...for another micro-second, than you really need to listen to Matthew Hoh:

Précis: Tom Hanks has been lionized in Time Magazine as America's Historian . He has also become the latest target of Right Wing anger for remarks concerning American racist attitudes directed against the Japanese during WW2. Here is what Hanks said:

Honor is rare enough among today's Conservatives. So few of them served in war. The wars they've fought have not gone well and their historians fallen into disrepute for rah-rahing those wars. It has all been seen before.

Juan Cole notes that the president of the Iranian de facto police state has proclaimed the 9/11 attacks were a "big lie", joining the ranks of the Truthers. Quote:

While trying to better understand the Taliban, David Rohde of the New York Times put himself at risk and was kidnapped by Taliban insurgents. He was held hostage for eight months, then escapted. His experience puts him in a unique position, as seen in his review of two books on the subject. Here are some of his observations:

I've been trying to get some kind of handle on the OPR report, which recommends Yoo be referred to the state bar for professional misconduct. And the Margolis memo, released with it as a package, declining to do anything but shake his finger at the author of DOJ's most notorious finding ever.

It's a little early to judge how things are going in Marja, but the capture of the Taliban's top military commander in Pakistan is a big deal, in part because Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar is a big fish, and because his capture was done by a joint US-Pakistani operation, and because Pakistan's previously Taliban-friendly ISI was involved.

Even in a best-case scenario, Iraq is going to have an endemic terrorism problem for long, long after the U.S. military has left. Iraq still gets the equivalent of an Oklahoma City every other month or so. But this terrorism receives little or no attention in the American news media. For a bombing to get mentioned on TV news, it has to be big. The war in Iraq has vanished from the attention of the American news viewing and news reading public.

While I'm glad to hear that the Underpants Bomber has started talking to investigators, he could stop at any time. After all, this very thing happened in the case of the Millennium Bomber. After pledging to cooperate, Ahmed Ressam clammed up after two years of ratting on his fellow rats, bollixing the trials against two other militant Islamists, and he also recanted all of his previous testimony.

Not soon, say the Obama Admininstration.

The New York Times has a snapshot of the situations in the three countries where the WAMI is the hottest.