But for now, I defer to your obvious suffering.
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When George Bush beats you in the dignity department...it's a pretty bad sign.
...did Elvis do the Robot?
Dude is the Elaine Benes of dancing politicians.
(AFP/Paul J. Richards)
Two years ago the US military invited Mr Mujahid, a former Afghan police commander accused of plotting against the United States, to prove his innocence before a special military tribunal. As was his right, Mr Mujahid called four witnesses from Afghanistan.
But months later the tribunal president returned with bad news: the witnesses could not be found. Mr Mujahid's hopes sank and he was returned to the wire-mesh cell where he remains today.
The Guardian searched for Mr Mujahid's witnesses and found them within three days. One was working for President Hamid Karzai. Another was teaching at a leading American college. The third was living in Kabul. The fourth, it turned out, was dead. Each witness said he had never been approached by the Americans to testify in Mr Mujahid's hearing.
The case illustrates the egregious flaws that have discredited Guantánamo-style justice and which led the US supreme court to declare such trials illegal on Thursday in a major rebuke to the Bush administration. Mr Mujahid is one of 380 Guantánamo detainees whose cases were reviewed at "combatant-status review tribunals" in 2004 and 2005. The tribunals were hastily set up following a court ruling that the prisoners, having been denied all normal legal rights, should be allowed to prove their innocence. Ten of the hearings proceeded to full trials, including that of Osama bin Laden's aide, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, who brought the successful supreme court appeal.
But by the time the review tribunals ended last year the US government had located just a handful of the requested witnesses. None was brought from overseas to testify. The military lawyers simply said they were "non-contactable".
That was not entirely true.
"They'll leave the wank on for ya'"
As noted in my earlier dispatches, NATO's commanders have devised an intriguing strategy—a revival of classic counterinsurgency theory, combined with high-tech communications and more than a dollop of precision air power—but the real question is whether Afghanistan is too far gone for any strategy to matter.
So, Secretary Rice was in a tough spot as she stood there yesterday in Kabul, touting our great friendship with Karzai, pledging not to abandon him like we abandoned Afghanistan before—but, in the end, having no rabbit, or other magic tricks, to pull from her sleeve.
Still, if the point of her visit was to reaffirm our support for Karzai and to extinguish all doubt about America's intentions to stick around for the long haul, she tarnished her credibility by lacing her messages with so much blatant nonsense.
The love fest began with an elaborate welcoming ceremony on the South Lawn and an exchange of gifts inside afterward. Koizumi gave the sports-loving president a bike and an enlarged version of the Japanese postage stamp that features Babe Ruth. The Bushes gave the Elvis-loving prime minister a refurbished 1954 jukebox that includes 25 songs by his favorite singer.
"Prime Minister Koizumi searched the keys and found 'I Want You, I Need You, I Love You,'" first lady Laura Bush said. "He and the president sang a duet."
In the evening, the Bushes were hosting a formal dinner, the eighth of their White House tenure. It was in honor of Koizumi, who leaves office in September after five years in office.
The divorced Koizumi did not have a date. He made his entrance between the president and Mrs. Bush, who wore a taupe dress by Bill Blass with cherry blossoms hand-painted on the Chantilly lace bodice.
The guest list included two Japanese-American Olympic athletes — speed skater Apolo Anton Ohno and figure skater Kristi Yamaguchi — astronaut Soichi Noguchi and baseball great Hank Aaron.
On Friday, the U.S. and Japanese leaders had their sights set on Graceland, Presley's mansion in Memphis Their tour guides: Elvis' former wife, Priscilla, and his daughter, Lisa Marie Presley.
Bush paid Koizumi the ultimate compliment, comparing the prime minister to Elvis, who Bush noted also once visited the White House.
"Like you, he had great hair," Bush joked during the dinner toasts. "Like you, he was known to sing in public. And like you, he won admirers in countries far from home."
Koizumi gave the president a pop culture compliment in return.
"I would like to pay my sincerest respects to President Bush, who has been so steadfast and determined in protecting freedom and justice. I sometimes see the image of the United States as Gary Cooper in my favorite movie, 'High Noon,'" Koizumi said in his toast, drawing a shoulder-shaking laugh from Bush.
At the White House, they dined on beef with cracked black pepper, shitake mushroom jus, silver corn pilaf and sesame-coated wild asparagus. The gold-colored china was from the Clinton administration.
Also on the menu: Maryland she crab soup; jicama and cucumber chiffonade; and an ornate desert modeled after a bonsai garden, with a chocolate tree on a base of kumquat-stuffed cherries, surrounded by miniature chocolate pagodas.
