Summaries here and here and here. Also this.

Oil-related news:

The U.S. State Department says an oil law implemented under Saddam Hussein is good enough for Iraq’s national government to sign oil deals, though it would prefer a new national law — mired in controversy and far from approved — to be used instead.

The new position is a shift for the U.S. government, or at least a nuance in its stance, which has pressed hard for a new hydrocarbons legal regime and condemned deals signed between a regional government and private firms — especially when it’s an American company. Article

Contours of chaos (emphasis added).

Insecurity in Iraq is most strikingly illustrated by the number of people fleeing their homes. The United Nations estimates that, since July, the number has risen by 60,000 every month. The best estimate is that around 16 percent of Iraq’s population, or one in six Iraqis, no longer live in their homes.

[snip]

According to the U.N., 69 percent of those displaced since February 2006 come from Baghdad, which demonstrates the extent of the “sectarianization” of the capital. Thus, one reason for the “success” claimed by supporters of the military surge may well be that sectarian cleansing in Baghdad has been hugely effective and is now nearly complete. Article

The hobnailed boots of Ares.

The construction of a large police barracks close to the Great Mosque of Samarra and its famed spiral minaret is imperilling another of Iraq’s precious historical sites, Unesco and senior archaeologists have warned.

Work on the building and a training centre for 1,500 Iraqi policemen is continuing in Samarra, about 60 miles north of Baghdad, despite the addition this summer of the ninth-century remains of the capital of the Abbasid dynasty to Unesco’s list of endangered world heritage sites.

There are fears that the police compound will prove an irresistible target for insurgents, and that the construction and operation of the barracks will damage the Samarra Archaeological City, one of the country’s largest and most valuable historical areas, the Art Newspaper reported in its November issue.

Unesco officials said the dire security situation in Samarra had prevented them from taking any measures to secure and protect the site. Neither Unesco’s office for Iraq, which is currently based in Amman, nor Iraq’s board of state antiquities and heritage, had been consulted about the location of the new police building.

There were similar protests after reports of damage to ancient sites by US forces in Babylon and Nineveh, and international experts say the future looks bleak for Iraq’s ancient heritage. Conservation projects in Iraq have stalled and many archaeologists have left the country.

Samarra’s department of antiquities was looted and burned in May.

Nearly 50,000 packs of playing cards meant to help US troops avoid unnecessary damage to ancient sites and curb the illegal trade of stolen artefacts are to be shipped to troops in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as training sites in the United States. Each card displays an artefact or site and gives a tip on how to avoid damaging historic treasures. Article

Summary here and here.

#1:

About 100 members of the official defence forces of Iraq’s Kurdish region were headed Wednesday for a camp near the border city of Dahuk, 420 kilometres northwest of Baghdad.

One of them, who would only identify himself as Capt. Ziad, said his troops had been mobilized from Irbil, capital of the autonomous Kurdish region. “We want to prevent the conflict in Turkey from coming across the border,” he said. Article

#2:

In Baghdad Wednesday, Iraq’s Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari met with his Iranian counterpart Manouchehr Mottaki.…

[snip]

Zebari said the measures include more checkpoints along Iraq’s northern border to keep fuel, food and other supplies from reaching the Kurdish rebels. Zebari, a Kurd, also said Iraq would restrict the movement of PKK fighters to prevent them from reaching populated towns and areas inside Turkey. Article

Some more info regarding the Iranian leg of the triangle here.

#3:

The U.S. acknowledged Wednesday it has undertaken military moves against Kurdish rebels in Iraq after asserting for weeks that their strikes in Turkey were a diplomatic matter.

Pentagon officials are now starting to say publicly that the U.S. is flying manned spy planes over the border area, providing Turkey with more intelligence information, and that there are standing orders for American forces to capture rebels they find. Article

#4:

There has been increased speculation that if Iraq, the Iraqi Kurds and the US fail to meet Turkish demands over the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) terrorists, Ankara will be left with only one choice: staging an operation into northern Iraq some time in mid-November as the Turkish government has come under increased public pressure, said an Ankara-based Western military analyst.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan will fly to Washington to meet with President George W. Bush on Nov. 5. Deputy Chief of General Staff Gen. Ergin Saygun will accompany Erdogan during his Washington visit, along with Foreign Minister Ali Babacan and Defense Minister Vecdi Gönül.

Separately, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is scheduled to visit Ankara this Friday. In both meetings, the main topic will be the search for ways to avert an all-out Turkish invasion of northern Iraq to pursue the PKK terrorists.

Erdogan said last Tuesday during an address to the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party) that he would take a report to Washington showing alleged links between the Kurdish regional government in northern Iraq and PKK terrorists holed up there who launch cross-border attacks on Turkish soil.

He warned the US that failure to stop the PKK from operating out of northern Iraq will damage ties between the two NATO allies. Article

#5:

Turkey will push U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice this week to follow through on promises to help eradicate Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq but experts say the top U.S. diplomat’s hands are tied.

Rice arrives in Ankara on Friday for talks with Turkey’s leaders, before going to Istanbul for a meeting of Iraq’s neighbors and major powers that is also expected to be dominated by tensions between Iraq and Turkey.

“I can’t imagine what she is going to be able to do in terms of pulling a rabbit out of the hat that would enable her to leave claiming that some progress had been made,” said Mark Parris, a former U.S. ambassador to Turkey. Article

Afghanistan summaries here and here and here.

Pakistan summaries here and here. Also this.

Summary here and here.

Contours of chaos.

Almost 90,000 people have fled Mogadishu or moved to safer areas within the city to escape the latest outbreak of violence in the war-torn Somali capital.

An aid worker in Mogadishu had told UNHCR on Tuesday that fighting on Saturday, Sunday and Monday was “the worst in months.” The situation in the city was calmer on Wednesday and the number of civilians fleeing appeared to fall though people were still seen leaving the capital or preparing to move out.

The mayor of Mogadishu, Mohamed Dheere, issued a radio message on Tuesday urging civilians to stay in their homes. He claimed that people had misunderstood his earlier declarations calling for the evacuation of districts near the sprawling Bakara market as security operations were going to take place there. His words appeared to reassure some people.

But many families wanted to go somewhere safer. “You can feel tension in the air,” a Somali aid worker told UNHCR. “Everyone is afraid that the lull in fighting is not going to last. They fear the insurgents are organizing themselves and that violence is going to be unleashed on an even higher scale.”

[snip]

“Entire families are now crammed in tiny huts,” a UNHCR staff member reported from Afgooye. “Those who arrived this weekend were hoping to go back to the capital in a matter of days, but now they see their relatives who have been here for months, they lose hope.”

Exiled within their own country, many people can’t hide their frustration. “You see groups of people spontaneously protesting, crying for help from the international community and wondering aloud how long Mogadishu will keep on being destroyed,” the UNHCR staff member added. Article

Analysis du jour.

Of course the push for tougher sanctions shortens the distance to war, and make it more likely, for a simple reason: Those pushing for them see the sanctions as a “last hope” for something they curiously dub “diplomacy”, failing which force becomes the “only alternative.” But there won’t be tougher sanctions, and not because of the commercial interests of those like Russia and China that oppose them. The reason there won’t be tougher sanctions is that most of the international community recognizes two things: The balance of power in the region is such that Iran is unlikely to respond to pressure and ultimatums over its nuclear program (nor, for that matter, is it likely to be deterred by air strikes, for which it will surely retaliate and extract a heavy price from the U.S. and its allies). Second, and, even more important, most of the international community rejects the very premise that Iran’s nuclear program represents an imminent threat that can only be dealt with by tougher sanctions or military action.

[snip]

Whereas the mainstream media appears to have taken as read largely unsubstantiated claims about Iran’s nuclear program representing an existential threat to Israel and others, and similarly unsubstantiated claims about Iran’s role in Iraq (which has lately become the Bush Administration’s fallacy d’jour in explaining its failures there), more sober heads begin the discussion by asking whether Iran’s nuclear program actually represent a threat, and if so, is it a threat of sufficient magnitude to justify the risk of potentially catastrophic consequences that military action would carry. And if not, are there options besides war and sanctions for responding to Iran’s undoubted growth as a regional power in the wake of – and as a result of – the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Israel’s foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, has acknowledged behind closed doors that even if Iran had nuclear weapons, they would not, repeat NOT, pose an existential threat to Israel. Other top Israeli security officials have said the same thing. Yet Bush and the neocons are left unchallenged when they spin this line.

In an outstanding column in Newsweek two weeks ago, Zakaria did what few mainstream media figures are prepared to do when the President glibly tells Americans that the sky will fall unless they do his bidding – eschewing the deference that so often characterizes the media corps’ approach to the Bush Administration, Zakaria leaves his readers in no doubt that he thinks the President of the United States is a bullsh**ter, and a dangerous one at that. …

[snip]…Tehran insists it has no intention of building nuclear weapons, and the IAEA has repeatedly made clear that it has seen no evidence that Iran’s program is intended for weaponization. (The issue between the IAEA, and then the UN Security Council, and Iran is its failure to comply properly with transparency requirements over its past activities. Although the Security Council has demanded that Iran cease uranium enrichment until those concerns are resolved, it has not demanded that Iran abandon its right to enrich uranium, because that would contradict the NPT.) So the issue, really, is that the U.S. and its allies don’t trust Iran enough to allow it a full-cycle nuclear energy program, because this gives it the potential to build nuclear weapons if it opted out of the NPT. In its own negotiating efforts via the Europeans, Tehran has previously sought to find a formula under which it would abrogate its right to opt out of the NPT, although those negotiations are going nowhere right now.

