Links ahoy

* Nat Hentoff thinks Jane Mayer's recent essay, "Outsourcing Torture," is the "most important piece run by The New Yorker since John Hersey's internationally resounding essay on what we did to Hiroshima in Japan with the first atomic bomb ever used in warfare." It should, therefore, be spread far and wide, in the hopes that it will actually trigger some kind of palpable response to the torture that the President, much of Congress, and a wide segment of the American public seem to endorse.

* From Bagram to Abu Ghraib to today: In related pieces, Emily Bazelon investigates how torture in Afghanistan has long been overshadowed by what's going on in Iraq, while Tom Wright revisits the Abu Ghraib (non)scandal, one year later.

* A killing caught on tape? That's A-OK, too.

* It looks like the horrors of Fallujah are being reinscribed on Ramadi as residents flee in response to repeated military assaults.

* As a report by the Democratic staff of the House Budget Committee estimates that the bill for the Iraq war will reach between $461 and $646 billion by 2015, David Isenberg says there are a variety of hidden costs that aren't calculated in those figures.

* Frontline's controversial documentary, "A Company of Soldiers," is available for viewing online.

* We Aren't Fighting to Win Anymore?! We never were, says Michael Gaddy.

* I agree with Matt Taibi. Kurt Andersen's New York essay on Iraq, "When Good News Feels Bad," is the "most shameful, vicious piece of horseshit I have seen anybody write about this terrible war."

* Make way for democracy in the Middle East! If only it were that simple, writes Juan Cole in the LA Times.

* All hail Walid Jumblatt, savior of the warbots!

* Since Hariri's assassination, there's been a steady drumbeat of calls for Syria to get out of Lebanon. Ahmed Amr has no problem with that, as long as Israel gets out of Syria, too.

* Following the suicide bombing in Tel Aviv, much of the euphoria over the Sharm a-Sheikh summit has receded. The current climate of relations between the Israeli and Palestinian leadership looks, according to Ali Abunimah, "ominously like the failed Oslo peace process."

* The Guardian's Chris McGreal reports on the release of a new study that charts the costs of Israel's settlement policies. Published by the Adva Centre, the report notes that military and construction expenditures divert funds away from Israel's social welfare programs, increase poverty and inequality, and foment political instability. In related news: "Gaza 'out,' West Bank 'in'"

* A new report from the UN Population Division says the world's population will increase by a staggering 40 percent to 9.1 billion in 2050. Virtually all of the growth will come in the developing world, particularly in the poorest countries of the Global South. However, this population explosion will not be seen in much of sub-Saharan Africa, where the ravages of AIDS will stall population growth between 2005 and 2020.

* Gene Gerard holds Bush's feet to the fire on his bogus promises to fight the global AIDS pandemic. Meanwhile, in the US, the HIV infection rate has doubled among blacks in the last decade.

* Summarizing their research findings, Steve Freeman and Josh Mitteldorf assert in In These Times that examinations of the exit polls of the 2004 Presidential election provide strong evidence of corruption and fraud.

* The 160-page Luntz playbook on how to keep Republicans in power makes for some interesting reading. Searchable version, here.

* Michael Miller of Public Domain Progress hacks through the chaff to find the wheat of the Choicepoint controversy.

* Holly Sklar decodes what's behind the ideologically-loaded "ownership society." Bush's proposals, she claims, will green light socially irresponsible business practices.

* Eric Boehlert wonders why the mainstream media ignored the Gannon/Guckert scandal.

More quick takes

* In "Why Europe Ignores Bush," Tony Karon explains that Bush's efforts to mend fences are a day late and a dollar short. The Iraq project, rather than ushering in the New American Century, is quickly shifting international relations away from post-Cold War "unipolarity" towards a "multipolar" system heavily influenced by the emergence of China. Plus, Conn Hallinan asks, "Is it really a good idea to push that dragon into a corner?"

* Along similar lines, Kirkpatrick Sale reads Jared Diamond's Collapse thesis into current affairs to discern an American Empire on the way down.

