From our intrepid Nancy Youssef, embeded with U.S. Marines in Afghanistan:

Well, after seven days, six nights, five star hotels (not), four military installations, three cancelled flights, two convoys and a very weird, lying  NATO soldier, I am here, in Farah province, at the border of Helmand.

I am the first to embed with the Marine unit, and they are only the second Marine unit to come through this area. To say the base in barren is an understatment. No bathrooms (as in we use a bag) or heat. The days of personal hygiene are over, and my presence here has doubled the female population. But I think I will eventually find an interesting story. Gen. Conway will be here Wednesday. They offered me Christmas with him, flying around all the FOBs (Forward Operating Bases) here but I decided I would rather spend it with the troops here. Jumping from place to place really did not appeal to me.

It appears the Taliban are beefing up their military prowess in response to the Marine presence here. They are up to company level.  The Marines tell me they are weaker but one district over they are large and in charge because they don't have enough Marines to put there as well. I also want to do a piece on how these guys are adjusting from Anbar to here. They thought they were going to Iraq up until two months before their deployment. I do my first patrol tomorrow and hope to have more ideas then. 
 

This is (probably) Warren's last blog from his December 1-13 reporting trip to Iran...

And with Christmas now upon us, it's a bit of a timely one, since with all those presents being unwrapped, it's a point in the year when we often think more about the quality of the products we buy.

As I've blogged before, I was struck by how wide and deep the genuine pro-American sentiment is in Iran, at many (although certainly not all) levels of society.

One manifestation of that is Iranians' love for American-made things, and their belief that U.S. quality is No. 1 in the world. This was explained to me by more than one Iranian, including a taxi driver who got angry when describing how the Chinese trucks imported by the Iranian government keep breaking down. But, oh, the big U.S.-made trucks imported before the Shah of Iran was overthrown in 1979! Those beauties, he said, eyes agleam, are still working.

Part of this may be a time-warp effect from the 1970s. U.S. manufacturing WAS No. 1 back then, and many of the U.S. products imported at that time of close U.S.-Iranian relations are still working--including a smattering of old Buicks, Jeeps and Chevys that still roll down Tehran's clogged streets. Part of it may also be the attraction of the forbidden. U.S. consumer products are available in Iran, to be sure, but most have to be re-exported from third countries due to U.S. sanctions, and they are overwhelmed by clothes, electronics, etc., from Europe and Asia.

To those of us bludgeoned by various official reports and the news media in to believing that the United States has been eclipsed by China, Japan and others, it's refreshing to be told incessantly how good Made in America is.

"(Bleep) Chinese products. It's ruined our economy," said 24-year-old Mohammad Mirzaei, who works in his father's clothing shop in south Tehran. The public's belief, he said (perhaps being a bit metaphorical) is that products made in Iran work for one day, those made in China work for three days, and those made in the U.S.A. work for a year.

Greetings from Afghanistan, dear readers. I have been here about two weeks now, and I owe you a smart blog about all the ways Afghanistan is not Iraq. And let me tell you the list grows everyday. I promise it is coming soon. In the meantime, I am happy to report I found one of the most important Marines around these days, the postal chief, Staff Sgt. Jason Dixon, 30, of Springfield, Missouri. Dixon works out of Camp Bastion, which sits on the edge of Helmand province, a Taliban stronghold. His job is to get all the Christmas packages out on time to the 3rd battalion, 8th Marines stationed here and in neighboring Farah province, an area that is about the size of Vermont.  Sounds simple, right? Wrong. These days they receive 24,0000 pounds of mail every few days, much of that is care packages from friends and strangers alike.

I am happy to report that Staff Sgt. Dixon and his colleagues are working around the clock to make sure the deliveries make it by Christmas morning. I found him sorting packages around 8:30 p.m. Dixon, who joined the Marine Corps twelve years ago after he was turned down for a job at the Postal Service, does his job with great pride. I have included a photo of him in front of a portion of one shipment. He sorts them and gets them out to the five bases here. And when a shipment arrives at these barren military posts, you will see the toughest, strongest Marines scurrying to the truck, looking for their packages. It is heartwarming and amusing, indeed.

