Afif Sarhan/Basra & Caroline Davies | May 11

The Observer - Two weeks ago, The Observer revealed how 17-year-old student Rand Abdel-Qader was beaten to death by her father after becoming infatuated with a British soldier in Basra. In this remarkable interview, Abdel-Qader Ali explains why he is unrepentant - and how police backed his actions.

For Abdel-Qader Ali there is only one regret: that he did not kill his daughter at birth. 'If I had realised then what she would become, I would have killed her the instant her mother delivered her,' he said with no trace of remorse.

Two weeks after The Observer revealed the shocking story of Rand Abdel-Qader, 17, murdered because of her infatuation with a British solider in Basra, southern Iraq, her father is defiant. Sitting in the front garden of his well-kept home in the city's Al-Fursi district, he remains a free man, despite having stamped on, suffocated and then stabbed his student daughter to death.

May 9

AP - Blackwater: "If it is determined that there are any individuals who need to be held accountable, we support that."

The Associated Press reports that Blackwater Worldwide is not expected to face criminal charges for the shooting deaths of 17 Iraqi civilians in September and that it's likely to keep its multimillion-dollar contract to guard U.S. diplomats.

Citing a half-dozen people close to the investigation AP writes that the Justice Department is focusing only on three or four Blackwater guards. Late summer is the earliest the final decision on any charges will be made, one source said.

Last month the State Department extended Blackwater's contract for one year, though it raised concerns about whether the corporation or individuals were liable.

Mohammed Tawfeeq, Jomana Karadsheh, Tommy Evans, Terry Frieden and Ingrid Formanek | Baghdad | May 7

CNN - The leader of al Qaeda in Iraq was captured early Thursday in the northern city of Mosul, Iraqi officials said....

... Al-Masri ("the Egyptian"), also known as Abu Hamza al-Muhajer, took the reins of the Iraqi al Qaeda offshoot in June 2006 after a U.S. missile strike killed his predecessor, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Since then, Iraqi officials have reported his death three times, his capture twice and a mortal wounding once.

It's like an omen: as I'm putting the final touches on my five part blog series, "Who's Supporting Our Troops?", featuring an in-depth interview with a formerly-deployed soldier sharing her firsthand account of the KBR contaminated water scandal (this blog will run on the Progressive Future website all next week), it turns out that contractor abuse and fraud has exploded all over the blogs.

And thank heavens. Because as I have been following story after story of private contractors acting in total disregard for the health and safety of our troops, I was starting to think the American public is too jaded by the lies and deception the administration has been feeding us for the past seven years, to come together and take action.

Four-thousand U.S. troop deaths and counting. We shouldn't have to feel that the biggest enemy facing our troops, national security and international reputation is the bureaucratic mess and greed allowing private contractors to use the cradle of civilization as their own personal playground.

And yet, with every story that breaks, exposing scandal after scandal of private contractors cutting corners, hording money and endangering our troops, I can't help picturing these contractors as operating in some alternate reality, where consequences don't exist, money is no object, and the well-being of our troops is just an obstacle standing in the way of the contractors' ability to capitalize on the destruction befalling the occupied country.

Do not walk, but run over to the Washington Note and read this essay by Nir Rosen about the US, Iraq and Iran. A note on Mr. Rosen: he's the only reporter I know of who has extensively reported from within the insurgency, not from without like most MSM reporters. And on that note, he knows what he's talking about in a way others cannot and will not ever know. Two short quotes for flavor:

[T]he Americans have always blamed their failures in Iraq on outsiders, Baathists, al Qaeda, Iranians, because they refuse to admit that the Iraqi people don't want them [there].

There is no proxy war in Iraq, because the US and Iran share the same proxy and the US installed that proxy and empowered it.

Now, please go read. See also, Col. Lang on 'new' Israeli intel on Iran, here.

This takedown of Naomi Klein's books is exceptional. I'd post about it, but it would pretty much be a whole bunch of quotes from the article and me simply adding, "yeah!" Or "indeed!" Or some such. Here's one for you, however:

. But the damage done by Chicago School thinking had less to do with the unleashing of acquisitiveness than with the stupefaction of thought. People indoctrinated in a ‘radical anti-state agenda’ would obviously not be well prepared for the challenge of restoring order in post-Saddam Iraq . . . It was not the utopian project of creating an ideal market that was the original sin of the war planners, as Klein argues, but the failure to appreciate the difficulty of building even a minimal state capable of monopolising violence. Without such a state, needless to say, nothing resembling a free market could survive.

