The New York Times reports that “up to 35 officials in the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior ranking as high as general have been arrested over the past three days with some of them accused of quietly working to reconstitute Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party.”

The arrests, confirmed by officials from the Ministries of the Interior and National Security as well as the prime minister’s office, included four generals. The officials also said that the arrests had come at the hand of an elite counterterrorism force that reports directly to the office of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki.

Maliki’s creation of military units answerable only to himself and the inner circle of his Da’wa Party has been a growing issue. Musings on Iraq had this overview in October:

Since the security operation in Basra in March 2008 Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has been organizing local tribes to back the security forces and his government. So far these Tribal Support Councils have been established in Basra, Maysan, Babil, Wasit, Karbala, Dhi Qar, and Baghdad provinces. They are paid $21,000 by Baghdad when they first form, then receive $10,000 a month afterwards. They answer directly to Maliki’s office.

This has caused increasing tensions with the Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council (SIIC) who rules most of the south. The SIIC is afraid that Maliki will use these sheikhs to help his Dawa party gain seats in the upcoming provincial elections. The Prime Minister has publicly declared that the councils are non-partisan in nature, and that he would disband any that are allied with a party, but their political nature is apparent to everyone.

Recently, a tribal leader in southern Iraq publicly said what has been an open secret for months now that the Tribal Support Councils are meant to sway voters to Maliki’s Dawa party. Sheikh Nabil Sagban, the head of the Fatla tribe and a Tribal Support Council in Qadisiyah, said that the provincial elections are causing increasing tensions between Dawa and the SIIC. Each one is looking to gain followers before the balloting in early 2009. The tribes are in the middle as they can influence large numbers of Iraqis, especially in rural areas. The coming of a Support Council to the Fatla area of Qadisiyah seemed to work for Maliki as the sheikh declared he would vote for Dawa, and that he would tell his tribesmen to do the same.

In November, Iraq’s presidential council demanded that Maliki “suspend pro-government tribal councils so their legality could be reviewed.”

“We demand that you intervene to order a halt to the work of these councils until there is agreement about them, in order to provide administrative and legal cover for them,” the council said in a letter posted on its website.

The so-called Support Councils have already drawn fire from Iraq’s two main Kurdish parties, who earlier this month accused Maliki of creating his own militias to consolidate Baghdad’s grip on ethnically mixed regions.

While the Kurds in the north and Maliki’s Shia rivals in the south accuse Maliki of using these militias to strengthen his party’s hold in advance of January elections, Maliki has apparently learned from his Bush administration sponsors in that you can do pretty much anything you want as long as you call it “fighting terrorism.”

In recent days, Vice President Cheney has been vociferously defending the Bush administration’s detention policies. On Monday, he told Rush Limbaugh that Guantanamo Bay has been “very well run” and mocked President-elect Obama’s promise to close the facility. “I think they’ll discover that trying to close it is a very hard proposition,” said Cheney. More from the interview:

CHENEY: Remember, these are unlawful combatants. These are people who don’t belong to any recognized military force. They don’t obey the rules of warfare. They’re unlawful combatants. And you can’t — if you’re not going to have a place to locate them like Guantanamo, then you either have to bring them here to the continental United States — and I don’t know any member of Congress who’s volunteering to have al Qaeda terrorists deposited in his district — or you’ve got to turn them over to some foreign government.

Yesterday, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who will continue to serve under Obama, disputed Cheney’s skepticism. While Gates admitted that shutting down Guantanamo would be difficult, he said that all the potential problems are “solvable.” “I would like to see it closed,” said Gates. “And I think it will be a high priority for the new administration.” Watch it:

In his first weeks as Bush’s defense secretary, Gates also argued that Guantanamo needed to be shut down. According to the New York Times, Gates “urged that trials of terrorism suspects be moved to the United States, both to make them more credible and because Guantánamo’s continued existence hampered the broader war effort, administration officials said.” However, he was overruled by Cheney and then-attorney general Alberto Gonzales. (CAP’s Ken Gude has put together a plan on how to safely close Guantanamo and transfer the detainees.)

Transcript: Read more

This morning, CNN aired an exit interview with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. During the interview, reporter Zain Verjee asked Rice if she “regretted her role in the Iraq war.” Rice responded by saying that she had no regrets about the war and is “absolutely so proud” of invading Iraq:

QUESTION: Do you regret your role in the Iraq war?

SECRETARY RICE: I absolutely am so proud that we liberated Iraq.

QUESTION: Really?

SECRETARY RICE: Absolutely. And I’m especially, as a political scientist, not as Secretary of State, not as National Security Advisor, but as somebody who knows that structurally it matters that a geostrategically important country like Iraq is not Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

Watch it:

Rice’s pride is misplaced. Indeed, leaving aside the fact that the war was predicated on false intelligence, Rice cannot credibly argue as a “political scientist” that invading Iraq was in the interest of the U.S. “geostrategically.”

Indeed, Iraq posed no military threat to the United States in 2003. As Rice herself explained in July of 2001, Saddam Hussein had been unable to reconstitute himself militarily following the 1991 Gulf War. More importantly, the invasion of Iraq destabilized the region and empowered Iran politically and militarily. And contrary to neo-conservative predictions, Iran accelerated its nuclear weapons program in the wake of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Contrary to Rice’s assessment of the strategic value of the war in Iraq, a group of the some of the nation’s most celebrated political scientists argued in a paid advertisement in the New York Times on the eve of the Iraq war that the invasion was not in America’s strategic interests and predicted several of the negative effects of the war:

View the full ad here.

Despite her pride, Rice was — and remains — wrong about invading Iraq.

In an interview earlier this week, Vice President Cheney admitted to personally approving the torture of high-profile detainees. In a new interview with the Washington Times, Cheney stridently defended the Bush administration’s torture policies, saying, “I feel very good about what we did. I think it was the right thing to do.” He added emphatically that he would “do exactly the same thing again.”

Most audaciously, Cheney specifically defended the morality of torture, suggesting that it would have been immoral for the United States to not torture:

“In my mind, the foremost obligation we had from a moral or an ethical standpoint was to the oath of office we took when we were sworn in, on January 20 of 2001, to protect and defend against all enemies foreign and domestic. And that’s what we’ve done,” he said. [...]

“I think it would have been unethical or immoral for us not to do everything we could in order to protect the nation against further attacks like what happened on 9/11,” Mr. Cheney said.

Cheney insisted that the torture policies he helped craft were “directly responsible for the fact that we’ve been able to avoid or defeat further attacks against the homeland for 7 1/2 years.”

Torture has endangered, not protected, American lives. Military experts say that the U.S.’s torture policies have been the single greatest recruiting tool for al Qaeda. A former interrogator who worked in Iraq stated unequivocally, “The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001.”

Rather than keeping us safe, former FBI special agent Jack Cloonan warned that Cheney’s torture policies will lead directly to another domestic terrorist attack:

Based on my experience in talking to Al Qaida members, I am persuaded that revenge in the form of a catastrophic attack on the homeland is coming; that a new generation of jihadist martyrs, motivated in part by the images from Abu Ghraib, is, as we speak, planning to kill Americans; and that nothing gleaned from the use of coercive interrogation techniques will be of any significant use in forestalling this calamitous eventuality.

Cheney appeared unconcerned about the possibility of being held legally responsible for what many are calling an admission of war crimes. He insisted that waterboarding was not torture, and explained, “We spent a great deal of time and effort getting legal advice.” However, speaking on MSNBC last night, Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) said, “You can’t just suddenly change something that is illegal into something that is legal by having a lawyer write an opinion that saying it’s legal.”