The Washington Post has obtained the statements provided by detainees from Abu Ghraib who were asked to describe in their own words what happened to them in Tier 1A at the prison. The other side of the pictures we’ve seen is that the detainees were savagely beaten if they balked at being humiliated and photographed. It’s impossible to describe how angry the story makes me.

Respectful of Otters describes a social program that just works today. Unsurprisingly, despite its low cost and absurdly high effectiveness at actually saving money (and lives), it’s often a political target.

The Sacramento Bee has a depressing interview with a Marine who has returned from Iraq. It really drives home the point that any soldier who fights in a war is a victim of it.

So on May 11, conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote a column with the headline, “For Iraqis to Win, the U.S. Must Lose.” The point was pretty basic — the people who eventually end up with power are not going to be people who are seen as US stooges. Going into the war, the biggest US stooge was Ahmed Chalabi. As it turns out, the Bush administration was his stooge, but I doubt that’s how it’s perceived in Iraq.

Earlier this week, Chalabi’s funding was cut off by the Pentagon, as of today he’s been thrown off the Interim Governing Council, and his home and offices have been raided. That would seem to indicate that he’s completely out of favor with his former allies in the Bush administration, but perhaps the alternate explanation makes more sense. Recent polls have shown that Muqtada al-Sadr, who has been under assault by the coalition for a couple of months, is the second most popular leader in Iraq. The most popular, Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani, has had a somewhat rocky relationship with the coalition as well. Could it be that the Pentagon is throwing Chalabi in the briar patch in order to boost his legitimacy going into the handover on June 30 and the elections (whenever they happen)? As it is, Lakhdar Brahimi has said he isn’t going to include Chalabi in the caretaker government, so Chalabi is out of power in a month either way. If he’s the guy the the Pentagon really trusts, then kicking him while he’s down may be the best move possible to increase his political viability. This possibility was raised in a comment over at Dangerousmeta, and I felt compelled to post about it myself.

Update: Josh Marshall makes a pretty good argument that the conspiratorial view of Chalabi-related events is probably off base.

The Washington Post runs an editorial today that makes the point I was trying to make yesterday, which is that responsibility for the torture (and murder) of detainees goes straight to the top, based strictly on the evidence that we now know to be fact. The Denver Post has a widely linked story today that talks about prisoner deaths while in custody.

I don’t know how realistic the talk of reinstitution of the draft is, but I do find it a bit disturbing that twice in the past few weeks I’ve gotten spam encouraging me to jion the National Guard. The most recent spam was sent to the contact address for a domain name that I have registered (it’s not an address that has ever been used for anything else), so I know for certain that I didn’t sign up for something and get these emails as a side effect. It’s just spam. The spam itself looks professionally produced, so the question is who is paying for a spammer to recruit for the National Guard?

Change for America reports that Kerry’s latest campaign theme is taken from the title of a poem by Langston Hughes, Let America Be America Again. I have to admit that when I saw it, it made me think of an episode of The West Wing when the staff adopted the slogan “Let Barlet be Bartlet.” I wonder if most other people will make the same association?

One problem in the world of big and growing scandals is that as allegations and revelations spill out, it’s hard to keep track of which facts are actually in dispute. On one hand, this makes it easy for the people with grudges to make outrageous claims, but on the other side, it makes it possible for the people accused of wrongdoing or their supporters to argue against the most bogus claims and then pretend like their arguments dismiss the scandal altogether. We’re seeing a lot of that in the torture scandal. But, here are a few things that nobody disputes at this point, and which makes it perfectly clear that the responsibility for the scandal falls on the Pentagon, not on the prison guards or even their superiors:

1. Torture is part of the interrogation process at Guantanamo.
2. The Pentagon sent the guy who set up the torture program at Guantanamo to Iraq to make recommendations on how they could extract more information from prisoners they had captured.
3. He ordered that the guards at the prison be placed under the authority of the interrogators, and that the purpose of the guards was to set the conditions for successful interrogation.
4. The guards at Abu Ghraib started torturing the prisoners.

Even if nothing else that is being reported is true (highly unlikely), the facts as listed above are not in dispute. Given those facts, I don’t see how the civlian leadership at the Pentagon isn’t on the hook.

If you like the Daily Show, you’ll love the commencement speech Jon Stewart gave this year at his alma mater, William & Mary.

If you’re considering using JBoss for a project, you may want to consider the fact that the company encourages its employees to post at The Server Side (and probably on other sites) anonymously, trashing their competitors and critics and boosting the company. As it turns out, the comments were posted “anonymously” rather than anonymously, and the shills have been revealed.