Thanks for passing by. Thank you for all the good comments and lively discussions that make MoA a satisfying endeavor.

Please keep coming and posting. Next year Billmon will be back with us, I will be less depressed and we will all have lots of scandals and outrages but also funny and amusing stuff to talk about.

Light some fireworks or clap your hands and scare away the old ghosts and greet the new ones.

Happy New Year to you wherever you are.

Uncle $cam asks you to nominate a Comment of the Year 2005. A good reason to take a walk through the archives (monthly links are on the left side of the main page) and to reread some threads.

To Uncle $cam this one is a candidate. So your nomination is … ?

The Cheney administration is giving us the late holiday gift of a leak investigation into the NSA wiretap reporting done by the New York Times and others.

The Justice Department has opened an investigation into the leak of classified information about President Bush’s secret domestic spying program, Justice officials said Friday.

This promisses us further delicous public disclosures about this and other NSA projects and their justification.

Cont. reading: Leak Leak Investigation

Last news & views call for 2005 …

Reading the recent reports by Tom Lasseter of Knight Ridder, there is a growing possibility of a civil war about Kirkuk, a city of 300,000 in northern Iraq and the capital of an oil rich province.

Lasseter talks to Iraqi troops in that area and finds many of them consisting of intact Kurdish Peschmerga units. Units who are willing to take on the Arabs when those do not agree to integrate Kirkuk into a Kurdish statelet – which they may well not do.

There are several long term problems for the Kurds themselves to go into this direction. Though, unfortunately, the do not seem to give them enough thought.

Cont. reading: Kurdish Problems

As I was traveling by train these last days, I had a chance to finish the newest book by Peter Scholl-Latour: "Giant on Clay Feet".

Scholl-Latour is a German author, an Arabist and TV correspondent now 82 years old. He reported on three wars from Vietnam, from Korea, Algeria and countless other conflicts.

His books are bestsellers in Germany. There is some information in English on his previous book, "Superpower in Quicksand". Unfortunately the only one translated to English seems to be "Death in the Rice Fields", an eyewitness account on three wars in Vietnam.

What makes Scholl-Latour’s books attractive, is his personal knowledge of actors and places.

Just as one example, he was the only western journalist to accompany Ayatollah Khomeni, who he criticize, to Tehran in 1979. Unsure of his treatment on arrival, Khomeni entrusted Scholl-Latour to carry his handwritten version of the new Iranian constitution.

Cont. reading: Feet of Clay

If there is an intensive effort at persuasion or deception, one has to check the details.

snow job – detail
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Full picture, uncompressed (140kb)

News, views, opinions …

snow job
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A heartfelt -non snow jobish- "Merry Christmas" to all of you.

Peace!

Oepn thread …

(lifted from a comment)

by Debs is dead

It seems to me that this whole war on terror thing is moving into
the endgame. It is OVER. Except of course innocent civilians are still
dying. From the viewpoint of using this meme to control populations it
is history though.

This is supported by the news that the US has been meeting secretly
with what until recently they had been calling "Ba’athist dead enders".

With typical lack of insight into other people, BushCo seems
surprised that this agreement to meet didn’t lead to the much promised
but never witnessed sight of Iraqis throwing flowers at US soldiers or
even a quiet thank-you for releasing 24 senior Ba’athists imprisoned
for nearly three years without an iota of evidence of wong-doing. No
instead the ingrates wanted to complain about former US friends the United Iraqi Alliance, who are also good friends of Iran.

Cont. reading: DeadISH GWOT

When the new conservative German minister of defense, Jung, made is first visit to the U.S. last week, expectations were high.

Germany has some 2,400 soldiers in Afghanistan. That number had been announced to rise to 3,000 and to probably increase further.

Turns out Rumsfeld was a bit too rummy to achieve that. According to a press leak (in German), his first question to Jung was not if, but when Germany would lift its defense spending to 2% of GDP. That would be some 87% above today’s level and would have zero political support.

