“Nearly 80% of drug offenders in prison have never been convicted of a violent felony; about half have never even been arrested for one.” Let that figure sink in for a little bit. As New York eases the infamous Rockefeller Drug Laws, legislators and social workers in NYC are once again faced with the question of how our society ought to deal with drug use and addiction. Whatever they decide, we certainly know that the laws were not working. It is high time we “look outside our eyes…think outside our brain…walk outside our life to where the neighborhood changes.” For a while now, we have been losing the war on drugs, relying on harsh punishments instead of rehabilitation as if turning a blind eye on a problem has ever worked as a solution.

Addiction — a psychological condition — is a variable that we never considered when we first wrote up all of the various punitive equations. I’m not sure what these changes will eventually add up to, but it’s become glaringly apparent: The answer does not lie behind bars.

In December, the Washington Post reported that, “Under a presidential directive and authorities approved by administration lawyers,” the CIA was being allowed to hold “certain classes of [terrorism] suspects without accounting for them in any public way and without revealing the rules for their treatment.” These suspects are denied even the meager rights afforded to prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. They are reportedly transferred between a series of undisclosed detention centers around the world, including facilities at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, on ships at sea, and on Britain’s Diego Garcia island in the Indian Ocean. Until now, it was unclear how this secretive “presidential directive” squared with the president’s avowed distaste for torture and his promise that all suspects in American custody would be “treated well.”

Today, a 48-year-old Australian citizen who grew up in Egypt, Mamdouh Habib, gives a first-hand account of America’s “gulag” in the LA Times. After being interrogated by Americans in between torture sessions in Pakistan, Habib says he was flown to Cairo in October 2001, where American operatives delivered him to Egyptian interrogators who “shocked him with high-voltage wires, hung him from metal hooks on the wall, nearly drowned him and mercilessly beat and kicked him.”

After confessing to a litany of terrorism-related crimes — all of which he later insisted were false and given under “duress and torture” — Habib was transferred to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in May 2002, where he has languished since. He is expected to be released, uncharged, in the next couple of weeks.

This fairy tale squares nicely with the New York Times story this morning detailing how the White House made Congressional leaders scrap “a legislative measure…approved in the Senate by a 96-2 margin, [which] would have clamped down on C.I.A secret detention centers” and “explicitly extended to intelligence officers a prohibition against torture or inhumane treatment.”

Even as it has expressed disgust about abuses at Abu Ghraib, the administration has said “almost nothing” about the CIA operations.

Right-wingers in the Senate are having a hard time squaring their current objections to judicial filibusters with past practices. Specifically, they can’t get their story straight about their 2000 filibuster of Richard Paez, Bill Clinton’s nominee to the 9th Circuit.

Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) was confronted about his vote to filibuster Paez on CBS’s Face the Nation in November. Frist claimed they just needed more time (never mind that the nomination had been pending for four years):

“Filibuster, cloture, it gets confusing — as a scheduling or to get more information is legitimate. But no to kill nominees.”

In a recent article in the New Republic, Sen. Orrin Hatch has a different explanation. Hatch actually claims they were doing Paez a favor by filibustering his nomination:

“Even on controversial nominees such as Richard Paez…we invoked cloture to ensure that we would vote on confirmation.”

The truth, however, is found in a press release — entitled “Smith Leads Effort to Block Activist Nominees” — by former Sen. Bob Smith, issued on March 9, 2000, the day after the filibuster. Smith unequivocally states:

“[I] built a coalition of several moderate and conservative Senators in an effort to block [Paez].”

Last week it was announced that the crucial $581 million overhaul of the FBI’s computer system hit a major snag: it doesn’t work. Called “Virtual Case File,” the software was intended to aid in coordinating the agency’s antiterrorism measures, but “the bureau is so convinced that [it] will not work” that it has already started preparing to reopen the bidding process for new contractors to design new software. The software was designed by the Science Applications International Corp (SAIC), which will pocket a cool $100 million, even thought their software was a bust. Here’s a little more about this company, which in 2003 pulled in $5.4 billion in government revenue:

The Record
Even though they had no broadcasting experience, SAIC received an $82 million no-bid contract to run the first post-Saddam TV network in Iraq. It was an unmitigated disaster. Requests for basic news gear were denied. An audit found SAIC was paid for work it did not complete. They had no programs and relied on a mix of announcements from the U.S. military and rehashed U.S. newscasts – like coverage of the Laci Peterson coverage.

Although SAIC paid their executives in Iraq $273 an hour and security officers up to $1000 a day, they paid the Iraqis they hired as news anchors as little as $60 a month. When the Iraqis pointed out that wasn’t even enough to pay for decent clothes to wear on air, SAIC agreed to pay to dress them…but only from the waist up.

In March 2004, a Pentagon audit found SAIC improperly charged the government to fly a Hummer and pickup truck to Iraq on a private jet for the personal use of an SAIC employee. In all, they recommended that the company repay the government $634,834 for unsubstantiated costs.

SAIC was also awarded the contract to train Iraqi soldiers and police officers.

The Players:
Adm. William Owens, former SAIC president and CEO, became an influential member of Sec. Rumsfeld’s Defense Policy Board

Christopher Henry, former senior vice president at SAIC, became a key aide to Douglas Feith, who was in charge of supervising contract work done by SAIC in Iraq.

Gen. Wayne Downing, SAIC board member, became the chief counterterrorism expert at the National Security Council. Also a lobbyist for disgraced Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress, he was a vocal advocate for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

Follow the Money:
In the last election cycle, SAIC’s PAC gave $45,000 to the National Republican Senatorial Committee and the National Republican Congressional Committee alone.