bujacob is burning

Freshlyground

2008-10-28T07:36:00.001Z

I went to this beautiful concert last night. It was so uplifting it was actually depressing

Ninja cat comes closer while not moving!

2008-09-28T23:43:00.001+01:00

I really miss my cat...

KEITH OLBERMANN ON DAVID LETTERMAN SEPT 24th, 2008 McCAIN

2008-09-27T14:15:00.001+01:00

David Letterman destroys McCain for backing out of an interview.

Been missing Asterix these days...

2008-09-27T02:29:00.001+01:00

...or imagine just pining for my not so innocent youth.

Hellboy II

2008-09-27T02:26:00.005+01:00

I watched it for the second time today. There's something very personable about the whole thing.

Woody Allen

2008-09-27T02:22:00.001+01:00

"I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying."

The most evil Cyanide and Happiness yet

2008-09-26T01:38:00.002+01:00

Lady Ishikawa (7th C. CE): Poem by Lady Ishikawa in response

2008-09-26T01:36:00.001+01:00

Waiting for me,
you grew wet there
in gentle foothills,
in the dew drops of the mountains--
I wish I'd been such drops of dew.

*****************
Although I come to you constantly
over the roads of dreams,
those nights of love
are not worth one waking touch of you.

********************
I can give myself to her
In her dreams
Whispering her own poems
In her ear as she sleeps beside me

The Mysterious Stranger - Extract

2008-09-26T01:34:00.001+01:00

Strange, indeed, that you should not have suspected that your universe and its contents were only dreams, visions, fiction! Strange, because they are so frankly and hysterically insane - like all dreams: a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice and invented hell - mouths mercy and invented hell - mouths Golden Rules, and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship him! . . .

"You perceive, now, that these things are all impossible except in a dream. You perceive that they are pure and puerile insanities, the silly creations of an imagination that is not conscious of its freaks - in a word, that they are a dream, and you the maker of it. The dream-marks are all present; you should have recognized them earlier.

"It is true, that which I have revealed to you; there is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream - a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought - a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!"

- Mark Twain

Mao Zedong...

2008-09-26T01:24:00.001+01:00

"The enemy advances, we retreat. / The enemy camps, we harass. / The enemy tires, we attack."

Jaafar Al Sadiq - Guarding Oneself (Ri'ayah)

2008-09-25T05:28:00.002+01:00

Whoever guards his heart from heedlessness, protects his self from appetites, and guards his intellect from ignorance, will be admitted into the company of the vigilant. Then he who guards his knowledge from fancies, his faith from innovation, and his property from the forbidden is among the righteous.

The Messenger of Allah said, 'It is a duty for every Muslim, man and woman, to seek knowledge,' that is, knowledge of the self. Therefore it is necessary for the self to be in all states either expressing his gratitude or proffering his excuse for lack of gratitude. If this is acceptable to Allah it is a favour upon him, and if not it is justice upon him. For every self it is necessary to work that it may succeed in its acts of obedience, and for its protection in its efforts to abstain from doing harm.

The basis of all this is recognition of total need and dependence on Allah, caution and obedience. The key to it is in delegating your affair to Allah, cutting off expectation by always remembering death, and seeing that you are standing in the presence of the All compelling. This gives you rest from confinement, rescue from the enemy, and peace for the self. The means to sincerity in obedience is harmony, and the root of that rests upon considering life as being only as long as a day.

The Messenger of Allah said, 'This world lasts but an hour, so spend it in obedience to Allah.' The door to all of this is always to withdraw from the world by means of constant reflection. The means to this withdrawal is contentment, and abandoning such existential matters as do not concern you. The means to reflection is emptiness [desirelessness], and the buttress of emptiness is abstinence. The completion of abstinence is precaution, and the door to precaution is fear. The proof of fear is glorification of Allah, adherence to obeying His commands with sincerity, fear and caution, and holding back from the forbidden; and the guide to this is knowledge. Almighty Allah said,

إِنَّمَا يَخْشَى اللَّهَ مِنْ عِبَادِهِ الْعُلَمَاء

Those of His servants who are possessed of knowledge fear Allah.(35:28)

Jaafar Al-Sadiq - On Leaving your Home

2008-09-25T05:26:00.001+01:00

When you leave your home, do it as if you will never return. Leave only for the sake of obedience to Allah or for the sake of the faith. Remain tranquil and dignified in your bearing, and remember Allah both secretly and openly.

One of the companions of Abu Dharr asked a member of Abu Dharr's household where he was and she said, 'He has gone out.' When the man asked when Abu Dharr would return, she replied, 'When he returns is in the hands of someone else,' for he has no power on his own.

Learn from Allah's creation, both the pious and the deviants, wherever you go. Ask Allah to place you among His sincere and truthful bondsmen, and to join you to those of them who have passed on and to gather you in their company. Praise Him, and give thanks for the appetites He has made you avoid, and the ugly actions of the wrongdoers from which He has protected you. Lower your gaze from carnal appetites and forbidden things, and pursue the right course on your journey. Be vigilant, fearing Allah at every step, as if you were crossing the straight path. Do not be distracted. Offer a greeting to His people, both giving it first and answering with it. Give help to those who ask for it in a righteous cause, guide those who are lost and ignore the ignorant.

When you return to your home, enter it as a corpse enters the grave, its only concern being to receive the mercy and forgiveness of Allah.

A conversation with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, President of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

2008-09-25T05:20:00.001+01:00

This is likely the best interview I have ever seen with him.

The moths and the flame

2008-09-25T00:55:00.001+01:00

Moths gathered in a fluttering throng one night
To learn the truth about the candle's light
And they decided one of them should go
To gather news of the elusive glow.
One flew till in the distance he discerned
A palace window where a candle burned -
And went no nearer; back again he flew
To tell the others what he though he knew.
The mentor of the moths dismissed his claim,
Remarking: "He knows nothing of the flame."
A moth more eager than the one before
Set out and passed beyond the palace door.
He hovered in the aura of the fire,
A trembling blur of timorous desire,
Then headed back to say how far he'd been,
And how much he had undergone and seen.
The mentor said: "You do not bear the signs
Of one who's fathomed how the candle shines."
Another moth flew out - his dizzy flight
Turned to an ardent wooing of the light;
He dipped and soared, and in his frenzied trance
Both Self and fire were mingled by his dance -
The flame engulfed his wing-tips, body, head;
His being glowed a fierce translucent red;
And when the mentor saw that sudden blaze,
The moth's form lost within the glowing rays,
He said: "He knows, he knows the truth we seek,
That hidden truth of which we cannot speak."
To go beyond all knowledge is to find
That comprehension which eludes the mind,
And you can never gain the longed-for goal
Until you first outsoar both flesh and soul;
But should one part remain, a single hair
Will drag you back and plunge you in despair -
No creature's Self can be admitted here,
Where all identity must disappear.

-Farid Ud-Din Attar

Iranian President Speaks to UN

2008-09-24T23:41:00.001+01:00

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Speech to the United Nations General Assembly, Tuesday 23 September 2008

An American friend of mine, a dear close Republican friend watched it too. He said, "Yeah this guy is saying this stuff, but I know he's scum and just wants to destroy the world." I responded, "How do you know?" He realised then that he didn't know, he didn't know if this man was evil or just maligned.

I also realised then that I also will never know. I have come to understand that in this life it is very difficult to tell good from evil. It's hard to even know if there is such a thing. We are also affected from our perspective. If I am evil then what is good will seem foul, and if I am evil my evil will appear good.

I'll let you be the judge and ultimately He will be the judge and we will know what we really are.

EGYPT: Judges victims of police brutality, report says

2008-09-24T23:25:00.002+01:00

In reports of another show of Egyptian police brutality, two judges were allegedly beaten by three police officers Monday in the departure hall of the Luxor airport on grounds that they did not carry valid tickets.

According to a report in al-Masry al-Youm daily, the police tried to force the justices out of the departure hall after refusing to acknowledge their electronic tickets. The judges were insulted and punched by the policemen, according to the newspaper. A police source speaking to the local press on condition of anonymity said that negotiations were underway to reach reconciliation.

Yet, the judges said no reconciliation was conceivable and that the cops should be prosecuted.

The incident again calls attention to Egypt’s poor humanrights record -- even those who mete out law and order may not beimmune to abuse and humiliation. According to local human rights organizations, torture is practiced systematically by Egyptian police.

Human rights have long been a point of contention between Cairo and Western capitals. Earlier this week, the release of the U.S. State Department 10th annual report on international religious freedom dealt a blow to the Egyptian government. The report states that “although there were some positive steps in support of religious freedom, the status of respect forreligious freedom by the government declined overall during the period covered by this report.” The Egyptian government, as it usually does when criticized, disputed the validity of the U.S. report and blamed outside forces for meddling: “The report contains false information and interferes with matters that only concern the Egyptian society and government. It is not acceptable from external parties to interfere with purely Egyptian domestic matters,” said Hossam Zaki, the foreign ministry’s official spokesman. — Noha El-Hennawy in Cairo

Mickey Mouse must die, says Saudi Arabian cleric

2008-09-24T23:21:00.001+01:00

Someone sent me the article below. Reading it, one gets the impression that it was an angry shaykh condemning Mickey Mouse to death. Watching it you realise it's just another example of the sloppy use of Shariah by many scholars. Saying that Divine Law dictates that a fictitious character must be executed is ridiculous and ill thought out. So is the immediate of so many cultural conservatives of the insidious effect of cartoon's on childrens' minds. Although, I do find mice quite cute so maybe I've simply been brainwashed - by Mighty Mouse in my case. The point is that these kinds of statements, while providing ample ammunition to those who enjoy humiliating us over our follly, show a general disrespect for the great tradition of Islamic Law.

I leave you with this, from your humble corrupted infidel...

http://www.memritv.org/clip/en/1850.htm

Sheikh Muhammad Munajid claimed the mouse is "one of Satan's soldiers" and makes everything it touches impure. But he warned that depictions of the creature in cartoons such as Tom and Jerry, and Disney's Mickey Mouse, had taught children that it was in fact loveable. The cleric, a former diplomat at the Saudi embassy in Washington DC, said that under Sharia, both household mice and their cartoon counterparts must be killed.

Mr Munajid was asked to give Islam's teaching on mice during a religious affairs programme broadcast on al-Majd TV, an Arab television network.

According to a translation prepared by the Middle East Media Research Institute, an American press monitoring service, he said: "The mouse is one of Satan's soldiers and is steered by him.

"If a mouse falls into a pot of food – if the food is solid, you should chuck out the mouse and the food touching it, and if it is liquid – you should chuck out the whole thing, because the mouse is impure.

"According to Islamic law, the mouse is a repulsive, corrupting creature. How do you think children view mice today – after Tom and Jerry?

"Even creatures that are repulsive by nature, by logic, and according to Islamic law have become wonderful and are loved by children. Even mice.

"Mickey Mouse has become an awesome character, even though according to Islamic law, Mickey Mouse should be killed in all cases."

Saudi maid verdict 'outrageous'

2008-09-24T05:57:00.001+01:00

Human Rights Watch has called on Saudi judges to overturn a decision to drop charges against a Saudi couple accused of severely abusing an Indonesian maid.

A judge in Riyadh awarded $670 damages to the maid, Nour Miyati, but dropped all charges against her employers.

The female employer, who admitted the abuse and was originally sentenced to 35 lashes, had her sentence overturned.

Human Rights Watch said the ruling on Monday was "outrageous", and sent "a dangerous message" to Saudi employers.

Ms Miyati, 25, contracted gangrene after allegedly being tied up for a month and left without food in 2005. She had to have several fingers and toes amputated.

New York-based Human Rights Watch called for an appeals court to "impose stiff penalties on the employers, including imprisonment, and payment of significant financial compensation".

Saudi officials have not commented on the report.

'Impunity'

Human Rights Watch says Ms Miyati was treated in a Riyadh hospital in March 2005 for gangrene, malnourishment and other injuries.

All charges against Ms Miyati's male employer were dropped early in the investigation, Human Rights Watch says.

On Monday a Riyadh judge found the female employer not guilty, despite her earlier admission and "compelling physical evidence", the group says.

A prior Saudi judgement, subsequently overturned, had seen Ms Miyati convicted of falsely accusing her employers and sentenced to 79 lashes.

Human Rights Watch said the latest ruling "sends a dangerous message to Saudi employers that they can beat domestic workers with impunity and that victims have little hope of justice".

Rights organisations say many foreign domestic maids in Saudi Arabia work in harsh circumstances and often suffer abuse by their employers.

The Saudi Labour Ministry has acknowledged some problems, but the government also says foreign workers' rights are protected under Islamic law.

The Reciter

2008-09-24T05:48:00.004+01:00

Blue Sky Sudios

2008-09-24T05:37:00.003+01:00

UnderCover Mosque: The Return

2008-09-24T05:22:00.000+01:00

A compelling documentary on the women's section of London Mosques. These are not obscure mosques, but central ones to London's Muslim life like Regent's Park - one I have attended many times. My question is how did we reach the point of intellectual barrenness that has led us to see a world in such pathetically simplistic terms.

The Evolution of 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover

2008-09-24T00:49:00.002+01:00

An excellent interview about living beyond our means

2008-09-24T00:45:00.001+01:00

Bill Moyers Journal . Watch & Listen | PBS

Is an imperial presidency destroying what America stands for? Bill Moyers sits down with history and international relations expert and former US Army Colonel Andrew J. Bacevich who identifies three major problems facing our democracy: the crises of economy, government and militarism, and calls for a redefinition of the American way of life

Habib Ali Jifri's advice to the west

2008-09-24T00:31:00.003+01:00

Click here to listen to Habib Ali Jifri's presentations to Western audiences. A very interesting look at our own responsibilities and an antidote to the blame game. You can find the rest of the presentations here.

Matam on Park Lane

2008-09-23T21:48:00.006+01:00

I was walking along with a friend in Hyde Park and noticed this familiar sound. It couldn't be? Nope, it was. Commemoration of the assassination of Imam Ali, on Park Lane. I'm not sure what the council thought it was approving, probably just a small religious ceremony. I love London.

The Road To Karbala

2008-09-22T00:36:00.002+01:00

I have included one of the most moving documentaries that I have seen in a long time. This is the mobilisation of a nation and a people to face and yet accept their terrible fear and pain. Every day is Ashura, every land is Karbala.

ONCE UPON A TIME IN IRAN: PILGRIMAGE TO KARBALA #1
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ONCE UPON A TIME IN IRAN: PILGRIMAGE TO KARBALA #2
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ONCE UPON A TIME IN IRAN: PILGRIMAGE TO KARBALA #3
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ONCE UPON A TIME IN IRAN: PILGRIMAGE TO KARBALA #4
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Al Habib Ali JIfri explains the shortcomings of the Muwa7id ideology

2008-09-20T12:14:00.001+01:00

The logic speaks for itself.

Tropic of Thunder

2008-09-20T00:30:00.001+01:00

This is Robert Downey's best character since Kiss Kiss Banig Bang!!!

Tropic Thunder Trailer - 8.15.08

Paint

2007-08-19T21:53:00.003+01:00

Process Enacted: by Jordan C Greenhalgh

2007-08-19T21:53:00.001+01:00

Hearing on US Embassy in Iraq: Mayberry's Opening

2007-08-19T21:50:00.001+01:00

‘Untouchable’ corruption in Iraq ministries

2007-08-19T21:44:00.001+01:00

Report partially faults PM’s office, says health ministry in ‘grip’ of militants By Aram Roston and Lisa Myers NBC News Investigative Unit Updated: 8:56 p.m. ET July 30, 2007 Supplies and medicine in strife-torn Baghdad's overcrowded hospitals have been siphoned off and sold elsewhere for profit because of corruption in the Iraqi Ministry of Health, according to a draft U.S. government report obtained by NBC News. The report, written by U.S. advisers to Iraq's anti-corruption agency, analyzes corruption in 12 ministries and finds devastating and grim problems. "Corruption protected by senior members of the Iraqi government," the report said, "remains untouchable." One potential problem is in the office of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, according to the report. The report said that "the prime minister’s office has on a number of occasions intervened on cases involving political supporters." An al-Maliki adviser acknowledged to NBC that the problem of corruption in Iraq is "huge," but denied that al-Maliki's office has intervened in investigations. He said the prime minister is working hard to minimize the problem. The draft report obtained by NBC said the Iraqi Ministry of Health, which oversees the country's hospitals, is in the "grip" of the Mahdi Army, the anti-American militia run by Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. "Contract fraud and employee theft of medicines, food, vehicles are viewed by investigators as the greatest problems," the report said, adding that "military sources have reported that the Mehdi Army [sic] finances operations from diverted medicines." Corruption 'widespread' In the Ministry of Oil — the most important agency for Iraq’s economy — the report said "corruption is a major problem" when it comes to refined oil products, such as gasoline and kerosene. The report said corruption in the oil ministry is partly to blame for lines of cars stretching for miles as Iraqis wait hours to fill up their tanks. An entire battalion of Iraqi police "was found to be nonexistent" and corruption in the army is "widespread," with ghost employees and a shortage of supplies, according to the report. The report also cites alleged favoritism and selective prosecution. The draft report cited an incident at the Ministry of Oil that implicated the Shiite minister and four other officials, including one Sunni. The other three officials were reportedly Shiites, who were "the only ones capable of giving testimony against the minister." The minister, the report said, then used a technicality in Iraqi law to exempt the three Shiites from prosecution so that only the Sunni went to prison. That technicality he allegedly used is a Saddam Hussein-era law known as Article 136B that was lifted when Americans first occupied the country. The statute was reinstated by the Iraqi government. 'Get out of jail free card' The law allows the prime minister to exempt Cabinet ministers from prosecution and allows ministers to exempt their employees from prosecution. "This is tantamount to a get out of jail free card," Stuart Bowen, the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, told NBC. Bowen pointed to the oil ministry case involving the three Shiites as a stark example of the problem. "It exposes the arbitrariness of Article 136B," he said. Bowen said the provision "essentially acts as a bulwark against effective enforcement. If a minister wants to protect an employee from corruption charges, simply by fiat that minister can do so." The top Iraqi anti-corruption investigator, Judge Rahdi al Rahdi, told NBC that "in many important cases, ministers did not give us the permission to take their employees to court, the prime minister's office did not give us permission to take ministers to court." Rahdi said the total amount of missing money involved in his investigations into government misconduct is $11 billion. Corruption is so serious that it is difficult for the government to function, according to Ali Allawi, a former Iraqi government minister. "There's a serious problem in the Ministry of Oil," Allawi said, "There's a serious problem in the Ministry of Health. There's a serious problem in the Ministry of Trade, and really, there's a serious problem in every government department." Americans 'must grin and bear it' Allawi, who has written a book called “The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace,” said corruption has shattered any faith in government. "In some cases there is ... despair that ... corruption has destroyed the ability of the government to provide services," he said. The draft report obtained by NBC outlines some devastating cases in Iraq, like a "guns for cash scheme with the Mehdi Army" involving a candidate for the head of Iraqi intelligence. On top of the troubles of the current oil minister, the report said a former acting minister of oil was indicted — a case blocked by high-ranking officials. In another case a former minister of transportation was indicted. Last week Bowen issued a report finding the U.S. Embassy had not done enough to combat corruption. Allawi argues that U.S. authorities can do little because of the Iraqi officials with whom they are dealing. "The Americans who are supporting this political class, I believe really have no choice. This is a group they have been saddled with, or supported in power, and must grin and bear it," he said. © 2007 MSNBC Interactive

As British Leave, Basra Deteriorates

2007-08-19T21:40:00.001+01:00

Violence Rises in Shiite City Once Called a Success Story By Karen DeYoung and Thomas E. Ricks Washington Post Staff Writers Tuesday, August 7, 2007; A01 As British forces pull back from Basra in southern Iraq, Shiite militias there have escalated a violent battle against each other for political supremacy and control over oil resources, deepening concerns among some U.S. officials in Baghdad that elements of Iraq's Shiite-dominated national government will turn on one another once U.S. troops begin to draw down. Three major Shiite political groups are locked in a bloody conflict that has left the city in the hands of militias and criminal gangs, whose control extends to municipal offices and neighborhood streets. The city is plagued by "the systematic misuse of official institutions, political assassinations, tribal vendettas, neighborhood vigilantism and enforcement of social mores, together with the rise of criminal mafias that increasingly intermingle with political actors," a recent report by the International Crisis Group said. After Saddam Hussein was overthrown in April 2003, British forces took control of the region, and the cosmopolitan port city of Basra thrived with trade, arts and universities. As recently as February, Vice President Cheney hailed Basra as a part of Iraq "where things are going pretty well." But "it's hard now to paint Basra as a success story," said a senior U.S. official in Baghdad with long experience in the south. Instead, it has become a different model, one that U.S. officials with experience in the region are concerned will be replicated throughout the Iraqi Shiite homeland from Baghdad to the Persian Gulf. A recent series of war games commissioned by the Pentagon also warned of civil war among Shiites after a reduction in U.S. forces. For the past four years, the administration's narrative of the Iraq war has centered on al-Qaeda, Iran and the sectarian violence they have promoted. But in the homogenous south -- where there are virtually no U.S. troops or al-Qaeda fighters, few Sunnis, and by most accounts limited influence by Iran -- Shiite militias fight one another as well as British troops. A British strategy launched last fall to reclaim Basra neighborhoods from violent actors -- similar to the current U.S. strategy in Baghdad -- brought no lasting success. "The British have basically been defeated in the south," a senior U.S. intelligence official said recently in Baghdad. They are abandoning their former headquarters at Basra Palace, where a recent official visitor from London described them as "surrounded like cowboys and Indians" by militia fighters. An airport base outside the city, where a regional U.S. Embassy office and Britain's remaining 5,500 troops are barricaded behind building-high sandbags, has been attacked with mortars or rockets nearly 600 times over the past four months. Britain sent about 40,000 troops to Iraq -- the second-largest contingent, after that of the United States, at the time of the March 2003 invasion -- and focused its efforts on the south. With few problems from outside terrorists or sectarian violence, the British began withdrawing, and by early 2005 only 9,000 troops remained. British Prime Minister Tony Blair announced further drawdowns early this year before leaving office. The administration has been reluctant to publicly criticize the British withdrawal. But a British defense expert serving as a consultant in Baghdad acknowledged in an e-mail that the United States "has been very concerned for some time now about a) the lawless situation in Basra and b) the political and military impact of the British pullback." The expert added that this "has been expressed at the highest levels" by the U.S. government to British authorities. The government of new Prime Minister Gordon Brown has pointed to the current relative calm in three of the region's four provinces -- barring Basra -- as evidence of success. According to one British official, Brown told President Bush when they met last week at Camp David that Britain hopes to turn Basra over to Iraqi control in the next few months. Although a further drawdown of its forces is likely, Britain will coordinate its remaining presence with Washington after an assessment in September by Gen. David H. Petraeus, the U.S. commander in Iraq. As it prepares to take control of Basra, the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has dispatched new generals to head the army and police forces there. But the warring militias are part of factions in the government itself, including radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr -- whose Mahdi Army is believed responsible for most of the recent attacks on the airport compound -- as well as the Fadhila, or Islamic Virtue Party, and the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, the country's largest Shiite party. In March, Fadhila pulled out of Maliki's ruling alliance of Shiite parties in Baghdad after it lost control of the petroleum ministry to the Supreme Council. Last week, under pressure from the council, Maliki fired the Fadhila governor of Basra. Fadhila has refused to relinquish power over the governate or over Basra's lucrative oil refineries, calling the Maliki government "the new Baath" -- a reference to Hussein's Sunni-led political party -- and appealed the dismissal to Iraq's constitutional court. Jockeying for political power in Baghdad has long since translated into shooting battles in Basra. The militias have shifted alliances with one another, as well as with the British and with Iran as they fight for control of neighborhoods and resources. With the escalation of street battles and assassinations, much of the population is confined to homes and is fearful of Islamic rules imposed by militias. Although neighbor Iran's presence is pervasive -- with cultural influence, humanitarian aid, arms and money -- U.S. officials and outside experts think that the Iraqi parties are using Iran more than vice versa. Iraqis in the south have long memories of the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, one U.S. official said, and when a southern Shiite "wants to tar someone, they call them an Iranian." He said the United States is "always very concerned about Iranian influence, as well we should be, but there is a difference between influence and control. It would be very difficult for the Iranians to establish control." The ICG study described Iran, Britain and the United States as equally confused about what is happening in Basra. During a recent visit there, the U.S. official said, he was unable to meet with any local Iraqis outside the airport base or to travel beyond the secured route between the base and the palace. About 200 Americans are in and around the city, including those assigned to the embassy office, some civilian support personnel and contract security guards. Basra's "security nightmare" has already had devastating effects on Iraq's economy, said Juan Cole, a Middle East specialist at the University of Michigan. Home to two-thirds of Iraq's oil resources, Basra is the country's sole dependable outlet for exporting oil, with a capacity of 1.8 million barrels a day. Much of Basra's violence is "over who gets what cut from Iraq's economic resources," a U.S. Army strategist in Iraq said. Militias and criminal gangs are financed in part by stolen oil smuggled outside the country, even as Iraq lacks enough energy to provide electricity to many of its people. Both the oil industry and the port facilities -- providing Iraq's only maritime access -- have made Basra "a significant prize for local political actors," the ICG said. The current U.S. security operation to "clear, hold and build" in Baghdad and its surroundings is almost a replica of Operation Sinbad, which British and Iraqi forces conducted in Basra from September 2006 to March of this year with a mission of "clear, hold and civil reconstruction." Although Operation Sinbad initially succeeded in lowering crime and political assassinations, attacks rose in the spring and British forces withdrew into their compounds. In the early years of Iraq's occupation, British officials often disdained the U.S. use of armored patrols and heavily protected troops. The British approach of lightly armed foot patrols -- copied from counterinsurgency operations in Northern Ireland -- sought to avoid antagonizing the local population and encourage cooperation. A 2005 report by the defense committee of the House of Commons commended the British army's performance and urged the Ministry of Defense to "use its influence" to get the Americans to take a less aggressive approach. In a recent BBC interview, Air Chief Marshal Jock Stirrup, chief of the British defense staff, insisted that Basra has been a success. But he acknowledged that judgment depended on "what your interpretation of the mission was in the first place," adding: "I'm afraid people had, in many instances, unrealistic aspirations." The mission, he said, was simply to "get the place and the people to a state where Iraqis could run this part of the country, if they chose to."

Elvis Presley - Suspicious Minds

2007-08-19T21:30:00.001+01:00

Looting fear as Iraqi state library seized

2007-08-19T21:28:00.001+01:00

Michael Howard in Irbil Friday August 10, 2007 The Guardian Thousands of rare books and manuscripts in Iraq's national library and archive, one of the country's most important cultural institutions, are in peril after the occupation of the building by Iraqi security forces, the library's director said yesterday. Saad Eskander, a respected Kurdish historian who has run the library since 2003, told the Guardian that up to 20 Iraqi troops had seized the building at gunpoint yesterday, threatening staff and guards. "They have turned our national archive into a military target," he said. "Tomorrow or the day after, the extremists will attack the Iraqi forces there." He said the soldiers, who said they had occupied the building to defend Shia worshippers heading to the shrine of Khadimiya, about 15 miles away, had positioned themselves on the roof of the library. They had already started to dismantle the main gate, and had smashed doors and windows inside the main building, he said. The national library and archive stands on the east bank of the Tigris, close to the old defence ministry, now a military outpost for Iraqi and US troops. The area is a hotbed of insurgent activity. "The reckless actions of the Iraqi forces and the US military, who appear to condone the operation, will put the staff and library and archival collections in real danger," said Mr Eskander. He fears soldiers may start looting the building "or even set fire to it". "We are like many ordinary citizens, caught between the extremists and terrorist on one side, and the Iraqi and US army on their other," he said, vowing he would hold both US army and the Iraqi military responsible for all losses and casualties. No one from the defence ministry or US military could be reached for comment. Like Iraq's national museum, the library and archive was badly damaged in the chaos that gripped Baghdad following the collapse of Saddam's regime. Large parts were gutted by arsonists, and pillaged by looters. More seriously, the library estimated it lost 25% of its collections, including many rare books, while the archive lost 60% of its collections, including irreplaceable records from the Ottoman era. Since then, Mr Eskander and his team have rebuilt the library and archive, winning respect around the world. He has also kept a blog detailing his daily travails and the plight of his city. It can be read on the British Library website. "By any measure, he has done a remarkable job amid very difficult circumstances," said Andy Stephens of the British Library. "He is a Kurd and has resisted the pressure of sectarian and political influence on his work." Mr Eskander said: "We don't have anyone to support us here in Iraq ... You can see there is a hostility to us. They don't want liberal secular-oriented people running cultural institutions."

