Yesterday, reports surfaced that President Bush ordered Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to abstain from voting for a UN ceasefire resolution on Gaza due to pressure from Israeli Prime Minster Ehud Olmert. “I told him the United States could not vote in favor. It cannot vote in favor of such a resolution. He immediately called the secretary of state and told her not to vote in favor,” Olmert said.

An unnamed State Department official was quoted yesterday saying that it was Rice’s “recommendation all along” to abstain from the vote. Yet, ministers from Arab states said Rice had promised the U.S. would support the resolution “but then made an apparent about-face after talking to Bush.”

Now, the White House is disputing the reports, but won’t say what it is disputing. This morning, spokesman Gordon Johndroe said the reports on Olmert’s phone call to Bush “are inaccurate,” but did not specify the inaccuracy. And in the White House press briefing today, deputy press secretary Tony Fratto not only echoed Johndroe, but quickly moved on to another question when a reporter asked him to specify the inaccuracies in Olmert’s account:

FRATTO: Look, I think I’ve seen some of the reporting on this. I want to say that some of what we’ve seen is not accurate. [...]

Q: When you say reporting on this, I mean, these are actually Olmert’s words. I mean, he actually said this.

FRATTO: Yes, there are inaccuracies.

Q: In what Olmert said?

FRATTO: Yes.

Watch it:

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack today avoided specifics all together, saying everything Olmert said isn’t true. Olmert’s comments “are wholly inaccurate as to describing the situation, just 100-percent, totally, completely not true,” he said, adding that “[t]his idea that somehow she was turned around on this issue is 100-percent completely untrue.”

Still, some Arab ministers said they were surprised by Rice’s abstention. “We were told that the Americans were going to vote in favor,” Palestinian Foreign Minister Riad Malki said. “What happened in the last 10 or 15 minutes, what kind of pressure she received, from whom, this is really something that maybe we will know about later.”

As Democrats prepare to expand the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) and Republican Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA) are calling on Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and President-elect Barack Obama to continue denying health insurance to immigrant children. In a letter to the Democratic leaders, Boehner and Cantor stipulate that “only U.S. citizens and certain legal residents should be permitted to benefit from a program like SCHIP”:

Only U.S. citizens and certain legal residents should be permitted to benefit from a program like SCHIP. We believe SCHIP legislation must include stronger protections to prevent fraud by including citizenship verification standards to ensure that only eligible U.S. citizens and certain legal residents are controlled in the program.

The issue in question is the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), which subject most legal permanent residents to a five-year ban on eligibility. Under the provision, legal immigrants who are not refugees, humanitarian immigrants, active-duty members or veterans of the Armed Forces and their families (presumably this is what Boehner and Cantor mean by ‘certain legal residents’) can become eligible for SCHIP after a five-year residency period, provided they meet the program’s other income and categorical eligibility requirements.

The Democrats’ bill to expand SCHIP is expected to give states the option of lifting the five year waiting period and allow as many as 4000,000 children to apply for federal health programs.

Indeed, since 1996, immigrant children and pregnant women with no other source of coverage have been prevented from obtaining essential health care. The ban contributes to “higher costs for emergency room visits and poorer health outcomes” and has “exacerbated the disparity in health coverage between immigrants and native citizens,” contributed to the increasing uninsured rates among immigrants, and “shifted the burden of covering this population to sates and local safety net providers.”

But the argument for including tax-paying non-citizens in the SCHIP program is as much economic as it is moral. Forcing immigrant children to go five years without seeing a medical professional only increases SCHIP’s costs once the now sicker children become eligible for insurance.

As Chris Jennings explained at a recent CAP health event, “if people go in and out of the system you can neither prevent that problem nor can you coordinate the disease [management] well if you don’t have coverage.” Diagnosing and treating childhood diabetes or asthma before those conditions progress, improves the health status of the patient and saves money on costly treatments within the system.

Luckily, most Americans support lifting the ban. According to a survey commissioned by the child advocacy group First Focus, 67 percent of Americans “favor eliminating the five-year waiting period for legal immigrant children, while 19 percent were opposed.”

Still, perhaps the best solution to the SCHIP-immigration issue is comprehensive immigration reform that provides non-citizens with a path to full citizenship and benefits. Coupled with health care reform for all, such an approach can bring everyone into the health system and contain the nation’s spiraling health costs.

Yesterday, Freedom House released the latest edition of Freedom in the World, its annual survey of global political rights and civil liberties. According to the survey’s findings, “2008 marked the third consecutive year in which global freedom suffered a decline.”

Issued on the same day that President Bush gave his final petulant and combative press conference, Freedom House’s findings serve as yet another grim verdict on Bush’s “freedom agenda,” which has been long on rhetoric, but short on policies that actually promote freedom.

Significantly, according to the report, though Iraq registered slight gains, it is still categorized as “not free.”(pdf) Despite the best efforts of the pro-war gang to present Iraq as a success, it still suffers from widespread and persistent political dysfunction.

In this morning’s Washington Post, Anthony Shadid — whose Night Draws Near is one of the very best books on the Iraq war — has an excellent article providing some needed perspective on Bush’s Iraq. It’s the story of a 30 year-old former Al Qaeda insurgent who switched sides, and now rules over his town of Thuluyah, thanks to his command of a paramilitary Sons of Iraq unit:

Thuluyah is a microcosm of Sunni Muslim regions of the country, residents like to say. If so, the town is a sober harbinger. Khalil, often forthright, sometimes persuasive and occasionally thuggish, has become the strongman.

