Now things are getting interesting. So Congress is investigating the Executive over intelligence failures leading to September 11, when someone from Congress leaks some information from that investigation to the press. The Executive is incensed, and so Congress asks the Executive to investigate the source of the leaks. Now both branches are investigating each other, at the same time, over the same general issue. Where does this lead? Why, to the FBI asking members of Congress to submit to polygraph tests.

I'm pretty sure the Founders never would have seen this one coming.

 
LLRX.com discusses how to research Islamic law for lawyers and scholars alike. Sharia is derived from a complex set of sources-within-sources, plus a dizzying array of interpretations, most of which conflict with each other to greater or lesser degrees. Even worse, Islamic law really consists of the religious law, plus the law of Medina during Muhammad's tenure, so someone researching Islamic law has to separate those two from each other, and determine how they interact with modern, secular law. Andrew Grossman describes the basics and provides a vast number of links to online and paper sources.

 
Great Lithwick piece over at the Times on why Moussaoui may not be crazy after all: "[U]ntil last week, he believed he was facing the death penalty for Sept. 11 just for being a member of Al Qaeda. Under the government's version of the law -- the only version to which he had access -- he assumed he was being paraded in a show trial that was more about revenge than justice." Yes, he's a terrorist, but the law does not allow us to avenge the whole upon a part.

 
Conservatives behaving badly: Ramesh Ponnuru does some very good work, but when he's bad, he's evidently very, very bad. To wit:

If Republicans take the Senate in the fall elections ... Chief Justice William Rehnquist ... is likely to want Bush ... to nominate a conservative jurist to replace him.

Waiting for a Republican Senate, however, may not be the best tactic. Republican Senates do not just happen by themselves, after all. Nor can one count on Republican politicians to do what it takes to produce them. Chief Justice Rehnquist might have been better advised to retire this year, and thus to make his replacement an election issue.

Now, I'll be the first to admit that it's naive to expect politicians not to ... well, politicize the judiciary, but does Ponnuru have to ask this nation's First Jurist to do so? It seems so, but it's a terrible idea, and worse tactics.

In particular, the Dems have always been effective at raising the spectre of a hard-right Court, busily engaged in rolling back a century's worth of controlling legal interpretation. Suggesting that the Supreme Court Justices plunge into the political morass -- especially following the contentious (I said "contentious." I did not say "indefensible") election decision -- is a sure method of stirring the Democratic anthill. Worse yet, Ponnuru has ceded the moral suasion available to those who advocate evaluating nominees on the merits, not on the basis of political strategy -- which makes hollow any attacks on, say, the sinking of Priscilla Owen. Bad conservative editorialist! Bad!

 
"A Conscience Scream." The Weekly Standard has a piece on the strange reversal of Scott Ritter. After resigning his position with UNSCOM, charging both that the US refused him the support he needed, and used UNSCOM equipment as intelligence listening posts inside Iraq, Ritter now has done a volte-face on Iraq, arguing in an LA Times editorial that "Iraq no longer possesses meaningful quantities of weapons of mass destruction or the means to produce such weapons. And yet Iraq continues to be punished by economic sanctions ... The justification for this tragedy lies not in Iraq's disarmament obligation, which has been largely fulfilled, but rather in the policy of regime removal pursued by the United States."

Ritter is undoubtedly right when he states that Iraq no longer poses a threat to its neighbors; Hussein's policy of developing a concentric military (Army, Republican Guard, SRG, Fedayeen Saddam, and so on), with each ring spying on the ring immediately outermost, has been extremely successful at preventing any kind of military coup, but has also effectively defanged it in respect to other Arab nations. However, Iraqi WMD is another issue entirely; the big nightmare is Iraq obtaining the final elements (so to speak) for an atomic weapon, suddenly polarizing the entire region between two nuclear powers. In 1999, Ritter said that "Iraq has retained a considerable nuclear weapon manufacturing production base." (Endgame, pg. 223)

I'm not surprised that Ritter is defending Iraq. He's always displayed a great deal of sympathy for the Iraqi people, and even the members of Saddam's government, if not the government itself. But his recent support of Hussein, and by extension his torture-state kleptocracy, is inexplicable to me, and deeply disturbing.

