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From Al Jazeera

Iraq’s prime minister has for the first time publicly called for a US troop withdrawal timetable.

Nuri al-Maliki said on Monday that a military agreement the two countries are negotiating should include provisions for the withdrawal of American troops.

In a meeting with Arab ambassadors in the United Arab Emirates on Monday, al-Maliki said Iraq had proposed a short-term interim memorandum of agreement rather than the more formal status of forces agreement the two sides have been negotiating.

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From Al Jazeera

One person has died and at least 30 others have been injured by a series of small bombs planted in the southern Pakistan city of Karachi.

The six devices went off within an hour of each other on Monday evening in different locations of the port city in Sindh province.

A provincial police officer said bomb disposal teams had been sent to determine the nature of the devices.

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From Al Jazeera

Israeli forces have blockaded the Palestinian West Bank village of Ni’lin.

Troops encircled Ni’lin on Sunday to prevent foreigners from joining protests against a network of razor-wire fences and concrete barricades that cut into occupied Palestinian land.

“The protests have been getting more violent, and that is what we’re trying to stop,” an Israeli army spokeswoman said.

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From Al Jazeera

At least 20 people, mostly police officers, have been killed in a suspected suicide attack in Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad.

The attack on Sunday was near a police station several hundred metres from a rally marking one year since a deadly raid on the Lal Masjid (Red Mosque).

“The whole event at the mosque went smoothly but then the suicide bomber targeted the security,” Rehman Malik, the interior ministry chief, told reporters at the scene.

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From Reuters.com, by Daren Butler

Istanbul - Four Iraqi men are suing U.S. military contractors who they say tortured them while they were detained in Abu Ghraib prison, according to lawsuits being filed at U.S. federal courts on Monday.

The lawsuits allege the contractors committed violations of U.S. law, including torture, war crimes and civil conspiracy.

The scandal over the treatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib unleashed a wave of global condemnation against the United States when images of abused prisoners surfaced in 2004.

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From TheNewYorker.com, by Seymour M. Hersh

Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership. The covert activities involve support of the minority Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups and other dissident organizations. They also include gathering intelligence about Iran’s suspected nuclear-weapons program.

Clandestine operations against Iran are not new. United States Special Operations Forces have been conducting cross-border operations from southern Iraq, with Presidential authorization, since last year. These have included seizing members of Al Quds, the commando arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and taking them to Iraq for interrogation, and the pursuit of “high-value targets” in the President’s war on terror, who may be captured or killed. But the scale and the scope of the operations in Iran, which involve the Central Intelligence Agency and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), have now been significantly expanded, according to the current and former officials. Many of these activities are not specified in the new Finding, and some congressional leaders have had serious questions about their nature.

Under federal law, a Presidential Finding, which is highly classified, must be issued when a covert intelligence operation gets under way and, at a minimum, must be made known to Democratic and Republican leaders in the House and the Senate and to the ranking members of their respective intelligence committees—the so-called Gang of Eight. Money for the operation can then be reprogrammed from previous appropriations, as needed, by the relevant congressional committees, which also can be briefed.

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From IHT.com, by Scott Shane
In a makeshift prison in the north of Poland, Al Qaeda’s engineer of mass murder faced off against his Central Intelligence Agency interrogator. It was 18 months after the 9/11 attacks, and the invasion of Iraq was giving Muslim extremists new motives for havoc. If anyone knew about the next plot, it was Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.

The interrogator, Deuce Martinez, a soft-spoken analyst who spoke no Arabic, had turned down a CIA offer to be trained in waterboarding. He chose to leave the infliction of pain and panic to others, the gung-ho paramilitary types whom the more cerebral interrogators called “knuckledraggers.”

Martinez came in after the rough stuff, the ultimate good cop with the classic skills: an unimposing presence, inexhaustible patience and a willingness to listen to the gripes and musings of a pitiless killer in rambling, imperfect English. He achieved a rapport with Mohammed that astonished his fellow CIA officers.

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From IHT.com, by Andrew E. Kramer

Four Western oil companies are in the final stages of negotiations this month on contracts that will return them to Iraq, 36 years after losing their oil concession to nationalization as Saddam Hussein rose to power.

Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and BP — the original partners in the Iraq Petroleum Company — along with Chevron and a number of smaller oil companies, are in talks with Iraq’s Oil Ministry for no-bid contracts to service Iraq’s largest fields, according to ministry officials, oil company officials and an American diplomat.

The deals, expected to be announced on June 30, will lay the foundation for the first commercial work for the major companies in Iraq since the American invasion, and open a new and potentially lucrative country for their operations.

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From Al Jazeera 

Al-Maliki had said last week that talks with the US on the long-term pact had reached a “dead end”

A controversial deal on the long-term US military presence in Iraq will not include immunity for US contractors working in the country, the Iraqi foreign minister has said.

Speaking exclusively to Al Jazeera, Hoshyar Zebari said on Monday that the US had accepted the demand and it would be stated explicitly in the agreement.

“There would be no immunity whatsoever for private contractors because of what we’ve gone through with them in the past and because of the sensitivities for the Iraqi people,” he said.

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From JPost.com, by Abe Selig

Having adamantly denied for months that Israel could possibly be purchasing any oil originating in Iran, an Israeli official has now acknowledged that the Jewish state cannot be sure that Iranian oil is not coming here indirectly, and a former Israeli energy minister has told The Jerusalem Post that Iranian oil may have been imported indirectly for years and that he would have readily authorized such purchases himself.

“I don’t see any problem if Iranian oil is arriving in Israel,” said Moshe Shahal, who served as energy minister from 1984 to 1990, “because it’s not coming straight from Iran.”

Shahal explained that once oil is on the open market, its source becomes clouded. In a sense, he said, the oil loses its nationality while retaining its quality.

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