Colorado’s Republican Senate candidate Bob Schaffer says that he’d like to see our immigration policy remodeled to emulate that of the Mariana Islands, the US Pacific protectorate.

Remember, the Marianas guest worker program has become notorious for numerous instances of guest workers forced into prostitution, child prostitution, forced abortion, slave labor, beatings and various other forms of 13th century labor practices.

From the Denver Post …

He pointed to the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. protectorate that imports tens of thousands of foreign textile workers, as a successful model for a guest-worker program that could be adapted nationally.

“The concept of prequalifying foreign workers in their home country under private- sector management is a system that works very well in one place in America,” he said of the islands’ program. “I think members of Congress ought to be looking at that model and be considering it as a possible basis for a nationwide program.”

Curious to see whether anyone raises these matters with Schaffer. This article in the Denver Post seems to have been written with little sense of the track record in the Marianas. The reporter presents Schaffer’s pitch as part of the candidate’s effort to take a ‘moderate’ stance on the immigration question.

[Special thanks to TPM Reader TR.]

ABC News’ Jan Crawford Greenburg reports:

In dozens of top-secret talks and meetings in the White House, the most senior Bush administration officials discussed and approved specific details of how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency, sources tell ABC News.

The so-called Principals who participated in the meetings also approved the use of “combined” interrogation techniques — using different techniques during interrogations, instead of using one method at a time — on terrorist suspects who proved difficult to break, sources said.

Highly placed sources said a handful of top advisers signed off on how the CIA would interrogate top al Qaeda suspects — whether they would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subjected to simulated drowning, called waterboarding.

The high-level discussions about these “enhanced interrogation techniques” were so detailed, these sources said, some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed — down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic.

The advisers were members of the National Security Council’s Principals Committee, a select group of senior officials who met frequently to advise President Bush on issues of national security policy.

At the time, the Principals Committee included Vice President Cheney, former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, as well as CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft.

…

Then-Attorney General Ashcroft was troubled by the discussions. He agreed with the general policy decision to allow aggressive tactics and had repeatedly advised that they were legal. But he argued that senior White House advisers should not be involved in the grim details of interrogations, sources said.

According to a top official, Ashcroft asked aloud after one meeting: “Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly.”

Earlier today we noted that the Republican Senate candidate from Colorado, Bob Schaffer, told the Denver Post that America should adopt an immigration and guest labor policy modeled on that of the Mariana Islands (aka the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands) — whose guest worker program is notorious around the world for forced abortion, slavery, child prostitution, sex trafficking, beatings, female workers kept in shacks with no plumbing surrounded by barbed wire and other fun stuff.

When I first heard what a bang up job Schaffer thinks they’re doing in the Marianas I figured he had only some casual acquaintance with the situation in the Islands.

But it turns out that’s not so.

TPM Reader AK points out that the folks at ProgressNowAction have done a little digging. And it seems that that back in 1999, when Schaffer was serving in Congress, he went on one of those junkets to the Islands put together by none other than disgraced lobbyist and now-federal inmate Jack Abramoff.

Those of you with a clear recollection of the details of the Abramoff scandal will remember that one of Jack’s biggest clients was the group of sharks who ran the Marianas sweat shops.

They had a great thing going because they were able to slap Made In The USA labels on clothes and other items made in Saipan by female guest workers imported from other parts of East Asia to work in sub-Third World labor conditions. That is, when the guest workers weren’t busy getting beaten, raped or coerced into having abortions. Jack’s job was to find politicians willing to travel with him on junkets to the Marianas, hang out at the casinos and come back to the states and say how well the labor conditions actually there seemed to be.

It was actually amazing what Abramoff could get members of Congress to do for the Marianas sweatshop owners. After his Marianas junket, Rep. Ralph Hall (R-TX) agreed to enter into the congressional record a series of personal attacks against a 15 year old sex slave whose ordeal had become a major source of press attention. “[S]he wanted to do nude dancing,” said Rep. Hall.

