Logo credit: Sloane

Buried within an ABC News story about today’s release of hundreds of Solyndra-related emails is a reminder of what White House Spokesman Jay Carney said at a press conference late last month after being asked about the involvement of a Department of Energy consultant and Obama fundraiser named Steve Spinner:

Carney replied: “It’s my understanding, at least with regard to the gentleman you just mentioned [Steve Spinner], that he had no connection to overseeing the loan guarantee program.”

After hearing Carney say that, your first instinct might have been to think, “Hey, Spinner must have a connection to overseeing the loan guarantee program!”

Now back to the top of the story for confirmation that you should always trust your instincts:

An elite Obama fundraiser hired to help oversee the administration’s energy loan program pushed and prodded career Department of Energy officials to move faster in approving a loan guarantee for Solyndra, even as his wife’s law firm was representing the California solar company, according to internal emails made public late Friday.

“How hard is this? What is he waiting for?” wrote Steven J. Spinner, a high-tech consultant and energy investor who raised at least $500,000 for the candidate before being appointed to a key job helping oversee the energy loan guarantee program. “I have OVP [the Office of the Vice President] and WH [the White House] breathing down my neck on this.”

Many of the emails were written just days after Spinner accepted a three-page ethics agreement in which he pledged he would “not participate in any discussion regarding any application involving [his wife's law firm] Wilson [Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati].”

Prediction: At the next press conference Carney will claim that when he said Spinner had “no connection” to the loan program, he meant literally — as in that Spinner wasn’t duct taped, chained, super glued or stapled to it in any way.

If the “breathing down my neck on this” Spinner references from the White House and Veep’s office was in email or memo form, we might learn about it on a subsequent Friday afternoon document drop & dash.

Also, it isn’t difficult to spot a party planner who has access to piles of other people’s money:

Many of the emails surround his efforts to coordinate plans for either President Obama or Vice President Biden to announce it as the administration’s first loan approval — one that he repeatedly notes will create clean energy jobs.

It is Spinner, for instance, who pushes for a “big event” with “golden shovels, bulldozers, hardhats, etc.”

It wasn’t just a shovel ready job — it was a golden shovel ready job. At this point though, the whistling robots were just a gleam in his eye.

Politico has a story today about the “*#~@ show,” and there’s lots more Solyndra and Solyndra-related background here.

**Written by Doug Powers

Twitter @ThePowersThatBe

The fly-over reportedly made President Obama “furious” (and this is a president who sat through an anti-American diatribe by Daniel Ortega without batting an eye, so that’s saying something), so clearly it was time to get to the bottom of the incident… many, many weeks later.

Now it’s another Friday afternoon, which means it’s time for a bunch more stuff we’re supposed to forget about by Monday:

The Department of Defense released a flurry of additional photos Friday of Air Force One’s controversial Manhattan flyover in April.

A total of 146 photos were released of the April 27 incident, which panicked many local citizens and prompted officials in the New York metropolitan area to question why the White House Military Office did not make the mission more broadly known.
[...]
In May, the White House reluctantly released a single photo of the flyover, prompting 40 organizations, including FOX News, to formally request the Department of Defense to release of the rest of the photos. Citing the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, FOX News also requested records related to the decision not to notify the media or the public of the photo-op.

The Federal Aviation Administration told FOX News in a letter that some of those documents were withheld because they are exempted from FOIA’s mandatory public disclosure requirement due to the “sensitive security information” and information about the “deliberative process” they contained.

Here’s one of the pictures:

Yeah, that was worth the expense.

The manifest that seems to be missing a bit of information is here (PDF).

More pics, “supporting documents,” etc., are here.

Greta Van Susteren has a few questions:

We asked the White House for the pictures on May 1 …and finally, the government is complying!! Here are some questions: why did the White House make all of us spend money for the FOIA request? That seems dumb..and ready for more? The photographer who took the pics is no doubt a professional, yet check out the quality of the photos posted below. The photo #1 is my effort to clean up the photo the White House had posted (their posted picture is #2.) I think my cleaned up photo (#1) better explains why the ridiculous Air Force One flyover terrified New Yorkers…what do you think? why the ho-hum quality pics sent to us? (that they wanted to send us exactly what they took and did not want to fix them so that we did not accuse them of fixing them??? If that is the reason, I don’t blame them. I guess it is better to give us exactly what they have…but I am surprised at the quality. My point and shoot does better!)

