Northman's Fury

The Bush administration likes to go on about how they keep finding Iranian weapons in Iraq, and how this proves malicious intent on the part of the Iranians. Of course, if the fact that military equipment from a certain country finds its way to the Iraqi insurgents is proof of intent, the US has a problem:

Thefts and illegal exports of advanced military night-vision gear are rising sharply, and U.S. officials say some of the devices have reached enemies in Afghanistan and Iraq, where they could erode the edge U.S. troops have in after-dark combat.

The government has prosecuted more than two dozen businesses and individuals over the past 18 months for stealing night-vision gear or skirting prohibitions on foreign sales, according to a USA TODAY review of federal documents and public records.

In at least five cases, prosecutors linked shipments to terrorist groups, such as al-Qaeda and Hezbollah. A few others were headed to Iran and Taliban forces in Afghanistan, court records show; several were destined for China and Japan.

. . .

"If you look at cases where groups like the Taliban are trying to get this stuff, that's how they want to use it, for night operations to kill our troops," Pelak says.

Lower-grade night-vision devices are sold commercially, but military versions are far more sensitive and can include features that identify U.S. troops by infrared tabs on their uniforms. Sales and exports of that equipment are restricted by law.

As Cernig has noted repeatedly, weapons travel, and there is a large and lucrative black market in all sorts of military technology. Something to keep in mind the next time the warfloggers cite the finding of Iranian weapons as proof of their meddling.

Up until an hour or so ago, the biggest news of the day was Hillary's blow-out win in West Virginia, which makes Edwards' endorsement of Obama quite a timely one. Edwards is one of the last truly big names in the Democratic party with a large support base to endorse, and this now becomes the dominant story for the news cycle, which blunts the West Virginia results.

As to Hillary herself, kudos for this:

Hillary Clinton on Wednesday reiterated her vow to stay in the Democratic presidential race, but she said it would be a "terrible mistake" for her supporters to vote for John McCain over Barack Obama.

"Anybody who has ever voted for me or voted for Barack has much more in common in terms of what we want to see happen in our country and in the world with the other than they do with John McCain," Clinton said on CNN's "The Situation Room."

"I'm going to work my heart out for whoever our nominee is. Obviously, I'm still hoping to be that nominee, but I'm going to do everything I can to make sure that anyone who supported me ... understands what a grave error it would be not to vote for Sen. Obama."

Reading the comments here, or pretty much anything here, (this post as example), Hillary's going to have to say that over and over again so that it sinks in.

All and all, a good day for Obama, with the exception that he deserves a good slap upside the head for this dumb-ass comment. Seriously, outside of Michelle, never use the term "sweetie" to refer to any grown woman, ever.

Ouch!

FB: Now, back when your husband was president he cut nine million poor women and children off welfare. But now you're the candidate of women and poor people and poor workin women. So did you approve of what your husband did at the time, and if not are you going to reverse it as president and give all those poor people their money back?

CLINTON: Ha haaa! That's an excellent question, Fafnir, and the only way to answer it is with a hearty chuckle followed by a complete non sequitur!

FB: Ha ha, that is so true!

CLINTON: You know, I wish I could make all those women's lives better, I really do. But in a way, wouldn't it help all of them even more if we could just make one woman's life a whole lot better, and then say it sort of counts towards all those other women who aren't getting anything? And wouldn't it be even better-er if that one woman was me?

FB: You know, you just can't argue with that math! Now are you running for president of Iraq, too? Because then your vote for the war totally makes sense!

CLINTON: I didn't vote for the war, Fafnir. I voted to give the president the authority to go to war. What was he going to use that authority for? Maybe he'd just frame it and hang it in his office. Maybe he'd use it to prop up one of the legs on his desk. Maybe he'd use it to sing songs and dance jigs and lift weary spirits down at the old folks home! I honestly couldn't say!

FB: If only you knew at the time that that devious George Bush would use a war authorization to authorize a war!

CLINTON: You know, I guess I'm just too giving. Maybe I just love my country too much to deny it the universal health care and endless wars it so desperately needs. Maybe some theoretical secret black Muslim who hates America wouldn't have that problem.

FB: Maybe it didn't have to be an actual war, though. Maybe you coulda just met the president halfway by settin a big pile a money on fire an shootin a buncha random people.

CLINTON: You know, Fafnir, we could stand around and argue over who raped and slaughtered whose country all day long, but where's that gonna get us? What America needs now is a president who's ready on day one to rape and slaughter competently for the American people in the next war, and I've got the sixty-five years of experience to do it.

FB: Ooh, ooh! Where's the next war gonna be, Hillary Clinton? Is it gonna be Iran? I bet it's gonna be Iran!

CLINTON: Ha haaaa! Oh, you won't get spoilers out of me that easily!

A couple of stories today got me thinking about when it would actually be the ethical choice to intervene by force for humanitarian reasons. The idea has most recently gained attention again due to the situation in Burma, but the story that got me thinking is a forced intervention of a far smaller scale.

A young boy suffering from a return of cancer that was once beaten into remission by chemotherapy. When it returned, he and his family refused treatment, but the courts intervened and are forcing him to take the treatments.

"If a doctor says [therapy] is in your best interest and you say you don't want it, within our laws, ethically and legally, that's fully acceptable," said Kerry Bowman of the University of Toronto's Joint Centre for Bioethics.

"And in this case that's kind of turned upside down. Best interests have taken over as opposed to what the family believes, and I think there's a lot of ethical tension here, and I think it's pretty worrisome."

As a child, his views are basically being dismissed as uninformed, and there is more than a little precedent for overruling a families choice in such matters. Having said that, intervening in the “best interests” of the children can be a slippery slope, either here or in a case like that of the polygamous compound raided in Texas last month. When do you overrule the parent’s right to raise their own children? And who do you empower to do so? The same rationale was used to justify things like residential schooling for aboriginals, which hardly worked out as beneficial.

The above chemo case seems simple, but what if the only result of the chemo is to make the kid’s last few months an even more painful ordeal than it would have been otherwise?

The reason I find that story important for a decision on a forced intervention in someplace like Burma, (or Darfur, or Somalia, or Zimbabwe, or New Orleans), is because the rationale and purpose are much the same, to do what’s best for those who can’t help themselves, and where those who are nominally responsible for them are refusing to do what is required.

It seems simple, and we so like simple narratives. I tend to oppose such interventions because the situation is never as simple as it is usually portrayed, and because of those we're forced to trust with the responsibility should an intervention go forward. I trust the child's doctors above understand his medical condition as well as it can be understood. I have significantly less trust in world leaders' understanding of Burma.

The military junta in Burma is evil, and therefore we're likely to say that those who oppose it must be on the side of good. For an idea of why that’s a really bad way of looking at things, remember that bin Laden and his buddies in the Taliban were “freedom fighters” per Reagan back when the US was funding them to fight the “Evil Empire”. The fact that some nasty pieces of work are lording it over their opponents unfortunately doesn’t mean their opponents are on the side of angels. More often they’re almost interchangeable, and occasionally, the reason the current nasties are in charge is because the folks they’re fighting were even worse and lost the population's support.

The situation in Burma is anything but simple, something that Eric Margolis was kind enough to explain last October when the junta was crushing the massive demonstrations occurring at the time.

But extreme caution is advised in dealing with Myanmar. If things go wrong there, it could turn into an Southeast Asian version of Iraq, Yugoslavia or Afghanistan.

Myanmar’s central government has been at war for 50 years with 17 ethnic rebel groups seeking secession from the former 14-state Union of Burma created by Imperial Britain, godfather of many of the world’s worst current problems.

