|
|
 |
Archive: POLITICS >please note: some links may no longer be active.
An Important – though little known – Conversion Last week, The Guardian's Ian Black reported on "a remarkable recantation" by one of the founding figures of the modern jihadist movement, Sayid Imam al-Sharif. A former comrade-in-arms of Ayman al-Zawahiri -- al Qaeda's own Dick Cheney, the "deputy" who actually runs the gang -- Sharif was the mastermind behind the Islamists' first great "spectacular": the 1981 assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. Now Sharif, imprisoned in Egypt, is finishing a new book "that undermines the Muslim theological basis for violent jihad" and is already creating fissures throughout the Islamist movement, the Guardian reports. Sharif is now repudiating the very jihadist methods that his group, Islamic Jihad, helped pioneer, instead citing the Quranic precept, "Fight in the cause of God those who fight you, but do not transgress the limits; for God loveth not transgressors." In a letter from prison indicating his new line, Sharif declared: "We are prohibited from committing aggression, even if the enemies of Islam do that," reports Asharq Alawsat, the London-based Arabic daily. "Armed operations [are] wrong, counterproductive, and must cease." Sharif's earlier work, "Basic Principles in Making Preparations for Jihad," is considered "the jihadist movements' constitution and all researchers use it as a reference. It lays down the rules of jurisprudence for combat operations for all jihadist groups. Al-Qaeda regards the book as its guide for combat," says Asharq Alawsa. And while hundreds of jihadis have embraced his new principles, Sharif's old colleagues in al Qaeda have been stung into a response, the Guardian reports. Read Chris Floyd's full account, which includes a link to the original piece
Compounding the Outrage New definition of chutzpah: You send a country to hell, and then you refuse to assist the millions of people you have caused to suffer. The Bush Administration is showing the utmost callousness toward the more than two million Iraqis rendered nationless due to its misadventure. A recent conference in Amman, Jordan, to deal with the situation only highlights the crisis. An estimated 1.5 million Iraqi refugees live in Syria, and 750,000 in Jordan. (An additional two million are internal refugees—out of a population of twenty-eight million—making this a catastrophe of truly staggering proportions.) Iraq’s neighbors, economically ill-equipped to cope with the massive population flows, are having to bear the brunt. The fact that Syria is hosting, by far, the most refugees is made even more interesting by the fact that it is on the official enemies list and has been repeatedly accused by the Bush Administration of having a negative role to play in the war. Now, the refugees have often not been treated well in these countries, but at least they have managed to find asylum there. In contrast, what has been the sum total of Bush Administration’s efforts to alleviate the distress it has helped create? Almost zero. Since the start of the war, in four long years, the United States has allowed in just 701 refugees. The grand number of 202 Iraqi refugees were admitted to the United States in 2006, while in the first half of this year, the State Department let in sixty-eight. You read those figures right. A single town (Sodertalje: population 60,000) in Sweden (a country not exactly responsible for creating the crisis) took in last year twice as many Iraqi refugees as did the whole of the United States (population 300 million). The situation would be laughable if the effects of the Bush Administration’s pitilessness weren’t so heartrending. Amitabh Pal's full article can be found in The Progressive
State Department Sanctioned Kidnapping Perhaps "sanctioned" is too strong a word, but a Kuwaiti firm did kidnap Filipino workers who helped to build the new U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. And the project was (and is), of course, being overseen by the State Department. Oh, and there has also apparently been an effort to cover up the story. See for yourself in this damning testimony:
Hostage Values The recent series of hostage dramas in Afghanistan poses the following question: what's the value of a hostage in 21st century warfare? Answer: an order of magnitude more than it was a decade ago (in contrast, the Iranian hostage drama and the Lebanon hostage crisis were outliers to the trend line driven by more by domestic US politics than any inherent system effects). Here's why: * In today's supercharged media environment, hostage dramas become 24x7 news events -- replete with interviews of every crying relative or co-worker the hostage ever had. * The value of human life (sadly, only for and between members of Westernized states) has grown substantially. This value has grown in parallel with the average level of investment made in people in the West. This valuation now even applies to the lives of soldiers (as seen in actions against Israeli, Brit, and American troops). * The pressure to rapidly resolve the crisis, due to the first two factors, can throw the governments and/or corporations involved into convulsions. Even if the country doesn't negotiate with hostage takers, like the US, the efforts to rescue the hostages amount to the same thing. The rest of John Robb's brief analysis can be found here
