The tycoon and the candidate talked about the Occupy Wall Street protests, fiscal issues and petroleum policy. But Bachmann made sure that callers knew that Trump was not endorsing her.

“He is not on the call this evening because he is endorsing my campaign for Presidency, he’s on the call this evening because he’s admired, he’s respected,” she said.

One caller wanted to know, “Where is the Republican leadership in regards to what appears to be a Marxist group down there on Wall Street?”

Bachmann dissed the Occupy Wall Street protesters before agreeing with part of their message.

“I think people are looking at this and try to figure out, is this a George Soros inspired protest down there? Are there legitimate grievances?” she said. “I think people look at Wall Street and they see a $700 billion blank check. I voted against that $700 billion blank check.”

Trump admitted that some protesters might have valid reasons to be scornful of Wall Street, but questioned the movement.

“I was in New York recently where you had—I wouldn’t call it a riot, but it got—you had thousands of people marching down Wall Street,” Trump said. “This is a group of in many cases very well-dressed, and I look at it and I say something has got to be done to break it up.”

The bulk of the conversation involved oil, both tapping U.S. oil and being smarter with OPEC. And both Trump and Bachmann though it would be a good idea to demand the Iraqis, Afghanis and Libyans give oil to the U.S. for free for “liberating” them.

“Constantly it’s the United States that are the chumps,” Bachmann said. “We constantly clean up everybody else’s mess. Look at Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, we should be getting paid back from these countries we have liberated.”

Trump agreed with Bachmann.

“In Libya, the rebels—that’s a very glamorous term, the rebels—they probably come from Iran,” he said of those opposing the Gaddafi regime. ”We are spending billions and billions of dollars. If six months ago, if they came to us and said we need help. if we would have said, ‘You know what? We are going to give you help but for the next 20 years, we get the 50 percent of your oil,’ you know what they would have said? ‘Absolutely! We will give you 75 percent.’”

Trump accused anti-Gaddafi fighters of opposing the United States in the Iraq War.

“They come from Iran in many cases and here we are spending billions of dollars and what do we get out of nothing,” Trump said. “In Iraq with the second largest oil fields in the world, we fight, we spent a trillion and a half, lost thousand of lives, great, great young people, what do we get?

Trump added that when the U.S. leaves Iraq at the end of the year, Iran will take the oil that should belong to the U.S.

“Now Iran, when we leave and you know we are not getting along with the government, Iran will come in and take over those oil reserves they are just waiting, waiting to take over the oil reserves because our leaders are just stupid. We are not smart people we have very pathetic leadership.

He concluded, “I have suggested we should have kept a percentage of the oil but also pay back the families who lost lives. In the old days to the victor go the spoils. Well, we don’t do that anymore. We spend a trillion and a half dollars and they are practically throwing us out of Iraq.

Bachmann added that it wasn’t fair for Iraqis to ask American forces to leave without giving the United States its oil. “We have just been kicked on this deal. We were trying to train their people. Iraq they spit at us and said we are not going to give immunity to the 5,000 Americans who were going to stay in Iraq and now all the money we have poured into Iraq, the lives we have poured into Iraq.”

She added, “This is a complete travesty, this is a complete disrespect for the United States.”

“It is in the interest of the U.S. that Iraqi Armenian Christian refugees be provided the opportunity to start a new life in safety and peace,” said McCollum in a press release on Tuesday. “The Armenian government’s offer to receive refugees is very generous, and I believe the U.S. should provide the humanitarian support necessary to ensure their successful relocation and integration into Armenian society.”

While not a signatory on the letter, Rep. Collin Peterson has joined Walz and McCollum in supporting the effort.

Here’s the full text of the letter:

May 14, 2010

The Honorable Hillary Rodham Clinton

Secretary of State

U.S. Department of State

2201 C Street NW

Washington, DC 20520

Dear Secretary Clinton:

We are writing to urge the Obama Administration to make a commitment of funds to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to assist in the resettlement of Iraqi Armenian Christian refugees from Syria and Jordan to Armenia. It is our understanding that the State Department is in the process of formulating the Administration’s response in support of UNHCR’s 2010 Global Appeal for Iraq. We feel strongly that it is essential that an initial and specific U.S. commitment is made to meeting the needs of Iraqi Armenian Christian refugees.

