The WaPo obit by J.T. Smith.

The WaPo obit of JT Smith.

There's some deeper meaning there about Ford, I guess.

FDS (Ford Derangement Syndrome): "Squeaky" Fromme, deranged defender of trees, discusses her assassination attempt on Ford. So, strangely, does Ford.

"His life didn't mean more than the redwoods to me."

Posted by: Ace at 01:05 PM | Comments (19)
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Actually the "Special Crimes Unit" was just that-- a unit devoted to perpetrating special crimes, like kidnapping, torture, and vengeance killing.

The British let this cancer fester for far too long. And while they freed 127 victims -- many showing signs of real torture, like crushed hands -- the perpetrators had mostly fled when they stormed in.

So they blew the building up. Big whoop. Many of the detainees who were tortured seem to have been terrorists themselves, though.

Yesterday's operation, one of the biggest since the 2003 invasion, was the latest stage of a drive to stamp out renegade Shia Muslim militia elements believed to have infiltrated police operating from the compound.

Late on Christmas Eve, using night-vision glasses, an overwhelming force of British troops and Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) headed for the compound. Their Challenger tanks and Warrior armoured vehicles were fired upon from alleyways leading to the al-Jameat police station. The British used heavy machineguns to kill seven Iraqi gunmen.

At 2am local time (11pm GMT), with helicopters circling overhead, they began the raid to capture the station. With the rogue police leaders already removed, the troops met limited resistance from remaining officers. There was an exchange of fire but no casualties. Policemen were arrested under warrants issued by the Iraqi Interior Ministry.

The soldiers burst into the prisonersÂ’ quarters, a large concrete-walled room with a few mats on the hard floor, crammed with men groaning in pain and fear.

The 127 prisoners, suspected criminals, found by the British received medical attention. Crushed hands and feet strongly suggested that they had been treated brutally by their interrogators. The men, many needing to be carried, were taken by the ISF to the Warren custody facility in the oil-rich southern port.

There are fears others have escaped. Some reports suggested the British had expected to find 178 detainees. BasraÂ’s police chief, furious that the raid happened without his knowledge, said there had been 147 locked up. There was no accounting for "20 of the most dangerous of them, who have carried out bomb attacks in Basra", he said.

...

After yesterdayÂ’s raid, part of the wider Operation Sinbad to clean up BasraÂ’s police, British bases in the city came under mortar attack.

Major Burbridge said: "We identified the Serious Crimes Unit as, frankly, too far gone. We just had to get rid of it. For some time weÂ’ve been talking about culling the police force. Well, this is exactly what weÂ’ve done. WeÂ’ve removed a very significant and nasty part of the police force which has been scaring people in Basra."

Sigh:

...

Brigadier Mohammad al-Musawi, BasraÂ’s police chief, nevertheless accused the British of trying to stir up trouble. General Ali Ibrahim, an Iraqi army commander, told reporters the raid was illegal. He said: "We could have solved this problem ourselves between Iraqi forces but the British overreacted."

Shockingly, there is a backlash against the Brits by angry Shiites.

The British militaryÂ’s demolition of a Basra police station that they claim was used as a base for death squads has caused a political backlash, creating possible complications for the British campaign to purge the southern port cityÂ’s notoriously corrupt police force.

However, in an environment where militias, criminal gangs, political parties and factions within the police force all overlap in a patchwork of often competing alliances, it is difficult to tell exactly how widespread is the opposition to the British move against what they called a rogue police unit.

...

Basra citizens frequently complain about their police force, which many say is the product of a local authority that is fractured between several large Shia Islamist factions, including the Fadila party, the radical Sadrist movement, and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, plus a handful of smaller ones.

In the absence of clear dominance by one faction or the other, each has cultivated its allies within the police force.

Last summer, in response to a surge in violence, Nouri al-Maliki, prime minister, deployed the army on the streets and formed a special security committee to tackle the port city’s anarchy – a move opposed by some local politicians.