Burmans, of Tibetan ethnic origin, form 68% of the population of 57 million. But there are other important, distinct ethnic groups: Shan, the largely Christian Karen, Kachin, Chin, Mon, Wa, and Rakhine, Anglo-Burmese, Indians and Chinese. The largest, Shan, with their Shan State Army, are ethnically close to neighboring Thailand, and in cahoots with the Thai military. Each major ethnic group has its own army and finances itself through smuggling timber, jewels, arms, and drugs.

The military juntas in Rangoon, and its 500,000-man armed forces, know as `Tatmadaw,’ battled these secessionists for decades until the current junta managed to establish uneasy ceasefires with all the major rebel groups.

If the junta were to be replaced by a democratic civilian government led by the gentle Suu Kyi, and military repression ended, it is highly likely Myanmar’s ethnic rebellions would quickly re-ignite. The only force holding Myanmar together is the military and secret police.

Shan, Karen, Kachin, and Mon still demand their own independent nations. Burma’s powerful neighbors – India, China and Thailand – have their eye on this potentially resource-rich nation. They, and neighboring Bangladesh, also fear Burma’s troubles will spill across their borders, as occurred in 2002 when the military junta expelled thousands of Muslims to Bangladesh from the Arakan region.

Now who would you trust to intervene forcefully into that situation?

The decisions are tough ones, as they should be. It's very hard to see people suffer and die when there is way to save them, but how do you ensure that your intervention doesn't end up causing more harm than the situation you intervened to stop would have caused on it's own?

Relatively busy these days, but I thought I'd pass on news of a newly discovered element:

Research has led to the discovery of the heaviest element yet known to science. The new element, Governmentium (Gv), has one neutron, 25 assistant neutrons, 88 deputy neutrons, and 198 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 312.

These 312 particles are held together by forces called morons, which are surrounded by vast quantities of lepton-like particles called peons. Since Governmentium has no electrons, it is inert; however, it can be detected, because it impedes every reaction with which it comes into contact. A tiny amount of Governmentium can cause a reaction normally taking less than a second, to take from four days to four years to complete.

Governmentium has a normal half-life of 2-6 years. It does not decay, but undergoes a reorganization in which a portion of the assistant neutrons and deputy neutrons exchange places. In fact, Governmentium's mass will actually increase over time, since each reorganization will cause more morons to become neutrons, forming isodopes, not to mention multiple oxymorons.

This characteristic of moron promotion leads some scientists to believe that Governmentium is formed whenever morons reach a critical concentration. That hypothetical quantity might normally be called 'critical mass' but, in this unique case it is known as 'critical mess'.

When catalyzed with money, Governmentium becomes Administratium (Am), another just-discovered element that radiates just as much energy as Governmentium since it has half as many peons but twice as many morons.

Joe Gandelman at The Moderate Voice did a round-up on the weekend of the continuing reaction to Clinton’s remarks about her hardworking, white supporters. The word that seemed to come up in several of them was “tragedy”. It is, I think, the most accurate way to describe what has happened.

I once described my reaction to the continuing Clinton campaign as starting out worried about the strong feelings of hatred she inspired in the Republicans, to coming to respect her as a candidate, to understanding why so many of her opponents hated her. Her desire to change the rules mid-stream with regards to Michigan and Florida, her implications that she was going to go after Obama’s pledged delegates, and particularly her repeated assertions of only she and McCain being worthy of the presidency was, and still is, enough to get the anger broiling, and the campaign tactics haven’t exactly improved since.

The anger though, has faded, to be replaced by a sort of pity. Hillary has gone so far over the top in her pandering and “Southern Strategy” that her campaign has turned into a caricature of itself. Given how skilled and talented she actually is, and the respect and support she earned in the early parts of the campaign and throughout her career, to see her piddle that away in an increasingly desperate gamble for votes can only be described as tragic.

She still has the chance to repair the damage, of course, but the longer she stays on the current path, the harder it will be to heal the divisions the campaign has opened up. Here's hoping she finds a way, and soon.

That's gotta hurt!

That has long been the view of many who consider themselves pro-Israeli, but I thought it was important to note that the Bush administration has now made it official US policy.

The Bush administration has taken the ground-breaking step of identifying some virulent criticism of Israel as anti-Semitism, as it warns that anti-Jewish attitudes and incidents are on the rise worldwide.

. . .

“Anti-Semitism has proven to be an adaptive phenomenon,” the report said. “New forms of anti-Semitism have evolved. They often incorporate elements of traditional anti-Semitism. However, the distinguishing feature of the new anti-Semitism is criticism of Zionism or Israeli policy that – whether intentionally or unintentionally – has the effect of promoting prejudice against all Jews by demonizing Israel and Israelis and attributing Israel’s perceived faults to its Jewish character.”

The danger here is that if you broaden the definition of anti-Semitism too far, to the point where even legitimate criticism is tarred with that brush, people will simply start ignoring the charge completely as just a meaningless partisan-style attack. That then allows real anti-Semites the cover they need to spread their hatred. And there are clearly some anti-Semites out there, as we can see in this example from Canada.

Egypt's ambassador says he is concerned that the growing number of Jewish Canadians might cause a shift in this country's Middle East policy.

. . .

He said Jewish communities have had an impact on the foreign policies of such countries as France, and he is concerned Canada might follow.

"The question is, how do you treat the results of this fact? Do you expect from these greater numbers that they will absorb themselves into Canadian society as Canadians or that they'll try to push Canadians to adopt their own values and principles? And this is the gist of the problem," he said in an interview.

. . .

"First of all, there's a Jewish member of Parliament, who's elected to one of the Toronto ridings ..., who has been outspoken in his hostility toward Muslim nations," Mr. Baker said.

"I've got nothing against the fact that Jews are members of the Canadian Parliament. But it worries me that the type of political influence that we're seeing in Britain, in France, might ultimately reach the Canadian political system."

My apologies to Egypt. That was actually Israel's ambassador talking about Muslim Canadians. He's apparently worried that Canada may move back towards it's more even-handed approach of the past. It's not many countries whose ambassadors can get away with insulting a good number of Canadian citizens and elected members of Parliament without offering any proof whatsoever of their attitudes, and in direct contradiction of the facts.

The number of Muslim Canadians more than doubled between 1991 and 2001, to about 579,600, according to Statistics Canada; the proportion of people who identified themselves as Jewish remained relatively static, at about 330,000.

However, Canada's foreign-policy stand has become more pro-Israel since 2004, when Paul Martin's Liberal government began shifting the country's voting pattern at the United Nations.

Mr. Harper's Conservatives moved further toward Israel, and Canada now votes consistently with a group of about a half-dozen countries, including the United States, Australia and Israel itself, that tend to buck the overwhelming majority.

"This was a major shift, in my opinion, in Canadian policy," Mr. Baker said.

"My aim is to ensure that any Canadian government will continue to maintain this position of realizing the true commonality of interests, and not going back to a non-committal attitude," he said.

And I think it's safe to say that Mr. Harper won't be changing course on his Israel policy or jumping to defend the Muslim citizens so recently smeared.

Some of the criticism brewing in Canada against the state of Israel, including from some members of Parliament, is similar to the attitude of Nazi Germany in the Second World War, Prime Minister Stephen Harper warned yesterday.

You know, when Tony Blair was doing his poodle impression for the Bush administration, he at least had enough sense to try and reign in some of their excesses. Harper on the other hand, in his eagerness to please, goes beyond what even the Bushites would probably dare. What an embarrassment.

It's been a little over six month since Robert Dziekanski died after being repeatedly tasered by the RCMP at the Vancouver Airport. The inquiry into his death started on Monday, which appears to be none too soon, as the RCMP seem to have learned very little from the incident.

An elderly man in Kamloops, B.C., was zapped three times on the torso by a police stun gun while lying on his hospital bed, CBC News has learned.

Frank Lasser, 82, appeared fragile Thursday when he showed the Taser marks on his body and talked about the ordeal he went through Saturday.