With the Obama administration running things, do you feel like a dog surrounded by about a dozen different people who are trying to get you to chase different sticks? Knowing which one(s) not to bother chasing is the hard part.

In any case, there’s one photo that the DoD forgot to release.

Twitter @ThePowersThatBe

Via Cox & Forkum, a fitting cartoon flashback:

***
One of the most useful roles of the blogosphere is its service as an open-source intelligence-gathering medium. You can draw on the expertise of people around the world at the touch of a button. We saw this with typography experts during the Rathergate scandal; Photoshop experts during the Reutersgate debacle; and military experts during the Jesse Macbeth unmasking.

Now, it’s the statisticians and math geeks’ turn. Remember that massively-publicized 2004 Lancet Iraq death toll study? It was cited in nearly 100 scholarly journals and reported by news outlets around the world. “100,000 Civilian Deaths Estimated in Iraq” blared the Washington Post in a typical headline.

There were attempts made by lay journalists to debunk the 2004 study (as well as the 2006 follow-up study that purported to back up the first). But none of those dissections comes close to a damning new statistical analysis of the 2004 study authored by David Kane, Institute Fellow at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University. I read of Kane’s new paper at this science blog and e-mailed him for permission to reprint his analysis in its entirety here so that a wider blog readership could have a look. He has given me his permission and adds that he welcomes comments and feedback. He’ll be presenting the paper at the Joint Statistical Meetings in Salt Lake City on Monday — the largest conference of statisticians in North America.

Much of the math here is mind-numbingly complicated, but Kane’s bottom line is simple: the Lancet authors “cannot reject the null hypothesis that mortality in Iraq is unchanged.” Translation: according to Kane, the confidence interval for the Lancet authors’ main finding is wrong. Had the authors calculated the confidence interval correctly, Kane asserts that they would have failed to identify a statistically significant increase in risk of death in Iraq, let alone the widely-reported 98,000 excess civilian deaths.

An interesting side note: as Kane observes in his paper, the Lancet authors “refuse to provide anyone with the underlying data (or even a precise description of the actual methodology).” The researchers did release some high-level summary data in highly aggregated form (see here), but they released neither the detailed interviewee-level data nor the programming code that would be necessary to replicate their results.

Kane has sent his paper to Lancet. But the blogosphere need not wait for Lancet to complete its review. If you’ve got a statistics background or know someone who does, have a look. Kane’s e-mail address is dkane-at-iq.harvard.edu. He’s a blogger himself at EphBlog.

***

She was one and half years old.

I asked the Montgomery County State’s Attorney’s Office for the charging papers in the case.

Here’s the statement of probable cause:

Click on the thumbnails for full-size.

***

The Washington Post, which first blew the whistle on the case, follows up on the prosecutor’s appeal of the case dismissal:

Prosecutors in Montgomery County said yesterday that they intend to ask an appellate court to overturn a judge’s dismissal of a case against a Liberian immigrant charged with raping a young girl. The judge had ruled that repeated delays caused by the court’s failure to find an interpreter fluent in the accused man’s native dialect had violated his right to a speedy trial.

Mahamu D. Kanneh was arrested in August 2004 after witnesses told police he raped and repeatedly molested a 7-year-old relative. The case was dismissed last week, nearly three years later, by Circuit Court Judge Katherine D. Savage.

Montgomery County State’s Attorney John J. McCarthy said in a statement yesterday that the judge’s ruling should be overturned. “While the Defendant is presumed innocent, the charges are serious, and a trial on the merits of this case is what we hope to achieve through this appeal,” McCarthy said.

“The Court, under the extraordinary circumstances of this case, attempted multiple times to satisfy its obligations. The bottom line is that any delays caused by the attempt to find an appropriate and qualified interpreter is not attributable to the prosecution . . . and should not serve as the basis for dismissing the charges against the Defendant,” the statement said.

In her ruling July 17, Savage didn’t assign blame for the delay.

I asked the Montgomery County State’s Attorney’s Office for the indictment of Mahamu D. Kanneh, the accused immigrant child molester let off because of a lack of a translator. There were nine counts against him involving not one, but two girls–both relatives of Kanneh. I’ve blocked out their names. Here’s the six-page indictment:

Fox News has the latest:

The prosecutor in the case of a Liberian native charged with repeatedly raping and molesting a 7-year-old girl said Monday that he is filing an appeal of a controversial judge’s ruling that dismissed all charges because an interpreter who spoke the suspect’s rare West African dialect could not be found. Montgomery County State’s Attorney John McCarthy called the ruling last Tuesday by Judge Katherine Savage “improper,” adding that his office has “requested that an appeal be taken to reverse the court’s order.”

…Court records, meanwhile, show that an interpreter was “sworn” by a Maryland court on the same day Savage dismissed the case, FOXNews.com has learned. Loretta Knight, a clerk with the court system in Montgomery County, Md., claimed she had been unable to find an interpreter to stay on the case, even after an exhaustive search that included the Liberian Embassy and courts in 47 states. But a look at the court docket for July 17, the day the case was dismissed, shows the entry “Interpreter sworn.” Several items below in the docket, Judge Savage “grants defendant’s oral motion to dismiss case based on a speedy trial violation.”

A review by FOX News of the audio from that hearing shows, however, that an interpreter was present throughout the entire court proceeding, during which time Kanneh’s lawyer, Theresa Chernosky, argued that her client had not been able to get a good job because of unresolved rape charges. Chernosky is heard also telling Savage that her client works at a gas station, and has not signed up for school because of the uncertainty about his future.

The translator can be heard throughout the entire hearing. Savage, however, notes to that the events in the case were “unforeseeable, truly difficult in terms of the interpreter issue.” She then tells the court that “in spite of herculean efforts on the part of the state’s attorney … time has become the enemy.” “What we come back to, then … too much time has passed, is that it’s the defendant who hold speedy trial rights.”

The Washington Post reported, however, that Kanneh had waived his rights to a speedy trial.

Why Savage dismissed the case when records indicate an interpreter had been sworn is just one of several questions raised by an examination of records by FOXNews.com.

Records from a case-worker report dated Oct. 31, 2006, show that the case worker visited Kanneh’s residence to check on him and instead found another sex offender, Sehkou Massaquoi, at the home along with two male children who shared the last name of the defendant.

10:15pm Eastern update. A reader wants to know whether the Georgia Republican Senators’ amendments are in the clay pigeon package. Yes, they are there. But remember to take all this amendment talk with a grain of salt. These are being used to try and buy off shamnesty votes. They are amendments in name only.

Anyway, the Chambliss amendment relating to Social Security totalization agreements is here. The Isakson preemption/Home Depot amendment is here.

9:12pm Eastern update. The clay pigeon package is now searchable and linkable, thanks to the indispensable NZ Bear.

Ed Morrissey is wading through the amendment package. Here are a few of the quick points he has already raised:

POINT 1: Page 21, lines 12-16, apparently reinstated the 24-hour limit on probationary background checks. Remember when they promised to fix that so that no one would get a probationary card without passing the full background check? I guess they broke that promise.

POINT 2: Page 29, lines 12-end: The Z-visa has unlimited 4-year terms. I don’t think this is a change, but shouldn’t the immigrant at some point actually immigrate?

POINT 3: Page 33, lines 19-25: Z-visa non-immigrants over the age of 65 are not expected to maintain employment in order to remain eligible to be in the US. Again, why would they be here if they’re not working and not applying for a regular immigration status?

POINT 7: Page 69, line 20: The DREAM Act, providing scholarships for the children of illegal immigrants, still exists in the bill.

POINT 8: Page 89-90, lines 22-04: The 24-hour limit on background checks still holds within the Ag Workers section (the temporary guest worker program). If it takes longer than 24 hours, they get their credentials. (h/t: commenter Redherkey)

POINT 9: Page 92, lines 14-15: Do I read this correctly? The new limit on guest-worker visas is now 1,500,000 — not counting dependent Z-A visas? Wasn’t this originally 400,000 and reduced by half later?

