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Claudia Rosett, who’s written regularly about the UN Oil-for-Food scandal, looks in more detail at the trade in baby food, and concludes:

[W]hat we know already is that Mr. Annan, whose Secretariat turned a blind eye to Saddam’s food pricing scams, has never apologized for presiding over the biggest fraud in the history of relief. He has not used the word “illegal.” The closest he’s come has been to admit this past March, after much stonewalling, that there may have been quite a lot of “wrong-doing”–before turning over the whole mess over to a U.N. investigation that has since smothered all details with its own blanket of secrecy.

Mr. Annan is due to step down next year. If he wants to leave a legacy more auspicious than having presided over Oil-for-Fraud, he might want to devote his twilight time at the U.N. to mending a system in which a U.N. Secretary-General feels free to describe the overthrow of a murderous tyrant as “illegal,” but no one at the top seems particularly bothered to have presided over that tyrant’s theft of food from hungry children.

eir prior activities is illegal. The declarations made by Saddam that he is currently the legitimate President of Iraq would be considered valid. In brief, I would list Annan as my star witness in defense of Saddam.

The ensuing inference from the previous inference is that the government of Iyad Allawi is illegitimate; the Transitional Administrative Law (TAL) drafted by the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) and ratified by the former Iraq Governing Council is void and null. In conclusion there should not be a national election in January 2005.

The reverse side of Annan’s value judgement on the illegality of the war is that the USA, U.K., Italy, Australia, and the other partners in the coalition were thugs and violators of the U.N. Charter and international law. Under Annan’s point of view, a good defense lawyer would argue not only for the release of Saddam and his criminal goons, but also ask for reparations from the coalition nations.

e vendor said that when a new film arrives on the stalls he can sell about 65 a day, better even than his more discreet selection of pornography. They are bought mostly for their shock value, but in the process they spread al-Zarqawi’s insidious propaganda through the volatile slums of Iraq.

Though clumsy by Western standards, they show a chillingly professional fusion of video technology and Islamic rhetoric and imagery, deploying graphics, revolving logos, fadeouts, Koranic chants and soundtracks. Each execution is preceded by the group’s symbol — a Kalashnikov, a flag and an arm emerging from the open pages of the Koran — to the accompaniment of a battle hymn in Arabic. The introduction is soon followed by the reading of a statement by a hooded figure flanked on either side by armed guards, usually dressed in black. Behind them, pinned to the wall, is the group’s distinctive flag: a black banner emblazoned with a large yellow circle and the group’s name. In front of the execution squad is a bound and blindfolded figure.

Then there’s the man himself:

Al-Zarqawi was raised in a branch of the powerful Bani Hassan tribe and is remembered as a simple troublemaker who got mixed up with the wrong people. Many of his neighbours recalled him as a tattooed, under-educated thug, once jailed for drug abuse and sexual assault in Jordan, who was an embarrassment to his long-suffering father, a retired army officer.

Like many aimless youths in the Arab world in the 1980s, he was drawn to the cause of the Mujahidin in Afghanistan, then fighting the Soviet occupation. He arrived in 1989, too late to fight, so instead became a journalist working for an Islamic magazine. He returned home, three years later, a committed Islamic warrior in search of a cause.

The article makes clear how big a mistake it was to allow Fallujah to fester:

He is already credited with establishing a mini-Islamic state in the rebel stronghold of Fallujah, west of Baghdad, where his Mujahidin volunteers from across the Arab world operate in relative freedom after forcing out US troops in April.

Although his group is fundamentally opposed to the country’s Shia Muslim majority and other non-Sunni Arab sects, he has nevertheless succeeded in co-opting the resistance movement, which began as a nationalist struggle.

“This is jihad (holy war), so we cannot prevent any Muslim or Arab coming here to fight,” Abdullah al-Salafi, a local resistance fighter, said. “Our goal is to create in the rest of Iraq what we have achieved in Fallujah.”

Large sections of the city have been abandoned by the civilian population, allowing al-Zarqawi’s men to establish safe houses and plan future kidnappings, suicide car bombings and assassinations. For days last week his followers even seized control of Haifa Street, one of Baghdad’s main arteries, where the group’s distinctive black flag was draped on apartment balconies, street lamps and, briefly, on a destroyed US armoured vehicle.

What can you say about this?

The family of British hostage Kenneth Bigley today made a desperate plea to Tony Blair to bow to his kidnappers’ demands as the only way of saving his life.

They face a traumatic 24-hour wait after the deadline for Mr Bigley’s execution was extended, following the beheading on camera of one of his fellow hostages in Iraq, US building contractor Eugene Armstrong.

The kidnappers say Mr Bigley, 62, and their third hostage, American Jack Hensley, will meet the same fate unless Iraqi women held prisoner by the US are freed.

In a televised plea, Mr Bigley’s son Craig, 33, told Mr Blair: “Only you can save him now. You have children and you will understand how I feel at this time.” Mr Bigley’s brother, Philip, said: “We have seen the Prime Minister spending time on trains that can help a commuter save 14 minutes on a journey to London, when he should be devoting his time to saving the life of my brother.

“We are not politicians. He is the political head of our country. It is the Prime Minister who has the power to save Ken’s life. Prime Minister, we as a family are begging you, please help us.”

At the family home in Liverpool, he added: “We feel helpless. We do not have the power to save Ken’s life. The death of the American hostage has proved to us that if nothing is done then the two remaining captives will die by the most horrific means. The only person we can now beg to help us is the Prime Minister.”

Mr Blair has said he will not negotiate with terrorists. Before news of the execution, he said: “Our response has got to stand firm.”

You can’t blame Kenneth Bigley’s relatives. What would you do if it was a member of your family? You can’t blame the journalists – it’s a hot story. Should Blair give in to the demands? Of course not. But if Begley is killed, there’s no doubt Blair will take much of the blame, and we’ll see emotional outbursts from various relatives – and others seeing an opportunity to weigh in. It just needs to be appreciated quite how despicable this is; how Islamic terrorists have sunk, keep sinking, to new lows of behaviour. There’s nothing much more to be said, is there? Threatening to saw off an innocent man’s head live on video unless their demands are met? I mean, could we have believed just a few years ago that we’d be seeing something like this, that some people were capable of such things? Yes, I know we’re all hardened, post-holocaust, to the evils that humanity is capable of, but still…..

ey’re winning. And when he promises a “more sensitive” war on terror, it’s read as a pending declaration of surrender.

Kerry blathers. Bush delays. Iraq burns.

Meanwhile, our intelligence community has once again shown its weakness by covering its backside, instead of finding terrorists. A National Intelligence Council report revealed this week paints a bleak picture of the future of Iraq. Why? Because the intel bureaucrats don’t want to be blamed if things go wrong. There’s nothing safer than assuming failure.

us of the sex abuse cases in the eighties] actually may not be a bogeyman of the past. Some parents, therapists and child-protection professionals continue to believe ritual sex abuse took place at McMartin preschool. ”In 10 to 15 years, there will be an attempt to rehabilitate the ritual abuse scare,” [psychologist] Wood says. ”You can bet on it.”

nese government adamantly denied the women’s claims, saying they were feeding anti-Arab propaganda.

“These things simply do not happen,” one senior Sudanese diplomat said. “Such stories are a conspiracy of the West to discredit the government of Sudan.”

gime.”

And despite sporadic laughs here and there, most of Moore’s sardonic humour appeared to fall flat. The end of the film was also greeted with some half-hearted clapping.

“The problem is the subtitles,” said Sogol Zand, an English teacher. “The jokes are not as funny.”

Others, obviously out for a rare taste of Hollywood entertainment, disagreed.

“It was just too political. I was bored from the middle, and I wished we had gone to see “Kill Bill” instead,” said one young man, referring to the trendy Quentin Tarantino flick also being shown.

But those of the older generation appeared to relate well to the film, which succeeded in sparking some vigorous after-show chatter.

“I saw it as an Iranian who has also lived in America,” said Kourosh Amini, a man in his 50s. “It perfectly depicted the realities of American life, and they have to learn what war really looks like.”

And even though his twenty-something son quipped in to say he was “disappointed” by the film and asserted “politics is not as important” for Iran’s younger generation, he did envy Moore’s position.

“It sure is a great country, where someone like Moore trashes the president and gets away with it — and makes so much money!” he laughed.

Another woman said she was impressed with the scene where Moore chases US congressmen to ask them if they would send their children to Iraq.

“How many top officials here sent their offspring to fight in the Iran-Iraq war?” asked the woman, one of several who directed their frustrations at Iranian authorities — and not President Bush.

rfur was really, strictly speaking, a “genocide,” or merely a lot of people being killed in the same place at the same time. Perhaps they should simply have asked General Bashir, who plainly has some expertise in this area. Nonetheless, having evidently exhausted that legalism as a justification for its torpor, the U.N. is onto yet another scintillating exercise.

As reported in the New York Times on Wednesday, the United States has placed on the table a resolution (you may recall how well those worked in Iraq) raising the specter of “sanctions” (oh my goodness) against Sudan’s sharia-crats and its oil industry if they persist in their unseemly failure to hold the barbarity in Darfur down to a dull roar. But the resolution is stalled over a knotty problem.

The original U.S. draft, you see, said the Security Council “shall take” action in the very likely event Sudan ignores it. This upset China and Pakistan, which do big oil business with Sudan. So those two notoriously staunch defenders of human rights are holding out for “shall consider” — the semantic leap from take to consider possibly being enough to persuade them not to vote for, but to abstain from, the resolution so it can go through. In any event, we’ve now courageously agreed to modify this latest exercise in hand-wringing, ensuring for Darfur whatever additional weeks of delay it requires [for] 15 disparate countries to consider sanctions, versus to decide what sanctions to take. The shrill sound you just heard was either the last dying screams of another western tribesman or General Bashir laughing his head off — I’m not sure.

e region’s vast pistachio forests.

The head of the Natural Resources Department of Baft City in Kerman Province, Nasser Aqa-Molaei, said the prickly creatures have been nibbling at the roots of the trees and making them dry out. Reports said officials have resorted to surrounding the trunks of damaged trees with mesh wire in order to keep the porcus spina from destroying the crop of Iran’s favourite table-top nibble.