(A guest post by See-Dubya, not Patterico.)

Patterico implored me to post something on Rumsfeld’s resignation. I think the real place to look will be Garfield Ridge this evening, but I’ll take a crack at it:

Rumsfeld arrived with a mission of transforming America’s military into a technologically superior, fast, mobile force and undoing the malign “swords into plowshares” neglect of the Clinton years. How much of that mission he was able to accomplish, I can’t really say, but I do know he was “overtaken by events” on 9/11 and needed to focus on fighting a war in the Middle East with the transitional army we have.

Anytime you have a big reform project like he had, you’re going to make enemies. Compounding this effect was his blunt personality–probably a prerequisite for the sort of sweeping changes he had planned–which people either loved or hated. I loved the guy, but a lot of people didn’t. In fact a Navy officer told me back in 2003 or so that the opinion among his seniors was that this guy hates the military.

There is a lot to dislike about military bureaucracy and inefficiency, and Rumsfeld’s dislike for it was returned in spades, but I think that was just another one of the many political attacks levelled against him. Every setback on every front was greeted with the same strident calls for his resignation, from the same people. The cries of Wolf turned me off at a point in early 2004, when I realized how trumped up the Abu Ghraib stories really were and how little they had to do with U.S. warfighting policy. Whatever Rumsfeld’s quirks, I decided then, his critics were simply not acting in good faith and had squandered any credibility they might have had. And when Ashcroft left, Rumsfeld was left out as the sole lightning rod to soak up their bolts.

But more and more critics piled on, some of them who I respected and who articulated more substantive complaints. The combined weight of these criticisms hamstrung Rumsfeld’s effectiveness more and more. Do we need to send more troops? For Rumsfeld to give such an order would set off a politically crippling shockwave that would have opened him up to attacks that we were ignoring other trouble spots and overextending ourselves by putting so many troops in Iraq–and, well, would have caused us to lose the House and Senate.

So, I wish he had given that order, and a few more, like neutralizing Al-Sadr back when it could have prevented a lot of trouble we’ve faced since then. And, as the American Spectator’s Andrew Cline memorably memo’d to Rumsfeld about the timing of his resignation: You’re supposed to leap in front of the bullet, not behind it. But he has presided over two amazing military victories, in Afghanistan and Iraq, and overseen the rebuilding of our military as the most capable and fearsome fighting force in the entire world–capable of overrunning any nation in the world, provided we have the will to win.

Which we don’t, but that’s not Rumsfeld’s fault. As for the more strident complaints against him, I challenge you to present to me this modern-day Sun Tzu who would have done his job better and pacified and unified Iraq without any American casualties. That man is a construct of hindsight, wishful thinking, and political bluster. Rumsfeld served his country well and, while he made mistakes, suffered a great degree of scorn he did not deserve. I am sorry to see such a dedicated public servant leave under these circumstances, and I do not envy his replacement.

See-Dub, over and out. Cross-posted at Junkyard Blog.

UPDATE by Seedub: Dave@GR’s take, which I mentioned above, is now up and worth your time.

UPDATE BY PATTERICO: I don’t share See-Dub’s love for Rummy. He has been a charming answerer of question at press conferences, but there’s a growing body of evidence that he didn’t have a decent post-war plan for Iraq, that he knew he didn’t, and that he didn’t care. In my view, his arrogance towards the military and cavalier attitude towards planning for a post-war Iraq makes this step long overdue.

(A post by occasional guest blogger See-Dubya; to be cross-posted at Junkyard Blog.)

Straight from the horses’ mouth: the Editor of the L.A. Times is cleaning out his office. He wouldn’t agree to further staff cuts, but the publisher insisted on them.

We now take you back to your regularly scheduled election freakout. If you’re like me you’ve taken everything you’ve heard with so many grains of salt that your blood pressure is redlining.

See-Dub, over and out.

UPDATE FROM PATTERICO: I posted a post of my own breaking the news, not realizing that See Dubya had already done so.

Just so there is no confusion about where to comment, I’m closing comments here. Leave your comments on my post.

