Believe Me, It’s Torture
What more can be added to the debate over U.S. interrogation methods, and whether waterboarding is torture? Try firsthand experience. The author undergoes the controversial drowning technique, at the hands of men who once trained American soldiers to resist—not inflict—it.
by Christopher Hitchens August 2008

Believe Me, It's Torture: Politics & Power: vanityfair.com

The emerging political reversals of the two Virginias are part of a national shift that has been underway for at least a decade and is expected to reveal itself more clearly than ever this November. As the gap grows between places that are prospering and those that are not, Democrats are strengthening their hold in major metropolitan areas, particularly in places faring well in the technology-driven economy.

A New Political Geography - washingtonpost.com

The dirty little secret of the Iraq war isn’t in Baghdad or Basra. Rather, it’s found in the squalid brothels of Damascus and the poorest neighborhoods of East Amman.

Some two million Iraqis have fled their homeland and are now sheltering in run-down neighborhoods in surrounding countries. These are the new Palestinians, the 21st-century Arab diaspora that threatens the region’s stability.

Op-Ed Columnist - Books, Not Bombs - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com

The government has vowed to change the law to allow anonymous witnesses in some court cases after a key Law Lords ruling effectively halted the practice.

BBC NEWS | UK | Law 'to change' on witness rules

It is pitiful to see how little faith the leaders of European Union countries have in themselves and in the great human, political, economic and social experiment that outrageous fortune has put in their care. European integration is in danger, but not because of the Irish rejection of the diluted reform treaty that aimed to make the Union a more coherent and functional political body. It’s in danger because of the tactical incompetence and lack of inspired leadership on the part of the people who govern the member-states’ governments as well as those charged with running the EU.

yes

see my remarks here

Nikos Konstandaras at PostGlobal: Defend Europe Now - PostGlobal at washingtonpost.com

Europeans have spent a lot of time in recent years asking Americans how they could be dumb enough to make the same mistake twice in electing George W. Bush. But when it comes to sheer electoral crassness, it’s hard to beat what the Irish have just done.

absolutely
too many of my fellow Europeans don't have a clue about how important European union is for prosperity and for having influence in a global environment
nobody sells the advantages -- a good friend of mine who works in IT, an intelligent chap and I've never noticed that he's a raving nationalist, just an ordinary well educated and reasonably well paid bloke, just the sort of person who should understand the benefits of European integration and be trying to convince tabloid readers (fed a diet of Euro-sceptic misinformation for nearly 20-30 years) but no his status on Facebook was that he wished he had £10 million so he could buy everyone in Ireland a drink for voting no to the treaty

the Irish No vote was a victory for lies, bigotry, small minded nationalism, provincialism, insularity and anti-imigration and supported by intelligent decent people and I'm sure that a significant number of those who voted no are intelligent decent people -- it just seems that the contary case makes all the noise and drowns out and frightens those who should be making the case for being cosmopolitan, tolerant, open and richer (it's bizare that although Europe clearly makes us as Europeans more proserous as a whole that simple point gets lost -- the one point that should be easiest to sell, even to the more bigoted members of society) -- it all seems in the end to come down to the fact that it's easier to sell nationalism that cosmopolitanism -- I'm reminded of what Obama said about small towns and god, guns etc although I don't think it's all to do with economic hardship but rather people like to cling to certain traditional identities and when threatened; economically, by larger different cosmopolitan identities, threatened by the new and to them the strange (the outsider, the gay, the black, the garlic eater, the muslim), they retreat into tradional identities and sometimes those identies become even narrower. And if that process becomes too magnified demagogues arise.

The EU is politically flawed, it needs to be more democratic and more participatory. But the idea is good and the people who support the project have to be less afraid of making the case. Openness, tolerance, prosperity. Economic openness, social openness, embrace and adapt to change.

Op-Ed Columnist - Roger Cohen - The Muck of the Irish - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com

The political classes don t like this sort of thing. There s too much raw emotion involved. Like nervous prefects, they dismissed Davis as vain, egotistical, narcissistic and irresponsible. He was, said one commentator of my acquaintance, suffering from a mid-life crisis and probably knew he didn t have the brains to be Home Secretary, which is why he had bailed out.

That very much captures what is wrong with the Westminster village, which is so consumed with the talk of power, the jockeying for power, the acquisition and loss of it, that there is very little space left in the minds of journalists and politicians for principles and ideas. Yet that was what so much of last week in the House of Commons was about. Let us not forget that the Prime Minister won 42 days pre-charge detention by buying votes from nine hard-faced men from Northern Ireland, while 36 members of his own party stood up for the fundamental freedoms of our country. This was a moral defeat, not for Labour, but for Gordon Brown.
...
But when you think of the magnificence of the gesture - in Cyrano's word, the panache - the wonderful departure from the norms of Westminster and the fatalistic reductions of the political classes, your support flies to him. Here was a man who threw dignity and prospects to the wind in order to defend 'the relentless erosion of fundamental freedoms'. After all, he said, what are MPs there for if not to protect Magna Carta?

Coincidentally, as he was saying this, Senator Barack Obama issued a statement welcoming the Supreme Court's rejection of the legal black hole at Guantanámo 'as re-establishing our credibility as a nation committed to the rule of law, and rejecting a false choice between fighting terrorism and respecting habeas corpus'.

Davis is right for the same reasons as Obama is, and many on the Labour benches who voted for the measure will eventually realise that.

Henry Porter: A magnificent gesture that we must support | Politics | The Observer

When a battle-weary David Davis got off the train home on Friday night, the condemnation of his colleagues ringing in his ears, he headed to his local pub for solace. His aides were waiting, with a sheaf of emails they stuffed straight into his hands.

They came from excited Tory activists, life-long Labour voters, ordinary people who had never written to politicians before: there was an offer of help from a Lib Dem constituency chairman and pledges of cash from pensioners. But one, he admits, gave him a lump in the throat : it was from a woman who worked on a local government project to encourage the alienated and unfranchised to vote. What he had done, she wrote, would make my job so much easier .

Suddenly, Labour is not laughing at David Davis | Politics | The Observer

The chief executive of the world's largest energy company has issued the most dire warning yet about the soaring the price of oil, predicting that it will hit $250 per barrel "in the foreseeable future".

The forecast from Alexey Miller, the head of the Kremlin-owned gas giant Gazprom, would herald the arrival of �2-per-litre petrol and send shockwaves through the economy. His comments were the most stark to be expressed by an industry executive and come just days after the oil price registered its largest-ever single-day spike, hitting $139.12 per barrel last week amid fears that the world's faltering supply will be unable to keep up with demand.

An ominous warning that the rapid rise in oil prices has only just begun - Home News, UK - The Independent

Question: What do America’s premier investor, Warren Buffett, and Iran’s toxic president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, have in common? Answer: They’ve both made a bet about Israel’s future.

Op-Ed Columnist - Thomas L. Friedman - Buffett and Ahmadinejad Bet on Israel’s Future - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com