That island would be Cuba, specifically the United States’ 40-square mile tropical enclave (and naval air station) at Guantanamo Bay, and those voted off by SecDef Rumsfeld are reporters from the Miami Herald, L.A. Times and Charlotte Observer (the latter of whom thought he could report on the base commander’s briefing in response to the recent detainee suicides.) Despite my own paltry efforts to draw some attention to the Gitmo situation which have gone, by and large, unheeded (this is, after all, a hobby), it seems that the only things that get play down there are either a Supreme Court...

The Newsrack blog gives us a snippet of an interview with Major Thomas Fleener, the military attorney thrust on Gitmo Commission defendant Al-Bahlul who’d prefer to represent himself; Major Fleener (rightly) argues that the Gitmo military commissions amount to little more than show trials. The Bush Administration, rather than try to formulate anything approaching, oh, fairness in the military commission process, says it will wait for the Supreme Court to tell it what to do. (I guess that’s just professional courtesy to a body without whom there might not be a Bush Administration, one supposes.) Scroll down a bit for...

Once in a while, we must take a moment away from the weight of the world, and just enjoy a moment. Such a moment is now. The Loquacious Pup has lost her first tooth (naturally, a canine; they’re all canines!) I know in the good old days, the Tooth Fairy would be notified of these things by telephone (or perhaps by telepathy), but in this case, she’ll (we think the TF is a she, though we can never be sure) be notified by this blog’s RSS feed. Or something.

Karl Rove’s attorney Robert Luskin announced that he, Rove and the White House have been advised by the office of Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald that it is unlikely that Karl Rove will be indicted as part of the Valerie Plame leak probe. Rove has made innumerable appearances before the Grand Jury in last minute efforts to save his own (and, therefore, the President’s) ass… and apparently these efforts have been successful. It is unclear what, of course, Rove’s legal team has successfully accomplished (other than the only thing that matters, of course, and the only thing that should matter to...

This was inevitable. Two Saudis and one Yemeni, using bedsheets and clothing, managed to hang themselves at Guantanamo Bay, and are the first detainee deaths at that facility. Held there over four and a half years, without charges, without access to the outside world save only occasional highly restricted visits with attorneys (for those with attorneys)… suicides were inevitable. While prior attempts by detainees to kill themselves via a hunger strike were thwarted using force-feeding in a restraining chair (described in detail in my interview with Dr. David Nicholl here), amongst other methods, and heretofore perpetual surveillance permitted intervention at...

Pennsylvania Congressman John Murtha has announced his intention to run for the position of House Majority Leader, should the unthinkable happen, and the Democrats take back the House. I guess from where I sit, this looks like a great move; he’d leapfrog over current House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer, a guy who makes Joe Lieberman look like the Daily Kos in terms of his giving deference (and succor) to the Bush Administration. Plus, Murtha actually stands for something with respect to the Iraq War, to wit, ending it, and won’t do the usual Democratic two-step: when they talk about something...

Well, well… Republican efforts (supported by some Democrats) for outright repeal of the nation’s fairest and most efficient tax, that on estates that doesn’t really kick in until estates reach around $2,000,000, failed to overcome a “cloture” (or “filibuster”) vote in the senate. In part, this issue is a result of a failure of Democratic discipline (see “Baucus, Max”) in two ways. The first is holding its members in line against any asinine deficit-expanding repeals, until we have some semblance of overall budget sanity, there’s no call for making things yet worse. Second, the proponents of repeal have had the...

What a week this has been for the GOP AMERICA! Today’s spectacular news is that terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has been killed in an airstrike north of Baghdad. This was “confirmed” by the Iraqi government, but actual confirmation appears on the Islamist web-site of his “organization”, “Al-Qaeda in Iraq”. In short, it might actually be true. There is no doubt that this will be the greatest day in the long march toward winning the key battle in Iraq in the global war against swarthy-people’s extremism since the fall of Saddam, or the toppling of his statue, or the deaths...

Oooohhh!!! All hail the latest urinating contest between the United States’ outspoken ambassador to the United Nations (and advocate of its destruction) John Bolton and the United Nations Secretariat, notably Mark Malloch Brown of Britain, the U.N. Undersecretary General. Malloch Brown gave a speech suggesting that the United States “plays” the U.N. by convincing the moron masses in the heartland that the U.N. is utterly irrelevant and to be despised while engaging with it from Bosnia to East Timor to Kosovo to Pakistan to Palestine to Iraq, etc. Worst of all, he suggested that people who listened to Rush Limbaugh...