On Saturday, the New York Times reported that the military is taking a tougher stance at what Rush Limbaugh likes to call “Club Gitmo”:

As the first detainees began moving last week into Guantánamo’s modern, new detention facility, Camp 6, the military guard commander stood beneath the high, concrete walls of the compound, looking out on a fenced-in athletic yard.

The cells at Camp 6, which began to house its first prisoners last week. Following a riot at Guantánamo in May, the facility has been retrofitted to make it more difficult to attack guards and commit suicide.

The yard, where the detainees were to have played soccer and other sports, had been part of a plan to ease the conditions under which more than 400 men are imprisoned here, nearly all of them without having been charged. But that plan has changed.

“At this point, I just don’t see using that,” the guard commander, Col. Wade F. Dennis, said.

After two years in which the military sought to manage terrorism suspects at Guantánamo with incentives for good behavior, steady improvements in their living conditions and even dialogue with prison leaders, the authorities here have clamped down decisively in recent months.

The reason was simple:

The commander of the Guantánamo task force, Rear Adm. Harry B. Harris Jr., said the tougher approach also reflected the changing nature of the prison population, and his conviction that all of those now held here are dangerous men. “They’re all terrorists; they’re all enemy combatants,” Admiral Harris said in an interview.

He added, “I don’t think there is such a thing as a medium-security terrorist.”

The article goes on to inform us:

[Shortly after Admiral Harris’s remarks, another 15 detainees were sent home to Saudi Arabia, where they were promptly returned to their families.]

So they’re all terrorists, except for those 15 (or 16 — see below) Saudis. Oops, and 18 more, as we learn from today’s Times:

The Defense Department said Sunday that a total of 18 prisoners who had been held at the naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, had been sent to their home nations over the weekend, reducing the captive population at the base to about 395.

Aside from seven Afghan prisoners, who arrived in Kabul on Saturday, the group included six sent to Yemen, three to Kazakhstan and one each to Libya and Bangladesh, the Pentagon said in a news release.

So either those guys were hard core terrorists who have just been released to once again ply their trade, or they weren’t and just spent four years as involuntary guests of Uncle Sam.

Oh, also:

Sixteen (sic) Saudi Arabian prisoners were sent home earlier in the week, and another 85 prisoners of various nationalities have been designated for transfer to their countries, some for continued detention and some for outright release.

But the rest — they’re all terrorists.

This is what can happen to American citizens in the post 9/11 world:

One night in mid-April, the steel door clanked shut on detainee No. 200343 at Camp Cropper, the United States military’s maximum-security detention site in Baghdad.

American guards arrived at the man’s cell periodically over the next several days, shackled his hands and feet, blindfolded him and took him to a padded room for interrogation, the detainee said. After an hour or two, he was returned to his cell, fatigued but unable to sleep.

The fluorescent lights in his cell were never turned off, he said. At most hours, heavy metal or country music blared in the corridor. He said he was rousted at random times without explanation and made to stand in his cell. Even lying down, he said, he was kept from covering his face to block out the light, noise and cold. And when he was released after 97 days he was exhausted, depressed and scared.

Detainee 200343 was among thousands of people who have been held and released by the American military in Iraq, and his account of his ordeal has provided one of the few detailed views of the Pentagon’s detention operations since the abuse scandals at Abu Ghraib. Yet in many respects his case is unusual.

The detainee was Donald Vance, a 29-year-old Navy veteran from Chicago who went to Iraq as a security contractor. He wound up as a whistle-blower, passing information to the F.B.I. about suspicious activities at the Iraqi security firm where he worked, including what he said was possible illegal weapons trading.

But when American soldiers raided the company at his urging, Mr. Vance and another American who worked there were detained as suspects by the military, which was unaware that Mr. Vance was an informer, according to officials and military documents.

At Camp Cropper, he took notes on his imprisonment and smuggled them out in a Bible.

“Sick, very. Vomited,” he wrote July 3. The next day: “Told no more phone calls til leave.”

Nathan Ertel, the American held with Mr. Vance, brought away military records that shed further light on the detention camp and its secretive tribunals. Those records include a legal memorandum explicitly denying detainees the right to a lawyer at detention hearings to determine whether they should be released or held indefinitely, perhaps for prosecution.

The story told through those records and interviews illuminates the haphazard system of detention and prosecution that has evolved in Iraq, where detainees are often held for long periods without charges or legal representation, and where the authorities struggle to sort through the endless stream of detainees to identify those who pose real threats.

