AMMAN (Reuters) – Jordan’s King Abdullah asked national security head Marouf Bakheet on Thursday to form a new cabinet after the government resigned, a government source said.

It said the monarch officially accepted the resignation of Prime Minister Adnan Badran, 69, a U.S.-educated academic appointed last April, and asked Bakheet to take over the post and form a new team.

The choice of Bakheet, a former ambassador to Israel with a long career in military intelligence, reaffirms the leading role of the security forces in decision-making, a senior official told Reuters.

Although the change was expected, security concerns have become a priority as a result of the suicide bombings at three luxury hotels earlier this month which killed 60 people.

Bakheet was appointed last September as acting head of national security and chief of staff of the king’s private office.

King Abdullah surprised many when he appointed Badran to succeed Faisal al-Fayez, blamed by politicians for several policy blunders.

Responsibility for the attacks, among the worst acts of violence in recent Jordanian history, have been claimed by Iraq’s al-Qaeda led by Jordanian-born Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Most powers rest with the king, who appoints governments, approves legislation and can dissolve parliament.
nytimes.com

I’d like to be a fly on the wall and know what’s going on here..my guess is that the bombing was not what it seems, and this is common knowledge.

…Bolton said the General Assembly has “essentially not made progress” since President Bush and other world leaders convened a U.N. summit in September to endorse a platform of changes, including proposals to increase scrutiny of spending practices and to create a human rights council that would exclude rights abusers. He said that continued resistance to change in the organization would drive the American public away from the United Nations.

“Americans are a very practical people, and they don’t view the U.N. through theological lenses,” Bolton told reporters outside the General Assembly hall. “They look at it as a competitor in the marketplace for global problem-solving, and if it’s successful at solving problems, they’ll be inclined to use it. If it’s not successful at solving problems, they’ll say, ‘Are there other institutions?’ . . . that’s why making the U.N. stronger and more effective is a reform priority for us: Because if it’s a more agile, effective organization, it is more likely to be a successful competitor as a global problem-solver.”
informationclearinghouse.info

What hypocrisy. Who came into the UN and scuttled reform efforts in the first place?

Perhaps we should redeploy the democracy experts we have sent to the Middle East and ask them to work on our Congress. The last few days have confirmed that our national government is dysfunctional.

It wasn’t just the nasty Friday evening “debate” over Iraq policy in the House, set up by Republican leaders to score political points after Rep. John Murtha’s call for immediate withdrawal received so much attention. And it wasn’t just Rep. Jean Schmidt, an Ohio Republican, deciding to send a constituent’s “message” to Murtha — a Marine combat veteran with 37 years of active and reserve service — to the effect that “cowards cut and run, Marines never do.”

What happened hours earlier, at 1:45 a.m., symbolized all that is wrong with Washington. After immense pressure from Republican leaders, the House passed $50 billion in budget cuts — including reductions in Medicaid, food stamps and child support enforcement — on a 217-215 vote. Republicans who pride themselves in being moderate had their arms twisted into backing the bill, partly on the basis of promises that many of the cuts it contained wouldn’t survive in House-Senate negotiations.

…”Mr. Speaker, in south Mississippi tonight, the people who have electricity, who might be at a VFW hall or a parish church hall, who are living in two- and three-man igloo tents waiting for Congress to do something, have absolutely got to think this place has lost their minds. The same Congress that voted to give the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans tax breaks every time … suddenly after taking care of those who had the most, we have got to hurt the least. … Folks, this is insane. … This is the cruelest lie of all, that the only way you can help the people who have lost everything is by hurting somebody else.”
commondreams.org

11/23/05 “The Australian” — — THE war in Iraq could last for decades with British troops unlikely to withdraw without a “highly unlikely” split with Washington, a report says today.

The Oxford Research Group non-governmental organisation, which assesses constructive approaches to dealing with international terrorism and the “war on terror”, says the war in Iraq is only in its early stages.

“Given that the al-Qaeda movement and its affiliates are seeking to achieve their aims over a period of decades rather than years, the probability is that, short of major political changes in the USA, the Iraq war might well be measured over a similar time span,” the report concludes.

It says the presence of coalition troops in Iraq since the March 2003 US-led invasion has been a “gift” to Osama bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda.

The terror network has gained recruits by portraying their presence as a neo-Christian occupation of a main Muslim country, the report says.

The group says an American pullout would be “a foreign policy disaster greater than the retreat from Vietnam”.
informationclearinghouse.info

The pullout was not a ‘disaster’ for Vietnam, however.

Afghanistan: How Ragtag Insurgents Beat the World’s Sole Superpower
…f Afghanistan was a dry run, I observed at the time, there was little reason to expect that Iraq would turn out less disastrously. But no one, especially not the newspaper editors who’d been conned into supporting the Fourth Afghan War, wanted to hear that argument.

Four years later, little has improved. Most Afghans, Peter Baker wrote recently in The Washington Post, “still grind out the subsistence lives they did under the Taliban.” Women still wear the burqa. “Corruption is widespread,” The Week reports. “Outside Kabul, the country functions like a group of independent fiefdoms from the Middle Ages.” Ordinary Afghans “are angry at the continuing war, the widespread malnutrition, and the snail’s pace of progress.”

Poor residents and nonprofit groups in the South Bronx are about to receive a huge Christmas gift from Venezuela’s firebrand President Hugo Chavez: Eight-million gallons of heating oil at bargain-basement prices.

Two months ago, in an interview with the Daily News during his visit to the United Nations, Chavez first made the startling offer of cheap fuel for this winter from his oil-rich country to a handful of poor communities in the United States.

At the time, critics of the radical populist Chavez, the Bush administration’s biggest nemesis in South America, scoffed at his proposal.

But the Venezuelan leader is about to deliver.

“The first shipments of low-cost fuel from CITGO will begin arriving in my district by late next week,” U.S. Rep. Jose Serrano (D-South Bronx) said yesterday.

CITGO, the Houston-based subsidiary of Venezuela’s national oil company, owns 14,000 gas stations and eight refineries in the U.S. Because of that, Chavez has a ready-made distribution system and doesn’t need any special approvals from the White House for his project.

“My constituents are facing some of the highest energy bills in recent history, even as oil companies are reporting the largest profits in recent memory,” Serrano said. “I’m very pleased to have helped broker this historic agreement.”

The Bronx congressman has been working feverishly for weeks to connect local nonprofit groups with CITGO and Venezuelan government officials. The South Bronx plan is similar to one announced yesterday in Boston for CITGO to supply 12 million gallons of discounted heating oil to 45,000 low-income families and nonprofits in Massachusetts.
commondreams.org

Following a week in which TV and newspapers reported the US military’s illegal use of chemical weapons in Iraq, and the employment by the US-backed Iraqi government of torture chambers and paramilitary death squads(1), one might be forgiven for thinking that the media is carrying out the essential task of relaying the information necessary for us to be able to assess our government’s policies. In fact, it is the media’s near total failure to report on the bloodshed caused by our side in the ongoing conflict that keeps many current US-UK government officials in their jobs, if not out of the International Criminal Court on charges of committing war crimes. The reality is that gruesome atrocities continue to be committed by the occupying powers in Iraq, and that these pass with little or no mention in the mainstream media on either side of the Atlantic. As such the media are accessories to these crimes, standing as they do between the criminals and accountability.
democratsdiary.co.uk

Behind the phosphorus clouds are war crimes within war crimes
…But buried in this hogwash is a grave revelation. An assault weapon the marines were using had been armed with warheads containing “about 35% thermobaric novel explosive (NE) and 65% standard high explosive”. They deployed it “to cause the roof to collapse and crush the insurgents fortified inside interior rooms”. It was used repeatedly: “The expenditure of explosives clearing houses was enormous.”

The marines can scarcely deny that they know what these weapons do. An article published in the Gazette in 2000 details the effects of their use by the Russians in Grozny. Thermobaric, or “fuel-air” weapons, it says, form a cloud of volatile gases or finely powdered explosives. “This cloud is then ignited and the subsequent fireball sears the surrounding area while consuming the oxygen in this area. The lack of oxygen creates an enormous overpressure … Personnel under the cloud are literally crushed to death. Outside the cloud area, the blast wave travels at some 3,000 metres per second … As a result, a fuel-air explosive can have the effect of a tactical nuclear weapon without residual radiation … Those personnel caught directly under the aerosol cloud will die from the flame or overpressure. For those on the periphery of the strike, the injuries can be severe. Burns, broken bones, contusions from flying debris and blindness may result. Further, the crushing injuries from the overpressure can create air embolism within blood vessels, concussions, multiple internal haemorrhages in the liver and spleen, collapsed lungs, rupture of the eardrums and displacement of the eyes from their sockets.” It is hard to see how you could use these weapons in Falluja without killing civilians.

This looks to me like a convincing explanation of the damage done to Falluja, a city in which between 30,000 and 50,000 civilians might have been taking refuge. It could also explain the civilian casualties shown in the film. So the question has now widened: is there any crime the coalition forces have not committed in Iraq?

US intelligence classified white phosphorus as ‘chemical weapon’
“When Saddam used WP it was a chemical weapon,” said Mr Ranucci, “but when the Americans use it, it’s a conventional weapon. The injuries it inflicts, however, are just as terrible however you describe it.”

The Republican party was yesterday facing a fast-growing corruption scandal with potentially serious implications for next year’s elections after a well-connected Washington lobbyist pleaded guilty to bribing a congressman and other public officials.

The plea by Michael Scanlon is a breakthrough in an investigation of influence-peddling in Congress that could reach top levels of the party. It comes at a time when the Republicans are already nervous about next November’s congressional elections, with public support for the Iraq war falling away and the White House under the cloud of an intelligence leak investigation.

“The potential is huge,” said Thomas Mann, a political analyst at the Brookings Institution. “We’ve never seen an example as egregious as this with these sums of money, the bilking, the cynicism and linkages… I think you’re going to see a string of indictments.”

