From The Consortium News
By Jason Leopold

The Pentagon’s decision to drop war-crimes charges against Mohammed al-Qahtani, the alleged “20th hijacker” in the 9/11 attacks, again underscores the consequences of the Bush administration’s descent into torture and other abusive treatment of “war on terror” detainees.

If al-Qahtani’s case had gone forward, the U.S. government would have been forced to reveal its own violations of the Geneva Convention, anti-torture statutes and the laws of war, according to lawyers representing al-Qahtani.

“All of the [incriminating] statements Mohammad al-Qahtani made or is alleged to have made were the result of torture or made under the threat of torture and that is in my view why the government decided to dismiss his case at this point,” said Vince Warren, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) in New York.

CCR has been representing Mohammed al-Qahtani since 2005 and has led the legal battle for the human rights of detainees incarcerated at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for the last six years.

The harsh treatment of al-Qahtani was catalogued in an 84-page log of his interrogation that was leaked in 2006. The so-called “torture log” shows that beginning in November 2002 and continuing well into January 2003, al-Qahtani was subjected to sleep deprivation, interrogated in 20-hour stretches, poked with IV’s, and left to urinate on himself.

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From TruthDig
By Marie Cocco

For weeks after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when images of twisted metal and smoldering debris still filled television screens and the wail of bagpipes at firefighters’ funerals sounded day after day, there was one face that seemed to embody the terror. It was that of Mohamed Atta, ringleader of the suicide hijackers, with his steely eyes and tight lips that appeared to reflect the evil within.

Seven years later, if we were to seek a portrait that is emblematic of the way the United States has tried—and failed—to bring those responsible for the heinous plot to justice, we would have to produce a photograph of Mohammed al-Qahtani.

If such a photo were made public, it would probably show a battered man with signs of diminished mental capacity, a man who authorities concede was so badly abused—those outside the Bush administration call his treatment torture—that he will not be tried by a military commission with other alleged plotters of the 9/11 attacks. The Pentagon has formally dropped charges in the case against Qahtani, conceding that most of the evidence it has came from Qahtani’s own coerced statements, made after abusive interrogations.

“He’s in very poor condition mentally and I would say even physically,” says Gitanjali Gutierrez, a lawyer with the Center for Constitutional Rights who is representing Qahtani in other pending cases. She said she could not be more specific about his condition because the notes she took on her last visit with him at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have yet to be declassified.

For years, military and law enforcement authorities have considered Qahtani a prime catch. He was dubbed the “20th hijacker” after it came to light—only after the attack—that he had been stopped by a suspicious immigration inspector at the Orlando, Fla., airport in August 2001 and refused admittance to the United States. Following the attacks, he was caught up in the international sweeps and brought to Guantanamo, where the Bush administration has held hundreds of men it suspects of terrorist ties—without trial or charge, and without showing evidence against them.

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From The Washington Post
By Jonathan Weisman and Paul Kane

House Republicans turned on themselves yesterday after a third straight loss of a GOP-held House seat in special elections this year left both parties contemplating widespread Democratic gains in November.

In huddles, closed-door meetings and hastily arranged conference calls, some Republicans demanded the head of their political chief, while others decried their leadership as out of touch with the political catastrophe they face.

GOP leaders sought yesterday to “re-brand” the party with a new slogan and renewed pledges of fiscal rectitude and limited government. But the slogan — “The Change You Deserve” — came under mocking fire, because it parallels Democratic presidential front-runner Barack Obama’s “Change We Can Believe In” motto and it mirrors the advertising slogan for the antidepressant Effexor.

“What we’ve got is a deficiency in our message and a loss of confidence in the American people that we will do what we say we’re going to do,” conceded Rep. Tom Cole (Okla.), chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee.

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From The NY Times
By Adam Nagourney and Carl Hulse

The Republican defeat in a special Congressional contest in Mississippi sent waves of apprehension across an already troubled party Wednesday, with some senior Republicans urging Congressional candidates to distance themselves from President Bush to head off what could be heavy losses in the fall.

