Where Are All These 'Loose Women' My Pastor Keeps Warning Me About?

I've lived in Clearburg my whole life, and I've been attending services at Holy Christ Almighty Lutheran Church for about as long as I can remember. I know my Bible stories, because Mom and Dad saw to it that they raised me right. I figure I'm about as faithful of a 17-year-old high-school kid as there ever was. There's one thing I don't understand, though: It seems like practically every week, Pastor Clayman goes off again about the dangers of harlots and jezebels, and how I shouldn't allow them to tempt me away from the path of the righteous. But as far as I can tell, I've never met a so-called "loose woman." I'm starting to get really curious about where they're all supposed to be.

I'm not saying I want to associate with loose women—far from it. All I'm saying is, I wouldn't mind just getting a chance to find out for myself where these loose women might be congregating. So far, all I have to go on is Pastor Clayman's assurances that they're tempting us from everywhere. The guy really gets going with his descriptions of the painted faces, the beckoning leers, the naked, perfumed flesh undulating to the throbbing beat of secular music—but they don't match any of the women in this town in any of the numerous places I've checked.

I know plenty of women, but I don't believe any of them are "loose." There's Karen Marckell, who works down at her daddy's liquor store, for example. She wears a belt buckle that says "Born To Raise Hell," and I've heard some of the church ladies describe her as "trouble," but she appears to be a downright healthy-looking woman to me. Especially her hair—it's real pretty. I ought to know, too, because I've scrutinized every inch of her—sometimes for minutes on end. In my mind's eye, I can picture her contorting like a harlot, but whenever I talk to her, she just smiles and rings up my soda. She never even offers me reefer or makes provocative motions with her hips or anything.

There's girls at my high school that are supposed to have "bad reputations," but whenever I try and approach them, they just ignore me or call me "Geek Bundle." Here's how many times my soul has been enticed into sin: none.

I drove out to Kendall, Prior Bluff, Plovis—once all the way out to Mitchville—and I didn't have any luck finding loose women in any of those places, either.

Pastor says they've got a whole lot of them in the big city, and you can bet that when I went there for the national Youth League conference last fall, I was watching for them like a hawk. But most of the city women I saw were just riding the bus and staring straight ahead with blank looks on their faces. The last thing they seemed interested in was luring me into the sordid back alleys of vice and hedonism. I mean, they didn't even make eye contact with me, to tell the truth.

Maybe these loose women aren't as bad as Pastor Clayman says. Maybe if I just got a chance to talk to one, I could convince her to come with me to Sunday services and pray for Jesus to enter her. Maybe she'd even let me hold her hand while we prayed together. Sure, there's some risk—I admit that—but I'll bet I could probably keep her from talking me into doing anything really bad.

I'll bet I could resist a loose woman, no problem, if I could ever find one. Sometimes, I imagine myself resisting as many as three or four at a time. Abraham was commanded by the Good Lord Himself to sacrifice his own son as a trial of his faith, and Abraham almost did it, too, before the Lord stayed his hand and told him he'd passed the test. Well, if Abraham's faith was as strong as that, you'd think the least the Good Lord could do is send me one loose woman and see how I stand up in a real-life test of faith.

Just a couple of loose women, leaning lasciviously on the hood of a sports car or something, like in my cousin's hot-rod magazines, would be more than enough for me to feel my faith had been adequately proven before the Lord.

The last thing I want is to burn in the flames of perdition and retribution for all eternity like I've heard Pastor Clayman talk about until he's blue in the face every single Sunday since the day I was born. In fact, when it comes to big, long-winded speeches that really fix every detail in your mind's eye, the eternal agonies of Hell are probably the only thing Pastor Clayman talks about as much as these loose women supposedly lurking around every corner, forcing me to fight them off all day and night, continually attacking my soul with their constant barrage of temptations.

Well, maybe that's what Pastor Clayman's life is like, but mine sure as heck ain't.

Comic psyops: CIA's Grenada booklet from 1983 invasion

The comic book gem GRENADA: Rescued from Rape and Slavery was produced by the CIA and air-dropped over the island nation after the 1983 US-led invasion.

Art Dorks

Soviet-era space-themed New Year's cards

Awesome gallery of aerospace-themed holiday greeting cards from the former Soviet Union. Link All of the cards in the linked to collection are, in fact, New Year’s cards, not Christmas cards – they bear the New Year greeting С Новым годом! (Pronounced: s’novy godom). New Year’s was the main holiday celebrated in the former Soviet Union (officially atheist), replete with a New Year’s tree and the appearance of “Dyet Moros” (Grandfather Frost) – not Santa. Christmas was banned after the 1917 revolution and not celebrated again until 1992. Also, in Russia, Christmas is celebrated by the Orthodox church according to the Julian calendar, on January 7, and was/is a much different type of celebration than New Years. (Link).

Methadone clinic comix: HOOKED!

Scans of HOOKED!, an anti-drug comic book distributed at New York City methadone clinics in 1966. Link.

Q: Is life, essentially, comic or tragic?

Emma Brockes Tuesday December 20, 2005

Guardian

Woody Allen has been playing himself for so many years now that one wonders if his personality might, at some stage, actually run out. He admits that when he is filming he grows tired of his image and, for the past few years, audiences have tired of it too. But when asked if he worries whether he might, one day, stop being funny he says, "Well, no. Because if I wake up, I'm going to be funny, because it's me. It's not that I put on a thing to do it; I wake up in the morning and I can write. I roll out of bed and I can write; I can write - that's what I do, that's me. So it would have to be a complete personality change for that to happen."

Allen at 70 looks little different to the young man who appeared in Play It Again, Sam in 1972. His agelessness is often remarked upon and it is curious; the pale, unlined face is soft-looking, like moleskin, and the eyes are wide, in the way of all creatures who spend too much time straining to see through the dark. On the evidence of our interview, Allen's public persona is a barely exaggerated version of his private self; he really does whine; he really does see the world as a tragic place; he really is amused, in a ghoulish way, by the suspension of disbelief that allows people to function in the face of their own mortality. You either like him for this or you don't; if you do (I do), then the shtick is enough to make even in the slightest of his films a joy; if you don't, he is simply horrid.

Even so, for the past decade, ever since the triumph of Bullets Over Broadway (it was nominated for eight Oscars and won one), Woody Allen films have been a little samey, have looked a little tired, which is why his new production, Match Point, benefits greatly from the fact that he is not in it. It is the first film he has shot in London and it is big and long and serious, something the audience is tipped off about early on when the lead character, played by Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, is filmed casually reading Crime and Punishment (Allen says the book "puts my movie to shame"). Although the title sounds like a made-for-TV movie, this is Allen as the sort of film-maker he has always admired, but rather defensively sent up. It tackles big, Greek themes, with a classical score, beautifully shot and shockingly concluded. The film revisits the age-old debate of character versus fate, faith versus self-determination and above all, luck; at what stage does a series of bad line calls constitute a destiny?

"I had an idea about wanting to do something about the role that luck plays in life," he says, "and that we're all terrified to face up to that. Everyone wants to think that they, you know, control their lives, or at least have some control. You like to think, you know, well, if I exercise and eat right and don't smoke, I'm going to ... But that doesn't do it. And no amount of planning can account for the big part that luck plays. I wanted to write a story that would illustrate that."

Is he lucky? Yes, he says; he must be, in some way, merely by virtue of the fact that he is successful.

