If you work in public service . . .

. . . haven't you wanted to do something like this, just once? Airbus pilot maroons drunken passenger on desert island

"We are selling our souls for dross . . . "

In a remarkable display of what blogs can do now, Daily Kos is publishing the British torture memos today.
These memos were written by the former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray. He has written a book describing how the UK and US governments are justifying torture in Uztekistan, which Murray says is not only immoral but also useless. Bloggers in UK, and Daily Kos in the US, are publishing the memos simultaneously today, to stymie attempts by the UK Foreign Office block their release.
Here is some of what Murray wrote in July 2004 -- and no wonder the UK government did not want anyone to read it:

CONFIDENTIAL . . . TO IMMEDIATE FCO . . . SUBJECT: RECEIPT OF INTELLIGENCE OBTAINED UNDER TORTURE . . . I understand that the principal argument deployed [to support use of the information obtained by torture] was that the intelligence material disguises the precise source, ie it does not ordinarily reveal the name of the individual who is tortured. Indeed this is true – the material is marked with a euphemism such as "From detainee debriefing." The argument runs that if the individual is not named, we cannot prove that he was tortured.
I will not attempt to hide my utter contempt for such casuistry, nor my shame that I work in an organisation where colleagues would resort to it to justify torture. I have dealt with hundreds of individual cases of political or religious prisoners in Uzbekistan, and I have met with very few where torture, as defined in the UN convention, was not employed. When my then DHM raised the question with the CIA head of station 15 months ago, he readily acknowledged torture was deployed in obtaining intelligence. I do not think there is any doubt as to the fact . . . On the usefulness of the material obtained, this is irrelevant. Article 2 of the Convention, to which we are a party, could not be plainer: "No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture."
Nonetheless, I repeat that this material is useless – we are selling our souls for dross. It is in fact positively harmful. It is designed to give the message the Uzbeks want the West to hear. It exaggerates the role, size, organisation and activity of the IMU and its links with Al Qaida. The aim is to convince the West that the Uzbeks are a vital cog against a common foe, that they should keep the assistance, especially military assistance, coming, and that they should mute the international criticism on human rights and economic reform.
I was taken aback when Matthew Kydd said this stuff was valuable. Sixteen months ago it was difficult to argue with SIS in the area of intelligence assessment. But post Butler we know, not only that they can get it wrong on even the most vital and high profile issues, but that they have a particular yen for highly coloured material which exaggerates the threat. That is precisely what the Uzbeks give them. Furthermore MI6 have no operative within a thousand miles of me and certainly no expertise that can come close to my own in making this assessment.
At the Khuderbegainov trial I met an old man from Andizhan. Two of his children had been tortured in front of him until he signed a confession on the family's links with Bin Laden. Tears were streaming down his face. I have no doubt they had as much connection with Bin Laden as I do. This is the standard of the Uzbek intelligence services . . .

Note in particular Murray's observation that the intelligence services are seeking "highly coloured material which exaggerates the threat". That's not surprising.

If a soldier dies in the forest . . .

Hmmm. If a soldier dies in the forest, does his death matter if nobody knows about it?
Adding up the deaths reported in Today in Iraq it appears that at least 18 US soldiers have been killed by insurgents in Iraq over the last week, since Thursday, Dec. 22.
Did anyone see any US news coverage about these deaths? Well, at least the Irish Sun has reported on eight of them .

Great lines of the year

Canadian Press has published a round-up of the year's best lines. Here are ones I liked:

