Iraq PM warns critics of Saddam's hanging

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has threatened to review relations with countries that have criticised the bungled execution of former president Saddam Hussein.

Mr Maliki says the hanging was an internal matter and was conducted for the benefit of Iraq's unity.

A clandestine video showing images of Shiite officials taunting Saddam on the gallows has angered his fellow Sunnis and increased sectarian tension.

Mr Maliki, who rushed through the execution of his former enemy four days after Saddam lost an appeal, has not named any countries.

But his remarks come days after Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak joined criticism from other Sunni countries to say pictures of the hanging were "revolting and barbaric".

The Iraqi Prime Minister says Saddam received a fair trial.

"The execution of the dictator is a domestic affair," he said.

"It is related to the Iraqi people alone and we reject and condemn all official and unofficial statements made by some governments...

"The Iraqi Government may have to reconsider its relations with any country that does not respect the will of the Iraqi people."
'Not political'

Mr Maliki, a member of the Shiite majority that was oppressed under Saddam, has defended the US-backed court that tried the ousted leader.

"The execution of the tyrant was not a political decision, as the enemies of the Iraqi people are trying to show," he said.

"This decision was made after a long and fair trial the tyrant did not deserve."

Mr Maliki, who in an officially released video was seen signing the execution order in red ink, also has harsh words for international human rights groups who have criticised the execution.

"I have to remind the international community and human rights groups, where were they when the crimes of Anfal, Halabja, the mass graves and the executions took place?," he said, referring to crimes against humanity that have been blamed on Saddam.

Thousands of Sunnis have marched in protest against Saddam's execution.
Baghdad crackdown

The Prime Minister has also announced a major crackdown on both Shiite militias and Sunni insurgents in Baghdad to stem the rise of killings that are now running at hundreds a week.

Mr Maliki says commanders in each neighbourhood will come down hard on illegal groups, "regardless of their sect or politics".

He says US troops will support Iraqi forces in the crackdown.

Mr Maliki has been under pressure from Washington to stamp out death squad killings and ethnic cleansing in the city that is blamed on militias loyal to fellow Shiite leaders.

But there has been no sign of the crackdown on the streets of the capital.

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U.N. Investigates 300 PeaceKeepers for Sexual Abuse

EDITH M. LEDERER

The United Nations has investigated more than 300 members of U.N. peacekeeping missions for alleged sexual exploitation and abuse during the past three years and more than half were fired or sent home, according to a senior U.N. official.

The announcement came as the United Nations was trying to determine whether a report in a British newspaper involved new allegations or ones the U.N. had investigated or was investigating. The Daily Telegraph report alleged U.N. personnel in southern Sudan were involved in sexual exploitation and abuse of more than 20 children.

U.N. Assistant Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Jane Holl Lute said Friday that the U.N. has done more in the last two years than ever before to try to combat sex abuse in its 16 peacekeeping missions "but we're not satisfied with where we are."

With nearly 200,000 people from more than 100 countries rotating through the peacekeeping missions every year, some people "are going to behave badly," she told a news conference. "What's different now is … our determination to stay with this problem … and constantly improve our ability to deal with it."

Between January 2004 and the end of November 2006, Lute said, the U.N. investigated allegations of sexual exploitation and abuse involving 319 peacekeeping personnel "in all missions" from East Timor, the Middle East and Africa to Kosovo and Haiti.

This resulted in the summary dismissal of 18 civilians and the repatriation of 17 international police and 144 military personnel, she said.

According to the Department of Peacekeeping, during the first 10 months of 2006, 63 percent of all misconduct allegations involving peacekeeping personnel were related to sexual exploitation and abuse, a third of them to prostitution.

While allegations of abuse have dogged peacekeeping missions since their inception more than 50 years ago, the issue was thrust into the spotlight after the United Nations found in early 2005 that peacekeepers in Congo had sex with Congolese women and girls, usually in exchange for food or small sums of money.

Jordan's U.N. Ambassador Prince Zeid al Hussein wrote a report several months later that described the U.N. military arm as deeply flawed and recommended withholding the salaries of the guilty and requiring nations to pursue legal action against perpetrators. It said abuses had been reported in missions ranging from Bosnia and Kosovo to Cambodia, East Timor, West Africa and Congo.

The U.N. peacekeeping department instituted a new code of conduct for peacekeepers and new training for officers and all U.N. personnel, and it reinforced messages of "zero tolerance" for sexual abuse.

A new anti-prostitution campaign is about to start "to target what has been a troubling pathway for sexual exploitation and abuse in the missions," Lute said.

Meanwhile, the Department of Peacekeeping corrected information it supplied Thursday that four U.N. peacekeepers from Bangladesh have been sent home and 13 other peacekeepers serving in southern Sudan are under investigation for alleged serious misconduct including sexual exploitation and abuse.

