THIS MODERN WORLD

Still a few minor details to work out in the meantime:

Majid Hamid, 41, a Sunni human rights worker whose brother was kidnapped and killed by men in uniform four months ago, said he doubted that the answer would ever be known. Now, he said, the authorities normally trusted to investigate may be responsible for the crime.

“Whenever I see uniforms now, I figure they must be militias,” Mr. Hamid said in a recent interview. “I immediately try to avoid them. If I have my gun, I know I need to be ready to use it.”

Such is the attitude of Iraqis in this capital shellshocked and made fearful by violence that seems to be committed almost daily by men dressed as those who are supposed to protect and serve. The audacious kidnapping on Monday was just the latest case of men using the signals of law and safety — a uniform, a vehicle with blue lights, a patch on the sleeve — to attack and abduct.

Everywhere Iraqis in uniform go, from ice cream shops to checkpoints, people now flee. The mottled mix of green, blue and khaki camouflage, along with the blue shirts of the local police, have all blurred into a flag for alarm. “En eles,” Iraqis in Baghdad now say when a friend has been taken; in traditional Arabic it means chewed up, but in the streets it has come to mean taken by mysterious men without explanation.

Here:

A Marine Corps staff sergeant who led the squad accused of killing two dozen civilians in Haditha, Iraq, will file a lawsuit today in federal court in Washington claiming that Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.) defamed him when the congressman made public comments about the incident earlier this year.

Attorneys for Frank D. Wuterich, 26, argue in court papers that Murtha tarnished the Marine’s reputation by telling news organizations in May that the Marine unit cracked after a roadside bomb killed one of its members and that the troops “killed innocent civilians in cold blood.” Murtha also said repeatedly that the incident was covered up.

And here:

Source: Haditha evidence implicates Marines

Investigators reportedly finish initial review in deaths of 24 civilians

WASHINGTON – Evidence collected on the deaths of 24 Iraqis in Haditha supports accusations that U.S. Marines deliberately shot the civilians, including unarmed women and children, a Pentagon official said Wednesday.

Agents of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service have completed their initial work on the incident last November, but may be asked to probe further as Marine Corps and Navy prosecutors review the evidence and determine whether to recommend criminal charges, according to two Pentagon officials who discussed the matter on condition of anonymity.

… A parallel investigation is examining whether officers in the Marines’ chain of command tried to cover up the events.

Scanned from this morning’s New Haven Register:

Great. Lebanon is in flames, the Iraqis are playing Name That Death Squad, the neocons want to renact Hiroshima in Iran, the Turks are talking about settling scores with the Kurds, the Taliban are cultivating their Pashtun gardens, and Bush’s butler is giving us existentialist psychobabble.

I think he may be even more deranged than his master. The other day Blair said something to the effect that he was absolutely confident — way down in that “irreducible core” of his — that his Middle East policies are correct. It was the sort of thing Shrub might say if he knew what the word “irreducible” means.

I remember thinking: Anyone who has even a smidgeon of knowledge about, or experience in, the Middle East, and who says he is absolutely, 100% certain he has the right answers, is either a liar, a fanatic, or Tom Friedman — which is to say, a world-class educated fool.

Blair, unfortunately, is all three.

Just go, and start scrolling.

“Helpless,” with Bruce Springsteen, at the Bridge School benefit in 1986.

I was at that show (jesus — twenty years ago); one of my strongest memories from the evening is of Springsteen doing a solo version of “Born in the USA.” I wasn’t a huge Springsteen fan, and while I understood that the song was hardly the pro-American anthem a lot of people were pretending that it was, I was still pretty sick of the driving, anthemic beat punctuated with that bumper-sticker chorus. But that evening, Springsteen reinvented the song, turned it into the slow mournful blues number that it really should have been all along, and the moment was utterly captivating. Whoever posted the video above doesn’t seem to have posted that performance, but this is a similar version: