Backpedal, backpedal. After a Guardian story on Saudi plans to increase tourism, the government quickly changed their website to remove some of the most inflammatory terms and conditions. The original website read:

Visas will not be issued for the following groups of people: An Israeli passport holder or a passport that has an Israeli arrival/departure stamp[,] Those who don't abide by the Saudi traditions concerning appearance and behaviors[, and] Jewish People.

The post-Guardian version simply says, "The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia's visa regulations are available at the Kingdom's Consulates. When erroneous information was noticed on SCT's website, it was removed. SCT regrets any inconvenience this may have caused."

In any case, don't think you're going to find a direct flight from Tel Aviv to Riyadh anytime soon; the visa application from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs still lists "religion" as a necessary field.

The Guardian also noted that the al'Sauds had a history of arresting tourists on spurious charges of terrorism, which brings us to a not-unrelated piece of news: Two British men are suing Saudi government officials for damages, claiming that they were tortured into confessing to a series of bomb attacks against Westerners in 2000.

Sandy Mitchell and Les Walker spent two and a half years in prison, and were sentenced to beheading and crucifixtion before being released in 2003. Their lawyers claim that the Saudi government tortured the men and five other foreign nationals with beatings, sleep deprivation, and threats in order to coerce false confessions from them.

The Saudi government, which linked the bombings to rivalries between alcohol smuggling gangs, has denied any coercion. But others outside the government argue that the kingdom has tried to cover up the involvement of Islamist terrorists in the bombing wave, which has continued since 2000 to injure and kill Westerners in Saudi Arabia. Saad al'Fagh, a Saudi dissident now living in London, has told reporters that splinter terror groups have taken credit for the bombings.

 
Insofar as Lawler's feelings on bioethics go, his thoughtful pieces on biotechnology and human happiness are well worth reading: here and here. I do have to wonder if this comment will come back to haunt him, however: "Mormons are oppressive with a smile."

 
The President's Council on Bioethics is, let us be clear, a political creature designed primarily to give the President good advice within rather narrow ideological parameters. It is not an independent commission charged with careful consideration of the issues, but instead a group of like-minded theorists given the chance to promote their values in full. (Less charitable minds might say that they are an intellectual fig leaf for policies decided upon well before they convened.)

Having said that, the news that two members of the panel have been ejected for essentially disagreeing with the political stance of the White House is saddening if unsurprising. Both Dr. Blackburn, a former President of the American Society for Cell Biology, and Dr. May, a founder of The Hastings Center for Bioethics, were supremely qualified members of the Council.

Of the replacements, Dr. Carson is the most qualified; a brilliant neurosurgeon, he became director of Pediatric Neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins when only 32 years old, earning his way with high-risk, high-profile surgical interventions. He has also written a number of spiritually-uplifting books and was the subject of a short documentary, Heroes: A Triumph of the Spirit. Nonetheless, beyond his medical career and religious writings, it's not clear if he has any background in bioethics.

The other two appointees, Peter Lawler and Diana Schaub, are political scientists (which I cheerfully admit is "science" only in the most tenuous sense). Both are well-respected for their work in political theory and history (Schaub is a respected theorist, while Lawler has written extensively on Tocqueville), but neither is known for their work on bioethics, and both are politically very conservative (Schaub delights in attacking postmodernism and calls Generation X "degenerate," while Lawler is quite frankly a partisan Republican, having written extensively for The National Review on political topics).

We do at least know the position Schaub holds on the matters before the Council, as she made clear in an article for The Public Interest:

[I]f one were, with an open mind, to read the whole of the [Council's report on cloning] ... one would be persuaded of the rightness of banning all human cloning, whether for the purpose of children or research. ... Kass reminds us ... that "reasonable and morally serious people can differ about fundamental issues," but I take it that this unique experiment in clarifying the differences is undertaken in the hope that such clarification will lead to the concord of truth. In other words, this is not a matter about which we can just agree to disagree. There is an imperative to continue reasoning with one another, which implies, I think, that there is reason with a capital R out there somewhere, and that reasonable people, were they perfectly reasonable, or even just sufficiently reasonable to the occasion, would arrive at it. ...

Cloning is an evil; and cloning for the purpose of research actually exacerbates the evil by countenancing the willful destruction of nascent human life. Moreover, it proposes doing this on a mass scale, as an institutionalized and routinized undertaking to extract medical benefits for those who have greater power. It is slavery plus abortion.

Schaub does make, of course, a perfectly reasonable and defensible point -- but one might wish that she were willing to concede that those who disagree with her might be equally reasonable and their arguments equally defensible.

 
... And a thick neck, too: "If you want to be at the top, you've got to have broad shoulders." (Barry Bonds, on how he has been affected by the BALCO/steroids controversy)

 
The Soviet Reunion Tour continues in Belarus, where Baptist pastors are being prosecuted and fined for refusing to register with the government. The International Union of Baptist Churches, a Russian Baptist organization, has had its members repeatedly fined for failure to register and holding prayer services in private homes, which is illegal for all groups in the nation.