Still, assume for a moment Iran did actually use its nuclear energy infrastructure to build a weapon – which it could potentially do, although it would probably take more than five years from now – even then, is Iran really a doomsday threat?

Zakaria has systematically demolished the claims by the war lobby that Iran is beyond negotiation and deterrence, because it is somehow driven by nutty apocalyptic religious zeal, and pointed out that it is the U.S. that has actually refused to negotiate when the Iranians have made decent offers.…

[snip]

…it’s the absence of real diplomacy by the Administration, not some false choice between sanctions or air strikes, that should be the focus of the media’s – and the Democratic presidential candidates’ – discussion of Iran. Article

Shining light on the not so hidden hand of the promulgators of brutality as primacy.

Vice President Dick Cheney and his neo-conservative allies in the George W Bush administration only began agitating for the use of military force against Iran once they had finally given up the illusion that regime change in Iran would happen without it.

And they did not give up the illusion until late 2005, according to a former high-level Foreign Service officer who participated in United States discussions with Iran from 2001 until late 2005.

Hillary Mann, who was the director for Persian Gulf and Afghanistan Affairs on the National Security Council (NSC) staff in 2003 and later on the State Department’s Policy Planning staff, observes that the key to neo-conservative policy views on Iran until 2006 was the firm belief that one of the consequences of a successful display of US military force in Iraq would be to shake the foundations of the Iranian regime.

[snip]

In November 2001, General Wesley Clark, who had recently retired from his post as head of the US Southern Command, learned from a general he knew in the Pentagon that a memo had just come down from the office of the secretary of defense outlining the objective of the “take down” of seven Middle Eastern regimes over five years.

The plan would start with the invasion of Iraq, and then go after Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia and Sudan, according to an account in Clark’s 2003 book, Winning Modern Wars. The memo indicated the plan was to “come back and get Iran in five years”.

[snip]

By the end of 2005, however, the neo-cons had finally accepted the reality of the failure of the Bush administration’s military intervention in Iraq, according to Mann. She also notes that the electoral victory of Mahmud Ahmadinejad, representing a new breed of nationalist conservative with a base of popular support, in the June 2005 presidential election, spelled the “death knell” for neo-con optimism about regime change in Iran.

Mann observes that the neo-cons had never given up the idea of using force against Iran, but they had argued that less force would be needed in Iran than had been used in Iraq. By early 2006, however, that assumption was being discarded by prominent neo-conservatives.

[snip]

Neo-conservatives aligned with Cheney argued that Iran was now threatening US dominance in the region, through its proxies in Lebanon, Iraq and the Palestinian territory and its nuclear program. They insisted that the administration had to push back by targeting Iran’s Quds Force personnel in Iraq, increasing the naval presence in the Gulf and accusing Iran of supporting the killing of US troops. Article

Noted FYI:

Iran’s Foreign Ministry Spokesman Mohammad-Ali Hosseini said here on Sunday that the increase of U.S. spy plane flights over Iran’s southern borders is a clear violation of international law and the Islamic Republic’s territorial integrity. Article

Revisitng the crucial question of whether there exist bounds — or dictatorship.

The US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit heard oral arguments Wednesday in an en banc rehearing of its earlier ruling that the military cannot seize and imprison civilians lawfully residing in the United States and detain them as “enemy combatants.” In June, a three-judge panel rejected government arguments that the president was authorized to order the military seizure of Illinois resident and Qatari native Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri from civilian custody and hold him indefinitely in a military jail without charge and the court subsequently issued an order granting a Department of Justice (DOJ) petition to re-hear the case en banc. DOJ principal deputy solicitor general Gregory C. Garre argued Wednesday that the government was given broad authority by Congress to arrest individuals suspected of al Qaeda association. Al-Marri’s lawyer countered that enemy combatant status does not apply outside of combat situations, and asked the court to uphold the panel’s decision. Source

Must Read. Long snippet from an important and steady horse’s mouth overwiew and explanation on the creeping implementation of inhumanity as both process and policy. Shorter version: Because it is wrong, in theory, in fact and in principle.

…We, as a nation, are having a crisis of honor.

[snip]

In fact, waterboarding is just the type of torture then Lt. Commander John McCain had to endure at the hands of the North Vietnamese. As a former Master Instructor and Chief of Training at the US Navy Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape School (SERE) in San Diego, California I know the waterboard personally and intimately. SERE staff were required undergo the waterboard at its fullest. I was no exception. I have personally led, witnessed and supervised waterboarding of hundreds of people. It has been reported that both the Army and Navy SERE school’s interrogation manuals were used to form the interrogation techniques used by the US army and the CIA for its terror suspects. What was not mentioned in most articles was that SERE was designed to show how an evil totalitarian, enemy would use torture at the slightest whim. If this is the case, then waterboarding is unquestionably being used as torture technique.

The carnival-like he-said, she-said of the legality of Enhanced Interrogation Techniques has become a form of doublespeak worthy of Catch-22. Having been subjected to them all, I know these techniques, if in fact they are actually being used, are not dangerous when applied in training for short periods. However, when performed with even moderate intensity over an extended time on an unsuspecting prisoner – it is torture, without doubt. Couple that with waterboarding and the entire medley not only “shock the conscience” as the statute forbids -it would terrify you. Most people can not stand to watch a high intensity kinetic interrogation. One has to overcome basic human decency to endure watching or causing the effects. The brutality would force you into a personal moral dilemma between humanity and hatred. It would leave you to question the meaning of what it is to be an American.

We live at a time where Americans, completely uninformed by an incurious media and enthralled by vengeance-based fantasy television shows like “24″, are actually cheering and encouraging such torture as justifiable revenge for the September 11 attacks. Having been a rescuer in one of those incidents and personally affected by both attacks, I am bewildered at how casually we have thrown off the mantle of world-leader in justice and honor. Who we have become? Because at this juncture, after Abu Ghraieb and other undignified exposed incidents of murder and torture, we appear to have become no better than our opponents.

With regards to the waterboard, I want to set the record straight so the apologists can finally embrace the fact that they condone and encourage torture.

[snip]

1. Waterboarding is a torture technique. Period. There is no way to gloss over it or sugarcoat it. It has no justification outside of its limited role as a training demonstrator. Our service members have to learn that the will to survive requires them accept and understand that they may be subjected to torture, but that America is better than its enemies and it is one’s duty to trust in your nation and God, endure the hardships and return home with honor.

2. Waterboarding is not a simulation. Unless you have been strapped down to the board, have endured the agonizing feeling of the water overpowering your gag reflex, and then feel your throat open and allow pint after pint of water to involuntarily fill your lungs, you will not know the meaning of the word.

Waterboarding is a controlled drowning that, in the American model, occurs under the watch of a doctor, a psychologist, an interrogator and a trained strap-in/strap-out team. It does not simulate drowning, as the lungs are actually filling with water. There is no way to simulate that. The victim is drowning. How much the victim is to drown depends on the desired result (in the form of answers to questions shouted into the victim’s face) and the obstinacy of the subject. A team doctor watches the quantity of water that is ingested and for the physiological signs which show when the drowning effect goes from painful psychological experience, to horrific suffocating punishment to the final death spiral.

Waterboarding is slow motion suffocation with enough time to contemplate the inevitability of black out and expiration – usually the person goes into hysterics on the board. For the uninitiated, it is horrifying to watch and if it goes wrong, it can lead straight to terminal hypoxia. When done right it is controlled death. Its lack of physical scarring allows the victim to recover and be threaten with its use again and again.

[snip]

3. If you support the use of waterboarding on enemy captives, you support the use of that torture on any future American captives. The Small Wars Council had a spirited discussion about this earlier in the year, especially when former Marine Generals Krulak and Hoar rejected all arguments for torture.

Evan Wallach wrote a brilliant history of the use of waterboarding as a war crime and the open acceptance of it by the administration in an article for Columbia Journal for Transnational Law. In it he describes how the ideological Justice Department lawyer, John Yoo validated the current dilemma we find ourselves in by asserting that the President had powers above and beyond the Constitution and the Congress:

“Congress doesn’t have the power to tie the President’s hands in regard to torture as an interrogation technique….It’s the core of the Commander-in-Chief function. They can’t prevent the President from ordering torture.”

That is an astounding assertion. It reflects a basic disregard for the law of the United States, the Constitution and basic moral decency.

[snip]

Torture in captivity simulation training reveals there are ways an enemy can inflict punishment which will render the subject wholly helpless and which will generally overcome his willpower. The torturer will trigger within the subject a survival instinct, in this case the ability to breathe, which makes the victim instantly pliable and ready to comply. It is purely and simply a tool by which to deprive a human being of his ability to resist through physical humiliation. The very concept of an American Torturer is an anathema to our values.

