So on Thanksgiving Day President Bush takes with him five reporters, five photographers, a TV producer and a two-person camera crew as he flies into Baghdad under cover
The American political language does not include a grown-up vocabulary for such events, which are co-equal with the publicity they generate and could not exist without that publicity. We have two main ways of talking about such cases-- one tends to be critical, the other admiring. Both see themselves as sophisticated and up-to-date. There is reason to doubt that.

Even the most naked publicity stunt is an acknowledgement of limited power because those whose power is unlimited need not bother with publicity; they can do things in secret, then claim not to have done them.

For example: Ask any of the reporters who accompanied Bush to Baghdad what they were doing there and, after allowing for the unusual circumstances (extreme secrecy) they would say they were there to "cover the president's surprise trip to Baghdad." Which sounds reasonable enough until you realize that the president's trip did not exist as a workable idea outside the anticipated news coverage of it. This realization takes under three seconds.

For George Bush, people’s expectations have always been naturally low. When bad things have happened, we’re not shocked, nor disappointed—in some sense, we’re surprised it wasn’t much worse. We have a unique tolerance for him..

The timing here was excellent (excellent timing is the point): good economic news together with the treacly Norman Rockwell portrait of the president serving turkey to the troops.

If the second week of testimony in the DC Sniper trial proved anything, it was that prosecutors had, relatively speaking, actually exercised some restraint during the first week.

Baltimore police officer James Snyder testified that he happened upon Muhammad, sleeping in his Snipermobile, at 3:00 AM the morning after the shooting. Snyder was the third officer to tell the jury that he had stopped the Snipermobile during the first week of the shootings. Strangely enough, he was also the third officer to tell the jury that Muhammad, purportedly one-half of an inseparable team, had been alone in the car.

If the state’s reconstruction of the crimes is accurate, however, any shell casings would have ejected into a closed trunk. It would have been all but impossible for a shell casing to have been left behind inadvertently. That key piece of evidence, therefore, had to have been left at the scene deliberately.

Prosecutors even openly acknowledged that it was very unlikely that Muhammad shot the one victim that they charged him with shooting.

That was, you see, a perfectly reasonable scenario for distinguished prosecutors to sell to a jury, and for the mainstream media to report without a hint of skepticism. But let someone suggest an only slightly different scenario, such as that both Malvo and Muhammad were, and still are, the “brainwashed” tools of unseen actors, and let the scoffing and the eye rolling begin.

The state of Virginia, by the way, while still portraying Malvo as the mindless puppet of his master, Muhammad, began selecting a jury that it hopes will convict the teenager of first-degree murder and sentence him to death. To do so, of course, the state will have to employ a different strategy entirely -- one that explicitly repudiates the very arguments that were used to justify Muhammad’s conviction.

"Everything about that car," Goodwin told the jury, "was wrong." So wrong, she said, that her "first instinct" was to call the police – although she didn’t. She later heard that a man had been killed at the very gas station where she claims that she saw the Snipermobile. She waited almost two weeks to report the sighting.

Linda Franklin, it must be noted, was a 'counter-terrorism' expert with the FBI. Her job involved keeping tabs on warnings of possible terrorist threats -- such as all those specific warnings that came in prior to September 11, 2001. Franklin was probably not, in other words, a randomly selected target.

A four-page note, enclosed in a plastic baggie, was found tacked to a tree near the scene. That note, demanding that $10 million be deposited into a credit card account, was an important element of the state's case, since it allegedly showed that Muhammad was attempting to extort money from the government, thus qualifying him as a 'terrorist.'

The best the state could do was to repeatedly trot out witnesses who had belatedly come forward to report sightings of the Snipermobile.

Not to beat a dead horse here, but not a single witness called during the week provided testimony concerning the murder that Muhammad was charged with. Not one.

Donahue didn't seem concerned that he had been left alone for nearly three hours, as an unarmed private citizen, to provide surveillance on a team of deadly assassins. And no one covering the trial, of course, found it unusual that it took officers nearly three hours to show up after being notified of the whereabouts of the most wanted, and allegedly most dangerous, man in the country.

Following that predictable ruling, the jury was brought in and it was the defense team's turn to step up to the plate. Shapiro and Greenspun called five witnesses, introduced into evidence a handful of photographs -- and then called it a day. Spectators were stunned. With their client's life clearly on the line, the crack defense team rested after just two-and-a-half hours.

