29 July 2005 @ 11:26AM >> The analysts for our intelligence services have a remarkably difficult job. Not only do they have to pick nuggets of important information from swamps of raw, often useless, and sometimes deliberately deceptive data, but they must then determine whether the data they gather constitutes a threat. To do this, they must set some threshold of sensitivity for the data. Two bits of information might not signal an impeding attack, but ten might. Of course, getting it right isn’t easy, as Jeff Jacoby notes in the Boston Globe:

Three weeks before the London bombings of July 7, Britain’s Joint Terrorist Analysis Center advised policymakers that “at present there is not a group with both the current intent and the capability to attack the UK.” That reassuring message from the country’s top intelligence and law enforcement officials, The New York Times reported last week, prompted the British government to lower its terror alert. Less than a month later, 52 people were murdered and 700 wounded when three subway trains and a bus were blown up in the worst act of terrorism the United Kingdom has experienced since the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 in 1988.

[...]

[T]he botched terror assessment raises a question for us, too: Which kind of intelligence failure is better — the kind that badly understates a threat, such as the one in London, or the kind that overstates a threat, such as the insistent warnings before the invasion of Iraq that Saddam Hussein was armed with weapons of mass destruction?

[...]

So what kind of culture do we want intelligence agencies to foster among their operatives and analysts: one that tends to be overly focused on possible threats, or one that is more likely to downplay them? In general, would we rather take action to eliminate a danger that turns out to have been overstated — or take no action, and then be stunned when the enemy strikes?

Two years ago, I wrote:

In the case of the September 11th report, critics say intelligence analysts missed signals and failed to evaluate the threat thoroughly. Had the analysts been more vigilant, the argument goes, perhaps the September 11th attacks would have been prevented. And in the case of the pre-war intelligence on Iraq, the criticism is that intelligence analysts put too much credence in a few suspect pieces of data. In other words, the analysts were overly vigilant in assessing the threat. Of course, it is not possible to be too vigilant and insufficiently vigilant at the same time—but to the president’s critics, that’s beside the point. A political trap has been set that allows the carping to continue under all possible scenarios. Too hot, too cold...to some, it seems the porridge is always the wrong temperature as long as President Bush is serving it.

Because it is often difficult to distinguish suspicious intelligence reports from iron-clad information, human interpretation is required; inferences must be drawn. That’s why there are often disagreements in the intelligence community: different people looking at the same set of data can draw different conclusions. Such disagreements are not evidence of fraud, they’re evidence of varying levels of risk tolerance. That the Bush Administration is now less willing to accept a risk that was tolerated before is a direct result of the lessons learned on September 11th.

How risk-sensitive do we want our intelligence services to be? If we set the sensitivity threshold too high, we’ll get surprised by attacks like September 11th or the recent bombings in London. If we set the bar too low, we run the risk of relying on faulty information, which it appears we did with respect to Iraq’s WMD.

This is a discussion that we as a nation need to have. Indeed, this is a discussion we should have had by now. Unfortunately, it seems that the left these days wants none of the responsibility of putting forth possible solutions. Where is the left-wing plan for dealing with Islamist extremists who want to destroy Western society? We know that the left finds much fault in the United States, but in the nearly four years since the September 11th attacks, I still don’t know what the left proposes in response to the problem. (Sorry, I don’t accept doing nothing as a solution. We did nothing in response to terrorist attacks for years before September 11th, and look where that got us.)

It is legitimate to criticize President Bush, it is legitimate to criticize our past mistakes as a nation, but those criticisms seem to be the only thing the left can articulate. The are many self-proclaimed great thinkers on the left. Where are their ideas for confronting Islamic mass murder?

28 July 2005 @ 12:11PM >> Political correctness requires that we pretend a Swedish girl is just as likely to set off a bomb in the subway as some guy whose name includes the word Jihad. In that spirit, New York City recently began random bag searches in subway stations. But searching bags isn’t the only way in which governments can employ randomness for the benefit of all. The People’s Cube explains.

27 July 2005 @ 4:04PM >> According to this report, the New York City Department of Investigation is looking into the claims that hundreds of thousands of dollars were diverted from a Bronx-based Boys & Girls Club and put into the coffers of the liberal radio network Air America.

26 July 2005 @ 6:07PM >> In California, the position of Attorney General is awarded through a partisan election. Despite this, Californians have a right to expect that the Attorney General will act above partisanship and will ensure that the state’s Department of Justice will be just to all Californians, regardless of whether they share the Attorney General’s political preferences. For this reason, displays of political propaganda within Department of Justice offices are ill-advised and unethical.

