Ask the family
The Blair(s) and Brown show has been a spectacle like no other
It is normally customary for a performance to end before the reviews are issued. In the case of Gordon Brown’s address to the Labour Party conference yesterday, however, it is alleged that the Prime Minister’s wife reached a conclusion before the Chancellor arrived at the second page of his oration. These matters are, though, as Downing Street was eager, possibly desperate, to point out, often misinterpreted. It may have been “That’s a lie”, but, equally, it could have been “Let me by”, “A lovely tie” or “Hi-de-hi” instead.
If Cherie Blair had been able to listen to the whole of Mr Brown’s address, then “That one will fly” is the conclusion she would surely have come to. The Chancellor’s speech was more strategic than Cicero, managed than moving, inclusive than inspiring, but that is what suited the moment. He was speaking mainly to the audience in the hall, a body of activists who have been confused by the factionalism of recent weeks and who wanted to be reassured that Mr Brown is the man to carry their colours.
His words will not have ended speculation about the leadership and whether he will face a serious challenge, yet they will have placed that debate in a different context. Mr Brown was rightly flattering about the Prime Minister without laying it on with an implausibly large trowel, and he was wise to concede his regret about their past disputes (a statement that he charitably made on Mr Blair’s behalf as well). He did his best to reach out to Cabinet colleagues by praising their efforts, although this process of dialogue should not end once Labour has left Manchester. He struck a balance between hinting at the direction he would take as Prime Minister without seeming to disown the administration in which he must serve at the Treasury for several more months. He stuck to the political centre ground, which Labour abandons at its peril, while making overtures to some of those who have drifted away from the party since 1997. At times he appeared to be deliberately declining the chance to move into the top gear of rhetorical flourishes. That, too, was appropriate for the occasion. If Mr Brown was trying to place a vast plaster over Labour’s (self-inflicted) wounds, he largely succeeded.
The task for Mr Blair today is different. He is a liberated man, with no obligation to appease either party or public, an outer date for his departure established and a place in history that is assured although he cannot be sure he will agree with every part of that assessment. He has a unique opportunity in the coming months to talk to the country and the international community about the lessons he has learnt and the challenges of the future. What he will be paid a fortune for on the lecture circuit, the British public can enjoy without being charged. He should take the chance to set up that series of talks in his speech today and reciprocate Mr Brown’s remarks about him.
When he does eventually move on, Labour Party conferences will not be the same. For more than a decade, they have been dominated by the extraordinary Blair-Brown family which has proved brilliant, compelling and dysfunctional at the same time. Labour has ultimately benefited from being able to offer voters “two for the price of one”, even if the two have never quite agreed on which is the better item. It has been a show like no other. It now falls to Mr Blair to bring down the curtain with candour, dignity and style.

The Sunday Times
September 24, 2006
Torture by any other name is just as vile

Andrew Sullivan
Last week America’s political classes found themselves forced by the Supreme Court to confront the issue of whether the United States has legally authorised the torture of terror suspects in its prisons.
That has been the issue for five years now, ever since the Bush administration unilaterally evaded the Geneva conventions and, on the president’s executive authority, tortured several Al-Qaeda suspects in CIA custody.
It blew up when the Abu Ghraib photographs emerged, showing that torture and abuse had spread like a cancer through the ranks of the military, with hundreds of documented cases in every field of combat.
It was almost halted last December by the McCain Amendment, which the president subsequently declined to enforce. It came to a climax last week in a confusing blizzard of legislative verbiage. Both sides are still fighting over what exactly the Senate-Bush deal meant, which means that “the programme” will apparently continue.
Of course, the narrative I have just used is disputed by the president. He stated very recently: “I want to be absolutely clear with our people, and the world: the United States does not torture. It’s against our laws, and it’s against our values. I have not authorised it — and I will not authorise it.”
So we are reduced to fighting over a word, “torture”. President George W Bush’s preferred terminology is “alternative interrogation techniques” or “coercive interrogation” or “harsh interrogation methods”, or simply, amazingly, his comment last Thursday that a policy of waterboarding detainees is merely a policy to “question” them.
Suddenly I am reminded of George Orwell. One essay of his, Politics and the English Language, still stands out over the decades as a rebuke to all those who deploy language to muffle meaning. One passage is particularly apposite:
“A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics’. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.”
It is time to concede that in America right now the atmosphere is bad. Here is Bush defining torture in a speech he gave in June 2003: “The Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment, ratified by the United States and more than 130 other countries since 1984, forbids governments from deliberately inflicting severe physical or mental pain or suffering on those within their custody or control.”
So what is “severe physical or mental pain or suffering”? The president does not apparently believe that strapping someone to a board, tipping them upside down and pouring water repeatedly over Cellophane wrapped over their face is severe suffering.
The CIA confirms that most suspects cannot last much more than 30 seconds of the drowning sensation. But no marks are left. So that is not “torture”.
We are then informed that almost all the “coercive interrogation techniques” used by the Bush administration are not torture. One is called “long time standing”. Basically, it entails forcing a prisoner to stay standing indefinitely, by prodding him if he tries to rest, or shackling his wrists to a bolt in a low ceiling or a railing.
At first the detainees in CIA custody were required to be so restrained for a maximum of four hours without any rest. Then a memo from Donald Rumsfeld , the defence secretary, came down the chain of command: “I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to four hours?”
Why indeed? It certainly sounds mild enough.
But here is a description of what it actually means in uncorrupted English: “There is the method of simply compelling a prisoner to stand there. This can be arranged so that the accused stands only while being interrogated — because that, too, exhausts and breaks a person down.
“It can be set up in another way — so that the prisoner sits down during interrogation but is forced to stand up between interrogations. (A watch is set over him, and the guards see to it that he doesn’t lean against the wall, and if he goes to sleep and falls over he is given a kick and straightened up.) Sometimes even one day of standing is enough to deprive a person of all his strength and to force him to testify to anything at all.”
What wimp wrote that? Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who documented “long time standing” as a method used by the Soviet Union in the gulag.
“Sleep deprivation” also sounds mild enough to avoid the moniker of “torture”. Here is one account of such an alternative questioning method, in which a prisoner “is wearied to death, his legs are unsteady, and he has one sole desire to sleep, to sleep just a little, not to get up, to lie, to rest, to forget . . . Anyone who has experienced the desire knows that not even hunger or thirst are comparable with it”.
Again, which whiny liberal wrote those words?
The answer is Menachem Begin, former Israeli prime minister and a former terrorist himself. He is also describing the methods used by the Soviets in Siberia, where they imprisoned him in 1939.
We know that one prisoner in Guantanamo Bay was forced to go without sleep for 48 of 55 consecutive days and nights.
He was also manacled naked to a chair in a cell that was air-conditioned to around 50F and had cold water poured on him repeatedly, until hypothermia set in. Doctors treated him when he neared permanent physical damage.
According to the president of the United States, this is not “severe mental or physical pain or suffering”. This is an “alternative interrogation method”. This is not torture. it is “the programme”.
And so Latin words fall upon the West’s moral high ground “like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details”.
If only George Orwell were still alive. If only all of this weren’t actually true.

New York Daily News - http://www.nydailynews.com
The Big Apple hits back BY ADAM LISBERGDAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

