“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...

Given how unreliable American intelligence sources had been with respect to the threat presented by al Qaeda prior to September 11th (they were lighting up like X-mas Christmas trees, except that the Bush Administration wasn’t interested) or regarding the threat posed by Iraqi WMDs (again, they concluded that contentions of Saddam’s WMDs were both unsupported by actual evidence and the sources were extremely unreliable)… there seems no reason whatsoever to accept the current consensus of the intelligence community, i.e., the news that the latest National Intelligence Estimate concludes that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003. (As always, digby...

“They”, of course, are per se impeachable offenses signing statements, particularly the first one that the President has used all year, this associated with a military appropriations bill as duly observed by Signing Statement Chronicler Extraordinaire Charlie Savage. In some ways, the current signing statements are more oblique than some of his earlier statements, such as, in response to an affirmative torture ban passed by his own party: “That pussy-shit John McCain can kiss my ass, I’ll water-board any damned raghead terrorist that I feel like”. The current, kindler, gentler signing statement now reads “Consistent with my Constitutional duties and...

The Rudy laugh fest continues, what with reports that while Mayor (of my fair City), Giuliani arranged for his personal security detail to have his then adulterous tryst with his paramour Judy Nathan in the Hamptons paid for by the City out of various City agencies and funds under the ubiquitous title “security”. It’s one thing for former State Comptroller Alan Hevesi to hae been ridden out of town on a rail for using a State employee to drive his wife to the doctor, but Rudy used City cops to drive him to his mistress, and they had to be...

We get some helpful and hopeful news (c/o Bruce the Veep… who else?!) such as this item from the AP and this item from TPM Muckraker, that tell us essentially on a semi-official basis what we have known for years… this time, in the nature of “dreams with a deadline”. (Hint: it’s about Iraq.) We have known since the heady early days when the Bushmen wanted to call the Excellent Iraq AdventureTM “Operation Iraqi Liberation”, but Karl Rove himself had to scotch that because even Americans could figure out that if you called it “O.I.L.”, it would be hard to...

It’s been a while since I read my own comments about the gigantic protest march against the Iraq war in New York City on 15 February 2003, one of the coldest days I remember, at which hundreds of thousands turned out. I did not realize that I mentioned that the local “paper of record” suggested as many as 400,000 attended, which, ultimately, was my own best estimate; I just remember its insistence on treating the Republican Lord Mayor’s self-serving estimate at only 100,000 as if it were of equal importance. (In retrospect, I was too kind to Bush by… a...