Politico Almost Commits an Act of Journalism

The unvarnished look at General McChrystal that just tanked his career was made available by a freelance reporter who wasn't beholden to almighty "access." So said Politico before they sent that little revelation down the memory hole.

The Politico was so hopped up about the story that it took the extraordinary step of posting on its site a PDF of Rolling Stone’s article because Rolling Stone had not put it online fast enough. In one of the many articles The Politico ran about the episode the following observation was made by reporters Gordon Lubold and Carol E. Lee:

McChrystal, an expert on counterterrorism and counterinsurgency, has long been thought to be uniquely qualified to lead in Afghanistan. But he is not known for being media savvy. Hastings, who has covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for two years, according to the magazine, is not well-known within the Defense Department. And as a freelance reporter, Hastings would be considered a bigger risk to be given unfettered access, compared with a beat reporter, who would not risk burning bridges by publishing many of McChrystal’s remarks. [emphasis mine]

. . .

Our reveal is looking pretty good, isn’t it? Gordon Lubold and Carol E. Lee let us in on a little trade secret. They have no motive to make it up. Lee is a beat reporter herself, qualified to speak on the subject. Lubold has covered the military for years. Politico trades in this kind of observation; it was founded to reveal some of journalism’s “state secrets.” Tom Ricks, a former beat reporter for the Washington Post who also covered the military, says pretty much the same thing: beat reporters have an investment in continuing the relationship so they are less risky for a powerful figure like McChrystal.

And then, the next day… the reveal disappears. The Politico erased it, as if the thing had never happened. Down the memory hole, like in Orwell’s 1984. The story as you encounter it online today doesn’t have that part (“would not risk burning bridges…”) in it. Clint Hendler of Columbia Journalism Review, who discovered the missing lines, asked The Politico about it…

Hendler got no answer. One wonders what access Politico is trying to preserve.

Wag The Children Tour Stumbles

Alberto Gonzales's Wag the Children tour is getting off to a rocky start. The press seems to be having a little trouble getting into the spirit of things. They just keep prodding and pestering him over this trifling federal prosecutor scandal. Today the fearless protector of our little ones was actually driven from the podium with the carping of Chicago reporters. Can't they read? "Protect Safe Childhood!!!" Can't miss it. It's on a great big, Orwellian backdrop that was paid for with our tax dollars. Doesn't say "Prosecutorgate" over and over in big block letters, now does it? These reporters seem to have forgotten how these things work. Let's review:

Make, announce, type. Put them through a spell check and go home.
-- Stephen Colbert

Yeesh!

On Being Mr. Buttle

I was pondering just yesterday the plight of Mr. Buttle. How many of us are going to end up just like him; tortured to death because of a typo? See I can never decide what's worse. The loss of our civil liberties or the mind numbing incompetence of the people in whom our precarious freedoms are entrusted.

Here's what brought this to mind. Yesterday my internet service was out for most of the day. In my frustration, I called Verizon, who owns all the pipe around here, and keeps it functioning about as well as the duct-work in Terry Gilliam's "Brazil." But when I called them, a customer service rep (the lot of them are the bane of my existence) told me that he could not tell me anything, because when I told him the name on the account, he insisted that I was wrong. I explained, "A bill manages to find its way here every month and we pay it." This confused him terribly. I asked him if the name on the account was the one for which we receive a myriad of calls; the previous owners of our dialing digits... yes. Well that explains why we're getting so many wrong numbers six months later. So I was gaffed off because of a data entry error by the same company that left us without phone service for a month when they botched our order. I loathe Verizon.

I was inconvenienced yesterday because of bureaucratic ineptitude. But it will not be an inconvenience if I am, or someone like me is, secreted away to Egypt in a rendition program, because of typos, or any of the growing number of snafus that plague Americans daily.

This morning I learn from the Washington Post that the FBI has been abusing the Fourth Amendment even more heinously than previously known, in spite of growing concern from its own attorneys.

Under pressure to provide a stronger legal footing, counterterrorism agents last year wrote new letters to phone companies demanding the information the bureau already possessed. At least one senior FBI headquarters official -- whom the bureau declined to name -- signed these "national security letters" without including the required proof that the letters were linked to FBI counterterrorism or espionage investigations, an FBI official said.

The flawed procedures involved the use of emergency demands for records, called "exigent circumstance" letters, which contained false or undocumented claims. They also included national security letters that were issued without FBI rules being followed. Both types of request were served on three phone companies. . . .