"People are often not honest about it, but the truth of the matter is that you are very dependent on ... You know, when I started in show business, there were guys and girls who were as talented as me or more; and you know, one died in a plane crash. You know ... what can you ... you need luck. It's a very, very important part of your life, and you don't acknowledge that."

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Bound for Glory: America in Color

The blurb from the site: Bound for Glory: America in Color is the first major exhibition of the little known color images taken by photographers of the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information. These vivid scenes and portraits capture the effects of the Depression on America's rural and small town populations, the nation's subsequent economic recovery and industrial growth, and the country's great mobilization for World War II. I just love this kind of thing. I find it fascinating how difficult life was for almost all the previuos generations, and how relative it all truly is. I sit as a middle class man, in luxuries many of my ancestors would never have dared dream of, and yet I hunger. I feel unentertained. I feel incomplete. Contentment with what one has is the provision of the believer. We are full, yet we're truly starving. I think that many of those who tread before us would smack us if they heard us complain. Like when I was doing ablutions at the mosque. There was this elderly Bangladeshi chap next to me. In hope of making conversation I said, "Cold eh," smilingly. He looked up at me as one would some lint. "You are young," he firmly replied. It makes me laugh to think of it. I have the softest whitest hands. Yes, these hands have never known labour. Click here for the online exhibition.

'I do bad taste with intelligence'

Over an anarchic lunch, Mel Brooks wisecracks about everything from the new-found success of The Producers to his wartime high jinks. But the recent death of his wife, Anne Bancroft, has left him bereft. Rachel Cooke Sunday December 18, 2005 The Observer To slip briefly into luvvie parlance, Mel Brooks is what is known as a trouper. This means he always gets on with the job, come sleet or snow, a goonish smile slathered across his face (even if, in some lights, the smile does look more like a grimace). His old-fashioned trouper qualities manifest themselves in all sorts of ways. At one end of the scale, there is his determination to keep working and talking and travelling, even though it is still only six months since his wife of more than 40 years, Anne Bancroft, died of cancer. At the other end, there is his delightful enjoyment of this room, in Simpson's, an ancient restaurant on the Strand, where we are trying - and just about succeeding - to have lunch together.

Mel, and Mel's people, had hoped to bag a table at the Savoy Grill. But nothing doing. So we have come round the corner to this less swanky establishment. The carpets are busy, and the place is packed with office Christmas parties; I can hardly hear myself speak, let alone catch Brooks's hammy burr. To my left, a woman in a sparkly dress has just taken a photograph of her group (I can only give grateful thanks that her camera is back in her handbag when my guest walks in), and later the maitre d' will proffer a laminated menu for Brooks to sign, which he does, even though the Biro skids over it like a glass on a Ouija board ('Don't worry! I can do it,' he yells, gripping the pen with all his might).

But does any of this bother him? Does it hell. 'Isn't this great?' he shouts. I must look blank, because he soon says again: 'I said, isn't this GREAT?' I nod my head vigorously. His approach to dining is as wilfully anarchic as his humour. First he orders some brown toast. Having demolished this, he asks for a cappuccino. Next, a Dover sole, which he would like meunière rather than grilled. When the waiter tells him that this comes with chips, he yelps as though he has been burnt: 'No, no, no!' A compromise is found. He will have potatoes and some savoy cabbage. As for the cappuccinos, they just keep on coming; he drinks them so fast, I fear for his tongue.

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Where there's smoke ...

When the government last year downgraded it to a class C drug, the message seemed pretty clear: cannabis is harmless. Since then, there has been mounting evidence of a link between the drug and mental illness. So is it safe to skin up? Blake Morrison reports

Friday December 16, 2005

Guardian

About five years ago, Julie Lynn-Evans became aware that cannabis was not the mild and harmless drug that she had always thought it to be. Partly it was through having teenage children of her own and talking to other parents, and seeing how wiped out and catatonic kids could be after smoking "skunk", as the form of the drug now dominating the market is known. At the same time, she began to notice that a large proportion of the troubled adolescents she was seeing in her consulting room - all the boys, at least- were cannabis users. A psychotherapist with many years experience of working with teenagers, she suddenly saw links between their use of the drug and the problems that were bringing them to her, including paranoia, depression, lethargy, violence, school refusal, school exclusion and poor self-esteem. There was no scientific evidence she knew of to support her. But other psychiatrists she talked to had observed the same phenomenon and were arriving at the same conclusion.

"I'm not an alarmist," she says, "nor a reactionary. In fact, I'd say I'm one of the most liberal people I know. But I am really worried. What my generation smoked as cannabis and what today's kids are smoking are completely different. This isn't some cosy, middle-class moral panic - we're talking about kids with knives, kids in trouble with the police, kids on lock-up wards and in psychiatric hospitals. I used to get just a trickle of cases - now I've a long waiting list of kids who have lost their way. And there's no doubt that skunk plays a large part in many of the sad stories I'm asked to disentangle. It's an incredibly dangerous drug."

Earlier this year, to make her point, she told a newspaper: "I would rather my daughter took heroin." Now she slightly regrets the sound bite - "a needle full of heroin is a pretty scary idea, too" - but she sticks by the point she was trying to make: that while heroin addiction is curable, the effects of skunk on some people are not. "Once psychosis has been triggered, the effects can be permanent. I have young kids who come to see me who only get by because they're on anti-psychotic drugs. And for a small percentage, there's no way back. They've lost control of their lives and we've lost them."

Lynn-Evans and I come from the same generation, one that hit adolescence in the 1960s or 70s. Aren't her anxieties precisely those which our parents expressed when we took drugs? "Fair point," she says. "It could be that I'm turning into a reactionary old goat. But the kids who come to see me don't seem to think so. And the research to back up my hunch is in place now. There's more and more of it every week, and all the studies show the same thing: that for a significant number of young people, smoking cannabis poses a risk; and the earlier you start smoking, the greater that risk will be."

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Two tribes go to war

With supremacist 'Anglos' battling it out with 'bloody Lebs' on Cronulla beach, it looks like being a long, hot summer down under. But the reality is that Australia is no more racist than Britain, argues Germaine Greer

Germaine Greer Thursday December 15, 2005

Guardian

'We are the Sons and Daughters of the Anzacs. We cannot expect our treasonous government to protect us in these times, they are the ones that bought us to this very place. With 150,000 Arabs entering our nation 'legally' each year, it is time Australians stood up and were counted. For we are the Sons and Daughters of the Anzacs, the men who protected us from threat and invasion in years gone by. Now it is your turn, OUR turn, the guard has changed, the times have changed, but true patriots shall never be silenced."

So runs the latest communique of the commanders-in-chief of the "Anglo" side in the south Sydney beach wars, summoning me and other "Australians" to Cronulla next Sunday to do battle with the foreign invader. Under freshly invoked emergency powers, the Australian who sent it to me could incur a fine of A$5,000 (£2,130). Meanwhile, Arab-Christian and Arab-Muslim organisations are desperately trying to impose a curfew on their communities; Lebanese mothers are being asked to use their authority in the family to keep their sons at home next weekend.

The "can-Australia-really-be-racist?" approach of the British media to reportage of the battle of Cronulla is gratuitous and silly. Australia is as racist as Britain, no more, no less. Australian racism derives from the same bottomless source as British racism - from universal ignorance and working-class frustration, reinforced by an unshakeable conviction of British superiority over all other nations on earth, especially the swarthy ones. If Australia had been colonised by any other nation but the British, it would be less racist. As it is, it is dying hard.

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Suspected and Feared

Muslim Migrants after September 11th By Behzad Yaghmaian

It was a beautiful and sunny day that September 11th and I was in New York's Central Park biking when I saw the helicopters flying south. Sirens and more helicopters followed. Sensing that something troubling had happened, I headed for home.

On my way into my building, I was stopped by a harmless, mentally-impaired man, a street regular in our neighborhood. With a frantic look, he stuttered out, "Did you hear? The Arabs have attacked!" Then he said it again. "The Arabs" was what I heard as I headed for my apartment, hoping he was wrong. What could he know? I thought, only half-convinced.

By midday, of course, everyone was talking about the Muslims, the Arabs, the Middle Eastern terrorists. I remained in my room, avoiding suspicious neighborhood eyes, watching the Twin Towers crumble again and again on screen. I had lived in the United States for years, but already I feared I had somehow become an outsider -- a suspected outsider. I feared the start of a witch-hunt against people who looked like me. Some of my American friends, who had the same fears, called offering, for instance, to drive me to work the next day. "Nobody will bother you if you're with me," said one. "Stay here with us and you won't have to drive at all," said another who lived near the college where I taught economics.

Long before September 11, I had decided to write a book about the journey of millions of desperate migrants seeking in the West a life free of violence and poverty. The attacks of September 11th narrowed my focus to Muslim migrants who were now regarded as potential terrorists and a threat to national security. As the months passed and the President's "war on terror" began, I prepared for a long eastward journey of my own in order to follow Muslim migrants west in search of new homes. Expecting to be away for at least two years, I visited Quebec in May 2002 to say farewell to friends.

Early on a Saturday morning, bidding my friends in Quebec goodbye, I drove towards the U.S. border less than an hour away. Lining up behind the other cars, I reached over and unzipped the side pocket of my knapsack, got my American passport out, checked all my documents, and slowly approached passport control. A middle-aged woman with short blond hair and a blank face took my passport.

"Where are you going, sir?" she asked.

"Home. New York City," I replied.

Where had I visited, she wanted to know. What were the names of people I met? What exactly was my profession? I responded as calmly as I could. She asked me to open the trunk and remain inside my car while she searched it. I complied.

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Breakdancing Transformers Video

Friend sent me this link..... transformers....wicked.... See them dance.. click here

The sickness bequeathed by the west to the Muslim world

The Iranian president's support for Holocaust denial is a measure of how far the infection of Jew-hatred has spread

Jonathan Freedland Wednesday December 14, 2005

Guardian

There were few memorable moments in the election campaign of 2005, but there's one I won't forget. It came when I was interviewing a group of Muslim voters in Edinburgh, asking how the Iraq war had unsettled their political allegiances. One older man began telling me that he did not blame Tony Blair or even George Bush for the way things had turned out, because they were mere dupes of a more powerful force. The calamity of 9/11 was not all it seemed: the authors of that event were not the 19 hijackers, but more shadowy players, unknown even to Bush. Later, as he gave me a lift to the station, I asked who these secret powers might be. The answer was "rich Jewish people".

I told him that just as there were plenty of lies told about Muslims, so there were lies told about Jews - and that neither of us should accept either. I put the comments to one side, dismissing them as the ramblings of one man.

Again and again in recent years, I've made the same move. I've read the reports of sermons in the Arab world, denouncing Judaism and Jews, and tried to see a wider context.

So I saw the vox pop on Saudi TV asking people on the street whether they would ever shake hands with a Jew - unanimous answer: no - and guessed that perhaps this was an exceptional item, hardly indicative. I read the transcript of an interview with Basmallah, a three-year-old girl, again aired on Saudi TV, who was introduced as a "Muslim girl, a true Muslim". Here's the exchange:

Host: Basmallah, do you know the Jews?

Basmallah: Yes.

Host: Do you like them?

Basmallah: No.

Host: Why don't you like them?

Basmallah: Because they are apes and pigs.

I shuddered to read such a thing. But it was translated and distributed by the Middle East Media Research Institute, and, like others, I wondered about the group's motives: Memri was founded by a veteran of Israeli military intelligence. (On the other hand, few challenge the accuracy of Memri's translations: unpalatable though they are, the texts Memri finds are all too real.)

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Shattering Iraq

By Paul Starobin, National Journal © National Journal Group Inc. Friday, Dec. 9, 2005

Civil war. Surely this is an adjectival misnomer of the first rank. Of all of the various types of war, civil war -- that is, a violent conflict waged between opposing sides within a society -- has generally been the least mannerly and the most savage. "By nature without rules of engagement and retaliation, civil war is a cauldron of wanton and unpremeditated violence with little, if any, ideological leaven," historian Arno J. Mayer of Princeton University wrote in The Furies, his masterful account of the civil wars that followed the Jacobin revolution in France and the Bolshevik upheaval in Russia. Why are civil wars inherently brutal? Because, Mayer said in a recent telephone conversation, they are at bottom about "vengeance."

By just about every meaningful standard that can be applied -- the reference points of history, the research criteria of political science, the contemporaneous reporting of on-the-ground observers, the grim roll of civilian and combatant casualties -- Iraq is now well into the bloody sequence of civil war. Dispense with the tentative locution "on the verge of." An active, if not full-boil, civil war is already a reality. The principal combatants are drawn from the Sunni Arab and Shiite Arab communities, which together comprise about three-quarters of the Iraqi population of 26 million. In this picture, U.S.-led coalition forces tend to be viewed by "rejectionist" Sunni Arabs as protectors of the Shiites, who dominate the new, U.S.-backed, Iraqi government and who operate militias with close ties to the new Iraqi regime.

The Bush administration does not say that Iraq is in a civil war -- but then again, the administration does not say Iraq is not in a civil war. In the battle of words in Washington over defining the conflict, the White House studiously avoids any use of this ominous-sounding term; President Bush didn't use it in his November 30 speech at the U.S. Naval Academy on his strategy for "victory in Iraq." But in the White House's frankest appraisal, to date, of the situation, its new "victory" blueprint acknowledges that Iraqi Sunni Arab "rejectionists," and not Saddam loyalists or Qaeda-linked terrorists, are "the largest group" opposed to the new Iraqi government. This analysis is consistent with the civil-war paradigm of the conflict. Still, the White House prefers to talk about Iraq in the more limited, and less scary, vocabulary of insurgency and counterinsurgency.

The Pentagon, meanwhile, months ago began reviewing the question of whether the Iraqi conflict could be seen as a civil war. Back in the spring, Army Col. Bill Hix, then the chief of strategy for multinational forces in Iraq, initiated a conversation with two political science professors at Stanford University about applying the civil-war prism to Iraq. The discussion centered on the questions of how, and how quickly, a low-grade civil war can become full-blown. The Stanford duo, James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin, told Hix, who left his position in August, that civil wars have often occurred despite the presence of "foreign stabilization forces," and they encouraged him to look at past civil wars in such oil-rich countries as Algeria, Angola, and Nigeria. "I understand that by your metric, we are already in the midst of a civil war," Hix replied to the professors in a May e-mail, "but for reasons that are both operationally convenient and, I also think, valid ... I disagree."

Indeed, focusing the lens of civil war on Iraq omits some aspects of this exceedingly complex conflict. Foreign jihadists drawn to Iraq to kill U.S. soldiers as part of a project to establish a new caliphate in the Middle East are not really civil-war combatants. Still, the civil-war prism can explain a lot -- and also offer some prospective guidance. In the elections set for December 15, Iraqis will choose members of a permanent parliament. And if Sunnis participate widely, the elections could start repairing the hurts between warring factions in Iraq, and thereby reduce the level of violence. But it is also possible, and given the history of civil war, perhaps more likely, for the elections to stoke the flames. Democracy is not an antidote to civil war, because elections in fragile societies are often polarizing. In recent history, civil war broke out after contested elections in several post-Soviet republics; and in the United States, the 1860 presidential election turned out to be a prelude to civil war. Indeed, historian David Herbert Donald of Harvard famously blamed the American Civil War on "an excess of democracy."

The worrisome sign in Iraq is that political parties are already organizing principally along religious and sectarian lines. Moreover, the new Iraqi security forces, including the army, are composed of militia elements that "retain their original loyalties or affiliations," as the Pentagon acknowledged last July in a sentence buried in a generally upbeat report to Congress on "measuring stability and security in Iraq." Such units, if made combat-ready, "might very well turn these very arms against each other," notes Pavel Baev, who is a senior analyst for the Center for the Study of Civil War at the International Peace Research Institute in Oslo. So, what does history teach about how civil wars end? Baev's answer is not especially hopeful. "A military victory on one side," he replied.

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Voice Of God Revealed To Be Cheney On Intercom

WASHINGTON, DC—Telephone logs recorded by the National Security Agency and obtained by Congress as part of an ongoing investigation suggest that the vice president may have used the Oval Office intercom system to address President Bush at crucial moments, giving categorical directives in a voice the president believed to be that of God.

While journalists and presidential historians had long noted Bush's deep faith and Cheney's powerful influence in the White House, few had drawn a direct correlation between the two until Tuesday, when transcripts of meetings that took place in March and April of 2002 became available.

In a transcript of an intercom exchange recorded in March 2002, a voice positively identified as the vice president's identifies himself as "the Lord thy God" and promotes the invasion of Iraq, as well as the use of torture in prisoner interrogations.

A close examination of Bush's public statements and Secret Service time logs tracking the vice president reveals a consistent pattern, one which links Bush's belief that he had received word from God with Cheney's use of the White House's telephone-based intercom system.

Officials privately acknowledged that there is reason to believe that the vice president, as God, urged Bush to sign legislation benefiting oil companies in 2005.

"There's a lot of religious zeal in the West Wing," said a former White House staffer who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "It's possible that the vice president has taken advantage of that to fast-track certain administration objectives."

An ex-Treasury Department official and longtime friend of Cheney was asked to comment on the vice president's possible subterfuge. "I don't know. I certainly don't think it's something [Cheney] planned," he said. "I do know that Mr. Bush was unfamiliar with a phone-based intercom, and I suppose it is possible that Dick took advantage of that."

A highly placed NSA official who has reviewed the information released Tuesday said Cheney masked his clipped monotone, employing a deeper, booming voice.

Said the NSA source: "It sounded as though the speaker, who identified himself as God, stood away from the intercom to create an echo effect."

On Capitol Hill, sources are expressing surprise that Cheney, a vice president with more influence than any other in U.S. history, would have resorted to such deception.

"The vice president has a lot of sway in this administration," said a former White House aide. "But perhaps when President Bush was particularly resolute and resistant to mortal persuasion, the vice president chose to quickly resolve disputes in his favor with a half-decent God impression."

For many, the revelation explains Bush's confusion in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

"I was very surprised by the president's slow response in New Orleans," political commentator Bill Kristol said. "The president told me that he was praying every day in his office, but had received no reply. I had no idea what he meant, but of course, it all makes sense now."

At the time of Katrina, Cheney was on a fly-fishing trip, from which he returned on Sept. 1.

According to highly placed White House sources, Bush's senior advisers are trying to shield the president from the news. Aides are concerned that too harsh an awakening might shake Bush's faith, which has been a central part of his life for nearly 20 years.

"It's hard to tell the leader of the free world that he has been the butt of an elaborate and long-term ruse," a former staffer said. "Maybe it would be easier to take if it came from Cheney's God voice."

Badr's spreading web

By Mahan Abedin The recent discovery of a supposedly secret prison allegedly run by elements in the Iraqi Interior Ministry loyal to the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), has raised fears of an escalating sectarian conflict in Iraq. Leaving aside the sensational reporting on this incident, there is nothing particularly new or even secret about this development. Certainly the American authorities in Iraq are not only well aware of aggressive counter-insurgency tactics, but in some cases even oversee them. The timing of the so-called secret prison's "discovery" is also interesting, coming at a time when the US is trying to diminish the influence of the Shi'ite Islamist bloc in the government. The elections scheduled for December 15 are seen as a perfect opportunity by the Americans and their main ally in Iraq, former premier Iyad Allawi, to curtail the electoral clout of SCIRI and other Shi'ite organizations and personalities, including Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Chalabi. The "discovery" of the secret detention center and the sensational reporting that followed is part of this American-led electoral strategy. In the security field, though, there are unlikely to be any changes to the way the Shi'ite-dominated security forces conduct the war against the Arab Sunni guerrilla movement and the Salafi-jihadi extremists. However, the events of the past month have highlighted a potentially fatal long-term flaw in the development of new Iraqi security forces, and that is the emergence of two separate security/intelligence structures: one which is entirely overseen by the Americans, and the other entirely led by Shi'ite Islamists with strong ties to Iran. Read more...

Can Democracy Stop Terrorism?

By F. Gregory Gause III

From Foreign Affairs, September/October 2005

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Summary: The Bush administration contends that the push for democracy in the Muslim world will improve U.S. security. But this premise is faulty: there is no evidence that democracy reduces terrorism. Indeed, a democratic Middle East would probably result in Islamist governments unwilling to cooperate with Washington.

F. GREGORY GAUSE III is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Vermont and Director of its Middle East Studies Program.

WHAT FREEDOM BRINGS

The United States is engaged in what President George W. Bush has called a "generational challenge" to instill democracy in the Arab world. The Bush administration and its defenders contend that this push for Arab democracy will not only spread American values but also improve U.S. security. As democracy grows in the Arab world, the thinking goes, the region will stop generating anti-American terrorism. Promoting democracy in the Middle East is therefore not merely consistent with U.S. security goals; it is necessary to achieve them.

But this begs a fundamental question: Is it true that the more democratic a country becomes, the less likely it is to produce terrorists and terrorist groups? In other words, is the security rationale for promoting democracy in the Arab world based on a sound premise? Unfortunately, the answer appears to be no. Although what is known about terrorism is admittedly incomplete, the data available do not show a strong relationship between democracy and an absence of or a reduction in terrorism. Terrorism appears to stem from factors much more specific than regime type. Nor is it likely that democratization would end the current campaign against the United States. Al Qaeda and like-minded groups are not fighting for democracy in the Muslim world; they are fighting to impose their vision of an Islamic state. Nor is there any evidence that democracy in the Arab world would "drain the swamp," eliminating soft support for terrorist organizations among the Arab public and reducing the number of potential recruits for them.

