After the 2003 Iraq invasion, Coalition Provisional Authority chief Paul Bremer created a major anti-corruption ministry in Iraq, the Public Integrity Commission (CPI). Last October, former CPI commissioner Judge Radhi al-Radhi, who was appointed by Bremer and whose work has been praised by top U.S. officials, told Congress about the “rampant” corruption in Iraqi ministries that had cost Iraq as much as $18 billion.

Radhi’s gripping account detailed how Prime Minister Maliki tried to subvert his commission and how nearly four dozen of his staff members were killed. Subsequently, he was forced to seek asylum in the United States.

But today, Radhi is living as an undocumented immigrant in Virginia. In a Democratic Policy Committee hearing yesterday, former State Department official James Mattil told Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-ND) that Radhi has no “official status” in the U.S. Currently, only a group of Quakers and Arthur Brennan, the former head of the department’s Office of Accountability and Transparency, are funding Radhi, he said:

DORGAN: And where is Judge al-Radhi at the moment?

MATTIL: Living in an apartment in Springfield, maybe for the rest of the month if they can get it worked out that somebody is going to pay for it. But he’s not allowed to work. He has no official status, so he’s not — he’s undocumented — I don’t know what he is. I mean, he’s lost. He’s a person without a country.

Watch it:

The State Department turned against Radhi, according to Mattil and Brennan. They “said a senior State Department official had ordered agency employees not to give al Radhi references or contact him” about the asylum. Radhi is “destitute” in his current situation, they noted.

An infuriated Dorgan slammed the administration’s neglect of an ally whose work it didn’t like. “This is about betrayal,” Dorgan declared. “[O]ur government turned against him. Our State Department and our embassy pulled the rug out from under him. … [W]e’re going to ask the State Department what in the hell are they thinking.”

The American asylum program for Iraqis who have aided U.S. forces in Iraq has “fallen far short of demand,” as the Washington Post noted in January. Even Iraq’s top anti-corruption official, who has “praised the U.S. invasion of Iraq,” is subject to complete abandonment.

On Fox News’s America’s Election HQ yesterday, Nancy Pfotenhauer, a senior policy adviser to Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), disingenuously attacked Sen. Jim Webb’s “21st Century GI Bill,” in order to justify her boss’s opposition to the bill. Webb’s bill “does nothing to address reenlistment and retention,” charged Pfotenhauer.

Pfotenhauer cited a recent Congressional Budget Office report to support her specious claims:

Senator McCain has his own legislation, and by the way, he’s largely supportive of the goals of the Webb bill. The problem is, it doesn’t do enough — it doesn’t it quickly enough and it does nothing to address reenlistment and retention. In fact, CBO, the Congressional Budget Office has estimated that if the Webb bill went through, we’d see a reduction in reenlistment rates of 16 percent.

Watch it:

But, as ThinkProgress has noted, the CBO report cited by Pfotenhauer actually shows that Webb’s bill would increase enlistment to such an extent that it would completely offset the loss in retention:

Literature on the effects of educational benefits on retention suggest that every $10,000 increase in educational benefits yields a reduction in retention of slightly more than 1 percentage point. CBO estimates that S. 22 (as modified) would more than double the present value of educational benefits for servicemembers at the first reenlistment point — from about $40,000 to over $90,000 — implying a 16 percent decline in the reenlistment rate, from about 42 percent to about 36 percent. […]

Educational benefits have been shown to raise the number of military recruits. Based on an analysis of the existing literature, CBO estimates that a 10 percent increase in educational benefits would result in an increase of about 1 percent in high-quality recruits. On that basis, CBO calculates that raising the educational benefits as proposed in S. 22 would result in a 16 percent increase in recruits.

Sen. John Warner (R-AZ), a co-sponsor of Webb’s bill who is also a veteran of World War II and Korea, has said that the flip side of the impact on retention is that “putting a big piece of cheese out there will induce more qualified people to join just to get this.”

The Army is in need of new incentives like Webb’s bill in order to attract higher quality recruits. Thus far, in 2008, 13 percent of the Army’s recruits have been granted “conduct” waivers for misdemeanor or felony charges, which is up from 11 percent in 2007 and 4.6 percent in 2004.

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The AP reports today that the Pentagon has “dropped charges” against Mohammed al-Qahtani, a Saudi held at Guantanamo Bay since 2002 who was alleged to have been the so-called “20th hijacker” on 9/11.