"They [police] should have known I had bypass surgery," Lasser told CBC News.

Lasser has had heart surgery and needs to carry an apparatus to supply oxygen at all times. He was in the Royal Inland Hospital Saturday due to pneumonia but has since been released.

You read that correctly. You had three RCMP officers, squaring off against an 82-year-old with a small pocket knife, on oxygen, and lying on his back in a hospital bed, and apparently the only reasonable method of subduing him was multiple shots from their taser guns. Who the hell is training these guys?

The safety of tasers is an ongoing debate, but the real issue here isn't really if they are safe to use, but how they are being used. To quote myself:

The fact that tasers are "safe", meaning that they don't normally kill the people you shoot with them, is entirely beside the point. Its their use when they need not be used that's the point. We give these guys guns and authorize them to shoot people when its justified. We'd make quite a bit of noise if the police starting shooting people when it wasn't necessary. We shouldn't be any less angry over excessive use of force in any other instances.

After the release of the video showing what happened to Dziekanski, Boris at The Galloping Beaver posted some thoughts on how policing had changed over the years from his father's day.

My father was a policeman during the 1960s and would often go out on patrol without his service revolver. Never once did he have to draw his weapon or beat someone to make an arrest. Indeed, he once, unarmed and alone, successfully disarmed and arrested a man with a shotgun who’d just blown a hole in his wife’s leg. He did this with a calm voice and discussion.

Somewhere between his day, and now, there seems to have been something lost in the human side of policing.

I wonder if the invention and provision of the Tazer has created the incentive and standard procedural justification – an “immediate action” - to use it, when in the past a politiely worded request, a soothing voice, would’ve sufficed. I wonder if violent arrest technique has become increasingly official procedure, regardless of context, among some police forces.[Emp. mine]

From the recent incident above, or this one, or this one, it seems to be the case that police in North America have moved more towards forceful submission rather than conflict resolution. This is a bad move on the whole.

What the police appear to miss is that not everyone cowers when confronted with power and threats. Some people push back. Even innocent, unarmed ones. Granted, the police should be able to protect themselves, but not at the expense of the public. Ultimately, this harms the police as public trust is eroded, and the public begins to fear the people meant to protect them. Policing then becomes a version of a protection racket.

Ultimately, such tactics undermine law enforcement's legitimacy, which can have dire effects for everyone's security. Unfortunately, I don't see the trend reversing itself anytime soon.

Whatever it's dubious benefits are as a prison camp, Guantanamo Bay is a stain on the America's reputation internationally, and it appears that the stain is also now affecting it's commanders.

When the Pentagon announced in March that Maj. Gen. Jay W. Hood would become the senior American officer based in Pakistan, it reflected the military’s aim to put a crisis-tested veteran in a critical job at a pivotal time in the fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

But nearly two months later, the military has quietly canceled the assignment of General Hood, a 33-year Army veteran who was excoriated in the Pakistani news media for one of his previous jobs: commander of the United States prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

. . .

The decision to withdraw General Hood’s assignment has not been announced, but it appears to reflect the widening shadow that the military prison at Guantánamo is casting over American foreign policy. While the United States considers Pakistan a close ally in its counterterrorism efforts, the accounts by Pakistanis who have returned to Pakistan after being held at Guantánamo Bay have added to anti-American sentiment in the country.

Several leading Pakistani military and foreign affairs commentators denounced General Hood’s selection in recent weeks, calling on their new government to block his appointment. In interviews this week, American military officials said they had reluctantly concluded that General Hood’s effectiveness could be seriously hindered, and that his personal safety might even be at risk if he were to take up the post.

The article states that General Hood is credited with improving overall conditions for the prisoners being held there, but it is clear that the reputation of Guantanamo is past the point where it can be repaired. The only real solution is to shut the prison down. Otherwise you can watch as it continues to drag America's reputation, and the reputation of those who serve her, on an ever downward spiral.

Obama's message to Israel on it's 60th anniversary includes this snippet:

. . . there is no greater gift America can give to Israel--no better way we can salute our Israeli friends on this important anniversary -- than to redouble our commitment to help Israel achieve its goal of true security through lasting peace with its neighbors. The United States does Israel no favors when it neglects opportunities for progress in Arab-Israeli peacemaking.

Israelis can always count on the United States to stand with them against any threat, from as close as Gaza or as far as Tehran, and to ensure that Israel has the means to defend itself. Israel has real enemies, and we will face them together. But standing with Israel also requires America to do everything it can to reduce and ease the conflict with the Arab neighbors. To do any less would be to prevent Israel from achieving its full, extraordinary potential.

Most of the article has a more hawkish tone, but it is nice to see a US presidential candidate who actually realizes that true security for Israel will come through long-term peaceful relations with it's neighbours.

I wonder if this means that unlike the previous two US presidents, Obama won't wait until the last year of his second term to start using real diplomacy on the issue.

In a heated phone call with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi late last month, Hillary Clinton supporter Harvey Weinstein threatened to cut off campaign money to congressional Democrats unless Pelosi embraced a new plan by the movie mogul to finance a revote of the Democratic presidential primaries in Florida and Michigan

Unless I miss my count, that's at least the third time I've heard of Clinton campaign donors threatening the Democratic Party with funding cut-offs if they refused to their bidding.

Nice to know that politics isn't all about money, eh?

I honestly have a hard time trying to figure out the point of this column. Marshall goes on a rant about how the judges need to heed "the message", but unfortunately fails to tell us exactly what that message is, only that the judges are a big part of the problem.

Legal architects deserve some blame. But so does the often unaccountable, plutocratic, and out of touch judiciary.

It is anything but immune from culpability in allowing the escalation of this intolerable state.

Today's judges, a supposed august body of the exceptional, are failing to act in the best interests of the community as they rule in the confines of a de facto lawyer state, rubber stamping fantastic tales of remorse and promise spun by insincere attorneys.

He goes to tell how bad the car thief situation in Winnipeg is, which is true, though he doesn't get around to telling us just why the judges bear such responsibility for any of the incidents in question. He then moves on to mob justice in Tanzania.

The mugging of his colleague and the beating of the perpetrators by locals are apparently somehow the result of a judiciary that refuses to protect its citizens, something Winnipeg is apparently in danger of becoming.

Now, I do think judges are necessary to defend Canadians, but more in the way of ensuring we get to keep our civil rights when law enforcement wants to impose upon them. Protecting us from violent muggers and car thieves falls to the police force. I mean, my sister was mugged in Winnipeg, and fought back, twice. (Don't piss her off when she's drunk, and don't be touching the iPod!)

In any case, she didn't go looking for a judge to deal with the problem. The police nabbed the perps and gave her her stuff back. What happened to them after that didn't really matter to her.

You don't like the laws the judges are applying, go to your elected officials to change them, and if they run into issues because of Constitutional freedoms, see if they can convince the rest of us to change the Constitution. But if you're so worried about lawless vigilantes, then stop bitching about judges following the law.

A few folks over at the Slate law blog have been having an interesting discussion over whether or not the airstrikes carried out by the US in Somalia are legal under international law. One of them asks:

Does Anyone Care Whether the Bombing in Somalia Was Legal?

I’m thinking the obvious answer is, “No, not really”. I mean, I understand why it should be important, but even though I wrote a long post on the overall situation in Somalia after the latest US strike, the question of the strike’s legality never even occurred to me. It has just been so long apparent that the US isn’t terribly respectful of others territorial sovereignty that it’s no longer a question.

And this is not about just the Bush administration, whose penchant for flaunting international law has spread to multiple other areas to a far greater degree, but about pretty much every US administration since WWII when the UN Charter became the law that the US was ignoring. Seriously, name me one administration that didn’t in some way, somewhere, go well beyond what is ordinarily considered international law by arranging coups, training and supplying militants and insurgents, bombing and sending in strike teams, all the way up to outright invasions, of some various number of poor, and occasionally not-so-poor, countries?

