As usual, Matt Yglesias sums it all up in very few words:
“John McCain says that “anyone who worries about how long we’re in Iraq does not understand the military.” On the contrary, it seems to me that McCain doesn’t understand diplomacy, Iraq, foreign policy, strategy, the concept of limited resources, or just about anything else.”
In the Maryland primary yesterday, Republican Congressman Wayne Gilchrest was defeated by a pro-war challenger.
Gilchrest voted for the Iraq War in 2003, but later said he regretted the decision. Gilchrest later criticized Bush’s handling of the war and became one of two Republicans (with Ron Paul) to vote last year for a withdrawal timeline.
The campaign against Gilchrest started just a few months after he took office for his ninth term and his challengers were heavily funded by pro-war establishment GOP leaders.
Speaking before the American Bar Association, former Secretary of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge, went against most of his fellow Republican politicians, at least on the subject of torture: “And I believe, unlike others in the administration, that waterboarding was, is, and will always be torture. That’s a simple statement.”
What disclosures are those? Treason.
Sunday Times 1,2,3. Philip Giraldi 1,2,3.
Now BradBlog reports to us an interview from Tuesday, February 12th 2008, in which “outed” CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson discusses (at 39:00) the allegation that former State Department official Marc Grossman tipped off the Turks and Pakistanis to her nuclear black market-monitoring CIA front company years before we ever heard of her. From Bradblog:
[Plame] says she has been following recent blockbuster series in British paper concerning U.S. nuclear secrets espionage, allegations that her [CIA] cover company, Brewster Jennings, was exposed by a former high-ranking State Department official as long ago as 2001.
Former CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson says the recent disclosures in the UK’s Sunday Times concerning the sale of U.S. nuclear secrets to the foreign black market, as aided by high-ranking government officials, are “stunning.”
The previously covert agent, who had worked in the agency’s counter-proliferation division for years, monitoring traffic in the nuclear black market under the guise of a cover company named Brewster Jennings until being outed by Administration officials, was asked about the recent series of explosive stories in the British paper during an interview this morning with Florida radio host Henry Raines of American AM.
Those disclosures include allegations that Brewster Jennings was outed to Turkish officials as a CIA front, by State Department official Marc Grossman, as early as 2001.
That would be as opposed to by Robert Novak in July of 2003.
Plame says that she can’t confirm it, but she sure doesn’t sound doubtful of Edmonds’ story.
Read the transcript of the interview at Bradblog. Listen to it here.
I know that if at first you don’t succeed, you’re supposed to try, try again. But I think that phrase needs an exception: do not keep trying the same thing over and over again, especially after you fail 100 times in as many years.
British Foreign Secretary David Miliband should take this to heart, given his country’s embarrassing failure in exporting democracy through colonization and occupation — not to mention the planned starvation of sanctions and the mass murder of war. But no, he stands defiant in the face of reality, insisting that the debacle in Afghanistan and the horror show in Iraq is just another flawless intervention that just went a little wrong because of a few “mistakes.”
He makes a case for endless interventions around the globe for various foreign offenses — and then unwittingly shows himself up by bringing up the miracle of China. Commerce brought wealth and power to the masses of China, not “humanitarian intervention.” The state has done nothing but fight, tooth and nail, the advances of peaceful humanity on every front. The 20th Century was its last great push. It is finally losing, and the tide of prosperity and cooperation is shifting to overtake misery, poverty, and war. If the power-hungry, bloodthirsty, warmongering — or if you prefer, downright stupid — likes of Miliband would just step aside and allow people to decide for themselves what they want, we’d get there a lot faster.
In a post sure to infuriate cons and libs, neos and paleos, progs and trogs alike, IOZ seconds the archbishop of Canterbury. Agree or disagree, it’s worth a read.
