When Pfc. Lynndie England was convicted two years ago, we called her a scapegoat. Now, a military jury at Ft. Meade has found Lt-Col. Steven Jordan—the only officer to be court-martialled over the Abu Ghraib case—guilty of disobeying an order to keep silent about the abuse investigation. But they simply reprimanded him, sparing him a prison term. A day earlier, Aug. 28, he was acquitted of failing to control lower-ranking soldiers who abused and sexually humiliated detainees at the prison near Baghdad in autumn 2003. (The Scotsman, Aug. 30) Contrast the treatment dished out to his subordinates. From AP, Aug. 29:

In a victory for the Bush administration, the full 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals will reconsider a ruling that the government should charge Ali al-Marri, a legal US resident and the only suspected "enemy combatant" on American soil, or release him from military custody. The administration had asked the full 4th Circuit to review a three-judge panel's June 11 ruling. The Justice Department had argued that national security will be threatened if the administration is not allowed to indefinitely hold "enemy combatants" within the US.

An Aug. 13 statement from the National Lawyers Guild calling for repeal of the "Protect America Act" signed into law by George Bush Aug. 6:

Congress put its stamp of approval on the unconstitutional wiretapping of Americans by amending the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in the "Protect America Act of 2007."

In another exercise in understatement, this terrifying July 27 Washington Post piece by Walter Pincus is entitled "Bush order on freezing assets is unusually broad." Do those "threatening the peace or stability of Iraq" include striking oil workers and other civil anti-occupation forces?

WASHINGTON -- Be careful what you say and whom you help -- especially when it comes to the Iraq war and the Iraqi government.

A three-judge panel of US Court of Appeals in Washington DC July 20 ordered the government to turn over virtually all its information on Guantanamo detainees who are challenging their detention, rejecting an effort by the Justice Department to limit disclosures. The ruling opens the way for scores of cases by detainees challenging the actions of Pentagon tribunals that decide whether terror suspects should be held as "enemy combatants." It is the latest in a series of legal challenges to the administration's detention policies that have increased the pressure on the White House to find an alternative to Guantanamo, where about 360 men are now being held.

A very amusing New York Times profile July 21 of Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed, the former firebrand cleric who is now exiled in Lebanon and barred from returning to his former home of Britain. The man who once praised the 9-11 plotters is now attempting to negotiate a truce in the fighting between the Lebanese army and Fatah al-Islam. He says: "I want to support Muslims by saving their blood and their life. My job is to calm the fighting and to open a dialogue." Counterintuitively, he says that it is moderate Muslims who are most at risk of becoming jihadist cannon fodder:

"How come the moderate Muslims, not Omar Bakri, do this?" he demanded. "Because of Sheik Google," he quipped, referring to the use of the Internet to learn Islamic principles.

In a strange case of role-reversal, BBC July 20 takes the more Bush-friendly tack in reporting a new executive order on treatment of detained "terror suspects," writing in the lead that it bans "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment," while the headline states: "Bush bans terror suspect torture." Not until six paragraphs down do we get the requisite caveats from rights observers—and then in a quote from another news agency. Leonard Rubenstein, director of Physicians for Human Rights, told AP (BBC says): "What is needed now is repudiation of brutal and cruel interrogation methods. General statements like this are inadequate, particularly after years of evidence that torture was authorised at the highest levels and utilised by US forces." Meanwhile, the establishmentarian New York Times headline on the story reads "C.I.A. Allowed to Resume Interrogations," and the lead states: "After months of behind the scenes wrangling, the White House said Friday that it had given the Central Intelligence Agency approval to resume its use of some harsh interrogation methods in questioning terrorism suspects in secret prisons overseas." Gee, doesn't sound so good after all, does it? Is the BBC still so shaken over the scandal following the 2003 Hutton Report that they are determined to be more Catholic than the Pope?

The latest piece of overwrought effluent from Kurt Nimmo once again exemplifies the fundamental flaw with the Conspiracy Industry. Those sources from the mainstream media which support the Conspiracy Theory are taken as gospel truth; those which point the other way are dismissed as disinformation. It is a fundamentally dishonest as well as pathetically transparent propaganda trick. Alas, the Conspiranoids' legions of true believers never seem to get it. Nimmo writes, July 14 (emphasis added):