I have tried to avoid entries consisting of little more than links to other sites. The main argument for this was that by researching various sources and “collating” them, I improved my grasp of a question and my understanding of possible solutions.

I break that tradition here. Yes, I’m getting a bit lazy, but sometimes I can do no better than what others say on a given problem, and I also want to refer you to one of my principal news sources, the World Socialist Web Site (wsws.org). They collate the news and provide insightful analysis. I don’t always agree with their conclusions, but they’re certainly thought-provoking.

As examples I present two articles from Friday’s edition. The first is on John Kerry’s botched joke. The opening sentence is a gem: “John Kerry is guilty of the most fatal of blunders for an American bourgeois politician: speaking the truth inadvertently.”

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/nov2006/kerr-n03.shtml

The second article is important because it deals with a subject which must not be discussed in polite society, including most of the mainstream press: the inhuman treatment of Jose Padilla, an American citizen, in a naval brig in South Carolina.

Padilla was given up during the “aggressive interrogation” of Abu Zubaydah, a mentally handicapped al-Qaeda functionary. There’s no doubt that Padilla bore watching – he may have led to other dangerous people. Instead, the FBI arrested him and, based on his fantasies about a “dirty bomb”, Bush declared him an “enemy combatant” and sent him on his Kafkaesque journey. Of course, Padilla was no closer to making a nuclear weapon than I am to riding a jackass to the moon. His current indictment makes no mention of the dirty bomb. The article quotes the conclusion of his legal brief:

“For most of one thousand three hundred and seven days, Mr. Padilla was tortured by the United States government without cause or justification. Mr. Padilla’s treatment at the hands of the United States government is shocking to even the most hardened conscience, and such outrageous conduct on the part of the government divests it of jurisdiction, under the Due Process clause of the Fifth Amendment, to prosecute Mr. Padilla in the instant matter.”

The link is:
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/nov2006/nyt-n03.shtml

One final request: in case you are unfamiliar with the case of Ali al-Timimi, please research it. This is a heinous miscarriage of justice – as are most of Bush’s anti-terror prosecutions. I’ll paste the Wikipedia article to get you started:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_al-Timimi