Trent Lott has another case of foot-in-mouth disease. Via Political Animal and Patridiot Watch, here are Lott's comments:

"Frankly, to save some American troops' lives or a unit that could be in danger, I think you should get really rough with them," Lott said. "Some of those people should probably not be in prisons in the first place."

When asked about the photo showing a prisoner being threatened with a dog, Lott was unmoved. "Nothing wrong with holding a dog up there unless it ate him," Lott said. "(They just) scared him with the dog."

Lott was reminded that at least one prisoner had died at the hands of his captors after a beating. "This is not Sunday school," he said. "This is interrogation. This is rough stuff."

Our eyes rolled when we heard last night about the new terror threats. We immediately wondered if this was a planned response by the Bush team to pick up his falling approval ratings if Monday's speech didn't do the trick. Then we wondered if we were being too cynical. We concluded that Bush is becoming like the little boy who cried wolf too many times. Wouldn't it be a shame if there really was a threat and none of us gave it any credence because his administration has lost so much credibility?

We decided not to report on the terror threat. Very few liberal bloggers have. But, apparently we're not the only one to have this "doubting Thomas" reaction that it's a political ploy. Steve Soto at Left Coaster says:

So let’s take inventory. Bush tanks his major speech on Iraq. Bush sees poll numbers that show new lows in his approval ratings. Bush makes a scapegoat of one of his leading generals in Iraq to cover for Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, and his vice president. So what is the Bush White House Standard Operating Procedure to shore up its gullible base and distract the public? Why, it must be time for another terrorist warning. And as usual, to show how credible and serious this threat is, it is based on no specified evidence or threat. ....the administration has no plans to raise the threat indicator......

We need a President we can trust. Bush doesn't make the cut. He isn't leading the country, he's on permanent damage control. He's sending Mueller and Ashcroft and Ridge out now to convince us. Forget it, we're no longer listening.

Are we a nation of voyeurs, of paranoids, or merely one of citizens with a growing skepticism of what our leaders tell us? Kareem Fahim examines our fascination with the video depicting the killing and decapitation of Nicholas Berg in Paranoid Nation.

By the thousands, the curious still combed the Internet for poor Nicholas Berg last week....some great bulk of surfers simply craved a few seconds of ghastly footage. Others were no doubt moved by Berg's compelling and sadly concluded story, and the very public manner in which his family was forced to bear his death. But another faction was on the lookout for more obscure clues, bits of information to support a story line steeped in intrigue and, frankly, implausibility....

It was a reasonable response to the times. Faced with a war many Americans find implausible, waged by a president who lost credibility following bad intelligence about weapons of mass destruction (provided by advisers with a plan for the world), this second faction blurred the line between healthy skepticism and paranoia. Many of those questioning the White House line on Berg were fringe, yes, but they fed on the doubts of a mainstream no longer sure what to believe. Last week, the U.S. either bombed a safe house for terrorists, or an Iraqi wedding. Ahmad Chalabi is either an asset and one of the fathers of the new Iraq, or a spy. And Donald Rumsfeld either authorized the kind of torture meted out at Abu Ghraib, or knew nothing.

Here's one historian's viewpoint:

As James Ridgeway in the Village Voice writes, this likely made Ashcroft gag.

[FBI translator Sibel] Edmonds claimed to have translated testimony in criminal and counter-intelligence cases involving different FBI field offices, going back into the late 1990s. .... Among the Farsi translators working for the FBI, she said, it was common knowledge that a longtime, highly regarded FBI "asset" placed in Afghanistan told the agency in April 2001 that he had information from his contacts there that bin Laden was planning a major attack, involving the use of planes, in one or another of big American cities—Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York among them. The agents who took down the information from the spy wrote up reports and sent them to their superiors. That was the last the agents heard of the matter.

The Justice Department has gagged her by designating her information classified--two years after the fact and using an arcane law. Here's some background:

Blogger Oliver Willis has started his new paying gig at Media Matters. Here's his first post on the torture scandal.

In other Media Matters news today, check out their press release (pdf) charging that Rush Limbaugh is endangering our troops:

Media Matters for America has sent a letter to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld asking that he consider removing Rush Limbaugh’s radio show from the taxpayer-funded American Forces radio network. MMFA has also created a petition you can sign, urging Secretary Rumsfeld to remove Limbaugh’s show from the network.

And don't forget to get a copy of Media Matter's chief David Brock's new book:

The Republican Noise Machine :
Right-Wing Media and How It Corrupts Democracy

President Bush is pulling at the heartstrings in his latest photo op. He's featured today shaking the new prosthetic hands of seven Iraqis whose hands were ordered amputated in 1995 at Abu Ghraib under Saddam Hussein. Bush does not deserve any credit:

Don North, a documentary producer, discovered the men last year and sought help for them in the United States, and a Houston journalist, Marvin Zindler, helped arrange for their surgeries and publicized their story.

