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The Iranian President decided to present his own version of the New Year’s Honours List by handing out medals to the Iranian military personnel who captured the British military personnel in the Persian Gulf and announced: Iran ‘to release British sailors’

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says 15 British naval personnel captured in the Gulf will be freed.

He repeated allegations that the British sailors and marines “invaded” Iranian waters, but said they would be freed as a “gift” to Britain.

He got to appear to be a peace loving, reasonable leader, slam the UK and US for aggression, and avoid an internal struggle within the Iranian government.

I would wait until the British personnel are back in British hands before scheduling any celebrations, because there are a lot of groups and people in Iran who can overrule decisions made by Ahmadinejad.

[It’s the new year on the Persian calendar.]

The BBC highlights a problem which affects the entertainment industry in the current stand-off: C[hannel] 4 may pull drama over Iran fears.

Channel 4 says it is considering delaying a drama about British soldiers in Iraq as the UK negotiates to free 15 Royal Navy personnel captured by Iran.

The Mark of Cain, which was due to be broadcast on Thursday, shows British troops abusing Iraqi detainees.

I’m not in favor of censorship, but this is probably not a good time to remind people of the coalition treatment of detainees in Iraq. This is why adherence to the Geneva Conventions is not “quaint” – you do it to protect your own people.

Update: Michael Hirsh of Newsweek looks at The Rose Garden Offensive, and doesn’t buy it:

Bush came out swinging against a Democratic Congress determined, he argues, to undo the benefits of the “surge.” Time for a reality check. Finding the thorns in Bush’s Rose Garden address.

Update: Magpie at Pacific Views looked it up: so far the Dems have taken 57 days this year for this bill. The Reps took 86 days in 2005 and 119 days in 2006.

Update: Melanie at Just a Bump in the Beltway notes that Mr. Absent is complaining about Congress taking a break the day before he heads back to Crawford for Easter. [Back in January she noted he had racked up 365 days at Camp David and 405 days in Crawford in 6 years.]

From BBC coverage of the Shrubbery’s press conference: Bush warns over Iraq funds delay

US President George W Bush has warned that US troops will suffer if a dispute with Congress over a war funding bill is not resolved soon.

Speaking at the White House, Mr Bush said Congress was failing in its “basic responsibility” to give troops the equipment and training they need.

Actually, Congress has been funding equipment and training for years, and the Pentagon hasn’t been using the money. Rumsfeld was not replacing equipment, and people were being sent to Iraq without training. The problem for the last six years has been the Department of Defense, not Congress.

Not that Congress has been doing a great job. The 109^th Congress under Republican leadership still hadn’t passed the budget bills that were due in October of last year when they left, but the Shrubbery didn’t complain about that.

Congress is the branch that declares war, authorizes money, writes the rules [UCMJ] for the military, has to agree on the commissions of officers. Congress has more power regarding the military than the “Commander in Chief.” If Congress wants the war to end, it is over. If the President doesn’t agree, Congress can impeach the President.

It’s time that Congress takes its responsibilities seriously, and starts to use its power.

Update 04/03: Via Juan Cole, The Australian carries a report by James Hider in Baghdad for The Times:

…21 Shia market workers were ambushed, bound and shot dead north of the capital.

The victims came from the Baghdad market visited the previous day by John McCain, the US presidential candidate, who said that an American security plan in the capital was starting to show signs of progress.

John feels a need to prove that Iraq is becoming Eden, so he interrupts the war by showing up and demanding to go on a walking tour. He wanders outside the Green Zone and visits a market for a total of an hour and declares that a new era in dawning.

He fails to mention the sweep looking for bombs and snipers before he went, the 100 infantrymen in his bodyguard, the three Blackhawks used for aerial surveillance, the two Apache gunships for extra punch, or the personal body armor. He makes no mention of the lives he put it harm’s way, the cost, the wear and tear on people and equipment that were involved in this political stunt.

Quiddity noticed the reaction of a mild-mannered Middle East professor at mild-mannered Midwestern university, Doctor Juan Cole.

Quiddity is as stunned as I am. Dr. Cole wears tweed jackets and glasses, and always sounds so professorial.

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Lurch at Main and Central labeled his post: Soylent Green.

Add Gravy Train, Jerky Treats, Pounce, Ol’ Roy, Dollar General and Happy Trails brands to the list of those who used the suspect wheat gluten. But the fun part is:

Wheat gluten is sold in both “food grade” and “feed grade” varieties. Either may be used in pet food, but only “food grade” gluten may be used in the manufacture of products meant for human consumption.

This was “food grade” gluten and they still haven’t identified the source, so it could have been used in the stuff you microwaved last night. I don’t guess consumers are ready for the truth – no one is inspecting the food supply.

As Pensacola Beach Blog puts it :McCain’s Walk on the Wild Side.

Anyone with a company of heavy infantry, three Blackhawks and two Apaches for air cover, and personal body armor can walk through a carefully selected Baghdad neighborhood.

John McCain is clueless. He has hitched his wagon to a mission on its way over a cliff.

I’ve said before, you can’t trust any information provided as a result of torture. That reality is embedded in US law. People continue to promote torture because they are sadistic bastards: it doesn’t provide useful information, so QED they are sadistic bastards. Courts also refuse to recognize any agreement that results from coercion, a polite name for torture. The whole reason for coercion is to force people to do something they wouldn’t do if given the choice.

Lt. Col. V. Stuart Couch, JAG USMC, understands this. Pierre of Candide’s Notebooks tells the story of the colonel in The Conscience of the Colonel. The colonel has every reason, including the death of a friend to want to see al Qaeda pursued and destroyed, but he knows at a gut level if someone was coerced, you can’t be sure anything he said was true.

After all these years we are still hearing stories like, UK man released from Guantanamo: “Bisher al-Rawi, an Iraqi national, was held at the US detention camp in Cuba on suspicion of links to terrorism while on a trip to Gambia in 2002.” The man and a business associate are picked up in Africa, declared terrorists, and sent to Guantanamo. After four years he is released because there is no real evidence that he did anything wrong.

Then there’s Gitmo Australian Gets 9 Months, the story of David Hicks:

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Everything is politics with these people.

CNN reports that War efforts funded through July, analysis finds, but the Shrubbery and his Chairman of the Joint Chiefs have a different story:

President Bush and Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have said the Pentagon needs Congress to approve additional war funding by April 15, or military operations will begin to be affected.

Pierre Tristam plotted the other line of attack yesterday in Swine Story, i.e. that the Shrubbery will claim the bill is filled with “pork barrel” projects [like the money promised to people recovering from hurricanes and rebuilding the New Orleans flood barriers].

On cue in his weekly liar-side chat™ Bush vows to veto Iraq war bill; vet says it should pass:

President Bush, seeking to one-up Congress’ Democratic majority in a showdown over the Iraq war, suggested Saturday that lawmakers should be ashamed that they added non-war items to an Iraq spending bill.

“I like peanuts as much as the next guy, but I believe the security of our troops should come before the security of our peanut crop,” Bush said in his weekly radio address, referring to a provision in the war funding legislation that earmarks $74 million for secure peanut storage.

Excuse me, the agricultural elements are part of a supplemental appropriation to cover disasters. The funds for the military should have been in the main budget that was submitted, but the entire war has been funded off budget, so the Shrubbery can lie about the deficits he is racking up.

Update: Via Avedon Carol of Sideshow, Terry Jones [of Monty Python] writes in The Guardian: Call that humiliation? – “No hoods. No electric shocks. No beatings. These Iranians clearly are a very uncivilised bunch.”

Just to help calm down the situation, after deciding to hold war games off the coast of Iran, now the US rejects Iran captives exchange. As Ellroon Rants from the Rookery puts it: Do as I say. [/snark]

The US raided an Iranian liaison office in Northern Iraq on January 11^th and seized 5 Iranians working there. The Iranians have been “disappeared”, but no one is supposed to question what happened, and there is no contact between the prisoners and their government. The Iranians were there at the request of the regional government to coordinate border crossings.

The Iranians want to exchange the 15 UK personnel for the 5 Iranians. The US has produced no hard evidence that the Iranians were doing anything that wasn’t within their mandate in the agreement with Kurdish authorities, just as there is no hard evidence that the British personnel have done anything wrong.

An exchange would have gone a long way towards reducing tensions, but the Shrubbery can’t deal with reality. The history of Iran hostage rescue missions is not good.

Update: Via Alice in comments, Think Progress reports: Republican Delegation Currently Visiting Syria, Spared From White House Attacks. There are currently two Republan Congresscritters in Syria, and another is accompanying Speaker Pelosi. IOKIYAR.

We are told that the White House criticizes Pelosi’s planned Syria visit:

“We do not encourage and, in fact, we discourage members of Congress to make such visits to Syria,” said White House deputy spokeswoman Dana Perino. “This is a country that is a state sponsor of terror, one that is trying to disrupt the (Prime Minister Fouad) Siniora government in Lebanon and one that is allowing foreign fighters to flow through its borders to Iraq.

“I don’t know what she is trying to accomplish, and I don’t know if anyone in the administration has spoken to her about it,” Perino said. “In general, we do discourage such trips.”

Responding to a follow-up question, Perino added, “We think that someone should take a step back and think about the message that it sends … to our allies.”

What allies? We still have allies?

It would appear that the message the Speaker is sending is that some portion of the American government is willing to talk to people, and more importantly – to listen.

The Siniora government is in trouble because the government is a parliamentary system and it has lost its majority support after the Israeli attacks. The Shi’ite parties want a new election in accordance with the laws of Lebanon.

Foreign fighters can move around the Syrian-Iraqi border because the American military killed several Syrian border guards in hot pursuit of sheep smugglers earlier, and the Syrians aren’t anxious to repeat the experience. Of course, there is no one to stop the infiltration on the Iraqi side because we don’t have enough troops to seal the border. It’s a feature of borders that they can be sealed from either side.

As for terrorists, I don’t suppose anyone checked the lists on the MEK, or, even the Dawa party of the current Iraqi prime minister, clients of the US. There isn’t a political party in the Middle East that didn’t start out as a terrorist group.

Just because the Shrubbery doesn’t have the courage to talk to people who don’t agree with him, doesn’t mean that no one is able to do it. Talk is cheap, wars are very expensive.

And at It’s morning somewhere, Oldwhitelady has baby pictures.

I really am, I have a terrible attitude.

Mustang Bobby at Bark Bark Woof Woof does a fantastic job in The Prophet from Colorado Springs with this killer final paragraph:

Dr. Dobson and his crew keep predicting the End of Days and the Rapture when all of his like-minded “Christians” get beamed up to heaven, leaving behind all their clothes, worldly possessions, and the rest of us non-believers. As far as I’m concerned, it can’t happen soon enough: all those annoying, constipated, gay-bashing busybodies will be gone, and we can sell all their stuff on E-Bay.

And my mind conjures up one of my favorite of all time lines from any television show: It’s a cookbook!

Now, admit it, that is really an evil mind at work.

UPDATE: Here’s the position plotted on Google maps with an overlay by bbs.keyhole.com. I would note that the position shown is using the helicopter GPS, which is commercial , and only accurate to 10 meters, and it reflects the location of the helicopter, not the ship, which appears to be some unknown distance away.

The British Navy has published the GPS readings, and pictures “to try to prove that its naval party had not gone into Iranian waters and ridiculing Iranian claims to the contrary.”

But there’s a major problem:

Richard Schofield, an expert in international boundaries at King’s College London, questioned whether the dispute would be eased if the Royal Navy released co-ordinates of where the sailors were seized.

[snip]

“Iran and Iraq have never agreed a boundary of their territorial waters. There is no legal definition of the boundary beyond the Shatt al-Arab.”

The line on the British map has never been agreed to by anyone, so there is no agreement as to whether the coordinates the British published are in Iraqi or Iranian waters. The British personnel could be held up waiting for Iraq and Iran to agree on the border, which might be what the Iranians were after when they made the seizure.

Debbye Turner, the resident vet at CBS, warns that there are indications that the final number of deaths will be in the hundreds when the results are in for the tainted pet food. Matthew Philips of Newsweek asks Is Pet Food Properly Regulated?

I don’t mean to pick on Mr. Philips, but he needs to look at recent history, which makes the answer obvious – pet food has a lower priority than human food, and the record on regulation of human food is shameful.

Wikipedia maintains a List of United States foodborne illness outbreaks. If you come forward from year 2000 you will find:

• Salmonella in peanut butter, bean sprouts, and orange juice,
• E. coli O157:H7 in lettuce, spinach, and hamburger,
• Hepatitis A in green onions,
• Listeria in chicken, and
• Botulism in fish.

In case people have forgotten the mantra of Republans is that regulation is bad for business and should be avoided because of the costs. They forget about the costs involved when people and pets die from the lack of regulation. They forget about the cost associated with government bailouts after unregulated businesses go bust.

Right now we are looking at “Resolution Trust II” to clean up the mess in the home mortgage sector. More billions of tax dollars to rescue people from what unregulated business does under Republans.

And some people still believe these clowns are going to protect us from terrorists? All al Qaeda has to do is incorporate in Delaware and they’ll receive tax breaks and subsidies.