Max Cleland was, until the last election, one of Georgia’s two Senators. A triple-amputee due to wounds sustained in Vietnam, was hounded out of office by his GOP opponent who tried to equate him with Saddam and Osama for questioning some changes made to the Homeland Security bill; there are still some questions surrounding his loss.

Fortunately for all of us, Cleland has stayed active. He wrote an essay for Salon in September attacking the Administration’s failure to plan for postwar Iraq; the essay concludes with “Welcome to Vietnam, Mr. President. Sorry you didn’t go when you had the chance.” Score one for Max.

He’s also one of the ten commissioners serving on the independent panel investigating the 9/11 attacks — a commission the White House has resisted at every turn for reasons so far unknown.

Today, Salon’s running an interview with Cleland. It’s worth your time, no matter what you think of the war.

The Murdoch-Media is apparently all aflutter over a memo supposedly establishing once and for all that Saddam and Osama were in cahoots, and have been for years, and that we’ve known it all along. Predictably, Murdoch’s machine is all over this, though the rest of the media have essentially ignored the story, and for good reason.

Why? Well, rather than explain it all again here, I’ll point you to our friends at Talking Points Memo (that post and this one)and Slacktivist, who enumerate a wealth of reasons why this isn’t the slam dunk it may appear to be. For one thing, even the Pentagon is saying it’s not proof of a link.

Bush has already commented on the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruling that struck down that state’s same-sex marriage ban:

“Marriage is a sacred institution between a man and a woman,” Bush said in a statement released shortly after he arrived in London for a state visit. He said the ruling by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court “violates this important principle.” “I will work with congressional leaders and others to do what is legally necessary to defend the sanctity of marriage,” he said. Salon coverage

Tom DeLay (R-Tx-Weasel) had this to say, where (unlike Bush) he openly advocates a Constitutional Amendment banning same-sex marriage:

When you have a runaway judiciary, as we obviously have, that has no consideration for the Constitution of the United States, then we have available to us through that Constitution (a way) to fix the judiciary.” Ibid

Huh? Where in our Constitution does it deal with marriage, exactly?

The hardline conservatives would have us all rally against gay marriage, because it’s apparently very important that we control what other people do. I’m deeply confused by this; it seems to me to be a blatent case of unequal access to government services for vague and artificial reasons. I’ve no idea how a heterosexual couple might suffer if their neighbors were a married gay couple; to deny them that is simply absurd. Not only that, shouldn’t governmental regulation of marriage fall outside the party-of-small-government’s jurisdiction?

Fortunately, the Massachusetts court majority agrees with me, and not with Antonin “If it were up to me, sodomy would still be a crime” Scalia, et. al.:

Recognizing the right of an individual to marry a person of the same sex will not diminish the validity or dignity of opposite-sex marriage, any more than recognizing the right of an individual to marry a person of a different race devalues the marriage of a person who marries someone of her own race. If anything, extending civil marriage to same-sex couples reinforces the importance of marriage to individuals and communities. That same-sex couples are willing to embrace marriage’s solemn obligations of exclusivity, mutual support, and commitment to one another is a testament to the enduring place of marriage in our laws and in the human spirit. Ibid

Salon has additional coverage as well, focusing in particular on how gay marriage may well become the major domestic issue of the ’04 Presidential race.

Two thirds of a New York Federal Appeals Court have proved very hostile indeed to the Government’s insistence that it may declare someone an “enemy combatant” and thereby detain them indefinitely without charge and without access to counsel.

Bush has pulled out of a planned speech to Parliament, apparently in fear of heckling by anti-war MPs. Nice.

Dan Gillmor notes that 61 Demcorats in the House have cosponsored a bill mandating voter-verifiable paper printouts. The number of GOP cosponsors? Zero. The bill’s still in committee.

The Toledo Blade — and independent, family owned paper — ran a four-part series last month uncovering perhaps one of our bleakest military episodes: the war crimes of the Tiger Force unit in Vietnam. Briefly, in 1967, this unit went on a seven-month killing spree that was by no means confined to “enemy combatants;” they killed unarmed men, women, and children. Salon:

The paper also uncovered for the first time that a secret four-year Army investigation had concluded that 18 members of Tiger Force had committed war crimes, but no charges were ever brought. Instead, the investigation was simply filed away in 1975, during Donald Rumsfeld’s first run as secretary of defense.

