Asked by Tim Russert yesterday what Iraqi leaders the coalition planned to hand over the government to on the target date of June 30, Paul Bremer began his answer with "That's a good question."

It would seem that the decision by most news organizations not to publish the "fact sheet" alongside the PDB was a political-editorial decision. Instead, they simply dissected the fact sheet in their own editorial. Hello, kettle? This is pot calling.

Not to be outspun, the White House has posted the fact sheet at

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/04/20040410-5.html

but you'll find no link to the PDB itself. Interestingly, "-3" and "-4" in the 4/10 series are apparently reserved for future use, and "-6", although not listed in the index, serves up a lengthy (42 minute) Saturday evening background briefing on the PDB release. Instead they link only to the 7-minute Easter Sunday "Remarks to the Travel Pool."

The Silent President

Lionel: Let me show you.

The Truth

Homer: I don't know, Marge, trying is the first step towards failure.

Trying and Failure

20. Senior commanders and staffs need the most education and training for nontraditional roles. The troops need awareness and understanding.

Bob Kerrey offers his thoughts in the Sunday New York Times.

Anyone who was in Congress, as I was during the critical years leading up to Sept. 11, 2001, must accept some of the blame for the catastrophe. It was a collective failure.

It has been difficult for all of us to understand and accept the idea that a non-state actor like Osama bin Laden, in conjunction with Al Qaeda, could be a more serious strategic threat to us than the nation-states we grew up fearing.

Time is not on our side in Iraq. We do not need a little more of the same thing. We need a lot more of something completely different.

Fighting the Wrong War

Decius wrote:
] ... the 1993 WTC bombing -- did they make organizational
] changes then to address the fact that they didn't predict
] that? Also, the embassy bombings and the U.S.S. Cole. Why
] didn't they foresee these things? Were they repairing that
] problem?

A couple of thoughts.

First, 'predict' is the wrong idea. No one should expect the government to be clairvoyant. Tenet had it right when he recently explained why we didn't prevent 9/11: "We didn't steal the secret that told us what the plot was. We didn't recruit the right people or technically collect the data notwithstanding enormous efforts to do so."

] These, of course, are questions for the Clinton
] Administration ... Also, there are questions that we should
] have been asking then, and not now, when we were busy fussing
] about interns.

Second, with regard to intelligence, it's largely the same administration. Bush kept Tenet, and Rice kept Clarke. The CSG remained intact throughout the period in question. As Stratfor noted recently, the Bush policies were the Clinton policies.

If anyone is to blame for the intern fiasco, it's the Congress. One can be sure that Clinton would have preferred to focus on foreign affairs, and he tried his best to do so, working all-out on an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement right up until the end. Clinton didn't press Tenet to go all-out against al Qaeda because doing so would have precluded a Middle East peace deal. We ended up with a new intifada anyway, but invading Afghanistan to oust the Taliban in 1999 would have just brought it about that much sooner.

Third, there were efforts to transform the military and intelligence communities for the 21st century -- many of them, in fact. One, for example, was the Commission to Assess United States National Security Space Management and Organization, chaired by Rumsfeld. It issued a report in January 2001. Bob Kerrey and Porter Goss co-chaired a commission on the NRO in 2000. The NIMA commission published its report in April 2001. The Hart-Rudman commission on National Security in the 21st Century issued a highly critical report in early 2001 that made many strong recommendations, including an increased focus on homeland security to protect against terrorist attacks (among other dangers). So, even if Congress was distracted by a dress or sidetracked by the definition of "is", they still did their part along the way.

To claim that we did not do enough before 9/11 is true but unmoving. Could we have ever done enough? Who among us would say, "eh, that's good enough" at some intermediate point? But to claim that no one was doing anything is to dismiss or ignore the facts.

RE: Text of Presidential Daily Briefing from August 6, 2001

Topics will include embedded systems and networks, new computational substrates stemming from the bio-info-nano fusion, pervasive computing and communication, and augmented cognition.

Many of the sessions are available in streaming video, including a keynote speech by Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google; a talk on security and privacy by David Wagner; and a talk on ubicomp by Jen Mankoff, formerly of Georgia Tech.

Berkeley EECS Annual Research Symposium

If you're following the FCC's actions against broadcasters of the Howard Stern radio show, you may be interested in a transcript of the broadcast in question, provided courtesy of The Smoking Gun.

Howard Stern Broadcast Triggers $495,000 FCC Fine

Al-Sadr is, in fact, al-Sistani's pawn. Perhaps more precisely, al-Sadr is al-Sistani's ace in the hole.

Gaming Out Iraq

"Black Ships and Samurai" is, of course, not merely about the United States and Japan at a time long ago. It is offered as a model for beginning to understand how we visualize both ourselves and others. After being introduced to the Perry unit, students in MIT’s "Visualizing Cultures" course develop individual or collaborative projects on subjects of their own choosing.

As yet, no student-created projects are available on the OCW web site.

Black Ships & Samurai