Fifteen months ago, the armed wing of Lebanon’s Hezbollah party, listed as a terrorist organization by the United States and most other Western countries, attacked Israel’s northern border, capturing two Israeli soldiers and killing eight more. Israel replied with a month of massive air attacks all across Lebanon that destroyed much of the country’s infrastructure, leveled a good deal of south Beirut, and killed around a thousand Lebanese civilians.

Washington, London, Ottawa and some other Western capitals insisted that this was a reasonable and proportionate response, and shielded Israel from intense diplomatic pressure to stop the attacks even when Israel launched a land invasion of southern Lebanon in early August, 2006. The operation only ended when Israeli casualties on the ground mounted rapidly and the Israeli government pulled its troops back.

So what would be a reasonable and proportionate Turkish response to the recent attacks by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), listed as a terrorist organization by the United States and most other Western countries, from northern Iraq into southeastern Turkey?

. . .

What’s that? Washington is asking Turkey to show restraint and not attack Iraq at all? Even after the Kurdish terrorists killed or kidnapped all those Turkish people? Could it be that Turkish lives are worth less than Israeli lives?

Never mind. At least the United States officially classes the PKK as a terrorist organization and refuses to let its officials have any contact with it. But what’s this? There is a parallel terrorist organization called the Party for Free Life in Kurdistan (PJAK), essentially a branch office of the PKK, also based in northern Iraq, which carries out attacks into the adjacent Kurdish-populated region of Iran, and the United States does not condemn the PJAK? It even sends its officials to have friendly chats with the PJAK terrorists? How odd!

The PJAK’s leader, Rahman Haj-Ahmadi, paid an unofficial visit to Washington last summer. One of his close associates, Biryar Gabar, claims to have “normal dialogue” with US officials, according to a report last Tuesday in the New York Times — and the American military spokesman in Baghdad, Cmdr. Scott Rye, issued a carefully structured nondenial saying that “The consensus is that US forces are not working with or advising the PJAK.”

Biryar Gabar also said that PJAK fighters have killed at least 150 Iranian soldiers and officials in the past three months. That’s a lot more people than the PKK have killed in Turkey in the same time, and yet neither Washington nor any other Western country has expressed sympathy for Iran. Could it be that Iranian lives are worth even less than Turkish lives?

And here’s something even more peculiar. Iran, like Turkey, is already shelling Kurdish villages on the Iraqi side of the frontier that it suspects of sheltering or supplying the PKK/PJAK. How come President George W. Bush and Vice President Richard Cheney simply ignore these actions, when they have been working hard for the past year to build a case for attacking Iran?

A new danger looms. The US invasion devastated Iraq and effectively split into three pieces - fulfilling the first step in Israel’s grand strategy of fragmenting Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria. Iraq’s Mosul oil region, which formerly belonged to the Ottoman Empire, is a mere 119 kms from Turkey’s border. Kirkuk is only a bit further. After World War I, the British Empire grabbed this oil-rich region, cobbling together the unnatural state of Iraq to safeguard the oil.

If Iraq slides further into the abyss, Turkey and Iran may partition Iraq. Today, Turkey has no oil. Its fragile economy is hammered by having to earn US dollars to buy oil. But if Turkey repossessed Iraq’s northern oil fields, this nation of 70 million with 515,000 men at arms would become an important power that would reassert traditional Turkish influence in the Mideast, Balkans, Caucasus, and Central Asia.

`Pan-Turanism,’ the idea of spreading Turkish influence from its eastern border across the Turkic lands of Central Asia to the Great Wall of China remains dear to the hearts of many Turkish nationalists and far rightists. Iraq’s huge oil reserves are a big temptation Ankara cannot ignore. After all, if the US can invade Iraq for oil, why not neighboring, ex-owner Turkey?

Documents obtained by CBC News show that the Justice Department looked into whether or not it could attempt to recover the $2.1 million-settlement Mulroney received after revelations Mulroney had accepted cash payments from Schreiber.

But the RCMP shut down the investigation into Mulroney, even saying he'd never be charged again, without confirming whether or not Mulroney even got the money or what it might have been used for.

Now, ten years ago Japan had slower internet than the US. So they looked to the US to see how to do it - and they saw that the US had open access laws (where in the old days, companies could buy access to the lines at wholesale rates - which is why there was an ISP on every corner in the 90's) and decided they were key.

