While others take Newsweek to task for its possibly erroneous story on Koran-flushing, I'm pleased as hell to see that fine magazine is engaged in the honored journalistic duty of following up. Unfortunately, they're following up on the jobs being filled by "Apprentice" winners, a story long since mined by the NYT (and I'm sure others) in the reality-after-the-reality-show-ends genre.
If Newsweek (or anybody else) really wants to follow something up, something that requires a bit more effort than visiting a Trump office tower and asking for the cubicle of the new guy, here's my suggestion: A.Q. Khan.
Reviewing the little we already know: this is the father of the Pakistani nuclear program (supposedly a hero in his homeland) who, while head of that country's miliary, was running a nuclear proliferation shop, selling plans, knowhow and parts to the North Koreans, the Libyans, maybe the Iranians, helping the world get more nuclear. When this program was uncovered, the Pakistani government arrested him, then pardoned him, and has held him in some kind of protective custody since. We don't know who's had access to him. We don't know why we should believe the official Pakistani statements that Kahn's operation was a lone-wolf, rogue-element, father-of-the-country's-a-bomb-goes-nutty kind of deal, that there was no involvement by higher-ups in his mission to bust atoms all over the globe. To lapse into Rumsfeldisms, we don't know what we don't know. And yet the official story has been met with more journalistic credulity than the explanation for why George W. Bush wasn't informed contemporaneously about last week's capital air scare.
If I were editing a publication with lots of staff and money, I'd be throwing them at the A. Q. Khan story. Good thing I'm just sitting here, ordering pajamas on the Internet.
UPDATE: The Los Angeles Dog Trainer (some call it The Times) checks in with a long piece today mulling over the improbability of Kahn's free-lancing.