[snip]

Who will complain about the new world-wide embrace of torture? America has justified it legally at the highest levels of government. Even worse, the administration has selectively leaked supposed successes of the water board such as the alleged Khalid Sheik Mohammed confessions. However, in the same breath the CIA sources for the Washington Post noted that in Mohammed’s case they got information but “not all of it reliable.” Of course, when you waterboard you get all the magic answers you want -because remember, the subject will talk. They all talk! Anyone strapped down will say anything, absolutely anything to get the torture to stop. Torture. Does. Not. Work.

According to the President, this is not a torture, so future torturers in other countries now have an American legal basis to perform the acts. Every hostile intelligence agency and terrorist in the world will consider it a viable tool, which can be used with impunity. It has been turned into perfectly acceptable behavior for information finding.

[snip]

It is outrageous that American officials, including the Attorney General and a legion of minions of lower rank have not only embraced this torture but have actually justified it, redefined it to a misdemeanor, brought it down to the level of a college prank and then bragged about it. The echo chamber that is the American media now views torture as a heroic and macho. Article

Related — “irreplaceable” does not define as otherwise unobtainable, Gen. Hayden.

CIA Director Michael Hayden defended his agency’s interrogation practices Tuesday as political pressure mounted on President Bush’s attorney general nominee to reject a technique that allegedly was part of the CIA’s interrogation program.

“Our programs are as lawful as they are valuable,” Hayden said to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. “The best sources of information on terrorists and their plans are the terrorists themselves.”

Hayden said “the irreplaceable nature of that intelligence is the sole reason we have rendition, detention and interrogation programs.”

[snip]

In September ABC News reported that Hayden had banned waterboarding in CIA interrogations in 2006. Agency officials have neither confirmed nor denied waterboarding prisoners in the past, and they would not confirm the reported ban.

After his remarks in Chicago, an audience member asked Hayden: “Is waterboarding torture and will you continue to waterboard? Yes or no.”

In his answer, Hayden briefly discussed constitutional law, the United Nations Convention Against Torture and the Geneva Convention before ending: “Judge Mukasey cannot nor can I answer your question in the abstract. I need to understand the totality of the circumstances in which this question is being posed before I can give you an answer.” Article

In a word, SNABU.

An independent panel has sharply criticized the Army for failing to train enough experienced contracting officers, deploy them quickly to war zones like Iraq and Afghanistan and ensure that they properly manage billions of dollars in contracts to supply American troops in the field, according to officials briefed on its findings.

In a wide-ranging report to be made public on Thursday, the panel said these and other shortcomings had contributed to an environment in Iraq and Kuwait that allowed waste, fraud and other corruption to take hold and flourish.

The report does not address any suspected crimes by soldiers or civilian contractors; those are being pursued by investigators from the Army and the Justice Department. Nor does it single out individuals for blame.

But the six-member panel, appointed in August by Army Secretary Pete Geren, levels a stinging indictment of how the Army oversees $4 billion a year in contracts for food, water, shelter and other supplies to sustain United States forces in Iraq, Kuwait and Afghanistan. The panel also blames senior Army leaders for not responding more swiftly to the problems, despite warning signs like severe shortages of contracting officers in the field. “The Iraq-Kuwait-Afghanistan contracting problems have created a crisis,” the report states.

[snip]

The panel’s report, which runs about 100 pages including supporting documents, recommends increasing the number of Army contracting officers by about 25 percent, or 1,400, in coming years. It urges the department to improve training and to start young officers in the procurement corps soon after they join the Army, not after seven or eight years of other duties, as is common now.

The panel argues that the procurement corps, now dominated by civilians who balk at being sent to a war zone, must be trained to be an expeditionary force, just as Army combat forces train to deploy quickly for yearlong tours to Iraq.

“You need more people and better-trained people in contracting,” said a person who had been briefed on the report and who spoke on condition of anonymity because the findings had not been made public. “Right now, a lot of the work isn’t getting done or it’s done poorly.”

[snip]

“If you had had more personnel, who were better trained, on longer tours with more supervision, could you have cut the number of fraud, waste and corruption cases in half?” asked Raymond F. DuBois, a former senior Army official. “Yes.” Article

Patriot of conscience.

By all accounts, Colby Vokey is a model officer in the U.S. Marine Corps, at one point helping command an artillery unit in Kuwait during the Gulf War in 1991. For the past four years, Vokey has served as chief of all the Corps’ defense lawyers in the western United States – and he’s played a key role in some of the military’s most sensitive legal issues, including the murder investigation in Haditha, Iraq, and in the debate about detainees at the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo Bay. “Colby Vokey?” muses retired Col. Jane Siegel “Integrity almost seems like a word too small to describe him.” Says Lt. Col. Matthew Cord, “He’s just one of the best.”

So when Vokey announced recently that he wanted to leave the Corps, it said something troubling about the military system of justice that he’s served for almost 20 years. Vokey charges that some commanders and officials in the Bush administration have abused the system of justice, and he’s going to retire from the Corps May 1, 2008. People who know him say that privately, Vokey has acknowledged he is “angry” and “bitter.” Publicly, Vokey describes himself as “fed up.” “I think changes to the system are well-overdue,” he told NPR. “And it’s a little frustrating when you see problems are highlighted time and time and again.”

[snip]

The U.S. has imprisoned hundreds of “enemy combatants” at Guantanamo Bay in a military legal system that Vokey denounces as “horrific.” Vokey saw the system first-hand when he agreed two years ago to defend a teenager there who had been charged with murdering a U.S. soldier in Afghanistan. Vokey said he knew the case would be difficult, but he discovered that the legal system at Guantanamo is a “sham.” Vokey said the military staff constantly harassed him and interfered with his defense work by making it difficult even to meet with his client or show his client the government’s evidence against him. The teenager confessed to killing the soldier, but he told Vokey he confessed after being shackled for hours in excruciating positions and bombarded by screeching music and flashing lights. FBI agents have reported seeing detainees treated in similar ways and investigators at human rights groups have reported evidence suggesting that detainees are routinely abused. Vokey calls the system “disgraceful.”

“Anytime you want to subvert the rule of law to the power of a government, you’ve got a very bad thing brewing,” Vokey told NPR. “As an officer in the Marine Corps I took an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. And now we are perpetrating something that if any other country in the world was doing, we would likely step in and stop it.” Hemingway, who until recently was the top lawyer advising U.S. officials on how to handle detainees at Guantanamo, dismisses those charges. Hemingway said he has asked the staff to investigate complaints by detainees, including Vokey’s client, and “we have found absolutely nothing to substantiate that.” He added, “I know of no one in uniform who signed up to embarrass the United States of America by running a system that doesn’t meet what we consider to be appropriate standards.” Vokey, undeterred, said the legal system at Guantanamo has left him feeling “disgusted.”

When asked to identify exactly which officials in the military and the Bush administration he believes have abused the system of justice, Vokey avoids giving an answer. When pressed, Vokey went to his bookshelf, pulled out the Manual for Courts-Martial, and read from Article 88: “‘Any commissioned officer who uses contemptuous words against the president, vice president, Congress’” and a list of other officials, he said, “’shall be punished as a court martial may direct.’” “I need to be careful,” Vokey said. Article

So much for tortured claims of an ‘open’ proceeding.

A civilian lawyer for the only Canadian terrorism suspect held at Guantanamo said on Wednesday he had been barred from his client’s hearing at the U.S. base next week because of a dispute with military defense lawyers.

The Canadian lawyer, Dennis Edney, said he was prevented from visiting Toronto-born Omar Khadr, who is accused by a U.S. military war crimes tribunal of throwing a grenade that killed one American soldier and wounded another during a firefight at an alleged al Qaeda compound in Afghanistan in 2002.

Edney said the ban came after he disagreed with and publicly criticized the U.S. military lawyers appointed to defend Khadr, who was 15 years old and severely wounded when he was captured. He is now 21.

“It’s certainly not in Khadr’s best interest,” Edney said by telephone. “It’s a violation of the accepted right to counsel. They obviously don’t want me speaking to Khadr before the arraignment.”

Military defense lawyers did not immediately return calls seeking comment.

[snip]

Edney, who was at the June hearing, battled for years before winning U.S. permission to visit Khadr. He said he was barred from seeing him in September and that military defense lawyers recently told him in a phone call that he could not attend Khadr’s arraignment.

Under revised trial rules, defendants can represent themselves or have U.S. military defense lawyers appointed. Foreign and civilian lawyers can join the defense but only as advisors, if they obtain U.S. security clearances and if someone other than the U.S. government pays the bill.

Khadr fired his American civilian lawyers and has repeatedly said he only wants Canadian attorneys. Article

Keeping up with unrest in Nigeria’s oil region:

One navy officer was killed and four other naval personnel injured in an overnight attack on a vessel protecting a Shell oilfield off southern Nigeria, industry and security sources said Wednesday.

[snip]

The State Security Service (SSS) also confirmed the attack, but said no hostages were taken from the Anglo-Dutch oil facility. Article

It is a commodity. That it is a cital commodity in terms of the infrastructural set-up of both societies and economies doesn’t make it any less a commodity. Economic gobbledygook pooh-poohing the eternal scales of supply and demand as expressed in this piece wouldn’t be acceptable froma freshman. That it emanates from a senior editor at Fortune magazine speaks volumes.

Racing headlong to the making of a new world in the detrimental likeness of the old.

The rush for biofuels could harm the world’s poorest people, Oxfam has said.

In a new report, the UK aid charity appears to be joining a growing chorus of concern about the side-effects of Europe’s drive to get fuel from plants.

The European Union wants to cut the CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels and has demanded that 10% of all transport fuels should come from plants by 2020.

[snip]

The BBC’s environment analyst Roger Harrabin said there were also fears over the environmental cost of making fuel from crops like maize.

Scientists have said it takes so much energy to produce some biofuels that it would be cleaner overall to burn petrol in our cars, he said.

To make it worse, he added, valuable rainforest is still being cleared to make way for fuel crops like palm oil.

Robert Bailey, a policy advisor at Oxfam, said: “In the scramble to supply the EU and the rest of the world with biofuels, poor people are getting trampled. Article

Still too slow in building, but the wider realization that putting the cart before the horse get no one anywhere, that privacy once lost or surrendered is gone and the dissemination of the data undeterminable is taking hold.

As the body of the latest Australian soldier to be killed in Afghanistan arrives in Perth today, the Australian Defence Force (ADF) has announced it will set up a DNA database to help in identifying soldiers who are killed in action.

But Defence Minister Brendan Nelson has ruled out making it compulsory for troops to provide DNA samples.

The ADF expects around two-thirds of its 90,000-strong force will submit to voluntary blood tests.

Although defence experts have welcomed the initiative, privacy campaigners say it raises serious ethical concerns.

[snip]

Defence Minister Brendan Nelson was unavailable to speak to ABC’s The World Today program, but his spokesman says the Minister has ruled out changing the law to make the scheme compulsory.

That raises ethical difficulties for the ADF’s DNA database. The ADF has promised troops that their DNA will not be used for other purposes such as criminal cases.

But Brigadier Nikolic says the Defence Act will need to be altered to make sure of that.

[snip]

A spokesman for Defence Minister Nelson says the Minister will change the Act to ensure the DNA samples are protected from being used for purposes other than identification.

Roger Clarke, chair of the Australian Privacy Foundation and a sometimes commissioned officer in the Army Reserve, urges troops not to provide any DNA to the database until those legislative changes have been made.

“Unfortunately those assurances are very probably false assurances because all manner of agencies have got all manner of uncontrolled powers to get access to data and to get access to samples,” he said.

“Unless there is explicit and overriding legislation passed, I think those assurances should be treated as intentional misinformation or downright lies, because it is simply not how the Australian legal system works.” Article

Any smaller and it wouldn’t be there. Incredible (and implantable).

Make way for the real nanopod and make room in the Guinness World Records. A team of researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California at Berkeley have created the first fully functional radio from a single carbon nanotube, which makes it by several orders of magnitude the smallest radio ever made.

“A single carbon nanotube molecule serves simultaneously as all essential components of a radio — antenna, tunable band-pass filter, amplifier, and demodulator,” said physicist Alex Zettl, who led the invention of the nanotube radio. “Using carrier waves in the commercially relevant 40-400 MHz range and both frequency and amplitude modulation (FM and AM), we were able to demonstrate successful music and voice reception.”

Given that the nanotube radio essentially assembles itself and can be easily tuned to a desired frequency band after fabrication, Zettl believes that nanoradios will be relatively easy to mass-produce. Potential applications, in addition to incredibly tiny radio receivers, include a new generation of wireless communication devices and monitors. Nanotube radio technology could prove especially valuable for biological and medical applications.

“The entire radio would easily fit inside a living cell, and this small size allows it to safely interact with biological systems,” Zettl said. “One can envision interfaces with brain or muscle functions, or radio-controlled devices moving through the bloodstream.”

It is also possible that the nanotube radio could be implanted in the inner ear as an entirely new and discrete way of transmitting information, or as a radically new method of correcting impaired hearing.

[snip]

“To correlate the mechanical motions of the nanotube to an actual radio receiver operation, we launched an FM radio transmission of the song Good Vibrations by the Beach Boys,” said Zettl. “After being received, filtered, amplified, and demodulated all by the nanotube radio, the emerging signal was further amplified by a current preamplifier, sent to an audio loudspeaker and recorded. The nanotube radio faithfully reproduced the audio signal, and the song was easily recognizable by ear.”

When the researchers deliberately detuned the nanotube radio from the carrier frequency, mechanical vibrations faded and radio reception was lost. A “lock” on a given radio transmission channel could be maintained for many minutes at a time, and it was not necessary to operate the nanotube radio inside a TEM. Using a slightly different configuration, the researchers successfully transmitted and received signals across a distance of several meters. Article

CANINE CONVENIENCE

Looking to extend the life of lamp posts.

---

NAMING THE DISEASE

Dick Cheney ought to leave comedy to the professionals.

Summaries here and here.

The deputy governor of the southern Iraqi city of Basra said on Tuesday that security authorities are unable to control the city, calling on citizens to abide by legal procedures in various fields to control the security situation.

“Security forces in Basra are trying to control the security situation, but the number of forces and their weapons are not enough to fully control a large city like Basra,” Loai al-Batat said at a press conference held in the city hall. Article

It’s time-tested tech nology, not rocket science (emphasis added).

A U.S. review of Iraq reconstruction finds Iraq oil production down compared with this time last year, though capacity is up.

[snip]

Iraq oil production averaged 2.16 million barrels per day in third-quarter 2007, as the northern pipeline was fixed and better guarded than before.

“It is important to note, however, that this quarter’s production lags slightly behind the same period last year,” the report said. It also pegged production capacity at 3 million bpd.

[snip]

The report noted an increase in household appliances has bolstered demand while U.S. reconstruction efforts, done in isolation of the status of Iraq’s electricity sector and its problems, have hurt the sector by stocking plants with too many generators of differing make, capacity and technology. Article

Related:

Several Iraqi power plants are idle due to shortages in fuel supplies, exacerbating blackouts across the country.

Electricity Minister Kareem Waheed blamed the stoppages on lack of fuel, saying neighboring countries have failed to honor contracts to ship fuel supplies.

[snip]

Iraqi refineries have the capacity to churn out up to 700,000 barrels a day but they are working much below capacity due to acts of sabotage, lack of maintenance and corruption.

Waheed’s target in Kuwait is to persuade Kuwaiti authorities to sign a new fuel import contract as domestic fuel production is dwindling, electricity ministry officials said.

They said several power plants were idle because there was no fuel to operate them. Article

Looking in on the mercenary mayhem. Summary here and here.

A grant of limited immunity by State Department investigators to Blackwater security guards accused of shooting dead 17 Iraqis last month could complicate efforts to bring charges against them, a U.S. government official said on Tuesday.

The officials confirmed media reports that State Department investigators had given limited immunity protecting Blackwater guards’ statements from being used against them.

But the officials said the guards could still be subject to prosecution using other evidence in the probe into the Sept 16 incident, which is now being led by the FBI.

“They have to reconstruct the case around (avoiding) the statements,” that had already been given, a government official said.

Another official said the FBI investigators had not known of the immunity provisions. “Law enforcement said they didn’t know what DSI (the State Department’s Department of Special Investigations) was doing on the ground,” he said.

[snip]

U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the Democratic chairman of the Judiciary Committee, called the immunity provisions given by State Department investigators an example of a “well-worn pattern” of the Bush administration avoiding accountability.

“That seems to be a central tenet in the Bush administration — that no one from their team should be held accountable,” Leahy said.

“If you get caught, they will get you immunity. If you get convicted, they will commute your sentence. They are the amnesty Administration.” Article

#1 — but they’re not public employees or officers, they are private employess under contract with a public entity.

…The guards, who allegedly fired on civilians, killing 17 and prompting the Iraqi government to withdraw Blackwater’s operating license, have received so-called “Garrity protections” from the Bureau of Diplomatic Security, the branch of the State Department that oversees private security firms. Garrity protections prohibit statements made by public law enforcement officers from being used against them in criminal prosecutions.… Source

#2:

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said the department did not have the authority to give someone immunity from federal criminal prosecution.

“The kinds of, quote, ‘immunity’ that I’ve seen reported in the press would not preclude a successful criminal prosecution,” he said.

Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd Tuesday called the reports “inaccurate” but gave no details.

“The Justice Department and the FBI cannot discuss the facts of the Blackwater case, which is under active investigation. However, any suggestion that the Blackwater employees in question have been given immunity from federal criminal prosecution is inaccurate,” Boyd said in a statement.

If the reports of the immunity offer are accurate, though, it could reignite the controversy in the Iraqi capital over the role of private security firms such as Blackwater USA in the war-torn country, which a recent Defense Department report characterized as out of control.

The New York Times Tuesday said officials in the State Department’s investigative unit, the Bureau of Diplomatic Security, made the immunity offer though they lacked authority to do so.

Most of the guards involved in the shooting were promised they would not be prosecuted for anything they said in interviews as long as their statements were truthful, the Times reported.

And one law enforcement official told the Washington Post that some Blackwater guards cited the immunity promises in refusing to be interviewed by the FBI, which took over the investigation this month.

McCormack Tuesday sought to distance Rice from the scandal, emphasizing that her attitude is that “if there are individuals who broke rules, laws or regulations, they must be held to account.” Article

#3:

Iraq’s cabinet approved a draft law on Tuesday to end foreign security firms’ immunity from prosecution by scrapping a controversial decree that Iraqis say amounts to a “licence to kill”.

The bill, which has to be approved by parliament, follows a Sept. 16 shooting incident involving Blackwater in which 17 Iraqis were killed. The U.S. security firm said its guards acted lawfully, but the shooting enraged the Iraqi government.

In Washington, a U.S. government official said efforts to bring charges in U.S. courts could be complicated by an offer of limited immunity to Blackwater security guards by State Department investigators. The New York Times said the investigators did not have the authority to make such an offer.

[snip]

The new bill also proposes tightening controls on foreign security firms by making them register and apply for a licence to work in Iraq, and for all guards to have weapons permits. That process has begun but has been mired in bureaucracy.

A potential source of friction is a proposal to make foreign security guards, and the convoys they are protecting, subject to searches at Iraqi security force checkpoints. Article

#4 — tweaking and trimming around the edges doesn’t address the rot in the center.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates met on Tuesday to discuss a working group’s recommendations to give the U.S. military “considerably more involvement in contractor operations,” the Pentagon said.

“All this stuff needs to be tightened up,” Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell told a news briefing.

However, the agreement appeared to fall short of a deal putting contractors under the command of the military, as Pentagon officials had suggested.

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said from a practical standpoint, it was decided not to put contractors under military command.

“Once they did an analysis of it, they decided this was not something they wanted to take on,” said McCormack. Article

Summary here and here.

Any move by Turkish troops into Kurdish territory would be a declaration of war, the region’s leader said yesterday.

[snip]

“If they invade or if there is any incursion, it means war,” Mr Barzani said at his offices on the outskirts of Arbil. “If they attack our people, our interests, our territories then there will be no limit because everything is subject to that incursion.” Article

[Prime Minister Recep Tayyip] Erdogan said the safe haven that terrorists enjoy in northern Iraq would dominate his talks with US President George W. Bush at the White House on Nov. 5. “I will openly tell him that we expect concrete, immediate steps against the terrorists,” Erdog(an told his deputies. “The problem of the PKK terrorist organization is a test of sincerity for everybody,” he said. “I will tell him [Bush] that this test carries great importance for the region and in determining the fate of our future relations.”

Erdogan said he would seek an explanation from Washington on how US military hardware given to Iraqi forces had ended up in PKK hands. Article

#1:

The Kurdish parliament decided on Tuesday to send a parliamentary delegation to Baghdad to discuss with the federal government the recent Turkish threats to invade northern Iraq after a closed session attended by Kurdistan’s President Massoud Barazani, the parliament’s speaker said.

Speaking at a joint press conference, with Barazani, in the Kurdish parliament after the session, Adnan al-Mufti said “the parliament decided at the end of its closed session to send a parliamentary delegation to meet Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to coordinate with the Iraqi government on Turkish threats on Iraq’s Kurdistan region.” Article

#2:

A gradual economic embargo is being imposed on firms connected to Iraqi Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani and flights to the northern Iraqi city of Arbil have been stopped, said Ercüment Aksoy, the head of the Foreign Economic Relations Council’s (DEI.K) Turkish-Iraqi Business Committee in an exclusive interview with business daily Referans last week.

The decisions made in the National Security Council (MGK) and the steps taken are positive, according to Aksoy. “The embargo will be against individuals, institutions and sectors who are collaborating with the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). Turkey does not want to punish the Iraqi people,” he said.

Turkey had a trade volume of $5 billion with Iraq in 2005, and it stands at $1.250 billion for the first six months of this year. A trade volume of $4 to 4.5 billion is aimed for by year end. “It does not matter if our loss amounts to $5 billion or $50 billion. We will do anything for Turkey,” Aksoy said, in response to any possible negative effects of the embargo on trade volume. Article

#3:

In the face of Iraq’s failure to cooperate with Turkey against the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) militants holed up in Iraq, Turkey is getting ready to play the embargo card.

Suggestions for possible economic measures drawn up by Naz?m Ekren, the deputy prime minister in for economy coordination, and Hayati Yaz?c?, the deputy prime minister who oversees Customs, in line with a decision taken at the National Security Council’s (MGK) meeting held on Oct. 24, will be discussed at the Cabinet meeting today.

The first stage of short, medium and long-term plans for sanctions consist mainly of economic measures such as intermittently cutting the electricity supply to northern Iraq and preventing passage of construction materials and foodstuff through the Habur border crossing. Turkey currently supplies 10 percent of northern Iraq’s electricity needs. Turkey may eventually opt to close down Habur, the single and most important border crossing between Turkey and Iraq.

Previously, Turkey had planned to construct another border crossing in Ovaköy as an alternative to Habur, but could not make any progress with that project. Another border crossing, Nusaybin, seems more viable than Habur, as 85 percent of its construction has been completed.

Reports drafted by Ekren and Yaz?c? also identify the extent of economic measures that Turkey may employ against Iraq. Turkey’s action plan also takes into consideration the risk of the Iraqi administration’s shutting down the Kirkuk-Yumurtal?k pipeline. When this pipeline operates at full capacity, Turkey earns $300 million from it annually. However, following the US occupation of Iraq, this pipeline has never operated at full capacity, due to sabotage, and Turkey’s revenue from it has dropped to $100-150 million a year. In the event of a Turkish military incursion into northern Iraq, the pipeline may be shut down and Turkey may lose this source of income. However, given rapid fluctuations in crude oil markets, Turkey does not think that the Iraqi administration will be willing to shut down the pipeline.

[snip]

Aware of the fact that 70 percent of logistical supplies to US troops pass through the Habur border gate, Turkey will act with common sense in its economic measures against Iraq in order to ensure that Turkish-US relations are not affected negatively by its embargo. Recognizing the importance of the Habur border crossing in the reconstruction of Iraq, the government is planning to block passage of construction materials to northern Iraq. No restriction is planned for medical supplies and medicine, as such sanctions would be a violation of international conventions. Initially, exports of foodstuffs and agricultural products may be restricted.

[snip]

The opening of the Nusaybin border crossing may prove to be another thorn in Turkish-US relations as it bypasses the Kurdish region in northern Iraq to access the Arab region of Iraq. Because of its problematic relations with Syria, the US administration may oppose the opening of this border crossing on the grounds of security problems in the Arab region of Iraq.

[snip]

Transportation Minister Binali Yildirim announced on Tuesday that Turkey may suspend flights to Iraq and prohibit Iraqi planes from using Turkish airspace in line with the imposition of economic sanctions on northern Iraq. Article

#4 — related, from the horse’s mouth, so to speak.

Turkish drivers carrying goods and equipment to Iraq say that the closure of the Habur Border Gate with northern Iraq will result in a boycott by them because the alternative route of using the Rabia border gate via Syria is unsafe.

One driver waiting in Zaho in northern Iraq to cross into Turkey via Habur, Bedirhan Konuk, said it was highly unlikely for Turkish drivers to travel to Iraq via Syria using the Rabia border gate. He said, ?there are headhunters once you pass that gate. They [headhunters] kill drivers and torch their trucks. No one can guarantee drivers’ safety there.”

He said they will be the main victims if the Turkish National Security Council (MGK), the country’s top advisory body, decides to close the Habur gate as part of its effort to pressure the northern Iraq government.

He said before the MGK’s decision last week, 1,000 vehicles passed the Habur gate every day on average, noting that it had already dropped to 400 since then. Article

#5 — op-ed du jour:

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will arrive in Ankara next Thursday, one day ahead of her trip to Istanbul to attend the Istanbul summit on Iraq. I don’t know what this hastily arranged visit to the capital might signal. Is she coming to Turkey to try to convince Turkey not to carry out an operation into Iraq, or to tell us that at least some of the conditions Turkey has insisted on to head off an attack have been fulfilled? There is a common belief and pessimism in Ankara that Rice will come to Turkey to head off an attack. The lack of trust between Washington and Ankara has recently become very clear. I could see this when US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Matt Bryza, attending the Black Sea Economic Cooperation (BSEC) meeting yesterday as an observer, said that the US was trying to rescue the eight Turkish soldiers who were taken prisoner last Sunday. Reporters there heard a top Turkish official loudly dismiss this as “empty words” which were irritating Turkey.

[snip]

…developments indicate rising pressure on the government, which wants to minimize public tension, to take action. In addition, what the Iraqi delegation which arrived in Ankara yesterday has to say is another matter of curiosity, because Iraqi Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani and Iraqi President Jalal Talabani are still resisting cracking down on the PKK. There are many reasons for this, including their fear that the terrorist group will target them as well. The Kurdish administration might not be able to take a lot of harm, from pipeline sabotage to God knows what. What’s more, the Kurds rely on the US occupation of Iraq, and thus feel they’re on the verge of an independent Kurdish state and are playing for high stakes. So maybe next week the government can tell Rice something similar to what Republican People’s Party (CHP) leader Deniz Baykal recently said: ‘Instead of Turkey stopping the PKK, why don’t you?” Article

Afghanistan summary here and here and here.

