The CIA, the Swansea police and the neo-conservatives

I don't think this story has been covered much in the UK, which is a great pity as not only is it good, it is also a fine piece of Ealingesque British farce. Imagine. The former director of the CIA, James Woolsey, snooping around a college in Swansea trying to prove that one of its former students was really the 1993 World Trade Centre bomber Ramzi Yousef in order to substantiate a weird conspiracy theory concocted by a neocon pet intellectual to boost the war with Iraq. Imagine him coming to the attention of The Authorities in the form of South Wales policemen, usually more famous for playing rugby union than exploding international espionage. Imagine the State Department having to hang him out to dry - his visit being neither official nor authorised - and also admitting that no-one had told them about Woolsey's Dick Tracy act. Well, it all happened...

Basically, the problem was a woman from the American Enterprise Institute who wrote a book, in which she claimed on the grounds that Yousef's passport photo didn't look too much like him (I paraphrase) that the original 1993 WTC attack was an Iraqi plot and that hence it was all Iraq's fault. Details and debunking here Now, the original book had been showered with glittering reviews from people like - well - Richard Perle and John Bolton, and she found it necessary to credit Paul Bleeding Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney's future chief of staff in the acknowledgements. If it didn't hold up, there would be trouble. It was necessary to prove that Yousef really had been given the identity of another man by Iraqi intelligence - well, that would be tough, but a start would be to prove the other man was Yousef. The FBI don't, holding that Yousef had invented the name. So, that former CIA boss set out for the college in Swansea where someone using that name had done a course in electrical engineering. It would appear, though, that he failed to find any evidence that the student was Mr. Yousef. And that, it seems, was when he fell foul of PC Plod.

"Apparently proving that directors of intelligence organizations do not themselves make ideal field operatives, Woolsey's pursuit of the World Trade Center connection led him to the small town of Swansea, Wales, where his sleuthing piqued the curiosity of the local constabulary, whose chief decided to ring the U.S. Embassy in London for clarification as to whether Woolsey was visiting in an official capacity. This was the first anyone at State or CIA had heard of Woolsey's British expedition, and upon being apprised of it, Powell and Tenet were not amused. "It was a stupid, stupid, and just plain wrong thing to do," an intelligence consultant familiar with the "operation" said."

Talking Points Memo is following this.

Background: Initial Guardian report, but there's not much else from British media sources out there. The Financial Times's search function amusingly brings up the same Guardian story as the top result -
but requires you to subscribe to the FT to see it. Clever. Mind you, in the end it was the Grauniad that came up with the full skinny:link

"The two sets of fingerprints were entirely different," says a source familiar with the investigation.

Improving parliament's security

As is now well reported, our MPs recently voted to spend £2 million on building a huge glass wall across the House of Commons, in order to protect them from putative terrorists ensconced in the public gallery. Or perhaps from the justified fury of the citizens, but let that pass. Apparently, this is to protect them in the event someone was to squirt or toss poison or germs down into the chamber. Having first of all passed through two independent security checks and left the contents of their pockets at the second, naturally. No, the guards would apparently leave your sarin spray can with you. Obviously, because they have to have a wall to keep it out! If I were an assassin with pockets stuffed with smallpox, would I brave the second check when I could simply loiter in the corridors until a minister passed? If I had a pass, I could probably get close enough to the chamber to release it anyway - wall or no wall.

Note the meaning of this. In the event of someone producing, as the ridiculous Conservative Angela Browning suggested, an Estee Lauder perfume bottle laced with MacCluskie's disease or whatever and squirting away, they should be on the other side of the glass wall watching us die. Hell, why bother to evacuate when they need the parliamentary time to get the ID card legislation through? Browning produced a perfume bottle and waved it about, while declaring that "we would all be doomed to die". I'm not an aerodynamicist, so I can't really rule on the effectiveness of a perfume bottle for dispersing chemical agent in a space as large as the Commons Chamber. But I suspect it wouldn't be fantastic. Aum Shinirikyo, after all, needed several gallons of sarin in bags to kill a fairly small number of people in the much greater confinement of tube trains.

I have a small proposal fitting the case, which would tend to render our great national institutions far more suited to the realities of modern British politics. I say we build the glass wall, and big enough to enclose the whole Palace of Westminster in a seamless box; a glass case quite appropriate for an irrelevant and outmoded theatre in a country defined more and more by dictatorially minded press barons, control-obsessed security bureaucrats, and the President of the United States. It would keep them all quite safe, and prevent anything dangerous leaking out as well as in. Alternatively, we could build the wall around the chamber out of mirror glass, at last making real what politicians have sought for years - an entirely self-regarding, self-serving world where everything looks like a politician and tiresome reality never intrudes.