I'm not a fan of Klein's arguments--although my father is--and I think Holmes' essay is a good corrective. Her ideas are too easy intellectually, as Holmes amply proves.

This article by Jonathan Landy and Warren Strobel and Hannah Allam of McClatchy is worth a read. It's from last Monday but still interesting. I have some problems with many of its claims, but I hasten to add that it comes recommended from a gentleman's who's military judgement I trust. So, take that into consideration when you read it. I hope to drag him into an email discussion about specific claims made in the article and by the US military at some point in the future and will let you know what the thrust of the conversation is when it happens.

As we commemorate the passing of five years since George Bush’s infamous “Mission Accomplished” stunt on the U.S.S Abraham Lincoln, new information has come to light that shows just how convinced the administration was at that time that the war in Iraq was over. Originally, the Pentagon had prepared a post-combat Phase IV plan for the occupation and rebuilding of Iraq. Somewhere along the way this plan was shelved, and all the generals and military staff in Iraq assigned to its implementation were called back home. It was clearly understood among the commanders in the field that this decision to ignore Phase IV came with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s approval, and therefore with the full knowledge of the National Security Council, Vice President, and President.

Great insight from Stirling here:

So what all of this means is that the numbers as presented are accurate, but uninformative to the question that most Americans want to know. What they say is that the very small elites are prevailing in their gambling to keep control of the economy, while producing a radically lower standard of living for everyone else. They are continuing in their gamble to incarcerate or keep in the military the small core of people who are willing to break bones to make political change. Here.

No, it's not a touchy-feely, nice sentiment. But that doesn't make it untrue. Nothing will change until the war ends. Period. Full stop.

Quite a catch-22 there, huh?

Joshua Holusha | May 1

NY Times - Thousands of dockworkers at West Coast ports stayed off the job on Thursday in what their union said was a call for an end to the war in Iraq.

The International Longshore and Warehouse Union said more than 25,000 members in 29 ports stayed off the job. The action came despite an order issued Wednesday by an arbitrator directing the union to tell its members to report for work as usual in response to a request from employers.

“Longshore workers are standing down on the job and standing up for America,” Bob McEllrath, the union’s president, said in a statement. “We’re supporting the troops and telling politicians in Washington that it’s time to end the war in Iraq.”

Jill Serjeant and Bernard Woodall | Los Angeles | May 1

Reuters - LOS ANGELES, May 1 (Reuters) - Ports along the U.S. West Coast, including the country's busiest port complex in Los Angeles, shut down on Thursday as some 10,000 dock workers went on a one-day strike to protest the war in Iraq, port and union officials said.

Twenty-nine ports from San Diego to Washington state that handle more than half of U.S waterborne trade ground to a halt, but shipping experts said the economic costs of the walk-out would be limited.

By Alex Abella

Back when neoconservatives ruled Washington (was it really just five years ago?), some conservative observers compared the controversial Iraqi banker-politician Ahmed Chalabi to George Washington. As head of the largest Iraqi exile group, The Iraqi National Congress, he had convinced the Bush Administration that invading Iraq would be a cakewalk, that invading Americans would be greeted as liberators, not conquerors. Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith, former Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle, Vice President Dick Cheney, President Bush, all saw Chalabi as the man who would be hailed as the founding father of his country. Nowadays, four thousand American casualties and a trillion dollars later, we see that that Chalabi is really today’s Talleyrand.

After the fall of Napoleon in 1814, when the great powers of Europe wanted to dismember France, Talleyrand, a French nobleman, was able to preserve the territorial integrity of France through sheer diplomacy alone. Like Talleyrand, Chalabi used his persuasiveness to save his country, leading the mightiest military power in the world to depose the tyrant of his people, and in the process restore his own family fortune—all through skilful diplomacy. For, what is diplomacy if not carefully calibrated lies to secure advantage over an adversary?

Editor | April 27

Allegations Lead Army to Review Arms Policy

The United States Army has begun a broad review of procedures used to supply security forces in Afghanistan and Iraq with foreign arms, prompted by an allegation of fraud and questions about the competence of the main private supplier of ammunition to Afghanistan.

