BAGHDAD -- Any uneventful day in Khadimiya, a Shiite neighborhood just west of the Tigris, gives cause for celebration. But Saturday's non-events were especially significant since the streets teemed with processions for Arba'een, the end of the mourning period for Ashura. The neighborhood's namesake mosque, one of the holiest in Iraq, remained untouched. That's no small victory. Sadr City wasn't as fortunate, as a car bomb killed 18 on the other side of the city.

The Iraqi Police here deserve a great deal of the credit for securing the area. The much-derided force makes its presence felt on the streets, setting up extensive checkpoints and enforcing a partial vehicular curfew south of Khadimiya. Spot checks on the neighborhood's patrol station with the 57th Military Police Company's 3rd Platoon, commanded by Lieutenant Jonathan Sherrill, found most of the usable vehicles -- unarmored, vulnerable cars -- and senior commanders out of the station and into the field.

That's not to say the police are free of their reputation for weakness, sectarianism and corruption. What several senior IP officials emphasize, however, is that they're at the mercy of a Ministry of Interior that's vastly more corrupt and sectarian.

The neighborhood's district commander, a Colonel Haidar, is a tough guy -- a man with a black mustache, literally and figuratively. He's well-respected by Sherrill, who says he's turned the command around. But when asked about militia penetration, the commander gets agitated. Haider, a Shiite, says that a full fifty percent of new IP recruits belong to one militia or another. "They come here to collect information on members of the other sects," he tells me, meaning, principally, Sunnis. The Ministry of Interior (MoI) knows "everything" about who the new recruits are.

Haider's deputy is Major Ali, a bulky, garrulous man who begs Sherrill to show him how to use Microsoft Access in order to keep track of his multitude of logistics, personnel and finance tasks for the command. (Amazingly, Sherrill quickly and expertly walks Ali through it, despite the program being in Arabic.) Ali, who is Haidar's cousin, fears that the influx of new recruits are turning his station into an intelligence-gathering apparatus for sectarian attacks. "When they get into civilian clothes, they go out and kill members of the other sect," he says. "I have no control over that. The recruits come to me from up higher," -- that is, from the MoI.

Sherrill dissents from the idea that the Ministry is fundamentally corrupt, but he definitely sees corruption within it. "It's all about weeding out the bad apples," he says. But sectarianism is just one of MoI's problems. Today Ali is troubled by a rare instance of the ministry's responsiveness.

Over the last 18 months, the station hasn't received a single 9 mm round for any of its officers, despite repeated requests, assisted by Sherrill, who says they "worked that for months." The request has finally come through, as Ali demonstrates by showing the MoI approval form to the young American lieutenant. But Sherrill is hardly relieved by what he reads: "What happened to the 25,000?" Apparently, MoI is only giving Ali 2,000 rounds. Sherrill promises to take the request back up to his command, and "work it up the chain."

The Interior Ministry has been a hotbed of sectarianism for years. The hope was that Jawad Bolani, the Interior Minister in the Maliki government, would prove to be a corrective force, but while Bolani has been more responsive to American pressure than his predecessor, ex-Badr Corps commander Bayan Jabr, senior Iraqi police commanders say the ministry is getting in the way of their best efforts at creating a professional force.

Whether Haider and Ali's charges amount to buck passing is unclear, but Sherrill and his superior officer, Captain Rob McNellis, have confidence in the two leaders, and Khadimiya has become one of the safest areas for the 57th. Their frequent presence out on the streets in the neighborhood doesn't even subject them to small-arms fire these days. And today, with Haider and Ali's men out in Khadimiya, the locals are safe to celebrate the holiday.

Spencer Ackerman is a senior correspondent with The American Prospect currently on assignment in Iraq.

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- It's a hot afternoon at al-Karkh Traffic Police headquarters in Khadimiya, easily the hottest in the last week. In a darkened office of the sunny building, Major Lawrence (his real name; really!) is answering inventory questions for Lieutenant Anthony Howell of the 92nd Military Police Battalion. Lawrence, who looks like a fat Bashar Assad, has the monotonous job of tracking logistics for the traffic police, and his office has the perfunctory whiteboard filled with statistics about shifts, weapons, ammunition, everything. (Whiteboards are necessary for accounting when you have only a few hours of electricity for your computers every day.)

The half-hour-long stats check bogs down to the point where Lawrence starts committing a no-no from the U.S. perspective: asking the Americans for stuff. Howell and his fellow MPs want Lawrence to go through their own chain of command for their inventory needs, both to test the efficiency of the Iraqi system and to roll back any sense of dependency. But now Lawrence has his hand out, and he can't close it. He starts out asking Howell for flak jackets -- diplomatically, Howell says he'll see what he can do, but no promises -- and soon he's passing out his ballpoint pens to show Howell and his colleague, civilian police adviser Jon Moore, how Iraqi pens smudge and tear paper. "How about getting me some American pens?"

