Saddam "remnants" or Saddam "loyalists" are far more difficult to sustain as enemies when they can no longer be loyal to Saddam. Their Iraqi identity will become more obvious and the need to blame "foreign" al-Qa'ida members all the greater.

a sergeant in the 1st Armoured Division on checkpoint duty in Baghdad explained the situation to The Independent in remarkably blunt words. "We're not going to go home any sooner because of Saddam's getting caught," he said. "We all came to search for weapons of mass destruction and attention has now been diverted from that. The arrest of Saddam is meaningless. We still don't know why we came here."

Thalia Assuras of CBS, from Baghdad, says the streets are very, very quiet. Where are the shouts of joy?

Law Professor Francis Boyle, who represented Bosnian victims of atrocity in international courts :
The video footage of Saddam, resembling a homeless man, having his mouth swabbed and hair checked for lice, was a violation of Articles 13 and 14 of the Third Geneva Convention, Boyle argued. [s]Article 13 states that prisoners of war must at all times be humanely treated, not subjected to insults and public curiosity, and Article 14 says prisoners are entitled to respect.

Orwell was merely premature

William Kristol and Robert Kagan are not pleased with the Pentagon over its “heavy-handed” action in publicly excluding governments that opposed the invasion of Iraq from bidding on reconstruction contracts. Yesterday, they released a memorandum, posted on the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) website, urging the President to reverse that policy.
mer ed: ?

Sending baker to Europe empty-handed to beg for handouts seems, to say the least, unseemly.

After all, unless the Bush administration grasps the diplomacy of looting pretty quickly, they are unlikely to get much support for their next imperial act of aggression.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld says Saddam Hussein must know where his country's weapons of mass destruction are hidden. But, Mr. Rumsfeld indicates he expects little cooperation from the captured former Iraqi leader and suggests the search for the missing weapons is likely to go on for some time.
The defense secretary notes U.S. and coalition troops searched for months before getting intelligence information that led them to Saddam's hiding place in a tiny hole in the ground at a remote farmhouse near Tikrit.
"Think of the quantity of biological weapons that could fit in that hole alone could kill tens of thousands of human beings," he said. "So the difficulty of finding him is the same difficulty of finding anyone else or another thing, like weapons."

One day after the United States announced the capture of ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, the top issue has become what to do with him.
mred - nice planning team.


Sky News has been fined £50,000 by the Independent Television Commission for broadcasting a fake news report during the Iraq war.
James Forlong, 44, had claimed that footage of a Cruise missile being fired at Iraq from the Navy submarine HMS Splendid, broadcast in March, was being shown live. It later emerged the film of the missile being fired was library stock and the crew members were on a practice run.
The Commission also noted that Mr Forlong was an experienced journalist whose reports had never previously proved to be inaccurate. He resigned in July and committed suicide three months later.

New research suggests that the miracles promised by antidepressants may be largely due to the placebo effect. Too bad there's no money to be made in sugar pills.
And by the end of the study, Schonfeld seemed to be yet another person who owed a nearly miraculous recovery to the new generation of antidepressants -- in this case, venlafaxine, better known as Effexor.

Psychiatrists and other mental-health professionals (I am a practicing therapist) know that any given antidepressant has only about a 50 percent chance of working with any given person. But what most people -- patients and clinicians alike -- don't know is that in more than half of the 47 trials used by the Food and Drug Administration to approve the six leading antidepressants on the market, the drugs failed to outperform sugar pills, and in the trials that were successful, the advantage of drugs over placebo was slight.

New York Times columnist Frank Rich insightfully called the Jessica Lynch story an American ink blot test.

Pornographers troll for people like Jessica Lynch: slender, blonde, with an air of pretty next-door innocence the degradation of which titillates the main consumers of pornography: men. Wealthy men are also quick to colonize young women like Jessica Lynch as models, mistresses, and trophy wives.

Jessica Lynch was 19 when she was deployed to Kuwait to support an impending invasion of Iraq. Like so many young people for whom the military is a sectoral economic strategy, she was unschooled in the dynamics of capital accumulation and imperialism.

One Iraqi officer and an ambulance driver named Sabah Khazaal tried to transport Lynch back to the Americans.
The reasoning was that an ambulance is protected under the Geneva Conventions and wouldn't be fired upon. It didn't work. When the ambulance was within 300 meters of the American army checkpoint, U.S. soldiers opened fire on it, nearly killing Lynch after she was well on her way to a successful convalescence and repatriation to the United States.

"Rendon even boasted about it to the National Security Council, saying, "If any of you either participated in the liberation of Kuwait City ... or if you watched it on television, you would have seen hundreds of Kuwaitis waving small American flags. Did you ever stop to wonder how the people of Kuwait City, after being held hostage for seven long and painful months, were able to get hand-held American flags? And for that matter, the flags of other coalition countries? Well, you now know the answer. That was one of my jobs.""
(Rendon's Chief Financial Officer is Sandy Libby, wife of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff.)

mred - i see the same thing on the tv today in iraq. i wonder when the signs were made

This tactic is combined with language/message control--explaining why masculine bluster like "Americans are not the running kind" can show up in two separate speeches in the same day by different members of the administration--redefining all opposition to US actions as terrorists, and building false associations through repetition: "echoing," another industry word. (How many times did we hear "September 11," "terrorists," and "Saddam Hussein" in the same breath.) This is a Psyops technique, a method to "construct memory," and the "target audience" is not the enemy, and not the "indigenous population." It is us.

When they get caught, they reconfigure the story with elliptical, some would say obtuse, language, then let it linger some more. Weapons of mass destruction become a "weapons program," a "seeking" of WMD. George Tenet's CIA "had questions" about the British forgery... er, dossier.