I’ve seen a couple of ads on FX TV recently about a new series starting next month called “Over There”, evidently about our troops in Iraq. It is produced by Steven Bochco (Hill Street Blues, NYPD Blue). Does anyone know anything about this? The ads looked appealing, focusing on infantry men and women, and seemed pretty gritty. I’m wondering if this will be something like M*A*S*H was to the Viet Nam war.

Posted by: maxcrat | Jun 18 2005 12:22 utc | 4

The NY Times is turning up the heat on Iran:
Iran’s Sham Democracy.
Astounding, given not only the fact this theirs is an election not held under foreign occupation, as in Iraq, but the completely degenerate state of our electoral system.
Norman Soloman, who is actually in Iran covering the elections, reports on the vitality of the pro-Democracy movement there. The Nation reports:
As one of Iran’s leading bloggers Hossein Derakhshan recently pointed out, the country’s many blogs (Iran has 75,000 bloggers) are generating “an unprecedented amount of information.” In fact, as he observed: this election “will probably be one of the most open and transparent” Iran has ever seen.
The election is now going to a runoff
Open and transparent? Competitive?
Time for a humanitarian intervention to liberate those poor people.

Posted by: tgs | Jun 18 2005 13:41 utc | 6

The war goes on. Mortar attack kills 9 coalition.
UPI link

Posted by: DM | Jun 18 2005 15:21 utc | 8

The US would be fools not to take this deal (if it really exists). But then we all know the true intentions lie bound to that tightly held monad deep in the black heart of this administration — those goddamned military bases, which guarantee the wheels of democracy be spun like a mafia roulette table where the house always wins when it wants to. This is what they will never let go of ,what will have to be pryed from the cold dead fingers of our nations youth who will have died in service to their insatiable vanity.

Posted by: anna missed | Jun 18 2005 18:04 utc | 10

Agood Guardian comment Cold war, take two

No global power ever gives up its power voluntarily (in the case of the Soviet Union, it simply disintegrated). The US will be no exception. On the contrary, having defeated the USSR in the cold war and now glorying in its status and power as the sole superpower, it will defend its position with ruthless determination. The growing conflict between an extant America and a rising China will become the dominant fault line of global politics. We are not entering a period of calm or quiescence; the contrary in fact. The lines of future conflict are already anticipated in a Pentagon review of America’s military needs leaked by the Wall Street Journal in March: the review explicitly commits to the idea of huge military spending as a way of deterring would-be superpowers, with China explicitly mentioned in this context.
…
But as China and the US bump against each other in a growing number of regions and over an expanding number of issues – trade and financial imbalances between the two, oil and natural resources in Africa, Latin America and the Middle East, regional competition in east Asia, not to mention Taiwan and Japan – then this will become progressively more difficult and relations will become increasingly fraught. It is not impossible, indeed, that the rise of China will undermine the advantages of globalisation in the American mind – as the US economist Clyde Prestowitz has recently suggested – leading to increasing acrimony, the end of globalisation as we know it, and a rising tide of protectionism.
The prospect of decades of political tension lies ahead. It will require enormous willpower on the part of the US, China, the EU and Japan to contain those tensions. China will be demonised for its political system and its profound cultural differences – for the first time in modern history, a non-white, non-European-based society will be a global superpower. The west will need to learn to live with difference rather than seeking to denounce and subjugate it. The US will need to learn to contain its primordial desire to have an enemy, be it Native Americans, the Soviet Union, Bin Laden or China. Otherwise the 21st century will be grim indeed.

Posted by: b | Jun 18 2005 19:46 utc | 12

A news agency is waking up. After weeks of sleep on the Downing Street Memo the Associated Press is getting out of bed with a bigger report.
Memos Show British Concern Over Iraq Plans
The even verified and put up all the documents – here they are:
http://hosted.ap.org/specials/dowdoc/fcolegal020308.pdf
http://hosted.ap.org/specials/dowdoc/manning020314.pdf
http://hosted.ap.org/specials/dowdoc/meyer020318.pdf
http://hosted.ap.org/specials/dowdoc/ods020308.pdf
http://hosted.ap.org/specials/dowdoc/ricketts020322.pdf
http://hosted.ap.org/specials/dowdoc/straw020325.pdf
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-1648758,00.html
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1593607,00.html
About 90% of what news outlets produce is from agencies like AP. This will have a huge impact as many, many local papers and stations will report on this base now.

