What Novak didn't say

Let's be clear: Bob Novak had every right to publish Valerie Plame's CIA identity.
As he correctly asserts, her identity bore on an important political story: her husband Joseph Wilson's CIA connection.

Yet, in his memoir, The Prince of Darkness, the septuagenarian makes it appear that, as a journalist, he can dish it out, but as a subject of a news controversy, he can't take it. Clearly he is bitter at how he was treated by his peers with respect to Plame. His account focuses on his specific role and rarely mentions the names of other journalists also ensnared in the controversy, excepting those who wrote what he considers to be inaccurate reports about him.

Novak makes a strong case for the theory that the ultraleft whipped up the Plame controversy as a means of attacking Bush, who had been hell on plugging leaks.

So I have to wonder, why does he join the ultraleft and others in ignoring Bush's impeachable behavior in the Plame probe. Either Bush and Cheney committed perjury about secetly declassifying Plame's identity or they kept silent and allowed a special prosecutor probe for no other reason than to spare themselves political embarrassment prior to the 2004 election. A woman was jailed for three months while they dummied up.

Now why doesn't Novak feel outraged at Bush and Cheney for doing so much damage to freedom of the press by their unseemly silence? Isn't he bothered by the fact that Bush and Cheney stayed silent while journalists were pressured to reveal sources, with one going to prison, but then opened up at the last minute when it appeared that Cheney might face indictment? He joins ex-spook chief Tenet in publishing a memoir that conspiratorially ignores a point so dangerous to the bad guys.

A previous draft of this post misspelled Novak.

America's economy in hands of wingnuts
Any business in America can now have its secret transactions and dealings examined by faceless security people, who need only say that they think someone in another country -- who might be linked to terrorists -- might somehow be connected to the business. Thank you Comrades, for a wonderful new security tool, pushed through by a sinister cabal of those posing as persons on the right and left wings.

That follows Bush's recent signing of an executive order giving the Treasury Department the right to -- without warning and due process of law -- seize the assets of any American or any American business if there is somehow a whiff of association with people who might be violent. Got that?

Putin or the Chinese politburo would be proud.

Bush and Cheney have turned out to be wolves wearing "pro-business" clothing. If placating the oligarchs who run greedy cartels is pro-business, then America is in real trouble.

Bush and Cheney have managed to divert the defense resources of America into what should have been a strategically minor matter (dealing with terrorists) and away from the threat of communism, which still exists while at the same time driving up the price of oil as a result of a bad war and reviving Russia's superpower ambitions.
Oil-rich Russia has now resumed daily long-range bomber sorties, as had been the custom of the old Soviet Union, which KGB veteran Putin tends to glorify.

In fact, the mix of economic capitalism and political KGBism or communism found in Russia and China is nothing new. Lenin instituted such measures in the 1920s in his New Economic Policy, which was eventually scrapped by Stalin's collectivizations.

No wonder the markets are jittery. Why should anyone have confidence with radicals in the White House?

Blog goes blank during debate
An email debate among scientists and academics was occurring when a curious thing happened. Google's spam patrol blanked out the related site Kryptograff.blogspot.com which included a summary of the NIST's secnario for 9/11. So the interested parties could not refer to it.

The last I looked, there was nothing on that blog that looked like spam. However, this account has been plagued with a number of morphing bugs, which Google apparently refuses to acknowledge or correct.

On the 911science blog, posts have been deleting themselves without my permission. In one case, I took the precaution of making a mirror page of one post. The last time Google shut down one of these blogs, they left the read privilege. This time, the read privilege has been denied also. Result: a useful summary was taken out of circulation during an important debate.

Experts can't verify key 9/11 experiment

Citing public safety and other concerns, the NIST is preventing outside experts from reviewing an important 9/11 computer simulation.

Please see details at

http://911science.blogspot.com

Hacker cover stories

The hacking of this blog -- despite my changes of password, terminal and geographic location -- notionally might not be the work of a government agency.

According to Bruce Schneier in his latest Cryptogram (available on the net), commercial security systems are generally very poor, as is demonstrated by the pathetic security record of computer voting machines.

One would think however that Google's security system would be top-shelf. But perhaps not. Or perhaps someone is tracking my movements so closely as to be able to use keyboard detectors when I change passwords and locations or is otherwise able to exploit security holes specific to a particular location.

Still, I suspect that the hackers are very likely cut-outs for a government unit of some kind. Do you really suppose that the 9/11 traitors are twiddling their thumbs while their adversaries are calling attention to the holes in their story?

So why did Google's techies claim that a bug wasn't at work here? Their letter made it appear that the fault was apparently mine. That's SOP when a government operation is compromised: blame the target.

