It’s always nice to get confirmation of the self-evident. The Australian Broadcasting corporation has obtained emails from two former military prosecutors claiming that, in the words of one prosecutor, the trials are “a half-hearted and disorganised effort by a skeleton group of relatively inexperienced attorneys to prosecute fairly low-level accused in a process that . . . → Read More: Prosecutors: Guantanamo trials rigged

Washington Post reporters Ellen Knickmeyer and Omar Fekeiki filed a story from Baghdad tonight about a move by Iraq’s Interior Minister banning alcohol sales at Baghdad International Airport.

The airport duty-free shop so far has refused to comply with the order by Salam Maliki. Airport officials said Maliki threatened to have the store’s $800,000 supply of alcoholic beverages destroyed.

The alcohol ban heightened fears of some more-secular Iraqis that the Shiite Muslim majority might seek to impose a rigid interpretation of Islamic law in Iraq, traditionally considered to be tolerant in its observance of religious law. The order followed a visit Maliki made this month with other government officials to Iran, which is controlled by fundamentalist Shiite clerics.

Passengers arriving at the airport are still subjected to the diving spiral approach taken to avoid possible missile attacks from insurgents, and departing passengers must survive a helicopter ride to the airport or the world’s most expensive taxi ride down the world’s most dangerous stretch of highway. (If Don Rumsfeld is looking for a good metric of success in Iraq, he might want to keep tabs on the price of that high-speed dash from the Green Zone to the airport. When it drops back to last year’s $6,000 from the current $35,000 we can declare victory and leave, assuming the administration actually wants to leave.)

Continue reading Who do you have to kill to get a drink around here?

According to Title 18, Section 1621 of the US Code, anyone who “in any declaration, certificate, verification, or statement under penalty of perjury as permitted under section 1746 of title 28, United States Code, willfully subscribes as true any material matter which he does not believe to be true” has committed perjury.

On July . . . → Read More: Did John Bolton commit perjury?

Associated Press reports that after weeks of denials, the State Department acknowledged tonight that contrary to assurances provided a Senate committee, the Bush administration’s nominee for the position of US ambassador to the UN lied on a form asking whether he had been interviewd for or testified to a grand jury in any investigation . . . → Read More: John Bolton: Another inoperative administration claim

The bottom line is that no matter the corruption and incompetence and inefficiencies that sometimes bedevil unions, every advance in the rights of workers has been good for this country. We need a strong middle class, and unions have been the springboard out of poverty and into if not affluence, at least security. Union insistence on decent working conditions and environmental protections has been the driving force behind many of the protections working Americans enjoy whether or not they’re unionized; for every former hippie and Nader disciple in the environmental movement there’s a steelworker or a meatpacker who has had just as much of an impact, whose demands for a safer environment inside the plant have helped create a safer one outside it as well. Those are the people Democrats need to support, and if a few Democratic politicians lose their jobs and the swanky benefits that come with those jobs because Andy Stern is busy helping less well-paid workers keep their jobs and get benefits amounting to a fraction of what Congresscritters get, well, tough. Any Democrat who can go to the doctor for free or pick up a $5 prescription at the pharmacy or collect that $10,000 paycheck every month and doesn’t think about what he or she can do for people living on a quarter of that or less with few or none of the benefits doesn’t deserve to be called a Democrat and certainly doesn’t deserve to be in office. . . . → Read More: Solidarity Forever?