This summary of some reactions to the recent Baker Report on Iraq is a few days old, but it’s still interesting, because the reactions are from the Middle East instead of from the West.

They include two from Iraq itself. From Al-Dustur:

A change cannot happen in isolation from the Iraqi national will. The Americans are incapable of making a change outside the framework of Iraqi national interest which is defined by the Iraqis rather than any other party.

From Al-Adalah:

International conferences cannot decide the fate of the political process in Iraq. Rather, Iraqis, who have made immense sacrifices for the political process, can alone determine the fate of their country and draw up its policies.

[tags]Iraq[/tags]

“One spring day during his three and a half years as an enemy combatant,” the New York Times reports, “Jose Padilla experienced a break from the monotony of his solitary confinement in a bare cell in the brig at the Naval Weapons Station in Charleston, S.C.”

Padilla was taken to the dentist that day and for whatever reason, his trip was videotaped. That tape is one of the few glimpses into his incarceration.

Padilla, an American citizen, was accused of plotting a dirty bomb attack but was not charged (his status has since been changed to criminal defendant and he awaits trial on other, lesser charges).

He was held for 21 months without seeing a lawyer. His interrogations included “hooding, stress positions, assaults, threats of imminent execution and the administration of ‘truth serums’,” according to his lawyers.

His lawyers also say he was “held alone in a 10-cell wing of the brig; that he had little human contact other than with his interrogators; that his cell was electronically monitored and his meals were passed to him through a slot in the door; that windows were blackened, and there was no clock or calendar; and that he slept on a steel platform after a foam mattress was taken from him, along with his copy of the Koran, ‘as part of an interrogation plan'”.

This is how they treat American citizens. How do you suppose they treat everyone else?

What if one day they “detain” you or me?

[tags]torture[/tags]

Stéphane Dion has beaten Michael Ignatieff to win the leadership of the Liberal Party, winning 57.4 percent of delegates’ votes to Iggy’s 45.3 percent.

Dion, a former professor of political science and Minister of the Environment under Paul Martin, has made the environment his central concern. The Tories are certainly vulnerable on the environment, which speaks in Dion’s favour, but on the other hand he has been described to me as “boring”.

Then again, Harper has the charisma of a frozen venison chop, so maybe boring and bookish stands a chance. I haven’t yet formed an opinion of him, but I’m interested in hearing yours. What is Dion all about, what does this mean for the Liberal Party, and can they take back Parliament with Dion at the helm?

[tags]Dion, liberals, Canada, politics[/tags]

The video for Bombs by UK group Faithless contains powerful, thought-provoking imagery. Which is probably why it’s been banned by MTV*.

*I have not been able to confirm the ban via any news organization, but that’s the word on the blogs and elsewhere:

They have a thing on MTV Hits where you can ask any question you like via TXT, so I asked why MTV had banned the video :-) They actually aired it and answered! Here is what MTV said: “No official statement has been made, but Faithless ‘Bombs’ has most likely been banned for being too violent, political and/or controversial !!!

[tags]music[/tags]

The folly of America’s administration and its apologists, among them the New York Times, the Washington Post, and now the “opposition” party, the Democrats, knows few bounds.

Consider Robert Fisk’s Like Hitler and Brezhnev, Bush is in denial:

More than half a million deaths, an army trapped in the largest military debacle since Vietnam, a Middle East policy already buried in the sands of Mesopotamia – and still George W Bush is in denial. How does he do it? How does he persuade himself – as he apparently did in Amman yesterday – that the United States will stay in Iraq “until the job is complete”?

[…]

About the only truthful statement uttered in Amman yesterday was Bush’s remark that “there’s a lot of speculation that these reports in Washington mean there’s going to be some kind of graceful exit out of Iraq [but] this business about a graceful exit just simply has no realism to it at all.” Indeed, it has not. There can be no graceful exit from Iraq, only a terrifying, bloody collapse of military power.

Now consider, on the other hand, the Times’ Idea of Rapid Withdrawal From Iraq Seems to Fade:

In the cacophony of competing plans about how to deal with Iraq, one reality now appears clear: despite the Democrats’ victory this month in an election viewed as a referendum on the war, the idea of a rapid American troop withdrawal is fast receding as a viable option.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff are signaling that too rapid an American pullout would open the way to all-out civil war. The bipartisan Iraq Study Group has shied away from recommending explicit timelines in favor of a vaguely timed pullback. The report that the panel will deliver to President Bush next week would, at a minimum, leave a force of 70,000 or more troops in the country for a long time to come, to train the Iraqis and to insure against collapse of a desperately weak central government.

[…]

Standing next to Mr. Maliki on Thursday in Amman, Jordan, Mr. Bush declared that Iraqis need not fear that he is looking for “some kind of graceful exit out of Iraq.” But a graceful exit – or even an awkward one – appears to be just what the Iraq Study Group, led by James A. Baker III and Lee H. Hamilton, tried to design in the compromise reached by Republicans and Democrats on the panel on Wednesday.

Ah, the Democrats, erstwhile friends of the anti-war movement. They stood with the majority of Americans against the war just a few weeks ago, now, they support the Bush plan for Iraq with merely a few vague adjustments.

A democracy requires opposing points of view. A democracy requires an active press that speaks truth to power. A democracy requires active public debate, not “consensus” handed down from on high.

No country should quibble and mutter and praise its own good intentions while the country it occupies burns. No opposition party should stand by and watch this happen, let alone participate in it.

Shame on you, Democrats, for turning your back on Americans, Iraqis and the rest of the world so soon after promising so much.

[tags]Democrats, Iraq[/tags]