Anonymoses on the nobility of Richard Clarke

Excerpt:

A Renaissance of Conscience?

But I think there will be a renaissance of conscience, if you will. And that those who know things will come forward, and realize that their loyalty too has been abused. And that lives are being lost needlessly, and because of incompetence, greed perhaps, and pressures which simply should not have been allowed to enter into the decision-making process, while those that should have been...were ignored.

NYT Magazine
Al Franken, Seriously

..He wants to have Paul Krugman, Kevin Phillips and the Clintons as guests. Also Gary Bauer, G. Gordon Liddy, Chris Rock and Michael Moore. He wants to feature national-security experts. He wants it to be in part a homage to old-time radio. He plans to have Bob Elliot, one of his radio heroes, come on to revive an old character.........Though he says he is interested in sticking around, Franken has reportedly signed only a one-year contract. ''I'm doing this because I want to use my energies to get Bush unelected,'' he told me. ''I'd be happy if the election of a Democrat ended the show.''.......... Franken, who is 52, was born in New York City, but he was raised in the heartland of liberalism: Minnesota. He counts the Minnesotans Hubert Humphrey, Eugene McCarthy and Paul Wellstone among his political heroes......

What we knew about Pakistan-one year ago and what we're doing today

To the Bush administration:
Don't ever try to tell the American public that you didn't know what Dr. Khan and the Pakistani government were doing.
The big story broke on February 2 of this year. Talk about late-breaking news.

A year ago on Iddybud:

The UN has documented that in October 1990, i.e. just two months before the US-led Operation Desert Storm to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait, Dr. Khan allegedly offered Iraq through an unnamed intermediary the technology to "manufacture a nuclear weapon". Baghdad said it rejected the offer fearing an American trap, and Pakistan denied the offer as a fraud. But the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) listed it as a key unresolved issue in a 1999 report to the UN on Iraqi arms programs. In light of the potential for further radicalization in Pakistan - and especially after the experience of after Sept. 11, 2001 – it is only to be expected that the US will want to become physically involved in the safekeeping of Pakistani nuclear weapons; reports suggest it may already have some kind of guardianship role. If acknowledged, of course, any such development could have a devastating effect on Musharraf's rapidly deteriorating domestic credibility.

Sunday Herald UK: "Ask No Questions"

The US press may finally be realising it was hoodwinked over the war … but the coverage of Madrid proves it hasn’t learned

I consider this opinion to be close to all I've been believing and stating about the American media since I premiered this blog over a year ago. When you read the summary of editorial positions of the principal Scottish and UK newspapers in the run-up to war in Iraq, you may see a startling variance in opinion from what we saw in the American press.

Excerpt:

Headlines have told their story. “Iraq’s arsenal was only on paper” admitted the Washington Post recently. “So, what went wrong?” Time magazine wanted to know. Even the right-wing Wall Street Journal was obliged to report that: “Pressure rises for probe of pre-war intelligence”. The cat was out of the bag: they’d been had. Yet why had publications with vast editorial resources been such easy marks? And why had sceptics and dissidents been silenced?

The answer to the second question is simple: the great American newspapers censored themselves. They became, if you like, patriotically deaf. In the post-9/11 atmosphere they had no editorial strategy for coping with George Bush’s moral authority, and no editorial will to devise one..

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This is my own statement from March 25, 2003:

I think we need to carefully consider the daily-changing reasons, fabrications and innuendo our own government has thrown out into the ether in order to justify this war.
The visions of cheering, dancing sugar-plums and Iraqis waiting with open arms and open hearts for their liberation.
People were led to believe this would be the case. The media reinforced that vision every day.

It just isn't so.

A lot of things the government has been telling us haven't turned out to be "so".

When we fail to question, we fail as a democracy.

We just can't assume a sense of blind loyalty and think our best interests are at the heart of all this.