Pennsylvania: Bush

Not sure what to make of this week's column by Jack Kelly.

It's a confusing mush as he seems to be advocating a "strategy" that doesn't have the support of the general he describes as nothing less than "no greater expert in the U.S. military on this strategy".

But first, some fact-checking.

As always, Jack just can't help himself. In a gratuitous slap more or less completely beside his point, he spins on Health Care in a column on Afghanistan. Take a look:
If President Barack Obama supports the recommendations of Stanley McChrystal, the general he picked to run the war in Afghanistan, he'll have done a very brave thing.

The AP is reporting:
A new scientific paper asserts that the CIA's harsh interrogation program likely damaged the brain and memory functions of terrorist suspects, diminishing their ability to provide the detailed information the spy agency sought.

The paper, published Monday in the scientific journal "Trends in Cognitive Science: Science and Society," says the harsh techniques used by the CIA under the Bush administration were biologically counterproductive to eliciting quality information.

The report says extreme stress, the kind caused by the extended use of waterboarding — a form of simulated drowning used on three CIA prisoners — can also cause suspects to make up and believe false memories, a phenomena known as confabulation.

In this week's column (a column my friend Ed Heath calls "silly") Jack Kelly both attacks and defends the CIA.

And en passant he spins torture into a clumsy euphemism. Take a look:
Attorney General Eric Holder -- who before his confirmation hearings told senators he wouldn't -- has appointed a special prosecutor to pursue CIA interrogators who discomforted al-Qaida bigwigs to get them to talk.
Discomforted? Is that even a word? First off, let's rid ourselves of the clumsy. It was torture. Take a look at this is from January of this year:
The top Bush administration official in charge of deciding whether to bring Guantanamo Bay detainees to trial has concluded that the U.

Who is Steven L Anderson? In order to answer that question, we have to start with Christopher Broughton.

So who's Christopher Broughton? From the Arizona Republic:
The man who drew international attention by bringing an assault rifle to President Barack Obama's rally on Monday is a Phoenix resident with ties to several anti-government or Nativist groups.

The man, who until now has been identified only as "Chris B," is actually 28-year-old Christopher Broughton, a former employee of a Tempe plastic-mold manufacturer.
Oh, that guy.

Talkingpointsmemo picks up the story:
Chris Broughton, the man who brought an assault rifle and a handgun to the Obama event in Arizona last week, attended a fiery anti-Obama sermon the day before the event, in which Pastor Steven Anderson said he was going to "pray for Barack Obama to die and go to hell", Anderson confirmed to TPMmuckraker today.