The Houston Chronicle reports:

Eight detainees were transferred from the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to the custody of Afghanistan and Middle Eastern governments, a Pentagon spokesman said today.

Six detainees were transferred to Afghanistan, and one each to Libya and Yemen, said Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon, a Defense Department spokesman. Their identities were not released. (more…)

Whenever I am asked about Dutch movies I answer without hesitation that the best one ever made was Soldier of Orange (1977). It was at the time the most expensive movie production ever made and it launched the international careers of both Rutger Hauer and Paul Verhoeven. With this movie Verhoeven - who went on to achieve Hollywood fame with ‘Basic Instinct’ - brought his unique brand of realism to a larger and international audience. It meant that ‘Soldier’ was enriched with quite a bit of sex and a few torture scenes that stand the test of time and are as haunting today as they were thirty years ago. But above all it was the script that was able to condense the experiences of the Dutch under Nazi rule into a compelling film built around a hero who waged his own struggle against the brutal German oppressor.

The movie was based on the autobiographical book written by the man who came to be known as the ‘Soldier of Orange’, Erik Hazelhoff Roelfzema who died in his home on Hawaii earlier this week at the age of 90. (more…)

This year’s exercise in hypocrisy by the UNHRC is over. Anne Bayefsky has provided an excellent summary of its decisions and indecisions.

Thankfully, the UNHRC’s actions and inactions haven’t gone without notice in the halls of Congress:

Alongside what passes at the U.N. for “human rights” protection, stands the eminently reasonable legislation that has come from both the House and the Senate calling for an end to American funding for the Human Rights Council. The House passed their version of the Department of State Foreign Operations and Related Programs Appropriations Act on June 22 and included by unanimous agreement an amendment introduced by Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen to refuse any funding for the Council. In the Senate version, proposed by Senator Norm Coleman and adopted unanimously on September 6, an exemption law was inserted by Senators Richard Lugar and Joe Biden. It would refuse funding for the fiscal year 2008 unless the President certifies either that providing the funds to the Council is in the national interest of the United States, or the U.S. is a member of the Council. Conference negotiations are underway, but some form of the restriction is expected to survive.

“As well it should” says Bayefsky. Ditto for me.

Devlin Barrett writes:

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton said Friday that every child born in the United States should get a $5,000 “baby bond” from the government to help pay for future costs of college or buying a home.

…

The New York senator did not offer any estimate of the total cost of such a program of how she would pay for it.

No, I expect that Ms. Clinton did not bother to explain that. Why hamper the process of buying votes with other people’s money??

Since I’ll be paying for this little ditty if Hillary gets elected I whipped out my little calculator post haste. I figure that it’s going to cost around $84 billion per year. Feel free to check my numbers.

Average stock market return: about 8%

Value of $5000 in 18 years at that rate: about $21,000

Babies born annually: > 4,000,000

Total: about $84,000,000,000 annually

Nice. (more…)

In reference to American para-military contractors in Iraq, Paul Krugman at the NY Times writes: “mercenaries, whom Machiavelli described as ‘useless and dangerous’ more than four centuries ago”, saying that mercenaries are back in vogue once more. More:

As far as I can tell, America has never fought a war in which mercenaries made up a large part of the armed force. But in Iraq, they are so central to the effort that, as Peter W. Singer of the Brookings Institution points out in a new report, “the private military industry has suffered more losses in Iraq than the rest of the coalition of allied nations combined.”

And, yes, the so-called private security contractors are mercenaries. They’re heavily armed. They carry out military missions, but they’re private employees who don’t answer to military discipline. On the other hand, they don’t seem to be accountable to Iraqi or U.S. law, either. And they behave accordingly. (more…)

Amanda at ThinkProgress writes that:

During last night’s post-Democratic presidential debate analysis, MSNBC host Chris Matthews was hung up on the fact there is a woman running for president. After questioning Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) about Sen. Hillary Clinton’s (D-NY) position on entitlement reforms, he then asked Dodd, “Do you find it difficult to debate a woman?” Dodd, not surprisingly, said, “[N]ot at all.”

The question gets dismissed by Rachel over at HuffPo:

Watch how he can’t wait to ask the burning question that’s been on his mind all night: “Do you find it difficult to debate a woman?” After, he reveals where his mind is when he thinks of what Hillary Clinton called her “36-year conversation” with her husband and partner. There is no other word for this than “Sheesh.”

