The president of the United States has reported through the State Department to the disgusting United Nations Human Rights Council (see our post America begs, August 26, 2010) that his country is much at fault in the way it treats (among others) illegal immigrants, citing in particular the Arizona law recently passed to deal with the problem.

Governor Jan Brewer of Arizona was justifiably outraged and wrote to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton:

The idea of our own American government submitting the duly enacted laws of a State of the United States to ‘review’ by the United Nations is internationalism run amok and unconstitutional … I again respectfully request that you amend the Report to remove Paragraph 95 relating to the State of Arizona and S.B. 1070. If you choose not to do so, the State of Arizona will monitor the proceedings and assert any rights it has in this process. Be assured that the State of Arizona will fight any attempt by the U.S. Department of State and the United Nations to interfere with the duly enacted laws of the State of Arizona in accordance with the U.S. Constitution.

Read the whole letter here.

Ben Johnson at Liberty News reports and comments:

A portion of her letter pins the blame for the increased deaths of illegal aliens where it belongs: squarely on the shoulders of Barack Obama and his Open Borders allies. …

Brewer noted Obama’s “failure to secure the entire border” and his decision “not to enforce major portions of our federal immigration laws” has encouraged alien traffickers to enter through the Arizona desert, leading to at least 170 dead illegals along that state’s border so far this year.

Thousands of migrants have died on the Arizona-Mexico border. A few days ago, August 25, seventy-two were reported killed by drug lords.

The letter challenged Hillary to compare human rights conditions in Arizona with those in member nations of the UN Human Rights Council “and publish that comparison.” …

The only thing missing in [Governor Brewer's]  gutsy letter is mention of the human rights violations American citizens face because of Obama’s de facto amnesty program, such as paramilitary clashes, drug trafficking, murders, increased gang activity, rampant kidnappings, sexual assaults, crime, welfare use, home invasions, overcrowded schools, hospital closures caused by soaring medical costs, job losses, bulging prison detentions, bilingual status, property damage, environmental degradation, and overburdened infrastructure.

Brewer is standing up for her state and the whole country — and not merely on the immigration issue. Although few media outlets have covered it, I reported last week that the remainder of Obama’s report to the UN Human Rights Council establishes new categories of “rights” for the UN to enforce, including the “right” to gay “marriage” and military service, ObamaCare, card-check union registration, taxpayer-funded daycare, bilingual education, race-based voting schemes, and Affirmative Action. Three foreign nations will then draw up a plan for the United States to follow, in order to implement these “rights” — and check up on our progress four years from now, regardless of whether Barack Obama is president. The body reserves the right to “decide on the measures it would need to take in case of persistent non-cooperation.”

The three foreign nations are France, Japan, and Cameroon (a member of the Organization of Islamic Conference). On November 5 their diplomats will start to examine the United States on the issues raised by its own self-deprecating report along with complaints about America compiled by other foreign bodies. Part of their remit will be to see in due course whether  “voluntary pledges and commitments” made by the country under examination have been carried out. As the Obama administration has committed itself to fighting the Arizona law, the UNHRC will now expect it to do so successfully, and can “take measures” against the US if it fails.

The “measures” could do no harm unless the US government actually wanted them to.

Is it really possible that Obama wants America to accept the rule of the appalling UN?

Apparently, yes.

Christine Brim at Big Peace reveals that the Obama administration is doing still more to assist Islamic organizations in America, including funding them with tax-payers’ money. To what end?

On August 31, this coming Tuesday, the Muslim Brotherhood-associated “Coordinating Council of Muslim Organizations” (CCMO) will bring 25-30 Muslim leaders of 20 national Muslim groups to attend a special workshop presented by the White House and U.S. Government agencies (Agriculture, Education, Homeland Security, Health and Human Services etc.) to provide the groups “funding, government assistance and resources.” The workshop will apparently provide special access for these Muslim Brotherhood organizations: the organizers pledge to provide “direct access” and “cut through red tape.” Government and Muslim groups will hold an Iftar dinner (breaking the fast of Ramadan) after the workshop.

The event was announced in an email newsletter sent August 27 by the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism finance trial, long associated with the Muslim Brotherhood, the global Islamist network. …

The Muslim Brotherhood founded in 1928, is a global Islamist political movement dedicated to imposing Shariah law on all nations and institutions. Their credo is “Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. Qur’an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.”

While it promotes stealth jihad throughout the Western world, it also uses violent force when and where it can. It is the parent movement of Hamas, the terrorist organization that controls Gaza and wages perpetual war on Israel.

The Hudson Institute quotes the Muslim Brotherhood’s own declaration of its world-wide ambitions:

We have a clear mission—to implement Allah’s law, on the basis of our belief that that it is the real, effective way out of all our problems—domestic or external, political, economic, social or cultural. That is to be achieved by forming the Muslim individual, the Muslim home, the Muslim government, and the state which will lead the Islamic states, reunite the scattered Muslims, restore their glory, retrieve for them their lost lands and stolen homelands, and carry the banner of the call to Allah in order to bless the world with Islam’s teachings.

Christine Brim thinks that the groups attending the “workshop” and dinner are likely to be associated with the Muslim Brotherhood, because -

The sponsoring organization – the Coordinating Council of Muslim Organizations (CCMO), co-sponsoring with the Department of Agriculture – has a long history of associations with the Muslim Brotherhood.

And because the CCMO officers are themselves Muslim Brotherhood leaders:

These are not just your garden-variety Muslim Brotherhood operatives. The CCMO officers include leading national and international figures in the Muslim Brotherhood, settled in the Washington DC suburbs to enjoy “direct access” to the Administration and Congress. CCMO is a major U.S. node in the loosely coordinated Muslim Brotherhood network. Just the fellows to give your tax dollars as stimulus money!

If Christine Brim is right and the organizations being aided by the government are pursuing the aims of the Muslim Brotherhood, this can only mean that the Obama administration is actively helping to promote those aims.

Is it doing so inadvertently, not realizing that these organizations have an anti-American agenda? Christine Brim doesn’t think so:

I suggest that the Administration knows these groups are linked to the Muslim Brotherhood. They think that’s a good thing.

This isn’t incompetence; it’s intentional.

What can be done about it? Any chance the mainstream media will investigate these dark procedures as a start?

Not much of a one, we guess.

Obama has stopped the prosecution of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, “a major al-Qaeda figure”, who coordinated the lethal attack on the USS Cole.

October 10 will be the 10th anniversary of the bombing.

The Washington Post reports:

The attack …  killed 17 sailors and wounded dozens when a boat packed with explosives ripped a hole in the side of the warship in the port of Aden.

In a filing this week in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, the Justice Department said that “no charges are either pending or contemplated with respect to al-Nashiri in the near future.”

The statement, tucked into a motion to dismiss a petition by Nashiri’s attorneys, suggests that the prospect of further military trials for detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, has all but ground to a halt, much as the administration’s plan to try the accused plotters of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in federal court has stalled.

Why  has the prosecution of al-Nashiri been dropped?

We hear pundits on TV saying that it is because the US “needs Yemen”.

What for?

If  Yemen is a country that requires terrorist murderers to be acquitted, why does the US have anything whatsoever to do with it?

Oh, we remember now: Yemen is an Islamic country, and the president of the United States wants the country he leads to submit, submit, submit to Islam.

Obama’s America is begging for approval by the UNHRC.

What is the UNHRC (United Nations Human Rights Council)? What does it do? What has it done? What is its record?

The appallingly misnamed UNHRC is the principal subcommittee driving the anti- Israel campaign, with more than 80 percent of its condemnatory resolutions directed against the Jewish state. Whereas the Bush administration boycotted the UNHRC, one of President Barack Obama’s first foreign policy initiatives was to join it. …

Democracies comprise only 40% of UNHRC membership. Last month, seven additional authoritarian regimes were elected – unopposed – joining other “human rights devotees” such as Saudi Arabia, China, Cuba and Russia.

The most notorious, Libya is a dictatorship which sanctions torture and lethal amputations, executes women for violating moral codes and criminalizes homosexuality is . Currently, the Libyan envoy, notorious for his anti-Semitic outbursts, is president of the UN General Assembly. …

The brutal Iranian regime … withdrew its nomination for UNHRC membership in return for a backroom deal to obtain a seat on the UN’s Commission on the Status of Women. To enable Iran, which probably holds the world’s worst record of abuse of women, to participate in an organization purportedly advancing women’s rights transforms the UN into a total farce. …

Sudan, the site of the Darfur genocide, was cited [by the UNHRC] in 2009 for its “progress” in human rights. …

It refuses to take action against human rights abuses in Iran.

The UNHRC has created a number of subcommissions exclusively for the purpose of bashing Israel. There is also an advisory committee chaired by Halima Warzazi, who shielded Saddam Hussein from UN censure after the 1988 gassing of Kurds. The deputy chair is Jean Ziegler who, following the Libyan bombing of the Pan Am airliner, recommended Gaddafi for a human-rights award.

