What's Wrong With the US Supreme Court - Start With Scalia

The highest court in any democratic state ought to be the preserve of the best legal minds in the country. It is the court of last resort. It is the court that has to weigh constitutional questions and define statutory enactments.

American presidents, it seems, have been pretty lax in their duty to select proper material for the nation's Supreme Court and Antonin Scalia is one clear example.

Scalia is the guy who goes duck hunting with Dick Cheney while a case against Halliburton is before him.

Now he's shown the depth of his juridical prowess by his asinine arguments that Guantanimo detainees should be denied the right to prove their innocence in federal courts. In the case of Boumediene v. Bush, Scalia wrote, "At least 30 of those prisoners hitherto released from Guantanamo have returned to the battlefield."

Now just where did Mr. Justice Scalia get that pearl of factual wisdom? The Seton Hall Law Center for Policy and Research answers that:

"The statistic was endorsed by a Senate Minority Report issued June 26, 2007, which cites a media outlet, CNN. CNN, in turn, named the DoD [Department of Defense] as its source. The '30' number, however, was corrected in a DoD press release issued in July 2007, and a DoD document submitted to the House Foreign Relations Committee on May 20, 2008, abandons the claim entirely."

So, if it comes straight from the mouth of Wolf Blitzer, Scalia is able to take judicial notice of it, to treat it as fact upon which to base a judgment? This guy is a never ending disgrace to his bench and yet he just keeps going on like that battery bunny. If he had a shred of integrity he'd resign because he's repeatedly shown himself unfit to serve.

Nature Finally Intervened to Relieve Sam Golubchuk

Sam Golubchuk won't have to wait until the end of September to hear his family argue that he ought to remain on life support no matter how long it took him to rot into oblivion. Nature finally overwhelmed the best of medical science and kicked Sam off life support.

Golubchuk's family who, unlike Sam, weren't rotting alive felt that Sam's parting should be in God's hands. The part they left out (and isn't there always one?) is that the only thing keeping their father out of God's hands these past many months was an array of machines and products pumped into the old guy that allowed his heart to keep beating after the rest of him had gone wherever one goes at the end.

The Golubchuk case strained medical and legal ethics. A number of physicians at Winnipeg's Grace Hospital resigned rather than keep putting the old man through procedures they deemed futile and grotesque. And the Manitoba courts, instead of expediting the hearing of the family's demands to keep Sam going no matter what, simply moved the trial date from December to late September. I think a courageous judge would have given them two weeks to get their witnesses together and argue their case. There's no way of knowing for sure but I suspect the Winnipeg judges just decided to kick the can, with Sam inside, right down the road, hoping it would be over before the trial date ever rolled around.

Okay Lardo, It's a Command Performance Now

Our Furious Leader, little Stevie Harper, may have to think twice about spurning Stephane Dion's challenge for an "adult debate" on the Liberal Green Shift proposal.

A Toronto Star/Angus Reid poll found 70% of respondents absolutely keen on the debate idea.

The Big Greasy Splotch is going to have to tread carefully through this one. If he doesn't debate, he won't look good to most Canadians. If he does debate, he runs even greater risks. He might just give Dion the opportunity to show he's not a wimp. Worse yet, he might give Dion a forum to showcase the real merits and limited downside effects of the tax shift proposal.

Poor old Lardo. He's great at sniping from the weeds but now he's being called out - by the Canadian people.

The Bush Court Pays Off Big Time for Exxon

Next year will be the 30th anniversary of the Exxon Valdez disaster in Aslaska's Prince William Sound. The tanker Valdez struck a rock, causing the worst oil spill in American history. The effects are still being felt.

In 1994 a jury awarded the state and affected parties a $5-billion judgment against Exxon. An Alaska appeals court then trimmed that - by half - down to $2.5-billion.

Today the Bush court voted 5-3 to transform Exxon's smackdown into a pat on the bottom, lowering the punitive damages award to $500-million. That's trimming 90% off the punitive damages the jury sought to impose. That works out to just under $50 per gallon of spilled oil in punitives.

Putting a Number on the Tar Sands

The US Conference of Mayors annual meeting came up with a great idea - tracking the "life cycle impact" of various fossil fuels. They also passed a resolution urging member municipalities to stop using unconventional fuels with lage carbon footprints. The resolution specifically referenced Canada's Tar Sands:

"The production of tarsands oil from Canada emits approximately three times the carbon dioxide pollution per barrel as does conventional oil production and significantly damages Canada's Boreal forest ecosystem - the world's largest carbon storehouse."

You see, once you factor in the carbon footprint of various fossil fuels - assign a number to them - it's an easy process to translate that into any of several forms of carbon tariffs.

Alberta's Tar Sands have always benefitted from the "out of sight/out of mind" syndrome. They're way up north where few Albertans live. People don't have to see them if they don't want to. That, I suspect, is a key reason why Big Oil and the Alberta government have been able to get away with the environmental destruction the Tar Sands necessitate. Whenever someone does complain they're rebuffed with the same old assurances about new technologies being just around the corner, an excuse that's then put back in the bottom drawer until the next time it's needed.

A carbon tariff by end user markets might give Big Oil and the Alberta government the big, swift kick in the ass they've needed to actually make those promised new technologies a reality. You simply make it more expensive for them not to clean themselves up. They say they can do it. It's time they did.

Kudos to the US Conference of Mayors. They just might have pointed to the right path to curbing tar sands pollution.

Travers Nails Harper the Bully

If you haven't already read it, take a couple of minutes to scan James Travers' insightful take on Stephen Harper in today's Toronto Star.

http://www.thestar.com/comment/article/447680

Canada Lags on Fighting Corruption

Transparency International reports that 18 of 34 OECD countries get failing grades on enforcement of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development's 2007 Anti-Bribery Convention.

Countries cited for having "little or no enforcement" of the convention included Britain, Japan and Canada. From The Guardian:

The UK and Japan were two of three G7 countries "showing a lack of sufficient commitment". The third was Canada.

TI said Canada had an "inadequate definition of foreign bribery". It recommended "greater efforts within government agencies involved in foreign countries or with foreign trade initiatives to report up the line and ultimately to enforcement agencies about allegations of bribery".

The full list of countries showing little or no enforcement was: Austria, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, Czech Republic, Estonia, Greece, Ireland, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Turkey and the United Kingdom."

Oh, To Live On Planet Bush

I hope the next time Americans elect a president they try to get one from planet Earth. Those that come from beyond, places like planet Bush, don't do too well down here. Maybe it's the whole gravity thing. They get weighted down and sluggish and their minds turn really dull. They can't seem to get a sentence out right. Maybe it's too much oxygen in the atmosphere that exaggerates their alternate reality from beyond.

Don't believe me? Here, take a look. Bush says, probably believes, he cares about the environment. But, in his alternate reality, that means blowing the tops off mountains in West Virginia, drilling wells and running pipelines through wilderness preserves, and doing everything he can to thwart action on slashing greenhouse gas emissions.

Bush says he wants to bring peace and democracy to the Middle East and I guess he must believe that. But he supports brutal tyrants in places like Egypt and Saudi Arabia and practically has a fit when people democratically elect Hezbollah to seats in Lebanon's parliament or vote in Hamas in the Palestinian territories.

The man from planet Bush says he wants to build a strong, safe America and he might even believe that too. But he wages an insanely expensive war without end and does it on borrowed money, putting the fiscal equivalent of a burning tire around the necks of future generations and leaving the country to look forward to unnecessary decline. Better yet, he's transformed war itself into a big business with mercenary contractors already matching or exceeding troop levels in Iraq.

Now the government's own General Accounting Office shows that Bush's alternate reality has done it again, this time on his claims about progress in Iraq. From the New York Times:

Over all, the report says, the American plan for a stable Iraq lacks a strategic framework that meshes with the administration’s goals, is falling out of touch with the realities on the ground and contains serious flaws in its operational guidelines.

Newly declassified data in the report on countrywide attacks in May shows that increases in violence during March and April that were touched off by an Iraqi government assault on militias in Basra have given way to a calmer period. Numbers of daily attacks have been comparable to those earlier in the year, representing about a 70 percent decline since June 2007, the data shows.

While those figures confirm the assessments by American military commanders that many of the security improvements that first became apparent last fall are still holding, a number of the figures that have been used to show broader progress in Iraq are either misleading or simply incorrect, the report says.

Administration figures, according to the report, broadly overstate gains in some categories, including the readiness of the Iraqi Army, electricity production and how much money Iraq is spending on its reconstruction.

And the security gains themselves rest in large part not on broad-scale advances in political and social reconciliation and a functioning Iraqi government, but on a few specific advances that remain fragile, the report says. The relatively calm period rests mostly on the American troop increase, a shaky cease-fire declared by militias loyal to the Shiite cleric Moktada al Sadr,

and an American-led program to pay former insurgents to help keep the peace, the report says."

So the guy isn't well-grounded, so what? His time on planet Earth is coming to an end and just months from now he'll take wing and head back to planet Bush. Maybe next time Americans will do better.

Put Big Oil on Trial?

One of the world's top climate scientists, American James Hansen, thinks Big Oil executives ought to be put on trial for crimes against humanity for deliberately and maliciously waging a campaign to spread doubt about the reality of global warming.

For some time I've thought exactly the same thing. Let me explain. Every law student learns of the case where a guy yelled "fire" in a movie theatre. The crowd panicked, there was a rush for the door, people got trampled and some died. Now the jerk hadn't trampled any of the victims, he had no direct part in their deaths. Yet he was tried for and convicted of their killings as surely as if he'd used a gun to shoot them in their seats. Why? Because the law presumes us to intend the logical consequences of our acts. You yourself don't necessarily have to foresee the tragic result as long as it would be foreseeable to the average person. The defendant knew or ought to have known that yelling "fire" would trigger panic that could lead to a lethal stampede. Guilty as charged.

Now let's say I'm the head of Exxon. I'm no dummy, I know the reality of global warming and the suffering and death it's bound to cause. I'm no dummy but I'm willing to bet that plenty of others are and that they can be easily duped. What I have to do is pay some jerks - why not use the same gang RJ Reynolds used to sow doubts about the link between cigarettes and lung cancer? - to do the same thing to the obvious link between fossil fuels and global warming. Why not just get them to deny global warming is even real? That way I can forestall, possibly for years, meaningful action that might hurt my company. That way my company stands to rake in maximum profits until the public finally catch on and demand government intervention.

If the logical consequence of sowing doubt about global warming is to worsen the problem and that can't help but cause additional suffering and death, am I not responsible for the results caused by my actions? Of course, my victims aren't a theatre full of moviegoers but all of humanity and just about every other lifeform on this planet. Therefore, can I really argue that I haven't committed a crime against humanity?

And what of Big Oil's paid collaborators, the pseudo-scientists who earn big bucks by spinning nonsense to the public? They should have been taken off the streets after running the Big Tobacco scam but we left them at large to come back and beset our societies all over again.

Hansen, who will testify before Congress today, spoke with The Guardian:

"When you are in that kind of position, as the CEO of one the primary players who have been putting out misinformation even via organisations that affect what gets into school textbooks, then I think that's a crime."

He is also considering personally targeting members of Congress who have a poor track record on climate change in the coming November elections. He will campaign to have several of them unseated. Hansen's speech to Congress on June 23 1988 is seen as a seminal moment in bringing the threat of global warming to the public's attention. At a time when most scientists were still hesitant to speak out, he said the evidence of the greenhouse gas effect was 99% certain, adding "it is time to stop waffling".

He will tell the House select committee on energy independence and global warming this afternoon that he is now 99% certain that the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has already risen beyond the safe level.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/jun/23/fossilfuels.climatechange

Not Like He Didn't Have It Coming - George Carlin, 71

George is gone. If that sounds callous, I really don't believe he'd have the slightest problem with my tagline above. If there were a few things Carlin believed it was that your Karma would catch up with you eventually. He embraced the sinner except more to partake than forgive.

71? I guess it sounds early but maybe we should first ask Keith Richards.

There always was a dark spark inside that guy, try as he might disguise it in the "commerical era" of his career.

McCain - He's So All About War

John McCain knows the horrors of war but he still can't seem to kick the addiction

An "Adult Debate" on Climate Change?

Stephane Dion seems insistent on bringing Stephen Harper into the floodlights over climate change.

Dion has struck back, challenging our Furious Leader, Mr. "We're Screwed" Harper, to an adult debate on the Liberals' "Green Shift" plan to reduce carbon emissions.

"I call on the Prime Minister to debate with me any time on TV on this issue in a respectful, meaningful and adult way."

No word yet on whether the Great Greasy Spot will take Dion's challenge.

3 in 10 Americans Admit Racial Bias

And it's a safe bet most of them will be voting for John McCain in November.

The Washington Post and ABC News conducted a poll in which three in ten interviewed admitted to harbouring some racial bias. Not surprisingly, slightly more Afro-American respondents, 34%, admitted to holding some racial bias.

The good news for Obama, if it's credible, is that nine in ten white respondents said they would be comfortable with a black president. Half that number said they would be comfortable with someone coming into the Oval Office at age 72.

The overall responses make it obvious that Obama will have to overcome a significant racial bias if he's to win in November.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/21/AR2008062101825.html?hpid=topnews

The Afghanistan War Spreads to Pakistan

Remember a recent clash at the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan in which the Pakistanis claimed American forces had attacked and killed a dozen of their soldiers and the United States insisted it had attacked Taliban insurgents?

Turns out they were both right.

A story in today's Guardian claims Pakistan's border troops have been massively infiltrated by Afghan Taliban insurgents:

"The Pakistani Frontier Corps has been heavily infiltrated and influenced by Taliban militants, sometimes joining in attacks on coalition forces, according to classified US 'after-action' reports compiled following clashes on the border.

According to those familiar with the material, regarded as deeply sensitive by the Pentagon in view of America's fragile relationship with Pakistan, there are 'box loads' of such reports at US bases along the length of the Pakistan-Afghan border. Details of the level of infiltration emerged yesterday on a day when five more US-led soldiers were killed in southern Afghanistan. Four of the soldiers died in a bomb and gunfire attack outside the southern city of Kandahar.

Nato officials have reported a dramatic increase in cross-border incidents compared with the same period last year. The US documents describe the direct involvement of Frontier Corps troops in attacks on the Afghan National Army and coalition forces, and also detail attacks launched so close to Frontier Corps outposts that Pakistani co-operation with the Taliban is assumed.

'The reality,' said a source familiar with the situation on the ground, 'is that there are units so opposed to what the coalition is doing and so friendly to the other side that when the opportunity comes up they will fire on Afghan and coalition troops. And this is not random. It can be exceptionally well co-ordinated.'

Frontier Corps personnel have in the past been implicated in the past in murdering US and Afghan officers. In the most high-profile case, a Frontier Corps member 'assassinated' Major Larry J Bauguess during a border mediation meeting. In another incident, an Afghan officer was killed. Since then the problem appears to have worsened as the Taliban renew their insurgency on the Afghan side of the border.

The allegation that senior Pakistani officials continue to offer lukewarm assistance to the coalition while offering help to the Taliban is also reiterated in Descent into Chaos, a new book by the veteran Pakistani author Ahmed Rashid."

So, there it is. We now have Pakistani forces not only aiding the Taliban but joining them in firing on us. What are we to do? Help Musharraf stage a coup and restore martial law? Attack Pakistan?

We don't seem to have any good choices left. Don't count on NATO coming up with another two or three-hundred thousand combat troops. Don't count on the US so long as it's stuck in Iraq. We're spread so thin we can't even control our zones in Afghanistan. We hardly have the masses of troops it would take to extend our war into Pakistan. Perhaps the worst part is that we know it and so do they.

Stirring Up the Pot - Iraq's American Albatross

There are two things George Bush desperately wants to achieve before he's evicted from the White House and they're both huge concessions from Iraq. One is the national oil deal that lets the select Big Oil companies (Exxon, Chevron, Shell and BP) "manage" Iraq's oil and the other is the Status of Forces Agreement whereby Iraq accepts a massive and permanent American military presence in the country.

The feckless Iraqi prime minister Nouri al Maliki made some noise about the Status of Forces agreement, even suggesting that the Iraqi parliament might just prefer the Americans to leave by the end of the year, but that was a negotiating ploy at best designed to blunt the wrath of Iraqi nationalists before the country's national elections this fall.

Cutting these deals is somewhat bizarre. Arab leaders have learned never to conclude major agreements involving Washington in an outgoing president's final year in office. The lame duck has little to offer in the long-term. They understand that rude surprises can also follow an American election and change in presidents. Best to keep as many bargaining chips as possible for that first meeting with the new guy.

It's hard to see that these deals are truly in Iraq's or America's interests. Reverting Iraq's oil resources to the very type of colonial management overthrown by every Middle East state, including then Baathist Iraq, seems to play into the hands of Iraqi nationalists like Muqtada al Sadr. Allowing American forces to establish and operate out of 58-bases in Iraq with virtual impunity merely throws fuel on the fire.

Adding these stressors at a time when Iraq's central government is still fumbling the unity problem much less the equally problematical distribution of the nation's oil wealth seems ludicrous. Why would Maliki worsen his own vulnerability and hand over such powerful ammunition to his rival, al Sadr?

This whole business sounds eerily like the Anglo-Iraqi treaties of 1922 and 1930. Why two? Here's a hint. The Brits found big oil fields in Iraq in 1927.

The 1930 treaty enshrined British commercial and military rights in Iraq for which Iraq got - zip, nada, zilch. It gave the Brits almost unlimited military basing and unlimited mobility rights throughout Iraq and a colonial power over Iraqi oil.

Is any of this beginning to sound familiar? To protect their interests, the Brits ensured that the minority Sunnis would run the place, compliantly they hoped. That lasted until the Baathist nationalists took over the place after WWII.

Endless comparisons are being drawn between the British experience in the 20th century and America's Iraq predicament of the 21st. Reading too much into them can be misleading. Britain had a vast colonial empire stretching through Asia, the Middle East and Africa at that time. Today's Middle East has thrown off the shackles of colonialism but still harbours bitter memories of subjugation. Even the House of Saud is no longer dancing to Washington's tune.

In fact, America today may more closely resemble the Ottomans following WWI than the Brits prior to WWII. Like the Ottomans, American prestige, power and influence are in retreat as new players such as China emerge to stake out their own turf. America's military prowess was always more potent unused than when it took the field in Iraq and revealed its enormous limitations. America's ability to maintain a conflict such as Iraq entirely on borrowed money and without implementing a draft has been exposed as its ruin.

The next few months promise to be a fascinating time for Iraq and the United States alike. There's a chess game underway and, unfortunately, Washington still has Dick Cheney at its side of the board. At the end of the day, Cheney's hardball tactics may do neither country any good.

British Columbia's Limitless Free (Almost) Energy

Coal, oil and gas - their days are numbered. They're non-renewable and, especially in the case of coal and oil, really dirty. One part of Canada, which conveniently just happens to be my part, is blessed with another source of limitless, clean and relatively cheap energy - geothermal. It's the upside of being part of the Pacific "Rim of Fire."

When gas prices were cheap (back when George w. Bush was first appointed monarch), government and industry dragged their heels on developing this resource. Times change and, if you've noticed, so do prices at the gas pump.

The map shows BC's geothermal resource belts and the red swathes are the prime territory for letting our own planet earth get us off the fossil fuel habit. Studies show that it's a win-win-win proposition.

The US Department of Energy reports that geothermal electricity comes in at under 4 cents per kWh compared to between 5-6 cents for wind and 7-8.5 cents for biomass energy. Recent technology advancements have dropped geothermal costs by close to 25% and a further 20% drop is forecast by 2020.

Unlike wind power, geothermal provides a constant supply of energy and the existing technology is said to achieve a 95-98% efficiency. It's not affected by weather or climate changes.

Geothermal power provides a significant environmental advantage over fossil fuel power sources in terms of air emissions because its production releases no nitrogen oxides (NOx) or sulfur dioxide (SO2), and much less CO2 than fossil-fuelled power. The reduction in nitrogen and sulfur emissions reduces acid rain, and the reduction in CO2 emissions reduces the contribution to global climate change.

A typical 100 MW plant will reduce CO2 emissions by 600,000 tonnes/yr, and NOx and SO2 emissions by 120,000 tonnes/yr compared to a natural gas plant of equal size. (Western GeoPower Corp, 2003). Emission reductions would obviously be far greater yet when compared to oil or coal-fueled plants.

And whereas oil and natural gas prices are expected to keep increasing, geothermal is expected to become less expensive.

Two demonstration projects are now underway to establish the commercial viability of large-scale geothermal production. At one drill site, they're encountering subsurface temperatures of 275 C.

Britain's Green Revolution

The Guardian has managed to get a copy of the British government's $250-billion renewable energy strategy. The goal is to produce 15% of the country's energy from renewables by 2020 while reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 20% and reducing dependency on oil by 7%.

"The proposals include:

· New powers to force people to improve the energy efficiency of their homes when they renovate them;

· A 30-fold increase in offshore wind power generation;

· New loans, grants and incentives for businesses and households;

· An area the size of Essex to be planted with trees and other crops to produce biomass energy;

· Forcing people to replace inefficient appliances such as oil-fired boilers [furnaces].

Although the proposals are contained in a consultation document, the government has committed to hitting the 15% target and ministers accept most of the measures will have to be introduced to achieve it.

The government says the transformation of the country's energy policy will have "significant impacts on all our lives" but claims it will create big new markets and 160,000 jobs."'

Newsweek Poll - Obama Up by 15!

The latest Newsweek poll shows Barack Obama leading John McCain among registered American voters by a 51-36% margin. The poll shows a surge in Obama's popularity since the Democratic nomination bloodletting was brought to an end.

Worse news for Senor McSame - only 14% of Americans said they were satisfied with the direction the country has been following. Given that the atrophied Arizonan wants to pursue the current failure's insane Iraq policy and the same tax cuts for the rich, it would appear that Mr. McCain has already fallen well behind the American electorate.

Worse yet. 55% of voters polled now call themselves Democrats or supporters of the party compared with just 32% willing to identify themselves with the Republicans.

One Step Forward, Two Back - Marching Through Afghanistan

In this weekend's Sunday Times, Max Hastings reviews Ahmed Rashid's new book, Descent into Chaos: How the War Against Islamic Extremism Is Being Lost in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia.

I usually wouldn't be inclined to review a review of a book but this is Max Hastings writing about the writing of Ahmed Rashid so warrants an exception.

"Rashid is no foaming leftist, still less an enthusiast for Islamic militance. He merely tells a story from the viewpoint of a highly informed Pakistani who knows intimately almost all the leading players, including Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, many of the Afghan warlords, and, of course, key figures in his own country.

The severest criticism that can be made of his tale is that we know some of it already. A group of ignorant, immensely powerful and thus dangerous men in Washington, of whom Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, was probably the worst, sought to exploit America’s shock after 9/11 to pursue their own global agenda, on which taking out Saddam Hussein was tops.

Rashid inks in much detail about the post-conflict failure in Afghanistan after Kabul fell to the Northern Alliance in December 2001. Rumsfeld’s rejection of nation- building, matched by America’s willingness to deliver much of the country to warlords paid by the CIA, destroyed any chance of achieving post-Taliban stability, or making a Karzai national government work.

Americans on the ground ladled out cash to the wrong people, ignored mass killings of prisoners and presided over systemic and illegal brutality to captives. “Suspects” as old as 88 and as young as 13 were shipped to Guantanamo Bay. The neocons cared about only one objective, hitting Al-Qaeda, and were indifferent both to collateral damage and to the importance of salvaging the Afghan society that they had overrun.

Coupled to failure on the Afghan side of the border was Washington’s decision to give Musharraf carte blanche to rule Pakistan as he chose, in exchange for his declared support in the “war on terror”. The Americans were extraordinarily naïve, says Rashid, in failing to realise how far Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the ISI, continued to give active support to thousands of Taliban fighters escaping from Afghanistan. Washington even allowed Pakistani military aircraft to cross the border and evacuate ISI personnel, Arabs and key Taliban just before Kabul fell.

Pakistan’s intelligence service is still playing a deadly double game. It provides just enough assistance to its western counterparts, especially the British security authorities, to keep alive hopes of a working co-operation to crush Al-Qaeda. But the ISI stays deep in bed with the Taliban, and shelters all manner of dangerous people.

The difficulty in Afghanistan and Pakistan, as in Iraq, is how now to undo the consequences of years of policy blunders. Even generous cash aid, were it to be made available, is hard to use well when western Pakistan has succumbed to law-lessness, and anti-western sentiment is endemic. In Afghanistan, the drug industry is all- powerful and the Taliban widely resurgent.

A growing body of western critics such as Simon Jenkins argues that we must recognise failure in Afghanistan, and quit. It seems impossible to dispute their view that defeat is the most likely outcome. Yet, as Rashid so vividly shows, the consequences of abandoning the region to anarchy are so awful — above all, for its own peoples — that it seems to me we must keep trying. "

Wouldn't it be refreshing to hear our leader, the prime minister hisself, discuss these problems and come up with some answers, some leadership for Canada and for NATO? That's what leaders are supposed to do. Instead he won't even acknowledge these realities, glaring as they are. Nor will our top dogs at National Defence Headquarters who just keep grinding out horse crap about how we're winning in Afghanistan. Hucksters and fixers always play to their script.

So our game plan is to swat at flies (the Taliban) while we build an Afghan army or at least pretend to just that. It ignores the fundamental problem that an army without a viable government can't do much good except to seize power itself. Then again, that would probably be a rare sign of progress in Afghanistan.

Arms Race Update - Space in India's Crosshairs

The Chinese-Indian arms race is one of the least mentioned but most interesting now underway (yes there are a few others).

The world's two most populous states have been pursuing military co-operation even as they stoke the boilers of military rivalry. There's a great naval race underway with both countries eager to deploy true "blue water" naval muscle to secure their sea lane access to the Persian Gulf and the oil that serves as the lifeblood of their economic miracles. Washington is actively courting India to assist it in containing China.

It's Chinese advances in space, however, that now have India's military worried. China has already achieved manned space flight and has developed proven anti-satellite missiles. From The Times:

"General Deepak Kapoor, India’s Chief of Army Staff, has spoken publicly for the first time of his fears about China’s military space programme and the need for India to accelerate its own.

“The Chinese space programme is expanding at an exponentially rapid pace in both offensive and defensive content,” he told a conference attended by India’s military top brass this week. “The Indian Army’s agenda for exploitation of space will have to evolve dynamically. It should be our endeavour to optimise space applications for military purposes.”

Beijing’s space programme is already several years ahead of Delhi’s: China sent its first man into space in 2003, the third country to do so after the Soviet Union and the US. The Indian Space Research Organisation said last year that it aimed to send a manned mission to the Moon by 2020 — four years before China — but did not plan to send its first astronauts into orbit until 2014.

What really shocked India was China's shooting down of one of its own weather satellites in January last year — again placing it alongside Russia and the United States as the only countries capable of such a feat. By comparison, India does not yet have a single dedicated military satellite, relying instead on the dual-use telecommunications satellites for surveillance and reconnaissance.

One of the military’s priorities is to match the technology China used to shoot down its satellite with a ballistic missile about 860km (535 miles) above the Earth’s surface. Abdul Kalam, a former President of India and missile engineer, said in February that India already had the capability to “intercept and destroy any spatial object or debris in a radius of 200km”.

Population Control - Indian Style

Next Monday a report will be released in London that looks at trends in population, development and reproductive health in today's India.

The report, Disappearing Daughters, prepared by the NGO Actionaid and Canada's International Development Research Centre, outlines India's growing "sex selection" crisis. This arises out of the spreading practice of sex selection abortion used to ensure male children by aborting female fetuses. From Reuters Alternet:

"Findings from sites across five states in north and northwest India reveal that the sex ratio of girls to boys has not only worsened but is accelerating compared to the last national census in 2001.

Latest figures from one site in the Punjab, India’s richest state, show the number of girls has plummeted to just 300 compared to 1000 boys amongst higher cast families.

In a culture that predominantly views girls as an expense rather than an asset, women are put under intense pressure to produce sons.

The trend for smaller families is also deepening the aversion to daughters, with the use of ultrasound technology now being used to plan families. This is despite the existence of laws banning prenatal sex detection and sex selective abortion.

ActionAid has also found that girls are more likely to be born but less likely to survive in areas with more limited access to public health services and modern ultrasound technology. In rural Morena and Dhaulpur, deliberate neglect of girls, including allowing the umbilical cord to become infected, is used as a way to dispose of unwanted daughters. Such neglect ensures fewer surviving daughters, with the best chances of being born and surviving as a girl depending on the birth order in your family. "

Rescuing America - From the Pentagon

Writing in today's Asia Times Online, regular Grist contributor and PhD Jonathan Rynn explains how America's decline is being driven, in large part, by his nation's profligate defence spending.

"When New York City wanted to make the biggest purchase of subway cars in US history in the late 1990s, more than US$3 billion worth, the only companies that were able to bid on the contract were foreign. The same problem applies to high-speed rail today: only European or Japanese companies could build any of the proposed rail networks in the United States.

The US has also ceded the high ground to Europe and Japan in a broad range of other sustainable technologies. For instance, 11 companies produce 96% of medium to large wind turbines; only one, GE, is based in the United States, with a 16% share of the global market. The differences in market penetration come down to two factors: European and Japanese companies have become more competent producers for these markets, and their governments have helped them to develop both this competence and the markets themselves.

But Europe and Japan's dominance in renewable technologies is really based in a broader domain of competitive competence. They dominate the most fundamental sector of the economy, namely the production of machinery for manufacturing industries in general (often referred to as the mechanical engineering sector). The European Union produces almost twice as much industrial equipment overall as the United States, according to data compiled by the EU, Japan produces almost as much as the US, with about half the population. The split among the EU, US, and Japan, which together produce most of the world's machinery, is 52%, 27% and 21%, respectively.

The different niches of an economic ecosystem, such as the various machinery and equipment sectors, thrive as a self-reinforcing web of engineers, high-skill production workers, operational managers and factories. As of 2003, Europe's manufacturing sector made up 32% of its nonfinancial economy, while the manufacturing sector of the United States comprised only 13% of its nonfinancial sectors. The decline of American machinery and manufacturing sectors, in conjunction with the on-again/off-again nature of American renewable energy policy, explains why Europe and Japan are so far ahead of the United States in the transition to a more sustainable economy. And America's decline can be traced to one overriding factor: a military budget that comprises nearly half of the world's military spending. For decades, as the late Professor Seymour Melman showed in many books (such as After Capitalism) and in numerous articles, the Pentagon has been draining not just money but also the engineering, scientific and business talent that Europe and Japan have been using for civilian production. As Melman often pointed out, the US military budget is a capital fund, and American citizens can use that fund to help finance the construction of the trains, wind and solar power, and other green technologies that will help us to avoid economic and environmental collapse.

That economic collapse, if it comes, will be caused by two major factors: the end of the era of cheap oil, coal and natural gas; and the decline of the manufacturing and machinery base of the economy. Both problems can be addressed simultaneously, as Europe and Japan are showing, by moving the economy from one based on military and fossil fuel production to one based on electric transportation and the generation of renewable electricity."

Farewell Bangladesh

Stephane Dion's Tax Shift initiative is going to be pounced on by the far-right and the far-left as an unwarranted tax grab that'll harm the country. Right, sure. This stuff is perfect fodder for the denialists and those who'll harp on about how Canada can't make a difference globally anyway.

Maybe we ought to be looking at our greenhouse gas problem from the perspective of others who don't have the luxury of attributing blame among big emitters for their global warming plight. Finger pointing isn't of much interest to the people of Bangladesh. An article in today's Indepedent reveals the price already being exacted by our greenhouse gas emissions:

"Ten years ago, the village [of Munshigonj] began to die. First, many of the trees turned a strange brownish-yellow colour and rotted. Then the rice paddies stopped growing and festered in the water. Then the fish floated to the surface of the rivers, gasping. Then many of the animals began to die. Then many of the children began to die.

The waters flowing through Munshigonj – which had once been sweet and clear and teeming with life – had turned salty and dead.

Arita Rani, a 25-year-old, sat looking at the salt water, swaddled in a blue sari and her grief. "We couldn't drink the water from the river, because it was suddenly full of salt and made us sick," she said. "So I had to give my children water from this pond. I knew it was a bad idea. People wash in this pond. It's dirty. So we all got dysentery." She keeps staring at its surface. "I have had it for 10 years now. You feel weak all the time, and you have terrible stomach pains. You need to run to the toilet 10 times a day. My boy Shupria was seven and he had this for his whole life. He was so weak, and kept getting coughs and fevers. And then one morning..."

Her mother interrupted the trailing silence. "He died," she said. Now Arita's surviving three-year-old, Ashik, is sick, too. He is sprawled on his back on the floor. He keeps collapsing; his eyes are watery and distant. His distended stomach feels like a balloon pumped full of water. "Why did this happen?" Arita asked.

It is happening because of us. Every flight, every hamburger, every coal power plant, ends here, with this. Bangladesh is a flat, low-lying land made of silt, squeezed in between the melting mountains of the Himalayas and the rising seas of the Bay of Bengal. As the world warms, the sea is swelling – and wiping Bangladesh off the map.

Dr Atiq Rahman's office in downtown Dhaka is a nest of scientific reports and books that, at every question, he dives into to reel off figures. He is a tidy, grey-moustached man who speaks English very fast, as if he is running out of time.

He handed me shafts of scientific studies as he explained: "This is the ground zero of global warming." He listed the effects. The seas are rising, so land is being claimed from the outside. (The largest island in the country, Bhola, has lost half its land in the past decade.) The rivers are super-charged, becoming wider and wider, so land is being claimed from within. (Erosion is up by 40 per cent). Cyclones are becoming more intense and more violent (2007 was the worst year on record for intense hurricanes here). And salt water is rendering the land barren. (The rate of saline inundation has trebled in the past 20 years.) "There is no question," Dr Rahman said, "that this is being caused primarily by human action. This is way outside natural variation. If you really want people in the West to understand the effect they are having here, it's simple. From now on, we need to have a system where for every 10,000 tons of carbon you emit, you have to take a Bangladeshi family to live with you. It is your responsibility." In the past, he has called it "climatic genocide".

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/bangladesh-is-set-to-disappear-under-the-waves-by-the-end-of-the-century--a-special-report-by-johann-hari-850938.html

Severe Weather Forecast for North America. Really?

The US government's top climate scientists have just released the first comprehensive analysis of projected weather and climate change effects on North America. As expected, the US Climate Change Science Program is predicting an increase in the number, severity and duration of extreme weather events including heat waves, floods, droughts and hurricanes. Welcome to the new reality, the one we're seeing in mid-west floods, southern droughts and California wildfires.

From ENN:

"Among the major findings reported in this assessment are that droughts, heavy downpours, excessive heat, and intense hurricanes are likely to become more commonplace as humans continue to increase the atmospheric concentrations of heat-trapping greenhouse gases.

The report is based on scientific evidence that a warming world will be accompanied by changes in the intensity, duration, frequency, and geographic extent of weather and climate extremes.

Global warming of the past 50 years is due primarily to human-induced increases in heat-trapping gases, according to the report. Many types of extreme weather and climate event changes have been observed during this time period and continued changes are projected for this century. Specific future projections include:

Abnormally hot days and nights, along with heat waves, are very likely to become more common. Cold nights are very likely to become less common.

Sea ice extent is expected to continue to decrease and may even disappear in the Arctic Ocean in summer in coming decades.

Precipitation, on average, is likely to be less frequent but more intense.

Droughts are likely to become more frequent and severe in some regions.

Hurricanes will likely have increased precipitation and wind.

The strongest cold-season storms in the Atlantic and Pacific are likely to produce stronger winds and higher extreme wave heights.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, an agency of the U.S. Commerce Department, is dedicated to enhancing economic security and national safety through the prediction and research of weather and climate-related events and information service delivery for transportation, and by providing environmental stewardship of our nation's coastal and marine resources."

The complete text of the reports, including proposals for adaptation and remediation, can be found here: http://www.climatescence.gov/.

If Dion needs ammunition to bolster his Tax Shift/climate change initiative, there's plenty of it in these reports.

Tax Shift - Can Dion Sell It?

Stephane Dion has belatedly unveiled more details of his Tax Shift platform upon which the Liberals will either stand or fall in the next election.

The idea, overall, seems pretty good but I'm going to wait to see what intelligent criticism it draws. If there are serious holes in the idea, problems that haven't been foreseen or taken into account, then it might be doomed from the outset.

Then there's the issue of salesmanship. The Harpies are going to go full-bore negative on this and, following the Bush/Cheney playbook, they'll resort to as much fear-mongering as they can persuade an indulgent media to tolerate. Pretty much everybody now realizes that the Cons are flush out of ideas but that's not a problem when a campaign is going to be fought over another party's Big Idea.