Mr Scanlon is expected to give evidence against public officials alleged to have accepted bribes, including free golfing trips to Scotland, restaurant meals and sports tickets, in return for pushing legislation favourable to clients of Mr Scanlon and his boss, Jack Abramoff, a Washington super-lobbyist who is also under investigation.
guardian.co.uk

The whereabouts of 6,644 people reported missing after Hurricane Katrina have not been determined, raising the prospect that the death toll could be higher than the 1,306 recorded so far in Louisiana and Mississippi, according to two groups working with the federal government to account for victims.

Most of those who remain listed as unaccounted-for 12 weeks after the storm probably are alive and well, says Kym Pasqualini, chief executive officer of the National Center for Missing Adults. She says they are listed as missing because government record-keeping efforts haven’t caught up with them in their new locations.

However, Pasqualini says those counting the victims are particularly concerned about an estimated 1,300 unaccounted-for people who lived in areas that were heavily damaged by Katrina, or who were disabled at the time the storm hit. The fact that authorities haven’t been able to determine what happened to them suggests that the death toll from Katrina could climb significantly.

usatoday.com

ROME (AP) — Hunger and malnutrition kill nearly 6 million children a year, and more people are malnourished in sub-Saharan Africa this decade than in the 1990s, according to a U.N. report released Tuesday.

Many of the children die from diseases that are treatable, including diarrhea, pneumonia, malaria and measles, said the report by the Rome-based U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization.

In sub-Saharan Africa, the number of malnourished people grew to 203.5 million people in 2000-02 from 170.4 million 10 years earlier, the report states, noting that hunger and malnutrition are among the main causes of poverty, illiteracy, disease and deaths in developing countries.
hosted.ap.org

LONDON – A civil servant has been charged under Britain’s Official Secrets Act for allegedly leaking a government memo that a newspaper said Tuesday suggested that Prime Minister Tony Blair persuaded President Bush not to bomb the Arab satellite station Al-Jazeera.

The Daily Mirror reported that Bush spoke of targeting Al-Jazeera’s headquarters in Doha, Qatar, when he met Blair at the White House on April 16, 2004. The Bush administration has regularly accused Al-Jazeera of being nothing more than a mouthpiece for anti-American sentiments.

The Daily Mirror attributed its information to unidentified sources. One source, said to be in the government, was quoted as saying that the alleged threat was “humorous, not serious,” but the newspaper quoted another source as saying that “Bush was deadly serious, as was Blair.”

Blair’s office declined to comment on the report, stressing it never discusses leaked documents.

In Qatar, Al-Jazeera said it was aware of the report, but did not wish to comment. The U.S. Embassy in London said it was making no comment.

The document was described as a transcript of a conversation between the two leaders.

Cabinet Office civil servant David Keogh is accused of passing it to Leo O’Connor, who formerly worked for former British lawmaker Tony Clarke. Both Keogh and O’Connor are scheduled to appear at London’s Bow Street Magistrates Court next week.

According to the Crown Prosecution Service, Keogh was charged with an offense under Section 3 of the Official Secrets Act relating to “a damaging disclosure” by a servant of the Crown of information relating to international relations or information obtained from a state other than the United Kingdom.

O’Connor was charged under Section 5, which relates to receiving and disclosing illegally disclosed information.

According to the newspaper, Clarke returned the memo to Blair’s office. Clarke did not respond to calls from The Associated Press seeking comment.

Press Association, the British news agency, said Clarke refused to discuss the contents of the document. PA quoted Clarke as saying his priority was to support O’Connor who did “exactly the right thing” in bringing it to his attention.

Peter Kilfoyle, a former defense minister in Blair’s government, called for the document to be made public.

“I think they ought to clarify what exactly happened on this occasion,” he said. “If it was the case that President Bush wanted to bomb Al-Jazeera in what is after all a friendly country, it speaks volumes and it raises questions about subsequent attacks that took place on the press that wasn’t embedded with coalition forces,” the newspaper quoted Kilfoyle as saying.

Sir Menzies Campbell, foreign affairs spokesman for the opposition Liberal Democrats, said Tuesday that, if true, the memo was worrying.

“If true, then this underlines the desperation of the Bush administration as events in Iraq began to spiral out of control,” he said. “On this occasion, the prime minister may have been successful in averting political disaster, but it shows how dangerous his relationship with President Bush has been.”

Al-Jazeera offices in Iraq and Afghanistan have been hit by U.S. bombs or missiles, but each time the U.S. military said they were not intentionally targeting the broadcaster.

In April 2003, an Al-Jazeera journalist was killed when its Baghdad office was struck during a U.S. bombing campaign. Nabil Khoury, a State Department spokesman in Doha, said the strike was a mistake.

In November 2002, Al-Jazeera’s office in Kabul, Afghanistan, was destroyed by a U.S. missile. None of the crew was at the office at the time. U.S. officials said they believed the target was a terrorist site and did not know it was Al-Jazeera’s office.

news.yahoo.com

Gee the news is funny today, albeit horrifying.