British International Development Secretary Hilary Benn has announced an end to the use of "war on terror" phraseology among the UK government. "What these [terrorist] groups want," he observed, is to "force their individual and narrow values on others without dialogue, without debate, through violence." Thus, in its conveyance of tackling a monolithic "enemy," the "war on terror" term has only served to strengthen the "terrorist" resolve, he critiqued. Benn also advocated increased use of ideational and value-based "soft power" policies, having called for the closure of the Guantánamo Bay detention facility, and emphasizing Britain’s ascription to the International Criminal Court. [AlJazeera, April 16]

Remember all the hype when Padilla was first arrested? Now that he is finally going to trial—on considerably less ambitious charges than those originaly floated—it is a discrete little story on the inside pages. Funny how that works, huh? We have noted a lot of utterly specious terrorism cases lately. This much-hyped case could turn out to be another one. From Los Angeles Times, April 16:

Scott Ritter has been wrong before, but The Nation is still enamored of him. Robert Scheer has also been wrong before. Now they team up for a little collaborative error. In an April 13 piece on Scheer's TruthDig, "The Final Act of Submission," Ritter once again displays his right-wing nationalist colors, scapegopating the usual suspects for Washington's misadventure in Iraq. His charming closing lines:

More than a dozen detainees have launched a new hunger strike at Guantánamo, and the military has responded by starting to force-feed the detainees, according to an April 8 New York Times report. Lawyers for the hunger strikers said the strike was prompted by harsh conditions at a new maximum security complex, where some 160 prisoners had been moved since December. "The reports about the conditions at Camp 6 are deeply disturbing, and holding people indefinitely without legal process or access to family is an invitation to disaster," Hina Shamsi, a lawyer with Human Rights First, told AP.

From the Center for Constitutional Rights, April 2:

Supreme Court Denies Immediate Review of Guantanamo Cases
Clients May Wait Another Year in Detention Without Meaningful Way to Challenge Imprisonment
The Supreme Court announced today that it would not be hearing the cases of the Guantánamo detainees for the time being. The Court denied the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and co-counsel's motion to hear the case with three justices dissenting and two issuing a statement that the detainees should exhaust the process set up by the Detainee Treatment Act (DTA), allowing for limited appeals from the decisions of military review panels, before they would consider ruling on constitutional questions. Attorneys with the Center for Constitutional Rights expressed disappointment with the ruling.

A high-level al-Qaeda suspect who was in CIA custody for more than four years has alleged that his US captors tortured him into making false confessions about terrorist attacks in the Middle East, according to newly released Pentagon transcripts of a March 14 military tribunal hearing at Guantánamo. Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who US officials link to the 1998 East Africa embassy bombings and the 2000 USS Cole bombing in Yemen, told a panel of military officers that he confessed torture. "The detainee states that he was tortured into confession and once he made a confession his captors were happy and they stopped torturing him," Nashiri's representative read to the tribunal. "Also, the detainee states that he made up stories during the torture in order to get it to stop." (AND from WP, March 31)

From the Center for Constitutional Rights, March 27:

First Military Commission at Guantanamo Deeply Flawed
The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) today released a statement on the military commission proceedings at Guantánamo Bay against Australian David Hicks that began yesterday. Hicks pled guilty to material support of a terrorist group last night apparently in exchange for being allowed to serve his sentence in Australia.

In the March 25 Washington Post, Trilateral Commission ideological guru and former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski once again sounds like he was bitten by a radioactive Noam Chomsky. What's really sad is that the remnants of the American left are so rudderless and gullible that they fail to recognize this intra-elite squabbling on the proper maintenance of Empire as what it is, and fall for the pseudo-populist rhetoric. They will doubtless eagerly lap up this Trilateralist ejaculate, as they do the vile propaganda of Mearsheimer and Walt—never stopping to question the reactionary source. Writes Zbiggy (more commentary to follow):