...while my baby walks the streets of Baltimore.....

Well, I made it to Baltimore and am currently up all night at the Hyatt, where we arrived late after a rather nightmarish trip. It was actually going OK until the Delaware Bridge where there had been some huge accident which caused police to completely close the highway for close to 3 hours! It was incredible how little we moved in how long of a time, and how antsy it made the boys even though I let them listen to their bands LOUD...ouch! When we finally got to the accident, where they were letting a single slow file of cars by, all that was left was a huge Harley, all wrecked and laying on its side, lots of marks in the road and cops measuring stuff and taking notes...and chunks of the divider forcibly taken out with concrete and metal twisted here and there! So whatever it was, sad as it was, I stepped on it and hightailed it out of there.
We listened to some of Grandpa's crazy old Inner Sanctum shows along the way and the boys were on edge and feeling spooky for the rest of the trip...
More about Baltimore to come if I can get up tomorrow....beyond getting them into the convention. I'm going to the aquarium, but really going for the aviary on the roof (thanks to TN for the tip on that,)...and also hope to ride the water taxi in the rain (thanks to PK for the tip on that....) But some sleep would also be great!
The good news is that Im right across the hall from the gym and they have just renovated the whole hotel, so its sort of a comfortable and usable version of the hip Schraeger Hotels, that look nice but are pretty uncomfortable!
Here is Dowd for now...


PS The locks on the bathroom stalls in the rest stops (where the boys ate Nathans chili cheese hotdogs for dinner...note to self: no chili cheese anything with boys enclosed in a car for a long period of time!...and I just drank coffee and ate apples and yogurt...Seanie, how can you live in this stuff?,) are made by a company called "hiney hiders."

May 13, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Six Degrees of Bacon
By MAUREEN DOWD
WASHINGTON
I bet you're wondering how someone like Dusty Foggo, who had his C.I.A. badge deactivated yesterday because of his role in a scandal ripe with poker parties, Dominican cigars, prostitutes, Scotch, luxury suites, bribed congressmen, defense contracts and even a rumored Teutonic dominatrix, was ever chosen to run day-to-day C.I.A. operations at such a parlous moment in American history.
It's because of Bacon Guy.
That would be Michael Kostiw, a conservative darling who was Porter Goss's first choice to be the third-ranking official at the C.I.A. He was derailed in 2004 after fellow spooks leaked word to The Washington Post that Mr. Kostiw had left the agency under a hickory-smoked cloud two decades earlier, after being caught shoplifting a $2.13 package of bacon from a supermarket in Langley, Va., near C.I.A. headquarters.
Not the pork you usually associate with Washington.
Mr. Goss, W.'s absurd choice to lead our inept intelligence agency in the battle against Islamic terrorists, was so loony he wanted to put a man in charge of C.I.A. discipline who had to be disciplined for slipping chazerai into his pants, or wherever he put the package to bring home the bacon.
Mr. Goss's departure, after a season spent sulking about losing the president's ear to John Negroponte, has opened the window on a whole new level of incompetence, turf wars, corruption and wackiness. Now we see that the C.I.A. was mired not only in professional mistakes, but also in a complete lack of personal and personnel judgment. The more you know about the people Mr. Goss put in top positions, the scarier it gets.
When he was caught in 1981, Mr. Kostiw had been a C.I.A. case officer for a decade. But his answers on a C.I.A. polygraph test and psych exam about the purloined bacon were so sketchy that he was placed on administrative leave and forced to get counseling, Walter Pincus wrote in The Post. Mr. Kostiw wound up resigning.
Like Brownie, Bacon Guy found his comeback path greased by cronyism. He worked on Porter Goss's terrorism subcommittee when Mr. Goss led the House Intelligence Committee, after working as a lobbyist for ChevronTexaco. (All roads lead back to oil.)
After Bacon Guy was forced to withdraw, Mr. Goss and his chief of staff, Patrick Murray, were not moved to look for a sterling choice for the No. 3 post. They were moved to go on a rampage to ferret out and get rid of the libs in the agency whom they suspected of leaking the news of Bacon Guy's carnivorous crime.
With a Nixonesque sense of paranoia and vendetta, the Bush dominatrixes never seem to worry about the nefarious activity itself — from shoplifting to gathering data on all Americans' phone records. They just resent it when the nefarious activity is revealed. When word got out that the government was snooping on domestic calls, the administration rushed into action, not to investigate the violation of the Constitution but to punish any government employees who might have leaked it to The Times.
Despite rumors and complaints about Dusty, Porter Goss once more went for a bad choice, installing Dusty in the inner circle of Gosslings, as the C.I.A. director's cronies were known.
No doubt trying to save himself, Mr. Goss asked Dusty to step down once he became publicly ensnared in a bribery scandal that includes a wild cast of poker-playing characters, like Duke Cunningham and the retired C.I.A. official Brant Bassett, a k a "Nine Fingers." He's said to have a prosthetic 10th finger to hide his identity during cloak-and-dagger operations.
Dusty's childhood friend Brent Wilkes, a defense contractor who has racked up almost $100 million in government contracts, is reported to have given Dusty's other pal, Nine Fingers, a $5,000 fee to go to Germany for a few days as a consultant on a business deal in 2000.
Investigators are looking into whether Mr. Foggo gave a contract to deliver bottled water to a C.I.A. office in Iraq to a relative of Mr. Wilkes, and whether Mr. Wilkes treated him to posh vacations in Hawaii and Florida.
In a scene that would impress even the "Law and Order" impresario Dick Wolf, investigators from the F.B.I., the I.R.S., the Defense Criminal Investigative Service and the C.I.A.'s inspector general showed up yesterday for the searches. Dusty's C.I.A. office and his house in a nearby Virginia suburb were examined.
The dolts at F.B.I. headquarters could not get it together to search Zacarias Moussaoui's computer before 9/11, but now we have the F.B.I. searching the C.I.A.
That's not progress.
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Lost in Translation...

