We wrote about this in April, it's big in MSM today. First, from our post:

taking reality tv to new heights or lows, depending on your viewpoint, an Iraqi television station is broadcasting confessions of alleged terrorists obtained during interrogations.

"A man, appearing disheveled and uncomfortable, sits on a wooden chair in a dim room of what appears to be a police station. As an interrogator peppers him with questions, the man says he was part of a gang that kidnapped and murdered Iraqis during the past two years in order to create a split between Shi'ite and Sunni Iraqis. But he says his acts were not holy war. They were blasphemous."

Newsweek's Baghdad bureau chief, Ron Norland, is leaving Iraq after two years. Some of his parting thoughts from Good Intentions Gone Bad :

Two years ago I went to Iraq as an unabashed believer in toppling Saddam Hussein. I knew his regime well from previous visits; WMDs or no, ridding the world of Saddam would surely be for the best, and America's good intentions would carry the day. What went wrong? A lot, but the biggest turning point was the Abu Ghraib scandal.

Since April 2004 the liberation of Iraq has become a desperate exercise in damage control. The abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib alienated a broad swath of the Iraqi public. On top of that, it didn't work. There is no evidence that all the mistreatment and humiliation saved a single American life or led to the capture of any major terrorist, despite claims by the military that the prison produced "actionable intelligence."

The most shocking thing about Abu Ghraib was not the behavior of U.S. troops, but the incompetence of their leaders.

[link via Atrios, who has his own thoughts on Iraq here.]

Bump and Update: Armando at Daily Kos notices there's a lot more news lately about Saddam, and wonders why. I think it's because his trial is supposed to begin in two months. It is curious, as Armando notes, that the quote about Saddam's spirits comes from a judge. Judges don't pay house calls to inmates, even in Baghdad. So who leaked this information? Is it part of an orchestrated campaign that began with the undie photos?

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Original Post

This is just laughable. The Judge in the trial of Saddam Hussein says his spirits have sagged in recent months as reality sets in.

"The ousted president has suffered a collapse in his morale because he understands the extent of the charges against him and because he's certain that he will stand trial before an impartial court," [Judge Raid] Juhi was quoted as saying.

What self-serving propoganda. Does anyone really think Saddam believes his trial will be impartial? His lawyer, by the way, says his spirits are high.

Medium Lobster at Fafblog answers questions about torture in American prisons. [hat tip Suburban Guerilla]

Avedon Carol at Sideshow has a round-up of the urine-spraying articles. You can leave comments there now too.

Crooks and Liars highlights AfterDowningStreet.org. ADS is a coalition of veterans' groups, peace groups, and political activist groups, which has launched a campaign to urge Congress to begin a formal investigation into whether President Bush has committed impeachable offenses in connection with the Iraq war. To join the alliance of bloggers supporting the campaign, go here.

TBogg explains why Iraq is like Vietnam and what's going to happen.

The Pentagon today acknowledged - for the first time- that a soldier mistreated the Koran.

The Pentagon has confirmed for the first time that a U.S. soldier deliberately kicked a Guantanamo Bay prisoner's Quran in violation of the military's rules for handling the Muslim holy book.

In other confirmed incidents, prison guards threw water balloons in a cell block, causing an unspecified number of Qurans to get wet; a guard's urine splashed on a detainee and his Quran; an interrogator stepped on a Quran during an interrogation; and a two-word obscenity was written in English on the inside cover of a Quran.

The findings are among the results of an investigation last month by Brig. Gen. Jay Hood, the commander of the detention center in southeastern Cuba. The probe was triggered by a Newsweek magazine report -- later retracted -- that a U.S. soldier had flushed one Guantanamo detainee's Quran down a toilet.

USA Today has more. And Eric Alterman has a new column in The Nation on the Newsweek story - and why the Government shouldn't have "declared a jihad" and intervened.

We may finally get to the bottom of the Administration's "few bad apples" meme. The ACLU won another round in federal court today in its FOIA lawsuit.

A federal judge has ordered the Defense Department to turn over dozens of photographs and four movies depicting detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq as part of an ongoing lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union.

"These images may be ugly and shocking, but they depict how the torture was more than the actions of a few rogue soldiers," said Anthony D. Romero, Executive Director of the ACLU. "The American public deserves to know what is being done in our name. Perhaps after these and other photos are forced into the light of day, the government will at long last appoint an outside special counsel to investigate the torture and abuse of detainees."