Friday, September 22nd, 2006 Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez's outrageous comments about President Bush brought wide condemnation from political friends and foes alike yesterday - as Chavez hinted that Bush plotted the 9/11 attacks and again called him the devil.
"You don't come into my country, you don't come into my congressional district, and you don't condemn my President," Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) scolded after Chavez's rambling, 90-minute rant at Harlem's Mount Olivet Baptist Church.
"I just want to make it abundantly clear to Hugo Chavez or any other president: Don't come to the United States and think because we have problems with our President that any foreigner can come to our country and not think that Americans do not feel offended when you offend our chief of state," Rangel said from Washington.
Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) had few words for Chavez: "Despicable and disgusting."
And Gov. Pataki told Chavez to get out of town.
"The best thing he can do is go back to Venezuela and try to provide freedom for his people instead of what he's done here in New York," Pataki said.
But the crowd of hundreds of cheering Chavez supporters - including actor Danny Glover, City Councilman Charles Barron (D-Brooklyn) and celebrity Princeton Prof. Cornel West - waved Venezuelan flags and cheered as he made fun of Bush.
"I said he was a devil - yes, a devil. I think he's a devil," the Venezuelan president said in Spanish.
"Now, the most important thing is that a better world lives, and that the world rids itself of this menace," Chavez said. "Because, without a doubt, it's a menace to life and the world."
Chavez also denounced a string of U.S. military actions over the decades - and seemed to include the 9/11 attacks.
"To use arms with chemical weapons like they used in Fallujah, to kill all forms of life, to take planes filled with passengers and smash them into the towers ... the Twin Towers, that's barbarism," Chavez said - less than 9 miles from Ground Zero - as some in the audience hooted approval.
"The devil, yes, the devil," Chavez said. "Seriously."
His angry man routine came just a day after Chavez told world leaders at the UN General Assembly that the podium still smelled of sulfur from when Bush spoke there earlier.
Former President Bill Clinton said Chavez's tactics could backfire.
"It makes him look small and undermines his effectiveness," Clinton told Fox News Channel.
Yesterday, Chavez said Bush tries to walk like John Wayne - strutting onstage to demonstrate - and made fun of the drinking problem that Bush beat before running for President.
"He was an alcoholic - you have as President an alcoholic!" Chavez said. "I'm sorry to say it, but it's true. He's an alcoholic. He's a sick man, with a complex."
The appearance was arranged to launch this year's campaign to give 100 million gallons of free or low-cost Venezuelan heating oil to poor Americans.
It gave Chavez a chance to speak glowingly of friends like Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Cuban leader Fidel Castro, who he said is recovering well from intestinal surgery.
At times Chavez sounded as if he was giving one of Castro's famously interminable speeches - reciting agricultural statistics, digressing into the merits of drinking tea made from coca leaves and complaining that windows aren't big enough in modern buildings.
"Buildings are glass cages," he whined. "They don't have windows [that open]. Therefore you have to have the air conditioning on day and night."
Chavez also again waved a copy of a Noam Chomsky book that claims the U.S. is a terrorist state, and spoke glowingly of Americans from Abraham Lincoln and Mark Twain to Harry Belafonte and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
Mayor Bloomberg - in California making an environmental announcement with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger - said of Chavez's appearance in the city, "I wouldn't dignify this guy's comments with a response. I think the ways to handle somebody like that is just don't pay any attention to anybody that does something as inappropriate and as untrue."
The Governator agreed, saying, "I don't think he deserves a response. Period."
With Michael McAuliff in Washington, Joe Mahoney in Albanyand Michael Saul in Los Angeles
Rep Rangel tells the Daily News:I'm outraged by attack on W
Rangel tells Editor:
I want to express my extreme displeasure with statements by the President of Venezuela attacking President Bush in such a personal and disparaging way during his remarks at the United Nations General Assembly yesterday and then again in my Harlem community today at the Mount Olivet church meeting announcing an expanded fuel-oil-for-the-poor program.
George Bush is the President of the United States and represents the entire country. Any demeaning public attack against him is - and should be viewed by Republicans and Democrats, and all Americans - as an attack on all of us.
I have defended Mr. Chavez's right to differ with our nation in his vision for the hemisphere and the world, and in the past have sympathized with some of his criticism of this administration's foreign policy. I have certainly been critical of Bush's failed invasion of Iraq. But I draw the line at allowing a foreign leader to come into my country and my community to personally insult my President.
I am particularly outraged because today he used the goodwill that his oil-for-the-poor program has generated in my community to attract an audience whom he exploited by subjecting them to more vitriolic rhetoric, in which he again insulted Bush by calling him an alcoholic and mentally disturbed.
By offering discounted fuel oil in the winter to provide warmth to people in need, Venezuela has won many friends in low-income communities of New York and other states. As long as U.S. companies buy oil from Venezuela without offering any program to reduce its price for the poor, I will be grateful for the generosity of the government of Venezuela. Hugo Chavez's generosity to the poor, however, should not be interpreted as license to personally attack and insult President Bush.
Sincerely,
Charles RangelMember of Congress

Fossil of Child, Age 3 Million, Offers New Insights
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD NY Times
If the fossil Lucy, the most famous woman from out of the deep human past, had a child, it might have looked a lot like the bundle of skull and bones uncovered by scientists digging in the badlands of Ethiopia.
The paleontologists who are announcing the discovery in the journal Nature said the 3.3 million-year-old fossils were of the earliest well-preserved child ever found in the human lineage. It was estimated to be about 3 years old at death, probably female and a member of the Australopithecus afarensis species, the same as Lucy’s.
An analysis of the skeleton revealed evidence of a species in transition, the scientists said in interviews today. The lower limbs supported earlier findings that afarensis walked upright, like modern humans. But gorilla-like arms and shoulders suggested that it possibly retained an ancestral ability to climb and swing through the trees.
“Her completeness, antiquity and age at death make this find unprecedented in the history of paleoanthropology,” said Zeresenay Alemseged, the Ethiopian leader of the discovery team and a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.
Two reports of the findings are being published in Nature on Thursday. The National Geographic Society, a supporter of the research, will run a popular article on the fossil child in the November issue of its magazine.
At a news conference today in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, the scientists gave the fossil the name "Selam,’’ which means peace in Ethiopia’s official Amharic language.
Scientists not involved in the research said the fossils were a significant find that should provide new insights about the afarensis species and a little-known period of early human origins.
“The child really confirms that afarensis was walking upright,” said Tim D. White, a paleoanthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley. “It has the potential to answer old questions and raises some new ones” — including their behavior in trees.
Dr. White, who has found even earlier human ancestors in Ethiopia, participated in the analysis of the 3.2-million-year-old Lucy fossils. They were uncovered elsewhere in Ethiopia in 1974 by Donald Johanson, who is now director of the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University.
Other discoveries show that the afarensis species, thought to be among the earliest direct ancestors of humans, lived in Africa from earlier than 3.7 million to 3 million years ago.
In an accompanying commentary in the journal, Bernard Wood of George Washington University, who had no part in the discovery, said the specimen was “a veritable mine of information about a crucial stage in human evolutionary history.”
Dr. Wood, a paleoanthropologist, also noted how rare it was for the fragile bones of infants to survive long enough to fossilize. “But if they do, they provide precious evidence about the growth and development of the individual and the species,” he wrote.
Until now, Dr. Wood said, the earliest comparably complete specimen of a human-related child was that of a Neanderthal who lived less than 300,000 years ago in Syria.
The discovery team said the largely intact condition of the fossils indicated that the child was presumably buried in sand and rocks shortly after death during a flood in a desert region known today as Dikika, in northeastern Ethiopia.
Then, in December 2000, along came a team of fossil hunters led by Dr. Alemseged. On a steep hillside, one of the men, Tilahun Gebreselassie of the Ethiopia Ministry of Culture and Tourism, was the first to see the child’s tiny face looking up from a block of sandstone. It was a long and projecting face with a flat nose.
The face and skull were clearly that of a young afarensis, the scientists concluded almost immediately.
Dr. Alemseged’s team spent much of the last five years extracting the rest of the specimen from the surrounding stone with dentist’s drills and picks. The tedious work exposed the full cranium and jaws, the torso and spinal column, limbs and the left foot. The child’s one complete finger was curled in a tiny grasp, much like a young chimpanzee’s. The skeleton is much more complete than Lucy’s.
Although the fossils are still being studied, Dr. Alemseged and his colleagues noted several important findings and areas for further research.
The Dikika girl’s brain size, for example, was about the same as that of a similarly aged chimpanzee, but a comparison with adult afarensis skulls indicates a relatively slow brain growth slightly closer to that of humans.
The presence of a hyoid bone was a surprise. It is a rarely preserved bone in the larynx, or voice box, that supports muscles of the throat and tongue. The bone in the infant appeared to be primitive and more similar to those found in apes than humans, the scientists said, but is the first hyoid found in such an early human-related species and thus important in research about the origins of human speech.
The first relatively complete shoulder blades to be found in an australopithecine individual was one of the most puzzling aspects of the discovery, several scientists said. The lower body appeared to be adapted for upright walking by afarensis. But the shoulders and long arms were more apelike.
In the journal report, Dr. Alemseged and his team wrote that “the functional interpretation of these features is highly debated, with some arguing that the upper limb features are nonfunctional retentions from a common ancestor only, whereas others proposed that they were preserved because A. afarensis maintained, to some degree, an arboreal component in its locomotor repertoire.”
Home

