Political Bloviation

Tortures Blowback – washingtonpost.com
THE GHOSTS of interrogations past have come back to haunt the Bush administration. This week, the legal officer supervising the military trials at the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, dismissed capital charges against Mohammed al-Qahtani, who allegedly would have been the 20th hijacker during the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks [...]

Informed Comment: Bush Abdicates to Generals on Iraq; <br> 10 Killed in Sadr City; <br> Al-Maliki Excludes Sadrists
War turns Republics into dictatorships. The logic is actually quite simple. The Constitution says that the Congress is responsible for declaring war. But in 2002 Congress turned that responsibility over to Bush, gutting the constitution and allowing the [...]

Apparently not much:
Crooks and Liars » Sen Menedez to Amb. Crocker: Reconstruction billions have worsened everyday Iraqi life
Some of Menendez’s figures are downright infuriating. This is what $25 billion has gotten us:
43% of population lives in absolute poverty
prior to war 19% of children suffered malnutrition; today 28%
last year 75% elementary-aged kids went to school; now [...]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9xFCBwuOJ8

Despite the Fighting in Basra, Bush Emphasizes Progress – washingtonpost.com
An honest editor might change that to:
Despite reality, Bush continues to lie.

The more violence there is the better it show we’re controlling the violence? Oh please, if you’re going to lie to us can’t you at least make it slightly believable?
AFP: Pentagon says new Iraq fighting arises from surge’s success
The Pentagon on Wednesday said an eruption of violence in southern Iraq, where US-backed government forces were [...]

I guess it wasn’t lives he cared about or his treasure that was sacrificed. After all, sacrifice is for the little people:
Five years on, Bush again talks of Iraq victory | U.S. | Reuters
President George W. Bush said on Wednesday he had no regrets about the unpopular war in Iraq despite the “high cost in [...]

McClatchy Washington Bureau | 03/10/2008 | Exhaustive review finds no link between Saddam and al Qaida
An exhaustive review of more than 600,000 Iraqi documents that were captured after the 2003 U.S. invasion has found no evidence that Saddam Hussein’s regime had any operational links with Osama bin Laden’s al Qaida terrorist network.The Pentagon-sponsored study, scheduled [...]

Iraq: Worth the Price – washingtonpost.com
Where to begin? How about Hitchens adding up the comparative costs of the containment policy that was demonstrably working? They’ve yet to find the mythical WMDs that were supposed to have made Saddam a worldwide threat. The policy pursued  by Bush Sr. and Clinton worked, plain and simple, at a [...]

No Torture. No Exceptions
The Washington Monthly sets out to end the debate on torture by presenting a series of short essays from people across the political spectrum on why torture is, in fact, bad. The real tragedy here is that is necessary to make this point in the USA in the 21st century.
Here’s a quote [...]

Now that’s some patriotism for you from the Dicksters alma mater:
Top Iraq contractor skirts US taxes offshore – The Boston Globe
Kellogg Brown & Root, the nation’s top Iraq war contractor and until last year a subsidiary of Halliburton Corp., has avoided paying hundreds of millions of dollars in federal Medicare and Social Security taxes by [...]

The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan
Basically: borrow around a trilllion from the Chinese to give Iran a new client state next door, occupy it for the next thirty years, and still keep oil at $106 a gallon barrel. Yes: lots to debate.
Death, strategic and financial disaster, way to go Bushie.

Re-Thinking The Terror War – The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan
File this one under “no shit?”
The great unanswered question of the last six and a half years is: why haven’t we been attacked again? There are logically two – not necessarily exclusive – possibilities: our defense has been getting much better; their offense was [...]

McClatchy Washington Bureau | 02/27/2008 | Nobel laureate estimates wars’ cost at more than $3 trillion
The questions are:

Are we better off for this huge cost in blood and treasure?
Did we buy better security?
What were the opportunity costs of going into Iraq?

I’d argue that we are less secure, and less able to respond to terrorist threats [...]

NPR: Britain: Harry’s Afghan Deployment Over
I heard that Prince Harry has been secretly serving with the British Army in Afghanistan since December, this is until he was outed by Matt Drudge. Military officials will now have to pull Harry out of his unit because he’s such a high profile target that he endangers other members [...]

McClatchy Washington Bureau | 02/27/2008 | Iraqi leaders veto law Bush administration hailed as political breakthrough
This was the closest thing to political progress from the Iraqi national gvoernment the administration could find since the begining of the surge. Shot down in flames.

No, the surge is not a success. – By Michael Kinsley – Slate Magazine
Michael Kinsley lays out why, in Bush’s own terms, the surge is a failure. Simply put the stated purpose was to increase troop levels temporarily for the purpose of reducing violence enough to begin bringing troops home. We have yet to get [...]

It’s pointless and even counter productive in its stated purpose, but it expands executive powers so the GOP must support it:
Unchecked surveillance threatens security as well as privacy
The debate over changes to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act—the legal framework governing how agencies like the NSA conduct wiretaps—is typically framed as a contest between the competing [...]

Tim F. over at Balloon Juice, notes that things are not going so great in Afghanistan. Playing into this is the lack of flexibility in dealing with the deteriorating situation because of our never ending commitment in Iraq.

Can’t he just say something like, “It’s wrong, illegal and diametrically opposed to American values” and be done with it?
Mukasey Demurs on Waterboarding – New York Times
“Given that waterboarding is not part of the current program and may never be added to the current program, I don’t think it would be appropriate for me to [...]