Fatigue cripples US army in Iraq

2007-08-19T21:17:00.001+01:00

Exhaustion and combat stress are besieging US troops in Iraq as they battle with a new type of warfare. Some even rely on Red Bull to get through the day. As desertions and absences increase, the military is struggling to cope with the crisis Peter Beaumont in Baghdad Sunday August 12, 2007 Observer Lieutenant Clay Hanna looks sick and white. Like his colleagues he does not seem to sleep. Hanna says he catches up by napping on a cot between operations in the command centre, amid the noise of radio. He is up at 6am and tries to go to sleep by 2am or 3am. But there are operations to go on, planning to be done and after-action reports that need to be written. And war interposes its own deadly agenda that requires his attention and wakes him up. When he emerges from his naps there is something old and paper-thin about his skin, something sketchy about his movements as the days go by. The Americans he commands, like the other men at Sullivan - a combat outpost in Zafraniya, south east Baghdad - hit their cots when they get in from operations. But even when they wake up there is something tired and groggy about them. They are on duty for five days at a time and off for two days. When they get back to the forward operating base, they do their laundry and sleep and count the days until they will get home. It is an exhaustion that accumulates over the patrols and the rotations, over the multiple deployments, until it all joins up, wiping out any memory of leave or time at home. Until life is nothing but Iraq. Hanna and his men are not alone in being tired most of the time. A whole army is exhausted and worn out. You see the young soldiers washed up like driftwood at Baghdad's international airport, waiting to go on leave or returning to their units, sleeping on their body armour on floors and in the dust. Where once the war in Iraq was defined in conversations with these men by untenable ideas - bringing democracy or defeating al-Qaeda - these days the war in Iraq is defined by different ways of expressing the idea of being weary. It is a theme that is endlessly reiterated as you travel around Iraq. 'The army is worn out. We are just keeping people in theatre who are exhausted,' says a soldier working for the US army public affairs office who is supposed to be telling me how well things have been going since the 'surge' in Baghdad began. They are not supposed to talk like this. We are driving and another of the public affairs team adds bitterly: 'We should just be allowed to tell the media what is happening here. Let them know that people are worn out. So that their families know back home. But it's like we've become no more than numbers now.' The first soldier starts in again. 'My husband was injured here. He hit an improvised explosive device. He already had a spinal injury. The blast shook out the plates. He's home now and has serious issues adapting. But I'm not allowed to go back home to see him. If I wanted to see him I'd have to take leave time (two weeks). And the army counts it.' A week later, in the northern city of Mosul, an officer talks privately. 'We're plodding through this,' he says after another patrol and another ambush in the city centre. 'I don't know how much more plodding we've got left in us.' When the soldiers talk like this there is resignation. There is a corrosive anger, too, that bubbles out, like the words pouring unbidden from a chaplain's assistant who has come to bless a patrol. 'Why don't you tell the truth? Why don't you journalists write that this army is exhausted?' It is a weariness that has created its own culture of superstition. There are vehicle commanders who will not let the infantrymen in the back fall asleep on long operations - not because they want the men alert, but because, they say, bad things happen when people fall asleep. So the soldiers drink multiple cans of Rip It and Red Bull to stay alert and wired. But the exhaustion of the US army emerges most powerfully in the details of these soldiers' frayed and worn-out lives. Everywhere you go you hear the same complaints: soldiers talk about divorces, or problems with the girlfriends that they don't see, or about the children who have been born and who are growing up largely without them. 'I counted it the other day,' says a major whose partner is also a soldier. 'We have been married for five years. We added up the days. Because of Iraq and Afghanistan we have been together for just seven months. Seven months ... We are in a bad place. I don't know whether this marriage can survive it.' The anecdotal evidence on the ground confirms what others - prominent among them General Colin Powell, the former US Secretary of State - have been insisting for months now: that the US army is 'about broken'. Only a third of the regular army's brigades now qualify as combat-ready. Officers educated at the elite West Point academy are leaving at a rate not seen in 30 years, with the consequence that the US army has a shortfall of 3,000 commissioned officers - and the problem is expected to worsen. And it is not only the soldiers that are worn out. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have led to the destruction, or wearing out, of 40 per cent of the US army's equipment, totalling at a recent count $212bn (£105bn). But it is in the soldiers themselves - and in the ordinary stories they tell - that the exhaustion of the US military is most obvious, coming amid warnings that soldiers serving multiple Iraq deployments, now amounting to several years, are 50 per cent more likely than those with one tour to suffer from acute combat stress. The army's exhaustion is reflected in problems such as the rate of desertion and unauthorised absences - a problem, it was revealed earlier this year, that had increased threefold on the period before the war in Afghanistan and had resulted in thousands of negative discharges. 'They are scraping to get people to go back and people are worn out,' said Thomas Grieger, a senior US navy psychiatrist, told the International Herald Tribune in April. 'Modern war is exhausting,' says Major Stacie Caswell, an occupational therapist with a combat stress unit attached to the military hospital in Mosul. Her unit runs long group sessions to help soldiers with emerging mental health and discipline problems: often they have seen friends killed and injured, or are having problems stemming from issues at home - responsible for 50 to 60 per cent of their cases. One of the most common problems in Iraq is sleep disorders. 'This is a different kind of war,' says Caswell. 'In World War II it was clear who the good guys and the bad guys were. You knew what you would go through on the battlefield.' Now she says the threat is all around. And soldiering has changed. 'Now we have so many things to do...' 'And the soldier in Vietnam,' interjects Sergeant John Valentine from the same unit, 'did not get to see the coverage from home that these soldiers do. We see what is going on at home on the political scene. They think the war is going to end. Then we have the frustration and confusion. That is fatiguing. Mentally tiring.' 'Not only that,' says Caswell, 'but because of the nature of what we do now, the number of tasks in comparison with previous generations - even as you are finishing your 15 months here you are immediately planning and training for your next tour.' Valentine adds: 'There is no decompression.' The consequence is a deep-seated problem of retention and recruitment that in turn, says Caswell, has led the US army to reduce its standards for joining the military, particularly over the issue of no longer looking too hard at any previous history of mental illness. 'It is a question of honesty, and we are not investigating too deeply or we are issuing waivers. The consequence is that we are seeing people who do not have the same coping skills when they get here, and this can be difficult. 'We are also seeing older soldiers coming in - up to 41 years old - and that is causing its own problems. They have difficulty dealing with the physical impact of the war and also interacting with the younger men.' Valentine says: 'We are not only watering down the quality of the soldiers but the leadership too. The good leaders get out. I've seen it. And right now we are on the down slope.' 'War tsar' calls for return of the draft to take the strain America's 'war tsar' has called for the nation's political leaders to consider bringing back the draft to help a military exhausted by wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In a radio interview, Lieutenant General Douglas Lute said the option had always been open to boost America's all-volunteer army by drafting in young men in the same way as happened in Vietnam. 'I think it makes sense to consider it,' he said. Lute was appointed 'war tsar' earlier this year after President Bush decided a single figure was needed to oversee the nation's military efforts abroad. Rumours of a return to the draft have long circulated in military circles as the pressure from fighting two large conflicts at the same time builds on America's forces. However, politically it would be extremely difficult to achieve, especially for any leader hoping to be elected in 2008. Bush has previously ruled out the suggestion as unnecessary. Lute, however, said the war was causing stress to military families and, as a result, was having an impact on levels of re-enlistment. 'This kind of stress plays out across dinner tables and in living-room conversations within these families. Ultimately the health of the all-volunteer force is going to rest on those sorts of personal family decisions,' he said. A draft would revive bad memories of the turmoil of the 1960s and early 1970s when tens of thousands of young men were drafted to fight and die in Vietnam. Few other policies proved as divisive in America and the memories of anti-war protesters burning their draft cards and fleeing to Canada are still vivid in the memory. Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007

Military families live in dread, while the rest of America is busy shopping

2007-08-19T21:14:00.001+01:00

With the army stretched by Iraq to the brink of restoring the draft, US politicians rely on the distraction of a tax cut Gary Younge Monday August 13, 2007 The Guardian Mom, I had another friend die today from a massive ied [improvised explosive device] and many more wounded with shattered bones and scrapes. We used to be in the same platoon. 1st platoon and the same squad when I first arrived at fort hood for a good 7 months or so. He was 17 then and barely a day over 19 now that he has passed away. It's tearing me up so badly inside. I just can't stand it. I can't get rid of the feeling that I probably won't make it home from this war. I have this horrible feeling that his fate will soon become my own. I don't want to die here Mom. Don't tell Erin bc I know it will devastate her. But if somehow I don't make it, I want you Mom and Dad and all the family and especially Erin to know I love you all so so much and appreciate everything you all have done for me in the thick and thin. The most important thing I want you all to do, is to use all of your connections to do everything in your will to use my death as a tool with the media to end this pointless war. Contact Michael Moore or whomever it may be to get the word out about how disgusted with our government I am about forcing us to come here to wait for death to claim us. I want it to end. How many more friends, sons, daughters, mothers, and dads must die here before they say it's enough? And if you don't die, the worst part you have to live with is the guilt of surviving. Surviving this war and not dying like your buddies to your left and to your right in combat. I love you all so so much. love, Zach Wednesday August 8 2007, Baghdad 'Death," said Donald Rumsfeld, the former United States defence secretary, "has a tendency to encourage a depressing view of war." Zach Flory, 23, didn't start his military career depressed. He enlisted full of idealism about the potential of American power. Raised in Clinton, Iowa, on the banks of the Mississippi, he came home on September 11 and asked his parents for permission to join the military. They refused. They wanted him to finish high school first. "He was a young man with a conscience," said his mother, Marcia, who has always been opposed to the war. "He wanted to make things right." They hoped he would change his mind. He didn't. In February 2004 he enlisted in the first cavalry infantry division and signed a three-year contract. He did his time, serving in South Korea and Texas, and should have been discharged in June. Instead, the army forced him to extend his service by a year in what is known as the stop-loss programme - a form of indentured servitude that can keep soldiers working beyond the expiration of their contract for several years - and sent him to Iraq. Shortly before he left he married Erin, whom he has known since childhood. "Zach's greatest fear is to have to shoot innocent civilians," said Marcia shortly after he left. "What is this war doing to our fine young men and women?" Even as Iraq has dominated America's political stage it has occupied a parallel universe in mainstream society. Military families may listen intently to every news report and live in constant fear of a visit from two uniformed officers in the wee hours. But the rest of the nation is shopping. This is the only war in modern American history that has coincided with a tax cut. "People seem to think war is OK as long as it is someone else's kid doing the fighting," says Zach's dad, Don. Serving in it falls on the shoulders of the poor and the dark, who are over-represented in the military. And the casualties fall disproportionately on white men from small towns - like Donald Young, Zach's recently departed teenage friend. Iraq remains the number one issue of political concern, but it is rarely the central topic of conversation. Needless to say, Iraqi deaths barely feature at all. The US military, which ostensibly came to liberate Iraqis, does not even count their corpses. So their death toll is approximate - rounded up or down by the thousand rather than counted individually. We'll never know what tender words an insurgent might send to a family member following the death of a fellow combatant, let alone the final farewell of an unsuspecting civilian slain by American troops or a car bombing. Perhaps if we did, it would help those with a limited imagination and compassion humanise the horrors of this war more easily. Fortunately, this is not a competition. Unfortunately, there is enough misery to go around. This is an American story. A tale of imperial overreach, military fatigue and political hubris as it affects a midwestern boy in a far away land who wants to get home. "You can tell a true war story if it embarrasses you," wrote Tim O'Brien in his Vietnam war novel, The Things They Carried. "If you don't care for obscenity, you don't care for the truth; if you don't care for the truth, watch how you vote. Send guys to war, they come home talking dirty." The army is "about broken", said retired general Colin Powell last year - before Bush announced an escalation in troop numbers. British military standards dictate that a soldier should have two years at home for every six months deployed and that anything less than this 4:1 ratio could "break the army". American troops currently serve 15 months followed by less than a year's rest - a ratio of 4:5. US military leaders deny the army is strained. But in recent years they have lowered standards and changed entry requirements in order to bolster flagging recruitment, including a push to attract non-citizens and to lift the upper age limit for new recruits. Since 2001 it has raised by half the rate at which it grants "moral waivers" to potential recruits who have committed misdemeanours and lowered the educational level required. Steven Green, the former soldier who now faces the death penalty on charges of raping a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and murdering her family in Mahmoudiya, entered the military on one such waiver. On Friday the president's new war adviser, Lieutenant General Douglas Lute, said it was time to think about restoring the draft. "I think it makes sense to certainly consider it," he said, suggesting that some soldiers' families could soon reach breaking point themselves. "And I can tell you, this has always been an option on the table." There is gruesome irony in the fact that such a possibility should come from an administration headed by a president who dodged the draft and a vice-president who "had other priorities" than serving in Vietnam. But American conservatives have a curious inability to put their children where their mouth is when it comes to the war. All of the main Republican contenders back it; none of their children are in it. On the day that Zach sent his email home, Republican frontrunner Mitt Romney addressed a town hall meeting 50 miles from his home town. Romney was asked why none of his children are serving in the military. "One of the ways my sons are showing support for our nation is helping me get elected because they think I'd be a great president," he said. g.younge@guardian.co.uk

Mark Steel: Atheists and believers have got religion wrong

2007-08-19T21:09:00.001+01:00

There's a modern brand of militant atheist that can appear horribly smug and superior Published: 15 August 2007 Whenever there's an argument between those who claim the religious are ethically superior, and the Richard Dawkins-following fans of atheism, I want someone to bang the table and shout "Oy - you're all wrong." For example, a column in this paper claimed, "Judaeo-Christian religion devotes itself principally to instructing its adherents in how to behave well in their dealings with others." Someone ought to try this out, and apply to be a Rabbi or the Pope by saying, "I don't really care for God, but I always give up my seat to old women on the bus. When can I start?" Also, Judaeo-Christian religion pays some regard to the Bible, which is full of instructions to behave well, such as the one in the book of Deuteronomy, "In the cities of the nations the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave anything alive that breathes. Otherwise you will sin against the Lord your God." Anything that breathes? Even Hitler left it at humans. But that's not enough for the Bible, that screams, "The trouble with genocide is it's too soft. It takes no account of lizards." Clearly most modern Christians don't go along with this, and they say the Bible isn't meant to be taken that literally. Which seems a bit of a cop-out, as it is the Bible. It's like a political party issuing this statement in a manifesto, and then when they're questioned about it saying, "Oh I wouldn't take any notice of that. It's more of a long-term goal than a commitment." The idea that religious people are more moral or better at behaving well than atheists is hard to show. From the Spanish Inquisition to Cliff Richard they've got to make a lot of excuses. But equally, there's no clear case in blaming everything on religion. For example, the conflict between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland was evidently about more than that. When Loyalists chucked stones into a Catholic estate they weren't thinking, "Transubstantiation my arse." Because it's not ideas that drive actions such as these, it's circumstances. There have been few religious ideas that, on the face of it, are more batty than the beliefs of the Nation of Islam. If they're right, then apparently white people were all bred by an evil doctor on an island over a period of thousands of years, and there's a flying saucer involved as well. But when seen in context, from the point of view of black people angry at segregated, lynch-happy America, the devils theory could make sense. Similarly, modern Islam is shaped by events in Palestine and Iraq, which has led millions of Muslims to conclude that Western governments have got it in for them. If you start from the point that circumstances drive ideas, then as a non-Muslim you can engage with Muslims in discussing how to deal with George Bush's Project for the American Century. If you start from the point of view that all religion is nutty, you've got nothing more to say to a Muslim than, "How can a mountain move, you idiot?" There's a modern brand of militant atheist that can appear horribly smug and superior. It's an attitude that can be summed up as, "Aren't religious people stupid? All over Africa they're stupid, and the Middle-East. And the Romans, believing in all those two-headed animals, the morons. Aristotle with his unmoved moving God, as if. Descartes, Isaac Newton, Bob Marley, they all fell for it. In fact everyone who ever lived up to about 1800, and most people since then have been stupid stupid stupid." Or worse, there's these patronising stuck-up columns that go, "Aren't these Afghan peasants awful? I mean, I took the trouble to read Voltaire and Hume at university so why can't they? Their sexual politics is frankly shocking, and there's no excuse these days because with the internet they could order Armistead Maupin novels on Amazon and they'd be out to the caves of Tora Bora within a fortnight. I think the time has come for decent mountain tribes to say to these sexist types if they don't change their ways they won't be invited to any dinner parties or any openings of art galleries." There's always a rational basis to the irrationality of religion, and however bizarre, religious ideas usually reflect the reality of people's lives. So the Christianity of a Mexican landless peasant takes a different form from the Christianity of Tony Blair. In a just and fair world, these ideas would be no more harmful than the irrational following people have for football teams. Maybe they'd even be more relaxed about people taking the piss, with other religions allowed into the away end of the temple, where they could chant, "Who ate all the wafers?"; "You're damned - and you know you are"; and "Can you hear the Trappists sing - I can't hear a thing."

You Worry Too Much

2007-08-19T21:08:00.001+01:00

Oh soul, you worry too much. You say, I make you feel dizzy. Of a little headache then, why do you worry? You say, I am your antelope. Of seeing a lion here and there why do you worry? Oh soul, you worry too much. You say, I am your moon-faced beauty. Of the cycles of the moon and passing of the years, why do you worry? You say, I am your source of passion, I excite you. Of playing into the Devils hand, why do you worry? Oh soul, you worry too much. Look at yourself, what you have become. You are now a field of sugar canes, why show that sour face to me? You have tamed the winged horse of Love. Of a death of a donkey, why do you worry? You say that I keep you warm inside. Then why this cold sigh? You have gone to the roof of heavens. Of this world of dust, why do you worry? Oh soul, you worry too much. Since you met me, you have become a master singer, and are now a skilled wrangler, you can untangle any knot. Of life's little leash why do you worry? Your arms are heavy with treasures of all kinds. About poverty, why do you worry? You are Joseph, beautiful, strong, steadfast in your belief, all of Egypt has become drunk because of you. Of those who are blind to your beauty, and deaf to your songs, why do you worry? Oh soul, you worry too much. You say that your housemate is the Heart of Love, she is your best friend. You say that you are the heat of the oven of every Lover. You say that you are the servant of Ali's magical sword, Zolfaghar. Of any little dagger why do you still worry? Oh soul, you worry too much. You have seen your own strength. You have seen your own beauty. You have seen your golden wings. Of anything less, why do you worry? You are in truth the soul, of the soul, of the soul. You are the security, the shelter of the spirit of Lovers. Oh the sultan of sultans, of any other king, why do you worry? Be silent, like a fish, and go into that pleasant sea. You are in deep waters now, of life's blazing fire. Why do you worry?

Faith that is set in stone

2007-08-19T21:07:00.001+01:00

August 14, 2007 Jehovah’s Witnesses are taking Bible tours of the British Museum. Our correspondent loses patience with the prophecy Josh Spero Among the Greek goddesses and Assyrian altars of the British Museum can be heard the growing rumble of the imminent Apocalypse. At least, that’s what the Jehovah’s Witnesses who gather there every Saturday tell me. Even if I’m a bit deaf to it, they’re not – and they’re using the Museum to prove it. These Witnesses are going on Bible tours, where they are taken around the museum to see objects relating to history and prophecies as given in Scripture. They are turns round the Classical world with an Apocalyptic twist. With a variety of routes and subjects, hundreds of people – not exclusively Witnesses – turn up each week. Many of them come from abroad, some especially to go on the tours. One such woman, from Zimbabwe, segues smoothly and without irony from talking about Harare’s terrible problems to cheerfully predicting the end of the world. If the Bible’s prophecies are right – and they are, she says – “The good times are here!” Never before has Armageddon sounded so cheery. The tourists I meet take pains to stress that their faith is not in stones but in Scripture, a sentiment seemingly at odds with the tours’ purpose: who needs physical proof for a fundamental belief? Nor do any of them see the tours as a Da Vinci Code backlash – although the setting and the methods summon up the comparison. All that’s really missing is the ominous music and an albino monk. Emmanuel Zervides is the charismatic, learned showman at the centre of the tours. A Greek forced out of Egypt after Nasser’s expulsion of nonnationals, he moved to London and started taking tours in 1970. Since then, they have expanded into a non-profit-making venture with a dozen volunteer guides. All tourists are asked to donate 50p to the Museum. According to Zervides, the tours have raised £150,000 for the British Museum since 1989. He cuts quite a dash as he takes the first tour – a greying Barnum presiding over stone lions. He darts between objects as he keeps us in suspense about the significance of the 13 Israelites on the Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III (they stand for each tribe of Israel) and wildly waves his hands while explaining the deficiencies of Assyrian sculpture (all too flat and lifeless). The showmanship is tremendously entertaining and does nothing to detract from his lucid history lesson, which uses the museum’s artefacts as evidence to be questioned and eventually reconciled with the Bible. It resembles a vivid university tutorial, given by a teacher with a flair for amateur dramatics; Zervides pause pointedly before stage-whispering his thesis: “Don’t you see? The stones are crying out!” Zervides’s showmanship would have helped Gary Hollington, another guide, who led the second tour – it would at least have distracted from the flaws in his argument. The tour, called “This is history written in advance”, purported to tie down prophecies in the Book of Daniel to Greek and Roman items fabricated centuries afterwards, such as busts of the early Roman Emperors and coins struck by Alexander the Great. Unfortunately Hollington neglected to mention the dispute over the date of Daniel; prophecies work much better when they predate the events they foretell. But if these were prophecies and they are true, the Witnesses hold, then all the others in Scripture – including the rapid approach of the Apocalypse, as calculated and then recalculated by the Witnesses – must be true. What starts out, however, as a whistle-stop plunge through Classical history ends up as a lesson in dubious hermeneutics. Take Daniel xi, 5, cited as a proven prophecy: “Then the King of the South shall grow strong, but one of his officers shall grow stronger than he and shall rule a realm greater than his own realm.” The first half is said to relate to Ptolemy, one of Alexander’s heirs, who indeed grew strong. Yet the second half of the sentence, which contradicts historical reality because no officer did grow stronger than this heir, is apparently a separate prophecy. It’s a buffet approach to the Bible, picking what suits regardless of order or logic. I got scowls from my fellow tourists for asking about this, and Hollington, who earlier said that Daniel specifically predicted Alexander would have four heirs, none of whom were his children, told me that Daniel couldn’t know all the details of future history. Another of my suggestions, that one of Hollington’s interpretations might be a bit tenuous and ignore actual history, was greeted with a rab-bit-in-the-headlights look as he stood beside a bust of the Emperor Titus. When discussing my queries afterwards, Zervides reached for the excuses: “I studied the Bible but I can’t remember all of it”; “I can get back to you with an explanation of that”. Gary contributed his own: “I don’t claim to know every bit of the Bible.” Not even the second half of a verse you were just explaining? No. These tours are decent introductions to Classical history led by experienced guides. But as soon as there is talk of prophecies or Scripture – and challenges to interpretations – it becomes nothing more than a Bible-versus-reason debate: as Zervides says, “You still need faith to understand it.” In the British Museum, the glorious product of the Enlightenment, this is a profoundly disturbing sentiment. And still the Apocalypse rumbles away, as imminent as ever.

Order without law: Hamas flexes its muscles to assert political authority

2007-08-19T20:58:00.001+01:00

Gaza Palestinians welcome safer streets but Fatah rivalry is a volatile undercurrent Rory McCarthy in Gaza City Thursday August 16, 2007 Guardian Six guards from the Hamas Executive Force stood before the shopping crowds in Palestine Square. The men, who are what passes for a police force in Gaza, were dressed in black and armed with Kalashnikovs and wooden batons. In the pick-up truck behind them was an unhappy man arrested for carrying a knife. Ahead was their next target: dozens of cigarette sellers hawking under the flimsy shade of a few trees. Although it was not the most pressing security concern in the overcrowded Gaza Strip, it was still a mission that Munir Mohasin, 21, the thin, young patrol commander, took seriously. He said: "We want this place cleaned up. It's not legal for them to stop and sell here. We've had complaints from the shopkeepers and we had complaints that some of them are being rude to women. Some are selling drugs." His patrol then descended on the hawkers, shouting and shoving until they had confiscated several large boxes of cigarettes and loaded them into their pick-up. Two sellers were arrested; others escaped with a public telling-off. The sellers, all struggling to make a living, argued back. "There's nowhere else for us to go," Khader Abu Amjad shouted at Mr Mohasin. "Are we just going to play cat and mouse all day?" After several minutes in the midday heat and more shouting, the Executive Force moved on and the hawkers went back to selling their cigarettes. Later, back at his local station, Mr Mohasin said: "We're not just stopping people selling in the street; we're working for the security of our country." This has been the message from the Islamist Hamas movement since it seized full control of security in the Gaza Strip two months ago, the culmination of a six-month near-civil war with its rival, Fatah. Palestinians welcomed the return to safety on the streets and the chance to leave their homes without fear, a point Hamas is keen to highlight. The Hamas-led government was promptly sacked and has now been further isolated by Israel, the west, and Fatah leaders in the occupied West Bank. Now there is growing concern about steps taken by Hamas in recent weeks that appear to go well beyond maintaining order and suggest that it is trying to extend its authority. Two weeks ago Hamas took off air The Red Line, a weekly political chatshow that has been hosted for the past decade by Hassan al-Kashef. Although a secular leftist and a former head of the Palestinian Authority's information ministry, Mr Kashef, 63, had hosted several Hamas leaders on his show in the past year, including Ismail Haniyeh, the former prime minister, and, by satellite link from Damascus, Khaled Meshal, Hamas's leader in exile. Recently he broadcast a show about Gaza's economic woes and began by saying what he thought of Hamas. "I was clear that I am with one law, one authority, one legitimate government and that I am against the coup," he said. A few days later, an unsigned letter was received from the Hamas information ministry ordering the TV station not to broadcast The Red Line again. It has been off air ever since. "Hamas made a military coup and now it is making a political coup. But they don't have political experience," said Mr Kashef. "There isn't just one voice in Gaza." Last month Hamas organised a tour for foreign journalists, a rare foray into public relations to show off what it called "the new face of Gaza: safe, clean and green". But the same day the Executive Force detained several media distributors bringing in Palestinian newspapers from the West Bank. Sami al-Qishawi, director of Gaza's Al-Ayyam newspaper, said the guards were angry over a report of a press conference in Gaza City by a Hamas opponent. "It is a dangerous sign of control, of trying to have just one voice, of restricting our freedom," said Mr Qishawi. He said although his paper was close to Fatah it was independently financed and had not been alone in reporting the press conference. "We can't just report statistics and the number of people killed," he said. "To make any progress in solving our problems we need to talk about important issues, about freedoms." A week earlier, a group of armed men, some in masks, others in police uniforms, broke into the office of a Fatah MP in Rafah, southern Gaza. Ashraf Jumaa, one of only a handful of Fatah politicians who has stayed in Gaza, was beaten on the head with a rifle butt and an aide was shot in the leg in what appeared to be a warning. Mr Jumaa insists some of the attackers were members of the Hamas militia, the Izzedin al-Qassam Brigades. "We're in a very bad situation now," said Mr Jumaa. "Hamas says it wants to talk to Fatah but they have to prepare the ground for negotiations, not just say they want it." Other incidents underscore the continued volatility of factional rivalry here. Several Fatah security officials have been killed this month. Last week, the director of Gaza's main Shifa hospital was sacked and another senior doctor was sacked and arrested, apparently because they refused to take orders from Hamas ministries. On Saturday, 15 Fatah figures were arrested by Hamas men after clashes at a wedding where the guests sang Fatah songs. On Monday Hamas guards fired into the air to disperse a Fatah rally in the city and imposed restrictions on public rallies. Gazans are debating whether these incidents have been ordered by Hamas leaders or local commanders acting independently. Hamas is trying to exert its authority in a complex, politicised climate. The appointed government in the West Bank has told police and lawyers in Gaza to stay away from work or risk losing their salaries. As a result, courts are not working and Hamas is policing with its 6,000-strong Executive Force, a year-old paramilitary group which the West Bank government declared illegal. One prominent Palestinian businessman described it as "order without law". There is also an economic crisis and a collapse of private businesses unable to import or export goods since Israel closed Gaza's crossings to all but humanitarian aid after Hamas took over. In the West Bank, Hamas politicians have been harassed and arrested. Hamas says it is just trying to impose order in an increasingly chaotic Gaza. "People feel for the first time there is a full degree of freedom," said Ahmed Yusuf, an adviser to the former premier Mr Haniyeh. "There is a new look here in Gaza ... There is really a state of law." He downplayed recent incidents. There had been political problems with Palestine TV, which broadcast Mr Kashef's chatshow and is close to Fatah, he said. On the arrest of the newspaper distributors, he blamed an overzealous local commander. He insisted Hamas was not involved in the attack on Mr Jumaa, the Fatah MP. "We are not building an Islamic state in Gaza or anything that would be a separate entity," Mr Yusuf said. Apart from security, the public goal of Hamas now is to return to an agreement with Fatah and secure the elusive reform of the many Palestinian security forces. Although there is little sign of any rapprochement, he said secret talks were under way. "We want to bring them [Fatah] to the table to see how we salvage the problem." Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007

Cheney '94: Invading Baghdad Would Create Quagmire C-SPAN

2007-08-19T20:40:00.001+01:00

The insurgents hate us

2007-08-07T07:41:00.001+01:00

They play a crucial part in helping journalists to cover the Iraq war but their highly dangerous work is largely unheralded. Here an Iraqi 'fixer' tells his story Ayub Nuri Monday August 6, 2007 Guardian I became a fixer shortly before the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. A man drove me to a house in the northern town of Sulaimaniya where two American journalists needed an interpreter to do an interview. They worked for the New York Times Magazine: Elizabeth Rubin, a writer, and Lynsey Addario, a photographer. They were sitting with a local Kurdish commander, waiting for someone to help them talk to him. When the interview was finished, they asked me to be their "fixer". In a war zone, a fixer is a journalist's interpreter, guide, source finder and occasional life saver. I was offered $100 a day, about 25 times what I could make as an English teacher. I spent the next three years as a fixer and watched as my country learned a painful lesson: sometimes when you try to fix something, you break it even more. When Baghdad fell, in April 2003, I went south to the capital. I quickly became friends with fixers for National Public Radio, Knight Ridder, the Boston Globe, the BBC and the Times. I supported the war, as did many of my countrymen and pretty much all the fixers. We thought that only a powerful outside force could take on the job of ousting the dreadful Saddam. The war also brought an economic boom. In some streets, the pavements were piled with boxes containing TV sets, air conditioners and other appliances. People thought Iraq would become a kind of 51st state of the US. But then the war entered a new phase. A few weeks after President Bush's announcement that combat operations were over, American troops were battling insurgents across Iraq. My responsibilities as a fixer were rapidly expanding. I was not only taking reporters around the country and interpreting for them and then choosing safe routes home, but I was also finding people to be interviewed. Then, five months into the new phase of the war, I met Quil Lawrence, an American reporter for the BBC who worked for the show The World. Every morning, Quil and I would set out for interviews along with our driver, Abdulrazzaq. We did political reports as well as human-interest stories on reconstruction, the printing of new textbooks, the release of new albums by local singers. From the beginning, I watched carefully as reporters asked questions. When I began working with radio reporters, I also learned the techniques of recording. Other Iraqi journalists were getting a similar education. During Saddam's regime, the media were controlled by the state, and journalism was not an enviable profession. But only a few months after Saddam was toppled, there were more than 100 newspapers being published in Baghdad alone. It was a turning point in the history of the Iraqi media. Soon, however, the situation in Iraq grew much worse. The insurgency spread to cities, and all foreign nationals became targets. The insurgents hated fixers. They called us "collaborators". They broke into my apartment three times in Baghdad, but luckily I wasn't there. Many of my fixer friends received letters from armed groups ordering them to quit their jobs or they would be killed. At times, fixers have been killed without warning. Just two weeks ago, Khalid W. Hassan, a 23-year-old interpreter and reporter with the New York Times in Baghdad, was on his way to the bureau when he was stopped by gunmen and shot dead. Though fixers run as many, and often more, risks than western reporters, we haven't had the same protections. There have been no guidelines on what we should wear or when it is OK for us to travel for a story. As Iraqi natives, we have been expected to use our judgment about these things. And while American news organisations have often supported fixers' applications for visas to the US, the US government does not see itself as having a special obligation to them. Many Americans don't realise how central Iraqis are to bringing them the news they read every morning. But most of the journalists we worked with knew, even before we did, that they would come to rely on us more and more. One day, Quil and I were sitting in our hotel-room studio when he turned to me and said it was time for me to learn how to edit sound on the computer and file radio pieces myself. I asked him why. "One day we won't be able to come to this country any more," he said. "You fixers will have to replace us." I began going out with the radio equipment to interview the police, militia leaders and people on the street. I would take the tape back to the hotel and give it to the reporter or reporters I was working for. Sometimes a reporter would call me on my cellphone and tell me whom to interview and even what questions to ask. And sometimes I would do my own article. Some fixers had so much autonomy that after doing interviews and research for an article they would get a byline in a foreign paper. In the autumn of 2004 Iraq's political parties were preparing for general elections. At the same time, American troops were preparing for their second attack on Falluja - to make the city "safe for voters," they said. In this assault many hundreds of Iraqis, including civilians, were killed. Quil told me it was time for me to do my own radio pieces. With the recording equipment in my bag, I went to the headquarters of the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council. A man in a blue suit introduced himself as the party's spokesman. Over the next two days I met a range of politicians and people in the street. The Iraqis I talked to were angry about the plan to attack Falluja. I took the tapes back to the office, and I sat down to write my script. Finally it was time to read my piece over an ISDN line that would allow me to be recorded in the studios in Boston. The only way for me to listen to my story was via the internet, so I logged in and listened to it over and over again. I was not paid for that story because I was still in training, but my "sign off" dream had finally come true. "For The World, this is Ayub Nuri, in Baghdad." There was so much for me to learn. I especially wanted to improve my writing skills so that I might one day write for foreign newspapers. My American journalist friends encouraged me to apply to Columbia University's journalism school. Last summer, I received a scholarship from Columbia. I was very excited to begin that new experience and get away from the war for a while. Several other Iraqi fixers have also gone to the US to attend journalism school. When we left Iraq, we were all planning to go back after graduation. But the worsening war has made return all but impossible. We are stranded here. Every time we speak with our families on the phone, they tell us not to come home. "At least one less person to worry about," they say. Many of the fixers fled Iraq and are now refugees in neighbouring countries. Some of those who remained have big families to feed, so they stay. But some fixers I know refuse to leave the country merely out of loyalty to their trade. We welcomed the US war with a lot of hope. We changed careers and became fixers to help Iraq. Some of us paid with our lives. Now we are no longer sure we will ever be able to fix anything. · This article first appeared in the New York Times magazine

Iranian morals police arrest 230 in raid on 'satanist' rave

2007-08-07T07:40:00.001+01:00

Robert Tait in Tehran Monday August 6, 2007 Guardian Iran's drive to enforce Islamic morals netted revellers from Britain and Sweden after police swooped on a "satanic" concert organised over the internet. Police arrested 230 people and seized drugs, alcohol and 800 illicit CDs after raiding the event in Karaj, 12 miles west of Tehran. Those arrested included young women in skimpy and "inappropriate" clothing, officers said. Reza Zarei, Tehran's provincial police chief, said the operation also resulted in the confiscation of 20 video cameras, with which organisers allegedly planned to shoot "obscene" films and then blackmail female participants. The event included rock and rap performers as well as female singers, who are banned under Iran's Islamic laws. The authorities described the artistes as "satanist" without elaborating. Iran's rulers routinely label much of western-style popular music and culture as decadent. Preparations were kept so secret that revellers were made aware of the venue only hours before the rave. Although security guards were hired to act as lookouts and plans were made to clear the site of alcohol and drugs the police found 150 bottles of alcohol and drugs, including marijuana. Most of the detainees came from rich families and included people from Iranian backgrounds who had travelled from Britain and Sweden, Mr Zarei said. "This is the first time that tens of male and female participants have been invited to such an event through an internet call," he told the semi-official ISNA news agency. Rock concerts are rarely permitted in Iran but are sometimes held illegally in venues such as underground car parks. Last Wednesday's raid occurred during a government-backed "social security" campaign in which police have arrested or cautioned thousands of women whose dress or headscarves have been deemed insufficiently Islamic. While such offensives occur periodically, this year's has been carried out with unusual intensity over a prolonged period amid accusations that the US is trying to topple the Islamic regime through a "soft revolution". Authorities last month doubled the number of officers deployed on morals patrols. Police have been instructed to arrest young men with "western" hairstyles. Those arrested are released only after giving the names of their barbers and making signed commitments to get hair-cuts. They then have to return to the police station to show their new hairstyles.

