This was written as a guest post for Feministe is a part of its series on Sexual Assault Awareness Month.

“I’ve been raped, physically beaten, extorted, pimped out/sold, intimidated, manipulated, threatened, humiliated, [and] harassed by both officers and inmates,” California prisoner Meagan Calvillo wrote a few years back, in a blunt summary of what happens every day in American prisons. Among transgender people behind bars, her story is not unusual; as Emily Alpert wrote in 2005, “outside of prison, transgender people are among the most marginalized in the United States; inside it, they confound a system that’s ill-prepared to serve them, or even to decide where to put them.”

Cavillo’s experience may sound extreme, but it mirrors that of the most vulnerable prison populations in the U.S. In 1994 in the case Farmer v. Brennan, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a prison official’s “deliberate indifference” to the risk that a trans woman prisoner named Dee Farmer would be raped when placed within the general population of a men’s federal prison violated her Eighth Amendment rights. Yet, “deliberate indifference” remains a good phrase to define the broader attitude towards prisoners who are raped behind bars; among them, transgender prisoners, gay prisoners, young prisoners, prisoners who are locked up for the first time, and prisoners who are mentally ill are often the most targeted for sexual assault by guards and other prisoners alike, their bodies treated as a commodity in the prison power economy. If survivors of sexual assault are routinely silenced in the outside world, those who are assaulted behind prison walls are even more invisible. They are also the least likely to receive sympathy or help from people on the outside.

“Survivors of sexual abuse behind bars experience the same emotional pain as other rape victims,” the staff at Just Detention Inc, the only organization in the country that is “dedicated exclusively” to eliminating sexual assault in prisons or jails, remind us. Yet the ugly reality — familiar to anyone who has ever seen depictions of prison on TV or in popular music, or heard the phrase “don’t drop the soap” — is that prison rape has long been ingrained in the cultural imagination as, at worst, a hilarious punchline about deserving convicts, at best, an indignity that simply comes with the territory.

To combat this attitude, JDI launched an ad campaign a few years ago to force people to visually confront their unconscious double standards about rape victims. “Would you joke around about this man being raped?” asks one ad about a young man dressed in a nondescript t-shirt. In the next frame, the same man is dressed in an orange prison jumpsuit. “How about now?”

Printed on postcards and sent out to prison administrators, these ads have attracted a lot of attention in the past several months, but as Lovisa Stannow, JDI’s Executive Director told Change.org’s Matt Kelley last month, they are not a new phenomenon. “JDI has been distributing these postcards for several years, to prison officials and others,” she said. “We revamped our website earlier this year and featured them prominently on the homepage, which led to the ‘discovery’ of the images among bloggers.”

In the public debate, prisoners tend to be silent and invisible. Most inmates come from marginalized, low-income communities and people of color are vastly over-represented among them. Prisoners cannot stage public relations campaigns to counter injustices on late-night television or on the big screen. But flippant and ill-informed attitudes about inmates and their right to be free from sexual violence are major obstacles to ending this type of abuse. That is why JDI has made it part of its mission to ensure that prisoner rape is described accurately — as a crime and a devastating human rights violation. The postcard campaign is part of that effort.

It is probably impossible to know exactly how many prisoners are raped behind bars. “According to the best available research,” reports JDI, “20 percent of inmates in men’s prisons are sexually abused at some point during their incarceration. The rate for women’s facilities varies dramatically from one prison to another, with one in four inmates being victimized at the worst institutions.” With some 2.3 million people behind bars in the U.S., the implications are nothing short of a human rights and public health epidemic.

Fortunately, things are starting to change. Stannow cites a “dramatic shift in the debate about prisoner rape” in the past year alone, thanks in part to decades of work by dedicated activists, many of whom are former prisoners and rape survivors themselves.

Stephen Donaldson, one of JDI’s former directors, was a pacifist protesting his government’s bombing of Cambodia in 1968 when he was arrested on the White House lawn, tossed in jail, and, in his own words, “gang-raped about sixty times over two days,” with the complicity of a DC prison guard. Donaldson was one of the earliest people to speak publicly about prison rape, authoring the Prisoner Rape Education Project, which published “practical information and advice on prisoner rape.” He died of AIDS, the result of contracting HIV from one of the people who raped him.

Thanks to the pioneering work of people like Donaldson, today survivors of rape have more of a voice.

