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20. september 2004
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Libya urges Iran to comply with IAEA ruling
Bush has now officially revoked the US trade embargo against Libya that was suspended in April.
Libya on its side goes out of its way to be a responsible member of the world community and get on the west's good side. Now it is imploring Iran to follow its example: comply with the IAEA demands and abandon all weapons of mass destruction.
Amazing what effect dragging Saddam out of a spider hole had on Colonel Gaddafi.
11:22:03 PM 
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Novak: US will cut and run from Iraq
Robert Novak, citing his anonymous "well-placed sources," is convinced that not only will John Kerry leave a messy Iraq behind sometime next year, so will the Bush administration:
Whether Bush or Kerry is elected, the president or president-elect will have to sit down immediately with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The military will tell the election winner there are insufficient U.S. forces in Iraq to wage effective war. That leaves three realistic options: Increase overall U.S. military strength to reinforce Iraq, stay with the present strength to continue the war, or get out.
Well-placed sources in the administration are confident Bush's decision will be to get out. They believe that is the recommendation of his national security team and would be the recommendation of second-term officials. An informed guess might have Condoleezza Rice as secretary of state, Paul Wolfowitz as defense secretary and Stephen Hadley as national security adviser. According to my sources, all would opt for a withdrawal.
Getting out now would not end expensive U.S. reconstruction of Iraq, and certainly would not stop the fighting. Without U.S. troops, the civil war cited as the worst-case outcome by the recently leaked National Intelligence Estimate would be a reality. It would then take a resolute president to stand aside while Iraqis battle it out.
The argument, apparently, is that even a divided and unruly Iraq is vastly preferrable to Saddam's regime.
It's a shocking article.
I think and hope that Novak is wrong.
8:33:01 PM
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CBS admits mistake - Rather apologizes
CBS News has today, much too late, issued a retraction and apology over the fake guard memos, in what has been called "Memogate" or "Rathergate".
CBS News said Monday it cannot prove the authenticity of documents used in a 60 Minutes story about President Bush's National Guard service and that airing the story was a "mistake" that CBS regretted.
CBS News has stopped just short of admitting the obvious, that the documents were crude forgeries and that it would have seen this if it had acted half responsibly.
As many newsmedia have already stated, Bill Burkett was the source, and he's a lying bastard.
In a statement, CBS said former Texas Guard official Bill Burkett "has acknowledged that he provided the now-disputed documents" and "admits that he deliberately misled the CBS News producer working on the report, giving her a false account of the documents' origins to protect a promise of confidentiality to the actual source."
The network did not say the memoranda — purportedly written by one of Mr. Bush's National Guard commanders — were forgeries. But the network did say it could not authenticate the documents and that it should not have reported them.
What the rest of the world has known for some time.
Burkett lied to the CBS News about his source for the documents, and now he refuses to reveal who it is. I think a look at his PC would provide the answer.
Heynard issues a full apology:
"Based on what we now know, CBS News cannot prove that the documents are authentic, which is the only acceptable journalistic standard to justify using them in the report," said the statement by CBS News President Andrew Heyward. "We should not have used them. That was a mistake, which we deeply regret.
"Nothing is more important to us than our credibility and keeping faith with the millions of people who count on us for fair, accurate, reliable, and independent reporting," Heyward continued. "We will continue to work tirelessly to be worthy of that trust."
Dan Rather is somewhat less forthcoming in his apology, blaming the source and insisting CBS News acted "in good faith":
Now, after extensive additional interviews, I no longer have the confidence in these documents that would allow us to continue vouching for them journalistically. I find we have been misled on the key question of how our source for the documents came into possession of these papers. That, combined with some of the questions that have been raised in public and in the press, leads me to a point where-if I knew then what I know now-I would not have gone ahead with the story as it was aired, and I certainly would not have used the documents in question.
But we did use the documents. We made a mistake in judgment, and for that I am sorry. It was an error that was made, however, in good faith and in the spirit of trying to carry on a CBS News tradition of investigative reporting without fear or favoritism.
Please know that nothing is more important to us than people's trust in our ability and our commitment to report fairly and truthfully.
If that had been the case, this statement would have been issued last week, and you'd still have some credibilily left.
8:11:11 PM
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How are you?
I have been wasting way too much time chatting to A.L.I.C.E. today, or Alice as I like to call her.
She's surely an improvment on Eliza.
7:58:49 PM
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The Official God FAQ
Hehe.
5:48:41 PM
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Mega-Wikipedia
Wikipedia, the free "open source" encyclopedia, has now passed one million articles.
While there are naturally varying quality of these articles, I have to say it's generally my preferred online source for general information about historical events, biographies and technical overviews.
So far, however, I have to say the Norwegian edition has not been up to decent quality, but that can probably be expected. A wiki needs a critical number of contributors to work. I suspect most Norwegian contributors are students, and most articles appear to have been written by people who actually believe what they learn in social sciences (compare e.g a three paragraph article on Winston Churchill emphasising his terror bombing of Germany during WWII and his role in colonial oppression, with a long article on Karl Marx which reads like an apologia distancing the master from the horrors of the communist states).
PS: Norwegian geeks probably stick to English. The Norwegian wikipedia has no entry for TCP/IP! The English, of course, has an excellent article.
4:31:53 PM
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CBS News to give in?
According to the NYT's Jim Rutenberg, CBS News officials now have "grave doubts" about the authenticity of the memos, and are expected to make an annoucement today that it has been deceived. Maybe.
WaPo's Howard Kurtz has what is essentially the same story.
9:49:20 AM
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© Copyright 2004 Jan Haugland.
Last update: 01.10.2004; 07:27:10.
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