Summary here and here.

Peeling away factionally or a date dropping from a dying palm?

Iraqi justice minister Hashem al-Shebly has resigned because of dissatisfaction over the running of the government. He is the first cabinet minister to quit since Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. took office nearly a year ago. Article

Much more here:

The Iraqi government has endorsed a decision to relocate and compensate thousands of Arabs who moved to Kirkuk as part of Saddam Hussein’s campaign to push out the Kurds, an official said yesterday. The decision was a major step toward implementing a constitutional requirement to determine the status of the disputed oil-rich city by the end of the year.

Iraq’s Justice Minister Hashim Al-Shebli said the Cabinet agreed on Thursday to a committee’s February recommendation that Arabs who moved to the city from other parts of Iraq after July 14, 1968, would be returned to their original towns and given monetary compensation. Al-Shebli, a Sunni Arab, also confirmed he had offered his resignation on Thursday, citing differences with the government and his own political group, the secular Iraqi List, which joined Sunni Arab lawmakers in opposing the Kirkuk decision.…

[snip]

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s spokesman, Ali al-Dabbagh, could not be reached for comment. Government adviser Sami al-Askari said he had no information about the resignation.… [Purely speculation, but there almost must be some hardball internecine positioning and backbiting occuring related to Talabani’s massaging of Turkey regarding the status of Kirkuk (see yesterday’s Iraq IIO section). — voxd] Article

Two of the three factories produce (wait for it) supplies for the occupation forces, the military and police.

In an Iraq jobs program, the Pentagon has helped reopen three factories shuttered after the 2003 invasion, seeding the ground by buying uniforms and armored vehicles from two of them.

[snip]

In a program started nearly a year ago, the Defense Department has reopened a large textile factory in Najaf by buying uniforms for Iraqi soldiers and police that the U.S. has been training, and has reopened a vehicle factory south of Baghdad by buying armored vehicles, said Paul Brinkley. He is deputy undersecretary of defense in charge of Pentagon business modernization efforts and has been running the program.

[snip]

Brinkley has been taking representatives from private industry in the United States and elsewhere to Iraq to encourage them to do business in the country.

One company has agreed to buy 120 trucks from the transport company and another is expected to buy clothing from the textile factory that Brinkley said could be on American shelves by fall. [Wanna bet on that? Odds are heavily against meeting that commitment. — voxd] Article

Therein lies the dilemma. What Gen. Petraeus describes as ‘victory’ is not a military solution, nor a military job. Using a jackhammer to pound in thumbtacks results in an entirely predictable mess.

Everywhere Petraeus went on Saturday, shopkeepers asked when they would have such services as electricity.

[snip]

The war is not about killing the enemy, he said. It’s about providing jobs, gaining people’s trust, learning who can be brought into the political fold and
who is irreconcilable, about mending sectarian wounds and providing services.

[snip]

On Saturday, only Iraqi army troops were present in the market, though two police brigades are in the neighborhood.

In any case, Petraeus said, it’s unlikely that violence will disappear. Iraqis will have to grow accustomed to it.

“You’re trying to learn how to live with a level of violence,” Petraeus said. “It’s not sustainable if people don’t feel secure.” Article

Editorial du jour:

Now the lines are clear and the American people have a choice on Iraq policy.

The choice is not whether or not to continue the Bush administration’s current surge of more than 28,000 additional troops into Iraq. Both the House and Senate have passed supplemental spending bills providing funds for the surge.

The choice concerns what happens after that. Will a post-surge policy be one of continued escalation or one of contraction? If the surge succeeds in stabilizing Baghdad and the Anbar province west of Baghdad by late summer, as Gen. David Petraeus hopes, what’s the plan? And if it doesn’t succeed, what then?

The new majorities in the House and Senate support a post-surge policy of contraction. The Senate’s bill, approved Thursday on a 51-47 vote, requires the president to send Congress a plan for drawdown of U.S. combat brigades with a goal of completing redeployment by April 2008. The House bill passed last week sets a binding timeline for U.S. troop withdrawal by Sept. 2008.

[snip]

The congressional bills do not call for precipitous withdrawal. They give the surge time to stabilize the situation (or not) and for regional diplomatic initiatives to take place to prevent a widening of the Iraq civil war to neighboring countries, as the Iraq Study Group recommended last December.

[snip]

All options at this stage are less than ideal, a point that the Iraq Study Group report underscored. It concluded that reducing our combat troop commitments in Iraq, “undeniably creates risks, but leaving those forces tied down in Iraq indefinitely creates its own set of security risks.”

The congressional funding bills should be seen as a mechanism for forcing a long overdue weighing of those risks, a consideration of unpalatable but inescapable alternatives.

At the moment, both Congress and the president seem intent on winning a war of rhetoric. By passing these supplemental appropriations bills, Congress has signaled that the current open-ended commitment, upping the ante at each new decision point, is no longer acceptable. The president insists that the issue centers on presidential authority in wartime and support for the troops. Article

Keeping up with the courts-martial:

The trial for a soldier accused in the rape and murder of an Iraqi teenager and the slaying of her family has been delayed, the soldier’s attorney said.

Pfc. Jesse V. Spielman’s trial was scheduled to start Monday at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, but was pushed back after his defense attorney received new information regarding witnesses, attorney Dan Christensen said.

A public affairs officer at Fort Campbell, Master Sgt. Terry Webster, said Saturday he did not know about the delay. As a matter of protocol, military prosecutors will not discuss the case. Article

Summary here and here.

