revision and retirement

Hitchens has decided that the civil war in Iraq was inevitable -- that Saddam would not have been able to keep a lid on the boiling tensions between Shia and Sunni factions -- and that our presence in Iraq now as the pot begins to boil over is a good thing. There you have it, a revisionist explanation for why we invaded: to put ourselves in the middle of a religious struggle.

Meanwhile, Bush is considering a new strategy (or soda) called "Surge." The idea is that we need to provide security for the Iraqi people; that democracy cannot emerge in the presence of excessive violence.

WAY TO GO YOU FUCKING IDIOT. We could have used some security in Iraq immediately after we invaded, don't you think? You know, fill a power vacuum before allowing insurgents to get a good footing?

ITS TOO LATE, BUSH, YOU FUCKED IT UP.

Abizaid agrees. He's retiring.

Padilla

I've been disgusted by the descriptions that surfaced a few weeks ago about the detention of Jose Padilla. I am shocked and appauled. Horrified. Padilla faced no charges for years -- no indictment -- and instead was detained as an unlawful combatant on suspicion of plans to detinate a dirty bomb. The indictment that was finally delivered makes no mention of this dirty bomb. The reason? The only evidence against him are toture confessions.

Great job, Bush.

So while Bush has obtained no admissible evidence against Padilla, he's abused him so thuroughly, Padilla remains only the shell of a former man barely able to control his own body.

Salon has a great article contrasting the successful prosecution of a right-wing domestic terrorist threat in Tennessee and the miserable failure of a prosecution of Padilla.

From Salon:
"Given the chance to prosecute Jose Padilla in the way that countless prosecutions had been successfully conducted before, the Bush administration chose instead to go a new route, assuring us all the while that only they knew how to keep us safe. In that, they seem to have failed."

Gordievsky: Russia has become a terrorist regime

Powerful opinion piece by a former KGB agent.

Clown

Scaramela was a charlatan.

Kovtun was not poisoned Nov 1

The half life of polonium 210 is thirty days in humans. Now, thirty five days after Litvinenko's Nov 1 poisoning, a Russian business man, Kovtun, falls seriously ill and into a coma* from Polonium 210 poisoning. Fishy? You bet. Why would someone fall drastically ill so rapidly so long after an initial exposure to Polonium? After all, Litvinenko was hospitalized only hours after he first fell ill. Do you think the timing of Kovtun's hospitalization could have anything to do with the British arrival in Moscow?

*Kovtun's layer says he is not in a coma. Why is there a discrepancy? Why would the hospital say otherwise?

The Russians will say "Oh, look, Litvinenko poisoned another man but poisoned himself in the process, case closed. Everyone go back to your business and forget about this incident."

Litvinenko

A lot of my readers* have been emailing me asking why I haven't yet blogged about Litvinenko's poisoning.

(*All of them in fact. No one reads this blog.)

I have been following this case like a hawk, of course. I'm decidedly anti-Putin and I see the connection between Litvinenko and Politkovskaya as further evidence against Putin. (Can you believe that fucker dismissed her assasination by noting that her work as a journalist was inconsequential?)

So, the story for those of my readers who haven't been following it*:

(*Again, an empty set)

Litvinenko stumbles into a London hospital after a shitload of vomiting. 10 days later, he's lost all his hair. Litvinenko accuses the Kremlin of beging behind his apparent poisoning. Doctors struggle to identify whatever it is that's killing him. They fail; it kills him. They detect Polonium 210 in an unnatrually high concentration.

Polonium, it turns out, isn't available to anyone who doesn't have a nuclear reactor.

The Britts then start combing London for more of this Polonium and find it in minute traces everywhere Litvinenko has been.

His timeline is here.

Some of the controversy has revolved around Mario Scaramella who met Litvinenko for lunch at a sushi bar on the day of his poisoning. Scaramella has been accussed of being behind the poisoning, which he vehemently denies, since the two were friends and on the "same side" in the investigation into Politkovskaya's murder -- and because the topic of the conversation was a hit list from the Kremlin that Scaramella had gotten wind of... Scaramella was on it. Scaramella also says that Litvinenko did not eat anything

Today, Scaramella was found to have some amount of Po 210 in his system. (Traces or lots? Don't know.)

The rest of the controversy has been over the meeting that Litvinenko had with two former KGB agents in a London hotel on the day of his poisoning. It's a classic case of "you done it" -- Just like the dioxin poisoning of Ukranian candidate Victor Yushchenko two years ago.

Polonium 210 was found both at the hotel where Litvinenko met the KGB agents, and at the sushi bar where he met Scaramella afterwards. I'm no genius, but seems to me like the poison simply followed Litvinenko around with him -- he shed some at the hotel and then later he shed some at the sushi bar. This clears Scaramella's name.