I’ve been watching for coverage of Muhammed Yunnus getting the Nobel Peace Prize – and am disappointed at the desultory results. But why should I be surprised? Yunnus isn’t glamorous or political particularly, just really smart, and really compassionate, and...
From my down-under pen-pal Tim Gillin over at Stress: "The Australian opposition leader Kim Beazley has labeled Iraq, the worst foreign policy failure since Vietnam. Beazley, recently in the US, outlined a proposed withdrawal plan he calls ‘repositioning’. Beazley...
Newsday’s Walt Handelsman, aided by Roy Furchgott, has a wonderful animated cartoon featuring singing spies. The cartoon is here. This makes the National Security Agency wiretap issue so simple even a congressman might be able to get the point. ...
Intrepid Washington reporter Robert Dreyfuss interviews Salah Mukhtar, who is "close" to the Iraq opposition. It's clearly as bad or worse than you think. Our choices seem to be: 1. Stay the course of installing the dictatorship of the Iran parties, 2. Switch sides...
 I was reading the July 17 New Yorker & found "The Agent: Did the C.I.A. stop an F.B.I. detective from preventing 9/11?" (pdf file here) by Lawrence Wright. It's a long article, so some excerpts follow, starting with the main point: In March, the C.I.A. learned...
Along the lines of Justin Raimondo's article about Jonah Goldberg and the Ledeen Doctrine, one of the most sickening yet, as far as I can tell, unremarked upon bits of hearsay in Bob Woodward's new book, State of Denial, is about the bloodlust of Henry Kissinger,...
There's a strict taboo in the column-writing business against recycling ideas. So let me start with something fresh. Jonah Goldberg is a lying sack of bad arguments. I know, I know. I've said it before. And I enjoy saying it now. So, what's fresh about my...
Most commentary on North Korea, by hawks and doves alike, posits a false dilemma: either "get tough" with Kim Jong-Il (thus far, this has meant talk tough, because there's no military solution that doesn't end with Seoul in ashes), or send him money. This naturally...
Last week, a mortar attack on a U.S. ammo-storage site in Baghdad "set off a series of explosions … that shook buildings miles away." If you're wondering what such a thing looks like, watch the video below. Note in particular the explosion at 3:57....
From The History of Torture by George Riley Scott (London, 1940), we read: Often in combination with the rack was applied the "torture of water." This was generally adopted when racking, in itself, proved ineffectual. The victim, while pinioned on the rack, was...
