Saturday the U.S. said there was no wedding in Iraq at which celebrants were killed:

"There was no evidence of a wedding: no decorations, no musical instruments found, no large quantities of food or leftover servings one would expect from a wedding celebration," Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt said Saturday. "There may have been some kind of celebration. Bad people have celebrations, too."

Now we learn there was a wedding, and it was videotaped.

A videotape shows a dozen white pickup trucks speeding through the desert, escorting a bridal car decorated with colorful ribbons. The bride wears a Western-style white bridal dress and veil. The camera captures her stepping out of the car but does not show a close-up.

The videotape obtained Sunday by Associated Press Television News captures a wedding party that survivors say was later attacked by U.S. planes early Wednesday, killing up to 45 people. The dead included the cameraman, Yasser Shawkat Abdullah, hired to record the festivities, which ended Tuesday night before the planes struck. ...video that APTN shot a day after the attack shows fragments of musical instruments, pots and pans and brightly colored beddings used for celebrations, scattered around the bombed out tent.... An AP reporter and photographer, who interviewed more than a dozen survivors a day after the bombing, were able to identify many of them on the wedding party video - which runs for several hours.

Is there another explanation for this man's death?

by TChris

Two thousand pages are missing from the congressional copy of Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba's classified report of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. The Pentagon referred to the missing pages, about a third of the total report, as "an oversight."

by TChris

TalkLeft has been wondering for some time why the Bush administration has been in bed with Ahmad Chalabi (see, for instance, this and this and this). Despite Chalabi's denials, evidence is growing that Chalabi passed highly classified information to Iran. Now the question is: how did Chalabi get his hands on highly classified information?

Federal investigators now suspect that Mr. Chalabi funneled a wide array of Pentagon and C.I.A. secrets to Iran — much more material than they believe he might have obtained through his political contacts with Americans, they said. "This was not the kind of stuff that he would have gotten by accident," one official said.

Investigators are looking a "handful" of officials, primarily in the Pentagon, who could have passed the information along to Chalabi.

A jail cell in Jordan has already been reserved for Chalabi, but Jordan might have to wait for Chalabi to serve a term in a U.S. prison for espionage.

by TChris

The NY Times recaps the murky status of homicide investigations regarding prisoners who died in the Bagram Detention Center in Afghanistan, and links members of a military intelligent unit responsible for interrogations at both Bagram and Abu Ghraib in Iraq. The LA Times reports that two military intelligence soldiers who appear in pictures taken at Abu Ghraib, Spcs. Armin J. Cruz and Israel Rivera, have been ordered to remain in Bahgdad as the investigation of prisoner abuse continues.

In an interview, Houston defense attorney Guy L. Womack, who represents Army Cpl. Charles A. Graner Jr., said that he expected a wave of charges in coming weeks against military intelligence officers, who he said he believed were directing the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

A defense lawyer representing another guard being court-martialed said Cruz and Rivera were present on the tier during the torture because they wanted to make sure the abuse was carried out.

The military claims that its homicide investigations have been slowed by the difficulty of locating witnesses or participants who have transferred out of Iraq. Now that the scandal has been publicized, the military seems to be doing a better job of keeping track of its soldiers. While Rivera and Cruz will remain in Iraq, neither has been charged, and it is unclear whether they are regarded as witnesses or targets of the investigation.

by TChris

Scandals at the California Youth Authority (TalkLeft background here) and a Governor who doesn't need campaign contributions have combined to create a new political reality for the California Correctional Peace Officers Association. The prison guard's union has wielded enormous influence in the state's Democratic party, resulting in tough-on-crime legislation that guarantees full prisons and full employment for well-paid prison guards.

Bucking its history of support for the CCPO, the California Senate unanimously approved a code of conduct for prison guards in an effort to eliminate "what a federal court-appointed watchdog said is a systemwide 'code of silence' that protects wrongdoers while punishing whistleblowers." The Senate also voted to block a clause in the union contract that requires investigators to turn over confidential information to prison employees who are under investigation.

In addition, 17 Democratic Senators want to renegotiate a contract that gives prison guards a 37 percent pay increase over five years. The union is fighting back with increased spending on public relations, but it may have trouble convincing voters that the pay increases are justified in tough economic times.

"To be honest, they look a little like crybabies. I don't think they're going to get a lot of public sentiment," said University of California, Berkeley political scientist Bruce Cain.

by TChris

Every few months, it's worth remembering that your tax dollars are being spent to incarcerate Tommy Chong so that the Justice Department could send a message about pot pipes and bhongs.

