The Wonk Engine is getting some scheduled maintenance this weekend.
Additionally, user comments will be disabled for 24 hours or so while we make a transition to a new server (we’re moving from FreeBSD to OpenSolaris for the curious geek among you).
All other services should be uninterrupted.
Wish me luck.
*
Update — that seemed to go well. Now would be a great time to let me know if you notice anything strange. I’m particulary worried about any character encoding issues you might find (commas or quotes that look like gibberish).
Guess I should find a way to use quotes and commas to test the newly tooled machine…
So, ACW, what do you think about the NYT story today by David Sanger and Mark Mazzetti claiming that the target of the Israeli strike in September was a “partly constructed reactor”? (According to unnamed “Israeli and American intelligence analysts”.)
My reaction is that it’s pretty effing shameless and bold. But if the whole “arms control” apparatus is in the hands of people like the fellow featured in the previous post, anything’s possible.
[“There wasn’t a lot of debate about the evidence,” said one American official…]
Because debating about evidence is soooo 2002.
(Bracketed passage copied and pasted from NYT site to test copied quotes. Looks fine.)
There’s some kind of sytematic formatting error: the string “according to an administration spokesman,” messes with the display codes; what follows is inevitably gibberish. Try cutting and pasting those quotes into a blank document, then select all and choose any font but “dingbats”… see if that helps.
Nell: what about the exciting tales of Israeli commandos getting their “soil samples?” What about the skullduggery involving secret manifests, a rejected bid to board a Panamanian-flagged container ship, military convoys out of Latakia? Where would the previous leaks fit in with the new assertion that they bombed a construction site so new it that was formless and unrecognizeable as a nuclear reactor?
The new narrative seems to assert that everything in the original narrative is bogus. In other words, “we were lying before, but you can trust us to tell the truth now.” The NYT gulps and says, “Okay!” Just the sort of skeptical, hard-hitting, inquisitive reporting we’ve come to expect from that institution.
Your new server seems to be working fine. I hate to change the subject here but since everyone else seems to already have done this I’m going to pile on. I may not know much about plutonium but I do know that satellite photos are capable of distinguishing a nuclear reactor in the process of being constructed from other types of structures. I also know that you guys at ACW have looked at enough reactors to recognize one when you see one. I suspect that some of you know people who have access to recent satellite photos of the region in Syria which was recently bombed. Without revealing any classified information could one of you please address this authoritatively? I have come to expect BS from the mainstream media, but I need to know that there are still a few places that I can go to get truth online. With the rumors currently circulating that we are trying to gin up an excuse to bomb Iran it is critical for people to have somewhere they can go for good information about what is going on in the mideast. Thank you for posting my diatribes and please consider my request.
Stop playing around Jeffrey. You know you want to blog about that Sanger article from Saturday.