From the BBC…

“The lower house of the US Congress has voted down a $700bn (£380bn) plan aimed at bailing out Wall Street.

The rescue plan, a result of tense talks between the government and lawmakers, was rejected by 228 to 205 votes in the House of Representatives.

About two-thirds of Republican lawmakers refused to back the rescue package, as well as 95 Democrats.

Shares on Wall Street plunged within seconds of the announcement, after earlier falls on global markets.

A White House spokesman said that President George W Bush was “very disappointed” by the result.

He would meet members of his team in the coming days to “determine next steps”, spokesman Tony Fratto said.

The vote followed a day of turmoil in the financial sector.”

[…]

“So grave are the consequences of this decision, reports the BBC’s Kevin Connolly from Washington, that the speaker of the house paused for several long minutes after the vote was taken before declaring it official.
The no vote plunged the world of Washington politics into turmoil and the markets into deep and instant chaos with rapid falls on Wall Street, our correspondent says.”

A comment left by a reader from Baltimore summed it up…

“I am glad the bailout bill failed. I work five days a week, save cash and pay my bills. I did not want to pay for Corporate America’s greed”.

Global Impact

» Wachovia, the fourth-largest US bank, was bought by larger rival Citigroup in a rescue deal backed by US authorities.

» Benelux banking giant Fortis was partially nationalised by the Dutch, Belgian and Luxembourg governments to ensure its survival.

» The UK government announced it was nationalising the Bradford & Bingley bank.

» Global shares fell sharply - France’s key index lost 5%, Germany’s main market dropped 4% while US shares plunged after the vote result was announced.

Update

I’m not one to happily use Lou Dobbs to demonstrate a point, but in this instance it’s pretty relevant (tip: satchboogieca)….

If one amazing thing did occur during tonight’s first Presidential debate it was the BBC’s live web coverage. While the debate was streamed live, automatic updates were posted below it, including comments from site visitors in real time, blog entry excerpts in real time, Twitter Tweets, and commentary by the BBC’s Justin Webb in real time (their North American editor). It was, as far as web feats go, extremely impressive. You can check it out here.

I don’t know what to say about this. It’s quite beyond me…

“A 73-year-old Austrian is under arrest on suspicion of hiding his daughter in a cellar for 24 years and fathering seven children with her, police say.

The existence of the woman, believed missing since 1984 and now 42, emerged after a teenage child fell ill and had to be taken to hospital.
Both the woman and teenage girl are receiving medical treatment and the other children are in care.

A police investigation in Amstetten, Lower Austria Province, is continuing.
The suspect, named only as Josef F, was arrested on suspicion of incest and keeping his daughter in captivity. He has not responded to the charges against him, police say.

One of the children the man allegedly fathered died in infancy, police believe.

Three children, including the 19-year-old, were allegedly kept in the cellar with their mother while the other three reportedly grew up with their grandparents.”

[…]

“The mother, named as Elisabeth F, has been receiving medical and psychological treatment since being discovered.

She appeared “greatly disturbed” psychologically during questioning and agreed to talk only after authorities assured her that she would no longer have to have contact with her father, and that her children would be taken care of, police added.

The six children are three boys and three girls aged between five and 20.
Police spokesman Franz Polzer told reporters they had been taken to a safe location.

“They are all in psychological care in a secure institution in a clinic here in this area,” he said.

“They are being cared for individually - those between 12 and 16 years of age who grew up with their grandparents, and two boys who, when they came out yesterday with their mother, saw the daylight for the first time in their lives.”

The three children who grew up with their grandparents were left at birth outside the house, the first accompanied by a note from Elisabeth in which she said she could not care for the baby herself.”

[…]

“She said she had been sexually abused by her father since the age of 11.
Josef allegedly lured her into the cellar of their house in Amstetten on 28 August 1984, drugging and handcuffing her before locking her up.

It was assumed she had disappeared voluntarily when her parents received a letter from her asking them not to search for her.

“Abused continuously during the 24-year-long imprisonment”, Elisabeth bore six children while a seventh, one of a set of twins, died soon after birth.

The dead baby was allegedly taken out of the cellar and burnt by Josef.

Elisabeth said Josef had provided her and three of her children, who were locked up along with her, with clothing and food.

His wife Rosemarie had allegedly not been aware of what was going on.

The discovery of another Austrian woman, who was held captive in a cellar by an abductor for more than eight years, gripped the country in 2006.”

If there is a hell, that poor woman has seen it. No matter what happens now, she will remain the shadow of a person. How do you compensate someone for the loss of their life when they’re technically still alive?

In a surprising move after reports that Turkey’s offensive in northern Iraq would be sustained for the foreseeable future, Turkish forces began withdrawing yesterday in force. It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that the withdrawal occurred just after President Bush called on the Turkish government to end the offensive and a day after US Defense Secretary Robert Gates visited the Turkish capital to deliver Washington’s message that the incursion must not be open ended. Of course, the Turkish government and military is claiming that the withdrawal was preplanned and that it had nothing to do with US pressure, but that’s obviously transparent given the fact that the withdrawal itself began before any official Turkish statements were made regarding it.

Were I to venture a guess, I would say that behind closed doors Washington rubber stamped the Turkish invasion and then used condemnation of it to remove suspicions of complicity. And, of course, the Turks played along and got what they wanted out of it.

That would be my guess anyway.

Gaza

Here’s the back story via the BBC…

I want to state, for the record, that the use of violence by both sides in this matter is, in my opinion, unforgivable given the toll that it has taken on civilians, both at present and in years past.

That said; when one looks at this in a very hard, cold light, there are a few realities that must be addressed, though many of you might disagree.

The governing issue of Israel and Palestine as entities and the decades old arguments about how that region has found itself where it is now aside, there are a few truths that we should be willing to admit as members of a society that is primarily pro-Israeli.

The first is that Hamas is a terrorist organization, one that is supported by numerous benefactors throughout the Middle East. They fire homemade rockets into Israel from the slums of one of the world’s foremost ghettos where millions rely on international humanitarian aid to simply survive. That aid, by the way, is also one of the most outstanding examples of international blackmail in modern history.

Israel, on the other hand, is supported by the world’s foremost military super power and is the recipient of immense military aid. They possess a state of the art air force, replete with US made fighters, bombers, and attack helicopters. They possess state of the art armour and boast one of the best-trained and equipped armed forces in the world. They also possess a nuclear arsenal, a navy, and one of the world’s most feared covert intelligence outfits.

Were Palestinian militants to possess the same military capabilities as the Israelis, the need to lob homemade rockets and employ suicide bombers wouldn’t be required. In short, they would possess the same ‘honourable’ weapons of war as the Israelis and be in the position to employ them in the exact same fashion that the IDF does. That is, of course, not something that Israel, nor those that support it, would ever stand for. Thus, those who believe in the ridiculous use of violence as a measure with which to lash out against Israel wouldn’t be lobbing homemade rockets into Israel from Gaza and, in the process, endangering the lives of innocents that end up paying the price when Israeli forces retaliate – not to mention killing Israeli civilians.

That is, if you actually believe that a fair brawl between conventional forces doesn’t produce civilian deaths, which is, of course, a fallacy. In truth, they produce far more.

In this neck of the woods, the math is simple. A single Israeli life is equal to that of maybe 100 Palestinians. Let’s face it, they’re terrorists and extremists, or at least that’s what they’re painted as being by our media. The Israelis, on the other hand, are simply trying to defend themselves. Never mind the massive economic disparities between the two, never mind that Gaza is little more than a massive prison camp for all intents and purposes, which provides the sort of atmosphere in which those desperate enough are willing to focus their anger in ways that are unconscionable. If you cage an animal long enough it’s going to do one of two things. Wither away to nothing or start taking swipes through the bars at those on the other side.

Gaza is not internationally recognized as being a part of any sovereign entity, nor is it claimed by any, though it’s currency remains the Israeli Sheqel. After Hamas’ victory in Parliamentary elections in 2006, Israel, The United States, Canada, and the EU froze all funds to the Palestinian government, economically crippling it. Due to the fact that Hamas is considered a terrorist organization, it is not viewed as a legitimate governing body, even within the tenuous confines of a government that never really had any international recognition beyond that required to placate those responsible for providing it economic aid. Thus, as long as Hamas remains in power, their presence will be used as an excuse to continue to punish the people as a whole, despite the fact that it was democratically elected – a process that those who refuse to recognize it claim to champion the world over (that is, as long as it conforms to their ideology).

Now, let me state for the record that I am not defending Hamas. Obviously, the recognition of Israeli’s right to exist is something that must occur. After decades of the same tired argument, the time has come to consider the welfare of the Palestinian people as a whole, which, for some, is a bitter pill to swallow. That said; there is certainly a reason why Hamas was successful in the elections in 2006.