Some citizens have praised Mr Maliki for taking a firm hand against local corruption. Militias such as the Mahdi Army, however, are believed to have strong roots in the cityÂ’s extensive slums, where many people reportedly blame the British for the lack of any improvements in their conditions over the past three years.

At least twice in the past the Basra provincial council has promised to cut off relations with British forces, but such boycotts have been relatively short-lived.

It's always someone else's fault with these guys, huh?

Posted by: Ace at 03:16 PM | Comments (61)
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All the joys of communism, minus the great gymnasts and chess players.

The report isn't as credible as I'd like -- because the writers use their claims to engage in apologism for Iran's nuke program. They claim that Iran may really need nukes because they're "neglecting investment" in oil production.

Well, gee whiz, from where could they get the additional money to invest in oil production? Maybe from the nuke program? And it's not nuclear energy that has America riled up about Iran -- it's Iran's specific insistence on building nuke power plants that enrich uranium into a weapons-grade form. Such nukes simply aren't necessary if you just want to produce electricity.

The report is also sanguine on the possibility that Iran may self-destruct without a military strike by America -- which may be an intentionally false bit of optimism. Peace in our time and all that.

So take it with a grain of salt.

Iran is suffering a staggering decline in revenue from its oil exports, and if the trend continues income could virtually disappear by 2015, according to an analysis published Monday in a journal of the
National Academy of Sciences.

Iran's economic woes could make the country unstable and vulnerable, with its oil industry crippled, Roger Stern, an economic geographer at Johns Hopkins University, said in the report and in an interview.

Iran earns about $50 billion a year in oil exports. The decline is estimated at 10 to 12 percent annually. In less than five years exports could be halved and then disappear by 2015, Stern predicted.

For two decades, the United States has deployed military forces in the region in a strategy to pre-empt emergence of a regional superpower.

The U.S. military exercises have not stopped Iran's drive. But the report said the country could be destabilized by declining oil exports, hostility to foreign investment to develop new oil resources and poor state planning, Stern said.

Stern's analysis, which appears in this week's edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, supports U.S. and European suspicions that Iran is trying to develop nuclear weapons in violation of international understandings. But, Stern says, there could be merit to Iran's assertion that it needs nuclear power for civilian purposes "as badly as it claims."

He said oil production is declining and both gas and oil are being sold domestically at highly subsidized rates. At the same time, Iran is neglecting to reinvest in its oil production.

"With an explosive demand at home and poor management, the appeal of nuclear power, financed by Russia, could fill a real need for production of more electricity."

Um, yeah. And Russia's offered a dozen times to process whatever uranium Iran says it needs, and Iran has refused every time. Because they don't want nuclear energy; they want nuclear weapons.

Posted by: Ace at 02:55 PM | Comments (17)
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Lost his appeal. The clock ticks.

An Iraqi appeals court on Tuesday upheld a ruling that Saddam Hussein should hang for crimes against humanity, Iraq's national security adviser told Reuters.

Under the statute governing the Iraqi High Tribunal, the death sentence must be carried out within the next 30 days.

The former Iraqi leader and two former aides were sentenced to death in November for crimes against humanity over the killings of 148 Shi'ites from the town of Dujail after he escaped assassination there in 1982.

"The court just upheld the verdict and sentence," Iraq's national security adviser Mowaffaq al-Rubaie told Reuters.

Old by now, but good news.

Posted by: Ace at 02:31 PM | Comments (26)
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From A- to BBB+, increasing the cost of servicing debt and indicating it's slighly riskier to lend to the NYT.

At what point will the NYT officially be peddling "junk bonds," and when can we jail Pinch Sulzberger for doing so?

Posted by: Ace at 02:26 PM | Comments (18)
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Ah. Now it all makes sense.

The photograph is jarring, to say the least. Why on earth would a rabbi from New York travel to Tehran to embrace Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a man who says the Holocaust never happened and that Israel should be annihilated?

...

This small suburban county has the highest percentage of Jews in the nation, and many if not most of them have been seething since leaders of the ultra-Orthodox sect Neturei Karta attended the Holocaust conference in Tehran and seemingly lent their support to known Holocaust deniers.

Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss led the Neturei Karta delegation to Iran's capital on Dec. 11 to participate in a two-day conference on whether the Holocaust occurred. Among the other attendees were former Ku Klux Klan Imperial Wizard David Duke and French professor and gas-chamber denier Robert Fuerisson.

...

But residents say Neturei Karta, led by Weiss, is a fringe operation that espouses views held by virtually no one else in the community — namely that Israel must be destroyed and put into Arab hands before the coming of the Messiah.

"He wants his 10 minutes of infamy," Greenberg said. "That's what it's about."

Neturei Karta, Aramaic for "guardians of the city," was founded in Jerusalem in 1938 as a splinter group of Agudas Yisroel, an anti-Zionist cell of Orthodox Jews founded 26 years before, according to the Neturei Karta Web site.

The group denies that they are "a small sect or an extremist group of 'ultra-orthodox' Jews," but rather are "fighting the changes and inroads made by political Zionism during the past 100 odd years," according to the site.

"Zionism is a fundamentally heretical movement which denies the Divine imperative that Jews remain in exile until the day when all mankind will be miraculously redeemed,” Weiss told a gathering of protesters in New York City in November.

Liberals always tar Christian supporters of Israel by impugning us with selfish motives held by a small number of Christians -- millenialist Christians who believe a strong Israel with its capital Jerusalem is necessary to hurry the second coming of Jesus.

Well, I guess then liberals are equally guilty of wishing Israel to be destroyed so as to hasten the coming of the Jewish Messiah, yes?

Posted by: Ace at 02:18 PM | Comments (58)
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If there is such a thing as strong-form melt-the-icecaps global warming, isn't there a big element of self-correction to it? If burning carbon for heat causes temperatures to rise, rising temperatures cause less carbon to be burned for heat, right?

Anyway, in the Northeast, it's almost balmy. And wonderful.

Oil and natural gas prices fell hard Tuesday amid mild winter weather that has depressed demand for home-heating fuels.

Trading volume was light and that exaggerated the moves lower, analysts said.

U.N. sanctions against Iran that were approved over the weekend could raise concerns about supplies in 2007, though traders so far appear to have shrugged off the continuing dispute over Tehran's nuclear ambitions.

Light sweet crude for February delivery declined $1.31, or 2 percent, to settle at $61.10 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange, which reopened Tuesday after a three-day closure for the Christmas weekend.

In other Nymex trading Tuesday, natural gas prices dropped 52.2 cents, almost 8 percent, to settle at $6.113 per 1,000 cubic feet and heating oil futures fell 5.87 cents to settle at $1.6233 a gallon. Unleaded gasoline slid 5.08 cents to settle at $1.5722 a gallon.

In London, Brent crude futures declined $1.32 to settle at $61.10 a barrel on the ICE Futures exchange.

"The weather is taking a big hold of this market," said Societe Generale commodity strategist Mike Guido, who estimated that consumption of home-heating fuels in the Northeast was as much as 30 percent below normal over the past 45 days.

Posted by: Ace at 02:11 PM | Comments (10)
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If true-- Somalia and Ethiopia can combine to crush these guys, but we can't?

Somalia's Islamists are in full retreat after Ethiopian airstrikes and a ground offensive that have killed up to 1,000 of the religious movement's fighters, Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi said on Tuesday.

"A joint Somali government and Ethiopian force has broken the back of the international terrorist forces... These forces are in full retreat," Meles told reporters in Addis Ababa, adding that up to 1,000 Islamist fighters had been killed.

"A few are Somali but the majority are foreigners," he said of the dead.

Addis Ababa has vowed to protect Somalia's weak interim government from rival Islamists based in Mogadishu. A week of artillery and mortar duels between the two sides has spiraled into open war that both sides say has killed hundreds.

Meles said most fighters of the Somalia Islamic Courts Council (SICC) had fled to their home areas. He said Ethiopian forces were now hunting down troops from his arch-foe Eritrea, which he accuses of supporting the Islamists.

"The only forces we are pursuing are Eritreans who are hiding behind the skirts of Somali women, and terrorist mujahideen," Meles said.

Ethiopia says the SICC has recruited foreign jihadists, and that a handful of almost 300 prisoners taken after one battle for a central Somali town held British passports.

300 prisoners after one battle. (I highlighted "handful" so you wouldn't misread as I did and think all 300 had British passports.) 1000 dead.

What the hell?

Can we get these guys to lend us a hand in Iraq?

Posted by: Ace at 01:48 PM | Comments (50)
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Sorry, eman. I was cleaning up spam coming from 9999mb.com and my filter triggered on your email address and ate a whole bunch of your comments.

I'll see if I can retrieve them from the backup.

Update: 57 comments saved from eternal damnation deletion!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:22 AM | Comments (47)
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Ah, well.

The Senate Intelligence Committee has rejected as untrue one of the most disturbing claims about the Sept. 11 terrorist strikes — a congressman's contention that a team of military analysts identified Mohamed Atta or other hijackers before the attacks — according to a summary of the panel's investigation obtained by The Times.

The conclusion contradicts assertions by Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.) and a few military officers that U.S. national security officials ignored startling intelligence available in early 2001 that might have helped to prevent the attacks.

In particular, Weldon and other officials have repeatedly claimed that the military analysts' effort, known as Able Danger, produced a chart that included a picture of Atta and identified him as being tied to an Al Qaeda cell in Brooklyn, N.Y. Weldon has also said that the chart was shared with White House officials, including Stephen J. Hadley, then deputy national security advisor.

But after a 16-month investigation, the Intelligence Committee has concluded that those assertions are unfounded.

"Able Danger did not identify Mohammed Atta or any other 9/11 hijacker at any time prior to Sept. 11, 2001," the committee determined, according to an eight-page letter sent last week to panel members by the top Republican and Democrat on the committee.

...

The panel said it found "no evidence" to support claims by military officers connected to Able Danger that Defense Department lawyers prevented the team's analysts from sharing their findings with FBI counter-terrorism officials before the attacks.

Nor was the alleged chart or any information developed by Able Danger improperly destroyed at the direction of Pentagon lawyers, the panel concluded — a charge that had stoked claims of a cover-up.

...

Able Danger was the unclassified name given to a program launched in 1999 by the U.S. Special Operations Command as part of an effort to develop military plans targeting the leadership ranks of Al Qaeda and other terrorist networks.

Military analysts assigned to the effort did create charts with pictures of Al Qaeda operatives whose identities were known publicly at the time, the committee found. But the committee concluded that none of those charts depicted Atta, and that the claims of Weldon and others may have been caused by confusion.

One of the charts, titled "The Al Qaeda Network: Snapshots of Typical Operational Cells Associated With UBL [Usama bin Laden]," was attached to the letter sent to committee members last week by Sens. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) and John D. "Jay" Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), the panel's leaders.

"One of these individuals depicted on the chart arguably looked like Mohammed Atta," the committee concluded. "In addition, the chart contained names of Al Qaeda associates that sound like Atta, as well as numerous variations of the common Arab name Mohammed."

The committee also suggested that officials' memories may have been clouded by the flurry of charts and photographs of Atta that surfaced after the attacks. The panel noted that a defense contractor that produced the chart at the center of the controversy subsequently created a follow-up chart, after the attacks, that did include Atta.

Posted by: Ace at 12:27 PM | Comments (36)
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