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Archive: POLITICS

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Precisely

The "war on terror" has created a culture of fear in America. The Bush administration's elevation of these three words into a national mantra since the horrific events of 9/11 has had a pernicious impact on American democracy, on America's psyche and on U.S. standing in the world. Using this phrase has actually undermined our ability to effectively confront the real challenges we face from fanatics who may use terrorism against us.

The damage these three words have done -- a classic self-inflicted wound -- is infinitely greater than any wild dreams entertained by the fanatical perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks when they were plotting against us in distant Afghan caves. The phrase itself is meaningless. It defines neither a geographic context nor our presumed enemies. Terrorism is not an enemy but a technique of warfare -- political intimidation through the killing of unarmed non-combatants.

The above is from Zbigniew Brzezinski's OP-ED in today's Washington Post

Gag Orders

Yet another example of how this Administration has abused the rights of U.S. citizens. Here's the lede from an editorial in today's Washington Post:

The Justice Department's inspector general revealed on March 9 that the FBI has been systematically abusing one of the most controversial provisions of the USA Patriot Act: the expanded power to issue "national security letters." It no doubt surprised most Americans to learn that between 2003 and 2005 the FBI issued more than 140,000 specific demands under this provision -- demands issued without a showing of probable cause or prior judicial approval -- to obtain potentially sensitive information about U.S. citizens and residents. It did not, however, come as any surprise to me.

Three years ago, I received a national security letter (NSL) in my capacity as the president of a small Internet access and consulting business. The letter ordered me to provide sensitive information about one of my clients. There was no indication that a judge had reviewed or approved the letter, and it turned out that none had. The letter came with a gag provision that prohibited me from telling anyone, including my client, that the FBI was seeking this information. Based on the context of the demand -- a context that the FBI still won't let me discuss publicly -- I suspected that the FBI was abusing its power and that the letter sought information to which the FBI was not entitled.

The full editorial

Outside of Baghdad

Frequently one hears, when listening to the spin of Bush Administration spokespeople, that the serious, violent problems in Iraq are mostly confined to Baghdad. But like so much of what the Administration, Tony Blair, and their apologists have been spewing for over six years now, that claim is false.

Patrick Cockburn, who works for The Independent (UK), has been filing brutally honest reports throughout the war, reports which have therefore been striking contrasts to most of what we have been exposed to in the mainstream U.S. media. Here's an excerpt from Cockburn's piece in today's paper:

The difficulty of reporting Iraq is that it is impossibly dangerous to know what is happening in most of the country outside central Baghdad. Bush and Blair hint that large parts of Iraq are at peace; untrue, but difficult to disprove without getting killed in the attempt. My best bet was to go to Sulaymaniyah, an attractive city ringed by snow-covered mountains in eastern Kurdistan. I would then drive south, sticking to a road running through Kurdish towns and villages to Khanaqin, a relatively safe Kurdish enclave in north-east Diyala province, one of the more violent places in Iraq.

We start for the south through heavy rain, and turn sharp east at Kalar, a grubby Kurdish town, to Jalawlah, a mixed Kurdish and Arab town where there has been fighting. Ominously, there are few trucks coming towards us. I was on this road last year and it was crowded with them.

We go to the heavily guarded office of the deputy head of the PUK, Mamosta Saleh, who says the situation in Diyala is getting worse. The insurgents have control of Baquba, the provincial capital. He says: "They are also attacking a Kurdish tribe called the Zargosh in the Hamrin mountains." Security is so bad that government rations had not been delivered for seven months.

I do the rounds of the town and hear on all sides that "security is good in the centre". Everybody says this in Iraq, even in villages that do not seem to have a centre. I know that six weeks earlier a bomb killed 12 and wounded 40 people in the centre of Khanaqin.

Baquba is only 30 miles from Baghdad. It is as if the government in London had lost control of Reading. I say I want to meet some refugees from Baquba or Baghdad. A grim-looking policeman is given the job of guiding us. We drive a long way out of town behind his red car. Then he stops and talks to some men. The conversation seems too long if he is only asking the way. We are nervous of kidnappers so we race back into town.

Cockburn's full article

The best Beltway Journalist?

Josh Marshall, of course. It's been obvious for a while, in my view, but the U.S. Attorney purge story/scandal has nailed down the honors.

As a related aside, the mainstream media has done a truly pathetic job on this important story, and I'm not referring to their having initially been scooped by a modestly funded blogger. I'm referring to the terrible work which they have done since the story broke, and especially since it became so apparent that the Justice Department and the Administration have been lying throughout.