 
Max is back at MaxSpeak, and has posted an interesting tidbit about Iraq, oil, and the economy sparked by an Andrew Sullivan piece. (Max's conclusion is more succinct, and more reliable, than Sullivan's: "So in conclusion, deficit spending, probably not a problem. Oil price spike, very big problem."). I like to think of this as an unrelated elaboration on his last reply to me. So, running the risk of fighting a bear in his own cave, let me throw a few of my own thoughts out into the ether.

In his brief post contra the Times, Sullivan asks, "One question: wouldn't lots of military spending help the economy?" (The sound you hear is Milton Friedman having a heart attack.) In reply, Max notes that right now, unemployment is high and the economy is on an anemic recovery path:

In the short term military spending is helpful, though I could think of better uses for the money. Longer term, deficits could spark a return of inflation, if the economy returns to low unemployment and tight labor markets.

Even though I don't question that the economy is Pareto-suboptimal right now, I'm not convinced that increased military, domestic security, and social spending won't put pressure on a recovering economy as it did during the '60s and '70s.* Unlike the first go-round in the Gulf, we are unlikely to get other nations to foot the bill and, in fact, may need to provide major financial concessions to countries in order to secure basing rights for the conflict. Pace the Administration figures who want a Special Forces-heavy, Afghanistan-like "inside out" attack against Baghdad, a successful war against Hussein will be a major affair even with limited enemy engagement. Prosecuting a war in an environment as hostile as the desert requires a huge logistics effort; getting vehicles, fuel, spare parts, and water supples to LOGBASES along the supply line is an expensive, complex, expensive, heroic, and expensive task. Expenditures to rebuild an Afghanistan or Iraq -- and to quell restless Kurdish groups in the north -- would only add to the cost.

Increased domestic spending is also in the works, from expanded Medicare coverage to the huge costs involved in creating a homeland security system, plus a massive short-term hit (as in "three or four decades" short-term) should the Administration successfully push through its Social Security privitization plan.

These are not the kind of expenditures that can be credibly stopped on short notice, even without considering the fact that government spending rarely corrects itself (continuing appropriations being the last refuge of a bureaucracy). Since a tax hike is politically unthinkable for the current Administration, it seems at least possible to me that we're looking at a return to the "guns and butter" days of Vietnam, when government spending competed with a growing economy to push up inflation ... just in time for the energy shocks of the '70s. As Sawicky notes, an international energy price spike could serious depress economic growth, as oil-producing nations siphon off capital. If we run out of military fuel reserves, then government purchases will certainly force energy prices even higher.

One thing that Max says is that "There is no problem in building useless weapons as long as there is slack in the economy (just as there is no problem sending checks to poor people)." I heartily disagree; after all, building weapons requires a massive redirection of resources, resources that could be better spent developing a productive capacity that would last beyond the next war. If, all things remaining equal, we have to make a choice, then send the checks, not the bombs!

 
TIPS and Dips, Part ... well, probably the last. Dahlia Lithwick has a piece up at Slate that says TIPS wasn't such a bad idea after all, if it had been done right from the start.

As any political junkie knows by now, the Torch leapt from the fire on Tuesday with nothing more than a minor rebuke by the Senate Ethics Committee for "creat[ing] at least the appearance of impropriety." This leaves Torricelli free to concentrate on his re-election campaign against GOP candidate Doug Forrester, a generally unknown player whose personal wealth helped secure him the primary, but hasn't given him the visibility he needs to capture the electorate; 69% of his own party "haven't heard enough" about Forrester to have an opinion about him, according to a recent survey. (Poll numbers are here.)

Forrester's low visibility has a number of factors feeding into it. Foremost perhaps is that Forrester was never even supposed to be running in the first place; the leading GOP contender, Jim Treffinger, had to bow out after an FBI raid on his office, leaving the field to three unknowns. One of those unknowns, State Senator Diane Allen, polled within ten to twelve points of Torricelli, making her the strongest GOP contender in the general election, and giving her a strong media presence that overshadowed Forrester.

