Summary here and here.

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Of course, if taken absolutely word-by-word literally, existing violence and chaos “beyond greater Baghdad” which experiences an uptick in frequency and/or brutality would not be a “spread.” Spare us the obfuscation and eternal dance of denial of those tasked with mucking in the quagmire.

[Gen. George W. Casey] said he considers it “unlikely” that violence would spread much beyond greater Baghdad because the battle for the city is “the central struggle” for control of Iraq. Article

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When yin and yang (or if you prefer, Frick and Frack) agree…

Former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and Madeleine Albright urged President Bush on Wednesday to go beyond a planned buildup of U.S. forces in Iraq to develop a comprehensive strategy for the area.

They called for wide-ranging talks with Iraq’s neighbors, including Iran and Syria, and increased autonomy for clashing Iraqi groups. The administration has brushed aside the proposal to engage Syria and Iran. Article

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Contours of chaos.

The International Organization for Migration (IOM) has released a report saying more than 1.5 million people have been displaced inside Iraq, surviving without some of the most basic necessities such as food, water, and shelter. Article

Related, from Sweden:

The Migration Board has in recent weeks reported a rise in the number of Iraqi nationals seeking asylum, and estimated some 3,000 people had applied for asylum last December. Article

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So how’s that training going? “Inside” a barracks?

And not far away from Baghdad, a suicide bomber blew himself up inside an Iraqi army barrack in al-Muqdadiyah district, 80 km northeast of Baghdad, killing one soldier and wounding ten others. Article

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Take careful note of some of the contents listed.

Iraqi troops and U.S. soldiers from Multinational Division Baghdad found a large military-equipment cache near an eastern Baghdad warehouse Jan. 29. Troops with the 2nd Brigade, 6th Iraqi Army Division, and the U.S. Army’s 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division, discovered the cache, which included 200 pairs of military boots, 150 helmets, 150 flak vests, 75 armor plates, an improvised explosive device initiator, U.S. military field rations, and a variety of uniforms, including U.S. uniforms.

“There was enough gear in there to outfit a battalion,” said Army Capt. James Ojeda, a fire support trainer with the brigade’s Military Transition Team.

A few of the items were already being sold on the open market, Ojeda said, but most were still in the warehouse. The items in the market were discovered by chance when a brigade senior noncommissioned officer spotted them while returning from a combat logistics patrol. The items in the market were seized on the spot, and this led to the cordon-and-search mission, which uncovered the cache. Article

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The data from the hostilities outside of Najaf remain in flux and daily become murkier.

The messianic Shi’a cult that battled US and Iraqi forces last weekend had been known to authorities for two years and was believed to have no links to other Shi’a groups, an interior ministry official said on Wednesday.

[snip]

But so much conflicting information has been released that significant details - including the identity of the leader and the group’s intentions - remain murky. Official accounts have raised numerous questions. Article

Related:

A convoy of thirteen journalists was based at a hotel in Najaf. Among them was the American journalist, Hoffman Smith, and the Iraqi journalist, Aws al Khafaji, who said, “We had an agreement with the American troops to head to the field where the fighting was taking place, but then we were locked in the hotel by the Iraqi forces who forbode any journalist to head to the place.” Article

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Tracking the spiral: Another reporter wraps up a doleful assignment.

For Reuters journalists, this week’s high points were the safe return of two colleagues seized by a death squad which shot two other hostages and the survival of the teenage nephew of another employee who was kidnapped and tortured in Baghdad.

The lows, as I complete nearly two years running the news agency’s operations in Iraq, were sending condolences to the family of our former driver Ismail Ibrahim, who was gunned down in Mosul this month, and trying to find out from U.S. forces why they seem intent on detaining our reporter in Ramadi for a third time.

[snip]

I have watched colleagues go pale and weep in the newsroom as word came in of relatives slaughtered, heard their tales of midnight flight from family homes in fear of their lives and took dazed reports from those caught up in suicide bombings.

These are the everyday stories of Iraqis today, and their ebb and flow through our office has been a vital part of gauging the state of Iraq.

Journalists face particular dangers, too. A policeman pistol whipped our Najaf correspondent this week, a commonplace occurrence. Article

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Shorter version: It (that being the woebegone G. Walker administration’s neocon-fueled illegal invasion and occupation) would be a snap, but for such ‘obstacles’ as – er, um – the people, the culture, the society, the politicians. etc., etc., etc.

It’s amazing, frankly, that even as the Scooter Libby trial reveals the machinations of an Administration determined to prevent any jabs of reality from puncturing the “Iraq threat” scarecrow it had built to stampede Americans into war, the same crowd are getting a free hand to build an “Iran threat” scarecrow.

[snip]

From the very outset, this democratically elected government was an obstacle to the realization of U.S. goals in Iraq, because it didn’t necessarily share them. Not in terms of the desired domestic political arrangements for a post-Saddam Iraq; not in terms of U.S. policy in the Middle East more widely; and certainly not on Iran. And with Iran now identified as the premier strategic threat, the U.S. objectives in the region had to be recallibrated, and suddenly the old Arab autocracies that were to be swept away in the “creative chaos” of the U.S. democratic revolution in the Middle East were now, instead, to be rehabilitated as the key “moderates” holding the line against the “extremism” represented by Iran and other Islamist elements.…

[snip]

Some of those regimes have urged the U.S. to do more to combat Iranian influence in Iraq, which the U.S. has lately shown a great eagerness to do. But, in case anybody failed to notice, Iraq’s government is not complaining about “Iranian meddling” in Iraq, but they are complaining about U.S. efforts to hound Iranian operatives there. Key Shiite and Kurdish leaders have bluntly criticized the U.S. for arresting Iranian diplomats in Erbil last week, and have warned it against doing so again. The Shiites, of course, have a long history of intimate ties with Tehran, but even the key Kurdish parties have a long history of close cooperation with Iran.[…] So, to the extent that the U.S. moves to confront Iran in Iraq, it quite simply parts ways with the Iraqi government. And then the question becomes what exactly the U.S. is doing in the country. Article

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The process may seem painfully slow and plodding, but getting names on the record in a roll call vote is crucial; doing so drives a wedge into cracks in the shell of bluster that masks the deep-seated insecurity of the woebegone G. Walker administration as well as metaphorically reaching out a hand to turn on a fan against the house of cards the administration has constructed unimpeded (previously) by such quaint niceties as a robust examination of their flawed and deadly policies, methods and motives.

With the Senate preparing to confront Bush over his Iraq policy, it has been unclear whether any of the proposals circulating could gather the super-majority of 60 votes needed to overcome procedural hurdles in the 100-vote chamber, which has 51 Democrats and 49 Republicans.

Warner, the former Armed Services Committee chairman, unveiled changes in his proposal aimed at getting over this vote hurdle, although supporters would not predict whether the plan had sufficient backing. Article

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Noted FYI, but one must also voice suspicion as to whether this might represent a pressuring of the Romanian government vis-à-vis the role speculated for them in yesterday’s Persia Potpourri.

Two Romanian workers have been detained by coalition forces in Iraq, officials said Wednesday.

The two, a carpenter and an electrician identified as Adrian Gancean, 39 and Nelu Ilie, 41 were detained on Oct. 31 after they allegedly took pictures and filmed without permission in a U.S. military base in Iraq, state news agency Rompres reported.

[snip]

They had been working at the base for a U.S. contractor since May 2006, maintaining installations for bottling water. In Brussels, President Traian Basescu said Wednesday that the two were held on suspicion of “illegal activities,” but that he was confident the situation would be resolved according to law. Article

Po-tay-to, po-tah-to.

The Afghan government will not negotiate with the resurgent Taliban as a group, Afghanistan’s national security adviser Zalmai Rassoul said on Wednesday.

In an interview in Berlin with Reuters, the adviser to President Hamid Karzai said there was “no way” the government could negotiate with the hardline Islamists even though Karzai offered peace talks on Monday, but without naming the Taliban. Article

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Undercutting the Brits, for starters, by replacing a scalpel with a sledgehammer.

American forces in Afghanistan are poised to attempt to recapture the town of Musa Qala…

[snip]

About 30 paratroops from 16 Air Assault Brigade Regiment were ordered to withdraw from Musa Qala in November as part of a deal with tribal elders and the governor of Helmand. The American military were said to be “absolutely furious” at what they saw as a pullout by their principal partners, complaining that it left Musa Qala under Taleban control.

Brigadier Jerry Thomas, who took over as commander of the British Task Force in the province after the withdrawal deal was agreed, denied that the Taleban had been involved in the consultations over the future of Musa Qala. The British insist that the deal could point the way for future security arrangements, giving tribal elders a greater role in keeping the Taleban in check.

But the withdrawal caused a rift between the American and British military. The American view is that northern Helmand has become a no-go zone and needs to be dealt with aggressively. There is now every expectation that General McNeill may try to reverse the deal and put even more troops back into the town to expel the Taleban. Article

Related: So much for any possible progress (and hard-won trust) already underway:

Seasoned British officers assigned in southern Afghanistan to clean up the mess created by the Americans can sense that big trouble is simmering, but they are convinced that any aggressive policy will aggravate the situation.

They realize that they have to accept the Taliban’s existence as a reality, strike peace deals with them and allow them into the political power-sharing apparatus. This, they argue, can be done through extensive reconstruction, which is the only way to isolate hardline insurgents. Military might, therefore, is to be used only for the security of the people, not for aggressive armed campaigns.

[snip]

There is no military solution to the insurgency,” said Nic Kay, the British regional coordinator for southern Afghanistan. Kay is a seasoned official of the Foreign Commonwealth Office (FCO) and heads all operations in Helmand province. He previously served in Pakistan and Afghanistan, besides serving as a senior desk officer handling Afghanistan and Pakistan in the FCO.

“It would be a blunder if we assess the situation with a single-track mind. We need to appreciate the fact that ‘Taliban’ is a generic name and there are a whole lot of reasons behind the support for the Taliban in southwestern Afghanistan,” Kay told Asia Times Online in his newly built office at the British task force camp in Lashkar Gah, Helmand province.

[snip]

District shuras (councils) have been established across the province to make contact with the Taliban. The traditional structures of tribal elders and mullahs are part of the shuras, which to date have struck peace deals in Sangeen and Nawzad districts. A peace agreement in Musa Qala was secured some months ago.

“These peace agreements are actually a blessing for the people of Helmand province as they have got rid of the fighting. In the meantime, it allows us to address people’s concerns, like law and order and development work,” said Kay.

“For instance, three weeks ago the Afghan Auxiliary Police were deployed in Musa Qala. The police have been stationed for the protection of specific development projects like the National Solidarity Program, which is being undertaken by the Bangladeshi NGO [non-governmental organization] BRAC [Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee]. This includes the construction of new mosques and schools, and in the meantime, with the help of the shura, we have make sure that the Taliban do not disrupt these development works,” Kay said.

Kay acknowledged that despite the peace agreements, the Taliban still move around relatively freely and that the shuras themselves comprise pro-Taliban people. But Kay is confident that as long as all the protocols of the agreements are implemented, gradually the writ of the Afghan government will become stronger and the hardline Taliban will be isolated. Article

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The lack of immediate assignment of blame is tres unusual.

Insurgents burned down a primary school in south-eastern Afghanistan, police said yesterday, in the second such attack this year targeting the country’s struggling education system.

The primary school was set ablaze overnight in the Kharwar district of Logar province, the Afghan interior ministry, which controls the police, said in a statement.

“The ministry condemns this unforgivable action of foreign mercenaries,” it said, without referring to any particular country or group.

Similar attacks in the past have always been blamed on the remnants of the Taleban regime. The Afghan government says the militants are supported by circles in Pakistan. Article

Reading between the lines: for “balance,” read “quash.”

The US administration should step in and ‘balance’ proposed legislation to curtail military assistance to Pakistan if it does not step up its fight against terrorism, the Foreign Ministry in Islamabad said Wednesday.

[snip]

Non-compliance would result in a suspension of military assistance, including sales of weapons and spares.

Pakistan is due in the coming years to receive F-16 fighters worth 5 billion dollars as well as hundreds of air-to-air missiles from the United States. Article

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Ping-pong pronouncements. One day, a government minister blithely announces there are “no Taliban” in Pakistan whatsoever, today they are for all intents and purposes an entrenched, sophisticated (and covenient) network.

The truth lies somewhere in the middle, and the involvement and instigation of government and ISI-related elements is always papered over.

Pakistani investigators said yesterday they had found leads linking a string of suicide bombings to Taleban militants, as the death toll from a wave of Islamist violence rose to 23.

They said six men arrested in a northwestern town at the weekend told interrogators about a web of militants, connected to a senior Taleban commander, who were plotting suicide and car bomb attacks across the country. Article

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Noted FYI:

A group of Pakistani men has been accused of raping a teenaged girl and forcing her to parade naked through her village because one of her relatives eloped with a young women from the men’s family, police said on Wednesday.

[snip]

Another senior police official, Mushtaq Khoso, said police had arrested four of the 11 men named in the complaint and police were awaiting a medical report to confirm the 16-year-old had been raped.

Another police officer said certain influential people were pressing the girl’s father to drop his complaint.

The case brings to mind a similar attack on a village woman in 2002. Article

Air missions for two days. (The GBU-12s mentioned as being dopped in the area of al-Rassaq are 500-lb. bombs, as are the GBU38s also named.)

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Overview and recap of Al-Qaeda in 2006.

Developments here and here and also here.

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Gotta have the big guns there to welcome in Adm. Fallon if/when he is approved to take over?

The U.S. Navy has scaled back its presence off Somalia’s coast, withdrawing the USS Eisenhower aircraft carrier after a three-week mission there, officials said Wednesday.

The carrier left Tuesday to return to the Persian Gulf region, where it had been supporting NATO-led forces in Afghanistan before going to the African coast, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the record.

[snip]

At least two U.S. ships remain off Somalia’s coast … the guided missile cruiser USS Bunker Hill and amphibious landing ship USS Ashland, officials said.… Article

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Noted FYI:

The US believes militant Islamists from the ousted coalition that held sway over parts of southern Somalia may be regrouping in Saudi Arabia, Eritrea and also Yemen, Jendayi Frazer, US assistant secretary of state for Africa, said yesterday.

Speaking to the Financial Times in Addis Ababa, Ms Frazer said it was too early to tell who among the Islamist leadership had survived Ethiopia’s invasion last month and subsequent US air strikes on alleged affiliates of al-Qaeda. Article

Doing the people’s business, and stepping up to whittle down the stake driven into the heart of Uncle Sam by the woebegone G. Walker administration’s wanton, disdainful, purposeful and unitary creation of the ongoing Constituional crisis.

- New House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers used his first oversight hearing Wednesday to say that he’s launching an investigation into President Bush’s possible abuse of presidential signing statements.

Democrats and some Republican lawmakers have accused Bush of conducting an imperial presidency by using bill signing statements to declare that he’ll interpret legislative provisions his way and will feel free to ignore some terms.

“That conduct threatens to deprive the American people of one of the basic rights of democracy - the right to elect representatives who determine what the law is, subject only to the president’s veto,” Conyers said as he opened a hearing on signing statements. “That does not mean having a president sign those laws, but then say that he is free to carry them out or not, as only he sees fit.”

[snip]

“The potential for misuse in the issuance of presidential signing statements has reached the point where it poses a real threat to our system of checks and balances and the rule of law,” said Karen J. Mathis, president of the American Bar Association. The ABA approved a resolution last August condemning the way Bush uses signing statements and their frequency.

[snip]

Former Rep. Mickey Edwards, R-Okla., urged Congress to fight the White House tooth and nail on the issue.

“Presidential signing statements may not sound like such a big deal, but they are declarations of the right of a president to be above the law, and that is a path that, once taken, will prove ultimately fatal to our democracy,” he said. Article

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It’s a start, albeit a tiny one, as the usual vituperative cries of “national security” and direct claims that the government’s custodians aren’t entitled to know what the government is undertaking pretty much are attempts to pull the rug out. Keep at it, Congress. Restoring and rehabilitating the tasks of investigation, oversight and accountability, all of which the previous majority allowed or actively worked to atrophy will not come overnight, but must not be abandoned.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales Wednesday turned over to key legislators copies of a secret court’s “highly classified” orders spelling out how the administration has stopped wiretapping suspected terrorists without warrants and is now spying with judicial supervision.

Gonzales disclosed the decision, which averts a confrontation that might have brought congressional subpoenas, during a news briefing at the Justice Department.

The classified documents lay out details of a secret arrangement approved by a judge on an 11-member national security court that puts the spying program under its jurisdiction. The material was delivered to members of the House and Senate intelligence committees late in the day, congressional aides said.

[snip]

Gonzales said that the documents being released detail “highly classified activities” and must remain secret because their public disclosure “may jeopardize the national security of our country.” He said that other documents on the program are “especially sensitive,” and it’s still not clear whether they’ll be given to Congress. Article

Breaking:

Arrest warrants have been issued for 13 people in connection with the alleged CIA-orchestrated kidnapping of a German citizen in the agency’s extraordinary rendition program, a Munich prosecutor said Wednesday.

Prosecutor Christian Schmidt-Sommerfeld said the warrants were issued in the last few days. He did not say for whom the warrants were issued, but indicated a statement would be issued later Wednesday. Article

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Analysis du jour, and well worth a full read as we’re fast approaching, egged on and hell-bent for leather by the woebegone G. Walker administration, what is perhaps the mother of all crossroads.

History tells us that one of the most unstable political combinations is a country - like the United States today - that tries to be a domestic democracy and a foreign imperialist.

[snip]

The combination of huge standing armies, almost continuous wars, an ever growing economic dependence on the military-industrial complex and the making of weaponry, and ruinous military expenses as well as a vast, bloated “defense” budget, not to speak of the creation of a whole second Defense Department (known as the Department of Homeland Security) has been destroying our republican structure of governing in favor of an imperial presidency. By republican structure, of course, I mean the separation of powers and the elaborate checks and balances that the founders of the United States wrote into the constitution as the main bulwarks against dictatorship and tyranny, which they greatly feared.

We Americans are on the brink of losing our democracy for the sake of keeping our empire. Once a nation starts down that path, the dynamics that apply to all empires come into play - isolation, overstretch, the uniting of local and global forces opposed to imperialism, and in the end bankruptcy.

[snip]

As a form of government, imperialism does not seek or require the consent of the governed. It is a pure form of tyranny. The US attempt to combine domestic democracy with such tyrannical control over foreigners is hopelessly contradictory and hypocritical. A country can be democratic or it can be imperialistic, but it cannot be both.

The US political system failed to prevent this combination from developing - and may now be incapable of correcting it. The evidence strongly suggests that the legislative and judicial branches of the US government have become so servile in the presence of the imperial presidency that they have largely lost the ability to respond in a principled and independent manner.… Article

Related:

The US risks being pulled into Iraq’s raging sectarian conflict and has lost the ability to impose its global agenda, one of Britain’s leading think tanks said on Wednesday.

The International Institute of Strategic Studies said that President George W Bush’s push to regain the initiative in Iraq had too few troops and too little support from the government of Nouri al-Maliki.

[snip]

“US power is strong enough to establish an agenda for international activity but is too weak effectively to implement that agenda globally,” said John Chipman, the institute’s chairman. He added that the rest of the world was “strong enough to resist an American agenda” but not to establish an alternative.

[snip]

Mr Cronin added that in current circumstances one of the biggest dangers was the risk that the US would participate in attempts by the Iraqi authorities to clear areas of particular ethnic groups. Article

The full report and ancillary info is here.

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Ye old scribe has scant familiarity with the intricacies of the petromarket, but do take a gander, as the allegations are momentous:

Last year was the year that oil prices came close to breaching $80 per barrel. This was despite the fact that there were no significant supply interruptions and oil demand fell in industrialized countries. That raises the question of what caused the spike.

It turns out there is good reason to believe that record oil prices may have been due to our own strategic oil reserve, which the Bush administration may have been manipulating to drive up prices for the benefit of its supporters. This is something Congress must investigate, and here is some preliminary evidence.

[snip]

Over the past month, spot crude oil prices have been tumbling. The reason is that the market has run out of storage capacity, which means that all oil produced must now be immediately sold — and that has driven oil prices down. This suggests there has never been a supply shortage warranting $75 oil, and absent the administration’s dealings, oil prices might not have risen as high as they did.

The story does not end here. With private-sector oil storage capacity exhausted, the president in his State of the Union address has now announced his intention to double the size of the strategic oil reserve from 700 million barrels to 1.5 billion barrels. The Bush administration plans to start purchasing 100,000 barrels of oil per day.

The result has been predictable, with the futures price of oil jumping from $50 to $54 per barrel between Jan. 19 and Jan. 24. Not only will these government purchases increase oil demand, they will also provide new storage capacity needed to re-corner the market.

[snip]

Every price blip in the oil market calls forth explanations in terms of Chinese demand, more violence in Nigeria’s delta region, cold weather, threats from Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chavez, or heightened tensions over Iran’s nuclear program. The strategic reserve is the perfect vehicle for subterfuge corruption because its transactions can be cloaked in the veil of national defense. But a motive exists and the circumstantial evidence is troubling.

Congress must investigate the strategic oil reserve; how it has been managed and what its purpose is. The recently announced expansion serves no real national security function (though that will be the justification) and will only drive up oil prices.

One last factoid. A recent working paper posted by the International Monetary Fund documented that oil prices in the United States appear to be politically manipulated, falling prior to elections. If you are an economist, you ask how that is done. The answer is the strategic oil reserve. Article

Molly Ivins died today. Mourn the loss of one both fine and feisty.

Smart, skilled and sassy, the gal had moxie.

"It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America."

Puncturing the pompous and discomfiting the comfortable in her own inimitable style, she done good.

Obituary here. R.I.P.

