Here's a roundup of stories I didn't have time to blog, but thought were important.
Here's testimony to the Bush administration's record of competence, brought home to the USA by FEMA this past hurricane season:
BBC: "Key Asia militant 'escaped jail'"
But did that guy really escape, or did they kill him and destroy the evidence? Americans don't do things like that? I remember when Americans didn't torture people to death. And I even remember when you could trust the president's word about something. Not every president, I do remember Nixon, but some of them.
Remember when we lived under a constitutional government?
Washington Post: "Rebellion against abuse"
LAST MONTH a prisoner at the Guantanamo Bay military base excused himself from a conversation with his lawyer and stepped into a cell, where he slashed his arm and hung himself. This desperate attempted suicide by a detainee held for four years without charge, trial or any clear prospect of release was not isolated. At least 131 Guantanamo inmates began a hunger strike on Aug. 8 to protest their indefinite confinement, and more than two dozen are being kept alive only by force-feeding. No wonder Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has denied permission to U.N. human rights investigators to meet with detainees at Guantanamo: Their accounts would surely add to the discredit the United States has earned for its lawless treatment of foreign prisoners.
Guantanamo, however, is not the worst problem. As The Post's Dana Priest reported yesterday, the CIA maintains its own network of secret prisons, into which 100 or more terrorist suspects have "disappeared" as if they were victims of a Third World dictatorship. Some of the 30 most important prisoners are being held in secret facilities in Eastern European countries -- which should shame democratic governments that only recently dismantled Soviet-era secret police apparatuses. Held in dark underground cells, the prisoners have no legal rights, no visitors from outside the CIA and no checks on their treatment, even by the International Red Cross. President Bush has authorized interrogators to subject these men to "cruel, inhuman and degrading" treatment that is illegal in the United States and that is banned by a treaty ratified by the Senate. The governments that allow the CIA prisons on their territory violate this international law, if not their own laws.
More on CIA secret jails and the White House (non)response.
Meanwhile the Republican reaction:
GOP Congressional Leaders Seek Leak Probe
By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 8, 2005; 7:50 PM
Congress's top Republican leaders today demanded an immediate joint House and Senate investigation into the disclosure of classified information to The Washington Post that detailed a web of secret prisons being used to house and interrogate terrorism suspects.
So where were these guys when the White House was outing CIA agent Valerie Plame?
At least the Democrats in the Senate are trying to get an investigation into real problems:
Christian Science Monitor: Senate to probe how case for war was made