Given this, you’d think the story would be all over the national press. Today, Salon wonders why this Pulitzer contender isn’t on a TV near you.

He’s pledging a significant portion of his wealth, and encouraging others to do the same, in order to prevent Bush’s re-election. This Whiskey Bar post discusses his actions in more detail, and the challenges he’ll face once the Rove Machine starts to notice they have a well-funded enemy.

White House security officials are demanding that Scotland Yard effectively shut down central London for Bush’s three day visit later this month.

American officials want a virtual three-day shutdown of central London in a bid to foil disruption of the visit by anti-war protestors. They are demanding that police ban all marches and seal off the city centre. But senior Yard officers say the powers requested by US security chiefs would be unprecedented on British soil. While the Met wants to prevent violence, it is sensitive to accusations of trying to curtail legitimate protest.

(Via BoingBoing, who appear to finally have a stable server.)

A high school in South Carolina conducted a drug sweep with local officers — who entered the school with guns drawn, and restrained some students face down on the floor for the duration of the raid. CNN and CBS News are also on the story.

They found nothing beyond the suspicions of K-9 officers that some backpacks had at some point had drugs in them. Or liver treats, I guess. No arrests were made.

Apparantly, “avoiding the surveillance cameras” was one of the things that tipped the administration off to the enormous amount of drug activity in the school. Think carefully about that: it’s basically the “if you’ve got nothing to hide, then why worry about privacy?” argument, and now they’re teaching it in high schools. Good God.

Back in 1998, former President George H. W. Bush and Brent Scowcroft published a piece in Time called “Why We Didn’t Remove Saddam.” It contained several points that continue to apply today, 12 years after Bush’s famously secong-guessed decision not to roll to Baghdad after ejecting Iraq from Kuwait.

Well, the article — often cited by war opponents in the run up to the new invasion — has been removed from the Time web site. Not only that; the archived table of contents for the issue in question no longer lists the article.

Fortunately, the folks at the Memory Hole have a copy, along with a scan of the original magazine pages. I suppose Time could insist it be removed on copyright grounds, but that would just be creepy, wouldn’t it?

MoveOn has the text of a speech given by Al Gore yesterday. Some choice quotes:

[F]or the first time in our history, American citizens have been seized by the executive branch of government and put in prison without being charged with a crime, without having the right to a trial, without being able to see a lawyer, and without even being able to contact their families. President Bush is claiming the unilateral right to do that to any American citizen he believes is an “enemy combatant.” Those are the magic words.ÊIf the President alone decides that those two words accurately describe someone, then that person can be immediately locked up and held incommunicado for as long as the President wants, with no court having the right to determine whether the facts actually justify his imprisonment. Now if the President makes a mistake, or is given faulty information by somebody working for him, and locks up the wrong person, then itÕs almost impossible for that person to prove his innocence Ð because he canÕt talk to a lawyer or his family or anyone else and he doesnÕt even have the right to know what specific crime he is accused of committing. So a constitutional right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness that we used to think of in an old-fashioned way as ÒinalienableÓ can now be instantly stripped from any American by the President with no meaningful review by any other branch of government. How do we feel about that? Is that OK?

There’s also a fine quote from the Israeli high court in 1999:

This is the destiny of democracy, as not all means are acceptable to it, and not all practices employed by its enemies are open before it.ÊAlthough a democracy must often fight with one hand tied behind its back, it nonetheless has the upper hand. ÊPreserving the Rule of Law and recognition of an individualÕs liberty constitutes an important component in its understanding of security.ÊAt the end of the day they (add to) its strength.

Just a reminder, dear readers. Just a reminder.

A Marine Corps Intelligence Analyst may have been forced out of the service because he has “liberal views.”

I know the military gets to play by its own rules, but this seems absurd. Well, only sort of, now that I think about it; this is also the military that discharged six Arabic linguists last year because, you know, they’re gay, and never mind that whole “we have a shortage of Arabic expertise” thing.

Rumsfeld is having a little trouble with the press; it seems he’s been denying statements he made in the months leading up to the war in re: the Iraqis welcoming us as liberators and Saddam’s supposed WMDs.

Um, Rummy? These guys take notes for a living, and some of them have those newfangled video cameras. Just a hint.