April 15th, 2008
Jon Soltz, co-founder of VoteVets.org and a veteran himself of the Iraq war, points out that the candidate touting his military record this presidential season has, in fact, incorrectly answered two basic questions. The first was, when McCain confused the Sunni and Shia populations or Iraq. And, now, the second question, “[W]ho commands what in our military?”
Mr. Soltz points out:
Just yesterday, John McCain seemed to say that General Petraeus is the top military commander of our Armed Forces, telling the Associated Press that he wouldn’t shift the focus of the military from Iraq to Afghanistan “unless Gen. [David] Petraeus said that he felt that the situation called for that.”
Petraeus, of course, is our commander of forces in Iraq. That’s it. He’s not responsible for Afghanistan, or our regional commitment, or our global commitments. As a Commander in Chief, McCain should know that there are people much more qualified to speak to our global strategy than Petraeus — including the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the Secretary of Defense, and the CENTCOM commander.
[...]
It sounds to me like Senator McCain has become confused because of the White House strategy. The White House, of course, has sent General Petraeus to Capitol Hill a number of times, and tried to paint it as an overall assessment of the global war on terror. If they were serious, they’d would have long ago sent the CENTCOM commander up for days upon days of hearings, followed by General McNeill, who could talk about the situation on the ground in Afghanistan, followed by General Petraeus.
April 12th, 2008
Great take on this photo of Gen. Petraeus, before the House Armed Services Committee, via BagNewsNotes.com:
[T]he General [represents] the serpentine head of of a military institution which has been cut off but for the one spokesman, who is marginalized and dislocated. Checking out the hands under the table, the school boy quiescence demonstrates that assessment has been silenced. Also noted was the fact that Petraeus’s mug is actually blocking a symbol of one of the service branches on the wall — more evidence that Petraeus has become a branch unto himself.
April 10th, 2008
When will this group of thugs be criminally prosecuted for violation of international and domestic laws, not to mention the irreparable harm they’ve done to the reputation of our country?
Bush administration officials from Vice President Dick Cheney on down signed off on using harsh interrogation techniques against suspected terrorists after asking the Justice Department to endorse their legality, The Associated Press has learned.
The officials also took care to insulate President Bush from a series of meetings where CIA interrogation methods, including waterboarding, which simulates drowning, were discussed and ultimately approved.
A former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the meetings described them Thursday to the AP to confirm details first reported by ABC News on Wednesday. The intelligence official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to publicly discuss the issue.
Between 2002 and 2003, the Justice Department issued several memos from its Office of Legal Counsel that justified using the interrogation tactics, including ones that critics call torture.
“If you looked at the timing of the meetings and the memos you’d see a correlation,” the former intelligence official said. Those who attended the dozens of meetings agreed that “there’d need to be a legal opinion on the legality of these tactics” before using them on al-Qaida detainees, the former official said.
[...]
The former intelligence official described Cheney and the top national security officials as deeply immersed in developing the CIA’s interrogation program during months of discussions over which methods should be used and when.
Anyone that still defends this group of thugs is either a sadist, has not been paying attention over the past seven years, or does not believe in the democratic liberal principles that founded America.
March 31st, 2008
As if I didn’t have sufficient cause to worry about all the private info I’ve willingly handed over to Google (oh, how I love Gmail and Google calendar and Google Docs and Google Apps and Google sitemaps and Google Analytics and… and …), I now have to wonder about this match that’s straight out of 1984:
Google has been recruited by US intelligence agencies to help them better process and share information they gather about suspects.
Agencies such as the National Security Agency have bought servers on which Google-supplied search technology is used to process information gathered by networks of spies around the world.
Google is also providing the search features for a Wikipedia-style site, called Intellipedia, on which agents post information about their targets that can be accessed and appended by colleagues, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
All right, let’s set my paranoia aside, and admit that organizing and building a wiki-style tool for the intelligence community is pretty cool and, too, one of those, “Shit, why weren’t they doing that already?” kind of moments.
And now, back to dealing with my paranoia, Shit, just what else will Google, NSA, CIA and the Telecomms collaborate on next, and just how badly will we get screwed?
March 22nd, 2008
Paul Krugman reminds us of the lessons we’ve forgotten since 1929 — the time of the “Great Depression”:
The financial crisis currently under way is basically an updated version of the wave of bank runs that swept the nation three generations ago. People aren’t pulling cash out of banks to put it in their mattresses — but they’re doing the modern equivalent, pulling their money out of the shadow banking system and putting it into Treasury bills. And the result, now as then, is a vicious circle of financial contraction.
Mr. Bernanke and his colleagues at the Fed are doing all they can to end that vicious circle. We can only hope that they succeed. Otherwise, the next few years will be very unpleasant — not another Great Depression, hopefully, but surely the worst slump we’ve seen in decades.