Even if democracy were achieved in the Middle East, what kind of governments would it produce? Would they cooperate with the United States on important policy objectives besides curbing terrorism, such as advancing the Arab-Israeli peace process, maintaining security in the Persian Gulf, and ensuring steady supplies of oil? No one can predict the course a new democracy will take, but based on public opinion surveys and recent elections in the Arab world, the advent of democracy there seems likely to produce new Islamist governments that would be much less willing to cooperate with the United States than are the current authoritarian rulers.

The answers to these questions should give Washington pause. The Bush administration's democracy initiative can be defended as an effort to spread American democratic values at any cost, or as a long-term gamble that even if Islamists do come to power, the realities of governance will moderate them or the public will grow disillusioned with them. The emphasis on electoral democracy will not, however, serve immediate U.S. interests either in the war on terrorism or in other important Middle East policies.

It is thus time to rethink the U.S. emphasis on democracy promotion in the Arab world. Rather than push for quick elections, the United States should instead focus its energy on encouraging the development of secular, nationalist, and liberal political organizations that could compete on an equal footing with Islamist parties. Only by doing so can Washington help ensure that when elections finally do occur, the results are more in line with U.S. interests.

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Tomgram: Dreyfuss on Bush's Deadly Dance with Islamic Theocrats

During his embattled summer vacation in Crawford, Texas, George Bush managed to launch a new promotional ditty for his war in Iraq: "As Iraqis stand up, we will stand down." Since then there has been much commentary from the administration, from military officials, and from the media on the question of how successfully the Iraqi military is actually "standing up." (Not especially successfully is the usual answer.) There has, however, been scarcely any serious discussion about what that new Iraqi army, heavily infiltrated by Shiite and Kurdish militiamen from the ruling parties in the Iraqi government, is actually going to stand up for. And yet this is an important question.

Only recently, for instance, American forces uncovered some striking evidence of what our new Iraq has increasingly come to look like. In a bunker in Baghdad they discovered a detention and torture center run by the Interior Ministry, itself headed by Bayan Jabr, a senior member of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. SCIRI is the main Shiite religious party in the government and has a 20,000-man strong militia, the Badr Organization. While the bunker's discovery caused an uproar here (and in Iraq), it is but the tip of the iceberg. In some sense, it is not even a new story.

For well over a year now, Human Rights Watch has been cataloguing Interior Ministry abuses and warning about a human rights catastrophe unraveling in "our" Iraq. Last July, Peter Beaumont of the British Observer revealed that the Shiite religious/political powers-that-be had set up not one detention-and-torture center but a whole "ghost network" of them -- in some cases, he gave locations – in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities, partly financed by British and American funds originally intended for the rebuilding of the police force. In these centers, torture methods "resurrected from the time of Saddam" were being used; and the centers, in turn, were connected to paramilitary commando units (and police units) -- basically kidnapping and death squads -- being run by the Interior Ministry as well as by the Shiite religious parties. Such units are increasingly engaged in a war of revenge with Sunni insurgents and in an ever growing campaign of assassinations, summary executions, and disappearances in Sunni neighborhoods which months ago reached "epidemic levels." Human rights organizations in the country have hundreds of cases of disappearances on their lists -- as well as assassinations, torture of every sort, and an endless raft of human rights violations.

When asked about these practices by the Washington Post's Ellen Knickmeyer, Abdul Aziz Hakim, head of SCIRI, responded with complaints that the Bush administration wasn't letting his men act aggressively enough. The United States, he insisted, "is tying Iraq's hands in the fight against insurgents" -- oddly enough the very (tortured) image Vice President Dick Cheney recently used in opposing Senator John McCain's anti-torture amendment in the Senate. (The amendment, he said, "would bind the president's hands in wartime.")

This week, just as Saddam Hussein went back into court, a new voice was added to the discussion about the "collapse of human rights in Iraq" -- that of Iyad Allawi, the former Iraqi Prime Minister in the American-sponsored Interim Government. Running for office again in the upcoming elections, he accused the Iraqi government -- essentially the Shiite religious parties -- of sponsoring "human rights abuses in Iraq [that] are now as bad as they were under Saddam Hussein and are even in danger of eclipsing his record." He told the Observer's Beaumont that "the brutality of elements in the new security forces rivals that of Saddam's secret police," and added, "We are even witnessing Sharia courts based on Islamic law that are trying people and executing them." The former American favorite "now has so little faith in the rule of law that he had instructed his own bodyguards to fire on any police car that attempted to approach his headquarters without prior notice, following the implication of police units in many of the abuses."

All this, by the way, from a man, who was the head of an exile organization, the Iraqi National Accord, which, according to a little noted June 2004 front-page article in the New York Times, planted car bombs and other explosives in Baghdad in the 1990s in an attempt to destabilize Saddam's regime -- and did so under the "direction" of the CIA.

Robert Dreyfuss has a particularly vivid way of catching the strange dilemma George Bush's war has left us in today. American forces in Iraq, he writes below, are now "the Praetorian Guard" for a radical right-wing Iraqi theocratic government in Baghdad, one deeply indebted to that full member of the "axis of evil," Iran. Dreyfuss is the author of a remarkable new book, The Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam. It's a striking history of how, for the last half century, successive American administrations have bedded down with right-wing Islamic movements. James Norton, former Middle East editor for the Christian Science Monitor, recently called the book "a chronicle of mistakes made, opportunities lost, and lessons most vividly not learned. It's also the story of the historical error that has come to define U.S. foreign policy in the Muslim world: the Machiavellian use of political Islam as a sword and shield against communism and Arab nationalism… Devil's Game records the long and sordid history of right-wing and hard-line elements in the U.S. government finding common cause with fundamentalist groups in the Middle East… By feeding the monster of militant Islamism to fulfill short-term goals, Dreyfuss argues, the United States helped unleash the most challenging foreign policy crisis of the new millennium" It is a must read. In the meantime, consider his latest take on the Bush administration and the Islamic right. Tom

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Art, truth and politics

In his video-taped Nobel acceptance speech, Harold Pinter excoriated a 'brutal, scornful and ruthless' United States. This is the full text of his address

Harold Pinter Thursday December 8, 2005

Guardian Unlimited

In 1958 I wrote the following:

'There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.'

I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?

Truth in drama is forever elusive. You never quite find it but the search for it is compulsive. The search is clearly what drives the endeavour. The search is your task. More often than not you stumble upon the truth in the dark, colliding with it or just glimpsing an image or a shape which seems to correspond to the truth, often without realising that you have done so. But the real truth is that there never is any such thing as one truth to be found in dramatic art. There are many. These truths challenge each other, recoil from each other, reflect each other, ignore each other, tease each other, are blind to each other. Sometimes you feel you have the truth of a moment in your hand, then it slips through your fingers and is lost.

I have often been asked how my plays come about. I cannot say. Nor can I ever sum up my plays, except to say that this is what happened. That is what they said. That is what they did.

Most of the plays are engendered by a line, a word or an image. The given word is often shortly followed by the image. I shall give two examples of two lines which came right out of the blue into my head, followed by an image, followed by me.

The plays are The Homecoming and Old Times. The first line of The Homecoming is 'What have you done with the scissors?' The first line of Old Times is 'Dark.'

In each case I had no further information.

In the first case someone was obviously looking for a pair of scissors and was demanding their whereabouts of someone else he suspected had probably stolen them. But I somehow knew that the person addressed didn't give a damn about the scissors or about the questioner either, for that matter.

'Dark' I took to be a description of someone's hair, the hair of a woman, and was the answer to a question. In each case I found myself compelled to pursue the matter. This happened visually, a very slow fade, through shadow into light.

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How Bush Created a Theocracy in Iraq

By Juan Cole

The Bush administration naively believed that Iraq was a blank slate on which it could inscribe its vision for a remake of the Arab world. Iraq, however, was a witches’ brew of dynamic social and religious movements, a veritable pressure cooker. When George W. Bush invaded, he blew off the lid.

Shiite religious leaders and parties, in particular, have crucially shaped the new Iraq in each of its three political phases. The first was during the period of direct American rule, largely by Paul Bremer. The second comprised the months of interim government, when Iyad Allawi was prime minister. The third stretches from the formation of an elected government, with Ibrahim Jaafari as prime minister, to today. In the first phase, expatriate Shiite parties returned to the country to emerge as major players, to the consternation of a confused and clueless “Coalition Provisional Authority.”

The oldest of these was the Dawa Party, founded in the late 1950s as a Shiite answer to mass parties such as the Communist Party of Iraq and the Arab nationalist Baath Party. Dawa means the call, as in the imperative to spread the faith. Dawa Party leaders in the 1960s and 1970s dreamed of a Shiite paradise to rival the workers’ paradise of the Marxists, with a state ruled by Islamic law, where a “consultative council” somehow selected by the community would make further regulations in accordance with the Koran. The Dawa Party organized covert cells throughout the Shiite south. In 1980, in the wake of the Khomeini revolution in Iran, Saddam Hussein and the Baath Party cracked down hard on Dawa, executing many of its leaders, attacking its party workers and making membership in the party a crime punishable by death. The upper echelons of the Baath were dominated by Sunni Arabs who disliked religious Shiites, considering them backward and Iran-oriented rather than progressive and Arab. In the same year, 1980, Saddam invaded Iran, beginning a bloody eight-year-long war with his Shiite neighbor. In the early 1980s, Iran came to be viewed in Washington as public enemy Number 2, right after the Soviet Union. In the Cold War, the United States had viewed Iran as a key asset, and in 1953 the CIA overthrew the populist government of elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, which had broken with the country’s monarch. The U.S. put the autocratic Mohammad Reza Shah back on his throne, building him up as an absolute monarch with a well-trained secret police and jails overflowing with prisoners of conscience. The shah’s obsequiousness toward the U.S., and his secularism, provoked the ire of many religious Shiites in Iran. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, exiled as a troublemaker in 1963, had lived from 1964 to 1978 in Iraq, where he developed a new doctrine that clerics should rule. In 1978 he was expelled from Iraq to Paris and helped lead the revolution of 1978-79 that overthrew the shah and brought Khomeini to power as theocrat in chief.

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Wrongful Imprisonment: Anatomy of a CIA Mistake

German Citizen Released After Months in 'Rendition'

By Dana Priest Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, December 4, 2005; A01

In May 2004, the White House dispatched the U.S. ambassador in Germany to pay an unusual visit to that country's interior minister. Ambassador Daniel R. Coats carried instructions from the State Department transmitted via the CIA's Berlin station because they were too sensitive and highly classified for regular diplomatic channels, according to several people with knowledge of the conversation.

Coats informed the German minister that the CIA had wrongfully imprisoned one of its citizens, Khaled Masri, for five months, and would soon release him, the sources said. There was also a request: that the German government not disclose what it had been told even if Masri went public. The U.S. officials feared exposure of a covert action program designed to capture terrorism suspects abroad and transfer them among countries, and possible legal challenges to the CIA from Masri and others with similar allegations.

The Masri case, with new details gleaned from interviews with current and former intelligence and diplomatic officials, offers a rare study of how pressure on the CIA to apprehend al Qaeda members after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has led in some instances to detention based on thin or speculative evidence. The case also shows how complicated it can be to correct errors in a system built and operated in secret.

The CIA, working with other intelligence agencies, has captured an estimated 3,000 people, including several key leaders of al Qaeda, in its campaign to dismantle terrorist networks. It is impossible to know, however, how many mistakes the CIA and its foreign partners have made.

Unlike the military's prison for terrorist suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba -- where 180 prisoners have been freed after a review of their cases -- there is no tribunal or judge to check the evidence against those picked up by the CIA. The same bureaucracy that decides to capture and transfer a suspect for interrogation-- a process called "rendition" -- is also responsible for policing itself for errors.

The CIA inspector general is investigating a growing number of what it calls "erroneous renditions," according to several former and current intelligence officials.

One official said about three dozen names fall in that category; others believe it is fewer. The list includes several people whose identities were offered by al Qaeda figures during CIA interrogations, officials said. One turned out to be an innocent college professor who had given the al Qaeda member a bad grade, one official said.

"They picked up the wrong people, who had no information. In many, many cases there was only some vague association" with terrorism, one CIA officer said.

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Why Do People Behave Nicely?

No one may ever know unless social psychologists shake off their fascination with jerks

By Ethan Watters Photography by Greg Miller

DISCOVER Vol. 26 No. 12 | December 2005 | Anthropology

On the television show The Bachelor, Rachel lies to her fellow contestants about last night's date. Over on The Amazing Race, Jonathan shoves his wife after she slows them down en route to the finish line. On The Apprentice, Maria attacks Wes, then Donald Trump fires them both.

In just a few years, more than 100 reality television shows have been striving to help contestants act like jerks, and audiences love it. Sure, contestants sometimes form noble alliances, and the occasional romance blossoms, but the behavior that viewers talk about the next day at the watercooler invariably involves contestants behaving maliciously or embarrassing themselves by cracking under pressure. Although it's clear that participants are purposely placed in coercive situations, we nonetheless think we are seeing something real and noteworthy about the character and the psychology of fellow humans.

Perhaps that fascination explains why so many experiments in the field of psychology read like the premise for a reality TV series. Consider the most famous of all social psychology experiments, Stanley Milgram's "Behavioral Study of Obedience," published in 1963. After answering a newspaper ad, volunteers (all men) arrive at a Yale University laboratory, where a man in a gray lab coat asks for help in a "learning experiment." The subject is instructed to administer a shock to a stranger in an adjoining room when the stranger answers a question incorrectly. The shocks are mild at first, but after each wrong answer the experimenter asks the subject to deliver a stronger voltage. The cries from the stranger in the other room grow more agonized as the shock is increased in 15-volt increments. (The shocks aren't real; the "stranger" is merely acting.) If the subject hesitates, the man in the lab coat says sternly, "Please continue." If the subject still balks, he is first told, "The experiment requires that you go on," then, "It is absolutely essential that you continue," and then, "You have no other choice, you must go on."

By the time the subjects deliver what they believe to be a "very strong shock," some are sweating, trembling, stuttering, or biting their lips. In the most interesting reaction, which would have made for great television, some of the subjects experience uncontrollable fits of nervous laughter. One 46-year-old encyclopedia salesman is so overcome by a seizure of laughter that the experiment has to be stopped to allow him to recover.

What drew attention to Milgram's paper was his report that most of the randomly selected men were coaxed into hitting a switch labeled "Danger: Severe Shock," administering a supposed 420-volt zap. Milgram was surprised that although "subjects have learned from childhood that it is a fundamental breach of moral conduct to hurt another person against his will," most were willing to do so.

