But “a really big hole” in the U.S. strategy, a second counterterrorism official said, “is that we focus on the terrorists and very little on how they are created. If you looked at all the resources of the U.S. government, we spent 85, 90 percent on current terrorists, not on how people are radicalized.”

Here’s an interesting parallel I just thought of: how this compares with our approach to law enforcement in this country – we have the highest incarceration rate in the world, we support capital punishment, we are against rehabilitation of criminals, and we are increasingly using more militaristic methods there, like SWAT teams and the War on Drugs.

So perhaps this is another consequence of our right-wing, unenlightened, myopic American mindset.

coverage varies depending on location

http://www.miserywatch.com/200….._was_.html

timing has not been kind to us

UNTILL THIS

this NIE is an INDICTMENT of the policies this president uses

this turns conjecture into FACT

we have THIS to PROVE our image torturing people HARMS OUR CAUSE

democrats NEED to at least TRY to mount the fillibuster against the torture bill

Maybe they are too incompetent and inept to pull us out of what is going to be a horrific mess.

Our leaders ignored history.
We American citizens ignored history.
The history of unintended consequences.
Bin Laden came out of the Islamic warriors WE financed in Afganistan in the 1980s.
We won.
We congratulated ourselves.
We won.
Or did we?
We showed BinLaden how to fight, how to lead.
We showed him with American taxpayer money.
We showed him with our CIA operation.
All to defeat the Russians in Afganistan.
To fight the cold war.
To keep the Russians away from “our” oil.
We celebrated by driving around in big and bigger gas-guzzlers.

We are now creating a new generation of Islamic Warriors.
They will come out of Iraq knowing how to fight, knowing how to lead.
How many BinLadens are we creating this time?

Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian dictator, who is planning on handing off his leadership to his son..sound familiar?

Mubarak said before the war that the Iraq attack will “creat a thousand Bin Ladens”…

Heckuva job Georgie.

-GSD

http://www.newsobserver.com/114/story/489327.html

Interesting “cherrypicking” leaks and misinformation leaks pattern in Arar – where have we seen that before? Seems as his situation became known and public support was growing, and after his release with additional support, gov felt it had to pushback with some leaks about how he definitely (like the Iraq alum tubes were definitely for nukes) trained in al-Qaeda camps in Afghanist and was “not a virgin” (although 40ish and married with children, having sex is a bad thing, so it pretty much justifies torture rendition, right;) ?) etc.

No one has been able to track down the source of the leaks. Now if only they had a Scotty McCanada who could sort it all out for them – list all the guys in gov who definitely never leaked the info to a reporter.

One observation that seems to me obvious, yet totally without precedent in the Bush Administration. The origins of the scandal were pre-Harper, under the Liberal Gov, and a liberal PM mentions this:

Liberal MP John McCallum (Markham-Unionville, Ont.), former finance minister under Paul Martin (LaSalle-mard, Que.), said in a scrum on the Hill last week that no one in the top levels of the former Liberal government knew that the information was false. “Well, my understanding is that no one in the government was aware of what was going on at all. Had they been, they should certainly have resigned or spoken out. I would be amazed if that were the case. In some ultimate sense, since we were the government, we were responsible, and so to that extent I think we collectively bear a part of the blame.”

emph added

I guess they don’t automatically put the people who know about and participate in torture on the bench in Canda. Eh?

Then there’s this reaction:

“With the leaks, this is willful misconduct, and it is despicable conduct when you consider what he had been put through,” Mr. Comartin said of Mr. Arar. “It was despicable because it was an attempt to protect their own ineptness and incompetence and they were quite prepared to sacrifice [Mr. Arar].”

And it looks like they are having some of the soul searching on anonymous sources, whistleblowing and govt use of covert journalist contacts to leak disinformation that we were supposed to have here, except for the part where it never actually was articulated here.

“There are some [reporters] who told me, ‘I had the same information as others, but I refused to print it.’ There were these sources who were going around trying to shop the information. And some used it and have now told me that they’re sorry they used it,” Mr. Waldman said. Anonymity is important for whistle blowers, Mr. Waldman added, but there are also potentially damaging effects to be had from uncorroborated, unnamed sources with an agenda.

“There’s another question. When your anonymous source turns out to be a liar, when do you reveal who the source is?” Mr. Waldman said. “I think the media, in light of what’s happened to Maher Arar, has to have a very serious debate about using anonymous sources.”

I took the torture postcard pdf and put 4 up on a page to save paper. Who can host it?

I can.

It has an animated rock video comparing Bushco to the Nazis. Set to a cover of “Land of Confusion”

the tag at the end said:

Disturbed
Land of Confusion
Ten Thousand Fists

It’s really compelling.