The Sunday Times
September 17, 2006
Powell leads the right in a Bush-whack

Andrew Sullivan
In my first year in America, as a budding young conservative, my old friend, the writer John O’Sullivan, invited me out to dinner. The dinner, it turned out, was with none other than William F Buckley, a man who remains the undisputed titan of American conservatism.
Buckley became famous in America in the 1950s and 1960s for being a conservative intellectual when such a thing was regarded as axiomatically oxymoronic. He founded the National Review, the indispensable magazine for the burgeoning American conservative movement.
He was one of the inspirations for Barry Goldwater’s emergence as a conservative Republican nominee in 1964, and instrumental in Ronald Reagan’s long, steady intellectual march to power. I wasn’t having dinner with just anyone that night — but with a man for whom the phrase eminence grise seemed to have been invented.
I recall this because if Buckley has decided George W Bush is not a conservative, it cannot be easily dismissed. Some of us were so appalled by Bush’s profligate spending, abuse of power and recklessness in warfare that we reluctantly backed John Kerry in 2004 as the more authentically conservative candidate. Many Republicans scoffed. Now fewer do.
“I think Mr Bush faces a singular problem, best defined, I think, as the absence of effective conservative ideology,” Buckley recently explained. “[The president] ended up being very extravagant in domestic spending, extremely tolerant of excesses by Congress. And in respect of foreign policy, incapable of bringing together such forces as apparently were necessary to conclude the Iraq challenge . . . There will be no legacy for Mr Bush. I don’t believe his successor would re-enunciate the words he used in his second inaugural address because they were too ambitious. So therefore I think his legacy is indecipherable.”
His legacy, I’d argue, is actually quite decipherable. It includes two bungled wars, a doubling of the national debt, a ruination of America’s moral high ground in the war against Islamist terror, the worst US intelligence fiasco since the Bay of Pigs, and the emergence of Iran as a regional and potentially nuclear power with control of the West’s energy supplies.
But the damage to America itself — to its cultural balance and constitutional order — is just as profound. In a recent CNN story on Southern women and the Republicans, one voter explained: “There are some people, and I’m one of them, that believe George Bush was placed where he is by the Lord. I don’t care how he governs, I will support him. I’m a Republican through and through.”
American conservatism has gone from being a political philosophy rooted in scepticism of power, empirical judgment and limited government into an ideology based in born-again religious faith, immune to empirical reality and dedicated to the relentless expansion of presidential clout. It sanctions wiretapping without court warrants, indefinite detention without trial and the use of torture.
Last week saw perhaps the tipping point in the reawakening of the traditional conservative perspective. In the Senate, the president’s bid to legalise torture and ad hoc military tribunals was stopped not by the Democrats but by four key Republican senators: John McCain of Arizona, the frontrunner for the Republican nomination in 2008, John Warner of Virginia, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Susan Collins of Maine.
They were supported by the former secretary of state, Colin Powell, who penned a public letter to McCain opposing Bush’s detention policies. “The world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism,” Powell observed. “To redefine common article 3 [of the Geneva convention] would add to those doubts. Furthermore, it would put our own troops at risk.”
It is hard to dismiss McCain and Powell as men who do not know a thing about war or torture. One was tortured by the Vietcong; another actually won a war in Iraq. The contrast with the current White House is almost painful to observe.
Two weeks ago, word leaked that the president’s political guru, Karl Rove, was hoping to use the issue of who was tough enough on military prisoners against the Democrats in the November congressional elections. He was going to tar them as wimps again for not waterboarding terror suspects. But that strategy was stopped in its tracks by Senator Graham.
“This is not about November 2006. It is not about your election,” Graham declared with passion. “It is about those who take risks to defend America.”
Graham is also a former military lawyer and, along with the entire legal leadership in the US military, opposes Bush’s military kangaroo courts. “It would be unacceptable legally in my opinion to give someone the death penalty in a trial where they never heard the evidence against them,” he said of the White House proposal. “‘Trust us, you’re guilty, we’re going to execute you, but we can’t tell you why’? That’s not going to pass muster; that’s not necessary.” It’s also, well, not American.
To add to the revolt, last week six leading conservative writers penned separate essays on why the Republicans deserve to lose the November congressional elections. Here’s a stunning quote from one of them: “The United States has seen political swings and produced its share of extremists, but its political character, whether liberals or conservatives have been in charge, has always remained fundamentally Burkean. The constitution itself is a Burkean document, one that slows down decisions to allow for ‘deliberate sense’ and checks and balances.
“President Bush has nearly upended that tradition, abandoning traditional realism in favour of a warped and incoherent brand of idealism. At this dangerous point in history, we must depend on the decisions of an astonishingly feckless chief executive: an empty vessel filled with equal parts Rove and Rousseau.”
That passage was written by Jeffrey Hart, a speechwriter for Nixon and Reagan and another pillar of the conservative movement. It’s a sign of a brewing conservative revolt against Bush’s policies that may crest at November’s elections.
Bush has allies in the House of Representatives — but what appears to be a unified and stalwart resistance in the Republican-controlled Senate. It turns out that the US does have a functioning opposition party after all. It’s called the authentically conservative wing of the Republicans.

RELIGIONChabad movement gaining followers in South Florida

BY TODD WRIGHTtwright@MiamiHerald.com
From sundown Friday until sundown Saturday, members of Chabad Lubavitch synagogues are forbidden to drive, cook meals or even flip a light switch. Leaders wear old-fashioned, heavy black coats and hats and long beards.
Their need to be within walking distance of their members has sometimes brought Chabad into conflict with local government officials. Many cities have zoning laws prohibiting houses of worship in private homes or shopping centers.
But this once-small branch of Orthodox, Hasidic Judaism is now attracting thousands of new participants, and new synagogues are sprouting up in single-family homes and storefronts throughout South Florida.
Synagogues, day-care centers, Torah seminars, drug rehabilitation programs and elderly services are just the start of what Chabad has to offer.
''Chabad is truly a phenomenon,'' said Ira Sheskin, a geography professor at the University of Miami who studies Jewish population trends. ``It is taking advantage of what is happening in American religion in general. People are either getting more serious about religion or becoming more secular.''
The number of households that affiliate with Chabad in South Florida has more than doubled over the past decade, and so has the number of Chabad congregations.
In 1990, about 615 households supported seven Chabad centers in Broward. Six years later, Chabad had added four more places and another 600 families. Sheskin is surveying Broward to get current data, but he believes the numbers have at least doubled again in the past 10 years.
In Miami-Dade County, 10 Chabad establishments were on record in 2004 compared to only five in 1994. And while most Chabad synagogues don't keep membership numbers, Sheskin estimates that about 1,000 households in Miami-Dade attend Chabad synagogues regularly, compared to 448 in 1994.
''In a lot of places, Chabad is becoming the only game in town,'' said J.J. Goldberg, editor of The Forward, a national Jewish weekly newspaper. ``They are in places you wouldn't expect. The Chabad is trying to be anywhere Jews are.''
JOY OF FAITH
Many are drawn to the Orthodox sect by its joyous services, the celebration of the Jewish heritage and the friendly rabbis. That's what attracted Barry Alter 25 years ago.
While still a paid member of Temple Sinai, a large Conservative synagogue in Hollywood, Alter often attends Chabad services and social functions.
''Chabad just wants to help every Jew to raise his level of Jewishness,'' said Alter, a Hollywood lawyer. ``They are charismatic people who love to teach and who love to help and who do it without any sense of looking down on those who are not as observant.''
Chabad services are lively, with a lot of singing in Hebrew. While members put on prayer shawls during services, few have long beards and even fewer wear the old-fashioned clothes in daily life. Some even drive to synagogue on the Sabbath.
And that is also part of Chabad's appeal, Goldberg said: Its leaders welcome newcomers but don't push their practices onto others.
''They don't demand that people worship like them. Usually, the rabbi and his family are the only Hasidic family in the building,'' Goldberg said. ``Everyone else is essentially a hang-around. The liberal Jew is coming to Chabad for the experience.''
ZONING CONFLICTS
Chabad establishments usually start small, with a few people worshipping in a house or the clubhouse of a gated community.
But when the congregation grows, it's noticeable to everyone nearby, including local officials who have to enforce zoning laws.
Last year, the Chabad Key Biscayne Jewish Center invoked a federal law that says municipalities can't use zoning laws to discriminate against religious groups. That group operates out of a home on the island.
The big win for Chabad may have come this year in Hollywood, where commissioners responded to residents who complained about the Hollywood Community Synagogue. The city ended up losing a $2 million religious discrimination lawsuit.
The synagogue's neighbors had complained about illegal parking, trash and noise from parties late at night. City officials tried to kick the congregation out of the neighborhood, citing zoning rules against houses of worship in a single-family district. But the city lost, and the Chabad is now allowed to stay permanently.
The ruling could force the hand of other cities as Chabad rabbis apply to create more centers.
Recently, Cooper City's zoning rules have been questioned by Rabbi Shmuel Posner, who wants to start a Chabad outreach center in a storefront. The city prohibits religious institutions in its commercial district.
''It's obvious the discrimination that is going on,'' said Rabbi Joseph Korf, of the Hollywood Chabad that won the lawsuit. ``After all this, people are still not allowing them. It makes you wonder why. We're not bothering anybody.''
LIMITED ATTRACTION
Despite Chabad's growth, it likely won't replace any of the mainstream Jewish denominations, said Lynn Davidman, professor of Judaic studies at Brown University.
Chabad appeals to many Jews who are searching for a more authentic religious experience. But while many Jews enjoy participating in Chabad services, the group's strict adherence to religious rules discourages most from joining, Davidman said.
RUSSIAN ROOTS
Chabad started about 250 years ago in Russia, but didn't arrive in the United States, in Brooklyn, until about 1940.
Upon arrival in the United States, rabbis, called emissaries, were sent to different areas to find Jews and re-educate them on their heritage and history. The first Chabad synagogue in Broward opened in 1980.
''People are not staying with the religious traditions they were raised with,'' Davidman said. ``There is a spiritual marketplace now, and it's a place where they can seek a religious community that best suits them. That's part of the appeal of Chabad.''
EMBRACED BY YOUNG
Chabad rabbis have been particularly successful at attracting young adults on college campuses.
Rabbi Mendy Fellig started Chabad's presence at the University of Miami five years ago and now hosts as many as 200 students at his home every Friday for Sabbath dinner.
''Some never had a true Jewish home,'' Fellig said. ``A lot of them were told they should be a proud Jew, but they get older and they wonder what that means and we teach them that. Our goal is to inspire them to identify with Judaism.''
That mission has been adopted by students who frequent Chabad.
Matthew Salzberg was raised in a Reform Jewish household in Connecticut before moving three years ago to attend UM.
He was immediately attracted to Fellig's pitch and has recruited other students to attend Sabbath meals on Friday nights.
Now Salzberg, 21, is co-president of the Chabad student organization.
''It's a very mixed crowd, and that's the beauty of it,'' he said. ``No one feels out of place. You can be yourself. All we care is that you are Jewish and we're coming together.''