Gaza is 41 kilometers long and 12 kilometers wide; that’s 360 square kilometers. In that space there are 1.4 million people, 1 million of which are officially recognized by the United Nations as refugees. Some 18% of children in Gaza between the ages of 6 months and 5 years old suffer from chronic malnutrition. 53% of women of reproductive age and children are anemic. Given such facts, one can begin to see why support for an organization that undertakes initiatives within the community to secure popular support, not to mention striking at those they view as their oppressors, might attract the support of the suffering and the disenfranchised. In truth, it’s not a phenomenon that is, by any stretch of the imagination, limited to that area of the world. It is a phenomenon that has been quintessential in the birth of Western democracies and, if we’re going to be completely honest, Israel itself.

Now, you can rush out and get a copy of The National Post and succumb to the bias that we’re exposed to on a daily basis regarding this issue, or you can spend some time trying to look at it from the other side of the fence (literally). I’ll not condone the use of violence as a method with which to enact change, but I will also not condemn those that feel they have no way out of a situation that is, in truth, entirely comparable to an existence in prison. There are better ways to go about it, I will admit that freely, and also not hesitate to suggest that such methods be embraced, but I do not live in Gaza, nor do I have to endure its realities, so that position remains one of a lofty Western idealist.

The Iranian Laptop Nuke Data

Gareth Porter provides some valuable insight regarding this issue…

“The George W. Bush administration has long pushed the “laptop documents” – 1,000 pages of technical documents supposedly from a stolen Iranian laptop – as hard evidence of Iranian intentions to build a nuclear weapon. Now charges based on those documents pose the only remaining obstacles to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) declaring that Iran has resolved all unanswered questions about its nuclear program.

But those documents have long been regarded with great suspicion by US and foreign analysts. German officials have identified the source of the laptop documents in November 2004 as the Mujahideen e Khalq (MEK), which along with its political arm, the National Council of Resistance in Iran (NCRI), is listed by the US State Department as a terrorist organization.

There are some indications, moreover, that the MEK obtained the documents not from an Iranian source but from Israel’s Mossad.

In its latest report on Iran, circulated Feb. 22, the IAEA, under strong pressure from the Bush administration, included descriptions of plans for a facility to produce “green salt,” technical specifications for high explosives testing and the schematic layout of a missile reentry vehicle that appears capable of holding a nuclear weapon. Iran has been asked to provide full explanations for these alleged activities.

Tehran has denounced the documents on which the charges are based as fabrications provided by the MEK, and has demanded copies of the documents to analyze, but the United States had refused to do so.

The Iranian assertion is supported by statements by German officials. A few days after then-Secretary of State Colin Powell announced the laptop documents, Karsten Voight, the coordinator for German-American relations in the German Foreign Ministry, was reported by the Wall Street Journal Nov. 22, 2004 as saying that the information had been provided by “an Iranian dissident group.”

A German official familiar with the issue confirmed to this writer that the NCRI had been the source of the laptop documents. “I can assure you that the documents came from the Iranian resistance organization.,” the source said.

The Germans have been deeply involved in intelligence collection and analysis regarding the Iranian nuclear program. According to a story by Washington Post reporter Dafna Linzer soon after the laptop documents were first mentioned publicly by Powell in late 2004, US officials said they had been stolen from an Iranian whom German intelligence had been trying to recruit, and had been given to intelligence officials of an unnamed country in Turkey.

The German account of the origins of the laptop documents contradicts the insistence by unnamed US intelligence officials who insisted to journalists William J. Broad and David Sanger in November 2005 that the laptop documents did not come from any Iranian resistance groups.

Despite the fact that it was listed as a terrorist organization., the MEK was a favorite of neoconservatives in the Pentagon, who were proposing in 2003-2004 to use it as part of a policy to destabilize Iran. The United States is known to have used intelligence from the MEK on Iranian military questions for years. It was considered a credible source of intelligence on the Iranian nuclear program. after 2002, mainly because of its identification of the facility in Natanz as a nuclear site.

The German source said he did not know whether the documents were authentic or not. However, CIA analysts, and European and IAEA officials who were given access to the laptop documents in 2005 were very skeptical about their authenticity.

The Guardian’s Julian Borger last February quoted an IAEA official as saying there is “doubt over the provenance of the computer.”