The trouble with Big Ideas is that they're usually pretty tough to sell. There's a mountain of truly good ideas that never got off the ground and we're scrapped. You have to be able to sell them to your market. Can Dion sell his Tax Shift?

Once again the Layton NDP will ride to Harper's side to oppose the Liberal/Green policy, in other words to keep Harper in power for years to come. Of course, being Dippers, once they manage that, they'll duck all responsibility for the aftermath of their duplicity and try to blame it on the Libs instead. Slimy, sure, but that's the nature of Jack Layton and those who follow him.

So, Stephane has unveiled his baby. Now the real work begins. This is his chance to show that he can lead the LPC and our country itself. The cost of failing on this could be bigger than we imagine.

CANADA - please stand up for S. Golubchuck

What in God's name is wrong with Manitoba judges? Doctors are resigning rather than force treatment on an essentially-dead man knowing that would be nothing shy of grotesque torture.

This is being portrayed as a clash of medical ethics but it's much more than that, it's a collapse of the will of our legal system.

The Manitoba court ordered hospital physicians to keep 84-year old Samuel Golubchuck alive, regardless of the consequences, until the court can get off its fat, lazy ass and hear the question in late September? This poor man is already essentially dead and the Manitoba court wants to keep him on some respiratory and circulatory treadmill until "cottage time" has comfortably ended. And his very flesh is rotting away before our own eyes. Doesn't Sam deserve a lot better than this? What kind of people could, quite knowingly, subject another human being to this fate? I sure couldn't, could you?

If this court has a shred of integrity, it'd get off its sackcloth and silk backside and direct expedited argument, perhaps within a day. A court with even a modicum of courage would respect any ( and definitely your and mine) Canadian's life enough to expedite this. If the victim was us, would any of us not want just that degree of respect and consideration?

There's a powerful smell about this. Judges who aren't willing to put Golubchuk where he deserves to be - front and centre - but who will duck and weave and dodge, seemingly hoping that he'll be gone before they can possibly be forced to rule.

If the courts won't stand up for Golubchuk and his right to face inevitable death without outside contrivance tantamount to torture, then we're going to have to.

This just has to stop. People - we can't have this in Canada!

Arrest Bush, Arrest Them All

The United States Army general who investigated the Abu Ghraib torture scandal has accused the Bush regime of war crimes and challenged American prosecutors to act.

Retired Major General Antonio Taguba, who claims he was forced into early retirement for his outspoken findings, says Bush and his minions have disgraced the honour of the United States and its military:

"This report tells the largely untold human story of what happened to detainees in our custody when the Commander-in-Chief and those under him authorized a systematic regime of torture. This story is not only written in words: It is scrawled for the rest of these individuals' lives on their bodies and minds. Our national honor is stained by the indignity and inhumane treatment these men received from their captors.

The profiles of these eleven former detainees, none of whom were ever charged with a crime or told why they were detained, are tragic and brutal rebuttals to those who claim that torture is ever justified. Through the experiences of these men in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, we can see the full scope of the damage this illegal and unsound policy has inflicted - both on America's institutions and our nation's founding values, which the military, intelligence services, and our justice system are duty-bound to defend.

In order for these individuals to suffer the wanton cruelty to which they were subjected, a government policy was promulgated to the field whereby the Geneva Conventions and the Uniform Code of Military Justice were disregarded. The UN Convention Against Torture was indiscriminately ignored. And the healing professions, including physicians and psychologists, became complicit in the willful infliction of harm against those the Hippocratic Oath demands they protect.

After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts, and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.

The former detainees in this report - each of whom is fighting a lonely and difficult battle to rebuild his life - require reparations for what they endured, comprehensive psycho-social and medical assistance, and even an official apology from our government.

But most of all, these men deserve justice as required under the tenets of international law and the United States Constitution.

And so do the American people."

Read the summary of the Taguba report here:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4894001/

Look, people, here's another challenge. These draft-dodging despots, beginning with Cheney and working on down through the ranks of the neo-con vultures, are war criminals, plain and simple. Why, then, are we still treating them as legitimate members, nay leaders, of the community of nations of the free world? Bush/Cheney have caused the slaughter of far more people than Mugabe ever did, more than Ghadaffi, more than Arafat, more than al-Qaeda or Osama bin Laden, more than just about anyone save for Nixon, Stalin and Hitler.

These people, and the right-wingers in other nations who serve as their enablers, are vermin and if our world is to heal the wounds they've torn into us, the leadership must be denounced and condemned, charged and tried. The hundreds of thousands of dead and millions displaced deserve nothing less.

Before you dismiss this call as histrionic or hyperbole, at least read this:

http://physiciansforhumanrights.org/

Then, those of you interested in seeing the complete mosaic of how the American people and the rest of us were neo-conned into the War Without End on Terror, throw 75-bucks at PBS and get a copy of their 4.5-hour DVD "Bush's War." If you still have some hold on your senses and integrity, it'll make your blood boil.

Now It's Six Feet?

Another "foot in sneaker" find, this one in Campbell River on the east side of mid-Vancouver Island.

From the Globe & Mail:

"RCMP in Campbell River on Vancouver Island said a local woman strolling a beach found an Adidas sneaker this morning, containing what appears to be a man's foot.

“It's certainly suspicious,” Sergeant Mike Tresoor said in an interview.

“A lady walking on the beach alerted us to this. … It appears to be human remains. We haven't absolutely confirmed it – it will be confirmed through a pathologist.”'

Nothing particularly sinister about this one, though. Like the first four, it's a right foot, male, about size 10.

Minister of Family Values Attacks Louise Arbour

Harpo scumbag philanderer, the oh-so-self-righteous Vic Toews, has lambasted UN Human Rights Commissioner Louise Arbour, calling her "a disgrace."

The numbnutted bastard who recently fathered a bouncing out-of-wedlock bastard baby with a much younger woman to the chagrin of his faithful wife of 30-years ought to know what a disgrace really is as he's reminded of it so fulsomely every morning when he gazes into the mirror to trim his old man/new dad moustache.

It seems this pathetically unaccomplished jerk, who has single-handedly elevated hypocrisy to near religious dimensions, objects to Ms. Arbour's legitimate criticisms of Israel.

A Truly Sinister Development

Another foot - the fifth in the span of a year - clad like all the others in a running shoe has washed up on the British Columbia shore.

This time, however, it's a left foot. All the others have been rights. The Latin word for left is, of course, "sinister." As though four right feet weren't sinister enough.

No word yet on whether the leftie is a match for any of the righties.

The police, as ever, have no idea what this is all about. I will resist the urge to pun this one silly. Weird, just plain weird.

Sarah Chayes' Afghanistan

The magazine is called Espirit de Corps and the name leaves no doubt it's not some pinko rag. That's why I found EDC editor Scott Taylor's interview with Sarah Chayes, I knew it was worth heavily excerpting:

"She is probably the most knowledgeable westerner when it comes to the situation in southern Afghanistan, and as an American living alone in downtown Kandahar, she is undoubtedly one of the bravest women I have ever met.

What is truly significant is that Chayes has been able to continue her work despite the deterioration in the security situation. Although a committed pacifist, Chayes is no fool and she carries a Kalashnikov assault rifle for her own protection. Several of her staff have weapons permits as well.

Chayes’s input has become regarded as a vital source of intelligence for those stakeholders trying to get a full picture of the situation on the ground without many eyes and ears outside the wire. She supports a continued NATO presence in Kandahar but is highly critical of the political strategy and combat tactics of the coalition forces.

"I was very happy to see NATO come (to Kandahar) but disappointed that NATO hasn’t altered their policy of using corrupt Afghan officials," she said. "They have given a blank cheque to the local government authorities and you simply can’t do that. Fighting corruption is a daily process. You can’t just remove a few officials and consider the task complete."

According to Chayes, NATO’s killing of insurgents is negated by the unchecked corruption of the local government, which is causing an even greater number of volunteers to take up arms and join the resistance. She said the solution is for NATO to take firm control of the Afghan administration it is fighting to prop up.

"These corrupt Afghan officials will respond to foreign pressure because they know they are in power thanks to NATO," Chayes said. "If NATO wasn’t here, the Karzai regime wouldn’t last five days, or five minutes, because the people are so upset."

"If the Afghan government is a criminal enterprise and Canada’s stated mission is to support the government of Afghanistan, then what the hell are you achieving?" she said. "Is NATO here to make five people happy or to make the whole province happy?"

In addition to NATO cleaning house within the Afghan administration, thereby winning the hearts-and-minds campaign among the local population, Chayes believes even more foreign combat troops are required to stem the flow of insurgents from bases across the Pakistani border.

"Kandahar is the most important province in Afghanistan. Kandahar is where this campaign will be won or lost," she said. "It was a strategic error for the Americans to give up Regional Command South, but NATO must now fill the void. Kandahar is the marrow in Afghanistan’s bones."

Chayes is right. She understands what NATO needs to do in southern Afghanistan. She knows we need far more troops for the job than we have. She knows we need to topple the "criminal enterprise" that is the Karzai/warlord coalition. She knows we have to start helping the Afghan people not their oppressors just because they happen to be on "our side."

I'd also bet that Sarah Chayes knows all these things aren't going to happen. Our Furious Leader won't even breathe a word about these problems and the clown car of generals we rotate through there won't stand up for our troops and mention them either. We'll just keep on keeping on until we get so tired of it we give up and leave.

Driving on Zero

Today's Globe & Mail has an account of Honda's new, zero emissions car, the FXC Clarity.

The new Honda runs on hydrogen and electricity, in other words a fuel cell, and emits only water.

It's a start.

The great thing about the Clarity and other fuel cell vehicles is that the break the dependency on fossil fuels, but only on their end. They still depend on power generation to produce electricity or generate hydrogen and that is typically fossil fuel powered.

Now we know how to generate electricity, lots of it, without burning fossil fuels. We have hydro-electric, solar, wind, tidal and geo-thermal generation. There's also nuclear power as a stopgap. What we have to do is tap into these renewable sources of essentially free energy. Use that electricity to produce the fuel for our zero emission cars and get on with it.

With oil hovering at $140 a barrel, those nations which first implement successful renewable energy grids will be the winners in the coming decades.

New technologies are coming. One of them is the WES or Water Energy System now being tested by the Japanese developer, Genepax. Unlike the normal fuel cell vehicle, WES does its own hydrogen generation. You fill the tank from your garden hose and WES converts the water into fuel using an onboard membrane electrode assembly or MEA. Now, admittedly, the demonstration vehicle is a bit quirky but, who knows?

Harper & Hillier's Disgrace

The honour of Canada's military mission to Afghanistan has been sullied, perhaps irreparably.

The story in today's Toronto Star says it all. Canadian soldiers being ordered to look the other way and shut up about sexual assaults on civilians by their Afghan army comrades.

"Canadian soldiers serving in Afghanistan have been ordered by commanding officers "to ignore" incidents of sexual assault among the civilian population, says a military chaplain who counsels troops returning home with post-traumatic stress disorder.

The chaplain, Jean Johns, says she recently counselled a Canadian soldier who said he witnessed a boy being raped by an Afghan soldier, then wrote a report on the allegation for her brigade chaplain.

In her March report, which she says should have been advanced "up the chain of command," Johns says the corporal told her that Canadian troops have been ordered by commanding officers "to ignore" incidents of sexual assault. Johns hasn't received a reply to the report.

While several Canadian Forces chaplains say other soldiers have made similar claims, Department of National Defence lawyers have argued Canada isn't obliged to investigate because none of the soldiers has made a formal complaint, says a senior Canadian officer familiar with the matter."

Great. We're over in Afghanistan training a corps of armed sodomite pedophiles. Best of all, we're making sure to keep a lid on it.

Fight with the Canadian Armed Forces! Indeed. Maybe we could start by shooting a few of the peds we're allied with. Maybe, as described in this 2002 account from the New York Times, we should just hand our Afghan army comrades over to the Taliban:

"Though the puritanical Taliban tried hard to erase pedophilia from male-dominated Pashtun culture, now that the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice is gone, some people here are indulging in it once again.

''During the Taliban, being with a friend was difficult, but now it is easy again,'' said Ahmed Fareed, a 19-year-old man with a white shawl covering his face except for a dark shock of hair and piercing kohl-lined eyes. Mr. Fareed should know. A shopkeeper took him as a lover when he was just 12, he said.

An interest in relationships with young boys among warlords and their militia commanders played a part in the Taliban's rise in Afghanistan. In 1994, the Taliban, then a small army of idealistic students of the Koran, were called to rescue a boy over whom two commanders had fought. They freed the boy and the people responded with gratitude and support.

''At that time boys couldn't come to the market because the commanders would come and take away any that they liked,'' said Amin Ullah, a money changer, gesturing to his two teenage sons hunched over wads of afghani bank notes at Kandahar's currency bazaar. "

A Solid Case for Renewable Energy

$140 a barrel oil. Surely that's enough to get us off our duffs and get serious about renewable energy.

Brit prime minister Gord Brown calls today's oil prices "the most worrying situation in the world." A bit of hyperbole in that one, perhaps, but still...

Brown said there was a growing view that the price of oil was "increasingly dependent, not just on today's demands, but on what people perceive as demand outstripping supply next year and in the long term."

So, you see, it all comes down to perception. It's all about perception of what oil demand will be next year and there's not a lot we can do on the supply side of the equation. But - and here's the kicker - there are so many solutions open to us on the demand side. Everything from smaller, more fuel efficient cars; smaller and cheaper to heat housing; and, of course, renewable energy.

Of course, our Furious Leader might not see things that way. As a net producer of oil, admittedly dependent on ersatz oil production, the economic impacts are different for Canada than they are for major net importers such as that country just across the line. There's gold in them thar tar pits, plenty of it, and the best part is that most of it is just where he wants it - in Alberta.

Remember when Stephen Harper denounced the global warming issue as a "great socialist plot" to transfer wealth. Well his tar sands pet project increasingly sounds like a "great capitalist plot" to suck wealth out of the rest of Canada and transfer a bit to Alberta and the lion's share to the main beneficiaries, American oil companies developing Athabasca.

Isn't it time for a government that's not wed to the Tar Sands and Big Oil?

We've Got a Whole Lot of Killing To Do

General Rick Hillier's estimate of a "few dozen ...scumbags" worth of Taliban in Kandahar province was always pretty stupid but now seems positively delusional. What was this guy thinking or was he even thinking at all?

Thanks to last Friday's prison break in our very own Kandahar province, the Taliban came into a fresh force of 400-hardened fighters. Now I would've thought the insurgents would be pleased enough to spirit their comrades away for a bit of R&R in some distant, safe rear area. Apparently not.

Over the weekend DefMin Peter MacKay assured us it was all the Afghan's fault that the Taliban were able to mass for an attack to overwhelm the major prison in our area and then get away, unmolested, with their liberated comrades. Terrible stuff, bad Afghans. He also assured reporters that Canadian forces were deploying in defence of Kandahar city.

Trouble is, no one told the Taliban that they were supposed to go to Kandahar city to duke it out. Instead they seem to have taken over a series of villages in a district north of Kandahar. From The Guardian:

"Around 500 Taliban fighters have taken over villages in Arghandab district, just north of Kandahar, Mohammad Farooq, the top official in the district, was quoted as saying by Associated Press.

The forces would be hard to remove from the strategically important area, a local tribal leader told the agency.

"All of Arghandab is made of orchards. The militants can easily hide and easily fight," Haji Ikramullah Khan said. "During the Russian war, the Russians didn't even occupy Arghandab, because when they fought here they suffered big casualties."

This one has a bad smell to it. When these guys stand and fight against vastly superior, Western forces, there's usually a solid reason for it.

By the way, Pete, remind me again just how much progress we're making over there.

Climate Change Deal Staggers Along

It's a vexing problem that spells enormous trouble for mankind: everybody's right and, in being right, everybody's wrong.

When it comes to anthropogenic global warming, excuses trump ideas every time. The developing countries, notably the emerging economic powerhouses of India and China, point the finger at the developed (white) world where vast prosperity has been achieved by creating most of the problem that besets the planet right now. The industrialized nations, they claim, created the mess and therefore have a moral obligation to be the first to mend their ways. It's a good point and has fairness on its side.

The industrialized nations reply that the past is past and all nations have to cut emissions drastically because to cut the developing nations the slack they want will defeat any meaningful carbon reductions and, worse, will give them an enormous economic advantage (of the sort we enjoyed for centuries) and they're not even white!

So, how do we break this deadlock and get everyone to come up with a workable solution? We wait. Eventually, and we probably won't have to wait too long, conditions will get unpleasant enough all around that we'll set aside our childish arguments and accept the unavoidable. When it comes to that, the sooner the better. The longer we wait, the more losses we'll have to endure and the more costly will be remediation and adaptation. Delay is very much a losing proposition.

It's becoming clear that we're no longer near the action tipping point. Negotiations have been underway to reach a new climate deal by the end of 2009 and they're snagged on the standard disputes. From ENN:

"The road ahead of us is daunting," Yvo de Boer, head of the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat, said of a U.N. timetable meant to end with a climate deal in Copenhagen in December 2009 to widen and toughen the existing Kyoto Protocol.

Still, he said there was progress in Bonn partly because nations had a better understanding of what should go into the hugely complex treaty meant to slow desertification, heatwaves, floods, rising seas and more powerful storms.

"It is crucial that the next stage of meetings produce concrete negotiating texts," he said. Bonn was the second session in a two-year push for a deal after starting in Bangkok in March. The next will be in Accra, Ghana, in August.

Others were more sceptical.

"It could well be said that we have been beating around the bush," said India's Chandrashekhar Dasgupta. He said there was a "deafening silence" from almost all rich nations on ways to make new cuts in their greenhouse gas emissions."

These deadlocks remind me of tectonic plates, grinding against each other while pressure continually mounts. Sooner or later something has to give but, when it does, the effects are often devastating.

Time to Put Down the Mad Dog of Harare

It's a neat trick. Frustrate the legitimate democratic aspirations of your opposition, brutalize them and oppress your people - until they begin to think about things like regime change - and then arrest them for treason for thinking about regime change.

Robert Mugabe is the mad dog of Zimbabwe. Now he's served notice that his army will "go to war" if he loses the presidential run-off in two weeks. 'It shall never happen ... as long as I am alive and those who fought for the country are alive,' he said. 'We are prepared to fight for our country and to go to war for it.'

