This will be a short diary. Sue me.
President General Pervez Musharraf's coup within a coup has just dropped deeper into the abyss of dictatorship. Tonight, on the BBC's news website, we read THIS:
'Merciless' attack
"Police beat lawyers with batons as they came to the High Court in the morning," Akhtar Hussain, a former president of the Sindh High Court Bar Association, told Reuters news agency.
"Many of them have been arrested."
Senior lawyer Akhtar Hussain told the AFP news agency that police had detained "some 50 lawyers" and "whisked them away in waiting vans".
Police also "mercilessly beat" half a dozen lawyers who were chanting anti-government slogans at a court in the city of Rawalpindi, lawyer Mudassir Saeed told AFP.
Like a lot of fresh news out of Pakistan right now, you'll note that a lot of this has been hastily translated. Very few in that country speak English as well as Musharraf. While it is troubling that the situation is getting out of hand, violence-wise, how Musharraf's government is explaining all this is even more shocking, and probably sounds a little familiar.
Responding to reports of the crackdown on Jamaat-e-Islami, Information Minister Tariq Azim described the claim of hundreds of detentions as an exaggeration.
He told the BBC that it was up to protesters to remain calm, or deal with the consequences.
"If people take law into their [own] hands, obviously, they have to be dealt with," he told The World Today.
(emphasis mine, and probably unnecessary)
Right now, Ms Rice says she's "reviewing" the billions of dollars of aid we send to Musharraf, but includes that most of that money goes toward Pakistan helping us in the WOT, so there's basically very little chance we'll withold it. Great Britain says pretty much the same thing.
Consider that, and then read Information Minister Tariq Azim's words again.
War on Terror?