RELIGIONChabad movement gaining followers in South Florida

BY TODD WRIGHTtwright@MiamiHerald.com
From sundown Friday until sundown Saturday, members of Chabad Lubavitch synagogues are forbidden to drive, cook meals or even flip a light switch. Leaders wear old-fashioned, heavy black coats and hats and long beards.
Their need to be within walking distance of their members has sometimes brought Chabad into conflict with local government officials. Many cities have zoning laws prohibiting houses of worship in private homes or shopping centers.
But this once-small branch of Orthodox, Hasidic Judaism is now attracting thousands of new participants, and new synagogues are sprouting up in single-family homes and storefronts throughout South Florida.
Synagogues, day-care centers, Torah seminars, drug rehabilitation programs and elderly services are just the start of what Chabad has to offer.
''Chabad is truly a phenomenon,'' said Ira Sheskin, a geography professor at the University of Miami who studies Jewish population trends. ``It is taking advantage of what is happening in American religion in general. People are either getting more serious about religion or becoming more secular.''
The number of households that affiliate with Chabad in South Florida has more than doubled over the past decade, and so has the number of Chabad congregations.
In 1990, about 615 households supported seven Chabad centers in Broward. Six years later, Chabad had added four more places and another 600 families. Sheskin is surveying Broward to get current data, but he believes the numbers have at least doubled again in the past 10 years.
In Miami-Dade County, 10 Chabad establishments were on record in 2004 compared to only five in 1994. And while most Chabad synagogues don't keep membership numbers, Sheskin estimates that about 1,000 households in Miami-Dade attend Chabad synagogues regularly, compared to 448 in 1994.
''In a lot of places, Chabad is becoming the only game in town,'' said J.J. Goldberg, editor of The Forward, a national Jewish weekly newspaper. ``They are in places you wouldn't expect. The Chabad is trying to be anywhere Jews are.''
JOY OF FAITH
Many are drawn to the Orthodox sect by its joyous services, the celebration of the Jewish heritage and the friendly rabbis. That's what attracted Barry Alter 25 years ago.
While still a paid member of Temple Sinai, a large Conservative synagogue in Hollywood, Alter often attends Chabad services and social functions.
''Chabad just wants to help every Jew to raise his level of Jewishness,'' said Alter, a Hollywood lawyer. ``They are charismatic people who love to teach and who love to help and who do it without any sense of looking down on those who are not as observant.''
Chabad services are lively, with a lot of singing in Hebrew. While members put on prayer shawls during services, few have long beards and even fewer wear the old-fashioned clothes in daily life. Some even drive to synagogue on the Sabbath.
And that is also part of Chabad's appeal, Goldberg said: Its leaders welcome newcomers but don't push their practices onto others.
''They don't demand that people worship like them. Usually, the rabbi and his family are the only Hasidic family in the building,'' Goldberg said. ``Everyone else is essentially a hang-around. The liberal Jew is coming to Chabad for the experience.''
ZONING CONFLICTS
Chabad establishments usually start small, with a few people worshipping in a house or the clubhouse of a gated community.
But when the congregation grows, it's noticeable to everyone nearby, including local officials who have to enforce zoning laws.
Last year, the Chabad Key Biscayne Jewish Center invoked a federal law that says municipalities can't use zoning laws to discriminate against religious groups. That group operates out of a home on the island.
The big win for Chabad may have come this year in Hollywood, where commissioners responded to residents who complained about the Hollywood Community Synagogue. The city ended up losing a $2 million religious discrimination lawsuit.
The synagogue's neighbors had complained about illegal parking, trash and noise from parties late at night. City officials tried to kick the congregation out of the neighborhood, citing zoning rules against houses of worship in a single-family district. But the city lost, and the Chabad is now allowed to stay permanently.
The ruling could force the hand of other cities as Chabad rabbis apply to create more centers.
Recently, Cooper City's zoning rules have been questioned by Rabbi Shmuel Posner, who wants to start a Chabad outreach center in a storefront. The city prohibits religious institutions in its commercial district.
''It's obvious the discrimination that is going on,'' said Rabbi Joseph Korf, of the Hollywood Chabad that won the lawsuit. ``After all this, people are still not allowing them. It makes you wonder why. We're not bothering anybody.''
LIMITED ATTRACTION
Despite Chabad's growth, it likely won't replace any of the mainstream Jewish denominations, said Lynn Davidman, professor of Judaic studies at Brown University.
Chabad appeals to many Jews who are searching for a more authentic religious experience. But while many Jews enjoy participating in Chabad services, the group's strict adherence to religious rules discourages most from joining, Davidman said.
RUSSIAN ROOTS
Chabad started about 250 years ago in Russia, but didn't arrive in the United States, in Brooklyn, until about 1940.
Upon arrival in the United States, rabbis, called emissaries, were sent to different areas to find Jews and re-educate them on their heritage and history. The first Chabad synagogue in Broward opened in 1980.
''People are not staying with the religious traditions they were raised with,'' Davidman said. ``There is a spiritual marketplace now, and it's a place where they can seek a religious community that best suits them. That's part of the appeal of Chabad.''
EMBRACED BY YOUNG
Chabad rabbis have been particularly successful at attracting young adults on college campuses.
Rabbi Mendy Fellig started Chabad's presence at the University of Miami five years ago and now hosts as many as 200 students at his home every Friday for Sabbath dinner.
''Some never had a true Jewish home,'' Fellig said. ``A lot of them were told they should be a proud Jew, but they get older and they wonder what that means and we teach them that. Our goal is to inspire them to identify with Judaism.''
That mission has been adopted by students who frequent Chabad.
Matthew Salzberg was raised in a Reform Jewish household in Connecticut before moving three years ago to attend UM.
He was immediately attracted to Fellig's pitch and has recruited other students to attend Sabbath meals on Friday nights.
Now Salzberg, 21, is co-president of the Chabad student organization.
''It's a very mixed crowd, and that's the beauty of it,'' he said. ``No one feels out of place. You can be yourself. All we care is that you are Jewish and we're coming together.''

Garrison Keillor
In search of coffee, tea or triacetone triperoxidePublished September 13, 2006
And now you can't bring your cup of coffee on board the airplane. It's the latest new rule laid down by the nation's security wizards. Everyone knows it's ridiculous--the notion that you can toss together a few liquids and make an explosive is a fiction from late-night movies. You might as well prohibit bald men on the grounds that the evil Lex Luthor was bald and so was Blofeld, the head of S.P.E.C.T.R.E.But we ditch our venti latte in the trash barrel (goodbye, four bucks) and board the flight, and there we read in the paper that aggressive CIA questioning of an Al Qaeda bigwig, stripping him, turning the air conditioner to 40 degrees, blasting him with Red Hot Chili Peppers music, broke him so he ratted on Jose Padilla, a terrorist who set out to make a dirty bomb and who believed that by swinging a bucket of uranium in a circle over his head he could separate plutonium. It's like a cartoon.The way to stop terrorists on planes is to encourage passengers to bring loaded firearms aboard: guys in orange vests sitting in exit rows with deer rifles on their laps, ladies with Mr. Colt in their purses, kids with peashooters. Somebody wake up the National Rifle Association. Does the 2nd Amendment say "The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed except on commercial airliners"? Where is the right wing when you really need them?This way, if some guy in a burnoose sets up a chemistry lab in row 24 and mixes hydrogen peroxide, sulfuric acid and acetone in a big beaker that is packed in 15 pounds of dry ice to keep it cool, and cooks up some triacetone triperoxide, or TATP, the passengers will be able, in the several hours it will take him to make the deadly explosive, to bring him under control, assuming the fumes haven't knocked Ahmed out. And they could nab the mastermind too, the monocled guy in first-class petting the white cat.It all began with the name Homeland Security. Somebody with a tin ear came up with that, maybe the pest exterminator from Texas, or Adm. Poinduster, because, friends, Americans don't refer to this as our homeland. It's an alien term, like Fatherland or Deutschland or Tomorrowland. Irving Berlin didn't write "God Bless Our Homeland." You never heard John Wayne say, "Men, we're going over that hill and we're going to kick those krauts out of there. And we're going to raise the flag of the homeland.""Homeland" was a word you heard shrieked by a cruel man flicking his riding crop against his shiny black boots: "Zie homeland--ve shall defend it at all costs, achwohl!" Americans live in Our Country, America, the nation of nations, the good old U.S.A.But they couldn't call it the Department of National Security because there was one of those already, so they created this new Achtung bureau to make us take off our shoes and put the toothpaste in the checked luggage and dump the coffee. The jihadists we're afraid of are, so far as we know, young Muslim men from the Middle East, not old grandmas named Evelyn and Gladys married to soybean farmers, and not even old white guys like me, but nonetheless they pat us down for plastic explosives under our Sansabelts and have us raise our stockinged feet to be wanded for possible toe bombs. It's all to make us feel we're in a movie and it will have a happy ending.God forbid somebody shows up at an airport somewhere in the world with an explosive tucked in his lower colon. The Achtung people will come up with some new security procedures that will effectively kill airline travel, and then this enormous bureaucracy can turn its attention to the nation's highways. Pull over at the checkpoint, get out of the car, open the trunk, take off your shoes, put your hands on the top of the car, turn your head to the right, and cough.They can search each laptop for possible terrorist-type writing and confiscate cell phones, white powder, shoelaces, car keys, pencils, anything sharp or cylindrical or made of glass, and interrogate people randomly, putting them naked into cold rooms with ugly music played at top volume. It's all fine with me. I'm a liberal and we love ridiculous government programs that intrude on personal freedom. But where are the conservatives who used to object to this sort of thing?----------