A March 9 report by Fine bluntly stated that the FBI's use of the exigency letters "circumvented" the law that governs the FBI's access to personal information about U.S. residents.

The exigency letters, created by the FBI's New York office after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, told telephone providers that the FBI needed information immediately and would follow up with subpoenas later. There is no basis in the law to compel phone companies to turn over information using such letters, Fine found, and in many cases, agents never followed up with the promised subpoenas, he said.

But Fine's report made no mention of the FBI's subsequent efforts to legitimize those actions with improperly prepared national security letters last year.

But whose phone records is the FBI illegally obtaining? Mine or the previous owner of my phone number... Mr. Buttle's or Mr. Tuttle's?

I leave you with the latest from Bill Maher:

And finally, new rule: liberals must stop saying President Bush hasn't asked Americans to sacrifice for the War on Terror. On the contrary, he's asked us to sacrifice something enormous: our civil rights.

My good friend Renee has done the leg work and provides a full transcript of Maher's remarks here.

NYC Jumps on Censorship Bandwagon

Make no mistake. I hate the n-word. I just hate censorship more.

New York's resolution is not binding and merely calls on residents to stop using the slur. Leaders of the nation's largest city also hope to set an example.

Other municipalities have already passed similar measures in a debate that rose to a fever pitch late last year after "Seinfeld" actor Michael Richards spewed the word repeatedly at a comedy club in Los Angeles.

At New York's City Hall, supporters cheered passage of the resolution, with many of them wearing pins featuring a single white "N" with a slash through it.

Hip-hop pioneer Kurtis Blow Walker said blacks need to stop using the word so "we can elevate our minds to a better future."

Others argue that use of the word by blacks is empowering, that reclaiming a slur and giving it a new meaning takes away its punch. Oscar-winner Jamie Foxx, for example, said he would not stop using the word, and did not see anything inappropriate about blacks using it within their own circles.

But in the uproar over Richards' outburst, black leaders including the Rev. Jesse Jackson and California Rep. Maxine Waters said it is impossible to paper over the epithet's origins and ugly history of humiliating blacks. They challenged the public and the entertainment industry to stop using the epithet.

And can we please take poor Michael Richards out of the stockade. That he has become the emblem for racism is, well... deeply indicative of the real problem.

I absolutely believed Michael Richards when he said he was not a racist. I think that's why he upset people so much. He reminded us all of what lurks in our deep subconscious, in that dark place right next to our fears. A friend of mine calls them "isms." My friend is a gay man who speaks of his own subconscious homophobia. He points out that these are inculcated attitudes that we ideologically and intellectually deplore. They can snap to the surface when we're triggered, as Richards was, by aggressive heckling.

What's worse. Richards's meltdown -- explained beautifully by Elayne Boosler -- or this:

State Senators Robert Ford and Darrell Jackson are considered key black political leaders in South Carolina because they backed John Edwards in 2004 and managed to hand Edwards 37 percent of the vote in a state where half the primary voters are black.

For those of you who don't understand why we keep harping on early primaries, it's simple. If a presidential candidate wins an early primary state -- like Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina -- deep-pocket donors keep funding their campaigns.

The losing candidates are well on their way to becoming also-rans.

So you tell me why Ford and Jackson found it necessary to tell reporters that they were driving Miss Hillary so early in the game.

"It's a slim possibility for [Obama] to get the nomination, but then everybody else is doomed," Ford told a reporter with the Associated Press on Tuesday.

"Every Democrat running on that ticket next year would lose because he's black and he's top of the ticket. We'd lose the House and the Senate and the governors and everything," he said. "I'm a gambling man. I love Obama," Ford said. "But I'm not going to kill myself."

This, from a man who claims in his bio that from 1966 to 1972, at the height of the civil rights movement, he was arrested 73 times as a staff member with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

Here's a tip. One has tangible consequences.

Anyone who thinks we can unwrite our "isms," or thoughtcrimes, by excising a word from the lexicon is naive. We would do better to grab hold of teachable moments, like Richards's outburst, and open a real dialog. Anything less is just sticking our fingers in our ears and going, "la, la, la, la!"

Crazy Pills: Ruminations on Sy Hersh

Will the Chicken-Hawk-in-Chief never tire of hiding behind our troops? Follow the pretzel logic if you will. We must attack Iran in order to "protect our troops."

