DeskJockeys

This is the single week this year in which Karl Rove can walk into a Manhattan bar and get treated like Julian Casablancas. I'm just back from a College Republicans state chairs' party, held at a place called Windfall that looks like the love child of a sports bar and an old boys club. When Rove walks in to rally the troops, a boisterous "We Love Rove!" chant starts up, to be restarted when he finishes. His speech is a brief pep talk about the importance of active campus recruiting. He tells the crowd of a young man who had given up politics in favor of playing guitar in high school, but who, upon arriving at college, was approached by a friend to join the College Republicans. "He figured that if he played guitar and was political, he might get a date. And that young man was Lee Atwater." Quite a few people, unsettlingly, seem to find this genuinely inspirational.

Some analysts suggested the vice president's words were smart politics. They could be reassuring to moderates and independent-minded suburban voters concerned that the administration was intolerant in its attitudes toward gays.

She's a statuesque redhead with green eyes who stands 5'7". Her measurements are 36-22-36 and she's posing topless for the October issue of Playboy magazine.

Oh, just one thing... she's a video game character.

President Bush said Monday that he thought a new campaign-finance law governing this year's elections should have put an end to attack ads paid for by wealthy partisans, such as the ones attacking Democrat John Kerry's Vietnam War record.

"I frankly thought we'd gotten rid of that when I signed the McCain-Feingold bill," Bush told reporters at his ranch near Crawford, Texas. "I thought we were going to once and for all get rid of a system where people could just pour tons of money in and not be held to account for the advertising."

Russia’s overnight emergency triggered elevated levels of security at the international airports of Europe and Israel, focusing mainly on passenger planes incoming from Russia, the Caucasus and Central Asia. Israel’s Ben Gurion airport security is also carefully screening flights from eastern and southern Europe, Turkey, Hungary and Bulgaria.

The United States too, three weeks after raising terror alerts in New York, Washington and New Jersey over a threat to its financial sector, has also instituted extra-special precautions. American security authorities decided to be on the safe side and act as though the Moscow hijackings were the start of a series in places other than Russia, especially in view of their timing – four days before Chechnya’s presidential election on Sunday, August 28 and five days before the Republican National Convention opens in New York to nominate President George W. Bush as party’s presidential candidate and Vice President Richard Cheney his running mate.

Al Qaeda has issued threats against both events.

The terrorists also count on Russian security services’ responses to terror being cumbersome and slow. Tuesday afternoon, a small explosive charge blew up at a bus stop on the road to Domodedovo airport, injuring three people. Witnesses at the airport describe the security authorities’ response as hysterical and muddled, which the hijackers must have exploited to slip through to the targeted airliners. The small blast should have prompted the sealing off of the airport and its approaches and flight cancellations for redoubled checks - as would have happened in New York or London. National security services might also have been expected to assume responsibility at Domodedovo from the private firm in charge there, although Russian security is reputed to be so riddled with corruption that terrorists have an easy time operating anywhere in Russia, including Moscow.

In the eyes of Alice Cooper, all the rock stars campaigning for Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry are guilty of one thing: treason. The shock-rock legend, a staunch Republican who attends NBA games in Phoenix with Arizona Senator John McCain, was disgusted when he learned of plans by Bruce Springsteen, John Mellencamp, R.E.M. and other bands to hold a series of concerts aimed at unseating U.S. President George W. Bush.

"To me, that's treason. I call it treason against rock 'n' roll because rock is the antithesis of politics. Rock should never be in bed with politics," says the 56-year-old Cooper, who begins a 15-city Canadian tour on Aug. 20 in Thunder Bay, Ont.

"When I was a kid and my parents started talking about politics, I'd run to my room and put on the Rolling Stones as loud as I could. So when I see all these rock stars up there talking politics, it makes me sick.

"If you're listening to a rock star in order to get your information on who to vote for, you're a bigger moron than they are. Why are we rock stars? Because we're morons. We sleep all day, we play music at night and very rarely do we sit around reading the Washington Journal."

According to court papers, the Orioles around April 27 made an offer in writing for $1 million, which the band rejected. The Orioles came back with an offer of $1.5 million, plus 80 percent of ticket revenues and 80 percent of gross merchandise revenues, plus a budget for expenses and a non-compete provision that prohibited Van Halen from performing in other venues in the vicinity of Baltimore.

