BBC report.

A Japanese oil tanker has been damaged by an explosion in the Strait of Hormuz near Oman, causing a minor injury to one crew member.

Japanese officials say the blast might have been caused by an attack, although piracy in the area is rare.

Patrick Cockburn in the Independent.

Pictures of prisoners being tormented in Abu Ghraib led to a tidal wave of revulsion against the US occupation of Iraq. The release of the vast archive of US military documents on Afghanistan is not likely to have the same explosive impact, but the sheer nastiness of the conflict is vividly conjured by the cumulative effect of thousands of uncensored reports from the frontline. The "Afghan Files" explain why the Kabul government is getting weaker, despite the fact that the US now has over 90,000 troops fighting 28,000 Taliban at a cost of $300bn (£190bn) over the last nine years.

Daily Mail report.

A former Russian spy's dossier which suggests that Government scientist David Kelly was 'exterminated' in a planned assassination is being studied by the Attorney General.

Boris Karpichkov, who fled to Britain after 15 years as a KGB agent, claims a London intelligence contractor linked to MI5 told him Dr Kelly's death was not suicide.

Independent report.

Dr Chris Busby, a visiting professor at the University of Ulster and one of the authors of the survey of 4,800 individuals in Fallujah, said it is difficult to pin down the exact cause of the cancers and birth defects. He added that "to produce an effect like this, some very major mutagenic exposure must have occurred in 2004 when the attacks happened".

From wsws.org.

The Iraqi city of Fallujah continues to suffer the ghastly consequences of a US military onslaught in late 2004.

According to the authors of a new study, "Cancer, Infant Mortality and Birth Sex-Ratio in Fallujah, Iraq 2005--2009," the people of Fallujah are experiencing higher rates of cancer, leukemia, infant mortality, and sexual mutations than those recorded among survivors in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the years after those Japanese cities were incinerated by US atomic bomb strikes in 1945.

From TheyWorkForYou.

Approximately 1.9 metric tonnes of DU ammunition was expended in the 2003 Iraq War by UK forces. The MOD provided the coordinates of targets attacked using DU ammunition in 2003 to the United Nations (UN) Environmental Programme. The MOD also shared with the UN and the Government of Iraq the results of a scientific assessment carried out in June 2003 that indicated very low levels of DU even in the vicinity of vehicles struck by DU munitions.

PA report.

Ministers could still use their powers to turn the July 7 London bombings inquests into a public inquiry to prevent secret MI5 evidence being released, a hearing has been told.

The Government said it would not launch a legal challenge to the coroner's ruling that she should investigate alleged police and security service failings.

But Home Secretary Theresa May reserves the right to launch a public inquiry and halt the inquests, potentially adding extra cost and delay to the process, the hearing at the Royal Courts of Justice in London was told.

David Hughes' Telegraph blog.

In his statement to the Commons on September 24, 2002, Tony Blair was unequivocal about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. He told MPs that the Joint Intelligence Committee had concluded:

…that Iraq has chemical and biological weapons, that Saddam has continued to produce them, that he has existing and active military plans for the use of chemical and biological weapons, which could be activated within 45 minutes, including against his own Shia population, and that he is actively trying to acquire nuclear weapons capability.

Chilling stuff. How does it measure up against today's testimony from Baroness Manningham-Buller at the Chilcot inquiry? The former MI5 chief has revealed that she advised officials a year before the war that the threat posed by Iraq to the UK was "very limited" and that the intelligence on Iraq's weapons threat was "fragmentary". And she added: "If you are going to go to war, you need to have a pretty high threshold to decide on that."

Guardian report.

David Cameron told the Commons that the government will next year "publish a green paper which will set out our initial proposals for how intelligence is treated in the full range of judicial proceedings, including addressing the concerns of our allies". The government is seeking legislation that would in future prevent judges releasing information passed to MI5 by the CIA, as they did in the Binyam Mohamed case.

Independent report.

In a letter copied to the Prime Minister, Reprieve has requested that Sir Peter Gibson step aside as his impartiality is fatally compromised.

As the Intelligence Services Commissioner (ISC), it has been Sir Peter's job for more than four years to oversee the Security Services; he cannot now be the judge whether his own work was effective.

Guardian report.

The Guardian has learned that while the American government is still officially resistant to the idea of talks with Taliban leaders, behind the scenes a shift is under way and Washington is encouraging Karzai to take a lead in such negotiations.

"There is a change of mindset in DC," a senior official in Washington said. "There is no military solution. That means you have to find something else. There was something missing."

The Leveretts comment. They refer to this article quoting Philip Giraldi.

Perhaps the strangest aspect of the strange case of Shahram Amiri is the behavior and public statements of U.S. officials since Amiri returned to Iran. These officials are talking to the media about Amiri in a way that makes one think they are out to goad the Iranian government into prosecuting Amiri for espionage. Why would they do that? Are they simply immature and unprofessional? Or, could it be that Amiri told them something they did not want to hear?

From the Sabbah Report.

Spot and Shoot, as it is called by the Israeli military, may look like a video game but the figures on the screen are real people -- Palestinians in Gaza -- who can be killed with the press of a button on the joystick.

The female soldiers, located far away in an operations room, are responsible for aiming and firing remote-controlled machine-guns mounted on watch-towers every few hundred metres along an electronic fence that surrounds Gaza.

[...]

The Israeli army, which plans to introduce the technology along Israel's other confrontation lines, refuses to say how many Palestinians have been killed by the remotely controlled machine-guns in Gaza. According to the Israeli media, however, it is believed to be several dozen.

Richard Ingrams comments in the Independent.

While the media pursue these red herrings, the most likely reason for Megrahi's release will go unmentioned. It is generally forgotten that, at the time of his release, he was engaged in a lengthy appeal hearing against his original conviction. Evidence showing the flimsiness of the case against him would have been produced; well-founded allegations of the bribery of witnesses and the possible planting of evidence on the crash site by the CIA would have been aired. It could all have ended with the exposure of one of the most scandalous miscarriages of justice ever acknowledged in a British court. No wonder that in the circumstances the Justice Minister, Jack Straw, was so keen to see the back of Megrahi and the discontinuation of his appeal hearing.

Telegraph report.

But his decision to fly back voluntarily, claiming outlandishly that he was kidnapped by CIA and Saudi agents during a pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia last June and then tortured in the US, has prompted suspicions that he was a double agent working for Iran all along, The Sunday Telegraph has learned.

New York Times report.

Iran's deputy police chief accused Pakistan on Saturday of providing a haven for members of an armed rebel group that has claimed responsibility for the deadly twin suicide bombings last week in front of a mosque in the southeastern city of Zahedan.

Robert Fisk in the Independent.

For that was the collective sin of Misses Nasr and Guy. What they said might have made Israel's supporters angry. And that will never do. The reality is that CNN should have told Israel's lobbyists to get lost, and the Foreign Office -- which was indeed upbraided by the Israeli foreign ministry -- should have asked the Israeli government when it is going to stop thieving Arab land. But as my old mate Rami Khoury put it in the Jordanian press this week, "We in the Middle East are used to this sort of racist intellectual terrorism. American and British citizens who occasionally dare to speak accurately about the Middle East and its people are still learning about the full price of the truth when Israeli interests are in the room."

Which brings us, of course, to the Grovel of the Week, the unctuous, weak-willed, cringing figure of Barack "Change" Obama as he strode the White House lawn with Netanyahu himself. For here was the champion of the underdog, the "understanding" president who could fix the Middle East -- finding it "harder that he thought", according to his spokesman -- proving that mid-term elections are more important than all the injustice in the Middle East. It is more than a year now since Netanyahu responded in cabinet to Obama's first criticisms with the remark: "This guy doesn't get it, does he?" (The quote comes from an excellent Israeli source of mine.) Ever since, Netanyahu has been McChrystalling Obama on a near-weekly basis, and Obama has been alternatively hissing and purring, banning Netanyahu from photo calls, but then -- as those elections draw nearer -- rolling over and talking about how the brave Netanyahu, whose government has just destroyed some more Arab homes in East Jerusalem, is taking "risks for peace".

