To Tame Tehran: "These developments create opportunities for Western leaders well beyond U.N. votes. First, and most obviously, the United States must take advantage of the current climate to further isolate and marginalize Ahmadinejad and his cabal and hold them responsible for the crisis. Calls for constructive engagement with Iran's president are wrong; such overtures would only confirm Ahmadinejad's contention that confrontational policies reap rewards.
Second, U.S. and European leaders must do more to stimulate a serious discussion in Iranian society about the country's security interests, and articulate policies and arguments that will strengthen an Iranian political coalition against nuclear weapons. So far the Tehran regime has monopolized the discussion. Though disguised in assertions about Iran's right to nuclear energy, the strategic thinking of the regime has been quite simple: The United States invaded Iraq because Iraq did not have nuclear weapons; the United States has not invaded North Korea because North Korea has nuclear weapons.
The flaws in this logic must be exposed. In a major public address, President Bush should pledge that the United States will never attack a nonnuclear Iran, while also underscoring that the Iranian process of acquiring nuclear weapons capabilities actually increases the likelihood of military confrontation with the United States. Western leaders should remind Iranian society that a nuclear Iran would also trigger a nuclear arms race in the region, as Egypt and Saudi Arabia would move quickly to develop their own arsenals.
Third, Bush should endorse the idea of creating a regional security organization in the Middle East, which would include Iran. Like the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe during the Cold War, this new organization could begin to provide secur"

The Blog | Matthew Yglesias: Think Again: Iran is a Problem, Not an Emergency | The Huffington Post: "With the latest breakdown in negotiations between Iran and the European Union, the years-long steady drip of Persia-related punditry has become a flood over the past month. Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer fretted on January 17 that the Islamic Republic was 'probably just months' from constructing a bomb, and blamed European fecklessness.
Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol opined in his magazine's January 23 issue that America should be 'holding open the possibility of, and beginning to prepare for, various forms of military action' because Iran's 'nuclear program could well be getting close to the point of no return.' The headline of a Reuel Marc Gerecht article in that magazine's January 30 issue wonders, 'Coming Soon: Nuclear Theocrats?'
Based on such pronouncements, the reasonable reader, while perhaps disagreeing with the neoconservative pundits' preferred 'bombs away' policy, would no doubt conclude that, at a minimum, the Iranian nuclear program is, if unchecked, less than a year away from producing a usable nuclear weapon.
The reality, as Dana Linzer reported in the news pages of the Post last August, is rather different. Rather than being months from a bomb, a National Intelligence Estimate reflecting the consensus view of America's intelligence agencies concluded 'that Iran is about a decade away from manufacturing the key ingredient for a nuclear weapon.' This report revised earlier projections that, while more alarmist, still pegged the figure at five years, not months, and brings American estimates into line with analysis from British and Israeli intelligence. In addition, while manufacturing a sufficient quantity of highly enriched uranium (what"

How U.S. used Iraqi wives for ?leverage? - Conflict in Iraq - MSNBC.com: "But documents describing two 2004 episodes tell a different story as far as short-term detentions by local U.S. units. The documents are among hundreds the Pentagon has released periodically under U.S. court order to meet an American Civil Liberties Union request for information on detention practices.
In one memo, a civilian Pentagon intelligence officer described what happened when he took part in a raid on an Iraqi suspect?s house in Tarmiya, northwest of Baghdad, on May 9, 2004. The raid involved Task Force (TF) 6-26, a secretive military unit formed to handle high-profile targets.
?During the pre-operation brief it was recommended by TF personnel that if the wife were present, she be detained and held in order to leverage the primary target?s surrender,? wrote the 14-year veteran officer.
He said he objected, but when they raided the house the team leader, a senior sergeant, seized her anyway."

Fight the West cannot win : Mail & Guardian Online: " cannot see how all this confrontation will stop Iran doing whatever it likes with its nuclear enrichment. The bombing of carefully dispersed and buried sites might delay deployment. But given the inaccuracy of US bombers, the death and destruction caused to Iran?s cities would be a gift to anti-Western extremists and have every world terrorist reporting for duty. Nor would the ?coward?s war? of economic sanctions be any more effective.

By all accounts, Ahmadinejad is not secure. He is subject to the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. His foe, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, retains some power. Tehran is not a Saddamist dictatorship or a Taliban autocracy. It is a shambolic oligarchy with bureaucrats and technocrats jostling for power with clerics. Despite a quarter century of effort, the latter have not created a truly fundamentalist Islamic state. Iran is a classic candidate for the politics of subtle engagement.

This means strengthening every argument in the hands of those Iranians who do not want nuclear weapons, who crave a secular state and good relations with the West. No such argument embraces name-calling, sabre-rattling, sanctions or bombs.

Iran is the regional superstate. If ever there were a realpolitik demanding- to be ?hugged close?, it is this one, however distasteful its leader and his centrifuges. If you cannot stop a man buying a gun, the next best bet is to make him your friend, not your enemy. ? ? Guardian Newspapers 2006"

U.S. 'outsourced' torture, investigator says - International Terrorism - MSNBC.com: "'Deprived of their liberty and all rights'
?On the other hand, it has been proved that individuals have been abducted, deprived of their liberty and all rights and transported to different destinations in Europe to be handed over to countries in which they have suffered degrading treatment and torture,? the report said.
In the report, Marty analyzed the cases of an Egyptian cleric allegedly kidnapped in Italy and sent back to Egypt and a German captured in Macedonia and taken to Afghanistan.
Last week, Italy?s justice minister formally asked the United States to allow Italian prosecutors to question 22 purported CIA operatives they accuse of kidnapping the Egyptian cleric, Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, in 2003 from a Milan street."

