I stopped going to that website because they seemed obsessed with Sarah Palin. Granted Palin is deeply flawed, but she does not deserve the disproportionate trashing she is getting, particularly its focus on her personal life instead of her policies and record.

And their coverage of Hillary Clinton was extremely biased. Arianna should be ashamed.

Our captives are, evidently to a man - in both Afghanistan and Iraq - not classified as "Prisoners of War" for the duration of this armed conflict - with that status's attendant good treatment and zero tolerance for attempts to coerce information from captives via "harsh interrogation." If we have yet to 'find' a foreign Prisoner of War after years of roaming at will in foreign lands, I submit that we ought to stop pretending that we are fighting any sort of genuine "war," except one of resource extraction by force abetted by a cover story of transferred racist hostility for a group of human beings whom it's still "politically correct" in America to hate. (pow wow)

I'm really not sure that there is justification for holding many prisoners in Afghanistan at all. There are two complete commands there, one international, run by NATO, and one American. Even the majority of the American troops there are under the NATO command. That command has its authorization under treaties and agreements, but there is no corresponding War Powers Act resolution authorizing American forces participating in it, nor were the resolutions and treaties brought before Congress for ratification.

The other 11,000 American troops are there to battle the group that planned September 11th and those who harbored them. All of whom are in Pakistan, and have been there for years. So it doesn't seem that there is authorization for them, either, or for their holding prisoners, or for their duration of conflict.

Congress has accepted a role unique in its history as subservient to the President in all matters of war, reserving only the 'power of the purse' which will never be used while there are troops in the field. But they've never genuinely brought to the table, or for a vote, the prisoners you are talking about in Afghanistan, or even much of the conflict under their war powers.

Ché Pasa: Whether or not the media need to be paying more attention to Honduras, it isn't really true that their interest in Xinjiang materialized out of nowhere, or was largely centered on Islam. Edward Wong, for instance, at NYTimes Beijing bureau, has been covering Chinese suppression and a series of predicted (both by the media and by the Chinese government) crackdowns last year and this, and I think they were actually expecting something to happen in Xinjiang after what happened during the Olympics. What's happening there would not be remarkable (there are hundreds of thousands of labor and ethnic dust ups in China per year these days) except for the massive loss of life. It is a particularly brutal riot, and even with all the extra police/paramilitary presence that was there before it started, it isn't under control, which is unusual for China.

I'm just curious why you would believe ANYthing William S. Lind says. His middle name seems to be "HATE".

From Sourcewatch:

William S. Lind is Director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism at the Free Congress Foundation, a conservative Washington think tank. Lind served as assistant for military affairs to U.S. Senator Gary Hart. Lind writes and lectures internationally on military theory and doctrine.

According to Stan Goff, in 1989, conservative culture warrior William S. Lind worked with a team of men to dress up a set of perfectly obvious military realities as a new theory, and named it Fourth Generation Warfare (4GW). [1] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=William_S._Lind

From The Southern Poverty Law Center:

Mainstreaming Hate A key ally of Christian right heavyweight Paul Weyrich addresses a major Holocaust denial conference

“[…] In 1995, a "futuristic fantasy" by Lind was published in The Washington Post just 11 days after the Oklahoma City bombing. It described the breakdown of the United States, a land that had developed "the stench of a Third World country," into racial mini-states — a salutary result, in the narrator's judgment, that enabled a return to older "Victorian" values in now all-white New England. Lind also wrote of teaching kids in this brave new world "with Mr. McGuffy's readers" — a reference to school books used in the 19th century that are chock-full of anti-Semitic stereotypes. […] http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?aid=40”

From The Daily Howler:

HATE THE TEACHERS WELL! The WashTimes slandered the NEA. Your pundits, bought off, just don’t care

MONDAY, AUGUST 26, 2002

But let’s stop playing—William Lind is a rank hate-peddler. But because they’re out on the field of battle, haters like Lind are now driving our discourse. SHIELDS and GERGEN have stronger reps. But have you heard them speak this week? Or are they simply too bought-off to care? http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh082602.shtml

But there is great reason for hope. Although Dan Froomkin is going to focus on Washington, he was among the crew that put together the Washington Post online site, which for a couple of years was the best of the online newspaper sites in terms of layout, clarity, and editorial choices. So if any of that rubs off at HuffPo, the site may become something quite special.

Oh please, please, please, please, please let it be so. I do a lot of reading online, but rapidly lose patience trying to get around at that site, so I probably miss a lot of good stuff that would interest me. And their letter section is internet hell. I never venture those wretchedly arranged scribblings any more.

March 10, 2002

http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=F30910FA3D540C738DDDAA0894DA404482

The Fighting Next Time, By BILL KELLER

The original military reformers have dispersed, too -- sometimes to unexpectedly far corners of the political landscape. Take William Lind, an author of that prescient paper on fourth-generation warfare. In the ensuing years Lind has become a key figure at the Free Congress Foundation, a hard-right policy center. Earlier this year, when Marine Corps Gazette invited him to revisit the notion of fourth-generation warfare in light of Sept. 11, Lind proposed a four-step response to terror that suggested he had moved beyond the tedious business of reforming military procurement. His first recommendation was this: ''Within 48 hours, we should have wiped Taliban-held Afghanistan off the map, using nuclear weapons.''