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NBC asks: Would eavesdropping bill snag reporters?

Senators Mike DeWine [R-OH], Olympia Snowe [R-ME], Lindsey Graham [R-SC] and Chuck Hagel [R-NE] are under the impression that all of the current laws against disclosing classified information aren’t sufficient.

DeWine claims that this law doesn’t target reporters, when it obviously does. The only problem with the old law is that it kept interfering with the ability of the White House to misuse classified information, while not stopping reporters from reporting on illegal activities, even after they are improperly classified.

Anyone associated with, or who votes for this bill is an enemy of the First Amendment. It’s that simple, so select your representatives accordingly.

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Glenn Greenwald has a nice post on the hypocrisy of “conservative Republicans” and their attitude about the power of the government.

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The significance of this report, Haig says U.S. repeating Vietnam mistake, is not obvious to those who didn’t experience “the unpleasantness” in Southeast Asia.

“Former Nixon adviser thinks forces in Iraq hamstrung by politicians” encapsulates the excuse used by the “true believers” as to why the US was forced to withdraw. The argument was that the military was never given the forces it needed to win the war.

While I personally doubt that Southeast Asia was ever winnable, enough troops to ensure security after Saddam was run out of town was the one big hope for success in Iraq. If we had had the people to protect ourselves and the Iraqis from lawlessness, it would have kept the insurgency at a manageable level.

The looting should never have been allowed. Americans are still being killed with explosives looted from Iraqi dumps because there were no troops to protect them. The people still resent the loss of personal property to the mob in the anarchy that followed the American invasion.

Rumsfield surrounded himself with people who wanted to fight a war, but neglected to have anyone who knew how to win one.

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While some may rue that he was not found guilty at the court in the Hague the fact that the ‘Butcher of the Balkans’ Milosevic found dead in cell is probably the best outcome for all concerned because it prevents his being considered a martyr to the West.

Slobodan Milosevic was a lawyer, gas company executive, and party apparatchik who used nationalism and the media to murder hundreds of thousands of people in the name of a “Greater Serbia” that only existed in response to a desire by Aleksandr, Tsar of all the Russias, to glorify all things Slavic. Aleksandr paid to have bogus histories written that amplified the achievements of the Slavic people, and the fables he had created have been used as justification for “ethnic cleansing”.

Jack Cluth at The People’s Republic of Seabrook worked in the Balkans and saw what Milosevic did first-hand.

Milosevic’s rise to power shows how even a mediocre energy executive can rise to political power when the media is behind them and people are whipped into a frenzy with fear.

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March 11^th, 2004, Madrid

Nuestros profundos condolencias en vuestra perdida.