Report Sees Illegal Hiring Practices at Justice Department Justice Department officials over the last six years illegally used “political or ideological” factors to hire new lawyers into an elite recruitment program, tapping law school graduates with conservative credentials over those with liberal-sounding resumes, a new report found Tuesday. The blistering report, prepared by the Justice […]
New America Media, Special Investigative Report … According to the influential Rome-based La Repubblica, Carlo Rossella – at the time editor-in-chief of Berlusconi’s Panorama, one of Italy’s largest weeklies – delivered the dossier in the autumn of 2002 to the U.S. Embassy in Rome. Rossella’s actions were puzzling because its top investigative reporter, Elisabetta Burba, […]
Cheney gets last laugh Vice President Dick Cheney has won his battle to withhold records from the public despite efforts by Congress and other critics who say they should be open to scrutiny. The Democrats are conceding defeat. The party’s top investigator in the House of Representatives acknowledges that there is nothing more he can […]
The unexpected and untimely death of Tim Russert has evoked a mammoth media response and commentary from just about everybody. I don’t watch the Sunday Talking Head shows anymore, so my exposure to Tim was on the nightly news or on election coverage. In Bush’s first term and a half, I was down on […]
Status of Forces Agreement [SOFA] in the insulting Treaty our departing Administration has tried to force the Iraqis to sign before they leave office [which is not a Treaty because Treaties have to be ratified by Congress and because the Acronym isn’t manly – SOFT]. You know the terms. Our soldiers are immune to Iraqi […]
As any psychotherapist knows, there is no "solution" to paranoia. In its most virulent form, paranoid schizophrenia, medication helps with psychotic symptoms and the pressure to act on paranoid ideas. But those ideas often persist, either quietly in the foreground, or waiting in the background for the next bout. But paranoid thinking comes in gradations […]
Iran and the Problem of Evil Michael Ledeen Ever since World War II, we have been driven by a passionate desire to understand how mass genocide, terror states and global war came about – and how we can prevent them in the future… Most eventually accepted a twofold "explanation": the uniqueness of the evil, and […]
Supreme court ruling on right to trial puts Guantánamo future in doubt The future of the infamous Guantánamo detention centre was thrown into doubt yesterday after the US supreme court delivered the most serious blow yet to President George Bush’s policy of holding prisoners indefinitely without trial. The justices, in a historic ruling, said the […]
Who knows who Michael Ledeen is? He is a Jewish American who went off to graduate school to study Fascism, and seems to have fallen in love with it. He particulary loved Machiavelli. Studying in Italy, he somehow became involved with the Italian Secret Service SISMI and a number of Shady International figures [Manucher Ghorbanifar]. […]
Scottie and Condi and the Niger Intelligence …In this post, I want to look at how he deals with the underlying issue–the Niger intelligence and the White House’s response to it. I find his treatment particularly curious. As many of you have pointed out, Scottie McC is fairly critical of Condi Rice. Over time, I […]