When I first read the U.S. government’s complaint against Aafia Siddiqui, who is awaiting trial in a Brooklyn detention center on charges of attempting to murder a group of U.S. Army officers and FBI agents in Afghanistan, the case it described was so impossibly convoluted—and yet so absurdly incriminating—that I simply assumed she was innocent. According to the complaint, on the evening of July 17, 2008, several local policemen discovered Siddiqui and a young boy loitering about a public square in Ghazni. She was carrying instructions for creating “weapons involving biological material,” descriptions of U.S. “military assets,” and numerous unnamed “chemical substances in gel and liquid form that were sealed in bottles and glass jars.” Siddiqui, an MIT-trained neuroscientist who lived in the United States for eleven years, had vanished from her hometown in Pakistan in 2003, along with all three of her children, two of whom were U.S. citizens. The complaint does not address where she was those five years or why she suddenly decided to emerge into a public square outside Pakistan and far from the United States, nor does it address why she would do so in the company of her American son. Various reports had her married to a high-level Al Qaeda operative, running diamonds out of Liberia for Osama bin Laden, and abetting the entry of terrorists into the United States.

Abstract of Professor Dreier's report that Rachel mentions: Manipulating the Public Agenda: Why ACORN Was in the News, and What the News Got Wrong FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: Peter Dreier, E.P Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics and Urban & Environmental Policy Program director, Occidental College, (323) 259-2913, dreier@oxy.edu Christopher Martin, professor of journalism, UNI Department of Communication Studies, (319) 273-7155, martinc@uni.edu Note: Read “Manipulating the Public Agenda: Why ACORN Was in the News, and What the News Got Wrong” online at http://www.uepi.oxy.edu/acornstudy Accurate reporting sidelined as mainstream media repeats allegations of Republican Party operatives and politicians Recently released study finds widespread inaccuracy in the reporting of an alleged “voter fraud” scandal involving ACORN CEDAR FALLS, Iowa — An independent study by two prominent academics, released this week, found repetition of unverified allegations and distortions was the rule in national reporting of a purported “voter fraud” scandal involving the community organizing group ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) during the 2008 presidential campaign.

The second study, a 12-week program, is designed only for veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder and focuses heavily on anger management. Taft said his researchers have done a lot of work on therapies to help veterans overcome what he called a “heightened level of threat perception.’’ Due to the nature of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan - where an innocent-looking bystander can be a suicide bomber or enemy insurgent - service members must be constantly aware of their environment, scanning their surroundings for the smallest sign of a threat. That vigilance can be hard to turn off at home, sometimes leading to the false impression that a family member or other person wants to cause harm. But getting veterans to agree to treatment is proving to be the toughest part, Taft said. And, he warned, “the more they avoid seeking help the worse their symptoms will get.’’

They were always seen by all who passed by, broke and idle in a number of Washington, DC, parks and grassy nooks. After 9/11, however, they began to disappear and in large numbers. “They” were the familiar faces of Washington’s homeless. From Lafayette Park, across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House, to Virginia Avenue across from the State Department, and Franklin Square, amid the city’s glass and steel towers housing DC’s power elite to tony Georgetown, many homeless people, both those truly down on their luck and those who were mentally ill, began to disappear. As one Washington homeless advocate told this editor, “These people simply vanished.” Although the best-case scenario is that these unfortunate people have, in fact, been relocated to other areas, the spokesman ended the interview on a chilling note. He said with federal camps and a high demand for any usable body parts by the lucrative transplant industry, he feared the worst may have befallen some of DC’s “invisible residents.”

When it comes to domestic policy, there are two Barack Obamas: Barack the Policy Wonk [and] Barack the Post-Partisan, who searches for common ground where none exists, and whose negotiations with himself lead to policies that are far too weak. Both Baracks were on display in the president’s press conference earlier this week. First, Mr. Obama offered a crystal-clear explanation of the case for a public option competing with private insurers. But when asked whether the public option was non-negotiable he waffled, declaring that there are no “lines in the sand.” The point is that if you’re making big policy changes, the final form of the policy has to be good enough to do the job. Reform isn’t worth having if you can only get it on terms so compromised that it’s doomed to fail. So Mr. Obama and Democrats in Congress have to hang tough — no more gratuitous giveaways in the attempt to sound reasonable. And reform advocates have to keep up the pressure to stay on track. Yes, the perfect is the enemy of the good; but so is the not-good-enough-to-work. Health reform has to be done right.

The Israeli Defense Force wins wars; the Israeli government is generally first-class at the conflict negotiations with Arabs. Only the absence of an Israeli grand approach lets the conflict drag on for almost six decades of Israeli-Arab history. There is no end to the Arab Israeli conflict. Jews may choose to shrink their borders, or Israel may choose to expand at Arabs expense.

"Communists had their turn. Feminists. Hippies. Then came the evil homosexual people, with their famous, much-lauded agenda to destroy the holy sanctimony[!] of Christian marriage via encouraging girls to smoke and listen to punk rock, teaching interior decorating to straight boys and convincing innocent church pastors and Republican senators to fellate them in cheap motel rooms. The horror!"

At the core of the Russian thinking lies the preference for a regional approach that excludes outside powers. Lavrov was open about it. He said, "We see the chief value in the Turkish initiative in that it rests on common sense and assumes that countries of any region and, first of all, countries belonging to this region should themselves decide how to conduct affairs there. And others should help, but not dictate their recipes." NOTE: [See comments section]

In scrutinising the Bush policy on secret detentions, the Amnesty International identifies Pakistan as one of the chief collaborators. The rights group says that in that country there are many cases of enforced disappearances linked to the so-called U.S. war on terror. The group also points to Iraq as another major source of concern regarding the issue of enforced disappearances. The Asian Federation against Involuntary Disappearances (AFAD) says this Saturday, family members of the disappeared will gather in Baghdad to give public testimonies of what occurred to their relatives. The leaked reports by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba and Maj. Gen. George Fay, among others, documented the existence of so-called "ghost detainees," who were held in secret and moved around the prisons where they were being held to hide them from visits by Red Cross members.

Talk about your fuzzy math: "More than 7,000 prisoners have been captured in America's war on terror. Just 700 ended up in Guantanamo Bay. Between extraordinary rendition to foreign jails and disappearance into the CIA's "black sites", what happened to the rest?"

Henry Kissinger, the architect of covert torture and murder abroad, in the name of "realpolitik," which is just an euphemism for war crimes.