House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) is in Iraq this weekend on a “surprise” visit to pay “respects to our troops and at the same time learn more about what the situation is on the ground.” Time notes that “in many ways she got a nicer arrival treatment than the last senior female American official to appear in Baghdad,” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice:

Rice slipped into Iraq in January much the same way Pelosi did today — stealthily, with a terse confirmation by the U.S. embassy offering few details of the agenda. But within hours of Rice’s arrival, TV news was crackling with word of it, and soon thereafter a volley of mortars fell on the Green Zone in an obvious message from Rice’s detractors. No rockets or mortars were heard heading into the Green Zone today as word of Pelosi’s presence hit the Iraqi airwaves in what amounted to a daytime news blip.

Some Iraqi officials, however, did not receive Pelosi, in part due to her advocacy of a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. On her “first day on the ground Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki did not make an effort to see her,” Time adds.

A new report from the Justice Department’s inspector general concluded that “no agents for the Federal Bureau of Investigation took part in the military’s rough interrogations” in Guantánamo Bay, Iraq and Afghanistan. The report, however, also states that agents were too slow to respond to misgivings about questioning tactics. Some agents said the “torture tactics” they witnessed “yielded little actual intelligence“:

F.B.I. agents complained to superiors beginning in 2002 that the tactics they had seen yielded little actual intelligence, prevented them from establishing a rapport with detainees through more traditional means of questioning and might violate F.B.I. policy or American law.

One F.B.I. memorandum spoke of “torture techniques” used by military interrogators. Agents described seeing things like inmates handcuffed in a fetal position for up to 24 hours, left to defecate on themselves, intimidated by dogs, made to wear women’s underwear and subjected to strobe lights and extreme heat and cold.

In “a stark acknowledgment that the United States is likely to continue to hold prisoners overseas for years to come,” the New York Times reports today that “the Pentagon is moving forward with plans to build a new, 40-acre detention complex” at the Bagram air base in Afghanistan. As Justin Peters notes at Slate, the Times’ article doesn’t reveal until its final paragraphs that “some detainees have been held without charge for more than five years” at the current Bagram detention facility:

Military personnel who know both Bagram and Guantánamo describe the Afghan site, 40 miles north of Kabul, as far more spartan. Bagram prisoners have fewer privileges, less ability to contest their detention and no access to lawyers.

Some detainees have been held without charge for more than five years, officials said. As of April, about 10 juveniles were being held at Bagram, according to a recent American report to a United Nations committee.

Yesterday, a military judge “postponed the first war crimes tribunal at Guantanamo Bay, saying he wants to wait until the Supreme Court makes its highly anticipated ruling on the right of detainees to challenge their confinement in civil courts.” The case will now be delayed until July 21, to avoid “‘potential embarrassment, waste of resources and prejudice to the accused,’ if the Supreme Court ruling forces a halt to the proceedings mid-trial.” Defense lawyers for Salim Ahmed Hamdan had requested a postponement, but military prosecutors said they were “eager to go to trial.”

Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) campaign has begun an effort to reach out to both liberal and conservative bloggers, perhaps attempting to repair the senator’s past slights against new media. However, one blogger upset at not being included in the project is Michelle Malkin, who yesterday complained that she wasn’t invited to take part:

Yesterday, I learned that several far left-wing blogs were invited to participate in The Maverick’s blogger conference call session (it’s part of that Big Vision Thing). I e-mailed McCain’s New Media guy, Patrick Hynes, asking if I could participate in the next blogger conference call.

After all, McCain said yesterday he’ll “listen to any idea that is offered in good faith and intended to help solve our problems, not make them worse” and “will set a new standard for transparency and accountability” and “will work with anyone, of either party, to make this country safe, prosperous and proud.”

If he’s willing to take questions from hostile liberal bloggers, why not take some from conservative bloggers who represent substantial readerships with dissenting views on how best to make this country “safe, prosperous, and proud?” I’ll keep you updated.

As Malkin herself would say, “Boo-freakin-hoo.” (HT: Atrios and TBogg)

Despite Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) occasional attempts to distance himself from President Bush, ABC News concludes that there really isn’t “too much distance.” In fact, a fundraiser has been set for May 27 in Phoenix, marking the first time Bush will join McCain for a campaign event since he secured the nomination.

Lots of interesting material in Michelle Cottle’s notebook dump on what various Clintonistas think the campaign did wrong. Two small points before I get to my big point. One:

“Devastating vulnerabilities such as Obama’s associations with Wright and Ayers were not unearthed by the campaign’s vaunted research team in time to be fully taken advantage of–despite being readily available in the public domain.”

I’d heard about Wright and Ayers from Clinton supporters long before the Clinton campaign started officially pushing these issues. I simply don’t believe that the “vaunted research team” hadn’t “unearthed” this information. Rather, I think the campaign thought it would be sleazy and counterproductive to start campaigning on this stuff until they got truly desperate. And I think they were right.

Two — when you lose a big race by a close margin there are a million things you can second guess and no one true answer.

Big point — it’s fascinating to me that nobody mentioned the war. Clinton supported the war. In retrospect, the war was a terrible idea. Her support for it was a mistake. What’s more, it’s inconceivable to me that Obama’s campaign could have gotten off the ground had Clinton spent 2002 and 2003 as a lonely liberal voice speaking out against the war, then spent 2005 and 2006 being completely vindicated in her judgment. It’s not just that Obama wouldn’t have beaten her, he wouldn’t have run at all — it would have been preposterous. She would have faced a from-the-right challenge in the primary that would have gotten some attention but never posed any real threat.

But Clinton’s error on the war opened up serious doubts about her substantive and political judgment about one of the highest-profile issues of the moment. In many ways it’s a testament to how brilliant her campaign was all throughout 2007 and 2008 that they never allowed the war issue to bury her, considering that an overwhelming majority of Democratic primary voters think she made a mistake.