Summary here.

Unknown gunmen abducted Tuesday more than 40 people, including tribal leaders and prominent persons from two Shiite towns in north of Baghdad, provincial police said.

[snip]

The convoy was carrying a delegation heading to Baghdad to meetIraq’s top officials, including Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, when they were attacked by gunmen in Tarmiya area, some 40 km north of Baghdad. Article

One particular paragraph which stood out:

Meanwhile the US blockade of several Iraqi suburbs and the subsequent traffic chaos forced the Iraqi parliament to postpone a session on Tuesday after just 95 of 275 members attended. Article

Chaos abides. Finessing semantics isn’t going to change that centrality.

In the latest of a series of reports on Iraq, Anthony Cordesman, a widely-respected expert at Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies, said this month the level and sources of violence in Iraq clearly meet a dictionary definition of civil war.

Ken Pollack and Daniel Byman of the Brookings Institution think tank, reached a similar conclusion two months earlier.

“The debate is over. By any definition, Iraq is in a state of civil war,” they said.

[snip]

When Reuters Iraq bureau chief Alastair Macdonald raised the question of terminology with Ihsan Abudlhadi, owner of Baghdad’s main English-language bookstore and a connoisseur of Iraqi phrase-making, the reply was:

“We haven’t agreed yet whether it’s a civil war or if it’s just a mess. No one can really agree on just what kind of troubles we’re having.” Article

Enlightening Q&A regarding the recent report by The Lancet (re-link to .pdf file) on deaths among Iraqis.

Hmm. Noted, but scant sourcing.

As noted a couple of days ago, Azzaman reported on the weekend details of what Washington had in mind as a possible military government for Iraq, and one of the points was there could be nine to eleven military people involved. Today’s Al-Quds al-Arabi (Tuesday October 31) tells what happened to one of these persons already, Muhammad Abdullah al-Shahwani, described as head of Iraqi intelligence. Citing sources close to Shahwani in London, the paper says US forces had to suddenly airlift him to Amman after learning of a plan to assassinate him, along with members of his group. The Americans told Shahwani to stay in Amman until further notice, and someone else has been appointed to replace him as head of Iraqi intelligence. This report says the supposed assassination plot was involved “armed militia tasked with the protection and escort of senior officials in the government and ministers, and the protection of their houses in the Green Zone”. Article

Riots in the offing?

The defence team of ousted Iraqi president Saddam Hussein has sent a letter to US President George W. Bush warning him that Iraq will develop into ‘hell’ if the former leader is sentenced to death, one of the lawyers said Tuesday.

‘We have sent a letter to Bush urging him to realize that any verdict passed on the country’s legitimate president will turn Iraq into hell and play havoc with neighbouring countries, where peoples will not stay idle as they see Islamic Iraq set ablaze,’ Ziyad Najdawi told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

The Iraqi criminal court, which two months ago concluded the trial of Saddam and six of his co-defendants in the case of Dujail, has set next Sunday as a date for issuing its ruling.

But Najdawi said that he had learnt that the court had deferred issuing the verdict until further notice, suggesting the message to Bush was the reason behind the deferment. Article

Three stories that together inform substantially more then they do individually.

#1:

A senior Iraqi security official issued a veiled threat to neighboring countries whom he accused of sponsoring insurgents who carry out deadly attacks.

“We don’t want to send booby-trapped cars for the ones that are sent to us. We are capable of that but this is not the nature of the new Iraq,” national security advisor Muwafaq al-Rubaie told reporters in neighboring Kuwait.

“Neighbors are sending death vehicles, terrorists, financial and logistical support and also plotting,” the Shiite politician said, declining to point the finger at any particular country. [cough – Sunni Saudi Arabia – cough — voxd]

“We will give them more time to reconsider their calculations … We don’t want to open fire on any country … but Iraq’s patience has a limit,” he added on the sidelines of an Iraq donors’ conference.

A senior official from a neighboring country will visit Iraq in the next few weeks to discuss a political solution, Rubaie added without elaborating. Article

#2:

The “ground is prepared” for direct talks between Iran and the United States over the situation in war-ravaged Iraq, former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami said on British television.

Khatami also said that he did not think that Iran was intervening militarily in neighbouring Iraq, despite suspicions that the country was arming Shiite insurgents in the south. Article

#3:

The US war in Iraq is a “lost battle” and the violence-ravaged nation’s “dire” plight seems certain to see it shatter along ethnic lines, an advisor to the Saudi government is warning.

The damning analysis, unveiled in a presentation at a two-day conference on US-Arab relations here, sees violence in Iraq getting worse and alleges large-scale Iranian “interference” there is set to grow.

“It is already a lost battle,” said Nawaf Obaid, Managing Director of the Saudi National Security Assessment project, at the annual policymakers conference of the National Council on US-Arab Relations which ended Tuesday.

The question in Iraq is not “if the US succeeds — it has failed by every single measure that you can think of,” said Obaid, private security and energy advisor to Saudi Ambassador to Washington Prince Turki al-Faisal.

“The failure is only compounded by the fact that we just don’t know what the endgame is.” said Obaid, head of the Riyadh-based independent consultancy which advises the Saudi government.