Just 30 years old, Khalil has inherited from his family the town’s biggest mosque, where brimming crowds gather on Fridays for his stentorian sermons. He heads the council that oversees the hundreds of armed men who deserted the insurgency for U.S.-funded units known as the Sons of Iraq, outnumbering the police and army unit stationed here. The mention of Khalil’s name — Mullah Nadhim, as he is known here — ensures passage through their checkpoints. He heads a council of tribal leaders that provides a channel to Maliki, who offered his hand in friendship in a meeting in Baghdad’s Green Zone. [...]

[Khalil] still calls himself an Islamist, and to his followers, his words remain harsh.

“Our country is occupied and our bodies are torn apart, but we shouldn’t forget our families in Palestine,” he proclaimed in a sermon recently to an overflow crowd in his austere mosque, its white walls gouged by shrapnel from his assassination attempt.

“Those sons of monkeys, enemies of God and killers of prophets,” he declared, his voice rising in denunciation of Jews, “are killing our brothers and sisters in Palestine.”

Let freedom ring! But seriously, the key question is whether Khalil — and the hundreds of former insurgent paramilitary commanders like him all over Iraq — can translate the power of their guns and their authority as conduits for American cash into genuine political legitimacy, and then whether that legitimacy will complement or contest the legitimacy of the Iraqi state. We shouldn’t expect these questions to be answered by the coming January 31 provincial elections in Iraq, but they should be clarified to some extent.

It’s very important to understand that, while the security environment in Iraq has been transformed over the last year, the Bush administration is not, in any sense, bequeathing an Iraq “success” to President Obama. He’s merely handing over a slightly less severe set of problems.

The new season of Fox’s popular terrorism drama ’24′ debuted Sunday night with a special two-hour episode. The season opened with the show’s main character, Jack Bauer, testifying before a Senate committee. Asked by the committee if he had engaged in torture while interrogating suspected terrorists, Bauer delivered a dramatic defense of torture:

BAUER: When I am activated, when I am brought into a situation, there is a reason and that reason is to complete the objectives of my mission at all costs. [...]

For a combat soldier the difference between success and failure is your ability to adapt to your enemy. The people that I deal with, they don’t care about your rules. … In answer to your question, am I above the law? No, sir. I am more than willing to be judged by the people you claim to represent. I will let them decide what price I should pay. Now please do not sit there with that smug look on your face and expect me to regret the decisions that I have made because, sir, the truth is I don’t.

Bauer’s fictional defense of torture and his fictional claims of its effectiveness are having very real consequences. Over the last two days, right-wing commentators have cheered Bauer’s belligerent Senate testimony, wondering how Congress could be so ungrateful to a torture advocate like Bauer. Often their commentary has been directed at critics of the Bush administration’s torture policies and suggests that the “average person” would approve of Bauer’s conduct. Watch a compilation:

The right wing’s love affair with Bauer’s use of torture is rooted in fantasy. The so-called “ticking time bomb” scenarios that Bauer often finds himself in and that conservatives cite as instances where torture should be allowed rarely, if ever, occur. Further, where torture has been used, it almost certainly results in the extraction of unreliable or inaccurate information. The “average person” is decidedly against the use of such techniques.

Still, the show is closely watched by American service men and women around the world. At Guantanamo Bay, in particular, the show was extremely popular; a former Guantanamo JAG explained, it “gave people a lot of ideas.” Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan at West Point even traveled to meet with the show’s creator and complained that the show was “promoting illegal behavior” among military officials.

If right wingers see Bauer as an example of how to prosecute the war on terror, they might be disheartened to learn that even the man that plays Bauer, actor Keifer Sutherland, doesn’t see his character’s torture techniques as effective in real life. “You torture someone and they’ll basically tell you exactly what you want to hear, whether it’s true or not, if you put someone in enough pain,” Sutherland said last year.

President-elect Obama campaigned on a plan to deploy up to 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan. But the “incoming administration does not anticipate that the Iraq-like ‘surge’ of forces will significantly change the direction” of the conflict. Instead, it hopes that the troops will “buy enough time for the new administration to reappraise the entire Afghanistan war effort and develop a comprehensive new strategy,” the Washington Post reports today.

This week, a coalition of progressive bloggers — spearheaded by Brave New Films (BNF) and The Seminal — are launching a campaign called Get Afghanistan Right. Bloggers will talk about the risks of escalation, the current situation in Afghanistan, the effects of the war domestically, and potential solutions. Robert Greenwald writes:

With the economy continuing a severe decline and the international scene in turmoil, we absolutely cannot afford a hugely expensive troop increase in Afghanistan. The country desperately needs many of the reforms and programs proposed by the incoming Obama administration. But, an escalation in Afghanistan will cripple our ability to mitigate the effects of the recession while making that country less stable. The success of the President-elect’s broader agenda depends on his ability to get us out of President Bush’s wars.

Interviewing The Washington Note’s Steve Clemons on Jan. 8, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow stated, “Maybe there is not a consensus about what to do in Afghanistan. Maybe there is no good war. Watch it:

Speaking about the Bush years, a senior U.S. military commander told the Post, “We have no strategic plan. We never had one.” A retired senior officer with ties to the Obama team added, “One of the problems is you don’t really know what kind of forces, and how many, until you know what strategy you’re going to have.”

Spencer Ackerman has more on the campaign and future Afghanistan policy.