OK, I hear from a reliable source that it was actually a Bass that Bush was referring to and that the translation was screwed up. Heres my question, though, if it was a Bass, was it not one lame-ass small Bass for a private stocked pond? Is that small of a Bass the BEST experience that he has had in the past 6 years? (thanks to PJ Sauter for pointing that out! I am not much of a fisherwoman, though my cousin Faye from Cape Cod is currently in the running for some sorta medal in women's Deep Sea Bass fishing, or some such....too bad her husband is a neocon or I'd pick her brain on this subject)
Something doesnt add up...and though I dread diving back into the world of fish and fishing on Google, (yuck!, though I am about to take my son down the road to the river soon,) I cant exactly call my Perch-gate case 100% closed.
In a really fun afterthought on the whole "best moment in office" subject, MSNBC did a poll in which 47% of Americans agree with Bush that that small-ass Bass was his best achievement in office, while 69% would argue that the reallybestest moment was Cheney shooting the guy in the face...Its just too good!

Meantime, thanks to my ever fun, smart, and faithful, co-conspirators on the MorningSeditionsts blog, Ive got this handy little piece to present, along with the Wednesday Select offering below:

Molly Ivins: The Best Little Whorehouse in Washington

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20060508_molly_ivins_whorehouse/

Posted on May 8, 2006

By Molly Ivins

AUSTIN, Texas—Of course I am above sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll. So serious a servant of the public interest am I, I can fogey with the best: On my better days, I make David Broder look like Page Six.

I don’t care what anyone smoked 20 years ago, I approve of those who boogie till they puke, and I don’t care who anyone in politics is screwing in private, as long as they’re not screwing the public.

On other hand, if you expect me to pass up a scandal involving poker, hookers and the Watergate building with crooked defense contractors and the No. 3 guy at the CIA, named Dusty Foggo (Dusty Foggo?! Be still my heart), you expect too much. Any journalist who claims Hookergate is not a legitimate scandal is dead—has been for some time and needs to be unplugged. In addition to sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll, Hookergate is rife with public-interest questions, misfeasance, malfeasance and non-feasance, and many splendid moral points for the children. Recommended for Sunday school use, grades seven and above.

But for starters, let us consider the unenviable record of Porter Goss at the CIA. From the beginning of his tenure, Goss has been criticized for politicizing the agency. He brought a bunch of political hacks with him for staff, one of whom turns out to be the poker player called “Nine Fingers.” And in the end, he was probably fired for not having politicized the agency sufficiently.

What is the point of politicizing an intelligence agency? So the CIA officials would get a report from some agent in Iraq saying, “Looks bad.” The first thing they’d ask was, “Is this agent a Republican or a Democrat?”

