Quoting the quotable

Reporters are not only murdered in Iraq of course.

Hélène, 48, who had been in Côte d'Ivoire for RFI for only a few months, was gunned down near police headquarters as he waited to interview government opponents who had just been released after several days in detention. Police said he was shot in the head and that the officer responsible had been questioned by his superiors. article

It's understandable why Al Giordano was so concerned with the safety of his reporters that he shut down Narco News.

And, if you've been following his reports on Bolivia, you know that this analysis in the New York Times today is what Al's been saying all along.

United States officials interviewed here minimized the importance of the drug issue in Mr. Sánchez de Lozada's downfall, blaming a "pent-up frustration" over issues ranging from natural gas exports to corruption. But to many Bolivians and analysts, the coca problem is intimately tied to the broader issues of impoverishment and disenfranchisement that have stoked explosive resentments here and fueled a month of often violent protests.

"The U.S. insistence on coca eradication was at the core of Sánchez de Lozada's problem," said Eduardo Gamarra, a Bolivian scholar who is director of the Latin American and Caribbean Center at Florida International University in Miami.

Dr. Gamarra and others point to events in Bolivia as a warning that United States drug policy may sow still wider instability in the region, where anti-American sentiment is building with the failure of economic reforms that Washington has helped encourage here.

Sharp turn.

Josh Marshall has some comments about a "Rumsfeld memo" comment:

What jumped out at me was this line down at the bottom of the memo in which he tosses out the idea of founding a sort of Muslim MacArthur Foundation (Ansar al-MacArthur?) which will subsidize madrassas that are crazy but, you know, not that crazy.

Here's the line: "Should we create a private foundation to entice radical madrassas to a more moderate course?"

Couldn't we just build a super-strong ladder up into space instead of using those rocket?

You'd think the madrassas backed by the America-funded Madrassa Foundation (administered, no doubt, by General Boykin) might take a bit of a hit to their legitimacy. But, you know, I'm a details man. And why quibble with a bold idea...

And I have to agree with his assessment disagreeing with the numerous comments about this memo that have been coming out - people interpreting it to mean that Rumsfeld isn't the monster he pretends to be - that privately (or at least not publicly) he has his doubts about the whole neocon approach. When I read the memo, however, I had a similar reaction to Josh's:

Yes, there's pessimism. But it's pessimism of a certain sort. The theme of the memo isn't that there might have been too much of X or too much of Y, but that they need to consider 2X or 2Y. And perhaps if things get really freaky, Y squared or even cubed.

Josh also gives his reasons for believing that the information about a Saudi-Pakistani nuclear pact is probably disinformation.

Billmon takes on the memo as well. He also lays out my own views on the verity of anything we get from Iraq's Saddam's-thugs-turned-Ameica's-thugs.

Like I said: take it with a grain of salt. But using a Mukhabarat man to arrest a dissident Shi'a cleric (or torture a few Shi'a prisoners) would be another one of those little ironies that make the New Iraq® such a difficult place to parody.

And he has a nice little post called "Dishonor Roll" quoting some of the gang who tried to push that "support our troops or be a traitor" business down America's throats (and succeeded to a large degree, I might add).

Check it out.

....or do what you want....you will anyway.