Posted by: b | Jun 18 2005 21:42 utc | 14

She’s one of us
She’s one of us

Posted by: Zelph | Jun 18 2005 22:26 utc | 16

Will You Survive The Coming Financial Crash?, Interestaining reading indeed…lol

Posted by: cdr | Jun 18 2005 22:53 utc | 18

all of these leaked memos/minutes coming out lately… so will rove counter w/ his own sensational transcript, as the heat bushco is taking at the moment is starting to resemble a good ole’ flaming necklace? one or more big breaking leaks that reel in the press and drown out all the others, only to be easily discredited in some fashion, and sending another not-so-subtle msg to the media community, ala rather & newsweek, on just who controls the vertical. certainly wouldn’t put it past him.

Posted by: b real | Jun 19 2005 5:44 utc | 20

Frank Rich: Two Top Guns Shoot Blanks

TO understand how the Bush administration has lost the public opinion war on Iraq it may be helpful to travel in H. G. Wells’s time machine back to Oct. 30, 1938.
That was the Sunday night that Orson Welles staged the mother of all fake news events: his legendary radio adaptation of another Wells fantasy, “The War of the Worlds.” The audience was told four times during the hourlong show that it was fiction, but to no avail. A month after Munich, Americans afflicted with war jitters were determined to believe the broadcast’s phony news flashes that Martians had invaded New Jersey. Mobs fled their homes in a “wave of mass hysteria,” as The New York Times described it on Page 1, clogging roads and communications systems. Two days later, in an editorial titled “Terror by Radio,” The Times darkly observed that “what began as ‘entertainment’ might readily have ended in disaster” and warned radio officials to mind their “adult responsibilities” and think twice before again mingling “news technique with fiction so terrifying.”
That’s one Times editorial, it can be said without equivocation, that didn’t make a dent. Nearly seven decades later the mingling of news and fiction has become the default setting of American infotainment, and Americans have become so inured to it that the innocent radio listeners bamboozled by Welles might as well belong to another civilization. Nowhere is the distance between that America and our own more visible than in the hoopla surrounding the latest adaptation of “The War of the Worlds,” the much-awaited Steven Spielberg movie opening June 29.
…
Politicians who dive into this game by putting on their own reality shows think they are being very clever. But like Mr. Cruise, they’re being busted by a backlash. John Kerry was the first to feel it: his stagy military pageant, complete with salute, at the Democratic National Convention came off as so phony that the greater (but more subtle) fictions of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth struck many as relatively real by comparison. George W. Bush proved a somewhat more accomplished performer – in his first term. With the help of Colin Powell and some nifty props, he effortlessly sold the country on Saddam W.M.D.’s. He got away with using a stunt turkey as the photo-op centerpiece during his surprise Thanksgiving 2003 visit to the troops in Iraq. His canned “Ask the President” campaign town-hall meetings – at which any potentially hostile questioner was either denied admittance or hustled out by goons – were slick enough to be paraded before unsuspecting viewers as actual news on local TV outlets, in the tradition of Welles’s bogus “War of the Worlds” bulletins.
But the old magic is going kaput. Mr. Bush’s 60-stop Social Security “presidential roadshow,” his latest round of pre-scripted and heavily rehearsed faux town-hall meetings, hasn’t repeated the success of “Ask the President.” Support for private Social Security accounts actually declined as the tour played out and Mr. Bush increasingly sounded as if he were protesting too much. “See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda,” the president said on May 24. He sounded as if he were channeling Mr. Cruise’s desperate repetitions of his love for his “terrific lady.”

Posted by: Fran | Jun 19 2005 7:53 utc | 22

Thanks Nugget!
Sunday Times again:
British bombing raids were illegal, says Foreign Office

