Is the US really bringing stability to Baghdad?
By Patrick Cockburn, The Independent, February 15, 2008
… any true assessment of the happiness or misery of Iraqis must use a less crude index than the number of dead and injured. It must ask if people have been driven from their houses, and if they can return. It must say whether they have a job and, if they do not, whether they stand a chance of getting one. It has to explain why so few of the 3.2 million people who are refugees in Syria and Jordan, or inside Iraq, are coming back.

In a first, Ahmadinejad to visit Iraq next month
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will travel to Iraq next month in the first such visit by a leader of the Islamic Republic, Iraqi officials said Thursday, adding that Iran had postponed a fourth round of talks with the United States to discuss Iraq’s security.

Invited by Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, Ahmadinejad is scheduled to arrive March 2 for a visit of two to three days to discuss bilateral relations, the officials said. He will also meet with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

The two neighbors fought an intense eight-year conflict in the 1980s during the rule of Saddam Hussein. But the ascent of a Shiite-dominated government in Iraq after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion ushered in a new era of friendship with overwhelmingly Shiite Iran.

The door to Iraq’s oil opens
By M K Bhadrakumar, Asia Times, February 16, 2008
The cynosure of Western eyes at the meeting of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, commonly known as OPEC, in Abu Dhabi, the United Arab Emirates, last December 5 was an unexpected personality – Iraqi Oil Minister Hussain al-Shahristani.
But that wasn’t a chance occurrence. By the time OPEC gathered in Vienna six weeks later, it was beyond doubt that Shahristani was on the way to becoming a celebrity in the West.

Shahristani is “a rare thing” in politics, to quote Toby Lodge, the well-known scholar on Iraq at the International Institute of Strategic Studies in London – “not too religious, not too political, not too secular, not too pro-American Shi’ite who [Grand Ayatollah Ali] Sistani would talk to”.

But for the ease with which Shahristani traversed in his later years the dividing line that separates religiosity and idealism from worldliness and pragmatism, Shahristani would have become a cult figure for human-rights activists, given his extraordinary background as a top nuclear scientist who turned a stubborn dissident, and then a reckless jail breaker from Saddam Hussein’s Abu Ghraib prison where he was tortured and tucked away in solitary confinement for an impossibly long 10 years till 1991.

Hezbollah chief warns Israel of wide war
Hezbollah’s leader threatened Thursday to strike Israel anywhere in the world in retaliation for what he said was its role in assassinating Imad Mughniyah, a Hezbollah commander blamed by the United States and Israel for killing hundreds in bombings, kidnappings and hijackings over a quarter-century.

In a video speech broadcast to thousands of mourners in a spare but sprawling tent in southern Beirut, Hasan Nasrallah said that because Israel had struck beyond what he called the “traditional battlefield” of Lebanon and Israel, it risked a borderless war with the Shiite Muslim group. Israel has denied involvement in the car bombing Tuesday that killed the 45-year-old Mughniyah in a tony neighborhood of Damascus, the Syrian capital.

“You have crossed the borders,” he said in the speech, which was vehement even by Nasrallah’s fiery standards. “Zionists, if you want this type of open war, then let it be, and let the whole world hear: We, like all other people, have a sacred right to defend ourselves, and everything we can do to defend ourselves, we will do.”

Top Pakistan lawyer in vote rigging tape row
Worries about vote rigging in Monday’s general election in Pakistan deepened yesterday when Human Rights Watch released an audio tape in which the government’s top lawyer allegedly predicts the vote will be “massively rigged”.

The recording, which was posted on the internet, features a voice identified as the attorney general, Abdul Malik Qayyum, advising a friend about which party to approach for a nomination in the parliamentary election.

“They will massively rig to get their own people to win. If you can get a ticket from these guys, take it,” he said in apparent reference to President Pervez Musharraf’s ruling party.

Where feudalism lives on
By Dilip Hiro, The Guardian, February 15, 2008
The main contest in the Pakistani general election on February 18 is seemingly between the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), led by late Benazir Bhutto’s husband, Asif Zardari; the pro-Musharraf Pakistan Muslim League-Q (“Q” for “Qaid-e Azam”, the honorific for the state’s founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah); and the opposition Pakistan Muslim League-N (“N” for Nawaz Sharif, former prime minister).

But no matter which party wins most seats and governs alone or in coalition, and which becomes the opposition, the privileges of feudal lords dominating the overwhelmingly rural society will remain intact.

The roots of feudal dominance lie in history. The Pakistan Muslim League, the parent of its present two versions, is the descendant of the All India Muslim League (AIML). Formed in 1906 to promote loyalty to the British Crown while advancing Muslim interests, the AIML was led by Muslim grandees and feudal lords. It was not until 1940 that it demanded partition of the Indian sub-continent, with Muslim majority areas constituting independent states. Unlike the anti-imperialist Indian National Congress, it lacked an economic programme favouring small and landless peasants, and trade unions for industrial workers.

How ‘inevitable’ got outmaneuvered
By E.J. Dionne Jr., Washington Post, February 15, 2008
What happened to Hillary Clinton?

Last fall, she was the “inevitable” nominee whose “machine” would raise scads of cash and push her to an early victory. She demonstrated poise and knowledge in debates, and party leaders lined up behind her, fearful of missing her fast-moving train.

But this narrative was flawed from the beginning. Her campaign has suffered from profound organizational failures, small mistakes that took on larger import and miscalculations that have put her in a position where to survive, she must defeat Barack Obama in both Texas and Ohio next month.

McCain calls for Obama to use public financing
Hammering Senator Barack Obama for a fourth straight day, Senator John McCain said here on Friday that he expects Senator Obama to abide by his pledge use public financing for his general election if Mr. McCain does so as well.

“It was very clear to me that Senator Obama had agreed to having public financing of the general election campaign if I did the same thing,” he said after a town hall meeting here. “I made the commitment to the American people that if I was the nominee of my party, I would go the route of public financing. I expect Senator Obama to keep his word to the American people as well.”

Asked if he would use public financing even if Mr. Obama did not, he said: “If Senator Obama goes back on his commitment to the American people, then obviously we have to rethink our position. Our whole agreement was we would take public financing if he made that commitment as well. And he signed a piece of paper, I’m told, that made that commitment.”

Barack Obama’s secret weapon plots a new course for election victory
Steve Hildebrand describes himself as a “big fat goof” who is scared of flying. But, as the chief author of Barack Obama’s grassroots strategy, he is helping to rewrite America’s campaign rulebook.

While Hillary Clinton has won most of the key contests that she has made a priority, Mr Obama is leading the race for delegates because he has picked up most of the other states. “We have competed in large and small states — primaries and caucuses — and not let any state go by,” Mr Hildebrand explains in an interview with The Times. “It’s beyond me why the Clinton campaign did not do the same.”

When we torture
By Nicholas D. Kristof, New York Times, February 14, 2008
The most famous journalist you may never have heard of is Sami al-Hajj, an Al Jazeera cameraman who is on a hunger strike to protest abuse during more than six years in a Kafkaesque prison system.

