Brilliant FBI agents decipher threat to New York in anthrax letters.

On April 3, late on a Friday afternoon, the Justice Department asked a judge to dismiss a lawsuit filed against the National Security Administration for unlawfully spying on Americans’ telephone records. In its brief, the Justice Department made two arguments:
First, it claimed that allowing the lawsuit to proceed would result in the disclosure of [...]

George W. Bush’s public statements have been absurd for so long, that it’s almost poor sport to continue to skewer them. Nevertheless, because I haven’t done so on BTC News in quite a while, and because this may be my last opportunity, I can’t resist one last shot. For auld lang syne, as it were.
When [...]

According to John McCain, he was visited by a mysterious Christian North Vietnamese prison guard twice in 1969 and “often” thereafter. The timeline of these visitations is interesting.
Starting in December 1967, McCain was held in a prison camp in northeast Hanoi that the prisoners referred to as “The Plantation.” In May of 1969, McCain [...]

On Monday at the White House press briefing, Press Secretary Dana Perino declined to answer when I asked her whether the White House would apologize for last Friday’s raid by U.S. forces in Iraq that reportedly killed a relative of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
The slain man, Ali Abdul Hussein al-Maliki, was described as the [...]

That’s a mind-boggling but logical implication of an amazing anecdote in a Washington Post commentary today written by John Rogers, a captain in the U.S. Army who served in Iraq from June 2006 to September 2007.
Rogers’s piece is an explanation of why he plans to leave the army. One of his reasons is that his [...]

Jackson Diehl, the deputy editorial page editor of the Washington Post, has an op-ed today in which he asserts that the lack of political progress in Iraq is an argument for staying there indefinitely. It’s another version of the now familiar If-Things-Are-Getting-Worse-We-Must-Stay-In-Iraq-And-On-The-Other-Hand-If-Things-Are-Getting-Better-Then-We-Must-Stay-In-Iraq argument that, whatever its deficiencies might be, is at least admirably consistent.
But I’m [...]

The Washington Post has a story today, on page 14, about the results from nineteen focus groups—conducted for the U.S. military—that were held throughout Iraq last month. According to a military analysis of the results, there is good news: Iraqis from every sectarian and ethnic group share many beliefs in common.
And what are those [...]

The Washington Post’s lead editorial today asserts that Tehran is supplying “sophisticated bombs” that are killing American soldiers in Iraq.
After President Bush made the same accusation last year, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Peter Pace said, on March 14, 2006, that he had no proof that the Iranian government was responsible for such attacks.
This year, on [...]

I’m puzzled. When Karl Rove finally spoke in public about the Plame Affair last week, he said that Armitage was the one who “used her name.” But didn’t Novak look it up in Who’s Who?
Aha. I see you subscribe to the immaculate leak theory of Plameogenesis.
It’s true that Novak started making that claim after the [...]

11-15-02 [dates are linked]: The FBI announces that Al Qaeda may be planning “spectacular attacks” in the United States that will cause “mass casualties” and “severe damage” to the economy.
3-19-03: One of the real ones.
3-2-04: Fox News reports that in February 2004, U.S. officials released what they said was an intercepted letter written by Jordanian [...]

Check out this fascinating combination of articles in yesterday’s Washington Post ‘Outlook’ section:
Getting the CIA we need, by David Ignatius
Our clueless intelligence system, by Amy Zegart
Who runs the CIA? Outsiders for hire, by R. J. Hillhouse
Ignatius thinks that the CIA is something of a rogue outfit, because it doesn’t have sufficient oversight from the White [...]

At Slate, Timothy Noah has written a defense of Bush’s commutation of Scooter Libby’s jail sentence that is riddled with errors, fallacies, and non-sequiturs. To wit:
1. Noah says that Libby “probably didn’t understand that Plame’s identity was a government secret.” In fact, in Libby’s indictment, we read that:
Shortly after publication of the article in The [...]

Today at the White House press briefing, I got into a somewhat heated (on my part) dispute with John Gizzi, political editor of the right wing web magazine HumanEvents.com. It happened like this…
Earlier in the briefing, the press was asking Tony Snow some pretty good questions about Bush’s commutation yesterday of Scooter Libby’s prison sentence. [...]

Threatening letters to Judge Walton are counterproductive.

U.S. Counterterrorism Center says there’s more terrorism than ever!

Two British men suffer for Bush’s sins…

Bush tells Saudis: I’ll never leave Iraq!

In which Tony dodges questions about the U.S. Attorney firings…

The Bush Doctrine’s return on investment is unattractive…

After six years of being lied to by the Bush administration and the pundits, the American people finally hold someone accountable…

Killing time and taking chances, while the Libby jury ponders its decision…

If at first you don’t succeed, lie, lie again…

Ted Wells wants Scooter back, Pat Fitzgerald would rather have the truth…

The U.S. military’s demonstration of “Iranian” weapons in Iraq fails to convince…

Why are lefty bloggers embracing the defense’s attack on Russert’s credibility?

