The battles, the most ferocious in nearly a year in Baghdad, erupted minutes after the arrest of Adil Mashadani, the leader of the Fadhil Awakening Council, which is composed mostly of former Sunni insurgents who allied themselves with the U.S. military in exchange for monthly salaries that are now paid by Iraq's government.
WP: residents direct anger at Iraqi police for failing to dismantle car bomb that killed 16
Standing with his colleagues as residents cleaned the street, Abbas, the sergeant, teared up.
"As long as there is vengeance against you and vengeance against me, as long as there's blood between us, this isn't going to end," he said. "This isn't going to finish. Even if the government drafted half the people into the army and police, it won't end."
...Thursday's bombing was the fourth major attack in Baghdad and its outskirts this month, illustrating the resilient ability of insurgents to carry out devastating strikes in some of the country's most dangerous regions -- parts of Baghdad and its outskirts, Diyala province, northeast of Baghdad, and the region around the northern city of Mosul. Some police and Interior Ministry officials have warned that Shiite militias and Sunni insurgents are reorganizing in parts of Baghdad and its outskirts and in Basra. "They're all waiting for the Americans to leave," Abbas said.
WP: Iraq to relocate members of Iranian dissident group
For years there have been tense relations between Bahrain's Sunni elite and the Shiite majority. That tension exploded into regular protests this year after the police arrested 23 opposition organizers, including two popular figures, Hassan Mushaima'a and a Shiite cleric, Sheik Mohammed Habib al-Moqdad. Prosecutors accused them of trying to destabilize the government and planning terrorist attacks.
...Compared with other places in the Persian Gulf, tiny Bahrain feels laid back and calm in the capital and the better neighborhoods. More than half the nation's one million residents are expatriate workers, giving the streets a relatively cosmopolitan feel. Bahrain also has a not-too-hidden seedy side. Prostitution is rampant in the hotels and nightclubs, and the streets are filled with "massage parlors." Bahrain is a destination for sex tourism.
Bahrain's politics are heated, too. The 40-member Parliament is controlled by religious parties, Sunnis and Shiites, who have turned it into a sectarian battleground. The country is run by a self-declared king, Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa, who presides over a police force staffed primarily by foreigners: Syrians, Iraqis, Jordanians, almost anyone who happens to be a Sunni and is eager to earn a Bahraini passport.
Shiites are all but banned from the military and security forces — certainly from command positions — one of their primary grievances.
The Shiite majority complains that the government has a plan to naturalize as many Sunnis as possible, to change the demographic balance. The government and its supporters insist that is not true.
BBC: clashes in Yemen between security forces and al-Qaeda associates
Slate: The Art of Recruitment: al-Qaeda's training manual
Gdn: identifying allies and enemies
"I can become someone's worst enemy in a second, but that is a short-term solution," said [Colonel David] Haight. "My aim here is governance, security and sustainability."...
"Sometimes we are talking to people then someone joins us and the villagers all go quiet," [Captain José] Vasquez said. "In one village there are three brothers who say they have no power but clearly run the place and clearly are not on our side. Another village is just plain bad. We got stones thrown at us there."
Interviews with MPs, officials and judges from Logar revealed a typically web of shifting loyalties, divided communities, inter-generational tensions and desperate bids by village elders to gauge who is the best guarantor of security and resources: the Americans who have guns and money but will eventually leave, or the insurgents who have less of both but are going nowhere.
Gdn: training the Afghan army (video): 'it's like having 26 kids'
Support for the Taliban, as well as other militant groups, is coordinated by operatives inside the shadowy S Wing of Pakistan’s spy service, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, the officials said. There is even evidence that ISI operatives meet regularly with Taliban commanders to discuss whether to intensify or scale back violence before the Afghan elections...
The ISI helped create and nurture the Taliban movement in the 1990s to bring stability to a nation that had been devastated by years of civil war between rival warlords, and one Pakistani official explained that Islamabad needed to use groups like the Taliban as “proxy forces to preserve our interests.”
NYT: factions of Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan try to solidify alliance in anticipation of US troop deployment
WP: village on border pays price for resisting
Nearly all of the leads attained through the harsh measures quickly evaporated, while most of the useful information from Abu Zubaida -- chiefly names of al-Qaeda members and associates -- was obtained before waterboarding was introduced, they said.
AP: Spanish court considers trying Bush administration officials for providing legal cover for torture
The ex-Bush officials are Gonzales; former undersecretary of defense for policy Douglas Feith; former Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff David Addington; Justice Department officials John Yoo and Jay S. Bybee; and Pentagon lawyer William Haynes.