7:20pm Eastern update.

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The House Republican Conference today by 114 to 23 passed a resolution introduced by U.S. Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI) that expresses opposition to the Senate immigration bill. “Today’s vote illustrates overwhelming opposition among Republicans in the House to the Senate immigration bill and the process in which it was developed,” Hoekstra said. “The Republican Conference has always advocated for immigration reform, but the Senate bill is bad public policy that does not reflect our position.” The text of the Hoekstra resolution is as follows: “Resolved the House GOP Conference disapproves of the Senate immigration bill.” “We have always reserved concerns about the policies that it advocates, but until now we have remained on the sidelines,” Hoekstra said. “It is important that we publicly express our opposition to the Senate bill before consideration is complete.”

Townhall.com’s Dean Barnett, subbing for Hugh Hewitt on the radio, notes that a large number of House GOP members sat out the vote. That is disturbing.

***

I’ve just received the PDF file of the 373-page “Clay Pigeon” amendment.

Here it is.

The blogosphere’s open-source intelligence-gatherers will be integral in digesting this thing. Dig in.

***

To borrow Glenn’s phrase and Allah’s metaphorical application, what’s needed right now: An army of legislative skeet-shooters.

***

While I wait for my printer to churn out this piece of clay pigeon poop, let me reiterate just how crummy this process is. The Grand Schemers drop this thing in on a Tuesday evening and expect they’ll be ramming it through–in as little as 48 hours–on Thursday or Friday with severely limited debate again.

Crummy. Stanley Kurtz is right:

Something about this immigration battle doesn’t sit well. For all the bitterness of our political battles, there’s at least the sense that the government responds to the drift of public opinion. The Republicans in Congress turned into big spenders and the war in Iraq went poorly. As a result the Democrats prospered in 2006, if narrowly. That’s how democracy works. Our politics are often angry and ugly (and that’s a problem), but this is because the public is deeply divided on issues of great importance. Deep down, we understand that our political problems reflect our own divisions.

Somehow this immigration battle feels different. The bill is wildly unpopular, yet it’s close to passing. The contrast with the high-school textbook version of democracy is not only glaring and maddening, it’s downright embarrassing. Usually, even when we’re at each others’ throats, there’s still an underlying pride in the democratic process. This immigration battle strips us of even that pride.

I’m still stuck on the way this bill was going to be pushed through without a public airing of crucial provisions, in the two or three days before Memorial Day recess. But I should be stuck even further back–on the way this bill was cooked up in a backroom deal that bypassed the ordinary process of public hearings. We take them for granted, but those civics textbook fundamentals are there for a reason. We’re going to pay a steep price for setting the fundamentals aside.

Update:

Flashback..

“The Senate conducts most of its business by cooperation and consent. The minority provides that consent with the expectation that the courtesies it extends to the majority will be met with respect for minority rights. And no Senate right is more fundamental than the right to debate.”

- Senator Harry Reid, March 15, 2005
Letter to then Majority Leader Bill Frist

More:

U.S. Senator Jim DeMint (R-South Carolina) said Tuesday that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid bears responsibility for the immigration bill after Reid used his powers to guarantee votes on a few amendments while blocking all others. According to the Senate historian, this has never been done before in U.S. history.

“Senator Reid has been trying to portray this immigration nightmare as solely the responsibility of President Bush, but today we saw just how bad Reid wants it. He used his power as Majority Leader to manipulate and abuse the rules of the Senate to ram this bill down our throats. He has set up a process that guarantees votes on a few amendments while blocking all others. This has never been done before, and it’s the most heavy-handed and rigged thing I have ever seen. This bill may have Ted Kennedy’s name on it but it belongs to Harry Reid now.”

After the Senate voted to cut off debate on the question of whether to resurrect the Senate immigration bill, Senator Reid set up unique debate process that guarantees votes several hand-picked amendments but blocks consideration of all others. Senator Reid used a parliamentary tool called a “clay pigeon” to divide a giant amendment into multiple amendments and then moved to block all others. No other member of the Senate besides Reid could have accomplished all of this without being stopped by another Senator. No other Majority Leader in history has done this.

