The PATRIOT Act was up for renewal this week. Democrats wanted to add some civil liberties backstops to it, but were unable to get it done because, well, they’re Democrats, and the getting done of things just isn’t among their areas of expertise. So they compromised with themselves by kicking the can down the road [...]

The United States, we are often told, is a nation bound by the rule of law. We hear that less and less as it becomes more and more risible but I guess it still officially is, unless you’re the president, or you’re operating an armed drone on behalf of the president, or torturing someone on [...]

Many years ago, very shortly after BTC News burst upon the blogosphere like a firefly at high noon, we began an occasional feature called My Favorite Warlord. Readers were invited to play along; all that’s required is to choose one among the host of what are commonly referred to as warlords in Afghanistan, and do [...]

This is a multi-subject spectacular. First we address the details of November’s strong words to the Secretary of State regarding Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, from Ambassador Karl Eikenberry—who described Karzai as erratic, corrupt, incompetent and incapable of governing without US support, and strongly objected to what has since become the Obama Afghanistan policy on the [...]

Stuff worth reading:
The Columbia Journalism Review’s story on the Russian press and Russian journalists. The story cites the Committee to Protect Journalists ranking of Russia as the third most dangerous country for journalists, behind second-place Algeria and the US-created democratic capitalist paradise of Iraq, and describes the gyrations that reporters and writers for independent newspapers [...]

Specifically, our freedom to do whatever it is we want to do to them and their part of the world without consequence.
Disclaimer: I don’t support terrorism as an expression of political or ideological frustration, or in any event, but I understand the impulse and one has to admit that as a negotiating technique, it [...]

This place would be a paradise tomorrow if every department had a supervisor with a submachine gun.
   - Jim Jones on Jonestown

At home, the Obama Justice Department is busy trying to insulate the Bush administration at large and torture memo author John Yoo in particular from the US Geneva Conventions obligation to prosecute war criminals [...]

I had every best intention of doing little more than to acknowledge that president Obama made some sort of speech about some sort of strategy in some sort of country called Afghanistan, but people keep writing about it and I keep reading about it and, well, you know.
Most recently, I read the reaction from Slate’s [...]

I wasn’t going to comment on the Obama/Bush/Pentagon/GOP/Dahmer plan to add some 30,000 US troops to the 60,000-some already in Afghanistan because it’s a stupid plan, but I went ahead and read the speech and there’s a relevant point I want to make in response.
According to the guy who wrote the recently (2006) updated Army [...]

I didn’t actually watch or read Obama’s Afghanistan speech but I gather it was similar to but less coherent than his campaign speeches about Afghanistan, which I did read, so I feel comfortable commenting on his announced alleged policy.
But you know, screw it. Who cares? This is not my beautiful house. I will mention [...]

Do a Google News search on the name of Afghan warlord Rashid Dostum and the odds are sterling that the results will include bad news from Afghanistan.
The Dostum factor was the subject of one of my first BTC News posts, back in October of 2003. The search that week turned up a BBC News [...]

This blog has seen its ups and downs since October of 2003 debut. It went from approximately no readers in the first year to right around a million readers over the course of 2005, after it became the first blog to field its own semi-regular White House correspondent, the inestimable Eric Brewer, who asked some [...]

I can’t believe anyone believes the CIA when it says that Iran was working toward nuclear weapons for a while but now they’re not. This sounds like they got snookered on the front end and now they’re covering for it. “Oh, shit. They weren’t working on a bomb. What do we do now?” I wonder [...]

You don’t try very hard to please me; with what you know it should be easy … this could be the last time, this could be the last time, may be the last time, I don’t know …
If I had an audience large enough, I’d make “The Last Time”, a pre-punk Rolling Stones anthem of [...]

The Georgian invasion of South Ossetia, which precipitated a wider conflict between Georgia and Russia, was a move so boneheadedly perverse that it almost certainly has roots in the Bush White House. The Georgians obviously believed that they had sufficient backing from the West, i.e., from the US and its allies in the EU and [...]

“The main reason we are losing in Afghanistan is not because there are too few American soldiers, but because there are not enough Afghans ready to fight and die for the kind of government we want.”
Let’s coin some alternatives. “The main reason al-Qaeda is losing in America is not because there are too few terrorists, [...]

One of the most unfair aspects of George W. Bush’s foreign policy disasters, not counting the literally millions of people who have been killed, maimed or driven from their homes in direct consequence — we’re not counting them because, let’s face it, for Americans they don’t count — is that he won’t suffer any repercussions [...]

