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

1. The news from Burma today.

   • Spiegel brings this chilling story out of Burma: ‘They Come at Night and Murder the Monks’.

     …It is completely quiet for a moment in the car park. Then a young man emerges from the darkness. He was obviously waiting for a chance to be alone with foreigners. He is poorly clothed, but speaks English that is somewhat understandable. “Please don’t believe what the junta says,” he whispers. “The repression is continuing every night. When there are no more witnesses, they drive through the suburbs at night and kill the people.”

     …It was around midnight when the long convoy of military vehicles drove into the district. They contained police officers from the anti-insurgency unit and the so-called “Lome-Ten,” a unit of gangsters and ex-convicts, who do the regime’s dirty work.

     They surrounded a monastery on Weiza Yandar Street. All the roughly 200 monks living there were forced to stand in a row and the security forces beat their heads against a brick wall. When they were all covered in blood and lay moaning on the ground, they were thrown into a truck and taken away. “We are crying for our monks,” said the man, and then he was gone.

   • The Guardian reports the surviving monks are fleeing the crackdown as reports of brutality emerge. “Scores of Burmese monks were stranded in Rangoon’s railway station yesterday while trying to flee the bloody crackdown on pro-democracy protests that has left thousands languishing in prison. ¶ Bus drivers refused to take the russet-robed monks, fearing the security forces would cut off fuel supplies for their vehicles if they accepted the fares, even as the military conducted further raids and made dozens of arrests… ¶ Fearing the violence that was to come, a Burmese army major, Htay Win, deserted from his unit in Rangoon before the killings began. He fled to Thailand in search of asylum, and yesterday explained why. ‘I knew the plan to beat and shoot the monks, and if I had stayed I would have had to follow those orders,’ said Major Htay, 43, yesterday. ‘But because I’m a Buddhist I didn’t want to follow those orders. I did not want to kill the monks.'”

   • According to The Independent, a French oil firm is accused of complicity with military regime in Burma. “The French oil giant Total faces a renewed inquiry into claims that it was complicit in crimes against humanity committed by the military regime in Burma. ¶ The federal prosecutor’s office in Belgium has re-opened a five-year-old case brought by four Burmese refugees, who allege that France’s largest company financed human rights violations and used forced labour supplied by the junta to build a gas pipeline in the 1990s. A preliminary court hearing is expected later this month, according to Alexis Deswaef, the Belgian lawyer acting for the refugees. ¶ The Belgian government’s decision, following a ruling by the country’s constitutional court, is a further blow to Total as it struggles to defend its presence in Burma.”

   • The Independent reports Burmese troops round up activists. “The Burmese regime has stepped up its search for democracy activists in the aftermath of last week’s demonstrations – rounding up suspected participants and dividing them into ‘passers-by’, ‘those who watched’, ‘those who clapped’ and ‘those who joined in’. ¶ Patrolling the streets of Rangoon before dawn in trucks equipped with loudspeakers, troops broadcast a series of messages that warned: ‘We have photographs. We are going to make arrests!'” In another story, The Independent adds that many protesters are staying put to battle junta as world waits on Burmese border. “At the Moei river in Thailand there is sticky sunshine, jungle and the world’s media in waiting. Yet there is no flood of refugees from across the border in Burma… ¶ In recent years, analysts have argued that non-violence against such regimes doesn’t work, generalising from the failure of non-violent struggles, such as that of the Tibetans against the Chinese, to make significant headway. It worked for Gandhi because the British were soft-hearted foreigners who had to worry about elections and who in any case would have gone home some day anyway. But against pitiless regimes such as that in Burma, hands dripping with blood, it is futile… ¶ this new generation of rebels is bent on proving them wrong.”

   • BBC News reports Burma sets conditions for Suu Kyi. “Burma’s military leader, Gen Than Shwe, has agreed in principle to meet the detained pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, state media has reported. ¶ In return she must drop her support for international sanctions and abandon her confrontational attitude, it said. It is the first time during his 15-year rule that Gen Shwe has indicated he may be ready for dialogue with Suu Kyi.”

The rest of today’s Four at Four can be found below the fold. Today’s stories are:

2. Gonzales’ secret DoJ opinion condoning torture.

3. The daily Blackwater news round-up.

4. Sailing the Northwest Passage and climate change legislation in Congress.

Plus, there’s a bonus story today. Happy 50th anniversary day, Sputnik!
More below the fold…

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

1. As expected, George W. Bush, the ‘compassionate conservative’, vetoed the children’s health insurance bill Congress sent to him. The New York Times reports, Bush Vetoes Children’s Health Insurance Bill. “Mr. Bush wielded his pen with no fanfare just before leaving for a visit to Lancaster, Pa. The veto was only the fourth of Mr. Bush’s presidency. ¶ ‘Because the Congress has chosen to send me a bill that moves our health care system in the wrong direction, I must veto it,’ Mr. Bush said in his veto statement, adding that he hoped to work with the lawmakers ‘to produce a good bill that puts poorer children first.’ ¶ The bill was approved by Congress with unusual bipartisan support, as many Republicans who side with the president on almost everything else voted to expand the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, or Schip, from its current enrollment of about 6.6 million children to more than 10 million.” In its story, the Washington Post reports Bush saying, “The initial intent of the program is not being recognized. It is not being met.” “He also repeated claims, disputed by some, that the measure he vetoed would allow children in families earning as much as $83,000 a year to receive coverage under the program. ¶ ‘That doesn’t sound poor to me,’ Bush said.” With Bush’s weak dollar, that doesn’t sound very wealthy either. I recommend anyone with a craven Republican representative who didn’t vote for this, to give them a call supporting a veto override.

2. BBC News reports that monks are ‘trying to escape Rangoon’. “Scores of monks are trying to leave Burma’s main city, Rangoon, following the military’s bloody crackdown on anti-government protests, reports say. Monks were seen at the railway station and bus drivers were reportedly refusing to take them, out of fear they would not be allowed petrol. Curfews and night-time police raids are continuing in Rangoon. Correspondents describe a climate of fear there.” The Guardian reports that an unnamed Burmese army major defected to Thailand. “A Burmese army major defected today, raising renewed hopes of dissent in the armed forces that is seen as crucial to bringing down the ruling junta. The unnamed officer fled to Thailand apparently in disgust after being ordered to beat Buddhist monks protesting against the regime last week.”

   The military rulers of Burma, er Myanmar have cut off communication to the outside world. Reporting for The New York Time, Seth Mydans filed this story: In Crackdown, Myanmar Junta Unplugs Internet. “It was about as simple and uncomplicated as shooting demonstrators in the streets. Embarrassed by smuggled video and photographs that showed their people rising up against them, the generals who run Myanmar simply switched off the Internet. ¶ Until last Friday television screens and newspapers abroad were flooded with scenes of tens of thousands of red-robed monks in the streets and of chaos and violence as the junta stamped out the biggest popular uprising there in two decades. ¶ But then the images, text messages and posts stopped, shut down by generals who belatedly grasped the power of the Internet to jeopardize their crackdown. ¶ ‘Finally they realized that this was their biggest enemy, and they took it down,’ said Aung Zaw, editor of an exile magazine called Irrawaddy, whose Web site has been a leading source of news over the past weeks.”

3. In today’s Four at Four, I focus on the Blackwater news not directly related to yesterday’s hearing. For my hearing coverage, please see my essay, Pop! Or, how the Blackwater Hearing Was Covered by the Media.

   • In ‘From Errand to Fatal Shot to Hail of Fire to 17 Deaths‘ reporting for The New York Times, James Glanz and Alissa Rubin meet with Haider and Mariam Ahmed, whose mother and older brother were killed by Blackwater in the Nisour Square massacre, and their father. ” The car in which the first people were killed did not begin to closely approach the Blackwater convoy until the Iraqi driver had been shot in the head and lost control of his vehicle. Not one witness heard or saw any gunfire coming from Iraqis around the square. And following a short initial burst of bullets, the Blackwater guards unleashed an overwhelming barrage of gunfire even as Iraqis were turning their cars around and attempting to flee. ¶ As the gunfire continued, at least one of the Blackwater guards began screaming, ‘No! No! No!’ and gesturing to his colleagues to stop shooting, according to an Iraqi lawyer who was stuck in traffic and was shot in the back as he tried to flee… A traffic policeman standing at the edge of the square, Sarhan Thiab, saw that a young man in a car had been hit.”

     “We tried to help him,” Mr. Thiab said. “I saw the left side of his head was destroyed and his mother was crying out: ‘My son, my son. Help me, help me.’”

     …Then Blackwater guards opened fire with a barrage of bullets, according to the police and numerous witnesses. Mr. Ahmed’s father later counted 40 bullet holes in the car. His mother, Mohassin Kadhim, appears to have been shot to death as she cradled her son in her arms. Moments later the car caught fire after the Blackwater guards fired a type of grenade into the vehicle…

     The shooting started like rain; everyone escaped his car,” said Fareed Walid Hassan, a truck driver who hauls goods in his Hyundai minibus. He saw a woman dragging her child. “He was around 10 or 11,” he said. “He was dead. She was pulling him by one hand to get him away. She hoped that he was still alive.”

     You must read this piece.

   • ABC News suggests mental stress on employees may be factor in Blackwater killings. Said one military contractor, “Blackwater might have a house shrink, but I’d be surprised if they do. Anyone who has spent more than a few months in Iraq is bound to have mental health issues… You put a bunch of jittery guys into a situation where everyone wants to bomb or kill Americans and that’s a recipe for a really bad situation.” “The VA estimates that 34 percent of soldiers suffer from post-traumatic stress. A DynCorp study found that 24 percent of contractors reported having symptoms, a number the company’s psychologist, Paul Brand, said was probably low due to people too embarrassed to report conditions honestly. ¶ Some 125,000 American and international contractors are working in Iraq.”

   • The AP reports that “Congress is moving to close a loophole in the law that has left private security contractors in Iraq like Blackwater immune to criminal prosecution, despite warnings by the White House that expanding the law could cause new problems. ¶ The House was expected to pass legislation on Wednesday by Rep. David Price, D-N.C., that would extend criminal jurisdiction of U.S. courts to any federal contractor working alongside military operations. Senate Democratic leaders said they planned to follow suit as soon as possible and send the measure to… Bush to sign… ¶ White House officials say they support increasing accountability of contractors abroad, but worry that the House bill is too vague and may go too far. An administration statement issued Wednesday said the bill would have ‘unintended and intolerable consequences for crucial and necessary national security activities and operations.'” In an earlier story, Legal Avenues Against Blackwater Murky, the AP reported “Somewhere in western Washington state is a former Blackwater contractor who might, under normal circumstances, be on trial in Baghdad… Amid an outcry from Iraqis who questioned how an American could kill someone in those circumstances and return to the U.S. a free man, the Justice Department announced it would investigate.” Anonymous Bush administration officials claimed “the case has been turned over to the U.S. attorney’s office for western Washington, where the man lives”. “It’s been 10 months and the Justice Department has not done anything to him,” Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney (D-NY) said. “If you work for Blackwater, you get packed up and you leave within two days and you face a $1,000 fine.”