“Republicans need to take a step back and realize what happened today. Senator Reid turned the Senate into the House and fundamentally undermined minority rights,” said Senator DeMint. “I was always told the Senate was the saucer that cooled the pot, but Senator Reid is forcing us to drink straight from the spout. Republicans better wake up soon or they can expect Senator Reid to use this tactic in the future to raise taxes, increase spending, and weaken our national security.”

All true. But it doesn’t take away the slap in the face the GOP Grand Schemers and the White House administered when they decided to collaborate on this nightmare.

Speaking of holding Republicans accountable, check out the latest in our anti-amnesty Hot Air ads:

RNC Refund.

Update: New WashTimes article on the report here.

This weekend, dogged Washington Times reporter Audrey Hudson previewed a Department of Homeland Security Inspector General’s report on the handling–and mishandling–of Flight 327. Longtime readers will remember this incident as an airline security object lesson on the need for passengers to say something when they see something. Thirteen Middle Eastern men aroused the suspicion of federal air marshals, flight crew, and passengers with disruptive, red-flag behavior at takeoff and landing. Freelance writer Annie Jacobsen was on the flight in June 2004 and bravely blew the whistle on security lapses and bureaucratic incompetence.

Now, the redacted, 51-page OIG report is online in PDF form. Jacobsen has posted it at her blog, Aviation Nation. POGO also obtained the report through a FOIA request and has also posted the report here. More on the report in a moment.

For those who aren’t familiar with Flight 327 or who have forgotten the details, Jacobsen wrote a book about her experience and continued to investigate the case and related reports of terrorist dry runs at home and abroad. She did all this despite ridicule, derision, and accusations of bigotry. Here’s a reminder of what I wrote about the case on July 24, 2004:

Following the lead of anonymous air marshals (see Eric Leonard’s KFI news story), some in the blogosphere are piling on Annie Jacobsen. One blogger calls her a “sniveling little twit.” Kevin Drum pooh-poohs “Panic in the Skies.” Armed Liberal advises Annie to take a “chill pill.” And Commissar at Politburo Diktat writes: “We are freaking out. Panicking. Overreacting. Getting jumpy. For Chrissakes, GET A GRIP, comrades. We (I mean Ms. Jacobsen) are, by the words of our federal air security officials, creating a danger in the air.”

I respectfully take issue with this characterization. Let’s remember what exactly Annie and Kevin Jacobsen did on their flight. By one unnamed marshal’s own words: “Jacobsen and her husband had a number of conversations with the flight attendants and gestured towards the men several times, the source said.”

Who’s freaking out? The unnamed marshals who spoke to KFI are popping veins over the Jacobsens for having merely discussed their concerns with the flight crew and “gestured towards the men.” The couple didn’t jump up and scream “We are going to die!” They didn’t faint or have heart attacks. And they didn’t confront the 14 Syrians while they all stood up before landing, went to the bathroom, and congregated in the aisles in violation of security regulations. (No one confronted them, for crying out loud. That is the problem.)

The Jacobsens didn’t even muster up the courage to say meekly to the Syrians, “Hey, could you please sit down. You are making me nervous.” And they didn’t blab to other passengers about their fears.

The Jacobsens talked to the flight attendants and they kept to themselves. In fact, in their MSNBC interview, Kevin Jacobsen said he sat quietly with his wife and son during the landing and resignedly wrote about his concerns in his journal. Out-of-control menaces in the air? Come on.

The message that the alarmed and panicked marshals are sending out is that if and when we view suspicious behavior, we should all just sit tight in our seats, shut up, and do nothing until it’s too damned late lest we possibly risk blowing their cover.

Meanwhile, Tom Ridge and Norm Mineta ask us all to be vigilant, buy our duct tape, hand over our nail clippers and knitting needles, keep our lips sealed, and relinquish complete control and responsibility for homeland defense–and self-defense–to The Professionals.

Two words: Hell, no.

Jacobsen was a citizen John Doe before the John Doe movement had a name. Here’s what she wrote in April:

I am John Doe, in spirit, and I’m also John Doe in reality. I am Annie Jacobsen and three years ago, I saw something on an airplane and I said something about it. I wasn’t sued — but a whole lot of other things happened instead.

What I saw on Northwest Flight 327 was a group of Syrian men act as though they were going to hijack the plane. The men blocked the aircraft aisles, knocked over a passenger and spent so much time in the aircraft bathrooms that one Syrian emerged covered in toilet chemicals. As the flight was about to land, seven of the men stood in the aisle and used the toilets while the leader read from a small red book. One of the men then made a slashing motion across his throat and mouthed the word, ‘no.’

What I saw on that Detroit-to-Los Angeles flight was so alarming it never occurred to me to censor myself when it came to speaking out about what happened on the flight. It never occurred to me to worry about getting sued. First I spoke with federal agents for two hours, under oath, detailing what I saw. Later, after I learned that the government botched the investigation of the Syrians and then tried to cover their mistakes, I spoke up about that. For three years now, I’ve spoken up about what I saw as a guest on more than 400 radio and television programs. I’ve written 28 articles on the subject as well as a book. I’m so glad I did.

Federal counterterrorism agents have told me that the Syrians on the flight I was on were practicing how to build a bomb in the aircraft toilet — that the flight I was on was something known in counterterrorism circles as a “dry run.” Other federal agents have told me it was more likely “the real deal called off.” But that information came to me much later. That information came long after WomensWallStreet.com published my original 3,000-word article in which I describe exactly what I saw.

Any reasonable person would have done what I did; others on the flight went on television and described the terror resulting from what they saw on Flight 327, too. Eventually, the White House asked the Department of Homeland Security, Office of Inspector General, to investigate exactly what happened on the flight. The investigation, called Review of the Department’s Handling of Suspicious Passengers Aboard Northwest Flight 327, took 22 months to complete (I was interviewed for the investigation). The review is a textbook case of why reporting suspicious behavior must be a citizen’s protected right.

Indeed, it is. If not for Annie Jacobsen, who was backed up by flight crew members and who emboldened other passengers on the flight to speak out, the OIG report would not have forced the feds to address fundamental flaws in airline security. If the Left weren’t stuck in 9/10 mode and so bent on demonizing Jacobsen, it would be heralding the OIG report as evidence of the Bush administration’s homeland defense ineptitude.

Here are excerpts from the report, but go to Jacobsen’s site and read the whole thing.

The OIG narrative of on-board activity summarizes the suspicious behavior:

The report also corroborates WNBC investigative reporter Scott Weinberger’s scoop that the Syrians were here on expired visas and corroborates the Dallas Morning News’s finding that the feds had not bothered to check their visas against immigration databases on the day of the incident. We also learn that the Syrian band promoter, whom Clint Taylor first identified as Nour Mehana correction: Elie Harfouche, had been involved “in similar suspicious behavior” on another flight:

Jacobsen’s investigative work and the work of those who followed up and took her seriously resulted in the OIG demanding that the Transportation Security Administration, Federal Air Marshals Service, and FBI address serious gaps in communication, coordination, and basic database searches:

The ball is now in the homeland security agencies’ court:

For its part, here’s how TSA rationalized its failure to report the Flight 327 incident to the Homeland Security Operations Center, which was created after 9/11 to “serve as the nation’s nerve center for information sharing and domestic incident management:”

So top brass at FAMS, the FBI, and TSA all wanted to downplay the incident and keep it out of the homeland security database. But HSOC believed the case warranted reporting after an inquiry from the White House Security Council and coverage by the Washington Times–all prompted by citizen whistleblower Annie Jacobsen’s eyewitness account and investigative research.

Several questions remain: What was in that FBI ACS report about Nour Mehana’s [correction:] Elie Harfouche’s previous suspicious behavior? Was that a test run or misinterpretation? The OIG report does not say. Because of the heavy redaction, it is also unclear whether Flight 327 was a jihadi test run. What is clear is that some federal agency officials have a bad habit of denying the obvious. What is also clear from the OIG report is that the feds remain woefully underprepared to handle jihadi test runs–let alone the real thing.

Thanks to Annie Jacobsen, we have been put on alert again: Homeland security begins not with the White House or behemoth bureaucracies. It begins with you.

Never forget.

If it looks familiar, you may recall that I posted the whole thing here back in January 2006 after reading about it in the Miami Herald and then obtaining the original document from the US Attorney’s Office in Florida. All it took was a simple phone call.

Secrets of ABC’s crack investigative team revealed!

Look at how they make it look like it was such a scoop to obtain the document:

The application–obtained by ABC News’ Law & Justice Unit–provides a window into a highly sophisticated organization with a corporate structure that resembles that of large American companies.

“It’s a membership application–just the way you or I would fill out an application for a credit card company,” said Jack Cloonan, former head of the FBI’s Osama bin Laden squad in New York and now an ABC News consultant, who reviewed the document. “They’re no different.”

The document’s authenticity was confirmed to ABC News’ Law & Justice Unit by the U.S. attorney’s office in Miami, where Padilla is being prosecuted.

How many people are there in the “ABC News’ Law & Justice Unit” and how long did it take them all to “obtain” the document–more than a year after the Miami Herald reported on it and it was posted in full here?

Next time, try this face-saving measure: Google it.

***
Previous:

January 13, 2006: Document drop – Padilla’s al Qaeda form

After the U.S. military invaded Afghanistan to oust its Taliban rulers, authorities found a locker full of applications to join al Qaeda’s holy war overseas.

Among the alleged applicants: José Padilla, the former ”enemy combatant” who once lived in Broward County.

A prosecutor produced the alleged document for the first time Thursday in Miami federal court, where Padilla pleaded not guilty to conspiracy charges that he was a recruit for a North American terrorist cell with South Florida links that aided Islamic jihad abroad.

…”It was recovered by U.S. personnel in late 2001 after the United States began bombing Afghanistan,” Justice Department lawyer Stephanie Pell said, referring to Padilla’s alleged al Qaeda application.

She added it was found among 80 to 100 other mujahadeen (holy warrior) applications found in the country, which harbored al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden before he masterminded the Sept. 11, 2001, U.S. terrorist attacks.

Pell said Padilla’s July 24, 2000, application was authenticated by a ”cooperating government witness” convicted in an unrelated case who had once filled out the same Arabic ”mujahadeen data form.” She said Padilla’s date of birth, Oct. 18, 1970, was on his application along with his adopted Muslim name, Abu Abdullah Al Mujahir.

I obtained the five-page document (plus the five-page English translation) from the US Attorney’s Office in Florida this afternoon. Click here for the full document (.pdf file).

Here’s an excerpt of the first page in Arabic:

And here’s a bit of the English translation from a different page:

Yes, they asked him about his “hobbies.”

Padilla’s lawyer denies the terror suspect filled out the form.

It should be obvious to anyone who so much as glances at the documents being cited that the FBI was reporting the statements of detainees rather than endorsing or validating those allegations. Immediately before describing the Koran-in-the-toilet allegation, the FBI notes the detainee’s statement that “God tells Muslims to do a jihad against non-Muslims.” Does Kos expect us to believe the FBI is endorsing that statement too?

Many detainees have made allegations of serious physical abuse as well as mistreatment of the Koran. Notwithstanding the MSM’s “flood the zone” coverage, that’s neither unexpected nor particularly newsworthy.

Are the detainees’ complaints valid? Maybe some are. But the FBI documents heralded by Kos and others as evidence of abuse actually show that a significant number of detainees’ complaints were either exaggerated or completely fabricated.

One detainee who claimed to have been “beaten, spit upon and treated worse than a dog” could not provide a single detail pertaining to mistreatment by U.S. military personnel. Another detainee claimed that guards were physically abusive and told detainees that U.S. soldiers were having sex with the detainees’ mothers. Yet this detainee said he had neither seen any physical abuse nor heard these comments from the guards. Other detainees who complained about abuse of the Koran admitted they had never personally witnessed any such abuse, but one said he had heard that non-Muslim soldiers touched the Koran when searching it for contraband.

