We probably won’t hear about this new tactic in tonight’s presidential speech on strategy in Iraq. Rummy boy is working to eliminate those pesky gosh darn photos: “Mobil phones fitted with digital cameras have been banned in U.S. army installations in Iraq on orders from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld,” The Business newspaper reports. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

More on “torture,” the word and the practice: “Don’t torture English to soft-pedal abuse” by Geoffrey Nunberg, in Newsday, adapted from his piece on NPR’s “Fresh Air.” It quotes Secretary of State Colin Powell saying on Fox News, “Torture is torture is torture.” Also “What’s in a Word? Torture” by Adam Hochschild, in The New York Times. […]

More essential reading: Susan Sontag has Sunday’s cover story of The New York Times Magazine. It’s a thoughtful, elegant essay called “The Photographs Are Us.”  Here’s a reminder that at Straight Up, blogged on the fly (on the gadfly?) — we sometimes log on while still rubbing sleep from our eyes — our timing seems right even if […]

Today’s torture headlines are self-explanatory. Anyone who cannot see the signs of systematic mismanagement in all that’s being reported must be blind. Even if the nitwit in the White House and the top Pentagon brass from Rummy boy on down had no knowledge of what was going on — which strains credulity — such purported ignorance […]

In “A Call to Conscience,” Roger Morris, “the diplomat who quit over Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia, asks Americans on the front lines of foreign service to resign from the ‘worst regime by far in the history of the republic.’” This is powerful stuff. Reasoned. Urgent. Necessary. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

Whenever he opens his mouth, the world-renowned economist Jeffrey Sachs speaks truth to power. Or so it seems to me, having heard him twice in the past few days. The first time was over the weekend at the “What We Stand For” conference, where he brought more than 800 liberal Democrats to their feet with an extemporaneous speech that […]

Can you stand this much silliness? It came in an email message. We’ve been holding back on it, but somehow that seems wrong. So here’s the “first final” list of events for the Republican National Convention in New York City: August 30 6 p.m.: OPENING PRAYER read by Mel Gibson, while being flogged with a […]

The 9/11 Commission continues its hearings this morning (beginning at 8:30) on New York City’s response to terrorism and may be watched on C-SPAN-3 on the Web. Former NYC Mayor Rudolph Giuliani is testifying right now. The current mayor, Michael Bloomberg, will also testify, as will Tom Ridge, who heads the U.S. Department of Homeland […]

Mark Danner speaks for us in “Torture and Truth,” his ruminations in the current issue of The New York Review of Books on the “Article 15-6 Investigation of the 800th Military Police Brigade” by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba and the “Report of the International Committee of the Red Cross on the Treatment by the […]

From Straight Up’s poet laureate, we received this message: “Ever consider running something critical of our president?” And so, per Leon (“Our Calvin Trillin”) Freilich: George W. Bush sometimes suggests that he abandoned reading newspapers when he moved into the Oval Office … [but he] is known for devouring the sports section. — USA Today […]

What did Kevin Phillips say at the “What We Stand For” conference that made him yesterday’s coming attraction for today’s report from the Land of Is? Pretty much nothing he hasn’t written in AmericanDynasty, his devastating examination of the Bush family dynasty going back four generations. But there’s nothing like hearing the message from the […]

This morning’s 9/11 Commission hearing about New York City’s questionable “emergency response” to the al Qaeda attack that killed 2,749 people and destroyed the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001 is being televised from the New School in Manhattan and may be viewed in a Webcast by C-Span. (I’m having trouble with the link. Maybe […]

All eyes are on “The Gray Zone,” Seymour Hersh’s story, posted Saturday by The New Yorker, charging that “the roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal” can be traced to Rummy boy’s decision to apply “a highly secret operation” that dealt with Al Qaeda in Afghanistan “to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq.” The Afghanistan […]

Like Dorothy on the Yellow Brick Road, we’re off to see the wizards of “What We Stand For,” a two-day conference featuring Paul Krugman, Gary Hart, Jim Fallows, Sandy Berger, Eliot Spitzer, Barbara Ehrenreich, Kevin Phillips, Robert Reich, Joe Trippi and many more from the Land of Is. In our absence, here are some excerpts […]

Will the family coat of arms being prepared for Colin Powell reflect his role as a federal arts patron? Not according to a report that the family crest he’s requested from the Lord Lyon, “which bestows coats of arms in Scotland,” will have a banner saying “Devoted to Public Service” instead of “Devoted to Public […]

CNN reports: The Malaysian company hosting “the al-Qaeda-linked Web site that first posted the video of Nicholas Berg’s beheading shut down the site today “because it was drawing too much traffic.” By now, of course, the decapitatiion nightmare can be seen elsewhere on the Internet. In the meantime, the Defense Department is still deciding whether to let the general public […]