And then there are the actions of America's main allies in the country,

A leading human rights group on Tuesday accused Ethiopian troops in Somalia of killing civilians and committing atrocities, including slitting people's throats, gouging out eyes and gang-raping women.

Under the circumstances, worrying about whether or not the odd US bombing run is technically legal or not just doesn't seem that important.

Tory cabinet minister Oda hid thousands of dollars in limo rides

If you want people to take you seriously, you're going to have to stop doing stuff like this.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume Harry Potter wasn't a big seller in that area.

For some reason most of the networks don't want to call Indiana for Clinton yet, but with 84% reporting, I can't see there being enough votes left for Obama to overcome his deficit.

Ultimately, I doubt it matters. Clinton isn't going to quit at this point, regardless what she said about NC on Friday. The numbers that are worrisome are these.

Forget the horse race numbers for a moment: if the surveys are accurate, the polarization within the Democratic Party has reached critical levels. Nearly six in ten Obama supporters in Indiana say they would be dissatisfied if Clinton were the nominee -- that's (I believe) the high percentage of Obama supporters who have ever said that.

In both IN and NC, two thirds of Clinton supporters say they'd be dissatisfied if Obama were the nominee -- I believe that's the highest number recorded for that question, too.

The percentage of Clinton voters who say they'd choose McCain over Obama in a general election is approaching 40% in Indiana. Put it another way: in North Carolina, less than HALF of folks who voted today for Hillary Clinton are ready to say today that they'd definitely vote for Obama in a general election.

Some, (and hopefully a lot), of that is likely hyperbole, but the longer this goes on, the likelier it is that at least some of those uber-partisans do as they're threatening to do.

And it may be Iqaluit at 5:35, but it isn't from today. We've been losing our snow the last couple of days. Here's today from my front porch.



Though there's still enough that we're supposed to go for a 15 mile snowmobile run across the bay on Friday.

I had meant to get to this earlier, because it bears repeating. [Via]

A Canadian captured in Afghanistan at age 15 can be tried for murder in the Guantanamo war crimes court, a U.S. military judge ruled in rejecting claims that he was a child soldier who should be rehabilitated rather than prosecuted.

Canadian prisoner Omar Khadr, now 21, is charged in the Guantanamo court with throwing a grenade that killed a U.S. soldier during a firefight at a suspected al Qaeda compound in Afghanistan in 2002.

The Kadr case was already shown to be a mockery of due process back in February when the military accidently released documents showing Kadr wasn't the only person alive when US soldiers entered the compound, but this ruling is more historic in it's own way.

His military lawyer, Lt. Cmdr. William Kuebler, had argued in February hearings at the Guantanamo naval base that Khadr was a child soldier illegally conscripted by his father, an al Qaeda financier. He urged the judge to drop the charges, which carry a maximum penalty of life in prison.

The judge, Army Col. Peter Brownback, issued a ruling on Wednesday agreeing with prosecutors' position that the law authorizing the Guantanamo trials contained no minimum age.

Brownback's ruling clears the way for Khadr to be tried in the special tribunals created by the Bush administration to try non-U.S. captives it considers "unlawful enemy combatants" outside the regular civilian and military courts.

Kuebler called the ruling "an embarrassment to the United States" and said Canada would share in the embarrassment if it allows its citizen to be tried at Guantanamo. He said Khadr would be the first child soldier tried for war crimes in modern history.

Canada, of course, won't be doing anything about Kadr so long as we're led by folks who worship Bush and the neocons, something which embarrasses a great number of us all on it's own. This will add a considerable stain.

Aren't we all proud to live in countries willing to allow this historic first?

Jack Cafferty has the following to say about the importance of tomorrow's contests:

If Obama can deliver a pair of wins, it would be a huge psychological boost for his campaign and could bring him one step closer to winning the nomination. If Clinton wins both, she'll still be behind but will think she's won the nomination.

Of course, the most likely scenario is that Obama wins North Carolina and Clinton wins Indiana, not just because that's what the polls generally indicate, but because that's the result most likely to result in the campaign continuing to be portrayed as a close horse-race with neither candidate having enough momentum to break away, and guaranteeing that the seemingly endless Democratic primary campaign continues on it's downward, fratricidal slide for at least several more weeks.

We're just lucky that way.

Sam Harris has an essay over at The Huffington Post about how we in the West have turned into a bunch of cowardly, spineless jellyfish because we don’t offer more and greater platforms to those who attack Islam, generally don't go out of our way to attack Islam ourselves, and even occasionally go to the great lengths of actually criticizing people who do attack Islam.

I’ll leave aside the debate over whether or not it’s truly necessary to distribute and promote material you disagree with in order to defend “Free Speech”, but Harris does offer a comparison in his essay that to me encapsulates the reason I dislike so much of what he talks about in the rest of it.

A point of comparison: The controversy of over Fitna was immediately followed by ubiquitous media coverage of a scandal involving the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS). In Texas, police raided an FLDS compound and took hundreds of women and underage girls into custody to spare them the continued, sacramental predations of their menfolk. While mainstream Mormonism is now granted the deference accorded to all major religions in the United States, its fundamentalist branch, with its commitment to polygamy, spousal abuse, forced marriage, child brides (and, therefore, child rape) is often portrayed in the press as a depraved cult. But one could easily argue that Islam, considered both in the aggregate and in terms of its most negative instances, is far more despicable than fundamentalist Mormonism. [emp. added]

The problem with his little comparison is that he's comparing a tree to a leaf. He isn't comparing Mormonism to Islam, but taking the FLDS, "depraved cult" and comparing it to Islam “in the aggregate”, so that he can say that all Muslims are worse than the most extremist Mormons.

The difference is stark and shows the double-standard that Harris and others like him hold for Muslims. No one ever asks that every Mormon of every stripe publicly condemn and reject and disavow the FLDS sect. The FLDS are portrayed as a “depraved cult”, and the mere fact that other Mormons aren’t members of said cult is enough for everyone to give them a pass. Just for a moment, do a quick bit of research and see how far off the FLDS sect is from “traditional” Mormonism in many of those abhorrent practices.

Polygamy is certainly still a tenet with some strength in the more “mainstream” Mormon flock, enough for HBO to do a comedy series on it. How much discussion is there over how close other Mormons may be in their beliefs to those in the compound? Why not a discussion about Mormons “in the aggregate”? How about some calls for a Mormon "Reformation"?

When the FLDS branch, or abortion clinic bombers, or some other deranged Christians do something nasty, regardless whether or not they can find all sorts of justifications for their acts in their holy books, they are treated as deranged individuals or groups, rather than as representative of their faith. Muslims aren’t so lucky.

Whenever a Muslim does something, even if they don’t use any religious justification for their actions, it is treated as an example of the entire faith and everybody who follows it. Occasionally it is more subtle, but it is the difference between saying someone of religion X did some nasty thing, and saying someone did some nasty thing because of religion X. Muslims always seem to fall into the latter category.

Go back, if you really want to, to all those stories about the FLDS compound, and wonder for a moment if the media didn’t bother using the acronym, but instead always referred to the group solely as Mormons, or at most, fundamentalist Mormons? Talked about how their Mormon beliefs justified such practices? How “traditional” Mormon belief allowed such things? How everything they did was because they were Mormons?

How long do you think it would be before the rest of the Mormon community got a little upset over the coverage?

No faith, no group, does terribly well if it gets painted as though its most extreme members are representative of the whole. Hell, as an atheist I don’t like being lumped in with guys like Harris or a cretin like Chris Hitchens, even if by definition I happen to share at least some of their views to varying degrees. They don’t answer to me and their views are their own.

