1. The Washington Post reports House passes compromise wiretapping bill. The only thing compromised is our Bill of Rights.

   The House today overwhelmingly approved a sweeping new surveillance law that effectively would shield telecommunications companies from privacy lawsuits for cooperating with the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program…

   The House approved, 293 to 129, a re-write of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) that extends the government’s ability to eavesdrop on espionage and terrorism suspects while providing a legal escape hatch for AT&T, Verizon Communications and other telecommunication firms. The companies face more than 40 lawsuits that allege they violated customers’ privacy rights by helping the government conduct a warrantless spying program after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

   Caroline Fredrickson, director of the ACLU’s Washington Legislative Office, writes:

   No matter how often the opposition calls this bill a ‘compromise,’ it is not a meaningful compromise, except of our constitutional rights. The bill allows for mass, untargeted and unwarranted surveillance of all communications coming in to and out of the United States. The courts’ role is superficial at best, as the government can continue spying on our communications even after the FISA court has objected. Democratic leaders turned what should have been an easy FISA fix into the wholesale giveaway of our Fourth Amendment rights.

2. I think Condoleezza Rice has forgotten what was done at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and secret prisons by those interrogators following the torture directives of the Bush administration.

   The LA Times reports the U.N. Security Council says sexual violence akin to war crimes. “Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice introduced the U.S.-sponsored resolution at a special session attended by diplomats from 60 nations. Rice said the resolution brought an end to a debate about whether sexual violence was a security issue and belonged on the council’s agenda.”

   “We affirm that sexual violence profoundly affects not only the health and safety of women, but the economic and social stability of their nations,” Rice said.

   The thing is, Condi seems to have forgotten sexual violence can happen to men too. From Seymour Hersh’s 2004 article for The New Yorker, “Torture at Abu Ghraib“.

   The photographs tell it all… Yet another photograph shows a kneeling, naked, unhooded male prisoner, head momentarily turned away from the camera, posed to make it appear that he is performing oral sex on another male prisoner, who is naked and hooded.

   Such dehumanization is unacceptable in any culture, but it is especially so in the Arab world. Homosexual acts are against Islamic law and it is humiliating for men to be naked in front of other men, Bernard Haykel, a professor of Middle Eastern studies at New York University, explained. “Being put on top of each other and forced to masturbate, being naked in front of each other-it’s all a form of torture,” Haykel said.

   Or as Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba wrote, “After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes… The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.”

   So while this is good Madam Secretary, I ask — what did you know about the administration’s advocation of torture and when did you know it? And, why still to this day, have you not spoken out against Bush administration sanctioned torture?

Four at Four continues with oil output and swim records.

1. Just in case you missed it. McClatchy Newspapers now joins Meteor Blades, buhdydharma, and others in reporting the General who probed Abu Ghraib says Bush officials committed war crimes.

   The Army general who led the investigation into prisoner abuse at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison accused the Bush administration Wednesday of committing “war crimes” and called for those responsible to be held to account.

   The remarks by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who’s now retired, came in a new report that found that U.S. personnel tortured and abused detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, using beatings, electrical shocks, sexual humiliation and other cruel practices.

   “After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes,” Taguba wrote. “The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.“

   Impeach, convict, imprison, throw away the key. Speaker Pelosi, your Constitutional and legal duty urgently calls. You must put impeachment back on the table.

Four at Four continues below the fold.

1. Mixed reports about the situation in the Arghandab distrct are coming from Afghanistan. Reuters reports the Taliban win tactical success near Kandahar. “The infiltration of hundreds of Taliban militants this week into an area close to Afghanistan’s second city was a tactical success for them and a setback for NATO, a NATO general said on Wednesday.”

   While in follow-on fighting, the Washington Post reports Afghan and NATO troops move against the Taliban. “Hundreds of Afghan and Canadian troops launched a major attack Wednesday against Taliban fighters who have moved into several southern Afghanistan villages in recent days”. The Canadian Press reports that according to the Afghan Defense Ministry, the joint offensive killed at least 36 Taliban fighters with no NATO casualities. And, according to the report in the NY Times, the operation against the Taliban is just beginning.

   The operation, which NATO officials said would last several days, is to clear out Taliban insurgents who have swarmed into the northwestern part of the district, causing villagers to flee and threatening government control. The security of the district is critical to that of Kandahar city, the capital of southern Afghanistan…

   Helicopters flying high over the Argandab River valley fired rockets at Taliban positions just a mile or so west of the river, indicating that insurgents were much closer to the district center than NATO and Afghan officials have admitted.

   In related news, The Guardian reports the First female British soldier has been killed in Afghanistan. Her name has not yet been released, but she was killed by an explosion that hit a British convoy and killed three other soldiers.

Four at Four continues with a deadly bombing in Baghdad, the five men behind the Bush administration’s use of torture, and an op-ed on bananas.

Here’s a thought.

The Republican Party has used Evangelical Christians over the past 30 plus years to help them win power. The Republicans held out the promise of overturning Roe v Wade and outlawing abortion. The promised public school prayer legal, to remove evolution from textbooks, to prevent same-sex marriages, and champion other conservative Baptist values.

But success never quite has come for the Evangelical agenda. The Republicans were always a few Congressional seats short, a few judges short, even when they controlled all three branches of the government, they still were not enough Republicans to make good on the promises they made to the Evangelicals.

Now take the Democratic Party. The mantra coming from many of the people in the Democratic leadership is elect more Democrats in order to make possible the progressive agenda. A liberal progressive that includes providing universal healthcare, leaving Iraq, restoring civil liberties, rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure, and reducing greenhouse gas emissions and securing energy independence, and protecting the environment all seem tantalizing within reach with more Democrats in Congress.

But, we had Democratic control of Congress when Clinton took office in 1993. But, universal healthcare was sabotaged, we stayed in Iraq, civil liberties were eroded, the infrastructure continued to crumble, and despite a Vice President Al Gore little was done to fight climate change and move to a renewable energy economy.

Are Progressives to Democrats, the same as Evangelicals are to Republicans? Just so many useful idiots to keep the wealthy and corporatists in power?

1. The Taliban is gaining in Afghanistan. There has been a massive offensive by the Taliban that seized seven villages. According to the Washington Post, “an estimated 500 Taliban fighters swept into several villages in the Arghandab district… The Taliban’s seizure of the villages comes three days after an audacious prison break at a Kandahar jail, in which an estimated 1,000 to 1,200 prisoners, many of them Taliban fighters, escaped.”

   The Associated Press reports that in preparation for their offensive, the Taliban mined villages and destroyed bridges. “More than 700 families — meaning perhaps 4,000 people or more — had fled the Arghandab district 10 miles northwest of Kandahar city”, according to Afghan police. The Arghandab district is “a lush region filled with grape and pomegranate groves that the Soviet army could never conquer”. The NY Times notes that “control of Arghandab is considered critical to control of the city of Kandahar and has been the source of forces that have seized the city in the past.”

   Over the past year, NATO commanders on the ground in Afghanistan have pleaded for additional troops, but with the U.S. tied up in Iraq the occupation is still undermanned to counter the Taliban and hold territorial gains. Additional NATO forces are being shifted from Kabul to Kandahar, Afghanistan’s second largest city, because, according to the Canwest News Service, Taliban forces massing on Kandahar doorstep.

2. In Militants found recruits among Guantanamo’s wrongly detained, Tom Lasseter of McClatchy Newspapers reports that the Bush administration has fueled Islamic jihad.

   Mohammed Naim Farouq was a thug in the lawless Zormat district of eastern Afghanistan. He ran a kidnapping and extortion racket, and he controlled his turf with a band of gunmen who rode around in trucks with AK-47 rifles.

   U.S. troops detained him in 2002, although he had no clear ties to the Taliban or al Qaida. By the time Farouq was released from Guantanamo the next year, however – after more than 12 months of what he described as abuse and humiliation at the hands of American soldiers – he’d made connections to high-level militants.

   In fact, he’d become a Taliban leader.

   In the McClatchy investigation, they “found that instead of confining terrorists, Guantanamo often produced more of them by rounding up common criminals, conscripts, low-level foot soldiers and men with no allegiance to radical Islam – thus inspiring a deep hatred of the United States in them – and then housing them in cells next to radical Islamists.”