Tehran killers hanged in public

2007-08-02T20:04:00.001+01:00

Two men have been hanged in a Tehran square for the murder of a prominent judge, thought to be the first public execution in Iran's capital since 2002.

Majid and Hossein Kavousifar's deaths come a day after nine public hangings in other parts the country.

The government says it is part of a major effort to tackle violent crime and the illegal drug trade in Iran.

Human rights groups have criticised Iran for the high number of executions it carries out, second only to China.

The uncle and nephew were convicted of the murder of Judge Hassan Moghaddas in central Tehran two years ago.

Their execution was held at the same location as the murder, and on the same date, in front of a large picture of the murdered judge.

People like him should know that their actions cannot and will not dissuade our judges from carrying out their dee
Chief prosecutor Saeed Mortazavi
When Hossein Kavousifar looked distressed as he awaited his execution, his uncle gestured to him and smiled in an attempt to reassure him.

When the time came, hangmen with their heads covered, put the nooses around their necks kicked away the stools on which the two men stood.

A crowd of several hundred watched. Some shouted "God is great", some took pictures with their mobile phones. A few laughed.

The mother of one of the condemned men cried out: "God, please give me back my son."

'No remorse'

Executions doubled in Iran in 2006 to 177, and seven months into 2007, Amnesty International says 151 people have been executed, with the number increasing.

The assassinated judge was known for adjudicating in political cases and cases where Iran's Islamic revolutionary system had been criticised.

In 2001, he was the sitting judge in the case of Akbar Ganji - a prominent dissident whom he condemned to six years in prison.

Tehran's chief prosecutor Saeed Mortazavi told reporters that the Majid Kavousifar had expressed no remorse, after killing a judge he had deemed "corrupt".

"People like him should know that their actions cannot and will not dissuade our judges from carrying out their deeds," he said.

On Wednesday seven convicted criminals were hanged for rape, kidnapping and armed robbery in Iran's Second City, Mashhad, with the other two convicts executed in south-east Iran.

A few days earlier 12 people were hanged in Tehran's Evin prison.

The Dark Knight OFFICIAL Teaser HD

2007-08-02T19:59:00.001+01:00

Fatal Mortality - Episode 2

2007-08-02T19:57:00.001+01:00

Lego star wars

2007-07-31T22:50:00.001+01:00

A green light to oppression

2007-07-31T22:45:00.001+01:00

Brian Whitaker

July 31, 2007 1:30 PM

In a move supposedly intended to counter Iranian influence, the US has announced a series of arms deals with Middle Eastern countries.

Apart from Israel, which will receive $30bn in military aid, Egypt will get $13bn. Five Gulf states - Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman and the UAE - will also be sold weaponry to the tune of $20bn, with the lion's share going to the Wahhabi regime in Riyadh.

Thus, in the name of "working with these states to fight back extremism" (as secretary of state Condoleezza Rice put it), the US is arming two of the Arab world's leading human rights abusers: Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

The reaction from Tehran was predictable. US policy "is creating fear and concerns in the countries of the region and trying to harm the good relations between these countries", foreign ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini told reporters in Tehran. And he's absolutely right.

If the Bush administration's goal was to inflame Sunni-Shia tensions across the region and to spread the sectarian strife in Iraq to neighbouring countries, it would be hard to imagine a more effective way of going about it.

Although Iran is the worldwide centre of Shia Islam, there's an important distinction to be made between Shia Muslims and the Iranian regime. The question is how many people will actually make it. Marginalised Shia communities in the Gulf states and Egypt will undoubtedly feel more threatened, while others will interpret the American move as a green light to oppress them further.

In Egypt, the tiny Shia population is already harassed by the authorities and treated with suspicion. Some of this has been documented by the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights. Its report talks of Shia Muslims being arrested - ostensibly for security reasons - but then being subjected to torrents of abuse by state security officers for their religious beliefs.

One officer is quoted as telling a suspect: "I'm going to keep tabs on you. If you try anything, I'll make you regret it. I'm prepared to forgive the members of the Gamaa'a Islamiyya [the armed Sunni Islamist group], although they murder us, but I wouldn't forgive you, because at least the Gamaa'a Islamiyya shares my creed."

In Saudi Arabia, where Shia account for 20% of the population (and, more critically, 75% in the oil-rich region), the official policy, as Matthew Mainen of the Institute for Gulf Affairs noted recently, is to treat them as polytheists, idol worshippers, and as part of a vast Jewish conspiracy against Islam.

"Matching the indoctrination of Saudi Arabia's public education system, governmental practices and policies reinforce the notion that Shia Muslims are subhuman. Shia books, education, music, and art are banned in Saudi Arabia. Shias are further barred from playing any political, social, or religious role in Saudi society, and are not even allowed to provide testimony in courts of law ...

"As long as Saudi Arabia continues to promote and practise an ideology holding that it is the obligation of Sunni Muslims to purge Islam of Shias in the great jihad, hundreds of Saudi insurgents will continue to cross the Iraqi border to further the sectarian violence without hindrance from the Saudi security forces."

As the US state department itself has observed in a report on religious freedom in the kingdom:

"Members of the Shia minority are subject to officially sanctioned political and economic discrimination ...

"Members of the Shia minority are discriminated against in government employment, especially in national security-related positions, such as in the military or Ministry of Interior. While there are some Shia who occupy high-level positions in government-owned companies and government agencies, many Shia believe that openly identifying themselves as Shia would have a negative impact on career advancement ... While there is no formal policy concerning the hiring and promotion of Shia, anecdotal evidence suggests that in some companies -including companies in the oil and petrochemical industries - well-qualified Shia are passed over for less-qualified Sunni compatriots ...

"The Government also discriminates against Shia in higher education through unofficial restrictions on the number of Shia admitted to universities."

Viewed from Washington, bolstering tyrannical Sunni regimes against Iran might seem like pragmatism - a convergence of interests. But it's a dangerous sort of pragmatism because the American and Saudi interests are ultimately different. The Saudi government isn't really worried about Tehran; it's worried about keeping the lid on its Shia population in the oil-rich eastern province - and in the long term that can only rebound negatively on the US.

Just as there is a need to recognise that Jews in general are not responsible for the actions of the Israeli government, nor ordinary Muslims for the actions of al-Qaida, Arab states must be careful not to automatically treat their Shia communities as tools of the Iranian government, or encourage the public to think that they are.

What the region needs most right now is not more arms but a concerted effort to promote religious tolerance, to combat religious discrimination and prejudice, and to draw the Arab Shia communities into the political processes of their home countries before it is too late.

Bread graft taxes Egypt's poorest

2007-07-31T22:43:00.001+01:00

Officials say corruption is worsening a wheat shortage. Government-subsidized flour, meant for poor Egyptians, is often sold on the black market.
By Jill Carroll | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

CAIRO

Every day throughout this largely poor city, throngs of Cairenes scramble to get their share of government-subsidized bread.

Each person can buy as many as 20 pieces. And when the bakeries begin running low, the crowds begin growing restless. In many bakeries in the city's impoverished quarters, bakers have already built cages to protect them from customers not known for their patience.

Now that the country is facing a wheat shortage, parliamentarians are worried that cheap bread for the poor may become even more scarce.

But Hamdan Taha, first prime minister for supplies at the Ministry for Social Solidarity, says this problem has little to do with the wheat shortfall and everything to do with corruption.

If people weren't selling cut-rate government flour on the black market, "we could have a large amount of flour," says Mr. Taha.

As central as bread is to life here, so too is corruption in the subsidized flour system. Many public bakeries, which receive cut-rate flour from the government, sell their flour on the black market to private bakeries. To compensate for the lack of ingredients, the public bakeries, who cater to the poor, often make bread smaller and lighter and sometimes simply bake less.

One sack of subsidized flour costs about 16 Egyptian pounds, or almost $3. A sack on the black market fetches almost ten times as much.

To cheat the system, black market flour dealers sometimes bribe bakery inspectors, who work for low state wages, say sources in the government.

Members of Egypt's Parliament demanded this week that an emergency session be held to discuss the wheat shortage. Shortfalls in wheat imports caused a spike in demand and private bakeries (which cater to the country's middle and upper classes) have been buying up much of what is on the market, leaving government wheat inventories short, according to the independent newspaper Ad-Dustour. Parliament is on a break until November.

The government has tried some measures to stop the corruption, including tougher laws against corruption at bakeries last year and a proposal for a separate distribution system. But old habits have proven hard to break. Flour corruption, in tandem with a growing population, a shortage of public bakeries in poor areas, widespread poverty, and fluctuations in wheat production lead to periodic bread shortages particularly in poor neighborhoods.

A 2001 report by the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington said corruption meant about 28 percent of wheat flour was lost to the black market. That along with subsidies on bread and other food distributed equally regardless of income meant only about a third of subsidy benefits go to the truly needy.

Inside a public bakery in the poor Al Waaili neighborhood, a veteran baker – eyelashes to trousers dusted in government-subsidized flour – points to a yellowed and crumbling notice on a column.

"It says make sure all the 30 [sacks of flour] are used for the bread. The government bakeries, they are selling this flour," says the baker, who only gave his name as Sayid and crows with pride that they don't sell their flour on the black market.

"But it's just the truth," he says as his boss tries to quiet him from disparaging other bakeries.

"It's common, but [done] in a very secret way," says Samir Gamal Abdel Salim who runs Grand Bake, an upscale private bakery. Public bakeries, he says, pile the sacks of flour in big trucks or cars at night and drive them to their black market customers.

"It's much easier for them to sell this flour rather than making bread. They are selling this flour to any bakery and they will get profit without any effort, and a lot of profit. But [black marketeers have] to be very careful," he says.

He said the private bakeries mix in the lesser quality subsidized flour with the regular flour so customers, paying a premium, don't notice the difference.

"I prefer if there is no subsidy at all and they use the subsidy in another field, because this subsidy is for bad people to get rich," says the tall, lanky owner of the public bakery in Al Waaili who asked his name not be used because of the sensitivity of the subject. He says government inspectors sent to weigh and measure the bread are often bribed.

Politicians learned their lesson about trying to reduce the expensive subsidy 30 years ago. Egyptian President Anwar Sadat tried to reduce subsidies on some foods including some bread and flour in 1977, sparking riots that threatened the stability of his government and the proposal was quickly withdrawn. Since then, debate about Egypt's subsidies has centered on how to more equitably distribute them, not do away with them.

Abu Somaa ekes out a living from several jobs and lives on subsidized food. He works a government factory job during the day and at a private bakery in the Al Waaili at night, selling bread he could never afford. He uses a nickname because he says it's illegal to have a government job and another job. He is afraid he will lose the bakery job that earns him a crucial extra $3.50 a day.

He hands out bread at the bakery counter and during lulls in his 12-hour shift, piles bread atop a wooden lattice longer than he is, balances it on his head, and rides a bicycle a few blocks away to sell it at a meager profit.

"This is my [work] and [it was] my father's work," he says, next to the bakery as the sunset call to prayer floats down on the tiny side street among donkey carts, tumbled-down buildings, and men sipping tiny glasses of coffee at rickety tables in a cafe in a rubble strewn lot.

"Life is very hard. There are lots of people like this. So many people don't have enough money. They are doing this rather than becoming criminals," he says.

Gamal Fouad Naguib, a sugar company employee, bends down in a narrow alley by a busy public bakery, sorting his hot, subsidized bread on newspaper on the ground to cool.

"My salary is not enough to buy the bread [at the private bakeries]," so he comes here everyday or so to collect his 20 pieces of bread for about 17 cents. But on the days he works late and public bakeries have either run out or closed down, he has to go to the private bakeries that are at least four times as much.

While Mr. Taha, says corruption is "the main problem," he then back peddled, perhaps sensing the sensitivity of the issue, "There's no problem, no problem... It's not a lot. It's not a real problem. Just some people doing this who [are] very weak and they sell it, but it's not a huge problem," he says.

Best of cartman

2007-07-28T11:21:00.001+01:00

Father-to-be allowed into delivery room for first time in Iran

2007-07-24T22:02:00.001+01:00

Robert Tait in Tehran Monday July 23, 2007 Guardian It has become a fixture of modern medical practice: women giving birth in the comforting presence of the father-to-be. Now a custom long seen as a sign of western social progress is being adopted in the conservative setting of Iran as doctors seek to wean the country's women off their preference for caesarean births. Sarem hospital in Tehran last week became the first in Iran to allow a father inside a delivery room for the birth of his child. The hospital is offering couples the chance to stay together during childbirth after being told that it is permissible under Iran's Islamic laws. What has become common practice in the west is still unknown in Iran, where pregnancy and birth are still seen as women's business. But Dr Abutaleb Sarem, a western-trained specialist obstetrician and medical director at Sarem hospital, is urging patients to bring in husbands for health and psychological reasons. He believes the presence of fathers is necessary to soothe women's nerves and make them more willing to give birth naturally. Dr Sarem came up with the proposal after Iran's health ministry asked doctors to reduce the number of caesarean births. About 70% of babies in Iran are born by caesarean section, largely due to women's fears about the pain of childbirth and the worry that natural births make them less attractive to their husbands. Dr Sarem said the fears about pain could be eased by fathers attending the births. "Our hospital advertised that we had all the latest facilities to make natural childbirth painless but patients were still insisting on caesareans, despite the high risks of infection and serious side-effects," he told the Guardian. "I remembered that when I worked in Austria and Germany, women were forgetting about the pain when their husbands were present at the births. The atmosphere in delivery rooms seemed so peaceful and I wondered if it was because the fathers were there. So I offered it to the husband of one of my patients. "He agreed after we asked if it was religiously permissible and were told that it was. We gave the mother a low epidural. The environment was very spiritual and friendly, with husband and wife laughing and joking. The mother was able to help the medical team a little and delivered the baby, a girl, without great discomfort. The husband was emotional and in tears." Caesareans were traditionally frowned upon in Iran as a sign of ill-health and weakness, but they have become more popular since the 1979 Islamic revolution.

This time it's personal

2007-07-24T20:09:00.001+01:00

Alastair Harper July 24, 2007 12:00 PM http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/alastair_harper/2007/07/this_time_its_personal.html Our privacy is a farce. As you read this, the cute bod you met last night has found your Facebook profile and is sniggering at the photo of you, aged 16, looking an idiot at an Ibiza foam party while lifting a delighted alcopop to the camera. You'd told them you were a Rhodes scholar. Your number has already been deleted from their phone. The Sun is now able to do odd little stories about a policeman being homosexual and, dear Lord, actually admitting to it on his Facebook profile. They justify the story by saying he was recently promoted in the Transport Police - meaning he now might guard high-profile passengers, So if, say, the Queen were to catch the Central line to Bethnal Green in order to have a look around Whitechapel market, he might possibly be one of her many guards. The issue, according to the Sun, is that his profile has made him a target for terrorists. And he is gay. Oxford University can now use the pictures put up by friends of some poor Bullingdon sap burning peasant villages and discipline him. Or congratulate him, I'm not quite sure how it works up there. It's amazing how much easier the internet has made it for fools to be foolish. Intrigued as to Facebook's ability to find friends through your email username, I managed to accidentally ask everyone I had ever emailed to be my friend. Everyone. Imagine it was your job to very occasionally interview quite important people and so have email contact with them. Imagine what you'd feel like when you asked cabinet ministers or an elderly and very respected playwright to join you on, of all things, Facebook. Meanwhile there are infuriating little applications trying to extract every bit of data they can for their marketing departments, hiding under the guise of turning you into a zombie or inviting you to cyber-kick someone in the jaw. I remember working for an internet company and coming up with these sorts of things: made in half an hour to hook stupid people into revealing all their information for no reward other than getting a little profile of their dog. The thing is, any social networking site is completely pointless for keeping in touch with friends. You don't socially network, anyway. That implies some cyber cocktail party where you see someone else is a fan of both the Television Personalities and Knut Hamsun and start a wonderful relationship before moving on to the chap that has also flagged his interest in Joseph Priestly and the Holy Modal Rounders. In reality, the only thing you do is receive requests from the people you hated at school and weigh up in your head if it's worth having them being able to look at your life in exchange for you having a good nose around theirs. Keep your fingers crossed - they might have a crack addiction. Actually I might be wrong about a choice when it comes to adding someone. There seem to be strange etiquette rules that I don't quite understand. I was once called "extremely petty" and thoroughly told off by several friends for denying a request from someone that I was very open (especially to him) about disliking. They were also very open about disliking him too, but they had not refused to add him. The idea that I want as few people as possible to be able to report me to the Sun when suspicious photos of me playing with a police truncheon go up just doesn't seem to occur to them. The last thing I want to have happen is what occurred to two of my friends last week. Having been happily engaged for the last few years and, apparently, looking forward to their wedding in late summer I logged into Facebook to see a little gif of a broken heart and the casual announcement that x and y are no longer engaged. It must be some sort of electronic glitch, I thought. But a click on the former affianced's profile showed her receiving cyber hugs from various members of her ex-beau's family. In fact it was how his family found out. Phonecalls surged from America and the Middle East as cousins alerted their non-information age fathers to the sudden change in their nephew's life. So for the last week traditional Muslim patriarchs have been calling him every few days to have a little conversation about how he chooses to take out internet advertisements before telling his family. Once the phone stops ringing he intends to delete his profile.

America's North-West Frontier fantasy

2007-07-24T20:05:00.001+01:00

Declan Walsh

July 24, 2007 11:30 AM

A perplexing twist in Washington's "war on terror" has occurred. For over two years the White House has stoutly defended the Pakistani president, Pervez Musharraf's, record on combating Islamist extremism, even as a cyclone of Taliban terror ran through the tribal belt. But now, when Musharraf is finally starting to act - ordering the Red Mosque siege three weeks ago, deploying fresh troops to North West Frontier Province, and rallying Pakistan for a potential civil war against militants - Washington has suddenly decided he's not going fast enough. In fact it seems to be seriously considering war.

Six years after dropping troops into Afghanistan, Washington seems to believe it invaded the wrong country. A cascade of ever-tougher statements have created the impression that unilateral mlitary action against targets inside Pakistan is looming. First then the National Intelligence Estimate pinpointed the tribal areas as al-Qaida's global headquarters and warned that it was putting the US at risk. Then President Bush declared that Musharraf's efforts to broker peace in the same area had miserably failed. Finally his homeland security adviser, Fran Townsend, said that "no options are off the table" to solve the problem - including military action.

Trigger-happy Democrats chimed in enthusiastically. Whatever rock "those evil people" were hiding under, crowed the Senate Majority leader Harry Reid, "we should go get them".

It's not only politicians who are baying for bombs. A Washington Post editorial last week called for "targeted strikes or covert actions" inside Pakistan. The influential New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd declared she "had it up the Wazir with Waziristan" and called on a few good "Army Rangers or Navy Seals" to take care of business.

This sabre-rattling is ill-informed, dangerous and counter-productive. Certainly President Musharraf and his devious intelligence agencies have an ambiguous approach to the Taliban. But this must not be confused with the situation on the ground where, since the Red Mosque siege ended on July 11, Islamists have launched a blistering onslaught against government forces. The only thing guaranteed to rouse the fire-breathing mullahs even more is the prospect - however remote - of an American invasion.

And what would an American war in Waziristan look like? A full-scale invasion is unthinkable unless the US intends to topple Musharraf and create a second Iraq. They could go for targeted strikes - but in fact they already are. American Predator drones have been secretly hitting al-Qaida hideouts across the tribal areas for at least two years; to save itself political embarrassment Islamabad claims responsibility.

The military's last tactic is commando raids - a tactic the US has employed across the border in Afghanistan for the past six years with limited success. How would the same Special Forces, operating in a treacherous mountainous environment with hardly a friend, do any better in Waziristan?

Of course the rocket-propelled talk may be simply a ploy to make Musharraf push faster and harder against his troublesome tribesmen and their al-Qaida guests. If so, it's a risky gambit. At best the threats will deepen anti-Americanism and the perception that Musharraf is Bush's "poodle". At worst they will further destabilise the Pakistani state at an immensely fragile time. Musharraf is politically weak and his forces are at war in pockets of the Frontier. The suicide bombing - a device previously reserved for presidential assassination bids - has become a thrice-daily occurrence. No matter how much Washington exhorts him to "do more", Musharraf may reaching the limits of his power.

This is partly the Bush administration's own doing. Since 2001 it has propped up Musharraf with $10bn in aid and endless diplomatic cover-fire, free of cost. The price has been paid in terms of numerous distortions of politics and society - political alliances between Musharraf and the mullahs, a castrated parliament and, most recently, surging anti-military feeling. It was no coincidence that as triumphant lawyers tumbled out of the supreme court last Friday - after the victory of the chief justice, Muhammad Iftikhar Chaudhry, against Musharraf - that some also chanted anti-American slogans.

But even if Musharraf's sell-by date is approaching, American bombs are no solution. Success against bin Laden and his chums at their "terrorist mountain spa", as Ms Dowd puts it, is inextricably linked to solving the problems of the tribal areas themselves. The scheming tribesmen have survived on the outer margins of the Pakistani state since independence in 1947. Now, by whatever means possible - greater political freedoms, more schooling or just old-fashioned bribery - they must be brought into the fold. Few consider America a friend; but not all need to see it as the enemy.

Some American officials already know this. Before the latest hard talk they announced a $750m aid package for the tribal belt. The plan attracted some criticism, notably about tricky issues like corruption and finding projects that won't get blown up. But the broad alternative looks much worse. American military action in Pakistan now could plunge the country into turmoil, swamp its beleaguered democratic forces and fail to yield the terrorist scalps Washington is looking for. In fact it would likely create many more.

No bloodless revolution

2007-07-24T20:02:00.001+01:00

Turkey's election may point the way to further democratisation, but the army means to block it Maureen Freely Tuesday July 24, 2007 The Guardian When Turkey went to the polls at the weekend, it was, according to the headlines, fighting for its soul. Which would it choose, Islam or secularism? But that was never the real contest. The key issue was democracy - would the Turkish electorate again endorse a secular system that has, since its inception, been enforced by the military? Or would it signal that the time had come to let the people govern themselves? This was their message on Sunday, when they returned the mildly Islamist AK party to power with 47% of the vote. That they could do so at all is a victory for democracy. But it is not at all clear who will have the final say. A few words, then, on Turkish secularism. In 1923, when Mustafa Kemal Ataturk pulled Turkey from its Islamic roots to establish a western-style republic, one of his first acts was to shut down the dervish lodges. He went on to "nationalise" religion. To this day, clerics are state employees. When he replaced the Arabic script with a Latin alphabet, his aim was to increase the literacy rate - but he also knew that, before long, most Turks would be unable to read the Qur'an, or indeed any version of their history that he and his successors did not endorse. A pretty amazing achievement. It is unlikely that he could have done the same by democratic means. This has long been the refrain of the generals and those secularists who put their trust in them. Turkey's democracy is young, they say. Unsupervised, it will go back to its old ways. To keep it on the true path, the army has rolled in its tanks three times in the past 50 years. A decade ago, it successfully organised a tank-free intervention - what has come to be known as the post-modern coup. In spring, it staged an "e-coup", issuing on its website a "press release" warning it would intervene if the ruling AK party continued to Islamicise the state. The big fight then was about the presidency. The prime minister's candidate was Abdullah Gul, who had once been less mildly Islamist and whose wife wears a headscarf. But as foreign minister he took Turkey towards Europe. He has worked hard to keep the accession project afloat and his colleagues in Europe hold him in high esteem. Some in the army see this as stage one of a dastardly plan. By taking Turkey into Europe, the secretly fundamentalist AK party would emasculate the military, paving the way for an Islamist counter-revolution. There is no evidence that AK has such ambitions, or that Turkey - which overwhelmingly supports the separation of religion and state - would endorse such a project. But the military will want to curb and supervise the newly re-elected government, and there are fears that if that doesn't work, it will find an excuse to shut it down - thus "saving" it not just from Islam, but also from Europe. There are those who say the army cannot afford to stage a full-size coup. Having refused to play along in Iraq, it can no longer depend on its usual sponsor, the US. It has its own internal, though largely unreported, power struggles. And it is disinclined to take action without first manufacturing consent. But this it would seem to have done. Since 2005, the media has run a hate campaign against those it deems traitors. It has, in addition to reigniting the Kurdish issue, championed the ultranationalist lawyers who have prosecuted more than 100 journalists, writers, publishers, academics and activists for "insulting Turkishness". They have convinced the public that these "traitors" have sold the country to Europe to advance their careers. Few of their targets are Islamists. Meanwhile, the nation's mayors compete to prove who is the most patriotic. Istanbul is so thick with flags you can hardly see the skyline. Nothing stays still for long in Turkey, however. The economy is booming. During the AK party's five years in power there has been steady growth. For this it has won the approval of the secularist business world. Many in the liberal intelligentsia - secularists who are repelled by the nationalist rhetoric of Ataturk's old party the CHP and disturbed by the rise of the ultra-nationalist MHP - gave their votes to the AK party. At grassroots level there is abundant evidence that Islam and secularism can co-exist productively, as can Turkey and Europe. Even Turks and Kurds. But it's not going to be easy with an army this strong and this determined to block change. If democratisation continues, it is unlikely to be bloodless. · Maureen Freely is the author of Enlightenment maureen.freely@warwick.ac.uk

The silent majority

2007-07-24T20:00:00.001+01:00

The extremists marching in Jerusalem last night were by no means representative of the Israeli mainstream, so why was there no counter-protest?

July 24, 2007

Last time I wrote about Nadia Matar, her response was to brand Josh and me as "Palestinian agents". She fired off a mass email to her acolytes, to this effect, calling for them to be vigilant against our espionage. Ignoring the thinly veiled threats she'd made against us, we headed back into her lair again last night and witnessed what happens when Nadia is allowed to pull the strings of a few thousand puppets in the heart of Jerusalem.

Her Women In Green organisation was behind yesterday's march round the Old City of Jerusalem. The march is an annual event that coincides with Tisha Ba'av, the saddest day in the Jewish calendar. By fasting, and reading the Book of Lamentations, Jews around the world commemorate the series of tragedies connected with this date that have engulfed the Jewish people over the centuries (including the destruction of the First and Second Temples, the expulsion from Spain and the Holocaust).

However, subdued mourning and introspection do not appeal to Nadia Matar and her merry men. Instead, they hijack the event in order to stick the boot in to the Arab residents of East Jerusalem by way of their inflammatory march.

It is, to all intents and purposes, the Mediterranean equivalent of the Orange Order parade in Drumcree. Even the colours are the same, thanks to the presence of the anti-disengagement crowd whose orange T-shirts and flags bear their latest, shamelessly sectarian slogan, "The Land of Israel for the People of Israel". Two thousand people gathered in Kikar Safra, West Jerusalem, where Nadia worked herself and the crowd into a frenzy, stalking round the square in her trademark green baseball cap while preaching her message of hate and war through a microphone.

I asked a passing demonstrator if he was worried that the Arabs might react badly to such an incendiary march, but was reassured that "they know better than to mess with a crowd this big". He strode off into the distance, while Josh, Alex and I debated the wisdom of our three-man Cif cell spending the next two hours in such delectable company. Trying to spot Nadia in the crowd before she clocked us was like playing a real-life game of Where's Wally, and in this furtive manner we made our way down to Damascus Gate to begin the parade.

