Archive for September, 2007
If At First You Don’t Succeed
Omar Khadr is no innocent trapped in Guantanamo Bay because someone turned him in for the bounty. By all accounts, he is a genuine terrorist. But he was also just 15 years old when he was captured in Afghanistan (in a raid in which he killed Special Forces Sgt. Christopher Speer with a grenade), and [...]
The State Department On Blackwater USA
It shouldn’t come as a surprise at this point, but all they got is lies: A State Department official asked why the military is shifting the question to State “since the DOD has more Blackwater contractors than we do, including people doing PSD [personal security detail] for them. . . . They’ve [Blackwater] basically got [...]
Hypocrite-in-Chief
(1) Sen. Charles E. Grassley had a really interesting revelation yesterday about President Bush‘s staunch opposition to the bipartisan proposal for expanding the popular State Children’s Health Insurance Program: With a five-year, $35 billion expansion of the children’s health insurance program due for a final vote in the House today, Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) [...]
Adventures In Supporting Democracy
The Telegraph, U.K., has a curious story about the U.S reaction to Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf‘s recent moves to expel or arrest political opponents: The United States demanded yesterday that President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan release hundreds of political opponents as tension mounted ahead of his planned re-election attempt. Pakistani police detained dozens of opposition [...]
Faster Than The Mind Can Grasp
The Supreme Court has agreed to hear 17 appeals during its upcoming term that begins on October 1: The justices met on Monday to review some 2,000 appeals that piled up during its three-month summer recess and selected the 17 cases to decide. Let’s assume they worked really hard and put in a ten-hour day. [...]
The Sporting Life
This is fantastic: The ball Barry Bonds hit for his record-breaking 756th home run will be branded with an asterisk and sent to the Baseball Hall of Fame, its owner said Wednesday. Fashion designer Marc Ecko, who bought the ball in an online auction, set up a Web site for fans to vote on the [...]
Safe To Leave Now
WaPo‘s Karen DeYoung (may her tribe increase!): Civil war has been averted in Iraq and Iranian intervention there has “ceased to exist,” Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said yesterday. Mission accomplished, huh? Bookmark on DeliciousDigg this postShare on Facebookshare via RedditShare with StumblersTweet about itBookmark in BrowserTell a friend
Lies, Damned Lies And Amazing Coincidences
Of course, Petraeus is just a soldier, and not half a politician too. Of course, Petraeus didn’t cook-to-order the numbers he presented to Congress this month, when he claimed that sectarian violence was down after the surge. This is just an amazing coincidence: Civilian casualty numbers in the Pentagon’s latest quarterly report on Iraq last [...]
The Master Baiting Plan
If this is the quality of military thinking coming out of the Pentagon these days, no wonder the war in Iraq is going so badly: A Pentagon group has encouraged some U.S. military snipers in Iraq to target suspected insurgents by scattering pieces of “bait,” such as detonation cords, plastic explosives and ammunition, and then [...]
Worst Non-Denial Denial Ever
It’s always refreshing to find out what happens when the government outsources big important projects, like the $1 billion IT contract awarded to Unisys a few years ago: The FBI is investigating allegations that Unisys Corp failed to detect a Chinese Web site’s cyber break-ins on computers at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and [...]