Will Republicans heed his words or excommunicate him like they’re trying to do with Colin Powell?

Olbermann haters should skip to the 0:54 mark to hear Petreaus speak for himself.

Two of the most respected military minds say that torturing detainees and keeping Gitmo open hurts national security. Why doesn’t the right get it?

I recently got into a somewhat heated argument with a conservative friend of mine about Fox News and whether it was more or less misleading than the other mainstream media outlets. I pointed to the two or three Pew polls that show that Fox News viewers on average were the least likely of all the major news outlets to have a clear understanding of the facts. I argued that MSNBC may on the whole be liberal, but at least they “deal in facts” (i.e. they cite their sources and don’t just make stuff up as they go along, like Bill O’Reilly or Sean Hannity do). The following video is a great example. Bill O’Reilly attempts to debunk Obama’s assertion that Winston Churchill was anti-torture, even when he was under the most dire of circumstances. Notice how O’Reilly makes statements as if they were fact, with no supporting documentation, and how he distracts his audience by going on tangents that have nothing to do with the torture question. Then watch as Olbermann counters Bill O’s argument with facts and actually cites his sources.

It’s amazing to me that anyone still believes that Fox News is “fair and balanced.” What’s even more amazing is that the same conservative friend watched the documentary “Outfoxed” on my suggestion and agreed with much of what it had to say. Three or four years later, now that Obama is in the White House, that objectivity has vanished.

Don’t bother reconciling the two…it’s impossible.

President Obama continues the clean break from the policies of the Bush administration. Today he signed new executive orders regarding the closure of the Guantanamo detention facility within a year, the review of military trials of terror suspects and a ban of the harshest interrogation techniques. Obama made his intentions clear:

The message we are sending around the world is that the US intends to prosecute the ongoing struggle against violence and terrorism and we are going to do so vigilantly, we are going to do so effectively, and we are going to do so in a manner that is consistent with our values and our ideals … We intend to win this fight, and we intend to win it on our terms.

I find it interesting that he did not use the phrase “war on terror.” I have no idea if that was intentional, but as I’ve said in the past that phrase was always overly broad and misleading. Hopefully we can move beyond simple slogans to a more sophisticated policy that effectively fights those who wish to do us harm and rebuilds our bonds with moderate and peace-seeking peoples around the world.

I’m watching Countdown and Keith Olbermann is interviewing former NSA analyst Russell Tice. Tice has been explaining how the NSA has been snooping on ordinary Americans, including phone calls, faxes, emails etc. He specifically stated that the NSA was tracking major American news organizations and their reporters.

This is outrageous and scary as hell. It will be interesting to see what the Obama administration does with this.

9/11 conspiracy buffs have long pointed to the collapse of 47-story building 7 of the World Trade Center as evidence that there was a conspiracy behind the attacks. Many have speculated that only a controlled explosion could have led to the collapse of the building.

The government has just released a study in an attempt to refute these theories.

Federal investigators issued a report Thursday concluding that fires brought down a skyscraper next to New York’s twin towers on Sept. 11, refuting conspiracy theorists who have long believed that explosives somehow caused the collapse.

Scientists with the National Institute of Standards and Technology say their three-year investigation of the collapse of the 47-story World Trade Center 7 was the first known instance of fire causing the total failure of a skyscraper.

The investigators also concluded that the collapse of the nearby towers broke the city water main, leaving the sprinkler system in the bottom half of the building without water.

The structure has been the subject of a wide range of conspiracy theories for the last seven years, partly because the collapse happened about seven hours after the twin towers were felled. That fueled theories that something else might have caused the collapse.

This explanation seems very plausible to me.

Rudy Giuliani is the genius who compared George W. Bush to Winston Churchill at the 2004.

If there’s one reason I’d like to see Joe Biden as Obama’s VP choice, it’s to watch him ridicule guys like Giuliani and of course John McCain for some of the ridiculous things these guys say about national security. After his performance in 2004, and in the primaries this year, Giuliani ought to be too embarassed to speak in public. Of course, none of the networks will call him on these comments. All of the news anchors are still in awe of Giuliani.

Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria takes a close look at Barack Obama’s approach to foreign policy, noting Obama’s emphasis on realism, in sharp contrast to John McCain and George W. Bush, who have embraced the wide-eyed idealism of the neoconservatives.

The rap on Barack Obama, at least in the realm of foreign policy, has been that he is a softheaded idealist who thinks that he can charm America’s enemies. John McCain and his campaign, conservative columnists and right-wing bloggers all paint a picture of a liberal dreamer who wishes away the world’s dangers. Even President Bush stepped into the fray earlier this year to condemn the Illinois senator’s willingness to meet with tyrants as naive. Some commentators have acted as if Obama, touring the Middle East and Europe this week on his first trip abroad since effectively wrapping up the nomination, is in for a rude awakening.

These critiques, however, are off the mark. Over the course of the campaign against Hillary Clinton and now McCain, Obama has elaborated more and more the ideas that would undergird his foreign policy as president. What emerges is a world view that is far from that of a typical liberal, much closer to that of a traditional realist. It is interesting to note that, at least in terms of the historical schools of foreign policy, Obama seems to be the cool conservative and McCain the exuberant idealist.

Just as with his other policies, Obama takes a much more nuanced approach to the world, recognizing that the world is a complex place. In contrast, McCain seems to embrace W’s simplistic “good vs. evil” approach to most situation.

Obama rarely speaks in the moralistic tones of the current Bush administration. He doesn’t divide the world into good and evil even when speaking about terrorism. He sees countries and even extremist groups as complex, motivated by power, greed and fear as much as by pure ideology. His interest in diplomacy seems motivated by the sense that one can probe, learn and possibly divide and influence countries and movements precisely because they are not monoliths. When speaking to me about Islamic extremism, for example, he repeatedly emphasized the diversity within the Islamic world, speaking of Arabs, Persians, Africans, Southeast Asians, Shiites and Sunnis, all of whom have their own interests and agendas.

Obama never uses the soaring language of Bush’s freedom agenda, preferring instead to talk about enhancing people’s economic prospects, civil society and—his key word—”dignity.” He rejects Bush’s obsession with elections and political rights, and argues that people’s aspirations are broader and more basic—including food, shelter, jobs. “Once these aspirations are met,” he told The New York Times’s James Traub, “it opens up space for the kind of democratic regimes we want.” This is a view of democratic development that is slow, organic and incremental, usually held by conservatives.

After running one of the most pathetic presidential campaigns in modern history (he paid $50 for one delegate), Rudy Giuliani is being trotted out as John McCain’s latest attack dog on national security. Here’s an example of why Rudy is so bad. Like McCain, he can’t keep his story straight.

One of the most compelling arguments against the Iraq War at the time was that it would divert our efforts in Afghanistan and against Al Qaida, the ones who actually attacked us.

In the debate on Thursday, Obama made this point in response to Hillary’s ridiculous claim that only she is ready on day one to be commander-in-chief. He pointed out that she voted for the Iraq War, and that the war had disastrous consequences.

One of those consequences was a diversion from the war in Afghanistan. Obama cited a situation involving an Army camptain in Afghanistan.

“You know, I’ve heard from an Army captain who was the head of a rifle platoon — supposed to have 39 men in a rifle platoon,” he said. “Ended up being sent to Afghanistan with 24 because 15 of those soldiers had been sent to Iraq. And as a consequence, they didn’t have enough ammunition, they didn’t have enough humvees. They were actually capturing Taliban weapons, because it was easier to get Taliban weapons than it was for them to get properly equipped by our current commander in chief.”

Many conservatives challenged the veracity of the story, but now ABC News has contacted the captain and has backed up Obama’s story.

Just another set of facts demonstrating the stupidity of this war and the incompetence of the Bush administration. Hillary supported this policy, and she can’t spin that fact.

With President George W. Bush, we had a president who made sweeping promises about the importance of fostering democracy around the world, to the point that many of his speeches reminded listeners to the utopian goals of Woodrow Wilson. Unfortunately, Bush and his advisors had no clue about the challenges facing those trying to bring democracy to places like the Middle East. Just as in Iraq, lofty goals were not backed up with preparation or hard work. Instead we had utter incompetence.

