1. U.S. Preparing Military Options Against Iran
   By Ann Scott Tyson, Washington Post

   The nation’s top military officer said today that the Pentagon is planning for “potential military courses of action” against Iran, criticizing what he called the Tehran government’s “increasingly lethal and malign influence” in Iraq.

   Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said a conflict with Iran would be “extremely stressing” but not impossible for U.S. forces, pointing specifically to reserve capabilities in the Navy and Air Force.

   “It would be a mistake to think that we are out of combat capability,” he said at a Pentagon news conference.

   Still, Mullen made clear that he prefers a diplomatic solution to the tensions with Iran and does not foresee any imminent military action. “I have no expectations that we’re going to get into a conflict with Iran in the immediate future,” he said.

   The Los Angeles Times adds Mullen believes Iran is increasing, not curbing, arms flow to Iraq. “Adm. Michael G. Mullen, the Joint Chiefs chairman, said there was not a massive infusion of weapons but said over time there had been ‘a consistent increase’ in arms shipments. Speaking at a morning news conference, Mullen said weapons had been intercepted in Iraq that showed evidence of relatively recent manufacture in Iran, adding that Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top commander in Iraq, would lay out a fuller account of the evidence in the weeks to come.”

   Yes, I know the U.S. has a war plan for every nation on the planet, but that’s not the point. The point is the Bush administration has been, once again, beating the drum for war with Iran more loudly. The biggest infuser of weapons to Iraq is the United States. The biggest source of foreign fighters in Iraq, next to the U.S., is Saudi Arabia. The Bush administration’s rhetoric is increasing and they are determined to have a war and almost any encounter in the Gulf could be used as a catalyst. Such as…

   The Guardian reports US military ship shoots at ‘Iranian’ boats. “A ship contracted by the US military fired warning shots towards two ‘Iranian’ boats, American defence officials said today. The Westward Venture, a cargo vessel chartered by the US department of defence, was travelling north in international waters in the central Gulf at around 8am local time yesterday when the incident took place, the US navy said… Tehran played down the incident, saying there was no confrontation. A US defence official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the boats were believed to be Iranian.”

   Yesterday it was Syria, today it is Iran. Bush is determined to have total war.

Four at Four continues below the fold…

1. The Washington Post reports the CIA foresaw interrogation issues and thought investigations into their use of torture “virtually inevitable”. So “inevitable” that the CIA sought Department of Justice legal support.

   The CIA said it had identified more than 7,000 pages of classified memos, e-mails and other records relating to its secret prison and interrogation program, but maintained that the materials cannot be released because they relate to, in part, communications between CIA and Justice Department attorneys or discussions with the White House.

   Nineteen of those documents were withheld from disclosure specifically because the Bush administration decided they are covered by a “presidential communications privilege,” according to the filings, made in federal court in Manhattan. Some were “authored or solicited and received by the President’s senior advisors in connection with a decision, or potential decision, to be made by the president.“

   Although the precise content of the documents is unknown, the agency’s statements illustrate the extent to which senior White House officials were involved in decision-making on CIA detentions, interrogations, and renditions, a term for forced transfers of prisoners.

   Translation: If this memo was the smoking gun, those nineteen documents are the smoking howitzer. Impeach.

2. The New York Times reports Inmate count in the United States dwarfs all other nations’. “The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners… The United States has, for instance, 2.3 million criminals behind bars, more than any other nation, according to data maintained by the International Center for Prison Studies at King’s College London… The gap between American justice and that of the rest of the world is enormous and growing.”

Four at Four continues below the fold with the Bush administration’s interfering with EPA scientists and Bush’s secret deal with Israel.

1. What’s wrong with this scenario? The Guardian reports the Senate wants Pentagon to investigate courting of TV analysts. “The US Senate armed services committee today asked the Pentagon to investigate its practice of courting military analysts on popular TV programmes in order to push positive spin on the Bush administration’s anti-terrorism policy.”

   Carl Levin, the Democratic senator who chairs the armed services committee, asked for an internal probe of the Pentagon’s relationship with TV networks in a terse letter to defence secretary Robert Gates.