A SHARP increase in British and American bombing raids on Iraq in the run-up to war “to put pressure on the regime” was illegal under international law, according to leaked Foreign Office legal advice.
The advice was first provided to senior ministers in March 2002. Two months later RAF and USAF jets began “spikes of activity” designed to goad Saddam Hussein into retaliating and giving the allies a pretext for war.
The Foreign Office advice shows military action to pressurise the regime was “not consistent with” UN law, despite American claims that it was.
The decision to provoke the Iraqis emerged in leaked minutes of a meeting between Tony Blair and his most senior advisers — the so-called Downing Street memo published by The Sunday Times shortly before the general election.
Democratic congressmen claimed last week the evidence it contains is grounds for impeaching President George Bush.
…
The allies had no power to use military force to put pressure of any kind on the regime.
The increased attacks on Iraqi installations, which senior US officers admitted were designed to “degrade” Iraqi air defences, began six months before the UN passed resolution 1441, which the allies claim authorised military action. The war finally started in March 2003.
…
The Foreign Office advice noted that the Americans had “on occasion” claimed that the allied aircraft were there to enforce compliance with resolutions 688 and 687, which ordered Iraq to destroy its weapons of mass destruction.
“This view is not consistent with resolution 687, which does not deal with the repression of the Iraqi civilian population, or with resolution 688, which was not adopted under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, and does not contain any provision for enforcement,” it said.
…
Further intensification of the bombing, known in the Pentagon as the Blue Plan, began at the end of August, 2002, following a meeting of the US National Security Council at the White House that month.
General Tommy Franks, the allied commander, recalled in his autobiography, American Soldier, that during this meeting he rejected a call from Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, to cut the bombing patrols because he wanted to use them to make Iraq’s defences “as weak as possible”.
The allied commander specifically used the term “spikes of activity” in his book. The upgrade to a full air war was also illegal, said Goodhart. “If, as Franks seems to suggest, the purpose was to soften up Iraq for a future invasion or even to intimidate Iraq, the coalition forces were acting without lawful authority,” he said.
Although the legality of the war has been more of an issue in Britain than in America, the revelations indicate Bush may also have acted illegally, since Congress did not authorise military action until October 11 2002.
The air war had already begun six weeks earlier and the spikes of activity had been underway for five months.

The relvant memo is here

Posted by: b | Jun 19 2005 10:24 utc | 24

Dead American troops hung from lampposts as savage fighting continues in al-Qa’im Saturday.

Ferocious fighting rages in al-Qa’im. American corpses hang from lampposts as US aircraft blast city with indiscriminate rockets and cluster bombs. Sandstorms envelope city after dark, knocking down US communications towers.
Savage fighting continued Saturday in al-Qa’im sending dozens of refugees streaming out of the city on the Iraq-Syrian border as American forces continued to batter the city in what they call Operation Spear.
Refugees from the city told Mafkarat al-Islam that on Saturday afternoon, they had watched as leading commanders of the Iraqi Resistance in the city hoisted the corpses of four dead American soldiers to the top of electric poles in the city.
Al-Hajj Mahdi al-‘Ani told the correspondent for Mafkarat al-Islam in al-Hadithah that he personally saw the bodies of four Americans in their well-known uniforms tied at the legs and hanging by legs from electric poles in the center of al-Qa’im.
Other families leaving war-ravaged city recounted how they passed dozens of wrecked US vehicles littering the streets as they left the city. They could see the bodies of the dead Americans who had been killed on Friday night and already had been gnawed apart by wild dogs.

I don’t know how reliable this site is, it is the first time I read it. This is from Saturday, 18 June 2005.

Posted by: Fran | Jun 19 2005 15:39 utc | 26

@Outraged, yes it is difficult to decide which is real and which not. Here the Independent reporting about the same battle.
Sixty killed as US launches major offensives on two fronts in Iraq

Battles on two fronts in Iraq claimed the lives of nearly 60 people identified by US military as insurgents yesterday, as marines and Iraqi forces launched major offensives. And, in other attacks, two US soldiers and four Iraqis died, and about 20 were injured.
More than 50 of the insurgents died in Operation Spear, aimed at stopping the infiltration of foreign fighters from neighbouring Syria. More than 1,000 marines and Iraqi forces engaged in firefights in the dusty frontier town of Karabilah, about 200 miles west of Baghdad. About 100 insurgents have been captured, the US military said.
Another campaign of about the same size, Operation Dagger, was launched yesterday against insurgent training camps and weapons caches in the southern part of the Lake Tharthar area in central Iraq. This is the area where, in late March, US and Iraqi forces killed about 85 militants at a suspected training camp.

So which one is the real one – I guess hard to know. I read the other day, that the numbers of dead American soldiers is not accurate either (can’t find the link anymore), because they count only the ones that die on the battle field, but not the one’s that die during evacuation or in German hospitals and that 9’000 would be a more realistic number. Who knows? I just wish all this killing would finally end and all those war-mongers including Blair and some of his supporting ministers would be put in jail and not for Blair becoming president of the EU, even if it is only for 6 months – it is a disgrace for the EU.

