Summaries here and here and here and also here.

Suffer the children.

The bomb went off just outside the school as the IPS correspondent stood speaking to children and teachers within.

The headmaster smiled. “You will hear many of these every day if you stay here another day or two,” he said. “The resistance will not stop until the last American leaves.”

The children too took no notice of the blast, which shook the doors and windows of the half-destroyed school in this town near Fallujah, 70km west of Baghdad.

The children are growing up in occupied Iraq — and they are resisting it.

[snip]

“How can we teach them forgiveness when they see Americans killing their family members every day,” the teacher in the classroom who gave her name as Shyamaa told IPS. “Words cannot cover the stream of blood and these signs of destruction, and words cannot hide the daily raids they see.” Article

Note that this comes from the newly ensconced head of the British army.

- The head of Britain’s army said the presence of British troops in Iraq was exacerbating the security situation on the ground and they should be withdrawn soon, according to a British newspaper.

General Sir Richard Dannatt also said in an interview with the Daily Mail newspaper that Britain’s Iraq venture was aggravating the security threat elsewhere in the world.

In unusually blunt comments for a serving senior officer, Dannatt told the Friday edition of the newspaper that the troops should “get … out sometime soon because our presence exacerbates the security problems”. Article

So how’s that training going?

The Bush administration plans to shut down a highly successful Iraqi police academy in Jordan even as security in Iraq worsens, the Daily News has learned.

The Jordan International Police Training Center near Amman will stop training Iraqi police recruits this year, having already graduated 40,000 cops from its eight-week course since 2004, U.S. officials confirmed.

[snip]

…State Department officials who run the Pentagon-funded academy said Iraqi authorities want all training shifted to eight regional academies in Iraq, including Baghdad Police College - which has to be rebuilt because of bungled construction.

“Moving the functions of this facility to Iraq will add to the cost - especially for security - and subtract from these vital recruitment and training missions,” Leahy said.

The Iraqi Police - apart from the paramilitary National Police linked to death squads - are routinely attacked at recruiting centers and stations. By some estimates, 12,000 of the 130,000-man force have been killed or wounded or have quit or been fired.

“They’re under siege,” said one U.S. official. “Their main focus is their own security.” Article

McLuhan revamped: The media mutates the message.

American news outlets tend to be rather cavalier about the suffering at the other end of the Pentagon’s missiles, bombs and bullets. And there’s a strong tendency to brand documented concerns as unfounded speculation – a media reflex that suits war-crazed presidents just fine. Article

Editorial du jour:

At his news conference Wednesday, President Bush expressed not once but three times his view that if the U.S. does not defeat the terrorists “over there” in Iraq, it will have to fight them here in the United States. This crude formulation is tiresome and insulting to Americans’ intelligence.

“I firmly believe that the American people understand that this is different from other wars because in this war, if we were to leave early, before the job is done, the enemy will follow us here,” Bush said. This conjures up improbable images of Shiite death squads and Sunni insurgents stuffing bomb-making manuals into their backpacks and booking flights to LAX while U.S. troops march out of Baghdad.

There are good reasons not to withdraw from Iraq hastily. But Bush’s assertion about a good offense being the best defense undermines his own credibility.

[snip]

Bush is right to say that Al Qaeda would crow at an American “defeat” in Iraq. Indeed, anti-American elements around the world would surely take great satisfaction in any U.S. humiliation. But his equation of withdrawal with defeat, of leaving the Iraqis to manage their own affairs with handing a victory to terrorists, is simplistic in the extreme. Sooner or later, the U.S. military will leave Iraq. A sober and thoughtful national debate could illuminate how best to accomplish that.

The deliberate repetition of a shameless canard just before an election does not contribute to this thoughtful debate. Indeed, Bush’s formulation could lead to a false sense of complacency. Fighting the terrorists “over there” does not necessarily make us safer “over here.” This is not to say that there is no relation at all between Iraq’s fate and the threat of terrorism to the U.S. But the relationship is not as simplistic as the president describes it. Pretending these two issues are part of the same problem trivializes them both. Article

Summary here.

Is NATO working towards an end of spliting the difference?

Musharraf said the commander of the NATO force fighting a spiralling Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan, British General David Richards, had agreed with Pakistan’s strategy when he visited him earlier this week.

[snip]

Ahead of his talks with Musharraf on Tuesday, Richards said that Pakistan’s arrangement could set an example for the 31,000-strong NATO-led International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan. Article

Putting the onus squarely where it belongs.

Over the past six years, our “my way or the highway” president blew up a crucial nonproliferation agreement which was keeping North Korea’s plutonium stores under seal, ended bilateral talks with Pyongyang, squashed Japan’s and South Korea’s carefully constructed “sunshine policy,” which was slowly drawing the bizarre Hermit Kingdom back into the light, and then took every opportunity to personally insult the country’s reportedly unstable dictator because it played well politically at home.

If you shun them, they will shape up - this was the essence of President Bush’s non-diplomacy, as it was in regards to Iran, Lebanon and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The result? Cold War-style brinkmanship that has left the United States helpless.

The policy options left are dumb and dumber: Either passively accept Pyongyang’s defiant threats and ability to slip weapons-grade plutonium around the world, or launch an invasion that could spark a devastating attack on Seoul.

Thank you, Mr. President. I feel so much safer now that we have a wannabe cowboy in charge of the free world. Article

What are Cheney and the neocons marshaling for? Armaments, war, and anything but talks. They and the policies of inherent violence and arrogant upheaval they promulgate still have 2 more years in office, but ridding the Republicans of a majority in at least one chamber of Congress is the key method to put up roadblocks and put the brakes on their machinations and martial agenda.

Encouraging Japan to build nuclear weapons, shipping food aid via submarines, and running secret sabotage operations inside North Korea’s borders are among a raft of policy prescriptions pushed by prominent U.S. neo-conservatives in the wake of Pyongyang’s nuclear test.

Writing in publications from National Review Online (NRO) to the New York Times, neo-conservatives claim, contrary to the lessons drawn by “realist” and other critics of the George W. Bush administration, that Monday’s test vindicates their long-held view that negotiations with “rogue” states like North Korea are useless and that “regime change” — by military means, if necessary — is the only answer.

[snip]

They are opposed by the “realists” who are concentrated in the State Department and also include former secretary of state Colin Powell; his chief deputy, Richard Armitage; and a number of top national security officials in the administration of former President George H.W. Bush, such as former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft, and secretary of state James Baker, who just last weekend publicly called for Washington to directly engage its “enemies”, including North Korea, Syria and Iran.

That stance is anathema to the neo-conservatives and their right-wing allies, such as Cheney, who, at one national security council meeting on North Korea several years ago, was reported to have said, “We don’t negotiate with evil; we defeat it.” Article

While ye old scribe certainly has more than passing disagreements with this one, it is a viewpoint that has a place at the table. However, abandoning the U.S.’ umbrella of protection or South Korea and Japan in favor of the wobbly guaranteee of the influence of a militarized totalitarian regime as a primary check on the DPRK eliminates too many avenues that can be offered only (or most readily) from elesewhere.

North Korea must be treated as a regional problem to be managed by a regional concert of powers, with China in the lead. The U.S. role in all this should be sympathetic – and distant. Article

Much more clear-headed and amenable in the realization of the existence and the limitations of both carrot and stick is Jimmy Carter:

What must be avoided is to leave a beleaguered nuclear nation convinced that it is permanently excluded from the international community, its existence threatened, its people suffering horrible deprivation and its hard-liners in total control of military and political policy. Article

Oy. If so, a repellant and repugnant fielding of lethality.

An investigative report to be aired on Italian television Wednesday raises the possibility that Israel has used an experimental weapon in the Gaza Strip in recent months, causing especially serious physical injuries, such as amputated limbs and severe burns.

The weapon is similar to one developed by the U.S. military, known as DIME, which causes a powerful and lethal blast, but only within a relatively small radius.

The Italian report is based on the eyewitness accounts of medical doctors in the Strip, as well as tests carried out in an Italian laboratory. The investigative team is the same one that exposed, several months ago, the use by U.S. forces in Iraq of phosphorous bombs, against Iraqi rebels in Faluja.

[snip]

The investigation, by Rai24news, follows reports by Gaza-based doctors of inexplicably serious injuries. The doctors reported an exceptionally large number of wounded who lost legs, of completely burned bodies and injuries unaccompanied by metal shrapnel. Some of the doctors also claimed that they removed particles from wounds that could not be seen in an x-ray machine.

According to those who testified, the wounded were hit by munitions launched from drones, most of them in July.

Dr. Habas al-Wahid, head of the emergency room at the Shuhada al-Aqsa hospital, in Deir el-Balah, told the reporters that the legs of the injured were sliced from their bodies “as if a saw was used to cut through the bone.” There were signs of heat and burns near the point of the amputation, but no signs that the dismemberment was caused by metal fragments.

Dr. Juma Saka, of Shifa Hospital, in Gaza City, said the doctors found small entry wounds on the bodies of the wounded and the dead. According to Saka, a powder was found on the victims’ bodies and in their internal organs.

“The powder was like microscopic shrapnel, and these are what likely caused the injuries,” Saka said.

[snip]

The Italian investigative team raised the possibility that the IDF is making use of a weapon similar in character to DIME - Dense Inert Metal Explosive - developed for the U.S. military. According to the official website of a U.S. air force laboratory, it is a “focused lethality” weapon, which aims to accurately destroy the target while causing minimum damage to the surrounding.

According to the site, the projectile comprises a carbon-fiber casing filled with tungsten powder and explosives. In the explosion, tungsten particles - a metal capable of conducting very high temperatures - spread over a radius of four meters and cause death.

According to the U.S.-based website Defense-Tech, “the result is an incredibly destructive blast in a small area” and “the destructive power of the mixture causes far more damage than pure explosive.” It adds that “the impact of the micro-shrapnel seems to cause a similar but more powerful effect than a shockwave.”

The weapon is supposed to still be in the testing phase and has not been used on the battlefield.

[snip]

The report says that the weapon is not banned by international law, especially since it has not been officially tested.

It is believed that the weapon is highly carcinogenic and harmful to the environment.

The non-governmental organization Physicians for Human Rights has written to Defense Minister Amir Peretz requesting explanations for the aforementioned injuries to Palestinians. Amos Gilad, a senior adviser to the minister, is supposed to meet with the group on the matter in the near future. Article

There is still that inisistent little voice in the back of ye old scribe’s mind that nags that the 30-day “orientation” is linguo-babble for feeding them back to a semblance of the state of the other detainees, allowing wounds and bruises time to heal and providing instruction under duress on what not to reveal.

Representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross have interviewed 14 top al-Qaeda prisoners at the US prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, including the alleged mastermind of the September 11 attacks.

[snip]

The interviews began after the prisoners went through a 30-day “orientation” after their arrival at the detention center which is located on a US naval base on the southeast tip of Cuba. Article

Maybe because that little voice is steeped in awareness of too many instances like this.

Further examining Lady Liberty as she lies supine and on life support.

In 1798, Thomas Jefferson wrote that “Habeas Corpus secures every man here, alien or citizen, against everything which is not law, whatever shape it may assume.” For 200 years, with rare and shameful exceptions, the writ of habeas corpus, written into the text of the U.S. Constitution even before the Bill of Rights was added, has protected the fundamental right of any person held in custody by the U.S. government to challenge the unlawfulness of their incarceration.

[snip]

Largely based on proposals written by the White House and Justice Department, the Military Commission Act is breathtaking in its denial of fundamental rights under the Constitution and international law. The law re-establishes virtually intact President Bush’s military tribunals, which were rejected by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional in Hamdam v Rumsfeld only three months ago.

It legalizes U.S. war crimes committed before Dec. 30, 2005. It also prevents people harmed by the U.S. in violation of the Geneva Conventions from filing a claim in a U.S. court and strips legal residents of their right to challenge their detention in court if they are accused of being enemy combatants. It retroactively abolishes the right of Guantánamo detainees to challenge their detention, approves the CIA program that in the past allowed waterboarding and other forms of torture and designates any individuals as unlawful enemy combatants if they provide material support to those engaged in hostilities against the U.S., a concept previously found unconstitutionally vague by the U.S. District Court for the Central District, in Los Angeles. Even worse, the law expands the definition “unlawful enemy combatant” to include anyone determined as such by a tribunal under the authority of the president or the defense secretary. The law denies anyone determined to be an enemy combatant - or anyone “awaiting such determination” - the right to challenge his or her detention, treatment or conditions of confinement in court.

[snip]

Over the past several years, documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union and information disclosed by the International Committee of the Red Cross show that federal employees have engaged in appalling acts such as soaking a prisoner’s hand in alcohol and setting it on fire, administering electric shocks, subjecting prisoners to repeated sexual abuse and assault, kicking and beating prisoners in the head and groin, putting lit cigarettes inside a prisoner’s ear, force-feeding a baseball to a prisoner, chaining a prisoner hands-to-feet in a fetal position for 24 hours without food or water or access to a toilet, breaking a prisoner’s shoulders and using abusive methods that contributed to several deaths.

[snip]

Congress has never before authorized federal prosecutors to use evidence obtained by torture or abuse in any criminal trial. The new law allows convictions based on statements made by people who may have been willing to invent anything to stop the pain.

During several congressional hearings, the nation’s top judge advocates general for the four uniformed services, deeply concerned that what the U.S. does to its detainees other countries may do to our soldiers, all agreed that coerced evidence has no place in any American courtroom and no place in any American military commission. Congress ignored them.

[snip]

Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson took leave from the court to serve as chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg war crimes trials. When his work was done 60 years ago this week, confident that the rule of law had prevailed, he wrote, “Of one thing we may be sure. The future will never have to ask, with misgiving, what could the Nazis have said in their favor. History will know that whatever could be said, they were allowed to say. They have been given the kind of a trial, which they, in the days of their pomp and power, never gave to any man. But fairness is not weakness. The extraordinary fairness of these hearings is an attribute of our strength.” If the Military Commissions Act is not overturned in court, the future will ask what could the detainees have said in their favor. The world will compare what this government has done to infamous Star Chamber and show trials of totalitarian regimes.

By ignoring the lessons of the past and sacrificing fundamental fairness for an illusion of strength, our government has seriously weakened America, put our own soldiers at greater risk, enhanced the image of the United States around the world as a tyrannical evildoer and cast lasting shame on the promise of our Constitution. Article

And more:

It’s long been apparent that many US citizens would watch fundamental rights be swept away with hardly a shrug. But it’s stunning that our congressmen, elected officials sworn to bear true faith and allegiance to the Constitution, would actually vote to strip US courts of the power to protect essential rights.

And yet that’s exactly what happened when Congress recently approved the Military Commissions Act to govern the treatment and trial of detainees held at Guantanamo Bay and other US detention facilities abroad.

In denying the writ of habeas corpus to noncitizens detained by the United States outside the country, Congress has turned its back on one of the most venerable of Constitutional protections: A prisoner’s ability to go to court to challenge the lawfulness of his detention.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of that right.

“It really is the fundamental underpinning of the rule of law,” says Boston attorney Harvey Silverglate, a well-known civil libertarian. “If the president can just pick anyone up and hold them, tell me what meaning there is to a court system. That is what the rule of law is all about: that an independent judiciary can determine whether or not you are being held legally.” Indeed, the establishment of habeas marks the historical transi tion away from the whims of a despot and toward constitutional government. Article

When the top is detached from reality, and when the ‘Decider’ makes faulty, misguided, retrogressive, wrong, vindictive and dangerous decisions in a vaccum of authority.

There’s always been the frightening question of what would happen if a President of United States went completely bonkers. But there is an equally disturbing issue of what happens if a President loses touch with reality, especially if he is surrounded by enough sycophants and enablers so no one can or will stop him.

At his Oct. 11 news conference, Bush gave the country a peek into his imaginary world, a bizarre place impenetrable by facts and logic, where falsehoods, once stated, become landmarks and where Bush’s “gut” instinct, no matter how misguided, is the compass for finding one’s way. Article

Translation: “after the trial is under way” = after elections.

At least 135 federal employees, including a White House staff member and National Security Agency employees, bought bogus online college degrees from a diploma mill, a lawyer in the case against the mill operators said.

[snip]

The bogus degree purchases by the federal workers were revealed Wednesday during a U.S. District Court status conference for five defendants in the case against the mill, The Spokesman-Review reported Thursday.

None of the federal officials was identified during the conference.

“We’re not going to disclose who bought these degrees until after the trial is under way,” U.S. Attorney James A. McDevitt told the newspaper.

[snip]

Material provided to the defense by the Justice Department shows at least 135 government employees bought college or university degrees to use in seeking promotions or pay raises, Schweda said. The phony diplomas came from such places as St. Regis University, James Monroe University and Robertstown University. Article

Veering away from the overtly political for a bit, read about the new office of religious weblog expansion and the very old Zurkhaneh.

1915: 100,000,000 •• 1967: 200,000,000 •• 2006: 300,000,000 #1 — #2

MOUNTAIN MASSACRE

Horrid, brutal and reinforced by the exquisite cowardice of commerce.

The incident, witnessed by international climbers and Sherpas at a camp on Mount Cho Oyu - about 20 kilometres west of Mount Everest - occurred on September 30 as a group of refugees, including many children, made their way across the 5700-metre-high Nangpa La Pass from Tibet to Nepal and then on to Dharamsala in India - the home of their spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama.

[snip]

“It was actually the Chinese militias hunting Tibetans on to the glacier … They were shooting Tibetans like rats, dogs, rabbits - you name it.”

[snip]

Some staff at mountaineering companies operating in the area were reportedly keeping quiet about the incident for fear that commenting might jeopardise their permits to enter the Tibetan region.

“Most of them won’t go on record and give their names because they are working for international organisations that want to keep their rights to climb in the region,” the executive officer of the Australia Tibet Council, Paul Bourke, told smh.com.au. Article

Quasi-related:

China had its second-largest ever trade surplus in September, signaling the government may struggle to cool an investment boom.

The gap narrowed to $15.3 billion from a record $18.8 billion in August, the Beijing-based customs bureau said today on its Web site. For the first nine months, China’s trade surplus reached $110 billion, exceeding last year’s total.

Premier Wen Jiabao calls the soaring surplus one of China’s biggest economic “problems” because it’s strained trade ties with the U.S. and flooded the economy with cash, complicating his efforts to slow investment. The gap, which China aims to close by 2010, is adding pressure on the nation to let its currency gain faster to stem money inflows and avoid trade sanctions.

[snip]

The gap has caused foreign exchange reserves to skyrocket to almost $1 trillion, the highest of any nation. China’s foreign exchange regulator on Oct. 6 said imbalances in international payments balances makes China more vulnerable to external shocks and acknowledged the need to deepen foreign exchange reform and seek other ways to stem the surplus.

[snip]

At the same time, countries are responding to the perceived threat of lopsided tradeflows to global financial stability. A swelling U.S. current account deficit, mirrored by a widening surplus in China, may trigger a dollar slump and “play havoc” with the world economy, Asian Development Bank Chief Economist Ifzal Ali said Oct. 3.

[snip]

“Yuan gains are needed to help resolve China’s economic distortion,” Fan Gang, a member of People’s Bank of China’s policy committee, said Oct. 10. An expected decline in the dollar may erode the value of China’s reserves, he said. Article

ENTRANCE EXCLUSION

Insulation from the ‘other’ and isolation from the wide-ranging intercourse of ideas makes us poorer as a people and eventually breeds a stunted, self-limiting groupthink born of fear and fed by ignorance.

In these official follies there is an apparent mixture of deliberate ideological exclusion and blind bureaucratic stupidity. Among refugees, the government has kept out anti-Castro Cubans, Vietnamese and Laotian Montagnards, Liberians, Somalis, and Colombian peasants, all of them barred for voluntary or coerced support of armed groups, all of them desperate for asylum in this country. In the aftermath of September 11th, the United States drastically reduced the number of people admitted as political refugees. In 1992, there were more than 130,000; this year, of 60,000 slots, only 41,500 have been filled. Most of these cases of exclusion are so unjust that an unusual coalition of congressional liberals and conservatives is advocating a change to the Patriot Act.

[snip]

The larger problem is that terrorism has created an atmosphere in which no official wants to be the one who gives a visa to an Al Qaeda operative, while there is no professional price for barring a professor with unpopular ideas or for making a graduate student miss a semester of school. (The number of foreign students admitted annually has declined in the past five years, though the State Department is trying to ease their visa process.) Living in the United States is a better advertisement for America than most of its foreign policies, but it is an increasingly difficult experience for foreigners to have.

[snip]

…[a more rational approach] would reduce the “habits of hypocrisy and meanness” that Jefferson identified as the result of legislating against thought.… Article