The roads were cordoned off and manned by a huge police presence, meaning that the protesters were free to strut their stuff as provocatively as they liked - and they did. One burly man, dressed in sackcloth in honour of the occasion, spotted a group of Arab youths on the other side of the road, and purposefully stormed over to wave his flag in their faces as he smirked triumphantly. Resisting the urge to connect my right fist to his temple (first or second - either would do), I decided instead to approach my new friend and casually enquire as to what he hoped to achieve with his actions.

In a booming American accent, Eliyahu told me "I don't hate them, I just want them to understand that they can only live here under Jewish rule." As I struggled to keep up with his frantic pacing, I asked him whether he thought this method of getting his message across was likely to do more harm than good in terms of Judaeo-Arab relations. He exploded like a cluster bomb. "Look," he screamed, "I don't care whether they like it or not. They need to understand that they lost the war; we won, they lost. Why it's taken them 40 years to get the picture I don't know, but we're not going to stop until they understand who's in control."

Warming to his theme, he went on to deride "the chutzpah that the Arabs have - they demand that we can't even live in their midst and want us to withdraw. You're from England, so answer me this - what if all the Pakistanis in England said we don't want any whites living in our area, they've all got to go? What would you say to that?"

For all his incendiary posing, Eliyahu was by no means a major player at an event like this. That accolade belongs to the rightwing member of Knesset, Arieh Eldad, whose firebrand speech in front of his adoring audience was as frightening as it was surreal. With the walls of the Old City lit up behind him in a fluorescent glow, he bellowed out his message: "We must take back the Temple Mount, if we are to avoid another Churban [Destruction] befalling the Jewish People. We are doomed unless we bring in a strong Jewish leader to rule a land which is meant for Jews, a land which is not meant for Arabs." He left the stage to thunderous applause, the crowd lapping up his battle cry and hanging on his every word.

What disturbed me most about the entire evening of marching and sabre-rattling was not the protesters themselves, since our recent trip has left me rather immune to their ranting and raving by now. Instead, it was the absence of counter-protest by fellow Israelis who knew this event was going ahead, yet were either too apathetic or too intimidated to do anything to stand up to the fascist face of the Israeli far right.

When I was young, my parents would regularly take me on anti-NF rallies at Trafalgar Square. They instilled a firm belief in me that standing by and doing nothing makes you (almost) complicit in the crime itself. The extremists marching round the Old City last night are by no means representative of the Israeli mainstream, but they're far better organised, far more passionate, and far more prepared for action than any other section of society here.

With the likes of Nadia Matar and Arieh Eldad at the helm, an event like last night should send an urgent warning to their opponents that it's time to stand up and show the world that this type of hate will not be tolerated.

The insurgents' achilles heel

2007-07-22T11:29:00.001+01:00

Sami Ramadani July 20, 2007 8:30 PM http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/sami_ramadani/2007/07/the_insurgents_achilles_heel.html Yesterday's Guardian report on armed resistance organisations in Iraq and their plans to form a political front was a fresh and illuminating snapshot of the most dangerous and far-reaching conflict of our times. By eschewing the usual cliches and bundles of distortions about any Muslims bearing arms, the report enriches our understanding of the best organised of the resistance groups active in parts of Baghdad and the areas up to and including Mosul, north of the capital. What they say indicates a major shift in tactics and strategy, but also reveals these groups' achilles heels. Politically, one of the most telling statements was from the spokesperson of a faction of the Ansar al-Sunna resistance group: "Resistance isn't just about killing Americans without any aims or goals ... Our people have come to hate al-Qaida, which gives the impression to the outside world that the resistance in Iraq are terrorists. Suicide bombing is not the best way to fight because it kills innocent civilians. We are against indiscriminate killing - fighting should be concentrated only on the enemy. They [al-Qaida] believe that all Shia are kuffar [unbelievers]- and most of the Sunnis as well ... The Americans magnify their role, even though they are responsible for a minority of resistance operations - remember that the Americans brought al-Qaida to Iraq." The statement is significant in two respects. One is the fact that al-Qaida is being denounced openly, and the second is that the man making the statement is from Ansar al-Sunna, one the organisations that gained notoriety in its indiscriminate methods of fighting and sectarian ideology. Equally significant is the fact that the other faction of Ansar al-Sunna is being accused of working with al-Qaida. One of the least sectarian of the seven groups forming the new alliance is the 1920 Revolution Brigades, whose leader, Harith al-Dhari, was assassinated recently by al-Qaida, according to Muthanna al-Thari, spokesperson of the very influential Association of Muslim Scholars. The leader of the AMS, Sheikh Harith al-Dhari, is the assassinated leader's uncle and the most influential of the anti-occupation Sunni cleric. Reversing earlier statements, Sheikh Dhari, has also become very critical of al-Qaida. His and other recent anti al-Qaida statements are fuelled by the enormous loathing that Iraqis of all sects and ethnicities have for al-Qaida and all sectarian attacks. Indeed, popular opinion in the streets of Iraq habitually accuse the occupation of backing al-Qaida to spread sectarian divisions and split the struggle against the occupation. The seven groups are not only anti al-Qaida but also keen to distance themselves from the Saddamist wing of the Ba'ath party, led by Izz'at al-Douri, Saddam Hussein's deputy until the 2003 invasion. Such political credentials should in theory make the task of unity with Muqtada Sadr's movement less difficult. However, the resistance leaders who talked to the Guardian accuse Sadr's Mahdi army of sectarian killings while ignoring the fact that most of the sectarian attacks have been aimed at Sadr City, Najaf, Kufa and Karbala. For his part, Sadr has conceded that his movement has been infiltrated by its enemies, including the occupation authorities. Referring to the climate of chaos and occupation presence, Sadrist spokesmen have often referred to "the ease with which sectarian crimes could be committed by anyone wearing black and claiming to be from the Mahdi army." Following the second attack on the Samarra Shia shrine, Sadr accused the occupation of being behind the attack - a position echoed by Sunni clergy and secular forces - and stressed unity with Sunnis. He later accused the US of sabotaging his attempts to unite with Sunnis. While it obviously suits the US to divide the opposition to its occupation of the country, Sadr's own tactics are attacked for being one of the biggest obstacles to greater anti-occupation unity. These tactics include on-off participation in the government and the Sadrists' presence in parliament (in the sect-based Coalition List that won most of the seats in the January 2006 occupation-controlled elections). Though some of the criticisms of Iranian policies by the resistance leaders interviewed by the Guardian are based in fact, the seven groups' hostility to Iran is still trapped within the old Saddamist-style anti-Iranian chauvinism that fuelled his eight-year war against Iran following the 1979 overthrow of the US-backed Shah regime. Racist propaganda against the Iranian people lasted for a quarter of a century and permeated Iraqi society and its educational system. The US-led propaganda campaign against Iran has thus fallen on receptive ears. The US is happy to see Iraqis directing their wrath against the fictitious "presence of hundreds of thousands of Iranians fighting alongside the US forces to evict Sunnis from Baghdad and replace them with Shia" - in the words of one Iraqi victim of the occupation who, with her daughter, was forced to leave Iraq after the murder of her brother. The seven resistance groups don't appear to be facing up to the fact that effectively by far the biggest organised armed resistance group in Iraq is Sadr's Mahdi army, estimated to be well over 100,000 strong - or that, in the absence of strong non-religious anti-occupation organisations, millions of people across Iraq are supporters of Muqtada Sadr's anti-occupation message. US jets and helicopters are daily bombarding Sadr City in Baghdad and towns south of Baghdad. Thousands of Sadrists are in jail and the US is acutely aware that the Sadrists remain one of the biggest obstacles to controlling Iraq. Last but not least, when talking about the resistance in Iraq it's important to remember that most of the thousands of military operations that the Pentagon reports are carried out monthly against the occupation forces go unclaimed by any organisation. This confirms the impression that I and many Iraqis have that most of the armed resistance to the occupation is conducted by localised groups in the villages and cities of Iraq. Armed resistance to the occupation has much deeper and more popular roots than the politicians in Washington and London dare to admit. For admitting it, at least in public, means abandoning their much trumpeted "exit strategy", otherwise known as having your cake and eating it. Having a pro US government in Baghdad, withdrawing most of the troops but keeping military bases in Iraq is not what Iraqis mean by ending the military and economic occupation of Iraq. Such an exit strategy will not stop the resistance and the sea of popular support that feeds and protects it. For even those who are engaged in anti-occupation political and trade union activities in Iraq do not hide their support for the "al-muqawama al-sharifa" ("the honourable resistance" as distinct from terrorism). And it is these deep Iraqi roots which are likely, sooner or later, to produce the united front that rises above the differences based on religion or ethnicity. A slogan gaining momentum in the streets of Iraq reflects this popular mood:"La lil ihtilal; la lil ta'iffia; la lil irhab": "No to the occupation; no to sectarianism; no to terrorism."

Conquest of Egypt

2007-07-22T11:24:00.001+01:00

Welcome to Richistan, USA

2007-07-22T10:50:00.001+01:00

The American Dream of riches for all is turning into a nightmare of inequality. But a backlash is brewing, reports Paul Harris in New York Paul Harris in New York Sunday July 22, 2007 Observer On the surface, Mark Cain works for a time-share company. Members pay a one-off sum to join and an annual fee. They then get to book holiday time in various destinations around the globe. But Solstice clients are not ordinary people. They are America's super-rich and a brief glance at its operations reveal the vast and still widening gulf between them and the rest of America. Solstice has only about 80 members. Platinum membership costs them $875,000 to join and then a $42,000 annual fee. In return they get access to 10 homes from London to California and a private yacht in the Caribbean, all fully staffed with cooks, cleaners and 'lifestyle managers' ready to satisfy any whim from helicopter-skiing to audiences with local celebrities. As the firm's marketing manager, Cain knows what Solstice's clientele want. 'We are trying to feed and manage this insatiable appetite for luxury,' Cain said with pride. America's super-rich have returned to the days of the Roaring Twenties. As the rest of the country struggles to get by, a huge bubble of multi-millionaires lives almost in a parallel world. The rich now live in their own world of private education, private health care and gated mansions. They have their own schools and their own banks. They even travel apart - creating a booming industry of private jets and yachts. Their world now has a name, thanks to a new book by Wall Street Journal reporter Robert Frank which has dubbed it 'Richistan'. There every dream can come true. But for the American Dream itself - which promises everyone can join the elite - the emergence of Richistan is a mixed blessing. 'We in America are heading towards 'developing nation' levels of inequality. We would become like Brazil. What does that say about us? What does that say about America?' Frank said. In 1985 there were just 13 US billionaires. Now there are more than 1,000. In 2005 the US saw 227,000 new millionaires being created. One survey showed that the wealth of all US millionaires was $30 trillion, more than the GDPs of China, Japan, Brazil, Russia and the EU combined. The rich have now created their own economy for their needs, at a time when the average worker's wage rises will merely match inflation and where 36 million people live below the poverty line. In Richistan sums of money are rendered almost meaningless because of their size. It also has other names. There is the 'Platinum Triangle' used to describe the slice of Beverly Hills where many houses go for above $10m. Then there is the Jewel Coast, used to describe the strip of Madison Avenue in Manhattan where boutique jewellery stories have sprung up to cater for the new riches' needs. Or it exists in the MetCircle society, a Manhattan club open only to those whose net worth is at least $100m. The reason behind the sudden wealth boom is, according to some experts, the convergence of a new technology - the internet and other computing advances - with fluid and speculative markets. It was the same in the late 19th century when the original Gilded Age of conspicuous wealth and deep poverty was spawned by railways and the industrial age. At the same time government has helped by doling out corporate tax breaks. In the Fifties the proportion of federal income from company taxes was 33 per cent, by 2003 it was just 7.4 percent. Some 82 of America's largest companies paid no tax at all in at least one of the first three years of the administration of President George W Bush. But who are the new rich? Some of the names are familiar, Microsoft tycoon Bill Gates and savvy stock investor Warren Buffett. But most are unknown, often springing from the secretive world of financial hedge funds. Men like James Simons, who took home compensation of $1.7bn last year. Last year the 25 top earning hedge fund bankers in the US earned an average of $570m each. The average US household income is $50,000. It is such men - and they are usually men - who feed the outlandish luxury goods economy of Richistan. It is they who are responsible for the rebirth of the butler industry, which was all but dead in the Seventies and is now facing a shortage of trained staff. So keen is the demand that many can expect to earn a six-figure salary when they graduate from booming butler schools. Then there is the runaway feeder-industry of luxury consumer items. The new ultra rich turn up their noses at Rolexes; the sought-after brand is Franck Muller, which sells a high-end timepiece for $736,000. Or try a Mont Blanc pen, encrusted in jewels, for $700,000. Louis Vuitton's most exclusive handbag sells for $42,000. Only 24 were ever made and none ever touched a shelf as all were pre-sold to Richistani clients. In places such as Manhattan and Los Angeles, restaurants and bars outdo themselves in excess. New York's Algonquin Hotel has a $10,000 'martini on a rock' (it comes with a diamond at the bottom of the glass). City eateries sell burgers for more than $50. One offers a $1,000 omelette. In Los Angeles there is a craze for Bling mineral water - at $90 a bottle. Then there are the boats. The private yacht industry in America has been caught in an arms race of size and luxuriousness. So far, there has been a clear winner: Oracle-founder Larry Ellison's 450ft water palace, the Rising Sun. More than 80 rooms on five storeys and a landing craft that carries a Jeep, a basketball court doubling as a helipad and a fully-equipped cinema. Now an Oregon-based company is taking things further: private submarines. An estimated 100 or so private subs are now drifting around the world's oceans. Then there are the rockets - several notable billionaires are now leading the way in private exploration of space. One of them is Robert Bigelow who has ploughed $500m into trying to build an inflatable space hotel. A miniature prototype model was successfully launched and tested last month. In a scene that perhaps James Bond would find familiar, armed guards now patrol the fences of Bigelow Aerospace's headquarters wearing badges decorated with an alien as their corporate logo. But this is not just a world of riches gone mad that the rest of America can ignore. The growth of such a large super-rich class, coupled with a deepening poverty in many communities, is starting to tear at the fabric of society. Even some of the most wealthy - like Gates and Buffett - have spoken openly of the needs to address the massive 'inequality gap' that they have come to exemplify. In effect, some of the very richest Americans are calling for themselves to be taxed. In a speech last month Buffett - the third richest man in the world - pointed out that his tax rate was 17.7 per cent of his income while his secretary was taxed at 30 per cent. 'Many of the new super-rich are looking long term at the world and they see a collapsing US education system and health-care system and the disappearance of the middle class and they realise: this is bad for everybody,' said Frank. Defenders of low tax for the very rich point to the theory of trickledown economics - the spending power of the rich benefiting the poor. But while the super-rich have boomed, the earning power of the average and poor citizen has not nearly matched the performance of the elite. In 2005 the top one per cent of earners in the US gained 14 per cent in income in real terms, while the rest of the country gained less than one per cent. The situation is especially bad for the severely poor - those living at half the poverty level - whose numbers are at a 32-year high. The rich are getting richer but are not bringing everyone else with them. 'If you look at the impact of the last 20 years it seems pretty clear that trickledown just does not work,' said Paul Buchheit, economics professor at Chicago's Harold Washington College. There are some signs of a change in attitude. Recent huge Wall Street flotations such as the listing of private equity giants like Blackstone have created a push in Congress for taxes on the instant billionaires they have created. Scandals of excess such as Enron and WorldCom and the trial of Conrad Black have been high-profile. But few politicians, needing campaign cash from new millionaires, will get far preaching higher tax. Calls for more equality tend to have come from men like Buffett and Gates whose fortunes are so enormous that a little extra tax would make no difference. Bush has pushed to phase out taxes like the estate tax, which benefit only the rich. 'I don't see it changing. No matter what administration is in power,' said Buchheit. But many think it must change. To a large degree, the debate over the booming lives of the super-rich is an argument about the American soul. It is a country that has always worshipped wealth, where the creation of a fortune was seen as virtuous and a source of pride. But now that huge wealth has started to squeeze the 'middle class' out of existence, leaving the haves and have-nots in very separate worlds. It is possible that political will may develop to address the problem or that the problem will correct itself. The notorious end of the Gilded Age came in the panic of 1893 that sank America into depression. Frank believes the signs of a coming storm are there. 'The trick is to spot when prosperity turns to excess,' he said. 'When a large amount of people make a lot money very quickly it's a sign you are near the top of the market.' In a world of mega-yachts, private submarines and space hotels, that peak might be close at hand. And it's a long way down. Billionaire's row · There are 7.5 million households in America worth up to $10m. A further two million are worth $10m-$100m and thousands are worth more than $100m. · There is now a two-year waiting list for 200ft yachts. If put end to end, the boats on that list, which cost $50m each, would be 15 miles long. · Sebonack Golf Club in the Hamptons, Long Island, charges $650,000 for membership. That doesn't include the $12,000 annual dues, or tips for caddies. · Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page have a private Boeing 767. · John D. Rockefeller was America's first billionaire. Adjusted for inflation, he had $14bn - less than the net worth of each of Sam Walton's five children today. There were 13 US billionaires in 1985. Now there are more than 1,000. There are as many millionaires in North Carolina as in India. · 'Affluent' is Richistani for 'not really rich'. According to Frank, you need about $10m to be considered entry-level rich.

Diet Coke and mentos

2007-07-22T01:00:00.001+01:00

Indian Thriller

2007-07-22T00:56:00.001+01:00

On The Map with Avi Lewis: Ayaan Hirsi Ali & Islamophobia

2007-07-22T00:47:00.001+01:00

Colin McRae DIRT (Trailer)

2007-07-21T14:50:00.001+01:00

TPMtv: The New Al Qaeda Bamboozle

2007-07-21T11:28:00.001+01:00

The Wind-up Bird Chronicle

2007-07-21T11:06:00.001+01:00

by Haruki Murakami

Amazon.co.uk Review
Bad things come in threes for Toru Okada. He loses his job, his cat disappears, and then his wife fails to return from work. His search for his wife (and his cat) introduces him to a bizarre collection of characters, including two psychic sisters, a possibly unbalanced teenager, an old soldier who witnessed the massacres on the Chinese mainland at the beginning of the Second World War, and a very shady politician.

Haruki Murakami is a master of subtly disturbing prose. Mundane events throb with menace, while the bizarre is accepted without comment. Meaning always seems to be just out of reach, for the reader as well as for the characters, yet one is drawn inexorably into a mystery that may have no solution. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is an extended meditation on themes that appear throughout Murakami's earlier work. The tropes of popular culture, movies, music, detective stories, combine to create a work that explores both the surface and the hidden depths of Japanese society at the end of the 20th century.

If it were possible to isolate one theme in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle that theme would be responsibility. The atrocities committed by the Japanese army in China keep rising to the surface like a repressed memory, and Toru Okada himself is compelled by events to take responsibility for his actions and struggle with his essentially passive nature. If Toru is supposed to be a Japanese Everyman, steeped as he is in Western popular culture and ignorant of the secret history of his own nation, this novel paints a bleak picture. Like the winding up of the titular bird, Murakami slowly twists the gossamer threads of his story into something of considerable weight. --Simon Leake, Amazon.com --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Book Description
'Mesmerising, surreal, this really is the work of a true original' The Times

Synopsis
Toru Okada's cat has disappeared and this has unsettled his wife, who is herself growing more distant every day. Then there are the increasingly explicit telephone calls he has started receiving. As this compelling story unfolds, the tidy suburban realities of Okada's vague and blameless life, spent cooking, reading, listening to jazz and opera and drinking beer at the kitchen table, are turned inside out, and he embarks on a bizarre journey, guided (however obscurely) by a succession of characters, each with a tale to tell.

From the Publisher
Mesmerising, surreal, this really is the work of a true original - The Times

About the Author
Haruki Murakami was born in Kyoto in 1949. His works include A Wild Sheep Chase; The Elephant Vanishes; Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World; Norwegian Wood; Dance Dance Dance; South of the Border, West of the Sun; The Wind-up Bird Chronicle; Sputnik Sweetheart; Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche; after the quake and Birthday Stories.

Warriors of God: Richard the Lionheart and Saladin in the Third Crusade

2007-07-21T11:04:00.001+01:00

by James Reston

The story of the Third Crusade, and the two men who dictated its outcome: Saladin, hero of the Islamic world and Richard the Lionheart. Richard and the King of France led a European army of several hundred thousand warriors, but Saladin's manoeuvres resulted in the crusaders retreat and the demise of the Third Crusade.

Counting Sheep: The Science and Pleasures of Sleep and Dreams (Paperback)

2007-07-21T11:02:00.001+01:00

by Paul Martin (Author)

Amazon.co.uk Review
A good kip, a nice nap, forty winks--we all know how agreeable it is to hit the hay. In Counting Sheep, Cambridge scientist Paul Martin, onetime Director of Communication at the Cabinet Office, analyses quite why sleep is so biologically and psychologically rewarding.

The book is divided into seven sections, with titles like "Preliminaries, Mechanisms and Origins". Using this scaffolding Martin confidently builds his thesis, that sleep is an adaptation for resting the weary body, which Homo sapiens has since cannily put to other uses (like dreaming).

But this is no dry Darwinian text. Martin is a plausible and highly engaging writer who has a gift for the telling anecdote: witness the Empress of Russia who employed an old woman specifically to tickle her feet so as she could drop off, or the famous-but-sleepy pianist who could only be roused by his wife playing an unresolved chord. Other enlightening diversions take Martin through the pros and cons of hypnotics, sleepwalking, snoring, late night milky drinks, nightmares, fatigued politicos and bedmates. Every section is enlivened by lots of pithy and well-chosen quotes, like James Joyce's blissfully simple: "warm beds, warm full-blooded life".

The author concludes with a chapter on sleeping problems. Many people have trouble getting the right amount of kip from time to time, and Martin gives sage advice on the best sleep regimens and remedies. But you don't have to be a narcoleptic or an insomniac to enjoy Counting Sheep: almost anyone should find this perfect bedtime reading. --Sean Thomas --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Sunday Times 21 July 2002
Just about everything you could possibly wish to know about sleep...Marvellous.

Sunday Telegraph 23 June 2002
A fascinating account of what happens during the dark third of our lives, the time with which we are so familiar but about which we know so little.

Evening Standard 17 June 2002
Energetic and immensely readable, this is as good a popular science book as I have read.

New Statesman 8 July 2002
A masterpiece of efficiently and entertainingly delivered information, bracingly clear and thoroughly researched.

Scotland on Sunday 23 June 2002
A thoroughly engaging and passionate book, littered with fascinating experiments, titillating examples and offbeat asides.

Book Description
A popular science book about the science and pleasures of sleep and dreams.

Synopsis
This an overview of that most vital, most underrated and most elusive of human activities, that draws on both cutting-edge neuroscience and classic literature. We spend one third of our lives asleep, but know hardly anything about it, and can remember so little of it as we come out of it. Why? This text seeks to answer questions such as: does sleeping keep us sane?; are dreams the place we go to resolve our problems, emasculate our fears and rehearse our hopes?; why are we paralysed when we dream?; why did sleep evolve?; and are we getting enough sleep?

From the Back Cover
To sleep, to dream: Paul Martin's Counting Sheep understands the centrality of these activities to all our lives, and can help you respect, and extract more pleasure from, that delicious time when you are lost to the world.

About the Author
Paul Martin studied biology at Cambridge, acquiring a First in Natural Sciences and a PhD in behavioural biology. He went to Stanford as a Harkness fellow and then to the School of Medicine as Postdoctoral Fellow, before lecturing and researching at Cambridge University. He is the co-author with Pat Bateson of Measuring Behaviour and Design for a Life. His first solo book was The Sickening Mind, which was shortlisted for the NCR Prize in 1997. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Power of Nightmares (1-6) Part 1 'Baby it's cold outside'

2007-07-21T10:52:00.001+01:00

SEXYDROWNWATCH starring Borat

2007-07-21T10:36:00.001+01:00

glumbert.com - SEXYDROWNWATCH starring Borat

Wolves

2007-07-21T10:34:00.001+01:00

One evening an old Cherokee told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside all people. He said, "My son, the battle is between two wolves inside us all. One is Evil. It is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego. The other is Good. It is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith." The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather: "Which wolf wins?" The old Cherokee replied, "The one you feed."

Maritess vs. Superfriends

2007-07-21T10:30:00.001+01:00

قصيدة الحزن

2007-07-21T10:20:00.001+01:00

علمني حبك ..أن أحزن

و أنا محتاج منذ عصور

لامرأة تجعلني أحزن

لامرأة أبكي فوق ذراعيها مثل العصفور

لامرأة.. تجمع أجزائي

كشظايا البلور المكسور

***

علمني حبك سيدتي أسوء عادات

علمني أخرج من بيتي

في الليللة ألاف المرات..

و أجرب طب العطارين..

و أطرق باب العرافات..

علمني ..أخرج منبيتي..

لأمشط أرصفة الطرقات

و أطارد وجهك..

في الأمطار..

و في أضواء السيارات..

و أطارد ثوبك..

في أثواب المجهولات

و أطارد طيفك..

حتى..حتى..

في أوراق الإعلانات..

علمني حبك كيف أهيم على وجهي..ساعات

بحثا عن شعر غجري

تحسده كل الغجريات

بحثا عن وجه ٍ..عن صوتٍ..

هو كل الأوجه و الأصواتْ

***

أدخلني حبكِ.. سيدتي

مدن الأحزانْ..

و أنا من قبلكِ لم أدخلْ

مدنَ الأحزان..

لم أعرف أبداً..

أن الدمع هو الإنسان

أن الإنسان بلا حزنٍ

ذكرى إنسانْ..

***

علمني حبكِ..

أن أتصرف كالصبيانْ

أن أرسم وجهك بالطبشور على الحيطانْ..

و على أشرعة الصيادينَ

على الأجراس, على الصلبانْ

علمني حبكِ..كيف الحبُّ

يغير خارطة الأزمانْ..

علمني أني حين أحبُّ..

تكف الأرض عن الدورانْ

علمني حبك أشياءً..

ما كانت أبداً في الحسبانْ

فقرأت أقاصيصَ الأطفالِ..

دخلت قصور ملوك الجانْ

و حلمت بأن تزوجني

بنتُ السلطان..

بلك العيناها ..

أصفى من ماء الخلجانْ

تلك الشفتاها..

أشهى من زهر الرمانْ

و حلمت بأني أخطفها مثل الفرسانْ..

و حلمت بأني أهديها أطواق اللؤلؤ و المرجانْ..

علمني حبك يا سيدتي, ما الهذيانْ

علمني كيف يمر العمر..

و لا تأتي بنت السلطانْ..

***

علمني حبكِ..

كيف أحبك في كل الأشياءْ

في الشجر العاري, في الأوراق اليابسة الصفراءْ

في الجو الماطر.. في الأنواءْ..

في أصغر مقهى.. نشرب فيهِ..

مساءً..قهوتنا السوداءْ..

علمني حبك أن آوي..

لفنادقَ ليس لها أسماءْ

و كنائس ليس لها أسماءْ

و مقاهٍ ليس لها أسماءْ

علمني حبكِ..كيف الليلُ

يضخم أحزان الغرباءْ..

علمني..كيف أرى بيروتْ

إمرأة..طاغية الإغراءْ..

إمراةً..تلبس كل كل مساءْ

أجمل ما تملك من أزياءْ

و ترش العطرعلى نهديها

للبحارةِ..و الأمراء..

علمني حبك أن أبكي من غير بكاءْ

علمني كيف ينام الحزن

كغلام مقطوع القدمينْ..

في طرق (الروشة) و (الحمراء)..

علمني حبك أن أحزنْ..

و أمنا محتاج منذ عصور

لامرأة تجعلني أحزنْ..

لامرأة تجمع أجزائي..

كشظايا البلور المكسور..

With a Grain of Salt

2007-07-21T10:18:00.001+01:00

By Mohamed Salmawy
First Published 6/15/2007

Absolute Freedom for All

I do not agree at all with those who claim — and they are many — that there is no freedom in Egypt. The truth is that we have never, throughout our seven-thousand-year history known the kind of freedom we now enjoy.

The press, for example, has come to enjoy absolute freedom to slander the highest-ranking officials and insult them however it pleases. It is also free to invent scandals around these officials whenever necessary.

In one newspaper I recently saw a headline that read “Ministers’ sex scandals,” pointing to a story in one of its inside pages. I was disappointed in the newspaper after reading the inside page, not because the report did not match up to its headline, but because it didn’t include any pictures — not even graphics of any sort.

Nevertheless, publishing such a headline, even unaccompanied by any story at all — which is often the case with many newspapers — is enough to rub it in the faces of those who doubt the freedom that the press enjoys nowadays.

However, freedom in Egypt is not — as those who doubt it claim — limited only to the press. It extends to political life as well. Any political group (eg the Muslim Brotherhood) can now function as a public political organization, with its own recognized leaders, members, policies and slogans.

The government’s respect for such a group has grown so much that it now acknowledges it by dealing with it on a daily basis in or out of the People’s Assembly, even if it (or its newspapers) have never recognized its name and refer to it simply by its legal description as “the banned group.”

This free environment has of course reflected on other aspects. The whole country now enjoys a rare case of absolute freedom. I have traveled almost all around the world, but I have never ever seen anything quite like this. Citizens can now walk in the middle of the street oblivious of the existence of any sidewalks. Landlords can now leave their buildings unpainted, red bricks exposed, without any legal penalties.

In Maadi, where I live, we were all surprised at a neighbor who actually annexed the sidewalk extending his own property and turning it into his own little garden. When the neighbors complained to the district officials, the officials showed utmost respect to the freedom of the resident, who had obviously ironed out the matter with them beforehand – hence they did nothing about it.. A few days later, three other neighbors on the same street practiced their own ‘ironed-out’ rights as well, and followed in their neighbor’s footsteps.

Another resident in the same area went ahead and built a kitchen without a license just below his neighbor’s bedroom. When the wronged neighbor, who was fed up of smelling the fried garlic and listening to the splash of mulukhia every time he entered his bedroom, took the matter to court our deficient legal system did not recognize this newly-found freedom. It ordered the immediate demolition of the kitchen and slapped the perpetrator with a one-year prison sentence.

Strangely enough the verdict was never carried out because — believe it or not — demolition orders can now never be executed without the approval of the police.

The entire society, I say, now enjoys absolute freedom. That includes the government as well, which now feels free to turn a deaf ear to any criticism of its policies whether in the press or in parliament. Ministers don’t even bother to attend the parliament interpellations.

Furthermore, ministers — or at least some of them who belong to the NDP’s Policy Secretariat — can now reject any decision by the prime minister himself or refuse to carry out public government policy if they so choose.

Last year, in the prime minister’s office I was witness together with all 30 members of the Board of the Writers’ Union to a decree issued by the prime minister granting financial subsidy to the union towards setting up a much-needed pension fund for Egyptian writers. But the finance minister, who can’t stand the word “subsidy,” a dirty word in the IMF dictionary, refuses so far to carry out the prime minister’s decree, thus asserting his undeniable freedom.

For the same way the press, or members of political groups can do what they want, ministers too can now also do what they want — and so does the police.

Where else in the world can you find such absolute freedom?!