Mr. Hajj’s fortitude has turned him into a household name in the Arab world, and his story is sowing anger at the authorities holding him without trial.

That’s us. Mr. Hajj is one of our forgotten prisoners in Guantánamo Bay.

If the Bush administration appointed an Under Secretary of State for Antagonizing the Islamic World, with advice from a Blue Ribbon Commission for Sullying America’s Image, it couldn’t have done a more systematic job of discrediting our reputation around the globe. Instead of using American political capital to push for peace in the Middle East or Darfur, it is using it to force-feed Mr. Hajj.

US official admits waterboarding presently illegal
A senior official in the Bush justice department said for the first time today that the controversial interrogation tactic is currently illegal.

The waterboarding remarks by Stephen Bradbury, head of the justice department office of legal counsel, caused a stir in America because they go further than more uncertain opinions on the legality of the tactic voiced by the CIA director and attorney general.

London bombs justify ‘torture’, says Bush
President George Bush cited the London July 7 bombings in an interview broadcast last night to justify his support for waterboarding, an interrogation technique widely regarded as torture.

In an interview with the BBC he said information obtained from alleged terrorists helped save lives, and the families of the July 7 victims would understand that. Bush said waterboarding, which simulates drowning, was not torture and is threatening to veto a congressional bill that would ban it.

Duet in Damascus – is it déja vu?
By Amir Mizroch, Jerusalem Post, February 14, 2008
Duet in Beirut by former Mossad operative Mishka Ben-David is a work of fiction, but owes its wealth of detail to the author’s intelligence experience. Published in Hebrew six years ago, it describes a Mossad hit team traveling to Beirut, stalking the head of Hizbullah’s foreign terror department and assassinating him in a car bombing. Perhaps unfortunately for Mughniyeh, it was not translated into Arabic; had he read it, he might have taken greater precautions.

Ben-David said Wednesday that he had modeled his terror overlord, “Abu Khaled,” on two men: Hamas political bureau head Khaled Mashaal, and Mughniyeh, long Hizbullah’s chief of foreign terror operations.

While Ben-David is careful to say that Israel may not have been behind Mughniyeh’s killing, he does detail several examples of how the planned killing of the fictional Abu Khaled might mirror the death of Mughniyeh.

Roiled Hezbollah chief throws down the gauntlet
By Zvi Bar’el, Haaretz, February 15, 2008
When Hassan Nasrallah quotes David Ben-Gurion to emphasize to Israel that “if it loses one war, it will collapse,” or the Winograd report to impress his supporters with the fact that Israel lost the fight against several thousand Hezbollah fighters, we can once more be impressed that he and his advisers follow what is going on in Israeli society far more closely than Israel follows developments in Lebanon. But Nasrallah also knows that sharp rhetoric and expert usage of language are no substitute for a plan of action.

He presented his plan Thursday in his speech by setting the rules for war against Israel: “If you want an open-ended war, it will be an open-ended war,” and he also explained what this would entail. Because Hezbollah blames Israel for the assassination of Imad Mughniyah, which it claims occured “outside the natural arena of the war” (in other words Syria and not in Lebanon), the organization considers it legitimate to use the same method and target Israel outside the “natural arena”: not directly on Israeli territory but against Israeli targets abroad. Thus, Nasrallah absolved himself of the rules he followed for years, according to which he was conducting a war of Lebanese liberation against Israeli occupation. Henceforth, he is adopting a war on behalf of the organization, not in the name of Lebanon, against Israel’s existence.

Iraq successes hang in the balance
By William M. Arkin, Washington Post, February 14, 2008
We have heard a lot in the past year about the Sunni Awakening movement in Al Anbar province in western Iraq, the development of a Concerned Local Citizens program (also known as the Sons of Iraq program) in Baghdad, and the unilateral cease-fire called by Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army Shia militias. These three developments have not only been key to American military gains, but they also are central to the possibility of successful civil society and the prospects for transitioning from the military mission. [Deputy assistant secretary of defense for Middle East affairs, Mark] Kimmitt frankly calls all of these developments in 2007 a “surprise.” They are also factors most outside of U.S. control.

“The success of the surge was not pre-ordained nor has the surge succeeded according to plan,” Kimmitt says. “No one last December had any ideas that we would see a Sunni Awakening movement, nobody knew that the … [Mahdi Army] would declare a ceasefire …”

Bush’s Iraq calculus
By David Ignatius, Washington Post, February 14, 2008
The last thing the Bush White House would want, you might think, would be to make the 2008 presidential election a referendum on the unpopular war in Iraq. The 2006 congressional elections were such a referendum, and the Republicans got hammered.

But President Bush, newly confident that his troop-surge strategy is working, is taking steps that are likely to guarantee another Iraq-driven election. He favors keeping a big U.S. force in Iraq through the November elections, probably close to the pre-surge level of 130,000 troops. That large presence will draw Democratic fire — and it will make the presidential contest all the more a test between a pro-war Republican nominee and an antiwar Democrat.

Iran postpones talks with U.S. on Iraq
American officials ratcheted up the accusations against Iran today as Tehran postponed another round of negotiations with the United States over security in Iraq.

The development came as the Iraqi government announced that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would arrive March 2 for a two-day visit, the first such trip by an Iranian leader since the two countries fought a devastating war in the 1980s that killed or injured an estimated 1 million people.

The United States and Iran, already locked in a dispute over Tehran’s nuclear program, have long traded blame for the bloodshed in Iraq. But U.S. officials softened their tone late last year, backing away from sweeping accusations that Iran is orchestrating the funding, training and equipping of Shiite Muslim militants who have battled U.S. soldiers here.

In a reversal, U.S. agrees to produce data pointing to Iran’s nuclear ambitions
The Bush administration has agreed to turn over to international inspectors intelligence data it has collected that it says proves Iran worked on developing a nuclear weapon until a little more than four years ago, according to American and foreign diplomats.

The decision reverses the United States’ longstanding refusal to share the data, citing the need to protect intelligence sources.

The administration acted as the International Atomic Energy Agency is scheduled to issue a report as early as next week on Iran’s past nuclear activities. Administration officials hope that the nuclear inspectors can now confront Iran with what the Americans believe is the strongest evidence that the Iranians had a nuclear program.

Anguish of the Stolen Generations
With torment still in his voice, Frank Byrne recalls the day six decades ago when he was taken from his mother and their community in Christmas Creek, Western Australia.

He was just five at the time, and his mother, Maudie Yooringun, had long feared the day that the government would come to seize him – and he would be “stolen”.

“The government came to Christmas Creek where we had a mud house and told me I was been taken away,” he said.

“My mum was completely ignored. She was not a human. That’s what they thought in those days. The government fella said: ‘I am your total guardian’.”

“You could see the sorrow in my mother’s eye. I could see the tears rolling down as she was driven away. I was held there by a couple of blokes as the truck went away.”

