Today in a speech to the Women’s Foreign Policy Group, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice refused to answer what she knew about the interrogations that were videotaped in 2002, and then destroyed two years later. When moderator Andrea Mitchell asked Rice when she learned of the destruction of the tapes, Rice replied, “I myself don’t recollect any knowledge of the tapes.”

When asked about the 2002 interrogations, however, Rice was less forthcoming:

MITCHELL: Could we just ask, since the interrogations took place in 2002 when you were national security adviser, at the time were you aware — fully aware of the techniques being used and the videotape?

RICE: As I said, the Justice Department has now taken up this matter, and so I don’t think that it’s appropriate for me to comment further.

Watch it:

Rice is willing to publicly state that she had no knowledge of the tapes’ destruction in 2005, but won’t do the same on the 2002 interrogations.

In addition to Rice, at least five high-ranking administration officials and former officials have disavowed any knowledge of the tapes’ destruction. They have instead placed the blame on Jose Rodriguez, then the CIA’s head of the clandestine division. Former CIA officials, however, have described Rodriguez as “a cautious operator who probably would have ensured that top CIA managers knew of the plan” to destroy the torture tapes.

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Former Halliburton/KBR employee Jamie Leigh Jones has revealed that she was gang-raped by her co-workers while working in Baghdad, and then left by the company in a “shipping container for at least 24 hours without food or water.” ABC News reports:

Jamie Leigh Jones, now 22, says that after she was raped by multiple men at a KBR camp in the Green Zone, the company put her under guard in a shipping container with a bed and warned her that if she left Iraq for medical treatment, she’d be out of a job. [...]

Over two years later, the Justice Department has brought no criminal charges in the matter. In fact, ABC News could not confirm any federal agency was investigating the case.

Legal experts say Jones’ alleged assailants will likely never face a judge and jury, due to an enormous loophole that has effectively left contractors in Iraq beyond the reach of United States law.

Jones is now trying to proceed with the case in civil court, but KBR is pushing for it to be heard in “private arbitration,” without a “public record or transcript.” Halliburton has “won more than 80 percent of arbitration proceedings brought against it.”

The ONE Campaign’s put together a useful website, on the record that lets you see what the various presidential candidates have committed to in terms of extreme global poverty and disease. It’s got a comparison feature which reveals that the three major Democrats all have pretty similar positions. And sound ones at that, which is very good news, though with something like promises to spend billions on improving developing world access to education, the crux of the matter is not so much the difference between Clinton and Obama promising $2 billion a year and Edwards promising $3 billion a year as it is the question of what congress is willing to pony up.

On the Republican side you see some bigger difference. Here’s Romney, Huckabee, and Giuliani, for example, where you’ll see that Huckabee’s committed to doing the most whereas Giuliani’s never so much as publicly addressed most of these issues. That should tell you a thing or two about hizzoner’s depth of understanding of world affairs — he hasn’t rejected a particular approach to global poverty and development issue, he just hasn’t devoted any thought or attention to the issue whatsoever since if it doesn’t involve killing people or grandstanding, I guess he’s not interested.

In light of news that the CIA destroyed tapes documenting the torture of detainees, Sen. Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) today wrote to Attorney General Michael Mukasey asking that he detail his views on interrogation. Mukasey repeatedly dodged these questions during his nomination hearings. From his letter:

During the hearing on your nomination to be Attorney General and in your answers to questions submitted for the record, you repeatedly refused to answer questions related to interrogation techniques on the grounds that you had not yet been briefed on the CIA’s interrogation and detention program. I was disappointed with these responses. [...]

Nonetheless, now that you have been sworn in as our nation’s Attorney General and presumably have been briefed on the program, I urge you to provide your views on its legality to Congress at the earliest possible date.

In Iowa today, 10 newspapers are running a full page ad advocating for a single-payer health-care bill, highlighting the fact Vice President Dick Cheney has benefited from his government-provided coverage. “If he were anyone else, he’d probably be dead by now,” the ad claims. Cheney, as the ad notes, has a long history of health problems:

The patient’s history and prognosis were grim: four heart attacks, quadruple bypass surgery, angioplasty, an implanted defibrillator and now an emergency procedure to treat an irregular heartbeat

The ad, which is sponsored by the California Nurses Association and the National Nurses Organizing Committee, argues that without his government-provided health care, Cheney’s recent heart problems would have been “a death sentence“:

For millions of Americans, this might be a death sentence. For the vice president, it was just another medical treatment. And it cost him very little.

Unlike the average American, the president, vice president and members of Congress all enjoy government-financed health care with few restrictions or prohibitive fees.

In response to the ad, Cheney spokesperson Megan Mitchell told the Wall Street Journal that “something this outrageous does not warrant a response.”

The factual and provocative ad isn’t outrageous. What is outrageous is the fact that there are roughly 47 million people in America without health insurance, including 3.2 million children, but President Bush vetoed legislation in October that would have extended coverage to 4 million more children.

While it is certainly good that Vice President Cheney was able get the medical attention he needed, the groups’ ad is right. “The rest of us deserve no less” than Cheney.

How is it exactly that a letter Jane Harman writes to the CIA manages to be classified? Harman doesn’t work for the CIA, after all. Spencer Ackerman gets the answer: a legal called “derivative classification.” This seems like an odd legal principle to me, but it seems well-established.

In 1998, then-Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee spoke at the National Pastors’ Conference, explaining why he entered into politics:

I didn’t get into politics because I thought government had a better answer. I got into politics because I knew government didn’t have the real answers, that the real answers lie in accepting Jesus Christ into our lives. [...]

I hope we answer the alarm clock and take this nation back for Christ.

In the past, Huckabee has also claimed that God supports Republicans. McCain, similarly, has claimed that “the Constitution established the United States of America as a Christian nation.”

UPDATE: Mother Jones has “contacted the Huckabee campaign and asked if it would help make his previous sermons available, the campaign replied in a one-sentence email that it had received multiple requests for such material and was ‘not able to accommodate’ them.”

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