Good Question; correct answer Like any terrorist organization, al-Qaeda wants attention. It wants to be perceived as powerful. And it particularly wants Americans to live in fear. Could al-Qaeda possibly have found a better publicist than President Bush? At a South Carolina Air Force base yesterday, Bush mentioned al-Qaeda and bin Laden 118 times in 29 minutes, arguing that the violence unleashed by the U.S. invasion in Iraq would somehow come to America's shores if U.S. troops were to withdraw. But the majority of that violence in Iraq is caused either by Iraqis murdering each other for religious reasons or by Iraqis trying to throw off the American occupation. The group that calls itself al-Qaeda in Iraq is only one of a multitude of factions creating chaos in that country, and the long-term goals of its Iraqi members are almost certainly not in line with those of al-Qaeda HQ (which is safely ensconced in Pakistan). Furthermore, the administration's own intelligence community has concluded that the war in Iraq has helped rather than hurt al-Qaeda. More from Dan Froomkin in the Washington Post
Inept, pathOlogical liar Forget about the politicization of the Justice Department. Forget about the falling morale there. Forget about the rise in violent crime in some of our biggest cities. Forget about the events leading up to the U.S. Attorney scandal and the way he has handled the prosecutor purge since. Forget about the Department's role in allowing warrantless domestic surveillance. Forget about the contorted and contradictory accounts he's offered before in his own defense. Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales deserves to be fired for his testimony Tuesday alone; for morphing into Jon Lovitz's famous "pathological liar" character (or maybe just one of the Marx Brothers) as he tried to dodge and duck responsibility before the Senate Judiciary Committee not just for his shameful leadership at Justice but also his shameless role in visiting an ailing John Ashcroft in the hospital to try to strong-arm him into renewing the warrantless surviellance program. Can anyone out there remember a worse, less-inspiring, less confidence-inducing performance on Capitol Hill? I cannot. Read the rest of Andrew Cohen's scathing piece in the Washington Post And this from Hunter at Daily Kos: I'll add my two cents to all of this. Short version: this has gone on long enough. There are no reasons -- none -- for continuing to keep Alberto Gonzales in his position. No degree of supposed presidential perogative can justify obstruction and incompetence of the level that has been witnessed in the last few months. Alberto Gonzales' testimony today was, as usual, outrageous. He seemed brow-furrowingly intent on balancing each answer between a thinly veiled lie, gross and wide-ranging job incompetence, and a total disregard for the right of Congress to know the actual answers in the first place. He must be a true pro at it, because he managed to give all three impressions with nearly every answer. Finally, here's a snippet of one of many revealing exchanges from today's hearing. This one is between Senator Specter and our nation's leading law enforcement officer:
True Patriotism Stephen E. Abraham’s assignment to the Pentagon unit that runs the hearings at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, seemed a perfect fit. A lawyer in civilian life, he had been decorated for counterespionage and counterterrorism work during 22 years as a reserve Army intelligence officer in which he rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel. His posting, just as the Guantánamo hearings were accelerating in 2004, gave him a close-up view of the government’s detention policies. It also turned him into one of the Bush administration’s most unlikely adversaries. In June, Colonel Abraham became the first military insider to criticize publicly the Guantánamo hearings, which determine whether detainees should be held indefinitely as enemy combatants. Just days after detainees’ lawyers submitted an affidavit containing his criticisms, the United States Supreme Court reversed itself and agreed to hear an appeal arguing that the hearings are unjust and that detainees have a right to contest their detentions in federal court. Some lawyers say Colonel Abraham’s account — of a hearing procedure that he described as deeply flawed and largely a tool for commanders to rubber-stamp decisions they had already made — may have played an important role in the justices’ highly unusual reversal. That decision once again brought the administration face to face with the vexing legal, political and diplomatic questions about the fate of Guantánamo and the roughly 360 men still held there. “Nobody stood up and said the emperor’s wearing no clothes,” Colonel Abraham said in an interview. “The prevailing attitude was, ‘If they’re in Guantánamo, they’re there for a reason.’ ” [snip] Most detainees, he said, have no realistic way to contest charges often based not on solid information, but on generalizations, incomplete intelligence reports and hints of terrorism ties. “What disturbed me most was the willingness to use very small fragments of information,” he said, recounting how, over his six-month tour, he grew increasingly uneasy at what he saw. In the interviews, he often spoke coolly, with the detachment of a lawyer, but as time wore on grew agitated as he described his experiences. Often, he said, intelligence reports relied only on accusations that a detainee had been found in a suspect area or was associated with a suspect organization. Some, he said, described detainees as jihadist without detail. More from William Glaberson's article in the NY Times