The Mormons at the compound in Texas are responsible for their own acts, regardless of what the Mormon community as a whole believes or supports, and the same goes for any other people belonging to any other overall grouping.

Harris, though, doesn’t see it that way. The only people he seems willing to criticize as individuals are those who don’t feel it’s right to demonize an entire faith because some of those who purportedly follow it are really, really bad, (particularly Muslims who seem oddly unwilling to demonize their own faith).

The lesson we should draw from the Fitna controversy is that we need more criticism of Islam, not less. Let it come down in such torrents that not even the most deluded Islamist could conceive of containing it

Islam. Not Islamists, not jihadists, not Al Qaeda, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, not particular practices or certain activities, no qualifiers or quibbling. Go out and bash Islam, plain and simple.

But really, as Harris tells us, he’s not the bigot here.

if anyone in this debate can be credibly accused of racism, it is the western apologists and "multiculturalists" who deem Arabs and Muslims too immature to shoulder the responsibilities of civil discourse.

Note to Harris: Denouncing the entire Islamic faith is not a form of responsible civil discourse. When you figure that out, I’m sure you’ll find that there are plenty of Arabs and Muslims capable and willing to partake in such discussions.

Another article on how the big ISP's in Canada are holding back development.

Legitimate online video services have already been slow in coming to Canada, but because of download limits being imposed by the country's major internet service providers, they may never really get here.

Many of the country's largest ISPs recently did away with unlimited download offerings in favour of consumption-based models, where users are billed extra if they exceed a given cap. The move, they say, is being made in order to cope with ever-growing internet usage and capacity problems, which are requiring continual reinvestment in their networks.

Industry observers, however, say the change is a potential threat to downloadable video services, such as those offered by Microsoft Corp. over Xbox Live and Apple Inc. through iTunes, which are still in their infancies both in the United States and Canada. The market's growth will depend on users buying and downloading plenty of content from these providers — something they won't do if they're constrained by caps because they will effectively end up paying twice for the same product, according to analysts.

It's shouldn't be a surprise to anyone in Canada that we are far, far behind the US in this area. This is in part thanks to the same companies since the broadcast networks they control hold the internet rights to the shows, and have been slow in allowing Apple, Microsoft, and others the ability to sell the shows on-line.

The download limits place another barrier in the way of those who would like to use their computer as the centre of their entertainment network, and it is here that the anti-competitive charge stems from.

Internet experts say the caps in Canada are anti-competitive because the ISPs offer services themselves that rival those from the likes of Microsoft and Apple. While Rogers and Bell both offer video-on-demand services that allow customers to purchase as many movies as they want through their television connection, their internet users are constrained in how much they can buy from third parties by the companies' caps.

And that is before we get into the "data-shaping" Bell and Rogers have been partaking in, that slows down the internet speed of users actually trying to use the bandwidth they're paying for, for anything beyond e-mail and basic web-surfing.

"The issue that many of them are starting to confront from an increasingly angry public is that they are charging a certain amount for bandwidth and then making it very difficult for people to use that bandwidth," says Michael Geist an internet and e-commerce law professor at University of Ottawa. "They're trying to have their cake and eat it, too."

As for the argument that the ISP's are only charging for those few users that are sucking up all the bandwidth, a pay-per-use type metered system, Geist has the answer too.

Geist says that if ISPs truly wanted a metered service, they would lose money because most people don't use that much bandwidth.

"A truly metered system would see many peoples' bills go down," he says. "Of course, that's not what the [ISPs] want to do."

Download limits are another way of saying that the ISP's are charging you for downloading 60GB or whatever your particular limit happens to be whether or not you actually use it. If I were one of their customers that generally didn't use anywhere near that kind of bandwidth, I'd either start complaining that they were charging me too much for what I was using or start looking for free video podcasts and the like so I could make up the slack in all that empty download space I was being charged for anyway.

In any case, another example of why proper Net Neutrality legislation in Canada is so important.

Cernig and the other folks at The Newshoggers have invited me to do some guest-posting at their site, an opportunity I plan on taking full advantage of before they come to their senses. You can head on over there for my latest.

I seem to be coming across an increasing number of stories in the last few days showing that the, (we don't want to call it a), recession is hurting an ever increasing number of Americans.

At the overview level, there is this from McClatchy, showing the decline in overall discretionary spending.

In one form or another, Americans from coast to coast are following Wade's cost-cutting ways. Whether it's fewer restaurant visits, shorter road trips or skipping a haircut here and there, more consumers are looking for ways to stretch their dollars.

And with good reason. The soaring cost of core essentials like gasoline, food and housing now account for 57 cents of each consumer dollar spent. That leaves Americans with a record-low 43 cents out of each dollar for discretionary spending, according to new figures from Wachovia Economics Group.

. . .

Since last year, egg prices are up 30 percent. Milk and cheese have increased 13 percent. Prices for wheat, soybeans, and corn have jumped 60-to-80 percent since last year on the Chicago Board of Trade, driving up the price of cereal, bread and other products.

Governments maintain that the "core" inflation rate is only about 3.2%, but that's because it leaves out the volatiles like food and energy, which are increasing at far faster rates and, as the above story shows, eating a larger portion of people's after-tax income. Income that for most Americans, shrunk and never recovered:

The bigger problem is that the now-finished boom was, for most Americans, nothing of the sort. In 2000, at the end of the previous economic expansion, the median American family made about $61,000, according to the Census Bureau’s inflation-adjusted numbers. In 2007, in what looks to have been the final year of the most recent expansion, the median family, amazingly, seems to have made less — about $60,500.

This has never happened before, at least not for as long as the government has been keeping records. In every other expansion since World War II, the buying power of most American families grew while the economy did. You can think of this as the most basic test of an economy’s health: does it produce ever-rising living standards for its citizens?

And the rising costs of food and fuel aren't the only place where low- and middle-income Americans are feeling the pinch.

Many of the 158 million people covered by employer health insurance are struggling to meet medical expenses that are much higher than they used to be — often because of some combination of higher premiums, less extensive coverage, and bigger out-of-pocket deductibles and co-payments.

With medical costs soaring, the coverage many people have may not adequately protect them from the financial shock of an emergency room visit or a major surgery. For some, even routine doctor visits might now take a back seat to basic expenses like food and gasoline.

“It just keeps eating into people’s income,” said James Corbin, a former union official who works for the local utility in Tucson.

Mr. Corbin said that under their employer’s health plan, he and his co-workers are now obliged to pay up to $4,000 of their families’ annual medical bills, on top of about $1,600 a year in premiums. Five years ago, they paid no premiums and were responsible for only about $2,000 of their families’ medical bills.

“That’s a big jump,” Mr. Corbin said. “You’ve just lost a month’s pay.”

. . .

Experts say that too often for the underinsured, coverage can seem like health insurance in name only — adequate only as long as they have no medical problems.

“There’s a real shift in the burden of health care to people who happen to be sick,” said Paul B. Ginsburg, the president of the Center for Studying Health System Change, a research group in Washington.

The inanity of how the US runs it's health care system is worthy of a series of articles in it's own right, but for now it is enough to note that it's rising costs are placing an increasing financial burden on even those who are healthy enough to qualify for the insurance in the first place.

That burden is leading more and more people to some very hard choices.

Struggling with mounting debt and rising prices, faced with the toughest economic times since the early 1990s, Americans are selling prized possessions online and at flea markets at alarming rates.

To meet higher gas, food and prescription drug bills, they are selling off grandmother's dishes and their own belongings. Some of the household purging has been extremely painful — families forced to part with heirlooms.

