Unqualified Offerings

Mr. Gary Farber notices that, amid the Ron Susskind hoopla, UO’s favorite MI6 propaganda vector, Daily Telegraph reporter Mister Con "My first name is way too on-the-nose" Coughlin plays a major role. Gary’s post is also a quote-rich overview of the letter-forgery case and Susskind’s history of Bush administration coverage.

I try to keep the tinfoil off my head (it’s scratchy) regarding the anthrax case, but corners of the case keep coming untucked around the edges. For instance, in today’s Washington Post, the team of Carrie Johnson, Joby Warrick and Marilyn W. Thompson tell us that
Bruce E. Ivins, the government’s leading suspect in the 2001 [...]

By Thoreau
I go by the TSA blog from time to time. It appears that a guy named Dean is one of the more popular Staatssicherheit henchmen (no, I will not call him a “TSO”) there, earning even a bit of grudging respect from the TSA’s critics. He may very well be the best [...]

By Thoreau
I’m writing this massive multi-investigator grant, and a lot of things actually become easier if you look at the science first, and once you do that the politics sort of solves itself (or at least it does in the summer, when there are fewer people around and it’s just the PI and co-PI making [...]

By Thoreau
Via the comments, former UN Weapons Inspector Richard Spertzel weighs in on the anthrax case.  The short version of his article is that the weapon described by the FBI does not match the capabilities of Ft. Detrick, let alone a single unaided scientist.  The greatest weakness of Spertzel’s analysis is that he accepts as [...]

Over there, I ponder McCain, Obama and words that start with ‘P.’