Omar at Iraq the Model asks “Does the CNN [sic] have problems with translation from Arabic to English or is it a case of deliberate twisting of facts?”  This pertains to CNN’s reporting that Iraq’s Foreign Minister defended Iran’s nuclear program.

CNN reported:

Iran has a right to develop nuclear technology and the international community should drop its demands that Tehran prove it’s not trying to build a nuclear weapon, Iraq’s foreign minister said Friday.

“Iran doesn’t claim that they want to obtain a nuclear weapon or a nuclear bomb, so there is no need that we ask them for any guarantee now,” Hoshyar Zebari said after meeting with his Iranian counterpart, Manouchehr Mottaki.

This report was parlayed into reports the new Iraqi government would not be U.S.-friendly.  Well, it is a sovereign government and they can choose what to do and say.

But that’s not the crux of the matter as Omar lays out.  What exactly did Zebari say?

We respect Iran’s and every other nation’s right to pursue nuclear technology for research purposes and peaceful use given they accept [giving] the internationally required guarantees that this will not lead to an armament race in the region…

Now wait a minute.  That’s not what CNN reported.

The Pakistani man who was arrested just two days before the start of the Republican National Convention in 2004 and accused of developing a terrorist plot that would have attacked the subway system of New York has been convicted. But just remember, he was set up and he would have been selling cars at an used car lot if that damn FBI informant didn’t trap him by showing him pictures of the abuse at Abu Ghraib (did those same pictures come from the front pages of the New York Times?).

The jurors rejected his defense that a paid police informer had entrapped him by stoking his rage with images of Muslims abused at the hands of Americans.

The defense in the case argued that Mr. Siraj had been entrapped by the paid informer, Osama Eldawoody, a 50-year-old Egyptian-born nuclear engineer who, Mr. Siraj’s lawyers contended, sought to draw their client into the plot for the money. Evidence showed he was paid about $100,000 over two years and nine months — $25,000 during the 13 months he worked as an informer and the rest in relocation and living expenses over the 20 months between the arrests and the trial.

Mr. Siraj’s lead lawyer, Martin R. Stolar, had sought to portray his client as a hapless dullard ripe for manipulation [ed. aren’t most jihadis easily manipulated rather than actually believing Allah wants them to slaughter innocent men, women and children?]. He said Mr. Eldawoody, posing as a father figure and religious guide, had cajoled and inflamed the younger man, in part by showing him images of abuses, some of them at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Mr. Stolar said the government had manufactured the crime, noting that the informer had told Mr. Siraj and another man that he was part of a terrorist group that did not exist and that he would supply the explosives, though there never was a bomb.

Strange, but the New York Times article on the conviction really gives only Siraj’s side, or that of his lawyer. Perhaps it’s just me, and frankly it usually is, but if a man approached me on the street and showed me images of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison and then wanted to recruit me into what I believed was his tangled web of jihad, I’d turn the guy in and go on my way. Siraj though did not go his own way but rather was engaged by the plot and wanted to bomb the NYC subway.

That’s not entrapment, though five of the jurors in the case considered this at least partial entrapment. It’s just stupidity and a belief that because of the actions by a few, granted those actions have been cast so loudly by opponents to the war and the United States including the very publication that wrote such a one-sided article on the outcome of the trial, that means innocent civilians in New York should be killed. That’s what Allah wants.

Maybe Siraj just has a small penis and thought jihad was his only way out, though that apparently can be fixed now. In that regards, we should offer people like Siraj a way out of jihad and just give them an extra large penis so they won’t kill in the name of Allah. You see, all Allah really seems to want is men with large penises so they can have fun and not be mocked at the giant orgy awaiting in the afterlife.

The Jawa Report linked with NYC Subway Bomb Plotter Convicted...

Well this surley explains why Speaker of the House Dennis Hassert is up in arms about the DOJ investigating Congressman William Jefferson as some sort of seperation of powers nonsense thus telling the American people that you can actually be above the law.

The Speaker of the House of Representatives, Dennis Hastert, is under investigation by the FBI, which is seeking to determine his role in an ongoing public corruption probe into members of Congress, ABC News has learned from senior U.S. law enforcement officials.

Actually, maybe not.

The Justice Department took the unusual step Wednesday of declaring that it was not investigating House Speaker Dennis Hastert.

This calls into question the validity of the ABC News blog that broke the story that Hassert was being investigated.  Couple this with the strange post that Osama Bin Laden is in Pakistan as confirmed by the Pakistani government that contradicts with every single statement issued by the government of Pakistan, including one just last week, that says OBL is not in Pakistan, I don’t know that I’ll believe anything I read on ABC News’ blog.  The ABC News blog has just become as credible as the laughable “Rove Indicted” Truthout.

Unpartisan.com Political News and Blog Aggregator linked with Bipartisan Furor Over FBI Raid...

Huh?

The NATO mission in Afghanistan will not be deterred by a recent surge in violence there, and opponents of nation-building will be defeated, the head of the alliance said Friday.

“NATO will stay the course and the spoilers will not have a chance,” Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said during a visit to Lisbon. “The operational plan is robust and the rules of engagement are robust.”