A week later Frank saw his mother again. But that was to be the last time he ever saw her alive.

Australia apology to Aborigines
The Australian government has made a formal apology for the past wrongs caused by successive governments on the indigenous Aboriginal population.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apologised in parliament to all Aborigines for laws and policies that “inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss”.

He singled out the “Stolen Generations” of thousands of children forcibly removed from their families.

When words aren’t enough
National Aboriginal Alliance spokesman Les Malezer last weekend said the apology was “not enough”. But even the alliance is prepared to defer compensation.

From a strategic angle, these indigenous leaders are fooling themselves or their constituents. If they were serious about compensation, the time to address it is at the same time as the apology. Blackfellas will get the words, the whitefellas will keep the money. And by Thursday the Stolen Generations and their apology will be over as a political issue.

*

The war against tolerance
Walid Shoebat, Kamal Saleem and Zachariah Anani are the three stooges of the Christian right. These self-described former Muslim terrorists are regularly trotted out at Christian colleges—a few days ago they were at the Air Force Academy—to spew racist filth about Islam on behalf of groups such as Focus on the Family. It is a clever tactic. Curly, Larry and Mo, who all say they are born-again Christians, engage in hate speech and assure us it comes from personal experience. They tell their audiences that the only way to deal with one-fifth of the world’s population is by converting or eradicating all Muslims. Their cant is broadcast regularly on Fox News, including the Bill O’Reilly and Neil Cavuto shows, as well as on numerous Christian radio and television programs. Shoebat, who has written a book called “Why We Want to Kill You,” promises in his lectures to explain the numerous similarities between radical Muslims and the Nazis, how “Muslim terrorists” invaded America 30 years ago and how “perseverance, recruitment and hate” have fueled attacks by Muslims.

Israel embassies on high alert following Mughniyah killing
Israel’s security services have issued orders to its embassies and delegations abroad to be on high alert following the assassination of Hezbollah terror leader Imad Mughniyah on Wednesday, anticipating the possibility that Hezbollah will try to carry out a major attack against Israeli or Jewish targets worldwide in response to the killing.

Whoever killed Mughniyah showed impressive capabilities
In the case of the killing of Mughniyah we can draw two opposing conclusions. One is that the killing created shock and awe in Hezbollah and damaged its self-confidence. There is no doubt that the killing sent an unequivocal message to Nasrallah that maybe he should lower his profile of arrogance and self-confidence.
[…]
The second conclusion is that in the long run Hezbollah will clearly recover from the killing and return to functioning normally as a political movement with its own militia that has an organization for carrying out terror attacks.

Israel plans to build in East Jerusalem
Israel on Tuesday unveiled plans to build 1,120 apartments for Jews in East Jerusalem, a move Palestinians called a setback for U.S.-backed peace negotiations.

The announcement by Housing Minister Zeev Boim appeared to be aimed at placating the Shas religious party, which had vowed to quit the coalition government if it conceded anything to the Palestinians on Jerusalem.

Arab states plan TV crackdown
In a collective effort to curb satellite channels such as al-Jazeera, Arab states have adopted a charter that authorises individual countries to penalise media organisations deemed to have offended political and religious leaders or to have damaged social harmony and national unity.

Only Qatar, home to al-Jazeera, refused to endorse the document citing the need to study it further to ascertain that it did not ­conflict with its legislation.

Muqtada, the man who would be ayatollah
As a political and military force, Iraq’s Shi’ite Sadrist movement has undergone a number of radical transformations since 2003, when its leader Muqtada al-Sadr surprisingly emerged as a leading political figure. Muqtada’s recent decision to continue with his seminary studies and graduate as an ayatollah at the conservative seminary school of Najaf underpins a major change in the movement’s structure that could have serious repercussions for the future of Iraq.

Against the backdrop of changing political alliances between Kurds and Sunnis, Muqtada is transforming his movement into a new political phenomenon with implications for the country’s political structure and security dynamics. The consequences are also immense for Shi’ite Iraq, posing serious challenges to the conservative clerical establishment in Najaf.

Muqtada’s attempt to become an ayatollah follows his earlier call to suspend operations by his militia, the Jaish al-Mahdi (The Mahdi Army, or JaM) in the summer of 2007. Together with his decision to study in Najaf, this has marked a decisive new beginning in the organizational structure and leadership dynamics of the Mahdi militia.

McCain votes against waterboarding ban
Today, the Senate brought the Intelligence Authorization Bill to the floor, which contained a provision from Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) establishing one interrogation standard across the government. The bill requires the intelligence community to abide by the same standards as articulated in the Army Field Manual and bans waterboarding.

Just hours ago, the Senate voted in favor of the bill, 51-45.

Earlier today, ThinkProgress noted that Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), a former prisoner of war, has spoken strongly in favor of implementing the Army Field Manual standard. When confronted today with the decision of whether to stick with his conscience or cave to the right wing, McCain chose to ditch his principles and instead vote to preserve waterboarding.

Senate passes interrogation ban
The Senate voted 51 to 45 on Wednesday afternoon to ban waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods used by the Central Intelligence Agency against high-level terrorism suspects.

Senate Republicans generally opposed the bill, but several of them also did not want to cast a vote that could be construed as supporting torture, and so were relying on President Bush to make good on a threat to veto legislation limiting C.I.A. interrogation techniques.

The prohibition of harsh interrogation techniques is part of a wider intelligence authorization bill and would restrict all American interrogators to techniques allowed in the Army Field Manual, which bars the use of physical force.

In tribal Pakistan, religious parties are foundering
Senator Asfandyar Wali, the leader of an opposition party, the Awami National Party, is campaigning for the elections next week from the safety of his bed, under a quilt and propped up on bolsters for his bad back at his country home outside Peshawar.

Ill health aside, Mr. Wali is staying home because suicide bombers are seeking to kill him, his party has been warned by high-level government officials. There have been two bomb attacks on his party’s election gatherings in the last week. Two candidates have been killed, one in a suicide bombing and one in a shooting in Karachi.

Yet despite the attacks and the limited campaigning, his party is expected to do well in the parliamentary elections on Monday. The religious parties that for the last five years have governed the North-West Frontier Province and Baluchistan Province, which border Afghanistan and the tribal areas, are foundering.

Senate passes bill to expand U.S. spying powers
After more than a year of heated political wrangling, the Senate handed the White House a major victory Tuesday by voting to broaden the government’s spy powers after giving legal protection to phone companies that cooperated in President Bush’s warrantless eavesdropping program.

Amnesty Day for Bush and lawbreaking telecoms
(Glenn Greenwald) — [The Senate bill] has two simple purposes: (1) to render retroactively legal the President’s illegal spying program by legalizing its crux: warrantless eavesdropping on Americans, and (2) to stifle forever the sole remaining avenue for finding out what the Government did and obtaining a judicial ruling as to its legality: namely, the lawsuits brought against the co-conspiring telecoms. In other words, the only steps taken by our political class upon exposure by the NYT of this profound lawbreaking is to endorse it all and then suppress any and all efforts to investigate it and subject it to the rule of law.

