Its OK for a Republican Judge to Have Empathy

Flashback: Alito on his immigrant background: ‘I do take that into account’ when ruling.
Judge Sonia Sotomayor has come under fire from the radical right for stating that her experiences as a Latina affect her judicial outlook. However, these same conservative critics never objected when Judge Sam Alito said virtually the same thing during his confirmation hearing, discussing how he “can’t help but think of” his immigrant family when evaluating immigration cases:

ALITO: Senator, I tried to in my opening statement, I tried to provide a little picture of who I am as a human being and how my background and my experiences have shaped me and brought me to this point. … And that’s why I went into that in my opening statement. Because when a case comes before me involving, let’s say, someone who is an immigrant — and we get an awful lot of immigration cases and naturalization cases — I can’t help but think of my own ancestors, because it wasn’t that long ago when they were in that position. [...]

And that goes down the line. When I get a case about discrimination, I have to think about people in my own family who suffered discrimination because of their ethnic background or because of religion or because of gender. And I do take that into account.

Who Is Rick Scott And What Type Of Health Care System Is He Advocating

Who Is Rick Scott And What Type Of Health Care System Is He Advocating
This Sunday, the front group Conservatives for Patients’ Rights will be airing a 30-minute documentary with “horror stories” aimed at chipping away public support for reforming our health care system. Ironically, the leader and financier of the organization, private health care executive Rick Scott, is actually credited with transforming the American health care system into the profit above-all-else culture that is currently plaguing America.

Rick Scott is not only known for his efforts to build the “McDonald’s” of the health care industry, but his company was also forced to pay a $1.7 billion fraud settlement, the largest health care fraud settlement in U.S. history, for systematically stealing from taxpayers.

ThinkProgress has compiled a video report detailing who Rick Scott is, and what type of health care system he is defending. Watch it:

Robert Gates The Bureaucrat Unbound

Robert Gates The Bureaucrat Unbound
A few weeks ago, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates trooped up to Capitol Hill to answer questions about the new Pentagon budget. This is an unseemly spectacle under the best of circumstances. Even reasonable members of Congress have been known to empretzel themselves shamelessly, attempting to defend weapons the Pentagon doesn't want or need, but which provide jobs for their constituents. Usually, they win, too. It is just too difficult for a Secretary of Defense to argue against shiny new weapons systems with subcontractors in 46 states, even if they are fantastically over budget and designed to counter a missile threat that the Soviets never perfected 30 years ago.

But this is a different year, and Gates is a different sort of Defense Secretary. He warned the legislators that each decision was "zero sum." Any money that went to things he didn't want would come out of programs necessary to support the troops fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. (Read "Can Robert Gates Tame the Pentagon?)

Undaunted, the legislators pressed their case — especially the Republicans, who seemed convinced, as one said, that the Pentagon budget was part of a nefarious Obama Administration plot: "Fiscal restraint for defense and fiscal largesse for everything else." Congressman Trent Franks of Arizona was very concerned about anti-missile defense — a gold-plated pipe dream, if there ever was one — and especially a product dramatically called the Kinetic Energy Interceptor. To which Gates replied, in a manner so casually dismissive that Franks seemed to shrivel in his seat, "I would just say that the security of the American people and the efficacy of missile defense are not enhanced by continuing to put money into programs ... that are essentially sinkholes for taxpayer dollars." (Read about the troubled SBX radar.)

And as for that kinetic contraption, it was a "five-year development program, in its 14th year, not a single flight test, little work on the third stage or the kill vehicle, etc., etc., no known launch platform ..."

Rat-a-tat, Gates continued on, in that flat, unassuming Kansas twang that screams: No bull here. The next day, testifying on the Senate side, Gates performed a similar anti-missile evisceration of Senator Jeff Sessions, who responded, "I'd say you were ready for that question."

After a quietly impressive career in government that has spanned more than 30 mostly Republican years, Robert Gates is suddenly seeming almost, well, charismatic. He reeks authority. He is, according to several sources, the most respected voice in National Security Council debates. The President is said to love his unadorned manner. Much of which is attributable to the fact that, in the self-proclaimed twilight of his public career, Gates has emerged as that most exotic of Washington species — the bureaucrat unbound, candid and fearless. He tells members of Congress what he really thinks about their pet programs. He upends Pentagon priorities, demotes the military-industrial hardware pipeline and promotes the immediate needs of the troops on the front line. He fires high-ranking subordinates without muss or controversy — an Air Force secretary and chief of staff who didn't agree with him on the need to end production of the F-22 aircraft; the commandant of Walter Reed Army Medical Center, who presided over disgraceful conditions; even a well-respected general like David McKiernan, a conventional-warfare specialist unsuited for the asymmetrical struggle in Afghanistan.

When, in a recent conversation, I noted that he seemed gleefully outspoken these days, Gates offered a twinkly smile and said, "What are they going to do, fire me?"

In truth, Gates has been bulletproof ever since George W. Bush lured him from Texas A&M University to replace the disastrous Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense. His mission, Gates said, was "to put Iraq in a better place," which is a spectacular understatement. Iraq was falling apart in late 2006, and Gates found the Defense Department in paralytic denial. His nonstop effort to reform the institution — abetted by military rebels who had been cast into the outer darkness by the powers that were — is a great untold story of the war on terrorism.

"If you ever get a chance to interview Donald Rumsfeld," a retired four-star general told me in 2005, "ask him two questions and see which one lights up his eyes. Ask him what our force posture should be toward China 10 years from now. And then ask him what tactical changes we should make on the ground in Iraq as a result of the last three months of combat. I'll bet you anything, he gets more excited about China."

And that was the problem. The Cheney-Rumsfeld axis, which essentially ran national-security policy in the first half of the Bush Administration, was stuck in the Cold War. Rather than fight the enemy we had — the stateless terrorists of al-Qaeda — they sought more conventional enemies. Attention quickly — too quickly — shifted from Afghanistan to Iraq. And then, once the conventional armored push to Baghdad was completed, the ongoing war effort became — amazingly — a bureaucratic orphan. "Every time we tried to do something for the troops in the field in both Afghanistan and Iraq, we had to go outside the regular Pentagon bureaucracy to get it done," Gates recalled. "For example, there was no institutional home" for figuring out how to combat roadside bombs — but there were plenty of people working on how to counter missiles from North Korea.

On the day after he took over, Gates summoned General David Petraeus — no favorite of Rumsfeld's — from near exile at Fort Leavenworth, Kans., where he had supervised the writing of a new counter insurgency-warfare manual. Gates was about to travel to Iraq and wanted to know what the big questions were. "The biggest question is whether we have the right strategic concept to fight the war," Petraeus told him. "Instead of concentrating all our efforts on transitioning to Iraqi control, we need to go out and secure the population." (See pictures of Basra getting back to business.)

