Karpinski said she removed a bottle of facial cream from her purse then returned it while rummaging for her cell phone.

Though a security guard mistakenly believed the bottle belonged to the shop, store personnel later concluded it was her property and had been ‘clearly partially used.’

“They had nothing about Abu Ghraib to use against me,” Karpinski told The Signal, “so they pull this flaky allegation out and use it to demote me? … To save face? To mislead the American public yet again?”

Honey. Only a pawn in their game.

11 held in Iraq over death of Irish-born aid worker US and Iraqi forces yesterday detained a group of men suspected of abducting and murdering Irish-born aid worker Margaret Hassan last year

no matter what you think of it nor how useless, nor that there aren’t any answers, the question beats on and on and on and on

until i am quite sure what you hear is the exactly the beat of the human heart. no more, no less.

Rereading Seymour Hersch in The New Yorker. Christ, it’s searing. Explain to me what the Rumsfelds of this world, the Gonzales’, explain to me what the prize is. Or is it just that when you no longer feel what other humans feel, you are capable of anything.

These mild men. Not-men. Our own, pale Eichmanns. Read the rest of this entry »

There is not narcissism and non-narcissism; there are narcissisms that are more or less comprehensive, generous, open, extended. What is called non-narcissism is in general but the economy of a much more welcoming, hospitable narcissism, one that is much more open to the experience of the other as other. I believe that without a movement of narcissistic reappropriation, the relation to the other would be absolutely destroyed, it would be destroyed in advance. The relation to the other—even if it remains asymmetrical, open, without possible reappropriation—must trace a movement of reappropriation in the image of oneself for love to be possible . . .

—Entretien avec Jacques Derrida, Digraphe 42

Oh, reappropriate me, baby, feels so good.

“I don’t think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center,” Condoleezza Rice, President Bush’s national security adviser, said in May 2002.

1. … in its investigation, the commission found that an attack described as unimaginable had in fact been imagined, repeatedly. The commission said that several threat reports circulated within the government in the late 1990′s raised the explicit possibility of an attack using airliners as missiles.

2. … in September 1998, based on information provided by a source who walked into an American consulate in East Asia, that “mentioned a possible plot to fly an explosives-laden aircraft into a U.S. city.” In August of the same year, it said, an intelligence agency received information that “a group of Libyans hoped to crash a plane into the World Trade Center.”

3. The North American Aerospace Defense Command had gone so far as to develop exercises to counter the threat and, according to a Defense Department memorandum unearthed by the commission, planned a drill in April 2001 that would have simulated a terrorist crash into the Pentagon.

{ fin }

So Tenet leaves the CIA. I want more.

I want Humpty (Wolfowitz) and Dumpty (Rove) both, twisting in the wind. Read the rest of this entry »

One of Zinni‘s responsibilities while commander-in-chief at Centcom was to develop a plan for the invasion of Iraq. Like his predecessors, he subscribed to the belief that you only enter battle with overwhelming force.

But Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld thought the job could be done with fewer troops and high-tech weapons.

Read the rest of this entry »