Don't miss this article by Jesse at the Stakeholder (DCCC weblog) about Rumsfeld and Chalabi. Atrios has a visual aid. Roger Ailes shares some memories. Kevin Drum takes bets, his money's on Chalabi.

Sign the Petition for Rumsfeld's removal. [Hat tip to Stirling Newberry at Newberry for Congress who also comments on the strange bedfellows.]

In light of the ongoing revelations about the U.S. abuse of Iraqi and Afghani prisoners, we thought we'd let you know:

Law Professor Celia Rumann has just published a timely article on the Founding Fathers’ prohibition on extreme interrogation. Tortured History: Finding Our Way Back to the Lost Origins of the Eighth Amendment, 31 Pepperdine L. Rev. 661 (2004) traces the history of the Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause to such documents as Massachusetts’ “Body of Liberties” (1641), English Bill of Rights of 1689, and Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765) as the Founders’ original check on forcing confessions through torture and “bodilie punishments.”

Prof. Rumann also argues that the Fifth Amendment’s Self-Incrimination Clause is not rendered redundant by this theory, but was intentionally added as a check on admission into evidence of forced confessions, whatever the compulsion.

Pepperdine Law Review does not offer articles on-line but you can order by sending an e-mail to lawreview@law.pepperdine.edu. You can also access it at Lexis.com, for a fee.

Via Atrios....and we are as outraged as he is. This just turns our stomach:

A military intelligence analyst who recently completed duty at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq said Wednesday that the 16-year-old son of a detainee there was abused by U.S. soldiers to break his father's resistance to interrogators. The analyst said the teenager was stripped naked, thrown in the back of an open truck, driven around in the cold night air, splattered with mud and then presented to his father at Abu Ghraib, the prison at the center of the scandal over abuse of Iraqi detainees.

Upon seeing his frail and frightened son, the prisoner broke down and cried and told interrogators he would tell them whatever they wanted, the analyst said.

The U.S. today raided the house of Ahmad Chalabi, a former ally and U.S. appointed member of the new Iraqi Governing Council. Chalabi was home. They were searching for 15 members of the Iraqi National Congress, which is Chalabi's party.

For years, Chalabi's INC received money from the Pentagon, in part for intelligence passed along by exiles about Saddam's purported weapons of mass destruction. Chalabi has been criticized since large stockpiles of such weapons were never found.

What were they searching for?

A senior coalition official said on condition of anonymity that an Iraqi judge issued warrants "for up to 15 people" on allegations of fraud, kidnapping and "associated matters." Several people were arrested, and Chalabi was not a suspect, he said....

U.S. officials declined to comment on the raid. Privately, however, American authorities have said Chalabi is interfering with a U.S. investigation into allegations that Saddam Hussein's regime skimmed billions of dollars in oil revenues during the U.N.-run oil-for-food program.

Chalabi was upset:

I am America's best friend in Iraq," Chalabi told a news conference. "If the (coalition) finds it necessary to direct an armed attack against my home, you can see the state of relations between the (coalition) and the Iraqi people."

More on Chalibi here.

According to a Department of Justice official:

The CIA has sent three cases to the Justice Department for possible criminal prosecution against agency personnel accused of involvement in the deaths of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan....The deaths last year have been linked to CIA officers and contractors.

Case Number 1:

The earliest case was a June 2003 prisoner death at a U.S. holding facility in Afghanistan's Kunar province, near the border with Pakistan. On June 23, the military announced the death, which may have involved a CIA contractor.

Case Number 2:

....the role of a CIA officer and agency contractor in the November death of a prisoner at the now-famous Abu Ghraib facility outside Baghdad.

Case Number 3:

Also that month, Maj. Gen. Abed Hamed Mowhoush, a former commander of Saddam's air defenses, died after complaining he didn't feel well during an interrogation in Qaim, Iraq. A CIA officer may have been involved.

What about the June 6, 2003 death of an Iraqi detainee ?

What about this soldier who abused a prisoner and in December, 2003 got a sanction (keeping his pension)?

What about these soldiers who received a discharge from the military rather than face a court martial for their abuse of an Iraqi soldier in January, 2004?

What about these cases of abuse?

ABC News has some new Iraqi prisoner abuse photos. This one's a charmer.

ABCNEWS has obtained two new photos taken at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq showing Spc. Charles Graner and Spc. Sabrina Harman posing over the body of a detainee who was allegedly beaten to death by CIA or civilian interrogators in the prison's showers. The detainee's name was Manadel al-Jamadi.

[Comments now closed, thanks to all for sharing their thoughts.]

by TChris

The AP reports that U.S. helicopters fired on a wedding party in Iraq, killing more than 40 people.

Associated Press Television News footage showed a truck containing bloodied bodies, many wrapped in blankets, piled one atop the other. Several were children, one of whom had been decapitated.

Iraqis interviewed on the videotape said revelers had fired volleys of gunfire into the air in a traditional wedding celebration before the attack took place. American troops have sometimes mistaken celebratory gunfire for hostile fire.

The AP report says the military is investigating. An anonymous source at the Pentagon told the AP that a military operation was being conducted about 15 miles from the wedding celebration.

If the report is accurate, this incident represents another blunder that will convince Iraqis that the U.S. places no value on innocent Iraqi lives. Now that Wolfowitz has admitted that the Pentagon "miscalculated" the strength and endurance of the resistence occupation forces were likely to encounter, will the Pentagon also admit that it only harms U.S. interests by continuing to kill the innocent?

The Denver Post has examined Pentagon records and is reporting that :

• five prisoners have died at four detention camps (including Abu Ghraib) while undergoing interrogation by the U.S.

• at least one of the deaths was previously reported as being from natural causes

• the soldiers got off light, mostly without criminal charges.

Here's more:

As expected, Jeremy Sivits has pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate against other soldiers in exchange for a lesser sentence--he got a year in jail and a bad conduct discharge.

"I'd like to apologize to the Iraqi people and those detainees," Sivits said, breaking down in tears as he made his statement. "I should have protected those detainees, not taken the photos."

The Abu Ghraib prison scandal is still big news. We're putting the morning news here, as we're ready to move on to some other issues:

Three Key Witnesses in Abuse Scandal Refuse to Testify
Los Angeles Times

Military Justice Put on Trial in Iraq Abuse Scandal
Legal Times

U.S. Faces Growing Fear of Failure
Washington Post

3 to Be Arraigned in Prison Abuse
Washington Post

Officer Says Army Tried to Curb Red Cross Visits to Prison in Iraq
New York Times

Officers Say Colonel at Abu Ghraib Felt Pressure to Get Inmates to Talk
New York Times

News Agency Employees Detail Abuse by U.S. Forces
Reuters

Legal Review Could Have Halted Abuse, Lawyer Says
New York Times

Former Abu Ghraib Intel Staffer Says Army Concealed Involvement in Abuse Scandal
ABC News

For more articles, check out Cursor.

So you believed we were getting ready to pull out of Iraq? They fooled you.

While the Pentagon says it plans to scale back the U.S. occupation in Iraq, it's quietly doing just the opposite, high-level internal e-mails reveal. It has launched a massive nationwide call-up of former service members across the country who have not fully completed their eight-year contractual obligation to the US Army. They are known collectively as the Individual Ready Reserves, or IRR, and they number more than 118,000.

Even the IRS is being enlisted to help:

The Defense Department, strapped for troops for missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, has proposed to Congress that it tap the Internal Revenue Service to locate out-of-touch reservists. It's one of the last options the military has before drafting civilians. And the move comes on top of rumors the Pentagon plans to redeploy to Iraq some 4,000 US troops stationed in South Korea. Call-ups for IRR members begin today, according to high-level Army e-mails I've obtained. Those who don't report could face AWOL or desertion charges.

Link via Unfair Witness. Also discussing this development is Daily Kos, Political Animal and Atrios .

Could it get any more obvious Bush is planning a draft next?

by TChris

Can the U.S. convince citizens of other nations that our ideals are real, much less worth adopting, if we jettison those ideals whenever they seem inconvenient? Take, for instance, the right to due process and to the presumption of innocence -- rights that protect individuals from the arbitrary actions of government. Or freedom from cruel and unusual punishment, which has long been understood to include torture.

Stuart Taylor Jr. explores the question: Must We Become More Like the Barbarians to Save Ourselves? His answer: the administration's policy of presuming guilt and violating fundamental rights has been a strategic disaster. If Bush intended to persuade the world that our ideals mean nothing, he's done a masterful job.

"The only thing I know for certain is that these are bad people." So said Bush last July, in response to a reporter's question about whether the 660 suspected Qaeda and Taliban members then imprisoned at Guantanamo (aka Gitmo) were "getting justice." The "bad people" included three Afghan boys between 13 and 15 years old who have since been released as harmless, after many months in captivity.

Bush decreed in January 2002 that no Gitmo prisoner would be allowed to go before a tribunal, because it was clear beyond doubt that every single one of them was an unlawful combatant. This was ludicrous on its face. In the fog of war—against enemies without uniforms who hid among civilians, while dishonest bounty hunters collected rewards for all the "terrorists" they could grab—many of those detained will inevitably turn out to be civilian noncombatants. Indeed, anonymous officials have asserted that, despite supposedly careful screening in Afghanistan, dozens, if not hundreds, of men were sent to Gitmo by mistake. And the Pentagon has released more than 130 Gitmo detainees.