Gates seems uncomfortable talking about military intellectual stuff like counterinsurgency doctrine. He insists that logic, not doctrine, has driven everything he has done as Secretary of Defense. The highest priority was supporting the troops. "He resourced the important bureaucratic knife fights," said one senior Army officer. "He sided with us on MRAPs [mine-resistant vehicles] and unmanned drones, and increased intelligence, and more helicopters. Those should have been no-brainers, but it had been a real struggle to fund them before Gates." A military intelligence officer who was an Iraq specialist told me he had been pleading for more resources throughout the Rumsfeld years: "Iraq was Rumsfeld's fourth highest priority, after China, North Korea and Iran," he said. "But Gates called me in and asked, 'What do you need?' And he gave us everything we requested." Senior combatant commanders say these decisions, no less than the new tactics and increase in troops, helped change the course in Iraq.

And that, according to the Secretary of Defense, is the rationale for his new Pentagon budget; Bush had funded his wars outside the usual budget process, via so-called supplemental appropriations. Gates has included the war funding in his base budget, "so the programs will be institutionalized and the various services will fight for them." He insists that he is not abandoning the fancy hardware and future gizmos that his predecessors and Congress loved. "The things we've cut," he told me, "wouldn't have been in the budget even if we had $50 billion more to spend. They were programs that simply were unnecessary or weren't working."

The negotiating over the budget is likely to turn brutal, although Obama aides insist the President will veto the budget if Gates isn't satisfied with the result. And then there are the wars — especially Afghanistan, which Gates has said he hopes will turn around in the next year, but which has obviously become a more difficult enterprise than anticipated. Gates originally had planned to retire after a year or so, but he seems to have settled in, found a level of comfort and influence with the Obama Democrats that he never quite expected. "I don't do maintenance," Gates told me. "I would never do a job just to sustain the status quo. I like to go into an institution that's already good and do everything I can to make it better."

The Pentagon was good at some things, dreadful at others. It is better now, but there are lives at stake every day. Gates keeps track of those killed and wounded on his watch. He knows the exact numbers. He can get misty talking about the troops he's met downrange, young people the same age as the carefree students he supervised at Texas A&M, "which makes this all so much harder," he says. They — not future fights with China, not last week's tactics in Afghanistan — light up his eyes. He won't be abandoning them anytime soon.

Torture Is Not a New US Foreign Policy Tool

Torture Is Not a New US Foreign Policy Tool by Cesar Chelala

"We are going to smash your hands to pulp like the Chileans did to Victor Jara." Those were the words of the torturers in a Uruguayan prison spoken to my friend Miguel Angel Estrella, a pianist from Argentina. They were referring to the fate of the imprisoned Chilean singer and guitarist Victor Jara, whose hands were destroyed so that he would never play the guitar again. Jara, a fervent opponent of the Pinochet regime, was brutally tortured and later machine-gunned to death after the coup that brought Pinochet to power in 1973.

Estrella was being held in Uruguay's Libertad prison, accused of being a guerrilla from Argentina fighting the Argentine military regime. Unable to prove the charges against him, and given the unprecedented international pressure, the Uruguayan government released him in 1978, having kidnapped him at the end of 1977.

Estrella was luckier than most of those imprisoned by the South American military. Although tortured and held for a long time in isolation, Estrella eventually recovered, leads a brilliant career as a musician, and is now Argentina's Ambassador to UNESCO.

One of those training the Uruguayan torturers was an American operative, Daniel (Dan) Mitrione, who was later captured and killed by Uruguayan guerrillas. According to A.J. Langguth, a former New York Times bureau chief in Saigon, Mitrione was among the US advisers who taught torture to the Brazilian police.

Mitrione's method for the application of torture was carefully orchestrated. Langguth reports that the method was described in detail in a book by Manuel Hevia Cosculluela, a Cuban double agent who worked for the C.I.A., "Passport 11333, Eight Years with the C.I.A."

This is Mitrione's voice: "When you receive a subject, the first thing to do is to determine his physical state, his degree of resistance, through a medical examination. A premature death means a failure by the technician. Another important thing to know is exactly how far you can go given the political situation and the personality of the prisoner. It is very important to know beforehand whether we have the luxury of letting the subject die....Before all else, you must be efficient. You must cause only the damage that is strictly necessary, not a bit more. We must control our tempers in any case. You have to act with the efficiency and cleanliness of a surgeon and with the perfection of an artist..."

In Uruguay, Mitrione was the head of the Office of Public Safety, a U.S. government agency established in 1957 by US President Dwight D. Eisenhower to train foreign police forces. At Mitrione's funeral, Ron Ziegler, the Nixon administration's spokesman, stated that Mitrione's "devoted service to the cause of peaceful progress in an orderly world will remain as an example for free men everywhere." Thanks to former Senator James Abourezk's efforts, the policy advisory program was abolished in 1974.

Mitrione's case was far from unique. Through the School of the Americas, thousands of military and police officers from Latin America were trained in repressive methods, including torture.

On November 16, 1989, six Jesuit priests, a co-worker and her teenage daughter were massacred in El Salvador. I knew one of those killed, Ignacio Martin-Baró, vice-rector of the Central American University. He was the closest I have ever been to a saint. A U.S. Congressional Task Force concluded that those responsible for their deaths were trained at the U.S. Army School of the Americas at Ft. Benning, Georgia.

Human beings make culture. And we also make torture, that bastard child of culture. It is up to us to change this situation. When running for president Barak Obama stated, referring to the Iraq war. "It is not enough to get out of Iraq; we have to get out of the mindset that led us into Iraq." A similar assertion could be made about torture. It is not enough to say that torture will not be practiced any longer by the U.S. We need to get out of the mindset that made torture possible in the first place.

Buchanan, Peters call Cheney speech "candid," "accurate" despite discredited claims

Buchanan, Peters call Cheney speech "candid," "accurate" despite discredited claims
Despite several discredited claims made by former Vice President Dick Cheney during his May 21 speech to the American Enterprise Institute, MSNBC contributor Pat Buchanan subsequently referred to Cheney's remarks as "candid." Similarly, Fox News contributor Ralph Peters said of the speech, "every single point he raised was accurate. I am 100 percent behind him on this, because he's right." During his remarks, Cheney offered discredited assertions with respect to the relationship between interrogation techniques used at the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and Abu Ghraib prison; whether detainees provided information without the use of "enhanced interrogation techniques"; and whether Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair supports the use of those techniques.

For instance, Cheney claimed that "there has been a strange and sometimes willful attempt to conflate what happened at Abu Ghraib prison with the top secret program of enhanced interrogations." He continued: "At Abu Ghraib, a few sadistic prison guards abused inmates in violation of American law, military regulations, and simple decency. For the harm they did, to Iraqi prisoners and to America's cause, they deserved and received Army justice. And it takes a deeply unfair cast of mind to equate the disgraces of Abu Ghraib with the lawful, skillful, and entirely honorable work of CIA personnel trained to deal with a few malevolent men."

