CATASTROPHE KEEPS THEM TOGETHER. Never let it be said that CIA Director Michael Hayden isn’t shrewd. Knowing that media coverage of yesterday’s Senate testimony will focus overwhelmingly on General John Abizaid’s call for eternal war in Iraq, he discreetly dropped this bombshell about al-Qaeda: Hayden said [al-Qaeda] had lost a series of leaders since the […]
Spencer Ackerman
Spencer Ackerman, a senior correspondent for The American Prospect, is a senior reporter for The Washington Independent.
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YOO TWO: IN THE NAME OF LOVE.
YOO TWO: IN THE NAME OF LOVE. The ACLU is trying to get its hands on something we lowly national-security reporters have tried for years to obtain. That’s something known colloquially as Yoo Two — Yoo as in John Yoo, the torturer from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel in the first Bush administration. […]
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BARBARIANS AT THE GATES.
BARBARIANS AT THE GATES. If Walter Pincus is correct that Defense Secretary-designee Bob Gates will scale back Donald Rumsfeld‘s expansion of the Pentagon’s role in intelligence, we should let out a resounding cheer. Rumsfeld pushed the Pentagon way, way out into the blue yonder of intelligence work — both with the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group, […]
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VIEW ON GATES FROM INSIDE THE CIA.
VIEW ON GATES FROM INSIDE THE CIA. I just talked with someone we’ll call a former senior intelligence official about the end of Rummy and the era of Bob Gates at the Pentagon. He’s not very keen. Asked about Gates’s rocky relationship with Dick Cheney, the ex-official comments, “That’s for sure, with Cheney. Each time […]
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Imperial Hubris
And so ends the long, hard slog that was the Donald Rumsfeld Pentagon. Surely unwilling to submit to the endless nightmare posed by two years’ worth of Senate and House inquiries into his tenure as defense secretary, Rumsfeld did what he — and President Bush — promised he wouldn’t, and abandoned his post. Immediately, the […]
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EXIT STRATEGY: WRATH OF THE MATH.
EXIT STRATEGY: WRATH OF THE MATH. David Gergen just speculated on CNN that Donald Rumsfeld will “fall on his sword,” meaning he’ll submit his twice-rejected resignation. Bush, of course, has pledged that Rumsfeld is his man. The only situation I can see whereby Rumsfeld is out at the Pentagon is if Claire McCaskill and Jim […]
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A QUESTION FOR BUSH’S PRESS CONFERENCE TOMORROW.
A QUESTION FOR BUSH’S PRESS CONFERENCE TOMORROW. “Mr. President, you said last week that ‘However they put it, the Democrat approach in Iraq comes down to this: The terrorists win and America loses.’ Did the American people just vote for the terrorists last night?” –Spencer Ackerman
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WEBB NEEDS TO DECLARE VICTORY.
WEBB NEEDS TO DECLARE VICTORY. Jim Webb needs to take a page out of Bush‘s 2000 playbook and declare victory now. I was in Austin on election night 2000, and the second that Bush confidently told supporters he won, the momentum changed entirely. Bill Daley was left pleading that the race was an open contest, […]
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CIV IS A DEMOCRAT TONIGHT.
CIV IS A DEMOCRAT TONIGHT. Rahm Emanuel is pushing “A New Direction” as the Dem slogan all night. For the New York Hardcore kids, that’s a totemic slogan — a reference to the first track off Gorilla Biscuits‘s classic Start Today album. Here are those ’88 NYHC lyrics in full: What do you mean it’s […]
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DEMOCRATS FOR DOUG FEITH.
DEMOCRATS FOR DOUG FEITH. With 81 percent reporting for the PA-10, Dem Chris Carney is leading incumbent wife-beater (alleged!) Don Sherwood, 54-46. It was an uphill fight for Carney, a first-time candidate and Naval Reserve lieutenant commander, as the northeast Pennsylvania district is heavily conservative, thanks in large part to the decline in Democratic stronghold […]