Today's scheduled embrace of the Dalai Lama by George W. Bush represents a major change in foreigner policy by the White House.

Bush's new plan: If you meet the Buddha on the road, get a photo-op with him.

That's a shift from the Blackwater philosophy: If you meet an Iraqi on the road, shoot him.

In any case, plagued by a war that his own regime started, the president has chosen to burnish his image by meeting with a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. No, not Al Gore, who looks as if he's won several pizza prizes since Bush's operatives stole the presidency from him in 2000.

This Nobel winner is Tenzin Gyatso, who was proclaimed the Dalai Lama when he was only two years old and ruled Tibet until China ousted him years ago. Gyatso won the 1989 Nobel prize "for his consistent resistance to the use of violence."

Meanwhile, China is pissed, as the L.A. Times notes this morning:

Too bad that Hunter S. Thompson, the Dalai Lama's deceased twin, isn't around to write about this absurd face-to-face between two spiritual leaders whose approaches to violence are so different.

Will the peace-loving Buddhist leader have any impact on Bush? It's too late for that. The best we can hope for is that, instead of gonzo pol Karl Rove whispering into Bush's ear, "Stick to principle, stick to principle," this Gyatso pol will whisper, "Stay in the moment, stay in the moment."

It would be nice if he also told Bush, "Don't stay in Iraq, don't stay in Iraq."

Bad news on the global terror front: Unstable Pakistan will become even more shaky when its former leader (and Musharraf's enemy) returns home this week.

As Benazir Bhutto prepares to return to Pakistan later this week from her Dubai exile and becomes a target of strongman prick Pervez Musharraf's assassins, we can only recall how tragic it was for the U.S. to pull back from that volatile region more than five years ago.

Back in 2002, the Bush-Cheney regime abandoned the full-fledged hunt for Osama bin Laden and duped Congress and the country into invading Iraq.

Pakistan was where it was at. Bin Laden was hiding there and in neighboring Afghanistan. As the Soviets found out, you can't fight rebels in Afghanistan without somehow, some way also fighting them as they scurry across the border into Pakistan, where they have even government support.

Officials of Pakistan's spy agency, the ISI — widely credited with co-opting the Taliban and, along with the Saudis and Reagan administration, arming them — were sympathetic to bin Laden as long as he didn't destabilize their own country.

Recall that Porter Goss and Bob Graham, chairs of the House and Senate Intelligence committees, were having breakfast on the morning of 9/11 with Mahmood Ahmed, the Pakistani ISI official who later turned out to be hijacker Mohammed Atta's bagman. It was also Ahmed who had sent $100,000 to Atta on orders from the guy who later kidnapped Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. You can't make this shit up.

Yes, we left Pakistan in 2002. Big mistake.

We invaded Iraq. Bigger mistake.

We inflamed the Shia-Sunni schism in Iraq, widening everywhere else that ancient rift between Islam's main sects. Take Pakistan. Unlike in Iraq, the Sunnis are the majority. Please remember that most of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudis, and despotic monarchy Saudi Arabia is ruled by Sunni fanatics.

There has long been sectarian violence in Pakistan — see this October 2004 BBC backgrounder. Add to that the return to the country of Benazir Bhutto, whose daddy, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was Pakistan's prime minister in the '70s before he was executed by the country's military. Later, Benazir Bhutto — nearly a dead ringer for Andrea Martin/Edith Prickley's version of another South Asia strongwoman, Indira Ghandi — became prime minister, and then she was driven from Pakistan amid corruption charges.

Pakistan was a bigger threat to world stability after 9-11 than Iraq was. Yes, Iraq was a bigger threat to Israel and always a danger to Kuwait, but Pakistan's instability was a much more dangerous threat to the U.S., no matter what the Bush regime's propagandists have drummed into our heads.

Now's the perfect time to recall that the hunt by Musharraf and the ISI for bin Laden was half-hearted at best. Our reaction has been to step up arm sales to Musharraf, as I noted in April 2005.