U.S. 'outsourced' torture, investigator says - International Terrorism - MSNBC.com: "STRASBOURG, France - The head of a European investigation into alleged CIA secret prisons in Europe said Tuesday there was evidence the United States outsourced torture to other countries and it was likely European governments knew about it.
But Swiss senator Dick Marty said there was no formal evidence so far of the existence of clandestine detention centers in Romania or Poland as alleged by the New York-based Human Rights Watch.
?There is a great deal of coherent, convergent evidence pointing to the existence of a system of ?relocation? or ?outsourcing? of torture,? Marty said in a report presented to the Council of Europe, the human rights watchdog investigating the alleged secret prisons."

Daily Times - Site Edition: "Unless policy makers are prepared to take into account the fact that Iran is no minor player in the Central Asia-Middle Eastern scene, and that its influence extends deep into Shia Iraq and in places like Palestine, Jordan and Syria, we are likely to witness a repeat of the same military adventurism that brought the US into Afghanistan and Iraq"

The Sentinel: "O'Connell points out that, while neoconservatives advocate several months of bombing Iran ? two or three months, at least, of bombing purported 'nuclear' sites in Iran, those sites are all in residential neighborhoods.
Supposing the administration were to bomb millions of Iranians, for two or three months, as neoconservatives are proposing, O'Connell wonders. 'If we start another war,' in Iran this time, 'how do we get out of it?' 'There is no exit strategy ? like in Iraq.' Right now, the U.S. maintains a tenuous hold in Iraq because of the majority Shia population who, led largely by Ayatollah Sistani, have chosen to try to participate in reestablishing Iraq as a nation. But Iraqi Shia might well react against an administration bombing millions of Shia in Iran, where they are 89 percent of the population.
Shia Islam has two main schools of thought: the theocratic, which predominates in Iran; and one that more separates church and state, which predominates in Iraq. Administration policy seems to aim at driving the two populations together in opposition to the U.S. This would approach the goal of a pan-Islam war, global war between the West and Muslims, advocated by some well-placed neoconservatives and also by Osama bin Laden. "

TIME.com: Slamming Its Doors on the World -- Jan. 23, 2006 -- Page 2: "writers for posting subversive material online, handing them jail terms ranging from a few days to 14 years. Last June, following Ahmadinejad's surprise election, the government launched a fresh onslaught, this time against the websites and blogs themselves. Using keyword filters and censorship software pirated from U.S. firms, the government blocked thousands of websites containing news, political content and satire. It even blocked the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM). The crude filters make it impossible to look up suggestive words such as women, so a Google search on women's pregnancy produces an ACCESS DENIED screen. 'The end result is a marginalization of women and women's issues,' says activist Sussan Tahmasebi.
Activist webmasters and bloggers are trying to navigate around the filters. Many have changed their domain names to get themselves back online for a few days until the censors catch up. Women in Iran, an assertive website carrying news and reports about women's issues, switched from com to a org address after being blocked, was filtered again and is now accessible as net. Activists in Iran now hoard backup domain names, although they have recently hit an unexpected wall: Iranian Web developers say that U.S. domain providers have stopped selling addresses to Iranian Web clients, claiming the sales contravene U.S. economic sanctions against Iran. As a result, some activists are investigating the possibility of running their sites through satellite services, which may allow them to evade the government's reach. Hossein Derakhshan, a prominent Iranian exile blogger who offers a quirky, Jon Stewart--like brew of political commentary, has watched Iranian visitors to his blog plummet from a high of about 8,000 hits a day to"

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | US army in Iraq institutionally racist, claims British officer: "A senior British officer has criticised the US army for its conduct in Iraq, accusing it of institutional racism, moral righteousness, misplaced optimism, and of being ill-suited to engage in counter-insurgency operations.
The blistering critique, by Brigadier Nigel Aylwin-Foster, who was the second most senior officer responsible for training Iraqi security forces, reflects criticism and frustration voiced by British commanders of American military tactics.
What is startling is the severity of his comments - and the decision by Military Review, a US army magazine, to publish them.
American soldiers, says Brig Aylwin-Foster, were 'almost unfailingly courteous and considerate'. But he says 'at times their cultural insensitivity, almost certainly inadvertent, arguably amounted to institutional racism'.
The US army, he says, is imbued with an unparalleled sense of patriotism, duty, passion and talent. 'Yet it seemed weighed down by bureaucracy, a stiflingly hierarchical outlook, a predisposition to offensive operations and a sense that duty required all issues to be confronted head-on.'
Brig Aylwin-Foster says the American army's laudable 'can-do' approach paradoxically led to another trait, namely 'damaging optimism'. Such an ethos, he says, 'is unhelpful if it discourages junior commanders from reporting unwelcome news up the chain of command'.
But his central theme is that US military commanders have failed to train and educate their soldiers in the art of counter-insurgency operations and the need to cultivate the 'hearts and minds' of the local population.
While US officers in Iraq criticised their allies for being too reluctant to use force, their strategy was 'to kill or"

