AA Gill describes what it was like listening to Tony Blair's testimony to the Chilcot inquiry on Friday, from inside the press room:

The verbiage crept out of the screen and slid off my brain like spit off a window.

It's the most trenchant description I've read of Blair's comportment at the hearing into the Iraq War: His lies were as transparent as spit.

According to Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman, the DOJ’s Office of Professional Reponsibility (OPR) is about to release an investigation that lets off the 2002 Torture Memo’s authors, John Yoo and Jay Bybee, with no more than a mild rebuke.

The OPR report originally criticized them strongly for misconduct in producing that brief for torture with reckless disregard for legal precedent. But Bush’s Attorney General, Michael Mukasey, didn’t care for that finding. First he and then Eric Holder allowed the CIA to weigh in on the OPR draft report, whose criticisms of Yoo and Bybee were then toned down radically.

Reportedly the final draft will charge them only with showing “poor judgment”, a finding so flaccid that it does not even require a DOJ referral to state bar associations for disciplinary action against Yoo and Bybee. Bybee, a federal judge, could have faced impeachment.

On Friday former Prime Minister Tony Blair finally will address the Chilcot inquiry, where he will face questions about the Iraq War. The inquiry so far hasn’t uncovered much new information, partly because the British government continues to refuse to make public some of the most embarrassing documents that any serious inquiry would have to refer to. Still, the British papers are full this week of suggested questions to put to the man who backed George Bush’s invasion to the hilt. However technical, these proposed questions will never succeed in getting the slippery Blair to actually come clean about anything significant.

In fact, Blair is inclined to charge that the Chilcot inquiry trivializes the larger questions about Iraq.

He complained to a friend: "It's called the Iraq inquiry, but where are the Iraqis?"

Fair enough, why not put the Iraqis back into the picture? Here are two questions that I propose ought to be put to Tony Blair on this, perhaps the last occasion when he’ll be grilled in public about his decision to invade Iraq. These are questions that, curiously enough, nobody ever seems to think to raise with Blair (or Bush).

Barack Obama, speaking of health care reform, in his State of the Union speech:

So, as temperatures cool, I want everyone to take another look at the plan we've proposed. There's a reason why many doctors, nurses, and health care experts who know our system best consider this approach a vast improvement over the status quo. But if anyone from either party has a better approach that will bring down premiums, bring down the deficit, cover the uninsured, strengthen Medicare for seniors, and stop insurance company abuses, let me know. Let me know. Let me know. I'm eager to see it.

Mr. President, glad to oblige. Single-payer.

H/t WhateverItIsI'mAgainstIt.

Remember John Kiriakou, the former CIA officer who popped up in December 2007 to tell America how wonderfully effective – and expeditious – the CIA’s torture of the prisoner Abu Zubaydah had been? Kiriakou said that he knew for a fact that Zubaydah revealed all manner of dangerous al Qaeda plots after being waterboarded a single time.

It was music to the ears of right-wing torture apologists…though Kuriakou’s most important assertions couldn’t be squared with the other information we already had about Zubaydah’s torture (in particular that it had generated all manner of unreliable allegations).

Now Kiriakou is back, hawking a book. Guess what? On the next to last page, he admits that it was all a campaign of misinformation.

Yesterday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced that President Obama intends to select Dr. Elisabeth Hagen as his nominee for USDA Under Secretary for Food Safety. In that position, she would oversee food safety issues related to inspection of meat, poultry and egg products.

Public interest organizations have been clamoring for the President to fill the Under Secretary position and the position of Administrator, FSIS, with individuals committed to correcting an alarming trend in foodborne illness, massive recalls and other problems. "We can and must do a better job of ensuring the safety of meat and poultry products regulated by USDA," admits USDA Secretary Vilsack.

But, there are seven reasons to be concerned about President Obama's pick.

On January 18 (the Martin Luther King holiday), USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) issued a notice that it was recalling 864,000 pounds of ground beef potentially contaminated with a strain of E. coli that has caused deaths and serious illness. Some of the meat had been produced between January 5 and January 15, and was shipped to hotels, restaurants and distribution centers in California; but not all of it.

No doubt by now you’ve heard that the Supreme Court’s “conservatives” took an axe to regulations that for a century have limited corporate spending on political campaigns. By the slimmest of majorities, SCOTUS ruled today that corporations and unions may spend without limit on political issues and in support of candidates because they have free speech rights under the 1st Amendment just as any actual human being.

The ruling threatens to open floodgates to spending on a massive scale by corporations seeking to advance their own interests against the interests of, well, actual human beings. It should also do nicely to enhance the public’s cynicism about corporate influence over legislators (and elective judges). By itself the mere potential for uncontrolled corporate spending will tend to distort political calculations and legislative/judicial decisions – and the public’s perception of those things. The impact could be most severe in congressional elections where corporate spending or its potential will be most likely to overwhelm actual humans’ spending.

National Republicans are overjoyed at the ruling because they gladly and loudly shill for corporate interests. Democrats are talking about trying to limit the damage caused by this cataclysmic change to campaign financing by enacting new legislation. But what kind? Lyle Denniston expresses skepticism that Congress will be able to find any constitutional and practical solution to this crisis.

To my mind, however, the first step is pretty obvious. Congress should prohibit any corporation from engaging in this new political spending if it has any non-American shareholders or owners. Because after all, foreigners have no 1st Amendment protections.

Cross-posted with permission from Haiti Haiti

It has now been a full week since a 7.0 earthquake turned much of Haiti into rubble. Airport traffic has increased to 180 flights a day, but a plane loaded with medical equipment nevertheless was prevented from landing three times since Sunday, despite a US commitment on Monday to giving landing priority to humanitarian flights.

"We have had five patients in Martissant health center die for lack of the medical supplies that this plane was carrying," said Loris de Filippi, emergency coordinator for the [Doctors Without Borders'] hospital in Cite Soleil.

In the trailer for Michael Moore's film, "Capitalism: A Love Story," Moore audaciously tells a bank employee, "We want our money back!"

Today, President Obama echoed those words in a short address to the nation.

"We want our money back."

The American Society of International Law (ASIL), a nonpartisan nonprofit organization, held a meeting yesterday in Washington, D.C., to discuss the human rights implications of climate change, a slow-moving global disaster, and the need for new international laws to address gaps in current law.

Here are two Civil War re-enactor “officers” who don’t seem to have a clue concerning what war is about. They squabbled on the “battlefield” and ended up charging each other with assault.

Here is an example of astounding incompetence by journalist Pete Yost and the Associated Press. Today he produced a not-very-enlightening report for the AP on a ruling by U.S. District Judge Thomas Hogan in a habeas case brought by a Guantanamo prisoner, Musa’ab Omar al-Madhwani. Yost states – rather vaguely – that the ruling was made "this week".

That’s false. Judge Hogan made his ruling on December 14, 2009 (PDF). By the next day there were multiple news reports available on the ruling, such as this from the WaPo and this at McClatchy.

So how did Yost get this so badly wrong? The short answer is pure sloppiness.

Bloggers owe a lot to Michael Heilemann, writes Tina Daunt at the Huffington Post. Heilemann created the familiar blue and white default Wordpress theme that has greeted new users since 2005. Heilemann, a science fiction enthusiast, says that he was watching Stanley Kubrick’s film masterpiece, “2001” as he configured the them [Daunt] and decided to honor the visionary director-producer.

Desperate to revive their industry worldwide, carmakers are putting a new twist on the traditional strategy of planned obsolescence. They’re developing cars that will be crashed much more often by the simple device of installing video screens in dashboards. Since most crashes involving distracted drivers are not absolutely fatal, many of the vehicles will in course be replaced.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) reports that the National Biosurveillance Integration Center (NBIC) is plagued with problems, which the GAO euphemistically calls "challenges." NBIC's goal is to "help provide early detection and situational awareness by integrating information and supporting an interagency biosurveillance community." But, "only 2 of 11 partner agencies have assigned personnel to support the integration center," according to the GAO. The failure of federal agencies to collaborate on national security matters is a longstanding problem that the Obama administration is currently reviewing in the wake of a failed bombing attempt on Christmas Day.