Catch up

Lots of linkage; little commentary. Read at your peril. Not much good news afoot, but much of it important.

* While Iran "buys some time" from the IAEA and Bush leaves military options on the table, Ian Davis sees ominous days ahead if the US is allowed to push a resolution on Iran's nuclear program to the Security Council.

* For a pessimistic reading of where we're headed regarding Iran, see Gary Leupp and Mike Whitney. Hell, even The New Republic says, "Attacking Iran is a bad idea."

* "Recent attempts by Vice President Dick Cheney and his 'neo-conservative' allies to conjure up a nuclear threat from Iran as 'justification' for military action have been exposed as a charade by timely leaks to the Washington Post," observes Ray McGovern, who then proceeds to send a "Reminder to Patriotic Truth Tellers: Timing makes all the difference."

* Doug Ireland reminds us that the the AIPAC spy scandal is really about "helping to prepare an attack by Israel on Iran."

* Lo and behold, Iran's winning America's war in Iraq, says Michael Schwartz.

* The confluence of deadly attacks, particularly on a single Ohio Marine battalion, and Cindy Sheehan's arrival in Crawford have put renewed pressure on Bush's Iraq policy.

* Contradictory calls for raising and lowering troop levels in Iraq are one thing, but Ashraf Fahim thinks the primary issue at hand regarding the US military's presence in Iraq is whether it is going to hold on to those "enduring bases."

* "If the U.S. Army and its Iraqi allies are killing as many insurgents as reports indicate they are per month, why is the insurgency intensifying instead of collapsing?" asks UPI's Martin Sieff, dredging up an issue that plagued the US during the Vietnam conflict.

* Nothing to see here, folks. Just a coup in Baghdad.

* The CS Monitor's Dan Murphy reports that Iraqis are increasingly taking aim at interim government officials because of fuel and water shortages when in previous summers they blamed the Americans.

* Michael Meacher channels Naomi Klein in the London Times. The "reconstruction" of Iraq, he writes, "amounts in effect to wholesale privatisation of the economy and is little short of economic colonisation."

* Paul Street dissects the recent NY Times piece on the discontent among soldiers in Iraq who see the homefront detached from the war as a whole. The story reflects, according to Street, the "very real ongoing conflict between the hard, murderous requirements of militarism and the soft, 'normalcy'-craving imperatives of American consumer capitalism, which tries to reduce democratic citizenship to the uninterrupted and often trivial pursuit, purchase, and enjoyment of commodities."

* Knight Ridder's Leila Fadel reports on life in Basra, which "is enjoying an economic and religious renaissance, even as the rise of conservative Shiite Islam has put a chill on its traditionally flourishing cultural scene."

* Steven Vincent, an un-embedded reporter and blogger who supported the war, was recently killed in Basra, with many speculating that he was targeted for penning a NY Times piece that highlighted the increasing Shi'ite violence and authoritarianism in the city. Add his name to the already long list of journalists killed in Iraq.

* The London Times' Michael Smith, who broke the DSMs, follows up on the premature bombing of Iraq story, a tale the US media and Congress have no trouble ignoring.

* In a TomDispatch piece, Jim Lobe does some heavy lifting to date Cheney and Co.'s first reference of the Iraqi nuclear threat back to December 2001. As Lobe writes, "It was a new argument being taken out for a test run, one that would become painfully familiar in the months that followed."

* Parts of the long-awaited Volcker report on the UN "oil for food" scandal have been published. The lede from Haider Rizvi's IPS story summarizes the absurdities well: "After spending some 35 million dollars probing wrongdoing in Iraq's Oil for Food Programme, U.N. investigators have accused the former head of the humanitarian project of taking nearly 150,000 in cash bribes." See The Economist for more and a past post of mine for added context.

* Chris Floyd opines that "it looks like they've finally hit on a winning formula" for dealing with Saddam Hussein's trial. "The secret of America's ungodly machinations with this thug will thus stay safely buried."

* The WSWS has more on the killing of Iraqi Maj. Gen. Mowhoush, which was outlined in the recent Washington Post articles on the CIA's team of "Scorpions."

* Considering what's been mentioned previously, I suppose it's no surprise that the Pentagon is claiming that the release of the next round of Abu Ghraib photos would constitute a threat to national security, citing the uproar sparked by Newsweek's Koran flushing story.

* American Leftist notes that Jane Mayer's New Yorker article on the lab rat experiments being conducted on Gitmo detainees is now available online.

* "Leaked emails from two former prosecutors claim the military commissions set up to try detainees at Guantanamo Bay are rigged, fraudulent, and thin on evidence against the accused," reports the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

* Are you ready for a hoedown this coming September 11th?! Mark your calendars.

* So much for GSAVE. We're back to GWOT, apparently.

* "The U.S. military has devised its first-ever war plans for guarding against and responding to terrorist attacks in the United States, envisioning 15 potential crisis scenarios and anticipating several simultaneous strikes around the country," reports the Washington Post. Essentially, this means the military is planning for martial law.

* According to Gary Berntsen, the field commander of the CIA's operations in the Hindu Kush at the time, the US let Bin Laden slip away at Tora Bora in December 2001.

* Kevin Drum rounds up the flurry of recent news on "Able Danger," along with the fallout from this odd story. "I've had a hard time getting my hands around the whole mess," admits Drum. "The only thing that's sure is that the NRO crowd is going absolutely batshit over it."

* Juan Cole Fisks the "War on Terror" on his blog and then explains in Salon, "What Michael Moore (and the neocons) don't know about Saudi Arabia."

* In a Salon review of Robert Pape's much-discussed new book (amongst others), Laura Miller goes "Inside the Minds of Suicide Bombers."

* Sibel Edmonds, the gagged FBI whistleblower, dropped a bomb in a Vanity Fair interview last week about Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert being discussed as a possible bribe recipient from Turkish sources.

* The FT reports on a survey that shows the decline in American prestige over the past few years is "hurting companies whose products are considered to be distinctly 'American.'" Recall earlier iterations of this trend.

* With Big Oil warning of a coming energy crunch and the US shown to be "over a barrel," Michael Klare's sober musings on the "Twilight Era of Petroleum" are well worth noting. See also: Richard Heinberg on "How to avoid oil wars, terrorism, and economic collapse."

* As the WSWS says Congress "delivers for its corporate masters," Russ Feingold serves up the bad news about the recently passed energy bill.

* "The American public has enjoyed the fiesta, but the blue-light special orgy of easy motoring, limitless air-conditioning, and super-cheap products made by factory slaves far far away is about to close down. Globalisation is finished," declares James Howard Kunstler in the Guardian.

* New research suggests that global warming is making hurricanes more ferocious, melting glaciers at an alarming pace, and thawing out Serbian permafrost "for the first time since it formed 11,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age." See also: "In all likelihood, events are now set to run their course."

* Writing for TomPaine.com, Bill McKibben looks for "The Future Of Environmentalism" and Mark Hertsgaard explains that "Nukes Aren't Green."

* Gar Alperovitz, the leading American "revisionist" scholar on the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, looks at the debate 60 years later; Richard Frank puts forth the case for the bomb in the Weekly Standard; and GWU's NSA collates some primary sources for you to make up your own mind.

* See more a-bomb material: the WSWS' three part series, "Sixty years since the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings"; coverage from Democracy Now!; sage advice from Noam Chomsky; Greg Mitchell and E&P's reporting; and yet more reading from Left End of the Dial.

* Particularly with Iran's program being so high on the international agenda right now, Ramzy Baroud implores, "The BBC’s striking revelations regarding the secretive and disconcerting British role in making an Israeli nuclear bomb possible deserves more than a quick pause and a few dozen news reports. It obliges a thorough investigation coupled with a complete reversal in the double standard that views Israel’s fully-fledged nuclear capabilities as a trivial concern."

* What is behind the Gaza "disengagement plan"? Justin Podur takes a measured look.

* "While the world focuses on Gaza, the future of Israeli-Palestinian relations in fact may be playing itself out away from the spotlight, in Jerusalem," goes the executive summary to an important new report by the International Crisis Group.

* How much money has Israel poured into West Bank settlements? Nobody really knows, as Al Jazeera reports.

* The World Bank is already tinkering with the promised G-8 debt relief program, says Emad Mekay of IPS.

* The Independent reports on what investigators have concluded thus far regarding the July 7 bombings in London. In a somewhat related piece, USA Today summarizes "Why suicide attackers haven't hit U.S. again."

* The US was evicted from its K2 airbase in Uzbekistan, a move that the Uzbeks had reportedly been trying to precipitate for some time. See also: Craig Murray on "Why the US won't admit it was jilted."

* Stephen Zunes raises the alarm that the Bush administration "is actively pursuing policies which will likely increase the risk of a catastrophic nuclear confrontation on the Indian subcontinent."

* Here's some reporting on the unrelated crises in Mumbai and Niger.

* Mary Anne Saucier summarizes Mark Crispin Miller's hard-hitting Harper's article on the 2004 election fraud in Ohio. You can read Miller's entire article, here. Additionally, Harper's has posted a short excerpt and the transcript to a related forum on the 2004 election anomalies.

* "More than a month after the Supreme Court ruled that governments could take one person's property and give it to another in the name of public interest," the NY Times reports, "the decision has set off a storm of legislative action and protest, as states have moved to protect homes and businesses from the expanded reach of eminent domain."

* Judy Miller: heroic martyr or White House stooge? Take a guess. Also, Murray Waas alleges Scooter and Judy met on July 8, 2003 to discuss Plame, six days before Novak's infamous column appeared, and the Washington Post strongly hints that Plame's identity was indeed gleaned from the June 2003 State Department memo that wound up making its way on Air Force One for a Bush visit to Africa. Plus: "How Judy Miller Screwed Us All" and "Shades of '92?"

* "Liberals pledge millions to revive US left" reads the Guardian's headline. Well that's one interpretation. Here's another.

* George Monbiot has "no idea why I should love this country more than any other." He's speaking of his homeland, Britain, but his remarks could equally apply to the America-firsters over here.

* Chris Mooney probes the origins of "Intelligent Design" in the American Prospect.

* Eric Hobsbawm has an interesting review of Goran Therborn's new book, Between Sex and Power, in the LRB. Earlier, I posted a review of the book from The Nation.

* Here's a disturbing report from Amina Mire on the emerging skin-whitening industry.