Sotheby's to sell a raggedy-ass copy next month in New York City. Habeas corpus not included.

With the Lieberman-Kyl Amendment's momentous move toward a pre-emptive strike on Iran, now's as good a time as any to sell off the Magna Carta. As everyone can see, George W. Bush has poked enough holes in it to reduce its value.

In our era of take no prisoners, but if you do, hold them unlawfully at Abu Ghraib, Gitmo and various torture chambers around the world — new AG Michael Mukasey is bound to agree and, more importantly, he'll be much more effective at running that game on us than Alberto Gonzales was. So it makes sense to peddle this piece of civil-liberties paper to the highest bidder.

In December, Sotheby's plans to do just that in New York City. The privately owned copy, dated 1297, is expected to fetch $20 million to $30 million — undercoating included. But after the past seven years of the Bush-Cheney regime's erosion of the ancient document's key provision on habeas corpus, the question is whether it's worth the vellum it's scrawled on.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's appearance in New York City coincides perfectly with the attempt by war hawks Joe Lieberman and Jon Kyl to push us into a pre-emptive strike on Iran. Rapping the Iranian ruler's knuckles was so easy that it was bound to stir up the populace and take their minds off the tragedy in Iraq.

The New Yorker's Seymour Hersh wrote years ago about the current administration's thirst for Persian blood, and various Israeli officials have beat those drums too.

That's all we need: another war to produce more prisoners whose rights of habeas corpus we can deny.

Here's a question, raised in 1979 by the mellifluous Mighty Diamonds:

Thirty years later, the answer's clear: The Pentagon, that's who. At best we'll get the "rogue security contractor" excuse from the Bush regime for Sunday's cacophonous killing of 11 Iraqis in Baghdad by the North Carolina mercenary army Blackwater.

That excuse has worked before. As I wrote in July 2004, it was used by the Pentagon after the Abu Ghraib tortures came to light. SecDef Don Rumsfeld blamed "rogue" soldiers.

Our memories are short when it comes to the mercenaries employed by the Bush regime. As I pointed out in August 2004, private "interrogators" from CACI were employed by the Pentagon at Abu Ghraib, where all that "fear up" went down.

After this latest incident of privatized violence, we have Blackwater saying its boys were ambushed. Blackwater has 1,000 "troops" in Iraq and guards Ambassador Ryan Crocker. Yes, they guard Crocker, and the administration guards them. Monday's Washington Post concisely captured the two versions of the latest Blackwater escapade. Here's the first:

Followed by the second version:

They wanted to shoot them some Ay-rabs, pal. The way I see it, the Mighty Diamonds sang about the possibility of dreadlocked Rastafarians someday making bodyguards pay the price:

But don't worry, Blackwater bodyguards, the Bush regime will shelter you. Iraq's citizens are the ones who can't hide. As of this morning, IBC's "documented civilian deaths from violence" totals somewhere between 72,596 and 79,187.

Yes, the Blackwater "incident" was notable. But as the IBC "recent events" list notes, on that same Sunday, many other Iraqis died, and not at the hands of American mercenaries, whom our press continues to euphemistically label "contractors" or "bodyguards."

One of the victims was a 12-year-old boy who was killed in Diwaniya during a raid by U.S. and Iraqi troops, according to news reports assembled by IBC. Wonder what happened there?

In any case, this particular bloody Sunday was predestined. IBC's list of 38 people who were killed just the day before includes this entry:

And this one:

Lieutenant Colonel Steve Jordan's acquittal of charges in his court-martial over Abu Ghraib tortures should have been no surprise. Only a week ago, some of the most serious charges against Jordan — including that he lied — were dropped just before the court-martial began.

It didn't matter that the Abu Ghraib scandal — and its coverup — reached all the way up to the White House of Dick Cheney. Check out my August 22 piece, "Chains of Command," for links to the Washington Post series on Cheney and to great stuff by the New Yorker's Seymour Hersh.

The Post's Josh White reports today:

What's curious is that White's story today doesn't at least mention the previous dropping of charges. After all, White's excellent August 21 story reported it:

White explained the situation quite well in his earlier story, just before the court-martial trial began:

In any case, don't let Abu Ghraib slip down the memory hole. We've known for a long time that the genesis of the abuse was in D.C., that it was a rogue presidency, not just rogue soldiers. Read Hersh's June story on Taguba and Taguba's own 2004 report.

To unravel the tortured excuses for Abu Ghraib abuses, go back to June 25, a day of brilliant journalism.

Once so proud of plans for "War on Terror detainees" that they even showed off their special Gitmo chains and other jewelry, the Bush regime's various soldiers are now crying, as the Nazis did, "We were only following orders." Or they're saying, "Hey, I didn't even give the orders."

Blame them, but save the biggest share of blame for their higher-ups — all the way up to Vise President Dick Cheney.

The freshest example is that of Lt. Col. Steven L. Jordan, whose court-martial right now at Fort Meade, Maryland, for Abu Ghraib abuses that occurred on his watch is a travesty of cover-up upon cover-up.

