Different Opinion

U.S. retail gasoline seem to have risen roughly 10% in the first weeks of May. If I haven't miscalculated, that should have increase the average consumer prices (CPI-U all items) about 0.3%. Which should explain why the inflation futures on CME have moved rapidly to imply a monthly CPI increase - for May - of about 0.7%. Economists, in median, estimate the number to be 0.4%, but that was according to a Bloomberg poll probably conducted before the worst hike in gasoline prices. The figure is due next Tuesday, we'll see then.

According to Guardian The Guardian, US intelligence fears Iran duped hawks into Iraq war. This have been on in the media at least since the raid on Ahmed Chalabis office a couple of days ago, and may help explain just why US invaded Iraq. It is however the first time I see such a comprehensive headline on subject. Counterspin have dubbed it THE INTELLIGENCE COUP OF THE CENTURY, Mark Kleiman calls it the Chalabi situation. Here is how I like to think of the synopsis of this story:

After Afghanistan, US felt they should invade one more country. They made up a candidat list consisting of N.Korea, Iran and Iraq and called it the "Axis of Evil". N.Korea though was unthinkable because of their nukes and their fortified artillery directly threatening the tens of thousands of US soldiers stationed in S.Korea. Officially, it was up to the countries in the region to deal with N.Korea. As if the US hasn't been heavily engaged in that region ever since Pearl Harobour... Iraq was contained under an embargo and no-fly zones, weak after fighting wars in Kuwait and Iran, the Saddam regime had no links to Al-Quaeda and was already subject to a UN weapons inspection program. So Iraq would have been pretty pointless. Iran however, with its theocratic regime, its nuclear program that not yet had produced any weapons, its well documented direct involvment in international terrorism was the obvious target.

Iran was the obvious target! But US politicans told that Iran would be fixed by its "students movement"! The US-supported Shah failed to keep control, US-supported Saddam,alledgedly armed with weapons of mass destruction, failed. Now it was up to the "students movement". To stop the Iranian nuke program!?

How could US leave fundamentalist ruled nuclear Iran, to deal with already contained Iraq? The Iranians duped them - anyone has to agree at least to that this is a very tempting explanaiton:

Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | US intelligence fears Iran duped hawks into Iraq war: "US intelligence fears Iran duped hawks into Iraq war

� Inquiry into Tehran's role in starting conflict
� Top Pentagon ally Chalabi accused

Julian Borger in Washington
Tuesday May 25, 2004
The Guardian

An urgent investigation has been launched in Washington into whether Iran played a role in manipulating the US into the Iraq war by passing on bogus intelligence through Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, it emerged yesterday.
Some intelligence officials now believe that Iran used the hawks in the Pentagon and the White House to get rid of a hostile neighbour, and pave the way for a Shia-ruled Iraq.
According to a US intelligence official, the CIA has hard evidence that Mr Chalabi and his intelligence chief, Aras Karim Habib, passed US secrets to Tehran, and that Mr Habib has been a paid Iranian agent for several years, involved in passing intelligence in both directions.... "

Update: Brad Delong catch up on Counterspin's headline "The Intelligence Coup of the Century", only cautiously adding a question mark. The post he is pointing to definitely takes it one step further. Former State Department counter-terrorism official Larry Johnson's comment to the Guardian is dubbed quote of the day in Political Wire:

"Iran has run one of the most masterful intelligence operations in history."

As ibergus points out, it's getting harder to tell satire and serious news reports aparts these days. The Onion tries hard to make up quotes from US officials that are worse than those in the newspapers. Not an easy job, but someone has got to do it I guess.

What's this? A race to the bottom between Major General James Mattis, commander of the 1st Marine Division and US military spokesman in Iraq, Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt? Commenting on claims that his forces had bombed a wedding party in an attack were the US military estimates that more than 40 people were killed, Mattis denied the killed were celebrating a wedding, telling that among the victims "were more than two dozen military-age males. Let's not be naive...Bad things happen in wars."

Now Kimmit confirms that "There may have been some kind of celebration", however immediately adding that "Bad people have celebrations, too."

The New York Times > International > AP: Video Shows Iraq Wedding Celebration: "The U.S. military says it is investigating the attack, which took place in the village of Mogr el-Deeb about five miles from the Syrian border, but that all evidence so far indicates the target was a safehouse for foreign fighters.
``There was no evidence of a wedding: no decorations, no musical instruments found, no large quantities of food or leftover servings one would expect from a wedding celebration,'' Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt said Saturday. ``There may have been some kind of celebration. Bad people have celebrations, too.''
But video that APTN shot a day after the attack shows fragments of musical instruments, pots and pans and brightly colored beddings used for celebrations, scattered around the bombed out tent.
The wedding videotape shows a dozen white pickup trucks speeding through the desert escorting the bridal car -- decorated with colorful ribbons. The bride wears a Western-style white bridal dress and veil. The camera captures her stepping out of the car but does not show a close-up.
An AP reporter and photographer, who interviewed more than a dozen survivors a day after the bombing, were able to identify many of them on the wedding party video -- which runs for several hours."

