Actually, I thought it "again raises one of the United States most vexing questions: Who is really in charge of the country?" Israel? Or Americans?

As a Canadian, I am ashamed, disgusted, dismayed by the silence of our government on this issue. EVERY other detainee citizen of a western country has been freed or returned to his own country except Khadr. The trial is a travesty- how can you charge someone with murder in the midst of a war? Taking up arms when an invading group is shooting at you- this is a war crime? What was he supposed to do- shoot himself, I suppose?

This trial is a nail in the coffin at the burial of the last vestiges of American credibility. That it happens under a Democratic President reveals to the world what we barely dared to fear: that it was never a question of George W. Bush; GW was not an aberration away from what America truly is and stands for; Obama has proved what the United States really is. A rogue state, a worth successor to Stalin's Russia. God help us all.

Enough time has passed for us to pass judgement on the Obama regime: he's GW with good diction.

Every one of the revolutionary ideas inserted into US politics by GW- ideas that were once absurd but are now core beliefs- preventive war, global death squads, star chamber courts, indefinite detention, permanent war against a tactic, absolute executive power in a permanently undeclared state of war- all of these are revolutionary ideas and are only, at least in their implementation, some eight years old. All are unconstitutional. All are... un-American.

Obama could and should have identified them one by one and eliminated them as revolutionary.

But there will, it seems, be no counter-revolution.

It's possible that the Iraqis, like the French and Germans after world wars 1 and 2, will make peace because they all have long and bitter experience with the alternative. There may be at least some hope that all sides are so exhausted by six years of fighting that they're willing to compromise.

Wasn't Stalin's remark "It's not who votes that counts- it's who counts the votes?" Or perhaps that symetrical phrasing is only available in English.

The perfection is in the chutzpa. And the irony is that only Hebrew can provide a word that adequately describes it.