NYT: leaked accounts of Israeli soldiers operating in Gaza raise questions of war crimes
When asked why that elderly woman was killed, a squad commander was quoted as saying: “What’s great about Gaza — you see a person on a path, he doesn’t have to be armed, you can simply shoot him. In our case it was an old woman on whom I did not see any weapon when I looked. The order was to take down the person, this woman, the minute you see her. There are always warnings, there is always the saying, ‘Maybe he’s a terrorist.’ What I felt was, there was a lot of thirst for blood.”
Slate: why use white phosphorous?
Gdn: the Naxalite insurgency in India
The Naxalites - villagers call them dada, Hindi for older brother - get their name from an uprising in the Naxalbari area of West Bengal in 1967. Playing on the frustrations of India's hundreds of millions of rural poor, they have won support by redistributing the wealth of the landowners and opposing industrialisation. They are estimated to have a strong presence in at least 170 out of India's 602 districts and have warned that they will use violence to block the elections in those areas.
In Chhattisgarh alone, in the past two years, 578 civilians have died in Naxal-related violence. The police and special police officer death toll stands at 231, against 142 dead Naxalites. According to police figures, in the past eight years in the Dantewada district alone 72 roads have been destroyed, 18 banks, 291 public vehicles, 87 schools, two hospitals, 24 railway lines and 56 electricity stations.
To counter their influence, the Salwa Judum militia emerged in 2005, ostensibly out of the frustration of those who had suffered at the hands of the Naxalites. The result was more killing, as the SJ members turned on those they accused of harbouring and supporting the Naxalites. Caught in the middle are the tribal people who live in the forests. There was no voting in the state elections in November in once prosperous Nendra: it has been attacked three times; 145 houses have been burned down, 16 adults and nine children killed.
The few villagers who have since returned huddle together around the one building that still has a roof. Its pink walls are covered with neatly painted Hindi script. The message the Naxalites left would be unequivocal, were the villagers able to read Hindi: "Don't take part in elections. Don't listen to the Hindu fascist members of the BJP [the Hindu nationalist opposition party]. Throw away their leaflets, don't help the police."
Scared at first, they relax as night falls, the trees around come alive with fireflies and the local hooch emboldens them. Yes, the dadas come from time to time, they say, but what can they do? They feed them and send them on their way. Then the SJ comes and burns their houses and kills those who cannot run away. "We are just living and surviving," says a voice in the darkness.
...
• The Naxalites take their name from the Naxalbari district in West Bengal where the movement began in 1967.
• They started by organising uprisings among landless workers in West Bengal, Bihar and Andhra Pradesh. They then moved into the mineral-rich areas of Orissa, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand.
• The movement, whose aim is violent revolution, has now spread to 170 of India's 602 administrative districts.
• The Naxalites consider themselves the heirs of Mao Zedong, although China has denounced the movement.
• With a force of up to 15,000 soldiers, it controls a fifth of India's forests.
• Two wings, People's War Group and the Maoist Communist Centre, combined several years ago to form the Communist Party of India (Maoist).
BBC: investigations of a weapons cache found in Bangladeshi madrassa
WP: Colombian gov't to return stolen land to internally displaced
Government investigators say that illegal, anti-guerrilla death squads that swarmed through in 1996 and 1997 worked with troops commanded by Gen. Rito Alejo del Rio, who is now in jail on charges that include murder and collaborating with paramilitary groups. More than 100 villagers were slain, and as many as 3,000 farmers were forced to abandon 247,000 acres, a swath about a third the size of Rhode Island.
The palm companies then built roads through the forest and planted nearly 15,000 acres with African palm, which is used as a biofuel and in many other products. The few farmers who had individual titles to land were forced to sell. "They would say, 'Sell, or your widow will,' " recalled one farmer, Eustaquio Polo Rivera, 40.
...Documents from the attorney general's office and the nation's controller obtained by The Washington Post show that state loans were used to bankroll the palm oil company operations. Urapalma received most of its start-up funding from the state, the controller's office said, and the company accounted for 89 percent of the incentives provided from 2002 to 2006 through a rural development fund to companies in Choco.
...Court documents and depositions show that some of the companies had close links to illegal paramilitary groups that massacred villagers in a dirty war against leftist rebels. The commanders of those groups have since disarmed their forces and are offering testimony about their alliances with military and government officials in exchange for leniency.
Miami Herald: one of them, Raul Hasbún, describes banana company payments to paramilitaries in the same region
The son of a former plantation owner, Hasbún took over the family banana plantation as guerrilla power hit its peak in Urabá, the heart of the Colombian banana-growing region.
