Summary here.

The statistics of daily trauma.

New survey data finds the Iraqi public demonstrates the highest levels of intolerance of foreigners and other social out-groups out of 80 countries for which data is available, along with extraordinarily high levels of ethnic solidarity.…

[snip]

In addition to recent terrorism and the instability following the 2003 invasion the authors consider the impact of Saddam Hussein’s repressive rule, which differentially affected ethnic groups in Iraq. Broadly speaking, “the Arab regions of Iraq show levels of xenophobia that are almost twice as high as those found in the Kurdish region”–even as the Kurds still show “one of the world’s highest levels of xenophobia” compared to other countries.

Since 9/11 thousands of lives have been lost to terrorist attacks around the world. More than half these deaths have been in Iraq, leading to “widespread feelings that life has become unpredictable and society is falling apart” as well as “a severe sense of existential insecurity” on the part of the Iraqi public. Accordingly, 59% of all Iraqis strongly agree that life in Iraq is unpredictable and dangerous today.

The full impact of this collective trauma is evident in the survey data. “The Iraqi public,” state the authors, “reject foreigners to a degree that is virtually unknown in other societies throughout the world, including more than a dozen predominantly Islamic countries.” Accordingly, 90% of all Iraqis reject Americans or British as neighbors, compared to an international median of 16% who reject foreign neighbors. Surprisingly, 90% of Iraqis reject French neighbors as well–despite the strong objections of the French to the invasion of Iraq–including approximately 51% of Kurds and 90% of Arab Iraqis.

[snip]

The current high levels of insecurity have led to the marginalization of other out-groups such as women: 93% of Arab Iraqis and 72% of Kurds agree that men make better political leaders. In addition, adherence to traditional values such as loyalty and conformity is also extremely high today. Obedience, instead of individual autonomy, is emphasized more strongly by Iraqis than in any of the other 80 societies measured. Furthermore, “fully 97% of Arab Iraqis say that religion is important in their lives” and Arab Iraqis also ranked among the world’s highest in terms of the rejection of atheists as political leaders. Kurdish Iraqis also exhibited internationally high levels of religiosity and adherence to traditional values, albeit less than their Arab compatriots. Article

Summary here and here.

What’s up.

Developments here.

Half a world away, there is so precious little we know of what is being done in our good name.

Originally intended as a short-term holding pen for al-Qaida and Taliban suspects later shipped to Guantanamo, Bagram has expanded and acquired its own notoriety over abuse allegations though attracting much less international attention than the U.S. detention facility in Cuba.

The U.S. plans to turn over the Afghan nationals in its custody to the Afghan government by next summer. They will be sent to a new high-security wing at the Afghan government’s main Policharki prison in Kabul - scene of repeated deadly riots and escapes in recent years. But non-Afghans currently held at Bagram will stay in U.S. custody, officials say.

Bagram’s estimated 500 inmates are mostly Afghans, but also are believed to include Arabs, Pakistanis and some Central Asians. They wear the same orange jump suits and shaven heads as the “enemy combatants” at Guantanamo, but lack even the scant legal rights granted to the inmates at that facility, such as the right to appear at military hearings that assess whether they pose a security threat. In some cases, they have been held without charge for three to four years, rights workers say.

New legislation would extend anti-torture protections to all prisoners in U.S. custody. But only those hand-picked by the president or the military would get rights to legal representation and a hearing. So far, that has been accorded to only a handful of men at Guantanamo, and none held at Bagram or in Iraq, where more than 13,000 are in U.S. custody without charge.

[snip]

…the most enduring concern is not prison conditions but the legal limbo of detainees - and concerns over how many ended up there in the first place.

A Western official, who requested anonymity because of diplomatic sensitivities, recounted as an example how earlier this year, three armed, plainclothes police were rounded up and dispatched to Bagram after they were stopped at a roadblock in an eastern province during a U.S. military operation.