I also asked one young man in Chicago why they were attacking the President rather than promoting their candidate in a positive manner. He told me that until the convention, they were not allowed by campaign law to promote Kerry, but attacking Bush allowed them to get around that restriction. I was told by the campaing worker not to tell anyone about this, since you never know who you are talking to and some Republican might put their little "secret" all over Fox News. He should take his own advice. Since the convention, they have been asking people to support Kerry.

To be sure, sometimes things happen at U.S. military bases that damage, rather than help, America's world image. Our military personnel in Okinawa, where U.S. soldiers have assaulted Japanese civilians, are not well loved by their neighbors.

There are growing indications that Iran may be planning an attack on American soil. These indicators are not secret — they appear in speeches,newspaper articles, TV programs, and sermons in Iran by figures linked to the supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and other government officials, all discussing potential Iranian attacks on America, which will subsequently lead to its destruction.

A report on May 28 in Al-Sharq Al-Awsat reported that an Iranian intelligence unit has established a center called “The Brigades of the Shahids of the Global Islamic Awakening.”The paper claimed that it had obtained a tape with a speech by Hassan Abbassi, a Revolutionary Guards intelligence theoretician who teaches at Al-Hussein University. In the tape, Mr. Abbassi spoke of Tehran’s secret plans, which include “a strategy drawn up for the destruction of Anglo-Saxon civilization.” In order to accomplish this, he explained,“There are 29 sensitive sites in the U.S. and in the West. We have already spied on these sites and we know how we are going to attack them.”

It was reported that America expelled two Iranian security guards employed by Tehran’s U.N. offices on June 29, after the mission was repeatedly warned against allowing its guards to videotape bridges, the Statue of Liberty, and New York’s subway system.This was the third time the Iranians have been caught in such activities, which could be connected to the sites mentioned in potential plans to attack America.

Radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr announced Wednesday he will leave the Imam Ali Mosque, after a threat by the government to "liberate" it from al-Sadr's militia.

In a letter from al-Sadr's office in Baghdad, al-Sadr said he agreed to three demands made to him Tuesday night by a delegation from the conference -- that he and his forces leave the mosque, disband his Mehdi Army and "enter into the mainstream political process."

Kuwait and Saudi Arabia would be greatly endangered by an anarchical Iraq, which might even allow Iran to invade its southern regions on the pretext of protecting fellow Shiites. Again, the threat of American withdrawal would be apt to concentrate minds wonderfully. The goal would be to get Kuwait and Saudi Arabia to replace the American taxpayer in aiding Iraq; the two could also jointly sponsor peacekeeping troops, in earnest this time, financially rewarding poorer Muslim countries with troops to spare. While deploying such soldiers across Iraq would be a very bad idea - they would be Sunnis of course, and most unwelcome to Iraq's Shiites - they would be fine for the recalcitrant Sunni towns.

Likewise, while some say that the two major powers in the region, Iran and Turkey, would see an anarchical Iraq as an opportunity to expand their influence, that seems unlikely. Rather, a divided Iraq would be a base from which those countries' enemies - especially dissident Kurds - would be able to operate with impunity.

For now, with the United States viewed as determined to stay the course, the hard-liners in Iran can pursue their anti-American vendetta by encouraging the Shiite opposition, supplying Mr. Sadr's militia and encouraging Syria to help Islamist terrorists sneak into Iraq. But an American withdrawal would mean the end of any hopes for a unified, Shiite-led Iraq, which is Iran's long-term goal, and likely a restored Sunni supremacy, which is Iran's greatest fear.

. . . Foreign Policy/Intelligence Columnist Andy Martin uncovers some secrets to this regards, and asserts that McGreevey sex scandal was an Israeli Intelligence operation.

"People have been confused by the McGreevey sex scandal," says Martin. "But McGreevey's dilemma is not a gay sex scandal. It is an Israeli intelligence operation gone sour. This is not a scandal about 'sex.' It is a scandal about 'secrets', Martin says.