However, as Media Matters for America documented, contrary to Cheney's claim that Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo were unfairly compared, a 2008 Senate Armed Services Committee report released jointly by chairman Carl Levin (D-MI) and ranking member Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) concluded that "Special Mission Unit (SMU) Task Force (TF) interrogation policies were influenced by the Secretary of Defense's December 2, 2002 approval of aggressive interrogation techniques for use at GTMO [Guantánamo]. SMU TF interrogation policies in Iraq included the use of aggressive interrogation techniques such as military working dogs and stress positions. SMU TF policies were a direct cause of detainee abuse and influenced interrogation policies at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere in Iraq."

The report also stated that "[i]nterrogation techniques such as stripping detainees of their clothes, placing them in stress positions, and using military working dogs to intimidate them appeared in Iraq only after they had been approved for use in Afghanistan and at GTMO."

Moreover, Cheney suggested that detainees did not provide information before "enhanced interrogation techniques" were used, claiming that those techniques "were used on hardened terrorists after other efforts failed." He later added that "with many thousands of innocent lives potentially in the balance, we didn't think it made sense to let the terrorists answer questions in their own good time, if they answered them at all."

However, as Media Matters noted, former FBI agent Ali Soufan -- who interrogated Abu Zubaydah -- testified before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee on May 13 about the success of non-harsh interrogation methods, which he contrasted with the "ineffective" harsh techniques. Soufan stated in his written testimony that "the Informed Interrogation Approach outlined in the Army Field Manual is the most effective, reliable, and speedy approach we have for interrogating terrorists. It is legal and has worked time and again." He continued: "It was a mistake to abandon it in favor of harsh interrogation methods that are harmful, shameful, slower, unreliable, ineffective, and play directly into the enemy's handbook."

Soufan pointed to "[t]he case of the terrorist Abu Zubaydah" as "a good example of where the success of the Informed Interrogation Approach can be contrasted with the failure of the harsh technique approach." Soufan then presented a "timeline" of the Zubaydah interrogation, which he said showed that "many of the claims made in the memos about the success of the enhanced techniques are inaccurate." He added: "For example, it is untrue to claim Abu Zubaydah wasn't cooperating before August 1, 2002. The truth is that we got actionable intelligence from him in the first hour of interrogating him."

Soufan also testified about other uses and successes of the informed interrogation approach. He stated that his interrogation of Osama bin Laden's former chief bodyguard, Nasser Ahmad Nasser al-Bahri, also known as Abu Jandal, was "done completely by the book (including advising him of his rights)," and that, from it, "we obtained a treasure trove of highly significant actionable intelligence."

Cheney - Concern About Torture Is ‘Contrived Indignation And Phony Moralizing’

Cheney: Concern About Torture Is ‘Contrived Indignation And Phony Moralizing’
Today, Vice President Cheney gave a speech at the right-wing American Enterprise Institute in response to President Obama’s speech on human rights. Cheney launched an aggressive defense of the Bush administration’s torture program by saying that it was necessary after the 9/11 terrorist attacks:

In the years after 9/11, our government also understood that the safety of the country required collecting information known only to the worst of the terrorists. And in a few cases, that information could be gained only through tough interrogations.

In top secret meetings about enhanced interrogations, I made my own beliefs clear. I was and remain a strong proponent of our enhanced interrogation program. The interrogations were used on hardened terrorists after other efforts failed. They were legal, essential, justified, successful, and the right thing to do.

Cheney also criticized critics of the Bush administration’s program, calling it “feigned outrage based on a false narrative. In my long experience in Washington, few matters have inspired so much contrived indignation and phony moralizing as the interrogation methods applied to a few captured terrorists.” He then claimed that these critics are attacking intelligence officers for trying to “avenge the dead of 9/11? through torture:

I might add that people who consistently distort the truth in this way are in no position to lecture anyone about “values.” Intelligence officers of the United States were not trying to rough up some terrorists simply to avenge the dead of 9/11. … We sought, and we in fact obtained, specific information on terrorist plans.

Watch it:

Cheney has set up a straw man. Critics are not upset at intelligence officers for trying to “avenge the dead of 9/11? by “rough[ing] up some terrorists.” People are upset at top Bush administration officials for authorizing human rights violations in order to pursue a political agenda.

As the 2008 Senate Armed Services Committee report made clear, interrogators at Gitmo were under “pressure” to produce evidence of ties between Iraq and al Qaeda, even though they were ultimately unsuccesful. “The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish that link…there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results,” said former U.S. Army psychiatrist Maj. Charles Burney.

Media Ignores Gingrich Frequent Lies

Media declare Gingrich GOP's "ideas man," ignore his frequent falsehoods
Falsehoods offered by Gingrich include:

* During the May 10 edition of Fox Broadcasting Co.'s Fox News Sunday, Gingrich claimed that Democrats have "had control since January of 2007. They haven't passed a law making waterboarding illegal. They haven't gone into any of these things and changed law." However, the Democratically controlled Congress did pass a bill in 2008 that would have banned the use of waterboarding, had President Bush not subsequently vetoed the measure. Gingrich further suggested that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), who according to a recently released CIA document was first briefed about harsh interrogation techniques in September 2002, could have threatened "to pass a law cutting off the money" for the techniques if she objected to them. But Democrats were not in power until January 2007; Pelosi was the ranking member of the House intelligence committee and a senior minority member of the House appropriations committee in 2002, and House minority leader from 2003 to 2006.

* During a March 25 appearance on Fox News' Hannity, Gingrich falsely claimed that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner proposed to "take over non-bank, non-financial system assets" and that "Congress had passed the authorization in the stimulus bill" to pay bonuses to AIG executives. According to Gingrich, those policies "absolutely moves you towards a political dictatorship."

* In a March 3 Twitter post, Gingrich wrote that his wife, Callista, "pointed out flying into [S]anta [B]arbara you can see the oil rigs off shore," and asserted, "Ironically they have had no spill since 1969." In fact, in just the few months preceding Gingrich's post, there had been at least two oil spills reported in or near the Santa Barbara Channel, according to the U.S. Coast Guard, including one spill in mid-February and another in December 2008 that required a coordinated cleanup effort by the Coast Guard, the California Department of Fish and Game Office of Spill Prevention and Response (OSPR), and the company responsible for the spill.

* In a February 22 New York Times article, reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg wrote that Gingrich "sees the stimulus bill as his party's ticket to a revival in 2010, as Republicans decry what they see as pork-barrel spending for projects like marsh-mouse preservation. 'You can imagine the fun people will have with that,' he said." In fact, the bill does not contain any language directing funds to the salt marsh harvest mouse, or its San Francisco wetlands habitat, a fact that the House Republican leadership aide who reportedly originated the claim has reportedly acknowledged.

