The MAeLstrom

[A scan of news articles and commentary on the internet.]

Scooter Libby Love Letters, Washington elite petition judge on behalf of convicted Cheney aide: The Smoking Gun — The Smoking Gun houses the letters asking that Lewis Libby should lie with impunity. Frank Rich writes: But what makes these letters rise above inanity is the portrait they provide of a wartime capital cut adrift from moral bearings. As the political historian Rick Perlstein has written, one of the recurrent themes of these pleas for mercy is that Mr. Libby perjured himself "only because he was so busy protecting us from Armageddon."

Soldiers Haunted by War Struggle to Get Care — Dana Priest and Anne Hull lay out in the Washington Post how troops who are returning from the battlefield with psychological wounds find a mental-health system that makes healing difficult.

More US Personnel Killed in Iraq than Reported — John R Moffett writes at opednews.com that, "The U.S. military has never released complete statistics on contractor casualties or the number of attacks on privately guarded convoys. The military deleted casualty figures from reports ... the military wanted to hide information showing that private guards were fighting and dying in large numbers because it would be perceived as bad news."

Wisconsin Republican Committee Chair May Kill Bill Helping Rape Victims — Mobile’s Take blog notes: “This Bill will allow rape victims in Wisconsin to be given information about and access to emergency contraception in hospital emergency rooms.” The Neanderthal in question who wants to kill the popular rape victim-assistance bill is state Rep. Mark Gundrum (R-New Berlin).

The General’s Report — Seymour M. Hersh writes: “How Antonio Taguba, who investigated the Abu Ghraib scandal, became one of its casualties,” in the New Yorker.

Judge orders domestic surveillance docs public — From ThinkProgress: “Just one day after a news that an internal audit found that FBI agents abused a Patriot Act power more than 1000 times, a federal judge ordered the agency Friday to begin turning over thousands of pages of documents related to the agency’s use of a powerful, but extremely secretive investigative tool that can pry into telephone and internet records.”

The April request from the Electronic Frontier Foundation asked the FBI to turn over documents related to its misuse of National Security Letters, self-issued subpoenas that don’t need a judge’s approval and which can get financial, phone and internet records. Recipients of the letters are forbidden by law from ever telling anyone other than their lawyer that they received the request. Though initially warned initially to use this power sparingly, FBI agents issued more than 47,000 in 2005, more than half of which targeted Americans. Information obtained from the requests, which need only be certified by the agency to be 'relevant' to an investigation, are dumped into a data-mining warehouse for perpetuity."

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