As the tide shifts.

The latest scathing criticism of General Pervez Musharraf’s failure to reverse Pakistan’s legacy of militancy ought to shock the country’s ruling establishment into action towards tackling the problem.

But if the seven-year track record of the General is any indication, complacency and inaction are more likely to be the driving forces rather than tangible action, which begins by making a fundamental difference.

[snip]

Events in Pakistan have recently demonstrated that Musharraf’s government has failed to maintain its writ over the country. The government has also become increasingly prone to taking more and more ill-advised decisions, as illustrated by the recent suspension of the chief justice of the supreme court.

Musharraf’s tenure has seen the consistent and increasing marginalisation of the parliament and other political institutions. While the General insists he has overseen the arrival of a better quality democracy than what existed before his rule, the reality is that his tenure has only seen Pakistan’s political weakening.

There are no short cuts to political stability. There is only one, simple, tried and tested solution. The first step for Pakistan to improve its outlook must come through the country’s return to a more representative democratic rule. Article

Related:

The threat to Musharraf’s grip on power has rekindled fears in Washington whether a strategic relationship anchored in effect by one man in Pakistan is sustainable in the long run. “The US strategic partnership with Pakistan is in a troubled state,” said Marvin Weinbaum, a former US State Department expert on Pakistan. “It rests too heavily on the political survival of one man and a military rule facing formidable domestic challenges and declining legitimacy,” he said.

Washington’s preoccupation with counterterrorism since the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States has in effect given Musharraf “a pass on satisfying us on the issues of democracy, nuclear proliferation and extremism,” Weinbaum said. President George W. Bush’s administration has ruled out any immediate threat of Musharraf being toppled, but the Democratic-controlled US Congress is not taking chances. “What we truly need in Pakistan is someone else to talk to,” said Democrat lawmaker Gary Ackerman, who heads a House of Representatives panel on South Asia.

“The administration seems content to only speak with president Musharraf and portrays him as the indispensable man. The truth is, for our goals to be achieved in Pakistan, there should be more than one phone number there to dial,” he said. … Article

Following up on a story mentioned here earlier this week:

Taleban militants on Friday freed the principal of a high school who was kidnapped four days ago for stopping the rebels recruiting his students, his family said.

[snip]

The release was negotiated by an eight-member council led by a local cleric, he said. Article

Noted FYI:

Maulana Abdul Aziz, the prayer leader at Lal Masjid and principal of Jamia Hafsa, on Friday gave the government a week’s deadline to “enforce Sharia” in the country, otherwise “clerics will Islamise society themselves”. “If the government does not impose Sharia within a week, we will do it,” Aziz told a gathering after Friday prayers.… Article

Summary here and here.

The metrics of chaos head towards the red.

The largest exodus ever witnessed in the last 15 years is going on in the Somali capital Mogadishu as heavy fighting continued for the third day, Somalia’s local Shabelle Media Network reported Saturday, saying even it’s staff are also joining the people fleeing the city.

In a notice posted on its website, Shabelle notifies online visitors that the network is difficult to update news stories as previously due to the intensifying fighting in Mogadishu.

[snip]

According to local hospital sources and the International Committee of the Red Cross, the fiercest battle in more than a decade in the city has killed at least 30 people and wounded 229.

[snip]

In the very few streets still open for civilians in the capital,cars carrying families and their belongings are racing to get out of the city. Article

Aussie look at the Hicks case brings in some more dribs and drabs of data:

…As well as keeping Hicks in jail until after the federal election, the agreement stops Hicks from talking to the media for a year. That provision appears to have been inserted by the Australian Government. It would be unconstitutional in the US.

If Hicks talks to the media after that date, he will forfeit any money he might receive. Article

Limp. Quack. Limp. Quack.

Hold firm, hold strong, Congress.

“The House and Senate bills have too much pork,” President Bush declared on Wednesday, referring to the latest “supplemental” spending bill for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Pork? Let’s see. The bill is a monstrosity. No question about that: $122 billion to finish off the year’s fighting – and raise the cost of the wars this year alone to $200 billion, or $3.8 billion a week, or, essentially, $500 million a day.…

[snip]

Is Bush suggesting that spending that amount of money on 30 hours of illegitimate war-making in Iraq is more valuable than a calendar year’s worth of extra assistance for the poor? Of course he is. “The House and Senate bills have too much pork,” he says, because it’s the only way to deflect attention from the true crime in the supplemental appropriation, the $116 billion being spent on a war we shouldn’t be fighting in a place we shouldn’t be, at the expense of crying needs at home.… Article

Robert Fisk on “The Crushing Fear That Stalks America”:

…the girl in Noll’s seminar isn’t spouting this stuff about “jihadists” traveling from Iraq to America because she supports Bush. She is just frightened. She is genuinely afraid of all the “terror” warnings, the supposed “jihadists” threats, the red “terror” alerts and the purple alerts and all the other color-coded instruments of fear. She believes her president, and her president has done Osama Bin Laden’s job for him: he has crushed this young woman’s spirit and courage. Article

Analysis du jour:

The US has long viewed terrorism as ahistorical and apolitical, more of a moral mutation than a social phenomenon, which can be battered away with military might. Analysing jihadists as social actors driven by political, religious and geostrategic concerns may prove beneficial to the US and the world at large in seeking a lasting and nuanced political-diplomatic strategy to deal with this essentially social phenomenon.

