Fox News chief Roger Ailes gave a no-holds-barred interview to Newsweek and the Daily Beast’s Washington bureau chief Howard Kurtz, but the interview took a strange turn when Ailes lashed out at the Associated Press’ reporting on an Aug. 29 suicide bombing in Baghdad. Kurtz writes:

The talk turns to terrorism. Ailes is angry about an Associated Press report that 29 worshipers were killed by a suicide bomber in Baghdad’s largest Sunni mosque during prayers. “How do we know they were worshiping?” he demands. “I think the AP is so far over the hill, they’ve become left wing, antiwar. Gotta watch their copy.”

Andrew Sullivan notes Ailes’ comment and asks readers to “take a few steps out”:

Ailes seems to believe that an assumption that Muslims in a Mosque were at prayer is a function of “left-liberalism” not empirical fact. Why? Because, presumably, the sacrilegious carnage would reflect badly on the aftermath of the Iraq war and occupation – showing that we had achieved almost nothing after so much sacrifice. This is wrong because it would be “anti-war,” and therefore “left wing”. Not because it’s untrue.

But also, Ailes claim that the AP’s reporting represents its supposed left-wing bias lacks evidence. The AP’s story that a a suicide bomber detonated during prayers is corroborated by reporting from a wide variety of news outlets, including the Christian Science Monitor, the Voice of America and Reuters. And CNN, citing a source in the Iraqi Interior Ministry, reported:

Twenty-eight people are dead following a suicide bomb attack at a Sunni mosque in Baghdad. We’re getting that from an official at the Iraqi Interior Ministry. Another three dozen people were wounded. The attack occurred during prayers at the Umm al-Qura mosque in western Baghdad. A Sunni member of parliament was among those killed.

Watch it:

While numerous reports, both from eyewitnesses and in the Iraqi government, confirm that the attack occurred during prayers, Ailes suggests that the AP’s report, which was in line with all other news accounts, needs to “watch their copy.” Ailes fails to explain how a report that a suicide bomb was detonated during prayers helps further the “leftwing, antiwar” agenda he attributes to the AP and its reporters.

Today, the Atlantic has published a new article by Matthieu Aikins, “Our Man In Kandahar,” that alleges that Kandahar police chief Abdul Raziq has ordered both brutal interrogations involving electric shock treatment and massacres of unarmed individuals.

Aikins, who had heard rumors of Raziq’s abuses since he wrote a 2009 article about him in Harpers, first investigates the case of two boys he refers to as Ahmed and Najib to protect their safety. Both boys told him they were arrested in Kandahar and then summarily tortured with electric shocks; they then were interrogated by Raziq, who appeared to approve of their treatment. Aikins found that the boys’ co-workers and a source within the Kandahar police department corroborated their story. “It felt like my whole body was filled with moving knives,” said one of the boys:

Najib went first. He was forced to lie on his back, and wires leading to the generator were attached to toes on both his feet. A group of Border Police crowded around him, jeering and spitting snuff on his face. “Tell us the truth,” they commanded. Then they switched on the power. “It felt,” Najib told me, “like my whole body was filled with moving knives.” After he passed out from the pain, it was Ahmad’s turn to be tortured. When the two awoke from the ordeal, they were placed in separate rooms. In the evening, they were taken to police headquarters to see Abdul Raziq himself.

Aikins goes on to note that “a number of Afghan and international officials familiar with the situation there told me that Raziq has brought with him a new level of brutality” after taking over as Kandahar’s police chief. He notes that Raziq’s men are trained by Dyncorp and Xe (formerly Blackwater) at a U.S.-funded training center and that their salaries are paid for by the “Order Trust Fund for Afghanistan, a UN-administered international fund, to which the U.S. is the largest contributor.”

But the most troubling allegation is of Raziq’s involvement in a massacre along the Afghanistan in 2006. Raziq, who was then head of a militia and tasked with border security in the town of Spin Boldak, claimed that he had killed a number of Taliban fighters in a skirmish. But word soon began to leak out of a massacre, yet no official investigation was ever released of the events that took place there. Yet Aikins obtained the results of a suppressed police investigation of the incident that concluded that Raziq had ordered detainees summarily executed, and that some of the victims were children. In interviews with “a diverse set of sources, including tribal elders, human-rights workers, police officers, and government officials,” Aikins concludes that the people killed by Raziq’s forces were civilians that were part of a rival tribe — targeted as a part of tribal conflict over smuggling routes —  rather than Taliban fighters. The Atlantic has published photographs of the massacre in a slide show found in Aikin’s article from the suppressed police investigation. (WARNING: the photos are very graphic).

