Connections and reasons...

Today 60 people were killed by suicide bombers across Iraq. Yesterday the toll was higher. 80 people were killed. It is difficult to read this and not think about new revelations reported by McClatchy a couple of days back which asserted that the Bush administration applied relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaeda and the late Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

Such information would've provided a foundation for one of former President George W. Bush's main arguments for invading Iraq in 2003. In fact, no evidence has ever been found of operational ties between Osama bin Laden's terrorist network and Saddam's regime. The use of abusive interrogation — widely considered torture — as part of Bush's quest for a rationale to invade Iraq came to light as the Senate issued a major report tracing the origin of the abuses and President Barack Obama opened the door to prosecuting former U.S. officials for approving them."There were two reasons why these interrogations were so persistent, and why extreme methods were used," the former senior intelligence official said on condition of anonymity because of the issue's sensitivity. 

..."The main one is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack (after 9/11). But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there." It was during this period that CIA interrogators waterboarded two alleged top al Qaida detainees repeatedly — Abu Zubaydah at least 83 times in August 2002 and Khalid Sheik Muhammed 183 times in March 2003.

Relatives mourned in Dhuluiya, north of Baghdad at the funeral of an Iraqi who was among the 80 killed across the country yesterday. Photo from the Associated Press

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Keith Olbermann analyzes the timelines involved in this and talks to Jonathan Landay, the McClatchy reporter who first revealed that torture was used to forcibly produce false testimony reflecting a connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda.

Comment on a recent incident of domestic abuse

Recently, a Muslim man committed a 'honor killing' in upstate New York. The method chosen to dispose of his victim, his wife, was death by beheading.
A prominent Muslim cleric Imam Shaykh Hamza Yusuf has spoken out against such killings (see video here) and is rightly shining a light on domestic abuse amongst minority groups across America. I am glad. However, it irks me that he nonchalantly refers and compares to incidents of domestic abuse in Jewish and Christians families in the following words while making the case that domestic abuse is prevalent across many religious denominations:

If a Christian beats his wife up, it's not Christian violence, if a Jew beats his wife up (from what the statistics show, it does not happen very often), but if they do then it is not Jewish violence - if a Muslim should do something to his wife, suddenly it has something to do with the religion of Islam.

Dear Mr. Hamza Yusuf, there definitely is a difference between beating and beheading. I really do not remember the last time we saw the words 'domestic abuse' and 'beheading' used in the same sentence and the latter being used as a vehicle to propagate the former. Yes, speaking out against domestic abuse is a good and a much needed thing, but comparing beating and beheading are poles apart...

Quotable

"Indian Muslims are proud of being both Indian and Muslim, and the Mumbai terrorism was a war against both India and Islam. Terrorism has no place in Islamic doctrine. The Koranic term for the killing of innocents is 'fasad.' Terrorists are fasadis, not jihadis. In a beautiful verse, the Koran says that the killing of an innocent is akin to slaying the whole community. Since the ... terrorists were neither Indian nor true Muslims, they had no right to an Islamic burial in an Indian Muslim cemetery."

- M.J. Akbar, the Indian-Muslim editor of Covert, an Indian investigative journal. From here.

Photographer Margaret Bourke-White captures a caravan of Muslim Indians fleeing from east to west Punjab escaping Sikh mobs, slowly streaming past the dead of a previous caravan & the whitened bones of their buffaloes & bullocks, India, April 20, 1945. From Life archives here.