So when California Attorney General Bill Lockyer installed a Bush-bashing “art” exhibit in the Department of Justice cafeteria, many Californians objected, and understandably so. The California Department of Justice is endorsing a political view that 5.5 million Californians reject—according to the 2004 election results—and it is doing so in a government office building, with taxpayer money, along with the California Arts Council, another taxpayer-funded organization.

Just as church and state should be kept at arm’s length, so should politics and law enforcement. Bill Lockyer has made it clear that he can’t separate the two, and in so doing, he has cast doubt on his ability to administer justice fairly and without regard to ideology. He should resign, and Californians should demand to know why their tax money is paying for political propaganda.

26 July 2005 @ 5:37PM >> If al Qaeda pulled off this kind of attack, the American political landscape would be dramatically different. Celebrities would suddenly become the War on Terror’s biggest supporters.

22 July 2005 @ 12:44PM >> This editorial in the Los Angeles Times makes me wonder: is there anything about George W. Bush that his opponents don’t hate?

22 July 2005 @ 12:17PM >> William Powers of National Journal—a magazine primarily aimed at D.C.-based political professionals—has some interesting thoughts on media bias in an article discussing coverage of the Supreme Court nomination of John Roberts:

Many well-meaning media-watchers believe that the goal should be absolute objective purity, but to me, that isn’t human. Organizations are made up of people, people have leanings, and those leanings will always to some degree shade the choice of language and visuals. Fox News now regularly does what the networks have done for years — lets unmistakable code words and signals slip into the coverage, albeit of the opposite tincture.

Why not acknowledge the elephant? Talk about it in the news product, bring readers in on the struggle, make the bias question an occasional sidebar to the Roberts coverage. A really bold newspaper editor (any out there?) might send out two reporters of opposite ideological persuasions to cover one day of the confirmation hearings. Have each write a news story, and run them side by side, labeled as to leaning. Leave off the bylines, if you like. This idea may seem a little cute and professionally self-absorbed, but you know what? People would read it, and be impressed that you were wrestling with the bias question, instead of pretending it isn’t there.

I think he’s absolutely right. As I say in the about page for this site:

To claim to be without bias borders on outright fraud, because the only purpose of such a claim is to trick the audience into unwittingly digesting opinions that are packaged as fact.

[C]onsumers of news and opinion must be cognizant of the biases of the various media outlets they use. Regular readers of Brain Terminal will become aware of the biases of the editor, and this is a good thing, because it will make them smarter consumers of the opinions presented here.

One of the biggest problems the establishment media faces is an erosion of trust among news consumers. Some of that lack of trust is a direct result of the media’s claims to be objective and unbiased. If we’re seeing the bias on a regular basis from organizations that claim to have none, we begin to feel like we’re being lied to. To pretend that people who spend their entire lives covering news have no opinions at all about what they’re covering is absurd. And if reporters do have opinions, then to say that their opinions never color their reporting is naive and shows a fundamental ignorance of human nature.

The establishment media could probably cure a lot of its ills if it simply unleashed reporters from the straight-jacket of professed objectivity. At least if reporters were honest about who they are and what they believe—instead of hiding it and pretending they believe nothing in particular—we could properly evaluate what they say in light of where they’re coming from. Instead, vital information is being withheld from us, and we’re told that there is no bias when we can see it plainly for ourselves. We’re being played for fools, and that may have something to do with the public’s waning trust in the media.

In any process that involves humans, bias will be present. Instead of the media ignoring it and pretending it’s not there—and in the process destroying its own credibility—why not embrace it and make it part of the product?

21 July 2005 @ 8:31AM >> When President Bush nominated one John Roberts for the Supreme Court, a certain CBS News reporter with the same name apparently suffered an ego blow. Now that CBS’s John Roberts is no longer the John Roberts in D.C., the reporter took the occasion to pen a smirky commentary piece that reveals his overinflated sense of self importance:

After my four and a half years covering the Bush White House, I couldn’t imagine the name “John Roberts” and the phrase “widely admired for his intellect, his sound judgment and his personal decency” being used in the same time zone, let alone the same sentence. More likely would have been “John Roberts” and “should join Judith Miller in jail”; or “frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs”; or, “Oh yeah, we’ve got a dossier on him”.

Yeah, that’s it, John, you’re such a dangerous, fearless reporter that the Gestapo-like Bush White House would like nothing more than to put you in jail.

This feeble attempt at humor—at least I’m assuming he was aiming for humor here—reveals more about his perceptions of the White House and the media than anything else:

It’s no secret that the White House doesn’t hold a lot of respect for the media at large [...]

Gee, I wonder why that is!

Does Roberts expect that the White House should hold respect for the media? When was the last time you saw the media show respect towards this White House? Reporter Roberts might not understand an important dynamic of respect: people rarely respect those who find them contemptible.

As a correspondent, it was one of the most frustrating days of my life. A lot of my fellow White House denizens share the same sentiments. My BlackBerry was buzzing all day with messages from colleagues – “I HATE this” and “Just SHOOT me now” were two of the more popular expressions of exasperation.

Just a hunch, but the dread expressed by these news insiders might have something to do with the president making the Supreme Court choice, not with the process itself. I doubt these same insiders “hated” the day President Clinton announced Ruth Bader Ginsburg as a nominee. At the very least, they probably weren’t requesting to be shot.

19 July 2005 @ 12:29PM >> Caution, kids! Any form of playing and/or having fun can scratch you or poke an eye out.

In the not-too-distant-future, safety advocates, trial lawyers, the government, and insurance companies will conspire to ensure that all citizens are shrouded in bubble wrap and suspended by bungee cords from the ceiling of a padded room, to ensure maximum safety.

19 July 2005 @ 11:11AM >> Item 1:

[Brigadier General Jay] Hood was briefing the subcommittee on one particular terrorist detainee [who] had lost his leg. During his stay at Guantanamo, American military doctors provided him—at taxpayer expense—with a modern prosthetic leg, Hood said. A subsequent review of his status resulted in the decision to release him from American custody.

Hood told the subcommittee that this terrorist has since rejoined the fight with his jihadist brothers in Afghanistan.

Congressman Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.), chairing the hearing, revealed some of his outrage at that fact with biting sarcasm.

“Has he reported back from the battlefield against Americans how well the leg we provided him with works?”

Item 2:

During a routine patrol in Baghdad June 2, Army Pfc. Stephen Tschiderer, a medic, was shot in the chest by an enemy sniper, hiding in a van just 75 yards away. The incident was filmed by the insurgents.

Tschiderer [...] was knocked to the ground from the impact, but he popped right back up, took cover and located the enemy’s position.

After tracking down the now-wounded sniper with a team from [the] Iraqi Army Brigade, Tschiderer secured the terrorist with a pair of handcuffs and gave medical aid to the terrorist who’d tried to kill him just minutes before.

(Emphasis mine.)

18 July 2005 @ 3:08PM >> Until recently, the official seal of Los Angeles County bore three very small cross emblems recalling the county’s heritage and founding. A lawsuit by the ACLU ended that, and the religious symbols have since been scrubbed from the seal.

The Constitution’s establishment clause forms the legal basis of the ACLU’s argument:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...

To me, it seems pretty extreme to argue that the presence of a religious symbol on a county seal is tantamount to the establishment of an official religion. If you’ve seen a supermarket tabloid in the last fifty years, you’d know that Los Angeles County isn’t exactly being run by fundamentalist Christians.

Nevertheless, enough judges agree with the ACLU that, bit by bit, different facets of our country’s history are being etched out if they contain any hint of the religious backgrounds of our founders. That’s as much a crime against history as pretending that Martin Luther King wasn’t black.

The controversy surrounding the Los Angeles County seal gave an opportunity for Anna of Liberty Belles to perform her own video investigation, complete with a guest appearance of Dennis Prager.

15 July 2005 @ 2:19PM >> Some people argue against the War on Terror by saying we’re simply breeding more terrorists by fighting back. Of course, such logic is a recipe for complete surrender. Did we worry that killing Nazis in World War II would create more Nazis? Did we fret that going after the Japanese in the wake of Pearl Harbor might just make them madder and even more violent?

Now, a new poll puts another nail in the coffin of this flimsy thinking:

Osama bin Laden’s standing has dropped significantly in some pivotal Muslim countries, while support for suicide bombings and other acts of violence has “declined dramatically,” according to a new survey released yesterday.

14 July 2005 @ 9:39AM >> If you’ve been relying on the establishment press for news on Karl Rove’s apparent involvement the Valerie Plame controversy, you might be missing a few very important details that PowerLine and The Wall Street Journal have outlined.

