Connect the Enron Dots to Bush: “Enron is Whitewater in spades. This isn’t just some rinky-dink land investment like the one dredged up by right-wing enemies to haunt the Clinton White House–but rather it has the makings of the greatest presidential scandal since the Teapot Dome.” The Nation [thanks, David]

• Looking beyond Yasir Arafat: “…Arafat is a spent figure whose usefulness is rapidly dwindling, but he may still be able to help make a transition to a new generation of moderate Palestinian leaders.” NY Times editorial
• William Pfaff: Silly Question: Support the Palestinian Authority or Hamas? International Herald Tribune op-ed
• Michael Lerner: Unholy alliance — how Sharon and Hamas work in concert against peace Salon

On a BBC chatboard, the majority of both US and foreign contributors are skeptical about the authenticity of the bin Laden tape.

Free speech advocates are worried that a recent federal appeals decision could have a chilling effect on online journalists who use hyperlinks to direct readers to relevant, newsworthy sites that contain illegal material.

Even more troubling, the critics say, may be an emerging double standard in the way courts treat traditional print publishers and their online offshoots, especially when it concerns printing a controversial address in a newspaper vs. linking to it from a Web page.

The recent, high-level judicial guidance on the law of linking came about in a relatively overlooked part of a widely-reported decision two weeks ago in the so-called “DeCSS” case. NY Times

Bush Invokes Executive Privilege: ‘President Bush invoked executive privilege for the first time Thursday to keep Congress from seeing documents of prosecutors’ decision-making in cases ranging from a decades-old Boston murder to the Clinton-era fund-raising probe.

“I believe congressional access to these documents would be contrary to the national interest,” Bush wrote in a memo ordering Attorney General John Ashcroft to withhold the documents from a House investigative committee that subpoenaed them.

The decision institutes a dramatic change in the way the administration intends to deal with Congress after years in which the Justice Department, sometimes reluctantly, shared sensitive investigative documents with lawmakers.

Republicans and Democrats alike excoriated the decision, suggesting Bush was creating a “monarchy” or “imperial” presidency to keep Congress for overseeing the executive branch and guarding against corruption.

The Republican House committee chairman who sought the documents raised the possibility of taking Bush to court for contempt of Congress.’ Associated Press

Morons.org – Who Said It?

Attorney General John Ashcroft has been sounding a lot like former Senator Joseph McCarthy, infamous for starting the “Red Scare” of the 1950’s, finding communists at every turn, especially in people who disagreed with his witch hunt.

Test your knowledge of history and the present. See if you can tell Ashcroft from McCarthy in our “who said it” test. To make it more difficult we’ve replaced words like “communist” and “terrorist” with “___”.

And The Progressive has a New McCarthyism Watch. Read what happened to a nonviolence activist who went to a post office in Chicago and asked for 4,000 stamps for a political mailing they were putting out — but didn’t want stamps with the American flag on them! And, to make matters worse, he wanted to pay cash!

How We Lost Afghanistan

Now a Third Afghan War is wrapping up its final act around Kandahar, and a laughable band of charlatans has lobbied in Bonn, Germany, for the right to rule the unruly. Somehow, if the Bushalopes and the Annanites are to be believed, a New Democratic Afghanistan will be cobbled together from the Hekmatyars and Dostums and Rabbanis, all united under the banner of an 87-year-old king who owes more to Fellini than to Shah Mohammed. And get this: After the Afghan parliament gets together, the burkas will come off, the Fairway will open up next to the main gate of the Kabul bazaar, and that Internet-famous Unocal pipeline project, dormant for far too long, will begin sucking Kazakh crude out from under the Caspian and into the Pakistani port of Karachi. Next mission: bombing Iraq into capitalism.

The networks aired maps turning from Taliban red to Northern Alliance blue, but here on the ground, as people who prefer to remain anywhere-but like to say, no such thing occurred. Dasht-e Qaleh and Taloqan and Kunduz all “fell,” but 99 percent of the conquerors were Taliban troops who shed their beards and turbans and picked up Shah Masood’s hip hat for a buck. There were, before September 11, a mere 6000 to 20,000 Northern Alliance soldiers holding the eastern portion of Takhar province and the extremely mountainous Badakhshan and Wakhan corridor, an inland peninsula created as a buffer zone between imperial Russia and British India during the 19th century.

When your taxpayer-funded $75,000 bombs began pounding frontline Taliban positions and the not-so-occasional farming village, the age-old Afghan tradition of ideological flexibility and self-preservation led thousands of Taliban to cross the lines to “defect.” “I am so sorry,” a Taliban commander cried in the welcoming arms of his Northern Alliance counterpart a day before Kunduz “fell.” “We are brothers and should not have fought.”

Finally, a rare truth in a land of lies—both men had fought together in the Taliban and before that against the Soviets. The vast majority of “Northern Alliance” fighters now were Taliban a few weeks ago; welcome to the first fashion war of the new millennium. Village Voice