[snip]

“All indications point to a current state of civil war and the disintegration of the Iraqi state,” Obaid said, adding that Saudi leaders had been trying to counter what he said were US misconceptions about Iraq.

“Unfortunately the assessment is very dire, and we don’t think there is a possibility now to avoid a potential disintegration of Iraq.”

The presentation claimed that there had been large-scale “infiltration, funding and arming” of Shiite militias by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Article

Unsaid is how much easier it is to dominate the region if there are 3 (or more) smaller, weaker states than if there is on large one.

Like a missive from Captain Obvious (emphasis added):

Growing numbers of American military officers have begun to privately question a key tenet of U.S. strategy in Iraq – that setting a hard deadline for troop reductions would strengthen the insurgency and undermine efforts to create a stable state.

[snip]

Former Pentagon official Kurt Campbell said more officers are calling for deadlines after concluding that the indefinite presence of U.S. forces enables the Shiite-run Iraqi government to avoid making compromises.

“There is a new belief that the biggest problem that we face is that our forces are the sand in the gears creating problems,” said Campbell, coauthor of a book on national security policy. “We are making things worse by giving the Iraqis a false sense of security at the governing level.”

[snip]

Some officers who have served in Iraq believe that much of the Iraqi government is not functioning effectively. Finding ways to force the sectarian factions to put aside their differences and focus on improving security and basic services must be the top priority in Iraq, these officers say. Without government reform, the Iraqi security forces are unlikely to ever be strong enough to take on the insurgency or the sectarian militias.

“It’s basic counterinsurgency,” said a military officer who has served in Baghdad and did not want to publicly disagree with the president’s stated policy. “You have to have a trusted, capable government.” Article

Ye old scribe very rarely makes much mention of polls, but the numbers are so unassailably (and rightly) stacked against the woebegone G. Walker administration that this one is noted:

Some 70.2 percent of those asked disagreed with a statement U.S. plans for Iraq after Saddam Hussein was deposed were adequate; 15.8 percent agreed. The divide was much greater among self-described Democrats, 92.2 percent of whom said post-war planning was inadequate.

[snip]

The data were only slightly better for the Bush administration regarding whether Iraq`s occupation has been ‘handled competently.’ Nearly two-thirds — 62.5 percent — disagreed and 25.8 percent of those asked agreed. Article

Frankly, it should be called the “All the King’s Horses and All the King’s Men Face-saving Group” or if that’s too long, keep its acronym – ISG – as that is perfectly usable for Iraq Spin Group.

The Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group, named after part-time diplomatic illusionists James A. Baker III and Lee H. Hamilton, doesn`t have an Iraq exit rabbit to pull out of the hat. ISG`s volunteer helpers have been told mum`s the word until the American people have spoken Nov. 7. But some are speaking out, albeit anonymously. They feel precious time is being wasted at a time when each day counts for the inevitable shift in strategy.

[snip]

Other ISG staffers are suggesting the United States should subsume the Iraq problem within a larger set of regional issues and treat the stabilization of Iraq as only one part of a new grand strategy for the Middle East as a whole. This, they say, should be done by enlisting the interest and support of some parties in the region who are enjoying the spectacle of American disgrace and humiliation — e.g., Iran, Syria and Palestine.

Short of such bold initiatives, the group of restless ISG sherpas believe the United States is headed straight toward a trainwreck that ‘will hurt many more governments and individuals than just the United States and the poor Iraqi people.’ Article

Noted FYI, from a previous quagmire:

The principal difference between a humiliating retreat and a great victory lies in thorough control of the media. Remember, only the enemy will know what actually occurred – so make sure no smart-ass reporter asks them for their opinions, and of course restrict their access to all media in languages anyone speaks.

One must be careful not to create any impression of failure. A country that has been brought freedom and democracy by US troops yet has failed to embrace these gifts has only itself to blame. Thus emphasis must be placed on the uselessness and ingratitude of the natives for any chaos and destruction that remains when our brave soldiers leave. Source

The administration’s balloon of denial can only take so much hot air before it pops.

In a brief interview after the speech, Burns said he was not saying there is no security threat in Afghanistan. But, he added, the Afghan government is stable.

“We don’t believe the Taleban represent a strategic threat in this sense: the government of Afghanistan is secure,” he said. “And there’s a problem of security in Afghanistan. It’s primarily in the east and in the southern provinces of Kandahar and Uruzgan and Helmand.

[snip]

Barnett Rubin, senior fellow of New York University’s Center for International Cooperation, says the Taleban may not pose a strategic threat in the conventional military sense. But Rubin, who was a U.N. advisor in the Afghan peace negotiations after the Taleban fell in 2001, says the Taleban is eating away at the Kabul government’s authority.

“The Taleban pose a very serious threat to the government of Afghanistan,” he said. “They do not pose a conventional military threat to NATO, the U.S.-led coalition, or the Afghan government, which is unfortunately what U.S. planners seem to have in mind when they make statements like ‘the Taleban do not pose a strategic threat.’ But the Taleban are very successfully undermining the legitimacy of the Afghan government.” Article

The deadly and debilitating square dance of shifting control and suppression.

