Do ya think this might have something to do with Gramm's sudden departure?

Oh boy, this is going to blow up all over the McCain campaign.

Gramm's stated reason for his abrupt departure from the McCain campaign - that's Democrats are picking ion him over his "nation of whiners" comment smelled like bullshit to us from the get-go. After all, this is the guy who defended saying that we are the only country where all the poor people are fat, and who rails about government but has spent his entire life suckling at the government teat.

Ol' Phill just ain't the kind of guy who would quit the campaign of Mr. Straight Talk for talking, as he sees it, straight.

We think he is going to get hauled up in front of Senator Levin and his buddies on the Permanent Subcommittee On Investigations, a subcommittee of the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs for being a tax cheat. There are 1400 names on the list of treasonous tax cheaters who are engaged in economic warfare against the United States provided by a former employee of LGT Bank in Liechtenstein, and Durbin's subcommitte starts holding hearings on Thursday, and we do not think it is coincidence that this report (.pdf) to the subcommittee was released on Thursday and Gramm bailed on Friday.

But if you do, we have a killer deal on some beachfront property in Mesa, Arizona and we'll throw in a bridge in Brooklyn as soon as your check clears.

~BG

We doff our cap to a lurker for the email that put us on the trail. You know who you are, and you should also know we are deeply appreciative of the tip.

Petraeus predicts September draw-down in Iraq

Of course he does! He is a political hack and a water-carrier for the republican warmongers and chickenhawks and never let anyone tell you otherwise!

Testifying before the Senate Armed Services committee this morning, he told the panel "My sense is that I will be able to make a recommendation at that time for some further reductions." Then he hastened to add that he didn't want to imply that he had anything specific in mind, no particular brigade or combat formation has been decided on. ''But I do believe there will be certain assets that, as we are already looking at the picture right now, we'll be able to recommend can be either redeployed or not deployed to the theater in the fall,'' he said, while repeating his past caution that conditions on the ground could change. Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, responded: ''That's good news to most of us.''

(Yeah Carl - it's real good news that the four-star hack is quietly influencing this upcoming presidential election, just like he did the last one. Who can forget that editorial in the Washington Post that touted non-existent progress and success of aWol's pet war - six weeks before the election? The answer to that question, by the way, is "very few" because we won't let them!)

But the meddling doesn't stop with vague suggestions of possible troop withdrawals to commence six weeks before the election. The upcoming Iraqi parliamentary elections are being pushed back to November from October.

You see, it simply wouldn't do to have all that effort to sway influence to McCain offset by Sadr's bloc waltzing to victory the following month, so the Iraqi elections have to be pushed back to after the U.S. presidential election.

So are you feeling manipulated yet? And if not, why not?

They violated international law, they employed torture, and Condoleezza Rice is complicit

An audit by the Inspector General for the Department of Justice was released yesterday and what is detailed in the 370-page report is enough to turn the stomach of decent people. It is horrifying. It is sick. It is perverse. And FBI Agents were complaining about the detainee treatment they witnessed that was perpetrated by military interrogators and CIA agents at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp and other detention centers.

And it was all done in your name. You had to be made safe, you know, even at the expense of the moral high ground that we liked to consider we occupied. That illusion should be over by now, in the face of what we know has transpired.

Complaints by FBI agents about abusive interrogation tactics at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and other U.S. military sites reached the National Security Council but prompted no effort to curb questioning that the agents considered ineffective and possibly illegal, according to an internal audit released yesterday.

Reports that Guantanamo detainees were being subjected to extreme temperatures, religious abuses and nude interrogation were conveyed at White House meetings of senior officials in 2003, yet these questionable tactics remained in use, a lengthy report by the Justice Department's inspector general concluded.

In one instance, colleagues of then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft reported that he personally aired concerns about Defense Department strategy toward a particular detainee with Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser, while other Justice managers shared similar fears with the council's legal adviser in November 2003, the report said.

Ashcroft declined to be interviewed by investigators, so it remains uncertain how aggressively he pressed the issue, according to the report. Other senior Justice officials told investigators that no changes were made in interrogations at Guantanamo Bay even after these and other complaints filtered up to the National Security Council.

Nearly half of the 450 FBI agents who worked at Guantanamo reported that they had observed or heard about military interrogators using a variety of harsh interrogation techniques on detainees, with the most common being sleep deprivation and short-shackling -- or locking a detainee's hands and feet together to prevent comfortable sitting or standing -- for long periods of time.

