How to do it

Knight Ridder, which is still for sale:

WASHINGTON - U.S. intelligence agencies rpeatedly warned the White House beginning more than two years ago that the insurgency in Iraq had deep local roots, was likely to worsen and could lead to civil war, according to former senior intelligence officials who helped craft the reports.
Among the warnings, Knight Ridder has learned, was a major study, called a National Intelligence Estimate, completed in October 2003 that concluded that the insurgency was fueled by local conditions - not foreign terrorists- and drew strength from deep grievances, including the presence of U.S. troops.
The existence of the top-secret document, which was the subject of a bitter three-month debate among U.S. intelligence agencies, has not been previously disclosed to a wide public audience.

All here.

Legacy

Pet peeve

One of them anyway:

Elizabeth Vargas: Let's start with Katrina, because today is the six-month anniversary of the hurricane hitting ...

No, it's not. Anniversaries, by definition, occur annually.

In the tank

Crappy president:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - America's backing for President George W. Bush's handling of the war in Iraq has tumbled to an all-time low, and the vast majority of troops fighting there want out within the next year, new polls showed on Tuesday.
... Growing pessimism over Iraq, along with Bush's support despite bipartisan objections for letting a state-owned Arab company take over key operations at six U.S. ports, appeared key factors driving his approval rating down to 34 percent in a CBS News poll, the lowest recorded by CBS.
... Raising questions about Bush's vow to keep troops in Iraq as long as they are needed, a Le Moyne College/Zogby poll showed 72 percent of U.S troops serving there think the United States should exit within the next year.
Nearly one in four said the troops should leave immediately.

Where were these people in November 2004, when they could have made a difference?

1,300

WaPo:

BAGHDAD, Feb. 27 -- Grisly attacks and other sectarian violence unleashed by last week's bombing of a Shiite shrine have killed more than 1,300 Iraqis, making the past few days the deadliest of the war outside major U.S. offensives, according to Baghdad's main morgue. The toll was more than three times higher than the figure previously reported by the U.S. military and the news media.
Hundreds of unclaimed dead lay at the morgue at midday Monday -- sprawled, blood-caked men who had been shot, knifed, garroted or apparently suffocated by the plastic bags still over their heads. Many of the bodies had their hands still bound -- and many of them had wound up at the morgue after what their families said was their abduction by the Mahdi Army, the Shiite militia of cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.

It's hard to imagine any good outcome for this blunder.

Rewriting history

Robert Fisk:

Everyone in the Middle East rewrites history, but never before have we had a US administration so wilfully, dishonestly and ruthlessly reinterpreting tragedy as success, defeat as victory, death as life - helped, I have to add, by the compliant American press. I'm reminded not so much of Vietnam as of the British and French commanders of the First World War who repeatedly lied about military victory over the Kaiser as they pushed hundreds of thousands of their men through the butchers' shops of the Somme, Verdun and Gallipoli. The only difference now is that we are pushing hundreds of thousands of Arabs though the butchers' shops - and don't even care.

Stephen Hadley:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush's national security adviser said Sunday that Iraqi leaders had "stared into the abyss" and determined that sectarian violence was not in their interest.

Glad that's over.

We get e-mail

Thanks.

Congrats [spook],
You're the winner of our write-in contest for the dynamic duo contest. You can pick up a free sports final t-shirt at either of our Fort Smith or Fayetteville television stations.
nice job!
Mark Lericos, Sports Director 40/29

They picked "Brewathon." That will probaly be our epitaph.

Post deleted: Venn Diagram

The sets didn't really intersect.

Bode Miller

AP:

"Man, I rocked here."

Are they sure he said "rocked?"

S'wonderful

Arkansas 73
(10) Tennessee 69

Sick raccoons

There sure are a lot of them in Bella Vista.
UPDATE: Distemper outbreak.

Krugman

Via the Arkansas Times blog, we learn that the shrill one is once again available at truthout.

