Category: long story short

  • US Decries Iranian Meddling

    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…

  • Our Question Wins by a Mile!

    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…

  • FT counterstory anticipates Marshall’s scoop

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

  • Bush testifies without Cheney present

    “I have thought from the beginning that this case was a ticking time bomb,” writes MARK (in Mark A. R. Kleiman: Valerie Plame: A chat with the Prez): Having interviewed Dick Cheney some time ago, yesterday Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor working on the Valerie Plame affair, spent an hour and ten minutes with the…

  • I pledge alliegance to my respective country…

    This was a Reuters headline today: Serb Vote Halts Feared Slide Back to Nationalism The AP story led with: A reformist politician defeated a nationalist ally of Slobodan Milosevic… I wonder, seriously wonder, what in the world we Americans do think about nationalism. Do we think that we are nationalistic? If so, do we take…

  • The Detainee Documents

    The statements on detainee treatment released by the Bush administration yesterday carefully keep all the options of torture and Geneva violations open. From today’s NYT (All italics are mine.) “[A] senior Justice Department official said the document [the already infamous 8/02 Justice Department memo] was ‘overbroad and irrelevant’ and was unnecessary because no one in…