Despite the fact that the soldiers under Jordan got off by torturing and humiliating prisoners — most of whom were innocent and none of whom were of any intelligence value — Jordan himself will probably get off with a wrist-slap.

Today's account of this extremely important trial is buried on page A14 of the Washington Post:

The news cycles of real news, especially follow-ups, cause so much frustration. How can anyone put his or her hands around what's going on?

Abu Ghraib blazed in the headlines in 2004, but now that details of who did what and when are coming out, it's considered old news. That's why I try to salt my posts with so many links. All we can do is point to some stories that point to the facts and provide context.

And one unmistakable fact is that no matter what happens to Jordan, the torture scandal goes all the way up the chain of command, right into the White House run by Dick Cheney.

When it comes to Abu Ghraib, all you really have to do is focus on just one day's worth of brilliant journalism. Go back to this past June 25 and you'll see what I mean.

Now, I'm not faulting the Post for burying today's Jordan story. It has kicked the ass of the New York Times on almost every topic since the Bush regime came to power. While Jordan's court-martial continues, go back and re-read the Post's stellar series on Cheney, particularly Barton Gellman and Jo Becker's June 25 "Pushing the Envelope on Presidential Power," which I wrote about that day. Here's how that Post story began:

Remarkable stuff. Too bad it didn't come out before the November 2004 presidential election.

If you really want to understand how such a coverup happened — and what tragic roles this Colonel Jordan and various other officials played in this sick drama —go back to Seymour Hersh's brilliant piece "The General’s Report: How Antonio Taguba, who investigated the Abu Ghraib scandal, became one of its casualties," also published on June 25.

Taguba's investigation (PDF of his report) was circumscribed by his higher-ups, Hersh reveals. And of course now it comes out that Jordan supposedly wasn't read his rights at the proper time and he might skate on serious charges.

What about the people above — way above — Jordan? Hersh's reporting explodes the Bush regime's lame excuse that Abu Ghraib's abuses were the work of a few "rogue soldiers":

Rogue soldiers? No, a rogue presidency.

Here is something to snack on while you watch the main course, Don Rumsfeld, get grilled at today's Tillman hearing.

Thanks to Henry Waxman, we have not only a copy of Rumsfeld's statement today but also some letters that shed light on who knew what when where and how. Well, a little light anyway.

Rumsfeld to Tillman: I luv ya, guy.

Rumsfeld to Tillman's family: Zip.

Rumsfeld to investigators: I don't recall.

See the last one below.

We're listening to Connecticut GOP congressman Chris Shays actually congratulate Don Rumsfeld for "calling the bluff" of "critics" by appearing at today's hearing on the Pat Tillman coverup. Shays makes Rumsfeld's behavior sound like a profile in courage.

Tune it in yourself.

Now Dennis Kucinich is grilling the hell out of Rumsfeld. Too bad he has only five minutes.

Rumsfeld tells Kucinich: "I have not been involved in any coverup whatsover."

Kucinich replies: "Well, thank you for acquitting yourself. But we were talking about the Department of Defense."

You know, the department that Rumsfeld was running?

Even under friendly fire just before Kucinich stepped in for Rumsfeld's five minutes of hell, Rumsfeld said he never had a discussion with anyone in the White House about "press strategies" regarding Tillman's death and the spin the regime put on it.

Well, what about Rumsfeld's aides and George W. Bush's aides? They were all talking about it via e-mail — see the incontrovertible proof in this four-page PDF made available by House Oversight Chairman Henry Waxman.

It shows that Rumsfeld's speechwriter Heddie Henderson and Bush speechwriter John Currin were in close touch with the same Army flack in April 2004 to nail down details of how they were going to handle the Tillman references. This was just before Bush's speech at a reporters dinner.

At the time, the Pentagon knew that Tillman had been killed by friendly fire. They were keeping it from Tillman's family so the regime could continue to score p.r. points by portraying Tillman as a hero killed by enemy fire.

Rumsfeld is trying to say that all this stuff took place so far under him that he didn't know. Yeah. Like his speechwriter is so far, far under him.

Former SecDef goes to Capitol Hill to finally answer for Tillman coverup — or at least face some unfriendly fire. Watch it live.

Three years after the Pentagon covered up the circumstances of soldier Pat Tillman's actual death by fratricide in Afghanistan so it could falsely portray it as a death by hostile fire, thus taking the country's mind off Abu Ghraib, Don Rumsfeld finally has to answer questions about it.

The hearing's going on right now, thanks to dogged California congressman Henry Waxman — and only because of the 2006 midterm elections that wrestled control of the House from the GOP.

Why C-SPAN isn't televising it on its main channel is beyond me, but you can catch it right now on Waxman's excellent site, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, of which he is now chairman. For background, read Waxman's opening statement and Waxman's hearing this past April on the Tillman coverup.

