Summaries here and here and here.

A group of demonstrators burnt tires in front of a gas station in Kut, Wassit province, in protest against the fuel crisis that has gripped the city for over 10 days, a government source said on Saturday.

A number of demonstrators, mainly drivers of gas-fueled vehicles, gathered in front of a gas station on the highway linking Kut and Baghdad, burnt tires and blocked all roads leading to the province, a source from Wassit’s Oil Protection Force (OPF), who spoke on condition of anonymity, told the independent news agency Voices of Iraq (VOI). Article

So how’s that sovereignty going?

Iraq’s Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki on Saturday criticized the U.S. military operation in Baghdad’s Shiite bastion of Sadr City, hours after the U.S. military killed 26 suspected militants in the capital’s eastern neighborhood.

Maliki also ordered the Iraqi special forces not to take part in any military operation without prior approval from Iraqi military command.

In a statement, Maliki said that his government “vehemently rejects any military operation by the Multi-National Forces in any Iraqi province or city without prior approval of the command of the Iraqi military forces or coordination with the command.” Article

Chaos mapped:

The following is a translation of one such email making the rounds among residents of Baghdad and on Iraqi Web forums. The sarcastic email, which was written in Iraqi slang, attempts to classify the districts of Baghdad based on their level of danger. According to the author, the safest neighborhoods are the ones where the odds of staying alive are 50%:

The situation in different areas of Baghdad in regard to takfiri gangs of the new age: Al-Qaeda, the Mahdi Army, and their spiritual leaders – the forces of liberation. fall into four different categories: safe, relatively safe, dangerous, and relatively dangerous. They are classified as follows:

• A safe area: where the probability of you staying alive is 50%.
• A relatively safe: where the probability of you staying alive is 40%.
• A relatively dangerous area: where the probability of you staying alive is 30%.
• A dangerous area: where the probability of you staying alive is 20 to 10%. Source

Oil happenings — rushing to get the ink dry before any movement on the draft law?

Iraq’s Kurdish regional government plans to invite foreign bids on 40 new oil blocks in anticipation that a new national oil law will be agreed upon soon.

In a statement posted on the Kurdish authority’s website on Friday, it detailed plans for investor conferences in Erbil, London and possibly Houston to discuss the tendering process.

[snip]

Kurdish officials last month reached an agreement with the central government in Baghdad over the fair sharing of oil revenues from the country’s oil fields, a major plank of a long-awaited new hydro-carbon law.

[snip]

Important areas remained to be thrashed out, including annexes in the draft that Kurds say are unconstitutional because they wrest oilfields from regional governments and place them under a new national state oil company. Article

Contours of chaos:

The deteriorating security situation and absence of law and order has allowed sexual slavery to grow in Iraq, with traffickers able to sell victims without fear of punishment.

According to the US State Department’s Trafficking in Persons Report, issued in June, Iraqi women and children are forced into prostitution and trafficked inside Iraq and abroad, to countries like Syria, Jordan, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey and Iran.

In the volatile northwestern city of Mosul, near the Syrian border, girls and young women from poor and illiterate families are particularly vulnerable to sexual exploitation. Many of those hired as domestic servants end up becoming sex slaves.

[snip]

Victims of sexual slavery in Iraq have little support from the police or the courts. Iraqi law only criminalises the sexual exploitation of children.

Many women are tricked into sex slavery in Iraq with the promise of a new life in the Gulf.

[snip]

The state department report noted that the Iraqi government did not prosecute any trafficking cases this year, nor did it offer protection for victims or make efforts to prevent or document trafficking. It also said efforts needed to be made to “curb the complicity of public officials in the trafficking of Iraqi women”. Article

Keeping up with the charged:

Two American soldiers have been charged with premeditated murder and planting weapons on dead Iraqis, the United States military said Saturday.

The soldiers, Staff Sgt. Michael A. Hensley and Specialist Jorge G. Sandoval Jr., were detained after fellow soldiers reported they had been involved in the deaths of three Iraqis near Iskandariya, a stronghold of the Sunni Arab insurgency south of Baghdad, in separate events between April and June this year.

[snip]

…American military officials said Sergeant Hensley, 27, from Candler, N.C., faces three charges of premeditated murder, obstruction of justice and wrongfully placing weapons with the remains of deceased Iraqis. Specialist Sandoval, 20, faces one charge of premeditated murder and one of wrongfully placing a weapon on one of the three Iraqis killed.

Both were serving with the First Battalion, 501st Infantry, of the 25th Infantry Division, which has its headquarters at Fort Richardson, Alaska. Specialist Sandoval was picked up while at home on a two-week leave in Laredo, Tex., the military said. Charges were filed Thursday, and both men are in confinement in Kuwait.

The military said in a statement that an investigation was under way. Article

Summary here and here.

Afghan officials launched an inquiry Saturday following reports that as many as 120 civilians and Taliban fighters were killed in a coalition airstrike following an ambush on Afghan and US forces in the country’s south.

The airstrike took place Friday night in Gerishk district of southern Helmand province after an attack began when militants blew up two of coalition vehicles.

Haji Dur Alishah, mayor of Gerishk district, who has been appointed by provincial authorities as the head of a team to investigate the incident, said: ‘We can confirm that 30 civilians including women and children have been killed in the air bombardment.’

Alishah insisted that the figure was preliminary and said an exact number would be announced once the investigation was over. He could not however give any exact death toll for the Islamist extremist Taliban.

Haji Noor Ali, a landlord in Gerishk district told dpa that over 30 civilians including women and children were killed in the airstrike, and that the people planned to take the dead bodies to provincial authorities to prove their claims. Article

And the hits just keep on comin’.

President Gen. Pervez Musharraf received another blow from his critics [Saturday] when Chief Election Commissioner Qazi Muhammad Farooq called Musharraf’s active support of his favorite political parties as “inappropriate.”

The official made his comment while hearing a petition from a Jamaat-e-Islami delegation comprising Liaquat Baluch, Fareed Piracha and Mian Aslam.

The men criticized the Pakistani leader for making speeches in favor of the ruling Pakistan Muslim League. They also accused Musharraf of rigging local elections.

Baluch asked the commissioner to announce a proper code of conduct for elections. Farooq said he cannot do that and directed the petitioners to take the matter to the country’s highest court.

“We will definitely move the Supreme Court,” Baluch told Arab News. “It is our constitutional responsibility to bring the unconstitutional activities of President Musharraf to the notice of the election commissioner.”

Meanwhile, an Interior Ministry document has warned Musharraf that without “swift and decisive action” the Taleban will soon spread across all of Pakistan. Article

Summary here and here.

Thumbnails of the 9 men at Guantanamo Bay who were once Taliban prisoners

Noted FYI:

Google, the world’s biggest search engine, is being sued by a London businessman in a landmark legal action that could hold the US-based company liable for the publication of inaccurate, malicious or damaging material on the internet.

The case, the first of its kind in this country that seeks to make search engines responsible for the content of the internet - could trigger severe restrictions on the free flow of information on the web.

…internet experts warned that if the action was successful it would mean Google could be held liable for the content of 11.5 billion web pages.

[snip]

The allegations are believed to have originated in America, where it is much more difficult to succeed in a libel claim.

US judges have ruled that search engines and other third party internet service and product providers are immune from defamation lawsuits. But in Britain, similar legal protection is conditional on the company not having notice of the complaint. And in Britain that area of the law is yet to be fully tested.

[snip]

A successful defamation ruling against a search engine such as Google would have dramatic consequences for thousands of similar organisations or internet product providers which refine, channel and forward information. The reason that has not already happened is that the Defamation Act 1996 offers a defence to an internet product or service provider where it can claim it is unaware of defamatory or potentially defamatory material it is hosting or material arising from a search result. This protection is supported by the Electronic Commerce (EC) Directive, 2002. But the Defamation Act stipulates that once the company has been put on notice about a complaint it must take action to remove the material or block access. Article

In Canada, devouring a bit more civility in the name of the illusion of security. Not addressed is if it is even a reciprocal arrangement.

The federal government plans to give an unspecified number of American police agents carte blanche to carry guns in Canada. It insists that in the post-9/11 world it is just being sensible. It is not.

Few things are more crucial to a nation’s sovereignty than its control over legalized violence. It is quite often lawful for the police to shoot you. It is almost never lawful for you to shoot the police. We accept that arrangement only because those who have been given this remarkable life and death authority are in some sense “ours” – they are responsible to governments that we elect.

Ottawa’s plan would dramatically change this relationship. It would introduce a whole new array of armed peace officers into this country that are answerable to a foreign power.

