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A group of tech celebs gathered on Capitol Hill this week to brief Congressional aides on how Congress and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) can, and probably will, make a complete mess of the Internet in about a year's time.In other words, the banner of deregulation is once again used to help corporation become entrenched monopolies. This is important; go read it.
At issue are likely revisions to the 1996 Telecommunications Act and FCC regulations, which, thus far, have managed to do scant violence to the Net. Unfortunately, changes now being contemplated, urged by telecomms and media behemoths and their lobbyists, may soon alter that happy state of affairs. Broadband users are particularly at risk, because they enjoy little of the consumer choice available to dialup users. One can connect to a phone line and reach any of hundreds of dialup ISPs. Broadband users have no such luxury.
SUNNI and Shi'ite residents of two Baghdad suburbs, once fierce enemies, said overnight they had put their differences aside to unite in their fight to oust the US occupying force from Iraq.
"All of Iraq is behind Moqtada al-Sadr, we are but one body, one people," declared Sheikh Raed al-Kazami, in charge of the radical Shi'ite cleric's offices at a mosque in the Shi'ite neighbourhood of Kazimiya, west of the Iraqi capital. He spoke following three days of fierce clashes between militiamen loyal to Sadr that left at least 57 people dead and 236 wounded.
Al-Kazami said residents of the Sunni neighbourhood of Adhamiya, a stone's throw from Kazimiya, had offered their support, as had residents from Ramadi and Fallujah, west of Baghdad, as well as residents of the northern city of Mosul.
The Muslim cleric, surrounded by armed bodyguards, said some Sunnis had even offered to join Sadr's militia.
A Pentagon source has said up to 130 US troops have been killed in fierce fighting in Iraq.From CNN, via The Agonist:
The large scale battle, described as "intense", has taken place in the town of Ar Ramadi, 20 miles west of Fallujah.
Sky News' David Chater said: "None of this is official yet - none of it is confirmed."
But he added: "It sounds very much like this is being carried out by men who are militarily trained."
Chater described the attack as "highly sophisticated".
CNN is reporting breaking news at 3:30 pm CST. The Shiites have launched a major offensive throughout Iraq on Coalition forces. Situation is developing and details still breaking. This news comes from high level government sources.And this:
CNN reports 4:05 CST that an unknown number of US Marines have been killed in Ramadi.
Per CNN 4:23 pm CST, a dozen US Marines have been killed in Ramadi and more than a dozen have been wounded.
About 150 cars filled with people pull up in front of Camp Babylon this evening (headquarters of Polish led multinational division). The Poles have no idea who is in them or what they want but they fear the worst and have moved journalists into a more distant part of the camp for their own safety.
Q But even with the deployment of troops for the operation in Fallujah, we lost more Marines today. What is the President's concern about the situation? Is it, in fact, a rebellion, and not just the actions of 0--
MR. McCLELLAN: No, I don't think I would look at it that way at all. I think that, again, this is what the President talked a little bit about -- has talked about this recently a good bit. This is a time of testing. There are those who are opposed to democracy and freedom in Iraq. They represent a small minority. The vast majority of the Iraqi people want democracy and freedom. They want a better future, a future that moves away from the past of an oppressive regime that was built around torture chambers and mass graves and rape rooms. So this is a time when there are thugs and terrorists in Iraq who are trying to shake our will. And the President is firmly committed to showing resolve and strength during this time of testing. They cannot shake our will.
Q Ambassador Bremer tried to characterize this not just as a sectarian problem between Shiites and Sunnis and the coalitions that are there, but rather 10 percent of the people don't want to see a transition to democracy. Why this change in characterization?
MR. McCLELLAN: What do you mean change in characterization? I disagree that's a change in characterization.
Q But what is it?
MR. McCLELLAN: We've always talked about the thugs and terrorists in Iraq who want to derail the democratic process, who want to derail -- or who want to undermine freedom and democracy for the Iraqi people. The vast majority of the Iraq people are committed to freedom and democracy. And we are working closely with the Iraqi people and the coalition to move forward on democracy and freedom as quickly as possible for the Iraqi people.
We'Ve TakEn THe BloGGeR. CliCK ThE PAypAl buTToN NoW oR Go bAck tO ReADing tHE waSHinGtoN poSt WiTHoUt coMmenTary.
diD yOu reAlLy ThInK yoU'd Get aWaY WitHouT PaYinG?
So how did the original plan get replaced with a plan so obviously wrong on the science?
The answer is that the foxes have been put in charge of the henhouse. The head of the E.P.A.'s Office of Air and Radiation, like most key environmental appointees in the Bush administration, previously made his living representing polluting industries (which, in case you haven't guessed, are huge Republican donors). On mercury, the administration didn't just take industry views into account, it literally let the polluters write the regulations: much of the language of the administration's proposal came directly from lobbyists' memos.
E.P.A. experts normally study regulations before they are issued, but they were bypassed. According to The Los Angeles Times: "E.P.A. staffers say they were told not to undertake the normal scientific and economic studies called for under a standing executive order. . . . E.P.A. veterans say they cannot recall another instance where the agency's technical experts were cut out of developing a major regulatory proposal."
Among the names being discussed within the administration are Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz; retired Gen. George A. Joulwan, a former NATO commander; Robert Blackwill, a former ambassador to India who now directs Iraq policy at the White House; and two veteran diplomats, Thomas R. Pickering and Frank G. Wisner.
On April 28, 2003, just two days before President Bush declared the end of "major hostilities" in Iraq, members of the 101st Airborne Division occupying a school in Fallujah opened fire on about 200 Iraqi demonstrators, killing 15, including at least three schoolboys under the age of 10.Yep. Jay Garner planned to use all those soldiers to rebuild Iraq; Paul Bremer put a stop to it. So they're sitting there, with no jobs and a lot of time on their hands.
The residents claimed they were demonstrating to get the troops out of the school so that classes could resume. The Pentagon said the soldiers were fired upon and returned fire.
There was another incident two days later in which more Iraqis were killed.
"That set the tone for the occupation in Fallujah," said Rashid Khalidi, professor of Middle East and Arabic history at Columbia University, yesterday. "It got off on the wrong foot. In Fallujah, there is a degree of bitterness that isn't seen anywhere else. There haven't been mutilations elsewhere."
***
Residents claim the city has no strong love for ousted dictator Saddam Hussein, but it is home to thousands of decommissioned Iraqi soldiers, who now have little to do but brood over their lost jobs.
***
The mutilation of one's enemies, like the dragging, burning and hanging of four American civilians in Fallujah last week, has a long history in Iraq that is unique in the Middle East, experts say.
More recently, Iraq's Hashemite boy-king Faisal II was killed along with his entire family in 1958, when the monarchy was overthrown. The crown prince and a politician named Nuri Pasha al-Said were dragged through the streets, mutilated and their bodies hanged in public.
Five years later, in the U.S.-backed Ba'athist coup that ultimately brought Saddam Hussein to power, communists were killed and hanged and the mutilated, decapitated body of the president was shown on television.
"[Mutilation] seems to be a habit in Iraq," Mr. Khalidi said.
"Let us rid ourselves of the fiction that low oil prices are somehow good for the United States," Mr. Cheney, who is now vice president, said shortly after introducing the legislation.I'm sure Tubby Tim Pumpkinhead will bring it up this week on Meet the Whores, though.
Oil prices had plunged to $15 from nearly $40 a barrel in the early 1980's, as Saudi Arabia flooded world markets, and Mr. Cheney argued the tax was needed to stabilize oil-state economies devastated as a result. But other lawmakers, including some Republicans, criticized the Cheney plan and similar proposals as "snake oil" that would throw 400,000 Americans out of work. They also said then, as President Bush does now, that higher taxes would stall the economy.
Yet even though a suspicious police officer reported him to the state medical board, Zaleski was never disciplined by his fellow physicians. (He says he does not remember the specifics of the case, and while he acknowledges a past substance-abuse problem, insists that he has been clean and sober for 21 years.) Given this history, the real scandal may not be how high Zaleski's insurance premiums are, but the fact that he can get insurance at all. Zaleski's malpractice record may have been extreme, but it was not unusual among the doctors who walked out of West Virginia hospitals in January. According to a Charleston Gazette report, nine of the 18 doctors striking at Wheeling Hospital, including Zaleski, had cost their insurers more than $6 million in malpractice settlements and judgments. At least some of the suits don't seem to merit the adjective "frivolous." In one case, a doctor had left a clip on an artery, eventually forcing the patient to have a liver transplant. In another, a surgeon cut into his patient's stomach wall during surgery, causing a massive, fatal infection. Indeed, a number of those doctors leading the protest movement include former drug addicts, felons, doctors whose licenses have been revoked, and many, many others who get sued a lot--and far more than most of their colleagues.
British officials say that while they are sympathetic with the daunting management task that Americans have undertaken, they also believe that the Coalition Provisional Authority under Mr. Bremer has become too "politicized," meaning that events are orchestrated and information controlled with the American political agenda uppermost in mind.
While we're at it, Mr. Bush can send an important signal with his choice of who should succeed Mr. Bremer as U.S. ambassador to Iraq. The worst choice would be a career diplomat. We'd recommend Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy Defense secretary, who has his own reputational stake in Iraq's success and would be seen by Iraqis as someone committed for the long haul. He also wouldn't need on-the-job training. Rudy Giuliani would also be a serious choice.Because God knows, ignoring the advice of the State Department experts has worked out so well so far, right?
Bush's poll numbers getting worse...
Q Mr. President, can you just tell me -- the 9/11 Commission, the Chairman yesterday, Governor Kean, said a date had been set, I think, for your testimony and the Vice President's. Is that --Yes, he'd put on his special superhero costume, the one that makes bullets bounce off, and he would have stopped the World Trade Center attack.
THE PRESIDENT: I would call it a meeting.
Q A meeting, I'm sorry.
THE PRESIDENT: Thank you.
Q Has that date been set, and could you share it with us? And number two, can you tell us the rationale as to why you have chosen to testify or rather meet with them with the Vice President?
THE PRESIDENT: First of all, it will be a great opportunity from them to ask both of us our opinions on the subject. And we're meeting with the entire commission. I'm not exactly sure what the status is of putting out the date. I told them I'd meet with them at a time that's convenient for all of us, and hopefully we'll come to that date soon.
I look forward to sharing information with them. Let me just be very clear about this: Had we had the information that was necessary to stop an attack, I'd have stopped the attack. And I'm convinced any other government would have, too. I mean, make no mistake about it; if we'd had known that the enemy was going to fly airplanes into our buildings, we'd have done everything in our power to stop it. And what is important for them to hear, not only is that, but that when I realized that the stakes had changed, that this country immediately went on war footing, and we went to war against al Qaeda. It took me very little time to make up my mind, once I determined al Qaeda to do it, to say, we're going to go get them. And we have, and we're going to keep after them until they're brought to justice and America is secure.
But I'm looking forward to the conversation. I'm looking forward to Condi testifying. I made a decision to allow her to do so because I was assured that it would not jeopardize executive privilege. And she'll be great. She's a very smart, capable person who knows exactly what took place, and will lay out the facts. And that's what the commission's job is meant to do, and that's what the American people want to see. I'm looking forward to people hearing her.
All right, got to go to work. Thanks. Good to see you all.
From today's Nelson Report ...And the generals want to know how many troops they can use. D-R-A-F-T.......
Gloom... has been building over Iraq. Increasingly, the Wise Heads are forecasting disaster. Wise Heads say they see no realistic plan, hear no serious concept to get ahead of the situation. Money, training, jobs...all lagging, all reinforce downward spiral highlighted by sickening violence. There seems to be no real "if", just when, and how badly it will hurt U.S. interests. Define "disaster"? Consensus prediction: if Bush insists on June 30/July 1 turnover, a rapid descent into civil war. May happen anyway, if the young al-Sadr faction really breaks off from its parents. CSIS Anthony Cordesman's latest blast at Administration ineptitude says in public what Senior Observers say in private...the situation may still be salvaged, but then you have to factor in Sharon's increasing desperation, and the regional impact.
Note: "quagmire"...when you are in a bad situation you created yourself, and would quit in a minute if you could, but which if you did, it would make everything else worse. So you can't...and it gets worse anyway. (Apologies to Bierce...)
1. Comes word from Very Senior Foreign Policy Observers that the situation now unfolding in Iraq is "a qualitative change of very profound significance. The chances of something like a general breakdown after the July 1 transfer is accelerating." The Observation continues: "Even if [dissident cleric Muqtada] al-Sadr is arrested, the whole question is whether the Shi'ia majority is comfortable with continued U.S. occupation." The suggested answer seems to be "no".
-- the Observer goes on to warn that, on the basis of personal soundings within the Administration, the conviction arises that the White House has "no concept of how to manage the crisis, no plan in place likely to work." This Observer last week relayed a concern that President Bush was not being given accurate reports from Iraq, but today, one assumes that even a President who prides himself on not reading the newspapers now grasps that things are not necessarily proceeding to our advantage, to borrow an historic phrase.
Researchers have found that every hour preschoolers watch television each day boosts their chances -- by about 10 percent -- of developing attention deficit problems later in life.Now, the thing they don't tell you is, it all depends on what you mean by "permanent". Some doctors have gotten great results by sending highly ADD children to a calm environment for an extended period - say, a few months or so visiting a rural relative, a la Paris Hilton. They say it seems to "reset" their brain wiring.
The findings back up previous research showing that television can shorten attention spans and support American Academy of Pediatrics recommendations that youngsters under age 2 not watch television.
"The truth is there are lots of reasons for children not to watch television. Other studies have shown it to be associated with obesity and aggressiveness" too, said lead author Dr. Dimitri Christakis, a researcher at Children's Hospital and Regional Medical Center in Seattle.
The study, appearing in the April issue of Pediatrics, focused on two groups of children -- aged 1 and 3 -- and suggested that TV might overstimulate and permanently "rewire" the developing brain.
The fact is that the U.N. Office of Drugs and Crime recently reported that not only did the number of fields used to cultivate poppies—the raw ingredient for heroin—grow to near-record levels in 2003, but, according to surveys of farmers, seventy per cent expect to grow even more next year. Much of that is taking place in areas in which the U.S. has a major military presence. The Taliban, awful as they were, hated drugs, and in their last year in power heroin production had fallen to a hundred and eighty-five metric tons; last year, the number was thirty-six hundred.
Almost a twentyfold increase.
That’s right. And to the credit of the Pentagon, I must say, there are people there who recognize that there has been a failure on our part, and that something needs to be done about it.
What about American soldiers? You write that there are concerns about their well-being, given the glut of drugs in the area.
I’ve been told for more than a year that there were problems of heroin use, in particular among the rear-echelon soldiers in Afghanistan, and that it was a problem that was simply being buried by the leadership. In my reporting, I was also told that there had been a problem with some of the Marines. And the Pentagon, when they were asked for comment, acknowledged that there had been problems with some U.S. military personnel for suspected use, though in the case of the Marines, at least, they said that it was marijuana, not heroin. A lot of hashish is also produced in Afghanistan.
An Iraqi judge has issued a murder arrest warrant for a radical Shiite Muslim cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr, for the slaying of another Shiite leader shortly after the U.S.-led invasion of the country, coalition officials said today.From Billmon:
Meanwhile, U.S. troops today sealed off the city of Fallujah west of Baghdad, where some 1,200 Marines and two battalions of Iraqi security forces were poised to launch an operation aimed at pacifying the city, one of the most violent places in the Sunni Triangle.
... President Bush said he was committed to the June 30 deadline for transferring power in Iraq and won't be deterred by violence and an armed Shiite revolt against the U.S.-led occupation. "The deadline remains firm," Bush said.
If I were one of those jarheads, I'd be real careful around those "two battalions of Iraqi security forces." Probably not a good idea to turn your back on them.Steve Gilliard says:
You'd think that with all hell breaking loose in the supposedly pacified parts of Iraq, Centcom would have better things to do with its time than staging the purely symbolic punishment of a single rebellious city. Because unless the Marines have suddenly developed the absolute ruthlessness of a Saddam or an Assad -- or even a Sharon -- this little demonstration of "claws and teeth" isn't likely to impress the natives very much. They're too familiar with the genuine article.
Bremer is a cheap talking punk. He talks as if he can ensure justice and he sounds like an ill-mannered fool. Sadr wants to be a freaking outlaw, the young men following him want to be rebels against the infidels. Bremer talks like an action movie mayor when the people he's dealing with are as serious as cancer. Sure, Sadr had a big mouth and his paper was filled with lies, but it didn't kill anyone. They were waiting for a chance to kill Americans and Bremer handed it to them.Waist deep in the Big Muddy, and the big fool says to push on.
Now, we have a grim choice of killing Shias by the streetload or turning Sadr into a massive hero.
The pictures of American troops storming into a mosque is scary to me. It would be Osama's dream photo:look at the infidels delifing our religion. Coming out with a dead, martyred Sadr would be even worse.
Why are they doing this? We cannot deal with a Sunni innsurection. Why are we making Sadr into an American-killing hero? Leaving him alone was the only smart solution. Killing him would be dumb, jailing him would be worse.
But with Kerry all this would change. That beatnik from Boston has already proposed reforming international corporate taxes to give companies a huge incentive to invest more money domestically. By giving them a one-year 10-percent tax rate on billions of corporate dollars gathering dust in other countries, Kerry's economic plan would create a windfall.I'm so ashamed. I see now how selfish I've been in the larger scheme of things.
I don't want a lot of dusty dollars landing on my nice clean domestic surfaces, thank you. And a windfall! That would only spread the monetary mulch around more! Wait, it gets worse. If Kerry is elected, he's threatened to blow that windfall on a two-year tax credit for companies that create jobs here at home. Even if his evil scheme succeeded only halfway, it would still unleash 5 million jobs upon the land in four years, cluttering up the economic landscape with twice the number of jobs tidied away by Bush.
The horror! And all so a bunch of spoiled unemployed people can indulge their lust for survival. They should find something to occupy their time.
- Sixty-three of the nation's 100 largest labor markets have fewer jobs now than when George W. Bush took office.What the hell was so bad about peace and prosperity, anyway? Oh, that's right - blowjobs. Geeze, what I wouldn't give to have a president who was screwing around with an intern instead of us...
- Seventy-nine of those markets posted slower job-growth rates during Bush's first three years than under any of his three predecessors: Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush or Ronald Reagan.
- Ninety-nine of those markets have worse employment records under George W. Bush than under Clinton. The sole exception is Honolulu.
What is happening is nothing short of historic. The American workers' share of the increase in national income since November 2001, the end of the last recession, is the lowest on record. Employers took the money and ran. This is extraordinary, but very few people are talking about it, which tells you something about the hold that corporate interests have on the national conversation.You should be grateful you even have a job. Now help me fix these time cards.
The situation is summed up in the long, unwieldy but very revealing title of a new study from the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University: "The Unprecedented Rising Tide of Corporate Profits and the Simultaneous Ebbing of Labor Compensation - Gainers and Losers from the National Economic Recovery in 2002 and 2003."
Andrew Sum, the center's director and lead author of the study, said: "This is the first time we've ever had a case where two years into a recovery, corporate profits got a larger share of the growth of national income than labor did. Normally labor gets about 65 percent and corporate profits about 15 to 18 percent. This time profits got 41 percent and labor [meaning all forms of employee compensation, including wages, benefits, salaries and the percentage of payroll taxes paid by employers] got 38 percent."
For every ton of turkey slop that goes in, what comes out at the end are 640 pounds of clean-burning oils that are sold for use in fuels and manufacturing, 100 pounds of propane, butane and methane gases that are burned at the factory site to generate the electricity that powers the garbage-to-fuel process, and 60 pounds of solid minerals that are sold as fertilizer. Because each type of raw material -- tires, plastics or sewage, for example -- produces different grades and quantities of oil and gas, the company prefers to limit the process to one kind of garbage at a time.This is really interesting. Imagine what the world would be like if we didn't need the Middle East oil supply.
Incredibly, the only "waste" that's left behind is distilled water. There are no smokestacks bellowing chemical-laden smoke, and no pipes discharging fetid wastewater. Plus, the plant produces more than enough fuel gases to power itself without using any additional energy.
If it's made from garbage, petroleum suddenly becomes a "renewable" resource that can be produced without smokestack emissions that contribute to global warming, a chronic problem for oil refiners. And because the bio-fuel doesn't contain sulfur, ash or dioxin, it's much cleaner than most conventional fuels when burned in power plants or in engines.
Yet even though it's cleaner, bio-fuel still generates some pollution when it's burned. That bothers activists who think the United States should be moving away from the use of any petroleum and instead should be embracing even cleaner technologies such as wind and solar power.
"It's a complicated mess of interacting issues, and it's hard to draw a clear line through it. But the bottom line is that these animal waste-to-energy technologies have real promise and they need to be pursued," said Nathanael Greene, a senior policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group.
The fiercest battle took place Sunday in the streets of Sadr City, Baghdad's largest Shiite neighborhood, where black-garbed Shiite militiamen fired from rooftops and behind buildings at U.S. troops, killing the eight Americans. At least 30 Iraqis were killed and more than 110 wounded in the fighting, doctors said.Don't worry, we're going to burn the village in order to save it:
Violence broke out Monday morning in another Shiite neighborhood of the capital, al-Shula, where followers of the cleric clashed with a U.S. patrol. An American armored vehicle was seen burning, and an Iraqi man was seen running off with a heavy machine gun apparently taken from the vehicle. A U.S. helicopter hovered overhead. There were no immediate reports of injuries.
Meanwhile, U.S. troops on Monday sealed off Fallujah ahead of a major operation code named "Vigilant Resolve," aimed at pacifying the city, one of the most violent cities in the Sunni Triangle, the heartland of the insurgency against the American occupation.
Fresh fighting between U.S. forces and Shi'ite militiamen erupted in a Baghdad neighborhood Monday, with two Apache helicopters firing on targets in the area, Reuters journalists at the scene said.I feel so much safer now. Don't you? Here's the latest from the city of Basra, where they really, really like us:
A U.S. vehicle was also in flames in the area, a predominantly Shi'ite neighborhood.
Supporters of a radical Shia cleric have taken over the governor's building in Basra, the southern Iraqi city under the control of British forces.
Moqtada Sadr is an outspoken opponent of coalition forces in Iraq and the arrest of one of his aides sparked the protest which attracted 150 people.
The blather from both sides obscures the real, but largely hidden, agenda behind the Bush tax cuts. Bush has been open about each item he wants: lowering taxes on capital income, such as dividends and capital gains; creating two big new income-sheltering investment plans; eliminating the estate tax. But he's not been at all forthcoming about the ultimate effect of his program.
If Bush gets what he wants, the income tax will become a misnomer—it will really be a salary tax. Almost all income taxes would come from paychecks—80 percent of income for most families, less than half for the top 1 percent. Meanwhile taxpayers receiving dividends, interest and capital gains, known collectively as investment income, would have a much lighter burden than salary earners—or maybe none at all. And here's the topper. In the name of preserving family farms and keeping small businesses in the family, Bush would eliminate the estate tax and create a new class of landed aristocrats who could inherit billions tax-free, invest the money, watch it compound tax-free and hand it down tax-free to their heirs.
Indeed, Ms. Rice's biggest vulnerability may have been that when she came to Washington in 2001, she was determined to quickly tackle three tasks that had little to do with terrorism: refocusing the nation's diplomacy on big-power politics, chiefly Russia and China; fulfilling Mr. Bush's pledge of a missile-defense system; and steamlining the security council, getting it out of what she called "operational matters."Seems like a lot of things aren't part of this administration's scope, doesn't it?
Her background, as she acknowledged, was as "a Europeanist." And when she briefly dropped her self-confident tone, Ms. Rice, then a professor and former provost at Stanford, said in an interview in June 2000 that as a campaign adviser to Mr. Bush, she found herself "pressed to understand parts of the world that have not been part of my scope."
Inside the marble-floored palace hall that serves as the press office of the U.S.-led coalition, Republican Party operatives lead a team of Americans who promote mostly good news about Iraq.Well! Isn't that special? We have a bunch of campaign hacks paid to pump out the P.R. for Bush - at our expense. I don't know why; God knows, there are so many positive stories anyway.
Dan Senor, a former press secretary for Spencer Abraham, the Michigan Republican who's now Energy Secretary, heads the office packed with former Bush campaign workers, political appointees and ex-Capitol Hill staffers.
One-third of the U.S. civilian workers in the press office have GOP ties, running an enterprise that critics see as an outpost of Bush's re-election effort with Iraq a top concern. Senor and others inside the coalition say they follow strict guidelines that steer clear of politics.
One of the main goals of the Office of Strategic Communications - known as stratcom - is to ensure Americans see the positive side of the Bush administration's invasion, occupation and reconstruction of Iraq, where 600 U.S. soldiers have died and a deadly insurgency thrives.
"Beautification Plan for Baghdad Ready to Begin,'' one press release in late March said in its headline. Another statement last month cautioned, "The Reality is Nothing Like What You See on Television.''
Senor, spokesman for the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority, said his office is guided by ethical "red lines" that prevent it from crossing into the Bush campaign.
"We have an obligation to communicate with the U.S. Congress and the American people, given that they're spending almost $20 billion in Iraq and have committed over 100,000 U.S. troops here,'' Senor said in an interview with The Associated Press.
Four soldiers from a New York Army National Guard company serving in Iraq are contaminated with radiation likely caused by dust from depleted uranium shells fired by U.S. troops, a Daily News investigation has found.
They are among several members of the same company, the 442nd Military Police, who say they have been battling persistent physical ailments that began last summer in the Iraqi town of Samawah.
"I got sick instantly in June," said Staff Sgt. Ray Ramos, a Brooklyn housing cop. "My health kept going downhill with daily headaches, constant numbness in my hands and rashes on my stomach."
A nuclear medicine expert who examined and tested nine soldiers from the company says that four "almost certainly" inhaled radioactive dust from exploded American shells manufactured with depleted uranium.
A federal judge yesterday ordered several federal government agencies to release documents concerning their work on Vice President Cheney's energy task force or provide a legal reason for withholding them.
U.S. District Judge Paul L. Friedman rejected arguments by Bush administration lawyers that employees from the Department of the Interior and Department of Energy can claim special confidentiality privileges for the period when they worked for the task force, which held private meetings with energy industry representatives as it crafted a national energy policy.
Ruling that those employees were not engaged in a deliberative process and were not temporary employees of the White House, Friedman said the agencies must search for and produce records of their employees' task force assignments.
The judge's order, which requires release of documents by June 1, could potentially open a new window into the workings of Cheney's task force. In a related 2001 case, the Justice Department has four times appealed federal court rulings that the vice president release task force records. That case, in which Cheney claims his office has executive privilege, is now pending before the Supreme Court.
President George Bush first asked Tony Blair to support the removal of Saddam Hussein from power at a private White House dinner nine days after the terror attacks of 11 September, 2001.
According to Sir Christopher Meyer, the former British Ambassador to Washington, who was at the dinner when Blair became the first foreign leader to visit America after 11 September, Blair told Bush he should not get distracted from the war on terror's initial goal - dealing with the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.
Bush, claims Meyer, replied by saying: 'I agree with you, Tony. We must deal with this first. But when we have dealt with Afghanistan, we must come back to Iraq.' Regime change was already US policy.
It was clear, Meyer says, 'that when we did come back to Iraq it wouldn't be to discuss smarter sanctions'. Elsewhere in his interview, Meyer says Blair always believed it was unlikely that Saddam would be removed from power or give up his weapons of mass destruction without a war.
Faced with this prospect of a further war, he adds, Blair 'said nothing to demur'.
Details of this extraordinary conversation will be published this week in a 25,000-word article on the path to war with Iraq in the May issue of the American magazine Vanity Fair. It provides new corroboration of the claims made last month in a book by Bush's former counter-terrorism chief, Richard Clarke, that Bush was 'obsessed' with Iraq as his principal target after 9/11.