A senior European diplomat who had examined the documents was quoted by the New York Times in November 2005 as saying, “I can fabricate that data. It looks beautiful, but is open to doubt.”

Scott Ritter, the former US military intelligence officer who was chief United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998, noted in an interview that the CIA has the capability test the authenticity of laptop documents through forensic tests that would reveal when different versions of different documents were created.

The fact that the agency could not rule out the possibility of fabrication, according to Ritter, indicates that it had either chosen not to do such tests or that the tests had revealed fraud.”

I think I did something wrong there and lost a post while trying to edit it. We’ve been having a lot of weird things happening lately, which has been driving The Hobbit up the wall. So sorry about that. The link to the story that I mentioned is here if you want to read or bookmark it.

There seems to be a lot of ghosts in the machine lately. For one thing, my iChat on my new iMac is completely screwed and I have absolutely no idea why. I have tried everything that I, and a host of others (including friends at Apple), could think of with zero results. Basically, the chat function works fine, but once I try and video chat with someone the application crashes. Another bizarre thing is that every time I open it up, an empty chat window appears that is linked to the last person that I was talking to, even though I closed the application and the window. I have to admit, for all its advances, Leopard is becoming a bit of a pain in the ass.

Plus, my fucking caps lock key is still screwed.

Music Crap

I have been doing a lot of demoing recently and have completed half of my next release. I most likely won’t step into a studio until the fall, at the earliest, so you just know that I’m going to forget 90% of the guitar parts and have to spend two weeks figuring them all out again.

Damn it!

My DVD War With John Amato

John Amato, owner/operator of Crooks & Liars, and I have been engaged in an all out contest to see who can watch an entire television series on DVD in the shortest amount of time. And while that might make us sound like slackers, the reality is that John has been rather ill, and therefore bedridden, and I just haven’t been able to sleep for two weeks.

So far, John is ahead, though I did recently watch all of Ken Burn’s ‘The Civil War’ (for the 400th time) in one sitting, so I might have stolen the crown. I’ll have to wait and see what he comes up with next. Of course, he has the ever-evolving Presidential race to cover, among other things, so his time is going to be limited.

An Observation Regarding One Of My Favourite Blogs

It’s no secret that one of my favourite daily reads is Hot Chicks With Douchebags. Why, you ask, given the altogether serious nature of my own website? Well, probably because of the altogether seriousness of my own website.

That said; if you spend some time looking at the photographs on the site you’ll begin to see an eerie pattern emerge. 98% of the girls in those pictures look identical. The same blonde hair, the same wavy extensions, the same facial expressions, the same clothes. Is there a handbook out there that details this stuff? Come to think of it, given my past, I suppose I should be able to answer that question, now shouldn’t I.

Shit, my coffee’s cold.

I’ve been a voting member of the International Academy of Digital Arts And Sciences for a few years now. Every year the IADAS holds The Webby Awards in New York to recognize the best of the web in a variety of different fields, one of them being the news category.

The BBC, which has one of the most in-depth and user friendly websites in the world, is commonly the winner of the news category, and one of the standout features of the site has always been its lack of adverts. Thus, I was surprised to discover that they have recently started to include adverts on their front page.

To most, the inclusion of adverts on a website is a pretty common thing. In fact, it’s something that is so commonplace that we tend not to really notice them most of the time. But as someone that studies websites, especially when it comes to voting with regards to The Webby’s, the fact that The BBC has started to include adverts is a bit of a disappointment. In fact, for me, it’s a big disappointment. True, revenue will be gained - God knows that advertising on the front page of The BBC’s website would not only provide immense traffic, but cost a great deal of money as well. I suppose it’s just sad to see something that was free of adverts in a realm that is utterly inundated by them finally succumb.

Another Miraculous Apple Breakthrough

But can you plug them in when you’re in the car?

Call me suspicious, but I find it hard to believe that the Gulf Cooperation Council is suddenly willing to provide enriched uranium to Iran without the covert involvement of the United States. To me it smacks of a MERLIN redeux, an attempt to sabotage the process from within using Gulf State allies. At the very least, it would provide a glimpse at the state of Iran’s program.

“Prince Saud said the GCC had developed the proposal to stave off a nuclear arms race in the Gulf.

Iran says its nuclear programme is for civilian energy purposes, but the US claims Tehran is developing nuclear weapons.

