Summaries here and here and here.

The latest massacre of Iraqi children came as 21 Shia market workers were ambushed, bound and shot dead north of the capital.

The victims came from the Baghdad market visited the previous day by John McCain, the US presidential candidate, who said that an American security plan in the capital was starting to show signs of progress. Article

Shorter version: Just keep shoveling out bilions after billions, but don’t dare even to ask about the hole it’s being tossed into.

Despite repeated requests from a House committee chairman and government investigators, the Pentagon has failed to hand over its official assessments of the readiness of US-trained Iraqi security units to take over key functions from the US military.

Representative Ike Skelton of Missouri, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, has demanded that the Pentagon provide the assessments, which critique Iraqi performance on the battlefield, according to a previously unreleased letter. The Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, also has requested the reports as part of a separate inquiry. But the Defense Department has balked on both requests so far, without giving any official explanation.

The field reports, which are known as Transition Readiness Assessments, are compiled every month by US advisers embedded with Iraqi units.…

[snip]

“Congress must have this information in order to carry out its constitutional oversight responsibilities,” Skelton said in the March 15 letter. “It is essential that the Congress is provided with the unit-level [transition readiness assessments] as soon as possible.”

The letter marked the second time this year the committee has formally asked the Pentagon for the reports. The first time was back in January, according to officials.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon has not met the GAO’s request for the reports, according to the officials. The vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Edmund P. Giambastiani , said in a Feb. 21 letter to Skelton that the department was “aiming to reach a consensus with GAO” for the information.

[snip]

…Even the whereabouts of all of the security forces that have completed training is unclear, according to Olga Oliker , a senior policy analyst at the government-funded Rand Corporation.

“No one knows how many Iraqi security personnel there are today,” she told the oversight panel on Thursday. For example, she added in an interview, “it is unknown how many have died or how many have deserted.”

The detailed field assessments drafted every month by US advisers, however, would provide a much more accurate view, experts and lawmakers believe. Article

Catapulting the propaganda of fear: The always present unacknowledged burden is proof is provenance — whether direct provisioning, through intermediaries (charges on at least two occasions have been drawn up in Italy), Iraqi complicity or obtained from the open and bustling arms bazaar that is the Middle East.

The United States has growing evidence of Tehran’s involvement in destabilizing Iraq, with more sophisticated Iranian weapons being found, a senior State Department official said on Tuesday.

Jim Jeffrey, principal deputy assistant secretary of State for Near East Affairs, said Iranian interference in Iraq had intensified in recent months. Tehran denies this.

“It’s growing, it’s quite frightening. We are getting much more accurate indirect fire and we see this as both Iranian munitions and possibly Iranian training,” Jeffrey said in an interview with Reuters. [Horrible thing to have to put so bluntly, but it is also a case of practice, practice, practice — which Mr. Jeffrey either discounts or is silent about. — voxd]

He said over the last couple of months many more recently manufactured Iranian rockets and other “modern munitions” had found their way into Iraq. He did not provide figures. Article

Yes, he’s plugging his upcoming play, but right on the money that the festering wound made of Fallujah oozes no less today.

In the face of repeated independent verification, US forces have now acknowledged the use of chemical weapons, and yet there remains no sustained international outcry and no official response (let alone condemnation) from any government or the United Nations. The US has overthrown a regime while supposedly searching for phantom weapons of mass destruction, only to use such weapons on the newly “liberated” civilian population. The cold hypocrisy of such actions is outweighed only by its extravagant viciousness.

Seventy articles of the Geneva conventions were breached in the two separate months of siege warfare. Despite calls to abolish the conventions by the past and present Conservative leaders Michael Howard and David Cameron among others, they remain an essential bulwark against the bullying tactics of the powerful, and a poignant index of the increasing impunity of the neo-colonial project. Their ethos is that the innocent, the weak, the defeated and the injured be afforded all the protection possible in times of conflict. The ethos of the US government is that the weak and innocent are a hindrance to the acquisition of power and, occasionally, an opportunity for the expansion of profit. Article

Editorial du jour:

…To the chagrin of the occupation forces, the insurgency was restarted even in places that were supposed to be ‘completely pacified.’ Tal Afar is one of the towns where intensive anti-insurgency operations were undertaken on two occasions since the March 2003 invasion; it was declared violence-free both times. The occupation troops who have reason to think that they are trapped in a pointless ‘whack-a-mole’ game could have been hardly surprised when the resistance revived in Baghdad as well.

Aside from the increase in troop levels, almost no other part of the re-worked strategy fell into place. While three Iraqi brigades were to have participated in the operations, most of the personnel deployed were apparently drawn not from the newly raised army but from the Peshmerga militias of the Kurdish parties. The regime headed by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has also not met the political benchmarks set for it.… Article