Stephen Harper’s government, which quietly published these proposed regulatory changes in its Canada Gazette last weekend, suggests the move is designed primarily to accommodate armed air marshals who routinely fly back and forth across the border. But it also says the arrangement would apply to other situations, including “various cross-border enforcement initiatives between Canada and the United States.”

This is bureaucratese for open-ended. It means the new law could apply to just about any U.S. agency – from the FBI to Homeland Security to Buffalo police.

Presumably, foreign agents would be allowed not just to carry weapons but to use them. Otherwise what would be the point?

[snip]

Until the ’90s, no foreign peace officer was allowed to enter Canada armed – a rule that particularly irked U.S. secret service agents assigned to protect their president during official visits. That rule was relaxed in 1995 specifically to let foreign leaders bring in armed bodyguards. However, these bodyguards – and anyone else who wants to bring a gun in or out of Canada – must apply for one-time permits.

For armed air marshals who make regular cross-border runs, this can be a bureaucratic process. But it seems to work. And it surely can’t be more onerous than any of the other security provisions imposed on air travellers.

So why loosen the rules? The government offers no coherent reason – except to say that in some instances peace officers cross the border several times a day. This may be true. But unless these unspecified agents are planning to police someone else’s country, they could simply leave their guns at home.

And that is the rub. Since 9/11, the U.S. has already expanded its security and police presence in Canada. The FBI has opened new offices here. The public inquiry into the imprisonment and torture of Maher Arar revealed that agents from the FBI and other unnamed U.S. agencies routinely took part in RCMP meetings dealing with his case. Undercover U.S. agents monitored the Six Nations standoff at Caledonia. Their presence was exposed publicly only after native protestors hijacked their car.

But so far, none of these foreign agents has been given broad legal authority to arrest, detain or shoot anyone in Canada – which is why they are not allowed to carry weapons here. That privilege is reserved for Canadian peace officers answerable to Canadians. Now, Ottawa plans to erode this important distinction. Article

Cool:

Scientists in Spain were…celebrating the discovery of a tooth from a distant human ancestor more than one million years old - the oldest human fossil found in western Europe.

The tooth, a pre-molar, was discovered on Wednesday at the Atapuerca site in Spain’s Burgos province, where caves containing evidence of prehistoric human occupation have been found.

[snip]

…Researchers believe the tooth came from an individual aged 20 to 25 and are working to confirm thespecies. They are confident it is at least 1.2 million years old because of the age of the rock in which it was found. Article

Not quite so cool:

Whisky prices will have to rise at more than three times the rate of inflation to meet growing demand from China, a senior industry executive has warned.

Demand for whisky has nearly doubled in the past year and supplies have been reduced to such an extent that price rises of 10% or more a year are on the cards.

Ken Grier, head of malts at Edrington, the distiller behind The Macallan and Famous Grouse, is one of a handful of senior figures in the industry who have admitted the days of cheap whisky are over.

[snip]

Whisky consumption in China has risen from 700,000 to 5.7 million litres over the past 10 years, fuelled by a burgeoning middle class, who have acquired a taste for Scotch.

This has been helped by World Trade Organisation rules, including a gradual reduction of the import tariff on spirits from 65% to 10%.

Last year total sales in China hit £58.2m, an increase of 27% since 2005. Article

Summaries here and here and here and here.

The Imam of al-Kufa mosque said on Friday that Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr decided to cancel his call to visit the city of Samarra scheduled for next weekend.

During the Friday sermon in al-Kufa mosque, Sheikh Assad al-Naseri said that “Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr issued an order to cancel our march to Samarra after the government decided to abandon protection for the visitors.”

During the sermon which was attended by thousands of al-Sadr’s followers, the imam also said, “If the government is no longer able to protect citizens it has to step aside.” Article

East, west, south, north — chaos abides.

Hundreds of Qaeda-linked fighters drove into the streets of the northern city of Mosul, brandishing their weapons and shouting Islamic slogans.

The parade, early this week, was a show of force that the group did not fear the presence of the lightly armed and terror-stricken Iraqi police officers and paid little attention to U.S. marines camped outside the city.

Mosul has turned into one of the most violent cities in Iraq with the Qaeda fighters imposing their strict interpretation of Islamic jurisdiction by force.

The city is being emptied of its once thriving Christian community following the murder of two priests and several deacons.

Many churches, whose spires dot the city’s skyline, are deserted. Other minorities like the Shebeks, who are Shiites, and Yazidis, are also being targeted.

Qaeda’s influence in Mosul, which many see as the country’s second largest after Baghdad, has grown tremendously since the start of the U.S. military campaign to subdue Baghdad more than four months ago. Article

Coupled with reports from Basra of a near-total breakdown of civil control, sadly unsurprising.

A crude oil pipeline taking fuel from Alexandria and Mueilha (60 kilometers north of Hella) was blown up by unknown gunmen Friday, police captain Abul Hareth Al-Maamouri said.

[snip]

The targeted pipeline takes crude oil from oil fields in the south to a power generation station in Massib and to another power station south of Baghdad… Article

Short version: paralysis. Should al-Maliki try to tout “approval” of the draft oil law from what will be a skeleton cabinet, expect immediate ramifications and repercussions.

Iraq’s main Sunni Arab bloc said on Friday it was suspending its participation in cabinet because of legal steps being taken against one of its ministers, deepening the sectarian gulf between the country’s politicians.

The Sunni Accordance Front has six cabinet posts and the move is a blow to Shi’ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki at a time when he is under U.S. pressure to push through laws aimed at reconciling majority Shi’ites and minority Sunni Arabs.

The bloc also suspended its participation in parliament a week ago over the ousting of speaker Mahmoud al-Mashhadani, one of its members. The latest move effectively removes Sunni Arabs from the cabinet and parliament, leaving Shi’ites and Kurds.

“We have suspended our membership in the cabinet until the government puts an end to procedures being taken against Culture Minister Asaad Kamal Hashemi,” the head of the bloc, Adnan al-Dulaimi, told Reuters by telephone from Amman.

“We have told our six ministers not to attend cabinet meetings until the government halts these legal steps.” Article

Possibly related: Is the U.S. shielding and/or holding al-Hashemi?

Any way it is sliced: C-i-v-i-l w-a-r.

American officials were surprised Monday when an explosion in the lobby of Baghdad’s Mansour Hotel killed six Sunni Muslim sheiks whom the U.S. considered top allies.

The hotel’s tower is visible to most officials who work in the heavily fortified Green Zone, and U.S. officials had talked regularly with the sheiks and given them money. But the officials had no idea that the sheiks were planning to talk with their Shiite Muslim counterparts in the hotel’s lobby, though clearly someone else did.

One U.S. military officer based in the Green Zone characterized the American reaction as “Huh?”

“No one here knew they were getting together until it happened,” said the officer, who asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of the topic.

In the end, the sheiks were operating on their own, and therein lies the risk in the U.S. strategy of working with Sunni tribal leaders.

[snip]

Specialists in Iraqi tribes caution that tribal loyalty extends only to the tribe itself. Once tribal leaders think that the U.S. no longer is serving their interests, they’ll turn, the experts warn. Moreover, many Shiites who’ve joined the Iraqi military and security forces continue to moonlight for their sectarian militias.

“We make the assumption they are our ally,” said Judith Yaphe, an Iraq expert at the National Defense University in Washington. “But they are independent; we cannot direct them. They are reaching out because they want us to arm them.”

[snip]

There are roughly 150 tribes in Iraq. Each protects its members from outsiders. Tribal leaders are expected to settle local disputes. In Iraq’s rural areas and smaller towns, tribes play key roles in nearly everything.

Historically, Iraq’s tribes have wielded the most power when the central government is weakest.

After the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Saddam Hussein reached out to tribal leaders in areas where his hold on power was in jeopardy. He armed and funded them, telling tribal leaders they could enact their own laws as long as it didn’t affect him, Yaphe said. Article

Quasi-related, a look at one factional attempt to sew a new quilt of patches from the Green Zone government.

…sentiments [relating to or predicting a break-up of the state] are being challenged by a nascent bloc of Iraqi nationalists who, against all odds, are working to put together a pan-Iraqi coalition that would topple the US-backed government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. Maliki’s ruling alliance includes separatist Kurdish warlords and Iranian-backed Shiite fundamentalists, both of whom want to carve out semi or wholly independent statelets. Although it has not yet jelled, Maliki’s opposition–which includes Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds, as well as Christians, Turkmen and others–is within striking distance of creating a functioning parliamentary majority.

