Iraq

White House Hoist on the Patriot Act?

This entry was posted in ashcroft bush Domestic Terrorism Iraq Patriot Act War on Terrorism on by

Maybe.
Samual Dash argues that the perps who leaked Plame’s identity appear to have violated at least 2 sections of the Patriot Act and should, under the act, be considered domestic terrorists.
Furthermore, Dash then suggests the additional set of tools that the Justice Department could be bringing to bear:

Can they treat this investigation differently from any other terrorist investigation? Under the Patriot Act, they have acquired expanded powers to wiretap and search. Will they place sweeping and roving wiretaps on White House aides? Will they engage in sneak, secret searches of their offices, computers and homes? Will they arrest and detain incommunicado, without access to counsel, some White House aides as material witnesses?
Certainly, nobody expects they will and I hope they would not employ such police-state tactics.

While no law enforcement officials should have police-state tools at their disposal the current administration is certainly a deserving target if said tools are going to be used against anyone.
The entire article is worth a read.
Via Talkleft.

Why IraQ?

This entry was posted in bush Iraq US Foreign Policy War on Terrorism World Affairs on by

w asked, in a speach to the Australian parliament:

Who can possibly think that the world would be better off with Saddam Hussein still in power?

Charles Kuffner has the best answer to this that I have seen so far:

That’s not the point
…..
The problem here is that this is the wrong question to be asked. It’s a meaningless question meant to distract us from looking at the implications of how we went about removing Saddam from power and what it has cost us in money, lives, missed opportunities, and international reputation.

Read it all. There is some good stuff in the comments as well.
Via Not Geniuses.

Points of View

This entry was posted in Iraq on by

Both Hesiod, Counterspin, and Joe Katzman, Winds of Change, stated that the denial of service attack that brought Hosting Matters to its knees today was something directed against warbloggers in general. Both were wrong in their initial posts.
Hesiod, gloats:

AT BLOGGERHEADS: It appears that most of the top pro-war blogs were subjected to a massive denial of service attack today.
Heh. Indeed.

Joe Katzman initially sounds like he’s found another piece of the liberal media conspiracy:

there appears to be another round of DoS cyber-attacks in progress against a number of prominent warblogs.

Yea, this impacted some warbloggers but in fact the attack has been directed against one specific site (Internet Haganah) which lives at Hosting Matters. All the rest were simply drowned in the fallout.
Joe K updated his original post noting some of the left sites that were also down and, overall, wins the exchange with Hesiod based on a detailed followup and the posting of a bunch of useful information on denial of service attacks.