Chalabi to be ditched?

Apparently some people in Washington, DC call their favourite Iraqi, Ahmed Chalabi, "the greatest Arab since Mohammed". (Link via Talking Points Memo) Mind you, it's not a front that is going to last, as apparently the Pentagon is going to cut off the old fraud's monthly $340,000 subsidy. I wonder if they will also take back the Iraqi secret police files his lot carried off for their whips' black book? When you realise that it's Chalabi and friends who got their hands on those archives, quite a few things make more sense. Like exactly where those "secret files" come from that neocon rags like the Telegraph love to publish. If Mr C's got the order of the boot from Washington, it's no surprise that the list of alleged oil recipients got read out in Congress just now.

Courts rule that man must be freed due to mental state

The courts have ruled in a groundbreaking decision that a man who can only be named as "DB", who has been detained without trial or even a reason in the Home Office since 2001, must be released from his duties immediately on the grounds that his ordeal has caused him to develop a psychosis. Sources close to his doctors suggest that his symptoms include a florid delusion that he "knows what is best for everybody's safety" and a "dangerous obsession with control". Judges were forced to act when he took a number of Muslim citizens hostage in Belmarsh prison for no reason he would give to anybody else. But it seems that this may not be the end of the matter, as he is reported to be in denial of his illness and to be experiencing an extreme transference of his problems onto those around him: DB calls judges' decision "bonkers" and claims he will change the law

I suggest the patient should observe a period of silence and undergo obscurity.

Airport security misses 20% of weapons

Airport Screeners Do Poorly, Panel Told (washingtonpost.com)

Apparently, the TSA's security screeners miss 2 out of every 10 prohibited items sent through their checkpoints in a test. According to the Post, there was no difference between state-run and private security. Which is no surprise when they hire the kind of people who stick their heads in the X-ray machine to "see their brains". Would you trust this lot with your biometric data?

Admin: Paging Guild of Ghostwriters

Right - is the Ranter now showing normally?

Heigh ho! for the EU Constitution referendum. Great!

So - it's official. We are to have a referendum on the European Constitution. And - of course - we are going to vote No. What happens next, no-one is very sure of. This depresses me deeply. After all this time, says Blair, we are going to have the grand showdown argument to whack the Eurosceptics for good. Just like the one we were meant to have about the Euro. We'll still be having that one, at some time in the future, in case anyone is worried about running out of misrepresentations, self-seeking and nonsense. I've never been very convinced by this argument that a referendum will part the seas and finally revolutionise the popular perception of Europe - it seems to me more like hurrying to hell than brilliant statesmanship, especially now with the astonishing degree of hatred for Tony Blair that exists in the country. For some time now, even before I parted company with The Party, I've not been able to understand the conventional wisdom that Mr. Blair is generally loved. In fact, as far back as 2000, I've been more impressed by the ferocious loathing so many people harbour for him personally. I wonder to what extent those old stellar poll ratings were really a reflection of the government's success dragging up the prime minister, not the other way round?
Now, with equal loathing on the Left and Iraq all over his face, what chance a revolution in opinion at his behest?

Most depressing of all is the widespread story that Irwin Steltzer, Rupert Murdoch's pet economist, was the agent of Blair's decision when he supposedly informed the prime minister that the Murdoch press "would not support Labour at the next election". And this is the national sovereignty they claim to defend. Government policy is reversed at the drop of a hat, without debate, without reasons, without Cabinets, without Parliament, on the say-so of the friend of a denationalised Australian resident in the United States, with menaces. This was nothing but blackmail. But it points up a crucial, perhaps the crucial myth of the Blair years.

This is the delusion that the Murdoch press support Labour. It is held especially strongly by those closest to the Prime Minister, I suppose because of the psychological phenomenon that, placed under stress, we tend to revert to the plans and perceptions we learnt first. Hence the flying instructors' maxim that "it's important to learn the right way first time; the way you first learn it is the way you will react in an emergency." Back in 1996-97, the first taste of power for the Blair team, the operational code of the day was to trim to the (albeit minimal) concessions given by the yellow press whilst bashing the Tories with all available means and attempting to divide opposition through triangulation. They learned it from Bill Clinton's staff and put it into practice with success. That perceptual fix is still there, and each crisis sees them reaching back to it.