Now, the key words to Mugabe's rant are "as long as I am alive." From The Guardian:

"Sources across Zimbabwe have reported an increasing number of roadblocks manned by militias and war veterans, effectively cutting people off and creating a dusk-to-dawn curfew.

James McGee, US ambassador in Harare, said 30,000 potential MDC voters had fled their constituencies. Mugabe has already ordered charities to stop work, leaving millions struggling to find food in the collapsed economy.

A total of 67 people have been killed and tactics familiar from past state violence campaigns are returning - sticks rolled with barbed wire, whippings and arson. The internationally-touted 'third way' - a Government of National Unity - has been met with stiff opposition from the military, Zanu-PF and many in the opposition who want no truck with Mugabe. Andrea Sibanda, of Matabeleland Freedom Party said: 'Whoever is floating the idea of GNU with Mugabe and Zanu-PF must be coming from another planet. How does one unite with them when their hands are dripping with blood of their kith and kin?'"

Nope, sorry, but this brutal charade has gone on far too long already. Somebody has to turn Mugabe's generals against him to topple this monster or a force has to come from outside Zimbabwe's borders to bring down the entire brutal regime. If Mugabe won't step down while he's alive, well that's his choice, isn't it?

Karzai Wants to Widen War

Great, just great. Afghanistan's supposed president Hamid Karzai is now threatening to send Afghan troops across the border into Pakistan to hunt down Taliban insurgents. From the New York Times:

"Karzai said Afghanistan has the right to self defense, and because militants cross over from Pakistan ''to come and kill Afghan and kill coalition troops, it exactly gives us the right to do the same.''

Speaking at a Sunday news conference, Karzai warned Pakistan-based Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud that Afghan forces would target him on his home turf. Mehsud is suspected in last year's assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.
''Baitullah Mehsud should know that we will go after him now and hit him in his house,'' Karzai said.

''And the other fellow, (Taliban leader) Mullah Omar of Pakistan should know the same,'' Karzai continued. ''This is a two-way road in this case, and Afghans are good at the two-way road journey. We will complete the journey and we will get them and we will defeat them. We will avenge all that they have done to Afghanistan for the past so many years.''

It's hard to say whether Karzai's threats were for domestic consumption or to appeal to American ears but, either way, it's nonsensical. His fledgling army isn't remotely big enough for its main task of defending Afghanistan territory and far less than half the size of the highly trained and well equipped forces that Pakistan has itself previously sent into the tribal lands in failed attempts to tame the militants.

This probably sounds sensible to someone not burdened with the history of the rivalry between Pakistan and Afghanistan, the Durand line, Indian meddling, Pakistan's political turmoil and so many other complicating factors.

An Afghan force would quickly find itself swarmed not only by the militants but also by the tribesmen and, quite probably, by the Pakistani military. Unlike the Afghanis, the Pakistanis are already geared up to fight a major war - with India. They have huge numbers, first-rate training, and all the high-tech toys from assault helicopters to artillery to jet strike fighters. The new Pakistani government would be unable to resist popular pressure to repel Afgan invaders. Karzai's force would come out beaten and bloodied, if not destroyed outright.

My guess is that Karzai is desperate and sees his hopes of retaining the presidency in the upcoming elections fading fast. He also could use a distraction to divert the focus from the humiliating Taliban raid on his main prison in southern Afghanistan. But, if he does act irrationally, it could expand the war enormously, a prospect for which neither the Americans nor NATO is prepared.

Krazy Kandahar Kapers

When a Taliban force of 30-guys on motorbikes, supplemented by two suicide bombers and a suicide truck bomb, attack and overwhelm a prison, release 1,100 inmates and then withdraw unmolested leaving behind nine dead prison guards, it speaks volumes for how the Afghan war is going no matter how loudly NATO claims it doesn't.

That is a significant operation to organize. It takes a lot of people and a lot of support and virtually everything they do in the final days before the attack has to be done right under the nose of the government side (that's us). There's a lot of discipline involved, a lot of tactical decisions taken all under a tight blanket of secrecy.

Attacking a prison is one thing but getting away is quite another. That requires real sophistication and a well-trained force of attackers. It also required a convoy of minivans which, it seems, we didn't notice either.

The destruction of the main prison in southern Afghanistan sent NATO spin doctors into overdrive. Spokesman Brig. Gen. Carlos Branco did his best to downplay the whole thing. "OK, they got some more fighters, more shooters. These guys who escaped from the prison are not going to change the operational tempo and they do not provide the Taliban with operational initiative."

No doubt the 400 or so militants, including a number of key leaders, among the freed prisoners won't provide the Taliban with "operational initiative" but the General overlooks that the Taliban already had operational initiative, buckets of it, just in order to stage this raid. They hold the initiative when they can marshall their force at the doorstep of a major prison. They hold the initiative when they can assault and overwhelm a major prison without our intervention. They hold the initiative when they can roll away, unmolested, with their liberated comrades. Remember these are the little guys who fight with what are genuinely primitive weapons, 1950's vintage Soviet rifles and bazookas. They have no artillery, no tanks, no helicopter gunships, no jet strike fighters, no aerial surveillance. Despite all their limitations and shortcomings, the Taliban have shown again that they can freely operate right under NATO's nose and get away with it.

The Taliban are fighting a classic insurgency which is a political war. When the Pashtun villagers of southern Afghanistan see that the guerrillas can overwhelm the biggest prison in the area with impunity, it undermines their confidence in the Karzai government, the Afghan army and NATO and, right now, we've got a lot of egg on our faces.

Tim Russert Dead

The New York Times is reporting that TV pundit Tim Russert has died, at age 58, of an apparent heart attack.

Quagmire Afghanisnam

The easiest thing about a war is getting in. It's getting out with both cheeks intact that can be awfully tough.

Canada's senate has had the courage to say what we haven't been hearing from the Conservatives or Liberals - Canada hasn't a hope of getting our troops out of Afghanistan by the latest "deadline" of 2011.

"I don't think there's any chance of being out of there in three years," Liberal Senator Colin Kenny, the national security and defence committee chairman told reporters.

As I argued at the time of our last capitulation to a further, two year extension of "the mission," setting unilateral deadlines was futile without the firm agreement of NATO or the United States to replace Canadian forces one way or the other in time for our scheduled departure. Put another way, we needed a positive, unequivocal, even airtight commitment that, if NATO couldn't come up with a replacement force, the Americans would agree to furnish the troops necessary to relieve us. Without these sorts of binding undertakings, we were simply selling out our soldiers. And that's just what we did.

It's not that we shouldn't have known better. Remember when we were supposed to be out in 2008 and then 2009? We extended and Jaap de Hoop Scheffer did absolutely nothing about it. NATO made no provision to replace us. Instead it left us in the impossible position of being the first nation to bail out and, even if you think that was a good idea, the majority of Canadians would have been aghast and ashamed. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice...

There's no way in hell we shouldn't have known that, if we let that Dutch weasel get away with it once, he'd do it to us again if he could. And yet we acted as though the United States command and the NATO secretary general had a shred of integrity and honour. They showed their respect and appreciation for every Canadian soldier, dead or alive, by taking us for granted and leaving us stuck without relief. Harper and Manley simply put a lovely, patriotic gloss over the outrage.

We had something NATO and the United States needed and wanted - our willingness to stick this out for yet another extension - and we failed to secure the one thing we needed from them in return - their word.

Why Not Make It an Even 60?

Iraqi legislators are falling all over each other in the race to leak details of the "status of forces" agreement the US is trying to negotiate with the Maliki government.

The latest pearl is that the Pentagon wants to maintain 58-permanent bases in Iraq. Now, what does that mean? Where's the perspective? Here's an idea. Up till now, US forces have operated out of 30-bases. 58, of course, would be just shy of double that.

The next question is why? Why would Washington want to double its military installations in another country especially when it's boasting how everything is settling down there. Why would it be asking for absolute control of Iraqi airspace up to 30,000 feet? Why negotiate for immunity for American military personnel and private contractors? Must be some explanation, right? There is but don't hold your breath waiting for the Americans to admit it.

State Department spokesmen have hastened to tell reporters from America's largest embassy on the planet that the US has no plans for a permanent occupation of Iraq. Just hearing that in a diplomatic complex bigger than the entire Vatican must be surreal.

This capitulation of sovereignty, if the Maliki government accepts it, will undermine all the progress that's been made in Iraq. It will set Sunni against Shiite all over again. It will empower the nationalists like Muqtada al Sadr anhd weaken the already feeble Baghdad government. It will generate a pushback by Iran which might be enough to make Washington pull the trigger.

Check Please, Waiter!

I've decided this will be the last post I'll make on the hapless LPC leadership until there's some major change at the top.

Dion's milquetoast performance during the immigration vote was really pathetic although it gave his ever loyal apologists yet another opportunity to expound on his tactical brilliance. Yet that's not what's driven me from Mr. Dion's camp. It's his rank stupidity that bothers me.

Mr. Dion. If you have a signature policy, one you're actually willing to fight an election over, then keep it to yourself until you're ready to unveil it and until you're ready to explain it and until you're ready to sell it and until you're ready to defend it.

Instead of acting like the leader of a political party fit to govern this country, Mr. Dion let the vague idea of his policy dribble out, leaving the policy and the party he's supposed to lead vulnerable to a summer long spin campaign by the Cons. If he doesn't want to explain it, he can't complain when the Cons take full advantage of that blunder. They've got the cash advantage right now and they're all too willing to spend when we give them such a juicy opening.

So, thanks Stephane, for handing the Cons a summer's worth of rich propaganda opportunities on a neat, little platter. Maybe you can take the summer to come up with an idea that might actually help the Liberal Party. If you can't come up with something, let me know. I've got one idea that I know will help.

The Case for Confidence Voting in the U.S.

It's probably not much use to try to persuade an American that his system of government is less than perfect. The sublime superiority of American government is imbued in our southern cousins from an early age.

But, what if they amended their system to incorporate the confidence vote? How long would Bush/Cheney have lasted if Congress had the power to vote them out and force them to stand for re-election? How much damage might the United States and the world at large been spared if these irresponsible clowns had been held accountable for their duplicity, lies, neglect and incompetence back in 2005 or even earlier?

Instead of dissolving Congress outright, perhaps only those senators and representatives slated to defend their seats in the next election would have to run.

Imagine what would visit Republican incumbents this November if their constituents had the power to punish them at the ballot box for not dumping Bush and Cheney back in 2006 when the public was already clamoring for their heads?

Imagine what might have happened had Bush/Cheney been toppled years ago and a responsible executive brought in to clean up their messes in Iraq and Afghanistan?

Imagine what might have happened had Big Oil and Big Coal's dream ticket been turfed years ago and replaced by an administration willing to tackle global warming and the other aspects of climate change?

I think Bush/Cheney have shown that fixed, four-year terms are no longer suitable to meet the challenges in today's rapidly changing world. A four year term imposed by a blatantly partisan court followed by a second, four-year term won from an electorate powerfully cowed by fears inculcated by their own regime.

Imagine.

Isn't This Where We're Supposed to Scream "FIX"?

It's my fault. I haven't read the script. But somehow I remember from so many Conservative rants when they were in opposition (most of my considerable lifetime) that this is the moment when I'm supposed to decry "the system" as corrupt.

Plain as day, you see. Here's the background from The Star:

"The federal ethics commissioner has cleared Dimitri Soudas – Prime Minister Stephen Harper's senior adviser on Quebec – of allegations he interfered on behalf of a real-estate developer in a dispute with the federal government.

Mary Dawson says Soudas's actions may have appeared to be overzealous but there is no evidence he put inappropriate pressure on Public Works."

Well, I think that pretty much speaks for itself. Why the fix was in. Federal ethics commissioner Mary Dawson must be a Harper stooge. The whole thing stinks. I want an election to put an end to this legacy of corruption!

Conservatives Dissected and Explained

It took the government of the United States to do it but there's finally an explanation of just what makes Conservatives tick. From The Guardian:

A study funded by the US government has concluded that conservatism can be explained psychologically as a set of neuroses rooted in "fear and aggression, dogmatism and the intolerance of ambiguity".

As if that was not enough to get Republican blood boiling, the report's four authors linked Hitler, Mussolini, Ronald Reagan and the rightwing talkshow host, Rush Limbaugh, arguing they all suffered from the same affliction.

All of them "preached a return to an idealised past and condoned inequality".

Republicans are demanding to know why the psychologists behind the report, Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition, received $1.2m in public funds for their research from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.

The authors also peer into the psyche of President George Bush, who turns out to be a textbook case. The telltale signs are his preference for moral certainty and frequently expressed dislike of nuance.

"This intolerance of ambiguity can lead people to cling to the familiar, to arrive at premature conclusions, and to impose simplistic cliches and stereotypes," the authors argue in the Psychological Bulletin.

And you thought conservatism wasn't a disease. It's not that they're bad, they just malfunction.

Dead, But Not Before Its Time

Is the Hummer about to go the way of the Dodo bird?

With U.S. gas prices forecast to hit $4/gallon, General Motors is now trying to figure out whether the Hummer division should be killed off, sold off or transformed into something a little less - well, less stupid.

Oh there'll still be holdouts, the clowns who'll think they'll make their mark by continuing to drive the big box, but their numbers will dwindle about as fast as Edsel buyers in the 60's. And what sort of resale price do you think they'll fetch when these jokers finally decide to unload them?

The once Big Three are providing an invaluable object lesson in what happens when industry, business or even individuals don't approach climate change proactively. Thousands of people lose their jobs, plants close and asset values plummet - at least that's the climate change template for automotive manufacturers.

General Motors, Ford and Chrysler ought to have understood what happens when a company falls behind changing market conditions. It's how they capitulated to competition from foreign passenger car makers. They thought they could remain viable and profitable by concentrating instead on the pickup truck and SUV markets and, like Easter Islanders, they held fast to their self-defeating policies until it was too late.

It's sad really. It didn't have to be this way. It should never have been allowed to get to this point. It's like running into a brick wall - a wall that you've been watching draw ever nearer for miles yet wouldn't take your foot off the gas.

Lumbering behemoths often fall prey to the small, quick and agile. That's the reality that confronts the Big Three today. Suddenly they have to learn to dance.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20080607.RCOVER07/TPStory/TPBusiness/America/

Iraqi Parliament to Washington - Just Get Out!

A letter to Congress signed by a majority of Iraq's members of parliament warns they reject any long-term security deal that doesn't provide for the total withdrawal of American troops from their country. From Reuters:

"The majority of Iraqi representatives strongly reject any military-security, economic, commercial, agricultural, investment or political agreement with the United States that is not linked to clear mechanisms that obligate the occupying American military forces to fully withdraw from Iraq," the letter to the leaders of Congress said.

Two Iraqi lawmakers whose parties were listed as signatories testified to Delahunt's panel on Wednesday that U.S. troops should leave Iraq, and that talks on the long-term security pact should be postponed until after they are gone.
"What are the threats that require U.S. forces to be there?" asked Nadeem Al-Jaberi, a co-founder of the al-Fadhila Shi'ite political party, speaking through a translator.

"I would like to inform you, there are no threats on Iraq. We are capable of solving our own problems," he declared. He favored a quick pullout of U.S. forces, which invaded the country in 2003 and currently number around 155,000.

A Sunni Iraqi lawmaker, Khalaf Al-Ulayyan, founder of the National Dialogue Council, said bilateral talks on a long-term security deal should be shelved until American troops leave -- and until there is a new government in Washington.

"We prefer to delay until there is a new administration in the United States," he said. The United States elects a new president in November; Democrat Barack Obama, who clinched his party's nomination this week, is among senators sponsoring a bill requiring any long-term pact with Iraq be submitted to Congress for approval."

Bush is pressuring the Maliki government to ink the deal that provides for the establishment of up to 50-permanent US military bases in Iraq. It's widely believed that such a deal would play directly into the hands of Muqtada al Sadr as well as Sunni nationalists.

NEO-CONNED?

Is this the Bush regime's Watergate? It's a long post and it's far from complete but it suggests a pattern of duplicity, corruption and even treachery that led to the American invasion of Iraq and the deaths of tens, perhaps thousands of innocents. A look at the villains and miscreants involved reads like a spy novel, only worse. This post is assembled from various sources. It's long but I believe well worth the read.

McClatchey Newspapers has broken a story that suggests the "neo-cons" either naively duped or recklessly conned the Bush administration on behalf of the Iranian government to invade Iraq.
The cast of characters is fascinating - Rumsfeld, Cheney, Douglas Feith, Peter Cambone, Michael Ledeen and a supposed Iranian exile Manucher Ghorbanifar.

Rumsfeld and Cheney you know. Douglas Feith headed Rumsfeld's private intelligence agency within the Pentagon (the Office of Special Plans) that somehow always seemed to produce supposed intelligence far more provocative than what was coming out of America's established intelligence agencies such as the CIA.

Michael Ledeen. This character is a "scholar" at the American Enterprise Institute, the neo-cons own bat cave where folks like John Bolton, David Frum, Fred Kagan, Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz hide from the sunlight. Born in Los Angeles, Ledeen moved to Rome in 1974 to study - why, of course, Italian fascism. A founding member of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), Ledeen worked for the Italian military intelligence service in 1980 as a risk analyst and later served as a Special Advisor to Secretary of State Al Haig during the Reagan administration.

Then there's Iranian exile Manucher Ghorbanifar, the supposed Iranian exile. Here's part of his Wikipedia bio:

Manucher Ghorbanifar (nickname Gorba) is an expatriate Iranian arms dealer. He is best known as a middleman in the Iran-Contra Affair during the Ronald Reagan presidency. He is suspected to be a double agent for Mossad. He re-emerged in American politics during the lead-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq during the first term of President George W. Bush as a back-channel intelligence source to certain Pentagon officials who desired regime change in Iran.

In the 1980s Ghorbanifar's principal American contacts were National Security Council agents Oliver North and Michael Ledeen. Ghorbanifar also tried to get the US to support the Mojahedin-e-Khalq (MEK) opposition to the Khomeini government of Iran. Ledeen vouched for Ghorbanifar to National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane. Oliver North later claimed that Ghorbanifar had given him the idea for diverting profits from TOW and HAWK missile sales to Iran to the Nicaraguan Contras.

Ghorbanifar's suspected duplicity during the Iran-Contra deal led CIA Director William Casey to order three separate lie-detector tests, all of which he failed. Iranian officials also suspected Ghorbanifar of passing them forged American documents. The CIA issued a burn notice (or "Fabricator Notice") on Ghorbanifar in 1984, meaning he was regarded as an unreliable source of intelligence, and a 1987 congressional report on Iran-Contra cites the CIA warning that Ghorbanifar "should be regarded as an intelligence fabricator and a nuisance".

