(Above, from left) Douglas Feith, David Addington, Alberto Gonzales, George Bush, Dick Cheney; (below) The infamous Haynes Memo It had been widely assumed that the decision to torture enemy combatants and other detainees in the so-called War on Terror began with military commanders and interrogators at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The Bush administration has taken refuge behind this “trickle up” explanation, but as is now apparent, the origins of this dark chapter in American history —...

I’ll get this turdball rolling by noting that I knew several members of the Weather Underground back in the day and am a longtime friend of one whom I invited into my home when he was a fugitive. But even in the context of those crazy times, the Weathermen were a bunch of zonked-out wannabe revolutionaries who ultimately diverted attention from their occasionally worthy causes by doing a lot of really bad stuff. All that so noted, I had a hard time getting behind President Clinton’s...

UPDATE As this link shows and as a commenter indicated after this story was posted on Thursday, John McCain now seems to be vaccilating on whether to break with the White House and Pentagon on increasing educational benefits to veterans and is under pressure from some veterans groups to do so. Stay tuned. * * * * * John McCain was once a returning soldier – in fact a soldier returning from five-plus years as a POW who was a victim of the very torture techniques that he now embraces. But you...

MORE HERE.

It is now well known that when the White House needed justification for its endorsement of Nazi-like torture techniques, it turned to John Yoo. The young attorney in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel wrote a series of memos that he believed gave the Bush administration the legal fig leaf it needed to use torture and deny enemy combatants protection under the Geneva Conventions. Yoo was a foot soldier in a national tragedy starring Vice President Cheney, Attorney General John...

. . . over the far ridgeline, casting ever longer shadows across the green-tinged trees on the floor of the valley. My thoughts returned, as they have frequently, to whether Barack Obama has the right stuff. There was the unmistakable kree-eee-ar of a red-tailed hawk in the distance. Damn! I forgot to take dinner out of the freezer. I pondered Pope Benedict’s message to the faithful gathered on the lawn of the White House. Something caught my eye. It was the boy across the road playing with his...

Any alleged terror plot has to be taken seriously, but the Justice Department is amassing a pretty lousy record when it comes to separating the amateurs from the pros. So it is no surprise that the second trial of the Liberty City Six, formerly the Liberty City Seven, whom the government alleged were planning to take a bus from Miami to Chicago and blow up the Sears Tower ended yesterday with another mistrial. The Justice Department made a collective fool of itself because Attorney General Alberto...

Rocker Bruce Springsteen, who has gotten filthy rich (and deservedly so) for his gritty parables of blue-collar Americans, is defending — and endorsing — Barack Obama. The Boss wrote in a message to fans that Obama’s comments that some small town Americans were “bitter” and so they clung to religion and guns, had been “ripped out of context.” Wrote Springsteen on his website: “Like most of you, I’ve been following the campaign and I have now seen and...

Barack Obama has moved within striking distance of Hillary Clinton with the all-important Pennsylvania primary six days away. The latest Franklin & Marshall Poll shows Clinton clinging to a lead of 46 percent to 40 percent among likely registered Democratic voters, with 14 percent undecided. In March, Clinton led 51 percent to 35 percent. The poll has an error margin of +/- 4.2 percent. There is a stark divide between the eastern and western parts of Pennsylvania in the poll. Obama leads in...

IRAQI SOLDIERS FLEE AFTER DESERTING TUESDAY NIGHT IN SADR CITY How many more Americans will have to die before the folly of the Iraq war collapses in on itself? Hundreds? Thousands? (Some 25 have died this month alone, a return to pre-Surge levels.) Proving yet again that the Baghdad government is unwilling and unable to take advantage of the opening that the military phase of the Surge strategy provided, there has been another round of Iraqi army desertions during a crucial battle, this time in...

Will left-of-center bloggers go easy on Barack Obama after he is sworn in as the next president? If human nature and all of the right-of-center bloggers who have been struck deaf, dumb and blind when it comes to writing about the extralegal excesses of George Bush’s tenure are any indication, the answer is a resounding “yes.” Exhibit A in this regard is Bush’s embrace of Nazi-like terror techniques, to my mind and many others the most atrocious aspect of a presidency that...

Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton joins some blue-collar workers for a beer and a shot while campaigning in Indiana.

Geez! I don’t blog for a day or so and all hell breaks loose out on the old campaign tail. Many commentators have weighed in on Barack Obama’s “bitter” remarks, and as someone who has worked in, traveled through and is blogging this week from one of the most depressed areas of small town Pennsylvania with among the nation’s highest foreclosure, bankruptcy and unemployment rates, all I can say is: Right on, brother. Hillary Clinton, of course, takes voters for fools...