“I continue to contend with flashbacks of what this correctional officer did to me and the guilt, shame, and rage that comes with having been sexually violated for so many years,” former prisoner Necole Brown told the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission (NPREC) in testimony published last year. “I felt lost for a very long time struggling with this. … I still struggle with the memories of this ordeal and take it out on friends and family who are trying to be there for me now.”

Brown is just one of many prisoner voices in the 276-page NPREC report, which offers an important, newly comprehensive look at the problem of prison rape in the United States. Mandated by the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003, the report makes recommendations for how to address issues like housing, staff training, prisoners education, and medical and mental health care for victims of sexual assault. The U.S. Attorney General has until this coming June to codify the recommendations.

Anyone who wants to learn more about the pervasiveness of rape behind bars should read the NPREC report, which, in addition to compiling expert and survivor testimony, sheds new light on the increasing problem of sexual assault in immigrant detention centers: “In the 15 years from 1994 to 2009,” the authors write, “the number of immigrants held in detention pending a judicial decision about their legal right to remain in the United States increased nearly 400 percent. For the 2009 fiscal year, ICE has budgeted enough money to detain 33,400 people on any given night and more than 400,000 people over the course of the year. The population of immigration detainees includes adults, thousands of ‘unaccompanied’ children, and whole families confined together.”

Because immigration detainees are confined by the agency with the power to deport them, officers have an astounding degree of leverage — especially when detainees are not well informed of their rights and lack access to legal counsel. The Commission learned that officers have propositioned women whose cases they control, telling them that if they want to be released they need to comply with their sexual demands. The fear of deportation cannot be overstated and also functions to silence many individuals who are sexually abused. Those brave enough to speak out may face retaliation. After women detainees at the Krome immigration detention facility in Miami reported sexual abuse by staff, several of them wrote, “We are afraid … each time one of us is interviewed by investigating officers. … [S]ome of the women who have given statements have either been transferred or deported to their countries.”

With immigrant detention (in its current form) a relatively modern phenomenon in the U.S., this is a new version of an old problem.

Go here to learn more about prison rape: http://www.justdetention.org/

Go here to read the testimony of prison rape survivors: http://www.justdetention.org/en/survivortestimony/portraits_of_courage.aspx

By now we’ve heard plenty of people’s opinions on the now famous WikiLeaks video showing the U.S. military killing 12 Iraqi civilians — from Defense Secretary Robert Gates to Stephen Colbert to Josh Stieber, a former soldier turned conscientious objector who would have been on the mission over Baghdad that day. But missing from the discussion have been the voices of Iraqis themselves, those who witnessed the slaughter, and especially those whose loved ones were killed.

Fortunately, this week and last, Democracy Now! broadcast some of these voices loudly and clearly, providing a much needed dose of reality amid so much talk of “rules of engagement” or WikiLeaks’s political “bias.” On Monday, Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez played clips from an interview with Ahlam Abdelhussain, whose husband, Saleh Mutashar, died trying to rescue one of the two Reuters newsman hit by the blasts while his two children were injured. “My husband did nothing wrong,” she says, now a widow.

“How do I feel? What can I say? Why was he shot with his children in the car? They did nothing wrong. He was helping a journalist. What was his crime? What was the crime of our children who are left with no father and no support.”

Saleh’s nephew, Anwar, said:

He was carrying wounded people during the American attacks. He was trying to help. They believe that someone who was carrying a gun will take his children along with him? Unbelievable. What can we do? God take revenge from the Americans. They destroyed us and destroyed our nations. What is the future of those children? They are orphans.

And if it’s more “context” you need, consider this report by independent journalists Rick Rowley and David Enders, who were on the scene the day after the massacre:

RICK ROWLEY: We came to the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad one day after a U.S. attack helicopter strike that killed twelve Iraqis, including a journalist and a driver working with Reuters. The U.S. military claimed that they were under attack from rocket-propelled grenades and small-arms fire and that all of the dead, except for the two Reuters employees, were insurgents. But local residents showed us the remains of a burnt-out van spattered with blood and told us a different story.

WITNESS 1: [translated] The helicopter came yesterday from there and hovered around. Then it came right here where a group of people were standing. They didn’t have any weapons or arms of any sort. This area doesn’t have armed insurgents. They destroyed the place and shot at people, and they didn’t let anyone help the wounded.

WITNESS 2: [translated] I swear to God it was helicopters that attacked us. These people are all witnesses. They attacked us twice, not once.