"I know a lot of you are going through separation anxiety... but there's nothing I can do about getting a Tim Hortons in Kabul," brigade commander Col. Al Howard to troops leaving for Afghanistan.
"A significant shock to the system." Lt.-Col. Dave Anderson, missions chief of staff of Canadian troops in Afghanistan, on their switch to American army rations.
"This is a typical day in a lawless country. It's Dodge City without a sheriff." Former Canadian diplomat Ken Taylor on the hostage-taking of two Canadians in Iraq.
"Guns turn punks into killers." Toronto Mayor David Miller.
"The right to bear handguns is not a Canadian value." Ontario Attorney General Michael Bryant.
"I don't want people to think I am someone who is dangerous who will do something to their children." Karla Homolka on her release from prison.
"Being cloistered with nuns could be a very good option." Anna Campagna, executive director of Centre Generation Emploi in Montreal, on Homolka's job prospects post-prison.
"I don't treat my dog like that. I buried my dog." Daniel Edwards on an elderly woman who lay dead in a wheelchair at the New Orleans convention centre three days after Katrina.
"They play hardball. There's no point in us playing some kind of Nerf ball here." NDP Leader Jack Layton on the debate with the U.S. over softwood lumber.
"Gomery put the scandal back in scandalous." Prof. David Docherty of Wilfrid Laurier University on the Gomery inquiry into federal sponsorships.
"If we do not do something about the BlackBerrys, we will have to develop a spray for them," Liberal Senator John Bryden on the technology that disrupts Parliament's electronics.
"The country they left to us has become a place of infinite possibilities." New Gov. Gen. Michaelle Jean on the Fathers of Confederation.
"Somebody might check your wallet before they check your pulse." Health Minister Ujjal Dosanjh on privatized health care.
"Come hell or high water, there's no frigging way I'm going to let one ovary bring the government down." An ailing Independent MP Carolyn Parrish on her efforts to get to a confidence vote in Parliament.
"It's like the thief who cries fire in a crowded restaurant." Stephen Harper on the Liberals criticizing the Tories.
"We have to start thinking that Hannibal Lecter is running the government and they'll do anything they have to do to win." Deputy Tory leader Peter MacKay on the Liberals attempt to hold onto power.
"It was the night of the election of the next loser." Foreign Affairs Minister Pierre Pettigrew on the election of Andre Boisclair as Parti Quebecois leader. "It's maliciousness, it's arrogance, it's smugness." BQ Leader Gilles Duceppe in response to Pettigrew.
"I think I'm ethically entitled to the entitlements which I believe are owing to me." David Dingwall, who resigned as head of the Canadian Mint after a fuss over his expenses, on whether he should get a severance package.
"We are talking the full range of various states of undress, and the more startling thing is we get people right down to starkers." Richard Mahoney, Liberal candidate in Ottawa Centre, on door-to-door campaigning.
"They've been dating for quite a long time; now they've decided to get married." McGill University business professor Robert David on the merger of beer giants Molson and Coors.
"The man's 63. He's going to die in jail. How much sterner could you get?" A pleased Gino Cavallo, who lost retirement money in the WorldCom scandal, on former boss Bernard Ebberss 25-year prison term for leading the largest corporate fraud in U.S. history.
"This has been one massive smear job from A to Z, and it will have a surprise ending." Fallen print baron Conrad Black on accusation he stole more than $80 million US from Hollinger International Inc.
"You know the outcome of an unsuccessful situation. I am talking about a complete splat." Judge James Farley on the never-ending Stelco Inc. restructuring talks.
"These are tough times for General Motors, but we've got to fight like hell to save them from themselves. Not putting in a new product in your best plant is not the greatest strategy to revive North America." CAW president Buzz Hargrove on the news GM planned to shut an award-winning plant in Oshawa, Ont.
"You generally find, in terms of fiscal performance, the laziest, sloppiest governments in the world are the ones that come up with these silly charges." Robert Milton, chairman of Air Canada, on governments that impose fees on airlines.
"He'll keep his clothes on." Charles Coplin, the man the NFL put in charge of the Super Bowl halftime show, on performer Paul McCartney.
"They are about to go over a cliff together on a Zamboni." Former Ontario deputy labour minister Victor Pathe on the NHL lockout.
"I drink a lot - I'm a curler - but I don't do drugs." Ontario curler Joe Frans on testing positive for cocaine at the national men's curling championship.
"Lord thunderin' Jesus, it feels awesome. I tell you I could swim to Italy right now." Curler Russ Howard after his Newfoundland team won a Winter Olympics berth.
"It allows us to feel like were contributing to society other than great tunes and great dancing." Tyler Stewart of the Barenaked Ladies on performing in the Live 8 concert for Africa.
"There's only so much T-A you can do within the confines of an intelligent, issue-driven story." Peter Simpson, producer of The Eleventh Hour, on the cancelled but award-winning CTV series.

Great line of the day

From the Comments for a Daily Kosdiary: "Mr. Bush, you have managed to royally piss off Bob Barr and Burt Bacharach. Do you have any idea how spectacularly shitty you have to be to do that???"
It will be interesting to see what happens when Congress resumes in January -- the senators and congresspeople will have been getting an earful from their home districts about the NSA eavesdropping and the Islamic government in Iraq, along the lines of "What is Bush DOING -- and what are YOU doing to STOP it?" And the usual response of "Nothing to see here, folks. Move along, move along" isn't going to cut it.
UPDATE: Welcome, Sideshow people -- thanks, Avedon Carol, for the link. To see my whole blog, click here.

News and new links

Over on the right you may notice some new and revised links.
For the New Links in this go round, I have added a link to my son's page -- he is running for the Greens this election and making a film about it. The Greens will be releasing their platform early in January, so I will be blogging about it then.
Also in the New Links section is a variety of other sites which I now click on or which I think I will refer to frequently. I moved many of the old "new links" into their appropriate sections, but deleted some that I found I wasn't using.
I consolidated the old "group blogs" into the "blogospheres" section. And I have switched the other sections into alphabetical order, to make it easier to find stuff.

Great lines of the day

From James Wolcott's Headhunters, about how warbloggers are entranced with the idea of cutting off our heads. It reminds me of Wonderland's mad White Queen - "Off with their heads!" -- but Wolcott thinks it represents a secret obsession with death porn:

It's no accident that it is the rightwing bloggers and pundits who have been avid about defending the use of torture against suspected terrorists. Nor is it an accident that many of them pooh-poohed Abu Ghraib, sluffing it off as no more harmless than fraternity hazing. But what their decapitation odes reveal is that what they'd really like to do is permit torture closer to home. Domesticate it. Trivialize it. Completely destigmatize it as a tool of the state.
I don't worry about this being actually implemented, though I worry fractionally more every day. I'm interested in it more as a pathological rash afflicting the more rabid warbloggers. It's a sign of impotence, this lurid fury of theirs. It bugs the hell out of them that those of us who opposed the war have turned out to be right. It thwarts the hell out of them that Ward Churchill still has tenure, that they couldn't convict Sami Al-Arian down in Florida, and that their latest purple-finger festival fizzled out so soon. If postwar Iraq swirls down the drain, they'll be looking for someone to blame, and since they never blame themselves for anything (a bedrock neoconservative trait), they leaves nobody here but us chickens. I dread to think of the imaginary punishments they'll devise for us appeasers, turncoats, and traitors; I'm sure they'll be quite vivid.

Merry Christmas, Katrina survivors!

These news photos and their cutlines show how the survivors of Hurricane Katrina are doing Christmas this year -- with courage and determination and good humour. Admirable people, all:


Gregory Scott stands on his porch amidst his tent and Christmas decorations in New Orleans . . . Other than three weeks he spent on a median on the Orleans Parish border, he says he never left New Orleans or his damaged home since Hurricane Katrina. At left is his friend Myron, no last name given. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)


Kim Newton walks with her dogs Boots and Rocket in front of her FEMA trailer which is decorated for Christmas in front of her home that was heavily damaged by Hurricane Katrina in the St. Bernard Parish town of Chalmette, La. just outside New Orleans. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)


Children homeless from Hurricane Katrina cheer as a man dressed as Santa Claus arrives on a fire engine for a toy giveaway at Camp Premier, a tent city for people displaced from the storm in Chalmette, La. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)


A weathered Santa wearing a toxic mask stands in front of a home destroyed by Hurricane Katrina in Chalmette, La. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

Shut up, and watch your poll numbers increase

Here's the Politics Canada poll chart again:


And isn't it interesting -- the lates story is that the Tory campaign is failing to gain traction with voters:

Stephen Harper's policy-heavy election campaign is no better at capturing voters' imaginations than the Liberal effort, according to a new poll that also finds less gloom about the direction of the country than when the election was called . . . Allan Gregg, chairman of The Strategic Counsel, said a strategy of not focusing on criticism of the Liberals may be contributing to the Tories stall. "[The Conservatives] have to get that general protest sentiment back up there," Mr. Gregg said. "The cornerstone of any opposition party is unhappiness with the status quo. It's the oldest cliché in the book, but it's true. Governments defeat themselves."
Mr. Gregg said the Liberals may have found their game simply by fighting back every time the Tories lay out a policy proposal. "They're not doing much on the initiative front, but they're very effective in their counter-punching," he said.
The results appear to run against the grain of some commentators who have criticized the Liberals for running a relatively quiet campaign focused on their record rather than announcing new policy ideas. The Tory campaign has announced almost daily policy prescriptions, while the Liberals have criticized them for being too ideological.

This confirms my own thinking -- which I didn't blog about because I didn't think I could possibly be right -- that Martin was getting better traction NOT making policy announcements than Harper was getting by making them.
The problem for Martin with just about any policy announcement, of course, is that the response would be -- well, why didn't you do this already? Harper is not so constrained -- but, on the other hand, when a political party announces armfuls of goodies day after day after day, eventually people start to wonder whether anyone has added it up and whose money will be paying for it.
And Harper's latest one, the Arctic sovereignty thing, is just stupid -- he's trying to counter Martin's winning anti-Bush strategy with a little flag-waving of his own, but Canadians know we have better things to do with billions of dollars than harass a few US submarines.
Harper's deeper problem, however, is that he simply cannot describe how he could manage a minority government.
Canadians aren't stupid -- we know reality. We know that if the Bloc maintains their vote in Quebec, then they will prevent either the Conservatives or the Liberals from achieving a majority government. We know that to form a government, either Harper or Martin would have to ally with either the NDP or the Bloc. We don't want the Bloc to get any stronger than it already is, so we would prefer that they NOT be the deal-breaker party.
We know that Martin would ally with the NDP. And we're OK with that. But we don't know what Harper would do.
No wonder the poll numbers are dropping -- all those policy announcements, yet he hasn't announced the one thing that Canadians would want to know.

Happy Festivus

Hey, December 23 is Festivus, the holiday billed as "for the rest of us."
We had the traditional red Festivus comfort-food meal tonight -- spagetti and meatballs (though I must admit the menu was accidental because I had forgotten all about it.)
Anyway, the other Festivus events are the traditional Airing of Grievances, which begins with "I have a lot of problems with you people" and carries on with a listing of the ways in which your nearest and dearest have disappointed you this year. Then there are the Feats of Strength, and the gathering around the alumnium festivus pole.
This all started as a Seinfield episode -- and has evolved to the point that there are now a number of companies which actually sell Festivus poles.
Obviously, a holiday whose time has come.

Oh festivus, oh festivus, your day is for the rest of us
Oh festivus, oh festivus, we'll tell you all the worst of us.
We'll wrestle and we'll genuflect
Around your pole and then we'll ...
Oh festivus, oh festivus, your day is really best for us.

Well, great -- I have an "estate" now

Hey, folks, if this is true, then divy me up! "A body could be worth about $150,000, according to Art Caplan, Professor of Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania."
So make sure my family doesn't bury me or cremate me. Instead, I want them to make a few bucks and break me down for parts.
Will I care? Not at all.

No votes for Chalabi

Well, first of all, Chalabi's defeat couldn't have happened to a more deserving guy: "Preliminary results in the Iraqi capital of Baghdad indicate that Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress scored a minuscule 0.36 percent of the votes. Out of almost 2.5 million voters in Baghdad, only 8,645 voted for Chalabi. In the Shiite city of Basra, the results indicate he had an equally dismal showing of 0.34 percent of the vote. In the violent Sunni province of Anbar, 113 people voted for him."
But second, I wonder if, in the end, the iraq election will stand? US pundits seem shocked - shocked!- that Iraq has elected a Shiite fundamentalist government with ties to Iran. And I was shocked that they knew so little about Iraq that they would be surprised at this -- who did they THINK the Iraqi electorate would vote for? Anyway, now that Chalabi has hired a PR firm, we'll see whether the "vote fraud" story will be inflated to try to hamper, delay and ultimately invalidate the election result.

Thanks, Bazz

In Comments, Bazz from the Oi! Thump! blog, points us to this hysterically funny Onion story: U.S. Troops Draw Up Own Exit Strategy

BAGHDAD—Citing the Bush Administration's ongoing refusal to provide a timetable for withdrawal, the U.S. troops stationed in Iraq have devised their own exit strategy. "My marines are the best-trained, best-equipped, most homesick fighting force in the world," said Staff Sgt. Cornelius Woods. "Just give us the order, and we will commandeer every available vehicle to execute a flanking maneuver on the airstrips of Mosul. By this time tomorrow, we will have retaken our positions at our families' dinner tables in full force." In a striking rebuke of the assertions of the Pentagon and the White House that a swift exit is neither practical nor possible, soldiers of varying rank have outlined a straightforward plan of immediate disengagement, dubbed "Operation Screw This.". . .

Ah, was there every anything like the Onion? Even the Daily Show doesn't get quite as sharp as the Onion. Thanks, Bazz.

Great line of the day

In 'Cheney's cheerleading falls flat' on The Smirking Chimp, author John Nichols from The Nation describes the reaction of US soldiers to Cheney's visit to Iraq:

. . . the administration's talk about how the U.S. will stand down as the Iraqis stand up remains an empty promise. How empty? Consider a line buied deep in the AP report of the vice president's visit to Taji Air Base in Iraq: "U.S. forces guarded Cheney with weapons at the ready while Iraqi soldiers, who had no weapons, held their arms out as if they were carrying imaginary guns." For all of Cheney's cheerleading about how well things are going, those carrying the real guns recognize that they will not soon be coming home from a country where their 'replacements' are carrying imaginary guns.

Emphasis mine.

Beware of paralegals

Lawyers always have had a reputation, mostly undeserved, for being con artists. But it appears from this list of the year's best scams and cons from Insurance Bureau of Canada that paralegals are the people to watch now:

1) A Halifax man made 11 claims in which he pretended to be struck by cars backing out of parking lots.
2) A man exported his new vehicle to Europe and claimed it was stolen three months later.
3) A Toronto-area man who took his car to a body shop for repair of a minor scrape was surprised to see the enormous bill and list of unnecessary parts - including a front grille and cooling system - the shop sent to his insurance company.
4) A Quebec man earned the title Chop Shop King for running two bustling garages where police found 40 stolen vehicles being carved up for parts. The king was jailed six years and ordered to pay a $774,000 fine.
5) An Alberta man reported his high-end pickup truck stolen, collecting $68,000 from his insurer. Months later, investigators learned he had stripped the vehicle and sold the parts. He was charged with public mischief and fraud.
6) A Toronto-area paralegal recruited people to file more than $200,000 in claims for phantom injuries from supposed car crashes. The scheme was supported by a clinic that claimed to have assessed and treated the injuries.
7) Salespeople at a few Toronto-area car dealerships charged $500 to arrange insurance with a broker they said would save car owners lots of money on premiums. The scammers put bogus information on the applications so that customers would be put into a cheaper rate group, but that made the policies invalid.
8) A woman in the Toronto area persuaded friends and family to join her in staging car accidents and filing false claims. One annoyed neighbour was pestered once too often and secretly recorded her pitch.
9) The owner of a company that had several workers filing injury claims denied knowing any of them. It turned out that a paralegal had forged employment forms to boost the compensation claims of staged "victims."
10) A car crash victim seeking cheap legal advice from a paralegal was duped into signing a pile of legal forms that had the paralegal negotiate on the man's behalf with the insurance company. The paralegal then forged the man's signature on the resulting cheque and cashed it.