More catch up

My schedule continues to leave me little time to blog, so I'm reduced to playing catch up every once in a while. Here's the latest batch of links. I might go on a more extended hiatus, but for now just expect infrequent link purges like this one.

* A surprise ending: the transfer of sovereignty in Iraq went forward two days earlier than planned, no doubt in an attempt to preempt more violence and bombings from the insurgency.

* The NY Times reports that the US military launched 50 airstrikes in the early moments of the Iraq war aimed at taking out top Iraqi military and government officials, none of which were successful and all of which caused a significant number of civilian casualties.

* Just last week the US military launched aerial strikes on Fallujah allegedly aimed at allies of the mysterious Abu Musab al-Zarqawi that killed 22 Iraqis -- and, again, all of them were civilians.

* In related stories, Laura King of the LA Times reports on Fallujah, the "mini-republic that lives largely according to its own rules, in defiance of the potent American military force that remains poised on its doorstep" and Jeffrey Gettleman explores the city's "re-Baathification" in the NY Times Magazine.

* Fallujah isn't the only place rife with radicals and Islamists. Hannah Allam of Knight Ridder reports that extremism is sweeping across large portions of Iraq.

* A joint study by IPS and FPIF has found that the US has spent more than $126 billion on the Iraq war, which will eventually cost every American family an estimated $3,415. And, as Jim Lobe explains, the study emphasizes that the costs of the war extend far beyond financial terms.

* Raed Jarrar of the blog Raed in the Middle and CIVIC have published their survey of civilian war casualties in Baghdad during the first four months of the war.

* "The Pentagon may have wasted billions of dollars in Iraq because of a lack of planning and poor oversight," according to the LA Times. Wonderful. Throw it on the pile.

* As the NY Times reports that the US is diverting $2.5 billion from Iraq's oil revenues to fund auxiliary projects in Iraq, a UN oversight committee is investigating whether the CPA has mismanaged Iraq's oil fund. Additionally, a new Christian Aid report suggests that the CPA cannot account for nearly $20 billion of Iraq's revenues.

* Thomas DeFrank of the NY Daily News reports from the US military's medical treatment center in Landstuhl, Germany -- the first stop for nearly 13,000 patients from Iraq, of which about 4,000 suffered battlefield injuries.

* Over the past 3-4 months, the best reporting from the ground in Iraq has been coming from Dahr Jamail of The NewStandard. He'll be leaving soon, but be sure to support his efforts and browse through the archives of "Iraq Dispatches" for a riveting narrative that isn't appearing elsewhere in the media.

* Walden Bello is cheering for the "failure of the empire" in Iraq, hoping that it will lead to the "emergence of the truly democratic republic that the United States was intended to be before it was hijacked to be an imperial democracy."

* Alix de la Grange profiles some former Saddam Hussein generals who are now members of the Iraqi resistance for the Asia Times Online.

* Is the U.S. government above propaganda? Of course not, says Miren Gutierrez.

* What's Ahmed Chalabi up to now? Dan Murphy of the CS Monitor takes a look.

* Mark Huband of the Financial Times reports on new developments in the Niger uranium story, which Josh Marshall promptly throws cold water on.

* Another torture memo has been revealed publicly, this one from the Justice Department. Circulated in 2002 at the request of the CIA in order to maneuver around legal definitions of torture so that more aggressive measures could be used against Gitmo detainees, the memo set the framework for the March 2003 Defense Department memo that rationalized torture in the quest for better intelligence from prisoners. Both documents, which implicate the very top of the Bush cabinet, provided the intellectual ammunition and institutional momentum for the abuse at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere.

* Following the release of the Justice Department memo, and in an effort to mute concerns about torture, the Bush administration has done one of its typical document dumps. The CAP breaks down the documents that were released to quell the firestorm.

* If you're having trouble following all of the memos related to the torture scandal, the NY Times has compiled a useful guide, while antiwar.com and the National Security Archive have collated the major documents related to the scandal.

* As part of the fallout from the media's focus on torture, Dana Priest of the Washington Post reports that the CIA has stopped its harshest interrogation techniques, pending further legal review.

* Jason Burke of the Guardian details the US government's secret network of prisons around the world "into which thousands of suspects have disappeared without trace since the 'war on terror' began" and Human Rights First has issued a complementary report on the activities at these hidden facilities.

* Another investigation by the Guardian probes the goings-on at detention centers in Afghanistan, where there is "widespread evidence of detainees facing beatings, sexual humiliation and being kept for long periods in painful positions."

* The 9/11 commission has found that Al Qaeda planned to strike inside the US earlier than previously thought and Pakistan and Saudi Arabia played crucial roles in facilitating Al Qaeda's growth.

* The commission has also concluded that Iraq and Al Qaeda had no “collaborative relationship". In response, the administration has stuck to its Big Lie technique and Fox News has been dutifully repeating the administration's spin. For added context, see: "No Link? Who Knew?" and John Stewart's slap down of Dick Cheney's Iraq-Al Qaeda claims.

* In yet another sign of overstretch, the US military is getting ready for an involuntary mobilization of nearly 6,000 reserve troops for duty in Iraq and Afghanistan.

* Should we be getting ready for the draft?

* In a great column, Molly Ivins skewers the Bush administration's talking points and the media's willingness to give them a free pass.

* "A senior US intelligence official is about to publish a bitter condemnation of America's counter-terrorism policy, arguing that the west is losing the war against al-Qaida and that an 'avaricious, premeditated, unprovoked' war in Iraq has played into Osama bin Laden's hands," reports the Guardian.

* Brendan O'Neill says the claim by the International Institute for Strategic Studies that Al Qaeda's ranks have swelled to 18,000 is bogus.

* "Given all the indignant neoconservative 'outrage' over the financial misdeeds arising from the UN’s socialist oil-for-food program during the 1990s, when the UN embargo was killing untold numbers of Iraqi children, one would think that there would be an equal amount of outrage over a much more disgraceful scandal — the U.S. delivery of weapons of mass destruction to Saddam Hussein during the Reagan administration in the 1980s," avers Jacob G. Hornberger.

* The LA Times reports on the release of a joint statement by 26 former senior diplomats and military officials which challenges the foreign policy course taken by the Bush administration and urges voters to remove Bush from office come November.

* A conservative President?: Since 9/11, Federal Spending Under Bush Increases at Fastest Rate in 30 Years.

* The AP has sued for access to all of Bush's Vietnam-era service records.

* Although William Arkin "would love nothing better than to see Bush out of office," he views John Kerry as nothing but a "gloomy alternative. Worse yet, in the short term, his 'me too, only better' approach to the war on terrorism could actually serve to make the United States less safe."

* Steve Shalom presents the case for tactical voting come November.

* The Supreme Court has ruled that Dick Cheney's energy task force documents will remain under lock and key.

* Bill Clinton, if you haven't noticed, is all over the news again with the publication of his autobiography. Revisit Clinton's legacy, courtesy of Ed Herman.

* Seymour Hersh's latest article in the New Yorker claims that Mossad is running covert ops into Iran and Syria with the help of the Kurds and Iyad Allawi, the current Prime Minister of Iraq, ran a European hit squad in the 1970s that helped Saddam Hussein rise through the ranks of the Ba'ath party.

* The NY Times reports on the expansion of Israel's "separation barrier" deep into the West Bank to encase the settlement of Ariel, a move that will confiscate thousands of acres of Palestinian land.

* Reuters reports what's been widely suspected: Israel is planning to relocate settlers evacuated from Gaza to the West Bank. And Palestinians are supposed to be thankful for Sharon's "withdrawal" plan...please.

* A poll conducted by the University of Haifa has found that nearly 64% of Israeli Jews believe their government should encourage Arabs to leave the country. In other words, ~64% think ethnic cleansing is A-OK.

* Speaking of ethnic cleansing, it's been going on in the Sudan for quite some time. But that's ok, too, as long as nobody uses the "G word" or dares to juxtapose what's going on in Darfur with what's happened in Israel since 1948.

* The BBC reports on the continued health effects of Agent Orange in Vietnam. Be proud, America, be proud...

* A UN study has found that the "pace of desertification has doubled since the 1970s, swallowing an area the size of Rhode Island each year and threatening to turn 135 million people into environmental refugees."

* Global warming is occurring faster than thought, according to recent computer projections by the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

* A Harvard University study has found that workers in the United States "have fewer legal rights to time off for family matters than workers in most other countries, and rank near the bottom in pregnancy and sick leave" and a related study by Families USA claims that nearly 82 million people in the US went at least one month over the past two years with no health insurance.

* Want the real unemployment rate in the US? Double the official figure and you're pretty close.

* Randall Shelden and William B. Brown chronicle the new American apartheid -- part I and part II.

* Fahrenheit 9/11 is getting tons of press and attention. It's a film worth seeing, no matter how hard people on the right try to stop it. There are, however, other equally compelling documentaries worth checking out this summer -- like Control Room, a movie that goes behind the scenes at Al Jazeera, Preventive Warriors, which peers behind the Bush adminstration's 2002 National Security Strategy, and The Corporation, which takes a look at the pathology of the dominant cultural and business institution on earth.

* Be on the lookout for fascism, says Norman Solomon.

* "Bomb the living daylights out of them." That's Bill O'Reilly's final solution.

* Paul Street tackles the eternal question: “Do you think if people knew this, they would do something about it?”