Update Feb. 1 5:15 a.m.: A rousing remembrance:

Keeping a promise she’d made when her old friend and fellow Texan John Henry Faulk was on his deathbed, Molly accepted a steady schedule of invites to speak for local chapters of the American Civil Liberties Union in dozens of communities, from Toledo to Sarasota to Medford, Oregon. Though she could have commanded five figures, she took no speaker’s fee. She just came and told the crowds to carry on for the Constitution. “I know that sludge-for-brains like Bill O’Reilly attack the ACLU for being ‘un-American,’ but when Bill O’Reilly’s constitutional rights are violated, the ACLU will stand up for him just like they did for Oliver North, Communists, the KKK, atheists, movement conservatives and everyone else they’ve defended over the years,” she told them. “The premise is easily understood: If the government can take away one person’s rights, it can take away everyone’s.” Article

The Vatican goes ballistic.

An Italian magazine report which sought to prove that what some priests tell Catholics in the confessional is not always what the Church preaches in public has enraged the Vatican.

[snip]

“Shame — there is no other word to express our shock over something that is disgusting, unworthy, disrespectful and particularly offensive,” the [Vatican’s] newspaper said. Article

Summary here and here.

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Creeping catalysis: The hideous offspring of Tinkerbell and Humpty-Dumpty.

One veteran military expert on Iraq, retired US Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor, said Bush’s new policy is a “war against all” in Iraq and called it “a blunder of Hitlerian proportions”.

[snip]

Macgregor is no stranger to military planning in Iraq. He led combat troops in destroying a brigade of Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard troops in the most significant tank battle of Desert Storm in February 1991 and prepared a proposal for a limited-duration attack on Baghdad at the request of a personal representative of then secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld in autumn 2001.

“It is ideology pushing violence to extremes,” Macgregor said of the latest turn in Bush’s Iraq policy. “They are trying to reverse the damage they have already done to themselves by having built up a Shi’ite state and army. But it is too late, and it is bound to be counterproductive.” Article

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Teasing data from the hostilities outside of Najaf:

Many contradictions remained unexplained. A neighbor of the cult compound, Mohan Hameed, said the religious group began moving into the small farming area 5 miles north of Najaf 16 or 17 years ago. On Monday, the provincial governor had said that the group bought the farmland only several months ago.

McClatchy Newspapers special correspondent Qassim Zein entered the compound Tuesday afternoon, more than 24 hours after the battle had ended. It still had the look of a brutal killing ground.

“I have seen something I never imagined I would see in my life,” Zein said in a cell-phone call from the area.

Corpses lay everywhere, contorted in death, he reported. “I cannot count the bodies,” he said. The remains of three children and six women were among the uncollected dead, he added.

[snip]

Zein said a police official told him that a search of the compound uncovered $8 million to $10 million in American currency. U.S. Army officials took the money along with computers and documents, he told Zein. Article

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Meet (kinda, sorta) the new chief spook in Iraq.

Given the desperate situation in Iraq, the CIA’s Baghdad station chief needs to be an exceptional manager who can marshal the agency’s forces and work closely with the U.S. armed forces. Unfortunately, several sources have informed me that the CIA has nominated a man who has been widely criticized within the agency and seen as a bad fit for the role. Furthermore, I’m told, the new station chief is closely associated with detainee abuses, especially those involving “extraordinary renditions”—the practice of covertly delivering terrorist suspects to foreign intelligence agencies to be interrogated.

[snip]

The appointment…has the support of top CIA officials, including the current head of the agency’s Near East Division…. But sources have told me 0he] has frequently been divisive and ineffective in previous positions.

One former official who knows [him] well described him as “a capable officer,” but, he said, “I heard he had been selected to go to Baghdad, and was shocked. He is a linear thinker, very cautious and uninspiring. His reputation and relationship with the military, especially the special-ops community, is very bad, based on substantive issues that arose during his time [in Afghanistan and Pakistan] post-9/11. He is the wrong guy to send, especially when General [David] Petraeus is headed out to take our final shot at turning Iraq around.”

Another former official called [him] a “smart guy” who had developed a good relationship with Afghan president Hamid Karzai, but described him as a terrible manager. “He’s the last guy you want running a tense place like the station in Baghdad, because he creates a lot of tension himself,” he said. Article

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None — none — of these reports take into account the non-random factor of the out of control, delusional, power-mad, woebegone G. Walker administration and their propensity for bloodlust. (emphasis added)

The US must draw up plans to deal with an all-out Iraqi civil war that would kill hundreds of thousands, create millions of refugees, and could spill over into a regional catastrophe, disrupting oil supplies and setting up a direct confrontation between Washington and Iran.

This is the central recommendation of a study by the Brookings Institution here, based on the assumption that President Bush’s last-ditch troop increase fails to stabilise the country - but also on the reality that Washington cannot simply walk away from the growing disaster unleashed by the 2003 invasion.

[snip]

US troops, says the study, should withdraw from Iraqi cities. This was “the only rational course of action, horrific though it will be”, as America refocused its efforts from preventing civil war to containing its effects.

The unremittingly bleak document, drawing on the experience of civil wars in Lebanon, the former Yugoslavia, Congo and Afghanistan, also offers a remarkably stark assessment of Iraq’s “spill-over” potential across the Persian Gulf region.

[snip]

…the Brookings report urges the creation of a regional group to help contain a civil war. That would see exactly the contacts with Iran and Syria that the Bush administration steadfastly refuses.… Article

More:

The Washington think-tank distils [sic] what it says are the lessons learned from other civil wars, laying out the case histories of Afghanistan, Congo, Lebanon, Somalia and Yugoslavia.

Kenneth Pollack, a former Clinton administration official and CIA analyst who co-authored the report with Daniel Byman, told the Financial Times they were looking for a “Goldilocks solution” - somewhere between “stay the course” and “getting all out”.

“It was arrogance in the face of history that led us to blithely assume we could invade without preparing for an occupation, and we would do well to show greater humility when assimilating its lessons about what we fear will be the next step in Iraq’s tragic history,” the report says.

Brookings identifies six patterns from other civil wars that are already manifesting themselves in Iraq: large refugee flows, the breeding ground of new terrorist groups, radicalisation of neighbouring populations, the spread of secessionism, regional economic losses, and intervention by neighbours. Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait and Turkey are said to be “scrambling to catch up” with rival Iran.

[snip]

Mr Pollack, who previously was an outspoken proponent of the invasion, says the lessons of past full-blown civil wars reveal nearly all efforts by states to minimise or contain spillover have failed. Article

The full report (.pdf file) is here.

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Shorter version: Thanks. Now piss off.

Millions of Iraqi refugees fleeing violence and sectarian cleansing after the U.S.-led invasion four years ago are finding it nearly impossible to get safe harbor in America, including those who risked their lives helping President George W. Bush’s war effort.

The new Democratic-controlled U.S. Congress has begun pressuring the Republican Bush administration to open the door to them, especially the Iraqi translators and others who face gang-style execution at home for working with American combat troops.

[snip]

About 3.7 million of Iraq’s 24 million people have either fled the country for Syria, Jordan and other nations or left their homes for safer havens within Iraq, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Around 50,000 Iraqis flee their homes every month.

“This is the fastest growing refugee crisis in the world,” Refugees International President Kenneth Bacon told the Senate Judiciary Committee on January 16.

In 2006, the United States accepted 202 Iraqis out of its 70,000 refugee slots worldwide. In contrast, Australia said it granted about 2,000 such visas to Iraqis last year.