Mohamed Salmawyis President of the Writer’s Union of Egypt and editor-in-chief of Al-Ahram Hebdo. This article is syndicated in the Arabic press.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare Official Trailer 1

2007-07-21T10:16:00.001+01:00

The Story of My Life

2007-07-21T10:13:00.001+01:00

i was ready to tell
the story of my life
but the ripple of tears
and the agony of my heart
wouldn't let me
i began to stutter
saying a word here and there
and all along i felt
as tender as a crystal
ready to be shattered
in this stormy sea
we call life
all the big ships
come apart
board by board
how can i survive
riding a lonely
little boat
with no oars
and no arms
my boat did finally break
by the waves
and i broke free
as i tied myself
to a single board
though the panic is gone
i am now offended
why should i be so helpless
rising with one wave
and falling with the next
i don't know
if i am
nonexistence
while i exist
but i know for sure
when i am
i am not
but
when i am not
then i am
now how can i be
a skeptic
about the
resurrection and
coming to life again
since in this world
i have many times
like my own imagination
died and
been born again
that is why
after a long agonizing life
as a hunter
i finally let go and got
hunted down and became free

-Rumi

I Saw Goodness Getting Drunk

2007-07-21T10:11:00.001+01:00

I am gone,
lost any sense of wanting the wine
of the nowhereness ask me,
I don't know where I am.
At times I plunge
to the bottom of the sea,
at times, rise up
like the Sun.

At times, the universe is pregnant by me,
at times I give birth to it.
The milestone in my life
is the nowhereness,
I don't fit anywhere else.
This is me:
a rogue and a drunkard,
easy to spot
in the tavern of Lovers.
I am the one shouting hey ha.

They ask me why I don't
behave myself.
I say, when you
reveal your true nature,
then I will act my age.

Last night, I saw Goodness getting drunk.
He growled and said,
I am a nuisance, a nuisance.
A hundred souls cried out, but
we are yours, we are yours, we are yours.
You are the light
that spoke to Moses and said
I am God, I am God, I am God.
I said Shams-e Tabrizi, who are you?
He said, I am you, I am you, I am you.

-Rumi

Inside the minds of killer doctors

2007-07-21T10:10:00.001+01:00

Some of the accused behind the recent terror plots in Britain were professional healers. What on earth prompts someone to snap from caregiver to killer?

By Juan Cole

Jul. 09, 2007 | Counterterrorism officials have expressed astonishment that physicians and medical personnel appear to have been behind the recent terror plots involving car bombs in Britain. Physicians swear the Hippocratic oath to do no harm, and are in a caring profession aimed at healing, not killing. This puzzlement, however, betrays a lack of understanding of how members of small terrorist cells think and what motivates them. How, indeed, could a physician plan to inflict mayhem and lethal violence on club-goers or airline passengers?

Last Tuesday, a former Muslim militant, Shiraz Maher, dropped a bombshell in an interview on the BBC's "Newsnight," saying he had known one of the alleged perpetrators, Dr. Bilal Abdullah, a Sunni Iraqi, when Abdullah was at Cambridge. Dr. Abdullah, he said, "actively cheered the deaths of British and American troops in Iraq." From an elite Sunni medical family, born in the U.K. but raised in Baghdad, Abdullah attended the upscale al-Mansour high school and Baghdad College. Abdullah's family and friends have been targeted by Shiites in the past, according to recent news reports, although Abdullah reportedly had converted to the radical Salafi Jihadi form of Sunnism even before the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime. He is alleged to have hated Shiites, whom he considered apostates. He is also said to have come under the influence, while in Iraq, of the Sunni fundamentalist cleric Sheikh Ahmad al-Kubaisi, of the Association of Muslim Scholars.

Although not all the suspects so far detained in the attacks may be presumed guilty, Dr. Abdullah was arrested at the scene, on fire. He likely believed that Britain and the U.S. were responsible for the hundreds of thousands of deaths in Iraq -- though this is a gross simplification of a complex war -- and that the imperial powers had fatally marginalized Iraq's formerly dominant Sunni Arabs in favor of Iran-linked Shiites and separatist Kurds.

Abdullah's actions are consistent with the research findings of University of Chicago political scientist Robert Pape, who found that most suicide bombers are protesting what they see as the humiliating occupation of their country by a foreign military. He theorized that the bombings are intended to affect public opinion, and so to bring about changes in political attitudes in the occupying country toward the occupiers. Although the other alleged cell members are not Iraqis, they would have agreed that a key region of the Muslim world is occupied by Western troops, and felt similar outrage. At least one of the other plotters is thought to be from a Palestinian family displaced to Jordan by the rise of Israel, another source of anger in the Muslim world over occupation of Arab land.

Yet, the actions of the group in Britain were too erratic and error-prone to be the result of careful political planning. And the self-immolation by some of them raises questions as to their deeper mind-set. Terrorists imagine the world in black and white, as full of demons and angels, and place themselves on the side of the angels. Sociologist Mark Juergensmeyer has called this way of thinking "cosmic war." Small terrorist cells arise in part because their members develop a specific way of looking at the world, which they reinforce for one another in everyday interactions. As the group becomes more and more distinct in its views from the society around it -- and more isolated -- its members can cross boundaries of reason and human sentiment, becoming monstrous.

For caring professions to produce terrorists is hardly unprecedented. Israeli-American Dr. Baruch Goldstein carried out the 1994 massacre of Palestinians in the West Bank city of Hebron, killing 29 persons at the Ibrahimi Mosque and wounding another 150. The No. 2 man in al-Qaida, Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri from the elite Azzam family, trained as a physician in Cairo in the 1970s.

Paul J. Hill, who shot down abortion clinic physician Dr. John Britton in 1994 in Florida, was a formally trained clergyman who started out committed to helping people spiritually, not killing them. He became so overwrought about what he considered genocide inflicted on the unborn, however, that he felt compelled to save innocents by killing Dr. Britton. The reverend reflected, chillingly, afterward, "If I wounded him, just shot him in the leg or shoulder, I knew there was an excellent probability that he would return to killing innocent children. In my thinking it just became: I had to kill him."

Becoming a religious terrorist depends on several steps. The first is conversion to a way of thinking by which the perpetrators identify with a core group that they wish to protect, but which they believe is being subjected to great harm. Typically this group is imagined to be composed of innocents or lonely carriers of divine truth, whose existence is both essential and yet precarious.

The second is the naming of the malevolent force that is harming these pure ones. The so-called Christian Identity Movement in Oklahoma, to which terrorists Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols had links, posits that the U.S. government is persecuting the vanishing band of Anglo-Saxon Christians, the pure lost tribe of Israel, on behalf of polyglot minorities. This belief appears to have been among the motivations for the two to bomb the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168 people.

The question for true believers thus becomes how to safeguard the righteous innocents from being wiped out by the forces of darkness. Some choose peaceful paths to that goal. If they simply organize protests or join political parties, they become social activists.

But a key motivation for the turn to terror is a sense of extreme urgency. If the true believers are convinced that an occupying force or government is committing daily mass murder, and simply cannot bear for it to continue, they may feel an impulse to do something immediate and dramatic. Hothouse conversations with a select group of like-minded believers can reinforce and multiply this feeling. Dr. Abdullah was seen by his co-workers at his hospital as a slacker who spent all his time surfing Muslim fundamentalist Web sites. If their description is accurate, it seems likely that he was increasingly obsessed with the alleged British and American threat to Sunni Islam.

Activists who become terrorists often view themselves as soldiers in God's army. Seeing all British citizens unsympathetic to the Salafi Jihadi cause as soldiers in an opposing army authorized the terrorists, in their own minds, to target civilians in the Tiger Tiger nightclub near Piccadilly Circus. Their intended victims were not simply late-night revelers in the mind of the would-be attackers, but rather enemy troops on rest and recreation.

Such perpetrators can also be impelled to act by a fear of imminent capture, since in their view this would spell the final victory of the forces of evil over the elect few. After the People's Temple group killed California Rep. Leo Ryan in Guyana in 1978 they were forced by their leader, Jim Jones, to commit mass suicide because Jones realized that this murder would lead to the destruction of their group, which he felt was alone in carrying the truth. Jones began as a pastor in a mainstream church and had at one point been a civil rights leader in Indiana -- a dramatic example of how caring individuals can go wrong.

It is likely, then, that Dr. Abdullah's group attacked Glasgow Airport in such an amateurish way out of panic, knowing that their botched operation in Haymarket, London, a few days before would likely lead to their arrest. Authorities have found a suicide note, and collective suicide appears to have been as important to them as damaging the airport or killing passengers.

The Glasgow Airport bombing underlines how the Iraq war is not, as President George W. Bush argues, quelling terror, but rather is generating it. How much Iraq-focused terrorism was there in the U.K. before 2003? The earlier Madrid and London Underground bombings were driven by the same motivation. That said, it must be underlined that in British society these individuals had access to peaceful means of expressing dissent and their views of policy. Moreover, most Britons already want their troops out of Iraq -- and so might even have given them a sympathetic hearing if they had not lashed out in irrational rage. And the tragic war in Iraq is not only being fought by British and American troops: Salafi Jihadi guerrilla cells, which may be inspired by preachers like Abdullah's mentor, Sheikh al-Kubaisi, routinely kill dozens of innocent Shiite Iraqis, and have also targeted Kurds and secular or tribal Sunni Arabs. Most Iraqis do not want the Salafi "Islamic state," of which Abdullah dreams.

Ironically, Abdullah and his group have possibly hindered any near-term withdrawal of British troops from Iraq -- if any such logical goal can be attributed as their aim -- since the new Labour government of Prime Minister Gordon Brown will not want to be seen as bowing to coercion by terrorists. Dr. Bilal Abdullah violated his oath as a physician because he cared too obsessively about the putative welfare of some, and cared not at all about that of others.

-- By Juan Cole

Banishing the Ghosts of Iran

2007-07-21T10:07:00.001+01:00

By FATEMEH KESHAVARZ

The recent arrest in Iran of Haleh Esfandiari, director of the Middle East program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, has ignited a storm of protest around the Western world. To many Americans, it is but one more sign that Iran, in particular, and the Muslim Middle East, in general, are inhospitable to women and to freethinkers. For some years, America's popular reading list has bolstered that view, ignoring political complexities of the region in favor of a simple narrative.

Best sellers like Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (Random House, 2003), Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner (Riverhead Books, 2003), and Åsne Seierstad's The Bookseller of Kabul (Little, Brown, 2003) have enforced and embellished the one-sided picture of Middle Eastern culture. Call it the "New Orientalism."

In the 1970s, Edward W. Said's influential Orientalism (Pantheon Books, 1978) offered a decisive critique of entrenched Western assumptions that construed Europe as the norm, from which the "exotic" and "inscrutable" Orient deviates. Not infallible — but certainly profound and engaging — Said's views fired the imagination of such influential scholars as Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, now central to postcolonial and subaltern studies.

But a new version of earlier assumptions pervades our culture today. The old European Orientalist writers of the 18th through the 20th centuries treated Middle Eastern culture and people as having been great in the remote past, but devoid of complexity and agency in the present. The New Orientalists don't improve on that. Whether it is Nafisi's women reading Western literature in postrevolutionary Iran, a brave bookseller smuggling works into Seierstad's Taliban-run Kabul, or Amir's guilt at tolerating the rape and repression of his kite-runner friend in Hosseini's book, they all reduce the cavernous and complicated story of the region into "us" and "them" scenarios.

Make no mistake. We should protest the incarceration of any academic anywhere in the world who gets caught in the crossfire of political games. We all wish Esfandiari to be freed, but the danger is that we will color all of Iran, the country in which I was born and whose contemporary literature and culture are a delight to teach, with such actions. If we do, we will give less, not more, aid to the many intellectuals, scholars, and writers who, little known in the United States, make up a vibrant, multifaceted Iranian culture. Bottom line: Iran — like many other countries in the Middle East — is more than a country of victims and villains. It has much to offer the world.

What makes the old Orientalism and its newer version effective is that their sinister plots build on each other — and gradually seep into our daily accumulated fears. In Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (University of Minnesota Press, 1997), the sociologist Avery F. Gordon explains that ghost stories are accounts of phantoms that disturb the reader with their overpowering presence. And yet their most distinct feature is that they are absent from view. Ghosts haunt us by not being there. And the New Orientalist literature has been producing ghosts in abundance. Muslim ghosts are large in number and perfectly wicked, suitable qualities for generating fear. They are old, so their past supplies material for nightmarish rereadings of history.

The memoirs, travel accounts, novels, and journalistic writings whose popular domain is haunted by Muslim ghosts vary in quality. Thematically, they stay focused on the public phobia: blind faith and cruelty, political underdevelopment, and women's social and sexual repression. They provide a mix of fear and intrigue — the basis for a blank check for the use of force in the region and Western self-affirmation. Perhaps not all the authors intend to sound the trumpet of war. But the divided, black-and-white world they hold before the reader leaves little room for anything other than surrender to the inevitability of conflict between the West and the Middle East.

An example is Nafisi, a visiting fellow at the Johns Hopkins University's Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, in Washington, whose memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran I use to analyze the New Orientalist approach in my book Jasmine and Stars: Reading More Than Lolita in Tehran (University of North Carolina Press, 2007). In the memoir, the professor of literature who is the book's narrator brings other women into her home to read Western classics. Outside the reading group, the author is angered by the preference that a male Muslim student exhibits for the protagonist in Maksim Gorky's Mother over Jane Austen's female characters. She says to Mr. Nahvi, the archvillain: "I am not comparing you to Elizabeth Bennet. There is nothing of her in you, to be sure — you are as different as man and mouse." The "good" professor, who appreciates Austen and Western characters, and the "bad" Iranian of today, who dislikes them, appear to be locked in eternal fight. What about the vast range of other Iranians who fall somewhere in between?

Reading Lolita in Tehran banishes what it cannot deal with. For example, it celebrates the power of literature for the women who gather to read the forbidden texts (although it would not have to have been as secretly as the book suggests) as evidence of women's resilience in the face of a revived patriarchy in post-1979 Iran. The least the book could do would be to mention a few contemporary Iranian women writers. It makes no such reference. The reader will not know that at the time this memoir was written, such prominent Iranian women writers as Shahrnush Parsipur, Simin Danishvar, Moniru Ravanipur, and Simin Behbahani, to mention only a few, captured the imagination of readers and made it to the best-seller list in Iran. In Reading Lolita in Tehran's narration of postrevolutionary Iran, such complex and towering Iranian women do not exist.

Further, despite favoring democratization of the Middle East, ghost stories refrain from addressing repression when conducted by the United States (for example, the toppling of Mohammad Mosaddeq, the democratically elected Iranian premier, with the help of the CIA in the early 1950s, or the behavior of governments deemed allies of the United States toward their own citizens). Indeed, the way this literature navigates its way through the Middle Eastern mess without running into the U. S. presence there is astounding. Reading Lolita in Tehran, for example, makes no reference to the coup ousting Mosaddeq, despite highlighting the anti-American orientation of the 1979 revolution that was widely understood to be fostered by the CIA's role in the coup. Neither is there any mention of chemical and other weapons used on Iranians and Kurds, with no objections at the time from Western democracies, during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s.

At the low end of the scale, the New Orientalist narrative not only draws on the ghosts of our fears but also harbors grotesque errors and generalizations bordering on the absurd. In Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women (Anchor Books, 1995), the prize-winning author and journalist Geraldine Brooks turns into a linguist. Commenting on the "tribal" connections among the roots of Arabic words, Brooks suggests that the word for "mother" has a common root with words that mean many things, including "stupid," "illiterate," "parasite," and "without opinion." A larger outcome of that supposed linguistic ambivalence is said to be ignorance of religion, because "the nature of the Arabic language meant that a precise translation of the Koran was unobtainable."

Irshad Manji, a Canadian television host and author, plays social scientist and historian in The Trouble With Islam: A Muslim's Call for Reform in Her Faith (St. Martin's Press, 2004), finding one of "the troubles with Islam today" to be the way it distorts history. "Growing up," Manji writes, she never "heard Abraham's name in a history lesson." Elsewhere she indicates that Muslims are not allowed to think for themselves, but only to imitate the behavior of the prophet.

The verdict — extended to more than a billion Muslims — is based partly on a report published by the religious academy in Manji's town that suggests that Muslims view the prophet as a perfect example. The author deals with specialized topics such as the chronology of the Koran in equally simplistic ways, assuming that since she cannot understand it, no other Muslim does. From that she argues that ignorance about the Koran leads to global tragedy. Had Mohamed Atta known that the hur promised to him by the Koran could refer to "white raisins" and not "dark-eyed virgins," the September 11 tragedy might have been avoided. From Manji's perspective, trying to understand political conflict, extremism, or injustice is unnecessary.

Don't hold your breath, either, for the "scholarly" versions of the New Orientalist discourse. They replicate the disturbing features of their popular counterparts. Bernard Lewis's recent work What Went Wrong?: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response (Oxford University Press, 2002) lumps together the entire Muslim Middle East as "a culture" in turmoil in order to contrast it with Christian Europe as the epitome of progress. Generally speaking, Lewis, a well-known scholar of Near Eastern studies, is hostile to his subject: the modern Middle Eastern Muslim. Omid Safi, an associate professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, counts, in an essay in the fifth volume of Voices of Islam (Praeger Publishers, 2007), 14 demeaning qualifiers, such as "poor," "weak," "ignorant," "humiliating," "corrupt," "impoverished," "weary," and "shabby," on one page. The menacing tone of Lewis's discourse, perpetuated in his punitive narrating voice, scolds Muslim subjects at every turn for their "fall" from glory. At the same time, while their supposed rage, ignorance, and incompetence are made hypervisible, a kind of background noise setting the ghostly ambience, they rarely speak for themselves. The absence of Muslim voices and commentators comes across as a natural function of their lack of dynamism and agency.

With Muslim women, matters are even simpler. Silenced twice (by local culture and by Western narrative), Muslim women are elusive subjects in many Western histories of the Middle East. Historians make an effort to seek them in documents that capture smaller moments of personal exchange, like court records; deeds of charitable foundations, called waqf, that they owned; or biographical sources on transmitters of sayings of the prophet, called hadith. More often, in their flowing black chadors and locked inside a proverbial harem, women are favorite candidates to be made hypervisible and yet totally masked: perfect ghosts. Lewis, for example, cites their low status in the Muslim world as "probably the most profound single difference between the two civilizations." Legally, he places them categorically below the unbelievers and slaves. Members of the other two groups can improve their status, but women will always be women.

Lewis documents the plight of women through uninformed comments of a handful of men about a handful of other men. There is Evliya Çelebi, the 17th-century Ottoman traveler who expressed surprise that the Austrian emperor stopped his horse on the street to let a woman pass. The Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi, in his opera Aida, told the story of the Egyptian Radames, torn between his love for the Egyptian princess Amneris and the Ethiopian slave Aida. To Verdi, a European Christian, Radames had to face the tragedy of choosing between the two women. What he didn't understand, says Lewis, is that his Egyptian hero would not have been faced with a problem: He could have possessed both women. Lewis also gives us the Iranian revolutionary leader Ayatollah Khomeini, who blamed the deposed shah for women's immodest clothing and social activities. Such comments "document" the backward social status of the Ottoman, Egyptian, and Iranian women. The women themselves are not quoted and discussed.

Lewis closes with prescribing for the ghost a dose of the liberty enjoyed by those "schooled in the theory and practice of Western freedom." The list of recommended freedoms is long, but it does not include the one on the minds of Middle Easterners these days: freedom from military intrusion.

As in many other places in the Middle East, in Iran new and less-known players appear on the scene if today's culture is allowed to come into full view. Again, the case of women is instructive. Shahrnush Parsipur, born in 1946, is a powerful postrevolutionary author of many successful novels, including The Dog and the Long Winter (1976) and Tuba and the Meaning of the Night (1989). Parsipur is also the author of Women Without Men: A Novella, which she composed after the 1979 revolution and which Syracuse University Press translated in 1998. I purchased the latter two novels in Iran last summer, although they are supposedly "banned." In Women Without Men, she gives us Zarrinkolah, the charming prostitute. Shortly after the onset of the revolution, Parsipur's women are out to "see the world," and no one is going to stop them. When Zarrinkolah, a "little woman of 26 with a heart open like the sea," decides to leave the brothel, she needs no one's permission, no blessing from a holy man. She is her own source of holiness, the ray of light that brightens the brothel's miserable life. A holy prostitute in postrevolutionary Iran has to be a miracle, you say. But that is exactly the point. Postrevolutionary Iran has towering women writers who make miracles possible. Parsipur has since left for exile in the United States. But her books still have an enormous following that cannot simply be dropped from the picture of Iranian history and contemporary cultural life. Iranian women have figures like her to look to for a sense of empowerment.

Parsipur is one of many. A few decades before the revolution, and before Parsipur's generation made its presence felt, Simin Danishvar — born in 1921 and still living in Iran — had captured the imagination of thousands of Iranian readers. Her beautifully crafted novel Savushun takes place in the historic city of Shiraz in southwestern Iran. It follows the life of a Persian family confronting change during World War II, through the eyes of a young wife and mother. It is one of Iran's all-time best sellers.

An equally powerful poetic voice in 20th-century Iran is that of Simin Behbahani, born in 1927 and affectionately known to her followers as the lioness of Iran. A major literary figure before and after the revolution, she is also known for her activism and outspoken dedication to women's rights. She is currently president of the Iranian Writers' Association. During the Iran-Iraq war, Behbahani wrote passionately in favor of finding a peaceful solution to the conflict. In 1997 she was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Many of these writers view themselves as citizens of the world, and they have identities that are hybrid. Such identities are part of our evolving global society, which demands new ways of knowing and writing about one another: as a kaleidoscope of colors, accents, and vantage points. Unless we learn about less-explored cultures, those colors and vantage points will remain beyond our reach. Few Western readers and scholars would look up the exquisite poetry of the prominent 20th-century Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad, who died in 1967, in a bookstore, or include her work in a world-literature or gender-studies course. It has to grow roots and bloom in the culture before the seeds are carried to new gardens.

Farrokhzad's beautifully crafted poem "Frontier Walls" is her poetic manifesto, her philosophy of life. In the light of the candle she carries, she and readers leave behind the walls that separate them and see the wholeness of human experience:

Return with me to that star,
Return with me
To that star far away
from the frozen seasons of the earth and its
ways to measure and understand
Where no one fears light.

Return with me
To the start of creation
To the fragrant core of a fertilized egg
To the moment I was born from you
Return with me, you have left me incomplete.

Fatemeh Keshavarz is a professor of Persian language and comparative literature and chair of the department of Asian and Near Eastern languages and literatures at Washington University in St. Louis. She is author of Jasmine and Stars: Reading More Than Lolita in Tehran (University of North Carolina Press, 2007).

'The carnage, the blown-up bodies I saw ... Why? What was this for?'

2007-07-21T10:04:00.001+01:00

Terrifying house raids; random checkpoint shootings; speeding convoys that wipe out anyone in their path. Interviews with 50 US war veterans back from Iraq reveal the terrible daily brutality they inflicted on innocent civilians. A unique investigation by Chris Hedges and Laila Al-Arian

In pictures: the Iraq veterans
Chris Hedges and Laila Al-Arian
Friday July 13, 2007

Guardian Unlimited
Over the past several months The Nation interviewed fifty combat veterans of the Iraq War from around the United States in an effort to investigate the effects of the four-year-old occupation on average Iraqi civilians. These combat veterans, some of whom bear deep emotional and physical scars, and many of whom have come to oppose the occupation, gave vivid, on-the-record accounts. They described a brutal side of the war rarely seen on television screens or chronicled in newspaper accounts.

Their stories, recorded and typed into thousands of pages of transcripts, reveal disturbing patterns of behavior by American troops in Iraq. Dozens of those interviewed witnessed Iraqi civilians, including children, dying from American firepower. Some participated in such killings; others treated or investigated civilian casualties after the fact. Many also heard such stories, in detail, from members of their unit. The soldiers, sailors and marines emphasized that not all troops took part in indiscriminate killings. Many said that these acts were perpetrated by a minority. But they nevertheless described such acts as common and said they often go unreported--and almost always go unpunished.

Court cases, such as the ones surrounding the massacre in Haditha and the rape and murder of a 14-year-old in Mahmudiya, and news stories in the Washington Post, Time, the London Independent and elsewhere based on Iraqi accounts have begun to hint at the wide extent of the attacks on civilians. Human rights groups have issued reports, such as Human Rights Watch's Hearts and Minds: Post-war Civilian Deaths in Baghdad Caused by U.S. Forces, packed with detailed incidents that suggest that the killing of Iraqi civilians by occupation forces is more common than has been acknowledged by military authorities. This Nation investigation marks the first time so many on-the-record, named eyewitnesses from within the US military have been assembled in one place to openly corroborate these assertions.

While some veterans said civilian shootings were routinely investigated by the military, many more said such inquiries were rare. "I mean, you physically could not do an investigation every time a civilian was wounded or killed because it just happens a lot and you'd spend all your time doing that," said Marine Reserve Lieut. Jonathan Morgenstein, 35, of Arlington, Virginia. He served from August 2004 to March 2005 in Ramadi with a Marine Corps civil affairs unit supporting a combat team with the Second Marine Expeditionary Brigade. (All interviewees are identified by the rank they held during the period of service they recount here; some have since been promoted or demoted.)

Veterans said the culture of this counterinsurgency war, in which most Iraqi civilians were assumed to be hostile, made it difficult for soldiers to sympathize with their victims--at least until they returned home and had a chance to reflect.

"I guess while I was there, the general attitude was, A dead Iraqi is just another dead Iraqi," said Spc. Jeff Englehart, 26, of Grand Junction, Colorado. Specialist Englehart served with the Third Brigade, First Infantry Division, in Baquba, about thirty-five miles northeast of Baghdad, for a year beginning in February 2004. "You know, so what?... The soldiers honestly thought we were trying to help the people and they were mad because it was almost like a betrayal. Like here we are trying to help you, here I am, you know, thousands of miles away from home and my family, and I have to be here for a year and work every day on these missions. Well, we're trying to help you and you just turn around and try to kill us."

He said it was only "when they get home, in dealing with veteran issues and meeting other veterans, it seems like the guilt really takes place, takes root, then."

The Iraq War is a vast and complicated enterprise. In this investigation of alleged military misconduct, The Nation focused on a few key elements of the occupation, asking veterans to explain in detail their experiences operating patrols and supply convoys, setting up checkpoints, conducting raids and arresting suspects. From these collected snapshots a common theme emerged. Fighting in densely populated urban areas has led to the indiscriminate use of force and the deaths at the hands of occupation troops of thousands of innocents.

Many of these veterans returned home deeply disturbed by the disparity between the reality of the war and the way it is portrayed by the US government and American media. The war the vets described is a dark and even depraved enterprise, one that bears a powerful resemblance to other misguided and brutal colonial wars and occupations, from the French occupation of Algeria to the American war in Vietnam and the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory.

"I'll tell you the point where I really turned," said Spc. Michael Harmon, 24, a medic from Brooklyn. He served a thirteen-month tour beginning in April 2003 with the 167th Armor Regiment, Fourth Infantry Division, in Al-Rashidiya, a small town near Baghdad. "I go out to the scene and [there was] this little, you know, pudgy little 2-year-old child with the cute little pudgy legs, and I look and she has a bullet through her leg.... An IED [improvised explosive device] went off, the gun-happy soldiers just started shooting anywhere and the baby got hit. And this baby looked at me, wasn't crying, wasn't anything, it just looked at me like--I know she couldn't speak. It might sound crazy, but she was like asking me why. You know, Why do I have a bullet in my leg?... I was just like, This is--this is it. This is ridiculous."

Much of the resentment toward Iraqis described to The Nation by veterans was confirmed in a report released May 4 by the Pentagon. According to the survey, conducted by the Office of the Surgeon General of the US Army Medical Command, just 47 percent of soldiers and 38 percent of marines agreed that civilians should be treated with dignity and respect. Only 55 percent of soldiers and 40 percent of marines said they would report a unit member who had killed or injured "an innocent noncombatant."

These attitudes reflect the limited contact occupation troops said they had with Iraqis. They rarely saw their enemy. They lived bottled up in heavily fortified compounds that often came under mortar attack. They only ventured outside their compounds ready for combat. The mounting frustration of fighting an elusive enemy and the devastating effect of roadside bombs, with their steady toll of American dead and wounded, led many troops to declare an open war on all Iraqis.

Veterans described reckless firing once they left their compounds. Some shot holes into cans of gasoline being sold along the roadside and then tossed grenades into the pools of gas to set them ablaze. Others opened fire on children. These shootings often enraged Iraqi witnesses.

In June 2003 Staff Sgt. Camilo Mejía's unit was pressed by a furious crowd in Ramadi. Sergeant Mejía, 31, a National Guardsman from Miami, served for six months beginning in April 2003 with the 1-124 Infantry Battalion, Fifty-Third Infantry Brigade. His squad opened fire on an Iraqi youth holding a grenade, riddling his body with bullets. Sergeant Mejía checked his clip afterward and calculated that he had personally fired eleven rounds into the young man.

"The frustration that resulted from our inability to get back at those who were attacking us led to tactics that seemed designed simply to punish the local population that was supporting them," Sergeant Mejía said.

We heard a few reports, in one case corroborated by photographs, that some soldiers had so lost their moral compass that they'd mocked or desecrated Iraqi corpses. One photo, among dozens turned over to The Nation during the investigation, shows an American soldier acting as if he is about to eat the spilled brains of a dead Iraqi man with his brown plastic Army-issue spoon.

"Take a picture of me and this motherfucker," a soldier who had been in Sergeant Mejía's squad said as he put his arm around the corpse. Sergeant Mejía recalls that the shroud covering the body fell away, revealing that the young man was wearing only his pants. There was a bullet hole in his chest.

"Damn, they really fucked you up, didn't they?" the soldier laughed.

The scene, Sergeant Mejía said, was witnessed by the dead man's brothers and cousins.

In the sections that follow, snipers, medics, military police, artillerymen, officers and others recount their experiences serving in places as diverse as Mosul in the north, Samarra in the Sunni Triangle, Nasiriya in the south and Baghdad in the center, during 2003, 2004 and 2005. Their stories capture the impact of their units on Iraqi civilians.

Raids

"So we get started on this day, this one in particular," recalled Spc. Philip Chrystal, 23, of Reno, who said he raided between twenty and thirty Iraqi homes during an eleven-month tour in Kirkuk and Hawija that ended in October 2005, serving with the Third Battalion, 116th Cavalry Brigade. "It starts with the psy-ops vehicles out there, you know, with the big speakers playing a message in Arabic or Farsi or Kurdish or whatever they happen to be, saying, basically, saying, Put your weapons, if you have them, next to the front door in your house. Please come outside, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And we had Apaches flying over for security, if they're needed, and it's also a good show of force. And we're running around, and they--we'd done a few houses by this point, and I was with my platoon leader, my squad leader and maybe a couple other people.

