In April I testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to attempt to explain what was really happening in Iraq, where I have spent most of the last five years, so that they could better challenge General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker during their Senate testimony. But it made little difference.

As always, little interest was shown in the Iraqi people, and the fact that they were enduring a brutal foreign military occupation. Those who opposed the war did so because it was too expensive for American taxpayers, not even because American men and women were dying for absolutely nothing, and certainly not because anybody cares about Iraqis. But one of the main themes I heard repeated by the General and the Ambassador and by the senators who questioned them, was that Iran was the bad guy in Iraq these days. They accused Iran of supporting "Shiite extremists" and said that Muqtada al Sadr was one such extremist. They even managed to blame Iran for the Iran-Iraq war, which Iraq had initiated with US backing. Iran was the bad guy and the US was fighting a proxy war against it.

There has never been any evidence of this, save the accusations of a US regime that still hopes it can score a last minute war against Iran, but lack of evidence did not stop the Washington Post editorial page from declaring war against Iran on April 13th.

The Post talked about the "growing aggressiveness of Iran," taking at face value the Senate testimony of two politicized US officials about "Iranian-backed militias" which are the largest threat to U.S. forces and the Iraqi government." This "proxy war in Iraq is just one front in a much larger Iranian offensive," said the Post, citing Gaza and Lebanon as well as examples of "Iran's military adventurism," and stating that military force would have to be used to counter this "growing menace." The Post actually thinks there is a way to "nurture" a "popular backlash against Iran's military adventurism" in the region.

In a region devoid of democracy a popular backlash would not matter anyway, but Hizballah and Hamas are popular in the region, the U.S. and its occupation of Iraq are not popular. Perhaps with enough payoffs, cajoling and threats the U.S. can nurture a backlash among the unpopular dictators it supports in the Middle East. But the backlash by the people of the region is against America's military adventurism, not Iran's. The Americans hope to persuade the skeptical people of the region that Iran is their real enemy. And it was clear the Prime Minister and President of Iraq clearly did not view Iran as a threat when they welcomed Mahmud Ahmedinajad to Baghdad like a dear friend.

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The dark-haired 22-year-old in black T-shirt, blue jeans and red Crocs is understandably hesitant as he sits at a picnic table in the incongruous setting of a beauty spot somewhere in Israel. We know his name and if we used it he would face a criminal investigation and a probable prison sentence.

The birds are singing as he describes in detail some of what he did and saw others do as an enlisted soldier in Hebron. And they are certainly criminal: the incidents in which Palestinian vehicles are stopped for no good reason, the windows smashed and the occupants beaten up for talking back  for saying, for example, they are on the way to hospital; the theft of tobacco from a Palestinian shopkeeper who is then beaten "to a pulp" when he complains; the throwing of stun grenades through the windows of mosques as people prayed. And worse.

The young man left the army only at the end of last year, and his decision to speak is part of a concerted effort to expose the moral price paid by young Israeli conscripts in what is probably the most problematic posting there is in the occupied territories. Not least because Hebron is the only Palestinian city whose centre is directly controlled by the military, 24/7, to protect the notably hardline Jewish settlers there. He says firmly that he now regrets what repeatedly took place during his tour of duty.

But his frequent, if nervous, grins and giggles occasionally show just a hint of the bravado he might have displayed if boasting of his exploits to his mates in a bar. Repeatedly he turns to the older former soldier who has persuaded him to speak to us, and says as if seeking reassurance: "You know how it is in Hebron."

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The number of migratory songbirds returning to North America has gone into sharp decline due to the unregulated use of highly toxic pesticides and other chemicals across Latin America.

Ornithologists blame the demand for out-of-season fruit and vegetables and other crops in North America and Europe for the destruction of tens of millions of passerine birds. By some counts, half of the songbirds that warbled across America's skies only 40 years ago have gone, wiped out by pesticides or loss of habitat.

Because of changed consumer habits in Europe and the US, export-led agriculture has transformed the wintering grounds of birds into intensive farming operations producing grapes, melons and bananas as well as rice for export.

Ornithologists say another silent spring is dawning across the US as birds are being poisoned by toxic chemicals or killed as pests in their winter refuges across South and Central America as well as the Caribbean. They say that many species of songbird will never recover, and others may even become endangered or extinct if controls are not put in place or consumer habits changed.

More problems await those birds which make it home. Millions of acres of wilderness the birds use as nesting grounds have been ploughed under in the drive to grow corn for ethanol, for bio-fuel.

[Read the whole article.]

Five years of occupation have destroyed Iraq as a country. Baghdad is today a collection of hostile Sunni and Shia ghettoes divided by high concrete walls. Different districts even have different national flags. Sunni areas use the old Iraqi flag with the three stars of the Baath party, and the Shia wave a newer version, adopted by the Shia-Kurdish government. The Kurds have their own flag.

The Iraqi government tries to give the impression that normality is returning. Iraqi journalists are told not to mention the continuing violence. When a bomb exploded in Karada district near my hotel, killing 70 people, the police beat and drove away a television cameraman trying to take pictures of the devastation. Civilian casualties have fallen from 65 Iraqis killed daily from November 2006 to August 2007 to 26 daily in February. But the fall in the death rate is partly because ethnic cleansing has already done its grim work and in much of Baghdad there are no mixed areas left.

[Read the whole article.]

After failing to anticipate Hamas's victory over Fatah in the 2006 Palestinian election, the White House cooked up yet another scandalously covert and self-defeating Middle East debacle: part Iran-contra, part Bay of Pigs. With confidential documents, corroborated by outraged former and current U.S. officials, David Rose reveals how President Bush, Condoleezza Rice, and Deputy National-Security Adviser Elliott Abrams backed an armed force under Fatah strongman Muhammad Dahlan, touching off a bloody civil war in Gaza and leaving Hamas stronger than ever.

[Read the whole article.]

The "surge" - the 30,000 extra US troops implementing a new security plan in Baghdad - has helped to make Baghdad safer. In effect, they have frozen into place the Shia victory of 2006. The city is broken up into enclaves sealed off by concrete walls with only one entrance and exit.

Areas that were once mixed are not being reoccupied by whichever community was driven out. Bassim can no more reclaim, or even visit, his house in the Jihad district of Baghdad than he could a year ago. He can still work as a taxi driver only in Sunni areas. The US military and the Iraqi government are wary of even trying to reverse sectarian cleansing because this might break the present fragile truce.

"People say things are better than they were," says Zanab Jafar, a well-educated Shia woman living in al-Hamraa, west Baghdad, "but what they mean is that they are better than [during] the bloodbath of 2006. The situation is still terrible."

Baghdad still feels and looks like a city at war. There are checkpoints everywhere. "You seldom see young girls walking in the streets, or in restaurants," adds Zanab Jafar, "because their families are terrified they will be kidnapped, so they send private cars to pick them up directly from school." New shops open, but they are always in the heart of districts controlled by a single community because nobody wants to venture far from their home to shop.

For all the talk of Baghdad being safer, it remains an extraordinarily dangerous place. One Western security company is still asking $3,000 to pick a man up at the airport and drive him six miles to his hotel in central Baghdad. The number of dead bodies being picked up by the police every morning in the capital is down to three or four when once it was 50 or 60.

"People say things are better than they were," says Zanab Jafar, a well-educated Shia woman living in al-Hamraa, west Baghdad, "but what they mean is that they are better than [during] the bloodbath of 2006. The situation is still terrible."

[Read the whole article.]

Much of Gaza is once again in darkness, as Israel cut off the fuel to its only power plant. Hospital patients have reportedly died, communications are out, and movement and commerce in an already beleaguered economy have come to a near halt.

Michele Mercier, spokesperson for the the International Committee of the Red Cross, said Gaza hospitals still had medications "but it won't last for more than two or three days." Now, Gazans must also contend with the possibility of already scarce food supplies being cut off. Christopher Gunness of UNRWA, the UN relief agency, said the agency could be forced to suspend food distribution to 860,000 people because of the shortage of fuel and plastic bags.

The New York Times, always to be counted on to provide the right euphemisms, reported that "Israel's defense minister, Ehud Barak, ordered a temporary halt on all imports into the Hamas-run Gaza Strip late last week. The measure, along with stepped-up military operations in Gaza, was meant to persuade Palestinian militants there to stop firing rockets at Israel." (Isabel Kershner, "Fuel Shortage Shuts Gaza Power Plant, Leaving City Dark," 21 January 2008.)

Terms like "measures" and "persuasion" sound so gentle. But they cover up a brutal reality that Israeli leaders are keen to boast about: they are acting with premeditation to inflict suffering on the Palestinian civilian population, and they display an extraordinary degree of callousness for their victims.

[Read the whole article.]

