ED MORRISSEY looks at a new threat to political free speech.

THE ARMY SUBPOENAS JOURNALISTS and the journalists don’t like it:

“It’s not a reporter’s job to participate in the prosecution of her own sources,” said Sarah Olson, an Oakland freelance journalist and radio producer. “When you force a journalist to participate, you run the risk of turning the journalist into an investigative tool of the state.”

But Olson, who received her subpoena Thursday, acknowledged she has no legal grounds to refuse to testify, since she is being asked only to confirm the accuracy of what she wrote about Watada and not to disclose confidential sources or unpublished material.

Normally, she said, “no one, myself included, has any problem verifying the veracity of their reporting.” The ethical problem in this case, she said, is that she would be aiding the prosecution of one of the dissidents and war critics who regularly trust her to tell their stories to the public.

That’s not ethics. That’s politics. But many “journalists” seem to confuse the two.

DUKE (NON)RAPE UPDATE:

RALEIGH, N.C. – The North Carolina bar filed ethics charges Thursday against the prosecutor in the Duke lacrosse sexual assault case, accusing him of saying misleading and inflammatory things to the media about the athletes under suspicion. . . .

Among the four rules of professional conduct that Nifong was accused of violating was a prohibition against making comments “that have a substantial likelihood of heightening public condemnation of the accused.”

In a statement, the bar said it opened a case against Nifong on March 30, a little more than two weeks after a 28-year-old woman hired to perform as a stripper at a lacrosse team party said she was gang-raped.

The ethics charges will be heard by an independent body called the Disciplinary Hearing Commission, made up of both lawyers and non-lawyers. A date for the hearing has not been set.

I suspect that there’s more to come.

AT THE BELMONT CLUB, a look at the blogosphere at war.

MORE THOUGHTS on Iran’s looming oil shortage mentioned below.

MICROSOFT: giving free laptops to bloggers who review Windows Vista, according to a report at Slashdot.

On the one hand, it could be a bribe. On the other hand, the laptops are from Acer.

ON MORE THAN ONE OCCASION, I’ve suggested that the United States should not be trying to serve as an “honest broker” for a peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians on the grounds that the Palestinians are our enemies, and thus we can’t and shouldn’t be neutral about them.

More evidence that I’m right:

A newly declassified report from 1973 shows that Yasser Arafat personally commanded the terrorist attack that resulted in the murders of Ambassador Cleo Noel and his deputy George Moore, as well as a Belgian diplomat. Moreover, the two murders appear to have been the entire point of Arafat’s attack. . . . The State Department had proof all along that Yasser Arafat not only masterminded this attack, but deliberately plotted to kill American diplomats as a means to pressure the US out of the Middle East. In other words, the PLO/Fatah/BSO conducted a terrorist attack on American interests, murdered Americans, and got away with it.

Like I said, our enemies. We should have killed Arafat and his cronies, not tried to help them get a better deal out of Israel. I would wonder if the Nobel Peace Prize committee knew about this, but I doubt it would matter, as it appears that no amount of anti-Americanism, in word or in deed, is a bar to that award.

Meanwhile, Scott Johnson is aiming an I told you so at his critics.

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY IS PAGING JAMIL HUSSEIN:

Last summer, Reuters, the media outlet that refuses to label terrorists as terrorists, was jolted by the “fauxtography” scandal. Adnan Hajj, a freelance Lebanese photographer, allegedly doctored images of the Israel-Hezbollah war and photographed what appeared to many to be staged scenes of victim rescue and recovery efforts in Qana, a Lebanese village where Israel attacked Hezbollah terrorists. Both were clearly an effort to further inflame a world that had already cast Israel as the villain.

Just as we asked in August if Reuters was “a patsy or collaborator,” we wonder the same about the AP. We also wonder if we can trust any AP report from the Middle East. If it can’t show us Capt. Jamil Hussein, we’re not sure it has anything else we want to see.

(Via Newsbeat1).

A SUGGESTED TACTIC IN IRAQ: “In Iraq and elsewhere, traditional troops, weapons and tactics are less useful than tools of influence, covert operations and intelligence brought to the battlefield by special operators working harmoniously with indigenous forces and local populations. The prime objective is to create a climate of fear within enemy ranks that breaks its will to continue the armed insurrection against the freely elected Iraqi government. . . . It’s imperative that the United States transition quickly to an unconventional war strategy with USSOCOM generals and/or admirals in charge, or the war will be lost.”

SOME HOMELAND SECURITY PROBLEMS for the new Congress.

YES, BLOGGING WAS LIGHT yesterday. We went diving — me, my nephew, and the Insta-Mom, who had never been diving before and decided to try a resort course, where you get a quickie lesson in a pool and then dive with an instructor.

Diving was okay. The water was a bit chilly –75 degrees — though I was comfortable enough in a 3-mil wetsuit with a hood. The visibility was only fair, and there was a current. As always with Florida diving, I concluded that it’s better than no diving at all, but not a patch on Cayman or Cozumel. I’m told, though, that it’s much better here in the summer.

Meanwhile, on the beach-reading front, I’ve finally started the Robert Heinlein / Spider Robinson novel Variable Star. I’m only a couple of chapters into it, but so far it’s okay. I’m amazed at how Heinlein-like it sounds.

I’m enjoying my vacation. If this has caused me to miss your email or blog post, sorry. Okay, I’m not that sorry. The blogging will still be around next week; the subtropical sunshine will not.

JOHN EDWARDS announces for President.

Scott Ott says he’s ahead of the curve.

UPDATE: More here:

Those cheering on Mr. Edwards’s antipoverty crusade include party strategist Donna Brazile, who was Al Gore’s campaign manager in his 2000 presidency bid. Recalling Mr. Edwards’s past emphasis on the “Two Americas” theme, she says: “In 2004, that message went largely unheard. To his credit, he kept at it. And Katrina demonstrated the validity of that message.”

It’s going to be interesting to see if Edwards can keep to this theme without taking a hard Lou Dobbs / Pat Buchanan kind of line against immigration and foreign trade.

ROGER STERN looks at Iran’s oil crisis. That’s a link to Stern’s paper. Here’s a news story on his findings. Excerpt:

Iran’s oil exports are plummeting at 10pc a year on lack of investment and could be exhausted within a decade, depriving the world economy of its second-biggest source of crude supplies.

A report by the US National Academy of Sciences said rickety infrastructure dating back to the era of the Shah had crippled output, while local fuel use was rising at 6pc a year.

“Their domestic demand is growing at the highest rate of any country in the world,” said Prof Roger Stern, an Iran expert at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore.

“They need to invest $2.5bn (£1.28bn) a year just to stand still and they’re not doing it because it’s politically easier to spend the money on social welfare and the army than to wait four to six years for a return on investment,” he said.

“They’ve been running down the industry like this for 20 years.”

Prof Stern said Teheran faces impending disaster since it relies on oil revenues for 70pc of its budget.

Perhaps this explains the Bush Administration’s otherwise-inexplicable malaise with regard to Iran. We talked to Stern, and to energy expert Lynne Kiesling, in this podcast. But read this for a shorter-term worry.

NANOTECHNOLOGY BREAKTHROUGHS for 2006.

SENDING A MESSAGE TO SADR: I’m not sure it’s strongly worded enough.

DEATHBED CONVERSION: Saddam speaks against hatred.

SUING JESSICA: The Washingtonienne lawsuit is going ahead.

GRIM MILESTONES: “Did anyone ever think to criticize World War II after the 2.303 ‘grim milestone’ was reached (the number of people killed at Pearl Harbor? Obviously not; back then people had the moral compass in place. Just think that as the war ended, they would have been able to count that ‘grim milestone’ a staggering 182 times, since in WW2 about 420,000 people died, 407,000 of them military.”

STRATEGYPAGE ON SOMALIA:

Ethiopian troops have stood aside so that Somali gunmen representing the Transitional Government can enter Mogadishu. The surviving Islamic Courts fighters have fled south, from whence they came. This does not solve the basic problem, that the Somali clans cannot agree on how to share power, or how to impose law and order in the country. The Ethiopians are only interested in keeping the Islamic Courts from being in power (and following up on their pledge to invade Ethiopia and “liberate” the Ogaden region, which is inhabited by ethnic Somalis.) The clans that traditionally inhabit, and control, Mogadishu, are apparently renouncing the Islamic Courts (an organization controlled by clans further south), and joining the Transitional Government once more. The Mogadishu clans were forced to “join” the Islamic Courts earlier this year. The Islamic Courts brought law and order, but too much for many Somalis. Prohibiting movies, drugs, cigarettes and short skirts was not popular. The Islamic Courts were also bringing in foreign Islamic militants (including al Qaeda), who were not popular either.

The U.S. was apparently providing the Ethiopians with satellite and aircraft photos of Islamic Courts positions. The U.S. has a large counter-terror force to the north, in Djibouti. The U.S. may be supplying Ethiopia with cash (to pay for all the gas the Ethiopians are burning in their operations). For years, the U.S. has been training Ethiopian troops for operations like this.

Nice to know that we’re helping here. We should be doing more things like this. More on Ethiopia and Somalia here.

BLOGGING FROM LEBANON: Michael Totten posts on Hezbollah’s Putsch.

I MAY BE ON VACATION, but Kaus is blogging up a storm.

KERRY MEETS THE TROOPS in Iraq. (Via The Corner).

Meanwhile, Prince Harry may be going, as a soldier.

A LOOK AT THE BRADY CAMPAIGN AND VIOLENT CRIME:

Brady has issued grades for states. These grades are gun control rankings from A to F, with an A indicating more gun control and more in line with Brady’s goals. Strangely, most of the increase in violent crime occurred in states that earned higher Brady rankings.

If from this you conclude that the Brady Campaign is responsible for violent crime . . . well, then, you’re operating at the level of statistical literacy at which the Brady Campaign itself usually operates! But it certainly doesn’t say anything good about their approach

UPDATE: Related item here. “Enactment or failure to enact Brady’s legislative priorities had no correlation to murder rates. If a state were to go from F to A, from virtually no gun control to everything on Brady’s agenda, the only result would be a joyful press release from Brady. It is quite interesting to see an advocacy group impeached by its own grading system.”

FROM THE ECONOMIST: Thoughts on Gary Hart and Barack Obama. More on that subject here.

HERE’S A massive Gerald Ford roundup at Pajamas Media.