They have received so much here that they are now making stockings for each Marine to hand out on Christmas Day. So rest assured dear readers, the Marines are feeling the love, one shipment at a time.

From today's guest blogger, our colleague Greg Gordon, McClatchy Washington bureau investigative reporter:

To carry out a recommendation from the Sept. 11 Commission aimed at preventing terrorists from ever again capitalizing on the lack of U.S. intelligence sharing, the Department of Homeland Security has since 2004 quietly facilitated the creation of 58 to 60 ``fusion centers’’ that blend local, regional, state and federal agents.

One pregnant question has been how closely these agencies have been observing state and federal privacy laws as information, sucked up from eavesdropping, informants, surveillance and government records, flows among the feds, state and local agencies down to cops on the beat.

In a Privacy Impact Assessment released today, Homeland Security officials ticked off no fewer than seven ways in which each center, with its own organizational structure, poses risks to Americans’ privacy. Among them:

-- Justifying the centers’ existence, best done in local communities by forming a privacy committee and keeping transparent.

-- Lack of rigorous controls over data mining, in which computer programs search for patterns among massive bits of information.

 -- ``Ambiguous lines of authority,’’ a problem because Homeland Security and FBI employees are governed by federal laws, while state laws guide other agents.

 -- The centers’ excessive secrecy, a veil that can by lifted somewhat by publishing documents to show compliance with privacy laws.

 -- Dissemination of inaccurate or incomplete information that can hurt individuals.

 -- Involvement of the military and private sector, which might have no grounds to see personal data.

-- Mission creep, because some of the centers are increasingly being used to pursue all crimes, not just terrorism.

The assessment is an alphabet soup of acronyms for various laws, committees and policies governing the flow of ``personally identifiable information’’ – also known as PII. It seeks to implement a set of Fair Information Practice Principles (FIPP, of course) to embed privacy protections into the centers.

The assessment echoes warnings from the Congressional Research Service, the Government Accountability Office and even the American Civil Liberties Union about potential breaches of individuals’ privacy. The most critical prevention tools are basic: written policies and training of everyone involved to ensure they know what information is to go nowhere.

When mistakes are made, DHS’ Privacy Office recommends that agents ``acknowledge the error and take corrective action,’’ allowing harmed individuals to seek redress.

Caroline Fredrickson, director of the ACLU’s Washington Legislative Office, said the fusion centers ``remain a mysterious and troubling trend in local law enforcement,’’ especially given the history of domestic spying by police and the FBI. She said her group and the DHS’ Privacy Office agree on the same set of risks.

``The use of data mining, participation by the private sector, ambiguous lines of authority and the general lack of transparency all pose hazards for Americans’ privacy,’’ Fredrickson said.

It all depends how one defines "work," I suppose.

The goal of United Nations and U.S. sanctions is to persuade Iran to give up its suspected drive for a nuclear weapon, and halt what the State Department says is its support for terrorist groups such as Lebanon-based Hezbollah. On that score, clearly the sanctions haven't achieved their intended goal. And after just spending two weeks in Iran, it's unclear to me that Iran will ever give up the nuclear option — or, at least that it will do so as a response to pressure.

It's harder to measure whether the sanctions have achieved their more immediate target: cutting off Iran's access to sophisticated military and nuclear technology, and to the U.S.-dominated international financial system. My guess is that the answer here is a qualified yes — that is, the sanctions have raised Iran's cost of doing business in these areas considerably.

How about Iran's oil and gas industry, the country's prime income earner? Iran is badly in need of foreign investment and technology — $120 billion worth, by one estimate I read — and keeping international energy firms out of Iran is a prime goal of U.S. government policy. Is it working?

To find out, I spent 2 1/2 hours in Tehran last week with Hojatollah Ghanimi Fard, from the National Iranian Oil Company.

Fard — you can see his photo here — manages to be both friendly and fiesty at the same time. He holds the title of Vice President for Investment Affairs. From the U.S. perspective, he might as well be Vice President for Getting Around the Sanctions.

We discussed, and debated, oil, sanctions, U.S. policy toward Iran, the 1980-81 seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and a lot else besides.