   • The AP reports that John Edwards wants to limit the government’s of security contractors. In remarks provided by his campaign to the AP, Edwards says “We must put the democracy back in our military and prevent a disaster like the continuation of the Iraq War from ever occurring again… As commander in chief, I will transfer most security missions currently performed by contractors back to military command, where they belong… If you’re not ending combat operations, you’re not ending the war”.

   • Once again according to AFP, Iraq PM says ‘unfit’ Blackwater must go. “Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said on Wednesday that Blackwater should leave the country because of the mountain of evidence against the under-fire US security firm… ¶ ‘I believe the abundance of evidence against it makes it unfit to stay in Iraq,’ Maliki told a televised press conference in Baghdad.”

   • According to the Los Angeles Times, the State Department is examining its Iraq security practices. “Members of a team dispatched by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have begun a review of the State Department’s security practices in Iraq… ¶ Ambassador Patrick Kennedy, the State Department’s director of management policy, and Ambassador Eric Boswell, a former assistant secretary of State for diplomatic security, arrived in Baghdad on Sunday and have begun meeting with U.S. and Iraqi officials, said U.S. Embassy spokeswoman Mirembe Nantongo. Other members of the team are expected to arrive soon. Kennedy, who heads the panel, will present his preliminary findings to Rice by the end of the week, Nantongo said.”

   • Steve Fainaru of the Washington Post reports that, shock, mercenaries report far fewer incidents than actually occur. “Two former Blackwater security guards said they believed employees fired more often than the company has disclosed. One, a former Blackwater guard who spent nearly three years in Iraq, said his 20-man team averaged ‘four or five’ shootings a week, or several times the rate of 1.4 incidents a week reported by the company. The underreporting of shooting incidents was routine in Iraq, according to this former guard.” David Horner, a former truck driver contractor for Crescent Security Group said preemptive firing was part of traveling through town. “I know that I personally never saw anyone shoot at us, but we blazed through that town all the time… Personally I did not take aim at one person. But I don’t know what everybody else did. We’d come back at the end of the day, and a lot of times we were out of ammo.” Horner “said he quit after one of Crescent’s Iraqi employees fired a belt-fed PK machine gun from the bed of Horner’s truck and hit what appeared to be two members of the Iraqi National Guard.” The man in charge of monitoring contractors under military contract in Iraq, Maj. Kent Lightner of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, said he normally accepted a company’s report. “I’m not going to investigate. I’m not going to worry about it, unless somebody comes back and says, ‘Yeah, they dropped two children, or they dropped a woman,'” Lightner said.

   • Somewhat lost in yesterday’s hearing, the House Oversight Committee released a memo on ‘The Crash of Blackwater Flight 61’. “On November 27, 2004, a flight operated by Blackwater Aviation and designated ‘Blackwater 61’ crashed in a canyon in a remote area of Afghanistan, killing the members of the flight crew and three U.S. military personnel who were passengers. According to government investigative reports and other documents obtained by the Committee, the crash and the deaths of the crew and passengers were caused by a combination of reckless conduct by the Blackwater pilots and multiple mistakes by Blackwater, including hiring unqualified and inexperienced pilots, failure to file flight plans, and failure to have proper equipment for tracking and locating missing aircraft.”

4. And now for something completely different. The Telegraph reports a new Wallace and Gromit film is in the works. “The adventures of plasticine friends Wallace and Gromit are set to continue with the pairs’ next film, a murder mystery set in a bakery entitled Trouble At Mill. Creator Nick Park has revealed to fans details of the next Aardman Animations venture… Trouble At Mill, to be shown on BBC1, is a return to the 30 minute format… It sees flat-cap favourite Wallace in his new bakery where he is ‘dough-eyed’ in love with bread enthusiast Piella Bakewell… The film is currently in pre-production but exclusive clips can be viewed on the Wallace and Gromit website.”

So, what else is happening?

Cross-posted on Daily Kos.

This diary is an overview of yesterday’s hearing of the House Oversight Committee featuring testimony from Blackwater CEO Erik Prince and three officials from the State Department: Ambassador David Statterfield, Ambassador Richard Griffin, and Deputy Assistant Secretary William Moser. Video of the hearing is available.

This diary is also a follow up to my previous diary, BOOM! Waxman Fires a Shot Across Blackwater’s Bow!

The overview is divided into two parts: blog coverage and traditional media coverage. But first, here are my three observations that I didn’t see covered anywhere else. My observations concern the remarks of Ranking Member Tom Davis (R-VA) and Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH).

This is an OPEN THREAD. Here are four stories in the news at 4 o’clock to get you started. Whoever pats scoripions with the hand of compassion gets stung.

1. According to The Guardian, 1,000 British troops will be redeployed home by Christmas. In his visit to Baghdad today, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced Britain will redeploy 1,000 of its remaining troops from Iraq. “The prime minister brushed off concerns the security situation would deteriorate, predicting that Iraqi forces could take control of Basra province within the next two months. ¶ Mr Brown said the UK force in Basra would be cut from 5,500 to 4,500, meaning 1,000 troops were likely to be ‘home by Christmas’. ¶ However, the departure of 500 of these forces had already been announced last month.” The Telegraph, of course, reports on the Tories’ anger over Basra pullout announcement. “The Prime Minister was attacked by former Prime Minister Sir John Major for failing to make his announcement on troop withdrawals to the House of Commons. He was also accused of playing a ‘shameful’ political game after he sprung a surprise visit to Iraq timed to coincide with the Conservative party conference. Sir John questioned the timing of the announcement and the number of troops it appeared to concern.” He said: “I’ve no conceivable idea why 1,000, rather than the 2,000 that was briefed, or any other number. I’m not sure what the mission of the remaining troops may be, but in particular I’m not sure what will happen between now and Christmas that will justify the thousand coming home.” The Independent has more on Brown’s ‘Home by Christmas’ pledge. “He said that this would involve the present British force of 5,500 being cut to 4,500 – freeing up the troops for other duties.” I’m guessing those ‘other duties’ involve redeployment to Afghanistan.

2. The Guardian reports that scientists with Conservation International fear the Amazon jungle could be lost in 40 years time, because of threat from development and new transportation routes. “The Amazonian wilderness is at risk of unprecedented damage from an ambitious plan to improve transport, communications and power generation in the region… ¶ Development plans have been drawn up to boost trade links between 10 economic hubs on the continent, but threaten to bring ‘a perfect storm of environmental destruction’ to the world’s oldest rainforest, according to a report from Conservation International. ¶ Projects to upgrade road and river transport, combined with work to create dams and lay down extensive power and communications cabling, will open up previously inaccessible parts of the rainforest, raising the risk of widespread deforestation that could see the loss of the entire Amazon jungle within 40 years, the environmental group said.”

3. Science Daily reports Arctic sea ice extent may have fallen by 50 percent since 1950s. “Arctic sea ice during the 2007 melt season plummeted to the lowest levels since satellite measurements began in 1979, according to researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder’s National Snow and Ice Data Center. ¶ The average sea ice extent for the month of September was 1.65 million square miles (4.28 million square kilometers), the lowest September on record, shattering the previous record for the month by 23 percent, which was set in 2005. At the end of the melt season, September 2007 sea ice was 39 percent below the long-term average from 1979 to 2000. ¶ If ship and aircraft records from before the satellite era are taken into account, sea ice may have fallen by as much as 50 percent from the 1950s. The September rate of sea ice decline since 1979 is now more than 10 percent per decade, said the CU-Boulder research team.” While BBC News reports “the giant Ayles Ice Island drifting off Canada’s northern shores has broken in two – far earlier than expected.” The New York Times adds this summer’s Arctic melt unnerves the experts. “The Arctic ice cap shrank so much this summer that waves briefly lapped along two long-imagined Arctic shipping routes, the Northwest Passage over Canada and the Northern Sea Route over Russia… ¶ Now the six-month dark season has returned to the North Pole. In the deepening chill, new ice is already spreading over vast stretches of the Arctic Ocean. Astonished by the summer’s changes, scientists are studying the forces that exposed one million square miles of open water — six Californias — beyond the average since satellites started measurements in 1979… ¶ The pace of change has far exceeded what had been estimated by almost all the simulations used to envision how the Arctic will respond to rising concentrations of greenhouse gases linked to global warming. But that disconnect can cut two ways. Are the models overly conservative? Or are they missing natural influences that can cause wide swings in ice and temperature, thereby dwarfing the slow background warming?”

4. Today, an explosion of Blackwater related news was triggered by a House Oversight Committee memorandum (pdf) that I wrote about in ‘BOOM! Waxman Fires a Shot Across Blackwater’s Bow!‘ And, as I’ve been compiling today’s Four at Four, Blackwater’s CEO, Erik Prince, was testifying under oath before the committee. I will bring summaries of his testimony tomorrow. In the meantime, I have tried to pick through the more interesting pre-hearing coverage by the traditional media. Most of which, is on the Oversight Committee’s memorandum.

   • The Los Angeles Times gives an overview of the memorandum in ‘Inquiry details Blackwater firings‘. “Blackwater USA, the private security contractor under scrutiny for its role in a deadly Baghdad shootout in September, has sacked 122 of its armed guards in Iraq since it started protecting U.S. diplomats there nearly three years ago… ¶ The firings, most frequently for weapons-related incidents, amount to more than one-seventh of Blackwater’s current workforce in Iraq. None of the people fired has been subject to any legal proceedings or other sanction, the investigation found… ¶ Of the 122 firings, 28 were for weapons-related incidents, including two for improperly shooting at Iraqis and one for threatening Iraqis with a firearm. Another 25 people were discharged for drug and alcohol violations and 16 for ‘inappropriate/lewd conduct.’ Ten others were dismissed for aggressive and violent behavior.” The article concluded with this nugget — “Prince’s brother-in-law is Richard DeVos Jr., former chief executive of the direct sales group Amway. A former Republican gubernatorial candidate in Michigan, DeVos has donated more than $160,000 to the Republican National Committee and Republican congressional committees. ¶ Amway attracted attention in 1993 when it paid former President George H.W. Bush $100,000 for an address to the company’s distributors. At the time, the speaking fee was one of the largest ever paid to a former government official.” Amway! As if there was any doubt these guys were bad news.

