“A large part of Valerie Plame’s job at CIA was to track the illicit trade in nuclear technologies peddled by Dr. Khan’s network. Khan’s Nuclear Walmart made it very easy for customers to buy what they needed to start home bomb-making. Khan’s one-stop shop for WMDs made it just as easy for the CIA to keep track of nuclear programs in at least half-dozen unfriendly countries, and a variety of criminal organizations in a dozen more that supplied money and know-how”

“The Safari Club
The Khan network was the product of more than an alliance against the Soviet Union. It sprang out of a post-Watergate era partnership between disgraced former covert operators who had been thrown out of American intelligence, the Saudi Royal family, and third-country partners who provided manpower and technical assistance. It was called, “The Safari Club”

That they are substantively brilliant picks for their respective offices is an added bonus, but it’s not their present utility.

Combined with the rise of modernity, the emancipation and assimilation of Jews, industrialization, literacy, and a scientific outlook – epitomized by Darwin and Wallace’s 1859 publications on natural selection and the origin of species, including man – the pope’s realm on earth was reduced to the hearts of men and Vatican City. The development of modern concepts of science and history was bringing scripture and an ahistorical church’s authority into doubt.

The pope was determined that his spiritual authority not become as irrelevant as his temporal authority. Like Cheney, one reaction was to declare his opinion on matters of faith to be infallible and irrefutable, the spiritual analogue to a politician’s hiding behind patriotism and his troops safety.

Don Quixote is one of the foundational works of modern European literature. The last thing that either the Don or Cervantes himself, different though their views are, would want to say is that a windmill is just a windmill.

Ceci n’est pas un pipe, plunger.

Fitz’s letters (beginning Oct 2007 — does that affect the laches issues?) are well worth reading; in the second of them he quotes more of Lance than anyone most people here would ever want to read, and just about every sentence he quotes confirms LabDancer’s analysis @ 22.

Unfortunately, the letters are on Lance’s site (link at Raw Story), and Lance supplies only one response from Harper Collins, the sweetly feeble letter to which Fitz’s second is the reply (devastating, I thought). Publisher’s sweetly feeble lawyer tries to argue at one and the same time that Lance never inarguably and explicitly imputes any such motives to Fitzgerald, and besides, even if and when he does, he puts his imputations in the context of conditional clauses and opinion, and everyone is entitled to his own opinion, eh? Heh.

I don’t know what goes on in court, but I do know what goes on when book publishers get sued: money gets spent, a lot of money, ‘way more money than book publishers can normally afford, long before anyone gets to court. That’s your actual libel chill, and I mostly don’t like it either. I’ve watched publishers chew over nuisance threats. Some of them are brave enough to take the dare and keep going, which is often smart because most nuisance threats go away, but most publishers will fold fairly easily just because they can’t afford to defend, even when they’re right.

To me, though, in this case it’s blindingly obvious that Fitz is right, but then I am NAL. (He is, though. *wink*)

Anyway, those letters were for me a real edumacation and a great read as well — I can’t imagine why Lance is putting stuff so damaging to himself on his own site. Shame that we don’t have the whole series, which I suspect would make Harper Collins look even sillier.