In the spirit of laughing with tears in your eyes (or, as Wavy Gravy put it, demanding your right to bring a whoopie-cushion to Auschwitz), file this under "Leftist Conspiracy Theorists Vindicated Again." From the BBC, Dec. 9:

The US has admitted for the first time that it has not given the Red Cross access to all detainees in its custody.

The state department's top legal adviser, John Bellinger, made the admission but gave no details about where such prisoners were held.

Correspondents say the revelation is likely to increase suspicion that the CIA has been operating secret prisons outside international oversight.

You can't make this stuff up. From the Jerusalem Post, Dec. 8:

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad continued his anti-Israel rhetoric Thursday afternoon, denying the Holocaust and calling on Germany and Austria to create a Jewish State within their borders, Israel Radio reported.

"We do not believe that Hitler killed six million Jews, but even if this is true by some chance, then why should the Palestinians pay the price for it," he asked, and suggested that the governments in Vienna and Berlin concede two or three provinces to the Zionists and settle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict once and for all.

The ugly face of petro-tyranny (or is the better term autocracy?). From AP, Dec. 6:

Man Who Received Jaywalking Ticket Dies of Injuries

Washington D.C. (AP) A 73-year-old man who received a $5 jaywalking ticket after he was hit by a car has died from his injuries.

Charles Atherton, a former secretary of the U.S. Commission on Fine Arts, was hit last Thursday while crossing Connecticut Avenue Northwest, near the Uptown Theater. He died Saturday night at George Washington University Hospital.

Here's some good news for humanity, but a real no-win for the neo-Ustashe and neo-Chetniks who plague this blog. The neo-Ustashe will be aghast that the proud defender of an ethnically-pure Croatia has been subjected to this indignity—or, the more hypocritical ones will be chagrined by the riots in their civilized, Euro-ready Croatia. The neo-Chetniks, in turn, will have still less plausibility to harp on their long-nourished gripe that the world is picking on the Serbs and giving the Croats a pass. We imagine both varieties of kneejerk extremists will become even more venemous upon being backed into a corner like this. Bring it on! Let the abuse hurl forth! From the Financial Mirror, Dec. 9:

Noting the rise of Islamist Shi'ites to power in Iraq, we recently asked Is Iran the real winner? One who seems to think so is Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute. In the Nov. 30 National Review Online, he takes the Bush administration on for retreating from the maximalist necon agenda to reshape the Middle East. He especially accuses US Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad of a "policy of preemptive embrace of our announced enemies."

The war in Iraq was waged against an evil regime run by (minority) Sunnis. The object of Operation Iraqi Freedom, oft stated by the president and his Cabinet secretaries, was the overthrow of Saddam and the liberation of the Iraqi people. We have repeatedly promised to create the first democracy in the Arab Middle East, in which a constitution will protect the rights of the people, and the people will elect their own leaders.

Most of the establishment in the Muslim Middle East hates this idea, because, if implemented regionally, it would remove every current leader. The royal families, Baathists, and mullahs vastly prefer the kind of dictatorship imposed on the Iraqi people by Saddam and his (Sunni) Tikritis. They have been the Sunnis' biggest and boldest lobbyists, constantly issuing outrageously meddlesome statements from their own capitals and from meetings of the colossal failure known as the Arab League. They don't want democracy. They want the big guys to call the shots, and they want the Iraqi Sunnis to have power far beyond their real political strength.

Incredibly, they have convinced the American government to do just that.

From Reporters Without Borders, Dec. 8:

The 2005 Reporters Without Borders/Fondation de France prize in the "cyberdissident" category was awarded on 7 December to Massoud Hamid. He was arrested in July 2004 and sentenced to three years in prison for "membership of a secret organisation" after posting photos of a Kurdish demonstration in Syria on a foreign-based website.

One of the very few journalists who have managed to take photographs of a pro-Kurdish demonstration in Syria, which he sent abroad to be posted on a German-based website (www.amude.com). He was punished very harshly.

The current (Dec. 1) issue of The Economist includes a profile of "China's far west"—a region variously known as Xinjiang (to the Chinese), or East Turkestan or Uighurstan to its indigenous inhabitants, the Turkic and Muslim Uighurs. After providing some background on the separatist strife in the Autonomous Region (which readers of WW4 Report will already be familiar with), it notes the recent development of gasfields there and the construction, now underway, of a pipeline to Kazakhstan. We recently noted that Kazakhstan is to be connected with the new trans-Caucasian Baku-Ceyhan pipeline with a link across the Caspian Sea, at the other end of the country. Now, Kazakhstan is a vast place, but it is nearly inevitable the global planners already foresee linking these pipelines. The question, ultimately, is whose control all this infrastructure will fall under. With all eyes on the Baku-Ceyhan route, Japan is seeking a Pacific route for Siberian and (eventually) Central Asian oil and gas—which would, as we have noted, strategically by-pass longtime rival China.

The patrician wonks at the Council on Foreign Relations raise the alarm in a January report that Africa will be increasingly strategic to global energy security in the coming century—and that China is beating the US to the punch in securing access to the continent's fossil fuel resources. From Reuters, Dec. 7:

THE US faces stiff competition from China for oil supplies from Africa and Washington must take a more strategic view of the continent by investing more resources there, US experts say.