It's semi-official. Once the U.S. turns power over to the Iraqi interim Government on June 30, the death penalty will be restored:

Justice Minister Malik Dohan al-Hassan today said: "The death penalty is suspended in Iraq, but with the return of sovereignty, nothing obliges us to maintain this suspension. "We want to reinstitute it for very specific cases." The death penalty was suspended in Iraq by then US Central Command chief General Tommy Franks in April last year, as the US-led coalition invaded the country and toppled Saddam's regime.

Saddam likely will not be happy to hear it. Especially because if Saddam were tried in an international court, there would be no death penalty. Here's an outline of the charges that are expected to be lodged against Saddam. Here are some excellent reasons why Saddam should be brought before an international tribunal.

by TChris

Can we trust the Pentagon to investigate itself? In addition to criminal investigations of specific abuse allegations, the military has opened six broader investigations into the treatment of prisoners. But by charging each investigation with a narrow and specific task, the Pentagon assures itself that no investigation is likely to follow the evidence very far up the chain of command.

None of the investigations has been assigned to look specifically at higher-ups at the Pentagon, or at leadership in Central Command, which has responsibility for Iraq. Even the investigation most eagerly anticipated by Congress, Maj. Gen. George Fay's look at military interrogators, is expected to stop well short of determining if any responsibility lies with top generals or Pentagon policy-makers, because Fay's probe is designed to focus on the role of military intelligence at the prison.

Only an independent investigation can reach to the top of the Pentagon.

"No one who is a uniformed officer is going to have the authority to get into [questioning] Rumsfeld" or his top deputies, said Scott Silliman, a military justice expert and law professor at Duke University. "The only way you're going to crack that nut is to have either the statutorily independent [Pentagon] inspector general take a look at it, or Congress."

Donald Rumsfeld undoubtedly hoped to preempt an independent investigation by appointing a panel, headed by former defense secretary James Schlesinger, to review the military's detention operations and decide whether further inquiries are warranted. But the panel, hand-picked by Rumsfeld, is hardly independent, as evidenced by remarks made by one of its members, former Republican Congresswoman Tillie Fowler, who insists that Rumsfeld will not be a focus of the panel's investigation.

We've been asking this question for weeks....why did Attorney General John Ashcroft pick Lance McCotter to set up U.S. prisons in Iraq? The New York Times has been on top of the story as well. Sunday, the paper asks the question again. It was McCotter, whose chequered past in prison administration is startlingly abysmal, who picked Abu Ghraib to be the main prison and then directed its reconstruction. Neither the Justice Department nor McCotter will answer.

This is a gruesome article, but it's necessary reading. And, doesn't this sound familiar? In the case of one inmate in McCotter's jail who hung himself:

...when a guard noticed Mr. Johnson had hanged himself, the officer on duty first went looking for a camera to record the scene, rather than cut Mr. Johnson down. "The response of the jail was to protect themselves by taking pictures rather than to save his life," [Johnson's attorney] Mr. Haas said.

Did our soldiers, intelligence officers or American contractors commit war crimes at Abu Ghraib? The High Commissioner for Human Rights, the U.N.'s top human rights watchdog, says it's at least a possibility:

The United Nations' top human rights watchdog warned yesterday that prisoner abuses committed by US forces in Iraq could constitute war crimes and called for "full accountability" of those responsible. In a keenly awaited report on the human rights situation in occupied Iraq, Bertrand Ramcharan, the acting High Commissioner for Human Rights, said the ill-treatment of detainees in Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison and other US-run detention centres "might be designated as war crimes by a competent tribunal".

One intelligence soldier at Abu Ghraib is talking...and not only describing the abuse of prisoners, but naming another intelligence soldier involved in the abuse:

U.S. Army Spc. Israel Rivera had just returned to duty at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq last October after minor surgery to remove shrapnel from his face. He was checking his e-mail, he recalls, when another military intelligence soldier approached. "Hey Izzy, did you hear about those detainees that raped that one kid?" asked the other soldier, Spc. Armin J. Cruz.

