The Gitmo detainees: Who are they?

Andy Worthington put three years and a lot of work into identifying and chronicling the stories of all 779 people who've been held in the Guantanamo Gulag. Here's the list, with basic information and cross-references to Worthington's book, The Guantanamo Files.

The book, says Worthington, is "based on an exhaustive analysis of 8,000 pages of documents released by the Pentagon (plus other sources)." It includes a narrative of the establishment and operation of the facility, a chronology of prisoner seizures, and the detailed stories of about 450 of the prisoner, as well as contextual/circumstantial information on the rest.

Note: This is not a review -- I haven't read the book yet. It sounds fascinating, though, and is probably the most detailed and factually honest account of Gitmo we're going to get until and unless Gitmo produces a Solzhenitsyn.

The temporary blogroll solution is ...

"What have you done for me lately?"

My old blogroll was huge -- so huge that I had to break it down into five separate categories and implement a script to collapse them, or the sidebar would have been like, eight miles tall, dude. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I tried to include every blog that I found interesting, any blog that linked here, anything I thought KN@PPSTER's readers might find useful.

Then came the transition to "new Blogger," and the script that drove that collapsible scheme didn't pass muster with Blogger's widget input apparatus.

I may bring the old massive blogroll back -- when and if I have time to validate all the links and punch them into a widget and find a way to make that widget display them collapsibly without bringing the Google XML Gawds down on my head.

For the moment, though, I'm going with eReferrer, a service that presents a list of inbound links, in order by just how many readers they're sending this way. A sort of meritocratic reciproll, if you will. While I don't necessarily value blogs solely on the basis of how much traffic they get or how much of that traffic they shift to me, it was the first workable stopgap that I came across.

Another Massachusets mystery solved ...

Methinks Republican Scott Brown -- and the usual suspects -- doth protest too much about Democrat Martha Coakley's absence from the campaign trail.

On the basis of the evidence ... well, we've all seen Mrs. Doubtfire, right? I can see how the constant wardrobe changes and minor issues tweaks would wear the candidate out and make a vacation for one of his/her two personae seem like a good idea. But don't lay the complaints on so thick, Sco ... Marth ... whoever you are. We're onto you.

Go, Joe!