by TChris

Where do you suppose officials in the Iraqi government would have gotten the idea that it's acceptable to torture detainees?

Iraq's government said Tuesday that it had ordered an urgent investigation of allegations that many of the 173 detainees American troops discovered over the weekend in the basement of an Interior Ministry building in a Baghdad suburb had been tortured by their Iraqi captors. A senior Iraqi official who visited the detainees said two appeared paralyzed and others had some of the skin peeled off their bodies by their abusers.

Ahmad Chalabi is getting the star treatment. The neocon purveyor of faulty intelligence met Monday first with Donald Rumsfeld and then with Dick Cheney.

Arianna tells all in My Dinner With Chalabi.

Other persons he's met with while here: Sen. Carl Levin, Rep. Tom Lantos, and Dick Holbrooke. He now praises Henry Waxman and hates Paul Bremer.

It sounds like his current meme is to protest he's being treated as a scapegoat of the CIA while declaring that human rights abuses, not WMD's, are why he made taking out Saddam his life mission.

Saddam's has been in jail for over a year and it seems the torture of Iraqis by Iraqis continues. But 2,000 young American lives have been lost. I'm not buying anything Mr. Chalabi has to sell, unless its a speedy withdrawal of American troops.

by Last Night in Little Rock

Two defense lawyers in the Saddam Hussein trial have been murdered since the current recess to November 28th started, the first on October 20th and the second on November 8th. Iraq's Prime Minister called the murders an effort to end the trial as noted in the London Sunday Times. The defense is calling for a boycott of the trial because of security concerns, as noted here:

After the killing of the first lawyer, defence attorneys announced they would not co-operate with the court and would refuse to appear at the next session until they were satisfied with security.

Saddam and his co-defendants had 1,500 lawyers working on their behalf, in some capacity, with many in Jordan, and 1,100 of them have withdrawn from the case as noted here.

The court has said that the trial will go on without those who left, by appointing new lawyers as lead counsel. There are, after all, plenty to choose from. If the existing lawyers are willing to go on, you can be sure it will.

by Last Night in Little Rock

Jeremy Hinzman, a U.S. soldier who deserted and fled to Canada rather than go to Iraq accusing the U.S. of war crimes, sought and was denied asylum by the Canadian government because he was not a conscientious objector.

The Canadian Federal Court granted review of the case Friday. See articles in the National Post and Globe and Mail.

Colin Powell's former Chief of Staff, Lawrence Wilkerson, is back in the news suggesting that a National Security Memo (first reported in USA Today in 2003) outlining the number of troops necessary to fight a war in Iraq may never have reached Bush.

Wilkerson suggests, but acknowledges he cannot prove, that Stephen Hadley who was Condi Rice's NSC deputy, blocked the memo:

by TChris

The president who switched from searching for weapons of mass destruction to searching for weapons of mass destruction-related program activities (suggesting that's what he was looking for all along) is now accusing his critics of attempting to “rewrite the history of how that war began."

Jen Banbury, writing in Salon, interviews former Brigadier General Janis Karpinski of Abu Ghraib notoriety about her experiences and her new book, "One Woman's Army: The Commanding General of Abu Ghraib Tells Her Story."

Karpinski makes a strong argument that she was made a scapegoat by George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, her immediate bosses and military intelligence commanders. Frustratingly, Karpinski never steps up and takes responsibility, in any way, for what happened at Abu Ghraib. Yet, despite her lack of accountability or mea culpa, the book is an often shocking, guns-a-blazing indictment of the inept occupation of Iraq, and of the men who planned it and continue to run it today. Salon reached Karpinski by phone this week to talk about the Gitmo-ization of Abu Ghraib, the policy that keeps thousands of innocent Iraqis behind bars, and the reasons that the people truly responsible for Abu Ghraib are still in power.

The papers may be full of election news tomorrow, but hopefully they will also cover the arrival of Ahmed Chalabi. If they don't, you can catch what you're missing over at Huffington Post, where Arianna is staying on the story.

• Rub Elbows With Judy Miller, Just $375!
• Ahmad Does D.C.: An Alternative Chalabi Itinerary
• Dick Durbin Tees Off

Durbin's speech today to the Senate on Chalabi is a must-read:

by TChris

An Italian news channel today aired a documentary that "accused the United States of using chemical weapons against the civilian population during a November 2004 bombardment of Fallujah."

RAI says the use of white phosphorus in built-up areas amounts to the illegal use of chemical weapons, although the BBC notes that such bombs are considered incendiary devices. The US military admits to using the weapon to illuminate battlefields in Iraq, and says it did so in Fallujah, but insists it did not use it in civilian areas.

The military denies that video in the documentary shows the indiscriminate use of white phosphorus "on both insurgents and the civilian population," as the documentary alleges. The description of photographs posted by the news service is gruesome:

A second lawyer for a co-defendant of Saddam Hussein has been shot and killed. I realize that lawyers are not the most popular people in our society, but still, this should be attracting more attention.

Adil Muhammed al-Zubaidi was killed when three gunmen in a red Opel shot at the car he was driving in Baghdad. His passenger, another of the lawyers involved in the trial, was hurt.He had represented ex-Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan, one of Saddam's longtime aides, in the Dujail case -- the first trial of alleged crimes against humanity by the former regime. It was not immediately clear whom the injured attorney, Thamer Hamoud Hadi al-Khuzai, was representing in the case.

Why aren't these lawyers being provided with security guards? Apparently, Sadoon Janabi, the lawyer who was gunned down on October 20, had refused protection. It should be mandatory.

Murray Waas has a new exclusive article reporting that Democratic Senators are considering pressing for a Senate Select Committee -- along the lines of the Senate Watergate and Church Committees -- to investigate the Administration's pre-war intelligence claims as well as the Valerie Plame affair.

Waas recites the history of Phase I and Phase II of the Senate Senate Intelligence Committee investigation. As to Phase II, which was to examine whether the Bush Administration misrepresented the intelligence information that led us to war, Waas reports that the Senators feel stymied by the Administration's failure to provide key documents.

Waas reported last week in the National Journal that David Addington, Cheney's counsel whom he elevated yesterday to Chief of Staff to replace Scooter Libby, along with Cheney and Libby, played a key role in the decision to withhold documents from the Committee.

Here are the Senate Rules on closed sessions:

• During a secret session, the doors of the chamber are closed, and the chamber and its galleries are cleared of all individuals except Members and those officers and employees specified in the rules or essential to the session.

• Standing Senate Rules 21, 29, and 31 cover secret sessions for legislative and executive business. Rule 21 calls for the Senate to close its doors once a motion is made and seconded. The motion is not debatable, and its disposition is made behind closed doors.

Why are the Democrats doing this? According to an e-mail statement I received: