Today, Barack Obama said:

What’s missing in our debate about Iraq, what has been missing since before the war began, is a discussion of the strategic consequences of Iraq and its dominance of our foreign policy . . . [T]his war distracts us from every threat that we face and so many opportunities we could seize. This war diminishes our security, our standing in the world, our military, our economy, and the resources that we need to confront the challenges of the 21st century. By any measure, our single-minded and open-ended focus on Iraq is not a sound strategy for keeping America safe.

McCain responded:

Via Yglesias, the ACLU reports that the Bush Administration has added the one millionth person to its terrorist watch list:

The nation's terrorist watch list has hit one million names, according to a tally maintained by the American Civil Liberties Union based upon the government's own reported numbers for the size of the list. "Members of Congress, nuns, war heroes and other 'suspicious characters,' with names like Robert Johnson and Gary Smith, have become trapped in the Kafkaesque clutches of this list, with little hope of escape," said Caroline Fredrickson, director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office. "Congress needs to fix it, the Terrorist Screening Center needs to fix it, or the next president needs to fix it, but it has to be done soon."

Hmm. Do you doubt they are all being surveilled under the FISA Capitulation Act?

When the Bush administration decided to get into the torture business, it adopted methods used by Chinese interrogators during the Korean War -- despite evidence that the techniques lead to false confessions.

The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.

In Bushworld, a false confession is better than no confession. [more ...]

Last week, TalkLeft called attention to an appellate decision that found insufficient evidence to justify the government's detention (for six years) of Huzaifa Parhat as an enemy combatant. The unclassified version of the court's decision (pdf) has been released. It reveals the court's impatience with the administration's arguments.

With some derision for the Bush administration’s arguments, a three-judge panel said the government contended that its accusations against the detainee should be accepted as true because they had been repeated in at least three secret documents. The court compared that to the absurd declaration of a character in the Lewis Carroll poem “The Hunting of the Snark”: “I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true.”

“This comes perilously close to suggesting that whatever the government says must be treated as true,” said the panel of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

Isn't that exactly what the Bush administration has been saying ever since 9/11?

Remember Steven Hatfill? He's the scientist who was declared a "person of interest" during the FBI's investigation of a series of anthrax incidents. In Hatfill's case, "person of interest" means "our profiler thinks he did it but we can't prove it so let's publicize the allegation and see if he panics." As TalkLeft reported here, Hatfill sued before the FBI got around to announcing its public regret over the mess it made of Hatfill's life.

That report was in September 2003. The litigation has finally ended.

The Justice Department has agreed to pay former Army scientist Steven Hatfill almost $6 million to settle his claims that the government violated his privacy rights during its investigation of the 2001 anthrax attacks.

It's a structured settlement. [more ...]

David Addington, Dick Cheney's former legal counsel and current Chief of Staff (post Scooter Libby) testified before a House subcommittee today on the Administration's interrogation practices and torture.

Crooks and Liars has some thoughts as well as videos of Addington's testimony and the law profs at Balkanization have lots to say about John Yoo's testimony.

Human Rights First has the lowlights of both men's testimony. John Yoo's prepared testimony is here.

In other torture news, the American Civil Liberties Union is calling on the United States government "to appoint an independent prosecutor for U.S. torture crimes, to put an end to practices that involve torture and abuse and to fulfill its obligations under the Convention Against Torture (CAT). "

TSA at work:

For my friend Margaret, a savvy government lawyer and nursing mom, the decision to travel overseas wasn’t one she made lightly, but she figured she could handle the logistics. Boy was she wrong. The trip got off to a bad start, she says, when “the all male screeners at Dulles spent about 20 minutes examining and testing the [breast] pump for bomb residue and once they finally figured out its general purpose, grew very uncomfortable.”

If it has wires, it must be a bomb.

This link will direct you to a nice piece of writing by Chris Floyd on Torturegate.

By week's end, the evidence that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and other top government officials had deliberately created a system of torture which they knew was illegal – indeed, a capital crime – under U.S. law was so plain, so overwhelming, and so handily concentrated that it broke through the levees of institutional cover-up and media complicity that had held this clear truth at bay for so long. The grim facts had finally worked their way into "conventional wisdom." It was now permissible for good "centrist" folk to speak of such things, even condemn them, without being automatically relegated to ranks of "the haters," the "unserious," the "shrill partisans," etc.

Floyd warns against a "line of defense ... that would allow the purveyors of conventional wisdom to vent a bit of righteous outrage at official wrongdoing without actually having to do anything about it or admitting of any flaws in their fundamentalist doctrine of American exceptionalism." He adds that Barack Obama "has given every indication he too sees the Administration's high crimes as "dumb policies" that don't require any legal redress." The whole piece is worth a read.

If you can put the torture, abuse, and other human rights violations out of your mind ... and if you aren't an inmate ... turns out Guantánamo is just the place to take a quiet vacation. Will Brangelina show up soon?

Ryan Singal reports newly declassified documents show that the FISA Court had concerns the FBI was wiretapping innocent Americans:

Does the FBI track cellphone users' physical movements without a warrant? Does the Bureau store recordings of innocent Americans caught up in wiretaps in a searchable database? Does the FBI's wiretap equipment store information like voicemail passwords and bank account numbers without legal authorization to do so?

That's what the nation's Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court wanted to know, in a series of secret inquiries in 2005 and 2006 into the bureau's counterterrorism electronic surveillance efforts, revealed for the first time in newly declassified documents.

A review of the declassified documents shows: [More...]

Denver is one of five aiports in the country that has begun "full body scanning" of passengers.

The Transportation Security Administration today will start screening travelers at Denver International Airport using a machine that bounces radio waves off skin to produce a graphic, whole-body image. The scan aims to reveal weapons, explosives or other items hidden on a passenger's body. But because the image is anatomically explicit, millimeter-wave screening is controversial.

DIA and five other U.S. airports are using the new technology in pilot programs to assess its capabilities, said David Bassett, TSA's federal security director in Denver.

Passengers who object can request a pat down search. The other cities:

Sky Harbor International Airport in Phoenix, Los Angeles International, JFK International in New York, Baltimore-Washington International and Albuquerque International.

This is a very invasive machine. [More...]

The New York Times reports that the Bush Administration's wiretapping of defense lawyers in terror cases in Oregon is having an effect nation-wide:

Sean M. Maher, a New York lawyer who is a co-chairman of the national security committee of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, said he knew talented private lawyers who were refusing to take on terrorism cases because of potential violations of their privacy, including monitoring of their communications with clients. That fear has grown as a result of the disclosures in Oregon, Mr. Maher said.

Lawyers who agree to defend terrorism suspects in cases involving classified information are required to undergo background checks that can include an F.B.I. review of their financial and medical records, including records of psychiatric care.

“People just aren’t going to get involved in this process,” Mr. Maher said. “I find it unfathomable that in our adversarial system, we’ve created a process to weed out qualified defense counsel.”

Background on the Oregon wiretapping is here.