Iraq torture may be worse now - GOP still wants to encourage more

There goes yet another reason for invading Iraq. The torture angle was always weak because if that was a reason for going in, the US would have to add quite a few other countries to that list, including itself in the GOP control era. Who could even imagine that the US Congress would actually be sitting around and debating how much torture is good policy? I must have missed that part in the Bible that talks about the Christian benefits of torture. I must have missed the Jefferson quote about how democracy thrives with a bit of waterboarding. Look at the mess the Republicans have created both for Iraq and for America.

Manfred Nowak, the U.N. special investigator on torture, made the remarks as he was presenting a report on detainee conditions at the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay as well as to brief the U.N. Human Rights Council, the global body's top rights watchdog, on torture worldwide.

Reports from Iraq indicate that torture "is totally out of hand," he said. "The situation is so bad many people say it is worse than it has been in the times of Saddam Hussein."

Nowak added, "That means something, because the torture methods applied under Saddam Hussein were the worst you could imagine."

Some allegations of torture were undoubtedly credible, with government forces among the perpetrators, he said, citing "very serious allegations of torture within the official Iraqi detention centers."

"You have terrorist groups, you have the military, you have police, you have these militias. There are so many people who are actually abducted, seriously tortured and finally killed," Nowak told reporters at the U.N.'s European headquarters.

"It's not just torture by the government. There are much more brutal methods of torture you'll find by private militias," he said.

Read the rest of this post...

Open Thread

Got torture? Read the rest of this post...

Correction to Joe's post below

The White House just issued a corrected transcript to Bush's statement about the torture deal. The corrected text from the president reads as follows:

“The agreement clears the way to do what the American people expect us to do — to capture innocent Canadians, to detain innocent Canadians, to question innocent Candians, and then to deport them to Middle Eastern countries where they'll be tortured.”

Read the rest of this post...

Bush/GOP Senators reach deal on torture

That's the latest news from Capitol Hill...waiting for real details.

CNN is reporting that there are still some "hurdles" from the House side.

Bush is going to make a statement soon.

UPDATE: Bush spoke....this is his top legislative priority:

“I’m pleased to say this agreement preserves the single most potent tool we have in protecting America and foiling terrorist attacks,” he said in televised remarks. “The agreement clears the way to do what the American people expect us to do — to capture terrorists, to detain terrorists, to question terrorists and then to try them.”

Can he pay some attention to the messes in Iraq and Afghanistan now? Read the rest of this post...

House GOPers again show why people hate Congress

Today's NY Times poll has the approval rate for Congress at 25%:

By broad margins, respondents said that members of Congress were too tied to special interests and that they did not understand the needs and problems of average Americans. Two-thirds said Congress had accomplished less than it typically did in a two-year session; most said they could not name a single major piece of legislation that cleared this Congress. Just 25 percent said they approved of the way Congress was doing its job.

Dana Milbank's column in today's Washington Post documenting the shenanigans in Tex Sensenbrenner's hearing on torture helps explain why:

It was, in all, a tough day for the jowly, red-faced chairman, who had insisted that the legislation go through his committee against House leaders' wishes. Nor was it one of the finest days for House Republicans, who proved that, on the subject of torture, they could tie themselves in knots just as easily as their colleagues in the Senate, where the Bush bill is in a stalemate with one backed by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and friends.

Confronted with one of the weightiest issues of the times -- whether to reinterpret the Geneva Conventions' torture prohibitions -- the committee members quickly retreated to the familiar terrain of extraneous and off-point arguments.

The Republicans on the Hill can't govern. They can't think for themselves. It's either Bush pulling the puppet strings or one of their entrenched special interests. Read the rest of this post...

Bush administration looking to depose another Iraqi PM?

Recent reports indicate that the Bush administration is increasingly unhappy with Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki. Maliki's government is four months into its tenure, and in that time it has stumbled in its efforts to provide security, economic development, and basic services. For some reason, President Bush seems to impute this to a failure of will (perhaps having been indoctrinated into the neocon Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics?), and he indicated that U.S. support hinges on how "tough" the Iraqi government is:

Mr. Bush said he wanted Iraqis to know "that the United States of America stands with them, so long as the government continues to make the tough choices necessary for peace to prevail."

Considering the fact that this administration seems to equate leadership with obstinacy, these increasing criticisms aren't surprising. The administration used similar critiques when it essentially pushed out the first elected Prime Minister, Ibrahim Jaafari, calling him indecisive and weak when the reality was that the administration was terrified of his dependence upon Sadr for political support. Of course, Maliki also depends on Sadrist support, because Sadr controls the largest Shia bloc in parliament. And Maliki is faced with the thankless (and so far luckless) job of holding together political groups that have vastly disparate goals.

All this is bad enough, but the current administration seems intent on focusing on all the wrong things. Apparently the be all and end all of Maliki's tenure is whether he'll stand up to Sadr, who just happens to be his most important political benefactor. Hoping for this is just like all the pretending that "sensible centrists" do about the Bush administration: "If only he did something that's totally out of character, totally against past precedent, and totally against his political interests, everything would be fine!" The inability to work with (or even accept the existence of) people the administration doesn't like is seriously damaging our foreign policy, and this myopic strategy appears likely to continue:

A former senior official said the big test would be whether Mr. Maliki could confront Mr. Sadr. "If you don’t do that, I don’t know how he can succeed," the official said.

