The practice has generated increasing criticism from civil liberties groups; in Sweden a parliamentary investigator who conducted a 10-month probe into the case recently concluded that the CIA operatives violated Swedish law by subjecting the prisoners to "degrading and inhuman treatment" and by exercising police powers on Swedish soil.

By 5 p.m., Swedish police had arrested both men and were waiting for the plane to arrive. Already, however, problems had begun to surface.

Two unnamed officials from the U.S. Embassy informed Swedish officers that there would be no room on the jet for them on the trip back to Cairo. The Swedes complained and were ultimately given two seats on the plane, but raw feelings persisted.

"I felt that they were backing into our territory," an unidentified female Swedish security officer told investigators, according to a transcript of her interview.

More conflicts arose after the plane landed. One Swedish officer walked up the steps of the aircraft to greet the crew and was surprised to see that the agents -- a half-dozen or so Americans and two Egyptians -- were wearing hoods with semi-opaque fabric around the face, even though the small airport was essentially deserted.

"I told them that you don't need to wear hoods because there is no one here," the officer recalled in his statement to investigators. The foreign agents ignored him.

The Swedish police said they were also perplexed by a demand from U.S. agents that they be allowed to strip-search the prisoners, even though the two men had already been searched and were in handcuffs. The Swedes relented after the captain of the plane said he would refuse to depart unless the Americans were allowed to do things their way, the documents show.

The prisoners were taken into the airport police station, one by one, to be searched.

One agent quickly slit their clothes with a pair of scissors and examined each piece of cloth before placing it in a plastic bag. Another agent checked the suspects' hair, mouths and lips, while a third agent took photographs from behind, according to Swedish officers who witnessed the searches.

As the prisoners stood there, naked and motionless, they were zipped into gray tracksuits and their heads were covered with hoods that, in the words of one Swedish officer, "covered everything, like a big cone."

The Swedes were disturbed by the search itself:

Inside an airport police station, Swedish officers watched as the CIA operatives pulled out scissors and rapidly sliced off the prisoners' clothes, including their underwear, according to newly released Swedish government documents and eyewitness statements. They probed inside the men's mouths and ears and examined their hair before dressing the pair in sweat suits and draping hoods over their heads. The suspects were then marched in chains to the plane, where they were strapped to mattresses on the floor in the back of the cabin. ...

 

..."Should Swedish officers have taken those measures, I would have prosecuted them without hesitation for the misuse of public power and probably would have asked for a prison sentence," the investigator, Mats Melin, said in an interview. He said he could not charge the CIA operatives because he was authorized to investigate only Swedish government officials, but he did not rule out the possibility that other Swedish prosecutors could do so.

President Bush's meticulously stage-managed presentations on Social Security have slowly shifted into a new phase, in which White House aides find misinformed young people to share the stage with the president and assert that Social Security won't be there at all when they retire.

And rather than correcting them on their misconception -- government estimates, after all, say that after 2041 Social Security will still be able to pay at least three-quarters of currently promised benefits without any changes -- Bush congratulates them on their perspicacity.

Froomkin says Bush is skillfully using carefully selected youth in his scare campaign:

He's still telling seniors not to listen to all those unspecified people trying to frighten them by saying their benefits are about to be cut.

But he himself is forcefully asserting to young people that for them, when it comes to Social Security, the sky is falling.

Froomkin also links to this Los Angeles Times story about how these poor little stooges are chosen.

However, Froomkin notes, less and less of the national media are bothering to cover the road show. And the President's push for Social Security seems weirdly disconnected from the struggle on Capitol Hill. And yesterday,  Robert C. Pozen, the business executive who developed the theory behind Mr. Bush's benefit cuts plan, "urged the president today to drop his insistence on using a portion of workers' taxes to pay for individual investment accounts," according to the New York Times.   

Maybe you're the kind of idiot who reads a story like this and has no reaction except "How dare the liberal media undermine our troops?" If so, listen up: The people responsible for this are the ones who are undermining the troops. The people who are too stupid to know that you don't do this when you're in a global battle for hearts and minds are the ones who betrayed our country.

