Our Christmas Day disgrace.

I really hate to be doing this. I've been very much enjoying my semi-retirement from wallowing in bile for paragraphs at a time, and I hate to come out of it at all, let alone today, but this is just so appalling I feel I basically owe it to the really innocent to bear some kind of witness.

The atrocity at hand is the case of Bilal Hussein, an inconvenient AP photographer (a Pulitzer Prize winner, in fact) who was seized by the US military in April, 2006 and held without charges until fairly recently. He's now about to be tried in an Iraqi court whose presiding judge has already promised a guilty sentence, and he's being denied counsel from his lawyer because, I dunno, we don't like him. There's an update here, and if it doesn't make you feel like you're going to throw up, you probably have a different idea about what America should be than I do - or else you're just more badly beaten down.

Ho ho ho.

Merry Christmas to all!

Unless you're not into that kind of thing - in which case, happy Tuesday!

Dodd!

The gentleman from Connecticut pulls out a win (`til January, at least).

I see Chris Dodd and Russ Feingold are doing their jobs.

See here, if you don't immediately know what I'm talking about. Short form: Dodd is gearing up to block a FISA bill offering immunity to telecoms who've broken pesky laws.

Obama has released a pro-filibuster statement, but apparently isn't heading back to the Senate to speak out in person (and give Dodd a breather). I don't really hold it against him, but I think it's fair to say that it's the gentleman from Connecticut who really comes out of this looking heroic. [Of course, his campaign was always a longshot, so the politics are different - the publicity he gets from this will probably do him more good with the base than any day's campaigning in Iowa could. And rightly so!]

Harry Reid, meanwhile, seems to be doing more harm in this one instance than even a Republican would; I can't recall even Bill Frist casually violating Democratic holds when push came to shove, but Reid apparently sees that as his privilege. It's an ugly scene he's created - though I think Matt Yglesias is right to note that Reid is only the point man for evil on this one, not the exclusive embodiment of it. The Senate is simply broken.

Anyway, as is almost always true, it's Glenn Greenwald who's most thoroughly hammering on this - if you've got the time, give the man a page hit.

At last! Congress is protecting us from the free flow of information!

Apparently, when we think of public internet access, the first thing we should do is worry about dirty cartoons.

I miss the days when I didn't realize the Democrats deserved nothing but contempt.

What happens in Iraq stays in Iraq.

Even gang-rapes and kidnapping, apparently.

ABC Blotter ran (and Matt Yglesias flagged) this story over the weekend; thankfully, it hasn't gone away since - at least, not on the frontiers of Electronica, Left and Right. The meat of it is in these paragraphs . . .

Jamie Leigh Jones, now 22, says that after she was raped by multiple men at a KBR camp in the Green Zone, the company put her under guard in a shipping container with a bed and warned her that if she left Iraq for medical treatment, she'd be out of a job.

"Don't plan on working back in Iraq. There won't be a position here, and there won't be a position in Houston," Jones says she was told.

In a lawsuit filed in federal court against Halliburton and its then-subsidiary KBR, Jones says she was held in the shipping container for at least 24 hours without food or water by KBR, which posted armed security guards outside her door, who would not let her leave.

"It felt like prison," says Jones, who told her story to ABC News as part of an upcoming "20/20" investigation. "I was upset; I was curled up in a ball on the bed; I just could not believe what had happened."

Finally, Jones says, she convinced a sympathetic guard to loan her a cell phone so she could call her father in Texas.

"I said, 'Dad, I've been raped. I don't know what to do. I'm in this container, and I'm not able to leave,'" she said. Her father called their congressman, Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas.

"We contacted the State Department first," Poe told ABCNews.com, "and told them of the urgency of rescuing an American citizen" -- from her American employer.

Poe says his office contacted the State Department, which quickly dispatched agents from the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad to Jones' camp, where they rescued her from the container.

According to her lawsuit, Jones was raped by "several attackers who first drugged her, then repeatedly raped and injured her, both physically and emotionally."

Jones told ABCNews.com that an examination by Army doctors showed she had been raped "both vaginally and anally," but that the rape kit disappeared after it was handed over to KBR security officers.

. . . but there are a couple of other details to note. First, we're hearing about this because Jones is pursuing a civil suit; the government is apparently clinging to the principle that no one anywhere has any jurisdiction over our colonial enterprise, so a criminal trial is probably not going to happen (and so Dahlia Lithwick's seven-year intellectual hangover continues to worsen). Second, Jones' former bosses are arguing that a civil suit is way too harsh, and that the contract they made with the woman they allegedly locked in a shipping container without food or water entitles them instead to an arbitrated settlement.