* The New Scientist has a special report on "India: The next knowledge superpower." Worth checking out.

* Not this time, Mr. Chalabi. Ibrahim Jaafari is the new Iraqi prime minister.

* Sanjay Suri says the situation in Iraq is getting worse for women, according to a new report from Amnesty International.

* Pankaj Mishra went in search of the "real Afghanistan" to write his essay for the NYRB. He found Afghans "weary but still hopeful" as "they compete for the attention and goodwill of an easily distracted world."

* Will there be a draft? Tom Regan probes recent media reports.

* Looking for a cause? How 'bout fighting for a living wage.

Now they tell us

Today's helping

* While Syria hints that it will withdraw troops from Lebanon, Stephen Zunes analyzes the "broader implications" of the Hariri assassination, teasing together the potential effects of the killing on internal Lebanese politics, Syrian-Lebanese relations, and external political pressure from France, the US, Israel, etc.

* "From the U.S. perspective," Bob Herbert writes in the NY Times, "Syria is led by a gangster regime that has, among other things, sponsored terrorism, aided the insurgency in Iraq and engaged in torture. So here's the question. If Syria is such a bad actor - and it is - why would the Bush administration seize a Canadian citizen at Kennedy Airport in New York, put him on an executive jet, fly him in shackles to the Middle East and then hand him over to the Syrians, who promptly tortured him?"

* Those pesky ACLUers keep finding more torture goodies in the dark recesses of the US government's file cabinets. Plus: Tex from Unfair Witness teaches us a new term -- "Palestinian hanging" -- to add to our "ever-growing torture vocabulary list." Thanx, Tex!

* Oh, and forget about that wee lil' Gulfstream V. The CIA is using a Boeing 737 to ship its "ghost detainees" around the globe, according to Newsweek.

* "The best news in a long time has got to be Time magazine's remarkable story about negotiations taking place between the U.S. and the Iraqi insurgency," declares Justin Raimondo. "This is enormously significant," he adds, "because it means an influential section of the U.S. military and political leadership has begun to realize that they can't win the war in a purely military sense with the present level of resources" and "are looking to build the foundations for a political solution."

* Get ready, Ramadi. The calls to rebuild your town can already be heard.

* The US Army is having trouble reaching its recruitment goals, according to the Washington Post. To compensate, the Army is rushing enlistees into duty and utilizing more active-duty recruiters in an attempt to bridge the gap.

* Reuters reports that the first ever Afghanistan Human Development Report warns that, despite the "remarkable progress" witnessed in that country since the fall of the Taliban, it "could easily tumble back into chaos" unless substantial improvements in social welfare, physical infrastructure, and political participation are instituted.

* Paul Harris puts the Gannon/Guckert controversy into its proper context in the Observer. Rather than viewing this bizarre incident in isolation, Harris says it needs to be analyzed in conjuncture with Bushist efforts to manipulate the press and the American media's inability to properly contextualize current affairs.

* So the Swifties have been resurrected to fight Bush's Social Security battles. From the NY Times comes this gem of analysis: "'They are the boulder in the middle of the highway to personal savings accounts,' said Charlie Jarvis, president of USA Next and former deputy under secretary of the interior in the Reagan and first Bush administrations. 'We will be the dynamite that removes them.'"

* The recently-released Doug Wead tapes provide an additional glimpse into Dubya's carefully choreographed effort to craft his political image and woo Christian fundamentalists, says Robert Parry.

More lazy blogging

* Rami G. Khouri explains the "ramifications of Hariri's assassination" in the Daily Star of Beirut, while Jim Lobe notes that the assassination is reviving the dreams of the Syrian "regime changers." Meanwhile, partly in response to recent developments, Syria has announced it is teaming up with Iran to form a "united front due to numerous challenges," aka US bellicosity and sanctions.

* As four former security contractors tell NBC News that "heavily armed private security contractors in Iraq are brutalizing Iraqi civilians," MSNBC's Tom Curry probes why Americans don't seem to care about the abuse and torture that the US government and its surrogates now regularly employ.

* Atrios has a round up of Gannon-related opinion pieces worth reading. I'd also add Michelangelo Signorile and Joe Conason to the list.

* Elaine Cassel addresses some of the issues at the heart of the Lynne Stewart verdict.

Catching up

* With the announcement of the Iraqi election results, Robin Wright of the Washington Post observes that "one of the greatest ironies" of the US invasion has come to fruition. Iraqis, she writes, now have "elected a government with a strong religious base -- and very close ties to the Islamic republic next door. It is the last thing the [Bush] administration expected from its costly Iraq policy."

* In accord, Newsweek profiles Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, "now indisputably the most powerful man in Iraq," and Stanley Reed of Business Week examines whether Iraq is likely to become an Islamic state.

* Ed Herman compares the trends in media coverage of the Iraqi election with past "demonstration elections" in the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, and El Salvador, stressing that in each case the polls were "mainly designed to placate (and mislead) the home population of the United States rather than to decide anything important in the countries in which the election was held."

* In related commentaries, Jonathan Steele and Naomi Klein note that the election was far from a ratification of the US invasion or occupation. To the contrary, both contend it was another cry for the US to get the hell out of the country. Along similar lines, Omayma Abdel-Latif claims the elections were hyped to justify Western intervention and Tariq Ali says the polls were "designed not so much to preserve the unity of Iraq but to re-establish the unity of the west." See more on "PR, Lies and the Iraqi election."

* The Washington Post's Jackie Spinner revisits Fallujah, Dahr Jamail submits testimony to and reports from the World Tribunal On Iraq, and Jeremy Iggers probes whether the Americans committed war crimes in Iraq.

* Dexter Filkins of the NY Times reports on the "political resurrection" of Ahmad Chalabi, who "has seen his usefulness in Washington ascend again" as he longs to fill the post of Iraqi Prime Minister.

* From Cursor: "With 'Post-election Optimism Ebbing in Iraq,' and insurgents directing a wave of carnage at civilians, the Independent reports that 'training of Iraq's security forces...is going so badly that the Pentagon has stopped giving figures' for the number of combat-ready Iraqi troops, who may number as few as 5,000 out of an overall target of 270,000."

* In a review of Ken Pollack's new book, The Persian Puzzle, Christopher de Bellaigue nicely summarizes some of the issues on the front burner regarding Iran's alleged nuclear tomfoolery.

* Confirming a bevy of Iranian news stories, the Washington Post reports, "The Bush administration has been flying surveillance drones over Iran for nearly a year to seek evidence of nuclear weapons programs and detect weaknesses in air defenses," activity that is "standard in military preparations for an eventual air attack and is also employed as a tool for intimidation."

* Jim Lobe can hear those Iran war drums beating, loud and clear. See also: "If Not Now, When?" and the "Top 20 Indications that Bush Invades Iran -- Soon!"

* Up to 50 Iranian citizens on the CIA's payroll "were executed or imprisoned in the late 1980s or early 1990s after their secret communications with the agency were uncovered by the government," reports the LA Times, in what a number of former CIA officials described "as a major setback in spying on a regime that remains one of the most difficult targets for U.S. intelligence."

* "A strategy document outlining proposals for eliminating the threat from Al Qaeda, given to Condoleezza Rice as she assumed the post of national security adviser in January 2001, warned that the terror network had cells in the United States and 40 other countries and sought unconventional weapons," reports the NY Times. The January 25, 2001 memo from Richard Clarke and corresponding 13-page plan "laid out ways to step up the fight against Al Qaeda, focusing on Osama bin Laden's headquarters in Afghanistan. The ideas included giving 'massive support' to anti-Taliban groups 'to keep Islamic extremist fighters tied down'; destroying terrorist training camps 'while classes are in session' and then sending in teams to gather intelligence on terrorist cells; deploying armed drone aircraft against known terrorists; more aggressively tracking Qaeda money; and accelerating the F.B.I.'s translation and analysis of material from surveillance of terrorism suspects in American cities."

* In the New Yorker, Jane Mayer has the goods on the secret history of the US' policy of outsourcing torture, what's euphemized as "extraordinary rendition." Meanwhile, several former Gitmo detainees, such as Mamdouh Habib and Martin Mubanga, have recently come forth to tell about their ordeals in captivity.

* Following the assassination of the former Lebanese prime minister, Rafiq Hariri, the NY Times reports that the US is going to get tough on Syria, even though it has "no concrete evidence of Syria's involvement in the killing." Already, the US ambassador to Syria has been withdrawn.

* "Is the US government’s determination that the atrocities in Darfur qualify as 'genocide' an accurate depiction of the horrors of that war and famine?" asks Alex de Waal in the Index on Censorship. "Or is it the cynical addition of 'genocide' to America's armoury of hegemonic interventionism – typically at the expense of the Arabs? The answer is both."

* In an updated excerpt from her book, Israel/Palestine: How to End the War of 1948, Tanya Reinhart throws some cold water on the "euphoria" over the recent Sharm El-Sheikh summit between Sharon and Abbas, cautioning that recent events are essentially replicating the steps taken during the failed Oslo period.

* Coming on the heels of news that Israel activated a land claim law that was dormant for years, a Washington Post investigation has concluded that the "Israeli government and private Jewish groups are working in concert to build a human cordon around Jerusalem's Old City and its disputed holy sites, moving Jewish residents into Arab neighborhoods to consolidate their grip on strategic locations."

* The LA Times reports that Bush's 2006 budget proposal of $2.5 trillion dollars nevertheless calls for billions of dollars in cuts, affecting a total of 154 programs, "that will touch people on food stamps and farmers on price supports, children under Medicaid and adults in public housing." To make things worse, Jonathan Weisman and Peter Baker of the Washington Post report that Bush's budget is set to blow up around 2010: "By the time the next president comes along, some analysts said, not only will there be little if any flexibility for any new initiatives, but the entire four-year term could be spent figuring out how to accommodate the long-range cost of Bush's policies."

* In his NY Times column, Paul Krugman calls the budget "top-down class warfare in action. And," he adds, "it offers the Democrats an opportunity, if they're willing to take it."

* Even though Bush has requested $419 billion for the Pentagon in his spending plan, Robert Higgs estimates that "the government's total military-related outlays in fiscal year 2006 will be in the neighborhood of $840 billion."

* "Uncle Sam wants you," announces Tom Dickinson in Rolling Stone. "He needs you. He'll bribe you to sign up. He'll strong-arm you to re-enlist. And if that's not enough, he's got a plan to draft you."

* "It's global-warming time again," declares Tom Engelhardt in an excellent summary of recent news about climate change for TomDispatch.

* With the Kyoto Protocol set to take effect today, Mark Hertsgaard says the international treaty doesn't go far enough towards addressing the threat of climate change.

* In a Washington Post opinion piece, Elizabeth Warren summarizes the implications of the recent Health Affairs survey on medical bankruptcy in the US.

* Writing for FAIR's publication Extra!, Steve Rendall argues that, in order to revive American democracy and the credibility of the American media, the Fairness Doctrine needs to be brought back.

* "Four years ago," Robert Parry writes, "some hopeful political analysts predicted that the rightward swing of the media pendulum, which so bedeviled Bill Clinton in the 1990s, would lurch back leftward once Bush took office in 2001." How wrong they were. Today, Parry says, the pernicious "Bush standard of journalism" reigns supreme.

* Nick Lemann wonders, "Why is everyone mad at the mainstream media?"

* Chris Paterson takes on the Eason Jordan brouhaha, asserting that questions about the deliberate targeting of journalists by the US military are, indeed, far from settled.

* Salon's Eric Boehlert probes the Jeff Gannon/Jim Guckert imbroglio, which seems to grow more bizarre by the day. AMERICAblog is the place to go for running updates on this story.

* Scott Smallwood rewinds the clock to discern how the Ward Churchill controversy took on legs in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Plus: Robert Jensen on Churchill's "rights" and Clay Evans on Churchill's ego.

* Chris Floyd, putting it bluntly, as usual: "Bush lied. He stole. He murdered. In broad daylight. And he got away with it. That's the story. But you'll never hear it at the Press Club."

* You can watch Outfoxed, Robert Greenwald's documentary on Rupert Murdoch and the Fox News Channel, here.

* Joel S. Hirschhorn pens memo to Howard Dean, the new DNC chair, on some strategic initiatives to begin working on.

Away

Out of town for a week+...

Yet another list

* Mike Whitney, Jim Lobe, and David Corn weigh in with -- what do you expect? -- negative takes on Bush's State of the Union address. Plus: Mark Weisbrot on lowering the bar to 2018 and Matthew Yglesias breaks down the Bush plan for social security into "three distinct phases."

* The LA Times notes that Bush's second-term domestic agenda is driven as much by ideology as the hope that dismantling the welfare state will allow the GOP to "achieve an ambitious political goal: Stripping money and voters from the Democratic Party and cementing Republican dominance for years after he leaves office."

* Dave Lindorff revisits Bush's bulge, noting how the NY Times killed the story because of -- get this -- its potential impact on the Presidential election.

* Jack Shafer dons the shrill hat in Slate, asserting that "slogan-chanting is only one small part of an effective propaganda operation. Successful propagandists must also discourage dissenters who might disrupt the party line. And the two best ways to keep people stupid and nodding is by shutting down the information flow and by stiffing the press. At these chores," Shafer contends, George Bush "excels."

* Similarly, the Center for Public Integrity's Charles Lewis asks, "What has happened to the principle that American democracy should be accessible and transparent?"

* Looks like Iyad Allawi, America's favorite thug in Iraq, is going to be out of power pretty soon, making way for Sistani.

* "Influential Sunni Arab leaders of a boycott of last Sunday's elections expressed a new willingness Friday to engage the coming Iraqi government and play a role in writing the constitution, in what may represent a strategic shift in thinking among mainstream anti-occupation groups," reports Anthony Shadid of the Washington Post.

* Despite Condi Rice's soft-pedaling, Kaveh L. Afrasiabi says the demonization campaign against Iran is well under way.

* In the Daily Star, Jonathan Cook observes that the recent controversy over Israel's "land theft" policies raises a fundamental question about Israel's "original mass dispossession of the Palestinians" in 1948, which was subsequently justified by similar legal provisions.

* Is Israel trying to "make the desert bloom" via massive crop dusting projects in the Negev?

* Whither media coverage of Afghanistan? Kim Hart searches in vain for AJR.

* A study in Health Affairs has found that "medical problems contribute to about half of all bankruptcies" in the US, and concludes that the "low rate of medical bankruptcy in Canada suggests that better medical and social insurance could greatly ameliorate this problem in the United States."

* "The Central Intelligence Agency is refusing to provide hundreds of thousands of pages of documents sought by a government working group under a 1998 law that requires full disclosure of classified records related to Nazi war criminals," according to the NY Times. See more on the CIA and Nazi War Criminals over at the National Security Archive.

* George H.W. Bush -- "Deep Throat"?

* Anthony Lappé throws his two cents into the ring over the Ward Churchill controversy, to which Joshua Frank responds.

Approved

'Raiding The 20th Century'

Wow.

Quick stuff

* "The elections held on Jan. 30 in Iraq were deeply flawed as a democratic process," writes Juan Cole in Salon, "but they represent a political earthquake in Iraq and in the Middle East...For the first time in the Arab Middle East, a Shiite majority has come to power. A Shiite-dominated Parliament in Iraq challenges the implicit Sunni biases of Arab nationalism as it was formulated in Cairo and Algiers. And it will force Iraqis to deal straightforwardly with the multicultural character of their national society, something the pan-Arab Baath Party either papered over or actively attempted to erase. The road ahead is extremely dangerous: Overreaching or miscalculation by any of the involved parties could lead to a crisis, even to civil war. And America's role in the new Iraq is uncertain."

