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.

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NAMING THE DISEASE

Dick Cheney ought to leave comedy to the professionals.