Here's another superb post from Josh, who, as I've implied, is truly the only one worth listening to on this story.

The U.S. Attorney Purge, Simplified

For the benefit of those of you who are confused by the reporting on the U.S. Attorney purge story, Josh Marshall, who has absolutely driven the story from the outset, cuts to the heart of the scandal in a recent post:

There are many people in this conversation trying to avoid the issues, confuse the issues or just ignore them. And more than a few people are just plain confused. But it's not that complicated. Administration officials have repeatedly and demonstrably lied about the firings. And there is now abundant evidence of a pattern of using the president's power to hire and fire US Attorneys to stymie public corruption investigations of Republicans and use the Justice Department to harass Democrats by mounting investigations of demonstrably bogus 'voter fraud' claims. It's really that simple.

In the same post, Josh explodes the outrageous canard being parroted by Administration officials and apologists alike: that Clinton's firing of all 93 U.S. Attorneys at the beginning of his term (also done by GHWB and Reagan) was a worse offense:

As the Congressional Research Service has shown, over the last twenty-five years only ten U.S. Attorneys have been dismissed other than at the beginning of a new president's term of office. And of those eight were for clear cause.

Think about it: 10 over the past 25 years, and now Bush fires eight, only one of which might – and even that one is a stretch – have done something to deserve such action.

You can read Josh's full post, and get further background at his TPM

If only it were a movie

Sidney Blumenthal makes some interesting observations in the early paragraphs of his most recent piece at Salon.com:

Leave aside the unintentional irony of President Bush asserting executive privilege to shield his aides from testifying before the Congress in the summary firings of eight U.S. attorneys because the precedent would prevent him from receiving "good advice." Leave aside also his denunciation of the Congress for the impertinence of requesting such testimony as "partisan" and "demanding show trials," despite calls from Republicans for the dismissal of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Ignore as well Bush's adamant defense of Gonzales.

The man Bush has nicknamed "Fredo," the weak and betraying brother of the Corleone family, is, unlike Fredo, a blind loyalist, and will not be dispatched with a shot to the back of the head in a rowboat on the lake while reciting his Ave Maria. (Is Bush aware that Colin Powell refers to him as "Sonny," after the hothead oldest son?) But saving "Fredo" doesn't explain why Bush is willing to risk a constitutional crisis. Why is Bush going to the mattresses against the Congress? What doesn't he want known?

Blumenthal's full piece

The Perfect Storm

(But this disaster was produced in Washington rather than Hollywood.)

“It was a perfect storm that had been building for more than a quarter century,” writes Robert Parry for consortiumnews.com, describing how our system of checks and balances proved utterly useless in preventing what is arguably the worst foreign-policy disaster in the nation’s history. The D.C. war culture that fueled George Bush’s folly was, he writes, “a collision of mutually reinforcing elements: aggressive Republicans, triangulating Democrats, careerist journalists, bullying cable-TV and talk-radio pundits, aggressive and well-funded think tanks on the Right versus ineffectual and marginalized groups on the Left.”

Robert Koehler expands on Roberts Parry's excellent above summary.

"Performance Related" My ass

We have heard, ad nauseum, from the Bush administration and its apologists, that the firings of the now famous eight U.S. Attorneys were completely justifiable on the basis that they were "performance related". Well, if having watched the Administration's consistent pattern of dishonest partisan politics over the past six years wasn't enough to have you scoffing in disgust at that transparent excuse, perhaps this AP story will. Here's the lede:

Six of the eight U.S. attorneys fired by the Justice Department ranked in the top third among their peers for the number of prosecutions filed last year, according to an analysis of federal records.

In addition, five of the eight were among the government's top performers in winning convictions.

via Josh Marshall

UPDATE: Here's a very interesting related post from Kevin Drum, and more on the SF Attorney here

Any questions?

Of course the following is likely to lead to many more questions, but for those who were still unsure about whether partisan politics played a role in the the firings of the eight U.S. Attorneys, David Iglesias' Op-Ed in the NY Times should put that one to bed. Here's a damning excerpt:

United States attorneys have a long history of being insulated from politics. Although we receive our appointments through the political process (I am a Republican who was recommended by Senator Pete Domenici), we are expected to be apolitical once we are in office. I will never forget John Ashcroft, then the attorney general, telling me during the summer of 2001 that politics should play no role during my tenure. I took that message to heart. Little did I know that I could be fired for not being political.