Chong’s home was raided in February 2003 as part of the Justice Department’s nationwide crackdown against 55 companies and individuals who, according to a rarely enforced federal law, were illegally selling drug paraphernalia over the Internet. In May 2003, Chong pleaded guilty to the charge of conspiracy to distribute paraphernalia, and on October 8, 2003, he started serving a nine-month sentence at Taft Correctional Institution, a privately run federal prison in central California.

The linked article leads to an internet petition demanding Chong's release, and to other sites that protest the decision to single out Chong for harsh treatment because of his symbolic value. Prior TalkLeft coverage of Chong's case is collected here.

Pot-TV says it has torture videos available for viewing on its website. We haven't viewed them so we can't vouch for them, but you can take a look for yourselves. [Update: The link goes directly to the show page. To view the video, click the link on the left that says "RealPlayer"and the show will start. It is a news show with the video of prison abuse mixed in.]

The following program contains scenes of police and prison guard brutality, profane language, full frontal male nudity and torture and humiliation. Intended for mature audiences with strong stomachs only!

In this first part of a three part series, Loretta Nall exposes the torture and human rights abuses that are inflicted on American prisoners, many of whom are convicted of simple possession only. These acts are committed every day in the supposed Land of the Free. The abuses and torture meted out by sadistic “rent-a-guard” private contractors in a Texas jail directly mirrors the abuses and torture meted out by sadistic “rent-a-soldier” private contractors at Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq.

WHERE IS THE AMERICAN OUTRAGE FOR OUR OWN PEOPLE?

by TChris

Dixie Shanahan's story isn't pretty. Her husband beat her for three days, angry that she became pregnant with their third child. He responded to her refusal to get an abortion by repeatedly punching her in the stomach. When she fled, her husband dragged her back into the house, pointed a shotgun at her and threatened to kill her.

At some point, Shanahan shot her husband. Whether she did so in response to another threatening move, or shot him in his sleep, was disputed at her trial. An Iowa jury convicted her, and a judge imposed a mandatory 50 year sentence. The judge didn't think the sentence was fair under the circumstances, but mandatory sentencing laws gave him no discretion.

The sentence, said Shanahan's attorney, was like one last beating.

Mandatory sentencing laws often lead to injustice.

But then, justice has become a rarer commodity since the "get tough on crime" movement swept the nation during the Reagan years. Declaring the courts too soft on crime, state legislators around the country decided that judgment was too important to be left to judges. They enacted mandatory sentencing guidelines that were supposed to produce tougher and more uniform sentences. Instead, those guidelines produce travesties.

It will be 35 years before Shanahan is eligible for parole.

by TChris

The Los Angeles County Sheriff blames a lack of resources for the violent chaos in the county jail, but it's difficult to believe that mismanagement isn't part of the problem.

In all there have been five killings inside the Los Angeles County Jail over the last seven months, more than the San Quentin penitentiary has had in eight years.

LA Couny's District Attorney is commissioning a panel to investigate the Sheriff's failure to protect inmates within the jail.

The Asia Times reports that leading forensic experts say the Nicholas Berg decapitation video was staged, and he likely was dead before the decapitation. They give several reasons.

In other Berg news, the Guardian reports that authorities have information that the execution squad was led by one of Saddam Hussein's nephews.

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Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI) was the lone Senate vote against the passage of the Patriot Act. After it passed, he introduced a bill to "limit records searches by requiring the FBI to show that the documents pertain to a suspected terrorist or spy."

"The Patriot Act went too far when it comes to the government's access to personal information about law-abiding Americans," he said.

Check out his letter to Attorney General John Ashcroft about Ashcroft's decision to increase the number of federal death penalty prosecutions:

....I am concerned that your apparent determination to increase death penalty prosecutions, including sometimes overriding decisions of local prosecutors, increases the risk that the federal government could execute an innocent person. Former federal prosecutors have said that "they need to take every last precaution to avoid the risk of condemning an innocent person to death." See "In Brooklyn Murder Case, Doubts on Identification," New York Times, Feb. 12, 2003. While you and I may disagree on the fundamental question of whether the federal government should be authorized to use capital punishment, I hope that we can agree that the Constitution and the integrity of our criminal justice system require the fair administration of the death penalty and that only the guilty are convicted....

Sen Feingold introduced legislation to stop the Total Information Awareness Act (TIA) from being passed. He opposed the federal Victim's Rights Amendment to the Constitution, sponsored by Sens. Feinstein (D-CA) and Kyl (R-AZ).

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo on the President's "bike spill" yesterday:

Along related lines, I can't help but wonder whether the spill the president took from his bicycle today won't become iconic in the same way that the state dinner the first President Bush attended in Tokyo on January 8th 1992 in which he collapsed into the arms of, and then vomited on, Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa became a symbol of his then-faltering presidency.