Don't be surprised if that well-armed Pakistan government sends more Lockheed fighter jets swooping down on Bhutto than it sent to look for bin Laden.

Lettuce have your huddled masses: Work force becomes truly globalized.

Beset by an immigration war on one front and just plain war on another front, government officials in the U.S. are frantically seeking more illegals for necessary farm work here and longer stays in Baghdad for shanghaied foreigners to build the unnecessary supermax American embassy.

As Nicole Gaouette of the Los Angeles Times reported yesterday,

Meanwhile in Baghdad, workers from the Philippines and other countries who were shanghaied by U.S.-hired contractors to build the supermax U.S. embassy will probably be roped into staying longer as that project falls behind and its cost soars toward $1 billion. Check out the testimony at intrepid California congressman Henry Waxman's July hearing for details on the shanghai gestures.

Without addressing the issue of the original trickery that landed many of those foreign workers in Baghdad against their will, Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post reported yesterday:

As I wrote on August 8:

That story was broken by others, including David Phinney of Inter Press Service in June, who noted that contractor First Kuwaiti has reaped $2 billion from U.S. taxpayers for construction of military camps and the embassy. Phinney wrote:

Wait a sec. As Phinney also notes, Filipino laborers at the new embassy are making much more than that:

Pay is marginally better in our fields. Gaouette's Times story mentions almost by the way that "almost three-quarters of farmworkers are thought to be illegal immigrants."

The percentage of people who mow our lawns is probably even higher, but anyway, Gaouette notes that the White House is extremely concerned about this aspect of the free-market economy:

These are truly salad days for government officials in the U.S. as they quietly chew on these labor-force problems. Gaouette noted:

Pursued not for the sake of the workers but of the corporate farms that depend on cheap labor.

Slave work in Baghdad or California — take your pick. Farmworkers don't get health benefits, and the embassy is going to have a full-time psychiatrist for counseling and drugs, so Iraq seems the better bet: At least your boss in Iraq will be medicated.

Rehnquist is dead, but his spirit lives. The Supreme Court and Rove's man at the FEC pump life into "voter fraud" scheme.

A snapshot of current American electoral politics is one of the ugliest pictures of the year, now that the increasingly conservative Supreme Court has decided to hear a major voter-fraud/national photo ID case before next year's elections.

The GOP-engineered presidential-vote debacle in 2000 has developed into what may become a major scandal involving the use of photo IDs, which the GOP has been trying to engineer in time for next year.

"Voter fraud" — a purported invasion of polling places by illegitimate voters — is the battle cry of Republican officials hoping to stem turnout by likely Democratic voters in battleground states.

And "voter fraud" is right: The requirement that voters present photo IDs is their scheme, and Hans von Spakovsky is their standard-bearer at the Federal Election Commission. That uncomfortable sensation felt by small-d democrats is their cherished poll being shoved up a place where the sun don't shine.

Who said Karl Rove left the building? Coupled with the appointment of Michael Mukasey to oversee the Justice Department and its Civil Rights Division, the GOP is setting itself up well for '08, fighting a winnable war against U.S. voters while it fights an impossible war overseas. Rove's fingerprints are all over this, whether or not he's still using his White House keyboard.

Iraq has left the Republicans flaccid, but their "voter fraud" canard and accompanying strategy threaten to give the GOP yet another election.

Shades of Bill Rehnquist! Before he was chief justice of the U.S., Rehnquist personally blocked black people from voting in Phoenix in 1964, using "voter fraud" as his excuse. I wrote about that in September 2005 ("Rehnquist Death Gives Bush Chance to Deepen American Crisis"), recalling Dennis Roddy's riveting column in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that itself recalled Rehnquist's totalitarian behavior in Arizona as a GOP operative.

