Summary here and here.

Do the words ‘inflammable basket case’ ring a bell?

…Nearly 60 percent of Iraqis are unemployed, according to NGOs, a figure confirmed by the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs.

Ensuring people can work and have access to basic needs are seen by NGOs as essential elements to stemming the tide of violence in Iraq.

“The lack of essential needs has provoked revolt from the population, and without controls it generates more violence and lack of support to the parliament which is running the country,” said Nissirin Hummam, public officer manager of the Bagdhad-based Iraq Aid Association.

[snip]

In addition, 30 percent inflation over the past year makes it increasingly difficult for families to afford food. At least 70 percent of the population depends on food rations - nearly double the percentage of dependency during former president Saddam Hussein’s time, according to government officials and NGOs. Article

Chaos ascendant: The plan to meeet to plan to discuss planning on implementation of a proposed plan gets derailed.

Iraq’s government indefinitely postponed a much-anticipated national reconciliation conference today as at least 83 people were reported dead in a two-day spree of sectarian revenge killings and insurgent bombings.

[snip]

A brief statement from the Ministry of State for National Dialogue said the Iraqi political powers conference planned for Saturday had been put off because of “emergency reasons out of the control of the ministry”. Article

Following U.K. Army chief Dannatt’s sharp critique earlier this week, a high-ranking voice from the other side of the globe:

Australia’s defence force chief at the time of the invasion of Iraq said in remarks published yesterday that he now believes the war has increased the threat of militancy. The comments by retired general Peter Cosgrove come just days after Britain’s army chief said British troops in Iraq were exacerbating security problems around the world.

“If people say there has been an energising of the jihadist movement through the protracted war in Iraq – well that’s pretty obvious,” Cosgrove told the Sunday Telegraph. The highly respected Vietnam veteran, who retired last year, said he had apologised to national police chief Mick Keelty for criticising his comments that the Iraq war had inspired the 2004 terrorist attacks in Madrid. Article

But they can’t be ‘permanent’ bases, because Congress specifically forbade funding those in Iraq as a part of the Defense budget, right?

Uh-huh. Dream on, bunky.

As if the woebgeone G. Walker administration gives a fig for the niceties of ‘inconvenient’ things like budgets and law.

The United States is allegedly planning to construct a big military base in northern Iraq as part of its military plans for the Middle East.

A news article published on the Firat News Agency website, which is known to have close connections to the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK), said that U.S. officials in agreement with the regional Kurdish administration in northern Iraq have begun to construct a military airport in the Arbil region. A small model of the base will be established in Suleymaniya. Article

Could be splinter propaganda, could be a trial baloon, could be empty posturing, but noted nevertheless.

A video posted on the internet on Sunday in the name of one of Iraq’s largest insurgent groups called for the creation of a separate Sunni Islamic state in the country.

If authentic, it could indicate a shift in strategy for parts of the Sunni Arab insurgency. “Your brothers in the Mutayibeen Coalition herald the establishment of the Islamic State of Iraq,” said a spokesman, whose face was blotted out.

He said it should encompass the governates of Baghdad, Anbar, Diyala, Kirkuk, Salahedddin, Nineveh and parts of Babel and Wasit – a swathe of central and western Iraq where most Sunni Arabs live.

The Mutayibeen coalition was purportedly set up last week by the Mujahideen Shura Council, an al-Qaeda-dominated umbrella organisation, along with smaller groups and tribal leaders.

It is rarely clear whether internet statements represent a coherent stance by insurgents or a splinter group, or indeed if they are authentic at all.

But if a separate state is really now a goal of radical Sunni Islamist guerillas, it would put them at odds with mainstream Sunni politicians and many other insurgent groups. They tend to look askance at partition, which they claim would deprive their oil-poor central Iraqi heartland of resources. Article

Too tame a recap/analysis by half (there is a difference between ‘balanced’ and muted), but this observation stands out:

Alas, whatever chances we may have had to overcome these difficulties have been torpedoed by the breathtaking incompetence of the Bush administration in managing postwar Iraq. Article

Summary here and here.

More:

A series of Taliban-linked attacks across Afghanistan left seven people dead, as the Italian government said it believed a missing freelance photojournalist had been kidnapped. Article

Cross-border tit-for-tat accusations.

Afghan Foreign Minister Rangeen Dadfar Spanta accused Pakistan of trying to play down the threat of “international terrorism” by labelling the Taliban uprising here an ethnic issue.

[snip]

“The terrorism which is religious extremism is a global network operating against Afghanistan and other democratic states from Russia to India to America with the support of a country,” Spanta told a news conference in Kabul, in a clear reference to Pakistan. “Terrorism is not an ethnic issue.” Article

Locked away and forgotten — a dour snapshot of G. Walker’s blueprint for America.