Quacks like torture

Knight Ridder:

WASHINGTON - Military interrogators posing as FBI agents at the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, wrapped terrorism suspects in an Israeli flag and forced them to watch homosexual pornography under strobe lights during interrogation sessions that lasted as long as 18 hours, according to one of a batch of FBI memos released Thursday.
FBI agents working at the prison complained about the military interrogators' techniques in e-mails to their superiors from 2002 to 2004, 54 e-mails released by the American Civil Liberties Union showed. The agents tried to get the military interrogators to follow a less coercive approach and warned that the harsh methods could hinder future criminal prosecutions of terrorists because information gained illegally is inadmissible in court.
Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who was in charge of the prison at the time, overrode the FBI agents' protests, according to the documents.

Miller keeps cropping up in these cases. Of course, that doesn't necessarily mean that he's a sick, sadistic freak or a war criminal or anything. Even though he took the UCMJ equivalent of the Fifth Amendment rather than testify against subordinates prosecuted for abusing detainees at Abu Ghraib.

The beat goes on

What will it take to get these people to obey the law?

A controversial counter-terrorism program, which lawmakers halted more than two years ago amid outcries from privacy advocates, was stopped in name only and has quietly continued within the intelligence agency now fending off charges that it has violated the privacy of U.S. citizens.
Research under the Defense Department's Total Information Awareness program -- which developed technologies to predict terrorist attacks by mining government databases and the personal records of people in the United States -- was moved from the Pentagon's research-and-development agency to another group, which builds technologies primarily for the National Security Agency, according to documents obtained by National Journal and to intelligence sources familiar with the move. The names of key projects were changed, apparently to conceal their identities, but their funding remained intact, often under the same contracts.

All here. Increasingly Nixonian.

Another purloined nickname

Stop us before we steal again. Now some marketing genius has decided to start calling Fayetteville the "Track Capital of the World." Sure, John McDonnell's Razorbacks have won 39 NCAA championships, and the UA is building a first-class outdoor track to match our indoor one. But Eugene, Ore., has been called "Track Capital of the World" for 40 years. A little originality, please.

National Pubs Week

Take the BBC quiz.

Chicken Little comes home to roost

Exactly:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - For almost five years President George W. Bush has warned Americans to fear terrorism, but now those words may come back to bite him.
The president, who has cast himself as America's protector against terrorism and Islamic militancy, has been thrown on the defensive by a bipartisan revolt over his administration's approval of a state-owned company from the United Arab Emirates assuming operation of six major U.S. seaports.

He can't have it both ways.

Lyons, Conason

Gene's "first inclination upon hearing the news was to give Deadeye Dick Cheney’s hunting accident a pass." But he couldn't.
Joe reminds us that "a missile strike intended for Osama bin Laden had to be called off in 1999 because certain Emirate royals were present at his hunting camp in Afghanistan."

Gitmo

Mighty white of 'em:

General Craddock suggested that the medical staff had indulged the hunger strikers to the point that they had been allowed to choose the color of their feeding tubes.

Unclear whether they are afforded this courtesy before or after they're strapped into the "restraint chairs."

Mladic surrender?

This would be good, although a decade overdue:

BELGRADE, Serbia-Montenegro (AP) -- War crimes fugitive Gen. Ratko Mladic has been located and authorities are negotiating his surrender, a senior state security official told The Associated Press on Tuesday.

Now if they can just find Radovan Karadzic.

UA nicknames

Mark Lericos, 40/29 sports director, wants to nickname the Razorbacks' erstwhile combined offensive threat of Jonathon Modica and Ronnie Brewer. His front-runner? "Brodica."
Really.
Sadly, we have a crappy history around here with nicknames.
Some history: They called Oliver Miller "The Big O." No. Alonso Lane became "Shaq" (Technically "Baby Shaq." They said he resembled Shaq facially). John McDonnell they tagged "Johnny Mac." Matt Jones? "M.J."
Our submission? "Brewathon."
It encapsulates the aftermath of having lost almost every close game this season so far. Let's hope that win over Florida ignites a fuse. This is a talented team.