[A post by See-Dubya]

Patterico is on vacation, so the LA Times has been getting a bit of a free pass. But I had to say something about Erin Aubry Kaplan’s rant about Andrew Young, former spokesman for Wal-Mart. Young, you will remember, said something stupid the other day:

Well, I think they should; they ran the `mom and pop’ stores out of my neighborhood,” the paper quoted Young as saying. “But you see, those are the people who have been overcharging us, selling us stale bread and bad meat and wilted vegetables. And they sold out and moved to Florida. I think they’ve ripped off our communities enough. First it was Jews, then it was Koreans and now it’s Arabs; very few black people own these stores.

And Kaplan doesn’t think it’s that bad:

Young repeated what blacks have said for generations: that members of other ethnic groups account for a disproportionate share of the merchant class in their own community.He said it badly, and in painting all those merchants as uncaring and unethical, he said it too broadly. But he had a point. The chronic lack of business ownership among blacks in black communities is a real problem, and it was a major factor in civil unrest in 1965 and in 1992.

Young’s comments were called racist, and I don’t entirely agree. Certainly it’s despicable to exploit racial and economic anxiety in order to convince the black media that Wal-Mart is a solution. Being racially or ethnically specific, however, is not the same as being racist.

First, Ms. Kaplan, what would be a “proportionate share” of “the merchant class”? Why do we care what race owns the bodegas on in a particular neighborhood? Is, for example, 15% Samoan ownership a good thing or bad thing?

That aside, let’s look at her take on being “ethnically specific”. When is that okay? I can remember as a child and reading my state and local paper (yes, I was a news nerd then too) and noting that it often identified the race of a person who had been arrested. Well, actually it identified race if the person was black. The papers changed this policy in the early eighties because it served no purpose and was rightly criticized as racist. Or so I thought; but perhaps the reporters were just being racially specific.

Andrew Young described an economic problem—shopkeepers selling substandard merchandise—and dressed it up as a racial problem. Doing so is inflammatory and, yes, racist. Ms. Kaplan’s apology for racism like that is just pathetic.

Hat tip to Best of the Web. Cross-posted at Junkyard Blog.

(a post by guest blogger See-Dubya.)

An excellent, in-depth Vent at Hotair today covers of Riverside County goat-farmer and Al-Qaeda spokesman Adam Gadahn and the network of terrorists he is involved with—including a plot to blow up a Baltimore gas station.

Two names I recognized from this presentation are the father-and-son terror-finance team of Uzair and Saifullah Paracha, whom I blogged about here. My post pointed out how at least Paracha Junior was caught through SWIFT monitoring, and probably his father as well. At the time, as I noted previously, Paracha’s arrest was attributed to information gleaned from the interrogation of Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, in order to prevent disclosure of the true source: SWIFT monitoring.

So: not only were the Parachas financing terror, they were helping terrorist Majid Khan return illegally into the country to carry out the gas station bombing. Paracha Jr. even posed as Khan on the phone to INS and picked up Khan’s mail in Baltimore.

In other words, SWIFT monitoring not only led to the arrests of the five or six terrorists I’ve detailed in my previous post, but if it brought Uzair Paracha to light…

…then SWIFT monitoring disrupted a terrorist attack on the United States.

But the terrorists won’t be so careless next time. Thanks, New York Times!

Cross-posted at Junkyard Blog.

(A post by See-Dubya, cross-posted at JYB)

Risen and Lichtblau and Keller (and Clarke), backpedaling furiously, would now have us believe that everyone but you and me knew about the “closely held” SWIFT surveillance program. Well, you, me, and Hambali the Bali Bomber, whom we arrested in 2003:

Among the successes was the capture of a Qaeda operative, Riduan Isamuddin, better known as Hambali, believed to be the mastermind of the 2002 bombing of a Bali resort, several officials said. The Swift data identified a previously unknown figure in Southeast Asia who had financial dealings with a person suspected of being a member of Al Qaeda; that link helped locate Hambali in Thailand in 2003, they said.

