The Galaxies of the Universe Appear to Negate Big Bang Theory

August 09, 2010

The Galaxies of the Universe Appear to Negate Big Bang Theory

The prevailing Big Bang Theory predicts that all galaxies should be evenly distributed on the outer rims of the initial expanding explosive force. But in contradiction to the standard theory, ancient galaxies orbit the Milky Way. There are nearby galaxies over 13 billion years in age as well as and ancient fully formed galaxies located over 13.1 billion light years distant from the Milky Way. Galaxies move in the wrong directions and at different speeds, with galaxies colliding into one another from every conceivable direction.
Throughout the known, Hubble length universe, hundreds of millions of galaxies have clumped together, forming super clusters and a series of great walls of galaxies which are separated by vast voids of empty space. Several of these elongated super clusters have formed a series of walls, one after another, spaced from 500 million to 800 million light years apart, such that in one direction alone, 13 Great Walls have formed with the inner and outer walls separated by less than 7 billion light years. Some recent theories estimate that these galactic walls may have taken from 80 billion to 100 billion, to 150 billion years to form.
Millions of galaxies over one hundred million light years across, moving in the same direction, have penetrated the center of the local super cluster of galaxies located in the vicinity of the Centaurus and Hydra and constellations.
Another anomaly is the Coma cluster at the center of the CfA2 Great Wall. It is one of the largest observed structures in the Universe, containing over 10,000 galaxies and extending more than 1.37 billion light years in length.
In there attemps to rationalize these glaring anomalies, the prevailing theory has posited "dark energy" to explain why a created universe did not spread out uniformly at the same speed and in the same "spoke-like" directions as predicted by theory. With the addition of as yet unproven dark energy or a "great attractor" the "Big Bang universe slows down, then suddenly speeds up, then slows down, then accelerates. with different regions all moving at different velocities and different directions."
Casey Kazan
Sources: Springel, V. et al., (2006). The large-scale structure of the Universe. Nature 440, 1137-1144; Cosmology.com

mage of the Day: A Deep View Inside the Coma Galaxy Cluster

Image of the Day: A Deep View Inside the Coma Galaxy Cluster

The Coma cluster is one of the largest observed structures in the Universe, containing over 10,000 galaxies and extending more than 1.37 billion light years in length. A long-exposure Hubble Space Telescope image shows a majestic face-on spiral galaxy located deep within the “Coma Cluster” of galaxies and islands of stars similar to the Milky Way.
Nasa said the stunning long-exposure picture, titled “Island Universe”, shows the “majestic face-on spiral galaxy” in the northern constellation Coma Berenices amid a sea of stars.The galaxy, titled as NGC 4911, contains rich lanes of dust and gas near its center. These are silhouetted against glowing newborn star clusters and iridescent pink clouds of hydrogen, the existence of which indicates ongoing star formation.
Hubble has also captured the outer spiral arms of NGC 4911, along with thousands of other galaxies of varying sizes. The high resolution of Hubble’s cameras, paired with considerably long exposures, made it possible to observe these faint details.
NGC 4911 and other spirals near the center of the cluster are being transformed by the gravitational tug of their neighbors. In the case of NGC 4911, wispy arcs of the galaxy’s outer spiral arms are being pulled and distorted by forces from a companion galaxy (NGC 4911A), to the upper right.
The resultant stripped material will eventually be dispersed throughout the core of the Coma Cluster, where it will fuel the intergalactic populations of stars and star clusters.
The Coma Cluster is home to almost 1,000 galaxies, making it one of the densest collections of galaxies in the nearby universe. It continues to transform galaxies at the present epoch, due to the interactions of close-proximity galaxy systems within the dense cluster. Vigorous star formation is triggered in such collisions.
Galaxies in this cluster are so densely packed that they undergo frequent interactions and collisions. When galaxies of nearly equal masses merge, they form elliptical galaxies. Merging is more likely to occur in the center of the cluster where the density of galaxies is higher, giving rise to more elliptical galaxies.
This natural-color Hubble image, which combines data obtained in 2006, 2007, and 2009 from the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 and the Advanced Camera for Surveys, required 28 hours of exposure time.

