According to the AP:

An Afghan man who had faced the death penalty for converting from Islam to Christianity quickly vanished Tuesday after he was released from prison, apparently out of fear for his life with Muslim clerics still demanding his death.

Second good move:

Italy’s Foreign Minister Gianfranco Fini said he would ask his government to grant Abdul Rahman asylum. Fini was among the first to speak out on the man’s behalf.

And then there’s this:

Deputy Attorney-General Mohammed Eshak Aloko said prosecutors had issued a letter calling for Rahman’s release because “he was mentally unfit to stand trial.” He also said he did not know where Rahman had gone after being released.

He said Rahman may be sent overseas for medical treatment.

“It is so if you think so,” said Luigi Pirandello. Hey, come to think of it, Rahman may be headed for Italy – the land of the great Pirandello himself.

More HERE. (ht: markus)

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No, I’m not talking about the low turnout so far. That was predicted. I’m talking about the Guardian Newsblog where Lisa Goldman is blogging about the election (and the country) in a remarkably sympathetic manner for the British newspaper whose opinons about the Jewish state are often… well, the less said the better. The Guardian is the last place I would have looked for coverage of the Israeli election had it not been for Pajamas’ own Allison.

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The Israeli election is upon us with the supposed insiders and the real insiders all reporting a blasé attitude from the electorate with the lowest turnout ever predicted (sixty percent – still wildly high by US standards, of course). My view from far-off LA is somewhat different. As a long time follower of Israeli politics – yes, I am one of the thirty or so people who used to watch the Knesset on CSPAN – I think this is one of the more significant Israeli elections. Looking back, it now appears that all the many elections about how much to give the Palestinians in negotiation or whether to negotiate with them at all were meaningless. There was never anyone with whom to negotiate in the first place. Arafat simply walked away from the table when negotiations got serious and now, not that many years later, we have Hamas, who has no interest in going to the table at all.

So enough already. Unilateralism, while not wonderful, is the only sensible answer. The Israelis have no one to negotiate with but themselves and they might as well get it over with. Kadima, Sharon’s old-new party, appears to have the best plan. I hope they win big.

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It’s a little amusing when a blogger at the Huffington Post (with a Russian name, no less) doesn’t fully recognize the class struggle when she sees it. But it’s hard to get upset with Larisa Alexandrovna for being gentle with the Associated Press when she writes of their response to her allegation that they have plagiarized one of her posts:

We do not credit blogs!

Never mind that plenty of journalists have blogs or that Raw Story is not a blog, or that the mainstream will cite blogs such as the Huffington Post while inexplicably not cite smaller blogs that have become heroic in the world of journalism for what they have uncovered. I have a nagging feeling that this random sourcing is less about freelance journalists or blogs or any other label de jour, but rather, it has everything to do with who can afford to take legal action. Clearly, they have pegged me correctly as not in any position to take on a major news organization.

But this is more than picking on the small fry. This is fear of the small fry – the media class struggle in its MSM vs. blogs essence. Don’t credit blogs unless you have to – a policy followed by the blog (competition) phobic including not only the AP, but Bill O’Reilly and Matt Drudge as well – a group that may cross ideological, but certainly not class, lines. For all of them, this is not about the search for truth. It’s about the search for bucks.

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The latest poll from Time Mag is interesting in that it tells us that the majority of Americans think it’s real but the majority of Republicans don’t. To me this is disconcerting on both ends. The is a scientific issue, not a political one. Energy independence is a different story – that’s scientific and political. I’m agnostic on global warming but not on energy independence. We have to move forward on the latter now – and vigorously.

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Some say the current struggle is about oil. But I say it’s about women – their role in society. Conventional “liberals” miss this,or ignore it, and that, more than any other reason, is why I have left the fold. Unfortunately, our government often misses this too as Malalai Joya points out.

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… but who in his right mind would fly economy on long flights if he had a choice?

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The New York Post this morning has great coverage of my wife Sheryl Longin’s novel. From the Post: The book conjures elements of three canine-lit classics: Virginia Woolf’s “Flush,” J.R. Ackerley’s “My Dog Tulip,” and John Steinbeck’s “Travels with Charley.”

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The release of the Saddam documents has made me think (alas, again) about the WMD issue, which we could call the “Great Gotcha” of the Iraq War. It’s all about politics and little about itself, about reality. In other words, leaving aside partisan gain, ask yourself to what extent would Saddam eventually have had significant WMDs and should we have been worried about that? The documents are showing us many things related to this issue so far, but two appear to be particularly important: 1. Saddam’s willingness to work with and encourage terror organizations when he felt like it. (See Stephen Hayes’ Camp Saddam) 2. His continued interest in WMDs via Russian and Turkish scientists, who were – if the documents are to be believed and let’s assume for the moment they are – working in Iraq right under the noses of the UN inspectors.

Now with all due respect to the Turks, I’m not especially sure of their level of scientific competence, but the Russians? The second country to have the atom and hydrogen bombs, a country we now know was willing to share at least some secrets with the Saddam regime? If we think through this with any honesty, that is a far scarier revelation in the long term than the discovery of a few suitcases of anthrax. There is an argument to be made that left to their own devices the Russians would have eventually turned Saddam into a full-blown nuclear powerwith Uday and Qusay as heir apparents. It’s Dr. Strangelove times four, Slim Pickens. Think about that one when you wonder whether the war was a good idea.

It will be interesting to see if our mainstream media, when it starts to digest this material, reacts with any thoughtfulness.

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It was in the fall of 1991 that Russian citizens, in the joy ofnew found democracy, knocked over the statue of Comrade Felix Dzerzhinsky, the godfather of the Cheka and attendant vicious organs of Soviet intelligence. Apparently this wasn’t enough. That massively self-destructive and paranoid streak in the Russian culture, unbroken since the Tsars, lives on. Today the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service has dismissed claims that they gave confidential information on US forces to Saddam’s thugs: “Similar, baseless accusations concerning Russia’s intelligence have been made more than once,” agency spokesman Boris Labusov said. “We don’t consider it necessary to comment on such fabrications.”

Thank you, Comrade Labusov, you lying sack of @#@&! Meanwhile, in the same AP report:

Yevgenia Albats, a Moscow-based journalist who specializes in intelligence matters, said she suspected there was “at least a certain truth reflected in the Pentagon report,” considering Russia’s close relationship with the ousted Iraqi leader.

But she cautioned that didn’t necessarily mean the Kremlin was involved.

“It is sometimes difficult to figure out whether certain steps were undertaken with the knowledge of top Russian authorities or whether those were steps undertaken by certain intelligence officers on their own,” Albats told The Associated Press.

What Albats is describing, however, is in many ways a distinction without a difference. On my visits to the Soviet Union I was endlessly tracked by intelligence agents masking as translators and journalists anxious to probe my thinking and in two cases even to recruit me. It was almost a national sport or employment agency. Sometimes it was funny in a macabre sort of way, other times frightening. But looked at from even the slightest distance, self-destructive in the extreme. If you think the world is a conspiracy, indeed it is. Unfortunately, on a more recent trip to the Russian Republic, the atmosphere did not feel radically different. There were just more SUVs.

But the real question, no matter how you fall out on the above, is how we could be trusting the Russians on the Iran issue. [Perhaps the release of all this information right now has something to do with that, you birdbrain.-ed. Watch it, pal. Who's paying whom around here?]

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