How is it with all of the incidents involving employees of Xe/Blackwater shooting civilians, that this company still receives its millions of dollars and is allowed to continue causing more harm than good? Last I heard, Iraq expelled the company from its borders (anyone know if that's correct?), so why are we still allowing these thugs to represent US interests at all?

Here's the latest from the Independent:

Four US contractors for the company formerly known as Blackwater were not authorised to carry weapons when they were involved in a deadly shooting in Afghanistan this month, the US military said today.

The men - accused of opening fire on a vehicle in the capital (Kabul) on 5 May - have charged that their employer, now called Xe, issued them guns in breach of the company's contract with the military. One Afghan was killed in the shooting, and two others wounded.

Xe has said its employees are not generally banned from carrying weapons in Afghanistan, though the authorization depends on the duties of the contractors. Anne Tyrrell, a spokeswoman for Moycock, N.C.-based Xe, declined to comment on the terms of this specific contract or say if the company issued guns to the men.

But the military told The Associated Press that the contract did not allow the men to keep guns on them.

The four American contractors claim they are being scapegoated by Xe, claiming that Xe issued them the guns. It surely wouldn't be surprising to anyone to find out that this was true, but still, opening fire on unarmed citizens after being involved in an accident is a hard one to explain away.

"While stopped for the vehicle accident, the contractors were approached by a vehicle in a manner the contractors felt threatening" and opened fire, the statement said.

Callahan -- the attorney who also represented the families of four Blackwater employees killed in Iraq in 2004 who sued the security company -- said the contractors were traveling in two vehicles when a car hit the first one. They had gotten out to give first aid when another car made a U-turn and drove toward them, he said.

"These four men drew their guns and shot," Callahan said.

The brother of one of the wounded Afghans has said the car was full of shopkeepers heading home from work who misinterpreted one of the Americans hitting the car as an order to move. Bullets started hitting the back of the Toyota Corolla as it drove off. A passenger was hit in the stomach and died two days later, said Shah Agha, whose brother Farid was driving the car. Farid was shot in the hand and another person was injured outside the vehicle, Agha said.

One would have a hard time arguing that Xe/Blackwater was responsible for these men using unauthorized weapons to kill a civilian. But the overall picture is still the same, employees of Xe/Blackwater have again found themselves in another incident of needless killing. Is it lack of training? Lack of accountability? Lack of any real oversight?

Isn't it time that we stopped this practice of hiring private contractors to do the jobs that our military has traditionally done? Wasn't the whole argument put forward by Donald Rumsfeld that private contractors were more efficient and cost-effective? Where is the evidence of this? 

This amazingly well-researched diary by "occams hatchet" at Daily Kos is one of the best presentations I've seen in regards to how a war crimes trial was, and should be, conducted. I've included just the opening paragraphs and a little of the discussion of the use of the film here, and highly recommend taking a minute to read the entire post.  

- and then they showed that awful film, and it just spoiled everything.

                                  - Hermann Goering
                                    at Nuremberg

So, Dick Cheney doesn't want the latest batch of detainee-abuse photos released.

Huh - I wonder why?

Nuremberg, Germany, November 1945: The Nuremberg trials were underway. In a legal proceeding unprecedented in human history, the victorious Allied powers were prosecuting 21 Nazi defendants for their respective parts in the horrors inflicted on the world by Adolf Hitler's Germany over the previous 12 years. Fittingly, given the unprecedented scope of the atrocities, the prosecution was seeking to prove the Nazis guilty of a new crime in international law: the waging of aggressive war,  a war perpetrated against people and nations that posed no threat to Germany. Never before in history had such an ambitious prosecution been attempted, nor had such a daunting task been faced by those seeking justice.

Realizing the unique nature of the challenge facing it, the prosecution team elected to take advantage of the Nazis' own meticulous record-keeping to make their case for them.  Headed by former U.S. Attorney General and then-U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, the Allies intended to bury the Nazis under a mountain of their own documentation. The sheer literal weight of the evidence amassed against the defendants - including 250 tons of paper in all - insured that the tribunal, rather than looking like an episode of "Perry Mason," with a dramatic denouement presented to a gasping gallery of awestruck observers, more likely would be about as exciting as a reading of the New York City phone book.

*****

The film, "Nazi Concentration Camps," was a distillation of footage shot by Allied cameramen as their armies had liberated the death camps one by one in the final months of the war. The documentary was directed by Lt. Col. George C. Stevens, a noted Hollywood director in his own right (before enlisting, Stevens directed Woman of the Year; after the war, some of his most notable films included Shane, The Diary of Anne Frank, Giant and A Place in the Sun, the last two of which earned him Best Director Oscars).

The scenes, many of them familiar to us now, were absolutely shocking in their day: Bulldozers shoving tumbling corpses into open pits.  Bodies stacked like cordwood. Walking skeletons looking dazedly into the camera, uncomprehending. And then, just when the viewer's mind started to go numb, the camera would focus in on a single dead face among a literal pile of dead faces, eyes staring vacantly, glazed over, transforming the millions of deaths which (to paraphrase Stalin) up to that point were just a statistic, into the unspeakable tragedy of single death upon single death upon single death, repeated to horror.

The film lasted just under an hour. The effect on the mood in the courtroom can hardly be overstated.

Read the entire post here:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/5/18/727464/-Cheney,-Nuremberg-and-aggressive-war:-the-day-the-smirking-stopped

Here's a must-read article now up at Salon.com:

May 18, 2009 | On April 16, the Obama administration released four memos that were used to authorize torture in interrogations during the Bush administration. When President Obama released the memos, he said, "It is our intention to assure those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice that they will not be subject to prosecution."