Pakistan summary here.

Chaos entrenched.

…Nine months after the Taliban’s takeover of Musa Qala’s district center, serious splits have formed between the foreign fighters and the majority of tribal Taliban operating throughout the district. The largest Pashtun tribe in Helmand, the Alizai (23.5%), are in secret talks with the government regarding a possible defection from the Taliban insurgency. The tribe’s leader, Mullah Abdul Salaam, is a powerful Soviet-jihad mujahidin commander and former Taliban Corps commander.

he political outcome is so serious and potentially devastating to the Taliban movement that senior Taliban officials outside of Helmand dispatched assassins to kill Mullah Addul Salaam this week but failed. Other provincial officials have confirmed that ‘secret’ peace talks have transpired and support any such developments. Unlike Helmand’s other marginalized Taliban aligned tribes, like the Noorzai and the Itzakzai, the Alizai have been included in legitimate government positions and the illicit drug trade.

But Mullah Abdul Salaam is not the only Alizai battling to fill the power vacuum in Helmand.

Sher Muhammad Akhundzada, an Alizai and the former governor of Helmand province discharged for his close ties to the drug trade, has restored himself politically and is now actively vying for the governorship once again. After President Karzai fired Sher Muhammad at the insistence of the UK contingent in Helmand, he was appointed to Parliament where he helped create a 500 man tribal militia to help combat Taliban activities in remote areas of Helmand province. This controversial lashkar essentially served to consolidate Sher Muhammad’s power base and enhanced his powerful social position.

[snip]

…Sher Muhammad is a Helmand native and still commands a strong following amongst its residents, but he is strongly despised by the UK and US forces stationed in the province. Coalition misgivings or not, a massive defection by the Alizai tribe may be all that is needed for Sher Muhammad to regain his governorship of Helmand province. Article

Add in as well that the record of U.S. involvement, understanding and interaction with the meniscus of tribal structures and allegiances in the fluid context of political and martial relational realities is far, far from unsullied and also that that legacy remains current.

To which the response will be something along the line of the old carnival barker rsponse, to wit, “Go away, kid, ya bother me.”

At a joint meeting on Monday, the Afghan authorities reiterated their reservations about the introduction of biometric system at the Pak-Afghan border post near Chaman.

Reliable sources said the Islamabad decision to make the biometric system functional from November 1 was discussed at length during a trilateral meeting attended by Pakistani, Afghan and Nato officials.

The sources said the Afghan officials characterised the system as an obstruction in the way of free movement of Afghans living on both sides of the border. The Nato officials, however, did not object to the Pakistani government’s plan. Article

Keeping up with the charges:

A Marine Corps legal tribunal called to investigate the killing of up to 19 Afghan civilians earlier this year has been delayed until early December, a spokesman said Tuesday.

The court of inquiry, a rare legal mechanism last used by the Marine Corps in 1956, will examine the roles of two Marines present during the shootings. It was scheduled to begin Thursday at Camp Lejeune but was tentatively pushed back because of scheduling conflicts, said Lt. Col. Sean Gibson, a Marines spokesman at Central Command.

Mark Waple, an attorney representing one of the Marines, said the defense asked for the delay so lawyers “could get through the several thousand pages of information we have to digest.”

[snip]

Lt. Gen. James Mattis, the top Marine officer at Central Command, ordered the court to examine the roles of Maj. Fred Galvin, who was a company commander with the 2nd Marine Special Operations Battalion, and Capt. Vincent Noble, the platoon commander. Neither man has been charged.

Mattis will review the court’s findings to determine if criminal charges are warranted.

Waple, Galvin’s civilian lawyer, said his client never told anyone to fire and didn’t fire shots himself. Waple said Galvin wouldn’t make public statements because “he’s a quiet, professional Marine and very much wants to keep it that way.”

Noble’s attorney didn’t immediately return a telephone call Tuesday.

None of the company’s Marines has been charged, but eight members of the company were ordered back to Camp Lejeune after the incident. The remainder of the unit was ordered to leave Afghanistan and return to ships in the Persian Gulf.

Gibson said he couldn’t provide details on why Galvin and Nobel were singled out, adding that it was unlikely other Marines would be formally examined.

The court of inquiry, which was last used to investigate the deaths of recruits at Parris Island, will be comprised of senior officers who will hear testimony before making a recommendation to Mattis. The officers’ names haven’t been released. Article

Monitoring the ‘election’ pressure cooker.

#1:

Pakistan’s top judge on Tuesday ordered the government to allow Nawaz Sharif to return home, saying its deportation of the former Prime Minister in September violated an earlier court ruling.

Hundreds of Mr Sharif’s supporters clapped and shouted slogans against military ruler President Pervez Musharraf outside the Supreme Court after the move by Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry.

The judge also accused current Premier Shaukat Aziz of disobeying the Supreme Court’s orders when Mr Sharif was put onto a plane to Saudi Arabia on September 10, hours after ending his seven-year exile.

Justice Chaudhry, a thorn in the government’s side since Gen. Musharraf tried to sack him earlier in 2007, had ruled on August 23 that Mr Sharif had an “inalienable right” to come home and told authorities not to hinder him. “The judgment passed by this court is very much intact… and is required to be implemented in letter and spirit,” Justice Chaudhry told the court as he adjourned a hearing on appeals against the deportation until November 8.

“There was a clear-cut violation of our judgment.” Article

#2:

An 11-member bench of the Supreme Court said on Tuesday that it would decide a number of petitions challenging President General Pervez Musharraf’s eligibility to run for president on Friday. Article

#3:

Pakistan President General Pervez Musharraf is being advised to declare emergency in the country before a possible Supreme Court decision against his eligibility, official sources said.

“Though the President is not inclined on declaring emergency, his advisers are preparing a draft decree in this regard (to declare emergency).

This will be an option with the President if the Supreme Court decides against him,” a senior government official told this newspaper.

[snip]

The official said, “Some of Gen. Musharraf’s advisers think the time is ripe to declare emergency in the country.” Article

Chaos on hold — for now.

A tense calm prevailed in Swat district on Tuesday following a temporary ceasefire between militants and government forces on Monday as a 25-member local jirga won support from the militants and the security forces for a permanent ceasefire, officials and elders said.

“We have separately met military officials and a Taliban commander to win their support for a permanent ceasefire in the Kabal area,” Israr Ahmed, a key jirga member, said after the meetings. He said the jirga had meetings with Colonels Sarfraz and Jawad and Taliban commander Akbar Hussain to discuss the possibility of a ceasefire in Kabal and surroundings.

“Both sides extended their full cooperation and from tomorrow (Wednesday) onwards Kabal bazaar will be reopened,” Awami National Party leader and jirga member Fazle Maullah told reporters. Under the proposed permanent ceasefire deal, the jirga said, the army would restrict itself to Kabal Golf Ground whereas the militants would remove their bunkers and leave the bazaar. Article

Summary here and here.

Op-ed du jour:

In America’s darkest hour, Franklin Delano Roosevelt urged the nation not to succumb to “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror.” But that was then.

Today, many of the men who hope to be the next president – including all of the candidates with a significant chance of receiving the Republican nomination – have made unreasoning, unjustified terror the centerpiece of their campaigns. Article

Yuppers. Delineating the full circle. Gotta love Studs:

In 1978, with broad public support, Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which placed national security investigations, including wiretapping, under a system of warrants approved by a special court. The law was not perfect, but as a result of its enactment and a series of subsequent federal laws, a generation of Americans has come to adulthood protected by a legal structure and a social compact making clear that government will not engage in unbridled, dragnet seizure of electronic communications.

The Bush administration, however, tore apart that carefully devised legal structure and social compact. To make matters worse, after its intrusive programs were exposed, the White House and the Senate Intelligence Committee proposed a bill that legitimized blanket wiretapping without individual warrants. The legislation directly conflicts with the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution, requiring the government to obtain a warrant before reading the e-mail messages or listening to the telephone calls of its citizens, and to state with particularity where it intends to search and what it expects to find.

Compounding these wrongs, Congress is moving in a haphazard fashion to provide a “get out of jail free card” to the telephone companies that violated the rights of their subscribers. Some in Congress argue that this law-breaking is forgivable because it was done to help the government in a time of crisis. But it’s impossible for Congress to know the motivations of these companies or to know how the government will use the private information it received from them.

And it is not as though the telecommunications companies did not know that their actions were illegal. Judge Vaughn Walker of federal district court in San Francisco, appointed by President George H. W. Bush, noted that in an opinion in one of the immunity provision lawsuits the “very action in question has previously been held unlawful.” Article

A bombshell dropped on Britain.

More details have emerged about the nature of the tipoff provided by Saudi Arabia to the United Kingdom in 2004 which King Abdullah said was ignored by the British government.

