Summaries here and here and here.

The Iraqi Central Criminal Court sentenced on Thursday, in absentia, the defense minister of the interim government under Iyad Allawi, Hazem Shaalan, to seven years imprisonment on corruption charges.

[snip]

During Shaalan’s tenure, the defense ministry is alleged to have spent about $1.3 billion on military equipment, most of which was inappropriate, out of date and bought from intermediaries rather than suppliers in contravention of the law. Article

Hearts and minds. (emphasis added)

The soldiers usually stay only a few minutes in each house – as long as it takes to quickly go through each room checking anywhere there may be people or weapons hidden.

But they started out long before dawn and now they’re looking for an overwatch – a house that’s protected but high enough to provide visibility of the street and the surrounding houses.

Selma’s house, with its high walls and rooftop, seems to be it. She has five daughters and a son – two of them are still sleeping.

[snip]

“If you stay here, they will say we were cooperating with the Americans and they will come and attack us,” she says.

[snip]

Selma imagines she has a choice in whether the solders stay and Gaines is prepared for a while to let her believe it.

[snip]

“There’s no police in this neighborhood – no Iraqi national guard. How am I not supposed to be afraid?” Selma asks.

Gaines has heard this before. “They say that because they don’t want me to hang out here. The terrorists know these people don’t really have a choice and we can use whatever house we want and she doesn’t really have a choice either. So really what she needs to do is move in that room for her safety and we will be out as quickly as we can be.”

He tells her the family can leave if they like while they use the house.

[snip]

I wonder aloud how Americans would react if soldiers came into their homes like this and took it over. Article

A reminder of what the U.S. military has sworn to protect and defend: U.S. Constitution, Amendment 3: “No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.”

C-i-v-i-l w-a-r.

Wide-scale clashes broke out on Thursday in al-Aameriya neighborhood in western Baghdad between gunmen believed to be members of al-Ashreen (1920) Revolution Brigades and the Islamic army on the one hand and elements of al-Qaeda on the other, eyewitnesses said.

[snip]

A third eyewitness told VOI by telephone that he can see through his house window scores of bodies in the main street near the police station in al-Aameriya.

“The Iraqi army and police forces have not intervened so far, but U.S. helicopters were seen hovering over the area,” the third eyewitness said.

No word was available from Iraqi police or Multi-National Forces on the clashes. Article

Some more here:

It was not clear how many people had been killed in several days of fighting. Residents gave varying death tolls while the police had no comment. Iraqi security forces rarely venture into the area. Article

Also:

Backed by helicopter gunships, U.S. troops on Thursday joined the two-day battle in the Amariyah district, according to a councilman and other residents of the Sunni district.

[snip]

Lt. Col. Dale C. Kuehl, commander of 1st Battalion, 5th Cavalry Regiment, who is responsible for the Amariyah area of the capital, confirmed the U.S. military’s role in the fighting in the Sunni district. He said the battles raged Wednesday and Thursday but died off at night. Article

Delineating the multi-faceted Rubik’s cube of chaos:

…recent developments could have far-reaching implications, even into the volatile city of Kirkuk in the Kurdish-controlled north, where tensions run high between Arab Shi’ites and Kurds. Kurdish groups are intent on controlling the city and forcing other groups out, so as to control the oil-rich surrounding area to facilitate the creation of an independent Kurdish state.

Dressed in official police uniforms to gain access through a checkpoint to detain Sunni worshippers at a mosque in the area, Mahdi Army members told Kurdish members of the Iraqi Army who were participating in the crackdown in the southwestern areas of Baghdad that they were following orders from the Ministry of Interior.

A member of the local council in the area of Baghdad where the incident took place spoke with Inter Press Service (IPS) at his office on condition of strict anonymity: “The dispute started when the Mahdi Army members raided the Bayaa and Amil area to arrest 14 worshippers at a Sunni mosque while broadcasting a message through loudspeakers that they were conducting the raid by orders from Brigadier-General Nizar, the Kurdish platoon leader.”

The Kurdish unit was placed in the Amil and Bayaa areas of southwest Baghdad in March as part of the security crackdown there led by the US military.

“The detainees were found executed later, so we understood that the force was in fact a death squad working for the Ministry of Interior,” he said. “Brigadier Nizar later revealed that fact to the media, saying the attacking force had an official warrant from the Ministry of Interior and that was why he allowed them to go through his checkpoints.”