Politics entered my life with two phone calls that I received last fall, just before the November election. One came from Representative Heather Wilson and the other from Senator Domenici, both Republicans from my state, New Mexico.

Ms. Wilson asked me about sealed indictments pertaining to a politically charged corruption case widely reported in the news media involving local Democrats. Her question instantly put me on guard. Prosecutors may not legally talk about indictments, so I was evasive. Shortly after speaking to Ms. Wilson, I received a call from Senator Domenici at my home. The senator wanted to know whether I was going to file corruption charges — the cases Ms. Wilson had been asking about — before November. When I told him that I didn’t think so, he said, “I am very sorry to hear that,” and the line went dead.

Read Iglesias' full piece

Leaks of a different sort

Bush's press conference, as reviewed by the incomparable James Wolcott:

Quite a petulant display our president just put on. Chris Matthews may admire the "fighting tiger" spirit that Bush uncaged once he finished stammering and stumbling through his prepared text, but the very ferocity of Bush's defiance and vocabulary ("show trials," "klieg lights"--as if Pat Leahy were some Stalinist grand inquisitor) suggest that there may be something more to this story, something bigger buried deeper in the weeds. This mini-press conference was the most Nixonian performance of Bush's presidency, and his robotic repetition of the word "reasonable" to characterize his proposal to let Karl Rove, Harriet Miers, and others be interviewed in a shady lagoon (not under oath, no transcripts made) could only remind Watergate buffs of the phrase "modified limited hangout". That's what's so strange about this percolatiing scandal. Instead of defusing it, dousing it, sedating it, Bush & co. have amped it up to a mini-Watergate decibel level of confrontation and document spew, complete with a former Watergate cast member. When Dick Cheney famously told Pat Leahy to go fuck himself, he and the rest of the administration clearly never anticipated the day when Leahy would return to powerful chairmanship; I think they internalized Karl Rove's visionary scheme of a permanent Republican majority and thought the future was in the bag. Now they're holding the bag and it's leaking all over their laps.

JW's blog

Four Years Later

In predictable contrast with the (still mostly compliant) mainstream U.S. media, the U.K.'s Inpedendent distills the situation in Iraq after four years of carnage. Here's an excerpt from Patrick Cockburn's piece:

For Iraqis, every year has been worse than the last since 2003. In November and December last year alone 5,000 civilians were murdered, often tortured to death, according to the UN. This toll compares to 3,000 killed in 30 years of conflict in Northern Ireland. Many Iraqis have voted with their feet, some two million fleeing - mostly to Syria and Jordan - since President George Bush and Tony Blair ordered US and British troops across the Iraqi border four years ago today.

So dangerous is it to travel anywhere in Iraq outside Kurdistan that it is difficult for journalists to provide evidence of the slaughter house the country has become without being killed themselves. Mr Blair and Mr Bush have long implied that the violence is confined to central Iraq. This lie should have been permanently nailed by the Baker-Hamilton report written by senior Republicans and Democrats, which examined one day last summer when the US military had announced that there had been 93 attacks and discovered that the real figure was 1,100. In other words the violence was being understated by a factor of 10.

Read the full article

Honest republicans

One of the interesting – and frankly quite scary – aspects of the consistently outrageous behavior of the Bush administration, is that so many so-called Republicans continue to support its actions even when they are clearly exposed as being dangerously misguided. On the other hand, there are an increasing number of honest Republicans who can no longer, in good conscience, aid and abet the most corrupt, secretive, dishonest, politically motivated, and harmful Administration in U.S. history. Thankfully, former U.S. Attorney Bud Cummins falls squarely into the latter category.

Here's Cummins speaking to Paul Kiel at Josh Marshall's TPM:

"I've heard every one of the [Justice Department's "performance related" issues with the other dismissed US attorneys], and I'm completely convinced at this point that they are fabricated assertions, and that they were in no way on the table when the decisions to dismiss those seven USAs were made.

I gave them the benefit of the doubt at the beginning of this. They told me directly that my case was completely different from the others, that there were significant performance issues involved in the other decisions, and if I saw, I'd agree that they'd have to go.

Now that I've seen the decisions, not only don't I see why they had to go, I see that [the charges of performance issues] are really not true."

Cummins, who is a lifelong Republican, even running for the House once in the nineties, says that this was a ""reluctant conclusion," but one he was forced to reach, and one he felt compelled to speak out about.

"When they made the decision to lie about these seven people to Congress, that's when the trouble started," he said.. Cummins added that if the Justice Department were to retract the statements that the others were fired for deficiencies in performance, "I'll disappear."