More important, outside Parliament the nationalists represent an overwhelming majority of rank-and-file Iraqis. Among the Sunnis, who have fifty-five seats in the 275-member Parliament, there is broad support for maintaining Iraq’s territorial integrity not only among its deputies but throughout the armed Iraqi resistance, a diverse group that includes Baathists, Sunni tribal leaders, former military officers and the Association of Muslim Scholars, a Sunni religious organization that claims to be the political arm of the resistance.

Among the Shiites, most Iraqi observers believe that if new elections were held, the big winners would be Muqtada al-Sadr’s party, which controls much of eastern Baghdad and wields great power in the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala, and the Fadhila party, a quasi-Sadrist party with great strength in Iraq’s south, particularly Basra. The big losers would be the ruling Dawa party, which has little or no remaining support, and the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), an Iranian-backed paramilitary party that now calls itself the Supreme Islamic Council of Iraq (SICI).

Add to those forces the dwindling but still significant influence of secular nonsectarian Iraqis, whose titular leader is Iyad Allawi. Allawi’s party, which has friends in the Arab Gulf and good connections to the CIA and MI-6, controls twenty-five deputies in Parliament. Its strength is ebbing as Iraq’s middle class flees the civil war at an accelerating rate. But Allawi, who also has strong ties to Iraq’s military officer class, could be a power broker in the emerging nationalist coalition.

Almost unnoticed in the American media, these nationalist forces have been groping toward an accommodation that could oust Maliki. In fits and starts, and under the worst possible conditions–literally under fire–they are looking for a way out of the ethnic and sectarian crisis. It is an effort that has been under way for nearly a year. But they are doing so not only without American support but with determined opposition from the Bush Administration.

[snip]

Why isn’t Washington backing the nationalists, despite its growing frustration with Maliki’s inability to meet the so-called “benchmarks” of political reconciliation that the United States wants? Because what holds together the emerging nationalist coalition, more than anything else, is militant opposition to the US occupation of Iraq.

Over the past two months, the nationalists in Parliament have won two landmark votes: the first in support of a bill calling for the United States to set a timetable for withdrawal and the second in a vote demanding that the Iraqi government submit any plan to extend the US occupation past 2007 to Parliament. Most (but not all) of the support for those votes came from deputies associated with the Sunnis (fifty-five seats), Sadr (thirty seats), Fadhila (thirty seats) and Allawi (twenty-five seats). Theoretically, those four parties control 140 seats in Parliament, a bare majority–and one that could be bolstered by independent Shiite and even some dissident Dawa party members, according to Iraqi sources.

[snip]

The most active Iraqi politician working to assemble the nationalist bloc in Iraq is Saleh Mutlaq, the former Baathist and leader of the National Dialogue Front. “We have been engaged in constructive talks to create this powerful bloc to save Iraq,” he said earlier this month. “Maliki’s government should go because it has brought untold suffering to the Iraqi people.” Mutlaq and others, including Allawi, have spoken about a “National Salvation Government” that could replace Maliki.

Of course, achieving that is a tall order. There is enormous suspicion among many of the potential players in the opposition. And with each passing day, as more Iraqis are killed, as sectarian atrocities pile up and as attitudes harden and fears grow, it becomes more difficult to bridge those divides. On top of all that, opposition leaders have to deal with the heavy-handed influence of the United States in all aspects of Iraqi civil affairs. According to US sources, Washington is using its vast influence in Iraq to prevent the emergence of a nationalist opposition and to preserve Maliki’s regime. Article

On the other hand, allegiances and alliances are fluid, fleeting and in flux throughout.

Stay tuned; you can’t tell the players without a scorecard, as the old saw goes.

Iraqi and Arab papers are abuzz with the news of the formation of a new political coalition designed to prop up al-Maliki’s government.

Media outlets have termed the new coalition “the alliance of the moderates,” and it mainly consists from the Shi’a Da’wa and al-Hakeem’s SIIC parties, in addition to the two mainstream Kurdish parties. In other terms, the political groups that remain supportive of al-Maliki within the parliament.

The new coalition is also seeking to gain the Sunni Islamic Party on its side, and – potentially- several deputies from ‘Allawi’s bloc, in order to maintain the image of a “non-sectarian” project, as some of the coalition’s engineers are referring to their new political front.

The “coalition of the moderates” intends to establish a smaller cabinet headed by al-Maliki. By distancing parties that – formally – make part of the current Maliki cabinet, but are actively trying to undermine it, the “moderates” hope to create a more harmonious, stable governmental alliance.

[snip]

Mathematically speaking, the new coalition represents a retrenchment of the Maliki majority, with the distancing of the Sadrist bloc and most of the Sunni “Accord” coalition. The new coalition, if it materializes, will also further exclude Sunni participation from the government, even if the Islamic Party joins the front. But it will also be the natural result of the failure of the anti-Maliki mosaic to form a viable coalition to challenge the current government. Article

Still tit-for-tat rhetoric, but should Barzani preemptively pull back peshmerga forces from Baghdad or elsewhere, watch out.

Masoud Barzani, the head of the autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq, warned on Friday of a “catastrophe” if Turkey attacked his territory and vowed that Kurds would defend themselves.

Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul was quoted as saying on Friday that Turkey has prepared detailed plans for a cross-border operation into Iraq against Kurdish rebels and will act if U.S. or Iraqi forces fail to tackle them.

“We will defend ourselves against any state that attacks us,” Barzani said in an interview with Germany’s Deutsche Welle public radio. Article

It is sadly noted that the April-May-June period now marks the first consecutive three-month span during which U.S. deaths in Iraq reached 100 or above in each month.

As the catalysis creeps:

[U.S.] Embassy Baghdad reports Ambassador Crocker’s office window was damaged by one IDF round, sending shrapnel into his office. The Ambassador was in the room at the time of the attack, but there were no injuries Source

Afghanistan summary here and here.

Pakistan summary here and here.

Pro-Taliban militants at a Pakistani border town blew up 13 oil tankers supplying fuel for international troops in Afghanistan, officials said [Friday]. Article

One instance after another serves to demonstrate a serious disconnect between command and the deployed; each instance another brick in the wall.

U.S. soldiers killed four civilian members of the same family during a raid on Friday in Afghanistan’s eastern province of Nangarhar, an Afghan rights body said.

The soldiers also arrested 15 civilians during the pre-dawn raid in Khogiani district which lies in the foothills of the provincial capital Jalalabad, Lal Gul, the head of Afghanistan’s Human Rights Group said.

Those killed in the raid were an 85-year-old man, Mohammada Jan, two of his sons and a grandson, Gul told Reuters.

“The American soldiers blew up the gate of Mohammada Jan’s house and then martyred him along with his three family members,” Gul said.

“From there they went to several other houses, broke into them and arrested 15 civilians,” he added.

A provincial spokesman confirmed Gul’s accounts.

A U.S. military official confirmed the operation, but said coalition soldiers killed three militants after they came under fire and arrested 16 more militants.

They said there were no civilian casualties. Article

Related:

Ferocious attacks on civilians, be these by ill-trained troops or brave warriors of the skies who bomb and rocket houses occupied by women and children, are serving to hasten the spread of distrust and loathing. The opposition, whether ‘Taliban’, double-dealing warlords, drug thugs, or ordinary tribesmen who hate all foreigners, is by its nature disorganized and incapable of mounting major attacks. But it doesn’t need to. The war in Afghanistan is being lost because the foreign occupiers are killing Afghan civilians. Article

Summary here.

Mogadishu taxi-driver Yusuf Ali starts work three hours later than usual after he has heard the latest security updates on the radio.

“I don’t use a road twice,” he says. I call my two wives often just to tell them I’m alive. It’s that bad.”

Every time she leaves for work, Nadifa Abdi says she reminds her children what to do with her financial affairs if she doesn’t come back.

“Uncertainty and fear hang in the air,” says Abdi, who sells the stimulant khat leaf. “I leave a will whenever I go to work because I’m not sure I will return home alive.”

An upsurge of violence in the Somali capital — where Islamist insurgents are attacking Somali government targets and their Ethiopian military allies — has compelled war-sick Mogadishu residents to alter their daily habits.

Civilians, rather than combatants, have borne the brunt of unceasing explosions and deadly gunfights that are bearing an ever-growing grim resemblance to scenes in Baghdad.

[snip]

Many of the impoverished residents would like to flee the senseless killings — and 400,000 have since February, according to the United Nations — but do not have the means to leave.

Terrified inhabitants say the endless roadside bombs and suicide attacks were unknown before the government took over the city after it ousted an Islamist movement at the end of 2006 with the help of Ethiopian troops.

“Roadside bombs and suicide attacks are a new phenomenon,” says khat vendor Abdi. “Even tyre bursts force us to duck for cover as troops open fire randomly.”

