Kit Bond, who cares very much about not overstating threats: Feinstein’s GOP counterpart, Kit Bond (R-Mo.), chided Attorney General Eric Holder for being definitive about Shahzad’s Taliban connections on Sunday talk shows. “I am not convinced by the information I’ve seen so far that there is adequate, confirmable intelligence to corroborate the statements on Sunday [...]

New letter from three veteran FBI special agents, right as Attorney General Holder goes to the House Judiciary Committee, urges the president not to mess with any carve-outs to the Miranda warning. If we abandon our laws and apply draconian methods in response to terrorist threats, then the terrorists and their quest for lawlessness will [...]

IMMEDIATE RELEASE No. 387-10 May 12, 2010 DOD Identifies Marine Casualties The Department of Defense announced today the death of two Marines who were supporting Operation Enduring Freedom. The following Marines died May 11 while supporting combat operations in Helmand province, Afghanistan: Cpl. Jeffery W. Johnson, 21, of Tomball, Texas, and . Sgt. Kenneth B. [...]

I hesitate to disagree with Phil Mudd, who has forgotten more about al-Qaeda than I’ll ever know, but I don’t really get the utility of this analogy: [Recent terrorist plots in the U.S.] may seem episodic and detached, particularly if we look at them as separate operations by individuals who may have had some vague [...]

Punk and indie bands have done pop and disco before. Endlessly. And despite the permutations, always in the same general sense: to carry along a critique and pass along an aesthetic judgment, whether it’s Gang of Four doing “At Home He’s A Tourist” (out on the DISCO FLOOR! They make their PROFIT!) or Suicide trying [...]

I watched the joint Karzai-Obama presser and wrote — of course — a listicle. Furious Five messages. It was on my mind. I’ll be at a thing tomorrow with President Karzai & Secretary Clinton. Hopefully I can ask a question or two and get something more than This Is The Message.

“Homosexuals have always served in the US Military,” reads a new joint statement by a coalition of milblogs, “and there have been no real problems caused by that.” Good for them. Reasonable people can disagree about Secretary Gates’s desire to delay congressional action to repeal DADT until the December completion of a survey of military [...]

A powerful letter from a coalition of human rights groups to the Pentagon demanding their reinstatement. I’m an interested party here, the furthest thing from a neutral observer, but my guess is that the public-affairs shop in the Office of the Secretary of Defense backs down here. (There are face-saving ways of reversing this hasty [...]

Clearly, allowing open homosexual service will expose U.S. military personnel to a set of experiences they have no basis for comprehending. We must stop this menace immediately! Are you listening, Secretary Gates? Not just to Ke$ha, like I know you do on repeat when you work out at the Pentagon gym, but to the servicemembers [...]

Right on time for Hamid Karzai’s visit to the White House… The human terrain layer of the battlefield is a necessary component of mission planning and success in a counterinsurgency environment. Coalition forces have become aware of the utility of understanding it but have failed to quantify their efforts in exploiting it. The fact that [...]