"McGreevey said he had sex. He did. Golan Cipel says he is not gay. He's not. They are both right. Mr. Cipel was a junior Mossad case officer, originally posted to New York under official cover. The Mossad is well known for using human sex toys. McGreevey was lured into a relationship that was intended to penetrate New Jersey's homeland defenses.

"Since 9/11 there has been barely suppressed anger at the fact Israeli intelligence knew about the hijackers and said nothing. Israelis have found themselves under suspicion and restricted by some intelligence channels. The state homeland security position was seen as a back door way of spying on anti-terror preparations in the New York-New Jersey area, and possibly nationally. . . ."

The release of Mr. Khan's name - it was made public in The New York Times on Aug. 2, citing Pakistani intelligence sources - drew criticism by some politicians, like Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, who charged that this leak might have compromised the search in Britain and Pakistan for Mr. Khan's Qaeda partners. (No officials in Britain, Pakistan or the United States have told The Times on the record that identifying Mr. Khan had such an impact).

Unlike in Europe, where the attacks of 9/11 did elicit a passing moment of sympathy for the United States ("We Are All Americans Now," proclaimed a headline the next day in the leading leftist daily in Paris), in the realm of Islam the news of 9/11 brought dancing in the streets and screams of jubilation. Almost to a man, Muslim clerics in their sermons assured the faithful that in striking a blow against the "Great Satan," Osama bin Laden had acted as a jihadist, or holy warrior, in strict accordance with the will of God.

This could have been predicted from a debate on the topic "Bin Laden—The Arab Despair and American Fear" that was televised on the Arabic-language network Al-Jazeera about two months before 9/11. Using "American Fear" in the title was a bit premature, since this was a time when very few Americans were frightened by Islamic terrorism, for the simple reason that scarcely any had ever heard of bin Laden or al Qaeda. Be that as it may, at the conclusion of the program, the host said to the lone guest who had been denouncing bin Laden as a terrorist: "I am looking at the viewers’ reactions for one that would support your positions—but . . . I can’t find any." He then cited "an opinion poll in a Kuwaiti paper which showed that 69 percent of Kuwaitis, Egyptians, Syrians, Lebanese, and Palestinians think bin Laden is an Arab hero and an Islamic jihad warrior." And on the basis of the station’s own poll, he also estimated that among all Arabs "from the Gulf to the Ocean," the proportion sharing this view of bin Laden was "maybe even 99 percent."

Surely, then, the chairman of the Syrian Arab Writers Associations was speaking for hordes of his "brothers" in declaring shortly after 9/11 that:

When the twin towers collapsed . . . I felt deep within me like someone delivered from the grave; I [felt] that I was being carried in the air above the corpse of the mythological symbol of arrogant American imperialist power. . . . My lungs filled with air, and I breathed in relief, as I had never breathed before.

In 1947, we accepted the responsibilities of moral and political leadership that history "plainly intended" us to bear, and for the next 42 years we acted on them. We may not always have acted on them wisely or well, and we often did so only after much kicking and screaming. But act on them we did. We thereby ensured our own "preservation as a great nation," while also bringing a better life to millions upon millions of people in a major region of the world.

Now "our entire security as a nation"—including, to a greater extent than in 1947, our physical security—once more depends on whether we are ready and willing to accept and act upon the responsibilities of moral and political leadership that history has yet again so squarely placed upon our shoulders. Are we ready? Are we willing? I think we are, but the jury is still out, and will not return a final verdict until well after the election of 2004.

Saddam Hussein periodically removed guards on the Syrian border and replaced them with his own intelligence agents who supervised the movement of banned materials between the two countries, U.S. investigators have discovered.
The recent discovery by the Bush administration's Iraq Survey Group (ISG) is fueling speculation, but is not proof, that the Iraqi dictator moved prohibited weapons of mass destruction (WMD) into Syria before the March 2003 invasion by a U.S.-led coalition.

A wag once suggested that the War on Terror could end in either of two ways. The Islamic fundamentalist could become like the infidel and within a generation acquire the material wealth and technology whose lack has been their weakness. Or the infidel could become like the Islamic fundamentalist for a day and the end the fight as the fundamentalist would. I thought it was funny once.

