The news and open thead at 4 o’clock.

1. Reuters reports that Turkey to exhaust diplomacy before striking. “Turkey said on Monday it would exhaust diplomatic channels before launching any military strike into northern Iraq to root out Kurdish rebels, who killed at least a dozen Turkish soldiers in fighting over the weekend. Turkey has built up its forces along the border with Iraq in preparation for an incursion against rebel bases but Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan has said he will hold off for a few days to let the United States try to curb the Kurdish separatists.”

   The Guardian reports Iraq says Kurdish rebels will announce ceasefire. “Kurdish rebels will announce a ceasefire tonight, the Iraqi president said today, with the news coming amid hectic diplomatic efforts to avert a Turkish attack on northern Iraq.”

   A Kurdish press agency has released the names of seven of eight men who were taken hostage after the clash, in south-eastern Turkey, which Ankara has blamed on PKK guerrillas…

   The Turkish soldiers died during a large operation against PKK rebels in the Oramar area of Hakkari province, where the borders of Iran, Iraq and Turkey converge.

   PKK guerillas reportedly blew up a bridge as a Turkish military convoy was crossing it. In the fighting that ensued, the Turkish military said it had killed 32 rebels.

   A spokesman for the PKK told the Guardian guerillas had killed 17 Turkish soldiers as they ambushed a military convoy heading towards the Iraqi border. The rebel group had also taken eight “prisoners of war”. He said the PKK had suffered no losses.

   The attacks by the “separatist Kurdish Workers’ Party, known by its Kurdish initials PKK” have been condemned by the Bush administration and the Kurdish government in northern Iraq. The Washington Post reports, U.S. is discouraging Turkey from cross-border attack.

   The Bush administration condemned the Kurdish assault. “These attacks are unacceptable and must stop now,” said Gordon Johndroe, President Bush’s national security spokesman.

   Massoud Barzani, president of the Kurdish regional government, also condemned the attack but warned against a Turkish offensive into northern Iraq. “If this struggle touches the Kurdistan region, then we will defend our citizens,” he said.

   “Iraqi residents of the border area braced for more of the violence that has destroyed parts of their villages and forced some of them to flee.” As covered in Saturday’s Four at Four, Iraqis who fled homes in fear face new terror as Turkey targets PKK rebels. Refugees from across Iraq who fled to the Kurdish north and found relative peace now are are “threatened by shelling and cross-border raids” from Turkey as the country targets the PKK. Upwards of 30,000 people may be displaced by a Turkish incursion.

In the rest of today’s Four at Four — Big news about Blackwater from Henry Waxman in today’s Guns of Greed. There are also stories about aviation safety and libraries. Plus a bonus story about one man’s quest to help save sea turtles. So, dive in. The water’s fine below the fold.

1. In much of the western United States, ‘The Future Is Drying Up‘. Joe Gertner of The New York Times reports on the West’s lack of water and how drought is becoming the norm. “Over the past few decades, the driest states in the United States have become some of our fastest-growing; meanwhile, an ongoing drought has brought the flow of the Colorado to its lowest levels since measurements at Lee’s Ferry began 85 years ago… Lake Mead, the enormous reservoir in Arizona and Nevada that supplies nearly all the water for Las Vegas, is half-empty, and statistical models indicate that it will never be full again.”

   “Water tables all over the United States have been dropping, sometimes drastically, from overuse. In the Denver area, some cities that use only groundwater will almost certainly exhaust their accessible supplies by 2050.” Many western water managers were once of the belief that the severe drought years of 1950s marked the worse case fort the Colorado. But recent fir and pine tree ring studies have concluded that the drought in the 1950s “were mild and brief compared with other historical droughts.”

   “An even darker possibility is that a Western drought caused by climatic variation and a drought caused by global warming could arrive at the same time… Climatologists seem to agree that global warming means the earth will, on average, get wetter.” A study by Climate scientist Richard Seager predicts “the Southwest will ultimately be subject to significant atmospheric and weather alterations.” But, he cautioned, “You can’t call it a drought anymore, because it’s going over to a drier climate. No one says the Sahara is in drought.”

   Many water managers have known this for a while. The two problems — water and energy — are so intimately linked as to make it exceedingly difficult to tackle one without the other. It isn’t just the matter of growing corn for ethanol, which is already straining water supplies. The less water in our rivers, for instance, the less hydropower our dams produce. The further the water tables sink, the more power it takes to pump water up. The more we depend on coal and nuclear power plants, which require huge amounts of water for cooling, the larger the burden we place on supplies.