Known as Detainee 063, Qahtani was the subject of a 2002 meeting at Guantanamo that included former Bush lawyer Alberto Gonzales, Cheney’s lawyer David Addington, and former Rumsfeld lawyer Jim Haynes. The trio approved the interrogations at Guantanamo, with Donald Rumsfeld then authorizing the “First Special Interrogation Plan” specifically for Qahtani. The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) noted that these methods included:

[F]orty-eight days of severe sleep deprivation and 20-hour interrogations, forced nudity, sexual humiliation, religious humiliation, physical force, prolonged stress positions and prolonged sensory overstimulation, and threats with military dogs. The aggressive techniques, standing alone and in combination, resulted in severe physical and mental pain and suffering.

“This is a very dangerous individual who has provided us with valuable intelligence,” claimed former White House press secretary Scott McClellan in 2005. But as Marcy Wheeler notes, the dismissal raises questions about the credibility of torture-based evidence.

Renowned international lawyer Philippe Sands, who has extensively studied Qahtani, talked to PBS’s Bill Moyers about the interrogations of Qahtani on Friday. “And the bottom line of it was, contrary to what the administration said, they got nothing out of him,” Sands explained. Watch it:

In 2006, Qahtani recanted a confession he said he made after he was tortured. In fact, “Qahtani never made a single statement that was not extracted through torture or the threat of torture,” CCR notes.

Records of the interrogations of Qahtani, however, were “mysteriously lost.” Cameras that “run 24 hours a day at the prison were set to automatically record over their contents,” the Guardian reported last month.

It says a lot about the state of our political culture that the best interview of Doug Feith was conducted by Jon Stewart on The Daily Show. That’s not to take anything away from Stewart — as usual, he manages to be funny, astute, and (mostly) respectful while revealing his guest as a disingenuous, dissembling weasel. It’s sad that the news show in which Feith is subjected to his most challenging interview was originally created as a satire of news shows.

I’m seriously not inclined to get into the yogic tangle of excuses that Feith offers. Essentially, Feith wants us to believe that pretty much everything else that we’ve read and heard about the administration’s decision to invade Iraq, and Feith’s own role in that decision, is wrong, and that we should instead heed Doug Feith’s own transparently self-serving interpretation of those events:

FEITH: When people read this book, I think people will be surprised to be reminded of what was actually said. A lot of people’s perceptions of what was said is filtered through the recent history….I think they misremember a lot.[...]

STEWART: Maybe the disconnect is that the written record within the government differs so greatly. With all respect, I think I remember pretty clearly the general tenor of what people were saying in the run-up to war, and it was, the president specifically: The risk of doing nothing is far greater than the risk of going in. But the risks of going in were never quantified publicly the way they were privately. In fact, the opposite: they undersold them. [There was] a consistent drumbeat, a willful selling of the positive and pushing back of the negative.

FEITH: Some of the criticisms you’ve made are valid. There were statements that everyone in the administration, myself included, made that looking back you wish you could make them differently. I don’t think any of them were deception. I think they were errors.

I think I see the problem. The problem is that Doug Feith has his own special, secret definition of “deception.” Telling the American people that you are sure Saddam Hussein has WMD (and “we know where they are!“) when in fact you are not sure that Saddam Hussein has WMD apparently does not meet that standard.

Back in the real world, the record on this is pretty clear: Having taken the decision, in the months after 9/11, to invade Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein’s government, the Bush administration mobilized every unit of the executive branch, even creating new ones, blurring every possible line between advocacy and propaganda to make that invasion happen. And, as the Pentagon Retired Military Shills story shows, they have maintained this psy-ops campaign through the Iraq war to this day. For this administration, American public opinion has always been the central front in the war on terror.

In this respect, Doug Feith is only small part of a bigger story, an ideologically hidebound bureaucrat condemned to spend the rest of his life frantically and fruitlessly arguing against history’s overwhelmingly clear verdict on his incompetence and mendacity. At the end of the day, though, he’s just a supporting player in the tragedy of how the George W. Bush administration politicized America’s national security in order to enact a fundamentally unworkable model — a model based on a bunch of bong-hit fantasies about American power. And in doing so they led America into one of the biggest and costliest blunders in its history.