Maybe there really are conservatives who believe everything in Iraq is hunky-dory and there’s a giant media conspiracy to hide the joyous tidings. But as you may recall, the ever-nimble minds at Donny Rumsfeld’s shop have already tried paying public relations people to invent good news about Iraq and then plant it in newspapers there—it didn’t work. In fact, it was so stupid it was humiliating. Fortunately, the Pentagon was once again able to investigate itself and determine it had done nothing illegal.

So now they’re turning the CIA over to a general who not only ran the warrantless wiretap program but still can’t figure out that it’s unconstitutional. Why do I get the feeling this is W. and Karl again flipping the finger at some grown-up they don’t like?

Gen. Michael Hayden had mixed reviews as director of the National Security Agency—he’s evidently not a good manager, which makes him a perfect Bushie. But is he straightforward enough to have admitted that some warrantless spying has been done for political reasons? None of the usual Washington insiders seems to have a bead on this. Hayden would theoretically report to John Negroponte, Bush’s supposed intelligence czar. Negroponte is widely considered worthless. His major achievement so far seems to be organizational charts and buying furniture.

You know me, no conspiracy theories here, but the Bush administration, which doesn’t seem to be able to run much, set out to retool the CIA after 9/11 and the Iraq war. Problem is, everything that worked at the CIA—that it warned about 9/11 and said the Iraq war was a bad idea—was on the hit list. The Bushies wanted to eliminate the people who were right and promote those who were wrong. This is no way to shape up an intelligence agency, not to mention the White House spit fit over Joe Wilson’s wife.

Next, we need to contemplate sincere, old-fashioned, non-ideological greed, theft and bribery. In the beginning, there was only Duke Cunningham, the high-living, fun-loving super-patriot congressman from San Diego. His yacht was called The Duke-Stir, and he had nice taste in 19th century French commodes. While we all are happy to see our elected representatives enjoying themselves in Washington, that’s real people’s money. Actually, the yacht and commode were paid for by defense contractor Brent Wilkes (keep an eye on that player). It was people’s money that paid for the defense contracts Wilkes allegedly bribed public officials into landing for his clients.

The former inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security, Clark Kent Ervin—that would be the DHS equivalent of a police department’s internal affairs chief—tried to blow the whistle on shady contracts at DHS and instead was thrown overboard himself. Folks, we’ll never get government straightened out again if we don’t keep the IGs strong and independent.

If the Bush administration continues to fall apart at this clip, I think we’ll be grateful for incompetence as an excuse.

To find out more about Molly Ivins and see the work of other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate’s Web page at www.creators.com.

May 10, 2006

Op-Ed Columnist

Father and Son Reunion

By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON

One Bush did it by staying out of Baghdad, raising taxes and driving down the deficit.

The other Bush did it by going into Baghdad, cutting taxes and driving up the deficit.

But, perhaps inevitably, the father and son ended up in an Oedipal tango at the same spot: 31 percent.

After trying not to emulate his father's presidency in any way, W. emulated it in the worst possible way. He came out of a conflict with Saddam as a towering figure with soaring approval ratings and ended up as a shrunken figure with scalding approval ratings.

In the latest New York Times/CBS News Poll, W.'s stunning implosion landed him in a tie with his dad's low point in July 1992, four months before the public traded in Poppy for Bill Clinton. As Adam Nagourney and Megan Thee noted in their Times article today, that is the lowest approval rating for any president in the last half-century, other than Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter.

Even Hillary Clinton has a more favorable rating than W. — 34 percent. The president can draw some solace: John Kerry's at 26 and Al Gore's at 28 percent. And Dick Cheney is in the bunker at 20.

But in the new poll, even many of the party faithful are glum. Only 45 percent of evangelical Christians, 69 percent of Republicans and 51 percent of conservatives like the way W. is taking care of bidness. A whopping 70 percent deem the country pretty seriously on the wrong track, and two-thirds consider the nation in worse shape now than when W. took over.

On the issues that earned Karl Rove his nickname, Boy Genius — values and national security — the shift was notable. Fifty percent of respondents said Democrats came closer to sharing their moral values, compared with 37 percent who said Republicans did. And the G.O.P. retains a tenuous advantage on being seen as stronger on terrorism. The numbers for those who think we did the right thing by invading Iraq are steadily dropping, and the numbers are rising for those who believe we should have stayed out.