"This is not about downsizing. It's about needing gas money," said Nancy Baughman, founder of eBizAuctions, an online auction service she runs out of her garage in Raleigh, N.C. One former affluent customer is now unemployed and had to unload Hermes leather jackets and Versace jeans and silk shirts.

At Craigslist, which has become a kind of online flea market for the world, the number of for-sale listings has soared 70 percent since last July. In March, the number of listings more than doubled to almost 15 million from the year-ago period.

And,

"People are cleaning out their houses of gold, silver, whatever, to get money just to fill their cars with gas," said Nat Leonard, 51, whose grandfather opened Society Hill in 1929. "People are pawning out like crazy."

Business is up maybe 20 percent over last year.

"With this economy, we're not done yet with bad times," Leonard continued. "Not even close."

Things are so awful, he said, he's getting loads of first-time customers.

"I've got business owners coming in to pawn things just to make their payrolls," Leonard said, incredulous. "I've never seen that before."

In this economy, people aren't buying as much jewelry as usual, so retail jewelers on and around South Street have to pawn inventory to pay their workers. "One jeweler owes me $150,000," Leonard said, showing off the pawned collateral in a backroom safe.

. . .

Over at Carver W. Reed & Co., a pawnshop at 10th and Sansom Streets since Lincoln was president, more and more higher-echelon people are filing in, owner Tod Gordon said.

"The upper middle class is feeling the crunch like never before," he said. "They're bringing in diamonds and gold to pay for margin calls on stocks. There's a feeling of despair.

"These people are used to paying their bills, no problem. Now it's a whole new world. They're struggling. So maybe they won't go on vacation this summer, and they'll pawn jewelry to fix the roof."

As a result, pawnshops are more frequently becoming the secret repositories of great local wealth.

Outside of hoping that the pawn shops in Philadelphia have really good security systems since they're no longer quite-so-secret repositories of great wealth, the above stories show just how deep some people are digging to keep themselves afloat these days. But personal possessions are a well that can't be tapped indefinitely, and there is also the fact that with so many people unloading so much stuff, the price they can get for those treasured heirlooms is dropping. Too many selling and too few buying, and even the pawn shops won't be doing that well anymore.

Moving back out to the bigger picture, Fester noted on Friday that the decrease in discretionary spending is leading to a decrease in local government revenues, since they don't tax the things like food and healthcare that are eating up people's income. To offset this, municipal and state governments are turning to selling debt, gambling their employees' pension futures to shore up today's deficits.

The other part of what Fester posted leads to some troubling questions as well,

. . . there are a couple of interesting things in the GDP report. The first is that the purchases of tangible goods decreased over the last quarter, and that a good deal of the growth in goods and services purchased were from imputed/calculated transactions such as the cash value of the rent owners pay themselves to live in their house.

The reason I find it troubling is this post by Stirling Newberry at The Agonist.

The market understands that the US economy is using monetization to avoid writing off the lost value of capital. This is showing up in the sharp drops in the value of the dollar against independent currencies, and against the trade weighted average of the dollar. Measured in trade weighted terms, rather than devaluing dollars, the commerce department's sluggish growth over the last two quarters becomes outright contraction. You want "two quarters of negative GDP?" Well you've got them measured in the world average of currency. What has happened is a sleight-of-hand to turn the devaluation of the dollar into non-inflation.

How did this work? Well gas prices and housing prices are in tension. The fall in housing prices is being used to offset the rise in gas prices in the GDP deflator. Presto! Having to bleed money to hold on to your house becomes "growth".

Now I predicted this in 2002, namely that we would see a "Japanification" of the American economy, that the currency would be devalued both to prop up exports and as a tax - a tax that would be used to pay for the war - and that the collapse of the bubble would be used to offset the inflation rate. This has led to what it led to in Japan, a perpetual "Bright Depression", where nominal growth at the top of the economy in assets that are over-valued because they are artificially constrained in liquidity - read, everyone agrees not to sell their 9 Billion Puppies on the open market, because they won't fetch that much any more,and thus carry them on the books as worth 9 billion dollars - to create an illusion of more growth than exists.

It goes on quite a bit from there, but suffice to say that the big numbers that people in the Bush administration and their supporters throw around tend to be more about masking problems than addressing them. For an example, we can go back to the McClatchy story I started with.

While things remain tense for poor and middle-class Americans, Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez told McClatchy Newspapers on Friday that things are better than could be hoped for in the broader economy, considering the deep housing-market correction and problems in credit markets.

The economy shook off those problems to grow at a sluggish rate of 0.6 percent in the first quarter. And while employers trimmed the workforce for the fourth consecutive month, Friday's job numbers showed that unemployment actually improved to 5 percent.

"All of the indicators that we look at suggest that the fundamentals are still strong, and once again it is a great example of a resilient economy," Gutierrez said.

The New York Times did a good job some time ago on why such unemployment numbers are less than useful, and we've already seen why the so-called increase in GDP is no increase at all. The ultimate effect is that the vast majority of Americans are, or are going to, see their standards of living drop, and thanks to the fact that the American consumer has been the driving force of the world economy for the last several decades, the rest of us will likely be following suit.

The federal Conservatives have quietly killed an access to information registry used by journalists, experts and the public that users say helped hold the government accountable.

The Coordination of Access to Information Requests System, or CAIRS, is an electronic list of nearly every access to information request filed to federal departments and agencies.

. . .

"It was really a tool designed to make government more open," said CBC investigative journalist David McKie.

"Now that it appears as though this is no longer going to be available it is very disappointing indeed and people are really wondering what the real motivation is."

Hmm, killing off a registry designed to make the federal government more open and accountable. Yeah, what possible motivation could the Conservatives have for that?

Public Works, which operates the database, spent $166,000 improving it in 2001. Federal officials in 2003 had been working on a publicly accessible online version.

"To do this now after the CAIRS' usefulness has been proven over and over again is indicative of the extent to which government will go to stifle the access regime," said Michel Drapeau, a lawyer who frequently uses the system and is a co-author of a reference work on access law.

"This is terrible and I consider this to be yet one more step in making records less accessible," he told Canadian Press.

New Democrat MP Dawn Black also condemned the Tories for shutting down the system.

"It's another example of the Harper government's talk about accountability and transparency — they talk the talk but they don't walk the walk," said Black, who said her office often uses the database.

What she said.

The US recently launched one of what has been a series of airstrikes in Somalia.  This time, unlike most, they seem to have actually hit their intended target, killing a UIC military leader.  The US has accused the Islamists in Somalia of being linked to al Qaeda and harbouring some of those responsible for the 1998 embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya, though as with most of their accusations, haven’t actually offered any proof of those claims.  Given the Bush administration’s record on these matters, it is probably enough that they’re Muslims who don’t agree with the US.

In any case, since it has at least briefly brought the fighting in Somalia back into the consciousness of the mainstream, I thought it would be worthwhile to review how the US created and nurtured this mostly ignored front in the “War on Terror”.

Somalia has been in a state of near-anarchy since the overthrow of the dictator Siad Barre in 1991 by a group of warlords who, having overthrown the government, fell to fighting each other for control.  (It was into this mess that the US and others sent troops, which led to the events made famous by “Black Hawk Down”)

The warlords were thugs, criminals, and worse.  Their men ravaged the residents of Mogadishu, robbing, raping, and killing as they pleased.  However, in the post-9/11 world, they had the advantage in the US’s eyes, of not being Islamist.  In January of 2006, that point made them US allies, which didn’t work out at all as planned.

The land was little more than a patch of scrub outside the city. But this being Somalia -- lawless, fractured and armed to the teeth -- it was a patch of scrub that two of the country's most powerful families were prepared to fight over.

The fighting, which began Jan. 13, quickly took on wider significance because of the presence, at an airstrip just three miles away, of a small team of U.S. intelligence officials, according to Somalis knowledgeable about the events of that day.

