saddam hussein

In one of the more bizarre subplots of the Iraq war, the United States has for years protected thousands of members of the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, an Iranian organization chartered by Saddam Hussein to carry out terrorist attacks against Iranian targets. The MEK has a cultish aspect to it — Elizabeth Rubin wrote a great and detailed [...]

Sometimes grafs from New York Times obituaries can’t help but undermine the points they seek to make. To wit:
A spokesman for the Los Angeles Police Department said the department assigned its robbery and homicide division to investigate the death, but the spokesman said that was because of Mr. Jackson’s celebrity.
“Don’t read into anything,” the spokesman [...]

Michael Goldfarb writes:
Is it possible that the Iraqi election experience had something to do with Iranian expectations of an election? If critics of the war can for just a moment move beyond their own deeply held opinions about the invasion of Iraq — that this was a war of choice fought on false premises to [...]

Over the weekend, The Washington Post had this telling account about how Philip Mudd’s nomination to be Homeland Security undersecretary for intelligence unraveled:
Over the Memorial Day recess, Mudd met with senior staff members of the Homeland Security panel whose interest was primarily how he would handle issues of intelligence sharing with state and local police [...]

Ah, one for old times’ sake:
We had the training camps of Afghanistan, and dictators like Saddam Hussein with known ties to Mideast terrorists.
Sigh. He wants you to hear “known ties to al-Qaeda,” knowing that for eight years, you’ve heard Bush administration officials conflate al-Qaeda with the generic term “terrorists.” In truth, Saddam Hussein had “known [...]

Saddam Hussein henchman Tariq Aziz has been convicted by an Iraqi court of crimes against humanity. His sentence is … fifteen years in prison. Daphne, perhaps you can correct me here, but doesn’t it seem as if a crime of that enormity should carry a longer sentence? Apparently, throwing your shoes at George W. Bush [...]

While Weigel covers the crazy at the RNC chairman race, Justin Elliott at TPMmuckraker has some lunacy updates from the not-too-distant past. According to documents that turned up from a Freedom of Information Act request that TPMmuckraker filed, as recently as fall 2007, one of the premier fever-swamp conspiracy theorists, Laurie Mylroie of the American [...]

Vice President Dick Cheney’s exit interview with PBS’ Jim Lehrer has to be seen to be believed, and Ben Craw has the video. Editor & Publisher has the transcript.
CHENEY: … And if I were to look for one where there was a miscalculation on my part, I think I underestimated the difficulty of getting an [...]

Via Dana Goldstein, Esquire rounds up some quotes, anecdotes and nyuk-nyuks from the new Commerce Secretary-designate (and possible post-Clinton secretary of state?). Here’s my favorite, with a guest appearance from Saddam Hussein:
Saddam had these small, black eyes. I started giving him my spiel, which was, “I want you to release these Americans as a humanitarian [...]

Here I was, all set to debunk Robert Kagan’s bloviations about how it’s an “absurd conspiracy theor[y]” to say that President George W. Bush lied about the basis for the Iraq war, when Matt Duss of the Center for American Progress beat me to it.
But why stop at the invasion? Bob Woodward’s new book “The [...]