The Center for Public Integrity has obtained classified background materials from the Army report on Abu Ghraib that describe in detail attacks, prisoner riots, interrogation methods and the torture and death of detainees. These documents, along with reports about the documents will be released in two parts beginning today, October 8. [link fixed]

British hostage Ken Bigley has been beheaded . The militants who kidnapped him sent out a video. The group responsible reportedly is the armed Tawhid wa al-Jihad (Unity and Holy War) group.

R.I.P. Mr. Bigley.

In a report prepared for Congress, another weapons inspector says Saddam had no WMDs before we invaded....and hadn't since the early 1990's.

Iraq had no stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons before last year's U.S.-led invasion and its nuclear program had decayed since the 1991 Gulf War, a weapons inspector appointed by the Bush administration said on Wednesday. The assessment contrasted with statements by President Bush before the invasion, when he cited a growing threat from Iraq's weapons of mass destruction as the reason for overthrowing President Saddam Hussein.

"I still do not expect that militarily significant WMD stocks are cached in Iraq," Charles Duelfer, the CIA special adviser who led the hunt for weapons of mass destruction, said in testimony prepared for the Senate Armed Services Committee obtained by Reuters. He said Iraq's nuclear weapons program had deteriorated since the 1991 Gulf War, but he said Saddam did not abandon his nuclear ambitions.

Speaking at the Insurance Leadership Forum in West Virginia, Paul Bremer, the top civilian official in Iraq, said the U.S. had insufficient troops in place to fight the war:

In remarks published Tuesday, the official, L. Paul Bremer, said he arrived in Iraq on May 6, 2003 to find "horrid" looting and a very unstable situation - throwing new fuel onto the presidential campaign issue of whether the United States had sufficiently planned for the post-war situation in Iraq.

"We paid a big price for not stopping it because it established an atmosphere of lawlessness," Bremer said during an address to an insurance group in White Sulphur Springs, W.Va. The group released a summary of his remarks in Washington. "We never had enough troops on the ground," Bremer said, while insisting that he was "more convinced than ever that regime change was the right thing to do."

Whoops. The White House has no comment. And true to Administration style, today Bremer backtracks and says:

In a statement Monday night to The Washington Post, Bremer said he fully supported the Bush administration's strategy in Iraq. "I believe that we currently have sufficient troop levels in Iraq," he said in the e-mailed statement, according to Tuesday's edition of the Post. He said references to troops levels related to the situation when he first arrived in Baghdad "when I believed we needed either more coalition troops or Iraqi security forces to address the looting."

Like Rumsfeld backtracking to cover Cheney on WMDs.

Remember that old Animals' song?

I'm just a soul who's intentions are good
Oh Lord, please don't let me be misunderstood

This Administration is becoming laughable. Not just in our eyes, but in the eyes of the world. The right hand doesn't have a clue what the left hand is doing. Their spin machine is working overtime. No wonder voters lined up in droves to register to vote.

See: Hesiod at Counterspin here. Left Coaster here.

Betty Bowers is going after Bush for his "Don't Forget Poland!" remark during the debate.

Poland has announced it will begin the withdrawal of its forces from Iraq by January 1. [link via Cursor .]

Don't miss this AP article on how and who we are fighting in Iraq. Look what this Administration got us into. How how will it ever get us out?

The U.S. military is fighting the most complex guerrilla war in its history, with 140,000 American soldiers trained for conventional warfare flailing against a thicket of insurgent groups with competing aims and no supreme leader.The three dozen or so guerrilla bands agree on little beyond forcing the Americans out of Iraq.

In other U.S. wars, the enemy was clear. In Vietnam, a visible leader - Ho Chi Minh - led a single army fighting to unify the country under socialism. But in Iraq, the disorganized insurgency has no single commander, no political wing and no dominant group. U.S. troops can't settle on a single approach to fight groups whose goals and operations vary. And it's hard to sort combatants from civilians in a chaotic land where large parts of some communities support the insurgents and others are too afraid to risk their lives to help foreigners.

"It's more complex and challenging than any other insurgency the United States has fought," aid Bruce Hoffman, a RAND counterinsurgency expert who served as an adviser to the U.S.-led occupation administration.

Next, a look at who we are fighting: 20,000 insurgents who belong to four groups with different goals. If there is a central theme it's this:

...inflicting as much pain as possible on the United States and its Iraqi and foreign allies.

Four U.S. soldiers from Colorado werecharged with murder today in the suffocation death of Iraqi General Abid Hamed Mowhoush.Our first report on the General's death was in November, 2003:

Maj. Gen. Abed Hamed Mowhoush, an air defense general captured Oct. 5 in a raid near the Syrian border, was being questioned Wednesday while in American custody in Qaim near the Syrian border when lost consciousness after complaining he didn't feel well, the military said in a statement. He was pronounced dead by a U.S. military physician. The cause of death is under investigation, the military said. The statement did not give his age.

In May, 2004, the U.S. announced it had submitted three deaths of Iraqi prisoners to the CIA for investigation. We cited several other publicized cases, and asked, how many more are out there?