In a jail cell at an immigration detention centre in Arizona sits a man who is not charged with a crime, not suspected of a crime and not considered a danger to society.

However, he has been in custody for five years.

His name is Ali Partovi and according to the Department of Homeland Security, he is the last to be held of about 1,200 Arab and Muslim men swept up by authorities in the US after the September 11, 2001, terror attacks. Article

Editorial du jour.

When President Bush rammed the bill on military commissions through Congress, the Republicans crowed about creating a process that would be tough on terrorists but preserve essential principles of justice. “America can be proud,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, one of the bill’s architects.

Unfortunately, Mr. Graham was wrong. One of the many problems with the new law is that it will only make it harder than it already is to separate the real terrorists from the far larger group of inmates at Guantánamo Bay who were bit players in the Taliban or innocent bystanders. Mr. Graham and other supporters of this dreadful legislation seem to have forgotten that American justice does not merely deliver swift punishment to the guilty. It also protects the innocent.

[snip]

…Mr. Bush created Combatant Status Review Tribunals, which gave the most cursory possible reviews of the Gitmo detainees. These reviews took place years after the prisoners were captured. They permitted the use of hearsay evidence, evidence obtained through coercion and even torture, and evidence that was kept secret from the prisoner. The normal burden of proof was reversed: the tribunals presumed prisoners were justifiably detained and the prisoners had the burden of disproving government evidence – presuming they knew what it was in the first place.

The new law leaves this mockery of justice stronger. The Military Commissions Act of 2006 makes it virtually impossible to contest a status tribunal’s decision. It prohibits claims of habeas corpus – the ancient right of prisoners in just societies to have their detentions reviewed – or any case based directly or indirectly on the Geneva Conventions. Even if an appeal got to the single appeals court now authorized to hear it, the administration would very likely argue that it cannot be heard without jeopardizing secrets, as it has done repeatedly. Article

Avedon Carol speaks plain truth within (apparently) a bluish funk.

It’s tough to pigeonhole this story, but it is an interesting look at the too-often losing fight to battle environmental degradation and hazard, especially in ‘traditional’ societies.

Give Gov. Brian Schweitzer of Montana a cookie.

CEREMONIAL SALT AND THE OLD SOD

Two words you never thought you’d see together: Irish sumo.

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NITTY GRITTY MOUSEPLAY

Inquiring minds want to know: Was it Chip or Dale? We’ve always harbored suspicions about one of them.

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SPEAKING OF FANTASY…

Park your brain at the door and peek in at Right Wing Happyfunland.

IRAQ IIO

The signs mount that the woebegone G. Walker administration is touting for the removal and replacement of the ’sovereign’ government after the November midterm elections.

U.S. strategy in Iraq currently revolves around the idea that given enough time and the proper security environment, Maliki’s government will take control of the country and calm the sectarian tensions that threaten to dismember it.

Yet since Iraq’s first permanent government was elected, security has eroded by nearly every measure, despite the U.S. training of more than 300,000 Iraqi police and soldiers. When the government came into power, 65 bodies on average were appearing on Iraq’s streets a day; today, 100 are killed daily.

According to the interior minister, the government is issuing 15,000 passports a week, many to residents who say they’re desperate to flee; school populations have dropped; and some Iraqi neighborhoods have become so sectarian that some areas are divided up street by street. Services, such as electricity, haven’t improved.

Now there’s a growing chorus that Maliki’s government is unlikely to ever come to terms with the country’s problems, a complaint reflected in Iraqi Web logs, newspaper columns, and, U.S. civilian and military officials say, in private conversations. Article

THE MOST DANGEROUS RACE

Proliferation has been rudely shoved back onto the international menu.

The declaration last Monday by North Korea that it had conducted a successful atomic test brought to nine the number of nations believed to have nuclear arms. But atomic officials estimate that as many as 40 more countries have the technical skill, and in some cases the required material, to build a bomb.

That ability, coupled with new nuclear threats in Asia and the Middle East, risks a second nuclear age, officials and arms control specialists say, in which nations are more likely to abandon the old restraints against atomic weapons.

The spread of nuclear technology is expected to accelerate as nations redouble their reliance on atomic power. That will give more countries the ability to make reactor fuel, or, with the same equipment and a little more effort, bomb fuel — the hardest part of the arms equation.

Signs of activity abound. Hundreds of companies are now prospecting for uranium where dozens did a few years ago. Argentina, Australia and South Africa are drawing up plans to begin enriching uranium, and other countries are considering doing the same. Egypt is reviving its program to developnuclear power.

Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the I.A.E.A., has estimated that up to 49 nations now know how to make nuclear arms, and he has warned that global tensions could push some over the line.

“We are relying,” he said, “primarily on the continued good intentions of these countries — intentions which are in turn based on their sense of security or insecurity, and could therefore be subject to rapid change.”

[snip]

“The general concepts are widely known,” said Robert S. Norris, the author of “Racing for the Bomb.” “Still, it’s another thing to actually do it. That still requires certain skills of engineering and chemistry and physics.”

The hardest part, experts agree, is not acquiring the weapons blueprints but obtaining the fuel. That is becoming easier because of developments both overt and covert.

Abdul Qadeer Khan, a chief architect of Pakistan’s nuclear arms program who went on to establish the world’s largest atomic black market, sold the secrets of how to make centrifuges for enriching uranium to Libya, Iran and North Korea. Tehran insists its intentions are entirely peaceful, though most analysts judge that all three countries bought from the black market because they wanted to make nuclear arms.

Dr. Khan sold plans and parts for Pakistan’s first-generation centrifuge, the P-1, as well as the next generation, the P-2, which can spin faster to enrich uranium more rapidly.

Investigators are still trying to learn where else Dr. Khan may have planted his nuclear seeds. They discovered outposts of his network in Dubai, Malaysia and South Africa and found that before his downfall in 2004 he visited at least 18 countries, including Egypt, Niger, Nigeria, Sudan, Syria and Saudi Arabia.

The worrisome enrichment trends involve not just stealthy military advances but also soaring demands for nuclear power, driven by rising populations, dwindling oil supplies and fears that the combustion of fossil fuels is warming the planet.

“The nuclear renaissance is gaining momentum,” said George B. Assie, vice president for business development at Cameco, the world’s largest publicly traded uranium company, based in Canada. Article

GUANTÁNAMO

A shameful case, with the extremely tenuous ‘evidence’ unquestionably having been extracted by torture. This is what we have become under the woebegone G. Walker administration. Two more years of their being in office, abetted by Republican majorities in Congress, may be more than any ostensibly free republic can safely endure.

Young runaway Abdul Rahim endured cigarette burns, electric shocks and repeated beatings at the hands of Taliban soldiers who captured him in 2000, he said — all because he refused to fight for al-Qaeda.

In one of the bizarre twists of war, the 22-year-old college student was taken from the Taliban prison to another prison run by Americans after the invasion of Afghanistan. And the U.S. military’s chief reason for holding Rahim for the past five years, according to newly declassified records, is the false confession Rahim gave to placate his Taliban torturers.

Rahim’s American lawyers filed the records in federal court in Washington this week, along with the results of their own investigation corroborating Rahim’s claims of innocence, adding sworn statements from witnesses. They are asking a judge to order the military to admit that it made a mistake and release Rahim, who is being held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

[snip]

While in a cell in Kandahar, Rahim said, he gave his captors what they wanted to hear: He falsely confessed on videotape that he was a spy for the United States and promised to renounce the West and wage jihad. Among the people who tortured him, he said, was one of America’s most notorious enemies: al-Qaeda operative Muhammad Atef, who was killed in 2001.

Rahim’s account of being imprisoned and tortured by the Taliban is supported by newspaper accounts about Rahim and fellow prisoners whom the Taliban abandoned when U.S. forces began bombing Afghanistan in the fall of 2001. It is also supported by documents from impartial agencies that had contact with Rahim, notably the International Committee of the Red Cross.

[snip]

Rahim’s attorneys, who work in the federal public defender’s office in Oregon, said they traveled to Afghanistan in their investigation of Rahim’s case. The key facts were not difficult to gather, they said.

“All you have to do is find public news articles and find out this guy was imprisoned by the Taliban,” said Steve Sady, one of the lawyers.

In court filings, the attorneys argue that there is no legal justification for the Bush administration to detain someone who never took up arms against the United States and was simply in Afghanistan without a passport.

“No conceivable definition of enemy combatant would include a freed political prisoner who had been subjected to brutal torture and confinement by the enemy prior to the declaration of war,” the lawyers wrote in their court filing. Article

PLIGHT OF TROTH

The religious right can rant and pout until the cows come home, but the times they are a-changing.

Married couples, whose numbers have been declining for decades as a proportion of American households, have finally slipped into a minority, according to an analysis of new census figures by The New York Times.

The American Community Survey, released this month by the Census Bureau, found that 49.7 percent, or 55.2 million, of the nation’s 111.1 million households in 2005 were made up of married couples — with and without children — just shy of a majority and down from more than 52 percent five years earlier.

[snip]

…Some of the highest numbers of unmarried couples were recorded in the South, which as defined by the census, has the largest population of any region.

With more competition from other ways of living, the proportion of married couples has been shrinking for decades. In 1930, they accounted for about 84 percent of households. By 1990 the proportion of married couples had declined to about 56 percent.

Married couples have not been a majority of households headed by adults younger than 25 since the 1970’s, but among those aged 25 to 34 the proportion slipped below 50 percent for the first time within the past five years. (Among Americans aged 35 to 64, married couples still make up a majority of all households.) Article