Morning News Roundup (15 September)

BushCo's Wars

• Sectarian “killings and violence are surging around Iraq,” “despite a month-old security crackdown in the capital.” “It’s barbaric but sadly we’ve become used to it,” an Iraqi Interior Ministry official said. “Forty bodies, 60 bodies - it’s become a daily routine.” [ThinkProgress' ThinkFast]
  
  
• Pointing the finger at Shiite death squads, Iraq's top Sunni leader Adnan al-Dulaimi said Friday that "well-known militias" were behind the communal bloodletting that he warned was propellling the country towards "disaster." The United Nations has also warned that Iraq could slide into civil war as the daily bloodshed shows no signs of abating despite political efforts for national reconciliation. [AFP]
  
  
• A Senate committee rebuffed the personal entreaties of President Bush yesterday, rejecting his proposed strategies for interrogating and trying enemy combatants and approving alternative legislation that he has strenuously opposed.
  [...]
  Moments after the Armed Services Committee voted 15 to 9 to endorse McCain's alternative bill, the Arizona senator lashed out at CIA Director Michael V. Hayden, who had also lobbied lawmakers personally. McCain told reporters that Hayden wants Congress to give the CIA a virtually free hand to treat detainees as it wishes so that he and his agents will be immunized against accusations of unlawful conduct. "He's trying to protect his reputation at the risk of America's reputation," McCain said. [WaPo]
  
  
• Regarding BushCo's marketing of torture to Congress, the New Yorker's George Packer (author of Assassins' Gate) points to the parallel release of the military's field manual update with specified restrictions on torture. Packer also notes that General John (Jeff) Kimmons contradicted the President's reasoning for keeping torture on the books:

  No good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices. I think history tells us that. I think the empirical evidence of the last five years, hard years, tells us that. And, moreover, any piece of intelligence which is obtained under duress, through the use of abusive techniques, would be of questionable credibility, and additionally it would do more harm than good when it inevitably became known that abusive practices were used. And we can’t afford to go there. Some of our most significant successes on the battlefield have been—in fact, I would say all of them, almost categorically all of them, have accrued from expert interrogators using mixtures of authorized humane interrogation practices, in clever ways that you would hope Americans would use them, to push the envelope within the bookends of legal, moral, and ethical, now as further refined by this field manual. So we don’t need abusive practices in there.

• The CIA learned in late September 2002 from a high-level member of Saddam Hussein's inner circle that Iraq had no past or present contact with Osama bin Laden and that the Iraqi leader considered bin Laden an enemy of the Baghdad regime, according to a recent Senate Intelligence Committee report.
  
  Although President Bush and other senior administration officials were at that time regularly linking Hussein to al-Qaeda, the CIA's highly sensitive intelligence supporting the contrary view was apparently not passed on to the White House or senior Bush policymakers.
  [...]
  According to the three Republicans, the CIA said it did not disseminate the intelligence about the lack of a Hussein-bin Laden connection because "it did not provide anything new."
  
  But other information obtained at the same time from the same source that paralleled what administration officials were saying was immediately passed on to "alert" the president and other senior policymakers, the three Republicans said. A "highly restricted intelligence report" conveyed the source's claim that although Iraq had no nuclear weapon, Hussein was covertly developing one and had stockpiled chemical weapons, according to the committee members. [WaPo]

Climate Crisis

• The Bush administration has proposed eliminating funding for two renewable energy sources: hydropower and geothermal power research. Federal studies suggest that the “costs of lost opportunities from dropping such research could be enormous in the long run.” [ThinkProgress' ThinkFast]
  
  
• An Inconvenient Truth, a climate change documentary by former US presidential candidate Al Gore, is opening across the UK. Its release comes in a week which has seen scientists release evidence that:
  
  • old Arctic ice may be melting spectacularly fast
    
  • humanity's greenhouse gas emissions are probably stoking the power of hurricanes
    
  • observed temperature rise cannot be explained directly by changes in the Sun's output
  [BBC]

Obama's Corner

• Chris Cillizza over at the WaPo's Fix blog column find more fuel for an Obama run in 08
  

  Obama will be accompanied on the trip (to Iowa) by Steve Hildebrand, considered one of the major "gets" for candidates eyeing the 2008 race due to his expertise as a field organizer and campaign manager. In 2000, Hildebrand managed Vice President Al Gore's Iowa caucus victory over New Jersey Sen. Bill Bradley. Four years earlier he ran the Midwest for the Clinton-Gore reelection effort.
  [...]
  It's important to remember that Hildebrand is not signed on with Obama in any formal capacity. In fact, Hildebrand has been helping Daschle as he moves around the country exploring a White House bid of his own -- a longshot prospect at best.
  
  But the presence of Hildebrand at Obama's side this weekend means that Obama will meet all the right movers and shakers in the state. As we have said before, although Obama is extremely inexperienced politically, a compelling case exists that he should run for president in 2008. The smart money is still on him waiting until 2012 or 2016, but this latest development has to give even those most pessimistic about an Obama '08 bid some pause.