Oh, I'm sure someone will be churning out satellite imagery of what might be North Korean missiles with Pakistani warheads there soon.

Or maybe just a teeny-weeny bioweapons laboratory in the backyard of some kindergarten so's we can add these beasties are using children as human shields too?

By the way, do the Americans still operate a electronic listening post in or around Asmara? They did in the 1960s: I almost got my a55 kicked there in 1966 because a few patrons in a local café thought I worked there. Everybody in the whole place suddenly became really warm and human as soon as I said I didn't.

The issue is not what is closed or left open, but what happens to its, um, guests and the minimum standards of, um, hospitality to be applied at all detention centers worldwide.

Torture's prime value is not extraction of operational information, but terrorization of the population within its reach. To that end, it is very very important to publicize that most detainees are probably innocent: that way EVERYBODY feels threatened and goes to extremes to keep beneath the radar screen.

Got it now?

Mr. Biden has singlehandedly performed the second "zero reset" of Russia/US relations. (sigh)

Yikes! THANX. Crimean War! Yes!

Such a move would take the Russia and the US one step closer to mutual thermonuclear evaporation and my guess is he's looking at window between 2012 and 2015.

I'm sure Gen. McChrystal read the Charge of the Light Brigade when he was in high school but does he know it happened in Afghanistan?

Any strike package that failed to secure radical regime change would, among other things, cause Iran to drop out of Nabucco, which would seriously jeopardize US oil strategy out to contain China and Russia ad well as to reduce European dependence on Russian oil.

Google up M.K. Bhadrakumar at, say, www.atimes.com for more insight.

There's an old story about a fellow who takes a commercial flight for the first time in his life. After a few minutes, the captain announces he's lost an engine, stresses the aircraft's safety and adds the only real problem is the inconvenience of arrival 20 minutes late. Half an hour later, the captain announces loss of a second engine and arrival 60 minutes late. Yet another hour later, he announces loss of a third engine and arrival 2 hours late. Suddenly, our passenger says to his neighbor "Gosh, I hope he doesn't lose the last engine -- otherwise we'll be stuck up here all day."

The continuity of the current Administration over its predecessor is unfortunate but unsurprizing.

Yep. He was a brilliant stand-up straight man in a macabre decade-long comedy that cost the lives of at least 57,000 Americans and 3,000,000 Vietnamese. Today 4,000,000 million Vietnamese suffer from the effects of Agent Orange and its molecular kin, with more freakshow babies born daily there. How many American babies are born funny because they carry the agent orange gene too?

The purpose of torture is to terrorize the unarrested. To be truly effective, it is imperative to make it known that some or most of the tortured are innocent. That way, everyone knows "It can happen to me."

It diminishes the sum total of a perception of freedom in a nation's population.

Once the torture of innocents among the guilty becomes acceptable because it catches the guilty, they say, then it follows that it is acceptable to torture the citizen as well as the alien.

This is where the game is going; Ms. Shepherd is a sharp player.