[snip]

Sadly, the dominant narrative in Washington neglects the role of politics and foreign policy in driving violence and constantly downplays political means in combating it. In fact, the Bush administration, while paying lip service to public diplomacy, has relied excessively on militarism to wage all-out war against an unconventional and fractured foe.

The irony is that Bin Laden and Zawahiri had actually failed to draw the bulk of former jihadists into their war against the US. Many former jihadists, whom I interviewed in the late 1990s and after 9/11, said that while delighted at America’s humiliation, they also feared that Bin Laden and Zawahiri recklessly endangered survival of the Islamist movement. Instead of the river of recruits to Afghanistan, only a trickle of volunteers signed up to defend the Taleban and Al Qaeda after 9/11.

Widespread empathy for the victims came from the Arab and Muslim world. Leading Muslim clerics and opinion makers condemned Al Qaeda’s terrorist tactics and exposed the falsity on which Al Qaeda based its jihad. An historic moment was lost, as the Bush administration declared war against both real and imagined enemies.

[snip]

Tragically, the Iraq war has given rise to a new generation of militants who use terrorism as a rule, not an exception. More youngsters are deeply affected by what they see as external aggression perpetrated against their religion. Article

Oy.

Two Australian soldiers who served in the first Iraq war have tested positive to depleted uranium (DU) contamination despite assurances from the Federal Government they had not been exposed, an anti-nuclear group said…. Article

Two off-the-beaten-track stories about Barack Obama: #1 — #2

Q: So, did you see all of the exhibit?

A: Not sure, but then isn’t that the point?

The punchlines write themselves.

He recognises himself in the mirror, plays hide-and-seek and breaks into fits of giggles when tickled. He is also our closest evolutionary cousin.

A group of world leading primatologists argue that this is proof enough that Hiasl, a 26-year-old chimpanzee, deserves to be treated like a human. In a test case in Austria, campaigners are seeking to ditch the ’species barrier’ and have taken Hiasl’s case to court. If Hiasl is granted human status - and the rights that go with it - it will signal a victory for other primate species and unleash a wave of similar cases. Article

And by his 128th birthday, it’ll all be his.

Summary here.

Twenty five corpses have been found in scattered places in the city of Mosul, according to police.

A police source in Mosul told KUNA Friday that the Iraqi patrol vehicles were able to discover the corpses in scattered places in the city.

It added that some of the corpses were blindfolded and had gunfire scars. Article

Chaos surges as the catalysis creeps.

Iraqi state television said Friday that U.S. air strike killed 16 people in Sadr City, a Shiite stronghold in eastern Baghdad, while the U.S. military said they raided the Shiite bastion and detained a suspected militant.

Al-Iraqia, the Iraqi state-run television, reported the incident, adding 14 more people were wounded in the attack.

The U.S. military did not confirmed the incident. Article

Samuel Beckett, Tom Stoppard and Eugene Ionesco — combined — would be hard pressed to concoct as bizarre a scenario.

Iraqi authorities have re -arrested 18 policemen who had been detained but then freed over the reprisal killing of up to 70 Sunni Arab men in the northern town of Tal Afar this week, police said on Friday. Article

Those Bulgarian troops ostensibly guarding the MEK coralled in Camp Ashraf make wavelets again.

Two Bulgarian soldiers have been recalled from their mission in Iraq, Darik News reported.

The troops were part of Bulgaria’s non-combat unit that guards the Ashraf refugee camp, located 60 km north of Baghdad.

[snip]

The news comes just weeks after a scandalous amateur Web video exposed Bulgarian soldiers’ humiliating attitude towards Iraqis. The battalion, which was deployed in Kerbala from January 15 to July 15, 2004, used to go on patrolling in the area. It was exactly during such a mission that the video was shot, the ministry announced.

In the video, the soldiers are calling young local citizens names with a Bulgarian word, which means dirty Roma [aka Gypsy — voxd] and has an offensive connotation. Article

Genuinely working at defusing the recent escalation of tensions and rhetoric, sending a signal that the status of Kirkuk (regardless of whether any referendum is held) is a fait accompli, kicking the can tinderbox down the road, or some of each?

Iraqi President Jalal Talabani’s proposal to Turkey to send a delegation to the strategically important northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk, the future of which Ankara has serious concerns about due to a huge recent influx of Iraqi Kurds, was considered by the Turkish capital as “a positive sign clearly showing Iraqi Kurds want a better relationship with Turkey.”

Riyadh was the venue for Talabani’s proposal earlier this week when he met with Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who reiterated Turkey’s unease over developments in Kirkuk. Talabani answered him: “Is there a mistake that the Iraqis have made in regards to Kirkuk? Send a delegation; let them carry out investigations in Kirkuk. Let them look into whether the records of deeds have been erased. Let them carry out demographic studies. The base for these deeds is in Baghdad. Let Turkey’s consulate in Mosul look into this.”

…Kirkuk lies just south of the Kurdish autonomous region stretching across Iraq’s northeast. Kurdish leaders want to annex the city. Iraq’s constitution calls for a census and referendum on the issue by the end of this year.

As of Friday, Foreign Ministry officials said that there was currently no concrete plans for sending such a delegation to Kirkuk. “It is a fact that Talabani’s proposal is in itself a positive step reflecting the Iraqi Kurds’ willingness for having a better, milder and — most importantly — appropriate relationship with Turkey,” a senior diplomat told Today’s Zaman, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

[snip]

When reminded of possible interpretations of Talabani’s proposal, such as the Iraqi Kurds using a delegation sent by Turkey to the city for legitimizing their inappropriate activities, the same diplomat sounded confident and firm as on their position: “Ankara has no such worries because Turkey’s stance regarding Kirkuk is very well known by the Iraqi Kurds as well as by the international community.”

