I hate making small posts that don't contain much analysis. It seems a lazy way to fill a blog page to me. So I collect them and post them all together, sometimes with added snark.
Psst...want to follow the wicked web of Republican corruption? Anything They Say can and will be used against them.
Remember Afghanistan, where the Great War On Michael Moore was already won? As I and others have been saying for over a year, the Iraqi adventure has drawn off resources to such an extent that Michael's...sorry, Osama's...forces are resurgent and mounting ever heavier attacks. But wait, it gets worse. It seems Pakistan (remember? strongly Sunni Islamist, has nukes, run by a dictator - exactly not like Iran) is where most of the militants are coming from nowadays.
Pakistani Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz on Sunday ridiculed as "bizarre" a U.S. report that senior al Qaeda leaders were killed in a CIA attack on a home along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. "There is no evidence, as of half an hour ago, that there were any other people there," Aziz said on CNN's "Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer." U.S. counterterrorism officials have said they believe the January 13 attack killed four to eight al Qaeda-affiliated "foreigners" attending a dinner meeting. When liars collide, who can you believe? That's the question that Bush and his cronies have given the whole world. Once upon a time, the world tended to believe America.
Never mind the terrorists, here's the armed criminals! In a story that says everything about the White House spin about how well everything is going in Iraq, everyone who can get out - doctors, lawyers, professors, businessmen - is getting out of the country.
The United States has said that British police can board and search rendition flights carrying terrorist suspects if the authorities can produce evidence of a crime and officers turn up with a search warrant. The catch? According to the UK's Crown Office, they don't think moving terrorist suspects to a country where they could be tortured is enough of a crime to qualify for a search warrant. US officials have also ruled out the possibility of CIA planes being subject to routine inspections like every other plane that passes through UK airspace.
And while the UK's Jack Straw is lying through his teeth and saying the government had "found no evidence" of detainees being "rendered" through Britain since September 11, the Malta Independent (of all places) gives Straw the lie with a sneak preview of the findings of EU investigator Dick Marty:
Governments across the European Union have “collaborated, tolerated or looked away” from the United States Central Intelligence Agency’s clandestine operations on their countries’ soil for the last two to three years. This is expected to be one of the main findings that will be revealed on Tuesday when a Council of Europe (COE) inquiry presents its interim report on the use of European territory for the practice of ‘extraordinary rendition’.
The report is due tomorrow, notice. It should be a show stopper.
Talk Left has the goods on how the Patriot Act enabled the creation of a national police force - a uniformed branch of the Secret Service - that works solely for the President and has wide powers to arrest without warrant.
Oh Maaaan! Go read William Pitt Rivers RIGHT NOW! He is so all over the congressional Dems spinelessness and the GOP's intention to terrify the electorate into voting for them that it's just not funny.
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