From William Blum’s always-excellent Anti-Empire Report:

General Augusto Pinochet, who escaped earthly justice on December 10, was detained in London in 1999 awaiting a ruling by a British court on whether he would be extradited to Spain on a Spanish judge’s warrant to face charges of crimes against humanity committed during his rule in Chile from 1973 to 1990. “I tell you how I feel,” he told a London journalist at the time. “I would like to be remembered as a man who served his country, who served Chile throughout his entire life on this earth. And what he did was always done thinking about the welfare of Chile.”

P.W. Botha, former president of South Africa died November 1. He was a man who had vigorously defended the apartheid system, which led to the jailing of tens of thousands of people. He never repented or apologized for his actions, and resisted attempts to make him appear before the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. At one point he declared: “I am not going to repent. I am not going to ask for forgiveness. What I did, I did for my country.”

As Pol Pot lay on his death bed in 1997, he was interviewed by a journalist, who later wrote: “Asked whether he wants to apologize for the suffering he caused, he looks genuinely confused, has the interpreter repeat the question, and answers ‘No.’…‘I want you to know that everything I did, I did for my country.’”

“In these three decades I have been actuated solely by love and loyalty to my people in all my thoughts, acts, and life.” Adolf Hitler, “Last Will and Testament,” written in his bunker in his final hours, April 29, 1945.

The rest.

Lindsay:

When the Associated Press reported that 6 Iraqis had been burned to death in sectarian violence, Michelle Malkin and the right wing bloggers went on the offensive against the AP. Their main complaint was that the report of immolation was based on a single source, identified as police captain Jamil Hussein, who couldn’t be tracked down for confirmation.

So, former CNN chief Eason Jordan invited Michelle Malkin to come to Iraq and investigate the story for herself. Miraculously, within hours of the challenge, a Pajamas Media blogger found the source. Turns out he’s Jamail Hussein, not Jamil Hussein.

* * *

Imagine that, as soon as Michelle is asked to put up or shut up, one of her colleagues solves the mystery. I sure hope Michelle Malkin has a nice Christmas present picked out for Danziger.

… for the record, count me in with what Atrios said.

UPDATE: Videos here. Some of the sound is a little unclear, so hopefully there will be transcripts soon.

You may recall Colin Powell saying this during his U.N. speech:

Iraq’s record on chemical weapons is replete with lies. It took years for Iraq to finally admit that it had produced four tons of the deadly nerve agent, VX. A single drop of VX on the skin will kill in minutes. Four tons.

The admission only came out after inspectors collected documentation as a result of the defection of Hussein Kamal, Saddam Hussein’s late son-in-law.

This was true. However, there’s one little thing Powell left out: when Hussein Kamel defected in 1995, he also said ALL IRAQ’S UNDECLARED WMD HAD BEEN SECRETLY DESTROYED IN 1991. In other words, Iraq had been lying about what it had done in the past, not what it possessed in the present.

Of course, to know this you had to have access to supersecret sources of information. For instance, CNN:

SADLER: Can you state here and now — does Iraq still to this day hold weapons of mass destruction?

KAMEL: No. Iraq does not possess any weapons of mass destruction. I am being completely honest about this.

Or the U.N. notes from the debriefing of Kamel:

All chemical weapons were destroyed. I ordered destruction of all chemical weapons. All weapons - biological, chemical, missiles, nuclear were destroyed.

This morning Sam Husseini caught Colin Powell as he was leaving an appearance on Face the Nation and asked him whether he was aware of this when he spoke at the U.N. Powell said he wasn’t; in other words, he declared that he didn’t know the most basic information about what he was saying, and apparently doesn’t feel any responsibility for knowing it.

Check back later today for the video and transcript.

I believe Dennis Perrin may possess the world’s greatest YouTube skillz. If you like Monty Python arcana, be sure not to miss these videos he dug up of Terry Jones, Michael Palin and Graham Chapman appearing with Tom Snyder on “Tomorrow” in 1979 to promote Life of Brian. (You’ll have to scroll down past some cruel comments about James Woolsey and friends.)

A big story from England:

The Government’s case for going to war in Iraq has been torn apart by the publication of previously suppressed evidence that Tony Blair lied over Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.

A devastating attack on Mr Blair’s justification for military action by Carne Ross, Britain’s key negotiator at the UN, has been kept under wraps until now because he was threatened with being charged with breaching the Official Secrets Act.

