Posts from — March 2006

For those of you interested in taking part, you can send your old wire coat hangers to:

Governor Mike Rounds
Office of the Governor
500 E. Capitol Avenue
Pierre, SD 57501

The BBC writer says: Moussaoui judge interrupts trial

Judge Leonie Brinkema is considering whether to rule out the possibility of executing Moussaoui because of “egregious” government misconduct.
…[snip]
“In all the years I’ve been on the bench, I’ve never seen such an egregious violation of the court’s rule on witnesses,” she told the trial in Virginia, now into its second week.
…[snip]
“This is the second significant error by the government affecting the constitutional rights of this defendant,” Judge Brinkema said on Monday.

“More importantly, it affects the integrity of the criminal justice system of the United States.”

In the criminal justice world this would be called “witness tampering” and you go to prison for it. This wasn’t an accident, it was an intentional violation of procedure.

The incompetent cronies at the Shrubbery’s Justice Department are about to blow a case in which the defendant confessed. They just can’t follow the rules.

On Saturday Bob Geiger features The Saturday Cartoons.

On Sunday, Mustang Bobby at Bark Bark Woof Woof features Sunday Reading of The New York Times, while Robert at Interstate 4 Jamming has the Sunday Florida Editorial Roundup.

If you aren’t on-line over the weekend, be sure to check them on Monday.

[Editor: If you can get to them as Blogger has been flaky all day.]

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.

“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.

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.

March 11^th, 2004, Madrid

Nuestros profundos condolencias en vuestra perdida.

A high-level leak has revealed that God is ‘furious’ at Tony Blair’s attempts to implicate him in the bombing of Iraq. Sources close to the archangel Gabriel report him as describing the Almighty as ‘hopping mad … with sanctimonious yet unscrupulous politicians claiming He would condone their bestial activities when He has no way of going public Himself…

And then Juan Cole reacts to Ibrahim Jaafari claiming that honor:

Oh, great. First God chose George W. Bush and whispered things in his ear. Then He chose Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and whispered things in his ear. Now we have yet another messianic, divinely appointed leader out to do God’s will. If God really were choosing these people, couldn’t He come up with better candidates? And if He is giving them advice, why isn’t it better advice? I’d just like to caution all these political prophets that it is widely rumored among medieval observers, who were the real experts in things divine, that sometimes Satan manages to misrepresent himself to you as the voice of God. And sometimes the conviction that God is speaking to and through you is not so much piety as the mortal sin of pride.

American criticism of human rights abuses in other nations ring hollow and have no value after the documented conduct of the US in the “War on Terror”. The Shrubbery has given out “get out of jail free” cards to every repressive regime on the planet.

The original NBC News report, from December, focused on a secret 400-page Defense Department document listing more than 1,500 “suspicious incidents” across the country over a 10-month period. One such incident was a small group of activists meeting in a Quaker Meeting House in Lake Worth, Fla., to plan a protest against military recruiting at local high schools.

In his Wednesday letter, Rogalski said such anomalies in the TALON database had been removed.

“They did not pertain to potential foreign terrorist activity and thus should never have been entered into the Cornerstone database. These reports have since been removed from the Cornerstone database and refresher training on intelligence oversight and database management is being given,” Rogalski wrote.

Rogalski said only 43 names were improperly added to the database, and those were from protest-related reports such as the Quaker meeting in Florida.

“All reports concerning protest activities have been purged,” the letter said.

The activities have been “purged” from these databases, but what about all of the other databases created using them? Is the “Do Not Fly” list purged? Are people being issued apologies and official letters of explanation that will help them clear up all of the “misunderstandings” caused by appearing on these lists?

Update: Laura Rozen reminded me that this program was run by Mitchell Wade’s MZM, one of the contracts Wade received for bribing “Duke” Cunningham.

The message is that the stupid twit who occasionally wanders into the office he is suppose to be using at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, doesn’t know what his assortment of courtiers and hangers-on are doing.

Having the news that the ports he has refused to secure were going to be handed over to a company owned by the Emir of Dubai should not have just been a media report. The matter should have been vetted, at an absolute minimum, with the Republicans in Congress. This isn’t something you drop on the people in your own party during an election year after you have been banging the drum of Islamic terrorism for years.

If our ports were actually secure, it wouldn’t make any difference who was moving the cargo. But when the cargo handlers are the first line defense, they have to be vetted.

™ ^{[Kevin Drum]}

Attempted Escape

Come on, be a pal.

[Editor: CC would like me to help remove the screen so she can come out.]

Friday Ark

“DP World will transfer fully the U.S. operations … to a United States entity,” the firm’s top executive, H. Edward Bilkey, said in an announcement that capped weeks of controversy.

Relieved Republicans in Congress said the firm had pledged full divestiture.

Bilkey’s title is “chief operating officer”, so I’m not confident that he is, in fact, the “top executive”. The Emir of Dubai owns DP World and everyone else can be replaced.

He said that US operations would be transferred to a “United States entity”. I’m sure he knows the words “company” and “corporation”, but he said “entity”.

This was an emergency measure to stop Congress from passing a law to bar DP World.

Whatever happens, it is sure to involve James Baker, the Bush family consigliere on all things Mideast, and don’t be surprised if there are references to the Carlyle Group.