Other priorities

LATimes:

WASHINGTON — For Americans troubled by the prospect of federal agents eavesdropping on their phone conversations or combing through their Internet records, there is good news: A little-known board exists in the White House whose purpose is to ensure that privacy and civil liberties are protected in the fight against terrorism.
Someday, it might actually meet.
Initially proposed by the bipartisan commission that investigated the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board was created by the intelligence overhaul that President Bush signed into law in December 2004.
More than a year later, it exists only on paper.
Foot-dragging, debate over its budget and powers, and concern over the qualifications of some of its members — one was treasurer of Bush's first campaign for Texas governor — has kept the board from doing a single day of work.

That they could find any Republicans to sit on such a panel is surprising.

Carp

Sounds like a problem:

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Fish that leap into passing boats may be a fisherman's fantasy, but scientists fear that hyperactive Asian carp will reach the U.S. Great Lakes, devour the base of the food chain and spoil drinking water for 40 million people.
In less than a decade since escaping southern U.S. fish farms, the hardy and voracious carp have come to dominate sections of the Mississippi River and its tributaries.

Yeah, those fish farms are in Arkansas. Unclear why they're being farmed here. Unless they're different from the indigenous carp -- and they must be -- carp are virtually inedible.

Prosecute 'em

They're war criminals:

One of the Pentagon's top civilian lawyers repeatedly challenged the Bush administration's policy on the coercive interrogation of terror suspects, arguing that such practices violated the law, verged on torture and could ultimately expose senior officials to prosecution, a newly disclosed document shows.

All the way to the top.

Wreeee-ow!

Arianna emasculates Mrs. James Carville. (She has help from elsewhere in the the blogosphere -- click every link.)

Winter Olympics

Dear NBC:
Can we ban "How-does-it-feel?" and "What's-it-like?" questions for athletes who have just won medals and/or set records? Please?

At last

(10) Florida 81
Arkansas 85 OT

No e-mail

For Rumsfeld, Chertoff.

Dear Walton Arts Center:

Please try to suck less.

Not yet

The New York Times editorial page asks a rhetorical question:

Is there any aspect of President Bush's miserable record on intelligence that Sen. Pat Roberts, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, is not willing to excuse and help to cover up?

That didn't work

If Quick-draw Dick thought Brit Hume's sponge-bath would clear up to the satisfaction of the national media any questions about his shooting a guy, he was wrong. Dan Froomkin rounds 'em up. And who are these people who believe anything they see on Fox News? Not members of the reality-based community, we guess.

William Blake illustrations

Newly discovered. Don't miss the slideshow.

Still no here there

There, meaning here.

Coulter in town tonight

Perhaps someone can ask her about this.

Cheney had 'a beer'

OK.

'Shocking but, unfortunately, not surprising'

That's a lot of terrorists:

The National Counterterrorism Center maintains a central repository of 325,000 names of international terrorism suspects or people who allegedly aid them, a number that has more than quadrupled since the fall of 2003, according to counterterrorism officials.

Luckily, according to our preznit, we've captured or killed most of their leaders. Suppose there are any innocent people on that list? Nah.

Peter Principle

Don is correct. This Lincoln Group is a real piece of nice work if you can get it.

More Abu Ghraib pics

Disgusting.

Wednesday staples

Lyons:

Gonzales’ legal justifications of the spy program are similarly preposterous, proving only something else we already knew: that for a fancy title and an office filled with expensive leather furniture, you can find a shyster to argue damn near anything.

Conason:

For the unfortunate victim of Dick Cheney’s quail-shooting misadventure, the experience of being blasted with birdshot and almost killed was all too real. For those of us lucky enough to be out of range, however, that incident may serve as a metaphor for the Vice President’s troubled tenure.

Senate shelves asbestos bill

Good:

WASHINGTON, Feb. 14 — The Senate decided on Tuesday night to all but kill legislation to create a $140 billion fund to compensate victims of asbestos poisoning.

This bill was a bailout for an industry that made a harmful product and knowingly exposed workers to it. One of them was Dresser Industries. Let's take a stroll down Memory Lane:

In 1998, Dresser merged with its main rival, Halliburton, and is now known as Halliburton Co. Dick Cheney negotiated the $7.7 billion deal, reportedly having done so during a weekend of quail-hunting. In 2001, Halliburton was forced to settle the asbestos lawsuits that it acquired as a result of purchasing Dresser, causing the company's stock price to fall by 80 percent in just over a year.

