I think this is also appropriate: Yo Jay! (One) day when I was chillin' in Kentucky Fried Chicken Just mindin' my business, eatin' food and finger lickin' This dude walked in lookin' strange and kind of funny Went up to the front with a menu and his money He didn't walk straight, kind of side to side He asked this old lady, "Yo, yo, um...is this Kentucky Fried?" The lady said "Yeah", smiled and he smiled back He gave a quarter and his order, small fries, Big Mac! You be illin' (To)day you won a ticket to see Doctor J Front row seat (in free!) no pay Radio in hand, snacks by feet Game's about to start, you kickin' popcorn to the beat You finally wake up, Doc's gone to town Round his back, through the hoop, then you scream "Touchdown!" You be illin' The other day around the way I seen you illin' at a party Drunk as skunk you illin' punk and in your left hand was Bacardi You went up to this fly girl and said "Yo, yo, can I get this dance?" She smelt your breath and then She left you standin' in your illin' stance You be illin' Dinner, you ate it, there is none left It was salty, with butter and it was def You proceeded to eat it cause you was in the mood But holmes you did not read it was a can of dog food! You be illin'
The Shoe (Bomb) on the Other Foot President Bush’s revelation about a foiled bomb plot shows the dangers of declassification for purely partisan purposes. By Jonathan Alter Newsweek Feb. 10, 2006 - Poor Porter Goss. First, the longtime Florida congressman leaves his safe seat to become director of the CIA, only to find that he’s been neutered by a new bureaucratic setup where he reports to John Negroponte, the director of national intelligence. Then he writes an op-ed piece decrying intelligence leaks in The New York Times on Friday, the exact same day as a story appears identifying today’s biggest leaker of antiterrorism secrets in Washington—President George W. Bush. For crass political reasons—namely to advance his position on the National Security Agency spying story—the president chose to use a speech to the National Guard Association to disclose details of a 2002 “shoe bomb” plot to blow up the U.S. Bank Tower, the tallest building in Los Angeles. While the plot had been revealed in general terms in the past, the White House this week arranged for Bush’s counterterrorism adviser, Frances Fragos Townsend, to explain to reporters in a conference call exactly the kind of details that Goss claimed on the op-ed page helped the enemy. “We are at risk of losing a key battle,” Goss wrote. “The battle to protect our classification system.” That system is at particular risk when it is exploited for political purposes. The president is allowed to declassify whatever he wants; that’s one of the privileges of being president. So in this case—unlike the NSA’s warrantless eavesdropping—there is no issue of Bush breaking the law. But let’s be clear on what this was: a deliberate effort to use declassification for partisan purposes, in this case, defending the administration’s policy on NSA surveillance, which Karl Rove says publicly will be a big part of the 2006 midterm campaign. The White House made perfect political use of the twilight zone of intelligence. While Townsend did not explicitly claim that the NSA surveillance program had foiled the Los Angeles plot, she tried to imply that it might have played a role. “We use all available sources and methods in the intelligence community but we have to protect them,” she told reporters. “So I’m not going to talk about what ones we did or didn’t use in this particular case.” Let’s get this straight. The president and administration officials will suddenly talk about details of the foiled plot—details that were highly classified until now. But they won’t say if the controversial NSA program was involved. Given their new willingness to talk at length about the case, can anyone seriously doubt that had the NSA eavesdropping cracked this case, they would have mentioned that? Simply saying that the NSA helped foil the plot—if it had—would not have compromised “sources and methods.” You can bet that if this were an NSA case, we’d know it. The chronology of Bush’s politicizing of intelligence goes something like this: First, the president discloses classified information without any good reason to do so. Why now? It’s not as if Los Angeles is hosting the Olympics or under some new threat. (To understand how hurried and political this disclosure was, consider the fact that Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, a Democrat, wasn’t briefed on the foiled plot and has been stiffed in his efforts to meet with the president about homeland security in his city, a problem that New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and other Republican mayors do not have). Then, by implying without stating that the NSA may have been involved, the White House uses sensitivity about classified information as a shield against finding out whether the NSA is relevant to the Los Angeles plot in the first place. Goss, meanwhile, is left hanging out to dry: he seems to be calling for more criminalization of intelligence leaks in one part of the paper while the president leaks like a sieve in the other. Elsewhere, he makes a big distinction between whistleblowers who seek accountability through proper channels (they’re right) and those who go to the media (obviously wrong). Feeling some pressure three quarters into his op-ed piece to offer even one example of how media coverage has jeopardized an intelligence operation, Goss hauls out the same chestnut Bush used in a press conference last month—the revelation that Osama bin Laden’s satellite phone had been tapped. The implication was that once the evil American media revealed this fact, bin Laden stopped using the phone and was harder to catch. In fact, bin Laden gave up his satphone after President Bill Clinton used coordinates from the phone to bomb him in 1998. It was Clinton’s missiles, not the media, that convinced the Al Qaeda leader he needed a more secure way to communicate. Will the White House get away with using intelligence as a political weapon? Probably. Imagine if it were Clinton, not Bush, who decided to reveal classified information about the plot against Los Angeles in a politically convenient way. The rightwing gabfests would be having a field day, as well they should. But now the shoe bomb is on the other foot. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11279032/site/newsweek/