RICK ROWLEY: Another resident went on to describe what happened to the man who tried to help the wounded.

WITNESS 3: [translated] The driver went to carry the injured, who had been shot in front of his eyes. While he was going to pick them up, the pilot of the helicopter kept flying above, watching the scene. They started firing at the wounded and the dead. The driver and the two children were also there. The helicopter continued shooting until none of the bodies were moving.

RICK ROWLEY: We asked the crowd of people what might have prompted the attack, and they said that when the journalist arrived, residents quickly gathered around him.

WITNESS 2: [translated] The group of civilians had gathered here because people need cooking oil and gas. They wanted to demonstrate in front of the media and show that they need things like oil, gas, water and electricity. The situation here is dramatically deteriorating. The journalists were walking around, and then the Americans started shooting. They started shooting randomly and targeted peaceful civilians from the neighborhood.

WITNESS 3: [translated] There were children in the car. Were they carrying weapons? There were two children.

WITNESS 2: [translated] Do we help the wounded or kill them? They killed all the wounded and drove over their bodies. Everyone witnessed it. And the journalist was among those who was injured, and the armored vehicle drove over his body.

WITNESS 3: [translated] The U.S. forces, who call themselves “friendly” forces, were telling us on speakers that they were here to protect and help us. We heard those words very clearly. But what we saw was the opposite of that. We demand the American Congress and President Bush supervise their soldiers’ actions in Iraq.

Secretary Gates — and anyone else who defends the videotaped aerial murder of Iraqi civilians as somehow justified — should listen to these voices before they open their mouths again.

For the full reports, go here and here.

Last month, a Texas judge granted death row prisoner Hank Skinner a temporary stay of execution, giving him a one-month lease on life beyond his February 24th execution date.

For his lawyers, the Medill Innocence Project at Northwestern University, and Amnesty International and other activists, this meant a one-month window to fight like hell to get critical DNA evidence in his case tested for the first time. Earlier this month, Chromosomal Laboratories, a DNA laboratory in Phoenix, AZ, offered to analyze the DNA evidence within 30 days and free of charge, if Gov. Rick Perry would grant permission.

But one month later, Skinner is set to die anyway. The courts have turned him down. The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles has turned him down. Barring intervention from the governor, Skinner will be executed in the Huntsville death chamber at 6pm.

Skinner sits on death row for the 1993 murder of his girlfriend, Twila Jean Busby, and her two adult sons, who were stabbed to death on New Years Eve. Subsequent investigations into his case, however, have revealed alarming evidence that Skinner could be innocent of the crime. (Read about the case in detail here.)

“In more than twenty years of investigating and researching possible wrongful convictions, I have rarely seen a case this circumstantial and shaky in which the prisoner was actually guilty,” says Medill Innocence Project Director David Protess.

Many Texans share his alarm, including state Senator Rodney Ellis and state Representative Elliott Naishtat, who yesterday sent letters to Gov. Perry urging him to grant a 30-day reprieve for Skinner.

“The state’s determination to execute Hank Skinner tomorrow should make even death-penalty supporters go pale,” the Dallas Morning News wrote in an editorial yesterday.

Key evidence in the 1993 murder case has never undergone DNA analysis. Skinner may be guilty of a bloody triple slaying … but every sliver of doubt must be eliminated before the state exercises its life-or-death authority.

We trust that Gov. Rick Perry agrees with that, and we urge him to use the power of his office to postpone tomorrow’s planned execution as insurance against miscarriage of justice.

Unfortunately, as we have seen again and again and again and again, Rick Perry has never let concerns over innocence get in the way of a good execution. With 212 executions under his belt, killing Hank Skinner tonight will be business as usual.

To demand a stay of execution for Hank Skinner, call Gov. Perry at (512) 463-1782 or Fax: (512) 463-1849.

Twitter is all abuzz today over news that Erick Erickson, the right-wing, tea-partying Editor-in-chief of RedState.com, has been hired as a contributor to CNN, the “most trusted name in news.” Rather than name all the reasons this is bad — this is the man who joked, upon hearing that Obama was a Nobel laureate: “I did not realize the Nobel Peace Prize had an affirmative action quota for it” – I’ll focus on one particular strain of his bigotry, allowing Erickson to speak for himself — through his own tweets.

Here’s Erickson (@ewerickson on Twitter) on SuperBowl Sunday, upon finally viewing the much-anticipated Focus on the Family ad featuring Tim Tebow.

That last one is less vile than simply nonsensical, of course, but given that it was the Superbowl, my guess is that he’d had a few beers, hence the total lack of misogynist filter.

Then again, maybe not.

The next day:

In a statement today, CNN political director Sam Feist said, “Erick’s a perfect fit for John King, USA, because not only is he an agenda-setter whose words are closely watched in Washington but as a person who still lives in small-town America, Erick is in touch with the very people John hopes to reach.”

Are his words closely watched, Sam? Or is John King having a hard time bringing in the Rabid Chauvinist demographic?

“Joining CNN is like coming home,” Erickson said in a statement of his own.

Way to go, CNN. You must be so proud.

As part of his ongoing media blitz to promote his book, Courage and Consequences, Karl Rove appeared Thursday on the BBC program Newsnight, where he told his host that he takes pride in the Bush administration’s so-called “enhanced interrogation” program.

“I’m proud that we used techniques that broke the will of these terrorists and gave us valuable information that allowed us to foil plots …” Rove said, adding that it “made the world safer.”

His host asked about waterboarding. “It is torture, isn’t it?”

“No it’s not,” Rove responded, inviting her to read the, um, torture memos. (”People need to read the memos that outline what was permissible and not permissible before they make a judgment about these things.”)

In the same interview, Rove acknowledged that intelligence on supposed WMDs in Iraq “got it wrong,” but defended the U.S. invasion anyway.

His BBC appearance followed a Wednesday interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, who asked Rove how his former boss is doing.

“He’s doing really well. He’s — he’s got a wonderful life.” Rove said, adding that he is “polishing” a book of his own, due out in November. “And life is really good for him.”

Add Michael Mukasey to the list of Republican officials who have come out against Liz Cheney’s ugly ad smearing Obama’s Department of Justice lawyers as terrorist sympathizers — but don’t get too excited. The former Bush Attorney General has an op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal in which he defends attorneys’ professional mandate to represent even the most despicable clients (Bernie Maddoff comes up in the second sentence). But a few paragraphs in, it becomes clear that the essay is more of a defense of the Bush administration’s unconstitutional terror policies than a defense of the rule of law.

“More recently,” Mukasey writes, “we’ve witnessed a campaign to impose professional discipline on two former Justice Department lawyers, John Yoo and Jay Bybee, for legal positions they took as to whether interrogation techniques devised and proposed by others were lawful — a campaign that also featured casual denunciations of them as purveyors of torture.”

He goes on:

Most recently, lawyers now employed at the Justice Department who, while in private practice, volunteered to represent suspected terrorist detainees, or argued legal positions supporting various rights of such detainees, have been portrayed as in-house counsel to al Qaeda.

It’s a bogus comparison — anyone who has read the torture memos knows that Yoo and Bybee were hardly just “taking legal positions” — and a telling juxtaposition. Mukasey is trying to draw an equivalence between an attack ad on government lawyers that perverts American democracy and the rule of law with attempts to hold accountable government lawyers who themselves perverted American democracy and the rule of law.

It’s a smart move, of course, and one Yoo himself makes in a quote published today in the New York Times.

On the issue of Obama’s DOJ lawyers defending prisoners of the so-called “war on terror,” Yoo said: “What’s the big whoop?”

“The Constitution makes the president the chief law enforcement officer,” he said. “We had an election. President Obama has softer policies on terror than his predecessor … He can and should put people into office who share his views.”

Putting aside the absurd claim that “Obama has softer policies on terror” than Bush, it’s pretty clear what Yoo is trying to do (with a bit of a wink and a nod). He is not really defending Obama or his DOJ lawyers. He is defending himself, by casting the torture lawyers as dedicated public servants unfairly maligned for doing their jobs.

Like Yoo before him, Mukasey uses the column space provided to him in the Wall Street Journal to criticize attacks on Bush detention policies (while appearing to make a principled defense of the rule of law):

I think the Supreme Court decided wrongly in several key cases regarding the war on terror and our national security. They include Boumediene v. Bush (2008), in which the Court found insufficient protection for Guantanamo detainees that had not yet been put to the test, and Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (2006), in which the Court applied to detainees a provision of the Geneva Conventions that was intended to apply only in civil wars on the territory of a signatory to those Conventions. While I disagree with the Court’s decision in these cases, I stop well short of blaming the outcome on lawyers who argued successfully.