I haven’t had much to say on this affair because almost all of the reporting is based on speculation about secret grand jury testimony. There aren’t many real details known except that Karl Rove spoke to a few reporters, a fact that the entire media establishment is now spinning into scandal. Okay, fine, if Karl Rove broke the law, President Bush should get rid of him, but there’s absolutely no evidence of that; there are just the expressed wishes of a few Democrats and their media mouthpieces.

Something about the way the media is acting makes me think they’re going to end up with egg on their faces yet again. That’s just a gut feeling, perhaps fed by my own biases—in this case, my hyper-skepticism about the press—so I reserve the right to be wrong.

Judith Miller, a New York Times reporter, sits in jail right now for refusing to testify for the grand jury. She claims she’s protecting a source, but she also admits that the source granted her permission to talk. In her judgment, the source’s permission was granted under duress and therefore wasn’t truly voluntary, so she’s sticking with her commitment to hide her source even though she’s been released from that commitment. Would a New York Times reporter really go to jail to protect Karl Rove?

Miller believes that her source was essentially coerced to release her from the confidentiality agreement. President Bush is only person who could conceivably exert pressure on Rove to release Miller from the confidentiality agreement. So we’re expected to believe that Miller sits in jail even though Rove and (presumably) President Bush authorized her testimony. Sorry, that doesn’t seem plausible to me. My suspicion is that Miller’s source—and perhaps the source of other reporters—is not Karl Rove. Perhaps the source is actually someone who will embarrass the Times instead of the Bush Administration. That would explain the tight lips over at the Times.

Judith Miller is now being cast as a noble journalist who’s willing to go to jail to stand by her principles. Is she protecting a source, or is she really just protecting the name of the Times from further self-inflicted sullying?

The only people who know for sure are the source and a few people at The New York Times. But the Times isn’t talking. So much for the public’s right to know!

13 July 2005 @ 9:03PM >> In the Los Angeles Times, Govindini Murty—a co-founder of the Liberty Film Festival—makes a good point:

Hollywood’s box office has hit the skids, and the entertainment media are in overdrive trying to explain why. The most obvious explanation for box office malaise is consistently overlooked: Hollywood’s ruling liberal elites keep going out of their way to offend half their audience.

Meanwhile, Bridget Johnson notes in The Wall Street Journal:

Last year, in an OpinionJournal column about the murder of Theo van Gogh at the hands of an Islamic extremist, I mentioned how the 2002 film version of Tom Clancy’s “The Sum of All Fears” transformed the Palestinian terrorist characters into Euro neo-Nazis. The day my piece appeared, I received an anonymous e-mail from someone who claimed to be “close to the decision” to alter the adaptation, defending the pre-9/11 changes as trying “to avoid a tired cliché.”

Hollywood actually avoided a tired cliché? Well, I guess there’s a first time for everything...

12 July 2005 @ 5:01PM >> It has just come to my attention that all e-mail sent to me at my Brain Terminal address since the middle of last week has disappeared into a void. Some e-mails addressed to me are bouncing, others just disappear without any notice to the sender. Unfortunately, I was not aware of this problem because my outgoing mail was working just fine.

The problem appears to be with my hosting provider, with whom I’m on the phone now. It may be a day or more before the problem clears up entirely. No word yet on whether the e-mails have been lost permanently.

Update: My e-mail is back up and running now, but a large portion of the e-mails sent to me over the past week have bounced. If you tried to e-mail me and have not heard back, please re-send your e-mail.

8 July 2005 @ 2:42PM >> There’s a real war going on out there, and the enemy isn’t each other. If we can just stop assuming we’re the problem, we might actually stand a chance of victory. But if we waste time navel-gazing in a world that contains wealthy terrorists and starving nuclear powers, we will ultimately be killed in our own streets in a way that’ll make September 11th look like a verbal reprimand. And if you don’t think that’s a possibility, then you really don’t know the enemy. More >>

6 July 2005 @ 5:32PM >> In an article entitled “US delight as Iraqi rebels turn their guns on al-Qa’eda”, the Telegraph (London) reports that a split is developing between al Qaeda and native Iraqi insurgents:

American troops on the Syrian border are enjoying a battle they have long waited to see - a clash between foreign al-Qa’eda fighters and Iraqi insurgents.

Tribal leaders in Husaybah are attacking followers of Abu Musab Zarqawi, the Jordanian-born terrorist who established the town as an entry point for al-Qa’eda jihadists being smuggled into the country.

The reason, the US military believes, is frustration at the heavy-handed approach of the foreigners, who have kidnapped and assassinated local leaders and imposed a strict Islamic code.

[...]

Shops selling music and satellite dishes had been closed. Women were ordered to wear all-enveloping clothing and men forbidden from wearing western clothes.