US Army its own worst enemy: British officer - World - smh.com.au: "A senior British Army officer has written a scathing critique of the US Army and its performance in Iraq, accusing it of cultural ignorance, moralistic self-righteousness, unproductive micromanagement and unwarranted optimism.
His publisher: the US Army.
In an article published this week in the army magazine Military Review, Brigadier Nigel Aylwin-Foster, who was deputy commander of a program to train the Iraqi military, said American officers in Iraq displayed such 'cultural insensitivity' that it 'arguably amounted to institutional racism' and may have spurred the growth of the insurgency.
The US Army has been slow to adapt its tactics, he argues, and its approach during the early stages of the occupation 'exacerbated the task it now faces by alienating significant sections of the population'.
The army magazine's decision to publish the essay - which has already provoked an intense reaction among US officers - is part of a broader self-examination in many parts of the force as it approaches the end of its third year in Iraq.
The army was full of soldiers showing qualities such as patriotism, duty, passion and talent, writes Brigadier Aylwin-Foster.
'Yet it seemed weighed down by bureaucracy, a stiflingly hierarchical outlook, a predisposition to offensive operations, and a sense that duty required all issues to be confronted head-on.'
Those traits reflect the army's traditional focus on conventional wars and are seen by some experts as less appropriate for counterinsurgency, which they say needs patience, cultural understanding and a willingness to use innovative, counterintuitive approaches.
In counterinsurgency campaigns, Brigadier Aylwin-Foster says, 'the quick solution i"

Opinion: More Information on Iran, please! | Germany | Deutsche Welle | 11.01.2006: "Although Tehran has signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and accepted the auxiliary protocol, it should abstain from every form of uranium enrichment and now, even nuclear research. These are things which every other country in a similar situation would be allowed to do; and countries who haven't even signed the NPT, such "

(DV) Norouzi: US Media and the Road to War With Iran: "As the U.S. mutates the rationale for its preemptive invasion of Iraq, the mainstream media continues to pander to xenophobic and partisan denominators vis-?-vis Iran. Despite massive government intelligence failures concerning the September 11th tragedy, the heartbreaking devastation of Hurricane Katrina, and the perversely flawed intelligence on non-existent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, major media outlets persist in rushing to judgment on the manufactured Iranian nuclear 'crisis'. It is a sickening display.
The lopsided reporting is nothing new. American media, in complicity with the U.S. government, has waged a no-holds barred image war with Iran ever since it broke diplomatic relations following the Islamic Revolution. It is safe to say that approximately 99% of the media coverage of Iran over the past 25+ years has been negative, and of that, about 99% is of a political nature. Therefore, although politics is but one facet of life, Iran -- its people, its culture, its history -- is perceived almost entirely through a political vacuum. In this way, Iranians remain an abstraction in the American consciousness, perfectly situated for slaughter should circumstances desire.

The image war officially began in 1979, after large mobs of Iranian students and revolutionaries, demanding the U.S. extradition of the exiled Shah to Iran, stormed the U.S. embassy (dubbed the ?den of spies?) and took 52 white male American hostages. The hostage issue was a national obsession, prompting ABC executives to create a specially devoted TV program, ?The Iran Crisis: America Held Hostage,? to update Americans on the situation day by day. Veteran newsman Ted Koppel soon took the helm as anchor of the program, which lasted for 440 of the 444 days the hostages were held. After the "

NSA spied on its own employees, other U.S. intelligence personnel, journalists, and members of Congress :: Alternative Press Review :: Your Guide Beyond the Mainstream: "NSA spied on its own employees, other U.S. intelligence personnel, journalists, and members of Congress

By Wayne Madsen
NSA spied on its own employees, other U.S. intelligence personnel, and their journalist and congressional contacts. WMR has learned that the National Security Agency (NSA), on the orders of the Bush administration, eavesdropped on the private conversations and e-mail of its own employees, employees of other U.S. intelligence agencies -- including the CIA and DIA -- and their contacts in the media, Congress, and oversight agencies and offices.
The journalist surveillance program, code named 'Firstfruits,' was part of a Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) program that was maintained at least until October 2004 and was authorized by then-DCI Porter Goss. Firstfruits was authorized as part of a DCI 'Countering Denial and Deception' program responsible to an entity known as the Foreign Denial and Deception Committee (FDDC). Since the intelligence community's reorganization, the DCI has been replaced by the Director of National Intelligence headed by John Negroponte and his deputy, former NSA director Gen. Michael Hayden.

Firstfruits was a database that contained both the articles and the transcripts of telephone and other communications of particular Washington journalists known to report on sensitive U.S. intelligence activities, particularly those involving NSA. According to NSA sources, the targeted journalists included author James Bamford, the New York Times' James Risen, the Washington Post's Vernon Loeb, the New Yorker's Seymour Her"

TheStar.com - Weaselly Rice tortures facts: "Our secretary of state's tortuous defence of supposedly non-existent CIA torture chambers in Eastern Europe was an acid flashback to Clintonian parsing.
Just as Bill Clinton pranced around questions about marijuana use at Oxford during the '92 campaign by saying he had never broken the laws of his country, so Condoleezza Rice pranced around questions about outsourcing torture by suggesting that President George W. Bush had never broken the laws of his country.
But in Bill's case, he was only talking about smoking a little joint, while Condi is talking about snatching people off the street and throwing them into lethal joints.
'The United States government does not authorize or condone torture of detainees,' she said.
It all depends on what you mean by 'authorize,'' 'condone,'' ``torture' and 'detainees.''"

