Summary here and here.

Chaos abides.

Partial statistics released by the Health and Interior Ministries indicated the number of civilians killed in September leapt by over 40 percent to a record high. Though not complete, the series of data is an early indicator of trends.

It showed 1,089 civilians died violently, up from 769 in August and more than the record of 1,065 in July. The United Nations estimates that more than 100 people are dying every day.

In addition to 50 bodies found around Baghdad over the day, many tortured, and most bound and shot, five corpses were pulled from the Tigris downstream at Suwayra, including that of a girl. Article

This is passing strange indeed, as Barzani has cracked down on journalism previously by way of passage of laws within the Kurdish north. That such detail would be given the nod for publication i an indication that someone’s agenda is in play. Whose, though (keeping in mined that there are two main factions in the Kurdish autonomous gobvernement who had agreed to act together), is unknown. One also can’t discount speculating on the hand of Turkey in this (insofar as posiibly supplying intelligence data), but that is all it is just now — speculation.

Iraqi Kurds were left reeling after two independent newspapers named scores of people who allegedly cooperated with Saddam Hussein’s feared intelligence services, including many now in positions of power.

[snip]

The names of more than 150 people who allegedly spied on their fellow Kurds for Saddam’s mukhabarat intelligence service after the Kurdish uprising of 1991 were published by the Awina (Mirror) and Hawalati (Citizen) newspapers Friday.

According to the newspapers, which both went through several print runs on the day of publication, the mukhabarat recruited people close to the two main Kurdish rebel leaders, Barzani and Jalal Talabani, now Iraq’s president.

The allegations drew demands for an inquiry from members of both former rebel factions — Barzani’s Kurdistan Democratic Party and Talabani’s Patriotic Union of Kurdistan — and by Saturday more than half of the 111 MPs in the regional parliament had signed a petition calling for an immediate debate. Article

Staking out the sands, the Wahhabists in Saudi Arabia essentially excommunicate Iraq.

Security in Iraq has collapsed so dramatically that Saudi Arabia has ordered the construction of a 550-mile high-tech fence to seal off its troubled northern neighbour.

The huge project to build the barrier, which will be equipped with ultraviolet night-vision cameras, buried sensor cables and thousands of miles of barbed wire, will snake across the vast and remote desert frontier between the countries.

The fence will be built despite the hundreds of millions of pounds that the Saudi kingdom has spent in the past two years to beef up patrols on its border with Iraq, with officials saying the crisis in Iraq is now so dangerous it must be physically shut out.

“Surveillance has already been stepped up over the past 18 months,” said Nawaf Obaid, the director of the Saudi National Security Assessment Project, an institute that advises the government on security affairs.

“But the feeling in Saudi is that Iraq is way out of control with no possibility of stability. The urgency now is to get that border sealed: physically sealed.”

[snip]

For Saudi Arabia, whose nationals have been accused of playing a key role as foreign fighters in the Iraq insurgency, the deterioration in its northern neighbour is a security nightmare.

Saudi officials are worried about so-called “blowback”, in which Saudi insurgents in Iraq bring jihad back to the streets of Riyadh and Jeddah. But they are mostly concerned that an Iraqi civil war will send a wave of refugees south, unsettling the kingdom’s Shia minority in its oil-producing east.

[snip]

Despite the details emerging about the fence, Saudi Arabia’s military is keeping some aspects under wraps. According to one source, the project is being kept so secret that military officials from Centcom, America’s central command responsible for Iraq, have been told they cannot inspect the site on “national security” grounds. Article

Pulling back the curtain a bit on the whys, hows and wherefores involved in reporting from Iraq. Fascinating, and a trove of important information as well.

Macdonald began his career as a financial journalist on banking magazine Euromoney – a far cry from his current job – and joined Reuters in 1990 as an economics correspondent.

He explains how murder and mayhem not only dominate the Reuters Iraq newswire, but office life as well.

“There are no local wires – no TASS – no way of knowing what’s going on in Iraq without knowing it first hand

We have people in 19 or 20 cities – ideally a cameraman, photographer and reporter – although in some places one or two people will cover more than one specialisation.