To me it seems that bad people hold positions in the US military too.

No, no - it's not that I'm comparing US president George W Bush to Iraq's ex-dictator Saddam Hussein. I would never even think of doing such an evil thing. But "Mr. Saleh, 42, [who] says he is a Shiite Muslim who fled Iraq after the first Gulf war " is actually in the position to do so, according to his own account in the New York Times. He says that he spent time in Abu Ghraib both under Saddam's regime, and more recently under George Bush's. According to Saleh, the conditions during the two periods are acutally comparable to each others:

The New York Times > National > Iraqi-Born Swede Says U.S. Returned Him to Prison for No Reason: "Saddam took our money and our profits and our life, and now the American Army is doing the same thing" ... "Mr. Saleh says he was imprisoned at Abu Ghraib from 1980 to 1985 under the Hussein regime and says his house was demolished by the government. He wanted to return, he said, because he thought the American government wanted Iraqis to come back to help rebuild.
He returned last August, he said, leaving his wife and five children in Sweden and carrying with him $79,000 in savings and money from relatives. He said he was a mechanic and car dealer who wanted to set up shop in Najaf.
In September, he says he was stopped on a road to Najaf by two American soldiers and a translator. They pointed guns at him, confiscated his passport, his Mercedes and his cash, which was in a suitcase, and put a hood over his head. He says he was not carrying a weapon and does not know why he was detained.
By Oct. 4, he was back in Abu Ghraib."

The Associated Press has filmed the bombed wedding party. Time for Major General James Mattis to stop being naive and admit that the warfare of his and his men just sucks as hard as any other warfare. Like the one Staff Sgt. Jimmy Massey of the US Marines tells about here. (pointed out by MaxSpeak)

Here are some more comments from the US military on the recent bombing of a wedding party near the Iraqi-Syrian border. And now there is even more agreement between these reports and those given from the local population as the US military now implicitly confirms that several people among the killed were not "men of fighting age".

Top News Article | Reuters.com: "Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt said the attack targeted 'a suspected foreign-fighter safe house.' 'We took ground fire and we returned fire,' he said. 'We estimate that around 40 were killed. But we operated within our rules of engagement.'
Major General James Mattis, commander of the 1st Marine Division which controls the area, told reporters that more than two dozen men of fighting age were among the dead."

OK - so there were people not being "men of fighting age were among the dead". Possibly up to 20 people, women, children? That would confirm the local's reports then. More from this James Mattis in the same newspiece:

"

How many people go to the middle of the desert 10 miles from the Syrian border to hold a wedding 80 miles from the nearest civilization?" Mattis said in Falluja.
"These were more than two dozen military-age males. Let's not be naive...Bad things happen in wars.

"I don't have to apologize for the conduct of my men."

Munif Abdullah, who said he witnessed the attack at Wakr al-Deeb but was not at the wedding, told Reuters at a memorial service in the regional capital Ramadi: "They hit the cars and houses. They even hit the families running away."

Mourners at the funeral of a noted Baghdad wedding singer told Reuters he was killed after performing at the gathering.

A member of Iraq's U.S.-appointed Governing Council said he found it hard to believe the U.S. version of events. Mahmoud Othman told Reuters: "I think they have made a mistake."

It is one thing that Major General James Mattis does does not want to call the people living in that sparsely populated border area civilized. The US military does not seem that civilized itself these days. More surprising is the incredible naivete he is displaying in military matters. You can't be proud of killing "military-age males". Is he really using those killings as an excuse for killing other people as well? Announcing all "military-age males", or at least those dwelling in sparsely populated areas, as being your foes and your targets, sounds to me as more or less declaring war against mankind. Why?

And why on earth does he think that "foreign-fighters" would gather in large number in a house in an area that "is under constant surveillance by American forces" (WSJ article below), bringing women and children with them? Why would they disclose their location by firing on coalition aircraft? Don't be naive Major General James Mattis, any such "fighters" would long ago have been killed by the trigger happy servicemen of an increasingly unpopular organization...

BTW, Reuters has "A popular wedding singer" as being among one of the victims, via Washington Post. More reports"[a]s survivors tell it" from AP via mlive.com via Google News.