In Afghanistan officials said that the return of the Taleban to a town secured and then left by British troops was beyond dispute. “This is the first time in history that the Taleban were recognised as a political movement,” said Haji Dad Mohammed Khan, the former intelligence chief of Helmand, and now an MP in Kabul.

Mr Khan, who lost most of his family to a Taleban ambush this summer, said that since British troops pulled out a few weeks ago the town had become “a shelter for the Taleban”. He named the four main Taleban commanders controlling Musa Qala, and said that the new administration’s police chief and its principal leader, Mullah Malang and Haji Sher Agha, were a front for the Taleban. Mr Khan added that only four days ago the Taleban kidnapped Ahmad Shahan, a prominent local government official, from the centre of Musa Qala. He has not been seen since.

The Defence Secretary was questioned in the Commons after The Times revealed that the Taleban had returned to Musa Qala. Mr Browne played down the idea that Taleban influence had returned.

He said that neither he nor his officials had heard of Nafaz Khan, a militia commander and former police chief, who was injured fighting alongside the British, and voiced frustration at the reappearance of the Taleban. Article

What an oily euphemism — “non-traditional security.”

President Gen Pervez Musharraf has said that the 80 people killed in the air strike on a seminary in Bajaur were Taliban militants adding that army and force would be used against militancy anywhere in the country.

[snip]

The President was of the view that changes were rapidly taking place around the globe and the situation was turning from traditional security to non-traditional security and motive behind it was the longstanding political issues that needed to be addressed. “These political issues are giving birth to terrorism, extremism and other problems which should be resolved on priority basis,” he advocated.

[snip]

The president remarked that the military alone could not restore peace and underlined the need for political and administrative strategy in this connection. Article

The spoilage of war: a Himalaya of loss, an ecological nightmare.

Between the highway and the shoreline an ever-growing mountain of acrid-smelling debris is piling steadily higher — and also marching inexorably towards the breaking waves.

These are the ruins of the capital’s southern suburbs, a Hizbullah bastion that was repeatedly pounded by Israel in July and August.

From this one area alone, in which 400 buildings were pulverized, engineers estimate the volume of debris at 1.2 million cubic meters. Every day some 400 trucks laden with rubble make the trip between the suburbs and the rubbish tip.

“For two days at the end of August everything was tipped directly into the sea,” says Omar al-Naeem of Greenpeace Lebanon. “But organizations protested, and now it is all collected and deposited along the shore.”

Clearing the suburb is expected to take at least until the end of the year.

At least this rubble mountain can be seen, and the authorities know where it is.

In the south of the country, where the fighting was fierce and the authorities say 10,649 homes were completely destroyed, you have to search for much of the debris which has often been dumped in the folds between hills.

Only by following garbage trucks does one come across these “secret” dumps — along secondary roads, well-hidden at the bottom of valleys and along water courses, or down banks by the roadside.

Ten or 11 trucks hauling 13 tons each day are continuing to clear the village of Gandouriyeh, which was home to 6,000 people, according to the driver of one truck found emptying debris.

“The rubble of destroyed houses isn’t just cement,” says Ricardo Khoury, whose Elard environmental consulting agency is contributing to a United Nations Environment Programme assessment of the ecological damage caused by the war.

“You also find everything that makes a home, things like batteries, storage heaters, fridges, electronic equipment… millions and millions of dollars are needed to dispose of all this properly.”

“It’s not easy,” he adds. “Neither is it a priority.”

Elard has pinpointed 16 sites that Khoury says are high priority and need to be cleaned up quickly.

These include the generating station at Jiyeh south of Beirut, where aerial bombardment created a massive oil slick that coated the Lebanese shoreline with sludge; fuel-storage tanks at Beirut Airport; warehouses that storied food, detergents and chemical products at Shweifat, also south of the capital; plastics factories in Tyre; and a glass-producing plant in the Bekaa Valley.

All were hit by Israeli bombs or missiles and all burned for days. But the treatment of refuse — wastewater included — is practically unheard of in Lebanon.

Apart from Beirut and Zahle in the east of the country, the main coastal towns — Tyre and Sidon in the south and Tripoli in the north — discharge their waste directly into the sea, says Karim Jisr, environmental consultant to the World Bank and United Nations Development Programme. Article

More, more more – with no exit strategy or positive plan in sight. More we don’t have, more piled higher and more precariously onto the deficit and the national debt. (emphasis added)

The U.S. Air Force has asked the Pentagon’s leadership for $50 billion in emergency funding for fiscal year 2007, defense analyst Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute said on Tuesday.

[snip]

A source familiar with the Air Force’s plans said it was also seeking additional funds to help pay for the transportation of a growing numbers of U.S. soldiers who are being killed and wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Air Force’s emergency budget request is just less than half the $105.9 billion it requested as its base budget for fiscal year 2007, which began on October 1.

Lawmakers are growing increasingly concerned about the huge sums being requested and approved ‘off budget’ to fund the wars, since these funds are not subject to the same level of congressional oversight as regular budget requests. Article

The most devastating realization is that it is so readily believable and accruable to the woebegone G. Walker administration and their execrable undertakings in defiance of the Constitution and the rule of law.

He was held in a brig at the Naval Weapons Station in Charleston, South Carolina for three years and seven months, without charge, before being abruptly transferred to a federal lock-up in Miami and brought into the official legal system.

