Author: Andrew Sullivan

The NYT's account of systemic use of torture largely by Shiites on Sunnis, revealed in the Wikileaks doc-dump, is here. It's horrifying – along the lines of Abu Ghraib and Bagram, but also, in many cases, even worse and cruder. It occurred during US occupation of the country; although most of the torture was perpetrated by Iraqi security forces, and although on occasion American forces prevented torture, some occurred under American control, and there was inevitable enmeshment as they fought alongside:

The documents show that Americans did sometimes use the threat of abuse by Iraqi authorities to get information out of prisoners. One report said an American threatened to send a detainee to the notorious Wolf Brigade, a particularly violent Iraqi police unit, if he did not supply information.

Some of the worst examples of Iraqi abuse came later in the war. In August 2009, an Iraqi police commando unit reported that a detainee committed suicide in its custody, but an autopsy conducted in the presence of an American “found bruises and burns on the detainee’s body as well as visible injuries to the head, arm, torso, legs, and neck.” The report stated that the police “have reportedly begun an investigation.”

Then in December, 12 Iraqi soldiers, including an intelligence officer, were caught on video in Tal Afar shooting to death a prisoner whose hands were tied.

Ambers has a summary here. The Guardian:

In two Iraqi cases postmortems revealed evidence of death by torture. On 27 August 2009 a US medical officer found "bruises and burns as well as visible injuries to the head, arm, torso, legs and neck" on the body of one man claimed by police to have killed himself. On 3 December 2008 another detainee, said by police to have died of "bad kidneys", was found to have "evidence of some type of unknown surgical procedure on [his] abdomen".

The forces that conducted these horrific acts are the forces we are handing the country over to. History will harshly judge this war, and those of us who supported it, its long-term strategic effect, and so forth. In particular, it appears, that one of the main actors was Iran, and Iran has emerged as the core winner. But the hell unleashed by the incompetent occupation led to over 100,000 often gruesome civilian deaths in what was a nation-wide bloodbath of almost frenzied proportions.

I think it can be said, now more forcefully than ever, that whatever moral legitimacy this war once had is now gone forever.

It was worse than a mistake. It was, in many ways, a crime.

Nyhan digs into the numbers:

[I]t's clear that the favorable electoral environment has attracted a strong group of Republican candidates. Despite the influence of the Tea Party movement, the GOP actually has more House candidates who have previously held elected office running for open seats than the Democrats do…

Weigel explains:

If this is surprising, a lot of that has to do with 1) a weird occasional media focus on noncompetitive races and 2) the ability of some smart politicians to brand themselves as "Tea Party" candidates.

A reader writes:

Your reader quipped, "At least there's one good thing to come out of this whole Juan Williams v. NPR mess: we've finally found a program that Republicans are willing to say they would cut." It's a decent dig, and Mike Huckabee and Sarah Palin have made comments along these lines. 

There's just one problem: NPR does not receive any direct federal funding for operations.  Less than 2% of the budget is derived from competitive grants from federally funded groups such as the National Endowment for the Arts. Certain member stations receive some state and local funding, to the tune of about 5% of their funds. A detailed breakdown complete with audited tax forms is available on their website. 

"Public Radio" no longer means "government funded," if it ever did.

A reader writes:

Beyond the deception regarding China's successful use of government stimulus, there is another important lie in that ad: China owns most of our debt. This is absurd.

The vast majority, almost 75% of our debt, is held within the U.S. itself; only about a fourth is owned by foreign countries. Of that 25%, China owns slightly more than a fifth of it (as of July 2010), and is nearly tied with Japan. So a fifth of a fourth, or around 5%. Now, I don't claim to be a mathematical whiz, but I don't think 5% of the total constitutes "most".

Then again, these are the same people who are telling us they can cure the deficit without touching Medicare, Social Security, or Defense spending. So perhaps calling it a lie is being too harsh. Maybe they just really suck with numbers.

I believed her then. And there's corroborating evidence now.

The first story from the Wikileaks doc-dump makes for grim reading. We got rid of one torturer and replaced him with countless others fighting alongside and for us:

The new logs detail how:

• US authorities failed to investigate hundreds of reports of abuse, torture, rape and even murder by Iraqi police and soldiers whose conduct appears to be systematic and normally unpunished.

• A US helicopter gunship involved in a notorious Baghdad incident had previously killed Iraqi insurgents after they tried to surrender.

The numerous reports of detainee abuse, often supported by medical evidence, describe prisoners shackled, blindfolded and hung by wrists or ankles, and subjected to whipping, punching, kicking or electric shocks. Six reports end with a detainee's apparent death.

A Tumblr classic. But it also shows, of course, an implication in Juan Williams' comments. In them, he says that Muslims wearing Muslim garb are somehow more scary to him than Muslims not wearing such garb. Apart from the fact that this makes no logical sense when it comes to Jihadist terrorists (who all try to look as un-Muslim as they can), it also sends a signal to Muslim-Americans that there are appropriate ways to dress publicly if you are not to provoke fear. I don't like the implications of that.

Would someone say that Jews should not wear yarmulkes in public, because it presents them "first and foremost" as Jewish? Or that gays should never appear effeminate? Or that African-Americans should always wear suits and ties – because a different appearance can legitimately provoke nervousness or discomfort? Where does this stop?

One thing that distresses me about the plain meaning of Williams' remarks, and his justification of them by his own record of writing about the civil rights struggle for African Americans, is that he is implying that this other minority has to abide by standards of public appearance that his own minority doesn't. He wasn't invoking his civil rights journalism to stand against stigmatizing minorities based on appearance, he was invoking it to allow him to stand for their stigmatization. He was creating a new other – not by endorsing removal of constitutional rights, of course (leave that to Marty Peretz) – but by defending the legitimacy of being scared because someone is obviously "the other".

Sharon Begley has a Wired cover story on "tissue engineering," a technology being primed for use in breast enlargement. Irin Carmon explains the process:

Doctors experimented with injecting liposuctioned fat directly into other parts of women's bodies in the 80s and 90s, but the effect would be temporary as the body gradually absorbed that fat. According to Wired's Sharon Begley, it was a female post-doc, Min Zhu, who made the key discovery that if you use blood as feeder cells, you could get adipose tissue to differentiate into bone and cartilage, muscle, or neuron.

That was in 2001, and since then, a plastic surgeon and a medical device maker teamed up to create the Celution, a sort of magic box that centrifuges fat cells and readies them to be injected back into the body in pearl-like droplets. "Within 48 hours, new capillaries and blood vessels entwine through the injected cells, supplying oxygen and nutrients to the now-stable tissue," according to Wired.

The technology is about more than big breasts:

It makes sense to apply Cytori’s technology to enhance breasts instead of, say, repair urinary sphincters as a strategic way to move the patented technology out of rats and into people as soon as possible. Hearts, kidneys, and even sphincters have to work in order for us to survive. But we can live just fine without breast tissue, and, outside of feeding offspring, breasts don’t have to do much. The fact is, the scientific and regulatory hurdles to getting Cytori’s cells into clinical use will be easier to clear for breasts than for other tissue: Breasts simply aren’t as necessary as other organs, so the bar for proving to regulators that the technology works will be lower.

Hackers attacked on the eve of a major Iraq doc-dump, according to this Twitter feed. The hackers were "very skilled". But the documents, which allegedly show more proof of the war crimes of the last administration, will emerge tomorrow in major newspapers.