AP story in the Wall Street Journal:

Iraqi Officials Say U.S. Attack
Killed More Than 40 at Wedding

Associated Press
May 20, 2004

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- A U.S. aircraft fired on a house in the desert near the Syrian border Wednesday, and Iraqi officials said more than 40 people were killed, including children. The U.S. military said the target was a suspected safehouse for foreign fighters from Syria, but Iraqis said a helicopter had attacked a wedding party.

Associated Press Television News footage showed a truck containing bloodied bodies, many wrapped in blankets, piled one atop the other. Several were children.

The attack happened about 2:45 a.m. in a desert region near the border with Syria and Jordan, according to Lt. Col. Ziyad al-Jbouri, deputy police chief of Ramadi, the provincial capital about 250 miles to the east. He said 42 to 45 people died, including 15 children and 10 women. Dr. Salah al-Ani, who works at a hospital in Ramadi, put the death toll at 45.

The area, a desolate region populated only by shepherds, is popular with smugglers, including weapons smugglers, and the U.S. military suspects militants use it as a route to slip in from Syria to fight the Americans. It is under constant surveillance by American forces.

Military officials in Washington refused to address the question of whether anyone from a wedding party was among the people killed.

In a statement, the U.S. Central Command said coalition forces conducted a military operation at 3 a.m. against a "suspected foreign fighter safe house" in the open desert, about 50 miles southwest of Husaybah and 15 miles from the Syrian border.

The coalition troops came under hostile fire and "close air support was provided," the statement said. The troops recovered weapons, Iraqi and Syrian currency, some passports and some satellite communications gear, it said.

APTN video footage showed mourners with shovels digging graves over a wide dusty area in Ramadi, the provincial capital where bodies of the dead had been taken to obtain death certificates.

Iraqis interviewed on the videotape said revelers had fired volleys of gunfire into the air in a traditional wedding celebration before the attack took place. American troops have sometimes mistaken celebratory gunfire for hostile fire.

Mr. Al-Ani, the doctor, said American troops came to investigate the gunfire and left. However, Mr. al-Ani said, helicopters later arrived and attacked the area. Two houses were destroyed, he said.

"This was a wedding and the [U.S.] planes came and attacked the people at a house. Is this the democracy and freedom that [President] Bush has brought us?" said a man on the videotape, Dahham Harraj. "There was no reason."

Lt. Col. Dan Williams, a U.S. military spokesman, said earlier that the military was investigating.

"I cannot comment on this because we have not received any reports from our units that this has happened nor that any were involved in such a tragedy," Mr. Williams wrote in an e-mail in response to a question from The Associated Press.

In July 2002, Afghan officials said 48 civilians at a wedding party were killed and 117 wounded by a U.S. airstrike in Afghanistan's Uruzgan province. An investigative report released by the U.S. Central Command said the airstrike was justified because American planes had come under fire.

Copyright © 2004 Associated Press

Coalition forces confirm AP's report of the US attack on an Iraqi wedding party when it comes to time and number of persons killed. The main difference in the accounts reported by abcnews is that AP claims children to have been among the victims and coalition forces "declined to say whether there were any children" killed. The person writing headlines for abcnew's website has apparently looked at it in a different way:

ABCNEWS.com : U.S. Denies Wedding Party Attacked: "Different Accounts
U.S. Military Denies Wedding Party Attacked
...
Qatar-based Al-Jazeera quoted eyewitnesses as saying that 40 people, including women and children, were killed in a predawn attack on a village near the Syrian border. The Associated Press said Iraqi officials in the nearby city of Ramadi gave the same death toll.
Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the chief military spokesman in Iraq, denied that U.S. forces fired on a wedding party but said the military would investigate.

Kimmitt said coalition forces did conduct an operation about 15 miles from the Syrian border at 3 a.m., and that ground troops found 40 bodies after the attack. He declined to say whether there were any children among the dead."

War really sucks. None of this will be helpful in "winning hearts and minds" or increase US popularity in the "arab street".

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | US fire 'kills 40 Iraqi wedding guests': "Associated Press
Wednesday May 19, 2004

A US helicopter fired on a wedding party in western Iraq today, killing more than 40 people according to Iraqi officials.
Lt Col Ziyad al-Jbouri, deputy police chief of Ramad, west of Baghdad, said between 42 and 45 people were killed in the attack, which took place in the early hours in a remote desert area near the border with Syria and Jordan. He said the dead included 15 children and 10 women.
Dr Salah al-Ani, who works at a hospital in Ramad, put the death toll at 45. The US military said it had no reports of such an incident.
Dr Ani said people at the wedding were firing weapons in the air, and that American troops came to investigate and then left. But, later on, helicopters attacked the area. US troops took the bodies and those injured in a truck to Rutba hospital, he added.
AP Television obtained videotape showing a truck containing the bodies of people who were allegedly killed in the incident. Most of the bodies were wrapped in blankets and other cloths, but the footage showed at least eight uncovered, bloody bodies, several of them children. One of the children was headless."

More of the same from the Gaza Strip via New York Times:

"By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: May 19, 2004
Filed at 1:15 p.m. ET

RAFAH, Gaza Strip (AP) -- Israeli forces fired a missile, four tank shells and machine guns to hold back a crowd of Palestinian demonstrators Wednesday, and shrapnel from the blasts killed at least 10 Palestinian children and teenagers and wounded 50 people, hospital officials said.

An Israeli army spokeswoman said soldiers fired warning shots toward an abandoned structure -- and not the crowd -- to try to stop 3,000 demonstrators marching toward the Rafah refugee camp, scene of a deadly Israeli offensive.

But witnesses saw at least one large explosion go off among the protesters. White smoke rose into the air as Palestinians carried the wounded -- including children with bloodied faces -- from the scene."

And from the Voice of America - an increadible display of bad timing from US president, George W Bush:

President Bush is urging restraint on the part of both Israelis and Palestinians amid escalating violence in the Gaza Strip. The president said that he wants to get "clarification" on what occurred during an attack on Palestinian demonstrators by Israeli military forces.
The president addressed both Israeli and Palestinian leaders at a recent news conference.

"It is essential that people respect innocent life in order for us to achieve peace," he stated.

Not only people should do this but also american soldiers, one would be tempted to add.

Financial markets have always been very sensitive to risk and uncertainty (see ICAPM for a closer look). Since 911, some have now and then said that newsagencies and markets now are so anxious about bombings that anyone could make good gains by "going short and blowing up their garage". And part of the hunt for the terrorists were said to include some investigations into accounts that made profits from short positons accidentally or not timing the acts of terror.

Barry Ritholtz takes it one step further. Are terrorists not only using markets to make money on their bombings? Are they even using them to leverage the damage they inflict? Let's hope not!

"Consider the coordinated assault on various oil installations as an attack on the lifeblood of global capitalism. With oil over $41 a barrel, there is a huge vulnerability in the global economy to a major oil disruption. That explains why there hass been attacks on pipelines, on foreign oil engineers living in Saudi Arabia, and on shipping lanes. I would not be surprised to see attempts made on big tankers or on oil installations in a less guarded part of the world, such as South America.
It is not unthinkable that terrorists are targeting perceived vulnerabilities in the global economic infrastructure: 9/11 happened just as the market was about to reverse - indeed, the futures were up huge that fateful morning. Today's attack happened coincidentally at another market pivot point. That suggests global stock markets are targets for these sick bastards."

Bengt O. doesn't compare George W Bush to Adolf Hitler. Of course not, and neither do I. It's only that Bengt happened to find an "apparent closeness in attitude" from these two quotes, the first from Washington Times:

"Mr. Bush thinks that immersing himself in voluminous, mostly liberal-leaning news coverage might cloud his thinking and even hinder his efforts to remain an optimistic leader.

'I like to have a clear outlook,' he said. 'It can be a frustrating experience to pay attention to somebody's false opinion or somebody's characterization, which simply isn't true.'

the second from Adof Hitler's "Mein Kampf":

I know people who read interminably...Of course they 'know' an immense amount but..they have not the faculty of distinguishing what is useful and useless in a book; so that they may retain the former in their minds and if possible skip the later. [One must] instantly discern, in a book or journal or pamphlet, what ought to be remembered because it meets one's personal needs..."

Was Rumsfeld representating american values, american leadership, in what he was saying at this Committee hearing on the funding of the Iraq war?

"Will it happen right on time? I think so. I hope so. Will it be perfect? No.... Is it possible it won't work? Yes"...

"I look at Iraq and all I can say is, I hope it comes out well, and I believe it will. And we're going to keep at it."...

"I've kind of stopped reading the press, frankly,"...

Let's hope not. Thanks to the Agonist for the link.

And the NYT headlines their story on Rumsfeld's surprise visit to Iraq like this: "...Rumsfeld Says Abuse Will Be Dealt With Openly". Openly - as by an independent international organization? Ha!

Drudge and the New York Post, I won't give them a link, are helping to protect Rumsfeld's leadership by focusing on the guilt of one single american soldier. An officer? No. A white male? No - it's a women, a private, I guess that's practically speaking very low in the hierarchy of the military (I do recall press reports about how it has treaten some of its female members).

I won't go as far as to talk about the US as "the last Soviet state", or about the "American gulag". But I understand that many professional writers and bloggers apparently do these days.

(And Bengt. O has gone off topic in My Lai.)

By Heather Langan and Lou Giserman

May 12 (Bloomberg) -- The father of Nick Berg, the American
civilian beheaded in Iraq, has criticized the U.S. military for
detaining his son and preventing him from leaving the country as
planned at the end of March, before a recent escalation of violence that included the kidnapping of foreigners.
Nick Berg, 26, was in Iraq to find work on communications
towers, his parents told reporters yesterday at their home in West Chester, Pennsylvania, as they recounted their contacts with him. Unable to get a job in Iraq, he planned to come home at the end of March, they said. A week before he was to leave, his calls to them stopped.

Days later, the Federal Bureau of Investigation told the Bergs their son was arrested by Iraqi police and turned over to U.S. custody. His parents sued the U.S. Defense Department to force his release, and he was freed after 13 days, on April 6. He told his parents he would be leaving Iraq immediately. They last heard from him on April 9. U.S. authorities notified the Bergs of his death after his body was found Saturday in Baghdad.

WASHINGTON, May 9, 2004 (Xinhua via COMTEX) -- Major General Geoffrey Miller, commandant at the US military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was sent to Iraq last year to teach American soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq "his best psychological and physical techniques for squeezing information out of detainees," a news report said Sunday.

Late in the summer of 2003, US military intelligence officers in Iraq were under pressure from their superiors to get information regarding Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction and the rebels who were attacking American troops, said the report, which will be published in Newsweek's May 17 issue that is to be on newsstand on Monday.

"There was extraordinary pressure being put on MI (military intelligence) from every angle to get better info," Janis Karpinski was quoted as saying. Karpinski was the former 800th MP Brigade commander, who at the time was responsible for Abu Ghraib and other Iraqi prisons.

Ricardo Sanchez, the coalition commander in Iraq, and Barbara Fast, his top intelligence officer, asked for a fixer and got Miller, commandant at Guantanamo Bay, where the US military had held more than 600 detainees for more than two years without charges, the report said.

Quoting a subsequent inquiry by Major General Antonio Taguba, the report said Miller's task was "to rapidly exploit internees for actionable intelligence."

Deputy Central Command commander Lance Smith insisted that Miller's changes at Abu Ghraib in 2003 "didn't have anything to do with the methods of interrogating," but Taguba's report clearly outlines Miller's attempt to turn Abu Ghraib guards into "enablers " for interrogation, the report said.

"This is not a few bad apples. This is a system failure, a massive failure," Senate Armed Services Committee member Lindsay Graham, a conservative Republican, was quoted as saying.

And here is the online version of the Newsweek article.

Update: A newspiece from AP of the newly disclosed report from the International Committee of the Red Cross on the issue is here. And the ICRC report itself is here.

We're now here in Stockholm in the part of Swedish spring - according to many the height of it - that we lable "mellan haegg och syren". It is the time when the bird cherry tree, the haegg is flowering, but the lilac is still not. Here is the top Google result for "mellan heagg och syren", with some nice pictures to go with the Swedish text.

Today, at 1600 hrs CET, the Swedish parliament vote against the so called "transition rules" for the joining EU states. In spite of the xenophobia in Sweden and the Swedish PM and his social-democratic party (toghether with some of the liberals) tries to exploit it, Sweden will hence allow workers from the joining EU states at the same conditions as from the rest of the EU. Read a good in depth analysis at BonoboLand, by Agnes of the Islands

U.S. Army Wants Ski Resorts to Return Artillery, AP Reports

By Kimberly M. Chipman
April 27 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. military is asking for the
return of five howitzers that two Sierra Nevada ski resorts
borrowed to help prevent avalanches, saying it needs the
artillery for fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Associated
Press reported.
Alpine Meadows and Mammoth Mountain obtained the pieces,
which are used to shoot explosive shells at ground targets,
through a loan from the Army. The reports started using them last
year to fire rounds into mountainsides to knock snow loose, the
AP said.
The ski resorts were notified earlier this month that the
Army's Tank Automotive and Armaments Command at the Rock Island
Arsenal in Illinois needs the howitzers back as soon as possible,
according to the AP. The resorts said they will return the
artillery.
Don Bowen, the Army command's team leader overseeing the
howitzers, told the AP that he needs them back for troops to use
within 60 to 90 days.