The problem is, of course, that the facts have changed and the ideas have not.

Whatever promises of support were ever given to Blair have not been borne out by reality. From 1997 on, the four-barrelled barrage continues. The Sun, the Times, the Mail, the Telegraph - they pour on the vitriol daily with astonishing and probably unprecedented ferocity. Europe is the issue on which the ferocity is greatest, the unity most pronounced and the distortions most severe. And this is support? Is handing over what appears to be a pre-emptive veto on policy in general really a price worth whatever insignificant reduction in violence this "support" adds up to? The Government has an abusive relationship with Murdoch. However viciously he behaves, they cling to their promises. Oh, I know I can change him. He loves me really. Smack! Get hold of that you whore! But they aren't going to leave, and he's not going to change. They usually don't. And the longer this goes on, the worse the consequences will be in the end.

Does anyone honestly believe, for example, that now Mr. Murdoch has the latest concession tucked away his papers will not mount a savage anti-EU and anti-Blair referendum campaign? If such a paragon of good will exists and reads this, they may be educated by today's headline in the Sun. They have chosen to demonstrate the promised support by a splash in at least 72 point red lettering that "97% SAY NO!" (God knows what Uzbek polling methodology was used to get that result) The agenda is to get the referendum held as soon as possible, win it, and boost Michael Howard into power on a withdrawal ticket. Which means, I suppose, we're all going to have to sign up to help win the referendum. Which means supporting Tony Blair. What bliss.

Logistics crisis in Iraq - and the negotiations

More and more reports suggest that the Coalition and specifically the US Army and Marines in Iraq are having serious difficulties keeping open the roads. This was no doubt behind the announcement that several major highways would be closed to civilian traffic, despite the rather pathetic attempt to spin this as "repairs". After all, by the time they got to the line about repairs they had already declared that any "civilians that attempt to drive on these roads may be "considered anti-coalition forces"", or to put it another way, shot. (link to Back to Iraq) The New York Times reports above that

"But a senior American official said Saturday that the cutoff in supplies reaching the American occupation authority's headquarters in Saddam Hussein's former Republican Palace in central Baghdad were approaching a critical point. Canteens feeding 2,000 people, civilians as well as military personnel, may soon be forced to serve combat rations in plastic sleeves, known as meals ready to eat."

Horrors! The spooks, spin doctors and staffies of the Green Zone reduced to eating the rations of the troops. No more turkeys, plastic or otherwise, if the main supply route closes... Reuters further reports that bridges have been blown between Baghdad and Hilla on the main road south, and the Washington Post reports that, even paying $700 per trip, Kellogg, Brown and Root are unable to hire Iraqi drivers. This is not good. Perhaps, though, there might be some positives. I wonder what influence the emerging logistics crisis has had on the negotiations outside Fallujah and Najaf - perhaps these have been given a chance due to the army's troubles?

Which New York Times Columnist Are You?

You are Paul Krugman! You're a brilliant economist
with a knack for both making sense of the
current economic situation and exposing the
Bush administration's lies about it. You
somehow came out as the best anti-war writer on
the Op-Ed staff. Other economists hate your
guts for selling out to the liberals. To hell
with 'em.


Which New York Times Op-Ed Columnist Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

Admin - referrer tracking

We now have referrer tracking.

Admin - blogroll changes

I've changed the way the Ranter's blogroll works. From now on, blogs with RSS/XML feeds will be included in the RSS display under Ranter Coverage. Blogs without will simply be linked. At the moment I can't display Atom feeds, so Atom users will get a link but not feed coverage. We welcome British Spin, Bloggerheads, Overstated.net and Ray Girvan to the Ranter.