Referring to my July 13 Corner posting about my daughter's discovery of the universal, metaphysical dichotomy between things eiuw and things non-eiuw, a faithful reader points out that the McGreevey resignation & speech confirms once and for all, as it it needed further confirmation, that the Democrats are the eiuw party.

"Given the circumstances surrounding the affair and its likely impact upon my family and my ability to govern, I have decided the right course of action is to resign," McGreevey said.

Clearly, if the expected sexual harassment allegations are valid, then obviously it's just as bad as heterosexual sexual harassment. But, for the moment, leaving that as an open question, McGreevey managed to give some true nobility to a painful, ignoble moment.

Garden State Equality, a gay rights group, called McGreevey's coming-out speech "poignant" and said its members' thoughts were with the governor and his family.

"We all know how difficult it is to come out as openly gay, whether to family or other loved ones," Garden State Equality chairman Steven Goldstein said. "No one could imagine what it's like to come out to 300 million people -- this is totally unprecedented."

The Bloomberg administration is permitting a handful of protests in Central Park, but it adamantly refused the requests of United for Peace and Justice, the organizers of the coalition planning the largest rally during the convention. Instead, officials came up with a plan that would let the demonstrators march past Madison Square Garden on Aug. 29, the day before the convention opens, and hold their mass rally - which could involve hundreds of thousands of people - on the West Side Highway. The city has been relying on the deal in making its plans to keep the city secure. Given that some 50,000 delegates and other visitors attached to the convention are expected in addition to all the demonstrators, that planning is no small task. If the protesters back out now, there is a real risk of disorder, and perhaps violence.

. . .

Making matters worse, there are reports that some demonstrators not affiliated with United Peace and Justice may "spontaneously" show up in Central Park on Aug. 29. All the protest organizers should denounce this idea. Bypassing the permit process in this way could lead to clashes between protesters and police. Civil disobedience should be used rarely, and a disagreement with the city over a protest venue does not warrant it.

Enormous national events will inevitably be terror targets. So will the president. But before we single out the anarchists and the environmentalists and the puppet-guys for diminished constitutional protections - before we herd them into what are speech-free zones - we might question whether they represent the real danger. If we don't recognize the distinction between passionate political speech and terrorism now, it may be too late to protest later.

The trouble is, it's not true. The Patriot Act does not create a crime of "domestic terrorism." In fact, there is no such crime. The Patriot Act created a statutory definition of the phrase "domestic terrorism" in 18 U.S.C. 2331(5), which was added to the preexisting definition of "international terorrism" found in 18 U.S.C. 2331(1).

Privately, some Democrats said the nomination put them in a difficult political position. The C.I.A. has already gone two months without a replacement for George J. Tenet as director. The Democrats said that if they opposed the Goss nomination they expected that the White House would cast them as obstructionists who were delaying prosecution of the war on terror.

Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, said the president might have been "looking for a fight" by nominating a politician. But, Mr. Schumer said, Democrats can avoid falling into that domestic-security kind of trap by accepting Mr. Goss, if the president accepted the recommendations of the commission that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks.

"The best way for Democrats to stay true to their principles is not to go after Goss, who I believe is a decent guy, but by focusing on the restructuring, which is more important than any single person," Mr. Schumer said.

Asked about the story selection, Olbermann says he and his "Committee of Irresponsible Persons" hunt for such offbeat topics, adding: "You can't argue that it's something people were not talking about."

"The goal of the next attack is twofold: to damage the U.S. economy and to undermine the U.S. election," the official said. "The view of al Qaeda is 'anybody but Bush.'"

Anyway, this morning I was trudging through the mud flats where the desert used to be right behind the house -- a "new development" is being built, which means it's almost time to move again -- wondering why the teevee news loves the "missing what's-her-name" stories so much, when I never see anything about these worthless Court-TV events on the blogs. I look at a lot of these blogs. Lefty, Righty, legal, libertarian, jokey, group blogs ... blogs about books, movies, technology, comics, business, music, travel, dogs, specific cities or countries, food, etc. Blog writers and readers have got to be the biggest "news consumers" in the world, and yet I never see much of anything about these court cases & dead pregnant women. Was I missing something? Was there a secret world of blogs where people were as interested in these police melodramas as the news networks seem to be?

I checked the DayPop for mentions of the two big U.S. murder stories that seem to take up about half the news time these days, and found just 15 blogs referencing Laci Peterson and 16 mentioning Lori Hacking.

Compare that to 940 matching George W. Bush and 1,330 talking about John Kerry. Iraq? 1,640 citations. These murder cases, which are always about a white suburban woman, don't show up in the Top 10 stories or news searches. Not even in the Top 40 news posts on the entire InnerNut.

Whereas Laura Bush yesterday trumpeted her husband's authorization of $25 million to support stem cells, California voters are poised to throw $3 billion at the field in November when they vote on a bond issue to fund new research. Spearheaded by top California Democrats, the initiative would almost single-handedly reverse the effect of Bush's policies. While Kerry uses the issue to score points, Democrats in the Golden State are busy doing something about it.

Prop 71 won’t increase or create any taxes. It authorizes tax-free state bonds that will provide an average of $295 million per year over ten years to support stem cell research at California universities, medical schools and research facilities.

Dems are saying that Goss is too partisan and that he was picked because he is from Florida. I.e. It is all about politics. Just ran into this link, interestingly, from last month: A Hill interview with Pat Roberts in which he says Goss won't be picked because Dems will take aim:

We do not want a partisan fight right before the election,” Roberts said.

“[Rockefeller] said he was too partisan and not acceptable,” Roberts said. “I don’t think Porter is too partisan or that he is unacceptable, but that doesn’t speak for the other side. Apparently, if you have the vice chairman firmly opposed to the nominee, I don’t think that’s a very good starting point.”

Well, now he's the pick. What happens? Senate Dems let him go through because they don't want to look like they are playing politics with the CIA. Or, the Dems somehow make this case that he is unqualified for the job (because he's not a Democrat?). I'm guessing the Bush camp, doing the right thing, can handle this one just fine.

When the Justice Department obtained two videos suggesting terrorists had cased Las Vegas, Nevada, casinos, the discussions didn't center on public alerts or heightened security. Rather, authorities worried about the effects on tourism and the casinos' legal liabilities, internal memos show.

. . .

Though the FBI offered, most local law enforcement and casino security officers declined an invitation to view the footage after it was obtained in 2002, according to the memos and one of the prosecutors in the Detroit case.

One document obtained by The Associated Press quotes a federal prosecutor in Las Vegas as saying the city's mayor was concerned about the "deleterious effect on the Las Vegas tourism industry" if the evidence became public. The mayor said Monday he was never told of the footage.

The unmasking of an al Qaeda mole after a U.S. security alert points to disarray within U.S. intelligence and could mean President George W. Bush is accused of playing politics with security, the top U.S. election issue.

Washington raised its security alert to high on August 1 and disclosed a man held in secret by Pakistan was the source of information that justified the alert.

U.S. officials next morning confirmed a media report naming the man as Mohammad Naeem Noor Khan, a computer expert arrested secretly in July and used by Pakistan to track down al Qaeda militants in Britain and America.

Pakistani intelligence told Reuters that Khan was still working undercover when the U.S. security status was raised to orange and his name appeared in a U.S. newspaper.

Security analysts said the outing of the source was a major blunder that forced Britain to arrest 12 terrorism suspects in a hurry; nine are still in custody. Washington said the arrests, which included an alleged top al Qaeda figure, were a success.

Eight months ago, Paul Chan, a 31-year-old artist, began thinking about the tens of thousands of people from across the United States who are expected to arrive in New York at the end of this month to protest during the Republican National Convention.

For many of them, he realized, a foray into a large city might be a confusing and daunting experience. So, with two friends, Joshua Breitbart and Nadxieli Mannello, he began designing a reference guide called "The People's Guide to the Republican National Convention."

. . .

Included is information of the sort that could be of use to any traveler: a street map of Manhattan south of 59th Street and addresses of restaurants, bookstores, libraries and places to rent bicycles.

Other elements are specific to the convention: hotels where various state delegations will be staying, sites of official convention events, and times and locations of planned demonstrations. There are also the words of the First Amendment, phone numbers for the New York Civil Liberties Union and information about bail bondsmen.

