Buried down at the bottom of this news article:
I am under the impression that Ahmad Chalabi had taken over as oil minister. Well, is he or isn’t he? No mention if Chalabi has stepped down.
Repaired some broken links, deleted some defunct ones, and added four on the floor: Diana Moon, Sheldon Richman, Glaivester, and Kevin Carson. Check ’em out.
For all those who have been trying to keep up with (and make sense of) the story of Sibel Edmonds, the woman who learned terrible things while translating for the FBI, blew the whistle and was promptly fired and gagged with the court invented “state’s secrets privilege,” there is good news.
Lukery, proprietor of the excellent blog wot is it good for?, has put in the time and gray matter to piece together what we can learn from what she can say around her gag order. (Which was recently upheld by the Supreme Court without comment.)
It seems clear at this point that the many scandals of the neoconservatives who lied us into Iraq, as Edmonds told me last August 13, are connected together. It seems more and more likely that her half-told portion is the puzzle piece to hold them all together, though many questions indeed remain.
Lukery’s excellent summary is here.
Notes from his interview of her here.
More from him on the subject here, here, here, here and here.
Christopher Deliso’s interviews of Sibel are here and here.
His 3 latest articles on all this here, here and here, my December 17th interview of him on the subject here.
Sibel’s website, the notorious Vanity Fair article, and the transcript of my most recent interview of her here, mp3 here.
Check out these pathetic right-socialist warmonger types trying to claim that Americans aren’t bothered by the recent National Security Agency wiretapping scandal. Citing a Rasmussen poll, “NewsBusters” claims, “the nation doesn’t feel the Bush administration is doing anything wrong.”
“Busters” is right, because that wasn’t the question.
Media Matters has Pat Buchanan – typically right in writing and wrong on TV – making the same ridiculous claim on Hardball ,
“MSNBC political analyst Pat Buchanan, Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, CNBC host Lawrence Kudlow, and conservative radio host Michael Reagan referenced the Rasmussen poll in defending Bush’s authorization of the NSA eavesdropping program. The poll, conducted December 26-27, asked respondents: ‘Should the National Security Agency be allowed to intercept telephone conversations between terrorism suspects in other countries and people living in the United States?’ Sixty-four percent of respondents answered ‘Yes.'”
Wowee, well I guess I can ignore the fact that the NSA has been tapping virtually all international calls and that the law has been broken, since this stupid unrelated poll question was tailored in such a way as to make for a useful soundbite for the warmongering and liberty hating Krauthammers of the world.
I give up. You conservatives are right. A “Democracy,” as the new leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iraq have taught us, “means accepting the will of the majority” – that is, as determined by misinterpreted phony poll questions on a day to day basis.
President Bush announced today that some U.S. troops would be withdrawn from Iraq this year. That’s great, but does anyone really think that all, or even the majority of, U.S. troops will ever be withdrawn from Iraq? We still have 69,395 troops in Germany, 35,307 in Japan, and 32,744 in Korea.
Lt. General Ricardo Sanchez, addressing troops in Germany on their way to Iraq, explained
“The country’s on the verge of a civil war.”
They are finally starting to admit it.