But, in the end, the problem is with Forrester himself: no one can really figure out his policy positions. Former legislator and PBS news anchor Steve Adubato says of the candidate, "I interviewed the guy, and it is unclear what he actually stands for. He appeared afraid to say anything that might be remotely seen as controversial." This is not the kind of politician -- fey and diffident -- that the GOP wants going up against the notoriously combative Torricelli. Although the polls have consistently shown the electorate is willing to offer strong support to any politician going up against Torricelli, the Democratic senator isn't going to give up without a typically nasty brawl, and anyone who can't stand up to the inevitable flurry of punches isn't going to make it to the Hill in November. As WaPo reports, the fight is already on.

Harvard provides its own competition to LawMeme, with GrepLaw, a Berkman Center piece. Good stuff, frequently updated, with some good original reporting to boot. (But, c'mon, "GrepLaw?" Give me a break.)

 
Some quickies to recap the day:
Happy birthday to Milton "Free to Choose" Friedman, today a nonagerian. NRO has a copy of a recent speech by Donald Rumsfeld on the economist's impact in history.

The Post fronts word that the government is trying to verify stories of a resurgent Iraqi bioweapons capability. The allegations center primarily around the existence of a lab named "Tahaddi," or "Challenge," which is supposedly being used for biological weapons R&D. Iraq has a history of developing innovative and extremely dangerous WMD, including the "dusty mustard" mask-breaker, consisting of mustard gas particularized by way of diatomaceous earth, and a fair number of biological weapons, none terribly effective in combat operations. (The chemical weapons were extremely effective, but it took the Iraqi military quite some time to figure out how not to kill their own troops in the process.) It's also generally accepted that Iraq has two or more gun-type nuclear weapons that only ("only") require weapons-grade uranium to complete them.

Donkey Nation? TNR has an interesting article suggesting that the GOP is becoming rapidly irrelevant as the Dems triangulate themselves into ... well, New Democrats. Or maybe New New Democrats, or New Old Democrats. Even if you look at it as an interesting case study of the current parties' mania to make sense of the emergent voting coalitions amongst the electorate, it's still an interesting think-piece.

Busy bees: WaPo also drops an interesting article on mobile swarming and its impact on the social lives of those who end up "skittering like water bugs on the surface of life ... [and] avoid[ing] deep contact in a time-consuming and meaningful way." So, where's the party tonight?

 
Mean People Suck. No, really. The Slacktivist checks out a recent David Brooks interview and finds the ethos of Brooks' Bobos "not a bad place to start." (Bobo: That's Bohemian Bourgeois, by the way. Or maybe Bourgeois Bohemian. Something like that.)

Brooks' work is amusing, not exactly philosophy for the ages, but he treats his subjects with a kind of fond exasperation that's refreshing to read. His point -- one reiterated to a point by the Slacktivist -- is that what the Bobos consider to be life-guiding principles really only provide feel-good expediencies. Well meant expediencies, yes, but expediencies that serve only to cover up greater, if often abstract, harms with a patina of bumper-sticker pleasantries.

 
What's the deal with all those NYT war stories? Slate is happy to explain. For my money, the Times' coverage of these stories has reached the level of farce, with leakers eagerly competing for that precious above-the-fold space.

A journal called Genome Biology is not normally in the middle of a political controversy, but it's getting there, thanks to a recent opinion piece entitled "Categorization of humans in biomedical research: genes, race and disease" (subscription required, trial available) and an article in the NYT health section.

This is one of those interesting cases where denying the biological reality of race is a dangerous game to play. (The alternative, mentioned in both the NYT and the journal article, is "clustering," a feat of medical legerdemain that uses genetic analysis between individuals to group them into clusters, resulting in racial and ethnic partitioning without ever actually using the term.) The NYT story puts it well:

Dr. Stephen O'Brien, a geneticist at the National Cancer Institute, said that the conclusion that race was not a valid concept "comes from honest and brilliant people who are not population geneticists."

"That doesn't mean they are insincere," Dr. O'Brien said. "It's just that they haven't really looked at it. What is happening here is that Neil and his colleagues have decided the pendulum of political correctness has taken the field in a direction that will hurt epidemiological assessment of disease in the very minorities the defenders of political correctness wish to protect."

One real problem with denying race is that it weakens the position of those who would argue against works like The Bell Curve, or those who would import innate Will and Culture to Race. The important question is not, "Is there such a thing as race?", but, "Are there any differences between races that are important for purposes of social policy?" That, at least, has not been proven to my satisfaction, especially by social scientists who think they can discuss inheritance without genetics.