Rehnquist died in September 2005, but that didn't help because John Roberts, who favors corporate citizens over human citizens, took his place. An event that may turn out to be equally vital to the GOP occurred three months later, when Bush made a recess appointment to the FEC of von Spakovsky, a former Republican county chairman in Georgia. Before his FEC appointment, von Spakovsky was the chief civil-rights violator in the Justice Department's civil-rights division, leading the move to suppress minority and poor voters.

Von Spakovsky is up for confirmation to another FEC term. And the Roberts Supreme Court announced yesterday that it will hear the issue involving national photo IDs and voting — just in time for next year's election. This is dangerous, because it will likely bollix up '08 voting in key states.

There's plenty to read on this topic. From Paul Kiel at Talking Points Memo this past June:

Kiel refers to a 2004 piece by Jeffrey Toobin in the New Yorker whose headline says it all: "Poll Position: Is the Justice Department poised to stop voter fraud — or to keep voters from voting?"

See Lou Dubose's 2006 account of how von Spakovsky collaborated with Rove to scheme Tom Delay's crooked redistricting in Texas earlier this century. More to the current point, Dubose noted at the time:

Dahlia Lithwick's piece two days ago in Slate is also vital for understanding the back story on von Spakovsky.

Legal beagles can parse Bob Bauer's analysis yesterday of the politics swirling around the vote case the Supreme Court has now agreed to hear.

For a very recent story hinting at the bad smell emanating from the Justice Department, see "The Stooge," by David Martin of Kansas City's The Pitch.

As for following this issue, though, nothing beats wonk lawyer Rick Hasen's Election Law site, though Hasen is perhaps too hopeful that the high court will protect the rights of voters.

As I've pointed out before, in a September 2004 piece about dubious electronic-voting machines, Hasen is always a captivating and current legal-news live wire.

Those who can't live without the New York Times can learn some things from an April 12 story, "In 5-Year Effort, Scant Evidence of Voter Fraud," co-bylined by Ian Urbina, whose copy I used to have the pleasure of editing.

But you must keep clicking on the excellent McClatchy home page (formerly the Knight-Ridder D.C. Bureau), and definitely read Greg Gordon's story last April, "Administration pursued aggressive legal effort to restrict voter turnout." Gordon noted:

Next year those of you who can vote might want to vote early and vote often.

Kids of all religions learning a lot about rocketry.

You don't have to be a rocket scientist to know that the Israeli-Palestinian death dance marathon staged by adults is more than annoying to children on both sides.

In schools themselves, the ones that are open, it's like the science fair from hell: The kids are learning immediate lessons in rocket-building and rocket avoidance. After school, the favorite music is rock — the pop of the ones being thrown by Palestinian kids, the house rock of walls inside Gaza homes being pummeled into rubble by Israeli soldiers.

It's a little different in Iraq's schools, where recess is going on and on — millions of people have fled their homes, and those who haven't find it too risky to venture outdoors. Want good grades? Forget the apple. Threaten to kill your teacher or kidnap his son.

Take a break from all the stories about nutcase Mahmoud Ahmadinejad speaking at Columbia. Protest against him — that's your right — but who the hell cares? That's a circus. But the freaky sideshows are in the Middle East, where the age of rock is going to cause permanent damage to kids for generations to come, creating anger and fear on all sides that will be easily stirred up into religious fear. In effect, chapters of Future Terrorists of Arabia are popping up all over.

Here in Springfield, Mrs. Lovejoy would say, "Ohhh, won't somebody please think of the children!" (Listen to her here.)

She's right, and these are a few of the stories — underreported in the U.S. or not reported at all — that explain why:

• Shell shock: Seven Qassams, crude but effective Palestinian-made rockets, blast the Israeli town of Sderot in early September:

• Human shields: Israeli soldiers storm a West Bank refugee camp, blasting through the interior walls of homes and reportedly using Palestinians as shields:

• "Fighting Israel is Islamic duty": Palestinian kids are being taught that fighting Israel is a holy task, and Israeli kids are being taught that there is no West Bank, that Israel has dominion over all of ancient Israel. Palestinian maps and schoolbooks are nuts, and those in Israel border on the insane:

• Hostile entities: After years of Arab countries continually refusing to call Israel anything other than "the Zionist entity," Israel is now labeling Gaza a "hostile entity" and is further strangling its residents:

• Recess in Iraq: Iraqi parents are running on empty. School attendance is sharply down because of an outbreak of ditching — that's residents flinging themselves into ditches to avoid be killed by explosions or soldiers:

• "Either you give us good marks or you will die": If Iraqi kids do somehow manage to reach college, they're practically assured of high grades because professors are scared to death:

Sotheby's to sell a raggedy-ass copy next month in New York City. Habeas corpus not included.

With the Lieberman-Kyl Amendment's momentous move toward a pre-emptive strike on Iran, now's as good a time as any to sell off the Magna Carta. As everyone can see, George W. Bush has poked enough holes in it to reduce its value.

In our era of take no prisoners, but if you do, hold them unlawfully at Abu Ghraib, Gitmo and various torture chambers around the world — new AG Michael Mukasey is bound to agree and, more importantly, he'll be much more effective at running that game on us than Alberto Gonzales was. So it makes sense to peddle this piece of civil-liberties paper to the highest bidder.

In December, Sotheby's plans to do just that in New York City. The privately owned copy, dated 1297, is expected to fetch $20 million to $30 million — undercoating included. But after the past seven years of the Bush-Cheney regime's erosion of the ancient document's key provision on habeas corpus, the question is whether it's worth the vellum it's scrawled on.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's appearance in New York City coincides perfectly with the attempt by war hawks Joe Lieberman and Jon Kyl to push us into a pre-emptive strike on Iran. Rapping the Iranian ruler's knuckles was so easy that it was bound to stir up the populace and take their minds off the tragedy in Iraq.

The New Yorker's Seymour Hersh wrote years ago about the current administration's thirst for Persian blood, and various Israeli officials have beat those drums too.

That's all we need: another war to produce more prisoners whose rights of habeas corpus we can deny.

This oily business of dealing with evil foreign leaders.

New York's tabloids and assorted pols came unglued yesterday about the very idea of Iran's crackpot hardliner Mahmoud Ahmedinejad wanting to visit Ground Zero.

Where were they when Uzbek dictator Islam Karimov, whose regime boils people to death, was courted by George W. Bush and Mayor Mike Bloomberg?

Don't let your own blood boil at the thought of a bad guy visiting our sacralized 9/11 site. Condemn it, if you want, but Ahmedinejad was just trying to score political points, as our own pols do all the time at Ground Zero. He got what he wanted: The angry U.S. reaction will play well back home in Tehran, especially with the radical mullahs who really run Iran and like to stir up hatred for the "Great Satan."

Do we even have to say that in international politics, enemies today are pals tomorrow, and vice versa, and that the reasons almost always have to do with greed for money and natural resources?

On the other hand, it would be nice if our press at least reported these events. The Uzbek despot Karimov laid a wreath at Ground Zero in 2002, and there was literally not one word in the U.S. press about it at the time — I'm not talking about criticism or praise but any words at all. Nothing.

So Karimov is not a bad enough guy to get you worked up? Saddam Hussein was brown-nosed by Don Rumsfeld in December 1983. There's no reason to condemn Rumsfeld for that; it was just oil politics — just like the oil politics that Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney played when they seized upon the 9/11 attacks to justify invading Iraq.