Military officials at Guantanamo Bay used some aggressive techniques before they were approved, possibly in violation of Defense Department policy and U.S. law, the report said. They also continued to use "stress positions" and other such techniques well after they were prohibited by Defense Department policy in January 2003, the report said.

The 370-page report draws heavily on e-mail messages and contemporaneous memos to provide the clearest and most definitive account to date of the key tactics used by the government against suspected terrorists after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. It describes, for example, a "frequent flyer program" meant to lessen resistance by extensively disrupting sleep, use of strobe lights in conjunction with loud rock music, twisting of thumbs backward, and exposure of detainees to extreme temperatures, threatening dogs, pornography and sexual taunting.

Detainees in Iraq had water poured down their throats while they were cuffed and kneeling, the FBI agents told investigators.

Carl Levin, Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, was angry. "Some have suggested that the abuse of detainees in U.S. custody was simply the result of a few bad apples acting on their own. The report released today by the Department of Justice Inspector General is proof that that is simply not true. The IG found that scores of FBI agents observed the use of harsh interrogation techniques in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay."

Aren't you just bursting with pride?

We can not abide this as a nation. We know the Congress can't impeach Bush and Cheney because there is not the political will to make it stick. If anyone got a blow job the woman who knew about it and could prove it is conveniently dead..so...no impeachment for them...

But Condi Rice is another story. Can't we impeach her for her complicity in desecrating our country and allowing us to become a nation of gulags and torture and Kafkaesque process?

UPDATE I / Warren Street / 11:51 AM

The government kept meticulous records of everything it did, also in our name, by the way. TPM's document collection has more

This is just for IRAQ:




What kind of horrific bureaucracy keeps track of how many times it threatens to harm someone's family? I just want to know. Because I don't care what anyone says--THAT'S un-American. Period.

Levin and Warner are back from Iraq, and they have a bleak assessment

Senators Levin and Warner, Chairman and former Chairman/ second ranking Republican member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, respectively, are back from Iraq, and they have a grim assessment of the situation there. So grim, in fact, that Levin openly called for the ouster of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kemal al-Maliki. "I hope the parliament will vote the Maliki government out of office and will have the wisdom to replace it with a less sectarian and more unifying prime minister and government," Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) told reporters upon his return from a three-day trip to Iraq and Jordan. He and ranking Republican member of the committee Sen. John W. Warner (Va) embarked on a hastily arranged trip to Iraq last Friday in advance of the report on the war due in less than four weeks after the Mighty Wurlitzer cranked up last week.

Via McClatchy:

In a joint statement, Sens. Carl Levin, D-Mich., the committee's chairman, and John Warner, R-Va., the committee's senior Republican, said that while a surge of U.S. troops had tamped down violence in some parts of Baghdad, there was no sign of political reconciliation between Iraq's Sunni and Shiite rivals and "we are not optimistic about the prospects." They said U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker shared their views.

Levin later told reporters during a conference call from Tel Aviv that he believed the Iraqi parliament should replace Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki. "The Maliki government is nonfunctional and cannot produce a political settlement because it is too beholden to religious and sectarian leaders," Levin said.

Levin said he and Warner spent two hours with Army Gen. David Petraeus, the U.S. commander in Iraq, but that Petraeus didn't say what he planned to recommend about U.S. Iraq policy in a much-anticipated report to Congress next month.

The Maliki government, still clung to desperately by Resident Evil as "the last chance for this government to solve the Iraqi political crisis" is on the verge of collapse. Enough cabinet members have withdrawn from the government that a quorum can not be reached by the cabinet to advance legislation to the parliament to be debated and voted on.

Levin’s statement is the strongest open condemnation of the Maliki attempt at governance yet by an American lawmaker.

al Maliki is a Shiite, and he spent many years in exile in Iran when Iraq was under the control of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party, and indeed has a closer relationship with the Iranian government than the current occupant would prefer.

In recent days, al Maliki has been trying to conjure a summit with rival Sunni politicians and ethnic Kurdish officials in an attempt to come to compromise positions on several issues, including the Exxon Mobile Enrichment Act Oil Sharing Law.

Should he prove unable to bring the summit together in the coming days, Levin and Warner said, "[T]he Iraqi Council of Representatives and the Iraqi people need to judge the Government of Iraq's record and determine what actions should be taken -- consistent with the Iraqi Constitution -- to form a true unity government to meet those responsibilities."