Barack Obama, the Democratic contender for the US presidency, has said his main priority as president would be to end US involvement in Iraq.

Speaking before an international tour, Mr. Obama said "our single-minded and open-ended focus on Iraq is not a sound strategy for keeping America safe".

In his speech at the International Trade Center in Washington, Mr. Obama said: "This war diminishes our security, our standing in the world, our military, our economy, and the resources that we need to confront the challenges of the 21st Century."

He said the conflict in Iraq must be brought to an end as "the central front in the war on terror is not Iraq, and it never was".

Mr. Obama said that as president he would take the US in a new direction, and a priority would be to finish the fight against the Taleban and al-Qaeda, which has an expanding base in Pakistan.

BBC News: Obama vows to end US role in Iraq

Good for him for saying it. Everything he said was just as obvious four years ago as it is now, so it's too bad John Kerry wasn't willing to make a speech like this during the 2004 campaign.
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Bush signs spy bill and draws lawsuit.

Fortunately, for those of us who don't like the government listening to our phone calls without a warrant, there's software like Zfone. Unfortunately, it's still in beta.
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Yesterday, Congress passed the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which gives telecommunications companies retroactive immunity from civil lawsuits for their participation in Bush's illegal wiretapping program. The bill also legalizes warrantless wiretapping in many cases.

Needless to say, every representative or senator who voted for this bill betrayed their constitutents and the constitution when they did so. There's nothing new about Congress ignoring the constitution and trampling on the rights of US citizens, but what's especially disappointing about this is that Senator Obama, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, voted for it.

Glenn Greenwald at Salon did an excellent job taking apart the ridiculous excuses Obama and his supporters have given for this betrayal.

Meanwhile, the ACLU is suing to stop the government from engaging in the surveillance allowed by this law. I urge you to give them your support.

My "Obama '08" bumper sticker hasn't showed up in the mail yet, and now I'm glad. I can just throw it in the trash instead of having to scrape it off my car.
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Two days ago, the Prime Minister of Iraq (USA Today) said he wants to set a timetable for the withdrawal of US troops. Yesterday, the foreign minister (Washington Post) has said any agreement governing the future role of U.S. troops in Iraq must include a timetable for their withdrawal.

I am sure the United States will respect the wishes of the elected government of this sovereign nation, just like we always do. Right?

Former White House press secretary Scott McClellan today said that a former top aide to President Bush directed him to mislead the press about another administration official's involvement in the leak of a spy's name to the news media.

In testimony before the House judiciary committee, McClellan said that then-White House chief of staff Andrew Card told him to tell reporters that Scooter Libby, former chief of staff to vice-president Dick Cheney, played no part in the release of CIA officer Valerie Plame's identity. He said Card told him that at the request of Bush and Cheney.

The Army official who managed the Pentagon’s largest contract in Iraq says he was ousted from his job when he refused to approve paying more than $1 billion in questionable charges to KBR, the Houston-based company that has provided food, housing and other services to American troops.

The official, Charles M. Smith, was the senior civilian overseeing the multibillion-dollar contract with KBR during the first two years of the war. Speaking out for the first time, Mr. Smith said that he was forced from his job in 2004 after informing KBR officials that the Army would impose escalating financial penalties if they failed to improve their chaotic Iraqi operations.

Army auditors had determined that KBR lacked credible data or records for more than $1 billion in spending, so Mr. Smith refused to sign off on the payments to the company.

But he was suddenly replaced, he said, and his successors — after taking the unusual step of hiring an outside contractor to consider KBR’s claims — approved most of the payments he had tried to block.

Army officials denied that Mr. Smith had been removed because of the dispute, but confirmed that they had reversed his decision, arguing that blocking the payments to KBR would have eroded basic services to troops. They said that KBR had warned that if it was not paid, it would reduce payments to subcontractors, which in turn would cut back on services.

Wait a minute. Their excuse for giving in to KBR is that KBR threatened them?

New York Times: Lost Army Job Tied to Doubts on Contractor
May require free registrations, sorry.

Iraqi PM Nouri Maliki has said that talks with the US on a long-term agreement allowing US forces to remain in Iraq have "reached an impasse".

Speaking in the Jordanian capital, Amman, Mr Maliki said the American demands infringed Iraqi sovereignty.

With the UN mandate for US forces to be in Iraq expiring at the end of 2008, the White House wants a deal by July.

BBC Baghdad correspondent Nick Witchell says the disagreement between Mr Maliki and US negotiators goes to the heart of the immensely sensitive issue of who is actually in charge in the country: the Americans or the Iraqis.

The Americans are trying to negotiate a new Status of Forces agreement with the Iraqis.

But the Iraqi government regards many of the American demands as infringements of Iraqi sovereignty.

"We have reached an impasse, because when we opened these negotiations we did not realise that the US demands would so deeply affect Iraqi sovereignty and this is something we can never accept," Mr Maliki said.

"We cannot allow US forces to have the right to jail Iraqis or assume, alone, the responsibility of fighting against terrorism," he said.

The Americans want to maintain military bases and, it is reported, to keep control of Iraqi airspace. They also want immunity from prosecution for their own forces and for US contractors, a proposal which Mr Maliki said Iraq "rejected totally".

Impasse in US-Iraqi forces talks

It's time to liberate Iraq - from George W. Bush.
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America's most senior general was "hoodwinked" by top Bush administration officials determined to push through aggressive interrogation techniques of terror suspects held at Guantánamo Bay, leading to the US military abandoning its age-old ban on the cruel and inhumane treatment of prisoners, the Guardian reveals today.

General Richard Myers, chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff from 2001 to 2005, wrongly believed that inmates at Guantánamo and other prisons were protected by the Geneva conventions and from abuse tantamount to torture.

The lawyers, all political appointees, who pushed through the interrogation techniques were Alberto Gonzales, David Addington and William Haynes. Also involved were Doug Feith, Rumsfeld's under-secretary for policy, and Jay Bybee and John Yoo, two assistant attorney generals.

The Bush administration has tried to explain away the ill-treatment of detainees at Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq by blaming junior officials. Sands' book establishes that pressure for aggressive and cruel treatment of detainees came from the top and was sanctioned by the most senior lawyers.

A followup on a story I've linked to before:

The High Court has ruled that the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) acted unlawfully by dropping a corruption inquiry into a £43bn Saudi arms deal.

In a hard-hitting ruling, two High Court judges described the SFO's decision as an "outrage".

Defence firm BAE was accused of making illegal payments to Saudi officials to secure contracts, but the firm maintains that it acted lawfully.

A US military study officially acknowledged for the first time yesterday that Saddam Hussein had no direct ties to al-Qaida, undercutting the Bush administration's central case for war with Iraq.

The Pentagon study based on more than 600,000 documents recovered after US and UK troops toppled Hussein in 2003, discovered "no 'smoking gun' (ie, direct connection) between Saddam's Iraq and al-Qaida", its authors wrote. George Bush and his senior aides have made numerous attempts to link Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda terror in their justification for waging war against Iraq.

As early as 2002, military intelligence analysts discounted the administration's claim that the Hussein government had trained al-Qaida members to employ chemical weapons. But Bush aides continued asserting that the intelligence they received showed a link.

"The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al-Qaida: because there was a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida," Bush said in 2004.

The Pentagon's independent auditor released a report last year that chastised an internal military office created by Bush allies for promoting a link between Hussein and al-Qaida despite intelligence showing that none existed. Even after that report, however, vice president Dick Cheney continued saying that al-Qaida leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi collaborated with Iraq.

The Pentagon's treatment of the report today echoes its response in 2005 to a study prepared by another research arm that chastised the White House for failing to prepare for the post-war reconstruction of Iraq. Military officials deemed those conclusions "of a limited value" and decided to keep the study secret, the New York Times reported.

Wikileaks is an important internet initiative - a repository of leaked documents from all over the world, information that various governments and corporations don't want people to see. Among other things, you can find the official Camp Delta Standard Operating Procedures there.

Unforunately, a federal judge in California (who obviously failed his constitutional law class) has issued an injunction against Wikileaks's US domain name host, making it harder to find the site. Instead of typing wikileaks.org in your address bar, you have to type http://88.80.13.160.

But you can help! if you have a blog or a website, put the following text somewhere in one or more of your pages, and search engines will make it easier for people to find Wikileaks:

<a href="http://88.80.13.160">Wikileaks</a>
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As you are probably aware, for several months now Bush has been pressing Congress to "revise" the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Two of the revisions he has demanded are legalization of the illegal warrantless wiretapping he was caught doing, and immunity for the phone companies that cooperated. Obviously such a change would be contrary to every principle this country was founded on. Outrageously, a majority in the Senate - including many "Democrats" - have already voted to enact this Orwellian legislation. Only a filibuster by Senator Dodd of Connecticut has kept the law from passing the Senate.

There is still a sliver of hope in the House. It is, of course, ridiculous that this bill even got out of a committee. But such are the times we live in. I urge all Americans reading this blog to contact their representatives in the House and Senate and tell them to vote against any bill that legalizes warrantless wiretapping or offers immunity to phone companies for breaking the law. If you don't know how to contact your representatives, follow the ACLU link below.

From the ACLU:

The Senate should not fool itself; by supporting final passage of the intelligence committee’s domestic spying bill, Congress would be granting the administration virtually unchecked powers to monitor the calls and emails of ordinary Americans on American soil without a warrant for the next six years.

This week, while Senate Republicans blocked votes on amendments to revisions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) as a delay tactic, the president threatened to veto the bill unless it includes a multi-million dollar present for the telecom companies who facilitated warrantless wiretapping in the United States. The administration has repeatedly claimed that American lives will be at risk if the Intelligence Committee’s bill is not adopted, yet the President has now said he is willing take that alleged risk if the bill does not include retroactive immunity for the phone companies.

Article

Action link

From last week on Slashdot:

The law says telecom providers can't wiretap your phone calls or net traffic, but as long as their taps are legal or they acted in good faith they're already immune from prosecution and lawsuits. That said, your telecom providers are still trying to get Congress to immunize them for cooperating with NSA wiretaps (presumably because the taps were both illegal and done in bad faith). Retroactive immunity wouldn't just mean they get away with it, it would crush our ability as citizens to find out what happened using the power of the courts. Last month, Sen. Chris Dodd temporarily stopped the bill, but within days -- probably on Monday -- it's going to be reintroduced, and it's not at all clear it will be stopped again. He'll need strong allies, because he's fighting not just the Bush administration and GOP Senators, but his own party's Sen. Harry Reid and "AT&T's personal Senator" Jay Rockefeller. So Dodd needs more Senators backing him up, preferably joining a full-blown filibuster on the Senate floor. If you ever want accountability for whatever companies illegally forwarded your data to the NSA, you basically have today and tomorrow to say something.

Telecom Immunity -- We're Down to the Wire(tap)

From a commentary Jonathan Steele wrote for the Guardian.

Many critics blame the occupation's difficulties on a lack of planning, and a series of mistakes in the first few months, including the disbanding of the Iraqi army and failures to provide Iraqi with electricity and water. The line is summed up in the phrase "Winning the war but losing the peace".

But this assumes that a more intelligent and efficient occupation could have worked. It is an extraordinary notion. Like other Arabs, Iraqis have a long memory of US and British intervention in the Middle East, toppling regimes and controlling puppet governments, both to maintain an imperial presence and for the sake of oil. As soon as the Americans made it clear in mid-2003 that their occupation was going to be openended and without a timetable for troop withdrawal, Iraqi nationalists were bound to become suspicious and start resisting.

Yet L Paul Bremer, Iraq's American overlord, as well as his political masters in Washington, used the template of the occupations of Germany and Japan in 1945. They seemed to forget they were occupying an Arab country with a long history of anti-western resistance.

Upon reading that last paragraph, an educated reader, one with a passing knowledge of the history of Iraq and neighboring countries, would probably say something like "No shit, Sherlock. Who wouldn't know that would be a bad idea?" That reader would then remember, "Oh yeah, the leaders of two of the most powerful nations in the world couldn't figure it out."

That's what this whole blog is about. I've touched on related issues, like the wisdom of engaging in colonial foreign policy altogether, but the main focus has always been on the fact that the people put in charge of sending my country's soldiers to war were profoundly ignorant of the people they intended to make war on. But worse than that is that the press in my country has barely discussed this; that's why I mostly quote British sources. Even worse than that is that the opposition political party has discussed it only slightly more.

Other Iraqi exiles, as well as foreign experts on the country, had seen the danger well before the invasion. They tried to warn Bush and Blair that there would be resentment and resistance. Saddam could be toppled easily, but this would not be victory. As long as the occupation continued, it would provoke suspicion and hostility which could quickly lead to an armed insurgency. They also pointed out that the people who would fill the post-Saddam vacuum would be Islamists, both Shia and Sunni. Whatever political structures were put in place, these anti-western groups would become the dominant force. Amazingly, few people in the Bush administration or in the British Foreign Office got the point. Much attention has been given to Washington's failures of military intelligence in believing Saddam still had weapons of mass destruction. The failure of political intelligence was equally disastrous. Put another way, the invaders' real problem was not a lack of planning, but a lack of analysis.

A failure to think

The Bush administration's chief intelligence official said yesterday that President Bush authorized a series of secret surveillance activities under a single executive order in late 2001. The disclosure makes clear that a controversial National Security Agency program was part of a much broader operation than the president previously described.

The disclosure by Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, appears to be the first time that the administration has publicly acknowledged that Bush's order included undisclosed activities beyond the warrantless surveillance of e-mails and phone calls that Bush confirmed in December 2005.

More at the Washington Post
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