It's not every day that a nation (or its close allies, in this case, the Ossetians) is accused of blowing up its own troops on purpose. So I thought this was noteworthy:

Mr. Utiashvili said the explosion was part of a strategy to delay the planned withdrawal.

“They have tried to create tensions several times by killing Georgian policemen, and we didn’t respond to any of the actions. They just did it themselves,” he said.
It must be noted that Russia has been accused of such false flag attacks before. Putin was widely suspected of being behind a string of attacks on Moscow apartment buildings as a means of whipping up enthusiasm for his Chechen wars: see http://www.rawstory.com/news/2006/Was_former_KGB_agent_murdered_over_1126.html
for speculation that the spectacular assassination (by an "unconventional weapon," no less) of a former spy was motivated by a desire to cover up the allegations.

And consider this:

Earlier in the day, a device exploded near a car belonging to Anatoly Margiyev, the head of South Ossetia’s Leningorsk district administration, as he was en route to Tskhinvali, Interfax reported. Mr. Margiyev jumped clear of the car, which burned.

The explosion occurred in an ethnic Georgian area, and a South Ossetian government spokesman said it was an attempt on Mr. Margiyev’s life. Since he took the position as head of the district administration, he has been threatened repeatedly and asked to step down, Interfax reported.

As one intelligence analyst says, it is impossible to be too cynical about Russian motives. At the same time, it is impossible to assign Russians (or their allies) the blame for this, simply because a Georgian official says so.

This is an inordinately complex situation. We have a responsibility to elect leaders who are capable of sorting through complex problems and reaching rational conclusions about them, and who are able to allow our own intelligence agencies the freedom to do their jobs properly (and, of course, requiring them to do so without violating our laws and civil liberties- in truth the tasks are complementary, but this Administration does not know this).

So Foggo has gotten off with a plea deal, secured in lieu of spilling enough State Secrets to destroy the CIA forever, which, in view of the damage Cheney, Libby, and Porter Goss have already inflicted, might have been a mercy killing.
And the OIG has written 400 pages on the Attorneys scandal,  ending with a plea for an independent prosecutor, who will be under the watchful eye of Michael Mukasey, who will do the job Chuck Schumer tapped him for, which is to shred the Constitution and keep his bosses out of trouble, and  to ensure that voter fraud is prosecuted to the fullest limits of the law (but nothing else is).

I first became interested in this website because of its extensive documentation of the Attorneys scandal. And this passage from over a year ago illustrates the reaction any honest person would have when confronted by the nonstop scandal that is the Bush Administration:

McKay
said he began to have concerns about politics entering the Justice Department in early 2005, when Gonzales addressed all of the country's U.S. attorneys in Scottsdale, Ariz., shortly after he took over as attorney
general.

"His first speech to us was a 'you work for the White House' speech," McKay recalled. " 'I work for the White House, you work for the White House.' "

McKay said he thought at the time, "He couldn't have meant that speech," given the traditional independence of U.S. Attorneys. "It turns out he did."

He looked around the meeting room and caught the eyes of his colleagues, who gave him looks of surprise at Gonzales' remarks. "We were stunned at what he was saying.""<all emphases are mine.>

McKay and colleagues had seen the surefire sign of rot, the corrupting of Justice, and the destruction of the rule of law. They could not help but be appalled.

McKay's description is strikingly similar to Valerie Plame Wilson's account of what transpired at the CIA, right after the '04 elections, and the installation of Foggo's boss, Porter Goss, a man who surely owes Foggo a debt of gratitude for not spilling State Secrets (as Bush and Cheney owe Schumer a debt of gratitude in finding such a suitable replacement for Gonzo in the DOJ):

"Goss e-mailed a memo to all CIA workers that said in part, 'We support the Administration, and its policies, in our work as agency employees.... We do not identify with, support or champion opposition to the Administration or its policies....'... It had a kind of creepy Orwellian Ministry of Truth ring to it..."

It appears honest people everywhere draw the same deduction from this evidence: as Plame Wilson says, it convinced CIA staffers that "the Agency was rapidly losing credibility and power as partisan politics began to degrade its work product."

When this kind of corruption invades high places, ethical, responsible, and competent people are driven out, and we are left with war profiteers like Foggo and torture apologists like Mukasey. And we are left with the people who bring them to power, like Medal of Freedom recipient Porter Goss, who is now one of Pelosi's vaunted ethical watchdogs, and Sen. Chuck Schumer.

The seeds for the next cycle of scandals are already being planted....





'

of things 'to-do' after 9/11?
Let's imagine Bill Clinton was the one with "no plan to catch bin Laden after 9/11." What would have happened to him? (We all know the answer.)

Consider this damning account:, which invests this rhetorical question with some poignancy:
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=44054

Had the Bush administration's priority been to capture or kill the al Qaeda leadership, it would have deployed the necessary ground troops and airlift resources in the theatre over a period of months before the offensive in Afghanistan began.

"You could have moved American troops along the Pakistani border before you went into Afghanistan," said Lamm. But that would have meant waiting until spring 2002 to take the offensive against the Taliban, according to Lamm.

The views of Bush's key advisers, however, ruled out any such plan from the start. During the summer of 2001, Rumsfeld had refused to develop contingency plans for military action against al Qaeda in Afghanistan despite a National Security Presidential Directive adopted at the Deputies' Committee level in July and by the Principles on Sep. 4 that called for such planning, according to the 9/11 Commission report.

Rumsfeld and Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz resisted such planning for Afghanistan because they were hoping that the White House would move quickly on military intervention in Iraq. According to the 9/11 Commission, at four deputies' meetings on Iraq between May 31 and Jul. 26, 2001, Wolfowitz pushed his idea to have U.S. troops seize all the oil fields in southern Iraq.

Even after Sep. 11, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Vice President Dick Cheney continued to resist any military engagement in Afghanistan, because they were hoping for war against Iraq instead.

Bush's top secret order of Sep. 17 for war with Afghanistan also directed the Pentagon to begin planning for an invasion of Iraq, according to journalist James Bamford's book "Pretext for War".

"We are gratified that the report apparently verifies . . . that Judge Gonzales's action in the removal of certain U.S. Attorneys was proper and appropriate," said George J. Terwilliger III, Gonzales's attorney.

U.S. attorneys serve at the pleasure of the president and can be fired for any reason. But contradictory explanations for the dismissals, and the steady release of internal e-mails suggesting the plan had evolved over two years in consultation with White House officials, damaged the department's reputation and credibility. The report will sift through all of the conflicting data about prosecutors who found themselves on lists prepared by D. Kyle Sampson, former chief of staff to Gonzales.

Among the most closely watched of the cases is one involving former New Mexico U.S. attorney David C. Iglesias, who says he received troubling phone calls from GOP Sen. Pete V. Domenici and Republican Rep. Heather A. Wilson about the status of a criminal corruption probe against a prominent local Democrat shortly before the 2006 elections. In April, the Senate Ethics Committee admonished Domenici, who is retiring.

Investigators failed in their attempts to interview lawmakers, their assistants or former White House aides. As a result, they asked Mukasey to continue the probe by appointing a prosecutor.

Despite calls from some of the fired U.S. attorneys, Mukasey has not named a special prosecutor from outside the department. He intends to hand over the project to a career prosecutor with experience in public corruption work, the sources said.