Abbas, one of the volunteers, summed up the contrast between Emar’s projects and the contracts given out by the occupying powers. Contracts for school rehabilitation are commonly worth forty to fifty thousand dollars and they do almost nothing. The schools are still not fit for use. Bechtel has been one of the main beneficiaries. They immediately sub-contract the work for about $28,000 to a company which then contracts the work to another company for about $10,000. He has this information from a friend who works as an engineer in the Ministry of Education.

At one local school that was “rehabilitated” this way, the fence the contractors built was such poor quality that it collapsed, hurting two of the girls. Abbas said their lives are finished. Both girls suffered broken hips so they won’t be able to have children, so no one will want to marry them. His medical information is maybe a bit sketchy – they’re only 8 and it’s unlikely that broken hips now will stop them bearing babies, should they want to, in adulthood, but his take on the situation is indicative of the distress the accident must be causing the girls and families concerned.

Radioactive pollution from the Sellafield nuclear plant in Cumbria has led to children's teeth across Britain being contaminated with plutonium.

The Government has admitted for the first time that Sellafield 'is a source of plutonium contamination' across the country. Public Health Minister Melanie Johnson has revealed that a study funded by the Department of Health discovered that the closer a child lived to Sellafield, the higher the levels of plutonium found in their teeth.

...according to one of his most dishonest aides, Condi Rice, Bush was concerned that his visit would increase the danger faced by the troops in Iraq. But we know that's bullshit, because Bush is more than willing to challenge the Iraqi guerrillas attacking our troops to "bring it on," as long as his chickenhawk ass is at least six or eight time zones away from the line of fire.

However, by pointing out that Hillary Clinton and Senator Jack Reed (D-R.I.) are touring Baghdad today, this story leads to an interested question: why is Baghdad too unsafe for Bush but not for Hillary Clinton?

the President had to sneak in and out of Iraq for a quick and dirty photo op, clearly in fear of his life if the news of his visit had leaked. He did not even get time to eat a meal with the troops. He was there for two hours. He did not dare meet with ordinary Iraqis, with the people he had conquered (liberated).

Offstage, the real Iraq carried on. Guerrillas attacked a military convoy on the main highway to the west of Baghdad, near Abu Ghraib. The wire services said, that an AP cameraman filmed "two abandoned military trucks with their cabs burning fiercely as dozens of townspeople looted tires and other vehicle parts." Guerrillas in Mosul shot an Iraqi police sergeant to death.

More U.S. troops have died in Iraq in November than in any month since the war began last March, according to Defense Department figures.

With November nearly over, the official death count yesterday stood at 79, surpassing March (65) and April (73), when the invasion was underway and fighting was most intense and widespread.

The surge has reflected an increase in the effectiveness and the frequency of guerrilla attacks.

   

Subject: Idleworm Date: Wed, 26 Nov 2003 21:25:00 -0800 (PST) From: Freddie Miller Jr <freddiemillerjr@sbcglobal.net> I just visited your site.I think your ignorant anti-american bias fits in perfectly with the mindless games and movies you have there.Keep up the good work,jackass. And just remember,Canada will never be 1/10th the country the United States is.Hell,if it wasn't for America,your shitty little country would be part of the Russian Federation by now.

  

Exclusive photos show US-led occupation forces frisking schoolgirls – a move condemned by the girls’ parents and international human rights organisations alike.

One father, Abu Muhammad, told Aljazeera.net on Sunday that if he ever hears his daughter has been touched by American soldiers again, he would “not be responsible for the consequences”.

“This humiliation has got to end now. I refuse to live like this. I’d rather die and I’ll take a few soldiers with me – and that’s a promise, not a threat.”

Dulame, 36, spent three months in detention, during which he said he was poorly fed and beaten for leading prisoner demonstrations. His family didn't know where he was until he was released in September. Since his release, he has been unable to trace other detainees he met while imprisoned.

"I am not afraid to say it, frankly. I hate the Americans, my daughter hates the Americans, my neighbors hate the Americans," said Dulame, sitting in his living room in an olive brown traditional robe, his jet black hair and mustache neatly trimmed, his eyes on a portrait of his late father, a tribal sheik.

With the Red Cross gone, detainees' families are increasingly unable to get basic information about them, human rights agencies say. And as U.S. troops crack down on armed opponents in Iraq, the growing number of detainees is breeding more hostility and resistance.

"Ask my neighbors. When they saw me being arrested and they knew I am just a simple man, they became angry," Dulame said. "Three times they [U.S. troops] raided my house. Every time, they turned everything upside down. They broke the doors and stole money and jewelry."

Palace staff said they had never seen the Queen so angry as when she saw how her perfectly-mantained lawns had been churned up after being turned into helipads with three giant H landing markings for the Bush visit.

The rotors of the President's Marine Force One helicopter and two support Black Hawks damaged trees and shrubs that had survived since Queen Victoria's reign...

"The Queen has every right to feel insulted at the way she has been treated by Bush," said a Palace insider.

"The repairs will cost tens of thousands of pounds but the damage to historic and rare plants will be immense. They are still taking an inventory.

"Her Majesty greeted the news that Bush was coming with his own chefs in absolute silence," says one insider. "That's her general way of expressing disapproval. She's not thought to be mad about the whole visit anyway, but when you consider that she has excellent cooks herself, you can see why this would be taken as a bit of an insult."

