(Indymedia) A bi-partisan group of Congressmembers have personally apologized to Maher Arar, the Canadian citizen seized by U.S. officials secretly flown to Syria where he was tortured. Arar testified last week before a House panel, the first time he has had a chance to tell his story to U.S. lawmakers. But he couldn’t testify in person. Even though the Canadian government has cleared his name, Arar remains barred from the U.S. because the Bush administration says he poses a national security threat.

A group of Democratic and Republican members of Congress have personally apologized to Maher Arar. He is the Canadian citizen who was seized by U.S. officials in 2002 at JFK airport in New York and secretly flown to Syria as part of the Bush administration’s extraordinary rendition program. In Syria, Arar was held for almost a year in a grave-like cell and repeatedly tortured. He was released without ever being charged with a crime.

On Thursday, Arar testified before a House Judiciary and Foreign Affairs subcommittee hearing on extraordinary rendition. It marked the first time Arar had a chance to tell his story to U.S. lawmakers. But he couldn’t testify before Congress in person.

Even though the Canadian government has cleared his name, Arar remains barred from entering the United States because the Bush administration maintains that he poses a national security threat.

This is the complete video of the hearing:

Sy Hersh delivers the annual Amnesty International/Trinity College lecture.

This is the third year, previous speakers were Noam Chomsky (2006) and Michael Ignatieff (2005). Recorded on 24th October 2007.

Click here to listen to the lecture (file in mp3 format)

The new version of Ubuntu called “Gutsy Gibbon” just came out and it has plenty of good stuff. As usual the ‘main’ release is based on GNOME (v2.2), but a KDE version (Kubuntu), a Xfce version (Xubuntu, for older machines, a very elegant desktop manager) and even a non-official Fluxbox version (Fluxbuntu, available in 2 days, superfast and light). There is even a brand new 100% free version called Gobuntu (the second such totally free software based distro, the first one was the excellent gNewSense, also Ubuntu based) and a special educational version called Edubuntu.

I have just upgraded (seamlessly, no problems whatsoever) from ‘Feisty Fawn’ (the previous version) to ‘Gutsy Gibbon’ and to celebrate this I wanted to share with you a real neat - if dated - essay by Neal Stephenson entitled “In the beginning was the command line”. Read an excerpt below and click on the link for the rest of the essay.

Cheers!
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Imagine a crossroads where four competing auto dealerships are situated. One of them (Microsoft) is much, much bigger than the others. It started out years ago selling three-speed bicycles (MS-DOS); these were not perfect, but they worked, and when they broke you could easily fix them.

There was a competing bicycle dealership next door (Apple) that one day began selling motorized vehicles–expensive but attractively styled cars with their innards hermetically sealed, so that how they worked was something of a mystery.

The big dealership responded by rushing a moped upgrade kit (the original Windows) onto the market. This was a Rube Goldberg contraption that, when bolted onto a three-speed bicycle, enabled it to keep up, just barely, with Apple-cars. The users had to wear goggles and were always picking bugs out of their teeth while Apple owners sped along in hermetically sealed comfort, sneering out the windows. But the Micro-mopeds were cheap, and easy to fix compared with the Apple-cars, and their market share waxed.

Eventually the big dealership came out with a full-fledged car: a colossal station wagon (Windows 95). It had all the aesthetic appeal of a Soviet worker housing block, it leaked oil and blew gaskets, and it was an enormous success. A little later, they also came out with a hulking off-road vehicle intended for industrial users (Windows NT) which was no more beautiful than the station wagon, and only a little more reliable.

Since then there has been a lot of noise and shouting, but little has changed. The smaller dealership continues to sell sleek Euro-styled sedans and to spend a lot of money on advertising campaigns. They have had GOING OUT OF BUSINESS! signs taped up in their windows for so long that they have gotten all yellow and curly. The big one keeps making bigger and bigger station wagons and ORVs.

On the other side of the road are two competitors that have come along more recently.

One of them (Be, Inc.) is selling fully operational Batmobiles (the BeOS). They are more beautiful and stylish even than the Euro-sedans, better designed, more technologically advanced, and at least as reliable as anything else on the market–and yet cheaper than the others.

With one exception, that is: Linux, which is right next door, and which is not a business at all. It’s a bunch of RVs, yurts, tepees, and geodesic domes set up in a field and organized by consensus. The people who live there are making tanks. These are not old-fashioned, cast-iron Soviet tanks; these are more like the M1 tanks of the U.S. Army, made of space-age materials and jammed with sophisticated technology from one end to the other. But they are better than Army tanks. They’ve been modified in such a way that they never, ever break down, are light and maneuverable enough to use on ordinary streets, and use no more fuel than a subcompact car. These tanks are being cranked out, on the spot, at a terrific pace, and a vast number of them are lined up along the edge of the road with keys in the ignition. Anyone who wants can simply climb into one and drive it away for free.

