“Women in burqas and men with long beards have become a common sight in the Bosnian capital in recent years,” says Reuters. So the employees of a Sarajevo bank didn’t think it unusual when two figures in full niqab (which covers the face as well, leaving only the eyes uncovered) showed up. That is, of course, until they “trained guns on customers…”
The two “women” made off with $40,000, and the police have no clue how to track them down.
Bush/Cheney Co-conspirator Libby Walks
Former Ambassador Joseph Wilson reacts to Bush’s commutation of Lewis “Scooter” Libby’s prison sentence.
MP3 here. (16:13)
Joseph C. Wilson 4th, former United States ambassador to Iraq and Gabon, and husband of outed CIA agent Valerie Plame, is an international business consultant.
US Backs Iran in Iraq, Blames Them for Everything
Investigative reporter Robert Dreyfuss reports on efforts of Iraq nationalists to forge a multi-ethnic unity government against the determined efforts of the Cheney administration to back the Iranian factions, SCIRI and the Da’wa Party and the failure of most Americans to demand hard news and the media to supply it.
MP3 here. (43:37)
For nearly fifteen years Robert Dreyfuss has worked as an independent journalist who specializes in magazine features, profiles, and investigative stories in the areas of politics and national security. In 2001, he was profiled as a leading investigative journalist by the Columbia Journalism Review, and two of his articles have won awards from The Washington Monthly. In 2003, Dreyfuss was awarded Project Censored’s first prize for a story on the role of oil in U.S. policy toward Iraq.He has appeared on scores of radio and television talk shows, including Hannity and Colmes on Fox News, C-Span, CNBC, MSNBC, Court TV, and, on National Public Radio, The Diane Rehm Show and Public Interest with Kojo Nnamdi, and Pacifica’s Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman.
Based in Alexandria, Va., Dreyfuss been writing for Rolling Stone for at least a decade, and currently covers national security for Rolling Stone’s National Affairs section. He’s a contributing editor at The Nation, a contributing writer at Mother Jones, and a senior correspondent for The American Prospect. His articles have also appeared in The Washington Monthly, The New Republic, Newsday, Worth, California Lawyer, The Texas Observer, E, In These Times, The Detroit Metro Times, Public Citizen, Extra!, and, in Japan, in Esquire, Foresight and Nikkei Business. On line, he writes frequently for TomPaine.com, and produced a popular blog for Tom Paine called The Dreyfuss Report.
Dreyfuss is best known for ground-breaking stories about the war in Iraq, the war on terrorism, and post-9/11 U.S. foreign policy. In 2002, he wrote the first significant profile of Ahmed Chalabi by a journalist, for The American Prospect. Also in 2002, he wrote the first analysis of the war between the Pentagon and the CIA over policy toward Iraq, which included the first important account of the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans. Other stories in The American Prospect included detailed accounts of neoconservative war plans for the broader Middle East. In 2004, he co-authored what is still the most complete account of the work of the Office of Special Plans in manufacturing misleading or false intelligence about Iraq, for Mother Jones, entitled “The Lie Factory.â€
Before 9/11, Dreyfuss wrote extensively about intelligence issues, including pieces about post-Cold War excursions by the CIA into economic espionage, about the CIA’s nonofficial cover (NOC) program, and about lobbying by U.S. defense and intelligence contractors over the annual secret intelligence budget.
Among his many other pieces, Dreyfuss has profiled organizations, including the Democratic Leadership Council, the Center for American Progress, the National Rifle Association, the NAACP, the Human Rights Campaign, and Handgun Control. He has also profiled Vermont Governor Howard Dean, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, House Majority Whip Tom DeLay, conservative activist Grover Norquist, House Ways & Means Committee Chairman Bill Thomas, Senator John McCain, and, in 1999, Texas Governor George W. Bush. One of his most important pieces was the result of a weeks-long visit to Vietnam in 1999, where he wrote about the effects of Agent Orange dioxin in Vietnam since the 1970s. His stories on the privatization of Social Security and the politics of Medicare and Medical Savings Accounts have been widely cited.
