Not that everything isn't going great and everything in Iraq, but the pentagon needs a little more money to get the job done. About 70 billion more.

The Post:

The Bush administration intends to seek about $70 billion in emergency funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan early next year, pushing total war costs close to $225 billion since the invasion of Iraq early last year. [Weren't Bush's attack dogs just saying kerry was exaggerating the $200 billion number?]

The new numbers underscore that the war is going to be far more costly and intense, and last longer, than the administration first suggested.

The deferral of needed repairs over the past year has added to maintenance costs, which can no longer be delayed, a senior Pentagon official said.

Gross negligence.

Ayad Allawi, on Tuesday accused foreign troops in the country of "gross negligence" in the massacre of 49 Iraqi National Guard recruits over the weekend, an unusually critical remark by the U.S.-backed leader. [These are the guys we're turning over everything to after the election.]

In Washington, a former top occupation security official said more Iraqis were being trained for the country's security forces than the United States and its allies are capable of protecting.

"There are so many being trained now, U.S. forces can't watch them all now," said Peter Khalil, an Australian defense expert who was in Iraq from last summer until this spring as the director of national security policy for the Coalition Provisional Authority. "There are 40 battalions of the Iraqi National Guard, six or seven battalions of the Iraqi army. Recruits are coming in all the time. You don't have force levels to protect indigenous forces."

Meanwhile, an insurgent group, the Ansar al-Sunna Army, said Tuesday that it had kidnapped 11 Iraqi National Guardsmen, according to a statement posted on its Web site, the Reuters news agency reported.

"The mujaheddin in the army of Ansar al-Sunna captured a group of militia linked to the coalition forces that was out on patrol along the Baghdad-to-Hilla road," the group said in the statement. Hilla is about 60 miles south of Baghdad.

Brits on the march.

Tony Blair sucks a little harder on the pipe and sends 850 troops into the quagmire to protect our backside while we go clean up Fallujah. Last time we killed about 600 civilians and lost a ton of marines and came out of it with zilch.

Maybe, we ought to turn this one over to the Israelis.

The wolf is at the door while Bush fiddles above the flames.

We need a billion dollars a day to finance our 7 trillion dollar debt, run up by Bush and Co. Where is it all going to come from?

Sooner or later the Chinese and the Japanese are going to get tired of loaning us money, especially as it becomes more and more apparent this government has no intention of getting serious about our enormous debt.

The latest corporate tax give away to the tune of 140 billion doesn't exactly inspire confidence the republican led congress is capable of reigning in their spending spree. Bush sign the tax bill into law yesterday and this is what happens.

LONDON(AFP) - The dollar remained mired at more than eight-month lows against the euro and six-month lows against the yen, as oil prices spiked ever higher and investors continued to fret about the US' record high current account deficit.


The single European currency jumped to 1.2778 dollars in late afternoon trading from 1.2680 late on Friday in New York.


The dollar skidded to 106.64 yen from 107.20 on Friday.


The euro earlier had climbed to 1.2829 dollars, breaching the 1.28 dollar level for the first time for eight months. Its record peak is 1.2929 reached on February 18.


Jitters ahead of next week's US presidential election and a weak opening on Wall Street provided further excuses for investors to sell the US currency.


"The US is suffering from the Japan syndrome of a few years ago, where anything out of the market is seen as negative and taken as an excuse to sell the dollar," said Standard Chartered foreign exchange strategist Marios Maratheftis.


Since the end of last week, the market has been focusing on concerns over the huge current account and budget deficits in the United States, and the need for the dollar to go lower, he said.

Just a little "untidiness."
Well, at least these explosives aren't in the hands of that madman Saddam!

GREELY, United States (AFP) - The White House played down the loss of 350 tonnes of high explosives in Iraq which Democratic presidential challenger John Kerry said was proof of the administration's "blunders."

President George W. Bush had known about the lost explosives for 10 days, said White House spokesman Scott McClellan.

International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors were informed because the munitions were considered dual-use materials and subject to monitoring, said McClellan, traveling on Bush's re-election campaign.

McClellan blamed the disappearance on "some looting that went on in Iraq toward the end of Operation Iraqi Freedom, or during and toward the end of Operation Iraqi Freedom." [Oh well, that's okay then.]

The Iraqi ministry of science and technology informed the IAEA of the disappearance of about 350 tonnes (380 tons) of mainly HMX and RDX explosives on October 10, agency spokeswoman Melissa Fleming in Vienna told AFP.

IAEA officials informed the US mission in Vienna, where the IAEA is based, on October 15. National security councilor Condoleezza Rice was informed and she told Bush, the spokesman added. [That's reassuring. Condi is right on the ball. It's no one's fault though.]

