Two former Navy judge advocates general and a retired Marine brigadier general with expertise in prisoners of war treatment have filed a friend of the court brief in the case of 16 Guantanamo detainees pending before the Supreme Court. WASHINGTON – Navy Rear Admiral Don Guter felt the Pentagon shudder when an airliner hijacked . . . → Read More: Good news: military jurists file a brief against Guantanamo

In case anyone has forgotten, Congress recently voted to pump $20 billion into a country over which we no longer have, if ever we did, any effective political control. It’s like that movie, The Money Pit, only with Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz instead of Tom Hanks and Shelley Long. Plus it isn’t funny.

. . . → Read More: The Money Pit

I’m probably missing something here. Researchers led by Dartmouth Medical School’s John D. Birkmeyer, M.D., found that patients of high-volume surgeons had lower death rates for heart bypass surgery, carotid endarterectomy-an operation to prevent stroke-lung resection, and five other cardiovascular and cancer procedures than did patients whose surgeons performed these operations less frequently. The . . . → Read More: News Flash: Experienced Surgeons Kill Fewer Patients Than Rookies!

An unsigned editorial (“About That Memo”) in the Weekly Standard—most likely the work of Fred Barnes and Bill Kristol—expresses the magazine’s hurt and bewilderment over the Bush administration’s failure to run with the leaked Douglas Feith memo that the Standard claims is proof of a strong enough Iraq-al Qaeda connection to have justified the . . . → Read More: What do we have to do to get a date?

A Neoconservative Goes Sane!

Is Wesley Clark an egotistical reptilian sociopath or an extraordinarily bright and compelling military fish-out-of-water?

Author and New Yorker political journalist Elizabeth Drew has a piece on Wesley Clark in the current New York Review of Books. Read Matt Taibbi’s Clark ruminations in The Nation and follow it up with . . . → Read More: Steel Cage Death Match: Wes Clark vs. Wes Clark, plus

George Bush has now commuted in three years more death sentences for turkeys than he commuted for humans in six. Is it that the taboo on eating humans in polite company makes their plights less urgent?

Former Illinois Senator Paul Simon is in Editor & Publisher this week with a column bemoaning the single-minded pursuit of profit in the news industry. He says, basically, that a pure profit motive transforms a newspaper from a newspaper into an ATM for shareholders, and we all know how good ATM’s are at covering . . . → Read More: Paul Simon (former Senator, not current Singer) has an epiphany.

Three articles from yesterday and today describe how, in one case, and why in the other two, US policy for the transition from occupation to self-rule in Iraq failed so completely. The New York Times and the Washington Post both focus on a June fatwa issued by Iraq’s most senior cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali . . . → Read More: Eyeless in Babylon

The Washington Post has an article about a guy, Steve Aftergood (destiny, anyone?), who maintains a web site dedicated to keeping tabs on the government’s secrecy fetish on behalf of the Federation of American Scientists. Here’s the money quote: In fact, the government’s classification chief, J. William Leonard, has bookmarked Aftergood’s Web site because . . . → Read More: An annoyingly bright spot in an otherwise shadowy world.

At least Iraq doesn’t have this problem.