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Richard Clarke spins out a large number of issues that have been seriously sidelined by the BushAdmin as so much attention has been given to Iraq.

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Check this out at Steve Knight’s blog!

dlw

Carl Bildt,the Swedish Foreign Minister, said that Saddam Hussein shd not have been hung in Baghdad on a Sunday Morning.

He opposed it as part of Sweden and Europe’s general opposition to the death penalty, but in addition it means that the ongoing legal action against the Saddam cannot be concluded.  “The judicial process against Saddam Hussein is an important part of Iraq’s coming to terms with the past.”

Hopefully, they will be able to continue through others and start a process of reconciliation to end the civil wars and face the future together.

dlw

Levko at Foreign Notes shares the perspective of an insider on whether there is a chance of effective cooperation between Yushchenko and Yanukovych(The President and PM of Ukraine who were rival candidates for the presidency before and during the Orange Revolution in 2004.).

“Viktor Yushchenko and Viktor Yanukovich have only one [realistic] perspective - I started to talk about this after the second round of presidential elections. If the two Victors eventually comprehend that responsibility for the future of Ukraine rests on their shoulders, then they should find compromises and try, for two and a half or three years, to change the situation in the country for the better. Then there will be [good] prospects for both them and at us. If this does not happen, there will be elections for everybody and everything.”

I think this would fit the desire for both stability and change in their country that most Ukrainians want.  It is the sort of thing that will only happen when both leaders put to death their harmful rivalry and agree to care more for their fellow citizens.  Levko is pessimistic, but I think it’s worth praying for, as Ukraine’s peaceful development is of importance for the Former Soviet Union.

dlw

I just saw the news on CNN. 

I feel nothing but sadness.

I see nothing here that brings hope that the serious death and destruction in Iraq will come to an end, enabling Iraqis to look forward to a better future.

Only when we become better followers of Jesus will there be a way out of this morass. 

dlw

Our desire for independence based on cheaper oil is giving more power to oil/gas autarchs around the world.  We’ve had to accomodate Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and now he’s shutting down the opposition press in his country.  How much you wanna bet we want his oil enough that we don’t say much of a word edgewise?

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When I posted about “Why We Fight”, I got a comment from Ken Larson who blogs at Rose Covered Glasses.  He fought in Vietnam and came back with PTSD, which he dealt with by becoming a workaholic within the Military-Industrial complex in ways that were harmful for his family life.  He has now retired and is a small business consultant, but here he tells of his life and how formidable the Matrix of the Military Industrial Complex is.

dlw

According to Dalia Ziada of the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information and Jesse Sage of the (Hands across the Mideast Support Alliance)HAMSA project of the American Islamic Congress:In Egypt a 22 year old student, Amer, has been jailed for blogging about his country’s politics. 

If these standards of censorship were applied in the United States or Europe, thousands upon thousands of bloggers would be behind bars. The basic right of individual free expression is sadly not respected in today’s Egypt. Yet the authorities’ decision to jail an obscure student for his writing reveals a larger struggle for free speech playing out between dissident bloggers and state prosecutors across the Middle East.  For decades, the region’s dictators maintained a monopoly on public information. Newspapers, radio stations and television broadcasts were nearly all state owned.  The advent of blogs in the past few years, however, has altered the playing field. While regimes still own the main printing presses, any citizen can access free blogging services.

Regimes accustomed to control have struggled to respond. In Tunisia, a Web publisher, Zouhair Yahyaoui, was dragged from an Internet café by security forces and tortured into revealing his site’s password after he posted a quiz mocking President Zine Abidine ben Ali. In Iran, authorities arrested a student, Mojtaba Saminejad, after he condemned the arrest of several fellow bloggers and “insulted the Supreme Leader.” Daif Al-Ghazal, an investigative reporter for the Web journal Libya Al-Youm, was found murdered in Benghazi — his fingers cut off as a warning sign to anticorruption online writers.

Amer has been able to smuggle blogposts out from his Alexandria cell. “A person using his brain and expressing his ideas freely is more dangerous in our country than someone who destroys others’ property or deals drugs.”

That sounds like an important message.  It bears some reflection on the blessings and freedoms that we have today.

dlw

TPM reports how Woodward apparently found out two some years ago that Gerald Ford was very very critical of the BushAdmin for Gulf War II, but had to agree not to reveal the info until Ford died.

It seems quite sad that Ford felt his criticism had to wait until after he died to be made public.

dlw

I’m just watching Anderson Cooper’s CNN special on Christianity in the US. 

Here is a rush transcript.

The “Evangelicals” who are looking forward to the rapture and “Gospel of Wealthers” come out looking pretty bad, in my opinion.

dlw

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