Manal and Alaa's bit bucket

I forgot to link last week to Zibniew Brzezinski’s well thought-out article about why the Bush administration should not refer to Islamism as the same as communism. By asserting that Islamic extremism, “like the ideology of communism . . . is the great challenge of our new century,” Bush is implicitly elevating Osama bin Laden’s stature [...]

Asia Times Online describes an Al Qaeda compilation CD (why call it state-of-the-art, though?) that is being sold illegally in South Asia and the Middle East. The CD is quite well put together, apparently, reminding me of the high production quality of an Iraqi insurgency video a few months ago. That seemed to have been [...]

In a recent speech, US President George W. Bush stated that his policy in Iraq is to "stay the course" and not "allow the terrorist to break our will" and "not permit Al Qaeda to turn to Iraq to what Afghanistan was under the Taliban, a safe haven for terrorists and a launching pad for attacks on America".

One should remember that none of these "terrorists" were in Iraq before the USA invaded in 2003.

Al Qaeda had no presence before that time. These "terrorists" flocked to Iraq as a direct result of the invasion: mainly fuelled by the mere presence of invading forces inflaming emotions by the invasion, but also by the instability and power vacuum in the country that insued after the Saddam regime fell.

The Pentagon has finally stated that the old rules on prisoners no longer apply. They continue to use the term "detainees" for those in Guantanamo, Bagram and Abu Ghraib as opposed to the term "prisoners". From the start, those prisoners had the label "enemy combatants", so as to deprive them from the Geneva Conventions.

This continuous rewriting of the rules as the game progresses will only cause more resentment towards the USA, and damage to its image worldwide. 

The Washington Post has a good article by David Luban, professor at Georgetown University Law Center, and visiting professor at Stanford University Law School. The article is titled Torture, American Style.

NPR also has Luban as a guest on "The Debate Over Torture", with the other side represented by neo-conservative ideologue Charles Krauthammer, who is a member of the Project for the New American Century, and a columnist for the Weekly Standard.