After all, when Texas oil execs questioned Cheney in 1998, when he was still at Halliburton, about the physical dangers of pursuing oil in turbulent parts of Asia, the future vice president and de facto commander in chief told them:

Saddam is gone, but we still don't really have Iraq's oil. We do, however, have such evil people as the Taliban to deal with, right? Well, the Taliban were hailed as Afghan freedom fighters by Ronald Reagan during their triumphant visit to the White House on March 21, 1983. Reagan said at the time:

That's ancient history, huh? In fact, they were still our pals 14 years later. In late 1997, the Taliban were wined and dined at the homes of Bush's pals, the Houston oil execs, during Dubya's reign as the hangingest governor in U.S. history.

The oil schnooks were buttering up the Taliban for pipelines and other bidness, of course. See Wayne Madsen's "Afghanistan, the Taliban, and the Bush Oil Team" for details.

At least that courting of the Taliban less than 10 years ago was reported at the time. Of the many words in the mainstream press, my favorites are from a December 14, 1997, story by Caroline Lees in the Telegraph (U.K.), in which she describes the Taliban officials' visit to Unocal vice president Martin Miller's palatial Houston home:

The world has started foreclosure proceedings on the U.S. It's finally happening, much to the detriment of your children and their children.

Bad news out of Saudi Arabia: The archaic but wealthy kingdom is so scared of our imminent recession that it's abandoning our shaky dollar. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard of the Telegraph (U.K.) explains this morning:

This stuff is really complicated, and I'm oversimplifying, and many rich schnooks are the ones making the decisions. (Read this good overview of Wall Street's subprime greed by David Ignatius in Beirut's Daily Star.)

The fact is that, no matter how much money the hedge funds and private-equity people are raking in, a recession looms in the U.S. The rest of the planet is a coalition of the unwilling to be dragged down with us.

This attack by the Saudis on our economy may prove to be more damaging to the U.S. in the long run than the mostly Saudi hijackers' attack on the World Trade Center, which, though horrible and deadly, was an attack on only the symbol of our economy. There was no justification for the 9/11 attack. But this economic attack is justified, because of the greedy schmucks and costly war that have helped send our economy spinning out of control.

Here's the rub: Our rich are getting richer, but foreign investors and governments own most of our debt. As the dollar collapses, they are pulling their money out — can't a brother get a dime?! World investors are looking elsewhere; many have a yen for Japan's strong economy.

We're Number Something-Other-Than-1!

Just one example of how relatively poor we are and how this crisis has been building for a long time: In April, Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal demanded that Citigroup make "Draconian" cuts in its budget, and 17,000 people lost their jobs. Who cares what some Saudi prince says? Well, he's the huge bank's biggest individual shareholder.

Here's more from the Telegraph on the recent move by Saudi royals:

Our money woes are killing us:

Are the Democrats really sure they want to take over the White House? They will inherit an economy heading south and an unwinnable, tragic war.

We can't afford to keep fighting in Iraq, but we can't afford not to as long as we can't get some sort of international alliance to help calm things down over there.

Mercenaries like Blackwater may have to do all the fighting for us, but we won't be able to pay for them. As for our own soldiers: When we finally bring them home, there may be a full-blown recession and no jobs for them.

This is all tied to our mortgage-market crisis, which is caused by our money men playing dangerous games with the dough you homeowners send to the bank every month.

Here's even more from the Telegraph that warns of an even deeper crisis with the mortgage mess:

That's easy for him to say. He's got a new book to peddle.

Still secret: Corruption in the White House.

Over at Secrecy News, the indefatigable Steven Aftergood has posted a heretofore secret study of Iraqi government corruption.

Even though the Nation's David Corn already wrote about the study, I can't say it would be much of a surprise anyway: The investigating agency, the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, knows a lot about corruption.

Anyway, the report notes:

Sounds like the White House. U.S. congressmen and various public-interest groups got nowhere when they tried to probe Dick Cheney's "energy task force" early in the Bush regime.

And the White House has continually tried to call a halt to the excellent investigative work by Stuart Bowen on corruption in Iraq.

It took a British NGO, Christian Aid, to break the news a few years ago that Jerry Bremer, the Barney Fife of Baghdad, couldn't explain why $9 billion in Iraqi oil revenue was missing.