Let’s look at the public record and put a name to one of those “persons”, shall we? A while back I just happened to post about the arrests of several Canadians on charges of plotting terrorism, and mentioned a CBC broadcast about the strange journeys of an apparent Al-Qaeda bag man, Canadian Mohammed Mansour Jabarah, who helped Hambali plan the Bali nightclub bombing in 2002:

In November 2001, Jabarah went to City One Plaza in Kuala Lumpur several times to meet al-Qaeda’s chief financial officer in Southeast Asia. He received $10,000 US on each visit, which he transferred to the men who were to carry out the bombings.…

After the arrests in Singapore, Hambali met with Jabarah in Thailand, says Rohan Gunaratna. Hambali knew how important Jabarah was and that he would be identified and picked up if he remained in Southeast Asia.

Hambali urged Jabarah to leave Southeast Asia immediately for the Middle East, which he did.

According to the FBI Interrogation report, Hambali gave Mohammed Mansour Jabarah a critical piece of information in that Bangkok meeting. He said that Al Qaeda would now move on to attacking undefended targets such as “nightclubs frequented by Westerners” in Indonesia and elsewhere.

“Why did Hambali tell this information to Jabarah?” says Gunaratna. “Because Jemaah Islamiyah was dependant on al-Qaeda money, and that money, $70,000 was provided to Jemaah Islamiyah by al-Qaeda through Jabarah.”

It looks like Jabarah and the unnamed Al-Qaeda money man in Kuala Lumpur may have been the other two parties identified by Swift surveillance, and that Jabarah was the “link” who met with Hambali in Thailand and tipped off the authorities. In which case that makes at least four terrorists identified by the program.The fourth being (according to Risen and Lichtblau) Uzair Paracha, a Pakistani man arrested in Manhattan in 2003 and thought to be a financial conduit for Al-Qaeda. Curiously, authorities attributed Paracha’s arrest to information received from the interrogation of Al-Qaeda mastermind Khaled Sheikh Mohammed*, and not to the surveillance of the Swift data, the closely-held open secret that everybody knew about, except for you, me, and four terrorists (apparently including Al-Qaeda’s chief financial officer in Southeast Asia, whom you would think would know about this sort of thing if anybody would.)

Oh, maybe we should make that five, because Paracha’s father Saifullah Paracha, was arrested in Thailand and is now in Guantanamo:

According to American investigators, Saifullah Paracha, 58, who is being held at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp in Cuba for suspected terrorist ties, urged Al Qaeda operatives to acquire nuclear weapons for use against US troops. The allegation, contained in documents filed recently in US District Court in Washington, also identifies Saifullah Paracha, who has an import business in New York, as a participant in a plot to smuggle explosives into the United States and to help Al Qaeda hide “large amounts of money,” according to newspaper reports.

So maybe the authorities thought that if the program had already caught three money men, a courier, and a major terrorist organizer there might be one or two more Al-Qaeda operatives somewhere in the world who hadn’t gotten the memo about the Swift program surveillance…and so it might be a good idea to keep it a secret.

Oh, well: they’ve heard of it now. Thanks, New York Times!

(*I get the feeling that a lot of the cool sources and methods the government would rather not blab about get attributed to the “interrogation of captured Al-Qaeda figures”.)

UPDATE: You know, looking back over that CBC story linked above, I notice that Mohammed Mansour Jabarah’s brother Abdul Rahman Jabarah was also an Al Qaeda operative who was killed by Saudi police in 2003. His father told him in 2002 that the Canadian police were looking for him. Since Mohammed Jabarah was apparently discovered through Swift monitoring, and was being tracked and followed, and both brothers were wanted by the time they met in Dubai in January 2002, it seems logical that Swift surveillance of one Jabarah brother led to the revelation of the other as well—bringing the total to six terrorists probably identified and/or stopped by the secret Swift program. How many more leads these six that we know about turned up, we’ll never know—especially since all of their associates are now busily covering their tracks now that they realize how the Crusader Infidel Army as been tracking them down and picking them off.

