ABC News has an exclusive report of two released Iraqi detainees who allege shocking accounts of torture by U.S. troops. Aside from physical beatings, the men allege:

"They took us to a cage — an animal cage that had lions in it within the Republican Palace," he said. "And they threatened us that if we did not confess, they would put us inside the cage with the lions in it. It scared me a lot when they got me close to the cage, and they threatened me. And they opened the door and they threatened that if I did not confess, that they were going to throw me inside the cage. And as the lion was coming closer, they would pull me back out and shut the door, and tell me, 'We will give you one more chance to confess.' And I would say, 'Confess to what?'"

Inside the Republican Palace — the site of Saddam's former office — Sabbar says troops taunted him with a mock execution.

There are several editorials in today's papers opposing the Graham Amendment:

• Houston Chronicle
• Boston Globe
• Denver Post
• Miami Herald
• San Francisco Chronicle
• North Jersey Record and Herald News
• Baltimore Sun

[hat tip to Neal Sonnett of Miami]

Of all the articles and columns I have read in recent days about the injustice of stripping the right of detainees to access to our courts to challenge the legality of their detention, this is my favorite.

It is written by two Denver civil rights lawyers with clients at Guantanamo. When reading it for quotes, I couldn't pick just a few. Every paragraph should be read.

To get the flavor, start with this:

Italian prosecutors are seeking the extradition of 22 CIA agents involved with the kidnapping and extraordinary rendition of Egyptian Islamic cleric Mustafa Osama Nasr, also known as Abu Omar. Omar was kidnapped by the CIA on a street in Milan and flown to Cairo where he allegedly was tortured.

Also see the English translation of an Italian news article on the extradition request here, reporting among other things that one of the 22 agents is a woman and that no final decision by the Italian Government has been made on whether to formally seek extradition:

Hilary at Obsidian Wings debunks Sen. Lindsay Graham's claims about detainee lawsuits.

Also, there is now at least one online campaign to support the Bingaman Amendment to defeat the Graham amendment and save habeas corpus for detainees. Please visit One Million Phone March to Save Habeas:

With virtually no advance notice the Republican majority in the Senate approved a last minute amendment to the Defense Authorization Act to deny U.S. courts jurisdiction to examine the legality of detainee detention in Guantanamo and elsewhere. They did this in defiance of the not yet completely packed Supreme Court (another reason to reject Alito), whose authority they would annul.

This is all despite the well-known FACT that many scooped up into these hell holes of torture are not terrorists at all, some even having been sold for bounty. Senator Bingaman immediately responded with a proposed corrective amendment (S.AMDT.2517) to restore jurisdiction.

Bump and Update: Unbelievable. The Senate today passed Lindsay Graham's amendment, 49 to 42 barring detainees at Guantanamo and others declared by the Executive Branch to be enemy combatants from seeking judicial review of the legality of their detentions.

Democrats indicated they may try to kill or change the provision before the Senate votes on the overall bill next week. Five Democrats sided with 44 Republicans in voting for the provision.

Who are the five Democrats who voted with Republicans?

Conrad, N.D.; Landrieu, La.; Lieberman, Conn.; Nelson, Neb.; Wyden, Ore.

As I said below, this is an end-run around the Supreme Court's decision in Rasul v. Bush which held Guantanamo detainees have the right to challenge the legality of their detentions.

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Original Post: Nov. 9, 9:52 am

Breaking: Senator Lindsay Graham is introducing an Amendment to the defense appropriations bill pending in the Senate (S. 1042) that would strip those designated by the Administration as enemy combatants of the ability to seek habeas review in federal courts. This is an end-run around the Supreme Court's decision in Rasul v. Bush which held Guantanamo detainees have the right to challenge the legality of their detentions.

Too funny. This morning, Sen. Frist and Rep. Hastert sent a letter complaining about leaks of the locations of secret prisons that found their way into the Washington Post. The New York Times reported on the letter here.

But, it has backfired.

But today, in an off-camera meeting with reporters, Sen. Trent Lott (R-MS) revealed that the leak likely came from a Senator or Senate staffer who attended a GOP-only meeting with Vice President Dick Cheney last week, where the detention centers were discussed.

Crooks and Liars has the video from CNN's Situation Room today. Raw Story has the letter which Frist at first said he didn't sign and then it turned out that he did sign it.

Jane Mayer has an excellent article in the New Yorker, A Deadly Interrogation: Can the C.I.A. legally kill a prisoner?

Meet Mark Swanner:

Mark Swanner, a forty-six-year-old C.I.A. officer who has performed interrogations and polygraph tests for the agency, which has employed him at least since the nineteen-nineties. (He is not a covert operative.) Two years ago, at Abu Ghraib prison, outside Baghdad, an Iraqi prisoner in Swanner’s custody, Manadel al-Jamadi, died during an interrogation. His head had been covered with a plastic bag, and he was shackled in a crucifixion-like pose that inhibited his ability to breathe; according to forensic pathologists who have examined the case, he asphyxiated. In a subsequent internal investigation, United States government authorities classified Jamadi’s death as a “homicide,” meaning that it resulted from unnatural causes. Swanner has not been charged with a crime and continues to work for the agency.

President Bush, speaking in Latin America, defended his Administration's treatment of detainees:

President Bush vigorously defended U.S. interrogation practices in the war on terror today and lobbied against a congressional drive to outlaw torture.

"There's an enemy that lurks and plots and plans and wants to hurt America again," Bush said. "So you bet we will aggressively pursue them but we will do so under the law." He declared, "We do not torture."

Right. We just send them to other countries that do allow torture.

The good news is that White House and Pentagon officials are deserting Cheney in droves. The bad news is, as most of us suspected, he is the Torturer in Chief.

Cheney's camp says the United States does not torture captives, but believes the president needs nearly unfettered power to deal with terrorists to protect Americans. To preserve the president's flexibility, any measure that might impose constraints should be resisted. That is why the administration has recoiled from embracing the language of treaties such as the U.N. Convention Against Torture, which Cheney's aides find vague and open-ended.

It's now Cheney and Addington vs. the detainees:

Human Rights Watch reports that the CIA moved terror prisoners to Poland and Romania. The heads of both countries deny it.

In implicating Poland and Romania, Human Rights Watch examined flight logs of CIA aircraft from 2001 to 2004, said Mark Garlasco, a senior military analyst with the New York-based organization. He said the group matched the flight patterns with testimony from some of the hundreds of detainees in the war on terrorism who have been released by the United States.

Finally, this story has legs.

The Washington Post today reports on the CIA's use of secret prisons overseas, in Thailand and an unnamed Eastern European country, used to house and interrogate terror suspects. America: Gulag nation. It's not a pretty picture.

The hidden global internment network is a central element in the CIA's unconventional war on terrorism. It depends on the cooperation of foreign intelligence services, and on keeping even basic information about the system secret from the public, foreign officials and nearly all members of Congress charged with overseeing the CIA's covert actions.