U.S. Jewish leader worried by thrust of White House campaigns
The head of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Malcolm Hoenlein, expressed concern Tuesday regarding the atmosphere that has surrounded Democratic Senator Barack Obama’s campaign for president, while making it clear he has no problem with Obama himself.

“All the talk about change, but without defining what that change should be is an opening for all kind of mischief,” Hoenlein said at a press conference in Jerusalem. Obama has made change a central theme in his campaign.

The blind giant of the Middle East
(David Grossman) — More and more it looks as if the things that set Israel going at its birth have lost their potency — its concept and its daring, its confidence in its purpose and values, its desire to create a country that would not only be a refuge for the Jewish people, but that would also transform Jewish existence into a modern civil state. Now, 60 years after Israel was founded, it must find new substance that will fuel its way forward. Without re-creating itself, it will not be able to stay in motion. Too many things, outside and inside, will hinder it. The time will come when Israel will not have the strength to overcome them.

Palestinian revenge was inevitable
(Ahmed Yousef) — Last week’s bombing in Dimona was the first martyrdom operation committed by Hamas in more than five years. For some time, we have been warning the world that the relentless pressure on our people would eventually tell. In the last two months, more than a hundred people have been killed by the Israeli occupation forces in the Gaza Strip, including many civilians, women and children.

Thirty people have died in the last month for lack of medical care brought on by the embargo. Only two weeks ago, we saw the appalling sight of over 40 women and children seriously injured when an Israeli F-16 dropped an enormous bomb in the middle of the densely populated Gaza City, a few meters from a wedding party. This kind of atrocity, piled onto the daily death toll, has finally tested the patience of Palestinians, and after lengthy restraint, revenge was inevitable.

To many in Israel and the West, this act of resistance will be judged in isolation. They will no doubt say that it justifies the inhumane embargo on the people of Gaza and the arrests of more than 500 people and daily torture of innocents in the West Bank by both Israelis and the puppet government imposed on us by the U.S.. What they seem to forget is that just in the last two years, 2,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli military action and thousands more injured. The cold-blooded fact is that the ratio of Palestinian deaths to Israelis is now over 40 to 1.

Palestinian questions peace progress
The U.S.-backed Palestinian prime minister said Monday that time is running short to demonstrate progress in the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks President Bush launched to fanfare last fall.

“Unless there is tangible progress in the period immediately ahead” on a list of pledges made by Israel, “I think, honestly, it would require that we begin to really call this for what it is,” Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad said.

Focus of detainee trial is likely to suit Bush
Harsh interrogations and Guantánamo Bay, secret prisons and warrantless eavesdropping, the war against Al Qaeda and the one in Iraq. On issue after issue, President Bush has showed little indication that he will shrink from the most controversial decisions of his tenure.

With the decision to charge six Guantánamo detainees with the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and to seek the death penalty for the crimes, many of those issues will now be back in the spotlight. In an election year, that appears to be exactly where Mr. Bush wants the focus to be.

Asia’s hidden arms race
(John Feffer) — While in the news sunshine prevails, in the shadows an already massive regional arms race is threatening to shift into overdrive. Since the dawn of the twenty-first century, five of the six countries involved in the Six Party Talks have increased their military spending by 50% or more. The sixth, Japan, has maintained a steady, if sizeable military budget while nonetheless aspiring to keep pace. Every country in the region is now eagerly investing staggering amounts of money in new weapons systems and new offensive capabilities.

The arms race in Northeast Asia undercuts all talk of peace in the region. It also sustains a growing global military-industrial complex. Northeast Asia is where four of the world’s largest militaries — those of the United States, China, Russia, and Japan — confront each other. Together, the countries participating in the Six Party Talks account for approximately 65% of world military expenditures, with the United States responsible for roughly half the global total.

Here is the real news that should hit the front pages of papers today: Wars grip Iraq, Afghanistan, and large swathes of Africa, but the heart of the global military-industrial complex lies in Northeast Asia. Any attempt to drive a stake through this potentially destabilizing monster must start with the militaries that face one another there.

The law on the powers of governorates
(Reidar Visser) — Whenever Iraqi politics becomes difficult to classify according to the ethno-sectarian mindset preferred by most Western commentators, interest in what is going on in Baghdad seems to dwindle. Little wonder, then, that for the past few weeks, somewhat esoteric news items (like a visit to Iraq by Angelina Jolie) have dominated press reports from Iraq. The two truly significant developments during the past month have received less coverage: the attempts to agree on a general budget, as well as efforts to pass a law on the powers of governorates nor organised in a [federal] region.

America’s green policy vacuum
It’s been a year since Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth packed theaters and won an Oscar. And a good year it has been for the green movement. Venture capital firms poured a record $2.6 billion into clean tech startups in the first three quarters of 2007. Meanwhile, the green buzz has only grown louder. This year, green building construction starts are projected to reach $12 billion. And both Senator Hillary Clinton and Senator Barack Obama have made a greener economy a key plank in their Presidential campaigns.

It’s enough to make you believe an optimistic report that estimates the green economy could produce as many as 40 million jobs and $4.53 trillion in annual revenue by 2030. To put those numbers in perspective, consider this: In 2006, according to a November report commissioned by the American Solar Energy Society (hardly a disinterested body), companies in renewable energy and energy efficiency industries accounted for 8.5 million jobs and generated $970 billion in revenues. The report based that scenario on “aggressive, sustained public policies at the federal and state level during the next two decades.” (It also included growth scenarios based on current government spending levels and on a moderate increase.)

Despite the undeniable green momentum, a $4 trillion-plus U.S. green economy is far from likely—even in 22 years—because there simply is no “aggressive, sustained” federal policy. The federal government has failed to create and adequately fund the programs that would make the U.S. a world leader. And that’s what the government should be trying to do, for reasons that go far beyond rising carbon levels. The U.S. risks falling way behind other countries in the development of green technologies. On its current course, this country could trade oil dependence for reliance on alternative energy products built by other nations already far ahead of it.

No Manchurian candidate
By Roger Cohen, International Herald Tribune, February 10, 2008
I believe Barack Obama is a strong but not uncritical supporter of Israel. That is what the Middle East needs from an American leader: the balance implied by a two-state solution.

Yet it’s a tough position for Obama to hold in this presidential campaign because his Jewish credentials are under intense scrutiny.
[…]
Jews should get over the scaremongering: Obama is no Manchurian. Nor is he blind to the fact that backing Israel is not enough if the backing gives carte blanche for the subjugation of another people.

Behind Obama and Clinton
By Stephen Zunes, Foreign Policy in Focus, February 4, 2008
Voters on the progressive wing of the Democratic Party are rightly disappointed by the similarity of the foreign policy positions of the two remaining Democratic Party presidential candidates, Senator Hillary Clinton and Senator Barack Obama. However, there are still some real discernable differences to be taken into account. Indeed, given the power the United States has in the world, even minimal differences in policies can have a major difference in the lives of millions of people.