His own cohorts in the arms trading affair were also non-plussed. “I knew him to be a liar,” North eventually acknowledged. Robert McFarlane, the national-security adviser who approved the Iran-Contra arms trades, once described Ghorbanifar as “one of the most despicable characters I have ever met."

In December 2001, Michael Ledeen organized a three-day meeting in Rome, Italy between Manucher Ghorbanifar and Defense Intelligence Agency officials Larry Franklin and Harold Rhode. Also present were two officials from Italy's SISMI. In addition to a position at the American Enterprise Institute, Ledeen was working as a consultant to then U.S. Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, who oversaw the Office of Special Plans.

The 2001 meeting took place with the approval of then-Deputy National Security Advisory Stephen Hadley. The meeting concerned a secret offer from reportedly dissident Iranian officials to provide information relevant to the War on Terror and Iran's relationship with terrorists in Afghanistan.

In June 2002, officials of the Department of Defense met with Ghorbanifar and Iranian officials in Paris, France, without approval from the White House or other relevant Executive agencies. It is unclear if the other Iranians were actually MEK members.

Summer 2003 news reports of the meetings prompted an internal review, as well as an investigation by the US Senate Intelligence Committee. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld described the meetings as, "There wasn't anything there that was of substance or of value that needed to be pursued further."

Now, back to the McClatchey story.

Defense Department counterintelligence investigators suspected that Iranian exiles who provided dubious intelligence on Iraq and Iran to a small group of Pentagon officials might have "been used as agents of a foreign intelligence service ... to reach into and influence the highest levels of the U.S. government," a Senate Intelligence Committee report said Thursday.

A top aide to then-secretary of defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, however, shut down the 2003 investigation into the Pentagon officials' activities after only a month, and the Defense Department's top brass never followed up on the investigators' recommendation for a more thorough investigation, the Senate report said.

The revelation raises questions about whether Iran may have used a small cabal of officials in the Pentagon and in Vice President Dick Cheney's office to feed bogus intelligence on Iraq and Iran to senior policymakers in the Bush administration who were eager to oust the Iraqi dictator.

Iran, which was a mortal enemy of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and fought a bloody eight-year war with Iraq during his reign, has been the primary beneficiary of U.S. policy in Iraq, where Iranian-backed groups now run much of the government and the security forces.

The aborted counterintelligence investigation probed some Pentagon officials' contacts with Iranian exile Manucher Ghorbanifar, whom the CIA had labeled a "fabricator" in 1984. Those contacts were brokered by an American civilian, Michael Ledeen, a former Pentagon and National Security Council consultant and a leading advocate of invading Iraq and overthrowing Iran's Islamic regime.

Stephen Cambone, then the undersecretary of defense for intelligence, shut down the counterintelligence investigation after only a month, the Senate report said.

The Senate report said that Pentagon officials never followed up on the investigators' recommendation for a comprehensive analysis of whether Ghorbanifar or his associates tried "to directly or indirectly influence or access U.S. government officials."

The counterintelligence investigators recommended that U.S. officials attempt "to map Ghorbanifar's relationship within Iranian elite social networks and, if possible, his contacts with other governments and/or intelligence organizations," but that effort was never undertaken.

The Senate committee also found that Pentagon officials concealed the contacts with Ghorbanifar from the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the State Department. Pentagon officials also provided Senate investigators with an inaccurate account of events and, with support from two unnamed officials in Cheney's office, continued meeting with Ghorbanifar after contact with him was officially ordered to stop.

The first meetings with Ghorbanifar, which were disclosed in August 2003 by the Long Island, N.Y., newspaper Newsday, took place in Rome in December 2001. They were attended by two Pentagon Iran experts, Harold Rhode and Larry Franklin; by an Italian military intelligence official, and by Ledeen.

Franklin, who, in an unrelated matter, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to prison in 2006 for providing classified information on Iran policy to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, passed the information about the alleged Iranian hit squads to a U.S. Special Forces commander in Afghanistan. Although a DIA analyst told the Senate committee that he couldn't speculate on whether the information had been "truly useful," Ledeen and Pentagon officials claimed it saved American lives, the committee said.

During the Rome meetings, Ghorbanifar also laid out a scheme to overthrow the Iranian regime on a napkin during a late night meeting in a bar. "The plan," said the Senate committee, "involved the simultaneous disruption of traffic at key intersections leading to Tehran that would create anxiety, work stoppages and other disruptive measures" in a capital city famous for its traffic congestion.

Ghorbanifar asked for $5 million in seed money, Franklin told the committee, and indicated that if the traffic jam plan succeeded, he'd need additional money.

After Franklin and Rhode returned from the Rome meetings, the Senate report said, two series of events began to unfold in Washington that were typical of the gamesmanship that plagued the Bush administration's national security team.

"First," the report said, "State Department and CIA officials attempted to determine what Mr. Ledeen and the DOD representatives had done in Rome, and second, DOD officials debated the next course of action."

When the CIA and the State Department discovered that Ledeen and Ghorbanifar were involved, they opposed any further contact with the two. Ledeen's contacts, the Defense Human Intelligence Service concluded, were "nefarious and unreliable," the Senate committee reported.

According to the report, Ledeen, however, persisted, presenting then-Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith with a new 100-day plan to provide, among other things, evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that supposedly had been moved to Iran — Saddam Hussein's archenemy. This time, the report said, Ledeen solicited support from former speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich and from three then-GOP senators, Sam Brownback of Kansas, Jon Kyl of Arizona and Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania.

Rhode and Ghorbanifar met again in Paris in June 2003 with at least the tacit approval of an official in Cheney's office, the Senate report said.

Now for a quick look at Peter Cambone- the guy who shut down the investigation. From Wikipedia:

"In January of 2001, as George W. Bush prepared to take office, Cambone served on a panel for nuclear weapons issues sponsored by the National Institute for Public Policy, a conservative think tank. Other members of the panel included Stephen Hadley, William Schneider, and Robert Joseph. This panel advocated using tactical nuclear weapons as a standard part of the United States defense arsenal.

According to Peter Ogden, of the Center for American Progress, Cambone's nomination as undersecretary of defense for intelligence was "the culmination of [Donald] Rumsfeld's efforts to politicize intelligence gathering and analysis... Cambone is despised by many within the Pentagon for his attempts to steamroll all opposition to Rumsfeld's military transformation projects and is widely perceived as a pompous ideologue who cannot be trusted to bring the requisite objectivity to intelligence matters."

Cambone was known in the Pentagon as Donald Rumsfeld's "chief henchman". The orders to soften up Iraqi prisoners for intelligence interrogators (both military and private contractors) are said to have come directly from Cambone's office. In a 2006 Counterpunch article, Jeffrey St. Clair reported that Cambone is responsible for intelligence operations like Gray Fox, a kind of sabotage and assassination squad. Several sources report that Cambone has become so hated and feared inside the Pentagon as Rumsfeld's hatchetman that one general told the Army Times: 'If I had one round left in my revolver, I would take out Stephen Cambone.' " In early December 2006 it was announced that Dr. Cambone would step down at the end of that year, becoming the first key department member to leave in the wake of Rumsfeld's resignation.

War crimes prosecution

On 10 November, 2006, the German Federal Government announced that it had decided, within the legal framework of universal jurisdiction, to permit the war crimes prosecution of Stephen A. Cambone for his alleged role in condoning the abuse of prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison during his tenure from 2001 to 2003 as U.S. Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence."

What conclusions can be drawn from this? Just one - that there's an urgent need to investigate what was really going on within the vice-president's office, Rumsfeld's Pentagon, the Office of Special Plans and the American Enterprise Institute itself. There's just too much smoke here to avoid the conclusion there's fire to be found underneath all this.

Above all, this investigation needs to be purused urgently before these very same reprobates manage to push the United States into war on Iran. There have been too many crimes and too much death to let these punks, thugs and fixers continue to operate with impunity.

Addendum:

More on Michael Ledeen.

Former CIA head of counterterrorism operations and intelligence director at the National Security Council under Ronald Reagan, Vincent Cannistaro, believed Ledeen was also directly tied to the Niger yellowcake story used by Bush and Cheney to claim that Saddam was pursuing the development of nuclear weapons.

"When the former CIA head of counter-terrorism was asked if a Michael Ledeen had been the one who produced the Iraq documents he said "You'd be very close."

This is consistent with the theory that the documents are the work of Iraqi dissidents associated with Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress.

The documents would have flowed from Chalabi to Ledeen to SISME, and thus would have been laundered to make them appear as legitimate products discovered by a legitimate intelligence agency.

This sophistication in the use of foreign intelligence agencies appears to be part of the modus operandi of the neocons, and may derive from the particular expertise of Ledeen and Richard Perle, developed in various shenanigans going back to the 1970's in particular the Iran-Contra affair.

Intelligence agencies in Britain, France, and Germany were also used in the same campaigns of lies which led to the attack on Iraq. One of the strategies was to feed some nonsense to one intelligence agency, and then have that nonsense distributed to other intelligence agencies. Then the claim would be that the information must be true, as it came from multiple sources."

And, as intended from the outset, Bush & Company are still falling back on the "everybody believed it" line to bury the reality of how they lied their asses off in order to invade Iraq.

McSame and his Trained Chimp

Steve Bell, The Guardian

Clintonistas Under a Microscope

Hillary Clinton was the first woman to lose a major party's nomination for president and that's not sitting well for some of her more zealous feminist supporters. Michelle Goldberg writing in The New Republic analyzes the lasting legacy of feminist bitterness in her article, "3 A.M. for Feminism, Clinton dead enders and the crisis in the women's movement."

It's an eye-opener and is worth a close read regardless of which candidate you favoured:

http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=2c2ec3a8-e813-4d4e-b566-510e0f19eced

10,000 Turn Out at Obama Rally

John McCain managed to muster 30 or 40-supporters the other night for his wretched, pre-emptive speech trying to undermine Barack Obama. In fairness, McCain often attracts much larger crowds, often hundreds at a time.

Barack Obama held a rally of his own - in Virginia - and all he could draw was a paltry TEN THOUSAND enthusiastic supporters. From the Washington Post:

"In Virginia, Obama delivered his standard stump speech at both campaign stops, but the events were weighted with significance, a reminder of one of his biggest primary wins and his determination to compete in Virginia and other traditional Republican strongholds in November.

The senator from Illinois noted the symbolism of the first African American presidential nominee appealing for support in a former Confederate state.

"This crowd reflects what was done 40 years ago to perfect this union," Obama told the Nissan crowd, referring to achievements of the civil rights movement. "And now, 40 years later, that same sense of urgency is demanded."

Die-hard Obama supporters and undecided voters converged on the amphitheater in Prince William County three hours before the candidate was scheduled to take the stage at 6 p.m. State and local transportation officials had braced for a major backup on Interstate 66, but traffic was like that of a normal evening rush."

Israel Threatens Iran, Tehran Says Thanks!

Here's the premise. One of Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert's deputies announces that an Israeli strike on Iran might be "unavoidable" if Tehran continues to pursue its nuclear weapons programme, i.e. nuclear enrichment.

Haven't we seen this movie before?

Washington kick-started Iran's ascendancy in the Muslim world by going to war against Iraq. That allowed Iraq to fall under Shiite control, enormously boosting Iran's influence and prestige. Then Iran bankrolled Hezbollah and Hamas, extending its sphere of influence from the Persian Gulf all the way to the Mediterranean Sea.

Lately Iran has picked up a couple of new patrons - Russia and China. China wants a secure source of oil, an energy "leg up" over India and the U.S. Russia wants to manage the control of Iranian oil and natural gas to help it tighten its control over Europe's energy supplies. Both want to put a dent in American hegemony over the area. To this end, Russia has supplied Iran with some of its latest surface-to-air missile batteries while China has delivered what may be the most sophisticated and capable anti-ship cruise missiles on the planet.

Who would benefit from airstrikes against Iranian nuclear installations? Here's a clue - it's not Israel, it's not the United States, it's not the Sunni Arab states. The winner would be - Iran!

The Mullahs and Ayatollahs in Tehran face greater threats from within than from without. Iran's younger generation clamours for secular and democratic reforms. Yet these very same reformers warn anyone who'll listen that an attack on their homeland would drive them right behind the Tehran government in support of their country. Attacking Iran, in effect, could unify Iran, bolster solidarity for Tehran throughout the Muslim world and cause the Shia regions to coalesce ever more strongly behind it. That could play proper hell with American forces in a seemingly more tranquil Iraq and could also impact on the war in Afghanistan.

If Israel attacks it's a fair bet that Iran will retaliate against the West. It could withhold its own oil exports and block most other oil shipments through the Persian Gulf with its anti-ship missiles. That could be enough to collapse many Western economies. It could likewise drive a wedge between the Israeli/American coalition and Europe while simultaneously improving Russia's and China's hands in the region and elsewhere.

So, what's the answer? I don't know but it certainly isn't resort to airstrikes. That route is a temporary solution, at best, but fraught with so many downsides as to make it ludicrous. Do we really need Israel doing for Iran the same favour it did for Hezbollah in Lebanon?

The solution might just lie in taking Washington and Israel out of the equation altogether and entrusting the problem to more effective intermediaries, Russia perhaps, while contenting ourselves with sanctions and containment.

I only wish that the United States and Israel weren't, at this critical moment, saddled with two of their most inept leaders in history.

Another Harpie Heading for the Toolbox?

I never understood Jim Flaherty.

There was always something about the guy that didn't add up, that seemed somehow off. He wasn't what we've come to expect in a Finance Minister. He wasn't that essential bit reserved and considered. Instead he more closely resembled the beer hall brawler on a Saturday night at closing time.

Flaherty exuded a dull and brutish tone, presenting a character that seemed to constantly embrace a simmering belligerence. He always struck me as a tad unhinged. Come to think of it, that could equally well describe Harper's EnviroMin, John Baird. Maybe there's something in that flawed character profile that genuinely appeals to our Furious Leader. But I digress.

In the Toronto Star, Chantal Hebert ponders what may be, for Flaherty, the end of the road:

"In the week since Bernier's resignation, Flaherty's future as finance minister has become the focal point of the upcoming cabinet shuffle. One way or another, his fate will reveal more about Stephen Harper's mindset in the lead-up to a possible fall election than any other cabinet move.

Earlier this week Flaherty's cabinet future, rather than Bernier's romantic past, was the prime topic of speculation at Stéphane Dion's end-of-session garden party. Almost to a man and a woman, senior Liberals expect the Prime Minister to seize the pretext of an unexpected shuffle to replace Flaherty with the less abrasive Jim Prentice.

With cabinet fever running rampant within Conservative ranks and with at least a half-dozen ministers pining for new assignments, the impetus for a major shuffle has been gaining momentum daily on Parliament Hill.

But the finance minister is a central figure of the cabinet. His role is ultimately more pivotal than that of the foreign affairs minister; to replace Flaherty at this advanced stage in the life of the government would be a delicate operation.

On the other hand, if the Conservatives do want to run as the team best equipped to deal with a flagging economy in the next election, Harper has no interest in going into the campaign with his current finance minister.

Flaherty may not have been the only minister from Ontario to engage in a war of words with Queen's Park but it was his vocal part in the federal attacks on Dalton McGuinty that seemed to finally gel the province's public opinion and send Conservative popularity on a downward spin this spring.

With satisfaction with the government declining in tandem with public confidence in the economy, Flaherty's credentials as a former Mike Harris minister do little to dispel the perception that Harper's regime is short on sensitivity and compassion."

But we shouldn't be too hard on Jim Flaherty. There's no way he could have gotten away with his bellicosity toward Queens Park except with Stephen Harper's approval.

Maybe we should pity Flaherty. After all, he's coming out of this looking a bit like the loser in one of those internet street brawls where the rubbies beat the hell out of each other for a bottle of hooch.

The Madness of King George w.

The adage about the futility of trying to drive a square peg into a round hole may serve as a handy metaphor to describe Washington's bungling throughout the Middle East.

There's no region on earth where the Bush regime has squandered more American lives, treasure and prestige than the Middle East and no place on earth where it has consistently failed so miserably. But don't take my word for it.

Look at places like Lebanon, Gaza and Syria. There has been progress made lately in all three hotspots and in each there appears to be one common factor - the United States has been dealt out. From The New York Times:

"In the last few weeks, three long-frozen conflicts in the Middle East have displayed early signs of thawing. Israel and Hamas may be inching toward a cease-fire that would end attacks by both sides and, perhaps, loosen the siege imposed on the impoverished Gaza Strip. The factions in Lebanon, after a long period of institutional paralysis and a near civil war, have reached a tentative political agreement. And eight years after their last negotiations, Israel and Syria have announced the resumption of indirect peace talks.

The Gaza deal is being brokered by Egypt. Qatar mediated the Lebanese accord. Turkey is shepherding the Israeli-Syrian contacts. All three countries are close allies of the United States. Under normal circumstances, they would be loath to act on vital regional matters without America’s consent.

Yet in these cases they seem to have ignored Washington’s preferences. The negotiations either involved parties with whom the United States refuses to talk, initiated a process the United States opposes or produced an outcome harmful to its preferred local allies.

The region is in a mess, and Washington’s allies know it. They privately blame the United States and have given up waiting for the Bush administration to offer them a way out.

By acting as they did, Egypt, Qatar and Turkey gave the true measure of America’s dwindling credibility and leverage after American debacles in Iraq, the Palestinian territories and Lebanon. They are willing to take matters into their own hands and overlook American ambivalence about their doing so.

Intent on isolating its foes, the United States has instead ended up marginalizing itself. In one case after another, the Bush administration has wagered on the losing party or on a lost cause.
Israel wants to deal with Hamas because it — not America’s Palestinian partners — possesses what Israel most wants: the ability to end the violence and to release Cpl. Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier held by Hamas. Israel has come around to dealing with Syria because Damascus — not America’s so-called moderate Arab allies — holds the crucial cards: Syria has a clear strategy of alliance with Iran; it supports the more powerful forces on the ground in Lebanon; and it provides refuge to opposition and Islamist forces in Palestine.

Likewise, America’s Lebanese friends had to give in to Hezbollah’s demands once it became clear that the support of the United States could not undo their country’s balance of power. Meanwhile, the process President Bush seems to care about most — that elusive Israeli-Palestinian track — is also the least likely to go anywhere.

The United States has cut itself off from the region on the dubious assumption that it can somehow maximize pressure on its foes by withholding contact, choosing to flaunt its might in the most primitive and costly of ways. It has pushed its local allies toward civil wars — arming Fatah against Hamas; financing some Lebanese forces against Hezbollah — they could not and did not win. And it has failed to understand that its partners could achieve more in alliance than in conflict with their opposition."

American efforts in all three cases have also fallen flat because Washington keeps trying to add one additional, vexing layer to them - Iran. The U.S. sees Iran's evil hand as the culprit behind each crisis instead of understanding that Iran is mainly supporting Hezbollah, Hamas and Syria just as the U.S. has been supporting the other players in each conflict. Trying to somehow undo Iran on the backs of the crises in Palestine, Lebanon and the Golan Heights is beyond America's or anyone's power.

Once the Egyptians, the Qataris and the Turks engage the principles without the hurdles poised by the Washington-Iran conflict, progress is suddenly possible.

Arms Race Update - Space Wars

Is this blunt enough for you? From Asia Times Online:

"Chinese military experts believe a confrontation in space, probably with the United States, is inevitable. What they haven't said is whether they expect to win."

China is concerned because of Bush's space doctrine that reserves to the United States the unilateral authority to decide which nations will be allowed to use space and, more importantly, the right to prevent others from placing satellites or other space craft into orbit. Sound a tad arrogant, belligerent even? It is and the Chinese know the nation that Bush is referring to but won't mention is theirs.

So the Chinese, it appears, will be gearing up to muscle their way into a region which, in reality, belongs to no one.

"...since they successfully shot down an obsolete weather satellite with a missile in an outer orbit in January 2007, the Chinese armed forces have been operating from a position of relative strength.

So powerful was the impact from the four-stage rocket, which was traveling at nearly 29,000 kilometers an hour when it struck the satellite, that it scattered debris halfway around the globe. A definite footprint of strategic intent.

No surprise then, that the Pentagon responded in February this year by shooting down one of its own wayward satellites over the Pacific Ocean with a rocket, thus shattering a 1980s undertaking not to conduct antisatellite (ASAT) tests.

Thirty-two countries are known to have a missile capability, including Asian foes India and Pakistan, South and North Korea, Israel, Syria, Taiwan, Iran, Vietnam, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, as well as Russia, China and the US. Any could technically wage a military campaign in space, even if it were limited to ground-to-air strikes.

Most of these countries are signatories to the Outer Space Treaty, an agreement approved by the United Nations in 1967 after tortuous negotiations between the US and the Soviet Union - though China is one of the few nations to fully accede to its provisions.

Core commitments are that signatories will not place "nuclear or any other weapons of mass destruction", military installations or fortifications in orbit around the Earth or on any celestial body, undertake testing of weapons there or conduct military maneuvers.

Conventional weapons based in space are totally legal. And there is no prohibition on the firing of ground-based missiles into space, as both the US and Soviet Union were developing intercontinental missiles and peaceful space programs when the treaty was signed.

Similarly, there is wide scope for interpreting "weapons of mass destruction"; as US defense officials have pointed out, practically anything that could be propelled into space could be used to ram a satellite without violating the treaty."

China has succeeded in getting American right-wingers apoplectic and suspicious to the point of paranoia.

Heritage Foundation vice president for foreign policy and defense studies, Larry M Wortzel, railed in a commentary, "China's strategy here is to blunt American military superiority by limiting and ultimately neutralizing its existing space-based defense assets, and to forestall deployment of new technology that many experts believe would provide the best protection from ballistic missile attack."

The Chinese are also in development of a new generation of stealthy, small, satellite killers:

"The Technology Research Academy has been working on an advanced ASAT weapon called a "piggyback satellite" that would attach itself to an enemy satellite, space station or space-based laser and jam communications or blow up the target.

A generation of mini satellites is being developed that would be so small they would be difficult to detect from the ground. They are said to be defensive, but would still be capable of surveillance, reconnaissance, communications and - theoretically - the destruction of other satellites."

Meanwhile U.S. sources revealed today that China is poised to beat the Americans to the moon. The US landing is scheduled for 2020 but the Chinese are expected to make it there by 2017 or earlier.

By the way, if the Chinese and Americans ever do get into a battle in space, prepare to return to the 1950's. Everything from cell phones to aerial navigation will go down if - make that when - the cascade of debris begins, rapidly taking down satellites until all that's left is debris. And, when that happens, don't count on anyone fixing the problem anytime soon. We'll just have to sit and wait about two generations before all that space debris falls back to earth before it'll be safe enough to put anything back up there again.

The Subjugation of Iraq

George w. Bush may have just handed victory to Barack Obama and a crushing defeat to John McCain.

The British newspaper The Independent reports it has obtained leaked details of the impending security agreement soon to be inked by the Maliki government in Baghdad:

"A secret deal being negotiated in Baghdad would perpetuate the American military occupation of Iraq indefinitely, regardless of the outcome of the US presidential election in November.

Iraqi officials fear that the accord, under which US troops would occupy permanent bases, conduct military operations, arrest Iraqis and enjoy immunity from Iraqi law, will destabilise Iraq's position in the Middle East and lay the basis for unending conflict in their country.

But the accord also threatens to provoke a political crisis in the US. President Bush wants to push it through by the end of next month so he can declare a military victory and claim his 2003 invasion has been vindicated. But by perpetuating the US presence in Iraq, the long-term settlement would undercut pledges by the Democratic presidential nominee, Barack Obama, to withdraw US troops if he is elected president in November.

America currently has 151,000 troops in Iraq and, even after projected withdrawals next month, troop levels will stand at more than 142,000 – 10 000 more than when the military "surge" began in January 2007. Under the terms of the new treaty, the Americans would retain the long-term use of more than 50 bases in Iraq. American negotiators are also demanding immunity from Iraqi law for US troops and contractors, and a free hand to carry out arrests and conduct military activities in Iraq without consulting the Baghdad government.

The precise nature of the American demands has been kept secret until now. The leaks are certain to generate an angry backlash in Iraq. "It is a terrible breach of our sovereignty," said one Iraqi politician, adding that if the security deal was signed it would delegitimise the government in Baghdad which will be seen as an American pawn.

The US has repeatedly denied it wants permanent bases in Iraq but one Iraqi source said: "This is just a tactical subterfuge." Washington also wants control of Iraqi airspace below 29,000ft and the right to pursue its "war on terror" in Iraq, giving it the authority to arrest anybody it wants and to launch military campaigns without consultation.

Mr Bush is determined to force the Iraqi government to sign the so-called "strategic alliance" without modifications, by the end of next month. But it is already being condemned by the Iranians and many Arabs as a continuing American attempt to dominate the region. Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the powerful and usually moderate Iranian leader, said yesterday that such a deal would create "a permanent occupation". He added: "The essence of this agreement is to turn the Iraqis into slaves of the Americans."


The newspaper reports that al-Maliki also doesn't like the agreement but feels he must sign it because his government cannot survive without American support.

John McCain's position that the war in Iraq needs to continue is based on his claim that the surge is working, that violence is waning in Iraq and al-Qaeda is on the run. This "status of forces" treaty, due to be inked next month, is bound to spark unrest - the sort of violence McCain claims is dying out. It will vindicate al Sadr's claim that Iraq is facing permanent occupation and it will cast Maliki's government as eerily similar to Petain's Vichy rule under Nazi occupation.

What Bush doesn't appear to have considered is how his successor is to come up with the forces necessary to keep this farce going. With some poor saps already on their fourth and fifth combat tours in the War Without End on Terror, a ground force that's nearly broken, a recruiting machine that is so desperate it's scraping the barrel and still coming up short, and a population at home simply fed up with Iraq - the only way they're going to be able to staff those 50-permanent bases is with fresh blood and that, in turn, means bringing back the draft.

Another little point. Who's going to pick up the tab for this infinite adventure? I don't think American voters, when presented with the cost they've already incurred in the form of government borrowing and the additional fortune it would cost to maintain the American legions in Mesopotamia, will accept that when they go to the polls in November.

Once this comes out in the open it can only reinforce al Sadr's demand for a referendum to let the Iraqi people decide whether American troops should go or stay.

I think this plan is an enormous blunder, even by the standards of the man whose entire administration has been a succession of blunders.

LIAR, LIAR

The US Senate Intelligence Committee has finally said it - George w. Bush and Dick Cheney deliberately made public statements to promote an invasion of Iraq that they knew at the time were not supported by available intelligence.

There's the verdict. They weren't mistaken. They weren't misled by faulty intelligence. It wasn't just an honest mistake. THEY LIED!

Yes Messrs. Bush and Cheney lied their assess off to deceive Congress and the American people into supporting their war of whim in Iraq. From McClatchey Newspapers' Washington Bureau:

“Before taking the country to war, this administration owed it to the American people to give them a 100 percent accurate picture of the threat we faced. Unfortunately, our Committee has concluded that the administration made significant claims that were not supported by the intelligence,” said committee Chairman John D. Rockefeller IV, D- W. Va.

It's long been known that the administration's claims in the runup to the Iraq war, from Saddam Hussein's alleged ties to al Qaida to whether Iraq had an active nuclear weapons program, were incorrect, and White House spokeswoman Dana Perino suggested the problems were faulty intelligence.

"We had the intelligence that we had fully vetted, but it was wrong," she said. "We certainly regret that and we've taken measures to fix it."

But the Senate report, the first official examination of whether the president and vice president knew that their claims were incorrect at the time that they made them, reached a different conclusion.

“There is no question we all relied on flawed intelligence. But, there is a fundamental difference between relying on incorrect intelligence and deliberately painting a picture to the American people that you know is not fully accurate," Rockefeller said in a statement.

'Statements by the President and the Vice President indicating that Saddam Hussein was prepared to give weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups for attacks against the United States were contradicted by available intelligence information," the report concluded.

Among the reports conclusions:

Claims by President Bush that Iraq and al Qaida had a partnership "were not substantiated by the intelligence."

The president and vice president misrepresented what was known about Iraq’s chemical weapons capabiliies.

Rumsfeld misrepresented what the intelligence community knew when he said Iraq's weapons productions facilities were buried deeply underground.

Cheney's claim that the intelligence community had confirmed that lead Sept. 11 hijacker Mohammed Atta had met an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in 2001 was not true."

Looking for the High Crimes and Misdemeanours department? Look no further than the White House and its denizens. The committee report reads like an indictment for crimes that have directly taken the lives of tens, probably hundreds of thousands of innocents. Finally official Washington has said what a lot of us have known all along, this criminal regime deliberately and methodically betrayed its nation and lied the country into a war that has brought little but devastation and rebuke. If ever an executive belonged behind bars and high walls, this is it.

What's On O'Reilly's Mind? Man Rape, Of Course!

I wonder if Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity and all the other uber-right loudmouths at Fox are getting their knickers in a twist at the prospect of a new broom arriving to clean out the filth at the White House? After all, like cockroaches everywhere, they've feasted royally on that very filth these past eight years and the idea of being sent scurrying in search of another dark, dirty hiding place must be daunting.

It certain seems to have gotten to O'Reilly who recently accused McClellan of holding Bush down while the left wing media ass raped George w. Bush. That's the sort of imagery that runs through a tortured mind like O'Reilly's. Then again, maybe Bill's just jealous.

Who Will DeThrone the President?

The most important, and critical, reason for impeachment of Bush and Cheney was to defend the Constitution against their excesses, their abuses and restore America's system of checks and balances. America will not long sustain a government "of the people, by the people and for the people" unless balance is restored which requires, in essence, removing powers wrongfully usurped by the executive and restoring to Congress its rightful powers.

There is a solid case for impeachment of the president and vice-president for "high crimes and misdemeanours" but, so far, it's been reduced to a plaything for constitutional scholars. Unfortunately, the American public has poorly understood the nature of the case and what's at stake if nothing is done. House and senate Republicans would have fought it out of fear of the damage it could cause their party in future elections. Democratic congressional leaders Reid and Pelosi likewise showed little stomach for a fight which surely must rank right up there as one of the most serious derelictions of duty by senior American congressional leaders since Bush was first appointed president.

Without impeachment, America's next best hope is for the incoming president to do the right thing and disavow the abuses of the Bush regime. Right now the prospects of that aren't great.

Republican nominee John McCain (yes, I know, he's the "presumptive" nominee) has already indicated that he'll retain the full powers of a "wartime president", basically embracing the abusive precedents set by George w. Bush and his henchman Cheney. Now McCain is quick to claim that no American president is above the law but he also maintains that the constitutional powers of a wartime president override laws such as the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure.

It sure sounds as though John McCain will be happy accepting the basketful of purloined powers filched by the Cheney administration these past eight years. More one-man rule.

Maybe Congress needs to address this forcefully. One way might require any president seeking to circumvent the Constitution and Bill of Rights to make a public declaration of a State of Emergency capped at, say, four to six months after which that president would be required to make a fresh declaration of a State of Emergency. Let the people clearly know and force the president to regularly remind them that he's placed every one of them and their constitutionally-guaranteed freedoms in suspension and then let them judge whether they're content with that.

I think that would put an end to this nonsense in short order. With congressional elections every two years, the American people would be able to respond forcefully to hand an abuser his hat at the polls and punish the president and his party by stripping them of their seats. In essence, it would be a popular call or endorsement for impeachment.

America has allowed its president and viceroy to get too comfortable atop their thrones these past few years. It's time that was put to an end.

The Big Dog Back In the Spotlight

I was wondering what got Mr. "I did not have sex with that woman" in such a rage the other day about an article coming out in Vanity Fair. Now I know.

Apparently the VF article alludes to a number of women Bill has been seen with ever since being rejuvenated through heart surgery in 2004. One of the women named was Gina Gershon. Her lawyers have written to publisher Graydon Carter demanding a full retraction. The magazine says that the article doesn't suggest that Gershon did anything untoward with Bill, just that they were reportedly seen together.

It seems the article was based on interviews with several unnamed Clinton staffers. Clinton referred to the writer, Todd Purdum, a "scumbag."

We probably won't have long to wait before the stories begin pouring in. I'll give Bill the benefit of the doubt, at least until then, but we've all been deceived by him before.

Wherrrrrres Johnny?

Legendary Johnny Carson sidekick and infomercial pitchman Ed McMahon is on the verge of getting booted out of his home.

Question. How does a guy at 85 still owe almost $5-million on his mortgage?

In any case McMahon has fallen into default on the $4.8-million he owes the mortgage company and is desperately trying to flog the property. A spokesman said Ed broke his neck 18-months ago and hasn't been able to work since, leaving him without an income to service the mortgage debt.

Okay, but. McMahon recently bagged a $7.2-million win against his insurance company for a claim that his house developed mold which led to the death of his dog Muffin and sickened Ed and Mrs. McMahon. Okay, $7.2-million minus $4.8 million ought to leave you with clear title to your $6.5 million dollar home and a tidy $2.4-million in spending money left over. Maybe it's not the Publishers Clearinghouse grand prize but it's still pretty decent.

Draco Reborn - Harpo's Copyright Law

I don't use the internet to download music or movies. I prefer to own the CD or DVD and keep it in my own collection but, then again, I pick and choose and can afford what I buy. So much for me.

What of those who do download and participate in file-sharing services? According to the National Spot, the Harperites are moving to stomp on them with both boots. It seems the government's updates to the Copyright Act will introduce a fine of $500 for each and every illegal file transferred online. 500 bucks a pop - if you're caught or if someone in the ranks of Harper's faceless political commissars wants you or your kid caught.

Get this. Those Reformatory stiffs are also going to make it illegal to "unlock" your cell phone! If you bought it from Rogers or Telus or Fido, so long as you have that phone you're a slave to Rogers or Telus or Fido. Get real. There are plenty of reasons to unlock a cell phone. If you're travelling abroad an unlocked phone lets you buy a local SIM card and take the benefit of local, long-distance rates instead of the usurious roaming charges Canadian cellular companies levy.

Here's a question. I just bought a cell phone on ebay and it's already unlocked. Is that going to make me some sort of outlaw when I go shopping for a Canadian carrier or if I decide to later switch? By the way, if you're looking for a cell phone do check ebay because you can often get one for a small fraction of the best price you'll get from a Canadian cellular provider even with a longterm plan.

There's yet another damned good reason to get rid of Harper and his punks. Harper may be content to bend over for the cellular providers so long as he gets a reacharound out of it but there's no reason the rest of us should tolerate their little lovefest.

China Dirties Up - Coal Liquefaction Underway

It's possible to extract a form of ersatz oil out of coal. It's an old technique but one that's fallen out of favour due to the large amounts of greenhouse gases created in the production process.

China's willingness to trash the global environment is a question of deeds, not words. The Chinese talk a good game but they're launching a major CTL, or coal-to-liquid, plant in Inner Mongolia.

The first plant will only produce about 20,000 barrels of oil a day, a drop in the bucket compared to China's 7.2 million barrel a day consumption. To reach this level of production, China will process 3.5 million tonnes of coal per year into 1 million tonnes of oil products such as diesel for cars.

But wait, there's more.

China is targeting on transforming half of Mongolia's coal production into oil by 2010. That would involve processing 135-million tonnes of coal per year.

And China may soon be joined by the United States which is believed to have the largest reserves of coal in the world. From ENN:

"DRKW Advanced Fuels plans to start construction on a plant in Wyoming next year in partnership with Arch Coal Inc and with technologies licensed by General Electric and Exxon Mobil. The defense department is experimenting with CTL in an effort to cut reliance on fuel from countries unfriendly to the United States.

But CTL is highly controversial. Experts say the whole lifecycle releases about twice as much carbon dioxide, the most common greenhouse gas,

as fossil fuel. Liquefying coal also requires large amounts of energy and drains water supplies.
The fuel produced through this method has a shelf life of up to 15 years, unlike other motor fuels which is attractive to the military and to governments keen to ensure fuel security.

Though CTL technology was developed about 100 years ago, it has been little used, except in Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa, which had difficulty accessing then-inexpensive oil.
Oil prices, which have more than quadrupled this decade to above $130 a barrel, have reignited interest in CTL.

The Oil and Gas Journal in April suggested it costs $67 to $82 a barrel to produce CTL fuel, based on the experiences of South Africa's Sansol. Exact prices would depend on a range of factors including coal and water prices and of course it is very expensive to build CTL plants.
Shenhua will be the first to use direct CTL technology on a large scale. It is different from indirect CTL, proven in Nazi Germany and by South Africa's Sasol, and converts coal directly into liquid fuel, skipping gasifying coal into syngas.

