LecternGate Goes from Strength to Strength!

OnlyKevin Movement takes flight in the House!

More from PodiumLecternGate: It seems rather quaint at the moment. But I wanted to flag to your attention that the blogger/FOIAer/gadfly/lawyer, Matt Campbell, who has close to singlehandedly made the podiumlecterngate into the story it is, has now unearthed pretty incontrovertible documentary evidence of document tampering by the Office of the Governor in Arkansas. Specifically, a representative of the office tried to get a state employee to change document to match the Governor’s cover story.

I want to reiterate what I wrote two days ago in my first post about the current conflict in Israel. If you’re looking for information on the coordinated Hamas attacks in southern Israel I recommend this Twitter list of (mostly) English language news sources from Israel, if you’re on Twitter. The Times of Israel, the English language version of Haaretz and Ynet are also good. Obviously there are many good sources of information. This isn’t meant to be exhaustive. These are some of the first places I go when I’m looking for the latest information.

With a story like this we’re not going to break new information. I see our role as helping sift through the flurry of new details and the often-chaotic stream of information we’re seeing.

A few times I mentioned the WSJ article which reported a series of secret meetings in Beirut in which Iran and Hamas planned the attack on Israel and Iran authorized it. I noted that there was significant and credible pushback on the article, which appeared to rely on Hamas sources. Since then I’ve seen a pretty lopsided chorus of doubts about the report. The relevant governments seem skeptical, at least publicly. And most people with significant area expertise seem skeptical about the report itself as well as various details within it.

One issue that is increasingly coming into focus is the claim that Egyptian intelligence warned Israel, specifically warned Prime Minister Netanyahu, that something big and bad was coming from Gaza. Just what kind of warning we’re talking about, the timing, details has been fuzzy over the last 24 hours. But at least the claim is coming into focus. Ynet is reporting that ten days before the attack the Director of the General Intelligence Directorate of Egypt, Abbas Kamel, called Netanyahu and warned “something fierce will happen from Gaza”. Netanyahu, according to this report, reacted in a nonchalant fashion and said the IDF had its hands full with events in the West Bank.

Needless to say, this claim is going to loom over everything that is unfolding. The Prime Minister’s office has officially denied the report. But I suspect a huge amount will turn on the specifics of just what is being alleged and denied. Is the PM’s office denying any conversation took place? Are they disputing the specifics of the warning? Even the quote I printed above must be one handed from Arabic to Hebrew and then into English. So we shouldn’t get too focused on the words in that quote.