And your prize, Gordon, is ... a poisoned chalice

Michael Portillo
Sunday Times of London
He could have stopped it with a click of his fingers. The former home secretary Charles Clarke will not be alone in reflecting bitterly that had Gordon Brown supported Tony Blair at the beginning of last week the Labour party could have avoided days of disastrous infighting.
The chancellor has performed incompetently. For years he has held back from staging a coup because he knew that Labour would be ungovernable afterwards. But now, without striking openly against his leader, he has shown himself to be untrustworthy. He remained silent too long, he was grudging in his belated statement of support on Thursday, and when he left a meeting with a beleaguered Blair, he was caught grinning more broadly than we had ever seen before.
Clarke has done more than merely add to the barrel of bile spewed from the Labour party last week. He has created a lasting image of Brown as slippery and unreliable. The chancellor is pigeonholed. Having stayed his assassin’s hand to the point of appearing irresolute, Brown has branded himself a traitor, almost as if he had wielded the dagger.
When Margaret Thatcher was brought down in 1990, the Conservative party had one other superstar: Michael Heseltine. But he was the principal culprit in her demise, and that was enough to deny him the leadership. Even those who had wanted her gone balked at rewarding the lead plotter.
When John Major unexpectedly resigned as party leader in 1995 and invited challengers, I did not offer myself for election, mainly because it would have been impossible to command the support of a new cabinet if I had busted apart the old one. Brown will find it difficult to lead a united government. Senior ministers know how much damage Brown’s surliness has done to Blair and to the government’s programme.
Once lost, party discipline is difficult to restore. Having deposed Thatcher, the Tory party has made each of her successors live on a knife edge. The Labour party will be the same. Disappointed Blairites will owe no allegiance to Brown. Some of them will relish his difficulties and the opportunity to humiliate him in retaliation for Blair’s treatment.
Labour backbenchers are now aware of what power they wield. Conventional wisdom had it that Labour did not depose its leaders in office. The textbooks must now be rewritten. Even the most successful and powerful premier in Labour’s history must take dictation from those deemed unworthy to hold salaried office, not so much the great unwashed as the great unpaid. That is bad news for Brown.
The rise of dissent against Blair can be mapped against two events: Labour’s decline in the opinion polls and the alignment of the government’s foreign policy with America’s.
The Labour party is massively too sensitive to the polls. Blair’s achievement of keeping the government ahead of the opposition for nine years is unparalleled. Thatcher consistently trailed Labour but moved ahead at election time. Labour MPs went soft during all those years that Blair led in the polls. Now pathetically they are in turmoil because they are somewhat behind the Tories, with three years or more remaining before an election.
If Brown is judged by the same criteria, he will not last long. It is the norm for the opposition to be ahead, but as Thatcher demonstrated, that does not foretell the next election result. It is likely that David Cameron will continue in front. After all, Labour appears to have a death wish and is now more interested in its own issues than the electorate’s.
The polls suggest that Cameron’s lead will grow when Brown takes over. The chancellor may enjoy a bounce in support on entering 10 Downing Street, as Major did, but he should no longer count on it.
Major was a breath of fresh air, because he was almost unknown. Brown is grimly familiar to us all. Major had a winsome smile. The chancellor’s resembles a fault line in Scottish granite.
Labour finally lost its patience with Blair over his support for Israel in Lebanon. Following the catastrophe of the Iraq war, it was the last straw. The pressure is on Brown to divorce himself from the United States. He has kept (disgracefully) silent on Iraq and Lebanon, so his options are open. But it would be amazing if he began his premiership by pulling out of Iraq (and/or Afghanistan), causing a breach with Washington. He could not easily put an honourable gloss on a British retreat.
Nor can we assume that the next US president will favour early troop withdrawal. It will be difficult for any presidential candidate to campaign as anti-war without appearing un-American. In any case, most of the presidential hopefuls have a track record of supporting the Iraq war.
So it is likely that Brown, struggling to control a party accustomed to flexing its muscles and from which he cannot demand loyalty, will trail in the polls, and will not reverse Blair’s unpopular foreign policy positions.
Supposedly, Brown longs to take on Cameron at prime minister’s questions. Perhaps he underestimates the task. The Tory leader is at ease in the house, and hits his target.
He makes good jokes, but unlike a predecessor, William Hague, he looks weightier than a student union debater enjoying his own wit.
Brown has no experience of taking unexpected questions on the whole range of government policies for half an hour. The chancellor answers only once a month, and shares the burden with four other ministers. The questions are on narrow subjects (eg, interest rates) published in advance, and all supplementary questions must be strictly on the same topic.
Should Cameron ever be short of ammunition, Clarke’s descriptions of Brown will come in handy: “absolutely stupid” and “lacks confidence”. Clarke says that there are instances in the chancellor’s behaviour that “build up to a terrible picture”. In extremis the Tory leader could quote Brown’s anonymous cabinet colleague who told the BBC that he would make “a f****** dreadful prime minister”.
For Cameron it will be a joy to know that each barb will drive Brown to fury, and make him brood again upon his host of grievances.
Ten years at the Treasury is not necessarily a good preparation for the top job. The chancellor is traditionally protected against meeting real people. For example, he decrees the budget of the National Health Service but is not obliged to receive delegations of doctors, nurses and patients.
The chancellor inhabits an ivory tower much more than the prime minister, and he may not enjoy descending from it. The Canadian finance minister, Paul Martin, chafed for a decade as the heir apparent.
He became premier at last, but then disappointed the electorate, who briskly threw him out.
When Thatcher was deposed, I was one of the last to urge her to fight on. On the day she made her decision to quit, I joined her and other friends at midnight in the cabinet room. The conversation turned immediately to the pressing matter of how to stop Heseltine from succeeding her. I expect that in 10 Downing Street there have been many similar conversations about Brown. But Blair will not enjoy Thatcher’s satisfaction from thwarting the rival.
The best card we had to play against Heseltine was that he could not be trusted, and that worked nicely. Clarke is using the same argument against Brown, but with this difference. There is no prospect of stopping him. So Clarke is merely blackening the name and blighting the premiership of Labour’s next leader. That demonstrates that Labour is in meltdown.
michael.portillo@sunday-times.co.uk

Here is something worth reading and thinking about.
(Printed without Permission)

Empty Evidence THE NATIONAL JOURNAL February 4, 2006
Copyright 2006 National Journal Group, Inc. THE NATIONAL JOURNAL
February 4, 2006

Empty Evidence

By Corine Hegland

HIGHLIGHT: The lawyers representing Guantanamo prisoners say the evidence against their clients is weak, indirect, and often based on lies from other detainees. Defense Department documents suggest they are right.

