“You shouldn’t be worried about being spied on by your government,” says a Los Angeles sherriff, because you already are. . . . → Read More: Privacy concerns unwarranted because you have no privacy
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A memo from the US embassy in Iraq to the US state department offers a bleak assessment of life for Iraqi employees of the embassy. As dark as it is, though, the memo may be more significant for what it doesn’t say. Washington Post columnist Al Kamen got a copy of the memo (Acrobat file) and described it in a one-paragraph story last Friday. The memo was sent, says Kamen, “[h]ours before President Bush left on a surprise trip last Monday to the Green Zone in Baghdad for an upbeat assessment of the situation there.” (Juan Cole has a transcription of the memo here.) The description of conditions in Baghdad isn’t much different from that provided by just about any source other than the official pronouncements of the US government; it doesn’t make news in that sense. Employees, the memo says, are afraid to reveal that they work for the US because it could get them killed; they’re living without electricity most of the time in Iraq’s 100+-degree summer heat; they don’t trust Iraqi security forces; the women are increasingly forced to wear traditional garments, sometimes including veils; sectarian tensions even within families are rising; neighborhoods have formed their own governments, often consisting of outsiders; and employees’ relatives and neighbors are abandoning their homes and sometimes Iraq in large numbers. Continue reading The dog that didn’t bark in Khalilzad memo to Rice A memo from the US embassy in Iraq to the US state department offers a bleak assessment of life for Iraqi employees of the embassy. As dark as it is, though, the memo may be more significant for what it doesn’t say. . . . → Read More: Bad news in Khalilzad Iraq memo to Rice obscures worse news Roger Ailes wrote last Monday about shlock jock Howard Kurtz’s penetrating interview with Amanda Congdon of Rocketboom fame. Congdon, we learn, is young, hot and fond of brevity. Kurtz, we learn, is none of these things, although he confesses to being one of them some years ago. . . . → Read More: Promoting stupidity, violence and bigotry for fun and profit Adherents to the Democratic Leadership Council’s concrete overshoes philosophy refer to themselves as “New Democrats.” Joe Lieberman’s refusal to rule out leaving the Democratic party if he loses his primary fight to challenger Ned Lamont, Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee head Chuck Schumer’s refusal to rule out supporting Lieberman if he does leave and DLC president Bruce Reed’s brief paeans to Republicans Dan Coats, John McCain and Michael Gerson suggest that there’s a “New New Democrat” waiting in the wings. . . . → Read More: Redefining the New Democrats Someone claiming to be “the man named Wissam al-Zahawie” responded this week on Slate.com’s message board to noted British romancer Christopher Hitchens’ April 10, 2006, Slate article in which Hitchens charged Zahawie, once Saddam’s envoy to the Vatican, with being a raving anti-Semite whose love of Wagner places him in dangerously close approximation to Hitler. . . . → Read More: Zahawie strikes back Slate magazine has two offerings related to the centrist blogfest in Las Vegas over the weekend, one from Bruce Reed and one from John Dickerson. Reed, the current president of that millstone around the Democratic party’s neck known as the Democratic Leadership Council, writes from the perspective of someone who dearly wants bloggers such as those attending the Yearly Kos confab to sit down and shut up; Dickerson, Slate’s chief political correspondent, focuses more on bloggers as a media phenomenom. . . . → Read More: The Democratic Leadership Council: Al Davis In Petticoats The suicides of three inmates in the US gulag at Guantanamo Bay have US officials screaming “foul.” One says the suicides were”a good PR move.” Another says they were a form of asymmetrical warfare, and still another invoked 911 as a comparably unpredictable and diabolically clever act. . . . → Read More: Is America the real victim of the Guantanamo suicides? Remember when “compromise” meant finding some acceptable intermediate position between opposing viewpoints? . . . → Read More: Your “Democracy” at Work |
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More than 100 Iraqis kidnapped from Baghdad plant
Kidnapping countermeasures taken by Iraqi employees were among the chilling details in the US Iraq embassy memo to Condoleeza Rice. “Planning for their own possible abduction,” the memo says, employees “use code names for friends and colleagues and contacts entered into Iraq cell phones.” Today’s news that more than 100 Iraqi government employees were kidnapped while leaving their jobs at an industrial facility near Baghdad highlights the nightmare. . . . → Read More: More than 100 Iraqis kidnapped from Baghdad plant