The Boumediene and Hamdan decision, of course, were two of the Bush-era’s most important instances of judicial oversight on a runaway administration. Mukasey’s defense of the lawyers involved is fine and good, but on issues of judicial legitimacy, he, like Yoo, shed his credibility a long time ago.

As the U.S. continues its Iraq withdrawal show — even while the supposed withdrawal deadline is seriously in doubt — what is happening right now in the city of Fallujah is a devastating reminder of what the war has wrought.

It’s not just the heavy civilian toll during the famous battles of Fallujah, which left hundreds of innocents dead, or the iron-fisted security measures that followed, which cut off the city from the outside world. Today, the legacy of the U.S.-led war is written on the bodies of children who weren’t even alive when the city fell under siege.

According to the BBC, “Doctors in the Iraqi city of Fallujah are reporting a high level of birth defects, with some blaming weapons used by the U.S. after the Iraq invasion.”

“Now, the level of heart defects among newborn babies is said to be 13 times higher than in Europe.”

Today’s BBC report follows an investigation by the Guardian last fall, which found “up to 15 times as many chronic deformities in infants, compared to a year ago,” according to doctors in Fallujah.

Neurologists and obstetricians in the city interviewed by the Guardian say the rise in birth defects — which include a baby born with two heads, babies with multiple tumors, and others with nervous system problems — are unprecedented and at present unexplainable.

Dr. Ayman Qais, director and senior specialist at Fallujah General Hospital, told the Guardian, “We are seeing a very significant increase in central nervous system anomalies. Before 2003 [the start of the war] I was seeing sporadic numbers of deformities in babies. Now the frequency of deformities has increased dramatically.”

The U.S. military has feigned ignorance about its role in this pediatric health crisis — “No studies to date have indicated environmental issues resulting in specific health issues,” a military spokesperson told the BBC — a claim bolstered by difficulty in unearthing a single cause for the deformities and abnormalities.

In addition to new weaponry, factors that could contribute include “air pollution, radiation, chemicals, drug use during pregnancy, malnutrition, or the psychological status of the mother,” according to Dr. Qais.

“We simply don’t have the answers yet.”

It would be hard to overstate the suffering of the people of Fallujah in the past several years. The first battle of Fallujah, in April 2004, destroyed much of the city, once known as the “City of Mosques.” The second battle, in November and December of that year, more or less finished the job, bringing, aside from death and destruction, the insidious substance known as white phosphorus.

“The brutal destruction of Fallujah by the American army was not followed by any reconstruction, as if the city is being punished for its attitude against the occupation,” an engineer in Fallujah told IPS journalists Ali al-Fadhily and Dahr Jamail in 2008.

“Our best doctors fled the city for fear of being detained by American and police forces just because they helped civilians during the two sieges of 2004,” a doctor at Fallujah General Hospital told al-Fadhily and Jamail. “They are now considered terrorists or at least terrorist supporters, when they should have been decorated with medals for their heroic work in helping their people.”

The IPS report cited disturbing figures from hospital administrators as well as two other local groups on the medical nightmare emerging in Fallujah:

… [I]n 2006, they found “5,928 new illness cases that were unknown before in Fallujah,” over 70 percent of which were “cancers and abnormalities” in children below 12 years of age.

In the first six months of 2007 there were 2,447 cases, more than 50 percent of these cases were children. Simply, this means that most of the victims are children, and this will threaten the new generation in this city.

Almost two years later, BBC world affairs editor John Simpson “visited a new, U.S.-funded hospital in Fallujah where pediatrician Samira al-Ani told him that she was seeing as many as two or three cases a day, mainly cardiac defects.”

Our correspondent also saw children in the city who were suffering from paralysis or brain damage — and a photograph of one baby who was born with three heads.

He adds that he heard many times that officials in Fallujah had warned women that they should not have children.

To see a video on the BBC report, go here.

Fresh off a news cycle that saw him define executive power as bestowing the president the right to massacre whole villages, notorious torture lawyer John Yoo has published a new piece in the Wall Street Journal, boldly titled “My Gift to the Obama Presidency.”

“Barack Obama may not realize it,” he writes, “but I may have just helped save his presidency.”

How? By winning a drawn-out fight to protect his powers as commander in chief to wage war and keep Americans safe.