Jupiter devoured a Massive SuperEarth

August 13, 2010

Jupiter Won Early Planetary Rollerball -Devouring a Massive SuperEarth

Last summer a massive mystery object struck Jupiter and disappeared into its opaque atmosphere. Now, research led by Shu Lin Li of Peking University in China has revealed that billions of years ago Jupiter’s core might have been vaporised in huge collision with a planet up to ten times the size of Earth. Computer simulations showed that the incoming rocky body flattened when it hit the gas giant’s atmosphere before drilling into the giant’s core with the energy of the collision vaporising much of the the planet's core. Jupiter, which is more than 120 times bigger than the Earth, has an extremely small core that weighs just two to 10 Earth masses, while Saturn's comes in at 15 to 30.
These vaporised heavy elements would then have mixed with the hydrogen and helium of the gas giant's atmosphere, leaving only a fraction of the gas giant's former core behind. This could explain not only why Jupiter's core is so small, but also why its atmosphere is richer in heavy elements compared with the sun, whose composition is thought to mirror that of the nebula that gave birth to the solar system's planets (arxiv.org/abs/1007.4722).
These vaporised heavy elements, reported New Scientist,  would then have mixed with the hydrogen and helium of the gas giant’s atmosphere, leaving only a fraction of the gas giant’s former core behind, which could explain not only why Jupiter’s core is so small, but also why its atmosphere is richer in heavy elements compared with the Sun, the scientists said.
Study co-author Douglas Lin at the University of California, Santa Cruz, told New Scientist that the super-Earth might have grown into a gas giant itself one day if it had not collided with Jupiter.
“It may very well have been on its way to becoming a gas giant, but lost the race and got gobbled up.” Saturn has a similar overabundance of heavy elements in its atmosphere and the scientists believe this could also be due to impacts by rocky objects smaller than Earth that decelerated and broke up before they could reach Saturn’s core. Jupiter and Saturn are thought to have begun life as rocky worlds with the mass of at least a few Earths. Their gravity then pulled in gas from their birth nebula, giving them dense atmospheres.
“It’s an interesting explanation of why you might have a variety of core masses in giant planets,” said William Hubbard of the University of Arizona in Tucson. “It’s a very useful contribution.”  The new findings help clarify the evidence that the solar system's birth was a violent and chaotic business, with perhaps five of its eight extant planets having suffered impacts by other planet-sized objects, and the rest by objects not much smaller. Giant collisions are thought to have spawned Earth's moon, blasted away the outer layers of Mercury, reshaped Mars's northern hemisphere and knocked Uranus onto its side. Smash-ups may also have led Neptune to acquire a moon and slowed Venus's spin rate.
Casey Kazan via New Scientist http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20727733.600-jupiter-swallowed-a-superearth.html and http://www.indianexpress.com/news/jupiter-swallowed-planet-10-times-the-size-of-earth/659441/

Novas in Milky Way Discovered Emitting Huge Gamma Ray Bursts

August 14, 2010

Novas in Milky Way Discovered Emitting Huge Gamma Ray Bursts

The story of the discovery of novas emitting gamma rays thought previously to come only from the more massive supernovas (image), opened in Japan during the predawn hours of March 11, when amateur astronomers Koichi Nishiyama and Fujio Kabashima in Miyaki-cho, Saga Prefecture, imaged a dramatic change in the brightness of a star in the constellation Cygnus. They realized that the star, known as V407 Cyg, was 10 times brighter than in an image they had taken three days earlier. A nova is a sudden, short-lived brightening of an otherwise inconspicuous star. The outburst occurs when a white dwarf in a binary system erupts in an enormous thermonuclear explosion.
On March 13, Goddard's Davide Donato was on-duty as the LAT "flare advocate," a scientist who monitors the daily data downloads for sources of potential interest, when he noticed a significant detection in Cygnus. But linking this source to the nova would take several days, in part because key members of the Fermi team were in Paris for a meeting of the LAT scientific collaboration.
"This region is close to the galactic plane, which packs together many types of gamma-ray sources -- pulsars, supernova remnants, and others in our own galaxy, plus active galaxies beyond them," Donato said. "If the nova had occurred elsewhere in the sky, figuring out the connection would have been easier."
The LAT team began a concerted effort to identify the mystery source over the following days. On March 17, the researchers decided to obtain a "target-of-opportunity" observation using NASA's Swift satellite -- only to find that Swift was already observing the same spot.
"At that point, I knew Swift was targeting V407 Cyg, but I didn't know why," said Teddy Cheung, an astrophysicist at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) in Washington, D.C., and the lead author of the study. Examining the Swift data, Cheung saw no additional X-ray sources that could account for what Fermi's LAT was seeing.
Half an hour later, Cheung learned from other members of the LAT team that the system had undergone a nova outburst, which was the reason the Swift observations had been triggered. "When we looked closer, we found that the LAT had detected the first gamma rays at about the same time as the nova's discovery," he said.
V407 Cyg lies 9,000 light-years away. The system is a so-called symbiotic binary containing a compact white dwarf and a red giant star about 500 times the size of the sun.
"The red giant is so swollen that its outermost atmosphere is just leaking away into space," said Adam Hill at Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble, France. The phenomenon is similar to the solar wind produced by the sun, but the flow is much stronger. "Each decade, the red giant sheds enough hydrogen gas to equal the mass of Earth," he added.
The white dwarf intercepts and captures some of this gas, which accumulates on its surface. As the gas piles on for decades to centuries, it eventually becomes hot and dense enough to fuse into helium. This energy-producing process triggers a runaway reaction that explodes the accumulated gas. The white dwarf itself, however, remains intact.
The blast created a hot, dense expanding shell called a shock front, composed of high-speed particles, ionized gas and magnetic fields. According to an early spectrum obtained by Christian Buil at Castanet Tolosan Observatory, France, the nova's shock wave expanded at 7 million miles per hour -- or nearly 1 percent the speed of light.
The magnetic fields trapped particles within the shell and whipped them up to tremendous energies. Before they could escape, the particles had reached velocities near the speed of light. Scientists say that the gamma rays likely resulted when these accelerated particles smashed into the red giant's wind.
"We know that the remnants of much more powerful supernova explosions can trap and accelerate particles like this, but no one suspected that the magnetic fields in novae were strong enough to do it as well," said NRL's Soebur Razzaque.
Supernovae remnants endure for 100,000 years and affect regions of space thousands of light-years across.
Kent Wood at NRL compares astronomical studies of supernova remnants to looking at static images in a photo album. "It takes thousands of years for supernova remnants to evolve, but with this nova we've watched the same kinds of changes over just a few days," he said. "We've gone from a photo album to a time-lapse movie."
"In human terms, this was an immensely powerful eruption, equivalent to about 1,000 times the energy emitted by the sun every year," said Elizabeth Hays, a Fermi deputy project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "But compared to other cosmic events Fermi sees, it was quite modest. We're amazed that Fermi detected it so strongly."
Gamma rays are the most energetic form of light, and Fermi's Large Area Telescope (LAT) detected the nova for 15 days. Scientists believe the emission arose as a million-mile-per-hour shock wave raced from the site of the explosion.
Casey Kazan via JPL/NASA

Supernova Reveals a Stunning Fossil of the Early Universe

August 14, 2010

Supernova Reveals a Stunning Fossil of the Early Universe

At first, like an opening scene scene out a scifi classic, there didn't seem anything odd or unusual about the tiny point of light blinking in the southern Californian night sky in early April 2007. Only the robotic eyes of the Nearby Supernova Factory, a project designed to spy out distant stellar explosions, spotted it from the Palomar Observatory, high in the hills between Los Angeles and San Diego.

The project's computers automatically forwarded the images, following the same routine that kicks in scores of times each year when a far-off star in its death throes explodes into a supernova, before fading into the vast cosmic backstory of the universe.
This extraordinarily bright supernova named SN 2007bi, snagged in a search by a robotic telescope, turns out to be the first example of the kind of stars that first populated the Universe. The superbright supernova occurred in a nearby dwarf galaxy, a kind of galaxy that's common but has been little studied until now, and the unusual supernova could be the first of many such events soon to be discovered. Despite the prominence of large elliptical and spiral galaxies, most galaxies in the universe appear to be dwarf galaxies. These tiny galaxies are about one hundred times smaller than the Milky Way, containing only a few billion stars
SN 2007bi was discovered by the Supernova Factory (SNfactory) based at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Over the next year and a half the Berkeley scientists participated in a collaboration led by Avishay Gal-Yam of Israel's Weizmann Institute of Science to collect and analyze much more of the unusual object's spectrum data as the supernova slowly faded away.
The analysis indicated that the supernova's precursor star could only have been a giant weighing at least 200 times the mass of our Sun and initially containing few elements besides hydrogen and helium -- a star like the very first stars in the early Universe.
"Because the core alone was some 100 solar masses, the long-hypothesized phenomenon called pair instability must have occurred," says astrophysicist Peter Nugent. A member of the SNfactory, Nugent is the co-leader of the Computational Cosmology Center. "In the extreme heat of the star's interior, energetic gamma rays created pairs of electrons and positrons, which bled off the pressure that sustained the core against collapse."
"SN 2007bi was the explosion of an exceedingly massive star," says Alex Filippenko, a professor in the Astronomy Department at UC Berkeley whose team helped obtain, analyze, and interpret the data. "But instead of turning into a black hole like many other heavyweight stars, its core went through a nuclear runaway that blew it to shreds. This type of behavior was predicted several decades ago by theorists, but never convincingly observed until now."
SN 2007bi was recorded on images taken as part of the Palomar-QUEST Survey, an automated search with the wide-field Oschin Telescope at the California Institute of Technology's Palomar Observatory, and was quickly detected and categorized as an unusual supernova by the SNfactory.
The SNfactory has so far discovered nearly a thousand supernovae of all types and amassed thousands of spectra, but has focused on those designated Type Ia, the "standard candles" used to study the expansion history of the Universe. SN 2007bi, however, turned out not to be a Type Ia. For one thing, it was at least ten times as bright.
"The thermonuclear runaway experienced by the core of SN 2007bi is reminiscent of that seen in the explosions of white dwarfs as Type Ia supernovae," says Filippenko, "but on a much larger scale and with a far greater amount of power."
Nugent contacted Gal-Yam, then a Caltech postdoctoral fellow, the lead investigator for the all-other category. "I asked, are you interested? He said, sure!" Nugent then contacted Filippenko, who was about to conduct a night of observation with the 10-meter Keck I telescope on the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii. Filippenko immediately set out to obtain an optical spectrum of the unusual supernova.
Caltech researchers subsequently acquired additional spectra with the Keck telescope, as did Paolo Mazzali's team from the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, Germany, using the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile.
Says Mazzali, "The Keck and VLT spectra clearly indicated that an extremely large amount of material was ejected by the explosion, including a record amount of radioactive nickel, which caused the expanding gases to glow very brightly."
"The central part of the huge star had fused to oxygen near the end of its life, and was very hot," Filippenko explains. "Then the most energetic photons of light turned into electron-positron pairs, robbing the core of pressure and causing it to collapse. This led to a nuclear runaway explosion that created a large amount of radioactive nickel, whose decay energized the ejected gas and kept the supernova visible for a long time."
Gal-Yam organized a team of collaborators from many institutions to continue to observe SN 2007bi and obtain data as it slowly faded over a span of 555 days. Says Gal-Yam, "As our follow-up observations started to roll in, I immediately realized this must be something new. And indeed it turned out to be a fantastic example of how we are finding new types of stellar explosions."
Because it had no hydrogen or helium lines, the usual classification scheme would have labeled the supernova a Type Ic. But it was so much brighter than an ordinary Type Ic that it reminded Nugent of only one prior event, a supernova designated SN 1999as, found by the international Supernova Cosmology Project but unfortunately three weeks after its peak brightness.
Understanding a supernova requires a good record of its rise and fall in brightness, or light curve. Although SN 2007bi was detected more than a week after its peak, Nugent delved into years of data compiled by NERSC from the SNfactory and other surveys. He found that the Catalina Sky Survey had recorded SN 2007bi before its peak brightness and could provide enough data to calculate the duration of the rising curve, an extraordinarily long 70 days -- more evidence for the pair-instability identification.
"It's significant that the first unambiguous example of a pair-instability supernova was found in a dwarf galaxy," says Nugent. "These are incredibly small, very dim galaxies that contain few elements heavier than hydrogen and helium, so they are models of the early Universe."
These tiny dwarf galaxies could be pristine remnants of the early universe, preserving its composition and conditions in a cosmic museum. Their degree of preservation could be the result of their sheer dwarfishness: because gravity within them is weaker than within a normal galaxy, a supernova exploding within it will eject the metal-rich products outwards at such speed that they mostly escape altogether.

If the original conditions of the universe were preserved in these dwarf galaxies, there would be no reason why further waves of megastars should not continually form and die within them throughout time. If it is the absence of metals that determines stellar size, these monster stars are not restricted to the furthest reaches of the universe: they could be found in any dwarf galaxy with a low enough metal content, including places well within reach of Earth's telescopes.

The discovery of a nearby population of megastars in what amounts to suspended animation would have huge implications for stellar science. We do not understand the processes of star formation and death as well as we would like to think.

"It is surprisingly difficult to get the models to agree with the observations," says Gal-Yam. He cites the example of gold, the abundance of which in the universe essentially defies explanation, although most astronomers assume it must somehow be made in supernovae. To find the answers, we might need to look no further than dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way.

Dwarf galaxies are ubiquitous but so faint and dim -- "they take only a few pixels on a camera," says Nugent, "and until recently, with the development of wide-field projects like the SNfactory, astronomers had wanted to fill the chip with galaxies" -- that they've rarely been studied. SN 2007bi is expected to focus attention on what Gal-Yam and his collaborators call "fossil laboratories to study the early Universe."

"In the future, we might end up detecting the very first generation of stars, early in the history of the Universe, through explosions such as that of SN 2007bi -- long before we have the capability of directly seeing the pre-explosion stars," added Filippenko .

With the advent of the multi-institutional Palomar Transient Factory, a fully automated, wide-field survey to find transients, the SNfactory, the Near Earth Asteroid Team, and other surveys, the collaborators expect they will soon find many more ultrabright, ultramassive supernovae, revealing the role of these supernovae in creating the observable universe as we know it today.

Casey Kazan via DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Other Source: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20527470.900-primordial-giant-the-star-that-time-forgot.html?full=true

Iraq snapshot - August 13, 2010

Iraq snapshot - August 13, 2010

The Common Ills

Friday, August 13, 2010.  Chaos and violence continue, the political stalemate continues, rumors swirl throughout Iraq, and more.

Today on the second hour of The Diane Rehm Show (NPR), Diane discussed Iraq with  Daniel Dombey (Financial Times), Yochi Dreazen (National Journal) and Susan Glasser (Foreign Policy).

Diane Rehm: And now we have Iraq's most senior soldier saying the Iraqi army will not be ready until 2020.  What does that mean, Dan?

Daniel Dombey: Well I think one of the things that it really means is that if you were a betting person, I think you would be very advised to bet that there will still be US soldiers in Iraq after the 31st of December 2011.

Diane Rehm: The question is how many?

Daniel Dombey: Well at the moment there supposed to come down to 50,000 by the end of this month. That from a peak of over 140,000 when President [Barack] Obama took office. I have to say they talk a lot about the combat mission ending. I would say a large part of that is just semantics. They're still going to be involved in counter-terrorism, they're still going to be an essential part in terms of communication and logistics and transport -- all the really difficult actions against al Qaeda or against insurgengents are going to likely rely on US forces for some time to come, I would say.

Yochi Dreazen: Two quick points.  One on this issue of semantics, it's important also to look at what General Zubari -- Babaker Zubari -- was actually saying.  He was asked about Iraq's ability to defend its borders externally.  Which is a very different issue when it has Iran on one side, Turkey on other side, I mean it has multi-powerful countries on almost all of its borders.  That's a very different question from its ability to patrol within its borders. And clearly the US focus rightly has been can you get Iraqi security forces capable of fighting insurgents, controlling areas, operating on their own.  And there's been really  remarkable progress.  I mean, admist all the bad news from Afghanistan, I've spent a lot of time with Iraqi forces over the years, they've gotten markedy, markedly better. So the question of what their main mission is in the near future, they're already doing it.  I would also add that I totally agree with Dan's point. I think that there's no question in the mind of anyone I talk to in Afghanistan -- I'm sorry, in Iraq or the Pentagon, that there will be an amendment to the deals to allow for some number -- usually in the low thousands is the number I hear -- to stay after 2011 when they're supposed to all leave.