Also in May, 2004, the Government began to come clean about the circumstances of Mowhash's death. No longer was it claiming he died from natural causes:

The military has said Mowhoush died during interrogation Nov. 26 from asphyxiation due to smothering and chest compression. The CIA said one of its agents may have been involved and referred the case to the Justice Department. Jaleel died Jan. 9 at a post near Al Asad, Iraq, of blunt force injuries and asphyxia, the Army said last week. The facility was the base camp of the 3rd Armored Cavalry.

Also in May, TChris wrote about the new investigation into Mowhoush's death. He noted:

Earlier predictions have come true and it's a banner year for opium production in Afghanistan. Officials are now worried it will spread to Iraq. What is responsible for the surge?

Instability in the wake of the U.S.-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq has resulted in one booming market for the production of drugs, and a second potential market for narcotics sale and transit, officials said....The country's exploding drug production has already become an issue in the U.S. presidential campaign. In Thursday's debate in Florida, Democratic candidate Sen. John F. Kerry cited the burgeoning opium poppy crop as evidence of President Bush's "colossal misjudgment" in turning his attention from Afghanistan to wage war in Iraq.

Administration officials are pushing this meme hard:

Indeed, U.S., U.N. and Afghan officials believe that opium smuggling is a source of funding for Taliban insurgents, Al Qaeda terrorists and criminal gangs operating in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Much of the opium is exported through the lawless border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan where Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden is believed to be hiding, officials said. Insurgents encourage small farmers in areas they control to grow the drug, and charge a tax on it for transportation.

Italy may pull its troops from Iraq after the January elections.

Italy's deputy premier Gianfranco Fini, meanwhile, suggested that his country could withdraw its 3,000 troops from Iraq after the elections, saying they will no longer be needed when a representative government is in place.

Will this mean anything for our troops, particularly if other countries follow Italy's lead?

Has Britain agreed to release detainees in its prisons for the release of hostage Ken Bigley?

British police are investigating a claim that Ken Bigley, the British engineer held for more than two weeks by a militant Islamic group in Iraq, will be freed if the UK government releases around a dozen high-profile detainees. The statement, purporting to come from the Tawhid and Jihad group, which has been holding Bigley for 17 days, was posted on the internet last week. It claims that Bigley, 62, will be released if around a dozen foreign Islamic militants held in Belmarsh high-security prison in south-east London are freed.

Abu Qatada, the militant cleric who has been detained for nearly two years, is the only prisoner mentioned by name in the statement, though Abu Hamza, the firebrand Egyptian-born cleric, is also held at Belmarsh. Qatada is a Jordanian, like Tawhid leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and is known to have been an influence on the group.

A Kuwaiti newspaper reported on the alleged swap.

'There's near certain information pointing to the entry of an Iraqi militant group into negotiations with [the Tawhid group] for the release of the British hostage,' the al-Rai al-Aam newspaper said, quoting 'informed Islamic sources' in Iraq.

British officials deny they would deal with terrorists. Bigley's family has passed out 100,000 leaflets in Baghdad with statements from Muslim leaders condemning Bigley's kidnapping.

After a lengthy investigation, New York Times reporters have found that the Bush Administration provided dubious, one-sided data to support its conclusion that Saddam was rebuilding his weapons program, thereby sending us off to war in Iraq. For example,

Speaking to a group of Wyoming Republicans in September, Vice President Dick Cheney said the United States now had "irrefutable evidence" - thousands of tubes made of high-strength aluminum, tubes that the Bush administration said were destined for clandestine Iraqi uranium centrifuges, before some were seized at the behest of the United States.

The tubes were the only physical evidence the Bush team had to back up their claim:

Those tubes became a critical exhibit in the administration's brief against Iraq. As the only physical evidence the United States could brandish of Mr. Hussein's revived nuclear ambitions, they gave credibility to the apocalyptic imagery invoked by President Bush and his advisers. The tubes were "only really suited for nuclear weapons programs," Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security adviser, explained on CNN on Sept. 8, 2002. "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."

Yet Team Bush knew their portrayal was disputed by their own experts:

Fox News aired Rita Cosby's recently taped interview with Donald Rumsfeld tonight. She asked him about rumors that there were plans to reinstate the draft. "Oh my goodness, no," he said.

She asked if it is possible that we may have to increase the number of troops in Iraq. "Sure, sure" he said, meaning it's a possibility.

Rumsfeld said the draft bills pending in Congress were introduced by Democrats and as far as he knew there was no Republican support for these bills.

He said he is dead set against a draft, there is no need for a draft in the United States of American and we have no trouble getting the help we need.

He sounded less sure about whether there would be a reduction in the number of months that army ground forces spend in Iraq. He said it is one of the things that has been discussed, but it almost seemed like his memory had to be jogged on this issue, so it's probably not a change that is going to come soon.

Why does no one want to acknowledge the Republican-sponsored "Universal Military Training and Service Act of 2001", H.R. 3598, introduced in the House by Republicans Nick Smith (MI) and Curt Weldon (PA) and co-sponsored by Roscoe Bartlett. It was introduced in late December, 2001 (after 9/11). Rangel's bill (H.R. 183)and its Senate counterpart (S. 89) were introduced on January 7, 2003. All three bills were referred to the Committee on Armed Services. No action has been taken on them since.

TalkLeft wrote about the Republican bill here. University Wire contains several articles on it. The Humanist, March 1, 2002, (available on Lexis.com)reported on the bill: