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More documents prove that top defense officials approved of abuse at Guantanamo detention center

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| Thu Feb. 23, 2006 11:05 AM PST

The American Civil Liberties Union has released documents that prove that top Department of Defense officials endorsed interrogation methods at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp that the FBI described as both abusive and illegal.

"We now possess overwhelming evidence that political and military leaders endorsed interrogation methods that violate both domestic and international law," said Jameel Jaffer, an attorney with the ACLU. "It is entirely unacceptable that no senior official has been held accountable."

A memo written in 2003 names Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, former Commander of Joint Task Force--Guantanamo, as favoring interrogation techniques that the FBI said "could easily result in the elicitation of unreliable and legally inadmissible information." That memo also indicates that FBI personnel brought their concerns to senior Department of Defense officials, but those concerns were ignored.

A few days ago, The New Yorker released a memo from Alberto Mora, outgoing General Counsel of the U.S. Navy, which describes his unsuccessful efforts in 2002 and 2003 to convince the Pentagon to renounce the prisoner abuse at Guantanamo. One of the people he had trouble convincing was his boss, William J. Haynes II, General Counsel of the Department of Defense.

At one point, however, Haynes did take Mora's concerns to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who responded by joking that he himself often stood for eight hours a day. "Torture? That's not torture!" One of his staff members reminded him that he had the option to sit down whenever he chose.

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Activist Laurel Hester Dies

Wed Feb. 22, 2006 6:54 PM PST

Laurel Hester, the New Jersey police lieutenant who fought for the right to leave her pension to her longtime domestic partner Stacie Andree, succumbed to lung cancer on Sunday. Hester, a 23 year investigator, made headlines last month when she pressed city officials in Ocean County, New Jersey to pass a domestic partnership resolution provided for by the Domestic Partnership Act which "gives counties and cities the power to extend pension and health care benefits to the gay partners of employees if they so choose."

Following several months of heated debate and wavering, the Ocean County freeholders eventually reversed their original decision on January 25th, granting police and fire department employees the freedom to designate their own pension beneficiaries. Thanking freeholders, and present despite the advice of her medical team, Hester told them "you have made yourselves an example of what democracy is all about." Laurel Hester certainly did not intend to become an activist, but she nonetheless became a hero in the fight for equality.

Sudanese Conflict Spills Into Chad

Wed Feb. 22, 2006 5:09 PM PST

The ethnic cleansing in Darfur has gone on since 2003, forcing two million people to abandon their homes and seek refuge in neighboring countries. As the violence rages, tens of thousands of displaced citizens have taken refuge in bordering Chad, and bringing with them the threat of insurgency. According to a new Human Rights Watch report, Chadian rebel groups have support from the Sudanese government to launch aggressive attacks in Eastern Chad.

The report, Darfur Bleeds: Recent Cross-Border Violence in Chad, is based on investigations conducted over the last two months in response to the spillover conflict that is now destroying neighboring Chad. 30,000 Chadians have abandoned their homes along the Chad/Sudan border in response to recent attacks, which include the mass destruction of villages, killing civilians and looting cattle, all apparently carried out in according with ethnic motives.

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Civil War in Iraq?

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| Wed Feb. 22, 2006 3:30 PM PST

Swopa rounds up evidence—okay, more like the barest of hints—that the bombing of the Shiite shrine in Samarra yesterday may have been the work of militant Shiites looking to provoke some serious sectarian warfare. It's not impossible, I guess. And it certainly appears to be working, with Shiites and Sunnis battling it out all across the country. Quite obviously a lot of different groups in Iraq have a lot of different motives for edging the country closer to civil war, and it seems like that will only become increasingly easier to do as time goes on.

Meanwhile, it was only a few days ago that Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad threatened to withdraw aid from the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government if it insisted on engaging in sectarian warfare with the Sunnis. And now top Shiite leaders are blaming Khalilzad for encouraging the insurgents with that statement all while… engaging in sectarian warfare. So what will the U.S. do? President Bush sounds like he's planning to back the Shiite government and oppose the "terrorists" while calling for "restraint" on all sides. But this doesn't seem like the sort of thing you can really finesse in this way. Juan Cole says this is an "apocalyptic day." Very bad.

Should Corporations Handle the Ports?

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| Wed Feb. 22, 2006 3:25 PM PST

Kevin Drum says he doesn't see why the sale of operations of six American ports to Dubai Ports World, a shipping company owned by the United Arab Emirates, is such a scandal. After all, the company wouldn't even be handling port security in those ports; the Coast Guard and U.S. Customs and Border Security would. Plus, over 30 percent of this country's port terminals are already operated by foreign companies anyway. And DPW already does this sort of thing in ports all over the world, and other countries seem okay with that. Okay, I'll buy all that.

But The Nation's John Nichols, meanwhile, asks an interesting question: Why are ports run by corporations at all? Shouldn't this sort of vital national infrastructure be operated and run by the government? Well, my understanding here is that ports are run by the government, mostly: port operations (i.e., moving ships in and out of terminals) are handled by corporations, true, but the regulatory apparatus (i.e., security, customs, licensing, etc.) is handled by the state, and all major U.S. ports are owned by public port authorities, which oversee development, construction, port policies, etc.

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GOP Requests Church Directories

Tue Feb. 21, 2006 6:24 PM PST

North Carolina Republicans know where to find their friends, and aren't afraid to give them a call. That is, if they can get the correct phone numbers. Over the protests of local national religious leaders, the North Carolina Republican party called on its members to submit their church directories to the party, stating that "people who regularly attend church usually vote Republican when they vote."

Bill Peaslee, the party's chief of staff, claimed he was simply targeting his demographic base. "The Republican Party believes that people shouldn't leave their moral and spiritual beliefs at the door of the polling place," the chief of staff said. "We're just appealing to one of our constituencies, just as the Democrat Party does. ... The Democrats may feel it's more profitable to go and do voter registration drives at a homosexual convention. We feel more comfortable going to churches."

According to the Internal Revenue Service, a church's tax exempt status may be revoked if it engages in "any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for public office." In this case, local North Carolina clergy have called the practice of soliciting directories unethical, especially if it could potentially call the leanings of the church into question.

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The Last Days of the Ocean

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| Tue Feb. 21, 2006 3:19 PM PST

The fate of the world's oceans doesn't get a whole lot of press coverage these days—if any—but in fact they're all an utter mess, and it's a real problem. From Julia Whitty's now-online cover story from the March issue of Mother Jones: "Science now recognizes that the ocean is not just a pretty vista or a distant horizon but the vital circulatory, respiratory, and reproductive organs of our planet, and that these biological systems are suffering." Read on for the gruesome details.

You can read this month's complete oceans package online here, with articles on, among other things, the effects of over-fishing and how the fishing industry is allowed to regulate itself; how polar bears now face extinction; how Navy sonar is killing whales, and how a company set up by George H.W. Bush is killing off the most important fish in America you've never heard of.

Supreme Court to Consider Partial Birth Abortion Ban

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| Tue Feb. 21, 2006 2:40 PM PST

The Supreme Court announced today that it will hear a challenge to the Partial Birth Abortion Ban passed by Congress in 2003:

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Chris Cox' Tenure So Far

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| Tue Feb. 21, 2006 1:37 PM PST

Those of us who follow corporate scandals and governance issues were certainly expecting the worst when President Bush nominated Chris Cox to head the SEC, after the former chairman, William Donaldson, was forced out (Donaldson, despite being Republican, had a bit too much of a reformist for this administration to stomach). Cox, after all, had spent his entire career in the House working to weaken corporate regulations. But in the early months after his nomination, some commentators suggested that Cox might not be the right-wing nutcase everyone expected, but would instead carry out some of Donaldson's modest reforms and do his best to try to avoid another wave of corporate scandals similar to those in 2002.

Or at least that was the thought. But now Roger Lowenstein has a piece in the February American Prospect arguing that, no, no, the worriers were right all along; Cox probably will be as bad as everyone expected. Corporate America, after all, needs some serious reforms—and fast—in order to avoid meltdowns in the relatively near future:

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The American Right Goes Global

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| Tue Feb. 21, 2006 1:08 PM PST

Rachel Morris of Legal Affairs has an intriguing report on conservative Christian legal groups that are going abroad to fight various legal cases abroad, before those cases end up as fodder for Supreme Court decisions here at home. Justice Anthony Kennedy, after all, has suggested that the interpretation of Constitutional law should at least listen to what foreign courts are saying—see Jeffrey Toobin's profile of Kennedy in the New Yorker for more on this—and Stephen Breyer has more-or-less agreed.

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