1. “Those 9/11 Commission Minders Again
New details have emerged about minders who sat in on 9/11 Commission interviews during a fact-finding trip to Canada. Commission heads Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton mentioned the minders generally in interviews during the panel’s lifetime, but a memo recently found in the National Archives and blogged here a couple of weeks ago showed how prevalent they were.
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One minder “acted as a participant,” “responded to inquiries” and “consulted with” the interviewee. She took verbatim notes in all three interviews she attended, doing so while sitting next to the interviewees in two of them. In addition, in one interview she “sighed heavily repeatedly.” The memo-writer also points out, “She had an opportunity to coach/poison the well with [Redacted] at dinner the night before and with others before they arrived including with FBI attorney and Legat [legal attaché].” It’s not clear which agency this minder was from, although she said she was an intelligence community attorney.
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The commission staffers were clearly annoyed with his behaviour, and the memo points out: “He sat next to the subjects in at least two. He responded to questions and even asked a question.” Worst of all, “He sought to describe Canadian system/organization while there were 3 Canadians there to talk to us.” As though there weren’t enough minders sitting in on the interviews already, he invited another minder to an interview the commission was to conduct the next day.
With this in mind, it is not hard to see why the commission’s staff became annoyed with the minders and tried to curb their influence.
Finally, given that this was a low-profile fact-finding trip to Canada, one cannot but wonder what the minders were doing in more sensitive interviews that had a bearing on the 9/11 plot itself and the US response to perceived threats.”
http://www.911blogger.com/node/20212
2. “Memorial Day: Burning Pols in Effigy
Georgia private B. M. Zettler’s reaction to being enmeshed in the battle of Bull Run:
“I felt that I was in the presence of death. My first thought was, ‘This is unfair – someone is to blame for getting us all killed. I didn’t come here to fight this way…’
An excellent sentiment – one that should not be forgotten on Memorial Day. It would have been fairer if the politicians had been in the front lines on both sides at Manassas.
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Sacralizing the war dead usually results in exonerating the politicians. Rather than parades, it would be better to celebrate this holiday like the British used to celebrate Guy Fawkes Day – by burning politicians in effigy, or a reasonable facsimile.
Too harsh?
Read the Pentagon Papers – and recognize the proper fate of all the politicians and political appointees who hatched and perpetuated that sham.
Likewise for the Iraq war – and a heap of others. “
http://www.antiwar.com/blog/2009/05/25/memorial-day-burning-pols-in-effigy/
3. Sotomayor:
“As is true for any Supreme Court nominee, there are many legitimate questions to raise about Sonia Sotomayor, but the smear attacks on her as some sort of “identity politics” poster child — which are still being justified largely if not entirely by the Jeffrey Rosen/TNR gossipy hit piece on her — are nothing short of disgusting. As Anonymous Liberal put it: “Apparently, the only way to avoid ‘identity politics’ is to pick white men for every job.” Both Adam Serwer and Daniel Larison note the glaring, obvious hypocrisy in simultaneously insisting that “empathy” has no place in the law while protesting Sotomayor’s decision in Ricci on the completely law-free ground that what happened to the white firefighters is so “unfair.”
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Anyone who is objecting now to Sotomayor’s alleged “empathy” problem but who supported Sam Alito and never objected to this sort of thing ought to have their motives questioned (and the same is true for someone who claims that a person who overcame great odds to graduate at the top of their class at Princeton, graduate Yale Law School, and then spent time as a prosecutor, corporate lawyer, district court judge and appellate court judge must have been chosen due to “identity politics”). And the idea that her decision in Ricci demonstrates some sort of radicalism — when she was simply affirming the decision of a federal district judge, was part of a unanimous circuit panel in doing so, was supported by a majority of her fellow Circuit judges who refused to re-hear the case, and will, by all accounts, have at least several current Supreme Court Justices side with her — is frivolous on its face.
