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Another Truther

Submitted by Bird Dog on Tue, 03/09/2010 - 4:03pm. Tags:

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:

"September 11 was a big lie and a pretext for the war on terror and a prelude to invading Afghanistan," Ahmadinejad was quoted as saying by state TV. He called the attacks a "complicated intelligence scenario and act."

AfPak developments

Submitted by Bird Dog on Sun, 02/28/2010 - 11:55am. Tags:

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:

So Anyway, This Makes Me Want to Vomit (Yoo, Bybee, OPR & Margolis)

Submitted by Jordan on Thu, 02/25/2010 - 11:54am. Tags:

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.

Partial removal of a Taliban cancer (Update: More cancer removed)

Submitted by Bird Dog on Tue, 02/16/2010 - 3:28pm. Tags:

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.

War Fatigue

Submitted by AndrewSshi on Thu, 02/11/2010 - 11:46am. Tags:

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.

A civilian case that failed...almost

Submitted by Bird Dog on Thu, 02/04/2010 - 11:46am. Tags:

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.

Close Gitmo?

Submitted by Bernard Guerrero on Fri, 01/22/2010 - 3:31pm. Tags:

Not soon, say the Obama Admininstration.

The Obama administration has decided to continue to imprison without trials nearly 50 detainees at the Guantánamo Bay military prison in Cuba because a high-level task force has concluded that they are too difficult to prosecute but too dangerous to release, an administration official said on Thursday.

Status of the three fronts

Submitted by Bird Dog on Fri, 01/08/2010 - 8:56pm. Tags:

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

Conspiracy theories

Submitted by Bird Dog on Thu, 01/07/2010 - 10:25am. Tags:

Londonstani spent a few weeks in Pakistan, noting a serious case of mass self-delusion:

As militant violence continues to claim lives throughout Pakistan, the job of finding answers is made impossible by the near-total inability of public opinion to arrive at some common understanding of its root causes.

Terrorball

Submitted by Bill White on Tue, 01/05/2010 - 8:08pm. Tags:

Our national government and almost all of the establishment media have decided to play a game which could be called Terrorball. The first two rules of Terrorball are:

(1) The game lasts until there are no longer any terrorists, and;
(2) If terrorists manage to ever kill or injure or seriously frighten any Americans, they win.

http://lefarkins.blogspot.com/2010/01/terrorball.html

Terrorball, then, is an elaborate political game that seems irrational on its face – after all, it’s certain that more than 2.4 million Americans will die this year, and fairly likely that not even one of those deaths will be caused by terrorism -- but which features its own peculiar logic. That logic reflects the anxieties of those who have created its rules, and serves the interests of both terrorists and those who profit from exploiting the fear of terrorism.