Month: November 2005

We have too many veterans. Mainly because we have had too many wars and interventions. On this Veterans Day let us not remember those in the military who “defend our freedoms” by invading other countries. Instead, let us never forget that it began as Armistice Day, which commemorated the end of the the monstrous evil known as World War I. Let us also never forget how wars result from the lies of politicians. After Woodrow Wilson campaigned on the slogan, “He Kept Us Out of War,” he said to the U.S. House: “There will be no war. This country does not intend to become involved in war. It would be a crime against civilization for us to go into it.”

So what happened to the war crime trial for Wilson? The same thing that will happen to the war crime trial for Bush for lying us into another war. When will Congress get the backbone to cut off funding for the monstrous evil in Iraq? I hate to be so pessimistic, but probably when Wilson and Bush are tried for war crimes.

Chalabi will visit wounded U.S. soldiers at Walter Reed Army Hospital. Is there no limit to the absurdities visited upon us? Senator Dick Durbin came out today for the FBI picking up this scamster for questioning: after all, we raidedhis headquarters last year looking for evidence that he sold or gave vital U.S. secrets to Iran.

Questioned — h*ll. He ought to be arrested, thrown in prison, and denied bail because he’s an obvious flight risk. The charges: fraud, and espionage. After he’s relieved of his silken threads, and fitted for an orange prison jumpsuit, he ought to be slapped with a bill for the total cost of the subsidies he sucked out of the U.S. Treasury over the years, totaling some $30 million. Let his Iranian (and Israeli) masters pony it up.

Chalabi’s latest publicity stunt is a moral obscenity. This liar extraordinaire and trickster has a lot of nerve setting foot in the U.S., never mind setting foot at Walter Reed. Every minute this man walks free is a crime against justice.

UPDATE: Judy, Judy, Judy, looking for hits already! Here’s Judy Miller’s "Farewell Letter" and embedded within it is a link to her website, all stocked and ready to go with rebuttals to everyone who’s been mean to her lately.

Judith Miller retires from New York Times

E & P has more details:

Under the terms of the separation, Miller will write a farewell letter to the editor, to be published in Thursday’s paper. Another condition of the split required Keller to share a letter with the paper’s staff clarifying his controversial remarks about her “entanglement” with I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the former White House official indicted in the CIA leak investigation.

“In her 28 years at The Times, Judy participated in some great, prize-winning journalism,” Keller wrote to the staff. “She displayed fierce determination and personal courage both in pursuit of the news and in resisting assaults on the freedom of news organizations to report. We wish her well in the next phase of her career.”

Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., said in a statement, “We are grateful to Judy for her significant personal sacrifice to defend an important journalistic principle. I respect her decision to retire from The Times and wish her well.”

Miller’s lawyers and the paper had been negotiating a severance package for the last two weeks, although they had declined to discuss specific terms of the deal. An article posted on the Times’ Web site Wednesday afternoon outlined the broad terms: “Under the agreement, Ms. Miller will retire from the newspaper, and The Times will print a letter she wrote to the editor explaining her position,” wrote Katharine Q. Seelye. “Ms. Miller originally demanded that she be able to write an essay for the paper’s Op-Ed page refuting the allegations against her, the lawyers said. The Times refused that demand — Gail Collins, editor of the editorial page, said, ‘We don’t use the Op-Ed page for back and forth between one part of the paper and another’ — but agreed to let her to write the letter.”

More here.

From TalkLeft:

Breaking: Senator Lindsay Graham is introducing an Amendment to the defense appropriations bill pending in the Senate (S. 1092) that would strip those designated by the Administration as enemy combatants of the ability to seek habeas review in federal courts. This is an end-run around the Supreme Court’s decision in U.S. v. Rasul which held Guantanamo detainees have the right to challenge the legality of their detentions.
[..]
This would effectively end all litigation brought on behalf of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay, as well as any future litigation on behalf of those imprisoned at the CIA secret detention camps. This bill is intended to have retroactive application.

However, you can rest assured that this measure won’t affect anyone important, right, George and Dick?

Steve Clemons at The Washington Note:

CHALABI News Flash: Congressman & Senator Call for Him to be Subpoenaed

Just got word that Congressman George Miller and Senator Richard Durbin, in a joint news conference later TODAY, will be calling for Ahmad Chalabi to be subpoenaed.

Good call.

More Fun With Chalabi.

By a strong 60-40 margin San Francisco voters approved Proposition I, which bans military recruiters from public schools. The measure also asks the city government to consider funding scholarships for education and training that could provide an alternative to military service (but doesn’t mandate any such funding).

They’re not much exercised about prewar lies, but exposing US gulags – well, they’re not having any of that:

Congress’s top Republican leaders yesterday demanded an immediate joint House and Senate investigation into the disclosure of classified information to The Washington Post that detailed a web of secret prisons being used to house and interrogate terrorism suspects.

The Post’s article, published on Nov. 2, has led to new questions about the treatment of detainees and the CIA’s use of “black sites” in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. The issue dogged President Bush in his recent trip to Latin America and has created consternation in Eastern Europe.

“If accurate, such an egregious disclosure could have long-term and far-reaching damaging and dangerous consequences, and will imperil our efforts to protect the American people and our homeland from terrorist attacks,” Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) and House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) wrote in a letter to the chairmen of the House and Senate intelligence committees.

That’s right: it’s the disclosure that so outrages these paragons of morality.

While we’re on the topic of your tax dollars and the toilets they end up feeding…

When’s the last time you took a vacation? Did you stay in a place like this? No? Well, maybe Ahmed will steal a towel for you. It’s the least he could do, really.