Following the recent wave of arrests in England and even Australia, everyone seemed surprised that most of the terrorist suspects were highly educated, some apparently from middle-class or privileged backgrounds. At least two of them had completed their medical training, with one about to become a neurosurgeon.
...
With Islamist militants, however, the sociological dynamics seem to be different. No researcher has yet been able to construct a single profile based on simple socioeconomic indicators that would accurately describe the "typical" jihadist. A senior British intelligence officer summed it up as follows: "The pattern is that there is no pattern."
...
What they share, however, is that they have all experienced tensions in their personal lives, or were faced with deep and sustained crises of identity that they resolved by embracing jihadism.

A crisis of identity and the appeal of jihad - International Herald Tribune

The violent Hamas takeover of Gaza raises a troubling question: Did the experiment of using democracy to tame Islamists lead to unmitigated disaster?

the Fukuyama thing -- build a democratic political class/culture/grassroots/institutions/space

Democracy works - only very slowly - International Herald Tribune

BBC correspondent Alan Johnston has been released by kidnappers in the Gaza Strip after 114 days in captivity.

huzzah

BBC NEWS | World | Middle East | BBC's Alan Johnston is released

President Bush said today that he had used his power of clemency to commute the 30-month sentence for I. Lewis Libby Jr., the former top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, who was convicted of perjury in March and was due to begin serving his time within weeks.

oh the comedy value!

Bush Commutes Libby’s Prison Sentence - New York Times

Just past the Oval Office, in the private dining room overlooking the South Lawn, Vice President Cheney joined President Bush at a round parquet table they shared once a week. Cheney brought a four-page text, written in strict secrecy by his lawyer. He carried it back out with him after lunch.

portrait of a master of the dark arts

'A Different Understanding With the President' | Cheney | washingtonpost.com

Americans overwhelmingly approve of legislation to prevent hate violence. In fact, three in four (or 68%) support expanding hate crimes laws to include sexual orientation and gender identity and giving local law enforcement the tools and resources they need to investigate and prosecute these tragic acts of bigotry.

I am confident that you will champion the will of voters in your community and the majority of Americans, and bring our federal hate crime laws into the 21st Century, by ensuring that all of our citizens are protected against senseless hate violence.

While a random act of violence against any individual is always a tragic event, we know that violent crimes based on prejudice are meant to terrorize an entire community.

As Americans, we must defend our neighbors from becoming victims of bias-motivated violence.

So get out there and send a message.
I am not gay or part of any alternative lifestyle but there is no place for violence in our country even if you think what someone else is doing is wrong. There are other ways to express your views and violence is not the way.

More info here... http://www.hrc.org/

Pass the Matthew Shepard Act...

The Iraqi conflict is going to be with us for years if not decades. The country has become the focus of a crisis of Islamic civilization that is closer to its onset than its conclusion. Violent conflict between the now dominant Shiite community and Sunnis nostalgic for power is but one aspect of this epochal upheaval.
...
Against this reality, exacerbated in Iraq by the whirlwind fragmentation that often occurs in multi-ethnic societies when the lid of despotism is lifted, America's September deadline for measuring the progress achieved by the addition of 30,000 troops looks almost comical.

Let's face it folks, things are not going to be measurably better in Iraq by September. They may be about the same; they could be worse. The destructive energy disaggregating the country is still building. Wars tend to end when their participants are exhausted. We are not there yet, not even close.
...
To ensure this, the United States must keep a military presence in Iraq for the foreseeable future. The size of this deterrent force is up for debate, but 50,000 soldiers, or 105,000 less than today, is one talked-about figure. The timing of the drawdown will have to be discussed with Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, but it should begin soon after September.

errr wrong the US is not a stabilizing force in Iraq
handing over to a regional force of combined Arab League and Iranian forces, if they could gel, would help
but hey reality check the US presence makes things worse, they're not seen as a neutral policeman, the US presence draws in outside forces and domestically a 50 year commitment like Korea is a non-starter
that's my opinion
I think the questions that need addressing are:
is the US a stabilizing force?
can the US both be a player in the conflict and a policeman? ( I think you're attending what my housemate, who's a cop, would call a DT [domestic trouble] and in a DT both parties are listed in the report as the aggrieved party even through one might be the instigator yet in Iraq the US is an aggrieved party)

Roger Cohen: The long view in Iraq - International Herald Tribune

On the military plane that crossed the ocean at night, the wounded lay in stretchers stacked three high. The drone of engines was broken by the occasional sound of moaning. Sedated and sleeping, Pfc. Joshua Calloway was at the top of one stack last September. Unlike the others around him, Calloway was handcuffed to his stretcher.

a must read

Little Relief on Ward 53 - washingtonpost.com

Army Spec. Jeans Cruz helped capture Saddam Hussein. When he came home to the Bronx, important people called him a war hero and promised to help him start a new life. The mayor of New York, officials of his parents' home town in Puerto Rico, the borough president and other local dignitaries honored him with plaques and silk parade sashes. They handed him their business cards and urged him to phone.

But a "black shadow" had followed Cruz home from Iraq, he confided to an Army counselor. He was hounded by recurring images of how war really was for him: not the triumphant scene of Hussein in handcuffs, but visions of dead Iraqi children.

Jeans Cruz lives with his family in a Bronx housing project, where a shooting left a door perforated with bullet holes, above. Among the family photographs on their living-room wall, below, hang plaques honoring Cruz for his service and his role in helping capture Saddam Hussein. What the former soldier remembers most about the war, however, is death; he recalls moving the bodies of Iraqi children.
...
As many as one-quarter of all soldiers and Marines returning from Iraq are psychologically wounded, according to a recent American Psychological Association report. Twenty percent of the soldiers in Iraq screened positive for anxiety, depression and acute stress, an Army study found.
...
Lt. Gen. John Vines, who led the 18th Airborne Corps in Iraq and Afghanistan, said countless officers keep quiet out of fear of being mislabeled. "All of us who were in command of soldiers killed or wounded in combat have emotional scars from it," said Vines, who recently retired. "No one I know has sought out care from mental-health specialists, and part of that is a lack of confidence that the system would recognize it as 'normal' in a time of war. This is a systemic problem."

bare in mind Joseph Heller's Catch 22 (one of the best books of the 20th Century) -- sometimes insanity is the sane reaction to insane situations

The War Inside - washingtonpost.com

In Vietnam, the mobility of the Vietcong guerrilla forces was eventually crippled by a laborious hamlet-level census completed by hand in 1968. Biometric tracking and databases have since made extraordinary advances, yet our vaunted technical experts have failed at this elementary task in Iraq.

Any time a car is stopped in the United States, the police run an immediate check. The New York Police Department tracks criminal trends by neighborhood and block in a real time database called Compstat. The Chicago police have handheld devices that send fingerprints over the airwaves and get a response in minutes. So do America's border police. But in Iraq, for four years American military units have been forced to concoct their own identification databases using laptops, spreadsheets and poster boards. At any one time, the military is conducting dozens of separate census operations. Houses are labeled by one unit and re-labeled by the next.

Meanwhile, it is common for an Iraqi civilian to carry two or three IDs with different names. The result: Last year 400,000 coalition and Iraqi troops made fewer than 40,000 arrests; in contrast, 22,000 New York City patrolmen made more than 500,000 spot checks and 313,000 arrests.

The laptop is mightier than the sword - International Herald Tribune