Joi Itoquotes Lauren Weinstein: Greetings. Seymour Hersh of The New Yorker, who exposed so many aspects of the Iraqi prisoner abuse story, now reports that U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and national security advisor Condoleezza Rice secretly approved the expansion of a clandestine program that encouraged physical coercion, sexual humiliation, and blackmail of Iraqi prisoners, setting the stage for the abuses that these same officials have recently been condemning so publicly. According to the report, President Bush was kept informed regarding this program. The Department of Defense called the accusations in the story “outlandish, conspiratorial, and filled with error and…

Via Neat New Things:Library Journal – The Case of the Disappearing Article On March 2, 1998, TIME magazine ran an article on the public’s reaction to President Clinton ordering air strikes against Iraq. “Selling the War Badly” had a sidebar by George Bush Sr. and his National Security Advisor, Brent Scowcroft. Titled “Why We Didn’t Remove Saddam,” the sidebar, an excerpt from their book A World Transformed, laid out the reasons Bush decided not to send forces on to Baghdad in the 1991 Gulf War. This passage gives the gist: Trying to eliminate Saddam…would have incurred incalculable human and political…

Via Joi Ito: A week after a scandal broke involving photos of American troops torturing Iraqi prisoners, Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown, & Root is pulling the plug on private electronic communications with the folks back home, apparently at the request of the Department of Defense. Uh, oh, I’ve been reading ginmar for a while and was wondering what the fallout might be for her after the photographs of prisoner abuse story broke. It’s nothing to do with her unit, but the issue of boots in the field having access to “non-military” channels of communication (in order to post personal reports…

Boing Boing: Patriot Act designed to protect Patriot Act by preventing challenges to it to be made public Patriot Act Suppresses News Of Challenge to Patriot Act By Dan Eggen Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, April 29, 2004; Page A17 The American Civil Liberties Union disclosed yesterday that it filed a lawsuit three weeks ago challenging the FBI’s methods of obtaining many business records, but the group was barred from revealing even the existence of the case until now. The lawsuit was filed April 6 in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, but the case was kept under seal to avoid…

From the entertaining George Says website – your very own custom political photo-cartoon. For $5 + shipping, they’ll make the image you create into a refrigerator magnet. Imagine this one showing up in the White House kitchens, eh? Via Pale Blue Dot.

Last night, I got a weird comment on the post about the woman who was fired for taking a picture of coffins in a cargo hold. The comment consisted of a link to a site called “thememoryhole.” I couldn’t figure out what it was about, because the site wouldn’t load (there was probably too much traffic on his site already. Anyway, it looked like a spam link, so I deleted it. Turns out The Memory Hole broke open a big story. Apparently, he or someone else posted links to a lot of blogs that had copies of the picture of…

A military contractor has fired Tami Silicio, a Kuwait-based cargo worker whose photograph of flag-draped coffins of fallen U.S. soldiers was published in Sunday’s edition of The Seattle Times. Silicio was let go yesterday for violating U.S. government and company regulations, said William Silva, president of Maytag Aircraft, the contractor that employed Silicio at Kuwait International Airport. “I feel like I was hit in the chest with a steel bar and got my wind knocked out. I have to admit I liked my job, and I liked what I did,” Silicio said. Her photograph, taken earlier this month, shows more…

Rob gets a call that his cousin William has lost a leg while stationed in Iraq. He goes to Andrews Air Force Base to meet the plane at 2 a.m. Why 2 a.m.? Ssssh!

Experts figure perhaps 70 Utah women a year terminate their pregnancies due to fatal fetal deformities. In most cases, doctors induce labor early to terminate the pregnancy. Doctors are horrified at the options they now will have to present to those traumatized women. And they are angry at lawmakers who they say patched together problematic legislation to make a political statement in an election year. “It’s such a politically volatile issue because the word abortion is in there,” said one Wasatch Front obstetrician who wanted to remain anonymous. “The representatives who passed this law did not understand the repercussions of…

The father of a Columbine High School victim found a cool welcome when he tried to attend an NRA event to engage VP Cheney about the assault weapon ban, which is due to expire this fall: Mauser entered the convention hall where the NRA was meeting, but was turned away by a security guard as several conventioneers applauded. A couple of conventioneers yelled “Get a life” and “Vote for Bush.” Mauser said the NRA “is an organization with a Field and Stream magazine membership, but a Soldier of Fortune magazine leadership.” Nice.