The Japanese theme extended to the decorations.
The tables were covered in green silk and large spheres of green cymbidium orchids, which grow in the wild in Japan. The orchids rested on top of tall clear glass cylinders that allowed guests to see each other across the table.
Three bonsai trees on loan from the National Arboretum were set up in the Grand Foyer. The menus themselves were decorated with a drawing of a blossom from the cherry trees that were given to the U.S. as a symbol of friendship from the Japanese nearly 100 years ago.
The entertainment was provided by the Brian Setzer Orchestra, known for song "Jump Jive An' Wail."
The formal part of the evenining ended and the two leaders retired to the White House's private quarters where the two leaders touched each others' respective hunks of burning love well into the morning hours.
Thomas refers to Justice John Paul Stevens’ “unfamiliarity with the realities of warfare” in his dissenting opinion. ACSBlog notes: “Stevens served in the U.S. Navy from 1942 to 1945, during World War II. Thomas’s official bio, by contrast, contains no experience of military service.”
Re: Dick Clarke [John Podhoretz]
Gee, the fact that Clarke has a monthly column in the Times Magazine couldn't have anything to do with his defense of the Times, could it?
Posted at 1:10 AM
More importantly, the Court held that Common Article 3 of Geneva aplies as a matter of treaty obligation to the conflict against Al Qaeda. That is the HUGE part of today's ruling. The commissions are the least of it. This basically resolves the debate about interrogation techniques, because Common Article 3 provides that detained persons "shall in all circumstances be treated humanely," and that "[t]o this end," certain specified acts "are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever"—including "cruel treatment and torture," and "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment." This standard, not limited to the restrictions of the due process clause, is much more restrictive than even the McCain Amendment. . . . If I'm right about this, it's enormously significant."
the court's decision would "sorely hamper the president's ability to confront and defeat a new and deadly enemy."
The court's willingness, Thomas said, "to second-guess the determination of the political branches that these conspirators must be brought to justice is both unprecedented and dangerous."
[Hillary Clinton] seems like someone who might calculatedly go to war, or not, based on how she wanted to be perceived and look and do. She does not seem like someone who would anguish and weep over sending men into harm's way.
As he sat behind his Oval Office desk just before he addressed the US on Wednesday night, Dubya picked up a copy of his speech in which he would tell the world that he had launched military strikes to topple Saddam.
According to one who witnessed the scene on a TV monitor, the president shook his fist, turned to an aide elsewhere in the room and said, with feeling: "Feels good!"
So relaxed and playful was he at this sombre moment that, when the BBC cut to him just before the start of his speech while he was having his hair and make-up finished, he was grinning and cracking jokes.
Bush the Younger would breastfeed the military if he could.
Osama bin Laden will issue a videotaped message paying tribute to slain al-Qaida in Iraq chief Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a message posted on an Islamic militant Web site said Wednesday.
Did you ever know that you're my hero,
and everything I would like to be?
I can fly higher than an eagle,
for you are the wind beneath my wings.
And death for America, vote Republican!
Outstanding public service.
Good hardball politics.
Why that's TREASON!
For all the talk about freedom of speech and individual freedom in the United States, ours is actually a hierarchical society in which most people cannot afford to speak out unless they are themselves independently wealthy. A lot of Americans work for corporations, which would just fire anyone who became so outspoken in public as to begin to affect their company's image. Look at how many bloggers are anonymous! Purveyors of opinion in the mass media, who use their real names, are employed by, or in some way backed by, media moguls. It is fairly easy to depart from the spectrum of acceptable opinion (i.e. acceptable to the three million or so people who have disproprotionate weight in how America is run), and if one does, after a while one is not heard from so much any more. Thus, those attacking Kos work for Martin Peretz and Arthur Shulzberger, Jr., and if they didn't they would not have their current influential perches.
The very wealthy are used to getting their way in US politics and to dominating public discourse, since so much can be controlled at choke points. Journalists can just be fired, editors and other movers and shakers bought or intimidated. Look what happened to MSNBC reporter Ashleigh Banfield, who dared complain about the propaganda in the US new media around the Iraq War. Phil Donohue, who presided over MSNBC's most popular talk show, was apparently fired before the war because General Electric and Microsoft knew he would be critical of it, and did not want to take the heat. Politicians who step out of line can just be unseated by giving their opponents funding (the Supreme Court just made it harder to restrict this sort of thing).
Cold open: We see Dave sitting with our old friend Jude . Dave attempts to make conversation.
Dave: "Big plans for the 4th?"
Jude: "No."
Dave: "I was thinking maybe you might want to come over and we could grill up some burgers."
Jude: (beat) "We're not friends. I don't like you. You use money and fame to bully those around you. You're actually the most unlikable person it's ever been my misfortune to know."
Dave: (beat) "If you don't want to do burgers, we could maybe go see a movie."
FNC programming VP "Bill Shine is testing several pilots, and this is one of them," an FNC spokesperson says...
Last week, TVNewser asked if Fox was working on a show pilot styled after Jon Stewart's Daily Show on Comedy Central. Then yesterday, TVNewser asked if conservative talk show host Laura Ingraham was at FNC shooting something over the weekend.
The answers are yes and yes, and they're apparently related. An anonymous tipster says Ingraham's pilot is known as "Watch This Right Now." The tipster calls it "an absolutely terrible rip off of Daily Show" including a "music and video montage" and "mouth replacement of known news figures." (Huh?) "They want to keep it a secret so they hired all freelance tech people," the tipster adds. "The writers and producers should be embarassed to show this one to Roger."
Movie great JAMES STEWART was forced to prove he wasn't gay by bedding two hookers, according to an explosive new biography.
Movie mogul LOUIS B MAYER reportedly instructed the IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE star to prove to him he wasn't a homosexual before offering him a film deal, sending the actor off to find a couple of prostitutes.
Bush has called the disclosure "disgraceful," looking far angrier (or fake-angrier) than he ever did about the Katrina fuckup.
QUESTION: I know you’ve said you are not planning to see Al Gore’s new movie, but do you agree with the premise that global warming is a real and significant threat to the planet?
BUSH: I think it’s — I have said consistently that global warming something is a serious problem.
The father of a man accused in a terrorism plot to blow up Chicago's Sears Tower said Saturday he was at a loss to explain how his son was suspected of leading such a group.
"He's not in his right mind, I'll tell you that," Narcisse Batiste, 72, said in an interview at his home here in central Louisiana.
And, right on cue, we have the New York Times weighing in with a well-timed leak promising major U.S. troop reduction, beginning two months before the November elections. Now isn't that a coincidence?
The top American commander in Iraq has drafted a plan that projects sharp reductions in the United States military presence there by the end of 2007, with the first cuts coming this September, American officials say.
The next step, of course, will be for the same people who three days ago were demanding the execution of John Kerry and John Murtha for even daring to suggest a withdrawal timetable to immediately begin calling for a withdrawal timetable -- that is, when they're not hailing the Cheney administration for having won a smashing victory in Iraq. In fact it's already started.
I really should have seen this coming. The tip off was the proposed amnesty for killers of U.S troops floated by one of Maliki's aides several weeks ago, which was immediately greeted by a bevy of GOP heel clickers as the second coming of Nelson Mandela (thus stacking one stinking pile of hypocrisy on top of another.) In hindsight, it's easy to see that they were just warming up for the BIG flip flop.
"The group apparently did little to inspire fear in the Liberty City neighborhood where they took up residence. A close family friend and a distance cousin of Stanley Grant Phanor described the leader of the group, Narseal Batiste, as a "Moses-like figure" who would roam the streets in a cape or bathrobe, toting a crooked wooden cane and looking for young men to join his group.
The attacks and suicide bombings that have ripped through hundreds of mosques and shrines across Iraq are affecting Muslims profoundly, causing some to abandon Friday group prayers in the mosques, one of the holiest Muslim rites. Prayer is one of Islam's five pillars, and the Koran encourages worshipers to pray in groups on Fridays.
For most of the past six months, Iraq drifted without a government and its security forces largely stood by and watched at crucial moments, like the one in February when Shiite militias killed Sunnis after the bombing of a sacred shrine.
Now, as Iraqi leaders in the Green Zone savor their recent successes — the naming of the first full-term government since the fall of Saddam Hussein and the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Iraq's most wanted guerrilla leader — Iraqis outside its walls are more frightened than ever. Neighborhood after neighborhood in western Baghdad has fallen to insurgents, with some areas bordering on anarchy. Bodies lie on the streets for hours. Trash is no longer collected. Children are home-schooled.
The paralysis that shut down life in western Baghdad is creeping ever closer to the heart of the city, and Iraqis in still-livable areas are frantic for the government to halt its advance, something the new leadership pledged to do when it started its new security plan for Baghdad last week.