The Americans were in Somalia because of concerns about terrorism, not land. But when the gunfire rang out, the sources said, the U.S. officials wrongly concluded that they were under attack by Islamic terrorists and abruptly fled. It was a provocation, U.S. officials later told Somalis, that demanded a muscular response.

In the weeks that followed this little-known incident, which U.S. officials have refused to confirm or deny, the United States expanded its role in Somalia to levels not seen since it abandoned the country in 1994. The Americans helped organize a group of secular warlords into an "anti-terror coalition" and provided them with a large, steady diet of cash.

The warlords, feared and hated by many Somalis, bragged about the money as they armed themselves as never before.

. . .

American analysts, though not knowledgeable about the incident at the airstrip, said that by giving cash to the warlords the United States triggered events that quickly moved beyond its control, producing a setback likely to hurt not only Somalis but also the U.S. war on terrorism.

. . .

Back in Mogadishu, the fight was seen differently -- as a sign of growing belligerence by the United States and the warlords it backed.

In the months leading up to the battle, Somalis say, officials of the Islamic courts had grown increasingly nervous as they watched Raghe and other suddenly flush warlords add men, guns and trucks to their arsenal. Surging demand caused the price of AK-47 assault rifles at Mogadishu's main market to more than quadruple, from $120 to $580. The price of gunmen went from $70 a month to $300, Somalis say.

"All of a sudden they were buying weapons," said Khadija O. Ali, founder of a Mogadishu women's group and a graduate student at George Mason University, speaking in Nairobi. "All of the sudden there were planes coming and the Americans were meeting only with" the warlords.

Anti-Americanism, stoked by the war in Iraq, intensified as supporters of the Islamic courts spread word that the United States was backing the warlords, whom many residents of Mogadishu say operated with impunity as their gunmen terrorized the lawless city, raping, robbing and killing as they pleased.

Public opinion gradually coalesced in favor of the Islamic courts and their militias, Somalis say. Prominent businessmen contributed men, trucks and guns to the cause of driving out the warlords. And so on Feb. 18, when Raghe and several other warlords announced the formation of an "anti-terrorism coalition" -- featuring the backing of even more American money -- the reaction was swift. Battles broke out the same day in a struggle now seen as being between homegrown Islamic militias and a hated U.S. proxy force.

The result was the routing of the warlords by the UIC, which by the summer of 2006 had extended it’s control over most of southern Somalia and brought the first period of relative stability to the country since the warlords has taken over.

The Bush administration, however, was unwilling to take the defeat of their thuggish proxies lying down.  With the warlords broken and discredited, the US turned to Ethiopia and the weak Somali interim government it was propping up.  The CIA began taking over whole blocks of hotel rooms in Addis Ababa as they begin to push the Ethiopians into ousting the Islamists for them.

In December of 2006, the Ethiopians seemed to do just that, leading to a fair bit of premature celebrating from the same crowd that figured Iraq would be a cakewalk.

Within a couple of months, it was clear that the Ethiopians were facing a growing insurgency, despite all of their “advantages”.  Eric Martin said it best:

Interestingly enough, despite Ethiopia's penchant for unrestrained brutality and disregard for international norms, as well as relatively inattentive media coverage, it appears that an insurgency is taking root and thriving regardless.  To such a degree that Ethiopian forces are heading for the exits and the current Somali government can barely take up residence in the nation's capital.

Why, it's almost as if insurgencies can get by without the aid and comfort of American leftists, humanitarian groups, the UN and the treasonous Western media.  One might even conclude that, at times, insurgents have goals and motivations that provide their own animating impetus - not derived solely from the domestic political situation in the occupier's home country.  Imagine the implications.

. . .

To be fair, the conservatives cited above were right to point out that we can learn from Ethiopia's experiences in Somalia.  They just happened to have misfired on the thrust of the curriculum.  We'll give them partial credit though.

The problem for the Ethiopians and their puppet Somalis is the same as the one the US faced with the warlords, and that they face in Iraq and Afghanistan.  A government that is imposed by a foreign power and that has to rely on foreign military power for its very survival is never going to be seen as legitimate in the eyes of those it purportedly rules.

By the end of last year, the Ethiopian government was forced to admit that it had gotten “bogged down” in Somalia.  They had planned for a quick ousting of the UIC, a handover to the interim government that they had supported and sheltered for years, which would allow them to quickly draw down their forces, leaving whatever pacification duties may be needed to an international force that has failed to materialize.  Any of that sound familiar?

Needless to say, things didn’t go quite as planned.

Ethiopia and Somalia fought a couple of post-colonial wars and the Ethiopians are understandably less than popular in Somalia as a result.  Having your government propped up by a hated rival is hardly the way to make it well-liked.  The tactics the Ethiopians have been using to fight the insurgents hasn’t made them many friends either.

Ethiopian commanders flouted international humanitarian law by firing "inherently indiscriminate" Katyusha rockets into civilian neighborhoods, the report found, and by "routinely and repeatedly" firing rockets, mortars and artillery in a manner that failed to distinguish between civilians and military targets.

The report found "strong evidence" that the indiscriminate bombardment was intentional, carried on day after day even after it was clear that scores of civilians were being killed.

In some areas, witnesses told the group, rockets and heavy artillery shells fell in a systematic pattern, as if the Ethiopians were attempting to level entire neighborhoods.

The US has been heavily involved in this mess from the get-go, providing intelligence, air strikes, and a naval blockade during the initial Ethiopian invasion, to the continued bombings and missile strikes at “suspected militants” that have sparked riots and demonstrations due to their very low success rate, unless you count blowing up a bunch of unnamed, innocent black people a success.  Add to that at least half a billion dollars in aid to the Ethiopian government.

Despite all the American aid and international cover, the Somalia invasion and occupation has turned into a strategic sinkhole for Ethiopia, and is racheting up instability in the entire region.

The Ethiopian decision to invade Somalia in December 2006 altered the balance of power in the Horn of Africa.

. . .

Ethiopian forces, which had been facing Eritrea along their 1,000km border, but were otherwise confronting few security threats, are now engaged on three fronts.

The forces in Somalia are now bogged down and cannot withdraw, as Prime Minister Meles Zenawi recently acknowledged.

In addition to the conflict in Somalia they now also confront a growing rebellion in the Somali region of Ethiopia from the Ogaden National Liberation Front.

The third front is a possible reopening of the hostilities between Ethiopia and Eritrea, something the US also has played an unhelpful hand in.

Add to all that the fact that all of the refugees streaming south into Kenya probably played a large part in straining tensions there past the breaking point recently.

All of this has of course placed considerable strain on the Ethiopian military.  Regardless of how big and well-equipped an army might be, there are only a finite number of folks who will willingly put their lives on the line.  Ethiopia not being nearly as wedded to human rights as any civilized nation, has went far beyond stop-loss to fill out the ranks of cannon-fodder.

Ethiopian soldiers have forcibly drafted hundreds of civilians to fight separatist rebels in the desolate, predominantly Muslim Ogaden region in a shadowy military campaign supported by the Bush administration, according to more than a dozen refugees and former recruits who've fled to neighboring Kenya.

The untrained and ill-equipped draftees — including students, camel herders and tribal leaders who've never fired weapons in combat — are being thrown into pitched battles with ethnic Somali guerrillas and often suffer heavy casualties, the refugees and ex-recruits said.

Men who resist joining these civilian militias — known as "dabaqodhi," or "puppets" of the government — are beaten, locked up in military prisons or killed, the refugees said in interviews. When recruits perform poorly in combat, as they often do, they're abused and accused of aiding the rebels, refugees said.

And that is really only the tip of the iceberg.  The humanitarian disaster that is Somalia and the neighbouring Ogaden region is one of the most under-reported parts of this whole sad mess.

