Stewart represented an accused terrorist. During his trial she relayed a message from him, regarding his thoughts on a cease-fire with Egypt, to a Reuters reporter. She then clarified the statement. This was part of her commitment to committing murder in a foreign country, apparently!

If, as prosecutors argue, Stewart knowingly violated specific restrictions again passing any messages from her client to any third parties, including the media, then, whatever, press charges. (Not that those specific rules seem particularly constitutional. And not that we should be complicit in the destruction of attorney-client privilege just because we really don't like terrorists.) But "conspiracy to provide material support to terrorism" seems like more than a bit of a stretch. You shouldn't really be locking up left-wing nuts for being naive about the beliefs and intentions of their clients. (And naive about the lengths to which the Bush Justice Department would go to appear to be serious about terror.)

Stewart was sentenced to 28 months in prison. The court of appeals did not specify how much tougher they'd like her sentence to be, but prosecutors sought up to 30 years. Stewart is 70 and about to go into surgery for breast cancer. And your IndyMedia types are about to start calling Obama a fascist, just like Glenn Beck!

What are the chances that any particular envelope full of unknown white powder is, in fact, full of deadly weaponized anthrax? Quite small! Exceedingly small. Vanishingly small. The original 2001 anthrax attacks were so spectacular precisely because it is so fucking hard to pull off something like that. Much easier to send bombs, really! Said bioweapons expert Richard Spertzel, "In my opinion, there are maybe four or five people in the whole country who might be able to make this stuff, and I'm one of them." Also: "And even with a good lab and staff to help run it, it might take me a year to come up with a product as good."

Here's what that means, in practical terms: The envelope full of white powder that you just opened in your Congressional office or governmental office or media outlet office or UN office is full of flour or baking soda or maybe even cocaine, but it is almost surely not full of anthrax. So stop evacuating place and shutting everything down. For chrissake. Some nut in Texas knew he could force the UN one-world foreigners to run in fear with less flour than it takes to make a cookie, and that's exactly what he did, and now it's worldwide news. Contrast that with what these places could have done when they got that envelope: Nothing. Set it aside, let the cops come test it, and keep working in the meantime. There's at least a 99% chance that you'll be fine.

We've said this before. Anthrax! It's a ridiculous thing. Just forget it. Do you smell that? No? That's because we had our operatives fill the room you're in with sarin, a colorless, odorless nerve agent 500 times more toxic than cyanide. You better evacuate now, because it kills in less than one minute.

Kidding! But sending you an envelope full of white powder would have been only marginally more difficult than that. So, seriously. Until further notice, just put it in the trash can. At least make the crazies come get you in person.

That kidnapping was part of a CIA program called "extraordinary rendition," wherein an unknown number of people were flown to secret prisons to be tortured. Obama signed an executive order promising to not fly prisoners to places where they will be tortured, anymore, so his CIA's policy might be more accurately described as ordinary rendition. And we all know the CIA will do exactly as they are told, because they always do.

Extradition of the 23 convicted Americans is not going to happen, though, so Italians should probably consider having agents of their own lawless and unchecked international intelligence organization kidnap them all as they go to church or whatever.

Patrick Nayyar and Conrad Stanisclaus Mulholland, a couple of middle-aged would-be entrepreneurs, agreed to sell "guns, ammunition, vehicles, bulletproof vests and night-vision goggles" to an interested religious organization based in Lebanon called The Party of God.

Mulholland is currently absconding (possibly in his home country Britain) but Queens native Nayyar is in custody and his lawyer thinks the FBI needs to look into the concept of "real terrorism". You see, back in 2007, Nayyar heroically battled a devilish wife-stealing cabdriver:

came to the aid of a Queens couple after an angry cabbie ordered the man out of his cab and sped off with the passenger's screaming wife. The ordeal ended when Patrick Nayyar, 43, used his SUV to cut off the cab.

"I don't know what this guy's intentions were," said Nayyar, who pulled the daring move near 57th Ave. in Elmhurst. "But he could have done anything to her."

Does that sound like the actions of a man who could sell arms to an FBI informant posing as a representative for Hezbollah? A cabbie-battler like him? Never! Except for the part where it totally looks as though he did.

Pic: NY Times.

This means the various poorly dressed and oddly coiffed young terrorist hep cats who burned the Olympic banner on the streets of the Windy City have won. Presumably they are right now pausing the Crass albums on their "Disc Mans" just long enough to cheer the failure of America. And they will be joined in that cheer by Matt Drudge!