Al Jazeera: "Allawi, who spent three decades in exile working partly with British and U.S. intelligence after breaking with Saddam Hussein and his Ba?ath party, met with various Arab leaders and officials the past period, discussing what The Tehran Times said was a plan that will lead to a coup in Iraq by reestablishing the Iraqi army and reorganizing the scattered forces of the Ba?ath Party, believing that only a military coup will extricate Iraq from its current crisis, and that Allawi is the man for the job.
The reason why the Bush administration and other countries in the Middle East region would support a coup in Iraq is the fear from a possible victory of the Shia, backed by Iran, in the December 15 parliamentary elections, which they think would lead to the formation of a 'Shia Crescent' in the region.
Washington claims it wants to establish Iraqi Unity, but the situation we're facing here is that the ethnic tension between Iraq?s ethnic groups has worsened ever since the occupying soldiers set foot in the country. Now "

Iran News - Elbaradei confirms Iran's position on N-energy: "LONDON, December 11 (IranMania) - Director General of International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Mohammad Elbaradei confirmed what Iran calls 'nuclear apartheid' saying this is the same unequal security system in the region.
Speaking to CNN, Mohammad Elbaradei who won the Nobel Peace Prize said some nations tell others that nuclear programs are not good for you but at the same time they opt for continuation of their nuclear activities.
On a question on whether he believes in the existence of what Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad calls nuclear apartheid in the world, he said 'I call it an unequal security system.'
He said to establish a security zone in the tense regions such as the Middle East, several crises including Palestine, Kashmir and North Korea should be resolved, IRNA said.
'Iran is in a region where some nations are not its friends and this a reason that it feels unsecured.' "

Crude Designs: The Rip-Off of Iraq?s Oil Wealth - UN Security Council - Global Policy Forum: "1. The Ultimate Prize: Anglo-American interests in Gulf oil
Back to top
The UK and US have long had their eyes on the massive energy resources of Iraq and the Gulf. In 1918 Sir Maurice Hankey, Britain?s First Secretary of the War Cabinet wrote:
?Oil in the next war will occupy the place of coal in the present war, or at least a parallel place to coal. The only big potential supply that we can get under British control is the Persian [now Iran] and Mesopotamian [now Iraq] supply? Control over these oil supplies becomes a first class British war aim.?(1)
After World War II both the US and UK identified the importance of Middle Eastern oil. British officials believed that the area was ?a vital prize for any power interested in world influence or domination?(2), while their US counterparts saw the oil resources of Saudi Arabia as a ?stupendous source of strategic power and one of the greatest material prizes in world history?(3).
TURNING BACK TO THE MIDDLE EAST
With over 60% of the world?s oil reserves,(4) their interest in the Gulf region is unsurprising. Iraq alone has the third largest oil reserves on the planet ? accounting for 10% of the world total. Iraq is also reckoned to have the world?s largest unexplored potential, primarily in the Western Desert. On top of its 115 billion barrels of proven reserves, Iraq is estimated to have between 100 and 200 billion barrels of further possible (as yet undiscovered) reserves. Furthermore, not only are Iraqi and Gulf reserves huge, they are mostly onshore, in favourable reservoir structures, and extractable at extremely low cost.
Since the nationalisation of the major oil industries of the Middle East in the 1970s, Gulf reserv"

Qaeda-Iraq Link U.S. Cited Is Tied to Coercion Claim - New York Times: "WASHINGTON, Dec. 8 - The Bush administration based a crucial prewar assertion about ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda on detailed statements made by a prisoner while in Egyptian custody who later said he had fabricated them to escape harsh treatment, according to current and former government officials.
The officials said the captive, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, provided his most specific and elaborate accounts about ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda only after he was secretly handed over to Egypt by the United States in January 2002, in a process known as rendition.
The new disclosure provides the first public evidence that bad intelligence on Iraq may have resulted partly from the administration's heavy reliance on third countries to carry out interrogations of Qaeda members and others detained as part of American counterterrorism efforts. The Bush administration used Mr. Libi's accounts as the basis for its prewar claims, now discredited, that ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda included training in explosives and chemical weapons.
The fact that Mr. Libi recanted after the American invasion of Iraq and that intelligence based on his remarks was withdrawn by the C.I.A. in March 2004 has been public for more than a year. But American officials had not previously acknowledged either that Mr. Libi made the false statements in foreign custody or that Mr. Libi contended that his statements had been coerced.
A government official said that some intelligence provided by Mr. Libi about Al Qaeda had been accurate, and that Mr. Libi's claims that he had been treated harshly in Egyptian custody had not been corroborated."

Project Censored Media democracy in action: "Military autopsy reports provide indisputable proof that detainees are being tortured to death while in US military custody. Yet the US corporate media are covering it with the seriousness of a garage sale for the local Baptist Church."

BERLIN The U.S. secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, will fly into a storm of criticism Monday as she begins a four-country swing through Europe amid mounting outrage over allegations that the United States has conducted covert counterterrorism missions on the Continent.

Accusations that the United States has snatched terrorism suspects from European streets, operated secret detention facilities, and used airports as stopover points for CIA planes transferring captives have caused a furor.

The charges have provoked parliamentary inquiries, caused close U.S. allies to issue indignant demands for information, and triggered a spate of criminal investigations.

The Angry Arab News Service/????? ????? ?????? ??????: "This is how we know that democracy has finally arrived to Iraq: 'The U.S. military command in Baghdad acknowledged for the first time yesterday that it has paid Iraqi newspapers to carry positive news about U.S. efforts in Iraq, but officials characterized the payments as part of a legitimate campaign to counter insurgents' "

Iran, Iraq, Turkey et al.?-?Editorials/Op-Ed?-?The Washington Times, America's Newspaper: "If U.S. troops leave Iraq early, it would be tragic to think that American men and women have died to strengthen the Iranian regime. That is why there is no other choice but victory in Iraq and finding a way to deal with Iran without a direct military confrontation. Whatever Mr. Talabani says, the United States is already fighting Iran in Iraqi territory.
On the nuclear front, the recent decision by the International Atomic Energy Agency to postpone referring Iran's nuclear program to the U.N. Security Council is a sign that the world body is still in control. Iran isn't bluffing when it reasons that it should have the right to have nuclear capabilities since Israel does. No one argues against Iran having nuclear power for energy, but the worry that such a program could be used to build weapons makes Russia's proposal a savior. In Tehran, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov tried to persuade the Iranian regime that the uranium should be enriched in Russia. Although the negotiations are not finalized, here are some suggestions to ensure success while dealing with Iran.
First: Sanctions don't work. When people suffer, their good feelings toward America fade. More than half of the 75 million people in Iran are under age 30, and the economy faces both underemployment and unemployment. It would be far more fruitful to lift the embargo and bring full-scale globalization to Iran. This new generation does not remember that the United States sided with Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war. But if sanctions are imposed, it's all anyone will remember.
Second: While trying to establish an Iranian opposition when the regime falls, make sure that it is composed of Iranians who actually live in Iran.
Third: Try to keep the IAEA inspectors in t"

"Bush and the Fear Factor"--A Commentary by Prof. Jack Balkin: "Abraham Lincoln once said that you can't fool all the people all the time. But Bush and Rove realized they didn't have to. Their goal was to split the country almost in half and seize the slightly larger piece. The strategy worked brilliantly. We now live in a bitterly divided nation, with each side unable to understand the other, and with one party controlling all the levers of power. With new judicial appointments and new partisan gerrymanders like that in Texas, the Republicans hope to entrench themselves into the distant future. All the Republicans have to do is hold on to that 51 percent and keep them devoted, distrustful of the other side, afraid and angry.
At some point, however, the piper must be paid. The problems the administration papered over during the past year have only grown worse. Huge tax giveaways have produced only a tepid recovery and sent deficits soaring. The situation in Iraq is slipping out of control. Serious foreign policy crises in North Korea and Iran await. Scandals are brewing beneath the surface: about Halliburton, about the misuse of intelligence before the Iraq war and about prisoner abuse and torture."

Balkinization: "Today the U.S. government formally indicted Jose Padilla, an American citizen arrested in the United States who had been held as an enemy combatant for three years outside the reach of the criminal justice system.

Originally the Justice Department claimed that Padilla had planned to detonate a 'dirty bomb' (i.e., one that would explode radioactive nuclear waste) in the United States. Later the Justice Department changed that to an allegation that he planned to set fire to (or blow up) an apartment building in Chicago. In today's indictment, the Justice Department alleges neither act; instead it claims that Padilla had traveled abroad to become 'a violent jihadist' and that he had conspired to send 'money, physical assets and new recruits' overseas to engage in acts of terrorism.'

Since 9/11 the Bush Administration has sharply criticized others for daring to suggest that citizens accused of terrorism should be dealt with through the criminal justice system. It has insisted that 9/11 changed everything and that terrorism must be dealt with through novel methods that dispense with the ordinary protections that the Constitution affords the accused. Now it has backtracked in one of the most prominent cases and done precisely what it said it could not do-- treat Padilla as a criminal defendant."

New Iraq strategy: Stay in hot spots | csmonitor.com: "That label is often applied to US forces in Fallujah by residents of this Sunni city that once gave bedrock support to Saddam Hussein. 'Fallujah, from day one [of the US attack] to now, is like a big prison - you have a time limit to get out, and to get in, and a [curfew] time you must sleep,' says Sheikh Ahmed Sarhan Abd, deputy head of the Fallujah Sheikhs Council. 'This emergency situation was supposed to last three or four months, not one year.'"

Guardian Unlimited | Guardian daily comment | George Monbiot: Behind the phosphorus clouds are war crimes within war crimes: "The US army knows that its use as a weapon is illegal. In the Battle Book, published by the US Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, my correspondent David Traynier found the following sentence: 'It is against the law of land warfare to employ WP against personnel targets.'
Last night the blogger Gabriele Zamparini found a declassified document from the US department of defence, dated April 1991, and titled 'Possible use of phosphorus chemical'. 'During the brutal crackdown that followed the Kurdish uprising,' it alleges, 'Iraqi forces loyal to President Saddam may have possibly used white phosphorus (WP) chemical weapons against Kurdish rebels and the populace in Erbil ... and Dohuk provinces, Iraq. The WP chemical was delivered by artillery rounds and helicopter gunships ... These reports of possible WP chemical weapon attacks spread quickly ... hundreds of thousands of Kurds fled from these two areas.' The Pentagon is in no doubt, in other words, that white phosphorus is an illegal chemical weapon.
The insurgents, of course, would be just as dead today if they were killed by other means. So does it matter if chemical weapons were mixed with other munitions? It does. Anyone who has seen those photos of the lines of blind veterans at the remembrance services for the first world war will surely understand the point of international law, and the dangers of undermining it."

Cursor.org - Table of Contents page: "A Washington Post editorial asks, 'If an American pilot is captured in the Middle East, then beaten, held naked in a cold cell and subjected to simulated drowning, will Mr. Goss say that he has not been tortured?'"

Bush Spoke of Attacking Arab News Channel, British Tabloid Says - New York Times: "LONDON, Nov. 22 - The Arab satellite channel Al Jazeera urged Britain and the United States on Tuesday to investigate a British newspaper report that Prime Minister Tony Blair had dissuaded President Bush from bombing the station's headquarters in the Persian Gulf.
Mr. Bush was said to have referred to the idea of bombing Al Jazeera's studios in Qatar, a close Western ally, according to a document quoted Tuesday in The Daily Mirror. The tabloid said it was quoting from a leaked government memo said to contain a transcript of a conversation by Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair at the White House on April 16, 2004.
The Bush administration has frequently depicted Al Jazeera's broadcasts as showing anti-American bias.
Mr. Blair's office said it never talked about leaked documents.
Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman, told The Associated Press via an e-mail message, 'We are not interested in dignifying something so outlandish and inconceivable with a response.'"

NATIONAL JOURNAL: Key Bush Intelligence Briefing Kept From Hill Panel (11/22/05): "Ten days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda, according to government records and current and former officials with firsthand knowledge of the matter.