Joe Klein reports the following from the U.S,-Islamic World Forum in Doha:

The distress was deeper than exhaustion. Many of the Muslim delegates seemed stunned, finally, by the rush of history unleashed by the Bush Administration. “Everything the United States has favored is now radioactive, especially democracy,” said Rami Khouri, a Lebanese journalist. The Administration had pushed for elections in places like the Palestinian territories where the essential components of democracy—a free press, a free economy, the rule of law—did not exist. Religious parties had won, or gained momentum, in most of these elections, and the U.S. had backtracked, refusing to accept the Hamas victory in the Palestinian territories, re-embracing autocrats like Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. “Our indigenous democratic reformers,” Khouri said, “are in retreat across the region.”

This isn’t about conservative or liberal foreign policy. It’s about common sense. Conservatives like George Will and Pat Buchanan saw the folly of Bush’s policies, as did liberals like Ted Kennedy. The greatest tragedy is that real efforts to bring democracy to the world have been set back by this administrations incompetence.

Newsweek’s Christpher Dickey has been one of the nest reporters covering the Iraq War from the beginning. If you read his columns, you knew that the chest-thumping and rosy scenarios coming from the Bush administration were not to be believed.

As we look for an exit strategy from this mess, Dickey explains how our withdrawel is playing around the world. The facts are grim – the terrorists will be emboldened.

Terrorists will indeed believe that all this is a triumph for their God, their vision, His design. But the United States and its friends would be repeating one of the egregious mistakes that got us into this sorry mess if we allowed the bad-guys’ opinions to dictate our strategy and tactics.

The signal error of the Bush administration was to embrace the terrorist rhetoric of war, and then to militarize a conflict that should have been handled all along as a matter for the police, the intelligence services and public diplomacy. The struggle ought to have been focused as a fight against malicious individuals, not their aberrant ideologies, against small criminal groups, not the vast civilizations they claim to represent. (A report from the James A. Baker III Institute and the Council on Foreign Relations in 2002 tried to make this point before we went into Iraq, but alas …)

Dickey again presents a powerful argument. We have to be smart about our counter-terrorism techniques.

John Ashcroft has plenty to answer for regarding his failures leading up to 9/11, so he decides to attack the 9/11 Commission in a pathetic attempt to avoid scrutiny of his own shortcomings.

This is amazing. Osama Bin Laden is responsible for nearly 3,000 American deaths on 9/11, yet catching or killing him is “not a high priority” for George W. Bush in the war on terror? Bush also said “Bin Laden doesn’t fit with the administration’s strategy for combating terrorism.”

VoteVets.org has a powerful new ad targeting George Allen and his failure to vote for improved body armor for our troops in Iraq. The ad is very simple yet very effective.

The organization is raising money so they can continue to show the ad and to create similar ads targeting other Senators who voted against this important protection.

The bottom line is this – when our government sent these troops to Iraq, many of them were not given the ncessary body armor to protect them. Many soldiers had to purchase this body armor on their own because the government would not foot the bill. Many units also did not have armored humvees.

This is a disgrace, and it undermines the chest-thumping claims of patriotism by the Bush Administration and the GOP cheering section. It’s time to hold them accountable.

Jim Webb has closed the gap in Virginia. This ad might help him score a huge upset and help the Democrats take over the Senate.

Richard Wolffe and Holly Bailey of Newsweek posted an excellent article explaining how Bush’s 9/11 address to the nation last night in prime time fits into his political strategy. Money quote:

The most important hallmark is a passive-aggressive strategy—to land a punch without looking like you’re in a fight. So Bush took the high road of patriotism, as he called for Democrats to stop opposing his policies in Iraq and elsewhere. “Winning this war will require the determined efforts of a unified country,” Bush said, “and we must put aside our differences and work together to meet the test that history has given us.”

Nothing in his speech, and nothing outside it, suggests that President Bush is ready to meet his critics half-way in setting aside their differences. In the president’s view, the people playing politics—and dividing the nation—are those who oppose his approach. That may not be explicitly partisan politics, but it is political debate dressed up in patriotic clothes.

Earlier in the speech, he was more explicit about the most important of those differences: about how to end the military operations in Iraq.

Bush’s rhetorical strategy is twofold: first, issue a statement of fact about your own position; second, caricature your opponents to look foolish. First the statement of fact: “We’re training Iraqi troops so they can defend their nation. We’re helping Iraq’s unity government grow in strength and serve its people. We will not leave until this work is done,” he explained.

Second, the caricature: “Whatever mistakes have been made in Iraq, the worst mistake would be to think that if we pulled out, the terrorists would leave us alone,” he said. “They will not leave us alone. They will follow us.”