"WORLD REJECTS OBAMA," Drudge says! That is a hilarious and easily predicted distortion! Also wasn't it weird how suddenly the right-wing hated the idea of a President trying to get America the Olympics? Like, seriously, what the fuck was that about?

Some of us were against having the Olympics in America because the IOC is run by vile old bastards, the bidding process is staggeringly corrupt, and Chicagoans, like New Yorkers, did not particularly want the Olympics, all that much. We did not want the IOC to reject our bid because Chicago has too many black criminals and because the idea of Obama trying to boost an American city enrages us, though. Why does Matt Drudge hate America? (Note: Chicago is part of America!)

Here we have the forces of American Exceptionalism and unrepentant jingoism teaming up with dreadlocked anti-American anarchists. Maybe the Spanish fascist who used to run the IOC will win the Olympics for Madrid, or (most likely) they will go to Rio de Janeiro.

As was just not reported anywhere in the US media really, but was reported quite a bit in the Guardian (and other UK news outlets), the US interfered with the trial of supposed Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi so much that his conviction was in danger of being overturned way before his release to die at home in Libya. And in exchange for his mercy release, Megrahi agreed not to appeal his conviction and embarrass the hell out of everyone.

But Megrahi has released some embarrassing documents anyway, related to the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission's review of how the US paid off the only witness, who was maybe lying. Maybe!

The commission found police memos suggesting that Tony Gauci, the only witness to link the Libyan to the alleged plot, expressed an interest in being paid to give evidence. He also received payments from the US department of justice after the trial, the new documents claim to show.

The commission said the documents should have been disclosed to Megrahi's defence team, and that the failure to do so made Megrahi's conviction unsafe. The papers allege that Gauci was paid $2m (£1.2m) after Megrahi's conviction, and his brother Paul $1m.

Sometimes we just want justice so much that we are forced to intervene when foreign, soveriegn nations attempt to have fair criminal trials, ok? That is the American way! And it also explains why we all got soooo mad when the Scots sent him back home to die in Libya. Don't you know how much that conviction cost us?

The FBI set up a sting to catch Finton in the act of trying to blow up a courthouse, as that is basically the pattern of most of these terror stings: the Feds find some disaffected and incredibly idiotic Muslim youth and provide him with a target and make-believe bombs and then arrest him when he tries to detonate these make-believe bombs that they got him, outside the terror target they helped him pick out. It is usually more than a little bit ridiculous.

Federal officials allege that on Wednesday, Finton drove a van containing what he thought was explosive material and parked it directly in front of the northwest corner of the Paul Findley Federal Building at Sixth and Monroe streets.

He got out of the van, locked the door and got into another vehicle driven by an undercover FBI officer and drove away. Within a few blocks of the federal building, Finton made a cell phone call to remotely detonate the purported bomb," officials said.

He was arrested immediately after he attempted to detonate the "device."

Yes, indeed. Finton told the judge that he worked part-time in the kitchen of a local "fish and chicken restaurant." And look, here is his MySpace!

It is not actually all that interesting, except that he certainly seems to be friends with a lot of immodest ladies. I can see their necks! And hair!

Oh, and there are a bunch of kind of tragic MySpace comments from someone who seems to be Finton's niece. She does break the news that Finton's been to jail before, and that afterward he cared more for his Muslim brothers and sisters than his "really family."

Have you finished composing your "where I was" blog post or, god save us, your #whereiwas Tweet? Have you muted MSNBC's deplorable annual encore performance of the televised deaths of thousands? Have you remembered to never forget? Good. Fine.

Shortly after (or maybe during) that day, our president at the time, a little fuckhead no one liked, handed over the reins to the most psychotic elements of his administration. In the vast national wave of jingoism, paranoia, dread, and fear that followed, he and his friends led us into an unrelated war they'd been planning beforehand, allowed the CIA to wiretap and torture anyone they liked (and encouraged the CIA to wiretap and torture even more than they were comfortable with!), and regularly insisted that our memory of that day should not be sullied with critical thinking or expressions of anything other than still-palpable fear. This played better in the sorts of places that had nothing to fear from international terrorism, but plenty of formerly reasonable-acting people in the major targets did play along, both out of personal conviction and partisan duty.

In fact an entire cottage industry of dudes who were Changed Forever On That Day thrived on the internet. Bloggers, all of whom were self-professed Former Liberal Democrats, were suddenly freed to be racist, bloodthirsty warmongers. They were rewarded with traffic and mainstream legitimacy (even as they ritually attacked the MSM as terrorist-loving fifth columnists). Most are still treated as Serious People, even though their defining characteristic was a hysterical response to a crisis.

But we don't even need to feel bad about the Joe Kleins, Chris Hitchens, Andrew Sullivans, Glenn Reynolds, Charles Johnsons, and Peter Beinarts of the media world. Because, whatever, they are as responsible in their own ways as Wolfowitz for the Iraq tragedy, but their magical ride on the patriotism express has ended.

Barack Obama is the president now. Regardless of what you think of him as a politician or a man, he admirably refuses to engage in 9/11 rhetoric. He does not operate from the cynical assumption that his audience believes that America Can Do No Wrong, that to criticize a war is to be a literal traitor, that to not worship the president is to spit on the graves of soldiers, that the correct response to a tragedy is to create a thousand more. He doesn't talk like that. And so, fucking finally, the anniversary belongs to the latte-sipping out-of-touch coastal elites who witnessed it.

On 9/12, people in New York (and DC) did not feel as "great" as Glenn Beck. They just felt like shit. They felt scared and confused and depressed. Many of them were drunk. And only an idiot or an actual terrorist would want to always feel like it was 9/12/01. And eight years later, normal people, with brains and souls, have decided that some emotional distance from that disaster is healthier and wiser than trying to recapture the dread.

So thank fucking christ that the Commander in Chief is no longer subjecting the nation to death porn.

No, this year it's limited to a nutty little cult leader on basic cable who is encouraging his radicalized band of fanatical followers to invade the cities where the tragedy actually happened in order to shock the populace back into fear.

Glenn Beck is an actual terrorist, and the people attending his rally in DC tomorrow are al-Qaeda in America.

In addition to having been considered morally wrong in any circumstance for the whole history of our nation, torture is also illegal. So it's pretty much a no-brainer, when you read the report about how the CIA tortured people, to say "well then they should probably look into prosecuting people." Unless you're Dick Cheney! Then what you do is demand that some other documents that will prove that torture worked get released. And once those documents are released and they just muddy the issue even further by saying over and over again that is impossible to know what interrogation techniques produced what intelligence let alone how much of that intelligence was actionable or even accurate, if you are the media, you write "well Dick Cheney has a very good point."

That is what The Washington Post did yesterday. According to the story, Khalid Sheik Mohammed was a difficult detainee who provided no worthwhile intelligence until he was waterboarded nearly 200 times and shackled and diapered and sleep-deprived for a week straight. Then he was suddenly a Chatty Cathy!

Of course, KSM has bragged about how he made up untrue intelligence while he was being tortured in order to make the torture stop, and the CIA inspector general who helmed the investigation into torture says there's been no analysis of which techniques produced what information or even how useful that information was, but hey, we tortured KSM and then he told us stuff, so torture works and no one should get in any trouble for it, ever.

The problem is probably that as soon as us shocked and appalled "civil rights extremists" who want to read al-Qaeda terrorists their rights said "torture is immoral and ineffective" it just opened the door for patriotic torturers to respond with "torture is effective and anyone who says otherwise has to prove it," which is not the best way for a moral debate to go, really.

We haven't had time to digest the hundreds of pages yet, but here are some snapshots that show the frantic attempts to deal with the "flail," as one Pentagon e-mail put it, and pass the blame up the bureaucratic chain.

The first inkling that something has gone wrong starts to circulate.

Uh oh. The blogs are on it.

And Robert Gibbs is not happy.

So let's talk about how to not get blamed for this.

One way to get blamed is to talk to reporters. SO DO NOT TALK TO REPORTERS.

Those fuckers at NORAD are going to try to blame us—don't let them!

Those acronyms are military-speak for this was not our fault.
She's got a point.



This is a chart from a media assessment of the flyover story's coverage. Those marks quantifying web coverage mean "infinity."

Why won't the bloggers shut up about this?

They seriously won't shut up about this.

Especially the conservative ones.

Oh shit. Twitter. But thank god for the swine flu.

It's cool, Boeing paid for the whole thing.

Boyd converted to Islam in the 1980s. And then he... went to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets, with the Taliban. And then he just moved back to Raleigh and married his high school sweetheart! And he had kids named Luqman and Zakariya and Dylan and Noah.

Authorities were interested in Boyd's growing stockpile of armor-piercing assault weapons and his rural training expeditions on the Virginia border with young Muslim men, as well as the networks he used to finance and plan trips overseas.

It is just a crazy tale, altogether. And hey, here is how law enforcement got his wife out of the house, while they arrested her husband and searched their house:

Boyd, whose family lives in the Johnston County community of Willow Spring, described a harrowing experience Monday afternoon when she answered the door to find a man she thought was a family friend wearing a shirt that appeared to be bloodied. He told her that Daniel and their three sons, Dylan, Noah and Zakariya, were in a serious car crash. He asked her to get into a Highway Patrol cruiser that would take her to Duke Hospital, where they were being treated.

Boyd summoned her daughter and pregnant daughter-in-law. They wrapped their heads in scarves, grabbed their Qurans and flew out the door. For Boyd, it was a particularly painful experience. Her 16-year-old son, Luqman, died in a car crash near their home in 2007.

When they arrived at Duke Hospital, the cruiser took them to a construction site at the rear of the facility. A man dressed as a doctor came out and asked whether she was the wife. When she said yes, he extended his hand. She told him she does not shake men's hands. He then grabbed her wrist and handcuffed her.

Can they do that? Not even on the TV have we heard of such a ridiculous anti-terror ruse.

And Susan Boyd is like yeah, they have guns, but they are white southerners, having guns is their favorite right of all! But, you know, also the trained militant thing. Who knows what's going on here.

[Photo: AP]

The General Services Administration contracted an expensive architecture firm to design a new border crossing station up in some godforsaken part of far northeastern New York State, as part of their "let's make government buildings look nice again like they did in the '30s" program. The centerpiece of the station design: "glossy yellow, 21-foot-high letters spelling 'United States.'" Sounds neat!

But because of 9/11, we cannot have nice things. Less than a month after the station opened, DHS began removing the fancy sign.

"There were security concerns," said Kelly Ivahnenko, a spokeswoman for the customs agency. "The sign could be a huge target and attract undue attention. Anything that would place our officers at risk we need to avoid."

Yes, right, of course. Terrorists aimlessly driving through rural Ontario may stumble across the border station, see the giant sign advertising what nation lies across the Saint Laurence River, and remember just how much they hate our freedom. Then they will blow up the sign, which is an internationally recognized symbol of American pride, as it is some letters spelling out the name of our country.

As Times architecture writer Nicolai Ouroussoff says:

In fact, the sign itself demands multiple readings. Unlike the Freedom Tower, whose name could be interpreted as a jingoistic expression of America's post-Sept. 11 arrogance, Smith-Miller & Hawkinson's "United States" sign is politically neutral. Its meaning is constantly changing for the viewer. It communicates openness and possibility, not aggression.

It is hard to see how values like those would make any building a target. They may even seem like something worth defending. They certainly put into question the thinking behind Customs and Border Protection's decision. It is as if the government is attuned to architecture's symbolic power, but unable to decipher its meanings.

Or it's as if the national security arm of our government is just kinda dumb?

Various stories have used the verb "appeared," "opened," and "developed" to describe the motherfucking hole in the god damn airplane what was way the hell up in the sky, doubtless causing all aboard to pee their pants at least a little. This is a somewhat more vivid description:

"All of the sudden, the loudest noise I ever heard came out of nowhere," he said. "There was no pop, no creak, no explosion-like noise. There was just a loud roar. It took me a couple of seconds to wake up. I got the baseball cap out of my face and I look up and there's the sun coming through the ceiling. ...I saw sky where I shouldn't be seeing it."

Southwest officials say they're stumped thus far as to why their cocksucking plane blew a hole, for Christ's sake, thousands of feet above the ground. But the passengers say they cheered and high-fived the captain after he landed, as you would imagine, since he's the guy who saved their ass from that life-sucking hole in the Jesus-loving aircraft, sucking and roaring and trying to pull them right out of the flippin' plane so they could fall thousands upon thousands of feet to their deaths.

The dude is no Sully but you're hellafied right he deserves a high five, or whatever the heck else he wants. Shit. Airplanes should not have holes.
[USAT. Pic via]

We are going to pretend that certain soulless assholes have not weighed in on this story, and just focus on what looks, so far, like a delightful happy ending to the miserable tale of America's post-9/11 desperation to look like it was doing something.

"I went swimming in the ocean for the first time ever yesterday, and it was the happiest day of my life," said Salahidin Abdulahat, 32.

They even say they don't have any hard feelings against the US! Despite our, you know, locking them up in solitary confinement and interrogating them for the crime of being Muslims in a Muslim country!

Now they can play in the waters. Khaleel Mamut, 31, said he went fishing on a boat on Saturday and caught his first fish ever. "I was so excited," he said. "You just drop the hook in the water and you get a fish."

Hooray for the Uighurs!

Uighurs are a Chinese minority group persecuted by the government. A bunch of them went to Afghanistan to escape that persecution. Then: whoops! 9/11! So America invaded. And America did things like pay Pakistani bounty hunters to round up random people who may or may not be dangerous terrorists, so we could ship them to our illegal off-shore prison, in Cuba. And that is what happened to our Uighur friends. A couple years later, the US determined that these were just some guys who hadn't done anything. And four years after that it was decided that maybe they shouldn't have to be in our military prison anymore, if they hadn't done anything.

So here's where we run into a problem: we cannot send them back to China, because they will be tortured and executed. We cannot send them to America, because America is scared of people it wrongfully imprisoned for years without cause or due process. We cannot send them to some random other country, because who would want them? What a pickle!

Well it turned out that we could just send a couple of them to Bermuda, a little island inhabited by tropical drink umbrella peddlers and cruise ships. Now Bermuda is a "dependency" of the UK but the UK's mild objections to this little relocation are basically unimportant. Especially compared to the very reasonable and important points brought up by Steve Doocy, the lady, and the guy who isn't Steve Doocy.

"We better warn Geraldo they could be coming to Puerto Rico!" Sure!

"Do you want to go to a place where that guy over there, in the sombrero, was actually trained in a terror camp in Afghanistan?" What a good point! No, I don't want to go to this weird Mexican restaurant in Bermuda, with the Chinese Muslim staff! I'd imagine the food would be terrible!

Three—three!—political shootings by right-wing extremists does actually make a trend, mostly because it's not accidental that the crazies are turning violent now. Right-wing domestic terror, weirdly, spikes when the right-wing media step up the intensity and violence of their rhetoric—which they happen to do when Democrats are in charge. Hey, remember Oklahoma City? Guess what: now we don't just have a regular Democrat president, we have a black man who is a secret Muslim! Sean Hannity and Dick Cheney and Bill O'Reilly tell the nuts that the nation is literally in danger because a terrorist has stolen the White House. So what happens then?

What happens is Scott Roeder, the Kansas resident who murdered Dr. George Tiller at church because he was an anti-abortion fanatic with ties to, hey, a right-wing extremist group.

There was Jim Adkisson, who shot up a Unitarian church, killing two, because he hated liberals and gays.

And now there is the White Supremacist who just shot up the goddamn Holocaust Museum. He is, of course, named "James Von Brunn," and he is 89 years old! And, obviously, he writes crazy things, on the internet. He is also a World War II vet? For the Allies!

Here is his biography, from his website:

In 1981 Von Brunn attempted to place the treasonous Federal Reserve Board of Governors under legal, non-violent, citizens arrest. He was tried in a Washington, D.C. Superior Court; convicted by a Negro jury, Jew/Negro attorneys, and sentenced to prison for eleven years by a Jew judge. A Jew/Negro/White Court of Appeals denied his appeal. He served 6.5 years in federal prison. (Read about von Brunn's "Federal Reserve Caper" HERE.) He is now an artist and author and lives on Maryland's Eastern Shore.

And look, he paints.

So, yes, maybe this is the sort of person the Department of Homeland Security should be keeping an eye on? As long as that doesn't offend Michelle Malkin!

His name is Ahmed Ghailani and he's the first Guantanamo Bay prisoner to be shipped out to stand trial here in the US. They brought him to NYC, the only place where all the residents and their elected representatives are not scared to death to have a jail-withered foreigner locked in their maximum-security prison cell, where he might spark another terrorist plot amongst his cellmates, if he had any.

Ghailani is charged with helping to build one of the bombs that blew up the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, and US officials say he was once Osama Bin Laden's bodyguard. Whether he's convicted or not, he should probably leave New York City as quickly as possible. He'll be okay if he can make it to a Red State, they're terrified of him there.
[Pic: AP]