The native Iraqi insurgency is largely a nationalist movement, mostly remnants of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party. They originally accepted support from al Qaeda because they both had a common enemy: the United States.

Throughout the war, towns on Iraq’s western border have been a haven for al Qaeda elements entering through neighboring Syria. Initially, the foreign fighters were welcomed by the Iraqi insurgents. But now, after growing weary of living in al Qaeda’s vision for an Islamist dictatorship, the nationalist insurgents have begun to turn their guns away from the U.S. and towards al Qaeda:

Fighting, which could be clearly heard at night over the weekend, first broke out in May when as many as 50 mortar rounds were fired across the city. But, to the surprise of the American garrison, this time it was not the target.

If a shell landed near the US base, “they’d adjust their fire and not shoot at us”, Lt Col Tim Mundy said. “They shot at each other.”

[...]

Arkan Salim, 56, who left with his wife and four children, said: “We thought they were patriotic. Now we discovered that they are sick and crazy.

“They interfered in everything, even how we raise our children. They turned the city into hell, and we cannot live in it anymore.”

Let’s hope this rift widens. Many native Iraqi insurgents are Sunni Arabs who took up arms in an effort to restore the dictatorship of fellow Sunni Saddam Hussein. The Sunnis, a minority in Iraq, benefitted disproportionately from Hussein’s rule, and therefore may fear diminished status in any representative government. Still, if they come to realize that their role in a democracy will still be more pleasing than subjugation to radical Islam, they may end up embracing the new Iraqi government in an alliance to push out the Islamists.

6 July 2005 @ 2:18PM >> London edges out Paris for the 2012 Olympics. This apparently came as a shock to the French:

Paris had been the front-runner throughout the campaign, but London picked up momentum in the late stages with strong support from Prime Minister Tony Blair.

One blogger, noting that two of the Olympic Committee voters were Finnish, speculates that outrage over the French President’s recent comments may have tipped the scales away from Paris towards London. Right before the Olympic Committee voting took place, Jacques Chirac offended both the British and the Finns by declaring their food terrible and that their poor culinary skills were grounds to distrust them as people.

As a New Yorker, I must say I’m relieved that the Olympics won’t be coming to my home town. To me, the Olympics seems like an endless parade of fringe sports that nobody cares about until the hype machine kicks into high gear every few years. Then all of a sudden, we’re obsessed for a few weeks with various sports so contrived that they could only have been invented by people trying—and failing—to prove that all the good sports hadn’t yet been created. But don’t listen to me, I’m just an old grouch trapped in a young person’s body who is happy that years of Olympic construction won’t be tying up traffic in a city already known as the gridlock capital of the world.

5 July 2005 @ 9:12AM >> In the 2004 election, a sizable bloc of the American electorate felt dissatisfied with what they perceived to be a condescending tone in the foreign policy of the Bush Administration. President Bush’s bluntness, they argued, alienated the more sensitive, cerebral Europeans. Maybe America would be more popular in the world if only Mr. Bush were more subtle, more sophisticated, more—dare I say—French. Fortunately for President Bush, Jacques Chirac, the President of France, was able to take some time out of his busy schedule to demonstrate why the French have been known as masters of delicate diplomacy since the days of Napoleon:

Jacques Chirac stirred the pot at a meeting in Russia on Sunday when he joked to [Russian President] Vladimir Putin and [German Chancellor] Gerhard Schroeder that the British could not be trusted and worse food was only found in Finland.

The French president declared that the only thing the British have ever done for European agriculture is mad cow disease, the French daily Liberation reported.

Mr Chirac then reportedly said: “You can’t trust people who cook as badly as that. After Finland, it’s the country with the worst food.”

[Chirac’s] jibes may have amused Mr Putin and Mr Schroeder, but they are unlikely to have pleased members of the Paris 2012 bid team lobbying the International Olympic Committee in Singapore. Mr Chirac’s absence while Tony Blair has been working on London’s behalf has been noted, but Paris officials have excused it by insisting that the president would arrive in time for the final presentation on Wednesday, which Mr Blair will miss.

Let’s hope President Bush takes note and adjusts his rhetoric to be more in line with European sensibilities. He might finally be able to win over the French, Russians and Germans.

1 July 2005 @ 4:39PM >> This Fourth of July weekend, consider checking out America Supports You, a site dedicated to sending words of encouragement to our selfless troops stationed around the world. Please let our military personnel know that they are not forgotten as we celebrate our nation’s independence.