It’s our old friend, Super Ahmad Chalabi, traveling around Iraq with his new friend Super Dave Osborne Petraeus, promising that The SurgeTM will result in new and improved governmental services, like electricity, water, security, etc. One suspects the Iraqis are on to this bulls***, but are willing to tell the press what it seems to want to hear– that they are willing to say they will put up even with a double-dealer like Super Ahmad, if he can deliver the goods (which they know he can’t). The question is just how stupid the American people are believed to be, if...

Fellow NYC attorney/blogger Glenn Greenwald gives us this downright bizarre account of an e-mail exchange he had with General David Petraeus’s aide and spokesman Col. Steven Boylan. The point of it appears to be a brilliant misdirection on the part of the Colonel, to wit, raising numerous attacks at Greenwald while never directly taking on Greenwald’s point, to wit, that Petraeus, at least, appears to be a monstrously partisan whore of the first order (I’m impugning his partisanship, not his sexual mores… the Senate may feel free to issue a resolution of their disapproval of me, if they can find...

It’s happy 60th to our next President, my state’s senator, Mrs. Hillary Clinton. (I thought it was her 59th; I forgot the year that the sun went dark, the rivers ran blood, the locusts invaded, etc.). My birthday wish for Mrs. C is that she silence her critics by pointing out that, unfortunately, all the pictures of her having sex with Janet Reno over Vince Foster’s body in the cabin of the black helicopter were accidentally burned up by Bill while he wasn’t inhaling. As to my own birthday wishes (I turn 45 today), besides peace on Earth, and for...

Angela Campbell is a partner at the law firm of Dickey & Campbell in Des Moines, Iowa, and previously served as an attorney with the Office of the Federal Defender in Iowa. Ms. Campbell represented four Afghan nationals previously detained at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, one of whom was released approximately two weeks ago. On October 12, 2007, I had the privilege of speaking with Ms. Campbell by telephone. My interview notes, as corrected by Ms. Campbell, are below. The Talking Dog Where were you on 11 September 2001? Angela Campbell: At the time that the planes crashed, I was in...

From our friends at Make them Accountable, we get a pair of charming stories: (1) from LA Times, this account on how the FBI is quietly trying to re-make cases against Ron Jeremy Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the 14 other “high value” detainees at GTMO, because the CIA and military f***ed up their interrogations with torture and other things that can’t be used in court; and (2) from WaPo, this account of why the GTMO military commissions prosecutor (Col. Moe Davis) abruptly resigned, to wit, the government was pushing the “sexier” cases ahead of the more solid ones so as...

John McKay, the former United States Attorney for the Western District of Washington, himself fired at the behest of Karl Rove Alberto Gonzales, says that he believes that the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General will recommend that former A.G. Alberto Gonzales (hey, that’s also A.G. isn’t it… tres freaky, n’est-ce pas?) be prosecuted for lying under oath, to the I.G., to Congress… to whomever! McKay, a rock-ribbed Republican himself, appointed by George W. Bush to be U.S. Attorney in Seattle, believes that after his own summoning to Washington to testify before the I.G. for around 8 hours, that the...

WaPo gives us this description of a village inside the Palestinian West Bank that has been cut off from its primary (and apparently only) source of business activity, Israeli Jews, by the over 400 mile long security wall being thrown up by Israel to separate itself from Palestinian Arabs who, prior to the wall, had been much more effective at blowing themselves and Israeli civilians up inside of Israel proper. The description of the village of Mas-Ha (presumably no relation to Hamas) and the now severed Highway 505 read almost like some post-apocalyptic fiction… but they’re not. Israel, benefitting tremendously...

Sentencing themselves to political death (in service of the all-important insurance industry), the House Republicans voted to sustain the President’s veto of a bill expanding the popular “S-CHIP” health insurance program for children, with a veto override failing by just 13 votes. Congratulations to the Republicans, having generated record deficits through massive tax cuts in favor of those who can most afford to pay taxes, to have had the fiscal discipline to try to restore some semblance of budget sanity on the backs of children, and their health! Way to go! This seems to confirm my view that the GOP...

Notwithstanding that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences liked him enough to award him an Oscar, and now, the Norwegian committee charged with the prize has awarded former Vice-President Al Gore the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in publicizing the dangers of climate change, the American press corps will still tell us that Gore is stiff, wooden and boring, sighs too much, and of course (wait for it…) he’s fat. Let’s face it… notwithstanding that he is a happily married man (and a decent man) who would never dream of such a thing, with an Oscar and...

This is more or less the conclusion reached by the Supreme Court of the United States in denying review of lower courts’ refusals to hear a case against the CIA brought by the ACLU on behalf of Khalid al-Masri, a German national mistakenly abducted and tortured for months by the CIA as part of its charming “extraordinary rendition” program, on the basis of the United States’ assertion of “state secrets”. Ben Wizner, the ACLU attorney speaking to the press, notes that the “state secret” involved is, of course, hardly “a secret” at all, to wit, that the United States kidnaps...