A number of detainees were concerned about relatively mundane issues such as lack of privacy, lack of bed sheets, being unwillingly photographed, the guards’ use of profanity, and bad food (like “the zoo,” said one critic). If lack of privacy or bed sheets is a detainee’s main concern, it is doubtful that the detainee is being tortured (unless the definition of “torture” is so ridiculously broad as to be meaningless).

Several detainees indicated they had not experienced any mistreatment whatsoever at Gitmo, including one detainee who claimed he was mistreated at Kandahar prior to his transfer to Cuba.

One detainee disputed claims that guards had mistreated the Koran. The detainee said that riots resulted from claims that a guard dropped the Koran. In actuality, the detainee said, a detainee dropped the Koran then blamed a guard. (This detainee is apparently more skeptical of Koran-abuse allegations than the Washington Post, which neglected to mention this tidbit.)

In one case, Gitmo interrogators apologized to a detainee for interviewing him prior to the end of Ramadan, giving lie to the MSM portrayal of guards and interrogators as Koran-dropping, Koran-kicking, Koran-flushing, Islamophobic thugs.

Don’t take my word for it. But don’t take Kos’s word for it either. Or the Washington Post’s. Go read some or all of the FBI documents yourself and draw your own conclusions.

In the meantime, see below to see excerpts from the FBI documents that won’t be making headlines.

Update: INDC Journal reports on another prisoner-abuse scandal: “Breaking News: the entire Death Row population at the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana testified, ‘that the food is terrible and I’m 110% innocent. I swear. Hey, you wouldn’t happen to have a smoke, would you?’”

Update II: Check out the new group blog “MediaSlander.com,” dedicated to highlighting “bias, rumor and falsehoods that have been creeping into military coverage under the guise of objective news.”

Update III: Excellent round-ups: Joe Gandelman, La Shawn Barber

Update IV: It’s not just Kos. Take a look at how Big Media is covering the story:

- ABC News, “FBI memo reports Guantanamo guards flushing Koran”

- Reuters AlertNet, “FBI memo reports Guantanamo guards flushing Koran”

- Sydney Morning Herald, “US knew about abuse of Koran, papers show”

- Yahoo! News, “FBI memo reports Guantanamo guards flushing Koran”

- Washington Times, “FBI reports show Koran abuse at Gitmo”

I’ve come to expect these kinds of distortions from the MSM, but the Washington Times?!? Good grief.

Clarification, 7:48 pm: The headline that appeared on the Washington Times web site was selected by UPI not the Washington Times.

Update V: Tom MacGuire at Just One Minute notices that compared to the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and New York Times covered the story quite fairly.

From the New York Times:

Unlike F.B.I. documents previously disclosed in a lawsuit brought by the civil liberties union, in which agents reported that they had witnessed harsh and possibly illegal interrogation techniques, the new documents do not say the F.B.I. agents witnessed the episodes themselves. Rather, they are accounts of unsubstantiated accusations made by the prisoners during interrogation.

On Wednesday, the Pentagon dismissed the reports as containing no new evidence that abuses of the Koran had actually occurred and said that on May 14 military investigators had interviewed the prisoner who mentioned the toilet episode to the F.B.I. and that he was not able to substantiate the charge.

The accusation that soldiers had put a Koran in a toilet, which has been made by former and current inmates over the past two years, stirred violence this month that killed at least 17 people in Muslim countries after Newsweek magazine reported that a military investigation was expected to confirm that the incident had in fact occurred.

Newsweek retracted the report last week, saying it had relied on an American government official who had incomplete knowledge of the situation.

None of the documents released Wednesday indicate any such confirmation that the incident took place.

And from the LA Times:

No independent verification has been made of the prisoners’ claims. The FBI reports say that some prisoners, when asked, were not able to say that they had witnessed such abuse of the Koran, but that they had heard rumors about it.

One prisoner, the FBI notes say, “considers it his duty as a Muslim to believe the rumor until it is proven untrue.”

Update VI: Don’t mess with the Junkyard Blog.

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FBI EXCERPTS THAT WON’T MAKE THE MSM HEADLINES

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