Kidnapped in Iraq - and this time they're ours

Here is the Christian Peacemaker Teams website talking about their four workers who were kidnapped. In a blog a couple of months ago I noted how courageous I thought these people were because they have been operating outside the Green Zone.
Canadian James Loney has worked in Iraq to take testimony from families of prisoners. The other Canadian captured, Harmeet Singh Sooden, is working toward a Master's degree in English literature. American Tom Fox is a Quaker, while Briton Norman Kember taught medicine in England.
And here is the most recent CPT update on Iraq -- a posting from earlier this month describing what is happening now in Falluja. CPT was one of the first groups to identify and document the prisoner abuse issue in Iraq.

Mr. Putz

So what is the one thing that everyone told Harper to just leave alone?
Just move on, Stephen, everyone said -- its settled now and a majority of Canadians support it and just about nobody except a few diehards even want to see it debated anymore?
So what is the first thing out of Harper's mouth? "Harper vows free vote on gay marriage"
Great judgement, Stevie -- exactly the quality of political decision-making we've come to expect from you. Mr. Putz.

Nuts and dolts

Well, here we go again.
I say right out front that I hope Harper and his Reform Lite party does not win.
Its not so much Harper himself that I object to -- though he doesn't manage his caucus very well and I doubt his ability to run a government. But what I am most afraid of all the right-wing nuts and dolts who would flood into Ottawa with him.
We don't need to refight all of the battles of the last 20 years -- same sex marriage, abortion, gun registration, Kyoto, missle defense, Iraq - but we will have to if some of Harper's supporters have their way.
And personally, I like Paul Martin - always have, always will. He loves this country -- all of it, including the parts that don't love him. I think the campaign will energize him, like the last one did.
So I'll be keeping track of progressive campaign coverage at Progressive Bloggers . And I'll be keeping track of the atrocities by monitoring the Blogging Tories site too -- hey, some of them are already talking about "librull" bias in the campaign coverage.

Great line of the day

From Americablog: "Say what you will about Bill Clinton, we never had to worry about whether he had gone crazy."

Great line of the day

Digby writes:

"Yea! President Bush has finally achieved consensus for his Iraq pull-out plan. . . . As you know, Democrats have long been insisting that the US stay in Iraq indefinitely. It was only through the wise counsel and patient persuasion of Dick Cheney and George W. Bush that they were convinced that a timed withdrawal was the best way to go. While it's great news that the Iraq war is over and done with (and the liberals can finally stop obsessing over it) it's going to take some work to get them to stop lobbying for more tax cuts and destroying social security. When are they going to get some responsibility and recognize that there is no free lunch? At least the Bush administration finally got the liberals to let the poor Katrina victims keep a roof over their heads until after Christmas. Jeez, what Scrooges. "

Emphasis mine. Yep, those awful democrats!
Well, I guess the Bush administration lied their way into this war, so why should anyone be surprised to see them lying their way out?

They'll turn themselves inside out

The White House has jumped the shark and is now doing EXACTLY what Murtha said they should do. And the Bush bloggers are going to have to turn themselves inside out on this one.
The White House is now saying they had a withdrawal plan all along and - suprise, surprise - its just about exactly the same as Joe Biden's plan. (Of course, really, it is John Murtha's plan that both Biden and the White House are now claiming as their own.)

The White House has for the first time claimed ownership of an Iraq withdrawal plan, arguing that a troop pullout blueprint unveiled this past week by a Democratic senator was 'remarkably similar' to its own . . . the United States will move about 50,000 servicemen out of the country by the end of 2006, and "a significant number" of the remaining 100,000 the year after. The blueprint also calls for leaving only an unspecified "small force" either in Iraq or across the border to strike at concentrations of insurgents, if necessary.

Murtha wanted them all out sooner, but it was his idea to move the troops 'over the horizon' - out of Iraq but still in the neighbourhood.
So the White House will now be trying to revise history, chattering on all the talk shows today about how they had a withdrawal plan all along -- I wonder how this will go over with the general public and with the media, who can look up for themselves all the "withdrawal = treason" quotes from the White House for the last three years.
But I also wonder whether Bush's few remaining supporters are going to be able to twist themselves into knots to support this, when they've spent the last several months gleefully trashing everyone who even used the words "withdrawal plan". All those blog posts that trashed Murtha and all democrats as cowards and traitors for even daring to suggest that the US should get out of Iraq -- well, I guess they're all now "inoperative". And all those OpEds and comment pieces about that bitch Cindy Sheehan and that traitor Michael Moore and those cowardly liberal "out of the mainstream" democrats -- well, never mind.
What are these people going to do now? Will they go back over all their recent blog posts and just delete the ones that talked about how stupid it would be to announce a withdrawal plan? Or willl they also start writing now about how they actually always supported the idea of having a withdrawal plan all along -- oh, and by the way, Oceania was always at war with Eastasia and anyone who remembers it differently obviously requires some reeducation from the Thought Police.