   Levin chastised the defence department for “giving both special treatment and valuable access” to military analysts who agreed with its decisions “while cutting off access to others who didn’t deliver as expected”.

   “While the media clearly have their own shortfalls for paying people to provide ‘independent’ analysis when they have such real and apparent conflicts, that doesn’t excuse the department’s behaviour,” Levin wrote to Gates.

   Bzzt. Levin cannot honestly expect the Pentagon to investigate itself. Levin needs to hold hearings and put network and Pentagon officials before the kleig lights answering questions. This go and investigate yourself nonsense is bunk. The Pentagon’s motive to lie and hide the evidence is too great. Put it this way Carl, what you propose is like trusting the Iranians to monitor their own nuclear program.

Four at Four continues below the fold with Iran’s alleged nuclear program, the march to war with Syria, an Israeli spy in the U.S., the “war on terror” backfiring, and the struggles of Iraqi women with dead or missing husbands since Bush brought his war to Iraq.

1. The Los Angeles Times reports Bush opens summit with leaders of Canada and Mexico. George W. Bush, Felipe Calderón of Mexico, and Stephen Harper of Canada are meeting for the fourth annual summit between the three nations. New Orleans was chosen as a venue by the Bush administration for propaganda value. Bush said he was celebrating “the comeback of a great American city” that was devastated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

   The summit will focus on trade, immigration, and cross-border drug and weapons smuggling, just as free-trade agreements and NAFTA in particular are under political attack more than at any time since the U.S.-Canada-Mexico agreement began eliminating tariffs and other barriers to North American trade 14 years ago.

   Three-way trade among the United States, Canada and Mexico has grown since 1994 from about $290 billion to $930 billion, according to U.S. government statistics.

   But Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, long an opponent of the pact, said the increase was largely the result of a “massive surge in imports” into the United States, bringing with it what the group calculated was a 691% increase in the trade deficit attributed to NAFTA.

   According to the AP, Bush refuses to admit the U.S. is in a recession. “Bush, replying to criticism from Democratic presidential candidates, said Tuesday that ‘now is not the time to renegotiate … or walk away from’ the North American Free Trade Agreement… Asked about the state of the U.S. economy, Bush said: ‘We’re not in a recession. We are in a slowdown.‘”

Four at Four continues below the fold with stories of big oil supporting state-sponsored terrorism, a plea to “eliminate capitalism” to save the planet and humanity, and an update on the Chinese arms ship en route to Zimbabwe.

1. Lugo wins Paraguay Presidency, ending 62 years of one party rule, reports The New York Times. Fernando Lugo, the “bishop of the poor”, a former Roman Catholic bishop “who resigned from the church two years ago to run, will be the first Paraguayan president since 1946 not to be from Colorado Party.”

   Mr. Lugo, a gray-bearded man who exudes natural warmth and often wears sandals, was backed by the Patriotic Alliance for Change, Paraguay’s second-largest party… [He] tapped into a deep frustration with single-party rule in Paraguay. He accused the Colorado Party of entrenched patronage and corruption, a theme that resonated with voters. Paraguay has struggled since the Stroessner days to rid itself of a reputation for being among the most-corrupt countries in Latin America.”

   According to The Guardian, Lugo quit the clergy because “he felt powerless to help Paraguay’s poor”.

   “We ask you never to abandon us. We’ll make democracy together!” Lugo, 56, told cheering supporters as firecrackers resounded around Asuncion last night…

   Eight months ago, Lugo welded unions, Indians and poor farmers into a coalition with the main opposition party to form the Patriotic Alliance for Change… Lugo calls himself an independent and has steered clear of Latin America’s more radical leftwing leaders…

   Lugo will take office on 15 August, and has vowed to carry out agrarian reform to ensure poor peasant farmers can till their own land in a country where a small, wealthy elite owns the vast majority of farmland and cattle ranches.

   Did the door to Bush’s escape route to Paraguay just slam shut?

Four at Four continues below the fold with news of the al-Sadr-Rice Grudge Cage Match, torture at Guantánamo, and the Bush administration’s dismal record of prosecuting terrorism cases.

So in the news today, The Guardian has this story: Nato admits mistakenly supplying arms and food to Taliban.