When did containment become such a dirty word? There's a reason "realism" and "reality" look alike. I don't like Sadr, and he's responsible for a significant amount of carnage in Iraq, both against Coalition forces and Iraqis, but we cannot afford to open up a front against the Shia in Iraq. The administration is fond of making World War II analogies, so maybe they'll understand this: forcing Maliki to go after Sadr, or doing it ourselves, would be about as good an idea as Germany opening up the Eastern Front against Russia. If we can't pacify Iraq with 140,000 troops, tank divisions, helicopter gunships, and fighter jets, Maliki certainly can't do it by having a chat with Moqtada al-Sadr. A political resolution is going to take time, which is an absolute tragedy as people continue to die by the thousands, but publicly intimating that Maliki is weak isn't going to help anything, and it further demonstrates the administration's inability to comprehend basic and vital ground truths. Read the rest of this post...

Houston gun shop owner: arm yourself against Katricians

Bush's legacy of failure following Katrina lives on. Bush never showed the leadership necessary to deal with this crisis. Now, they're Katricians:

When the "Katricians" rise up in violence, Houstonians had better be packing some serious heat.

That's the inflammatory message of a new gun-shop commercial on the radio that gives Hurricane Katrina evacuees a vaguely alien-sounding name, and advises Texans to take up arms to defend themselves against crimes committed by the newcomers.

"When the 'Katricians' themselves are quoted as saying the crime rate is gonna go up if they don't get more free rent, then it's time to get your concealed-handgun license," warns the radio ad by Jim Pruett, who co-hosts a bombastic talk-radio show and owns Jim Pruett's Guns & Ammo, a self-styled "anti-terrorist headquarters" that sells knives, shotguns, semi-automatic rifles and other weapons. As Pruett describes the dangers posed by "Katricians," glass can be heard shattering, and a bell tolling ominously.

Heckuva job, Bushie. Don't think that Bush is not ultimately responsible for this mess. This was a national disaster. It's part of the pattern of the Bush presidency. Talk and photo ops, but no action. Read the rest of this post...

Asymmetric Warfare?

As a fan of National Journal's "The Hotline," AMERICAblog is loath to compare Hotline employees Conn Carroll, John Mercurio and Chuck Todd to terrorists. But all seem to share at least one strategic similarity: asymmetric attacks.

Hotline can strike campaigns and candidates with bitter and churlish attacks that the candidates it supports could never dream of getting away with. When the attacked candidates strike back at Hotline, Hotline's favored candidates can then feign ignorance or claim no control over what its Hotline supporters do.

The best example of this is Hotline's recent involvement in the Virginia Senate race on behalf of Republican Senator George Allen. According to Hotline writer Conn Carroll, anti-Allen bloggers act like "terrorists." Those bloggers are doing the bidding of the Webb campaign, Hotline says. And Hotline claims, while offering no proof, that Webb's denial of having orchestrated the blog attacks is "feigned."

As VA SEN sinks further and further down into the gutter, will either candidate call on the National Journal and Hotline to clean up its act, or will they take the "Hotline who?" route? Read the rest of this post...

Santorum is still flailing

Little Ricky can't break 40% in the polls. Not a good place for an incumbent with less than seven weeks til Election Day. Not a good place for an incumbent who has been running aggressive negative ads against his opponent:

For the Senate, Democratic challenger Bob Casey led incumbent Sen. Rick Santorum 45 percent to 38 percent among registered voters, according to the Keystone Poll from Franklin & Marshall College. The result was virtually unchanged from the pollsters' August survey.

Green Party candidate Carl Romanelli, whose candidacy is expected to help Santorum by drawing support from Casey, was supported by 5 percent. Twelve percent were undecided.

Don't be surprised to see another poll in the next couple days showing Ricky under 40. He's got that stench of a loser. Read the rest of this post...

Just how well is Bush protecting our military bases? Not that well.

Seriously, it's the base that commands much of the war on terror and any idiot can just drive in. Then again, I'm sure no one could have ever imagined that terrorists might us a car as a weapon. Read the rest of this post...

The View from CREW

NOTE FROM JOHN: Today we launch a new regular feature on AMERICAblog, "The View from CREW." Every week or so, Melanie Sloan, the executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a kick-ass non-partisan ethics watchdog group here in DC, will check in and fill us in on the latest ethics atrocities in our lovely nation's capital. As longtime readers know, we really have a lot of respect for the work CREW does, so we're very excited that Melanie will be gracing our cyber-home.
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Tom DeLay may be gone from Congress, but his legacy of corruption is alive and well on Capitol Hill. As proof, today, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) released its second annual report on the most corrupt members of Congress entitled "Beyond DeLay: The 20 Most Corrupt Members of Congress (and five to watch)."