Meanwhile, it is still a subject of debate whether there had been any understanding over such proposal of inviting a Turkish delegation to Kirkuk between Talabani and Iraqi Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani, president of the de facto autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq, prior to Talabani’s meeting with Erdogan in Riyadh. Article

With the degree of stridency (and directness) at nearly unprecedented highs from Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E. and Jordan all in just one week, something’s afoot.

Policymakers and strategic analysts in the Arab world have little confidence that current US troop surge in Iraq will do much more than – at best – postpone a complete political-security breakdown in Iraq, which, they fear, could then spread across the Middle East. During my lengthy recent discussions with experts in Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, and with some well-connected Iraqis in Jordan, I heard a lot about how Iraq’s collapse has been affecting these Arab societies.

The news from my Iraqi friends – leaders in quasi-governmental and nongovernmental organizations – was grim. These were people who (on human rights grounds) had supported the US invasion in 2003, and who then worked hard to build an effective, democratic order in their country. Now, I found them downhearted – but thoughtful, as they tried to pinpoint the worst of many US mistakes in Iraq. They told piercingly tragic stories about the violence and sectarianism that affects everyone there.

[snip]

This group also talked about the region-wide fallout from the US troops’ current quagmirelike deployment in Iraq. They all expected to see a substantial drawdown – or perhaps a complete withdrawal – of US troops from Iraq within the next 12 to 18 months, regardless of whether Washington concludes an explicit agreement with Tehran…

Here in London, strategic thinker Hussein Agha told me that, for now, all of Iraq’s neighbors prefer that US troops stay tied down inside Iraq, rather than withdraw. For some countries, the status quo lessens the likelihood of US attacks against them.…

[snip]

Here in London, strategic thinker Hussein Agha told me that, for now, all of Iraq’s neighbors prefer that US troops stay tied down inside Iraq, rather than withdraw. For some countries, the status quo lessens the likelihood of US attacks against them.… Article

There are two great big honking aces in the hole:

1) The Congressional initiatives have popular (and still growing) support (and letting your Congresspeople know that they have and still have support for working to wind down and stop the atrocity which the woebegone adminsitartion has set loose on the planet is more than recommended — it is essential).

2) After six years of bellowing “Fear, fear!” each time the woebegone G. Walker administation trots out that swaybacked horse as a tactic it serves to throw into sharp relief their copious lack of ability and accomplishment.

One more time: If vetoes, come back with it again. And again. And again, including upping the ante — the history of this administration clearly, in bold face, screams that nods to “compromise” or “bipartisanhip” mean nothing to them other than concepts to be given lip service and then promptly ignored and trod into the dirt.

Last November, we the people did not vote for doormats.

Not to be overlooked as well is that, when dealing with a culture awash and steeped in (and ever on the hunt for) cash, greenmail can be an effective (if distasteful) strategy of intervention.

The current stalemate resembles that battle, but with the tables turned. It is now Congress-ruling Democrats who are defying a Republican president’s veto threat. Both the House and Senate have passed bills to provide money for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, but they include timetables for withdrawing U.S. forces that Bush says he will not accept. Article

Noted FYI: US Defense Expenditures Could Exceed $700 Billion. And, as always, mention is made that the figures leave out so-called ‘black budget’ secret appropriations.

Bullpuckey. If the White House claims ignorance or the “nobody could have anticipated a recess” crap, and expect anyone other than a retarded Venusian to accept it (and not also immediately question the competence of those in the White House), they’re self-painted as bigger boobs than their harshest critics portray.

“The president was surprised to learn that Congress went on vacation today,” said White House deputy spokeswoman Dana Perino. Article

Summaries here and here and here and here.

Oh what a tangled web we weave…

Just seven days after Pat Tillman’s death, a top general warned there were strong indications that it was friendly fire and President George W. Bush might embarrass himself if he said the professional American football star-turned-soldier died in an ambush, according to a memo obtained by The Associated Press.

It was not until a month afterward that the Pentagon told the public and grieving family members the truth – that Tillman was mistakenly killed in Afghanistan by his comrades.

The memo reinforces suspicions that the Pentagon was more concerned with sparing officials from embarrassment than revealing the real circumstances that led Tillman’s death to his family.

In a memo sent to a four-star general a week after Tillman’s April 22, 2004, death, then-Maj. Gen. Stanley McChrystal warned that it was “highly possible” the Army Ranger was killed by friendly fire. Article

As this story was previously linked to, but there is now a corrected version, doing so again.

…David Edwards, a U.S. anthropologist regarded as an expert on the origins of the Taliban, said reconstruction has been overshadowed by rampant corruption, meager international donations and poverty in a country where the unemployment rate is about 40 percent.

“It’s important to understand that Americans have come to be seen as an occupying power,” Edwards, an author who has traveled widely in Afghanistan, said at a Monday forum sponsored by the Pakistani Embassy in Washington. Article

Chaos in the wilds (and a convenient distraction for the public from Musharraf’s other myriad woes znd is machinations concerning them).

Pakistan says renewed fighting between local tribesmen and foreign militants in the South Waziristan tribal region bordering Afghanistan left at least 54 people dead Friday.