   • McClatchy Newspapers weighs in the memorandum with ‘State Department and Blackwater cooperated to neutralize killings. “State Department officials worked closely with the private security contractor Blackwater USA to play down incidents in which company operatives killed innocent Iraqis, according to Blackwater and State Department documents obtained by a congressional committee… ¶ The disclosures appear to contradict past claims by State Department officials that they aggressively investigated wrongdoing by Blackwater. The company has received $835 million in contracts to guard U.S. civilians in Iraq.” The article makes note of criminal investigation launched by the FBI at the request of the State Department.

   • Jurist Legal News gives the scoop, FBI investigating Blackwater role in Iraqi civilian shootings. “The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) said Monday that it would send a team of investigators to Iraq to study the circumstances surrounding a September shooting incident involving employees of the privately contracted security firm Blackwater USA that left 11 Iraqi civilians dead. According to the FBI, the US State Department has asked it to determine whether criminal charges should be pursued against the guards involved in the September 16 shooting.” It is doubtful that even if the Bush administration’s FBI finds there was criminal wrongdoing, that charges will climb the ladder up to the corporate top of Blackwater.

   • The New York Times split up coverage of the memorandum with at least four stories.

     1. An overview is given in ‘Report says firm sought to cover up Iraq Shootings‘. The article concluded with the news of “the Senate on Monday gave final approval, 92 to 3, to a defense policy bill that included the establishment of an independent commission to investigate private contractors operating in Iraq and Afghanistan. The bill, which must be reconciled with a House version, faces a veto threat because it includes an expansion of federal hate-crimes laws.”

     2. In ‘Report Describes Drunken Contractor’s Killing of Iraqi Bodyguard‘, the focus is on the December 2006 murder of Raheem Khalif, a bodyguard for Iraq’s Vice President Adil Abdul Mahdi. “A Blackwater USA employee under investigation in the killing last December of an Iraqi bodyguard in an off-duty confrontation was so drunk after fleeing the shooting that another group of guards took away the loaded pistol he was fumbling with… ¶ Within 36 hours, the report said, Blackwater fired the man for possessing a firearm while drunk and arranged with the State Department to fly him back to the United States, angering Iraqi officials who said the Christmas Eve shooting was murder.” The article then goes on to explain how the memorandum details how the State Department and Blackwater colluded to cover-up the crime. “Blackwater eventually paid the family $15,000, according to the report, after an embassy diplomatic security official complained that the ‘crazy sums’ proposed by the ambassador could encourage Iraqis to try to ‘get killed by our guys to financially guarantee their family’s future.’ ¶ The report did not identify the acting ambassador, but a State Department spokesman, Karl Duckworth, said it was Margaret Scobey.” According to the State Department’s website, Margaret Scobey is now Ambassador to Syria.

     3. ‘Report Depicts Recklessness at Blackwater‘ notes that “the report, based largely on internal Blackwater e-mail messages and State Department documents, depicts the security contractor as being staffed with reckless, shoot-first guards who were not always sober and did not always stop to see who or what was hit by their bullets.” It also calls to attention that “contrary to the terms of its contract, Blackwater sometimes engaged in offensive operations with the American military, instead of confining itself to its protective mission”. An important tangent to note that Waxman’s committee still has uncovered the missing White House/RNC emails.

     4. Finally, Mike Nizza’s blog column, The Lede, focuses on “a few interesting excerpts from the document, including a State Department debate on how much a wrongfully killed Iraqi ought to be worth, what taxpayers are charged for a Blackwater security guard’s working day, the reasons why more than 70 of those expensive contractors have been fired, and a jaw-dropping tale of vehicular recklessness.”

   • CNN reports that Blackwater contractor wrote government report on Blackwater’s Nisoor Square massacre. “The State Department’s initial report of last month’s incident in which Blackwater guards were accused of killing Iraqi civilians was written by a Blackwater contractor working in the embassy security detail, according to government and industry sources. A source involved in diplomatic security at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad said a Blackwater contractor, Darren Hanner, drafted the two-page ‘spot report’ on the letterhead of the Bureau of Diplomatic Security for the embassy’s Tactical Operations Center.” Hanner is set to leave Iraq this week. “The man who approved the report was Ricardo Colon, whom the embassy source identified as the embassy’s deputy regional security officer… A Ricardo Colon Cifredo works for the State Department in Iraq.” Iraqi reports contradict Blackwater’s report.

   • Salon looks at the Bush administration’s ties to Blackwater. The article details the money and political connections between Blackwater and the Christian right and the Bush administration. I’ll just post a few interesting facts that are new to me.

     • Blackwater CEO’s mother, Elsa, “currently runs the Edgar and Elsa Prince Foundation, where, according to IRS filings, her son Erik is a vice-president. The foundation has given lavishly to some of the marquee names of the Christian right. Between July 2003 and July 2006, the foundation gave at least $670,000 to the FRC and $531,000 to Focus on the Family.”

     • “Erik Prince himself is no slouch when it comes to giving to Republicans and cultivating relationships with important conservatives. He and his first and second wives have donated roughly $300,000 to Republican candidates and political action committees. Through his Freiheit Foundation, he also gave $500,000 to Prison Fellowship Ministries, run by former Nixon official Charles Colson, in 2000. In the same year, he contributed $30,000 to the American Entreprise Institute, a conservative think tank. During college, he interned in George H.W. Bush’s White House, and he also interned for Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.).”

     • “Blackwater’s benefits from government largesse haven’t ended at Iraq. The company was recently one of five awarded a Department of Defense counter-narcoterrorism contract that could reportedly be worth as much as $15 billion.”

     • “Joseph Schmitz, Chief Operating Officer and General Counsel: In 2002, President Bush nominated Schmitz to oversee and police the Pentagon’s military contracts as the Defense Department’s Inspector General… Schmitz resigned in 2005 under mounting pressure from both Democratic and Republican senators, who accused him of interfering with criminal investigations into inappropriately awarded contracts, turning a blind eye to conflicts of interest and other failures of oversight.”

     Think of those as appetizers. For the meat and potatoes, you will need to go read the article.

   • Writing for Salon, P.W. Singer, author and Brookings Institution security analyst, gives an excellent overview of Blackwater and other mercenary firms in ‘The dark truth about Blackwater’. Singer predicts:

     Prince will take his shots, and State officials will point to new investigations they are now launching to try to mollify congressional anger. But regardless of whether the Blackwater contractors were justified in the shooting, whether there was proper jurisdiction to ensure accountability, or even whether using firms like Blackwater saves money (the data shows it does not), there is an underlying problem that everyone is ignoring.

     Our dependency on military contractors shows all the signs of the last downward spirals of an addiction. If we judge by what has happened in Iraq, when it comes to counterinsurgency and the use of private military contractors, the U.S. has locked its national security into a vicious cycle. It can’t win with them, but can’t go to war without them.

     Singer then explains:

     The private military industry was an answer to these political problems that had not existed in the past. It offered the potential backstop of additional forces, but with no one having to lose any political capital. Plus, the generals could avoid the career risk of asking for more troops.

     That is, there was no outcry whenever contractors were called up and deployed, or even killed…

     Hence, while private losses were just the “cost of doing business” for a firm in Iraq, they actually had an undisguised advantage to policymakers. The public usually didn’t even hear about contractor losses, and when they did, they had far less blowback on our government. For all the discussion of contractors as a “private market solution,” the true costs that they hope to save are almost always political in nature.”

     The article is over 7,300 words, but well worth your time to read. Singer also reminds the reader of a his 2004 piece for Salon, ‘Warriors for hire in Iraq‘.

   • CNN reports that an Iraqi official is saying Blackwater was also involved in second shooting September 16. The official said “that a second group of Blackwater contractors on their way to assist the first group later engaged in an hour-long standoff with Iraqi police. The first, widely publicized shooting occurred at Nisoor Square in Baghdad… The second shooting occurred minutes later about 550 yards (500 meters) from Nisoor Square”. This partially confirms what the Washington Post reported from the ‘first blush’ report produced by the U.S. embassy in Baghdad that the U.S. Army interceded on Blackwater’s behalf. “‘The U.S. Army QRF’ — quick-reaction force — ‘arrived on scene at 12:39 hours and mediated the situation,’ the report said. ‘They escorted TST 22 out of the area and successfully back to the [Green Zone] without further incident.'” TST is a Blackwater ‘tactical support team’.

   • Finally, The Washington Post neocon editorial board weighs in with a rather weak-kneed editorial, ‘Blackwater Waves‘ seemingly claiming that investigating Blackwater is simply partisan. But, the editorial grudgingly admits: “Already, though, it seems clear that Blackwater’s critics are right in one important respect: There are inadequate controls over security firms, especially those working for the State Department… Congress and the Bush administration should ensure that those who kill innocent Iraqis or engage in other criminal excesses can be held legally accountable. Moreover, U.S. diplomats and military commanders should exercise more control over the guards who work for them, with the aim of preventing them from needlessly alienating Iraqis. ¶ At the same time it is foolish to propose the elimination of private security firms in Iraq and Afghanistan, at least in the short term… More than 130,000 contractors serve the U.S. mission in Iraq, including some 30,000 security guards, and without them it would be impossible for U.S. forces to function.” What the warmongers at the Post call foolish, I call prudent — get rid of the mercenaries, force the occupation to end.

One more story about the 50th anniversary of Sputnik below the fold…

Cross-posted on Daily Kos.

Today in the understated language that is his style, Rep. Henry Waxman, Chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform released a memorandum of Additional Information about Blackwater USA. In actuality, the memo is a shot across the bow of Blackwater and the craven Republicans on the committee and the State Department who will rise to defend the firm and its CEO Erik Prince who is scheduled to appear before the committee Tuesday, October 2 at 10:00 AM.

The memorandum, prepared by the Majority Staff, reveals:

Incident reports compiled by Blackwater reveal that Blackwater has been involved in at least 195 “escalation of force” incidents in Iraq since 2005 that involved the firing of shots by Blackwater forces. This is an average of 1.4 shooting incidents per week. Blackwater’s contract to provide protective services to the State Department provides that Blackwater can engage in only defensive use of force. In over 80% of the shooting incidents, however, Blackwater reports that its forces fired the first shots.

195 “incidents” coming at an average of 1.4 per week since 2005 where Blackwater shot first over 80% of the time.

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

1. The U.S. Supreme Court opened its 2007-08 term today. The Los Angeles Times provides a good overview of what the court will consider this term. The Supreme Court on Monday opens a new term that includes a rich mix of cases on election law, sentencing in drug cases, executions by lethal injection, age bias in the workplace and the rights of employees who put their money into 401(k) accounts. The court also will consider — again — whether the detainees at Guantanamo Bay have a right to plead their innocence before a judge… ¶ The dispute turns on the Constitution, which says ‘the privilege of the writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended,’ except during times of ‘rebellion or invasion.’ Civil libertarians have urged the court to say Congress violated this provision when it took away from the Guantanamo prisoners the right to go to court.”

   Already the Supreme Court is making news. Reuters reports U.S. top court won’t hear Guantanamo prisoner’s case. “The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday turned down an appeal by a Guantanamo prisoner whose legal challenges had forced changes to… George W. Bush’s anti-terrorism program last year. ¶ The justices refused to take up the case of Salim Ahmed Hamdan, who faces a possible military tribunal as an accused driver and guard for Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan… ¶ The high court may have denied the appeal because a U.S. appeals court has yet to rule on Hamdan’s case.” The Los Angeles Times reports the Supreme Court rejects greater rights for church groups. “The Supreme Court refused today to expand the rights of church groups, turning down appeals in a pair of cases. ¶ In the first, the justices rejected a free-speech claim from an evangelical minister from Northern California who wanted to hold worship services in the meeting room of a public library. ¶ In the second, the court rejected a freedom-of-religion claim from Catholic Charities in New York, which objected to a state law that requires them to pay for contraceptives for their employees as part of their prescription drug coverage.”

2. The AP is reporting US and Iraqi civilian deaths fell sharply in September. “Deaths among American forces and Iraqi civilians fell dramatically last month to their lowest levels in more than a year, according to figures compiled by the U.S. military, the Iraqi government and The Associated Press. ¶ The decline signaled a U.S. success in bringing down violence in Baghdad and surrounding regions since Washington completed its infusion of 30,000 more troops on June 15. A total of 64 American forces died in September — the lowest monthly toll since July 2006. ¶ The decline in Iraqi civilian deaths was even more dramatic, falling from 1,975 in August to 922 last month, a decline of 53.3 percent. The breakdown in September was 844 civilians and 78 police and Iraqi soldiers, according to Iraq’s ministries of Health, Interior and Defense. ¶ In August, AP figures showed 1,809 civilians and 155 police and Iraqi soldiers were killed in sectarian violence. The civilian death toll has not been so low since June 2006, when 847 Iraqis died.” Frankly anyone who claims this is progress is daft. Fatality statistics should be compared to pre-invasion counts not the previous year’s death toll. How anyone can see the deaths of 844 civilians and 78 Iraqi police as progress is beyond my understanding.

3. Here is today’s summary of Blackwater news and op-eds.

   • In ‘Death From All Sides‘, Kevin Peraino of Newsweek writes about the “confidential incident report” it has obtained. The “extensive evidence file put together by the Iraqi National Police… including documents, maps, sworn witness statements and police video footage” that contradict Blackwater’s account of their massacre in Baghdad’s Nasoor Square on September 16. The report concludes that Blackwater mercenaries “‘opened fire crazily and randomly, without any reason.‘” The police video is “footage of burned human remains and show the street littered with brass bullet casings.” The burned human remains is a woman and an infant and the driver of her car. The report found that “‘helicopters opened fire from the air toward the cars and civilians.’ Gen. Hussein al-Awadi, the commander of the Iraqi National Police, [said] that the trajectory of some of the bullet wounds could only have been caused by fire from the air. ‘If anyone moved—whenever they saw someone leaving—either the convoy or the chopper shot him,’ says Ali Kalaf Salman, an undercover Iraqi National Police officer who was working as a traffic cop at the scene.” Blackwater has denied their helicopters were involved in the shooting. Blackwater is still claiming they were attacked by the people their employees killed.

     “No one shot at Blackwater,” says Col. Faris Saadi Abdul, the lead Iraqi police investigator. “Blackwater shot without any cause.” Al-Awadi, the National Police commander, says that minutes after he heard the shooting begin, he rushed to the scene, which is just around the corner from the National Police headquarters. (He says he was accompanied by a unit of American military trainers embedded with his police.) “We were trying to figure out why they were shooting” … “We tried to find a reason and we couldn’t.” He says that his men searched the civilian cars at the scene, but didn’t find any weapons. When Iraqi investigators later stopped a different Blackwater convoy near the scene of the shooting, the general says that the Blackwater guards refused to comment about the incident.

     Blackwater mistook everyday events for hostile actions. “I pulled my radio out to call an ambulance, and they shot at me,” said Sirhan Diab, a traffic policeman who was working in Nasoor Square at the time of the shooting. Blackwater also shot at Iraqi police trying to help the victims.

     According to the accompanying incident report, the Blackwater guards opened fire on an Iraqi Army checkpoint on a nearby road leading away from the square. The convoy also apparently sideswiped at least one Iraqi civilian vehicle in the circle. Samir Hobi, 40, says he got out of his car and complained to the Blackwater guards about the damage. He says one of the guards shouted back: “Shut up or I’ll shoot you.”

   • The House oversight committee has released new information about Blackwater. “Previously undisclosed information reveals (1) Blackwater has engaged in 195 ‘escalation of force’ incidents since 2005, an average of 1.4 per week, including over 160 incidents in which Blackwater forces fired first; (2) after a drunken Blackwater contractor shot the guard of the Iraqi Vice President, the State Department allowed the contractor to leave Iraq and advised Blackwater on the size of the payment needed “to help them resolve this”; and (3) Blackwater, which has received over $1 billion in federal contracts since 2001, is charging the federal government over $1,200 per day for each ‘protective security specialist’ employed by the company.” In about 80% of the escalation incidents, Blackwater shot first. Additionally, disclosed in a committee staff memorandum, is the State Department’s suggestion to buy off the Iraqi families who had members murdered by Blackwater mercenaries. “The State Department took a similar approach upon recieving reports that Blackwater shooters killed an innocent Iraqi, except in this case, the State Department requested only a $5,000 payment to ‘put this unforunate matter behind us quickly.'” The Blackwater hearing is scheduled for tomorrow.

   • The Los Angeles Times reports that a U.S. team has begun a review of private contractors in Iraq. “Ambassador Patrick Kennedy, the department’s director of management policy, and Ambassador Eric Boswell, a former assistant secretary of state for diplomatic security, arrived in Baghdad on Sunday and have begun meeting with U.S. and Iraqi officials, said Embassy spokeswoman Mirembe Nantongo. ¶ Other members of the team are expected to arrive soon. Kennedy, who heads the panel, will present his preliminary findings to Rice by the end of the week, Nantongo told reporters.”

   • Harold Pincus reports in the Washington Post that the U.S. pays a steep price for private security in Iraq. “It costs the U.S. government a lot more to hire contract employees as security guards in Iraq than to use American troops. It comes down to the simple business equation of every transaction requiring a profit… How much more these costs are compared with the pay of U.S. troops is easier to determine. ¶ An unmarried sergeant given Iraq pay and relief from U.S. taxes makes about $83 to $85 a day, given time in service. A married sergeant with children makes about double that, $170 a day. Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Baghdad overseeing more than 160,000 U.S. troops, makes roughly $180,000 a year, or about $493 a day. That comes out to less than half the fee charged by Blackwater for its senior manager of a 34-man security team.” (Hat tip John Campanelli.)

   • The craven Wall Street Journal has an op-ed written by a mercenary and apologist: Ben Ryan, a “a former U.S. Navy SEAL officer who spent time in Iraq as an employee of Triple Canopy, a private security firm.” Ryan praises Blackwater contractors as “highly professional and well trained” and excuses their Nissour Square massacre because of what happend with Blackwater in Fallujah in 2004. Ryan claims “contractors are cost-effective” because “they usually receive no benefits”. He also feels mercenaries are not above the law. “Contractors are also subject to numerous U.S. statutes and regulations, as well as international treaties. Just last year, Congress amended the Uniform Code of Military Justice to include contractors. Contractors can also be prosecuted under the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act of 2000, which permits charges to be brought in federal court for crimes abroad.”

   • In a very colorful op-ed in the New York Post, worth reading for the use of language alone, retired Army officer Ralph Peters writes about ‘Trouble for Hire‘ and places the blame for Blackwater at the State Department’s doors. “Americans have always despised mercenaries. Our dislike of hired killers dates back to the days of our Founding Fathers. When Washington crossed the Delaware to defeat the Hessians at Trenton, he targeted hirelings who’d burned, raped and murdered their way across northern New Jersey… And now the United States has become the world’s No. 1 employer of hired thugs. By a conservative count, we and our partners in Iraq employ 5,000 armed American and other Western expatriates, at least 10,000 third-country-nationals or TCNs, and upwards of 15,000 Iraqis who should be serving their own country in uniform.” Peters writes that American troops get the blame for Blackwater’s crimes. “The Bush administration has made sure that there’s no real accountability in the contracting arena, but the particular villain in this mess in the State Department. Our military has been doing all it can to keep Blackwater’s cowboys at arms’ length in Iraq. But State’s diplomats – the men and women theoretically responsible for building good relations with Iraqis – prefer the Blackwater approach (shoot first, and don’t bother asking questions)… ¶ So State’s mission for Blackwater is straightforward: ‘Protect the principal.’ Defend the diplomat, whatever the cost. Well, maybe it’s time for State to risk a few principals in support of America’s principles. ¶ Our country has been dishonored. By our ‘Hessians.'”

4. The Guardian reports that Portugal gambles on ‘sea snakes’ providing an energy boost. “Portugal is poised to open what will be the world’s first commercial wavefarm, and while the coastline’s formidable surf will be a source of electricity, the engineers need a decent “weather window” to be able to get their machinery out to sea. ¶ The Pelamis machines, named after the Latin for sea snake and developed by a Scottish company that leads the world in one of the newest renewable energy fields, are a series of red tubes, each about the size of a small commuter train, linked together, and pointed in the direction of the waves. The waves travel down the tubes, causing them to bob up and down, and a hydraulic system harnesses this movement to generate electricity. ¶ The three ‘sea snakes’ will soon be towed out to a spot some three miles from the coast of northern Portugal at Agucadoura, from where the electricity they produce will be pumped into the national grid.”