The Cliff Palace at Mesa Verde (top) and The Castle at Hovenweep Except for the distant cry of a raven, there were only the sounds of my children, a friend and I peeling and munching on orange slices. It was noontime and we were squatting under the cottonwoods in a ravine beneath The Castle, an exquisitely constructed silo-like structure of sandstone at Hovenweep, a cluster of Anasazi ruins in the Utah desert. The trees offered the only shade in the area. Hovenweep was the northernmost advance of...

While the Bush administration’s stewardship of the economy and that pesky war, among other areas of vital concern to the national interest, have been seriously lacking, its ability to make significant policy changes without bothering to tell anyone — let alone come clean about their implications – has been nothing short of masterful. In one of the more insidious examples of this, the Justice (sic) Department, in the service of an administration allergic to regulating the corporate...

Cedella Booker, mother of international reggae icon Bob Marley, has died in her sleep in Miami. I had the privilege of hanging out with this marvelous and vibrant woman several times when I was a guest in her Wilmington, Delaware, home and she a visitor at the farm where I lived. As matriarch of that city’s small Jamaican community, she always had an open door and offered a helping hand. “Mama Marley” or “Mama B, “as she was alternately known, was born in Rhoden Hall,...

While it is unlikely that Newton noticed it the day he famously observed that apple falling to the ground, like gravity there is another immutable law of nature that goes something like this: What goes around comes around. And so it is with George Bush, who finds himself in the awkward if familiar position of having no moral gravitas, in this instance when it comes to condemning the People’s Republic of China for its latest violent crackdown on dissent in Tibet. There was a time somewhere...

There is an air of disbelief around a New York Times story today that John McCain, who has the insidious Phil Gramm advising him on the economy and the toxic Charles Black plotting his campaign strategy, is turning to the very same neoconversatives who drove the White House wagon off the cliff to advise him on foreign policy. Disbelief as in The Times seems hardly able to comprehend that McCain, the increasingly befuddled un-maverick who extols his decades of national security and foreign policy...

There is an old saying that Americans have to live with the decisions of the Supreme Court for the rest of their lives and then some, but that takes on a perverse new meaning for those who are maimed or their lives cut short by shoddily researched and falsely advertised medications that are inadequately vetted by the Food and Drug Administration and let slide by President Bush’s activist Supreme Court. It is deeply troubling that it is likely that the top court will soon rule the FDA —...

To everything/There is a season/And a time for every purpose, under heaven/A time to be born, a time to die/A time to plant, a time to reap/A time to kill, a time to heal/A time to laugh, a time to weep. — ECCLESIASTES 3: 1-8 The second and final day of Iraq progress report testimony before by General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker is as easy to sum up as the first, with one conspicuous addition: We have no long-term strategy. We have no end-game plan. We just need more Friedman...

Two weeks hence, the results of the all-important Pennsylvania primary will be in and poor Hillary Clinton will have to once again put those big goalposts on her itty-bitty shoulders and carry them on to the next round of primaries. Yup, I’ve given up on Clinton having the sense to gracefully bow out because she is neither graceful nor a bower outer although she will not have the pledged delegates, superdelegates and popular votes to wrest the nomination from Barack Obama. Pennsylvania will...

The first day of congressional Iraq progress report testimony by General David Petraeus is easy to sum up: We have no long-term strategy. We have no end-game plan. We just need more Friedman Units, pretty please. While none of this is surprising (and I hold Petraeus in the highest regard), it is deeply depressing that this is the best he can offer. It is the best that he can offer because that’s all that the White House has to offer. More here. Photograph by Pablo Martinez Monsivais/The Associated...

It’s semi-annual Iraq progress report time for David Petraeus and Ryan Crocker. But, alas, there has been no progress beyond a return to 2005 death-toll levels, which merely has given Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki an opportunity to try to exterminate his chief political rivals, so the general and the ambassador desperately need a carrot or a bogeyman to appease the few restive senators and representatives among the fawning congressfolk to whom they will report. You may recall that the duo...

The great editorial cartoonist for Investor’s Business Daily has won a 2008 Pulitzer Prize. Other winners include Bob Dylan and The Washington Post, which scored six prizes. Click here for a complete list.

UPDATE: You’ve got to hand it to Hillary Clinton. After getting backed to the wall by Pennsylvania labor unions over Mark Penn, her chief campaign strategist, she made a big deal of saying that Penn was history, but has turned around and welcome him back into her smarmy embrace. Penn, it is reported, as usual took part today in the campaign’s morning conference call and will be participating in preparations for a debate with Barack Obama on Saturday in Philadelphia. Yet again Clinton...