Legal pundits offered any number of rationalizations and apologias for the failure to mount a defense, but the reality was that Muhammad was clearly sold out by his defense team (thus illustrating, it should be noted, the defendant's initial wisdom in choosing to represent himself; it is unclear why he later reversed that decision).
The almost complete lack of a defense might be somewhat more understandable had the defense team challenged the state's case as it was being presented. But that didn't happen. As Greenspun acknowledged, "We asked few or no questions of most of the witnesses. It just would have been inappropriate to cross-examine many of these people."

The defense team could have, in other words, actually defended their client. But they chose not to. They also chose not to call as a witness the man who played a starring role during the sniper shootings, and yet was strangely absent from Judge Millette's courtroom: Chief Charles Moose.

"Chief Moose, I have a few questions for you that, admittedly, are not directly relevant to these proceedings, but since prosecutors have opened the door to soliciting irrelevant testimony, and since we have you under oath, I really have to ask: Are you absolutely certain that you and the defendant, John Allen Muhammad, never crossed paths during the two years (1994-1995) that the two of you were assigned to the same Oregon Air National Guard Base in Portland?"
"As the commander since May 2000 of the D.C. Air National Guard's security forces squadron at Andrews Air Force Base, tasked with protecting and maintaining a fleet of F-16 fighter jets, do you have any thoughts that you would like to share with us today on why none of those fighter jets were scrambled in response to the 'terrorist' attacks of September 11, 2001?"
"We understand that the Ph.D. program that you attended at Portland State University was largely funded by a controversial multi-million dollar grant from the Turkish government. We also understand that one of the professors in that Ph.D. program was a self-described former Islamic terrorist. After receiving your Ph.D. (and rather quickly, we might add), we understand that you were appointed chief of the Portland Police Department by Mayor Vera Katz, whose former intern, October Martinique Lewis, was just sentenced to a three-year prison term for her involvement with an allegedly pro-Taliban, Portland 'sleeper cell.' Could you please clarify for us, Chief Moose, whether you have ever been involved in any U.S. government-sponsored covert operations aimed at manufacturing phantom enemies through the creation of 'Islamic terrorist cells'? And if so, could you tell us if John Allen Muhammad was similarly involved in such operations?"

Since on Millette's calendar the Thanksgiving holiday apparently begins on Tuesday rather than Thursday, the judge was allocating exactly five-and-a-half court days for the jury to finish deliberating Muhammad's guilt, and for the state and the defense to then present their respective cases in the penalty phase of the trial, and for both sides to deliver their closing arguments, and for the jury to then deliberate the apparently trivial issue of whether John Allen Muhammad should be executed by the state of Virginia.

The Los Angeles Times reported that Millette "hinted Friday that he expected a swift verdict, telling jurors they could go all day -- 'if you need that much time.'"

Jonah Goldberg, editor-at-large of National Review Online, called the trip "a political masterstroke," saying: "This wasn't lying about an 18-minute gap on a tape or lying under oath. If they had announced the trip and there were attacks and people had died, everyone would be screaming bloody murder about how Bush put people in harm's way. I'm sure the press corps has their dresses over their head about it, but I sincerely doubt anyone in the real America will have any concern about it whatsoever."

The 13 pool correspondents summoned for the trip included Jim Angle of Fox News, the AP's Terence Hunt, Mike Allen of The Washington Post, Richard Keil of Bloomberg News, a Reuters reporter and photographers from Time, Newsweek and three wire services.

Kim Hume, Fox's Washington bureau chief, who knew that Angle was going, said White House officials "obviously made a decision that this was more important than the flak they were going to take from it." She said the administration took a network pool crew, as it was supposed to, and "we didn't get any competitive advantage from it." Had more journalists been told, Hume said, "the story would have leaked in about two seconds" because "news people are the biggest gossips alive."

Kathryn Kross, CNN's Washington bureau chief, said a two-person crew from her network was dismissed from the White House pool Wednesday, with the understanding that no further news would be made.

Time's Vivian Walt said on CNN that "an electric shock went through the room" and that for Bush, crying and trembling, it was "a taste of victory."

The message, retired Col. Ken Allard said on MSNBC, is that "you underestimate George Bush at your peril. It was a gutsy call, a Hail Mary pass, and he pulled it off."

Past official deceptions have tended to involve military matters. In 1983, then-White House spokesman Larry Speakes told a reporter a day before the United States invaded Grenada that the idea was "preposterous."