lightspeedius is +5 insightful, mod it up

This is the first time I've ever heard someone claim that the Taliban are actually a force of liberation, struggling to overthrow the US tyranny. In any case, that would be a civil war, so there would still be a war in Afghanistan.

You are right, I spoke a bit hastily; Canadian law enforcement was complicit in investigating Arar, so the Canadian government was at least slightly onboard.

What I haven't seen is any commentary on the Australian government's position on this. What do they think?

I'm Canadian; I sympathize with you on the having-a-small-force-in-Afghanistan front. The question of "why" is a good one for historians and political scientists, but the question we need to ask now that we're there is "how do we deal with this so that our own nation, the other nations involved, and the Afghans suffer the least?"

Assange had the power to say "no, we will not release these". He also had the power to wait to release until the documents had been carefully scrutinized to remove names and identifying details of anyone who might be endangered. At the very least, he is accessory to any crimes that might have been committed by the sources of leaks.

"It's OK to recklessly endanger informants and those who help the coalition, because people need to know the truth!" How does the death of one man get outweighed by the opportunity to find out some statistics?

It's funny that OP never mentioned the US in his post. If Wikileaks' actions led to the deaths of Australians (and there are over a thousand Australians in Afghanistan), then he could be considered a traitor.

If the Pentagon aided Wikileaks in any way, they would be conceding legitimacy to them, which would open several cans of worms that would not help them in any way.

This didn't stop them from extraditing Maher Arar.

But the most spelled-out format would be "the ninth day of August in the Year of our Lord two thousand and ten." So 9 Aug 2010 (NATO standard) is logical.

Volume of a 15 x 2 x 3 cm chocolate bar: 9e-5 cubic metres
Volume of an Olympic swimming pool: 2.5e3 cubic metres
Volume ratio is 1 : 2.78e7
Total volume of the oceans is 1.3e18 cubic metres
Iceberg volume, in the same ratio as chocolate bar : swimming pool, would be 4.68e10 cubic metres
If the iceberg is 200 m thick, then the area is 234 square kilometres.
The area of the iceberg, according to the article, is 260 square kilometres
O.o
You, sir, have astounding powers of estimation.

In Ottawa (well, at least in the schools in Ottawa that I've been to), all the high schools are PC-only or at the most have a half-dozen Macs for classes like Film that need the video-editing. This may be because there was a fire sale on PCs after the high-tech crash, though...

Shh! If Tom Clancy hears you, he'll come over and beat you to death with his Mac, the Constitution, and a shit-ton of whatever the newest American weapon is.

If at first you don't succeed, crash, crash again. MCCAIN '08

Someday Canada's going to go postal.