Vouchers, vouchers, vouchers

I recently commented on this blog entry concerning the Right's fascination with vouchers - education vouchers, health vouchers - and some possible extensions. They seem to consider that all problems may be solved simply by invoking the magic of vouchers. A couple of things stand out: firstly, what's the point of a voucher? The entire argument for them is based on an analogy with perfect competition theory - all those little rational utility maximisers will simply grab their vouchers and flock to the best school/hospital/whatever and the others will either Shape Up! or Go To The Wall! But why should the nanny state presume to tell people how much they should spend on education (or whatever), then? Why not hand out a briefcase of cash for each sprog, and set the parents free to take responsibility for their own decisions? (Tory Langue de Bois set to OFF)

After all, whatever decision they came up with would be a logically valid choice based on their individual preferences as represented by an indifference curve, and taken in the totality of all choices would represent the most efficient distribution of resources at any given moment - at least if you believe in this stuff. The reason why they won't is, of course, that they don't trust Dave and Brandee Forklift not to spend it all on vitamin Stella (or conversely, Hugh and Cressida de Bolleaux to spend it on sherry). Which implies that some choices are better than others and that, after all, the state knows best. Which doesn't leave the argument in terribly good shape. But leaving that aside, why not extend vouchers into other fields of government? Why not issue each citizen with a defence voucher equivalent to their share of the MOD budget, to spend as they see fit? If they consider themselves threatened by any international crisis, they would take the voucher to whatever army or, I suppose, private security contractor offered the operational plan they preferred. Obviously, the one who out-competed would collect. Simple, I feel, and elegant.

For a start, it neatly solves the problem of getting the disciplines of private business into the subsidy-bloated deep state. It disposes of the prejudices and preconceptions of staff officers in favour of the scientific certainties of The Market. It forces public agencies to compete and hence seek efficiency, and opens up the possibility of the privatisation to end all privatisations - selling off the armed forces! If all the MOD does is to whack out the vouchers, why should it also run the service? And if not all the vouchers go to our army - and they won't, if only due to being left under sofas, torn up by pacifists, etc - the budget will steadily reduce, forcing yet better performance or more likely worse! If it's worse, the customers will go elsewhere and it will shrink and be privatised - in fact, it's exactly what Kenneth Baker wanted to do with education.

It's the modern way!

AC/DC in Iraq - Highway to Hell!

It is reported that a US Army psychological operations team is broadcasting the songs of AC/DC, combined with a nice line in taunts ("You shoot like a goat herder!" Well, I rather suspect Iraqi goat herders are the sort of folk who learn to shoot straight before they can walk, but it's the thought that counts..), into the centre of Fallujah. How conciliatory. Other reports give the strong impression that some fighting continues despite the negotiations - that Yahoo News story mentions snipers and even an AC-130 sortie - I wonder if the talks are really not much more than a battlefield clearing? Certainly, it seems that this week's hope - the Anglo-Iranian attempt to mediate between al-Sadr and the US - has been wrecked. The Washington Post reports that US officials in Iraq had "rebuffed" these approaches. Well, there goes the only way out of this with honour that has presented itself so far. The backstory to this was that British representatives in Basra have been pursuing a private and little-reported entente with Iran, entirely in accordance with British policy but not, of course, with the CPA neo-cons' world view. The idea was to get the world's only Shia power to make representations to al-Sadr to call off his dog and work out a modus vivendi. Oh well, so much for our special influence..the Iranian foreign minister now simply says that "the US should leave Iraq as quickly as possible".

From the same Washington Post report, it would seem that AC/DC are just the band for the situation. Highway to Hell?

"On Saturday, the U.S. military closed sections of two major north-south highways that run from Baghdad, in a sign of the increased danger of kidnappings and bombings on roadways. "Civilians that attempt to drive on these roads may be considered anti-coalition forces and risk being subject to attack," a military statement said."

BBC - CRB brands innocent citizens criminals

Our beloved Criminal Records Bureau has apparently owned up to incorrectly listing some 193 persons as convicted criminals, usually by mis-associating applicants with similar names to criminals on the police national computer. This is fairly typical of David Blunkett's brilliant idea, which famously couldn't actually check criminal records much and took three months to process my own CRB clearance. But what lends it significance is, of course, the Home Office bureaucrats' messianic confidence that they could make an ID card system flawlessly efficient. They deny that it would be difficult, or that anyone might be falsely accused. On this showing, it should be blindingly obvious that the original data for such a system is riddled with nonsense - about 3.6 million wrong or missing records (link to report, Spyblog article), not to mention the processing of it. And don't even think about the government's traditional cluelessness about anything to do with IT.

No surprises, though, I suppose - the people who fucked up the CRB will be in charge of ID cards!

"John Denham did not seem to impressed with the assertions from Katherine Courtney (Director Identity Cards Programme) about the Office of Government Commerce Gateway Review process (which does not officially start until January ) with respect to this ID Card project. He noted that these were the same people who signed off on the disastrous and much less ambitious Criminal Records Bureau project.

Katherine Courtney also seemed to utter the words "literally impossible to forge" (which we will check with the transcript), which is a statement that is only ever heard from the Home Office, and not even from the most eager and enthusiastic sales people from the biometric industry itself."

Fills you with confidence.

A Brief Guide to the Non-War so far...

GlobalSecurity.org has a useful list of US Army and Marine operations in Iraq. Here goes:

Operations

Operation PLANET X (15 May 2003)
Operation PENINSULA STRIKE (9 June - 12 June 2003)
Operation DESERT SCORPION (15 June 2003 - ?)
Operation SCORPION STING
Operation SPARTAN SCORPION
Operation SIDEWINDER (29 June - 07 July 2003)
Operation SODA MOUNTAIN (12 July - 17 July 2003)
Operation IVY SERPENT (12 July 2003 - ?)
Operation IVY NEEDLE (26 August 2003 - ?)
Operation Longstreet (September 2003 - )
Operation CHAMBERLAIN (15 October 2003 - )
Operation SWEENEY (15 October 2003 - )
Operation Ivy Cyclone (07 November 2003 - )
Operation Ivy Cyclone II (17 November 2003 - )
Operation Iron Hammer (12 November 2003 - )
Operation Bulldog Mammoth (4 December 2003 - )
Operation Red Dawn (13 December 2003)
Operation Iron Justice (18 December 2003 - )
Operation Rifles Fury (21 December 2003 - )
Operation Iron Grip (24 December 2003)
Operation Market Sweep (13 Jan 2004)
Operation Saber Turner II (Feb 2004)
Operation Trailblazer (Feb 2004)
Operation Iron Promise (Mar 2004)
Operation Suicide Kings (17 Mar 2004)
Operation Devil Thrust (?? Mar 2004)
Operation Vigilant Resolve (5 Apr 2004)
Operation Resolute Sword (8 Apr 2004)

Great aren't they? The putative assault on Najaf, should it occur, rejoices in the title of Op. Duke Fortitude, which some bloggers believe is a reference to Garry Trudeau's cartoon strip, Doonesbury. But - could they get any tougher, or any more propagandistic? They are beginning to sound like the way in which weird and incompetent-but-vicious rebel bands in West Africa like to use the terminology of the Western way of war: "Captain Value special forces for LURD!" or "Operation Pay Yourself", both from Liberia, crazed child soldiers calling themselves generals, Operation Rifles Fury, "listening to the silent majority" - pick the odd ones out!

"When we get to the far side, I've got absolutely no clue where we are going."

Another damn good WaPo article from Iraq

"A few miles to the south, at 4:30 a.m., Capt. John Combs, the convoy commander, radioed back, "This is a known ambush point." It was a message he repeated frequently on the first part of the journey.

Near dawn, he radioed back with another worrisome message: The bridge ahead had been hit with explosives. "We'll have to find another route, maybe through Baghdad," Combs said. An hour later he called to report that the convoy had adopted Plan C: "The bridge at the secondary route is untenable, so we're going with a new route."

(just in case you thought our near-obsessive focus on Iraq was weakening)

CPS - still a hive of indolence?

The Guardian is currently running a series of reports by the excellent Nick Davies on the criminal justice system and how crap it is (I paraphrase). Today's story focused on the huge percentage of trials that simply don't happen because the bureaucracy bungles, people don't turn up, the court is double booked (really).

"A lot of CPS lawyers make a huge effort to avoid work - it is a civil service career without the same responsibility as private lawyers. There is a vacuum in management, from the middle up.

Last week I was in the office and a senior lawyer was sitting at his desk, fast asleep, while his manager sat just four or five feet away, taking not a blind bit of notice. No one even queries it. CPS lawyers spend a lot of time finding excuses to pass on files to somebody else. They will just dump files on somebody else's desk with a memo sticker saying, 'You worked on this earlier,' or some other excuse. And there is a massive sickness rate, with people just not turning up for work. If you have a bad court coming up, you phone in sick and leave it to somebody else, even if that does mean that witnesses and police and court staff all have a wasted morning. Our head of trials went off sick. We needed to check something with him; he was at the Chelsea flower show."