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Realists Tighten Grip as Talks Open with Iran

Jim Lobe WASHINGTON, Nov 28 (IPS) - In a new indication that the balance of power within the administration of President George W. Bush has tilted strongly in favour of the realists, Washington's influential ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, has disclosed that Bush has authorised him to open direct talks with Iran about stabilising Iraq. The announcement, which came in an interview with Newsweek magazine, marks a major change in policy. The two countries have not held direct talks since mid-May 2003, shortly after the U.S. ouster of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, when the influence of neo-conservatives was at its zenith. At that time, the administration charged that al Qaeda attacks carried out in Saudi Arabia had been coordinated from Iranian territory. It promptly broke off an ongoing diplomatic dialogue with Iran in Geneva that was led by Khalilzad himself and dealt primarily with Afghanistan and Iraq. "I've been authorised by the president to engage the Iranians as I engaged them in Afghanistan directly," Khalilzad told Newsweek. "There will be meetings, and that's also a departure and an adjustment (to U.S. policy)," he added. The decision to reopen direct talks with Iran, which has not yet reacted to Khalilzad's announcement, provoked a heated intra-administration debate earlier this fall about engaging Iran more deeply, particularly in light of U.S. concerns -- and threats -- concerning Tehran's nuclear programme. Read more...

No need to be afraid of us

The Muslim Brotherhood believes that democratic reforms could trigger a renaissance in Egypt

Khairat el-Shatir Wednesday November 23, 2005

Guardian

The violence that has erupted across Egypt in recent days is the result of government panic at the success of the Muslim Brotherhood - even in the rigged polls that pass for elections in the Arab world's most populous country. As the second round of voting opened on Sunday in Egypt's tightly restricted parliamentary contest, around 500 of our members were arrested at dawn and machete-wielding thugs attacked our supporters at polling stations. But the provocations of a corrupt, oppressive government - backed by the most powerful countries in the world - will not intimidate either our organisation, which has survived for 77 years, or the Egyptian people, who have increasingly come to trust us.

Despite the popularity of the Muslim Brotherhood - or rather because of it - the organisation continues to be banned in Egypt. Nevertheless, by standing as independents whose affiliation is widely known, 17 of our members managed to be elected as the largest opposition group in the last parliament.

Given the pressure for change, we mobilised to win more seats in the hope that these new elections would be more honest and free. We are committed to democracy and to respect fair election results, whatever the outcome. But we have contested only 120 of the 444 parliamentary seats, knowing that standing for more might provoke the regime into fixing the results. The first round of parliamentary elections, in which the Muslim Brotherhood won more than 65% of seats it contested despite large-scale rigging and intimidation, confirm that our movement is seen by the public as a viable political alternative. But in spite of the confidence the Egyptian people have in us, we are not seeking more than a small piece of the parliamentary cake. This decision is dictated by political realities, both locally and internationally: in other words, the possible reaction of a repressive government backed to the hilt by the US and other western governments.

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VIEW: Iraq’s economic divide —Amal Kashf Al Ghitta

The government must spare no effort in convincing poor Iraqis of the value of democracy and freedom. This will not be easy to achieve in a country where many people consider breaking the law an act of heroism. But we Iraqis have also learnt that power should not be concentrated in a few hands Everyone who looks at Iraq sees a nation divided between Shia, Sunni, and Kurd communities. But an equally fundamental division — one that has contributed as much to the ongoing insurrection as sectarian strife and opposition to the American-led military occupation — is the widening gap between Iraq’s rich and poor. When Iraq was liberated, most people, especially the poor, began to hope for a charismatic leader who would save them from the bitter reality of daily life. Raised in fear, they had no idea how democracy could apply to their society, or how human rights groups and other civic organisations could help shape the future. Soon enough, Iraq was faced with a new social divide. On one side stood people who understood how to operate in a democracy, attain power, and realise their ambitions. They learnt to speak the language of democracy, gaining money and influence in the process and enlisting independent organisations to defend their rights and privileges. On the other side, however, remains the vast population of powerless Iraqis, including widows and divorced or abandoned women with no one to provide for them and their children. For these people, democracy and human rights mean nothing. They are ignorant, poor, and sick. Victimised by an educational system that collapsed over a decade ago, they have few skills that can help them find employment in Iraq’s blighted economy. During Saddam’s reign, no effort was made to raise living standards for the poor. I have visited the huge slums of Iraq and found families living in homes with barely a roof to cover them, with insect infestations everywhere, and with raw sewage seeping under their doors. Day or night, they live in darkness. Needing nothing more than food, decent housing, and the possibility of a job, these families wait for death, dreading the cries of their starving children. When I met the women who live in those houses, they showered me with questions: will democracy give us food and houses? Will democracy stop men from beating their wives? Will it give citizenship to our children? Will it give us the right to divorce the husbands who abandon us? My answer to all of these questions was “yes”. Yes, democracy will give you the right to live in a decent house, the right to learn and work, and it will give citizenship to your children and make you equal with your men. But you have to work hard and make every possible effort in demanding your rights. They replied: “Saddam taught us for 35 years how to be jobless, silent, and fearful. What can we do now?” In these destitute areas, where most Iraqis live, people are prey to bitter temptations. Many are beyond the reach of political or government leaders. They fall easily into violence, theft, and sabotage. Poverty drives some to take money in exchange for acts of violence, abetted by the lure of a false heroism that they were not able to act upon during Saddam’s long reign. Poverty has exacerbated the trauma of Iraq’s violent history of wars and atrocities, which has desensitised people to killing. Read more....

Another day in Baghdad A&E

What happens to the victims of Baghdad's countless bombings? Ghaith Abdul-Ahad meets the doctors who battle to save them

Ghaith Abdul-Ahad Tuesday November 22, 2005

Guardian

Inside the compound of Yarmouk hospital, the mud-coloured buildings are filthy and falling apart. Smashed windows provide the only lighting along the corridors. Children touting sweets or cigarettes thread their way through piles of rubbish. Hundreds of people, some pushing wheelchairs, others supporting crouched figures - all clutching files of papers and x-rays - squeeze through narrow metal gates between the different sections of the compound.

There are the usual sort of hospital patients here: those with intestinal pains or broken limbs. But there are also Baghdad specialities: patients with car-bomb damage or mortar-shrapnel injuries or gunshot wounds.

Yarmouk, one of Baghdad's biggest hospitals, was built in the late 1970s when the oil-rich Iraqi government launched a five-year school, factory and hospital-building programme. That ambitious undertaking left Iraq with a modern and respected health-care system. But three wars and two decades later, it is in a shambles.

All the urgent cases end up in Yarmouk's emergency room - and there are plenty of urgent cases. The hospital receives most of the casualties from the west of Baghdad, the area of the city with the highest level of insurgent attacks; an area that has no-go zones for the Iraqi army and police personnel.

The ER is a big room with male and female sections divided by a curtain. Adjacent is a small operating theatre, a pharmacy and a large hall where waiting family members chain-smoke, sob and blame the Americans, the Zionists and the insurgents for the injuries to their loved ones.

In the main room, the floors and walls are tiled; the walls are filthy and covered with stains. In one corner sits a bulky, obsolete piece of equipment that is now used as a telephone table. In another corner there's a small, broken basin that the doctors use to wash their hands and cleaners use to fill buckets of water. Along one wall, there's a surface where doctors can fill in the three forms necessary for each patient, and then copy the forms into a big book. In the midst of all this, there are 12 metal hospital beds. Each is covered with green plastic sheets.

