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 [...]

Perhaps the most outstanding achievement of the speech was getting Chris Matthews to forget that Obama is not an Irishman. Seriously: Chris Matthews said that “I forgot he was black tonight for an hour.” Dude. Seek help. Never mind.
The White House web site has a transcript of the speech along with a convenient guide [...]

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 [...]

I hardly ever watch Chris Matthews on MSNBC but recently I’ve made an effort to inoculate myself against the madness by watching him and some of the other ADD media types who populate the various aethereal passages. Much of today’s episode was focused upon Obama’s Nobel Prize acceptance lecture—assessments of which varied wildly across the [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Louie Gohmert, a Republican representative from Texas, has a beef with the Supreme Court: its justices are deciding questions of law. Gohmert — not to be confused with Gomer (Pyle) or Homer (Simpson) — is unhappy with the court’s majority opinion that Guantanamo prisoners are entitled to the constitutionally guaranteed right of habeas corpus, allowing [...]

The worst national security administration ever has a hideous record of ministering to combat troops returning home with psychiatric issues. The military have been slow to recognize and treat post-traumatic stress disorder, and have returned soldiers to combat without treatment. The suicide rate for soldiers who are serving or have served in Afghanistan and Iraq [...]

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 [...]

Blaming our country’s woes exclusively on the people who have most directly wrought them—Bush, Cheney, torture maven David Addington et al—becomes increasingly difficult in the face of the refusal by Democratic party leaders to confer accountability, let alone make any attempt to visit some sort of necessarily inadequate justice, upon the administration.
The party’s presidential [...]

Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama has followed the lead of House majority leader Steny Hoyer (D-AT&T) and House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Vichy) and endorsed a “compromise” electronic surveillance bill that legitimates the Nixon-Cheney belief that the presidency confers immunity from any law the current holder of it chooses to ignore. Even better, it offers [...]

That’s a joke, the “adversarial” tag, but a story in the New York Times today helps explain the reason so many people see the press as anti-government. Investigative reporter David Barstow uncovered a White House-approved Pentagon operation to use high-profile television and print military analysts, mostly retired general officers, to help sell the Iraq invasion [...]

The news that senior Bush administration officials not only approved the use of torture but actually micromanaged the application of it should be the last straw for dithering Democrats in the House of Representatives.
We have known for years that the president and the vice president approved war crimes, including torture, on the basis of [...]

ABC News is reporting that senior Bush administration officials were intimately involved in planning torture regimens for use against terrorism suspects. The officials include vice president Dick Cheney; CIA director George Tenet and his successor, former CIA agent and Congressman Porter Goss; then-national security advisor Condoleezza Rice; former secretary of state Colin Powell; former secretary [...]

George W. Bush has a death grip on the title of Worst US President Ever, but he’s not alone in achieving historic levels of incompetence: his cabinet secretaries are pulling their weight as well.
Take Condoleezza Rice, for instance. As Bush’s national security council chief, she presided over the administration’s total lack of interest in counter-terrorism [...]

Documents unsealed in a British court allege that Prince Bandar, Saudi Arabia’s long time US ambassador and a close family friend of president George W. Bush, threatened to withhold terrorism intelligence from the UK if former prime minister Tony Blair failed to subvert a bribery inquiry into payments to the prince from mammoth British defense [...]

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 [...]

Note to regular patrons: you’re not hallucinating. This piece is an updated and greatly expanded version of the previous one.
Nancy Pelosi is at it again. On Friday, she reiterated her opposition to impeaching George Bush and Dick Cheney, saying that impeachment “would be very divisive in our country” and that despite increasing heat from constituents [...]

Despite the news that Iraq is still a bombed-out economic wreck and that highly-touted conciliatory legislation will actually heighten sectarian conflict, there is good news coming from the country’s entrepeneurial agriculture sector. For the first time in a millennium or two, opium production is flourishing.
The US Government Accountability Office says that reconstruction spending from Iraq’s [...]

A Rutgers law professor is calling on Congress to legislate “a form of preventive detention adapted to terrorism, and outside the criminal justice system” for terrorism suspects in order to spare US courts the frustration of attempting to try them. John Farmer says in a New York Times op-ed piece that trials such as those [...]

This year probably won’t be any worse for George W. Bush than last year or the year before, but it’s likely to be a wild ride for the rest of us. The president faces the prospect of leaving office, assuming we’re fortunate enough to actually get shed of him, in the throes of a recession [...]

Newly confirmed attorney general Michael Mukasey has announced a Justice Department probe into the destruction of CIA interrogation videos showing the torture of terrorism suspects. The reaction from some people who would like to see someone—anyone—in the Bush administration pay for something—anything—the administration has done is one of cautious optimism, with emphasis on the nature [...]

I haven’t paid much attention to Christopher Hitchens of late because, as prominent born-again wingnuts go, his value to the forces of darkness is much diminished. His latest Slate missive, though, in which he takes after the CIA for destroying the video of interrogations involving the torture of terrorism suspects and participating in the recently [...]

The latest signal came from George Bush, warning of a “nuclear holocaust” if Iran gets The Bomb (despite an IAEA report that Iran isn’t as much of a threat as Bush claims). There can’t be any more provocative words than “nuclear holocaust” to justify the purported prevention of one. Nor can there be any doubt [...]

The American Psychological Association now says that its members can’t take part in water-boarding, sleep deprivation or sexual humiliation, among other techniques that have become part and parcel of Bush tactics against alleged terrorists at Guantanamo. If they see such activities, they are now required to intervene to stop them, report them to superiors, and [...]

Friday’s Wall Street Journal [sorry, can't link] reported on 34 foreclosures in New Orleans, foreclosures by subprime lending companies which, it turns out, were invested in by the hedge fund (Fortress), which in turn John Edwards has been invested in — and which has hired him as advisor — all fully disclosed, never hidden, but [...]

ssssssssssssssssssss
That’s one giant hiss, and most of all to the women, and most most of all to the one who is one of my Senators … and not for the first time, sellout Diane Feinstein (aka DiFi) … who was inexcusably enabling Bush already back in 2001 …. and 2002 … but still in 2007?!?! [...]

The Washington Post is reporting today that top anti-terrorism official knew that U.S.-based Chiquita International paid protection money to a right-wing Colombian paramilitary group implicated in hundreds of murders and listed by the State Department as a terrorist organization but did nothing about it. The Post says that in 2003, when Homeland Security chief Michael [...]

Barack Obama invoked 911, directly slammed the Bush administration, indirectly slammed Hillary Clinton and delivered some distilled blood to his vampire constituency in what was billed as a major foreign policy address but turned out to be a more or less boilerplate, Council on Foreign Relations-style speech today.
The part of the speech drawing 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 [...]

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 [...]

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

More than 100 Washington Post readers have responded to a Washington Post op-ed piece by new U.S. intelligence director Mike McConnell calling for changes to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. At last count, only five comments could be interpreted as favorable, and only one of those was genuinely coherent. A number of readers point out [...]

People do stupid things all the time, but most people aren’t the Director of Central Intelligence and the things aren’t stuff like forgetting to write an intelligence assessment on a country you don’t think is much of a threat but that your employers seem intent on invading. So when George Tenet says that’s what he [...]

Michael Chertoff says you should be afraid, very afraid. He’s right. Why? Because he’s our Homeland Security chief and he’s deranged.
A little less than a month ago, former national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote a scathing Washington Post op-ed piece taking the Bush administration to task for parlaying the genuine national distress immediately following 911 [...]

Earlier this week I received an email thanking me for my part in helping to discredit the anti-war movement. It was from the woman pictured at left: Melting Melanie Morgan, the chairman of Move America Forward.
I’m not sure where MAF ranks in the right-wing crazies pecking order but if the email is any [...]

Some anonymous Bush administration officials appear to be trying to play Pakistan’s president Pervez Musharraf. A March 11 New York Times story reports that at least some officials think the death of Musharraf, whose military government is in serious political trouble, would have little impact on the country’s relationship with the US and would be [...]

The Bush Doctrine’s return on investment is unattractive…

Germany has become the second European country to issue arrest warrants for CIA agents involved in kidnapping terrorism suspects for transportation to third countries where the suspects are abused and often tortured. German citizen Khaled El-Masri was snatched from the German border, flown to Afghanistan where he was beaten and tortured, and was then dumped [...]