Alfred W. McCoy is a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of the book, "The Politics of Heroin," an examination of the CIA's alliances with drug lords, and "Closer Than Brothers," a study of the impact of the CIA's psychological torture method upon the Philippine military.

Today a shorter version of his article on the C.I.A.'s history of torture appears in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Even as pundits fantasized about "limited, surgical torture," the Bush administration, following the president's orders after 9/11 to "kick some ass, " was testing and disproving their theories by secretly sanctioning brutal interrogation that spread quickly from use against a few "high-value target" al Qaeda suspects to scores of ordinary Afghans and then hundreds of innocent Iraqis.

....Looked at historically, the Abu Ghraib scandal is the product of a deeply contradictory U.S. policy toward torture since the start of the Cold War. At the United Nations and other international forums, Washington has long officially opposed torture and advocated a universal standard for human rights. Simultaneously, the CIA has propagated ingenious new torture techniques in contravention of these same international conventions, a number of which the United States has ratified.

A longer version of his article is available here. An even longer version will appear in The New England Journal of Public Policy (Volume 19, No. 2, 2004).Also don't miss Human Rights First September 9 report, Detainee Abuse: New Human Rights First Report Details Failings of Pentagon Investigations

TBogg takes on Powerline's pictures comparing Kerry to Bush with ones that cast the two in a far truer light.

Dave Johnson at Seeing the Forest says in the strongest possible terms that those under 30 should be worried enough to vote because they are going to be drafted. Go copy his post and email it to someone you care about who's in the target age group. They need to know how crucial it is that they vote in this election.

Democracy Now has a transcript of BBC investigative reporter Greag Palast's interview with Bill Burkett about Bush's National Guard service from his new documentary, "Bush Family Fortunes: The Best Democracy Money Can Buy" by Greg Palast. [link via Buzzflash.]

Mary Jacoby of Salon interviews Seymour Hersh who provides an "alternative history of Bush's war."

The crack investigative reporter tells Salon about a disastrous battle the U.S. brass hushed up, the frightening True Believers in the White House, and how Iran, not Israel, may have manipulated us into war.

Ben Wasserstein, writing in the LA Times, on why the conservative bloggers should get a pat on the back but not a standing ovation for their role in Rathergate.

Veteran political reporter Martin Nolan in the San Francisco Chronicle explains why Bush may lose the election, despite current opinion polls. Four reasons:

What happens to children who falsely accuse adults of sexual abuse when they grow up? Some, like Ed Sampley, try to make amends. Sampley was one of five kids who accused John Stoll, then a 41 year old carpenter of sexual abuse. Stoll got 40 years in jail.

Last January, Sampley and three other former accusers returned to the courthouse where they had testified against Stoll. This time they came to say Stoll never molested them. They are in their late 20's now. They have jobs in construction, car repair, sales. A couple of them have children about the same age as they were when they testified. Although most of the boys drifted apart after the trial, their life stories echo with similarities. Each of them said he always knew the truth -- that Stoll had never touched them. Each said that he felt pressured by the investigators to describe sex acts. A fifth accuser isn't sure what happened all those years ago but has no memory of being molested.

The article, in Sunday's New York Times magazine, is seven pages. Unfortunately, the hysteria may be cyclical.

...discredited child-sex rings like McMartin actually may not be a bogeyman of the past. Some parents, therapists and child-protection professionals continue to believe ritual sex abuse took place at McMartin preschool. ''In 10 to 15 years, there will be an attempt to rehabilitate the ritual abuse scare,'' [Univ. of Texas psychologist Wood says. ''You can bet on it.''

Sampley still feels guilt over his false testimony:

The New York Times has a long article with details of Saddam Hussein's confinement.

Shorter Saddam: I'm the real President of Iraq. I have done nothing wrong. May I have a cigar and a muffin, please?

The new interim Government of Prime Minister Ayad Allawi is preparing for his trial. Not out of revenge, they say, but to help the Iraqi people heal.

The Salt Lake Tribune has a prominent article questioning Bush campaign Honcho Karl Rove's student deferment that allowed him to to avoid being drafted for three years of the Vietnam War. [link via Buzzflash.]

Except for a lapse of several months, Selective Service records show presidential adviser Karl Rove escaped the draft for nearly three years at the height of the Vietnam War using student deferments....[Rover's]draft record and accounts from friends reveal a young man who didn't necessarily agree with the war and managed to avoid being drafted.

Rove's friend and classmate back then, Mark Gustavson, now a Salt Lake City attorney, says:

Far from being a conscientious objector, Gustavson recalls, Rove's opposition to the war was political. He considered the conflict a "political skirmish that was not being properly administered."

Here's the nuts and bolts of Rove's draft status and deferment:

Lexis-Nexis is reaching out to lawyers and clients in Florida with a comprehensive disaster relief package. It includes a month of free Lexis for Florida bar volunteers providing pro bono legal aid to the community. So far, more than 700 lawyers have signed on across the state.

Lexis-Nexis has donated 40 laptop computers to The Florida Bar Foundation for use by the volunteer force. It has asked qualified Lexis employees to staff the Florida hotline providing advice to disaster relief victims.

Lexis -Nexis has had a "Lexis-Nexis Cares" program in place for some time, allowing employees to spend a few days per year working on pro bono projects of their choice. It now is urging employees to use some of this time to assist local relief agencies. The company also is offering to match employee donations to the Red Cross through September 30.

There's a lot more to the LN relief plan, but you get the idea. I have had the pleasure of serving on the Martindale Hubbell/Lexis-Nexis Legal Advisory Board for the past 8 years. They are an amazing company, far more like a family than a big corporation. It's a privilege to be associated with them.

