P.S. I like the ‘baffle ‘em with bullshit’ and ‘lost in Scooter’s smoke and mirrors’ comments above from montag and Mad Dogs. Good soundbite summaries of this saga. Let’s see if Judge Walton decides to baffle us now, by perhaps turning around and working with the government to enable all of the admissible classified evidence to be summarized and redacted for disclosure at trial, despite his Section 6(a) ruling’s (admitted) slant toward Libby (and despite Walton’s denial of the government’s first 6(c) substitution motion). [If the government were to get through the Section 6(c) process successfully, I think a huge amount of the credit would belong to the intelligence community’s hard work and cooperation - cooperation which may be much more forthcoming in this CIA-instigated investigation than it would be (or has been) in many other CIPA prosecutions (which could be another reason for the appeal of Walton’s pro-defendant 6(a) ruling).]

http://select.nytimes.com/2006…..amp;emc=th
David Brooks, “Teaching the Elephant.”

http://select.nytimes.com/2006…..amp;emc=th
Nicholas Kristof, “A Modest Proposal for a Truce on Religion.”

http://select.nytimes.com/2006…..amp;emc=th
Frank Rich, “Has He Started Talking to the Walls?”

Sauron at Numenor.

My bad.

(and Sauron’s)

Night pups.

I am so excited about Ciro Rodriguez for Congress in TX-23. He is so much more interesting than Karen Carter, who for some reason has received a lot of unearned attention. For Karen Carter is DLC, while Ciro is a true progressive who has truly crashed the gates.

HELP CIRO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! HELP PROGRESSIVES!!!!!!!!!!!!!! STOP THE DLC!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

On the self-financing thing, note the similarity to the way the Contras started out on the dole, then progressed to drug trafficking to such an extent that it seemed to be the tail wagging the dog. (Robert Parry again.)

http://aroundtheworldblog.blogspot.com/

There are four posts by him up now.

For Iraq, “The Salvador Option” Becomes Reality
by Max Fuller

http://www.globalresearch.ca 2 june 2005

[snip]

According to an article recently published in New York Times Magazine, in September 2004 Counsellor to the US Ambassador for Iraqi Security Forces James Steele was assigned to work with a new elite Iraqi counter-insurgency unit known as the Special Police Commandos, formed under the operational control of Iraq’s Interior Ministry (‘The Way of the Commandos’, Peter Maass, http://psychoanalystsopposewar…..andos.html ).

From 1984 to 1986 then Col. Steele had led the US Military Advisory Group in El Salvador, where he was responsible for developing special operating forces at brigade level during the height of the conflict. These forces, composed of the most brutal soldiers available, replicated the kind of small-unit operations with which Steele was familiar from his service in Vietnam. Rather than focusing on seizing terrain, their role was to attack ‘insurgent’ leadership, their supporters, sources of supply and base camps. In the case of the 4th Brigade, such tactics ensured that a 20-man force was able to account for 60% of the total casualties inflicted by the unit (Manwaring, El Salvador at War, 1988, p 306-8). In military circles it was the use of such tactics that made the difference in ultimately defeating the guerrillas; for others, such as the Catholic priest Daniel Santiago, the presence of people like Steele contributed to another sort of difference:

People are not just killed by death squads in El Salvador – they are decapitated and then their heads are placed on pikes and used to dot the landscape. Men are not just disemboweled by the Salvadoran Treasury Police; their severed genitalia are stuffed into their mouths. Salvadoran women are not just raped by the National Guard; their wombs are cut from their bodies and used to cover their faces. It is not enough to kill children; they are dragged over barbed wire until the flesh falls from their bones, while parents are forced to watch. (Cited by Chomsky, op cit.)

The Police Commandos are in large part the brainchild of another US counter-insurgency veteran, Steven Casteel, a former top DEA man who has been acting as the senior advisor in the Ministry of the Interior. Casteel was involved in the hunt for Colombia’s notorious cocaine baron Pablo Escobar, during which the DEA collaborated with a paramilitary organization known as Los Pepes, which later transformed itself into the AUC, an umbrella organization covering all of Colombia’s paramilitary death squads (http://cocaine.org/colombia/pablo-escobar.html ; http://www.ciponline.org/colombia/040105isac.htm ).

Like Colombia’s death squads, Iraq’s Police Commandos deliberately cultivate a frightening paramilitary image. During raids they wear balaclavas and black leather gloves and openly intimidate and brutalize suspects, even in the presence of foreign journalists (see the report by Peter Maass’s). Significantly, many of the Commandos, including their leader, are Sunni Muslims.