In the last two or three months state TV has started to break news, but that’s a novelty. Most of the stories on state TV come from Reuters or other agencies.

Hard news in terms of “this is what happened in Iraq yesterday” tends to come from ourselves or one of the other two international agencies – it’s the same with TV footage.

To some extent going out on the streets has become so dangerous that big agencies are providing most of the footage even for Iraqi TV channels.”

[snip]

“We have stringers around the country phoning in if things happen. Quite a lot of days we’ll get a call saying there’s been a bomb or a big explosion in Baghdad.

We try to get multiple sources on everything – it’s our experience that no one source is ever 100 per cent reliable in the confusion that surrounds a lot of what’s going on. We have a lot of sources in the police and security forces. We rarely put out a story based on just one of them.

If we think it’s a biggish attack we will send out reporters – but the threshold for that has gone up in the last three years.”

[snip]

“We have first-hand experience of US soldiers shooting our staff and we have been ourselves publicly critical of their investigation process.

A year ago one of our TV cameramen was shot dead by American soldiers, but the official investigation exonerated the US soldiers. We have very strong evidence the US soliders did break their own rules.

We have lost four people since the start of the war, all of them to American fire – although with one of them there was some doubt.

We’ve raised concerns about the extent to which the US military is holding their soldiers accountable.”

[snip]

“We make use of publicity trips when offered by embassies and the military.

If that was the only reporting we did from Iraq we’d have a very strange view of things, but it means we can have the opportunity to go in a helicopter and see somewhere else in Iraq.

The US embassy were very pleased to show us the refurbishment of Baghdad Central railway station.

Unfortunately, security is so bad that there are no trains, so our story was about the railway station that can’t go anywhere.

I thought that was quite an interesting story, I don’t think the person who organised the trip was too pleased with the angle we took, but I frankly couldn’t see any other honest angle we could take.” Article

Yuppers.

The facts of Iraq are not in dispute. But the truth is that facts don’t matter anyway to this administration, and that’s what makes this whole N.I.E. debate beside the point. From the start, honest information has never figured into the prosecution of this war. The White House doesn’t care about intelligence, good or bad, classified or unclassified, because it believes it knows best, regardless of what anyone else has to say. The debate over the latest N.I.E. or any yet to leak will not alter that fundamental and self-destructive operating principle. That’s the truly bad news.

This war has now gone on so long that we tend to forget the early history that foretold the present. Yet this is the history we must remember now more than ever, because it keeps repeating itself, with ever more tragic results. In the run-up to the war, it should be recalled, the administration did not even bother to commission an N.I.E., a summary of the latest findings from every American intelligence agency, on Iraq’s weapons. ARticle

Summary here.

Interesting tactical development, which would also seem to leave the local populace in limbo.

British troops battling the Taliban are to withdraw from one of the most dangerous areas of Afghanistan after agreeing a secret deal with the local people.

Over the past two months British soldiers have come under sustained attack defending a remote mud-walled government outpost in the town of Musa Qala in southern Afghanistan. Eight have been killed there.

It has now been agreed the troops will quietly pull out of Musa Qala in return for the Taliban doing the same. The compound is one of four district government offices in the Helmand province that are being guarded by British troops. Article

Rather than expound further today on the artifact of freedom that America has now become with the passage of this past week’s bill, will just let several pieces speak by themselves.

1:

Taken as a whole, the law will give the president more power over terrorism suspects than he had before the Supreme Court decision this summer in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld that undercut more than four years of White House policy. It does, however, grant detainees brought before military commissions limited protections initially opposed by the White House. The bill, which cleared a final procedural hurdle in the House on Friday and is likely to be signed into law next week by Mr. Bush, does not just allow the president to determine the meaning and application of the Geneva Conventions; it also strips the courts of jurisdiction to hear challenges to his interpretation.