[snip]

In north Mogadishu — where full-scale battles took place in March and April — deserted, bullet-poked houses stand with missing roofs destroyed by rockets and heavy artillery.

Shopkeepers say food prices have shot up since goods that used to arrive via Mogadishu port are now brought through the Gulf of Aden port of Bosasso, in northwest Somalia, as ships skirt insecurity in the capital and pirates off its coast.

Fuel prices have also doubled due to shortages.

“I have lost my enthusiasm for business in Mogadishu,” Dini Shukri, a 38-year-old entrepreneur, told Reuters.

In another echo of Iraq, he said he feared working for the authorities in case that made him a target.

“I wanted to seek contracts from the government, but decided not to because anybody who works with the administration is killed. I avoid military bases since they are like a time-bomb.”

[snip]

“Drivers are the most vulnerable since we go out on roads hidden with bombs,” taxi-driver Ali added.

“A colleague is still in shock after realising he carried a would-be suicide bomber. Life is unbearable.” Article

This is a biggie. The woebegone G. Walker administration’s latest pet pal golden boy trumpeted ally apparently sees the handwriting on the wall (it spells “quagmire”) and extends a stiff middle finger.

Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi said Thursday that his government “made a wrong political calculation” when it intervened in Somalia, where Ethiopian troops are bogged down in a fight against a growing insurgency.

Addressing Ethiopia’s Parliament, Meles said his government incorrectly assumed that breaking up the Islamic movement that took control of most of Somalia in June 2006 would subdue the country. He also said he wrongly believed that Somali clan leaders would live up to unspecified “promises.”

“We made these wrong assumptions,” Meles said on a day when a roadside bomb killed two Ethiopian soldiers in Mogadishu, the Somali capital, and two aid workers were shot dead in northern Somalia.

Opposition members of Parliament have accused Meles of making the same mistake in Somalia that critics say the United States made in Iraq: launching a military intervention without having a political plan.

[snip]

Many Ethiopian intellectuals and political leaders opposed the intervention because they said it would inevitably create the conditions for the sort of Somalia-based terrorist attacks that Meles intended to contain by invading the country. Article

Tenets of freedom remain metaphorically in the ICU, but even with the addition of Roberts and Alito, courts recoil from being unilaterally and imperiously deemed inconsequential, irelevant or unnecessary.

The U.S. Supreme Court said on Friday it would hear appeals by Guantanamo prisoners on their right to challenge their indefinite confinement, a test of President George W. Bush’s powers in the war on terrorism.

The high court in April had denied the same appeals by the prisoners. In a surprise and highly unusual reversal, the justices said they would hear arguments and decide the two cases during the court’s term that starts in October.

At issue is an anti-terrorism law that Bush pushed through Congress last year taking away the right of the foreign terrorist suspects at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba to have a judicial review of their detention.

The Supreme Court’s decision to hear the cases was a setback for the Bush administration, which had urged the justices to turn down the appeals.

[snip]

Three of the nine Supreme Court justices in April dissented from the decision to reject the appeals by the Guantanamo prisoners, and two others left open the possibility of hearing the appeals later.

After the appeals had been rejected in April, lawyers for the prisoners asked the court to reconsider, and the court on Friday agreed. The last time the court granted such a request after an initial denial was in 1968, a court source said.

The court gave no explanation in its one-paragraph order for the reversal.

[snip]

Navy Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift, the military lawyer who represents Guantanamo prisoner Salim Ahmed Hamdan of Yemen, said the upcoming Supreme Court decision could be key.

“It’s almost absolutely a recognition that the problems aren’t getting better in Guantanamo with time,” Swift said.

[snip]

Air Force Col. Moe Davis, the military’s chief prosecutor for the Guantanamo tribunals, said the Supreme Court’s about-face was disappointing.

“This constant uncertainty and meddling certainly takes a toll on people,” he said. “It would be nice to have some certainty for a change.” Article

More:

The order also said that new briefs will be sought, after the D.C. Circuit rules in pending cases on how judicial review is to work for detainees under the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005. The cases to be reheard by the Supreme Court are Boumediene v. Bush (06-1195) and Al Odah v. U.S. (06-1196). In those cases, the D.C. Circuit ruled on Feb. 20 that the Military Commissions Act of 2006 had stripped detainees of their rights to bring habeas challenges to their confinement. That is the ruling that the Supreme Court left intact in April, but now will move forward to review.

Under the Court’s Rules and precedents, it would have taken the votes of five Justices to grant rehearing, compared with the requirement of four votes to initially grant an appeal. When the Court denied review in April, only three Justices voted to hear the cases. But two of the other six, Justices John Paul Stevens and Anthony M. Kennedy, indicated they wanted the detainees to first attempt to get legal relief in the D.C. Circuit. Under the Detainee Treatment Act, the Circuit Court has the authority to provide limited review of military decisions to continue holding Guantanamo prisoners as “enemy combatants.”

Friday’s order was an indication that those two Justices had decided that the Court needed to change its approach, and so provided the votes needed to grant rehearing.

[snip]

Under the Court’s rules, a rehearing is granted only if there has been a change in “intervening circumstances of a substantial or controlling effect” or if counsel can cite “substantial grounds not previously presented.”

The new order did not state what changes had come about since the denial in April. The detainees’ lawyers, in their rehearing petition, had said that the unfolding of the review process in the D.C. Circuit Court would soon provide them with an argument for rehearing, since the process would be shown to be inadequate. More recently, the detainees’ lawyers had told the Court that information from inside the Pentagon detainee-review process confirmed their claim that the process was a “sham.” Article

A second helping of cookies for the judge:

A military judge at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, refused on Friday to reconsider an early June ruling that a military commission does not have the authority to hold a war crimes trial of a young Canadian detainee, Omar Ahmed Khadr. Turning aside a plea by military prosecutors, Judge Peter E. Brownback III, an Army colonel, said again that the military panel that reviewed Khadr’s status had not found him to be an unlawful enemy combatant, so a commission trial cannot be held and war crimes charges had to be dismissed. This new ruling set the stage for a Pentagon appeal — if some uncertainty over the availability of a proper appeals court is sorted out.

[snip]

The judge’s earlier order dismissing charges against Khadr was the second of two such rulings by a judge at Guantanamo on the same day. In a separate proceeding, another judge dismissed charges against Salim Ahmed Hamdan, for the same reasons. Prosecutors had also asked that judge to reconsider, but there was no word from that judge on Friday.

Judge Brownback, in a 10-page order in the Khadr case…said the plea for reconsideration to did not offer any change in the facts or law since his June 4 order finding no jurisdiction over Khadr’s case. But, the order went on, because of the prosecution request, he was clarifying the rationale for his earlier decision. While refusing to reconsider, the judge went ahead to dispose of each of the prosecutors’ arguments against the dismissal “in the interest of conserving judicial and other resources” should the case be appealed either to the new Court of Military Commission Review or the D.C. Circuit Court. Article

Noted FYI (absent though is mention of alleged plans to fund and open Kafka-Marts prisons overseas and franchise out the dreadful Gitmo brand and its inhabitants:

A group of 145 members of the House of Representatives sent a letter to President Bush on Friday urging him to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and move the detainees there to military prisons in the United States. Article

Turning treatment topsy-turvy: Psychologists do not take the Hippocratic oath. Perhaps that needs to be changed. Now.

Two Spokane psychologists are the focus of a congressional inquiry into the use of harsh techniques to interrogate terrorist suspects in Guantanamo, Iraq, Afghanistan and other secret military and CIA detention centers.

In an article published last week, the online magazine Salon.com identified psychologists James E. Mitchell and John Bruce Jessen as key developers of the interrogation program – which the magazine said was linked to the CIA and likely violated the Geneva Conventions against the torture and mistreatment of prisoners.

The interrogation methods, according to a recently declassified Pentagon report reviewed by The Spokesman-Review, are “reverse engineering” of techniques taught in the military’s SERE program, set up to train U.S. special forces and flight crews in the principles of Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape.

[snip]

The Spokane psychologists’ names surfaced after Sen. Carl Levin, D-Michigan, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told the Pentagon in May not to destroy any documents mentioning them or their consulting firm, Mitchell Jessen & Associates.

The Department of Defense responded by sending a “document preservation” order on May 15 to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other top Pentagon officials, according to Salon.com.

Levin’s Senate investigation will cast a new spotlight on the psychologists’ work and controversial human rights abuses in the interrogation program.

“It’s an issue he’s been interested in for quite awhile,” said Dave Pollock, a spokesman for Levin in Washington, D.C. The armed services committee isn’t ready to release additional details about the scope of its investigation, Pollock told the newspaper this week.

[snip]

The SERE program, established after the Korean War, studied the psychological reaction of humans to warfare and captivity and is a “storehouse of knowledge” about coercive methods of interrogation, according to a July 2005 article by reporter Jane Mayer of The New Yorker.

Mayer’s article, titled “The Experiment,” described how the military began to use SERE psychologists for advice on how to question suspected terrorists after the September 11 attacks.

The New Yorker article was among the first to describe in detail how teams of “non-treating” psychiatrists and psychologists, called Behavioral Science Consultation Teams or “biscuits” in military language, were used at Guantanamo, the detention site established in January 2002 to hold “suspected enemy combatants” in the war on terror. Those teams are trained in SERE methods, the article said. One source told the New Yorker that the teams “took good knowledge and used it in a bad way.”

Many of the coercive techniques fit the international description of torture, according to a 2006 report by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights.

The recently declassified Pentagon report, considered a military secret last year but made public in May by the Inspector General of the Defense Department, confirms that the SERE techniques were “reverse engineered” in 2002 for use against suspected al-Qaeda loyalists in Guantanamo, Iraq, Afghanistan and other CIA “black,” or secret, detention centers. Article

That death squads (in all but name) were considered an imperative is bad enough (such as the Task Force 88 story mentioned here June 14). The pendulum Rummy, et al. pinned at the far edge of its travel may be swinging back from banana republicanism.

Almost six years after the worst attack ever on U.S. soil, special operations commanders believe that simply killing terrorists will not win a war against an ideologically motivated enemy.

That view is reflected in a series of transitions in special operations leadership posts. New senior officers are expected to give greater weight to an indirect approach to warfare, a slow and disciplined process that calls for supporting groups or nations willing to back U.S. interests.

Former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld turned special operations forces into a “giant killing machine,” said Douglas Macgregor, a former Army colonel and frequent critic of the Defense Department.

Now, with Rumsfeld gone and Navy Vice Adm. Eric Olson about to take control of U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM), Macgregor anticipates a return to the fundamentals drilled into Army Green Berets, Navy SEALs and other specially trained troops.

“The emphasis will be on, ‘If you have to kill someone, then for God’s sakes, kill the right people,”‘ Macgregor said. “In most cases, you’re not going to have to kill people and that’s the great virtue of special operations. That’s been lost over the last several years.” Article

A somewhat related overview of the inherent necrotics of hegemonism and the affects of the dead weight of overstuffed and exorbitant militarism squatting on the chest of the body politic.

From one who knows whereof he speaks, John Dean:

Vice President Dick Cheney has regularly claimed that he is above the law, but until recently he has not offered any explanation of why.

In fact, it is becoming increasingly difficult to find a law that Cheney believes does apply to him, whether that law be major and minor.…

[snip]

Washington insiders have long understood that Cheney’s power stems from his knowledge of the way the White House and the Office of the President operate. This is knowledge he acquired as President Ford’s Chief of Staff. With Bush’s consent, much of the paper flow of the White House which heads up the chain of command toward the President goes through Cheney’s office. In addition, Cheney’s staff reaches down into the executive bureaucracy to shape the debate before it reaches the White House.

Those with whom I have spoken have serious doubt that Bush and the White House staff really knows what Cheney is doing, why he is doing it, or how he is doing it. From the outset of this administration, Cheney has been instrumental in placing people loyal to him throughout the Executive Branch. This is not to say that Bush is not “the decider,” for he is, but by shaping the debate and controlling the paper flow, Cheney decides what the decider will decide.

It has long been apparent that Cheney’s genius is that he lets George W. Bush get out of bed every morning actually believing he is the President. In fact, his presidency is run by the President of the Senate, for Cheney is its true center of gravity. That fact has become more apparent with every passing year of this presidency, and anyone who thinks otherwise has truly “misunderestimated” our nominal president and his vice president. Article

Analysis du jour:

…the term “Islamofascism” was not coined for nothing. It invites us to see a big part of the Islamic world as a natural extension of Nazism. Saddam Hussein, who was hardly an Islamist, and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is, are often described as natural successors to Adolf Hitler. And European weakness, not to mention the “treason” of its liberal scribes, paving the way to an Islamist conquest of Europe (”Eurabia”) is seen as a ghastly echo of the appeasement of the Nazi threat.

Revolutionary Islamism is undoubtedly dangerous and bloody. Yet analogies with the Third Reich, although highly effective as a way to denounce people with whose views one disagrees, are usually false. No Islamist armies are about to march into Europe - indeed, most victims of Revolutionary Islamism live in the Middle East, not in Europe - and Ahmadinejad, his nasty rhetoric notwithstanding, does not have a fraction of Hitler’s power.

[snip]

If it were really true that the fundamental existence of our democratic Western world were about to be destroyed by an Islamist revolution, it would only make sense to seek protection in the full force of the U.S. informal empire. But if one sees our current problems in less apocalyptic terms, then another kind of trahison des clercs (treason of the intellectuals) comes into view: the blind cheering-on of a sometimes foolish military power embarked on unnecessary wars that cost more lives than they were intended to save. Article

The endgame of the woebegone G. Walker administration’s “my way or the highway” claptrap: a traffic-choked highway. Recovering what has been squandered and lost will take years, if not decades.

Global opinion of the US continues to plummet thanks to the foreign policies of President George W. Bush, while the image of other major powers such as Russia and China are also taking a battering, according to the world’s most comprehensive assessment of global opinion.

[snip]

In a press conference launching the report, former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright and co-chair of Pew Research Centre said the survey indicated a breakdown in the international system and the growth of “nihilism” among the global citizenry.

“This is not an optimistic report,” Dr Albright said.

“It isn’t just the US being criticised, it’s the Russians and the Chinese.”

She said the numbers indicated the world was lacking “significant leadership.

Unease over US foreign policy has grown among its major allies, the survey says. While 25 of the 47 countries polled expressed a positive opinion of the US, the survey says the ratings have continued to fall since 2002, with the US’s image declining in most parts of the world.

It has dropped from 75 per cent favourable in Britain in 2002 to 51 per cent now; from 60per cent to 30 per cent in Germany; and from 64 per cent to 56 per cent in Mexico.

“The US image remains abysmal in most Muslim countries and in the Middle East and Asia,” the Pew report says.

[snip]

Pew head Andrew Kohut said: “Even though there is a mixed view of the United States around the world, there is increasing disapproval of the principal cornerstones of our foreign policy.” Article

SCOTUS observed — Stanford Law Professor Pam Karlan:

“…if this is the birth of a new constitutional era, all I say is what an ugly baby. Source

Keep in mind that there is a far from remote possibility of another court appointment within the timeframe of G. Walker’s remaining months, and an almost 100% certainty of one, two or even three vacancies during the following adminsitration.

Noted FYI:

KBR Inc. and its former corporate parent Halliburton Co. have been sued by four women claiming they suffered sexual harassment and, in two cases rape, by co-workers while working for KBR in Iraq, the Houston Chronicle reported on its Website Friday.

The women have filed separate lawsuits in federal courts in Texas, Florida and Oklahoma saying they faced repeated sexual harassment despite complaining about it to their supervisors, the Chronicle reported. Article

The detritus of the rushed-through India agreement:

Indians still bristle with anger at the crude gunboat diplomacy conducted by former U.S. President Richard Nixon when he sent then frontline aircraft carrier USS Enterprise to the Bay of Bengal in 1971 when India’s victory in a war with Pakistan seemed certain.

India refused to be intimidated. Although the event passed without incident, it left a deep wound on the Indian psyche that took many years of Washington diplomacy to heal.

Since then, many military ships and submarines, including nuclear-powered ones, from Britain, France, the U.S. and other countries have visited India as part of routine activity to promote goodwill and share experience.

But the proposed “friendship visit” next week of the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Nimitz to the southern Indian port of Chennai has reopened old wounds. It has also rekindled a debate on nuclear safety with allies of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh over the granting of permission for the American military ship to berth.

[snip]

The Indian defense ministry has clarified that Nimitz will not be carrying nuclear weapons. Nor is it actually going to berth at Chennai. The ship is expected to be in the southern port July 1-5.

“USS Nimitz is a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier and is not known to be carrying weapons with nuclear warheads. It is not going to enter the on-shore/alongside berths in Chennai port but will be anchored in water some distance away from the land,” the ministry said in a statement.

[snip]

The Nimitz issue comes even as the two countries are holding protracted negotiations on the civil nuclear deal signed by President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Singh in 2005 during the Indian leader’s visit to Washington.

