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Friday, February 09, 2007

News For Friday Afternoon

Associated Press

Honda   plans to recall 45,335 Civic Hybrid sedans worldwide to repair an electrical defect that could stop the cars' engines, a company spokeswoman said Friday.

Japan's No. 2 automaker plans to recall 7,219 of the vehicles sold domestically and another 38,116 sold overseas, mostly in the United States, a Honda spokeswoman said on condition of anonymity, citing company policy.

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Clint Eastwood said he opposed the U.S. decision to go into Iraq

AFP

"I wasn't for going in there," Eastwood said. "Only because democracy isn't something that you get overnight. I don't think America got democracy overnight. It's something we had to fight for and believe in."

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The Washington Times

Rival Palestinian factions signed a power-sharing accord aimed at ending months of bloodshed yesterday, agreeing that the Islamist militant group Hamas would head a new coalition government that would "respect" past peace agreements with Israel.

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    From Think Progress we get this piece on Bill Donohue, the man who cried about John Edwards hiring two blogger's who disagreed with some views on the Catholic group that Donohue heads.

During the 2004 presidential campaign, George Bush’s Catholic outreach coordinator, 54-year-old Deal Hudson, was outed as a sexual predator for taking advantage of a drunken 18-year old while he was a professor. The National Catholic Reporter reported:

According to documents obtained by NCR, Hudson invited a vulnerable freshman undergraduate, Cara Poppas, to join a group of older students for a pre-Lenten “Fat Tuesday” night of partying at a Greenwich Village bar. The night concluded after midnight in Hudson’s Fordham office, where he and the drunken 18-year-old exchanged sexual favors. The fallout would force his resignation from a tenured position at the Jesuit school, cost him $30,000, and derail a promising academic career.

Yet at least one prominent right-wing figure came to Hudson’s defense: the Catholic League’s Bill Donohue, who has spent the last several days calling for the heads of two John Edwards bloggers. Donohue ardently defended Hudson in a statement, even invoking the Virgin Mary in downplaying his sexual assault:

In a press release, Bill Donahue, president of the Catholic League, minimized the charges against Hudson and attempted a joke at the Virgin Mary’s expense. “Effective today,” Donohue wrote, his organization had “a new requirement for all future employees: all candidates must show proof of being immaculately conceived, that is, they must demonstrate that they were conceived without sin.”

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Reuters

US strike kills 8 Kurd soldiers in northern Iraq

Fri 9 Feb 2007

By Ibon Villelabeitia
BAGHDAD, Feb 9 (Reuters) - A U.S. air strike killed eight Kurdish Peshmerga soldiers and wounded six others in northern Iraq on Friday in what appeared to be a "friendly fire" incident, Kurdish officials said.

The men, who had ignored warnings in Arabic and Kurdish to put down their weapons, turned out to be Kurdish policemen, the military said in a statement, adding that U.S. forces expressed their "deepest sympathies" to the families of the victims.

 

 

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Former U.S. Interrogator, Eric Fair, Speaks Out

    Meet Eric Fair, a former contract interrogator in Iraq. He has an interesting article in the Washington Post on the nightmares that he suffers through since he  has come home from Iraq. He speaks on the interrogation of one prisoner who was in custody

I was one of two civilian interrogators assigned to the division interrogation facility (DIF) of the 82nd Airborne Division.

The lead interrogator at the DIF had given me specific instructions: I was to deprive the detainee of sleep during my 12-hour shift by opening his cell every hour, forcing him to stand in a corner and stripping him of his clothes.

   Mr. Fair goes on to state that it is he who now can not sleep because of the nightmares with this prisoner's face always in his dream. Mr. Fair has a guilt trip over what went on during the interrogating process.

American authorities continue to insist that the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib was an isolated incident in an otherwise well-run detention system. That insistence, however, stands in sharp contrast to my own experiences as an interrogator in Iraq. I watched as detainees were forced to stand naked all night, shivering in their cold cells and pleading with their captors for help. Others were subjected to long periods of isolation in pitch-black rooms. Food and sleep deprivation were common, along with a variety of physical abuse, including punching and kicking. Aggressive, and in many ways abusive, techniques were used daily in Iraq, all in the name of acquiring the intelligence necessary to bring an end to the insurgency. The violence raging there today is evidence that those tactics never worked. My memories are evidence that those tactics were terribly wrong.  WaPo Article

  

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