So they opened up broadband access - mandated that phone and cable lines had to be available to whoever wanted access. As SaveTheInternet points out:

If this quaint idea of “competition” seems familiar, that’s because America invented “open access” policies in the first place. And open access worked for decades to bring lower prices and more choices in long-distance phone service and dial-up Internet access.

The Japanese first adopted open access because they were worried about falling behind us. But under pressure from our own phone and cable monopolists, the Bush administration abandoned open access – and the fundamental protections for Net Neutrality along with it.

Now they’re standing idly by as America drops further and further behind the rest of the world in every measure of broadband progress.

. . .

When you don't have competition, with few exceptions, you don't get progress or better products. And so the US has worse broadband. It has worse wireless. It has worse (and deliberately crippled) phones. It's falling behind in the very industry it invented. All because a few gatekeeper corporations don't want to have to compete and because the Bush administration and conservative justices believe in concentration of wealth rather than progress and competition.

Like four other alleged al-Qaeda-affiliated foreigners held under controversial "security certificate" powers, he has recently agreed to live under extraordinary surveillance, in return for being let out of jail.

Past measures have included the suspects submitting to being followed by federal agents during their few weekly excursions, having their calls monitored, staying away from computers and having video cameras installed - but outside the home. Never before has any Canadian prisoner on bail been known to have had to countenance cameras inside the household.

Body counts are only one small part of a much larger puzzle.  What I want to know is not the day to day casualty trends, or good news stories from some carefully selected hamlet, or the latest assassination of an Awakening shaykh.   I want to know:   does the devolution to the local level make strategic sense, even if it reaps short-term tactical sense?  Towards what endpoint are the tactics leading?   Do we want to see a unified Iraq with a sustainable political accord - the official goal of American policy, as Undersecretary of State Nick Burns reminded the DACOR audience yesterday?  If so, are American political and military tactics encouraging or discouraging such an outcome? . . .



I was surprised at the consensus on our panel yesterday (among three people who have never discussed the issue before, and from much of a very knowledgeable and experienced audience based on post-session conversations) about where Iraq was heading:  towards a warlord state, along a Basra model, with power devolved to local militias, gangs, tribes, and power-brokers, with a purely nominal central state. 

As I've argued repeatedly, this is the most likely effect, intended or otherwise, of the Petraeus-Crocker tactics.   The US is empowering local actors at the expense of the national level, while both communities are fragmenting at a remarkable rate.  The Sunni side is divided among the various insurgency factions (their efforts at forming a Political Council notwithstanding), the various Awakenings (which are themselves internally divided, bickering over power and personalities), tribes and local leaders looking out for their own, and an al-Qaeda movement which peaked last fall when it launched its abortive and self-defeating bid for hegemony with its ill-fated Islamic State of Iraq project.   On the Shia side, the UIA has fragmented, the Mahdi Army has fragmented (though reportedly Sadr has used the ceasefire period to try to sort things out), Badrists and Sadrists are fighting in the streeets, Sistani has lost influence and his aides are being murdered at an alarming rate, and as Jon Alterman has pointed out there are some 144 competing militias in Basra alone. 

This kind of fragmentation might help the US in its tactical maneuvers at the local level, and buy local stability in the short term.  But it is absolute anathema to any kind of national deal.  As Jim Fearon, one of the leading political scientists working on civil wars, recently put it, "a power-sharing deal tends to hold only when every side is relatively cohesive. How can one party expect that another will live up to its obligations if it has no effective control over its own members?"   It also deeply complicates any neat ideas about partition, of course, since there are no unified blocs to which one could easily devolve power.

Tactics working against strategy - that's been the concern I've been expressing for many months now. I haven't been reassured.  Instead of getting sucked into debates over body counts, or clutching at whatever good or bad news crosses the headlines each morning, the national debate should be looking at the big picture.  It isn't about how we are doing day to day - what are we trying to achieve? 

The British Army campaign in Basra is exhausted and looking for a way out. That is the conclusion of one of the most senior Army officers in Iraq, in a necessarily anonymous interview with our foreign correspondent Gethin Chamberlain today.

"We are tired of firing at people," the officer said. "We would prefer to find a political accommodation."

The report paints a bleak picture of an Iraq in which the British have ceded control of Basra city, and must even ask the local Shia militias for permission to skirt its edges. The Iraqis within Basra have been effectively surrendered to rule by paramilitary squads, and the British-trained Iraqi police are ineffectual and compromised. Politically, the British are placing their faith in a Shia general, Gen Mohan al-Furayji, and negotiating with him in preference to the elected provincial governor.

UPDATE:  one of the commenters below brings up the point that the sheer magnitude of oil resources in Iraq makes control of Baghdad so valuable that an Afghan or Somali style warlordism is unlikely.  That's a good point, which actually did come up in the DACOR panel discussion, made by Jim Planke I believe.  The upshot is that the model for Iraq's future may most plausibly by Nigeria.  So, as before it's worth thinking about whether a Nigeria outcome (as opposed to Somali or Lebanese or any other outcome) is compatible with US interests (and Iraqi aspirations) and worth the expenditure of US resources to achieve.

On the eve of an important Senate committee meeting to consider the legislation, Nancy A. Nord, the acting chairman of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, has asked lawmakers in two letters not to approve the bulk of legislation that would increase the agency’s authority, double its budget and sharply increase its dwindling staff.

. . .

Ms. Nord, who before joining the agency had been a lawyer at Eastman Kodak and an official at the United States Chamber of Commerce, criticized the measure in letters sent late last week and this afternoon to the Democratic leaders of the committee. . . .

She opposed making it easier to bring criminal prosecutions of companies that knowingly sell defective products and also criticized a measure that would make it easier for the commission to publicly disclose reports of faulty products.

While manufacturers had agreed on another provision that would give independent company laboratories the authority to test products and certify their safety, Ms. Nord said she objected to the provision and preferred that the legislation give the commission the authority to defer to the work of the laboratories, should it choose to.

Some of Ms. Nord’s complaints were similar to the ones that business groups and manufacturers have raised, including that the legislation would be unnecessarily burdensome. But in other areas, such as whistleblower protection for company employees, her complaints went beyond those of industry.

Canada's military exports have more than tripled over the past seven years, a CBC News investigation has learned.

Over the past seven years, Canada has exported $3.6 billion in military goods. Canada now exports more arms and military goods than it imports.

The CBC analysis is based on customs data on exports specifically for military use, such as tanks, rocket launchers and munitions.

The surge in exports has made Canada the sixth-biggest supplier of military goods to the world, according to the most recent report by the U.S. Congressional Research Service.

The government's last annual report to Parliament, for 2002, showed that military exports had climbed to $678 million from $304 million in 1997.

But the full extent of Canada's military exports is hard to track with precision, because for the past four years the federal government has not released annual reports providing detailed information to Parliament.

. . .

Epps cited a recent report by the Small Arms Survey, a Geneva-based monitoring group, which dropped Canada's transparency rating on arms controls to just above that of Iran.

"Canada's rating is 11 on the scale out of 20 this year and the rating for Iran is 10.5," Epps said. "What does that say to you?"

Somalia's transitional Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Ghedi has resigned.

Mr Ghedi told MPs of his decision after handing a note to President Abdullahi Ahmed Yusuf.

Mr Ghedi had been blamed for failing to quell the Islamist insurgency in Somalia and for bringing Ethiopian troops onto Somali soil.

On Sunday, thousands fled the capital, Mogadishu, after Ethiopian troops opened fire on protestors.

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.

Perhaps we could extrapolate that Iraqi insurgents would be fighting on regardless of whether or not Jamil Hussein is a real person, or whether or not six Sunnis were set on fire that one time?

Whereas Saddam's possession of WMDs was a matter of reasonable but ultimately erroneous surmise, no one doubts that Iran is assiduously going about developing nuclear capability.

THE Foreign Office has cleared dozens of Iranians to enter British universities to study advanced nuclear physics and other subjects with the potential to be applied to weapons of mass destruction.

In the past nine months about 60 Iranians have been admitted to study postgraduate courses deemed “proliferation-sensitive” by the security services. The disciplines range from nuclear physics to some areas of electrical and chemical engineering and microbiology.