And I'm referring less to the torturers than to the high mucketymucks who gave the go-ahead for this kind of interrogation or suggested with a nod and a wink that it was a good idea, while turning the job over to callow amateurs understandably flush with post-9/11 righteous indignation...

... the ugly truth is that there are a lot of liberals in this country, perhaps a majority of them, who don't support the troops, who -- as one poster on the Democratic Underground put it -- look at the our troops as "Cannon fodder and killers doing what they're told to do".

Of course, since most Americans have a very high opinion of our soldiers, liberals would face enormous political ramifications if they were honest about what they thought. So instead, we get surreptitious assaults on our military.

For example, part of the reason Abu Ghraib has gotten so much attention & the press keeps churning out 2 and a 1/2 year old stories about soldiers working over prisoners is because liberals can use it to smear the troops. "See? That's what they're all like behind closed doors! Sadistic savages."

Journalists are not just being targeted verbally or politically. They are also being targeted for real in places like Iraq. And what outrages me as a representative of journalists is that there's not more outrage about the number and the brutality, and the cavalier nature of the U.S. military toward the killing of journalists in Iraq. I think it's just a scandal.

 

It's not just U.S. journalists either, by the way. They target and kill journalists from other countries, particularly Arab countries, at news services like Al Jazeera, for example. They actually target them and blow up their studios, with impunity. This is all part of the culture that it is OK to blame the individual journalists, and it just takes the heat off of these media conglomerates that are part of the problem.

The backlash became so severe Thursday that staffers at Guild headquarters in Washington, D.C., stopped answering the phone because of abusive phone calls and "people screaming at us," Foley said. Instead, callers were required to leave messages on voice mail and await a return call.

"We don't want people to be subjected to that kind of abuse," Foley said, adding that the angry calls began early Thursday. "It is annoying, but it isn't deterring us from doing what we have to do." 

You can watch some of the war dances via Memeorandum. Here, for example, is La Shawn "we don't need no steenking freedom of speech" Barber:

A journalist named Linda Foley, president of the Newspaper Guild, has been caught on tape pulling an Eason Jordan. Watch and listen to her make vile, inflammatory, and unsubstantiated claims about American troops military (Pardon me!) targeting Arab journalists on this RealAudio video.

Among the "unsubstantiated claims" mentioned in the E&P article are the bombing of Al-Jazeera's Baghdad office in April 2003 (which a State Department spokesman said was "a mistake") and the deaths of Taras Protsyuk, a Ukranian reporter who worked for Reuters, and José Couso, a cameraman for the Spanish television station, Telecino, also in April 2003. These two and another Al-Jazeera reporter were killed when when an American tank fired on the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad, where most international journalists were staying.

These deaths occurred during the initial phase of the Iraq War (pre flightsuit prance), but Jeanne (link above) lists more such incidents dated through May 2004. And yes, war zones are very dangerous places, and yes, innocent people do become collateral damage. Maybe these sites were not deliberately targeted. Maybe these actions were mistakes. Maybe U.S. soldiers really did confuse Mazen Dana's camera with a rocket-propelled grenade. In a place where death can come at any moment from unexpected sources, I don't doubt soldiers get twitchy. I do not discount the possibility that these journalists were not targeted and that these deaths were accidental.

But Ms. Foley's charges are not "vile, inflammatory, and unsubstantiated." And in America citizens are not supposed to be bullied into silence when they question their government.

World Nut Daily quotes Sinclair Broadcasting bobblehead Mark Hyman:

Hyman called on Foley to immediately present evidence to support her claims or resign.

"Unfortunately, the damage may have already been done," he said. "Her remarks could lead to further bloodshed, including against Americans."

Hyman concluded: "The question is whether Newspaper Guild members will hold Foley accountable or will they give her a free pass in endangering American lives with inflammatory remarks without any proof?"

What "free pass"? There is a pattern of journalists in Iraq being killed by "mistake."  This is well substantiated. Ms. Foley believes these deaths were not "mistakes," and said so. This is called "free speech."

