The Mosaic Intelligence Report comments on what Patraeus, Crocker, and the quizzing senators failed to mention, via DailyKos:
In the world of policy, a new legal case may set a precedent for a tougher UK asylum policy. The Guardian reports:
The United Nations last night accused the government of holding a ‘sword of Damocles’ over the heads of Iraqi refugees in Britain after it emerged that the Home Office had won a landmark test case giving it the power to return refugees to war-torn parts of their home country, including Basra and Baghdad.
But following the tribunal’s decision, the government now has the power to remove anyone to any part of Iraq. ‘We are pleased that the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal has agreed with our view and found that conditions in Iraq are such that an ordinary individual Iraqi civilian is not at serious risk from indiscriminate violence,’ a spokesman for the Home Office said.
The tribunal ruling has wide implications for Iraqi asylum seekers. It stated: ‘Neither civilians in Iraq generally, nor civilians even in provinces and cities worst affected by the armed conflict, can show they face a “serious and individual threat” to their “life or person”… merely by virtue of being civilians.’
This ruling is similar to a recent one in Sweden that also insisted that asylum seekers from Iraq prove that there is a direct and individual threat to their person, rather than a general threatening environment that results from war.