51 Vietnam vets gathered in Utah this weekend and discussed, among other things, whether Iraq has turned into another Vietnam.

Through two days of bring-your-own-wine receptions and lingering breakfasts in the downtown hotel here where the veterans had gathered, the answer was rarely a simple yes or no. For every 10 similarities, these veterans said, there are 10 subtle ways that Iraq seems different. Still, every answer was rooted in something that most Americans lack: intimate, vivid knowledge, much of it still raw despite the years, of the Vietnam War experience.

Iraq is charged with religion, some said, while Vietnam was more about the politics of nationalism. Some said the lack of an exit strategy from Iraq made Vietnam a parallel, while others argued that global terrorism had changed everything and comparisons with the 1960's were not possible.

Others said they thought the United States was getting in deeper every day in the Middle East and that Mr. Bush must take the blame. "Doing something that you know instinctively is wrong and continuing to do it is the height of folly — I fear that's where we are," said Robb Ruyle, who was in charge of patient records for the 71st Evac. Mr. Ruyle, now a small-business owner in Montrose, Colo., is married to a triage nurse he met in Pleiku, the former Lynn Morgan, and has a son, Thomas, who is now serving in Iraq as an infantry intelligence specialist.

Louis Pepe was a federal prison guard at MCC Manhattan in 2000 when he was brutally attacked, stabbed in the eye, and more by two of the defendants in the case involving the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa. One of the attackers, Mamdouh Mahmud Salimm, was reputed to be an associate of Osama bin Laden.

Salimn gets sentenced Monday and Pepe plans to be there. He is outraged that Salimn will only get 17 to 21 years for the assault, even though he is facing trial and a possible life sentence on conspiracy charges for the 1998 attack. We can't say we blame him, if you read the account of the attack, it sounds horrific.

But what's up with Pepe's claim that the U.S. Government has downplayed the attack and cast him in a role that suggests he was careless in allowing the attack to happen? This is one sad story, here's some of it.

In the interview Sunday with The Associated Press, Pepe sat in his wheelchair in a small room in the Queens house where he lives with his parents. Pepe said the government and Salim have combined to sanitize what happened on Nov. 1, 2000, portraying the assault as quick and almost entirely Salim's doing after the guard failed to handcuff the inmates.

Pepe said he will tell the judge how he properly handcuffed the inmates before they slipped free, blinded him with hot sauce, beat him repeatedly and even tried to rape him before stabbing him to get his keys in a bid to free other suspected terrorists. "Both of them did it, not just one," Pepe said excitedly, his right eye wide open and a piece of gauze resting in the socket where the left eye used to be....Pepe said the attack lasted an hour, rather than the 20 minutes that prison authorities maintain it took for help to arrive from less-isolated parts of Manhattan's Metropolitan Correctional Center.

by TChris

Federal authorities visited the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court 1,727 times during 2003 to ask for secret warrants in terrorism or espionage investigations. All but three requests were at least partially approved; two of those three were approved after the requests were modified.

The warrants authorize electronic interception of communications as well as physical searches. Requests for secret warrants have doubled since 2001, an increase that some find troubling.

Civil liberties advocates maintain that the sharp rise in the government's use of the secret warrants, made easier by the antiterrorism law known as the USA Patriot Act, represents a worrisome trend because the authorities are held to a lower standard of proof in spying on suspects than they are in seeking traditional criminal warrants.

The increased requests are reportedly "overwhelming the ability of the system to process them and to conduct the surveillance."

by TChris

A hundred people met today in Pinehurst, North Carolina to discuss the need for a moratorium on the state's death penalty. Attending the meeting were Darryl Hunt, who spent 19 years in prison before DNA evidence that prosecutors had withheld from him proved he didn't commit the crime, and Alan Gell, who spent nine years on death row before his lawyers uncovered witness statements, again withheld by the prosecution, that proved his innocence.

The state Senate passed a bill last year calling for a two year moratorium. The state House is now considering the bill.

Amnesty International calls for an independent investigation of the abuses of Iraqi prisoners of war by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison:

"There must be a fully independent, impartial and public investigation into all allegations of torture. Nothing less will suffice. If Iraq is to have a sustainable and peaceful future, human rights must be a central component of the way forward. The message must be sent loud and clear that those who abuse human rights will be held accountable."Our extensive research in Iraq suggests that this is not an isolated incident. It is not enough for the USA to react only once images have hit the television screens".

Amnesty International has received frequent reports of torture or other ill-treatment by Coalition Forces during the past year. Detainees have reported being routinely subjected to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment during arrest and detention. Many have told Amnesty International that they were tortured and ill-treated by US and UK troops during interrogation. Methods often reported include prolonged sleep deprivation; beatings; prolonged restraint in painful positions, sometimes combined with exposure to loud music; prolonged hooding; and exposure to bright lights. Virtually none of the allegations of torture or ill-treatment has been adequately investigated by the authorities.

Human Rights Watch calls for a probe of the military higher-ups and contractors:

The promised U.S. investigation into the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners should not stop with the lower-level soldiers who were immediately involved, Human Rights Watch said today. The United States should also investigate the superiors of these soldiers to see whether they ordered or knowingly tolerated these abuses.

An Iraq prison diary by Joe Ryan, one of the U.S. interrogators has found its way onto the web. [links via Orcinus and Billmon]

Another disturbing sign of the times....the U.S. is losing its scientic edge.

The United States has started to lose its worldwide dominance in critical areas of science and innovation, according to federal and private experts who point to strong evidence like prizes awarded to Americans and the number of papers in major professional journals. Foreign advances in basic science now often rival or even exceed America's, apparently with little public awareness of the trend or its implications for jobs, industry, national security or the vigor of the nation's intellectual and cultural life.

What does it mean?

Even analysts worried by the trend concede that an expansion of the world's brain trust, with new approaches, could invigorate the fight against disease, develop new sources of energy and wrestle with knotty environmental problems. But profits from the breakthroughs are likely to stay overseas, and this country will face competition for things like hiring scientific talent and getting space to showcase its work in top journals.

"We are in a new world, and it's increasingly going to be dominated by countries other than the United States," Denis Simon, dean of management and technology at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, recently said at a scientific meeting in Washington.

Maybe if we weren't spending billions of dollars on an unnecessary war being fought for no good reason we'd have more money to fund scientific research and our scientists. The Democrats think so and are attacking Bush on the subject:

A released Iraqi prisoner says in an interview he was tortured at Abu Ghraid prison first by Saddam and then by the Americans and his treatment by Americans was worse:

Dhia al-Shweiri spent several stints in Baghdad's notorious Abu Ghraib prison, twice under Saddam Hussein's rule and once under American. He prefers Saddam's torture to the humiliation of being stripped naked by his American guards, he said Sunday in an interview with The Associated Press.

....Al-Shweiri said he was not surprised to see TV images of smiling U.S. soldiers posing by naked, hooded inmates who, in one photograph, were piled in a human pyramid. Al-Shweiri, who was arrested by the Americans in October, said he was asked to take off his clothes only once and for about 15 minutes. "I thought they wanted me to change into the red prison uniform, so I took off my clothes, down to my underwear. Then he asked me to take off my underwear. I started arguing with him but in the end he made me take off my underwear," said al-Shweiri, who was too embarrassed to go into too much detail.

He said he and six other prisoners - all hooded - had to face the wall and bend over a little as they put their hands on the wall. "They made us stand in a way that I am ashamed to describe. They came to look at us as we stood there. They knew this would humiliate us," he said, adding that he was not sodomized.
"They were trying to humiliate us, break our pride. We are men. It's OK if they beat me. Beatings don't hurt us, it's just a blow. But no one would want their manhood to be shattered," he said. "They wanted us to feel as though we were women, the way women feel and this is the worst insult, to feel like a woman," al-Shweiri said.

al-Shweiri has a plan for retaliation:

Now the 30-year-old, who used to work in a fabric shop, is a die-hard fighter in the al-Mahdi Army, the fanatic militia of a Shiite Muslim cleric who has vowed to take on the Americans.

[comments now closed]

11 U.S. troops were killed today. Another 10 were wounded. Are we losing the war? Yes, says Patrick Cockburn, writing in Sunday's Independent.

A year on from 'Mission Accomplished', an Army in Disgrace, a Policy in Tatters and the Real Prospect of Defeat. Against the odds, America has earned the hatred of ordinary Iraqis. In Baghdad Patrick Cockburn sees the battle for hearts and minds comprehensively lost.

The tide is going out for the US in Iraq. They were not able to use their military strength against Fallujah and Najaf. They have very little political support outside Kurdistan. They can no longer win. It may be one of the most extraordinary defeats in history.

Reuters reports the Arab world believes the liberators are worse than the dictators. Check out the pictures.

by TChris

A deputy sheriff in Milwaukee, assigned to court duty as a bailiff, has been charged with sexually assaulting a 21-year-old woman who was in his custody.

According to the complaint, Terrell took her and a group of other inmates to a court holding cell, then took the woman alone into the bathroom of a jury room, locked the door and told the woman, "I would fall in love with you, but I'm too old." The complaint says Terrell then removed the woman's handcuffs, took off her prison clothes and assaulted her before re-cuffing her and saying she should not tell anyone about the incident.

This is the second time the deputy has been criminally charged. He was acquitted in 2000 when he was accused of "kissing an inmate and removing her shirt, then exposing himself, on a courthouse elevator."

by TChris

In an op-ed piece published in today's NY Times, Jonathan Knee argues that the government should pursue "a more radical approach to censoring pornography." He builds his argument from a strange premise:

The value of laws against prostitution is well established. What if we were to enact laws that made it illegal to give or receive payment to perform sex acts?

Well, actually, that's exactly what laws against prostitutution do. Almost everywhere in the U.S., it is illegal to pay a person to engage in a sex act with another person; whether the act is performed on the payor or a third party doesn't matter. We all know how effective those laws have been in stamping out prostitution.

by TChris

Jayson Williams escaped a manslaughter conviction for a number of reasons, but his "soft brown eyes" may have played a key role.

Williams's escape route from doom is due, in part, to a bumbling prosecution, his relentless team of elite lawyers, a convoluted law outlining negligence and his soft brown eyes. All of this provided a diligent jury with reason to doubt the courtroom depiction of Williams as a dark criminal mind.

"He didn't have the look of a cold-blooded killer," a juror, Angela Pravata, told reporters. "I didn't see it in his eyes."

Williams didn't testify, but he didn't need to. His eyes told his story for him.

Noah at Defense Tech writes of hints of Iraqi prisoner abuse in December. Billmon does the same with details you won't want to miss.

We have been reporting on alleged Iraqi prisoner abuse for a year. Starting with Noah's timeframe of December, working backwards: In December, 2003, we wrote about it here--and in November, we wrote about it here and here. In October, we wrote about an Iraqi prisoner being left to die at the hands of his countrymen.

In August, 2003, we wrote about a military hearing investigating abuse of Iraqi prisoners. We pointed out a Guardian article of concern to us here.

In July, 2003, we wrote about four U.S. soldiers who were charged with abusing POW's in May at a prison camp in Southeastern Iraq. In June, 2003, we reported the U.S. was investigating whether U.S. troops were responsible for the mystery death of an Iraqi POW.

In May, 2003, we wrote about suspected abuse of Iraqi pows by british soldiers. A soldier had left a roll of film for developing.

The film depicted a bound and gagged Iraqi inside a net that was suspended from a forklift, according to The Sun, which first reported the story this morning. The Sun also reported that the roll included pictures of soldiers performing sex acts near Iraqi prisoners.

So there have been hints, reports, investigation and hearings into abuse of Iraqi POW's all along. We can't help but question the sincerity of those in the military and Bush Administration who profess to be so shocked about it now.