Four military newspapers (Air Force Times, Navy Times and Army Times) are calling for Donald Rumsfelds resignation, saying that he is losing control in Iraq. The editorials go on to say that Rumsfeld has neither the support of our fighting men nor the support of top militarial officials.

The Air Force Times puts it like this :

"It is one thing for the majority of Americans to think Rumsfeld has failed. But when the nation’s current military leaders start to break publicly with their defense secretary, then it is clear that he is losing control of the institution he ostensibly leads."

However, our Commander in Thief still believes Rumsfeld is doin' a "heck of a job". The White House believes that this, as they do with anything else, is politically motivated.

How long can this president ignore the will of not only the American people but also our men and women in harms way fighting for democracy for the Iraqi people?

I, for one, "support our troops" in calling for your resignation Mr. Rumsfeld.

I'm at a loss with the news yesterday that a bill passed through the Senate regarding how the U.S. will try and treat the thousands of enemy combatants being held at Guantanamo Bay. At the same time Amnesty International released a report that said most of the prisoners that end up in Cuba are there because of frivolous bounty hunters in Pakistan with an eye on the $5000 U.S. bounty.

According to the Associated Press:

The report by the London-based rights group contended that hundreds of suspected terrorists have been quietly handed over to the United States, and detained at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and other locations.

Or as Claudio Cordone, Senior Director of Research at Amnesty International
puts it :

"The road to Guantanamo very literally starts in Pakistan."

So how will the Military Commissions Act keep you and I safer from terrorists?

• Expands the rules for what I means to be an enemy combatant to include people living in the U.S. who are not citizens.
• Denies habeas corpus (the right to challenge ones detention) to detainees being held by the U.S.
• Gives the president final say on how to interpret Article 3 of the Geneva Convention that deals with “cruel and unusual punishment” and prohibits prisoners from filing suits if a violation of human rights has taken place.
• Grandfather’s in past cases of torture into this new definition that could have been challenged.
• Relaxes the rules so certain statements made under torture are admissible as testimony.
• Up holds secret and hearsay evidence in court.
  

The U.S. government is asking citizens to sacrifice a lot for the war on terror. But as long a the sacrifice only includes human rights and justice for beared foreigners being held at a prison on some far off island or secret CIA prison, then I guess that’s ok and its business as usual. I wonder what the out cry would be like if instead of straining the principals and rights this country was founded there was a bill passed by congress asking people to, say, ration gas or stop eating spinach to fight the war on terror. Would there be lots of media coverage and a public outcry then?

A new report alleges that Algeria's counter-terrorism agency, the Deaprtment for Information and Security, has free range to torture people that it suspects of having ties to terrorism.

Click the link above to send a letter to Algeria's President Abdelaziz Bouteflika asking that he launch an invetigation into the allegations.

From Salon.com, 279 photographs and 19 videos from the Army's internal investigation record a harrowing three months of detainee abuse inside the notorious prison.

Some of these photos are quite graphic--way more graphic then what was shown on the evening news. Salon places the photos in chronological order and gives that context of each of the groups of photos in segemented chapters. Definetly worth the time to read the entire article.

Eye opening and horrific...that's all I can really say.

Bush is not above the Geneva Convention.
This ruling obviously got a lot of coverage in the mainstream media. We know the president was wrong but now what?

The links above are to two good Amnesty international articles that talk about what the ruling means to the 500 "enemy combatants" being held at Guantanamo.

The link above and the excerpt below are from a Time magazine article on a new book by Dr. Stephen Miles called Oath Betrayed. The book details, from thousands of FOIAed government documents, how George W. Bush and Don Rumsfeld authorized doctors to examine prisoners at places like Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib before the prisoners were totured. The doctors were also asked to give recommendations, based on the individual, as to the type of torture that would be most effective.

Sometimes you come across stories and they leave you jaded, slipping towards cynicism. This story just made me sick and angry. We are fighting a war with made up rules.

One of those rules was that a prisoner's medical information could be provided to interrogators to help guide them to the prisoner's "emotional and physical strengths and weaknesses" (in Rumsfeld's own words) in the torture process. At an interrogation center called Camp Na'ma, where the unofficial motto was "No blood, no foul," one intelligence officer testified that "every harsh interrogation was approved by the [commander] and the Medical prior to its execution." Doctors, in other words, essentially signed off on torture in advance. And they often didn't inspect the victims afterward. At Abu Ghraib, according to the Army's surgeon general, only 15% of inmates were examined for injuries after interrogation.

Fighting the "war on terror".

After a while, you get numb reading these stories. They read like accounts of a South American dictatorship, not an American presidency. But we learn one thing: once you allow the torture of prisoners for any reason, as this President did, the cancer spreads. In the end it spreads to healers as well, and turns them into accomplices to harm.

This might be George W. Bush's America but it's not mine.

Officials at Apple admitted that it's manufacturing company Foxconn ( wasn't that the original name for O'Reilly's show) forced Chinese laborers to overwork by an extra 80 hours a month, well above the standard extra 36 hours a month that the Chinese government allows companies to over work their employees.

Bravo, Apple your harsh even by the Chinese government's standards.

However, Foxconn said that the overworked employees were compensated for their time.

Hey, they're not slaves right Foxconn?

The Project for A New American Century is "heading toward closing", said one undefined source close to the project.

The conservative think-tank claims members such as Vice President Dick Cheney, Governor Jeb Bush, radio host and former "drug czar" William J. Bennett, Scooter Libby, president of the world bank Paul Wolfowitz and Dan Quayle...and Don Rumsfeld.

The nine-year-old group founded by William Kristol will be closing its doors because of a sense of "goal accomplished" among its members.

Sounds strangely familiar.

The PNAC, if you don't know, has pretty much dominated the Bush administration's foreign policy for the past 6 years and championed a plan to oust Saddam Hussein long before 9/11.

I guess the new American century is finally here.