What about reports that Pakistani intelligence is advising you not to enter into peace talks at this time?
The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan is independent and sovereign in its decisions and agreements. It is not taking any dictation from any group or government.

Do you fear that Pakistan would stop you from using its soil?
They have not given us permission to use their land even now.

Always correct or just prematurely correct?

The text:

For the second time in a row, Newsweek is the winner of the Media Fairness Caucus’ highly un-coveted “Lap Dog Award” for last week’s most glaring example of media bias.

The poster to my left of Newsweek’s cover story features former Vice President Al Gore with the caption, “The Thinking Man’s Thinking Man.”

The previous Newsweek cover featured President Obama with the caption, “Yes He Can” – a variation of his campaign slogan.

Before that it was Vice President Biden – “A Vice President to be Reckoned With.”

And Newsweek’s latest cover features Governor Sarah Palin and says she is “Bad News.”

It’s no wonder five out of six Americans say the national media are biased, according to a recent public opinion poll.

If you just want the liberal slant, read Newsweek. If you want the fact and news, you might want to look elsewhere.

It’s the most pro-Palin statement I’ve seen from a Republican in a while, although as you can see in the video, Smith mangles her name as “PAL-lin” (rhymes with Allen).

If anyone can learn anything from it: it shows why you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, gender, or color of skin.

How do you judge a book by its gender?

It’s telling of something — either the degree to which Washington journalists rush to “break” the news of new Palin posts without reading them, or the tongue-in-cheek way they covered her — that several news outlets reported Palin’s response to Newsweek without noting this bit of gibberish.

As TWI reported last week, the biggest ongoing controversy is over where to try the five suspected 9/11 co-conspirators. The administration has said it prefers to try terror suspects in federal court, whenever possible, and legal experts say that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his four alleged co-conspirators have all committed crimes easily triable in civilian court.

On the other hand, Congress last week passed amendments to the Military Commissions Act, giving military commissions broad jurisdiction over so-called “unprivileged enemy belligerents” (what the Bush administration called “enemy combatants”), suggesting that many lawmakers prefer trials by military commission.

Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff acknowledged in his story late Friday that in fact, no final decisions have yet been made on where any of the detainees will be tried. As TWI reported, the U.S. Attorneys’ offices in four different federal jurisdictions are vying for the opportunity to try the cases, with prosecutors in Manhattan, the principal site of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, making the strongest case.

Security concerns, as well as the ability to offer terror suspects a fair trial before a local New York jury, remain among the major challenges.

According to Newsweek, although the public demand for prosecutions had seemed to die down, in late June Holder spent two days holed up in his office poring over a classified CIA inspector general report on interrogation abuses and was “shocked and saddened” by what he read. The New York Times later reported that if Holder does open an investigation, it’s likely to be a narrow one, “focusing only on C.I.A. interrogators and contract employees who clearly crossed the line and violated the Bush administration’s guidelines and engaged in flagrantly abusive acts.”

That’s what The Post’s editorial board now wants as well, arguing that “those who relied on the memos and shaped their behavior in the good-faith belief that they were following the law should not be subject to prosecution.”

Of course, that’s exactly what former Attorney General Michael Mukasey and Vice President Dick Cheney argued more than a year ago. Will President Obama’s attorney general now conduct an investigation according to the strict parameters those Bush administration officials set out back then, which were widely viewed as self-serving?

Glenn Greenwald today points out the absurdity of the Justice Department’s going after low-level criminals and ignoring the bosses who instructed and cheered them on. That’s precisely the opposite of the way the Justice Department usually goes after criminal investigations — at least the ones it takes seriously.

As Greenwald puts it:

That, in a nutshell, is the twisted Washington mentality when it comes to lawbreaking:  when political crimes become so blatant and extreme that they can no longer be safely excused (Watergate, Iran-contra, Abu Ghraib), then it’s necessary to sacrifice some underlings who carried out the crimes by prosecuting them, but — no matter what else happens — the high-level political officials responsible for the crimes must be shielded from all accountability.  In ordinary criminal justice, what typically guides prosecutions is the opposite mindset:  namely, a willingness to immunize low-level soldiers in order to ensure that the higher-level criminals suffer the consequences of their crimes.  But when it comes to crimes committed by political officials in America’s Versailles culture, only the pawns are subjected to the rule of law while the monarchs and their highest royal court aides are immunized.

Fielding, citing a Department of Justice memo issued by the now much-discredited Office of Legal Counsel in 2007, informed Luskin that the department had decided that Rove, as a former adviser to the president, has “absolute immunity” from testifying to Congress about anything he did in his role as presidential adviser.

Never mind that, as I reported earlier, Judge John Bates of the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., strongly disagreed, saying the Justice Department’s case for “absolute immunity” was wholly unfounded in an earlier case in which former White House counsel Harriet Miers was subpoenaed to testify. As Bates put it, the Justice Department’s assertion of absolute immunity was “entirely unsupported by existing case law.” (Miers was issued a contempt citation, though it was never enforced.)

But as we already know, the Bush OLC has its own, rather unusual, ways of interpreting the law — principally, to favor the president’s desired outcome. Fielding apparently was instructing Luskin — and thereby Rove — that Bush would continue to stick to that view of the law even after he was no longer president.

So who’s in charge now?

“We’re in uncharted territory,” Luskin told Newsweek when asked whether former the former president can still control whether his former aide testifies even after the president leaves office.

Luskin has reportedly asked President Obama’s new White House counsel, Greg Craig, for his opinion on the matter. Craig hasn’t yet responded. But as I noted before, this may be the first big test of the new president’s view of the reach of executive privilege — and the sincerity of his pledges to lift the Bush-era veil of secrecy that shrouded the White House for the past eight years.

But sometimes there are exceptions. Like this Newsweek piece on President George W. Bush, President-elect Barack Obama and torture. Consider:

In times of war and crisis, as presidents such as Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt discovered, the nation needs a strong chief executive. The flaw of the Bush-Cheney administration may have been less in what it did than in the way it did it—flaunting executive power, ignoring Congress, showing scorn for anyone who waved the banner of civil liberties.

Chances are, if the NSA picked up, without a warrant, a passel of communications between Newsweek’s Stuart Taylor Jr. and Evan Thomas with their sources in the Middle East and South Asia; and then passed that information on to CIA, which had operatives abduct them and transfer them to undisclosed prison facilities in eastern Europe or southeast Asia where they were subjected to extreme cold or had water poured into their mouths and nostrils … well, I guess that they’d object to more than just the demeanor of the officials who ordered that to happen.

But because Washington journalists can employ anodyne euphemisms for what the legacy of the Bush administration actually is, and thereby avoid actual engagement with the issues it raises, it makes more sense to say that Obama should just be a less-obnoxious war criminal.

Then there’s this:

The issue of torture is more complicated than it seems. America brought untold shame on itself with the abuses at Abu Ghraib. It’s likely that the take-the-gloves-off attitude of Cheney and his allies filtered down through the ranks, until untrained prison guards with sadistic tendencies were making sport with electric shock. But no direct link has been reported.

Hey guys: you should give the Senate Armed Services Committee a call, because they reported precisely that.

Oh, wait, they don’t get into “electric shocks,” so I suppose your straw man survives, even though your laziness is still on display.

McCain’s advisers… were furious when they heard rumors that Todd Palin was calling around to Alaska bigwigs telling them to hold their powder until 2012.

Todd Palin took personal time off from his job as a producer on Alaska’s North Slope where he works the oil field for BP to join his wife on the campaign trail. So why would he be so intimately involved in his wife’s political future?

According to one of Palin’s top gubernatorial campaign advisers, who spoke to me off the record in Alaska, Sarah Palin has only two true political advisers: “Sarah and Todd Palin.”

Supporters and critics agree that the Palins are a team when it comes to Palin’s politics. The most prominent example being Todd Palin’s role in the Troopergate scandal, where he pressured his wife’s top safety official to fire their ex-brother-in-law over a family feud.

In Palin’s administration, Todd was also copied on emails about state business, like a contentious debate over the police union contract and a bill on parental consent for teenage abortions.

Just last week Sarah Palin smiled at her husband during an interview with Fox’s Greta Van Susteren when she said she was looking forward to working together in the White House

The Todd Palin-Sarah Palin dynamic is well-known in Alaska. It’s reasonable that Sen. John McCain was angry about Todd Palin’s involvement — but McCain shouldn’t have been surprised.

Newsweek reports this quote from Barack Obama while he was preparing for a debate — a quote which, as an environment reporter, I absolutely love.

“I don’t consider this to be a good format for me, which makes me more cautious. I often find myself trapped by the questions and thinking to myself, ‘You know, this is a stupid question, but let me … answer it.’ So when Brian Williams is asking me about what’s a personal thing that you’ve done [that's green], and I say, you know, ‘Well, I planted a bunch of trees.’ And he says, ‘I’m talking about personal.’ What I’m thinking in my head is, ‘Well, the truth is, Brian, we can’t solve global warming because I f***ing changed light bulbs in my house. It’s because of something collective.’”

From an environmental perspective, what I like about this quote is that it highlights the needs to address the root problems of climate change and to come up with large-scale solutions.

From an observer’s standpoint, the quote confirms my longtime feeling that the basic format of these debates produces an outcome that’s contrived, rehearsed and insincere. The funny thing is, Jim Lehrer, who moderated the first presidential debates, feels the same way.

According to Lawrence O’Donnell, a writer for “The West Wing,” Lehrer told him that he has wanted to break with the format for a long time. O’Donnell tried to get Lehrer to appear on “The West Wing” to host a fictional presidential debate in which the candidates, played by Alan Alda and Jimmy Smits, would completely break with the usual format and engage with each other — ie., have a real debate.

While Lehrer couldn’t appear on the show because of a PBS rule that he wrote, he reportedly wanted to emulate the fictional debate, asking debate commissioners to watch tapes of the show to get some pointers. That’s why Lehrer tried to get Obama and Sen. John McCain to actually talk to each other.

O’Donnell talked about all this in commentary on MSNBC here.