Posts Tagged ‘Attackerman’

Plead the Fifth

Tuesday, March 9th, 2010

Punk-rock journalist Spencer Ackerman had a post yesterday that linked to the text of bill McCain and Lieberman introduced regarding the closure of Guantanamo Bay, specifically regarding detention. Here’s a chunk (emphasis mine):

An individual, including a citizen of the United States, determined to be an unprivileged enemy belligerent under section 3(c)(2) in a manner which satisfies Article 15 5 of the Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War may be detained without criminal charges and without trial for the duration of hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners in which the individual has engaged, or which the individual has purposely and materially supported, consistent with the law of war and any authorization for the use of military force provided by Congress pertaining to such hostilities.

Um, don’t we have a Bill of Rights that includes, oh, I don’t know, the polar opposite of this? Something about not being deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law?

Criminy!

Lookout Palin, Here Comes Mitt

Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010

Spencer Ackerman’s is a blog I read daily. He writes mostly about the Iraq War, but also about comic books and punk rock. He was also a consultant on the film In the Loop.

Much of his post today can be summed up by just the title – “Sarah Palin Is No Longer The Stupidest Republican Presidential Hopeful.” But I do want to quote more than half of the article anyway:

I have just read the foreign policy sections of Mitt Romney’s brand-new book No Apology: The Case For American Greatness and filed a piece about them for the Washington Independent. (Hence today’s slow posting.) It’s currently being edited. My biggest concern for the piece is that I simply lack the narrative and argumentative skill to convey to you, sufficiently, how deeply and thoroughly stupid the political persona known as Mitt Romney is. It’s causing a bit of an internal journalistic crisis in my brain.

UPDATE: Here’s the article: “Romney’s ‘No Apology’ Outlines Foreign Policy for Fantasy World.”

Key quote:

But a glance through the remarkable conflation of conservative shibboleths, paranoid global fantasies and deterministic myopia in “No Apology” makes it difficult to avoid the conclusion that the perennial GOP candidate might have been better off saying nothing at all.

Damn. And damning.

Iran Nukes

Friday, February 19th, 2010

We were talking about “what if Iran finished a nuclear bomb” at work the other day, and I was all over the map with what I was saying. Then yesterday I read this quote from a blog by Scott Thomas that sums up my point better than I:

That being said, the results of a Nuclear Iran would probably be a lot less spectacular than people making both pro and con arguments realize. Israel will always have its second-strike submarine based arsenal, and attacking Israel wouldn’t further the Iranian agenda in any way. And as North Korea has found out, having a nuclear strike capability isn’t a golden ticket into the First World or make you the baddest kid on the block. Of course, all this doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t keep trying to dissuade them diplomatically and economically from arming themselves.