This is a rare case where the veil of secrecy has been lifted. We don't know all the details or explanations, but we know that something terrible happened. Our government took a man from an airport in New York City and handed him over to Syria, where he was tortured for 10 months. I think I've made a decent case that he was probably innocent; that this was done with the knowledge and approval of fairly important government officials; and that this was not some freak accident or isolated occurrence. This happened, and there is no reason to believe it will not happen again.

Obsidian Wings: Maher Arar Archives.

Reuters reports that while Bush was speaking, the residents of the local island of Goree were involuntarily rounded up at 6AM and held at a local football field until after Bush had left, to prevent them from protesting or otherwise exercising, you know, American-style freedoms that are the opposite of slavery.

I like to imagine it was the Supreme Court decision in Lawrence and Gardner v. Texas that drove Lester Maddox and Strom Thurmond over the edge.

Pentagon officials told CNN’s Barbara Starr that Friday is “A-day,” the day a promised campaign of “shock and awe” is to hit Iraq. "There will not be a safe place in Baghdad," a Pentagon official told America’s CBS News after a briefing on the plan. “The sheer size of this has never been seen before, never been contemplated before." Shock and Awe is terrorism. “I know it can be really effective on a beautiful cloudless morning.” If you’ve got the Real player, you can watch and hear it live (and free) on the BBC’s video stream.

AP: Guantanamo Detainees Moved to New Prison

But as U.S. officials have privately acknowledged, many of these people are totally innocent.

WP: interrogations at Bagram.

originally posted by xowie

Indigo Girls will help kick SOA’s ass this weekend.

originally posted by daiichi

Baghdad is an urban version of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. The birds have gone as avenues of palms have died, and this was the land of dates. The splashes of colour, on fruit stalls, are surreal. A bunch of Dole bananas and a bag of apples from Beirut cost a teacher's salary for a month; only foreigners and the rich eat fruit. A currency that once was worth two dollars to the dinar is now worthless. The rich, the black marketeers, the regime's cronies and favourites, are not visible, except for an occasional tinted-glass late-model Mercedes navigating its way through the rustbuckets. Having been ordered to keep their heads down, they keep to their network of clubs and restaurants and well-stocked clinics, which make nonsense of the propaganda that the sanctions are hurting them, not ordinary Iraqis.