The victory by Travis Childers, a conservative Democrat elected in a once-steadfast Republican district on Tuesday, was the third defeat of a Republican in a special Congressional race this year. In addition to foreshadowing more losses for the party in November, the outcome appeared to call into question the belief that Senator Barack Obama of Illinois could be a heavy liability for his party’s down-ticket candidates in conservative regions.

Republicans had sought to link Mr. Childers to Mr. Obama in an advertising campaign there. Republican leaders said they were looking to Senator John McCain of Arizona, the likely Republican nominee, as a model whose independent reputation appears to allow him to rise above party in a year when the Republican label seems tarnished.

But Mr. McCain’s advisers said the Mississippi race underlined his intention to distance himself as much as possible from Congressional Republicans. Mr. McCain has already been openly critical of some of President Bush’s strategies.

Read more Fears

From The Nation
By John Nichols

It was a weary and wistful Hillary Clinton who sat down with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer and other network anchors for extended interviews in the middle of the day Wednesday. She knew that, no matter what she said, and how well she said it, it would not be enough.

Like the coronation march that her 2008 campaign was supposed to be, her latest gambit would be trumped by Barack Obama’s juggernaut.

Yes, she had just been handed a face-saving landslide win by West Virginia Democrats, beating Obama by more than 2-1 in an honest-to-goodness swing state. But Clinton did not seem to be fighting very hard on a day when her senior campaign adviser, Harold Ickes, was disptached to Capitol Hill to reassure congressional supporter that the former frontrunner would remain in the race through June 3.

Clinton used her precious spotlight time to defend Obama as a friend of Israel, describe his supporters as people who thought he would be the best president and promised to “work my heart out for whoever our nominee is.” Indeed, if she made news Wednesday, it was with a seeming show of openness to an as-yet-unoffered place on an Obama-led ticket. Clinton did not dismiss the vice-presidential talk – and she certainly did not resort to the old dig of suggesting she might have a place on her ticket for the senator from Illinois – she simply it was “premature” to talk about what she would be doing after her campaign was done.

Read more Elbowing Aside

From The Niagara Falls Reporter
By Bill Gallagher

She is a woman. She is a white woman. She is a manly white woman. In her desperate quest for the presidency, Sen. Hillary Clinton’s campaign ramped up gender, race and machismo as the factors she wants the Democrats to consider in selecting the party’s nominee.

Watching Clinton’s campaign melting is an ugly sight. Her ruthless tactics are deplorable and divisive, not just for the party, but for the nation as well. As the reality of her failure sets in, and with Sen. Barack Obama now snatching the lead among superdelegates, Clinton has sounded slightly more conciliatory, but only after firing off a few more vile volleys at her rival.

After Obama pulled off an impressive victory in the North Carolina primary and Clinton eked out a narrow victory in Indiana — with Rush Limbaugh’s “ditto heads” providing the margin of her victory at his urging — Clinton provided post-election analysis that certainly pleased Rush and his right-wing chorus.

Clinton told USA Today that, in spite of Obama’s lead in the popular vote and number of state victories, she has “a much broader base to build a winning coalition.” If she left it at that, her remarks could be written off as innocuous political spin.

But then Clinton plunged into a graceless, destructive message that contained disturbing class and racial overtones. She cited and twisted an Associated Press article “that found how Sen. Obama’s support among working, hardworking Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me. There is a pattern emerging here.”

The pattern is Clinton’s willingness to say just about anything to advance her bleak chances of snaring the nomination from Obama. And if that means exploiting racial divisions, so be it. Sen. Clinton is essentially saying the black guy can’t win and only she can.

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From The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
By Jay Bookman

Race has been in the room since the beginning. It was there in Philadelphia, where the Founding Fathers debated slavery in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution. It is there now, two centuries later, still playing a central if sometimes hidden role in politics.

But in the election of 2008, the first in which a black person stands a reasonable chance of becoming president, the role of race will be far from hidden.

In ways large and small, the weeks and months ahead will test just how far we’ve come as a nation.

For some individuals, the answer will be not very far at all. In Marietta, for example, a tavern owner is proudly selling T-shirts depicting Barack Obama as a monkey holding a banana. Naturally, he professes to see nothing racist in the image.