The UNHRC Durban II Conference, purportedly launched to combat racism, was transformed into an anti-Israel hate-fest.

To this body Obama has now submitted a report on human rights in America.

What does the president say about human rights in his country that he submits to such a collection of tyrannies for approval?

These are a few things we have pulled out of it, dipping in with one hand while holding our editorial nose with the other:

It deplores (implying apology) the new Arizona law on illegal immigration. It regrets (implying apology) that Guantanamo is still open and detaining terrorists. It insists (Obama being world-government minded) that the US is a “cornerstone in an international system of cooperation to preserve global security, support the growth of global prosperity, and progress toward world peace.” It boasts of being the world’s largest donor of development aid, and of it’s “commitment to using ‘smart power’ in our foreign policy” (as if it is working really well for America with regard, say, to Russia and Iran).  It half apologizes for pursuing the war in Afghanistan – proudly quoting Obama’s Nobel Lecture on how the use of force is sometimes sadly necessary. It declares how much the Administration wants to find solutions to homelessness – through the subprime lending method (yes, the method that brought the US and most of the world to the brink of bankruptcy).  It applauds the Affordable [Health] Care Act (that most Americans want repealed). It solemnly praises the freedom of political participation in America (without of course mentioning intimidation at the polls by the New Black Panthers or voter fraud by ACORN, two  groups which enjoy special protection by Obama and his Justice Department).

Altogether it implies that the US still has a way to go to measure up to the standards of the other members. But it’s trying.

To check it out and see if you agree with our account and opinion of it, find the full report here.

Now who, we wonder, helped write it? Who contributed to it?

Doug Hagmann at Canada Free Press explains:

This is the first time in the history of the United Nations that the U.S. has submitted a report to the United Nation’s Human Rights Council, which is the first step in submitting the United States to international review by some of the most repressive and abusive nations in the world. …

The report is the product of about a dozen conferences held across the U.S. between January and April 2010. The participants of these conferences featured such luminaries as Stephen Rickard and Wendy Patten, from George Soros’ Open Society Institute; Devon Chaffee, Human Rights First; Andrea Prasow, Human Rights Watch; Imad Hamad (a suspected member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a Marxist-Leninist terrorist organization), American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee; Dawud Walid, Council American Islamic Relations; Nabih Ayad, Michigan Civil Rights Commission; Ron Scott, Detroit Coalition Against Police Brutality; Osama Siblani, Arab American News …

According to its authors, the report to the United Nations “gives a partial snapshot of the current human rights situation in the United States, including some of the areas where problems persist in our society.” Obviously, one of the “problems” identified with the report is illegal immigration and Arizona’s own initiate to solve the problem through state legislation. SB 1070 has been a particularly thorny issue to the Obama administration, which has now been moved to an international venue and potential international oversight by the United Nations. The stakes for our national sovereignty have been just raised by the submission of this document, which is the first step of “voluntary compliance” to the provisions of the United Nations’ Human Rights Council. …

What happens next, now that the report has been submitted?

Ben Johnson at ExposeObama writes:

As the process continues, a “troika” of three nations will review our report, other international reports, and the testimony of NGOs, then make a series of recommendations to implement these goals. Every four years, it will grade our “progress.” And this world body reserves the right to “decide on the measures it would need to take in case of persistent non-cooperation.”

That means if future administrations object to the plan the UN draws up along with the most anti-American administration in history, it could conceivably be deemed guilty of “persistent non-cooperation.” If it were sufficiently strong — and we were sufficiently weak — it could impose this agenda on the American people against their will. At a minimum, he’s reduced our standing in the eyes of the world if we reject any piece of his far-Left agenda. This report guarantees we will endure decades of international propaganda that the United States is “not meeting its human rights commitments to the United Nations” …

The Obama administration has made its entire platform the internationally recognized standard of conduct for future generations.

What is the remedy?

The United Nations and all its agencies, councils, commissions, and programs MUST BE DESTROYED.

The surge worked! Victory for the US-led coalition forces! The last combat brigade departs, leaving behind them a peaceful unified country governed by a democratically elected parliament.

Why spoil the hour of triumph? Obama wants his victory, claims credit for it even though he opposed the surge when Bush launched it.

Only thing is – tell it not in the American news media – no sooner had the last dust-cloud dispersed behind the last huge uncomfortable transport vehicle carrying the combat troops over the border into Kuwait from where they were to fly home, than murderous explosions broke out all over the country. It was a celebratory mass-killing, a fiesta of death, as terrorists let the country and the world know they were still there, still active. It was also a declaration that the victory, the peace, the solemn rituals of democracy, the visions of unity and co-operation were only such stuff as dreams are made of and will dissolve into thin air.