In an interview with the BBC’s John Simpson on Monday, King Abdullah said his country had passed on critical intelligence to Britain that could have stopped the London bombings but it was ignored. At least 56 people were killed when four separate explosions ripped through three London underground trains and a bus during the morning rush hour on July 7, 2005. They came to be known as the 7/7 bombings.

“I believe that most countries are not taking this issue (of terrorism) seriously, including, unfortunately, Great Britain,” the Saudi king said through a translator. “We have sent information to Great Britain before the (first) terrorist attack in Britain, but unfortunately no action was taken and it may have been able to avert the tragedy.”

Responding to the King’s disclosure, British intelligence services described the comments as a myth. “No prior warning of the attacks was received from any source,” said MI5 in a statement posted on its website late on Monday. “The Saudis provided information about possible planning for an attack in the UK which was materially different from the attacks that took place in London on July 7,” it said.

However, the BBC reported on Monday that King Abdullah was referring to an alleged memo sent on December 14, 2004, to the Saudi embassy in Washington which was shared with the CIA and MI5.

The memo stated that in December 2004, the Saudi government had arrested one of its nationals, named Adel, who had revealed under interrogation that in six months there would be a multi-faceted operation in London, using explosives from Bosnia, and would include the area around Edgeware Road. Adel, according to the memo, claimed that $500,000 was still needed to fund the London operation and four people would be carrying it out and although he did not know their names, he gave their rough ages, heights and descriptions.

In February 2005, the Saudis provided another report to the Americans and British with a more detailed description of those who were to carry out the attacks.

Among other things, the second report stated that the attack would involve explosives and a Syrian contact for financing. Article

Lessons direly in need for the U.S. congress to learn: Just Say No.

An unprecedented political impasse has all but ended Japan’s active part in the War on Terror and may have triggered the countdown to an early general election next spring.

Tokyo will be forced [Thursday] to suspend indefinitely its controversial military presence in the Indian Ocean after months of bitter feuding and the surprise resignation of a prime minister.

After pumping nearly half a million kilolitres of oil to a variety of allied vessels over the past six years, the supply ship Tokiwa has performed what was probably its last task of the mission: filling the fuel tanks of a Pakistani naval destroyer.

Racing vainly against a deadline that expires tomorrow at midnight, Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda yesterday failed to win parliamentary approval for a law that would have extended Japan’s practical support for the coalition efforts in Afghanistan.

Although the Government said that the setback was unlikely to cause permanent harm to Japan-US relations, it underlines the continuing chaos left by the sudden resignation of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe last month and is expected to sour badly Mr Fukuda’s planned visit to Washington next month. Article

Noted FYI:

Russia says it has successfully test-fired a number of short-range missile interceptors from a site in Kazakhstan.

The test comes amid tensions with the United States over Washington’s plans to set up its missile defence shield in the Czech Republic and Poland. Article

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

Nigerian militants have freed six foreign oil workers abducted last week from an Italian oil ship off the coast of southern Nigeria.

Italian energy company Eni says the Polish and Indian workers were released Tuesday and are in good health. Article

Also:

Three youths from Tamil Nadu, working for an Italian petroleum ship company in Nigeria, were abducted on Friday by armed militants demanding USD 50 million for their release.

The parents came to know about the abduction on Saturday when the company officials in Nigeria informed them of the incident, official sources said. Article

On the Scot who, among other notable positions, ruled Finland.

Partial day off, so very light posting today.

IRAQ IIO

Summaries here and here and here. Also this.

TURKISH TIGHTROPE

Summary here.

AFGHANISTAN

Summary here and here.

PAKISTAN

Summary here and here.

RAIDERS ON THE HORN

Summary here.

Unless (as rumored below) he is fleeing the country, under a parliamentary system ex-prime minister Gedi is still a sitting member.

Somali Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi resigned Monday following a long-running feud with the president, as the chaotic country sank deeper into a political, security and humanitarian crisis.

[snip]

He handed his resignation letter to President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, who immediately appointed Gedi’s deputy, Salim Aliyow Ibrow, as interim prime minister.

[snip]

Gedi, 55, took the helm of the transitional federal government in November 2004 but has often been at loggerheads with Yusuf. The men come from Somalia’s two main rival clans.

[snip]

Yusuf had been pushing parliament to oust the premier for failing to end the Islamist-led insurgency, draft a new constitution and bolster federal government.

Critics also blame Gedi for being behind the decision to invite Ethiopian forces into Somalia to help rescue the struggling government in its battle against Islamist militants. Article

Also:

The former prime minister of the transitional federal government of Somalia, Prof. Ali Mohamed Gedi, who resigned today in the face of mounting pressure, departed to Nairobi, Kenya, by special jet.

The purpose of Gedi’s trip to Kenya is yet to be known, but unconfirmed reports suggest that Gedi and members of his government have received asylum in the United States. Article

Summaries here and here and here.

Staking out nodes of influence.

Iraq’s Sunni vice president wants President Jalal Talabani to push parliament to pardon security detainees who aren’t what he called “dangerous elements” that would rejoin the insurgency, Tareq al-Hashemi’s office said Sunday.

The request to Talabani and Adil Abdul-Mahdi, the other vice president, is the latest move in a vigorous campaign by al-Hashemi, a Sunni Arab, to win the release of thousands of detainees held in Iraqi and U.S.-run detention facilities without charge.

Nearly 90 percent of the estimated 25,000 Iraqis held by the U.S. military are believed to be members of the once-dominant Sunni Arab minority, a fact that Sunni politicians say is evidence of sectarian policies of the Shiite-dominated government.

Al-Hashemi’s request was certain to further ruffle Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who has been involved in a very public squabble with the vice president over many issues.

[snip]

Al-Hashemi’s request for the intervention of Talabani and Abdul-Mahdi suggests that he has given up on al-Maliki issuing such a pardon, but it’s uncertain whether a motion for a pardon would pass the fractured 275-seat parliament.

Al-Hashemi has been touring prisons across the country in recent weeks. Footage broadcast by popular pan-Arab satellite news channels show him talking to detainees, including teenagers, pledging to do everything he can to secure release for the innocent.

His visits have apparently irked al-Maliki. Last week he issued a statement saying he would ban visits to prisons by officials seeking to make political gains. He did not mention al-Hashemi by name, but the vice president responded with his own statement saying the prime minister had no authority to stop his prison visits. Article

Thought it worth a mention of this, from Kuwait:

The Borders Security Department is interrogating an officer posted at the Northern borders after Saudi authorities informed that two Afghans managed to sneak into Iraq through the Kuwaiti borders, reports Al-Seyassah daily. Article

The odious Ahmad is ba-a-a-a-ack. This does not represent progress.

Ahmad Chalabi, the controversial, ubiquitous Iraqi politician and one-time Bush administration favorite, has re-emerged as a central figure in the latest U.S. strategy for Iraq.

His latest job: To press Iraq’s central government to use early security gains from the surge to deliver better electricity, health, education and local security services to Baghdad neighborhoods. That’s the next phase of the surge plan. Until now, the U.S. military, various militias, insurgents and some U.S. backed groups have provided those services without great success.

That the U.S. and Iraqi officials are again turning to Chalabi, this time to restore life to Baghdad neighborhoods, speaks to his resiliency in this nascent government. It’s also, some say, his latest effort to promote himself as a true national advocate for everyday Iraqis.

[snip]

Earlier this month, Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki named Chalabi as head of the services committee, a consortium of eight service ministries and two Baghdad municipal posts, that is tasked with bringing services to Baghdad, the heart of the surge plan.

[snip]

So far, the central government has not been effective. On Saturday, Petraeus traveled to Arab Jabour with Chalabi, their first trip together to a Baghdad neighborhood since Chalabi’s new posting. During the trip, Col. Terry Ferrell, 2nd brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division described where he wants to see a new health care facility. Chalabi chimed in: “Where is the Health Ministry in this?”

“That’s your job,” Petraeus replied.

And as Chalabi tried to assure the residents of Arab Jabour that the government would help, they told him they had heard it before. So far, the vice president, the governor of Baghdad and a top Iraqi police commander have traveled to Arab Jabour promising to deliver 200 police officers. None have shown up.

[snip]

So Chalabi has his work cut out for him.

Iraqi politicians have used service ministries to promote themselves before, and some suspect that Chalabi took this post to reach a populace that rejected him in the 2006 election when he won no official seats in the government.

[snip]

As he met with residents of Arab Jabour concerned about security and basic services, however, it was Chalabi the historian speaking, not Chalabi the ombudsman.

He reminded them that Alexander the Great once traveled through their neighborhood and that, at one point, 600,000 people lived in the area.

“We have a doctor among us,” one resident remarked politely.

Minutes later, another muttered: “He cannot help us.” Article

Summary here.

What’s been underway.

#1:

Alongside diplomatic initiatives, Turkey has used tough rhetoric to try to press the United States and Iraq into action. Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan said on Saturday a military operation could be carried out whenever it was needed.

“The United States has the real responsibility. It should hand them (PKK) over to Turkey and cooperate. Neither the U.S. nor Iraq has done anything that satisfies Turkey so far,” Deputy Prime Minister Cemil Cicek was quoted as saying on Sunday.

“We can use or continue to use diplomatic means, or resort to military means. All of these are on the table,” Foreign Minister Ali Babacan said in translated comments on Iran’s Press TV television channel, during a visit to Iran.

[snip]

Erdogan is due to visit President George W. Bush on Nov. 5. Senior Turkish diplomats say Erdogan has given Washington and Baghdad a deadline for showing concrete results or steps to be taken on the Kurds and the Washington talks are the last chance. Article

#2:

The deputy speaker of the Parliament of Kurdistan, Kamal Kirkuki, charged Sunday that Turkey’s threats to attack Kurdish rebels in Iraq’s northern region were motivated by an unspoken fear of the democracy developing beyond its southern border.

Turkey has been threatening to launch cross-border operations to seek out rebels from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), who are hiding in the rugged Qandil mountains of northern Iraq and attacking into Turkey.

But Kirkuki told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa he believed Turkey had a ’second reason.’

‘They don’t like the experiment in democracy we Kurds are now conducting,’ he said in the interview in Erbil, the capital of the Kurdish autonomous region.

Kirkuki is a former member of the Peshmerga, or fighters, of the Democratic Party of Kurdistan (KDP) of Masud Barzana, who is now the leader of Iraq’s Kurdish Autonomous Region. Article

#3:

Turkey’s foreign minister Sunday said his country aims to stop attacks by Kurdish rebels but has no interest in occupying northern Iraq.

“Our goal is terrorism and the terrorist groups and not the Iraqi soil and nation,” Ali Babacan said at a news conference in Tehran. Article

#4:

Iraqi Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani once again has rejected calls from Turkey to arrest and extradite leaders of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) based in northern Iraq, but vowed to expel them from the region.

“I will not hand over any person to any regional state no matter the cost; however, in truth, I will not allow any PKK official to use the Kurdistan region as a base or to be present here and threaten the security of Turkey,” Barzani said in an interview with Al Jazeera television aired on Sunday. “I will expel him from the Kurdistan region, but I will not hand him over.” Article

#5:

Britons are among foreigners attacking Turkish troops with the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in northern Iraq, a leading British paper reported yesterday.

The report in The Sunday Times also revealed that Russians, Germans, Greeks, Iranians and Arabs are helping the organization, listed as a terrorist organization by a large majority of the international community.

The Sunday Times article, sent from the Kandil Mountains in northern Iraq, reports that several Europeans have joined forces with the PKK, citing PKK members. “At least three Britons were in the PKK’s 3,000-strong force, boasted one fighter as he and a group of men huddled in a room discussing the latest clashes with the Turkish army. Others include Russians, Germans, Greeks, Iranians and Arabs,” the article said.

[snip]

When Turkey’s Foreign Minister Ali Babacan pressed for the closure of PKK camps, the Iraqi officials argued that the PKK bases were in remote rugged mountains that are difficult to access.

Babacan responded bluntly that “if journalists are able to find the camps, then you can certainly find them too,” the diplomat said. The foreign media has recently run several interviews with PKK terrorists from their bases in northern Iraq. On Saturday, BBC News posted an article from the border city of Zakho in northern Iraq titled “A mountain meeting with the PKK.” Article

Afghanistan summary here and here.

Pakistan summary here.

Contours of chaos: awash in arms.

Many former militia commanders and residents in northern Afghanistan have been hoarding weapons in violation of the country’s disarmament laws, giving the excuse that they face a spreading Taliban insurgency from the south that government forces alone are too frail to stop, Afghan and Western officials say.

After years of moderate success for government disarmament programs, rumors of widespread defiance in the north have arisen recently among government officials and intelligence agencies in Kabul and elsewhere. Although there is little hard evidence that commanders are greatly enlarging their arsenals, officials say, some have been thwarting government programs, refusing to disarm and possibly even remobilizing militias.

The talk of rearming underscores a deepening north-south ethnic divide that some diplomats and Afghan officials privately worry could lead the way toward a shift of power back to warlords - and toward a countrywide armed conflict - if left unchecked. And the situation poses a major challenge for President Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun from the south, whose administration has failed to win the confidence of many non-Pashtun leaders and northerners.

Prices on the weapons black market in the north have skyrocketed as residents, governed by suspicion and foreboding, have kept their firearms, driving down the supply.

[snip]

The Taliban insurgency is strongest in southern and eastern Afghanistan. And while it has been able to bedevil Afghan and international troops in some other regions of the country, before this year its reach rarely stretched into the northern provinces.

But government officials report an increase in Taliban activity in the north this year, particularly in the northwest. The number of Taliban attacks on Afghan and international security forces in Balkh and the other relatively peaceful provinces of north-central Afghanistan has risen from last year, the authorities say.

Afghan and Western officials also say in addition to an increase in Taliban activity, there has been an escalation in crime and, in some areas, tensions among rival northern political factions. These officials say it is often difficult to determine who is to blame for specific violent acts.

Afghan government officials say that in certain northern districts, militia commanders have evaded government weapons inspectors by breaking down their stockpiles of illegal firearms and redistributing them throughout their communities, making them harder to find. Afghan and Western officials say weapons are hidden everywhere: in grain silos and closets, in mountain caves and in holes in the ground. Article

Short follow-up to a story originally out of Pakistan mentioned here earlier:

Afghanistan on Sunday denied allegations it was involved in the unrest in Waziristan and Swat, saying that it would not let Afghan soil be used for anti-Pakistan activities. “We will not allow anyone to use our soil against Pakistan,” President Hamid Karzai’s spokesman Humayun Hamidzada told Daily Times, a day after the NWFP caretaker chief minister hinted at the possible involvement of India or Afghanistan in terrorist activities in the Swat region. “Using terrorism as a foreign policy tool will serve nobody’s interests; such a practice is bound to backfire,” Hamidzada said.… Article

Monitoring the ‘election’ pressure cooker.

#1:

In the face of escalating militant violence, the former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto has returned to her ancestral homeland under extraordinarily tight security.

It was her first big move since an assassination attempt against her killed 139 people, and in a quick and tightly scripted visit, Bhutto paid respects at the tomb of her father, the former prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and waved to thousands who had gathered to mark her homecoming on Saturday after eight years of exile. But she did not speak to the assembled mass of flag-waving supporters, and concerns about another attack seemed to dictate every aspect of the trip.

[snip]

Her convoy on Saturday, which included vehicles mounted with machine-guns, sped along the route from the airport in the southern city of Sukkur to the tomb in the village of Garhi Khuda Baksh. Only bodyguards and members of the media were allowed near.

The bullet-proof four-wheel-drive was equipped with a hatch in the roof, flanked by two metal slabs. At several points she emerged to show her face to locals who worship the Bhutto name with an almost religious fervour.

[snip]

The security concerns pose a considerable challenge for Bhutto and for Pakistan as parliamentary elections that are due by January draw near. Bhutto, whose Pakistan People’s Party has long relied on mass rallies to drum up support, has said her party is talking with political consultants about other, less dangerous campaign tactics, including tape-recorded messages.

On Saturday Bhutto’s personal bodyguards - many armed with automatic weapons - appeared to be in charge of her protection, with government forces present in modest numbers. Article

More:

…Wearing a black coat and her trademark white headscarf, Bhutto went to the home of Nizmuddin Sammo, a 22-year-old supporter who was killed in the blast, and met with his mother and two sisters, promising them financial assistance from her Pakistan Peoples Party. She praised Sammo as a young man who “lost his life in the moment to save democracy … He did not bow his head before dictatorship and terrorism. His sacrifice will not be in vain.” Article

#2:

Ms Bhutto, who has been in talks about a power-sharing deal with President Musharraf, could still face several cases outside of Pakistan.

One of the most advanced is in Switzerland, where in 2003 Geneva magistrate Daniel Devaud convicted Ms Bhutto of money-laundering.

In his judgment, he found she and her close associates received around $15m in kickbacks from Pakistani government contracts with SGS and Cotecna, two Swiss companies.

Mr Devaud sentenced Ms Bhutto and her husband Asif Zardari to 180 days in prison, ordering them to return $11.9m to the government of Pakistan.

“I certainly don’t have any doubts about the judgments I handed down [which] came after an investigation lasting several years, involving thousands of documents,” he has told the BBC.

Ms Bhutto contested the decision, which was made in her absence, and the case is being reheard, with the former prime minister now facing the more serious charge of aggravated money-laundering.

[snip]

Many in Pakistan assume the Swiss case will now collapse because of the deal struck between Ms Bhutto and President Musharraf.

Yet under Swiss law, even if the government of Pakistan stops co-operating, that would not automatically end legal proceedings in Switzerland.

Vincent Fournier, the Swiss judge in charge of the current case, told the BBC he planned to hand the case over to Geneva’s attorney-general this week.

A second international case involving Ms Bhutto is under way in England.

[snip]

The London case is a civil one. That means it could collapse should President Musharraf’s government decide not to pursue it.

Ms Bhutto also faces allegations concerning the United Nations oil-for-food scandal. Article

#3:

Former journalist and secretary general of the ruling Pakistan Muslim League (PML) Mushahid Hussain and two retired Supreme Court judges have become the latest addition to a growing list of nominees for the largely ceremonial post of caretaker prime minister who will conduct the next general elections. Article

What’s up.