The United Nations has called for the immediate closure of the US detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, in Cuba.

In a report on conditions there, the UN says the US should try all detainees or release them "without further delay".

The UN investigators allege that some aspects of the inmates' treatment amount to torture.

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Abbas Mutlaq and Thaer al-Mufti live at opposite ends of Iraq, but both have given up on the government to supply electricity, turning instead to private generators to keep the lights on.

And both say the power supply situation has worsened since the 2003 overthrow of Saddam Hussein despite the billions of dollars set aside by the Bush administration for reconstruction.

For many Iraqis, chronic power problems have become a litmus test of American promises of a better life without Saddam's tyranny.

Iraqis often ask why a superpower that can send thousands of soldiers, tanks and Humvees to fight a war half a world away cannot guarantee that the lights work.

More at Yahoo! News

The former CIA official who coordinated U.S. intelligence on the Middle East until last year has accused the Bush administration of "cherry-picking" intelligence on Iraq to justify a decision it had already reached to go to war, and of ignoring warnings that the country could easily fall into violence and chaos after an invasion to overthrow Saddam Hussein.

Paul R. Pillar, who was the national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005, acknowledges the U.S. intelligence agencies' mistakes in concluding that Hussein's government possessed weapons of mass destruction. But he said those misjudgments did not drive the administration's decision to invade.

"Official intelligence on Iraqi weapons programs was flawed, but even with its flaws, it was not what led to the war," Pillar wrote in the upcoming issue of the journal Foreign Affairs. Instead, he asserted, the administration "went to war without requesting -- and evidently without being influenced by -- any strategic-level intelligence assessments on any aspect of Iraq."

"It has become clear that official intelligence was not relied on in making even the most significant national security decisions, that intelligence was misused publicly to justify decisions already made, that damaging ill will developed between [Bush] policymakers and intelligence officers, and that the intelligence community's own work was politicized," Pillar wrote.

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