New model army
Mr Tony Blair's latest stunt is to seek to involve NATO in the training of "new Iraqi security forces." The idea is to have a colonial model of security with Iraqi cannon fodder taking the risks and American and European advisers giving the orders. It is a policy which has been tried before. There is a name for this policy. President Nixon used to call it "Vietnamisation of the war".
It didn't work.


Apparently limb amputations have been carried out at Abu Ghraib prison. According to Time Magazine:

"Medical personnel and others who worked at the prison tell TIME that, with straitjackets unavailable, tethers--like the leash on Gus--were put to use at Abu Ghraib to control unruly or mentally disturbed detainees, sometimes with the concurrence of a doctor. That such a restraint-- which is supposed to be placed around legs, arms or torsos--ended up instead around a man's neck seems to be a case of a medically condoned practice degenerating into abuse. But there was also medical disarray at the prison: amputations performed by nondoctors, chest tubes recycled from the dead to the living, a medic ordered, by one account, to cover up a homicide. That in itself would have made Abu Ghraib a scandal even without the acts of torture inflicted on the inmates by their guards."