When Jung mentioned the general German position on torture, Rumsfeld lectured him about his domestic U.S. law interpretation on that issue.

All in all – it did not go as smooth as expected and despite some friendly press-talk after that meeting, Jung seems to be pissed.

Today, on visit in Kabul, he announced the German troops numbers in Afghanistan to remain steady and to move most of those troops out of Kabul and into the peaceful and scenic northern region around Kunduz.

The U.S. strategy to sneak its troops out of Afghanistan and to leave the problem with NATO is now endangered.

Maybe the the poodle will pick up the mess and handle it as successful as the opium eradication program.

One government official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the administration complained bitterly that the FISA process demanded too much: to name a target and give a reason to spy on it.
link

That is the state of the union:

The executive is on to grab more power to control the peasants. In New York, the police mixes agent provocateurs into political rallies. Simple book orders are suspicious. A Catholic worker group is spied on as the fifth column of a long dead enemy. No bounds are accepted. There is no need for reason.

The legislative is either up to do the business of the highest bidder or in constant S&M session not willing or able to reign in the administration. Elections are unreliable. The people and their representative are manipulated through fake terror.

All hope now rests on the third branch, the judiciary. And there we find some encouraging motions.

Though the real Fitzmas may only come next year, with Abramoff willing to spilling his guts, hopes are up for a long holiday season.

But the judges, not the prosecutors are decisive and some are upset enough to take a real stand.

Cont. reading: Justitia Awakens

Sorry, busy today … not really, but kind of

YOUR news and views …

"Watergate and a lot of the things around Watergate and Vietnam, both during the 1970s, served, I think, to erode the authority I think the president needs to be effective, especially in the national security area," Cheney told reporters traveling with him on Air Force Two. "Especially in the day and age we live in … the president of the United States needs to have his constitutional powers unimpaired, if you will, in terms of the conduct of national security policy."
Cheney Defends Domestic Spying

They hate us because of our freedom — our meat-eating, fur-wearing freedom.

The Vegan Threat

Amnesia
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—

"For Americans to promote the canard that democracy fosters peace must be the most extreme case of amnesia on record."

Link

Thesis: The U.S. administration is using an automated communication surveillance system to monitor communications between the domestic U.S. and foreign countries. The system is a enhanced version of the Echolon system developed by the National Security Agency during the cold war to spy on foreign communication.

The use of such a system in communication involving the domestic U.S. is against the Fourth Amendment and could not possibly be legal even through the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

To be able to use the technology, the administration decided to break the law.

Cont. reading: Echelon And FISA

Billmon:

The Federales

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Adding another thought.

Bush’s argument: We  have to destroy the constitution in order to save it.
—

Bush’s defense for breaking the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) law does not make much sense.
He and his people come up with two arguments:

Cont. reading: Weak Defense +

Bush is supposed to have a major TV-speech tonight. The first since 2003. What will/does he say and why?

News & views …

NEW BEDFORD (RBN) – A senior at UMass Dartmouth was visited by federal agents two months ago, after he requested a copy of George Orwell’s tome on totalitarianism called "1984."
Two history professors at UMass Dartmouth, Brian Glyn Williams and Robert Pontbriand, said the student told them he requested the book through the UMass Dartmouth library’s interlibrary loan program.

The student, who was completing a research paper on Communism for Professor Pontbriand’s class on fascism and totalitarianism, filled out a form for the request, leaving his name, address, phone number and Social Security number. He was later visited at his parents’ home in New Bedford by two agents of the Department of Homeland Security, the professors said.

The professors said the student was told by the agents that the book is on a "watch list," and that his background, which included significant time abroad, triggered them to investigate the student further.
"I tell my students to go to the direct source, and so he asked for the official version of the book," Professor Pontbriand said. "Apparently, the Department of Homeland Security is monitoring inter-library loans, because that’s what triggered the visit, as I understand it."

Agents’ visit chills UMass Dartmouth senior