* During the February 17 edition of Hannity, Gingrich falsely claimed that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act contains "$30 million to save a mouse in San Francisco" and "$8 billion for a high-speed rail to Las Vegas for Harry Reid," adding, "[I]f those aren't set-asides, I don't know what you'd call them."

* During the January 22 edition of Fox News' On the Record, Gingrich referred to a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) initial "analysis" of the recovery package and purported that it analyzed the entire bill, stating: "Look, the Congressional Budget Office has reported that less than 10 percent of the bill will be spent the first year. Some of it would not be spent for 10 years. This is a bill -- this is not a stimulus package, this is a bigger government, more bureaucracy, more powerful politician package in the guise of a stimulus." In fact, as the initial Associated Press report on the CBO "analysis" noted, it did not take into account all aspects of the recovery plan. While the CBO write-up found that "only $26 billion out of $274 billion in infrastructure spending would be delivered into the economy by the Sept. 30 end of the budget year," it did not "cover tax cuts or efforts by Democrats to provide relief to cash-strapped state governments to help with their Medicaid bills," among other provisions.

* On the January 19 edition of Fox News' Happening Now, referring to President Obama's support for the Employee Free Choice Act, Gingrich claimed that Obama was "going to be for the labor unions taking away your right to a secret-ballot vote before being forced to join a union," echoing a common distortion employed by opponents of the legislation.

* Gingrich has repeatedly criticized Pelosi for using a military jet to travel to and from her congressional district, and has also falsely claimed that former Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL) "did not get a private plane" following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. In fact, as Media Matters for America has noted, following 9-11, the House sergeant-at-arms, the Defense Department, and the White House agreed that military planes should be made available to the speaker of the House for national security reasons, and Hastert was the first speaker to use one.

* During the November 16, 2008, broadcast of CBS' Face the Nation, Gingrich said that Republicans "who are about to face this question of, how do you get the economy growing again" should ask Republican governors Mitch Daniels of Indiana and Jon Huntsman of Utah, "[H]ow did they get to the lowest unemployment rate in their respective regions?" However, the most recent Bureau of Labor Statistics records at the time showed that Gingrich's claim was false. In fact, neither Utah nor Indiana had the lowest unemployment rate in its region, and several states with lower unemployment rates were governed by Democrats.

* During the July 31, 2008, edition of Fox News' Hannity & Colmes, Gingrich repeatedly mischaracterized Obama's energy policy, falsely suggesting that Obama's only "energy strategy" was to encourage people to keep the tires on their vehicles properly inflated and asserting that Obama "suggested if we all inflated our tires, that we would solve the problem."

* On the October 10, 2006, edition of Hannity & Colmes, Gingrich falsely claimed that Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-NY) "promise[d] to raise taxes" if Democrats were to take over the House of Representatives in that year's midterm elections. In fact, as Media Matters noted, during a September 26, 2006, interview with host Neil Cavuto on Fox News' Your World, Rangel, who was in line to become chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee if Democrats gained a majority in the House, stated that a House controlled by Democrats "would not raise taxes" and "would not roll back" Bush's tax cuts enacted by Congress and set to expire in 2010.

Media ignore question of whether Congress was briefed on torture dissent

Media ignore question of whether Congress was briefed on torture dissent
For example, in its coverage of Pelosi's May 14 press conference, The Washington Post did not note that, during the press conference, Pelosi stated that Congress was not provided with "contrary opinions within the Executive Branch [that] concluded that these [enhanced] interrogation techniques were not legal." Moreover, according to a Media Matters for America review* of the Post's coverage over the past month of what Pelosi knew about these techniques, the Post has not reported on, or raised, the question of whether Pelosi was informed of any dissent within the administration over the use of these techniques. Those who dissented include legal experts from the FBI and military who contested the Justice Department's determination that these EITs were legal; FBI and CIA counterintelligence experts who had reportedly expressed opposition to, and disputed the effectiveness of, the methods; and experts from the military's Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) program who similarly expressed concerns about the efficacy of subjecting detainees to harsh interrogation techniques modeled after ones used in the SERE program. Media Matters has previously documented a recent pattern of the media minimizing the Bush administration's role in the torture debate.

LEGAL OBJECTIONS

In a May 15 Washington Post article on Pelosi's press conference, staff writer Paul Kane wrote that Pelosi's critics "contend that top Democrats were aware that CIA interrogators were using waterboarding, or simulated drowning, and that their support waned only after its use became public and led to an outcry from human rights activists." Similarly, in a May 15 Post analysis, national political correspondent Dan Balz wrote, "Conservatives say that, if Pelosi was so opposed to torture, she should have spoken out forcefully when she learned that these techniques were being employed. Her failure to do so then leaves her in a weakened position to protest now, they argue." But Kane and Balz did not note that, during her press conference, Pelosi stated that she was not told "there were other opinions within the executive branch that concluded that these interrogation techniques were not legal."

According to a May 2008 report from the Justice Department's office of the inspector general, following a meeting with FBI counterterrorism assistant director Pasquale D'Amuro "in approximately August 2002," FBI Director Robert Mueller determined "that the FBI would not participate in joint interrogations of detainees with other agencies in which harsh or extreme techniques not allowed by the FBI would be employed." D'Amuro recommended that the FBI not participate in part because "the use of the aggressive techniques failed to take into account an 'end game.' " D'Amuro added, "[E]ven a military tribunal would require some standard for admissibility of evidence. Obtaining information by way of 'aggressive' techniques would not only jeopardize the government's ability to use the information against the detainees, but also might have a negative impact on the agents' ability to testify in future proceedings." Additionally, in a November 27, 2002, legal analysis, FBI deputy director Marion Bowman wrote that several of the enhanced techniques -- including "[u]se of wet towel and dripping water to induce the misperception of drowning" -- "are not permitted by the US Constitution" and may violate the federal torture statute.

Further, a November 20, 2008, Senate Armed Services Committee report, released jointly by chairman Carl Levin (D-MI) and ranking member Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), documented concerns the military services expressed, including that the enhanced techniques -- requested for use at Guantánamo Bay and authorized by Donald Rumsfeld on December 2, 2002 -- could not withstand legal scrutiny. On November 1, 2002, the Air Force commented on the request by expressing "serious concerns regarding the legality of many of the proposed techniques." The Marine Corps stated in a memo that "several of the Category II and III techniques arguably violate federal law, and would expose our service members to possible prosecution," and that the Corps "disagree[d] with the position that the proposed plan is legally sufficient." The Army, in turn, replied that it "interposes significant legal, policy and practical concerns regarding most of the Category II and all of the Category III techniques proposed." The committee report stated that a legal review subsequently initiated by Capt. Jane Dalton, legal counsel to the Joint Chiefs chairman, was "[q]uashe[d]" by Department of Defense general counsel Jim Haynes.

