* henley:
"I’m not opposed to trying tyrants for their atrocities. I oppose the death penalty, but for everybody - I have no special soft spot for sparing the lives of murderous rulers. But the Dujail case is bullshit in a couple of ways: First, it’s Saddam Hussein reacting to an attack in time of war in exactly the way that many of our brightest conservative lights have argued that we should react, backed up by innumerable guys in bars - the difference being that Saddam gave the residents of Dujail the formality of a trial first, while the boards of the American Spectator and the New York Post would just let the bombs fly. His actions also dovetail nicely with the theory of the unitary executive. Second, Dujail was obviously chosen for its convenience: trials on Saddam’s later atrocities would give Saddam’s defense team an opportunity to drag into evidence too many inconvenient truths about the footsie his regime played with the Reagan Administration during the time of, oh, the far greater enormities of Halabja and Anfal."* lobe:
"Worse, some of the neoconservatives former allies have publicly turned on them with a vengeance. Former Secretary of State Al Haig, a strong supporter of going to war in Iraq, shocked many here two weeks ago when he told a widely-viewed CNN Sunday talk show that the war had been "driven by the so-called neocons that hijacked my party."
He referred by name to Richard Perle of the American Enterprise Institute and the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board and former Deputy Defense Secretary (now World Bank President) Paul Wolfowitz, as well as the editorial-page writers of the Wall Street Journal.
Probably the capital's single most influential hard-line neoconservative, Perle himself appears to have become increasingly pessimistic and sour on trends within the administration over the past several months. "I think we have an administration today that is dysfunctional," he complained to an audience at the Center for Strategic and International Studies this week, although he was very careful not to blame Bush himself."
* josh:
"A lot of these races remain inside the MOE, the margin of error. And that means the MOT, the margin of theft. If Dems want to pick up seats on Tuesday they'll have to get a lot of these races out of the MOT. Because as long as they're inside, the Republicans can still grab them with a mix of voter suppression, dirty tricks and election fraud."
* wapo:
"As he barnstorms across the country campaigning for Republican candidates in Tuesday's elections, Bush has been citing oil as a reason to stay in Iraq. If the United States pulled its troops out prematurely and surrendered the country to insurgents, he warns audiences, it would effectively hand over Iraq's considerable petroleum reserves to terrorists who would use it as a weapon against other countries."* mcclatchy:
"The new chief of the FBI's Criminal Division, which is swamped with public corruption cases, says the bureau is ramping up its ability to catch crooked politicians and might run an undercover sting on Congress.
Assistant FBI Director James Burrus called the bureau's public corruption program "a sleeping giant that we've awoken," and predicted the nation will see continued emphasis in that area "for many, many, many years to come."
So much evidence of wrongdoing is surfacing in the nation's capital that Burrus recently committed to adding a fourth 15- to 20-member public corruption squad to the FBI's Washington field office.
[]
"It shows courage at the FBI," said Heymann, now a criminal law professor at Harvard University. He said he concluded, after watching a recent public television documentary and listening to experts, that "there is more corruption (on Capitol Hill) than I ever thought imaginable" and that a single FBI sting "might result in very large numbers of prosecutions.""
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