After a brief hiatus, the next episode of OTB Radio, our BlogTalkRadio program, will record and air live from 5:30-6:30 Eastern. The tired and very, very busy Dave Schuler and I will be joined by a special guest, Colonel Pat Lang of Sic Semper Tyrannis to talk about the WikiLeaks Iraq video, Afghan president Hamid [...]

A disturbing video which seems to show American soldiers shooting unarmed civilians just for fun is making the rounds. CSM’s Dan Murphy has the backstory: A video released on the Internet Monday by WikiLeaks, a small nonprofit dedicated to publishing classified information from the US and other governments, appears to show the killing of two [...]

Ed Driscoll, Jonathan Adler and Glenn Reynolds take the New York Times and other mainstream outlets to task for their decision to not republish the stolen emails from climate scientists on the grounds that they were illegally obtained and written with the expectation of being kept private.  After all, these outlets famously publish illegally obtained [...]

Scott Johnson contrasts the NYT’s silence on the David Rohde kidnapping to protect the safety of their reporter with “the Times’s illegal exposure of the NSA terrorist eavesdropping program in December 2005, as well as its exposure of the Treasury Department’s terrorist-finance tracking program in June 2006. Whereas the reporting of Rohde’s apprehension may have [...]

In the comments to my latest post on domestic oil production, in which I continue my skepticism over the benefits to more domestic oil production, a number of claims were made in the comments that raised some interesting issues. So I thought it might be worthwhile if I went ahead and investigated some of these [...]

Speaking of decrepit New York City landmarks, Mark Leon Goldberg reports on a major renovation of the 50-year-old United Nations building, which would have condemned “long ago if not for the fact that it falls under international jurisdiction.” According to the UN News Centre, the current buildings are “plagued by leaks, safety violations and outdated [...]

In an embarrassing technical glitch, Diebold has accidentally released the 2008 election results early, revealing that John McCain will win with 48 percent of the vote. ONN has the video report: Of course, I told you this months ago. via Thoreau

Howie Kurtz has an interesting piece on how mainstream media coverage of allegations of sexual misconduct have changed in recent years. It begins: When Gennifer Flowers held a news conference in 1992 to announce that she had carried on an affair with Bill Clinton, the New York Times devoted one paragraph of a news story [...]

Via the LAT: After outing Apple for years, blog shuts down After a long battle with Apple Inc., a Harvard University senior said Thursday that he would shut down Think Secret, the website known for landing scoops about the company’s latest products. Apple was peeved by the leaks and sued him in 2005. The site’s [...]

More details have been reported on the raid conducted by the Israeli Air Force on a base in Syria on September 6: Israeli commandos seized nuclear material of North Korean origin during a daring raid on a secret military site in Syria before Israel bombed it this month, according to informed sources in Washington and [...]

Blake Hounshell transcribes Secretary of Defense Bob Gates’ comments about U.S. plans vis-a-vis Iran and Syria on yesterday’s “Fox News Sunday.” While Gates was “cagey” in his reply, using the required disclaimer that “All options are on the table,” it’s quite clear that military intervention is simply not in the cards for either set of [...]

Blake Hounshell argues that the renewed speculation by some on the left that the United States is about to launch a pre-emptive strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities is misplaced. By rattling some sabers, but doing so in a deniable way, the Bush administration is trying to stiffen the spines of its European partners and the [...]

Donald Rumsfeld pulled the plug on a 2005 mission that might have taken out several top al Qaeda leaders for fear of alienating Pakistan, Mark Mazzetti reports in today’s NYT. A secret military operation in early 2005 to capture senior members of Al Qaeda in Pakistan’s tribal areas was aborted at the last minute after [...]

As one would expect, last evening’s news that President Bush has commuted Scooter Libby’s jail sentence has spawned a huge amount of controversy in the blogosphere, with some decrying it as the greatest outrage since Watergate and others complaining it didn’t go far enough. From the Left: Nancy Pelosi: “The President’s commutation of Scooter Libby’s [...]

Carol Leonnig, who covers the federal courts for WaPo and with whom I had the pleasure of sitting during my brief stint covering the Libby trail, shoots down “5 Myths About Scooter and the Slammer.” Her column will irritate both Libby’s strongest supporters and most vehement critics. It’s now rather clear that Libby lied to [...]

CIA sources have leaked to ABC News an alleged covert plan to destabilize the Iranian regime through non-lethal means. The CIA has received secret presidential approval to mount a covert “black” operation to destabilize the Iranian government, current and former officials in the intelligence community tell the Blotter on ABCNews.com. The sources, who spoke on [...]