This report extensively documents the egregious, unethical and possibly illegal activities of the most tainted members of Congress. CREW has compiled the members’ transgressions and then analyzed them in light of federal laws and congressional rules.

We issued our first “Beyond DeLay” in September 2005. Since then, DeLay has resigned and two of the 13 members in last year’s report have pleaded guilty to corruption crimes: Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham (R-CA) is now serving an eight-year jail term for bribery and Rep. Bob Ney (R-OH) will likely serve at least two years for conspiracy and making false statements.

Too many elected officials believe they are above the law. That’s why CREW created this encyclopedia on corruption in the 109th Congress: to hold unethical members of Congress accountable for their actions

The 20 elected officials named in this report have chosen to enrich themselves and their families and friends by abusing their positions, rather than work for the public good. And Americans care about congressional corruption: a Gallup poll released in May of 2006 shows that 83% of Americans consider corruption a serious issue.

There’s another reason why CREW creates reports like Beyond DeLay. Congress has abdicated its constitutional obligation to police itself. Not a single ethics complaint has been filed in the U.S. House of Representatives in this Congress – not even against Cunningham or Ney.

Luckily, the Department of Justice still believes that political corruption is worth pursuing. In fact, just yesterday, New York Daily News reported that the FBI has tripled the number of agents working on issues of congressional corruption.

Read "Beyond DeLay." You’ll be outraged. Unfortunately, I can guarantee we’ll be doing another edition next year. Read the rest of this post...

The Big Oil administration - "anything goes"

Are there no limits to the taxpayer-funded handouts to Big Oil? Everything within this administration is about helping the special interests who finance their campaigns.

The accusations, many of them in four lawsuits that were unsealed last week by federal judges in Oklahoma, represent a rare rebellion by government investigators against their own agency.

The auditors contend that they were blocked by their bosses from pursuing more than $30 million in fraudulent underpayments of royalties for oil produced in publicly owned waters in the Gulf of Mexico.

"The agency has lost its sense of mission, which is to protect American taxpayers,"said Bobby L. Maxwell, who was formerly in charge of Gulf of Mexico auditing. "These are assets that belong to the American public, and they are supposed to be used for things like education, public infrastructure and roadways."

Who needs education and infrastructure anyway

The new accusations surfaced just one week after the Interior Department's inspector general, Earl E. Devaney, told a House subcommittee that "short of crime, anything goes" at the top levels of the Interior Department.

In two of the lawsuits, two senior auditors with the Minerals Management Service in Oklahoma City said they were ordered to drop their claim that Shell Oil had fraudulently shortchanged taxpayers out of $18 million.

A third auditor, also in Oklahoma City, charged that senior officials in Denver ordered him to drop his demand that two dozen companies pay $1 million in back interest.

And in a suit that was filed in 2004, Mr. Maxwell charged that senior officials in Washington ordered him not to press claims that the Kerr-McGee Corporation had cheated the government out of $12 million in royalties.

Read the rest of this post...

Thursday Morning Open Thread

Just watched Bill Clinton on the Today Show. He's doing a lot of press this week around the Clinton Global Initiative. Meredith had some pretty inane questions, but didn't matter...he's good. It's a rare morning when a morning news show doesn't get my day off to a cranky start.

So what else is going on? Read the rest of this post...

The rebuilding effort in Iraq

So do we laugh or cry? When politics dictates everything, what's the difference between communist governments and the Bush administration? The countless similarities are creepy. Read the rest of this post...

UN report on Iraq shows civilian deaths rising

It must really stink to the Pentagon crowd when someone else actually checks your so-called facts and figures. The Pentagon trick to suddenly stop counting certain kinds of deaths in Iraq (because we all know how being blown to bits is much different than being shot on the street) is business as usual for the administration which struggles with the truth on a daily basis. This UN report also helps to understand the quick about face by the army with their "troops are coming home/uh-oh, we might have to add more" spin. The violence in Iraq just continues to get worse. Even the UN admits that their numbers may be low.

The report from the U.N. Assistance Mission in Iraq offered a grim assessment of other indicators, from unlawful detentions to the growth of sectarian militias and death squads, and a rise in "honor killings" of women.

The report raises new questions about U.S. and Iraqi forces' ability to bring peace to Baghdad, where the bulk of the violent deaths occurred. Iraq's government, set up in 2006, is "currently facing a generalized breakdown of law and order which presents a serious challenge to the institutions of Iraq," it said.

According to past U.N. reports, 710 civilians were killed in January, 1,129 in April, 2,669 in May and 3,149 in June.

Violent civilian deaths in July reached an unprecedented high of 3,590 people, an average of more than 100 a day, the new report said. The August toll was 3,009 people, the report said.

Of the total for July and August, the report said 5,106 of the dead were from Baghdad.

But those in Baghdad should remember that the right wing pro-war/pro-torture pundits always tell us how American cities are actually more violent, so they should be OK and feel better knowing this "truth." I think we all are familiar with all of the American cities who have experienced over 5,100 dead in two months, right?

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Open thread

Nice cool night in DC. Fall is here. Kind of. Read the rest of this post...