Newsweek [Thanks, Atrios]

Daily Kos has this roundup of the reviews of Bush's speech, and calls them "decidedly negative."

Update: Pakistan now reports Osama's sons were not arrested. They may have been wounded.

Update: MSNBC has this. And this great "Where's Waldo" type interactive graphic that you can follow the leads on.

CNN: BREAKING NEWS Sons of Osama bin Laden arrested in southeastern Afghanistan, Pakistani official says, according to The Associated Press. Details to come.

Feel free to use the comments for updates--

Georgetown Law Professor Jonathan Turley writes about reports that Bagram Air Force Base in Afganistan is being used as an American torture facility ,

Even more disturbing is emerging evidence that the United States may be operating something that would have seemed unimaginable only two years ago: an American torture facility.

Credible reports now indicate that the government, with the approval of high-ranking officials, is engaging in systematic techniques considered by many to be torture.

For months, international human rights groups have been protesting activities at the Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. In a closed-off part of the base, the CIA has constructed an "interrogation center" out of metal shipping containers. Last year, reports began to surface that the CIA was getting information the old-fashioned way -- by breaking suspects physically, except when they inconveniently die.

[link via Political Parrhesia]

Remember Colleen Rowley, the Minneapolis FBI agent who turned out to be a whistleblower and testified before a Senate Subcommittee in June, 2002? The Minneapolis Star Tribune yesterday published her Feb. 26 letter to FBI director Robert Mueller. Here's some of what she has to say:

In June, 2002, on the eve of my testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, you told me that you appreciate constructive criticism and that FBI agents should feel free to voice serious concerns they may have about senior-level FBI actions. Since then I have availed myself twice of your stated openness. At this critical point in our country’s history I have decided to try once again, on an issue of even more consequence for the internal security posture of our country. That posture has been weakened by the diversion of attention from al-Qaeda to our government’s plan to invade Iraq, a step that will, in all likelihood, bring an exponential increase in the terrorist threat to the U.S., both at home and abroad.....

Officials say files and documents on computers and cd-roms seized from Khalid Shaikh Mohammed show that he met with Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan last month.

"There is now no doubt that he is alive and well," a senior Pakistani government official said of bin Laden in an interview. "We have documents that show he is alive and in this region."

.... a second Pakistani official said Mohammed had told his captors during the raid of meeting with bin Laden a month ago at a site that Mohammed refused to specify.

"Praise be to Allah, our sheikh is alive," the official quoted Mohammed as saying. "I met him only one month ago."

.... Material seized in the raid has been shipped in boxes to Washington, where investigators are poring over it. Experts consulting in the case include translators, computer specialists, fingerprint examiners and other scientific analysts.

As to who turned Mohammed into authorites, Pakistani officials had this to say:

A significant detail emerged on Wednesday about events leading to the Rawalpindi raid. The senior Pakistani official suggested that Mohammed was betrayed by someone inside al-Qaida. He also noted the American government's offer of $25 million for information leading to his capture. "I'm not going to tell you how we captured him," the official said, "but Khalid knows who did him in."

Jack Balkin at Balkinization reports on Bush's "Pay-As-You-Go War":

The Bush Administration has been refusing to answer questions about how much the war with Iraq will cost. Outside studies have placed the cost as ranging from anywhere from $50 billion ( cheap, quick victory, short, easy, reconstruction) to more than a trillion dollars (tough, difficult victory, long, difficult reconstruction)....

The White House argues that it shouldn’t have to provide any estimates because the timing and length or war, and the duration and nature of post-war peacekeeping and reconstruction, are currently unknown. Therefore, the President should be allowed to go ahead with the war and Congress will get the bill later, and, of course, it is expected to pay that bill in full....

Our Constitution isn’t perfect, but separation of powers is one of the most important features Americans have for checking potential abuses of authority. Congress should not allow the President to do an end run around our constitutional system by stonewalling on crucial questions of war and peace.

Someone recently old us that in Bush's giant deficit budget, not one penny is earmarked or included for the War in Iraq. Is that true? Where is the money going to come from? We may not be financial whiz kids, but even we know it doesn't grow on trees.

We talked to some Turkish friends today and they say this is right:

[Turkish Parliament member] Ozal and other senior party members urged patience, arguing that the Turkish government could seek another vote in parliament well before U.S. ships now in Turkish waters could reach Kuwait.....

Special elections scheduled for Sunday could also help the measure. [Turkey's Justice and Development Party leader, Recep Tayyip] Erdogan is seeking a vacant parliament seat in that vote, and if he wins, political analysts predict that Prime Minister Abdullah Gul, an ally of Erdogan's, will step aside and let him form a new government. Erdogan was banned from running in the November elections that put his party in power because of a 1998 conviction for reciting a poem with Islamic overtones at a rally. Parliament has since lifted that ban.

If Erdogan becomes prime minister, he could purge the cabinet of several ministers who have opposed the U.S. deployment, an important step because the cabinet's unanimous approval is required to submit a proposal to parliament.

...."The government is not going to let this go down," said Nevzat Yacintas, a Justice and Development Party legislator. "They will do something, I am sure, because the friendship of the United States is very important to us."

According to our friends, Erdogan is a sure bet. They say Abdullah Gul has just been standing in for Erdogan during his "time out" which ends Sunday. One caveat: Our Turkish friends don't speak much English, and we don't speak Turkish. Their six year old bi-lingual child did most of the translating. What we understood from him is that Erdogan was the leader, he said something bad, and got put in "time out", and his friend took over, but his "time out" is up this weekend and he will come back and America will get the support from Turkey it wants. We weren't sure we understood any of it, until we read the Washington Post article quoted above, and then it kind of fell into place. We think. Anyway, it's probably as good a basic "International Relations 101" course as we're likely to get.

Here are the results of the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll on war with Iraq. The poll was conducted from Feb. 26 - March 2, 2003.

Two of TalkLeft's pals just returned from a two week stay in Spain and Paris. We had dinner with them last night, and they were exceptionally bridled by our media's portrayal of the French as being Anti-American. Absolutely not true, they said. The French are Anti-Bush, not Anti-American. Here's backup for their position from Elmar Thevessen, executive news director for the German television network ZDF, who was interviewed last night by MSNBC's Brian Williams

Williams: A recent poll in France shows seven out of 10 people there want their country to use its veto power to block a second U.N. resolution that would authorize war with Iraq. In Russia, an overwhelming percentage, 87 percent, oppose military action against Iraq.

And, in Germany, one poll conducted late last month found that more than half of Germans think the U.S. actually poses the greatest threat to world peace, greater than the threat posed by either Iraq or North Korea.

For more on the reaction there, we are joined tonight from Mainz by Elmar Thevessen, executive news director for the German television network ZDF, at least as it's known here. Elmar, thank you very much for being with us.

And I'm curious how bad and what are the manifestations of the negative anti -- the anti-American sentiment these days.

ELMAR THEVESSEN, ZDF GERMAN TELEVISION: The German public basically thinks that the U.S. government has done a very bad job in explaining why it tries to go about this war effort in Iraq. It's a question of bad public relations and bad communications. The U.S. government -- it seems to change the goals of why it is going against Iraq all the time.

First, it was about a regime change. Then, it was about terrorism with connections to al Qaeda that weren't there, at least from the view of European intelligence services. Then, about disarmament. And we see some progress in disarmament right now. And now, all of a sudden, it's back to regime change.

WILLIAMS: Now one way it might manifest itself -- as a visiting American, let's say, how would I feel anti-American sentiment these days, not only just in Germany, but in Europe?

THEVESSEN: I think you would encounter a lot of discussions, when you talk to Germans or to French people, that people in those countries are very much opposed to the war effort, but I think they make the distinction between the American people and the Bush administration, the government. (emphasis supplied)

Our friends asked us to put out the word that the French were extraordinarily courteous and friendly to them, and went out of their way to assure them that they have no bad feelings for the American people. They like Americans. It really is Bush (and Rumsfeld) they don't like, not us, and this was repeatedly expressed to them. Our friends say the media coverage of war and Iraq is far superior and more balanced in Europe and no one should cancel a planned trip France because they fear hostile treatment by the French.

We like Ted Barlow's comments yesterday on the Administrations's co-mingling of Osama with Saddam:

Is there anyone out there still unclear about the fact that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden are two different people? And that a war on Iraq isn't going to get bin Laden? Cause he's not there? And they're not allies?

Is there anyone who thinks that it's anti-war partisans, and not pro-war partisans, who are saying "forget about bin Laden"? Cause what I see is a lot of anti-war people saying, "what about bin Laden?", while the White House ignores the question.

Is there anyone except den Beste who thinks that the emotional trauma of September 11th justifies an attack-any attack? I want to attack Zimbabwe and get rid of Mugabe. Who's with me? What- don't you remember the horror of September 11th, you unfeeling bastards? Don't you remember the courage of those firemen rushing up the stairs when everyone else was rushing down? Don't tell me to "get over it"! On to Harare!...

Media Horse debunks Ari Fleisher's assertion that capturing Mohammed is more significant than capturing Osama.

More on the the long, incompetent arm of the law --about the FBI foul-up that caused a vacationing 72 year old Englishman to spend 20 days in a South African prison.

The horror story that unfolded for Bond over the next month is a cautionary tale as the Bush administration presses Congress to expand authorization for secretive arrests, unlimited detention and a curtailment of judicial review. And Bond's case didn't even involve terrorism, just what was apparently a stolen identity and incredible inattention by U.S. government officials, including some in Houston. The response of the FBI and the U.S. attorney's office so far has been acknowledgment that they screwed up and the cheeky suggestion that Bond's cooperation contributed to his predicament.

We don't want to see this get buried. Here's our post from yesterday on it: How do you prove your innocence?