(A post by See-Dubya) 

Here’s Richard Clarke and Roger Cressey in the New York Times:

Privacy rights advocates, with whom we generally agree, have lumped this bank-monitoring program with the alleged National Security Agency wiretapping of calls in which at least one party is within the United States as examples of our government violating civil liberties in the name of counterterrorism. The two programs are actually very different. Any domestic electronic surveillance without a court order, no matter how useful, is clearly illegal. Monitoring international bank transfers, especially with the knowledge of the bank consortium that owns the network, is legal and unobjectionable. … These initiatives, combined with treaties and international agreements, should leave no one with any presumption of privacy when moving money electronically between countries.

I bolded that part because it moots the argument that privacy interests were implicated by the Swift program. If there is no expectation of privacy in a transaction or communication, no warrant is necessary. It’s public knowlege. And it’s basic 4th Amendment stuff. The police can get your credit card records without a warrant, because you were willing to share them with the credit card company. The police can get a list of who you call on the phone, because you’re willing to share that information with the phone company (as opposed to tapping the content of the conversation itself, which does require a warrant.) No harm, say C&C; no foul.

C&C also speculate that President Bush’s reaction to the Timeses’ disclosure is a Rovian electoral calculation, and the value of the program is not that we catch terrorists with it, but that we make it more difficult for them to move money. C&C wonder whether “… the press [should] really be called unpatriotic by the administration, and even threatened with prosecution by politicians, for disclosing things the terrorists already assumed?” As Allahpundit points out, however, they ignore the fact that Hambali the Bali Bomber was caught because of information gathered through precisely this surveillance of his SWIFT transactions.

I am just fascinated that the Times thought running this piece was a good idea. Because it amounts to a repudiation of some the fundamental premises of James Risen and Eric Lichtblau’s original reporting.

Remember, this was supposedly a “secret” program. Hush-hush, nobody knows, classified—hence the title of R&L’s piece “Bank Data Secretly Reviewed by U.S. to Fight Terror”. They also have a caption to a picture there that says “Data provided by the program helped identify Uzair Paracha, a Brooklyn man who was convicted on terrorism-related charges in 2005, officials said.” But don’t pay attention to that right now. We’re arguing in the alternative.

Which we will continue to do below the jump… (more…)

(A guest post by See-Dubya)

One day the Missus and I drove through the lovely seaside town of Santa Cruz, California.  I think we stopped at a winery on the way in, then went to the boardwalk and shopped around downtown.  (I could swear that boardwalk is where they shot the Dirty Harry movie “Sudden Impact”, but I may be mistaken.)  Pretty  town, absolutely full of filthy, sullen, deranged neo-hippies stumbling around in a half-baked haze of hash and radical politcs.  

I was relieved to learn–as I recall, from a sign posted at the city limits–that the city of Santa Cruz is a “nuclear free zone“.  No way I want nuclear weapons falling into the hands of these clowns.    Sure, I had to leave my personal light-water reactor at home, but it was worth it to know that MoonStar and Peace wouldn’t accidentally trigger Chernobyl as they smoked up in their atomic Microbus.  I wondered whether the city had unhooked from the regional power grid, which is supported in too small a part by nuclear power, and generated its own electricity through clean-burning natural love-power and incense-driven turbines. 

I just hope the Commies were willing to observe that sign as well, and not let their ICBMs traverse Santa Cruz’s airspace.  Anyway…

Why they thought they could  beat the Supremacy Clause and prevent the Federal Government from, say, transporting a nuclear-capable cruise missile warhead through town was unclear.  They couldn’t possibly be so dumb as to overlook this fact, especially with all that “expansion” of their minds, and certainly they don’t look like Federalists or States-Rights types who usually wear blue blazers and red ties, or sometimes polo shirts.  After all, a municipal regulation doesn’t usually control over Federal law. 