At Rice’s Senate appearance in January, Democratic Senator Joseph Biden, of Delaware, pointedly asked her whether the U.S. planned to cross the Iranian or the Syrian border in the course of a pursuit. “Obviously, the President isn’t going to rule anything out to protect our troops, but the plan is to take down these networks in Iraq,” Rice said, adding, “I do think that everyone will understand that—the American people and I assume the Congress expect the President to do what is necessary to protect our forces.”

That's right. We must set Iran on fire, while our troops are sitting ducks in Iraq, in order to protect them. We must exhaust what's left of our military supplies and hardware in order to protect them. I fail to see how destroying our military readiness protects the troops or the country, for that matter.

This is where the rhetoric meets the road and shreds on contact. Protect the troops?! How does not giving them adequate body armor and up-armored vehicles protect them? How does warehousing our injured heroes in fetid squalor, complete with vermin and black mold protect them? How does an overburdened, underfunded VA protect the troops? How does announcing cuts in veteran's health care, while they are busy dodging bullets and IEDs protect them? How does leaving them penniless and homeless protect them?

The Bush Administration gave up any authority to talk about "protecting the troops" when they put them in the most wrong-headed war in American history and allowed comments like this to issue from their cabinet:

As you know, you go to war with the Army you have. They're not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time.

For this Administration to talk about "protecting the troops" is as Orwellian as their entire "war is peace" strategy. Sometimes I think their overarching strategy is to short-circuit the collective psyche of the American public with cognitive dissonance. They'll just keep bombarding us with illogic until we shut down like the Mudd's androids. Reading this latest from Sy Hersh, I am left feeling, once again, like I'm taking crazy pills.

"The Redirection" may be the most mind-melting expose of the Bush agenda yet. As near as I can tell, the goal is simply to make the Middle East as unstable as possible; just knocking over as many dominoes as they can to see if they form a pattern. That's certainly what it looks like, as they progress with their impossible plans for attacking Iran. According to Hersh they themselves made this attack necessary by destroying the only viable check on Iran: Iraq. To paraphrase Colin Powell: They Broke it. We bought it.

It's pretty clear to those of us who scrolled through the PNAC papers back in the day, that Iran was always in their sights. That Iraq is in a shambles, Afghanistan is erupting, and our military is nearly broken, doesn't even slow the Bush juggernaut down. They have so little respect for our cognitive abilities that they don't even bother to update their sales pitch. There are weapons of mass destruction! They're over here. No they're over here. Did I say that? Look over here.

Make no mistake. We are in no way prepared to attack Iran. And that's why the generals are balking.

A British defence source confirmed that there were deep misgivings inside the Pentagon about a military strike. “All the generals are perfectly clear that they don’t have the military capacity to take Iran on in any meaningful fashion. Nobody wants to do it and it would be a matter of conscience for them.

The most damning part of Seymour Hersh's newest piece of investigative journalism was highlighted over at Think Progress with video and transcript of Hersh's interview with Wolf Blitzer. Put simply the Bush Administration is funding terrorists. I seem to remember something about the Patriot Act making that explicitly illegal. I wonder if they'll be prosecuted. I won't hold my breath. Bush probably exempted himself from the Patriot Act with a signing statement.

Yes. We are fighting a "war on terror" by funding terrorists.

War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.

A Still Tongue Makes a Happy Life

Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak
is to narrow the range of thought?
In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible,
because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept
that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word,
with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings
rubbed out and forgotten.

-- George Orwell's "1984"

What if we could make hate disappear by eliminating offensive words and limiting discourse? Would that be possible? Would it be ethical?

Such questions arise when looking at a national trend in legislation to ban a racial slur.

PATERSON, New Jersey (1010 WINS) -- Paterson has joined a nationwide effort to get people to stop using the n-word by passing a resolution to abolish the racial slur.

The resolution is symbolic, though, carrying no penalties. Council Anthony Davis, the sponsor of the bill, says the word is negative and young people need to stop using it. Councilman-at-large Jeffrey Jones voted for the resolution, but says that it has no legs because there is no one to police it.

Paterson is following in the footsteps of Irvington, which passed a similar resolution earlier this month. Other places are also considering a ban. But some people don't think it will change anything.

Paterson resident Lamont Adams says using the word is part of how he associates with his friends.