[snip]

Bill Frelick, refugee policy director for Human Rights Watch, said Iraqis working for American forces go through extensive security checks before being hired: “If you were a smart terrorist, you could find easier ways to get to the United States.”

Frelick said two factors contributed to the Bush administration’s near moratorium on accepting Iraqi refugees.

Bureaucrats, Frelick said, don’t want to take chances on Iraqis. “It generally is easier to say no than to say yes.”

Politics also plays a role, he said.

“The very people the U.S. is relying on for the enterprise of building a stable democracy in Iraq are the very people who are fleeing the country. To admit those people are fleeing would be to recognize the enterprise is not succeeding,” Frelick said. Article

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Taking note of the bill mentioned within here but, realistically, don’t expect it to go anywhere.

Four years ago, Bush told us that we were going to Iraq to liberate the Iraqi people from the repressive regime of Saddam Hussein. And now the “insurgents” are fighting to liberate the Iraqi people from the repressive regime of George W. Bush.

We’ve done enough damage. Rebuilding is not on the table. The American people want us out of Iraq. The Iraqi people want us out of Iraq. The Iraqi government wants us out of Iraq. And we have no legitimate reason to stay.

Furthermore, we can leave Iraq without leaving a hopeless mess behind, if only we can do it right, and that means diplomacy.

To that end, Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-CA) seems to have the solution, in the form of H.R. 508, which will “require United States military disengagement from Iraq, [and] provide United States assistance for reconstruction and reconciliation in Iraq.”

This bill would bring our troops home from Iraq within a six-month timeframe. During that timeframe, the bill would accelerate the training of a permanent Iraqi security force.

It would rescind the Congressional authorization for the war in Iraq.

Upon request from the Iraqi government, the bill would authorize US support for an international stabilization force. Surely an international force, perhaps under the auspices of the United Nations, would do a better job of stabilizing Iraq than we could. The UN has its problems, but they’re not the Bush White House.

Also worth mentioning, the bill would prohibit the construction of permanent US military bases in Iraq. This could be the greatest step of all in the “war on terror.” After all, it’s the presence of US military bases on Arab-Islamic land (not that they “hate our freedom”) that was the primary motivator of Osama bin Laden’s jihad against America.

And the bill would ensure that the US has no long-term control over Iraqi oil. Sorry, Halliburton. Sorry, Exxon. Sorry, Chevron. The free lunch is over. Under this plan, Iraq (and its oil) would once again belong to the Iraqis. Article

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Oy.

Frantic attempts were made to call off American aircraft as they targeted a convoy of British tanks in Iraq, an inquest was told yesterday.

Smoke identifying the tanks as friendly forces was sent up and tank commanders radioed air controllers, but they were told that the aircraft were being flown by “rogue” pilots who could not be contacted. Instead, they swooped over the convoy once more, setting tanks on fire and killing Lance Corporal of Horse Matty Hull, 25, from Windsor, Berkshire.

Corporal Ashley Bell told Lance Corporal Hull’s inquest, in Oxford, of his shock when the aircraft continued to bomb the tanks as they conducted a reconnaissance mission near Basra in southern Iraq, in March 2003. “We started to realise this was a friendly-on-friendly and I got on to the radio,” said Corporal Bell, a staff corporal at the time of the incident. “I asked for a ‘Stop stop stop, check fire’, at which everyone in our forces is supposed to stop firing.” But he said that he got no response and the aircraft attacked again.

[snip]

The inquest was told that up to 100 villagers, some waving white flags, were 100 metres away. It is thought that several were killed. Lance Corporal Steven Gerrard said he had “never heard anything like” the sound as the aircraft opened fire. Article

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One word: Damning.

The Inspector General for the Defense Dept. is concerned that the U.S. military has failed to adequately equip soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, especially for nontraditional duties such as training Iraqi security forces and handling detainees, according to a summary of a new audit obtained by BusinessWeek.

[snip]

The Inspector General found that the Pentagon hasn’t been able to properly equip the soldiers it already has. Many have gone without enough guns, ammunition, and other necessary supplies to “effectively complete their missions” and have had to cancel or postpone some assignments while waiting for the proper gear, according to the report from auditors with the Defense Dept. Inspector General’s office. Soldiers have also found themselves short on body armor, armored vehicles, and communications equipment, among other things, auditors found.

“As a result, service members performed missions without the proper equipment, used informal procedures to obtain equipment and sustainment support, and canceled or postponed missions while waiting to receive equipment,” reads the executive summary dated Jan. 25. Service members often borrowed or traded with each other to get the needed supplies, according to the summary.

[snip]

In the summary of the Inspector General’s audit, the equipment shortages were attributed to basic management failures among military commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan. U.S. Central Command lacked standard policies for requesting and tracking equipment requirements or for equipping units to perform nontraditional duties. Auditors surveyed 1,100 service members stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan from all four military branches, the National Guard, and Reserves. Article

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With (literally) billions lost and unaccountable, how many other similar cases will never be uncovered staggers the imagination.

A former Defense Department contractor was sentenced on Monday to nine years in prison and ordered to forfeit $3.6 million for his role in a bribery and fraud scheme involving contracts to reconstruct Iraq, U.S. officials said.

U.S. Justice Department officials said Robert Stein, 52, of Fayetteville, North Carolina, also was sentenced to three years of probation after his release from prison.

[snip]

He admitted he conspired, along with others, including several U.S. Army officers, to rig bids to steer contracts to a certain contractor.

Stein admitted he and others received more than $1 million in cash, sports cars, a motorcycle, jewelry, computers and others items of value, and that they stole more than $2 million that had been designated for the reconstruction of Iraq. Article

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Keeping up with the courts-martial:

The Marine Corps said Monday that it has ordered a probe into how a government report on the killings of Iraqi civilians in the town of Haditha was leaked to the news media.

Lt. Gen. James Mattis, the top general at Camp Pendleton, ordered the investigation after several defense attorneys complained that sensitive information about their clients had been leaked, Marine spokesman Lt. Col. Sean Gibson said. Article

Summary here and here.

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Coming up quickly on 64 months — so far — in the other quagmire.

Overshadowed by United States President George Bush’s controversial, last-chance bid to salvage American honour in Iraq, the US is mounting a parallel military and reconstruction “surge” in Afghanistan ahead of an anticipated Taliban spring offensive. But Washington is also encountering some familiar Iraq-style obstacles: reluctant allies, meddlesome neighbours, a weak central government and the realisation that time is not on its side.

The US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice underscored the administration’s newfound sense of urgency at a hastily convened Nato foreign ministers meeting in Brussels last Friday. “Every one of us must take a hard look at what more we can do to help the Afghan people and to support one another,” Rice said. [Were ye old scribe doing the editing, the headline accompanying that revelation would read ‘Rice Says Sky Is Blue.’ — voxd]

[snip]

Whether this latest surge of US interest will decisively improve Afghanistan’s longer-term prospects is an open question. Karzai on Monday reiterated his offer of peace talks with the Taliban. But Rice’s tone is familiarly unyielding. Re-burying the mistakes made in Iraq, she is once again conjuring dramatic black-and-white choices…. Article

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Playing the ‘T’ Card:

Afghan Foreign Minister Rangeen Dadfar Spanta complained at the start of the two-day meeting of donors in the German capital that the Afghan government was being “bypassed” in the process of rebuilding the country after 25 years of conflict.

“Unfortunately, the Afghan government continues to be bypassed by donor countries.

“Trusting Afghan institutions will be an important step towards breaking this cycle.

“Terrorists will exploit this situation if the government is unable to provide services to its people.”

The meeting is aimed at assessing progress made since a conference in London last year when the international community launched a five-year plan, or “compact”, to coordinate financial and military support to Afghanistan.

Twelve months on, many regions are still ravaged by violence and the Western-backed President Hamid Karzai is unable to extend his authority into much of the country.

The international monitoring group Human Rights Watch said in a report released on Tuesday that little had been achieved in the past year in providing Afghans with security, food and health care.

[snip]

The US ambassador to Afghanistan, Ronald Neumann, said before the meeting that he understood the calls from the Afghan government to have a greater say in where aid money was spent.

“There is a clear need to run more money through the Afghan government,” he told journalists, but he could give no promises that that would happen. Article

More:

Benchmarks for the country’s development set at a conference in London a year ago had largely been missed and insecurity had spiralled to its deadliest since the Taleban were toppled from power in 2001…

[snip]

The International Crisis Group of political analysts said the insurgency had attracted attention after a year of “terrible violence” while the “long-term efforts to build the solid governmental institutions a stable Afghanistan requires are faltering.” The insurgency, sustained by sanctuaries and support from outside the country, had undercut the “assumption of relative stability” on which the Compact was based, it said.

“And state-building was warped from the start because of a refusal to exclude undesirable elements from positions of power in the new institutions.”

The rising violence had led the government to resort to “short-sighted, quick fixes that work around the new democratic institutions” needed for eventual stability, senior analyst Joanna Nathan said.

An example was the decision to recruit 11,000 “auxilliary police” in insecure areas, the group said in a report entitled “Afghanistan’s Endangered Compact”.

The limited training and questionable command structures of the armed and salaried force raised concerns it would form into militias, it said. Article

Related (emphasis added):

Ambassador James Dobbins urged more forceful U.S. efforts with Pakistan regarding cross-border support for the Taleban. “An increase in U.S. military manpower and money for Afghanistan such as the administration currently proposes, may well contain the renewed insurgency and prevent the Karzai government from being overthrown. But U.S. and NATO troops are likely to be required there indefinitely as long as the Taleban and other insurgent groups are able to recruit, train, raise funds and organize their operations in Pakistan,” he said.

Karl Inderfurth, a former Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia, says Congress must continue to support the Karzai government, but adds the U.S. must make a mid-course correction if efforts there are to succeed: Article

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Shorter version: Pawns.

For three centuries the Afghan state has been just barely a state, and ethnic and tribal communities paid obeisance to Kabul only if it accorded them autonomy. The communist regime installed by Moscow in 1978 aroused bitter opposition by attempting to centralize overnight. Now the U.S.-backed Karzai government is making a similar mistake by rushing to create a centralized regime instead of keying the process to the gradual development of a national economic infrastructure.

The central government has a critical role to play in combating the Taliban, but primarily through more effective economic assistance, with less accompanying corruption, not through military intervention that bypasses the tribal structure. The fledgling national police and army have a role in areas where tribal leaders want their help. But they are tainted in the eyes of many Pashtuns by their identification with a Kabul regime dominated by non-Pashtun ethnic rivals. Article

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Noted FYI:

Dutch soldiers stationed in the southern Afghanistan province of Uruzgan will not endorse or participate in the destruction of poppy fields in the region, said the Dutch minister of development. Article

Abrupt about face.

Somalia’s president agreed today to a national reconciliation conference in a bid to end 16 years of anarchy in the war-ravaged country, paving the way for the deployment of African peacekeepers.

After intense pressure from the US, EU and UN for all-inclusive political talks, President Abdullahi Yusuf said his government was willing to negotiate despite stiff opposition from within his own administration. The conference would include former political, religious and clan leaders, Yusuf said. Article

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Could well be, but rings hollow.

Djibouti President Ismail Omar Guelleh, who hosts the only permanent US military base in Africa, on Tuesday condemned recent American air strikes on southern Somalia as counter-productive.

“These American strikes are counter-productive, I always condemn them because they achieve nothing and because innocent people lose their lives,” Guelleh said in an interview at the ongoing African Union summit in Addis Ababa.

Guelleh insisted that the air strikes on suspected Islamist targets earlier this month had not been launched from Djiboutian soil. Article

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Match. Fuse. Oh, and oil.

The U.S. air strikes targeting al-Qaeda-linked terrorists in southern Somalia has caught many by surprise. It shouldn’t. Touted as a sudden display of American force after a 12-year leave of absence from the country, the move is more of an exclamation point heralding a broader initiative underway to secure lawless areas across the latest frontier of the Bush administration’s “war on terror.”

Pentagon architects are already providing arms and expertise to a host of African “partners” to shore up porous national borders, with grander designs in the works for a new Africa Command to anchor counter-terror operations and protect at-risk oil interests. Critics warn that strengthening authoritarian regimes to consolidate power and crushing legitimate opposition on the pretext of fighting terror is a strategy that could backfire: Radicalism might surge and make enemies where they scarcely exist. Early symptoms are visible. And in no place will long-term U.S. plans encounter fiercer resistance than Somalia, where clan-based tensions — now doused with an Islamist guerilla war — again threaten to plunge the country into anarchy.

[snip]

This prospect led the CIA to funnel suitcases of cash to leading warlords last summer when it became clear ICU fighters were preparing to take over Mogadishu. It was yet another backhanded strategy of using a devil to kill a snake — effectively the same devil that resulted in the deaths of 18 U.S. Special Forces more than a decade before. But the move is said to have helped consolidate Somali support for the ICU, seen as a stabilizing force to Somalis fed up with indiscriminate violence, and the warlords were routed. If not for the Ethiopian maneuver, Washington would still be facing what it dreads most: a potentially hostile Islamist state situated at the nexus of Africa and the Middle East. The fact that the ICU broke the warlords’ stranglehold and brought a semblance of order to a failed state ran into a policy monolith.

The blowback of unintended consequences could extend much farther. Starting in mid-2005, Congress earmarked $500 million for an overt counter-terror program to tame what military officials have called the “Wild West” of Saharan Africa. The Trans-Sahara Counter-Terrorism Initiative was conceived to give low-key military training and arms reinforcements to nine countries spanning Chad to Mauritania, where barren reaches are considered fertile ground for Islamist groups to establish Afghanistan-style terror training camps.…

[snip]

…”If anything,” he says, “the [Trans-Sahara Initiative] … will generate terrorism, by which I mean resistance to the overall U.S. presence and strategy.”

Similarly, a March 2005 report by the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think tank, asserts that though the Sahara is “not a terrorist hotbed;” heavy-handed governments there are exploiting the Bush administration’s “war on terror” to stifle political opposition and deny civil freedoms. Ignoring the region would be a mistake. But without a higher degree of economic and political liberalization, Crisis Group warned that anti-American sentiment was likely to surge in areas where it is not yet a problem.

[snip]

A recent swell of political instability has also accelerated Defense Department efforts to establish an Africa Command to encompass ongoing projects and streamline policy. In his final days as defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld lobbied President Bush on the importance of setting up a new command to pay closer attention to the restive continent, with keen eye on protecting oil reserves subject to theft and disruption by militant groups — and the aggressive advances of Chinese investors. Nigeria is the fifth-largest supplier of oil to the United States, but pipeline attacks could have severe ramifications on international oil prices stretched thin by Middle East violence and Asian demand. Energy officials say the Gulf of Guinea will produce 25 percent of U.S. crude by 2010, placing the region ahead of Saudi Arabia. The Bush administration has thus designated West African oil as a “strategic national interest.” This means defense by force if necessary. Article

Following up on a piece mentioned here on Saturday.

