Docudharma Times Sunday December 14

Blaming Others For Your Failures   Making Sure You Take No Responsibility

Report Spotlights Iraq Rebuilding Blunders



By JAMES GLANZ and T. CHRISTIAN MILLER

Published: December 13, 2008

BAGHDAD – An unpublished 513-page federal history of the American-led reconstruction of Iraq depicts an effort crippled before the invasion by Pentagon planners who were hostile to the idea of rebuilding a foreign country, and then molded into a $100 billion failure by bureaucratic turf wars, spiraling violence and ignorance of the basic elements of Iraqi society and infrastructure.

The history, the first official account of its kind, is circulating in draft form here and in Washington among a tight circle of technical reviewers, policy experts and senior officials. It also concludes that when the reconstruction began to lag – particularly in the critical area of rebuilding the Iraqi police and army – the Pentagon simply put out inflated measures of progress to cover up the failures.

Views on Auto Aid Fall On North-South Divide

Tennessee’s Nonunion Workers Bristle At Bailout Talk for Detroit’s Big Three

By Peter Whoriskey

Washington Post Staff Writer

Sunday, December 14, 2008; Page A01

SMYRNA, Tenn., Dec. 13 — People in this small town surrounding one of Nissan’s busiest U.S. car plants have followed the news of the auto bailout with particular interest.

Namely, they wonder, what about us?

Nissan is a Japanese automaker, but the Altimas, Maximas and Pathfinders that roll out of the factory are built by locals who are “Americans too,” they like to point out. And just like the other automakers, Nissan is inflicting some of the economic pain on its employees, cutting shifts and pay.

USA

Stimulus Package To First Pay for Routine Repairs



By Alec MacGillis and Michael D. Shear

Washington Post Staff Writers

Sunday, December 14, 2008; Page A01

President-elect  Barack Obama calls it “the largest new investment in our national infrastructure since the creation of the federal highway system in the 1950s.” New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg compares it to the New Deal — when workers built hundreds of bridges, dams and parkways — while saying it could help close the gap with China, where he recently traveled on a Shanghai train at 267 mph.

Most of the infrastructure spending being proposed for the massive stimulus package that Obama and congressional Democrats are readying, however, is not exactly the stuff of history, but destined for routine projects that have been on the to-do lists of state highway departments for years. Oklahoma wants to repave stretches of Interstates 35 and 40 and build “cable barriers” to keep wayward cars from crossing medians. New Jersey wants to repaint 88 bridges and restore Route 35 from Toms River to Mantoloking. Scottsdale, Ariz., wants to widen 1.5 miles of Scottsdale Road.

Obama may bring change, but Congress will be the same

A larger Democratic majority is unlikely to change the political nature of the House and Senate, which have just concluded a typically unimpressive year.

By Janet Hook

December 14, 2008

Reporting from Washington — The collapse of legislation to bail out the U.S. auto industry is a fitting end to this year in Congress — and a warning to President-elect Barack Obama that even larger Democratic majorities next year won’t guarantee smooth sailing for his ambitious agenda on economics and other issues.

Polarized, beset by crises, and preoccupied with ideological and regional politics, this Congress followed a pattern all too familiar in the past decade. It railed and wrangled over the nation’s toughest problems, but in the end failed to advance solutions.

From healthcare and costly dependence on foreign oil to the greatest economic crisis in more than half a century, the House and Senate have floundered into stalemate. Meanwhile, the economic woes have gone international.

Africa

Africa’s hungry tribe

Prices may be starting to fall in our supermarkets, but in Africa the cost of feeding a family remains terrifyingly high. Alex Renton reports from Tanzania, where the struggle to earn money for grain and the appropriation of grazing lands for tourism is driving the Masai to desperate measures



Alex Renton

The Observer, Sunday 14 December 2008

It was the best cup of tea. Nongishu Kingi made it the Masai way, in a big saucepan over the wood fire in her hut. When the water boiled, she dropped in the tea mix, added milk and stirred, and stirred. After five minutes she poured it carefully into old enamel mugs, each with a pinch from her tiny hoard of sugar. We stood outside the hut watching the cold dawn washing the slopes of the volcano, our hands warming on the mugs, breathing in the spiced steam. There’s cardamom, ginger and cinnamon in East African ‘masala chai’, and a smoky taste from the fire. It was so good you could live on it: some people do.

In a thorn paddock in the centre of the circle of huts, protected from leopards, the goats complained. The men frowned over their condition, pinching the bones that jutted in the loose skin of their backs. Nongishu gave her three older children their breakfast.

Missing activist was ‘collecting evidence’ on Mugabe crimes

 Human rights workers are going into hiding across Zimbabwe as regime launches new wave of arrests

Alex Duval Smith in Bulawayo

The Observer, Sunday 14 December 2008

A prominent Zimbabwean human rights activist abducted 12 days ago was working on case files to be used as possible prosecution evidence against members of President Robert Mugabe’s regime, The Observer has learnt.

Jestina Mukoko, director of the Zimbabwe Peace Project (ZPP), is the most prominent among 20 political and civil society activists who have disappeared in the past six weeks.

According to fellow campaigners, Mukoko had established a network of hundreds of monitors – mostly church people, teachers and ordinary township dwellers – who had provided handwritten testimonies of the campaigns of brutality carried out by Mugabe’s government. The testimony could have been used in any future investigation of human rights abuses by the Mugabe regime. ‘She had catalogued thousands of incidents of murder, assault, torture, arson, and who the perpetrators are. The work was so meticulous it could stand up in any court,’ said one associate.

