catching up

here are a few things I have read that are worth passing on:

yesterday's Krugman: Kansas on My Mind

yesterday's Herbert: Thrown to the Wolves (just another ho-hum torture case)

Speaking of torture, this is a must-read from Newsweek:

Aboard Air CIA
The agency ran a secret charter service, shuttling detainees to interrogation facilities worldwide. Was it legal? What's next? A NEWSWEEK investigation

Good WaPo editorial from last week: Injustice, in Secret

And as for the war on terror, I didn't have a chance to comment on the testimony given last week by Porter Goss and others before Congress. Tom Englehardt has some choice analysis, especially about this most galling admission:

Goss looked far into the future; assured the senators that "tough decisions" needed to be made "about which haystacks deserve to be scrutinized for the needles that can hurt us most"; added that, in his testimony, he would "not attempt to cover everything that could go wrong in the year ahead" (whew!); and then, summoning every ounce of wisdom he possessed, passed the buck and covered his butt. His predictions more or less took in anything he could imagine that might conceivably happen on his watch -- including the possibility that "[i]t may be only a matter of time before al-Qa'ida or another group attempts to use chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear weapons." (Note the wonderful "may" in that sentence. In other words, it may -- or may not -- be only a matter of time.)

Oh, he did at least manage to say that George Bush's Iraq was now a terrorist-producing machine:

"The Iraq conflict, while not a cause of extremism, has become a cause for extremists… These jihadists who survive will leave Iraq experienced in and focused on acts of urban terrorism. They represent a potential pool of contacts to build transnational terrorist cells, groups, and networks in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and other countries."

Read the whole posting at TomDispatch. My favorite line: "...an administration that means to make every schoolchild but not a single leader 'accountable' for what they do." Lot's of info and links on Negroponte and other villains.

WPU's own Stephen Shalom has an important analysis of the "Salvador Option": Phoenix Rising in Iraq?