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 […]