One more story about the Kiwi’s flag below the fold…

This is an OPEN THREAD. Here are four stories in the news at 4 o’clock to get you started. An egg cannot break a stone.

1. John Solomon and Juliet Eilperin report for the Washington Post that Bush’s EPA is pursuing fewer polluters and probes and prosecutions have declined sharply. “The Environmental Protection Agency’s pursuit of criminal cases against polluters has dropped off sharply during the Bush administration, with the number of prosecutions, new investigations and total convictions all down by more than a third, according to Justice Department and EPA data. ¶ The number of civil lawsuits filed against defendants who refuse to settle environmental cases was down nearly 70 percent between fiscal years 2002 and 2006, compared with a four-year period in the late 1990s, according to those same statistics. ¶ Critics of the agency say its flagging efforts have emboldened polluters to flout U.S. environmental laws, threatening progress in cleaning the air, protecting wildlife, eliminating hazardous materials, and countless other endeavors overseen by the EPA.” What did people expect when they voted for Bush?

2. Okay, it is Sunday, so I’m putting in some lighter fare. If you’re looking for the Blackwater summary, it’s below the fold. First from The Observer, the BBC is set to screen lost film charting Bob Dylan’s performances at 1960s Newport Folk Festivals. “Music history will be made as reclaimed footage of Bob Dylan’s fabled performances at the Newport Folk Festivals in America is broadcast. ¶ The filmed sequences from the three key years 1963, 1964 and 1965 have been released from a Dylan film archive for the first time and will demonstrate the bodyshock delivered by the young singer’s arrival on the folk music scene. The footage also shows the extraordinary change that took place in his performance style. On 14 October, BBC4 viewers will at last be able to witness the power of his quiet initial appearance in front of an eager crowd and to contrast it with the confidence of the rock star who takes to the same stage with an electric guitar in hand in 1965.”

3. The New York Times has a fascinating look at what positive things technology can achieve in A Painting Comes Home (or at Least a Facsimile). “Can — and should — technology right a historical wrong? That’s a question Italians have been asking since a facsimile of Veronese’s 16th-century ‘Wedding at Cana’ was installed on the Island of San Giorgio Maggiore a few weeks ago. ¶ At the heart of the debate is the digital re-creation of this vast 1563 painting, which Napoleon’s forces removed from the refectory in the Church of San Giorgio Maggiore 210 years ago and took back to France as war booty. ¶ The facsimile, by the Madrid enterprise Factum Arte, is a stunningly accurate replica of the 732-square-foot canvas. Details are reproduced down to the most minute topography, including the raised seams rejoining the panels that Napoleon’s troops cut the painting into when they transported it to France in 1797. (The original hangs in the Louvre Museum in Paris.)”

4. The Los Angeles Times brings the tale of the ‘lost’ Siqueiros mural. Argentina has pledged to restore a ‘secret’ work by the famed Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros, “in which his revolutionary zeal gives way to ‘an obsessive and desperate love'” Siqueiros met the poet Blanca Luz Brum in Uraguay.

   “I don’t believe that other human beings, man and woman, have loved each other with so much force, so much pureness and magnitude,” Blanca Luz Brum, whose given name means “white light,” later wrote of her early days with Siqueiros.

   After four tumultuous years of la vie bohème in Mexico, Los Angeles and South America against the backdrop of the political and artistic upheaval of the 1930s, jealousy and mistrust would devour their grand passion. But Siqueiros left behind a startling homage to Brum: a kaleidoscopic mural showcasing multiple voluptuous incarnations of her body with Betty Boop eyes.

   This vibrant paean to passion has endured decades of assorted indignities — defaced with acid, smeared with whitewash, sealed away from view and eventually divided up and deposited in metal containers. Now, almost three-quarters of a century later, Argentine authorities vow that the singular work will be brought out of storage, reassembled, restored and displayed publicly for the first time…

   Siqueiros painted the mural in the basement poker room of the mansion of a shady publishing tycoon who reigned in the political and cultural hothouse of 1930s Buenos Aires…

An extensive summary of Blackwater news and op-eds 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. When George W. Bush decided to go after Iraq’s oil rather than finish the job in Afghanistan, I wonder if he thought he would see this headline, Afghan president offers to meet Taliban leader, in the Los Angeles Times four years later? Heckuva screw-up, George. “President Hamid Karzai, expressing horror at a suicide bombing here in the Afghan capital that killed at least 30 people and wounded dozens more, offered today to meet with Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar to stop the carnage. Karzai spoke at an emotional news conference hours after an early morning blast tore through a bus carrying soldiers to their posts.”

   Saturday’s appeal, aimed directly at fugitive Taliban leader Mullah Omar and warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, carried more raw urgency than the U.S.-backed president’s previous overtures.

   “If I find their address, there is no need for them to come to me — I’ll personally go there and get in touch with them,” Karzai told reporters at his presidential palace.

   Apparently paraphrasing the question he would put to them, he asked: “‘Esteemed mullah, sir, and esteemed Hekmatyar, sir, why are you destroying the country?’ “

   There is more on the Kabul suicide attack in the Washington Post, suicide bomb attack kills dozens in Kabul. “The massive explosion, one of the largest suicide attacks in Afghanistan since the U.S. invasion almost six years ago, ripped through the roof and sides of the bus, leaving it an unrecognizable chunk of twisted and charred metal. The blast broke shop windows up to a block away and scattered splinters of glass, chunks of flesh and chards of metal for hundreds of yards… ¶ The 6:45 a.m. blast in the central Kabul neighborhood of Baharistan could be heard for miles in a city that was just waking up… The explosion occurred in front of a large movie theater, at a place where Afghan soldiers gather every morning to be picked up by a bus that takes them to their jobs, army spokesman Gen. Mohammad Zahir Azimi said in a telephone interview. He said the bomber, apparently wearing an explosive vest, boarded the bus at the stop dressed in a regular Afghan army uniform and blew himself up almost immediately.”

   The explosion comes on days after NATO’s top commander in Afghanistan, U.S. Army General Dan McNeill expressed doubts the Taliban was ever defeated by the American invasion and said he didn’t have enough troops to hold captured ground. McNeill told the BBC that he expected the Taliban will recapture territory this winter. With the United States’ attention not diverted to Iraq, things in Afghanistan could have been different as this Washington Post story, A haven of prosperity in Afghan’s Panjshir valley suggests. “This is the way reconstruction in Afghanistan was supposed to be. A little bit of U.S. pump priming, combined with profit motive and human need, would be harnessed by a grateful, liberated population to transform their lives and country. In the process, the people would become loyal allies in the fight against terrorism. ¶ It hasn’t always worked that way. Instead, Afghanistan is besieged by a growing insurgency that is shifting U.S. money and manpower from reconstruction to security, undermining vital road, electricity, school and other projects that are designed to extend the authority of the national government and win hearts and minds.” The U.S. never secured Afghanistan and defeated al-Qaeda and the Taliban before going after Iraq’s oil. Now the Afghans and the West will be paying the price of the Madness of King George.

2. I appears that early September’s propaganda surge by the White House and Gen. David Petraeus could not withstand reality for even a month. The Los Angeles Times reports, Petraeus acknowledges rise in Iraq violence. “Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, acknowledged today that violence had increased since Sunni Arab militants declared an offensive during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. ¶ ‘Certainly Al Qaeda has had its Ramadan surge,’ Petraeus said in his first comments to reporters since he returned from Washington to give lawmakers a status report on the war in Iraq. But he said the level of attacks was ‘substantially lower’ than during the same period last year.” Right… Petraeus “saw no need to revise the projections he presented to Congress” regarding the planned-since-the-Spring troop withdrawal due.

   After years of war and occupation in Afghanistan and Iraq, their is finally recognition that the troops face a serious threat from improvised explosive devices (IEDs). The Washington Post reports they are ‘The single most effective weapon against our deployed forces’. The first IED attack was on the morning of March 29, 2003, over a month before George W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” day. “Since that first fatal detonation of what is now known as an improvised explosive device, more than 81,000 IED attacks have occurred in Iraq, including 25,000 so far this year, according to U.S. military sources. The war has indeed metastasized into something ‘completely different,’ a conflict in which the roadside bomb in its many variants — including ‘suicide, vehicle-borne’ — has become the signature weapon in Iraq and Afghanistan… ¶ IEDs have caused nearly two-thirds of the 3,100 American combat deaths in Iraq, and an even higher proportion of battle wounds. This year alone, through mid-July, they have also resulted in an estimated 11,000 Iraqi civilian casualties and more than 600 deaths among Iraqi security forces. To the extent that the United States is not winning militarily in Iraq, the roadside bomb, which as of yesterday had killed or wounded 21,071 Americans, is both a proximate cause and a metaphor for the miscalculation and improvisation that have characterized the war… ¶ Despite nearly $10 billion spent in the past four years by the department’s main IED-fighting agency, with an additional $4.5 billion budgeted for fiscal 2008, the IED remains ‘the single most effective weapon against our deployed forces,’ as the Pentagon acknowledged this year… ¶ In Afghanistan, although IED attacks remain a small fraction of those in Iraq, the figures also have soared: from 22 in 2002 and 83 in 2003, to 1,730 in 2006 and a thousand in the first half of this year. Suicide attacks have become especially pernicious, climbing to 123 last year, according to a United Nations study, a figure that continues to grow this year, with 22 in May alone.” I think it can be argued that the Taliban learned IED tactics from observing their deadly effectiveness in Iraq.

3. The scrutiny on Blackwater USA by the traditional media thankfully continues.

   • The AP reports that five Blackwater incidents in question. “Five cases this year in which private Blackwater USA security guards killed Iraqi civilians are at the core of a U.S. review of how the hired protection forces guard diplomats in Iraq, officials said Friday. Iraqi authorities are also concerned about a sixth incident in which Blackwater guards allegedly threw frozen bottles of water at civilian cars, breaking windshields. No one was killed.” Only five or six? Come on, they’re barely looking.

   • MSNBC’s Richard Engel reports on Blackwater’s Ugly Americans. “They are becoming the poster boys for excess. A new ‘photo cartoon’ circulating in Baghdad among security contractors and some U.S. soldiers – and the laughter it’s generating here – speaks for itself.” Engel reports that “a picture is emerging” of the September 16th Nisour Square massacre. “Two American sources who spoke on the condition of anonymity have told me that during the incident at least one Blackwater guard ordered his colleague to ‘stop shooting.’ The guard went so far as to draw a weapon to try to force him to stop. ‘It was a Mexican standoff,’ a contractor said.” Engel writes:

     I met Mohammed Abu Razak today. He’s a well-spoken automotive parts importer, who survived the Sept. 16 incident. His 10-year-old son Ali did not.