Talks on the issue have been sputtering although negotiators have met four times since last year to work through the issues.

India’s latest tough stand on the issue came when S. Jaishankar, New Delhi’s negotiator on the issue, along with Foreign Secretary Shivshankar Menon, told a blue-ribboned audience in Washington this week that India will not compromise on the twin issues of enrichment and reprocessing of spent U.S. fuel and that India was seeking country-specific exemptions.

[snip]

Washington sees India as a rising Asian superpower and the deal was meant to build a strategic relationship between the two countries and end India’s global nuclear isolation, allowing other nations to sell their nuclear fuel and equipment to New Delhi.

It was approved by the U.S. Congress last December but the two nations have failed so far to conclude a bilateral pact due to India’s refusal to accept new terms in the deal that were included at the insistence of U.S. lawmakers.

The deal has been at the center of criticism from the start with critics in both countries lamenting that their governments were giving away too much to the other side.

According to Indian Foreign Secretary Menon, the two sides have managed “to come to an understanding of most of the issues.”

The sticking points are the issues of reprocessing spent nuclear fuel and the cessation of cooperation in the event that India conducts another nuclear test. India conducted nuclear tests in 1974 and 1998.

India and the U.S. also signed a nuclear fuel separation plan agreement in March 2006 which guarantees adequate fuel — including reserves — for India’s reactors.

Billed as the “Tarapur effect,” New Delhi is extremely cautious on these two issues, having been let down by the Americans before. Article

On its face, a policy with a backbone rooted in rationality and extant legal process. That is a Good Thing.

The European Union announced Friday that it had revised the way it compiles its “terrorist list” after the main Iranian opposition group in exile launched a legal challenge to be taken off.

The EU “has conducted a complete review of the persons and entities subject to the EU’s autonomous regime on specific measures directed against certain persons and entities with a view to combatting terrorism,” a statement said.

A total of more than 60 people and groups figure on the blacklist, including the armed Basque separatist group ETA, Sri Lanka’s Tamil Tigers and the Islamist group Hamas.

Those on it are subject to an asset and funding freeze.

The register was drawn up to respect a UN Security Council resolution adopted in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks which demanded that countries crack down on “terror” financing.

It is usually revised every six months but this had not happened, until Friday, since before a European court annulled on December 12 the listing of the People’s Mujahedeen of Iran (PMOI) in May 2002.

The Court of First Instance, Europe’s second-highest tribunal, ruled that the EU had not respected the group’s right to a fair hearing. Article

Keeping up with the kidnappings in Nigeria’s oil region:

Kidnappers Friday released the three-year-old son of a lawmaker who had been abducted in southern Nigeria’s Rivers State, after receiving 13 million naira (102,000 dollars) ransom, officials said.

[snip]

The boy, son of Linda Somiari, a woman member of the Rivers State assembly, was snatched from his school in Port Harcourt, the state capital on Tuesday.

Port Harcourt is the capital of Nigeria’s oil-rich but volatile Niger Delta where there has been an upsurge in kidnappings of local and foreign workers since the beginning of 2006. Article

Let’s see: 4 strikes. “Change of character?” Can you say hogwash? We knew that you could.

Associate Professor Yusuf Erçin Sönmez has been released from his most recent arrest, this time for transplanting from a Palestinian female donor to an Israeli patient — the fourth time that he has been seized due to illegal organ trafficking.

Following the arrest he and his team were released at their first hearing after almost two months in prison. The court released Sönmez, who had been charged with developing an illegal organization and organ trafficking, and his team based on a probable change in character. three doctors, a nurse and the director of the hospital had been taken into custody following a raid on a hospital in the Kadiköy district of I.stanbul by the teams of the Istanbul Provincial Health Directorate. Article

More power to them: No knock on the distribution program, just — literally — more power to them.

A Nigerian school has received a gift of 300 laptops — one per pupil — but has no electricity to power them up, the official News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reported Friday. Article

Witches in government service? O-o-o-kay.

John Alexander, a former Green Beret, earned a reputation in the 1990s as a vocal advocate of nonlethal weapons research. He was also a champion of the government’s now defunct “Remote Viewing” program, which, until its termination in 1995, sought to use psychics in the service of national security.…

Danger Room: So, tell me about the witches [who were brought into the Remote Viewing program].

John Alexander: It was a group of women. They were not doing remote viewing. They were doing palmistry, crystal ball kinds of stuff. This was very different from the guys who were the remote viewers, who were following very strict protocols.

DR: Then who were the witches?

JA: They were more like storefront psychics.

DR: Like you have all over in Washington, D.C.?

JA: Yeah.

DR: What year are we talking about?

JA: Must have been the 1990s. I’m not sure exactly what year, by 1995, [the remote viewing program] was dead.

DR: Were the witches successful?

JA: Not terribly. They lacked discipline and protocols. Article

Adding just a tad more stress to an already stressful job.

Always nicest to end with some good news, isn’t it? Congratulations to Mr. Adebari, and to Ireland.

A Nigerian who fled to Ireland as an asylum-seeker has just become the country’s first black mayor, in what is seen as a landmark in multicultural relations.

Rotimi Adebari, who was elected Mayor of Portlaoise Town Council, received a standing ovation amid scenes of celebration. He declared: “This is not just a country of a thousand welcomes, but a country of a thousand equal opportunities.”

Elected by six votes to three, those councillors who voted against him apologised, citing party tradition. One of them said to him: “You seem to radiate happiness and joy. I’d love to know what you’re on. We need a bottle of it over here.” Article

GOOD BUY

And good-bye.

---

TO SIR, WITH LOVE GLOVE

As good a want ad as any which India might submit.

---

STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND

Two terms one doesn’t expect to find in the same story: Inca and Oslo.

---

IS THAT ALL THERE IS?

Don’t know about you, but ye old scribe, while no stranger to eating, would tend to think thrice about tackling something billed as a “grease mountain.”

Summaries here and here and here and here.

Five Iraqi civilians were killed by a British chopper in the southern Iraqi city of Basra, a police source said on Thursday.

“A British helicopter opened fire against a civilian vehicle on Wednesday night in al-Hussein neighborhood in western Basra, killing the five civilians onboard,” the source, who declined to be named, told the independent news agency Voices of Iraq (VOI).

“The attack came after a shootout that flared up in the neighborhood between two tribes, al-Sawari and al-Shuwaylat,” the source added.

No word was immediately available from the British army on the incident. Article

Shorter version: The surgery was a success but the patient died on the table.

“The law-imposing security plan in Baghdad has seen dazzling success that citizens have not noticed because of the violent operations that target them,” [U.S. Gen.] Brooks explained…. Article

Prudence, bluntness, a pre-incident fig leaf — or an amalgam or all three?

The Iraqi government urged majority Shiites on Thursday to ignore a call from radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr to march to a northern town where a Shiite shrine was recently bombed.

Sadr called Shiites to march to Samarra next week to protest the June 13 bombing of the shrine of Al-Askari in the mainly Sunni Muslim town.

But in a frank warning from Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s office, the government warned that the road to Samarra was full of “terrorists.” Article

The uniforms may differ, but the tactics track damn close.

One recent roasting afternoon, members of the 3-7 went out in a convoy to find out what they could about the recent toppling of a tower near the village of Khifa. Looking for a village leader, they could find only his teenage son.

What, wondered Sgt. 1st Class Robert Flynn of West New York, N.J., did he know about the explosion?

Nothing, the boy said. I was asleep.

“That tower is right by this village,” the sergeant said. “This needs to stop right now (or) we’re going to come in here and it’s not going to be pretty. . . . We’re going to start sending people to jail.” Article

For what, Sgt. Flynn? Threats? On what evidence? As a warning? As blanket punishment?

Kilij-rattling (ref.) notches up again, pre-election.

Turkey has prepared detailed plans for a cross-border operation into Iraq against Kurdish rebels and will act if U.S. or Iraqi forces fail to tackle them, Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul was quoted as saying on Friday.

Ankara has on many occasions threatened to send troops into mainly Kurdish northern Iraq to hunt down thousands of militants from the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) who use the region as a base from which to attack targets inside Turkey.

“The military plans have been worked out in the finest detail. The government knows these plans and agrees with them,” Gul told the Radikal newspaper in an interview.

“If neither the Iraqi government nor the U.S. occupying forces can do this (crush the PKK), we will take our own decision and implement it,” Gul said.

