From Common Dreams
By Norman Solomon

Newspapers across the United States and beyond told readers Wednesday about sensational new statements by a former top assistant to Colin Powell when he was secretary of state. After interviewing Lawrence Wilkerson, the Associated Press reported he “said that wrongheaded ideas for the handling of foreign detainees after Sept. 11 arose from a coterie of White House and Pentagon aides who argued that ‘the president of the United States is all-powerful,’ and that the Geneva Conventions were irrelevant.”

AP added: “Wilkerson blamed Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and like-minded aides. Wilkerson said that Cheney must have sincerely believed that Iraq could be a spawning ground for new terror assaults, because ‘otherwise I have to declare him a moron, an idiot or a nefarious bastard.’”

Such strong words are headline grabbers when they come from someone widely assumed to be speaking Powell’s mind. And as a Powell surrogate, Wilkerson is certainly on a tear this week, speaking some truth about power. But there are a few big problems with his zeal to recast the public record: 1) Wilkerson should have spoken up years ago. 2) His current statements, for the most part, are foggy. 3) The criticisms seem to stem largely from tactical critiques and image concerns rather than moral objections. 4) Powell is still too much of a cagey opportunist to speak out himself.

Appearing on the BBC’s “Today” program Tuesday, Wilkerson said: “You begin to wonder was this intelligence spun? Was it politicized? Was it cherry-picked? Did, in fact, the American people get fooled? I am beginning to have my concerns.”

So Wilkerson, who was Powell’s chief of staff from 2002 till early this year, has started to “wonder” whether the intelligence was spun, politicized, cherry-picked. At the end of November 2005, he was “beginning” to have “concerns.”

“Beginning to have my concerns” is a phrase that aptly describes the Colin Powell approach.

Read more Powell

From Raw Story

Chairman and chief executive of media juggernaut Time Warner Richard Parsons, who barred a conversation with Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia from being on the record, cut a massive $25,000 check to the Republican National Committee in 2004, and according to Newsmeat.com has given $119,750 to Republican candidates and just $12,000 to Democrats.

Parsons tried to impose a “gag order” on a public interview of Scalia conducted by Norman Pearlstein, Time’s editor in chief, Nov. 21. Various publications, including the New York Daily News, flaunted the order; the News’ Lloyd Grove poked at the gag by presenting Scalia’s comments as hypothetical remarks — thereby not actually violating the off-the-record agreement.

The media has paid little attention to Parsons donations. Jack Shafer, a media critic for Slate, raised concern at Parsons’ move but did not attempt an explanation.

“What possessed Time Warner–whose choice subsidiaries are in the business of getting Washington’s most powerful minds on the record–to stage this farce?” Shafer wrote.

Read more Time Warner

From CounterPunch
By Mike Whitney

It’s pathetic to see the world’s most powerful man, shunted into prearranged venues so he can pitch his snake-oil to college aged boys. That said, Bush’s appearance today at the Naval Academy has got to be a new low for the White House public relations team. Apparently the only people buying the huckster-in-chief’s bedraggled vision of a democratic Iraq are rosy-cheeked young men who dream of battlefields instead of girlfriends.

Is this the last place Bush can count on a round of applause without body-scanning everyone who enters the door?

“Setting an artificial deadline to withdraw would vindicate the terrorist tactics of beheadings and suicide bombings and mass murder and invite new attacks on America,” Bush boomed.

Bush loves the applause. He luxuriates in the warm glow of human affection. In many ways he is the consummate politician feeding his fragile ego with the ephemeral praise of complete strangers. Too bad, his only springboard to fame has been as bullhorn for right-wing fanatics and war-mongers. Now, he finds himself toddling on a narrower and narrower ledge, peering down into the abyss of defeat and disgrace.

“To all who wear the uniform, I make you this pledge: America will not run in the face of car bombers and assassins so long as I am your commander-in-chief.”

Who could have dreamed that events would overtake Bush so quickly? A hawkish congressman takes the floor of the House and whispers “Withdrawal” and suddenly the whole neocon master-plan begins to unravel like a ball-o-yarn skittering across the kitchen floor.

