Letters to the Editor
ondelette
Published Letters: 1984 Editor's Choice: 19
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What does this mean?
[Read the article: Fred Thompson, "tough guy" and "folksy cultural conservative"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]From Dan Froomkin's column today:
Georgie Anne Geyer writes in her Dallas Morning News column that when it comes to his war in Iraq, "by all reports, President Bush is more convinced than ever of his righteousness.
"Friends of his from Texas were shocked recently to find him nearly wild-eyed, thumping himself on the chest three times while he repeated 'I am the president!' He also made it clear he was setting Iraq up so his successor could not get out of 'our country's destiny.'"
(boldface emphasis mine)
What does it mean? How do you set up Iraq so a successor cannot get out of "our country's destiny"? What destiny? And, apropos to today's topic, is this the plan that Fred Thompson agrees with, when he says he would continue doing what the president is doing? Is the destiny Iraq or Iran? Is Iran now the new North Korea?
I'm getting a really bad feeling about all this.
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Would ions in the Hudson River...
[Read the article: Fred Thompson, "tough guy" and "folksy cultural conservative"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]...make the Verrazano Narrows an ion channel?
Had to ask.
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@PoliticalRealityOnline
[Read the article: Fred Thompson, "tough guy" and "folksy cultural conservative"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Mindless capitulation to radical Islam in Iraq is not a strategy that any sane or responsible person could embrace, but that is all they have offered.
Excuse me for asking, since you seem to have a lot of answers to some incredibly difficult problems, but could you please talk about the reality on the ground in Iraq, the stateless chaos, the massive unemployment, the constant Iraqi casualties, the blood feuds, the militia and sectarian violence, and tell me what portion of it you see as radical Islam in Iraq?
The Sunni and Shi'a militias are, when fighting in any organized fashion, which is beginning to be rare, fighting a quite traditional feud, one exacerbated by blood debts built up under Saddam Hussein and under the American occupation. The loss of control by all major parties is due to blood feuding, caused by the desire for revenge by aggrieved relatives. The stateless chaos was largely caused by actions of the Coalition Provisional Authority, which was also at root cause for the massive unemployment that exists there. The refugee problem is and was caused by the failure of the occupational forces, largely American, to provide reasonable security to the middle class.
Mindless capitulation to radical Islam in Iraq? I think not. Radical Islam is potent there as it is elsewhere, but it is in the extreme minority as a cause for the problems there. Evacuation from Tora Bora, allowing al Qaeda forces to slip through the border and regroup in Pakistan, inability to stand up to the Pakistani ISI and bring force to bear in southern Afghanistan: That's a capitulation to radical Islam, but it was caused by rushing off to go topple Saddam Hussein.
600,000 - 700,000 dead in Iraq
4 Million refugees in and around Iraq
Half a trillion dollars in U.S. expenses
An Ascendant Iran with coming nuclear capabilities
Saddam Hussein was reported to have killed 300,000 of his own people, for which he is rightly despised. But take a good look at those figures. Political Reality is acknowledging that the Iraqi people have suffered worse for our interference than they did under Hussein. And, we lost 3500 of our soldiers, 23,000 wounded. And...we mindlessly capitulated to al Qaeda in Pakistan, and soiled ourselves with torture and extraordinary rendition, dimming what light we once were unto the world in the process.
Political Reality Online? I think not.
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Covered Person?
[Read the article: Fred Thompson, "tough guy" and "folksy cultural conservative"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Glenn's Update III has Fred Thompson saying that Ms. Plame was not a "covered person" under the statute.... The statute that most people are refering to makes no reference to "covered person". Do you think that is Beltway-three-martini-ese for "covert officer"? More importantly, do you think Fred has read "the statute"?
Manly? I'm still trying to imagine Fred Thompson as Uncle Sam with a bulging bicep, you know, like that cartoon of George W. Bush that surfaced a few months ago -- the one that looks like it was stolen from a 1970's gay S&M bar South of Market.
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@normanx
[Read the article: Fred Thompson, "tough guy" and "folksy cultural conservative"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The idea that we would elect someone who is most known for his portrayal of a prosecutor in a show that glorifies a system that has the highest incarceration rate in the world is beyond me.
Never mind that, someone that then turns around an excoriates real prosecutors in real life for prosecuting.
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With all due respect...
[Read the article: The corporate takeover of U.S. intelligence]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]...while I am glad someone is trying to bring to light the marked increases in outsourcing of our government in areas previously hidden, the truly interesting, and truly frightening, corporatization of our nation's intelligence capabilities is in the use of corporations, and foreign governments, to make end runs around Congressional oversight, around FISA restrictions, and around regulations on gathering information about people living in the United States.
Some of this latter is brought to you by the very same people that attempted to outsource covert operations to an "off-the-shelf covert entity outside the reach of congressional oversight" during the Iran-Contra period. When the TIA program was shut down due to public outcry, Poindexter and others simply moved it into a network of start-up companies and national security contractors (the latter include names that Tim Shorrock mentions, like Lockheed-Martin and Booz-Hamilton), a practice that he and others have been nurturing since at least 1996, and found foreign governments willing to let them set up and test data mining on ordinary people's internet traffic that they could not study here.
Continued involvement from DARPA, attendance at Singaporian national security meetings by representatives from the NSA and other DNI organizations is clear. So is the trail of start-ups used by Poindexter and others: Go to Google and start with either Project Genoa or BrightPlanet, Inc. and follow your nose. They have one purpose: to use the framework of small start-up technology firms to circumvent prohibitions on government spying.
Thanks, Tim, for bringing the extent of "operations" contracting to light. At your convenience, though, you should publish a follow up on the use of corporate secrecy to set up programs to spy on Americans outside the reach of Congress.