Heckuva job, Dick.

Uh-oh

Turn for the worse:

CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas (AP) -- The 78-year-old lawyer who was shot by Vice President Dick Cheney in a hunting accident has some birdshot lodged in his heart and he had a "minor heart attack," a hospital official said Tuesday.
Peter Banko, the hospital administrator at Christus Spohn Hospital Corpus Christi-Memorial, said Harry Whittington had the heart attack early Tuesday while being evaluated.
He said there was an irregularity in the heartbeat caused by a birdshot pellet, and doctors performed a cardiac catheterization. Whittington expressed a desire to leave the hospital, but Banko said he would probably stay for another week.

"Minor heart attack?"

Thieves

They've been reduced to looting:

WASHINGTON, Feb. 13 — The federal government is on the verge of one of the biggest giveaways of oil and gas in American history, worth an estimated $7 billion over five years. New projections, buried in the Interior Department's just-published budget plan, anticipate that the government will let companies pump about $65 billion worth of oil and natural gas from federal territory over the next five years without paying any royalties to the government. Based on the administration figures, the government will give up more than $7 billion in payments between now and 2011. The companies are expected to get the largess, known as royalty relief, even though the administration assumes that oil prices will remain above $50 a barrel throughout that period.

They're gonna steal as much as they can before they go. Three more years.

U.N.: Shut Gitmo down

Disgaceful:

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Five U.N. human rights experts urged the United States to shut down Guantanamo Bay after concluding the forced-feeding of prisoners and some interrogation techniques amounted to acts of torture, according to a draft report obtained on Monday.
The 38-page report, which may be revised, accused the United States of distorting international law by denying prisoners the right to due process, such as not allowing them to choose their defense lawyer and appointing hearing officers with a "minimum level of legal knowledge."

The war criminals in the White House and Pentagon deserve some due process, too.

Stick a fork in him

He's done:

TULSA, Okla. (AP) -- Eddie Sutton may have coached his last game, a 35-year career possibly ending six victories short of 800 because of a traffic accident in which he was injured and cited for driving under the influence.
Oklahoma State announced Monday that the 69-year-old Sutton would take a medical leave and that Sean Sutton, his son and designated heir apparent, will finish this season as coach. The school said no decision had been made on who will coach next season.

He says he's got a back problem. A witness says he saw a bottle of hydrocodone in Eddie's SUV.

Quick-draw Dick

Even Nedra Pickler gets it:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Vice President Dick Cheney apparently broke the No. 1 rule of hunting: be sure of what you're shooting at.

Leno and Letterman and their colleagues have days' worth of material. Speaking of Dave, we were reminded today that the Westminster Kennel Club show starts tonight and it's Fashion Week in New York, too. As Dave noted last year, "so the city has been overrun by temperamental bitches."

Classy

Mary Matalin on Cheney:

"He didn't do anything he wasn't supposed to do."

You're not supposed to shoot another hunter. They're trying to blame the victim.

Can't shoot straight

Incompetent:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shot and injured a man during a weekend quail hunting trip in Texas, his spokeswoman said Sunday.

Hypocrites

Jon Alter's been eating his Wheaties:

Feb. 10, 2006 - Poor Porter Goss. First, the longtime Florida congressman leaves his safe seat to become director of the CIA, only to find that he’s been neutered by a new bureaucratic setup where he reports to John Negroponte, the director of national intelligence. Then he writes an op-ed piece decrying intelligence leaks in The New York Times on Friday, the exact same day as a story appears identifying today’s biggest leaker of antiterrorism secrets in Washington — President George W. Bush.

This is precisely right. The preznit and his junta leak classified info all the time when they think it will benefit them politically. That's what he was doing when he talked about that alleged LA plot, and it's what they were doing when they blew Valerie Plame's cover. For them to whine about leaks is nothing more than hypocrisy. Good to see someone from the corporate media call bullshit.

St. Patrick

The Observer profiles Patrick Fitzgerald.

W/Abramoff photo

Kickapoo chief gives Times one.

Unintended irony

Abu Gonzales:

"I'm not going to get into specific laws that are being looked at. But, obviously, our prosecutors are going to look to see all the laws that have been violated. And if the evidence is there, they're going to prosecute those violations."