In any case, it was just one of these junkets with Abramoff that then US Rep. Bob Schaffer took back in 1999, which, as it happens, was a year after the release of the Department of Labor report that confirmed the 15 year old sex slave’s account.

Here at TPM we were honored this year to receive The Week magazine’s “Blogger of the Year” award for our reporting on the US Attorneys scandal. One thing I wanted to make clear: I very much wanted to be at the awards ceremony in DC Tuesday night. But my wife is due to give birth to our second child in just a few weeks. And I didn’t feel comfortable going out of town so close to the big day. In any case, I was reading this item in Mary Ann Akers The Sleuth blog in the Post. And apparently there was a funny, awkward moment at the ceremony since Karl Rove was there to appear on a panel. I’ll pick it up from Akers …

Marshall won the award for his relentless coverage of the U.S. attorneys firings scandal — and the White House’s behind-the-scenes role in the firings.

Since Rove himself was accused of having a role in the firings, the moment was a bit awkward.

Marshall, who also won a George Polk Award for his work on the story, posted thousands of internal Justice Department e-mails and memos on his blog, which became mandatory reading for anyone following the unfolding scandal.

Just as Marshall was being extolled Tuesday night, Rove, who was subpoenaed by the Senate during the height of the brouhaha, was overheard saying, “There wasn’t a shred of evidence in those documents.”

That does strike me as a very narrow and technical sort of self-exculpation, no?

We preview President Bush’s Iraq speech this morning: the New Newest New Way Forward.

We’ve got your Frank Luntz – Sean Hannity throwdown over whether Barack Obama is authentically “pro-American”:

Yesterday on the floor of the senate, Sens. Reid and McConnell tangled on the McCain hundred years comment. Reid simply said “one of the things that will be debated this fall is … whether our troops need to be in Iraq for another 50 or 100 years. I think that will be a pivotal part of the debate that takes place in the presidential election.” Then McConnell jumps to his feet and starts lying through his teeth claiming McCain never said any such thing. Reid didn’t say ‘war’, didn’t say anything but what McCain said as clear as day. Here’s what happened after that.

Saying ‘war’ confuses the issue. What Reid says is just the precise words that McCain said repeatedly, that he’d be happy to see American troops remain in Iraq for 50 or 100 years or more.

Overnight we brought word that Colorado senate candidate Bob Schaffer (R-CO) actually went on one of those Abramoff junkets to the Mariana Islands, funded by the islands’ sweatshop owners who were Abramoff’s biggest clients. This is how he came to the conclusion that we rebuild our own national immigration policy around the Marianas model even though the Marianas program is notorious around the world for forced abortion, slavery, child prostitution, beatings and having the overwhelmingly female foreign workers houses in shacks with no plumbing surrounded by barbed wire.

Well, this morning the Denver Post put out a new article on Schaffer’s trip which provides a host of new details, including pictures.

Here’s Schaffer and his wife doing a little parasailing …

And here’s Schaffer being conducted on a tour funded by the organized by Abramoff and the sweatshop owners.

According to the Post article, when the tanned Schaffer returned to the states he reported that everything seemed fine. “The workers were smiling; they were happy.”

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) confronted Attorney General Michael Mukasey this morning in a Senate hearing over that other Yoo memo, the one that said the 4th Amendment bar against unreasonable search and seizure did not apply to domestic military operations.

Mukasey bobbed, dodged and weaved — but refused to say that the 2001 memo had been withdrawn.

Charlie Rose kept me up late last night against my will, but his interview of the NYT‘s John Burns and Dexter Filkins about Iraq was fascinating, largely because it shed new light, for me at least, on how much things have actually improved on the ground there.

Whether the reduction in violence changes the strategic equation remains to be seen — and Burns and Filkins agree that the odds remain long. But coming from two men who were in Iraq during the worst of times, their astonishment at the turnaround there within a relatively short time is notable:

I certainly knew violence was down. But since the pronouncements of improvement in Iraq have come from such an unreliable messenger, the Bush Administration, they have been easy to discount. Perhaps too easy.