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