Electronic Intifada has an interesting summary of the current travails afflicting Yasser Arafat. It sounds as though the opposition in Palestine is somewhat more determined than that in Israel.
A string of protests at the Palestinian Authority’s corruption, including kidnappings of security officials, have forced the Palestinian president to cut the sprawling Palestinian security services to [...]

Weapons inspector turned flaming commie David Kay, the guy who introduced Gertrude Stein to George Bush*, continued his assault on the administration in his keynote address last week at the Government Security Expo and Conference.
The United States justified the invasion by saying Baghdad posed a threat because it had biological and chemical weapons and was [...]

I see this but honestly, I’m still having difficulty believing it.
Days after 9/11, a senior Pentagon official lamented the lack of good targets in Afghanistan and proposed instead U.S. military attacks in South America or Southeast Asia as “a surprise to the terrorists,” according to a footnote in the recent 9/11 Commission Report. The [...]

AP says Colin Powell was called to testify before the grand jury attempting to determine which treasonous bastard in the White House burned CIA agent Valerie Plame. That’s a pretty wide net floating around in the administration’s little pool.
I really, really, really hope the Democrats retake the Senate this year.

Eric Umansky notes in his “Today’s Papers” column at Slate that according to the Wall Street Journal, John Kerry is picking up some big name support from among the ranks of big business. Here’s an excerpt of the article, which is available to non-subscribers.
WASHINGTON — Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry has persuaded scores of corporate [...]

No one other than Newsweek seems to have noticed the memo suggesting a post-911 strike in South America to “confuse the terrorists,” and no one appears to have noticed the Newsweek story revealing the memo. Apparently it isn’t newsworthy that senior defense officials, aka Doug Feith, are completely insane. I suppose in retrospect that’s obvious [...]

From a US journalist working out of Stockholm and writing in the Asia Times Online, I learn that FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds has sent an open letter to 911 commission chairman Thomas Kean asking why the information she provided to the commission wasn’t included in the report, and detailing as much of that information as [...]

Christopher Allbritton is the journalist who made blogging history when he successfully solicited enough money to see him through a month in Iraq reporting via his blog. He spent April of last year there extending the meaning of gonzo journalism as he recorded his experiences and interacted with his blog readers.
He’s back in Iraq now, [...]

but meanwhile you can read about Bill Clinton’s CBC interview in a number of overseas papers. The man articulated a few minor differences with the Bush* post-911 “strategy.”
Clinton, who is supporting Bush’s Democratic opponent Senator John Kerry in the November 2 US election, said that at the time of the Iraq war, Saddam Hussein was [...]

Alan Keyes, a Maryland resident and Illinois GOP Senate candidate, reaches out for the youth vote by hitting the mosh pit during his run for President in 2000.

“God has put a hedge of protection around us. This has been a special country to Him. It’s been a land of His choosing. And we need as a people to turn from the way we’re going and to acknowledge His sovereignty and to humbly beseech Him for protection from what may be coming from [...]

Via Juan Cole, this news from Reuters.
ISLAMABAD/LONDON (Reuters) – U.S. officials providing justification for anti-terrorism alerts revealed details about a Pakistani secret agent, and confirmed his name while he was working under cover in a sting operation, Pakistani sources say.
A Pakistani intelligence source told Reuters on Friday that Mohammad Naeem Noor Khan, who was arrested [...]

Rashid Dostum is an Uzbek warlord who controls a big chunk of northern Afghanistan. He was one of the primary US allies in overthrowing the Taliban and is suspected of committing war crimes. As are most of the warlords, he’s in charge of the local economy in the areas he controls, and he maintains a [...]

Chris Floyd, the muckraking columnist at the Moscow Times, wrote Friday about the paternalist—or mysogynist, more appropriately—attitude toward women reflected in actions by the Pope and the President this past week. First, the Catholic church:
The Inquisitors declared that women who resist their subordination to men too strongly are “giving rise to harmful confusion” and perverting [...]

