The reason for closing up shop now is technical. Blogger is about to take away the option to use their software to publish blogs on third party hosts. I had several options for continuing to publish this blog, from migrating to another blog service (easy) to writing my own publishing software (harder but more fun). But given how little effort I've been putting in lately, and how few people read it, it seemed better just to stop the project altogether.

Existing posts will stay up until the domain name expires, at which point I'll sell it to Lateef the Truthspeaker if he wants it. Most American troops should be out of Iraq by the end of 2011. Maybe then people will be more willing to look back on what happened. More likely people will stop talking about it altogether.

Around the time I was born my country was involved in another war that, despite what the president at the time claimed, had nothing to do with protecting my country from a military threat. I thought maybe we had learned a lesson from that war about when it was appropriate to use military force and the limits of what you can accomplish with it. It turned out I was wrong. And just to add icing to this cake of pessimism, we've learned that the news media is even more easily manipulated into spreading the government's lies than it was forty years ago.

But being pessimistic doesn't mean we have to give up hope. Pessimism involves little hope; giving up means there is no hope. Each of us has just a little power over what our government does in our country's name. A little power is better than no power, and if you work with others (but not for them) the collective power of masses of people, can, once in a while, accomplish good things. Sometimes it can even expose the truth beneath a veil of lies.

Keep paying attention, and keep speaking the truth.
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A former senior MI6 officer has criticised the torture and abuse of terror suspects and says the US response to the threat posed by al-Qaida has been exaggerated and counterproductive.

Stinging criticism of the US is made in the Guardian by Nigel Inkster, assistant chief of MI6 until 2006.

In the article, which appeared originally in the International Institute for Strategic Studies journal Survival, Inkster and co-author Alexander Nicoll write: "It is surely not inspiring for radicalised people with the potential for violent action to see terrorists tried in ordinary criminal courts and sentenced to long prison terms." The authors, both senior IISS members, add: "But it surely is inspiring to them to see terrorists treated as a special class of prisoners to be held by the military, imprisoned without trial and tortured. This is the kind of treatment that makes jihadists believe that they can indeed be the fighters for a cause that they aspire to be."

Abandoning "ordinary standards of criminal justice" in terrorism cases can be counterproductive, they say. "On top of this, there is the argument that democratic values … are the [west's] best advertisement. Departures from such values have damaged America's … reputation."

The huge expense of Bush's "global war on terror", they said, had arguably caused more damage to the world economy than Osama bin Laden could have hoped for. "Nobody can forget the horror of 9/11, and it was inevitable that a government faced with such an outrage would respond in extreme fashion. Hindsight is easy, but if Bush had placed more emphasis on bringing those responsible to justice rather than on declaring an unwinnable 'war' against an undefined enemy, things might have turned out very differently."

Well, duh.

The Obama administration, its critics, and, of course, the press have all apparently forgotten that the terrorists who planned and carried out the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 (remember that?) were tried in civilian courts and are serving time in federal prisons. There was no uproar back then, and it was 6 years before al Qaeda attacked the US again.

Full article at The Guardain.
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The UK's most senior military intelligence officer in Iraq warned that the US was expressing concern about the ineffectiveness of British interrogation methods just as an Iraqi civilian died in British custody, it was disclosed today.

The implication of the warning, revealed in evidence to the inquiry into the death of Basra hotel worker Baha Mousa in 2003, was that the US wanted British forces to adopt tougher techniques even though they were already using methods officially banned by the government.

From the Guardian
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CIA report suggesting public relations strategies to use in NATO countries where there is little popular support for the Afghan War.

Afghanistan: Sustaining West European Support for the NATO-led Mission—Why Counting on Apathy Might Not Be Enough
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The government protested to the US over the torture of terror suspects, the former head of MI5, Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller revealed last night.

She also said the Americans concealed from Britain the waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the September 2001 attacks.

"The Americans were very keen that people like us did not discover what they were doing," Lady Manningham-Buller told a meeting at the House of Lords.

She also admitted MI5 were slow to recognise that the US was torturing detainees. Asked if Britain protested, she replied: "We did lodge a protest." She declined to elaborate but it is believed that the protests were made at ministerial level.

More at the Guardian.
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Here's a Justice Department report on laws broken by the FBI, with the full cooperation of certain phone companies:

http://www.justice.gov/oig/special/s1001r.pdf

(you'll need a PDF reader like Foxit Reader or Adobe Reader)

And here's a PC World article about it:

US DOJ: Operators helped FBI illegally obtain phone records
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From the Washington Post:

The FBI illegally collected more than 2,000 U.S. telephone call records between 2002 and 2006 by invoking terrorism emergencies that did not exist or simply persuading phone companies to provide records, according to internal bureau memos and interviews. FBI officials issued approvals after the fact to justify their actions.

FBI officials told The Post that their own review has found that about half of the 4,400 toll records collected in emergency situations or with after-the-fact approvals were done in technical violation of the law. The searches involved only records of calls and not the content of the calls. In some cases, agents broadened their searches to gather numbers two and three degrees of separation from the original request, documents show.

Bureau officials said agents were working quickly under the stress of trying to thwart the next terrorist attack and were not violating the law deliberately.

And the road to hell is paved with...
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Fresh evidence has emerged that Tony Blair's discredited Iraqi arms dossier was "sexed up" on the instructions of Alastair Campbell, his communications chief, to fit with claims from the US administration that were known to be false.

The pre-invasion dossier's worst-case estimate of how long it would take Iraq to acquire a nuclear weapon was shortened in response to a George Bush speech.

