Akkam’s Razor

Blogger, veteran, and author Colby Buzzell writes the following:

Since the Army was kind enough to send me an invitation to go back to Operation Iraqi Freedom, I decided to R.S.V.P. to it by writing a little Op-Ed piece about it for the San Francisco Chronicle.

The article is here. Buzzell says the following:

On way out of my building two weeks ago, I checked my mailbox and found a letter from the Department of the Army with “Important Document” printed in all caps on the middle. I immediately felt sick, so I went back to my room, locked the door, grabbed a beer from the fridge and stared out my window for a while. People outside were all wearing sunglasses and walking about enjoying the sun. I took a picture.

Breaking News vis MSNBC:

WASHINGTON - A cargo ship contracted by the U.S Military Sealift Command has fired at least one shot toward an Iranian boat, a U.S. defense official said on Friday.

“It was an MSC vessel,” the official said, confirming the ship fired on an Iranian boat.

Other details were not immediately available. A spokeswoman for the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain did not have any immediate comment.

Of course, this is excellent for John McCain.

Wow. Just wow.

That debate last night.

Wow.

As of right now, there are over 12,000 comments lambasting the debate and moderators at ABCNEWS.

First, to get this out of the way, Hillary clearly ‘won’ (please note that I am an Obama supporter) the Philadelphia Democratic debate which took place at the National Constitution Center last night (Wednesday, 4/17/2008) .

You may recall my prior post about John Yoo and the politicization of the Justice Department.  One of the things several bloggers have mentioned, after reading through the content and footnotes of Yoo’s 81-page torture memo (drafted when he was a rising star in the Office of Legal Counsel) was the notable absence of a particular hallmark case…

But before that, take a gander at this post at Lawyers, Guns, and Money, regarding Bush, Chertoff, and the border fence, referencing a NYTimes column:

Well, in particular, this Mukasey claim is remarkable (fast-forward to 1:21):

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Mukasey blubbers about how a missed phone call from a 9/11 Hijacker, if intercepted, could have stopped 9/11. Hamilton refutes this by essentially saying this is important, yet was not shared with the 9/11 Commission, implying one of three things:

1. Mukasey was making it up for dramatic appeal.
2. He was repeating something heard elsewhere, believing it to be true.
3. Somehow, something quite important was suppressed from the 9/11 Commision.

Interesting, and theoretically sound premise to force an end to the war, but too many people, including those in Congress, have too much to gain by letting the war play out.  It would be an interesting test in the staying power of the Yoo Doctrine - it’d be interesting to see if Congress had the guts (they don’t) to defund the war and if Bush wanted to force (yet another) Constitutional Crisis in the final 3-weeks of his Presidency (he would)?

I’ve wanted to write something about John Yoo and the torture memos, but it’s depressing and secondly I don’t like to write things that the more well-read political junkies already know, and I’m not sure how to sum up the intricacies of the entirety of Yoo, Bush, and the law in a way that will challenge any of the uninformed, misinformed, or Bush cheerleaders.  Regardless, I’m tackling it anyway.

John Yoo, an Ivy League educated scholar, American Enterprise Institute scholar and fellow, current professor at UC Berkley, and former clerk for two Supreme Court Justices, has been a central figure in many of the central rethinking controversies of President Bush’s administration, including (via ThinkProgress):

Foreign Policy has a nice chart, breaking down the war, by the numbers. Remember, ‘we’ll be greeted as liberators’, the ‘war will pay for itself with Iraqi Oil’, and no matter what any pesky Pentagon reports say, Saddam and Al Qaeda were THIS close.

Updated:  Harper’s provides the following from the ‘no-one could see this coming file’:

The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiques are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told … Itis a disgrace to our imperial record, and may soon be inflamed for any ordinary cure. We are today not far from a disaster.

– T.E. Lawrence, Report to the Sunday Times (London), Aug. 2, 1920.

Wingnut wet dreams not withstanding, I’m fairly certain that the multitude of cameras (over 600, circa 5/2005) surveying Times Square will quickly identify the alleged ‘bomber’ of the US Armed Forces Recruiting Station in NYC.

As soon as I had heard that a second fiber-optic undersea internet cable (map and story here and here - the number of broken cables now stands at four) had been broken in the Middle East, I automatically thought of the United States, the Bush Administrations desire to hit Iran, and the USS Jimmy Carter.

In the US Navy, tradition is that Presidents names are placed on aircraft carriers. But things would be different for Jimmy Carter, a former Nuclear Submariner. The Seawolf class submarine that would eventually bare his name would also be different than her class-mates.

Consider the following…

An unelected Presidential candidate (Bhutto) was a greater threat (and subsequently assasinated) and not the current dictator, who has been bankrolled by the US to the tune of $5 BILLION dollars.

How grim is it that the second I started reading about Robert Hawkins, the Nebraska mall shooter,  I start wondering if he has a MySpace or blog? 

The issues vultures, be it the Internet or Gun Control nannies from both the left and the right are sure to swoop-in to protect us from Emo kids and semi-automatics.