According to the department, there are currently 13 sexual exploitation and abuse cases under investigation by the U.N. Office of Internal Oversight Services in Sudan (OIOS), half in southern Sudan.

These cases include an investigation into an allegation of sexual exploitation and abuse in June 2006 against a Bangladeshi peacekeeper in southern Sudan. While the OIOS investigation is continuing, the department said the peacekeeper was sent home and dismissed from the army.

In addition, three Bangladeshi guards on duty when the alleged incident took place and two officers were repatriated for poor supervision or poor command. The Bangladeshi army dismissed one guard, lowered the rank of the two others, and severely reprimanded the two officers, the Peacekeeping Department said.

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Villagers shot dead in NE India

At least 30 people have been killed in two days of attacks by suspected separatist rebels in the north-eastern Indian state of Assam, police say.

The United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA), is suspected of carrying out the shootings.

Twelve villagers were shot dead in Tinsukia district on Saturday, while on Friday 18 people died in four co-ordinated attacks.

Most of the victims are said to be Hindi-speaking migrants.

In another incident on Friday, a bomb exploded on a railway line between Delhi and Dibrugarh.

No-one has claimed responsibility for the attacks, but police say the ULFA is likely to be behind them.

Violence in the state has increased since talks between the ULFA and the government broke down in September last year.

The rebels are seeking a separate homeland for the Assamese people and demanding the departure of the non-indigenous population, particularly Hindi speakers.

They have been fighting Delhi's rule in the tea and oil-rich state for the past 27 years.

Security officials say attacks could intensify ahead of India's Republic Day celebrations on 26 January.

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2007 to Be Warmest Year on Record, Forecasters Say

John Roach
National Geographic News


An El Niño weather phenomenon combined with high levels of greenhouse gases are likely to make 2007 the warmest year ever recorded, British climate scientists said today.

U.S. government scientists agree with the assessment.


According to the British forecasters, 2007 will probably be 0.97 degree Fahrenheit (0.54 degree Celsius) above the long-term average of 57 degrees Fahrenheit (14 degrees Celsius).

The current record holder, 1998, was 0.94 degree Fahrenheit (0.52 degree Celsius) above the long-term average. (The average is calculated from the years 1961 to 1990.)

This is the seventh year that the United Kingdom Met Office's Hadley Centre for Climate Change in Devon has released their forecast. Over the years the forecast has been remarkably accurate, with a margin of error of 0.1 degree Fahrenheit (0.06 degree Celsius).

According to the researchers, there is a 60 percent chance that 2007 will be the warmest on record. (Related: "Global Warming Likely Causing More Heat Waves, Scientists Say" [August 1, 2006].)

David Parker is a climate-variability scientist with the Hadley Centre who helped prepare the forecast.

The new calculations add to the "ongoing evidence that global warming is real and is sort of getting worse," he said.

Warm Water

According to Parker, 2007's record-breaking warmth will result from an El Niño weather pattern that is riding on top of warmer global temperatures caused by greenhouse gas emissions. (Related: "Hurricane Season May Fizzle Further Due to El Nino" [September 5, 2006].)

El Niño is a periodic warming of the tropical Pacific Ocean off the northwest coast of South America that affects climate all around the globe.

"It puts more heat into the air, and that gets carried around the world by the wind," Parker said.

This warm El Niño air adds to global temperatures already boosted by increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, he added.

Scientists believe greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide produced from the burning of coal and oil, are driving up global temperatures by nearly 0.36 degree Fahrenheit (0.2 degree Celsius) per decade, Parker said.

So when El Niño warming combines with greenhouse gas warming, record-breaking heat is likely.

"Generally the greenhouse gas warming provides the long-term warming and the El Niño provides the interannual variability," Parker said.

There was a strong El Niño in 1998, the current warmest-year record holder.

U.S. Agreement

Thomas Karl is the director of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, North Carolina.

He said the British forecast makes sense given the moderate El Niño already in place.

"This, in combination with the observed and projected increases in atmospheric greenhouse gases, will likely produce a record warm year in 2007, averaged across the globe," he said by email.

Karl added that with each succeeding El Niño event, new warmest-year records are likely to be set.

"This does not imply that it is only during El Niños we could see new record highs. But in general temperatures will continue to rise as greenhouse gases increase," he said.

But, he added, a major volcanic eruption could throw thick clouds of light-blocking chemicals into the air and "upset such a prediction."

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A French prisoner eats part of his cellmates body.

A French prisoner who killed his cellmate "very probably" ate some of the victim's body parts, a prosecutor in the northern town of Rouen said on Friday.

