Larry C. Johnson via Salon:

"We've seen it across different agencies, a pattern of going after anybody who's a critic. When people raise legitimate issues that may not be consistent with existing administration policy, those people are attacked and their character is impugned."

"Put it this way, with this White House, I see an outright pattern of bullying: Gen. Eric Shinseki, the former Army chief of staff, warned that the U.S. was going to need several hundred thousand troops in Iraq, and he's attacked for that, and basically told that he doesn't know what he's talking about -- and he's fired essentially a year before he's out of that job. When it's time for him to retire, not a single senior representative of the Department of Defense or White House leadership is there for his retirement. Then there was Thomas White, the secretary of the Army who was forced out. There was a senior CIA analyst by the name of Fulton Armstrong who was attacked, using leaks to the press, which alleged that he was disloyal and somehow under the influence of the Cuban government. There was a prosecutor [ousted from] the Department of Justice who had warned that John Walker Lindh's father had hired a lawyer and that [the DOJ] needed to consider the Miranda rights."

"I've been told that even a number of Republican members want to sign on to the efforts launched by Rep. Russ Holt [D-N.J.], who's a former intelligence analyst at the State Department -- but they're saying "If we do, Dennis Hastert is going to have our ass." So, clearly the intimidation and the fear factor continues."

The CIA revolt against the White House

] The Economist magazine, hardly an anti-American
] newsweekly, called Rumsfeld's remarks "unworthy of a
] nation which has cherished the rule of law from its very
] birth."

The Christian Science Monitor rounds up several articles on the military tribunal's in Cuba. In short, the precedent of giving the president this type of open ended power is bad. This administration doesn't seem to like any kind of civilian review or consent process for anything..

News round up on Cuba detainees

In a forceful preview of the Bush administration's expansionist military policies in this election year, Vice President Dick Cheney Wednesday painted a grim picture of what he said was the growing threat of a catastrophic terrorist attack in the United States and warned that the battle, like the Cold War, could last generations.

If a newspaper could have a soundtrack, you might expect to hear a bear growling on a windy, stormy night, with a wolf or two howling from the hills in the distance. Every few minutes, the rumble of an incoming mortar attack. And in between, the uncomortable silence of the things you can't hear.

Cheney's grim vision: decades of war

] What is clear is that al Qaeda is at a crossroads and --
] like the United States in the spring of 2002 -- it does
] not have really good choices, and therefore, must choose
] the best of a bad lot. Al Qaeda's original war plan is
] obsolete. The straight line it drew from Sept. 11 to the
] Caliphate has hit a wall. Bin Laden knows it. He doesn't
] have a good Plan B, but he will have to cook one up
] anyway. The war is not over, but for the moment, it is al
] Qaeda's turn to sweat out a solution to a difficult
] strategic problem. If they can't do that, then the war
] could very well be over, at least for this generation.

If anyone ever wants to do anything blindly nice for me, get me a Stratfor Premium subscription. However, this might take MemeStreams development to a crawl.. No.. Don't do that.

Al Q might be cooked...

There is a message here: Context matters

The Sunday New York Times offers the second of five parts in Tom Friedman's "War of Ideas" series.

War of Ideas, Part 2

] The Supreme Court agreed Friday to hear the case of a
] U.S.-born man captured during fighting in Afghanistan
] and held without charges, the latest setback for the Bush
] administration and its assertion of broad new powers to
] prosecute the war on terrorism.

Yahoo! News - Supreme Court to Rule on Terror Detainee

So what to do?

Tom Friedman returns from the holidays with some deep thoughts about the future. Stay tuned.

War of Ideas, Part 1

] Last month, an east Texas man pleaded guilty to
] possession of a weapon of mass destruction. Inside the
] home and storage facilities of William Krar,
] investigators found a sodium-cyanide bomb capable of
] killing thousands, more than a hundred explosives, half a
] million rounds of ammunition, dozens of illegal weapons,
] and a mound of white-supremacist and antigovernment
] literature.

] The case began in the fall of 2002 when a package bound
] for New Jersey was misdelivered to a New York address.
] The family inadvertently opened the package and found
] fake identification badges, including Department of
] Defense and United Nations IDs. The FBI eventually tracked
] the package back to Mr. Krar in Noonday, Texas.

] Featherston speculates that the Krar case got little
] attention because the arrests were made just after the
] war began in Iraq. "Excuse me, a chemical weapon was
] found in the home state of George Bush," says Levitas.
] "I'm not saying the Justice Department deliberately decided
] to downplay the story because they thought it might be
] embarrassing to the US government if weapons of mass
] destruction were found in America before they were found
] in Iraq. But I am saying it was a mistake not to give this
] higher profile."

Yes, we grow loonies too.

The terror threat at home, often overlooked | csmonitor.com

] Prime Minister Jean Chretien on Wednesday protested the
] U.S. treatment of a Canadian citizen who was detained in
] New York and deported to Syria last year on suspicion of
] having links to terrorists.

I've only tuned into one or two of the articles about what happened to this guy.. Its pretty over the top. This isn't right. I want the full story here.

Chretien Protests Deportation of Canadian (washingtonpost.com)

] His research shows that not only are suicide terrorists
] significantly more educated than their peers, they are
] also significantly better off. According to Krueger,
] although one-third of Palestinians live in poverty, only
] 13 percent of Palestinian suicide bombers do; 57 percent
] of bombers have education beyond high school versus 15
] percent of the population of comparable age.
]
] The Defense Intelligence Agency also gave me profiles
] of all these people they were interrogating at Guantánamo
] Bay in Cuba. They divide them into Yemenis and Saudis.
] The Yemenis are sort of the foot soldiers. And they found
] that the Saudis, their leaders especially, are from
] high-status families. A surprising number have graduate
] degrees. And they are willing to give up everything. They
] give up well-paying jobs, they give up their families,
] whom they really adore, to sacrifice themselves because
] they really believe that it's the only way they're going
] to change the world.

These people are not stupid, nor poor, nor desperate. While there are reasons to focus on education and poverty in places like West Bank/Gaza, the idea that its going to prevent people from deciding to become suicide terrorists is apparently wrongheaded.

An interested oped on Religion in this article too...

Everything you know about terrorists is wrong.