"And we were approaching this one house," he said. "In this farming area, they're, like, built up into little courtyards. So they have, like, the main house, common area. They have, like, a kitchen and then they have a storage shed-type deal. And we're approaching, and they had a family dog. And it was barking ferociously, 'cause it's doing its job. And my squad leader, just out of nowhere, just shoots it. And he didn't--motherfucker--he shot it and it went in the jaw and exited out. So I see this dog--I'm a huge animal lover; I love animals--and this dog has, like, these eyes on it and he's running around spraying blood all over the place. And like, you know, What the hell is going on? The family is sitting right there, with three little children and a mom and a dad, horrified. And I'm at a loss for words. And so, I yell at him. I'm, like, What the fuck are you doing? And so the dog's yelping. It's crying out without a jaw. And I'm looking at the family, and they're just, you know, dead scared. And so I told them, I was like, Fucking shoot it, you know? At least kill it, because that can't be fixed....

"And--I actually get tears from just saying this right now, but--and I had tears then, too--and I'm looking at the kids and they are so scared. So I got the interpreter over with me and, you know, I get my wallet out and I gave them twenty bucks, because that's what I had. And, you know, I had him give it to them and told them that I'm so sorry that asshole did that.

"Was a report ever filed about it?" he asked. "Was anything ever done? Any punishment ever dished out? No, absolutely not."

Specialist Chrystal said such incidents were "very common."

According to interviews with twenty-four veterans who participated in such raids, they are a relentless reality for Iraqis under occupation. The American forces, stymied by poor intelligence, invade neighborhoods where insurgents operate, bursting into homes in the hope of surprising fighters or finding weapons. But such catches, they said, are rare. Far more common were stories in which soldiers assaulted a home, destroyed property in their futile search and left terrorized civilians struggling to repair the damage and begin the long torment of trying to find family members who were hauled away as suspects.

Raids normally took place between midnight and 5 am, according to Sgt. John Bruhns, 29, of Philadelphia, who estimates that he took part in raids of nearly 1,000 Iraqi homes. He served in Baghdad and Abu Ghraib, a city infamous for its prison, located twenty miles west of the capital, with the Third Brigade, First Armor Division, First Battalion, for one year beginning in April 2003. His descriptions of raid procedures closely echoed those of eight other veterans who served in locations as diverse as Kirkuk, Samarra, Baghdad, Mosul and Tikrit.

"You want to catch them off guard," Sergeant Bruhns explained. "You want to catch them in their sleep." About ten troops were involved in each raid, he said, with five stationed outside and the rest searching the home.

Once they were in front of the home, troops, some wearing Kevlar helmets and flak vests with grenade launchers mounted on their weapons, kicked the door in, according to Sergeant Bruhns, who dispassionately described the procedure:

"You run in. And if there's lights, you turn them on--if the lights are working. If not, you've got flashlights.... You leave one rifle team outside while one rifle team goes inside. Each rifle team leader has a headset on with an earpiece and a microphone where he can communicate with the other rifle team leader that's outside.

"You go up the stairs. You grab the man of the house. You rip him out of bed in front of his wife. You put him up against the wall. You have junior-level troops, PFCs [privates first class], specialists will run into the other rooms and grab the family, and you'll group them all together. Then you go into a room and you tear the room to shreds and you make sure there's no weapons or anything that they can use to attack us.

"You get the interpreter and you get the man of the home, and you have him at gunpoint, and you'll ask the interpreter to ask him: 'Do you have any weapons? Do you have any anti-US propaganda, anything at all--anything--anything in here that would lead us to believe that you are somehow involved in insurgent activity or anti-coalition forces activity?'

"Normally they'll say no, because that's normally the truth," Sergeant Bruhns said. "So what you'll do is you'll take his sofa cushions and you'll dump them. If he has a couch, you'll turn the couch upside down. You'll go into the fridge, if he has a fridge, and you'll throw everything on the floor, and you'll take his drawers and you'll dump them.... You'll open up his closet and you'll throw all the clothes on the floor and basically leave his house looking like a hurricane just hit it.

"And if you find something, then you'll detain him. If not, you'll say, 'Sorry to disturb you. Have a nice evening.' So you've just humiliated this man in front of his entire family and terrorized his entire family and you've destroyed his home. And then you go right next door and you do the same thing in a hundred homes."

Each raid, or "cordon and search" operation, as they are sometimes called, involved five to twenty homes, he said. Following a spate of attacks on soldiers in a particular area, commanders would normally order infantrymen on raids to look for weapons caches, ammunition or materials for making IEDs. Each Iraqi family was allowed to keep one AK-47 at home, but according to Bruhns, those found with extra weapons were arrested and detained and the operation classified a "success," even if it was clear that no one in the home was an insurgent.

Before a raid, according to descriptions by several veterans, soldiers typically "quarantined" the area by barring anyone from coming in or leaving. In pre-raid briefings, Sergeant Bruhns said, military commanders often told their troops the neighborhood they were ordered to raid was "a hostile area with a high level of insurgency" and that it had been taken over by former Baathists or Al Qaeda terrorists.

"So you have all these troops, and they're all wound up," said Sergeant Bruhns. "And a lot of these troops think once they kick down the door there's going to be people on the inside waiting for them with weapons to start shooting at them."

Sgt Dustin Flatt, 33, of Denver, estimates he raided "thousands" of homes in Tikrit, Samarra and Mosul. He served with the Eighteenth Infantry Brigade, First Infantry Division, for one year beginning in February 2004. "We scared the living Jesus out of them every time we went through every house," he said.

Spc. Ali Aoun, 23, a National Guardsman from New York City, said he conducted perimeter security in nearly 100 raids while serving in Sadr City with the Eighty-Ninth Military Police Brigade for eleven months starting in April 2004. When soldiers raided a home, he said, they first cordoned it off with Humvees. Soldiers guarded the entrance to make sure no one escaped. If an entire town was being raided, in large-scale operations, it too was cordoned off, said Spc. Garett Reppenhagen, 32, of Manitou Springs, Colorado, a cavalry scout and sniper with the 263rd Armor Battalion, First Infantry Division, who was deployed to Baquba for a year in February 2004.

Staff Sgt. Timothy John Westphal, 31, of Denver, recalled one summer night in 2004, the temperature an oppressive 110 degrees, when he and forty-four other US soldiers raided a sprawling farm on the outskirts of Tikrit. Sergeant Westphal, who served there for a yearlong tour with the Eighteenth Infantry Brigade, First Infantry Division, beginning in February 2004, said he was told some men on the farm were insurgents. As a mechanized infantry squad leader, Sergeant Westphal led the mission to secure the main house, while fifteen men swept the property. Sergeant Westphal and his men hopped the wall surrounding the house, fully expecting to come face to face with armed insurgents.

"We had our flashlights and...I told my guys, 'On the count of three, just hit them with your lights and let's see what we've got here. Wake 'em up!'"

Sergeant Westphal's flashlight was mounted on his M-4 carbine rifle, a smaller version of the M-16, so in pointing his light at the clump of sleepers on the floor he was also pointing his weapon at them. Sergeant Westphal first turned his light on a man who appeared to be in his mid-60s.

"The man screamed this gut-wrenching, blood-curdling, just horrified scream," Sergeant Westphal recalled. "I've never heard anything like that. I mean, the guy was absolutely terrified. I can imagine what he was thinking, having lived under Saddam."

The farm's inhabitants were not insurgents but a family sleeping outside for relief from the stifling heat, and the man Sergeant Westphal had frightened awake was the patriarch.

"Sure enough, as we started to peel back the layers of all these people sleeping, I mean, it was him, maybe two guys...either his sons or nephews or whatever, and the rest were all women and children," Sergeant Westphal said. "We didn't find anything.

"I can tell you hundreds of stories about things like that and they would all pretty much be like the one I just told you. Just a different family, a different time, a different circumstance."

For Sergeant Westphal, that night was a turning point. "I just remember thinking to myself, I just brought terror to someone else under the American flag, and that's just not what I joined the Army to do," he said.

Intelligence

Fifteen soldiers we spoke with told us the information that spurred these raids was typically gathered through human intelligence--and that it was usually incorrect. Eight said it was common for Iraqis to use American troops to settle family disputes, tribal rivalries or personal vendettas. Sgt. Jesus Bocanegra, 25, of Weslaco, Texas, was a scout in Tikrit with the Fourth Infantry Division during a yearlong tour that ended in March 2004. In late 2003, Sergeant Bocanegra raided a middle-aged man's home in Tikrit because his son had told the Army his father was an insurgent. After thoroughly searching the man's house, soldiers found nothing and later discovered that the son simply wanted money his father had buried at the farm.

After persistently acting on such false leads, Sergeant Bocanegra, who raided Iraqi homes in more than fifty operations, said soldiers began to anticipate the innocence of those they raided. "People would make jokes about it, even before we'd go into a raid, like, Oh fucking we're gonna get the wrong house," he said. "'Cause it would always happen. We always got the wrong house." Specialist Chrystal said that he and his platoon leader shared a joke of their own: Every time he raided a house, he would radio in and say, "This is, you know, Thirty-One Lima. Yeah, I found the weapons of mass destruction in here."

Sergeant Bruhns said he questioned the authenticity of the intelligence he received because Iraqi informants were paid by the US military for tips. On one occasion, an Iraqi tipped off Sergeant Bruhns's unit that a small Syrian resistance organization, responsible for killing a number of US troops, was holed up in a house. "They're waiting for us to show up and there will be a lot of shooting," Sergeant Bruhns recalled being told.

As the Alpha Company team leader, Sergeant Bruhns was supposed to be the first person in the door. Skeptical, he refused. "So I said, 'If you're so confident that there are a bunch of Syrian terrorists, insurgents...in there, why in the world are you going to send me and three guys in the front door, because chances are I'm not going to be able to squeeze the trigger before I get shot.'" Sergeant Bruhns facetiously suggested they pull an M-2 Bradley Fighting Vehicle up to the house and shoot a missile through the front window to exterminate the enemy fighters his commanders claimed were inside. They instead diminished the aggressiveness of the raid. As Sergeant Bruhns ran security out front, his fellow soldiers smashed the windows and kicked down the doors to find "a few little kids, a woman and an old man."

In late summer 2005, in a village on the outskirts of Kirkuk, Specialist Chrystal searched a compound with two Iraqi police officers. A friendly man in his mid-30s escorted Specialist Chrystal and others in his unit around the property, where the man lived with his parents, wife and children, making jokes to lighten the mood. As they finished searching--they found nothing--a lieutenant from his company approached Specialist Chrystal: "What the hell were you doing?" he asked. "Well, we just searched the house and it's clear," Specialist Chrystal said. The lieutenant told Specialist Chrystal that his friendly guide was "one of the targets" of the raid. "Apparently he'd been dimed out by somebody as being an insurgent," Specialist Chrystal said. "For that mission, they'd only handed out the target sheets to officers, and officers aren't there with the rest of the troops." Specialist Chrystal said he felt "humiliated" because his assessment that the man posed no threat was deemed irrelevant and the man was arrested. Shortly afterward, he posted himself in a fighting vehicle for the rest of the mission.

Sgt. Larry Cannon, 27, of Salt Lake City, a Bradley gunner with the Eighteenth Infantry Brigade, First Infantry Division, served a yearlong tour in several cities in Iraq, including Tikrit, Samarra and Mosul, beginning in February 2004. He estimates that he searched more than a hundred homes in Tikrit and found the raids fruitless and maddening. "We would go on one raid of a house and that guy would say, 'No, it's not me, but I know where that guy is.' And...he'd take us to the next house where this target was supposedly at, and then that guy's like, 'No, it's not me. I know where he is, though.' And we'd drive around all night and go from raid to raid to raid."

"I can't really fault military intelligence," said Specialist Reppenhagen, who said he raided thirty homes in and around Baquba. "It was always a guessing game. We're in a country where we don't speak the language. We're light on interpreters. It's just impossible to really get anything. All you're going off is a pattern of what's happened before and hoping that the pattern doesn't change."

Sgt. Geoffrey Millard, 26, of Buffalo, New York, served in Tikrit with the Rear Operations Center, Forty-Second Infantry Division, for one year beginning in October 2004. He said combat troops had neither the training nor the resources to investigate tips before acting on them. "We're not police," he said. "We don't go around like detectives and ask questions. We kick down doors, we go in, we grab people."

First Lieut. Brady Van Engelen, 26, of Washington, DC, said the Army depended on less than reliable sources because options were limited. He served as a survey platoon leader with the First Armored Division in Baghdad's volatile Adhamiya district for eight months beginning in September 2003. "That's really about the only thing we had," he said. "A lot of it was just going off a whim, a hope that it worked out," he said. "Maybe one in ten worked out."

Sergeant Bruhns said he uncovered illegal material about 10 percent of the time, an estimate echoed by other veterans. "We did find small materials for IEDs, like maybe a small piece of the wire, the detonating cord," said Sergeant Cannon. "We never found real bombs in the houses." In the thousand or so raids he conducted during his time in Iraq, Sergeant Westphal said, he came into contact with only four "hard-core insurgents."

Click here for part two...

The Iraq war is lost

2007-07-21T10:00:00.001+01:00

Bush and his band of backers won't admit that -- but their strategy is already defined by the specter of American defeat.

By Peter Galbraith

Jul. 18, 2007 | On May 30, the Coalition held a ceremony in the Kurdistan town of Erbil to mark its handover of security in Iraq's three Kurdish provinces from the Coalition to the Iraqi government. Gen. Benjamin Mixon, the U.S. commander for northern Iraq, praised the Iraqi government for overseeing all aspects of the handover. And he drew attention to the "benchmark" now achieved: With the handover, he said, Iraqis now controlled security in seven of Iraq's 18 provinces.

In fact, nothing was handed over. The only Coalition force in Kurdistan is the peshmerga, a disciplined army that fought alongside the Americans in the 2003 campaign to oust Saddam Hussein; it is loyal to the Kurdistan government in Erbil. The peshmerga provided security in the three Kurdish provinces before the handover and after. The Iraqi army has not been on Kurdistan's territory since 1996 and is effectively prohibited from being there. Nor did the Iraqi flag fly at the ceremony. It is banned in Kurdistan.

Although the Erbil handover was a sham that Prince Potemkin might have admired, it was not easily arranged. The Bush administration had wanted the handover to take place before the U.S. congressional elections in November. But it also wanted an Iraqi flag flown at the ceremony and some acknowledgment that Iraq, not Kurdistan, was in charge. The Kurds were prepared to include a reference to Iraq in the ceremony, but they were adamant that there be no Iraqi flags. It took months to work out a compromise ceremony with no flags at all. Thus the ceremony was followed by a military parade without a single flag -- an event so unusual that one observer thought it might merit mention in "Ripley's Believe it or Not."

Mowaffak al-Rubaie, the Iraqi national security advisor, attended the ceremony alongside Kurdistan's prime minister, Nechirvan Barzani, but the Iraqi government had no part in supervising the nonexistent handover. While Mixon, a highly regarded strategist with excellent ties to the Kurds, had no choice but to make the remarks he did, al-Rubaie acknowledged Kurdistan's distinct nature and the right of the Kurds -- approximately 6 million people, or some 20 percent of Iraq's population -- to chart their own course.

On July 12, the White House released a congressionally mandated report on progress in Iraq. As with the sham handover, the report reflected the administration's desperate search for indicators of progress since it began its "surge" by sending five additional combat brigades to the country in February 2007. In recent months the Bush administration and its advocates have been promoting the success of the surge in reducing sectarian killing in Baghdad and achieving a turnaround in Anbar province, where former Sunni insurgents are signing up with local militias to fight al-Qaida.

Although reliable statistics about Iraq are notoriously hard to come by, it does appear that the overall civilian death toll in Baghdad has declined from its pre-surge peak, although it is still at the extremely high levels of the summer of 2006. Moreover, the number of unidentified bodies -- usually the victims of Shiite death squads -- has risen in May and June to pre-surge levels. How much of the modest decline in civilian deaths in Baghdad is attributable to the surge is not knowable, nor is there any way to know if it will last.

The developments in Anbar are more significant. Tribesmen who had been attacking U.S. troops in support of the insurgency are now taking U.S. weapons to fight al-Qaida and other Sunni extremists. Unfortunately, the Sunni fundamentalists are not the only enemy of these new U.S.-sponsored militias. The Sunni tribes also regard Iraq's Shiite-led government as an enemy, and the United States appears now to be in the business of arming both the Sunni and Shiite factions in what has long since become a civil war.

Against the backdrop of modest progress, much has not changed, or has gotten worse. The Baghdad Green Zone is subject to increasingly accurate mortar attacks and is deemed at greater risk of penetration by suicide bombers. Muqtada al-Sadr, the radical Shiite cleric whose Mahdi Army was a major target of Bush's surge strategy, remains one of Iraq's most powerful political figures. The military activity against his forces seems only to have enhanced his standing with the public.

Even if the surge has had some modest military success, it has failed to accomplish its political objectives. The idea behind Bush's new strategy was to increase temporarily the number of U.S. troops in Baghdad and Anbar. The aim was to provide breathing space so that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government might enact a program of national reconciliation that would accommodate enough Sunnis to isolate the insurgents. Meanwhile, Iraqi forces, improved by their close relations with U.S. troops and additional training, would take over security.

The core of the national reconciliation program is a series of legislative and political steps that the government should take to address the concerns of Iraq's Sunnis, who feel left out of the country they dominated until 2003. These steps include enacting an oil-revenue-sharing law (to ensure that the oil-poor Sunni regions get their share of revenue); holding provincial elections (the Sunnis boycotted the January 2005 provincial and parliamentary elections, leaving them underrepresented even in Sunni-majority provinces); revising Iraq's constitution (the Sunnis want a more centralized state); revising the ban on public-sector employment of former Baathists (Sunnis dominated the upper ranks of the Baath Party and of the Saddam-era public service); and providing for a fair distribution of reconstruction funds. Both the administration and Congress have placed great emphasis on the obligation of the Iraqi government to achieve these so-called benchmarks. Congress has, by law, linked U.S. strategy on Iraq and financial support of the Iraqi government to progress on these benchmarks and other steps.

Iraq's government has not met one of the benchmarks, and, with the exception of the revenue-sharing law, most are unlikely to happen. But even if they were all enacted, it would not help. Provincial elections will make Iraq less governable, while the process of constitutional revision could break the country apart.

Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Baghdad, likes to talk of the disparity between the Iraqi clock and the U.S. clock, suggesting that Iraqis believe they have more time to reach agreement than the American political calendar will tolerate. Crocker is the State Department's foremost Iraq hand but, more generally, American impatience often reflects ignorance. For example, both Congress and the administration have expressed frustration that the ban on public service by ex-Baathists has not been relaxed, since this appears to be a straightforward change, easily accomplished and already promised by Iraq's leaders.

Abdul Aziz al-Hakim leads the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC, previously known as SCIRI), which is Iraq's leading Shiite party and a critical component of Prime Minister al-Maliki's coalition. He is the sole survivor of eight brothers. During Saddam's rule, Baathists executed six of them. On Aug. 29, 2003, a suicide bomber, possibly linked to the Baathists, blew up his last surviving brother, and predecessor as SCIRI leader, at the shrine of Ali in Najaf. Muqtada al-Sadr, Hakim's main rival, comes from Iraq's other prominent Shiite religious family. Saddam's Baath regime murdered his father and two brothers in 1999. Earlier, in April 1980, the regime had arrested Muqtada's father-in-law and the father-in-law's sister -- the Grand Ayatollah Baqir al-Sadr and Bint al-Huda. While the ayatollah watched, the Baath security men raped and killed his sister. They then set fire to the ayatollah's beard before driving nails into his head. De-Baathification is an intensely personal issue for Iraq's two most powerful Shiite political leaders, as it is to hundreds of thousands of their followers who suffered similar atrocities.

Iraq's Shiite leaders are reluctant to spend reconstruction money in Sunni areas because they believe, not without reason, that such funds support the Sunni side in the civil war. In a speech in late June on the Senate floor, Indiana Republican Richard Lugar reported that Iraq's Shiite-led government has gone "out of its way to bottle up money budgeted for Sunni provinces" and that the "strident intervention" of the U.S. Embassy was required in order to get food rations delivered to Sunni towns.

Iraq's mainstream Shiite leaders resist holding new provincial elections because they know what such elections are likely to bring. Because the Sunnis boycotted the January 2005 elections, they do not control the northern governorate, or province, of Nineveh, in which there is a Sunni majority, and they are not represented in governorates with mixed populations, such as Diyala province, northeast of Baghdad. New elections would, it is argued, give Sunnis a greater voice in the places where they live, and the Shiites say they do not have a problem with this, although just how they would treat the militant Sunnis who would be elected is far from clear. The Kurds reluctantly accept new elections in the Sunni governorates even though it means they will lose control of Nineveh and have a much-reduced presence in Diyala.

The American benchmark of holding provincial elections would also require new elections in southern Iraq and Baghdad. If they were held, al-Hakim's Shiite party, the SIIC, which now controls seven of the nine southern governorates, would certainly lose ground to Muqtada al-Sadr. His main base is in Baghdad, and new elections would almost certainly leave his followers in control of Baghdad Governorate, with one-quarter of Iraq's population. Iraq's decentralized constitution gives the governorates enormous powers and significant shares of the national budget if they choose to exercise these powers. New local elections are not required until 2009, and it is hard to see how early elections strengthening al-Sadr, who is hostile to the United States and appears to have close ties to Iran, serve American interests. But this is precisely what the Bush administration is pushing for and Congress seems to want.

Constitutional revision is the most significant benchmark, and it could break Iraq apart. Iraq's constitution, approved by 79 percent of voters in an October 2005 referendum, is the product of a Kurdish–Shiite deal: The Kurds supported the establishment of a Shiite-led government in exchange for Shiite support for a confederal arrangement in which Kurdistan and other regions like the one SIIC hopes to set up in the south, are virtually independent.

Since there is no common ground among the Shiites, Kurds and Sunnis on any significant constitutional changes in favor of the Sunnis, such changes must come at the expense of the Kurds or Shiites. Since voters in these communities have a veto on any constitutional amendments, they are certain to fail in a referendum. A revised constitution has no chance of being enacted, but its failure will exacerbate tensions among Iraq's three groups.

Constitutionally, Iraq's central government has almost no power, and the Bush administration is partially to blame for this. When the constitution was being drafted in 2005, the United Nations came up with a series of proposals that would have made for a more workable sharing of power between regions and the central government. The U.S. Embassy stopped the U.N. from presenting these proposals because it hoped for a final document as centralized as (and textually close to) the interim constitution written by the Americans.

When the constitution finally emerged in its present form, then-U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad brokered a deal with several Sunni leaders whereby, in exchange for Sunni support for ratification, there would be a fast-track process to revise the constitution in the months following ratification to meet Sunni concerns. Like the Bush administration, the Sunnis want a more centralized state. While the United States insists that constitutional revision is a moral obligation, the Sunnis actually never lived up to their end of the bargain. Almost unanimously, they voted against ratification of the current constitution.

With input from the United Nations (belatedly brought back into the process last year), the Iraqi Parliament's mainly Arab Constitutional Review Committee (CRC) is considering amendments that would strip Kurdistan of many of its powers, including its right to cancel federal laws, to decide on taxes applicable in its own territory, and to control its own oil and water. The Sunni Arabs would also like Iraq declared an Arab state, a measure the non-Arab Kurds consider racist and exclusionary.

Thanks to Khalilzad's expedited procedures, constitutional revision may be the final wedge between Kurdistan and Arab Iraq. If approved by the CRC, the constitutional amendments will be subject to a vote in the Parliament as a single package and then to a nationwide referendum. Kurdistan's voters are certain to reject the proposed package (or any package affecting Kurdistan's powers), and this could push tense Sunni-Kurdish relations into open conflict. Kurdish nongovernmental organizations, who ran a 2005 independence referendum, are poised to make a "No" campaign on constitutional revision a "No to Iraq" vote. In its July 12 report to Congress, the White House graded the CRC's work as "satisfactory," an evaluation that was either grossly dishonest, or, more likely, out of touch with Iraqi reality.

For the most part, Iraq's leaders are not personally stubborn or uncooperative. They find it impossible to reach agreement on the benchmarks because their constituents don't agree on any common vision for Iraq. The Shiites voted twice in 2005 for parties that seek to define Iraq as a Shiite state. By their boycotts and votes the Sunni Arabs have almost unanimously rejected the Shiite vision of Iraq's future, including the new constitution. The Kurds' envisage an Iraq that does not include them. In the 2005 parliamentary elections, 99 percent of them voted for Kurdish nationalist parties, and in the January 2005 referendum, 98 percent voted for an independent Kurdistan.

But even if Iraq's politicians could agree to the benchmarks, this wouldn't end the insurgency or the civil war. Sunni insurgents object to Iraq's being run by Shiite religious parties, which they see as installed by the Americans, loyal to Iran, and wanting to define Iraq in a way that excludes the Sunnis. Sunni fundamentalists consider the Shiites apostates who deserve death, not power. The Shiites believe that their democratic majority and their historical suffering under the Baathist dictatorship entitle them to rule. They are not inclined to compromise with Sunnis, whom they see as their long-standing oppressors, especially when they believe most Iraqi Sunnis are sympathetic to the suicide bombers that have killed thousands of ordinary Shiites. The differences are fundamental and cannot be papered over by sharing oil revenues, reemploying ex-Baathists, or revising the constitution. The war is not about those things.

The Iraq war is lost. Of course, neither the president nor the war's intellectual architects are prepared to admit this. Nonetheless, the specter of defeat shapes their thinking in telling ways.

The case for the war is no longer defined by the benefits of winning -- a stable Iraq, democracy on the march in the Middle East, the collapse of the evil Iranian and Syrian regimes -- but by the consequences of defeat. As President Bush put it, "The consequences of failure in Iraq would be death and destruction in the Middle East and here in America."

Tellingly, the Iraq war's intellectual boosters, while insisting the surge is working, are moving to assign the blame for defeat. And they have already picked their target: the American people. In the Weekly Standard, Tom Donnelly, a fellow at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute, wrote, "Those who believe the war is already lost -- call it the Clinton-Lugar axis -- are mounting a surge of their own. Ground won in Iraq becomes ground lost at home." Lugar provoked Donnelly's anger by noting that the American people had lost confidence in Bush's Iraq strategy as demonstrated by the Democratic takeover of both houses of Congress. (This "blame the American people" approach has, through repetition, almost become the accepted explanation for the outcome in Vietnam, attributing defeat to a loss of public support and not to 15 years of military failure.)

Indeed, Vietnam is the image many Americans have of defeat in Iraq. Al-Qaida would overrun the Green Zone and the last Americans would evacuate from the rooftop of the still-unfinished largest embassy in the world. Bush feeds on this imagery. In his May 5, 2007, radio address to the nation, he explained:

If radicals and terrorists emerge from this battle with control of Iraq, they would have control of a nation with massive oil reserves, which they could use to fund their dangerous ambitions and spread their influence. The al-Qaida terrorists who behead captives or order suicide bombings would not be satisfied to see America defeated and gone from Iraq. They would be emboldened by their victory, protected by their new sanctuary, eager to impose their hateful vision on surrounding countries, and eager to harm Americans.

But there will be no Saigon moment in Iraq. Iraq's Shiite-led government is in no danger of losing the civil war to al-Qaida, or a more inclusive Sunni front. Iraq's Shiites are three times as numerous as Iraq's Sunni Arabs; they dominate Iraq's military and police and have a powerful ally in neighboring Iran. The Arab states that might support the Sunnis are small, far away (vast deserts separate the inhabited parts of Jordan and Saudi Arabia from the main Iraqi population centers), and can only provide money, something the insurgency has in great amounts already.

Iraq after an American defeat will look very much like Iraq today -- a land divided along ethnic lines into Arab and Kurdish states with a civil war being fought within its Arab part. Defeat is defined by America's failure to accomplish its objective of a self-sustaining, democratic and unified Iraq. And that failure has already taken place, along with the increase of Iranian power in the region.

Iraq's Kurdish leaders and Iraq's dwindling band of secular Arab democrats fear that a complete U.S. withdrawal will leave all of Iraq under Iranian influence. Sen. Hillary Clinton, Foreign Relations Committee chairman Joe Biden, and former U.N. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke are among the prominent Democrats who have called for the United States to protect Kurdistan militarily should there be a withdrawal from Iraq. The argument for so doing is straightforward: It secures the one part of Iraq that has emerged as stable, democratic, and pro-Western; it discharges a moral debt to our Kurdish allies; it deters both Turkish intervention and a potentially destabilizing Turkish-Kurdish war; it provides U.S. forces a secure base that can be used to strike at al-Qaida in adjacent Sunni territories; and it limits Iran's gains.

In laying out his dark vision of an American failure, Bush never discusses Iran's domination of Iraq even though this is a far more likely consequence of American defeat than an al-Qaida victory. Bush's reticence is understandable, since it was his miscalculations and incompetent management of the postwar occupation that gave Iran its opportunity. While opposing talks with Iran, the neoconservatives also prefer not to discuss its current powerful influence over Iraq's central government and southern region, persisting in the fantasy -- notwithstanding all evidence to the contrary -- that Iran is deeply unpopular among Iraq's Shiites and clerics. (At the same time, U.S. officials accuse Iran of supplying Iraqi Shiite militias with particularly lethal roadside bombs.)

On June 25, without giving the press or White House any advance notice, Richard Lugar, the most respected Republican voice on foreign affairs in Congress, spoke in the Senate about "connecting our Iraq strategy to our vital interests." On the face of it, the idea is as sensible and conservative as the senator delivering the speech. He observed that political fragmentation in Iraq, the stress suffered by the U.S. military, and growing antiwar sentiment at home "make it almost impossible for the United States to engineer a stable, multi-sectarian government in Iraq in a reasonable time frame." Lugar noted that agreements reached with Iraqi leaders are most often not implemented, partly, as Lugar observed, because the leaders do not control their followers but also because Iraqi leaders have also discovered that telling the Bush administration what it wants to hear is a fully acceptable substitute for action.

Lugar is blunt in his description of the situation in Iraq:

Few Iraqis have demonstrated that they want to be Iraqis ... In this context, the possibility that the United States can set meaningful benchmarks that would provide an indication of impending success or failure is remote. Perhaps some benchmarks or agreements will be initially achieved, but most can be undermined or reversed by a contrary edict of the Iraqi government, a decision by a faction to ignore agreements, or the next terrorist attack or wave of sectarian killings. American manpower cannot keep the lid on indefinitely. The anticipation that our training operations could produce an effective Iraqi army loyal to a cohesive central government is still just a hopeful plan for the future.

Lugar concluded his speech by urging that we "refocus our policy in Iraq on realistic assessments of what can be achieved, and on a sober review of our vital interests in the Middle East." After four years of a war driven more by wishful thinking than strategy, this is hardly a radical idea, but it has produced a barrage of covert criticism of Lugar from the administration and overt attack from the neoconservatives.