Clinton wins tacit support of Israeli establishment
Among mainstream Israeli commentators, there is little argument that the outgoing Republican Administration, with its invasion of Iraq, war against terrorism and strong line against Iran, has been the closest yet to Israel’s own world view.

Yet although the race to succeed Mr Bush has narrowed to a choice between John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, the Republican candidate is not the one the Israeli establishment would most like to see in the White House.

That unofficial honour goes to Senator Clinton, who Palestinians accuse of taking an increasingly one-sided approach to the Middle East conflict. Visiting the region in 2005 as senator for New York, Senator Clinton shunned the Palestinians completely, meeting only Israeli leaders and hearing and expressing only Israeli positions. She particularly galled Palestinians by enthusiastically backing the 700-kilometre complex of walls and fences that Israel is building inside the West Bank.

Barack Obama makes his case
Asked what he thinks is the biggest difference between himself and Senator Hillary Clinton, Obama told Kroft, “I think Senator Clinton is smart and can be an effective advocate. But I think that the biggest difference is that Senator Clinton accepts the rules of the game as they are set up. She accepts money from PACs and lobbyists. I don’t accept that politics has to be driven by those special interests and lobbyists.”

For Clinton, Ohio and Texas emerge as key states to win
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and her advisers increasingly believe that, after a series of losses, she has been boxed into a must-win position in the Ohio and Texas primaries on March 4, and she has begun reassuring anxious donors and superdelegates that the nomination is not slipping away from her, aides said on Monday.

Mrs. Clinton held a buck-up-the-troops conference call on Monday with donors, superdelegates and other supporters; several said afterward that she had sounded tired and a little down, but determined about Ohio and Texas.

Israel’s secret success
By Daniel Gavron, New York Times, February 11, 2008
If we cannot summon the determination it would take for a complete pullback, might the world, led by the United States, try to force us to withdraw? It might, but it probably won’t, so we are most likely looking at some sort of single state, bi-national state or confederation. What matters is that we are acting from a position of strength, and we ought to be investing our energy and creativity in working out a long-term solution with the Palestinians that will be acceptable to both of us.

What we should not be doing is what we are doing now: besieging and blacking out Gaza, killing and arresting dozens of Palestinians in the occupied territories every month, and constructing walls and fences between us and our neighbors.

The most recent suicide bombing in southern Israel has predictably prompted calls for a new barrier along our 145-mile Egyptian border. This is unreasonable. Walls, as recent events have shown, can be breached. Palestinian terrorism against civilians has decreased over the past years, even though the barrier separating Israel and the West Bank has many large gaps. It is illogical to suppose that this incomplete wall is the factor that has reduced terrorism.

Israeli minister: We should level Gaza neighborhoods
Tempers heated Sunday as cabinet ministers discussed the ongoing Qassam fire on Sderot and the situation in Gaza.

Interior Minister Meir Sheetrit suggested obliterating a Gaza neighborhood in response to Saturday’s Qassam fire on Sderot, saying “any other country would have already gone in and level the area, which is exactly what I thing the IDF should do – decide on a neighborhood in Gaza and level it.”

IDF to step up Gaza assassinations
The Israel Defense Forces and the Shin Bet internal security service are preparing to step up assassinations against key Hamas figures in the Gaza Strip in response to the continued Qassam rocket attacks against Sderot. The renewed campaign of targeted killings is not likely, at this stage, to include members of the Hamas political leadership.

Hamas leaders go into hiding as Israel plans targeted killings
Leaders of the ruling Hamas movement in the Gaza Strip have scaled back their public appearances and stepped up other security measures, fearing Israeli assassination attempts in response to a wave of Palestinian rocket attacks on southern Israel, Hamas officials said Monday.

New Hamas tactic: Bomb Israel into a truce
The message: henceforth, every Israeli operation will result in a similar response. Hamas is hoping that Israel will agree, after repeated bombing of Sderot, to a tahdiye (calm) in the territories, and even believe they can bring about an end to the arrests that the IDF is carrying out in the West Bank.

Behind the Hamas decision lies the assumption that the Israeli leadership is wary of a large-scale ground operation. This is based on the traumatic experience of the Second Lebanon War and Israeli concern that it may suffer heavy casualties. Senior officials in the Islamic organization believe that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is too concerned with his political future to risk initiating a broad IDF operation in the Strip.

Gates endorses pause in Iraq troop withdrawals
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates on Monday publicly endorsed the concept of holding steady the troop levels in Iraq, at least temporarily, after the departure this summer of five extra combat brigades sent last year as part of “the surge.”

America’s failure in Afghanistan
US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has been putting pressure on Germany to up its commitment to the NATO mission in Afghanistan. But some in Germany say it is America’s violence, not Berlin’s reluctance, that is the problem.

Flawed by design
By Fred Kaplan, Slate, February 8, 2008
…most of the NATO nations agreed to send troops on the premise that they’d be engaged in peacekeeping, not warfighting.

Then, in the spring of 2006, the Taliban threw a wrench in the works by staging offensives throughout southern Afghanistan—a huge area, about the size of Germany—after four years of relative calm. (Actually, they’d been infiltrating the region all this time; they resumed their offensives only to resist the returning Western troops.)

The alliance isn’t “evolving into a two-tiered alliance,” as Gates said. When it comes to Afghanistan, it’s been that kind of alliance from the start. As the fighting has grown fiercer, the inadequacies of this crazy quilt have become clearer.

NATO at twilight
By Andrew J. Bacevich, Los Angeles Times, February 11, 2008
NATO is no longer a fighting organization. Keeping the Americans in, the Germans down and the Russians out no longer demands the sort of exertion that was required half a century ago. If the alliance retains any value, it is as an institution for consolidating European integration and prosperity.

No amount of browbeating by the United States is going to change that. The Bush administration is kidding itself if it expects Europeans to save the day in Afghanistan. To think of NATO as a great alliance makes about as much sense as thinking of Pittsburgh as the Steel City or of Detroit as the car capital of the world. It’s sheer nostalgia.

Welcome to Cyberwar Country, USA
When a reporter enters the Air Force office of William Lord, a smile comes quickly to the two-star general’s face as he darts from behind his immaculate desk to shake hands. Then, as an afterthought, he steps back and shuts his laptop as though holstering a sidearm.

Lord, boyish and enthusiastic, is a new kind of Air Force warrior — the provisional chief of the service’s first new major command since the early 1990s, the Cyber Command. With thousands of posts and enough bandwidth to choke a horse, the Cyber Command is dedicated to the proposition that the next war will be fought in the electromagnetic spectrum, and that computers are military weapons. In a windowless building across the base, Lord’s cyber warriors are already perched 24 hours a day before banks of monitors, scanning Air Force networks for signs of hostile incursion.

