Live from the Nuke Free Zone

Planning for and carrying out a withdrawal of combat troops from Iraq over the next several months is an important component of spurring progress among the disparate Iraqi populations on issues of importance to Iraq’s long-term security and stability.

I may not have been fond of yesterday’s Supreme Court decision on redistricting (why redistrict if new population data hasn’t come in?), but today’s (quotes from Findlaw) is much better.
Once again, the Supreme Court has called Bush on the carpet for blatantly disregarding the Constitution in detaining people without charge, lawyers, evidence, or appeal in […]

In the better-late-than-never category, a review of the elections in Belarus and Ukraine.

In the wake of reports that Bush is planning to launch an unprovoked nuclear strike on Iran, Billmon has a lengthy post on the intriguing question: What if the US nuked Iran and nobody cared?

It’s just yet another link to a NYTimes article, but it’s important that this time, somehow, we manage to keep the nation’s collective head on straight. This one’s basically saying that the experts are in general agreement that Iran is 5 to 10 years away from a successful attempt to make a bomb, and that’s […]

…well, to be honest, I didn’t tell Sy Hersh anything; the man’s fully capable of coming to the same conclusions as this little blog. Namely, that if the administration seeks war with Iran, the wheels are in motion now. Mr. Hersh, with his usual investigative talent, is claiming that such plans are indeed in […]

So apparently more guns are hitting the streets of Baghdad. Because, y’know, during Saddam’s rule and the chaos after the war they’ve been so effective at:

preventing a tyranny from coming to power
holding down violent crime
anything else the NRA says they do

Yep… a few thousand more AK-47s is exactly what Iraq needs now. It sure was […]

The memos are well-reported and widely known.  “Intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy,” says the Downing Street Memo.  “Our diplomatic strategy had to be arranged around the military planning,” according to the latest memo released.  The Iraq war, in the President’s view, was inevitable.
And, at some tipping point, it was.  When Saddam […]

Mother Jones has a report on Salman Pak where they find that the ‘Iraqi General’ who claimed terrorists were trained there was a fraud. Salman Pak is the so-called Iraqi “terrorist training camp” which was probably nothing of the sort given the lack of conclusive evidence which would have been promoted to high heaven […]

Way back in 1996, the US Government passed the Communications Decency Act to censor “indecent” speech on the Internet. This came as a shock to an Internet that since its inception had little content regulation of any kind other than early anti-spam techniques. The Electronic Frontier Foundation began the Blue Ribbon Campaign while many websites, […]