Quick Bytes

I'm working and it's been a tough week already. I thought for sure I'd get some sleep last night, hitting the sack early but was awakened in the middle of the night by furious scratching under my floor. Thus I spent a couple of hours tossing and turning and banging a broom on the floor in an attempt to make whatever is trying to nest under there feel less welcome. Heck for a while I felt like a guard at Gitmo, doing my routine disruption procedures. In any event, no time for anything this morning but a quick link post on what I'm reading.

I have a post up at Detroit News on the latest in so called "hovering civil war" in Iraq. When are these people going to learn to call anarchy -- anarchy?

Glenn Greewald looks beyond satire and discovers the rightwingnuts, with Malkin leading the charge, are supporting terrorists this week.

Oprah doesn't want to be president, really. So don't try to make her do it.


I wish I had followed this race more closely. Deval Patrick handily wins the nomination for the gubernatorial race as the Democratic Party's candidate. He's the first black man to do gain the slot in the history of the Party. What surprises me is he overcame his close ties to the corporatocracy. In any event, he appears to have won as much on the anti-incumbent mood in the electorate I predicted months ago.

Anybody know about his politics? I'd like to know more about his stance on crime. It was mentioned briefly in the article but not detailed.

This was easily the most horrible item I read yesterday. It's terrifying just how easy it is to be wrong in this alleged "war on terror" on account of political pressure to perform. I don't mean it's easy to make a mistake, which it is but how easy it is to get away with it without retribution. You've all heard about the poor Canadian citizen who was rendered by the CIA and then not allowed to sue in US courts because the White House evoked the state's secrets defense. But what kind of country are we that would allow this sort of thing to occur without demanding accountability from the perpetrators who cause such unjust suffering.

The inquiry, which focused on the Canadian intelligence services, found that agents who were under pressure to find terrorists after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, falsely labeled an Ottawa computer consultant, Maher Arar, as a dangerous radical. They asked U.S. authorities to put him and his wife, a university economist, on the al-Qaeda "watchlist," without justification, the report said.

Arar was also listed as "an Islamic extremist individual" who was in the Washington area on Sept. 11. The report concluded that he had no involvement in Islamic extremism and was on business in San Diego that day, said the head of the inquiry commission, Ontario Justice Dennis O'Connor.

...Arar, now 36, was detained by U.S. authorities as he changed planes in New York on Sept. 26, 2002. He was held for questioning for 12 days, then flown by jet to Jordan and driven to Syria. He was beaten, forced to confess to having trained in Afghanistan -- where he never has been -- and then kept in a coffin-size dungeon for 10 months before he was released, the Canadian inquiry commission found.

WTF? A coffin sized dungeon? It makes me embarrassed to admit I'm an American.