I have no doubt there are legitimate grounds for objecting to some of Sotomayor’s judicial opinions. Doing that, as well as vigorously questioning her on important areas where she has little record (such as executive disputes), is not only legitimate, but vital. But the attacks thus far — not just from the Right but from the sterling Respectable Intellectual Center — say far, far more about the critics than they do about her.
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The focus on the three instances in which Sotomayor’s rulings were reversed is equally inane. Reversals of that sort are a standard part of how the appellate justice system works and hardly means that a judge’s abilities should be called into question. Any judge who sits on the bench long enough will make erroneous rulings at times. Many times, the Supreme Court makes new law when reversing and other times it is the Supreme Court’s majority that errs.
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There are numerous other instances where Alito’s rulings were repudiated either by the Supreme Court or even his own Circuit. Judge for yourself if those were treated the same way as Sotomayor’s more limited and less meaningful instances of reversals. Was the argument made that this proved he was inept, intellectually deficient, and chosen soley for “identity politics” in order to attract the key Italian and Catholic voting blocs?
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But based on everything that is known now, this seems to be a superb pick for Obama.
It is very encouraging that Obama ignored the ugly, vindictive, and anonymous smear cam
paign led by The New Republic‘s Jeffrey Rosen and his secret cast of cowardly Eminent Liberal Legal Scholars of the Respectable Intellectual Center. People like that, engaging in tactics of that sort, have exerted far too much influence on our political culture for far too long, and Obama’s selection of one of their most recent targets both reflects and advances the erosion of their odious influence. And Obama’s choice is also a repudiation of the Jeffrey-Rosen/Ben-Wittes/Stuart–Taylor grievance on behalf of white males that, as Dahlia Lithwick put it, “a diverse bench must inevitably be a second-rate bench.”
Obama has also ignored the deeply dishonest right-wing attacks on Sotomayor, beginning with the inane objection to her perfectly benign and accurate comments on videotape that appellate judges, as distinct from district court judges, “make policy.” Lawyer Anonymous Liberal thoroughly eviscerated that line of attack as the shallow and deceitful argument it is. A similar avenue of certain attack — that Sotomayor said in a 2001 speech that a female Latina judge has experiences that can inform her view of cases — is equally frivolous. There are a whole range of discretionary judgments which judges are required to make; does anyone actually doubt that familiarity with a wide range of cultural experiences is an asset?
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What is the basis for the seemingly now-widespread assumption that Sotomayor is some sort of left-wing pick? She was originally appointed to the bench by Bush 41 and her confirmation to the Second Circuit was supported by some of the most right-wing Senators (including Jesse Helms, Rick Santorum, Bill Frist and similar types). She began her law practice working as a District Attorney, prosecuting criminals. Anyone who wants to characterize her as “left-wing” — especially radical left-wing or even to the left of Souter — should be compelled to point to specific judicial rulings or other evidence for that characterization. The fact that she’s Latina and from the Bronx isn’t actually evidence of her ideology or judicial philosophy.”
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/05/27/sotomayor/index.html
4. “ In her foreword to “The Bases of Empire: The Global Struggle Against U.S. Military Posts,” an important collection of articles on United States militarism and imperialism, edited by Catherine Lutz, the prominent feminist writer Cynthia Enloe notes one of our most abject failures as a government and a democracy: “There is virtually no news coverage—no journalists’ or editors’ curiosity—about the pressures or lures at work when the U.S. government seeks to persuade officials of Romania, Aruba or Ecuador that providing U.S. military-basing access would be good for their countries.” The American public, if not the residents of the territories in question, is almost totally innocent of the huge costs involved, the crimes committed by our soldiers against women and children in the occupied territories, the environmental pollution, and the deep and abiding suspicions generated among people forced to live close to thousands of heavily armed, culturally myopic and dangerously indoctrinated American soldiers. This book is an antidote to such parochialism.”
Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes? 
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