As the ranking minority member during the first six years of the Bush-Cheney regime, Waxman lobbed shell after shell at the disgraceful conduct before and during the war on Terra — and on many other issues as well. Now Waxman has the power to put Rumsfeld in his sights.

Just a few minutes ago, Rumsfeld began his opening statement by saying, "I want to extend my deepest sympathies to the Tillman family."

Well, he said the same thing to them in the spring of 2004. But what he forgot to tell them at that time — although he knew it — was that Tillman was actually killed by his fellow soldiers in a terrible screwup. The Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal covered up the real circumstances, even from Tillman's family, so that it could score p.r. points. The cabal trotted out Bush to make the point that the dastardly enemy killed Tillman and that his was a noble sacrifice.

Steve Coll of the Washington Post (now at the New Yorker) first uncovered this sordid public-relations maneuver, which has enraged Tillman's family. Check out Coll's brilliant work from December 2004.

The current Pentagon, under Bob Gates, has continued to cover up the actions of top officials. Only a few days ago, Richard Sisk of the New York Daily News wrote:

Oh, now former Joint Chiefs chair Richard "Quag" Myers is talking about the "heartbreak" suffered by the Tillman family. But Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney is saying to Myers, "Why didn't you tell the Tillman family the truth?" All they're doing right now is trying to get them to apologize. Maybe it'll get better. Check it out.

On January 6, 2005, Texas senator John Cornyn kicked off the confirmation hearings for attorney general wannabe Alberto Gonzales by introducing him as "an inspiration to anyone." Well, Gonzales certainly inspired Chuck Schumer yesterday. The New York senator brought out the perspiration in Gonzales.

Call me Ishmael, but Spencer Ackerman and Paul Kiel did a whale of a job on tpmmuckracker.com, quickly posting commentary and clips of Schumer and Arlen Specter lobbing spears at the AG's blowhole.

At one point, Gonzales said he "clarified" a previous statement by calling Washington Post reporter Dan Eggen and retracting it. A few minutes later, Gonzales was forced to admit that one of his aides actually contacted Eggen and that Gonzales himself didn't know what was said.

Eggen was more charitable in his front-page story this morning, but his nut graf was this:

What a tough job it is to be one of the handlers of Gonzales or Bush. You got to watch those two like a hawk. And what the hell do you do when either of them is nakedly grilled? (See the full transcript of yesterday's hearing for an answer.)

In unrehearsed moments, their performances are staggering. Death-penalty foe Sister Helen Prejean (Dead Man Walking) recalls an anecdote by Tucker Carlson that left even that Bush fan astonished at the president's callousness and stupidity while the two discussed one of the people Bush had killed, Karla Faye Tucker.

Has there ever been a lawyer who's worse at thinking on his feet? Not much of a shock that Gonzales looked stupid yesterday. Sometimes pols intentionally act that way, of course. It may be difficult to tell whether Gonzales is lying or just plain dumb as a post, but the probable answer: both. He was grossly unqualified in the first place to be attorney general, as the confirmation hearings a year and a half ago showed. See my "Torture in Real Time" coverage of Gonzales trying to answer questions about the then-fresh Abu Ghraib scandal. (The full transcript of the January 6, 2005, session is here.)

Ted Kennedy was apoplectic during the confirmation hearings as he questioned Gonzales on the "techniques" of "live burial."

Yesterday's hearing showed how that's actually carried out.

Nobody should be surprised at Gonzales's performance. Russ Feingold noted back in January 2005 that, during Gonzales's term as counsel to Governor George W. Bush — when Bush became the hangingest governor in U.S. history — Gonzo didn't prepare memos on each case until the day of the execution.

Gonzales insisted that the memos merely "summarized discussions," what he called a "rolling series of discussions" with Bush "about every execution."

That was a lie. Alan Berlow's masterful "The Hanging Governor," way, way back in May 2000 in Salon, noted:

A lot shorter, in other words, than yesterday's strangling.

This morning's L.A. Times report that the U.S. and its allies are killing more Afghan civilians than the Taliban are could be just the tip of the coffin.

In Iraq, documents that the ACLU pried from the War Department indicate that the U.S. often rejects claims — even defying judges' rulings — that its troops have killed innocent civilians. And one of those rejected claims shows that a seldom-used word — "incorporeity" — is creeping into the wartime language.

Judges are granting "incorporeity damages" for civilian deaths, as the document below shows, but U.S. officials often rejected such claims. In the case below, an Iraqi claims that his son was killed by troops as he approached a checkpoint on his way to market. A judge valued the son at $7,500 — $5,000 for "killed my son" and $2,500 for "incorporeity damages" — but U.S. officials said his behavior was "threatening" and refused to pay.

