An official government website offered the world a virtual manual for nuclear bomb making, reports the New York Times.  Over the objections of John Negroponte, the website, "Operation Iraqi Freedom Document Portal," posted thousands of documents seized in the Iraq war.  Yesterday, following objections by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the website was taken down.  According to the Times, the website was expected to advance the Bush administration's claims that Saddam Hussein was building weapons of mass destruction.

The campaign for the online archive was mounted by conservative publications and politicians, who said that the nation's spy agencies had failed adequately to analyze the 48,000 boxes of documents seized since the March 2003 invasion. With the public increasingly skeptical about the rationale and conduct of the war, the chairmen of the House and Senate intelligence committees argued that wide analysis and translation of the documents -- most of them in Arabic -- would reinvigorate the search for clues that Mr. Hussein had resumed his unconventional arms programs in the years before the invasion. American search teams never found such evidence. (NYT, 11/3)

The U.S. Supreme Court has just overturned a ruling for President Bush that upheld Guantanamo Military Tribunals.

The Court said that the procedures adopted to try Guantanamo prisoner Hamdan violated the Geneva Conventions.

Once Again, the Bush Administration has overstepped its legal authority:

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Thursday that President George W. Bush overstepped his authority in creating military war crimes trials for Guantanamo Bay detainees.

The ruling, a rebuke to the administration and its aggressive anti-terror policies, was written by Justice John Paul Stevens, who said the proposed tribunals were illegal under U.S. law and the Geneva Convention.

Chrs Floyd - Empire Burlesque

When I read the passage below from Moazzam Begg's account of his years in Bush's Terror War prisons, I had a strange feeling of dislocation: it was as if 30 years had suddenly fallen away and I was back in high school, reading Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago in stunned disbelief at the hideous cruelty inflicted on the prisoners -- deliberately, as a carefully calculated instrument of state policy. And all of it done in the name of national security, of course, to protect the nation against "terrorists" and "traitors."

Solzhenitsyn's books -- not just the factual Gulag but also the deep-delving fiction of his middle years, the powerful First Circle and Cancer Ward -- were enormous influences on my own understanding of politics, power and morality. Years later, I was in Moscow when he returned to Russia from his long exile, having outlasted the system of state terror that had consumed so many of his compatriots. However much I had come to disagree with some of his political positions on certain issues, it was a still a moment of triumph for the deeper truths and moral courage that he continued -- and continues -- to represent.

[cross-posted at And, yes, I DO take it personally]

the stories about the u.s. treatment of detainees worsen by the day...

   While an international debate rages over the future of the American detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, the military has quietly expanded another, less-visible prison in Afghanistan, where it now holds some 500 terror suspects in more primitive conditions, indefinitely and without charges.

NB: "expanded," "less visible," "more primitive," and "indefinitely" - quite a damning list for a single paragraph.

Catholic Workers and others have been marching through Cuba for the last four days on their way to the U.S. run detention center. They arrived outside it today and intend to try to visit the prisoners tomorrow. If (!) they are not allowed in, they'll fast and pray outside.

The marchers website is here. It was down a few minutes ago, but may be working when you read this. Some pictures of one of several support vigils in the U.S. today are here.

The UN has long tried to gain access to Guantanamo and has finally received an invitation to go there - however, the 3 UN experts on torture and cruel treatment will not be allowed to meet with detainees!

"It makes no sense [to go]," Manfred Nowak, special investigator on torture and other cruel treatment, told a news conference at U.N. headquarters in New York. "You cannot do a fact-finding mission without talking to the detainees."

You got that right, Mr. Nowak!