Actually the question is a lot more interesting than these writers allow.  (more…)

Review Of Charlie LeDuff’s US Guys: The True And Twisted Mind Of The American Man
Copyright © by Dan Schneider, 9/28/07

If there is one thing more depressing than bad writers, it is bad critics, who are clueless as to what constitutes bad writing. As example, how many blurbs for books have you read that basically state: ‘’I knew exactly where this story was going from page 7, and loved every banal minute of the book!- BIG NAME AUTHOR/WHORE’? Then there are the bad quotations of the bad writing, seemingly given as proof that the bad writing is really good writing. In looking over the reviews of journalist Charlie LeDuff’s 2006 book (both professional and the Amazon sort), US Guys: The True And Twisted Mind Of The American Man, several of the same shorthand and cribbed metaphors and comparisons cropped up. This is another bane of bad criticism, as well the smoking gun that most of these phonies never even really read the book; they simply skimmed, took notes, and regurged what they read of what others thought of the book. (more…)

Mark Steyn writes that a proposed city bylaw in Vancouver, Canada would exempt Muslim “hookah lounges” from the no-smoking ordinance:

In Vancouver, infidels can’t smoke but Muslims can:

Vancouver’s hookah-parlour owners are celebrating after winning an exemption Thursday from a proposed new bylaw that will ban smoking on most sidewalks in commercial districts, in bus shelters and even in taxis passing through Vancouver.

In giving the bylaw unanimous approval-in-principle, Vancouver city council members bowed to arguments that hookah lounges…are essential for immigrants from hookah-smoking cultures, because it helps them deal with the depression common for newcomers and gives them places like they have at home.

This is ridiculous on several levels. (more…)

It is difficult to review a work that one not only knows is unfinished, but also one that reads that way. Such has never been a stronger case than with Irene Nemirovsky’s ‘novel’ Suite Française. The book has been marketed as a novel when really it is two unfinished novellas, and according to the appendix in the back of the book, Nemirovsky was intending to make the final book contain five parts but unfortunately she was sent to die in the Auschwitz death camp in 1942 before she was able to finish it. Her daughter, Denise Epstein, then kept the manuscript for 64 years, not really reading it and assuming the notebook was only scribblings of everyday observations. When she finally opened it, however, she found it was something of a narrative structure, albeit one that was in desperate need of revision and never got it. (more…)

CNBC is reporting,

A $25 billion takeover of SLM Corp., commonly known as Sallie Mae, was on the verge of collapse on Wednesday after the student lender said a consortium does not expect to complete its planned acquisition on the agreed terms.If the deal fails, it would be the latest casualty among a series of proposed leveraged buyouts to falter following the meltdown in credit markets over the last couple of months. But it was still unclear whether the deal would unravel entirely, as consortium leader J.C. Flowers suggested the buyer group was willing to renegotiate at a lower price.

Sallie Mae is the largest student loan company in the United States managing around 125 billion in student loan debt. (more…)

The WaPo reports that a U.S. District court ruled earlier today that two provisions of the Patriot Act are unconstitutional because warrants issued under FISA may not demonstrate probable cause:

U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken ruled that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, as amended by the Patriot Act, “now permits the executive branch of government to conduct surveillance and searches of American citizens without satisfying the probable cause requirements of the Fourth Amendment.”

…

“For over 200 years, this Nation has adhered to the rule of law _ with unparalleled success. A shift to a Nation based on extra-constitutional authority is prohibited, as well as ill-advised,” she [Judge Aiken] wrote.

While this decision will not make the Bush administration or security hawks happy I believe that it is the correct ruling. (more…)

I’ve sent the following letter to the authors of The Israel Lobby:

On pages 171 and 172 of The Israel Lobby, you state that

To its credit, the New York Times’s editorials sometimes criticize Israel policies, and in recent years, the criticism has occasionally been strongly worded. The Times recognizes that the Palestinians have legitimate grievances and a right to their own state. Still, its treatment of the two sides over the years has not been evenhanded.

