There are a couple of funny things about NYT’s public editor Arthur Brisbane’s article approving the NYT’s decision to sit on news of Raymond Davis’ CIA affiliation. Check out whom he consults for guidelines on what the NYT should or shouldn’t publish.

The Pakistanis are making a concerted effort to make it clear (or claim) that they let these thousands into the country with no vetting without first ascertaining what they would be doing. Mind you, they probably did know, at least vaguely. But if these numbers are true, the sheer scope of this program may be one of the big sources of the embarrassment here.

From the very first reports of Raymond Davis’ killing of two Pakistanis and subsequent arrest, the insistence he was just a consular employee was obviously just polite fiction. The Guardian has stopped sustaining that fiction.

The fiction that Pakistan has nothing to do with our drone campaign depends on mutual trust and sustenance of the fiction. The ISI has to be willing to play its part. And it’s not clear everyone wants to play that game anymore.

Jack Goldsmith links to an interesting document from the RummyLeaks library: then Chief of Staff Donald Rumsfeld’s memo to President Ford reviewing possible candidates to replace William Colby as head of the CIA.

But Goldsmith doesn’t call out the most amusing part of the memo: the way that Rummy asserts that Poppy has the intelligence experience to do the job without pointing out where he got that experience.

AFP has a report (notably picked up by Pakistan’s Dawn) on the Senate’s hand-wringing over whether we should tie aid to Pakistan to the release of Raymond Davis, the “consulate employee” who shot two alleged Pakistani spies. Here’s what Lindsey Graham had to say…

I do wonder whether there’s a correlation between those telecommunication companies that try to buy political favors and those that offer federal law enforcement favors in return.

A year and a half ago, I warned that if you bought certain beauty supplies — hydrogen peroxide and acetone — you might be a terrorism suspect. Shortly thereafter, John Kyl basically confirmed that the government had been tracking certain people buying hydrogen peroxide. Yesterday, FBI Director Robert Mueller did so in even more explicit terms.

William Ockham, who knows a whole lot more about coding than many of us, shares some interesting thoughts with us about the Stuxnet virus in this post.

The tense saga of Raymond Davis, who shot and killed two Pakistanis in Lahore on January 27, continues. His trial in Lahore has been delayed again, with the next hearing date addressing the question of diplomatic immunity now set for either March 3 or March 14, depending on which report you believe. On Wednesday, Senator John Kerry visited Pakistan to deliver yet another threat of Congress cutting off funding for Pakistan if Davis is not released. In the meantime, analysis of records for the “businesses” with which Davis is associated in the US raises the interesting question of whether he recruits potential spies among students taking courses in international security.

We’ve known the outlines of these details about Curveball before. But it sure adds to the picture of the US dialing up the intelligence it needed — however flimsy — to start a war.