Nor do church regulations.  As I googled to see if I remembered that correctly about Santa Cruz, I ran across a resolution passed by the Unitarian Universalist Church.  Apparently, they actually do believe something.  Let’s just say if you’re looking for America’s weapons of mass destruction, there’s no need to look inside a Unitarian church.  Anymore. I understand that the Air Force was appalled and had to move several Minuteman silos from their super-secret locations underneath Unitarian pulpits.  In fact, I  think the New York Times broke that story and published a map to all the American missile silos.  Anyway…

We were talking about futile gestures in California.  After a spate of Patriot-act-denouncing by municipalities, we now see Berkeley considering a motion to impeach George Bush, who is presumably the Acting Mayor of Berkeley, and that’s why they think they have the jurisdiction to impeach him.  They probably should.  Berkeley is a wacko town, crime-ridden and full of rude people who like to take grocery baskets away from the homeless and deep-freeze them.  The baskets, not the homeless.  They have a college in Berkeley and when I went there one time, I found masses of brightly colored paper flyers thrown down all over the place.  They were from an environmental rally earlier that day.  Anyway…

Yeah, Berkeley’s a hole and its Acting Mayor George Bush ought to be impeached for letting it get so out of hand.

–by See-Dubya, cross-posted at Junkyard Blog.

(A short guest-post by See-dubya, cross-posted at Junkyard Blog)

From Howard Kurtz’s column on how we partisan meanies are vilifying the poor New York Times for doing their job comes this gem from NYT editor Bill Keller:

“I always start with the premise that the question is, why should we not publish? Publishing information is our job. What you really need is a reason to withhold information.”

Hmmm…how about, oh, because it’s against the f—ing law, jackwipe.

Does he not understand that it is illegal to disseminate classified information? Does that word mean something different in New York?

UPDATE: I always start with the premise, why should I not urinate on something? Urinating on things is something I do. What I really need is a reason not to urinate all over Bill Keller’s tassel loafers.

Sorry, that’s much cruder than I usually write, but Keller’s lame defense deserves much, much worse.

— See Dubya

UPDATE FROM PATTERICO: I have comments on today’s silly New York Times editorial, which I will flesh out this evening.

Via Best of the Web Today I find the SF Chronicle asking a familiar question in its man-on-the-street “Two Cents” feature: “Who’s More Dangerous: Bin Laden or Bush?” The answers aren’t quite as cringeworthy as I might have expected–in fact a couple are quite good.

[This post by See-Dubya]

(By guest blogger See-Dubya)

While our host settles into his palatial new digs, I thought I would throw up a post about prosecutors’ responsibility. Over at NRO, Byron York is covering the Scooter Libby/Valerie Plame case, and he’s discovered that prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald refuses to disclose some information that might help out Libby’s case. York links to a Newsweek piece which announces that Fitzgerald has found support for the claim that Plame was covert. Well, whoopee. I suppose we’ll get to see this proof? Not according to York:

Fitzgerald refused to say whether he knew if Plame had been an undercover agent during the five years preceding her exposure. Referring to a 1963 Supreme Court decision in Brady v. Maryland, which requires prosecutors to turn over evidence that might point toward the defendant’s innocence, Fitzgerald wrote, “We do not agree that if there were any documents indicating that Ms. Wilson did not act in an undercover capacity or did not act covertly in the five years prior to July 2003 (which we neither confirm nor deny) that any such documents would constitute Brady material in a case where Mr. Libby is not charged with a violation of statutes prohibiting the disclosure of classified information.”

Sloppy writing, Fitz. Do you “neither confirm nor deny” the fact that Plame was not covert, or that you have documents that indicate that fact? There are an awful lot of negatives and subjunctives in that sentence, but as I read it, Fitzgerald is saying “even if we had evidence that Plame was NOT a covert agent, we would not be required by Brady to turn it over to the defense, because Libby isn’t charged with leaking secrets.”

Well, I disagree. Libby is charged with making false statements under oath , an element of which is materiality. It has to matter. And in fact in Libby’s indictment, Fitzgerald listed whether or not Libby knew whether Plame’s status was classified as a matter material to the investigation–actually on several of the counts. Plame’s classified status goes to the materiality of Libby’s statement, and therefore may be exculpatory. Therefore the prosecution ought to turn over what it has about Plame’s status. If Fitz wants to claim that releasing the evidence about Plame would somehow compromise national security, I’d be sympathetic, but I don’t think he can hide behind Brady.

Furthermore…
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