About Time A federal appeals court ordered the government yesterday to turn over virtually all its information on Guantánamo detainees who are challenging their detention, rejecting an effort by the Justice Department to limit disclosures and setting the stage for new legal battles over the government’s reasons for holding the men indefinitely. The ruling, which came in one of the main court cases dealing with the fate of the detainees, effectively set the ground rules for scores of cases by detainees challenging the actions of Pentagon tribunals that decide whether terror suspects should be held as enemy combatants. It was the latest of a series of stinging legal challenges to the administration’s detention policies that have amplified pressure on the Bush administration to find some alternative to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where about 360 men are now being held at the United States naval base. A three-judge panel of the federal appeals court in Washington unanimously rejected a government effort to limit the information it must turn over to the court and lawyers for the detainees. The court said meaningful review of the military tribunals would not be possible “without seeing all the evidence, any more than one can tell whether a fraction is more or less than half by looking only at the numerator and not the denominator.”
Already Taken Place The Iraq war is lost. Of course, neither the President nor the war's intellectual architects are prepared to admit this. Nonetheless, the specter of defeat shapes their thinking in telling ways. The case for the war is no longer defined by the benefits of winning—a stable Iraq, democracy on the march in the Middle East, the collapse of the evil Iranian and Syrian regimes— but by the consequences of defeat. As President Bush put it, "The consequences of failure in Iraq would be death and destruction in the Middle East and here in America." Tellingly, the Iraq war's intellectual boosters, while insisting the surge is working, are moving to assign blame for defeat. And they have already picked their target: the American people. In The Weekly Standard, Tom Donnelly, a fellow at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute, wrote, "Those who believe the war is already lost—call it the Clinton-Lugar axis—are mounting a surge of their own. Ground won in Iraq becomes ground lost at home." Lugar provoked Donnelly's anger by noting that the American people had lost confidence in Bush's Iraq strategy as demonstrated by the Democratic takeover of both houses of Congress. (This "blame the American people" approach has, through repetition, almost become the accepted explanation for the outcome in Vietnam, attributing defeat to a loss of public support and not to fifteen years of military failure.) Indeed, Vietnam is the image many Americans have of defeat in Iraq. Al-Qaeda would overrun the Green Zone and the last Americans would evacuate from the rooftop of the still unfinished largest embassy in the world. President Bush feeds on this imagery. In his May 5, 2007, radio address to the nation, he explained: If radicals and terrorists emerge from this battle with control of Iraq, they would have control of a nation with massive oil reserves, which they could use to fund their dangerous ambitions and spread their influence. The al Qaeda terrorists who behead captives or order suicide bombings would not be satisfied to see America defeated and gone from Iraq. They would be emboldened by their victory, protected by their new sanctuary, eager to impose their hateful vision on surrounding countries, and eager to harm Americans. But there will be no Saigon moment in Iraq. Iraq's Shiite-led government is in no danger of losing the civil war to al-Qaeda, or a more inclusive Sunni front. Iraq's Shiites are three times as numerous as Iraq's Sunni Arabs; they dominate Iraq's military and police and have a powerful ally in neighboring Iran. The Arab states that might support the Sunnis are small, far away (vast deserts separate the inhabited parts of Jordan and Saudi Arabia from the main Iraqi population centers), and can only provide money, something the insurgency has in great amounts already. Iraq after an American defeat will look very much like Iraq today—a land divided along ethnic lines into Arab and Kurdish states with a civil war being fought within its Arab part. Defeat is defined by America's failure to accomplish its objective of a self-sustaining, democratic, and unified Iraq. And that failure has already taken place, along with the increase of Iranian power in the region. Peter Galbraith's full piece in the New York Review of Books