Fard vigorously made the case that the sanctions, at least as applied to gas and oil, have hurt the United States and other Western powers more than they've hurt Iran. (U.S. firms are barred from doing business in Iran's energy sector; some European countries, such as France, have urged their companies not to make new investments).

The result, Fard said, is that Iran has looked elsewhere for investment (elsewhere apparently being places like China, Malaysia, and other Asian countries). He described the sanctions as being "like a roadblock. ... At first you get angry" when you come upon it as you're driving, but then you find a different route. "It's not as quick as the other but, ah, look at the scenery."

"If the sanctions mean depriving a country of (ultimately) receiving some technology ... I have to say to you there is no sanction of that sort," he said.

Fard asserted that Iran has signed "billions" of dollars worth of oil and energy development contracts with foriegn firms in the past four months. While Iran isn't naming its foreign partners yet, Fard insisted: "This is not bluffing."

Iran is holding off on announcing the contracts based on past experience, when agreements-in-principle were announced, and then scuttled by pressure from Western governments. Such was the fate of a deal estimated at $1 billion between Iran and Conoco, that was scuttled by President Bill Clinton in 1995.

While much of what Fard says might be accurate, one can't help but feel the sanctions must be having someimpact if Iran is afraid to announce its successes. And the fact remains that oil- and gas-rich Iran actually imports refined petroleum, because it doesn't have enough refining capacity to meet its domestic requirements.

.. is not entirely a blessing.

You think gas is getting cheap back in the United States? Try 10 cents a liter. (Please don't ask me to do the liter-to-gallon equivalent right now, but that's CHEAP).

That's what Iranians pay for gas under a system of government subsidies for basic goods like energy, sugar and bread that dates back to the Shah's time and is financed by Iran's massive crude oil exports. (Iranian citizens can purchase 120 liters a month at the subsidized price, I'm told, then have to pay a more market-oriented rate for anything above that).

For many working-class Iranians, the subsidies are a necessity to just get by, a cushion they couldn't imagine living without. But they tend to have unintended consequences. It's basic economic behavior - gas is cheap, so people drive a lot. A LOT.

Traffic is a nightmare in Tehran, a city of about 12 million, and pollution is a nasty, and no doubt health-threatening, blanket over the Iranian capital. On Monday, a particularly bad day, you could, if you really tried, make out behind the smog the beautiful Albroz Mountains, whose foothills begin just outside the city and rise majestically over it on rare clear winter's days.

Iranians are gracious and generous hosts, and I've been invited into nearly a half-dozen homes, both upscale Tehrani apartments and working-class domiciles, in my 9 days here. But many also tend to keep their homes heated to a toasty temperature. Why not? Home heating is subsidized too.

Saeed Laylaz, an independent economist who worked for the reformist government of former President Mohammad Khatami, said Iranians emit more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere per person - 6.4 metric tons - than Indians do at 1.2 metric tons. (The figure for the US is 20.6 metric tons per capita). Total Iranian emissions have doubled since 1990, Laylaz said.

Diesel gas is even cheaper here, at 2 cents per liter. "Nobody walks in this country," he said.

Two new reports provide a study in contrasts when it comes to the United States and the global weapons trade.

A study by the New America Foundation places the United States at the top of the list of the world's leading arms-selling nations in 2007, accounting for more than 45 percent of all global weapons transfers.

The Bush administration signed arms sales agreements with 174 nations and territories worth more than $32 billion last year, including with one or more parties involved in 20 of the world's 27 major conflicts, the report says. The five biggest recipients of U.S. arms were Pakistan, Turkey, Israel, Iraq and Colombia.

More than half of the top 25 purchasers of U.S. weapons were either undemocratic regimes or those with serious human rights records, including Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Egypt, Jordan and Bahrain, according to the report.

"By propping up repressive regimes and fueling regional arms races, arms transfers often promote the very instability they are meant to reduce," observe the reports authors, Willliam Hartung and Frida Berrigan. "And in too many cases, arms and military technology sent to allies of the moment end up in the hands of U.S. adversaries down the road."

Such is not the case with portable anti-aircraft missiles being recovered in arms cache busts in Iraq, says a new report by the Federation of American Scientists' Missile Watch Project.

By far the largest percentage of these weapons being found are of Soviet design and come from the arsenals of former Warsaw Pact nations, says the report, which found that at least 121 portable anti-aircraft missiles and four launchers have been recovered in arms cache raids since October 2006. To date, there have been no reports of any Western-made shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles being recovered, underscoring the effectiveness of Western military inventory tracking systems.

The United States has set aside $1 million for a program to buyback such weapons to reduce the threat to U.S. and Iraqi military aircraft and commercial aviation. But the large number of such missiles still being found indicates that a substantial amount of these highly dangerous weapons remain available to insurgent groups.

The good news is that there has been a dramatic reduction in attacks on U.S. aircraft with such weapons over the past year.

This is a very personal blog, but what the heck...

On Friday, I visited the site of the old U.S. Embassy in Tehran. Well, "visited" is probably too strong a word. We were driving in downtown Tehran when an Iranian friend announced that "We are near the site of your old embassy." A block and a half later it appeared on our left, and we pulled over--quickly--to take a look at the walled compound. Set in stone in the wall is the old official symbol, barely visible now, of the U.S. government eagle. The Embassy, as is well known, is now a shrine to America's alleged "crimes" around the world.

As it was Friday, said museum was closed and no one was around save for one guard at the gate.

Seeing the Embassy, where U.S. diplomats were held hostage for 444 days until they were freed in January 1981, brought a mixture of pain, sadness, nostalgia and confusion.

Most Americans around my age (46) remember where they were when the hostage crisis--and the failed rescue attempt by President Jimmy Carter--happened. In my case, I was a senior in high school. These were traumatic events even to those not directly involved.

Seeing the Embassy also closed a journalistic full circle for me. The story goes like this: In 1980, I was a freshman at St. Mary's College of Maryland, and working on the student newspaper there, an every-other-week journal with attitude called the Empath. One of our staff members had a father who was in the Air Force - not only that, he was (if memory serves), director of the flight line at Andrews Air Force Base. And so, on the day that the American hostages at long last came home, the day of President Ronald Reagan's inauguration, I and a few of my colleagues had a front-row seat to history.

I was there on the Andrews flight line when the plane bearing the hostages touched down and they stepped off the plane to be reunited with friends and family, there next to the Sam Donaldsons and Dan Rathers of the world. It was pretty heady stuff for an 18-year-old, and I was forever hooked on journalism and world affairs - a career that has blessed me with close-up views of lots of other history, covering five secretaries of state, and reporting from over 90 countries (Iran being the latest).

Iran's Islamic revolution will mark its 30th anniversary next year. Iran has never apologized for the take-over of the embassy and the hostage-taking, although some of the Iranian students involved have expressed regret.

Despite what happened then, and the bad blood between the two countries before and mostly since, people in Tehran, at least the educated classes, still have genuine affection for America. I've traveled enough to know the difference between formal, but insincere hospitality, and the real thing.

On one of my first days in Iran, I went to a small cafe for coffee and a snack. When the man working on the other side of the coffee bar discovered where I was from, his face immediately brightened. "When are you (Americans) coming back?" he asked.

N&S is making its debut appearance in Iran over the next two weeks. Warren will try to post as frequently as time and technology permit...

Despite what Condi Rice said last week (see below, "Iran: Interested No More," rumors are running rife in Tehran's huge central bazaar that the United States is on the verge of establishing some sort of diplomatic office in Iran for the first time since shortly after Iran's 1979 revolution.

That would probably cause a mass stampede, since half of Tehran seems to have a relative in the United States, and even many that don't would love to have a U.S. visa.

Ahmed Fathi, 68, a prominent seller of gold and other jewelry in the old bazaar, which extends for hundreds of acres in the Iranian capital, says he heard on the Voice of America's Persian language service that the U.S. Interests Section--a sort of proto-Embassy--is already a done deal. Rumor has it that the United States has already chosen land in north Tehran, the wealthy part of the city, and is moving personnel in from Dubai.

Told that the United States can't make a move without agreement from Iran's government, Fathi was unfazed. "I think the Iranian government has okayed an Interests Section behind the curtain," i.e., behind the scenes, he said.

He says he has a daughter who lives in southern California.