1. Actually engage people. “This blog is for you, and we hope you will take a moment to join the conversation,” Petraeus writes. And that’s just the right spirit! Now it’s time to make it meaningful. Delve down into the comment threads to address the concerns, criticisms and questions that people will pose to you as a public figure. Remember, they’re going to take you up on your “join the conversation” challenge, and so they’ll expect a reasonable degree of interactivity. You’ll be able to tell really quickly who’s being genuine and who’s trolling — that is, being deliberately and unconstructively provocative.

2. Actually write what goes under your name. A corollary of the first point. It’s always disheartening to learn that people pawn their blogging chores off on faceless assistants — I won’t name names — when the stated virtue of the medium is interactivity. View your time engaging with your readers as an investment for their support in your endeavors. Your colleague Adm. James Stavridis once made a point of remarking how he personally responds to messages left on his Facebook wall. If you don’t have the time, just post less. Being genuine is more important than being prolific.

3. Actually engage the debate. If people want to read CENTCOM press releases, they can sign up to have them emailed or subscribe to the RSS feed. (I do!) So if the blog is going to be worth everyone’s time, don’t just make it a repository for your talking points. You have a platform for making your case on the issues you face, and that means you can be parochial, but no one’s going to respond to your posts if they exist in a vacuum. Did you read something interesting in the paper or on Small Wars Journal or Abu Muqawama or Wings Over Iraq? Sure you did. Why not tie what you’ve got to say to that ongoing conversation? Remember: Just noting something exists by writing “This is interesting” isn’t the same thing as engaging the debate. (Twitter is good for the first task, blogging is good for the second.)

I recognize that this is really hard for someone whose every utterance is scrutinized by people trying to discern A Hidden Meaning for U.S. strategy. But as a wise man once said, hard is not hopeless.

*I know, I know, no other regional command’s website is being this interactive. But in the blogosphere, snark is just how we say hello.

So it’s surprising when Daily Kos diarist EmperorHadrian hinges off a blithe line in the First Read story — “some critics says [sic] he had line authority over controversial decisions involving interrogation and detention” — and says “as far as we know, Kappes has not objected to the torture policies he enabled.”

Let’s have an uncomfortable conversation.

The most serious charge against Kappes, as best I can tell, comes from his role in the abduction and rendition of Abu Omar, the Egyptian cleric taken by the CIA off the streets of Milan and tortured in Egypt. A 2007 article from The Chicago Tribune about the rendition reports briefly that Kappes was “one of those who signed off on the Abu Omar abduction.” (h/t TalkLeft.) No doubt that’s troubling. Extraordinary rendition is legally and morally problematic. Italy is prosecuting in absentia the CIA agents involved in the Abu Omar rendition.

But we really don’t know from what’s publicly available the context of Kappes’ decision. Was this something that his bosses demanded? Did he have decision-making authority on the rendition? (The Chicago Tribune piece is extremely complex, as much of this is murky.) What were the alternatives to handling Abu Omar? What did or didn’t Kappes know? I’m not saying this is exculpatory, necessarily. I’m saying that we should investigate before we reach a conclusion.

More broadly, though, there’s a tendency in the blogosphere to presume that the Google-able corpus of knowledge on torture is a definitive account of our government’s dalliance with it over the last decade or so. That’s just not the case.

The frustrating thing about intelligence reporting is just how dense and murky and opaque it is, and very few people who do it are able to create comprehensive accounts of what goes on. That’s why it’s necessary to hedge conclusions. A piece I’ve chased for years concerns internal CIA resistance to torture. I’ve confirmed very little of it, which is why I’ve not yet published anything. But if it pans out, I think it’s fair to say that it would complicate much of the picture of what people inside the agency did and didn’t resist, and how and why they did it.

This is partially why I keep calling for an independent congressionally-mandated investigation. There’s just too much that’s unknown to label individual CIA people torturers as a general proposition, so take it easy on that front. Reality-based community and all that.

Internet journalist/blogger and Little Green Footballs regular Zombie (not “conservative” per se, but rather anti-sharia/anti-jihad/anti-anti-American/anti-extremist Left) did extraordinary work digging up documents related to Barack Obama and left-wing terrorist Bill Ayers’s relationship — most notably, unearthing the Weather Underground manifesto Prairie Fire and Obama’s review of Ayers’s book on the juvenile court system.

I don’t know many conservatives who’d argue, in hindsight, that more citizen journalism about Bill Ayers (whose Weather Underground days were so mysterious that you can Netflix an Oscar-nominated documentary about them) was what the Right needed in 2008. But Malkin reminded me of Zombie’s other influential work: a lengthy essay titled “The Left’s Big Blunder,” about how the polls were biased, people were lying about their support for Obama, and the media was complicit. He used (among other examples) the test case of a German performing horse, Clever Hans.

Much of the media analysis, and even the strategies of the campaigns themselves, is based on the ongoing poll results indicating voter preferences state-by-state and nationwide. But I suspect that we are observing the Clever Hans Effect on a massive scale, and that the polls are in fact unreliable. Worse than “unreliable,” actually: they are inaccurate because to some degree they reflect not the honest feelings of the respondents but rather what the pollers want to hear. Since, as discussed above, most poll-questioners are likely to be Obama supporters, and since the Clever Hans Effect tells us that they likely slant their questions and/or provide subtle clues as to what the “correct” answer is whether or not they’re trying to be neutral and fair, the end result is that the poll results end up being tilted in favor of Obama. Pundits and journalists and campign directors are deriving supposed “information” from the poll results, and basing their actions on them — even though the polls merely reflect (to a certain degree) what the pollsters wanted to hear.

Barack Obama won the presidency by a 7.2 percent margin in the national vote and a 365-173 margin in the electoral college, picking off states like Indiana and North Carolina from the Republicans. Zombie updated his essay.

The effects described in this essay very likely did happen as I postulated, but not to a large enough extent to overcome Obama’s actual strength and McCain’s actual weakness. In other words, approximately 3% of people responding to polls did lie and say they supported Obama when in fact they did not (a ~9.5% predicted victory on average vs. a 6.5% actual victory).* It’s just that McCain was not close enough in real support for the Hans/Asch/Bradley Effect to make the difference.

This is a… let’s call it an innovative understanding of statistics. According to Michelle Malkin, we can call it “reporting.”

*Obama’s margin grew after this, after all West Coast votes were counted.