Can You Hear Me Now, Mr. President?
My favorite story of the week isn't the American Bar Association's idioticdecision to give disgraced former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales its 2007 Lawyer of the Year Award. It is not the looming announcement from Major League Baseball about its steroid investigation. And it is certainly not the story of misconduct by Central Intelligence Agency officials.
Nope. My favorite story of the week is the storyof Vifill Atlason, a16-year-old Icelandic kid who was able to schedule a call with President George W. Bush by posing as Icelandic President Olafur Ragnur Grimsson. The story is getting big play in Europe and elsewhere around the world, probably because people there love to hear about instances where Americans get fooled.
Atlason told Reuters that his December 1st call "was transferred around a few times until I got hold of Bush's secretary and managed to book a call meeting with Bush the following Monday evening." He told the National Post in Canada that he answered questions about Grimsson by using Wikipedia (memo to White House security, ask better questions) and was "very polite" to all of the people who screened him along the way.
The prank ended, however, when the CIA asked Iceland authorities to confirm the location of the telephone number where Atlason made the call. See? Who says that warrantless domestic surveillance isn't a good thing? Without it, President Bush last week might have found himself on the other end of a phone call with a kid who isn't even of legal age to have a drink in Iceland.
Mr. Bush has never been to Iceland, reports our very own Mark Knoller, the brilliant CBS News correspondent who happens to be the unofficial record keeper of all things White House. Mark tells me that two Presidents have made the trip. Atlason won't be charged in Iceland and unless the White House decides to go all "Padilla" on the clever kid we've probably heard the last of this little tale of ingenuity, technology and the most powerful man in the world.
(Editor's note: An earlier draft of this post mistakenly identified the "clever kid" as being from Finland. Finland was not amused. Neither was Mr. Cohen, when he realized the mistake. The piece has now been corrected.)