Who was the reporter that actually asked whether a military unit would flee because of some violence?  That violence, mind you, disproportionately hit the Taliban rather than Coalition forces.

And the tale of the NSA data mining phone records continues to twist.  Verizon now says they didn’t give the NSA phone records which contradicts the breakthrough story compiled by USA Today citing anonymous sources that was actually came out months after the initial reports filed in.

One of the most glaring and repeated falsehoods in the media reporting is the assertion that, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Verizon was approached by NSA and entered into an arrangement to provide the NSA with data from its customers’ domestic calls.

This is false. From the time of the 9/11 attacks until just four months ago, Verizon had three major businesses - its wireline phone business, its wireless company and its directory publishing business. It also had its own Internet Service Provider and long-distance businesses. Contrary to the media reports, Verizon was not asked by NSA to provide, nor did Verizon provide, customer phone records from any of these businesses, or any call data from those records. None of these companies - wireless or wireline - provided customer records or call data.

Oh, wait!  Verizon wasn’t even asked to provide phone records?  That sure puts a different spin on the story.  But there’s more.

Another error is the claim that data on local calls is being turned over to NSA and that simple “calls across town” are being “tracked.” In fact, phone companies do not even make records of local calls in most cases because the vast majority of customers are not billed per call for local calls. In any event, the claim is just wrong. As stated above, Verizon’s wireless and wireline companies did not provide to NSA customer records or call data, local or otherwise.

If you’re like me, you’re probably confused because you specifically remember the USA Today article leading with “the National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the arrangement told USA TODAY.”  But now Verizon comes out and says they were never even approached by the NSA and Verizon didn’t just hand the NSA phone records for the sake of handing them over.  I am a bit ashamed that I didn’t catch the other rather obvious mistake in the article as well, one that Verizon noted regarding local calls.

So just like the story on the CIA having so-called “secret prisons” accross Europe that there is no evidence of, is this leak to the press yet another attempt by a leaker to attack the Bush Administration aided by poor reporting?  Or is this some plot hatched by the CIA to pass off bogus information to reduce the credibility of leaked sources?  Either way, it shoudl be clear that in the future the press needs to take a second look at information leaked their way.

The American Mind linked with Verizon Denies Helping NSA...
Unpartisan.com Political News and Blog Aggregator linked with Verizon Denies NSA Sought Call Data...

In a blog posting yesterday by ABC News, reporters Brian Ross and Richard Espisito claim that the U.S. government has traced the phone calls of journalists working for the New York Times and the Washington Post.  Well, that would make sense considering the national security leaks both newspapers have uncovered (whether or not the secret prisons story is actually accurate or not).  But some people believe this is somehow connected to the NSA data mining phone records.

The executive director of the Reporters’ Committee for Freedom of the Press, Lucy Dalglish, said the government’s reported acquisition of journalists’ calling records was part of a pattern of intrusions on First Amendment rights by the Bush administration. “I’m ready to throw my arms up in the air,” she said. “If there was a subpoena, they are supposed to be notified.”

Ah, yes, they are supposed to be notified, but there is a 90 day window before notification must be made.  How exactly is an investigation into the leaks part of a “pattern of intrusions on the First Amendment rights?”  The First Amendment guarantees are still applicable, and they always will be, but it is against the law to print national security secrets and has been for decades.

Dalgish though apparently knows better and realizes that tracing phone calls can come from two sides, calling into question her original assertion in the first place.

Investigators could obtain records of calls from government phones without any subpoenas, Ms. Dalglish observed.

An FBI spokesman, Bill Carter, called the ABC report “misleading,” but did not dispute that journalists’ phone records have been obtained by his agency. “In any case where the records of a private person are sought, they may only be obtained through established legal process,” he said.

Is it not right to investigate where leaks come from and where they spread?

Unpartisan.com Political News and Blog Aggregator linked with BellSouth Says It Gave NSA No Call Records...

If you’re like me and still on pins and needles wondering why Qwest turned down the NSA and refused to hand over phone call records, in other words you didn’t bother reading why in the original USA Today article, thankfully the New York Times repeats the reasoning.

The telecommunications company Qwest turned down requests by the National Security Agency for private telephone records because it concluded that doing so would violate federal privacy laws, a lawyer for the telephone company’s former chief executive said today.

Yeah, because I was really wondering if things had changed in a day and Qwest decided legal reasons were not why they didn’t work with the NSA. From the original USA Today article:

According to multiple sources, Qwest declined to participate because it was uneasy about the legal implications of handing over customer information to the government without warrants.

What’s odd is that USA Today chose to even give this item in the news anonymous protection. The Qwest legal team issued a press release today so it’s not as if Qwest cared about being silent. Did the USA Today bother even asking Qwest directly why they chose not to participate? If so, did they just give them anonymous protection for the hell of it?

As I wrote yesterday, there will be several spinoff stories regarding this one piece of old news. “How coud it be old,” you ask. The New York Times covered this exact program months ago to much less fanfare. The New York Times apparently feels they should play catchup to cover a story that ‘broke’ months after their own newspaper broke the same story. Confused? You shouldn’t be. It’s the media business and in today’s world of reporting, newsworthy and timeliness are subjective words.

The New York Times piece is yet another of these spinoffs, but what is rather interesting judging from some of the comments we hear come from Capital Hill is that Senator Hagel says the program has “been briefed to the appropriate members of Congress.” Yes, and so too was the NSA wiretapping and just about everything else other members of Congress want to play dumb about.

The drum beat continues, but is anyone around to care?

Previous: Five of six terrorists choose Qwest for their telecom solutions. The sixth is at Gitmo.

Unpartisan.com Political News and Blog Aggregator linked with Lawyer: Ex-Qwest Exec Ignored NSA Request...

Le Monde has published the full text of the letter written by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to U.S. President George Bush (via American Future). Due to the length, a reported 18 pages, the full letter is below the jump.

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Unpartisan.com Political News and Blog Aggregator linked with Bush: Iran Letter Doesn't Answer Question...
A Blog For All linked with No Surprise at All...

CENTCOM has translated and released some of the documents that were captured with the Zarqawi blooper reel that you can watch in full HERE.  Included in the documents were Al Qaida in Iraq plans, critiques and problems.

From the translation:

The strength of the brothers in Baghdad is built mainly on booby trapped cars, and most of the mujahidin groups in Baghdad are generally groups of assassin without any organized military capabilities.

There is a clear  absence of organization among the groups of the brothers in Baghdad, whether at the leadership level in Baghdad, the brigade leaders, or their groups therein.  Coordination among them is very difficult, which appears clearly when the group undertake a join operations.

The policy followed by the brothers in Baghdad is a media oriented policy without a clear comprehensive plan to capture an area or an enemy center. Other word, the significance of the strategy of their work is to show in the media that the American and the government do not control the situation and there is resistance against them.  This policy dragged us to the type of operations that are attracted to the media, and we go to the streets from time to time for more possible noisy operations which follow the same direction.

Naturally I found the part about why AQ in Iraq launches the types of strikes they do most interesting.  It has been clear for three years that AQ in Iraq cannot and will not fight this war in a conventional sense, but rather they are waging their war on our front pages.  Well, this is the history of radical Islamic terrorism post-Munich.

Oh, but there’s more on how the group uses and understands the role of today’s media.

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So Porter Goss is out and the rumors are flying as to why he stepped down. Was he pushed out of office because he didn’t get along with John Negroponte? Who cares, seriously.

The New York Daily News reports that Goss was told to step down after he attended poker parties hosted by a defense contractor where former Congressman Duke Cunningham attended. Oh, and there were some prostitutes. Again, who cares. Goss was running the CIA, not the Boy Scouts. To have to deal with people like Mary McCarthy who believe leaking classified information is patriotic (assuming the information was not just made up) on a daily basis, I hope the whores brought a truck of booze with them.

To top it all off though, the NY Daily News trots out Larry Johnson as a character witness, and much to my surprise, Johnson doesn’t make an ass out of himself. Yes, this is the same guy that believes the sky is falling and that President Bush detonated a nuke above the atmosphere to start the chain reaction of events. Is it ever going to be possible for a news organization to use a source that’s character hasn’t been questioned by their own antics?

The Washington Post trots out five journalists, including one Dana Priest who knows a little something about the CIA, who say that President Bush lost confidence in Goss months ago and this stepping down was a long time coming. Yet they also cite an unknown Senior Official, presumably not Mary McCarthy, who said that Goss was always a transitional figure and he was supposed to step down.

What is rather humorous about this entire deal is that this resignation is being seen through political eyes by opponents to the President. The man right now expected to be the front-runner, General Hayden, may have a fun time at confirmation hearings.

Members of Congress privately predicted that Hayden, who once enjoyed tremendous support on the Hill, would face a contentious confirmation process over the Bush administration’s domestic spying program. Other sensitive issues, such as the existence of secret prisons abroad for terrorism suspects, also are likely to arise.

You had to know that was in the WaPo and that Dana Priest, the woman with a Pulitzer Prize, was writing this article, otherwise there would be no mention of the supposed secret prisons that there is no evidence ever existed. Pulitzer that! But that’s fine, trot out General Hayden and let Democrats say he’s unfit for this position because he wanted to eavesdrop on suspected terrorists and trick detainees during interrogation. That’ll be a sure fire winner to bring the one party that appears weak on national security more votes, at least as long as they use the word ‘tough’ everytime they talk about their own platforms.

“You all know I’m tough on terrorists, but don’t you think it would have been nicer to ask the suspect for permission to listen to his conversationg about a suicide attack first? But you don’t ask in kind voice, be tough like I am. Remind him that you’re tough . . . like me.”

People seem to forget how a government works. Think of a business, because government is one of the larger businesses in the world. The CEO must get along with the Board of Executives. The members of the Board must get along with those under them. Those under them must get along with those under them and so on and so forth. Then why, frankly, does it matter if Goss was asked to step down or decided on his own to do so? Not getting along is part of what got the CIA into this mess in the first place. Well, that and partisanship that trumped doing their actual job.