National Affairs Daily : Rolling Stone

National Affairs Daily by Tim Dickinson

Apr 20, 2006 6:05 PM

Gitmo's Guest List

The Pentagon has finally released the names of 558 Gitmo prisoners who've passed through the kangaroo court known as the Combatant Status Review Tribunal. The first official list provided since Gitmo began holding prisoners four years ago was only wrenched free by a FOIA request filed by the Associated Press.

I wonder if President Bush and China's President Hu will be discussing the fate of the prison's nearly twenty Chinese nationals.

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Apr 20, 2006 6:02 PM

In the Mind of the Decider

"Someone very close to the President said to me, you know, he won't fire Rumsfeld because it would be the equivalent of firing himself. He can't acknowledge that it was such a big mistake, in so many ways. And so Rumsfeld will stay. And that's the decision that the President has made. " -- Tim Russert, dishing on a conversation with a Bush confidante

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Apr 20, 2006 5:56 PM

War Costs Explode

From today's WaPo:

The U.S. government is now spending nearly $10 billion a month in Iraq and Afghanistan, up from $8.2 billion a year ago, a new Congressional Research Service report found . . .

Annual war costs in Iraq are easily outpacing the $61 billion a year that the United States spent in Vietnam between 1964 and 1972, in today's dollars . . .

The cost of repairing and replacing equipment and developing new war-fighting materiel has exploded. In the first year of the invasion, such costs totaled $2.4 billion, then rose to $5.2 billion in 2004. This year, they will hit $26 billion, and could go as high as $30 billion.

I now understand what Jack Murtha meant when he said in our interview last winter: "I told all the [defense contractor] CEOs this -- I said fellas let me just tell you how it's going to work. You're not going to have money for new equipment. There's only like five ships in the budget this year. You're going to have to rehabilitate equipment. That's the business you better get in."

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Apr 20, 2006 5:54 PM

Rove's Replacement, Republican Rioter

As Michael Crowley at TNR smartly reminds us Joel Kaplan -- the man assuming many of Karl Rove's policy duties -- was a member of the GOP melee that shut down the vote count in Miami-Dade county during Indecision 2000.

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Apr 20, 2006 5:51 PM