PARTNERS IN CRIME Christopher Hitchens joins a growing course of voices that are beginning to ask that age-old question: "With friends like these...?" The balancing act played by successive Administrations is beginning to teeter, at least among the media. The real question is why anyone truly thinks that thoughtful, logical or even value-based arguments will dissuade decision makers driven by fear, a need to control and expediency" Hitchens writes: "The bin Laden/Mullah Omar crime family was trained in Afghanistan by the Pakistani secret police and paid for by Saudi Arabian money. The American "national security" class looked (and looks) upon the Pakistani secret police and the Saudi Arabian royal family as friends and allies." And he goes on:

The worst of it is that this high-level collusion still goes on. The Saudi royal family has refused to share any police information on the fifteen of its citizens who immolated themselves and others. It openly acts as the theocratic and financial and military patron of the Islamic Jihad group, which has done such awful damage both to Israeli civilians and to the credit of the Palestinian revolution. But Bush continues to fawn on this disgusting dynasty, while for the oil executives who make up his inner circle the same dynasty fulfills the useful function of being the only Arabs they know or care about.

Meanwhile, in Pakistan it is difficult to argue that General Musharraf has exactly earned the enormous stipend given to him, his army and his police. Frustrated British and American officers in Afghanistan, combing the hills for the gangsters, have recently become convinced that their targets have relocated across the Pakistani border. Independent reportage supports this interpretation, which does not require much by way of an imaginative leap.

THE WHEELS OF JUSTICE GO ROUND, ROUND, ROUND I'm a big fan of an open society, which has caused no end of friction in my personal relationship with Attorney General John Ashcroft, who if pressed would probably say that he, too, is a big fan of an open society with only a few exceptions. Like maybe the entire judicial process should be a closed door event. So, I continue to be pleased by the decisions of federal judges, like the one covered in this Washington Post article. Basically, the judge said that closed immigration hearings for the hundreds of September 11 detainees is a bad thing, and that the public's right to know outweighs the government's desire that we not know, except in case-by-case decisions.

A federal judge in New Jersey dealt a significant blow yesterday to the government's efforts to hold terrorism suspects in secret, ruling unconstitutional a directive closing immigration hearings deemed of "special interest" to the investigation into the Sept. 11 attacks.

If upheld, the ruling would strike down one of the government's primary investigative tools after the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center and possibly shed light on the fate of dozens, if not hundreds, of people who have been arrested, detained or deported in secrecy.

The judge, John W. Bissell, described as "serious and legitimate" the government's assertion that opening the hearings could compromise its ability to prevent terrorism, but he said those concerns could be addressed case by case and were outweighed by the right of the public and the press to view the hearings.

QUESTIONS ABOUT GLOBALIZATION AND POWER I've tracked former CIA analyst Bill Christison's writings and interviews for a few months now, and continue to find myself generally agreeing with the questions he raises, and sometimes even with the conclusions he draws about the current geopolitical situation, and the deliberate, if clumsy, steps the U.S. is taking. In this piece for CounterPunch, Christison looks at globalization, and how U.S. policy warps the debate and quite possibly corrupts what could be a positive process. At the very least, two questions he raises are worth pondering:

ONE: Are most people in the United States likely to derive any real benefit from Washington's continuing drive for global political hegemony and an economic globalization that would mirror the economy of the U.S.? Will the military, economic, and internal security costs of such U.S. foreign policies benefit or damage our own society, living standards, and culture? Or will most of the benefits/profits from this version of globalization accrue to international corporations and to the thin layer of wealthy people who support them in the many nations where they operate?

TWO: Will the global income gap between rich and poor widen or narrow over time, if the U.S. continues to pursue its own version of globalization? If the answer to this question is unknowable, except, say, after ten more years of experience with the present version of globalization, can we afford to wait those ten years as expectations throughout the third world continue to rise but inevitably will not be fully met?

My own opinion is that the present U.S. version of globalization will most probably result over the next ten years in a continuing widening of the income gap between rich and poor in most of the world's countries, and a worsening of the animosities against the United States. Therefore the U.S. should (1) stop trying to implement the present U.S.-dominated globalization program, (2) launch immediately a vast aid program to reduce income gaps around the world, (3) encourage individual nations to accept or reject, more or less as China and India do now, whatever aspects of globalization they themselves choose, and (4) encourage individual nations to accept or reject the precepts of free trade to the extent they themselves choose. Finally, the U.S. in its foreign policies should encourage greater political democracy in other nations, especially those now ruled by dictatorial and corrupt minorities, but only through means other than military action and covert operations.

BETWEEN IRAQ AND A HARD PLACE A solid piece by an analyst at the Center for Defense Information (yawn) on how the Bush Administration is making some solidly incorrect decisions about engagement with Iran. The piece calls for a middle ground, somewhere between current U.S. and European approaches: "European ‘over-engagement’ holds some countries hostage to the commercial interests they share with Iran. But Washington’s unilateral policies increasingly isolate the United States rather than Iran. A coordinated approach by the United States and its European allies could produce both incentives for constructive change in Iran and deterrents where radical policies hold sway."

WE GOT YOUR FORCE The Self-Made Critic takes on Star Wars with an open letter to George Lucas and a review of the new movie. I've yet to summon enough Force to drag myself to a theatre and sit through the film, so it's nice to be able to let someone else do all the critiquing.

...you see Mr Lucas, you suck as a writer. Really awful... So here's the deal. You write up an outline (no dialogue allowed) of Episode Three. You then hire a competent and hip writer, someone younger than, say, fifty. Said writer writes Episode Three, based on your notes. Then, you go and hire yourself a hot, fresh director--or Steven Spielberg, he'd do. You let them direct the movie while you sit back and collect lots of money. Everybody wins. If you do that, we promise to go see it. And we will not burn you in effigy.