Many Americans have simply lost faith in the administration's ingenuity. Only a quarter of those polled had much confidence in W.'s ability to handle a crisis; a mere 9 percent are sure he can successfully end the Iraq war, and a paltry 4 percent think the administration has a clear plan to keep gas prices down. (But can triumphalist Nancy Pelosi lift their spirits?)

The Bush presidency has devolved into an assertion of empty will.

The White House blew off warnings from Republicans in Congress about appointing Gen. Michael Hayden as C.I.A. chief. You know you're in trouble when conservatives fret that the military is getting too much power.

If W. really cared about getting good intelligence for his war on terror, he would never have appointed Porter Goss. That wasted more than 18 months that could have been used fixing the dysfunctional agency, and drove out some good officials.

Mr. Goss, the Cheney toadie, was appointed because W. and Vice wanted him to do a hostile takeover at Langley to clear out suspected leakers (especially Kerry contributors), malcontents, critics of the war or anyone else who wasn't with the program.

Before the Iraq invasion, it was about fixing the intelligence around the policy. Now it's about appointing yes men and enforcing loyalty. The Bush warriors didn't want good intelligence in the first place because it would have told them they were wrong about Saddam's ties to Al Qaeda and W.M.D. And now they're still more concerned with turf battles than with truth-tellers and finding someone — anyone — who can tell us where Osama is. (Osama who?)

Even Denny Hastert, the Republican speaker, scoffed at the Hayden move as a Negroponte "power grab."

The general is a Cheney pal who stood up for the White House's right to be unconstitutional, going along with the heinous warrantless snooping. That makes him one of the team and ready for a promotion, or a Medal of Freedom. He will no doubt be accommodating when Darth Cheney comes over to Langley to lurk around the analysts and oversee the evidence building a case for sending bombs, rather than diplomats, to Iran.

Now that we're dealing with a crazed Iranian president, dreaming of nukes and writing an 18-page letter that sounds like an Israel-hating Islamic version of the Rapture, wouldn't it be great if our spooks could stop fighting and go spy on somebody?

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

A Fish Tale.....

"...Jimmy Carter said the best moment of his presidency was:

"I think the best time was probably dealing with the Middle East issue at Camp David," he said, "and even better I think was the peace treaty that came along six months later. I made a very difficult decision over the almost unanimous opposition of my cabinet and my staff to take the initiative and to go to Egypt and to go to Israel to try to get Begin and Sadat to agree on a peace treaty. And when they did sign-both of them signed the agreement-I guess that was probably my best moment."

And Bill Clinton said:

"So many things have happened here at home that have been important to me; passing economic plan, passing the Brady Bill and assault weapons ban, so many things have happened internationally, the role that I was fortunate to be able to play in the peace process in the Middle East and in Northern Ireland…."

And of course George W. Bush said:

"I would say the best moment of all was when I caught a 7.5 pound (3.402kiloss) perch in my lake."

I think that pretty much sums it up, don't you?"
PJ Sauter, Morning Seditionists Blog

All well and good except that, in a world where the likes of Dick Cheney hunts from a Suburban with some Mexicans, no doubt, flushing the tied and half blinded quail from the underbrush, there is something about a 7.5 lb perch that rings hollow to me.
If these Perch are true American Perch, then our President has broken all records with this catch in his home pond. These fish run to around 2-4 lbs, and in order to catch such a large fish the President and his fish pond stocker would have had to import some European Perch which can reach 10 lbs, and can cross breed with the common Yellow Perch and create some sort of hybrid Perch. I suppose that one couldn't claim a world's record with a hybrid Perch, Though I dont know the rules of world records....but someone also shouldn't really be so impressed with catching a "big" fish that has been put into an artificial setting, and is maybe not even the breed that it claims to be.
For some real Perch action the Prez can head out to Africa for some angling and catch himself a Nile Perch, but those tend towards 100 lbs and up, so that is hardly fair. I would've hoped that this American President would stock his pond with purely American fish, even if we are a global economy and all. Upon citing his most important moment of the past years, the least he could do is only count those purely American fish and not some illegal immigrant fish who have somehow snuck into the American stock and cross bred with our lovely little struggling perch.
In some areas Perch are endangered, and you need go no further than a Google search to find that the words Perch and Endangered brings up pages of areas, including Africa and Europe where perch are in trouble.
Did the president consider any of this when he blurted out his usual stupid comments in an interview with a foreign correspondent? Can he ever exhibit even a modicum of American spirit or foreign diplomacy? And why didnt the reporter ask which type of perch this was exactly?
No..He didn't use the opportunity to talk about conserving the endangered Perch, or to espouse the breeding of bigger, stronger Perch through internationalism, or to
talk about the science of pond stocking....No, he just told a fish story, like he has so many times before.
This time only a fish died, but it was a suspiciously large fish.
And why is his most cherished moment something to do with death rather than peace and life, like previous Presidents? The death of a fish beats out the "Liberation and Democracy" that he has brought to the Iraqi's? It beats out all of the stem cells that hes saved? It beats all of the abortions that hes blocked by preventing poor people from getting birth control or even actual abortions...and especially all of those evil raped women who want the morning after pill! A FISH is more important than all of this?
I began the weekend in awe at how stupid Bush is..But this lie, along with all the rest, is not only stupid, but destructive, and pathological. This guy is reallt sick and it seems like he is getting worse as his numbers drop.
He lied even about the fish..Even if it was an import stocked in his pond...Even if it was a glowing baby of polluted waters, or the biggest fish in the world..I've stopped being surprised by anything anymore!! The fish or breed is unimportant actually, its just this sicko's priorities that are troubling.