Valerie Plame has been invited to testify before Congress. About nothing in particular. Democratic lawmakers are eager to hear from outed CIA operative Valerie Plame as they try to make political fodder out of the 2003 leak scandal. Plame was scheduled to testify before a congressional committee Friday, but it was unlikely the hearing would [...]

David Obey has resorted to a time-honored trick for discovering the source of leaks. On Iraq, things have apparently gotten so tense between centrists and liberals in the House Democratic Caucus that Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey, D-Wis., has resorted to disinformation tactics. Speaking to reporters Wednesday on the topic of the Iraq spending bill, [...]

The government started its opening arguments at 1037 am. Live blog below the fold. As always, major breaking news will get separate posts.

I’m live in the media room at the Prettyman Federal Courthouse awaiting the resumption of voir dire in the Scooter Libby trial. AP’s Michael Sniffen reports that the jury selection should end today, although the problems that have plagued it remain. Libby’s lawyers, Theodore Wells and William Jeffress, have labored to keep opponents of the [...]

Lewis “Scooter” Libby may well find it hard to get a fair trial, if Pachacutec‘s account of the jury selection yesterday is any indication: “no jurors were excused for cause based on any predispositions that might prejudice them against the prosecution. Just the defense.” His post is worth reading in full but this pretty well [...]

Andrew Cochran termed last night’s attacks on al Qaeda targets there the “first publicly acknowledged military action against Somalian territory since 1993.” His Counterterrorism Blog cohert Daveed Gartenstein-Ross reports for PajamasMedia, though, that “publicly acknowledged” is the key: U.S. ground forces have been active in Somalia from the start, a senior military intelligence officer confirmed. [...]

The USS Newport News collided with a Japanese ship earlier today. A U.S. nuclear submarine and Japanese merchant ship collided in the Arabian Sea late Monday, but there were no injuries on either vessel, the U.S. Navy and Japanese officials said. There was no damage to the fast-attack USS Newport News submarine or the ship [...]

WSJ reports on extraordinary measures being taken to safeguard exit poll results from diabolical bloggers. Two-by-two, polling specialists from ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News and the Associated Press will go into rooms in New York and Washington shortly before noon Tuesday. Their cellphones and BlackBerrys will be confiscated; proctors will monitor the doors; and [...]

There was much hoopla overnight, created by a Drudge hyping of a NYT “November surprise” on Iraq’s WMD that, frankly, strikes me as a non-story. Here’s the gist: Last March, the federal government set up a Web site to make public a vast archive of Iraqi documents captured during the war. The Bush administration did [...]

Bill Gertz reports that the intelligence community badly botched its forecasts on the North Korean nuclear weapons program. Recent U.S. intelligence analyses of North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs were flawed and the lack of clarity on the issue hampered U.S. diplomatic efforts to avert the underground blast detected Sunday, according to Bush administration officials. [...]

Judd Legum chastises Roger Simon, Glenn Reynolds, and Pajamas Media for linking to an obscure blogger who “outed one of Mark Foley’s victim,” calling their actions “wrong” and the linked post “despicable.” Some of Legum’s commenters suggest that this might even rise to the level of criminality. While, like Michelle Malkin, I declined to link [...]

Robert Kagan has a withering critique of recent media reports based on leaks from a National Intelligence Estimation saying that the war in Iraq has created more terrorists. He observes that in both the NYT and WaPo stories, “there were no quotations from the NIE itself, so all we have are journalists’ characterizations of anonymous [...]

British Security Services have been chastising the FBI, claiming that the Bureau’s leaks to the media have hampered their investigations into the recent plot to bomb several transatlantic flights. Anti-terror police in Britain have made an angry request to their US counterparts asking them to stop leaking details of this month’s suspected bomb plot over [...]

Jonathan Adler passes on word that, The federal government may prosecute private citizens who illegally receive and retransmit classified information, held federal district court Judge T.S. Ellis III yesterday [Aug. 9] in United States v. Rosen. Judge Ellis denied a motion to dismiss filed by Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman, two former employees of the [...]

***Updated Below*** Scotland Yard has foiled an airline terror plot on a scale larger than the 9/11 attacks. BBC: A plot to blow up planes in flight from the UK to the US and commit “mass murder on an unimaginable scale” has been disrupted, Scotland Yard has said. It is thought the plan was to [...]

In earlier posts I mentioned the use of geoengineering as a way of dealing with excess CO2 emissions. One such method is called carbon sequestration and generally means pumping CO2 emissions into the ground for storage. The Economist has a report on one early attempt: But few studies have looked at what happens once the [...]

Michael Berlin, a former U.N. correspondent for the New York Post and The Washington Post, has an interesting piece in today’s Washington Post on the media and–obviously–a secret they kept. The story itself [of six American officials who managed to escape being captured by Iranian militants during the seizure of the U.S. embassy in November [...]