Stunning megalomania aside, it is an eerie thing for John Yoo to declare victory of any kind. Reading his op-ed is a little like listening to Emperor Palpatine crow that Luke Skywalker’s journey to the Dark Side is nearly complete. (”Welcome, young Skywalker. I have been expecting you … “)

Yoo begins by describing Obama’s sad devotion to the rule of law as a newly-inaugurated wet-behind-the-ears president.

“In office only one day,” he writes, “Mr. Obama ordered the shuttering of the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, followed later by the announcement that he would bring terrorists to an Illinois prison.”

What follows is a brisk re-cap of what he sees as Obama’s most grievous moments as Commander-in-Chief:

He terminated the Central Intelligence Agency’s ability to use “enhanced interrogations techniques” to question al Qaeda operatives. He stayed the military trial, approved by Congress, of al Qaeda leaders. He ultimately decided to transfer Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the planner of the 9/11 attacks, to a civilian court in New York City, and automatically treated Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who tried to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day, as a criminal suspect (not an illegal enemy combatant). Nothing better could have symbolized the new president’s determination to take us back to a Sept. 10, 2001, approach to terrorism.

It’s a veritable runaway train of right-wing talking points and, frankly, it merits no rebuttal. It would be hard to reach back to a time when Yoo had any credibility as a legal mind. Perhaps more than any of the Bush administration lawyers, his name has long been synonymous with torture (or as he dutifully puts it, “enhanced interrogation techniques”), his current claim to fame that he got away with his crimes.

More than his immoral views, or the fact that he has yet to be held accountable, the fact that Yoo continues to have no problem finding media platforms from where to spew them is deeply disturbing. This is the same man whose criminal role in the Bush administration won him a column in the Philadelphia Inquirer last year.

Nevertheless, Yoo goes on to describe himself as a victim of the Obama administration’s ideological persecution, which he describes as “hounding those who developed, approved or carried out Bush policies, despite the enormous pressures of time and circumstance in the months immediately after the September 11 attacks.”

He calls out Attorney General Eric Holder for daring to initiate an investigation into the CIA’s torture program, at one point characterizing the Obama White House as “hell-bent on finding scapegoats for its policy disagreements with the last president.”

Would that this were even remotely true.

The depressing reality is that just last week, an internal review by Obama’s Department of Justice let Yoo off the hook when it concluded that he and his fellow Bush administration lawyers exhibited “poor judgment,” but were not guilty of professional misconduct by creating the legal framework for that made torture the law of the land.

“This decision should not be viewed as an endorsement of the legal work that underlies those memoranda,” Assistant Deputy Attorney General David Margolis insisted in a memo released on Friday. It just means that there will be zero consequences for its authors.

Yoo’s Wall Street Journal column is really a cynical victory dance over this decision. He invokes the “rank bias and sheer incompetence” of the DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility, and sneers at what he calls “bizarre conspiracy theories.”

If it took a twisted legal mind to come up with the Bush-era torture doctrine, it takes an even more twisted mind to see the DOJ’s whitewash as a vindication, not just of the memos, but of American democracy itself.

Of course, Yoo is just that kind of mind.

“I did not do this to win any popularity contests, least of all those held in the faculty lounge,” the Berkeley Law professor writes.

(He’s humble too.)

“I did it to help our president — President Obama, not Bush.”

(And non-partisan!)

Yoo sums up his view of executive power during wartime (read: all the time), dressing it up as a patriotic pitch for the troops:

Mr. Obama is fighting three wars simultaneously in Iraq, Afghanistan, and against al Qaeda. He will call upon the men and women serving under his command to make choices as hard as the ones we faced. They cannot meet those challenges with clear minds if they believe that a bevy of prosecutors, congressional committees and media critics await them when they return from the battlefield.

Pesky checks and balances. Don’t they know there’s a war on?

Enough. Yoo belongs in jail, not profiting off sick essays that continue to promote torture and lawlessness as the only way to win an everlasting war. By failing to hold him accountable, the Obama administration has ensured that his views will be folded further into the mainstream — and that, like so many other decisions it has made regarding the so-called War on Terror, is the real threat to American democracy.

Here’s a horrific story: A 27-year-old soldier in Tacoma, Washington has allegedly admitted to police that he waterboarded his four-year-old daughter – mere weeks after winning custody of her — because she could not recite the alphabet.

According to the UK Daily Mail, the soldier, Joshua Tabor, “admitted to police he had used the CIA torture technique because he was so angry.”

As his daughter ’squirmed’ to get away, Tabor said he submerged her face three or four times until the water was lapping around her forehead and jawline.

It’s not clear whether Tabor has served in Iraq or Afghanistan — the soldiers at his military base have served in both — but there’s little doubt that he is a very disturbed individual. Tabor was initially arrested after “being seen walking around his neighborhood wearing a Kevlar military helmet and threatening to break windows.”

Police discovered the alleged waterboarding when they went to his home in the Tacoma suburb of Yelm and spoke to his girlfriend.

She told them about the alleged torture and the terrified girl was found hiding in a closet, with bruising on her back and scratch marks on her neck and throat.

Asked how she got the bruises, the girl is said to have replied: ‘Daddy did it.’

Read the whole story here.

TGIF and everything, but first: two disturbing, ongoing stories made for a pretty dark week in Washington, and they both flew mostly under the radar.

1) On Wednesday, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair acknowledged what Washington Post reporter Dana Priest revealed last week: that the Obama administration has made it its official policy to target U.S. citizens with possible terrorist ties — or as one senior administration official put it, Americans who become “part of the enemy” — for assassination.

Not without permission, mind you: “We take direct actions against terrorists in the intelligence community,” Blair said at a Congressional hearing on Wednesday. “If we think that direct action will involve killing an American, we get specific permission to do that.”

Permission from whom? Well, President Obama, of course.

Anyone else? Congress? The judiciary?

Nope, the authority stems solely from the Executive Branch.

Glenn Greenwald, who has been blogging on this topic since the story initially broke, reminds us why this is so dangerous:

Barack Obama, like George Bush before him, has claimed the authority to order American citizens murdered based solely on the unverified, uncharged, unchecked claim that they are associated with Terrorism and pose “a continuing and imminent threat to U.S. persons and interests.”

In general, no matter how shocking the story, I try to avoid saying things like “That’s police state stuff!”  because, like the “Nazi” labels that are so flippantly tossed around, such observations are overused and often undermine otherwise sound political analysis.

That said … that’s police state stuff.

So why aren’t people up in arms? As Greenwald observes:

Amazingly, the Bush administration’s policy of merely imprisoning foreign nationals (along with a couple of American citizens) without charges — based solely on the President’s claim that they were Terrorists — produced intense controversy for years. That, one will recall, was a grave assault on the Constitution. Shouldn’t Obama’s policy of ordering American citizens assassinated without any due process or checks of any kind — not imprisoned, but killed — produce at least as much controversy?

The answer is yes, of course, and yet most Americans seem to be unaware that this is even happening.

Or else, we are suffering from what Dahlia Lithwick calls “terrorism derangement syndrome,” a willingness to submit to the most frightening and wildly unconstitutional measures if it just means that we Will Be Safe once and for all.

Many excellent people have covered this ground this week and there’s no sense in rehashing their arguments. Read Greenwald here and Lithwick here.

2) The tale of the so-called Guantanamo “suicides” gets worse and worse.

On Thursday, Raw Story reported that “the family of a former Gitmo detainee are still waiting years later for answers regarding the events leading up to their son’s death.” As Harpers contributor Scott Horton revealed in a shocking feature a few weeks back, this man, Ahmed Ali Al-Salami, one of three Guantanamo prisoners who supposedly committed suicide in 2006 — “an act of asymmetrical warfare” according to Rear Adm. Harry Harris — was very possibly murdered while in U.S. custody, his death then made to look like a suicide.

Horton’s report caused a stir and the Pentagon has vehemently denied its veracity, calling it, among other things, “”a complete fabrication.”

Now, attempts to re-investigate the deaths are being blocked. “Rather than supplying the deceased’s missing throat and other necessary items, the Pentagon is attempting to cast aspersions on Horton’s report,” reports Raw Story.

Yes, missing throat. Apparently, that was one of the requests from the family of Ahmed Ali Al-Salami, who hopes that it will provide new evidence on how he died. But “hope that a second autopsy would provide those answers has been at a standstill as the doctor who performed the autopsy waits for U.S. officials to respond to a request for the return of the deceased’s missing throat, a request the Pentagon now appears to be denying was ever made.”

The Pentagon’s many denials can be found in this January 28th article from Human Events, which provides the basis for the Raw Story article.

Read the Raw Story report here.