US investigators have released accounts of the questioning of Saddam Hussein, offering a goldmine of historical and personal details on the Iraqi leader.

The documents released under freedom of information rules are from interviews and informal conversations he had in US custody with the FBI in early 2004.

Saddam Hussein said he refused to allow UN weapons inspectors into Iraq to stop Iran knowing how weak it had become.

No surprise there. This is what many analysts were hypothesizing before the invasion.
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After a week-long absence, National Public Radio's ombudsman has responded to her critics on her blog.

Your Voices Have Been Heard ... and Ignored

I won't repeat Alicia Shepard's pathetic excuses here, because I care about your digestion. It really is sad. The worst part is, she teaches a graduate-level course in Media Ethics at Georgetown University. I hope any potential students do their research before enrolling in her class, as she is obviously not qualified to teach it.

She has also refused an interview with Glen Greenwald at Salon. Can't take the heat, I guess.

Addendum:
Shepard did consent to a short interview with NPR's own program, "On the Media", and, wow. She appears to try to defend her position, but does a very poor job of it.

Torturous Wording

Obama junks "global war on terror" label

The Obama administration has junked the term “global war on terror” because it does not describe properly the nature of the terrorist threat to the US, according to Janet Napolitano, secretary for homeland security.

It never made much sense. Our enemy is one affiliation of groups that use terrorist techniques. Making war on every organization in the world that uses terrorist tactics is beyond our abilities and isn't something we need to do to stay safe.

Many years ago, I used to listen to NPR news a lot. I found they offered in-depth coverage that was less insulting to my intelligence than the mainstream commercial media.

Over the last ten years, and especially after the Iraq invasion, things have changed there, and not for the better.

This column by Alicia Shepard, the NPR Ombudsman, is a great example of how far NPR News has fallen. The ombudsman is supposed to represent listener interests, but this column, about why NPR News does not use the word "torture" to describe torture techniques authorized by the Bush administration, reads like a public relations piece. It could have been written by Karl Rove, and for all I know it was written by Karl Rove. It exemplifies everything that is wrong with mainstream American news coverage today.

Read it, but only if you have a strong stomach. And then read Glenn Greenwald's excellent criticism of it on Salon.

According to her bio, Shepard has an M.A. in Journalism from the University of Maryland. I think she should ask for her money back.

Labels: journalism, media, npr, npr sucks, propaganda

A confidential record of a meeting between President Bush and Tony Blair before the invasion of Iraq, outlining their intention to go to war without a second United Nations resolution, will be an explosive issue for the official inquiry into the UK's role in toppling Saddam Hussein.

The memo, written on 31 January 2003, almost two months before the invasion and seen by the Observer, confirms that as the two men became increasingly aware UN inspectors would fail to find weapons of mass destruction (WMD) they had to contemplate alternative scenarios that might trigger a second resolution legitimising military action.

Bush told Blair the US had drawn up a provocative plan "to fly U2 reconnaissance aircraft painted in UN colours over Iraq with fighter cover". Bush said that if Saddam fired at the planes this would put the Iraqi leader in breach of UN resolutions.

The president expressed hopes that an Iraqi defector would be "brought out" to give a public presentation on Saddam's WMD or that someone might assassinate the Iraqi leader. However, Bush confirmed even without a second resolution, the US was prepared for military action. The memo said Blair told Bush he was "solidly with the president".

With luck the actual memo will show up on Wikileaks soon. Until then we'll have to take the Observer's word for it, but most of their other sources about Iraq turned out to be legit.
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A newly declassified Congressional report released Tuesday outlined the most detailed evidence yet that the military’s use of harsh interrogation methods on terrorism suspects was approved at high levels of the Bush administration.

The report focused solely on interrogations carried out by the military, not those conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency at its secret prisons overseas. It rejected claims by former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and others that Pentagon policies played no role in harsh treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq or other military facilities.

The Senate report documented how some of the techniques used by the military at prisons in Afghanistan and at the naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, as well as in Iraq — stripping detainees, placing them in “stress positions” or depriving them of sleep — originated in a military program known as Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape, or SERE, intended to train American troops to resist abusive enemy interrogations.

According to the Senate investigation, a military behavioral scientist and a colleague who had witnessed SERE training proposed its use at Guantánamo in October 2002, as pressure was rising “to get ‘tougher’ with detainee interrogations.” Officers there sought authorization, and Mr. Rumsfeld approved 15 interrogation techniques.

And from the Guardian:

A Senate inquiry published today directly implicates senior members of the Bush administration in the extensive use of harsh interrogation methods against al-Qaida suspects and other prisoners round the world.

The 232-page report, the most detailed investigation yet into the background of torture, undercuts the claim of the then deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, that the abuse of prisoners in Iraq was the work of "a few bad apples".

The report says: "The abuse of detainees in US custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of "a few bad apples" acting on their own. The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorised their use against detainees."

The report, the result of an 18-month inquiry, reveals the administration rejected advice from various branches of the armed services against using more aggressive techniques. The military questioned both the morality and the reliability of information gained.

The report discloses that waterboarding and other techniques used were based on a faulty premise. The methods were lifted from a military programme known as Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape (SERE) but the armed forces pointed out that this was intended to train troops in resisting torture rather than establishing whether these were useful interrogation methods

The report says that SERE instructors trained CIA and other military personnel early in 2002 on the use of harsher interrogation techniques but warned that information obtained might be unreliable.