A huge thanks to Mike Ditto , a Denver blogger who volunteered to reinstall the comment spammer MT-Blacklist on TalkLeft. That was the last hurdle to our site upgrade. He also insisted on doing it for free.

So, this weekend's fund drive is over....We collected $140.00 and sent the excess to Mike even though he didn't want it. A big thanks to Jay Allen, creator of MT-Blacklist, who also offered to do the re-install for TalkLeft, but since he's visiting New York this week (his home is in Budapest, Hungary), I'm glad I didn't have to take him up on the offer.

If you're considering moving your blog to Movable Type, or upgrading to MT 3.11, I highly recommend letting them do the install. Sarah did our's and it works great. She was also very responsive to emails.

I also needed some help from TalkLeft's great hosting company, Hosting Matters, which responded right away(thanks, Stacy.)

The cool html buttons that now enable readers to post links in comments through the entry pages without typing html code were made possible a few months back by Helen and Jeff of Protein Wisdom, also from Denver, who graciously shared the code and spent hours helping me figure out how to incorporate it into TalkLeft. I met Mike, Jeff and Helen (and many others) at the Rocky Mountain Blogger Bash last May--it's really something how bloggers kick in to help when you need it--even when, like Jeff, they disagree with almost every word I write.

If you're looking for great free blog design tricks, like including quotes in a color lined box, TalkLeft's come from Mandarin Design. Meg even will help you via e-mail if you run into a snag.

I'm done playing techie for now. The concentration required over tiny details is exhausting. Much more so than blogging. Again, I really appreciate the financial contributions from you readers. I hope you like the changes. Let me know if you run across any bugs.

John Kerry says Bush has a secret plan to call up more troops. The White House denies it, but check this out:

Rep. John Murtha, D-Penn., ranking member on the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee and a former Marine who served in Vietnam, said he had learned through conversations with Pentagon officials that beginning in November, "the Bush administration plans to call up large numbers of the military Guard and Reserves, to include plans that they previously had put off to call up the Individual Ready Reserve."

So long as Bush stays in office, he will continue to lie and soldiers will continue to die. Freeway Blogger is doing his part to change things.

Iraqi militants are threatening to decapitate the two Americans and Briton kidnapped earlier this week.

The threat came in a video purportedly from a militant group linked to al-Qaida that showed Americans Jack Hensley and Eugene Armstrong and Briton Kenneth Bigley, the first word of their fate since the three construction workers were abducted from their Baghdad office two days ago.

....In the hostage video, posted on an Web site known for its Islamic militant content, kidnappers purporting to belong to Tawhid and Jihad - a group led by Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi - demanded that Iraqi women detained at two American-controlled prisons here are freed within 48 hours or the captives will be beheaded. A U.S. military official said two women are in U.S. custody.

The U.S. has acknowledged it is holding two "high value detainees" although they are not at Abu Ghraib or Camp Bucca, a U.S. detention facility near Umm Qasr.

Update: Ty Hensley, brother of one the kidnapped Americans, was on Geraldo at Large on Fox News tonight, trying to get a message out to the militants with reasons to spare his brother. Heartbreaking. Fox is going to get videotapes of the kidnapped Hensley with his wife and child out to al Jazeera and other Arab networks.

[comments now full]

Bump and Update: The upgrade is complete. It has taken all of yesterday and this morning to restore the templates and the newer functions so many of you liked....a list of the five most recently commented-on entries and the category name being placed in each entry alongside the permalink.

I also was able to add the same "html" and "quote" buttons that you see when you click "comments" to a post to each post when you access it by permalink. This will help those of you who are html-challenged and haven't been able to figure out how to add urls in html format. Now, just type your comment, highlight the words where you want your link to be, and click on the "html button". Just put the url in the popup and Voila. Same for a short quote. Just highlight the part you want quoted and click the quote button. It will appear in your comment indented and inside a blue box.

Thanks to readers, TalkLeft collected $105.00, which paid for the upgrade and install. However, I need to hire someone to install an upgraded version of MT-Blacklist,the comment-spammer, as I have no clue (and I tried) and some other "plugins" that will improve the site. Apparently, only one version of MT-Blacklist will work with this latest edition of MT. So the collection effort is still ongoing at this point. I'll let you all know when it's over. And if you have experience installing the new version of MT Blacklist with MT 3.11, and would like to make some money installing it on TalkLeft, let me know.

You can contribute here via PayPal. If you'd like to donate anonymously, use Amazon. Both are secure.

Thanks to all, and now, as soon as all the 8,000 individual entries are rebuilt (a few hours, I think) I will be back to regular posting. Please ignore any comment spam for online poker, viagra and the like which will go away once MT-Blacklist is reinstalled.

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Original Post

Too bad for Judicial Watch...

The Navy's chief investigator concluded Friday that procedures were followed properly in the approval of Sen. John Kerry's Silver Star, Bronze Star and Purple Heart medals, according to an internal Navy memo.

Vice Adm. R.A. Route, the Navy inspector general, conducted the review of Kerry's Vietnam-ear military service awards at the request of Judicial Watch, a public interest group. The group has also asked for the release of additional records documenting the Democratic presidential candidate's military service.

Here's background on Judicial Watch's ridiculous request.

The U.S. is deporting 1,500 Cambodians. Many have lived here for decades and with the exception of relatively minor offenses, like driving under the influence or assault, have been productive citizens.

Ho Beua will soon be handcuffed, loaded onto a U.S. government-chartered plane and banished to a country as foreign to him as the moon. He was 14 when he and his family arrived in the U.S. as refugees from Cambodia. Within years, he'd be in trouble with the law. Now a 38-year-old father of three, with his time already served for assault and DUI convictions, Beua is among 1,500 Cambodian criminal offenders in the U.S. being expelled to the Southeast Asian kingdom.

What awaits Ho Beua in Cambodia?