And it arises again in the blogosphere, where a battle is raging over free speech. As I wrote some time ago:

Web sites are private property not "free speech zones." Site owners do not have to respect First Amendment protections. That much is a fact. But you'd think that some of these site owners would display enough self-awareness not be total hypocrites; criticizing Bush for silencing dissent one minute, silencing their own dissenters the next. Unfortunately each site develops its own culture and its own taboos, which are enforced not only by the management but by self-appointed enforcers of societal norms. The result is that most of these sites ultimately become stifling environments and self-reinforcing echo-chambers of group-think.

Exhibit A: The Daily Kos. A few days ago, Hunter put out the latest encyclical on conduct and penalties for kossacks. It's a humdinger. Here are some of my favorite bits.

Autobanning

Through the ratings system, the community has been given the tools to, in most cases, police itself. Users who consistently bring good arguments, well thought out discussions, or simply happy doses of humor will be rewarded with "recommendations" from other site users: those that engage in offensive, disruptive, or forbidden behavior will find themselves "troll rated".

If a user constantly engages in disruptive behavior over a certain period of time, such that the community repeatedly trollrates the comments of that user, it may trigger an automatic banning of the user known as autobanning. This is the tool given to the community to police itself, and should be taken very seriously.

Autobanning is an entirely automated process -- there is no human intervention. The exact number of trollratings needed in a certain period of time to trigger autoban has not been publicly stated, but the algorithm, generally speaking, is calibrated to be very, very lenient -- you have to be very much an ass, for a prolonged period of time, before it will kick in. A mere bad mood in a comment thread or two won't do it, except in extraordinary cases. A prolonged history of trollrated comments will.

For that reason, you don't really have to worry that trollrating a single offensive post by an otherwise productive community member will get them banned: that doesn't happen. Five or ten such comments from that user, though, and they begin to be on thin ice indeed. If you are having a bad night, as a commenter, and find yourself being repeatedly troll-rated, stop what you are doing. This is considered a social IQ test: if you fail, and get autobanned, don't expect much sympathy.

One of the things the founding fathers understood was that mob rule poses as much of a threat to the free flow of ideas as oppressive government. The autobanning policy is like handing kossacks cyber torches and pitchforks. Many have been slammed with troll ratings and even banned, not for aggressive or "trollish" behavior, but for stating divergent views. As Booman observes in Hunter's thread:

Hunter

the problem I see can be clearly seen in this thread.

There is a kind of mob mentality that has taken over. Someone writes something controversial, like saying soldiers should refuse to serve in Iraq, and they don't get respect, they don't get rebuttals...

They just get blasted with meanness, and snark, and troll-ratings, and recipes.

It's out of control, IMO.

More banning offenses from Hunter:

Misrepresenting your identity. It is perfectly acceptable to remain pseudonymous on the site, meaning that you wish to provide no personally identifying information about yourself. This is fine and accepted practice: many users may have reasons why they do not want their political opinions widely known in their workplace, for example. What is not acceptable, however, is lying about your identity. You may not pretend to be someone else, claim to be a race or gender or class or nationality you are not, lie about your military service, or background, or otherwise misrepresent yourself. You may refrain from talking about those aspects of your life, but you may not misrepresent them in an attempt to bolster your pseudonymous credibility or otherwise mislead other community members.

"Outing" other site users. If a user wishes to protect their pseudonymity, and has not freely provided information which would unmask or otherwise undermine that pseudonymity, then you may not reveal private, personal information about that user that might allow others to subsequently identify them. Period. For that matter, you may not do it on another site either, if you wish to participate here: we take pseudonymity concerns very seriously.

So you can't misrepresent yourself, buuuuut... no one can point out that you are misrepresenting yourself. So you're pretty safe to flout that rule. Full disclosure: I was banned ostensibly for outing someone who was misrepresenting himself. Of course the punch-line is that I didn't out him. I simply pointed out that he had outed and exposed himself as a fraud repeatedly in his own writing. I suppose it's a fine point.

Now this is a fun one:

Consistently rating up the posts of users who are themselves engaging in inappropriate behaviors, thus thwarting the moderation efforts of more responsible community members. More on this below.

Think about that for a moment. Even supporting unpopular ideas, without writing a word, is a potentially bannable offense. As 5hearts of My Left Wing learned when she chose to support the "wrong" side in a disagreement.

I would love to know by what algorithm this happy message gets vomited out:

You've Been Warned...
2007-02-12 20:00:55
Please stop rating up other users' fights in the comment threads. MLW and Booman fights should be left on MLW and Booman, not encouraged.
I understand the above warning (posting is no longer allowed until this is acknowledged).

