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Summary: U.S./Top News Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega appeared win the presidency in Nicaragua, according to preliminary results released this morning. He garnered 38.5 percent of the vote, well above the 35-percent total and five-point margin over the second-place finisher needed to avoid a runoff, according to a quick count carried out by a respected civic organization.
The Bush administration told a federal judge terrorism suspects held in CIA prisons should not be allowed to reveal details of the "alternative interrogation methods" their captors used to get them to talk, the Washington Post reported Saturday. One attorney said "the executive is attempting to misuse its classification authority . . . to conceal illegal or embarrassing executive conduct." Another said the prisoners "can't even say what our government did to these guys to elicit the statements that are the basis for them being held. Kafka-esque doesn't do it justice. This is 'Alice in Wonderland.' "
Writing in the Nation on October 18, Tom Engelhardt asked, "Why hasn't the mainstream media connected the dots between the Saddam's judgment day and the midterm elections?"
With casualty numbers on the rise in Iraq, soldiers are showing a keen interest in this week's elections, McClatchy News Service reports.
An undercover investigation by ABC News revealed some Army recruiters told students that if they enlisted, their chances of going to Iraq would be small. In an exchange videotaped by a hidden camera, a student asked a recruiter, "Nobody is going over to Iraq anymore?" The reply: "No, we're bringing people back." One recruiter told a student that just quitting the Army was an option if military service didn't suit the new recruit. "It's called a 'Failure to Adapt' discharge," the recruiter said. "It'll just be like it never happened."
The Iraq war's neoconservative boosters have turned sharply on the Bush administration, charging their grand designs have been undermined by White House incompetence, David Rose writes for Vanity Fair. "Prince of Darkness" Richard Perle says if he had to do it over, he would not have advocated an invasion of Iraq.
A Democratic takeover of Congress would put two of the most outspoken critics of the Iraq war, Robert Byrd and David Obey, in charge of dispensing the money President Bush will seek for combat, Reuters reports. Even without withholding a penny for the war, appropriations committees could flex their muscles, one analyst notes. "There are a whole variety of things the secretary of defense wants and needs from the Appropriations Committee that has nothing to do with the support of troops in field," said Scott Lilly, of the Center for American Progress. Congressional appropriators control funds for everything from Rumsfeld's government limousine to Pentagon office computers and pet Defense Department projects.
US Vice President Dick Cheney said he would likely refuse to testify before Congress if he is faced with a subpoena from the opposition Democratic party, AFP reports.
Iran The Iranian Foreign Ministry said Sunday that Iraqi officials had asked Iran to hold talks with the US and that it would consider doing so if the US made an official request, the New York Times reports.
As the Bush administration struggles to rally international pressure on Iran to halt its nuclear program, China and Russia are working to take the military option off the table, the Washington Post reports. This article, by Colum Lynch, reports as fact without attribution the canard that the Iranian government has "threatened to wipe Israel off the map." The article leads by quoting approvingly Patrick Clawson of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, referring to him as a "researcher" and "analyst." Clawson is a prominent advocate for US military confrontation in the Middle East. WINEP's founding director, Martin Indyk, was research director of AIPAC, the main lobby in support of confrontational US and Israeli government Middle East policies in Washington. (See the Center for Media and Democracy's "Source Watch," http://www.sourcewatch.org/wiki.phtml?title=Washington_Institute_for_Near_East_Policy.)
This article evokes Judith Miller's reporting on Iraq in the run-up to the U.S. invasion.
IAEA inspectors visited Iran's second network of centrifuges at its Natanz uranium enrichment facility, the official IRNA news agency reported.
Iraq A series of secret U.S. war games in 1999 indicated an invasion and post-war administration of Iraq would require 400,000 troops, nearly three times the number there now, AP reports. And even then, the games showed, the country still had a chance of dissolving into chaos.
Iraqis were jolted Friday morning by the news that Sgt. Santos Cardona, viewed as one of the villains of Abu Ghraib, has been ordered back to the country, Time magazine reports. The reaction was total outrage.
Afghanistan A recent CIA assessment found the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, had been significantly weakened by rising popular frustration with his American-backed government, the New York Times reports.
Pakistan Almost all of the 80 victims of last week's airstrike on an Islamic school in a tribal region near the Afghan border were children or teenagers according to Pakistan's largest Islamic opposition party reported, the Los Angeles Times reports. The government has described the religious school as a terrorist training camp. But a list published by the Jamaat-i-Islami party indicated 13 of the victims were younger than 12 and the youngest was 7.
Mexico Thousands of anti-government demonstrators marched through Oaxaca Sunday, demanding federal police leave the city, AP reports. "They don't guarantee security; to the contrary, they scare us and are rude," said a local businessman.
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- Robert Naiman Just Foreign Policy www.justforeignpolicy.org