Everyone comes to school wearing a burqa. It seems surreal to me. A crowd of burqas walking in and out of a place of which I had a completely different image -- a place where signs of modernity were so visible. There were women with burqas in the streets of Kabul then, few and far between. But we would have laughed had we seen a woman in a burqa coming to school to teach, to study, or to work. Astonishing as it is, it is the necessity of time. These women fear for their lives. Security is like a fragile layer of ice, spread so thin over a river of anxiety and destitution. There is a growing concern about personal safety. Afghans know this too well. Just as they have realized that the latest threat to their lives comes from a dangerous little yellow-painted canister that litters the countryside.

One of these ominous little canisters sits on the table of Abdul-Latif Matin, regional manager of the UN Mine Clearing and Planning Agency. It is marked with the code “BOMB.FRAG BLU 97A/B 809420-30 LOT ATB92G109-001.” This is part of a US cluster bomb, made by American arms companies in Minnesota and California. They were dropped in their thousands during America’s bombardment of Afghanistan last year. Up to 20 per cent of the ordnance buries itself in the soil and turns into a mine. Two UN-supervised mine-clearers have been killed by these bombs just weeks before. I visit the family of Jawad, blown to pieces by an American bomblet in July. ''My son died because he was trying to help his family financially,'' Jawad’s father tells me. Latif has had to carry the bodies of his men home to their families, and takes an emotional, almost religious view of his work. ''We Muslims think that de-mining is part of our Holy War,'' he says. “It is a ‘jihad’ against the invisible enemies of Afghanistan. We believe if we die, we go to paradise.”

Bush oversaw a smart war in Afghanistan, and two years ago the crisp mountain air there pullulated with hope — along with pleas for more security.

One day back then, when I was thinking of driving to the southeast, six Afghans arrived from there — minus their noses.

Taliban guerrillas had stopped their vehicle at gunpoint and chopped off the men's noses because they had trimmed their beards.

I stroked my chin, admired my own proboscis and decided not to drive on that road.

Every foreign and local official said then that Afghanistan desperately needed security on roads like that one.

But the Pentagon made the same misjudgment about Afghanistan that it did about Iraq: It fatally underestimated the importance of ensuring security. The big winner was the Taliban, which is now mounting a resurgence.

Franks has speculated that in the wake of a major WMD attack, the US will scrap its constitution and adopt a military government. I can't imagine a more fascist, irresponsible thing for him to say. (I am not saying he advocates such a step. I am saying that for such a high-ranking former officer to even speak of this matter is the most irresponsible thing I have ever seen. The responsible thing for him to have done was to urge planning for civilian government under such emergency conditions.)

Their lying has finally become satire. Bush told David Frost that the world really had to change its attitude about Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons because they were "very advanced". My personal favourite is Donald Rumsfeld's assessment. "The message," he said, "is that there are known knowns - there are things that we know that we know. There are known unknowns - that is to say, there are things that we now know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns . . . things we do not know we don't know. And each year we discover a few more of those unknown unknowns."

Although the M16A1 — introduced in the early 1980s — has been heavily modernized, experts say it still isn't as reliable as the AK-47 or its younger cousin, the AK-74. Both are said to have better "knockdown" power and can take more of a beating on the battlefield.

   

   

In spite of the shortage, six soldiers trained to speak Arabic were among nine Army linguists dismissed from the service for homosexuality within six months of the U.S. invasion of Iraq last March. Two said they sought federal jobs to use their language skills in the war on terror but were rejected...

Meanwhile, the State Department, the agency primarily tasked with America's diplomatic relations worldwide, has fewer than 60 employees fluent in Arabic, out of 279 total Arabic speakers. A scant five have the polish and skills to go toe-to-toe with commentators on Middle Eastern television programs, according to an advisory commission Djerejian headed.

When Ariel Sharon, then a middle-aged general, wanted to send Israeli tanks into Cairo in October 1973, it was the arch-realist Henry Kissinger who realised how devastating the emotional effect would be in the Arab world, and stopped him. For a new generation of Arabs, the sight of American tanks in Baghdad is just as humiliating. Osama bin Laden's claim that having US forces at airbases close to the Islamic holy places in Saudi Arabia is a desecration appealed only to a few Muslims, but the daily television pictures of US troops in the heart of an Arab capital, and not just patrolling but using lethal force to back up an administration of occupiers, inflames a much larger audience.

   

“We need to have the guts to give at least one terrorist haven a stern lesson as an example to the others. Fallujah is the obvious choice.

“If the populace continues to harbor our enemies and the enemies of a healthy Iraqi state, we need to impose strict martial law. Instead of lavishing more development funds on the city—bribes that aren’t working—we need to cut back on electricity, ration water, restrict access to the city and organize food distribution through a ration card system.”

This program of starvation and oppression is to be applied to a city of 450,000 people—about the size of Cleveland, Ohio, or Atlanta, Georgia—with predictable consequences in terms of civilian casualties.

"We were asleep," recalled Mohammed Shakr al-Nassiri, 33, a shopkeeper. "We did hear some work going on during the night. When we got up, we found all this barbed wire around us. We don't understand the point of it. Why us? There's been resistance all over Iraq." In the case of Awja, the Americans appear to have resorted to this strategy after concluding they have no hope of winning over the people.

Similar tactics against the Palestinian intifada by Israel, which has sealed off towns and villages in the occupied territories for many months, have been widely criticised within the international community and human rights organisations as counter-productive.

The Americans have decided they have little to lose by sealing the town off in the hope that it will stifle guerrilla activity. Residents seem to think the approach is doomed to fail. A young policeman said over the wire barricade: "It will make the resistance stronger. Even those who did not fight when the Americans came to Iraq are being pushed to join the resistance."

“America will never run,” says President Bush. I should say not! After all, America has just won a crushing victory, as the president told us six months ago. So why is he even talking about running now?

As one hawkish pundit, imbued with the spirit of sacrifice, points out, the president is saying something that should go without saying. He shouldn’t even be telling our enemies that the thought of pulling out of Iraq has crossed his mind. It can only encourage them.

Meanwhile, ordinary Afghans have seen no meaningful improvement in their lives. Reshad, a 19-year-old whose father works for the Afghan Finance Ministry, told The Washington Post that his family hadn't gotten a paycheck in months. "We sold the carpets and the refrigerator," he said. "Now we'll borrow money to live. Finally, we'll have to start stealing something to eat. We'll join the Taliban just to support our family. If they give us money, we'll join them."

Michael might want to do a new song entitled, “Millions More Dollars,” because that is probably what it will take to prevent him from someday being used as a wishbone by the Aryan Brotherhood and the Crips. In ’93, he paid off a 13-year-old boy and his family an undisclosed whopping sum — believed to be in the $15-20 million range — to settle a civil suit, and there was a strong indication at the time that the agreement also included a promise by the kid not to testify at any criminal trial. That allowed Michael to continue having nosejobs and sleepovers as a free man.

GEORGE Bush was last night branded chicken for scrapping his speech to Parliament because he feared being heckled by anti-war MPs.

The US president planned to give a joint address to the Commons and Lords during his state visit to Britain.

But senior White House adviser Dr Harlan Ullman said: "They would have loved to do it because it would have been a great photo-opportunity.

"But they were fearful it would to turn into a spectacle with Labour backbenchers walking out."

Just for anyone who's keeping score: It's U.S. 0, Axis of Evil 4. That's based on the fact that Osama bin Laden, famously wanted dead or alive, is alive and at large. Saddam Hussein, clearly wanted just plain dead, is alive and at large. Axis of Evil member North Korea rolled out honest-to-god nukes while we were playing stupid games in weaponless Iraq. And Axis of Evil Member Iran is well on its way to getting nukes, which we can't do a damn thing about, because we spent all our credibility with the international community on Iraq.

Bush's choice to grant it an interview raised eyebrows among American journalists, who questioned its suitability for a president who has publicly embraced evangelical Protestantism.

"After coming to office with a vow to restore dignity to the White House, the president... granted an exclusive interview to a British tabloid that features daily photographs of nude women," the Washington Post said in an article on its Web site.

The Iraqi scientist who headed Saddam Hussein's long-range missile program has fled to neighboring Iran, a country identified as a state sponsor of terrorism with a successful missile program and nuclear ambitions, U.S. officers involved in the weapons hunt told The Associated Press.

Experts long feared the collapse of Saddam's rule could lead to the kind of scientific brain-drain the United States tried to prevent as the former Soviet Union collapsed. But the Bush administration had no plan for Iraqi scientists and instead officials suggested they could be tried for war crimes.

Only now is the State Department exploring the possibility of a government-funded program to block a scientific exodus and prevent Iraqis from doing future research in weapons of mass destruction.

Spectacular Martian landscape!

After being charged £20 for a £10 overdraft, 30 year old Michael Howard of Leeds changed his name by deed poll to Yorkshire Bank PLC Are Fascist Bastards. The bank has now asked him to close his account, and Mr. Bastards has asked them to repay the 69p balance, by cheque, made out in his new name. (The Guardian)

"The reason why people are against the death penalty very often is because of the risk of getting it wrong.
"With serial murders, that is unlikely to happen."

Those who worry about the low point Israel has reached in global public opinion are sharply divided over the reasons for it. Is opposition to Israel rooted in its military policy toward the Palestinians, or has anti-Semitism awoken after a long hibernation? As time passes and the negative attitude toward Israel intensifies, many Jews are beginning to feel that these sentiments are more anti-Semitic than anti-Israeli.

The controversial ingredient in the film is the suggestion that the doctor, in order to get his medical supplies through, works with the CIA and allows the smuggling of weapons. A shadowy intelligence agent pops up throughout the film in different locations.

The suggestion of a relationship between the CIA and aid groups has provoked an angry response from medical aid workers and groups. Medical aid organisations are particularly anxious to distance themselves from any governmental links after the attack on the International Committee of the Red Cross building in Baghdad.

Odd that we Americans care enough to liberate these wretches, but not enough to count how many of them we kill, either intentionally or by accident. If the government does count Iraqi mortalities, it doesn’t make its knowledge public. Iraqi ways, Iraqi people are not important enough to study.

This disparity, according to PIPA, which conducted the survey between October 31 and November 10, has translated into major questions about the president's personal veracity and credibility. Only 42 percent of those polled said that they believed that Bush was "honest and frank", while 56 percent said they had doubts about the things he says.

When, early in the 20th century, Oklahoma was granted statehood in the US, its first candidate for Congress campaigned for election by travelling from town to town with a speech that always ended with the same climactic appeal: "I beg you, I pray you, vote for old Jim. For otherwise, mark my words, they'll soon be practising celibacy in the streets of Oklahoma City." Since the good people of Oklahoma did not know what celibacy was, but assumed it to be some kind of papist evil, they elected the congressman by a landslide.

A Greek play believed lost when the Library of Alexandria is said to have burnt down in 48 BC is to be revived after fragments of text were found in an Egyptian mummy.

Papyrus inscribed with excerpts of Aeschylus's Trojan War trilogy Achilles were found by archaeologists.

...car models are a popular source of inspiration; 22 girls are registered as having the name Infiniti while 55 boys answer to Chevy and five girls to Celica.

Seven boys were found to have the name Del Monte - after the food company - and no less than 49 boys were called Canon, after the camera.

Designer firms and types of clothing were also well represented, with almost 300 girls recorded with the name Armani, six boys called Timberland and seven boys called Denim.

"It is no different from the 19th century when parents named their children Ruby or Opal... it reflects their aspirations" he says.

it's going to be a nerve-racking three days. "It's all thin ice," says a Foreign Office official. One element of unpredictability: Bush hates — really hates — the fuss and formality in which state visits are steeped.

The last time he dined with the Queen — in 1992 at his father's White House, wearing cowboy boots emblazoned with GOD SAVE THE QUEEN — he asked if she had any black sheep in her family. "Don't answer that!" his mother Barbara interjected, trying to avoid embarrassment. This time he's the President, the man in charge. Whatever Bush does, Blair will have to live with it.

An American citizen can be fingered as a terrorist, and with what proof? No proof. All you need is the word of the attorney general or maybe the president himself. You can then be locked up without access to a lawyer, and then tried by military tribunal and even executed. Or, in a brand-new wrinkle, you can be exiled, stripped of your citizenship and packed off to another place not even organized as a country — like Tierra del Fuego or some rock in the Pacific. All of this is in the USA PATRIOT Act.

the United States alone had more than 1.5 million troops in postwar Germany. That's not counting the French, the British, and of course, the Russians. That many troops in a country that had a lot of infrastructure—both social and civil. This, as opposed to the 130,000 troops that we have Iraq. It just isn't anywhere nearly enough.

The other thing, of course, is that soldiers aren't cops. Those are two different things, as we learned at Kent State thirty- odd years ago. Soldiers are not policemen, and it's very unfair, even for those soldiers who have some police training, to burden them with police duties. It's not what they're trained for, or equipped for.

France and Germany are publicly discussing the possibility of a "Franco-German union" that would allow them to cooperate more closely in such areas as education, social affairs and the economy and even merge their defence and foreign policies, the French daily Le Monde said yesterday.

In 1981, Kabul's two campuses thronged with women students, as well as men. Most went around without even a headscarf. Hundreds went off to Soviet universities to study engineering, agronomy and medicine. The banqueting hall of the Kabul hotel pulsated most nights to the excitement of wedding parties. The markets thrived. Caravans of painted lorries rolled up from Pakistan, bringing Japanese TV sets, video recorders, cameras and music centres. The Russians did nothing to stop this vibrant private enterprise...

..."Those were the best times," said Latif Anwari, a translator with an NGO in Mazar. Now in his late 30s, he studied engineering in Odessa from 1985 to 1991. "There was no fighting, everything was calm, the factories were working," he said.

Last week, a respected biologist was led into a Texas courtroom. He faces no fewer than 68 charges and could end up in jail for the rest of his life. Has the FBI finally caught the anthrax attacker? No. Thomas Butler merely reported that 30 vials of plague bacteria had gone missing from his laboratory at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, reports British science weekly New Scientist.

Some scientists, for instance, are refusing to work on projects involving agents that could be exploited as bioweapons, even though the US government is providing massive funding to boost such research.

Others are considering abandoning existing work. Irreplaceable collections of microbes essential for managing and tracing outbreaks, bioterrorist or natural, are being destroyed simply because labs cannot comply with the new rules. The climate of fear created by the Butler case is even threatening the US's ability to detect bioterrorist activity...

...if any terrorist ever does make off with dangerous bacteria, it will be a brave scientist who tells the FBI. As one put it: "I don't want to end up in a cell with Tom Butler."

Sami Awad, a Lebanese cameraman working as a freelancer for a German TV network, said that when his crew tried to check out a report Friday about hand grenades being thrown at a U.S. patrol in Baghdad, they encountered a roadblock at which soldiers told him to go ahead and film.

But as the crew proceeded down the street, more soldiers appeared, threw them to the ground and pointed their weapons at their heads, Awad said.

"They checked our identity badges and then let us go, saying they thought we were with Al-Jazeera," he said. "Each group of soldiers acts on its own, and most of them are very scared and inexperienced."

I Don't Want To Be a Soldier I don't want to be a soldier, I don't want to go to war, I'd rather stay at home, Around the streets to roam, And live on the earnings of a lady typist. I don't want a bayonet in my belly, I don't want my bollocks shot away, I'd rather stay in England, In merry, merry England, And fornicate my bleeding life away. Oh What a Lovely War

"He went completely out of his mind at the end. He started telling me about a hideous event that happened during a skirmish in a little ruined town in World War I. He'd killed someone in a miserable, horrible way and that had obviously haunted him throughout the rest of his life. As my grandfather died, in his mind he was back in that town, trying to find a German boy whom he'd bayonetted in the forehead. He'd lived with that memory all his life - and he was of a time when people kept things to themselves. When he finally told the story, it really affected me and I've not been able to get it out of my head."

The Parable of the Old Man and the Young So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went, And took the fire with him, and a knife. And as they sojourned both of them together, Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father, Behold the preparations, fire and iron, But where the lamb, for this burnt-offering? Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps, And builded parapets and trenches there, And stretchèd forth the knife to slay his son. When lo! an Angel called him out of heaven, Saying, Lay not they hand upon the lad, Neither do anything to him, thy son. Behold! Caught in a thicket by its horns, A Ram. Offer the Ram of Pride instead. But the old man would not so, but slew his son, And half the seed of Europe, one by one. War Poems of Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)

Where I was - the Ypres Salient in Belgium - there was no drainage at the Front. For the most part you were up to your thighs in water or mud. You can't be an effective fighting force slopping about like that. Soon we suffered the great discomfort and humiliation of becoming lice-bound and having rats running over us.

Excavation workers have filled a ship's container with artefacts from the period which include rifles, rum jars and newspapers. Five bodies still in uniform have also been recovered.

A couple of soldiers from each side then climbed out of their trenches, shook hands in no man's land, and wished each other a merry Christmas. They agreed not to shoot the following day.
"Afterwards, we placed even more candles than before on our kilometre-long trench, as well as Christmas trees," Zehmisch wrote. "It was the purest illumination - the British expressed their joy through whistles and clapping. Like most people, I spent the whole night awake. It was a wonderful, if somewhat cold, night."

Two startlingly white leg bones, a pair of decomposing boots, muddy buttons and a handful of rusting bullets are all that are left of one unknown British soldier whose remains lie in a Belgian field.
As the dead are remembered today at November 11 events, new finds are fuelling a bitter row over whether a motorway extension should be allowed to erase a first world war trench system uncovered by archeaologists.

what would Mary Detwiler, or any veteran of World War I, think of a United States of America that steadfastly refused to look squarely at the flag-draped coffins returning to Andrews Air Force Base, or at its own mutilated citizen-soldiers torn to shreds by RPGs or roadside bombs, on the grounds that such observances might be bad for either morale or ratings?

What might such a veteran think of million-dollar book and movie deals for photogenic blonde privates, and fat no-bid reconstruction contracts for Halliburton? What might such a veteran think of the bleating of armchair-warrior television and radio talk show hosts, whose sole combat experience arrived courtesy of Action Comics and The History Channel?

Steve Bell on Remembrance Sunday: ''They shall not grow rich, as we that sent them there grow rich...''

Last September, US forces shot dead Sarab's two-year old sister, Dunya, and wounded two other girls in her family, 13- year-old Menal and 16-year old Bassad. The family belongs to the Albueisi tribe who farm the rich land along the Euphrates river south of Falluja...

While the US authorities maintain that resistance attacks are carried out by former Baathists and supporters of Saddam, they continue to ignore the tribal nature of the insurgency which has grown steadily over recent months. Deeply conservative clans like the 50,000-strong Albueisi have codes of honour which they complain the American army ignores at checkpoints and during raids on houses...

...Last week an American Chinook helicopter was shot down by a heat-seeking missile a few kilometres from Sarab's house, killing 16 soldiers. It could have been worse, the neighbours say. Resistance fighters were ready to fire another missile at a second Chinook when they were stopped by worried locals.

After the crash, others in the area came out with rocket- propelled grenade launchers and Kalashnikovs, but they, too, were dissuaded for fear of retaliation. And with good reason. After Friday's downing of a Black Hawk helicopter near Tikrit,US troops dropped two 500lb bombs and fired tank rounds at the area of the crash in a show of force.

American soldiers handcuffed and firmly wrapped masking tape around an Iraqi man's mouth as they arrested him for speaking out against occupation troops.

Asked why the man had been arrested on Tuesday and put into the back of a Humvee vehicle on Tahrir Square, the commanding officer told Reuters at the scene: "This man has been detained for making anti-coalition statements."

...farmers feverishly plowing the rich dark earth for winter planting season have only one crop in mind: opium poppy. Some have already agreed to sell their future crop to smugglers from Pakistan, who are eager to front them seed and fertilizer money in return for a guaranteed low price at harvest time.

"Everyone is growing poppy now, and there's no way to stop it," said Amar Gul, 50, an illiterate farmer, rattling off the frank economic calculus that makes poppy-growing such a temptation for Afghanistan's impoverished rural communities.

U.S. MILITARY officers who recently returned from Afghan duty describe a deteriorating security situation in the country, which is currently patrolled by about 7,000 U.S. troops, primarily from the 82nd Airborne Division, along with a 5,000-strong United Nations peacekeeping mission confined to the capital, Kabul.

U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld last month declared that Afghanistan had shifted “from major combat activity to a period of ... stabilization and reconstruction.” Yet interviews with these officers, combined with assessments from independent experts, suggest that forces loyal to the ousted Taliban leadership may be preparing the ground for a comeback attempt.

Joe and Suzanne Werfelman of Sciota, Pa., were shocked to hear from their son, Richard, a 23-year-old law student called up by his military-police unit, that he had been issued a protective vest without the “plates” that stop automatic-rifle rounds. They bought and shipped the plates themselves, at a cost of $660.

"It is a...it is a...the people have gotta understand...the Iraqi People have gotta understand...that anytime you got a group of killers willing to kill innocent Iraqis...that um...their future, uh, must not be determined by these kind of killers. That's what they've got to understand. I think they do understand that. That's what th... It's in the interests of...uh...long term peace in the world that we, uh, work for a free and secure and peaceful Iraq. A peance freeance secure Iraq in the midst of the middle east will have enormous historical impact." - Listen. Check out the official transcript. They've fixed Bush's gibberish!

Civil rights campaigners say they expect draconian anti-terror rules to be deployed, although Sir John has assured them marches will be allowed and they will be able to use Trafalgar Square.

But the Met and the US Secret Service have reportedly agreed "rules of engagement" allowing Bush bodyguards to shoot anyone they believe is clearly threatening the life of the President.

During a recent briefing, as Tyson gave an account of three military police officers who died on the job in Karbala, his cell phone rang. The caller told him one of the dead officers was his close friend and mentor.

"I just broke down and cried right there," Tyson said.

His soldiers stood in formation and quietly watched. At that very instant, war became reality for 20-year-old Spc. Ruben Romero, among the silent ones that day.

"I felt like my heart skipped a beat," said Romero, who joined the Army two years ago.

US evangelicals employ a selective biblical literalism to support a theology that systematically confuses the kingdom of God with the US's burgeoning empire. It is no coincidence that the mission fields most favoured by US evangelicals are also the targets of neo-conservative military ambition. To use Jesus as the rallying cry for a new imperialism is the most shameful reversal of all, for he was murdered by the forces of empire. The cross spoke of Roman power in just the way Black Hawk helicopters speak today of US power.

"Neither America, nor the father of America, scares us," said one resident, Najih Latif Abbas. "Iraqi men are striking at Americans and they retaliate by terrifying our children."

Fakhri Fayadh, a 60-year-old farmer, said reprisal attacks "will only increase our spite and hatred of them. If they think that they will scare us, they are wrong. Day after day, Americans will be harmed and attacks against them will increase."

The dialogue is super bad, rivaling the banality of the dialogue in Star Wars Episode I. For example, any time a character asked the question "what do you want?" It was always answered with "the same thing you want." This little Q&A game is played all throughout the movie, question after question being "answered" with "YOU ALREADY KNOW." Great, then WHY DID HE ASK???

Crown Prince Abdullah, the effective ruler of Saudi Arabia, must be feeling some frightening winds blowing across the Saudi desert. For Bin Laden's aim to destroy the royal family is shared by the American right wing.

When Laurent Murawiec, friend of the then US defence policy board chairman Richard Perle, gave his odd but damning assessment of Saudi Arabia as an enemy of the US and the "Kernel of Evil", he might have been Bin Laden spokesman.

Murawiec, who works with the Rand corporation and has been an executive editor of Executive Intelligence Revue presented a slide show to the Pentagon last year with titles that included "taking 'Saudi' out of Arabia".

 

A series of shocking pictures revealing US soldiers tying up Iraqi women and children in their own home has provoked international outrage...

...A senior officer justified the action at the time saying the child could have been carrying explosives. He added the security of US soldiers came first before any hearts and minds operation.

...a senior (British) military source said: ''This sort of action would be highly unusual for British troops and would have to be authorised at the highest level.

''We just don't do things like that. We are working very closely with Iraqi people in the ground in Basra and prioritise in winning hearts and minds.''

I'm so glad that Afghanistan has been liberated from those horrid Taliban. Now Afghan women won't have to wear those degrading Burkhas: Beauty prize for Miss Afghanistan Ironically, if Ms. Samadzai is brave enough to return to the ''new'' Afghanistan, she'll almost certainly be arrested, or worse. The more things change, the more they stay the same...

I concede there are democratic reforms necessary in the Middle East; however, when I am back home in Kuwait, I take comfort knowing that I am able to send e-mails to my friends without having to worry about them being read by authorities.

As for safeguarding rule of law, one only needs to look at the cases behind many of those detained in Guantanamo Bay. Countless inmates have been denied their basic rights both as detainees and as American citizens.

In the case of Jose Padilla, the alleged "dirty bomber," it was reported that officials attempted to stop Padilla from meeting with his lawyers, a right later granted to him by U.S. District Judge Michael Mukasey. In an article that appeared in France's Le Monde newspaper early this year, Pakistani Mohammed Sanghir reported that officials at Camp Delta beat him, shaved his head and beard (which, to many Muslims, bears strong religious significance), and was initially not allowed to pray.

First, the picture's caption described it as depicting one of the wives of the prophet Mohammed. It was a concept that many Muslim visitors condemned as an act of blasphemy - since the Muslim faith prohibits human representations of the prophet, his wives or relatives.

But when, having rebuffed a number of complaints, the gallery conducted some historical research, it discovered a second gaffe: the painting of Ayesha was never intended to show one of Mohammed's wives at all. The woman was more likely to have been Queen Ayesha, a character from She, the classic novel by H Rider Haggard.

McDonald's has expressed its outrage over how the latest Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary describes job prospects at the US fast-food giant.

In its latest edition, the dictionary defines the term McJob as "low-paying and dead-end work".

McDonald's CEO Jim Cantalupo dismissed the term as "an inaccurate description of restaurant employment".

He called it "a slap in the face to the 12 million" industry's staff, according to the Associated Press news agency.

    

Though still not officially confirmed, the rumours surround a purported sexual contact between Prince Charles and Michael Fawcett, one of his closest advisers.

TIKRIT, Iraq - Houses shook, walls cracked, chandeliers swayed and children woke up screaming for their parents as U.S. planes dropped 500-pound bombs on the outskirts of Saddam Hussein's hometown overnight...

...''This is to remind the town that we have teeth and claws and we will use them,'' said Lt. Col. Steven Russell, who oversaw troops destroying two abandoned houses and a warehouse with machine gun and heavy weapons fire.

Yet efforts to curb the resistance breed even more hatred for coalition forces.

Defense analysts generally praised the report. "It's a very significant report," Lang said. One of its surprising findings, he said, was the conclusion that Iraq never intended to destroy its oil fields but may have tried to bluff the allies with such a threat "to deter us from invading." Some analysts have concluded that Iraq may also have bluffed possession of weapons of mass destruction to deter invasion.