Four at Four continues with evidence that Rumsfeld planned for the use of torture and the CIA advised the military how to torture, Iqbal v Ashcroft is now before the Supreme Court, and a bonus story about the Mundaneum. Oh, in case you missed this over at Daily Kos, Kagro X writes:

There will be no accounting for this “administration.” Not now, not in the 111th Congress, and not under President Obama.

1. McClatchy Newspapers report U.S. abuse of detainees was routine at Afghanistan bases. “The public outcry in the United States and abroad has focused on detainee abuse at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, but sadistic violence first appeared at Bagram, north of Kabul, and at a similar U.S. internment camp at Kandahar Airfield in southern Afghanistan.”

   The extent of the mistreatment eclipses the alleged abuse previously revealed. “Guards said they routinely beat their prisoners to retaliate for al Qaida’s 9-11 attacks, unaware that the vast majority of the detainees had little or no connection to al Qaida.”

   Since “Bush loosened or eliminated the rules governing the treatment of so-called enemy combatants, however, few U.S. troops have been disciplined under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and no serious punishments have been administered, even in the cases of two detainees who died after American guards beat them.”

2. The New York Times reports that Officials fear Pakistani nuclear bomb design went to others.

   Four years after Abdul Qadeer Khan, the leader of the world’s largest black market in nuclear technology, was put under house arrest and his operation declared shattered, international inspectors and Western officials are confronting a new mystery, this time over who may have received blueprints for a sophisticated and compact nuclear weapon found on his network’s computers.

   Working in secret for two years, investigators have tracked the digitized blueprints to Khan computers in Switzerland, Dubai, Malaysia and Thailand. The blueprints are rapidly reproducible for creating a weapon that is relatively small and easy to hide, making it potentially attractive to terrorists…

   The design is electronic …. making it easy to copy – and they have no idea how many copies, if any, are circulating.

Four at Four continues with flooding in the Midwest and in China, and bloggers being arrested.

1. Flooding in Cedar Rapids, Iowa forces evacuations and closes roads, reports the Associated Press.

   Rising water from the Cedar River forced the evacuation of a downtown hospital Friday after residents of more than 3,000 homes fled for higher ground. A railroad bridge collapsed, and 400 city blocks were under water.

   Cedar Rapids was the hardest-hit city in Iowa, where Gov. Chet Culver declared 83 of the state’s 99 counties as state disaster areas and nine rivers were at or above historic flood levels. Elsewhere in the upper Midwest, rivers and streams tipping their banks forced evacuations, closed roads, and even threatened drinking water…

   Dave Koch, a spokesman for the Cedar Rapids fire department, said the river will crest Friday at about 31.8 feet. It was at 30.9 feet early in the morning. In a 1993 flood, considered the worst flood in recent history, it was at 19.27 feet. At least 438 city blocks in downtown were under water, Koch said. There was more flooding outside of downtown, but authorities don’t know what widespread it is.

   Does Cedar Rapids, Iowa remind you of any thing?

   The New York Times adds The city that ‘Would Never Flood’ goes 12 feet under. “They said this city would never flood. They talked about 1993, and 1966 and 1851, years when the Cedar River swelled and hissed but mostly stayed within its banks. They thought they were safe. They were wrong. Cedar Rapids is experiencing the worst flooding in the city’s history… 12 feet higher than the previous record, set in 1851”

   8,000 people have evacuated and 5,500 homes are without electricity. More rain is forecasted for the weekend. The AP reports I-80 is closed due to flooding between Iowa City and Davenport. Flooding has halted the California Zephyr in Iowa too.

   There is flooding across the Upper Midwest. “Violent thunderstorms Thursday and Friday brought widespread flooding to Michigan’s Lower Peninsula that authorities say left some roads and bridges unstable or impassable… In Wisconsin, amphibious vehicles that carry tourists on the Wisconsin River were used to evacuate homes and businesses in Baraboo, north of Madison.”

   As the flood waters flow down to the Gulf, communities along the Mississippi river are bracing for a “significant rise” that is expected on Wednesday.

2. The New York Times reports Iraq says talks on pact with U.S. are at an impasse. Iraq’s prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, “explicitly detailed the main points of contention between the United States and the Iraqi government in the negotiations for the security agreement.”