According to a March 30, 2010 UNHCR press release, conditions for Iraqi refugees both inside and outside of Iraq are becoming increasingly desperate at the very time that international concern appears to be fading. “The dwindling media interest in Iraqi refugees,” the UNHCR says, “is not matched by a decline in the scale of the problem.”

With a planned U.S. troop withdrawal by the end of 2011, dwindling international support for Iraqi refugees, and the campaign of violence against Iraqi Christians continuing unabated, the U.S. must fulfill its obligation to this vulnerable population.

As you know, the State Department’s 2008 allocation of $1 million to UNHCR Armenia has enabled more than one thousand Iraqi refugees to begin to rebuild their lives via resettlement in Armenia. It has been a cost-effective and regional solution for a group that might otherwise seek resettlement in the United States.

UNHCR’s “Regional Response Plan for Iraqi Refugees” released in January 2010 identifies hundreds of Iraqi Armenian Christian refugees registered with UNHCR in Jordan. The number of refugees in Syria, the primary asylum destination for Armenian Christians fleeing Iraq, is known to be significantly larger. Of the more than two million refugees who have fled Iraq, only a small portion, less then 20 percent, have been registered by UNHCR thus far. Since hopes for successful repatriation and reintegration in Iraq have failed to materialize it is certain that the need for resettlement of Iraqi Armenian refugees will persist for the foreseeable future.

It is our understanding that the Government of Armenia has made a formal commitment to U.N. High Commissioner Antonio Guterres to: offer all Iraqi Armenian refugees a track to citizenship; formally participate in UNHCR’s Iraqi resettlement program; and make land and facilities available for refugees from Iraq to rebuild their lives. Armenia has, in fact, delivered on these promises substantially over the last two years.

The U.S. commitment of additional funds to UNHCR will allow UNHCR in Armenia to extend its assistance to Iraqi Armenian Christians while allowing for an accelerated resettlement of additional refugees from Syria and Jordan to Armenia.

Again, we urge the Obama Administration to sustain the momentum of what UNHCR, the United States, and Armenia have already accomplished on behalf of Iraqi Armenian Christian refugees.

Sincerely,

Betty McCollum

Frank Pallone, Jr.

Adam Schiff

Tim Walz

Raúl M. Grijalva

Charles A. Gonzalez

As if Iraq weren’t already riven enough with its own internecine antagonisms, prisoners there under U.S. military guard are siding with Minnesota in the bitter, cross-border gridiron rivalry between the two neighbor states.

The detainees clued into the Guard members’ loyalty to the Green and Gold after the soldiers repainted camp walls in those colors.

“They know Favre by name,” First Lieutenant Tim Boehnen said of the former Packers quarterback, in an interview with Milwaukee radio station WTMJ-AM.

“They obviously then started up the conversations and started talking about Brett Favre,” Boehnen said. “They soon learned about Favre going to the Vikings, and things just started going downhill from there.”

The abuse is apparently entirely verbal, and good-natured, according to Boehnen …

One of the big words they know now is shenanigan. They’ll constantly talk about “Favre shenanigans,” “He’s so good for the Vikings,” and “The Packers have got to really feel bad about that one.”

… unlike, say, the abuse of a goat in Winona that fans painted green and gold before shaving the number 4 into its side and stuffing it into the trunk of a car earlier this football season.

MnIndy file photo

An amendment that would ban federal funds going to companies that require arbitration in the case of sexual assault passed the Senate on Tuesday. The amendment was offered by Sen. Al Franken and was added to the defense appropriations bill by a vote of 68 to 30.

The amendment was offered after Jamie Leigh Jones, an employee of Kellogg, Brown & Root (formerly a subsidiary of Halliburton) was sexually assaulted by her co-workers in Iraq and then locked in a shipping crate when she tried to report the rape. Her return to the United States was facilitated by U.S. Rep. Ted Poe, R-Tex., but upon her return, she learned that the fine print of her employment contract banned her from taking the case to court.

On the Senate floor, Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., called it “a political attack directed at Halliburton.”

Franken rebutted, “This amendment does not single out a single contractor. This amendment would defund any contractor that refuses to give a victim of rape their day in court.”

The amendment was supported by a number of Minnesota organizations including Advocates for Human Rights, Breaking Free, Casa de Esperanza, Mid Minnesota Legal Assistance, the Minnesota Coalition against Sexual Assault, the Minnesota Indian Women’s Resource Center, the Minnesota Indian Women’s Sexual Assault Coalition, the Minnesota National Organization for Women, Minnesota Women Lawyers and the Sexual Violence Center.

“I’m proud of what we accomplished today. Victims of sexual assault deserve their day in court and no corporation should be able to deny them that right,” Franken said. “Jamie’s courage in telling her story will help women all over this country and I’m honored to have been a part of that.”

Jones also praised passage of the amendment. “This amendment makes all the hard times that I have gone through, when going public with such a personal tragedy, worth every tear shed from telling and retelling my horrific experience,” she said. “I am highly honored that Senator Franken and his wife have created this amendment to ensure that others do not have to endure the suffering that I have.”

A Chinook helicopter flies over Afghanistan (U.S. Army photo)

WASHINGTON — Last year, as Dr. Steven Miles, professor at the University of Minnesota Medical School and faculty member of its Center for Bioethics, was researching the deaths of detainees in U.S. custody, he noticed something strange. Although the Department of Defense had in the past issued press releases when detainees died at U.S.-run prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan, at some point in 2006, he says, the “entire prisoner death reporting system was turned off in Afghanistan.” Although at that time deaths in Iraq were still being reported, he says, that system was “turned off” at the beginning of 2008.

Miles, a member of the board of the Center for Victims of Torture and author of “Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity and America’s War on Terror,” was working on an updated edition of his 2006 book, which documents how physicians and psychologists working for the U.S. military violated the Hippocratic oath and American Medical Association rules by helping the government design and monitor abusive interrogations. The Hippocratic oath requires doctors to consider above all the health of their patients and to do no harm, while an AMA directive prohibits physicians from “providing or withholding any services, substances, or knowledge to facilitate the practice of torture” and obliges doctors to support victims and to “strive to change situations in which torture is practiced.”

Instead, Miles documented, first in the British medical journal the Lancet and then more expansively in his book, physicians actually helped facilitate torture. “The medical system collaborated with designing and implementing psychologically and physically coercive interrogations” in Iraq, Afghanistan and at Guantanamo Bay, he wrote. Death certificates were falsified and military health officers were either reporting instances of torture late, or not reporting them at all, he found. And, he observes in the Appendix to the book’s second edition, titled “Oath Betrayed: America’s Torture Doctors,” published by University of California Press this year, the military appeared to be using physicians and psychologists to test the reactions of detainees to particular interrogation techniques, which may well violate ethical bans on experimentation on human subjects. Physicians for Human Rights recently released a report documenting similar concerns.

As Miles was working on his book, he realized there were huge gaps in the military’s reporting about the torture, injury and death of detainees in its custody. Although Miles says the Pentagon never reported the deaths of detainees subjected to “extraordinary rendition” — those sent to other countries for interrogation, sometimes under torture — the Pentagon had, at least, been reporting the deaths of some prisoners it acknowledged having in its custody.

Then one day, the press releases stopped. “They just stopped reporting it,” said Miles last week. It couldn’t be that no one died, he said, because “you have a certain expected death rate based on the size of the population. I’ve been able to trace all public death reports and can show when they turned them off.”

Last week, the Washington Independent first reported that the Department of Defense appears to have stopped releasing information about the deaths of detainees in its custody in Afghanistan and Iraq. (It has continued to release them concerning detainees at Guantanamo, most of whom are represented by lawyers.) Despite numerous daily requests for a response from the Pentagon since the middle of last week, the site has still not received any information from the government about whether or why it stopped issuing these reports for its other detention centers abroad.

Miles, meanwhile, has used his findings to write an article about the Pentagon’s failure to disclose detainee deaths and their causes. The paper is now being prepared for publication in the American Journal of Bioethics, a leading bioethics journal and website. In his paper, Miles writes:

In May 2004, shortly after media published photographs of lethal abuse at Abu Ghraib prison, DoD disclosed 22 prisoner deaths; of which 12 (54%) were attributed to natural causes. DOD did not disclose another 67 deaths that occurred during that same period. Only 13 (15%) of the total 89 deaths were due to natural causes. By the end of 2008, 93 of 165 known decedents (56%) are unnamed. Death certificates are available for 37 (22%). Homicides and shelling of prisons are the leading causes of death. DoD has completely suppressed prisoner death reports from Afghanistan since 2004 and adopted a similar policy for Iraq in 2008.

That the government has concealed or delayed reporting on deaths in its custody is nothing new. The New York Times reported in 2004 that the Defense Department had provided incomplete or inaccurate information about deaths of prisoners in its custody. And Human Rights First, a leading human rights legal advocacy organization, in a comprehensive report in 2006 documented similar gaps in the government’s reporting of deaths in U.S. custody.

“Our report found that commanders failed to report deaths in custody,” said Devon Chaffee, advocacy counsel with Human Rights First. “Sometimes they reported them days or weeks later. But there clearly was a reporting problem. Some were simply not reported at all,” she said, although Army regulations require that deaths in U.S. custody be reported within 24 hours.

Human Rights First’s report, Command’s Responsibility, based on its study of autopsy reports and interviews with military personnel, witnesses and physicians, found that between August 2002 and February 2006 nearly 100 detainees had died “while in the hands of U.S. officials in the global ‘war on terror.’” Although the military had deemed 34 of those deaths suspected or confirmed homicides, Human Rights First counted a total of 45 cases where the facts suggested “death as a result of physical abuse or harsh conditions of detention.” What’s more, in almost half the cases surveyed, “the cause of death remains officially undetermined or unannounced.” Overall, the group found, by the beginning of 2006, “eight people in U.S. custody were tortured to death.”

The international Geneva Conventions, which govern the treatment of prisoners in wartime, requires each signatory country to report publicly the deaths of detainees in its custody. But because President Bush early on decided that detainees in the “war on terror” are not technically “Prisoners of War” entitled to the protections the Geneva Conventions, the U.S. military has not followed that requirement.

The Obama administration does not appear to have changed the reporting policy, although at least some officials in the administration have declared the “war on terror” over. Still, the Pentagon under President Obama has not resumed regular reporting on the deaths of prisoners in custody, says Miles. The system is “still shut down,” he said. “Obama hasn’t opened it up. It’s just mysterious to me.”

The Washington Independent has called and written to officials in the Defense Department at least six different times in the last week, asking for a response to this claim about its reporting and for a statement of the current policy on reporting detainee deaths. Late yesterday, a Pentagon spokesman confirmed that the DoD issues press releases when detainees die at Guantanamo Bay; the Washington Independent still has not received an answer with regard to the deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Regardless of the DoD policy, however, the result of the suppression of this information is that no one seems to know how many detainees in U.S. custody have died – including how many of those have been murdered or tortured to death – since the “war on terror” began.

Chafee said that Human Rights First and other human rights organizations, as far as she knows, have not had the resources to update their reports to keep an accurate count.

Representatives for the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights said those organizations have not been able to track those numbers, either. Both have sought information from the government related to detainee deaths through the Freedom of Information Act.

Daphne Eviatar is a law reporter for the Washington Independent.

We mentioned yesterday the varied mix of leaked documents that the Wikileaks.org Web site posts, including a U.S. Army memo on soldiers’ exposure to toxins. Today that Army memo and the Wikileaks site share center stage in a Duluth News Tribune story (via), along with a member of the 148th Air National Guard in Duluth who was one of thousands exposed to a toxic heap of burning trash in Iraq.

Here’s an excerpt:

Retired Chief Master Sgt. Ken McDonald of the 148th Air National Guard in Duluth said there was no way to avoid exposure to the massive open-air burn pit at the Balad air base in Iraq.

“We drove by it every day,” he said. “It was pretty nasty.”

McDonald, along with thousands of other troops who have served at Balad, may have been exposed to toxic waste from the pit, according to an Air Force memo that was leaked Tuesday on Wikileaks, a Web site that receives documents from anonymous sources to help expose government misdeeds.

“In my professional opinion, the known carcinogens and respiratory sensitizers released into the atmosphere by the burn pit present both an acute and chronic health hazard to our troops and local population,” Lt. Col. James R. Elliott, the chief of aeromedical services, wrote in the memo.

The memo, written in December 2006, said the pit had been identified as a health concern for several years, with one assessor calling it “the worst environmental site I have personally visited” in 10 years.

Since the fall of Saddam Hussein, homophobia and the terrorisation of LGBT people has got much worse. The western invasion of Iraq in 2003 ended the tyrannical Baathist dictatorship. But it also destroyed a secular state, created chaos and lawlessness and allowed the flourishing of religious fundamentalism. The result has been an Islamist-inspired homophobic terror campaign against LGBT Iraqis.

LGBT Iraqis are fleeing to neighboring countries where volunteers set up United Nations asylum status. Already, dozens of gay Iraqis have relocated to the United States, Sweden, the Netherlands and Germany.

This video, “The Sexual Cleansing of Iraq,” documents the connections between the homophobia-related murders and the democratic government of Iraq.

Both George W. Bush and Condoleeza Rice have commented that the incident with al-Zaidi is represents progress — a “sign of freedom that people feel,” as Bush said — in Iraq. No word yet on how and if the U.S. will look into the allegations.

So, given the competition, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that the incident in Iraq this weekend has taken such hold of global culture. Still, the story has prompted remarable responses: in the Arab world, supporters of the hurler, TV reporter Muntadar al-Zaidi, have taken to the streets to urge his release; a protest using shoes as props, is planned at the White House tomorrow; 95 of the top 100 YouTube politics videos today are about the incident; and scores of mash-ups, animated gifs and and spoof videos of the videos are making the rounds on the internet — some borrowing pop-culture figures, including The Three Stooges, video games, The Matrix and Monty Python.

George Bush Shoe Throw Austin Powers Remix, :25

Mashup: Bush Likes Shoes, 4:48

“These shoes rule. These shoes suck.” (Not safe for work due to language.)

Protest: Tomorrow a CODE PINK protest at the White House will include antiwar protesters and Iraq war veterans bearing bags of shoes.

Fashion tips: Hip-hop fashion site Complex offers a list of five shoes — many with nubs, spikes and knobs — that might’ve been better as projectiles.

Bush does stand-up: The surprisingly nimble Bush referenced what many consider a big boo-boo in his administration, saying he  “looked [Vladmir Putin] in the eye” — this was the year before Putin OK’d the raid on a Moscow theater held by Chechen separatists that killed 170 people, mostly civilians, and years before Russia sent troops into Georgia — and got “a sense of his soul.” In response to Saturday’s shoeing, he told reporters, “I didn’t know what the guy said, but I saw his sole.”

The comedy site 236.com says Bush is hoping his nimble response to the incident will help him “reshape his legacy” in Iraq: “Bush’s handling of the shoe-toss incident is far and away his most measured, calm, and reasonable response to a crisis on record.“

White House spin: Rob Walker, who writes for The New York Times Magazine, blogs, “I didn’t think there would be a way to reposition a guy throwing shoes at the President’s face as a victory for the American idea. But I guess there is.” He’s citing Bush who said “That’s what people do in a free society, draw attention to themselves” and Condoleeza Rice who said the incident “is a kind of sign of the freedom that people feel in Iraq.”

The Middle East responses: Iraqi officials don’t see it that way. The journalist is still being held in a Baghdad prison. Yesterday “thousands” of Iraqis protest his detention, calling him a “hero” (a poem posted on an Islamist site reportedly calls the man “a hero with a lion’s heart“). While many news outlets reported that al-Zeidi called Bush a “dog” while pitching the shoes, they (including this one) often neglect to include his other statement: “This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq.”

The Libyan group Wa Attassimou, run by Muammar Gaddafi’s daughter, Aicha Gaddafi, gave al-Zaidi a bravery award yesteday “because what he did represents a victory for human rights across the world.” The group called for al-Zaidi‘s release; he’s been accused of a “barbaric and ignominious act” and will be tried on charges of insulting the Iraqi state.

Then come the gifs, including this one spotted by Mediation…

…and these offered at Boing Boing:

And more:

Sock and Awe, the game, and what was on the bottom of the shoes:

Update: BBC and Arab media outlets are reporting that al-Zaidi is being tortured while in police custody

During a “surprise” visit to Iraq, George W. Bush held a press conference, during which an Iraqi journalist launched two shoes at the president. The man, who screamed “this is a goodbye kiss from the Iraqi people, dog,” was later wrestled to the ground. The BBC, which has the remarkable video, reports that in Arab cultures, the “soles of shoes are considered the ultimate insult.” (“Dog,” one might guess, likely comes in a close second.)

It’s one instance where the term “lame duck” doesn’t apply to Bush, who safely dodged the flung footwear.