 
Twenty years and six billion dollars after program inception, the RH-66 Comanche is being canceled, according to the Pentagon.

The troubled history of the Comanche is a case study in military mismanagement. The Army repeatedly changes its design decisions -- five years into development, for example, it decided that the single-seater reconnaissance helicopter it asked for should instead be a two-seat reconnaissance/attack platform. A 2001 GAO report on the RAH-66 warned that the Army's indecisiveness and repeated spec changes "increase the risk that the Comanche's planned performance goals may not be achieved." The GAO concluded that "the Army started the Comanche's program too early in terms of technology readiness," and that "[Today] the program is confronted with rising development costs, a compressed development schedule, and several major areas of high technical risk." In 2002, the Army carried out a much-lauded reassessment of the Comanche program, slimming the helicopter back down to a reconnaissance role, and the craft seemed poised to escape what had long been thought an inevitable cancellation.

This isn't to say that the Comanche, of which two prototype platforms currently exist, is a high-tech fantasy. The helicopter currently tops out at a speedy 230 MPH, can vertically climb 500 ft/min (its closest reconnaissance competitor, the OH-58D Kiowa Warrior, pokes along at 100 feet per minute), strafes at 70 MPH, has a radar profile 250 times smaller than the Kiowa Warrior's, and is half as loud as any other helicopter. With more time and a whole lot more money, the Comanche would have been a formidable enemy in the field.

So why was the RAH-66 cancelled this year, when the program was just coming back to life? Part of it is certainly the squeezing of the development budget in the military, as the Administration seeks to accomodate increasing costs in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. Another part of the puzzle is surely the problems encountered with the Stryker combat vehicle, which is going to require lengthy refit for improved survivability in the field. Finally, the direction the Comanche was headed in -- to become a remote targeting platform for other services' guided munitions -- may have persuaded the Army to spend its scarce funds for weapons systems that provide more direct benefit to the Army itself. It's likely that the Comanche funds will be redirected into a planned agile transport helicopter intended to carry the Future Combat System (FCS), a light combat force comprised of 18 platforms networked down to the soldier level. FCS is planned to be rolled out in 2010; any air transport would, of course, take longer to be put into production.

 
The biotech trade journal Acumen (current issue Vol. I, No. IV) has a must-read on bioterrorism, including details on the extent of the work done by the Soviet biowarfare center Biopreparat. Amongst the most chilling creations were "binary inocularies," genetically-modified diseases containing two different viruses, one of which was coded to express itself only when the first virus was treated.

For example, the Soviets considered a genetic crossbreed of plague with Venezuelan equine encephalitis, in which plague manifested itself first. Upon treatment with tetracycline, the VEE virus would be activated, attacking an already weakened host (VEE has a mortality rate of ~20% for those who develop encephalitis). With literally tens of thousands of skilled bioweapons creators out of work in the former Soviet Union and beyond, the threat of a bioweapons black market is very real indeed.

For those who don't have access to the journal, GMU has the primary article from the issue online.

 
Following up on the Iranian election story (referenced in the press roundup below), hardliners have once again taken control of the Iranian Majlis, after a controversial election in which the theocratic Guardian Council prevented more than half of the standing candidates from running, on grounds of being insufficiently Islamic in character. This Majlis election, the seventh since the revolution, is arguably the least free since the end of the Iran-Iraq war in 1988.

Reports from Tehran say that the mood is subdued, the traditional election-day rallies comprised mostly of government employees and basiji (a paramilitary youth group known for its attacks on reformists). Official government figures, always suspect, put votes cast at around 20 million, a 50% turnout that is considerably less than the ~65% turnout seen in the last elections, where reformists took control. (The Guardian Council has accused the government of deliberately skewing the numbers downward, though their protests are even less credible than the numbers themselves in the current environment.)

That the hardline clerics would so abruptly shut down political reformism in Iran seems, at least provisionally, to be related to the changes in Iran's relations with the outside world. With information coming out about Iran's deals on the nuclear black market, and American and NATO forces essentially surrounding the country (in Iraq, Turkey, Afghanistan and Turkmenistan), Iran is having to adjust to a greatly changed regional stage. It's certainly possible that the clerics feared the results of liberalizing pressure coming from both within and without.

 
A tempest in a teapot? Media check: Lefty bloggers and news sites are reporting that the Administration suppressed a Pentagon report warning of catastrophic climatic change. A quick look at the list of "findings", however, tells a different story. The laundry list of nightmares ("[V]iolent storms smash coastal barriers ... Deaths from war and famine run into the millions ... Mega-droughts affect the world's major breadbaskets" and so on) is patently not a list of likely occurences, but instead a "what-if" scenario to deal with possible threats.