Unfortunately, he's not talking about prosecuting violations of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. He's talking about prosecuting the whistle-blowers who leaked to The New York Times the fact that Bush was violating FISA.

That attack on Los Angeles

The one W bragged about thwarting? Not exactly:

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia (AP) -- A Malaysian recruited by al-Qaida to pilot a plane in a second wave of Sept. 11-style attacks on the United States has been in custody in his homeland since December 2002, Southeast Asian security officials said Friday.
The recruit, Zaini Zakaria, pulled out of the plot after seeing the carnage at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and was unwilling to die as a martyr for Islam, the officials said.

Apparently it was self-thwarting.

Bloggered

Blogger's been impossible all day. A restart seems to have worked, though.

It's going to backfire

They were warned:

Twice in the past four years, a top Justice Department lawyer warned the presiding judge of a secret surveillance court that information overheard in President Bush's eavesdropping program may have been improperly used to obtain wiretap warrants in the court, according to two sources with knowledge of those events.

Someone who's guilty is gonna beat the rap because of this illegal spying.

Our very own gulag

They call this "humane":

United States military authorities have taken tougher measures to force-feed detainees engaged in hunger strikes at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, after concluding that some were determined to commit suicide to protest their indefinite confinement, military officials have said.
In recent weeks, the officials said, guards have begun strapping recalcitrant detainees into "restraint chairs," sometimes for hours a day, to feed them through tubes and prevent them from deliberately vomiting afterward. Detainees who refuse to eat have also been placed in isolation for extended periods in what the officials said was an effort to keep them from being encouraged by other hunger strikers.

If you think these guys are all Qaeda terrorists or Taliban fighters captured on "the battlefield," read this and this.

W: 'I don't know him'

That's not what Abramoff says.

Comeuppance

A dishonest, wingnut crony bites the dust:

George C. Deutsch, the young presidential appointee at NASA who told public affairs workers to limit reporters' access to a top climate scientist and told a Web designer to add the word "theory" at every mention of the Big Bang, resigned yesterday, agency officials said.
Mr. Deutsch's resignation came on the same day that officials at Texas A&M University confirmed that he did not graduate from there, as his résumé on file at the agency asserted.

They'll find another job for him on K Street.

Scared yet?

Does this sound familiar?

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Iran used negotiations with the European Union to play for time and has now achieved the ability to both develop nuclear weapons and deliver them, a senior Bush administration official said Monday.
At a news conference at the Foreign Press Center, Robert G. Joseph, the undersecretary of state for arms control, cited "tremendous resources" as well as a "very sophisticated, a very advanced scientific and technical community" as helpful to Iran.
He offered no assessment of how long it might take Iran to produce nuclear weapons.

There's a reason for that last bit; if he had said "ten years," it wouldn't scare people into voting Republican in the midterms. The fear factor is their trump card; it's all they have. Never mind Iraq, Katrina, the Medicare drug fiasco and their general corruption and incompetence. Only the GOP can protect you from the sinister ayatollahs.
A nuclear-armed Iran would be a bad thing, as bad as nuclear-armed India and Pakistan and North Korea. But any Iranian attempt to actually use a nuke would be the end of Iran.
UPDATE: It's working.

Speculation

The Arkansas Times blog republishes an article from the right-wing Boston Herald so you don't have to give the Herald any traffic. The lede:

GASSVILLE, Ark. - The neo-Nazi teen who attacked patrons of a New Bedford gay bar with a hatchet and pistol was only a short drive from two Arkansas white supremacist groups known to recruit in Massachusetts when he had his deadly shootout with police.

All here.
UPDATE: He left a note. At some point, presumably, we'll find out what's in it.

Domestic spying hearing

Georgia10 is live-blogging it over at DailyKos. It's somewhat off-putting, to us anyway, the way georgia, like Armando, has to boldface parts of the excerpted text.
MORE: Via Atrios, so are Glenn Greenwald, Leah and Aravosis. ReddHedd, too.

That bowl wasn't exactly super

More like a regular football game.

Wow

Atrios is right, as usual. Blogger simply disappeared a post here from this morning. It was there until early this evening.

