From Fred Kaplan’s wrap-up of Condoleeza Rice’s public testimony today:

Rice insisted this title meant nothing. The document consisted of merely “historical information” about al-Qaida–various plans and attacks of the past. “This was not a ‘threat report,’ ” she said. It “did not warn of any coming attack inside the United States.” Later in the hearing, she restated the point: “The PDB does not say the United States is going to be attacked. It says Bin Laden would like to attack the United States.”

This distinction was not enough to prevent us from invading Iraq, but it does justify in retrospect not doing more to hunt for terrorists in the United States this summer? I’m not on the bandwagon that says that the Bush administration was negligent for not preventing the attacks on 9/11, but for an administration that espouses a foreign policy based on preemption, this argument seems a bit hollow.

Bonus: a glossary for the testimony by William Saletan. The Daily Show had a hilarious and depressing report on Rice’s testimony as well.

I possess an inordinate amount of morbid curiousity, and that leaves me watching all sorts of bizarre things on television that would cause most people to run away screaming. However, not even I can watch Extreme Makeover, and thus Fox’s new creepfest, The Swan is completely out of my league. Fortunately, Salon’s Heather Havrilesky bit the bullet and tuned in so that you and I can sort of figure out what it’s all about without actually debasing ourselves. The really funny thing is that if you watch any documentaries about beauty pageants, you know that they’re already all about plastic surgery. The women from Venezuela and Argentina who seem to consistently win these sorts of things are about half artificial, so on top of everything else, The Swan is redundant. Oh, by the way, Heather only made it through the first three minutes before turning it off.

Jeffrey Veen: How I stopped buying CDs and started loving music.

A good number of years ago, I used to spend entirely too much time hanging out no the #hack channel on IRC (back when there was really only one big IRC network), and one of the persistent jokes was pasting a bunch of words that might be construed as suspicious in one long string in order to trigger false positives for the “NSA greppers.” Well, apparently it can now be told that there really are NSA greppers, just as we always suspected.

If you’re an Emacs user, you can use the built in spook function to produce the sort of text that we reguarly pasted on IRC.

Abdul Rashid Dostum, one of the Northern Alliance warlords who helped oust the Taliban in 2001 appears to have decided he’s not playing nicely with Afghanistan’s central government any longer. Needless to say, this is really, really awful news. Sy Hersh has an article on the goings on in Afghanistan this week in the New Yorker. (Both links via Flit.)

As I read about the events that are going on in Iraq, I’m happy I’m a humble blogger rather than a politician or even worse, a US military commander. As the violence spirals upward, we’re in the position of fighting the very people we “liberated” a year ago. I enjoy being a Monday morning quarterback as much as the next guy, but if I were in charge I honestly have no idea what the next move would be.

Mark Kimmitt, a US general, has said that we aim to destroy Muqtada al-Sadr’s Army of the Mahdi. First of all, that doesn’t seem feasible to me. It implies killing an awful lot of Shiites, and more importantly, sending US forces into Shiite towns and neighborhoods to do some hardcore fighting amidst plenty of civilians and Shiite holy sites. After a few weeks of that, I don’t see most Shiites wanting to be our friends any more. At the same time, it’s clear to me that anyplace that Muqtada al-Sadr rules is going to be run like any other Islamic backwater in the world, with all the attendant repression that one might expect. al-Sadr’s connection to the Iranians are also worrying. What to do with this guy? Beats me, I have no good ideas.

The other side of the coin is the Sunni triangle, where we’re facing stiff resistance in Fallujah and Ramadi, and where it seems unlikely that we’ll ever have the support of the civilian populace. These people are the big losers in the regime change picture. Having once made up the privileged class, they’re now staring down the barrel of hardcore payback from the Sunnis that they’ve repressed as soon as democracy takes hold and they’re permanently in the minority. Maybe we could convince them that that’s not how it has to be if we could get them to stop shooting at us. Unfortunately, blowing up dozens of civilians in our latest attempts at pacification probably isn’t going to help.

I’m not surprised that no immediate solutions to these problems pop into my head, but I guess I’d hope that our leaders have some ideas of their own. The immediate plan seems to be trumping their violence with our violence, but even if that works, what’s next? If we “pacify” Fallujah, do we have the troops to keep it, along with every other town in Iraq, pacified? The Iraqi policemen and soldiers we’re training don’t seem to be much help, and in some cases, seem to prefer fighting against us, which is unsurprising given the rush job of we’ve been forced into there. What if the right answer is upping the troop count in Iraq to 300,000. What do we do then? Send over 190,000 more US troops? Maintain the current troop levels and pray for the best? Forget the whole thing and bring the troops home? These are decisions somebody has to make, and I’m glad it’s not me.

Update: Phil Carter has an entry today that makes it clear that what’s going on in Fallujah is full scale urban warfare.

Update: A month or so ago, members of the Mahdi Army ethnically cleansed a town populated by Iraqi gypsies. This story provides a good indication of what Iraq will be like if al-Sadr and his friends are allowed to run amok, and also a disturbing indication of how little control we have of what’s going on in Iraq, even in the southern parts that until recently were judged to be relatively calm.

The White House is refusing to hand over the text of a speech that Condi Rice was scheduled to give on September 11, 2001 on the grounds that it is confidential. Regardless of what you think about the utility of these hearings, you have to appreciate the absurdity of asserting that a speech that was intended for public presentation is now secret because its contents make the administration look like it was barking up the wrong tree.

Compare and contrast: Baghdad, Iraq and Storrs, Connecticut.

Slate ran an interesting article yesterday by Jim Lewis about the wisdom of newspapers publishing violent images. I can hardly bear to look at such images myself, and agree with the author that used improperly they can tend to overwhelm the news message that the editors are attempting to convey. But the other side of it is that they work at a visceral level that cannot be duplicated. I find this to be more true when it comes to people being wounded rather than killed. To me, dead is dead. When people say hundreds of civilians have died, I know what that means. Wounded, on the other hand, conveys a wider range of meaning. Last year a British journalist who has a weblog lost his foot to a land mine in northern Iraq. Seeing the pictures of his leg all bandaged up after surgery really brought things home in a way that just reading about a missing foot could not. More recently Boing Boing linked to pictures of an Iraqi man who had just been shot in the arm. “Shot in the arm” didn’t sound that horrific to me, but the pictures of a man’s forearm basically turned inside out certainly were. Most people, myself included, are willing to sanction violence in service to other ends, and most people will hopefully never see the immediate effects of that violence first hand. I think people should have enough exposure to the consequences of supporting such violence to absorb some of the implications of it.

The author of the article specifically mentions some pictures he took in Congo of bodies of people who were slaughtered using machetes, and that were never published. A few years ago, National Geographic ran some pictures of people who survived machete attacks during the Rwandan genocide. I’ll never forget those pictures, and the main thing they made me feel was rotten that the rest of the world let that genocide begin and commence until at least half a million people were killed. So I can’t say that I’m against the use of violent images in the media.

Boing Boing is at the inversion point that all wildly successful hobby sites arrive at eventually, the point where they need cash from visitors to keep things rolling. This is such a common phenomenon that it really deserves a name. Other sites that recently arrived at that point were The Whiskey Bar and Intel Dump. I’ll be interested to see how Boing Boing addresses the problem. (It won’t surprise anyone to learn that given my traffic and its lazy growth curve, I’ll never have to contend with that problem. Prices for bandwidth go down faster than my traffic goes up. That said, I’m incredibly flattered by the traffic I do get, it constantly exceeds my expectations.)