Straight Up | Jan Herman

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 […]

You can’t say the press didn’t warn us. A year before the invasion of Iraq, The Wall Street Journal sent an enterprising reporter to the U.S. Army’s interrogation school in Fort Huachuca, Arizona. His report, published on April 26, 2002, describes an instructor telling his class of freshmen, many under the age of 20, that the […]

The right-wing blog A Dog’s Life, which describes itself as a “Pedigreed Member of the Ankle-Biting Riffraff,” refers this morning to “one Jan Herman, a microcephalic version of Frank Rich but with worse hydrophobia,” and puts yours truly in the company of Matthew Yglesias, former editor in chief of The Harvard Independent. How sweet.

This morning’s lead editorial in The New York Times, “The Abu Ghraib Spin,” begins: The administration and its Republican allies appear to have settled on a way to deflect attention from the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib: accuse Democrats and the news media of overreacting, then pile all of the remaining responsibility onto officers […]

Most news of the torture scandal in Iraq has involved male prisoners. Luke Harding, a Guardian reporter in Baghdad, puts the focus today on the torture and rape of Iraqi women prisoners. Iraqi women needn’t have been incarcerated to come in for abuse, either. American soldiers on the street apparently feel they have a license to […]

Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who wrote the Army report on torture of Iraqi prisoners, is an American hyphenate. He is NOT white. He is a Filipino-American, born in Manila, who moved to Hawaii at age 11 and grew up there in a largely mixed-race society. I’d bet this made him sensitive to issues of racism […]

Ralph Nader live on C-Span on the Web: He’s answering viewers’ questions right now about various subjects, including the presidential campaign. Beginning at 9:30 a.m., Army Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who wrote the internal Army report on torture and abuse of Iraqi prisoners, is to testify in a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee. See […]

“My name is Nick Berg, my father’s name is Michael … I have a brother and sister, David and Sarah.” “My name is Daniel Pearl. I am an American Jew from California. I come from a Zionist family. My father is a Jew. My mother is a Jew. I am a Jew.” Postcript: Berg was […]

Did reality TV finally come to Iraq? Do you think the rise of popular American shows like NBC’s “Fear Factor” and CBS’s “Survivor” have anything to do with the torture and abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere? Those top-rated “entertainments” have prized physical degradation, along with psychological humiliation and plain old human […]

Excellent reading on the Whitehouse dimwit: “As the president says, we misunderestimate him. He was not born stupid. He chose stupidity. Bush may look like a well-meaning dolt. On consideration, he’s something far more dangerous: a dedicated fool.”

Thanks to anti-liberal columnist and blogger Steve Sailer for clarifying the chart that correlated state-by-state average IQs and income with the votes for Bush or Gore in the 2000 presidential election. When we posted the item “The Spectrum from Blue to Red,” we wrote: “The chart that explains it all for you” (an homage to Christopher Durang’s […]

Thanks to a good friend who keeps us up to date on useful information, here’s how our nitwit Maximum Leader (aka “the little fucker”) blows his horn (and our mind). This is from a stump speech he gave just the other day — May 3, to be exact — in Sterling Heights, Mich.: We confronted the dangers […]

How about “Military Personnel: Don’t Read This!” As reported in Time: It’s not exactly every day that the Pentagon warns military personnel to stay away from Fox News. But that’s exactly what some hopeful soul at the Department of Defense instructed, in a memo intended to forbid Pentagon staff reading a copy of the Taguba […]