Juan Cole writes on the assassination of Izzedine Salim.
I think it’s a telling indication of the power of the governing council (or lack thereof) that the discovery of an 80’s-era sarin gas shell is getting more media play than this suicide attack.

Now they’ve done it in Homochusetts (more pictures here).
Can another 9/11 be far off?
[/Jerry Falwell]

According to Re. Ike Skelton (D-MO), 47 % of U.S. troops killed in Afghanistan and 44% of those killed in Iraq come from “small town and rural America.”
I’m not sure how that area is defined for this statistic, but undoubtedly it’s paying a disproportionate price in the military campaigns.

First came Seymour Hersh’s article, which links the prison abuse at Abu Rhraib to a Pentagon strategy against al Qaeda.
Now there’s this:

By Jan. 25, 2002, according to a memo obtained by NEWSWEEK, it was clear that Bush had already decided that the Geneva Conventions did not apply at all, either to the Taliban or Al Qaeda. In the memo, which was written to Bush by Gonzales, the White House legal counsel told the president that Powell had “requested that you reconsider that decision.” Gonzales then laid out startlingly broad arguments that anticipated any objections to the conduct of U.S. soldiers or CIA interrogators in the future. “As you have said, the war against terrorism is a new kind of war,” Gonzales wrote to Bush. “The nature of the new war places a high premium on other factors, such as the ability to quickly obtain information from captured terrorists and their sponsors in order to avoid further atrocities against American civilians.” Gonzales concluded in stark terms: “In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva’s strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions.”

It’s not yet clear who planted the seeds which lead to Iraqi prison porn. But if you believe this was merely a handful of troops engaging in frat house fun, I’ve got some Niger yellowcake to sell you.
It’s interesting that under the administration’s “war on terror” paradigm, basic human dignity is now a quaint notion. This is all typical of what we have seen on a number of policy fronts. The administration declares itself not bound to old, pesky standards. They obfuscate lines of authority so when things get screwed up they can simply assert plausible deniability, benign neglect, or bureaucratic disarray (thanks to Clinton) so no one at the policy level ever gets held accountable. And thanks to a media which is generally unwilling to take stories to a degree of complexity beyond the picture-level, the ineptness continues.

In the wake of the Barcelona train bombings, which were detonated by cell phones, the L.A. County Sheriff floats the idea of jamming cell phone signals at crowded facilities:

Cell-phone use could be blacked out at Los Angeles International Airport, the Rose Bowl and Universal Studios under an anti-terrorism plan being formulated by L.A. County Sheriff Lee Baca and other law enforcement authorities.
Baca is exploring the use of jamming equipment — already used widely in foreign countries and to protect President Bush — to interrupt cell-phone signals if a terrorist attack was expected in Los Angeles.
The issue gained urgency after terrorists used cell phones to detonate explosives March 11 in railway bombings in Spain. Baca, who recently returned from a fact-finding trip to Pakistan, said a cell-phone jamming device helped avert the attempted assassination of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf on Dec. 14.

Interesting idea, but one not likely to go over well with the masses. And resourceful terrorists can always rig up a device which operates outside the cell phone range on the wave frequency spectrum. So there’s no guarantee this would thwart remote detonation.