The United States Senate has confirmed Gen. Michael Haden as CIA Director, by a vote of 78-15. Hayden, a four-star general, currently is the top deputy to National Intelligence Director John Negroponte. Hayden, 61, would be the first active-duty or retired military officer to run the spy agency in 25 years. He was approved by [...]

The Senate Intelligence Committee easily approved Gen. Michael Hayden’s nomination for CIA Director, despite controversy over his involvement in the NSA eavesdropping/datamining operations. CNN reports the vote at 12-3. Update: Reuters has details. Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden’s nomination as CIA director won the endorsement of the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday in a vote [...]

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales would not discount the possibility of the government prosecuting the New York Times for publishing classified information. NYT: The government has the legal authority to prosecute journalists for publishing classified information, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales said yesterday. “There are some statutes on the book which, if you read the language [...]

ABC News has, on their blog of all places, a story alleging that federal investigators are tracking the phone calls of journalists. A senior federal law enforcement official tells ABC News the government is tracking the phone numbers we call in an effort to root out confidential sources. “It’s time for you to get some [...]

The hot rumor overnight is that Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence and former NSA head Michael Hayden is the leading candidate to replace suddenly ousted Porter Goss as CIA Director (Note: Not as DCI; that second hat was stripped when the National Intelligence Director position was created.) Mike Allen and Timothy Burger at TIME [...]

David Broder finds the recent investigations into those who leak classified information to the press troubling. This is a troubling case for those of us in journalism. Our view is that it’s the government’s responsibility to keep its secrets secret and that it’s our responsibility to ferret out information so the public is aware of [...]

Much more news has come out about yesterday’s firing of a CIA officer for leaking classified secrets to the press. The NYT reports her name, duty station, and the information leaked: The C.I.A. would not identify the officer, but several government officials said it was Mary O. McCarthy, a veteran intelligence analyst who until 2001 [...]

The CIA has fired an officer for unauthorized leaks of classified information to the media. A CIA spokeswoman says, “This is just the beginning.” The CIA has fired one of its officers for leaking classified information, an agency spokeswoman said Friday. The officer admitted to “unauthorized discussions with the media in which the officer knowingly [...]

That a few retired generals have spoken criticially of SECDEF Donald Rumsfeld continues to gather a surprising amount of attention. The Washington Post‘s lead editorial today is entitled “The Generals’ Revolt” and carries the ominous subhead, “There are many reasons for Donald Rumsfeld to leave. Finger-pointing by retired officers shouldn’t be one.” The nut ‘graph: [...]

The State Department memo seen by most as the smoking gun in the Valerie Plame leak investigation contained no hint that she was a covert operative, Josh Gerstein reports. Contrary to published reports, a State Department memorandum at the center of the investigation into the leak of the name of a CIA operative, Valerie Plame, [...]

Steven Taylor has two interesting posts today on the subject of what constitutes a “leak.” In the first, he argues that, while the president is legally entitled to authorize selective release of information, doing so constitutes a “leak” and, since the president has constantly decried “leaks,” he is a hypocrite. He bases this judgment on [...]

With yesterday’s revelations that President Bush and/or Vice President Cheney authorized Lewis “Scooter” Libby to release certain classified information to the New York Times to help buttress their case for the Iraq War, critics are coming out of the woodwork claiming that President Bush is breaking the law or, at very least, being incredibly hypocritical. [...]

Lovely: Russian officials collected intelligence on U.S. troop movements and attack plans from inside the American military command leading the 2003 invasion of Iraq and passed that information to Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, according to a U.S. military study released yesterday. The intelligence reports, which the study said were provided to Hussein through the Russian [...]

After reading this story, I’ll sleep a little less soundly knowing that we have idiots working for in charge of important government agencies. The FBI used expanded powers under the USA Patriot Act to demand information from banks and other companies as part of the investigation of Oregon lawyer Brandon Mayfield, who was wrongfully arrested [...]

U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema ordered a halt to the death penalty case against confessed al-Qaida conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui while she considers whether to throw the case out entirely. According to the AP report, Brinkema said a lawyer for the Transportation Security Administration sent e-mail to seven Federal Aviation Administration officials outlining the prosecution’s opening [...]

Guillermo Christensen argues that the recent trend of retired and retiring CIA officers entering the public debate will diminish the long-term credibility of the Agency. The latest example is a piece by Paul Pillar in the current Foreign Affairs which Christensen rebuts. More important than the content of these books and op-eds, though, is the [...]

Vice President Cheney finally spoke publically about his weekend shooting incident. Vice President Dick Cheney on Wednesday accepted full blame for shooting a fellow hunter and defended his decision to not publicly disclose the accident until the following day. He called it “one of the worst days of my life.” “I’m the guy who pulled [...]