All Too rare Needless to say, the Democratic "opposition" to the disastrous Bush administration policies has been ineffectual, to put it mildly. There have been occasional exceptions (Waxman and Feingold spring to mind), but the overall behavior of the Democrats has been disgraceful. Tonight, on The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, Judy Woodruff (another disappointment, by the way) interviewed Joe Biden about Iraq. Biden, who has been uneven at best in recent years, talked about this crucial, complex topic in remarkably clear, intelligent terms. His assessment struck me as by far the best thus far produced by any American politician, and it's worth reading the transcript (or watching the video) in its entirety. Read, listen and/or watch the interview here
Hand in Hand I have some property in a rustic part of Colorado not far from the 120 mile long Rainbow Trail in the Rockies. I also get a decent tax deal on the land because I have an arrangement with a cattle farmer to allow grazing on the land. Colorado is a "fence out" state meaning that if cattle come into a ranch area, those cattle are free to roam everywhere -- unless "fenced out" by property holders. This is probably a bad metaphor for what is happening today geopolitically in the United States -- but the fenced out/fenced in realities of modern America are a useful template to think about an evolving "fortress mentality" among Americans -- both inside the country and between the United States and the rest of the world. For the most part, America has not maintained high fences to those from abroad. America has maintained over the two plus centuries of its formalized nationhood a fairly low bar to immigration and travel here. In fact, much of the nation's success is due to the fact that America has been the direct beneficiary of the rest of the world's brain drain. This may be in danger today as American borders are thicker than ever and that fear about allowing terrorists inside the nation is so great that whole classes of foreign visitors are subjected to a fickle, unpredictable, and inhospitable visa application and review process that telegraphs our national disinterest and ambivalence about nations and their citizens who aren't lucky enough to be included in a U.S. visa waiver program. There are sophisticated methodologies that can help screen bad people from good -- and we need to rely more on these and less on the clunky, expensive, and inefficient visa interview process that blocks so many from coming to America -- particularly from developing nations -- and which often charges them $100 for the application fee, only to find that they have in the end been rejected. The back side of neoconservatism has always been isolationism. They go hand in hand. Today, we really need to promote people to people exchanges. This is the best way that the rest of the world can understand that our objectives as a country are diverse, benign, hopeful, and not consistent with the image that Bush, Cheney, and Rove have generated. Steve Clemons' Washington Note
Right of Return My father’s family is from a Palestinian town named Atteel that lies a few kilometers north of the West Bank city of Tulkarem. In 1948, as Zionist gangs set about ethnically cleansing most of Palestine, they did not succeed in eradicating our village. Today, the town lies in the West Bank, just east of the Green Line—the virtual separation line between the West Bank and “Israel proper”. Some of Atteel’s agricultural land was not as lucky—it fell on the other side of the partition and now forms part of the state of Israel. My grandfather had orange groves there that went to Israel, and are now owned by the Jewish National Fund, and can only be given to Jews. Any person claiming to be Jewish from anywhere in the world can travel to Israel, receive an Israeli passport and be given that land by the Israeli government at a subsidized price. Meanwhile, my cousins and I, some of whom live meters away from that land are not even allowed to set foot on it. Such is real estate in “The Only Democracy in the Middle East.” Whenever peace is discussed, the majority of Israelis and westerners (and many Arabs) automatically assume that in order for there to be peace, the Palestinians need to give up their right of return. Israel has to remain a Jewish state, they argue, and giving Palestinians a right to return would mean no more Jewish majority, which would bring about a system of governance not based on religious exclusivity. It always amuses me when people make this argument with a straight face. Instead of ethnic cleansing and expulsion—an unquestionable evil—being used as an argument against a religiously exclusive racist state, the presence of the religiously exclusive racist state is used as an excuse for the propagation of ethnic cleansing and expulsion. Saifedean Ammous' full piece can be read at 3quarksdaily