Are there any senior Democrats who have said that troops should leave Iraq in the hope that “terrorists would leave us alone?” The Democratic argument is that troops should leave Iraq either to encourage Iraqis to take control, or simply to avoid greater casualties in what looks like a low-grade civil war.

They nailed it. When you break it down, it becomes apparant how offensive this strategy can be.

Now, instead of complaining about the tactics, the Democrats need to fight back. They need to challenge his statements and hit back hard.

Krauthammer is pointing out the obvious – the European plan to negotiate their way out of the Iranian nuclear crisis has been a failure. He also points out that Iran has most of the leverage with their threat to cut off their oil supply if attacked or if sanctions are approved.

Unfortunately, he doesn’t offer any solutions or a clear alternative. Furthermore, he can’t bring himself to criticize the Bush administration, which has gone along with this policy even though they would have preferred a push for sanctions.

Also, Krauthammer will not address the possibility that Bush’s disastrous policies in Iraq have completely undermined any chance of taking on Iran. Krauthammer loves to cite Lybia as evidence that the Iraq war has had a positive effect on other regimes in the Middle East, yet he says nothing about the current maniac running Iran. Did our policies in Iraq have any effect on the elections that brought him to power? Again, only positive effects are open for discussion aong supporters of the war.

Krauthammer is often very persuasive, but he loses credibility by consistently offering rough analysis on the Europeans or the opponents of the war, yet he seems incapable of aiming that same critical fire at this administration.

Over the past several years, numerous statement made by President Bush and his administration have proven to be false, including statements about WMD, the Iraq war, the events preceding 9/11 and issues like torture and domestic spying. We can now add another one to the list – the failure to capture Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora in 2001.

During last year’s presidential campaign, President Bush and John Kerry argued over whether Osama bin Laden had escaped from Tora Bora in the final days of the war in Afghanistan. Kerry charged that Bush let bin Laden get away by not choosing to “use American forces to hunt down and kill” him. Bush asserted that U.S. commanders on the ground did not know if bin Laden was at the mountain hideaway along the Afghan border.

Now we have the CIA commander on the ground telling his side of the story in a new book to be released. Newsweek breaks the story:

But in a forthcoming book, the CIA field commander for the agency’s Jawbreaker team at Tora Bora, Gary Berntsen, says he and other U.S. commanders did know that bin Laden was among the hundreds of fleeing Qaeda and Taliban members. Berntsen says he had definitive intelligence that bin Laden was holed up at Tora Bora—intelligence operatives had tracked him—and could have been caught. “He was there,” Berntsen tells NEWSWEEK. Asked to comment on Berntsen’s remarks, National Security Council spokesman Frederick Jones passed on 2004 statements from former CENTCOM commander Gen. Tommy Franks. “We don’t know to this day whether Mr. bin Laden was at Tora Bora in December 2001,” Franks wrote in an Oct. 19 New York Times op-ed. “Bin Laden was never within our grasp.” Berntsen says Franks is “a great American. But he was not on the ground out there. I was.”

I just saw Bernsten interviewed on MSNBC. The man is very credible. Again, we have incompetence from the Bush administration, and then they try to cover it up by denying the truth. Pathetic.

Lindsay Graham is becoming one of my favorite Republicans (there aren’t many). I don’t agree with him very often, but he has a knack for taking principled stands, many of which contradict GOP orthodoxy and GOP talking points. This independent streak has made him one of our most interesting and important Senators.

Graham is currently pushing two amendments that are critical to our fight against Islamist jihadists. In support of the McCain amendment agaist torture, Graham writes in the Washington Post:

Even during a time of war, we have chosen to be a nation of laws, with a different, higher set of values than the terrorists. We should always remember that we are Americans, possessing values superior to those of our enemy, and that there is a proper balance between the protection of our troops and the humane treatment of detainees. This value system is our national strength, not a weakness.

He also argues that Congress has been “AWOL on the status of enemy combatants.” He’s right,though it should also be pointed out that the Bush administration has offered no leadership whatsoever on this issue, instead arguing for virtual unlimited power on the part of the executive branch to hold these combatants. The result is a mess in the courts, so Graham is arguing for passage of the Graham-Levin-Kyl amendment.

These actions make sense and it’s time to get serious about these matters.