It was good that the Senate Judiciary Committee began looking into the "Able Danger" controversy this week. Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa., claimed that this secret military unit had identified Mohamed Atta and three others as being members of an al-Qaida cell before the Sept. 11 attacks, and that this information wasn’t shared with the FBI. Some Pentagon employees reportedly have confirmed that they recall seeing an intelligence chart identifying Atta as a terrorist before the attacks.
But others say that such reports are based on secondhand information. And Slade Gorton, a member of the Sept. 11 commission, said their review of Able Danger documents found "no charts, no data sets and no analysis identifying Mohamed Atta or any of the other hijackers" before Sept. 11, 2001, the Associated Press reported.
The Judiciary Committee needs to help sort this out.
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
Liberal columnist Molly Ivins wrote this week that the real problem with the media is not bias but laziness and bad news judgment. “Our failure is what we miss,” she contends, not that the media are supposedly pushing some liberal or conservative agenda. She’s probably right, though what news stories you think need more coverage tends to mirror your own biases.
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
By the standards of most U.S. surveys, an 83 percent overall compliance rate would be outstanding. But the issue is whether we wash our hands after using public restrooms, as researched by the American Society for Microbiology and the Soap and Detergent Association. The trade group found that 75 percent of men and 90 percent of women do (with higher percentages saying that they do when they don’t — tsk, tsk). The differences between male and female plumbing are real, but so is the public health risk posed by those who flush and dash. Didn’t our mothers teach us better than this?
Posted by Rhonda Holman