* In the Guardian, Sami Ramadani writes, "On September 4 1967 the New York Times published an upbeat story on presidential elections held by the South Vietnamese puppet regime at the height of the Vietnam war. Under the heading 'US encouraged by Vietnam vote: Officials cite 83% turnout despite Vietcong terror,' the paper reported that the Americans had been 'surprised and heartened' by the size of the turnout 'despite a Vietcong terrorist campaign to disrupt the voting.' A successful election, it went on, 'has long been seen as the keystone in President Johnson's policy of encouraging the growth of constitutional processes in South Vietnam.' The echoes of this weekend's propaganda about Iraq's elections are so close as to be uncanny."

* Newsweek has an in-depth feature on the nature of the insurgency in Iraq this week. The piece stresses that it is not a monolithic movement, but rather one fraught with internal disputes, particularly between nationalists and Zarqawi's faction.

* We're halfway there, observes Derrick Z. Jackson in the Boston Globe. "The estimated cost of Vietnam in current dollars was $584 billion, according to the Congressional Research Office. Iraq has already cost more in current dollars than either the Civil War or World War I. It is about to pass the Korean War. We are on pace to pass Vietnam in two or three years."

* Judy Fearmonger is back on the prowl, floating rumors that Chalabi is being wooed again by the Bushies.

* The next target? Iran? How 'bout Venezuela?

* Jehangir Pocha charts the emerging battle over oil between the US, China, and India for In These Times.

* Judge Joyce Hens Green pens memo to the Bushists: "Although this nation unquestionably must take strong action under the leadership of the commander in chief to protect itself against enormous and unprecedented threats...that necessity cannot negate the existence of the most basic fundamental rights for which the people of this country have fought and died for well over 200 years."

* In addition to the case they've filed against Donald Rumsfeld, lawyers from the Center for Constitutional Rights are now trying to bring up war crimes charges against Alberto Gonzales in Germany. Meanwhile, Dave Lindorff writes in The Nation that Michael Chertoff, the Bush nominee to head Homeland Security, gave free reign to torture, too. His role dates all the way back to the smash up job the military and intel services did on John Walker Lindh.

* Commenting on this piece of news, Maureen Dowd asks in the NY Times, "What good is it for President Bush to speak respectfully of Islam and claim Iraq is not a religious war if the Pentagon denigrates Islamic law - allowing its female interrogators to try to make Muslim men talk in late-night sessions featuring sexual touching, displays of fake menstrual blood, and parading in miniskirt, tight T-shirt, bra and thong underwear?"

* First Amendment rights? A recent survey commissioned by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation indicates that a high percentage of teens and young adults could care less about 'em.

* In yet another move to curb inconvenient speech in the academy, partly modeled on similar attempts to go after Middle Eastern specialists, attack dog conservatives are gunning for Ward Churchill. It looks like M. Shahid Alam is next.

* While much of the attention is focused on Bush's goal to privatize social security, the LA Times reports that conservatives are equally eager to dismantle the system of employer-provided health insurance, replacing it with a scheme "in which workers — instead of looking to employers for health insurance — would take personal responsibility for protecting themselves and their families: They would buy high-deductible 'catastrophic' insurance policies to cover major medical needs, then pay routine costs with money set aside in tax-sheltered health savings accounts."

* A new study of the 2004 Presidential election by a consortium of statistical and mathematics professors "shows that the possibility that the overall vote count was substantially corrupted must be taken seriously," and indicates that "precincts with hand-counted paper ballots showed no statistical discrepancy between the exit polls and the official results, but for other voting technologies, the overall discrepancy was far larger than the polls’ margin of error."

* You can watch the CBC's fifth estate program, here, that has Bill O'Reilly all hot and bothered.