Read more Cheerleading

From The Asia Timesvia Tom Dispatch
By Robert Dreyfuss

Nearly three years into the war in Iraq, the Bush administration tells us that it wasn’t about weapons of mass destruction or Iraqi ties to al-Qaeda, but about America’s holy mission to spread democracy to the benighted regions of the Middle East. However, postwar Iraq is anything but a democracy. In fact, if Iraq manages to avoid all-out civil war, it is likely to end up with a government that is fiercely undemocratic - a Shi’ite theocratic dictatorship that rules by terror, torture, and armed might.

What President George W Bush has wrought in Iraq is just the latest in a long string of US efforts to make common cause with the Islamic right. But like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, whose naive and inexperienced use of magic blows up in his face, American efforts to play with the forces of political Islam have proved to be dangerous, volatile and often uncontrollable.

The problem goes far beyond the Shi’ites in Iraq. In the Sunni parts of the country, the power of Islamism is growing, too - and by this I do not mean the forces associated with al-Qaeda. but the radical-right Muslim Brotherhood, represented there by the Iraqi Islamic Party, and other manifestations of the Salafi and Wahhabi-style religious right.

In Egypt, Syria and elsewhere, the radical religious right is also gaining strength. Meanwhile; sometimes deliberately, sometimes by sheer ignorance and incompetence, the Bush administration is encouraging the spread of political Islam. Were the US to “stay the course,” not only Iraq but much of the rest of the Middle East could fall to the Islamic right.

Does this mean that al-Qaeda-style fanatics will take power? No. Whether in the form of Iraq’s Shi’ite theocrats or the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood in Syria and Egypt, the Islamic right cannot be compared to al-Qaeda. Yet, just as the US Christian right has its abortion clinic bombers, just as the Israeli Jewish right spawned the assassin of Yitzhak Rabin and settler-extremists who kill dozens at Muslim holy sites, the Islamic right provides ideological support and theological justification for more extreme (and, yes, terrorist) offspring.

Read more Iraq

From The Washington Post
By Fred Barbash

Samuel A. Alito urged the Justice Department in 1985 to suggest to the Supreme Court that it consider overruling Roe v. Wade.

In a memo from Alito circulated in the department, he suggested filing a friend of the court brief stating that “we disagree with Roe v. Wade and would welcome the opportunity to brief the issue of whether, and if so to what extent, that decision should be overruled.”

In the memo, Alito said he found “this approach preferable to a frontal assault on Roe v. Wade. It has most of the advantages of a brief devoted to the overruling of Roe v Wade,” he wrote. “It makes our position clear, does not even tacitly concede Roe’s legitimacy, and signals that we regard the question as live and open.

“At the same time,” Alito wrote, “it is free of many of the disadvantages that would accompany a major effort” to overturn Roe, in part because if the court declines to do so, “the decision will not be portrayed as a stinging rebuke.”

The document was among those released this morning by the archives.

From The SF Chronicle
By Deb Riechmann

President Bush, facing growing doubts about his war strategy, said Wednesday that Iraqi troops are increasingly taking the lead in battle but that “this will take time and patience.” He refused to set a timetable for withdrawing U.S. forces.

Bush said the U.S. military presence in Iraq is set to change, by making fewer patrols and convoys, moving out of Iraqi cities and focusing more on specialized operations aimed at high-value terrorist targets.

“As Iraqi forces gain experience and the political process advances, we will be able to decrease our troop level in Iraq without losing our capability to defeat the terrorists,” Bush told a supportive audience at the U.S. Naval Academy. “These decisions about troop levels will be driven by the conditions on the ground in Iraq and the good judgment of our commanders, not by artificial timetables set by politicians in Washington.”

Bush’s emphasis on the readiness of Iraqi security forces came at a time when continued violence in Iraq and the death of more than 2,000 U.S. troops have contributed to a sharp drop in the president’s popularity.

Even before Bush finished speaking, Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid issued a statement claiming that Bush “recycled his tired rhetoric of ’stay the course’ and once again missed an opportunity to lay out a real strategy for success in Iraq that will bring our troops safely home.”

Read more Tired Rhetoric

From Brad Blog
By Brad Friedman

In North Carolina, Diebold had been attempting to get a special court order allowing them to get around NC’s law requiring that Voting Machine Companies hand over their source code for their secret software to be kept in escrow in the event of a problem later. North Carolina has had many recently, including the complete loss of some 4500+ votes in Cartaret County during the Nov. ‘04 Presidential Election which led to a Re-Vote in the county.

