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Politics : Sioux Nation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: stockman_scott who wrote (112399)	8/8/2007 8:37:37 PM
From: T L Comiskey	Respond to of 361688

Pakistan 'may declare emergency' The BBC Online President Musharraf has pulled out of a meeting in Afghanistan Pakistan's government is considering imposing emergency rule, the country's information minister has said. Tariq Azeem conceded that the issue was being discussed, as Pakistani TV channels reported that a declaration state of emergency was imminent. An emergency would limit the role of the courts, restrict civil liberties and curb freedom of expression. Earlier, Pakistan's president said he would not attend a tribal council in Afghanistan on combating the Taleban. General Pervez Musharraf pulled out of the three-day council, or jirga, citing commitments in Islamabad. Gen Musharraf faces a volatile political and security situation after a siege at a radical Islamabad mosque and protests by lawyers angry at the sacking of the country's chief justice. Opposition to Mr Musharraf's rule has also increased. "The possibility of the enforcement of emergency, like other possibilities, is under discussion," Information Minster Tariq Azeem said, although he said an emergency might not eventually be declared.

To: stockman_scott who wrote (112399)	8/8/2007 9:10:13 PM
From: T L Comiskey	Respond to of 361688

Hey General Petraeus, Wake Me When September Ends Larry C Johnson Wait until September has been the watchword. As Green Day has sung, Wake Me Up When September Ends. Someone also should smack General David Petraeus upside the head and wake his ass. youtube.com It is truly astonishing that Petraeus is being given the hero treatment when his record is neither distinguished nor honorable. I was reminded of this last week during a conversation with an active duty Army officer who was at Fort Leavenworth Kansas last year when Petraeus was supposedly thinking great thoughts about counterinsurgency ops. According to this officer, Petraeus declined to dig into the details of the manual he supposedly authored. Truth is he ignored the substance and scholarship that went into drafting the counterinsurgency manual for the Army. Pat Lang, a retired U.S. Army Colonel who taught at West Point in the seventies, said Petraeus as a student was considered the kind of sycophant who would marry the Superintendent’s daughter just to get a leg up. Guess who Petraeus married? That’s right, the Superintendent’s daughter. So how did Dave do during his second tour in Iraq (June 2004 - September 2005). Have you seen Frontline’s program, The Gangs of Iraq? Check it out. It seems that it was under the watchful eye of General Petraeus that the Iraqi Interior Ministry started its campaign of death squads, torture, and murder. Martin Smith’s interview of Petraeus is especially telling: Let me jump ahead. Just after you leave, we have the bunker incident. We find the structure has been infiltrated, or has devolved into militia groups; that the police within them have formed militias. Now clearly, you must have seen this coming. Editor’s Note: Two months after Petraeus rotated out of Iraq, a U.S. general found a ministry building, called the Jadiriyah bunker, containing 169 prisoners and evidence of torture; almost all of the detainees were Sunnis. I did not. I did not see militia groups in the special police during the time that I was there. Now, first of all, we brought in militia members as a matter of Iraqi policy. … It was actual [policy] to, in fact, recruit and bring into the army and the police militia members who met the qualification for those respective services, so there’s no question but that there were militia members in these organizations. The objective was to spread them out, not to have, for example, an entire battalion or company to be from one militia. Our belief was, at that time, that that had not taken place. Certainly Gen. Adnan Thabit and Minister Naqib, during their watch, felt that that was not the case. There was a shift, of course, in the ministry in the late spring of 2004 from a Sunni Arab to a Shi’a Arab minister. [When] Minister [Bayan] Jabr took over, there were concerns raised. … We addressed this with the new minister right away, in fact, because Minister Naqib and others said: “Hey, watch out. This is happening; that could happen.” Petraeus did not authorize or approve the actions of the death squads. But the key point is that he failed to put in place a system to ensure that there would not be those kinds of abuses. That lack of attention to detail was not, in my opinion, an aberration. Besides whacking folks the Iraqi security forces also had trouble hanging on to their weapons. Back in October 2006 there was this account: MORE noquarterusa.net