Indeed. Years ago I worked for the CPS, and that would have been a fair characterisation of our office. Remove the Chelsea flower show (we were in Bradford), but include the great piles of files slumbering on the floor, in doorways, on desks...and the computers installed in 1982 that did file tracking but nothing else, not even word processing...and the entire rape case I found in a wastepaper basket... I don't recall anyone being caught sleeping, but certainly about 50% of the people in the office at any one time were doing nothing. We had a pompous-git lawyer whose chief recreation was bullying women and phoning me at my desk to ask me to make phone calls. We had two women who did nothing but chat across their desks and glare at people, surrounded by sleeping files. We had a chap called Shahid who went to Pakistan without telling anyone and, once the heat was on, reported sick so as to keep drawing his pay. I suppose it amounted to a prince's ransom in Pakistani rupees. Not that his frequent absences prior to that affected the unsmooth functioning of "H Team". We had the manager who told me "Do not use your initiative!" Bwaagh. I thought things had got better - I am told that West Yorkshire is now a model of efficiency - but it seems that some traditions, at least, are being kept up.

Your crime? Other...

SpyBlog reports that contracts have been issued for a database of information on children in Lewisham, partly at least as a pilot for the national record of all kids planned under the Children Bill. Now, this idea came up as a result of the investigation into the Victoria Climbie case, but it's very hard not to see a strong link with ID cards - after all, if you were trying to set up an ID card scheme, wouldn't you want a database of all new people as a start? It would appear that the users of this new system will be able to flag any child's record with a "notification of concern" for a wide variety of reasons - in fact, too many reasons.

Apart from obvious and reasonable ones, like health concern, suicide or self-harm risk, drug abuse, bullying and the like, there are some real shockers. They could apparently start a file on your kids for reasons like these:

"Denies part in/does not believe commits anti-social behaviour" (so - if you are innocent you are obviously a real bastard!)

"Non-constructive spare time/easily bored" (Is there any child who this does not apply to? And isn't it just so New Labour to want to keep a searchable database of anyone found doing "non-constructive" things in their spare time - you know, so they can make you do something more dull.)

"Criminal area of residence" (WHAT? Does this mean any kid in a postcode considered dodgy can be monitored?)

And, to cap the lot, "OTHER".

Personally, this horrifies me - Christ only knows what horrors Bradford Council's files contain about my school life, for a start. Clearly, Martin Sixsmith's novel isn't quite as bad as I assumed (it postulates a near future where the government wants to issue parenting licences).

And there's more - co-ordinated bridge blowing in Iraq

Insurgents Display New Sophistication

The Washington Post reports that Iraqi insurgents have apparently been tracking the movement of the US 1st Infantry Division units sent south from the Baghdad area and arranging for bridges to be blown up ahead of them.

""The dropping of the bridges was very interesting, because it showed a regional or even a national level of organization," Pittard said in an interview. He said insurgents appeared to be sending information southward, communicating about routes being taken by U.S. forces and then getting sufficient amounts of explosives to key bridges ahead of the convoys."

Neither is this very encouraging:

"In a separate ambush east of Najaf, a group of fighters suspected to be part of Sadr's militia let a group of six U.S. armored vehicles pass their position, then placed obstacles across the highway behind them, cutting off their line of retreat. The armored vehicles were forced to move forward across a bridge. While they were on the bridge approaching a police checkpoint, Iraqi fighters, some of them wearing police uniforms, began firing on them. No U.S. troops were hurt in the incident."

Meanwhile, some kind of record in stupidity was set by the CPA spokesman, Dan Senor, when he stated that they were "listening to the silent majority". You couldn't make it up. It's worrying that the best men the United States could find seem to be provincial PR execs who have never previously left the country, but I suppose there is a tradition for this. (Didn't Harry Truman think that Stalin was just like a now-obscure party boss in Kansas City?) In the old saying: Luck will do for skill, but not consistently..

Troops in Iraq Strain to Hold Lines of Supply

New York Times: Troops in Iraq Strain to Hold Lines of Supply

This is not good. Some news stories recently have given me the strong impression that the world focus on the centres of drama in Iraq - Fallujah and Najaf - has obscured a worsening crisis in the countryside, and that the coalition is quite happy that this is so.

""We've had to take extraordinary steps to get stuff to them, fighting to open up some of the routes," Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the deputy director of military operations, said in a telephone interview from Baghdad about clearing the supply routes.

General Kimmitt told reporters that none of the routes in Iraq were now classified by the military as "black" or "red," meaning too dangerous to use. But he said most were "amber," a classification that means convoy operators assume "a certain measure of risk." He added, "It is certainly not green yet."