Why would they want that? you might ask.

Here you go:

In arbitration, there is no public record nor transcript of the proceedings, meaning that Jones' claims would not be heard before a judge and jury. Rather, a private arbitrator would decide Jones' case. In recent testimony before Congress, employment lawyer Cathy Ventrell-Monsees said that Halliburton won more than 80 percent of arbitration proceedings brought against it.

Now, from what I've read over the last few days, it doesn't seem like there are many holes in Jones' story - which, sure, doesn't mean that KBR and Halliburton should have to overcome a presumption of guilt and/or liability. What it does mean, to be really cold-blooded about it, is that there's now a very good test case for anyone concerned with the protections of the rule of law in our strange neo-colonial experiment - and the early results suck. Twenty years ago, we would've called it cyberpunk: twenty-first century megacorporations granting de facto criminal and civil immunity to their mercenary armies is pure William Gibson, even if he was too high-minded for gang-rape.

Still, the thing about dystopian fiction is that nobody should actually have to live in it.

The Supreme Court rules for . . . judicial discretion!

Oh, don't get me wrong - it's a good thing. It's just that it's also the only time I expect I'll ever see this particular court side with me over a half-assed right wing idea by 7-2. I'm just cynical that way.

Mitt Romney: a comedy in two parts.

Mitt on why Republicans are losing ground with Latinos:

You know, I think Republicans went to Washington with the expectations of the whole world that we would change Washington. And in many respects, as has been said by many people, Washington changed Republicans. And when Republicans act like Democrats, America loses. Republicans spent too much money, and we let down our ethical standards. And so, Hispanics, along with other people in this country, want to see change. The Republican Party can connect with Hispanic voters, like other Americans, because there are some peculiar connections between our party and the Hispanic people.

Now, Mitt on immigrant families:

And the Constitution, as Senator Thompson has indicated, indicates that those that are born here do become United States citizens by virtue of being born here. But if they're born here from parents who come across the border illegally and bring them here illegally, in my view, we should not adopt, then, these chain migration policies that say, you've got a child here that's a U.S. citizen, and the whole family can come in. That, in my opinion, is a mistake. We are a nation of laws.

Where's the Daily Show when we need it?

This too shall pass.

The latest stir on the American torture front starts with this:

In September 2002, four members of Congress met in secret for a first look at a unique CIA program designed to wring vital information from reticent terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. For more than an hour, the bipartisan group, which included current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA's overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.

Among the techniques described, said two officials present, was waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill. But on that day, no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder, two U.S. officials said.

"The briefer was specifically asked if the methods were tough enough," said a U.S. official who witnessed the exchange.

Now, I'm pretty sure Pelosi will escape this unscathed - hence the title of this post - but she shouldn't. As long as she's in office, we live in a two-party para-democratic system in which the leadership of both parties have embraced war crimes as policy. The American people literally have no other choices.

Read Glenn Greenwald for a systematic show of outrage, and Andrew Sullivan for the wary hope for the future. All I've got here is generalized disappointment.

Just months!

Just months after U.S. Army troops whisked a German man from Pakistan to the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in 2002, his American captors concluded that he was not a terrorist.

"USA considers Murat Kurnaz's innocence to be proven," a German intelligence officer wrote that year in a memo to his colleagues. "He is to be released in approximately six to eight weeks."

But the 19-year-old student was not freed. Instead, over the next four years, two U.S. military tribunals that were responsible for determining whether Guantanamo Bay detainees were enemy fighters declared him a dangerous al-Qaeda ally who should remain in prison.

The disparity between the tribunal's judgments and the intelligence community's consensus view that Kurnaz is innocent is detailed in newly released military and court documents that track his fate. His attorneys, who sued the Pentagon to gain access to the documents, say that they reflect policies that result in mistreatment of the hundreds of foreigners who have been locked up for years at the controversial prison.

The Supreme Court intends to weigh the legitimacy of the military tribunals at a hearing this morning. Lawyers for Kurnaz and other detainees plan to argue that the panels violate the U.S. Constitution and international law. They say that the proceedings have not provided Guantanamo Bay detainees with a fair and impartial hearing.

Lawyers for the Bush administration will argue that the tribunals have afforded suspected enemies all the rights to which they are entitled. The administration maintains that detainees need not know all of the evidence against them. The tribunals were established in 2004 after the Supreme Court ruled that such panels are needed when holding prisoners indefinitely, and Congress endorsed them in 2005.