Mr. Sepi did not like to venture outside too late. But, plagued by nightmares about an Iraqi civilian killed by his unit, he often needed alcohol to fall asleep. And so it was that night, when, seized by a gut feeling of lurking danger, he slid a trench coat over his slight frame -- and tucked an assault rifle inside it.

"Matthew knew he shouldn't be taking his AK-47 to the 7-Eleven," Detective Laura Andersen said, "but he was scared to death in that neighborhood, he was military trained and, in his mind, he needed the weapon to protect himself."

Head bowed, Mr. Sepi scurried down an alley, ignoring shouts about trespassing on gang turf. A battle-weary grenadier who was still legally under-age, he paid a stranger to buy him two tall cans of beer, his self-prescribed treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder.

As Mr. Sepi started home, two gang members, both large and both armed, stepped out of the darkness. Mr. Sepi said in an interview that he spied the butt of a gun, heard a boom, saw a flash and "just snapped."

In the end, one gang member lay dead, bleeding onto the pavement. The other was wounded. And Mr. Sepi fled, "breaking contact" with the enemy, as he later described it. With his rifle raised, he crept home, loaded 180 rounds of ammunition into his car and drove until police lights flashed behind him.

"Who did I take fire from?" he asked urgently. Wearing his Army camouflage pants, the diminutive young man said he had been ambushed and then instinctively "engaged the targets." He shook. He also cried.

Town by town across the country, headlines have been telling similar stories. Lakewood, Wash.: "Family Blames Iraq After Son Kills Wife." Pierre, S.D.: "Soldier Charged With Murder Testifies About Postwar Stress." Colorado Springs: "Iraq War Vets Suspected in Two Slayings, Crime Ring."

Individually, these are stories of local crimes, gut-wrenching postscripts to the war for the military men, their victims and their communities. Taken together, they paint the patchwork picture of a quiet phenomenon, tracing a cross-country trail of death and heartbreak.

[Read the whole article.]

On Tuesday, the Bush administration and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki pushed a resolution through the U.N. Security Council extending the mandate that provides legal cover for foreign troops to operate in Iraq for another year.

The move violated both the Iraqi constitution and a law passed earlier this year by the Iraqi parliament -- the only body directly elected by all those purple-finger-waving Iraqis in 2005 -- and it defied the will of around 80 percent of the Iraqi population.

Earlier in the week, a group representing a majority of lawmakers in Iraq's parliament -- a group made up of Sunni, Shiite and secular leaders -- sent a letter to the Security Council, a rough translation of which reads: "We reject in the strongest possible terms the unconditional renewal of the mandate and ask for clear mechanisms to obligate all foreign troops to completely withdrawal from Iraq according to an announced timetable."

We don't know if it was even read by members of the Security Council, but we do know that it, like previous communications from the Iraqi legislature, was completely ignored.

...

The U.N. mandate provides vital political cover for the occupation. The Bush administration has ignored or violated much of the international law governing the conduct of an occupying power. As Orwellian as it is, the United States, having bombed the hell out of Iraq, invaded it with a huge mechanized army and installed a government that exists wholly within the confines of its sheltered "international zone" -- the "Green Zone" -- and now maintains that its troops are in the country by the invitation of that government. The United Nations' mandate is a key part of maintaining that fiction.

[Read the whole article.]

When you warn people about the dangers of climate change, they call you a saint. When you explain what needs to be done to stop it, they call you a communist. Let me show you why.

There is now a broad scientific consensus that we need to prevent temperatures from rising by more than 2C above their pre-industrial level. Beyond that point, the Greenland ice sheet could go into irreversible meltdown, some ecosystems collapse, billions suffer from water stress, and droughts start to threaten global food supplies.

The government proposes to cut the UK's carbon emissions by 60% by 2050. This target is based on a report published in 2000. That report was based on an assessment published in 1995, which drew on scientific papers published a few years earlier. The UK's policy, in other words, is based on papers some 15 years old. Our target, which is one of the toughest on earth, bears no relation to current science.

...

The real issues in Bali are not technical or economic. The crisis we face demands a profound philosophical discussion, a reappraisal of who we are and what progress means. Debating these matters makes us neither saints nor communists; it shows only that we have understood the science.

[Read the whole article.]

Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki signed the declaration of principles during a secure videoconference as part of an effort to move forward 4 1/2 years after a U.S.-led coalition invaded Iraq and toppled Saddam Hussein. The declaration calls for the current U.N. mandate to be extended one year, then replaced at the end of 2008 by a bilateral pact governing the economic, political and security aspects of the relationship.

"The basic message here should be clear: Iraq is increasingly able to stand on its own," said Lt. Gen. Douglas E. Lute, Bush's top Iraq adviser. "That's very good news. But it won't have to stand alone."

The nonbinding statement sets the parameters for talks on a formal pact. Those negotiations will address thorny issues such as what mission U.S. forces in Iraq will pursue, whether they will establish permanent bases, and what kind of immunity, if any, should be granted to private security contractors such as Blackwater Worldwide. Lute said negotiators will seek to reach such an agreement by July 31.

Abu Abed, a member of the insurgent Islamic Army, has recently become the commander of the US-sponsored "Ameriya Knights". He is one of the new breed of Sunni warlords who are being paid by the US to fight al-Qaida in Iraq. The Americans call their new allies Concerned Citizens.

A senior Sunni sheikh, whose tribe is joining the new alliance with the Americans against al-Qaida, told me in Beirut that it was a simple equation for him. "It's just a way to get arms, and to be a legalised security force to be able to stand against Shia militias and to prevent the Iraqi army and police from entering their areas," he said.

"The Americans lost hope with an Iraqi government that is both sectarian and dominated by militias, so they are paying for locals to fight al-Qaida. It will create a series of warlords.

"It's like someone who brought cats to fight rats, found himself with too many cats and brought dogs to fight the cats. Now they need elephants."

...

Back at Abu Abed's HQ, the men were put into cells. Men in US-supplied blue uniforms were being jailed by men in US-supplied green uniforms.

An American officer, Captain Cosper, visited Abu Abed that night. He sat in the office trying to make sense of what was going on. "They [the Concerned Citizens] are not allowed to detain people or conduct raids," he told me.

In a nearby room, two blindfolded men were being questioned by Abu Abed's men. An American soldier put his head inside, watched for a few seconds and left. "They won't do anything to them while we're here," he said.

[Read the whole article.]

A catastrophic failure of the largest dam in Iraq would send a wave 65ft high hurtling down the valley of the river Tigris, killing up to 500,000 people, US engineers warned yesterday.

The dam, which is near Mosul in the north of the country, was built in 1984 on a bed of water-soluble rock and is in imminent danger of collapse. "In terms of the internal erosion potential of the foundation, Mosul Dam is the most dangerous dam in the world," said a report by the US Army Corps of Engineers. "If a small problem [at] Mosul dam occurs, failure is likely." The collapse of the two-mile long, earth-filled dam would release eight billion cubic metres of water in the lake behind it in a giant wave which would flood Mosul - a city of 1.7 million people 20 miles downstream - to a depth of 60ft.

The frantic debate within the US and Iraqi governments over the failing dam was kept secret for months to avoid public panic and attracting the attention of insurgents. The US Army Corps of Engineers has tried to monitor the deterioration and undertake remedial action.

The state of the dam and the experts' belief that it is on the verge of collapse was first revealed by The Independent on 8 August. "It could go at any minute," a senior aid worker, who knew of the struggle by American and Iraqi engineers to save the dam, told this newspaper. "The potential for disaster is very great."

...

The flat, Mesopotamian plain was the site of the biblical flood where Noah launched his ark to escape the rising waters. Much of the story was drawn from the legend of Gilgamesh, the ancient Mesopotamian hero, which recounts the tale of a great inundation with details strikingly similar to those in Genesis.

For millennia,Iraq was prone to floods as melting winter snows in the mountains of Turkey filled the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. In the 20th century, flooding was brought under control by an elaborate system of dams and dykes. But these would be unable to cope with the vast quantities of water which would be released if the Mosul Dam bursts.

U.S. forces engaged in an hours-long gun battle with militants during an early-morning raid in the Iraqi capital's Shiite Muslim district of Sadr City on Sunday. American officials said as many as 49 people were killed in the fighting.

The Iraqi government said many of the victims were civilians and protested the action. The American military said that all of those killed were "criminals."

A freelance correspondent for The Times said he saw the corpses of a woman and two small children. The wounded included two boys, 8 and 11, who were interviewed in their beds at Imam Ali Hospital by The Times. Another man said his 18-month-old son was killed, as well as a neighbor's son who was the same age.

The fighting followed recent incidents in which U.S. forces killed 15 civilians in an attack on alleged leaders of the insurgent group Al Qaeda in Iraq, and Western private security contractors shot and killed 17 Iraqi civilians, inflaming anti-U.S. sentiment.

In two raids this summer on Sadr City, American soldiers killed more than 50 people.

...

But the Iraqi witnesses' details about casualties differed widely from those provided by the Americans. "The pilot shot me when I crossed the street to buy bread," 11-year-old Ali Ahmad said from his hospital bed. "I have been hit by shrapnel in my chest."

"I was going to buy eggs for breakfast, then I was hit by a helicopter," said Murtada Naim, an 8-year-old who was also interviewed in his hospital bed. He appeared to have suffered wounds to his chest and hand.

Ismail Mikilf Hassan, 47, said his toddler was killed when a missile hit his house, and that his 19-year-old son, who was in the hospital, had been wounded by shrapnel.

[Read the whole article.]

The United States sells death, destruction, and terror as a fundamental instrument of its foreign policy. It sees arms sales as a way of making and keeping strategic friends and tying countries more directly to U.S. military planning and operations. At its simplest, as Lt. Gen. Jeffrey B. Kohler, director of the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, told The New York Times in 2006, the United States likes arms deals because "it gives us access and influence and builds friendships." South Asia has been an important arena for this effort, and it teaches some lessons the United States should not ignore.

A recent Congressional Research Service report on international arms sales records that last year the United States delivered nearly $8 billion worth of weapons to Third World countries. This was about 40% of all such arms transfers. The United States signed agreements to sell over $10 billion worth of weapons, one-third of all arms deals with Third World countries.

It is easy to put this in perspective: $10 billon a year is the estimated cost of meeting the UN Millennium Development Goal for water and sanitation, which would reduce by half the proportion of people in the world without proper access to drinking water and basic sanitation by 2015. Today, about 1.1 billion people do not have access to a minimal amount of clean water and about 2.6 billion people do not have access to basic sanitation.

The scale of recent U.S. arms sales should not be news. The United States sold over $61 billion worth of weapons to Third World countries from 1999-2006, making it by far the leading international supplier. Russia, the second largest arms dealer, managed to sell less than half as much.

The largest third world buyer of weapons in 2006 was Pakistan. It purchased just over $5 billion in arms deals. Almost $3 billion of the purchases by Pakistan were new U.S.-made F-16s fighter jets, up-grades to the F-16s Pakistan bought in the 1980s, and bombs and missiles to arm these planes. A White House Press spokesman explained that the sale of the jet fighters "demonstrates our commitment to a long-term relationship with Pakistan."

[Read the whole article.]

Nuclear-armed states are criminal states. They have a legal obligation, confirmed by the World Court, to live up to Article 6 of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which calls on them to carry out good-faith negotiations to eliminate nuclear weapons entirely. None of the nuclear states has lived up to it.

The United States is a leading violator, especially the Bush administration, which even has stated that it isn't subject to Article 6.

On July 27, Washington entered into an agreement with India that guts the central part of the NPT, though there remains substantial opposition in both countries. India, like Israel and Pakistan (but unlike Iran), is not an NPT signatory, and has developed nuclear weapons outside the treaty. With this new agreement, the Bush administration effectively endorses and facilitates this outlaw behaviour. The agreement violates US law, and bypasses the Nuclear Suppliers Group, the 45 nations that have established strict rules to lessen the danger of proliferation of nuclear weapons.

Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, observes that the agreement doesn't bar further Indian nuclear testing and, "incredibly, ... commits Washington to help New Delhi secure fuel supplies from other countries even if India resumes testing." It also permits India to "free up its limited domestic supplies for bomb production." All these steps are in direct violation of international nonproliferation agreements.

The Indo-US agreement is likely to prompt others to break the rules as well. Pakistan is reported to be building a plutonium production reactor for nuclear weapons, apparently beginning a more advanced phase of weapons design. Israel, the regional nuclear superpower, has been lobbying Congress for privileges similar to India's, and has approached the Nuclear Suppliers Group with requests for exemption from its rules. Now France, Russia and Australia have moved to pursue nuclear deals with India, as China has with Pakistan -- hardly a surprise, once the global superpower has opened the door.

The Indo-US deal mixes military and commercial motives. Nuclear weapons specialist Gary Milhollin noted Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's testimony to Congress that the agreement was "crafted with the private sector firmly in mind," particularly aircraft and reactors and, Milhollin stresses, military aircraft. By undermining the barriers against nuclear war, he adds, the agreement not only increases regional tensions but also "may hasten the day when a nuclear explosion destroys an American city." Washington's message is that "export controls are less important to the United States than money" -- that is, profits for US corporations -- whatever the potential threat. Kimball points out that the United States is granting India "terms of nuclear trade more favourable than those for states that have assumed all the obligations and responsibilities" of the NPT. In most of the world, few can fail to see the cynicism. Washington rewards allies and clients that ignore the NPT rules entirely, while threatening war against Iran, which is not known to have violated the NPT, despite extreme provocation: The United States has occupied two of Iran's neighbours and openly sought to overthrow the Iranian regime since it broke free of US control in 1979.

Over the past few years, India and Pakistan have made strides towards easing the tensions between the two countries. People-to-people contacts have increased and the governments are in discussion over the many outstanding issues that divide the two states. Those promising developments may well be reversed by the Indo-US nuclear deal. One of the means to build confidence throughout the region was the creation of a natural gas pipeline from Iran through Pakistan into India. The "peace pipeline" would have tied the region together and opened the possibilities for further peaceful integration.

The pipeline, and the hope it offers, might become a casualty of the Indo-US agreement, which Washington sees as a measure to isolate its Iranian enemy by offering India nuclear power in exchange for Iranian gas -- though in fact India would gain only a fraction of what Iran could provide.

The Indo-US deal continues the pattern of Washington's taking every measure to isolate Iran. In 2006, the US Congress passed the Hyde Act, which specifically demanded that the US government "secure India's full and active participation in United States efforts to dissuade, isolate, and if necessary, sanction and contain Iran for its efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction."

It is noteworthy that the great majority of Americans -- and Iranians -- favour converting the entire region to a nuclear-weapons free zone, including Iran and Israel. One may also recall that UN Security Council Resolution 687 of April 3, 1991, to which Washington regularly appealed when seeking justification for its invasion of Iraq, calls for "establishing in the Middle East a zone free from weapons of mass destruction and all missiles for their delivery."

Clearly, ways to mitigate current crises aren't lacking.

This Indo-US agreement richly deserves to be derailed. The threat of nuclear war is extremely serious, and growing, and part of the reason is that the nuclear states -- led by the United States -- simply refuse to live up to their obligations or are significantly violating them, this latest effort being another step toward disaster.

The US Congress gets a chance to weigh in on this deal after the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Nuclear Suppliers Group vet it. Perhaps Congress, reflecting a citizenry fed up with nuclear gamesmanship, can reject the agreement. A better way to go forward is to pursue the need for global nuclear disarmament, recognising that the very survival of the species is at stake.

Somewhere in imponderable nirvana, the Buddha may be exhibiting the faintest of smiles. Or is he? What a heavenly sight - the discreet, barefooted, crimson- and maroon-clad Buddhist monks of Myanmar, formerly Burma, able to affirm publicly their supreme moral authority and righteousness, supported by an exhausted, abused population, against the ravages of a pitiless, pitiful, 45-year-old military junta.

But the Buddha, whose infinite wisdom also includes knowledge about energy wars, would say that as everything is impermanent, the crackdown will come. The question is how.

Few can fail to be intensely moved by the exhilarating images of the "crimson revolution" - thousands of monks chanting "democracy, democracy" or reciting the Metta Sutta - the Buddha sermon on loving kindness, while civilian demonstrators, on a practical level, also call for the release of hundreds of political prisoners and a reduction in the price of fuel (raised 500% last month, the root cause of the protests).

[Read the whole article.]

The figure from ORB, a British polling agency that has conducted several surveys in Iraq, followed statements this week from the U.S. military defending itself against accusations it was trying to play down Iraqi deaths to make its strategy appear successful.

According to the ORB poll, a survey of 1,461 adults suggested that the total number slain during more than four years of war was more than 1.2 million. ORB said it drew its conclusion from responses to the question about those living under one roof: "How many members of your household, if any, have died as a result of the conflict in Iraq since 2003?" Based on Iraq's estimated number of households -- 4,050,597 -- it said the 1.2 million figure was reasonable.

ORB said its poll had a margin of error of 2.4%. According to its findings, nearly one in two households in Baghdad had lost at least one member to war- related violence, and 22% of households nationwide had suffered at least one death. It said 48% of the victims were shot to death and 20% died as a result of car bombs, with other explosions and military bombardments blamed for most of the other fatalities.

It's a tried-and-tested torture technique: strike fear into your victims, deprive them of cherished essentials and then eradicate their memories. In 2003, the US applied this on an enormous scale for its invasion of Iraq. And then, after Saddam's regime crumbled, Washington set out to rebuild the traumatised country through a disastrous programme of privatisation and unfettered capitalism, as Naomi Klein shows in this exclusive extract from her new book.

Q: There's a school of thought that free markets and democracy go hand in hand and together they make people free and prosperous. You're arguing that free-market ideology has triumphed around the world not because people have embraced the market but because the ideology has been imposed on them, often in moments of distress. Furthermore, these moments of distress have sometimes been created by governments as a pretext to bring in free-market policies. To top it all off, the policies haven't really worked. They've just enriched the people who introduced them. How's that for a summary?

Klein: That's pretty good. I would quibble with a few things. I don't know that there are examples of the governments themselves creating the crises.

Q: Okay. Is violence inherent in capitalism or is that something that's recently mutated out of capitalism as it's been practised over the last several hundred years?

Klein: I think you can make that argument. But the book is really looking at a war between different kinds of capitalism. It's about a battle of ideas between Keynesianism -- a mixed economy, which is what we have in this country -- and what I describe as a fundamentalist strain of capitalism which has an objection to the very idea of mixed economy. When these sort of fundamentalist capitalists get their way what is constructed is not capitalism at all, it's actually corporatism, China being one example ...

Q: Give me the attributes of fundamentalist capitalism.

Klein: They're almost the attributes of every fundamentalist: the desire for purity, a belief in a perfect balance, and every time there are problems identified they are attributed to perversions, distortions within what would otherwise be a perfect system. I think you see this from religious fundamentalists and from Marxist fundamentalists, and I would argue that [Austrian economist Friedrich] Hayek and [University of Chicago economist Milton] Friedman shared this dream of the pure system. These are brilliant mathematicians, in many cases, so it looks perfect in their modelling. But I think anyone who falls in love with a system is dangerous, because the world doesn't comply and then you get angry at the world.

[Read the interview.]

Aid agencies had warned of the possibility of a cholera outbreak as blazing summer heat settled in Iraq, where the infrastructure is shattered by war and neglect. The disease tends to appear in the summer because, as the temperature rises, Iraq's chronic electricity shortages make it difficult to operate pumps at sewage and drinking-water treatment plants, which leaves many people without clean water.

That was evident Wednesday at a squalid encampment outside Sulaymaniya, where several hundred people live in makeshift tents that are little more than worn blankets draped over wooden frames. Girls and women lined up to fill containers from a tanker distributing water.

"We drink from this water, whether it's drinkable or not," Zahra Jabbar Kadhim said.

"In this tent, we bathe, cook and sleep," she said, pointing to the canvas she shares with her husband, Abdullah Ahmed, and four children.

Ahmed, a Sunni Arab, said they fled Baghdad after a Shiite militia threatened to kill him.

Lamia Karim Shaalan ended up at the camp after she sold everything she had, including her shop, to pay a $60,000 ransom to kidnappers who took her 10-year-old daughter in Baghdad's Dora neighborhood.

"We live in this handmade tent on the sand and in the middle of heat and snakes," she said.

Who knew sports history could strike fear in the most fearsome prison system in the United States? But what other explanation could there be for the fact that the history of "America's Pastime" is being denied to Texas Death Row prisoner Kenneth Foster Jr.?

Kenneth's case has garnered international attention because both prosecution and defense agree that he was 80 feet away from the murder of Michael LaHood. Earlier in the evening, he had been driving the man who pulled the trigger, Maurecio Brown. In Texas, that's enough to land him on Death Row.

Foster and I began to exchange letters on sports and politics after he read my book Welcome to the Terrordome.

"I have never had the opportunity to view sports in this way," he wrote. "And as I went through these revelations I began to have epiphanies about the way sports have a similar existence in prison. The similarities shook me .... Facing execution, the only thing that I began to get obsessive about was how to get heard and be free, and as the saying goes -- you can't serve 2 gods. Sports, as you know, becomes a way of life. You monitor it, you almost come to breathe it. Sports becomes a way of life in prison, because it becomes a way of survival. For men that don't have family or friends to help them financially ...it becomes a way to occupy your time. That's another sad story in itself, but it's the root to many men's obsession with sports."

It didn't matter whether he was on Death Row or Park Avenue -- I felt smarter having read his words. But even more satisfying was the thought that thinking about sports took his mind -- for a moment -- away from his imminent death, the 11-year-old daughter he will never touch again and the words he will never write.

I thought that sending him my first book, What's My Name Fool?: Sports and Resistance in the U.S., would be a good follow-up -- but here is where the Texas Department of Corrections got its briefs in a bunch. A form titled "Texas Dept of Criminal Justice, Publication review/denial notification" issued to Kenneth on Aug. 9 says that What's My Name Fool? was banned from the row: "It contains material that a reasonable person would construe as written solely for the purpose of communicating information designed to achieve the breakdown of prisons through offender disruption such as strikes or riots."

It specifically said that Pages 44 and 55 met this criteria.

After lifting my jaw off the ground, I went to read those dangerous pages. On Page 44, the radioactive quote in question was from that seditious revolutionary Jackie Robinson -- you know, the guy whose number is retired by all of Major League Baseball. I quoted Robinson's autobiography, I Never Had It Made, when he wrote about suffering racism early in his rookie season:

"I felt tortured and I tried to just play ball and ignore the insults. But it was really getting to me. ... For one wild and rage-crazed moment I thought, 'To hell with Mr. Rickey's "noble experiment." ... To hell with the image of the patient black freak I was supposed to create.' I could throw down my bat, stride over to that Phillies dugout, grab one of those white sons of [expletive] and smash his teeth in with my despised black fist. Then I could walk away from it all."

On Page 55, the offensive passage was about Jack Johnson's defeat of the "Great White Hope," Jim Jeffries. It read: "Johnson was faster, stronger and smarter than Jeffries. He knocked Jeffries out with ease. After Johnson's victory, there were race riots around the country -- in Illinois, Missouri, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Texas and Washington, D.C. Most of the riots consisted of white lynch mobs attacking Blacks, and Blacks fighting back. This reaction to a boxing match was one of the most widespread racial uprisings in the U.S. until the 1968 assassination of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr."

Let's forget about the fact that there is something bizarre -- almost comical -- about Texas prison authorities believing that a sports history could lead to "the breakdown of prisons through offender disruption such as strikes or riots." Let's forget that they are denying a man reading material in his last hours.

There is something repugnant about the fact that they think a book -- any book -- would be the source of resistance, rather than the reality that 159 people have been executed since Gov. Rick Perry took office in 2001, or the fact that the people on Death Row have no civil rights, no access to radio, television or even arts and crafts.

It reminds me of the words of Carl Oglesby of the 1960s group Students for a Democratic Society: "It isn't the rebels who cause the troubles of the world, it's the troubles that cause the rebels."

The officials' fear that ideas -- even the ideas of sports history -- could cause a crisis in the Texas prisons reveals only how aware the Lone Star jailers are of how inhumanely they treat their prisoners.

There was a time in Texas when it was illegal to teach slaves to read. The fear was that ideas could turn anger often directed inward into action against those with their boots on black necks. It is perhaps the most fitting possible tribute to Jackie Robinson and Jack Johnson that their stories still strike fear into the hearts of those wearing the boots.

Whatever else they might disagree about, Iraqis, Americans and Britons have something crucial in common: large majorities in all three countries oppose the occupation of Iraq by US and British troops and want them brought home. Recognition that the war has been a political and human catastrophe is now so settled that politicians are obliged to pay at least lip service to the pervasive mood for withdrawal. Gordon Brown's studiedly suggestive remarks on the White House lawn about plans to move British troops from "combat to overwatch" in Basra, where two more British soldiers have been killed this week, were clearly aimed at anti-war opinion in Britain.

Meanwhile, speculation about scenarios for withdrawal is rampant in Washington and Iraq itself. But that doesn't mean it's about to happen - and there's a danger that pressure in the US and Britain to end the occupation could be relaxed in anticipation of a full-scale pullout that is still not seriously on the cards. After all, Richard Nixon was elected president in 1968 on a promise to end the Vietnam war and American troops were still there five years later.

What is clear is that the US has already suffered a strategic defeat in Iraq. A flagrant act of aggression intended to be a demonstration of untrammelled US imperial power to impose its will on the heart of the oil-producing Arab and Muslim world has instead demonstrated a fatal vulnerability to "asymmetric warfare". It's also true that, as a senior US intelligence officer told the Washington Post this week, "the British have basically been defeated in the south". Far from keeping rival militia from each other's throats, over 80% of violent attacks in the area are directed against British troops.

But, given the political embarrassment a British pullout would represent for the Bush administration in Washington, it's hard to imagine Brown's government ordering a comprehensive withdrawal any time soon. So British soldiers will have to expect to go on paying Tony Blair's blood price for the much-vaunted special relationship.

Despite the congressional bluster, a better guide to US intentions was given by the defence secretary, Robert Gates, a couple of months back, when he declared that the US was looking for a "long and enduring presence" in Iraq - reflected in plans to consolidate 14 "enduring bases" across the country. Given the huge US strategic interest in Iraq and the region - and its determination to halt the spread of Iranian influence - that seems unlikely to change in the event of a Democratic presidential victory in 2008. In other words, the price of staying in Iraq will have to rise still further if the US is going to be forced out and Iraq regain its independence.

Inside Iraq, that price can only be exacted by increased resistance. More than any other single factor, it has been the war of attrition waged by Iraq's armed resistance - or insurgency as it is usually described in the western media - that has successfully challenged the world's most powerful army and driven the demand for withdrawal to the top of the political agenda in Washington. Two years ago the US vice-president, Dick Cheney, insisted the insurgency was in its "last throes". But while the outside world has increasingly focused on al-Qaida-style atrocities against civilians and sectarian killings, the guerrilla war against the occupation forces has continued to escalate. There are now over 5,000 attacks a month, a more than 20-fold increase on four years ago, and the US and British death toll is rising. Opinion polls show there is majority support for armed resistance across Iraq; in Sunni areas it is overwhelming.

The mainstream resistance movement has often been dismissed in the US and Britain as politically incoherent, obscurantist or tarred with the brush of al-Qaida (which accounts for a minority of attacks, though perhaps a majority of suicide bombings). That has been made easier as it operated underground, communicating mainly through the internet or occasional statements to the Arabic media. Now that is changing. Last month, I interviewed leaders of three Sunni-based Islamist and nationalist-leaning resistance groups which are joining four others to launch a political front in advance of an expected American withdrawal. The recent cross-party Iraq Commission report cites four of the seven as among the "four or five main groups" the insurgency has now consolidated around. All have signed up to an anti-sectarian, anti-al-Qaida platform, oppose attacks on civilians, and call for negotiated withdrawal and free elections.

The greatest danger to both the resistance and the wider campaign to end the occupation remains the Sunni-Shia split, fostered since the invasion in classic divide-and-rule mode. Throughout the occupation, armed resistance has been concentrated in mainly Sunni Arab areas. Whenever it has spread to the Shia population - as it did in 2004, when Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi army fought the Americans - the potentially decisive threat to US control from a genuinely nationwide resistance movement has become clear. Now armed resistance by the Mahdi army has re-emerged, against the British in Basra and the Americans in Baghdad, where the US lieutenant general Raymond Odierno has claimed that most attacks during July were by Shia fighters.

But while acutely aware of the need to make common cause with Shia groups and the danger of the breakup of the country, the new Sunni-based resistance front refuses to have anything to do with the Mahdi army because of its role in sectarian killings and on-off participation in the floundering US-sponsored government. Meanwhile, the US is seeking to draw some on the margins of the Sunni-based resistance into the orbit of its anti-Iranian, anti-Shia regional alliance.

The history of anti-colonial and anti-occupation resistance campaigns shows that success has almost always depended on broad-based national movements. But the embryonic resistance front has got to be a positive development if it holds together. Not only could the creation of an alliance with a common programme help open up cooperation with Shia anti-occupation forces now, but if there is going to be a stable post-occupation settlement in Iraq, that will have to include all those with genuine support on the ground. Sooner or later, the Americans are going to have to negotiate with these groups.

Two thousand Iraqis are fleeing their homes every day. It is the greatest mass exodus of people ever in the Middle East and dwarfs anything seen in Europe since the Second World War. Four million people, one in seven Iraqis, have run away, because if they do not they will be killed. Two million have left Iraq, mainly for Syria and Jordan, and the same number have fled within the country.

Yet, while the US and Britain express sympathy for the plight of refugees in Africa, they are ignoring - or playing down - a far greater tragedy which is largely of their own making.

The US and Britain may not want to dwell on the disasters that have befallen Iraq during their occupation but the shanty towns crammed with refugees springing up in Iraq and neighbouring countries are becoming impossible to ignore.

Even so the UNHCR is having difficulty raising $100m (#50m) for relief. The organisation says the two countries caring for the biggest proportion of Iraqi refugees - Syria and Jordan - have still received "next to nothing from the world community". Some 1.4 million Iraqis have fled to Syria according to the UN High Commission for Refugees, Jordan has taken in 750 000 while Egypt and Lebanon have seen 200 000 Iraqis cross into their territories.

Kalawar refugee camp in Sulaymaniyah is a microcosm of the misery to which millions of Iraqis have been reduced.

"At least it is safe here," says Walid Sha'ad Nayef, 38, as he stands amid the stink of rotting garbage and raw sewage. He fled from the lethally dangerous Sa'adiyah district in Baghdad 11 months ago. As we speak to him, a man silently presents us with the death certificate of his son, Farez Maher Zedan, who was killed in Baghdad on 20 May 2006.

Kalawar is a horrible place. Situated behind a petrol station down a dusty track, the first sight of the camp is of rough shelters made out of rags, torn pieces of cardboard and old blankets. The stench is explained by the fact the Kurdish municipal authorities will not allow the 470 people in the camp to dig latrines. They say this might encourage them to stay.

...

Asked to list their worst problems Mr Nayef said they were the lack of school for the children, shortage of food, no kerosene to cook with, no money, no jobs and no electricity. The real answer to the question is that the Arabs of Kalawar have nothing. They have only received two cartons of food each from the International Committee of the Red Cross and a tank of clean water.

[Read the article.]

Asma al-Haj didn't know what had happened to her husband until late 2002, when she received a letter from him explaining that he was in Guantanamo. Around the same time, Al Jazeera issued a press release announcing that an employee was being held at the camp. The Committee to Protect Journalists wrote to former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld requesting information, but received no reply. For the next three years, little was known about the circumstances of al-Haj's detention, until early 2005 when he obtained the services of Clive Stafford Smith, a lawyer based in Britain.

The unorthodox legal processes governing detainees at Guantanamo are ill-suited to the familiar legal terminology of a trial. For the first two years that Guantanamo operated, the administration was able to prevent inmates from having access to any kind of legal forum at all, including Article 5 hearings under the Geneva Conventions (historically used by the military to determine whether a detainee is a legitimate prisoner of war) or habeas corpus review in a U.S. court. When the Supreme Court pronounced this state of affairs unconstitutional in June 2004, the administration devised special panels for detainees: a Combat Status Review Tribunal, or CSRT, to review whether a detainee's "enemy combatant" status was justified; followed by an Administrative Review Board, or ARB, an annual assessment of whether the detainee still belonged at Guantanamo. But those forums bear little resemblance to trials. They begin with the assumption that the detainee's enemy combatant label is correct. Instead of charging a detainee with violations of international or national law, military officers present an "Unclassified Summary of Evidence," which is assumed to be accurate. The detainee and his lawyer (if he has one) are rarely permitted to see the evidence itself, if at all. Nor can the lawyer attend the hearing (the detainee is instead provided with a military representative, who is obliged to tell the panel of any useful information he learns about the detainee in the process of helping him prepare). So far the written summaries in al-Haj's CSRTs and ARBs are the only formal information Stafford Smith has about why his client is being detained in Guantanamo.

For his part, Stafford Smith believes that al-Haj "is clearly in Guantanamo for one reason only, and that's because he's an employee of Al Jazeera." According to Stafford Smith, al-Haj has been interrogated approximately 130 times. Roughly 125 of those sessions, he said, dealt not with the allegations but with Al Jazeera's operations. Stafford Smith told me that military interrogators have repeatedly asked al-Haj to confirm that prominent Al Jazeera journalists are members of terrorist organizations or that Al Jazeera is funded by Al Qaeda. In addition, said Stafford Smith, interrogators offered to release al-Haj if he would spy on the network. Several military and intelligence sources with knowledge of Guantanamo told me that those contentions seem plausible, but they are impossible to confirm.

[Read the article.]

What if you spoke regularly of "haji food," "haji music" and "haji homes"? What if your speeding convoys ran over civilians often enough that no one thought to report the incidents? What if your platoon was told pointblank: "The Geneva Conventions don't exist at all in Iraq, and that's in writing if you want to see it"; or, when you shot noncombatants, it was perfectly normal to plant "throwaway weapons" by their bodies, arrest those civilians who survived, and accuse them all of being "insurgents"? What if your buddy got his meal-ready-to-eat standard spoon and asked you to take a photo of him pretending to scoop the brains out of a dead Iraqi? Or what if the general attitude among your buddies was: "A dead Iraqi is just another dead Iraqi.... You know, so what?"

These examples -- and many more like them -- can be found in a remarkable breaking story in the new issue of the Nation magazine. In a months-long investigation, Chris Hedges and Laila al-Arian interviewed 50 U.S. combat veterans who had been stationed in Iraq. They were intent on exploring "the effects of the four-year-old occupation on average Iraqi civilians" (as well as on those soldiers). The article, "The Other War: Iraq Vets Bear Witness," offers Americans a look behind the bombings and carnage in the headlines at just what kind of a war American troops have found themselves fighting -- focusing on the degradation that is essential to it and will accompany those troops home.

It is the perfect companion to the piece independent reporter Dahr Jamail has written for Tomdispatch today, which gives a sense of what anybody, even a journalist exposed to such "apocalyptic violence" and despair, is likely to bring home with him. Even more important, through a series of wrenching emails Jamail has received recently from Iraq, you get a small sense of what the dark and horrific war the American vets described to Hedges and al-Arian, a war only escalating in brutality, looks like to the Iraqis -- the ones who stand in danger of getting run over by those speeding convoys, or are at the other end of the kicked-in door, or the racism, or simply the anger and frustration of isolated soldiers in a strange and hostile land.

Jamail's new book on the Iraq he saw but most Americans, soldiers or journalists, didn't -- Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq -- is being published in October. Like Hedges and al-Arian, he offers a sense of an ongoing war you almost never hear about on the nightly news.

[Read the article.]

Over the past several months The Nation has 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.

...

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 on 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."

...

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.

[Read the whole article.]

More than 100 people, nearly half of them Afghan civilians, were killed in Nato air strikes against the Taliban this weekend, an investigation by local officials in Helmand province has concluded.

The civilian deaths are just the latest incident of so-called collateral damage to have occurred in recent weeks - a pattern that even foreign troops admit is rapidly undermining efforts to establish some sort of security in the country and win the support and loyalty of local people.

The assessment of Saturday's pre-dawn air strike in the Gereshk district came from the mayor and police chief, who said that 62 Taliban militants had died during the attacks as well as 45 ordinary Afghans including women, children and the elderly. President Hamid Karzai said this weekend that it was "difficult for us to accept or understand" what had happened .

He has repeatedly called on US, Nato and Taliban forces to do more to prevent civilian casualties, warning that "Afghan life is not cheap and it should not be treated as such". And he has ordered foreign forces to co-ordinate military operations with the Afghan government. "From now on, they have to work the way we ask them to work in here."

Concerns about the impact the fighting is having on civilians, especially children, has been growing since clashes increased after the spring thaws.

Such appeals appear to have had little impact on the operations of Nato's International Security Assistance Force [Isaf] or the US military's Operation Enduring Freedom, both of which are supposed to co-ordinate their actions with the Afghan authorities but often appeared to act unilaterally.

Did they jump or were they pushed? Was Hamas's seizure of Fatah security offices in Gaza unprovoked, or a pre-emptive strike to forestall a coup by Fatah? After last week's turmoil, it becomes increasingly important to uncover its origins.

The fundamental cause is, of course, well known. Israel, aided by the US, was not prepared to accept Hamas's victory in last year's Palestinian elections. Backed by a supine EU, the two governments decided to boycott their new Palestinian counterparts politically and punish Palestinian voters by blocking economic aid. Their policies had a dramatic effect, turning Gaza even more starkly into an open prison and creating human misery on a massive scale. The aim was to turn voters against Hamas - a strategy of stupidity as well as cynicism, since outside pressure usually produces resistance rather than surrender.

The policy shocked even moderate western officials like James Wolfensohn, the former World Bank chief, whom the Americans had appointed to help Gaza's economy before the Hamas election victory. "The result was not to build more economic activity but to build more barriers," he said this week while explaining why he resigned in disagreement with US and Israeli strategy.

It is also well known that Hamas was as surprised by its election victory as everyone else and that it offered its rival, Fatah, a coalition government of national unity. The offer was refused. If this was done initially out of wounded pride, Fatah's rejection of Hamas's regularly repeated overtures increasingly appeared to be coordinated with Washington as part of the boycott strategy.

Reports have been circulating for months of a more sinister side to the boycott. According to them, the US decided last year on a plan to arm and train Mahmoud Abbas's presidential guard in a deliberate effort to confront and defeat Hamas militarily. Israel has already locked up several dozen Hamas legislators and mayors from the West Bank. The next stage was to do the same in Gaza but have Palestinians, rather than Israelis, run the crackdown.

Arming insurgents against elected governments has a long US pedigree and it is no accident that Elliott Abrams, the deputy national security adviser and apparent architect of the anti-Hamas subversion, was a key player in Ronald Reagan's supply of weapons to the Contras who fought Nicaragua's elected government in the 1980s.

Documents doing the rounds in the Middle East purport to have evidence for Abrams's "hard coup" strategy. One text recounts Washington's objectives as expressed in US officials' conversations with an Arab government. These are, among others, "to maintain President Abbas and Fatah as the centre of gravity on the Palestinian scene", "avoid wasting time in accommodating Hamas's ideological conditions", "undermine Hamas's political status through providing for Palestinian economic needs", and "strengthen the Palestinian president's authority to be able to call and conduct early elections by autumn 2007".

The document is dated March 2, less than a month after Saudi Arabia brokered the Mecca agreement under which Abbas finally agreed with Hamas on a unity government. The deal upset the Israelis and Washington because it left Hamas's prime minister Ismail Haniyeh in charge. The document suggests the US wanted to sabotage it. Certainly, according to Hamas officials whom a depressed Abbas later briefed, Abbas was told to scrap Mecca at every subsequent meeting he has had with Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert or with US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice and Abrams.

Most ominously, the document of US objectives outlined a $1.27bn programme that would add seven special battalions, totalling 4,700 men, to the 15,000 Abbas already has in his presidential guard and other security forces, which were also to be given extra training and arms. "The desired outcome will be the transformation of Palestinian security forces and provide for the president of the Palestinian Authority to able to safeguard decisions such as dismissing the cabinet and forming an emergency cabinet," the document says.

[Read the whole article.]

For countries -- small, middling, or great -- acquiring nuclear weapons is all about the most basic requirement: the survival of the regime or nation. Joining the "nuclear club" has proved an effective strategy for survival. The possession of city-busting, potentially planet-ending weaponry threatens to bring about a MAD -- the Cold War acronym for "Mutually Assured Destruction" -- world. While the "madness" of this strategy is apparent, a rarely mentioned aspect of today's geopolitics is that acquiring nuclear arms has proven a logical step for a regime to take when its survival is at stake.

The United States and the Soviet Union, the superpowers of the Cold War, stacked up nuclear weapons by the thousands as "deterrents," well aware that the use of even a tiny fraction of them would annihilate the planet many times over. The doctrine worked, maintaining a precarious peace until the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

When Communist China acquired an atom bomb in 1964, it joined the four permanent members of the United Nations Security Council with veto power -- the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, and France -- which possessed nuclear arms, thus gaining an entry to the "nuclear club."

The club's monopoly was broken by a minor power, Israel, in 1967 -- stealthily, because its leaders decided not to test the bomb they had built. Even so, the Central Intelligence Agency got wind of it. What did then-President Lyndon Johnson's administration do about it? Nothing. And what about the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the U.N. watchdog agency charged with administering the 1968 nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)? It was empowered to act, but only in cases where a U.N. member had signed on to the Treaty. Israel did not.

In June 1981, when the U.N. Security Council's resolution 487 directed Israel to place its nuclear facilities under IAEA safeguards anyway, Israel simply ignored it. President Ronald Reagan's White House maintained a thunderous silence on the matter.

Compare that with the Bush administration's present stance in the case of Iran. Unlike Israel, Tehran initialed the Non-Proliferation Treaty early on -- and that treaty allows a signatory non-nuclear power to enrich uranium for civilian purposes. By not informing the IAEA when it started to do so in 2002, however, Tehran failed to meet its treaty obligations. That "original sin," combined with the Bush administration's strong animus toward a hostile regional power, has in its trail brought U.N. sanctions against Tehran, with Washington acting as the prime mover.

[Read the whole article.]

Across Iraq, millions of people are looking for safer places to live, and not finding them. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) reported last week that 4.2 million Iraqis have been forced out of their homes.

"The situation in Iraq continues to worsen," the UNHCR announced, "with more than two million Iraqis now believed to be displaced inside the country and another 2.2 million sheltering in neighbouring states."

The Iraqi refugee crisis is now surpassing in numbers anything ever seen in the Middle East, including the expulsion or flight of the Palestinians in 1948.

While most observers are focused on the U.S. Congress as it continues to issue new rubber stamps to legitimize Bush's permanent designs on Iraq, nationalists in the Iraqi parliament -- now representing a majority of the body -- continue to make progress toward bringing an end to their country's occupation.

The parliament today passed a binding resolution that will guarantee lawmakers an opportunity to block the extension of the U.N. mandate under which coalition troops now remain in Iraq when it comes up for renewal in December. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, whose cabinet is dominated by Iraqi separatists, may veto the measure.

The law requires the parliament's approval of any future extensions of the mandate, which have previously been made by Iraq's prime minister. It is an enormous development; lawmakers reached in Baghdad today said that they do in fact plan on blocking the extension of the coalition's mandate when it comes up for renewal six months from now.

Reached today by phone in Baghdad, Nassar al Rubaie, the head of Al-Sadr bloc in Iraq's Council of Representatives, said, "This new binding resolution will prevent the government from renewing the U.N. mandate without the parliament's permission. They'll need to come back to us by the end of the year, and we will definitely refuse to extend the U.N. mandate without conditions." Rubaie added: "There will be no such a thing as a blank check for renewing the U.N. mandate anymore, any renewal will be attached to a timetable for a complete withdrawal."

Without the cover of the U.N. mandate, the continued presence of coalition troops in Iraq would become, in law as in fact, an armed occupation, at which point it would no longer be politically tenable to support it. While polls show that most Iraqis consider U.S. forces to be occupiers rather than liberators or peacekeepers -- 92 percent of respondents said as much in a 2004 survey by the Independent Institute for Administration and Civil Society Studies -- the U.N. mandate confers an aura of legitimacy on the continuing presence of foreign troops on Iraq's streets, even four years after the fall of Saddam Hussein.

The resolution was initiated when a majority of Iraqi lawmakers signed a nonbinding legislative petition two weeks ago that called on the Iraqi government to demand a withdrawal of all foreign troops from the country.

While the issue of the Multinational Force's (MNF) mandate has been virtually ignored by the American media, it has been a point of fierce contention in Baghdad. Last fall, just after the midterm elections in the United States, a coalition of Iraqi nationalists in the parliament tried to attach conditions to the mandate's extension.

Iraqi lawmaker Jabir Habib (a Shia closely aligned with the al-Sadrist Movement) said in an interview last fall that the Iraqi Assembly had been poised to vote on the issue. "We spent the last months discussing the conditions we wanted to add to the mandate," he said, "and the majority of the parliament decided on three major conditions. These conditions included pulling the coalition forces out of the cities and transferring responsibility for security to the Iraqi government, giving Iraqis the right to recruit, train, equip and command the Iraqi security forces, and requiring that the U.N. mandate expire and be reviewed every six months instead of every 12 months."

Lawmakers said that while they likely had enough support to require a timetable for withdrawal as a condition of the mandate's renewal last year, they were sidelined by al-Maliki when the prime minister sent a letter to the U.N. Security Council requesting an extension without consulting members of parliament. The move outraged lawmakers.

In a phone interview just after the extension, Hassan al-Shammari, a Shia parliamentarian representing the al-Fadila party, said: "We had a closed session two days ago, and we were supposed to vote on the mandate in 10 days. I can not believe the mandate was just approved without our knowledge or input." Saleh al-Mutlaq, a secular Sunni lawmaker, was also shocked when we spoke with him last fall. "This is totally unexpected," he said. "It is another example of the prime minister dismissing the views of the parliament and monopolizing all power."

Today's resolution means that Maliki will not be able to make that claim this time around. Reached by phone today in Amman, Jordan, following the vote, al-Mutlaq said: "The parliament is more powerful now -- we can block the renewal of the U.N. mandate and demand to attach a timetable to it."

Iraq's government faces a crisis of legitimacy, in large part due to its refusal to demand the withdrawal of U.S. forces long favored by as many as four out of five Iraqis. According to a poll last year by the Project on International Policy Attitudes, 80 percent of Iraqis believe the U.S. plans to maintain permanent military bases in the country and three out of four believe that if their government were to demand a timetable for withdrawal, Washington would ignore it (according to the poll's authors, that finding was a major driver of the significant support among all groups of Iraqis for attacking coalition troops).

It is possible, even probable, that the Maliki regime will veto the resolution passed today. The White House's separatist allies in Baghdad have consistently found ways to bypass the assembly. Al Mutlaq said today that the nationalist bloc probably doesn't have the the two-thirds majority required to override a veto.

He warned, however, that the more the al-Maliki regime does to sideline the Iraqi parliament, the more Iraqis will be compelled to turn to violent resistance to the occupation. He said: "It will lead to many groups withdrawing from the political process and could only make things even worse."

The resolution passed today is only one part of the nationalists' effort to bring about a U.S. withdrawal. Nassar al Rubaie said of the measure's passage: "All of this is just our backup plan, but our other and more specific resolution setting a timetable will come soon." He promised that nationalists in parliament would force debate on a "clean" and binding resolution requiring occupation forces to withdrawal from the country in the immediate future. "We'll start the deliberations next week," he said. "We have enough signatures for that one already."

It is time once again for that touching annual ritual, in which the world's most powerful people move themselves to tears. At Heiligendamm they will emote with the wretched of the earth. They will beat their breasts and say many worthy and necessary things - about climate change, Africa, poverty, trade - but one word will not leave their lips. Power. Amid the patrician goodwill, there will be no acknowledgement that the power they wield over other nations destroys everything they claim to stand for.

The leaders of the G8 nations present themselves as a force for unmitigated good. Sometimes they fail, but they seek only to make the world a kinder place. Bob Geldof and Bono give oxygen to this deception, speaking of the good works the leaders might perform, or of the good works they have failed to perform - but not mentioning the active harm. They refuse to acknowledge that what the rich nations give with one finger they take with both hands.

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The G8 demands action on climate change; the World Bank, controlled by the G8 nations, funds coal burning power stations and deforestation projects. The G8 requests better terms of trade for Africa; Europe and the United States use the world trade talks to make sure this doesn't happen. The G8 leaders call for the debt to be reduced; the IMF demands that poor nations remove barriers to the capital flows that leave them in hock. The G8 leaders simultaneously wring their hands and wash their hands: we have done what we can; if we have failed, it is only because of the corruption of third world elites.

The question is no longer whether the undemocratic power the G8 nations exert over the rest of the world can be used for good or ill. The question is whether it will cease to be used.

[Read the whole article.]

The story is framed in U.S. news media as a simple matter of censorship: Prominent Venezuelan TV station RCTV is being silenced by the authoritarian government of President Hugo Chavez, who is punishing the station for its political criticism of his government.

According to CNN reporter T.J. Holmes (5/21/07), the issues are easy to understand: RCTV "is going to be shut down, is going to get off the air, because of President Hugo Chavez, not a big fan of it." Dubbing RCTV "a voice of free speech," Holmes explained, "Chavez, in a move that's angered a lot of free-speech groups, is refusing now to renew the license of this television station that has been critical of his government."

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In keeping with the media script that has bad guy Chavez brutishly silencing good guys in the democratic opposition, all these articles skimmed lightly over RCTV's history, the Venezuelan government's explanation for the license denial and the process that led to it.

RCTV and other commercial TV stations were key players in the April 2002 coup that briefly ousted Chavez's democratically elected government. During the short-lived insurrection, coup leaders took to commercial TV airwaves to thank the networks. "I must thank Venevision and RCTV," one grateful leader remarked in an appearance captured in the Irish film The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. The film documents the networks' participation in the short-lived coup, in which stations put themselves to service as bulletin boards for the coup--hosting coup leaders, silencing government voices and rallying the opposition to a march on the Presidential Palace that was part of the coup plotters strategy.

On April 11, 2002, the day of the coup, when military and civilian opposition leaders held press conferences calling for Chavez's ouster, RCTV hosted top coup plotter Carlos Ortega, who rallied demonstrators to the march on the presidential palace. On the same day, after the anti-democratic overthrow appeared to have succeeded, another coup leader, Vice-Admiral Victor Ramirez Perez, told a Venevision reporter (4/11/02): "We had a deadly weapon: the media. And now that I have the opportunity, let me congratulate you."

That commercial TV outlets including RCTV participated in the coup is not at question; even mainstream outlets have acknowledged as much. As reporter Juan Forero, Jackson Diehl's colleague at the Washington Post, explained (1/18/07), "RCTV, like three other major private television stations, encouraged the protests," resulting in the coup, "and, once Chavez was ousted, cheered his removal." The conservative British newspaper the Financial Times reported (5/21/07), "[Venezuelan] officials argue with some justification that RCTV actively supported the 2002 coup attempt against Mr. Chavez."

As FAIR's magazine Extra! argued last November, "Were a similar event to happen in the U.S., and TV journalists and executives were caught conspiring with coup plotters, it's doubtful they would stay out of jail, let alone be allowed to continue to run television stations, as they have in Venezuela."

When Chavez returned to power the commercial stations refused to cover the news, airing instead entertainment programs--in RCTV's case, the American film Pretty Woman. By refusing to cover such a newsworthy story, the stations abandoned the public interest and violated the public trust that is seen in Venezuela (and in the U.S.) as a requirement for operating on the public airwaves. Regarding RCTV's refusal to cover the return of Chavez to power, Columbia University professor and former NPR editor John Dinges told Marketplace (5/8/07):

What RCTV did simply can't be justified under any stretch of journalistic principles.... When a television channel simply fails to report, simply goes off the air during a period of national crisis, not because they're forced to, but simply because they don't agree with what's happening, you've lost your ability to defend what you do on journalistic principles.

The Venezuelan government is basing its denial of license on RCTV's involvement in the 2002 coup, not on the station's criticisms of or political opposition to the government. Many American pundits and some human rights spokespersons have confused the issue by claiming the action is based merely on political differences, failing to note that Venezuela's media, including its commercial broadcasters, are still among the most vigorously dissident on the planet.

[Read the whole article.]

The CIA has received secret presidential approval to mount a covert "black" operation to destabilize the Iranian government, current and former officials in the intelligence community tell the Blotter on ABCNews.com.

The sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the subject, say President Bush has signed a "nonlethal presidential finding" that puts into motion a CIA plan that reportedly includes a coordinated campaign of propaganda, disinformation and manipulation of Iran's currency and international financial transactions.

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Also briefed on the CIA proposal, according to intelligence sources, were National Security Advisor Steve Hadley and Deputy National Security Advisor Elliott Abrams.

"The entire plan has been blessed by Abrams, in particular," said one intelligence source familiar with the plan. "And Hadley had to put his chop on it."

Abrams' last involvement with attempting to destabilize a foreign government led to criminal charges.

He pleaded guilty in October 1991 to two misdemeanor counts of withholding information from Congress about the Reagan administration's ill-fated efforts to destabilize the Nicaraguan Sandinista government in Central America, known as the Iran-Contra affair. Abrams was later pardoned by President George H. W. Bush in December 1992.

In June 2001, Abrams was named by then National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice to head the National Security Council's office for democracy, human rights and international operations. On Feb. 2, 2005, National Security Advisor Hadley appointed Abrams deputy assistant to the president and deputy national security advisor for global democracy strategy, one of the nation's most senior national security positions.

As earlier reported on the Blotter on ABCNews.com, the United States has supported and encouraged an Iranian militant group, Jundullah, that has conducted deadly raids inside Iran from bases on the rugged Iran-Pakistan-Afghanistan "tri-border region.

U.S. officials deny any "direct funding" of Jundullah groups but say the leader of Jundullah was in regular contact with U.S. officials.

American intelligence sources say Jundullah has received money and weapons through the Afghanistan and Pakistan military and Pakistan's intelligence service. Pakistan has officially denied any connection.

A report broadcast on Iranian TV last Sunday said Iranian authorities had captured 10 men crossing the border with $500,000 in cash along with "maps of sensitive areas" and "modern spy equipment." A senior Pakistani official told ABCNews.com the 10 men were members of Jundullah.

The leader of the Jundullah group, according to the Pakistani official, has been recruiting and training "hundreds of men" for "unspecified missions" across the border in Iran.

At a meeting in mid-April in Geneva, held by Antonio Guterres, the United Nations high commissioner for refugees, the numbers presented confirmed what had long been suspected: the collapse of Iraq had created a refugee crisis, and that crisis was threatening to precipitate the collapse of the region. The numbers dwarfed anything that the Middle East had seen since the dislocations brought on by the establishment of Israel in 1948. In Syria, there were estimated to be 1.2 million Iraqi refugees. There were another 750,000 in Jordan, 100,000 in Egypt, 54,000 in Iran, 40,000 in Lebanon and 10,000 in Turkey. The overall estimate for the number of Iraqis who had fled Iraq was put at two million by Guterres. The number of displaced Iraqis still inside Iraq's borders was given as 1.9 million. This would mean about 15 percent of Iraqis have left their homes.

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The U.N. refugee agency meeting in Geneva on April 17 and 18 was the international community's belated attempt to confront the Iraqi refugee crisis. Jordan's minister of the interior, Mukhaimar al-Mukhaimar, claimed at the meeting that his country was spending $1 billion a year on Iraqi refugees; Syria's deputy foreign minister, Fayssal Mekdad, claimed his country had spent $160 million in 2006. "It's the fastest-growing refugee population in the world," said Kenneth Bacon, president of Refugees International and assistant secretary of defense for public affairs from 1994 to 2001. "It's a crisis in response to an American action. This is a refugee crisis that we triggered and aren't doing enough to deal with.

"What I find most disturbing," Bacon went on to say, "is that there seems to be no recognition of the problem by the president or top White House officials." But John Bolton, who was undersecretary of state for arms control and international security in the Bush administration, and later ambassador to the United Nations, offers one explanation for this lack of recognition: it is not a crisis, and it was not triggered by American action. The refugees, he said, have "absolutely nothing to do with our overthrow of Saddam.

"Our obligation," he told me this month at his office in the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, "was to give them new institutions and provide security. We have fulfilled that obligation. I don't think we have an obligation to compensate for the hardships of war." Bolton likewise did not share the concerns of Bacon and others that the refugees would become impoverished and serve as a recruiting pool for militant organizations in the future. "I don't buy the argument that Islamic extremism comes from poverty," he said. "Bin Laden is rich." Nor did he think American aid could alleviate potential anger: "Helping the refugees flies in the face of received logic. You don't want to encourage the refugees to stay. You want them to go home. The governments don't want them to stay."

Since 2003, the United States has accepted only 701 Iraqi refugees. In the first four months of 2007, it took in 69 Iraqi refugees, fewer than the number it accepted in the same period in 2006.

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Rich nations seeking to cut climate change have this in common: they lie. You won't find this statement in the draft of the new report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was leaked to the Guardian last week. But as soon as you understand the numbers, the words form before your eyes. The governments making genuine efforts to tackle global warming are using figures they know to be false.

The British government, the European Union and the United Nations all claim to be trying to prevent "dangerous" climate change. Any level of climate change is dangerous for someone, but there is a broad consensus about what this word means: two degrees of warming above pre-industrial levels. It is dangerous because of its direct impacts on people and places (it could, for example, trigger the irreversible melting of the Greenland ice sheet and the collapse of the Amazon rainforest) and because it is likely to stimulate further warming, as it encourages the world's natural systems to start releasing greenhouse gases.

The aim of preventing more than 2C of warming has been adopted overtly by the UN and the European Union, and implicitly by the British, German and Swedish governments. All of them say they are hoping to confine the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to a level that would prevent such a rise. And all of them know that they have set the wrong targets, based on outdated science. Fearful of the political implications, they have failed to adjust to the levels the new research demands.

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... our governments appear quietly to have abandoned their aim of preventing dangerous climate change. If so, they condemn millions to death. What the IPCC report shows is that we have to stop treating climate change as an urgent issue. We have to start treating it as an international emergency.

We must open immediate negotiations with China, which threatens to become the world's biggest emitter of greenhouse gases by next November, partly because it manufactures many of the products we use. We must work out how much it would cost to decarbonise its growing economy, and help to pay. We need a major diplomatic offensive - far more pressing than it has been so far - to persuade the United States to do what it did in 1941, and turn the economy around on a dime. But above all we need to show that we remain serious about fighting climate change, by setting the targets the science demands.

[Read the whole article]

The more serious lie at the center of the controversy is the implication that the World Bank was an institution with impeccable ethical credentials--until, according to forty-two former Bank executives, its credibility was "fatally compromised" by Wolfowitz. (Many American liberals have seized on this fairy tale, addicted to the fleeting rush that comes from forcing neocons to resign.) The truth is that the bank's credibility was fatally compromised when it forced school fees on students in Ghana in exchange for a loan; when it demanded that Tanzania privatize its water system; when it made telecom privatization a condition of aid for Hurricane Mitch; when it demanded labor "flexibility" in the aftermath of the Asian tsunami in Sri Lanka; when it pushed for eliminating food subsidies in post-invasion Iraq. Ecuadoreans care little about Wolfowitz's girlfriend; more pressing is that in 2005, the Bank withheld a promised $100 million after the country dared to spend a portion of its oil revenues on health and education. Some antipoverty organization.

But the area where the World Bank has the most tenuous claim to moral authority is in the fight against corruption. Almost everywhere that mass state pillage has taken place over the past four decades, the Bank and the IMF have been first on the scene of the crime. And no, they have not been looking the other way as the locals lined their pockets; they have been writing the ground rules for the theft and yelling, "Faster, please!"--a process known as rapid-fire shock therapy.