The United States will reassign some troops from South Korea to Afghanistan and Iraq and shift most of the 7,000 people in its headquarters in Seoul out of the capital beginning within a year, military officials say.

The Bush impulse to shut down the world, I suspect, combines many urges at once. Certainly, there's the urge to stamp an imperial imprint of power on the world, and allied to it, the urge to control. The desire to cut off information, to rule in silence and secrecy, must undoubtedly have allures all its own. And then there's also simple fear (a feeling not much written about since our President and his administration quite literally took flight on September 11, 2001). Underneath the "bring 'em on" mentality -- frightening in itself -- seems to lie an urge, when "they" actually come "on," to flee. Have you noticed how quickly all that "we-won't/can't/mustn't-cut-and-run" language cropped up -- and in administration mouths no less, even if projected onto others? Such warnings preceded the first significant mainstream calls for any kind of withdrawal from Iraq.

Now, the online publication of the Canadian Association of University Teachers reports that the U.S. Treasury Department has made a remarkable little decision of its own. It has declared that the act of editing a scientific paper from a place like Iran or Cuba can fall under the category of trading with the enemy (New U.S. Treasury Department Rules Cast Chill Over Scientific Publishing):

Editing -- your typical traitorous activity. That sends a little chill down the back of this particular editor. And, as it happens, the IEEE has responded by halting its editing of such papers, and so assumedly, their publication in its journals and has blocked as well the ability of engineers in countries like Iran to view its journals online. I think for this we should coin a new saying, admittedly not as rhythmic as the old one but to the point: "The pen is more illegal than the sword."

What we have here are some allegations that the analysts who had access to all the information either didn’t find credible or didn’t find meaningful. The leak of this dossier now is just an effort by the usual suspects at the Pentagon to push the already-discredited al Qaeda link because so much else that they’ve been involved with has gone so badly.

Martin says he's not using the word "sniper" yet.


Rees added, "It would be a tragic irony if, in the 21st century, this most technologically sophisticated of human societies finally succumbs to the unconscious urgings of fatally self-interested primitive tribalism."




U.S. Attorney-General John Ashcroft says the Bush administration received — and believed — assurances from Syria that it would not torture Maher Arar before deporting the Ottawa man to that Middle Eastern country.
The use of torture is “well documented in the case of Syria and it is pretty shameful” for the U.S. to have deported Mr. Arar to that country, Mr. Stork said. His statement Thursday was met with derision by human-rights groups because it appears to be at odds with official U.S. government reports that say torture is a routine interrogation tool in Syria.


"While [Lt. Gen. Ricardo] Sanchez reported no definitive evidence of the al Qaeda link [to the Iraqi guerillas], he said military authorities have detained about 5,000 people for questioning on that issue."

The first sentence of Guardian columnist George Monbiot's latest piece (see below) sums up the mentality of this administration beautifully: "Those who would take us to war must first shut down the public imagination." The column itself focuses on a story broken by ABC News and seemingly at the same moment by James Risen of the New York Times and almost instantly everywhere else, indicating that Saddam Hussein tried to offer the Bush administration a backchannel deal to avoid war, more or less promising everything the administration could have wanted, including monitored elections within two years -- and was kissed off by "the CIA" with the phrase, "Tell them that we will see them in Baghdad."