Susan Glasser: I think those are all really important points. I think a couple of things I would add.  One, is Iraq unlike Afghanistan had a large standing army that was to maintain internal and external order.  This was Saddam Hussein's police state which functioned in a very militarized way so they had something they were reconstructing there which is very different from in Afghanistan which has hadn't a very meaningful army in a long time.

Could Yochi explain this: "One on this issue of semantics, it's important also to look at what General Zubari -- Babaker Zubari -- was actually saying.  He was asked about Iraq's ability to defend its borders externally.  Which is a very different issue when it has Iran on one side, Turkey on other side, I mean it has multi-powerful countries on almost all of its borders."  Is he implying that Iraq installed new borders after 2003 (when the illegal war started)?  Or is he implying everyone overseeing the illegal war is so stupid they didn't know basic geography?  Iraq's borders were well known.  I believe a considerable amount of press ink was spent in 2002 and 2003, for example, on how Turkey might or might not allow the US to fly over (they decided not).  Iraq's defense is its borders.  It's stupid to act as if this just popped up or to say, "Woah, they can do the internal, just not the external!"  That's stupid and crazy.  And, point of fact, Iraqi forces can't protect the country internally. As AP notes, "Bombings continue almost daily in Baghdad and around the rest of Iraq, a grim reality illustrated by the fact that the number of civilians killed by insurgents in July was the highest in two years. Though violence is far lower than it was between 2005 and 2007, when revenge attacks brought the country to the edge of civil war, Iraq is far from secure." Matthew Rusling (Xinhua) speaks with Statfor's military analysist Nathan Hughes who also sees realities different than Yochi.

Michael Jansen (Irish Times) observes, "Iraq has just begun to receive some of the equipment it needs to defend the country. Eleven of 140 US battle tanks have arrived but crews will not be trained and the rest of the tanks will not be in service until mid-2012. Iraq has no independent air cover, an essential component of any defence strategy. Last March the government contracted to purchase 18 US F-16 fighter jets, but these are not set for delivery before 2013."  Arab News notes the following in an editorial:

Lt. Gen. Babaker Zebari went on to claim his troops might not be able to take control of the military situation for another decade. It is hard to imagine what the general thought he was going to achieve by this outburst, which surely cannot have been authorized by any government figure, if for no better reason than the deplorable fact that over five months after elections, Iraq still has no proper government.  

It will be suspected, of course, that Washington may have been behind Zebari's words, since they constitute an invitation for the US to continue its occupation. However, there are powerful factors arguing against US complicity. Barack Obama won the presidency with a clear promise to quit Iraq. The American message has been that the Iraqi police and armed forces have reached a level of competence and equipment where they can assume responsibility for security. Indeed in recent months, much has been made of the fact that very few US troops have been out on the streets, leaving the job of dealing with the violence to the Iraqis. Only in the field of sophisticated signals intelligence is the US likely to have any future role alongside the Iraqi military. That contribution probably need not involve the continued presence of US boots on the ground.

Besides, if Washington's assurances about the standards achieved by the Iraqi security forces really are nonsense, what does it say about similar protestations over the level of training and efficiency currently being claimed for the Afghan police and military?

And the line Yochi's attempting to draw -- "security" relegated to internal -- is as false as the claim that "combat" missions are now over and the US has housed Iraq with "non-combat" troops.

March 7th, Iraq concluded Parliamentary elections. The Guardian's editorial board notes, "These elections were hailed prematurely by Mr Obama as a success, but everything that has happened since has surely doused that optimism in a cold shower of reality." 163 seats are needed to form the executive government (prime minister and council of ministers). When no single slate wins 163 seats (or possibly higher -- 163 is the number today but the Parliament added seats this election and, in four more years, they may add more which could increase the number of seats needed to form the executive government), power-sharing coalitions must be formed with other slates, parties and/or individual candidates. (Eight Parliament seats were awarded, for example, to minority candidates who represent various religious minorities in Iraq.) Ayad Allawi is the head of Iraqiya which won 91 seats in the Parliament making it the biggest seat holder. Second place went to State Of Law which Nouri al-Maliki, the current prime minister, heads. They won 89 seats. Nouri made a big show of lodging complaints and issuing allegations to distract and delay the certification of the initial results while he formed a power-sharing coalition with third place winner Iraqi National Alliance -- this coalition still does not give them 163 seats. They are claiming they have the right to form the government. In 2005, Iraq took four months and seven days to pick a prime minister. It's now 5 months and 6 days. Andrew England (Financial Times of London) visits the Parliament and speaks with an unidentified MP who tells him, "Ten per cent of parliamentarians [those involved in political negotiations] are active, the other 90 per cent have nothing to do. The whole of Iraq is a vacuum, for God's sake. You know when you get a black hole in the universe? It's exactly the same now."  Hayder Najm (Niqash) states:

Iraqis have no idea when both the US and Iran have agreed to throw their combined support behind Nouri al-Maliki's candidacy for Prime Minister . The leader of the State of Law coalition has never been a 'key ally' to Tehran or Washington. In fact, he has probably been more of a source of concern for both.            
The US and Iran have managed to align their interests on the future of Iraq, despite their clashes over many issues.                    
The US accuses Iran of supporting armed groups in Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine and Afghanistan. Iran is critical about Washington's stances on Israel at the expense of its neighbours' interests. The Iranians recently detained three US citizens who crossed the border, who it accuses of spying. Iran's nuclear ambitions also remain on the US file.

Salah Hemeid (Al-Ahram Weekly) runs through a number of possibilities on what's taking place (including that the stalemate lives on).  As Azzaman notes, many rumors are flying around and they provide a list of some of the more popular ones:

·         The crime of killing medical doctors is back in Baghdad in full force.

·         Al-Qaeda is luring Sahwa Councils -- the Sunni militia the U.S. raised and armed -- by paying them salaries higher than those the U.S. offers.

·         The Iraqi army is asking U.S. troops to extend their occupation of the country for another decade. The reason is that the army comprises mainly candidates from sectarian parties who are not capable of guarding the country.            

·         Iran wants free shipments of Iraqi oil in return for compensations of the 1991 Gulf War.                 

·         The bombing of fixed U.S. military bases is easier than smoking a cigarette.                     

·         Militia leaders have returned to Baghdad camouflaged in parliamentary garb and quiet and moderate turbans.         

The Iraq War did create some things.  Such as the refugee crisis.  Michael Otterman pens a column about the refugee crisis for the Christian Science Monitor:

And there are currently 4.5 million displaced Iraqis languishing on the outskirts of Iraqi cities and scattered throughout nearby Jordan and Syria. This represents the largest urban refugee crisis in the world.   

Most displaced Iraqis fled Iraq amid the height of the civil war in 2006 and 2007. At the time, as many as 30,000 Iraqis per month poured into Syria. Thousands fled to Jordan everyday. The torrent slowed by 2008, but the refugees remain.

Dozens of them have shared their stories with me.                     

"I don't own a thing and even if I owned the world, if Iraq would become a country again, I would never return," said an Iraqi I met two years ago in Jeramana, a hub for Iraqis in Damascus, Syria. He told me between sobs about the kidnapping of his youngest son, whom he later found dead in an abandoned Baghdad schoolyard. He fled to Syria with his wife and two surviving children the day after he recovered the body.                      

"Everything is gone," an Iraqi living in a crumbling apartment in East Amman, Jordan, told me in 2008 while his pregnant wife paced nearby. In 2006, his house in Baquba, Iraq, burnt down amid crossfire between Iraqi insurgents and US forces. He sat at home and smoked cigarettes while pondering the future. "I never want to go back. [Iraq] will be divided," he said.

The Iraq War was also a 'growth industry' for ophans.  Kelly McEvers (NPR's All Things Considered) reports, "The war in Iraq has taken a heavy toll on children, many of whom saw their own family members kidnapped, tortured and executed during the brutal sectarian fighting from 2006 to 2008. More recently, orphanages are filling up with children left without parents after attacks from insurgent groups, including al-Qaida. But there are very few services for Iraq's estimated 4 million to 6 million orphans. Plans to open the country's first ever child-psychiatry clinic have been approved. But the project has stalled because there is still no government amid political wrangling after the March election."

And file it under "rumor," Samir Sumaida'ie is weighing in with his 'knowledge.'  Caroline Alexander and Margaret Brennan (Bloomberg News) report that the the Iraqi Ambassador to the US is insisting that all US forces will be out of Iraq at the end of next year.  Realities come in Jamal Dajani's column for the Huffington Post:

But will the U.S. actually withdraw from Iraq?                             

Not really. Tens of thousand of U.S. troops will remain in the country to train the Iraqi army and provide it with logistical support. If need be, they will be engaged in combat missions. Meanwhile, the number of private contractors working for the U.S. in Iraq in sectors such as security, communications, utilities, and commerce is estimated at 100,000. This number is likely to increase significantly once the "combat forces" are gone, especially in the security sector.                                                   

Move on US Marines, here come Xe Services (better known as Blackwater)!

Iraq: Former GIs Describe US Policy of Firing on Civilians

"Routine" Massacre of Civilians in Iraq: Former GIs Describe US Policy of Firing on Civilians

by Sherwood Ross

August 13, 2010 Three former U.S. soldiers involved in the infamous "Collateral Murder" helicopter gunship attack on Baghdad civilians in July 2007, say that attack was nothing out of the ordinary. The massacre---that killed more than a dozen Iraqis, two of them employed by Reuters---ignited a wave of international revulsion against the U.S. military in Iraq when a video of the massacre was released by WikiLeaks last April. "What the world did not see is the months of training that led up to the incident, in which soldiers were taught to respond to threats with a barrage of fire---a "wall of steel," in Army parlance---even if it put civilians at risk," report Sarah Lazare and Ryan Harvey in the August 16th issue of The Nation magazine. Former Army Specialist Josh Stieber said that newly arrived soldiers in Baghdad were asked if they would fire back at an attacker if they knew unarmed civilians might get hurt in the process. Those who did not respond affirmatively, or who hesitated, were "knocked around" until they realized what was expected of them, added former Army Specialist Ray Corcoles, who deployed with Stieber. A third former Army specialist, Ethan McCord, said his battalion commander gave orders to shoot indiscriminately after attacks by improvised explosive devices. "Anytime someone in your line gets hit by an IED…you kill every motherfucker in the street," McCord quotes him as saying. Corcoles told the reporters he purposely turned his gun away from people. "You don’t even know if somebody’s shooting at you. It’s just insanity to just start shooting people." "From our own experiences, and the experiences of other veterans we have talked to, we know that the acts depicted in this video are everyday occurrences of this war: this is the nature of how U.S.-led wars are carried out in this region," say McCord and Stieber in an open letter to the Iraqis who were injured in the July attack. Together with Corcoles, they have decided to go public about the true nature of the war. McCord was shown in the video rushing the wounded children from a van. For this humanitarian act, he was "threatened and mocked by his commanding officer," say TheNation reporters, and his platoon leader also yelled at him "to quit worrying about those 'motherfucking kids’." McCord told the reporters of "multiple instances in which soldiers abused detainees or beat people up in their houses. In one case, he says, someone was taken from his house, beaten up and then left on the side of the road, bloodied and still handcuffed," Lazare and Harvey write. The veterans say they support the release of the video and otber documents by WikiLeaks because it confronts people globally "with the realities of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan." Meanwhile, Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning, accused of leaking the video to WikiLeaks, is facing Espionage Act charges and has been transferred to Kuwait for a military trial, Lazare and Harvey note. The government is also probing where WikiLeaks got the 90,000 secret U.S. military documents from Afghanistan it released late last month. These reports, according to The Nation, detailed the role of U.S. assassination teams, widespread civilian casualties resulting from U.S. attacks and staggering Afghan government incompetence and corruption." The totalitarian mantle of secrecy by which the Pentagon shrouds its war crimes makes the disclosures by intelligence analyst Manning appear all the more courageous. As long as the Pentagon keeps him behind bars every American who believes in the Biblical injunction that "the truth shall make ye free" is also a prisoner of the same tyranny. And the three former Army specialists who told their story to The Nation have given us a good idea of what it is the Pentagon doesn’t want the American people to know. Sherwood Ross is a Miami-based public relations consultant for worthy causes who formerly reported for the Chicago Daily News and worked as a columnist for several wire services. Reach him at sherwoodross10@gmail.com

Iraq: The Kurds Propose to Change the Constitution

Iraq: The Kurds Propose to Change the Constitution

Reidar Visser

August 14, 2010 It had been expected that the Kurdish demands for supporting a new government would be on the unrealistic side, but what has emerged in press reports over the past days suggests a list of desiderata – reportedly 19 points -  that is completely over the top. Included are of course predictable items like implementation of article 140 of the constitution (disputed territories and Kirkuk), regional rights to sign oil deals with foreign companies and financing of the Kurdish peshmerga militias by Baghdad without integrating them fully in the Iraqi army as ordinary units. But the latest proposals contain far more. In fact, they amount to a complete revision of the Iraqi constitution, and in particular the removal of any possibilities for the re-emergence of a strong Baghdad. Back in 2006 and 2007, the Kurds played a key role in diffusing power through inventions of committees to be controlled by politicians: The council for national security in 2006 (it is not even in the constitution!); the oil and gas committee in the 2007 draft oil law (why cannot Iraq have a normal oil ministry like any other oil-producing state?) The most important new innovation is the attack on the powers of the prime minister: This is to be checked by making the head of the national security council into commander in chief of the armed forces and by giving some powers to – of course – the president (to be held by a Kurd according to the Kurdish demands). Not least, the ethno-sectarian, tripartite presidency council that was in force with strong veto powers as a transitional mechanism between 2005 and 2010 will be resuscitated, thereby incorporating a key feature of the failed constitutional-revision project from the previous parliamentary cycle. In other words, the Kurds are seeking to complete the parody-like transformation of Iraq to a loose banana confederation that was attempted back in 2005 when the constitution was drafted, but which failed to go all the way. It is of course not a big surprise that the Kurds are pushing in this direction. The great irony of the proposal, which is supposed to appeal to the Shiite-led Iraqi National Alliance (INA) and the secular Iraqiyya, is that both these parties hope to ultimately achieve the very premiership that the Kurds are seeking to strangle by the proposal. For this reason, the latest  Kurdish document will not solve anything in terms of government formation; since the Kurds do not any longer have veto power (i.e. through the erstwhile two-thirds supermajority requirement for appointing the presidency council) it is the triangular relationship between Iraqiyya, State of Law (SLA) and INA that will ultimately dictate the basics of government formation. If Kurdish demands are seen as extravagant, any combination of those three along with support from smaller blocs is sufficient to reach the magic mark of 163 deputies. As expected, at least Maliki’s SLA has had the guts to indicate scepticism to the proposals. The shocking development is that Iraqiyya has reportedly said they agree with them in principle! If true that would mean a complete abdication of Iraqiyya’s pretensions as a nationalist party, transforming it instead to a collaborator with the forces of division and the kings of ethno-sectarian quotas. In a way, if the Kurds have it their way, it does not really matter who the next prime minister is, because Iraq, as a centralised state, would be gone anyway. But at the same time, there are no signs that INA is prepared to give up the premiership to Iraqiyya or vice-versa, meaning any rapprochement between the Kurds, Iraqiyya and INA on the basis of these most recent Kurdish demands will be of limited value in terms of progress towards a new government anyway.

Obama’s covert wars

Obama’s covert wars

Peter Symonds

WSWS, August 16, 2010

A lengthy article in the New York Times on Sunday entitled "A Secret Assault on Terrorism Widens on Two Continents" has provided a glimpse into the extent of the Obama administration’s covert wars. Obama has not only continued, he has expanded the murderous operations that were waged under the banner of the "war on terror" by the CIA and Pentagon during the Bush administration.

As the authors explain: "In roughly a dozen countries—from the deserts of North Africa, to the mountains of Pakistan, to former Soviet republics [in Central Asia] crippled by ethnic and religious strife—the United States has significantly increased military and intelligence operations, pursuing the enemy using robotic drones and commando teams, paying contractors to spy and training local operatives to chase terrorists."
Obama has dramatically intensified the CIA’s drone missile attacks against alleged insurgents inside areas of Pakistan bordering Afghanistan. The White House has "approved raids inside Somalia," it has "carried out clandestine operations from Kenya," and it has collaborated with European allies in covert operations in North Africa, including a recent French strike in Algeria.
The most detailed information concerns the Obama administration’s expanding covert war inside Yemen, where the US military has carried out four air strikes since last December, killing dozens of civilians, including the deputy governor of Marib Province, Jabir al Shabwani, in May. The article incidentally confirms what has not previously been acknowledged: that all of the air strikes were carried out by the United States.
These attacks are just one aspect of American operations inside Yemen. "The Pentagon and the CIA have quietly bulked up the number of their operatives at the embassy in Sanaa, the Yemeni capital, over the past year," the Times explains. The US is also training elite Yemeni units, providing equipment and sharing intelligence to support Yemeni operations against Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
While the Times article acknowledges some political risks are involved, it is uncritical, even laudatory in tone. Under the banner of the "war on terror," the US is aggressively prosecuting its ambitions for strategic and economic dominance throughout the energy-rich regions of the Middle East and Central Asia. The neo-colonial occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan have been extended into a series of covert wars aimed at consolidating the American presence and expanding Washington’s political influence.
In Yemen, the Obama administration is helping to prop up the dictatorial regime of President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who is notorious for his suppression of political opposition. He came to power in what was North Yemen in 1978 and now runs a unified Yemen as a family fiefdom. The Yemeni military and security apparatus, which Washington is training and equipping, is firmly under the control of Saleh’s family members, who will undoubtedly use its improved capacities against political opponents and critics.
Obama’s secret wars are proceeding with little or no congressional oversight and scant regard for international or American law. As the Times pointed out, the White House is benefitting from "a unique political landscape," with support from Republicans and Democrats alike.
Earlier this year, the Pakistani newspaper, the Dawn, reported that at least 700 Pakistani civilians were killed in the CIA’s drone missile attacks during 2009. According to Amnesty International, the first US strike on Yemen last December was a cruise missile loaded with cluster bombs that killed more than 40 civilians over several days. None of these crimes has raised a murmur of opposition in the US political or media establishment.
Speaking to the Times, former top CIA officer Jack Devine raised concerns that the limited congressional oversight put in place after the notorious Iran-Contra affair in the 1980s—involving the illegal funneling of money from secret arms sales to Iran to right-wing Contra rebels in Nicaragua—had been weakened. For the current covert operations, he said, "there are not clear rules."
Under the Obama administration, the Times explained, the Pentagon has expanded its covert missions, which "typically operate with even less transparency and congressional oversight than traditional covert operations by the CIA." The article reported: "Across the Middle East and elsewhere, Special Operations troops under secret 'Execute Orders’ have conducted spying missions that were once the preserve of civilian intelligence agencies."
Not surprisingly, the CIA and military operatives involved in US imperialism’s past crimes are directing or intimately involved in the present operations. Former CIA agent Duane Clarridge, who was indicted in 1991 in connection with the Iran-Contra affair, reemerged in Pakistan, helping to run one of several Pentagon-funded contractors providing intelligence to the US military.
Assistant Secretary of Defense Michael Vickers, who oversees the Pentagon’s expanding Special Operation Command, was a senior CIA agent who helped direct its huge covert war to oust the Soviet-backed regime in Afghanistan in the 1980s. The CIA helped arm and train not only the Afghan mujahedin, but also assisted the thousands of Islamist militants from the Middle East, North Africa and Asia who passed through Al Qaeda (the Base) to fight in Afghanistan. Vickers, along with Defense Secretary (and former CIA head) Robert Gates, was one of several top officials appointed by Bush and kept in place by Obama.
In a sign of things to come, Obama last month appointed John Bennett to head the CIA’s National Clandestine Service, formerly known as the Directorate of Operations. Among his previous assignments, Bennett headed the CIA’s Special Activities Division, which handles highly sensitive spying and paramilitary missions. According to Newsweek, his last posting was as CIA station chief in Islamabad, where he was intimately involved in supervising drone missile strikes inside Pakistan.

Obama’s expansion of covert operations into some of the world’s most unstable countries and regions is reckless and inflammatory. His extension of the Afghan war into neighboring Pakistan, for instance, has not only undermined the government in Islamabad and triggered a dangerous civil war, but is destabilising relations with India and throughout the Indian subcontinent. As the US aggressively pursues its interests through military means—overt and covert—its actions cut directly across the strategic interests of other major powers such as China, and threaten to provoke broader conflicts.
Peter Symonds