Here and there Having spent a fair amount of time in occupied Iraq, I now find living in the United States nothing short of a schizophrenic experience. Life in Iraq was traumatizing. It was impossible to be there and not be affected by apocalyptic levels of violence and suffering, unimaginable in this country. But here's the weird thing: One long, comfortable plane ride later and you're in Disneyland, or so it feels on returning to the United States. Sometimes it seems as if I'm in a bubble here that's only moments away from popping. I find myself perpetually amazed at the heights of consumerism and the vigorous pursuit of creature comforts that are the essence of everyday life in this country -- and once defined my own life as well. Here, for most Americans, you can choose to ignore what our government is doing in Iraq. It's as simple as choosing to go to a website other than this one. The longer the occupation of Iraq continues, the more conscious I grow of the disparity, the utter disjuncture, between our two worlds. In January 2004, I traveled through villages and cities south of Baghdad investigating the Bechtel Corporation's performance in fulfilling contractual obligations to restore the water supply in the region. In one village outside of Najaf, I looked on in disbelief as women and children collected water from the bottom of a dirt hole. I was told that, during the daily two-hour period when the power supply was on, a broken pipe at the bottom of the hole brought in "water." This was, in fact, the primary water source for the whole village. Eight village children, I learned, had died trying to cross a nearby highway to obtain potable water from a local factory. In Iraq things have grown exponentially worse since then. Recently, the World Health Organization announced that 70% of Iraqis do not have access to clean water and 80% "lack effective sanitation." More from independent reporter Dahr Jamail at TomDispatch
HAMAS in L.A. The L.A. Times has published an extremely powerful editorial written by Mousa Abu Marzook, the deputy of the political bureau of Hamas. Here's a long excerpt: HAMAS' RESCUE of a BBC journalist from his captors in Gaza last week was surely cause for rejoicing. But I want to be clear about one thing: We did not deliver up Alan Johnston as some obsequious boon to Western powers. It was done as part of our effort to secure Gaza from the lawlessness of militias and violence, no matter what the source. Gaza will be calm and under the rule of law — a place where all journalists, foreigners and guests of the Palestinian people will be treated with dignity. Hamas has never supported attacks on Westerners, as even our harshest critics will concede; our struggle has always been focused on the occupier and our legal resistance to it — a right of occupied people that is explicitly supported by the Fourth Geneva Convention. Yet our movement is continually linked by President Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to ideologies that they know full well we do not follow, such as the agenda of Al Qaeda and its adherents. But we are not part of a broader war. Our resistance struggle is no one's proxy, although we welcome the support of people everywhere for justice in Palestine. The American efforts to negate the will of the Palestinian electorate by destroying our fledgling government have not succeeded — rather, the U.S.-assisted Fatah coup has only multiplied the problems of Washington's "two-state solution." Mr. Bush has for the moment found a pliant friend in Abu Mazen, a "moderate" in the American view but one who cannot seriously expect to command confidence in the streets of Gaza or the West Bank after having taken American arms and Israeli support to depose the elected government by force. We deplore the current prognosticating over "Fatah-land" versus "Hamastan." In the end, there can be only one Palestinian state. But what of the characterization by the West of our movement as beyond the pale of civilized discourse? Our "militant" stance cannot by itself be the disqualifying factor, as many armed struggles have historically resulted in a place at the table of nations. Nor can any deny the reasonableness of our fight against the occupation and the right of Palestinians to have dignity, justice and self-rule. Yet in my many years of keeping an open mind to all sides of the Palestine question — including those I spent in an American prison, awaiting Israeli "justice" — I am forever asked to concede the recognition of Israel's putative "right to exist" as a necessary precondition to discussing grievances, and to renounce positions found in the Islamic Resistance Movement's charter of 1988, an essentially revolutionary document born of the intolerable conditions under occupation more than 20 years ago. The sticking point of "recognition" has been used as a litmus test to judge Palestinians. Yet as I have said before, a state may have a right to exist, but not absolutely at the expense of other states, or more important, at the expense of millions of human individuals and their rights to justice. Why should anyone concede Israel's "right" to exist, when it has never even acknowledged the foundational crimes of murder and ethnic cleansing by means of which Israel took our towns and villages, our farms and orchards, and made us a nation of refugees? Why should any Palestinian "recognize" the monstrous crime carried out by Israel's founders and continued by its deformed modern apartheid state, while he or she lives 10 to a room in a cinderblock, tin-roof United Nations hut? These are not abstract questions, and it is not rejectionist simply because we have refused to abandon the victims of 1948 and their descendants. continue reading at the L.A. Times
