analyses and accusations

If you don't read Juan Cole, you are cheating yourself out of a great source for analysis on the situation in Iraq. Here Cole uses the facts to skewer Bush's Iraq speech. Best quote from Cole's post: "By unilaterally invading Iraq and then bollixing it up, Bush and (General John) Vines have created enormous amounts of terrorism, which they are now having trouble putting back in the bottle." This isn't fighting terrorists in Iraq instead of facing them here; this is CREATING new terrorists in a place that was NOT a terrorist hotbed, while the other terrorists (you may have heard of them -- Al Qaeda?) can still pull off attacks in Spain, Turkey, Indonesia...

Meanwhile, I stumbled across the fact that a UN official responsible for terrorism has accused the US of maintaining secret prison camps, including prisons on ships he believes to be in the Indian Ocean. A British magazine also added the US might also be using as prisons our bases on Diego Garcia, a British island in the Indian Ocean.

I found links about this news story here, here, and here. Oddly enough, despite repeated internet searches, I have so far been completely unable to turn up an America-based media outlet carrying this news. Gosh.