. . . Human Rights Watch says it has documented dozens of cases of severe abuse by Ethiopian troops in the Ogaden, including gang rapes, burned villages and what it calls “demonstration killings,” like hangings and beheadings, meant to terrorize the population.

. . .

Recent refugees said the military was trying to starve them out and the blockade had been like a noose on some parts of the region, cutting off food supplies.

In October, Save the Children U.K. surveyed more than 600 Ogadeni children and found that 21 percent were acutely malnourished, compared with United Nations surveys that found malnutrition rates of 19 percent in an area of Somalia and 13 percent in Darfur, Sudan. The United Nations considers 15 percent the emergency threshold.

Read over that last paragraph again.  The food situation for children in the Ogaden region and parts of Somalia is worse than it is in Darfur.  How is it we don’t hear more about this?

The Bush administration considers Ethiopia its No. 1 ally in combating terrorism in the Horn of Africa, and the American government provides it with roughly $500 million in annual aid.

Right.  Silly me.  Human rights only matter if you happen to be an enemy of the Bush administration.  When you’re an ally, particularly a Christian-led ally fighting Muslims, you can safely ignore them.

It also means you can call for international aid without being laughed at, but the international community is, not too surprisingly, reluctant to send much in the way of aid or soldiers to bail out the beleaguered interim government and the Ethiopians.  The result is the interim government taking actions that will likely hasten its fall.

The trouble started when government soldiers went to the market and, at gunpoint, began to help themselves to sacks of grain last week.

Islamist insurgents poured into the streets to defend the merchants. The government troops took heavy casualties and retreated all the way back to the presidential palace, supposedly the most secure place in the city. It, too, came under fire.

. . .

To get clan support and — just as crucially — more militiamen, transitional leaders have cut deals with warlords like Mohammed Dheere, now Mogadishu’s mayor, and Abdi Qeybdid, now the police chief. These are the same men whom the C.I.A. paid in 2006 to fight the Islamists, a strategy that backfired because the population turned against them, mostly because of their legacy of terrorizing civilians.

A legacy they seem intent on continuing, and one the Islamists are exploiting.

In the rat-tat-tat of nightly machine-gun fire, people are beginning to hear the government’s death knell. Many residents have mixed feelings about this. They contend that the government has enabled warlords. They say, almost without exception, that things were better under the Islamists. But they fear what lies ahead.

“We’re getting addicted to anarchy,” said Dahabo Abdulleh, a fuel seller.

. . .

Hassan, the government soldier, said he had been in one of these warlord militias since he was 8. He cannot read or write. He has thin wrists, a delicate face, empty eyes and a wife and two children to feed, which is why he said he routinely robs people.

“We are losing,” he said.

He said many of his friends were defecting to the Islamists because that was the only way to survive.

The Islamists have briefly captured several towns in recent weeks, freeing prisoners, snatching weapons and then melting back into the bush. Gone are the beards and the checkered scarves they used to wear. Many, like a young man named Elmi, are clean-shaven and favor crisply pressed suits.

Elmi, who like Hassan said he could not reveal his last name, said business owners sold gold, real estate and sheep to raise money for the Islamists. Elmi said that he was part of the battle at the market on March 20 that began with the looting, and that the government lost three trucks, which was corroborated by government soldiers.

“We were there because we are everywhere,” Elmi said.

The Islamists now effectively control large swaths of territory where they can strike at will, and the government’s legitimacy continues to fade, along with the increasingly small area it controls.

Somehow I doubt that a single airstrike is going to have much of an effect on this dynamic.

Three from Illinois, one from Texas, and another Judas,

A leader of the Democratic Party under Bill Clinton switched his allegiance to Barack Obama on Thursday and urged fellow Democrats to end the bruising nomination fight.

This has got to come to an end," former Democratic National Committee Chairman Joe Andrew told reporters in his hometown of Indianapolis just days before Tuesday's crucial state primary. He said he planned to call all the other superdelegates he knows and encourage them to back Obama.

Bill Clinton appointed Andrew chairman of the DNC in 1999, and he led the party through the disputed 2000 presidential race before stepping down in 2001. Andrew endorsed Hillary Rodham Clinton last year on the day she declared her candidacy for the White House.

In a lengthy letter explaining his decision, Andrew said he is switching his support because "a vote for Hillary Clinton is a vote to continue this process, and a vote to continue this process is a vote that assists (Republican) John McCain."

"The ship is taking on water right now," Andrew said at the news conference. "We need to patch those holes, heal the rift and go forward to beat John McCain."

This sets up a weird dynamic; Obama may soon end up with the lead in superdelegates that Clinton as enjoyed since long before the race really started just as polls show that he may lose several of the last few primaries. The proportional system means that he'll still maintain his lead in pledged delegates, and probably means that Obama will clinch the nomination just as Hillary finally succeeds in making him unelectable with an assist from Reverend Wright, ensuring that we all get to see President McCain sworn in.

Speaking of Rev. Wright, Mike Huckabee has an interesting theory as to why he seems determined to undermine Obama:

"His (Obama's) campaign is not being derailed by his race, it's being derailed by a person who doesn't want him to prove that we have made great advances in this country," Huckabee told reporters.

. . .

"Jeremiah Wright needs for Obama to lose so he can justify his anger, his hostile bitterness against the United States of America," Huckabee said.

That makes a tragic sort of sense. When your entire worldview is based on the belief that there can be no reconciliation between black and white, the last thing you want to see is someone prove that such reconciliation is possible.

though whether or not it will be reported is another matter. While much of the news this morning is focused on the fact that causalities and attacks are rising again in Iraq, the story that piqued my interest is this one from USA Today:

Drone attacks hit high in Iraq

U.S. commanders in Iraq have ordered an unprecedented number of airstrikes by unmanned airplanes in April to kill insurgents in urban combat and to limit their ability to launch rockets at U.S. forces, military records show.

. . .

Commanders are expected to rely more on unmanned systems as they begin to withdraw 30,000 U.S. troops sent last year. The military has dozens of Predators in Iraq and Afghanistan. In all, it operates 5,000 drones, 25 times more than it had in 2001.

Use of such drones and other air-launched attacks in dense urban environments cause a great deal of civilian causalities, but since the US doesn't count those, they probably don't care. The only causalities that count are those of US soldiers, and if the soldier is sitting thousands of miles away piloting a drone, the odds of him being a causality are pretty much non-existant. In Afghanistan, where there are far fewer troops and correspondingly far more airstrikes, the US and it's allies were directly responsible for more civilian deaths last year than the insurgents. I expect a similar scenario to play out in Iraq as the troops are drawn down.

So as US troops leave, air attacks will increase, and Iraqi suffering will increase with them. Whether or not anyone bothers reporting it is another matter.

. . . according to the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, the bigger problem appears to be John McCain's ties to President Bush.

In the survey, 43 percent of registered voters say they have major concerns that McCain is too closely aligned with the current administration.

In other news, water is wet. If the Democrats ever get over their mutual slaughter, they should be able to pound this meme over and over again. And while everybody is speaking about outspoken pastors, how about this tidbit from McCain-backer Hagee.

"As a nation, America is under the curse of God, even now." That ominous slam at America came from Pastor John Hagee, whose endorsement Republican presidential candidate John McCain sought, secured, and recently affirmed to ABC News that he is "glad to have." Hagee claims God's "curse" and "doom" is upon America because of two key issues: reproductive freedom and broad support for the teaching of the theory of evolution.

Although Senator McCain recently told George Stephanopoulos in an interview that his seeking of Hagee's endorsement was "probably" a mistake, he then doubled back to affirm his approval of Hagee's endorsement, stating, "I'm glad to have it."

Of course, Hagee isn't black, so there probably won't be too much focus on him or those like him.