Dreyfuss is a member of the American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA) and Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE). He graduated from Columbia University.
I don’t usually bother with the right-wing legal blog Volokh Conspiracy for reasons Jim Henley summarized years ago. So I was pleasantly surprised to find these comments on the Libby commutation.
[W]hether Scooter Libby’s original sentence was exactly correct is an interesting question I can’t answer; while I have a rough sense it was in the right ballpark, I didn’t follow the case closely enough to have any particular views of that.
Nonetheless, I find Bush’s action very troubling because of the obvious special treatment Libby received. President Bush has set a remarkable record in the last 6+ years for essentially never exercising his powers to commute sentences or pardon those in jail. His handful of pardons have been almost all symbolic gestures involving cases decades old, sometimes for people who are long dead. Come to think of it, I don’t know if Bush has ever actually used his powers to get one single person out of jail even one day early. If there are such cases, they are certainly few and far between. So Libby’s treatment was very special indeed.
Eugene Volokh chimed in with his agreement, then Kerr added this:
The Scooter Libby case has triggered some very weird commentary around the blogosphere; perhaps the weirdest claim is that the case against Libby was “purely political.”
I find this argument seriously bizarre. As I understand it, Bush political appointee James Comey named Bush political appointee and career prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald to investigate the Plame leak. Bush political appointee and career prosecutor Fitzgerald filed an indictment and went to trial before Bush political appointee Reggie Walton. A jury convicted Libby, and Bush political appointee Walton sentenced him. At sentencing, Bush political appointee Judge Walton described the evidence against Libby as “overwhelming” and concluded that a 30-month sentence was appropriate. And yet the claim, as I understand it, is that the Libby prosecution was the work of political enemies who were just trying to hurt the Bush Administration.
I find this claim bizarre. I’m open to arguments that parts of the case against Libby were unfair. But for the case to have been purely political, doesn’t that require the involvement of someone who was not a Bush political appointee? Who are the political opponents who brought the case? Is the idea that Fitzgerald is secretly a Democratic party operative? That Judge Walton is a double agent? Or is the idea that Fitzgerald and Walton were hypnotized by “the Mainstream Media” like Raymond Shaw in the Manchurian Candidate? Seriously, I don’t get it.
I would like to hear some of you bullsh*t neolibertarians out there explain how it can be anything other than abuse of power for a president to free his cronies who have obstructed investigations into his administration while thousands of nonviolent, victimless “criminals” rot in America’s prisons.
War Made Easy: Just Lie to Everyone
Norman Solomon and Lorretta Alper discuss their new movie War Made Easy, and the similarity of the propaganda techniques from Vietnam, the current Iraq war and the next one in Iran.
Norman Solomon is a nationally syndicated columnist on media and politics. He has been writing the weekly “Media Beat” column since 1992. Solomon’s latest book, War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death, was published in 2005.
Solomon is the founder and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, a national consortium of policy researchers and analysts.
His book “Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn’t Tell You” (co-authored with foreign correspondent Reese Erlich) was published in 2003 by Context Books. Loretta Alper, has been on the staff of MEF since the summer of 2000, when she was hired as a freelance producer. Since joining MEF full-time in 2001, she has produced a number of titles and served as the Executive Producer on several others.
Loretta graduated from the University of Massachusetts with a B.A. in English and Communication, and she also holds a Master’s degree in Secondary English Education from UMass. She became interested in media literacy while a high school English teacher. After teaching for six years, Loretta joined the staff at MEF eager to produce video resources for teachers to utilize in their work as media educators. She has produced videos on topics ranging from media coverage of female athletes to advertising in schools to American television’s representations of working class people. She is currently producing War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us To Death, an analysis of American war propaganda featuring media critic Norman Solomon and narrated by Sean Penn.