   “Iraq rejects Washington’s insistence on granting their forces immunity from Iraqi laws and courts,” he said. “We reject Washington’s demand to have a free hand in undertaking military operations without cooperation with the Iraqi government.”

   He added: “We cannot give permission to the American forces independent right to arrest Iraqis or execute operations against terrorism. We cannot allow them to use the Iraqi skies and waters at all times.”

   The question of immunity for American contractors accused of killing a number of Iraqi civilians unprovoked is a particularly sensitive point with Iraqis who want to be able to bring the wrongdoers to trial in Iraqi courts.

Four at Four continues with stories about 4000 years and 2000 years.

1. The United States has a New criminal record: 7.2 Million, reports the Washington Post. “The number of people under supervision in the nation’s criminal justice system rose to 7.2 million in 2006, the highest ever, costing states tens of billions of dollars to house and monitor offenders as they go in and out of jails and prisons.” America spent about $45 billion in 2006 to keep two million people in jail or prison , another 4.2 million people on probation, and 800,000 people on parole. States are opting for privately run prisons to alleviate overcrowding.

   Black men, about one in 15, were most affected, and Hispanics, one in 35, were well represented among offenders. The number of women in prison “rose faster in 2006 than over the previous five years,” mostly in Hawaii, North Dakota, Wyoming and Oklahoma, the Bureau of Justice Statistics report said.

   In 1980, about the time that tough sentencing laws, particularly for drug offenses, began to be passed by federal and state legislators, 1.8 million people were in the system and $11 billion was spent on corrections.

2. The Los Angeles Times reports Guest workers in U.S. say they are being exploited. “On Wednesday, … a dozen workers from India ended a four-week hunger strike that was meant to highlight their allegations that a guest worker program is abusing foreign laborers and shutting Americans out of decent jobs. The workers… came to the U.S. to work in a Mississippi shipyard, lured by assurances of permanent residency. Instead, they said, they ended up in substandard living conditions, with reduced wages and promises of a green card that never came. Their protest was designed to illuminate a guest worker program that critics say is rife with exploitation and can be repaired only with congressional action.” Guest workers are the slaves of the 21st century.

3. The Bush administration wants to expand their so-called “missile defense” system in Europe. According to The New York Times, Defense War Secretary Robert Gates is pressing NATO on missile defense expansion. An anonymous official claims “the United States would press alliance members to agree on options for a defensive system against short- and medium-range ballistic missiles. That future NATO missile defense system would cover territory across the southeastern rim of the alliance Bulgaria, Greece, Romania and Turkey. Portions of those nations – including almost all of Turkey – would not be covered by the longer-range missile defense system the United States hopes to install in Poland and the Czech Republic”. There is no gaurantee this M-I-C boondoggle will do anything other than enrich Republican doners and escalate tensions with the Russians. This article is a classic example of NYT propaganda.

4. Bay Windows reports With love and pride, Governor Deval Patrick’s daughter comes out publicly.

   On June 14, 2007, the day that lawmakers finally voted down an anti-gay marriage amendment to the state constitution, Katherine Patrick stood outside the State House and looked up at her father. Gov. Deval Patrick was standing on the front steps, surrounded by a jubilant crowd of hundreds that mobbed the brick sidewalk and spilled halfway across Beacon Street. As they cheered the defeat of the amendment – an effort led by the governor, Senate President Therese Murray and House Speaker Sal DiMasi – Katherine had never before felt more proud of her father.

   “Because, of course, he didn’t know that I was gay then,” the 18-year-old recalls. “So, for someone so publicly to fight for something that doesn’t even affect him was just like, ‘That’s my dad,’ you know?” she says with a laugh. “That’s all I could think. I was very, very proud to be part of this family, and this state in general.” …

   “As private of an issue as it is, we’ve sort of had to come to terms with the fact that we are a public family and there you give a part of yourself away,” says Katherine. “And we also … wanted people to know that it’s not only something that we accept, but it’s something that we’re very proud of. It’s a great aspect of our lives and there’s nothing about it that is shameful or that we would want to hide.”

   Gov. Patrick is worrying how much his daughter’s wedding is going to cost. Grin.