"If you think of the people down there, these are people, all of whom were captured on a battlefield. They're terrorists, trainers, bomb makers, recruiters, financiers, [Osama bin Laden's] bodyguards, would-be suicide bombers, probably the 20th 9/11 hijacker."
-- Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, June 27, 2005
Some of the men Rumsfeld described -- the terrorists, the trainers, the financiers, and the battlefield captures -- are indeed at Guantanamo. But National Journal's detailed review of government files on 132 prisoners who have asked the courts for help, and a thorough reading of heavily censored transcripts from the Combatant Status Review Tribunals conducted in Guantanamo for 314 prisoners, didn't turn up very many of them. Most of the "enemy combatants" held at Guantanamo -- for four years now -- are simply not the worst of the worst of the terrorist world.
Many of them are not accused of hostilities against the United States or its allies. Most, when captured, were innocent of any terrorist activity, were Taliban foot soldiers at worst, and were often far less than that. And some, perhaps many, are guilty only of being foreigners in Afghanistan or Pakistan at the wrong time. And much of the evidence -- even the classified evidence -- gathered by the Defense Department against these men is flimsy, second-, third-, fourth- or 12th-hand. It's basedlargely on admissions by the detainees themselves or on coerced, or worse, interrogations of their fellow inmates, some of whom have been proved to be liars.
Thomas Wilner, a partner at the Washington law firm Shearman and Stearling who is representing six Kuwaitis at Guantanamo, summarized the evidence against them: "Bullshit hearsay.... The information in some cases is, at best, hearsay allegations [obtained] long after capture."
One thing about these detainees is very clear: Notwithstanding Rumsfeld's description, the majority of them were not caught by American soldiers on the battlefield. They came into American custody from third parties, mostly from Pakistan, some after targeted raids there, most after a dragnet for Arabs after 9/11.
Much of the evidence against the detainees is weak. One prisoner at Guantanamo, for example, has made accusations against more than 60 of his fellow inmates; that's more than 10 percent of Guantanamo's entire prison population. The veracityof this prisoner's accusations is in doubt after a Syrian prisoner, Mohammed al-Tumani, 19, who was arrested in Pakistan,flatly denied to his Combatant Status Review Tribunal that he'd attended the jihadist training camp that the tribunal recordsaid he did. Tumani's denial was bolstered by his American "personal representative," one of the U.S. military officers -- not lawyers -- who are tasked with helping prisoners navigate the tribunals. Tumani's enterprising representative looked at the classified evidence against the Syrian youth and found that just one man -- the aforementioned accuser -- had placed Tumani at the terrorist training camp. And he had placed Tumani there three months before the teenager had even entered Afghanistan.The curious U.S. officer pulled the classified file of the accuser, saw that he had accused 60 men, and, suddenly skeptical, pulled the files of every detainee the accuser had placed at the one training camp. None of the men had been in Afghanistan at the time the accuser said he saw them at the camp. The tribunal declared Tumani an enemy combatant anyway. Guilt by Wristwatch "It's the Salem witchcraft trials," said Marc Falkoff of Covington and Burling's New York City office, who represents 17Yemenis, several of them fingered -- falsely, according to Falkoff -- by different accusers. "You get one guy to start making accusations, and whether it's believable or not doesn't matter." Front-line military interrogators might know that the accusations are false, but their superiors reading the files later do not.
The government has given Falkoff access to the complete files for 16 of his clients. Of those men, he says, "you bringthem into any court of law right now, and a judge is going to release them. It doesn't matter what the standard of review isgoing to be -- I'm not even talking about guilt beyond a reasonable doubt." At least eight prisoners at Guantanamo are there even though they are no longer designated as enemy combatants. Oneperplexed attorney, whose client does not want public attention, learned that the man was no longer considered an enemy combatant only by reading a footnote in a Justice Department motion asking a federal judge to put a slew of habeas corpus cases on hold. The attorney doesn't know why the man is still in Cuba. "The people you've been going up against in court have been saying he's the worst of the worst, Osama's right-hand man,"said Anant Raut, an attorney with the Washington firm of Weil, Gotshal, & Manges. "Then you go in there, and it's a guy who is as confused as you are as to why he is there." Raut has one client, a Saudi, who is classified as an enemy combatant largelybecause he spent a couple of weeks on a Taliban bean farm. The man says the Taliban imprisoned him there because they thought he was a Saudi government spy. National Journal could review only the unclassified parts of detainee files, consisting of memos, a summary of the evidence, and a transcript of the Combatant Status Review Tribunal proceeding. But federal courts ordered the Defense Department to give the volunteer lawyers the classified evidence by which their clients were found to be enemy combatants. The lawyers cannot discuss specifics of that evidence, but they uniformly say that nothing additional is there, just details and sourcing relating to the unclassified evidence. "There is no smoking gun," said John Chandler, a partner in the Atlanta office of Sutherland Asbill & Brennan. One of hisGuantanamo clients, picked up in Pakistan, is designated an enemy combatant in part because he once traveled on a bus withwounded Taliban soldiers in Afghanistan. The prisoner denies it, saying it was only a public bus. But then there's the prisoner'sCasio watch. According to the Defense Department files, his watch is similar to another Casio model that has a circuit boardthat Al Qaeda has used for making bombs. The United States is using the Qaeda-favored Casio wristwatch as evidence against at least nine other detainees. But the offending model is sold in sidewalk stands around the world and is worn by one National Journal reporter. The primary difference between Chandler's client's watch and the Casio in question is that the detainee's model hasn't been manufactured for years, according to the U.S. military officer who was his personal representative at the tribunal. Guilt by Association Baher Azmy of Seton Hall Law School represents Murat Kurnaz, a Turk who is at Guantanamo. "The government has no case against him," Azmy says. Kurnaz was plucked off a bus in Pakistan and subsequently accused of being friends with asuicide bomber. The government did not tell Kurnaz's tribunal that his friend is alive and therefore could not be the referenced suicide bomber. In March, Kurnaz's file was accidentally, and briefly, declassified: According to The Washington Post, it consisted of memos from domestic and foreign intelligence sources stating that Kurnaz posed no threat. The file, however, contained one anonymous memo contradicting the rest and claiming he was connected to Al Qaeda. In January 2005,a federal judge singled out Kurnaz's case as evidence of the lack of due process in the Guantanamo tribunals. The judge saidthat his tribunal had ignored exculpatory evidence and relied instead on the single anonymous memo that was not credible. Julia Tarver Mason, a partner with Paul, Weiss, a firm based in New York City, represents a number of detainees,including a Saudi -- an amputee -- whom Afghanistan's Northern Alliance turned over to the Americans. The alliance had taken him from a hospital. She says that the classified evidence against the men she represents has "details, but no meat." Theevidence might say, for example, that somebody said someone was a member of an aid group, and that aid group has been known to have some links to Al Qaeda, Mason says. "It's all 12 steps removed." George Brent Mickum, a partner with Washington law firm Keller and Heckman, represents two British residents held atGuantanamo. "I can tell you what's not there," Mickum said of the classified evidence against his clients. "What's not thereis any evidence that any of my clients was associated with Al Qaeda in any way." The men were arrested on a business trip toGambia. According to press reports, British intelligence suspected at the time that the two men intended to establish a terrorist training facility there. But today, the accusation against both men is only that they were associated with Abu Qatada, a radical but popular London cleric who is now in prison in Britain. Neither man denies the friendship with Qatada: One of the detainees, Bisher al-Rawi, says he served as a liaison betweenQatada and British intelligence at the request of the MI-5 domestic intelligence agency. The tribunal for the other man, Jamil el-Banna, met four times before deciding that he was an enemy combatant. Even so, el-Banna's personal representative,who had access to the classified files, objected. The British government was well aware of el-Banna's actions on British soil,the officer wrote, and the record is "insufficient to show [the detainee] should be classified as an enemy combatant for hisactions in Gambia." To Protect the Soldiers If many of the men held at Guantanamo were not caught in battle, and have not been tied directly to hostilities against the United States, why are they there? "I think the standards for sending someone to Guantanamo in 2002 and early 2003 were not as high as they should have been," said Mark Jacobson, who was an assistant for detainee policy in Rumsfeld's office from November 2002 through August 2003. When National Journal described some of the men in this story to Jacobson, he said he suspected that there was more information that was not referenced in the classified or the declassified files. But if the files were accurate, he said, "then it's reasonable and likely" that those men were in the batches taken to Guantanamo early on in 2002. The filtering process for deciding who was sent to Guantanamo wasn't perfect, Jacobson said, nor should it have been. To protect U.S. soldiers still fighting in Afghanistan it was better to err on the side of caution and to send more, rather than fewer, men to Guantanamo. "If it's the other way around, then you're doing it wrong." But nuance didn't exactly survive the air convoys to Cuba. The men in the orange jumpsuits, President Bush said, wereterrorists. They were the most dangerous, best-trained, vicious killers on the face of the earth, Rumsfeld said. They were sovicious, if given the chance they would gnaw through the hydraulic lines of a C-17 while they were being flown to Cuba,said Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But the CIA didn't see it that way. By the fall of 2002, it was common knowledge around CIA circles that fewer than 10percent of Guantanamo's prisoners were high-value terrorist operatives, according to Michael Scheuer who headed the agency's bin Laden unit through 1999 and resigned in 2004. Most of the men were probably foot soldiers at best, he said, who were "going to know absolutely nothing about terrorism." Guantanamo prisoners might be pumped for information about how they learned to fight, which could help American soldiers facing trained Islamic insurgencies. But the Defense Department and FBI interrogators at Guantanamo were interested more in catastrophic terrorism than in combat practicalities. They kept asking "every one of these guys about 9/11 and when was the next attack," questions most of these low-level prisoners couldn't answer, Scheuer said. Even as the CIA was deciding that most of the prisoners at Guantanamo didn't have much to say, Pentagon officials weregetting frustrated with how little the detainees were saying. So they ramped up the pressure and gave interrogators more license. The questions to the detainees about 9/11 and Al Qaeda and about each other were so constant, so repetitive, so oppressive that some prisoners, out of exasperation or fatigue or fear, just gave in and said, sure, I'm a terrorist. False confessions and false accusations are rampant, according to the lawyers and the Defense Department records. One man slammed his hands on the table during an especially long interrogation and yelled, "Fine, you got me; I'm aterrorist." The interrogators knew it was a sarcastic statement. But the government, sometime later, used it as evidence againsthim: "Detainee admitted he is a terrorist" reads his tribunal evidence. The interrogators were so outraged that they soughtout the detainee's personal representative to explain it to him that the statement was not a confession. A Yemeni, whom somebody fingered as a bin Laden bodyguard, finally said in exasperation during one long interrogation, "OK, I saw bin Laden five times: Three times on Al Jazeera and twice on Yemeni news." And now his "admission" appears in his enemy combatant's file: "Detainee admitted to knowing Osama bin Laden." By June 2004 conditions were so bad at Guantanamo that the International Committee of the Red Cross, the only civiliangroup allowed to meet with detainees, sent a furious confidential report to the White House charging that the entire system in Cuba was "devised to break the will of prisoners at Guantanamo," making them "wholly dependent on their interrogators" through "humiliating acts, solitary confinement, temperature extremes, use of forced positions," according to a Defense report leaked to The New York Times. The report called the operations "tantamount to torture." Pentagon officials, meanwhile, were citing the "safe, humane, and professional detention operation at Guantanamo thatis providing valuable information in the war on terrorism." Wrong Questions, Wrong People The one question nobody seemed to ask at Guantanamo was whether they were asking the right questions of the right people in the first place. After all, despite the rhetoric, most of the men at Guantanamo, or at least the 132 with court records and the 314 with redacted transcripts, came into American custody by way of third parties who had their own motivations for turning people in, including paybacks and payoffs. In Afghanistan, from late 2001 through the early months of 2003, local and tribal informers played on America's naivete byreporting their enemies as Qaeda members, according to a former intelligence operative there. The Americans, upon investigating, would find that a man did have weapons and assume that he was, indeed, Al Qaeda. "They wouldn't know the factions," the operative said, "and they wouldn't think, 'This is Afghanistan.Of course he has weapons.' " Ignorance of local politics might explain how, for example, an Arabic-speaking Iraqi Shiite ended up at Guantanamo accused of serving as the regional intelligence director for the Pashto-speaking Sunni Taliban. Some of the men at Guantanamo came from targeted, U.S.-guided raids in Pakistani cities, and the cases againstthose men tend to be fairly strong. But the largest single group at Guantanamo Bay today consists of men caught in indiscriminate sweeps for Arabs in Pakistan. Once arrested, these men passed through several captors before being given to the U.S. military. Some of the men say they were arrested after asking for help getting to their embassies; a few say the Pakistanis asked them for bribes to avoid being turned over to America. Others assert that they were sold for bounties, a charge substantiated in 2004 when Sami Yousafzai, a Newsweek reporter then stringing for ABC's 20/20, visited the Pakistani village where five Kuwaiti detainees were captured. The localsremembered the men. They had arrived with a larger group of a hundred refugees a few weeks after Qaeda fighters had passed through. The villagers said they had offered the group shelter and food, but somebody in the village sold out the guests. Pretty soon, bright lights came swooping down from the skies. "Helicopters ... were announcing through loud speakers: 'Where is Arab? Where is Arab?' And, 'Please, you get $1,000 for one Arab,' " one resident told Yousafzai. "The one thing we were never clear of was where they came from," Scheuer said of the Guantanamo detainees. "DOD picked them up somewhere." When National Journal told Scheuer that the largest group came from Pakistani custody, he chuckled. "Then they were probably people the Pakistanis thought were dangerous to Pakistan," he said. "We absolutely got the wrong people." The sweeps in Pakistan did pick up a few Qaeda members, but most of them were low level. People familiar with Pakistani politics agree that in the chaos of the war, simple foot soldiers or innocent bystanders were more likely to wind up inAmerican custody than were senior operatives. "It was helter-skelter, and it was perfectly possible innocents were arrested, while a lot of guilty guys knew how to evade [capture] and had the means to do so," said Husain Haqqani, an adviser to three former Pakistani prime ministers who now teaches international relations at Boston University. Tribes in the border region and operatives in Pakistan's intelligence service were historically sympathetic to Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Almost certainly, they aided senior Qaeda and Taliban members fleeing Afghanistan. At the same time, Islamabadwas eager to strengthen its new alliance with Washington. The Americans wanted prisoners, and nobody was looking too closely at who those prisoners were. Add a healthy dollop of cash spread around by both hunters and prey, and a U.S. military bureaucracy dedicated to protecting Americans against a threat from an unfamiliar corner of the world, and you have an unsettling formula for determining who got caught and who got away. It was "win-win," Haqqani said. "The Americans get their prisoners, Pakistanis get their praise, the guy who captures the prisoners gets his reward, and Al Qaeda gets its escape."

