Well, here's quite a "bomb" to drop in the news, invasions of Georgia notwithstanding. Apparently a new book out by Ron Suskind alleges that the CIA, under direction from the White House forged the letter that was used to link Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda.
...and the laughs don't stop there! The administration also apparently suppressed information that they was very sure that there were no weapons of mass destruction. Our people were telling us this, their people were telling us this. It literally was only Bush and Cheney saying there were WMDs there. No damn wonder we didn't find any.
For those who want to dig further, there's also this Politico article with more details: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0808/12308.html
The magic words for Google at the moment are "Cheney" and "Habbush".
...and just to spell it out in boldface for those who haven't caught on yet, these things would be impeachment material if anyone in Congress had the balls to stand up and do something about it. Of course, that's not going to happen, because this is far from the first thing that's broken that could cause such a process to begin.
I'm just gonna go ahead and say it... Impeachment is not a dirty word. It's not "bad for America" by any means. What's bad for America is sticking your head in the sand and pretending everything is okay in order to "present a strong face to the world". Personally, I would like for denial to go back to being a river in Egypt, as opposed to being America's 51st state.
Georgia Attorney General Troy King Is Apparently A Homosexual After All
Topic: Current Events
8:51 pm EDT, Jul 11, 2008
Apparently the man primarily responsible for getting sex toys outlawed in Georgia (not because they might or might not be effective for making people orgasm, but on moral grounds no less) has been caught f**king one of his aides, in his wife's bed, by his wife.
You know, it's just a wonder that with all the evidence we've gotten, both anecdotally and scientifically, about what's really going on in the minds of extreme homophobes and conservatives, that people just don't immediately point a finger and say "YOU SIR, ARE QUEER AS PINK INK" whenever anyone pops up acting like this.
Frankly, I'd like to see the man sentenced under the law he tried to pass to outlaw homosexuality just to make a point.
Op-Ed Columnist - The Truth Commission - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com
Topic: Current Events
11:40 pm EDT, Jul 7, 2008
When a distinguished American military commander accuses the United States of committing war crimes in its handling of detainees, you know that we need a new way forward.
“There is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes,” Antonio Taguba, the retired major general who investigated abuses in Iraq, declares in a powerful new report on American torture from Physicians for Human Rights. “The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.”
So, what of this claim Bush has made about there are no plans for a permanent occupation of Iraq?
It seems they were (drumroll please) YET MORE LIES!
Iraqi officials fear that the accord, under which US troops would occupy permanent bases, conduct military operations, arrest Iraqis and enjoy immunity from Iraqi law, will destabilise Iraq's position in the Middle East and lay the basis for unending conflict in their country.
Seymour Hersh exposes US covert operations in Iran
Topic: Current Events
4:20 pm EDT, Jun 30, 2008
This is basically some video footage of the guy from the New Yorker talking about his findings with respect to the US performing covert ops on Iran.
Covert ops that have actually affirmed Iran's statement that nuclear weapons weren't doing them any good, so now they're trying to make electricity.
...except that Bush and Cheney are disregarding the evidence at hand and looking to further destabilize the region before leaving office by invading or at least attacking Iran. My guess is that they're aiming to generate an excuse to call off the elections.
This article is mainly all about the picture. It's not gory, but it is rather gruesome. You have been warned.
Apparently, a 28-year-old American was drunk and passed out at the wheel and drove right into the middle of a bunch of cyclists.
It seems the American Consulate is handling this about as diligently as the Mexican Consulate does when an illegal alien kills a family of four in a DUI. Oh well.
Thickets three metres (10ft) high readily absorb heat, making them hard to penetrate with thermal devices, said Gen Rick Hillier in a speech in Ottawa.
Only the BBC could carry a news article about the problems wild marijuana are causing in the war against whoever-looks-hostile in such a deadpan way.
Ashley Gilbertson photographs the war in Iraq for the New York Times. He talks about the invasion of Iraq, the battle for Falluja, the Marines he worked with, post-traumatic stress disorder, Iraqi civilians, and the future of photojournalism. His work is available in Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: A Photographer's Chronicle of the Iraq War published by the University of Chicago Press.
Praise for the book:
“This is the kind of reporting we so desperately need: free of false bravura, free of agenda, free of inflated urgency. Gilbertson … shows us personally and incontrovertibly what it has been like for him coming of age in Iraq during the last five years.
“For this reason, the book belongs less with other histories of the war than on the same shelf with Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. This is not trumped-up news coming live from Iraq but the straight story with harrowing snapshots of the American soul. When future generations look back and wonder where we went wrong, where we failed ourselves and them, it will not be hours of television and radio broadcasts that they pore over. It will be a select few texts, and Gilbertson’s book deserves to be one of them.”
In a nutshell: last month, SITE used its access to Obelisk to obtain a "screener" of the latest Osama bin Laden video. They got excited, and, perhaps seeing an opportunity to boast, handed it off to top officials, who (according to Katz) promptly fumbled it into the national news media. Katz feels double-crossed and plays at revenge by naming names to the aforementioned national news media. (Mike also cites the coverage at the Sun.)
She claims that "a years-long surveillance operation" was compromised by the officials' early release of the video. If true, this reflects rather poorly on SITE's tradecraft.
If, at the time of the leak, Katz was embargoing this video from her regular subscribers, then why did she rely on SITE's basic Internet distribution mechanism? This sort of thing ought to be on a separate limited-access network. For that matter, she could have hand-couriered it over to Leiter at NTC. And why does the file remain online after Fielding, Bagnal, and Leiter had pulled their copies? They could have been given separate one-time-use URLs, each pointing to a separate watermarked copy of the video.
Venzke, her competitor at IntelCenter, is taking cheap shots at her expense, but he has a point: "It is not just about getting the video first. It is about having the proper methods and procedures in place ..."
It's possible this is a ruse. From the Bury the Lead Dept:
Al-Qaeda supporters, now alerted to the intrusion into their secret network, put up new obstacles that prevented SITE from gaining the kind of access it had obtained in the past, according to Katz.
"Oh, damn. Now I'm locked out."
It's also possible this is a deliberate disruption, akin to JIEDDO forcing bombers "back on the wire."
In either case, the infighting over the "leak" makes for good cover.
Note to early birds: the Shachtman story has been updated. See additional analysis at Captain's Quarters. Pundita was talking about Obelisk on Monday.
Here's a nice news program covering a student who had her wrist broken by a school security guard who apparently didn't like the way she reacted to him ordering her to clean up a piece of cake.
I'm at a bit of a loss as to why a security guard was handing out orders like that, perhaps he wasn't well-instructed on what he was supposed to be doing other than just making sure the children learn thoroughly to never question any authority figure, but that's another matter... The video explains itself.