Lie down with dogs and get up with fleas.
Ahmad Chalabi and his nephew are both wanted men in Iraq. Chalabi is suspected of abandoning his political ambitions in favor of his previous trade, fraud, while his nephew Salem is being sought on a murder warrant in connection with the assassination of, coincidentally, the head of [...]

The author of “Imperial Hubris,” the critique of US anti-terrorism policy written by a semi-anonymous CIA analyst—the former head of the CIA’s bin Laden unit—did an interview with Agence France Presse in which he reiterated his view that US actions in Iraq had created a recruiting windfall for al Qaeda and “al Qaeda-ism.”
According to AFP, [...]

Juan Cole has an update on the story about the US blowing Pakistan’s al Qaeda double agent. It’s a doozy.

I am really, truly sick of people who characterize themselves as liberal hawks saying that they couldn’t anticipate all the things going wrong in Iraq that opponents of the Iraq invasion publicly anticipated. “I wuz hypnotahzed!” Bah.
That’s all.

is a monthly online magazine devoted to photojournalism, photography and related topics. Every issue includes a photoessay or portfolio, sometimes from more than one artist or shooter, along with an increasing number of text features and essays. (It’s the site where I found the photoessay, “The Wall,” which I’ve mentioned a number of times in [...]

Bush* names self as CIA director
10 August, 2004
by BTC News
Washington (BTC News) – President Bush* today stunned observers inside the beltway and around the country by appointing himself to head the CIA. Although the previous President Bush served as CIA director prior to serving as vice president and president, no U.S. president has held both [...]

I’m not sure whether it’s meant to convey steadfastness in the event Nicaragua finally invades, or just a general willingness to help should the need arise to coordinate heavy armor across the country. That tag line, though — “Consider the dots connected” — has a very spooky ring to it. The ad is playing on [...]

I was and remain disgusted by most of the press coverage of the Democratic convention. (The bloggers weren’t any great shakes either, but I’m not sure why anyone expected much from them.) I just finished reading an essay on the convention by Andrew O’Hagan in the London Review of Books, and at the same time [...]

puts Osama to shame.
A scientist has attacked the inaction over a threat from a dangerous volcano in the Canary Islands which could send a tidal wave crashing against the US.
Bill McGuire of the Benfield Grieg Hazard Research Centre said no one was keeping a proper watch on the mountain.
If Cumbre Vieja volcano erupts, [...]

Now that the Washington Post has joined the New York Times in admitting that it pretty much bailed on its obligation to the public with respect to coverage of the prospective invasion of Iraq during the year prior to the invasion, we’ve seen two of the three most widely read national papers fess up. The [...]

The photo below is from NYU’s Global Beat service. The caption reads, “A U.S. soldier looks for supporters of Iraq’s rebellious Shiite leader Moqtada al-Sadr.” Everybody’s scared.

Lee Smith in Slate on the obligation of the press to mute its adversarial tendencies during time of war. Among other gems, he says the press should begin by assuming the administration “is a rational actor.” Smith apparently thinks the press was too hard on the administration during the runup to the invasion of Iraq. [...]

The Oregonian reported last Saturday on a unit of Oregon National Guard soldiers who were ordered to leave be a group of Iraqis the soldiers found abusing prisoners in a holding area adjoining the Interior Ministry. In a followup today, the reporter who broke the initial story reports that he received an email from a [...]

I learned a new acronym a few days ago: BOHICA. It stands for “Bend Over, Here It Comes Again.”
A number of administration luminaries haven’t been much in evidence of late. Colin Powell turns up in the odd third-world country now and again; Steven Friedman, the Bush* economic guru, and Greg Mankiw, the other economic guru, [...]

Via Atrios:
For more than two hours after the Federal Aviation Administration became aware that the first plane had been violently overtaken by Middle Eastern men, the man whose job it was to order air cover over Washington did not show up in the Pentagon’s command center. It took him almost two hours to “gain situational [...]