The victim's body was discovered in a prison cell on Wednesday, with a large wound to the chest. The alleged killer, who shared the cell, told investigators he had removed and eaten his victim's heart.

Investigators initially discounted the possibility of cannibalism after the victim's heart was "found intact in its usual place and in its membrane which was also intact," Rouen state prosecutor Joseph Schmit said in a statement.

However an autopsy revealed that pieces of muscle from the victim's rib area and part of his lung were missing.

"The absence of these anatomic elements, which have not been found on the scene of the crime, render the confessions of cannibalism by the presumed perpetrator of the crime very probable," Schmit said.

The case comes less than a year after a court in Germany sentenced Armin Meiwes, the cannibal who killed and ate a willing victim, to life in prison.

The alleged Rouen killer and another cellmate who admitted he had not been asleep at the time of the crime, were in temporary custody and would be placed under formal investigation for premeditated murder, Schmit said.bb

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Saddam's Execution Was a Gargantuan PR Disaster

Matt Taibbi

RollingStone.com

When will we recognize that the best thing we can do in Iraq is to get out of there?

"The president's view is that in the absence of a U.N. endorsement, this war will become 'self-legitimating' when the world sees most Iraqis greet U.S. troops as liberators. I think there is a good chance that will play out." -- Thomas Friedman, New York Times, March 2003

I thought of Thomas Friedman over the weekend as I watched the United States proudly gallop into its 9,598th consecutive gargantuan p.r. fuckup in Iraq, better known to the rest of the world as the execution of Saddam Hussein. In fact, I thought specifically of the above-mentioned column of Friedman's, written right on the eve of the initial invasion almost four years ago.

It was in that particular column ("D-Day," March 19, 2003) that Friedman long-windedly lamented President Bush's failure to secure broader international support for his invasion, which he feared would detract from the legitimacy of the operation. This was a blow to the Iraq war effort, in Friedman's mind (excuse me: in what passes for Friedman's mind), but in that "D-Day" piece of his he said that we could all still make things work in Iraq -- all we had to do, he said, was to "turn these lemons into lemonade."

Lemons into lemonade! That line has been stuck in my head throughout this war. It would be absolutely impossible to find a better example of just exactly why we should never have gone into Iraq.

Remember that this war was cooked up by American bureaucrats, people who know an awful lot more about bowling than they do about Islam. True, there were a few genuine lunatics involved in dreaming up the invasion -- that crazy fraternity of neocon academics, wannabe revolutionaries who spent the whole 1990s bitter about Clinton and wired on coffee and Goldwater biographies, waiting for their Big Chance. Those people came up with the specific details of the Iraq plan (when, where, ostensibly why) and it's doubtful that anyone else but a lunatic could have dreamed up those particulars, since their logic generally eludes the sane and the normal.

But the engine behind this entire escapade was really the great mass of ordinary Beltway apparatchiks and media creatures who cheerfully assented once the idea squirted out of Bush's mouth. You're talking about a bunch of half-bright golfers from the Virginian suburbs, people raised on Archie comics and fuzzy patriotic platitudes and old saws gleaned from William Holden war movies and their postwar corporate-executive Dads. They went for the war because people they trusted told them it was a good idea, and some of them even ended up running parts of the operation, either in Iraq or in positions of responsibility here at home.

Tom Friedman is the oracle of this crowd, the tormented fat kid with a wedgie who got smart in his high school years and figured out that all he had to do to be successful was shamelessly and relentlessly flatter his Greatest-Generation parents, stroke their outdated prejudices, sell them on the idea that the entire aim of the modernization process is the spreading of their amazing legacy through the use of space-age technology.

So he goes into America's sleepy suburbs with his seventies porn-star mustache and he titillates the book clubs full of bored fifty- and sixty-something housewives with tales of how the internet is going to turn Afghanistan into Iowa. The suburban guys he ropes in with a half-baked international policy analysis -- whats "going on" on "the Street," as Friedman usually puts it -- that he cleverly makes sound like the world's sexiest collection of stock tips: "So I was playing golf with the Saudi energy minister last week, and he told me..."

This is just a modern take on the same old bullshit rap that traveling salesmen all over America have been laying on wide-eyed yokels at 99 Steak Houses and Howard Johnsons hotel bars for decades: So I was having lunch with Jack Welch at the Four Seasons last week when I heard about this amazing opportunity... And these middle-manager types who live in Midwestern cubicles or in the bowels of some federal bureaucracy in Maryland eat it up; they buy every one of Friedman's books, treat his every word like gospel, and before you know it they're all talking about Israeli politics and "the situation" in Yemen or Turkey or wherever like they're experts.

