In East Vancouver, police beat a man after being called to a domestic dispute. After they’d broken fractured bones around his eyes and handcuffed him, they realized that they were at the wrong residence. Not only is that very bad luck for the guy with the fractured bones, but really, if they had been at the right address and beaten up someone there would that have been any better?

“They have no regard for life, either ours or their own. I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.” That’s what Rear Admiral Harris, in charge at Guantanamo Bay, after three prisoners supposedly hung themselves. Well, it appears that the warfare was indeed asymmetrical, but not against the U.S. Four American soldiers have come forward to say that they were on guard duty in Guantanamo Bay the night that three prisoners supposedly committed suicide, and contrary to the official report, they saw no one, alive or dead, pass between the prisoner’s cellblock and the camp infirmary where the bodies ended up. What they did see earlier in the evening was a government van usually used for transporting prisoners move between the cell block and a separate installation widely believed to be used for torture. The van returned several hours later and stopped at the infirmary. Since the Obama government has taken office, these guards have been cooperating with federal authorities in investigating what really happened that night, but federal investigators have declined to continue the investigation.

And ABC is reporting that the scopes on U.S. military sniper rifles are being stamped with New Testament references by the manufacturer.  That’s not strictly a beating, but it sure breaks the rules.

The current recession makes the need more urgent, but also makes the decision to spend more to reduce poverty more financially responsible. Economists are quite clear that the best way to get more money into circulation in the economy is to give it to the poorest people you can find, because they will spend it, while those of us who are well-off are more likely to dump it into a savings account. And yet governments are still not putting the money where it is most needed, and food bank use is increasing rapidly.

• The only surviving UK WWI vet doesn’t attend Remembrance Day ceremonies because they glorify war.
• A letter from former American Army Ranger Kevin Tillman about his brother Pat.

• 133 Canadian soldiers killed. 1513 NATO troops killed. People killed 20,119. Two UK soldiers were killed on Saturday.
• Afghanistan’s army is not becoming the guardian of safety and freedom that it has been trumpeted as.
• Afghanistan’s election scamming president is pointing out, correctly, that military force is not going to bring peace to Afghanistan.
• And commentators are still pretending that we should waste the lives of our soldiers because we’ve already wasted the lives of so many soldiers and we can’t admit that it was wrong.

• 20,000 Japanese protesting the U.S. military base on Okinawa. The U.S. has over 700 military bases on foreign soil, spanning over 120 countries.
• Hezbollah is rearming in preparation for a widely expected Israeli offensive in Lebanon this winter or spring. Israel is expected to attack Lebanon before attacking the Iranian nuclear program in order to stop Hezbollah, an ally of Iran’s,  from firing rockets into northern Israel.
• A civil war is expanding in Yemen. And the Yemeni government is now planning to build a nuclear power plant, which will likely have a destabilizing effect.