The meeting is about to break when Lawrence's warrant officer, Tarek, walks in. Tarek, thin as a skeleton, has the leathery face of a thirty-year veteran officer and the dessicated teeth of a fifty-year chain smoker, and sure enough he moves over in front of Lawrence's fridge and lights a Miami-brand cigarette. Do you know Tarek? Lawrence asks. They do, and everyone exchanges hellos. "He's a great officer, a longtime veteran," he says through the battalion translator, Achilles. "The only thing is he smokes too many cigarettes." Ha-ha; everyone laughs. Howell and Moore exchange a can-we-go-now look.

But Lawrence isn't finished. "He likes sex, too. You want to check out his cellphone? Lots of porno movies!"

Howell and Moore exchange another look. This one displays much more alarm. Suddenly this is no typical inventory meeting. Lawrence, grinning, taps Achilles, who arches an eyebrow. Achilles wants to make sure Lawrence means for him to translate what he's saying. He does. Achilles, himself bewildered, says, "He wants to know if you guys can have sex in Iraq."

MP training has not prepared the 24-year old lieutenant from West Lafayette, Indiana, for a sex chat with an Iraqi police bureaucrat. "Umm," he says. That's not really allowed.

You're kidding! Lawrence says through Achilles. "How do you do it, guys? What the fuck?"

Howell is blessed with being quick on his feet. "Lots of prayer." Moore, a terminally polite middle-aged Tennesseean, is chuckling to himself like he's trying to survive a plane crash through the power of positive thinking.

Lawrence keeps talking and Achilles keeps translating. "He was in the Iraqi Army, and when they'd be abroad, the officers would give them this white powder, to put in food, or in tea. It's called kafour; I don't know what that is in English, it's an Arabic term..." Moore nods to me: "I see where this is going." Achilles continues, "You put it in tea, it is to stop your orgasm -- your erection." Howell starts shooting me looks. I'm just scribbling as fast as I can.

"You've been to Iraq three times," Lawrence says to Howell, "and you haven't had sex? You're an American citizen! How can you do that?" Actually, it's Howell's second tour.

Elderly Tarek breaks in. "If I'm away from home for just three days, I'm ready to eat my wife!"

Look, Lawrence says. "I spent ten days here at once, not long ago. It wasn't secure enough to go home. When I got back, I ate a lot of dates and honey" -- an aphrodisiac -- "and it was like Viagra! My wife, she was screaming! 'Ah! No more!'" He continues to share that when security improved somewhat, he was able to vary the days he got to come home, and would startle his wife. "She was like, 'What the fuck?'"

Mercifully, Lawrence shifts the subject to how the promotion system for officers works in the U.S. Army. But before we're finally about to leave, he says he feels like Howell and Moore are his brothers. "I hope you guys go back to the States and get everything you want." Achilles doesn't need to explain what Lawrence means.

This piece is cross-posted to Spencer Ackerman's Too Hot For TNR blogspot. Ackerman, former associate editor of The New Republic, is senior correspondent for The American Prospect, currently on assignment in Baghdad for the Prospect and The Nation. Monday he posted exclusively for Slogger about the stability in Khadimiya, and the Iraqi police's role in securing it.

Baghdad, IRAQ -- Traffic crawls towards the the checkpoint near Baghdad's al-Zawra Zoo on a hot Tuesday afternoon, stopping entirely when a Humvee convoy from the 92nd Military Police Battalion, led by 24-year old Lieut. Anthony Howell, cuts across the median.

Cars slowly jockey for place before the checkpoint, falling into a line as if preparing for a drag race, but they'll have to wait. Up ahead, the Iraqi Police and National Police have stopped a white Mitsubishi station wagon that they suspect might be a car bomb.

Just a few feet away, the shade of the trees overhang the zoo's iron gate, but Mitsubishi Man squints under the hot sun and grinds his teeth while waiting for the Iraqis to confer with the Americans. Thin and about 30, he shifts his weight between his loafers or leans on the car's roof with the backs of his elbows, trying to get comfortable while awaiting his judgment.

Paul, a civilian police advisor and thirtysomething narcotics cop from Orlando with stubbly blond hair, approaches three policemen to find out what's happening to the detainee he heard they had stopped. Slowly, the Mitsubishi driver walks up to Paul from behind, trying to tell him something. Paul firmly tells him to step back, and the driver walks back to his car. Frustrated, he takes another few steps toward the oblivious American, and then thinks better of it.