     Ali was in the seat behind Abu Razak when a bullet hit him in the head, shattering his skull. Abu Razak picked up the pieces of his son’s skull and brain with his hands, wrapped the boy in a cloth and buried him in Najaf.

     “I can still smell the blood, my son’s blood, on my fingers,” he told me, looking down at his hands, fingers spread wide.

     Razak gave NBC News cell phone video (available here) he took shortly after the shooting. “Abu Razak says the shaky video proves that Blackwater did not fire with directed shots at clearly defined targets – the standard of military professionals – but shot multiple times at unarmed civilians cars like his.” The horror no father, no parent should ever have to face. The murder of their child. Congress needs to outlaw Blackwater and the rest of these mercenaries immediately. The murdered must be brought to justice and held accountable.

   • The Washington Post reports more on Krongard intimidation threats in State Department agents say their jobs were threatened. “Two career investigators in the office of State Department Inspector General Howard J. Krongard have charged that they were threatened with firing if they cooperated with a congressional probe of Krongard and his office. ¶ Told by Terry P. Heide, Krongard’s congressional liaison, that he should not agree to a request for a ‘voluntary’ interview by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Special Agent Ron Militana said he was then advised that reprisals could be taken against him. ‘Howard can fire you,’ he said Heide told him. ‘It would affect your ability to get another job.'” “In recent weeks, the agents relayed their concerns about Krongard to Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), chairman of the oversight panel. Waxman has said he is investigating allegations that Krongard has repeatedly thwarted investigations into alleged contracting fraud in Iraq and Afghanistan, including construction of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad and weapons smuggling allegations against Blackwater USA, a private security firm working under government contract in Iraq… ¶ In a letter, Waxman “included an internal e-mail that indicated Krongard had intervened to stop his office from cooperating with a Justice Department investigation into alleged arms smuggling by Blackwater. In a North Carolina case, two Blackwater employees have pleaded guilty to weapons charges and are cooperating with Justice officials.”

   • A bit more on the cancelled Blackwater real estate deal in North Carolina first covered in yesterday’s Four at Four. The News and Observer reports Amid uproar, Blackwater stops land deal. Blackwater “canceled a $5.5 million real estate deal to buy 1,800 acres of farmland near Fort Bragg”. The real estate deal was initiated by another company. “TigerSwan wanted to set up a training center near Fort Bragg with firing ranges, Miller said. TigerSwan planned to train soldiers from Fort Bragg, as well as corporate executives from Research Triangle Park and elsewhere.” The seller, Wayne Miller, president of Southern Produce Distributors, “said he was impressed with [TigerSwan President Jim] Reese and his project but wanted to know whether TigerSwan could finance such a land purchase… ¶ Miller said he had a hunch that Blackwater was backing the deal. When he asked, Reese confirmed it.” The contract allowed Blackwater to backout of the sale through September 27. What I am really curious about are these corporate executives that are being trained by Blackwater. If that doesn’t smack of class warfare, then I don’t know what would. (Hat tip Anglico.)

4. Finally, a story about how the Bush administration’s weak U.S. dollar and the stupidity of ethanol impacts America’s ability to provide foreign aid. Celia Dugger of The New York Times reports that as prices soar, U.S. food aid buys less. “Soaring food prices, driven in part by demand for ethanol made from corn, have helped slash the amount of food aid the government buys to its lowest level in a decade, possibly resulting in more hungry people around the world this year. ¶ The United States, the world’s dominant donor, has purchased less than half the amount of food aid this year that it did in 2000, according to new data from the Department of Agriculture… ¶ Corn prices have fallen in recent months, but are still far higher than they were a year ago. Demand for ethanol has also indirectly driven the rising price of soybeans, as land that had been planted with soybeans shifted to corn. And wheat prices have skyrocketed, in large part because drought hurt production in Australia, a major producer, economists say. ¶ The higher food prices have not only reduced the amount of American food aid for the hungry, but are also making it harder for the poorest people to buy food for themselves, economists and advocates for the hungry say.” The New York Times also reports that ethanol’s boom is stalling as supply glut depresses price. “The ethanol boom of recent years — which spurred a frenzy of distillery construction, record corn prices, rising food prices and hopes of a new future for rural America — may be fading… ¶ Companies and farm cooperatives have built so many distilleries so quickly that the ethanol market is suddenly plagued by a glut, in part because the means to distribute it has not kept pace. The average national ethanol price on the spot market has plunged 30 percent since May, with the decline escalating sharply in the last few weeks.” So not enough food, but too much ethanol. Also keep in mind the story Spiegel ran earlier in the week — Biofuels ‘Emit More Greenhouse Gases than Fossil Fuels’.

So, what else is happening?

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 that a senior State Department calls the Kurd oil deal at odds with Baghdad. “A senior State Department official in Baghdad acknowledged Thursday that the first American oil contract in Iraq, that of the Hunt Oil Company of Dallas with the Kurdistan Regional Government, was at cross purposes with the stated United States foreign policy of strengthening the country’s central government… ¶ Hunt Oil, a closely held company, signed a production-sharing agreement with the Kurdistan Regional Government this month. The company’s chief executive and president, Ray L. Hunt, is a close political ally of President Bush and serves on the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board… ¶ The embassy official said at least four other American and international oil companies had consulted with the State Department about energy investment in Iraq… ¶ Iraqi Kurdish officials bristled Thursday at word that the Iraqi central government would sign an agreement with Turkey on Friday that Kurds fear might pave the way for Turkish soldiers to cross into Iraq to pursue Turkish Kurdish separatists who take refuge in Iraqi Kurdistan.” In semi-related news, Spiegel has an interview with Seymour Hersh claiming Bush has ‘accepted ethnic cleansing’ in Iraq.

   The Surge means basically that, in some way, the president has accepted ethnic cleansing, whether he’s talking about it or not. When he first announced the Surge in January, he described it as a way to bring the parties together. He’s not saying that any more. I think he now understands that ethnic cleansing is what is going to happen. You’re going to have a Kurdistan. You’re going to have a Sunni area that we’re going to have to support forever. And you’re going to have the Shiites in the South.

2. News from Aghanistan in The Guardian today — Taliban stands to recapture territory, warns Nato commander. “The Taliban stands to recapture ground this winter previously lost to British forces, the Nato commander in Afghanistan has warned. ¶ General Dan McNeill said the alliance had made important military gains in the past six months. ¶ But he said Afghan security forces might not be able to hold the territory as the Taliban regroups during the winter.” The BBC has more with Gen. McNeill in Afghan gains ‘could be lost’. Even more on McNeill and the detiorating situation in Afghanistan in my essay, ‘Top Commander in Afghanistan Doubts Taliban Ever Defeated‘.

3. According to the Los Angeles Times, the U.S. Army looks to accelerate expansion. “Army Secretary Pete Geren said the planned expansion from its official size of 482,000 to 547,000, announced by President Bush in December as the first post-Cold War increase in U.S. forces, should be completed in four years rather than five to alleviate the strain on troops from frequent combat tours… ¶ The new Army plan would attempt to build the larger force in a shorter time by instead moving aggressively to retain personnel. ¶ The military has begun to consider options beyond the traditional cash bonuses and college scholarships to entice soldiers to continue service. New approaches under consideration include the promise of graduate school for young officers and the offer of educational benefits for career soldiers’ children. ¶ The new approaches reflect the continuing fallout of the 4 1/2-year-old Iraq war… ¶ Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said Thursday that he was inclined to support the Army plan to speed up the expansion. But he said he would not allow the Army to enlist more recruits without high school diplomas.” The AP has more in Gates expects to approve Army expansion. The Army’s proposal would cost “nearly $3 billion extra”.

4. Of course, more Blackwater coverage today.

   • Reporting for The New York Times in ‘Blackwater Shooting Scene Was Chaotic‘, James Glanz and Sabrina Tavernise write “Participants in a contentious Baghdad security operation this month have told American investigators that during the operation at least one guard continued firing on civilians while colleagues urgently called for a cease-fire. At least one guard apparently also drew a weapon on a fellow guard who did not stop shooting, an American official said.” After an IED detonated near to where “senior American officials” were meeting, Blackwater mercenaries decided to evacuate the officials from a “secure compound” instead of remaining in lock down until the situation on the Baghdad streets calmed down. During the September 16th Nisour Square massacre, Blackwater first shot a man driving a car and his passengers, a woman holding an infant.

     After the family was shot, a type of grenade or flare was fired into the car, setting it ablaze, according to some accounts. Other Iraqis were also killed as the shooting continued. Iraqi officials have given several death counts, ranging from 8 to 20, with perhaps several dozen wounded. American officials have said that no Americans were hurt.

     At some point during the shooting, one or more Blackwater guards called for a cease-fire, according to the American official. The word cease-fire “was supposedly called out several times,” the official said. “They had an on-site difference of opinion,” he said.

     In the end, a Blackwater guard “got on another one about the situation and supposedly pointed a weapon,” the official said. “That’s what prompted this internal altercation,” the official said.

     The official added that in the urgent moment of a shooting events could often become confused, and cautioned against leaping to hasty conclusions about who was to blame.

     AFP has more coverage in Blackwater besieged by more Iraq allegations. “‘The Americans are embarrassed,’ said Jalal Al-Din Al-Saghir, a member of parliament from the ruling Shiite majority. ‘What happened … is a crime.’ ‘To deter the company it is not enough to accuse it, it should first be condemned then closed down,’ he added.” The Washington Post has even more in ‘First Blush’ Report Raises New Questions on Shooting. The story details how the Army had to restore calm and extract Blackwater from the shootout. “‘The U.S. Army QRF’ — quick-reaction force — ‘arrived on scene at 12:39 hours and mediated the situation,’ the report said. ‘They escorted TST 22 out of the area and successfully back to the [Green Zone] without further incident.'” TST is a Blackwater ‘tactical support team’.

   • The New York Times reports by State Department count, there have been 56 shootings involving Blackwater so far this year while guarding American diplomats in Iraq. According to a State Department letter signed by Deputy Secretary of State John D. Negroponte, Blackwater made 1,873 “convoy runs” in Iraq and its employees fired weapons 56 times.

     Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has asked Mr. Negroponte to oversee the department’s response to problems with security contractors. A government official who was briefed on an hourlong meeting involving State Department officials on Thursday morning said that Ms. Rice had appeared surprised at the report that Blackwater had been involved in a higher rate of shootings than its competitors.