Posted by: Fran | Jun 19 2005 16:27 utc | 28

Since this is an open thread, I would like to point to the unintentionally hilarious cluelessness of certain US foreign relations “intellectuals” . No wonder Condoleeza is so hopeless, if her peers are anything to go by. The ones who pretend to be “liberals” even as they state their belief in US exceptionalism and world hegemony are the funniest of the lot.
One such clueless “expert” is a certain Anne-Marie Slaughter participating in the TPM Cafe, billed in her bio as Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. She sounds superficially reasonable, and yet is unable even now to see that the Iraq war was a blunder.
Some days ago, she had a post entitled “Younger and wiser?” extolling the supposed insights of a group of young “international relations professionals” calling themselves “Truman Democrats: Strong.Smart.Principled”, who by her account sounded like a subspecies of particularly dumb, but sanctimonious young neo-cons. In her highly complimentary post, she somehow neglected to mention that she is herself on the advisory board of the “Truman Project for National Security”(www.trumanproject.org).
I suggest that this woman, and the “Truman Project”, might bear watching, and maybe not just for the entertainment value.

Posted by: Sceptic | Jun 19 2005 17:15 utc | 30

Experts: Bush Remarks Spurred Iran Voters

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) – Iran’s spy chief used just two words to respond to White House ridicule of last week’s presidential election: “Thank you.”
His sarcasm was barely hidden. The backfire on Washington was more evident.
The sharp barbs from President Bush were widely seen in Iran as damaging to pro-reform groups because the comments appeared to have boosted turnout among hard-liners in Friday’s election – with the result being that an ultraconservative now is in a two-way showdown for the presidency.
“I say to Bush: `Thank you,”’ quipped Intelligence Minister Ali Yunesi. “He motivated people to vote in retaliation.”

Posted by: Fran | Jun 19 2005 19:14 utc | 32

From Fran’s 11:39 am link:
Immediately after the blast, US forces launched a wave of raids and arrests in which they picked up 46 local youths and hauled them away, without explanation. The American invader troops did, however, threaten to arrest more local people if another explosion took place.
Somehow my brain wants to read “Free French” or “Warsaw ghetto residents” here, but lately its always Iraqis. Strange to be a U.S. citizen and awake.

Posted by: citizen | Jun 19 2005 20:19 utc | 34

@Fran – tbrnews is about as reliable as a Bush press release.

Posted by: b | Jun 19 2005 20:23 utc | 36

It Is Remarkable Indeed How Misinformed Some People Can Be
June 13, 2005 by William Blum, The Anti-Empire Report
The Pentagon awarded three contracts this past week, worth up to $300 million, to companies it hopes will inject more creativity into US psychological operations efforts to improve foreign public opinion about the United States, particularly their opinion of the American military.
Dan Kuehl, a specialist in information warfare at the National Defense University, added: “There are a billion-plus Muslims that are undecided. How do we move them over to being more supportive of us? If we can do that, we can make progress and improve security.”
But what if it’s not a misunderstanding? What if the problem is that people in the Middle East and elsewhere in the world understand the Pentagon and US foreign policy only too well? In short, what if they don’t know how good we are?
What if they — in their foreign ignorance and al-Jazeera brainwashing — have come to the bizarre conclusion that saturation bombing, invasion, occupation, destruction of homes, torture, depleted uranium, killing a hundred thousand, and daily humiliation of men, women and children do not indicate good intentions?
Last week, as well, Zalmay Khalilzad, nominated to be US ambassador to Iraq, appeared before the Senate. “The degree of support for our policies, opinion polls indicate, is not very high,” he said. It has partly “to do with the perception that what we are about in Iraq is occupation, what we’re about is to gain control of Iraqi resources. I think what we need to do is a better job of explaining our goals, the goal of an Iraq that’s self-reliant, an Iraq that’s successful. We want Iraq for the Iraqis, an Iraq that works for the Iraqi people. It’s the insurgents who don’t care about the Iraqi people.”
Yes, it is remarkable indeed how misinformed some people can be.

Posted by: Outraged | Jun 20 2005 4:27 utc | 38

@fran

CH-53 Down
06/19/05 By PATRICK QUINN, Associated Press Writer
Videotape from a freelance cameraman working for Associated Press Television News in western Iraq Saturday showed what appeared to be the fuselage of an American-made CH-53 military helicopter sitting in a field with its rotor blades missing.
Other damage was difficult to asses in the tape, made at a considerable distance. An unidentified group of people could be seen around the fuselage. The U.S. military had no comment.