The company, AEY Inc. of Miami Beach, was suspended last month after Army investigators accused it of shipping aged Chinese rifle cartridges and claiming they were Hungarian.

Britons kidnapped in Iraq are ‘held by Iran’

Five British hostages who were kidnapped in Iraq almost a year ago are being held inside Iran by Revolutionary Guards, according to two separate sources in the Middle East and London.

The hostages were handed over to the Revolutionary Guards by their Iraqi kidnappers last November, the sources believe. One of the sources said they were being held in the western Iranian city of Hamadan.

**Head of Army defends Britain's role in Basra in open letter to his troops
**IRAQ: Poverty Gets the Survivors
**Competing Visions for Iraq: Clerics or Commerce? - analysis

Leave Taliban alone, Afghan president tells West

Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, has called on British and American troops to stop arresting Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan, saying that their operations undermined his government's authority and were counter-productive.

US military deaths in Afghanistan, Pakistan at least 425

As of Saturday, April 26, 2008, at least 425 members of the U.S. military had died in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Uzbekistan as a result of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001, according to the Defense Department.

Please post new stories and comments about the coalition's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan on this thread. (Prior weeks' Updates here)

Not a day goes by without mention of the phrase “tipping point”, and with good reason. Different variations of this phrase include “critical mass”, “precipice” and the ever popular “day of reckoning”. The truth is alarming when one considers how many times these phrases are used, and used correctly. Our nation and the World are facing challenges that need to be addressed, and addressed as swiftly as possible. The human race can no longer pass off the responsibility of meeting challenges by doing nothing while we put the onus of problem solving onto our children and grandchildren. The time of band-aids and temporary short term fixes in regard to our most pressing problems is just about over. This planet is poised to reap the rewards that have come about from choosing half measures and politically acceptable “solutions” that are not solutions at all, but rather compromises expressly designed to placate the people, while protecting political, economic or religious interests.

Team Agonist

Iraq's simmering ethnic war over Kirkuk
Kirkuk has been the object of a bitter struggle over the past five years among Iraq's competing ethnic and sectarian groups. And now Arab, Kurd, and Turkmen factions seem to be digging in, anticipating that tensions may erupt in an area that is the center of northern Iraq's oil industry ahead of a promised referendum on the fate of Kirkuk Province, officially still called Tamim, its previous Baath Party-era name.

Article 140 of Iraq's Constitution was supposed to resolve the issue by the end of 2007 but the deadline for a vote has been extended to the end of June in the hopes that the United Nations may be able to broker a solution by then.

Iraqis see red as U.S. opens world's biggest embassy
"Saddam had his big castles; they symbolized his power and were places to be feared, and now we have the castle of the power that toppled him," says Abdul Jabbar Ahmed, a vice dean for political sciences at Baghdad University. "If I am the ambassador of the USA here I would say, 'Build something smaller that doesn't stand out so much, it's too important that we avoid these negative impressions.' "

New Jobs Set for 2 Generals With Iraq Role
Under a plan announced at the Pentagon on Wednesday, the two commanders most closely associated with President Bush’s current strategy in Iraq would be elevated into new posts with responsibilities extending into the next administration over the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Previous Updates after the jump. Please post new stories and comments about the coalition's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan on this thread. (Prior weeks' Updates here).

A stockbroker called me the other day with yet another pick. It was Devon, the same guy who told me a month ago that Bear Stearns was a screaming, slam-your-hands-on-the-table, back-the truck-up-and-load-up buy. I say short the market on occasional spikes that fortune sends our way, but I listened to him just the same.

Devon: Mr Downing? Hi, this is Devon from New American Century. I know you’re very busy and I won’t take much of your time. It’s just that . . . well, damn it, Mr Downing, this opportunity is so exciting I just had to let you know about it! May I call you Brian?

As an Internet Organizer for Progressive Future, I've been busily spreading the otherwise buried reports of the atrocities and abuses committed by military contractors in Iraq. As outraged as they made me, I had to wonder why these stories failed to reach the mainstream American public. Now I know why.