Lugar's focus on the achievable runs against main currents of opinion in a nation increasingly polarized between the growing number who want to withdraw from Iraq and the die-hard defenders of a failure. We need to recognize, as Lugar implicitly does, that Iraq no longer exists as a unified country. In the parts where we can accomplish nothing, we should withdraw. But there are still three missions that may be achievable -- disrupting al-Qaida, preserving Kurdistan's democracy and limiting Iran's increasing domination. These can all be served by a modest U.S. presence in Kurdistan. We need an Iraq policy with sufficient nuance to protect American interests. Unfortunately, we probably won't get it.

-- By Peter Galbraith

Olbermann Special Comment on Iraq War Scapegoating

2007-07-21T09:34:00.001+01:00

How to create an Angry American

2007-07-21T09:29:00.001+01:00

Generation Chickenhawk: With The College Republicans

2007-07-21T09:21:00.001+01:00

Thriller Inmates

2007-07-21T09:17:00.001+01:00

Rumi

2007-06-14T22:12:00.001+01:00

n this world everyone is preoccupied with something. Some are preoccupied with love for women, some with possessions, some with making money, some with learning - and each one believes that his well-being and happiness depend on that. And that also is God's Mercy. When a man goes after it in search and does not find it, he turns his back on it. After pausing a while he says: "That joy and mercy must be sought. Maybe I did not look enough. Let me search again". When he seeks again he still does not find it, but he continues until the mercy manifests itself unveiled. Only then does he realise that he was on the wrong track before. God, however, has some servants who see clearly even before the Resurrection. Ali said: "If the veil were lifted I would not be more certain". By this he meant that if the shell was to be taken away and the Apocalypse were to appear, his certitude would not increase. His perception was like a group of people who go into a dark room at night and pray, each facing a different direction. When day breaks they all turn themselves around, all except the one man who had been facing Mecca all night long. Since the others now turn to face his direction, why should he turn around? Those servants of God face Him even during the night: they have turned away from all that is other than Him. For them the Resurrection is immediate and present. In a human being is such a love, a pain, an itch, a desire that, even if he were to possess a hundred thousand worlds, he would not rest or find peace. People work variously at all sorts of callings, crafts, and professions, and they learn astrology and medicine, and so forth, but they are not at peace because what they are seeking cannot be found. The beloved is called dil-aram because the heart finds peace through the beloved. How then can it find peace through anything else? All these other joys and objects of search are like a ladder. The rungs on the ladder are not places to stay but to pass through. The sooner one wakes up and becomes aware, the shorter the long road becomes and the less one's life is wasted on these "ladder rungs". Rumi, Fihi ma Fihi

Doll Face

2007-05-13T00:10:00.001+01:00

Kermit - Hurt

2007-04-02T21:06:00.001+01:00

Kermit - Hurt

2007-04-01T22:05:00.001+01:00

http://www.viralvideochart.com/youtube/sad_kermit__hurt?id=uLQRv0RjBBM

Next target Tehran

2007-01-15T21:31:00.001Z

All the signs are that Bush is planning for a neocon-inspired military assault on Iran Dan Plesch Monday January 15, 2007 Guardian The evidence is building up that President Bush plans to add war on Iran to his triumphs in Iraq and Afghanistan - and there is every sign, to judge by his extraordinary warmongering speech in Plymouth on Friday, that Tony Blair would be keen to join him if he were still in a position to commit British forces to the field. "There's a strong sense in the upper echelons of the White House that Iran is going to surface relatively quickly as a major issue - in the country and the world - in a very acute way," said NBC TV's Tim Russert after meeting the president. This is borne out by the fact that Bush has sent forces to the Gulf that are irrelevant to fighting the Iraqi insurgents. These include Patriot anti-missile missiles, an aircraft carrier, and cruise-missile-firing ships. Many military analysts see these deployments as signals of impending war with Iran. The Patriot missiles are intended to shoot down Iranian missiles. The naval forces, including British ships, train to pre-empt Iranian interference with oil shipments through the straits of Hormuz. Having been given so much advice on what to do in Iraq - most notably by the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group - the president went with the recommendations of the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI). So much for the idea that the Iraq debacle marginalised the neocons. The political context as seen from inside the White House and Downing Street is that we are in a war as serious as the second world war. John Bolton exemplified this outlook when he compared US problems in Iraq with the fighting with Japan after Pearl Harbour. Donald Rumsfeld and the AEI have developed a strategy for regime change in Iran that does not involve a ground invasion. Weapons of mass destruction will provide the rationale for military action, though it won't be limited to attacks on a few weapons factories. It will include limiting Iranian retaliatory capability, using bombers to destroy up to 10,000 targets in the first day of any war, and special forces flying in to destroy anything that's left. In the aftermath, the US will support regime change, hoping to replace the ayatollahs with an Iran of the regions. The US and British governments now support a coalition of groups seeking a federal Iran. This may be another neocon delusion, but that may not be the point. Making Tehran concentrate on internal problems leaves it unable to act elsewhere. Bush has said he will destroy the Syrian and Iranian networks in Iraq. These may include Moqtada al-Sadr's militia, but are also likely to target the Iranian-created Badr brigades, now wearing Iraqi police uniforms. In the south, the withdrawal of British troops to Basra airport looks more like a preparation to avoid a Shia backlash than a handover to the government of Iraq. The US director of national intelligence, John Negroponte, explained that the threat to launch Hizbullah against Israel was the main deterrent to a US attack on Iran. Although politically Hizbullah scored a major victory in holding off the Israeli army last summer, in fact it was badly damaged. The Iranian regime seems prepared for confrontation, perhaps confident Washington is bluffing. Next month Iran celebrates its completion of the nuclear-fuel cycle, in defiance of UN sanctions. Expect Bush and Blair to ask what the world will do to prevent a new Holocaust against the Jews. In his Plymouth speech, Blair told us that we could not pick and choose our wars. He may have been telling us more than we realised. · Dan Plesch is a research associate at the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy, School of Oriental and African Studies dan@danplesch.net

Manga Simpsons

2007-01-13T12:57:00.001Z

see rest of artists work here

Roxik

2007-01-13T12:50:00.001Z

elio drawing

2007-01-13T12:47:00.001Z

Did the U.S. just provoke Iran?

2007-01-13T12:41:00.001Z

Thursday's raid on the Iranian consulate is more evidence that President Bush is ready to escalate the conflict. Salon.com By Juan Cole Jan. 12, 2007 | For months, rumors of war between the United States and Iran have been building. Many fear that President Bush is spoiling for a fight, and they've begun to interpret various developments in the region as the run-up to an attack on Tehran. A report in the British press about a possible Israeli raid on Iran's nuclear facilities quickly became linked with predictions about coordinated action with the United States. Observers on all sides, left, right and other, convinced themselves that the appointment of Adm. William Fallon to oversee military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan meant there would soon be Tomahawk missiles, if not U.S. soldiers, crossing the border into Iran. President Bush's speech on Wednesday night only stoked such speculation. Bush paid lip service to the Iraq Study Group report, but cast aside its advice that he negotiate with Iran and Syria. Instead, he rattled sabers at Iran with some ferocity, accusing it of arming insurgents in Iraq and threatening it with international isolation. He attempted to rally his Sunni Arab allies, such as Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, in this effort. He said, "We will disrupt the attacks on our forces. We'll interrupt the flow of support from Iran and Syria. And we will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq." He announced that he would position another aircraft-carrier battle group in the Persian Gulf and would deploy Patriot antimissile batteries. Then Thursday came a U.S. raid on an Iranian consulate in the Iraqi Kurdish city of Irbil. By the end of the day, rumors of war with Iran had spread to normally cautious corners of the Internet. The Washington Note wondered aloud if Bush had issued an executive order to commence military action against Iran and Syria. Was the raid a deliberate provocation and the preface to war? An eyewitness report briefly posted in Arabic to the Web site of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan reported that two U.S. helicopters hovered near the building for a quarter of an hour early Thursday morning, then dropped off several soldiers. They approached the consulate and used megaphones to demand that those within surrender. They then tossed stun grenades inside before attacking it and detaining five persons within, three of whom were Iranians. The U.S. soldiers confiscated computers and records from the building. According to the Associated Press, U.S. troops also hurried to the Irbil airport in hopes of detaining persons suspected of trying to flee the country. The Iranian mission's application to the Kurdistan Regional Government to be recognized as a consulate is still in process, but it would be sophistry to argue, as the U.S. has done, that its status as a diplomatic mission is questionable. American forces did, indeed, raid an Iranian government installation. Thursday's events, however, are unlikely to be the immediate preface to wider action against Iran, since the operation appears to have been carefully targeted and limited in scope. It was also not the first action taken against Iranian targets inside Iraq. Last month, U.S. forces raided the compound of influential Shiite cleric Abdul Aziz al-Hakim and netted Iranian intelligence officers. But if Bush were to escalate the regional conflict and try to involve Iran, the assault on the Iranian consulate in Irbil suggests the ways in which he would justify his actions. He and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have begun speaking, without presenting any evidence, of Iranian aid to groups killing U.S. troops in Iraq -- hence the reference to "networks" in his Wednesday speech. The difficulties faced by the U.S. military occupation of Iraq itself may well be made the pretext for aggressive action against Iran. In escalating a confrontation with Iran, Bush is placating his friends in Sunni-dominated states. On Thursday, the Saudi-backed London daily Al-Hayat ("Life") reported that Bush called Saudi King Abdullah to discuss security issues with him, and described the measures to be taken in Baghdad. Saudi officials have on several occasions expressed alarm about increasing Iranian influence over Iraq. Sunni Arab allies of the U.S. such as Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt have taken the lead in asking that Bush not withdraw precipitately from Iraq and not acquiesce in growing Iranian influence and power in the region. In return, the Bush administration is pressuring the kingdom to help rein in rebellious Iraqi Sunni Arabs. Speaking in Provo, Utah, on Thursday, Saudi ambassador to Washington Prince Turki al-Faisal seemed to endorse Bush's plan, saying, Saudi Arabia "has always maintained that since America came into Iraq uninvited, it should not leave uninvited ... For America to pack up now and leave would be very detrimental and something that would be unacceptable to our part of the world." The anti-Iranian passages of Bush's speech seem to have pleased Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak as well. Al-Sharq Al-Awsat ("the Middle East"), a pan-Arab London daily, reported that Mubarak warned on Thursday against a deep cleavage in the region, which he said would harm the Middle East and the whole world. He accused the Iranians of seeking support in the region. He called on "all to keep their hands off Iraq," urging that the dangers of a sectarian or ethnic war be recognized. He predicted that the situation in Iraq would deteriorate after the "barbaric" way in which former dictator Saddam Hussein was executed. Iran had welcomed the execution of its old enemy. Reviews from elsewhere were less kind. Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad-Ali Hosseini condemned Bush's new security plan, charging that more U.S. troops would only bring greater instability and tension to the Iraqi capital. He called instead for an immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq as the only realistic means for solving U.S. problems in that country. He dismissed Bush's charges of Iranian and Syrian intervention in Iraqi domestic affairs as merely an attempt to find a scapegoat for its failed policies. He described Bush's decision to bring Patriot antiaircraft missiles to Iraq as a ploy to protect Israel ("the Zionist regime") under the guise of safeguarding Iraq, a Muslim country. With regard to the Iranians detained in Irbil, he demanded their immediate release. He pointed out that Iraqi officials had denied Iranian interference in their domestic affairs. And the Iranians were not the only ones alarmed by the belligerent tone of Bush's address and the immediate follow-up with a violation of international norms in assaulting a consulate. Senators of both parties also lambasted Bush's apparent resort to a tactic similar to that of Richard Nixon in Cambodia, when he widened a failing war. At a hearing on the Hill where Secretary of State Rice was grilled, Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., warned that Bush would need a new and separate congressional authorization to launch an attack on Iran. Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., called Bush's plan "the most dangerous foreign policy blunder in this country since Vietnam." Hagel specifically cautioned against a Cambodia-style diversion in Iran. Within Iraq, even local critics of Iran objected to Bush's plan to put more U.S. troops in Baghdad. The Association of Muslim Scholars, a hard-line Sunni Arab clerical organization, replied that "every U.S. soldier on Iraqi soil is one too many," and beseeched the U.S. Congress to take a stand against the president's plan so as "to prevent the continuing spillage of the blood of innocents," according to German wire service DPA. The consulate raid, meanwhile, seems to have alienated some of America's best friends. Members of the Kurdistan Regional Government maintain that the Americans did not contact them about this operation beforehand, and Kurdish leaders protested the raid. Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, who is of Kurdish heritage, said on the Al-Arabiyah satellite television channel, "What happened ... was very annoying because there has been an Iranian liaison office there for years and it provides services to the citizens." The U.S. definitely failed to coordinate the raid with Kurdish security forces. When American troops went to the airport, the Kurdish peshmerga who were guarding it, alarmed at the approach of unauthorized foreign troops, came very close to firing on them. Whether or not the raid was intended to provoke Iran, it almost turned into yet another Bush gambit with unforeseen, disastrous consequences. The fallout from a big firefight between U.S. soldiers and the Kurdistan paramilitary could have been serious, since Kurds are among the few strongly pro-American populations left in Iraq.

'The jihad now is against the Shias, not the Americans'

2007-01-13T12:38:00.001Z

As 20,000 more US troops head for Iraq, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, the only correspondent reporting regularly from behind the country's sectarian battle lines, reveals how the Sunni insurgency has changed Ghaith Abdul-Ahad Saturday January 13, 2007 Guardian One morning a few weeks ago I sat in a car talking to Rami, a thick-necked former Republican Guard commando who now procures arms for his fellow Sunni insurgents. Rami was explaining how the insurgency had changed since the first heady days after the US invasion. "I used to attack the Americans when that was the jihad. Now there is no jihad. Go around and see in Adhamiya [the notorious Sunni insurgent area] - all the commanders are sitting sipping coffee; it's only the young kids that are fighting now, and they are not fighting Americans any more, they are just killing Shia. There are kids carrying two guns each and they roam the streets looking for their prey. They will kill for anything, for a gun, for a car and all can be dressed up as jihad." Rami was no longer involved in fighting, he said, but made a tidy profit selling weapons and ammunition to men in his north Baghdad neighbourhood. Until the last few months, the insurgency got by with weapons and ammunition looted from former Iraqi army depots. But now that Sunnis were besieged in their neighbourhoods and fighting daily clashes with the better-equipped Shia ministry of interior forces, they needed new sources of weapons and money. He told me that one of his main suppliers had been an interpreter working for the US army in Baghdad. "He had a deal with an American officer. We bought brand new AKs and ammunition from them." He claimed the American officer, whom he had never met but he believed was a captain serving at Baghdad airport, had even helped to divert a truckload of weapons as soon as it was driven over the border from Jordan. These days Rami gets most of his supplies from the new American-equipped Iraqi army. "We buy ammunition from officers in charge of warehouses, a small box of AK-47 bullets is $450 (£230). If the guy sells a thousand boxes he can become rich and leave the country." But as the security situation deteriorates, Rami finds it increasingly difficult to travel across Baghdad. "Now I have to pay a Shia taxi driver to bring the ammo to me. He gets $50 for each shipment." The box of 700 bullets that Rami buys for $450 today would have cost between $150 and $175 a year ago. The price of a Kalashnikov has risen from $300 to $400 in the same period. The inflation in arms prices reflects Iraq's plunge toward civil war but, largely unnoticed by the outside world, the Sunni insurgency has also changed. The conflict into which 20,000 more American troops will be catapulted over the next few weeks is very different to the one their comrades experienced even a year ago. In Baghdad in late October I called a Sunni insurgent I had known for more than a year. He was the mid-level commander of a small cell, active against the Americans in Sunni villages north of Baghdad. Sectarian frontlines had been hardening in the city for months - it took us 45 minutes of haggling to agree on a meeting place which we could both get to safely. We met in a rundown workers' cafe. Kidnapped "Its not a good time to be a Sunni in Baghdad," Abu Omar told me in a low voice. He had been on the Americans' wanted list for three years but I had never seen him so anxious; he had trimmed his beard in the close-cropped Shia style and kept looking towards the door. His brother had been kidnapped a few days before, he told me, and he believed he was next on a Shia militia's list. He had fled his home in the north of the city and was staying with relatives in a Sunni stronghold in west Baghdad. He was more despondent than angry. "We Sunni are to blame," he said. "In my area some ignorant al-Qaida guys have been kidnapping poor Shia farmers, killing them and throwing their bodies in the river. I told them: 'This is not jihad. You can't kill all the Shia! This is wrong! The Shia militias are like rabid dogs - why provoke them?' " Then he said: "I am trying to talk to the Americans. I want to give them assurances that no one will attack them in our area if they stop the Shia militias from coming." This man who had spent the last three years fighting the Americans was now willing to talk to them, not because he wanted to make peace but because he saw the Americans as the lesser of two evils. He was wrestling with the same dilemma as many Sunni insurgent leaders, beginning to doubt the wisdom of their alliance with al-Qaida extremists. Another insurgent commander told me: "At the beginning al-Qaida had the money and the organisation, and we had nothing." But this alliance soon dragged the insurgents and then the whole Sunni community into confrontation with the Shia militias as al-Qaida and other extremists massacred thousands of Shia civilians. Insurgent commanders such as Abu Omar soon found themselves outnumbered and outgunned, fighting organised militias backed by the Shia-dominated security forces. A week after our conversation, Abu Omar invited me to a meeting with insurgent commanders. I was asked to wait in the reception room of a certain Sunni political party. A taxi driver took me to a house in a Sunni neighbourhood that had recently been abandoned by a Shia family. The driver came in with me - he was also a commander. The house had been abandoned in a hurry, cardboard boxes were stacked by the door, some of the furniture was covered with white cloths and a few cheap paintings were piled against a wall. The property had been expropriated by the local Sunni mujahideen and we sat on sofas in a dusty reception room. Abu Omar had been meeting commanders of groups with names like the Fury Brigade, the Battalions of the 1920 Revolution, the Islamic Army and the Mujahideen Army, to discuss options they had for fighting both an insurgency against the Americans and an escalating civil war with the Shia. Abu Omar had proposed encouraging young Sunni men to enlist in the army and the police to redress the sectarian balance. He suggested giving the Americans a ceasefire, in an attempt to stop ministry of interior commandos' raids on his area. Al-Qaida had said no to all these measures; now he wanted other Iraqi insurgent commanders to support him. 'Do politics' A heated discussion was raging. One of the men, with a very thin moustache, a huge belly and a red kuffiya wrapped around his shoulder, held a copy of the Qur'an in one hand and a mobile phone in the other. I asked him what his objectives were. "We are fighting to liberate our country from the occupations of the Americans and their Iranian-Shia stooges." "My brother, I disagree," said Abu Omar. "Look, the Americans are trying to talk to us Sunnis and we need to show them that we can do politics. We need to use the Americans to fight the Shia." He looked nervously at them: suggestions of talking to the Americans could easily have him labelled as traitor. "Where is the jihad and the mujahideen?" he continued. "Baghdad has become a Shia town. Our brothers are being slaughtered every day! Where are these al-Qaida heroes? One neighbourhood after another will be lost if we don't work on a strategy." The taxi driver commander, who sat cross-legged on a sofa, joined in: "If the Americans leave we will be slaughtered." A big-bellied man waved his hands dismissively: "We will massacre the Shia and show them who are the Sunnis! They couldn't have done anything without the Americans' support." When the meeting was over the taxi driver went out to check the road, then the rest followed. "Don't look up, we could be monitored, Shia spies are everywhere," said the big man. The next day the taxi driver was arrested. By December Abu Omar's worst fears were being realised. The Sunnis had become squeezed into a corner fighting two sides at the same time. But by then he had disappeared; his body was never found. Baghdad was now divided: frontlines partitioned neighbourhoods into Shia and Sunni, thousands of families had been forced out of their homes. After each large-scale bomb attack on Shia civilians, scores of mutilated bodies of Sunnis were found in the streets. Patrolling militias and checkpoints meant that men with Sunni names dared not venture far outside their neighbourhoods, while certain Sunni areas came under the complete control of insurgent groups the Shura Council of the Mujahideen and the Islamic Army. The Sunni vigilante self-defence groups took shape as reserve units under the control of these insurgent groups. Like Abu Omar before him, Abu Aisha, a mid-level Sunni commander, had come to understand that the threat from the Shia was perhaps greater than his need to fight the occupying Americans. Abu Aisha fought in Baghdad's western Sunni suburbs, he was a former NCO in the Iraqi army and followed an extreme form of Islam known as Salafism. Jamming Deep lines criss-crossed his narrow forehead and his eyes half closed when he tried to answer a question He seemed to evaluate every answer before he spoke. He claimed involvement in dozens of attacks on US and Iraqi troops, mostly IEDs (bombs) but also ambushes and execution of alleged Shia spies. "We have stopped using remote controls to detonate IEDs," he volunteered halfway through our conversation. "Only wires work now because the Americans are jamming the signals." On his mobile phone he proudly showed me grainy images of dead bodies lying in the street, their hands tied behind their backs . He claimed they were Shia agents and that he had killed them. "There is a new jihad now," he said, echoing Abu Omar's warning. "The jihad now is against the Shia, not the Americans." In Ramadi there was still jihad against the Americans because there were no Shia to fight, but in Baghdad his group only attacked the Americans if they were with Shia army forces or were coming to arrest someone. "We have been deceived by the jihadi Arabs," he admitted, in reference to al-Qaida and foreign fighters. "They had an international agenda and we implemented it. But now all the leadership of the jihad in Iraq are Iraqis." Abu Aisha went on to describe how the Sunnis were reorganising. After Sunni families had been expelled from mixed areas throughout Baghdad, his area in the western suburbs was prepared to defend itself against any militia attack. "Ameriya, Jihad, Ghazaliyah," he listed, "all these areas are becoming part of the new Islamic state of Iraq, each with an emir in charge." Increasingly the Iraqi insurgency is moving away from its cellular structure and becoming organised according to neighbourhood. Local defence committees have intertwined into the insurgent movement. "Each group is in charge of a specific street," Abu Aisha said. "We have defence lines, trenches and booby traps. When the Americans arrive we let them go through, but if they show up with Iraqi troops, then it's a fight." A few days later Rami was telling me about the Sunni insurgents in his north Baghdad area. A network of barricades and small berms blocked the streets around the car in which we sat talking. A convoy of two cars with four men inside whizzed past. "Ah, they are brothers on a mission," Rami said. Like every man of fighting age, Rami was required to take part in his local vigilante group, guarding the neighbourhood at night or conducting raids or mortar attacks on neighbouring Shia areas. But he paid $30 a week to a local commander and was exempted. According to Rami and other commanders, funding for the insurgents comes from three sources. Each family in the street pays a levy, around $8, to the local group. "And when they go through lots of ammunition because of clashes," Rami said, "they pay an extra $5." Then there are donations from rich Sunni businessmen, financiers and wealthier insurgent groups. A third source of funding was "ghaniama", loot which is rapidly becoming the main fuel of the sectarian war 'A business' "Every time they arrest a Shia, we take their car, we sell it and use the money to fund the fighters, and jihad," said Abu Aisha. The mosque sheik or the local commander collects the money and it is distributed among the fighters; some get fixed salaries, others are paid by "operations", and the money left is used for ammunition. "It has become a business, they give you money to kill Shia, we take their houses and sell their cars," said Rami. "The Shia are doing the same. "Last week on the main highway in our area, they killed a Shia army officer. He had a brand new Toyota sedan. The idiots burned the car. I offered them $40,000 for it, they said no. Imagine how many jihads they could have done with 40k." · Names have been changed in this report.

Fashion factor fuels Iran's Aids fears

2007-01-02T20:46:00.001Z

Robert Tait Tuesday January 2, 2007 Guardian Unlimited In a smart boutique displaying an array of miniskirts and skimpy tops, the shopkeeper was too busy attending to his female customers to listen to a sermon on HIV/Aids. "I don't know anything about it at all. Come back after I've finished with my customers," he told the volunteer health education worker. The volunteer, Amir Fattahi, was unsurprised. Observation and experience told him he had interrupted no ordinary business transaction. The four young women, he surmised, were prostitutes striking a deal with the shopkeeper offering sex in exchange for free or cheap clothes, an increasingly common arrangement in Tehran's fashion shops. Health education workers say the practice undermines efforts to combat HIV/Aids in Iran, where the disease is increasingly spread through sexual contact. Along with health officials they believe Iran's strict sexual mores are loosening among its predominantly young population and that pre- and extramarital sex are becoming more common. An official drive has been launched to raise HIV/Aids awareness, which lags far behind that in the west. However, experts say the fight to stop the disease spreading is being hampered by a lack of hard facts and reliable research. While the latest figures show 13,704 registered HIV cases, World Health Organisation and Iranian health ministry estimates put the true figure at between 70,000 and 120,000. Experts believe many infected young people do not seek blood tests because they are too ill informed or are afraid of their parents finding out. In the Qaem mall in north Tehran's affluent Tajrish district, where two floors are dedicated to women's fashion, several shopkeepers admitted to first-hand experience of receiving offers of sex. Arash, 23, said he had been propositioned 40 or 50 times in his store. "I reckon that 50% of shopkeepers have accepted sex in return for clothes," he said. Ahmed Reza, 23, admitted having accepted such offers. "I was sitting outside the shop when two women came and said they wanted to try various manteaus [overcoats]," he said. "They asked for a bargain and I offered them the standard discount. But they said, 'We cannot pay that - if you give us a good discount and your mobile number, we will serve you.' So I gave them more discount and got their mobile numbers. "I can tell a prostitute by their attitudes and body language. When she asks the price of something, I say it's much more than it really is. Then I reduce it when she asks for discount, so she think she's getting a great bargain and offers sex." Iran's Islamic authorities attempted a clampdown on the trade by deploying policemen and plainclothes security guards inside shopping malls. "I don't think [the prostitutes] are HIV/Aids-aware," said Mr Fattahi, a team leader with Iran Positive Life, a volunteer group part-funded by Unicef. "If they are infected and have sex with three or four shopkeepers a day, you can imagine the danger. I think most of the shopkeepers know the risk but they can't resist the temptation. Most times, the opportunity arises too quickly to take precautions." Iran Positive Life is trying to raise shopkeepers' awareness in the hope that it will rub off on the prostitutes. Every evening, teams of volunteers tour boutiques asking shop assistants about their level of HIV/Aids knowledge. On one tour, joined by the Guardian, most of those canvassed knew it could be contracted from unsafe sex and that using condoms could provide protection. However, experts say this awareness often does not translate into personal practice and is not passed on to prostitutes. "We have found that while people know about HIV, their information is not necessarily enough for them to use precautionary methods when engaging in sex," said the group's managing director, Amir Reza Moradi, who became HIV positive after receiving an infected blood transfusion. "At the same time, it's hard for us to reach sex workers, so our education workers go to malls and speak to shopkeepers ... If the shopkeepers become educated and change their attitudes, hopefully the sex workers will notice and change their own ways." Iran Positive Life's volunteers have spoken to an estimated 5,000 young Iranians in shopping centres, parks and coffee shops since the group launched its "peer education" programme three months ago. It has opened counselling services at health centres in an effort to estimate how many cases result from sexual transmission, rather than from drug addicts' infected needles - previously identified as the greatest danger. Official resistance to a more explicitly sexual message is strong. While the government has a five-year plan to tackle HIV/Aids, its information campaigns have been criticised as inadequate. Yet the religious hierarchy apparently needs no convincing. A recent survey of 17 senior ayatollahs produced a near-unanimous response condoning condom use and in favour of educating the young on sexually transmitted diseases.

Saudi clerics seek help for Iraqi Sunnis

2006-12-17T23:16:00.001Z

It has begun.....

RIYADH: A group of prominent Saudi clerics have called on Sunni Muslims around the world to mobilise against Shiites in Iraq, although a statement they issued fell short of calling for a jihad, or holy war.

The statement appearing on Saudi Islamist Web sites on Monday said Sunni Muslims were being murdered and marginalised by Shiites, backed by Iran, and the US-led forces.

Saudi Arabia, a bastion of Sunni Islam, backs the Shiite-dominated government of Nuri al-Maliki largely because it fears that sectarian violence between Sunnis and Shiites could lead to the break-up of its northern neighbour and spill over its borders.

“We direct this message to all concerned about Shiites in the world: the murder, torture and displacement of Sunnis ... is an outrage. We don’t think you would accept to be treated like this,” said the statement, dated Dec 7.

“Muslims must stand directly with our Sunni brothers in Iraq and support them by all appropriate, well-studied means ... Muslims generally should be made aware of the danger of the Shiites,” it said.

“Clerics and intellectuals should not stand hands folded over what’s happening to their Sunni brothers in Iraq; all occasions should be used to expose the Shiites’ practices ... What has been taken by force can only be got back by force.”

The statement was signed by 38 clerics and Islamic preachers, including Abdel-Rahman al-Barrak, Safar al-Hawali and Nasser al-Omar, leading figures of Saudi Arabia’s hardline school of Sunni Islam known as Wahhabism. Many Saudi clerics of the austere Wahhabi school of Sunni Islam dismiss Shiites as virtual heretics and the kingdom’s Shiites have long complained about second class treatment.