BLOGGING ON THE METRO Okay, the first assumption is that everyone knows what "blogging" is. Blogging is a crass abbreviation for "web logging," or a method of regularly posting content on a website, usually with links to other sites. You are currently reading my blog. Easy enough. And how odd that in the relatively anonymous world of blogging that the New York City Blogger Map exists. It's quite simply what it says: a map of Manhattan's Metro lines with web loggers listed by subway stop. Now you can find out who is blogging from the Hunter College stop on the 6 or near Penn Station on the 1. Odd. But interesting.

KING SAUD, LINE TWO Thanks to Andrew Sullivan for this link to Michael Barone's interesting li'l piece in the latest U.S. News and World Report. Barone's basic argument is quite simple: our "friends" the Saudis are actually our "enemies" the Saudis.

Freedoms? Zero for seven. The Saudis run a totalitarian society. Not one of the seven freedoms identified by President Bush in his State of the Union speech–the rule of law, limits on the power of the state, respect for women, private property, free speech, equal justice, religious tolerance–is honored by the Saudis. There is no free speech and no freedom of religion (during the Gulf War the Saudis did not allow President Bush to conduct a religious service on Saudi soil), and women are restricted and physically assaulted by religious police who prowl the streets (and, by some accounts, would not allow teenage girls to leave a burning school, lest they not be properly clad; 15 girls died).

FLOWER POWER My friend Abby eats marigolds. But that's okay, because apparently a lot of eccentric Indians do, according to this Washington Post article on cooking with flowers. It includes recipes (Pasta with DayLily Buds and Mushrooms) and a handy link to help you sort the poisonous from the delectable.

NANCY DREW AUTHOR DIES First, we lose the author of Pippy Longstockings. Now, Millie Benson has passed on. This year is shaping up to be a sad one for lovers of fiction about strong, outspoken women who wear goofy clothes. Millie Benson died while working on her weekly newspaper column for the Toledo Blade; she was 96. Copies of some of her recent articles can be found at the link above, as well as her full obituary. But here's why I liked her:

Her books, Nancy Drew buffs have said, allowed teenage girls and young women to imagine that all things might be possible at a time when females struggled mightily for any sense of equality. "Millie’s innovation was to write a teenage character who insisted upon being taken seriously and who by asserting her dignity and autonomy made her the equal of any adult. That allowed little girls to dream what they could be like if they had that much power," said Ilana Nash, a Nancy Drew authority and doctoral student at Bowling Green State University.

MIDDLE EAST PASSIONS You know, not everything in life has to be serious. Take this report from The Onion: JERUSALEM—The long-simmering sexual tension between Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat finally reached a breaking point Monday, culminating in a passionate kiss before a shocked delegation of Mideast negotiators. If only this is what all that tension was really about. Bugger. We need more love in these times of war.

WHEN SEX IS WRONG A few weeks back I posted about the startling rise in prostitution and sex trafficking in the former Yugoslavian states. The State Department will soon be releasing a report listing countries that are complacent when it comes to the forced prostitution of children. Big deal? Yes.

One large-scale offender is India; the State Department itself has stated that more than 2.3 million women and girls work against their will as prostitutes, and the United Nations estimates that two-fifths are under 18. Yet India is unable to tell the State Department of any convictions for sex trafficking, even though the practice is widespread and illegal. Similarly, Thailand has a huge number of child sex slaves, possibly as many as 1 million, but convictions are unheard of. Cambodia, a small country, has an estimated 20,000 child slaves in brothels; again, this routine crime is routinely unpunished.

ARABIC. JUST ADD WATER. About three years ago, I felt suddenly inspired. I was going to learn Arabic. I'd been fascinated with the culture and politics of the region for years, and now it was time to take the plunge. I turned to my friend Matt for his second-hand books and tapes, and off I went. Leafing through "Alif-Baa: Introduction to Arabic Letters and Sounds" I thought, "No problem. Ican blow through this in a week or three." Ha. By the time I traveled to Cairo in January of 1999, I knew the alphabet all right. I just didn't have a vocabulary. There was a good article in the Post this morning that helped me understand what I already knew: Arabic is hard, and it's harder when you are a lazy student.

Even with the new interest in the language, there are relatively few people being trained: fewer than 6,000 college students, according to the Modern Language Association's 1998 survey, compared with more than 3.5 million taking Spanish... Also, a few years of college instruction often isn't enough. The American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages estimates it takes between 2,400 and 2,760 hours of instruction for someone with a superior aptitude for languages to attain the highest level of achievement in Arabic -- one that would be good enough to be a translator or lawyer.

PORTRAIT OF AN OLD ARTIST AS A YOUNG ACTIVIST No, no. Not Bono. Danny Glover. A friendly read, this Washington Post article takes a look at actor Danny Glover's support of TransAfrica. You may remember TransAfrica as being a think-tank for African issues founded by Randall Robinson, but it's more likely you have no idea who Robinson is. You may recall TransAfrica's anti-apartheid protests in the 80s. No? Well, the main point here is that it continues to be reassuring to me that there are a handful of celebrities using their time and energy and money in relatively thoughtful ways. I don't agree with all of TransAfrica's views on the world, but I'd sure as hell rather see them thrive and articulate their views than fade away and leave one less voice in the dialogue about our future. Here's one of their core issues:

Africa has about 10% of the world's population but nearly 83% of the global total of HIV infected people. According to United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) there are about 24.5 million people infected with HIV/AIDS in Africa. According to the National Council for Science and the Environment's (NCSE) issue brief for Congress, approximately 13.7 million Africans have died of AIDS. The pandemic is currently the leading cause of death on the African continent.