Category: long story short

(The Reuters video in question) Mostly British and American, I suppose.

It has been widely reported and openly acknowledged that Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld issued orders to employ “harsh interrogation techniques”–orders that were later rescinded. A similar sequence occurred later in Iraq, with respect to interrogation orders issued by General Sanchez. In both cases, the orders were reversed on legal advice that the techniques authorized looked…

I’ve noticed that right wingers seem to believe that Democrats and liberals must be “outed” as closet socialists. The fact that they are bandying the word socialist around this way makes me wonder if the word liberal itself is losing its sting. Do they need to remind people that that liberal = left = socialist…

Iran Is in Strong Position to Steer Iraq’s Political Future, NYT, 7/3/04 ….Already, the Iranian government has quietly strengthened its presence in Iraq by providing financial backing…and by flooding the country with intelligence agents, the officials say….Most worrisome to American officials are Iran’s close ties to powerful Shiite clerics like Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani…and Moktada…

In March, I blog-worried about which of two questions about Bush and Terrorism would prevail: Our Question or his. I think now we know. [W]hich of two messages will end up as the net “take-away” …. –The weak one is that Bush didn’t care enough about terror: It’s mushy, vague, “who can know?”, etc. –The…

Marshall’s hypothetical: “‘[T]he bad actors’ … might well start trying to fight back, trying to gin up an alternative storyline to exculpate themselves….”