Presto Agitato

That's Called "Ordnance", Son

The "responsible" and "carefully edited" folks at the New York Times published this AFP photo:

With this heading:

Pakistani men with the remains of a missile fired at a house in the Bajur tribal zone near the Afghan border.

Take a moment to gaze at that picture.  See the problem?  That's not a missile.  It's an unexploded artillery shell, and drones don't fire artillery.  But no one at AFP or the responsible and carefully edited New York Times noticed that fact (for obvious reasons), nor the implications.  Thomas Lifson of The American Thinker was not so easily fooled and noted that the photo must have been staged.  His temerity has apparently raised hackles at the New York Times:

Bill Keller, executive editor of the Times, sent me an email the other day.

...

But most importantly, the correction does not address the real significance of the error: the fact that the picture must be a fake, staged with a prop piece of ordnance, not a missile.

Bill Keller must have read my article before he responded to my article, no? If he is in the habit of sending responses to articles he hasn’t read, he is even more arrogant and careless than I thought. So assuming he read my article, he knows that he has published a fake picture. And AFP gave it to him.

To quote Bob Dole, Where’s the outrage?

Bill Keller’s lack of protest over being had, his lack of evident resolve to get to the bottom of the situation, and his unwillingness to confront the actual criticism I made suggest some pretty ugly conclusions. He has been duped and he is content to pretend it is all just a little thing, not his fault, and that doesn’t matter very much, anyway. Or so it seems.

Is this really the extent of his regard for publishing the truth?

Um, that was a rhetorical question, right?

(h/t: Powerline)

HeeHee

Now these are my kind of people!

Brokeback Diplomacy

(Click on the image to go to C&F's website.)

Smackdown in Virginia

If you're Jim Moran (A-hole, Va.) and you're holding a "town meeting", you might want to make sure who's in the audience:

(I've had problems with this video; it appears to use a late version of the WMV codec, so you may be unable to run it without all of the updates to Windows Media/Windows Media Player.  You can also click here instead.  A partial transcript can be found by clicking "More", below.)

Come Again?

The Congressional Research Service has an interesting take on the NSA wiretap controversy:

A legal analysis by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service concludes that the Bush administration's limited briefings for Congress on the National Security Agency's domestic eavesdropping without warrants are "inconsistent with the law."

...

The Congressional Research Service memorandum, sent to the Intelligence Committee on Wednesday, explores the requirement in the National Security Act of 1947 that the committees be kept "fully and currently informed" of intelligence activities. It notes that the law specifically allows notification of "covert actions" to the Gang of Eight, but says the security agency's program does not appear to be a covert action program.

As a result, the memorandum says, limiting the briefings to just eight members of Congress "would appear to be inconsistent with the law."

Wait a minute: Did they say that the program wasn't covert?  Eh?

JustOneMinute has more.

Sigh (With Caveat)

I've heard at least one of these before in another form (it was middle-eastern men, not an old woman), so be alert for apocrypha, here.  However:

Time once again to review the winners of the Annual “Stella Awards.” The Stella Awards are named after 81 year-old Stella Liebeck who spilled hot coffee on herself and successfully sued McDonald’s (in NM). That case inspired the Stella Awards for the most frivolous, ridiculous, successful lawsuits in the United States.

Profanity suppressed.

Evidence, Hypothesis, and Cheap Baloney

From Drudge (here, as of 1:48pm Central):

British researchers say they have found no evidence to support fears that mobile phones cause brain cancer.

The new study, published online on Friday by the British Medical Journal (BMJ), covers mobile phone use by 966 Britons aged 18-69 who were diagnosed between 2000 and 2004 with glioma, a rare but highly malignant brain tumour.

The researchers compared these results with similar interviews conducted among 1,700 healthy people, AFP reports.

The probe found that there was no additional risk from mobile phones, as determined by the number of years the phone had been in use; the age at which it was first used; the number of calls made; and the number of hours a person spent talking on it.

The team did note that there was a significant tendency for a brain tumour to occur on the same side of the head where the user said he had usually placed the phone.

But, they suggest, this figure could be "recall bias" -- cancer patients, aware of the scare about mobile phones, may have been prompted to attribute their tumour to the gadget.

The study only covers use of mobile phones for up to 10 years. It does not apply to longer-term use.

However, some individual studies have suggested there could be a cancer risk from using mobile phones in rural areas, where electromagnetic signals are stronger in order to compensate for the greater distance between relay stations, and from using older-generation analogue phones.

There never was any evidence that cell phones cause brain cancer, nor any reasonable theoretical basis for the claim.  As with the worries about power lines causing cancer, it's all just Chicken-Little nonsense; the frequency and intensity of the electromagnetic radiation involved is just not enough to cause harm (carcinogenesis or mutagenesis) to human tissue.

In Interesting Times

Syria and Iran are becoming fast friends:

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad began a visit to Syria Thursday to consolidate an old alliance made increasingly crucial as both countries face mounting U.S. pressure and the threat of international sanctions.

Ahmadinejad and Syrian President Bashar Assad were expected to talk about Iran's standoff with the West over its nuclear program and the threat to refer it to the U.N. Security Council, as well as Syria's own troubles over a U.N. investigation that implicated it in the assassination of Lebanon's former prime minister.

But we all know that religious and secular Arabs would never work together.  Because they have nothing in common and hate each other, so we are told by all the smart, informed people.

Merde

There's nothing quite like French bluster:

France said on Thursday it would be ready to use nuclear weapons against any state that carried out a terrorist attack against it, reaffirming the need for its nuclear deterrent.

Deflecting criticism of France's costly nuclear arms program, President Jacques Chirac said security came at a price and France must be able to hit back hard at a hostile state's centers of power and its "capacity to act."

He said there was no change in France's overall policy, which rules out the use of nuclear weapons in a military conflict. But his speech pointed to a change of emphasis to underline the growing threat France perceives from terrorism.

Did someone tell Bill O'Reilly about this?  According to O'Reilly, anyone who thinks that the nuclear option shouldn't unilaterally be taken off the table is "Dr. Strangelove".  Okay, Bill....

An Offer We Can Refuse

Al Jezeera is playing excerpts from a tape, allegedly from Osama bin Laden:

Al-Jazeera on Thursday aired an audiotape purportedly from Osama bin Laden, who says al-Qaida is making preparations for attacks in the United States but offering a truce "with fair conditions."

The tape's release came days after a U.S. airstrike in Pakistan that was targeting bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, and reportedly killed four leading al-Qaida figures, including possibly al-Zawahri's son-in-law. There was no mention of the attack on the segments that were broadcast.

Al-Jazeera said the tape was recorded in the Islamic month that corresponds with December.

Bin Laden seems to be reading polls of American opinion re: Iraq, but not very well.  He shares much with the Democrats in this regard.

Intelligence sources are telling Fox News that the tape is very "crude" but appears to be authentic, so take that for what it's worth.  (The CIA also claimed that TWA Flight 800 climbed 3,000 feet without wings or engines, so I keep several grains of salt handy for these things.)  I noticed a few years ago that the language on these alleged "bin Laden" tapes had changed from florid and almost poetic to something much more direct and almost ... concise.  You know, by Arab standards.  So, as I said, take it for what it's worth.

Update: The Counterterrorism Blog has more here and here.

Update II, 2:00pm Central: The CIA has confirmed it publicly (remember the salt), and Walid Phares has details about the message itself.

Update: Protein Wisdom has meat, wisdom, and humor (!) on this.