So maybe they didn't actually check the blog, but simply saw a copy of a letter I sent to a media colleague. A fast reading of that email could have led them to that erroneous conclusion. Yet, all it would have taken was one click to reach the URL so they could see for themselves.

Or, maybe they were covering for someone by making it seem that I was deliberately switching the Hindi transliteration function on and off to create the appearance of a bug.

The latest wrinkle: when I hit "publish," an error banner appears saying the post can't be published, though there are no highlights marking specific errors, such as bad html tags. So I am forced quite frequently to hit publish twice. I read this as a statement from the hackers: You can't get rid of us; more games are in store.

Not a bug, Blogger techies say

The headline malfunction has been fixed. Blogger techies told me in an email yesterday that the problem was that I had apparently inadvertently enabled the Hindi transliteration function.

Low and behold, I checked and saw that that option had been enabled.

But this is a transparent cover story. For one thing, the transliteration bug has morphed over time. In its latest version, only part of the headline would transliterate, nothing else.

The email from Blogger arrived about the same time that media interest in the matter became known to me.

However, I expect that other "bugs" will occur that seem to signal a politically significant message.

ब्ब्ब x

As you see, the headline function remains unrepaired.

Despite a number of emails, no response has been received from either Google's tech team or its legal department regarding what may well be security agency interference in this site.

विल्ड-एयेद कोन्स्पिराच्य theory

Here's a wild-eyed conspiracy theory: Google can wash its hands of responsibility for the hacking of this blog now that Bush has signed a new, extended warrantless wiretap law.

The law was needed, according to N.Y. Times sources, because telecommunications companies, fearful of lawsuits, were balking at cooperating with some NSA demands. The details of the extension were, of course, kept under wraps.

Well, you say, what's a blog got to do with email communication? Google has changed its policy to require that every blog be linked to an existing email address, whether Google's Gmail or other. This blog's password is identical to my Gmail password, at Google's insistence.

So, if the feds demand the password for my Gmail account, then they also have the password for this blog. Once the interceptions are authorized, Google lawyers can then argue that any hacking is not Google's responsibility. Think the Bush-Cheney crowd wouldn't stoop to morphing a nettlesome critic into a "terrorist-linked" threat? Even now, numerous political activists are denied, without due process of law, their right to fly, though it is absurd in 99 percent of cases to view them as terror-tied.

I have contacted Google's tech team three or four times about the hacking but no response has been received and the latest bug remains unfixed. I did mention in one letter that I suspected that this blog was being hacked for political reasons and that the hackers seem to getting past Google's firewalls and into its main system. I say this because I keep shifting my passwords, computer terminals and geographic locations, but the hacking continues.

As luck would have it, shortly after I wrote that first letter to Google, the notorious bill was railroaded through Congress and hastily signed by Bush.

Now you may say that hacking blogs is not the same as scanning email. Yes, but don't forget, there are no warrants. And if one suspects such a dirty trick, there is the recent appellate decision tossing out a lawsuit by journalists and lawyers who had reason to believe they had been targets of warrantless NSA wiretaps. The government just applied catch 22: We are not allowed to win. One can't prove one's case without seeing the evidence and one can't see the evidence unless one proves one's case.

The political point of the most recent hack attack on this blog is, I believe, to counter my point that the invisible government is slipping in its control of public debate because the blogosphere is commandeering wedge issues left uncovered by the invisible government's media allies and pawns. How to scotch that dangerous thought? Stick an obvious bug on the blog, and see that it doesn't get fixed.

Also, I've noticed that once a clandestine operation is authorized, it keeps going on its own inertia, whether or not it still makes sense or whether there is a degree of public attention. Recall that the NSA is essentially a military operation.

Aug. 12 note: Yesterday's New York Times gave an account of how the bill zithered past worried Democrats. Democrat Jay Rockefeller, Senate intelligence panel chairman and a "liberal" oligarch, set the bill in motion. Supposedly, Rockefeller made a terrible political miscalculation because it was the expansive GOP bill that passed, rather than the Democrat bill. On the other hand, the invisible government of oligarchs and spooks is well satisfied.

The Democratic bill would not have given telecom companies -- nearly all of which are extensively interlocked with the Rockefeller crew in a tangled skein of business relationships -- near blanket immunity from lawsuits over protection of privacy from improper government access. However, even the Democratic bill would have given these firms, including Google, strong protection against such lawsuits.

टेस्ट

Headline function remains unfixed.
Last week I sent the Blogger tech team an explanation concerning this bug, but have received no response.