Additionally, figures obtained by David Willetts, the shadow secretary for innovation, universities and skills, show that in 2005-06, 30 Iranians were doing postgraduate degrees in subjects covering nuclear physics and nuclear engineering.

Earlier this year, a leading security think-tank estimated Tehran was two to three years away from acquiring a weapon.

That corollary to the Satayana rule I was talking about? It's the notion that each presidential election is an attempt to cure the ills of the preceding presidency. In the post-Watergate world of 1976, reliance on that rule brought us President Jimmy Carter. Let's see -- how did his Iran policy turn out?

Note: The Dowd crowd urges diplomacy with Iran. But as Ed Morrisey has noted at Captain's Quarters, an Iranian dissident discourages negotiations on the grounds that "it establishes [the Iranian regime] even more as legitimate and it damages the morale of those who work to rid Iran of oppression."

When the relatively moderate Mohammed Khatami was elected president in Iran, American conservatives pointed out that he was just a figurehead. Real power, they said (correctly), especially control of the military and police, was wielded by the unelected "Supreme Leader," Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Now that Ahmadinejad is president, they claim his finger is on the button. (Oh wait, Iran doesn't have a nuclear button yet and won't for at least three to eight years, according to the CIA, by which point Ahmadinejad may not be president anymore. But these are just facts.)

In a speech last week, Rudy Giuliani said that while the Soviet Union and China could be deterred during the cold war, Iran can't be. The Soviet and Chinese regimes had a "residual rationality," he explained. Hmm. Stalin and Mao—who casually ordered the deaths of millions of their own people, fomented insurgencies and revolutions, and starved whole regions that opposed them—were rational folk. But not Ahmadinejad, who has done what that compares? One of the bizarre twists of the current Iran hysteria is that conservatives have become surprisingly charitable about two of history's greatest mass murderers.

1. He knew just how disastrous the consequences would be without a good post-invasion plan.

2. He waited until just eight weeks before the invasion to start "tearing his hair out" over the fact that there wasn't any plan.

3. Despite knowing all of this, he still put his full support behind the invasion and mouthed platitudes about how good things were going to turn out.

Some energy stocks defied expectations by gaining value Friday, a day after Alberta introduced a controversial increase to the fees charged to oil and gas companies in the province.

. . .

Enbridge, which operates the world's longest crude oil pipeline system, gained just over two per cent, while Talisman Energy slipped by only 0.41 per cent.

Other big oil and gas companies, including Suncor and EnCana, slipped slightly, but the declines did not come close to the bloodbath some analysts projected. The TSX energy index finished up 0.23 per cent.

Wilf Gobert, an independent energy analyst, rejects any suggestion that the initial reaction from the energy industry was "knee-jerk."

"It's ridiculous and intellectually dishonest to be saying that a CEO doesn't know what he's talking about. They represent billions of dollars of shareholder value," he said in an interview while golfing outside of Calgary.

No gauges are necessary at Lake Lanier to measure the ravages of the Southeast's drought.

Wooden fishing docks tower 10 feet over dried mud that used to be squishy lake bottom. Boat ramps begin at the parking lot and end in sand. New islands emerge from shallows.

"If the water drops another foot, I don't know that anyone will be able to get a boat in," said Mike Boyle, 64, a resident who has long trolled the lake for spotted and striped bass.

The waters of Lake Lanier, funneled through federal dams along the Chattahoochee River, sustain about 2.8 million people in the Atlanta metropolitan area, a nuclear power plant that lights up much of Alabama, and the marine life in Florida's Apalachicola River and Bay.

Forty years ago, Muynak was a busy fishing port where the waters of the Aral Sea lapped up against the shoreline.

Today the waters have receded so much, that there is not a drop as far as the eye can see.

. . .

The human misery is huge. One victim has tuberculosis, which is rife and on the increase in the rest of the population. Cancer, lung disease and infant mortality are 30 times higher than they used to be because the drinking water is heavily polluted with salt, cotton fertilisers and pesticides.

Rim Abdulovich Giniyatullin of the International Agency for the Aral Sea Program hopes that the rest of the world can learn lessons from the Aral Sea tragedy.

"Don't allow the misuse of water," he warns.

"Be careful about how much you use, and stop before the source starts to shrink."