As Campbell prepares to appear before the Iraq inquiry on Tuesday, new evidence reveals the extent to which – on his instructions – those drafting the notorious dossier colluded with the US administration to make exaggerated claims about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.

From the Guardian
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It's bad enough that the Obama administration refused to publicly investigate and expose the mistakes of the previous administration. It now appears that they refuse to even learn from those mistakes.

According to Maj Gen Michael Flynn and two other intelligence advisers, the huge intelligence apparatus in Afghanistan is "only marginally relevant" to Nato's overall war plan because nearly all of its effort is spent finding Taliban fighters to kill rather than trying to understand the needs and grievances of ordinary Afghan civilians. Their support is now seen by military chiefs as key to beating the insurgency.

Bogged down producing detailed flow diagrams of rebel cells, intelligence officers are consequently "ignorant of local economics and landowners, hazy about who the powerbrokers are and how they might be influenced, incurious about the correlations between various development projects and the levels of co-operation among villagers", the report says.

It claims that some battalion-level officers looking for an overview of the political and economic situation in key areas "acquire more information that is helpful by reading US newspapers than through reviewing regional command intelligence summaries".

Tony Blair used "deceit" to persuade parliament and the British people to support war in Iraq, Sir Ken Macdonald, the former director of public prosecutions, said today.

In an article in the Times, Macdonald attacked Blair for engaging in "alarming subterfuge", for displaying "sycophancy" towards George Bush and for refusing to accept that his decisions were wrong.

Macdonald's comments about Blair's decision to go to war are more critical than anything that has been said so far by any of the senior civil servants who worked in Whitehall when Blair was prime minister.

MacDonald is telling us something we already know, but it's still nice to hear it from someone who was close to the action.

It would have been a lot nicer to hear it back in 2003.
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We've heard all this before, but this is the first time we've heard it on the record from high-ranking British officials. They were giving evidence at the UK government's inquiry into the Iraq war. I urge all Americans to read the accounts of the British inquiry, since it seems clear that we will never have such an investigation here in the US.

There was a "dire" lack of planning in Washington for what would happen in the aftermath of the Iraq invasion, a senior British diplomat has said.

The US had a "touching faith" that its troops would be welcomed in Iraq and democracy would soon follow, Edward Chaplin told the Iraq inquiry.

Mr Chaplin, director of Middle East policy at the Foreign Office in the run-up to the 2003 invasion and ambassador to Baghdad after the war, said preparations for what would follow the toppling of Saddam Hussein were a "real blind spot" in Washington.

Although the State Department looked at the issue in detail, Mr Chaplin said there was less interest "elsewhere" in Washington and that policy was largely dictated by the White House and Pentagon.

"They [US officials] had a touching faith that once Iraq had been liberated from the terrible tyranny of Saddam Hussein everybody would be grateful and dancing in the streets and there would be really be no further difficulty.

"And then the Iraqis would somehow magically take over and restore their state to the democratic state it should be in.

"We tried to point that this was extremely optimistic."

The US put too much faith in Iraqi opposition groups and political exiles about how quickly the country could be stabilised after the invasion, Mr Chaplin said, while coalition forces did not fully realise how "fractured" Iraqi society had become under Saddam Hussein.

From BBC News
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It must suck to be elected president and have to do your predecessor's job in addition to your own.

The Obama administration today ordered that the self-confessed mastermind of the September 11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and four others be transferred from Guantánamo Bay to New York to stand trial.

The US attorney general, Eric Holder, told a press conference in Washington he would be seeking the death penalty.

President Obama, speaking at a press conference during a trip to Japan, said he was sure Mohammed would receive a fair trial, in spite of the problems of finding unbiased jurors in New York, and of evidence being tainted by torture. "I am absolutely convinced that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed will be subjected to the most exacting demands of justice. The American people insist on it, and my administration insists on it," he said.

The US ambassador in Kabul has written to the White House arguing against sending thousands more American troops to Afghanistan.

In a leaked cable, Karl Eikenberry expressed doubts about the competence of President Hamid Karzai's government.

Mr Eikenberry, a former US commander in Afghanistan, also raised concerns about corruption within the Afghan government.

He said it was "not a good idea" to send more troops, the BBC has been told.

I'm not sure how I feel about this. I don't support the current nation-building project in Afghanistan, but I do support the hunt for Osama bin Laden, and I think we should commit however many troops it takes to get that job done.

But one thing we shouldn't do is say we want to achieve an objective but then fail to commit the resources for it. We should go all in or not at all.
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From the New York Times:

Top executives at Blackwater Worldwide authorized secret payments of about $1 million to Iraqi officials that were intended to silence their criticism and buy their support after a September 2007 episode in which Blackwater security guards fatally shot 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad, according to former company officials.

Blackwater approved the cash payments in December 2007, the officials said, as protests over the deadly shootings in Nisour Square stoked long-simmering anger inside Iraq about reckless practices by the security company’s employees. American and Iraqi investigators had already concluded that the shootings were unjustified, top Iraqi officials were calling for Blackwater's ouster from the country, and company officials feared that Blackwater might be refused an operating license it would need to retain its contracts with the State Department and private clients, worth hundreds of millions of dollars annually.

Four former executives said in interviews that Gary Jackson, who was then Blackwater's president, had approved the bribes and that the money was sent from Amman, Jordan, where the company maintains an operations hub, to a top manager in Iraq. The executives, though, said they did not know whether the cash was delivered to Iraqi officials or the identities of the potential recipients.