Izzy hadn't, so Cruz took him over to the cell block:

In a telephone interview with The Times, Rivera described his involvement in the case for the first time, saying that he visited the cellblock largely out of curiosity and that he was stunned by what he saw: detainees being stripped naked, made to crawl on their stomachs and chained into a ball of limbs and flesh on the prison floor. Rivera, 20, is the first military intelligence soldier to come forward publicly and say that he witnessed a fellow intelligence soldier, Cruz, taking part in the abuse of prisoners in the isolation cellblock at Abu Ghraib. Cruz has also been cited in testimony by Sgt. Samuel J. Provance III, another intelligence officer, who said Cruz "was known to bang on the table, yell, scream, and maybe assaulted detainees during interrogations in the booth."

Two marines have pleaded guilty to torturing an Iraqi prisoner with electroshock.

Pfc. Andrew J. Sting and Pfc. Jeremiah J. Trefney entered their pleas at a May 14 court-martial in Iraq, according to a statement by the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force in Iraq. Lt. Nathan Braden, a Marine spokesman at Camp Pendleton, Calif., released the statement Thursday.

According to the military statement, the pair and two other Marines wanted to discipline the detainee for throwing trash outside his cell and speaking loudly at the Al Mahmudiya prison, a temporary holding facility south of Baghdad. The Marines attached wires to a power convertor, which delivered 110 volts of electricity to the detainee as he returned from the bathroom, the statement said.

Sting pleaded guilty to charges of assault, cruelty and maltreatment, dereliction of duty, and conspiracy to assault. He was sentenced to a year in prison, a reduction of rank, forfeiture of pay and a bad-conduct discharge. Trefney pleaded guilty to cruelty and maltreatment, dereliction of duty, false official statement, violating a lawful order, and conspiracy to commit assault. He was sentenced to eight months in prison, reduction of rank and forfeiture of all pay, and he will also receive a bad-conduct discharge.

Ahmed Chalabi has accused George Tenet of being responsible for the charge that Chalabi passed intelligence information to Iran:

Chalabi told reporters that Tenet "was behind the charges against me that claimed that I gave intelligence information to Iran. I denied these charges and I will deny them again."

....Chalabi also accused Tenet of providing "erroneous information about weapons of mass destruction to President Bush, which caused the government much embarrassment at the United Nations and his own country."

How does this factor into Tenet's abrupt resignation for "personal reasons."? Did Tenet fall on his sword for the Administration? Or, is there a link between George Tenet and Bush's seeking legal advice over the leak of Valerie Plame's identity?

Atrios has the latest of President Bush's contradictory statements about Chalabi:

George W. Bush last Feburary, on Meet The Press (emphasis added):

Russert: If the Iraqis choose, however, an Islamic extremist regime, would you accept that, and would that be better for the United States than Saddam Hussein?
President Bush: They're not going to develop that. And the reason I can say that is because I'm very aware of this basic law they're writing. They're not going to develop that because right here in the Oval Office I sat down with Mr. Pachachi and Chalabi and al-Hakim, people from different parts of the country that have made the firm commitment, that they want a constitution eventually written that recognizes minority rights and freedom of religion.

George W. Bush yesterday , Rose Garden press conference:

Q Thank you, Mr. President. Mr. Chalabi is an Iraqi leader that's fallen out of favor within your administration. I'm wondering if you feel that he provided any false information, or are you particularly --
THE PRESIDENT: ....My meetings with him were very brief. I mean, I think I met with him at the State of the Union and just kind of working through the rope line, and he might have come with a group of leaders. But I haven't had any extensive conversations with him. ...

Q I guess I'm asking, do you feel like he misled your administration, in terms of what the expectations were going to be going into Iraq?
THE PRESIDENT: I don't remember anybody walking into my office saying, Chalabi says this is the way it's going to be in Iraq.

The Pentagon has begun polygraph testing of employees in an attempt to find out who leaked information to Chalabi about Iran.

The polygraph examinations, which are being conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, are focused initially on a small number of Pentagon employees who had access to the information that was compromised. American intelligence officials have said that Mr. Chalabi informed Iran that the United States had broken the secret codes used by Iranian intelligence to transmit confidential messages to posts around the world.

Chalabi, through his lawyers, has denied that he leaked info to Iran.

They sent a letter to Attorney General John Ashcroft and F.B.I. Director Robert S. Mueller III repeating Mr. Chalabi's denials and demanding that the Justice Department investigate the disclosure of the accusations against Mr. Chalabi.

Don't miss The Logic of Torture in the New York Review of Books. It's actually part 2 of a series by Mark Danner , Part 1, Torture and the Truth is here.

Danner includes the text of some sworn affidavits of Abu Ghraib prisoners made available by the Washington Post back in January. Chilling. Especially this one.

Also, from Jason Vest in the Phoenix Sun, On-the-ground-reality TV "Shocking footage of US military conduct in Iraq is available through major news services, yet the American public seldom sees what reporters see."

The ACLU and the Center for Consitutional Right, along with medical and veterans' groups have filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit charging that the Department of Defense and other government agencies illegally withheld records concerning the abuse of detainees in American military custody. Details and background are here.

An ACLU feature on the FOIA request, including a timeline that describes events that occurred during the time covered by its request is available here. You can read the complaint here (pdf).

"The government's ongoing refusal to release these records is absolutely unacceptable, particularly in light of the severity of the abuses we know to have occurred," said Jameel Jaffer, an ACLU staff attorney. "The public has a right to know what the government's policies were, why these abuses were allowed to take place, and who was ultimately responsible."

The withholding of documents, the lawsuit says, violates the government's obligation to comply with a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by the ACLU, CCR, Physicians for Human Rights, Veterans for Common Sense and Veterans for Peace. Filed more than six months ago, the FOIA request was directed to the Departments of Defense, State, Homeland Security, and Justice, as well as the CIA. The request expressed concern - now validated by the Abu Ghraib photographs - that detainees in U.S. custody were being subjected to abuse and even torture. The FOIA request also cited reports that detainees were being turned over or "rendered" to foreign countries with poor human rights records, as a way to sidestep domestic and international laws prohibiting torture.

by TChris

New information about the possible misdeeds of Ahmad Chalabi comes on the heels of an earlier report that Chalabi told officials in Iran that the U.S. had broken the secret communications code used by Iran's intelligence service. Newsweek reports that Chalabi "is suspected of leaking confidential information about U.S. war plans for Iraq to the government of Iran before last year’s invasion to oust Saddam Hussein."

There was never any reason to trust the self-interested Chalabi, but that didn't stop the Bush administration from paying him to lie -- payments that stopped only after Bush and Cheney learned that Chalabi had compromised U.S. codebreaking. The administration never should have trusted Chalabi, but now the question is: who in our government is so untrustworthy as to pass along sensitive information to him?

U.S. political activists close to Chalabi have told reporters in recent days that Chalabi learned about the codebreaking in Baghdad from a drunken U.S. official.

That doesn't narrow the field much, so the investigation continues.

Law-enforcement sources indicated that the American investigation will likely focus on whether sensitive information might have been leaked to Chalabi by officials in either the Pentagon or the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad.

The investigation may ask whether "Chalabi had collected and maintained files of potentially damaging information on U.S. officials with whom he had or was going to interact for the purpose of influencing them." So who did Chalabi intend to blackmail?

Not surprisingly, the administration is distancing itself from its old friend Chalabi, with Condoleezza Rice remarking that "it’s no secret that the relationship with Ahmad Chalabi has been somewhat strained of late" -- yeah, no secret there -- and the President saying that "he had only met the Iraqi very briefly a few times." Hey, he hardly knew the guy. At least that what Bush hopes voters will believe by November.