Belatedly complying with a Freedom of Information Act request from the ACLU, the Obama administration has release four memos from the Bush administration giving the CIA permission to use certain torture techniques.

President Obama banned the use of these methods in his first week in office. That's the good news. But so far he has shown no incliniation to bring criminal prosecutions against the officials who wrote the memos or the senior employees at the CIA who ordered agents to use torture. The message is clear. Publicly, the president affirms torture is against the law, but he won't prosecute anyone for breaking that law. This sets a dangerous precedent and will embolden those in the CIA and the military who believe they are above the law.

You can tell the president what you think about this issue at www.whitehouse.gov

BBC News: CIA 'amnesty' dismays campaigners
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Same as the old boss.

The Obama administration is again invoking government secrecy in defending the Bush administration's wiretapping program, this time against a lawsuit by AT&T customers who claim federal agents illegally intercepted their phone calls and gained access to their records.

Instead of change we can believe in, we're getting more of the same.

Several years ago I wrote about the "dodgy dossier", the intelligence report British Prime Minister Tony Blair used to support his claims that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. At the time, a whistleblower claimed the dossier had been "sexed up", and that there was political pressure to alter the dossier to make the WMD evidence seem more convincing. The British government vehemently denied this accusation, and even pressured the BBC to fire a reporter, Andrew Gilligan, for making it.

Now the Cabinet Office has released documents showing that the accusations were true.

A memo reveals the pressures facing Sir John Scarlett, then head of the joint intelligence committee, now head of MI6. The memo, dated 11 September 2002, was sent to Scarlett by Desmond Bowen, a senior Ministry of Defence official seconded to the Cabinet Office.

Bowen stated: "You will clearly want to be as firm and authoritative as you can be. You will clearly need to judge the extent to which you need to hedge your judgments with, for example, 'it is almost certain' and similar caveats."

He added: "I appreciate that this can increase the authenticity of the document in terms of it being a proper assessment, but that needs to be weighed against the use that will be made by the opponents of action who will add up the judgments on which we do not have absolute clarity."

The published dossier ignored the caveats, with the executive summary including the now discredited claim that some of Iraq's chemical and biological weapons were deployable "within 45 minutes".

Another email says: "We have suggested moderating the same language in much the same way on drafts from the dim and distant past without success. Feel free to try again!"

Cabinet Office papers reveal Iraq dossier fears

We have more evidence that "Support the Troops" was just a slogan for the Bush administration. This report was prepared by the US Air Force in 2006. It was recently leaked to Wikileaks. From the report summary:

It is amazing that the burn pit has been able to operate without restrictions over the past few years without significant engineering controls being put in place. I would hope in the future that issues such as burn pits are identified early on and engineering controls such as incinerators would be used to mitigate these hazards. It seems that money has been the issue of why engineering controls are not currently in place.

Burn Pit Health Hazards. Note that whoever submitted it to Wikileaks spelled the name of the air base wrong. It's Balad, not Balard.

President Obama welcomed former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who participated in the unnecessary war in Iraq, lied to the British Parliament and public about weapons of mass destruction, and allowed the CIA to use British airports to transport terrorism suspects to secret prisons, to a prayer breakfast on Sunday. Obama called Blair a "good friend".

After the address Mr Obama said: "I want to thank my good friend Tony Blair for coming today. He has been an example to so many people around the world of what dedicated leadership can accomplish."

Lies, torture, and unjustified wars are among Blair's most significant accomplishments. So much for change in Washington.

Today is the last day George W. Bush will be president. Recently I was thinking about the 2000 election. What brought it to mind is there is an electoral recount going on in my state for the office of US Senator. In my state, in contrast to Florida in 2000, the Secretary of State who manages the recount process is not also the chairman of one of the candidate's election campaigns. Although a Democrat like the presumed winner, he recently sided with our Republican governor in refusing to certify the results until the last lawsuit is resolved.

As we close in on the end of the Bush presidency, let's read two analyses of what went wrong:

Commentary: How Bush botched war on terror By Peter Bergen

Dick Cheney's fantasy world by Scott Ritter

As we head into the new one, let's not let our guard down. Barack Obama is still a politician. He, and the party that backs him, gets campaign donations from oil companies and defense contractors just like Bush does, if not in the same amounts. The dangerous idea that the United States should make a practice of invading countries and making them set up new governments is by no means dead or even not feeling well.

If posts stop appearing on truthspeaker.org, it's not because there is nothing to write about.*

That said, that a person of Barack Obama's ethnicity was elected president of the United States is not something I expected to see this early in the century. Attitudes and ideas about certain things, at least, have changed a lot in this country just in my lifetime. About damn time. Just as we can't allow ourselves to get complacent, neither should we lose sight of how far we've come.

*It's because, like the guy in the Sonic commercial, no one reads my blog but my mom.

No surprises here:

A bipartisan panel of senators has concluded that former defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and other top Bush administration officials bear direct responsibility for the harsh treatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, and that their decisions led to more serious abuses in Iraq and elsewhere.

In the most comprehensive critique by Congress of the military's interrogation practices, the Senate Armed Services Committee issued a report yesterday that accuses Rumsfeld and his deputies of being the authors and chief promoters of harsh interrogation policies that disgraced the nation and undermined U.S. security. The report, released by Sens. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.), contends that Pentagon officials later tried to create a false impression that the policies were unrelated to acts of detainee abuse committed by members of the military.

More at the Washington Post
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