The human race will one day split into two separate species, an attractive, intelligent ruling elite and an underclass of dim-witted, ugly goblin-like creatures, according to a top scientist.

100,000 years into the future, sexual selection could mean that two distinct breeds of human will have developed.

The alarming prediction comes from evolutionary theorist Oliver Curry from the London School of Economics, who says that the human race will have reached its physical peak by the year 3000.

We've got the charter, fellow Canadians. But will it save us from terrorism?

The founder of a Canadian-made, 100 per cent electric car says the federal government is blocking him from selling his cars in Canada.

The ZENN (zero emissions, no noise) electric car is already being sold in the United States, Mexico, and Europe, where it has won awards.

The two-seater is built in St. Jerome, Que., by Toronto-based ZENN Motor Company. It is roughly the same size as the Mini-Cooper, and would sell for approximately $14,000.

Company founder Ian Clifford says Canadians haven't heard much about the car because Ottawa won't let him sell it here.

When asked why the cars won't be licensed in Canada, Harry Baergen, a senior regulatory enforcement engineer with Transport Canada provided the following responses to CBC News:

CBC: "[Has the ZENN car] met the regulatory requirement?"
Baergen: "They haven't met our requirements yet, no."

Baergen: "They've showed us that it meets requirements as an LSV (low-speed vehicle)."
CBC: "They have shown that to you?"
Baergen: "Yes."

Five years after one of India's worst episodes of Hindu-Muslim violence, a series of videotaped confessions released Thursday showed Hindu activists acknowledging their roles in the killings and detailing blatant state collusion.

In the video footage, recorded as part of an undercover expose by a New Delhi-based weekly magazine called Tehelka, Hindu activists and politicians bragged about hacking Muslims to death and burning their bodies. One assailant said he slit open a pregnant woman's stomach.

. . .

The video footage, by Ashish Khetan, a reporter for the magazine, showed Hindu activists confessing to dousing petrified Muslims in kerosene and burning them alive. The footage also showed a Hindu nationalist politician saying that the chief minister of Gujarat, Narendra Modi, had "given us three days time to do whatever we could. After three days, he asked to stop and everything came to a halt."

Arsonists burst into a Jerusalem church and set the building on fire, church officials said Wednesday, raising suspicions that Jewish extremists were behind the attack.

The church in west Jerusalem's Rehavia neighborhood was rebuilt after it was burned down 25 years ago by ultra-Orthodox Jewish extremists.

. . .

Ultra-Orthodox Jews have begun moving into Rehavia and trying to impose their strict way of life in parts of the leafy, upscale neighborhood, which has a mixed population of secular and Orthodox Jews.

"Without good intelligence, sending large numbers of troops across the border or dropping bombs doesn't seem to make much sense to me," he told reporters after talks with NATO defence ministers in the Netherlands.

This applied "for anybody" considering such action, he added.

The Transportation Security Administration and the Department of Homeland Security are quietly pushing for a set of crazy new rules. All travellers in the U.S. will be required to get government-issued credentials and official clearance before every flight, both within the United States as well as internationally.

The government's terrorist watch list has swelled to more than 755,000 names, according to a new government report that has raised worries about the list's effectiveness.

The size of the list, typically used to check people entering the country through land border crossings, airports and sea ports, has been growing by 200,000 names a year since 2004. Some lawmakers, security experts and civil rights advocates warn that it will become useless if it includes too many people.

Whenever the world's tropical seas warm several degrees, Earth has experienced mass extinctions over millions of years, said a first-of-its-kind statistical study of fossil records.

And scientists fear it may be about to happen again — but in a matter of several decades, not tens of millions of years.

Four of the five major extinctions over 520 million years of Earth history have been linked to warmer tropical seas, something that indicates a warmer world overall, said the study published Wednesday

. . .

The author of the second study, which focuses on carbon dioxide, said he does see a cause-and-effect between warmer seas and extinctions.

Peter Ward, a University of Washington biology and paleontology professor, said natural increases in carbon dioxide warmed the air and ocean. The warmer water had less oxygen and spawned more microbes, which in turn spewed toxic hydrogen sulphide into the air and water, killing species.

Ward examined 13 major and minor extinctions in the past and found a common link: rising carbon dioxide levels in the air and falling oxygen levels. Ward's study will be presented Sunday at the Geological Society of America's annual convention in Denver.

Still, ponder this -- it has already been proved repeatedly, that humanity is capable of affecting ecosystems, atmospheric systems (I grew up in LA) and even (in the case of the ozone hole) planetary systems. Thus, it is simply mind-boggling that a concerned majority of world scientists should have to prove their worries valid, beyond all doubt...

...before humanity decides to take simple precautions THAT MAKE SENSE ANYWAY.

10) And that is the final kibosh. The devastator. The ultimate eviscerator of this horrific mass-cult.

Because they never make clear exactly what it is that they are afraid of!

What? Efficiency?

Let me reiterate.
That is what it boils down to. Fear and loathing of... efficiency.

It is what Al Gore, the world’s scientific “consensus” community, the community of nations and all the sensibly worried folks out here are talking about.

Simply putting efficiency at or near the top of our civilization’s urgent agenda.

Investing in research, tweaking some incentives, adjusting some market parameters (that were already meddle-skewed anyway, in wrong directions)...

... all with the goal that we should ...
...get... more... from... less!

And that last part is the real mind-boggler, when you stop to think about it. That all of these polemical maneuvers and illogical arguments and contradictions and hypocrisies should be aimed at diverting us from becoming more productive while depending on fewer resources.

US President George W Bush has said there is a "real and urgent" need for a missile defence system in Europe.

He warned that Iran could have a ballistic missile capable of reaching Europe or the US by 2015.

What a let down. My buddy Ebo and I attended Horowitz' opening night of Islamo-Fascism Awareness week and if this is our answer to sharia, then I guess Dirka Dirka Mohammed Jihad it will be.

The federal Conservative party has suspended the riding executive that backed ousted Nova Scotia MP Bill Casey.

. . .

Casey, the longtime MP for the region, was kicked out of the Conservative caucus in June for voting against his party's budget, which he said broke the promises laid out under a 2005 offshore oil and gas accord.

"It is unworkable when you have a board that is not committed to one thing and one thing only, and that is to electing a member of Parliament in the Conservative Party of Canada," he said.

The federal Conservative party's central database is set up to track the confidential concerns of individual constituents without their knowledge or consent, says a former Tory MP.

The issue spilled onto the floor of the House of Commons on Thursday when Garth Turner, the expelled Tory-turned-Liberal MP, accused Prime Minister Stephen Harper of an "unethical invasion of Canadians' privacy.''

Privacy experts agree the practice is a clear breach of standard privacy ethics -- but probably not the law, because federal political parties fall into a legislative grey area.

the Conservatives use a single clearing house for all data collection, storage, datamining, mailing lists, voter tracking and any other partisan use such information may serve.

. . .

Logging constituent files in a central party database that may also be used as part of election planning, fundraising, advertising strategy and policy deliberation appears to be clearly offside, two nationally respected privacy experts told The Canadian Press.

"If somebody contacts their MP because they're having a problem with their CPP benefit or their military pension, they don't expect to end up on a mailing list for a political party,'' said David Fraser, a Halifax lawyer who specializes in privacy issues with the firm McInnes Cooper.

The Conservatives, who openly boasted about their state-of-the-art CIMS database after purchasing it in 2004, now refuse to discuss it.

"I will not talk about internal party databases,'' said party spokesman Ryan Sparrow. "I'm not disclosing what is in our database, who is in our database.''

When asked if Canadians can request to see their file on the CIMS database, Sparrow responded: "What would be their specific need to see?''

Asked a second time, Sparrow shut down the inquiry.

"I'm not going to help you with your story. It's internal party matters.''

2. People who are "rendered" inevitably end up in a foreign slammer -- or worse.

Actually, that's not a foregone conclusion.

4. Rendition is just a euphemism for outsourcing torture.

Well, not historically.

5. Pretty much anyone -- including U.S. citizens and green card holders -- can be rendered these days.

A "U.S. person" (citizen or legal resident) has constitutional protections against being removed from the country through rendition

In fairness, though, the ghastly case of Maher Arar -- a Syrian-born Canadian citizen who convincingly says he was detained at New York's JFK Airport, handed off to Syria and tortured -- is way too close for comfort.