The administration has refused to provide the Sept. 21 President's Daily Brief, even on a classified basis, and won't say anything more about it other than to acknowledge that it exists.






The information was provided to Bush on September 21, 2001 during the 'President's Daily Brief,' a 30- to 45-minute early-morning national security briefing. Information for PDBs has routinely been derived from electronic intercepts, human agents, and reports from foreign intelligence services, as well as more mundane sources such as news reports and public statements by foreign leaders.
One of the more intriguing things that Bush was told during the briefing was that the few credible reports of contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda involved attempts by Saddam Hussein to monitor the terrorist group. Saddam viewed Al Qaeda as well as other theocratic radical Islamist organizations as a potential threat to his secular regime. At one point, analysts believed, Saddam considered infiltrating the ranks of Al Qaeda with Iraqi nationals or even Iraqi intelligence operatives to learn more about its inner workings, according to records and sources.
The September 21, 2001, briefing was prepared at the request of the president, who was eager in th"

Experts Question Latest U.S. Charges On Iran's Nuclear Program: "The Board of Governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is scheduled to discuss the Iranian nuclear program again on 24 November. The governors will meet amid new assertions by U.S. officials that Iran is attempting to develop nuclear weapons, although Tehran maintains that it's nuclear program is peaceful.
The latest IAEA meeting comes two months after the board issued a resolution that criticized Iran for not cooperating with the agency sufficiently. That resolution noted that 'after 2 1/2 years of intensive inspections and investigation' the IAEA believes 'Iran's full transparency is indispensable and overdue.' It also hinted at the possibility of referring Iran to the UN Security Council.
Laptop Info
In the run-up to this week's meeting, there are renewed allegations that the Iranian nuclear program is not intended solely for energy production, as Tehran contends. The 'New York Times' reported on 13 November that information purportedly found on an Iranian laptop computer secured by a U.S. intelligence agency reveals a 'long effort to design a nuclear warhead.' The newspaper goes on to charge that the information on the laptop is evidence that Iran is trying to design a 'compact warhead' for use on the 1,300-kilometer-range Shahab-3 missile. Senior U.S. intelligence officials reportedly described this information in a meeting with IAEA officials in Vienna in July.
Tehran rejected the 'New York Times' report. 'This is a worthless attempt to fabricate a scenario,' Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Assefi said on 13 November, according to state television. 'We don't use laptops to carry out our confidential work. [The report] caused amusement at the Foreign Ministry.' Supreme National Security Council official Javad Vaidi said allegations like "

BBC NEWS | World | Americas | White phosphorus: weapon on the edge: "'WP proved to be an effective and versatile munition. We used it for screening missions at two breeches and, later in the fight, as a potent psychological weapon against the insurgents in trench lines and spider holes where we could not get effects on them with HE [High Explosive]. We fired 'shake and bake' missions at the insurgents, using WP to flush them out and HE to take them out,' the article said.
In another passage the authors noted that they could have used other smoke munitions and 'saved our WP for lethal missions'.
A word about the term 'shake and bake.' Anyone with a family to feed in the US knows what this term, properly 'Shake 'n Bake, means. Made by Kraft, it is a seasoning which is shaken onto chicken before baking. Its use gives the article the smack of reality. It's the kind of thing US soldiers would "

Marc Cooper ? Blog Archive ? Withdrawal ? From Reality: "What makes the Republican ploy particularly repugnant is that it comes precisely on the same day that we learn that the top American military commander in Iraq has presented Donald Rumsfeld with a plan to begin withdrawing U.S. military troops ? as soon as a handful of weeks from now.
In other words, Democrats who propose a withdrawal are aiding and abetting the enemy, even though the White House and the Pentagon are secretly drafting a plan to do the same.
I can only give thanks that I don?t have a child fighting in Iraq today. I don?t know how I would react under those circumstances to the contemptuous, cavalier, cynical and reckless manner in which the lives of young Americans in uniform are treated by the Republican political leadership. "

Vice President for Torture: "VICE PRESIDENT Cheney is aggressively pursuing an initiative that may be unprecedented for an elected official of the executive branch: He is proposing that Congress legally authorize human rights abuses by Americans. 'Cruel, inhuman and degrading' treatment of prisoners is banned by an international treaty negotiated by the Reagan administration and ratified by the United States. The State Department annually issues a report criticizing other governments for violating it. Now Mr. Cheney is asking Congress to approve legal language that would allow the CIA to commit such abuses against foreign prisoners it is holding abroad. In other words, this vice president has become an open advocate of torture.
His position is not just some abstract defense of presidential power. The CIA is holding an unknown number of prisoners in secret detention centers abroad. In violation of the Geneva Conventions, it has refused to register those detainees with the International Red Cross or to allow visits by its inspectors. Its prisoners have 'disappeared,' like the victims of some dictatorships. The Justice Department and the White House are known to have approved harsh interrogation techniques for some of these people, including 'waterboarding,' or simulated drowning; mock execution; and the deliberate withholding of pain medication. CIA personnel have been implicated in the deaths during interrogation of at least four Afghan and Iraqi detainees. Official investigations have indicated that some aberrant practices by Army personnel in Iraq originated with the CIA. Yet no CIA personnel have been held accountable for this record, and there has never been a public report on the agency's performance"

Baghdad Burning: "I'm sure we can all sleep better at night with the knowledge that SCIRI/Da'awa torturers don't discriminate according to religious sect- under the new constitution, American military guidance, and the blessings of the Pentagon- all Iraqis will be tortured equally."