I wish I knew who said this--

I think what really creeps people out about fascism is that it allows the mob to oppress others, either inside or outside the state, willingly. The mob runs amok and controls itself and others in service of some ideal like national honor or virtue or glory. For the sake of these ideals, the mob votes away its freedoms. The state doesn't need to suppress dissent, at least initially, because the mob only too happily does it for itself. It really is like a democracy that has suddenly mutated and turned cancerous, its institutions rampant and without its usual curbs.

This quote was a comment left on Orcinus about a year ago that I kept, and now it is no longer online. All I can tell you is that the commenter's name is Melissa. But whenever the righties form their goon mobs to punish people who dare say what they don't want to hear, I think of this quote.

I assume the mob will be howling for Linda Foley's head for the next several days. Heaven help us all if they get it.

We have yet to see what's at the root, if anything, of the Newsweek story. But I think it's telling that some bloggers have devoted much, much more energy to covering the Newsweek error than they ever have to covering any sliver of the widespread evidence of detainee abuse that made the Newsweek piece credible in the first place. A simple question: after U.S. interrogators have tortured over two dozen detainees to death, after they have wrapped one in an Israeli flag, after they have smeared naked detainees with fake menstrual blood, after they have told one detainee to "Fuck Allah," after they have ordered detainees to pray to Allah in order to kick them from behind in the head, is it completely beyond credibility that they would also have desecrated the Koran? Yes, Newsweek bears complete responsibility for any errors it has made; and, depending on what we now find, should not be let off the hook. But the outrage from the White House is beyond belief. It seems to me particularly worrying if this incident further intimidates the press from seeking the truth about what the government is doing in the war on terror. It is not being "basically, on the side of the enemy," as Glenn Reynolds calls it, to resist the notion of government-sanctioned torture and to report on it. It is patriotism and serving the cause that this war is about: religious pluralism and tolerance. The media's Abu Ghraib?? When Mike Isikoff is found guilty of committing murder, give me a call. Austin Bay still insists that Abu Ghraib did not constitute "deadly torture." The corpses found there (photographed by grinning U.S. soldiers) would probably disagree. (Will Bay correct?) Three factors interacted here: media error/bias, Islamist paranoia, and a past and possibly current policy of religiously-intolerant torture. No one comes out looking good. But it seems to me unquestionable that the documented abuse of religion in interrogation practices is by far the biggest scandal. Too bad the blogosphere is too media-obsessed and self-congratulatory to notice.

We’re seeing unfold a contemporary example of the age old ambition of power and ideology to squelch — to punish the journalist who tell the stories that make princes and priests uncomfortable.

Hear me: an unconscious people, an indoctrinated people, a people fed only partisan information and opinion that confirm their own bias, a people made morbidly obese in mind and spirit by the junk food of propaganda is less inclined to put up a fight, ask questions and be skeptical. And just as a democracy can die of too many lies, that kind of orthodoxy can kill us, too.

...the rules of the game permit Washington officials to set the agenda for journalism, leaving the press all too simply to recount what officials say instead of subjecting their words and deeds to critical scrutiny. Instead of acting as filters for readers and viewers sifting the truth from the propaganda, reporters and anchors attentively transcribe both sides of the spin invariably failing to provide context, background or any sense of which claims hold up and which are misleading.

In an echo, the [New York] Times wrote vitually the same thing, adding that in America, a child's economic background is a better predictor of school performance than in Denmark, the Netherlands, or France. The best that could be said was that class mobility in the United States is ''not as low as in developing countries like Brazil, where escape from poverty is so difficult that the lower class is all but frozen in place."

Oh joy. This is what we have come to? Comparisons to developing countries?

The New York Times article Jackson quotes (from May 15) is here. The authors, Janny Scott and David Leonhardt, write [emphasis added],

Today, the country has gone a long way toward an appearance of classlessness. Americans of all sorts are awash in luxuries that would have dazzled their grandparents. Social diversity has erased many of the old markers. It has become harder to read people's status in the clothes they wear, the cars they drive, the votes they cast, the god they worship, the color of their skin. The contours of class have blurred; some say they have disappeared.