I clicked on pyhrro's username (a link under a comment of his) at dKos and up it popped....

Which brings me to Exhibit B: My Left Wing. Proprietor Maryscott O'Connor astonished and impressed me the other day when she threw down the gauntlet on this issue, and came down hard on the side of free speech and thought. It was a brave move and she has opened herself up to widespread criticism from the enforcers of social norms. More astonishing still, she opened the floor for debate on that third rail issue, verboten on most liberal websites; the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. Her diary on this and the heated debate it engendered can be found here.

Maryscott has ripped the scab off a festering wound in the blogosphere, and exposed a level of denial and hypocrisy that has astonished even me. The passion amongst a surprising number of site members for the suppression of ideas and the banning of dissenters, I find chilling. The idea that evil ideas, thoughtcrimes if you will, can somehow be stemmed by limiting discourse has found many takers. Dhonig for, instance, has written one of the most wrong-headed diaries I've ever read... and that's saying something.

Okay, so now on to the subject itself, why it is not just a matter of free speech, and why hate should be banned.

First, it is a mere aphorism that ugliness is cleansed by the light of day. And really, this is the theme for the rest of the diary. Some have argued that we should not shun the haters, but hear them, for by putting out their opinions they expose those opinions to "the light of day," where some magical process will cleanse them, or at least we will know them by the nature of their words. Unfortunately, this involves a utopian view of human nature, rather than a realistic observation.

Hate is ugly. Even the haters, if alone, know deep in their soulless little lizard brains that there might be something shameful about their point of view. They mostly keep it to themselves, huddling in the subterranean hovel of hatred. They suspect, perhaps even fear, that (a) they might not be right, and (b) their point of view might not be acceptable. But what happens when they come out, and their hate receives anything less than complete rejection, including rejection of the person and their presence forever? They get the message that somehow what they said was okay.

Their "soulless little lizard brains"... Now, where have I heard that kind of dehumanizing rhetoric used to describe a group of people before... Oh right!

In dhonig's cartoon world, only evil ideas can be viral. Rebuttals to them cannot. Discourse has no real capacity to enlighten, so certain ideas must be denied a forum. This is, of course, demonstrably false. Even in my own lifetime I have watched public opinion morph on race and civil rights, gay rights, and, yes, Jews. Racism, homophobia, and antisemitism are decidedly out of vogue; out of the mainstream, if you will. And much of what has changed these views is that we have seen the ugliness of hate with our own eyes, giving full form to social undercurrents, and rejected it. Full-blown "haters" are in the minority. As I pointed out to dhonig, David Duke, who he himself invokes in his diary as an example of hate run amok, has been rejected by voters repeatedly. Why? Because his odious views are a matter of public record. Something that would not be the case were it not for a First Amendment that protects his right to spew racial hatred.

From Nonpartisan we learn that Jews are a special group, deserving of total protection from offensive ideas. Blacks are not because not enough of them have been killed.

Have six million of them been murdered in a single generation? (0.00 / 0)
No. So...no.

Vague terms? How about this: If you think what you're about to say could in any way be offensive to a Jewish person, or could even be CONSTRUED as being offensive to a Jewish person, DON'T SAY IT.

Similar to the grounds of civil discourse in society, huh? If you persist in violating these norms in civil society, then you get shunned and maybe fired. If you do so in blogtopia*, then you should be banned.

*coined by Skippy.

Well. I'm speechless.

Note: Both The Prisoner and Orwell's 1984 are availaible in the bookstore.

Click-Click-Click: NSA on the Line?

Buy this Poster Card at AllPosters.com

Newsweek's Anna Quindlen writes:

I used to hear strange clicking sounds on my telephone and assume it was Verizon's usual level of service. Now I figure it's the National Security Agency.

I'm with you Anna. I've heard it too. So have those I've been talking to. A friend of mine first pointed it out a little less than a year ago. We were mostly exchanging "girl talk" but our long conversation drifted into the political here and there. We share a contempt for all things Bush. "What's that clicking sound?" she said excitedly. After that I started paying attention. Lo and behold, when my phone conversations drift into criticisms of the war, the economy, Bush the Liar, Cheney the Undead, etc., I start noticing audible clicking sounds. It happens when I talk to friends. It happens when I talk to my sister. All of whom, by the way, are right here in the good old US of A. So, yeah, it could be the woefully crappy Verizon service. Or it could be that saying anything negative about this misadministration gets you surveiled, and Fourth Amendment be damned. No, I no longer feel secure in my person.