TPM Muckraker

Brooks and Alterman

David Brooks puts it this way: "Say what you will about President Bush, when he thinks a policy is right, like the surge, he supports it, even if it's going to be unpopular. The Democratic leaders, accustomed to the irresponsibility of opposition, show no such guts."

[Alterman] I'd have put it this way: "Say what you will about President Bush, when he thinks a policy is right, like the escalation, he supports it, even if it's going continue to kill thousands of people, including our soldiers, for no good reason except to excite further hatred of this country and our citizens as his policies have done so far. The Democratic leaders, accustomed to the irresponsibility of opposition, show no such delusions."

Here Kitty Kitty!

"We've only had subpoena power for the last six weeks and every tree that we've barked up so far has had a cat in it," said a senior Democrat who spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak publicly. "Imagine where we'll be after six months."

From this article at Politico.com

Peter Pace, soldiers, and homosexuals

As some of you know through the headlines, Marine General Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently called homosexuality immoral, likening homosexual acts to adultery, and saying that the military should not condone it by allowing gays to serve openly in the armed forces. Of the fallout from Pace's remarks, the most interesting that I've read was written by the playwright Bill C. Davis. Here's an excerpt:

Pace in Italian means Peace.

His last name is only one irony. The fact that he, an accomplice to the military assault and occupation of Iraq, classifies erotic love between two human-beings of the same sex as immoral redefines the concept of irony. It's more than a cruel irony - it's epic.

For this particular military man a certain kiss is a special sin. A bayonet, a bullet or a bomb are blessed by some divine arbiter. The violent tension of repressed homoeroticism is in the Spartan worship of destructive testosterone that fuels much of the military as it is being used by this administration. Beyond this moment there is a timeless romanticism of buddies side by side killing who they're told to kill - in exacting vengeance when one of their own is hurt or killed - in the passionate desire to get back to the group you were forced to leave because of injuries.

In fact, what is presented as universally beautiful in any war is the fact that soldiers care less about the politics of their mission, or for that matter their wives and girlfriends at home, and much more about the brotherhood. The band of brothers. High romance. A romance that is sullied by a kiss - a passionate erotic kiss is immoral to General Peace. Romantic love between men is useful only to the extent that it encourages violence against the enemy. Tribal fraternal loyalty can be harnessed - erotic emotional connections are destructive to morale and decency. Decency. A kiss is indecent.

Davis' full piece

One-Third

An up-to-date Israeli government register shows that 32.4 percent of the property held by Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank is private, according to the advocacy group that sued the government to obtain the data.

The group, Peace Now, prepared an earlier report in November, also provided to The New York Times, based on a 2004 version of the Israeli government database that had been provided by an official who wanted the information published. Those figures showed that 38.8 percent of the land on which Israeli settlements were built was listed as private Palestinian land.

The data shows a pattern of illegal seizure of private land that the Israeli government has been reluctant to acknowledge or to prosecute, according to the Peace Now report. Israel has long asserted that it fully respects Palestinian private property in the West Bank and takes land there only legally or, for security reasons, temporarily. That large sections of those settlements are now confirmed by official data to be privately held land is bound to create embarrassment for Israel and further complicate the already distant prospect of a negotiated peace.

More from the NY Times

The Heart of the U.S. Attorney Purge story

Courtesy of the man who we all have to thank for driving the story from the very beginning: Josh Marshall.

Getting down to the real nub of the story. Here's a clip from McClatchy's overnight piece ...

"In an e-mail dated May 11, 2006, Sampson urged the White House counsel's office to call him regarding "the real problem we have right now with Carol Lam," who then the U.S. attorney for southern California. Earlier that morning, the Los Angeles Times reported that Lam's corruption investigation of former Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, R-Calif., had expanded to include another California Republican, Rep Jerry Lewis."

Cunningham is currently serving an eight-year prison sentence in Arizona. Lewis has not been charged with any crime. Lam was forced to resign.

In a speech on the Senate floor Tuesday, Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., said he wants to know whether Lam was fired for the Cunningham case or because "she was about to investigate other people who were politically powerful." Lam declined to talk publicly about her dismissal.

I'm going from recollection here. But I think the email they're referring to is one Paul Kiel and I were reading over together this afternoon. If it's the one I'm thinking of, the email clearly gave the sense that there was an unspoken reason for Lam's dismissal. But it was a bit too vague and meandering to really point to any one thing. The date, though, really speaks volumes.