In an extensive article on the front page of Sunday's New York Times, David Bartow exposes how the Pentagon recruited, groomed, prepped and, one may go so far as to say, bribed a team of "military analysts." This team consisted of retired military men, defense lobbyists and private contractor representatives, who were then unleashed upon the mainstream media to deliver manipulated testimony on the war. Highlights of the detailed investigation of the Pentagon's highly strategized manipulation of war reporting are as follows:

By Bob Geiger

Citing "the Bush administration's failure to take aggressive action to enforce and punish wartime fraud," Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) on Friday introduced legislation to crack down on the massive fraud and theft by some defense contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan and allow the government to criminally prosecute guilty parties even after the war is over.

S. 2892, the Wartime Enforcement of Fraud Act of 2008, would close a loophole in the 66-year-old Wartime Suspension of Limitations Act, that allowed the government to investigate and prosecute contracting fraud up to three years after the end of a war, but that does not apply to the current Bush-McCain war in Iraq because it was never formally declared.

It’s amazing how ideas that were rejected just a year ago are flying through cyberspace as well as real-space, at the speed of light. I’m talking about two things here. The first I’ll mention is the idea that both the Democrats and the Republicans’ are pawns of the corporate power structure in this country. It will probably seem hard to believe now, but just a short time ago I was called all sorts of things for bringing that up. Since 2004, I have been writing about campaign financing and the need for reform. This one issue is the basis of corporate control along with the “good folks” on K-Street that staff 70 lobbyist’s for every legislator we have on Capitol Hill. Gee, what a great system we have up there (for the legislators and the lobbyists). I can’t wait to run for office myself so I can get in on those goodies they’re passing out (only kidding), this can’t last forever…or can it?

While it was quite always the case that Col. Ken Allard, one of the sources in this huge, sprawling article in the New York Times today, disagreed, frequently on the radio; and while it was quite nearly always the case that he adhered to the Ledeen line on many things in Iraq and Iran I will say this for Col. Allard: he wasn't drinking the Kool-Aid.

Col. Allard and I had our disagreements, but we agreed on a great deal too: that Tommy Franks was an ass and a moron, that Rumsfeld didn't have a clue and that the war was horribly mismanaged from the get-go.

So, take that into consideration. Col. Allard is a man of integrity in my book. Were I a soldier I'd follow him, because in the end that's who he cares most about.

The political situation in the United States is different at this particular time than in any other time that I have witnessed in my 57 years on this planet. This is the only time in my life that I can ever remember when the right and the left agree more with each other than the so-called “centrists’” of the GOP and the Democratic Party. Those that lean left, like myself, are afraid of losing their civil liberties, afraid of the corporate control of the mainstream media, afraid of the government’s surveillance of our personal activities, afraid of violations of the second amendment when it comes to gun ownership and are thoroughly disgusted with the governments clampdown on our 1st Amendment rights on free speech. When we see protesters tasered and sprayed with tear gas, hit by rubber bullets and clubbed, as in what happened at the G8 meetings in Washington, something is definitely wrong in this republic.

Richard Norton-Taylor|April 18 | The Guardian

The US's most senior general was "hoodwinked" by top Bush administration officials determined to push through aggressive interrogation techniques for terror suspects held at Guantánamo Bay, the Guardian can reveal.

The development led to the US military abandoning its age-old ban on the cruel and inhumane treatment of prisoners.

General Richard Myers, the chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff from 2001 to 2005, wrongly believed that inmates at Guantánamo and other prisons were protected by the Geneva conventions and from abuse tantamount to torture.

The way he was duped by senior officials in Washington - who believed the Geneva conventions and other traditional safeguards were out of date - is disclosed in a devastating account of their role, extracts from which will be published in tomorrow's Guardian.

I have been writing about the same things for years now. I have been writing against the loss of our freedoms, the draconian laws that have been enacted in order to “protect” us from people that “hate us for our freedom”, I have written about the corporations that have tied this nation to war and more war. Even though my message has been the same, I find that my writing has fallen on deaf ears as of late. In fact, my writing, because of my criticism of this phony two-party system that has led us to where we are now, I have been banned from OpEdNews.com, DailyKos.com.TPMMuckracker.com, and left me with a small sidebar on SmirkingChimp.com.

Gareth Porter | April 19

Asia Times Online - General David Petraeus, in testimony before US congressional committees last week, portrayed Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's late March offensive in Basra as a poorly planned effort that departed from what US officials had expected.

What Petraeus, the US commander in Iraq, did not reveal is that Maliki was deliberately upsetting a Petraeus plan to put US and British forces into Basra for a months-long operation to eliminate the Mahdi Army from the city.