While in the brig, Padilla was ‘tortured by the United States government without cause or justification,’ his lawyers said, adding that his treatment was ’shocking to even the most hardened conscience.’

[snip]

…the allegation that Padilla was forced to consume mind altering drugs — reminiscent of CIA-financed mind-control experiments in the late 1950s — appeared to be one of the first such accusations in connection with Washington’s war on terrorism.

[snip]

The Bush administration dropped an ‘enemy combatant’ designation against Padilla last year, charging him instead with being part of a North American support cell for global Islamic extremism.

The charges against Padilla, a convert to Islam whom prosecutors said attended an al Qaeda training camp, were added to an existing case against four other men charged in Florida. Article

A reminder (and an excellent, measured recitation to boot) to keep in the forefront of consciousness when you go on 11/7 to exercise yourWMD: Weapon of Mass Democracy in support of an agenda of freedom and in firm support of the foundations and exercise of liberty to begin making America America again, politically constructing a “Stop! Detour!” sign on the road and and in opposition to a foundational and antediluvian driver of the agenda of the woebegone G. Walker administration by yanking control of at least one chamber of the people’s voice — the Congress — from the Bush-subservient Republicans now in charge.

Bush talks evangelical talk as no other president has, including Jimmy Carter, who also talked the language of the secular Enlightenment culture that evangelists despise. Bush told various evangelical groups that he felt God had called him to run for president in 2000: “I know it won’t be easy on me or my family, but God wants me to do it.”

Bush promised his evangelical followers faith-based social services, which he called “compassionate conservatism.” He went beyond that to give them a faith-based war, faith-based law enforcement, faith-based education, faith-based medicine, and faith-based science. He could deliver on his promises because he stocked the agencies handling all these problems, in large degree, with born-again Christians of his own variety. The evangelicals had complained for years that they were not able to affect policy because liberals left over from previous administrations were in all the health and education and social service bureaus, at the operational level. They had specific people they objected to, and they had specific people with whom to replace them, and Karl Rove helped them do just that.

[snip]

The deputy undersecretary for defense intelligence, General William (Jerry) Boykin–a man leading the search for bin Laden–made headlines during the Iraq war with a slide- show lecture he gave in churches. He appeared there not in his dress uniform but in combat gear. He asked audiences (this was after the 2000 election and before the 2004 one):

     Ask yourself this: why is this man in the White House? The majority of Americans did not vote
     for him. Why is he there?… I tell you this morning he’s in the White House because God put
     him there for such a time as this. God put him there to lead not only this nation but to lead
     the world, in such a time as this.

Then he asked the congregation who the enemy is. He showed slides of Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong Il, and Taliban leaders, asking of each, “Is this man the enemy?” He gave a resounding no to each question, and then revealed the foe’s true identity:

     The battle this nation is in is a spiritual battle, it’s a battle for our soul. And the enemy is a guy
     called Satan…. Satan wants to destroy this nation. He wants to destroy us as a nation, and he
     wants to destroy us as a Christian army.

[snip]

When General Edwin Walker began to promote the John Birch Society to his NATO troops, President Kennedy removed him. What happened to General Boykin after he went around calling Muslims Satanic? He was not silenced, demoted, removed, or even criticized. He has continued to work on the Pentagon’s special intelligence group.…

There was nothing surprising in all this. Boykin was just repeating what other evangelicals had been saying about the war in Iraq. Charles Stanley, a former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, wrote: “We should offer to serve the war effort in any way possible…. God battles with people who oppose him, who fight against him and his followers.” Jerry Falwell put it succinctly in 2004: “God is pro-war.” For some evangelicals, this was a war against the enemies of Israel, who are by definition anti-God. The evangelical writer Tim LaHaye called it, therefore, “a focal point of end-time events.” For others, it was a chance to spread Christianity to the infidels. An article syndicated on the Southern Baptist Convention’s wire service said that “American foreign policy and military might have opened an opportunity for the Gospel in the land of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” Franklin Graham, the son of Billy Graham, and Marvin Olasky, the inventor of Bush’s “compassionate conservatism,” agreed. Boykin’s was not a lone voice, then, but that of a member in good standing of the community that supported Bush on religious grounds, even in his warfare. Boykin was safe under the sheltering wings of a religious right that the White House did not dare to cross.

God’s war needs God’s warriors, and the White House was ready to supply them.…

[snip]

That was proved when the first director of Iraqi health services, Dr. Frederick Burkle, was dismissed. Burkle, a distinguished physician, was a specialist in disaster relief, with experience in Kosovo, Somalia, and Kurdish Iraq. His replacement, James Haverman, had run a Christian adoption agency meant to discourage women from having abortions. Haverman placed an early emphasis on preventing Iraqis from smoking, while ruined hospitals went untended. This may suggest the policy on appointments that put Michael Brown in charge of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, but the parallel is insufficiently harsh. Chris Matthews brought it up on his television show while interviewing the Washington Post reporter who had covered the CPA in Iraq, Rajiv Chandrasekaran, who said, “There were a hundred Browns in Iraq.” But there were Bible study groups in the Green Zone.

There is a particular danger with a war that God commands. What if God should lose? That is unthinkable to the evangelicals. They cannot accept the idea of second-guessing God, and he was the one who led them into war.… Article

IRAQ IIO

Summary here and here.

