Narus.Info

Liberated from behind the pay wall, this is a great column.

What to do with a guy who gets, like zero point zero percent of the vote? Promote him to head Oil Minister for all Iraq. Our man in Iraq, Chalabi has more lives than Freddy Krueger. Can this culture of corruption get any more pernicious? (Don’t answer that.)

Since I received no comments for these memos I am posted them again.

15. At the Khuderbegainov trial I met an old man from Andizhan. Two of his children had been tortured in front of him until he signed a confession on the family’s links with Bin Laden. Tears were streaming down his face. I have no doubt they had as much connection with Bin Laden as I do. This is the standard of the Uzbek intelligence services.

These are the direct words of the UK Ambassador to Uzbekistan, and Tony Blair threatens to jail anyone who publishes them. I just did; too bad I’m not in the UK.

Here’s what they have been up to, (in addition to running secret torture prisons) as admitted by our guys, who now want to include more GIs in on the fun:

“What we’re trying to look for is that moderation,” the official said, “that you can’t just go and attack that neighborhood because it’s primarily a different sect or a different race or a group of foreigners … and just arrest them because they’re different and put them in secret facilities and hold them for undetermined periods of time.”

and this:

“It is not easy to identify that some operation tonight was legitimately directed by somebody in the security organization of M.O.I. or M.O.D.,” the commander said, “or whether it was some people in stolen uniforms, or somebody’s posse or militia or projection cell who decided to attack someone’s opposite number in some other tribe or neighborhood.”

full story in LA Times here.

and that greyed-out lady the New York Times here.

Good thing there is no civil war, huh? These are the fighting forces Bush brags on so much. I guess when he says “ready to take the lead” he means it. Remember, as they stand up, we’ll stand down. And Advise… on where to best place the alligator clips.

Washington Post

The CIA has stuck with its overall approaches, defending and in some cases refining them. The agency is working to establish procedures in the event a prisoner dies in custody. One proposal circulating among mid-level officers calls for rushing in a CIA pathologist to perform an autopsy and then quickly burning the body, according to two sources.

The ACLU ran this ad in the New York Times yesterday, full page:

Many people are publishing these British Foreign Office memos on the web in order to help the former UK Ambassador to Uzbekistan reveal the truth about the use of torture with the knowledge and encouragement of the UK and US, committed by Uzbeks, who have been known to boil prisoners.

“The amount of subpoenas that carriers receive today is roughly doubling every month — we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of subpoenas for customer records — stuff that used to require a judge’s approval,” said Albert Gidari, a Seattle-based expert in privacy and security law who represents numerous technology companies.

This 2002 report from Newshouse News service outlines the flood of agents digging into your privacy in the name of national security. Keep in mind this is the LEGAL stuff, and what Bushco did thru the NSA is likely to be a hundred times more intrusive.

The customer is always right… if you are a guest worker from India and the Saudi man who pulls up to your pump decides to pick a fight. Human Rights Watch reports on this heinous sentence by our supposeed allies in the Middle East.

Maybe this is what they mean when conservatives say “strick constructivist judges.” An eye for an eye, indeed.