Not. Such as, evidently, Rudy’s predecessor as United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, as set forth in this Grey Lady Op Ed. Former federal judge and prosecutor John S. Martin, Jr. takes umbrage at St. Rudy’s claims of “having turned around” the Southern District, which Judge Martin rightly notes was, was before, and still is, regarded as just about the finest group of prosecutors in the United States; Judge Martin credits Rudy with not changing much, and also notes that the big-time mafia prosecutions were already in the works before Rudy showed up, and other securities...

Something we never seem to remember, while the good to the economy done by responsible and sensible federal policies may be quickly squandered (see “Clinton Legacy, the”), particularly the case when no lasting narrative is put behind those policies to keep them going, economic damage by insane policies can last generations. This is the conclusion of Joseph Stiglitz, one of my alma mater’s Nobel Laureates in Economics, writing in this lengthy Vanity Fair piece. Stiglitz, who long ago evaluated the real costs of the Iraq war and noted that counting things like losses caused by increasing the price of oil,...

A mysterious source (with a return address in a domain in Scandinavia) suggests that we take a look at recent news (here are, respectively, stories on the subject published at Daily Kos, “world content” and “airliners.net“; at least one of those sources is not, IIRC, in English)… on the subject of a CIA Gulfstream II business jet crashing in Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula with over 3 tons of cocaine aboard, some time last September. Regular readers know that this particular aspect of how The Company does business fascinates me, which is why we have interviews from both Trevor Paglen (co-author of...

In a move that should surprise exactly no one (coming with the ink barely dry on White House instructions not to cooperate in contempt of Congress proceedings against former White House officials), we now get news that our spanking (funny that) new Attorney General Michael Mukasey has, in one of his first official acts, directed the CIA not to cooperate with a House Committee’s probe of the recently disclosed destruction of tapes of the systematic torture of two “high value” detainees. (H/T to Bruce the Veep for both items; Bruce himself offers the old quote from Oliver Wendell Holmes to...

This is the musical question posed by Andrew Sullivan with respect to the coming accusation by the clearly-feeling-the-heat Hillary coronation committee presidential campaign that… wait for it… Barack Obama had best be prepared for attacks on the candor he has shown with respect to his drug use! (Specifically, the rollout of this attack comes from Hillary’s New Hampshire campaign.) The suggestion– noted by Sully– is that George W. (unlike Barack) had the “good taste” to bury his drug use under the category of of his youthful indiscretions (kind of like his drunk driving conviction, and his mutilation of small animals)....

“Dumbest f***ing guy on the planet” is certainly a moniker that could get an awful lot of competition in the Bush Administration, but Gen. Tommy Franks (to be fair, himself a contender for the title) awarded it to none other than former Defense Department Undersecretary Douglas Feith; many in the military agreed with the assessment. Feith, now wearing his reputation as an asshole proudly to Georgetown U.’s faculty, now brings us his own rollout show of revisionist history for his upcoming book “War and Decision”, announcing that he advocated for a “quick transition” in Iraq, and it was only that...

Yes, when I hear of an “M. Dowd” working hard to undermine and mock liberals at every turn while at the heart of the purported vanguard of “the liberal media”… I immediately think of the vapid red-head who writes for the Grey Lady. But our dear friend Julia (in a Firedoglake appearance) gives us this tour-de-force discussion of Matthew Dowd, former flag-of-convenience-Democrat, and former key Bush II and Karl Rove aide and enabler, now hired by ABC to be… wait for it… a “Centrist” commentator. Julia points out, correctly, that vast protestations of the value of “faith” and “authenticity” in...

It would be hard to sum up current right wing ideological support of American reversion to Middle Ages brutality and arrogance any better than Andrew Sullivan does here, discussing a recent gleeful performance by right-wing-apologist-and-ideologue-extraordinaire Dr. Charles Krauthammer. Krauthammer more or less abandons the so-called ticking time bomb fantasy as a justification for torture and gets right to it, noting that in 2002, the US of A had minimal intel as to what al Qaeda might be up to next, so torture got down to it quickly. (Sullivan notes that Krauthammer avoids the word torture, though it is clear that...

I can’t comment on revelations that the CIA destroyed videotapes of at least two “high value detainee” interrogations (despite same being requested by both the 9-11 Commission and by lawyers for such luminaries as Zaccarias Moussaoui) much better than the Heretik does here. The reason seems obvious: the CIA wanted to protect its agents from retaliation by law enforcement international war crimes tribunals al Qaeda. Yes, that’s the ticket. Al Qaeda. More proof for those who insist that the Bush Administration II is absolutely stupid and incompetent: when it comes to covering its tracks on its own crimes, it’s actually...

Yesterday marked the third time that the Supreme Court of the United States heard arguments relevant to guests of the American government held at its gulag concentration camp tropical beach resort at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. (The first two times were the cases of Rasul (Shafiq Rasul himself is interviewed here) and Hamdan (Salim Hamdan’s counsel Neal Katyal, who argued the case before the High Court, is interviewed here). It seems that at GTMO… not much ever happens, besides time ticking off (411 days left in the Bush II Administration today, btw). Former detainee Moazzam Begg (interviewed here) suggested that habeas...