Besides that oil-for-slush scandal, we're still waiting to see those millions of White House e-mails the regime is withholding that relate to various scandals. Then there are the missing-weapons scandal and the various KBR scandals — you get the picture.

In any case, this new report on corruption inside Iraq's puppet government is still worth reading. It turns out that we really have planted a seed of our own form of democracy over there.

$15 billion of your money up in smoke for under-fire mercenary company, other defense contractors.

While Blackwater's mercenaries beg for mercy for killing a baby and 19 other people in Baghdad on Sunday, they're already working on another lucrative government contract on yet another foreign adventure: the "war on drugs."

In a major new outsourcing deal reported by only a few outlets, including the Army Times, Blackwater will divvy up a $15 billion pot of government gold, along with four huge defense contractors: Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and Arinc.

Blackwater claims to be building remote-control spy airships. Purty darn good for an army based in a little North Carolina town — no, it's Currituck, not Mayberry.

Arinc, a Maryland-based major supplier of airplane surveillance and passenger-counting equipment, is particularly stoked about the deal, which it announced on the sixth anniversary of 9/11:

Hang on, Arinc, you're getting ahead of yourselves. Here's how GovExec.com's Katherine McIntire Peters describes this other privatized war, which apparently is necessary because, even with the privatized war in Iraq, we still don't have enough troops to conduct all these wars:

Blackwater clearly knows how to deal with foreigners. But how does a little ol' company get to share our wealth with such huge defense contractors? No doubt it's got low friends in high places.

It probably didn't hurt the mercenary army that, according to federal campaign records, its top execs gave $1,000 to Tom DeLay's campaign on December 14, 2004. Or that they contributed mostly to other openly God-fearing lawmakers, like Bono pal Rick Santorum, Kansas's Todd Tiahrt, and Indiana's Mike Pence — whose campaign-finance tool is the Principles Exalt a Nation PAC.

Praise the Lord and pass the ammo. Better make that a blunt.

How about "large armies of foreign mercenaries"?

Regarding the army of mercenaries I wrote about in "Dreadlock in Baghdad" (September 18), Harry Byrne writes from Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania:

Thanks for reading, Harry, but look, this sounds like some typically liberal claptrap. Anyone can lift a quote from Jefferson. What's the context?

Oh, wait, it's from the Declaration of Independence.

U.S. officials already banned from travel in Baghdad.

Despite Sunday's gun battle in Baghdad in which 20 civilians were killed by Blackwater mercenaries, there are new reports that the Iraqi government may not cancel Blackwater's contract after all.

No surprise there, because Iraq's foundering government seems to have been canceled.

Radio Free Iraq reports that the Iraqi Parliament called off its September 18 session because a majority of its members didn't show up for work. The parent Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty news service says in today's roundup:

U.S. officials have already been forbidden to travel outside the Green Zone. Iraqi officials, targeted by insurgents, don't want to travel either.

Bring in more mercenaries! That seems to be the message. Tel Aviv-based Dominic Moran of Zurich's International Relations and Security Network (ISN) reports today:

Providing a good roundup of U.S. mercenary work, Moran also notes:

Latest appraisal of Iraq debacle comes from an unlikely source: the magazine for mercenaries.

The latest piece of evidence that the Bush regime bungled post-invasion Iraq — and one of the first bits we've read from a high official that it likewise bungled Afghanistan's "reconstruction" — comes from the unlikeliest source: the trade journal for mercenaries like Blackwater.

Career diplomat Robert Pearson, the U.S. ambassador to Turkey during the Iraq invasion, treats the re-destruction of Iraq as a given — merely background for his article about how the mercenary industry can pitch in to help around the world.

Quite unintentionally, what Pearson says dovetails neatly with Charles Ferguson's response to preposterous pasha Jerry Bremer's op-ed about who didn't do what in the early stages of the Iraq disaster. (All you need see is Ferguson's journalistically groundbreaking video letter to the editor, "The Debacle of Disbanding the Iraqi Army - 9/14/07." )

If Bremer and the White House hadn't disbanded the Iraq Army, there wouldn't have been as much chaos, and "private security contractors" from companies like Blackwater wouldn't have invaded Iraq in such numbers. There are an estimated 129,000 private contractors of all types in Iraq, almost as many as the number of U.S. soldiers before the "surge" began last January.

Pearson matter-of-factly writes, on page 11 of the September/October issue of the super-jingoistic and wonderfully named Journal of International Peace Operations:

What a mess! In this magazine that features a full-page ad for Blackwater — the main U.S. mercenary company and the one now being driven out of Iraq — Pearson, an ally of Colin Powell's, notes that serious planning for post-invasion Iraq began in the fall of 2003.

Yes, that's six months after the U.S. invaded.

Even then, the White House refused to go along. Oh, at first, SecDef Don Rumsfeld did. But the regime refused to fund State's Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization (S/CRS, as it was known):

Wait. It gets worse. At least we had this S/CRS in place. But while Iraq and Afghanistan veered quickly into chaos, S/CRS had to fight to find some fighting elsewhere to fight. Pearson writes:

This episode also illustrates the struggle between Powell and Rumsfeld over the Bush-Cheney regime's "war on terror." It was a battle that Powell continually lost.

By the way, if you're interested in becoming a mercenary, especially now that Blackwater has been kicked out of Iraq and there's nobody left to guard Ambassador Ryan Crocker and U.S. officials have been forbidden to leave Baghdad's Green Zone, be sure to attend the "annual summit" of the International Peace Operations Association on October 28-30 in D.C.

Here's a question, raised in 1979 by the mellifluous Mighty Diamonds:

Thirty years later, the answer's clear: The Pentagon, that's who. At best we'll get the "rogue security contractor" excuse from the Bush regime for Sunday's cacophonous killing of 11 Iraqis in Baghdad by the North Carolina mercenary army Blackwater.

That excuse has worked before. As I wrote in July 2004, it was used by the Pentagon after the Abu Ghraib tortures came to light. SecDef Don Rumsfeld blamed "rogue" soldiers.

Our memories are short when it comes to the mercenaries employed by the Bush regime. As I pointed out in August 2004, private "interrogators" from CACI were employed by the Pentagon at Abu Ghraib, where all that "fear up" went down.

After this latest incident of privatized violence, we have Blackwater saying its boys were ambushed. Blackwater has 1,000 "troops" in Iraq and guards Ambassador Ryan Crocker. Yes, they guard Crocker, and the administration guards them. Monday's Washington Post concisely captured the two versions of the latest Blackwater escapade. Here's the first:

Followed by the second version:

They wanted to shoot them some Ay-rabs, pal. The way I see it, the Mighty Diamonds sang about the possibility of dreadlocked Rastafarians someday making bodyguards pay the price:

But don't worry, Blackwater bodyguards, the Bush regime will shelter you. Iraq's citizens are the ones who can't hide. As of this morning, IBC's "documented civilian deaths from violence" totals somewhere between 72,596 and 79,187.

Yes, the Blackwater "incident" was notable. But as the IBC "recent events" list notes, on that same Sunday, many other Iraqis died, and not at the hands of American mercenaries, whom our press continues to euphemistically label "contractors" or "bodyguards."

One of the victims was a 12-year-old boy who was killed in Diwaniya during a raid by U.S. and Iraqi troops, according to news reports assembled by IBC. Wonder what happened there?

In any case, this particular bloody Sunday was predestined. IBC's list of 38 people who were killed just the day before includes this entry:

And this one:

Picking Mukasey as AG should help the GOP and Rudy and should scare civil libertarians.