Iraq is not Vietnam. The scale of guerrilla attacks on the allies is still relatively tiny. Yet the British consider that the security situation on the ground is worse than the media convey because many local attacks go unreported, unless the allies suffer casualties. There is already a tension between the US administration, which is leaking hints of early troop withdrawals to meet Bush’s electoral requirements, and the urgent military need for more soldiers on the ground.

Today, the administration is lying to the American people by asserting that it has enough men in Iraq to do the job. It does not, and no reputable counter-insurgency expert would support current Pentagon claims of sufficiency. The British government and military are with difficulty containing a huge rage against Bush’s people. First, jotting down the tally of all British dealings with the US over, say, the last 18 months, they find the score to be: requests and proposals made, about Iraq and a wide range of bilateral issues — countless; matters on which Washington has given London satisfaction — zero.

...the Americans will not make headway in Iraq, any more than they did in Vietnam, until they commit people who possess a real interest in its welfare. It is no good sending Beltway types who perceive their sole responsibility in Baghdad as serving the national interest of the United States.

The British, in the days of empire, were very good at this...many British rulers displayed a passionate, even obsessive interest in the peoples among whom they served. Lawrence Durrell contrived to write with sensitivity and sympathy about Cyprus in 1956, even as some Cypriots were doing their utmost to drive him and his fellow colonial civil servants into the sea. By contrast, I have yet to meet an American who regards Iraq as anything other than ‘the asshole of the universe’.

The luxuriant countryside around al-Hussai is as flat as a billiard table and the slender minarets of mosques rise above swaying palm fronds. Yet the roads running through this idyllic setting are scarred with jagged craters, where bombs have exploded beneath military convoys.

A US helicopter was shot down five miles south of al-Hussai on Sunday, killing 16 soldiers. While American officers blame diehard supporters of Saddam Hussein and foreign "jihadis" for the attacks around Fallujah, the truth is both more prosaic and more worrying.

Any visitor soon discovers that US forces have alienated almost all of the local people. The population of some 250,000 believes that an occupying army has mistreated them.

Fallujah has seen more deadly American blunders than anywhere else in Iraq. In May, soldiers killed 18 civilians after armed men allegedly infiltrated a peaceful demonstration.

In September, they mistook eight Iraqi policemen for guerrillas and killed them. Last month, six civilians died when US soldiers opened fire in panic after a bomb attack.

Yet these incidents do not wholly explain the resentment. American forces have inadvertently offended the honour of the clans who dominate life around Fallujah.

CIVIC staff member Faiz Al Salaam monitors the girls' condition each day. Nobody in the military or the U.S. Army has visited them, nor has anyone offered to help this very poor family.

...the (helicopter) attacks should also send a shudder through anyone who flies, even if they never board anything but commercial wide-body airliners and never venture within 5,000 miles of Iraq. By removing the locks from Iraq's enormous stores of armaments, including "vast, unknown" quantities of anti-aircraft weapons, as Air Force Gen. John Handy, commander of U.S. Transportation Command, put it several months ago, the fighting in Iraq has virtually ensured that some of these arms will wind up in the hands of terrorists who will want to use them outside the current war zone.

The administration's efforts, while right-minded, pale next to the specter of jihadists streaming into Iraq and, in yet another unintended consequence of the occupation, creating a supply pipeline to al-Qaida. In the Washington Post last October, I wrote, "Even with U.S. special forces combing the country, the collapse of the Iraqi regime could prove to be the greatest proliferation disaster in history." I was thinking about chemical or biological weapons materials—back then everyone was sure they were present—that I thought might be "privatized" by unhappy former security service colonels. Now the same may be true of conventional weapons. While a MANPADS attack would lack the special horror of one with WMD, the damage could be comparable or greater.

The assumption that events will conform to a preconceived model is a failing to which neoconservatives are notably vulnerable. Part of this may be Marxist residue that never quite washed off. The intellectual descendants of Trotskyists, the neocons find the idea of revolution from above, in which intellectuals and ideas play the crucial role, instinctively appealing.

The Defense Department invited 21 people to travel to Iraq from November 2 to 7 and told us that they would limit the delegation to 17. Of the original 21 invitees, only three of us accepted. Those who turned down the invitation included Fred Barnes, Jackson Diehl, William Safire and George Will. After they extended more invitations, eventually 10 people accepted.

They strip searched me. It was humiliating. They put me in an orange suit, and took me to a doctor, where they made me sign forms, and gave me a vaccination.

I asked what it was, and they would not tell me. My arm was red for almost two weeks from that.

They took me to a cell. I had never seen a prison before in my life, and I was terrified. I asked again for a phone call and a lawyer. They just ignored me.

On Sunday night at about 9 p.m., the guards came to my cell and told me my lawyer was there to see me. I thought it was a strange time, and they took me into a room with seven or eight people in it.

I asked where my lawyer was. They told me he had refused to come and started questioning me again.

They said they wanted to know why I did not want to go back to Syria. I told them I would be tortured there. I told them I had not done my military service; I am a Sunni Muslim; my mother’s cousin had been accused of being a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and was put in prison for nine years.

They asked me to sign a document and I refused. I told them they could not send me to Syria - I would be tortured.

We landed in Amman at three in the morning local time on Oct. 9. They took me out of plane and there were six or seven Jordanian men waiting for us.

They blindfolded and chained me, and put me in a van. They made me bend my head down in the back seat. Then, these men started beating me. Every time I tried to talk they beat me.

For the first few minutes it was very intense.

It was three feet wide. It was six feet deep. It was seven feet high. It had a metal door, with a small opening in the door, which did not let in light because there was a piece of metal on the outside for sliding things into the cell.

There was a small opening in the ceiling, about one foot by two feet with iron bars. Over that was another ceiling, so only a little light came through this.

There were cats and rats up there, and from time to time the cats peed through the opening into the cell. There were two blankets, two dishes and two bottles. One bottle was for water and the other one was used for urinating during the night. Nothing else. No light.

I spent 10 months, and 10 days inside that grave.

You can preside over the most catastrophic failure of intelligence and national defense in history.

Can fire no one associated with this fatal chain of blunders and bureaucratic buck-passing.

Can oppose an inquest into September 11 for more than a year until pressure from the relatives of those killed on that day becomes politically toxic.

Can name Henry Kissinger, that mortician of truth, to head the independent commission you finally accede to.

You can start an unnecessary war that kills hundreds of Americans and as many as 7,000 Iraqi civilians—adjusted for the difference in population, the equivalent of 80,000 Americans.

Can occupy Iraq without a plan to restore traffic lights, much less order.

Can make American soldiers targets in a war of attrition conducted by snipers, assassins, and planters of remote-control bombs—and taunt the murderers of our young men to "bring it on."

Can spend hundreds of billions of dollars on nation building—and pass the bill to America's children. (Asked to consider rescinding your tax cut for the top one percent of taxpayers for one year in order to fund the $87 billion you requested from Congress to pay for the occupation of Iraq, your Vice President said no; that would slow growth.)

You can lose more jobs than any other President since Hoover.

You can cut cops and after-school programs and Pell Grants and housing allowances for the poor to give tax cuts to millionaires.

You can wreck the nation's finances, running up the largest deficit in history.

You can permit 17,000 power plants to increase their health-endangering pollution of the air.

You can lower the prestige of the United States in every country of the world by your unilateral conduct of foreign policy and puerile "you're either with us or against us" rhetoric.

Above all, you can lie the country into war and your lies can be exposed—and, if a majority prefers ignorance to civic responsibility, you can still be reelected.

Since Saturday, people in the Highlands of Scotland have been witnessing large movements of US warplanes overhead. Experienced observers say the large numbers are reminiscent of those that preceded the bombing of Iraq in 1998 and military strikes on Libyai in the1980’s as well as the first Gulf War.

She told him, in Arabic, that the soldiers "played with her." It was obvious to Moshe what she meant. Corporal Gideon, who would be one of the main prosecution witnesses in the trial, testified that after the girl told Officer Moshe what she told him, he said to the others that she must be washed so she would be clean for fucking. Gideon, who lives in Givatayim and works as a tour guide, declined to be interviewed for this article.

According to an unclassified Army report, the mystery projectile punched through the vehicle’s skirt and drilled a pencil-sized hole through the hull. The hole was so small that “my little finger will not go into it,” the report’s author noted.

The “something” continued into the crew compartment, where it passed through the gunner’s seatback, grazed the kidney area of the gunner’s flak jacket and finally came to rest after boring a hole 1½ to 2 inches deep in the hull on the far side of the tank...

...Experts believe whatever it is that knocked out the tank in August was not an RPG-7 but most likely something new — and that worries tank drivers.

"The closest parallel to the Iraq situation is the British in Northern Ireland, where you also had some people supporting the occupying army and some opposing them, and where the opponents were willing to resort to terror tactics," says Charles Peña, director of defense studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. "There the British needed a ratio of 10 soldiers per 1,000 population to restore order, and at their height, it was 20 soldiers per 1,000 population. If you transfer that to Iraq, it would mean you'd need at least 240,000 troops and maybe as many as 480,000.

"The only reason you aren't hearing these kinds of numbers discussed by the White House and the Defense Department right now," Peña adds, "is that you couldn't come up with them without a return to the draft, and they don't want to talk about that."

It’s not surprising that the New Jersey housewife who first spotted the five Israelis and their white van wants to preserve her anonymity. She’s insisted that she only be identified as Maria. A neighbour in her apartment building had called her just after the first strike on the Twin Towers. Maria grabbed a pair of binoculars and, like millions across the world, she watched the horror of the day unfold.

As she gazed at the burning towers, she noticed a group of men kneeling on the roof of a white van in her parking lot. Here’s her recollection: “They seemed to be taking a movie. They were like happy, you know ... they didn’t look shocked to me. I thought it was strange.”

In the car was $4700 in cash, a couple of foreign passports and a pair of box cutters – the concealed Stanley Knife-type blades used by the 19 hijackers who’d flown jetliners into the World Trade Centre and Pentagon just hours before. There were also fresh pictures of the men standing with the smouldering wreckage of the Twin Towers in the background. One image showed a hand flicking a lighter in front of the devastated buildings, like a fan at a pop concert. The driver of the van then told the arresting officers: “We are Israeli. We are not your problem. Your problems are our problems. The Palestinians are the problem.”

If the American footprint is reduced, it will not make the guerrillas stop fighting. (“Hey, Saddam, we’ve scared the Americans back into their compounds. Let’s ease up now and give them a break.”) On the contrary, the rebels will step up their attacks on the Iraqi Army and local politicians, whom they already accuse of being collaborators. Iraqification could easily produce more chaos, not less.

The idea of a quick transfer of political power is even more dangerous. The Iraqi state has gone from decades of Stalinism to total collapse. And there is no popular national political party or movement to hand power to. A quick transfer of authority to a weak central government will only encourage the Shiites, the Sunnis and the Kurds to retain de facto autonomy in their regions and fragment the country.