Prince Saud is reported to have said: “They [the Iranians] have responded that it is an interesting idea and they will come back to us.

“The US is not involved, but I don’t think it would be hostile to this, and it would resolve a main area of tension between the West and Iran.”

Given that President Bush recently employed the term ‘World War Three’ with regards to Iran’s nuclear potential, I find it highly unlikely that the United States would welcome this without some promise of an intelligence conduit being instituted that allowed them inside the deal’s particulars and, more importantly, if it happens, information gleaned from it. Given that the Gulf States involved are all US allies - Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates - it seems a stretch to believe that there isn’t a man behind the proverbial curtain.

There’s something to be said when some 300 US diplomats turn up at a State Department meeting incensed at the fact that some of their numbers are being forced to serve a year in Iraq - at either the US embassy or at other locations - or face the loss of their jobs: that the reality of the security situation is still so dismal that serving in the most heavily fortified part of the country is still deemed a risky affair. According to the BBC…

“The meeting was called to explain the “forced assignments” order made by state department human resources director Harry Thomas.

Last Friday, he notified about 250 “prime candidates” that they had been selected for one of 48 one-year postings at the embassy in Baghdad or in a Provincial Reconstruction Team elsewhere in the country.

They were given 10 days to reply.

Senior diplomat Jack Croddy, who once worked as a political adviser with Nato forces, highlighted safety fears of staff who would be forced to serve in a war zone.

“It’s one thing if someone believes in what’s going on over there and volunteers, but it’s another thing to send someone over there on a forced assignment,” Mr Croddy said.

“I’m sorry, but basically that’s a potential death sentence and you know it. Who will raise our children if we are dead or seriously wounded?

“You know that at any other [country] in the world, the embassy would be closed at this point.”

For months, US officials have been warning that a lack of volunteers could lead to this diplomatic call-up, says the BBC’s James Coomarasamy in Washington.

Many positions are due to become vacant in 2008.

But unions say the constantly growing embassy in Iraq is straining human resources.

An attractive financial package is being offered as well as a generous leave allowance.

But the Baghdad embassy is considered a hardship posting due to security risks and because spouses and children must be left at home.”

The US embassy in Iraq is the largest of its kind in the world, a rather ridiculous fact considering the state of affairs in the country itself. It symbolizes to many Iraqis the permanence of a US presence, and has even been involved in both financial and human rights scandals during its construction – both to do with the Kuwaiti firm hired to build it. In some instances, foreign workers were flown to Iraq and forced to work on the project having believed they were being taken elsewhere. While there, they were also forced to endure what have been called ‘slave labour’ conditions.

Maj Gen Tim Cross has come out of the wilderness, a wilderness in which others still reside, such as former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, George Bush, Dick Cheney, John Bolton – just to name a scant few. All of them, despite the massive disaster faced after the initial invasion of Iraq, still tow the line that post war planning was either sufficient or that those problems that arose could not have been foreseen.

Cross was the most senior British officer in charge of post war planning, and his decision to speak out has shed some light on a reality that tens of millions of Iraqis have since had to endure. That no realistic post war plan was solidly in place prior to the invasion, and that the US Department of Defense didn’t want to listen to criticisms and warnings.

According to the BBC, Cross has said…

“…he had raised serious concerns about potential post-war problems in Iraq with the then US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

But he said Mr Rumsfeld “dismissed” or “ignored” the warnings.

“Right from the very beginning we were all very concerned about the lack of detail that had gone into the post-war plan and there is no doubt that Rumsfeld was at the heart of that process,” he said.

“I had lunch with Rumsfeld in February in Washington - before the invasion in March 2003 - and raised concerns about the need to internationalise the reconstruction of Iraq and work closely with the United Nations.”

Maj Gen Cross, 59, who was deputy head of the coalition’s Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, said he also raised concerns over the number of troops available to maintain security in Iraq.

“He didn’t want to hear that message,” he said. “The US had already convinced themselves that following the invasion Iraq would emerge reasonably quickly as a stable democracy.”

He added: “There is no doubt that with hindsight the US post-war plan was fatally flawed and many of us sensed that at the time.”

[…]

“We should have kept the Iraqi security services in being and put them under the command of the coalition,” he said.

It’s been five years and electricity still isn’t reliable in Baghdad. The United States has been able to construct the largest embassy on the planet in that time worth in excess of $500 million dollars, but your average Baghdadi still doesn’t know when the lights might go out – or come back on, for that matter.

Look no further than Mr. Bush’s aircraft carrier escapade for some insight into just how much thought the United States put into post war planning. During that speech, the President declared major combat operations at an end. Tell that to the 4,000 some odd families of US soldiers that have died in ‘post-war’ Iraq, not to mention the families of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.

Daniel Ellsberg was a United States Marine. He worked for the Rand Corporation, was a noted Hawk, worked for the Pentagon under John McNaughton, served in Vietnam as a military observer for the Pentagon, and was an ardent supporter of the Vietnam war.

That is, until he realized that the war that was being advertised was not the one being waged.

When he return to the United States he left the Pentagon, returned to Rand, and was a contributing author of the 7,000 page, 47 volume study entitled - United States-Vietnam Relations, 1945–1967: A Study Prepared by the Department of Defense.

Being that Ellsberg was a contributing author, he was able to get Rand to pull some strings and allow him to obtain a copy of the top secret study, one which Congress did not even know existed. In it’s 7,000 pages, which Ellsberg read twice, he discovered the horrible truth about what he had once not only supported, but promoted. The study revealed the sham that was the Gulf of Tonkin incident, among numerous other transgressions and secrets unknown to both Congress and the American public. They were also not limited to a single administration, but ran through numerous ones.

And so this proud United States Marine, a man that had served his country in one capacity or another for most of his adult life, embarked on one of the most patriotic acts in American history.

During the night he would smuggle parts of the study out of Rand, where it was kept in his office in a locked safe, and began the arduous task of photocopying all 7,000 pages with the help of a former Rand employee and friend, Tony Russo.

The act itself was, in truth, highly illegal. Then again, when such knowledge is kept from the public, how does one define illegality and patriotism?

Ultimately, after exhausting innumerable avenues, excerpts from the study were printed by the New York Times. On the 28th of June, 1971, he surrendered himself to authorities in Boston and was charged with espionage, theft, and conspiracy. But despite the fact that he was, in truth, facing a lifetime in prison for leaking the study, the case against him was dismissed after it was learned that The Plumbers had broken into the office of his psychiatrist and stolen his files in hopes of finding information to use against him. Charles Colson, a White House Council, would later plead no contest to obstruction of justice with regards to their theft.

In the years since, Daniel Ellsberg, once an ardent Hawk, has been a dedicated activist. And in a piece posted today at Antiwar.com entitled Libby And Vanunu, he continues to make incredibly intelligent challenges to the abuse of power, be it in the United States or elsewhere.

An excerpt…

“There is no question that the information Vanunu revealed to the press in 1986 – primarily, that Israel, which has never signed the Nonproliferation Treaty nor opened its nuclear operations to any international inspection, had been for some time a nuclear weapons state, with an arsenal larger than that of Britain and perhaps larger than that of France – was regarded as secret in Israel and his revelation was illegal. On the other hand, no other nuclear weapons state had kept this status secret from its own people and the world: again, with the exception of South Africa, which revealed its earlier secret arsenal at the same time it disbanded it, along with apartheid. Moreover, by 1986 this program (aside from the scale Vanunu revealed, which was a surprise even to CIA) was a secret almost exclusively from those Israelis and others (including, officially, the American government) that chose to believe Israel’s ambiguous and deliberately deceptive denials.

In any case, it was information that Vanunu’s fellow citizens deserved urgently to have had long before, in time to reach an informed, democratic judgment and influence on their country’s policy. In my opinion, Mordechai Vanunu did what he should have with the information he acquired. I hope that I would have done the same in his position. His readiness to accept the personal risk that his truth-telling actually entailed – that he would suffer a long prison sentence (and the longest time in solitary confinement known to Amnesty International, which defined it as a human rights violation) – is deserving of worldwide admiration, and, I hope, emulation. His continued restriction and persecution after serving his sentence, his new return to prison for six months on a pretense of preserving 25-year-old secrets that he has yet to reveal (and which the restrictions do not protect), are illegal and outrageous.”

Today in Iraq, 231 Iraqis lost their lives and 311 more were wounded. With regards to the effects of President Bush’s ‘surge’, the BBC provides some insight…

The US costs for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq this year are up by one third, and could bring the total overall costs for both wars to in excess of 1.4 trillion dollars (slightly more than the United States owes China).

Two short films shot by Kay. One of my niece Lilah, and one of the infamous ‘snapping turtle!’…