Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


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Monday, April 25, 2011

Gitmo Wikileaks Reveal Fear and Paranoia

By Steve Hynd


By now you've all heard about and probably read some of the new Wikileaks data dump - the release of files from Gitmo is being covered by the Washington Post, the Guardian, the NY Times (which says it got the papers from someone else) and just about every other major news outlet.


The picture emerging from the leaked documents is partly of an intelligence community gone bad, cobbling together cases built on hearsay and torture to be heeard by kangaroo courts to please their political masters. But we knew that already, if not in such sordid detail. The files might make good evidence at war crimes and torture trials one day but its not as if they're a shocking revelation of what has been done under the guide of state secrecy and national security at Gitmo.


No, the most compelling new part of the picture is just how paranoid, how pants-poopingly afraid of Al Qaeda's shadow, the Bush administration and its instruments were in the years after 9/11. How else to explain the imprisonment of Al Jazeera cameraman Sami al-Hajj for six years, so that interrogators could pump him for information on the news network's operations? Or the sheer wingnuttery of including the BBC in a list of possible terrorist propaganda networks.


Richard A. Clarke, the national coordinator for security and counterterrorism on 9/11, has previously described the "trauma" and "shock" that event inflicted on the likes of Condolizza Rice and Dick Cheney and we know that conservatives, for all their blustering tough-talk, are more easily frightened than liberals. In the Gitmo papers, we see the results of that fear and traumatic shock.


Update: Over at FDL, Jeff Kaye has comment from former detainee David Hicks on the lies and distortions in his own Gitmo file. Marcy Wheeler also has more on the "high risk" labelling of innocent detainees and ProPublica's Dafna Linzer examines one of the Obama administration's worst enablings of their predecessors crimes, censoring a Judge's decision on a habeas corpus compliant by a detainee.



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