He estimated that as many as half those incarcerated at the American base, located an hour’s drive north of Kabul, shouldn’t be there. “Once you’re in, the process of getting out is very long and difficult,” the official said. Article

The woebegone G. Walker administration — a necrotizing fasciitis on the body politic, consuming “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

We are a respectful, patient and prudent people. We know how to change our nation’s political direction without force. It is done through the ballot. This is the inherent greatness of our system. Many nations rely on revolution and coups to replace administrations and direction. There are many countries in the world today that have followed our lead. In some countries, they have a no-confidence vote they can use to remove leaders that no longer inspire their people. In our representative democracy, we must wait for an election. A no-confidence option looks very appealing right now, but that would mean changing tradition, and many Americans don’t like to change our nation’s traditions, especially after they have served us so well for the better part of three centuries.

[snip]

The mid-term elections are little more than a month away. These are perhaps the most crucial elections that we have ever had in this country, even though we are not electing a President. It’s not just because we get to use these elections as a referendum of the failed policies of this President, they are the only way, short of a revolution to stop the direction that this President and his ultra-right agenda. This seems to be the only way we can stop the use of fear as a weapon, to control the hearts and minds of Americans that has proven to be, by far, the most effective tool that George W. Bush has in his arsenal. Bush has used fear to advance our decision to go to war with Iraq, and to advance every other piece of right-wing legislation since September 11, 2001.

The President will continue to use this tool. It is the only effective way he can convince the American people to turn their backs on the concepts of human rights. The “security moms” as they call them, are one of George Bush’s biggest supporters. Every day we hear the word terror and terrorist. According to the White House, these are the most terrible, the most diabolical enemy we have ever faced, and they are everywhere, looking to kill Americans because they hate our “Freedom”. Maybe when George W. Bush gets through with this country they won’t hate us for our “Freedom”, because we won’t have any. Article

Have gone back and forth several times on whether to link to this or not. It’s not that it is vehemently strident (or necessarily off the mark), it’s the inflammatory evocations.

But it puts forth a thesis that, once read, cannot be ignored.

…from the earliest days of the Terror War - September 17, 2001, to be exact - Bush has claimed the peremptory power of life and death over the entire world. If he says you’re an enemy of America, you are. If he wants to imprison you and torture you, he can. And if he decides you should die, he’ll kill you. This is not hyperbole, liberal paranoia, or “conspiracy theory”: it’s simply a fact, reported by the mainstream media, attested by senior administration figures, recorded in official government documents - and boasted about by the president himself, in front of Congress and a national television audience.

And although the Republic-snuffing act just passed by Congress does not directly address Bush’s royal prerogative of murder, it nonetheless strengthens it and enshrines it in law. For the measure sets forth clearly that the designation of an “enemy combatant” is left solely to the executive branch; neither Congress nor the courts have any say in the matter. When this new law is coupled with the existing “Executive Orders” authorizing “lethal force” against arbitrarily designated “enemy combatants,” it becomes, quite literally, a license to kill - with the seal of Congressional approval.

[snip]

So here we are. Congress has just entrenched the principle of Bush’s “unitary executive” dictatorship into law; and it is this principle that undergirds the assassination program. As I wrote in December, it’s hard to believe that any genuine democracy would accept a claim by its leader that he could have anyone killed simply by labeling them an “enemy.” It’s hard to believe that any adult with even the slightest knowledge of history or human nature could countenance such unlimited, arbitrary power, knowing the evil it is bound to produce. Yet this is exactly what the great and good in America have done. Article

TINY TREASURE

Aglets from Nuremberg as an unexpectedly in-demand trade item for early Spanish voyages to the western hemisphere.

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PICTURE THIS

Cool sounding search engine.

LOW GROWTH LAMENT

From puttering to sputtering.

The U.S. economy has slowed more dramatically than most economists expected just a few weeks ago, leaving it more vulnerable to a recession.

Forecasters at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and AllianceBernstein Holding LP in New York have cut their growth estimates for the just-ended third quarter to an annual rate of 2 percent or less. They don’t foresee much, if any, improvement in the fourth quarter: Auto-production cuts and slumping home sales are likely to overwhelm any boost the economy gets from lower gasoline prices, they say.

“We’re decelerating fairly significantly,” says Peter Hooper, a former Federal Reserve official who’s now chief economist at Deutsche Bank Securities Inc. in New York. He sees annual growth below 2 percent in the second half. The economy expanded at a 2.6 percent rate in the second quarter and 5.6 percent in the first.

Growth is getting closer to what Macroeconomic Advisers LLP President Chris Varvares describes as the “stall speed,” where an unexpected shock such as a terrorist strike or a hurricane might be enough to trigger a recession. A mathematical model of the economy developed by Federal Reserve economist Jonathan Wright puts the chances of a recession over the next year at about 40 percent.

With recession risks rising, some Fed officials are becoming uneasy about the outlook. While they remain on guard against the dangers of higher inflation, they say they’re also paying more attention to the threats to growth.

[snip]

Manufacturing in the U.S. last month expanded less than economists forecast as production growth slowed, an industry group reported today. The Institute for Supply Management’s manufacturing index dropped to the lowest level since May 2005.

The housing outlook is even grimmer. New-home sales in August were 17 percent year-over-year drop since 2003. Existing home sales were the lowest since early 2004, and prices fell for the first time in 11 years. Article

AFGHANISTAN

Remember, we’re fast coming up on five years since the first shots were fired. (emphasis added)

The problem, current and former U.S., European and Afghan officials and officers agreed, is that the United States failed to follow its own strategy in Afghanistan after the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001.

Instead, they said, the Bush administration, hostile to “nation-building,” relied too heavily on military firepower and concentrated on hunting Osama bin Laden’s followers, not rebuilding one of the most devastated countries on Earth.

The failure to make good on pledges of massive reconstruction has soured many Afghans on President Hamid Karzai and his U.S. supporters. Among the Pashtuns, the country’s dominant ethnic group, sympathy has grown for the Taliban, who are mostly Pashtuns.

So U.S. commanders retooled their approach earlier this year without direction from Washington, putting more emphasis on winning hearts and minds.

“It’s not been an institutional solution. It’s been a bottom-up solution,” said Sturek’s boss, Col. John W. Nicholson, the commander of U.S. forces in southeastern Afghanistan. “I’m encouraged by what I see. There is a real dialogue going on.”

But the challenge facing U.S. commanders is monumental, and it may be too late to prevent Afghanistan from sinking into greater violence and political chaos.

[snip]

In the Taliban-infested district of Dilla, the new civilian sub-governor and his police chief have had to make do with a tent while they await the construction of a new administration compound.

Like pioneers who crossed the western United States in wagon trains, Sturek’s men secured the site by drawing their Humvees up at night in a circle inside a razor-wire perimeter. Article

WHAT HAVE WE BECOME

Oh, so that’s it. Because the briefing didn’t include the specific date, time, place, cast, method and a checklist of steps to follow, there was nothing worth getting hot and bothered about or looking into. Mm-hm.

They’re pathetic. Inept and pathetic. And dissembling, preening poster children for The ‘fraidest Generation.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and former Attorney General John Ashcroft received the same CIA briefing about an imminent al-Qaida strike on an American target that was given to the White House two months before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The State Department’s disclosure Monday that the pair was briefed within a week after then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice was told about the threat on July 10, 2001, raised new questions about what the Bush administration did in response, and about why so many officials have claimed they never received or don’t remember the warning.

One official who helped to prepare the briefing, which included a PowerPoint presentation, described it as a “10 on a scale of 1 to 10″ that “connected the dots” in earlier intelligence reports to present a stark warning thatal-Qaida, which had already killed Americans in Yemen, Saudi Arabia and East Africa, was poised to strike again.

Former CIA Director George Tenet gave the independent Sept. 11, 2001, commission the same briefing on Jan. 28, 2004, but the commission made no mention of the warning in its 428-page final report. According to three former senior intelligence officials, Tenet testified to commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste and to Philip Zelikow, the panel’s executive director and the principal author of its report, who’s now Rice’s top adviser.

[snip]

Speaking to reporters late Sunday en route to the Middle East, Rice said she had no recollection of what she called “the supposed meeting.”

“What I’m quite certain of, is that it was not a meeting in which I was told that there was an impending attack and I refused to respond,” she said.

Ashcroft, who resigned as attorney general on Nov. 9, 2004, told the Associated Press on Monday that it was “disappointing” that he never received the briefing, either.

But on Monday evening, Rice’s spokesman Sean McCormack issued a statement confirming that she’d received the CIA briefing “on or around July 10″ and had asked that it be given to Ashcroft and Rumsfeld.

[snip]

The briefing “didn’t say within the United States,” said one former senior intelligence official. “It said on the United States, which could mean a ship, an embassy or inside the United States.” Article