Heretofore not used to describe the death of Iraq civilians, "incorporeity" comes from "incorporeal," according to my OED, which I guess you could say backs up the U.S. position: The first OED definition of "incorporeal":

The second definition gets right to it:

That's accurate. As I pointed out in October 2004, General Tommy Franks remarked early on, "We don't do body counts," but others were, including Iraq Body Count, which has documented 65,000 violent deaths so far. It used to be that we did most of the killing, but now of course it's the rebels' bombs and suicide runs that account for most of it. Nevertheless, IBC noted in a March 2007 rundown:

Check out the batch of Iraq death claims yourself at this ACLU page; there's even a search engine on civilian casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The same kind of destabilizing is happening in Afghanistan, where Hamid Karzai's government is shakier all the time. This morning's L.A. Times story notes:

The Times story tries to be fair:

Well, it's not true that no Western soldier wakes up in the morning with the intention of harming a civilian. How about the Abu Ghraib tortures, which my colleague Graham Rayman recently revisited?

A better example is soldier Steven Green, leader of a rape crew that prosecutors say got drunk, put on masks, invaded an apartment, raped a 14-year-old girl and killed her and her whole family.

Green's now facing the death penalty, so maybe at some point he'll become incorporeal himself.

Blow up the candles. Blow them up all over the world. George W. Bush's 61st birthday is tomorrow, July 6. Things are so bad that even the Presidential Prayer Team, focusing on "Today's Immediate Concerns," is praying as we speak that our troops come home:

Naturally, the prayer team's birthday wishes for Bush take precedence over a bunch of Okies and Kansans, not to mention people from his adopted home state. But for Bush — remember his slow reaction to the tsunami and his performance before and after Hurricane Katrina — natural disasters aren't his focus.

Manmade disasters are his thing. So buy at least 3,583 candles.

Yes, Bush's birth date, among other things, makes him a Cancer with a capital "C." As for our de facto president, Dick Cheney, you'll have to wait six months to celebrate his next birthday: He turns 67 on January 30, 2008.

It should have already dawned on you that we really are living in the age of Aquarius.

Grabbing onto the coattails of the Washington Post's brilliant series, "Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency," Democratic party activists and consultants are wailing that "Dick Cheney is a war criminal."

I guess that makes the whole host of Democrats who went along with the regime's march to war during the crucial Congressional votes of October 2002 "war schlemiels."

The Post series is indeed explosive. As this morning's dispatch, "Pushing the Envelope on Presidential Power," by Barton Gellman and Jo Becker, shows, Cheney and other top officials personally brainstormed how to violate the Constitution and perfect the torture of Arabs captured during the War of Terror.

Basically, Cheney acts as if he were a sheikh, kind of a Dick of Arabia. No wonder Halliburton, which continues to take cues from ex-CEO Cheney and kept paying a salary to the vice president through at least the first six years of his reign at the White House, has fled to Dubai. The United Arab Emirates is one of the most repressive regimes on Earth. Our own State Department says:

Otherwise, Dubai, where the world's tallest building is being erected, is a great place. It's the dream of people like Cheney. Business and government are one and the same. Most of the workers are foreigners — only 5 percent of Emirati citizens work. Development has run amuck. An oligarchy controls everything.

Burdened by an intolerable climate (as hot as Phoenix and as humid as Houston), Dubai is bursting with outrageous resorts. It's a playpen for the rich — more like a sandbox.

D.C. isn't the greatest place, either, and it's also a playpen, as the Post series points out. From this morning's piece:

Hope there's a special section in the George W. Bush Presidential Libary on Cheney. Actually, that library should be only a wing to Dick Cheney's tome tomb.

Where were the Post and other U.S. media back in the spring of 2005 when the Times of London — one of Rupert Murdoch's papers — revealed what became known as the Downing Street Memo and other documents laying out the furtive plotting in 2002 behind the unjustified invasion of Iraq?

Coming off the bench at the last minute to fight against release of further Abu Ghraib photos and videos, General Richard "Quag" Myers has apparently wowed Judge Alvin Hellerstein with an argument that flies in the face of facts.

Hellerstein, hearing the case in Manhattan federal court, hasn't decided whether to let the public see these additional torture/abuse photos, but he promises to do so quickly. If he buys Myers's argument that bad publicity from release of the photos would endanger our troops to the extent that the material shouldn't be shown to us, that's bad news.

The public needs to know the full scope of the prison abuses. Maybe then, the public would exert more pressure on the Bush regime to stop trying to white-knuckle its way to the bitter end of the Iraq debacle.

For now, you can keep track of this vital case via the ACLU and other sites, including the excellent legal-news source Jurist, which also has links to Myers's affidavit to the court and other stuff.

The AP reports this morning that the judge expressed hesitation during Tuesday's hearing in New York to release additional photos and videos from Abu Ghraib, as requested by the ACLU:

The judge questioned whether he could disregard arguments by Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who has warned that releasing the photos would aid al-Qaida recruitment, weaken the Afghan and Iraqi governments and incite riots against U.S. troops.

"How can I ignore the expert opinion of General Myers, who is concerned with the safety of his troops?" the judge asked. "I can't substitute my opinion for the opinion of General Myers."

But Myers's affidavit is based on the unstated fallacy that most of the bloodshed in Iraq has been caused by the insurgents.

The Bush regime is desperate to prevent release of the photos because they would prove harmful to the Bush regime, whose approval ratings are plummeting. Safety of the troops is secondary, as it has been throughout the Iraq fiasco.

In the general's "second amended declaration" to the court, dated August 26, Myers said:

Among the goals of the insurgency are to use violence against innocent civilians … . The insurgents will use any means necessary to incite violence and, specifically, will focus on perceived U.s. or Coalition mistreatment of Iraqi civilians and detainees as a propaganda and recruiting tool to aid their cause.

Thus, for example, we have documented situations in which insurgents have falsely claimed that U.S. actions in Iraq, rather than their own terrorist attacks have caused death and suffering.

Yes, the insurgents do doctor photos and present false evidence. No doubt. But the facts are that we have killed more civilians than the insurgent terrorists have. As I pointed out last month, most of the bombs exploding in Iraq are ours.

Iraq Body Count's detailed study released in late July estimated 25,000 civilian casualties so far and asked, "Who did the killing?" The answers:

• US-led forces killed 37% of civilian victims.

• Anti-occupation forces/insurgents killed 9% of civilian victims.

• Post-invasion criminal violence accounted for 36% of all deaths.

• Killings by anti-occupation forces, crime and unknown agents have shown a steady rise over the entire period.

What puts our troops in danger in Iraq is their continued presence in Iraq.

Whatever plans George W. Bush's handlers have for the rest of the world, they'd better get it in gear.

We don't know how many revolutions per minute the POTUS was spinning Wednesday on his bike ride while that Cessna, unbeknownst to him, was heading for the White House. But on the other side of the planet, it's no joke: Things are spinning out of control in the dictatorships we've embraced.

Their revolutions, in other words, may trump Bush's, and his helmet (see photo above) won't protect him when he crashes.

Anti-American rioting has spread from Afghanistan into Pakistan, as the Washington Post reports:

The unrest was triggered by a brief report in the May 9 edition of Newsweek that interrogators at Guantánamo had placed Korans in bathrooms and "flushed a holy book down the toilet." Desecration of the Koran is punishable by death in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Pakistan protested to the U.S. government last weekend about the alleged abuse.

Diplomats and officials have been taken aback by the intense reaction, which was exacerbated by a police crackdown on anti-U.S. protesters in the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad on Wednesday that left four dead and more than 70 wounded.

How in the world could they be taken aback?

Anyway, there's more. The long-oppressed people of Uzbekistan, one of the Bush regime's key allies, are starting to openly rebel against dictator Islam Karimov, whose 15 years of arresting people for practicing Islam are surely coming to an end.

Prisoners in Uzbekistan are beaten and boiled to death and their family members are raped in front of them. Meanwhile, Karimov's strictly controlled press celebrates his reign, and he proudly shows himself off with celebrities like Don Rumsfeld.

U.S. officials have had many chances to speak out against Karimov's outrageous human-rights violations—as the U.K.'s Craig Murray courageously did when he was ambassador to Tashkent—but we pointedly haven't. Our ambassador, Jon Purnell, has barely opened his mouth.

Forget the hype from the Bush regime. When it comes to democracy, this administration is usually on the wrong side.

That's certainly true in Asia. In a February 24, 2004, press conference in Tashkent starring Rumsfeld, Karimov, and Purnell, a Reuters reporter had this exchange with Rumsfeld:

Reuters: You spoke of this strategic framework, of the relationship between two countries. Uzbekistan said yesterday they’re going to free a 62-year-old woman from jail, who human rights activists say was jailed on trumped-up charges because she revealed that her son had been tortured to death in prison. Do you welcome this, sir, and to what extent will improvements in human rights in this country deal with continued U.S. military aid to Uzbekistan?

Rumsfeld: Well, obviously our relationship with this country and other countries is multi-faceted. I mentioned the military-to-military relationship because I’m involved with the Department of Defense, but it’s also a political and economic relationship. Needless to say the United States and the other NATO countries are always interested in seeing reform not just in the military, but also in the political and economic areas. I’m not intimately knowledgeable about the statement you just made, but my understanding is that from the Ambassador that—that is in fact the case and that the Embassy has expressed their awareness of that and I forget what the phrase was but—the Ambassador pointed out that they were pleased that the decision was made.

No wonder we're seen by common folk the world over as a defender of human rights and democracy. The Reuters reporter pressed the issue:

Reuters: Sir, did you discuss human rights with the President and the other officials?

Rumsfeld: In all of our meetings, the broad range of topics were discussed, the political and human-rights issues, as well as, economic issues and military-to-military issues. Yes—

A little more than a year later, Karimov had better get on his own bicycle and pedal his way out of the country as fast as he can. Peter Finn of the Washington Post explains why:

Resentment over a government campaign against alleged Islamic extremists exploded into violence in the Central Asian republic of Uzbekistan Friday when protesters stormed a local prison in the eastern city of Andijan, freeing thousands of inmates and triggering protests that left at least nine people dead, according to government officials and telephone interviews with local residents.