Interior Minister Aftab Khan Sherpao said 45 of the dead are foreign militants, mostly Uzbeks. He said the latest deaths bring to at least 177 the number of foreign militants killed since the clashes erupted last week.

A Taleban tribal elder has vowed the fighting will continue until the foreign militants are driven out of the region. A fragile ceasefire was broken earlier this week. Article

Some more here.

Keeping up with the ever-mounting fallout from Pervez’ self-coup:

The inquiry tribunal has finalized inquiry into the incident of manhandling of suspended chief justice of Pakistan Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry by the police and presented the sealed report to the Supreme Court (SC).

[snip]

The SC will announce its verdict on the matter within fifteen days in the light of the report. Article

Also:

The President Supreme Court Bar Association Munir A. Malik said on Friday that the proceeding of supreme judicial council could only be held on the principal seat of Supreme Court and the speculation and proposal that the third April proceeding of presidential reference against Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry may be shifted to Karachi, which would be totally unlawful and against the rules and regulation.

He was speaking on telephone from Islamabad at Chakwal press club on Friday.

Munir A Malik was confident that the law was very much clear and the proceeding of third April must be held at the building of supreme Court Islamabad.

He further told that all the lawyers community would observe complete strike on third April to make solidarity with chief justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry. Article

Noted FYI:

Taliban militants seeking to impose Islamic law blew up two video shops and torched a cable television operator’s office in Kohat, officials said on Friday.… Article

Summary here.

Heavy exchange of machine guns and artilleries have resumed in Mogadishu earlier this morning at 6:30 am local time near Mogadishu’s football stadium where Ethiopian forces and Somali insurgents were digging trenches and facing each other few meters away.

The sound of heavy artilleries could be in all parts of the capital city while panic stricken civilians are still fleeing from the city.

it is the second day clashes between Ethiopian forces and Somali insurgents with no attempts of negotiations or cease being taken. Article

With scenes of carnage shocking even by Somali standards, residents said the final death toll from the worst day of fighting since a war over the New Year could be much higher.

“People are worried, they did not know whether they will survive today or not,” said Osman Gabayre, a local journalist who saw five dead civilians on the streets and the wreck of an Ethiopian army truck hit by a rocket-propelled grenade. “I saw the remains of 17 Ethiopian soldiers there,” he said. Mobs tied ropes to some of the dead soldiers and dragged them through the streets. Article

Shorter version: Abandoned by his country, the U.S.

Ethiopia’s intelligence service is holding an American who fled Somalia’s fighting in a secret facility pending a hearing on his status next month, U.S. officials said Friday.

Ethiopian authorities on Friday allowed a U.S. diplomat to visit Amir Mohamed Meshal, 24, of Tinton Falls, N.J., only the second such visit since he was incarcerated in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital, about six weeks ago.

Meshal was among some 160 people who fled the fighting in Somalia in January and were detained in Kenya on immigration charges in a roundup that was coordinated with the United States.

[snip]

The State Department [said] that Ethiopian authorities haven’t charged [him] and plan to hold a status hearing April 14 to determine whether he should be held as a prisoner of war.

[snip]

U.S. officials asserted that Kenya’s decision to send Meshal back to Somalia took them by surprise and said they filed a protest with the Kenyan government.

But Kenyan and U.S. human rights groups dismiss the claim, pointing out that Kenya turned over another American who fled Somalia and admitted training with al-Qaida to the FBI.

They charge that the secret transfer of Amir Meshal and the other detainees back to Somalia - sometimes called a rendition - violated international law.

Jonathan Hafetz of the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, who’s providing legal assistance to Meshal’s family, said he saw “no indication at all” that the case “is a high priority with the United States.” Article

Opinion piece du jour:

It’s right that the government and media should be concerned about the treatment the 15 captured marines and sailors are receiving in Iran. Faye Turney’s letters bear the marks of coercion, while parading the prisoners in front of TV cameras was demeaning. But the outrage expressed by ministers and leader writers is curious given the recent record of the “coalition of the willing” on the way it deals with prisoners.

Turney may have been “forced to wear the hijab”, as the Daily Mail noted with fury, but so far as we know she has not been forced into an orange jumpsuit. Her comrades have not been shackled, blindfolded, forced into excruciating physical contortions for long periods, or denied liquids and food. As far as we know they have not had the Bible spat on, torn up or urinated on in front of their faces. They have not had electrodes attached to their genitals or been set on by attack dogs.

They have not been hung from a forklift truck and photographed for the amusement of their captors. They have not been pictured naked and smeared in their own excrement. They have not been bundled into a CIA-chartered plane and secretly “rendered” to a basement prison in a country where torturers are experienced and free to do their worst.

As far as we know, Turney and her comrades are not being “worked hard”, the euphemism coined by one senior British army officer for the abuse of prisoners at Camp Bread Basket. And as far as we know all 15 are alive and well, which is more than can be said for Baha Mousa, the hotel receptionist who, in 2003, was unfortunate enough to have been taken into custody by British troops in Basra. There has of course been a court martial and it exonerated the soldiers of Mousa’s murder. So we can only assume that his death - by beating - was self-inflicted; yet another instance of “asymmetrical warfare”, the description given by US authorities to the deaths of the Guantánamo detainees who hanged themselves last year. Article

Highly related:

With modern navigation devices such as the Global Positioning System (GPS) a ship can determine its position down to scant meters, a far cry from the days when ships navigated by a sextant and the stars.