Likewise, a few months ago a minor Republican Party official here in Georgia sent a mass e-mail to fellow party members and others featuring Photoshopped images of top Democrats.

In one, a bawling Chelsea Clinton is seen holding a T-shirt proclaiming “My mom is getting her ass kicked by a Negro,” as if there were some special shame in that.

In the second, Bill and Hillary are seen standing near a plantation house with a black-faced lawn jockey. The face on the lawn jockey is that of Obama.

Read more Transcending Race

From The LA Times
By Rosa Brooks

Can you forgive her?

In March, Lenore Skenazy, a New York City mother, gave her 9-year-old son, Izzy, a MetroCard, a subway map, a $20 bill and some quarters for pay phones. Then she let him make his own way home from Bloomingdale’s department store — by subway and bus.

Izzy survived unscathed. He wasn’t abducted by a perverted stranger or pushed under an oncoming train by a homicidal maniac. He didn’t even get lost. According to Skenazy, who wrote about it in a New York Sun column, he arrived home “ecstatic with independence.”

His mother wasn’t so lucky. Her column generated as much outrage as if she’d suggested that mothers make extra cash by hiring their kids out as child prostitutes.

But it also reinvigorated an important debate about children, safety and independence.

Reader, if you’re much over 30, you probably remember what it used to be like for the typical American kid. Remember how there used to be this thing called “going out to play”?

For younger readers, I’ll explain this archaic concept. It worked like this: The child or children in the house — as long as they were over age 4 or so — went to the door, opened it, and … went outside. They braved the neighborhood pedophile just waiting to pounce, the rusty nails just waiting to be stepped on, the trees just waiting to be fallen out of, and they “played.”

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From The Pgh Post Gazette
By Brian O’Neill

Nobody says this out loud for fear of scaring the children, but have you taken a look at the national debt lately?

We’re nearing $9.4 trillion and will be there before this newspaper yellows. We’ve had a reliable increase of roughly a half-trillion dollars a year under President Bush, but it looks as if he may leave office without quite doubling our debt. Sometimes you just run out of time.

The question today, class, is which presidential candidate is most capable of keeping us living well beyond our means?

Sen. John McCain, the Republican candidate, plans to stick with the administration plan: Continue fighting the Iraq War; don’t bother paying for it.

The Democratic candidates both say they’ll wind down the war, pushing Iraqis to figure out Iraq for themselves, but it’s not as if either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton plans to stop spending. Each favors greatly expanding health care. That won’t be cheap.

As Americans, we’ve been taught to expect something for nothing, so nobody is asking any candidate to get real. But as long as we’re going to stick our children and grandchildren with a tab north of $10 trillion, we should at least check the historical record. In our Internet age, daily updates are easily available at www.treasurydirect.gov.

Read more Trillions in Debt

From The Virginian Pilot
By Daryl Lease

The commercial opens with a sweeping aerial view of a lush, green lawn and a long, white-pebble lane leading to a stately brick manse. Birds chirp pleasantly in the distance.

As the camera draws closer, a sunshine-yellow Hummer limo rolls into view, then sputters to a loud stop.

A man emerges hurriedly from the back, back, baaack seat, one hand gripping a briefcase, the other gesticulating wildly. The birds fall silent. The camera zooms in for a close-up…

“Out of gas! If I’ve told that chauffeur once, I’ve told him a million times: Fill up the Hummer every few blocks and this won’t happen! That’s why we drill for the oil, for crying out loud, so we can use it!”

The man starts to trudge down the lane but, within a few steps, takes notice of the camera. Reflexively, he lifts his briefcase to shield his face.

“Are you from ‘60 Minutes’?” he asks, his voice muffled.

Silently, the camera pans slowly back and forth to indicate “no.”

The man stops, lowers the briefcase and smiles broadly. “Oh, right! The burnish-our-image commercial! I’d forgotten we’re doing that today. Well, come along! ”

The man resumes walking. The words begin to tumble out: “A lot of Americans - well-meaning Americans, not just the greenie weenies - don’t understand what we’re up against.”

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