Lam's firing has always been at the heart of this. I've had a lot of people ask me why we devoted so much virtual ink to this story so early. But the truth is that by rights Lam's dismissal should have sounded alarm bells for everyone on day one.

More here and here at Josh's invaluable TPM

UPDATE: Anonymous Liberal beautifully parses out the importance of the e-mails

Guantanamo: Not a Prison (for starters)

Karen J. Greenberg visited the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and tells her surreal story at TomDispatch. Here's are the first few paragraphs:

Several weeks ago, I took the infamous media tour of the facilities at Guantanamo. From the moment I arrived on a dilapidated Air Sunshine plane to the time I boarded it heading home, I had no doubt that I was on a foreign planet or, at the very least, visiting an impeccably constructed movie set. Along with two European colleagues, I was treated to two-days-plus of a military-tour schedule packed with site visits and interviews (none with actual prisoners) designed to "make transparent" the base, its facilities, and its manifold contributions to our country's national security.

The multi-storied, maximum security complexes, rimmed in concertina wire, set off from the road by high wire-mesh fences, and the armed tower guards at Camp Delta, present a daunting sight. Even the less restrictive quarters for "compliant" inmates belied any notion that Guantanamo is merely a holding facility for those awaiting charges or possessing useful information.

In the course of my brief stay, thanks to my military handlers, I learned a great deal about Gitmo decorum, as the military would like us to practice it. My escorts told me how best to describe the goings-on at Guantanamo, regardless of what my own eyes and prior knowledge told me.

Here, in a nutshell, is what I picked up. Consider this a guide of sorts to what the officially sanctioned report on Guantanamo would look like, wrapped in the proper decorum and befitting the jewel-in-the-crown of American offshore prisons… or, to be Pentagon-accurate, "detention facilities."

1. Guantanamo is not a prison. According to the military handlers who accompanied us everywhere, Guantanamo is officially a "detention facility." Although the two most recently built complexes, Camps Five and Six, were actually modeled on maximum and medium security prisons in Indiana and Michigan respectively, and although the use of feeding tubes and the handling of prisoners now take into account the guidelines of the American Corrections Association (and increasingly those of the Bureau of Prisons as well), it is not acceptable to use the word "prison" while at Gitmo.

the full piece

"Vulture" funds

Every day, millions of people around the world are taught hard truths about how the instruments of "civilization" are used to help the powerful at the expense of the deprived. They see the brutal hypocrisy behind the soaring rhetoric of noblesse oblige that issues from the citadels of wealth and privilege. They see, and learn, that raw self-interest is the true coin of the global realm; they see it in the ruins of their own lives and in the blighted futures of their children. Is it any wonder, then, that many of them come to reject the putative offerings of civilization and embrace extremist or nihilistic or asymmetrical responses to their distress?

Every instance of systemic or institutional injustice contributes to the growing instability of the world community, to the violence and corruption and despair that howl outside the shrinking "Green Zones" of prosperity and security in the developed nations. This holds true at every level, from the vast and glaring crime of aggressive war, as in Iraq, to obscure rulings on arcane points of international finance – as in a London courtroom last month, when the British High Court upheld the right of a well-connected financial predator to feast on one of the world's poorest nations.

The case involved the little-known but highly lucrative world of "vulture funds" – or as its practitioners prefer to call it, the "secondary market in sovereign debt." It works like this: private investors buy up bits of the debt of impoverished nations from various creditors – at pennies on the dollar – then go to court to force the debtor to cough up the full amount, plus punitive interest payments. In the London case, a New York vulture named Michael Sheehan and his off-shore, UK-registered front company, Donegal International, were trying to turn a $.3.3 million debt purchase into a $55 million profit bonanza squeezed out of the Zambian people, some of the poorest on earth. Donegal won the case, even though Justice Andrew Smith ruled that Sheehan and one of his associates "were at times being deliberately evasive and even dishonest" in their testimony, as the Financial Times reports.

The amount Donegal is asking for would effectively wipe out the debt relief Zambia would have received this year from the deal signed at the famous "Live 8" summit in Scotland in 2005, when the G-8 nations agreed – amidst much harrumphing self-congratulation – to a large-scale debt relief and restructuring program for poorer countries. Zambia had earmarked the relief money for health programs and education, in a country where the life expectancy is 37, more than half a million children have been orphaned, and 1 in 5 adults have HIV, as Oxfam reports.