Newsmax reports:

Bombers and gunmen launched an apparently coordinated string of attacks against Iraqi government forces on Wednesday, killing at least 43 people a day after the number of U.S. troops fell below 50,000 for the first time since the start of the war.

The violence highlighted persistent fears about the ability of Iraqi troops to protect their own country as the American military starts to leave.

There were no claims of responsibility for the spate of attacks. But their scale and reach, from one end of the country to the other, underscored insurgent efforts to prove their might against security forces and political leaders who are charged with the day-to-day running and stability of Iraq.

The deadliest attack came in Kut, 100 miles southeast of Baghdad, where a suicide bomber blew up a car inside a security barrier between a police station and the provincial government’s headquarters. Police and hospital officials said 16 people were killed, all but one of them policemen. An estimated 90 people were wounded.

An eerily similar attack came hours earlier in a north Baghdad neighborhood, where a suicide bomber detonated a car bomb in a parking lot behind a police station.

Fifteen people were killed in that attack, including six policemen. Police and hospital officials said another 58 were wounded [including 7 children] in the explosion that left a crater three yards wide and trapped people beneath the rubble of felled houses nearby. …

Since Iraq’s March 7 elections failed to produce a clear winner, U.S. officials have feared that competing political factions could spur widespread violence. …

U.S. and Iraqi officials alike acknowledge growing frustration throughout the nation, nearly six months after the vote, and say that politically motivated violence could undo security gains made during the past few years. …

From the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk to the holy Shiite shrine town of Karbala, scattered bombings killed and wounded scores more. …

They included bombs in Muqdadiyah and Tikrit, car bombs in Kirkuk, Iskandariyah, Dujail, Karbala, Basra, and a suicide bombing in Fallujah.

And that is only the beginning.

Why has Israel not yet taken action to destroy Iran’s nuclear installations?

Perhaps because it has to deal with a more immediately urgent threat nearer home.

According to this report and commentary, Iran’s proxies – Syria, Hizbullah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza – are poised to launch another war against Israel:

Defense minister Ehud Barak’s snap nomination of OC Southern Command Maj. Gen. Yoav Galant as Israel’s 20th chief of staff was necessary  … to pull the high command together in view of the preparations to attack Israel gathering momentum …

The general expectation of a US-Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear sites has therefore faded into the background of the threatening stance currently adopted by Tehran’s allies, Syria, Hizballah and the Palestinian Hamas and Islamic Jihad. …

Jerusalem is extremely concerned by the placing of four hostile military forces on the highest level of war preparedness in the last few days and are asking why. …

Syrian prime minister Naji al-Otari and Abbas Zaki, one of Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas’ closest aides, have spoken of a “very imminent” Middle East war …

There is no telling in the Middle East when an isolated incident may not deteriorate rapidly into a major conflict when the climate is as tense as it is at present. It came dangerously close on Aug. 3, when a Lebanese army sniper shot dead an Israeli colonel precipitating a heavy exchange of fire.

Lebanon is on tenterhooks over the nine Hizballah leaders the international court inquiring into the 2005 Hariri assassination plans to summon as suspected perpetrators of the crime. Hizballah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah has given the Beirut government due notice that if his top people are surrendered to the tribunal, he will plunge the country in a civil conflict.

Hizballah, backed by Damascus, recently began accusing Israel of engineering the murder, so providing themselves with a neat pretext for going to war and avoiding facing the music.

Thursday, Aug. 19, all Syrian homeland defenses and emergency services were placed on the highest war readiness for an outbreak of hostilities without further notice. …

We don’t doubt that all this is true. But our own view – admittedly from a distance – is that a devastating blow to Iran itself would stop the cat’s paw forces dead.

What else might be staying Israel’s hand against Iran? Bullying threats and orders from anti-Israel HQ, the White House?

Yes, we suspect that’s the answer. If we ‘re right, the danger of a widespread conflagration will intensify, and the pointless charade of “peace talks” between Israel and the Palestinian Authority’s powerless Abu Abbas, due to start September 2 on Obama’s insistence, can make not a jot of difference.

The UN does an enormous amount of harm. It would have to do an enormous amount of good just to balance its moral books, but does it do or has it ever done any good at all? If so, we’ve missed it.

Whatever the noble intentions behind its creation, its General Assembly is nothing better than a grand coven where evil-wishers chant curses on the United States and Israel. Its Security Council occasionally passes resolutions, of dubious value at best, that theoretically have the force of law but cannot be enforced. Its plethora of commissions and agencies send their devils posting about, going to and fro on the earth and driving up and down on it, doing wrong on tax-free wages.

And who pays pays the most for it? Why, the United States of course.

From the Heritage Foundation:

The U.S. has been the largest financial supporter of the U.N. since the organization’s founding in 1945. The U.S. is currently assessed 22 percent of the U.N. regular budget and more than 27 percent of the U.N. peacekeeping budget. In dollar terms, the Administration’s budget for FY 2011 requested $516.3 million for the U.N. regular budget and more than $2.182 billion for the peacekeeping budget.

That includes cash for UNIFIL, the organization that assists Hizbullah (see here and here), and for Moroccan rapists sent to keep peace for the UN in the Ivory Coast (see here).

The U.S. also provides assessed financial contributions to other U.N. organizations and voluntary contributions to many more U.N. organizations. …

The OMB [Office of Management and Budget] released its report on FY 2009 U.S. contributions to the U.N. in June 2010. The report revealed that the U.S. provided $6.347 billion to the U.N. system in FY 2009, including over $4 billion from the State Department, over $1.7 billion from USAID, over $245 million from the Department of Agriculture, and tens of millions more from the Departments of Health and Human Services, Labor, and Energy.

This is an all-time record in U.S. financial contributions to the U.N. system but, considering recent budget trends in the U.N., the record is likely to be broken in FY 2010.

Claudia Rosett writes about the UN’s waste, fraud, and abuse. She combs through such reports as can be winkled out of it and finds these instances among others:

In the realms of UN peacekeeping, with its more than $8 billion annual budget, for which U.S. taxpayers alone fork out roughly $2 billion per year, check out the UN’s nearly $1 billion annual program for peacekeeping air operations. In an August, 2009 report, the UN’s own internal auditors noted that participation by senior management was “inadequate,” current staffing levels were “insufficient,” time of effective bidding on air charter services was “insufficient,” provisions in air charter agreements were “unclear” and some vendor registration was “improper.”

It takes a certain amount of determination to slog through the UN jargon, in which an executive summary of “not adequate” is often code for outright abuse or screaming failure, if you slog on to the details of the report. But in these reports, which cover only a sampling of the UN’s sprawling global system, the problems roll on and on. In corners that rarely receive attention from the media, they range from poorly documented lump-sum handling of noncompetitively-sourced travel arrangements for the UN mission in East Timor (UNMIT), to the UN’s disregard of its own rules in choosing a director for the UN Centre for Regional Development (UNCRD), headquartered in Japan. …

When the Oil-for-Food scandal [UN/Iraq, see here] broke big time in 2004, the UN refused to release its internal audits of the program even to governments of member states, including its chief donor, the U.S. After a showdown with congressional investigators, the internal audits were finally tipped out in early 2005, via the UN inquiry led by Paul Volcker. They provided damning insights into UN administrative abuses and derelictions that helped feed the gusher of Oil-for-Food corruption. Those reports might have been useful in heading off the damage of that UN blowout, had they been released to the public as they were produced, instead of being exposed later as an embarrassing piece of the UN’s self-serving coverup. …

The UN delenda est!

The UN must be destroyed!

These days there cannot  be many states, if any, with governments free from corruption, but some are more corrupt than others. Afghanistan looks to be among the worst. Its make-believe democratic institutions, president and parliament, and the police and the military, are oiled with corruption. Bribery and extortion characterize the politics of the country. A thousand busy Americans driven by noble intentions will not easily succeed in purifying the soul of the nation or changing the Afghan way. Even John Kerry, whose noble intentions are on display though his own soul has been tainted by fibs about his military adventures, has failed to persuade President Karzai – the fellow who literally wears a mantle of power – to play nice. And though Secretary of State Hillary Clinton calls Karzai to inform him loftily of her “displeasure”, he continues to do it his way. This so disheartens the well-intentioned folk pursuing the counter-corruption endeavor that they are thinking of abandoning it.

This is from the Washington Post:

A close adviser to President Hamid Karzai, arrested last month on charges of soliciting a bribe, was also under investigation for allegedly providing luxury vehicles and cash to presidential allies and over telephone contacts with Taliban insurgents, according to Afghan officials familiar with the case.

The Afghan officials also said that it had been Karzai himself who intervened to win the quick release of the aide, Mohammad Zia Salehi, even after the arrest had been personally approved by the country’s attorney general. The new account suggests that the corruption case against Salehi was wider than previously known and that Karzai acted directly to secure his aide’s release. …

The intervention by Karzai came after the Afghan investigators had begun to pursue corruption cases against the aide and possibly other Karzai allies inside the presidential palace. A commission formed by Karzai after his aide was released concluded that Afghan agents who had carried out the investigation with support from U.S.-backed law enforcement units had violated Salehi’s human rights and were operating outside the constitution.

The back-and-forth revolves around the work of two American-backed Afghan task forces, one known as the Major Crimes Task Force and the other called the Sensitive Investigative Unit. It has created perhaps the most serious crisis this year in relations between Afghanistan and the United States. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton called Karzai to express her displeasure with any decision that undermines anti-corruption enforcement, and Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) flew to Kabul this week with a warning to Karzai that his actions put at risk U.S. funding and congressional support for the war. …

Salehi is a Pashtun from Wardak province who heads the administration of Afghanistan’s National Security Council. Salehi has played a key role in support of Karzai’s efforts to win reconciliation with Taliban insurgents and end the war in Afghanistan. The current and former Afghan officials said he had spoken regularly by cellphone with Taliban representatives and had arranged meetings between the Karzai administration and members of the Taliban …

The Afghan officials said that the investigation had determined that Salehi had also been involved with making cash payments from a palace fund to pay off Karzai’s political supporters, and distributed gifts such as armored Land Cruisers and luxury Lexuses.

“He was one of the most trusted staff members in the palace to do special things,” said one Afghan official with direct knowledge of the case. …

One of the special things he did was to accept a bribe not to investigate bribery:

Wiretapped conversations had also produced evidence that Salehi had accepted gifts, including a car provided to his son, in return for playing a role in opposing a corruption investigation aimed at New Ansari, the nation’s largest money-transfer business, which was raided by investigators in January. “The talk on the intercepts was pretty clear that this car was intended to get Salehi to interfere with the investigation,” said a senior U.S. official who worked with Afghan anti-corruption teams. The American official said the evidence had been presented to Afghanistan’s attorney general, Mohammad Ishaq Aloko, who signed an arrest warrant for Salehi and instructed the Major Crimes Task Force, an Afghan police unit mentored by the FBI, to execute the arrest. …

On July 25 … Salehi was taken to a counternarcotics detention center in Kabul.

By 6 p.m. the same day, however, police with the Major Crimes Task Force received a second letter from Aloko, the attorney general, ordering Salehi’s release.

An Afghan official with direct knowledge of the case said that Aloko had come under “enormous pressure” from Karzai to set Salehi free. A second Afghan official with direct knowledge of the events said that Aloko “received an order from the president” that Salehi be released. …

According to the Afghan officials, corruption investigators now say they fear for the safety of their families and do not believe it is possible to convict those close to the president. They do not expect Salehi to be indicted. Some believe the two elite task forces will be disbanded.

That would be a blow to General Petraeus. Apparently he’s pinned his hopes on them, believing that the country could be “restored” to stability if only the corruption could be got rid of.

Gen. David H. Petraeus the new American commander, has made clear that he sees the effort as central to restoring stability to the country.

So the story of Salehi is not encouraging to those who still believe there is something to be won in Afghanistan. To others it bears a message of despair.

The last US combat brigade has left Iraq. From now on American military personnel will be there only to “advise and assist” the Iraqi government – when there is an Iraqi government to advise and assist. Five months ago parliamentary elections were held, but which party or coalition of parties should govern, and which party leader should be prime minister, are still in dispute. Prospects for agreement are not growing brighter.

Still, the US mission of pacifying and democratizing the country is regarded as almost accomplished.

Not that the country is entirely pacified any more than it is truly democratized. Though everyone agrees that “the surge” succeeded, the terrorists do not consider themselves defeated. Only two days ago a suicide bomber killed 61 Iraqi Army recruits with nail-packed explosives.

So what will happen there? Will Iraq yet turn into a peaceful united democracy?

Or will it be torn and shattered by civil war as some Israeli observers foresee?

At least two civil conflicts are at boiling point – Sunni-Shiite strife and hostilities between the two Muslim factions and the Kurds of the North – and Iran’s followers stand ready to seize Iraq’s oil-rich South potentially sparking yet another world conflagration.

The political vacuum in Baghdad created by Nouri al-Maliki’s refusal to step down or join a unity government is unsustainable and the cause of a rising spiral of violence. Neither of the two leading Iraqi parties which emerged from the general election earlier this year – Maliki’s State of Law Party and ex-prime minister Iyad Allawi’s Iraqiya Party – is seen capable of commanding a parliamentary majority any time this year.

Dropping out of negotiations for joining Allawi in a coalition government, the transitional prime minister has turned his attention to preparations for a Shiite war against the Sunnis to be launched as soon as the Americans are gone. He has lined up senior Shiite commanders in the Iraqi Army who are willing to lead an all-out offensive against the Sunnis in Baghdad and central and western Iraq.

US intelligence is perfectly aware of the imminent threat. It is according to them that -

[The Shiites] are preparing to capture large parts of Baghdad as well as Habaniya, Ramadi, Tikrit, Falluja and sections of Anbar Province, in order to achieve two objectives.

One is to defeat Sunni forces, forcing them to accept their loss of political influence and bow to his conditions, or else face more casualties, the loss of more territory in the cities and more debacles.

The second is to crush the power bases the Saudis are building in Iraq at great expense.

While the Saudis and the Syrians are spending money to buy off Maliki’s supporters, he plans to physically destroy the Sunni power centers in which they are investing.

The war could be protracted, and disastrous not only for Iraq:

His plans could ignite a Shiite-Sunni war lasting from one to two years up to late 2012 or early 2013. At least one to one-and-a-half million Iraqi Sunnis will be put to flight and flood neighboring Jordan which has neither the resources not the utilities to support that many refugees.

And while that civil war is raging, another could break out:

A second Iraqi community, the Kurds of the north, is in the midst of war preparations out of a bitter sense of betrayal by Washington.

They are furious over America quitting the country without solving the critical issue of Kirkuk and its oilfields. Calculating that the Shiites and Sunnis will be caught up in their own war and have no soldiers to spare for stopping them, the Kurds have lined up this strategic northern city for capture as soon as September.

They also plan to exploit the anticipated armed Sunni-Shiite feud to drive south and grab parts of central Iraq up to a line some 250 kilometers north of Baghdad.

Holding such towns as Saghir, Chay Khanah, Qarah Tappah, Muhsin Aziz and As-Sadiyah would be the key to Kurdish control of the eastern provinces bordering on Iran. …

And all the while Iran will be watching, ready to take advantage of the turmoil for its own ends:

Tehran is also eyeing rich spoils in Iraq’s post-American era.

The networks in Iraq run by the Iranian Intelligence Ministry, the MOIS, and the Revolutionary Guards Al Qods Brigades have joined forces with their Iraqi allies to take over the southern oilfields centering on the city of Basra, which account for about 60 percent of the country’s oil output.

This would be Iran’s payback for the energy sanctions President Barack Obama imposed in July.

Iran also covets the two holiest cities of the world Shiite movement, Karbala and Najaf. …

Have seven and a half years of  war in Iraq achieved nothing worth the blood and sacrifice? We wouldn’t say so. We think President Bush was right to invade Iraq. It was good that the tyrant Saddam Hussein was toppled, captured, and hanged. But perhaps that was as much as could be done, and the Iraqis should have been left then to flounder into their next calamity on their own.

Imam Rauf, who insists on building a mosque next to Ground Zero (a triumphal monument to the Muslim mass-murderers 0f 9/11), is trying to hide the connection of his “Cordoba Initiative” with Iran.

Anne Bayefsky writes:

A Cordoba-Iranian connection? …

More questions have arisen about the attempt to build a mosque adjacent to Ground Zero, as part of the so-called Cordoba Initiative. In particular, why has the Cordoba website just removed a photograph of Iranian Mohammad Javad Larijani, secretary-general of the High Council for Human Rights in Iran? Is the move an attempted cover-up of their Iranian connections?

Two weeks ago the Cordoba Initiative website featured a photograph of the project’s chairman, Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf, and Iranian Mohammad Javad Larijani at an event that the Initiative sponsored in Malaysia in 2008. This week, the photograph, which appears below, has disappeared.

Larijani was the Iranian representative who defended Iran’s abysmal human rights record before the UN Human Rights Council in February and June of this year. Among other things, Larijani told the Council: “Torture is one thing and punishment is another thing. … This is a conceptual dispute. Some forms of these punishments should not be considered torture according to our law.” By which he meant flogging, amputation, stoning … which are all part of Iranian legal standards. …

The Iranian connection to the launch of Cordoba House may go beyond a relationship between Rauf and Larijani. The Cordoba Initiative lists one of its three major partners as the UN’s Alliance of Civilizations. The Alliance has its roots in the Iranian-driven “Dialogue Among Civilizations,” the brainchild of former Iranian President Hojjatoleslam Seyyed Mohammad Khatami. Khatami is now a member of the High-level Group which “guides the work of the Alliance.” His personal presidential qualifications include the pursuit of nuclear weapons, a major crackdown on Iranian media, and rounding up and imprisoning Jews on trumped-up charges of spying. …

In addition, a Weekly Standard article in July suggested that the idea of building an Islamic memorial in lower Manhattan may have originated back in 2003 with two Iranian brothers: M. Jafar “Amir” Mahallati, who served as ambassador of the Iranian Islamic Republic to the United Nations from 1987 to 1989, and M. Hossein Mahallati.

Also pictured at the same Cordoba-sponsored meeting is U.S. representative to the Organization of the Islamic Conference, Sada Cumber. The meeting was part of the Initiative’s so-called “Shariah Index Project,” a plan to rank and measure the “Islamicity” of a state or “how well … nations comply in practice with this Islamic legal benchmark of an Islamic State.” …

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The State Department has assured America that Imam Rauf will not use his tax-payer funded tour of oil-rich Arab states to raise money for his Ground Zero project.

Absolutely not! The State Dapartment would never permit him to do such a thing. Of course not. How could you suspect otherwise? If you even suggest it, you must be guilty of Islamophobia.

From the Washington Times:

Mr. Rauf is scheduled to go to Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Bahrain and Qatar, the usual stops for Gulf-based fundraising. The State Department defends the five-country tour saying that Mr. Rauf is “a distinguished Muslim cleric,” but surely the government could find another such figure in the United States who is not seeking millions of dollars to fund a construction project that has so strongly divided America.

By funding the trip so soon after New York City’s Landmarks Preservation Commission gave the go-ahead to demolish the building on the proposed mosque site, the State Department is creating the appearance that the U.S. government is facilitating the construction of this shameful structure. It gives Mr. Rauf not only access but imprimatur to gather up foreign cash. And because Mr. Rauf has refused to reveal how he plans to finance his costly venture, the American public is left with the impression it will be a wholly foreign enterprise. This contradicts the argument that a mosque is needed in that part of New York City to provide services for a burgeoning Muslim population. If so many people need the mosque so badly, presumably they could figure out a way to pay for it themselves.

Americans also may be surprised to learn that the United States has been an active participant in mosque construction projects overseas. In April, U.S. Ambassador to Tanzania Alfonso E. Lenhardt helped cut the ribbon at the 12th-century Kizimkazi Mosque, which was refurbished with assistance from the United States under a program to preserve culturally significant buildings. The U.S. government also helped save the Amr Ebn El Aas Mosque in Cairo, which dates back to 642. The mosque’s namesake was the Muslim conqueror of Christian Egypt, who built the structure on the site where he had pitched his tent before doing battle with the country’s Byzantine rulers. For those who think the Ground Zero Mosque is an example of “Muslim triumphalism” glorifying conquest, the Amr Ebn El Aas Mosque is an example of such a monument – and one paid for with U.S. taxpayer funds.

The mosques being rebuilt by the United States are used for religious worship, which raises important First Amendment questions. U.S. taxpayer money should not be used to preserve and promote Islam, even abroad. …

For example, our government rebuilt the Al Shuhada Mosque in Fallujah, Iraq, expecting such benefits as “stimulating the economy, enhancing a sense of pride in the community, reducing opposition to international relief organizations operating in Fallujah, and reducing incentives among young men to participate in violence or insurgent groups.” But Section 205.1(d) of title 22 of the Code of Federal Regulations prohibits USAID funds from being used for the rehabilitation of structures to the extent that those structures are used for “inherently religious activities.” It is impossible to separate religion from a mosque; any such projects will necessarily support Islam.

The State Department is either wittingly or unwittingly using tax money to support Mr. Rauf’s efforts to realize his dream of a supersized mosque blocks away from the sacred ground of the former World Trade Center, which was destroyed by Islamic fanaticism.

We are not conspiracy theorists. Generally we believe in the cock-up theory of government and history. But we cannot help catching a whiff of conspiracy steaming up from the ingredients in this cauldron: The Cordoba Initiative, the Arab States, Iran, the State Department, the Obama Administration’s “Muslim outreach” program …

Maybe we’re wrong. Maybe it’s just a nice warm brew of inter-faith nourishment and sweet tolerance, spiced with religious diversity.

How does it smell to you?