Bringing teh scary

Note to GOP: this shit is past its expiration date.

via dday

Be on the lookout for shifty looking purple people

I'm sure a copy editor will catch this, but I'll record it for posterity:

"The indictment of Christopher Paul paints a disturbing picture of an American who traveled overseas to train as a violet jihadist [emphasis added], joined the ranks of al-Qaida and provided military instruction and support to radial cohorts both here and abroad," Assistant U.S. Attorney General Kenneth Wainstein said in a statement.

Cannon fodder

Dear god:

US commanders in Baghdad said today that they were investigating an incident in which two children appeared to be used as decoys to get past an American checkpoint in a car that was then blown up with the pair still inside.

This makes me ill. Can anyone argue that invading Iraq was worth the price in spilled blood after reading this?

Dude: Superspy

The WaPo has some nice cloak and dagger news today:

Paul R. Hall, 31, allegedly used his position aboard the USS Benfold and his secret clearance to forward details of the battle group's defensive capabilities and how the ships were going to cross the Strait of Hormuz in April 2001. Federal officials wrote in a criminal complaint that Hall -- who is referred to as Hassan Abujihaad throughout the document -- was contacting the Web site to order jihad videos and supported the terrorist mission of attacking American targets such as the USS Cole.

Let's hear from Mr. Hall himself:

In a recorded conversation, Hall played down his contact with the Web site, according to charging documents.

"I corresponded with an e-mail site," Hall allegedly said. "It wasn't nothin' top secret like these people are saying, you know what I mean? I was just talking about, like the Cole . . . whatever."

This brief statement is enough to convince me that despite his islamutheranist proclivities, he's your average American. Along with the classified material, I'm sure our nefarious mole was sending along messages like "usa is teh suXXXXXXor!!1!!!!111!" and "ubl is teh 60m6!!!11!! lol1!!11!1!"

Now perhaps you've heard the phrase "such a tightass s/he shits diamonds." Kinda describes federal prosecutors right on down to the cufflinks, eh? Feed Mr. Hall's statement to U.S Attorney (and all around good Irishman) Kevin O'Connor and marvel at the product:

"Abujihaad described a recent force protection briefing given aboard his ship, voiced enmity toward America, praised Usama bin Laden and the mujahideen, praised the October 2000 attack on the U.S.S. Cole -- which Abujihaad described as a 'martyrdom operation' -- and advised the members of Azzam Publications that such tactics were working and taking their toll," according to a news release from U.S. Attorney Kevin J. O'Connor's office in the District of Connecticut. The response from the Web site allegedly encouraged Hall's efforts.

Shiny!

This isn't happening, is it?

Sy Hersh has been on top of Bushco's barbaric single-mindedness with regards to Iran for some time now. The Guardian pulls out this little tidbit in their summary:

Elements of the tough new approach towards Tehran outlined by Hersh include:

· Clandestine operations against Iran and Syria, as well as the Hizbullah movement in Lebanon - even to the extent of bolstering Sunni extremist groups that are sympathetic to al-Qaida...

In case you didn't follow that: the new Bush strategy involves us forming alliances with supporters of the people who attacked us on 9/11 so that we can destabilize not just one, but three other countries (in addition to Iraq) who had nothing to do with 9/11!

These sorts of contingencies demonstrate how dangerously unhinged Dick Cheney and his bloody-minded colleauges really are. Is he allowed to get away with growling out one side of his mouth about giving comfort to al Qaeda while handing cash out underneath the table to Bin Laden's allies in Iraq? Why do I have this weird sense of déjà vu?

Hersh claims that the former director of national intelligence, John Negroponte, resigned his post to take a parallel job as the deputy director of the state department because of his discomfort with an approach that so closely echoed the Iran-contra scandal of the 1980s.

Oh... that would explain Elliott Abrams hanging around the White House again.

Paying rent in my head

digby puts into words the vague queasiness I feel when reading the contemporary conservative commentariat:

The doughy pantload generation of wingnuts, on the other hand, thinks [the Global War on Terror is] some sort of game and they are the star players. They yearned to be "part" of something momentous --- but from a distance, like you are when you are watching movies about war and heroism and identify with the main characters. No need to give up your Milk Duds just to enjoy a good bloodbath. They are writing an exciting plotline that has Islamic terrorism somehow so uniquely dangerous that it has surpassed WWII and the cold war and is more like something out of science fiction: "Star Wars" or "War of the Worlds." To these people, national security is cheap pulp fiction.

What digby sez.

Embarrassing

via digby

36% of Americans approve of torture as a means to combat terrorism. About one-third of the entire world thinks that.

Wow. Simply, wow.

If you thought Horowitz was crazy, check out his readers!

Crazy Dave posts letters from his readers responding to the "routine betrayal of our country's secrets," readers who may be just as crazy as he is!

I`ve been a member of the Intelligence Community (IC) for just under 30 years. I too noticed the fact that individuals from the IC put their personal political views before the oath they took when the were hired.

