It's always something

What I like about reading the news everyday is the surprises I often find. Things unknown before or a little out of the ordinary.

Today I learned that outgoing President Bush has left a personal note to incoming President Obama in the top drawer of the desk in the Oval Office. This was a practice that started with Ronald Reagan who left one for his successor, and presidents have been doing it ever since. Of, course the mainstream media would have you believe that these are "welcome to the office and good luck" notes.

Don't be fooled for a minute. These notes are to advise the incoming guy that there really are pieces of a crashed alien spaceship and alien remains cryogenically frozen in Area 51, and that the staff on site serves a really good lunch if the President wants to visit.

On another topic, a couple of years ago there was huge flap in Canada over the fact that a Canadian Muslim guy named Maher Arar, who was connecting on a flight through New York was picked up by the Americans and rendered to Syria where he was tortured for a year as a potential terrorist. On returning to Canada, after much ado, we paid this guy $10.5 million for his pain and suffering. However, we could not persuade our American cousins to remove his name from their "no-fly" list, and we couldn't figure out why.

It turns out that our other favourite Canadian terrorist, Omar Khadr, who has been languishing in a jail in Guantanamo, awaiting a trial that should never take place, had identified Arar from a photograph in 2002 as somebody he had seen at an al-Qaida terrorist training camp in Afghanistan. Khadr said he never met Arar in Canada. Arar was living in Ottawa and Khadr was living in Toronto.

All very curious, said the cat.