Joe Agris, the plastic surgeon who fitted the men with high-tech hands last month, donated his services. The prosthetic devices, valued at $50k each, were also donated.

This is a shameless photo-op by Bush to support his war.

Dick Gephardt says the Dems would accept John McCain for a Vice Presidential candidate and McCain would be a good choice:

Asked after a speech in California on Monday what he thought of Mr. McCain's potential for the Democratic presidential ticket, Mr. Gephardt described him as a "very attractive figure in American politics" who "would be accepted by the Democratic Party," according to CNN. Mr. McCain is "someone a lot of Democrats could get interested in," Mr. Gephardt said at the Leon Panetta Center in Monterrey.

Not us. We still want Kerry to pick Edwards. We hope McCain sticks to his guns and rejects the overture, if made.

Public Defender Dude, a practicing Public Defender in California with a great blog, has a new piece up on the grossly excessive political clout of the California Prison Guards' Union. He says the power of the Abu Ghraib guards pales by comparison.

In California, the prison industry is the fastest growing industry around. In fact, if you want to talk about pure political muscle, there is no lobby quite as strong as the prison lobby. Consider what the prison guard's union has helped to accomplish in the last 20 years. They have increased tenfold the number of inmates in prison, they have increased exponentially the number of prisons, they have backed numerous draconian laws to ensure that more and more people go to prison for longer and longer for doing less and less.

by TChris

Amnesty International's 2004 report condemns human rights abuses by terrorists and by governments fighting against terrorism. Irene Khan, Secretary General of Amnesty International, reminds us why we need to guard against affronts to human rights wherever they arise.

"Governments are losing their moral compass, sacrificing the global values of human rights in a blind pursuit of security. This failure of leadership is a dangerous concession to armed groups."

"While governments have been obsessed with the threat of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, they have allowed the real weapons of mass destruction-- injustice and impunity, poverty, discrimination and racism, the uncontrolled trade in small arms, violence against women and abuse of children -- to go unaddressed."

The press release regarding the 2004 report is here. The online version of the report is here.

by TChris

If the NY Times can say "We were wrong," why can't the President?

[W]e have found a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been. ... The problematic articles ... depended at least in part on information from a circle of Iraqi informants, defectors and exiles bent on "regime change" in Iraq, people whose credibility has come under increasing public debate in recent weeks. ...

Editors at several levels who should have been challenging reporters and pressing for more skepticism were perhaps too intent on rushing scoops into the paper. Accounts of Iraqi defectors were not always weighed against their strong desire to have Saddam Hussein ousted. Articles based on dire claims about Iraq tended to get prominent display, while follow-up articles that called the original ones into question were sometimes buried. In some cases, there was no follow-up at all.

The Times catalogs some of the instances in which the paper was duped by misinformation and provides a link to more comprehensive coverage of its errant reporting. The paper deserves praise for setting the record straight.

Now if only the Bush administration would do the same.

Maria Suarez has been released from prison after 22 years. At 16, she was sold as a sex slave to a man who abused her for five years.

....his neighbors, a young couple who feared the man known as a witch doctor, clubbed him to death. Suarez, who washed and hid the weapon, was convicted of conspiring in the murder.

The case has made major headlines because the U.S. said she would be deported upon being released. Homeland Security has finally acted --she can stay in the U.S. Ms. Suarez went home yesterday with her 86 year old mother. She is 44.

More here.

Some more fingerpointing within the Bush Administration--this time over who authorized the use of dogs during interrogations at Guantanamo. Col. Thomas Pappas, the most senior official at Abu Ghraib, testified under oath it was Major General Jeffrey Miller, who at one time commanded the Gitmo interrogation center. Miller flatly denies it.

"It was a technique I had personally discussed with General Miller, when he was here" visiting the prison, testified Pappas, head of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade and the officer placed in charge of the cellblocks at Abu Ghraib prison where abuses occurred in the wake of Miller's visit to Baghdad between Aug. 30 and Sept. 9, 2003. "He said that they used military working dogs at Gitmo [the nickname for Guantanamo Bay], and that they were effective in setting the atmosphere for which, you know, you could get information" from the prisoners, Pappas told the Army investigator, Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, according to a transcript provided to The Washington Post.

Pappas, who was under pressure from Taguba to justify the legality and appropriateness of using guard dogs to frighten detainees, said at two separate points in the Feb. 9 interview that Miller gave him the idea. He also said Miller had indicated the use of the dogs "with or without a muzzle" was "okay" in booths where prisoners were taken for interrogation.

Miller not only denies the conversations, he denies dogs were ever used at Guantanamo to frighten detainees. So far, there have been no pictures released of interrogation chambers at Gitmo, so we can't know if Miller is telling the truth. Have any of the released Guantanamo detainees mentioned being threatened by dogs?