   Meanwhile, it is a perverse side effect of global warming that we may have to emit large volumes of carbon dioxide to obtain the clean water that is becoming scarcer because of the carbon dioxide we’ve already put into the atmosphere. A dry region that turns to desalination, for example, would need vast amounts of energy (and money) to purify its water. While wind-powered desalination could perhaps meet this challenge — such a plant was recently built outside Perth, Australia — it isn’t clear that coastal residents in, say, California would welcome such projects. Unclear, too, is how dumping the brine that is a by-product of the process back into the ocean would affect ecosystems.

   Over population, dwindling resources to fuel a 20th-century-styled economy combined with the realities of global warming. We have our work cut out for us. The sooner we admit there is a job to do, the sooner we can get busy. We have ideas that may be viable solutions, but getting bogged down in Iraq, the Arctic, the Amazon, or elsewhere trying to hold on to last century is not a smart way to meet the challenges of the 21st century. Sure, the future is scary, but a conservative approach, clinging desperately to a lost past, will only lead to more intense pain and killing in the years to come. We must embrace our future with an open and creative mind. We can do it.

Below the fold are three more stories. First, a couple of stories about oil drilling and prospecting in the Amazonian Rainforest. Second, today’s Guns of Greed with a story about the FIRST ever protest at the gates of Blackwater’s compound in Virginia. And third, a story about Quentin Blake, the wonderful artist who illustrated many children’s books, hired to make an ugly building in London disappear. So, don’t vanish… click the ‘There’s more’ link to reappear below the fold…

1. Lisa Foderaro of The New York Times reports that after four years of war and occupations, some are Old enough now to hear how a parent died at war.

   CamerynLee was only 3 years old when her father, Lance Cpl. Eric J. Orlowski, a Marine Corps reservist, was killed in an accidental shooting during the first days of the Iraq war. Now 8, she is suddenly hungry for information about the man she remembers only in sketchy vignettes…

   In a grim marker of the longevity of the war, children who were infants or toddlers when they lost a parent in action are growing up. In the process, they are coming to grips with death in new, more mature and at times more painful ways — pondering a parent they barely knew, asking pointed questions about the circumstances of the death and experiencing a kind of delayed grief…

   Ms. Kross also showed her daughter a letter that her husband wrote from Kuwait City, which began, “What’s up ladies?” He ended it by telling CamerynLee to be a “good girl for Mommy” and urging Nicole, a former Air Force Reservist, to “take care of yourself.”

   It was the first time that Ms. Kross had shown the letter to CamerynLee, a sprite of a girl with a gentle voice and large blue eyes.

   “I think about him every day,” CamerynLee said as she studied the letter. “I remember cooking with him. He was helping me flip the sausages. I remember him carrying me. I wish he was still alive.”

   I think the impact on these children’s lives is a deep, deep scar America. Not only will these children be forever paying for Bush’s total, endless wars, but they also lost a parent who loved and cared for them. The world becomes a little lonelier when a parent dies, but to lose a father or mother to a war of choice is horrible. How many more mommies and daddies need to die? Why?

2. According to the Washington Post, More emigrants head east, not west, for a better life. Ariana Eunjung Cha reports:

   For a growing number of the world’s emigrants, China — not the United States — is the land where opportunities are endless, individual enterprise is rewarded and tolerance is universal…

   While China doesn’t officially encourage immigration, it has made it increasingly easy — especially for businesspeople or those with entrepreneurial dreams and the cash to back them up — to get long-term visas. Usually, all it takes is getting an invitation letter from a local company or paying a broker $500 to write one for you.

   There are now more than 450,000 people in China with one- to five-year renewable residence permits, almost double the 230,000 who had such permits in 2003. An additional 700 foreigners carry the highly coveted green cards introduced under a system that went into effect in 2004.

   China’s approach seems to be strategically centered on countries where “long-term contracts for oil, gas and minerals” are possible. Part of the Chinese plans is to “portray” their country “as more open to Islam than other non-Muslim nations.” The Chinese government, over the past 20 years, have allowed mosques and other cultural institutions, including schools, to be rebuilt.