Imagine what 2009 and 2010 are going to be like. The recriminations and public debate are going to be dreadful. America will spend twenty years recovering from the Bush Era.

New strains of TB raise alarm
By Elisabeth Rosenthal International Herald TribuneTUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 2006-->Published: September 5, 2006
PARIS The spread of a new, highly resistant form of tuberculosis that is "virtually untreatable" is causing alarm among international health officials who say that it has now been identified in "all regions of the world," according to the World Health Organization.
For two decades, health officials have been concerned about the steady rise in drug resistant tuberculosis, which has forced them to rely on more expensive and prolonged treatments in order to achieve a cure, increasing the cost of treatment 100-fold.
But the new strains, called extremely drug resistant (XDR) TB, cannot be treated at any cost. In many patients, particularly those with HIV/AIDS, the emergence of such strains has transformed tuberculosis, generally a slow, chronic lung disease, into a rapid assassin.
"With XDR-TB we have very few options left - all we can even try are very old, very ineffective drugs that we stopped using in the '50s and '60s," said Dr. Karin Weyer, director of the TB Unit at the South African Research Council. "For many people, there is no option."
Later this week, international experts from the World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will meet in Johannesburg to plot strategies to contain this new killer. Officials from the World Health Organization declined to discuss the topic until after the conference.
In one recent TB outbreak among 544 people in the South African province of Kwazulu-Natal, most of whom were HIV positive, 221 had resistant TB, and 53 of those cases involved XDR strains. Of those 53 cases, 52 patients have died, including many who were otherwise getting the most advanced therapy for AIDS.
And the problem of extreme resistance is not limited to Africa or to patients with HIV/AIDS. When the U.S. Centers for Disease Control last year asked tuberculosis labs worldwide to take a look at specimens for XDR TB, the results were alarming.
In a paper published this summer in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly, researchers reported that 15 percent of samples in South Korea had extreme drug resistance, 19 percent in Latvia, as well as 14 percent in the East European/ West Asia region. In the United States, 4 percent of sample were XDR.
"XDR TB has emerged worldwide as a threat to public health and TB control, raising concerns of a future epidemic of virtually untreatable disease," the researchers said. Extreme drug resistance is defined as strains of tuberculosis that are impervious to at least 3 of the 6 second-line drugs available to treat TB, and some are impervious to all 6.
Effective treatment of TB often requires the simultaneous administration of more than 3 drugs.
Extremely drug-resistant TB arises when a strain of tuberculosis with a less severe form of resistance is unrecognized, or is otherwise treated inadequately or incompletely.
Even standard TB needs to be treated for six months for a cure. Multidrug resistant strains required patients to take multiple drugs for two years, a treatment plan that is, for many patients, particularly those in poor countries, difficult to afford and comply with.
In South Africa, the cost of the six- month treatment is about €50, or $64, while the cost of the two-year course is €4,000, Weyer said.
If that treatment is not adhered to, the patient is not cured though his condition may improve. But most worrying, the tuberculosis bacterium that remain in his body learn to defy those drugs. These germs can then be passed to others setting off untreatable epidemics, like that in South Africa.


PARIS The spread of a new, highly resistant form of tuberculosis that is "virtually untreatable" is causing alarm among international health officials who say that it has now been identified in "all regions of the world," according to the World Health Organization.
For two decades, health officials have been concerned about the steady rise in drug resistant tuberculosis, which has forced them to rely on more expensive and prolonged treatments in order to achieve a cure, increasing the cost of treatment 100-fold.
But the new strains, called extremely drug resistant (XDR) TB, cannot be treated at any cost. In many patients, particularly those with HIV/AIDS, the emergence of such strains has transformed tuberculosis, generally a slow, chronic lung disease, into a rapid assassin.
"With XDR-TB we have very few options left - all we can even try are very old, very ineffective drugs that we stopped using in the '50s and '60s," said Dr. Karin Weyer, director of the TB Unit at the South African Research Council. "For many people, there is no option."
Later this week, international experts from the World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will meet in Johannesburg to plot strategies to contain this new killer. Officials from the World Health Organization declined to discuss the topic until after the conference.
In one recent TB outbreak among 544 people in the South African province of Kwazulu-Natal, most of whom were HIV positive, 221 had resistant TB, and 53 of those cases involved XDR strains. Of those 53 cases, 52 patients have died, including many who were otherwise getting the most advanced therapy for AIDS.
And the problem of extreme resistance is not limited to Africa or to patients with HIV/AIDS. When the U.S. Centers for Disease Control last year asked tuberculosis labs worldwide to take a look at specimens for XDR TB, the results were alarming.
In a paper published this summer in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly, researchers reported that 15 percent of samples in South Korea had extreme drug resistance, 19 percent in Latvia, as well as 14 percent in the East European/ West Asia region. In the United States, 4 percent of sample were XDR.
"XDR TB has emerged worldwide as a threat to public health and TB control, raising concerns of a future epidemic of virtually untreatable disease," the researchers said. Extreme drug resistance is defined as strains of tuberculosis that are impervious to at least 3 of the 6 second-line drugs available to treat TB, and some are impervious to all 6.
Effective treatment of TB often requires the simultaneous administration of more than 3 drugs.
Extremely drug-resistant TB arises when a strain of tuberculosis with a less severe form of resistance is unrecognized, or is otherwise treated inadequately or incompletely.
Even standard TB needs to be treated for six months for a cure. Multidrug resistant strains required patients to take multiple drugs for two years, a treatment plan that is, for many patients, particularly those in poor countries, difficult to afford and comply with.
In South Africa, the cost of the six- month treatment is about €50, or $64, while the cost of the two-year course is €4,000, Weyer said.
If that treatment is not adhered to, the patient is not cured though his condition may improve. But most worrying, the tuberculosis bacterium that remain in his body learn to defy those drugs. These germs can then be passed to others setting off untreatable epidemics, like that in South Africa.

Here is an Editorial from the Atlanta Constitution. The South is starting to weary of the Bush Administration. Shrillness on the part of S. O. D. Rumsfeld serves no one. We are heading for a mid term shakeup that might match 1994. Read it and weep! The Great Silent Majority is fedup!
ajc.com > OpinionRoad to ruin in IraqRumsfeld quick to condemn critics, but U.S. needs to acknowledge its failure and try something else

Published on: 09/01/06
In recent polls, more than 60 percent of Americans say they disapprove of the Bush administration's approach to the Iraq war, with barely 30 percent still expressing approval.
If you believe Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, those numbers mean that two out of three Americans are appeasers who want to surrender to terrorists and who rush to "blame America first" for the world's problems.
In a speech this week to the American Legion in Salt Lake City, Rumsfeld went on to suggest that those Americans who question this administration's approach to Iraq are beset by cynicism and moral confusion, and are "more interested in dividing our country than acting with unity against the gathering threats."
No, they are not. In fact, Rumsfeld betrays his own cynicism and moral confusion when he attacks the patriotism, courage and moral fiber of millions of his fellow Americans, then bewails those who try to divide this country.
Those growing numbers of Americans who question the conduct of this war understand all too well that there is no alternative but victory in our struggle against Islamic extremists. However, they also understand through bitter experience that the current strategy and the current leadership are incapable of bringing that necessary victory.
For 3 1/2 years now, they have listened to Rumsfeld and others in the Bush administration claim that conditions in Iraq were getting better and better, and they look at Iraq today and know that has been a lie.
For 3 1/2 years, they have watched the administration conduct this war with a level of incompetence and blissful disregard for reality that has been utterly astonishing, and they have been appalled by the fact that no one has been held accountable for mistakes that have cost this country dearly, in lives, treasure, credibility and strength.
In his speech, Rumsfeld tried once again to shield himself and his colleagues from responsibility for their mistakes by hiding behind the American flag and behind the troops they have put in harm's way with insufficient resources. It was an utterly shameful, even cowardly performance that history will condemn in no uncertain terms.
To blame Donald Rumsfeld is not to blame America. To blame President Bush is not to blame America. To blame those of both parties in Congress who have lacked the courage to perform their duties of independent oversight in the conduct of this war is not to blame America.
It is not patriotism to sit in silent submission to those who have led this country into the most serious foreign policy blunder in our history. It is not moral confusion to point out that with its embrace of torture as a legitimate weapon, and with its refusal to abide by the Geneva Conventions, it is the Bush administration that has undercut the moral standing of the United States in a struggle in which moral standing is of utmost importance.
And it is neither appeasement nor surrender to search for a better way, because it is clear to many that the road we have taken so far does not lead to victory.
—Jay Bookman, for the editorial board

Book Review Christian Blog News
"While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West From Within1 " by Bruce Bawer; Doubleday ($23.95)If the ongoing “Battle of Khartoon” (let’s give it some historical resonance) proves anything, it’s that many otherwise well-educated Westerners remain illiterate about Islam.According to the Wall Street Journal, the editors of Denmark’s Jyllands-Posten newspaper didn’t understand when they published their visual bombshells2 that some strains of Islam3 (but not all) oppose depiction of Muhammad. Consider that just one gap in knowledge that new books like Bruce Bawer’s “While Europe Slept” help close.Indeed, thanks to Voltaire, the Enlightenment, and American freedom of expression, spring lists from prestigious publishers abound with scholarly tomes packed with information on Islam. Look, for instance, at Alan Jamieson’s “Faith and Sword: A Short History of Christian-Muslim Conflict4 ” (University of Chicago Press), or Efraim Karsh’s “Islamic Imperialism: A History5 ” (Yale).Such studies follow scores of volumes over the last few years that offer context for the current fury over Muhammad’s cartoon portrayal as a source of terror. Read, for instance, “Muhammad in Europe6 ” (NYU Press, 2001) by Minou Reeves, an Iranian scholar who examines traditional European images of Muhammad as a xenophobic warrior and argues that they misjudge him.Bruce Bawer’s “While Europe Slept7 ,” published this month, provides an extraordinarily timely and incisive complement to such works. His topic is far fresher, one rarely explained to Americans because of our shrinking coverage of Europe: the astounding growth of Muslim communities there over the last 30 years, and how they interact with traditionally Christian societies.Bawer, a gay, neoconservative American literary critic from New York who has lived in Amsterdam8 (now more than half non-Dutch) and, since 1997, in Oslo, energetically reports here what happens between the terrorist incidents that prod mainstream American media to brief coverage: the everyday tensions of a Europe that, for the first time in many centuries, must face substantial Islamic populations and ambitions.In Bawer’s view, Western Europe is becoming a “house divided against itself.” On the one hand, the educated European elite maintains an unshakable “belief in peace and reconciliation through dialogue,” a faith (their only remaining faith) that every issue can be resolved without violence.On the other hand, Europe’s unassimilated Muslim communities are led in many cases, Bawer contends, by “fundamentalist Muslims” who seek “the establishment in Europe of a caliphate government according to sharia law.” Such leaders, often imams and elders, see “Islamist terrorists as allies in a global jihad9 , or holy war, dedicated to that goal.”According to Bawer, liberals in Europe, even more than their American counterparts, want to believe that most Muslim immigrants share Western middle-class goals: a safe place to live, opportunities for their children, and the like. That accounts, Bawer argues, for the odd mix in their attitudes to Muslims: joy in the “multiculturalism” that makes their previously homogeneous societies more “colorful,” and a nativist desire to keep Muslims in their place as exotica.Bawer asserts that the reality — confirmed for him by the resistance of European Muslims to assimilation, and the marked presence in their communities of honor killings, homophobia, polygamy, marital rape, forced marriage, and intolerance of democracy and pluralism — is that European Muslim leaders, with demographics on their side, still harbor the millennial hope of taking power in Europe, and see the European attitude as both weak and hostile. It is “political correctness,” Bawer writes, that has “gotten Europe into its current mess.”Accept his analysis or not, Bawer and his details startle, since American tourists rarely visit the Muslim communities that now ring many European cities, and American journalists rarely cover them. Apart from the heinous killings by angry Muslims of prominent Europeans such as Dutch professor and politician Pim Fortuyn (after publication of his book “Against the Islamicization of Our Culture”) and Dutch artist and filmmaker Theo van Gogh10 , who dared to question Islamic brutalization of women11 , Bawer describes a landscape of dysfunction.Seventy percent of the inmates in French prisons, Bawer reports, are Muslim. Four out of five residents at Oslo’s main women’s shelter are non-Norwegian women seeking protection from male family members. In Denmark, “Muslims make up 5 percent of the population but receive 40 percent of welfare outlays.” Ninety-four percent of asylum seekers who come to Norway arrive with no identification, a well-known subterfuge around Europe that virtually ensures asylum on humanitarian grounds.Bawer’s book also highlights the ironies of current global politics and immigration. Radical Islamists, for instance, focus their fury on the United States even though it, unlike Europe, experienced little antagonism with Islam until the creation of Israel, and in fact most resembles the traditional Islamic “umma” (universal Muslim community), in the generosity with which it welcomes foreign residents (though it differs in offering equality rather than second-class “dhimmi” citizenship).Similarly, while Islamists explode with fury at the very idea that non-Muslims should occupy or live in Islamic countries, Bawer observes and amply documents that many employ every legal and illegal stratagem imaginable under the doctrine of “family reunification” to bring more relatives into their European countries. They then insist they have a right to be there and apply for the seemingly endless forms of European welfare: “unemployment benefits, relief payments, child benefits, disability, cash support, and rent allowance.”Bawer apportions blame for the “mess” he sees. Muslim immigrants insist on Islam’s traditionally imperialist principles, which presume that no Muslim properly lives under the sovereignty of a non-Muslim state. Europeans maintain a “romantic view of Muslim immigrants” as “colorful” unfortunates worthy of assistance, but steadfastly resist their entry into elite professions and neighborhoods. Bawer beautifully capsulizes this European mind-set as “millions in aid, but not a penny in salary.”Ultimately, his book, like the cartoon controversy, raises profound challenges to standard ideas of democracy, authority and free expression.