1. Winning hearts and minds in Iraq. Iraqis condemn American demands, reports the Washington Post. Iraqi politicians are denouncing Bush’s “demands to maintain nearly 60 bases in their country indefinitely. Top Iraqi officials are calling for a radical reduction of the U.S. military’s role here after the U.N. mandate authorizing its presence expires at the end of this year.”

   “The Americans are making demands that would lead to the colonization of Iraq,” said Sami al-Askari, a senior Shiite politician on parliament’s foreign relations committee who is close to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. “If we can’t reach a fair agreement, many people think we should say, ‘Goodbye, U.S. troops. We don’t need you here anymore.‘ “

   Elsewhere in Iraq, the BBC uncovers lost Iraq billions. “A BBC investigation estimates that around $23bn (£11.75bn) may have been lost, stolen or just not properly accounted for in Iraq.” Using “US and Iraqi government sources to research how much some private contractors have profited from the conflict and rebuilding. A US gagging order is preventing discussion of the allegations. The order applies to 70 court cases against some of the top US companies. While Presdient George W Bush remains in the White House, it is unlikely the gagging orders will be lifted.”

2. Winning hearts and minds in Pakistan. The Washington Post reports that Pakistan is blaming the U.S. for killing 11 soldiers.

   At least 11 Pakistani soldiers and 10 other people were killed in northwest Pakistan in a border clash that erupted during a military operation led by U.S.-supported Afghan forces, Pakistani military officials said Wednesday.

   The Pakistani army blamed the troop deaths on a U.S. airstrike and condemned an attack it said “had hit at the very basis of cooperation” in the countries’ joint battle against terrorism.

   The army statement called the airstrike “unprovoked and cowardly” and said that Pakistan’s army maintained “the right to protect our citizens and soldiers against aggression.”

   Meanwhile the LA Times reports Michael Mullen says action unlikely against militants in Pakistan. “Any future terrorist attack on the United States probably would originate in Pakistan’s western tribal regions, where Al Qaeda leaders have set up their most secure haven since the fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the top U.S. military officer said Tuesday. But Adm. Michael G. Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said action to forcibly disrupt the militants’ planning effort is unlikely for now.”

   Whoops! It looks like Adm. Mullen spoke a day too soon. Good thing we’re pissing of the Pakistanis and occupying Iraq.

Four at Four continues winning hearts and minds of American rockers and championing democracy around the world. Plus a bonus story about gardening to mitigate rising food costs.

The complete cartoon can be read at salon.com.

In itself, referencing the BBC television show Doctor Who in a political cartoon isn’t unusual. For example, it isn’t uncommon in Britain for editorial cartoonists to depict politicians, such as Tony Blair, as Daleks. But when the show makes an appearance in an American publication, it is something unusual and oddly out-of-place.

In this week’s This Modern World, cartoonist Tom Tomorrow has the Doctor and his TARDIS make a cameo appearance. As you can see, The Doctor travels back to 2003 to bring news to Sparky the Wonder Penguin about Barack Obama being the presumptive Democratic nominee for president.

Tom chose not just any Doctor, but the 10th Doctor currently being portrayed by David Tennant. Usually when Doctor Who is referenced in America, Tom Baker’s Doctor is depicted.

Doctor Who comics have a history of penguins. In the 1980s, the comic strip in Doctor Who Magazine had Frobisher, a shape-changing extraterrestrial whose preferred form was that of a penguin.

I wonder if he knows something of Doctor Who’s comic strip past? Or was this just an odd, happy coincidence?  

According to The Hill, a new proposal from some of the more spineless members of the Congressional Democrats, have offered the Republicans a “proposal to break the logjam on electronic-surveillance legislation by allowing federal district courts to determine whether telephone companies seeking legal immunity received orders from the Bush administration to wiretap people’s phones.”

The new smoke and mirrors immunity was offered by flag-pin wearing House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) and supported by Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), chair of the Senate Intelligence committee. While the plan differs from the one championed by Sen. Kit Bond (R-MO), “in both cases, the courts would not decide whether those orders constitute a violation of the law, according to people familiar with the language.”

But, Sens. Chris Dodd (D-CT) and Russ Feingold (D-WI) are having none of this. In a 3-page letter (pdf) to their congressional colleagues, they write: