This is probably the most important post I've ever written. Certainly it is the most urgent.

The Republican leadership of Congress is attempting to legalize extraordinary rendition. "Extraordinary rendition" is the euphemism we use for sending terrorism suspects to countries that practice torture for interrogation. As one intelligence official described it in the Washington Post, "We don't kick the sh*t out of them. We send them to other countries so they can kick the sh*t out of them.”

The best known example of this is the case of Maher Arar. Arar, a Canadian citizen, was deported to Syria from JFK airport. In Syria he was beaten with electrical cables for two weeks, and then imprisoned in an underground cell for the better part of a year. Arar is probably innocent of any connection to terrorism.

As it stands now, "extraordinary rendition" is a clear violation of international law--specifically, the U.N. Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Degrading and Inhuman Treatment. U.S. law is less clear. We signed and ratified the Convention Against Torture, but we ratified it with some reservations. They might create a loophole that allows us to send a prisoner to Egypt or Syria or Jordan if we get "assurances" that they will not torture a prisoner--even if these assurances are false and we know they are false.

Last month Edward Markey, a Massachusetts Congressman, introduced a bill [PDF file--MA]that would clearly outlaw extraordinary rendition. But Markey only has 22 cosponsors, and now the House leadership is trying to legalize torture outsourcing--and hide it in the bill implementing the 9/11 Commission Report.

CRAWFORD, Texas — A weekly newspaper that bills itself as President Bush's hometown paper endorsed John Kerry for president, saying the Massachusetts senator will restore American dignity.

The Lone Star Iconoclast, which has a circulation of 425, said in an editorial dated Sept. 29 that Texans should rate the candidates not by hometown or political party, but by where they intend to take the country.

"Four items trouble us the most about the Bush administration: his initiatives to disable the Social Security system, the deteriorating state of the American economy, a dangerous shift away from the basic freedoms established by our founding fathers, and his continuous mistakes regarding Iraq," the editorial said.

The Iconoclast, established in 2000, said it endorsed Bush that year. It also said it editorialized in support of the invasion of Iraq, and publisher W. Leon Smith promoted Bush and the invasion in a British Broadcasting Corp. interview, believing Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.

"Instead we were duped into following yet another privileged agenda," the editorial said.

The newspaper praised Kerry for "30 years of experience looking out for the American people" and lauded his background as "a highly decorated Vietnam veteran."

WASHINGTON — Shortly after arriving at the Justice Department nearly four years ago, Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft was faced with a new internal study that raised serious questions about the application of the federal death penalty.

A small number of federal districts, including pockets of Texas and Virginia, were accounting for the bulk of death cases. Experts decried the geographical disparities.

For Ashcroft, an ardent supporter of capital punishment, the solution was to seek the death penalty more often and more widely.

Since then, he has pushed federal prosecutors around the country — often over their objections — to be more aggressive in identifying prosecutions that could qualify as federal capital cases. Much of that effort has been in states that have banned or rarely impose capital punishment.

But Ashcroft's quiet campaign, which has been overshadowed by his prosecution of terrorism cases, has made few inroads.

With public support for the death penalty in decline, jurors have rebuffed calls for the death penalty in 23 of the 34 federal capital cases tried since 2001, according to the Federal Death Penalty Resource Counsel Project, a court-funded group that assists defense lawyers in capital cases.

But the poor track record, added time and significantly higher cost of death penalty prosecutions have not dissuaded Ashcroft.

This month, federal prosecutors began a capital murder trial in Iowa, where no one has been executed since the state abolished the death penalty in 1965. Vermont, another state that long ago abolished the death penalty, is gearing up for its own federal capital trial next year.

And in New York — which hasn't executed a federal prisoner since the Rosenberg spy case in 1953, and where jurors have already rejected two Ashcroft capital cases — a federal court on Long Island is expected to take up another death case next year.

"Federal law should be standard across the nation," said Justice Department spokesman Mark Corallo. Ashcroft declined to be interviewed. [Now there's a shocker--MA] "A person who commits a heinous crime under federal law in one state should not fare better or worse than someone who commits the exact same crime in another state."

The U.S. government has for years kept in its sights one of the world’s most notorious arms traffickers, Victor Bout. Known on both sides of the Atlantic as the "merchant of death," Bout has been implicated in running guns and missiles to combatants across the world, from the Taliban and Northern Alliance in Afghanistan to the UNITA rebels of Angola and the teen-age army of Liberia’s former tyrant, Charles Taylor. He has been blacklisted by the U.S. Treasury from doing any business in the United States, faces an arrest warrant for money laundering in Belgium, and was aggressively pursued by the Clinton administration. "We were trying to take him out of business," says Witney Schneidman, an Africa expert who worked in the State Department at the time.

But now the Bush administration has hired at least one company tied to Bout's network for the war effort in Iraq. Records obtained by Mother Jones show that as recently as August, Air Bas, a company tied to Bout and his associates, was flying charter missions under contract with the U.S. military in Iraq. Air Bas is overseen by Victor Bout’s brother, Serguei, and his long-time business manager, Richard Chichakli, an accountant living in Texas; in the past, payments for Air Bas have gone to a Kazakh company that the United Nations identifies as "a front for the leasing operations of Victor Bout’s aircraft."

Concerns about Bout’s work for the United States date back to May, when Senator Russ Feingold asked the Pentagon and the State Department to scour their files for any evidence of contracts with companies tied to Bout. An inquiry conducted by the State Department found, according to a State Department source, that "there were allegations that raised our concerns, and we shared those concerns with the Department of Defense." Months later, however, the Pentagon has yet to respond, and officials there would not say whether they are looking into the State Department’s concerns.

BETHESDA, Md. — In the name of homeland security, America's spy imagery agency is keeping a close eye, close to home. It's watching America.

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, about 100 employees of a little-known branch of the Defense Department called the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency — and some of the country's most sophisticated aerial imaging equipment — have focused on observing what's going on in the United States.

The National Mall is an example of an area on which imaging has been assembled by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency to assist the Department of Homeland Security.

Their work brushes the fine line between protecting the public and performing illegal government spying on Americans.

Roughly twice a month, the agency helps with the security of events inside the United States. More routinely, it is asked to help prepare imagery and related information to protect against possible attacks.

For instance, the agency has modified basic maps of the nation's capital to highlight the location of hospitals, linking them to data on the number of beds or the burn unit in each. To secure the Ronald Reagan funeral procession, the agency married aerial photographs and 3D images, allowing security planners to virtually walk, drive or fly through the Simi Valley, Calif., route.

The agency is especially watchful of big events or targets that might attract terrorists — political conventions, for example, or nuclear power plants.

The domestic mission of the NGA has increased dramatically in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, even though laws are in place to prevent government surveillance aimed at Americans.

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The agency is not interested in information on U.S. citizens, stresses office director Bert Beaulieu. "We couldn't care less about individuals and people and companies," he said.

But that's not enough for secrecy expert Steven Aftergood, who oversees a project on government secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists, a nonprofit watchdog of the impact of politics on science. "What it all boils down to is 'Trust us. Our intentions are good,' " he said.

Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, said, "As a general matter, when there are systems of public surveillance, there needs to be public oversight."

Post Sept. 11, the agency's new Americas Office assembles visual information on more than 130 urban areas, among other assignments, including creating maps of the National Mall, the country's high-voltage transmission lines and disaster exercises.

Sometimes, agency officials work with private groups, such as hotel security offices, to get access to video footage of lobbies and hallways. That footage can then be merged with other information to make an event more secure — or to take action, if a hostage situation or other catastrophe happens.

The level of detail varies widely, depending on the threat and what the FBI or another agency needs.

"In most cases, it's not intrusive," said the NGA's associate general counsel, Laura Jennings. "It is information to help secure an event and to have people prepared to respond should there be an attack, or to analyze the area where a threat has been made."

If the internet had been invented 50 years ago we could Google for the same newspapers writing up glowing appraisals of the installation of Saddam Hussein no doubt.

the unfounded but popular Baghdad street rumor of his recent gunplay against some bad guys

Ok, so independent witnessess say he executed half a dozen people in cold blood. Same difference. Just a little change to a couple of details, right? The message here is that any "facts" that the WaPo reports are likely to be this "accurate".

Let that settle in.

Let's play a little game whereby we assume that the WaPo was no more dishonest, but no less dishonest with other sections of it's article, and on that basis guess what I like to call "what really happened". For example, WaPo says,

that night in London in 1978 when intruders presumed to be Saddam Hussein's henchmen tried to hack him apart with axe

Ok let's change the location and date first of all, since WaPo considers such things to be window dressing (per "Baghdad street" rumour). Let's say the event took place in Mosul in 1969 instead. Same difference, right?

And instead of it being an unprovocked attack on Allawi as suggested (not quite stated) let's make it a mutual thing -- let's say it happened during a gang fight basically initiated by others (Allawi being too young to be a leader then). Same difference, eh? I mean the word "gunplay" in the above pretty much says it's ok to switch from "one party totally responsible" to "both parties equally responsible".

Lets replace "hack him apart with an axe" with "received some bruises" because (per "gunplay") even death itself can be characterised as "play" then a horrible wound can be represented as a bruise I'm sure.

Finally "Saddam Hussein's henchmen" becomes "rival gangsters" and we can keep the word "presumed" or not. Presumption of innocence surely means nothing because civilians rounded up by the authorities without charge but designated terrorists become "bad guys".

So in summary what is the truth?

that night in London in 1978 when intruders presumed to be Saddam Hussein's henchmen tried to hack him apart with axe

or

Allawi had a little more than his ego brusied in a gang fight with other criminal types back in 1969 in Mosul

Same difference, right?

Zell Miller wants you to believe that he is dispensing a dose of discipline to his beloved Democratic Party — pointing out the foibles and foolishness that have led to its loss of the South. Miller claims he only wants the Democrats to regain their traditional values before it's too late.

Miller is a hypocrite. As a historian, he knows exactly why the Democratic Party is teetering in the South: It's precisely because the Democrats set aside a century and a half of ugly traditions that it has lost so many rural white Southerners. Miller knows better than most; he was once one of those rural white Southerners who embraced those ugly traditions.

Running for Congress in 1964, Miller dismissed the Civil Rights Act as neither "constitutionally acceptable [n]or fundamentally proper as an approach to the solution of racial problems in America." Even back then, he denounced the Democratic presidential nominee, declaring that Lyndon Johnson "is a Southerner who sold his birthright for a mess of dark pottage." From 1968-71, Miller served as executive secretary to Gov. Lester Maddox, who remained an unrepentant segregationist until the day he died.

WASHINGTON — The computer systems that will count roughly half the ballots cast on Election Day are so vulnerable to hackers that almost anyone could rig the results, critics said Wednesday.

The group BlackBoxVoting.org illustrated its charge with a video showing "Baxter the Chimp" hamming it up as he punched a couple of computer keys that wiped out the totals on a vote-tabulating program.

Andy Stephenson of BlackBoxVoting.org shows former U.S. Rep. Cynthia McKinney how to hack a voting program.

Bev Harris, executive director of the citizens action group and a computer voting critic who has written a book on the subject, said the program was the same used throughout Georgia, which two years ago became the first state to adopt paperless touch-screen voting statewide.

At the demonstration, Harris asked former U.S. Rep. Cynthia McKinney, a Democrat from DeKalb County, to follow instructions and demonstrate the ease of hacking into the program made by Diebold Elections Systems Inc., the nation's biggest provider of electronic voting equipment.

McKinney moved the mouse and punched a few buttons, and the computer file vanished.

"This is incredible," said McKinney, who is running in the Nov. 2 election to regain her old seat.

Meanwhile, computer scientists from coast to coast have warned that the machines sometimes err in counting votes and could be easily compromised by amateur hackers intent on disrupting elections. In either case, they say, a manual recount would be meaningless if it was based on corrupted electronic data.

All of this has left officials like Palm Beach County Commissioner Addie Greene wishing they hadn't rushed to spend millions of dollars on the new touch-screen machines so soon.

In the last few months, as Greene campaigned for reelection, she told dozens of senior citizens to forget the newfangled voting terminals and put pencil to paper on their absentee ballots instead.

"I want our votes to be counted," said Greene, a 61-year-old Democrat. "I'd rather do absentee ballots than take a chance on the machines."

Greene is an unlikely critic of the electronic voting machines. After all, she helped get 5,000 of them deployed throughout this seaside county of 1.2 million residents.

I haven't been posting much about the eVoting issues lately because, frankly, I've seen my worst fears realized and it's depressing. The stories now being written are mostly about how it's too late to do anything about the election in November. Of course, it is not, but that's the story we're being fed. Go back to sleep.

We get fed lies daily by the corporate media - damaging, dangerous, deadly lies.

One of the things we Bush haters like to say to each other, over lattes with NPR in the background, is that the current president makes us nostalgic for George H.W. Bush, Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon. Non-Bush haters have trouble understanding this point. Is this GOP president really that much more conservative than other GOP presidents? Well, yes, he is. But the main problem is less his conservative principles than the frequent absence of any ideological principles whatsoever.

One telling episode began last year, when, because of a World Trade Organization ruling, Congress had to eliminate a $5-billion-a-year export subsidy. The obvious thing to do was pocket the $5 billion and make a dent in our quite large budget deficit. Of course, the GOP-controlled Congress decided instead that every dollar saved would be devoted to tax cuts. And because the newfound money would come from corporate America, it would be returned to corporate America.

That line, from the uncomfortably prophetic film The Siege, in some ways may say everything that needs to be said about the situation in Iraq as it is evolving, just as it would have summed up Viet Nam forty years earlier. Car bombs, suicide attacks, poorly armed militias holding off the might of the biggest, best, and most powerful military force in the world--it's time to say it out loud: Holbrooke is right. Iraq is Viet Nam all over again, only worse.

Ever since Bush announced his intention to follow the PNAC 'plan' from 1989 and invade Iraq on the strength of innuendo, misinformation, and bald-faced lies, critics like me have been saying it would be Nam all over again, and from the start of the invasion the parallels have been downright spooky. Yes, the physical terrain is different--desert instead of jungle; yes, the people are different, Arabs instead of Asians; yes, there is more at stake in the Gulf than there ever was in Nam--real oil instead of imaginary dominoes; and yes, Nam was not a response to a direct attack on US soil. But the mistakes are the same: arrogance fueled by fear, lies fueled by ideology, disastrous military decisions being made by civilians for political reasons against the advice of military leaders, a steady stream of HappyTalk from the Administration and its loyalists about how much better everything is than it looks, and, most importantly, a native insurgency arising from a desire to expel a foreign occupier being defined by a blind Admin as the rumpus made by a few 'outside agitators'.

The neocon naifs in the Bush Admin are patently still in thrall to Laurie Mylroie's paranoid fantasies and Ahmad Chalabi's self-serving lies: Wolfowitz and Perle are still insisting no more troops are needed and that everything is just ducky even as we have reached and passed the 1000-death mark in a war that was supposed to be over--shades of McNamara grousing about 'negativity'; Bush is running around the country campaigning on his 'Don't listen to them' platform, pleading with people to pay no attention to the reports of chaos and confusion, incompetence and outright theft, a massively botched reconstruction, and instead trust his glowing, optimistic assessment based on--what? He doesn't say. His optimism, one imagines.

It didn't have to be this way. As Jay Bookman points out in a brilliant essay, Tikrit is as quiet as Fallujah is an uproar.