Over the past few months, I've spent what amounts to about two weeks in the ER. Each time I come, there are police cars and army pick-up trucks parked outside where you might expect to see ambulances. These are the vehicles that bring the victims from the latest scene of violence.

Early-morning casualties

Dr Omar Ta'ie is 26 and has only recently qualified; he speaks flawless English and says he listens to western pop music. As part of his ongoing medical training he is spending a year here in the ER. He does 12-hour shifts for four consecutive days, then gets three days off. He talks me through an average day.

"Our day starts busy," he says. "The first attacks happen in the morning, and patients start arriving by 7.15am. By 8am all these beds are full."

The first victims tend to be from insurgent attacks. The insurgents like to let off their car bombs and small explosives, and to carry out their assassinations, while it's still early. The idea is to catch officials and policemen either as they change shifts or while they are driving to work. Many of the victims, however, tend to be passers-by on their way to work in the early-morning rush hour.

"Around 10am, things calm down and we have a break until one in the afternoon when the biggest wave of car bombs and explosions often happens," says Ta'ie. "By that time most of the patients have to lie on the floor. And then nothing until 9pm, when sectarian assassinations flare up, mixed with a couple of drunken fights."

There are usually four to five doctors and a couple of medics assigned to each shift. After each wave of patients, two workers, dressed in blue factory overalls, come in and start collecting the plastic sheets from the beds. One of them brings a bucket of water and the other a grey rope mop, and with the sheets done, they start cleaning the floor. Sometimes they have to use a piece of cloth to remove a difficult bloodstain.

I was in ER one morning in September when we heard ambulance sirens. The doctors came from behind their counter into the middle of the room as a medic entered. He was pushing a gurney on which a girl lay unconscious. "Shrapnel wounds in her arm and chest from a mortar that fell on their house," he said.

Two of the doctors took her to the female section and pulled the curtain closed. The girl's mother, a huge woman dressed in a black abaya, her headscarf in disarray and her hair falling over her face, stood in the middle of the room wailing as a young female doctor - given the job of filling in the usual forms - tried to question her.

A few minutes later a big man ran into the room. "Where is Saneya?" He was looking for his sister. One of the doctors assured him that she was fine, but that she had needed to go to another hospital where they had specialist brain surgery equipment - "just for a routine check".

"Our biggest fear is when someone dies because then the family and relatives will start beating us," one doctor told me quietly.

What's even more frightening for these doctors is that they get casualties in from "commando" units, part of a feared paramilitary group with links to a Shia militia, which has a base a few hundred metres from the Yarmouk hospital.

One night when I was about to leave the ER there was a burst of gunfire - heavy machine guns roared at the entrance of the hospital. The doctors started running around urging patients, if they were well enough, to clear out. Moments later, a group of masked young men in army fatigues and black T-shirts burst into the ward. Two went to where people had gathered in the hallway, pointing guns at them and telling them to look away. Three others carried between them a piece of cloth in which one of their comrades, badly injured, was lying. They placed him on one of the plastic-covered beds.

"Save him," said one of the men in black T-shirts. One of the commandos took off his mask and began weeping. The others laid their machine guns against the walls and lit cigarettes, trying to stay calm.

A doctor asked me to go. "If they find you are here, they will kill you," he said. Outside, some commandos were holding up the traffic with bursts of gunfire. I crouched between cars until it was safe to go. The doctors were lucky that day; the injured commando didn't die. But twice in the past few months the doctors have gone on strike, protesting against commandos and army soldiers beating them up and kicking patients out of their beds to make space for their casualties. After each strike they get assurances from the ministry of interior that no armed men will be allowed into the ER. But it keeps on happening.

No pain relief

The doctors here work hard, and are dedicated, but resources are scarce, and things frequently feel chaotic. One afternoon when I was in the ER a man with a partially severed hand was brought in, another victim of a mortar attack. He was holding his dangling hand with his other hand; a friend in a blood-splattered white robe came in with him. Three doctors laid the injured man out on a bed, then stretched his injured arm out over a plastic garbage bin.

"Get me some anaesthetics," a doctor shouted at one of the cleaning boys. The boy dashed out of the room.

A doctor wearing blue medical scrubs, helped by another doctor, started to clean the wound. The injured man had been calm with shock, but now began to scream.

The cleaning boy came back saying there was no anaesthetic in the hospital. The injured man's friend ran outside in his blood-soaked dishdashas to find out for himself, but the doctors decided to stitch the hand back on without waiting any longer. The injured man started to wail: "Oh, imam, come and help me. Oh God."

The doctor in blue started to sweat as he tried to find the bleeding artery. The man's screams grew louder.

"I can't find the damn thing," said the doctor.

Patients, relatives and passers-by formed a circle around the doctors as they carried out the operation. A cleaner swept beneath the bed.

After some 10 agonising minutes, a more senior doctor managed to complete the operation. By the time they had finished the man lay unconscious. The anaesthetic still hadn't arrived.

Once Ta'ie took me to the living quarters where the emergency doctors spend their time between shifts. The doctors' residence is a big three-storey building on one side of a courtyard. Inside is a long dark corridor with rooms off to either side. Each room is small, 3m by 2m, with two camp beds, a small table and a chair. The walls are painted in green and are as dirty as everything else at Yarmouk. Luckier, more senior doctors, have a functioning toilet in their rooms, but the others have to share.

Ta'ie walked me to his room, which he shares with six others, on the upper floor. The corridor there was lit by holes in the wall. Broken doors lay gaping open and the floor was thick with dust and mud. The toilets stank.

The doctors' communal dining room was furnished with four plastic tables and a few plastic chairs. Three cats wandered around. "It's not all bad like this," said Ta'ie. "We have a TV and satellite dish in the reading room, [although] all the sofas are broken."

"I feel I am alone here," he said later. "If we ask the administration of the hospital why the situation is like this, they say, 'Because the minister of health is from a different sect to the hospital manager.'"

Too late to save a leg

Not all the casualties are victims of mortar attacks and car bombs. On my last day in the hospital a few weeks ago, a whole football team showed up. They wore cheap football T-shirts and shorts. They were all young men; one of them, a young man called Hassan, was lying on a stretcher with his leg wrapped in plaster. His leg was broken in two places and needed an operation, the doctor told me. "He should have had an operation by now; instead, a medic just twisted back his leg and fixed him with the plaster."

When I asked why they couldn't do the operation, the doctor told me that the specialist comes only once a week. "He has to wait for another two days before we can do the operation. I think by then it will be too late for his leg to be back to normal."

By that time Hassan was crying and screaming, holding his head with his hands and shouting at his friends, who stood around him not knowing what to do. "Tell me what is happening?" he shouted.

As the football team gathered around the doctor, trying to find out if there were any other hospitals that might do the operation, a crowd of people rushed into the room, pushing a gurney. An old man, blood soaking his shirt, lay motionless on top of it. His son stood by, holding his father's head and shouting at the doctors to save his life.

"Please doctor - try, I beg you, maybe you can save him." The doctors, knowing the man was already dead, patted the son's shoulder, telling him it was too late. "They killed him just because he is a Shia, because he loves imam Ali," wept the son.

The man was a Shia shopkeeper who lived in Jihad, a Sunni area west of Baghdad. The football team silently pushed their injured mate away. It was already past nine o'clock and the first of the sectarian violence had begun.