[Peace-discuss] Just Foreign Policy News, November 6, 2006

[Robert Naiman]

Just Foreign Policy News
November 6, 2006

No War with Iran: Petition
Nearly 3400 people have signed the Just Foreign Policy/Peace Action
petition through Just Foreign Policy's website. Please sign/circulate
if you have yet to do so:
http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/involved/iranpetition.html

Get Local: the Just Foreign Policy NorthEast Tour
If there's an event in your area, try to come. If not, pass the info
to folks you know who live near upcoming events; we'll try to drop by
your neighborhood soon.
http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/tour/index.html

Just Foreign Policy News daily podcast:
http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/podcasts/podcast_howto.html

Summary:
U.S./Top News
Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega appeared win the presidency in
Nicaragua, according to preliminary results released this morning. He
garnered 38.5 percent of the vote, well above the 35-percent total and
five-point margin over the second-place finisher needed to avoid a
runoff, according to a quick count carried out by a respected civic
organization.

The Bush administration told a federal judge terrorism suspects held
in CIA prisons should not be allowed to reveal details of the
"alternative interrogation methods" their captors used to get them to
talk, the Washington Post reported Saturday. One attorney said "the
executive is attempting to misuse its classification authority . . .
to conceal illegal or embarrassing executive conduct." Another said
the prisoners "can't even say what our government did to these guys to
elicit the statements that are the basis for them being held.
Kafka-esque doesn't do it justice. This is 'Alice in Wonderland.' "

Writing in the Nation on October 18, Tom Engelhardt asked, "Why hasn't
the mainstream media connected the dots between the Saddam's judgment
day and the midterm elections?"

With casualty numbers on the rise in Iraq, soldiers are showing a keen
interest in this week's elections, McClatchy News Service reports.

An undercover investigation by ABC News revealed some Army recruiters
told students that if they enlisted, their chances of going to Iraq
would be small. In an exchange videotaped by a hidden camera, a
student asked a recruiter, "Nobody is going over to Iraq anymore?" The
reply: "No, we're bringing people back." One recruiter told a student
that just quitting the Army was an option if military service didn't
suit the new recruit. "It's called a 'Failure to Adapt' discharge,"
the recruiter said. "It'll just be like it never happened."

The Iraq war's neoconservative boosters have turned sharply on the
Bush administration, charging their grand designs have been undermined
by White House incompetence, David Rose writes for Vanity Fair.
"Prince of Darkness" Richard Perle says if he had to do it over, he
would not have advocated an invasion of Iraq.

A Democratic takeover of Congress would put two of the most outspoken
critics of the Iraq war, Robert Byrd and David Obey, in charge of
dispensing the money President Bush will seek for combat, Reuters
reports. Even without withholding a penny for the war, appropriations
committees could flex their muscles, one analyst notes. "There are a
whole variety of things the secretary of defense wants and needs from
the Appropriations Committee that has nothing to do with the support
of troops in field," said Scott Lilly, of the Center for American
Progress. Congressional appropriators control funds for everything
from Rumsfeld's government limousine to Pentagon office computers and
pet Defense Department projects.

US Vice President Dick Cheney said he would likely refuse to testify
before Congress if he is faced with a subpoena from the opposition
Democratic party, AFP reports.

Iran
The Iranian Foreign Ministry said Sunday that Iraqi officials had
asked Iran to hold talks with the US and that it would consider doing
so if the US made an official request, the New York Times reports.

As the Bush administration struggles to rally international pressure
on Iran to halt its nuclear program, China and Russia are working to
take the military option off the table, the Washington Post reports.
This article, by Colum Lynch, reports as fact without attribution the
canard that the Iranian government has "threatened to wipe Israel off
the map." The article leads by quoting approvingly Patrick Clawson of
the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, referring to him as a
"researcher" and "analyst." Clawson is a prominent advocate for US
military confrontation in the Middle East. WINEP's founding director,
Martin Indyk, was research director of AIPAC, the main lobby in
support of confrontational US and Israeli government Middle East
policies in Washington. (See the Center for Media and Democracy's
"Source Watch,"
http://www.sourcewatch.org/wiki.phtml?title=Washington_Institute_for_Near_East_Policy.)
 This article evokes Judith Miller's reporting on Iraq in the run-up
to the U.S. invasion.

IAEA inspectors visited Iran's second network of centrifuges at its
Natanz uranium enrichment facility, the official IRNA news agency
reported.

Iraq
A series of secret U.S. war games in 1999 indicated an invasion and
post-war administration of Iraq would require 400,000 troops, nearly
three times the number there now, AP reports. And even then, the games
showed, the country still had a chance of dissolving into chaos.

Iraqis were jolted Friday morning by the news that Sgt. Santos
Cardona, viewed as one of the villains of Abu Ghraib, has been ordered
back to the country, Time magazine reports.
The reaction was total outrage.

Afghanistan
A recent CIA assessment found the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, had
been significantly weakened by rising popular frustration with his
American-backed government, the New York Times reports.

Pakistan
Almost all of the 80 victims of last week's airstrike on an Islamic
school in a tribal region near the Afghan border were children or
teenagers according to Pakistan's largest Islamic opposition party
reported, the Los Angeles Times reports. The government has described
the religious school as a terrorist training camp. But a list
published by the Jamaat-i-Islami party indicated 13 of the victims
were younger than 12 and the youngest was 7.

Mexico
Thousands of anti-government demonstrators marched through Oaxaca
Sunday, demanding federal police leave the city, AP reports. "They
don't guarantee security; to the contrary, they scare us and are
rude," said a local businessman.

Contents:
U.S./Top News
1) Ortega appears to be winner in Nicaragua
Nancy San Martin, Miami Herald, Monday, November 6, 2006
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/15943009.htm
Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega appeared to slide into presidential
victory on his third attempt at regaining the power he once wielded,
according to preliminary results released this morning. The former
revolutionary garnered 38.5 percent of the vote, well above the
35-percent total and five-point margin over the second-place finisher
needed to avoid a runoff, according to a quick count carried out by a
respected civic organization.

U.S.-educated banker Eduardo Montealegre received 29.5 percent of the
vote, according to the count by Ethics and Transparency. Former vice
president and coffee grower José Rizo received 24 percent of the vote.
Lagging far behind were economist Edmundo Jarquín and Edén Pastora,
both of whom broke with Ortega's Sandinista National Liberation Front.

The quick count was based on results from a representative sampling of
polling stations and had a margin of error of 1.7 percentage points.
Official results in the most competitive presidential race in this
country's history were expected to be released this afternoon by the
Supreme Electoral Tribunal.

2) U.S. Seeks Silence on CIA Prisons
Court Is Asked to Bar Detainees From Talking About Interrogations
Carol D. Leonnig & Eric Rich, Washington Post, Saturday, November 4, 2006; A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/03/AR2006110301793.html
The Bush administration has told a federal judge terrorism suspects
held in secret CIA prisons should not be allowed to reveal details of
the "alternative interrogation methods" that their captors used to get
them to talk. The government says in new court filings that those
interrogation methods are now among the nation's most sensitive
national security secrets and that their release - even to the
detainees' own attorneys - "could reasonably be expected to cause
extremely grave damage." Terrorists could use the information to train
in counter-interrogation techniques and foil government efforts to
elicit information about their methods and plots, according to
government documents submitted to U.S. District Judge Walton.

The battle over legal rights for terrorism suspects detained for years
in CIA prisons centers on Majid Khan, who was one of 14 high-value
detainees transferred in September from the "black" sites to the U.S.
military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. A lawyer with the Center for
Constitutional Rights, which represents many detainees at Guantanamo,
is seeking emergency access to him. The government, in trying to block
lawyers' access to the 14 detainees, effectively asserts that the
detainees' experiences are a secret that should never be shared with
the public.

Gitanjali Gutierrez, an attorney for Khan's family, responded in a
court document yesterday that there is no evidence that Khan had
top-secret information. "Rather," she said, "the executive is
attempting to misuse its classification authority . . . to conceal
illegal or embarrassing executive conduct."

Joseph Margulies, a Northwestern University law professor who has
represented several detainees at Guantanamo, said the prisoners "can't
even say what our government did to these guys to elicit the
statements that are the basis for them being held. Kafka-esque doesn't
do it justice. This is 'Alice in Wonderland.' "

3) November Surprise?
Why Hasn't Mainstream Media Connected the Dots Between Saddam's
Judgment Day and the Midterm Elections?
Tom Engelhardt, The Nation, Wednesday, October 18, 2006
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1018-23.htm
The US-backed special tribunal in Baghdad signalled Monday that it
will likely delay a verdict in the first trial of Saddam Hussein to
November 5. Why hasn't the mainstream media connected the dots between
the Saddam's judgment day and the midterm elections?