Oxford Research Group report.

This report concludes that military action against Iran should be ruled out as a means of responding to its possible nuclear weapons ambitions. The consequences of such an attack would lead to a sustained conflict and regional instability that would be unlikely to prevent the eventual acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran and might even encourage it.

Associated Press report.

An Iranian official says the toll for an explosion outside a mosque Thursday night has risen to 22 and may increase further.

Ali Mohammad Azad, governor general of Sistan-Baluchistan province has told state TV that "some 22 people were killed instantly" in the twin bombing in the southeastern city of Zahedan.

The Leveretts comment on the Amiri affair.

As we wrote in April,

"[H]ow could it be that Amiri, who would have been 31 years old at the time of his defection, would have had meaningful access to anything sensitive about Iran's nuclear program--much less to have had such access "for at least a decade"? Unless Amiri completed his doctorate as a teenager and was given a senior position in Iran's nuclear program with high level access at the age of 20 or 21, this claim literally does not add up."

Now we learn, see here, that the CIA apparently tried to pay Amiri $5 million. Along with trying to figure out the details of Amiri's trajectory over the last year, journalists ought to be focusing on what the Agency's willingness to pay $5 million to a hyped-up source signals about the U.S. Intelligence Community's desperation to make a prosecutor's case against the Islamic Republic. Indeed, the CIA and the rest of the Intelligence Community seem sufficiently desperate to make their case that they will pay taxpayer dollars to gotten-up defectors who might be prepared to say--for the right price--what Washington elites want to hear. As we noted in our April piece, if the CIA and its partners in the Intelligence Community are unable to make a case against Iran, "how could Washington argue for intensified sanctions against the Islamic Republic--much less keep the military option 'on the table'."

Juan Cole comments on the Shahram Amiri affair.

This story, with the walk-in Iranian physicist who shows no interest in the reward money, who proves inconstant and toward the end tries to embarrass his host, has raised alarums among observers of the intelligence scene that Amiri was a double agent.

I am disturbed by this possibility because Amiri may have given false information to Washington. And the false information may have exaggerated Iran's nuclear capabilities.

New York Times report.

A strike at the traditional bazaar in Tehran continued into a second week on Thursday, spreading beyond the original gold and garments sectors and to at least two other major cities, news Web sites reported.

The strike, only the second at the bazaar to protest government policies since the 1979 revolution, began last week after the government proposed a 70 percent income tax increase and has continued even after the government lowered the planned increase to 15 percent. Major sections of the grand bazaar in Tehran have been closed this week with vendors sitting in their shops but keeping their doors and shutters closed.

Guardian report.

The true extent of the Labour government's involvement in the illegal abduction and torture of its own citizens after the al-Qaida attacks of September 2001 has been spelled out in stark detail with the disclosure during high court proceedings of a mass of highly classified documents.

Guardian report.

Is WikiLeaks the journalistic model for the future? He gives a characteristically lateral answer. "All over the world the barriers between what is inside an organisation and outside an organisation are being smoothed out. In the military, the use of contractors means that what is the military and what is not the military is smoothed out. Newswise, you see the same trend -- what is the newspaper and what is not the newspaper? Comments on websites from the general public and supporters ... "

BBC report.

Iran says a nuclear scientist it claims was abducted by the US has taken refuge in its interest section at Pakistan's embassy in Washington, state media say.

Shahram Amiri disappeared a year ago while on pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia.

From Jeff Stein's "Spy Talk" (Washington Post).