Now I have no idea whether this person actually works for any sort of intelligence agency, but using the term "member of the Intelligence Community (IC)" a) sounds really dorky and b) is suspiciously vague. For all we know, this person's membership in the "IC" consists of a subscription to Soldier of Fortune magazine.

From 1993 through 2001, there were issues I was aware of that might have been embarrassing had they come to light. I did not feel compelled to find a reporter (but then again (facetiously)where might I have gone?) and it no one else did.

It's a huge step to go from "embarrassing" to "unconsitutional" and "harming national security," as the latest leaks allege. It's not just politically embarrassing to the Bush administration that the war in Iraq is creating more terrorists - it obliterates one of the (many) pretenses for invading Iraq and shows that George W. Bush is demonstrably making this country less safe. It's not about scoring political points, it's about exposing a massive dereliction of duty.

Were I D/CIA General Hayden, I'd take a page from the Left`s book and conduct a rather exhaustive purge.

Only "the Left" conducts purges, eh? Must be news to General Hayden's predecessor and right-wing ideologue Peter Goss who conducted his own purge upon arriving at his post (scroll down) after Tenet was sacked (and subsequently awarded the Medal of Honor). But then, I tend to pay attention to nasty little things called "facts."

I think there are large segments of the CIA that cannot see the threats our country faces, primarily because of their left wing and I dare say, anti-American bias.

These biases are carefully concealed in intelligence publications, but they show up in discussion databases. Perhaps the most telling way to gauge the bias is by what reports are not written i.e. which subjects are taboo to address.

I'm willing to bet a hefty sum of money that Horowitz's reader is going to turn around and rah-rah the torture detainee bill winding its way through the Senate, which will allow these leftist, anti-American CIA bastards the ability to maintain secret prisons, conduct trials with secret evidence, and torture interrogate detainees in order to prevent future terrorist atrocities. Wouldn't this person be worried that the neo-Soviet CIA scoundrels might turn these tools on good, God-fearing Republicans like himself? No? Huh.

I`m not surprised that our fighting Islamist terrorists has made us more enemies. Seems to me that Islam`s 11 September 2001 attack on the United States brought a lot of fighters to our country`s side. If the pinnacle of the IC`s analysis is trumpeting discovery that our fighting Islamists creates more enemies, perhaps it`s time to find some better analysts.

Really? Because Americans were sold on Iraq because it would be a key piece in achieving victory in the War on Terror™. If achieving victory means creating more terrorists, well then, I have no argument for you. However, for those who expected a right and just war to bring more people to our side (the Iraq War didn't) and reduce the number of terrorists (the Iraq War is apparently creating them faster than Bushco can "eliminate" them), Iraq has been nothing but an unmitigated disaster.

One thing does perturb me (and a friend who is in the process of deserting the Left) is that no one on the Conservative side (in politics)is articulating the extent of the threatterror (suicide and remote-controlled) bombings, continued "random" murders by "disturbed" Muslims, and culmination in a (series?) of WMD attacks in the United States and how we should deal with it. We should not be waiting for these attacks to come to have a dialogue on how we should respond.

This person should be concerned. The vaunted Bushco was set to handover port security to (the vapors!) a company owned by a foreign - nay, Arabic! - government. And we've seen the conservative response plan for a catastrophe in its response to Hurricane Katrina. Conservatives have fucked up just about everything having to do with the security of Americans. Maybe the friend who is in the process of leaving "the Left" (what the fuck does that even mean?) should reconsider.

I considered cutting and pasting this person's last paragraph, but I believe Joseph Conrad put our writer's sentiment much more eloquently when he wrote, "Exterminate the brutes."

Stand by your man

I'm not a big fan of Hillary! as a politician, but I do like hearing her say this:

In unusually blunt terms, Senator Clinton questioned the current administration’s response to an intelligence briefing President Bush received about a month before the 9/11 attacks. It mentioned that Al Qaeda was intent on striking the United States using hijacked planes.

“I’m certain that if my husband and his national security team had been shown a classified report entitled ‘Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States,’ he would have taken it more seriously than history suggests it was taken by our current president and his national security team,” she said during an appearance on Capitol Hill.

>snip<

In her remarks, Senator Clinton also suggested that Bill Clinton’s animated defense of his own national security record as president, delivered only a few days earlier, provided a powerful example for Democrats, whom Republicans have sought to portray in recent national elections as too weak to lead the country in such perilous times.

An example, indeed. We don't have to take the GOP's bullshit.

In further news from HappyBubbleLand...

From the WaPo:

President Bush on Tuesday said it is naive and a mistake to think that the war with Iraq has worsened terrorism, disputing a national intelligence assessment by his own administration.

Naïve and a mistake?

It's delusional, bordering on insane, to believe that Iraq has been anything but an unmitigated foreign policy disaster for the United States. But those are the "grown-ups" in charge.

Are we out of rationales yet?

If Iraq really is part of the "Global War on Terror™," then we're losing, badly.