Talk about chutzpah, the Administration invoked, of all things, the Geneva Conventions to argue against release.

Coincidence? Last week it was reported that Iraq will resume the use of the death penalty.

In a show of force the Iraqi government hopes will help quell the insurgency, Iraq will soon carry out its first judicial executions since the fall of Saddam Hussein. And despite objections raised by some other countries and international human-rights groups, the Iraqi public, by most accounts, is welcoming their return.

.... After the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the U.S. administrator for Iraq, Paul Bremer, suspended capital punishment, declaring that "the former regime used certain provisions of the penal code as a means of oppression, in violation of internationally acknowledged human rights." Iraq's interim government revived the death penalty in August for a smaller set of violent crimes, as well as drug trafficking. The decision is believed to have been motivated by the desire to execute Hussein.

by TChris

A prosecutor's botched cross-examination can be a defense attorney's best friend. Here's a fascinating account of the courts martial trial of Pablo Paredes, who defended his failure to deploy by arguing that he was obliged not to fight an illegal war. Particularly amusing: the prosecution's cross of the defense's expert witness, Marjorie Cohn.

After a 20-30 minute eternity that left us all in a stupor of disbelief that the war's legality had just been debated in a military court, on the record, and had lost, badly, the attorney for the prosecution sat down. And then the judge said, "I believe the government has just successfully proved that any seaman recruit has reasonable cause to believe that the wars in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq were illegal."

by TChris

Iraqi journalists who try to report the diversity of opinion in Iraqi society complain of harassment and censorship by the United States and coalition forces. U.S. forces have detained eight journalists since March. Two of the journalists followed insurgents for a few days to write about their lives; they're now said to be security risks.

"We were living without press freedom during Saddam Hussein's regime and today there is not much difference. Journalists are being held by US forces for doing their job when they write about opposing views," Kamal Aidan, a senior official from the IAJ, told IRIN in Baghdad.

So much for the spread of American-style democracy and freedom.

"We cannot write with freedom anymore because if you write against them [US forces and Iraqi government] you are going to be considered automatically against them and face the possibility of being closed down. The safety of journalists and press freedom should be at the top of the agenda for action in the coming months to guarantee our freedom in writing and transmitting true news," editor of a local Iraqi newspaper called al-Baghdadi, Abdullah Kareem, told IRIN.

Update: Raw Story reports that Rep. Conyers has drafted a new letter to Rumsfeld demanding answers.

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This is bound to cause a stir, from the Sunday Times OnLine (UK):

THE RAF and US aircraft doubled the rate at which they were dropping bombs on Iraq in 2002 in an attempt to provoke Saddam Hussein into giving the allies an excuse for war, new evidence has shown.

....The new information, obtained by the Liberal Democrats, shows that the allies dropped twice as many bombs on Iraq in the second half of 2002 as they did during the whole of 2001, and that the RAF increased their attacks even more quickly than the Americans did.

The numbers detailed in the report are pretty convincing. The Times says this information was obtained following the leak of the Downing Street Memo, but was contained in the same briefing paper.

After deliberating three hours, a military jury found Lt. Andrew K. Ledford not guilty of charges related to the beating death of an Iraqi "ghost detainee." Ledford will now be promoted to the rank of Lieutenant Commander.

This sounds to me like it would have been the correct result had Leford been charged with murder. He wasn't. He was charged with poor leadership and lying to officials. It's a little surprising he wasn't convicted on any of those charges. Perhaps because the jury was persuaded that the real culprits were the CIA agents who allegedly suspended al-Jamadi from his wrists, handcuffed behind his back in a "Palestinean hanging" mode. As we've pointed out a few times,

A government report obtained by the Associated Press said that [Manadel]Jamadi died an hour after his arrival at Abu Ghraib in early November 2003. The report said he had been beaten while in CIA custody and then hung by his wrists, with his arms crossed across his back -- treatment described as "torture" by international organizations. The prisoner reportedly died before CIA interrogators extracted information from him. U.S. Army guards at the prison then packed his body in ice and posed with the corpse in mocking photographs.

In May, 2004, Slate had this chronology of statements by President Bush as the stories of Abu Ghraib abuse were revealed. [link via What Really Happened which republished the link to it today.]

Funny, I saw the title of the Slate article, "Rape Room" and thought it was going to be about the Senate Chamber in the wake of the compromise on the nuclear option and the news that Priscilla Owen was confirmed today.