It is indeed an outrage, that the big phone companies serve customers so poorly and the authorities so cravenly, that the so-called war on terrorism is so ineptly waged that billions of pages of numbers seemed like a useful tool. We can never forget that these were the same folks who intercepted two messages from Afghanistan on Sept. 10, 2001: "the match begins tomorrow" and "tomorrow is zero hour." No one understood except in hindsight, but hindsight was the only way the messages were seen. They weren't translated until Sept. 12, and zero hour had come and gone.

Oh, right. I don't feel any safer, either.

Ministry of Information Retrieval

Originally published: Sunday, February 12, 2006

Interviewer: Mr. Helpmann, what would
you say to those critics who maintain
that the Ministry Of Information has
become too large and unwieldy ...?

Helplmann: David ... in a free society
information is the name of the game.
You can't win the game if you're a man short.
-- From "Brazil"

Newsweek's Michael Hirsh makes this chilling assessment:

The Bush administration calls the war on terror "the long war." But if we are to take the president and his aides at their word, it is more like a permanent war, one that by definition can never end…. And that means the extraordinary powers that George W. Bush has arrogated to himself "during wartime"—including the surveillance of Americans—could become permanent as well. It all sounds frighteningly Orwellian.

Then ironically deduces:

But the truth is that, for all the hue and cry over American civil liberties, we are a long way from Big Brother today. In fact, we could probably use a little more Big Brother about now.

Hirsh has a point. We have not perfectly manifested Orwell's gravest fears. The dystopian vision we are rapidly devolving towards is more akin to Terry Gilliam's "Brazil." In "Wanted: Competent Big Brothers," Hirsh addresses an information gathering apparatus that can't seem to find its ass with both hands. For all the pronouncements of "saving thousands of lives," the Bush Administration has put in place a system drowning in data and producing almost no useful intelligence. That they might accidentally torture to death some poor Mr. Buttle, in place of Mr. Tuttle, because of a data entry error, seems to be a conservative prediction of just how dangerous their abuse of power can become.

Plastic surgery today?

Plastic surgery tomorrow?

We also learn from Mr. Hirsh that the very Orwellian sounding Total Information Awareness system, concocted by the felonious Iran-Contra figure Adm. John Poindexter, has survived it's Congressional assassination attempt and is hiding in the Pentagon under the code name "Topsail."

Hirsh is wrong that 9/11 has necessitated the consolidation of power in the executive branch. The "War on Terra" has simply provided cover for a power grab plotted by Mr. Cheney and his nefarious cohorts for some time. As John Dean explains in FindLaw:

Long before 9/11, Cheney was pushing this cause.

To understand Cheney's position, he suggests that others "go back and look at the minority views that were filed with the Iran-Contra report, [and] you'll see a strong statement about the president's prerogatives and responsibilities in the foreign policy/national security area in particular."

If one does as Cheney says, as I have, what will be found is rather startling, to say the least.

Cheney has long held the view that Presidents can make the rules as they go along, though he allows that Congress has "the right and the responsibility to suggest whatever they want to suggest." In Cheney's world view, Congress does not make laws, just suggestions; at least none that apply to the President.

If we follow Cheney's logic, the President can authorize wire taps of citizens, confine "enemy combatants" to indefinite detention, and allow poor Mr. Buttle, or some unfortunate Iraqi, to be tortured to death, according to his prerogative, even if Congress "suggests" otherwise.

This is a frightening amount of power to be amassed in any one man's hands. It is a thousand times more frightening when one considers that the President who has demanded this kind of latitude is the President who waged a war based on cherry-picked intelligence, failed to act on a briefing entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Attack in the United States," failed to predict a hurricane that had already been predicted by the weather service, and could not foresee an ensuing disaster that had long been envisioned by the Army Corps of Engineers.

As the New York Times editorial board says in today's paper:

We can't think of a president who has gone to the American people more often than George W. Bush has to ask them to forget about things like democracy, judicial process and the balance of powers — and just trust him. We also can't think of a president who has deserved that trust less.

Newsweek's Hirsh is correct that the issue of this Administration's incompetence is central to the debate over Presidential powers and intelligence gathering. What he fails to recognize is that any bureaucracy makes mistakes and that a system of checks and balances is necessary to protect the Mr. Buttles of the world from the consequences of human error, before they're turned over to "Information Retrieval."