And so this is how we got where we are. You get a whole nation full of people who spend 99% of their free time worrying about their lawns or their short iron game, you convince them that they know something about something they actually know nothing about, and next thing you know, they're blundering into a 1000-year blood feud between rival Islamic groups, shooting things left and right in a panic, and thinking that they get make it all right and correct each successive fuckup by "keeping our noses to the grindstone" and "making lemons out of lemonade."

The whole war has been characterized by this kind of behavior. The Americans continually make ghastly mistake after ghastly mistake, and they keep responding to their mistakes by digging down and seeking the aid of the same homespun American pseudo-folk wisdom that got them into this mess in the first place. Our foreign policy initiatives in the area resemble attempts to mend fences with a neighbor whose lawn has been mussed by bringing him a tuna casserole cooked specially by wifey; only in Iraq, when casserole-presenting Dad ends up with his eyes gouged out and his skull charred black, hanging upside down from a telephone wire and impaled on the shards of the casserole dish, the neighborhood committee convenes and... decides to bake a bigger casserole.

This is what I was thinking about this weekend, when the U.S. and the news media "celebrated" the hanging of Saddam Hussein by wallpapering the planet with video images of the execution on New Year's Eve. The execution was a complete and utter fiasco. When what is supposed to be a p.r. coup for the United States devolves into a situation where a crowd of Shia fanatics is chanting "Moqtada! Moqtada! Moqtada!" under the swinging feet of a new Sunni martyr, something has gone horribly wrong.

Not only did Saddam's execution serve notice to the entire world that the United States has essentially become the easily-manipulated muscle for Shiite extremists in Iraq, but it infuriated the entire Sunni world by its timing -- the execution coincided with the Islamic holiday Eid.

Moreover, the U.S. even managed to alienate Shiites around the world by intervening in the execution process -- not enough to stop or slow the execution, mind you, but just enough to take Saddam's body away from the Shiites and force them to deliver it back to Saddam's home city or a "decent burial."

Now we've pissed off both the Shiites and the Sunnis and gotten both sides markedly more pissed off with each other (not just in Iraq but around the world), and we've done so by accelerating the execution of a prominent Sunni politician whose fate was the one card the United States was really holding with a Sunni minority already deeply upset at being made the subjects -- at the end of an American bayonet -- to a Shiite-led government.

Not only that, but the execution put the finishing touches on the "Democracy lesson" we've supposedly been giving the Iraqi people, who, thanks to this move, still have yet to experience a government where a leader can leave power without losing his life. That is some interesting-tasting lemonade, I must say.

Rhetorical question: if you're going to offend the earth's entire Sunni population by letting a Shiite mob hang a prominent Sunni politician on a Muslim holiday -- on television on a Muslim holiday -- why bother interfering in the burial question? Seriously, why? To curry favor with the Sunnis? Because it's "the right thing" to do? What kind of deranged lunatic hangs "the Sunni sword" at the end of Ramadan and then tries to make up for it with the world's Sunnis by allowing a "civilized" burial? "We will all become a bomb," is how one Palestinian responded to this latest act of decency and goodwill on the part of the United States.

I'm not saying Saddam Hussein deserved to live. Fuck Saddam Hussein. The point is that his execution is a symbol of America's cultural blindness. America has one gear in its head: Saddam was a monster and a mass-murderer, so he should be executed and everyone should love us for doing it. Right? I mean, who doesn't like a tuna casserole?

Friedman, it must be said, predicted that we might have such troubles. Nearly four years ago, he came up with a clever way of phrasing what he meant, saying that the Bush team needed an "attitude lobotomy," that it needed to "get off its high horse" and "start engaging people on the World Street, listening to what's bothering them, and also telling them what's bothering us." He also said that we needed something like the Marshall Plan, something that was "both a hand out and a hand up." This was "D-Day for our generation," he said.

That was our attitude on the eve of war -- we sounded like we were preparing for a sales conference in Memphis, not a Middle Eastern bloodbath. It was like nobody in America noticed that all this catchy talk about high horses and handouts and hand ups was completely meaningless to anyone except the sloe-eyed residents of the American suburbs, people raised on this language of corporate memos and canned efficiency slogans and pep talks. If George Bush had gone on al-Jazeera after the invasion and promised to "get off his high horse," the Arab world would have stared back in amazement. What horse? What the fuck is he talking about? Why does this man invade us and then start talking about a horse? Are these people crazy?

That didn't happen, but it might as well have, because we're still doing basically the same thing. This isn't a pile of lemons we're dealing with, and there's no way to make it into lemonade. This is the Middle East, a place populated with Muslim people, and we know absolutely nothing about them and have no business being there. There's no horse to get off and no one here is looking for a hand out or a hand up. They just want us to get the fuck out of there. How long is it going to take for people to figure this out?

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