Thanks to efforts by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the court has now ruled against Diebold’s requested dispensation from state law. Now Diebold claims they are going to have to get out of the state entirely. Glad to hear it. If it’s true. Other Voting Machine Companies have complied with the law, apparently, so what’s Diebold’s problem? Do they have something they wish to hide in that source code?

We may never know…

Read more Diebold

From The Nation
By Eyal Press

Campus newspapers aren’t generally known for making waves inside the Beltway. Recently, however, the Daily Princetonian published a story that merits attention from senators gearing up for the confirmation hearings of Samuel Alito, George W. Bush’s nominee to replace Sandra Day O’Connor on the Supreme Court. As Chanakya Sethi reported in a November 18 article for the paper, in 1985 Princeton graduate and conservative Republican Alito sought to impress his colleagues in the Reagan Administration, where he was applying to become deputy assistant attorney general, by touting his membership in an organization called Concerned Alumni of Princeton.

Launched in 1972, the year Alito graduated, CAP had an innocuous-sounding name that disguised a less benign agenda, which included preventing women and minorities from entering an institution that had long been a bastion of white male privilege. In a 1973 article in Prospect, a magazine CAP published, Shelby Cullom Davis, one of its founders, harked back to the days when a gathering of Princeton alumni consisted of “a body of men, relatively homogeneous in interests and backgrounds.” Lamented Cullom Davis: “I cannot envisage a similar happening in the future with an undergraduate student population of approximately 40% women and minorities, such as the Administration has proposed.” Another article published that same year bemoaned the fact that “the makeup of the Princeton student body has changed drastically for the worse” in recent years–Princeton had begun admitting women in 1969–and wondered aloud what might happen if the university adopted a “sex-blind” policy “removing limits on the number of women.” In an unsuccessful effort to forestall this frightening development, the executive committee of CAP published a statement in December 1973 that affirmed unequivocally, “Concerned Alumni of Princeton opposes adoption of a sex-blind admission policy.”

Read more Alito

From The Guardian UK
By Nick Paton Walsh

The film is shaky, its pixillated frames jarring as it scans across the contents of the makeshift morgue. A leg, a dark mound of pubic hair, a heavily burned head, a broad chest that must for years have seemed invulnerable. About 60 bodies are heaped without decency or clothing on the floor of the refrigerated wagon, their blank faces caught by the mobile phone’s camera.

“It looks like something from Treblinka,” says Raya, whose son Vyacheslav, 30, a former Russian special forces soldier, lies among the dead. “I looked for him for a week before I found him there.”

Yet the authorities say these are not the bodies of victims but of “terrorists”, some of at least 92 men shot dead by special forces when they staged one of the biggest uprisings in Russia since the second Chechen war in 1999. On October 13, about 200 men in the sleepy southern spa town of Nalchik staged simultaneously eight armed attacks on police stations, the headquarters of the security and prison services.

The attacks failed spectacularly. Groups of about eight to 10 men, many from the town’s educated, young middle classes, appeared hopelessly ill-trained to face Russia’s souped-up special forces. One witness who watched the storming of the security services building recalls hearing them shouting frantically at each other: “How do you reload a grenade launcher?”

Officials say that the attacks began when police unearthed an arms dump meant to supply a larger uprising in early November, and the militants decided to go for broke, summoned by just a phone call from the underground Islamic groups that they had joined.

Read more Russia

From NY Times
By David E. Sanger and Eric Schmitt

President Bush on Wednesday will put forward for the first time a public version of what the White House calls a comprehensive strategy for victory in Iraq.

In a related effort to begin extricating American forces next year, military officials said Tuesday that they would seek billions of additional dollars to better train Iraqis to defend the country.

The military officials in Iraq said they had requested $3.9 billion for next year to help train and equip Iraqi troops, build new police stations and outfit Iraqi soldiers with new uniforms.

That amount would be part of a larger spending request to Congress for the overall war effort and is on top of the $10.6 billion that lawmakers have already approved to rebuild Iraq’s security forces.

Mr. Bush continued to emphasize that American forces cannot withdraw before their job is done.

Read More Iraq