The selection of terror-case judge Michael Mukasey, a pal of Rudy Giuliani's, as the next AG broadly hints at the GOP's strategy for next year's elections: Terror 24-7.

Mukasey's close ties to Rudy make him a simply fabulous choice as attorney general. He's practically a running mate for Giuliani during the next year of campaigning.

What about Mukasey and the rest of us? For the next year as lame-duck AG, Mukasey, who presided over the trial of the World Trade Center's 1993 bombers, will be a constant and sympathetic/heroic reminder of the "war on terror." Maybe that will stoke enough fear in us that we'll forget the war of terror we've created in Iraq.

This is a smart move by the GOP. It smacks of Karl Rove, but he supposedly left the building.

Here's the bad news: Mukasey is potentially far more hazardous to our civil liberties than Alberto Gonzales ever was. Gonzales was a dumb-ass, and Mukasey is very sharp. Mukasey thinks so highly of the Patriot Act that he felt compelled to defend it in a 2004 Wall Street Journal op-ed, writing:

Dispensing with the name, Mukasey proceeds to write a scary analysis, particularly his sneering at librarians' concerns and his strong implication that the Bill of Rights, because it was tacked onto the Constitution, has less heft.

His argument is that we ought to give the government the benefit of the doubt in its dealings with we the people. That's the same kind of reasoning that Chief Justice John Roberts uses to give corporations the benefit of the doubt over people, as I wrote in July 2005..

Here are Mukasey's concluding paragraphs from the WSJ op-ed:

Of course, it's the government that determines what measures are required to "keep us alive." This is one scary lawyer, or as Ben Franklin said:

But concerning the really important stuff — the '08 presidential campaign — Giuliani now has a security blanket. Mukasey is, in effect, his running mate. He'll get bipartisan support from the Senate — Chuck Schumer and other Democrats love him, and Mukasey's role as a judge intimately involved with World Trade Center and other terrorism cases while he was a federal judge in New York City will guarantee him a free pass during confirmation hearings.

You'll hear the word "terror" about a million times during those brief hearings, and the horror of the attacks will be brought up again and again.

As to Mukasey's connections with Giuliani? Forget this morning's papers if you want all the details. As Ron Mills pointed out yesterday in his cleverly named blog, Ron Mills — News And Commentary, Mukasey is a really close pal of Rudy's — he administered the oath of office to newly elected Mayor Giuliani twice in 1994 — once in Mukasey's apartment.

Mukasey was already a member of the Giuliani campaign's "Justice Advisory Committee", and Mukasey's son Marc is a partner in Rudy's law firm.

The apartment oath and the fact that Marc Mukasey is a law partner of Rudy's somehow didn't make it into this morning's New York Times story.

But if Rudy wins the '08 election, you can be sure of one detail: Mukasey will stay on as AG.

If you have some time on your hands, go to John Young's insane and great cryptome.org for the complete transcript of the trial stemming from the '93 bombing.

And what a trial that was. The prosecutor won the case, and you'd think that the GOP would love to give him a top job in the Bush administration — except for the fact that the prosecutor was Patrick Fitzgerald.

Fore! More Years! At Least!

While Americans were being shelled Tuesday by White-House-driven propaganda from General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker in D.C., rebels bombed our Camp Victory in Baghdad, a little-noticed Xanadu that illustrates the golf between us and the Iraqis.

Five years ago we "liberated" Saddam Hussein's sumptuous Al Faw Palace and planted the Pentagon's flag there.

By now we could have returned the palace to Iraq's citizens, who are dying of the heat, among other things. But all we've done is given it a friendlier second name, Camp Al-Nasr, for PR purposes aimed at Iraq's surviving Arab populace.

The only lifeguards with a good track record at Camp Victory are probably those at its pool — here's a photo of the actual palace swimmin' hole.

On Tuesday, the sixth anniversary of 9/11, Camp Victory, the U.S. military HQ, was shelled. Here's an AP report from this morning: