The 9-11 Commission, its formal mission completed, is staying on as a private body, the 9-11 Public Discourse Project. In its first efforts, this private body is finding fault with the FBI for perceived inefficiencies in its intelligence capabilities, and the agency, in turn, assures that it is making amends. All freedom-lovers should shudder.

William Schulz, executive director of Amnesty International, speaking on "Fox News Sunday," charged: "The U.S. is maintaining an archipelago of prisons around the world, many of them secret prisons, into which people are being literally disappeared, held in indefinite, incommunicado detention without access to lawyers or a judicial system or to their families. And in some cases, at least, we know they are being mistreated, abused, tortured and even killed."

The following item ran in the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on June 6:

Participants at an anti-Zionist conference in Kiev called for the deportation of Jews from Ukraine.
The call came from one of the participants in the June 3 meeting in the Ukrainian capital. David Duke, a U.S. white supremacist, presided over the one-day conference, titled "Zionism as the Biggest Threat to Modern Civilization." A number of Ukrainian politicians and public figures took part in the conference, including Levko Lukyanenko, a member of Parliament from the bloc headed by Prime Minister Yulia Timoshenko.

Much to our dismay, our story by Frank Morales in the current issue of WW4 REPORT, "The Provacateur State: Is the CIA Behind the Iraqi 'Insurgents'?", has been picked up by the neo-Nazi Stormfront, which bills itself as "the first White Nationalist website." Gee, what an honor. Just in case there is the slightest room for doubt, let us make explicitly clear that we despise Stormfront and everything they represent, and wish them total disaster in all their endeavors.

The following June 2 article is from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency:

Waxman: Investigate anti-Semitism charges
A Jewish lawmaker asked the U.S. Defense Department to investigate charges of anti-Semitism at the Guantanamo Bay military prison. Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) on Wednesday asked the Pentagon to investigate allegations that American interrogators made anti-Semitic remarks in order to drive a wedge between detainees and their attorneys.

In an editorial for the July issue of The Progressive, editor Matthew Rothschild makes a serious case for war crimes charges against Rumsfeld and Bush, as well as other White House and Pentagon figures...

Stripping Rumsfeld and Bush of Impunity
When Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee last year, he was asked whether he "ordered or approved the use of sleep deprivation, intimidation by guard dogs, excessive noise, and inducing fear as an interrogation method for a prisoner in Abu Ghraib prison." Sanchez, who was head of the Pentagon’s Combined Joint Task Force-7 in Iraq, swore the answer was no. Under oath, he told the Senators he "never approved any of those measures to be used."

Robots seem to be gaining reproductive rights even as women are losing theirs.

Robots at Cornell University are making copies of themselves without human intervention. In principle, the machines will thus be able to repair and reproduce themselves autonomously in remote environments. "Our self-replicating robots perform very simple tasks compared with intricacies in biological reproduction," said engineer Hod Lipson, a Cornell assistant professor. "But we think they demonstrate that mechanical self-reproduction is possible and not unique to biology."

Well, Pat Buchanan (whose name came up in the recent unpleasantness over anti-Semitism on this blog) noted the 60th anniversary of VE Day in his own inimitable way: by asking in a May 11 opinion piece "Was WWII Worth It?" And, of course, by promptly answering his own question: "For Stalin, Yes." What is truly appalling is less that Buchanan has written this execrable piece of revisionism than that it was run (with no rebuttal) by AntiWar.com, which mysteriously continues to have credentials on the "left" even as it becomes more and more transparently linked to the populist right.

It is always a dilemma whether to risk legitimizing evil claptrap by stooping to argue with it. But given how Buchanan's poison is insidiously creeping into the supposed "left," a few responses are probably in order.