USA does operate torture flights out of the Netherlands

The culprit is US Airways, a company which torments its travellers by putting them into burning aeroplanes. The plane was supposed to travel from Amsterdam to Philadelphia, but the pilot apparently decided that he didn't need the extra illumination on his left wing, and returned to Schiphol Airport. No one was injured.

19:27

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Have you booked your holiday to a war zone yet?

My position on Guantanamo Bay is well known: since the prisoners there don't fall under the protection of the Geneva convention, and habeas corpus doesn't apply, Congress should adopt laws which classify them as - well, as something other than nothing - and which guarantee some sort of due process. They've had four years to do so and I think it's about bloody time they got on with it.

That being said, I do not buy into the meme that the people who were staying there are for the most part innocent bystanders who were at the wrong place at the wrong time, as Dutch quality broadsheet NRC Handelsblad seems to allege in an article today:

'Jamal al-Harith (38) did not have an alibi, and was released, like other British citizens, after the British government had exerted pressure (on the American administration, AD). The Jamaican website designer, whose birth name is Ronald Fiddler and who converted to Islam, was a holiday maker in the border area between Pakistan and Afghanistan. When the bombardments on Afghanistan started, he wanted to leave.'

Yeah, I like to go hiking in dangerous, remote areas of the world too, especially when Al Qaeda training camps are within walking distance and America is about to start bombing the shit out of it. Napalm reminds me of the sunny sugar cane fields of Jamaica. Puh-leeze.

Of course, making sure the legislative and judiciary branch get to weigh in on what happens at Gitmo doesn't just make sense in a constitutional way, but also PR-wise. For the claims of the Bush administration that Gitmo is a necessity would become a lot more credible if they are supported by a different branch of the state, especially if that branch is not necessarily a political ally of the current administration.

17:45

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