"CTL happened only twice in world history, and both times it's been in nations facing some kind of state of emergency with respect to energy. It should sound an alarm bell," said Gary Kendall, from the WWF conservation group."

Think the supposedly green yet lobbyist plagued John McCain will shut this down? Think again.

A Distinction Without a Difference?

We're once again embroiled in the thorny issue of providing sanctuary to American servicemen and women who don't want to serve in the endless US war in Iraq.

The logic used by Citizenship and Immigration spokesperson Danielle Norris is that those seeking sanctuary now cannot be compared to the kids we took in during Vietnam. "Those coming to Canada now volunteered for military service."

Yes, they are different but it's a fragile distinction. During Vietnam the US government wasn't able to deceive enough young people to fill its army with volunteers. Instead it had to rely on the draft, conscription. Young people were forced, often against their will, to serve and fight and die abroad.

Contrast that with Iraq. Here the US government was able to deceive enough young people to fill its army with volunteers. But it hasn't been able to deceive enough young people to keep that scam going. It can't find volunteers, and doesn't have the courage to re institute the draft, so its cowardly way out is to resort to impressment of those who they snagged at the outset, including a lot of reservists, and transform them into a "Stop Loss" hostage army that keeps getting sent back to fight a war, 15-months at a stretch, for three or four or even five tours - and we're still counting.

These poor buggers weren't drafted in to the US armed forces but they've surely been drafted when their enlistments were up and they expected to be going home to their families and jobs. If you're looking for distinctions, here's the most important one. Today's hostage soldiers are drafted forever, until America finally tires of losing in Iraq. Forty years ago, draftees were only required to fight for one year before being released.

So, the Harper government's rationale is that these people were dumb enough to believe they were signing on for just a couple of years and got tricked and that's their problem. As far as we're concerned, they're entitled to all the rights and freedoms of a Roman legionnaire which were pretty much to keep fighting until you were dead.

No, the Harper government hasn't got the spine to do the right thing even if it has the approval of Parliament. After all we just signed up our own soldiers to carry on America's mismanaged war in Afghanistan until 2011.

"It's Our Time"

"It's Our Time" may be the meme of the Democratic presidential runoff. Obama used it to powerful effect in his speech last night. Hillary supporters have been using it constantly to bolster their claim that Mrs. Clinton deserves the throne.

To all you rabid Hillary supporters - it's your time when your candidate wins and, please, make sure I'm the first to know just when that happens. Until your candidate wins, it's not your time. Obama didn't deserve to win because he's black anymore than Hillary deserved to win because she's female. So, cut the crap.

Here's another thought. No genuine feminist can also be a racist. Sexism is bigotry and so is racism. You can't fight one form of bigotry and freely embrace another. And there's plenty of bigotry to be found among Hillary supporters.

It's difficult to read too much into blog comments but I'll give you a few examples of what Hillary supporters have been saying:

"the little sooty tan man"

" it was our time little man, not a token black man"

"the flushing sound? thats your buddy husseins chances of becoming prez"

Hillary enjoyed the support of rank bigots of both genders but it was the depth of bigotry among women that took me by surprise. Now I'm not naive. I studied in the states and I've seen, first hand, more than enough racism among American women. What troubles me is how the feminist leaders didn't step forward to denounce this sort of thing during the nomination campaign. Certainly they ought to have been fighting misogyny but also speaking out against the tide of racism that surfaced from their own gender. Instead they sat on their hands.

Genuine feminism cannot tolerate racism. So, what happened?

That Zombie Named Hillary

The primaries are over and Obama has taken the Democratic Party's presidential nomination. He came from behind and bested not only the shoo-in favourite but also her popular ex-president husband.

So, where were we? Of course, Obama has won the delegates he needs to take the Democratic nomination so where is Hillary? Has she done what is demanded of any losing candidate and fallen behind Obama to support his fight against the Republicans? Of course not. This is a Clinton who believes that America's imperial age continues and that, no matter the result of the primaries, the nomination is still hers because - well, because she's a Clinton. How arrogant of that skinny little upstart to even run against her in the first place? Really.

The New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd is unquestionably an Obama supporter and has been throughout. Notwithstanding that, her take on Billary in today's paper is spot on:

"Whoever said that after denial comes acceptance hadn’t met the Clintons.
If Hillary could not have an acceptance speech, she wasn’t going to have acceptance.

“It’s never going to end,” sighed one Democrat who has been advising Hillary. “We’re just moving to a new phase.”

Barry has been trying to shake off Hillary and pivot for quite a long time now, but she has managed to keep her teeth in his ankle and raise serious doubts about his potency. Getting dragged across the finish line Tuesday night by Democrats who had had enough of the rapacious Clintons, who had decided, if it came to it, that they would rather lose with Obama than win with Hillary, the Illinois senator tried to celebrate at the St. Paul arena where Republicans will anoint John McCain in September.

...“What does Hillary want?” she mused, in her most self-aware moment in some time. “I will be making no decisions tonight,” she concluded, asking fans to go to her Web site to share their thoughts.

And, even though Democrats were no longer listening, Hillary’s camp radiated the message that Obama was a sucker who had played by the rules on Florida and Michigan, and then reached an appeasing compromise, and that such a weak sister could never handle Putin or I’m-A-Dinner-Jacket.

...Clintonologists know that Hillary is up to something, but they aren’t sure what. Theory No. 1 is that it’s the Cassandra “I told you so” gambit: She believes intensely that he’s too black, too weak and too elitist — with all his salmon and organic tea and steamed broccoli — to beat her pal John McCain. But she has to pretend she’ll do “whatever it takes,” even accept the vice presidency, a job she’s already had and doesn’t want again, so that nobody will blame her when he loses on Nov. 4. Then she can power on to 2012.

Theory No. 2 is that it’s a “Bad stuff happens” maneuver, exemplified in her gaffe about the R.F.K. assassination, that she figures that at least if she moves a few blocks from Embassy Row to the Naval Observatory, she’ll be a heartbeat away from the job she’s always wanted.

...For months, Hillary has been trying to emasculate Obama with the sort of words and themes she has chosen, stirring up feminist anger by promoting the idea that the men were unfairly taking it away from the women, and covering up her own campaign mistakes with cries of sexism. Even his ability to finally clinch the historic nomination did not stop her in that pursuit. She did not bat her eyelashes at him and proclaim him Rhett Butler instead of Ashley Wilkes."

Dear Barack:

I don't want to meddle, and congratulations by the way on cinching the Democratic nomination, but -

...but, when you're looking for a running mate maybe, just maybe you might look to someone who hasn't lately and repeatedly and quite openly mused on your hypothetical assassination a'la Bobby Kennedy.

You'll spend your entire term glancing over your shoulder and you'll have to constantly watch both of them. Why not do it the easy way? Just fill the tub, throw in the piranhas and jump in.

A Government of Liars

I sympathize with the American people for, while they've made some stupid mistakes these past eight years, I can't think of a time in the last six decades when the population of a Western nation has been so overwhelmed by such a malevolent pack of liars in office.

Word of caution here. I am NOT suggesting the Bush regime is on some sort of par with the Hitler administration, not at all, nothing of the sort. That said, I don't think that state propaganda has been brought to bear on a populace so powerfully and effectively as by the Bushies since Joseph Goebbels and, even then, he openly called himself a propagandist.

It's easy for us to judge and heap scorn on the American people but when have we ever been subjected to such a subversive onslaught of deceit, fear mongering and hate mongering from our own government? We haven't. Not to say there aren't those north of the 49th who wouldn't try but we haven't experienced the traumatic underpinning the Americans suffered on 9/11 to let them get away with it.

They lied their way into wars without end. They lied about their tax cuts and the prosperity it would bring to all. They lied about the danger of environmentalism. It's been one lie atop the next until lie has become indistinguishable from truth.

Now we learn - surprise, surprise - that political appointees (commissars) in NASA's public affairs office, "worked to control and distort public accounts of its researchers' findings about climate change for at least two years, the inspector general's office said yesterday."

From the Washington Post:

"James E. Hansen, who directs NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and has campaigned publicly for more stringent limits on greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming, told The Post and the New York Times in September 2006 that he had been censored by NASA press officers, and several other agency climate scientists reported similar experiences. NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are two of the government's lead agencies on climate change issues.

From the fall of 2004 through 2006, the report said, NASA's public affairs office "managed the topic of climate change in a manner that reduced, marginalized, or mischaracterized climate change science made available to the general public." It noted elsewhere that "news releases in the areas of climate change suffered from inaccuracy, factual insufficiency, and scientific dilution."

Lest we yield to the temptation to get smug about this, remember this is pretty much exactly what Harpo has done by gagging Environment Canada scientists and requiring their communications with the outside world to be subjected to his political commissar's censorship from the PMO.

"Kristin Scuderi, a spokeswoman for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said in an e-mail that director John H. Marburger III "would not comment until he's reviewed the report, and he has not yet done so yet. Therefore, OSTP has no comment at this time."

Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.), one of the senators who pressed for the investigation, said in a statement that the report showed that citizens had been denied access to critical scientific information that should inform public policy.

"Global warming is the most serious environmental threat we face - but this report is more evidence that the Bush Administration's appointees have put political ideology ahead of science," Lautenberg said. "Our government's response to global warming must be based on science, and the Bush Administration's manipulation of that information violates the public trust."

I suppose it must be some comfort to the White House to know that, even if John McCain loses in November, there'll still be an administration nearby to keep alive the Bush legacy of secrecy and deceit. That is until we send them packing and restore democracy to Canada.

I remember the day when we used to mock and ridicule the Soviet Union for just this sort of thing.

Will Obama's Assassin Be Named Hillary?

A strange story is circulating today that Hillary Clinton will acknowledge Barack Obama as her party's presidential nominee tonight - but she won't pull out of the nomination campaign. Instead, so the story goes, she'll wind up her enormously expensive campaign, send the workers home, but stay in the game to hector Obama on her pet policies.

Is Hillary the next Joe Lieberman? She's already endorsed John McCain over Obama as a suitable commander in chief to defend America, an endorsement that McCain will use to pummel the Democratic Party's nominee time and time again. Then there's Bill's line about how the election ought to be between, "two people who loved this country and were devoted to the interest of this country.” In other words, Hillary and McCain - again. Stuff like this you can't buy. The Republicans ought to be picking up the tab for Hillary's multi-million dollar campaign deficit.

I don't think she'll do it but what befalls Obama won't be foremost in her mind. If Hillary concedes the nomination, she'll look worse than stupid if she doesn't withdraw. In fact she'll position herself to be seen as dogging Obama, forcing him to split his energies between fending her off and fighting the party's opponent, John McCain.

At least Joe Lieberman waited to defect until after the 2000 election was taken away from Al Gore.

The Hate Vote

Americans have spent an enormous amount of time, energy and money over the past half century to convince themselves that they had finally left behind their nation's horrible racist history.

Even if Barack Obama should lose to McCain in November, he'll have done his country an invaluable service by exposing just how alive and well racism is in today's America, among Democrats as well as Republicans, even among some feminists who ought to be the last to tolerate much less embrace racial bigotry.

Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen calls it "A Campaign to Hate."

"Wherever I go -- from glittering dinner party to glittering dinner party -- the famous and powerful people I meet (for such is my life) tell me how lucky I am to be a journalist in this the greatest of all presidential contests. I tell them, for I am wont to please, that this campaign is indeed great when, as history will record, it is not. I have come to loathe the campaign.

I loathe above all the resurgence of racism -- or maybe it is merely my appreciation of the fact that it is wider and deeper than I thought. I am stunned by the numbers of people who have come out to vote against Barack Obama because he is black. I am even more stunned that many of these people have no compunction about telling a pollster they voted on account of race -- one in five whites in Kentucky, for instance. Those voters didn't even know enough to lie, which is what, if you look at the numbers, others probably did in other states. Such honesty ought to be commendable. It is, instead, frightening.

...So I see little to be happy about, little that pleases my jaundiced eye. Yes, voter participation is way up and in the end, the Democrats will choose a woman or an African American and, to invoke that tiresome phrase, history will be made. But this messy nominating process has eroded the standing of both candidates. It has highlighted the reality that racism still runs deep and that misogyny, although more imagined than real, is not yet a wholly spent force. This is an ugly porridge that has been placed before us, turned rancid since the cold, pristine days of Iowa only five months ago. We were, with apologies to Bob Dylan, so much younger then. "

The Terrible Tempered Mr. Bill Runs Out of Steam

Bill Clinton used to know how to keep his cool. His ability to maintain his composure no matter how many times he got caught lying his ass off, mainly about his chronic inability to keep it in his pants, was instrumental in helping him survive the Republican's attempted impeachment coup.

Let's remember, the Republicans paid dearly for going after Bill because they weren't able to make a fatal dent in his public support. That might've been much different had then president Clinton revealed the ugly temper he's shown so often during his wife's campaign for the Democratic nomination.

It's not that Bill doesn't have reason to be upset. This nomination, after all, was supposed to be hers in a cakewalk. She was so far ahead of all the other Democratic candidates combined that she was as unsinkable as the Titanic.

It's useful to recall that Hillary, not Obama, had the black vote sewn up. Black voters were devoted fans of Bill Clinton. Barack Obama didn't steal those votes, the Clinton camp drove them out with their repeated race-baiting stunts. That was an event of seismic proportions that shook the black community. Interestingly enough it was Bill, not Hillary, who began that blunder.

And the Clinton campaign just kept tripping over a string of blunders. When she realized that what she had wasn't selling, Hillary kept trying to re-invent herself and pandered shamelessly to one group after another. She downed boilermakers with the blue collar crowd in Pennsylvania and professed her love for hot peppers to the Latino voters in Texas and showed up wearing an Indian necklace to appeal to South Dakota natives who had already decided to back Obama. Then there was that miserable "3 a.m." phone call ad, her attempt to knife Obama in the back by saying only she and McCain were experienced enough to be commander in chief, her crack about "I think he's a Christian," the one about her exclusive affinitity to "hard working Americans, white Americans," the outright and oft-repeated lie about braving sniper fire, the Bobby Kennedy assassination ploy. All this and more and yet Mrs. William Clinton and her rabid supporters claim the nomination was stolen from her. That is a pathetic, bordering on sick, joke.

Yet Bill still contends that "she wuz robbed." Of course it's the media's fault, especially the black media, those disloyal, ungrateful darkies. This campaign has shown the ugly side of Bill Clinton.

The New York Times' own black columnist, Bob Herbert, plainly won't be sad to see the Big Dog depart from the campaign:

"The cry of “McCain in ’08!” at the Democratic rules committee meeting in Washington over the weekend came from a supporter of Senator Hillary Clinton.

It reminded me of Bill Clinton’s comment that “it would be a great thing if we had an election year where you had two people who loved this country and were devoted to the interest of this country.”

He was talking about Hillary Clinton and John McCain. The former president’s comment played right into the sustained effort by opponents of Barack Obama to portray the senator as some kind of alien figure, less than patriotic, not fully American, too strange by half to be handed the reins of government.

This was supposed to have been the Democrats’ year. But instead of marching to victory, the party has been at war with itself in some of the ugliest ways imaginable. There was a time, not that long ago, when Democratic voters were crowing about how happy they were with all (or almost all) of the potential nominees.

But the Clinton and Obama partisans spent months fighting bitterly on the toxic terrain of misogyny, racism and religion. It can only make you wonder about the vaunted Democratic claims of moral superiority when it comes to tolerance.

This should have been the year when the Democrats just hammered the Republicans over the economy, the war, energy policy, health care, appointments to the Supreme Court, the failure to rebuild New Orleans, and so on. The list of important issues on which the Republicans are vulnerable is endless.

There is no end of blame to be apportioned among the Democrats. The Clintons have behaved execrably. But weak-willed party leaders showed neither the courage nor the inclination to stop them from fracturing the party along gender and ethnic lines.

As for Senator Obama, he’s been mired in a series of problems of his own — problems that have done serious damage to the very idea that brought him to national prominence in the first place: that he was a new breed of political leader, a unifying candidate who could begin to narrow the partisan divides of race, class and even, to some extent, political persuasion."

At the end of the day it may be clear that Bill Clinton did no favours for anyone.

Finally - a Good Deficit

The federal government is running in the red and it should bring cheers from all of us.

Transport Canada's "clean car" rebate programme is running far over budget. The government earmarked $160-million for the two year programme. The department now expects to spend up to $145-million of that in the first year alone.

So, will the Harper Cons build on this success, one of the few they can boast about? Not likely.
Transport Minister Lawrence Cannon says the Reformatories have no intention of expanding the programme because it "served its purpose."

Way to go, you clowns.

Victoria to Fight Ottawa Over Insite?

The BC government has warned it may intervene to keep the Harper government from shutting Vancouver's safe injection clinic, Insite.

Last week a BC Supreme Court judge, Ian Pitfield, ruled that Insite is a health care facility for drug addicts and, as such, can stay open despite the wacko fundamentalist views of the Harpies. The Cons have announced they'll appeal that decision so they can shut down the clinic.

This is an issue that puts Harper squarely at odds with the people and government of British Columbia. The safe injection clinic where addicts are given clean needles and a place to use them under limited medical supervision is strongly supported in this province in part because it's also the one place where addicts can get counselling and access to rehabilitation programmes.

BC Health Minister George Abbott was unequivocal in expressing his government's support for Insite. "It is a very important case involving a health facility we believe is important in the continuum of care for people with addictions and for people with mental illness." Abbott suggested that what British Columbia needs isn't the end of Insite but more such clinics.

Most of this province isn't keen on Harper's social conservative ways, especially not in major population centres. BC is also more tolerant of drug use than other provinces which is reflected in relatively light sentencing in criminal cases.

But, if the Furious Leader wants a fight on this issue, he couldn't have picked a better place for it in my view. If he wants a fight, a fight he'll get and, next time, all the cameras will be on Lardo. He may suddenly find that he's the one who's really on trial out here. Welcome to Beautiful British Columbia, Steve, c'mon in!

Bo Diddley, Dead at 79

Legendary bluesman Bo Diddley will play no more. Diddley died today at his home in Florida at age 79.

Just Another Godawful Lie

It's the constant fallback line of the Bushies whenever anyone suggests they ginned up the intelligence about Iraq, Saddam and non-existant WMDs - why Washington only had the same intelligence every other country had. In other words, we all believed Iraq was awash in WMDs and ready to use them against us or hand them over to terrorists.