October: 103 more “commas” indelibly incised into your bloody books, Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney and Mr. Rumsfeld.

This should be the final nail in the coffin of the First Dick’s “last throes.” It smacks more of the constancy of chaos and the anticipation of mass and potentially extremely violent demonstrations from one faction or another, dependent on what the announced verdict and sentence of Hussein’s first trial is, should those actually be made next week. Could also be a precursor related to the swirling rumors of a coup or the forced removal of al-Maliki after the U.S. midterm elections.

…the Pentagon said the US force in Iraq has grown to 150,000 troops, the biggest it has been since January.

[snip]

Eric Ruff, the Pentagon press secretary, said he did not know why US troops levels were climbing.

“This is news to me,” Ruff told reporters. “Talk to MNF-I (Multi-National Forces-Iraq). That’s General Casey’s decision.”

The increase is noteworthy because US troop strength in Iraq is only 10,000 under the all-time high of about 160,000 reported in January after the Iraqi elections. Article

Short-circuited ’sovereignty.’ (emphasis added)

Iraqi Shiite militants have won a major political victory after Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki ordered US and Iraqi units to lift a blockade around the flashpoint suburb of Sadr City.

American commanders believe Shiite gunmen may be holding a kidnapped US soldier in the east Baghdad slum and since last week have been maintaining a cordon of checkpoints and roadblocks around the area.

Iraqi and US forces have also launched raids inside the district, most recently on Tuesday morning, when they arrested three suspects.

Anger has been growing inside Sadr City, and on Tuesday militants loyal to radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr ordered a general strike, shutting down shops, offices and schools in an area of 2.5 million people.

The Shiite prime minister, who owes his job to the votes of pro-Sadr lawmakers, responded by ordering the US blockade lifted.

“The prime minister, in his capacity as commander in chief of the armed forces, has decided to lift the blockade of the access roads to Sadr City and other areas of Baghdad,” a statement from Maliki’s office said.

Maliki said he expected checkpoints to be lifted by 5:00 pm (1400 GMT), but added that it could be reimposed after dark during Baghdad’s nightly curfew.

It was not clear whether the US military would obey the prime minister’s order and, in a new sign of the lack of coordination between the allies, US headquarters said they had only learned of it through a news release.

“Our coalition force commanders have received the press release from the Prime Minister’s office and are determining how coalition forces can best address the Prime Minister’s concerns about checkpoint operations,” it said. Article

More:

A cordon of checkpoints and roadblocks has been set up around the district, provoking the anger of local residents, particularly after it failed to prevent a bomb attack Monday by suspected Sunni extremists which left 26 dead. Article

AFGHANISTAN

Summary here.

PAKISTAN

The repercussions are not going to quickly fade.

Over 15,000 armed Pakistani tribesmen protested on Tuesday against a Pakistan Army helicopter attack on an al-Qaeda-linked madrasa in Bajaur tribal region that killed around 80 suspected militants.

Chants of “Down with America” and “Down with Musharraf” rang out as the tribesmen gathered in Khar, the main town in the tribal region close to the Afghan border in protest against Pakistan’s deadliest air strike.

[snip]

The tribals in Khar demonstrated their loyalty with shouts of “Long Live Osama” and “Long Live Mullah Omar”. Similar protests were held in other parts of North West Frontier Province.

A planned visit by Britain’s Prince Charles and his wife Camilla to the NWFP capital of Peshawar on Tuesday was cancelled due to security concerns, as Islamists planned demonstrations.

The government had been trying to win support from Bajaur’s tribal elders for a pact similar to accords already brokered in Waziristan to end the militancy, but Monday’s airstrike appeared to end hopes of a quick deal. Article

Summaries here and here and here and here.

Chaos abides: The unbearable heaviness of being.

Their stories began with a familiar theme: the shrinking lives of middle-class families in the capital. Social clubs have emptied out. Weddings have been sparsely attended. But as the circle has become smaller, and as they focus intensely on just staying alive, they said, even the basics are being stripped away.

“All the elements of society have been dismantled,” said Fawsia Abdul al-Attiya, a sociologist and a professor at Baghdad University. “You are afraid because you are a woman, a man, a Sunni, a Shiite, a Kurd.

“All these things start to change society.”

[snip]

As the violence tears the fabric of society, breaking communities and long-established social networks, even peoples’ thinking is muted. Plans for the future are too painful, too breakable, many Baghdad residents say, and so their thoughts stay fixed on the immediate.

“The events are too big to comprehend, and the mind stops thinking,” Ms. Attiya said. The result, she said, is a distracted population with vastly diminished ambitions.

With jobs too difficult or too dangerous to find in many cases, young people in particular have put aside their dreams. In such an environment, the allure of populist leaders and militias offering protection, a sense of purpose and belonging has become compelling. Article

This particular report was requested by a Republican. Try to conceive the multitude of data and the certainty of resultant hearings exposing fiascos and ineptness, and the aggressive oversight and laying on of accountability that will occur if the Democrats gain a majority in the ever more frantically dirty election of 11/7.

Thousands of weapons the United States has provided Iraqi security forces cannot be accounted for, a new report to Congress says.