Tim Russert delivers the prosecution’s knockout punch…

In his grand jury testimony that we heard today, Scooter Libby introduced a novel concept to the field of national security law…

My paraphrased account of this morning’s playing for the jury of audiotapes of Fitzgerald’s March 5, 2004, interrogation of Libby…

In his March 2004 appearance before the grand jury investigating the Plame leak, Scooter Libby can’t recall very much…

Monday morning at the Libby trial, prosecution gets October 2003 Washington Post articles on the Plame leak admitted as evidence, and the defense continues cross examination of FBI agent Deborah Bond…

Plame-At-A-Glance™ condenses the whole Plame Affair down to one easy-to-understand flow chart…

There’s a revealing tidbit in a “Sporting Scene” article in the current New Yorker that sheds some light on today’s front page Washington Post story about how the Bush administration wants American troops to start killing Iranians in Iraq…

The Washington Post had a front-page article yesterday on the major surge in Iraqi civilian deaths that occurred during the second half of 2006. The article pins the blame for the surge on sectarian strife stirred up by the bombing of Samarra’s Golden Mosque in February.

But I was puzzled by the graph that accompanies the article…

Last Friday while listening to the news on the radio I had the pleasure of hearing our president say these words: “History will record that the first major ground battle in the 21st century involving American forces began with a Calvary charge. I guess that’s what you get when you bring together a President from Texas with a Secretary of Defense who actually remembers when America had a Calvary.”

From his November 6 memo:

Set a firm withdrawal date to leave. Declare that with Saddam gone and Iraq a sovereign nation, the Iraqi people can govern themselves.

That’s the way to think outside the box! (Although why did he include it on his list of “less attractive options”?)

Last week, Nicolo Pollari, the head of SISMI (the Italian counterpart to our CIA), was fired.

Tony Snow laughed at me today in the White House briefing room after I asked him a question inspired by John Yoo’s vigorous defense, in an op-ed in last Sunday’s NY Times, of the Supreme Leader style of government that Mr. Yoo helped fashion when he worked in Bush’s Justice Department in the two years after the 9/11 attacks.

Last Wednesday, Marco Mancini, the head of counterintelligence at SISMI, the Italian military intelligence agency, was arrested for allegedly abetting the CIA’s 2003 kidnap and rendition to Egypt of Muslim cleric Hassan Nasr.

Someone claiming to be “the man named Wissam al-Zahawie” responded this week on Slate.com’s message board to noted British romancer Christopher Hitchens’ April 10, 2006, Slate article in which Hitchens charged Zahawie, once Saddam’s envoy to the Vatican, with being a raving anti-Semite whose love of Wagner places him in dangerously close approximation to Hitler.

Tony Snow does his best to control the damage after Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki, speaking to reporters on Thursday, denounced coalition troops’ treatment of Iraqi civilians.

Leave it to the clever Brits to come up with the perfect description of the current state of the Bush-Blair special relationship.

Today during the White House briefing I asked Tony Snow this question: There have been news reports this week that the FBI is using the Patriot Act to obtain phone records of journalists without their knowledge and without judicial oversight. As a former journalist, are you at all concerned about this sort of intrusion on press freedom? Tony denied the allegation…

The White House press corps gave Tony Snow rock star treatment for his first televised press conference today. It was standing room only.

Tristero over at Hullabaloo has deconstructed Bush’s seemingly inscrutable statement to a German reporter last Friday that the best moment of his presidency was the time he caught a seven-and-a-half pound fish.

Today the U.S. government released its 2005 report on worldwide terrorism, which reveals that, compared to the figures for 2004, the number of terrorist attacks more than tripled and the number of people killed in those attacks more than doubled. The hard data: 14,602 killed in 11,111 attacks.

Today at the White House I asked Scott McClellan about this bombshell buried near the end of R. Jeffrey Smith and Dafna Linzer’s ’s article on the firing of Mary McCarthy from the CIA in last Sunday’s Washington Post: “The White House also has recently barraged the agency with questions about the political affiliations of some of its senior intelligence officers, according to intelligence officials.”

The Sierra Club is getting blasted by the Libosphere today. Kos started it (and Janeand Duncan chimed in) by linking to this article which, before it was altered, said: “The Sierra Club is endorsing Chafee even though the group gave the senator only a 20 percent rating in its environmental scorecard in 2004.”

Today Scott called on everyone else in the first four rows of the briefing room, some of them multiple times, but he didn’t call on me. I’m a little frustrated about not getting to ask my question (what it something I said? was my last post to cruel), but knowing that the White House hates me and/or is afraid of me is some compensation.

Nevertheless, it was a pretty interesting day. The place was jammed, and the first twenty questions dealt with Patrick Fitzgerald’s late Wednesday night bombshell revelation that, according to Lewis Libby, the president authorized Libby’s leak to Judy Miller of information from the top secret National Intelligence Estimate.

Michael Wolff over at Vanity Fair performs what may well be—considering the rumors of Scott McClellan’s imminent sacking—a premortem on poor in-over-his-head Scottie. And the vivisection is vivid. Wolff, unlike the regular White House correspondents who have to deal with McClellan every day and thus feel compelled to play nice, doesn’t hold back…