"It's like a cancer, spreading from area to area," said a guard at Delta Communications, a Mansour cellphone shop that has been shuttered since a bomb blast in front of it last month.
I've know John Kerry for over thirty five years. Unlike me-he is a combat veteran, so he gets some props, but in the last thirty five years, I've seen a hell of a lot more combat than John Kerry...
Coulter was escorted to the garden party by Slate's Mickey Kaus.
THE Iraqi Government will announce a sweeping peace plan as early as Sunday in a last-ditch effort to end the Sunni insurgency that has taken the country to the brink of civil war.
The 28-point package for national reconciliation will offer Iraqi resistance groups inclusion in the political process and an amnesty for their prisoners if they renounce violence and lay down their arms, The Times can reveal.
The Government will promise a finite, UN-approved timeline for the withdrawal of all foreign troops from Iraq; a halt to US operations against insurgent strongholds; an end to human rights violations, including those by coalition troops; and compensation for victims of attacks by terrorists or Iraqi and coalition forces.
The Bush administration will have to explain why it thinks it can ignore or overrule laws passed by Congress in a hearing next week, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter said Wednesday...
..."Our legislation doesn't amount to anything if the president can say, 'My constitutional authority supersedes the statute.' And I think we've got to lay down the gauntlet and challenge him on it," Specter said in a telephone interview.
At least 25 people have been executed gangland-style in Iraq's third-largest city this week, with residents gunned down in ones and twos and bodies found scattered throughout Mosul.
Bush Compares Iraq War to Hungary's Uprising
Roberts, who has stalled endlessly to prevent the completion of the investigation into whether public officials cooked the intel in crafting their pre-war public statements, may now be ensuring that it will never be completed.
Earth hottest in 400 years
Panel says humans responsible for much of the warming
The National Academy of Sciences, reaching that conclusion in a broad review of scientific work requested by Congress, reported Thursday that the "recent warmth is unprecedented for at least the last 400 years and potentially the last several millennia."
A panel of top climate scientists told lawmakers that the Earth is running a fever and that "human activities are responsible for much of the recent warming." Their 155-page report said average global surface temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere rose about 1 degree during the 20th century.
The report was requested in November by the chairman of the House Science Committee, Rep. Sherwood Boehlert, R-New York, to address naysayers who question whether global warming is a major threat.
Last year, when the House Energy and Commerce Committee chairman, Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, launched an investigation of three climate scientists, Boehlert said Barton should try to learn from scientists, not intimidate them.
The White House has completely failed in Iraq. They can't run a war, but they can run political campaigns. So, now the Bush administration is treating the Iraq war as just another political operation. It's all about politics for them:
But people who attended a series of high-level meetings this month between White House and Congressional officials say President Bush's aides argued that it could be a politically fatal mistake for Republicans to walk away from the war in an election year.
CNN's Dana Bash just said the GOP is "downright giddy" about the current debate. They're all loving it.
In Austria, that unpopularity is particularly acute: a recent poll by the Vienna-based News magazine found that 72 percent of those surveyed found Bush to be unlikable and a danger to world peace.
Santorum showed up to do his thing with Peter Hoekstra on H&C and it took one phone call by Jim Angle of FOX News to debunk Santorum's WMD claims today. That's pretty embarrassing when the Dick Cheney network undermines him. Hannity was all excited and tried to say that WMD's were only "a part of the reason we went Iraq."
Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), chairman of the House intelligence committee, and Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) told reporters yesterday that weapons of mass destruction had in fact been found in Iraq, despite acknowledgments by the White House and the insistence of the intelligence community that no such weapons had been discovered...
Last night, intelligence officials reaffirmed that the shells were old and were not the suspected weapons of mass destruction sought in Iraq after the 2003 invasion.
Padilla was designated an "enemy combatant" and held for 3 1/2 years without charge by the Bush administration shortly after his May 2002 arrest. He was accused then of plotting to detonate a radioactive "dirty bomb" in a major U.S. city.
Padilla was added as a defendant in the Miami terror support cell case last year amid a legal struggle over President Bush's authority to hold him indefinitely. The Miami indictment does not mention the "dirty bomb" allegations.
A federal judge ordered prosecutors to turn over more evidence to back up allegations that Jose Padilla and two co-defendants conspired to kill, injure or kidnap people overseas as part of a global Islamic terrorist network.
U.S. District Judge Marcia Cooke said Tuesday she agreed with claims made by defense attorneys that the indictment against Padilla and the others is "very light on facts" that would link the defendants to specific acts of terrorism or victims.