Musharraf’s approval rating plummets
A week before Pakistanis vote in parliamentary elections, President Pervez Musharraf’s popularity has hit an all-time low and opposition parties seem capable of a landslide victory that could jeopardize his efforts to cling to power, according to a poll to be released Monday.

The next president should open up the Bush Administration’s record
By Steven Aftergood, Nieman Watchdog, February 7, 2008
In 2005, then-Deputy Attorney General James Comey told colleagues at the Justice Department that they would be “ashamed” when a legal memorandum on forceful interrogation of prisoners eventually became public. In fact, however, disclosure of such secret Bush Administration documents may be the only way to begin to overcome the palpable shame that is already felt by many Americans at the thought that their government has engaged in abusive interrogations, secret renditions or unchecked surveillance.

The next President will have the authority to declassify and disclose any and all records that reflect the activities of executive branch agencies. Although internal White House records that document the activities of the outgoing President and his personal advisers will be exempt from disclosure for a dozen years or so, every Bush Administration decision that was actually translated into policy will have left a documentary trail in one or more of the agencies, and all such records could be disclosed at the discretion of the next President.

“Something is happening” — Obama’s movement for change
By James Zogby, Huffington Post, February 8, 2008
Profound transformative change, like that ushered in by the New Deal or created by the vision of the New Frontier/Great Society, can only come about because of the powerful demands of mass social movements that both pressure for change and create the conditions for its realization. When Barack Obama says, “We have been waiting for so long for the time when we could finally expect more from our politics, when we could give more of ourselves and feel truly invested in something bigger than a candidate or cause. This is it: We are the ones we’ve been waiting for, we are the ones that we seek” – he is both empowering his supporters, and challenging them to become the instruments of radical transformation. And it has worked, at least so far.

Obama wins Maine, giving him 4 victories in weekend
Senator Barack Obama defeated Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Maine caucuses on Sunday, giving him his fourth victory this weekend as he headed into three more state contests on Tuesday.

Milton Viorst on Israel’s tragic predicament
By Milton Viorst, Truthdig, February 1, 2008
In opening his stunning memoir, “Dark Hope: Working for Peace in Israel and Palestine,” David Shulman declares: “I am an Israeli. I live in Jerusalem. I have a story, not yet finished, to tell.” It is a very sad story, of a society gone astray with power, and of decent Israelis in despair over the failure of their efforts to save it from itself. The story, as Shulman says, is not yet over, but he asks whether its end is not already determined. Is tragedy inevitable? Can Israel right its course to achieve its once glowing promise as a refuge and as a nation?

Shulman’s memoir is not unique in raising these questions. Two recent books share his foreboding: “Lords of the Land: The War Over Israel’s Settlements in the Occupied Territories, 1967-2007,” a careful work of scholarship by Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar, and “Toward an Open Tomb: The Crisis of Israeli Society,” a stinging essay by Michel Warschawski. Shulman and Zertal are college professors, Eldar is a journalist, Warschawski is a peace activist. All are Israeli Jews. Whatever the stylistic differences of their books, they are equally unforgiving of Israel for placing its future in stark jeopardy.

The Gaza Strip blockade could seriously harm Israel’s economy
In 2006, for example, total Israeli exports to the 60 million or so residents of France stood at slightly more than $1 billion. Israeli exports to the same amount of people in Italy stood at just below $1 billion. Very fine statistics. But total exports to both of these countries, which rank among the eight richest countries in the world, are equal to Israel’s exports to the 3.5 million people of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, according to the Central Bureau of Statistics. This is more than 6 percent of all Israeli exports, excluding diamonds. Despite all the intifadas, the Palestinian Authority is the second biggest customer of Israeli exports, after the United States.

Iraq’s tidal wave of misery
By Michael Schwartz, TomDispatch, February 10, 2008
A tidal wave of misery is engulfing Iraq — and it isn’t the usual violence that Americans are accustomed to hearing about and tuning out. To be sure, it’s rooted in that violence, but this tsunami of misery is social and economic in nature. It dislodges people from their jobs, sweeps them from their homes, tears them from their material possessions, and carries them off from families and communities. It leaves them stranded in hostile towns or foreign countries, with no anchor to resist the moment when the next wave of displacement sweeps over them.

The victims of this human tsunami are called refugees if they wash ashore outside the country or IDPs (“internally displaced persons”) if their landing place is within Iraq’s borders. Either way, they are normally left with no permanent housing, no reliable livelihood, no community support, and no government aid. All the normal social props that support human lives are removed, replaced with…nothing.

Standoff in an Iraqi province
By Garrett Therolf, Los Angeles Times, February 10, 2008
A potential security crisis loomed Saturday in troubled Diyala province as significant numbers of a U.S.-funded force of Sunni fighters left their posts, demanding the ouster of the provincial police chief.

“You can imagine what danger will face the region in the next days,” said Abu Talib, commander of 2,000 to 3,000 so-called Sons of Iraq fighters. His men, many of them former insurgents, turned against the militant group Al Qaeda in Iraq last year under the Awakening banner.

Memo blasts State Dept. Iraq effort
In a confidential memo, a long-time Republican operative who has served in the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad for the past year says the State Department’s efforts in Iraq are so poorly managed they “would be considered willfully negligent if not criminal” if done in the private sector.

‘An intolerable fraud’
Editoral, New York Times, February 8, 2008
An envelope arrived in our office the other day. It had the bulky, tawdry look of junk mail: pink and lavender Easter eggs, a plastic address window and a photo of a young man in fatigue shorts using crutches to stand on his only leg. “Thousands of severely wounded troops are suffering,” it read. “Will you help them this Easter?”

It was a plea for money from the Coalition to Salute America’s Heroes, one of the worst private charities — but hardly the only — that have been shamefully milking easy cash from the suffering and heartache caused by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

U.S. loses prison camp records of bin Laden’s driver
The U.S. military has lost a year’s worth of records describing the Guantanamo interrogation and confinement of Osama bin Laden’s driver, a prosecutor said at the Yemeni captive’s war court hearing on Thursday.

Lawyers for the driver, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, asked for the records to support their argument that prolonged isolation and harassment at the Guantanamo prison have mentally impaired him and compromised his ability to aid in his defense on war crimes charges.

“All known records have been produced with the exception of the 2002 Gitmo records,” one of the prosecutors, Navy Lt. Cmdr. Timothy Stone, told the court. “They can’t find it.”

Truth or terrorism? The real story behind five years of high alerts
The Bush administration has never shied from playing the fear card to distract the American public from scandal or goad them into supporting a deeply flawed foreign policy. Here a history of the administration’s most-dubious terror alerts — including three consecutive Memorial Day scare-a-thons — all of which proved far less terrifying than the screamer headlines they inspired.

Saudi royal Prince Bandar Bin Sultan’s assets frozen
Prince Bandar Bin Sultan, the former Saudi Arabian ambassador to America, has been hit by a court order in effect freezing some of his US assets, as part of a class-action lawsuit over bribery allegations at British defence giant BAE Systems.

Don’t believe myths about sharia law
By Jason Burke, The Observer, February 10, 2008
The women had no doubt. Educated, young, articulate, they had one aim: to turn their country into a real Islamic state, run according to their interpretation of Islamic law, the shariat. Only then, they said, would they be protected from the chaos and violence of the modern world. Only then would there be an end to corruption and misgovernment. Only then would the country assume its true place as a Muslim nation.

The women were speaking in Rawalpindi, the crowded northern Pakistani city. All members of an Islamist party, they believed that the current system in Pakistan, where a secular legal system co-exists uncomfortably with a religious one, was doomed to failure. The coming of shariat was, they told me, inevitable.

Sharia sensibilities
By Ayesha Khan, The Guardian, February 11, 2008
The blizzard of controversy that has attended the Archbishop of Canterbury’s remarks about the “inevitability” of parts of Islamic law being introduced in Britain has thrown a rare spotlight on this country’s existing sharia councils.

The erroneous caricature of sharia as synonymous with stoning or flogging is a million miles from the reality in Britain. The councils’ judgments have no statutory basis in law, with participants abiding by rulings voluntarily, and the vast majority of cases concern relatively unremarkable divorce applications.

Injury from blast killed Bhutto, report says
Investigators from Scotland Yard have concluded that Benazir Bhutto, the Pakistani opposition leader, died after hitting her head as she was tossed by the force of a suicide blast, not from an assassin’s bullet, officials who have been briefed on the inquiry said Thursday. …

It is unclear how the Scotland Yard investigators reached such conclusive findings absent autopsy results or other potentially important evidence that was washed away by cleanup crews in the immediate aftermath of the blast, which also killed more than 20 other people.

Secret talks led to Pakistan cease-fire
Two Pakistani officials said Thursday that their government held secret talks with Taliban fighters and tribal elders near the Afghan border before a cease-fire just announced by the militants. …

Tehrik-e-Taliban is led by Baitullah Mehsud, an al-Qaida-linked commander based in South Waziristan whom Musharraf’s government has blamed for a series of suicide attacks across Pakistan, including the Dec. 27 assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.

CIA destroyed tapes as judge sought interrogation data
At the time that the Central Intelligence Agency destroyed videotapes of the interrogations of operatives of Al Qaeda, a federal judge was still seeking information from Bush administration lawyers about the interrogation of one of those operatives, Abu Zubaydah, according to court documents made public on Wednesday.

The court documents, filed in the case of Zacarias Moussaoui, appear to contradict a statement last December by Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the C.I.A. director, that when the tapes were destroyed in November 2005 they had no relevance to any court proceeding, including Mr. Moussaoui’s criminal trial.

It was already known that the judge in the case, Leonie M. Brinkema, had not been told about the existence or destruction of the videos. But the newly disclosed court documents, which had been classified as secret, showed the judge had still been actively seeking information about Mr. Zubaydah’s interrogation as late as Nov. 29, 2005.

New charges of Gitmo torture
Khan’s lawyers are armed with more than 500 pages of top-secret notes taken during recent sessions with their client at Guantanamo; they will use the material to describe his interrogation and detention to the Intelligence Committee. Though details are highly classified, his lawyers claim that he and others were tortured and videotaped, charges that Hayden and other CIA officials deny. On Feb. 5, Hayden admitted to Congress that the CIA had used waterboarding on Khaled Sheik Mohammed and two others. The CIA continues to assert that it does not engage in torture.

Mosul situation veers from ‘Baghdad model’
The battle for Mosul that will play out in the coming weeks and months could be a very different struggle than the successful U.S. campaigns against al-Qaeda militants in Baghdad and elsewhere.

Baghdad and much of Iraq are slowly coming under the control of U.S. and Iraqi forces. This city of 1.8 million people remains an urban stronghold for al-Qaeda in Iraq.

Obama: The shock of the red
By Timothy Egan, New York Times, February 6, 2008
Take a look at what happened on Tuesday in the nearly all-white counties of Idaho, a place where the Aryan Nations once placed a boot print of hate — “the international headquarters of the white race,” as they called it.

The neo-Nazis are long gone. But in Kootenai County, where the extremists were holed up for several decades, a record number of Democrats trudged through heavy snow on Super Duper Tuesday to help pick the next president. Guess what: Senator Barack Obama took 81 percent of Kootenai County caucus voters, matching his landslide across the state. He won all but a single county.

Manufacturer in $2 million acord wth U.S. on deficient Kevlar in military helmets
A North Dakota manufacturer has agreed to pay $2 million to settle a suit saying it had repeatedly shortchanged the armor in up to 2.2 million helmets for the military, including those for the first troops sent to Iraq and Afghanistan.

Twelve days before the settlement with the Justice Department was announced, the company, Sioux Manufacturing of Fort Totten, was given a new contract of up to $74 million to make more armor for helmets to replace the old ones, which were made from the late 1980s to last year.

Veterans not entitled to mental health care, U.S. lawyers argue
Veterans have no legal right to specific types of medical care, the Bush administration argues in a lawsuit accusing the government of illegally denying mental health treatment to some troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

The arguments, filed Wednesday in federal court in San Francisco, strike at the heart of a lawsuit filed on behalf of veterans that claims the health care system for returning troops provides little recourse when the government rejects their medical claims.

Sex asault sit v. Halliburton klled
A mother of five who says she was sexually harassed and assaulted while working for Halliburton/KBR in Iraq is headed for a secretive arbitration process rather than being able to present her case in open court.

A judge in Texas has ruled that Tracy Barker’s case will be heard in arbitration, according to the terms of her initial employment contract.

The CIA operation that should have prevented the Iraq war
When Saad Tawfiq watched Colin Powell’s presentation to the United Nations on February 5 2003 he shed bitter tears as he realised he had risked his life and those of his loved ones for nothing.

As one of Saddam Hussein’s most gifted engineers, Tawfiq knew that the Iraqi dictator had shut down his nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programmes in 1995 — and he had told his handlers in US intelligence just that.

And yet here was the then US secretary of state — Tawfiq’s television was able to received international news through a link pirated from Saddam’s spies next door — waving a vial of white powder and telling the UN Security Council a story about Iraqi germ labs.

Clarity sught on electronics searches
Nabila Mango, a therapist and a U.S. citizen who has lived in the country since 1965, had just flown in from Jordan last December when, she said, she was detained at customs and her cellphone was taken from her purse. Her daughter, waiting outside San Francisco International Airport, tried repeatedly to call her during the hour and a half she was questioned. But after her phone was returned, Mango saw that records of her daughter’s calls had been erased.

A few months earlier in the same airport, a tech engineer returning from a business trip to London objected when a federal agent asked him to type his password into his laptop computer. “This laptop doesn’t belong to me,” he remembers protesting. “It belongs to my company.” Eventually, he agreed to log on and stood by as the officer copied the Web sites he had visited, said the engineer, a U.S. citizen who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of calling attention to himself.

In my view: Iraqi blogger
By Raed Jarrar, Al Jazeera, February 3, 2008
When I first immigrated to the US in 2005, I was interested in foreign policy issues and spent most of my time working to end the occupation of Iraq and stop the blind support and unlimited aid to Israel.

Then I had a life-changing incident in 2006, when I was stopped at an airport in New York and prevented from boarding to my airplane because my T-shirt had the words “we will not be silent” in both Arabic and English printed on it.

A TSA [transportation security officer] told me that coming to a US airport with Arabic words on my T-shirt was equivalent to visiting a bank while wearing a shirt that read “I’m a robber”.

Time runs out for an Afghan held by the U.S.
By Carlotta Gall and Andy Worthington, New York Times, February 5, 2008

Abdul Razzaq Hekmati was regarded here as a war hero, famous for his resistance to the Russian occupation in the 1980s and later for a daring prison break he organized for three opponents of the Taliban government in 1999.

But in 2003, Mr. Hekmati was arrested by American forces in southern Afghanistan when, senior Afghan officials here contend, he was falsely accused by his enemies of being a Taliban commander himself. For the next five years he was held at the American military base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where he died of cancer on Dec. 30.

The fate of Mr. Hekmati, the first detainee to die of natural causes at Guantánamo, who fruitlessly recounted his story several times to American officials, demonstrates the enduring problems of the tribunals at Guantánamo, say Afghan officials and others who knew him.

Afghan officials, and some Americans, complain that detainees are effectively thwarted from calling witnesses in their defense, and that the Afghan government is never consulted on the detention cases, even when it may be able to help. Mr. Hekmati’s case, officials who knew him said, shows that sometimes the Americans do not seem to know whom they are holding. Meanwhile, detainees wait for years with no resolution to their cases.

U.S. says no one too young for Guantanamo court
By Jane Sutton, Reuters, February 4, 2008

If the U.S. Congress intended to try children as war criminals, it would have explicitly authorized that in the 2006 law that serves as a framework for the Guantanamo court, Kuebler said.

But a U.S. Department of Justice attorney, arguing for the prosecution, said that if Congress intended to exclude juveniles from the Guantanamo war court, it would have explicitly written that, because lawmakers knew Khadr could face charges. Instead, Congress wrote the law using the term “person,” which legally refers to “anyone born alive,” Justice Department attorney Andy Oldham said.

In the dark hole of a Pakistani prison
By Tim Johnson, McClatchy, February 4, 2008

A citizen is hauled away by security forces one day. His family grows desperate. The state won’t say where he is being held – or even if he is being held.

It’s got the whiff of Guantanamo, right? It does, but this time it’s an American who is being held, and the dank, windowless cell is in Pakistan.

The victim is Dr. Safdar Sarki, a Pakistani-American physician. It is now known that he’s being held in a prison in Zhob, a Pakistani backwater, and suffers from severe medical problems caused by beatings and shacklings.

Review: The Commission – The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Commission
By Even Thomas, New York Times, February 4, 2008

The official ineptitude uncovered by the commission is shocking. Dubbed “Kinda-Lies-a-Lot” by the Jersey Girls, Ms. Rice comes across as almost clueless about the terrorist threat. “Whatever her job title, Rice seemed uninterested in actually advising the president,” Mr. Shenon writes. “Instead, she wanted to be his closest confidante — specifically on foreign policy — and to simply translate his words into action.”

The C.I.A. has some inkling that Osama bin Laden is stirring to strike the United States, but for many crucial months fails to tell the F.B.I. that two terrorists (who later turned out to be 9/11 hijackers) are actually in the United States. The popular image of the C.I.A. as dashing and all-knowing is for the movies only. After much dickering with the White House, former New Jersey Gov. Thomas H. Kean, the mild-mannered patrician who succeeded Mr. Kissinger as commission chairman, is allowed to read pre-9/11 copies of the President’s Daily Brief, the C.I.A.’s digest of its most important secrets. “He found himself terrified by what he was reading, really terrified,” Mr. Shenon writes. “There was almost nothing in them.”

Of the briefings, Mr. Kean said, “They were garbage,” adding, “There really was nothing there — nothing, nothing.”

The lights have been turned off
ByGideon Levy, Haaretz, February 4, 2008

One after another, the final lights are being turned off, and a moral gloom is falling upon us as we stand at the edge of an abyss. Just last week, three more lights were turned off. The Winograd Report did not come out clearly against the fact that Israel embarked on a pointless war; the Supreme Court authorized collective punishment and the attorney general concluded that the killing of 12 Israeli citizens and someone from the territories by the police does not warrant a trial. The final keepers of order, the lighthouses of justice and law, are reconciling themselves with the most serious injustices of the institutions of authority and no one so much as utters a word about it. The upsetting and depressing crop of a single week has drawn the moral portrait of the country.

As expected, the Winograd Committee became irrelevant. It avoided dealing with the first question that should have been on its agenda: Was there any justification for embarking on the war? A committee that says nothing about a country that declares war on its neighbor, kills a thousand of its citizens, causes mass destruction, makes use of horrific munitions and continues to kill dozens of innocents to this day – is a derelict committee.

Hamas claims responsibility for blast
By Isabel Kershner, New York Times, February 6, 2008
Israel appeared to face a heightened threat from Palestinian suicide bombings on Tuesday after the military wing of Hamas officially claimed responsibility for a lethal blast the day before at a shopping center in the southern town of Dimona.

The claim by the Qassam Brigades wing of Hamas, the militant Islamic group, signaled a possible end to its self-imposed moratorium on such attacks that had lasted more than three years.

Hamas said its bombers came from the city of Hebron in the southern West Bank, contradicting earlier accounts that the Dimona bombers were from Gaza. But Israeli officials also expressed concern that potential attackers may be making their way into the country from the Egyptian Sinai, taking advantage of a recent 11-day breach of the border between Gaza and Egypt. Egyptian forces resealed the border on Sunday.

Sunni vs Shia: the real bloody battle for Baghdad
By Patrick Cockburn, The Independent, February 5, 2008

A teenage boy was arrested recently for the attempted rape of a girl his own age in a school in west Baghdad. He admitted he had chosen the particular girl as his victim “because I knew she was a Sunni and nobody would protect her”. The boy was mistaken in his belief that he was beyond the law, mainly because the girl’s uncle was a senior officer in the army. But his words explain why Iraq’s Sunni minority feel so vulnerable since they lost power to the Shia majority when Saddam Hussein was overthrown five years ago.

Reconciliation between Sunni and Shia, seen by the US as essential for political progress in Iraq, is not happening. The difficulty in introducing measures to conciliate members of the old regime is illustrated by the way in which a new law, originally designed to ease the path of former Baath party members into government jobs will, in practice, intensify the purge against them.

The framers of the law wanted Baathists to be able to get their jobs back in the Iraqi military, security services and elsewhere. But the Iraqi parliament has a Shia majority, and the legislation signed into law last Sunday will make it more difficult for the former Baathists to work for the government.