Yet 13 key people in the Bush administration cannot claim they relied on the memos from the DOJ's Office of Legal Counsel. Some of the 13 manipulated the federal bureaucracy and the legal process to "preauthorize" torture in the days after 9/11. Others helped implement torture, and still others helped write the memos that provided the Bush administration with a legal fig leaf after torture had already begun.

The Torture 13 exploited the federal bureaucracy to establish a torture regime in two ways. First, they based the enhanced interrogation techniques on techniques used in the U.S. military's Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) program. The program -- which subjects volunteers from the armed services to simulated hostile capture situations -- trains servicemen and -women to withstand coercion well enough to avoid making false confessions if captured. Two retired SERE psychologists contracted with the government to "reverse-engineer" these techniques to use in detainee interrogations.

These are just the first three paragraphs of the article, which also includes a list of what they are calling "The Torture 13", each of whose role is described in detail:

1. Dick Cheney

2. David Addington

3. Alberto Gonzales

4. James Mitchell

5. George Tenet

6. Condoleeza Rice

7. John Yoo

8. Jay Bybee

9. William "Jim" Haynes

10. Donald Rumsfeld

11. John Rizzo

12. Steven Bradbury

13. George W. Bush

The MoDo plagiarism scandal has hit the international news circuit today. The UK Guardian has a great little piece up on it, include some great props for our dear old TPM:

It is an axiom of the new digital media age that high-profile political columnists should generally avoid copying other people's words without attribution. Nobody wants to have the p-word hung around their necks.

It is a further axiom of the age that if a columnist is to borrow a paragraph unattributed, then at least they should ensure it doesn't belong to Josh Marshall. The man behind Talking Points Memo is one of the sharpest, most deadly bloggers around.

*****

Marshall has an enviable track record of investigative reporting.

Through the New York-based Talking Points Memo, or TPM to its many fans, he broke the story of the Bush administration's politicised sacking of federal lawyers in 2007; his Muckraker blog is a scourge of corrupt politicians.

Unfortunately, the Guardian gives no credit to the person who actually broke the story, TPM reader "thejoshuablog". Still, it's great to see TPM getting some good publicity in the international press.

Oh brother, the right-wing birther nutcases are going to have a field day with this. MSNBC  and the AP are reporting:

CAIRO - When President Barack Obama addresses the Muslim world from Cairo next month, Egyptian officials hope he will choose 1,000-year-old Al-Azhar mosque, the heart of a revered institution for Islamic study, as his backdrop to convey U.S. respect for Islam.

The American Embassy in Cairo said no decision has been made yet on a venue for Obama's June 4 speech on U.S. relations with the Muslim world. But two Egyptian security officials said Thursday that an American advance team scouted five potential sites this week and narrowed it down to a short list of three -- the Al-Azhar mosque and two other locations connected to it.

Al-Azhar is one of the oldest, most prestigious and most influential institutions of higher learning for Sunni Islam.

Persoanlly, I love the symbolism. But as an art historian and architectural preservationist, I guess I have my own agenda for calling attention to historic architecture. Oh yeah, and I love anything that makes the wingnuts scream. Here's a view of the Al-Azhar mosque: 

GQ has the exclusive story on how Donald Rumsfeld incorporated crusade-themed biblical verses in the cover sheets of his daily top-secret intelligence briefings to President Bush:

These cover sheets were the brainchild of Major General Glen Shaffer, a director for intelligence serving both the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the secretary of defense. In the days before the Iraq war, Shaffer's staff had created humorous covers in an attempt to alleviate the stress of preparing for battle. Then, as the body counting began, Shaffer, a Christian, deemed the biblical passages more suitable. Several others in the Pentagon disagreed. At least one Muslim analyst in the building had been greatly offended; others privately worried that if these covers were leaked during a war conducted in an Islamic nation, the fallout--as one Pentagon staffer would later say--"would be as bad as Abu Ghraib."

But the Pentagon's top officials were apparently unconcerned about the effect such a disclosure might have on the conduct of the war or on Bush's public standing. When colleagues complained to Shaffer that including a religious message with an intelligence briefing seemed inappropriate, Shaffer politely informed them that the practice would continue, because "my seniors"--JCS chairman Richard Myers, Rumsfeld, and the commander in chief himself--appreciated the cover pages.

But one government official was disturbed enough by these biblically seasoned sheets to hold on to copies, which I obtained recently while debriefing the past eight years with those who lived them inside the West Wing and the Pentagon. Over the past several months, the battle to define the Bush years has begun taking shape: As President Obama has rolled back his predecessor's foreign and economic policies, Dick Cheney, Ari Fleischer, and former speechwriters Michael Gerson and Marc Thiessen have all taken to the airwaves or op-ed pages to cast the Bush years in a softer light. My conversations with more than a dozen Bush loyalists, including several former cabinet-level officials and senior military commanders, have revealed another element of this legacy-building moment: intense feelings of ill will toward Donald Rumsfeld. Though few of these individuals would speak for the record (knowing that their former boss, George W. Bush, would not approve of it), they believe that Rumsfeld's actions epitomized the very traits--arrogance, stubbornness, obliviousness, ineptitude--that critics say drove the Bush presidency off the rails.

The images are copy-protected, so I can't post them here, but you can see the GQ slideshow at:

http://men.style.com/gq/features/topsecret

For anyone who believes in the separation of church and state, this is about as disgusting as it gets.

One other thing, there seems to be a sudden surge (ha!) of anti-Rumsfeld sentiment this week. Any clues as to what is behind this current trend?

ps - It wasn't there when I started to put this together, but I see Josh has this up on the front page now. He must read Huffington Post over his Sunday morning coffee, too. Anyway, take a look, and come back to comment!