The Army's 1st Infantry Division is headquartered in Tikrit, and its footprint has been heavy and it has been felt. U.S. troops patrol the streets in relative safety, because here, if nowhere else in Iraq, they have been given the numbers to squelch opposition. "I can sit on that corner, on 'RPG Alley,' and eat an ice cream cone now," Lt. Col. Jeffrey Sinclair recently told the Associated Press, pointing on a map to the infamous city's most infamous street.

Before the invasion, the haughty amateurs who planned this brave adventure were warned that hundreds of thousands of troops would be needed to pacify Iraq. Rather than listen and learn, they scoffed at the four-star generals who spouted such nonsense. These men knew better, for in the Washington think tanks that had nurtured them like fragile hothouse orchids, eager Iraqi exiles had assured them that if we invaded, we would be greeted as liberators, that our path would be strewn with roses, that our leaders would be honored with statues on Baghdad squares.

Tikrit, by its silence, condemns those men for their arrogance. Here, at the very core of Saddam's strength, the difficult has been achieved. The calm may be a sullen calm, an enforced calm, but it is a calm nonetheless. This is what might have been elsewhere in Iraq if competence had been valued over blind allegiance, if we had been led into this war by serious people who understood that when you bet high stakes, you play to win and you assume nothing.

Well, we elected a pile of corporate-trained, corporate-educated, corporate-indulged executives who, like all their class, were so completely cut off from reality, so thoroughly enmeshed in their own private fantasy world of success, so convinced that the lofty heights of business to which they had climbed--largely through political contacts and the Old Boy network--were the direct result of their own genius, that they virtually live in an alternate universe, a universe where their stubbornness is heroism, their incompetence is superior vision, and their blindness is loyalty. So what did we expect them to do? Suddenly become realists after spending their lives investing their energy and resources committing to an illusion? It don't work that way, people.

If we ever get out of this I hope the one lesson we take away with us, indelibly printed in the core of our brainpans, is to never never NEVER again allow corporate managers to grab the reins of government. Because while it matter who is the most committed, it matters just as much what they're committed to.

WASHINGTON (AP)--Senators from both parties urged the Bush administration on Sunday to make a realistic assessment of the situation in Iraq and adjust its policies aimed at pacifying the country. But Bush readied a firm defense of his Iraq policy--and a sharp new attack on rival John Kerry's stance--for a speech Monday.

``The fact is a crisp, sharp analysis of our policies is required. We didn't do that in Vietnam, and we saw 11 years of casualties mount to the point where we finally lost,'' said Sen. Chuck Hagel, a Vietnam War veteran who is co-chairman of President Bush's re-election committee in Nebraska.

``We can't lose this. It is too important,'' Hagel, R-Neb., said on CBS' ``Face the Nation.''

A major problem, said leaders of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was incompetence by the administration in reconstructing the country's shattered infrastructure.

The chairman, Sen. Richard Lugar, noted that Congress appropriated $18.4 billion a year ago this week for reconstruction. No more than $1 billion has been spent. ``This is the incompetence in the administration,'' Lugar, R-Ind., said on ABC's ``This Week.''

``Exactly right,'' interjected Delaware Sen. Joseph Biden, the committee's top Democrat. He said later: ``This has been incompetence so far. Five percent of the $18.4 billion that George Bush keeps ... beating the other candidate up and about the head for how he voted and didn't vote, and he's released 5 percent.''

Sen. John McCain, who has campaigned often with the president, said mistakes in Iraq generally can be attributed to inadequate manpower. McCain, R-Ariz., said problems began arising shortly after the dash through the desert to take Baghdad, the capital, in April 2003.

``We made serious mistakes right after the initial successes by not having enough troops on the ground, by allowing the looting, by not securing the borders,'' McCain said.

``Airstrikes don't do it; artillery doesn't do it. Boots on the ground do it,'' McCain told ``Fox News Sunday.''