Bump and Update: Sad news. The identity of the headless body found yesterday has been confirmed as that of Jack Hensley, who would have turned 49 today.

Bump and Update: Al Jazeera reports that the posting on the miltant Islamic website says Mr. Hensley was killed by having his throat slit.

The sons of our nation have slit the throat of the second American hostage after the deadline passed and we will provide you with pictures soon," said the contributor, who goes by the pseudonym Abu Maisarah al-Iraqi.

***************
Original Post

This is beyond sad. Iraqi militants have announced they have killed a second American hostage,Jack Hensley of Florida.

Against the wishes of the Bush Administration which has refused to negotiate with terrorists, the Iraqi Justice Minister announced that one of the two women being held in Iraqi prisons will be released in accordance with the militants demands. She is Rihab Taha, also known as "Dr. Germ" because she headed up Iraq's biological weapons program in the 1980's.

The second woman, Huda Ammash, was also a scientist involved in Iraq's weapons program. She has been referred to as "Mrs. Anthrax" and "Chemical Sally." She has been suffering from breast cancer while incarcerated. She will be given a hearing, and then she will probably be released. The Justice Minister said both have been cooperative. He stresses the releases have nothing to do with the kidnappings. Is anyone going to buy that?

Malik Dohan al-Hassan, the justice minister, told the Guardian that his government would later today release Rihab Taha, a biological weapons scientist. A hearing would be held to determine whether to release the second woman, Huda Amash, another weapons scientist, dubbed Chemical Sally.

"It has nothing to do with the kidnapping," he said. "They have all been cooperative and we have decided to release them on bail. In the Huda Amash case the Americans insist she should stay in detention and we said she should be released." A hearing would consider the case today, he said. "We couldn't find any wrongdoing they have committed."

If both women are released and Mr. Bigly's life is spared, does this mean that had the Minister acted 48 hours earlier, Mr. Armstrong and Hensley might also have been spared?

Update: Reuters reports the U.S. insists the women will not be freed.[link via Atrios.]

Here is the official document (pdf) calling for a reinsatement of the draft--for men and women--ages 18-34, not just to those who might qualify for active military duty, but for those with skills the Government finds helpful in war--linguists, medical workers, etc. Just about everyone.

Note this has nothing to do with bills to reinstate the draft by Democrats like Charlie Rangel that made headlines two years ago. This is the Bush Administration at work--its representatives on the Selective Service System (SSS).

The document was obtained through a Freedom of Information Act Request by a poster to Democracy Underground, going by the name of Will Winn. It has been republished by Blatent Truth. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has reported on it a few times, including here.

As we wrote here, this is very scary. You should email a copy to your local college papers and to every young person you know. Read Blatant Truth and Seeing the Forest for more details. And remember, John Edwards has said there will be no draft under Kerry-Edwards.

Huda Alazawi was one of the few females imprisoned at Abu Ghraib in Iraq. She was a wealthy businesswoman, blackmailed by a lowlife informant who falsely dropped a dime on her and her brothers, claiming they were supporters of the Iraqi resistance after she refused to meet his demand for money. Recently released after several months at Abu Ghraib, she recounted her ordeal to The Guardian.

Alazawi was imprisoned with two of her brothers and a sister. One brother was brutally sexually assaulted --hours later he was thrown at her and her sister's feet, bleeding from his head, knees and between his legs. He was dead.

The torture, abuse and degradation of Alazawi and other prisoners went on for months. She was able to document some of the abuse in a Koran. Other aspects of her report match those of other prisoners.

A few bad apples? No way. If even just half of Alazawi's account is true, common sense dictates that the abuse and torture were not merely condoned, but organized, planned and authorized. Almost equally disgusting is this U.S. miltary spokesman's indifferent response to her allegations:

She and her sister, which [sic] were the last two females we detained at Abu Ghraib, were separated from the male detainees in keeping with the cultural sensitivities." He added, "The fact that abuses occurred isn't really news any more. We know they did and those who are accused are being prosecuted for it."

How about the prosecution of those who authorized it?

Is Dan Rather really what you all want to talk about when this just came across the wires?

A Web site posting Monday claimed that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's group has beheaded one of the American hostages in Iraq and that others would soon be killed. The claim could not be verified. The short statement was posted by a Web site contributor using the pseudonym Abu Maysara al-Iraqi, who has put up past statements signed in the name of the Tawhid and Jihad group. The posting promised video proof "soon."

al-Zarqawi "has beheaded the first American. The group will next behead the others," the statement said. The reliability and authenticity of such statements, videos and pictures, which appear frequently on Internet sites known for their Islamic content, cannot be known for certain.

Update: Reuters reports that the website has posted the video., and that the American beheaded is U.S. Contractor Eugene Armstrong.

Alfred W. McCoy is a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of the book, "The Politics of Heroin," an examination of the CIA's alliances with drug lords, and "Closer Than Brothers," a study of the impact of the CIA's psychological torture method upon the Philippine military.

Today a shorter version of his article on the C.I.A.'s history of torture appears in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Even as pundits fantasized about "limited, surgical torture," the Bush administration, following the president's orders after 9/11 to "kick some ass, " was testing and disproving their theories by secretly sanctioning brutal interrogation that spread quickly from use against a few "high-value target" al Qaeda suspects to scores of ordinary Afghans and then hundreds of innocent Iraqis.

....Looked at historically, the Abu Ghraib scandal is the product of a deeply contradictory U.S. policy toward torture since the start of the Cold War. At the United Nations and other international forums, Washington has long officially opposed torture and advocated a universal standard for human rights. Simultaneously, the CIA has propagated ingenious new torture techniques in contravention of these same international conventions, a number of which the United States has ratified.

A longer version of his article is available here. An even longer version will appear in The New England Journal of Public Policy (Volume 19, No. 2, 2004).Also don't miss Human Rights First September 9 report, Detainee Abuse: New Human Rights First Report Details Failings of Pentagon Investigations

The New York Times has a long article with details of Saddam Hussein's confinement.

Shorter Saddam: I'm the real President of Iraq. I have done nothing wrong. May I have a cigar and a muffin, please?

The new interim Government of Prime Minister Ayad Allawi is preparing for his trial. Not out of revenge, they say, but to help the Iraqi people heal.

John Kerry says Bush has a secret plan to call up more troops. The White House denies it, but check this out:

Rep. John Murtha, D-Penn., ranking member on the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee and a former Marine who served in Vietnam, said he had learned through conversations with Pentagon officials that beginning in November, "the Bush administration plans to call up large numbers of the military Guard and Reserves, to include plans that they previously had put off to call up the Individual Ready Reserve."

So long as Bush stays in office, he will continue to lie and soldiers will continue to die. Freeway Blogger is doing his part to change things.

Iraqi militants are threatening to decapitate the two Americans and Briton kidnapped earlier this week.

The threat came in a video purportedly from a militant group linked to al-Qaida that showed Americans Jack Hensley and Eugene Armstrong and Briton Kenneth Bigley, the first word of their fate since the three construction workers were abducted from their Baghdad office two days ago.

....In the hostage video, posted on an Web site known for its Islamic militant content, kidnappers purporting to belong to Tawhid and Jihad - a group led by Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi - demanded that Iraqi women detained at two American-controlled prisons here are freed within 48 hours or the captives will be beheaded. A U.S. military official said two women are in U.S. custody.

The U.S. has acknowledged it is holding two "high value detainees" although they are not at Abu Ghraib or Camp Bucca, a U.S. detention facility near Umm Qasr.

Update: Ty Hensley, brother of one the kidnapped Americans, was on Geraldo at Large on Fox News tonight, trying to get a message out to the militants with reasons to spare his brother. Heartbreaking. Fox is going to get videotapes of the kidnapped Hensley with his wife and child out to al Jazeera and other Arab networks.

[comments now full]

The New York Times examines the case of John Boland, a military reserve officer from Cincinnati charge with abusing prisoners at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan. First, the charged facts:

The report also said that Sergeant Boland shackled an Afghan named Dilawar, chaining his hands above his shoulders, and denied medical care to the man, a 22-year-old taxi driver, whose family said he had never spent a night away from his mother and father before being taken to the American air base at Bagram, 40 miles north of Kabul. The two detainees died there within a week of each other in December 2002.

Now, 21 months later, the Army has charged Sergeant Boland with assault and other crimes and investigators are recommending that two dozen other American soldiers face criminal charges, including negligent homicide, or other punishments for abuses that occurred more than a year before the scandal at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Who authorized these methods of interrogation? And why did the military first say the two detainees died of natural causes? And who authorized the CIA to keep their names off the prisoner roster to shield them from the Red Cross?

Not good news. Two Americans and a Briton have been kidnapped from an upscale neighborhood in Baghdad.

The three, all employees of Gulf Services Company, a Middle East-based construction firm, were seized from a two-story house surrounded by a wall in the al-Mansour neighborhood, said Col. Adnan Abdul-Rahman, an Interior Ministry official.

Yesterday, three decapitated bodies were located by a roadside near Dijiel which is north of Baghdad. Authorities believe the bodies are those of Iraqis who have been killed but have not released their identities.

The bodies were found Wednesday in nylon bags, the heads in bags alongside them, said Abdul-Rahman said. They were all men with tattoos, including one with the letter 'H' on his arm, but no documents were found on them, he said.

[After two days of off-topic comments, this thread is closed.]

Great news from John Edwards today: If Kerry and Edwards are elected, there will be no military draft.

During a question-and-answer session, the mother of a 23-year-old who recently graduated from West Virginia University asked Edwards whether the draft would be reinstated. "There will be no draft when John Kerry is president," Edwards said, a statement that drew a standing ovation.

Despite Rumsfeld's statements Bush wouldn't start a draft either, recent actions of the Pentagon cast doubt on that claim. For example, the miltitary's use of the "stop-loss" program has been alleged by many to be a back-door draft. Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) thinks a reinstatement of the draft is warranted.

Ralph Nader warns a draft is coming....unless he's President, of course. Bills have been introduced in Congress to reinstate the draft...although they have little chance of success. Democratic Underground reports the draft may come disguised in a budget proposal.

But don't take a chance. The safest route to avoiding involuntary induction into active military service is a vote for Kerry-Edwards.