The Media’s Collective Yawn Over Torture for War

The Media’s Collective Yawn Over Torture for War
Faced with what could be the biggest foreign policy bombshell since the Gulf of Tonkin lies cleared the way for Vietnam, the Washington-New York media establishment has chosen to do nothing. Much as D.C. reporters decided several years ago that they were no longer interested covering the Bush administration's duplicity in the run-up to the Iraq war (nor are the David Gregory's of the world interested in revisiting their profession's complicity with the former administration in that regard,) "the press," it seems, has decided to take a pass. And what they're passing on is truly stunning.

In short, evidence is quickly piling up suggesting that the torture of terrorism suspects, and even the alleged request from no less than the office of the vice president of the United States, to waterboard an Iraqi official, had less to do with protecting Americans from further attack after 9/11, than it had to do with bolstering a phony case for invading Iraq. Polls show a plurality of Americans will accept even torture - as sickening as that fact is to anyone who cares about civil liberties - if it's done to save innocent (read American) lives. But how would the American people square the idea of torturing people, not to save lives, but to produce false confessions in order to give a small group of ideologues - the neoconservatives - the war they desired. Most Americans have long since accepted that the Bush administration's case for invading Iraq was flawed, if not totally false. What we didn't know until recently, was that to sell that case, members of the Bush administration, possibly including Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld - maybe even the president of the United States, were willing to do things we're accustomed to ascribing to the North Koreans or Maoist Chinese: using torture not to get good information, but to produce false confessions, to justify an unnecessary war.

The evidence just keeps coming. On Thursday, Colin Powell deputy Lawrence Wilkerson, and former NBC News investigative producer Robert Windrem, offered stunning news. In Wilkerson's words:

... what I have learned is that as the administration authorized harsh interrogation in April and May of 2002--well before the Justice Department had rendered any legal opinion--its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qa'ida.

So furious was this effort that on one particular detainee, even when the interrogation team had reported to Cheney's office that their detainee "was compliant" (meaning the team recommended no more torture), the VP's office ordered them to continue the enhanced methods. The detainee had not revealed any al-Qa'ida-Baghdad contacts yet. This ceased only after Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, under waterboarding in Egypt, "revealed" such contacts. Of course later we learned that al-Libi revealed these contacts only to get the torture to stop.

And per Windrem's reporting in The Daily Beast:

At the end of April 2003, not long after the fall of Baghdad, U.S. forces captured an Iraqi who Bush White House officials suspected might provide information of a relationship between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's regime. Muhammed Khudayr al-Dulaymi was the head of the M-14 section of Mukhabarat, one of Saddam's secret police organizations. His responsibilities included chemical weapons and contacts with terrorist groups.

Two senior U.S. intelligence officials at the time tell The Daily Beast that the suggestion to waterboard an Iraqi prisoner came from the Office of Vice President Cheney.

"To those who wanted or suspected a relationship, he would have been a guy who would know, so [White House officials] had particular interest," Charles Duelfer, head of the Iraqi Survey Group and the man in charge of interrogations of Iraqi officials, told me. So much so that the officials, according to Duelfer, inquired how the interrogation was proceeding.

Those weren't even the first stories on the subject. Last month, McClatchy correspondent Jonathan Landay reported, to precious little response from the rest of the mainstream press, that:

A former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue said that Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld demanded that the interrogators find evidence of al Qaida-Iraq collaboration.

"There were two reasons why these interrogations were so persistent, and why extreme methods were used," the former senior intelligence official said on condition of anonymity because of the issue's sensitivity.

"The main one is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack (after 9/11). But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there."

These are stunning facts - certainly more shocking, and of greater consequence, then finding out whether House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was told that waterboarding was for past, future or present use. And yet, a scan of the major headlines on mainstream news outlets reveals not a single headline about these stunning facts, including the fact that the false al-Libi confession now appears to have been the basis of the following testimony to the United Nations on February 6, 2003:

I can trace the story of a senior terrorist operative telling how Iraq provided training in these weapons to al Qaeda. Fortunately, this operative is now detained, and he has told his story. I will relate it to you now as he, himself, described it.

The testimony was from former Secretary of State Collin Powell. The detained operative, al-Libi, "told his story" after being beaten and locked in a coffin for 17 hours by "CIA surrogates" at a detention facility in Egypt.

You'd think that these would be top stories, worthy of serious consideration by a press corps that so shamefully let down the American people in the run-up to the Iraq invasion. The implications of these new revelations are stunning: a sitting president, vice president and defense secretary, selling a false case to the American people about an impending invasion of a country that had done no harm to us, and then using torture to produce false confessions in order to further the lie. Instead, the vaunted press corps is fixated - almost to the point of obsession - with Speaker Pelosi.

Even NBC News, the only outlet that has covered the story at all, has so far, relegated it to its "opinion/news" programs - "Countdown with Keith Olbermann" and "The Rachel Maddow Show," implying that the idea of the Bush administration torturing in order to justify war is nothing more than a liberal audience interest story, rather than a significant constitutional breach. The torture-Iraq link ceases to exist during MSNBC's daytime news programming. MSNBC.com, NBC's online arm, had zero headlines posted today, though they did put up a top story about whether inmates should be able to raise their babies in jail. Rival CNN has, to my viewing, ignored the story on air, and banished it to their international site online, while the Pelosi melodrama makes the domestic CNN.com front page. The New York Times had zero headlines on this subject on their website today, while Washingtonpost.com has six separate pieces on Pelosi, including an editorial, and not a single one on the torture-Iraq link. CBSnews.com takes a pass too, as does ABC News' online site, which instead boasts headlines about "John and Kate" and their marital dilemma. (I didn't bother to check Fox, since my interest was only in news outlets.)

And while the Washington Post today published an op-ed by neoconservative Charles Krauthammer justifying torture with the time-worn "ticking time bomb" meme, his paper's editors surely know by now that the Bush-Cheney torture program wasn't about a ticking time bomb. There's ample evidence of that. It's just that the Post, like her sisters in the print and broadcast media, are choosing to ignore, or to bury it.

Why would they do that? Perhaps members of the D.C. media establishment are loath to revisit at time period that wasn't exactly their shining moment. As New York Times White House correspondent Elizabeth Bumiller helpfully admitted back in 2004, during the run-up to the Iraq invasion:

'I think we were very deferential because ... it's live, it's very intense, it's frightening to stand up there. Think about it, you're standing up on prime-time live TV asking the president of the United States a question when the country's about to go to war. There was a very serious, somber tone that evening, and no one wanted to get into an argument with the president at this very serious time.'"

And argue they did not. As Dan Rather observed during a speech at the National Conference of Media Reform last summer:

"In the wake of 9/11 and in the run-up to Iraq, . . . news organizations made a decision -- consciously or unconsciously, but unquestionably in a climate of fear -- to accept the overall narrative frame given them by the White House, a narrative that went like this: Saddam Hussein, brutal dictator, harbored weapons of mass destruction and, because of his supposed links to al Qaeda, this could not be tolerated in a post-9/11 world.

David Sirota, writing in the Huffington Post, lamented in 2005 that the "gang of 500" - the main body of White House reporterdom - lost interest in covering the Iraq war because it was "hard" and besides, the American people didn't care about Iraq anymore. One Sirota observation seems especially relevant today:

...the American public keenly recognizes that many major media today are simply no longer interested in reporting on anything that might fundamentally challenge the Establishment power structure. For when the media seems more interested in covering what's on the President's Ipod and what the President's dancing habits are than they are the death/maiming of American soldiers in Iraq, well, we've got a serious problem.

No truer words...
Joy-Ann Reid is a writer and columnist for the South Florida Times and blogs at reidreport.com

Republicans Tortured to Justify War

Republicans Tortured to Justify War by Joe Conason
Dick Cheney keeps saying "enhanced interrogation" was used to stop imminent attacks, but evidence is mounting that the real reason was to invent evidence linking Saddam Hussein to al-Qaida.

The single most pertinent question that Dick Cheney is never asked -- at least not by the admiring interviewers he has encountered so far -- is whether he, Donald Rumsfeld and George W. Bush used torture to justify the illegal invasion of Iraq. As he tours television studios, radio stations and conservative think tanks, the former vice-president hopes to persuade America that only waterboarding kept us safe for seven years.

Yet evidence is mounting that under Cheney's direction, "enhanced interrogation" was not used exclusively to prevent imminent acts of terror or collect actionable intelligence -- the aims that he constantly emphasizes -- but to invent evidence that would link al-Qaida with Saddam Hussein and connect the late Iraqi dictator to the 9/11 attacks.

In one report after another, from journalists, former administration officials and Senate investigators, the same theme continues to emerge: Whenever a prisoner believed to possess any knowledge of al-Qaida's operations or Iraqi intelligence came into American custody, CIA interrogators felt intense pressure from the Bush White House to produce evidence of an Iraq-Qaida relationship (which contradicted everything that U.S. intelligence and other experts knew about the enmity between Saddam's Baath Party and Osama bin Laden's jihadists). Indeed, the futile quest for proof of that connection is the common thread running through the gruesome stories of torture from the Guantánamo detainee camp to Egyptian prisons to the CIA's black sites in Thailand and elsewhere.

Perhaps the sharpest rebuke to Cheney's assertions has come from Lawrence Wilkerson, the retired Army colonel and former senior State Department aide to Colin Powell, who says bluntly that when the administration first authorized "harsh interrogation" during the spring of 2002, "its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qaida."

In an essay that first appeared on the Washington Note blog, Wilkerson says that even when the interrogators of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the Libyan al-Qaida operative, reported that he had become "compliant" -- in other words, cooperative after sufficient abuse -- the vice-president's office ordered further torture of the Libyan by his hosts at an Egyptian prison because he had not yet implicated Saddam with al-Qaida. So his interrogators put al-Libi into a tiny coffin until he said what Cheney wanted to hear. Nobody in the U.S. intelligence community actually believed this nonsense. But now, al-Libi has reportedly and very conveniently "committed suicide" in a prison cell in Libya, where he was dispatched to the tender mercies of the Bush administration's newfound friends in the Qaddafi regime several years ago. So the deceased man won't be able to discuss what actually happened to him and why.

Wilkerson's essay was followed swiftly by an investigative report in the Daily Beast, authored by former NBC News producer Robert Windrem, who interviewed two former senior intelligence officers who told him a similar story about a different prisoner. In April 2003, U.S. forces captured an Iraqi official named Muhammed Khudayr al-Dulaymi, who had served in Saddam's secret police, the Mukhabarat. Those unnamed officials said that upon learning of Dulaymi's capture, the vice-president's office proposed that CIA agents in Baghdad commence waterboarding him, in order to elicit information about a link between al-Qaida and Saddam. Evidently that suggestion was not enforced by Charles Duelfer, the head of the Iraq Study Group who controlled Dulaymi's interrogation.

The same kind of demands were directed toward interrogators in Guantánamo, according to the testimony of former Army psychiatrist Charles Burney, who testified that he and his colleagues interrogating prisoners at the detention camp felt "pressure" to produce proof of the mythical link.

"While we were there, a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between al Qaida and Iraq and we were not successful in establishing a link between al Qaida and Iraq," he told the Army inspector general. "The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish that link ... there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results." In other words, they were instructed to use abusive techniques, as recounted in the investigation of torture by the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Looking back, we now know that coerced confessions -- and in particular the questionable assertions by al-Libi -- were highlighted by administration officials promoting the case for war with Iraq, in the landmark Cincinnati speech by President Bush in October 2002 and in Colin Powell's crucial presentation to the U.N. Security Council in February 2003, the eve of the war.

Whether Bush, Cheney and their associates were seeking real or fabricated intelligence, they knowingly employed methods that were certain to produce the latter -- as American officials well knew because those same techniques, especially water torture, had been used to elicit false confessions from captured Americans as long ago as World War II and the Korean conflict.

Cheney now claims that he preserved the country from terrorism and saved thousands and perhaps hundreds of thousands of lives. We need a serious investigation, with witnesses including the former vice-president under oath, to determine what he and his associates actually did with the brutal powers they arrogated to themselves -- because instead their actions cost thousands upon thousands of American and Iraqi lives, all in the service of a political lie.
© 2009 Salon.com

ABC report on interrogation hearing left out testimony on non-harsh methods' success

ABC report on interrogation hearing left out testimony on non-harsh methods' success

SUMMARY: Reporting on the testimony of a former FBI agent who "told Congress today that he witnessed CIA interrogation methods on terror suspects that were, in his words, 'borderline torture' " and "called the methods 'ineffective,' 'unreliable,' and 'harmful,' " ABC's Charles Gibson did not mention that the agent also testified about the success of non-harsh interrogation methods.

Republicans Dropping Pretext Of Tea Bagging as Grassroots Movements

Dropping Pretext Of A ‘Grassroots Movement,’ GOP Governors Launch ‘Tea Party 2.0’
Today, Politico reports that Republican Govs. Rick Perry of Texas and Mark Sanford of South Carolina are leading the latest development of the anti-tax, anti-Obama tea party protest movement. Dubbed the “Tea Party 2.0,” the Republican Governors Association will host a telephone conference call on Thursday with thousands of right-wing activists to discuss how “our states’ rights are being trampled upon.”

Official Republican Party involvement is nothing new in the tea party movement. The tea party efforts were initially organized by corporate lobbyists and GOP consultants, and later advertised for by Fox News. But by the time of the April 15 protests, hundreds of state and federal Republican office holders headlined events across the country. Eventually, House Republican Leader John Boehner (R-OH) and RNC Chairman Michael Steele all but declared ownership of the protests.