The report, prepared at the request of the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Virginia Republican John Warner, also found that major challenges remained that put at risk the Defence Department’s goal of strengthening Iraqi security forces by transferring all logistics operations to the Defence Ministry by the end of 2007.

[snip]

Nearly one of every 25 weapons the military bought for Iraqi security forces is missing. Many others cannot be repaired because parts or technical manuals are lacking…

[snip]

The Pentagon cannot account for 14,030 weapons – almost 4 per cent of the semiautomatic pistols, assault rifles, machine guns, rocket-propelled grenade launchers and other weapons it began supplying to Iraq since the end of 2003.

The missing weapons will not be tracked easily: The Defence Department registered the serial numbers of only about 10,000 of the 370,251 weapons it provided – less than 3 per cent.

Missing from the Defence Department’s inventory books were 13,180 semi-automatic pistols, 751 assault rifles and 99 machine guns. Article

And recall that the U.S. military lost track (and possession) of 380 tons of explosives from just one facility supposedly under their control.

More, added at 7:50 p.m. — Um, ya mean that military regulations apply to the military? What, no signing statements? (emphasis added)

Exactly where untracked weapons could end up — and whether some have been used against American soldiers — were not examined in the report, although black-market arms dealers thrive on the streets of Baghdad, and official Iraq Army and police uniforms can easily be purchased as well, presumably because government shipments are intercepted or otherwise corrupted.

In a written response to the inspector general’s findings, the American military largely conceded the shortcomings. The military said it would assist the Iraqis in determining the spare parts and maintenance requirements for the weapons. The military also said it has now instituted a “process to accurately issue weapons by quantity and serial number listing.”

Because the inspector general is charged only with looking at weaponry financed directly by the American taxpayer, the total of lost weapons could end up being higher. The Government Accountability Office and the Pentagon inspector general are expected to look at weapons financed by all sources, including the Iraqi government.

[snip]

Despite the potential risks from losing track of those weapons — involving 19 different contracts and 142 delivery orders — the United States recorded serial numbers for no more than a few thousand, the inspector general said.

There are standard regulations for registering military weaponry in that way, governed by the Department of Defense small-arms serialization program. The inspector general’s report said that when asked why so many weapons went to Iraq with no record of serial numbers, American military officials in Baghdad replied that they did not believe the regulations applied to them.

[snip]

There were also significant discrepancies in the numbers of weapons purchased and those in Iraqi warehouses. While 176,866 semiautomatic pistols were purchased with American money, just 163,386 showed up in warehouses — meaning that more than 13,000 were unaccounted for. All 751 of the M1-F assault rifles sent to Iraq were missing, and nearly 100 MP-5 machine guns. Article

Blame, blame, blame. Iraqis are kidnapping, torturing and killing Iraqis every single day in order to “influence” the U.S. election? Last week the administration blamed Ramadan; this week, the internet. How about facing reality and taking repsonsibility?

Corroborative data? Oh, this is the woebegone G. Walker administration. Never mind.

al-Maliki clearly complained, among other things (more), that he hadn’t been informed of the raid, but Sadr okayed it? The cart leading the horse? Something does not add up.

Moqtada al-Sadr gave the go-ahead to a US-led raid on the bastion of his Mahdi Army militia in Baghdad and plans to purge his movement of violent elements, according to an aide to the radical cleric. Article

All the colors of chaos.

From his house in the western neighbourhood of Al-Jamia’a, Mukhtar Salah, 40, a former member of Saddam’s security forces, said he witnessed gunmen kill a young man, who he later heard is alleged to have had an affair with an American soldier.

After killing him, the militants ordered people to go home and threatened to behead anyone who tried to claim the body. “[It] was left in the street for two days,” said Salah, until eventually it was picked up by a National Guard patrol.

In Saddam’s time, you risked being imprisoned for being gay - but homosexual practices were nonetheless common in religious neighbourhoods where young unmarried men would not dare to have any contact with women.

Nail Mohammed, 25, considers his being gay just one risk among many others. In the Al-Fadhil neighbourhood where he lives, extremist Islamic groups kill gay men, but also people who wear jeans or drink alcohol. In the past six months, he said three of his closest friends have been killed for drinking.

Bilal Arif, 40, a Baghdad lawyer, feels Iraqi society is going from bad to worse: open and secular from the 1950s to the 1970s, it turned into a military dictatorship under Saddam and is now moving towards religious extremism, he says.

Arif doubts that homosexuals are being systematically targeted. Rather, he suspects they are the victims of “the mess all over Iraq” which allows people to take the law into their own hands. “They are killed because there is no state to hold the murderers responsible or pursue them judicially,” he said. Article

Keeping up with the courts-martial.

Another Marine charged with kidnapping and murdering an Iraqi man has agreed to plead guilty to lesser charges, his attorney said Monday.

[snip]

Jackson, 23, of Tracy, is the third service member to have made a plea deal in the case, in which seven Camp Pendleton-based Marines and a Navy corpsman were charged with murdering 52-year-old Hashim Ibrahim Awad. Article

The timing, in concert with a visit by Prince Charles of the U.K., is questionable. The slaughter is irrefutable.

Pakistani troops backed by missile-firing helicopters killed an estimated 80 militants today after destroying a purported al-Qaida-linked training facility near the Afghan border, the military said.

The pre-dawn attack targeted a religious school ̫ known as a madrassa – in Chingai village near Khar, the main town in the Bajur tribal district, said army spokesman Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan.

[snip]

Siraj ul-Haq, a Cabinet minister from the North West Frontier Province, condemned the attack and announced he would resign from the government in protest.

[snip]

Body parts scattered the area, lying in pools of blood, on torn bed mattresses and among Islamic books, including copies of the Koran. Villagers put mutilated body parts into large plastic bags normally used to hold fertiliser. Article

More:

The DG ISPR said that gunship helicopters fired four to five rockets, which hit the Madrassah. He denied any civilian casualty in the air strike.

Meanwhile, eyewitnesses said that majority of the killed were children who were present in the seminary during air raid.

Three persons with severe injuries were brought to a local hospital; said Dr. Imran.

Meanwhile, senior provincial minister Sirajul Haq and MNA of the area Haroonur Rasheed attended the funeral of some victims of the air strike and announced resignation as a protest to the incident. Article

Related, but only one source thus far, so take that into consideration:

Pakistani authorities claimed immediately that the raid was carried out by Pakistani forces. However, Asia Times Online contacts on the spot are convinced that the raid was undertaken by North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces. Recently, Islamabad agreed with NATO that it could conduct operations in Pakistan from across the border in Afghanistan.

Monday’s attack came two days after thousands of pro-Taliban tribesmen held an anti-US, anti-NATO rally in Damadola in the Bajour area close to the site of a US missile attack that killed several al-Qaeda members and civilians in January.

Authorities say information that Taliban or al-Qaeda fugitives were in the region prompted Monday’s raid. The border village lies opposite the Afghan province of Kunar and is considered a major corridor for militants to enter Afghanistan. In May, Pakistani authorities said a senior al-Qaeda figure, Abu Marwan al-Suri, had been killed in Bajour during a clash with local police.

Just as they are denying NATO involvement in Monday’s attack, Pakistani authorities also initially denied the US had carried out the January attack.

[snip]

Significantly, Pakistan and Taliban authorities struck a peace deal in Bajour only two days ago and were scheduled to sign a document to that effect on Monday. This lends credence to the possibility that it was NATO and not Pakistani forces that made the raid. Article

And:

The military action sparked protests in the area, and in the neighbouring North-West Frontier Province, where a Minister belonging to the Jamaat-e-Islami resigned. The Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal, religious coalition that rules the province, announced it would organise nation-wide protests on Tuesday. Qazi Hussein Ahmed, leader of JI and the MMA, rubbished the military claim that the madrasa was harbouring militants and said a number of children were among the dead. The Army had acted under pressure from the U.S., he alleged.

[snip]

He said the military had given warnings to the madrassa, located in Chenagai, about 10 km north of the main Bajaur town of Khar, to “close down the facility” but “they failed to do so.”

[snip]

He confirmed that foreigners were among those killed, but said there were no high-value Al-Qaeda suspects in the madrasa. No women or children were killed, Maj-Gen Sultan said. The madrasa was in an isolated area and there were no houses nearby and therefore, no chance of collateral damage. But media reports quoted local residents of the area saying there were children who were students at the madrasa among the dead. Television footage showed sheet-covered bodies laid out on rows of cots. According to some reports, local people took out a protest march in Khar. Article

From Afghanistan, but highly related:

The dilapidated building near the mosque in the center of Mazar-e-Sharif does not seem like one of the finest religious institutions in Balkh province. The Sheikh Marghiani madrassa provides an Islamic education to approximately 100 students, but the classrooms look more like mountain caves than seats of learning.

The poor state of the school is witness to the Afghan government’s lack of attention to religious study, say those who attend the institution.

[snip]

The 35-year-old student intends to go to Pakistan soon to continue his religious education, because, he says, there are no adequate facilities in Afghanistan.

“Many of my friends went to Pakistan last year,” he said. “They learned a lot and the facilities are better than here.”

Although precise figures are not available, thousands of religious students go abroad every year, mostly to Pakistan, to complete their religious education. And it is in Pakistani madrassas that these students get radicalised, say government officials. If religious fundamentalism is to be combated, then the government must find a way of keeping the taleban at home.

Qari Habibullah, now studying at the Sheikh Marghiani school, spent four years at a madrassa in Pakistan.

“Most of my friends joined the Taleban or al-Qaeda after graduation,” he said. “Many religious students join the Taleban because they are not sure they can get jobs in Afghanistan.”

The Taleban began as a protest movement by religious students against the abuses of the Afghan warlords who dominated the country in the early Nineties. The word taleb refers to any religious student, and taleban is simply the plural.

In Afghanistan, the struggle is now on to keep the taleban from turning into Taleban.

[snip]

Abdul Qadeer Salehi, who heads an Islamic association in Afghanistan’s north, was sceptical of the new programme, saying that it was more an exercise in international politics than a genuine attempt to improve conditions for students.

“The government’s real objective is to use the madrassas as part of an anti-Pakistan policy,” he said. “If the government sincerely wants to reconstruct religious schools and not to misuse them, then our religious students will not leave the country. But it seems unlikely to me that the government is acting honestly.”

