At least 40 bodies have been found recently in Iraq's southern oil port of Basra, with the pull-out of British troops leaving only chaos and women increasingly targets of religious fundamentalists. "Some women along with their children have been killed," Basra police commander Abd Al Jalil Khalef told the pan-Arab daily Asharq Al Awsat. "A woman with two children, oe who was six and the other was 11 years old, were killed." He added that families usually refrain from filing complaints out of fear of retribution, indicating that many killings never get reported. Warnings have appeared written in red on the walls of Basra streets: "We are warning women not to wear makeup and not to be uncovered. Whoever violates this will be punished. As god as my witness, I have informed you."

A fire erupted Dec. 7 on the pipeline carrying oil from the Kirkuk fields to the Baiji refinery north of Baghdad. The state-run Northern Oil Company said the reason was unclear. In September, the pipeline burst in a suspected bomb attack. (Gulf News via Iraq Updates, Dec. 7) There have been 576 pipeline attacks in Iraq since March 2003, along with 69 attacks on refineries, 508 attacks on tanker trucks, six on maritime tankers and one on a train tanker car. At least 635 oil workers have been attacked—killed, wounded, kidnapped or subject to an attempted kidnapped. At least 1,211 workers in Iraq's power sector have also been targeted, and there have been 651 attacks on distribution and transmission lines and towers, 66 attacks on thermal power stations and five on hydroelectric power stations and 13 on power substations. Iraq's northern pipeline has been the major target. It was built with a total capacity of around 1.7 million barrels per day, but frequent attacks since the war have kept is largely out of commission. Recent repairs and a new security plan have allowed it to resume working, part of the reason Iraq has increased production from a little more than 2 million bpd to nearly 2.4 million. (UPI, Dec. 6)

From the Global Justice Ecology Project, Dec. 7:

Indigenous Peoples shut out of Climate Change Negotiations
Nusa Dua, Bali, Indonesia - Indigenous peoples representing regions from around the world protested outside the climate negotiations today wearing symbolic gags that read UNFCCC, the acronym of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, symbolizing their systematic exclusion from the UN meeting.

However naive she may be about Western intentions, Ayaan Hirsi Ali deserves creds for asking the tough questions about the Muslim establishment. Why—with rare exception—are no voices on the anti-imperialist left asking these questions? From the New York Times op-ed page, Dec. 7 (links added):

Pakistani security forces dynamited the homes of Maulana Fazlullah and his spokesman Maulana Sirajuddin Dec. 6 in the Swat Valley village of Imam Dehri, North-West Frontier Province. The Maulana's madrassa was left intact. "The fate of the controversial seminary of Maulana Fazlullah will be decided by local people," an official said. Military authorities said soldiers seized machine-guns, pistols, hand-grenades, rocket-launchers, computers and—surprisingly—some liquor bottles. Clean-up operations are said to be underway. "The forces will chase militants out of the area," Maj-Gen Naseer Janjua told journalists in the village. (Dawn, Pakistan, Dec. 6)

More than nine months and countless African lives ago, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued what critics dismissed as toothless "pseudo-indictments" against two men identified as masterminds of the Darfur genocide—Janjaweed militia leader Ali Muhammad Ali Abd al-Rahman (nom de guerre Ali Kushayb) and Sudan's ironically named "Humanitarian Affairs Minister" Ahmed Harun. Then, in a fairly obvious charade, the Khartoum regime announced it was putting Ali Kushayb on trial itself. A few months later, the Bush administration announced it was placing sanctions on Harun—but also on Khalil Ibrahim, one of the guerilla leaders resisting the genocide! Now, predictably, Kushayb has been freed by Khartoum for supposed "lack of evidence," while Harun continues on in his Orwellian position. The ICC issues a new report protesting Sudan's failure to turn over the two suspects—leaving rights groups to wonder if the charade will not continue interminably, as Darfurians continue to die. From Human Rights First, Dec. 6:

The CIA's admission that it filmed the interrogation of terrorism suspects and then destroyed the tapes will kill any chances of convictions, attorneys representing Guantanamo Bay prisoners say. "First, it's a criminal offence to destroy evidence," said Clive Stafford Smith of the legal group Reprieve. "Second, if you do, the American case law is quite clear: the charges get dismissed against the individual if it's evidence that would have helped the defense." Stafford Smith, who represents seven Guantanamo inmates, said, "Now, because they've tortured them, they've made the job of putting them on trial very much more difficult."

From the Polytechnic Free Campaign, support group for dissident students at Amir Kabir University of Technology (formerly Tehran Polytechnic), Dec. 6:

On Tuesday the 4th of December, security police and masked intelligence agents arrested 28 students during a demonstration against the Iranian government. Some of them are detained in solitary confinement in the notorious high security lockup of 209 and some in the small lockup of the intelligence agency in central Tehran called Tracking office (Daftare Peygiri).