Hope is not a plan

This has been a busy week for Iran in the news. Let's take a look.

In a typically ranting speech of the kind that may soon get him censured by the actual power in Iran, President Ahmadinejad has suggested that Iran is approaching the "summit of our nuclear path." In more material terms, Russia recently finished delivering nuclear fuel for Iran's first nuclear power station.

As I talked about last June, Iran faces a fundamental fuel issue that won't be solved by nuclear power -- gasoline. Although Iran is an oil exporter, it lacks refining capacity and has been hemorrhaging away its oil profits in the form of gasoline subsidies to keep fuel prices low inside the country. Last year's attempts to fix this situation by limiting fuel use went poorly. It's unclear to what extent nuclear power will lift this kind of cost pressure, but it's possible that the discovery of a massive gas field off the coast may help by providing even more capital to pay for all that fuel. However, as the article notes:

Iran has the world's second-largest proven gas reserves after Russia and it has ambitions to export gas to a host of countries including Armenia, Pakistan and Syria.

However, it has failed to become a major international exporter because of a lack of foreign investment and slow progress in exploiting its fields.

Despite its export plans, Iran had recently been forced to import gas from neighbouring Turkmenistan because of high domestic consumption.

Switching from resource management to social management, government spokesman Ali Reza Jamshidi announced the arrest of fifty-four members of the prohibited Bahai faith. The officially allowed faiths in Iran are Islam, Christianity, Judaism, and Zoroastrianism. Zoroastrianism was presumably grandfathered in, as it precedes Islam in the area, and Judaism and Christianity get the special "religions of the book" exception. Bahai is in the unfortunate position of suggesting that it's a later (and better) successor to all these other faiths (you can read more about Bahai at the official website). Fifty-one of the convicts were given suspended sentences, provided they take "courses by state propaganda officials."

In the same press conference, Jamshidi indicated that a customs official was recently executed for corruption and bribery, while admitting that, yes, they don't usually execute people for corruption. On that note, Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahrudi ordered a limitation on public executions, and publication of execution photos.

Correspondents say it appears Ayatollah Shahrudi wants to lower the profile of executions as Iran has been widely criticised by Western countries and international organisations.

Capital offences in Iran include murder, rape, armed robbery, serious drug trafficking, apostasy, adultery and male homosexuality.

Good to know.

One of the assertions I recalled vividly for years after graduation from my high school political science course was that, other than Watergate, every major news story that was broken about the operation of the United States government came from a reporter reading a GAO report. This surely is an overstatement, but it stuck with me.

The GAO, once the General Accounting Office and now renamed during the current administration to the mushier, feel-good title of Government Accountability Office, is responsible for investigating pretty much anything at the request of members of Congress. The old "A" of Accounting really tells the story about what the GAO does -- they investigate, run the numbers, make some estimates, and come up with an evaluation of whatever they were asked to look at in the first place.

I turn to the GAO quite a bit to see how our national government really works.

Fortunately for me (and everyone else), the GAO makes it utterly easy to find out what they're up to. You can:

• Sign up for a customized e-mail update
• Check in on their reports and testimonies page
• Check in on their legal decisions page
• Read their month in review
• Sign up for one of their four RSS feeds

I use the last option to keep up with the GAO. Specifically, I'm signed up for both the Reports & Testimonies feed and the Legal Decisions & Opinions feed. Usually, the interesting material appears in the former, but the latter has occasional gems like this instance and this later instance of GAO making Legal Decisions against war profiteer KBR based on their track record of dismal performance.

The GAO is perhaps my favorite Federal agency, and I continue to appreciate the lengths they go to, as an organization, to make their information publicly available.

As a reminder for all those Californians, this year's primary election is tomorrow, Tuesday, February 5.

If you need to find your polling place, you can click here for a list of phone numbers to call and websites to check.

If you need some background info on the three propositions and four referendums that are on the ballot this year, you can click here for links to all my summaries (each summary includes linkouts to the actual proposition/referendum text, as well as links to information on whose been campaigning for either side of each issue, summaries of the proposed laws and their effects, and my opinion on the measure).

Nuon Chea, also known as "Brother Number Two," the effective second-in-command of the Khmer Rouge, appeared in court for the first time this week. He is charged with a panoply of crimes against humanity for his actions as a leader within the extraordinarily cruel and bloody Khmer Rouge regime.

The tribunal, convened in 2006, has charged Nuon Chea with "murder, torture, imprisonment, persecution, extermination, deportation, forcible transfer, enslavement and other inhumane acts".

The tribunal is expected to hear documentary evidence that Nuon Chea personally ordered the murder of 14,000 people held at the Tuol Sleng prison, a former Phnom Penh high school.

The hearing today was meant to address a request by Nuon Chea that he be allowed out of custody. It had to be deferred, however, due to accreditation issues with one of the two Dutch attorneys on his defense team (Victor Koppe, whose bio can be found here).

Speaking before Monday's court appearance, Son Arun, Nuon Chea's lawyer, said his client "feels an absence of freedom in his detention, where all he does is eat and sleep".

As one assumes detention is necessarily meant to cause an absence of freedom, we're all glad to hear it's working properly. Nuon Chea is the second Khmer Rouge leader up on crimes against humanity charges to ask for bail. Earlier this year, Kang Kek Leu was denied bail, as the judge thought the former head of Tuol Sleng prison might, possibly, flee in the face of being charged with 17,000 murders. Given the similarity of Nuon Chea's charges, one imagines a similar outcome for his plea for bail.

The pressing of decades old crimes against humanity charges continues to be a high point of our nascent millennium. Whether it's Southeast Asian communists or former right-wing Latin American leaders, everyone is now on notice that there is no statute of limitations for crimes against humanity.

In his own half-assed, self-justifying defense, Nuon Chea once said: "Naturally, we are sorry, not only for the lives of the people, but also for the animals. They all died because we wanted to win the war."

Eliding the difference between his fellow Cambodians and farm animals is, more than anything else, the clearest view of what Nuon Chea thinks of everyone around him.

al Jazeera article

The United States has resumed military aid to Thailand close on the heels of the swearing in of a new, democratically elected government.

Aid was automatically suspended, with some exceptions, following the coup in late 2006 due to a provision in American law banning aid to nations whose elected leaders have been deposed. Exceptions included continuing counter-terrorism aid, and continuing joint military exercises between American and Thai forces.

US Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte "certified to Congress that a democratically elected government has taken office in Thailand", state department spokesman Tom Casey said.

"We congratulate Thailand's new cabinet on its inauguration, and the Thai people on their success in re-establishing an elected government," he said.

As a recent visitor to ostensibly military-controlled Thailand, I'll attest that it's a country that keeps on trucking regardless of who's nominally in power on the elected side. Given that the country's government has been rebooted at least fifteen times since 1932, it's unsurprising that the Thai people have a relaxed attitude about the rise and fall of elected governments.

The new Thai cabinet is full of loyalists to deposed PM Thaksin Shinawatra, raising the question of how long this government will get to stick around before the military hits the reset button again.

BBC article

Mike Huckabee took the Kansas Republican primary with about 60% of the vote today.

Seriously Kansas, must you vote for the dumber, strictly worse candidate because he's the more obnoxiously xenophobic man?

Defending his continued run for the candidacy, Huckabee said, "I did not major in math, but I majored in miracles, and I still believe in them."

Indeed, Huckabee has previously affirmed his deep inability to comprehend numbers, when he suggested that we deport 100,000 illegal immigrants per day, a mere 3900% in workload for the men and women of U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

It would be so wonderful to know that we could have a President who is not merely impractical, but innumerate. But, apparently, he brings comfort to us scared white folks, eh?

Ah, well. Maybe when he's raising Customs' workload 3900%, he can reduce taxes 3900%, too.

BBC article
al Jazeera article

Ahead of the Maryland primary, the BBC went around and asked voters who they were voting for, and why. This unfortunate response jumped right out from all the others. It's double disappointing.

