In anticipation of the release today of new Abu Ghraib photos and videos, I was searching around, and found this speech:

It is interesting that the nation which boasts the most about freedom and democracy is one of the world’s most rabid incarcerators. It is also interesting that the nation that deigns to serve as the world’s teacher on human rights brought you the vile indignities, tortures and terror of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq!

For many of us who dwell in these manmade hells, Abu Ghraib was no surprise; we have seen or heard the same things in the gulags where we are. Is it mere coincidence that many of the most notorious tyrants and slimy torturers at Abu Ghraib were, in their private lives, state prison guards? Or that the very ringleader, the man shown in most of those vicious photos, worked here, at this very prison, for over six years?

Where do you think he learned what he shared with his Iraqi captives? From a book? America has a long and distinguished career as cager, shackler, handcuffer and torturer. It has had over three centuries of practice against Africans and Indians.

By Mumia Abu-Jamal, "one of over 2 million men, women and children encaged in America’s gulags, the fastest growing public housing development in the United States."

Raw Story was the first to report that Bloomberg News was going to break a story saying Karl Rove and Lewis Libby may have lied to the grand jury. The upshot is that these Administration officials may have lied about where they first heard of Valerie Plame - claiming they heard it from reporters when they did not. In other words, they may have used the reporters as shields, to avoid disclosing they learned it from either a classified document or someone in the Government.

Lewis “Scooter'’ Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, told special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald that he first learned from NBC News reporter Tim Russert of the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame, the wife of former ambassador and Bush administration critic Joseph Wilson. Russert has testified before a federal grand jury that he didn’t tell Libby of Plame’s identity.

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove told Fitzgerald that he first learned the identity of the CIA agent from syndicated columnist Robert Novak, who was first to report Plame’s name and connection to Wilson. Novak, according to a source familiar with the matter, has given a somewhat different version to the special prosecutor.

Think Progress was the first to get the actual article text of the article, which appears below. Murray Waas was the first to break the story yesterday.

The House of Representatives stands ready to reauthorize the Patriot Act.

The ACLU reports that last night, the House Rules Committee refused to adopt reforms that were needed to bring the Patriot Act in line with the Constitution.

Last week, the House Judiciary Committee approved a seriously flawed bill that makes all but two of of the controversial expiring provisions of the Patriot Act permanent. It also puts an excessively long ten-year sunset on those two provisions and includes only minimal changes that the Justice Department has already conceded but that do not reform the excessive reach of these powers into the medical, library, financial and other records of ordinary, law abiding Americans.

In a disappointing development last night, the House Rules Committee rejected allowing a fair, up-or-down vote on series of amendments that would correct these flaws based on no apparent principle other than the fact that these amendments likely have majority support if allowed a vote in the House of Representatives.

Eric Alterman has started a new feature at Altercation called "Scoring Scotus." I am very flattered to have been asked by Eric to contribute to it. My first post is up today. (It's right after Major Bob, who is posting from Iraq.)

I won't be posting the same things on Altercation and TalkLeft, so I hope you will read both.

via The New York Times:

But retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor quickly weighed in on the president's nomination for her replacement, calling Judge Roberts "good in every way, except he's not a woman." Justice O'Connor made the comments in an interview on Tuesday after a fly-fishing trip with the outdoor editor of The Spokane Spokesman-Review, where she was also quoted as saying that she was almost sure Mr. Bush would not appoint a woman to replace William H. Rehnquist because she did not think he would want a woman as chief justice.

"So that almost assures that there won't be a woman appointed to the court at this time," Justice O'Connor said.

The article also has details about the interview process Bush went through. 4th Circuit Judge Harvie Wilkenson said he wasn't asked his opinion about Roe v. Wade or any other issue:

Very few things render me speechless. This is one of them. Via PageOneQ:

Two boys, one aged 18 and one underage minor, were lashed 228 times before being hung by Iranian authorities in the northeastern city of Mashad, PageOneQ has learned.

Within hours of the execution, Members of Iran’s parliament expressed outrage, not for the deaths of the two young men, identified only by the the initials A.M. and M.A., but at journalists who reported the ages of those who were put to death.

More here.

Ignorant, despicable barbarians. A pox on all their houses.

Four underground transit stations in London were evacuated this morning during rush hour.

BBC radio is reporting that several "dummy" bombs or detonators exploded but authorities had not confirmed that. There were no reports of casualties.

Update: Much longer article with new title and links now available here. The first half of the article is about the mis-information about Edith Clement. Were journalists purposely misled to give them less time to research Roberts before the announcement?

Howard Kurtz has an article today in the Washington Post, Court Nominee In Eye of the Blogger Swarm.

This is the first Supreme Court nomination of the Internet age, meaning that liberal and conservative opinion-mongers are already blanketing cyberspace with arguments, facts, taunts, polemics, gossip and electronic links to raw data, hoping to rally the faithful and influence the mainstream media coverage.

Kurtz writes about a BlogPac call the night of Roberts' nomination with 50 bloggers.

The lightning-quick attacks came after 50 top liberal bloggers held a 45-minute conference call Tuesday night. "On the left, we've always talked about the need to have an echo chamber," says John Aravosis, a Washington lawyer and gay rights activist who writes at Americablog.com.

Kurtz reviews the various positions on Roberts taken by bloggers and notes that not all liberal bloggers are marching in lockstep:

The Washington Post leads today with an article about the June 9, 2003 State Department memo that identified Valerie Wilson as the wife of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson:

A classified State Department memorandum central to a federal leak investigation contained information about CIA officer Valerie Plame in a paragraph marked "(S)" for secret, a clear indication that any Bush administration official who read it should have been aware the information was classified, according to current and former government officials.

The paragraph identifying her as the wife of former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV was clearly marked to show that it contained classified material at the "secret" level, two sources said. The CIA classifies as "secret" the names of officers whose identities are covert, according to former senior agency officials.

Anyone reading that paragraph should have been aware that it contained secret information, though that designation was not specifically attached to Plame's name and did not describe her status as covert, the sources said.

Given that Colin Powell had the memo with him on July 7, 2003 on Air Force One when the President and his entourage left for Africa, and that Fitzgerald subpoenaed phone records for Air Force one during that period, Fitzgerald may be assuming that someone leaked information from the memo. So, who saw the memo on Air Force One besides Colin Powell?

Two Afghans who were released Monday from Guantanamo said yesterday that more than 150 of the prisoners are on a hunger strike "to protest alleged mistreatment and to push for freedom." A Government spokesman and Amnesty International say they know nothing about it.

Neil Koslowe, a Washington-based lawyer for 12 detainees from Kuwait, said several inmates told him during a June 20-24 visit to Guantanamo that there was a ``widespread'' hunger strike over the amount and quality of their drinking water.

Eight of the detainnes are being released this week.

...three Saudis, who were not identified, were handed over to Saudi security, the official Saudi Press Agency said in Riyadh. It did not specify whether the three were detained for questioning, saying only that ``the regular procedures will be applied accordingly.''

Ouch.

The 14 Senators that sold us out on Janice Rogers Brown and Priscilla Owen are meeting Thursday. Why? Don't we still have a Senate Judiciary Committee? Who annointed them the arbiters of a Supreme Court nominee?

Via Up Against the Law:

As part of the ongoing FOIA litigation on behalf of the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights, a whole slew of the unreleased photographs and videos from Abu Ghraib are set to be released on Friday. These are the photographs and videos that were shown to the closed session of Congress, which reportedly include videos and photographs of the rape of detainees, including the rape of a male minor being held at the facility.

[Note: This is unverified but seems likely.]