"So, where's the detainee?," Paul asks. The battalion's translator explains to the Iraqi cops what Paul means, and nods his head at their answer. "That was the guy," the translator explains. Paul's eyes bulge. "The guy who just walked up behind me? The guy you think might be a terrorist was allowed to just -- walk up behind me?"

The cops have left their AK-47s in their unarmored pickup truck. Another officer, who's supposed to serve as cover in the event of an incident, stares with a glazed look at the endless line of traffic, precisely the opposite way he should be watching. Had he paid attention, he would have seen that the Americans, Paul and a Bostonian sergeant named Gary Comeau, had gotten between him and Mitsubishi Man. If he needed to open fire, so much for Paul and Gary. When Captain David Martin hears about the daydreaming officer in a post-mission briefing several hours later, he'll roll his eyes and let out an aw-Jeez.

Gary can't believe that the detainee is unrestrained. "You don't just leave the suspect standing out there," he says. "This goes against all my procedures." Gary left the active-duty Army in the 90s and became a National Guardsman and a Massachusetts state trooper. He volunteered for Iraq duty, and days like today test his cheerful demeanor.

Meanwhile, Howell asks the on-scene commander some questions. The commander explains that Mitsubishi Man's registration is out of order. He told the police that he bought the station wagon and sold it back a total of three times. "Couple things," Howell says. "A, why is no one watching this guy closely? And B, why is the car so close to these people?"

The police that Howell referred to are less than perturbed. It's OK, the commander indicates: we have his keys, and there's nothing in the car. The investigating officer is on his way, and should be there in ten minutes. When he does, they'll tow the car to the nearby Saliyah police station and decide what to do with Mitsubishi Man.

Suddenly, an officer in a red beret shows up. He bypasses the Iraqis entirely and starts talking to Comeau. He's not part of the checkpoint detail, he explains, but is part of the Ministry of Interior's entourage. Jawad Bolani, one of the most powerful men in Iraq, is stopped at the checkpoint, and they really have to get to a meeting in the Green Zone. Could they pass through? Comeau sees his documentation and waves the minister by. "They took the extra step of coordinating with us instead of just blasting through the checkpoint," Comeau says, pleased. I ask, "Is that rare?" "Let's just say coordination's not the greatest thing here."

Another cop, this one part of the detail, emerges with Mitsubishi Man's registration. It's clearly fraudulent, the commander explains to Howell. He understands: this guy is in for a long afternoon in Saliyah. "Outstanding work," Howell says, indicating to his men that they can head back to Camp Liberty now.

As the Humvee convoy starts to roll away, the checkpoint clears its contents and the drag race is on. Traffic immediately stops on the opposite side of the street as the Americans rumble across the median.

Spencer Ackerman, former associate editor of The New Republic, is senior correspondent for The American Prospect, currently on assignment in Baghdad for the Prospect and The Nation. He previously posted for Slogger about the stability in Khadimiya, and the Iraqi police's role in securing it, and the "Diplomacy of Porn in Khadimiya Police Station."

As crises go, the controversy over the Pentagon's decision to restrict access on DoD networks to thirteen popular websites doesn't compare to, say, the post-invasion looting in Baghdad or the Samarra mosque bombing. But much as those larger horrors caught the military command unprepared, the Pentagon appears surprised and embarrassed by the growing computer-network controversy.

Word of the guidelines made the front page news, causing such a cringe in first amendment experts and uproar in the blogosphere that the Pentagon called a press conference this week in an attempt to stem the criticism.

Defense Information Systems Agency vice director, Rear Admiral Elizabeth Hight, emphasized the Pentagon's message to reporters that:

"It's important to point out that this directive does not prohibit any individual, including DOD personnel or their families, from posting to or accessing these recreational websites from their personal or commercial network providers. It only restricts the use of DOD computer network resources to access these sites."

The trouble is that, at least in Iraq, far more troops rely on the DoD network to get online than use the Internet from their own laptops, and non-DoD resources are probably not sufficient to sustain troops' usual amount of leisure time invested in these sites.

At Baghdad's Camp Liberty in early March, the Morale, Welfare and Recreation tent's Internet-equipped computer lab frequently had a waiting list for weary soldiers and airmen seeking to get online. A much smaller tent with seven stations for troops to plug Ethernet cables into their laptops for Internet access through a commercial scratch card always had space for this reporter when he sought to avoid the MWR wait.

If the wait to access non-DoD computer networks was sometimes prohibitively long in March, it's hard to imagine the new guidelines won't impact soldiers' everyday access to MySpace and other sites. But that doesn't seem of much concern to the Pentagon.
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Q: Is DOD doing anything to facilitate more access through commercial providers in places where folks were using this bandwidth? Are you, you know, making it possible for commercial people to move in in greater numbers so that there are alternatives available beyond what had been available up till now?