But as Craig Murray, former chief of the Maritime Section of Britain’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office, points out, even the most sophisticated navigational devices are of no help in the current British-Iranian dispute because there is no clearly demarcated boundary.

“The major problem is, knowing where the ships were exactly doesn’t help you know precisely where the boundary line is because that’s what nobody really knows, because it [the boundary] has never been agreed,” he explained.

[snip]

Kaiyan Kaikobad is a professor of international law at Durham University in Britain who has advised the United Nations and written extensively about Persian Gulf maritime disputes. He notes that Iran and Iraq have still not agreed on a formal maritime boundary in that area where the Shatt-al-Arab flows into the Gulf.

“Once you’re in the Gulf, there is no lateral boundary that the two countries have agreed upon by virtue of a treaty,” he said. “Now it may be that over these 15, 20, 25 years, they have a kind of de facto arrangement.”

[snip]

Kaiyan Kaikobad says that even if British craft had strayed into what Iran claims as its waters, under international law, Iran had no right to seize the sailors.

“Even if a naval vessel, a warship, from Iraq or from the United Kingdom strays into Iranian territory by mistake, even if that is the case, you can’t arrest it,” he said. “You can’t board that craft. All that you do is you can ask that vessel, ‘we want you to leave.’ You can persevere in that. But you can’t go about arresting them. You can’t go about keeping their people in captivity.” [Unlike, say, consular staff as in those captured under G. Walker’s “shoot or spirit away first” policy, huh? He opened the door to shattering even the pretense of honoring international consensus on norms and parameters of operations; others took up the invitation and stepped right on in. — voxd] Article

Summary here and here.

The wheel of misfortune goes round and round, and stops at:

A U.S. military tribunal sentenced Australian David Hicks Friday to seven years in prison but he will only have to serve nine months of the sentence.

[snip]

Appearing at the U.S. military’s war crimes tribunal court at Guantanamo on Friday, Hicks acknowledged that he trained with al-Qaida in Afghanistan and fought with its forces against U.S. allies in Afghanistan in late 2001 for two hours and then sold his gun to raise cab fare and tried to flee to Pakistan.

[snip]

Hicks is not accused of actually shooting anyone.… Article

Other related Hicks case stories (including about the media gag placed on him for a year after sentencing) here and here.

Noted FYI:

A Saudi terror suspect says U.S. interrogators tortured him for five years and he confessed to involvement in the bombing of the USS Cole just to satisfy them and “make the people happy,” according to a Pentagon transcript of a military hearing at Guantanamo Bay.

Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a Saudi of Yemeni descent, is the second “high value” detainee to contend he was tortured while being held in secret CIA prisons prior to transfer to the detention site in Cuba last September.

In a transcript released Friday by the Pentagon, he said he made up the stories linking him to the Cole attack, which left 17 U.S. sailors dead and nearly sank the $1 billion destroyer in Aden harbor in 2000.

“From the time I was arrested five years ago, they have been torturing me. It happened during interviews. One time they tortured me one way, and another time they tortured me in a different way,” al-Nashiri said, according to the transcript of a hearing at the Guantanamo detention center on March 14. “I just said those things to make the people happy. They were very happy when I told them those things.”

[snip]

In a confidential report that has not been publicly distributed, the International Committee of the Red Cross has said the 14 prisoners described abusive interrogation methods, according to officials familiar with the report.

CIA spokesman Mark Mansfield wouldn’t respond to al-Nashiri’s allegations, but said Friday that the agency’s interrogation program is conducted lawfully – “with great care and close review, producing vital information that has helped disrupt plots and save lives.”

Soon after the capture of a key terror suspect in 2002, the CIA decided it should hold high-value captives for extended periods to extract information, using “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

Those widely reported practices include openhanded slapping, cold, sleep deprivation and – perhaps most controversially – waterboarding. In that technique, a detainee is made to believe he is drowning.

“It’s widely known that the CIA has abused prisoners – agency personnel have admitted as much to journalists, and detainees who have been released or transferred to military custody have described some of the abuses,” said John Sifton of Human Rights Watch in New York. “But now the military is acting as an accomplice after the fact.” Article

The redacted, sanitized (and independently uncorroborated) transcripts reside here.

Mr. Theroux, the clinical term is nucking futz.

NO JURY WOULD DENY IT…

…if it was presented as DWI: Driving While Insane.

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IS THAT A KIELBASA IN YOUR POCKET?

Or are you just glad to see us? Let’s find out, shall we?

Summary here and here.

Persistence of chaos.

Iraqi insurgents have intensified their attacks on U.S. targets inside the restive city of Falluja and the outlying villages and towns.

[snip]

The U.S. has placed the city under a strict curfew which is already in its third day and has banned people and trucks from leaving or entering the city, further fuelling popular resentment and anger at their tactics.

Despite the presence of thousands of U.S. troops inside and outside the city, the rebels still seem to have the upper hand.

They are almost in full control during the night and carry out hit and run attacks during the day. Article

The message, on its face, is self-contradictory (even moreso as, concurrently within the Green Zone, fatalities are occurring). al-Maliki may fancy himself a modern-day Ataturk, but cold, hard reality is a harsh mistress.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Al-Kaliki reasserted Thursday the capability of his government to protect “all components of Iraq.” He made the statement in the graduation ceremony of the ninth anti-terrorism course, held at the premise of special operation command here. Article

So now both chambers of Congress have sent the missive.