We've got a big military base in Uzbekistan—built by Halliburton, of course. If we have to start packing it up, why not hire Halliburton to do it for us?

The fact is that the enmity we've sowed in the Muslim world is just about ready for harvest.

Meanwhile, Bush pedals away, and if anyone needed more proof that he's merely a prop for Dick Cheney et al., the Cessna scare the other day in D.C. was it.

A testy press briefing by White House flack Scott McClellan yesterday reads like a "Who's on First Alert?" routine. (Thanks to colleague Syd Schanberg for the tip.) Editor & Publisher scooped it up, publishing choice excerpts and saying:

On the day after more than 30,000 people—including the vice president, the first lady, and a former first lady—were evacuated from their offices or homes in Washington, D.C., but the president, who was biking in Maryland, was not notified until the threat passed, reporters grilled Press Secretary Scott McClellan at his daily briefing.

For those who might have missed it on TV—that is, nearly everyone— … McClellan continually refers to "protocols" and reporters essentially ask, "Wouldn't most men like to know when their home is evacuated and their wife is hustled to a secure bunker?" They also wonder about the small matter of the president being commander in chief and the capital, theoretically, coming under attack.

What's even more bizarre is that Cheney was evacuated and taken away from the place while Laura Bush and Nancy Reagan, who was visiting the White House at the time, weren't. Meanwhile, George W. Bush, who was riding his bike outside the city, wasn't even notified about the Cessna incident until after it was over. Sure, he was riding his little bike and he had his little helmet on, but c'mon.

Now we're told there's an investigation of this "47-minute delay" in notifying the president. Can't wait for the results of that probe.

Meanwhile, here's part of the exchange between reporters and McClellan, from the White House site:

Q: I'm just finishing up the timeline. Mrs. Bush and Mrs. Reagan were put in a secure location in the White House—so the bunker, I assume?

McClellan: I will just leave it at that they were taken to a secure location.

Q: In the White House?

Q: On the grounds?

McClellan: They were here at the White House and they were taken to a secure location.

Q: You can't say on the grounds or off the grounds? All right. But you're saying that—but the Vice President was actually evacuated—

McClellan: That's right.

Q: —off the grounds?

McClellan: That's correct.

Q: That's correct. Why the distinction, given the history of this?

McClellan: Well, the Secret Service has security precaution protocols that are in place. And as I mentioned at the beginning, those precautions were followed. That's what they have in place. And it was consistent with the protocols that were in place.

In other words, if Bush is pedaling his bike, don't bother the little feller. Let him play. We'll put him before the cameras when we need him. But for God's sake, protect Cheney. He's the one who made all the decisions, such as they were, on 9/11. As long as there's oil underneath other countries, protect Cheney.

In the unlikely event that Bush isn't biking but is reading—say, The Pet Goat—don't disturb him then either. The grownups have everything under control. Except for the billions of Muslims angry at us.

Lynndie England's life has degenerated into little more than a double-wide soap opera. But before you wash your hands of her, feast on this link between her and last week's holier-than-thou National Day of Prayer—and to the Bush campaign chest and predatory lending. Connect the dots and you'll see there's a chicken in every plot:

• Before enlisting in the Army, the Abu Ghraib poster girl worked in a chicken-processing plant an hour's drive from her Fort Ashby, West Virginia, trailer, according to USA Today.

• The most popular such plant for Fort Ashby residents—it's exactly 59 minutes away, according to MapQuest—is the huge Pilgrim's Pride chicken-processing complex in Moorefield, West Virginia.

• In July 2004, PETA released a video— secretly shot inside the Pilgrim's Pride plant in Moorefield—that showed murder most fowl:

Workers were caught on video stomping on chickens, kicking them, and violently slamming them against floors and walls. Workers also ripped the animals’ beaks off, twisted their heads off, spat tobacco into their eyes and mouths, spray-painted their faces, and squeezed their bodies so hard that the birds expelled feces—all while the chickens were still alive.

This stomach-turning stuff—and its link to England's home state—was noted at the time by several bloggers, including those on Digestible News.

Say, that "stomping" sounds familiar. I wrote about that technique last summer in "You Flinched!"—an item about testimony from an Abu Ghraib soldier.

Also last summer, Princeton ethicist Peter Singer made the connection between the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and the torture of chickens at Moorefield. In a Los Angeles Times op-ed piece he co-wrote (and that was re-posted by Dangerous Citizen), Singer noted:

The sickening images echo the snapshots and videotapes that found their way out of another inhumane facility: Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

In both Baghdad and Moorefield, W.Va., a simple cruel dynamic was at work. When humans have unchecked power over those they see as inferior, they may abuse it. Slaughterhouse workers do not expect to be chastised for hurting animals. And the American soldiers at Abu Ghraib clearly did not expect punishment, or they would not have posed for photographs. In both instances, laws or treaties that should have protected against the abuses were unknown or ignored. That is not surprising: Where much abuse is allowed, the protections that do exist are unlikely to be taken seriously.

The Department of Justice has considered in detail when prisoners in the war on terror may be exempt from the humane protections of the Geneva Convention. The government has long since made that leap with animals. Chickens, for example, are exempt from the U.S. Humane Methods of Slaughter Act.

Singer didn't mention Lynndie England, but I'll bet she didn't treat chickens any better than she treated Iraqis.

• Pilgrim's Pride is the second largest chicken producer in the country. Here's how Reuters (through Yahoo's page on the company) puts it:

During fiscal year ended October 2, 2004 (fiscal 2004), the company sold 5.3 billion pounds of dressed chicken and 310.2 million pounds of dressed turkey and generated net sales of $5.4 billion.

Its profit margins were gross:

For the 26 weeks ended 4/2/05, revenues rose 13% to $2.74 billion. Net income totaled $104.9 million, up from $43.2 million. Revenues reflect an increase in chicken sales. Net income also reflects an increase in gross profit margins.

• Operating out of the Pilgrim's Pride home office in Pittsburg, Texas, the company's owner, Lonnie "Bo" Pilgrim (see photo), is one of the country's major individual donors to George W. Bush and the Republican Party. He was a "Minor League Pioneer" for Bush in 2000 and a "Major League Pioneer" for Bush in 2004, according to Texans for Public Justice.

Recall the company's history: In 2002, TPJ reminds us, Pilgrim's Pride recalled 27 million pounds of meat after one of its plants was thought to be the source of "a listeria outbreak that killed eight people, caused three miscarriages, and hospitalized dozens of victims." Heavily fined by environmental regulators for illegally discharging massive amounts of chicken shit and other filth, Pilgrim's Pride was at the same time "the 10th largest recipient of federal agricultural subsidies from 1995 through 2002," adds TPJ.

• Bo Pilgrim wears his fundamentalist Christianity on his sleeve and on his butcher's apron. As Marv Knox of the Baptist Standard quoted him as saying in 2002:

There's no doubt that God wanted me to exemplify being a Christian businessman. I have that feeling, and I am forever conscious of that. I'll go out and make lots of talks around the country. There's where I give Jesus credit for everything I am.

Start of digression: Knox tried to get Pilgrim to solve an age-old puzzle. Here's the exchange:

Knox: With all your history in chickens, do you know why the chicken crossed the road?

Pilgrim: I wish I could give you the answer. I guess everybody has a different answer, but I never really coined an answer for why the chicken crossed the road.

End of digression.

• Last year, Bo Pilgrim, who controls more than 60 percent of his huge, publicly traded company, put Keith W. Hughes on its board of directors.

Hughes was the CEO of Associates First Capital, a subprime lender accused of predatory lending.

Associates First was so notorious that in 2000, the giant company's last year of independent existence, the United Methodist Church's pension fund, the Priests of Sacred Heart, the Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word brought a shareholders resolution to try to get the company to investigate itself for predatory lending and clean up its act. The resolution failed.

The government's case against Associates First was settled only after Citigroup swallowed Hughes's company and coughed up $215 million to the Federal Trade Commission to pay off 2 million former customers. At the time of the 2002 settlement, it was the largest in FTC history.

• Last Thursday (May 5), George W. Bush hosted the annual National Day of Prayer ceremony in the East Room of the White House. The first speaker was Shirley Dobson, wife of right-wing radio evangelist James Dobson. Shirley Dobson is also chairman of the National Day of Prayer—yes, she calls herself "chairman" and "Mrs. Shirley Dobson."

After the choir stopped singing, Shirley Dobson stepped to the microphone in the White House, fawned over the Bushes for a little bit and officially launched the National Day of Prayer. (You can watch her performance, and Bush's speech, on the White House site.)

Millions of Americans, she said, "will seek the grace of God" today. She added:

For example, Pilgrim's Pride, one of America's largest producers of chicken products, is holding prayer observances in 56 of its facilities in 17 countries.

It was the only company she mentioned. (She did say that 150,000 people were supposed to gather at Daytona Beach Speedway to try to crash the pearly gates. Yee-haw!)

With the saccharine tone and sing-song cadence of a beauty pageant contestant's spiel, she praised Pilgrim's Pride but scolded the rest of us.

That scolding stuff is a familiar rap by the right-wing Christians—it's all explained by Shirley Dobson on her "Prayerfully Yours" page of the National Day of Prayer website:

As sinners saved by grace we must realize not only that we don't deserve God's favor, but that we do deserve His wrath! The miracle of God's grace is that He extends mercy to us in spite of our wickedness and rebellion against Him. Put another way, "mercy" is not getting what we deserve, and "grace" is getting what we don't deserve.

We need not look very far to see that our country stands in desperate need of God's healing touch. We have killed over 40 million babies since 1973, and saturated ourselves and our children with pornography and filth. We have numbed ourselves with drugs and alcohol, and taught our kids that premarital sex is a good thing if it is simply done right. We have pursued materialism and false security, while ignoring the Architect of our souls.