Results of tests conducted by United Nations peacekeepers in Lebanon showed that balloons which drifted from Israel into southern Lebanon over the weekend did not contain dangerous gases, a Lebanese security official has said.

The Israeli daily Haaretz reported Sunday that helium balloons from a promotional event by Ha’ir, a chain of local newspapers, had floated north over the border into Lebanon.

The balloons sparked panic among villagers over the weekend amid rumors they were filled with poison gas. Article

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Noted FYI:

In one of the largest weapons deals since the war in Lebanon, the Israel Air Force intends to purchase thousands of Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) missiles from the United States for an estimated $100 million, The Jerusalem Post has learned. Article

Summary here and here.

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Trial balloon? Propagandistic pressure intended for limited geographical consumption? Regardless, probably best to take it with some hefty grains of salt — for now.

President Bush is preparing to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities before the end of April and the US Air Force’s new bases in Bulgaria and Romania would be used as back-up in the onslaught, according to an official report from Sofia.

“American forces could be using their two USAF bases in Bulgaria and one at Romania’s Black Sea coast to launch an attack on Iran in April,” the Bulgarian news agency Novinite said.

[snip]

Whether the Bulgarian news report is a tactical feint or a strategic event is hard to gauge at this stage. But, in conjunction with the beefing up of America’s Italian bases and the acquisition of anti-missile defence bases in the Czech Republic and Poland, the Balkan developments seem to indicate a new phase in Bush’s global war on terror.

Sofia’s news of advanced war preparations along the Black Sea is backed up by some chilling details. One is the setting up of new refuelling places for US Stealth bombers, which would spearhead an attack on Iran. “The USAF’s positioning of vital refuelling facilities for its B-2 bombers in unusual places, including Bulgaria, falls within the perspective of such an attack.” Novinite named colonel Sam Gardiner, “a US secret service officer stationed in Bulgaria”, as the source of this revelation.

[snip]

Romania, the other Black Sea host to the US military, is enjoying a dollar bonanza as its Mihail Kogalniceanu base at Constanta is being transformed into an American “place d’arme”. It is also vital to the Iran scenario. Article

Shorter version: A pedestal provides a narrow and limited terrain. One step — and ker-splat.

Blasting the myth of perfect exceptionalism:

…For years there has been little or no critical reexamination of how and why the limited, specific, and ultimately successful postwar American policy of “patient but firm and vigilant containment of Soviet expansionist tendencies…and pressure against the free institutions of the Western world” (as George Kennan formulated it at the time) has over six decades turned into a vast project for “ending tyranny in the world.”

The Bush administration defends its pursuit of this unlikely goal by means of internationally illegal, unilateralist, and preemptive attacks on other countries, accompanied by arbitrary imprisonments and the practice of torture, and by making the claim that the United States possesses an exceptional status among nations that confers upon it special international responsibilities, and exceptional privileges in meeting those responsibilities.

This is where the problem lies. Other American leaders before George Bush have made the same claim in matters of less moment. It is something like a national heresy to suggest that the United States does not have a unique moral status and role to play in the history of nations, and therefore in the affairs of the contemporary world. In fact it does not. Article

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Shorter version: As Congress explicitly is given the power and authority by the Constitution to declare war on, that inherently carries with it and includes the ability to revisit the question (as they may do with any other legislation) and to declare war off. Q.E.D.

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Milking the teat of fear, and chipp[ing away yet more at the presumption of innocence and at freedom of movement and of assembly. Once your data is inside the bureaucracy, protestations to the contrary, it will rattle around forever, with no say from you on its use or on access to it.

The European Commission wants to retain existing limits on how the United States uses data on incoming air passengers despite U.S. calls for more flexibility, a spokesman said on Monday.

Under a temporary deal reached in October as part of U.S. efforts to combat terrorism, European airlines must pass on up to 34 items of data, including passengers’ addresses and credit card details, to be allowed to land at U.S. airports.

U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said last week Washington would not look for more data in forthcoming negotiations on a permanent accord but would push for more flexibility in how it could use the information.

[snip]

The United States has also been pushing for the right to hold data on passengers for longer. Article

Related, Chertoff goes all “aw, shucks” and downplays the initiative:

“We don’t really collect gigantic amounts of data,” Chertoff said at a news conference with German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble. “It’s about 30 information fields, things like your contact phone number and e-mail address.” Article

A reminder that similar expanded (and expansive) programs have previously been found illegal. From May of 2006:

The European Court of Justice ruled…that an agreement between the European Union and the US that compels European airlines to disclose information about passengers flying from Europe to the US is illegal.[…]The Court of Justice on Tuesday sided with the European Parliament, annulling both a European Commission decision [PDF text] finding that there the US had adequate security measures in place to protect the data and a European Council decision approving the EU-US agreement, saying that neither decision has an appropriate legal basis. Article

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Knowledge is power. Controlling its flow and destruction of knowledge is totalitarianism.

From influencing public opinion through new media to designing “computer network attack” weapons, the US military is learning to fight an electronic war.

The declassified document is called “Information Operations Roadmap”. It was obtained by the National Security Archive at George Washington University using the Freedom of Information Act.

Officials in the Pentagon wrote it in 2003. The Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, signed it.

[snip]

When it describes plans for electronic warfare, or EW, the document takes on an extraordinary tone.

It seems to see the internet as being equivalent to an enemy weapons system.

“Strategy should be based on the premise that the Department [of Defense] will ‘fight the net’ as it would an enemy weapons system,” it reads.

The slogan “fight the net” appears several times throughout the roadmap.

[snip]

And, in a grand finale, the document recommends that the United States should seek the ability to “provide maximum control of the entire electromagnetic spectrum”.

US forces should be able to “disrupt or destroy the full spectrum of globally emerging communications systems, sensors, and weapons systems dependent on the electromagnetic spectrum”.

Consider that for a moment.

The US military seeks the capability to knock out every telephone, every networked computer, every radar system on the planet. Article

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Taking note of this particularly because of the hard numbers included.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates has instructed all branches of the service to minimize the controversial “stop-loss” program, under which U.S. troops can be involuntarily kept in the service for deployments.

The policy allows each branch of the service to prevent troops from retiring or separating prior to deployments. Servicemembers can be kept in the service for three months prior to and following a deployment.

A total of 10,711 soldiers were subject to stop-loss restrictions as of Dec. 31, 2006, said Army spokeswoman Rhonda Paige.

As for the Marine Corps, Navy and Air Force, none have used the program since 2003, officials said. Article

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Regardless of your politics, please, media — the term ‘decider’ is simply not good language. The term is ‘decison maker.’

Yuppers.

George Bush proposes to deal with climate change by means of smoke and mirrors. So what’s new? Only that it is no longer just a metaphor. After six years of obfuscation and denial, the US government now insists that we find ways to block some of the sunlight reaching the earth. This means launching either mirrors or clouds of small particles into the atmosphere.

The demand appears in a recent US memo to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It describes “modifying solar radiance” as “important insurance” against the threat of climate change. A more accurate description might be important insurance against the need to cut emissions.