Local police believe that the Shi’ite militia, operating out of the Ministry of Interior as they have been for more than two years, also attempted to provoke a fight between the Kurdish unit in Baghdad and the local community in the area they were deployed, which is heavily Sunni.

[snip]

Sources from inside the Kurdish unit involved in the incident, who spoke with IPS on condition of anonymity since they were instructed not to speak with the media, explained that Kurdish soldiers and officers remain angry about the attack on their unit, but they had received strict orders from their command in northern Iraq not to fight back against the Mahdi Army at the moment, but “to deal firmly with any further attacks in the future”.

As a result, tensions are high and the urge to blame someone for the instability in the area has increased.

[snip]

Many analysts in Baghdad believe the US military is attempting to involve the Kurds in the escalating conflict by sending armed groups and death squads of other sects or ethnicities to engage the Kurdish forces in Baghdad in order to drag them into the conflict.

However, the Kurds are reportedly trying not to take sides and to remain neutral in the sectarian conflict, although most of them are Sunnis.

IPS sources in Baghdad believe that bringing the Kurds into Baghdad in itself is the beginning of their participation in the sectarian violence, especially when they are attacked by Shi’ite militias.

Others believe that the “divide and conquer” strategy by the US military and US-backed Iraqi politicians is being implemented across much of Baghdad. Article

Analysis and recap du jour:

The kidnapping of a British financial specialist and four bodyguards on 29 May 2007 would not have been unusual at this juncture in Baghdad except for two aspects.

The first is that this was close to the centre of the city nearly four months into a “surge” in United States forces that was expected to bring a degree of stability.

The second was the ability of the kidnappers to use large numbers of police vehicles to cordon off the streets around the finance ministry and then to walk in past the guards and abduct the five expatriates. This indicates either a remarkable ability of insurgents to acquire official vehicles or that the operation was the work of a renegade police unit most likely linked to a militia.

Each factor gives some indication of the problems facing the US military as it continues its surge, others being the high level of bombings in Baghdad and of American military casualties. On the same day as the abductions, a bus-bomb and car-bomb together killed at least forty people and wounded almost a hundred. That day too, the US military announced that another ten of its soldiers had been killed on 28 May. In addition, over 600 American soldiers were wounded in the three weeks to 22 May, with a majority of them sustaining serious injuries.

[snip]

Although some Washington sources still speak optimistically about the prospects for success with the surge, there have been two major shifts of mood in the past two weeks.… Article

Based on what has transpired over the past four years under her tenure, ye old scribe puts forward the proposition that her job will be to dangle the empire’s woebegone G. Walker administration’s sword of Damocles over the heads of Mailiki, et alia.

US President George W Bush on Thursday named a top aide as his personal envoy to Iraq, a move meant to increase pressure on rival Iraqi factions to reach political reconciliation.

Meghan O’Sullivan, 37, has helped shape US administration policy as Bush’s deputy national security adviser for Iraq and Afghanistan over the past four years. She spent a year in Baghdad with the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority after Saddam Hussein was toppled. Article

Shortages of fuel, lack of electricity, and on-again off-again curfews. Not particularly amenable to 24 hour service, not to mention the obviousness of mounting frustration and anger from those in the queues as well as the opportunistic targets for violence and mayhem such facilities create.

Iraq’s Oil Ministry will open 50 gas stations in Baghdad 24 hours a day as the fuel crisis worsens and the oil industry is unable to keep up with demand.

Iraqis wait for hours in line for gas that has skyrocketed in price since the 2003 invasion. Gas was subsidized, but that subsidy must be drawn down, according to terms of the economic structural adjustment program of the International Monetary Fund.

Issam Jihad, spokesman for the ministry, said the 50 stations would begin operating to ease the long lines at the pump, Al-Sabaah reports. He also said security at the stations would be increased as night falls. Article

Speaking of oil, a labor-based commentary from one out in the field:

President Bush and his administration are putting great pressure on the Iraqi government to approve a new hydrocarbon (oil) law. The U.S. Congress has enacted legislation that includes adoption of the oil law as a benchmark of “progress” in Iraq and condition of continued reconstruction funding. The oil law is being promoted as a means to assure the equitable distribution to all parts of Iraq of the revenues earned from the sale of our oil.

[snip]

President Bush and his administration are putting great pressure on the Iraqi government to approve a new hydrocarbon (oil) law. The U.S. Congress has enacted legislation that includes adoption of the oil law as a benchmark of “progress” in Iraq and condition of continued reconstruction funding. The oil law is being promoted as a means to assure the equitable distribution to all parts of Iraq of the revenues earned from the sale of our oil.

Everyone knows that this oil law does not serve the Iraqi people, and that it serves Bush, his supporters and foreign oil companies at the expense of the Iraqi people who have been wronged and deprived of their right to their oil despite enduring great suffering and sacrifice.

It is common knowledge that the occupation spared neither the old nor the young, and that Iraq is passing through the most difficult of times because all and sundry are hounding it and covet a share of its riches. We see no good reason for linking the passing of this oil law to the withdrawal of the occupation troops from Iraq.

It is important that the Bush administration, the U.S. Congress and the American people understand why Iraq’s oil workers, a majority of its Parliament and most Iraqis oppose this law.

[snip]

What is wrong with the law?

You are being told the law will guarantee equitable distribution of oil revenues to all areas of Iraq. But in a law that has more than 40 articles, there is only one reference to fair distribution: “The government’s revenue, including the oil revenue, must be distributed through the federal budget in a fair and just way in adherence to the constitution.” Fair distribution of oil revenues already exists in our constitution. This law adds nothing to that. There are, however, thousands of words devoted to assuring that foreign oil corporations will be able to secure long-term contracts (up to 30 years) to develop, extract, control and sell what amounts to two-thirds of our country’s oil reserves.

The law requires a royalty payment to the Iraqi government of just 12.5 percent. Does that sound to you like a fair distribution of oil revenues? The law does not require foreign corporations to hire Iraqi workers, to purchase from Iraqi businesses, to transfer technology to Iraqis, to reinvest profits in Iraq, or to submit disputes to resolution through the Iraqi judiciary. It even puts representatives of the oil cartel on the council that will be created to issue contracts to those same corporations.

By voting to make adoption of the oil law a benchmark of Iraqi cooperation, your Congress has become complicit in a raid by the international oil cartel on the national legacy of the Iraqi people and an attack on the sovereignty of our country. Congress is now a partner with President Bush in a scheme to recolonize our country. That is something we are pledged to prevent. Prior to the nationalization of our oil in 1972, foreign corporations controlled most of our oil resources and enriched themselves while the Iraqi people suffered. We will not allow our country to return to that condition.

Your nation’s mothers and fathers have lost more than 3,400 precious lives of their sons and daughters in Iraq. Our nation’s mothers and fathers have lost many hundreds of thousands of our children’s precious lives. Millions of Iraqis have been forced from their homes; many had to flee the country. Unemployment in many areas is 70 percent. Our hospitals have been destroyed and many doctors have fled. Our schools, power plants, sanitation system and many homes have been destroyed.

The general public in Iraq is totally convinced that Bush wants to rush the promulgation of the oil law so as to be able to leave Iraq with a victory of sorts, because his project is failing every day and the occupation is collapsing in all parts of Iraq.

We wish to see you take a true stance for the children of Iraq and for your own, and we always say that history will remember those who advance peace over war. We are not your enemy. We mean you no harm. Allow us to resolve our differences free of outside interference. Please leave our country so that we can heal our wounds, as you must heal yours. Both our peoples have suffered enough. Let there be peace for us all. Article

Gates shuffles along quiescently and toes the White House’s latest line.

US Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Thursday the United States is looking to a long-term military presence in Iraq under a mutually agreed arrangement similar to that it has long had with South Korea.

[snip]

“The Korea model is one, the security relationship we have with Japan is another,” he said. Article

Is the horrendous story of the virtual slavery, abysmal labor practices and despicable treatment of those tasked with building G. Walker’s grandiose monument on the Tigris at last percolating upwards?

Repeating (again) what was last repeated here (and many times prior to that) on Nov. 1, 2006:

Have mentioned this before, but it still generates seething disgust. Rather than re-post snippets, just go read (or re-read) the tales of the virtual slavery, labor abuse and casual fungibility inflicted on the workers coralled into building the half-billion dollar (in reality, probaby much more) G. Walker’s palace embassy compound in Baghdad. #1 — #2