1. Carefully read Martin van Creveld’s book The Transformation of War (1991).

2. Each week read the Sunday newspaper, or one of the major weekly magazines.

3. Determine what page of the book we are on.

I think most Americans, in a purely idealistic and theoretical sense, would support an interventionist policy. Most of us believe the man walking down the street has a moral obligation to try and stop a mugging he happens upon, even if the crime won’t affect him directly. Especially if the passerby happens to be the world’s biggest bodybuilder, a role filled internationally by none other than the U.S.

Allegations that a Syrian envoy admitted during a United Nations meeting Oct. 17 that an Israeli air strike hit a nuclear facility in September are inaccurate and have raised the ire of some in the US intelligence community, who see the Vice President’s hand as allegedly being behind the disinformation.

. . .

Recent news articles, however, continue to make allegations and suggest that a nuclear weapons facility was hit -- something that the Syrian government has denied, the Israeli government has not officially confirmed and US intelligence does not show.

According to current and former intelligence sources, the US intelligence community has seen no evidence of a nuclear facility being hit.

US intelligence “found no radiation signatures after the bombing, so there was no uranium or plutonium present,” said one official, wishing to remain anonymous due to the sensitivity of the subject.

One US intelligence source familiar with the events expressed concern about recent news reports describing Syria as having a functioning nuclear weapons program and cautioned against attributing those reports to the US intelligence community.

“The allegations that North Korea was helping to build a nuclear reactor have not been substantiated by US intelligence,” said this intelligence official, adding, “ but that hasn't stopped Dick Cheney and his minions at the NSC, Elliot Abrams and Steve Hadley, from leaking the information [to the press], which appears to be misleading in the extreme.”

Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-West Virginia) is reportedly steering the secretive Senate Intelligence Committee to give retroactive immunity to telecoms that helped the government secretly spy on Americans.

. . .

Both companies are being sued for allegedly turning over billions of calling records to the government, while AT&T is also accused of letting the National Security Agency wiretap phone calls and its internet backbone. A federal judge in California allowed the suits regarding the eavesdropping to continue despite the government's attempt to have the suits thrown out on the grounds they will endanger national security. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals reviewed that decision in August. The judges seemed reluctant to toss the cases, but have yet to issue a ruling.

On Thursday evening, the Rockefeller-led Senate Intelligence Committee is marking up a bill to re-amend the nation's spy laws. While the text of the bill has not yet been released, the bill reportedly includes a way for the telecoms to escape the litigation against them.

Rockefeller's commitment to getting the telecoms out of court surprises some who remember that Rockefeller was originally disturbed enough about the secret spying programs that he hand-wrote a letter to Dick Cheney in 2003, expressing his concerns about the program's legality.

Iraq has called on Kurdish rebels to leave the north of the country as soon as possible, to avoid the area being targeted by the Turkish military.

Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari said the separatist PKK group was operating without permission from regional authorities.

He said his government wanted to push the PKK out of the country but lacked the military power.

"Iraqi security forces are battling the terrorists in the streets of Baghdad and many other key cities, and are overstretched," Mr Zebari said.

"To release these forces really would create a vacuum."

The Conservatives introduced their new tough-on-crime legislation in the House of Commons on Thursday, a move that is expected to put the Liberal party in a tight spot once again.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper said Wednesday he will not allow opposition parties to make any amendments to the bill, which he will declare a matter of confidence.

If the bill doesn't pass, Harper's minority government will fall and an election will be called.

. . .

Dion heads into the crime debate after making a difficult decision on Wednesday to allow the Conservative's throne speech, outlining government's mandate for the next session of Parliament, to pass.

Dion said he will introduce amendments to the throne speech and if those are rejected, he will ask his party to abstain from voting on the speech, leaving the Conservatives with enough votes to pass the motion in support of the speech on their own.

“The Conservatives laundered over $1.2-million in national advertising expenses through local campaigns, which is against the law. Even worse, they tried to pad bank accounts of 66 Conservative riding associations with over $780,000 with taxpayer-funded rebates, again against the law,” charged Liberal Whip Karen Redman during one particularly heated exchange in the House.

Conservative House Leader Peter Van Loan defended the party's actions by saying other parties have engaged in similar practices – though Elections Canada says it has not seen this type of transaction before.

Liberals emerging from Question Period said their performance showed why it is in their interests not to bring down the government.

“I think we saw in Question Period today the kind of grilling that the Prime Minister and the government doesn't want,” Nova Scotia MP Scott Brison said.

James Watson, a Nobel Prize winner for his part in the unravelling of DNA who now runs one of America's leading scientific research institutions, drew widespread condemnation for comments he made ahead of his arrival in Britain today for a speaking tour at venues including the Science Museum in London.

The 79-year-old geneticist reopened the explosive debate about race and science in a newspaper interview in which he said Western policies towards African countries were wrongly based on an assumption that black people were as clever as their white counterparts when "testing" suggested the contrary. He claimed genes responsible for creating differences in human intelligence could be found within a decade.

In 1997, he told a British newspaper that a woman should have the right to abort her unborn child if tests could determine it would be homosexual. He later insisted he was talking about a "hypothetical" choice which could never be applied. He has also suggested a link between skin colour and sex drive, positing the theory that black people have higher libidos, and argued in favour of genetic screening and engineering on the basis that " stupidity" could one day be cured. He has claimed that beauty could be genetically manufactured, saying: "People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would great."

His views are also reflected in a book published next week, in which he writes: "There is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so."

It has been easy to express scepticism - even cynicism - about the Bush administration's efforts to try to bring about peace in the Middle East.

After all, this is an administration that throughout its entire first term - and much of its second - has shown little sense of urgency.

There is suspicion too as to why the Bush administration has chosen to focus on the issue now.

Is America's recent engagement little more than PR - trying to appease growing Arab anger, trying to win support for its actions in Iraq?

"We have better things to do than invite people to Annapolis for a photo op,"

“Every family has a black sheep.”

An eyewitness with cellphone footage spoke out Monday night about what she allegedly saw at the Vancouver International Airport when a man was subdued with Tasers by RCMP and later died.

. . .

Sima Ashrafinia, who recorded the incident at the airport on her cellphone, told CBC News that RCMP officers stunned Dziekanski four times and handcuffed him after he fell on the floor.

"The third and fourth ones were at the same time," she alleges. "The officer at his right and the officer at his left, they Tasered him at the same time and he fell down on his right.

Today marks five years since the authorization of military force in Iraq, setting Operation Iraqi Freedom in motion. Five years on, the Iraq war is as undermanned and under-resourced as it was from the start. And, five years on, Iraq is in shambles.

. . .

Against this backdrop, the U.S. military has been trying in vain to hold the country together. Even with "the surge," we simply do not have enough soldiers and marines to meet the professed goals of clearing areas from insurgent control, holding them securely and building sustainable institutions. Though temporary reinforcing operations in places like Fallujah, An Najaf, Tal Afar, and now Baghdad may brief well on PowerPoint presentations, in practice they just push insurgents to another spot on the map and often strengthen the insurgents' cause by harassing locals to a point of swayed allegiances. Millions of Iraqis correctly recognize these actions for what they are and vote with their feet -- moving within Iraq or leaving the country entirely. Still, our colonels and generals keep holding on to flawed concepts.

Of the twelve captains that wrote this article, not one of them has served in Iraq since General David Petraeus took over command of the mission. Not one of them served with the higher force levels that have been deployed to Iraq. None of them served during the Anbar Awakening. Most of them last served in 2005, two years ago.

I value the writers' service and their opinions as soldiers who have served in Iraq, but wouldn't this editorial have meant more if the Washington Post had managed to find soldiers to write it who had actually been in in Iraq in the last year?

. . .

While their opinions are valuable from a historical perspective based upon what they've seen while they served, they hardly seem to be best qualified to be able to comment upon the current situation on the ground in Iraq, as it has changed so radically since the last of them departed.

12 Captains

With an alarmingly poor grasp of political and military realities in Iraq and the United States weigh in with the following at the Washington Post:

Beijing has strongly urged US President George W Bush to cancel a planned meeting with the Dalai Lama, saying it would "seriously damage" relations.

. . .

On Wednesday, Mr Bush is due to attend a ceremony at the US Capitol where the Dalai Lama will receive a Congressional Gold Medal, a top US civilian award.

It will be the first time a sitting president will have appeared in public with the 72-year-old Buddhist leader.