Asked in a separate interview on Friday by CNN Turk television whether parliament may be recalled to authorise a military operation, Gul said: “This is not improbable”. Article

All rational beings can recognize the predicates of the flawed G. Walker policies — oblivious to facts, disdainful of science, dismissive of evidence. Even now, such does not, can not and will not negate those and their damning effect on the very heart of what the woebegone G. Walker administration has (and continues to) unleashed.

On the day before it is due to be shut down, the U.N. unit that found no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq but failed to stop the U.S.-led invasion said on Thursday time had justified its methods and work.

In a voluminous report detailing the history of Iraq’s banned weapons programs and U.N. efforts to dismantle them, it said the episode had shown that on-the-ground inspections were better than intelligence assessments by individual countries.

The report by the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, or UNMOVIC, did not name its targets but several of its conclusions appeared aimed at the United States and Britain, which invaded Iraq in March 2003.

Washington and London said despite UNMOVIC’s inability to find evidence, they were acting in the belief that Iraq was pursuing chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs begun in the 1970s. No such weapons have been found.

“Despite some skepticism from many areas within the international community, in hindsight, it has now become clear that the U.N. inspection system in Iraq was indeed successful to a large degree, in fulfilling its disarmament and monitoring obligations,” said the unit’s 1,160-page summing-up report.

“The UN’s verification experience in Iraq also illustrates that in-country verification, especially on-site inspections, generate more timely and accurate information than other outside sources such as national assessments.”

[snip]

The new report signed by UNMOVIC acting executive chairman Demetrius Perricos said it now seemed that much of what Iraq had said about its weapons in later years had been accurate.

But it said the government of late Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had found itself trying to prove a negative, a situation it had brought on itself by previous years of lying.

“With false and misleading information being supplied by Iraq, particularly during the early years of the inspection process, it became almost impossible for Iraq to provide convincing evidence that would remove doubt that even more evidence remained undisclosed,” it said.

It said that during its brief stay in Iraq, UNMOVIC carried out 731 inspections covering 411 sites, but it implied that U.S. and British anxiety to invade Iraq had hampered its work.

“Had UNMOVIC not been under such a stringent time constraint, the inspections could have been more detailed and thorough and many issues which emerged could have been pursued to a conclusion allowing greater confidence in the inspection process,” it said.

Hans Blix, the Swede who headed UNMOVIC at the time, has been more outspoken.

“The U.S. and the U.K. chose to ignore (our reports) and to base their action upon their intelligence,” Blix said in a 2005 interview. “We didn’t want an invasion; we wanted inspections.” Article

Love that phrase: “shambolic cockup.”

Afghanistan summary here and here.

Pakistan summary here.

Nearly 69 months on: And so it goes.

The Taliban has infiltrated an area of Afghanistan once seen by the United States and NATO as secure, boosting ranks and giving fighters strategic access to Kabul, a U.S. commander said on Thursday.

U.S. Army Col. Jonathan Ives, responsible for operations in five provinces in northeastern Afghanistan, said the Taliban had boosted recruiting in part of Kapisa, about 30 km (19 miles) north of the capital city.

“What we’ve seen is an escalation of force in there from about 50 to 200 — about fourfold — this year,” Ives told reporters by videolink from Bagram Air Base near Kabul.

He said the area had been “somewhat ignored” by coalition and Afghan security forces.

“We thought that it was safe and secure in this province and so we considered it to be a non-threat area and so we didn’t apply or maintain a security force,” Ives said.

“(The Taliban) did fill that vacuum in this case.” Article

Related:

The bodies of four bearded men still hang from two tall poles at a roundabout in Musa Qala District, Helmand Province, in southern Afghanistan. Musa Qala District is controlled by Taliban insurgents.

The four were hanged two days ago allegedly for spying for the Americans and the government of President Hamid Karzai. Only a Taliban decree can bring the decomposed bodies down and allow them to be buried according to Islamic rites.

In both Islamic and international law governing conflicts, dead bodies, even those of armed enemies, should be protected from disrespect, mutilation and pillage.

The Taliban have set up a special tribunal in the territory they control at which judges sentence whomever they deem to be culprits, or against the Taliban, to death, amputation or stoning, a source who cannot be identified for security reasons told IRIN.

In February 2007 Taliban rebels recaptured Musa Qala District, about 165km north of Lashkargah, the capital of Helmand Province, after a roughly five-year interval. It happened after a deal brokered by the then governor of Helmand, Engineer Daud, under which NATO-led British forces had agreed to withdraw from Musa Qala District Centre and local elders promised to keep the Taliban away, proved ineffective.

[snip]

In addition to Musa Qala, Afghan ministers have confirmed that the insurgents now control at least two other districts in Helmand Province and one in Kandahar Province - both of which border on Pakistan. Article

Whether gently sloped or precipitously canted, a spiral is a spiral is a spiral.

In the course of a single week, the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan felt compelled to express concern over a new aspect of the conflict raging in Afghanistan; it is an aspect over which neither of them seems to have much control but which undermines them substantially in the eyes of their own people.

First the President of Afghanistan Hamid Karzai repeated his lament that military operations by foreign forces were causing unacceptable civilian casualties and warned that in future they would somehow be subject to his approval.

Then the Pakistan government had to contend with the fall out of more lethal attacks by Coalition forces inside its territory in Waziristan. For most Pakistanis, it was more a matter of national sovereignty.

[snip]

Anxious to retain political support of the US, the beleaguered government of Pakistan settled for an inane statement that by all counts has done it considerable harm at a time when a general election to the national and provincial assemblies is looming large on the horizon.

As noted by more and more objective analysts in the West, the mounting number of innocent victims is widening the Afghan conflict and investing it with greater savagery somewhat on the Iraqi pattern.

In Pakistan, a government that has been ardently aligned with the US since 2001 faces not only a crisis of credibility about its role in the tribal belt along the Afghan border but also more recruits for suicide attacks within Pakistan to avenge the killings by missiles fired from across it.

Even more damaging is the allegation that it has failed to safeguard national sovereignty and the sanctity of its frontiers.

[snip]

Recent statements from Nato sources that they are in for the long haul and that the present situation which most Afghans recognise as alien occupation would last decades enable the Taliban to present themselves as the hard core of a national freedom struggle.

In Afghan semantics, freedom struggle is indistinguishable from jihad. Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf has lost hundreds of men and much popularity trying to block the call for this jihad at an international border that is seen as a notional aberration in an otherwise seamless unity of tribes in the borderlands. Article

Old: Supporting freedom and democratic movements.

New: Franchising tyranny.

With the George W Bush administration under pressure to close the US detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Pakistan is readying to step in to help its ally in the “war on the terror”.

[snip]

Asia Times Online has learned that the Bush administration is considering a plan under which inmates would be returned to special facilities in their countries of origin, where they would be treated on a case-by-case basis. There are an estimated 65 or so Pakistanis in Guantanamo, including Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the mastermind of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the US.

These special jails would be administered jointly by American and local security staff. At the same time, the new jails in allied countries would also house new suspects netted in the “war on terror”.

A top Pakistani official told Asia Times Online that a special facility has already been built in the city of Faisalabad, adjacent to Faisalabad Central Prison. Another such facility is under construction in Multan and is expected to be completed within the next few months. Work on a detention center adjacent to Adyala Jail in Rawalpindi, the capital Islamabad’s twin city, has just started.

These facilities are being funded by the US and will fall under the jurisdiction of Pakistan’s Ministry of Interior. Special staff will be deputed to the centers to work in conjunction with US officials.

The Asia Times Online contact said similar facilities will be established in Afghanistan, Egypt and other countries sympathetic to the “war on terror”.…

[snip]

A special cell comprising various Pakistani intelligence agencies will reinvestigate the cases of the returnees from Guantanamo and, after coordination with US officials, will decide their fate.

[snip]

Washington is reluctant to abandon Guantanamo without arranging alternatives where suspects can be interrogated without the interruptions of “normal” legal procedures.…

[snip]

In theory, the facilities being built in Pakistan will not be classified as “secret” and will be subject to the laws of the land, although they will be used only for suspects in the “war on terror”. Actual interrogation could be carried out elsewhere. Article

Kicking the can down the road (and an announcement in direct contradiction of U.S. State department forecasts made earlier this month).

The Pakistani government has ruled out calling a snap election to lift itself out of a political crisis brought on by President Pervez Musharraf’s move to oust the country’s top judge, a senior official told Reuters.

The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said on Thursday a general election would take place after the national and provincial assemblies complete their term in mid-November.

Musharraf wants the present parliament to re-elect him as president before it is dissolved, while he is still army chief, the official said. Article

Summary here and here.

A heart-rending story of the displaced and demoralized living victims of chaos.