Carne Ross:

I was First Secretary in the UK Mission to the United Nations in New York from December 1997 until June 2002. I was responsible for Iraq policy in the mission, including policy on sanctions, weapons inspections and liaison with UNSCOM and later UNMOVIC…

I read the available UK and US intelligence on Iraq every working day for the four and a half years of my posting…

During my posting, at no time did HMG assess that Iraq’s WMD (or any other capability) posed a threat to the UK or its interests. On the contrary, it was the commonly-held view among the officials dealing with Iraq that any threat had been effectively contained. I remember on several occasions the UK team stating this view in terms during our discussions with the US (who agreed). (At the same time, we would frequently argue, when the US raised the subject, that “regime change” was inadvisable, primarily on the grounds that Iraq would collapse into chaos.)

Any assessment of threat has to include both capabilities and intent. Iraq’s capabilities in WMD were moot: many of the UN’s weapons inspectors (who, contrary to popular depiction, were impressive and professional) would tell me that they believed Iraq had no significant materiel. With the exception of some unaccounted-for Scud missiles, there was no intelligence evidence of significant holdings of CW, BW or nuclear material.

(via via)

This, by James Woolsey in the recent Vanity Fair article about the chastened neocons, is a good start:

[Woolsey draws a] historical parallel, to the U.S. campaigns against Native Americans in the 19th century, to make another point: that the absence of Iraqi auxiliaries deprived coalition soldiers of invaluable local intelligence. “Without the trained Iraqis, it was like the Seventh Cavalry going into the heart of Apache country in Arizona in the 1870s with no scouts. No Apache scouts. I mean, hello?”

But we need much more where this came from. The lack of this is, I think, what has caused so much ill-will towards us among Iraqis. Only when they hear the United States constantly comparing them to Native Americans will they understand how truly glorious the future we have planned for them is.

Since repeating yourself seems to be the key to success, recent events have prompted me to bring back the beloved character, Gipper the Talking Points Duck (click to enlarge) :

Speaking of Mr. “Conservative and with a duck“, why is it that so many conservative humorists’ impressions of liberalism are completely stuck in the mid-90’s (at best)? Sure, they mention more recent figures like Howard Dean, but conservative hacks like Tinsley are always dating themselves with endless references to Ted Kennedy’s drinking, Bill Clinton’s infidelity, and Barbara Streisand. It’s not like lefties are still telling jokes about Ollie North, Jimmy Swaggart, and Ross Perot. As Jack Chick says, HAW HAW HAW.

My guess is that for conservatives like Tinsley, whose worldview revolves around the idea that mass media is intrinsically immoral and/or politically-biased, their shunning of the society they’re commenting on makes their decent into cultural illiteracy inevitable. In a fair world, they’d be treated like the disgruntled, out-of-touch loons that they are, but in the interest of “balance”, their work is promoted to the same level as people who know what the hell they’re talking about. I can’t help but think that if this sort of thing were happening in any other field, it would launch a thousand self-righteous lectures from the right about “reverse affirmative action” or something equally silly.

Been watching TV Chile on the satellite. I’ve been curious to see what Chilean TV news coverage of Pinochet’s death looks like.

Pretty damned amazing, I have to say, when you consider they’re still pulling themselves out of brutal dictatorship. My Spanish is still pretty rough, so I’m not getting everything they’re saying, but the visuals aren’t hard to follow.

They just did a piece about the Orlando Letelier bombing, for example. They used a supremely cheesy TV movie clip of a car explosion as an illustration, which was odd, but then cut to actual footage of the wreckage. A few seconds later, they’re showing a computer screen whose web browser is set to yesterday’s posting of declassified documents by the National Security Archive.

When some of these reporters were children, a broadcast like this, even if it were possible, would probably be enough to get you killed. Now that they have freedom, they’re using it. Hard.

What’s most interesting, though, are the bits of programming which aren’t about Pinochet — and yet still are. I’m trying to grok just how the years of dictatorship must color daily life, even now.

Like the sports report, for example. Tonight, Colo Colo, a Santiago team, is playing Pechuga from Mexico in the South American Cup. Fans cheer outside the gates excitedly, people wave flags, it looks a lot like a U.S. sports report. Then you learn that Colo Colo is closely identified with Pinochet and his supporters, and that the game will be held in the National Stadium, which Pinochet’s men used in 1973 as a torture and death camp for 40,000 prisoners.

Hell of a subtext. I believe I would be cheering for Pechuga.

Then they showed clips of previous matches held in the stadium, a highlight reel almost exactly like any other. Except the blurry 1970s video clips were a constant reminder that the ground where these games were played had been recently sprinkled with blood.

And yet these folks are willing themselves into a functional liberal democracy.

I feel something strangely akin to hope.