The persistently irritating John Tierney has done it again. In a typically smarmy column in the Oct. 25 New York Times, "And Your Point Is?", he dismisses the Plame affair as a bunch of empty hot air, asserting that "no one deserves to go to jail for leaking information to reporters without criminal intent." He also concludes: "No one deserves to be indicted on conspiracy charges for belonging to a group that believed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Foreign policy mistakes are not against the law."

Condoleeza Rice spilled the beans in Congressional testimony: there really is (as we always suspected) a White House plan to redesign the Middle East! Capitol Hill liberals like Barbara Boxer squawk about the administration's "unbelievable rewriting of history" in changing the justification for the Iraq invasion after the fact. But Republicans are unrepentant: its a new world war, deal with it. From the Washington Times, Oct. 20:

Well, Judith Miller is out of jail, has testified before the grand jury, and wrote up a story on her own testimony for the New York Times. She even expresses some contrition, admitting to error, if not wilful collaboration with a White House disinformation campaign. For those who care to wade through the barrage of bureaucratese obfuscation unleashed by this twisted affair, it does shed light on how the White House played the media in the prelude to the Iraq campaign, twisted the truth, and ultimately came to regard the Central fucking Intelligence Agency as a bunch of pussy-footing liberals for actually doing their job and providing accurate, um, intelligence. Via TruthOut:

In what has become a yearly ritual, activists from the American Indian Movement (AIM) staged angry protests at the Columbus Day march in Denver, while the city's Italian-Americans intransigently refused to "get it." This from an AP account online at Indian Country Today:

As drums and chants echoed in the background, demonstrators briefly staged a mock death scene in the street Oct. 8 before a Columbus Day parade passed by.

The Republican-controlled Senate voted Oct. 5 to impose restrictions on the treatment of terrorism suspects. Defying the White House, senators voted 90-9 to approve an amendment to prohibit the use of "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment" against anyone in US government custody. The amendment was added to a $440 billion military spending bill for the budget year that began Oct. 1. The proposal, sponsored by Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), also requires all service members to follow procedures in the Army Field Manual when they detain and interrogate terrorism suspects.

Vice President Dick Cheney said that the US must be prepared to fight the War on Terrorism for decades. Speaking to US military personnel at the Association of the US Army in Washington DC, he said that the only way terrorists would win was if the US lost its nerve and abandoned Iraq and the Middle East. "Like other great duties in history, it will require decades of patient effort, and it will be resisted by those whose only hope for power is through the spread of violence," he said.

From the Sept. 27 NY Times, reprinted in the International Herald Tribune:

A Spanish court on Monday convicted a Syrian man of conspiring to commit the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States, and found 17 other men guilty of belonging to or aiding a Spanish cell of Al Qaeda under his command.

British MP George Galloway, current darling of the left for his testimony against the Iraq war before the US Senate earlier this year and for slaying such mediocre dragons as Christopher Hitchens, reveals a disturbing side in a Sept. 9 interview with the loopy conspiranoid site Prison Planet, in which he both blames the Jews for persecution of Jews (including bringing Hitler to power), as well as for unleashing the global terror wave upon the world.