A possible death-sentence for Saddam and his top lieutenants on
November 5? Now, shouldn't that raise a few eyebrows somewhere? If you
happen to have a calendar close at hand, pull it over and take a quick
look. That verdict would then come, curiously enough, just two days
before the midterm elections. It's the sort of thing that-you would
think-that any reporter with knowledge of the US election cycle would
at least note in an article. But no, you can search high and low
without finding a reference to this in the mainstream media.

Scott Horton is an adjunct professor at the Columbia University Law
School, as well as chairman of the International Law Committee at the
New York City Bar Association. He makes frequent trips to Iraq,
working as an attorney "representing arrested local-hire reporters of
US media." I asked whether he thought Karl Rove might have anything to
do with this: "For sure. That November 5 date is designed to show some
progress in Iraq. This is the last full news-cycle day in the US
before the elections. It'll be Monday. And the American public will
see Saddam condemned to death and see it as a positive thing.

"When you look at polling figures," Horton said," there have been
three significant spike points. One was the date on which Saddam was
captured. The second was the purple fingers election. The third was
Zarqawi being killed. Based on those three, it's easy to project that
they will get a mild bump out of this. "After all, almost every
newspaper reserves space for Iraq reporting every day. This just
assures that they will have a positive news story to feature. I find
it amazing not that journalists don't editorialize on this, but that
they report the story without even noting that this is right before
the midterm elections."

4) Soldiers display a strong interest in elections
With casualty numbers on the rise in Iraq, soldiers are showing a keen
interest in this week's elections.
McClatchy News Service, Mon, Nov. 06, 2006	
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/nation/15939846.htm
Soldiers from Fort Bragg to Baghdad are showing more interest than
ever in voting this election, and some experts predict the military
may not back Republicans as much as they have in recent elections. In
Fort Bragg's home of Fayetteville, N.C., Chief Warrant Officer Jill
Spohn, who is helping soldiers get ballots, said the interest is
driven at least partly by the rising casualty numbers in Iraq.

Military personnel election turnout - 42 percent in 2002 and 79
percent in 2004 - usually matches or exceeds that of civilians,
according to the Pentagon. But the Pentagon has boosted its efforts to
make voting easier, and some soldiers say their personal stake in the
war is inspiring them to vote. "A lot of soldiers are worried we're
fighting for a lost cause," said Pfc. Joseph Wells, a 26-year-old
paratrooper.

5) Recruiters dishonest about Iraq
Chicago Tribune, November 5, 2006
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0611050364nov05,1,540347.story
An undercover investigation by ABC News revealed some Army recruiters
told students that if they enlisted, their chances of going to Iraq
would be small. In an exchange videotaped by a hidden camera, a
student asked a recruiter, "Nobody is going over to Iraq anymore?" The
reply: "No, we're bringing people back."

ABC News said Friday that it and New York affiliate WABC provided 10
students with hidden cameras and sent them to recruiters in New York,
New Jersey and Connecticut. One recruiter told a student that just
quitting the Army was an option if military service didn't suit the
new recruit. "It's called a 'Failure to Adapt' discharge," the
recruiter said. "It'll just be like it never happened."

But Col. Robert Manning, in charge of Army recruiting for the
Northeast, said it wouldn't be that easy, according to ABC. He told
the network that new recruits were likely to go to Iraq: "We are a
nation and Army at war still." "It's hard to believe some of the
things [recruiters] are telling prospective applicants," Manning said
after seeing the ABC News tapes.

6) Neo Culpa: Now They Tell Us
David Rose, Vanity Fair, November 3, 2006
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2006/12/neocons200612
As Iraq slips further into chaos, the war's neoconservative boosters
have turned sharply on the Bush administration, charging that their
grand designs have been undermined by White House incompetence. In a
series of exclusive interviews, Richard Perle, Kenneth Adelman, David
Frum, and others play the blame game with shocking frankness. Target
No. 1: the president himself.

Perle is unrecognizable as the confident hawk who, as chairman of the
Pentagon's Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee, had invited the
exiled Iraqi dissident Ahmad Chalabi to its first meeting after 9/11.
"The levels of brutality that we've seen are truly horrifying, and I
have to say, I underestimated the depravity," Perle says now, adding
that total defeat-an American withdrawal that leaves Iraq as an
anarchic "failed state"-is not yet inevitable but is becoming more
likely. "And then," says Perle, "you'll get all the mayhem that the
world is capable of creating."

According to Perle, who left the Defense Policy Board in 2004, this
unfolding catastrophe has a central cause: devastating dysfunction
within the administration of President Bush. Perle says, "The
decisions did not get made that should have been. They didn't get made
in a timely fashion, and the differences were argued out endlessly.…
At the end of the day, you have to hold the president responsible.… I
don't think he realized the extent of the opposition within his own
administration, and the disloyalty."

Perle goes so far as to say that, if he had his time over, he would
not have advocated an invasion of Iraq: "I think if I had been
delphic, and had seen where we are today, and people had said, 'Should
we go into Iraq?,' I think now I probably would have said, 'No, let's
consider other strategies for dealing with the thing that concerns us
most, which is Saddam supplying weapons of mass destruction to
terrorists.' … I don't say that because I no longer believe that
Saddam had the capability to produce weapons of mass destruction, or
that he was not in contact with terrorists. I believe those two
premises were both correct. Could we have managed that threat by means
other than a direct military intervention? Well, maybe we could have."

7) Iraq foes would head Democrat war-spending panels
Richard Cowan, Reuters, Sunday, November 5, 2006; 9:14 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/05/AR2006110500250.html
A Democratic takeover of the U.S. Congress would put two of the most
outspoken critics of the Iraq war in charge of dispensing the money
President Bush will seek for combat, adding pressure for a new
approach to the increasingly unpopular war.

In the House of Representatives, Rep. David Obey of Wisconsin would
rise to Appropriations Committee chairman if Democrats win this week.
At every opportunity, the scrappy Obey reminds fellow lawmakers of his
opposition to the Iraq war, calling it the "dumbest war since the War
of 1812."

Across Capitol Hill, Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia, now 88, would
head the Senate Appropriations panel. Just before the start of the war
in March 2003, Byrd accused Bush of flaunting "our superpower status
with arrogance." Of the coming U.S. invasion, he said, "Today I weep
for my country."

With either Obey or Byrd in charge of the committees that pay the
$8-billion-a-month Iraq war tab, experts said Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld would have to do far more explaining of how the money was
being spent.

That could open the door for Congress to pressure the administration
to work to work with it and with outside experts on a fresh, rigorous
assessment of Iraq's political problems and how to deal with them so
American troops can leave the country.

In the run-up to this year's election, Democratic Party leaders have
tried to assure the country they would not turn their backs on
American troops fighting in Iraq.

But without withholding a penny for the Iraq war, the appropriations
committees could flex their muscles, said Scott Lilly, who spent about
three decades as a high-level aide to Democrats in Congress, much of
that time with the House Appropriations Committee. "There are a whole
variety of things the secretary of defense wants and needs from the
Appropriations Committee that has nothing to do with the support of
troops in field," said Lilly, who now works the Center for American
Progress.

Congressional appropriators control funds for everything from
Rumsfeld's government limousine to Pentagon office computers and pet
Defense Department projects. "You put your foot down and make clear
there is a very unpleasant price if (information) is not provided,"
Lilly said.

>From their appropriations committee seats, Byrd and Obey have backed
combat troop funding, if not the war itself, by supporting the more
than $500 billion allocated so far for the wars in Afghanistan and
Iraq. The bulk of that money has been spent in Iraq and it contrasts
with the $50 billion or so some administration officials predicted
before the war.

Sitting behind Obey and Byrd as chairmen of key defense spending
subcommittees could be Rep. John Murtha of Pennsylvania, the ex-Marine
who a year ago called for withdrawing troops from Iraq, and Sen.
Daniel Inouye of Hawaii, who lost an arm fighting in World War Two and
has voted for withdrawing troops by next July.

8) Cheney Says Unlikely He Would Comply with Congress Subpoena
Agence France Presse, Monday, November 6, 2006
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/1105-02.htm
US Vice President Dick Cheney said he would likely refuse to testify
before Congress if he is faced with a subpoena from the opposition
Democratic party. The Democrats say if they prevail in Tuesday's
legislative elections they may launch investigations into past actions
taken by President George W. Bush's administration, possibly even
issuing subpoenas to compel prominent officials to testify. Asked in a
television interview if he would testify before Congress if he
received a subpoena from lawmakers however, Cheney said it was
unlikely he would comply, as it would break with American political
tradition.

Iran
9) Iraq Asks Iran to Meet U.S.
New York Times, November 6, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/06/world/middleeast/06iran.html
The Iranian Foreign Ministry said Sunday that Iraqi officials had
asked Iran to hold talks with the US and that it would consider doing
so if the US made an official request. Such talks were agreed to in
March, but tensions between the countries over Iran's nuclear program
began escalating and final arrangements were never made.

Many of Iraq's Shiite leaders lived in Iran when Saddam Hussein was in
power in Iraq, and some American military commanders have accused Iran
of training and equipping violent Shiite groups in Iraq. "If we
receive an official request over regional issues, we will consider
it," said a Foreign Ministry spokesman, Muhammad Ali Hosseini, during
a weekly news conference.

10) Dissent Grows at U.N. Over Iran
China, Russia Object to Including U.S.-Backed Military Option
Colum Lynch, Washington Post, Sunday, November 5, 2006; A25
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/04/AR2006110400959.html
As the Bush administration struggles to rally international pressure
on Iran to halt its nuclear program, China and Russia are working to
take the most powerful diplomatic weapon off the table: the military
option. Moscow and Beijing insist that a U.N. sanctions resolution
under negotiation in New York should avoid language that could be used
as a pretext for a military strike against Iran's nuclear facilities.
They have received the tacit backing of the US' key European partners,
Britain, France and Germany.

But analysts say the 15-nation Security Council's refusal to preserve
the possibility - however remote - of military action has weakened its
hand as it confronts one of the most significant challenges of the
21st century: the possible emergence of a radical Middle East
government with nuclear weapons.

"What means of enforcement is credible if you start out by saying in
the beginning that 'oh, by the way, we're not going to do the one
thing that you're most afraid of?' " said Patrick Clawson, deputy
director for research at the Washington Institute for Near East
Policy. He said the council should "have the military option on the
table" in the event that the government that threatened to wipe Israel
off the map does develop nuclear weapons.
[If the Washington Post has evidence that the government of Iran
"threatened to wipe Israel off the map," they should provide it.
Otherwise they should retract the claim. Clawson is more partisan hawk
than "analyst." By citing him in this way the Washington Post beats
the drums of war. - JFP.]

The effort to constrain the US underscores lingering distrust over the
Bush administration's decision to invade Iraq in March 2003 without
explicit Security Council approval, analysts said. It follows a
similar push to prevent the US from adopting U.N. resolutions that one
day may be used to punish Sudan and North Korea with stronger
sanctions or military force.

"People are afraid it's a slippery slope; that if they agree to
sanctions today, they give the authority for military intervention
tomorrow," said Edward C. Luck, a Columbia University historian who
studies the UN. He said the political dispute over the use of force
has eroded the council's credibility. "It is a sign of weakness and
division," Luck said.

The U.N. debate over the use of force in Iran coincides with a
realignment of power in the region that is already diminishing the
prospects for U.S. military action against Iran, analysts say. U.S.
and NATO military setbacks in Iraq and Afghanistan are eroding public
support in the US for military action in the region. And the US'
European allies are firmly opposed to any U.S. military action in
Iran.

The Bush administration maintains that though it never takes the
military option off the table, its diplomatic campaign to rally
support for sanctions against Iran and North Korea is not a cover for
launching new conflicts.

But Russian and Chinese diplomats note that the US insisted it was
committed to diplomacy in the months leading up to the March 2003
invasion of Iraq. When the US and Britain failed to secure U.N.
backing for a more forceful response, they turned to a 12-year-old
resolution as the legal basis for the invasion. "We learned our lesson
from what happened in Iraq and that's why we want to be very clear,"
said a Chinese diplomat.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, Moscow's former ambassador to
the UN, told reporters in March that the debate over Iran reminded him
of the run-up to the U.S.-led invasion. "That looks so deja vu,"
Lavrov said. "I don't believe that we should engage in something which
might become a self-fulfilling prophecy. We are convinced that there
is no military solution to this crisis."

The U.N. debate over the use of force in Iran and North Korea has
focused on Chapter 7 of the U.N. Charter, a provision that has
traditionally been used to enforce U.N. demands through the threat of
economic sanctions or military action. Russia and China have refused
to support the provision, arguing that it could be used to justify
future military action.

11) U.N. Inspectors Visit Iran Enrichment Cascades
Reuters, November 5, 2006, Filed at 6:07 p.m. ET
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-nuclear-iran-inspectors.html
A group of U.N. nuclear watchdog inspectors has visited Iran's second
network of centrifuges at its Natanz uranium enrichment facility, the
official IRNA news agency quoted an official as saying on Sunday.
Despite U.N. Security Council demands that it halt nuclear fuel
production work, Iran announced last month that it had started up a
second group of 164 centrifuges, which spin at supersonic speeds to
enrich uranium.

The networks of centrifuges are known as cascades. Iran says Natanz
will eventually house tens of thousands of the machines but that it
will only use them to enrich uranium to a level suitable for use in
atomic power reactors and not to the much higher level needed to make
atom bombs. "They have visited the second cascade and the Isfahan
uranium conversion facility," the unnamed official told IRNA.

The inspectors who arrived in Iran on Friday will stay in the country
for four days to collect information for International Atomic Energy
Agency (IAEA) chief Mohamed ElBaradei's November report to the
watchdog, IRNA said. "Their activities in Iran are based on
theNon-Proliferation Treaty and the IAEA's safeguards," the official
said, calling the visit a routine part of Iran's commitment to
international treaties.

Iran ended snap inspections of its nuclear facilities in February
after its case was referred to the Security Council. The US is pushing
the council to toughen a draft resolution drawn up by Britain, France
and Germany for sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program.
Russia and China, both veto-holding members of the council, want
extensive changes to soften and shorten the resolution.

Iran insists sanctions will not deter it and has threatened to take
counter measures, such as curtailing IAEA inspections altogether, if
the Security Council does take action against it. Experts say Iran
would need thousands of centrifuges spinning non-stop for months to
produce enough highly enriched uranium for one atom bomb. Iran says it
will install 3,000 centrifuges by March 2007.

Iraq
12) War simulation in 1999 pointed out Iraq invasion problems
Associated Press, November 4, 2006
http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/meast/11/04/war.games.ap/
A series of secret U.S. war games in 1999 showed that an invasion and
post-war administration of Iraq would require 400,000 troops, nearly
three times the number there now. And even then, the games showed, the
country still had a chance of dissolving into chaos.

In the simulation, called Desert Crossing, 70 military, diplomatic and
intelligence participants concluded the high troop levels would be
needed to keep order, seal borders and take care of other security
needs. The documents came to light Saturday through a Freedom of
Information Act request by George Washington University's National
Security Archive, an independent research institute and library.

"The conventional wisdom is the U.S. mistake in Iraq was not enough
troops," said Thomas Blanton, the archive's director. "But the Desert
Crossing war game in 1999 suggests we would have ended up with a
failed state even with 400,000 troops on the ground." There are about
144,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, down from a peak in January of about
160,000.

13) Shock and Anger in Baghdad Greet the Abu Ghraib News
Iraqis on the street and in the halls of power view the possible
return of a man convicted for his role in the prisoner abuse scandal
as another example of U.S. arrogance and insensitivity
Aparisim Ghosh, Time, Friday, Nov. 3, 2006
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1554399,00.html
Iraqis were jolted by a Friday morning bombshell: the news that Sgt.
Santos Cardona, viewed here as one of the villains of Abu Ghraib, has
been ordered back to the country. Although Iraqi and Arab media have
been slow to pick up on the story, many in Baghdad read about it
online, and word quickly spread. The reaction was predictable: total
outrage. "This is America spitting in our face," said Imad al-Hashimi,
a Baghdad paediatrician. "The sheer arrogance of it is unbelievable."

It wasn't until midday that the news began to circulate in the Green
Zone, the Baghdad enclave that includes many key government offices,
including that of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. There, it was greeted
with incredulity - and warnings of a backlash. "The reaction in the
street will be very bad," warns Maryam al-Rais, a member of the Iraqi
parliament. "This is just the latest in a long list of insults to
Iraqi dignity by the Americans."

Officials said that the Iraqi government was not consulted on Sgt.
Cardona's new posting. "He was sent without the knowledge of the Iraqi
government," says Said Fadil al-Shara'a, internal affairs advisor to
Nuri al-Maliki. "Nobody who has abused Iraqis should be allowed into
this country, whether or not he has been convicted."

One Western official in the Green Zone told TIME he had received
several angry calls from political figures, expressing "a cold fury"
at what they interpreted as American arrogance and insensitivity. "To
them, the fact that [U.S. Ambassador] Khalilzad didn't pick up the
phone and tell [Prime Minister] al-Maliki shows the Americans simply
don't care about Iraqi opinion," says the diplomat. "If Abu Ghraib was
a p.r. calamity, then this is Part II-another disaster."

The U.S. Embassy declined TIME's request for a comment, saying
questions about Sgt. Cardona were "military matters and issues." The
U.S. military in Baghdad has yet to respond to TIME's questions. But
Friday morning, in an apparent response to the publication of TIME's
story, the Pentagon issued a statement saying that Cardona's transfer
is being "evaluated" and that his movement with his unit into Iraq
from a staging area in Kuwait has been "stopped."

Iraqis contacted by TIME said it was especially galling that Sgt.
Cardona should be involved in training police. To political analyst
Tahseen al-Sheekli, it suggests "that America wants to build a police
force that doesn't believe in human rights."

Afghanistan
14) C.I.A. Review Highlights Afghan Leader's Woes
David Rohde & James Risen, New York Times, November 5, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/05/world/asia/05afghan.html
A recent CIA assessment found that the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai,
had been significantly weakened by rising popular frustration with his
American-backed government, American officials say.

The assessment found Karzai's government and security forces continued
to struggle to exert authority beyond Kabul, said a senior American
official. The assessment also found that increasing numbers of Afghans
viewed Karzai's government as corrupt, failing to deliver promised
reconstruction and too weak to protect the country from rising Taliban
attacks. "The ability to project out into the countryside, perceptions
of corruption in the government," said the official, listing Afghan
complaints. "The failure to deliver the services."

The assessment, which was conducted before Karzai's visit to
Washington in late September, echoes the frustration that has gathered
force in Afghanistan since the spring, and American officials in
Washington and Kabul are expressing increasingly dire warnings
regarding the situation here. Ronald E. Neumann, the American
ambassador in Kabul, said in a recent interview that the US faced
"stark choices" in Afghanistan. Averting failure, he said, would take
"multiple years" and "multiple billions."

Pakistan
15) Airstrike victims said to be children
Los Angeles Times, November 6, 2006
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-briefs6.1nov06,1,6020374.story
Almost all of the 80 victims of last week's airstrike on an Islamic
school in a tribal region near the Afghan border were children or
teenagers, Pakistan's largest Islamic opposition party reported. The
government has described the religious school, or madrasa, in the
Bajur tribal district as a terrorist training camp. But a published
list drawn up by the Jamaat-i-Islami party indicated that 13 of the
victims were younger than 12 and the youngest was 7.

Mexico
16) Protesters March in Oaxaca and Order Police to Pull Up Stakes
Associated Press, November 6, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/06/world/americas/06mexico.html
Thousands of anti-government demonstrators marched through Oaxaca
Sunday, demanding security forces abandon positions set up last week
to end a five-month protest. Masked police officers clutching
automatic weapons watched from rooftops as the protesters marched to a
plaza about a block away from their encampments, yelling, "Get out
federal police!"

The leaders formed a human chain to keep the crowd of an estimated
20,000 people from confronting the police, but about 400 people broke
through and attacked the officers with stones and bottles. Some of the
police officers lobbed rocks back, while officers on rooftops used
slingshots to shoot marbles at those trying to confront the police.

A radio station at Oaxaca's university, where the leftists had set up
their base last week, reported that gunmen had fired at some
protesters near the university earlier Sunday, wounding a 21-year-old
student, who was taken to a public hospital. The hospital confirmed
that a student had been brought in with a bullet wound.

About 4,000 federal police moved into the city on Oct. 29 to restore
order following a five-month protest that had rattled President
Vicente Fox's administration, scared tourists out of Oaxaca and left
more than a dozen people dead, mostly protesters shot by armed gangs.
After being chased out of the city center, the demonstrators moved to
the university. The police surrounded the campus last week and battled
hundreds of protesters.

The protests began in May when teachers went on strike for better pay
and conditions in Oaxaca, one of Mexico's poorest states. When the
police violently broke up one of their demonstrations in June,
protesters expanded their demands to include the ouster of the state
governor, Ulises Ruiz, whom they accuse of rigging the 2004 election
that brought him to power.

Now the demonstrators also want the federal police to leave. "They
don't guarantee security; to the contrary, they scare us and are
rude," said Jesús Velasco, 60, a businessman who was marching Sunday.
-
Robert Naiman
Just Foreign Policy
www.justforeignpolicy.org

Just Foreign Policy is a membership organization devoted to reforming
U.S. foreign policy so it reflects the values and interests of the
majority of Americans.