From The Huffington Post
By Tom Hayden

A peaceful coup is being attempted in Baghdad, seeking to replace Nouri al-Maliki with a coalition between the Sunni political leader Saleh al-Mutlak and the Shiite insurgent leader Moqtada al-Sadr.

In the background are calls from Iraq’s leading Shiite and Sunni clerics for an American withdrawal timetable.

Al-Mutlak, an ex-Baathist who heads the Iraqi Front for National Dialogue has eleven seats in parliament which, combined with Sadr’s twenty percent bloc, is enough to destabilize or even bring down the regime of al-Maliki.

As reported last week in the Huntington Post, secret efforts to strike a deal with the Sunni nationalist resistance have been underway for months. Ex-Baathists like Mutlak, Sunnis in the Muslim Scholars Association, and in particular the revered Sunni cleric Harith al-Dhari, are strongly supportive of a political settlement based on a US withdrawal timetable. But the sudden move by al-Sadr’s Shiite bloc, which pulled out of the Baghdad government over al-Maliki’s meeting with Bush, provides the anti-occupation coalition with significant, perhaps decisive, power, if they choose to bring down al-Maliki’s shaky coalition.

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From NY Times
By David E. Sanger

In the cacophony of competing plans about how to deal with Iraq, one reality now appears clear: despite the Democrats’ victory this month in an election viewed as a referendum on the war, the idea of a rapid American troop withdrawal is fast receding as a viable option.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff are signaling that too rapid an American pullout would open the way to all-out civil war. The bipartisan Iraq Study Group has shied away from recommending explicit timelines in favor of a vaguely timed pullback. The report that the panel will deliver to President Bush next week would, at a minimum, leave a force of 70,000 or more troops in the country for a long time to come, to train the Iraqis and to insure against collapse of a desperately weak central government.

Even the Democrats, with an eye toward 2008, have dropped talk of a race for the exits, in favor of a brisk stroll. But that may be the only solace for Mr. Bush as he returns from a messy encounter with Iraq’s prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki.

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From International News
By Shaheen Sehbai

Two court decisions in two days have seriously jeopardised President George W Bush’s authority to carry out pre-emptive actions against anyone he suspects to be a terrorist or a collaborator inside the United States.

In the first judgment given by a known radical judge in Los Angeles on Tuesday, Bush’s authority to designate groups as terrorist organisations was struck down while in another case in Portland, Oregon, the Bush administration on Wednesday agreed to pay two million dollars to a Muslim who was wrongly arrested and jailed by the FBI, suspected of being a terrorist.

Analysts said both the decisions hit the Bush strategy of dealing harshly with potential suspects hard, especially if they were Muslims or they belonged to any organisation which had suspected links to any terrorist outfit outside the US.

While the first decision to strike down the president’s authority would definitely be challenged by the administration in higher courts, the payment of compensation to the converted Muslim and his family in Oregon would force the FBI to look more closely at suspects before taking action.

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From Editor & Publisher

Malachi Ritscher envisioned his death as one full of purpose. He carefully planned the details, mailed a copy of his apartment key to a friend, created to-do lists for his family. On his Web site, the 52-year-old experimental musician who’d fought with depression even penned his obituary.

At 6:30 a.m. on Nov. 3 — four days before an election caused a seismic shift in Washington politics– Ritscher, a frequent anti-war protester, stood by an off-ramp in downtown Chicago near a statue of a giant flame, set up a video camera, doused himself with gasoline and lit himself on fire.

Aglow for the crush of morning commuters, his flaming body was supposed to be a call to the nation, a symbol of his rage and discontent with the U.S. war in Iraq.

“Here is the statement I want to make: if I am required to pay for your barbaric war, I choose not to live in your world. I refuse to finance the mass murder of innocent civilians, who did nothing to threaten our country,” he wrote in his suicide note. “… If one death can atone for anything, in any small way, to say to the world: I apologize for what we have done to you, I am ashamed for the mayhem and turmoil caused by my country.”

There was only one problem: No one was listening.

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From Yahoo News

The U.S. government has warned U.S. private financial services of an al Qaeda call for a cyber attack against U.S. online stock trading and banking Web sites beginning Friday, officials said on Thursday.

The officials — a person familiar with the warning and a spokesman for the Department of
Homeland Security — said the Islamic militant group aimed to penetrate and destroy the databases of the U.S. stock market and banking Web sites.

Homeland Security said it had no evidence to corroborate the threat but had issued the warning out of an “abundance of caution.” The department said in a statement that the threat was for all of December.