Voting the party line, even though I disagree with it in every detail

"I'm conservative, and always have been. I voted for Bush four years ago, but I don't agree with him on stem cell, abortion or gay marriage. He mixes religion and government too much."

Don't be the person who votes a party line because it's nominally in line with some portion of your beliefs. These days, people frequently quote Reagan's 80% rule as a reason to support John McCain even though he's a little too liberal (read: not a fundamentalist) for many party stalwarts. The 80% rule is fine, and very practical. But to vote for the party because "I've always been a conservative" without understanding that (1) Bush is not a fiscal conservative and (2) you may not be a social conservative if you're pro-stem-cells, pro-choice, pro-gay-marriage, and want religion out of politics, is just foolish.

Don't be that person. Vote the candidate. Very specifically vote the candidate. Don't vote Republican or Democrat (or Libertarian, or even, say, Whig) because it's your default party. That's idiocy.

Failing to do even basic research

It's not hard to fail to do basic research. It's super easy. It's easy to believe what the people next door to you tell you, or what your coworkers say, or some random snippet you heard on the radio in your car this morning before they did the funny skit where they prank call someone. Easy, but stupid.

"Obama, I don't really like his Muslim roots."

Barack Obama was born in Hawaii, went to Columbia University, and attends Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago.

Disliking Obama for his Muslim roots is about as clever as disliking Medal of Honor recipient and U.S. Senator Daniel Inouye for his presumptive Buddhist roots.

Or, you know, disliking Christ for his Jewish roots. Or anything else that completely misses the (incidentally, very Christian and very American) idea that the beliefs you adopt define you who are, rather than your birth or ancestry.

So come on. Be Americans, people. Judge people by what they are and do, not by their ancestry.

The National Institutes of Health fund the bulk of biology and medical research in the United States, to the tune of about $28 billion a year. If you've benefited from a medical or biotech advance (and if you grew up in the U.S., you have), you've benefited from your tax dollars at work in the NIH. Money from the NIH comes with, as everywhere else, strings attached. 2008 brings three new strings, one of which is quite positive. Here are the new legislative mandates for 2008, taken from this document:

• All publications resulting from NIH funding must be made public access within a year of publication. This is a huge positive, and serves the NIH's mission of supporting biomedical and health advances in the U.S. far more than the old practice of many journals of keeping data sequestered from anyone who couldn't afford a subscription.
• Funds can't be used to disseminate false or deliberately misleading scientific information. This isn't really a change from prior policy, but it's good to see the message reinforced.
• NIH funds can't be used to employ illegal aliens. Honestly, biomedical research is not an area with a substantial illegal labor force, but this proviso does fit the mood of the times.

These new (or "new" in one case) requirements are added on top of a set of restrictions from the prior fiscal year. These include:

• Salaries paid for by NIH funds are capped, so you can't pull in millions (or even hundreds of thousands) on NIH money. It's worth noting that you do have to justify each salary when the NIH is funding you, so this process undergoes heavy oversight, in addition to the absolute cap.
• Funds can't be used for lobbying.
• NIH money can't fund needle exchange. This is a shame, because needle exchange programs work, but many people in our country have yet to reconcile their desire to help others with their desire to punish addicts.
• You must acknowledge in press releases and publications that you received NIH funding. Basically, it's a "your tax dollars at work" sign for science. Good to have it there.
• NIH money can't be used to fund an abortion. This does not come up in biomedical research, of course.
• Funds can't be used for research that uses human embryos or generates stem cell lines.
• Finally, NIH money can't be used to promote the legalization of any schedule I drug...unless there is "significant medical evidence of a therapeutic advantage to the use of such drug or other substance or that federally sponsored clinical trials are being conducted to determine therapeutic advantage".

I obviously don't agree with all these provisos, but it's good for those of you who are American citizens to be able to see what requirements are placed on the researchers who you fund to bring you biomedical advances.

