Law enforcement officials identified the suspect as James Wenneker von Brunn, born in 1920, from the Eastern Shore of Maryland, NBC News reported. NBC said he may have had connections to hate groups or anti-government groups.

For those who started something when the terror book came out about right wing groups, this and the Tiller murder are the sort of thing it was talking about. How many lefty attacks have there been? Oh that's right, none.

Reality does have a liberal bias, and it's because of people like these guys.

Gunman, guard shot at Holocaust museum - Crime & courts- msnbc.com

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs wasn't buying it. Asked about it at his daily press briefing, he referred reporters to a Pentagon statement denying the story, then added, "If I wanted to read a write-up today of how Manchester United fared last night in the Champion's League Cup, I might open up a British newspaper. If I was looking for something that bordered on truthful news, I'm not entirely sure it would be the first stack of clips I picked up... I think if you do an even moderate Google search, you're not going to find many of these newspapers and truth within, say, 25 words of each other."

In "Woodstein" that's called "a non-denial denial," and means the story is likely true. Abu Ghraib is getting ready to go from a debacle to a complete disaster. IF this is true (looks likely) and IF the courts order the pictures (and VIDEO?) released (also looks likely), you can expect the Muslim world to explode. They stone people for this kind of thing.

As more and more about Abu Ghraib, Bagram and Gitmo comes out, this is turning into not "a few bad apples," but straight from the top. This is not going to go away, and it is turning the US under the prior administration into the first minor monsters of the 21st century, with Bush and Cheney standing next to Pinochet, Somoza, the Shah and Milosevic from the last.

We didn't just lose the "War on Terror," we became a first hand practitioner.

Is Obama covering up photos of detainee rapes? - War Room - Salon.com

Defenders of these techniques have claimed that they got Abu Zubaydah to give up information leading to the capture of Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a top aide to Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, and Mr. Padilla. This is false. The information that led to Mr. Shibh’s capture came primarily from a different terrorist operative who was interviewed using traditional methods. As for Mr. Padilla, the dates just don’t add up: the harsh techniques were approved in the memo of August 2002, Mr. Padilla had been arrested that May.

And this is why we don't let go of the torture question. It doesn't work, has actively made the country less safe by re-splitting the cooperation between FBI and intelligence, has actively made the country less safe by becoming a recruiting poster, damaged our credibility internationally, and trashed our position as a human rights leader.

This isn't just a failure, it's a disaster of incredible proportion and we're going to be trying to clean it up for decades.

Op-Ed Contributor - My Tortured Decision - NYTimes.com

Two senior British judges accused the United States on Wednesday of threatening to end intelligence cooperation if Britain released evidence about the alleged torture of a Guantanamo detainee.

Really?

UK judges accuse U.S. over Guantanamo case | International | Reuters

Both retired FBI officials asserted that the Bush administration was thoroughly briefed on the mortgage fraud crisis and its potential to cascade out of control with devastating financial consequences, but made the decision not to give back to the FBI the agents it needed to address the problem. After the terrorist attacks of 2001, about 2,400 agents were reassigned to counterterrorism duties.

Here's another casualty of the "War on Terror." The economy got mugged because we were looking the other way.

FBI saw mortgage fraud early

Decius wrote:
Hendrik Hertzberg:

What role the Bush Administration's downgrading of terrorism as a foreign-policy priority played in the success of the 9/11 attacks cannot be known, but there is no doubting its responsibility for the launching and mismanagement of the unprovoked war in Iraq, with all its attendant suffering; for allowing the justified war in Afghanistan to slide to the edge of defeat; and for the vertiginous worldwide decline of America's influence, prestige, power, and moral standing.

I wonder if there is anyone assessing the Bush Presidency at this moment who is able to do so objectively, without Partisan bias... Who can actually give him credit for the things he did accomplish while acknowledging his failures honestly.

I've always been concerned about his attitudes about constitutional rights and international treaties. Cheney is wrong - history will not look kindly upon what they've done there. Obama stuck a fork directly into that mess during his inaugural speech, so perhaps we're off to progress, but I'm eagerly awaiting actual policies. Some of those problems are easier to talk about than to fix.

The war in Iraq was a mixed bag. We did not get into it in the right way. It blew up in our faces. Finally Bush, in the wake of a failed Congressional election, did the right thing and fired Rumsfeld. We changed course in Iraq, and the situation is better now. This wasn't entirely the result of good fortune.

A number of countries that we considered state supporters of terrorism at the turn of the century are now off the list, although I'm still a little skeptical about North Korea.

I'd argue that they significantly softenned the blow of the stock market crash - of 2002. Few people understand that. When things don't go wrong no one understands what you achieved. They should have popped the housing bubble earlier, but the result would have been depressing regardless of when they did it. The real bubble was blown in the late 1990s. The greater catastrophy was likely averted, no matter how bad things are about to get.

For all the monday night quarterbacking about DHS and its inefficiencies, the US has not been subjected to another domestic terrorist attack.

AlQueda is singificantly weakened. They simply do not have the operational capabilities that they had 8 years ago.

Bush (and his party) failed on two key domestic policy issues: social security and immigration. They were largely unable to achieve the later because of the incongruence between reality and the views of Rush Limbaugh and his ilk. Bush is right. He should have just done it. Its not like he would be any less unpopular for having gone through with it.

Quite frankly, the Bush 43 administration has been one unmitigated disaster after another. Without being partisan about it, which I certainly could be, let's just use your list as... [ Read More (0.8k in body) ]

RE: Transitioning

Want to be a provincial police chief? It will cost you $100,000.

Want to drive a convoy of trucks loaded with fuel across the country? Be prepared to pay $6,000 per truck, so the police will not tip off the Taliban.

Need to settle a lawsuit over the ownership of your house? About $25,000, depending on the judge.

It's called Vietnam in the mountains, as Iraq has become Vietnam in the desert. This kind of crap is why we can't win this war and it's because we're all to happy to take the easy way out and buy our way to a solution, when buying the opening is only a stopgap measure. What's worse is the bribes cause an already untenable situation to degenerate further, faster.

This route is insanity. We've been down it multiple times before and ALWAYS, it leads to places we don't want to be. Why the hell are we going down it again?

Bribes Corrode Afghans’ Trust in Government - NYTimes.com

By this time, with rain battering my windscreen and cars jamming the road, I was at the end of my tether.

"OK", I said, tossing the phone into the back of the car.

"They are under P for pirates."

Giggling with pirates

"Hello. Please can I talk to the pirates," said my daughter in her obviously childish voice.

Just.... wow.

BBC NEWS | Programmes | From Our Own Correspondent | 'Mummy, can I phone the pirates?'

"Our findings suggest that the surge has had no observable effect, except insofar as it has helped to provide a seal of approval for a process of ethno-sectarian neighborhood homogenization that is now largely achieved," Agnew's team wrote in their report.

Well not quite, it seems to have been the capstone of ethnic cleansing in Baghdad.

The Surge Did Nothing

In it, two World of Warcraft players discuss a raid on the "White Keep" inside the "Stonetalon Mountains." The major objective is to set off a "Dragon Fire spell" inside, and make off with "110 Gold and 234 Silver" in treasure. "No one will dance there for a hundred years after this spell is cast," one player, "war_monger," crows.

Except, in this case, the White Keep is at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. "Dragon Fire" is an unconventional weapon. And "110 Gold and 234 Silver" tells the plotters how to align the game's map with one of Washington, D.C.

HAHAHAHAHA! Yep, let's talk in code in WoW. Give me a break.

Pentagon Researcher Conjures Warcraft Terror Plot | Danger Room from Wired.com