John Bolton makes the US look ridiculous again

The Bush administration thinks Bolton is hot stuff, but the rest of the world knows he is just a jerk. The British are not impressed by John Bolton's 'hold my breath til I turn blue' option at the UN, his heavy-handed attempt to shut down the budget until he gets his way. Not surprisingly, neither the Brits nor the European Union are backing Bolton -- I guess he can run down the hallway screaming and see how effective that is. The Telegraph story also reports that Bolton hasn't bothered to make friends or influence people at the UN -- "British diplomats express surprise that he has not made greater efforts to cultivate them or build alliances." Well, mainly, its because he doesn't know how.

Well, duhhhhh!

JoshMarshall says:

. . . there is no debate about withdrawing American troops from Iraq. That's over. What we have is posturing and positioning over the political consequences of withdrawal. The White House and the president's partisans will lay down a wall of covering fire, calling anybody who considers withdrawal an appeaser, to allow the president to go about the business of drawing down the American presence in Iraq in time to game the 2006 elections.

Well, OF COURSE that is what the Bush administration is doing. Is anyone surprised?
By the time of the Congressional midterms next year, the Republicans will all be saying "War? What war? Oh, we won that one, don't ya know!"

Go sofa, go

The other day, I said I wanted to see a photo of the world's fastest sofa.
Well, here it is, from the Cummfy Banana website:

It has a top speed of 87 miles per hour, and its in the Guinness Book of World Records.
Thanks very much to reader Lindsay for sending this along.

Torture -- don't ya just LOVE it?

Yesterday's Hardball showed an odd Chris Matthews performance -- it was about torture, and Matthews came across as lovin' it. The whole interview gave me a creepy-crawly sensation, like he was feeling himself up under the desk while he was talking about all these delicious torture techniques.
Matthews was interviewing an FBI interrogator named Joe Navarro, who has just published a text on interview techniques -- something needed, I think, considering how poorly trained the CIA and military interrogators apparently are these days.
While Navarro kept trying to deal with the issue seriously, Matthews kept chattering about Famous Torturers I Have Known and Loved. Here are some of the things Matthews said during the interview:

MATTHEWS: . . . I love this title - 'Advanced Interviewing Techniques.' Is that meant to be sarcastic or what? Interviewing techniques --I mean, if somebody has their thumbs in screws, is that an interview technique?

Obviously, he hadn't read the book -- he actually thought it described how to torture someone. Then he continues with a 'torture' example, metaphorically licking his lips as he describes a scenario:

You see a snake pit in front of you, all these snakes down there, killer snakes, horrible looking creatures, and you say to a person, if you don't answer the next three questions, you are going in that, and you are going to die in that pit. That doesn't work?
NAVARRO: It doesn't, because what may happen is, what that will generate is, they may just begin to provide superfluous information.
MATTHEWS: Well, then you say that is not good enough, buddy. You're going in the pit unless you tell us the truth.
NAVARRO: We don't—you need to establish the truth. For instance, if you harass someone long enough or even torture them, one of things that happens is it attenuates our ability to detect deception. The best way to detect deception is to establish some sort of norm. If we are torturing somebody or harassing them, we are, in fact, affecting their limbic system and our ability to read them. So it works against us.

Then Matthews starts into his Famous Torturers riff. First, how about the Mafia?

MATTHEWS: If it doesn't work, why does the mob use it? Don't they use it to find out who ratted who out? They used to do it in the movies.
NAVARRO: They use it because they are psychopaths, Chris.

