Spencer Ackerman

Few people alive know more about counterinsurgency that Dave Kilcullen, the former adviser to David Petraeus during the dawn of the surge and current adviser to Condoleezza Rice on COIN. (And the subject of a forthcoming profile by moi.) Given John McCain's current bout of surge/Awakening amnesia, it might be helpful to give a refresher of the timeline and facts behind the Awakening and the broader Sunni revolt against al-Qaeda.

John McCain feels forsaken by the media. Oh, it's a heartbreaking sound.

Titty Boy accomplishes the anatomically impossible.

VoteVets' 'Taking The Hill' panel

The right does not want a black man to be president. Say it again and again. Take Mick Jones' advice: If I get aggression, I give it two times back.

At 2 a.m. my friend Brian Beutler was shot multiple times. He lost a lot of blood and underwent major surgery. And by 4:30 p.m., when I saw him in the hospital, he was cracking jokes. That's the kind of guy he is: invincible. The blogosphere's very own 50 Cent.

Christopher Hitchens agrees to be waterboarded for Vanity Fair. Video here. Malcolm Nance, a friend of mine who has been waterboarded as part of his old SERE training and whom instructed Naval special forces how to endure it, described its brutality in gruesome detail to Congress last year.

So it appears the Iraqi Oil Ministry waited until the final months of the Bush administration to open the store for Western petrogiants. Call it a parting present. Now that we know the U.S. "advised" the ministry on giving no-bid contracts to Exxon, Shell, Total and BP, the Washington Post gives an overview of what Minister Hussain Shahristani -- a former exile who's sympathetic to both the U.S. and Iran -- plans to give Big Oil ...

As a rule, I don't criticize Sy Hersh pieces. Reporters do not have the right to fuck with Hersh until they've run through a Georgia barracks trying to find Calley or learned about an entirely secret war that Congress never dreamed of or published excerpts of the Taguba report. You do this, you can criticize.

The Anti-Defamation League wrote that Klein's line was "reminiscent of age-old anti-Semitic canards about a Jewish conspiracy to control and manipulate government," which is self-evidently ludicrous and hysterical. His very next sentence was about the profit-motive tendencies of oilmen Bush and Cheney -- the Gentiles he clearly recognizes are responsible for the war. I miss the days when the neocons were saying that was off-limits for public discussion!