Prisoner 345 In December 15, 2001, early in the morning on the last day of Ramadan, a reporter and a cameraman from Al Jazeera arrived at the Pakistani town of Charman on the Afghanistan border, on their way to cover the American military operation. The reporter, Abdelhaq Sadah, was replacing a colleague, but the cameraman, a Sudanese national named Sami al-Haj, had been on such an assignment before, and had crossed the border without incident. This time, however, an immigration official stopped him. He seemed angry. The official told Sadah that he could go, but "your friend is a wanted man and will stay here." In Sadah’s recollection, the official produced a letter from Pakistani intelligence—written, curiously, in English. It said that al-Haj had Al Qaeda ties and should be apprehended. Al-Haj noticed that the passport number in the letter didn’t correspond to the one in his current passport, but instead to an old passport he had lost several years ago in Sudan and had reported missing. Despite his protests, the official insisted on detaining him overnight. The next morning, Sadah returned to the border post just in time to see a Pakistani military officer lead al-Haj to a car and drive him away. Al-Haj is a tall, slender man whose round face and glasses give him a boyish demeanor. In photographs, he looks much younger than his thirty-eight years. People who have met him invariably describe him as polite; in conversation he is said to smile almost constantly. After Sadah informed Al Jazeera management what had happened, the network made contact with the Pakistani authorities and was told that al-Haj’s background was being investigated. On January 4, al-Haj called his wife, Asma, who was then living in Azerbaijan. He sounded confident, almost cheerful, saying that he expected to be back in Doha, Qatar, Al Jazeera’s headquarters, in two or three days. For the next six months, al-Haj was held in Afghanistan. In early June 2002, he was put on a military plane. In another letter to his lawyer, he explains that his hands were gloved and cuffed and linked to his leg shackles; his mouth was gagged. Every so often, American soldiers removed the gag to feed him peanut butter crackers. The plane landed many hours later. On June 14, al-Haj was given an orange jumpsuit and the ID number 345. He was in Cuba. For the past five years, al-Haj has been the only journalist known to be held in Guantánamo Bay. Read the full account of Sami al-Haj's nightmare at the Columbia Journalism Review
"the entire war is an atrocitY"
It is an axiom of American political life that the actions of the US military are beyond criticism. Democrats and Republicans praise the men and women in uniform at every turn. Apart from the odd bad apple at Abu Ghraib, the US military in Iraq is deemed to be doing a heroic job under trying circumstances. That perception will take a severe knock today with the publication in The Nation magazine of a series of in-depth interviews with 50 combat veterans of the Iraq war from across the US. In the interviews, veterans have described acts of violence in which US forces have abused or killed Iraqi men, women and children with impunity. The report steers clear of widely reported atrocities, such as the massacre in Haditha in 2005, but instead unearths a pattern of human rights abuses. "It's not individual atrocity," Specialist Garett Reppenhagen, a sniper from the 263rd Armour Battalion, said. "It's the fact that the entire war is an atrocity." A number of the troops have returned home bearing mental and physical scars from fighting a war in an environment in which the insurgents are supported by the population. Many of those interviewed have come to oppose the US military presence in Iraq, joining the groundswell of public opinion across the US that views the war as futile. This view is echoed in Washington, where increasing numbers of Democrats and Republicans are openly calling for an early withdrawal from Iraq. And the Iraq quagmire has pushed President George Bush's poll ratings to an all-time low. Journalists and human rights groups have published numerous reports drawing attention to the killing of Iraqi civilians by US forces. The Nation's investigation presents for the first time named military witnesses who back those assertions. Some participated themselves. The full piece in The Guardian (U.K.) The Nation article, authored by Chris Hedges and Laila Al-Arian
Wolcott on Chertoff So now Homeland Security hobgoblin Michael Chertoff has a "gut feeling" about a major terror operation in summer production? Frankly I'm surprised that the flesh-draped haunter of marble halls has a disgestive pouch worthy of the name, never mind one that receives vague transmissions through the data fog of terrorist "chatter." I hope his gut feeling proves to be a false alarm, nothing more than a red bean salad or overrich dessert that didn't agree with his system, because I have tickets to see Patti Lupone in Gypsy in late July and I'd hate to have anything disrupt that particular rendezvous with destiny. Jame's Wolcott's excellent blog
More politics? click here! •••
|
|
books
daily reads
film
favorite posts pinter on politicians' language
music
art
archives
|
| ©2005 Tony. All rights reserved. | Website
designed by JSVisuals.com |
