Calvo, Ivins and Another 9/11 Anniversary

“Are you telling me tens of millions of Americans are involved with al-Qaeda?” … “These are tens of millions of Americans who are not suspected of anything” — Sen. Patrick Leahy, then-ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, May 2006, on the news that telecom companies had handed domestic [...]

We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting to Spy On

Commit yourself to party loyalty and you must go along for the stomach-churning moral roller coaster ride. But fall in with a cult of personality and you won’t even notice the contortions of logic necessary to stay true. Keith Olbermann has been a keen, if personally annoying (no humorous remark shall pass out of his mouth unescorted by [...]

Priorities

I have just been reading about Italian businessman Raffaello Follieri, who reportedly fraudulently convinced New York investors that he was a Vatican financial officer who would be able to obtain redundant church properties at knock down prices for redevelopment.  Follieri would not even be having his fifteen minutes of fame but for the fact that [...]

Bush Wins, Again, Over Expanded Spy Powers

The Republican Party may be headed full-steam for loserville this November, but that hasn’t stopped it from again leveraging the Democrats’ infamous insecurities over the War on Terror to pull off what is now being considered another capitulation by the majority party in congress.
Senate leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi stood at a [...]

String ‘Em Up and Ask Questions Later

I was sickened today in reading the Washington Post front page article “CIA Played Larger Role in Advising Pentagon.”  The article states that a CIA “counterterrorism lawyer” named Jonathan Fredman had counseled the military authorities running Guantanamo that torture is basically “subject to perception” noting that CIA had “well trained individuals” to “perform this technique,” and [...]

Good Will

George Will — lauded as “the right’s most enduring elder statesman” by Jacob Heilbrunn in the New York Times last weekend — had a very good column yesterday about the Supreme Court’s Boumediene decision. Will drips scorn on John McCain’s proclamation that this ruling, which should shut down the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, [...]