Read the rest of Chris Floyd's damning piece

Gitmo insights from James Yee

The Talking Dog has posted an excellent and illuminating interview with James Yee. As many of you will recall, Yee served as the Muslim Chaplain at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, but was was arrested, and accused of espionage and spying. His nightmarish experience is summarized before the interview, and Yee has a number of very interesting things to say. For example:

The prisoners were subjected to a variety of troubling things during their interrogations. I was assigned to detention operations, working with the guards, rather than with intelligence operations. And I never crossed over that line, refraining from even observing any of the interrogations. That was appropriate because I was technically assigned to the detention operation, not the intelligence operation. However, I did strongly raise concerns about why there was no chaplain assigned to the intelligence operation, not to assist interrogators but to appropriately advise the commander of that intelligence operation on whether that commander’s decisions were morally or ethically sound. This is a specific role of the chaplain as laid out in army doctrine. But the commander of the Joint Interrogation Group had no chaplain assigned.

Read the full interview here

Alberto Gonzales: The real story

With the rapid pace of events, I suspect it's only a matter of time before the pressure starts to build for Alberto Gonzales's resignation. But this isn't about Alberto Gonzales. This isn't a guy with his own political strategy, his own list of political chits to arrange or grand strategies to advance. He's George W. Bush's consigliere. He gets done what the president wants done. It is a relationship almost Newtonian in its directness.

This was the main question senators had when Gonzales was nominated to be Attorney General -- whether he understood the difference between being the White House Counsel, the president's legal advocate and advisor, and the Attorney General, the chief law enforcement officer of the United States.

Clearly, it's not a distinction he recognizes. But this also tells us that this isn't something Gonzales thought up or did on his own. As two "senior Justice [Department] officials" told Michael Isikoff, the list of eight US Attorneys to be fired was developed "with input from the White House."

That's the story.

More from Josh Marshall on the Justice Department flap at his TPM

As conspiracy theories go...

this one is very interesting, and not so easily dismissed.

On the afternoon of September 11, 2001, an FBI bulletin known as a BOLO – "be on lookout" – was issued with regard to three suspicious men who that morning were seen leaving the New Jersey waterfront minutes after the first plane hit World Trade Center 1. Law enforcement officers across the New York-New Jersey area were warned in the radio dispatch to watch for a "vehicle possibly related to New York terrorist attack":

White, 2000 Chevrolet van with 'Urban Moving Systems' sign on back seen at Liberty State Park, Jersey City, NJ, at the time of first impact of jetliner into World Trade Center Three individuals with van were seen celebrating after initial impact and subsequent explosion. FBI Newark Field Office requests that, if the van is located, hold for prints and detain individuals.

At 3:56 p.m., twenty-five minutes after the issuance of the FBI BOLO, officers with the East Rutherford Police Department stopped the commercial moving van through a trace on the plates. According to the police report, Officer Scott DeCarlo and Sgt. Dennis Rivelli approached the stopped van, demanding that the driver exit the vehicle. The driver, 23-year-old Sivan Kurzberg, refused and "was asked several more times [but] appeared to be fumbling with a black leather fanny pouch type of bag". With guns drawn, the police then "physically removed" Kurzberg, while four other men – two more men had apparently joined the group since the morning – were also removed from the van, handcuffed, placed on the grass median and read their Miranda rights.

Read the rest of Christopher Ketchum's piece at Atlantic Free Press

The Press Corps and the Libby verdict

The utter venality, the disgusting servility, the putrid acquiescence of the White House press corps is completely well known and potentially repetitive drone of known fact (like stating Bush is easily our worst president of all time), but the latest outrage will still be expressed here if for no other reason than duty, duty to truth and the testament that the foul creatures who call themselves journalists assigned to White House do not represent America. We are not a stupid country bent on self-destruction in an orgy of corporate lying and enablement of felons, even if White House “journalists” are.

For endless months the White House cravenly evaded truth and accountability over the Libby trial and Valerie Plame with the irritating excuse they wouldn’t comment on legal matters under adjudication. Then yesterday the White House had the nuclear gall and contempt to look the press corps straight in the face after the verdict was in and say precisely the same thing—no comment, while under appeal we still can’t comment.

Pack of happy puppies, tails wagging, tongues hanging out, joyful in their run back home with only thoughts of getting patted on the head by their corporate masters, our horrible White House press corps ran instantly off to their cushy offices, perish the thought they’d been totally humiliated (for the 1,434th time) or that they actually had a professional duty that screamed they demand answers from our felon leaders over Valerie Plame.

Dan Froomkin, an extremely rare American journalist who earns the title, said the “…proper response, however, is sustained outrage, until every last critically important question is addressed.”