Next, how about Dirty Harry and Jack Bauer -- the Hollywood script where the good guy KNOWS that the bad guy knows the secret and the-bad-guy-must-talk-or-the-child-will-die:

MATTHEWS: So you don't buy the Alan Dershowitz, the professor at Harvard, who says if you've got somebody in the 11th hour and they know that it's going to be doomsday for the planet like a nuclear weapon in New York, a real nuclear bomb in New York, in the subway system, you don't think you would go to extreme measures?
NAVARRO: Look, Dershowitz is a brilliant attorney. He is not a world-class interviewer. I have talked to world class interviewers, I have taught these individuals. We don't need to torture these individuals.
MATTHEWS: What is the risk though in doing it? If you're really brutal about it, you needed to get the information, what's wrong with torturing somebody if it's a million people or 100,000 people are going to die the next day.
NAVARRO: Number one, the person may die. Number two, he may lie to us. Number three, he may lead us astray. Number four ...
MATTHEWS: Well, what do you have to lose at that point, if they're not talking?
NAVARRO: What do you have to lose? A lot. Because what if he has other information.

Finally, how about those Third-World Secret Police?

MATTHEWS: . . . We send them to parts of the world that don't have this intellectual approach to this. They may have some psychopaths on the payroll down in the basement of some truth ministry in Cairo or Amman or somewhere else over there in that part of the world. Why do we do that if we don't think torture works? Why do we have these renditions to these dark basements in the third world?
NAVARRO: I've never been party to it. And if it is going on, I don't agree to it. I think everything that we do should—or we do should stand up to judicial scrutiny . . . good interrogators don't need these techniques, they don't want these techniques. We just absolutely don't need them . . .
MATTHEWS: Do the Israelis keep their prisoners naked for weeks at a time, like in “Little Drummer Girl,” that movie?
NAVARRO: That I don't know.
MATTHEWS: Do they turn the lights on, like in “Darkness at Noon?”
NAVARRO: You know, a lot of books have been written about some of the techniques. I think they have gotten away from that because the Israeli Supreme Court said knock it off.
MATTHEWS: Do you believe that it's torture to keep a person awake for long periods of time, to use sleep deprivation to weaken their resistance? Is that torture?
NAVARRO: Yes I do. I do. I don't think it works.
MATTHEWS: It doesn't. I bet you become very hallucinatory and weak-minded if you are awake for days after days without getting enough night time.
NAVARRO: Look, if I have a subject I'm working on I want his mind to be lucid.

And at the end of the interview, Matthews still has techniques for torture on his mind:

MATTHEWS: Is there anybody who disagrees with you on this, who thinks torture works?
NAVARRO: There may be, but I'll tell you what, it's not something the FBI has ever taught and I still teach there. And we don't teach that. And we never will.
MATTHEWS: No thumb screws, no electric charges, nothing like that?
NAVARRO: Absolutely not.
MATTHEWS: God, it makes me surprised. I'm amazed there is no effort like that, even in extreme cases?
NAVARRO: We don't want it.

But Matthews does.

November 22, 1963

Anybody here seen my old friend John?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
He freed lotta people but it seems the good they die young
I just looked around and he's gone
. . .
Didn't you love the things that they stood for?
Didn't they try to find some good for you and me?
And we'll be free
Some day soon, it's gonna be one day

Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up over the hill
With Abraham, Martin, and John

Endorsed by the Klan?

Harper will be just thrilled with this, I'm sure:

Ontario MP Pat O'Brien . . . announced Tuesday that he has founded Defend Marriage Canada with a Conservative ally. . . ex-Tory MP Grant Hill . . . the group will raise money, publish letters, and lobby voters to elect candidates who oppose same-sex marriage.

I'm sure they'll have a website, and I bet I'll be just one of the thousands of people watching it to see just which candidates they endorse.
Its like being endorsed by the Klu Klux Klan. Or the Communist Party. Thanks but no thanks.

Great lines of the day

Steve Gilliard writes about Iraq. First, why the Iraqi army is being left in the dust:

Why is the soldiering so low in most Iraqi units? Because the real soldiers are the ones fighting us, we've got the desperate and the unmotivated. We also have a military structure which continues the worst of the old Iraqi Army. The resistance is a meritocracy. Only the best and brightest can lead there. Rank matters little. There is little margin for error in guerilla warfare . . .

Second, why US politicians are being left in the dust:

People like Clinton and Biden will be left in the dust as the American people embrace an anti-war stand. They vilified Cindy Sheehan and failed. They attacked Jack Murtha and embarassed themselves. The next person they go after will turn people against the GOP. The war is over, we're only debating how we end it.

Emphasis mine.

Haggling about the price

There's an old joke that goes like this:

A fellow approaches an attractive girl and says "would you sleep with me for a million dollars?" and she says "Well, sure!" Then he says "Would you sleep with me for a dollar?" and she says "Certainly not! What do you think I am?" and he says "We already know what you are. We're just haggling about the price."

I thought of this joke when I read Digby's article about torture and what the current torture discussion demonstrates about America:

To some extent civilization is nothing more than leashing the beast within. When you go to the dark side, no matter what the motives, you run a terrible risk of destroying yourself in the process. I worry about the men and women who are engaging in this torture regime. This is dangerous to their psyches. But this is true on a larger sociological scale as well. For many, many moons, torture has been a simple taboo --- you didn't question its immorality any more than you would question the immorality of pedophilia. You know that it's wrong on a visceral, gut level. Now we are debating it as if there really is a question as to whether it's immoral --- and, more shockingly, whether it's a positive good . . . When Daniel Patrick Moynihan coined the phrase "defining deviancy down" he couldn't ever have dreamed that we would in a few short decades be at a place where torture is no longer considered a taboo. It certainly makes all of his concerns about changes to the nuclear family (and oral sex) seem trivial by comparison. We are now a society that on some official levels has decided that torture is no longer a deviant, unspeakable behavior, but rather a useful tool. It's not hidden. People publicly discuss whether torture is really torture if it features less than "pain equavalent to organ failure." People no longer instinctively recoil at the word --- it has become a launching pad for vigorous debate about whether people are deserving of certain universal human rights. It spirals down from there. When the smoke finally clears, and we can see past that dramatic day on 9/11 and put the threat of islamic fundamentalism into its proper perspective, I wonder if we'll be able to go back to our old ethical framework? I'm not so sure we will even want to. It's not that it changed us so much as it revealed us, I think. A society that can so easily discard it's legal and ethical taboos against cruelty and barbarism, is an unstable society to begin with. At this rather late stage in life, I'm realizing that the solid America I thought I knew may never have existed. Running very close, under the surface, was a frightened, somewhat hysterical culture that could lose its civilized moorings all at once. I had naively thought that there were some things that Americans would find unthinkable --- torture was one of them.

Emphasis mine.
I have a couple of thoughts about this. It makes me wonder just how synthetic was American democracy, that a single horrific event, 911, could produce such an hysterical overreaction of the Patriot Act, imprisonment without trial, loss of habeus corpus, the doctrine of preemptive war, Guantanamo, assertion of a Presidential 'divine right of kings', and now Vice President Cheney -- the Vice President! -- promoting torture as state policy.
Maybe it was just the bad luck that Bush and Cheney happened to be in power when 911 happened - they are bombastic, incompetent and fearful men whose every instinct takes them toward the dark side. But no one stepped up to stop them, not in Congress nor in the media.
Maybe there really is some basic difference between Canadians and Americans -- even though there is a lot of rhetoric in the United States about democracy and freedom, maybe we Canadians actually do value our freedom and democracy more because we're had to fight for it in our own quiet way. Maybe our democracy has been tested more, and has matured, so we wouldn't haggle it away in a fool's trade-off for mythical security. Over the last fifty years, Canada has acknowledged Aboriginal self-government, dealt with the FLQ and the October Crisis and the War Measures Act, met many of the challenges of Quebec separatism and western alientation, adopted bilingualism and multiculturalism, approved gay marriage. And even though it took us a few months, most Canadians were eventually outraged at Mahar Arar's ordeal and the abuse of civil liberties which it represented. We are still grappling with separatism, I know, but even if Canada eventually loses that battle, I don't think we would let our country degenerate into violence. We know what we are, and what we are worth.

Now there's something you don't see everyday*

I'll bet your local newspaper didn't cover this -- the world's largest motorized shopping cart:


The photo cutline reads: "This photo supplied by Guinness World Records shows Edd China talking to a shopper while driving his way into Guinness World Records book in Henley-upon-Thames, England,Tuesday, Nov. 8, 2005, after engineering what the book calls the largest motorized shopping cart in the world. The 11.4 feet tall, 9.8 feet long and 5.9 feet wide cart was created to celebrate the book's self-proclaimed first ever Guinness World Records Day on Wednesday Nov. 9, 2005. Edd is also currently featured in the Guinness World Records 2006 edition book for his record for the World's Fastest Sofa."(AP Photo/Guinness World Records/Tim Anderson)
I would have liked to see a photo of the sofa, too.

*And yes, this is my favorite line from Ghostbusters, said by Bill Murray when the StayPuft Marshmallow Man makes his appearance.