U.S. District Judge Joyce Hens Green, who was privy to the classified record of the tribunal's decision-making about Kurnaz in 2004, concluded in January 2005 that his treatment provided powerful evidence of bias against prisoners, and she deemed the proceedings illegal under U.S. and international law. But her ruling, which depicted the allegations against Kurnaz as unsubstantiated and as an inappropriate basis for keeping him locked up, was mostly classified at the time.

Living life in Kafka's armpit.

Meta-parsing.

Whatever the president's blitherings here, my best guess is that the underlying truth is that he didn't know for sure that the NIE wasn't going to be totally butchered until just recently. Remember, the leaks coming out in early November were still suggesting that what we're currently calling the consensus was going to be the dissent position - and the Cheneyites were trying to get it struck altogether. I'm sure Bush himself has had access to the truth for ages, but I'm perfectly willing to believe that he didn't know what was going to be in the NIE itself until the last minute - I'm sure lots of people in the White House were hoping that the intelligence agencies would flush their professionalism again in the final hours.

Regardless, when the president says that nothing has changed, I'm sure he's sincere. It's not like he was more ignorant when he gave his crazier speeches than he is now.

Robert Reich has had a good week.

Reich was Bill Clinton's Labor Secretary from `93 to `97; granted, for about a third of the country, that would ordinarily imply that he has less credibility than a crazy uncle - but fear not, you guys! He's knocking the ex-First Lady!

Or, less theatrically, he's calling foul on her new, moderately desperate attacks on Obama.

Everything Reich says is fair, I think, and I'm glad he's making the points; the senator is basically talking crap. Still, it's been a crazy primary cycle - it's been going on for months, and yet Senator Clinton's presumptive front-runner status has ensured that nobody else has really gotten a taste of the kind of sliming the Democrat can expect in the general election. Obama's my first choice, and I'm not thrilled to see him take unfair lumps, but in a way I'm almost glad his organization is getting more practice at pushing back. If he does get the nomination, it's going to get much worse than this.

Anyway, back to Reich. Along with the HRC piece, he's also got a post up on telecom immunity, and the undesirability thereof - and that's even more appreciated on this end. Too much of the dialogue on the subject has been funded by AT&T; it's nice to see someone in a position of influence (albeit greatly reduced from its peak) who's just talking sense.

Now, this doesn't mean Ahmadinejad is a good guy.

On the other hand, it does mean that certain American political elements are full of shit.

Ah, but I'm ahead of myself. The "this" is question is this:

A new assessment by American intelligence agencies concludes that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and that the program remains frozen, contradicting judgment two years ago that Tehran was working relentlessly toward building a nuclear bomb.

The conclusions of the new assessment are likely to reshape the final year of the Bush administration, which has made halting Iran’s nuclear program a cornerstone of its foreign policy.

The assessment, a National Intelligence Estimate that represents the consensus view of all 16 American spy agencies, states that Tehran is likely keeping its options open with respect to building a weapon, but that intelligence agencies “do not know whether it currently intends to develop nuclear weapons.”

Iran is continuing to produce enriched uranium, a program that the Tehran government has said is designed for civilian purposes. The new estimate says that enrichment program could still provide Iran with enough raw material to produce a nuclear weapon sometime by the middle of next decade, a timetable essentially unchanged from previous estimates.

But the new estimate declares with “high confidence” that a military-run Iranian program intended to transform that raw material into a nuclear weapon has been shut down since 2003, and also says with high confidence that the halt “was directed primarily in response to increasing international scrutiny and pressure.”

Do bear in mind that last paragraph: contrary to Republican myth, it suggests diplomacy doesn't suck.

About a month ago, there was some warning that this report was coming; in fact, it had already been held up for a year at that point. Why? Three guesses - but if you need more than one I'm a bit embarrassed for you.

Cue Cheney's Imperial March.

A National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran has been held up for more than a year in an effort to force the intelligence community to remove dissenting judgments on the Iranian nuclear programme, and thus make the document more supportive of U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney's militarily aggressive policy toward Iran, according to accounts of the process provided by participants to two former Central Intelligence Agency officers.

But this pressure on intelligence analysts, obviously instigated by Cheney himself, has not produced a draft estimate without those dissenting views, these sources say.

Y'know, I'm finally daring to hope that the crazy old man won't get his third war.