Populist preachers who regularly appear on Saudi state television did not sign the document, which repeated fears expressed by Jordan’s King Abdullah of a “Shiite crescent” stretching across the Middle East, as Iran allies with Shiites in the Arab world after the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. reuters

Saudis Give a Grim What If Should U.S. Opt to Leave Iraq

2006-12-17T23:15:00.001Z

December 13, 2006 By HELENE COOPER WASHINGTON, Dec. 12 — Saudi Arabia has told the Bush administration that it might provide financial backing to Iraqi Sunnis in any war against Iraq’s Shiites if the United States pulls its troops out of Iraq, according to American and Arab diplomats. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia conveyed that message to Vice President Dick Cheney two weeks ago during Mr. Cheney’s whirlwind visit to Riyadh, the officials said. During the visit, King Abdullah also expressed strong opposition to diplomatic talks between the United States and Iran, and pushed for Washington to encourage the resumption of peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians, senior Bush administration officials said. The Saudi warning reflects fears among America’s Sunni Arab allies about Iran’s rising influence in Iraq, coupled with Tehran’s nuclear ambitions. King Abdullah II of Jordan has also expressed concern about rising Shiite influence, and about the prospect that the Shiite-dominated government would use Iraqi troops against the Sunni population. A senior Bush administration official said Tuesday that part of the administration’s review of Iraq policy involved the question of how to harness a coalition of moderate Iraqi Sunnis with centrist Shiites to back the Iraqi government led by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. The Saudis have argued strenuously against an American pullout from Iraq, citing fears that Iraq’s minority Sunni Arab population would be massacred. Those fears, United States officials said, have become more pronounced as a growing chorus in Washington has advocated a draw-down of American troops in Iraq, coupled with diplomatic outreach to Iran, which is largely Shiite. “It’s a hypothetical situation, and we’d work hard to avoid such a structure,” one Arab diplomat in Washington said. But, he added, “If things become so bad in Iraq, like an ethnic cleansing, we will feel we are pulled into the war.” The Bush administration is also working on a way to form a coalition of Sunni Arab nations and a moderate Shiite government in Iraq, along with the United States and Europe, to stand against “Iran, Syria and the terrorists,” another senior administration official said Tuesday. Until now Saudi officials have promised their counterparts in the United States that they would refrain from aiding Iraq’s Sunni insurgency. But that pledge holds only as long as the United States remains in Iraq. The Saudis have been wary of supporting Sunnis in Iraq because their insurgency there has been led by extremists of Al Qaeda, who are opposed to the kingdom’s monarchy. But if Iraq’s sectarian war worsened, the Saudis would line up with Sunni tribal leaders. The Saudi ambassador to the United States, Prince Turki al-Faisal, who told his staff on Monday that he was resigning his post, recently fired Nawaf Obaid, a consultant who wrote an opinion piece in The Washington Post two weeks ago contending that “one of the first consequences” of an American pullout of Iraq would “be massive Saudi intervention to stop Iranian-backed Shiite militias from butchering Iraqi Sunnis.” Mr. Obaid also suggested that Saudi Arabia could cut world oil prices in half by raising its production, a move that he said “would be devastating to Iran, which is facing economic difficulties even with today’s high oil prices.” The Saudi government disavowed Mr. Obaid’s column, and Prince Turki canceled his contract. But Arab diplomats said Tuesday that Mr. Obaid’s column reflected the view of the Saudi government, which has made clear its opposition to an American pullout from Iraq. In a speech in Philadelphia last week, Prince Turki reiterated the Saudi position against an American withdrawal from Iraq. “Just picking up and leaving is going to create a huge vacuum,” he told the World Affairs Council. “The U.S. must underline its support for the Maliki government because there is no other game in town.” Prince Turki said Saudi Arabia did not want Iraq to fracture along ethnic or religious lines. On Monday a group of prominent Saudi clerics called on Sunni Muslims around the world to mobilize against Shiites in Iraq. The statement called the “murder, torture and displacement of Sunnis” an “outrage.” The resignation of Prince Turki, a former Saudi intelligence chief and a son of the late King Faisal, was supposed to be formally announced Monday, officials said, but that had not happened by late Tuesday. “They’re keeping us very puzzled,” a Saudi official said. Prince Turki’s resignation was first reported Monday in The Washington Post. If Prince Turki does depart, he will leave after 15 months on the job, in contrast to the 22 years that his predecessor, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, spent as ambassador in Washington. In Riyadh, there was a sense of disarray over Prince Turki’s resignation that was difficult to hide. A former adviser to the royal family said that Prince Turki had submitted his resignation several months ago but that it was refused. Rumors had circulated ever since that Prince Turki intended to resign, as talk of a possible government shake-up grew. Prince Saud al-Faisal, Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister and Prince Turki’s brother, has been in poor health for some time. He is described as eager to resign, with his wife’s health failing, too, just as the United States has been prodding Saudi Arabia to take a more active role in Iraq and with Iran. The former adviser said Prince Turki’s resignation came amid a growing rivalry between the ambassador and Prince Bandar, who is now Saudi Arabia’s national security adviser. Prince Bandar, well known in Washington for his access to the White House, has vied to become the next foreign minister. “This is a very high-level problem; this is about Turki, the king and Bandar,” said the former adviser to the royal family. “Let’s say the men don’t have a lot of professional admiration for each other.” Hassan M. Fattah contributed reporting from Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

Middle East questions stump Democrats' intelligence overseer

2006-12-17T23:13:00.001Z

Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington Wednesday December 13, 2006 Guardian Of all the things on the to-do list before the Democrats take control of Congress next month, one item seemed to have escaped the attention of Congressman Silvestro Reyes: read something about the Middle East. Mr Reyes, a Democrat from Texas, was chosen by party speaker Nancy Pelosi to chair the house intelligence committee, charged with the oversight of the CIA and other agencies. So there was much chagrin when the congressman was unable to answer even the most rudimentary questions about militant Islamist organisations such as "Who is in al-Qaida", and "What is Hizbullah"? Mr Reyes's lack of expertise was exposed by a columnist for the Congressional Quarterly, a political magazine. During an interview last week, the columnist, Jeff Stein, set Mr Reyes a quiz on the modern Middle East. The congressman stumbled when asked whether al-Qaida was predominantly a Shia or a Sunni organisation. Mr Reyes guessed that the followers of the Saudi fugitive, Osama bin Laden, were primarily Shia. In fact, al-Qaida is an extremist Sunni organisation, and many of its followers see Shia as heretics. "He couldn't have been more wrong," wrote Stein. "It's been five years since these Muslim extremists flew hijacked airliners into the World Trade Centre. Is it too much to ask that our intelligence overseers know who they are?" By the time Stein got around to the subject of Hizbullah, the Shia militant group in Lebanon, Mr Reyes was feeling testy. "Why do you ask me these questions at five o'clock? Can I answer in Spanish? Do you speak Spanish?" he said. If it's any comfort for the congressman, he is not alone. Stein said two Republican committee members were "flummoxed" by such basic questions on Islam and the Middle East, and as the Iraq Study Group reported last week, only six people at the US embassy in Baghdad are fluent in Arabic.

Ahmadinejad On The Warpath

2006-12-17T23:11:00.001Z

By Mahan Abedin 18 February, 2006 Asia Times Online As the Iranian revolution enters its 28th year this month, the Islamic Republic stands at the most critical stage of its history. While power is being transferred to second-generation revolutionaries, the country is on a collision course with the United States over its controversial nuclear program. At the center of this unfolding drama is the perplexing figure of President Mahmud Ahmadinejad, who has managed to isolate,enrage and frighten important domestic and external constituencies in the space of only six months. Left to their own devices, Ahmadinejad and the second-generation revolutionaries who stand behind him are likely to change the Islamic Republic beyond recognition in the years ahead. But the complicating factor in all this is the increasing possibility of some form of military confrontation between Iran and the United States within two years. The key question is whether Ahmadinejad and his inner circle believe that military confrontation serves their long-term political and socio-economic agenda. A controversial president Ahmadinejad's first six months as president have had a mixed reaction. Domestically, he has tried to buttress his position among his core constituency, namely the urban poor and the lower classes who rallied around his calls for the revival of the Iranian revolution's egalitarian message. While it is clearly too early to judge his performance as a champion of a more egalitarian society, it is important to point out that the Ahmadinejad government has not undertaken a single serious policy that would reverse the country's widening wealth gap. That said, there has been no let-up in the populist rhetoric and sloganeering that marked his election campaign. Lack of progress on the economic and social-justice front notwithstanding, Ahmadinejad has introduced massive changes to the face and operations of the executive branch. Virtually all provincial governors have been replaced by Ahmadinejad loyalists, who tend to be young and hail from the Islamic Republic's security establishment, in particular the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC - or the Sepah-e-Pasdaran). Moreover, Ahmadinejad has replaced most senior bankers and other important figures in charge of the country's finances. Furthermore, many of the country's most experienced diplomats have been recalled from abroad and replaced by less experienced figures, with backgrounds in the Sepah-e-Pasdaran and other security outfits. At a superficial level it appears that the Ahmadinejad government is preparing for conflict and is reordering the entire machinery of government accordingly. But the changes introduced since August have a deeper meaning; they signify the coming of age of so-called "second-generation" revolutionaries who were propelled into a position of leadership by Ahmadinejad's surprise election victory last June. The most important feature of the second-generation revolutionaries is that they developed their political consciousness in the battlefields of the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, and not in the revolutionary struggle against the Pahlavi regime. While they are intensely loyal to the memory of the late ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (the leader of the Iranian revolution and founder of the Islamic Republic), the second-generation revolutionaries have tenuous ties (at best) to the conservative clerical establishment that controls the key centers of political and economic power. Contrary to Western reporting, Ahmadinejad's performance has generated more controversy and ill-feeling within the corridors of power in Tehran than in the crucible of Western public opinion. Arguably, the most surprising development in the past six months is the extent of Ahmadinejad's independence and freedom of action. Originally dismissed as the lackey of the clerical establishment, Ahmadinejad has proved time and again that the only agenda that drives him is his own. In the space of a few months the former IRGC commander has emerged as certainly the most independent and arguably the most powerful president in the republic's 27-year history. Even the Islamic Republic's spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, does not seem to have any appreciable influence over Ahmadinejad and his inner circle. While liberals and reformists are, broadly speaking, in opposition to the Ahmadinejad government, it is the conservative establishment that has emerged as the second-generation revolutionaries' most formidable adversary. This is not surprising, given that the latter aspire to reorder fundamentally the socio-economic system in the Islamic Republic, changes that would fatally weaken the conservatives. The conservative establishment hoped to delay the coming of age of the second-generation revolutionaries by positioning Hashemi Rafsanjani in the presidency. But Rafsanjani lost to Ahmadinejad, and he has since played the part of a bad loser. Indeed, the most vociferous opposition to the changes of the past six months has been made by Rafsanjani in his unofficial capacity as the public head of the conservative establishment. Consequences of war While Iranian-US relations have reached an all-time low, it is important to note that not even the most committed anti-American elements in Iran see war as a foregone conclusion. Near-universal public support for the country's nuclear program notwithstanding, Iranians are acutely aware of the consequences of military confrontation with the US. Insofar as Iran's standing in the region and the wider world is concerned, the stakes could not be higher. Reformists and conservatives alike are desperate to avoid war, for diametrically opposed reasons. For the former, aggression by the US would spell the end (at least for another generation) of the country's emerging grassroots democracy movement. Reformists fear that war would entrench the conservatives domestically and enable radical elements to seize control of the country's foreign policy and reverse the gains of the past 16 years. Ironically, conservatives fear war more than the reformists, even though they are confident of being entrenched politically, at least in the short term. What the conservatives fear losing (as a result of war and its concomitant extreme international isolation) is their economic and commercial privileges. Contrary to Western reporting, the conservative establishment is not held together by ideology, but by vast (and impossibly complex) networks of patronage and economic/commercial monopolies. These networks thrive in a wider context of socio-economic stability; stability that would be blasted away by conflict and its repercussions. The central question is how the second-generation revolutionaries led by Ahmadinejad view potential conflict with the US. The answer to this question lies in a better understanding of the second-generation revolutionaries' background, ideology and socio-economic agenda. The key personalities in this vast network are former IRGC commanders; this includes Ahmadinejad and nearly all members of his inner circle. This military-ideological background is accentuated by a strong sense of Iranian nationalism and Shi'ite supremacism. Some influential second-generation revolutionaries (including Ahmadinejad himself) even harbor millenarian beliefs. While they do not welcome conflict, they see it as an opportunity for a full-scale catharsis. To men like Ahmadinejad, the Islamic Republic is unconquerable; with its ability to project power well beyond its size and resources, rooted in its "undeterrable" nature. On a more practical level, the second-generation revolutionaries may see conflict as an opportunity for entrenchment and a context-generator for their long-term socio-economic policies. They would certainly see it as an opportunity to reverse Westernization and bring Iran more in line with developments in the wider Muslim world (where anti-Western feelings proliferate and Islamic movements are increasingly on the rise). While a US assault on Iran would probably engender all the above, it also runs the risk of unleashing dynamics that will elude the control of the Islamic Republic. First and foremost, conflict will almost certainly strengthen militant Islam in Iran, but of the kind that even the most hardline elements in the regime would not countenance. There are already many small networks of Shi'ite extremists in the country, but they are kept in check by the country's stability and an effective security establishment. Any weakening of the state will enable these networks to widen and deepen their influence exponentially. More worrying, conflict would significantly strengthen Sunni militancy on the country's fringes, particularly in the near-lawless Sistan va Balochistan province (bordering Pakistan and Afghanistan). A US assault on Iran would run the very real risk of enabling al-Qaeda to gain a foothold in the country. While Ahmadinejad and his supporters are correct in their belief that war would not fatally undermine the Islamic Republic, it is not at all clear whether they have properly thought through the potential consequences. At a time when the Americans are giving every indication of preparing for a long-term containment strategy over the controversial Iranian nuclear program (likely characterized by periodic bombings followed by long spells of tense standoff - eerily reminiscent of the containment strategy employed against Iraq from 1991-2003), Iranians of all political persuasions ought to be thinking of avoiding this scenario, at unacceptable costs if necessary. Mahan Abedin is the editor of Terrorism Monitor, which is published by the Jamestown Foundation, a non-profit organization specializing in research and analysis on conflict and instability in Eurasia. Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd.

Why i'm in love with A. Roy

2006-12-17T23:06:00.001Z

Mohammad Afzal is due to hang for his part in the 2001 attack on India's parliament building. But was he only a bit player? And is the country trying to bury embarrassing questions about its war on terror? By Arundhati Roy Arundhati Roy Friday December 15, 2006 Guardian Five years ago this week, on December 13 2001, the Indian parliament was in its winter session. The government was under attack for yet another corruption scandal. At 11.30 in the morning, five armed men in a white Ambassador car fitted out with an improvised explosive device drove through the gates of Parliament House. When they were challenged, they jumped out of the car and opened fire. In the gun battle that followed, all the attackers were killed. Eight security personnel and a gardener were killed too. The dead terrorists, the police said, had enough explosives to blow up the parliament building, and enough ammunition to take on a whole battalion of soldiers. Unlike most terrorists, these five left behind a thick trail of evidence - weapons, mobile phones, phone numbers, ID cards, photographs, packets of dried fruit and even a love letter. Not surprisingly, prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee seized the opportunity to compare the assault to the September 11 attacks in the US only three months previously. On December 14 2001, the day after the attack on parliament, the Special Cell (anti-terrorist squad) of the Delhi police claimed it had tracked down several people suspected of being involved in the conspiracy. The next day, it announced that it had "cracked the case": the attack, the police said, was a joint operation carried out by two Pakistan-based terrorist groups, Lashkar- e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammad. Three Kashmiri men, Syed Abdul Rahman Geelani, Shaukat Hussain Guru and Mohammad Afzal, and Shaukat's wife, Afsan Guru, were arrested. In the tense days that followed, parliament was adjourned. The Indian government declared that Pakistan - America's closest ally in the "war on terror" - was a terrorist state. On December 21, India recalled its high commissioner from Pakistan, suspended air, rail and bus communications and banned air traffic with Pakistan. It put into motion a massive mobilisation of its war machinery, and moved more than half a million troops to the Pakistan border. Foreign embassies evacuated their staff and citizens, and tourists travelling to India were issued cautionary travel advisories. The world watched with bated breath as the subcontinent was taken to the brink of nuclear war. All this cost India an estimated pounds 1.1bn of public money. About 800 soldiers died in the panicky process of mobilisation alone. The police charge sheet was filed in a special fast-track trial court designated for cases under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. Some three years later, the trial court sentenced Geelani, Shaukat and Afzal to death. Afsan Guru was sentenced to five years of "rigorous imprisonment". On appeal, the high court subsequently acquitted Geelani and Afsan, but upheld Shaukat's and Afzal's death sentence. Eventually, the supreme court upheld the acquittals and reduced Shaukat's punishment to 10 years of rigorous imprisonment. However, it not just confirmed, but enhanced Mohammad Afzal's sentence. He was given three life sentences and a double death sentence. In its judgment on August 5 2005, the supreme court admitted that the evidence against Afzal was only circumstantial, and that there was no evidence that he belonged to any terrorist group or organisation. But it went on to endorse what can only be described as lynch law. "The incident, which resulted in heavy casualties, had shaken the entire nation," it said, "and the collective conscience of the society will only be satisfied if capital punishment is awarded to the offender." Spelling out the reasons for giving Afzal the death penalty, the judgment went on: "The appellant, who is a surrendered militant and who was bent upon repeating the acts of treason against the nation, is a menace to the society and his life should become extinct." This implies a dangerous ignorance of what it means to be a "surrendered militant" in Kashmir today. So, should Afzal's life be extinguished? His story is fascinating because it is inextricably entwined with the story of the Kashmir Valley. It is a story that stretches far beyond the confines of courtrooms and the limited imagination of people who live in the secure heart of a self-declared "superpower". Afzal's story has its origins in a war zone whose laws are beyond the pale of the fine arguments and delicate sensibilities of normal jurisprudence. For all these reasons it is critical that we consider carefully the strange, sad and utterly sinister story of the December 13 attack. It tells us a great deal about the way the world's largest "democracy" really works. It connects the biggest things to the smallest. It traces the pathways that connect what happens in the shadowy grottoes of our police stations to what goes on in the snowy streets of Paradise Valley, and from there to the malign furies that bring nations to the brink of nuclear war. It raises specific questions that deserve specific, and not ideological or rhetorical, answers. What hangs in the balance is far more than the fate of one man. For the most part, the December 13 attack was an astonishingly incompetent "terrorist" strike. But consummate competence appeared to be the hallmark of everything that followed: the gathering of evidence, the speed of the investigation by the Special Cell, the arrest and charging of the accused and the three-and-a-half-year-long judicial process that began with the fast-track trial court. The operative phrase in all of this is "appeared to be". If you follow the story carefully, you will encounter two sets of masks. First, the mask of consummate competence (accused arrested, "case cracked" in two days flat), and then, when things began to come undone, the benign mask of shambling incompetence (shoddy evidence, procedural flaws, material contradictions). But underneath all of this - as several lawyers, academics and journalists who have studied the case in detail have shown - is something more sinister, more worrying. Over the past few years the worries have grown into a mountain of misgivings, impossible to ignore. The doubts set in as early as the day after the parliament attack, when the police arrested Geelani, a young lecturer at Delhi University. His outraged colleagues and friends, certain that he had been framed, contacted the well-known lawyer Nandita Haksar and asked her to take on his case. This marked the beginning of a campaign for the fair trial of Geelani. It flew in the face of mass hysteria and corrosive propaganda that was enthusiastically disseminated by the mass media. But despite this, the campaign was successful, and Geelani was eventually acquitted, along with Afsan Guru. Geelani's acquittal blew a gaping hole in the prosecution's version of the parliament attack. The linchpin of its conspiracy theory suddenly tuned out to be innocent. But in some odd way, in the public mind, the acquittal of two of the accused only confirmed the guilt of the other two. There was bloodlust that had to be satiated. When the government announced that Afzal, Accused No 1 in the case, would be hanged on October 20 2006, it seemed that most people welcomed the news not just with approval, but with morbid excitement. But then, once again, the questions resurfaced. To see through the prosecution's case against Geelani was relatively easy. He was plucked out of thin air and transplanted into the centre of the "conspiracy" as its kingpin. Afzal was different. He had been extruded through the sewage system of the hell that Kashmir has become. He surfaced through a manhole, covered in shit (and when he emerged, policemen in the Special Cell pissed on him. Literally.) The first thing they made him do was a "media confession" in which he implicated himself completely in the attack. The speed with which this happened made many of us believe that he was indeed guilty as charged. It was only much later that the circumstances under which this "confession" was made were revealed, and even the supreme court was to set it aside, saying that the police had violated legal safeguards. From the very beginning there was nothing pristine or simple about Afzal's case. His story gives us a glimpse into what life is really like in the Kashmir Valley. It is only in the Noddy Book version we read about in our newspapers that security forces battle militants and innocent Kashmiris are caught in the crossfire. In the adult version, Kashmir is a valley awash with militants, renegades, security forces, double-crossers, informers, spooks, blackmailers, blackmailees, extortionists, spies, both Indian and Pakistani intelligence agencies, human rights activists, NGOs and unimaginable amounts of unaccounted-for money and weapons. There are not always clear lines that demarcate the boundaries between all these things and people; it is not easy to tell who is working for whom. Truth, in Kashmir, is probably more dangerous than anything else. The deeper you dig, the worse it gets. At the bottom of the pit are the Special Operations Group and Special Task Force (STF), the most ruthless, indisciplined and dreaded elements of the Indian security apparatus in Kashmir, which play a central role in the Afzal story. Unlike the more formal forces, they operate in a twilight zone where policemen, surrendered militants, renegades and common criminals do business. They prey upon the local population, particularly in rural Kashmir. Their primary victims are the thousands of young Kashmiri men who rose up in revolt in the anarchic uprising of the early 1990s and have since surrendered and are trying to live normal lives. In 1989, when Afzal crossed the border to be trained as a militant, he was only 20. He returned with no training, disillusioned with his experience. He put down his gun and enrolled himself in Delhi University. In 1993, without ever having been a practising militant, he voluntarily surrendered to the Border Security Force. Illogically enough, it was at this point that his nightmares began. His surrender was treated as a crime and his life became hell. Afzal's story has enraged Kashmiris because what has happened to him could have happened, is happening and has happened to thousands of young Kashmiri men and their families. The only difference is that their stories are played out in the dingy bowels of interrogation centres, army camps and police stations where they have been burned, beaten, electrocuted, blackmailed and killed, their bodies thrown out of the backs of trucks for passers-by to find. Whereas Afzal's story is being performed like a piece of medieval theatre on the national stage, in the clear light of day, with the legal sanction of a "fair trial", the hollow benefits of a "free press" and the all pomp and ceremony of a so-called democracy. In documents submitted to the court, Afzal describes how, in the months before the attack on parliament, he was tortured in the camps of the STF - with electrodes on his genitals and chillies and petrol in his anus. He talks of how he was a constant victim of extortion. He mentions the name of Deputy Superintendent of Police Devinder Singh, who said he needed him to do a "small job" for him in Delhi. (Singh has subsequently admitted on record to having tortured Afzal in exactly the ways Afzal has described.) Afzal has also said that from the time he was arrested up to the time he was charged (a few months), his younger brother Hilal was held in illegal confinement in a police camp in Kashmir. As ransom. Even today, Afzal does not claim complete innocence. It is the nature of his involvement that is being contested. For instance, was he coerced, tortured and blackmailed into playing even the peripheral part he played? In a gross violation of his constitutional rights, from the time he was arrested and right through the crucial phase of the trial when the real work of building up a case is done, Afzal did not have a lawyer. He had nobody to put out his version of the story, or help him or anyone else sift through the tangle of lies and fabrications and propaganda put out by the police. Various individuals worked it out for themselves. Today, five years later, a group of lawyers, academics, journalists and writers has published a reader (December 13th: The Strange Case of the Parliament Attack, published by Penguin India). It is this body of work that has fractured what, only recently, appeared to be a national consensus interwoven with mass hysteria. Through the fissures, those who have come under scrutiny - shadowy individuals, counter-intelligence and security agencies, political parties - are beginning to surface. They wave flags, hurl abuse, issue hot denials and cover their tracks with more and more untruths. Thus they reveal themselves. The essays in the Penguin book raise questions about how Afzal, who never had proper legal representation, can be sentenced to death without having had an opportunity to be heard, without a fair trial. They raise questions about fabricated arrest memos, falsified seizure and recovery memos, procedural flaws, vital evidence that has been tampered with, false telephone records, false testimonies, legal lacunae, material contradictions in the testimonies of police and prosecution witnesses, and the outright lies that were presented in court and published in newspapers. They show how there is hardly a single piece of evidence that stands up to scrutiny. And then there are even more disturbing questions that have been raised, which range beyond the fate of Afzal. Some of these are critical for a country that is claiming to be a responsible nuclear power. Here are 13 questions for December 13: Question 1: For months before the attack on parliament, both the government and the police had been saying that parliament could be attacked. On December 12 2001, the then prime minister, AB Vajpayee, warned of an imminent attack. On December 13 it happened. Given that there was an "improved security drill", how did a car bomb packed with explosives enter the parliament complex? Question 2: Within days of the attack, the Special Cell of the Delhi police said it was a meticulously planned joint operation of Jaish-e-Mohammad and Lashkar-e-Taiba. They said the attack was led by a man called "Mohammad" who was also involved in the hijacking of flight IC-814 in 1998. (This was later refuted by the Central Bureau of Investigation.) None of this was ever proved in court. What evidence did the Special Cell have for its claim? Question 3: The entire attack was recorded live on CCTV. Two Congress party MPs, Kapil Sibal and Najma Heptullah, demanded in parliament that the CCTV recording be shown to the members. They said that there was confusion about the details of the event. The chief whip of the Congress party, Priyaranjan Dasmunshi, said, "I counted six men getting out of the car. But only five were killed. The closed circuit TV camera recording clearly showed the six men." If Dasmunshi was right, why did the police say that there were only five people in the car? Who was the sixth person? Where is he now? Why was the CCTV recording not produced by the prosecution as evidence in the trial? Why was it not released for public viewing? Question 4: Why was parliament adjourned after some of these questions were raised? Question 5: A few days after December 13, the government declared that it had "incontrovertible evidence" of Pakistan's involvement in the attack, and announced a massive mobilisation of almost half a million soldiers to the Indo-Pakistan border. The subcontinent was pushed to the brink of nuclear war. Apart from Afzal's "confession", extracted under torture (and later set aside by the supreme court), what was the "incontrovertible evidence"? Question 6: Is it true that the military mobilisation to the Pakistan border had begun long before the December 13 attack? Question 7: How much did this military standoff, which lasted for nearly a year, cost? How many soldiers died in the process? How many soldiers and civilians died because of mishandled landmines, and how many peasants lost their homes and land because trucks and tanks were rolling through their villages and landmines were being planted in their fields? Question 8: In a criminal investigation, it is vital for the police to show how the evidence gathered at the scene of the attack led them to the accused. The police have not managed to show how they connected Geelani to the attack. And how did the police reach Afzal? The Special Cell says Geelani led them to Afzal. But the message to look out for Afzal was actually flashed to the Srinagar police before Geelani was arrested. So how did the Special Cell connect Afzal to the December 13 attack? Question 9: The courts acknowledge that Afzal was a surrendered militant who was in regular contact with the security forces, particularly the STF of Jammu and Kashmir police. How do the security forces explain the fact that a person under their surveillance was able to conspire in a major militant operation? Question 10: Is it plausible that organisations such as Lashkar-e-Taiba or Jaish-e-Mohammad would rely on a person who had been in and out of STF torture chambers, and was under constant police surveillance, as the principal link for a major operation? Question 11: In his statement before the court, Afzal says that he was introduced to "Mohammed" and instructed to take him to Delhi by a man called Tariq, who was working with the STF. Tariq was named in the police charge sheet. Who is Tariq and where is he now? Question 12: On December 19 2001, six days after the parliament attack, police commissioner SM Shangari identified one of the attackers who was killed as Mohammad Yasin Fateh Mohammed (alias Abu Hamza) of the Lashkar-e-Taiba, who had been arrested in Mumbai in November 2000 and immediately handed over to the Jammu and Kashmir police. He gave detailed descriptions to support his statement. If police commissioner Shangari was right, how did Yasin, a man in the custody of the Jammu and Kashmir police, end up participating in the parliament attack? If he was wrong, where is Yasin now? Question 13: Why is it that we still do not know who the five "terrorists" killed in the parliament attack are? These questions, examined cumulatively, point to something far more serious than incompetence. The words that come to mind are complicity, collusion, involvement. There is no need for us to feign shock or shrink from thinking these thoughts and saying them out loud. Governments and their intelligence agencies have a hoary tradition of using strategies such as this to further their own ends. (Look up the burning of the Reichstag and the rise of Nazi power in Germany in 1933; or Operation Gladio, in which European intelligence agencies created acts of terrorism, especially in Italy, in order to discredit militant groups such as the Red Brigades.) The official response to all of these questions has been dead silence. As things stand, Afzal's execution has been postponed while the president considers his clemency petition. Meanwhile, the Bhartiya Janata party (now in the opposition) announced that it would turn "Hang Afzal" into a national campaign. But it does not seem to have taken off. Now other avenues are being explored. The main strategy seems to be to create confusion and polarise the debate on communal lines. In the business of spreading confusion, the media, particularly television journalists, can be counted on to be perfect collaborators. On discussions, chat shows and "special reports", we have television anchors playing around with crucial facts, like young children in a sandpit. Torturers, estranged brothers, senior police officers and politicians are emerging from the woodwork and talking. The more they talk, the more interesting it all becomes. One character who is rapidly emerging from the shadowy periphery and wading on to centre-stage is deputy superintendent Devinder Singh. He was showcased on the national news (CNN-IBN), in what was presented as a "sting" operation with a hidden camera. It all seemed a bit unnecessary, however, because Singh has been talking a lot these days. He has done recorded interviews, on the phone as well as face to face, saying exactly the same shocking things. Weeks before the sting operation, in a recorded interview with Parvaiz Bukhari, a freelance journalist, he said, "I did interrogate and torture him [Afzal] at my camp for several days. And we never recorded his arrest in the books anywhere. His description of torture at my camp is true. That was the procedure those days and we did pour petrol in his ass and gave him electric shocks. But I could not break him. He did not reveal anything to me despite our hardest possible interrogation ... He looked like a 'bhondu' [fool] those days, what you call a 'chootya' [idiot] type. And I had a reputation for torture, interrogation and breaking suspects. If anybody came out of my interrogation clean, nobody would ever touch him again. He would be considered clean for good by the whole department." This is not an empty boast. Singh has a formidable reputation for torture in the Kashmir Valley. On TV, his boasting spiralled into policy-making. "Torture is the only deterrent for terrorism," he said. "I do it for the nation." He did not bother to explain why or how the "bhondu" that he tortured and subsequently released allegedly went on to become the diabolical mastermind of the parliament attack. Singh then said that Afzal was a Jaish militant. If this is true, why was the evidence not placed before the courts? And why on earth was Afzal released? Why was he not watched? There is a definite attempt to try to dismiss this as incompetence. But given everything we know now, it would take all of Singh's delicate professional skills to make some of us believe that. The official version of the story of the parliament attack is very quickly coming apart at the seams. Even the supreme court judgment, with all its flaws of logic and leaps of faith, does not accuse Afzal of being the mastermind of the attack. So who was the mastermind? If Afzal is hanged, we may never know. But LK Advani, the leader of the opposition, wants him hanged at once. Even a day's delay, he says, is against the national interest. Why? What is the hurry? The man is locked up in a high-security cell on death row. He is not allowed out of his cell for even five minutes a day. What harm can he do? Talk? Write, perhaps? Surely, even in Advani's own narrow interpretation of the term, it is in the national interest not to hang Afzal? At least not until there is an inquiry that reveals what the real story is and who actually attacked parliament? A genuine inquiry would have to mean far more than just a political witch-hunt. It would have to look into the part played by intelligence, counter-insurgency and security agencies as well. Offences such as the fabrication of evidence and the blatant violation of procedural norms have already become established in the courts, but they look very much like just the tip of the iceberg. We now have a police officer admitting - boasting - on record that he was involved in the illegal detention and torture of a fellow citizen. Is all of this acceptable to the people, the government and the courts of India? Given the track record of Indian governments (past and present, right, left and centre) it is naive - perhaps utopian is a better word - to hope that today's politicians will ever have the courage to institute an inquiry that will, once and for all, uncover the real story. A maintenance dose of pusillanimity is probably encrypted in all governments. But hope has little to do with reason. (C) Arundhati Roy 2006