Baghdad Burning: "For over a year corpses have been turning up all over Baghdad. Corpses of people who are taken from their homes in the middle of the night (lately they've been more brazen- they just do everything in the light of day), and turn up dead somewhere. That isn't as disturbing as the reports about the bodies- the one I can't get out of my head is that many of the corpses are found with holes in the skull left by an electric drill.

I guess the lucky ones go to Abu Ghraib...?"

Baghdad Burning: "These torture houses have existed since the beginning of the occupation. While it is generally known that SCIRI is behind them, other religious parties are not innocent. The Americans know they exist- why the sudden shock and outrage? This is hardly news for Americans in the Green Zone. The timing is quite interesting- it shouldn't matter that this raid came immediately after the whole white phosphorous story came out, but the Pentagon and American military have proven to be the ultimate masters of diversion.

Only last year in an area called Ghazaliya, one such house was discovered. It was on a smaller scale though. My cousin lives in Ghazaliya and he said that when the Americans got inside, they found several corpses and a man hanging from the ceiling on a makeshift noose. The neighbors had tried to get the Americans to check the house for months- no one bothered. They finally raided it because they got information from someone in the area that it was an insurgents hiding place. I read once that in New York, if a woman is being raped, she should scream 'fire' instead of 'rape' because no one would come to save her if she was screaming 'rape'. That's the way it is with Iraqi torture houses- the only way they'll check it is if you tell them it's a terrorist cell."

TPMCafe || Ideology of Information: "Has anyone given serious thought to the possibility that Bush himself may not have been aware of the conflicting evidence [on Iraq], the caveats, etc.? I strongly suspect that Cheney and Rumsfeld presented him with one sexed-up dossier after another, each of which left out the doubts and uncertainties felt at the lower levels. And Bush would have been none the wiser. After all, it is well known that Bush doesn't look beyond his advisors for news of the world, for corroboration, or for counterfactuals with which to test his working hypotheses. And they all knew this about him in advance. He was ripe for manipulation."

: "WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Pentagon's inspector general has agreed to review the prewar intelligence activities of former U.S. defense undersecretary Douglas Feith, a main architect of the Iraq war, congressional officials said on Thursday.
News of the Defense Department probe comes at a time of bitter political debate over whether President George W. Bush misled the American people with prewar intelligence. The increasingly biter dispute has pitted the president and his top advisers against lawmakers including some from Bush's own Republican Party.
Democrats have accused Feith of manipulating information from sources including discredited Iraqi politician Ahmad Chalabi to suggest links between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network, which masterminded the September 11, 2001, attacks.
Bush and other top administration officials cited alleged ties between Iraq and al Qaeda as a justification for military action. But the September 11 commission later reported that no collaborative relationship existed between the two.
The inspector general's office informed the Senate on October 19 that it would undertake a review after receiving separate requests from the Republican chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the ranking Democrat on the Senate Committee on Armed Services, officials said.
Congressional officials expect the review to look at whether Feith and his staff bypassed the CIA by giving the White House uncorroborated intelligence that sought to make a case for war in the months leading up to the 2003 Iraq invasion."

All the King's Media: "Amid the smoke and stench of burning careers, Washington feels a bit like the last days of the ancien r?gime. As the world's finest democracy, we do not do guillotines. But there are other less bloody rituals of humiliation, designed to reassure the populace that order is restored, the Republic cleansed. Let the perp walks begin. Whether the public feels reassured is another matter.
George W. Bush's plight leads me to thoughts of Louis XV and his royal court in the eighteenth century. Politics may not have changed as much as modern pretensions assume. Like Bush, the French king was quite popular until he was scorned, stubbornly self-certain in his exercise of power yet strangely submissive to manipulation by his courtiers. Like Louis Quinze, our American magistrate (whose own position was secured through court intrigues, not elections) has lost the 'royal touch.' Certain influential cliques openly jeer the leader they not so long ago extolled; others gossip about royal tantrums and other symptoms of lost direction. The accusations stalking his important counselors and assembly leaders might even send some of them to jail. These political upsets might matter less if the government were not so inept at fulfilling its routine obligations, like storm relief. The king's sorry war drags on without resolution, with people still arguing over why exactly he started it. The staff of life--oil, not bread--has become punishingly expensive. The government is broke, borrowing formidable sums from rival nations. The king pretends nothing has changed. "

BBC NEWS | Middle East | US used white phosphorus in Iraq: "US used white phosphorus in Iraq

Falluja suffered great damage during the offensive
US troops used white phosphorus as a weapon in last year's offensive in the Iraqi city of Falluja, the US has said.
'It was used as an incendiary weapon against enemy combatants,' spokesman Lt Col Barry Venable told the BBC - though not against civilians, he said.
The US had earlier said the substance - which can cause burning of the flesh - had been used only for illumination.
BBC defence correspondent Paul Wood says having to retract its denial is a public relations disaster for the US.
Col Venable denied that white phosphorous constituted a banned chemical weapon. "

Another Set of Scare Tactics: "With a Wall Street Journal/NBC News Poll finding 57 percent of Americans agreeing that George W. Bush 'deliberately misled people to make the case for war with Iraq,' the president clearly needs to tend to his credibility problems. But his partisan attacks on the administration's critics, in a Veterans Day speech last week and in Alaska yesterday, will only add to his troubles.

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Bush was not subtle. He said that anyone accusing his administration of having 'manipulated the intelligence and misled the American people' was giving aid and comfort to the enemy. 'These baseless attacks send the wrong signal to our troops and to an enemy that is questioning America's will,' Bush declared last week. 'As our troops fight a ruthless enemy determined to destroy our way of life, they deserve to know that their elected leaders who voted to send them to war continue to stand behind them.'"

Daily Kos: US Army Admits Use of White Phosphorus as Weapon: "That's right. Not from Al Jazheera, or Al Arabiya, but the US fucking Army, in their very own publication, from the (WARNING: pdf file) March edition of Field Artillery Magazine in an article entitled 'The Fight for Fallujah':
'WP [i.e., white phosphorus rounds] proved to be an effective and versatile munition. We used it for screening missions at two breeches and, later in the fight, as a potent psychological weapon against the insurgents in trench lines and spider holes when we could not get effects on them with HE. We fired 'shake and bake' missions at the insurgents, using WP to flush them out and HE to take them out.'"

BBC NEWS | Politics | Ambassador turns on Blair over Iraq: "An important part of the book is the evidence it provides in showing how early the decision was taken to go for regime change.
Sir Christopher refers to a lunch he had in March 2002 with one of the administration's hawks, Paul Wolfowitz, an account of which was leaked.
Sir Christopher confirms the authenticity of this leak. He told Wolfowitz that Britain 'backed regime change', though he also recommended a strategy for building international support and not a unilateral American effort.
We already knew that by April 2002, when he met Mr Blair at his Texas ranch, Mr Bush was decided. He told Trevor McDonald at Crawford on ITV in April 2002: 'I made up my mind that Saddam needs to go.' "

BBC NEWS | Middle East | US 'uses incendiary arms' in Iraq: "Italian state TV, Rai, has broadcast a documentary accusing the US military of using of phosphorus bombs against civilians in the Iraqi city of Falluja.
In the film, eyewitnesses and ex-US soldiers who served in Iraq said white phosphorus bombs were used in built-up areas in the insurgent-held city.
Rai says this amounts to the illegal use of chemical arms, though such bombs are considered incendiary devices.
The US military admits using the weapon in Iraq to illuminate"

AlterNet: The Quiet Oil-for-Food Scandal: "In a widely-reported interview a year ago, Paul Volcker said, 'Look, we have problems with the American government ... I can't say that the American government has been eager, or officials of the American government have been particularly eager in some cases.' He added: 'I'm talking about the executive branch.'
That was nothing new. In April, 2004, news reports claimed 'the U.S. administrator in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, deliberately put the brakes on an investigation by the Iraqi Governing Council into ... bribes, kickbacks and smuggling at the U.N. Oil-for-Food program.'"

AlterNet: The Quiet Oil-for-Food Scandal: "The details the Journal editors referred to include the process by which Saddam and his cronies squeezed what were effectively bribes out of multinational corporations, great and small. Contracts were submitted to the United Nations where they were reviewed by the Security Council states (the U.S. and Britain were the only ones that reviewed every contract). Revenues from approved sales were deposited into UN-administered trusts from which goods could be purchased. But before companies could 'lift,' or load, oil, they had to come up with some cash for the Iraqi government. Those fees and surcharges were paid directly by the companies either into Iraqi-controlled accounts (mostly in Jordan) or as bags full of cash dropped off at Iraqi embassies around the world. The illicit funds -- widely reported by the media at the time -- never touched UN hands."

Editorial: U.S. must dismantle its secret CIA gulag: "Not many months ago, Amnesty International and Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., got in hot water for respectively calling Guant?namo Bay prison 'the gulag of our times' and comparing America's treatment of terror-war detainees to the kind of treatment one would expect from the Soviet gulag, Pol Pot, Nazis and others. Durbin apologized.
Now comes a story by the Washington Post's Dana Priest describing a string of secret CIA prisons scattered around the world, including one at an old Soviet facility in Eastern Europe. These are prisons that are known only to a handful of officials, facilities where inmates are kept, potentially until they die, in dark, sometimes underground cells. The prisoners have no contact with anyone except jailers, are afforded no legal rights and are subjected to 'enhanced' interrogation techniques that include almost drowning them. That is a gulag, albeit a miniature one.
This string of prisons is where the most important terrorist suspects are kept. Those with less potential intelligence value are 'renditioned' to other countries for interrogation, including some nations that are known by the State Department to practice torture."

Asia Times Online :: Middle East News, Iraq, Iran current affairs: "British Arabism
An in-depth understanding of the British sponsorship of Arab separatism in Iran requires an understanding of British Arabism in its entirety. Francis Fukuyama, in his description of the American Arabists, opines that they are '... a sociological phenomenon ... Arabists not only take on the cause of the Arabs, but also the Arabs' tendency for self-delusion'.

That tendency for self-delusion is vividly expressed by the main tenets of Arab nationalism, which views all non-Arab Muslim peoples as subsidiary to the Arab language and culture. Moreover, Robert Kaplan observes that psychologically the English-speaking Arabist is 'obsessed with the Arabs ... a defining Arabist trait'. This psychological process is subsumed under British commercial and political interests. This is vividly exemplified in the case of T E Lawrence, as defined by Kaplan (1993): 'Lawrence ... among Arabs in the desert ... became pro-Arab; in Whitehall he was pro-Empire.'

British Arabism can trace its origins to geopolitical imperialism, namely the need to project political, economic, and if necessary, military power into Persia. The first official Arabists are Sir Charles Lyall (1845-1920) and William Muit, both civil servants of the British East India Company. "

Reports of Secret CIA Prisons Prompt Concern - Los Angeles Times: "The Bush administration should reevaluate its long-term plan for detaining suspected terrorists in light of reports that the CIA has a secret prison system, members of Congress and current and former intelligence officials say.

Details of the post-Sept. 11 network of 'black sites' were first reported in Wednesday's Washington Post, and the locations were confirmed by the Baltimore Sun. The report raised questions about how the CIA was treating its detainees in Thailand, Afghanistan and Eastern Europe. "