“There is no information to corroborate this aspirational threat. As a routine matter and out of an abundance of caution, US-CERT issued the situational awareness report to industry stakeholders,” said Homeland Security spokesman Russ Knocke.

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From The Huffington Post
By Barry Yourgrau

I mean, functionally insane?

Or something close enough? How else explain his pronouncement yesterday that the chaos and horror in Iraq is the handiwork of Al Queda–and that any notion of “civil war” simply should be dismissed with a snort. A Bush-snort.

This is Bush just being Bush, is it? Stubbornly sticking to “his version of things” in the face of any–make that “all”–facts to the contrary?

Excuse me, but how can the care of this country, and beyond, be left in the hands of a man who behaves effectively like a doctor in an emergency room insisting that germs don’t cause infections and blood does not circulate?

This planet cannot survive two more years of a President and administration so stubbornly–insanely–oblivious to reality.

Read More Iinsane

From BBC News
By Jon Leyne

It was billed as a crisis meeting at a crucial time in Iraq’s history - although you would never have guessed, watching a disarmingly relaxed President Bush field questions afterwards.

There was certainly no hint that his project to spread democracy across the Middle East was in the tiniest bit of trouble.

“There are reports from Washington that we are looking for a graceful exit,” said Mr Bush. “But we will stay until the job is done.”

As for reports that the White House is losing confidence in Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki, Mr Bush would have none of it.

The Iraqi prime minister was a strong leader, “the right guy for Iraq,” insisted Mr Bush.

It is hard to believe it was all quite so cordial behind the scenes.

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From Yahoo News
By Jennifer Quinn

The FBI is joining the British probe into the poisoning death of a Kremlin critic, the agency announced Thursday as investigators found traces of radiation at a dozen sites in Britain and a former Russian prime minister reported symptoms consistent with poisoning.

British authorities requested the involvement of the FBI, agency spokesman Richard Kolko said. FBI experts in weapons of mass destruction will assist with some of the scientific analysis, he said.

There is no suspected link to the U.S. in an investigation that extends to five airliners and locations from London to Moscow. Russian officials said radiation levels were normal on two suspect Russian jets and appealed to British officials for information on how to test Russians who traveled aboard the two British Airways planes on which radiation has so far been detected.

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From The International Herald Tribune

It was one of the more outrageous moments in the story of the Bush administration’s illegal domestic wiretapping. Almost a year ago, congressional Democrats called for a review of the Justice Department’s role in the program. But the department investigators assigned to do the job were unable to proceed because the White House, at President George W. Bush’s personal direction, refused to give them the necessary security clearance.

Now the president, for reasons we can’t help thinking might have something to do with the midterm elections, has changed his mind. The White House will give Justice Department inspectors the required clearance, and a review will go forward.

That’s all to the good, as long as the investigation is not intended to pre- empt any efforts by the new Democratic majority to conduct its own congressional review of the wiretap program. The Justice Department inquiry will hardly do the full job.

The department’s inspector general, Glenn Fine, has already said that the question of whether the program was legal is beyond his jurisdiction. Instead, he will investigate whether department employees followed the rules governing the program, established in a secret executive order signed by Bush in October 2001. Since the rules will presumably stay secret, the investigation will not even clarify just how far from established legal standards Bush strayed when he authorized the government to eavesdrop on Americans’ international calls and e-mail without a court-issued warrant.

Read more Eavesdropping

From The Guardian UK
By Richard Norton-Taylor and Nicholas Watt

Britain’s role in CIA “torture flights” was roundly condemned yesterday by the European parliament in a scathing report which for the first time named the site of a suspected secret US detention centre in the EU - at Stare Kiejkuty in Poland.

It says EU governments, including the British, knew about the practice known as extraordinary rendition - secret CIA flights transferring detainees to locations where they risked being tortured - but made a concerted attempt to obstruct investigations into it.

The MEPs singled out Geoff Hoon, the minister for Europe, saying they deplored his attitude to their special committee’s inquiry into the CIA flights. They expressed outrage at what they said was the view of the chief legal adviser to the Foreign Office, Sir Michael Wood, that “receiving or possessing” information extracted under torture, if there was no direct participation in the torture, was not per se banned under international law. They said Sir Michael declined to give evidence to the committee.

The report condemned the extraordinary rendition of two UK residents, Bisher al-Rawi, an Iraqi citizen , and Jamil el-Banna, a Jordanian citizen, seized in the Gambia in 2002. They were “turned over to US agents and flown to Afghanistan and then to Guantánamo, where they remain detained without trial or any form of judicial assistance”, it said. The men’s abduction was helped “by partly erroneous information” supplied by MI5.

Read more Torture