U.S. government sources denied these allegations in interviews with Aikins. “I have never seen evidence of private prisons or of extrajudicial killings directly attributable to him,” said the State Department’s Ben Moeling. While diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks show that the U.S. government was skeptical of Raziq’s anti-corruption efforts, Rolling Stone’s Michael Hastings pointed out on Twitter, one cable shows that the U.S. government has been working to rehabilitate Raziq’s image. A Kandahar embassy cable dated February 17, 2010 notes that the Embassy was working on assembling a team to work on “the longer-term encouragement of stories in the international media on the ‘reform’ of Razziq. … Razziq said he would welcome such a team.”

When President Obama said he intended to fill the five-year vacancy at the U.S. embassy in Damascus, Syria, Republicans went wild, expressing opposition to an appointment and, eventually, blocking confirmation. Last December, Obama gave a recess appointment to Ambassador Robert Ford. With that appointment slated to expire at the end of the year, some conservatives continued to insist that Ford should be recalled or signaled that they again intend to block his confirmation.

But the tide — even among conservatives — has begun turning in favor of Ford’s confirmation as he’s established himself in a critical role as the Syrian government’s continued a months-long deadly crackdown against non-violent anti-government protests. The change came when Ford put his own life on the line to reach out to the Syrian opposition, even going so far as to join protesters in the street in a “show of solidarity.” Ford has also become the lynchpin of a U.S. policy now looking beyond the rule of Syrian dictator Bashar al Assad.

The latest conservative turn toward Ford came from Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK). Inhofe was one of a group of Republican senators that signed a May 2010 letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton arguing that any engagement with the Syrian regime constituted a “reward” for Assad’s government. But as Ben Birnbaum reported in the Washington Times today, Ihofe’s changed his tune:

“I really changed my mind on this,” said Sen. James M. Inhofe, Oklahoma Republican and member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

“He has done some things that are just really impressive. He’s gone to places where the protesters are. He’s been roughed up a few times. I had the impression that he wouldn’t be quite strong enough, and I’ve been proven wrong.”

In an interview with Birnbaum, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) went even further, accusing those opposed to Ford’s continuing presence in Damascus of verging on being pro-Assad:

I would say now, because he has become such a symbol of American support for the Syrian people, that it would actually be a defeat for the cause of freedom in Syria – and almost a victory for Assad – if we don’t confirm Robert Ford.

With tons of even neoconservatives — usually reliably hawkish on the Middle East and against diplomacy in countries considered U.S. adversaries — now coming out in favor of confirming Ford and allowing him to stay in Damascus to continue his work, one wonders how long the final holdouts like Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) and potentially others can cling to their obstructionist position on an up-or-down vote for the ambassador.

The Iranian government last week released Josh Fattal and Shane Bauer, two Americans who had been held there on false spying allegations since 2009, from prison, and in their first chance to speak to the media, Bauer and Fattal detailed the human rights violations they had experienced at the hands of the Iranian government. Among those violations were poor prison conditions and long periods of time spent in isolation, complaints similar to those filed by the lawyers of prisoners at American prisons controlled by the military and Central Intelligence Agency.

According to Bauer and Fattal, Iranian prison guards repeatedly used the harsh conditions of Guantanamo Bay and CIA prisons around the world to justify their own human rights violations:

BAUER: In prison, every time we complained about our conditions, the guards would immediately remind us of comparable conditions at Guantanamo Bay. They would remind us of CIA prisons in other parts of the world, and the conditions that Iranians and others experience in prisons in the U.S. We do not believe that such human rights violations on the part of our government justify what has been done to us. Not for a moment. However, we do believe that these actions on the part of the U.S. provide an excuse for other governments, including the government of Iran, to act in kind.

Watch it:

During his unsuccessful 2009 effort to close the Guantanamo Bay prison, President Obama and members of his administration claimed that techniques used by the American military there would be used to justify actions against captured American troops. Obama said the prison’s closure would allow the U.S. to regain the “moral high ground” in combating terrorism, while Admiral Dennis Blair called the prison a “a rallying cry for terrorist recruitment.” CIA Director Gen. David Petraeus, then the top commander in the Middle East, was more direct. “Gitmo has caused us problems, there’s no question about it,” Petraeus said. “I oversee a region in which the existence of Gitmo has indeed been used by the enemy against us.”

With clear evidence that Obama and his military leaders were correct in asserting that American actions at Guantanamo would be used against Americans captured abroad, perhaps it is time to consider the ramifications of not closing Guantanamo Bay.