Reza Kahlili, a self-proclaimed former CIA "double agent" inside Iran's Revolutionary Guards, appeared in disguise at a Washington think tank Friday claiming that Iran has developed weapons-grade uranium and missiles ready to carry nuclear warheads.

The pseudonymous Kahlili, whose previous accounts have been greeted with widespread skepticism, also said Iran was planning nuclear suicide bombings with "a thousand suitcase bombs spread around Europe and the U.S."

[...]

Several current and former U.S. intelligence officials in the audience "rolled their eyes" at Kahlili's claims, said one observer who was present.

New York Times report.

The Iranian government declared a sudden, two-day national holiday on Sunday and Monday, after a long-simmering dispute between President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the Tehran bazaar erupted last week, leaving one prominent merchant dead, according to opposition Web sites.

Chris Ames in the Gaurdian's CiF.

Ross rams the point home at the end of his statement when he addresses the inquiry's failings:

"It is striking that in my preparations for this testimony, I found several documents germane to the inquiry whose existence was not revealed by earlier witnesses, including those who authored them. Other documents by certain officials contradicted the testimony they have given at this inquiry and yet these witnesses were not questioned about these contradictions."

Independent report.

Britain and the US did not believe Iraq's weapons programmes posed a "substantial threat" before launching the 2003 invasion that overthrew Saddam Hussein, the inquiry into the war heard today.

Former UK diplomat Carne Ross claimed that the Government "intentionally and substantially" exaggerated its assessment of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in public documents.

Transcript of Mearsheimer's speech on antiwar.com.

[...] there's no accountability for Israel on any issue. You don't need opacity. If I went to the Middle East, and visited Israel, and I was killed, somebody shot me, do you think there would be any accountability? Seriously. If any of you went to the Middle East and were killed, do you think there would be accountability? There wouldn't be. This is how outrageous this situation is. Just think about the [USS] Liberty, think about Rachel Corrie, think about this Turkish-American who was just killed on the flotilla.

There's no accountability.

Obsolete on the Liquid Bombs case.

Not that any of the trials have ever even began to prove that the supposed bombmaker, Assad Sarwar, was capable of creating the bombs which would have been used to destroy the aircraft they were going to target. Indeed, the prosecution made clear that wasn't a part of their case, even if it was scarcely reported; there was no evidence that a viable device had been created, just that "eventually" they would have been able to have done so, despite it taking the government's own experts 30 attempts with the same materials before they succeeded. Instead all have been tried simply on conspiracy to murder, even if they would have never been able to do so without working explosives.

BBC report.

Frances Guy wrote on her personal blog that Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah was a "decent man" who rated among the people she most admired.

An Israeli spokesman said Ayatollah Fadlallah was "unworthy of praise".

The UK foreign office says it has taken down the blog after "mature consideration".

Independent report. All the headlines will be devoted to Abu Hamza: most people will remain unaware of Babar Ahmad and the terrible injustice that has been done to him.

Human rights judges today ordered a halt to the extraditions of Babar Ahmad and radical preacher Abu Hamza, both wanted in the US on terror charges.

Independent report.

Babar Ahmad, 35, is the longest-serving prisoner held without charge or trial in the UK. In his first media interview since his arrest on a US extradition warrant in 2004, Mr Ahmad tells Robert Verkaik that he is the forgotten victim of the 'war on terror'. In March 2009, he was awarded £60,000 in compensation after an admission by the UK's anti-terrorist police that they subjected him to 'grave abuse, tantamount to torture' during his first arrest in December 2003. Corresponding via email from a secure isolation unit at Long Lartin prison, he calls on the Government to charge him or release him. Today, the European Court of Human Rights rules on his case.

PA report.

Tony Blair "very much exaggerated" Iran's role in supporting al Qaida insurgents in their attacks on British and American forces in Iraq, a former ambassador to Tehran has said. And Sir Richard Dalton said that the UK and US misread the intentions of the Iranian regime, believing it would inevitably be hostile to their mission in Iraq when in fact Tehran wanted them to succeed in installing a stable government in Baghdad.