Middle East

Maliki takes revenge over new mandate

The nation’s leader, furious at the UK’s ‘surrender’ to Shia militias, is stalling on a deal for Britain’s continuing presence

By Jane Merrick and Raymond Whitaker

Sunday, 14 December 2008

British forces in Iraq are facing a humiliating end to their six-year mission in the country as the Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, takes his revenge for what he regards as the British surrender of Basra to hardline Shia Muslim militias.

Mr Maliki, incensed by Britain’s perceived failure to deal with the Mahdi Army of his bitter Shia rival, Moqtada al-Sadr, is stalling on a deal on Britain’s continuing presence in Iraq, barely a fortnight before the current arrangement expires. Frantic diplomatic efforts are under way to secure a legal framework for British forces after 31 December, when the current United Nations mandate expires.

Top-level sources described the situation as “extremely serious”. Even if a deal is struck within the next two weeks, the manner in which Iraq has allowed the issue to go right to the wire is a humiliation for Britain’s exit strategy.

Gaza families eat grass as Israel locks border

From The Sunday Times

December 14, 2008

Marie Colvin

AS a convoy of blue-and-white United Nations trucks loaded with food waited last night for Israeli permission to enter Gaza, Jindiya Abu Amra and her 12-year-old daughter went scrounging for the wild grass their family now lives on.

“We had one meal today – khobbeizeh,” said Abu Amra, 43, showing the leaves of a plant that grows along the streets of Gaza. “Every day, I wake up and start looking for wood and plastic to burn for fuel and I beg. When I find nothing, we eat this grass.”

Abu Amra and her unemployed husband have seven daughters and a son. Their tiny breeze-block house has had no furniture since they burnt the last cupboard for heat.

“I can’t remember seeing a fruit,” said Rabab, 12, who goes with her mother most mornings to scavenge. She is dressed in a tracksuit top and holed jeans, and her feet are bare.

Europe

Greek concessions fail to stop the riots

Anarchist groups blamed for exploiting shooting of teenager

By Peter Popham and Nikolas Zirganos in Athens

Sunday, 14 December 2008

Greek rioters were back in action this weekend, firebombing five banks and a branch office of the New Democracy party. There were no injuries, though nearby shops suffered damage. And one week after the shooting death of 15-year-old Alexis Grigoropolous, his schoolfriends and family, wearing white and carrying flowers, gathered peacefully yesterday at the spot in the Exarchia quarter of Athens where he died.

“We’re here to show our grief and sorrow, because no one understands us,” said 16-year-old Irini, a pupil at the same school as the victim. “They are killing children for no reason.

Plea to save Monet’s vanishing riverbank >



From The Sunday Times

December 14, 2008

Matthew Campbell, Paris

In an initiative that will delight fans of the impressionists, a campaign is being launched to preserve the landscapes they painted along the banks of Seine as a world treasure.

Claude Monet might not recognise them, but if Georges Mothron, a conservative MP, gets his way, the places that inspired him on the outskirts of Paris will one day join the Acropolis and the Great Wall of China on the “protected” list of Unesco’s world heritage sites.

It could be a hard sell. Argenteuil, the town where Monet lived and painted for seven years in the 19th century, is today in the heart of the concrete-encrusted Parisian banlieues, evocative less of art than crime, unemployment and immigrant riots.

Asia

Mumbai attacks: How Indian-born Islamic militants are trained in Pakistan

An underground network of Islamic extremists has recruited a new generation of Indian-born terrorists by exploiting sectarian tensions in the fault-line city of Hyderabad.

By Damien McElroy in Hyderabad  

Indian authorities have denied that there is a homegrown terrorist threat to the country, instead blaming Pakistan for allowing Islamist attacks including the atrocities in Mumbai to be launched across its borders.

But The Sunday Telegraph has learned that scores of young Muslim men have disappeared from the central Indian city of Hyderabad, suspected of leaving for Pakistan to be trained by the country’s Islamist terror groups.

As many as 40 potential recruits are reported to have left the city – which has a large Muslim minority – under extremist guidance, while many other young men cannot be traced.

Police efforts to track the youths have floundered in the wake of the Mumbai attacks last month. A wall of community silence has protected the activities of teachers and other shadowy figures working inside fundamentalist Islamic schools and mosques.

Mumbai gunman’s confession sheds light on massacre



By RAMOLA TALWAR BADAM, Associated Press Writer

MUMBAI, India – The gunman captured in last month’s Mumbai attacks had originally intended to seize hostages and outline demands in a series of dramatic calls to the media, according to his confession obtained Saturday by The Associated Press.

Mohammed Ajmal Kasab said he and his partner, who massacred dozens of people in the city’s main train station, had planned a rooftop standoff, but abandoned the plans because they couldn’t find a suitable building, the statement to police says.

Kasab’s seven-page confession, given to police over repeated interrogations, offers chilling new details of the three-day rampage through India’s commercial center that left 164 people plus nine gunmen dead.

Latin America

In Colombia, they call him Captain Nemo

Authorities say Enrique Portocarrero was the innovative creator of stealthy submarines called semi-submersibles, used by cocaine traffickers to evade detection.

By Chris Kraul

December 14, 2008

Reporting from Tumaco, Colombia — Squat, bull-necked and sullen-looking, Enrique Portocarrero hardly seems a dashing character out of a Jules Verne science fiction novel.

But law enforcement officers here have dubbed him “Captain Nemo,” after the dark genius of “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.” They say the 45-year-old has designed and built as many as 20 fiberglass submarines, strange vessels with the look of sea creatures, for drug traffickers to haul cocaine from this area of southern Colombia to Central America and Mexico.

Capping a three-year investigation that involved U.S. and British counter-narcotics agents, Colombia’s FBI equivalent, the Department of Administrative Security, arrested Portocarrero last month in the violent port city of Buenaventura, where he allegedly led a double life as a shrimp fisherman.