The missing explosives "can be used in a nuclear explosion device" as the blast to trigger the chain reaction, Fleming said, adding: "That's why it was under IAEA verification and monitoring" before the March 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq.

McClellan said the US Department of Defense "directed the multinational forces and the Iraqi Survey Group to look into this matter, and that's what they are currently doing." [Better late than never I suppose.]

War Crimes.

The Washington Post:

At the request of the CIA, the Justice Department drafted a confidential memo that authorizes the agency to transfer detainees out of Iraq for interrogation -- a practice that international legal specialists say contravenes the Geneva Conventions.

It permits the CIA to take Iraqis out of the country to be interrogated for a "brief but not indefinite period." It also says the CIA can permanently remove persons deemed to be "illegal aliens" under "local immigration law."

The treaty prohibits the "[i]ndividual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory . . . regardless of their motive."

The 1949 treaty notes that a violation of this particular provision constitutes a "grave breach" of the accord, and thus a "war crime" under U.S. federal law, according to a footnote in the Justice Department draft.

"For these reasons," the footnote reads, "we recommend that any contemplated relocations of 'protected persons' from Iraq to facilitate interrogation be carefully evaluated for compliance with Article 49 on a case by case basis."

It says that even persons removed from Iraq retain the treaty's protections, which would include humane treatment and access to international monitors. [Yeah, right. See Rummy on being made to stand for 8 hours]

International law experts contacted for this article described the legal reasoning contained in the Justice Department memo as unconventional and disturbing.

"The overall thrust of the Convention is to keep from moving people out of the country and out of the protection of the Convention," said former senior military attorney Scott Silliman, executive director of Duke University's Center on Law, Ethics and National Security.

"The memorandum seeks to create a legal regime justifying conduct that the international community clearly considers in violation of international law and the Convention." Silliman reviewed the document at The Post's request.

White House officials disputed the notion that Goldsmith's interpretation of the treaty was unusual, although they did not explain why.

Operation Days of Penitence

So after two weeks of killing and destruction in order the IDF says to stop Palestinians from firing Qassam rockets from Gaza, Qassams are still landing in Israel. So what was accomplished? 130 Palestinians at least were killed and dozens of houses bulldozed, thanks in part to Caterpillar armoured tractors.

Among the dead there were a large number of children including 2 school girls who were shot while they were sitting at their desks.

This is the most egregious story from the offensive though:

Israel's top military prosecutor has opened an investigation into a platoon commander whom soldiers accuse of emptying an ammunition clip into a 13-year-old Palestinian girl after earlier shooting her twice to make sure she was dead, the army said yesterday.

In media interviews, soldiers said the commander approached the girl, who they said had been shot from more than 200 feet away by soldiers who mistook her for a bomb-carrying militant entering a forbidden zone in Rafah, a Gaza Strip refugee camp.

The commander repeatedly shot the girl as they pleaded with him to stop, the soldiers said.

Iyman Hams, 13, was shot and killed Oct. 5. Initially the army had said soldiers shot and killed Hams as she planted a bomb near an army outpost in southern Gaza.

In disguised voices and without revealing their identities, soldiers told a different, chilling story to Israeli television stations Sunday night.

They said the platoon commander fired two bullets from close range at the girl, who had already been shot, to confirm that she was dead.

Two soldiers then described the commander going back a second time and spraying her with automatic-weapon fire.

The soldiers told Yediot that before the commander shot the girl they shouted to him over the two-way radio: "Don't shoot, she's a little girl."

"We saw her from a distance of 70 meters. She was fired at ... from the outpost. She fled and was wounded. I understood that she was dead.

The platoon commander neared her, shot two bullets at her, returned toward the force, turned back to her, put the weapon on automatic -- and emptied his entire clip," one soldier said.

Demolitions:

A Human Rights Watch report, entitled: "Razing Rafah -- Mass Home Demolitions in the Gaza Strip", said: "The pattern of destruction strongly suggests that Israeli forces demolished homes wholesale, regardless of whether they posed a specific threat, in violation of international law."

The New York-based organisation's executive director Kenneth Roth questioned Israel's insistence that the demolition of more than 2,500 houses over the past four years was necessary to destroy underground tunnels used by Palestinian militants to smuggle weapons into Gaza from Egypt.

Rather, he said the demolitions were about "creating a buffer zone, slice by slice" to facilitate long-term control over the Gaza Strip.

"The army is not serious, it wants to use the excuse (of tunnels) to invade, destroy and create a buffer zone," he told reporters at the launch of the report in Jerusalem.

The accusations of international law violations were echoed by Hansen as he toured the Jabaliya refugee camp in northern Gaza, the main focus of the recently ended Operation Days of Penitence which left around 130 Palestinians dead in less than three weeks.

"Most of what we have seen here in Jabaliya over the last two weeks is a gross violation of international and humanitarian law," he said.

Hansen told reporters that at least 90 houses had been destroyed but added the figure was "a low estimate but will increase, I am sure, as we get more and more careful surveys".

"That means that hundreds of people -- I believe 600 to 700 -- will be added to the rows of homeless which is already 20,000 people in Gaza," he said.

The U.N. ambulances that were supposedly transporting weapons, weren't really after all.

Hansen was involved in a furious row with Israeli authorities during the offensive, when they said that UNRWA had allowed one of its ambulances to be used by Palestinian militants to transport makeshift missiles used in attacks on southern Israel.

Israel later retracted their allegations but refused to apologise to UNRWA.

Brent Scowcroft blasts Bush.

Scowcroft told the Financial Times that:

...the current President Bush is "mesmerized" by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, that Iraq is a "failing venture" and that the administration's unilateralist approach has harmed relations between Europe and the United States.

"Sharon just has him wrapped around his little finger,"

"I think the president is mesmerized." He added: "When there is a suicide attack [followed by a reprisal] Sharon calls the president and says, 'I'm on the front line of terrorism,' and the president says, 'Yes, you are . . . ' He [Sharon] has been nothing but trouble."

When I first heard Sharon was getting out of Gaza I was having dinner with Condi [His protege] and she said: 'At least that's good news,' " [You mean it isn't all good news Condi?] Scowcroft recounted. "And I said: 'That's terrible news. . . . Sharon will say: 'I want to get out of Gaza, finish the wall [the Israeli security barrier] and say I'm done.' "

[See Oct. 1st posting for more on Sharon folding up the road map.]

What about those Anthrax attacks?
Justice Department runs and hides from its record:

Federal Judge Reggie B. Walton scolded the Justice Department for failing to stop leaks describing former Army scientist Steven J. Hatfill as a "person of interest" in the investigation of the anthrax attacks.

"It doesn't seem to me there's a significant likelihood of anything in the near future that's going to change the status quo," said Walton, who is presiding over a civil suit filed by Hatfill that accuses the Justice Department of defaming him and violating his privacy.

Walton told government lawyers that he was "extremely troubled" by recent newspaper articles that quote anonymous law enforcement sources as saying the FBI remains interested in Hatfill.

"They're undermining what this country is supposed to be about -- that is, that we treat people fairly," Walton said of the anonymous sources. "If you don't have enough to indict this man, then it's wrong to drag his name through the mud."

"That's not a government I want to be a part of.

It's wrong, and you all need to do something about it."

[Three years and counting...if we could only get Pariot Act II passed!!!]

Snickering Bush bullish on his record.
According to an article in the Post about Bush's visit to "Bank One Park" in Nevada after the debate, a rabid Bushite was not happy with John McCain being there to campaign with the great warrior president:

"Sit down, you Kerry-loving traitor," a man standing behind the third-base dugout yell(ed). [That's respect for a real war hero.]

(A) bumper sticker slapped across the heckler's Bush-Cheney T-shirt says "4 out of 5 dictators support John Kerry (phone service not available in Saddam's hole)."

[Oh, that's rich! We'll just forget about Moammar Kadhafi and the Saudi royal family and Perves Mushariff and about dozen other dictators sitting on vast oil reserves.]

Bush also reinterated that John Kerry can run but he can't hide, from his record. [I guess Osama can run and he has hidden.]

"Bush sometimes punctuates his sentences with quick cackles, even when he hasn't said anything funny. He did this more than usual Thursday, giggling, for instance, upon mention that Nevada has a 4 percent unemployment rate.

"I'm proud of my record, heh heh heh," he says. "But my opponent seemed to want to avoid talking about his, heh heh heh heh.""

[Oh really...]

Deficit at new record.

The federal government reached its $7.4 trillion debt ceiling yesterday, forcing Treasury Secretary John W. Snow to delay contributing to one of the federal employees' pension systems to avoid running out of cash and possibly defaulting on government debt.

Treasury has on five occasions delayed pension fund payments as it approached its limit on borrowing. Three of those incidents came under President Bush -- in 2002, 2003 and yesterday -- as Republicans in Congress have become leery of voting to raise the debt limit. The others were during the rapidly spiraling deficits of 1985 and the budget showdown between the new Republican Congress and President Bill Clinton in 1995.

When Bush came to office, the debt ceiling was $5.95 trillion and had last been raised in 1997.

"Following the presidential debate, where more attention was given to the candidates' wives than to the budget deficit . . . it is hard to see where the leadership to put the country back on the path of fiscal responsibility will come from," said Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

[That bastard Kerry. He hates lesbians! How about that anti-gay marriage amendment? Spread the love Dick!]

Grover Norquist's buddy sent up the river for 20 years...

The Washington Post:

A federal judge yesterday sentenced Muslim activist Abdurahman Alamoudi to the maximum 23-year prison term for illegal dealings with Libya that included his involvement in a complex plot to kill the Saudi ruler. [Crown Prince Abdullah]

Once so prominent that his influence reached the highest levels of the U.S. government, Alamoudi stood before U.S. District Chief Judge Claude M. Hilton in a green prison jumpsuit and said quietly: "I regret my involvement in everything unlawful I did."

[Of course, Moammar is now our good friend, eventhough he was plotting to kill Crown Prince Abdullah while we were negotiating with him, during his transformation into a "statesman."]

Grover's troubling ties to terrorists

From David Horowitz's right wing frontpagemag:

...it seems beyond dispute that Grover Norquist has formed alliances with prominent Islamic radicals who have ties to the Saudis and to Libya and to Palestine Islamic Jihad, and who are now under indictment by U.S. authorities.

Equally troubling is that the arrests of these individuals and their exposure as agents of terrorism have not resulted in noticeable second thoughts on Grover's part or any meaningful effort to dissociate himself from his unsavory friends.

As Frank Gaffney's article recounts, Grover's own Islamic Institute was initially financed by one of the most notorious of these operatives, Abdurahman Alamoudi, a supporter of Hamas and Hezbollah who told the Annual Convention of the Islamic Association of Palestine in 1996, "If we are outside this country we can say `Oh, Allah destroy America.'

But once we are here, our mission in this country is to change it." Grover appointed Alamoudi's deputy, Khaled Saffuri to head his own organization.

Together they gained access to the White House for Alamoudi and Sami al-Arian and others with similar agendas who used their cachet to spread Islamist influence to the American military and the prison system and the universities and the political arena with untold consequences for the nation.

[Boy, Grover's face must be red!

The mess in Iraq not playing well with reservists.
The Washington Post reports:

A platoon of Army reservists in Iraq is being investigated for allegedly refusing to carry out a convoy mission its members deemed too dangerous, Army officials said yesterday.

On Wednesday, 19 soldiers from the 343rd Quartermaster Company failed to report for a planned fuel convoy from Tallil Air Base across central Iraq to Taji, a base north of Baghdad, the Army said in a statement issued in Iraq.

An initial report indicated that some of the 19 soldiers (not all) refused to participate in the convoy as directed," the Army statement said. Brig. Gen. James E. Chambers, commander of the Army's 13th Corps Support Command...

The soldiers were concerned about the roadworthiness of their trucks and the lack of a helicopter escort for the mission, according to Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), who said he had talked with the wives of two of them who live in his district.

The Army statement called the incident "a temporary breakdown in discipline." [What about the 35% of ready reservists that have yet to show up?]

The unit felt that the vehicles they were required to drive weren't safe, both mechanically and in lacking armor to protect the personnel inside," he said. [Must be that damn Kerry voting against the 87 billion.]

In addition, he said, the troops had expected to be protected by attack helicopters, but then were told that the aviation escort was unavailable. [SNAFU]

Military Poll says:

The National Annenberg Election Survey found that 62 percent in the military sample said the administration didn't send an adequate number of troops to Iraq.

And 59 percent said too much of a burden has been put on the National Guard and the reserves when regular forces should have been expanded instead.

Family members were more critical of the administration's Iraq policy than those on active duty.

This critical view comes from a military group that has a more favorable view of President Bush, Iraq, the economy and the nation's direction than Americans in general.

Also:

_Six in 10 of the regular military in the sample said they were properly trained and equipped.

_Only four in 10 of the Guard members and reservists questioned said they were properly trained and equipped. [Hmmm]

Freedom is on the march.

Car bombs killed five U.S. troops in Iraq, the U.S. military said Saturday, the latest in a string of such attacks at the start of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.

[That brings to 25 killed this week, if Im counting correctly.
Green Zone hit for the first time. Maybe they should call it the rose zone, in honor of the president's glasses...]

The Guardian:

Suicide bombers penetrated the coalition's heavily fortified Green Zone in the heart of Baghdad for the first time yesterday, killing 10 people in two blasts that tore through a restaurant and street market.

The bombs were "hand-carried explosives", the military said, and were taken in by two suicide bombers. At least four American security con-tractors were killed. They worked for DynCorp.
Another 20 people were injured, mostly Iraqis, as well as four more Americans.