I’M NOT SURE WHAT I THINK ABOUT THIS STORY:

U.S.-led occupation authorities have begun a covert campaign to recruit and train agents with the once-dreaded Iraqi intelligence service to help identify resistance to American forces here after months of increasingly sophisticated attacks and bombings, according to U.S. and Iraqi officials.

These guys know a lot of useful stuff, but we can’t trust them. It’s not as obvious a risk as using them for guards, as the U.N. did, but it’ll be a real challenge to handle them well. The record of doing this with Germans after World War II was rather poor — the “Gehlen Organization” of ex-Nazi intelligence officers was heavily penetrated by the Soviets and probably did more harm than good.

CHIEF WIGGLES HAS MORE, and you should be reading it.

INDYMEDIA — Independent, free speech, except when it isn’t. Or something like that.

HERE’S A SURPRISINGLY UPBEAT STORY ON IRAQ FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES:

American soldiers, without helmets or flak jackets, attended graduation ceremonies of the Diwaniya University Medical School. At ease with the Iraqi students and their parents, the American marines laughed, joked and posed in photographs. One by one, the students walked up to thank them, for Marine doctors had taught classes in surgery and gynecology and helped draw up the final exams.

“We like the Americans very much here,” said Zainab Khaledy, 22, who received her medical degree last Sunday. “We feel better than under the old regime. We have problems, like security, but everything is getting better.”

Such is the dual reality that is coming to define the American enterprise in Iraq, a country increasingly divided between those willing to put up with the American occupation and those determined to fight it. While the areas stretching west and north from Baghdad roil and burn, much of the rest of the country remains, most of the time, remarkably calm. . . .

Rather than fight the Americans, most Iraqis appear to be readily accepting the benefits of a wide-ranging reconstruction.

The two faces of the occupation give American policy makers something to take solace in and something to worry over. Four months into the occupation, the rebellion against American forces, though fierce, is still largely limited to the Arab Sunni Muslim population and its foreign supporters and confined to a relatively limited geographic area.

That last point is one that quite a few bloggers — including some blogging from Iraq — have been making, but that the mainstream media have tended to miss. Nice to see the Times getting it right.

ANOTHER BOMBING IN IRAQ:

A crude bomb constructed from a cooking gas cylinder exploded outside the residence of Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Said al-Hakim in the holy city of Najaf today, slightly wounding the leading Shiite Muslim cleric in the neck and killing three of his bodyguards.

Senior religious officials were quick to blame the attack on members of the deposed Baath Party trying to use violence to foment schisms within the Shiite community

Well, that’s interesting. Of course, this bit is entirely predictable:

They also criticized the American-led occupation for failing to provide better security.

As Mark Steyn points out — see below — whatever happens, it’s always America’s fault.

MARK STEYN:

Well, that’s the luck of the draw at the UN, where so far this year Libya, Iraq and Syria have found themselves heading up the Human Rights Commission, the Disarmament Committee and the Security Council. The UN’s subscription to this charade may be necessary in New York, but what’s tragic is that they seem to have conducted their affairs in Baghdad much the same way. Offers of increased U.S. military protection were turned down. Their old Iraqi security guards, all agents of Saddam’s Secret Service there to spy on the UN, were allowed by the organization to carry on working at the compound. And sitting in the middle of an unprotected complex staffed by ex-Saddamite spies was Sergio Vieira de Mello, the individual most directly credited with midwifing East Timor into an independent democratic state. Osama bin Laden (or rather whoever makes his audiocassettes) and the Bali bombers have both cited East Timor as high up on their long list of grievances: the carving out, as they see it, of part of the territory of the world’s largest Islamic nation to create a mainly Christian state. Now they’ve managed to kill the fellow responsible. Any way you look at it, that’s quite a feather in their turbans.

Read the whole thing. And read this Ralph Peters column, too:

An active-duty U.S. Army officer, Lt.-Col. Jack Curran, was in charge of local medevac operations. Weeks before the truck-bomb attack, he, too, recognized the vulnerability of the hotel compound. Diplomatically, he asked if his pilots and medical personnel could “practice medevac ops” at the U.N. headquarters. “Just for training.” With the security officer’s help, he got permission.

As a result, there had just been two full, on-site rehearsals for what had to be done after the bombing. Thanks to this spirited, visionary officer, our helicopters and vehicles knew exactly how to get in, where best to upload casualties and where a triage station should be set up.

With impressive speed, the U.S. Army medevaced 135 U.N. employees and Iraqi civilians from the scene, saving more lives than will ever be known for certain.

U.S. Army Reserve engineers and Army mortuary personnel moved in to do the grisly, demanding work of rescuing any trapped survivors and processing the dead.

Now that the damage is done, the U.S. Army’s welcome. A company of our 82nd Airborne Division took over external security for the site last week.

But what were the first complaints we heard from the media “experts”? That the U.S. Army was to blame, because it failed to provide adequate security.

In fact, we offered the U.N. armored vehicles. They told us to take a hike. U.N. bureaucrats put more trust in the good will of terrorists and Ba’athist butchers than they did in GI Joe.

But when the U.N.’s own people lay bleeding, they were glad enough for our help. As one U.N. employee, speaking from inside the Baghdad compound, put it to me, “It was a proud day for the U.S. Army.”

Funny this wasn’t more widely reported.

ONE THING THAT WE’VE LEARNED SINCE 9/11, and again during the Great Blackout, is that the cellphone network isn’t just a luxury for rich guys and soccer moms anymore: it’s a vital part of emergency infrastructure.

Unfortunately, we’ve also learned that it isn’t up to the job:

Less than two years after the cellular network faltered following the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the cellular system — which the wireless industry promotes as a safety net during emergencies — choked again.

The system broke down as a flood of nervous callers overloaded the network for some carriers; there wasn’t enough capacity to handle the excess calls. Complicating matters, many cellular sites, which depend on electricity, had inadequate backup power.

Cell-phone carriers say the electrical outage was an event they couldn’t possibly foresee.

I don’t think that’s much of an excuse, and I think that cell-phone technology is mature enough that it’s fair to start expecting the kind of robust reliability that we’ve seen from landline services. This is too important to ignore.

No backup power? Puhleez. Well, okay “inadequate” backup power, as the story illustrates. Still, the cell network is vitally important, and yet it still has the reliability standards of a rich man’s toy, which it hasn’t been for a long time.

Of course, it’s not just cellphones. Backup power for traffic lights — at least at key intersections — would help deal with the traffic problems often associated with disasters, and even an hour or so of that would help clear the worst of the traffic.

There will be more about this in my TechCentralStation column this week.

UPDATE: Reader Ari Ozick emails:

Your note on Cell Phones and emergencies was right on target. It may surprise you to know that even in Israel, we have the same problems with our cell phone networks. When a terrorist attack happens, you can’t get a line on the 3 major networks for a good 15 minutes to a half hour. The fourth network, which is much smaller, currently can handle the overload, because it’s system doesn’t carry as much capacity as the other three regularly do.

The cell phone saturation in Israel is much more then that of the United States, and yet almost everyone I know keeps a telecard (good for a certain amounts of credit on a public phone, sort of like carrying a few quarters in your pocket) in their wallets, so that if they are out during an attack or an emergency and the cells are down, they can still call loved ones and reassure them.

Hmm. It seems that we should be sure not to let payphones die out, since they’re more reliable than cellphones. It also seems that we should educate people not to immediately call loved ones to “reassure” them when other folks may need something more concrete than reassurance.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Steve Sandvik emails:

I work in power generation, and I think that although this is a big black eye for the power industry (especially transmission), the difference in response and apparent level of concern between the cell phone industry and the power industry is very enlightening. They’re selling themselves as part of your disaster response toolbox, but they don’t want to pay for it.

That’s right. I’ve noticed that power workers have a sense of mission that cellphone people definitely lack.

MORE: A reader emails that Verizon wireless was up throughout the blackout, unlike other companies. Bravo!

STILL MORE: Solar-powered traffic lights are apparently feasible, at least in sunny San Antonio. Read this, too.

MORE STILL: Steven Den Beste, who knows a lot more about cellphones than I do, has a post on this subject. He says it’s a difficult problem — though I think regulation could ensure enough excess capacity to address the situation. But to the extent I’m wrong it’s yet another reason to keep those payphones around, I guess.

HERE’S A NICE ARTICLE ON WEBLOGS from the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Here’s another in The Bulletin, and here’s one from the Philadelphia Inquirer.

UPDATE: Meanwhile Cory Doctorow is writing that the Internet may elect the next President. Well, maybe.

ANOTHER UPDATE: And bloggers are already snarking. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. . . .

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Oh, and here’s a profile of Dodd Harris from a while back that I neglected to mention earlier. But better late than never!

MURDER WILL OUT:

RZHEVSKY ARTILLERY RANGE, Russia – They killed them effortlessly, in the signature style of Josef Stalin’s dreaded NKVD secret police: a bullet to the back of the skull, the bullet’s exit shattering the facial bones.

Then, haphazardly, the executioners buried their victims in mass graves, barely disguising their remains under a foot of sagging, sandy soil – year after year, body after broken body. . . .

What lies beneath the mulberry bogs of the Rzhevsky range could be perhaps the single biggest grave of victims of the “Great Terror” ever found in the former Soviet Union. But it appears that the people who died here are a part of a forgotten history Russia would rather not remember.

A year has passed since activists from Memorial – volunteers who have worked for more than a decade to uncover crimes of the communist era – unearthed this burial site: at least 50 graves set just a few paces apart, each containing remains of about 30 people, their yellowed skulls bearing bullet holes that St. Petersburg forensic experts said are telltale signs of NKVD executions.

The Russian government has said nothing so far about the ghastly find.

Irina Flige, head of Memorial’s historical department, said this silence is a disturbing symbol of Russia’s unwillingness to deal honestly with the ugly side of its recent past.

“It’s the kind of history the Russian government doesn’t need,” Flige said.

Historians believe that as many as 20 million people were executed without trial or perished in the labor camps of the Soviet gulag. In 1937-38, at the height of the purges, as many as 40,000 residents of St. Petersburg, then called Leningrad, were put to death.

I’m surprised that this story isn’t getting more attention. But not that surprised, as sympathy for communism is still treated as an amusing foible — rather than the complicity with mass murder that it, in fact, is.

UPDATE: But Marxist scholar Eric Hobsbawm is perfectly fine with mass murder in the name of communism. Despicable.

THE BBC IS NOW VERY MUCH ON THE DEFENSIVE:

Tony Ball, one of Rupert Murdoch’s key lieutenants in Britain, will unveil a survey showing that 51% of viewers believe the £116 annual fee does not represent good value for money.

It is the first time that an opinion poll has shown such dissatisfaction with the BBC, and will fuel the debate about the corporation’s method of funding in the run-up to the renewal of its charter, which sets its remit and method of funding. . . .

The survey, carried out by NOP in June, before the Hutton inquiry, shows that 51% of respondents disagreed with the statement that the “BBC licence fee provides good value for money”. The greatest dissatisfaction is demonstrated in low-income groups.

No doubt the Beeb will try to dismiss this poll, considering its source. But if other polling supports it, it will make things tough. And BBC Resistance is encouraging people to fight the mandatory license fee. (Via Bill Adams).

STEPHEN F. HAYES wonders why the White House continues to downplay the Saddam / Al Qaeda connection. I’ve wondered the same thing.

DONALD SENSING has an interesting post on an Iraqi columnist’s take on Palestinian intellectuals.

ROB SMITH, who’s not afraid of controversy, has his campaign platform all planned out. It’s sad in a whole lot of ways, but I actually think he would be more likely to keep his promises than some of the others who are running.

HERE’S A REVIEW of Lileks’ g