But class is still a powerful force in American life. Over the past three decades, it has come to play a greater, not lesser, role in important ways. At a time when education matters more than ever, success in school remains linked tightly to class. At a time when the country is increasingly integrated racially, the rich are isolating themselves more and more. At a time of extraordinary advances in medicine, class differences in health and lifespan are wide and appear to be widening.

And new research on mobility, the movement of families up and down the economic ladder, shows there is far less of it than economists once thought and less than most people believe. [Click here for more information on income mobility.] In fact, mobility, which once buoyed the working lives of Americans as it rose in the decades after World War II, has lately flattened out or possibly even declined, many researchers say.

The Times article links to supporting data. A couple of other promising resources, mentioned by Derrick Jackson, are the organizations United for a Fair Economy and the Institute for Policy Studies.

The New York Times article, which promises to be the first article of a series, admits that on the surface class divisions in the United States are eroding. These days, unlike in generations of the past, you can't always tell where a person falls on the socioeconomic continuum by his dress, his speech, his race, his religion. In the U.S., just about everyone who considers himself "middle class," which is most of us, has a standard of living our grandparents might have envied. We live in bigger homes and have dishwashers and enormous color televisions sets that get 300 channels (showing Law and Order reruns, but still...) and big refrigerators with built-in ice dispensers; and we have computers and cell phones and need to join gyms to get enough exercise. So what's the problem?

I wrote a couple of weeks ago, in a different context, that we're living in an era of pretend normalcy. "Normalcy" in the United States is upward mobility, increasing standards of living, more and better technological doodads to make our lives easier or more fun. For the past thirty years or so, vast numbers of Americans who call themselves "middle class" have worked more and more frantically to make their world "normal." A second income is no longer extra money, but essential to survival. Personal debt grows to cancerous proportions. In fact, we're no longer just stuck on treadmills; we're performing high-wire acts. One slip, one missed paycheck, one injury not covered by health insurance, and down we go. And don't expect a safety net.

How much longer can we keep this up before we notice it ain't normal?

(By contrast, after World War II, the government launched a public service campaign to persuade people it was OK to spend money and buy themselves nice things. The children of the Depression were so accustomed to hard-core frugality that, even when they had more money to spend, it took some doing to get some of them to spend it).

Last Sunday the Cabbage burbled that  "The G.O.P. succeeds because it is seen as the party of optimistic individualism." No, the G.O.P. succeeds because it is the party of cognitive dissonance. The difference between low-income Republicans and low-income Democrats is that the Dems accept reality; "normal" isn't normal. Low-income Republican voters, on the other hand, still believe in the Upward Mobility Fairy.

Let's go back to Derrick Jackson:

In 1973, the ratio of CEO pay to worker pay was 43 to 1. By 1992, it was 145 to 1. By 1997, it was 326 to 1. By 2000, it hit a sky-high 531 to 1. The post 9/11 shakeouts and corporate scandals of recent years on the surface narrowed the gap back to 301 to 1 in 2003. But a much worse parallel global gap is emerging in the era of outsourcing. United for a Fair Economy published a report last summer that found CEOs of the top US outsourcing companies made 1,300 times more than their computer programmers in India and 3,300 more than Indian call-center employees.

Such groups say if the minimum wage kept up with the rise in CEO pay, it would be $15.76 an hour instead of its current $5.15. Looking at it another way, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, another often written-off liberal think tank, published a report last month that in the last three years, the share of US national income that goes toward corporate profits is at its highest levels since World War II, while the share of national income that goes to wages and salaries is at a record low.

How did this happen?

This completes a perfect storm over the last quarter century of corporate welfare for those with the most among us and vilification for those with the least. Americans have been seduced by simplistic notions of rugged individualism to vote more to punish people (welfare mothers, prison booms, and affirmative action in the 1990s, and gay marriage in 2004) than for programs and policies that might lead to healing the gaps (national healthcare and revamped public schools).

And this, folks, is what's the matter with Kansas, and it goes back a lot further than the 1990s. The Greatest Generation saw nothing wrong with helping themselves economically through government programs. But I remember well that by the mid-1960s, the glory days of the Civil Rights movement, the white middle class was telling itself that the evil ol' "welfare state" had to be dismantled. This is not a coincidence. Domestic "entitlement" programs were fine when the white majority perceived that these programs helped them, their aged parents, and their growing children. But by the mid-1960s the middle class was floating in a seemingly inexhaustible pool of expanding prosperity. And when they started thinking of domestic spending as a transfer of their wealth to other (and darker) people, those spigots got turned down pretty durn fast. "Values" issues, certainly, also have been used skillfully to drive a wedge between people and their own economic interests, but social wedge issues aren't the whole story.

As Jackson says, and as I've been writing over the past several days, the real transfer of wealth in America has been from working, salaried people whose labor creates the wealth to their corporate overlords. Wage-earning Republican voters continue to support this transfer even as the tightrope gets longer, the balance pole gets shorter, and the safety net beneath them is being dismantled.

(Remember the Philip Agre essay, "What Is Conservatism and What Is Wrong With It"? Agre defines conservatism as "the domination of society by an aristocracy," and  "it is crucial to conservatism that the people must literally love the order that dominates them." Further, he says, aristocracy prevails by tricking the rest of society into deferring to it. Well, here you go.)

Derrick Jackson concludes:

It is obvious that Americans believed that none of the inequalities long endured by the poor (because it's all their fault, right?) would seep into our lives. We were wrong. With suburban schools slashing their budgets, healthcare costs rising, retirement funds in doubt, and the next generation facing a drop in their life span from obesity and diabetes, the nation is sliding into a dangerous place.

A quarter century of a ''mine, all mine" ethos continues to work for CEOs and the upper class. The rest of America finds the ladder taller and steepening. Much of the nation is now one catastrophic injury away from falling into poverty. It should be a national emergency that stratification in the richest nation in the world has us fading from the relative mobility of Europe and sinking toward the discouragement in developing countries.

It is no wonder why politicians who protect the wealthy scream ''class warfare" every time someone talks about inequity. It is a diversion to keep those who vote against their own interests from realizing they are victims of friendly fire.

Scott and Leonhardt of the Times write, "Blind optimism has its pitfalls. If opportunity is taken for granted, as something that will be there no matter what, then the country is less likely to do the hard work to make it happen." Blind optimism is the snake oil the Republicans are selling to working people. Ownership society! Best health care system in the world! Tax cuts! Step right up and get your prosperity!

Let's face it; reality is a harder sell.

The United States administration turned a blind eye to extensive sanctions-busting in the prewar sale of Iraqi oil, according to a new Senate investigation.

A report released last night by Democratic staff on a Senate investigations committee presents documentary evidence that the Bush administration was made aware of illegal oil sales and kickbacks paid to the Saddam Hussein regime but did nothing to stop them.

The scale of the shipments involved dwarfs those previously alleged by the Senate committee against UN staff and European politicians like the British MP, George Galloway, and the former French minister, Charles Pasqua.

In fact, the Senate report found that US oil purchases accounted for 52% of the kickbacks paid to the regime in return for sales of cheap oil - more than the rest of the world put together.

"The United States was not only aware of Iraqi oil sales which violated UN sanctions and provided the bulk of the illicit money Saddam Hussein obtained from circumventing UN sanctions," the report said. "On occasion, the United States actually facilitated the illicit oil sales.

The righties are still holding victory orgies to celebrate the slaying of the great beast Newsweek, but they might want to take a break and pay attention to this new twist in UNscam, because it could be huge. The best  blog analysis I've seen so far is from Steve Soto at The Left Coaster: 

We already know that Bush let Zarqawi get away several times in the year before the war, and now the man is killing our soldiers. We now find out that Bush allowed Hussein to enrich himself illegally at a time when Bush was planning to invade his country and commit our troops to toppling him. Worse yet, Bush had the US Navy provide escort to the ships of Odin Marine, who were shipping Saddam's crude from an unauthorized Iraqi port to Jordan, with Saddam getting kickbacks for these transactions as late as early 2003. Bush was helping Saddam line his pockets in the months leading up to the invasion, and some of that money probably helped finance what our soldiers are enduring now. What was the reason for allowing Saddam to profit from illicit oil deals circumventing the UN program? To allow Jordan and Turkey to get a source of oil that was hindered by the UN sanctions against Iraq,and to buy their support in other areas. Yet the US not only knew about it and condoned the enrichment of Saddam, but provided a navy escort for the oil shipments.

Bush and the GOP have the gall to call for Kofi Annan’s head over the administration of the Oil for Food program, and now it turns out that Bush let a member of the Axis of Evil profit from illegal transactions when just months later it was Saddam’s noncompliance with UN requirements that was cited by Bush as a reason for going to war? And we now find out that the Bush Treasury Department stonewalled the Volcker Commission's efforts to find out the US role in these illicit transactions, even after Colin Powell's State Department pressed Treasury.

You'd think the depths of Bushie corruption wouldn't surprise me any more, but I'm stunned. It's been obvious for several months that the Bushies were hyping UNscam to discredit the UN and keep the natives stirred up. They must have figured no one would notice they were the biggest scammers.

A little background: A Senate subcommittee for Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs chaired by Norm Coleman (the Republican who occupies Paul Wellstone's seat) has been holding hearings on the oil-for-food scandal. You'll remember the United Nations oil-for-food program, which was designed to let Saddam Hussein to sell oil in exchange for humanitarian goods to benefit the Iraqi people. However, it is charged that Saddam sold vouchers for oil to some journalists and politicians, including Koji Annan, son of Kofi. These vouchers could be sold at a profit. . The Bushies have made robust use of this scandal to innoculate the Bush Regime from UN criticism.

Sen. Coleman has been releasing reports that accused several people, including the above-mentioned Mr. Galloway, of being on the take (see, for example, this Power Line post). But in advance of Mr. Galloway's Senate testimony today, Democrats on the committee (the ranking member is Carl Levin, but I don't know if he was directly involved) released information that, apparently, Coleman was sitting on. Namely, that the biggest "taker" was the Bush Administration itself.

An amusing sidebar: Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs (to which I do not link) refers to Mr. Galloway as a " pro-terrorist antisemitic"  because of his alleged participation in the kickback scheme. So what does that make George W. Bush? And can we hang him yet?*

The Times of London reports today,

Last week the seven Republicans and six Democrats on the Senate permanent subcommittee on investigations claimed to have uncovered “significant evidence” that Mr Galloway was allocated millions of barrels of oil by Saddam’s regime as it systematically abused the UN’s Oil-for-Food programme.

But Mr Galloway, the former Labour MP who won an upset victory as an antiwar Respect Party candidate in the general election, was in fighting form yesterday as he prepared to board an aircraft at Heathrow.

“I am going to accuse them of being involved in a huge diversion from the real issues in Iraq, which are the theft of billions of dollars worth of Iraq’s wealth by the United States of America and its corporations, and the deaths of more than 100,000 people in Iraq, the destruction of the country, the opening of the doors to Islamic extremism of the al-Qaeda variety, tremendous crimes they have committed in Iraq,” he said.

When he arrived in Washington, he added: “I have no expectation of justice from a group of Christian fundamentalist and Zionist activists under the chairmanship of a neocon George Bush who is pro-war. I come not as the accused but as the accuser.”

Here is Steve Soto's review of the Galloway testimony, plus Galloway's reaction.

Skippy the Bush Kangaroo links to an Associated Press/International Tribune story that says another person accused by Coleman's committee, former interior minister of France Charles Pasqua, accuses the Bush Administration of carrying out a campaign against France because of its opposition to the Iraq War.

Also: Don't miss "Bush to Retract War." And this is why "Countdown" with Keith Olbermann is the only cable news show I can stand to watch.

*Note to thought police: This is a joke. I am opposed to capital punishment. I retract the hanging suggestion. Please don't decapitate any more horses.