It's long been an open secret that we have military plans dealing with a vast number of contingencies, ready to take off the shelf and update in the event of a real-world crisis. Sometimes these are simply analyses of possible situations (which the "climate wars" report seems to be), while others are full-blown warplans (the most famous being the "Rainbow plans" developed before World War Two, which envisioned wars against not only the Axis powers -- Rainbow 5 -- but also France, Mexico, the Caribbean, and even Britain and Canada). More modern examples would be Silent Prairie, a military scenario designed to test what might happen if an eco-terrorist group managed to introduce mad cow disease into a large number of American ranching operations. (The results were not encouraging.)

The military and other groups also go beyond tabletop scenarios to see what might happen in the field. The TOPOFF anti-terror exercises can bring entire city, state and federal organizations into a simulated terrorist attack. UNIFIED DEFENSE 04 is taking place in Texas this week, dealing with simultaneous nuclear-powered terror strikes from Islamists, maritime threats from Alaskan right-wing extremists, and a foreign country threatening tactical strikes against the mainland. According to sources I've spoken to, a secret exercise was held a few months after the 2001 anthrax mailings in which Bacillus subtilis was dumped into a North Texas water supply, to see if existing safeguards were sufficient to protect against an anthrax bioterror attack (these results were encouraging). But none of these -- analyses, simulations or exercises -- should be taken as representative of actual policies or intelligence.

 
It's been a while since I've done a world news update, so here we go with the state of play this weekend:

JAPAN, CHINA AND KOREAS: Trilateral meetings on North Korea have consumed Japanese, American and South Korean officials before Wednesday's six-way talks, while China and Russia are preparing for their role separately ... In Japan, last year's police raid on the Goryokai loanshark group netted further benefits, as police have found over six billion yen (roughly US$55M) laundered through Hong Kong channels ... Gang violence escalates as yakuza fight for turf, possibly finding weakness in the Yamaguchi-gumi syndicate (linked to the Goryokai) ... China is suggesting it might raise interest rates, which would not only slow inflation, but could keep the Renminbi's value high.

INDIA AND PAKISTAN: Prime Minister Vajpayee has launched an ambitious expansion of the social safety net (also here and here) intended to cover 37 crore (370 million) workers not currently covered by social programs ... A resolution to the clashes between Hindus and Muslims over the ownership of the Ramjanambhoomi/Babari Masjid complex seem further away as Muslims refuse to advance with talks until the elections are over with, arguing that the issue is too important to leave the impression of political influence.

Iran's admission that it bought equipment on the international arms black market has led to an Indian visit by Iranian security head Hassan Rohani, evidently in the hope India can forestall IAEA action against Iran ... Indian Defense Minister George Fernandes has announced that OKB Sukhoi will replace India's MiG-21s with their new Sukhoi-30 fighters. India currently has around 50 Sukhoi-30s in operation; it has slowly upgraded its MiG-21s with limited success, and has spoken often about either purchasing or licensing for production more Sukhoi-30 planes.

In Kashmir, Pakistani-financed revolutionary group Hizbul Mujahideen threatens retaliation against Kashmiris participating in Lok Sabha (Indian Parliament) elections ... The Kashmiri power crisis is likely to worsen in the future, both due to deteriorating infrastructure and economically-infeasible bargains that let consumers pay a flat rate for effectively-unmetered electricity ... Pakistan is undertaking another operation to oust al'Qaeda forces in South Waziristan, although recent attempts in the same area have had little success (but see the post below) ... With the chaos affecting the area, narcotics growth and shipping continue to plague India, Pakistan, and Myanmar.

RUSSIA: A Russian jury has asked for leniency for neo-Nazis involved in riots three years ago ... The Duma is considering bill to drastically limit the ability of the press to report on terror attacks, something that supporters say is necessary to stop terrorists from succeeding and opponents say is censorship that will lead only to rumormongering ... The Russian military reportedly has kept the true state of its disarray and weakness from Vladimir Putin, going so far as to hide the failure of a scheduled missile test by denying that any missile test was scheduled ... An increasingly weakened Communist Party is splitting along internal faction lines, crippling its already limited chances in the upcoming Presidential elections (more information on the elections here) ... Research shows that Russia includes more women amongst senior management than any other country, with 90% of Russian companies having women in senior management, and 42% of senior management slots filled by women.

AFRICA AND THE MIDDLE EAST: Rebels in Uganda reportedly killed 192 refugees Saturday in that country's ongoing civil war ... MEMRI has more information on the Saddam oil voucher affair ... In Iran, controversial elections from which moderates and reformists were excluded left Iranians wondering if they should vote at all; the official Iranian news agency now says over 20 million votes were cast in Friday's election, down roughly 15% from the last election ... As a hearing in the Hague opened on the legality of the Israeli separation fence, another terrorist attack rocked Jerusalem, causing panic in the PA and condemnations of the Hague process from Palestinian terror groups.

 
The Sunday Express claims, and others have picked up, that Osama bin Ladin has been targeted by Special Forces. Although the Express is slightly less reliable than an NYT zone-flooder on the Augusta National, this is worth watching, if only to stay ahead of the curve. We can only, of course, hope for journalistic accuracy.