According to a new poll, most Canadians believe US foreign policy is the root cause of the September 11 attacks.

Forty-three percent of Americans still believe Saddam Hussein had direct, personal involvement in 9/11, even though Bush has said Saddam had “nothing” to do with it. “One of the hardest parts of my job is to connect Iraq to the war on terror,” Bush admitted, in a September 6 interview with Katie Couric at CBS News.

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Another poll, this time of Britons, says that most British people think that the best defence against terrorism is a split from the US and a withdrawal from Iraq. After months of criticism, and endless ridicule for his close ties to President Bush, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair has announced his retirement.

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Many Americans believe conspiracy theories that purport US involvement in the September 11 attacks, and recently declassified documents “show how in 1962, the top US military leaders planned an operation to create terror attacks against its own cities and kill US citizens” in order to build support for a war against Cuba.

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Bush has now acknowledged the existence of secret CIA prisons across the globe, set up to hold top terror suspects. These suspects were subjected to interrogation methods that were “tough,” said Bush, as well as “safe and lawful and necessary”.

The admission of the prisons is a vindication for reporter Seymour Hersh, who broke the story in May 2005. The Bush administration denied it. Hersh has also reported that the US is planning an attack on Iran. The Bush administration denies it.

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The Bush administration has proposed new laws that will make many harsh interrogation techniques that are rejected by the US military and forbidden by the Geneva Conventions accepted as normal practice, including “stress positions, sleep deprivation and extreme temperatures”.

This follows the administration’s drafting of revisions to the US War Crimes Act that will “eliminate the risk of prosecution for political appointees, CIA officers and former military personnel” for using or approving these techniques. The revisions are seen necessary because foreigners are using accusations of US criminal behaviour as a way to rein in American power, according to a US official.

The United States has sought and received guarantees from dozens of nations that they will never extradite Americans for prosecution by the International Criminal Court in The Hague, and has plans in place to do whatever is necessary to prevent such prosecutions from occurring, including invading The Netherlands.

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Meanwhile, hearings were held on charges against two soldiers among eight who are accused of “premeditated murder, kidnapping, assault and other crimes in the April 26 death of Hashim Ibrahim Awad in Hamdaniya, Iraq”. The soldiers are accused of kidnapping the 52-year-old man, “shooting him and leaving an AK-47 and shovel near his body to suggest he was an insurgent burying a roadside bomb”.

[tags]9/11, CIA, war crimes, Iran[/tags]

A friend of mine talked to her landlord today. As they chatted, he mentioned the building’s latest tenant: the boyfriend of someone else in the building who has taken to living there, unofficially, but apparently on a permanent basis.

“I want to know who this guy is,” he said. “I want his social insurance number, a copy of his driver’s license, and his name on the lease. I don’t want some dude bringing drugs in here.”

The last comment could normally be passed off as that of a conscientious – perhaps overly conscientious – landlord. But the new boyfriend has dreadlocks. It was obvious to my friend that it was his appearance that prompted the concern about drugs.

No one would question the landlord’s desire to have proper documentation and a signature on a rental contract, especially when this is the standard he applies to all tenants. When someone’s appearance enters into things, questions arise.

Is it acceptable for the landlord to investigate the boyfriend – I’ll call him Ian – more thoroughly than he would normally, perhaps by running a criminal background check? And is it acceptable for Ian’s appearance to influence his decision about Ian’s potential tenancy?

Some types of discrimination are legal. Pardons Canada gives difficulty finding a place to live as one reason to have criminal records removed. The Ontario Human Rights Code does not list a criminal record among the prohibited forms of discrimination (interestingly, a criminal record is not grounds for discrimination with respect to employment).

The Code says that “Every person has a right to equal treatment with respect to the occupancy of accommodation, without discrimination because of race, ancestry, place of origin, colour, ethnic origin, citizenship, creed, sex, sexual orientation, age, marital status, family status, disability or the receipt of public assistance.”

Landlords are also prohibited from discriminating on the basis of a lack of credit history or a lack of references from previous landlords (because this discriminates against new renters and immigrants), as well as on the basis of many other factors, including some which the landlord may include on the rental questionnaire (it’s not illegal to ask someone the question, only illegal to discriminate on the basis of the answer – parse that logic for me).

In spite of searching fairly extensively, I could not find any information on whether or not discriminating on the basis of hairstyle is legal. The closest it might be to illegal is that a deliberate policy against dreadlocks may be what is called constructive discrimination:

Constructive discrimination refers to policies or practices which may not be intentionally or obviously discriminatory, but which have a discriminatory effect on a group or groups which are protected under the Code. For example, a policy of not allowing internal transfers in a building may not be intentionally discriminatory, but would have a negative, discriminatory effect on some groups protected under the Code, such as families who need to change apartments because of the birth of an additional child.

A policy against dreadlocks could be seen as one directed against blacks (even though Ian is white), because it is a hairstyle more commonly associated with black people than with white people (I have no idea whether or not there really are more black people with dreads than white people, but I could see this case being made).

Other than that, it appears as though the landlord may be legally justified in allowing Ian’s dreads to motivate increased scrutiny of Ian, and even to influence his decision to rent an apartment to him. But is it ethical?

The landlord associates Ian’s dreadlocks with drugs. This stereotype – people with dreads smoke pot – is probably based on the close relationship between dreadlocks and the Rastafari movement. Dreads are one of the religious movement’s most well-known symbols, and smoking pot is certainly its most famous sacrament.

The Rastafari movement’s other well-known symbol: Bob Marley

But there are plenty of clean-cut professionals who smoke pot too, as well as abuse any number of other substances, legal and illegal. Ian might be a great tenant. The next tenant with a crewcut could turn out to be a violent psycho.

They say you can’t judge a book by its cover. But what if the book chooses its cover?

[tags]discrimination, human rights, equality, dreadlocks, Rastafari, renting[/tags]

Britain is considering adopting racial and ethnic profiling procedures to help identify potential terrorists, a move British Metropolitan police chief superintendent Ali Dizaei has condemned as creating the new offence of “traveling while Asian”.

And two young men of “Middle Eastern or Asian” appearance were removed from a holiday flight after their fellow passengers complained that they were acting suspiciously:

In the early hours of Wednesday a number of passengers on Monarch Airlines flight ZB613 left the plane, refusing to fly unless the two men were removed, causing a three-hour delay.

Passengers are reported to have become suspicious after the men were overheard apparently speaking Arabic and seen repeatedly checking their watches, although this has not been confirmed by the airline.

If people who speak Arabic and check their watches frequently in airports are to be acted against, and if the colour of one’s skin is to once again become the determining factor in how one is treated by the police, perhaps it’s time to start jamming the culture a little bit.

That’s why I propose we put our heads together and start up a new company selling t-shirts with Arabic on them whose sayings translate into punchy commentary such as Declare Jihad on Illiteracy, or I Love America, or perhaps I Prayed to Allah on a Plane and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt.

We could also screen-print the image of some bearded, scary-looking dude on them to really make the point, like Abraham Lincoln:

What do you think?

[tags]terrorism,paranoia,politics,security[/tags]

Ethanol, the fuel mainly produced from agricultural crops like corn, will likely have disastrous effects on the environment. Deforestation and the massive use of chemical fertilizers are just the appetizers. But the environmental costs pale in comparison to the human costs. Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute, lays those out in a Fortune article:

The growing myth that corn is a cure-all for our energy woes is leading us toward a potentially dangerous global fight for food. While crop-based ethanol – the latest craze in alternative energy – promises a guilt-free way to keep our gas tanks full, the reality is that overuse of our agricultural resources could have consequences even more drastic than, say, being deprived of our SUVs. It could leave much of the world hungry.

We are facing an epic competition between the 800 million motorists who want to protect their mobility and the two billion poorest people in the world who simply want to survive. In effect, supermarkets and service stations are now competing for the same resources.

This year cars, not people, will claim most of the increase in world grain consumption. The problem is simple: It takes a whole lot of agricultural produce to create a modest amount of automotive fuel.

The grain required to fill a 25-gallon SUV gas tank with ethanol, for instance, could feed one person for a year. If today’s entire U.S. grain harvest were converted into fuel for cars, it would still satisfy less than one-sixth of U.S. demand.

This problem is especially acute in poorer countries, where farmers are shifting production from food to fuel crops, or simply taking food and selling it to fuel producers rather than food suppliers.

“Sugar prices have doubled over the past 18 months (driven in part by Brazil’s use of sugar cane for fuel)”, the article says, and “Malaysia, the leading exporter of palm oil, is emerging as the biofuel leader in Asia”, but has had to “suspend further licensing while it assesses the adequacy of its palm oil supplies”.

In Malaysia, as this 2004 article reports, there is an enormous gap between rich and poor.

Even within urban areas, a significant underclass has emerged as well over the decades. A few kilometers from Mariam’s kampong, at a sprawling squatter settlement next to an established industrial estate, conditions are dismal. A sizable number of undernourished children can be found in squatter areas and plantations, according to Nasir, a trained nutritionist. The telltale signs are underweight children, poor academic performance, and health problems. Invariably, many of the children drop out of school.

I wonder how Nasir the trained nutritionist feels about palm oil going into gas tanks instead of the mouths of undernourished children.

[tags]ethanol, renewable fuels, biofuel[/tags]

In a stirring article called A Judgment on Iraq, retired four-star general Wesley Clark and contender for the US Democratic Party’s nomination for president in 2008 communicates his vision for the Democrats:

The truth is the Democratic Party – elected leaders, party regulars and the big-time donors – pretty much agree on the failures of the administration, and even on the policies that need to be adopted, like stronger diplomacy and more reliance on allies and international organizations, coupled with a willingness to fully fund, rearm, strengthen and use America’s armed forces.

As well as the underfunded, underused American military, Clark went on to identify other pressing national problems, such as the anorexia epidemic and America’s unhealthy addiction to small Japanese cars.

[tags]Wesley Clark, Democrats, politics[/tags]