US personell at the Abu Ghraib prison were ordered to use unmuzzled dogs to "frighten and intimidate" prisoners during interrogations. According to the dog handlers, this was authorised by the top intelligence officer at the prison-
This is hardly going to go down in history as the worst example of prisoner abuse. Sorry, this is not good, but I have problems working up the big moral outrage. The media doesn't have similar problems.
The reporter had asked Putin to respond to U.S. press articles questioning Russia's place at the G8 feast of leading industrial countries.
Putin brushed these off, saying such articles were part of an internal U.S. political debate.
He went on: "I am deeply convinced that President Bush's political adversaries have no moral right to attack him over Iraq because they did exactly the same.
"It suffices to recall Yugoslavia. Now look at them. They don't like what President Bush is doing in Iraq."
Indeed, Russia was opposed to both conflicts, and can at least say they are consistent. France does not have that luxury. And neither does the democrats who supported Clinton's "unilateralism" in Kosovo.
At least we know Putin was not among the "foreign leaders" who would prefer John Kerry as president.
You can hardly open a political blog or a newspaper these days without seeing some pundit give his take on the big question of the day: Can Ronald Reagan be credited with ending the cold war? Not surprisingly, people tend to fall down along the political lines. Leftists tend to discredit the idea, either saying it was a coincidence that the Soviet Union fell after Reagan's military buildup or that it had been counterproductive. Those on the right tend to argue that Reagan's renewed arms race pushed the Soviets over the edge into bankrupcy, forcing the end of the cold war.
Fred Kaplan suggests a compromise: the end of the cold war was made possible by a unique combination of at least three factors: Reagan the hawk, Reagan the dove, and Mikhail Gorbachev, a man sane enough to see which way the wind blew, if not where that would end.
Ultimately, the question can not be definately resolved, as we cannot possibly know how the world would have looked like if Reagan or Gorbachev had not existed. But that never prevented us from speculating.
PS: Bjørn Stærk has a thread going with lots of speculation about precisely this question.
According to IAEA officials, Iran told a European black market supplier it was interested in obtaining "tens of thousands" of magnets used in in centrifuges for uranium enrichment. That means that Iran is interested in creating equipment for creating highly enriched, or weapons grade, uranium for nuclear weapons. Iran tries to pretend its enrichment programme is only for civilian purposes, and only an experimental project.
The earlier "smoking gun" showing that Iran has a clandestine nuclear project was traces of weapons-grade uranium earlier found on Iranian centrifuges. The excuse used was that the equipment, purchased on the black market (read: Pakistan), must have been contaminated earlier. To verify this possibility, Pakistan must give the IAEA access to its nuclear material, but Pakistan has refused (shouldn't it be possible for the US to push harder here?).
The US is pushing for some harsh censure of Iran, and now France, Germany and Britain are writing a draft resolution filled with negative language, but so far without a firm deadline and threats.
The world watches as a crazy mullahcracy, a major source of decades of international terrorism, goes nuclear.
It is a mystery why people who have been sympathetic to nazism were subject to harsh censure after World War II (as they should!), while the millions who followed communism has been able to hold on to their privilegued positions in society after the gulags, the killing fields and other atrocities were exposed.
A nazi past will make any political leader unacceptable in most of Europe, but on the left, outspoken Stalinists still hold positions of power. Indeed, many of them are totally unapologetic about their support of mass murderers, and it has absolutely no social consequences.
Here is an article reminding us about the horrors of Stalin's own holocaust. Since the fall of the Soviet union, a huge archive of ghastly details has become available to historians. The press has been largly uninterested.
People who make apologies for, and sometimes even support, this monster is still highly respected in some quarters. Quite a few of them are journalists and editors in the newspapers and TV stations across Europe, for one.
Glenn Reynolds, the InstaPundit, is on vacation in a place where they use jungle drums and smoke signals to send Internet messages, but he still couldn't really let go of keeping us updated.
Major John Tammes emails from Bagram, Afghanistan:
Please take your vacation. I mean TAKE YOUR VACATION. Stop posting - I thought Lileks had set you straight, Mr. Not A Public Utility. I want you to come back rested and refreshed. See you in a week...
When people are emailing you from a war zone to tell you to take it easy, well, it can't be good. . . .
Hong Kong's celebrity crocodile, that evaded expert crodocile hunters and became a major attraction has finally been caught.
Fishermen found Gucci the saltwater croc — first spotted in a swampy creek in November — trapped in a steel noose, said Cheung Chi-sun, a wildlife protection officer from the Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department.
A live broadcast on Cable TV showed agriculture department officials in a small boat moving the 5-foot-long reptile from the creek. It didn't seem to put up much of a struggle.
The 4 year old croc, somewhat omniously named Gucci, had earlier humiliated famous Australian croc hunter John Lever and other experts. It will not, as the name indicates, become a ladies' handbag but will be retired to a wetland park.
Not long after the reptile was first sighted in November, radio callers elected it "Personality of the Year."
Which probably says a lot about the other celebrities there.
Maybe the croc has the qualities the political masters in Beijing are searching for in a ruler of Hong Kong?