Nafeez Ahmed writes.

While in opposition David Cameron and Nick Clegg both supported the call for an independent public inquiry into the 7/7 terrorist attacks. Yet now that power is theirs, the duo's coalition regime is challenging the 7/7 inquest's attempts to explore the "preventability" of the attacks. Three weeks ago, MI5 declared they were now preparing to apply for a judicial review of that decision.

Independent report.

The personal bank accounts of British citizens will be made available to American investigators working on counter-terrorism cases when MEPs approve a request made by President Obama today.

The controversial deal raises serious concerns about the privacy rights of British and other EU citizens whose personal banking affairs are held on a giant database that covers the vast majority of bank-to-bank financial transactions across Europe.

Independent report.

Jewish settlers, who claim a divine right to the whole of Israel, now control more than 42 per cent of the occupied West Bank, representing a powerful obstacle to the creation of a Palestinian state, a new report has revealed.

Washington Times report.

The United Arab Emirates ambassador to the United States said Tuesday that the benefits of bombing Iran's nuclear program outweigh the short-term costs such an attack would impose.

In unusually blunt remarks, Ambassador Yousef al-Otaiba publicly endorsed the use of the military option for countering Iran's nuclear program, if sanctions fail to stop the country's quest for nuclear weapons.

AP report.

The EU on Tuesday banned most of Iran Air's jets from flying to Europe due to safety concerns, emphasizing that the move was not related to U.N. sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program.

Telegraph report.

BAA, which owns Heathrow Airport, and other civil bodies have denied taking action, which would go beyond the sanctions agreed at the United Nations last month.

But The Daily Telegraph has been told that BP stopped its contract to provide fuel to at least one Iranian air company in Dubai, an important hub for Iranian travel, three days ago. BP is also understood to have sent orders to its European subsidiaries and partners telling them to withdraw services from Iranian airlines.

Juan Cole comments.

[...] But, from the point of view of the Likud Party and Yisrael Beitenu, being Israeli means never having to say you are sorry.

[...]

Netanyahu will likely offer Obama more of these essentially phony peace moves in Washington. The tensions between Israel and Turkey will therefore boil along. But likely everyone will graciously let Davutoglu forget he spoke so categorically or issued an ultimatum. Rocky relations, yes. No relations? Unlikely in the medium term.

AFP report.

Iran said on Tuesday that claims made by some Iranian officials that its passenger planes were being denied refuelling by airports in Britain, Germany and the United Arab Emirates are "false."

Mark Curtis in the Guardian.

But Whitehall's view of Islamist militants as handy weapons or shock troops is far from historical. In 1999, during Nato's bombing campaign against Yugoslavia, the Blair government secretly trained fighters in the Kosovo Liberation Army to act as Nato's soldiers on the ground. The KLA was openly described by ministers as a terrorist organisation, and worked closely with al-Qaida fighters who joined the Muslim cause; their military centre was in the same camp network in Kosovo and Albania where the SAS were providing training. One KLA unit was led by the brother of Ayman al-Zawahiri, Bin Laden's right-hand man. This murky feature of Blair's "humanitarian intervention" remains conveniently overlooked in most accounts of the war.

James Denselow in the Guardian.

In 2009 the head of the army, General Sir Richard Dannatt, told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme: "A high number of deaths inevitably makes you question what we are doing, how we are doing it. The conclusion one has to reach is, going right back to basics on this, that this mission is really important." Yet Dannatt is guilty of a moral triangulation that has typified the avoidance of a real audit into Afghan deaths.

Indeed, the constant repetition of the British death toll and fiscal expenditure is part of the "blood and treasure" argument that, in a country that supports its soldiers, places a firewall in front of any real debate on the war itself, typified by the consensus during the recent election campaign.

BBC report.

Turkey has warned that all diplomatic ties with Israel will be cut unless it apologises for a raid on a Gaza-bound aid flotilla in May.

The Turkish foreign minister said such a break could only be averted if Israel accepted an international inquiry into the incident.

William Dalrypmle in the Guardian.

Since then the nature of Karzai's plans have become clearer: it has emerged that the head of the ISI, Lieutenant General Ahmad Shuja Pasha, has secretly been visiting Karzai; on Monday General Kayani, the head of the Pakistani army, will arrive in Kabul, presumably to confirm whatever deal has been agreed. It seems the Pakistanis are encouraging an accommodation between Karzai and the ISI-sponsored jihadi network of Sirajuddin Haqqani, which would give over much of the Pashtun south to Haqqani but preserve Karzai in power in Kabul. The US has been party to none of this, and administration officials are apparently surprised and alarmed.

Guardian report.

Andrew Tyrie, the Conservative MP who established the Commons All-Party Parliamentary Group on Extraordinary Rendition, said: "I am appalled but not entirely surprised by the extent of British involvement in extraordinary rendition which these documents appear to reveal. I was extremely concerned to read the telegram [giving the go-ahead for removing those detained in Afghanistan to Guantánamo] attributed to Jack Straw. If it is from him, it reveals that as foreign secretary in 2002 he stated that the transfer of UK detainees to Guantánamo Bay was the 'best way' and should take place 'as soon as possible' after the detainees had been interviewed by a British team."

"Yet Jack Straw subsequently claimed that he had no knowledge of any British involvement in rendition. Worse, he dismissed the concerns of those of us who had raised this issue over many years as 'conspiracy theories'. "I hope there is a good explanation. In the absence of one, for a Foreign Secretary to have issued such denials, after having apparently endorsed the rendition of UK detainees three years earlier, would further erode the public's trust in politics. That has already been badly damaged by the Iraq war."

New York Times report.

Pakistani television networks reported that the blasts killed at least 35 people, and wounded more than 175 in the Data Ganj Baksh shrine, an ancient white marble place of worship in Lahore that draws Muslims from all over Pakistan.

Andrew Sullivan on his Atlantic blog.

Nick Kristof observes ethnic cleansing and collective punishment first-hand:

On one side of a barbed-wire fence here in the southern Hebron hills is the Bedouin village of Umm al-Kheir, where Palestinians live in ramshackle tents and huts. They aren't allowed to connect to the electrical grid, and Israel won't permit them to build homes, barns for their animals or even toilets. When the villagers build permanent structures, the Israeli authorities come and demolish them, according to villagers and Israeli human rights organizations.

On the other side of the barbed wire is the Jewish settlement of Karmel, a lovely green oasis that looks like an American suburb. It has lush gardens, kids riding bikes and air-conditioned homes. It also has a gleaming, electrified poultry barn that it runs as a business. Elad Orian, an Israeli human rights activist, nodded toward the poultry barn and noted: "Those chickens get more electricity and water than all the Palestinians around here."

Guardian report.

Iran's largest private university has become the focus of a bitter political battle for control between President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his most powerful rival, Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.

Mirroring intense factional conflicts since last year's contested elections, rival factions are in a power struggle for Azad Islamic University in Tehran, which has hundreds of campuses across Iran and assets worth tens of billions of dollars.

Richard Sanders in the Guardian's CiF

But Camp David was a turning point. It was here that Blair firmly committed Britain to military action and it would be surprising if Blair's staff were unaware of this. The summit explains one of the great mysteries of the Iraq war -- why the Americans were so lacklustre in their attempts to get a second resolution at the UN in March 2003. They knew the British would be with them whatever happened. Blair had played his hand too early and from September 2002 Washington knew it could take Britain for granted.

Strangely, the Camp David summit was entirely omitted from the Chilcot inquiry's questioning of Blair in April. It may be an area it now wants to return to.