After reading this, I decided to investigate your assertion by consulting the Times’s online archive, starting in 1987. Enclosed are extensive excerpts from its editorials. My conclusion, unlike yours, is that the Times has been consistently evenhanded over the past twenty years.

I would obviously appreciate a reply to this letter.

I’m not holding my breath.

As soon as I finished reading Mearsheimer’s and Walt’s The Israel Lobby, I realized I had far too much to say to put it all into a single post. In view of the large number of arguable assertions in the book, it’s far easier — for me and my readers — to deal with them one at a time. In this first installment of my review, the focus is on the authors’ contentions regarding the mainstream media’s coverage of Israel.

Here’s what Mearsheimer and Walt (M&W) contend:

A key part of preserving positive public attitudes toward Israel is to ensure that the mainstream media’s coverage of Israel and the Middle East consistently favors Israel and does not call U.S. support into question in any way. While serious criticism of Israel occasionally reaches a large audience across the United States, the American media’s coverage of Israel tends to be strongly biased in Israel’s favor, especially when compared with news coverage in other democracies.

M&W treat the New York Times less harshly than other representatives of the mainstream media: (more…)

Melanie Phillips’ latest article is entitled “The drowning of common sense“. It was written after a young boy named Jordon Lyon drowned while emergency workers allegedly dithered rather than trying to save him. Not surprisingly, the police have a different understanding of the tragedy. Somehow it seems difficult to lay blame on the police now and from this distance, though Phillips believes otherwise.

Melanie goes on to write brilliantly about a problem in British society that is prevalent here in the U.S. as well - the “compensation culture” that demands that someone be made to pay for every unfortunate event that happens. (more…)

It has become incredibly popular for today’s conservative politicians to invoke Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and in some cases to seek the actual blessing from the now octogenarian Iron Lady. Last night in Vancouver, former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney tried to bring the 1980s back to life in order to sell his recently released book, Memoirs.

It is the sort of sentimental journey that gets a conservative crowd into a feisty mood and when Canadians start applauding the Reagan-name, you know there is something interesting going on. Yet, Mulroney’s reach back into history is above all a clear effort to cement his legacy as his record remains mixed at best.  (more…)

Saudi Arabia appears poised to make a major break with the United States by moving the riyal away from the United States dollar.

Saudi Arabia has refused to cut interest rates in lockstep with the US Federal Reserve for the first time, signaling that the oil-rich Gulf kingdom is preparing to break the dollar currency peg in a move that risks setting off a stampede out of the dollar across the Middle East.

“This is a very dangerous situation for the dollar,” said Hans Redeker, currency chief at BNP Paribas. (more…)

My thanks to blogfriend Georg Wolf — whose Atlantic Review blog I read regularly, and who is now working for The Atlantic Community think tank in Germany — for pointing me to a noteworthy post.

Here’s an excerpt:

While the American public and policy debate revolves largely around exit strategies and “redeployment,” there is apparent consensus among European policy analysts that American troops should remain in Iraq for the foreseeable future.

(more…)

I have to say that I was pleasantly pleased after having read Diane Ackerman’s latest non-fiction book, The Zookeeper’s Wife. This is my first time reading anything of hers, and I was also surprised to find that she has talent as a poet. I say ‘surprised’ because more often than not, those who claim to have written poetry really don’t succeed at it very much at all, but Ackerman, who has a nature bent to her work, possesses both literary quality and a good sense of historical and scientific background, which makes this book work. The story is about a Polish married couple named Jan and Antonia Zabinski who also run the zoo in Warsaw. Set during World War II, what we get is not just a war story of Jews hiding in the zoo from the Nazis, but also we are shown how the animals were affected during this period. (more…)

The full text of Columbia University’s President’s speech is available here, and it’s worth reading in its entirity. Someone had to say what Bollinger said. It makes me conclude that, on balance, Columbia’s decision to invite Ahmadinejad was a good thing.

Because of Bollinger’s no-holds-barred denunciation of Ahmadinejad, I find myself in agreement with today’s editorial in the New York Times: (more…)

If anyone is interested in attempting to decipher his verbiage, The Israel Project has links to transcripts of the Iranian President’s speeches (and Q&A) at the National Press Club and Columbia University. Rarely in human history have so many words said so little. Those who believe in parallel universes could use these transcripts as evidence.