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Today’s report that the blue-ribbon Iraq Study Group, led by former Secretary of State James Baker, will call for a pullback of American combat forces in Iraq is the beginning of the end of the war in Iraq. Stripped of its diplomatic weasel words, the ISG’s recommendations are a stunning blow to the administration of George W. Bush and everything it stands for. “We had to move the national debate from whether to stay the course to how do we start down the path out,” said one of the ISG’s commission members, according to The New York Times.

Faced with the ISG consensus, backed by a determined Democratic majority in Congress that was catapulted into power by an American electorate sick of the war, President Bush will have no choice but to capitulate. Early in 2007, American troops will start to come home. War-weary, mainstream Republicans, eager to get Iraq off the table before the 2008 elections, will strongly support the ISG’s exit strategy. It marks a sweeping, irreversible change of course for American foreign policy, and a death blow to Vice President Dick Cheney and the remaining, but dwindling population of neoconservatives inside the administration.

WASHINGTON (Dec. 1) – Without their knowledge, millions of Americans and foreigners crossing U.S. borders in the past four years have been assigned scores generated by U.S. government computers rating the risk that the travelers are terrorists or criminals.

The travelers are not allowed to see or directly challenge these risk assessments, which the government intends to keep on file for 40 years.

The government calls the system critical to national security following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Some privacy advocates call it one of the most intrusive and risky schemes yet mounted in the name of anti-terrorism efforts.

Virtually every person entering and leaving the United States by air, sea or land is scored by the Homeland Security Department’s Automated Targeting System, or ATS. The scores are based on ATS’ analysis of their travel records and other data, including items such as where they are from, how they paid for tickets, their motor vehicle records, past one-way travel, seating preference and what kind of meal they ordered.

The use of the program on travelers was quietly disclosed earlier this month when the department put a notice detailing ATS in the Federal Register, a fine-print compendium of federal rules. The few civil liberties lawyers who had heard of ATS and even some law enforcement officers said they had thought it was only used to screen cargo.

It’s taken nearly a century, but the federal government has finally dropped part of a tax it initially levied on telephone customers to help fund the Spanish-American War.

That’s the good news.

The better news is the Internal Revenue Service expects to return $13 billion in refunds to taxpayers next year.

Known as the “federal excise tax” on phone bills, the 3 percent surcharge on long-distance and bundled service was dropped in August. Refunds will be calculated on phone bills back to March 2003.

The tax will still be assessed on local phone service.

For an explanation of the refunds, reporter Purva Patel talked to Dick Hansen, president of Technology Change Management, whose firm advises businesses on billing issues.

Q: How does one claim this refund?

A: Basically, the way you’re going to claim it is through income tax forms. You can only get the credit on the 2006 forms. So as an individual, I personally will send in my 1040, and there’s a new line on that tax return that asks “What is your credit?” and you take it off your taxes.

Although rarely credited, the anti-war movement has been a major factor in mobilizing a majority of the American public to oppose the occupation and killing in Iraq.

To many observers, the movement seems feckless and marginal, its rallies an incoherent bazaar of radical sloganeering. Yet according to Gallup surveys, a majority of Americans came to view Iraq as a mistake more rapidly than they came to oppose the Vietnam War more than three decades ago. So how could there be a peace majority without a peace movement?

Foreign Affairs, the journal of the foreign policy establishment, wondered about this riddle in a 2005 essay by John Mueller reporting a precipitous decline in public support for the war even though “there has not been much” of a peace movement.

In January, when congressional opinion was shifting against the war, a Washington Post analysis made eight references to “public opinion,” as if it were a magical floating balloon, without any mention of organized lobbying, petitioning, protests or marches. That was consistent with a pattern beginning before the invasion, when both the New York Times and National Public Radio reported that few people attended an October 2002 rally in Washington, only to admit a week later that 100,000 had been in the streets.

Began then abandoned three attempts to write about Iraq, or what’s left of it. Maybe I’ve hit a wall when it comes to the war, or maybe there’s nothing left to say. When I read all the reports and analysis about the slaughterhouse we helped to erect, I feel paralyzed. I don’t know how others can keep offering opinions about this human disaster. At this point, especially for Americans, we should be shamed into silence.

Which is not to suggest, of course, that people do or say nothing about the war. Pressure to find alternatives to the present madness must be maintained, or else it’ll never end. Perhaps what I’m trying to say is that I no longer have anything to add to the chorus. I feel somewhat guilty about this, being a political blogger who’s expected to pop off at daily headlines. But that’s where I’m currently at, for what it’s worth. Besides, there are others, like Juan Cole and Patrick Cockburn, who keep their eyes and ears on the chaos. And my pal Jon Schwarz, who knows quite a bit about US involvement in Iraqi affairs, from pre-Saddam time to now, will always have something to say. Though how he keeps his sense of humor about it eludes me.

After six years of technological research, more than $4 billion spent by Washington on new machinery and a widespread overhaul of the nation’s voting system, this month’s midterm election revealed that the country is still far from able to ensure that every vote counts.

Tens of thousands of voters, scattered across more than 25 states, encountered serious problems at the polls, including failures in sophisticated new voting machines and confusion over new identification rules, according to interviews with election experts and officials.

In many places, the difficulties led to shortages of substitute paper ballots and long lines that caused many voters to leave without casting ballots. Still, an association of top state election officials concluded that for the most part, voting went as smoothly as expected.

Over the last three weeks, attention has been focused on a few close races affected by voting problems, including those in Florida and Ohio where counting dragged on for days. But because most of this year’s races were not close, election experts say voting problems may actually have been wider than initially estimated, with many malfunctions simply overlooked.