Every scheme that could give us a chance of preventing runaway climate change should be considered on its merits. But the proposals for building a global parasol don’t have very many. A group of nuclear weapons scientists at the Lawrence Livermore laboratory in California, apparently bored of experimenting with only one kind of mass death, have proposed launching into the atmosphere a million tonnes of tiny aluminium balloons, filled with hydrogen, every year. One unfortunate side-effect would be to eliminate the ozone layer.

Another proposal, developed by a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, suggests spraying billions of tonnes of seawater into the air. Regrettably the production of small salt particles, while generating obscuring mists, could also cause droughts in the countries downwind. Another scheme would inject sulphate particles into the stratosphere. It is perhaps less dangerous than the others, but still carries a risk of causing changes in rainfall patterns. As for flipping a giant mirror into orbit, the necessary technologies are probably a century away. All these fixes appear to be more expensive than cutting the amount of energy we consume. None of them reduces the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which threatens to acidify the oceans, with grave consequences for the food chain.

The demand that money and research be diverted into these quixotic solutions is another indication that Bush’s avowed conversion to the cause of cutting emissions is illusory.… Article

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Have cited reports on this multiple times previously, but it is never unfashionable to repeat it.

The Bush administration has routinely suppressed or ­distorted communication of climate change science to the public, a climate specialist at Nasa’s Goddard Institute said on Tuesday.

The accusation, before the chief oversight committee in the House of Representatives, was reinforced by claims by Democratic lawmakers that the White House was withholding documents proving that Philip Cooney, a former Bush administration official who now works as a lobbyist for ExxonMobil, regularly edited climate reports for political reasons.

[snip]

Rick Piltz, a former government official who co-ordinated and edited reports on climate change, said he resigned from his post in 2005 in protest against the Bush administration impeding communication on ­climate science and its implications.

Mr Piltz testified that the administration systematically attempted to “bury” a “national assessment” report that had been published during the Clinton administration that analysed the consequences of climate variability on the US. Article

A bit more:

he groups presented a survey that shows two in five of the 279 climate scientists who responded to a questionnaire complained that some of their scientific papers had been edited in a way that changed their meaning. Nearly half of the 279 said in response to another question that at some point they had been told to delete reference to “global warming'’ or “climate change'’ from a report.

The questionnaire was sent by the Union of Concerned Scientists, a private advocacy group. The report also was based on “firsthand experiences'’ described in interviews with the Government Accountability Project, which helps government whistleblowers, lawmakers were told. Article

Shorter version: The way of the woebegone G, Walker administration — use an anvil to crack open eggs.

Who then gets to interpret the Geneva Conventions could matter a great deal to supposedly “hard-core” prisoners held in indefinite detention without charge and with little or no prospect of release. Such detention is permitted by the conventions for enemy combatants granted prisoner-of-war status in an “international armed conflict.” But there is no provision for indefinite detention in the cases of “protected persons” who have been detained but not charged in conflicts that don’t meet that standard. Oblivious of contradiction, the administration has paid lip service to the Geneva standards—President Bush has repeatedly pledged to adhere to their “spirit”—while simultaneously implying that taking them literally could be at least inconvenient, possibly dangerous.

Strictly speaking, the government contended, the struggle against al-Qaeda couldn’t be an “international armed conflict” because al-Qaeda isn’t a state, or a “noninternational armed conflict” because it sprawls across the borders of many states. Therefore, government lawyers argued (until they lost the argument in the Hamdan case), there is a lacuna in the conventions. The administration, which places a low value on what’s called international humanitarian law, came forward with no proposals on how to fill the lacuna it perceived. Instead, claiming a license to set its own standards unilaterally, it charged right through it. It’s as if its legal advisers sought to apply to international law their usual conservative precepts about “strict construction” and “the intentions of the framers.”

The fact that al-Qaeda wasn’t foreseen when the conventions were agreed on in 1949, however, hardly negates a larger truth about the conventions, which the Supreme Court has now recognized: that they were intended in the judgment of most experts to be entirely comprehensive, setting minimal standards of humane treatment for illegal as well as legal combatants. No class of warrior was exempted from the minimal legal protections built into Common Article 3. These include a prohibition on “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment” as well as “cruel treatment and torture.” By now it’s more than obvious this was the language that worried administration officials, intent as they were on sending a message to interrogators on the urgent need for “actionable intelligence” on terrorist networks.

It’s possible to imagine a different kind of administration in which government lawyers might have worried about a different kind of lacuna in international law: the absence of any clear provision for preventive detention of fighters who view themselves as adherents of networks that spawn terrorist plots (and who therefore might reasonably be considered to be more dangerous than the traditional prisoner taken captive on a battlefield). With a view to maintaining alliances and building international support, such an administration might have thought about seeking an indictment of Osama bin Laden and his most conspicuous aides from the new International Criminal Court, which the United States has strenuously opposed under President Bush. It might have proposed negotiations on a new Geneva convention to cover the new situation. It might even have come forward to propose standards of due process for assessing and reassessing the threat posed by individual detainees. Dream on: that is clearly not the administration we are going to have for the next two years. It remains to be seen whether the new leadership at the Pentagon, following Donald Rumsfeld’s departure, will be willing to address a question that clearly never weighed on him: the question—it’s political as well as legal—of how long the system of indefinite detention can be sustained. Article

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Noted FYI:

The United States has agreed to release two Jordanian prisoners from Guantanamo detention camp, Foreign Minister Abdul Ilah Khatib said Tuesday. Article

Gee, ya think?

A U.N. human rights investigator said on Tuesday torture is both widespread and routine in Jordan, especially to extract confessions from terrorism suspects, while security forces enjoy total impunity.

[snip]

Methods used in Jordan include beatings with truncheons, batons, electrical cables and broom handles, burning detainees with cigarettes and forcing them to hold painful positions for long periods, according to the U.N. investigator. Article

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Patronizing as all get out, a ‘declaration of standards’ passed by a Quebec municipality also cautions:

However, we consider that killing women in public beatings, or burning them alive are not part of our standards of life. .pdf file

“We consider?” It is illegal, period. So is beating women short of the point of death. Or men, for that matter.

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It might well be wise to carry laminated notarized notes from your doctors.

When 75,000 football fans pack into Dolphin Stadium in Miami for the Super Bowl on February 4, at least a few may want to carry notes from their doctors explaining why they’re radioactive enough to set off “dirty bomb” alarms.

With the rising use of radioisotopes in medicine and the growing use of radiation detectors in a security-conscious nation, patients are triggering alarms in places where they may not even realize they’re being scanned, doctors and security officials say.

Nearly 60,000 people a day in the United States undergo treatment or tests that leave tiny amounts of radioactive material in their bodies, according to the Society of Nuclear Medicine. It is not enough to hurt them or anyone else, but it is enough to trigger radiation alarms for up to three months. Article

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On the plus side, gym memberships should skyrocket.

X-ray cameras could be installed on lampposts on British streets to spot armed terrorists and other criminals, it has been claimed.

According to a leaked memo seen by The Sun, “detection of weapons and explosives will become easier” if the scheme drawn up by Home Office officials is adopted.

However, officials acknowledged it would be highly controversial as the cameras can “see” through clothing. Article

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Killing the messengers: Don’t blame the vehicle, it’s the loose nut behind the wheel.

LEAVES OF CRASS

Um, olive trees predate Greece itself. Any such miraculous medical claim would have been known for thousands of years.

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EAT, DRINK AND BE WARY

More wine, honey?

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1) OPEN MOUTH

2) Insert feet.

Running way behind (obviously). Probably another 2 hours or so until today’s posts are collated and posted.