Many months ago when I was writing something about health care I ran across a blog that had a number of entries on the subject, one of which I used in my piece. That web page and 70-some others are still open in my browser, which in retaliation is now consuming most of my computer’s [...]

When last we noted the Bush administration’s appalling record on national security, a few items fell through the cracks. The story was on the economic resurgence of opium in Afghanistan following the US invasion that drove the Taliban out of power and ended the group’s short-lived but astonishingly effective ban on opium poppy cultivation. Since [...]

Sometimes I resent not owning a television, but at least once a year for the past eight years I’ve been grateful for the lack.
I read the various State of the Union speech press releases from the White House yesterday, including the morning press gaggle with Dana Perino during which she noted repeatedly that last [...]

The Bush administration probably didn’t actively intend to turn Aghanistan into the very model of a narco-terrorist state, but they clearly had no plan to avoid doing so.
In 2001, opium was a non-factor in Afghanistan’s economy, after the Taliban banned the crop the previous year in a failed effort to improve diplomatic relations with other [...]

The San Diego Air Show was in town a week ago and my residence was squarely in the flight path. The noise was nervewracking, and that’s without the expectation that missile or bomb strikes were imminent. Imagine what Iraqis who live in the vicinity of the air strikes conducted by the US military must be [...]

Here’s a December 13, 2001, CNN headline: “Fierce Fighting Resumes in Tora Bora, Advances Made Quickly Against al Qaeda”. Here’s an August 16, 2007, Reuters headline: “Afghan and U.S. forces assault al Qaeda in Tora Bora”.
What’s wrong with this picture?

Susie Madrak at Surburban Guerrilla neatly illustrates the educational clout blogs bring to the masses when she links to this post at Boing-Boing, which explains the genesis of the Bush-Cheney policy toward Iran. The vice-president, under the bedsheet, with a flashlight …

The Guardian published a story on Sunday detailing concern about Afghanistan among Britain’s military, [...]

A couple of days ago, Eric Umansky wrote that “a month ago, I was speaking with Karen Green at NYU’s Center on Law and Security, who [said] something about Gitmo that’s stuck with me ever since: Time and again prisoners at Gitmo have insisted that they are innocent and asked the tribunals there to [...]

Iraq’s health minister says 150,000 Iraqis have been killed since the US invasion, and the Pentagon needs another $160 billion to keep up the good work. The new supplemental budget request for military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere in the War on Terra® will push the total cash expenditures since the Iraq invasion past [...]

Iraq’s health minister says 150,000 Iraqis have been killed since the US invasion, and the Pentagon needs another $160 billion to keep up the good work. The new supplemental budget request for military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere in the War on Terra® will push the total cash expenditures since the Iraq invasion past [...]

Yesterday’s excerpt from the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq documented president Bush’s success at spreading terror. So how much has it cost us to make the country less safe at the same time as a gang of criminal deviants in Congress and the White House work to bury for once and all whatever claim to [...]

Iraq, with an impotent central government propped up by US troops and sectarian militias, is in practical terms a failed state. Afghanistan is in deep trouble. Pakistan’s dictator president is publishing a memoir aimed at burnishing his anti-US credentials. Hezbullah is sitting pretty in Lebanon. Gaza is in ruins. Iran is daily gaining clout in [...]

Perhaps the most maddening element to the administration’s assumption of the national security mantle is that some people, including some elected Democratic officials, still accept it. Reporters routinely report with straight faces about the Republican political advantage on national security issues, which, while it does exist, is due in large part to the uncritical press acceptance of the Republican claim that they’re strong on national security. We’ve visited this topic before, and at greater length, but it’s worth revisiting in light of recent events.

Afghanistan is another subject not often remarked upon at the BushBlog. Here’s one reason why.
The UN Security Council sent a high-ranking delegation to Afghanistan yesterday to bolster the country’s leader, Hamid Karzai, amid signs that his authority is steadily slipping to powerful warlords and warnings that an opium boom could turn Afghanistan into a failed [...]

Once a week or so I do a Google News search on Rashid Dostum, warlord, US ally, assistant minister of defense to the mayor of Kabul, likely opium trafficker and suspected war criminal. If anything bad is happening in Afghanistan, odds are that it’s either connected to Dostum or that whoever is reporting on whatever is happening will find occasion to mention him. This week, the search produced an article from the Beeb about UN concern over the increasing control the Taleban exercise over portions of the country.