Going back to the gun-infested capital, Mogadishu is not an option for the poor family. According to the United Nations, more than 400,000 IDPs who fled Mogadishu in March and April have not yet returned like Ahado in fear of the daily bomb explosions and gun battles in the city where insecurity is still compelling larger number of residents to escape.

Omar: I am not intending to go back to Mogadishu and even if I do, I do not know where to start. Our refugee compound has been burnt and ruined to rubbles when several mortars and missiles hit it. Even after we fled, I have been told that 20 people I knew were killed in the camp. Here life is hard but we can at least survive. Article

Analysis du jour:

…For external consumption, Somalia’s new Transitional Federal Government (TFG) describes the Somali conflict as a struggle against international terrorism; in reality, much of the fighting is due to historic animosity between some of Somalia’s largest clans. In Mogadishu, the Darod-dominated TFG is engaged in a running battle against the Hawiye clan, which were the largest backers of the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), the Islamist government expelled from power by last December’s Ethiopian invasion.

[snip]

Not all TFG officials agree on the al-Qaeda threat. On June 6, Mogadishu’s mayor, former warlord Mohamed Dheere, declared that “the Hawiye are now to blame for the bomb explosions in Mogadishu” (Shabelle Media Network, June 6). On the same day, TFG troops arrested the chairman of the Hawiye Committee, Haji ‘Abdi Iman Umar, during a series of raids and arrests. Haji ‘Abdi has denied any involvement of the Hawiye elders in the attacks (Radio HornAfrik, June 7). Bombings and assassinations of regional administration heads in Banadir district were attributed to Hawiye activity in a meeting of the regional council on June 3. In the Gedo region in southwest Somalia, local officials recently held talks with Ethiopian officials to refute allegations that al-Qaeda operatives were concentrating there for attacks on Ethiopia (HornAfrik, June 6).

[snip]

…There is always the possibility that Ethiopia may decide the best way to keep a lid on the resistance is to continue occupying Somalia until the Ogaden and its natural resources are secured, but Ethiopian troops targeted daily by roadside bombs and grenade attacks will have little appetite to stay put.

Lately, Zenawi seems to be suggesting that the eradication of terrorism in Somalia is not the objective of the Ethiopian occupation force. “It can be asked whether there exists a city where there are no terrorists,” he explained. “There can be terrorists hiding in other cities, let alone Mogadishu. So it is impossible to confidently say Mogadishu will be 100% free of terrorists. You cannot also be sure about Addis Ababa or New York, let alone Mogadishu…Even now the situation in the city is not that bad” (Ethiopian TV, June 10).

The assassinations and grenade attacks on Ethiopian troops have spread from the capital to Hawiye-dominated Beledweyn in central Somalia. In Somalia, there are many motivations for violence: the southern port of Kismayo is being fought over by TFG troops divided along clan lines; clan fighting in Mudug region erupted over a pool of rainwater during drought conditions; in Baidoa there have been horrific and unclaimed grenade attacks on a bank and a crowded cinema.

[snip]

The U.S. hunt for largely inactive al-Qaeda suspects in Somalia is proceeding at great risk to its reputation in the area. Its open alliance with Ethiopia and support for the Ethiopian occupation force have created an atmosphere of mistrust in fiercely independent Somalia. Despite enormous material and political costs, not one of the three foreign al-Qaeda suspects alleged to be taking refuge in Somalia (and wanted by Washington for their roles in the 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania) has been killed or captured. Article

What’s up.

“May you live in interesting times.”

Indeed.

No one was all that surprised when the Bush administration announced Thursday that it would not cooperate with congressional demands for documents and testimony by prominent former officials that would likely confirm this White House’s reckless disregard for the rule of law.

What was surprising, and encouraging, was the decisiveness with which key players in Congress responded.

After the White House asserted executive privilege in rejecting subpoenas issued by the House and Senate Judiciary committees as part of the ongoing probe of abuses within the Department of Justice, House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers wasted no time expressing his sense that a Contempt of Congress citation is in order.

“The President’s response to our subpoena shows an appalling disregard for the right of the people to know what is going on in their government,” explained Conyers, a Michigan Democrat who is the only Judiciary Committee to have participated in the fight between Congress and the Nixon White House for Watergate-related documents. “At this point, I see only one choice in moving forward, and that is to enforce the rule of law set forth in these subpoenas.”

The best way to enforce the rule of law is by issuing a Contempt of Congress citation. The rules of Congress permit standing committees, such as the House and Senate Judiciary panels, to compel witnesses to produce documents and testimony required to complete inquiries. Committee chairs are permitted to issue subpoenas seeking documents and testimony. And, when the targets of those subpoenas refuse to cooperate, a Contempt of Congress citation — outlining a criminal offense against the legislative branch of the federal government — can be drawn up.

The issuance of a Contempt of Congress citation would provoke the sort of Constitutional showdown that it now appears will be required if this administration is to be held to account for its abuses of power.…

[snip]

The “fear of being commanded to Capitol Hill to testify or having their documents produced to Congress” would prevent presidential advisers from communicating “openly and honestly” with the president,” wrote [White House counsel Fred] Fielding.

Senate Judiciary Committee chair Patrick Leahy suggests, there is another sort of fear in play: the fear of having improper and potentially illegal schemes exposed. Article

Disturb the complacent bubble of delusion, pay the price.

Several good pieces starting to appear as the delving into the muck and horrors of the CIA’s ‘family jewels‘ file release continues.

One such is here and also one from the same site on the race to close the atrocity gap with the U.S.S.R.

Frankly, am speechless. It is beyond comment.

When Shen Wentang, a peasant from central China’s Hebei province, bought a “ghost wife” for his dead father, he asked no questions about where the body had come from - and showed little curiosity about finding this out.

[snip]

All he remembered of the woman later on were the red dress and her age - about 40. Shen’s father, whose wife had walked away years ago, now had a new woman to keep him company in the netherworld. He could rest in peace.

Little did Shen know that the ghost wife - a mentally retarded woman - had been lured to her death by a profit-seeking peasant. The ghost wife and five other women had been murdered by Song Tiantang, from Hebei’s Linzhang county, so he could sell their corpses to be married in the afterlife.

“I only helped them to go to heaven earlier,” Song said when detained by the police in April, according to Chinese press reports. Ironically for a mass murderer, Song’s given name, Tiantang, means “heaven” in Mandarin.

In an interview with Beijing’s Xinjingbao newspaper, he unabashedly described how he always chose his victims from among the mentally retarded or single migrant women.

“They are muddle-headed and never put up too much of a fight,” he said. “No one would make much fuss about deranged women. As for those who come from other places, they would simply disappear, and their relatives back home would not know anything.”

[snip]

Zhao Shu, an expert on China’s folk customs, reckons that the tradition of marrying people in the afterlife is nowadays merely a vestige of the country’s long feudal history, practiced only in a few isolated areas.

But he admits that some families still pay a high price to procure a bride for the deceased. “It is seen as a last comfort for the dead,” he said.

The current resurrection of these feudal customs in Hebei bears an unusually ugly twist.

When Song embarked on his moneymaking scheme, he first sought to dig up and steal dead women’s bodies. But he soon realized that the price of a desiccated corpse was just a fraction of what he could earn for “fresh goods” - women who had died only recently. Then he started to murder women.

Song’s killing spree was exposed by China’s increasingly daring media as yet another unforeseen dark side of the country’s headlong pursuit of economic growth. With millions of rural people left on the fringes of the economic boom, more and more cases of moral degradation have come to light as people are willing to go to any lengths to make money.

[snip]

As in the slavery case, the murders of ghost wives occurred in some of China’s poorest provinces. Song Tiantang hailed from Linzhang county, Hebei province, and scouted neighboring counties for his victims.

An investigation by Southern Weekly uncovered similar cases of women murdered to be sold as brides in marriages in the afterlife in the provinces of Shanxi and neighboring Shaanxi.

Some have speculated that the murders have been prompted by the mounting death toll in China’s mining industry, which has pushed up demand for ghost wives for casualties. In many of the interior provinces where coal is produced in small and unsafe mines, deadly accidents have been happening weekly. China’s official tally of coal miners’ deaths for 2006 stood at 4,746, or an average of 13 each day.

With so many male miners dying prematurely, there is a booming market for ghost wives, one middleman told Xinjingbao. “If the groom has died in a coal-mine accident, my commission for finding a bride is higher,” the man, identified as Wang Zengxi, told the paper. Article

NEW LABELS FOR OLD

Somebody is going to have the distinction of being the last prostitute in Britain.

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BANDS ON THE RUN

Jupiter’s shifting colors dramatically.

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FISH FRACAS

A stomp most dreadful.