At that time, it was the rebels who were extorting business owners, transportation companies and shopkeepers. They kidnapped the wealthy and middle class alike, using the ransom to finance their war against the government. Like nearly everyone else, Hasbún paid his quota to the guerrillas.
In 1994, Hasbún became fed up with the shakedowns. He said he approached the Castaño family, a powerful clan that was forming small paramilitary death squads to fight the rebels and assassinate their followers, and ultimately joined their cause.
Working closely with local military officials, paramilitaries spent the next 10 years killing hundreds of suspected rebel collaborators and sympathizers, former paramilitaries from the region have testified. Hasbún himself has confessed that he killed or ordered the deaths of hundreds across a 200-mile swath of coastal territory.
CSM: FARC targets Colombian cities
LAT: police foil plot to kill Defense Minister
WP: Clinton acknowledges failure of US drug war policies, US demand for cocaine driving violence in Mexico
LAT: drug cartels diversify trafficking operations to include humans
SlateV: meanwhile, gringo guns go south
NYT: violence also crossing the border
African Affairs: ...and the Atlantic: a history of drug trafficking in West Africa (via Chris Blattman)
LAT: political prisoners in Zimbabwe
WP: members of Georgian opposition party arrested
The arrests, some of which took place at the offices of Burjanadze's party, come just over two weeks before Georgia's main opposition parties plan mass demonstrations calling on Saakashvili to resign.
The opposition has accused Saakashvili of monopolizing power and betraying the democratic ideals of the Rose Revolution, the 2003 street protests that swept him into office. A favorite of the Bush administration, the U.S.-educated lawyer has come under increased pressure since Georgia's defeat in a war with Russia in August over two breakaway territories.
Gdn: ...while a protest singer imprisons himself
BBC: rural violence mars Turkish elections
CSM: hijab debate ignites in Norway
urban ennui
NYT mag: the collapse of Cleveland
Time: reconstructing Detroit
NYT: ideas for the Bronx, LA, New Orleans, and Buffalo
++
NYT Freakonomics: what the 'avatars of the underground' have to say about the bailout
“See, by the time there’s a crisis, the Sleepy Heads are already gone. They’re the ones who keep the books, so they know where the money is, and they know when trouble starts. So they usually get out first. But at this point, in most of these companies, all you got left is the Killers. They’re the ones who like hanging around, who ain’t got no home life, who just love the blood, and the guts, who love the pain!”
“Again,” I interrupted, “what does that have to do [with the financial crisis?]”
“Never lose your killers. Never let them go, because you’ll need them when things gets better. You can always get the Sleepy Heads back. They’re hiding under a rock anyway. But the Killers! Those folks are hard to find, so you got to give up the money. Pay the ones at the top, the one’s who like to smell blood. Let the Sleepy Heads go, but keep the Killers.”++
public intellectuals
NYT: John Hope Franklin
NYT magazine: on science and consensus
Dyson may be an Obama-loving, Bush-loathing liberal who has spent his life opposing American wars and fighting for the protection of natural resources, but he brooks no ideology and has a withering aversion to scientific consensus...Dyson says he doesn’t want his legacy to be defined by climate change, but his dissension from the orthodoxy of global warming is significant because of his stature and his devotion to the integrity of science. Dyson has said he believes that the truths of science are so profoundly concealed that the only thing we can really be sure of is that much of what we expect to happen won’t come to pass. In “Infinite in All Directions,” he writes that nature’s laws “make the universe as interesting as possible.” This also happens to be a fine description of Dyson’s own relationship to science. In the words of Avishai Margalit, a philosopher at the Institute for Advanced Study, “He’s a consistent reminder of another possibility.” When Dyson joins the public conversation about climate change by expressing concern about the “enormous gaps in our knowledge, the sparseness of our observations and the superficiality of our theories,” these reservations come from a place of experience. Whatever else he is, Dyson is the good scientist; he asks the hard questions. He could also be a lonely prophet. Or, as he acknowledges, he could be dead wrong.
New Scientist: truth and revelation: physicist wins religious prize (via Chris Blattman)
Unlike classical physics, d'Espagnat explained, quantum mechanics cannot describe the world as it really is, it can merely make predictions for the outcomes of our observations. If we want to believe, as Einstein did, that there is a reality independent of our observations, then this reality can either be knowable, unknowable or veiled. D'Espagnat subscribes to the third view. Through science, he says, we can glimpse some basic structures of the reality beneath the veil, but much of it remains an infinite, eternal mystery.
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