Nato forces mistakenly supplied food, water and arms to Taliban forces in southern Afghanistan, officials today admitted.

Containers destined for local police forces were dropped from a helicopter into a Taliban-controlled area of Zabul province…

A Nato spokesman said the pallets were carrying rocket propelled grenades, ammunition, water and food.

Nothing like delivering rocket propelled grenades into the hands of the Taliban to help “win” in Afghanistan.  

1. Top general ‘hoodwinked’ over torture
   By Richard Norton-Taylor, The Guardian

   The US’s most senior general was “hoodwinked” by top Bush administration officials determined to push through aggressive interrogation techniques for terror suspects held at Guantánamo Bay, the Guardian can reveal.

   The development led to the US military abandoning its age-old ban on the cruel and inhumane treatment of prisoners.

   General Richard Myers, the chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff from 2001 to 2005, wrongly believed that inmates at Guantánamo and other prisons were protected by the Geneva conventions and from abuse tantamount to torture.

   The way he was duped by senior officials in Washington – who believed the Geneva conventions and other traditional safeguards were out of date – is disclosed in a devastating account of their role… in his new book…

   Is this operation CYA for Myers?

2. NATO mistakenly supplying arms and food to Taliban
   By Anil Dawar, The Guardian

   Nato forces mistakenly supplied food, water and arms to Taliban forces in southern Afghanistan, officials today admitted.

   Containers destined for local police forces were dropped from a helicopter into a Taliban-controlled area of Zabul province. The coalition helicopter had intended to deliver pallets of supplies to a police checkpoint in Ghazni, a remote section of Zabul late last month…

   A Nato spokesman said the pallets were carrying rocket propelled grenades, ammunition, water and food.

   Heckuva a job NATO! Actually, it wasn’t NATO per se. It was their private military contractors. Mercenaries at their finest.

3. Pentagon institute calls Iraq war ‘a major debacle’ with outcome ‘in doubt’
   By Jonathan S. Landay and John Walcott, McClatchy Newspapers

   The war in Iraq has become “a major debacle” and the outcome “is in doubt” despite improvements in security from the buildup in U.S. forces, according to a highly critical study published Thursday by the Pentagon’s premier military educational institute.

   The report released by the National Defense University raises fresh doubts about President Bush’s projections of a U.S. victory in Iraq just a week after Bush announced that he was suspending U.S. troop reductions.

   The report carries considerable weight because it was written by Joseph Collins, a former senior Pentagon official, and was based in part on interviews with other former senior defense and intelligence officials who played roles in prewar preparations.

   It was published by the university’s National Institute for Strategic Studies, a Defense Department research center.

   “Measured in blood and treasure, the war in Iraq has achieved the status of a major war and a major debacle,” says the report’s opening line…

   The report also singles out the Bush administration’s national security apparatus and implicitly President Bush and both of his national security advisers, Condoleezza Rice and Stephen Hadley, saying that “senior national security officials exhibited in many instances an imperious attitude, exerting power and pressure where diplomacy and bargaining might have had a better effect.”

   No one could have predicted an invasion and occupation of Iraq could go badly… oh wait. Nevermind.

Four at Four continues below the fold with an effort to convert polar bears into oil.

1. Why we fight

   Bloomberg reports “Iraq will open at least six major oil and natural-gas fields for exploration and production in its first licensing round since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, as the country seeks to raise output without a national energy law. Iraq, which pre-qualified international oil companies this week for the bidding round, will open the southern Rumaila, West Qurna and Zubair fields for exploration, Oil Minister Hussain al-Shahristani said in an interview in Brussels today. In the north, international oil companies will be invited to develop the Kirkuk oil field and the Akkaz gas field.”

   Here are some of the pre-qualified companies: Exxon Mobil, Royal Dutch Shell, BP, ConocoPhillips, Chevron. and Total SA. “Others were Russia’s OAO Gazprom, the world’s largest natural-gas producer, and OAO Lukoil, the Russian oil producer with the most overseas assets. Mitsubishi Corp. and Inpex Holding Inc. of Japan and China’s Sinochem Corp. were also accepted.”

2. Our military men and women pay

   The Los Angeles Times reports 18.5% of Iraq, Afghanistan veterans have depression or PTSD. “Nearly one in five veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars is currently suffering from depression or stress disorders, according to the latest and most comprehensive study of current and former military service members, released today. Less than half of those 300,000 veterans have received care for depression or post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), according to the study, signaling significant problems with the U.S. mental healthcare system.”

   Meanwhile CommonDreams notes that Vets have to press McCain to back greater benefits.

   The McCain Hypocrisy

   According to Disabled American Veterans (DAV), McCain voted almost a dozen separate times against spending additional money on veterans’ health care in 2005 and 2006 – even as hundreds of thousands of soldiers and Marines were returning from Iraq and Afghanistan and filing disability claims with the Department of Veterans Affairs.

   During that time, McCain voted against expanding mental health care and readjustment counseling for returning service members, efforts to expand inpatient and outpatient treatment for injured veterans, and proposals to lower co-payments and enrollment fees veterans must pay to obtain prescription drugs…

   McCain’s vote also helped defeat a proposal by Democratic Senator Debbie Stabenow that would have made veterans’ health care an entitlement programme like social security, so that medical care would not become a political football to be argued over in Congress each budget cycle.

   John McCain supports the troops like George W. Bush does.

Four at Four continues below the fold with news of peace in Iraq and Afghanistan and the booming U.S. economy.

Welcome to the United States of Gattaca. The Washington Post is reporting that the Bush administration is expanding DNA collection of people arrested for crimes.

The U.S. government will soon begin collecting DNA samples from all citizens arrested in connection with any federal crime and from many immigrants detained by federal authorities, adding genetic identifiers from more than 1 million individuals a year to the swiftly growing federal law enforcement DNA database.

The policy will substantially expand the current practice of routinely collecting DNA samples from only those convicted of federal crimes…

Anyone now arrested of a federal crime will have their DNA collected. With the past examples of abuse of the justice system by the Bush administration, it isn’t difficult to imagine how this change in policy could be abused. When the policy is implemented, roughly 1.2 million people a year will have their DNA collected.

1. Here are some examples of what its like to work in Iraq. The Associated Press reports AP photographer freed by US military after 2 years. “The U.S. military released Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussein on Wednesday after holding him for more than two years without filing formal charges… The U.S. military had accused Hussein of links to insurgents, but did not file specific charges.”

   In New York, the executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, Joel Simon, said the group was “thrilled” by Hussein’s release.

   “He now joins a growing list of journalists detained in conflict zones by the U.S. military for prolonged periods and eventually released without any charges or crimes ever substantiated against them,” said Simon. “This deplorable practice should be of concern to all journalists. It basically allows the U.S. military to remove journalists from the field, lock them up and never be compelled to say why.“

   BBC News reports on an Indonesian Worker ‘tricked into going to Iraq’. “Darmianti binti Jaba Saleh… was having her medical check-up prior to being placed as a domestic worker in the Kurdish north of Iraq. The only problem was that she had not been told she was going to Iraq at all… When she found out where she was, she said, she felt completely deceived… Darmianti said the agency she worked for refused her permission to leave Iraq unless she paid US$2,500… But after three months in Arbil, she escaped with the help of an international aid organisation and has now brought her former agent to court in Jakarta.”

   The Guardian reports Iraqi commanders recalled after failed Basra mission. “The Baghdad government today recalled the top military and police commanders in the southern city of Basra, after a botched offensive against Shia militias. Iraqi officials said Lieutenant General Mohan al-Furaiji and police Major General Abdul-Jalil Khalaf would be given senior staff positions in Baghdad as a “reward for their successful mission against the criminals in Basra“. That just drips with sarcasm.

   So, it’s probably no wonder that once again, Secretary of Torture Condoleezza Rice has Warned diplomats of possible mandatory service in Iraq, according to the Washington Post. “The State Department has warned U.S. diplomats that they may be required to serve in Iraq next year if there are insufficient volunteers to fill job openings there… The possibility of “directed assignments” was first raised last fall, when State projected a shortfall of about 50 volunteers for positions at the Baghdad embassy and other locations in Iraq in 2008. Although those jobs eventually were filled without compulsory postings, the possibility of being forced to serve in a war zone caused deep unease at State.”