Small world

He's toast:

NORFORK, Ark. (AP) -- A teenager accused of going on a rampage at a Massachusetts gay bar with a hatchet and a gun was in a Missouri hospital Saturday after two shootings in northern Arkansas that resulted in the death of a police officer and a woman accompanying the wounded teen, state police said.
Jacob D. Robida, 18, was transported to a hospital at Springfield, Mo., after an exchange of gunfire with police in Norfork, according to state police spokesman Bill Sadler.

He'll get the needle here. Shoulda stayed in Massachusetts, dumbass.
UPDATE: No needle; he's dead.

Sounds like perjury

Friday document dump:

Court documents released today provide new details about the testimony that Vice President Cheney's former chief of staff gave to a grand jury investigating his conversations with reporters and administration officials about a CIA operative.
The documents say I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby denied in his testimony ever mentioning CIA operative Valerie Plame to former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer or former New York Times reporter Judith Miller in separate conversations he had with them in July 2003, and further never disclosed talking to Miller about Plame in June 2003.

Don't believe the "I had other things on my mind and forgot" defense is gonna fly. Ari ratted him out.

Krugman

So good we'll link.

Morning network shows are creepy

Andrew Tyndall has a spot-on analysis. Excerpt:

Each network has a specialist in saccharine sincerity in the face of personal crisis. On "GMA" it is Robin Roberts; on the "Early Show," Hannah Storm -- but no one is more staggeringly sincere than "Today's" Ann Curry.

Ann Curry is the worst -- but not by much.

Libby trial delayed past midterms

Too bad:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A federal judge on Friday set former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby's trial date in the CIA leak case for January 2007, two months after the midterm congressional elections.
The trial for Libby, who faces perjury and obstruction of justice charges, will begin with jury selection Jan. 8, said U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton. The judge said he had hoped to start the trial in September but one of Libby's lawyers had a scheduling conflict that made that impractical.

This story might have been a good place to report this. It's like they're willfully ignoring the possibility of a massive cover-up.

Sweeps

GH resurrects Robert Scorpio.

Uh-oh

Not good:

NIKISKI, Alaska (AP) -- An oil tanker being loaded with fuel broke free of its dock in the Cook Inlet port of Nikiski and ran aground, U.S. Coast Guard said Thursday.
Officials at the refinery where the 575-foot Seabulk Pride was being loaded said the ship's cargo tanks were not breached, but that an unknown amount of fuel spilled into Cook Inlet southwest of Anchorage.

Isolationism

W warned ominously in his SOTU about it. We wondered what the hell he was talking about. Andrew J. Bacevich explains in the LATimes:

... President Bush worked himself into a lather about the dangers of "retreating within our borders." His speech bulged with ominous references to ostensibly resurgent isolationists hankering to "tie our hands" and leave "an assaulted world to fend for itself." Turning inward, the president cautioned, would provide "false comfort" because isolationism inevitably "ends in danger and decline."
But who exactly are these isolationists eager to pull up the drawbridges? What party do they control? What influential journals of opinion do they publish? Who are their leaders? Which foundations bankroll this isolationist cause?
The president provided no such details, and for good reason: They do not exist. Indeed, in present-day American politics, isolationism does not exist. It is a fiction, a fabrication and a smear imported from another era.

You know what to do.
via Froomkin (manimal item, too).

Manimal T-shirts

Get yours here.

Stealing elections

Funny:

House Republicans are taking a mulligan on the first ballot for Majority Leader. The first count showed more votes cast than Republicans present at the Conference meeting. Stay with RollCall.com for updates.

Wonder if they're using Diebold equipment.
via Josh.
UPDATE: Boehner.

Standing O

We didn't make it through the State of the Union, but we were still watching when the highlight came. Think Progress has the video. Too bad W squandered all his political "capital" on this boondoggle.

Iraq by the numbers

Knight Ridder compares Jan. 31, 2005/Jan. 31, 2006.

Super Bowl food

The LATimes serves up recipes for Buffalo wings, marinated baby back ribs and beer-battered shrimp.

Gene Lyons

Some thoughts on Cowboy W and the so-called war on terror.