Posted by: Outraged | Jun 20 2005 4:39 utc | 40

Instruction on the Laws of War are required in all Armies Initial Entry Training, including Basic Combat Training and the Officer Basic Course. The training guide stresses that certain acts are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever.
These include the ‘Taking of hostages’.
[Geneva Conventions Article 34. Hostages]
The U.S. Army’s Field Manual 27-10, The Law of Land Warfare, is one of the major resources used for educating U.S. military personnel on the law of war. It contains numerous pertinent direct quotations from the various Geneva and Hague Conventions, as well as several official interpretations of these conventions.

Field Manual No. 27-10
DEPARTMENT OF THE ARMY
WASHINGTON 25, D.C., 18 July 1956
FM 27-10
THE LAW OF LAND WARFARE
Note: Changes required on 15 July 1976, have been incorporated within this document. Changed or new material is indicated by an asterisk (*).
CHAPTER 5
CIVILIAN PERSONS
Para 273. Hostages
The taking of hostages is prohibited. (GC, art. 34.)

Relevant Article:

US Frees Iraqi Woman Detainees After Protests
Massive protests swept Mosul over the past few days to demand the immediate release of detained Iraqi women.
By Omar Salah Al-Din, Khalid Yassin El-Yassari, IOL Correspondents
MOSUL, June 19, 2005 (IslamOnline.net) – US occupation forces completed on Sunday, June 19, the release of twenty one Iraqi women held as a bargain chip in the northern city of Mosul.
“The release came after massive protests organized by the Islamic Party and the Islamic organization for human rights over the past three days,” Nour Al-Din Al-Hayalli, the Islamic Party’s media officer in Mosul, told IslamOnline.net.
The Islamic party championed a massive demonstration following the Friday prayers on June 17 to press for the immediate release of all Iraqi women in the US custody.
Assembling outside the Sedek Rashan mosque, protestors denounced the American occupation for dishonoring the Iraqi people by detaining women.
They carried photos of detained women, demanding the government of Ibrahim Jaafari to live up to its responsibilities toward the Iraqi people.
The demonstrators also issued a statement calling for an immediate release of all Iraqi women detainees across the occupied country.
There is no available figures on Iraqi women in the custody of American occupation forces, including former regime officials and scientists.
Bargain Chip
Al-Hayalli said many Iraqi families have complained that the occupation forces were holding women as a bargain chip against relatives reportedly involved in resistance operations …

Posted by: Outraged | Jun 20 2005 5:48 utc | 42

@Outraged, thanks – I checked headlines of Swiss newspapers, but can’t find any information. I am curious to know what a Swiss military helicopter would be doing in Iraq? I will keep my eyes open for more information.

Posted by: Fran | Jun 20 2005 5:55 utc | 44

Another good an frightening New Yorker piece:
GOD AND COUNTRY – A college that trains young Christians to be politicians.

Patrick Henry is a Christian college, though it is not affiliated with any denomination, and it gives students guidelines on “glorifying God with their appearance.” During class hours, the college enforces a “business casual” dress code designed to prepare the students for office life—especially for offices in Washington, D.C., fifty miles to the east, where almost all the students have internships, with Republican politicians or in conservative think tanks.
…
Muench, like eighty-five per cent of the students at Patrick Henry, was homeschooled, in her case in rural Idaho. Homeschoolers are not the most obvious raw material for a college whose main mission, since its founding, five years ago, has been to train a new generation of Christian politicians. Politics, after all, is the most social of professions, and many students arrive at Patrick Henry having never shared a classroom with anyone other than their siblings. In conservative circles, however, homeschoolers are considered something of an élite, rough around the edges but pure—in their focus, capacity for work, and ideological clarity—a view that helps explain why the Republican establishment has placed its support behind Patrick Henry, and why so many conservative politicians are hiring its graduates.
…
Of the school’s sixty-one graduates through the class of 2004, two have jobs in the White House; six are on the staffs of conservative members of Congress; eight are in federal agencies; and one helps Senator Rick Santorum, of Pennsylvania, and his wife, Karen, homeschool their six children. Two are at the F.B.I., and another worked for the Coalition Provisional Authority, in Iraq. Last year, the college began offering a major in strategic intelligence; the students learn the history of covert operations and take internships that allow them to graduate with a security clearance.
All seniors do a directed research project that is designed, Farris told me, to mimic the work that an entry-level staffer would be assigned. “A whole lot of elected members of Congress started off as Hill staffers,” Farris said. “If you want to train a new generation of leaders, you have to get in on the ground floor.”

Posted by: b | Jun 20 2005 7:57 utc | 46

U.S. military planting weapons on murdered teenagers in Buhriz, Iraq, May 2005 – photographs and explanatory article

Posted by: Nugget | Jun 20 2005 13:34 utc | 48

on a lighter note, it looks like the first space ship to sail using solar wind is about to be launched. this is pretty cool

Posted by: dan of steele | Jun 20 2005 15:35 utc | 50

Noted historian and magazine editor James Weinstein is dead at 78
James Weinstein, 1926-2005

Posted by: liz | Jun 20 2005 16:33 utc | 52

Slavoj Zizek on the European No

[T]he very fact that the No was not sustained by a coherent alternative political vision is the strongest possible condemnation of the political and media elite, a monument to their inability to articulate and translate the people’s longings and dissatisfactions into a political vision. Instead, in their reaction to the No voters, they treated them as retarded pupils who did not get the lesson of the experts: Their self-criticism was that of the teacher who admits that he failed to properly educate his pupils.
So while the choice was not the choice between two political options, neither was it the choice between the enlightened vision of a modern Europe, ready to fit the new global order, and old confused political passions. When commentators described the No as a message of confused fear, they were wrong. The main fear was the fear that the refusal itself provoked in the new European political elite, the fear that people will no longer easily buy into their “post-political” vision. For all others, the No is a message and expression of hope–hope that Politics is still alive and possible, that the debate about what the new Europe shall and should be is still open. This is why those on the left should reject the sneering insinuation by liberals that, in our No, we found ourselves strange bedfellows with neo-Fascists. What the new populist right and the left share is precisely this: the awareness that Politics proper is still alive.
For in fact, there was a positive choice in the No: the choice of the choice itself, the rejection of the blackmail by the new elite that offered us only the choice to either confirm their expert knowledge or to display our “irrational” immaturity. The No vote is the positive decision to start a properly Political debate about what kind of Europe we really want.
[snip]
To put it bluntly, do we want to live in a world in which the only choice is between the American civilization and the emerging Chinese authoritarian-capitalist one? If the answer is no, then the only alternative is Europe. The Third World cannot generate a strong enough resistance to the ideology of the American Dream. In the present constellation, only Europe can do so. The true opposition today is not the one between the United States and the Third World, but the one between the whole of the American global Empire (and its Third World colonies) and Europe.
[snip]
So although the French and Dutch No is not sustained by a coherent and detailed alternative vision, it at least clears the space for it. This void demands to be filled with new projects–in contrast to the pro-Constitution stance that effectively precludes thinking, presenting us with an administrative-political fait accompli. The message of this No to all of us who care for Europe is: We will not allow anonymous experts whose merchandise is sold to us in a brightly colored, liberal-multiculturalist package to prevent us from thinking. It is time for us “Europeans”–both citizens and lovers of Europe–to become aware that we have to make a properly Political decision of what we want. No enlightened administrator will do the job for us.

Posted by: liz | Jun 20 2005 16:45 utc | 54

Sibel Edmonds spills some beans

Posted by: b | Jun 20 2005 17:50 utc | 56

b real, could you elaborate on that? The the intercepts bolton & gang? Do tell…

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Jun 20 2005 19:54 utc | 58

Uncle $cam – i was refering to the nsa intercepts involved in the bolton case, the ones that the admin won’t turn over & which appear to be significant, if not damaging. in her op-ed, sibel edmonds mentioned ‘direct pressure by the State Department’ being alleged by some FBI agents in the obstruction of 911-related intel communications. that stmt caught my eye and i was curious as to whether any dots line up there that could possibly be connected, like could bolton have been involved in a 911 mop up?

Posted by: b real | Jun 20 2005 20:37 utc | 60

sounds reasonable, b. we know they’re not withholding the info strictly as a matter of principle, for they demonstrably have none – well, none that have anything to do honest actions.

Posted by: b real | Jun 20 2005 22:45 utc | 62

regarding Blowback post on June 12, 2005
http://billmon.org/archives/001900.html
Check the Wayback Machine for other favorite websites from yor…
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://lincolncorp.com

Posted by: observer | Jun 22 2005 2:40 utc | 64