President Bush’s reaction was instantaneous, familiar in its contempt for views that do not follow his in lockstep, and depressing in its lack of contact with reality.…

[snip]

Victory is no longer an option in Iraq, if it ever was. The only rational objective left is to responsibly organize America’s inevitable exit. That is exactly what Mr. Bush is not doing and what the House and Senate bills try to do. Article

The flaking scalp of international relations: One wonders if Rice’s “birth of a new Middle East” is something she’d be willling to repeat today.

The United States on Thursday expressed surprise at Saudi King Abdullah’s sharp criticism of the Iraq war and sought a “clarification,” as US officials acknowledged a chill in relations with Riyadh.

[snip]

At the White House, spokeswoman Dana Perino downplayed talk of a rift between Washington and its staunch Arab ally but allowed: “In any relationship, there are ebbs and flows.”

Asked whether that meant that relations were currently at an ebb, Perino replied: “Yes.” Article

Summaries here and here and here.

Hmm.

Attorney General Abdul Jabbar Sabit has said member of the Kabul provincial council Maulvi Habibullah will be arrested soon after his arrival in the country.

Speaking at a news conference here, Sabit alleged Habibullah had violated the law and would be detained at the Kabul airport after arrival from his official visit to Philippine. The AG presented three people before the journalists allegedly beaten by Maulvi Habibullah and his men in the Bagh-i-Bala area of this capital city. Article

Coming up shortly on 66 months since hostilities began.

Government officials in this town in Khost province refer to the cross-border operations simply as “Suicide, Inc”, a sophisticated joint venture between al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

Young Arab, Pakistani and Afghan bombers strapped with increasingly potent bombs aim for softer and softer civilian targets, both Afghan and Western. Just in tiny Khost province alone, which sits opposite the outlaw Pakistani city of Miram Shah, there have been two dozen suicide bomb attacks in the past year. In one of the most recent attacks, a suicide blast killed six civilians and injured 31 people in Khost city.

[snip]

More than 1,000 persons cross legally every day from Pakistan into Khost. Even if the Afghans knew who the bombers were, they would be hard pressed to “catch up to their Japanese motorcycles on our cheap Pakistani imitations”, said Major Bismullah, who travels to and from work with his two heavily armed sons. None of the bombers entering Khost has been captured alive, a credit to their well-crafted detonation devices that allow them to blow themselves up by pressing a button - usually positioned on the arm or wrist.

“The only thing left of them after they are done is two feet and a lot of skin,” complained the major. “If we get a finger, we have to send it to Kabul to analyze the prints.”

[snip]

Governor Jamal also uses billboards, rewards and public rallies in an effort to curtail the bombings. The billboards depict a bomber and warn that it is Islamic sacrilege to kill oneself in such a manner. Suicide bombing as a tactic of war was unheard of in the long Afghan jihad against Soviet aggression, when residents in Khost prided themselves in shooting down helicopters and ambushing foot patrols.

At a recent rally of tribal elders in the soccer stadium, the governor asked the US military to back off from security detail as a way of showing that Afghans are taking the lead in fighting the phenomenon.

Authorities in Pakistan, though, take the opposite tack.

In Waziristan, al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders, mimicking similar martyrdom celebrations in the West Bank and parts of the Arab world, throw lavish parties for the families of the bombers, said Afghan intelligence officials. Article

Things fall apart.

Afghanistan’s national airline could be days from collapse due to corruption, mismanagement and a crippling airplane lease that has drowned the struggling airline in debt.

The government is scrambling to court investors to privatize up to 75 percent of state-owned Ariana Afghan Airlines, and is tallying its assets in case the company is liquidated, an Associated Press investigation has learned.

The collapse of the 52-year old airline, which survived the Taliban regime despite international sanctions, would be a potent symbol of failure by the administration of President Hamid Karzai and would reinforce growing perceptions of corruption and incompetence.

“If Ariana collapses, it will be a very heavy blow for people’s trust in government,” said Ziauddin Zia, deputy commerce minister.

Afghanistan would lose 50 percent of its international flight capacity. Ariana is blacklisted from flying to European Union countries because of safety concerns; it mostly flies to the United Arab Emirates, India, and Turkey. U.S. Embassy and United Nations employees are also banned from flying the airline due to safety concerns.

[snip]

Jawid said he would let 75 percent of Ariana be privatized if an outside investor wanted to take over the company. He said he planned to meet with executives from Dubai-based Emirates airline next week. Other investors are said to have expressed interest but no firm offers have been made.

Jawid is also contemplating another proposal. He plans to ask U.S. Ambassador Ronald Neumann next week if the U.S. could help with the Boeing contracts in exchange for the value of the planes bombed by the U.S. military during the invasion in 2001.

The U.S. Embassy said it wouldn’t comment until it saw the specifics of any such request. Article

Noted FYI:

The Royal Air Force Regiment has relaxed the restriction on the growing of beards for its men in preparation for their deployment to Afghanistan.

Beards are considered to be a sign of status in the country and the air force hopes the move will boost relations.

Growing a beard is an unusual order for UK servicemen as they have been traditionally expected to be clean cut.

[snip]

Royal Marines have also been sporting beards during tours in Afghanistan.

Commanding Officer Squadron Leader Tony Brown said growing a beard was contrary to RAF regulations, but the wing asked permission from higher up the chain of command.

[snip]

Corporal Toby Box, 27, from London, said the gunners were told three weeks ago to try and grow a beard.

A parade was then held and the commanding officer selected 14 with the best growth.

He said: “We’ve been told that the Afghans pay attention to someone with a beard.” Article

Doings here.

A new twist on playing the terror card?

Musharraf, photographed on the front page of the newspaper in white civvies gesticulating to the veiled woman who remained unnamed, denied his government was behind the disappearance of hundreds of citizens and said they were in the custody of “jihadi” groups.

“The government is not involved. We don’t indulge in such activities,” Musharraf told the rally, adding that young men were being brainwashed and trained to be suicide bombers, which was against Islam.

Linking the missing people issue to terrorism, Musharraf said extremism was “a real threat” to Pakistani society and the development of the country. “No society with the menace of extremism can progress. If we fail to deal with this issue, the progress will halt,” said Musharraf. He also added that the reference against the chief justice was a judicial issue and should not be politicised.

The issue of missing people has become an emotional topic in Pakistan. The Supreme Court, hearing a batch of petitions from families of those who are “missing,” has been told that there are 199 such cases.

The families, led by homemaker Amina Masood Janjua, have alleged that their men have been picked up for interrogation and are being held illegally by various intelligence agencies.

This issue has become embarrassing for the Musharraf regime. Human rights organisations abroad have raised this issue and family members joined by civil liberties activists have been demonstrating outside the presidential palace and the Army Headquarters. Article

Editorial du jour:

Across Pakistan, in law offices, in the media, among the opposition parties and other sections of civil society, the feeling is growing that President Pervez Musharraf will have to quit sooner rather than later. After eight years of military rule, it appears people have had enough.

In the rapidly unfolding crisis Musharraf is a lame duck. He is unable to rein in the influence of the Taliban in Pakistan or guide the country toward a more democratic future.

[snip]

The legal convolutions about Chaudhry’s dismissal boil down to one simple fact: He was not considered sufficiently reliable to deliver pleasing legal judgments in a year when Musharraf is seeking to extend his presidency by five more years, remain as army chief and hold what would undoubtedly be rigged general elections.

Musharraf’s desire to replace Chaudhry with a more pliable judge has backfired.… Article

Summary here.

An Egyptian writer sees a “timebomb.”

Shorter version: Presumption of innocence and the golden thread of the rule of law are kaput.

Why does Secretary Gates hate America?

There is so much intrinsically, morally, ethically, legally and institutionally repugnant and flat out wrong with the part of the statement with emphasis added here as to make every signer of the Declaration of Independence spin at warp speed in his grave.

Congress and the Bush administration should work together to allow the U.S. to permanently imprison some of the more dangerous Guantanamo Bay detainees elsewhere so the facility can be closed, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said.

Gates said the challenge is figuring out what to do with hard-core detainees who have “made very clear they will come back and attack this country.”

He said it may require a new law to “address the concerns about some of these people who really need to be incarcerated forever, but that doesn’t get them involved in a judicial system where there is the potential of them being released,” Gates told the House Defense Appropriations subcommittee. Article

The woebegone G. Walker administration swung wide the door to the sealed dungeon, so no one should be surprised when like-minded throngs waltz right in.

Russian law enforcement agencies have tortured three former Guantanamo inmates and subjected them and four others to continual harassment and abuse, a US-based rights group said in a report on Thursday.

[snip]

he interior ministry declined to comment on the accusations. The Federal Security Service declined immediate comment.

Allison Gill, Moscow director for the rights group, said three of seven men who were released from the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay in 2004, have been severely beaten and tortured. All have suffered from detention and other forms of hounding by the authorities, especially on the part of the interior ministry and the Federal Security Service, the KGB’s main successor agency, she said.

“They have all been subjected to serious harassment,” she said. The report also said four have been forced into hiding.

One of the former detainees, Rasul Kudayev, has been held in custody in the North Caucasus city of Nalchik on charges of participating in the October 2005 attack by hundreds of militants on police and other government buildings. Kudayev’s lawyers and relatives say he was severely beaten while in custody to extract confessions and a regional court has ordered prosecutors to probe those allegations.

“They tortured him in all ways, the beat him day and night in the course of one month,” Kudayev’s mother Fatima Tekayeva told said in a phone interview. “I saw traces of the beatings on his body with my own eyes.”

Two other former inmates, Ravil Gumarov and Timur Ishmuratov, were sentenced to 13 and 11 years, respectively, in 2006 for blowing up a natural gas pipeline after having been acquitted in a prior trial.

Human Rights Watch said the trial was unfair and that the two men were beaten in custody until they confessed. Gumarov was deprived of sleep for about one week and kept in a small cage, his hands handcuffed over his head, the group said.

[snip]

The United States has said it does not systematically track what happens to detainees once they leave Guantanamo, but has said it seeks assurances that detainees will be treated humanely by their home countries. Article

Though said in an entirely different context, Sen. Pat Leahy’s comment made today is absolutely relevant here as well: “justice does not serve at the pleasure of the president.” (Source)

A British resident is to be released from Guantánamo Bay after nearly five years, the Foreign Office announced today.

Bisher al-Rawi, an Iraqi national, has been held at the US base in Cuba since 2002.

[snip]

Mr al-Rawi’s MP in Kingston and Surbiton, Liberal Democrat Ed Davey, welcomed the news.

“I am relieved that after nearly five years in prison without charge or trial my constituent is now being released from Guantánamo Bay.

“Everything I’ve learnt from his family, his lawyers, UK government officials, journalists and even the US authorities, tells me Bisher al-Rawi is not, and has never been, a threat to national or international security.

“His case should be a lesson to us all that when you ignore natural justice, injustice follows.” Article