The three creators said they spent $6,000 of their own money to print the guides, but are distributing them free.

"The main reason we made the guide is so that people have enough information to get in the way or out of the way," Mr. Chan said.

Is the Bush administration playing such cynical politics with our fears? Perhaps. But before we point that finger, maybe we should take a closer look at the Pakistanis. They’ve had an uncanny way of producing senior Al Qaeda figures when they’ve felt the heat from the United States, and seeming to miss them right in their midst when the pressure was lowered. The Bush administration may or may not have been telling the ISI it wanted a July surprise, or an October one. But it has plenty of good reasons to turn the screws on the government of President Pervez Musharraf all the time, and in every way it can.

"I just can't believe he'd be involved in anything like (anthrax) but who knows? Life's kind of funny," said William DiBerardino, a retired administrator at Jones Memorial Hospital in Wellsville, where Berry was director of emergency services until 2001.

Pershing was subject to orders which required him to respect the sovereignty of Mexico, and was further hindered by the fact that the Mexican Government and people resented the invasion. Advanced elements of the expedition penetrated as far as Parral, some 400 miles south of the border, but Villa was never captured. The campaign consisted primarily of dozens of minor skirmishes with small bands of insurgents. There were even clashes with Mexican Army units; the most serious was on 21 June 1916 at Carrizal, where a detachment of the 10th Cavalry was nearly destroyed. [Emphasis added]

At worst, the Bush administration is deliberately manipulating intelligence to scare everyone into voting for him. At best, the intelligence is real but the Bushies are doing everything in their power to hype it for partisan purposes. In the end, though, it probably doesn't really matter which, since in either case it's obvious that Bush treats national intelligence and the wider war on terror as little more than cynical campaign tools. The country would be a lot better off with a president who takes this stuff seriously.

I asked Mr. Kamel about the lyrics to a song called "Um al Shaheed" -- "Mother of a Martyr" -- that Mr. Mehana has recorded. It is not about suicide bombers, he insisted, but about soldiers who die in battle. Besides, if Mr. Mehana didn't do that old standard, "the people wouldn't like him." Mr. Kamel was raised Muslim but is now Catholic; he stated that suicide bombing bars you from heaven in both religions. "If you kill yourself, you're evil."

And on this subject Mr. Kamel said something I didn't expect him say: there are Middle Eastern bands out there with ties to terror groups. "I am a proud Arab American," he said. "But I don't deny there are some bad people" out there. He then named a couple of singers -- I will demur from repeating their names, but they appear to be quite prominent in Middle Eastern music -- whom he said had tried to enter the United States but were turned down because of alleged connections to [radical] Shi'a or to Hezbollah. One of them played at a party linked to Hezbollah. A rockin' affair that must have been.

According to an official with Pakistan's powerful Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), a White House aide told ISI chief Ehsan ul-Haq during a spring visit to Washington that "it would be best if the arrest or killing of [any] HVT were announced on twenty-six, twenty-seven, or twenty-eight July," during the convention.

Kerry won't answer multilateralist prayers on many other issues, either. Despite his strong record on the environment, like Bush he has never endorsed the Kyoto Protocol. On another multilateralist shibboleth, the International Criminal Court, Kerry's record is little different. He supported Bill Clinton's late signature of the ICC statute, but Clinton himself said at the time "I will not, and do not recommend that my successor submit the Treaty to the Senate for advice and consent until our fundamental concerns are satisfied." In other words, Clinton did not support or expect ratification of the treaty. And Kerry, like Bush, has spoken out repeatedly about the need to protect America's troops from ICC jurisdiction. He voted twice for the American Servicemembers' Protection Act, which even authorizes the president to free by force any Americans held by the ICC.

So, President John Kerry would not immediately sign the ICC statute and the Kyoto Protocol, pull America's troops out of Iraq, or promise never to go to war without the UN's say-so. On all these issues, his positions are close to those of his opponent's. But this is not to say he would be no different from Bush. Kerry has been vastly different from Bush in the tone and style he uses to deal with America's enemies and friends. He has repeatedly charged that Bush wasted the world's goodwill after September 11, was needlessly brusque about rejecting Kyoto and the ICC, and treated the UN as a rubber stamp for the Iraq war rather than making a real effort to win its approval.

Pasquale D'Amuro, director of the FBI's New York office and a veteran terrorism investigator, said the individuals under scrutiny here include people linked to Al Qaeda as well as Ansar al Islam and the Egyptian Islamic Jihad.

He said the monitoring began long before this weekend's heightened alert was announced.

While officials have said in the past that they were watching a handful of Al Qaeda suspects in the country, they have not said they were in the metropolitan area.

They also have not mentioned the Ansar al Islam and Egyptian Islamic Jihad.

The officials said the separate stream of intelligence, which they had not previously disclosed, reached the White House only late last week and was part of a flow that the officials said had prompted them to act urgently in the last few days.

On Friday morning, the intelligence briefing that awaited Ms. Townsend at her White House office seemed alarming, two senior White House officials said. There were two disturbing developments: information being gleaned from a computer hard drive recently seized in Pakistan suggested that Al Qaeda had studied specific sites in New York and Washington. Another stream of intelligence information pointed to the possibility of a current threat to attack New York.

"We know very early on Friday morning we've got an issue, a very serious, live issue," said one of the officials, who asked to remain unidentified because of the information being discussed.

It happened again this morning. I saw a picture of our president—my president—and my feelings about him were instantly rekindled. The picture was taken after his speech to the graduating seniors at the Air Force Academy. He was wearing a dark suit, a light-blue tie, and a white shirt. His unsmiling visage was grim and purposeful, in pointed contrast to the face of the elaborately uniformed cadet standing next to him, which was lit up with a cocky grin. . . . Although one man was essentially being asked to stake his life on the wisdom of the other, both were melded in an attitude of common purpose, and so both struck a common pose. With the cadet bent slightly forward and the commander in chief leaning slightly back, each man cocked his right arm and made a muscle. They flexed! I didn't know anything about the cadet. About President George W. Bush, though, I felt the satisfaction of absolute certainty, and so uttered the words as essential to my morning as my cup of Kenyan and my dose of high-minded outrage on the editorial page of the Times : "What an asshole."

Ah. That feels better. George W. Bush is an asshole, isn't he? . . .

Then I read the text of the speech he gave and was thrown from one kind of certainty—the comfortable kind—into another. He was speaking, as he always does, of the moral underpinnings of our mission in Iraq. He was comparing, as he always does, the challenge that we face, in the evil of global terrorism, to the challenge our fathers and grandfathers faced, in the evil of fascism. He was insisting, as he always does, that the evil of global terrorism is exactly that, an evil—one of almost transcendent dimension that quite simply must be met, lest we be remembered for not meeting it . . . lest we allow it to be our judge. I agreed with most of what he said, as I often do when he's defining matters of principle. No, more than that, I thought that he was defining principles that desperately needed defining, with a clarity that those of my own political stripe demonstrate only when they're decrying either his policies or his character. He was making a moral proposition upon which he was basing his entire presidency—or said he was basing his entire presidency—and I found myself in the strange position of buying into the proposition without buying into the presidency, of buying into the words while rejecting, utterly, the man who spoke them.

More financial institutions than previously disclosed may be at risk of attack, and an al-Qaida operative has told British intelligence that the group's target date is early September, intelligence sources said yesterday.

The operative, described as "credible" by British intelligence, told his debriefers that the attack would take place "60 days before the presidential election" on Nov. 2, according to a former senior National Security Council official. On Sept. 2 President George W. Bush is expected to address the Republican National Convention at Madison Square Garden.

But wouldn't the political effect of a terrorist attack depend on public opinion toward George W. Bush at the time of the attack? If voters are generally sympathetic to Bush, then, I agree, an attack will probably benefit him. When people are high on Bush, they tend to view him as a strong, decisive leader. And that's the kind of president you want after a terrorist attack.
But if public opinion is trending against Bush, couldn't another terrorist attack reinforce that as well? Under this scenario, the terrorist attack might play the role that the budget deficit played in 1992, when people saw it as a symbol of a government that wasn't functioning properly. This time around, another attack might be seen as a symbol of the administration's screwed up priorities (too much focus on Iraq, tax cuts; not enough focus on the war on terror, homeland security), in which case it would clearly hurt Bush and benefit Kerry.

Federal counterterrorism officials have told officials at the World Bank and International Monetary Fund that they believe plans for a possible attack on the two financial institutions were so detailed that terrorists must have had inside help from employees, contractors or visitors with access throughout the buildings, officials at the two organizations say.

Some federal officials have expressed some doubt on how recent the information is that spurred the government to elevate the threat alert status on Sunday. Still other officials are pursuing what they see as the possibility of an inside job regarding the World Bank and I.M.F. by telling officials of these institutions that they are preparing to formally request some lists of their mostly foreign employees and contractors. Special requests are required because the records of these institutions have diplomatic immunity, though not all of their staff does.

But officials said the World Bank and the I.M.F., both members of the larger United Nations family, are reluctant to hand over employee lists.

"If the Iranian government asked for a list of our employees in Tehran we wouldn't comply," said one official who spoke on condition of anonymity. "How could we turn around and give names to the United States government?"

During our vacation, American political junkies and politically engaged people in the West fell back into the comforting old habit of imagining that the only things that matter are the things American politicians do.

Everyone on the Left — from soft liberals to Michael Moore — seemed to have decided that the problems faced by the United States were primarily or even solely the fault of George W. Bush.

The Right fell to squabbling and niggling about the way in which the War on Terror was being fought.

During their vacation, both Left and Right fell prey to a kind of arrogant American innocence. It was as though both ideological camps essentially came to believe it was within the capacity of the United States to envision every conceivable difficulty we can face.

The further implication is that this is a zero-sum game, and that a dollar spent in Iraq is a dollar not spent on domestic needs. In other words, that this hospital or school in New Jersey or Montana would now be fully funded if it wasn't for a crowd of Arab and Kurdish panhandlers. Could anything be more short-sighted than that? Have we not learned that failed states turn into rogue states, and then export their rage and misery? Would we not prosper ourselves—if the question has to be stated in this way—if the Iraqi economy recuperated to the point where it could become a serious trading partner?

On a warm June day in 1978, William J. LeMessurier, one of the nation's leading structural engineers, received a phone call at his headquarters, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, from an engineering student in New Jersey. The young man, whose name has been lost in the swirl of subsequent events, said that his professor had assigned him to write a paper on the Citicorp tower, the slash-topped silver skyscraper that had become, on its completion in Manhattan the year before, the seventh-tallest building in the world.

LeMessurier found the subject hard to resist, even though the call caught him in the middle of a meeting. As a structural consultant to the architect Hugh Stubbins, Jr., he had designed the twenty-five-thousand-ton steel skeleton beneath the tower's sleek aluminum skin. And, in a field where architects usually get all the credit, the engineer, then fifty-two, had won his own share of praise for the tower's technical elegance and singular grace; indeed, earlier that year he had been elected to the National Academy of Engineering, the highest honor his profession bestows. Excusing himself from the meeting, LeMessurier asked his caller how he could help.

The student wondered about the columns--there are four--that held the building up. According to his professor, LeMessurier had put them in the wrong place.

"I was very nice to this young man," LeMessurier recalls. "But I said, 'Listen, I want you to tell your teacher that he doesn't know what the hell he's talking about, because he doesn't know the problem that had to be solved.' I promised to call back after my meeting and explain the whole thing."

On the island, LeMessurier considered his options. Silence was one of them; only Davenport knew the full implications of what he had found, and he would not disclose them on his own. Suicide was another, if LeMessurier drove along the Maine Turnpike at a hundred miles an hour and steered into a bridge abutment, that would be that. But keeping silent required betting other people's lives against the odds, while suicide struck him as a coward's way out and--although he was passionate about nineteenth-century classical music--unconvincingly melodramatic. What seized him an instant later was entirely convincing, because it was so unexpected almost giddy sense of power. "I had information that nobody else in the world had," LeMessurier recalls. "I had power in my hands to effect extraordinary events that only I could initiate. I mean, sixteen years to failure--that was very simple, very clear-cut. I almost said, thank you, dear Lord, for making this problem so sharply defined that there's no choice to make."