From the AP, Aug. 26:

YAMOUN, West Bank - They were struggling in a boy band, working the West Bank wedding circuit and dreaming of stardom.

Now the five singers who make up the Northern Band have come a little closer to their goal, with help from an unwitting ally - Hezbollah guerrilla chief Hassan Nasrallah.

From the Mehr News Agency, Aug. 24:

TEHRAN -- Iran's National Orchestra will be performing the symphony "Nuclear Energy" composed by Kambiz Roshanravan at Tehran's Vahdat Hall on August 27 in a program which President Mahmud Ahmadinejad is scheduled to attend.

As we noted in the case of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Europe's xenophobe right is appropriating the causes of feminism and secularism. Through the proverbial looking glass. From the New York Times, Aug. 24 (emphasis added):

BRESCIA — A series of unrelated killings here this month has pushed this elegant city to the center of a national debate on the challenges of immigration and cultural integration.

What a revealing piece of propaganda this is. British forces abandon Camp Abu Naji at Amarah, in southern Iraq, and not only Moktada al-Sadr but also the official Maysan provinical authorites proclaim it as a victory against the occupier. The British commander Maj. Charlie Burbridge asserts Iraqi army forces maintained "full control" of the base—even as it was being sacked by looters armed with AK-47s! Burbridge crows about how disciplined the Iraqi army maintaining (precarious) control of the base is—while a local brigade mutinies, and is apparently well-infiltrated by the Sadr forces! The British forces are evacuating the Amarah base to carry out "guerilla tactics" in the marshlands—an implicit acknowledgement that the insurgents are in control there! Finally, note that even the pacifistic Sufis have declared a jihad against the Anglo-American occupation (and the fundamentalist Shi'ites like al-Sadr who would like to exterminate them). From the Washington Post, Aug. 26 (emphasis added):

Mexico's Defense Secretariat has dispatched troops from the 36th Infantry Battallion, based at the 44th Military Zone headquarters in Minatitlan, Veracruz, to the Oaxaca City, which has been paralyzed by civil protests for weeks. The situation has promped the Popular People's Assembly of Oaxaca (APPO) to declare a "maximum alert," fearing that a violent eviction of their protest encampments in the city center is imminent. (APRO, Aug. 23)

This is how censorship works in the USA: by other names—which, of course, makes it more insidious. An ACLU press release, Aug. 24:

Village Cannot Impose Prohibitive Insurance Requirement as Condition of Free Speech, NYCLU Warns
NEW YORK -- The New York Civil Liberties Union today urged the village of Bellport to drop an arbitrary and unconstitutional requirement that any group wishing to march on the street must purchase $2 million in insurance and indemnify Bellport from liability as a condition of receiving a permit.

We welcome the Aug. 23 Amnesty International report taking Israel to task for massively targeting Lebanon's civilian infrastructure. But there is an ominous Achilles' heel to Amnesty's arguments. Contrasting Israel's actions to the "lawful targeting of military objectives" implicitly loans legitimacy to the concept of "collateral damage." In 1977, following the outcry over US carpet-bombing of Vietnam, Protocol II was added to the Geneva Conventions, with Part IV stating: "The civilian population...shall enjoy general protection against the dangers arising from military operations... The civilian population as such...shall not be the object of attack." The concept of "collateral damage" has served as a loophole to permit the targeting of the civilian population merely de facto rather than de jure—as the Pentagon's "Shock and Awe" plans for Iraq made nearly explicitly clear. In the actual event, the "Shock and Awe" plans were considerably scaled down due concerns about its "political consequences." This is evidence that protest is effective—it saves lives, at least sometimes, even if it falls short of its aims of stopping military aggression completely. But we should be wary of allowing the aggressors to set the terms of the debate.

From page 5, below the fold, of the New York Times, Aug. 25:

8 Killed in Raid by U.S. Forces in Afghanistan

KABUL — Eight civilians, including a child, were killed in an operation by American forces in eastern Afghanistan on Thursday, an Afghan police official said. United States forces acknowledged killing a child and injuring a woman but said the seven men also killed were “Qaeda facilitators” who had opened fire on them as they approached a compound.