CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons:

The CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe, according to U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement.

Quoth Eminem: "This is Bin Laden; look at him noddin'."

This kind of gulag/interrogation thing won't effectively combat network terrorism. It didn't work for the Soviets in the '80s and it won't work for us now. It will, however, serve to further radicalize Muslims against the US. Oh yeah, and it's deeply morally wrong.

There's a great deal of angst in Democratic circles about the party's weakness on national security. But the boys in the Senate are showing signs of chutzpah.

Howdy, Gansta! Here's your script if you have the balls to read it:

"President Bush has played directly into the hands of the terrorists. He let them escape from Tora Bora. He's financed the worlds largest training camp in Iraq at with 1000s of American lives and hundreds of billions of American dollars. He's given them propaganda recruitment gold at Abu-Ghraib, Guantanamo and now at in former Soviet Gulags in Eastern Europe.

What's worse, in spite of all the death, all the torture and all the terror alerts, United States citizens are no safer today than they were on September 11th, 2001. In fact, as unsettling as it is to say, it looks like we're less safe. Those who wish us harm are more numerous, more experienced and more organized, while our military is degraded from a foolish and unnecessary war and our emergency response capabilities are still clearly unable to cope with major catastrophe.

Ladies and gentlemen, it's time for a different approach..."

The proscriptive plan, politically speaking, can be almost anything. There are good ideas out there from the real heads, but nobody is going to be able to enact shit unless prominant national Democrats have the gall to call out the fact that by any objective measure Bush is losing his self-declared war on terror.

I know my comments are broken. I'm going to switch things up soon. Until then, I will dictatorially control the dialogue here, m'kay?

Quotes from HST in late 1969:

I've been reading "Fear and Loathing in America: The Brutal Odyssey of an Outlaw Journalist," which is Hunter S. Thompson's collected correspondence from 1968 - 78. Here are some choice bits I came across last night that seemed to echo with contemporary relevance:

On The New Journalism:

But the whole concept of "new journalism" is bogus -- unless we admit that honesty in a journalist is something new. The old, Hearst-style journalists had a privileged relationship with power -- and they paid fr that privilege by keeping a lot of warts and chancres off the public record. This tradition is still strong, especially with big-city newspapers, TV news departments and national newsmagazines...

So the "new journalism" is nothing more than a repudiation of the whole concept of privileged communication between newsmen and their sources... Nixon learned this lesson in 1960 and '62. This year he treated the press like a bunch of scorpions, playing "influential" reporters off against each other and awarding private interviews like gold stars for good behavior. I spent 10 days following him around New Hampshire and by the time I was finally granted an audience I felt almost lucky. This feeling passed very quickly, however, and now -- on the basis of what I wrote -- I have no illusions about getting a job as a White House correspondent. For the same reasons, I'll have a jaundiced view of any correspondent who seems "close to Nixon."

On The First Freak Power Campaign

Hunter and his Aspen-based cohort of anti-development refugees from the coastal cities launched a spur of the moment takeover bid, and came within a few votes of installing a 29-year-old hippie lawyer and motorcycle racer as mayor. This near victory set the stage for Hunter's own campaign for Sheriff.

The idea was to first mobilize our hidden vote -- Freak Power -- and then, using that as a power base, go after the small but very vocal "liberal vote." I was convinced that we could win by putting these two blocks together... and as it turned out I was right: That combination would have won by at least 100 votes out of 1,200 -- but it never occurred to me that most of the local "liberals" would back off at the last moment, leaving us with what amounted, in the end, to an "under-30 vote" and a hundred or so defectors from the old, failed-liberal camp who said, "Fuck it, let's run flat out this time..."

...

Electoral politics is such a foul and rotten game that only a fool would play it except to win and move on to something better.

Park Slope is a little different from Gpt/Wburg, not to mention the 'Shwick. It's older, all buildings stone and brick, no siding and few "new" looking places. It's more racially mixed, yet also more yuppified. Williamsburg has money pouring in -- just an obscene amount of real estate development, seemingly a lot of upper-class foreigners, and the third wave is definitely on -- but the Slope has been a destination for young urban professionals, especially couples, for more than a generation.

And, oh yeah, there are babies everywhere.

So I sit in the coffee shop and make funny faces at this ultra-cute toddler while his mother goes on to her friend about her husband (who she never mentions by name) and her various exes (who she does) and how it's sad that they haven't yet "gotten their act together."

"Which Barnes and Noble does he work at? ... Yeah, I think he's still bitter..."

It's going to be an interesting couple of months living here. Who knows? Maybe I'll like it enough to stay, though I find myself leaning more towards joining Operation Snowflake back out in the East Wburg/'Shwick area.