Customers come to this crossroads in throngs, day and night. Ninety percent of them go straight to the biggest dealership and buy station wagons or off-road vehicles. They do not even look at the other dealerships.

Of the remaining ten percent, most go and buy a sleek Euro-sedan, pausing only to turn up their noses at the philistines going to buy the station wagons and ORVs. If they even notice the people on the opposite side of the road, selling the cheaper, technically superior vehicles, these customers deride them cranks and half-wits.

The Batmobile outlet sells a few vehicles to the occasional car nut who wants a second vehicle to go with his station wagon, but seems to accept, at least for now, that it’s a fringe player.

The group giving away the free tanks only stays alive because it is staffed by volunteers, who are lined up at the edge of the street with bullhorns, trying to draw customers’ attention to this incredible situation. A typical conversation goes something like this:

Hacker with bullhorn: “Save your money! Accept one of our free tanks! It is invulnerable, and can drive across rocks and swamps at ninety miles an hour while getting a hundred miles to the gallon!”

Prospective station wagon buyer: “I know what you say is true…but…er…I don’t know how to maintain a tank!”

Bullhorn: “You don’t know how to maintain a station wagon either!”

Buyer: “But this dealership has mechanics on staff. If something goes wrong with my station wagon, I can take a day off work, bring it here, and pay them to work on it while I sit in the waiting room for hours, listening to elevator music.”

Bullhorn: “But if you accept one of our free tanks we will send volunteers to your house to fix it for free while you sleep!”

Buyer: “Stay away from my house, you freak!”

Bullhorn: “But…”

Buyer: “Can’t you see that everyone is buying station wagons?”

(read the full essay here)

(Cross-posted from my blog. I know that most of you will not agree with what I write here, but I offer my opinion candidely and I apologize in advance if that offends anybody)

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I have to admit that I like Ron Paul. A lot. While Mike Gravel and Dennis Kucinch are also speaking up against the transformation of the USA into a Neocon empire, the former, while certainly sincere and well-meaning, is too prone to antics and the latter showed an unforgivable lack of courage when he abstained during the vote on the infamous House Resolution 1400. In contrast, Ron Paul has shown impeccable character and courage in opposing the Neocons and he has a sterling record on refusing to vote for idiotic and propagandistic resolutions in Congress. Nobody, not even his opponents. seriously disputes that he is an honest and dedicated man.

The fact is that Ron Paul is in a league of his own. Not only that, but from all the anti-Neocon candidates he is the only one who has a conceivable chance, however small, of getting the nomination of his party (that could only happen if the Republicans finally realize that Ron Paul is the only Republican who, being anti-war, could beat the AIPAC-controlled Hillary).

Some of Ron Paul’s views raise concern among my friends. For example, Ron Paul’s belief that the Social Security Administration, the CIA, the FBI or the IRS should be eliminated might, at first glance, appear somewhat bizarre, but one must keep in mind a couple of things here:

1. Many federal administrations have, in the past, proven to be highly ineffective (can anyone name a single success of the CIA?)
2. Some federal functions could be better implemented on the state level
3. These are long-term goals and not something which Ron Paul would try to immediately implement if elected
4. None of these reforms could be implemented without Congress anyway

These standard objections to Ron Paul’s program really do not worry me at all.

More worrisome is Ron Paul’s beliefs in the values of deregulation such as, for example, “Internet neutrality” which he opposes. I can only explain that kind of irrational phobia of any regulation, no matter how obviously needed, by the typical “blindspot” of all US libertarians who, on principle and by definition, consider anything “government” as bad and who therefore automatically blame any corporate excesses upon government and its supposed “corporatism”. US libertarians are simply unable to accept the fact the corporations needs to be reined in by the civil society. They will always argue that a “truly free market” would resolve all issues of corporate greed, abuse, corruption and exploitation, nevermind that there has never, ever, been a truly free market anywhere and that there shall never be one either (the very concept of truly free market is based upon the idea of perfect competition which, in turn, is predicated on the two false assumptions of 1) perfect access by all to all information and 2) that information is free).

Nevertheless, this valid objection to Ron Paul’s idea on corporate power versus society needs to be placed in context. For one thing, corporate greed and power has reached such levels in the USA that it can scarcely be made worse: the US is already a country “by the corporations and for the corporations” in which none of the mechanisms which serve to keep corporations in check in civilized societies (unions, laws, regulations, elected representatives, etc.) have survived. Frankly, there is nothing Ron Paul could do to make this situation worse. Furthermore, even if some regulatory control over the corporate world, or some meager social right of the US worker, could conceivably be removed by a Ron Paul administration it would only very marginally affect the social Auschwitz which the USA has already become. In fact, I would argue that considering how toxic many US regulations are, or how pathetically vacuous US workers “right” have become over the past decades, some reduction in the federal red-tape just might be helpful, in particular if state and local governments substitute themselves to Washington on a more local and decentralized level.

Lastly, any valid criticism of some aspects of Ron Paul’s program should be contrasted with the two most salient and immensely important pillars of his entire worldview: a total rejection of imperial policies and wars of aggression abroad and an uncompromising dedication to civil rights domestically.

No, what really worries me about Ron Paul is something he said during an interview with Wolf Blitzer on CNN. When Blitzer asked him whether he would consider running as an independent third party candidate Ron Paul replied: “I never think about that, I have no intention of doing that“.

Contrast this with this entry on the Lew Rockwell blog:
——-

The House He Lives in Really Is America to Him

Posted by Mike Tennant at July 6, 2007 03:21 PM
A member of the Pittsburgh Ron Paul Meetup Group, who wishes to be known here merely as “Freedom Fighter,” wrote the following to the members of our group today:

I am 60 years old. I have always voted for smaller government and to uphold the Constitution. I have never gotten what I voted for. Today I put my home up for sale. I am taking the proceeds and going to spend it promoting Ron Paul. That is the best way to spend my grandchildren’s inheritance. They will benefit more by having President Ron Paul than having $100,000 of fiat money. Our lives, our fortunes, our sacred honor. The Revolution has begun.

Now that’s putting your money where your mouth is!

——-

Indeed, this is an amazing example of courage and dedication. The question I ask is what will happen to this man if Ron Paul does not get the Republican nomination or if he is not elected President? Would the “Revolution”, to use the expression of this Ron Paul supporter, simply be over?

As I have written before, there is only one thing which stands in the way of an openly Fascist President in 2008: a so-called “third party” candidate who would seek to unite behind him on a minimalistic “Jeffersonian” political platform all those in the USA who care about peace and liberty. Considering that these are the values which brought a majority of Americans to send the Democrats into Congress during the last election it is not unreasonable to assume that a majority of Americans would now support such values if given the option, notwithstanding the total betrayal of these voters by the AIPAC-controlled Democrats.

Sure, there is a core of mostly “inbred rednecks” who still believe the lies of the Neocons and who would actually welcome the election of a Fascist President in 2008. And there is a core of pseudo-liberal Democrats who will vote for Hillary just because she is a woman or for Obama because he is Black. But if you give the American population the choice between Neocon imperialism and even more internal control on one hand and a return to a republic and an end to wars of agression on the other I think that no more than 30% of the population will choose the former.

Even if a third party candidate is not elected and even if, as seems likely, Hillary returns to the White House next year, the struggle will not be over. A Hillary Administration, or a Guiliani one for that matter, will fully hand over all US power to the Neocons and AIPAC. It does not take some amazing gift of prophecy to see what that will result in: a bloodbath in the Middle-East and an ugly, and possibly bloody, repression of the internal opposition inside the USA.

In this context I ask two basic questions:

1) Does Ron Paul have the moral right not to run as an independent if he does not get the Republican nomination?

2) Does Ron Paul have the moral right to simply go back to “life as usual” when a Fascist becomes the President in 2008?

My own and unequivocal answer to these two questions is a resounding: NO!

Not only does Ron Paul have a duty to his country, but he also has a duty to all his supporters, like the man who sold his house to give the money to the Paul campaign. For Ron Paul to simply leave the stage and let down all the people who truly believed in him and who sacrificed so much for him would be a complete betrayal.

If Ron Paul does not become President in 2008, by 2010 the entire county will be begging for him to come back and save whatever can be saved from the Neocon folly and its consequences. But if in the meanwhile Ron Paul simply goes back to Congress, or back to Texas, and leaves all his supporters crushed by disappointment, nobody will ever believe any politician again and Americans will cease to believe that there can be an alternative to Fascism. In that case the Ron Paul supporter who sold his house would have been wiser to keep it for his children.

Ron Paul can think about his nomination and election next year, but I sure hope that he also prepares for the worst-case scenario as well. I only hope that he misspoke when he said to Blitzer “I have no intention of doing that”.

I just found this on a discussion group and decided to pass it on to those of you who have not switched to GNU/Linux (yet):

Many folks are coming to me and asking me to help them solve their computer issues of sudden reboots, or massive slowdowns, by helping them o reload their Microsoft Windows 98, XP, or 2000.

I resist with the simple fact that I can load Linux for them, immune to the million new Microsoft  virus/malware/trojans/exploits in about 20 minutes while the vulnerable Windows will require at least two hours, and I won’t waste my time if they won’t run an IPCOP box firewall.

Now, there has been, for about a year, a most serious reason to dump all MS, and switch to GNU/Linux!  It is the “Storm” virus/worm/bot rootkit for all Microsoft OS computers!

This worm/virus/trojan/bot has run for at least a year, and is difficult, if not impossible, to stop, as it has been updated several times!

http://www.snopes.com/computer/virus/storm.asp

Security experts state there is no solution to permanently repair and kill it in the Microsoft Windows environment, because it:

A. keeps a low profile,

B. only 20 - 25% of infections pop up, as it is ’smart’,

C. It is being manipulated, updated, remotely, after it is installed and functional,

D. Storm bot net is purportedly run by active Russian programmers who are very apt, on behalf of crime families.  Nobody seems to know who is aying the big bucks.

E. It has a random operational cycle.

F. The combination of mutation, updates, randomness, and social engineering of naive Windows users are powerful

G. It is a sophicated rootkit/worm/virus/bot

http://www2.csoonline.com/blog_view.html?CID=32845

“I uploaded the attachment to Virustotal.com, which uses many different antivirus programs to scan uploads. Of 31 programs, only 4—ClamAV, Safe, Kaspersky, and Symantec—reported a virus.”

“According to Postini, double-clicking the attachment unleashes a succession of modern malware attack methods. First, a rootkit will ttempt to hide the malware from both human and antivirus scans. Then the worm will attempt to disable antivirus programs. Next, the worm connects to a custom peer-to-peer network used by the worm’s creators to issue commands. Those commands might be to download additional malware, send spam, or transmit personal data stolen from the victim computer.

Finally, to spread itself further, the worm searches for e-mail addresses on the victim machine and sends itself to any discovered addresses. The worm is self-mutating, according to Postini, changing e-mail subject lines, attachment file names and malware characteristics in order to evade antivirus and antispam programs.

Cloudmark, another e-mail security company, says it sees similar outbreak numbers. Today’s flood is 10 times as large as one this past unday, which also involved the virulent Storm Worm.”

On top of the WGA fiasco, that forced 500,000 Microsoft users to fax to Redmond proof of purchase before they could reactivate their computers, and then the one week shutdown of WGA servers over Labor Day, added to the Vista failure, lack of drivers, then to cap it all, the IE6/7 vulnerabilities that run even when the user is in Opera or Firefox, this issue that requires a disk wipe and reinstall is a total waste of resources, time, and money!

These are just some of the arguments I present to my friends, family, and clients.   There is no fix for “stupid”, so some have to be let go from my world of happy computing, to roast in the Hell of the Evil Empire of Redmond, when they insist that they ‘like’ the absolutely broken Microsoft malware, and that they aren’t ‘pwned’.

Yes, I even show them the logs of 1,477 or more infestations in their ‘Microsoft’ computers!  I think many humans are genetically linked to Lemmings, except the Lemmings only migrate over cliffs occasionally, whilst humans seem to do so repeatedly, and pay up to $100 for the privilege of a repeat performance!

The BBC reports that a court in the US has ordered a woman to pay $222,000  in damages for illegally file-sharing music.

The jury ordered Jammie Thomas, 32, from Minnesota, to pay for offering to share 24 specific songs online - a cost of $9,250 per song.  Record companies said she had illegally shared a total of 1,702 songs.

Ms Thomas, who denied the charges, was the first person accused of illegal file-sharing who decided to fight the case in court. Each year, millions of households illegally share music files, and the music industry takes it as a serious threat to its revenue.

About 26,000 lawsuits have been filed against alleged file-sharers, but most defendants settle privately by paying damages amounting to a few thousand dollars.

However, contesting the charge and losing will cost Jammie Thomas almost a quarter of a million dollars.

Her lawyer, Brian Toder, told the Associated Press that Ms Thomas was reduced to tears by the verdict.  “This is a girl that lives from pay cheque to pay cheque, and now all of a sudden she could get a quarter of her pay cheque garnished for the rest of her life,” he said.

The US record industry said people would understand the verdict.  Richard Gabriel, a lawyer for the music companies, said the verdict was important.  “This does send a message, I hope, that downloading and distributing our recordings is not okay,” he told AP.  He said no decision had yet been made about what the record companies would do, if anything, to pursue collecting the money from Ms Thomas.

John Kennedy, chief executive of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industries, which represents record labels, said they were “reluctant litigators”.  “We do everything possible to persuade people not to leave themselves exposed to litigation. We educate, we warn, we even try and settle before a case gets to court.” He said he hoped the fine would prove a deterrent to others.

“Our message is: we don’t want to litigate - don’t leave yourself exposed to litigation,” he added.

 I am not sure with whom I am most disgusted with.  With the RIAA for suing the poor woman, the lawyers who agree to represent the RIAA, the judge for fining the woman, the ACLU for not giving a fuck about this case (heck, this is not the government, its *only* the corporations!), the media for discussing this issue without even a hint of outrage like its something normal, the politicians for allowing this to happen, or the American people for looking at how one of them gets victimized without any reaction?

If fascism is really the union of corporatism and government power than fascism in the USA is doing just great, thank you.  Beating up on one sheep to terrorize the entire herd is a typically fascist method to make sure everybody ‘behaves’.

I can’t wait for Hillary to be elected (with than scumbag Wesley Clark as SecDef!) to see to what new heights US fascism  will reach…

Check out my Q&A with Scott on my blog.  We touched upon libertarian ideas and the candidacy of Ron Paul.

(cross posted from my blog)

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad slams Washington’s domestic policy saying the US has turned into a big prison for the American nation.

He made the remarks at a meeting with the leaders of US Muslim community on Tuesday.

Ahmadinejad criticized the offensive remarks made by Columbia University’s President Lee Bollinger adding, “They insult the guest they’ve invited and echoed statements of a terrorist group in their remarks. They knew their words would not affect me and just tried to prevent the university students from listening to new words. “

Ahmadinejad said the Holocaust was a pretext to occupy Palestine and displace millions of peoples, therefore its aspects should be studied. “They displaced the Palestinian nation under the pretext of the massacre of the Jews; if it is revealed that the Holocaust has nothing to do with the issue of Palestine and the figures in this regard are exaggerated, they will have nothing to say.”

“Resolutions are no longer of any use to counter Israel’s crimes and the approved resolutions are not implemented either. I’m sure that Americans are against those crimes and consider Palestinians to be right. “

He described discord between Shias and Sunnis in Iraq as a plot hatched by the enemies, which can be thwarted by unity.

Ahmadinejad called on all Muslims to strive for justice in the world adding, “We believe all religions have the same origin. Christians, Jews and Muslims all believe in the savior. ”
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FYI - here is a comparison of worldwide incarceration rates:

Incarcerations per 100,000 population (sample):

1014____Texas (in 1999) (governor George W. Bush)
1013____Louisiana (2001)
715_____United States of America (2001)
584_____Russian Federation
554_____Belarus
487_____Cuba
416_____Ukraine
402_____South Africa
388_____Singapore
267_____Namibia
253_____Tunisia
248_____Taiwan
210_____Poland
204_____Chile
194_____Iran
189_____Hong Kong (China)
178_____Czech Republic
177_____Greenland (Denmark)
176_____Jamaica
174_____Israel
173_____Libya
169_____Brazil
169_____Mexico
161_____New Zealand
158_____El Salvador
146_____Lebanon
142_____United Kingdom: England & Wales
129_____Portugal
126_____Colombia
125_____Republic of (South) Korea
121_____Egypt
119_____China
116_____Canada

-In the USA, Blacks and Hispanics make up 62 percent of the incarcerated population, though comprising only 25 percent of the national population;

-Between ten and fifteen percent of black men are incarcerated in twelve states (Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Texas, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming);

-Black women are incarcerated at rates between ten and thirty-five times greater than the rates of white women in fifteen states (Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Rhode Island, Texas, Vermont, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming); and

-Hispanic youth are incarcerated at rates seven to seventeen times greater than those of whites in Connecticut, Hawaii, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire, while the incarceration rate for black youth is between twelve and twenty-five times greater than those of whites in Connecticut, Delaware, Iowa, Massachusetts, Montana, and New Jersey.

(See the World Incarceration Website for more details)

also,

In 2004 there were more than 800,000 full-time sworn law enforcement officers in the United States

(as far as I understand this does not include folks working in jails, prisons, penitentiaries, etc., though I am not sure about that)

All this adds up to a national rate of full-time law enforcement employees per 1,000 inhabitants of at 3.5 (in 2004) which also the highest in the world.

Lastly, remember the huge “security-intelligence complex” composed of the SIXTEEN official US intelligence and security agencies and the equally “huge private intelligence sector” and you really get a sense of how much a prison the USA has become.