As long as we're talking science, be sure to check out Quark Soup, one of the few science blogs out there, for some interesting info on antigravity, entropy, climatology, and the Catholic Church's sudden embrace of psychological rationality. (A belated thanks to Skippy for the link.)

 
Antichrist nukes Chicago. Film at eleven. Salon's Michelle Goldberg argues -- unconvincingly -- that the Administration is considering invading Iraq because Baghdad is "Satan's headquarters." Or something like that, anyway. She seems to have trouble figuring out how, and why, the turgid, almost unreadable Left Behind series is tied to White House foreign policy, but that doesn't stop her from trying to intimate that something is going on.

The Culture Wars go green: Islam in America has trodden the path blazed by Irish Catholics and German Protestants alike, but Islam in Europe is a very different thing, argues Bruce Bawer in the paleoliberal Partisan Review, proving that the difference between political lines is often a matter of emphasis, and that emphasis can sometimes make all the difference. Thought experiment for the day: what if Bawer's article had been printed, unlikely as it seems, in Chronicles?

 
Enron, WorldCom, dot-coms: Must be Clinton's fault! Not so, says the oft-perspicacious Jonah Goldberg. Then, the left thunders, Bush did it! Also not so, Goldberg replies calmly:

If ... the market crashed because of Bush, then the market was priced correctly before Bush was elected. If that is the case, then the accounting scandals should be meaningless because share prices were accurate in, say, 1999-2000. And, if they were accurate, then the earnings "clarifications" issued by WorldCom and co. should have been trivial, not catastrophic. Of course, we know that none of this is the case.

He even works "Star Trek" into his argument somehow, which has got to be a sign of rhetorical brilliance or incipient dementia.

In the meantime, I still refuse to exculpate the incredibly mendacious Billy Tauzin for his part in the accounting scandals.

(Tauzin, by the bye, is the same pol who tried to pass himself off as a expert on telecom matters in order to help his ILEC friends, a masquerade that fell apart when, in an online chat with the Washington Post, he referred to LATAs -- "Local Access and Transport Areas" -- as "latta lines." Note to staffers: oral briefings are not a substitue for a decent whitepaper.)

 
Today's NYT drags out its soapboax, saying that SecState Powell "should not be so accommodating" of the Administration's foreign policy, and perhaps should even consider "throw[ing] a tantrum or two."

Newspapers, especially Those Of Record, love political disloyalty, the higher the better, since what now passes as "investigative journalism" begins with the leak-lather-rinse-repeat tactics employed by mutual enemies. But suggesting that a senior Administration figure, especially one in a White House as concerned with loyalty as this one, should publicly stymie executive policy is a cut above the Times' already disturbing penchant for unmoored assertions and orders.

The fact that I tend to agree more with Secretary Powell's take on international affairs (to a point, my disagreements with his policy suggestions beginning where America's current power projection ends) doesn't obviate the fact that international policy is his to execute, not his to make. Administration officials may have differing levels of influence and power, depending on politics as well as personality, but the limits of their abilities are ultimately set by the President and his chosen team. For better or for worse, Colin Powell is not so favored.

The NYT's argument that, "The measure of success for secretaries of state is not whether they loyally follow the lead of the president, but whether they guide foreign policy in directions that advance American interests abroad," is arrogance laid naked before the reader; the elected officials are to be trumped by bureaucrats who are, to be brutally honest, no more than seasonal help, to be kept or discarded depending on the political harvest.

There are many outlets for honest and forthright dissent with the Administration's foreign policy: Congress, the media, even the streets, as the omnipresent protestors ringing the White House attest to. Should Mr. Powell wish to avail himself of those outlets, he can always return to private life, or seek election himself. But to use a Cabinet position to break with the Administration ranks is worse than irresponsible; it is a tactical mistake. Such a figure would very quickly find himself outside Foggy Bottom, with little more than an NYT op-ed contribution in his future.

It is for the best that Secretary Powell is unlikely to be persuaded by the Times. He no doubt recognizes that he has but two options in this case: either stay at his post, doing his best to persuade the Administration to follow his way of thinking; or resign honorably, citing the political version of "creative differences." To an increasingly partisan Times editorial page, having the Secretary of State sow open dissent within his own branch may seem an attractive solution, but Mr. Powell knows better.