Steven Spielberg withdrew this week from his role as an artistic adviser for this year's Olympics in Beijing, citing China's continued failure to do much of anything about the ongoing violence in Sudan's Darfur region. China buys some two thirds of Sudan's oil, a fact that on its own puts China in a unique position vis-a-vis the government of Sudan. Of course, the corollary is that it also puts the government of Sudan in a unique position vis-a-vis the energy-hungry nation of China -- especially in light of the Chinese government's reluctance to seem to be supporting any kind of divisive or separatist movement anywhere in the world.

I did wonder, though, why Spielberg didn't simply quit in the first place over the Chinese government's role in ruling China.

BBC article

In an interview on BBC radio yesterday, Associate Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, when asked about the legality of torture, pulled up everyone's favorite example of the "terrorist who knows where the nuclear bomb that's going to destroy Los Angeles is hidden" (otherwise known as any episode of 24). He suggested that it would be ridiculous to limit people in what they could do, under these circumstances, to extract information from that person. From there, he reasoned that there's a sort of sliding scale, whereby you can abuse someone more if their information is more critical.

No.

There may someday be this situation, where thousands to millions of lives are at stake, and someone on our side is confident that the person they have in custody, right now, knows enough information to prevent a disaster. They may even make the decision to torture that person to get that information.

And if and when they make that decision, I want them to make it knowing that they will go to jail for doing it.

I want the bar for torture to be "Am I willing to go to jail for this?"

After all, ask me any day of the week, and I will happily go to jail for two to four years (that's for assault with bodily injury, under California law) to save thousands or millions of lives. I believe that our police officers and Federal agents would make that same decision. And I really want them to have to.

There can be no sliding scale. Sometimes, the bar simply must be set at jail time. If you're willing to trade a few years of your freedom for the outcome, then you may have possibly given enough thought to what you're about to do to another human being. We don't want it to be any easier than that.

I donated blood today -- a double-red donation. The sign outside the blood center indicated that "all types" are needed. With the exception of the week immediately following the September 11th attacks here in the U.S., there's always a need for blood donations. If you're eligible (and your local blood center probably has a website that will let you know if you are), I urge you to go in and donate blood as often as possible. Although we're still working on it, blood is one of those biomedical products that we just can't replicate or manufacture.

For normal whole blood donations, you're eligible every eight weeks. If that feels too often for your busy schedule, you can do what I did today and do automated blood collection, for a double-red donation. In a double red, they collect a double dose of red blood cells from you without a double dose of blood volume. It leaves you a little more tired, but has you coming in every sixteen weeks instead of every eight. If you have more time, you can also do apheresis to donate other key blood products -- this is independent of other blood donations, and can be done on a fairly regular basis.

You have lots of options, and if you're in the U.S., probably have a blood center full of competent, helpful staff somewhere nearby. If you're eligible, please go and donate.

You can learn more about blood donation in general, and find a nearby donation center at the AABB website.

Former SS prison guard Michael Seifert was extradited last week from Canada to Rome, where he will serve the remainder of his life in custody following his conviction for World War II-era murder. Seifert was convicted in absentia eight years ago by an Italian military tribunal for his role in killing and torturing people during his time as a guard at a prison camp in Bolzano. He was arrested in 2002 at the request of the Italian government, and his attempts to prevent his extradition finally failed this year.

Seifert's extradition has been welcomed by groups campaigning for Nazi war criminals to be brought to justice.

"It sets an example for other war criminals, not only Nazi war criminals, but war criminals related to Rwanda, Bosnia, Darfur or any other genocide," he said.

Once again, this is one of the good signs of our times, much like the trials of former Khmer Rouge leaders and the prosecution of former South American government officials involved in operation Condor. Every time we do this, we reaffirm that there is no statute of limitations on crimes against humanity.

BBC article

Kosovo's parliament declared Kosovo's independence from Serbia today by a unanimous show of hands. Serbian Prime Minister Vojislav Koštunica declared it a "false state." Discussion in the U.N. Security Council broke down when Russia said that there was no call to change the 1999 resolution that placed Kosovo under U.N. authority.

Celebrations broke out in Pristina as violence broke out elsewhere.

The declaration approved by Kosovo's parliament contains limitations on Kosovan independence as outlined in Mr Ahtisaari's plan.