Ironically, the governors who are now using an official apparatus of the Republican Party to coordinate the tea party conference call were the same governors perpetuating the lie that the movement was entirely spontaneous, without any grass-tops involvement:

– Gov. Mark Sanford: “I was struck by the recent Tea Party rallies in Columbia, Charleston, and Greenville, where thousands of South Carolinians turned out in a spontaneous display of protest against reckless government spending.” [Post-Courier, 4/27/09]

– Gov. Rick Perry: “It’s a very organic thing,” he says, “a very powerful moment, I think, in American history.” On Tax Day, he told cheering veterans: “I’m just not real sure you’re a bunch of right-wing extremists. But if you are, we’re with you.” [Daily Press, 4/27/09]

Dropping any pretension that the tea parties are a citizens’ movement rather than a partisan ploy, an official working with the Republican governors said the effort was part of a “springboard” to raise funds for gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia.

Media let GOP change the subject in torture debate

Media let GOP change the subject in torture debate
SUMMARY: Adopting the GOP's emphasis on what Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats knew about the Bush administration's use of harsh interrogation techniques, some in the media have ignored evidence that the Bush administration began using the tactics before briefing Democrats, and that upon learning of them, Rep. Jane Harman unsuccessfully expressed concerns to the CIA.

By focusing on what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and other congressional Democrats knew about the Bush administration's use of harsh interrogation techniques, as the GOP has advocated, some in the media have ignored evidence that the Bush administration began using the tactics before briefing congressional Democrats, and that upon learning of the techniques in 2003, the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee expressed concerns to the CIA, but did not have the authority to force a change. Indeed, according to a May 2005 Bush Justice Department memo, following the Bush administration's authorization of the harsh interrogation techniques, CIA officials used one of the most controversial techniques, waterboarding, on Al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah in August 2002 -- before any congressional Democrats had been briefed on any of the tactics. According to the same Justice Department memo, CIA officials waterboarded Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in March 2003 -- after Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) had reportedly raised concerns to the CIA about the techniques in February 2003.

In the May 30, 2005, Justice Department memo, then-principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Steven Bradbury wrote that "[t]he CIA used the waterboard 'at least 83 times during August 2002' in the interrogation of Zubaydah." Yet, according to a chart of "Member Briefings on Enhanced Interrogation Techniques" (EITs) included in a recently released CIA document, the first briefing on the EITs was not given to members of Congress until the following month, on September 4, 2002. Then-Rep. Porter Goss (R-FL) and Pelosi, at the time the two ranking members on the House Intelligence Committee, were the only two congressional members listed as having been present at the briefing, and the document does not detail which specific EITs were discussed.

The CIA document listed Harman as having been briefed on the EITs on February 5, 2003, when she was the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. According to reports, Harman disclosed in December 2007 that she had sent a classified letter to the CIA on February 10, 2003, raising concerns about the EITs. Upon disclosing the letter, Harman reportedly noted that she had been prohibited from discussing the matter publicly. However, despite Harman reportedly raising concerns to the CIA in February 2003, according to the Bradbury memo, the CIA "used the waterboard" technique "183 times during March 2003 in the interrogation of KSM [Mohammed]."

The Plight of Women Soldiers

The Plight of Women Soldiers
Spc. Monica Brown received the Silver Star Medal at Bagram Airfield, Afghanistan in March 2008. Brown is the second female since World War II to earn the Silver Star award for her gallant actions while in combat. Pentagon policy prohibits women from serving in front-line combat roles, in the infantry, armor or artillery, for example. But the nature of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, with no real front lines, has seen women soldiers take part in close-quarters combat more than previous conflicts.



NPR.org, May 6, 2009 · Army specialist Mickiela Montoya was standing silently in the back of a Manhattan classroom while a group of male Iraq war veterans spoke to a small audience about their experiences as soldiers. It was November 2006, and she had been back from Iraq for a year, but was still too insecure to speak out in public. Anyway, the room was full of men, and Montoya had learned that a lot of men aren't much interested in listening to military women.

"Nobody believes me when I say I'm a veteran," she said that day, tucking her long red hair behind her ears. "I was in Iraq getting bombed and shot at, but people won't even listen when I say I was at war. You know why? Because I'm a female."

Montoya, who grew up in a Mexican family in East Los Angeles, served in Iraq for eleven months, from 2005-2006, with the 642nd Division Aviation Support Battalion. She was only 19 back then, but by the time she turned 21 she was as bitter as any old veteran, not only because of the lack of recognition she was receiving as a combat vet but because of the way she had been treated as a soldier—by her comrades, the army and by the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Many female veterans share Montoya's anger. They join the military for the same reasons men do—to escape dead-end towns or dysfunctional families, to pay for college or seek adventure, to follow their ideals or find a career—only to find themselves denigrated and sexually hounded by many of the "brothers" on whom they are supposed to rely. And when they go to war, this harassment does not necessarily stop. The double traumas of combat and sexual persecution may be why a 2008 RAND study found that female veterans are suffering double the rates of depression and post-traumatic stress disorder for their male counterparts.

Not many people realize the extent to which the Iraq War represents a historic change for American women soldiers. More women have fought and died in Iraq than in all the wars since World War II put together. Over 206,000 have served in the Middle East since March 2003, most of them in Iraq; and over 600 have been wounded and 104 have died in Iraq alone, according to the Department of Defense. In Iraq, one in ten troops is a woman.

Yet the military—from Pentagon to the troops on the ground—has been slow to recognize the service these women perform, or even to see them as real soldiers. Rather, it is permeated with age-old stereotypes of women as passive sex objects who have no business fighting and cannot be relied upon in battle. As Montoya said about her time as a soldier, "The only thing the guys let you be if you're a girl in the military is a bitch, a ho, or a dyke. You're a bitch if you won't sleep with them, a ho if you even have one boyfriend, and a dyke if they don't like you. So you can't win."

The pinnacle of this derogatory attitude toward women is the Pentagon's ban on women in ground combat, which it reaffirmed in 2006 despite being perfectly aware that in Iraq women are in combat all the time. (Speculation is that President Obama may finally reverse this ban, but it stands as of now.) Because the US military is so short of troops and Iraq's battlefields are towns and roads, women are frequently thrown into jobs indistinguishable from those of the all-male infantry, cavalry and armor divisions, often under the guise of "combat support." They "man" machine guns atop tanks and trucks, guard convoys, raid houses, search and arrest Iraqis, drive military vehicles along bomb-ridden roads, and are killing and being killed. In Afghanistan, too, women find themselves in these positions.

Yet even though more than 2,000 women who fought in Iraq or Afghanistan have been awarded Bronze Stars, several for bravery and valor in combat; more than 1,300 have earned the Combat Action Badge; and two have been awarded Silver Stars, the military's top honor for bravery in combat, the official ban continues. This makes it difficult for women to be taken seriously as soldiers or advance in their careers, let alone win respect.

The Pentagon justifies the ban by blaming civilian attitudes. American society, its policy statement says, believes that femininity is incompatible with combat, and will not tolerate the killing and mutilation of its mothers and daughters. Likewise, it argues, soldiers are more troubled by the sight of women being wounded and killed than of men, so will put themselves at extra risk trying to protect women in battle. And finally, women in combat would endanger men because of their lesser strength.

These arguments have been made for decades by conservatives too, but ironically a 2005 Gallup Poll, reported by the military itself, belies them: 72 percent of the public favored women serving anywhere in Iraq, and 44 percent (and here I quote the military's own report) "favored having women serve as the ground troops who are doing most of the fighting."

Not one of these arguments against women in combat has been borne out in Iraq. Any sign of public or media outrage over how many women soldiers are being killed and wounded in Iraq has been conspicuously absent; rather, the press has focused the bulk of its war stories on men, as if female soldiers barely exist, and the same applies to feature films and documentaries. Far from protecting women, many men are attacking them, as discussed below. Studies have long shown that some women's strength matches that of some men, and that women use ingenuity instead of strength where necessary. And there is no evidence that women soldiers add to the danger of men in any way. On the contrary, it is women who are in more danger than before, both from being in battle and from those very men who are supposed to feel so protective of them.

Did Blackwater (Xe) Contractors Attempt to Hide Evidence of a Massacre in Iraq

Did Blackwater Contractors Attempt to Hide Evidence of a Massacre in Iraq?
By Scott Horton

Private security contractor Xe (formerly Blackwater USA) has fallen on hard times. Iraq has yanked its license, forcing Blackwater out of one of its former operations centers. Last December, five Blackwater employees were indicted on fourteen manslaughter charges and allegations they used automatic weapons in the commission of a crime. A sixth Blackwater agent pleaded guilty to two charges as part of an agreement to testify against his colleagues. Now the company faces more bad news. Bill Sizemore of the Hampton Roads Virginian-Pilot reports that charges are being brought based on obstruction of justice:

Shortly after a 2007 shooting incident in a Baghdad traffic square that left 17 Iraqi civilians dead, Blackwater contractors allegedly transferred a number of machine guns to another contractor who is now charged with trying to smuggle them out of Iraq. The Blackwater contractors wanted to dispose of the weapons before an investigation of the bloody incident began, according to two confidential government informants. John Houston, the contractor charged in the case, allegedly told one of the informants that after Blackwater “got into trouble,” the guards had to get rid of the firearms so they wouldn’t be caught with them…

The GOP War on Doctors, Patients and Health Care Reform

The GOP War on Doctors, Patients and Health Care Reform
Back in 1993, Bill Kristol mobilized Republicans to block the Clinton health care plan with an infamous two- word talking point, "no crisis." Now 16 years later, GOP pollster and master of double-speak Frank Luntz is offering conservatives a new lexicon for scuttling President Obama's health care initiatives. While feigning support for "reform," Luntz insists, Republicans should oppose Obama by warning of threats to the "doctor-patient relationship."

Of course, the President is threatening no such thing. And as it turns out, George W. Bush not only used the same language Luntz now advocates. As its draconian positions over abortion policy and the Terri Schiavo case showed, it is the Republican Party which is intent on abridging the doctor-patient relationship.

...........complete post at link

Another Wacky Anti-science Republican Speaks Out

Pence: I’m Not ‘Anti-Science’…But I Don’t Believe In Global Warming, Stem Cell Research, Or Evolution
Last month, House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) announced the creation of the House GOP American Energy Solutions Group, which will “work on crafting Republican solutions to lower energy prices for American families and small businesses.” Undermining the seriousness of the task force, the GOP announced that it was appointing climate change denier Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) to the group.

Another member of the organization is Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN). In a contentious debate with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews today, the third-ranking House Republican claimed that the science behind climate change is “mixed.” Pence did, however, admit that it is “fair” to question whether that makes him a discredited messenger on energy issues

HealthCare for Every American is Not a Trojan Horse

Why The Public Health Plan Is Not A Trojan Horse
Former Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt argues that a new Medicare-like public health care plan is a “trojan horse” for “government-run” health care. He fully explains the metaphor:

The story of the Trojan horse is familiar. After years of fruitlessly trying to enter the city of Troy, the Greeks boarded their ships and pretended to sail away. They left behind a huge wooden horse, which the Trojans claimed as a symbol of their victory and dragged into their mighty fortress. But the horse was full of Greek soldiers, who waited until midnight and then opened the gates for their invading army. Advocates for government-run health care are similarly pretending to sail away from “Medicare for all” or “universal coverage,” leaving before us the notion of a “public option.”

Single-payer advocates huddled in a horse, waiting only to break-out and force every American to enroll in a new public option? No…. that’s not quite it. What will actually happen, Leavitt contends, is that the public plan will do such a good job of keeping costs low that more Americans will abandon their current plans — under which they saw premiums increase by 117% over the past ten years — and choose to enroll in the new public option.

And this is supposed to be a bad thing?

Yes, because with a ‘public option’ that uses “Medicare-like reimbursement rates”, employers would bolt…the Lewin Group estimates that 118 million Americans would lose their private health insurance…no private insurance system would be able to survive, and the United States would have a government-run system like Medicare,” Levitt explains.

But why are private insurers so vulnerable to competition? Under some conceptions of the public plan, the new program could use its purchasing power to bargain with providers, but reimbursement rates that are too low would drive away providers and, by extension, consumers. The public plan would fold. In an environment where private plans are forced to compete with a new efficient public program, inefficient, over-bloated insurers will go out of business, but private plans with good networks of providers or better services will continue attracting new enrollees. In other words, the public plan may have the advantage in administrative efficiency and setting rates, but the private plans will most certainly find a niche to fill.

Also, as public plan architect Jacob Hacker explains over at The Treatment, Lewin’s findings do “indicate that the savings from having a public plan compete with private plans could be huge…[but] it has virtually no bearing on the question of how large enrollment in the public plan would be” under health care reform.

That’s because The Lewin Group study that Leavitt cites, “looked at a hypothetical proposal in which employers could buy into a national public plan by paying the plan’s premium. What’s more, in the hypothetical proposal that the Lewin Group examined, new rules would be imposed on employment-based health insurance that would vastly increase the cost for some firms of providing coverage….By contrast, all the proposals that are actually on the agenda today have employers buy into an “exchange” that has both a public plan and private plans as a choice within it. Moreover, all these proposals have at least large employers enroll their workers in the exchange by paying a payroll-based contribution, not the public plan’s premium.”

According to Lewin’s analysis of something that’s actually been proposed (i.e. Hacker’s proposal), “the public plan ends up with much lower enrollment in the public plan than projected in the Lewin Group’s new analysis (90 million versus over 131 million)”; “around 38 million people in the exchange would choose private plans instead of the public plan.”

When considering health reform, policy makers have a choice to make: restructure the health insurance market so that it provides affordable and comprehensive health benefits to all Americans, or protect the monopoly of private insurers and continue redistributing as much income as possible to the private insurance industry. I think we know where Leavitt stands.