ADM. HIGHT: No, we're not. And I, quite frankly, think that there is a tremendous market approach to whether or not service providers need to be where they need to be. So in other words, I think that commercial providers go where the demand is.

Like Iraq.

MySpace, in particular, is a favorite at Camp Liberty -- both to talk with loved ones outside of Iraq and with one another. Flyers hanging on the bulletin board of the MWR tent advertise soldiers' MySpace pages and urge gawkers not to be "shy about making friends." At least one computer at the MWR tent had its background screen set to advertising a MySpace-available mixtape of troops rapping about their experiences. And MySpace's chat function seemed to be enabled as a desktop shortcut on most stations in the tent.

The new DoD network ban on MySpace received an unexpected and unwelcome mention in the coverage of the three soldiers missing since Saturday. Pfc. Joseph J. Anzack Jr.'s aunt told the Washington Post that her nephew had called from Iraq on Friday because the military had cut off his access to the MySpace account he used to keep in touch with his relatives.

Hight told reporters yesterday that the Pentagon might block "additional sites... in the future as part of ongoing efforts to ensure DOD networks have sufficient throughput available to conduct operational and supporting missions as well as enhance DOD network security." Yet when pressed as to how much bandwidth was really being expended by the use of the fourteen websites, Hight demurred:

Q: Are you able to put a rough percentage of how much of your bandwidth was being taken up by a recreational use from these sites, just to give us an idea of the proportion of the problem?

ADM. HIGHT: Well, I'll tell you why that's very difficult for us to do. We span the globe. We have over 5 million computers. And any number I gave you would just be an average of the world. So rather than mislead you, I'd rather not -- I'd rather not do that.

YouTube, BlackPlanet and other companies have said they will try to persuade the Pentagon to reconsider.

Coming on the heels of the recent decision to have restrict military blogging, many wonder about the new policy's impact on the information war. In a conference call yesterday, according to Noah Schachtman of Wired, Hight got the question head-on:

When asked whether these Internet-enabled troops are a valuable part of the information war against insurgents and Islamic extremists, Admiral Hight replies, "That's a great public affairs question. And I'm not a public affairs officer."

Over the summer, TPMmuckraker reported on an under-the-radar executive order issued by President Bush allowing him to freeze or seize the U.S-based assets of anyone, potentially including U.S. citizens, he deems to threaten "the peace or stability of Iraq or the Government of Iraq" or who "undermin(e) efforts to promote economic reconstruction and political reform in Iraq."

The executive order was written so broadly as to alarm civil libertarians, who feared it was a back-door attempt at criminalizing the antiwar movement -- which Bush could conceivably argue posed a threat to Iraq by seeking to end the U.S. military presence -- or even unwitting donors to insurgent-linked charities. A spokeswoman for the Treasury Department, Molly Millerwise, told us not to worry: "Be assured that the individuals and entities we add to this list are in full faith acting in an aggressive, violent and reckless way in financing the insurgency," she said.

Earlier this month, the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service said: actually, maybe you should worry. It released a report exploring "the contrast between the executive order's broad language and its narrow aim" and questioning why the Treasury Department hasn't released a list of eligible Iraq-related targets for the order.

While CRS credits Millerwise with indicating that the order will cause the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) to primarily go after foreigners, it criticizes the order's "piggybacking potential":

The issue is whether the executive order's application to anyone who provides "support" for a designated entity might affect U.S. persons inadvertently involved in some form of assistance, such as arranging transportation for, selling consumer goods to, or providing routine legal assistance to an entity that becomes blocked under the executive order. Could U.S. persons find themselves designated under the authority of the executive order and thereby have all of their assets subject to blocking whether or not the assets have any nexus with the transaction of any blocked entity or with any foreign entity?

The report says we can't answer that question until OFAC releases a set of regulations covering how to implement the order. Nothing so far appears to be forthcoming, despite Millerwise's comments to TPMmuckraker creating what CRS calls an "expectation" that OFAC will document its rules for implementation. It's also not clear whether interest from a particular member of Congress prompted the report -- and, if so, which member.

(Via Steve Aftergood, who observes, "the potential application of the order appears to be technically unlimited since it includes a recursive clause that has no defined endpoint." In other words, you can be targeted under the order even if you're X Degrees of Kevin Bacon away from an insurgent-related financial transaction.)

Executive Order 13,438: Blocking Property of Certain Persons Who Threaten Stabilization Efforts in Iraq, CRS, November 16, 2007 RL34254.pdf

Spencer Ackerman is a reporter for TPMmuckraker.com.