     “She needs to be convinced that Blackwater’s hands are clean,” the government official said. Ms. Rice was also said to be taken aback by pressure from Representative Henry A. Waxman, the California Democrat who is chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, who issued an angry letter to her this week complaining about what he saw as the State Department’s efforts to block his panel’s investigation into Blackwater.

     The meeting on Thursday with Ms. Rice seems to signal that the State Department’s leaders now recognize that the Blackwater issue is more serious than they had first thought, and that it may become harder for the Bush administration to defend Blackwater and allow the company to retain its prominent role in providing diplomatic security in Iraq.

   • According to McClatchy Newspapers, Blackwater guards killed 16 as U.S. touted progress. “As [U.S. Ambassador Ryan] Crocker and [Army Gen. David] Petraeus told Congress that the surge of more U.S. troops to Iraq was beginning to work and President Bush gave a televised address in which he said “ordinary life was beginning to return” to Baghdad, Blackwater security guards shot at least 43 people on crowded Baghdad streets. At least 16 of those people died… ¶ It was an astounding amount of violence attributed to Blackwater. In the same eight-day period, according to statistics compiled by McClatchy Newspapers, other acts of violence across the embattled capital claimed the lives of 32 people and left 87 injured, not including unidentified bodies found dumped on Baghdad’s streets.” The article gives accounts of many Iraqis being gunned down by Blackwater in cold blood including Batoul Mohammed Ali Hussein, a clerk in the Iraqi customs office in Diyala province, and four others in Khilani Square.

   • The House oversight commitee has released their findings on the death of four Blackwater USA employees in Fallujah, Iraq. “These eyewitness accounts and investigative reports conflict with Blackwater’s assertion that they sent the team out with sufficient preparation and equipment.” The committee’s full report (pdf) is available. The Virginian-Pilot has coverage on the report, Congressional probe faults Blackwater in Fallujah ambush. ” A congressional investigation has found Blackwater USA at fault on multiple levels in the infamous 2004 Fallujah convoy ambush in which four of its operatives were killed by Iraqi insurgents. The report, issued Thursday, also accuses Blackwater of repeated efforts to stonewall the investigation, even defying a congressional subpoena at one point.”

     The March 31, 2004, ambush in the restive Sunni Arab stronghold of Fallujah, in which two of the victims’ mutilated bodies were hung from a bridge, drew worldwide attention and prompted a devastating retaliatory assault on the city by U.S. military forces that fueled the Iraqi insurgency to new heights.

     The report by investigators on the staff of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee says Blackwater “ignored multiple warnings about the dangers of traveling through Fallujah, cut essential personnel from the mission, and failed to supply its team with armored vehicles, machine guns, sufficient threat intelligence, or even maps of the area.”

     Based on reports from Blackwater, the company that held the contract previously, the Coalition Provisional Authority and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, the investigation found details of the incident “disturbing, revealing an unprepared and disorderly organization operating in a hostile environment. Mistake apparently compounded mistake.”

     The investigators concluded that Blackwater’s actions “raise serious questions about the consequences of engaging private, for-profit entities to engage in essentially military operations in a war zone.”

     One of the four sections in the 18-page report was labeled “Impediments to the Committee Investigation.” The report says Blackwater consistently delayed and impeded the inquiry, erroneously claiming that the relevant documents were classified and then seeking to get them retroactively classified. The committee finally issued a subpoena for the documents, but Blackwater still refused to comply. It was only after the committee threatened a vote to hold Blackwater in contempt of Congress that the company produced the documents, according to the report.

     The Washington Post story seemed surprised to report that Blackwater is focused on cost, not safety, report says. “The private security firm Blackwater USA brushed aside warnings from another security firm and focused on cost, not safety… ¶ The report disclosed that another complicating factor was a contract dispute with a different company. The report suggested that Blackwater never intended to armor its own vehicles. Instead, Blackwater employees were told to ‘string along’ the other company in hopes of forcing them out of their contract or giving them ‘no choice but to buy us armored cars,’ according to interviews by the committee staff with Blackwater officials.” Blackwater, of course, claims the report is “one-sided”.

   • The Pentagon announced on Thursday that Blackwater was awarded a $92 million contract to deliver people and cargo. “Presidential Airways, Inc., an aviation Worldwide Services company (d/b/a Blackwater Aviation), Moyock, N.C., is being awarded an indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity (IDIQ) type contract for $92,000,000.00. The contractor is to provide all fixed-wing aircraft, personnel, equipment, tools, material, maintenance and supervision necessary to perform passenger, cargo and combi Short Take-Off and Landing air transportation services between locations in the Area of Responsibility of Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan and Uzbekistan. This contract was competitively procured and two timely offers were received. The performance period is from 1 October 2007 to 30 September 2011. The United States Transportation Command Acquisition Directorate, Scott Air Force Base, Ill., is the contracting activity (HTC7 11 -08-D-0010).”

News on mammoth cloning beneath the fold…

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

1. There is an uptick in news about global warming today. The Independent brings news from Washington D.C. as Bush prepares for ‘greenwashing’ climate summit. “For the first time in 16 years, a major environmental conference opens in Washington, hosted by the Bush administration. But no concrete results are expected, and that… is the point of this high-level meeting. ¶ Far from representing a Damascene conversion on climate change by… George Bush, the two-day gathering of the world’s biggest polluting nations is aimed at undermining the UN’s efforts to tackle global warming, say European sources. ‘The conference was called at very short notice,’ said one participant. ‘It’s a cynical exercise in destabilising the UN process.'” The Guardian also confirms that diplomats are accusing Bush of attempting to derail UN climate conference. “One European diplomat described the US meeting as a spoiler for a UN conference planned for Bali in December. Another… claimed that the US conference was merely a way of deflecting pressure from other world leaders who had asked at the G8 summit this year for the US to make concessions on global warming. ¶ They predicted that Mr Bush, who is to address the meeting tomorrow, will stress the need to make technological advances that can help combat climate change but will reject mandatory caps on emissions… ¶ One of those attending said the conference reflected ‘political hardball’ on the part of the Bush administration, aimed at undermining the UN, for which it holds long-term suspicion. Another said the conference was aimed at domestic politics, with Mr Bush seeking headlines and television coverage implying that he was doing something about climate change while, in fact, doing almost nothing.

   The Bush administration is doing nothing and taking credit for the work of others. The Washington Post reports the White House is taking unearned credit for emissions cuts. “Seeking to counter international pressure to adopt binding limits on greenhouse gas emissions, the Bush administration has been touting the success of three mandatory programs to curb U.S. energy consumption: gas mileage standards for vehicles, efficiency standards for home appliances and state laws requiring utilities to increase their use of renewable energy sources. ¶ But for most of the Bush presidency, the White House has either done little to promote these measures or, in some cases, has actively fought against them. Moreover, the fuel economy and appliance initiatives were first taken years ago to slash energy consumption, long before climate change became a pressing issue. ¶ The administration initially delayed plans to set improved energy-efficiency standards for 22 appliances, which led to a court battle with the Natural Resources Defense Council, an advocacy group. Under a 2006 legal settlement, the Energy Department is now working to finish the rules. The White House also tried to reverse strict efficiency standards for central air conditioners upon Bush’s taking office in 2001, a move the NRDC had reversed in a separate lawsuit.

2. Spiegel brings news of the ever-increasing evidence that biofuels ’emit more greenhouse gases than fossil fuels’. “A team of researchers led by Nobel-prize winning chemist Paul Crutzen has found that growing and using biofuels emits up to 70 percent more greenhouse gases than fossil fuels. They are warning that the cure could end up being worse than the disease.”

   Biofuels, once championed as the great hope for fighting climate change, could end up being more damaging to the environment than oil or gasoline. A new study has found that the growth and use of crops to make biofuels produces more damaging greenhouse gases than previously thought.

   German^* Nobel-prize winning chemist Paul Crutzen and his team of researchers have calculated the emissions released by the growth and burning of crops such as maize, rapeseed and cane sugar to produce biofuels. The team of American, British and German scientists has found that the process releases twice as much nitrous oxide (N2O) as previously thought. They estimate that 3 to 5 percent of nitrogen in fertilizer is converted and emitted, as opposed to the 2 percent used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its calculations.

   Crutzen is widely respected in the field of climate research, having received the Nobel Prize in 1995 for his research into the ozone layer. The study, published in the scientific journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, finds that the growth and use of biofuels produced from rapeseed and maize can produce 70 percent and 50 percent more greenhouse gases respectively than fossil fuels.

   * Crutzen is actually Dutch according to his Wikipedia entry.

3. Emily Wax reports for the Washington Post that boats are seen as the future in flood-prone Bangladesh. “Melting glaciers in the Himalayas are already causing sea levels to rise here, and scientists say Bangladesh may lose up to 20 percent of its land by 2030 as a result of flooding. That Bangladesh is among the most vulnerable countries on the planet to climate change is a tragedy for its 150 million people, most of whom are destitute… ¶ ‘For Bangladesh, boats are the future,’ said Abul Hasanat Mohammed Rezwan, an architect who started the boats project here and who now oversees it as executive director of the nonprofit Shidhulai Swanirvar Sangstha, a name that means self-reliance. ‘As Bangladeshi citizens, it’s our responsibility to find solutions because the potential for human disaster is so huge. We have to be bold. Everyone loves land. But the question is: Will there be enough? Millions of people will have nowhere to go.’ … ¶ Scientists in Dhaka, the capital, predict that as many as 20 million people in Bangladesh will become ‘climate refugees’ by 2030, unable to farm or survive on their flooded land. The migration has already started. In 1995, half of Bhola Island, Bangladesh’s biggest island, was swallowed by rising sea levels, leaving 500,000 people homeless.”

4. Finally, a double shot of Blackwater news today.

   • The New York Times reports that shootings by Blackwater exceed those of all other firms in Iraq. “Blackwater USA has been involved in a far higher rate of shootings while guarding American diplomats in Iraq than other security firms providing similar services to the State Department, according to Bush administration officials and industry officials… ¶ The State Department keeps reports on each case in which weapons were fired by security personnel guarding American diplomats in Iraq… ¶ The officials said that Blackwater’s incident rate was at least twice that recorded by employees of DynCorp International and Triple Canopy, the two other United States-based security firms that have been contracted by the State Department to provide security for diplomats and other senior civilians in Iraq… Last year, the State Department gave Blackwater the lead role in diplomatic security in Iraq, reducing the roles of DynCorp and Triple Canopy. ¶ The company employs about 850 workers in Iraq under its diplomatic security contract, about three-quarters of them Americans, according to the State Department and the Congressional Research Service. DynCorp has 157 security guards in Iraq; Triple Canopy has about 250.” So, to eliminate private security contractors from Iraq, it would take reassignment of 1257 military personnel?

   • The Los Angeles Times reports that Defense War Secretary Robert Gates has moved to rein in contractors in Iraq. “Gates has ordered U.S. military commanders in Iraq to crack down on any abuses they uncover by private security contractors in the aftermath of a deadly shooting involving American guards that infuriated Iraqis… ¶ In a three-page directive sent Tuesday night to the Pentagon’s most senior officers, Gates’ top deputy ordered them to review rules governing contractors’ use of arms and to begin legal proceedings against any that have violated military law. ¶ Gates’ order contrasts with the reaction of State Department officials, who have been slow to acknowledge any potential failings in their oversight of Blackwater USA… The Pentagon directive does not affect private security guards under contract to other agencies, including the State Department, which is investigating the Blackwater shooting.” According to the Washington Post, Gates declined to describe the contractors as mercenaries. ” Asked by a senator whether he considered the contractors ‘mercenaries,’ Gates replied that many of the security contractors in Iraq are former members of the U.S. military and do not see themselves in that light.” McClatchy newspapers reports some in the Pentagon prefer soldiers over contractors. “Within the military, there’s disagreement about the role of contractors. During his confirmation hearing earlier this year, Petraeus said that he couldn’t effectively wage a counterinsurgency war without contactors, who do everything from security to food preparation. ¶ But… Navy Adm. William Fallon, the commander of the U.S. Central Command, which oversees the Middle East, said he didn’t want contractors seen as a ‘surrogate army.’ ‘My instinct is that it’s easier and better if they were in uniform and were working for me,’ Fallon said. ‘There’s a rule set out there, and these guys should adhere to it as far as action, training and accountability.'”

Of course, there is one more story below the fold…

This is an OPEN THREAD. Here are four stories in the news at 4 o’clock to get you started. Better a handful of dried dates and content with that than to own the Gate of Peacocks and be kicked in the eye by a broody camel.

1. The New York Times reports the Bush administration is giving away $10 billion in federal oil and gas leases for little or nothing. The report, “prepared by the Interior Department’s inspector general, Earl E. Devaney, the report said that investigators found a ‘profound failure’ in the agency’s technology for monitoring oil and gas payments. ¶ It suggested that the agency was too cozy with oil companies and that internal critics had good reason to fear punishment… ¶ The report was the latest result of a long series of investigations into the troubled federal program for collecting oil and gas royalties. Last year, Mr. Devaney told a Congressional hearing that ‘short of a crime, anything goes at the highest levels of the Department of the Interior.’ ¶ The new report did not try to estimate the amount of money that might have been lost. Early in 2006, officials conceded that the government might lose about $10 billion in revenue over the next decade because of a legal mistake in oil and gas leases that had been ignored for six years.” Funny how the ‘mistake’ cropped up when Bush took office.

2. You think the dollar is about worthless now, just wait until the Republicans’ total war completely bankrupts the United States. The AP reports, Defense War Secretary Robert Gates seeks $190 Billion for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2008. His request increases “initial projections by more than a third. ¶ In remarks prepared for a Senate hearing, Gates says the extra money is necessary to buy vehicles that can protect troops against roadside bombs, refurbish equipment worn down by combat and consolidate U.S. bases in Iraq.” Gate makes sure to link everything back to September 11th, 2001, concluding his prepared remarks “I would like to close with a word about something I know we can all agree on — the honor, courage and great sense of duty we have witnessed in our troops since September 11th.” According to the U.S. News & World Report, “the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was $173 billion in fiscal 2007.” The capitulation Congress is expected to rubber stamp the ’emergency’ request, but add ‘strings’ like a war with Iran. Lovely.

3. Yesterday, the House passed legislation expanding the federal-state Children’s Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP) by a 265 to 159 vote. According to The New York Times, 45 House Republicans voted for it, along with 220 Democrats. “More than two-thirds of senators are expected to vote for the bill when it reaches the floor later this week. Without a fresh infusion of federal cash, a dozen states are expected to run out of money for coverage of children next month.” George W. Bush has promised to veto the legislation. “The money provided in the bill is $35 billion more than the current level of spending and $30 billion more than Mr. Bush wanted.” Insuring the health of American children is too expensive for the Republicans and the Bush administration, but according to House Minority Leader John Boehner, an Ohio Republican who did not vote for the bill’s passage. $190 billion for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is a “small price for the near future, but think about the future for our kids and their kids.” According to the Washington Post, “If it comes to a veto override fight, Boehner will be the White House’s man on the Hill.” Bush’s $10 billion gift to the oil and gas industry could have paid for a third of this program.

4. It just wouldn’t be Four at Four without a round-up of Blackwater news.

   • TPM Muckraker has obtained a forthcoming study by private-military contractor expert P.W. Singer concluding private security firms have hurt the U.S. efforts in Iraq. “What the contracting industry diminishes in political cost it compounds in actual cost to counterinsurgency. Iraqis view private companies like Blackwater as lawless, and they have no reason to distinguish between private contractors and U.S. troops — thereby compounding the danger to U.S. forces from infuriated Iraqis… ¶ Even more simply, private military contractors aren’t in the chain of command, meaning U.S. officers are powerless to stop them from engaging in activities deleterious to a command plan.” The Washington Post reports the U.S. military has made similar conclusions, putting the military at the state department at odds.

     In high-level meetings over the past several days, U.S. military officials have pressed State Department officials to assert more control over Blackwater, which operates under the department’s authority, said a U.S. government official with knowledge of the discussions. “The military is very sensitive to its relationship that they’ve built with the Iraqis being altered or even severely degraded by actions such as this event,” the official said…

     “This is a big mess that I don’t think anyone has their hands around yet,” said another U.S. military official. “It’s not necessarily a bad thing these guys are being held accountable. Iraqis hate them, the troops don’t particularly care for them, and they tend to have a know-it-all attitude, which means they rarely listen to anyone — even the folks that patrol the ground on a daily basis.”

     “This is a nightmare,” said a senior U.S. military official. “We had guys who saw the aftermath, and it was very bad. This is going to hurt us badly. It may be worse than Abu Ghraib, and it comes at a time when we’re trying to have an impact for the long term.”

   • The U.S. State Department is protecting Condoleezza Rice’s mercenary army in Iraq from Congressional oversight, the Los Angeles Times reports. “The State Department has interceded in a congressional investigation of Blackwater USA, the private security firm accused of killing Iraqi civilians last week, ordering the company not to disclose information about its Iraq operations without approval from the Bush administration… ¶ In a letter sent to a senior Blackwater executive Thursday, a State Department contracting official ordered the company “to make no disclosure of the documents or information” about its work in Iraq without permission.” The House oversight committee, chaired by Rep. Henry Waxman, had scheduled “a Blackwater hearing for next Tuesday, but Blackwater’s attorneys warned the committee that the State Department’s letter may complicate company executives’ testimony.” According to The New York Times, the State Department calls their interference just a “misundestanding”. “In response, a State Department statement late Tuesday said: ‘There seems to be some misunderstanding with regard to this matter. All information requested by the committee has been or is in the process of being provided.'” According to a statement on the House oversight committee’s website, “The State Department has sent a new letter to Blackwater informing Blackwater that the company should provide documents to the Committee.” I think Blackwater is a distraction to the real issue. Waxman must get Rice to publicly testify about private armies. Why, after six years are mercenaries still employed?

   • Despite allowing Blackwater back on the job, the Iraqi government might actually be asserting its sovereignty. According to the Financial Times, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki told George W. Bush that Iraq’s investigation into Blackwater comes before Bush’s coveted new oil law. “But despite months of US pressure, the Iraqi parliament has yet to agree a new oil law, relax earlier de-Ba’athification measures or change the constitution. ¶ Instead, the Baghdad government indicated on Tuesday that it was proceeding with plans to put private security groups – such as the US company Blackwater, which was involved in a fatal shooting this month – firmly under national law.” However, the Los Angeles Times reports the meeting between Bush and Malaki was brief. “U.S. officials said the exchange was neither lengthy nor confrontational. Instead, there was ‘a general discussion of the importance of recognition of Iraqi sovereignty,’ said Stephen Hadley, Bush’s national security advisor. ¶ Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Maliki discussed the incident in greater detail after the formal meeting. The two countries are seeking better cooperation and coordination in security operations, while taking into consideration Iraqi sovereignty and the needs of protecting State Department personnel, Hadley said.”

   • NPR’s profile of the CEO of Blackwater, concluded Erik Prince has strong Republican and Christian group ties. Prince’s father “was a close friend and supporter of Christian evangelists, such as James Dobson of Focus on the Family, as well as a contributor to the Republican Party. He was an early benefactor of the Family Research Council.”

     Prince has been a steady contributor to the Republican National Committee, giving more than $200,000 since 1998. He also has supported various conservative candidates, including President Bush, Sens. Tom Coburn (R-OK) and Rick Santorum (R-PA), Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA), and indicted former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-TX).

     Other members of Prince’s family have been active in Republican politics. His sister, Betsy DeVos, has served as chair of the Michigan Republican Party, and her husband, Dick DeVos, was an unsuccessful Republican candidate for governor of Michigan in 2006. Dick DeVos, a member of the conservative family that co-founded Amway, succeeded his father as president of that company.

     Prince serves as a board member of Christian Freedom International, a nonprofit group that provides Bibles, food and other help to Christians in countries where they face persecution.

One more story below the fold…

How bad is the situation in Afghanistan?

So bad that U.S. Army Gen. Dan K. McNeill, the top NATO commander in Afghanistan, doubts the Taliban were ever defeated in the first place by the 2001 invasion. The invasion that the American, Afghan, and Pakistani officials once described as a success and the Taliban as a “spent force”.

“The question is, were they ever defeated, and I don’t think they ever were,” McNeill said.

McNeill is quoted in a story by the Washington Post that reports of an emboldened Taliban carrying out more attacks with a greater reach – right up to provinces ringing Kabul, the Afghan capital.

After six years of the United States being distracted by Iraq, the Taliban is gaining the advantage and the U.S. doesn’t have the strength nor resources to stop them.

Fighting and holding ground “is a problem for us,” McNeill said. “We’re not all the force we should be, both in size and capability.” Boosting Afghan army and police forces is a key goal because indigenous forces typically are the most effective in fighting a counterinsurgency, he said.