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But anyone would have to be more loony than stupid to publish or believe this New York Times nonsense.

The Times is just delighted to report the progress the U.S. Marine Corps is making in training up "female engagement teams" to win over the local women in Afghanistan. The plan is to accomplish this winning-over by tabulating the locals’ grievances into the new remake-Afghanistan high-tech anthropological "change entire societies" database of hope.

Now, reports the Times, this is a most wonderful tactic, which, I suppose we are to suppose, will help the Marines to quickly bring Afghanistan into the fold of modern, western, technocratic, democratic™ nations. This must be part of our great leader General Petraeus’s brand-new, futuristic, brilliant, awesome, Counter-Insurgency Doctrine of Genius!

Is there anything the American empire cannot accomplish with the sophisticated utilization of women and computers?

Is there anything impossible that the editors of the Times will not believe - and would not have us believe?

And is it not some form of mental illness that would allow people to order and abet the slaughter of tens of thousands of innocent people for reasons that can’t stand up to a laugh test for a single minute? Should not the entire population of the white part of Washington D.C. - and the MSM with ‘em - all be immediately locked in prisons for the criminally insane? Should we not tie them up tight in straight-jackets and leave them locked alone in the dark forever?

I’m just saying that maybe it’s time to begin considering locking every federal government employee and their friends who write the news away in a cage for the rest of their lives, immobilized, since they are all crazy homicidal maniacs. That’s all I’m saying.

Well, last Friday a federal district court judge in Illinois refused to reject a lawsuit by two such people against former Offense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld among others.

[The judge] said his decision "represents a recognition that federal officials may not strip citizens of well settled constitutional protections against mistreatment simply because they are located in a tumultuous foreign setting." …

[Donald] Vance and [Nathan] Ertel were described by their attorney, Mike Kanovitz of Chicago, as being in their early thirties. He said the two Americans went to Iraq in the fall of 2005 to work for the Iraqi-owned contracting firm of Shield Group Security.

The suit filed in 2006 alleges that while working for the company they saw fellow employees making payments to "certain Iraqi sheikhs" and dealing in armaments in a way they believed would not be approved by the U.S. military.

According to the suit, Vance contacted an FBI official in Chicago with his suspicions and the two men eventually shared their concerns with three U.S. Embassy officials in Baghdad.

The suit said their actions provoked suspicion at the company and on April 14, 2006, fellow employees confiscated the identity cards that allowed them to enter the safe area known as the Green Zone.

The two men said they locked themselves in a room, called the Embassy for help and were extricated by "United States forces" who took them to the Embassy where they were taken into custody.

They were taken to two military camps in the Baghdad vicinity in the weeks that followed, the suit said. It said Ertel was released after a month and Vance after two months.

While in custody, they were subjected to sleep deprivation, long hours of interrogation, blasting music, threats, hunger and a practice known as "walling" in which subjects are blindfolded and walked into walls, according to the suit.

The suit describes such practices as forms of torture and alleges Rumsfeld personally took part in determining such methods were acceptable for use by the military in Iraq.

Note the implication that the company in question, Sheild Group Security was secretly and illegally selling weapons to the predominantly Sunni "insurgency" in 2005, or perhaps early 2006 - at a time long before the American generals had accepted Sunni leaders’ proposals for what eventually became the "Anbar Awakening" movement of "Concerned Local Citizens" - during some of the worst of the civil war and the war against the American occupation. No wonder Donald Rumsfeld had these whistle-blowers kidnapped and tortured.

Note also that the pentagon apparently had no problem finding thugs among their ranks willing to torture a couple of American contractors under the "they are terrorists so they have no rights" doctrine.

How long before Hope-Change™ invokes the State’s Secrets Privilege to prevent this case from going any further?

How long before the pretense is over and the Pentagon simply closes down the courts for good?

You best look out GE lady! You’re an "Unprivileged Enemy Belligerent" now.

So, anyway, this time the monster of "moderation" has been busted back down to his dank cellar by Milton Friedman’s son David, on occasion of Frum’s pathetic attempt at defending the Federal Reserve System from the continued withering assaults on its credibility and authority by Rep. Ron Paul. Frum’s dilemma is that Ron Paul is a master of economics and American history [.pdf], while Frum himself knows nothing. So where they disagree, it is obviously only because David Frum is what he always is: wrong.

Or as Friedman put it:

"[Frum's] version of the history of the Great Depression is entirely fictional."

No one is surprised at your failure here, but really Mr. Frum, you thought you were going to win an argument with my man Ron Paul about the Great Depression? Did you even bother to read what he’s written on the subject before regurgitating your 7th grade history text book for us over there at CNN? You might-should try a bit harder next time so that at least it will appear that you have any concept of what the other side of the argument is while posturing as such a smart guy. Then again, if you actually understood Paul’s position on gold and the Great Depression, you’d have to pick something else to write about - you know, like why everyone in America, excepting only you and yours, should go die murdering Arabs, Pashtuns and Persians for their own good or something else convincing like that.

Former Democratic VP candidate Joe Lieberman and former GOP presidential candidate John McCain have introduced a new detention policy bill in response to the Christmas Day underwear bomber. From The Atlantic: "A close reading of the bill suggests it would allow the U.S. military to detain U.S. citizens without trial indefinitely in the U.S. based on suspected activity."

Read the rest.

The revision thing by Sam Smith