Russia's foreign ministry has indicated that Western recognition of an independent Kosovo could have implications for the Georgian breakaway provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

As we've seen in the past few years, the Russian government has been trying to use separatist groups within neighboring nations such as Georgia and Moldova as leverage over those nations. Russia has troops on the ground in nominally Georgian and Moldavan territory, and has even lost some military officers, presumably at the hands of the Georgian military.

The Russian government differs, and dangerously, from the approach taken by its follow giant totalitarian state, China. Whereas China firmly clamps down on its own people and just as firmly refuses to get involved in the internal affairs of neighboring nations, the Russian government has chosen to use as leverage a problem that it itself has. It's unclear how Putin and friends plan to promote ethnic separatism in Abkhazia and South Ossetia without similarly promoting it in Chechnya, North Ossetia, and Kosovo.

BBC article

A 32-page draft document that was written as part of the general lead up to the war in Iraq was released this week following extensive pushing over the last few years. Written in late 2002 by foreign officer director of communications John Williams, it outlines a case for war in Iraq. Many people are trying to make hay out of its lack of support for the claim that Saddam was able to deploy weapons of mass destruction in 45 minutes, but that's not necessarily significant. As the British government notes, multiple drafts were made in parallel by different offices.

(Also, whether it takes 45 minutes or two days to deploy chemical or biological weapons is pretty immaterial.)

This language is more interesting:

In the document, written in late 2002, John Williams, director of communications at the foreign office, said: "Saddam remains the only man to have used chemical weapons to wage war on civilians: so far.

"It is not speculative to suggest he would do so again if he could: he has done it. And we know that he is now re-equipping himself with chemical weapons, while seeking to extend the range of the missiles that would carry them."

It may just be Mr. Williams' ignorance on the topic, but Hussein is at least the second authority to use chemical weapons on civilians, the first event of this kind being the use of biochemical agents against the Hmong minority by the Laotian government in the 70s (with presumptive Soviet backing).

Of course, we actually did not know Hussein was re-equipping himself with chemical weapons, bar our poor, single source intelligence that was actually the wild fantasy of an Iraqi student who really wanted to stay in Europe. All we really knew was that Hussein had used chemical weapons in war and on civilians, and that he was stonewalling U.N. inspectors. It was reasonable to presume that he still had an arsenal, but beyond that we knew very little.

The rest of the document shows the kind of "purpose drift" that was integral to selling the war and, more critically, reselling the war once people realized there were no vast arsenals of WMDs. The theoretical core purpose of reducing Iraq's threat to the world was heavily conflated with the idea of liberating its people from oppression. The adoption of that second point is cynical, as we and our allies have not been rushing in to liberate equally oppressed people in, say, China.

If liberation from oppression by force of arms is our aim, we have a lot of fighting to do.

al Jazeera article

Delegates from over a hundred nations are meeting this week in New Zealand to prepare a treaty banning the use of cluster munitions. These weapons, described here at fas.org, comprise hundreds of bomblets contained within an overall case. The intent is for the device to open up in midair, spreading bomblets over an area, where they are meant to detonate immediately. When they work, the explosions are impressive, and clearly lethal to any infantry or soft-skinned vehicles unlucky enough to be in the strike zone.

The move to ban cluster munitions comes because they often don't work, littering an area with unexploded munitions that can be triggered months and years later by unlucky civilians. For example, a 2001 cluster bombing of the Shomali Valley during our campaign against the Taliban in late 2001 left 17% of the bomblets unexploded on the ground. A good third of those were buried more than a few inches deep, meaning that large metal detectors would be needed to find them -- and that they thus present a huge risk to children at play and farmers plowing their fields. You can read the abstract of that study here. A second, more in-depth study in Afghanistan showed that over 80% of the casualties from unexploded devices were civilians, with children being most likely to be hurt specifically by unexploded ordnance (which includes cluster munitions, but excludes landmines). You can read that study here.

The big three arms distributors -- the U.S., China, and Russia -- are not participating in the conference.

The conference has been organised by the Cluster Munitions Coalition (CMC), a global network of 200 civil society organisations including leaders from the Nobel Peace Prize-winning International Campaign to Ban Landmines.

According to the CMC, France, Germany, Japan and the UK have been stepping up diplomatic pressure to weaken the draft treaty by excluding certain weapons, including a transition period and allowing the use of cluster bombs in joint military operations with countries that do not sign the treaty.

It's hard to find empirical evaluations of the relative worth of cluster munitions versus conventional munitions when addressing the same targets. The claim is often made that cluster bombs reduce immediate collateral damage by being far less destructive than conventional munitions, but again, there are no publicized evaluations to back this up. This Human Rights Watch background paper from 2001 addresses the claims that have been made, but concludes that very little solid data exist on this topic.

On the face of it, I find it difficult to believe that there are many targets for which a cluster munition is a better choice than a conventional weapon. There are probably no targets that a cluster munition can kill that a 500-pound bomb can't, and the unconfirmed potential for reducing collateral damage is at best mortgaging future civilian casualties to potentially reduce immediate civilian casualties, which given the persistence of unexploded ordnance almost certainly isn't a good deal.

al Jazeera article
BBC article

About halfway into this year, California is scheduled to crash right into a $14.5 billion budget deficit. As the governor negotiates with the legislature over budget cuts, he's ordered a package of immediate budget cuts meant to carve $100 million off the budget, possibly to push doomsday back just a little further.

The comprehensive budget cut package is meant to hack away about half the deficit, although it does so on the back of additional borrowing, delayed debt payments, and other delayed payments. One has to imagine that current budget problems would only have been exacerbated by the recent community college and transportation funding lock-in propositions.

One proposed solution to our current budget problems is the farming out of the state lottery to private industry. The governor's office recently backed down from repeated claims that this will yield $37 billion -- half up front, half over time. The very recent release of analyses of this proposal by a number of major investment banks show that the governor's office is using the highest end of the most optimistic projection. While Lehman Brothers suggested such a deal could be worth $16.1-37 billion over 40 years, most of the analyses put the range at $7-29 billion.

Moreover, to make the venture more attractive and command a higher price from an outside company, California might have to relax its gambling laws and allow a major expansion of the lottery. Critics say that means Schwarzenegger would be balancing the budget on the backs of the working class and the many poor people who avidly buy tickets.

Without that expansion, the projected up-front value of the deal is a mere $2 billion, which puts only a mid-sized dent in our budget deficit. And if we were to dramatically expand the lottery, we assuredly could do that within state control.

Leasing the lottery would require approval from the Legislature and a majority of the voters. Similar proposals are circulating in more than a dozen other states, including New York, Florida and Texas.

"There's a reason no state has yet gone through with this," said state Sen. Dean Florez, chairman of the committee that oversees the lottery. "Putting lottery terminals in malls in every floor, where pay phones used to be, that raises serious questions."

It appears (pending final confirmation) that the U.S. Navy successfully hit and fragmented the USA-193 spy satellite before it reentered the atmosphere.

Naturally, Russia and China have posted the de rigeur complaints about arms proliferation and such. One might imagine the Chinese would complain less, having much more messily destroyed a satellite about a year ago, a process that generated a 2,600 km wide swathe of orbital debris.

al Jazeera article
BBC article

In early 2006, the German government reportedly paid a significant fee to an informant within the banking system of Liechtenstein for a list of names of wealthy Germans with funds hidden within the Principality's opaque financial structures. Following reports of a similar "list purchase" the the government of the United Kingdom, now a host of nations are investigating the involvement of their own wealthy tax dodgers in this country that's smaller than most American cities and mid-sized towns.

German prosecutors said the homes and offices of 150 suspects had been raided and trusts worth 200m euros (£150m) were being examined.

Swiss bank Vontobel has been privately implicated as being involved, a claim they deny. You can read Vontobel's statement on the matter here. Interestingly, the only official statement from Vontobel confirms that their client data is not being used improperly by German authorities, rather than commenting on the possible involvement of Vontobel in aiding tax evasion.

The Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development lists Liechtenstein on its very short list of uncooperative tax havens, along with fellow teeny states Andorra and Monaco.

BBC article

Israeli helicopters continue missile attacks within the Gaza strip even as Hamas launches the occasional missile over the border. Characteristically, the most recent Israeli attacks netted some collateral fatalities and injuries among Palestinians who had the misfortune to be standing near the wrong car. Just as characteristically, Hamas is just randomly killing people as it pitches missiles into Israel without any specific targets.

Statements from the relevant parties set the tone for this reciprocal cycle of non-goal-achieving violence:

Hamas says attacks from the Gaza Strip, including rockets fired by its own fighters and others, are a response to Israeli military operations in the territory and the occupied West Bank and would end if Israel stopped all such activity and lifted its blockade.

David Baker, a spokesman for Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, said: "Israel will be diligent in our efforts to put an end to these lethal rocket attacks. Those firing rockets at our civilians will know neither rest nor have any respite from the measures we will take to stop these attacks."

Gaza's Coastal Municipalities Water Utility has put out this appeal for international assistance as they have run out of chlorine to sterilize drinking water within the area due to the ongoing blockade of Gaza. It's not altogether clear how this does not count as collective punishment of a civilian population, although it's worth noting that Palestinians not bearing citizenship of other nations who live within Gaza may not actually qualify for protection under the fourth Geneva convention, which normally prevents such collective punishments from being carried out. Of course, there may be any number of Palestinians bearing citizenships of signatory nations such as Jordan or perhaps Egypt (or even Israel itself), and they are theoretically protected from collective punishment by Israel or any other signatory. Random citizens of Israel are, of course, also supposed to be protected from being rocketed by any citizens of signatory powers who happen to disagree with Israeli policy.

al Jazeera article

Prince Harry will be withdrawn a bit early from his deployment to Afghanistan following the revelation that he's there by the Drudge Report. This came on the heals of an apparently accidental initial leak by an Australian magazine that discovered he was in Afghanistan and didn't realize there was a news embargo on the topic.

Of course, they perhaps they should have had the wit to realize not to report it anyway.

Seriously, there's very little immediate news value to the target markets (Australia, Europe, America) to know that a royal is in the field. In contrast, however, there's tremendous news value for this same item if one is a member of the Taleban looking to hit a high-value target in the current Afghanistan conflict. Whereas our interest is mostly celebrity, their interest is of a more problematic nature -- one that ought to have taken precedence.

One interesting comment in the aftermath of this came from a participant in an online discussion hosted by Washington Post's Kevin Sullivan:

One cannot help being struck by the contrast between, for example, former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who said that his five strapping sons were serving America by helping in their father's campaign, and Prince Harry, who not only went through Britain's West Point, Sandhurst, but worked diligently to then get into the fighting. His grandmother vetoed deployment to Iraq, so he went to Afghanistan -- and to one of the deadliest areas, Helmand province.

That's worth recalling later, the next time someone is hawkish with other people's children and a dove with their own.

The BBC article

The U.S.S. Cole has been ordered to sit off the coast of Lebanon as an overt act of support for the government of Lebanon in the face of electoral issues and burgeoning factional conflict.

Lebanon has not had a president since 24 November, when pro-Syrian Emile Lahoud left office. Parliament has repeatedly failed to elect a successor amid an ongoing row over candidates.

The election was postponed once again this week, and is now due to take place on 11 March. It was the 15th such delay.

It's notable that of the roughly forty or so ships in the sixth fleet, the U.S.S. Cole is the first tasked to the scene. The Cole, as you hopefully recall, was hit in late 2000 by suicide attackers while in port in Aden, Yemen. It was subsequently repaired and returned to duty.

The amphibious assault ship U.S.S. Nassau is expected to head to an offshore position near Lebanon as well. The Nassau normally carries a Marine Expeditionary Unit such as the 24 MEU, which assisted in the evacuation of Americans from Lebanon during the Israel-Hezbollah Summer War of 2006.

BBC article