And it broadens the definition of “unlawful enemy combatant” to include not only those who fight the United States but also those who have “purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States.” The latter group could include those accused of providing financial or other indirect support to terrorists, human rights groups say. The designation can be made by any “competent tribunal” created by the president or secretary of defense. Article

2:

In the autumn of 68 B.C. the world’s only military superpower was dealt a profound psychological blow by a daring terrorist attack on its very heart. Rome’s port at Ostia was set on fire, the consular war fleet destroyed, and two prominent senators, together with their bodyguards and staff, kidnapped.

The incident, dramatic though it was, has not attracted much attention from modern historians. But history is mutable. An event that was merely a footnote five years ago has now, in our post-9/11 world, assumed a fresh and ominous significance. For in the panicky aftermath of the attack, the Roman people made decisions that set them on the path to the destruction of their Constitution, their democracy and their liberty. One cannot help wondering if history is repeating itself.

…By the oldest trick in the political book – the whipping up of a panic, in which any dissenting voice could be dismissed as “soft” or even “traitorous” – powers had been ceded by the people that would never be returned…

[snip]

Those of us who are not Americans can only look on in wonder at the similar ease with which the ancient rights and liberties of the individual are being surrendered in the United States in the wake of 9/11. The vote by the Senate on Thursday to suspend the right of habeas corpus for terrorism detainees, denying them their right to challenge their detention in court; the careful wording about torture, which forbids only the inducement of “serious” physical and mental suffering to obtain information; the admissibility of evidence obtained in the United States without a search warrant; the licensing of the president to declare a legal resident of the United States an enemy combatant – all this represents an historic shift in the balance of power between the citizen and the executive.

An intelligent, skeptical American would no doubt scoff at the thought that what has happened since 9/11 could presage the destruction of a centuries-old constitution; but then, I suppose, an intelligent, skeptical Roman in 68 B.C. might well have done the same.

[snip]

It may be that the Roman republic was doomed in any case. But the disproportionate reaction to the raid on Ostia unquestionably hastened the process, weakening the restraints on military adventurism and corrupting the political process. It was to be more than 1,800 years before anything remotely comparable to Rome’s democracy – imperfect though it was – rose again. Article

3:

In June 2005, two senior national security officials in the Bush administration came together to propose a sweeping new approach to the growing problems the United States was facing with the detention, interrogation and prosecution of terrorism suspects.

[snip]

When the paper first circulated in the upper reaches of the administration, two of those officials said, it so angered Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that his aides gathered up copies of the document and had at least some of them shredded.

[snip]

…even as the White House negotiated with Congress in recent weeks, administration forces led by the vice president’s office reasserted themselves. Officials said Mr. Cheney’s staff and its bureaucratic allies – having agreed reluctantly to the disclosure of the C.I.A. operation and other changes – were closely involved in guiding the talks with Republican senators. Their adversaries in the administration, meanwhile, had to scramble just to keep up with details of the bargaining.

[snip]

The element of the new legislation that raised the sharpest criticism among legal scholars and human rights advocates last week was the scaling back of the habeas corpus right of terrorism suspects to challenge their detention in the federal courts. But in dozens of high-level meetings on detention policy, officials said, that provision was scarcely even discussed. Article

That touted ‘crescent stretching from Spain to Indonesia’ contains vast energy resources. The entire essay is more than worth your time.

The Bush administration needs the Terror/al-Qaeda bogeyman to justify the military occupation of strategic countries that have or are near to major oil and gas reserves. It needs al-Qaeda to justify the lily pad bases in Kyrgyzstan etc.

[snip]

Bush needs torture […] to generate false information that exaggerates the threat to his regime, so as to justify repression. He needs the ritual of confession and naming others, to have it down on paper so he can show it to Congress behind closed doors. But Bush/Cheney’s ambitions are global, not just internal. Article

Ratbag and Purple Dragon, among others.

A sparkling sanctum is discovered underground.

CRITTER JITTERS

The paws that refreshes: It’s just plain creepy.

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FLAPJACK FANCY

One surmises that having chefs involved might be the problem. We’ve all eaten at one time or another in a truck stop or diner where the short-order cook turned out something much more, shall we say, readily constructible.

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STAND AND DELIVER

Or not.