That oversight may not be possible in the presidential election of 2008, when turnout will be higher and every vote will matter in what experts say will probably be a close race.

We live in an age of imperialism. The mess into which the US and Britain have got themselves in Iraq is unlikely to change this.

Take the case of Nato—the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation—which holds its summit in Riga, the capital of Latvia, this week. Nato was founded in 1949, supposedly as a defensive military alliance against the Soviet Union, in reality as a means of maintaining the US as the dominant power in postwar western Europe.

This is why Nato wasn’t scrapped at the end of the Cold War. Instead of disappearing, it expanded to incorporate eastern and central Europe, drawing close to Russia’s borders. Latvia was part of the Soviet Union until 1991.

But Nato doesn’t just help the US to encircle Russia. At its relaunch summit in Washington in April 1999 the alliance adopted a new mission statement that committed it to “out of area” operations. European forces would act as junior partners of US imperialism globally.

To judge by the “comprehensive political guidance”, a document for the Riga summit that appeared in the Financial Times last week, Nato now wants to take this further. “Large-scale conventional aggression against the alliance will continue to be highly unlikely,” the document says, but “future attacks may originate from outside the Euro-Atlantic area and involve unconventional forms of assault”.

Hence the importance of enhancing Nato’s “ability to deter, disrupt, defend and protect against terrorism”. To that end, Nato should be able to conduct more than one big operation at a time, as well as a number of small-scale tasks. Some 40 percent of the alliance’s land forces should be able to undertake overseas missions.

It’s hard to know how seriously to take all this. Nato was, notoriously, given the bum’s rush by Donald Rumsfeld after 11 September 2001. The US relied on his “coalitions of the willing” in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Subsequently, however, an increasingly beleaguered George Bush has become keener on support from US allies. One of the first things he did after being re-elected was to visit Nato’s headquarters in Brussels.

France and Germany blocked serious Nato involvement in Iraq. But Nato has become increasingly involved in Afghanistan, where it has recently taken over the International Security Assistance Force occupying the country.

Afghanistan is hardly a shop window for Nato. US, British, and Canadian troops have been involved in very tough fighting with a resurgent Taliban in southern Afghanistan, while the 2,700 German troops based in the north have rules of engagement that stop them from leaving their bases for any offensive operation.

An article in last week’s Financial Times predicts that discontent against Hamid Karzai’s government could spread to the north. The US defeated the Taliban in 2001 through a combination of airpower and huge amounts of money that was used, as the intelligence website Stratfor put it, to “rent” the forces of the Northern Alliance.

Cyberspace police state dismissed by some, yet agenda for regulated, controlled, patrolled “Internet 2” advances

The Internet is the last true unregulated outpost of freedom of speech but moves are afoot to stifle, suffocate and control the world wide web. These threats are not hidden nor are they hard to deduce and yet a significant minority of truth seekers and activists remain naive as to their scope.

Following our publication of yesterday’s article, RIAA Legal Ruling Could Shut Down The Internet, we received a mixed response. Many were aware of the imminent dangers that threaten to change the face of the Internet but others were more hostile to the supposition that the world wide web could be devastated by landmark copyright case rulings as well as plans to develop “Internet 2.”

Some accused us of yellow journalism and scaremongering yet the warning that the Elektra vs. Barker case could criminalize the very mechanism that characterizes the Internet was not concocted by Alex Jones or Paul Joseph Watson, it was a statement made by the very lawyer fighting the case, Ray Beckerman.

It was a danger also reported on by one of the UK’s biggest technology news websites, the Inquirer, which also yesterday highlighted the frightening development in an article entitled, RIAA wants the Internet shut down.

The RIAA’s argument is that defendant Tenise Barker downloaded music files and made them available for distribution by placing them in a shared folder. Though Barker paid for the files and downloaded them legally, and the files were not copied by anyone, the RIAA’s motion states that simply making the files available constitutes copyright infringement.

As Beckerman points out, the entire Internet is nothing more than a giant network of hyperlinks making files ‘available’ to other people. If we link to CNN.com, we are making the file that constitutes the CNN homepage ‘available’ to other users. We don’t own the copyright to any of CNN’s material therefore if the RIAA’s argument is accepted, by simply making that CNN file available from our website, even if no one clicks on the link, we are committing a breach of copyright.

At no point in our article did we suggest that the ruling definitely would shut down the Internet, we highlighted the fact that hundreds of transnational corporations like Amazon.com who solely rely on Internet trade would scream bloody murder. But what the ruling would grease the skids for is the move towards a strictly regulated Internet whereby government permission would be required to run a website and that website would be subject to censoring and deletion if it violated any “terms of use.”

The example I highlighted yesterday on the Alex Jones Show was that running a blog would be like having a You Tube account – any politically sensitive or controversial information that the owners dislike would immediately be removed as it is frequently on You Tube.

In addition, the slide towards a licensed Internet that will be sold using fear of identity and credit card fraud could lead to mandatory biometric thumb or finger scanning simply to access the world wide web.

This is hardly a stretch of the imagination, since numerous public services and functions of society are increasingly accessible only through providing some form of biometric identification. Credit passes for travel, ATM terminals and access to theme parks like Disneyland are just a few of the many services we use that are shifting towards mandatory biometric gatekeeping.

Furthermore, Pay By Touch Online and other companies have already developed and launched keyboard biometric finger scanning terminals that require users to submit their biometric print before they can access the Internet or buy online.

Piggybacking the net neutrality debate, Internet 2 is being shaped to replace the old Internet, which will be allowed to self-destruct as it labors under the pressures of being relegated to slower and slower pipes and users will simply desert a painstaking system.

Earlier this year under the headline, The End of the Internet?, The Nation magazine reported,