But being the consummate liars they are, the Bushies always skip over the little point that the reason all these other nations believed the same thing is because all these other nations got spoonfed the same propaganda packaged as intelligence by the same people - the Bushies themselves.

What they're saying is "we fooled everybody else, so we get a pass on this one." Yes, they fooled everybody else - or almost everybody. The White House was warned, well in advance, that the smoking gun intelligence they were getting from Iraqi dissident "Curveball" was dodgy at best. And, of course, they were told - again and again - by the UN's eyes on the ground in Iraq, Hans Blix and his teams of weapons inspectors, that there was no sign of such weapons even as they checked out one CIA lead after another.

Drop dead gorgeous Dana Perino, successor to former White House mouthpieces Tony Snow, Scott McLellan and Ari Fleischer, is perhaps the most blatant liar of them all. On the 5th anniversary of Bush's "Mission Accomplished" aircraft carrier speech, Perino tried to turn history on its head by claiming the bold banner was actually about the carrier's completed cruise, not victory in Iraq. Now Deceitful Dana is dragging out the old intelligence scam to refute Australian Prime Minister John Rudd's allegation that the White House "abused" the intelligence to get its way.

"No-one else in the world, no other government, had different information and so we acted based on what was the threat that was presented to us. When the intelligence community presents you with their concerns, you'd better take them seriously," said Perino.

Yeah, Dana, that's right - no other government had different information and the White House saw to that. It's why, today, there are a lot fewer nations willing to take America's word about anything.

"Fool me once ...shame on ...shame on you ...fool me, you can't get fooled again."
Exactly George.

Bloodthirsty George, American Emperor

It was early in Bush's first term and we were all getting used to his malapropisms and other grammatical blunders. It seemed that, whenever the president of the United States opened his mouth (and wasn't reading from a speech), something goofy was almost sure to come out.

Some took that as a sign that Bush was genuinely moronic. Yet we keep getting assured that the guy is actually fairly bright, not that there have been many tangible signs of that.

But early on I read a report of an American linguistics prof who anaylyzed Bush's candid speech and came up with a startling finding. There was one circumstance in which Bush always spoke with total clarity and coherence - when the topic was death.

Death has played a prominent role in little George's life. He used his dad's influence to get a posting in the air national guard in order to dodge the prospect of death fighting in Vietnam. When he was governor of Texas, condemned prisoners were toast. It was said that Bush never saw a death warrant he didn't like and he signed them all as they came across his desk.

But death has never been as central to Bush's life as it has since 2001, beginning with the invasion of Afghanistan. It was the conquest of Iraq two years later, however, that saw the Bush legacy really steeped in blood as tens, probably hundreds of thousands, of innocents died in the aftermath of the botched occupation.

It turns out that there were times when Bush's blood lust was blatant, at least to those around him. US Army general Ricardo Sanchez recounts the bloodthirsty bent of his commander in chief in Sanchez' memoir, "Wiser in Battle," in which he relates what passed during a video conference call between Sanchez and Bremer in Baghdad and Bush, Powell and Rumsfeld in Washington during the reduction of the Sunni city of Falujah. From AlterNet:

According to Sanchez, Powell was talking tough that day: "We've got to smash somebody's ass quickly," the general reports him saying. "There has to be a total victory somewhere. We must have a brute demonstration of power." (And indeed, by the end of April, parts of Fallujah would be in ruins, as, by August, would expanses of the oldest parts of the holy Shiite city of Najaf. Sadr himself would, however, escape to fight another day; and, in order to declare Powell's "total victory," the U.S. military would have to return to Fallujah that November, after the U.S. presidential election, and reduce three-quarters of it to virtual rubble). Bush then turned to the subject of al-Sadr: "At the end of this campaign al-Sadr must be gone," he insisted to his top advisors. "At a minimum, he will be arrested. It is essential he be wiped out."

Not long after that, the President "launched" what an evidently bewildered Sanchez politely describes as "a kind of confused pep talk regarding both Fallujah and our upcoming southern campaign [against the Mahdi Army]." Here then is that "pep talk." While you read it, try to imagine anything like it coming out of the mouth of any other American president, or anything not like it coming out of the mouth of any evil enemy leader in the films of the President's -- and my -- childhood:

"'Kick ass!' [Bush] said, echoing Colin Powell's tough talk. 'If somebody tries to stop the march to democracy, we will seek them out and kill them! We must be tougher than hell! This Vietnam stuff, this is not even close. It is a mind-set. We can't send that message. It's an excuse to prepare us for withdrawal.

"There is a series of moments and this is one of them. Our will is being tested, but we are resolute. We have a better way. Stay strong! Stay the course! Kill them! Be confident! Prevail! We are going to wipe them out! We are not blinking!'"

The last six years have been one long John Wayne moment for George w. Bush and he's relished them to the full. What remains to be seen is how many more commander in chief moments will Bush try to cram in before he's given his eviction notice. Could he "do" Iran, even if just for the fun of it?

And what sort of world awaits Bush come January when he's back at the ranch in Crawford and there's no one left he can kill? Not even a stack of death warrants to sign. How's the guy going to cope in a strange, small world in which everyone lives?

Uncorking the Scientist In Each of Us

Up til now we've been content to view science as something for the geeks - essential, sure, but that's why we have geeks, right?

Whether we like it or not, our dismissive attitude may not work for us much longer. We're on the dawn of an age where holding well-informed scientific views is going to be essential to how we live and even how we vote.

Our parents' world, our grandparents' world is now much in the past. That world is gone, utterly gone, and it isn't coming back for centuries. When I was born the world's population had just set an all-time record of 2-billion people. Little more than half a century later and we've bumped that all-time record to 6.5-billion people which we expect to hit 9-billion before the next half-century is out. Just churn that over for a minute and digest it.

For all the thousands of years of our civilization, it wasn't until about 1814 that we first broke the billion-person mark. 140-years or so later than that, we'd doubled that record. Barely another 60-years yet, we'd gotten 6.5 times more populous than we were when the record was set in 1814. In another 50-years we're looking to be bigger by up to half again. This is something we really need to come to grips with in order to create the informed citizenry we're going to require in just a decade from now.

Here's something to chew on. There is a host of very important, social change decisions that will have to be taken, on a regular basis, fairly soon. What you need to bear in mind is that someone is going to be taking those decisions, one way or the other. If we don't recover our ability to make suitably important decisions in these critical times, we run the very real risk of that core power of our democracy becoming forfeit to others who believe they will make the decisions for us. Also bear in mind that those who usurp this power can't necessarily be trusted to make the best decisions in our interest.

Without wanting to sound like a paranoid conspiracy theorist, there is a tendency today and has been for about two decades of dumbing down the public. People seem to be transforming into cogs, losing their intellectual and political robustness. This sort of thing needs to be reversed if we're not to let our political freedom slip through our fingers. A New York Times article by Columbia physics prof Brian Greene suggests the key may be in science:



A COUPLE of years ago I received a letter from an American soldier in Iraq. The letter began by saying that, as we’ve all become painfully aware, serving on the front lines is physically exhausting and emotionally debilitating. But the reason for his writing was to tell me that in that hostile and lonely environment, a book I’d written had become a kind of lifeline. As the book is about science — one that traces physicists’ search for nature’s deepest laws — the soldier’s letter might strike you as, well, odd.

But it’s not. Rather, it speaks to the powerful role science can play in giving life context and meaning. At the same time, the soldier’s letter emphasized something I’ve increasingly come to believe: our educational system fails to teach science in a way that allows students to integrate it into their lives.

Allow me a moment to explain.

When we consider the ubiquity of cellphones, iPods, personal computers and the Internet, it’s easy to see how science (and the technology to which it leads) is woven into the fabric of our day-to-day activities. When we benefit from CT scanners, M.R.I. devices, pacemakers and arterial stents, we can immediately appreciate how science affects the quality of our lives. When we assess the state of the world, and identify looming challenges like climate change, global pandemics, security threats and diminishing resources, we don’t hesitate in turning to science to gauge the problems and find solutions.

But here’s the thing. The reason science really matters runs deeper still. Science is a way of life. Science is a perspective. Science is the process that takes us from confusion to understanding in a manner that’s precise, predictive and reliable — a transformation, for those lucky enough to experience it, that is empowering and emotional. To be able to think through and grasp explanations — for everything from why the sky is blue to how life formed on earth — not because they are declared dogma but rather because they reveal patterns confirmed by experiment and observation, is one of the most precious of human experiences.

It’s striking that science is still widely viewed as merely a subject one studies in the classroom or an isolated body of largely esoteric knowledge that sometimes shows up in the “real” world in the form of technological or medical advances. In reality, science is a language of hope and inspiration, providing discoveries that fire the imagination and instill a sense of connection to our lives and our world.

Like a life without music, art or literature, a life without science is bereft of something that gives experience a rich and otherwise inaccessible dimension."



This isn't to say that we all need to become scientists, not at all. Fortunately our society's ability to quickly disseminate their discoveries in a form we can comprehend them via the internet and other media is advancing rapidly.

We've certainly reached a critical mass of the production, dissemination and access to credible, lay science. RJ Reynolds and Big Oil aren't gone yet, nor are their shills, but the world is changing, right in front of our eyes, day in and day out, and the list of unresolved challenges gets a bit longer every year.

They always knew their scam couldn't last forever but that wasn't what they've been after. They were there to buy time they otherwise wouldn't have had, an extension, a little more time for another round of their rapacious and highly profitable ways.

There are big changes looming and they'll bring big opportunities as well as big challenges. It would be naive to expect that we'll all rally to these challenges to seek the greater good. There will certainly be individuals and industries that move to exploit it, to set up their interests against ours. The less we understand what's happening the greater their prospects of prevailing against us.

That's why it's becoming important, vital even, that we re-open our minds to science.

Hillary's End Of The Road

The misery is almost over. Hillary Clinton swept the Puerto Rico primary today, for what that's worth. Now there are just two states left - South Dakota and Montana, both of which are expected to be wins for Barack Obama.

The Guardian's Suzanne Goldenberg wrote this touching obituary of the Clinton campaign:

"...A lifetime's worth of ambitions, 16 years of acquaintances in the Democratic party establishment, 16 grinding months of rallies and debates, and $215m (£108m) in campaign funds, all now are exhausted.

So too was Clinton. Her face as she took the stage at the Pine Ridge reservation was drained of colour. People took pictures anyway. Those old enough to remember are still talking about the late Robert F Kennedy's visit to this remote outpost during the 1968 campaign.

They were already talking about Clinton's campaign in the same way: history. "I'm just curious to see her in person," said Beverly Tuttle, a grandmother from nearby Porcupine. That was as far as it went. Tuttle was voting for Obama. "I'm looking at her more like a celebrity than candidate," she said.

Clinton still has ardent supporters, even in a remote location such as Kyle (population 1,000). They just have been swifter than she has in recognising defeat. "She should be vice-president," said Tangerine LeBeau, who is just 18 and will be voting for the very first time.

Strength and resolve can only carry Clinton so far. Obama has powerful backers in the west. Tom Daschle, a South Dakota native who was once Senate majority leader, was one of Obama's earliest supporters. Obama's deputy campaign manager is also from South Dakota.

Despite the courtship by the Clintons, Obama was endorsed by the entire tribal leadership of South Dakota, and was adopted as a son of the Crow tribe in Montana. Obama also has the money to pour resources into South Dakota and Montana. Clinton's coffers are beyond empty. Her campaign, now $20m in debt, has no money for the prime venues that she favoured in the early months of the campaign. Almost all of her campaign events are held outdoors despite unpredictable weather. At one rally, Clinton's only stage prop was a giant cottonwood tree.

She has little money to get voters to the polls - a huge liability on the reservations where poverty and long distances depress turnout. Clinton also has little money for advertising. Her first television ad in South Dakota went on air less than a week ago. The ad, despite her own insolvent campaign, attacks President George Bush for running up the national debt.

Her entourage on the campaign trail is similarly shrunk. Her assistant, Huma Abedin, once deemed so glamorous she was given a Vogue photospread, remains along with a couple of other aides. News outlets have scaled back their coverage. Camera crews once used to jostling for positions on risers now have yards of space to themselves.

But it's possible to forget all of that, even in a modest crowd. At the end of her big rally in South Dakota last week, Clinton worked the rope line long after people had dispersed, stretching out to every last hand, unwilling to let go."

Despite all the reasons Hillary has given her opponents to dislike her, distrust her, perhaps for some even despise her, it is both touching and sad to watch her play out these final days. It's also just a bit painful to have to observe the spectacle.

America's Prison Galleys

The Brits used them, so did the French. They were all the rage in the 18th century - prison galleys, ships (usually mere hulks) used for the long-term confinement and transportation of convicts.

Now it seems the Bush regime may have revived this quaint tradition. According to The Guardian, the United States is rumoured to be operating floating prisons to hold captives from the War (without end) on Terror.

According to the human rights group, Reprieve, the US has used a fleet of naval vessels as floating prisons since 2001:

"Details of ships where detainees have been held and sites allegedly being used in countries across the world have been compiled as the debate over detention without trial intensifies on both sides of the Atlantic. The US government was yesterday urged to list the names and whereabouts of all those detained.

Information about the operation of prison ships has emerged through a number of sources, including statements from the US military, the Council of Europe and related parliamentary bodies, and the testimonies of prisoners.

The analysis, due to be published this year by the human rights organisation Reprieve, also claims there have been more than 200 new cases of rendition since 2006, when President George Bush declared that the practice had stopped.

It is the use of ships to detain prisoners, however, that is raising fresh concern and demands for inquiries in Britain and the US.

According to research carried out by Reprieve, the US may have used as many as 17 ships as "floating prisons" since 2001. Detainees are interrogated aboard the vessels and then rendered to other, often undisclosed, locations, it is claimed.

Ships that are understood to have held prisoners include the USS Bataan and USS Peleliu. A further 15 ships are suspected of having operated around the British territory of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, which has been used as a military base by the UK and the Americans."

What's next, Devil's Island? Oh, sorry, I forgot, they renamed that Guantanimo.

Just Whose War Are We Fighting?

One reason (but just one of several) why we'll never "win" in Afghanistan is that there are too many wars going on. The Americans are waging one war in Afghanistan. NATO (ISAF) is waging another. Then there are the American military campaigns involving Iraq, Pakistan and - yes, Iran. Each of them constantly bounces off all the others.

Most of these wars are long past their "best before" date. They've dragged on inconsequentially too long. Stand in one place in the mud and eventually you'll sink down to your knees.

Now some senior American officers are musing about US forces being in Afghanistan for generations. From the Globe & Mail:

"Lest anyone think this is a soft or peaceful process, [US Navy] Cdr. Dwyer's base was rocked, every minute or so all day, by the terrifying shock of its line of 155-mm howitzers firing their village-destroying shells over the hills and into the Korengal Valley.

The building of mosques and roads is matched with absolutely ferocious fighting in places such as Korengal — the Americans are much more willing to use air strikes and heavy artillery, with the resulting heavy civilian casualties, than other militaries.

There are good reasons to be suspicious of this approach.

"We do not believe in counterinsurgency," a senior French commander tells me. "If you find yourself needing to use counterinsurgency, it means the entire population has become the subject of your war, and you either will have to stay there forever or you have lost."

The Americans obviously see it differently.

"We're trying to raise the opportunity cost of picking up a weapon or growing poppy," says Alison Blosser, a Pashto-speaking State Department official.

(The Americans, unlike Canadians or Brits, have a surprising level of co-operation between their foreign-affairs people and their military officers these days.)

"We want to get to the point where there's long-term sustainable employment that leads to economic growth. … If the insurgents do decide to come back, they will face a great wall of resistance from a population that has experienced economic development."

It sounds good. But I should mention that eastern Afghanistan is facing the highest military casualty rate in the war's history at the moment, and a British report has just concluded that their heavy-handed poppy-eradication strategy is creating hundreds more Taliban fighters.

I ask one officer how long it is going to take to make this new strategy bear fruit.

"Look," he says, "we're still in Germany and Japan 60 years after that war ended. That's how long it can take. I fully expect to have grandchildren who will be fighting out here."

The Globe Sets Itself Free

At last. The Globe & Mail has finally realized that trying to get people to pay for access to their online version isn't going to work. It's just not worth it.

Finally the paper has followed last year's lead by The New York Times and transformed its internet edition into a free paper.

The good news is that you'll now get unfettered access to the likes of Jeffrey Stevens, Lawrence Martin and John Ibbitson. The bad news is that you'll now get unfettered access to the likes of Christie Blatchford, Marcus Gee, Rex Murphy and Margaret Wente.

No Welcome Mat for Afrikom

It was conceived by Donald Rumsfeld and that alone might go some way to explaining why Arican nations have been stubbornly unwilling to allow American forces a toehold on their continent.

Afrikom (actually "AfriCom" or Africa Command) is a tribute to America's too little, too late attitude to Africa; Washington's foreign affairs disasters in the Middle East; and the dramatic spread of Chinese influence into many African countries. Africans now know that the kindly grandma with the big teeth really is a wolf after all.

Africa has become of great strategic interest to the United States. A quarter of America's imported oil comes from Nigeria and Angola. And the Chinese are going into overdrive to tie up Africa's vast natural resources. Suddenly Africa matters - a lot.

It's a tale of bungled diplomacy and an awfully bad reputation. From the Washington Post:

"With its headquarters on the continent, liaison groups of 20 to 30 military personnel
established in key countries and U.S. units brought in to help with development and relief tasks, the command was envisioned as an example to Africans of how their own armed forces and civilians could work together for the good of their nations.
The trouble was, no one consulted the Africans. "Very little was really known by the majority of people or countries in Africa who were supposed to know before such a move was made," said retired Kenyan army Lt. Gen. Daniel Opande. Worry swept the continent that the United States planned major new military installations in Africa.

"If you know the politics of Africa," said Opande, who has headed U.N. peacekeeping forces in Sierra Leone and Liberia, "you know there are certain very powerful countries who said, no, we are not interested in having a headquarters here." South Africa and Nigeria were among them, and their resistance helped persuade others."

"I think everyone thought it would be widely greeted as something positive," the Africom officer said. "But you suddenly have wide publics that have no idea what we're talking about. . . . It was seen as a massive infusion of military might onto a continent that was quite proud of having removed foreign powers from its soil."

The United States "equates terrorism with Islam," senior Kenyan diplomat Bethuel Kiplagat said, and few African governments wanted to be seen as inviting U.S. surveillance on their own people."

AfriKom is set to go into business on October 1st. For the foreseeable future it'll have to look on Africa from a distance, from its headquarters in Stuttgart.