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Last night the Blogger empire was down for several hours before they found and corrected the problem.

The other difficulty is that they host the Blogger Status and Blogger Buzz on the BlogSpot servers, so they had no way of telling anyone what was going on and when it might be repaired.

You would think that a large Internet concern like Google would know better than to do that, especially being based in an earthquake zone.

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Years of investigation, months in the presentation, new laws to help them out, and the DoJ loses another battle in their “War on Terror”:

The case against Sami Al-Arian, 47, had been seen as one of the biggest courtroom tests yet of the Patriot Act’s expanded search-and-surveillance powers.

[snip]

Two co-defendants, Sameeh Hammoudeh and Ghassan Zayed Ballut, were acquitted of all charges. A third, Hatem Naji Fariz, was found not guilty on 24 counts, and jurors deadlocked on the remaining eight.

The U.S. Justice Department had no immediate comment.

Days worth of wiretaps and they couldn’t convince a jury to convict on anything. And people wonder why the 9/11 Commission won’t give them a passing grade.

Sami Al-Arian is an obnoxious jerk, but Ann, Rush, et al. had better hope that never becomes a crime. Oh, he was also a Bush supporter in 2000, big enough that there are pictures of the Shrubbery and Laura with Al-Arian’s family.

The question is: are they going to waste any more tax dollars on the charges that the jury couldn’t decide? I don’t know if he’s innocent or guilty, but this Justice Department is obviously not competent enough to prove their case.

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Two segments on All Things Considered tells us of the considered judgment of two professionals about Iraq before the war.

The first is an interview with Peter Galbraith, the former ambassador to Croatia and an advisor to the Kurds. Mr. Galbraith makes the point that it is obvious that when repressive governments are removed from countries that are collections of disparate national groups, nationalism will kick in and the artificial constructs will break down into their inherently more stable “natural states”. This happened in the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, so it should have been obvious that it was going to happen in Iraq.

In the second, Ex-CIA Agent Robert Baer talks about the new movie Syriana, which draws on his experiences working in the Middle East. [Listen to the interview to understand his involvement with the picture.]

He makes a makes a passing comment on the end of the interview that everyone knew that Iraq would come apart if Saddam was removed.

He implies that the reason that he parted ways with the CIA in 1995 was because he was suspected of being involved in a plot to assassinate Saddam, to the point that the FBI hauled him in for questioning.

[Edit: This was my 1000^th Post.]

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