Qayoum Babak, a political analyst in Mazar-e-Sharif, agrees.

“There is fighting in the south, and they say the roots of the violence lie in Pakistan, so the government is compelled to implement a decisive policy,” he told IWPR.

“The government wants to tell those who now go to Pakistan that opportunities will be provided in their own country. But the situation will become even more dangerous if the government cannot live up to its promises. Religious students will despair of getting any help in Afghanistan and will flock to Pakistan and other Muslim countries.” Article

Summary here and here.

Too much of the populace remains in a state of progress paralysis, the equivalent of a ball of yarn being batted about and fought over between a lion and a tiger.

Bibi Emna is the mother of 15 children, 11 of them daughters.

[snip]

None of her children are in school, she says. In fact, the village elders recently turned down a chance to have an internationally sponsored literacy program here.

[snip]

Several mothers and daughters gathered Monday for a rare visit with two female foreigners a short walk from where the provincial head of Afghanistan’s Ministry for Women’s Affairs was gunned down exactly five weeks ago.

[snip]

Outside movement is less restricted than under the Taliban but still, “women are afraid,” says Aziza, a United Nations monitoring and evaluation assistant.

“We work inside the house. We don’t go outside.”

She is asked why so many women are still wearing burkas five years after the Taliban were conquered.

There are many foreigners in Kandahar now, she says, and suicide bombings are a constant threat. Fear is a fact of life here, and it’s important to keep a low profile. Many women rarely venture beyond their front door, she says.

“We feel free when we are hiding.” Article

First-world power, third-world sensibilities. The U.S. has (still) a judiciary and a system of justice to rightfully be proud of. Yet the woebegone G. Walker administration refuses (and protests against) using it.

Many of the 435 suspected terrorists held in concrete and metal prisons on a U.S. military base in Cuba might never go home.

[snip]

“Yes, they could be held for the duration of their lives,” said Cully Stimson, the Defense Department’s assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, on one of his regular trips to the base last week.

Some, including Stimson, say that as far as detention goes, life inside Guantanamo isn’t so bad.

“If U.S. prisoners saw the detention regime these people are in, they’d be knocking down the door to get into Gitmo,” he said, using the nickname for the U.S. naval base on land leased from Communist Cuba. [Idiot. He’s referring to prisoners who have had a fair trial and have been convicted and sentenced to incarceration, cases entirely removed from those rounded up and not charged nor afforded a day in court. Idiot. — voxd] Article

A scant step away from mooning Congress and publicly pissing on the Constitution. To coin a phrase: “Bring it on” and expose for all to plainly see the vicious, naked lust for raw, unshackled power which the administration craves and the contempt for the values and principles of America (and its people and institutions) which the administration holds.

In fact, when it comes to deploying its Executive power, which is dear to Bush’s understanding of the presidency, the President’s team has been planning for what one strategist describes as “a cataclysmic fight to the death” over the balance between Congress and the White House if confronted with congressional subpoenas it deems inappropriate. The strategist says the Bush team is “going to assert that power, and they’re going to fight it all the way to the Supreme Court on every issue, every time, no compromise, no discussion, no negotiation.” Article

No matter who is #1, a sorry list, and a squandering of windfall revenue from oil prices for the tools of war.

Firefox 2.0 reviewed. Get it, install it, use it.

Missed this one from last week. It’s a regularly scheduled run. How could the big guns not know of it?

More Tony Soprano than Tony Blair: Did the U.K.’s PM threaten Turkey with blackmail?

Noted FYI:

KFC on Monday said all 5,500 of its U.S. fried-chicken restaurants will switch to a cooking oil with no trans fat by the end of next April. Article

ORGAN IN A DISH

Wowsers.

British scientists have grown the world’s first artificial liver from stem cells in a breakthrough that will one day provide entire organs for transplant.

[snip]

The liver tissue is created from stem cells - blank cells capable of developing into different types of tissue - found in blood from the umbilical cord.

[snip]

While other researchers have created liver cells from stem cells from embryos, the Newcastle team are the first to create sizeable sections of tissue from stem cells from the umbilical cord. Article

PROFITS, PROFITS, ÜBER ALLES

Science? A harmful myth to the woebegone G. Walker administration.

Related: Deny, deflect, deceive. Just hide or cut access to inconvenient data.

FULLER FLUTTERS

Carpeting the eyes.

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DAMNATION DEFLATION

Hell ain’t what it used to be.

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SUPERSTITION v. GULLIBILTY

The court must have been hard pressed not to fine both sides for gross dereliction of intellect.

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RING AROUND THE RANDY

Bulgaria to 19-year-old soccer sex-er: Get married, or else.

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FLAUNT FAIR

Fly thee to the czars: Excess for sale, a veritable gallery of gauche.

NOVEMBER 7 MATTERS

Descendants of presidents generally ranked at the bottom can walk a little taller.

This unseemly circus and its clowns in Congress can’t go away fast enough and with enough dishonor and disgrace to suit the circumstances. Their place in America’s history is secure: They will go down as the worst administration and the worst Congress we’ve ever had. Period. Article

LIGHTER FARE

Offbeat civic appellations.