Too Soon?

May 7, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Too Soon? It's Too Late for 'United 93'
By FRANK RICH

DON'T feel guilty if you, like most Americans, have not run or even walked to see "United 93." The movie that has been almost unanimously acclaimed as a rite of patriotism second only to singing the national anthem in English is clinical to the point of absurdity: it reduces the doomed and brave Americans on board to nameless stick figures with less personality than the passengers in "Airport." Rather than deepening our knowledge of them or their heroism, the movie caps an hour of air-controller nail-biting with a tasteful re-enactment of the grisly end.

But it's not a total waste. The debate that preceded the film's arrival actually does tell us something about the war on terror. The two irrelevant questions that were asked over and over — Does "United 93" exploit the tragedy? Was it made too soon? — reveal just how adrift we are from reality as we head toward the fifth anniversary of the attacks.

The answer to the first question is yes, of course "United 93" exploits 9/11. It's a Hollywood entertainment marketed to make a profit, with a smoking World Trade Center on its poster as a gratuitous selling tool and a trailer cunningly deployed to drum up pre-premiere controversy (a k a publicity) by ambushing Manhattan audiences. The project's unappetizing commercialism is not mitigated by Universal Pictures' donation of 10 percent of the opening weekend's so-so proceeds to a memorial at the site of the crash in Shanksville, Pa. Roughly 50 times that sum is needed to build the memorial (and its cost is peanuts next to the planned $1 billion extravaganza in New York).

Still, a movie that exploits 9/11 is business as usual. This is America, for heaven's sake. "United 93" is merely the latest in a long line of such products and relatively restrained at that. This film doesn't use documentary images of shrouded remains being borne from ground zero, as the Bush-Cheney campaign ads did two years ago. And it isn't cheesy like the first fictional 9/11 movie, Showtime's "DC 9/11: Time of Crisis," in 2003. That dog, produced with White House cooperation and larded with twin-tower money shots, starred Timothy Bottoms as a derring-do President Bush given to pronouncements like "If some tinhorn terrorist wants me, tell him to come get me!" It's amazing that it hasn't found an honored place beside "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" as a campy midnight perennial.

As for the second question in the "United 93" debate, it's disturbing that it was asked at all. Is this movie too soon? Hardly: it's already been preceded by two TV movies about the same flight. The question we should be asking instead is if its message comes too late.

Whatever the movie's other failings, that message is clear and essential: the identity of the enemy. The film opens with the four hijackers praying to Allah and, in keeping with the cockpit voice recording played at the Zacarias Moussaoui trial, portrays them as prayerful right until they murder 40 innocent people. Such are the Islamic radicals who struck us on 9/11 and whose brethren have only multiplied since.

Yet how fleeting has been their fame. Thanks to the administration's deliberate post-9/11 decision to make the enemy who attacked us interchangeable with the secular fascists of Iraq who did not, the original war on terrorism has been diluted in its execution and robbed of its support from the American public. Brian Williams seemed to be hinting as much when, in effusively editorializing about "United 93" on NBC (a sister company of Universal), he suggested that "it just may be a badly needed reminder for some that we are a nation at war because of what happened in New York and Washington and in this case in a field in Pennsylvania." But he stopped short of specifying exactly what war he meant, and that's symptomatic of our confusion. When Americans think about war now, they don't think about the war prompted by what happened on 9/11 so much as the war in Iraq, and when they think about Iraq, they don't say, "Let's roll!," they say, "Let's leave!"