As a nation, we have rebelled against the Creator. Our culture is steeped in immorality and self-sufficiency and is growing increasingly hostile toward religious expression.

Self-sufficiency? Have we fallen that far?

I know some chickens that could use "God's healing touch." But anyway, back to the White House. To her audience in the East Room, Mrs. Shirley Dobson toned it down a little bit, saying that her dictionary defines "grace" as something that's "undeserved," and adding:

Almighty God continues to bless America despite the fact that we corporately and individually have turned our backs on Him in many ways.

But our Creator is patient with us, granting His favor and forbearance even though we don't deserve it.

Speak for yourself, Mrs. America.

The president, of course, is a key part of any Christian puppet show. When Bush took the microphone, he smiled at the Dobsons and said:

I want to thank Shirley Dobson, the chairman of the National Day of Prayer. Thank you for organizing this event and thank you for your wonderful comments.

Why did the chicken cross the road? To escape from these religious nuts. The rest of us humans could also use a wing and a prayer.

Thursday's British election will cap a delightfully raucous campaign—delightful even if you forget about the underlying issues of the Bush-Blair war of terror.

No one puts this in clearer focus than Craig Murray, who was hounded out of his post as U.K. ambassador to Uzbekistan after he publicly rebuked that dictatorship for torture, including boiling people to death. Now Murray is running for Parliament in Thursday's election against his former boss, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw.

Murray's a key figure in exposing the evil practice of "rendition," in which the U.S. and Great Britain send detainees to Uzbekistan and other countries to be literally squeezed for information. The CIA, in fact, has done this.

Since the Bush regime's deadly combination of neocons and profiteers decided to use 9/11 as an excuse to launch a "war on terror," Uzbekistan's dictator, Islam Karimov, has become a big buddy of ours.

And for all the God talk by the Bush regime, it's supporting a dictator who tortures people for practicing their religion—in Karimov's case, the main religion he persecutes is Islam, so I guess it's OK. Here's how Guardian (U.K.) columnist George Monbiot wrote about it in '03:

There are over 6,000 political and religious prisoners in Uzbekistan. Every year, some of them are tortured to death. Sometimes the policemen or intelligence agents simply break their fingers, their ribs and then their skulls with hammers, or stab them with screwdrivers, or rip off bits of skin and flesh with pliers, or drive needles under their fingernails, or leave them standing for a fortnight, up to their knees in freezing water. Sometimes they are a little more inventive. The body of one prisoner was delivered to his relatives last year, with a curious red tidemark around the middle of his torso. He had been boiled to death.

His crime, like that of many of the country's prisoners, was practising his religion.

Strictly by coincidence, Halliburton "won" a $22.1 million contract to build something called Camp Stronghold Freedom in Uzbekistan.

Karimov is a harsh, repressive schmuck, like Saddam Hussein, who, as you may recall, was once our pal. In the '80s, Don Rumsfeld traveled to Iraq to pal around with Saddam. Now he does the same thing with Karimov (see photo below).

Don Van Natta of the New York Times wrote a lengthy piece about the U.S.'s "rough ally" a couple of days ago, including this passage:

Uzbekistan's role as a surrogate jailer for the United States was confirmed by a half-dozen current and former intelligence officials working in Europe, the Middle East and the United States. The C.I.A. declined to comment on the prisoner transfer program, but an intelligence official estimated that the number of terrorism suspects sent by the United States to Tashkent was in the dozens.

Big surprise. Murray has been talking about this for a couple of years, making headlines everywhere in the world except the U.S.

Not until the jump did Van Natta's May 1 story mention Murray:

"If you talk to anyone there, Uzbeks know that torture is used—it's common even in run-of-the-mill criminal cases," said Allison Gill, a researcher for Human Rights Watch who is working inside Uzbekistan. "Anyone in the United States or Europe who does not know the extent of the torture problem in Uzbekistan is being willfully ignorant."

Craig Murray, a former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, said he learned during his posting to Tashkent that the C.I.A. used Uzbekistan as a place to hold foreign terrorism suspects. During 2003 and early 2004, Mr. Murray said in an interview, "C.I.A. flights flew to Tashkent often, usually twice a week."

In July 2004, Mr. Murray wrote a confidential memo to the British Foreign Office accusing the C.I.A. of violating the United Nations' Prohibition Against Torture. He urged his colleagues to stop using intelligence gleaned in Uzbekistan from terrorism suspects because it had been elicited through torture and other coercive means. Mr. Murray said he knew about the practice through his own investigation and interviews with scores of people who claimed to have been brutally treated inside Uzbekistan's jails.

"We should cease all cooperation with the Uzbek security services—they are beyond the pale," Mr. Murray wrote in the memo, which was obtained by the Times.

Well, they didn't. In fact, Murray got into trouble with his bosses. Van Natta glossed over it, writing:

Mr. Murray, who has previously spoken publicly about prisoner transfers to Uzbekistan, said his superiors in London were furious with his questions, and he was told that the intelligence gle