World

Dick Cheney in an interview with ABC News: CHENEY: On the question of so-called torture, we don’t do torture. We never have. It’s not something that this administration subscribes to. Again, we proceeded very cautiously. We checked. We had the Justice Department issue the requisite opinions in order to know where the bright lines were that you could not cross. The professionals involved in that program were very, very cautious, very careful — wouldn’t do anything without making certain it was authorized and that it was legal. And any suggestion to the contrary is just wrong. Did it produce the desired results? I think it did. I think, for example,

I think I’ve mentioned before that President George W Bush was said to find the British press corps lack of respect for his office somewhat grating. Unlike our American counterparts, British journalists declined to stand to attention when Mr Bush strode into the East Room or sauntered out into the Rose Garden for yet another press conference with ACL Blair. If the President was not disgruntled by this discourtesy he was certainly, as they say, far from gruntled. The contrast between this and his cheery “For the record, it was a size 10” rejoinder to this week’s shoe-throwing incident in Baghdad is striking. Just goes to show you that the

Monday Mr Maude ecstatic about the polls. Says it’s the most significant narrowing he has seen in all his years of being miserable about the possibility of the Tories ever winning again. ‘Only four points ahead! We’re doomed! DOOMED I tell you!’ All the way to the Panic Room he was shouting: ‘Consigned to the scrap heap! Banished to the electoral wilderness! We’ve brought this on ourselves with all the evil talk of spending cuts!’ Of course this is complete nonsense. We only talked about spending cuts for ten minutes two weeks ago. It was barely briefed before we took it straight back, rubbished it and claimed we had never

Increasingly the media reports Afghanistan as a disaster story. Casualty lists from Helmand and other provinces sit side by side with accounts of millions of pounds’ worth of aid wasted and booming opium crops. No wonder then that politicians and journalists have begun to debate the wisdom of remaining committed to Afghanistan. In turn, the Afghan population has begun to doubt the commitment of its international partners. But the accepted story is never the whole story, and that is especially true of Afghanistan. The real truth about the country is that despite the many missteps, there is good cause for hope, and reason to believe that the country can pull

Hilarious stuff from Wall Street: Merrill Lynch & Co. chief John Thain has suggested to directors that he get a 2008 bonus of as much as $10 million, but the battered securities firm’s compensation committee is resisting his request, according to people familiar with the situation. As Patrick Appel observes Merrill lost $11 billion and its independence this year. And here’s a fun snippet from Michael Lewis’s terrific Portfolio piece on the sub-prime fiasco: Not long after that, FrontPoint had a visit from Sanford C. Bernstein’s Brad Hintz, a prominent analyst who covered Wall Street firms. Hintz wanted to know what Eisman was up to. “We just shorted Merrill Lynch,”

It started with Friday cat-blogging. Then there was a dog-blogging splinter group. I predict, however, that chicken-blogging will be the sensation of 2009. Here’s one of the cockerels, the one I call Lescarboura, surveying his manor…(Oddly, all cockerels here are named after French* rugby players. We’ve had Serge Blanco and Michalak and Yachvili before…) *UPDATE: Or Italian. See comments. UPDATE 2: As noted in the comments, George Orwell was a proto-chicken blogger too.

The President of the United States often really seems to be a kind of elected Priest-Monarch. One area in which this is obviously apparent, is his ability to reward cronies and fundraisers with agreeable Ambassadorships overseas. Matt Yglesias, who is too wise to buy the wisdom himself, offers the official justificatory fig-leaf for this patronage: I had always just thought of this is a kind of casual, widely accepted corruption. But recently I did learn the official story as to why this is good practice, namely that an important political supporter or a friend of the president is likely to have a much easier time of getting access to the

Bruce Schneier suspects we’ll probably learn the wrong ones. After all, as he points out, there’s very little you can do to stop 18 men with guns and grenades once they’ve begun their attack. I suspect John Robb would agree. Well-planned low-tech attacks that “leverage” a city’s own infrastructure are one of the nightmare scenarios. Yet since this kind of mission is more likely than not to end in the deaths of the terrorists themselves (cf the Chechen attack on a Moscow theatre) it remains, happily, an unpopular career choice. And for that one should be truly thankful. Imagine how easy it would be to cripple the railways, or, armed

Little to no blogging over the next few days, I’m afriad. I’m in East Lothian tonight, speaking at a St Andrews dinner, thence to Hawick to bid farewell to a cousin who is emigrating to Melbourne (an order for Boxing Day Ashes tickets has already, fear not, been placed) and then have a deadline to meet on Sunday. So, talk amongst yourselves peeps: now that counter-terrosim police have taken to arresting opposition politicians for the crime of embarrassing the government, is this government the worst we’ve endured in more than 50 years or merely one of the worst? Meanwhile, American readers are invited to speculate upon arguments in favour of,

There’s something splendid about this. Brent Whelan, an American in Paris, runs, as you do, into yet another demonstration. There was the… sound truck and chants, flags and banderoles, a regular labor action. But I missed the front of the cortège where the leafleters and signs were, so I couldn’t tell what it was about. So I asked a guy on the corner, who told me, “It’s the archaeologists.”  And that’s just who it was: several hundred archaeologists marching down the street, shouting and chanting, demanding that the government withdraw plans to disperse the headquarters of its national archaeological service from Paris. Only, I think, in Paris. And long may this

Sure, last month Barack Obama was an un-American, terrorist-coddling, muslim threat to every American Ideal every true-blooded, stout-hearted, tub-thumping patriot held dear. Now, however, things are a little different. We can seem more clearly these days, now the nonsense has receded. Ross Douthat offers a prediction: Among right-wing hawks, there will be strange-new-respectful talk about Obama’s centrist instincts, his Scoop Jackson-ish tendencies, his Reaganesque blend of idealism, pragmatism and strength. Meanwhile, the rest of the right-wing coalition will be getting steamrolled. Quite so. Viewed from outside the United States, the foreign policy “debate” in Washington is a curiously curtailed affair. It concentrates on means, not ends and this rather tends

Time to return to TP O’Connor’s Sketches in the House, his account of the 1893 parliamentary session. Back then, happily, the government could not yet guillotine a bill and so obstructionism – or filibustering – was a legitimate, if infuriating, parliamentary tactic. Much to Mr O’Connor’s irritation… Again I repeat, obstruction is a matter not of intellect, but temperament. Intellectually, I should put Jimmy in a very low place, even in the ranks of the stupid party. Temperamentally he stands very high. A brief description of his methods of obstruction will bring this home. First, it should be said that he is entirely inarticulate and, beyond rough common sense, destitute