The administration's blurring of the distinction between Al Qaeda and Saddam threatens to throw out the baby that must survive, the war against Islamic terrorists, with the Iraqi quagmire. Last fall a Pew Research Center survey found that Iraq had driven isolationist sentiment in the United States to its post-Vietnam 1970's high. In a CBS News poll released last week, the percentage of Americans who name terrorism as the nation's "most important problem" fell to three. Every day we spend in Iraq erodes the war against those who attacked us on 9/11.

Just how much so was dramatized by an annual report on terrorism issued by the State Department on the same day that "United 93" opened nationwide. The number of terrorist attacks was up by a factor of nearly four in 2005. While Al Qaeda is scattered, it has been replaced by what Richard Clarke, the former counterterrorism czar, describes as "a many-headed hydra that is just as deadly and far harder to slay." Osama bin Laden, no longer an operational leader, retains, in the State Department's language, "the capability to influence events, and inspire actual and potential terrorists."

We remain unprepared should they once again strike here. Like Hurricane Katrina before it, the Dubai Ports tsunami proved yet another indictment of our inept homeland security. While the country hyperventilated about the prospect of turning over our ports to a rare Arab ally, every expert on the subject, the former 9/11 commissioners included, was condemning our inability to check cargo at any point of entry, whether by sea or land, even if the Sopranos ran the show. Congress's Government Accountability Office reported that in a test conducted last year, undercover investigators smuggled enough radioactive material past our border inspectors to fuel two dirty bombs.

To add insult to this potential nuclear Armageddon, Afghanistan is falling back into the hands of religious fanatics; not even the country's American-backed president, Hamid Karzai, dared to publicly intervene in the trial of a man facing execution for converting from Islam to Christianity. "The Taliban and Al Qaeda are everywhere" is how a shopkeeper described the situation to the American commander in Afghanistan, The Times reported last week. These were the conditions that spawned the hijackers of "United 93" — all four of them trained in Qaeda camps in Afghanistan under Taliban rule. At this rate, we are in danger of marking the next anniversary of 9/11 with a reboot of the Afghanistan war we were supposed to have won more than four years ago.

Our level of denial about these setbacks is embedded not just in the White House, which blithely keeps telling us "we're winning" the war on terror, but also in the culture. The decision of most major networks and newspapers (including this one) to avoid showing the inflammatory Danish Muhammad cartoons attests less to our heightened religious sensitivities (we've all run reproductions of art Christians and Jews find blasphemous) than to our deep-seated fear of the terrorists' unimpeded power to strike back. The cheers that greet the long-awaited start of construction at ground zero are all the louder to drown out the unsettling truth that no major private tenant has bet on the Freedom Tower's security by signing a lease.

We also practice denial by manufacturing vicarious and symbolic victories at home to compensate for those we are not winning abroad. Two major liberties taken with the known facts in "United 93" — sequences suggesting that passengers thrashed and possibly killed two of the hijackers and succeeded in entering the cockpit — are highly cathartic but unsupported by the evidence. In its way, the Moussaoui prosecution conducted its own Hollywood rewrite by exaggerating the stature of the only person to go to trial for the crimes of 9/11. The larger this marginal creep loomed, the better the proxy he'd be for those we let get away (starting with bin Laden). Perhaps we might even be tempted to forget that F.B.I. incompetence had kept us from squeezing Moussaoui (or his computer) for information that might have saved lives during the weeks he languished in jail before 9/11.

Two of the F.B.I. bosses who repeatedly squelched Moussaoui search warrants in August 2001 remained at the F.B.I. as he went to trial. The genuinely significant 9/11 figures in American custody, like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, cannot be prosecuted because their firsthand accounts of our "interrogation techniques" at Guantánamo and our "black sites" are bound to incite more terrorists. Meanwhile, the American leaders who devote every waking moment to defending their indefensible decisions in Iraq have squandered the energy, the armed forces and the international good will needed to fight the war that began on 9/11 and that, in our own State Department's words, is "still in the first phase."

That's the scenario before us now. Next to it, "United 93" may in time look as escapist as the Robin Williams vehicle that outgrossed it last weekend, "RV."



Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company