   “In America, for people with my religion there can be a lot of problems,” said Adamou Salissou, 25, from Niger. “The image they have of Muslims is that they are terrorists. Chinese don’t have a problem with religion. They think, ‘It’s your religion and it’s okay.’ “

There’s still more today below the fold, including a story about Iraqi refugees in Kurdistan fearing an attack from Turkey, another episode of “Guns of Greed”, and a bonus story about Neanderthals. Plus, remember Four at Four is, as always an OPEN THREAD. See you on the flip side.

1. BBC News reports that Carbon dioxide being emitted from ships is ‘twice that of planes’. “Global emissions of carbon dioxide from shipping are twice the level of aviation, one of the maritime industry’s key bodies has said. A report prepared by Intertanko, which represents the majority of the world’s tanker operators, says emissions have risen sharply in the past six years… Some 90,000 ships from tankers to small freighters ply the world’s oceans.”

   According to The Independent, Shipping pollution ‘far more damaging than flying’. Each year, “one billion tonnes” of greenhouse gases are emitted. “Since the 1970s, the bulk of commercial vessels have run on heavy ‘bunker’ fuel, a by-product of the oil refining process for higher grade fuels. One industry insider described it as ‘the crap that comes out the other end that’s half way to being asphalt’. It has potentially lethal side effects such as the release of sulphur dioxide, carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxide and sulphuric acid. I suspect if the environmental cost of shipping goods from overseas was part of the equation, then “cheap” Asian goods wouldn’t be quite so cheap. I wonder if it is economically viable yet to have a fleet of modern “clipper” ships?

2. Some positive news concerning global warming for a change. According to the Kansas City Star, a Coal power plant was denied a permit! Reporters David Klepper and Karen Dillon write, “Delivering a stunning victory to those concerned about global climate change, Kansas’ top regulator rejected a proposal to build a coal plant in western Kansas.”

   “I believe it would be irresponsible to ignore emerging information about the contribution of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to climate change and the potential harm to our environment and health if we do nothing,” Rod Bremby, the state’s secretary of health and environment, said in a statement.

   Steven Mufson of the Washington Post has more on the news in slightly misleading headline, ‘Power plant was rejected over carbon dioxide for first time.’ “The Kansas Department of Health and Environment yesterday became the first government agency in the United States to cite carbon dioxide emissions as the reason for rejecting an air permit for a proposed coal-fired electricity generating plant, saying that the greenhouse gas threatens public health and the environment.”

   The Kansas agency’s decision comes after a Supreme Court decision in April that said greenhouse gases “should be considered pollutants under the Clean Air Act.” Two plants were to be built by Sunflower Electric Power in Holcomb to supply electricity for Kansas and eastern Colorado. “Together the plants would have produced 11 million tons of carbon dioxide annually”.

   This decision is a victory Kathleen Sebelius, the Democratic governor of Kansas. “Sebelius has been promoting the expanded use of renewable energy, especially wind. In her state of the state address this year, she said: ‘The question of where we get our energy is … no longer just an economic issue, nor solely an issue of national security. Quite simply, we have a moral obligation to be good stewards of this state.'” After the ruling, according to the story in the Kansas City Star, Sebelius “hailed Bremby’s decision in a statement as ‘a decision about all of us — today and into the future.'”

   Sunflower is likely to challenge the decision in court. “We are extremely upset over this arbitrary and capricious decision… This is a grievous error. To deny this on the basis of CO2 is pulling it out of thin air,” sputtered Steve Miller, Sunflower spokesman. Previously coal power plants have been stopped by the governors of Florida and California due to their negative climate change impact.

3. The New York Times reports on a New task for the Coast Guard in the Arctic’s warming seas. Matthew Wald and Andrew Revkin write, “The Coast Guard is planning its first operating base [in the Arctic] as a way of dealing with the cruise ships and the tankers that are already beginning to ply Arctic waters.” The new base is likely to be in Barrow, Alaska.

   “I’m not sure I’m qualified to talk about the scientific issues related to global warming,” the Coast Guard commandant, Adm. Thad W. Allen, said in an interview. “All we know is we have an operating environment we’re responsible for, and it’s changing.”

   “The Coast Guard has also begun discussions with the Russians about controlling anticipated ship traffic through the Bering Strait” such as freighters taking advantage of the Northwest Passage shaving more than 5,000 miles off a voyage between Asia and Scandinavia.” In another sign of less polar ice, “Royal Dutch Shell is preparing for exploratory oil drilling off Alaska’s Arctic coast beginning next year.”

Today’s Guns of Greed is below the fold.

This is an OPEN THREAD. Here are four stories in the news at 4 o’clock to get you started.

1. After four years of waiting for the Bush administration to get the electricity working again, James Glanz of The New York Times reports that “Iraq has agreed to award $1.1 billion in contracts to Iranian and Chinese companies to build a pair of enormous power plants, the Iraqi electricity minister said Tuesday.” Of course, the news of this deal is not sitting well with U.S. military officials who claim Iran’s involvement could “mask military activities”.

   The Iraqi electricity minister, Karim Wahid, said that the Iranian project would be built in Sadr City, a Shiite enclave in Baghdad that is controlled by followers of the anti-American cleric Moktada al-Sadr. He added that Iran had also agreed to provide cheap electricity from its own grid to southern Iraq, and to build a large power plant essentially free of charge in an area between the two southern Shiite holy cities of Karbala and Najaf…

   The agreements between Iraq and Iran come after the American-led reconstruction effort, which relied heavily on large American contractors, has spent nearly $5 billion of United States taxpayer money on Iraq’s electricity grid. Aside from a few isolated bright spots, there was little clear impact in a nation where in many places electricity is still available only for a few hours each day.

   A Chinese company, Shanghai Heavy Industry, will construct a new power plant in Wasit at an estimated cost of $940 million. The plant could add 1,300 megawatts of electricity to Iraq’s power grid, which currently has a total capacity “of roughly 5,000 megawatts.”

2. News from the Washington Post that Tough punishment is expected for B-52 nuke warhead errors. “The Air Force has decided to relieve at least five of its officers of command and is considering filing criminal charges in connection with the Aug. 29 ‘Bent Spear’ incident in which nuclear-armed cruise missiles were mistakenly flown from North Dakota to Louisiana, two senior Air Force officials said yesterday.”

   A formal announcement, according to WaPo is expected tomorrow “along with the detailed findings of an internal, six-week investigation into how a B-52 bomber crew mistakenly flew from one military air base to another with six nuclear warheads strapped to its wings.” “A colonel commanding one of the Air Force wings is likely to be the highest-ranking officer to be relieved”. “Letters of reprimand will be issued to several enlisted service members” and criminal charges may possibly follow.

3. Spiegel reports that Bloodstained rubies fund Burmese regime. “Large, deep red rubies from Burma command prices of tens of thousands of euros per carat, making them the most exclusive stones a gemstone dealer can offer.”

   The Burmese military regime forces workers to extract the precious stones under brutal conditions in its heavily guarded mines. Roughly 90 percent of the global supply of rubies comes from Burma. According to eyewitness accounts, mining bosses mix amphetamines into the workers’ drinking water to boost productivity. Sometimes children also work in the muddy mines…

   There are no exact figures for the junta’s gem trade. Estimates of the amount of income generated by the business range as high as hundreds of millions of dollars per year. At the state-organized gem auction in Yangon, where only middling quality stones come under the hammer, the regime has taken in some $300 million so far in 2007.

Below the fold is today’s “Guns of Greed”.

According to the Washington Post, the Senate and Bush Agree On Terms of Spying Bill. The bill gives in to Bush’s demand and telecommunications companies are to be given full immunity.

The draft Senate bill has the support of the intelligence committee’s chairman, John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), and Bush’s director of national intelligence, Mike McConnell. It will include full immunity for those companies that can demonstrate to a court that they acted pursuant to a legal directive in helping the government with surveillance in the United States.

Such a demonstration, which the bill says could be made in secret, would wipe out a series of pending lawsuits alleging violations of privacy rights by telecommunications companies that provided telephone records, summaries of e-mail traffic and other information to the government after Sept. 11, 2001, without receiving court warrants. Bush had repeatedly threatened to veto any legislation that lacked this provision.

The Fourth Amendment will never be the same again.

This is an OPEN THREAD. Here are four stories in the news at 4 o’clock to get you started.

1. The New York Times reports Parliament in Turkey votes to allow Iraq incursion. “The Turkish Parliament today granted authorization for a cross-border offensive to strike Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq, although diplomatic efforts continued to prevent any military action. The motion passed in the Parliament by 526 votes in favor to 19 votes against. It was drafted by the ruling Justice and Development Party, and grants the government open authority for one year to launch military incursions against rebels who carry out attacks in Turkey from northern Iraq.” Meanwhile, the Washington Post and others report that House support wanes for Armenian genocide bill. As much as the media and the Bush administration is linking the two, the Turks have had these incursion plans in the works for a long time. Good thing the Bush doctrine allows countries to invade to stop terrorism.

2. The Guardian reports Britain to claim more than 1m sq km of Antarctica and the move would extend UK oil, gas and mineral rights.

   

   The United Kingdom is planning to claim sovereign rights over a vast area of the remote seabed off Antarctica, the Guardian has learned. The submission to the United Nations covers more than 1m sq km (386,000 sq miles) of seabed, and is likely to signal a quickening of the race for territory around the south pole in the world’s least explored continent.

   The claim would be in defiance of the spirit of the 1959 Antarctic treaty, to which the UK is a signatory. It specifically states that no new claims shall be asserted on the continent. The treaty was drawn up to prevent territorial disputes.

   So what’s motivating this grab? Well likely, Britain has been ‘frozen” out of the land grab going on at the North Pole by Russia, Canada, the U.S. and other countries. (For more info, see my essay from September, “Mapping Claims to the Spoils of Global Warming”.) In addition, the rising price of oil, which is at $88 a barrel, is intensifying pressure to secure new potential oil sources.

   Unfortunately, this will be nothing but bad news for penguins and other creatures that live in Antarctica. In another story at The Guardian, science correspondent Alok Jha reports, WWF calls for protected areas for Antarctica. “Large parts of the oceans around Antarctica should be turned into marine reserves to protect the rapidly declining biodiversity on the continent,” according to the WWF. The environmental charity “will call on diplomats, environmentalists and scientists to support their plan to identify and designate a network of protected marine reserves to safeguard Antarctica and its surroundings, which occupy some 40% of the world’s surface.”

Below the fold is an article about the poverty line, which one ground says should be $74,044 for a 2-parent family of four living in Los Angeles, today’s “Guns of Greed”, and a “extra” report on the Solomon Island’s sale and export of 28 dolphins to Dubai taking place today.

This is an OPEN THREAD. Here are four stories in the news at 4 o’clock to get you started.

1. The New York Times reports In Iran, Putin warns against military action. “President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia told a summit meeting of five Caspian Sea nations in Iran today that any use of military force in the region was unacceptable and in a declaration the countries agreed that none of them would allow their territories to be used as a base for launching military strikes against any of the others.”

   “We should not even think of making use of force in this region,” Mr. Putin said…

   He was the first Kremlin leader to travel to Iran since 1943, when Stalin attended a wartime summit meeting with Churchill and Roosevelt…

   “Not only should we reject the use of force, but also the mention of force as a possibility,” Mr. Putin said. “This is very important. We must not submit to other states in the case of aggression or some other kind of military action directed against one of the Caspian countries.”

   … Mr. Putin added that the two countries planned to cooperate on space, aviation and energy issues and suggested that the tensions with the West over Iran’s nuclear program had provided Russia a unique role. “Russia is the only country that is helping Iran to realize its nuclear program in a peaceful way.”

   Putin to Cheney: Check. Your move. And to prove she would be just as crazy as the Bush administration, The Guardian reports Hillary Clinton would use violence against Tehran.

   Hillary Clinton today moved to secure her position as the most hawkish Democrat in the 2008 presidential race, saying she would consider the use of force to compel Iran to abandon its nuclear programme.

   In an article for Foreign Affairs magazine intended as a blueprint for the foreign policy of a future Clinton White House, the Democratic frontrunner argues that Iran poses a long term strategic challenge to American and its allies, and that it must not be permitted to build or acquire nuclear weapons.

   “If Iran does not comply with its own commitments and the will of the international community, all options must remain on the table,” Ms Clinton said.

In the rest of today’s Four at Four — the upcoming G-7 conference and the weak U.S. dollar, another episode of “Guns of Greed”, and an expedition to measure ice thickness at the North Pole. So, put on your mukluks and parkas and journey north with me to that frozen region we call below the fold…

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1. Not surprisingly, there is a lot of reports coming from the speech of Hu Jintao, China’s president and the Communist party general secretary, opening the Communist Party’s 17th National Congress. The New York Times reports Communist Party’s 17th National Congress. “Chinese President Hu Jintao promised to address social fissures, a degraded environment and rampant corruption during his second term as China’s top leader, but he all but ruled out more than cosmetic political reform… Mr. Hu spoke extensively about his ‘scientific view of development,’ a set of lofty, vague principles supporting harmonious economic, social and political development.” The NY Times think a shift in Hu’s rhetoric “suggests that Mr. Hu thinks the economy can outperform what he and his predecessors considered possible — or prudent — at the last party congress in 2002.”

   NPR focuses on Hu Making a peace overture to Taiwan. Hu “proposed talking with Taiwan about a formal peace accord, but included preconditions that Taiwanese officials previously found unacceptable. Hu stressed Beijing’s desire for a peaceful, negotiated settlement to the 58-year-old conflict with Taiwan. ‘We would like to make a solemn appeal: On the basis of the one-China principle, let us discuss a formal end to the state of hostility between the two sides, reach a peace agreement,'” Hu said. Taiwan’s has rejected Hu’s offer.

   The Guardian reports that Hu admits Communist shortcomings. “Hu Jintao promised a more open and sustainable model of development today in a speech that will set the policy of the nation for the next five years… Mr Hu acknowledged that the ruling party had failed to live up to the expectations of the people and proposed a series of modest reforms aimed at improving the skills, morals and accountability of cadres… The shift from quantity to quality in both party management and economic development underpins Mr Hu’s theory of ‘scientific development’, which will be written into the charter of a party that has moved from revolution to plutocracy.”

   Lastly, AFP reports China to go eco-friendly. “We will increase spending on energy and environmental conservation with the focus on intensifying prevention and control of water, air and soil pollution and improving the living environment for both urban and rural residents,” Hu said. “We will enhance our capacity to respond to climate change and make new contributions to protecting the global climate.” “Hu called the environmental effort ‘vital to the immediate interests of the people and the survival and development of the Chinese nation’. He said the government would seek to develop a ‘resource-conserving and environmentally friendly society’ and will ‘get every organisation and family to act accordingly,’ while offering no specific policy plans.” That last bit sounds almost Bushesque.

There’s more today including a story about how ‘Al-Qaeda in Iraq is crippled’, today’s episode of “Guns of Greed”, and the discovery of an enormous dinosaur fossil found in Patagonia. So, step into the Lost World, below the fold.

Gary Younge, the New York correspondent for The Guardian, has a commentary in today’s paper (15 October) about how America’s sense of optimism is gone.

It is a well-written essay and worth reading in full. I think Younge has nearly perfectly captured the general hopelessness that many Americans are feeling now about their country.

In his essay, The land of optimism is in the dumps, but refuses to accept how it got there, Younge writes:

This sense of optimism has been in retreat in almost every sense over the past few years… America, in short, is in a deep funk. Far from feeling hopeful, it appears fearful of the outside world and despondent about its own future. Not only do most believe tomorrow will be worse than today, they also feel that there is little that can be done about it.

OPEN THREAD, this is. Hmmmmmm… Four stories, there are. Yes. Get you started, they will. Hmmmmm…?

1. Elizabeth Bumiller reports for The New York Times that At an Army school for officers, there is blunt talk about Iraq.

   As the war grinds through its fifth year, Fort Leavenworth has become a front line in the military’s tension and soul-searching over Iraq. Here at the base on the bluffs above the Missouri River, once a frontier outpost that was a starting point for the Oregon Trail, rising young officers are on a different journey — an outspoken re-examination of their role in Iraq…

   Officers were split over whether Mr. Rumsfeld, the military leaders or both deserved blame for what they said were the major errors in the war: sending in a small invasion force and failing to plan properly for the occupation.

   But the consensus was that not even after Vietnam was the Army’s internal criticism as harsh or the second-guessing so painful, and that airing the arguments on the record, as sanctioned by Leavenworth’s senior commanders, was part of a concerted effort to force change…

   Much of the debate at Leavenworth has centered on a scathing article, “A Failure in Generalship,” written last May for Armed Forces Journal by Lt. Col. Paul Yingling, an Iraq veteran and deputy commander of the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment who holds a master’s degree in political science from the University of Chicago. “If the general remains silent while the statesman commits a nation to war with insufficient means, he shares culpability for the results,” Colonel Yingling wrote…

   One question that silenced many of the officers was a simple one: Should the war have been fought?

   No.

Below the fold is the rest of today’s Four at Four: terrorist training in Pakistan, “Guns of Greed”, and a story about flying in a Zeppelin.

This is an OPEN THREAD. Here are four stories in the news at 4 o’clock to get you started. Hearts are the depositories of secrets. Lips are their locks, and tounges are their keys.

1. Kevin Doyle, reporting for The Guardian from Rangoon, writes After the riots, Burma returns to an unspoken terror. “With only 30 minutes to curfew, no one takes chances with the Burmese military these days…”

   With the killing of an unknowable number of peaceful protesters and the imprisonment of thousands more during the pro-democracy demonstrations last month, many people fear reprisals by the military. At the Shwedagon pagoda, the nucleus of the protests, the military is still in force. Wearing steel helmets, flak jackets and carrying extra ammunition, the number of troops far exceeds the few old monks who potter among the golden spires of what is the spiritual centre of Burmese life…

   Sources said that around 1,000 monks had lived and studied at these small monasteries, but where they have gone is not a question that anyone ponders aloud. One man simply put his wrists together in the sign of locked handcuffs when asked where they are.

   “We cannot speak. We cannot defend. We have no weapons. They have all the weapons,” said another 30-year-old man, who cannot be identified for his own safety.

2. Ian Black of The Guardian reports, The honeymoon for is ending on ‘mission impossible’. Reality has begun to sink in for Tony Blair, former British prime minister, about his work as peace envoy.

   “Mr Blair was appalled by what we told him,” said Mats Lignell, spokesman for the international observers stationed here “temporarily” in 1994 after a Jewish extremist from the nearby settlement of Kiryat Arba massacred 29 Palestinians praying in the Ibrahimi Mosque…

   “Blair was really astonished and angry,” says the UN official who gave him a presentation on the devastating effects of Israel’s “security barrier”, settlements, checkpoints, and closures on the lives of Palestinians in the occupied territories. “He asked very smart questions, though I did think that someone who was prime minister for so long should already have known these facts.” …

   Crucially, Mr Blair is keeping away from the Gaza Strip, which is under international boycott and cut off from the West Bank since Hamas took over.

   He has said privately that Israel and the Palestinian Authority will eventually have to talk to the Islamists. The hope is that success in the West Bank will demonstrate the achievements of the moderates and weaken Hamas – ignoring evidence, from Iraq and elsewhere, that sanctions and collective punishment do not work.

3. Okay, this is coming from The New York Times, which has a history of manipulating the news to fit the Bush administration’s agenda, but the newspaper is reporting — ‘Analysts Find Israel Struck a Nuclear Project Inside Syria‘.

   Israel’s air attack on Syria last month was directed against a site that Israeli and American intelligence analysts judged was a partly constructed nuclear reactor, apparently modeled on one North Korea has used to create its stockpile of nuclear weapons fuel, according to American and foreign officials with access to the intelligence reports…

   Many details remain unclear, most notably how much progress the Syrians had made in construction before the Israelis struck, the role of any assistance provided by North Korea, and whether the Syrians could make a plausible case that the reactor was intended to produce electricity…

   “There wasn’t a lot of debate about the evidence,” said one American official familiar with the intense discussions over the summer between Washington and the government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel. “There was a lot of debate about how to respond to it.”

   Okay, once again the legitimacy of the “evidence” isn’t being questioned. Just like they “knew” where the WMDs were hidden in Iraq. Plus, Bush has advocated increased use of nuclear energy, which a Syrian (or Iranian) reactor could be used for, to counter climate change, but then they go an bomb any nation they don’t like that is building a reactor. Plus, these are the same people that claim the scientific evidence of global warming isn’t conclusive, but don’t even bat an eye at evidence of a nuclear weapons program in Syria? And still there are some people that believe Republicans are strong on security? Oy vey!

   Also, remember this partially contradicts what Night Owl relayed that Laura Rozen wrote about the attacks and a recent scud missiles shipment coming from North Korea; however, the North Korean angle is the same. But this whole Syria nuclear bit, to quote Yogi Berra, “It’s like déjà vu all over again.”

But that’s not all, Four at Four continues with today’s episode of “Guns of Greed” and an article about the “doomsday” seed vault in Norway. It’s a great story, so please make the voyage to the frozen land below the fold…