First, barring truly extraordinary circumstances, such as the likelihood that the claimant will destroy or conceal them, or clearcut evidence of ownership, items on international loan such as these should be exempt from such seizures lest museums cease to make such loans.

Second, Jordan has no legal claim to ownership. Prior to 1948, Judea and Samaria (the “West Bank”) as well as East Jerusalem were part of the British Mandate of Palestine. These areas were intended by the United Nations to become part of a Palestinian Arab state, but the Arabs rejected the partition plan and attacked Israel. In the course of the war, Jordan captured these areas, annexed them, and continued to occupy them until 1967 when Israel successfully repelled another Arab attack. No country other than the United Kingdom recognized the Jordanian annexation as it was the result of an illegal war of aggression and represented the seizure of territory to which it had no claim.

Third, Israel has a far stronger moral claim to the Dead Sea Scrolls than Jordan or the Palestinian Arabs. They were written by Jews in Israel about Jewish religion and related topics. They were not written by Arabs or in Arab lands and do not deal with topics of particular concern to Arabs or Muslims. In short, they are part of Jewish heritage, not Arab heritage.

An additional factor is the history of the handling of the scrolls. In spite of their clear relevance to Jewish history, while they were under Jordanian control, Jewish scholars were not permitted to see them. Only as a result of the liberation of Jerusalem in 1967 did the scrolls become accessible to Jewish scholars. In other words, while the Scrolls are in Israeli custody, we can be assured that they will be accessible not only to those most directly concerned, Jewish scholars, but to all. In Arab custody, there is a grave risk that access will be restricted. This is an instance of a more general pattern: under Jordanian occupation, Israelis were denied access to Jewish holy places such as the Temple Mount and Wailing Wall in Jerusalem and the Cave of Machpelah in Hebron.

The first reason is that the US military recognizes conscientious objectors. The problem here is that the US only considers a person to be a conscientious objector if he or she is an absolute pacifist. A soldier who objects to the war in Iraq but is not opposed to all wars is not eligible for conscientious objector status.

The second reason is that US troops are all volunteers and that they knew what they were getting into when they enlisted. It is true that they are volunteers, but not that they knew what they were getting into. The Bush Administration justified the invasion of Iraq on the grounds that Iraq was in league with Al Qaeda and had weapons of mass destruction. Both of these grounds were spurious. The result is that soldiers who enlisted thinking that they would be defending the United States and fighting terrorism were sent to war for entirely different purposes. Furthermore, the US’s incompetent conduct of the war has put soldiers at risk in ways that they could not have expected. Finally, the US has engaged in war crimes, in which some soldiers naturally do not wish to be complicit.

The deserters who seek asylum in Canada now do so for reasons much like those that motivated the war resisters of the Vietnam era, and like them, they do not have the option of conscientious objection. Just as Canada did the right thing during the Vietnam War and gave asylum to US war resisters, so we should do so again.

Geert Wilders’ film Fitna, which Islamic organizations have tried to suppress sight unseen, has been released and is available here. Having just watched it, I can see why these organizations do not like it: it is an accurate portrayal of a segment of Muslim opinion. The quotations from the Qur’an are authentic; the footage of Islamic terrorism and its results is real; the interviews with Muslims expressing hatred of Jews consistent with others that I have seen.

The presence of Israel on the list is indeed questionable. The Supreme Court of Israel has explicitly prohibited any form of torture, and the evidence is that with the occasional lapse this prohibition is observed. The United States, on the other hand, is quite properly included. We know that the United States deports foreigners, like Canadian Maher Arar, to countries where they will be tortured, and we know that, as a matter of Bush administration policy, the United States engages in torture, including, notoriously, waterboarding. US Ambassador Wilkins did not even have the gall to deny that the United States practices torture - he merely whined about the inappropriateness of including a great country like the US in a list with evil countries like Iran and China.

I find it appalling that the government has so readily agreed to the demands of the United States. If they had any backbone, they would tell the US that it will be removed from the roll of dishonour only when it repudiates torture. The criminals of the Bush administration do not deserve special treatment.

ordered Microsoft to obey a March 2004 commission order to share confidential computer code with competitors.

In point of fact, the EU ordered Microsoft to provide the specifications for its protocols, not “confidential compute code”. The judgment
is as explicit as could possibly be:

In the contested decision, the Commission emphasises that the refusal in question does not relate to Microsoft’s ‘source code’, but only to specifications of the protocols concerned, that is to say, to a detailed description of what the software in question must achieve, in contrast to the implementations, consisting in the implementation of the code on the computer (recitals 24 and 569 to the contested decision). It states, in particular, that it ‘does not contemplate ordering Microsoft to allow copying of Windows by third parties’ (recital 572 to the contested decision).

Have the Times’ reporters not read the judgment? Do they not understand the difference between source code and specifications? Or are they deliberately lying on behalf of Microsoft?

in an open format, the computer code is public, which allows developers to create new products that use it without paying royalties.

This is just flat wrong. An open format is a format, not a computer program. It does not consist of code. Rather, it specifies how information about a document’s format is represented, that is, how one indicates that the next word is in italics or that a new paragraph is to start. The Times article gives the misleading impression that companies are being asked to disclose the source code for their word processors. They aren’t. Rather, an open document standard, like the existing ISO standard Open Document Format, ensures that one word processor can read files saved by another word processor.

The Times article is also misleading in that it refers to OOXML as “open”. The openness of OOXML is one of the main points of dispute. Microsoft is putting OOXML forth as an open format, but critics have rightly observed that it contains quite a few undefined features, that is, secret features that can be implemented only by Microsoft. OOXML is not open, which by itself is reason to reject it.

Yet another error in the Times article is the attribution of the Open Document Format to “a consortium led by IBM”. Actually, ODF is based on a format developed by Sun and was created by OASIS. The OASIS committee included members not only from Sun and IBM but from Adobe, Ars Aperta, Beijing Sursen International Information Technology, Design Science, Novell, Intel, the Royal National Institute for the Blind, the Institute for Defense Analyses, and Duke University. Microsoft could have participated if they had wished to.

These issues have been extensively discussed in the technical community, and there are excellent summaries available. A major source of information is Rob Weir’s blog An Antic Disposition. Another is Andy Updegrove’s Standard’s Blog. There’s really no excuse for the Times to get this wrong.