In the current New Yorker, Seymour Hersh reports that some hawks in the U.S. administration saw Israel's battle with Hezbollah as a test case for a possible air attack on Iran.

This NYT piece from Aug. 14 (I thought I'd be the last media blogger in the world to mention it) talks about the difficulty of assigning proportionality to image when covering a conflict like Lebanon.

The Beeb did a round-up of some Mideast bloggers in the wake of the ceasefire between Hezbollah and Lebanon.

The bloggers do not feel we have achieved peace in our time. :)

The war on terror has suffered another blow. A federal judge in Detroit has declared the Bush administration's warrantless eavesdropping program to be illegal and unconstitutional. She wants it halted at once.

The NYT's Adam Cohen argues why the seminal Bush v. Gore ruling of the Supreme Court of the United States that handed the presidency to Dubya shouldn't be allowed to slide down the memory hole.

This NYT analysis looks at how the U.S. is framing the current series of conflicts with Islamist groups.

From the Salon blurb: Homegrown U.K. terror is a growing threat, multicultural "tolerance" can't combat it, and the war in Iraq will only make it worse.

In the United States, the vacation appears to be dying as people maintain their electronic tethers to the office, fearful that if they don't, they'll get shit-canned or, even worse, lose promotional opportunities.

Israel wants some short-range artillery rockets from the United States that use cluster-munition warheads. Israel wants them to attack Hezbollah missile batteries, but can you say, 'collateral damage'?

This NYT article looks at how the U.S. has focused on learning from the lessons of 9/11 while forgetting about the possibility of new emerging security threats.

According to this BBC story, many Muslims are not happy with Dubya's talk of Islamic fascists as he reacted to news of the latest terror plot.

Political writer and academic Timothy Garton Ash looks at why Britain's Muslims appear to be the most alienated in Europe, according to a Pew Poll.

OK, so now we have a UN-approved resolution to halt the hostilities in Lebanon. How easy will de-fanging Hezbollah be without a political settlement that Hezbollah can buy into? I think we all know the answer: Not very.

With all the other things to target -- buildings, transit systems, to name a few -- why do Islamist militants keep returning to aircraft as a target? Defence studies professor Michael Clarke explains why.

This Slate column observes that U.S. businesses that cater to the mass affluent are reporting disappointing financial results. It sets out to explain why, and part of the answer is that "yuppie inflation" is rising faster than core inflation.

An excerpt from a commentary by Slate national correspondent William Saletan (h/t to The Tyee):

We're living in a liquid world. All the solid lines—states, borders, battlefronts—are melting. British Home Secretary John Reid made that point in a speech yesterday. Then he reassured Britons that their government, through tougher immigration control, was protecting them from terrorists, "many of whom come from far beyond our shores and have no real connection with our nation."

Nice try. According to reports, all 20 or so alleged conspirators arrested in the new plot are British citizens. Sealing your borders won't protect you.

So, what do we do? As Reid put it,

What happens when the threat to our nation, and hence to all of us as individuals, comes not from a fascist state but from what might be called fascist individuals? Individuals who are unconstrained by any of the international conventions, laws agreements or standards, and have therefore, unconstrained intent? Individuals who can network courtesy of new technology and access modern chemical, biological and other means of mass destruction, and who have therefore unconstrained capability?

The answer is, some of us die. And the rest of us grieve, but we go on, doing our best to fight the bad guys and heal the world. The grieving and fighting and healing never end the dying. "We are probably in the most sustained period of severe threat since the end of World War II," Reid observed. "While I am confident that the Security Services and Police will deliver 100% effort and 100% dedication, they can never guarantee 100% success."

That's the bottom line: We die. In a liquid world, you can't seal off evil. All you can do is fight liquid with liquid. You have to absorb the tragedy, flowing around and through it. You need the strength of a river, not a rock. You need resilience. You can't be untouchable, but you can be undefeated.

Reid ended his speech with a quote from Charles Darwin: "It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change." It isn't the individual who has to adapt and survive. It's the species.

This Globe and Mail analysis asks whether al Qaeda is back.

The Beeb rounds up what the Brit papers are reporting in their Friday editions on Thursday's 'bomb plot' arrests.

If you go to this CTV.ca story and click on the Kathy Tomlinson video item, what you'll learn that it's not that easy to blow a plane out of the sky. Plenty of planes have survived small explosions with minimal loss of life.

(On the other hand, The Globe and Mail headlined one story: Liquid-based explosives could easily down airliners. The paper has a story on a previous al Qaeda plot known as Operation Bojinka, which sought to blow up airliners over the Pacific Ocean).

As such, some of the intonations from officials about "mass murder on an unimaginable scale" strike me as hyperbole. Had the 9/11 bombers hit lower on the World Trade Center towers or hit a half-hour later, they could have likely killed thousands more people than the roughly 3,000 they actually did.

However, the fanatics behind these plots are not stupid people (although fortunately for us, they aren't criminal masterminds either). One of these times, they will get "lucky" -- and mass tragedy on a scale even greater than 9/11 will ensue.

The one I still fear is a dirty bomb or suitcase nuke detonated in a world financial capital.

Democracy Now! spoke with Richard Debs, member of the international advisory board for Morgan Stanley and the former chair of the board of the American University in Lebanon.

This Lebanese-American thinks the current conflict in Lebanon will be a long-term catastrophe for U.S. interests in the region.

Joe Lieberman's fate, apparently. The three-time Senator from Connecticut got dumped by his party last night. They went with Ned Lamont, who fiercely opposes the Iraq War -- and who didn't get bussed on the cheek by Dubya after the 2005 State of the Union speech.

What does it all mean? Adam Nagourney of the NYT has an analysis.

The Chicago Tribune's Paul Salopek was told it would be impossible to trace where his city's gasoline came from. Fortunately, he didn't listen to that sage advice.

The Beeb's Alister Leithead hangs and yaks with some British troops operating in Helmand province and draws some comparisons with Iraq.