As a former member of the Air Force military police, as a play-by-the-rules guy, Drew Pooters said he was stunned by what he found his manager doing in the Toys "R" Us store in Albuquerque.I figure I have about $1000 in unpaid overtime from my most recent job. That's why the idea of comp time to save employers money is such a joke: when they're not paying the overtime in the first place.
Inside a cramped office, he said, his manager was sitting at a computer and altering workers' time records, secretly deleting hours to cut their paychecks and fatten his store's bottom line.
"I told him, `That's not exactly legal,' " said Mr. Pooters, who ran the store's electronics department. "Then he out-and-out threatened me not to talk about what I saw."
Mr. Pooters quit, landing a job in 2002 managing a Family Dollar store, one of 5,100 in that discount chain. Top managers there ordered him not to let employees' total hours exceed a certain amount each week, and one day, he said, his district manager told him to use a trick to cut payroll: delete some employee hours electronically.
"I told her, `I'm not going to get involved in this,' " Mr. Pooters recalled, saying that when he refused, the district manager erased the hours herself.
Experts on compensation say that the illegal doctoring of hourly employees' time records is far more prevalent than most Americans believe. The practice, commonly called shaving time, is easily done and hard to detect — a simple matter of computer keystrokes — and has spurred a growing number of lawsuits and settlements against a wide range of businesses.
By other measures, too, the market is badly bloated. One index of housing inflation is the difference between house prices and rents. In a healthy market, driven by demand, rents and sale prices ought to track roughly together. But while sale prices have soared, rents have stayed flat; and in some of the most overheated markets, like San Francisco and Seattle, they have actually been declining. Such a gap, the economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has written, suggests "that people are now buying houses for speculation rather than merely for shelter," evidence that he called a "compelling case" for a housing bubble. "Within the next year or so," The Economist argued in a May 2003 editorial, these regional "bubbles are likely to burst, leading to falls in average real home prices of 15-20 percent" across America. And, of course, in the most heated markets the drop is likely to be steeper yet.
When housing bubbles burst, they can hurt more than their sector of the economy. Studies have shown that they exercise twice the effect on consumer spending as comparable declines in stock prices. So, a 20 percent drop in housing prices would have the same, shriveling effect on the economy as a 40 percent crash in the stock market. When investors lose value in their houses, many of them pull money out of other investments, like stocks. Then, too, jobs in construction, real estate, and other fields that depend on new home sales die off.
What can Alan Greenspan or anyone else do about this? The answer is, not much. Prices are so stratospheric that even modest hikes in long-term interest rates could burst the bubble. And with federal deficits soaking up so much capital, interest rates are likely to rise as the economy heats up and demand for capital increases. Of course, Greenspan could argue for rescinding some of President Bush's tax cuts, which he's long defended, to bring down the deficit. But even that probably won't forestall a collapse in home prices.
It's a pattern Bush has set before, one of seeming to be intractable even to the point of political damage:What, you mean he had nothing to hide? His decisions didn't have anything to do with political pressure?
* He waited until the last minute last December before lifting 20-month-old tariffs on foreign steel. By delaying so long, Bush made it look like he bowed to pressure from the European Union, which was poised to slap $2.2 billion in sanctions on U.S. products. Bush's move will hurt steel makers in states critical in the November presidential election.
* He has never taken responsibility for the fact that weapons of mass destruction haven't been found in Iraq, or acknowledged that intelligence on them may have been faulty. His public jokes about not finding such weapons didn't help, drawing protests from military families.
* It took Bush weeks to take personal responsibility for his erroneous State of the Union claim in January 2002 that Saddam Hussein was shopping for nuclear materials in Africa. First, he let CIA Director George Tenet and a national security aide take the blame, giving ammunition to Democrats and other Iraq war critics.
* The White House continues to refuse to budge on releasing information about closed-door meetings of Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force, which crafted the administration's energy policy. The matter is now before the Supreme Court.
* His dogged insistence in 2001 on creating a national defense against incoming ballistic missiles from hostile states wore down most of his international and domestic critics.The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, using airplanes, undercut his early emphasis on missile attacks as the nation's biggest security concern.
Restricting Rice's availability, and his own, to the Sept. 11 commission fueled Democratic criticism that the White House had something to hide in the controversy caused by former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke's accusation that Bush's fixation on Iraq undermined the war on terror.
When he finally capitulated last week and agreed to let Rice testify under oath and in public, and agreed that he and Cheney would go before the full commission in a private session, much of the damage had been done -- and it looked like Bush was buckling to political pressure.
A government whistle-blower says the Bush administration covered up the reasons for a toxic coal slurry spill in Appalachia that ranks among the worst environmental disasters in U.S. history.
Jack Spadaro tells Correspondent Bob Simon that political appointees in the Department of Labor whitewashed a report that said an energy company that had contributed to the Republican Party was responsible for the 300-million gallon spill.
Simon's report will be broadcast on 60 Minutes, Sunday, April 4, at 7 p.m. ET/PT.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Spadaro was until recently the head of the National Mine Health and Safety Academy and played a key role in investigating the spill, which was 25 times the size of the Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska.
"It polluted 100 miles of streams, killing everything in the streams, all the way to the Ohio River," says Spadaro of the October 2000 spill that affected West Virginia and Eastern Kentucky.
"The Bush administration came in and the scope of our investigation was considerably shortened. I had never seen something so corrupt and lawless in my entire career...interference with a federal investigation of the most serious environmental disaster in the history of the Eastern United States."
Spadaro says his investigation found Massey Energy, the owner of the impoundment containing the viscous and toxic liquid, knew the containment was weak, and in fact, had leaked once before. The company was going to be cited for serious violations that could have resulted in large fines and criminal charges, Spadaro says.
The Mine Safety and Health Administration, a division of DOL, was also going to be criticized for its failure to regulate Massey's impoundment. But the MSHA, the government body for which Spadaro was performing the investigation, curtailed his report, says Spadaro. "It appeared to me that [MSHA] thought we were getting too close to issuing serious violations to the mining company," he said.
Secretary of State Colin Powell conceded Friday evidence he presented to the United Nations that two trailers in Iraq were used for weapons of mass destruction may have been wrong.Reminds you of Fonzie, doesn't it? "I was www...rr...onnnggggg...."
In an airborne news conference on the way home from NATO talks in Brussels, Belgium, Powell said he had been given solid information about the trailers that he told the Security Council in February 2003 were designed for making biological weapons.
But now, Powell said, “it appears not to be the case that it was that solid.”
The panel clapped delightedly as the President spoke while Mr. Cheney drank from a waterglass...As a Republican politician once explained it me, he was in politics "because it's good for business. If you're not in politics to get business for yourself and your friends, why would you bother?"
I think Eleanor Clift pretty much nails this one:
A top Republican strategist dubbed the legal document striking the unusual deal “the Wizard of Oz letter” because it strips away the myth that Bush is in charge. Until now, it’s been all speculation about Vice President Cheney’s influence. With the revelation of the tandem testimony, nobody with a straight face can deny Cheney is a co-president or worse, the puppeteer who pulls Bush’s strings.
Aside from being fodder for the late-night comics, the arrangement confirms Bush’s inability to articulate anything without a script--or a tutor by his side. There’s a reason lawyers don’t take testimony in groups. The whole idea is to get individual recollections and then compare stories to uncover contradictions. Try thinking about it this way: can anyone imagine Bush’s father in a similar situation bringing his vice president? (For those who need a refresher course, the elder Bush was a rocket scientist compared to his son, and the vice president was Dan Quayle.)
[...]
This is a defining moment in the Bush presidency because it reveals weakness at the top.
What Cheney and the tight circle around Bush are protecting is the myth they have created since 9/11 of a war president astride the world stage. Anybody who punctures that imagery is destroyed. Richard Clarke is only the latest in a series of insiders who have pulled back the curtain. At the center is an incurious president who is so inarticulate that he can’t be left on his own to make a sustained argument on behalf of his policies without falling back on rehearsed talking points and sound bites.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi says it's baffling and embarrassing that President Bush is appearing before the Sept. 11 commission with Vice President Dick Cheney at his side instead of by himself.There are so many subtle digs here, it's delightful. "Let" him go in, as if he were a small child seeking permission. "Standing tall" for the puny little runt. "Cannot" go it alone.
"I think it speaks to the lack of confidence that the administration has in the president going forth alone, period," Pelosi, D-Calif., said Friday. "It's embarrassing to the president of the United States that they won't let him go in without holding the hand of the vice president of the United States."
"I think it reinforces the idea that the president cannot go it alone," she said. "The president should stand tall, walk in the room himself and answer the questions."
Another thing, which bothers me, if no one else, is that US Marines will die to "avenge" them. The same Marines whose families live on food stamps, Navy relief and help from home. Whose reserve members will come home to forclosed homes, lost jobs and lifetime injuries. Who on your side of the fence is crying for them?
And now, to add insult to injury, these same teenagers are being asked to go into Fallujah and die for men who were making $100K a year. If we were talking about fellow soldiers or Marines, at least they would have shared the same burden. Instead, you're cheering on an expedition which will kill teenagers fighting for their country to avenge men who were fighting for a paycheck.
Is that the kind of thing you want to endorse? Or have you even considered that? If there was a legal process in Iraq, the killers would belong in jail. But by that same standard, anyone killed by a mercenary would have the right to have them jailed. No matter how gruesome their deaths, these were men outside the law. Why should US Marines die to avenge them, when soldiers who were killed in similiar ways were left unavenged?
Are mercenaries' lives more important than US soldiers? Two soldiers were dragged from their Humvee and stoned by a crowd in Mosul. Did you even know that happened? Did you call for revenge then, or did you need TV pictures for your outrage to mount?
But then there's this: "But in comments to reporters in Huntington, W.Va., McClellan declined to say whether the White House would agree to actually hand over any of the disputed documents at issue, raising the possibility of further disputes."
Is this an issue of whether the Commission gets physical custody of the documents, as opposed to reviewing them at some facility controlled by the White House, as has been the case with other material?
The article says some commission members are now raising the possibility that the White House is withholding other documents as well.
And, finally, here is what has to be the quote of the day, from Commissioner Jamie Gorelick:"We can't afford to have documents that are relevant to our inquiry being withheld on a technicality. This is not litigation. This is finding facts to help the nation, and we should not treat this as if we're adversarial parties here."
In its second high-profile turnabout of the week, the Bush administration agreed yesterday to give the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks full access to the papers of former President Clinton.
The decision came after commission officials pressed the White House to turn over thousands of pages of documents that had been shipped from the former president's archives for review by the commission.
On April 27, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in the case known as Cheney vs. U.S. District Court, involving the secrecy of the vice president's task force that brought together government officials with energy industry representatives to craft the nation's energy policy in 2001. Cheney has fought the release of his task force-related documents all the way to the high court. (Follow the trail of legal briefs here.) But why so secretive? Is this just part of an administration secrecy fetish, or is there something really damaging in those papers? Say, revelations about a link between military plans in Iraq and the task force's mission of increasing sources of foreign oil for the United States?
For a glimpse of what might be in those sealed energy task force documents, let's revisit Jane Mayer's New Yorker piece on Cheney from last month. This explosive excerpt didn't get too much press elsewhere, but it could, in the end, be what this task force legal drama is all about. "For months there has been a debate in Washington about when the Bush Administration decided to go to war against Saddam. In Ron Suskind's recent book 'The Price of Loyalty,' former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill charges that Cheney agitated for U.S. intervention well before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Additional evidence that Cheney played an early planning role is contained in a previously undisclosed National Security Council document, dated February 3, 2001. The top-secret document, written by a high-level N.S.C. official, concerned Cheney's newly formed Energy Task Force. It directed the N.S.C. staff to coöperate fully with the Energy Task Force as it considered the 'melding' of two seemingly unrelated areas of policy: 'the review of operational policies towards rogue states,' such as Iraq, and 'actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields.'"
"A source who worked at the N.S.C. at the time doubted that there were links between Cheney's Energy Task Force and the overthrow of Saddam. But Mark Medish, who served as senior director for Russian, Ukrainian, and Eurasian affairs at the N.S.C. during the Clinton Administration, told me that he regards the document as potentially 'huge.' He said, 'People think Cheney's Energy Task Force has been secretive about domestic issues,' referring to the fact that the Vice-President has been unwilling to reveal information about private task-force meetings that took place in 2001, when information was being gathered to help develop President Bush's energy policy. 'But if this little group was discussing geostrategic plans for oil, it puts the issue of war in the context of the captains of the oil industry sitting down with Cheney and laying grand, global plans.'"
In a January 2004 piece in Foreign Policy in Focus, Hampshire College professor Michael Klare wrote that the very goal of Cheney's energy plan was to find external sources of oil for the United States. And the Persian Gulf was an obvious oil-rich target, one the United States has long used military force to protect. By pursuing foreign oil there and elsewhere, the United States will inevitably find its energy and military policies colliding, Klare notes, although Cheney's energy report did not acknowledge this. Klare added: "However, the architects of the Bush-Cheney policy know that ensuring access to some oil sources may prove impossible without the use of military force … Whether or not the administration consciously linked energy with his security policy, Bush undeniably prioritized the enhancement of U.S. power projection as he endorsed increased dependence on oil from unstable areas."
What do all these flip-floppers have in common? Not subject matter: DiIulio worked on social policy, O'Neill on economics, Clarke on national security. Not party: Kerry, Edwards, and Gephardt are Democrats; O'Neill is a Republican; Clarke worked for President Reagan and both Bushes as well as for President Clinton. The only thing they have in common is that they all cooperated with this administration before deciding they'd been conned. Flip-flopping, it turns out, is the final stage of trusting George W. Bush.
***
Once you vote with Bush, serve in his cabinet, or spin for him in a classified briefing, you're trapped. If you change your mind, he'll dredge up your friendly vote or testimony and use it to discredit you. That's what he's doing now to all the politicians at home and abroad who fell for his exaggerations about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. "In Iraq, my administration looked at the intelligence information, and we saw a threat," he tells audiences. "Members of Congress looked at the intelligence information, and they saw a threat. The United Nations Security Council looked at the intelligence information, and it saw a threat." It's too late to admit that Bush is wrong and that you were fooled. You're on record agreeing with him. He doesn't even look dishonest when he rebukes you, because, unlike the people who run his administration's scams, he can't tell the difference between what he promised and what he delivered.
Maybe the White House will get away with this chicanery. Maybe people will believe its spin that flip-flopping is Kerry's idiosyncrasy, not the Bush administration's design. Or maybe some of the folks who voted for Bush last time around will decide they were conned and throw him out. Flip-floppers, every one of them.
Hart was co-chair (with former Sen. Warren Rudman, R-N.H.) of the U.S. Commission on National Security, a bipartisan panel that conducted the most thorough investigation of U.S. security challenges since World War II. After completing the report, which warned that a devastating terrorist attack on America was imminent and called for the immediate creation of a Cabinet-level national security agency, and delivering it to President Bush on January 31, 2001, Hart and Rudman personally briefed Rice, Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell. But, according to Hart, the Bush administration never followed up on the commission's urgent recommendations, even after he repeated them in a private White House meeting with Rice just days before 9/11.Go read the rest.
***
After your briefings, do you think the administration responded adequately to your warnings?
Well, let me just go through the history of things. Because we also sent copies of the report to every member of Congress. And we lobbied specific members of Congress, including Joe Lieberman, who took it very seriously. And in the spring of 2001, some members of Congress introduced legislation to create a homeland security agency. Hearings were scheduled. And our commission, which was scheduled to go out of operation on Feb. 15, 2001, was given a six-month extension so we could testify with some authority. Which we did in March and April.
And then as Congress started to move on this, and the heat was turned up, George Bush -- and this is often overlooked -- held a press conference or made a public statement on May 5, 2001, calling on Congress not to act and saying he was turning over the whole matter to Dick Cheney.
So this wasn't just neglect, it was an active position by the administration. He said, "I don't want Congress to do anything until the vice president advises me." We now know from Dick Clarke that Cheney never held a meeting on terrorism, there was never any kind of discussion on the department of homeland security that we had proposed. There was no vice presidential action on this matter.
In other words, a bipartisan commission of seven Democrats and seven Republicans who had spent two and a half years studying the problem, a group of Americans with a cumulative 300 years in national security affairs, recommended to the president of the United States on a reasonably urgent basis the creation of a Cabinet-level agency to protect our country -- and the president did nothing!
By the way, when our final report came out in 2001, it did not receive word one in the New York Times. Zero. The Washington Post put it on Page 3 or 4, below the fold.
***
One of the speeches I gave was, ironically enough, to the International Air Transportation Association in Montreal. And the Montreal newspapers headlined the story, "Hart predicts terrorist attacks on America."
By pre-arrangement I had gotten an appointment with Condi Rice the following day and had gone straight from Montreal to Washington to meet with her. And my brief message to her was, "Get going on homeland security, you don't have all the time in the world." This was on Sept. 6, 2001.
What was her response?
Her response was "I'll talk to the vice president about it." And this tracks with Clarke's testimony and writing that even at this late date, nothing was being done inside the White House.
For the most part, the report showed broad strength. Construction put in a massive showing, up 71,000. The service-sector jobs gain was the largest since May, 2000, with retail up 47,000 (some apparently from the return of California grocery workers after their recent strike), and trade/transport/utilities overall up 73,000.
The factory sector, however, lagged behind the rest of the economy yet again, as hiring was flat, vs. a median estimate of growth of 8,000 jobs. Net manufacturing jobs remain down 14,000 year-to-date -- and still some 1.7 million below the level when the recession officially ended in November, 2001.
BULLISH PAUSE? Moreover, the so-called factory diffusion index fell to 48.8 in March from 51.8 in February, suggesting that more companies were losing than gaining workers. This may give a bit pause to the bullish shock of the headline payrolls number and keep the issue of outsourcing in the political spotlight.
The slack gain in average hourly earnings in the March report -- up just 0.1% -- results partly from a dip in factory hours, to 40.9 from 41, but otherwise, this doesn't support the impression of stronger labor demand in the month, especially with construction making a sizable contribution to jobs. Aggregate hours worked fell 0.1% overall, and 0.3% for factories. The survey of households reported a jobs decline of 3,000.
The report has some odd aspects. Among the employment-related items in the release, only the headline nonfarm payrolls figure (arguably the most important single number in the report) was better than expected. And the sheer size of the gain in the construction sector makes us think the BLS [Bureau of Labor Statistics] may have a bit of a problem with some of the data.
Q Scott, what about this issue of the Clinton documents which have been withheld from the 9/11 Commission?I wonder how they're supposed to verify the documents are "non-responsive" or "duplicative" without reading them.
MR. McCLELLAN: Yes, I'm glad you brought that up. A couple of things. One, we have been fully responsive to the commission's request, and any allegation to the contrary is simply ridiculous. The commission wanted the White House to be the facilitator in this process. It was mutually agreed to -- it was a mutually agreed to process between the White House, the Archives, and the commission. And we follow the same standard for our administration as we do for documents from the previous administration. And if the commission now wants to go back and verify that some documents are duplicative or non-responsive to their request, then we are more than happy to work with the commission so that they can do so.
Q Are you going to release additional documents?
Q Scott, that's a key question. Are you releasing additional documents?
MR. McCLELLAN: I said, we'll work with the commission to make sure that they are able to verify that those documents are non-responsive to their request, or that -- or that they're duplicative. We're more than happy to do that, if they now want to verify -- verify that. But we -- we have been fully responsive to their request. And we will continue to do so. We have worked to make sure they have all the information they need to do their job.
And I'm sorry, but we've got to go. The President's leaving.
Anna Perez, who recently directed communications at the National Security Council, will become chief communications executive for NBC, the network announced yesterday.Don't be silly, honey. They didn't hire you for your "expertise."
Ms. Perez will take up the post of executive vice president for communications, but her duties will expand when NBC becomes NBC-Universal after the expected completion of the network's merger with entertainment units of Vivendi Universal.
***
She left the White House in December, where her titles included counselor for communications to President's Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice. Ms. Perez also worked in the White House for the first President Bush, as Barbara Bush's press secretary.
***
"I love the television business," Ms. Perez said. "I have no expertise in it so I will have a bit of learning curve. But I can't remember the last time I didn't have a learning curve when I took a new job.''
Stolen from Slate’s Today's Papers:
"The LAT teases on Page One word that House Republicans effectively killed a congressional inquiry into administration officials' keeping estimates of the prescription drug bill's cost from Congress. The Republicans declined to challenge the White House's refusal to allow two officials likely involved to testify. A White House spokesman explained that there were 'separation of power' issues, the same argument they used with Condi, until they backed down. Health and Human Services has launched its own internal investigation, which is continuing. The WP runs wire copy inside on the kibosh and the NYT seems to skip it altogether.”
Actually, take a look at the entire TP today. It’s the Medicare story writ large. The Bush Administration is hiding Clinton administration documents from the 9/11 Commission. Why is that? Could it be because they fear the documents will bear out Richard Clarke’s charges against them? And why did they appoint a right-wing partisan extremist to investigate whether they lied about the WMD threat? Why did they reveal the identity of a CIA agent to discredit a truth-teller about their phony WMD threats?
Why do they feel they can “smear with impunity?” Is it because the likes of Wolf Blitzer mindlessly pass along these smears on allegedly liberal CNN? Is it because they can threaten to fire a civil servant for telling the truth to Congress on a matter involving a $150 billion deception and get away with it, because the Washington Post runs wire copy inside and the NYT skips it altogether? I could go on, but it depresses me, given that I’ve sort of published two books on this topic in the past year or so. Plus it’s Slacker Friday.
Anyway, none of that stuff matters. Al Gore “invented” the Internet, “discovered” Love Canal, lied about “Love Story,” and John Kerry is a flip-flopper. Depend on it.
Gee - 3,300 more lucky duckies from Sun Microsystems. Way to celebrate that $1.6 billion.
At his own instigation, the House ethics committee is reviewing allegations that Rep. Curt Weldon (R., Pa.) improperly sought to help two Russian companies and a Serbian foundation that hired his daughter's public-relations firm for $1 million a year.Is it just me, or is "nothing to hide" just Republican for sleaze?
Weldon's attorney, William Canfield, said Weldon initiated the probe in an effort to disprove allegations that the companies and two brothers affiliated with the foundation won favorable treatment because they hired Solutions North America, a lobbying and public-relations firm run by Weldon's daughter, Karen.
Charles P. Sexton Jr., a political ally of Curt Weldon, co-owns the firm.
"We acted proactively because we have nothing to hide," Canfield said.
Weldon submitted a 30-page narrative to the ethics panel several weeks ago detailing his activities and rebutting suggestions that he had acted on behalf of those interests to further his daughter's business, Canfield said.
"I know it sounds a little crazy on its face. Why would he consider a bald, tactless, dishonest --- and dare I say Jew ---to be his running mate? But... think about this: out of all the other potential candidates I am the only one who offsets Bush and balances out the ticket ... because whatever qualities [Bush] has that people find appealing, I have those same qualities in spades.
David said his own qualities included being a "nincompoop," a "coward," a "liar" and a mediocre student.
"Go ahead, ask me who's the president of Japan? I don't know. Ask me what was in the newspaper today. Don't know ...Ask me what foreign countries I've been to. None!"
The president, said David, "avoided Vietnam by going into the Air National Guard. I avoided it by going into the Army Reserve... he couldn't outchicken me. My cowardice is legendary."
"And I'm homophobic to boot! Don't tell me that's not gonna swing some voters."
When Kerry took the stage at Ron Burkle's hillside mansion, he thanked David: "You are qualified to be a Republican. Tonight, rest assured, you did absolutely nothing to change my mind about you and the vice presidency."
A couple weeks back a legal memo fell into my hands from the sky. And it suggests that even the facts Rove has apparently admitted to put him in clear legal jeopardy.Click here for the memo.
***
The essential argument is that the law, the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, does more than simply prohibit a governmental official with access to classified information from divulging the identities of covert operatives. The interpretation of the law contained in the memo holds that a government insider, with access to classified information, such as Rove is also prohibited from confirming or further disseminating the identity of a covert agent even after someone else has leaked it.
I won't try to explain it anymore than that. The memo is only a few pages long and I've marked the key passages.
Despite official assertions that the U.S. had little reason to suspect before Sept. 11 that airliners would be used as weapons, there is new evidence that the federal government had on several earlier occasions taken elaborate, secret measures to protect special events from just such an attack.
***
In the aftermath of those attacks, Bush administration officials have said they received no intelligence warning of such a tactic. "I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon, that they would try to use an airplane as a missile," National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said in a May 2002 news briefing.
Yet on several occasions starting in the mid-1990s, U.S. intelligence agencies had passed on information concerning such a possibility, including early plans by al Qaeda officials to use passenger jets as kamikaze weapons, according to records and current and former government officials.
***
In addition, the plan was used for Mr. Clinton's second inauguration in 1997, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's 50th anniversary celebration in Washington in 1999, the Republican and Democratic conventions in 2000 and the Bush inauguration in 2001, according to former White House officials and Mr. Clarke's book. The plan's use for designated "National Security Special Events" was made official in a classified portion of a "presidential decision directive" that Mr. Clinton signed in 1998. Use of the plan at these events wasn't publicized, and officials were forbidden to talk about it.
***
The possibility of terrorists using hijacked jets against major U.S. buildings had been raised in a public federal-government report in 1999 on terrorist threats facing the U.S. Prepared by the federal-research division of the Library of Congress, it warned: "Suicide bomber(s) belonging to al Qaeda's Martyrdom Battalion could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency, or the White House." The report, referring to an al Qaeda leader captured in 1995, added that "Ramzi Yousef had planned to do this against the CIA headquarters." Bush administration officials have said publicly that they weren't aware of the report before Sept. 11. But a stream of intelligence beginning in 1995, which reached the White House, did indicate that terrorists were plotting attacks using hijacked jets.
Sources: 1999: Federal Research Division Report;
1998, 1996, 1994: Congressional Joint Inquiry on intelligence
relating to Sept. 11, issued July 2003; ''The Age of Sacred Terror''
by Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, published October 2002
Q But, substantively, the President said he didn't want to swat at flies. He also told Bob Woodward that he didn't have a sense of urgency about al Qaeda. Is that a fair description from his own mouth?Of course bin Laden is no more the sum total of al Qaeda than Bush is the sum of the Republican party. Cut off the head, and the body still moves.
MR. McCLELLAN: Well, I think some of what you're referencing is talking about bin Laden. Certainly the threat of terrorism is not one person. We recognize the threat of terrorism was broader than any one person, that we needed to go after this al Qaeda network and have a more aggressive approach to eliminating al Qaeda. The threat from al Qaeda and terrorism was a high priority for this administration prior to coming into office; it was a threat we took very seriously.
Q Scott, can I clarify something you just said before it gets too far away?I thought this part was interesting, considering they just slashed the budget for it:
Q To follow up on April's question about the one speech, you say it's just one speech. You obviously believe that the excerpts don't accurately reflect the priorities of the administration when it comes to fighting terrorism. Why not just release the full text?
MR. McCLELLAN: I don't think -- well, I already addressed that issue earlier. I don't think one meeting or one conference call or one speech necessarily reflects our commitment. I think if you look at the actions and steps that we took, that reflects our commitment. And we acted and we took concrete steps to confront this threat.
Q Why not release the full text to give us the context in which those --
MR. McCLELLAN: I've already addressed that issue, Suzanne. We went through it earlier today and it stands where it is.
Q Two questions on al Qaeda. First of all, before 9/11, were there any steps taken to freeze the money as there were steps taken after 9/11 that made the link to al Qaeda?I'm guessing this next question is from Fox News:
MR. McCLELLAN: I think there's -- I mean, you look at our counterterrorism budget, which a lot of it, obviously, is highly classified, but there are steps taken in a number of different areas. Certainly there is a recognition that the threat from terrorism cannot just be continued to be addressed through law enforcement or through launching a few cruise missiles. You need to have a more comprehensive strategy. And as you know, cracking down on terrorist financing is an important front in the war on terrorism.
Q I'd like to comment on the angry mob that surrounded Karl Rove's house on Sunday. They chanted and pounded on the windows until the D.C. police and Secret Service were called in. The protest was organized by the National People's Action Coalition, whose members receive taxpayer funds, as well as financial support from groups including Theresa Heinz Kerry's Tides Foundation.Hahahahahaha! We don't care if you're related to CIA staff, 'cause they're not actually "in" the White House. Get it?
MR. McCLELLAN: I would just say that, one, we appreciate and understand concerns that people may have. I would certainly hope that people would respect the families of White House staff.
We are mired in a savage mess in Iraq, and no one knows how to get out of it. More than 600 U.S. troops are already dead. The rest of the world has decided that this is an American show, so we're not getting much in the way of help. (Even the Saudis have been sticking their fingers in Uncle Sam's eye, leading the effort by OPEC to cut oil production.) President Bush won't come clean about the financial costs of the war. His mantra remains: tax cuts, tax cuts.Amen.
We're flying blind. There's no evidence that the president or anyone in his administration knows what the next act of this great tragedy will be.
But here's the really interesting part: CNN backed down, but it told Mr. Letterman that Ms. Kagan "misspoke," that the White House was not the source of the false claim. (So who was? And if the claim didn't come from the White House, why did CNN run with it without checking?)UPDATE: Letterman has the Yawning Kid booked for tonight's show. And the White House is now handling the kid's booking.... "You get on that show and tell them how much President Bush is reinvigorating you, or you can just forget about your allowance, young man!"
In short, CNN passed along a smear that it attributed to the White House. When the smear backfired, it declared its previous statements inoperative and said the White House wasn't responsible. Sound familiar?
On Tuesday, I mentioned remarks by CNN's Wolf Blitzer; here's a fuller quote, just to remove any ambiguity: "What administration officials have been saying since the weekend, basically, that Richard Clarke from their vantage point was a disgruntled former government official, angry because he didn't get a certain promotion. He's got a hot new book out now that he wants to promote. He wants to make a few bucks, and that his own personal life, they're also suggesting there are some weird aspects in his life."
Stung by my column, Mr. Blitzer sought to justify his words, saying that his statement was actually a question, and also saying that "I was not referring to anything charged by so-called unnamed White House officials as alleged today." Silly me: I "alleged" that Mr. Blitzer said something because he actually said it, and described "so-called unnamed" officials as unnamed because he didn't name them.
Gee, 2,500 more lucky duckies at Gateway.
Prosecutors investigating whether someone in the Bush administration improperly disclosed the identity of a C.I.A. officer have expanded their inquiry to examine whether White House officials lied to investigators or mishandled classified information related to the case, lawyers involved in the case and government officials say.
In looking at violations beyond the original focus of the inquiry, which centered on a rarely used statute that makes it a felony to disclose the identity of an undercover intelligence officer intentionally, prosecutors have widened the range of conduct under scrutiny and for the first time raised the possibility of bringing charges peripheral to the leak itself.
The expansion of the inquiry's scope comes at a time when prosecutors, after a hiatus of about a month, appear to be preparing to seek additional testimony before a federal grand jury, lawyers with clients in the case said. It is not clear whether the renewed grand jury activity represents a concluding session or a prelude to an indictment.
The broadened scope is a potentially significant development that represents exactly what allies of the Bush White House feared when Attorney General John Ashcroft removed himself from the case last December and turned it over to Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the United States attorney in Chicago.
Trend-conscious candidates beware: Do not get caught courting soccer moms or NASCAR dads. They're so over. This year's hot new swing voter is the single woman.
Democrats should be making an especially heavy play for them, since research shows that single women tend to be more progressive than other voters. And what's more, they are seriously ticked off: Over two-thirds of them believe that the country is moving in the wrong direction and want real change.
Although it's impossible to pigeonhole a group as diverse as single women -- they're young and old, encompass all races, and include divorced moms, widowed seniors and never-married Bridget Joneses -- there's a reason they tend to have the political opinions they do: The vast majority of them find themselves living on the economic edge, radicalized by the struggle to provide for themselves, their children and their older parents, mostly on one income.
The issues single women are most concerned with -- job security, affordable healthcare and decent educational opportunities for themselves and their children -- also skew heavily in the Democrats' favor. When you're barely making ends meet, another round of tax cuts for millionaires doesn't tend to be very high on your political must-have list. Neither is spending mega-billions fighting preemptive, ideological wars based on misleading premises -- especially when, more often than not, it's your loved ones coming home in body bags.
A former translator for the FBI with top-secret security clearance says she has provided information to the panel investigating the 11 September attacks which proves senior officials knew of al-Qa'ida's plans to attack the US with aircraft months before the strikes happened.
She said the claim by the National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, that there was no such information was "an outrageous lie".
Sibel Edmonds said she spent more than three hours in a closed session with the commission's investigators providing information that was circulating within the FBI in the spring and summer of 2001 suggesting that an attack using aircraft was just months away and the terrorists were in place. The Bush administration, meanwhile, has sought to silence her and has obtained a gagging order from a court by citing the rarely used "state secrets privilege".
She told The Independent yesterday: "I gave [the commission] details of specific investigation files, the specific dates, specific target information, specific managers in charge of the investigation. I gave them everything so that they could go back and follow up. This is not hearsay. These are things that are documented. These things can be established very easily."
She added: "There was general information about the time-frame, about methods to be used but not specifically about how they would be used and about people being in place and who was ordering these sorts of terror attacks. There were other cities that were mentioned. Major cities with skyscrapers."
The Treasury Department directed career employees to analyze tax ideas proposed by presidential candidate John Kerry and other Democrats after a request from House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, officials said Wednesday.
The Republican National Committee posted an interactive feature on its Web site that attaches the largest of those cost estimates to Kerry's plan to raise taxes paid by the wealthiest taxpayers [...]
Although federal law prohibits civil servants from working on political campaigns while on duty, Treasury Department attorneys concluded the work was appropriate, Treasury spokesman Rob Nichols said.
"That's a core functionality of the department," Nichols said. "Doing the analysis is proper, it's prudent, it's appropriate. It's our obligation to do it." [...]
"The Bush administration has an ugly habit of using the federal government for its political agenda," said Kerry spokesman Chad Clanton.
Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., said, "It was coercion. If they had refused to do it and they were made to do it, it's illegal."
Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., asked the agency's inspector general to determine whether laws were violated.
The Office of Special Counsel advises that federal employees cannot "use official authority or influence to interfere with an election" or "engage in political activity while on duty." The office is an independent agency charged with investigating and prosecuting violations of federal personnel laws.
The commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks isn't getting a full picture of former President Clinton (news - web sites)'s terrorism policies because the Bush administration won't forward all of Clinton's records to the panel, a lawyer said.
Bruce Lindsey, Clinton's legal representative for records and a longtime confidant of the former president, told The Associated Press on Wednesday that only about 25 percent of nearly 11,000 pages have been turned over.
"I don't want (the commission) drawing the conclusion the Clinton administration didn't do X or Y and then there be a document that contradicts that and they didn't have access to that document because the current administration decided not to forward it to them," Lindsey said.
While presidential records are sealed by law for five years after a president leaves office, an exception was made to allow early access for the Sept. 11 commission. But the National Security Council and Bush administration attorneys decided to turn over just a fraction of Clinton's documents, Lindsey said.
"The administration has interpreted the commission's request differently from the archives and, putting in the best light, has found that three-fourths of the pages did not comply with the commission's request," he said. "That's a fairly big difference of opinion."
As an additional accommodation, the President and Vice President have now agreed to take a "pinkie oath," looping little fingers with each other, while reserving the right to cross the index and middle fingers of their remaining hands and hide them behind their backs.
We must deny your request that Mr. Cheney bring along a PowerPoint presentation depicting who was in and out of the loop, in accordance with separation-of-PowerPoint principles. The Vice President has decreed that the loop of influence is under the cone of silence.
The Bush administration has scuttled a plan to increase by 50 percent the number of criminal financial investigators working to disrupt the finances of Al Qaeda, Hamas and other terrorist organizations to save $12 million, a Congressional hearing was told on Tuesday.Gee, you don't suppose it's because they're still trying to cover up the Saudis' financial support of terrorists, do you?
The Internal Revenue Service had asked for 80 more criminal investigators beginning in October to join the 160 it has already assigned to penetrate the shadowy networks that terrorist groups use to finance plots like the Sept. 11 attacks and the recent train bombings in Madrid. But the Bush administration did not include them in the president's proposed budget for the 2005 fiscal year.
The disclosure, to a House Ways and Means subcommittee, came near the end of a routine hearing into the I.R.S. budget after most of the audience, including reporters, had left the hearing room.
It comes as the White House is fighting to maintain its image as a vigorous and uncompromising foe of global terrorism in the face of questions about its commitment and competence raised by the administration's former terrorism czar, Richard A. Clarke, and its first Treasury secretary, Paul H. O'Neill.
Two private Saudi companies linked with suspected Al Qaeda cells here and in Indonesia also have connections to the Saudi Arabian intelligence agency and its longtime chief, Prince Turki bin Faisal, according to information assembled by German intelligence analysts.This company had locations in Bosnia. Remember when the Republicans were screaming about Clinton getting involved? They said we had no business there.
The Twaik Group and Rawasin Media Productions, both based in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, have served as fronts for the Saudi General Intelligence Directorate, according to an inquiry by Germany's foreign intelligence service, the BND.
Twaik, a $100 million-a-year conglomerate, has diverse holdings inside and outside Saudi Arabia. Rawasin reports earnings of about $4 million a year from producing and selling audio and videotapes promoting the Wahhabi version of Islam that is Saudi Arabia's dominant religion.
What we saw unfold in Bosnia was a guidebook to the bin Laden network, although we didn't recognize it as such at the time. Beginning in 1992, Arabs who had been former Afghan mujahedeen began to arrive. With them came the arrangers, the money men, logisticians and "charities." They arranged front companies and banking networks. As they had done in Afghanistan, the Arabs created their own brigade, allegedly part of the Bosnian army but operating on its own. The muj, as they bame to be known, were fierce fighters against the better-armed Serbs. They also engaged in ghastly torture, murder, and mutilation that seemed excessive even by Balkan standards.Clarke writes that Bosnia decided to take help where they could get it; America wasn't helping.
Iran sent guns. Better yet, al Qaeda sent men, tough, trained fighters. European and U.S. intelligence services began to trace the funding and support of the muj to bin Laden in Sudan, and to facilities that had already been established by the muj in Western Europe itself.Clarke applauds the work of the Clinton administration:
Although late to address the issue, the U.S. was the main reason that the Islamic government in Bosnia survived. The U.S. also blocked Iranian and al Qaeda influence in the country. Moreover, CIA was able to cripple parts of the al Qaeda network and uncover others. Much of what was uncovered was in Europe, where al Qaeda had taken advantage of refugee policies and other forms of international openness to lay down roots. Although Western European governments knew what was present in their countries, many continued to turn a blind eye to al Qaeda's presence.In other words, going into Bosnia was to stop the spread of terrorism.
President Bush's top lawyer placed a telephone call to at least one of the Republican members of the Sept. 11 commission when the panel was gathered in Washington on March 24 to hear the testimony of former White House counterterrorism chief Richard A. Clarke, according to people with direct knowledge of the call.
White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales called commissioner Fred F. Fielding, one of five GOP members of the body, and, according to one observer, also called Republican commission member James R. Thompson. Rep. Henry A. Waxman, the ranking Democrat on the House Government Reform Committee, wrote to Gonzales yesterday asking him to confirm and describe the conversations.
The Xinhua news agency has reported that the groups which rose up against Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide were armed and trained by the United States in the Dominican Republic, according to a preliminary report presented today.I wonder if CNN or MSNBC will bother to mention it.
That statement is the provisional conclusion by the Haiti Investigation Committee made up of religious and legal representatives from several different countries and created in 1991 by former U.S. Justice Secretary Ramsey Clark.
"Two hundred soldiers from the U.S. Special Forces arrived in the Dominican Republic with the authorization of President Hipólito Mejía as part of a military operation to train Haitian rebels," revealed the report that was circulated in the Dominican capital, Santo Domingo.
But Torres no longer works for the military. These days he's an employee of Blackwater USA, a private company that contracts with the US armed forces to train soldiers and guard government buildings around the world.Read the entire piece, then check this out:
Every day, the Navy sends chartered buses full of trainees 25 miles from Naval Station Norfolk, the world's largest naval base, to the company's 5,200-acre facility in Moyock, NC. Last fall, Blackwater signed a $35.7 million contract with the Pentagon to train more than 10,000 sailors from Virginia, Texas, and California each year in "force protection." Other contracts are so secret, says Blackwater president Gary Jackson, that he can't tell one federal agency about the business he's doing with another.
As the US military wages the war on terrorism, it is increasingly relying on for-profit companies like Blackwater to do work normally performed by soldiers.
***
Private military companies, for their part, are focusing much of their manpower on Capitol Hill. Many are staffed with retired military officers who are well connected at the Pentagon -- putting them in a prime position to influence government policy and drive more business to their firms. In one instance, private contractors successfully pressured the government to lift a ban on American companies providing military assistance to Equatorial Guinea, a West African nation accused of brutal human-rights violations. Because they operate with little oversight, using contractors also enables the military to skirt troop limits imposed by Congress and to carry out clandestine operations without committing US troops or attracting public attention.
"Private military corporations become a way to distance themselves and create what we used to call "plausible deniability,'" says Daniel Nelson, a former professor of civil-military relations at the Defense Department's Marshall European Center for Security Studies. "It's disastrous for democracy."
***
The United States has a history of dispatching private military companies to handle the dirtiest foreign assignments. The Pentagon quietly hired for-profit firms to train Vietnamese troops before America officially entered the war, and the CIA secretly used private companies to transport weapons to the Nicaraguan contras during the 1980s after Congress had cut off aid. But as the Bush administration replaces record numbers of soldiers with contractors, it creates more opportunities for private firms to carry out clandestine operations that are banned by Congress or unpopular with the public.
"We can see some merit in using an outside contractor," Charles Snyder, deputy assistant secretary of state for African affairs, recently told reporters, "because then we're not using US uniforms and bodies."
***
Blackwater USA's Gary Jackson, whose company operates in hostile parts of Africa and southwestern Asia, insists that his employees would never bolt from a war zone. "They're paying us good money to go to places that are already ugly," he says. "If it gets real ugly, that's why they hired us in the first place."
Last month Blackwater USA flew a first group of about 60 former commandos, many of whom had trained under the military government of Augusto Pinochet, from Santiago to a 970-hectare training camp in North Carolina.One of the earliest reports out of Fallujah yesterday mentioned that at least one of those killed was CIA. From what I'm reading about Blackwater, it sounds like the odds are good.
From there they would be taken to Iraq, where they were expected to stay between six months and a year, the president of Blackwater USA, Gary Jackson, said. "We scour the ends of the earth to find professionals - the Chilean commandos are very, very professional and they fit within the Blackwater system."
The dead security guards are a symbol of the deep ignorance that runs through this country as we find ourselves in the first war in American history that is not being fought against another country.
Al-Qaida is not a nation. It has nothing to do with the country of Iraq or of Afghanistan or Yemen or Bali or Saudi Arabia or the Sudan or the other places around the world where it exists. Al-Qaida makes explosives in those countries and it arms members and plans how to kill, and it worships. The last is perhaps the most important of all. In this war, ideology and religion are the enemies. There is no Germany or Russia. There is only our enemy, beliefs of others. You don't fight these opponents by using a map and planning attacks by air and land. The opponents are everywhere. You attack and come up against a bucket of steam.
"A danger to us is technological hucksterism," the book "Technology and War" notes. William S. Lind of a group of active army officers who write papers warning of our useless armaments, writes: "Coming up with Madison Avenue slogans to sell new weapons proclaiming that they fundamentally change warfare is a delusion. The enemy cannot be overcome by simply killing them. Their deaths mean martyrdom. Where they fall, dozens and hundreds spring up to take their places. They cannot be overcome solely through firepower attrition. Waging conflict with massive firepower and high technology are the hallmarks of the Great Satan to the Islamics."
If more attention would have been given to the fighting in Northern Ireland, it might have been noted that the Irish Republican Army, or Provos, or whatever the title they used, had three-man cells, one not knowing what the other was doing, and the operation had its most success with perhaps 75 members. Mitchell McLaughlin, who was the third in charge, said that "Twelve people can hold down Northern Ireland."
They fought on beliefs. The desire for a country of their own was at the bottom of it, but the British troops, who could not win, were not fighting against a country. They were in with the worst enemies, religion and ideology.
George Bush, who more and more appears incapable of enough thought to lead this nation, talks about Operation Iraqi Freedom and how we have placed on the field the greatest army known to man. He and those around him seem oblivious to guerrillas. What is Iraqi freedom to them? They are Islamic and they want us slaughtered wherever we are. The American answer is weapons, Bush says. The generals acquire in delight. They cannot wait to spend more billions on tanks and bombers that are useless.
When the effort to shoot the messenger failed to halt the political erosion, Bush did what he never should have done: He threw Rice to the commission. And, worse, he failed to do what he could have done long before: Offer the American people and the world a clear, coherent and detailed account of his own activities and state of mind in the months leading up to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.Wow. What does it say when even the mild-mannered Dean is scornful of Bush?
Instead of acting as the man in charge and saying to the commission, "No, you may not put my national security adviser on the mat, but I will answer to the public for what happened," he did just the opposite. He gave up Rice and then turned on his heel and walked out of the briefing room even as reporters were trying to ask him questions.
At a time when the American people -- and the world -- desperately need reassurance that the government was not asleep at the switch, Bush has clenched his jaw and said nothing that would ease those concerns. Instead, he has arranged that when he answers the commission's questions in a yet-to-be-scheduled private session, he will not face it alone. He and Vice President Cheney will appear together. It will be interesting to learn who furnishes most of the answers.
Letterman just said that according to his source the White House did indeed contact CNN to try and influence their coverage of his clip of Bush speech.Letterman had a very funny video of a young kid fidgeting, yawning and finally falling asleep behind Bush as he gave a speech about revitalizing America's youth. Here's a statement from Letterman's website:
If true, this is really incredible. First, CNN will report whatever the White House sends over to them. And, more importantly, when busted CNN will lie and claim they didn't get the information from the White House. They'll cover for them.
Unbelievable.
Last night we showed a clip of the President giving a speech. Behind him stood a lad who was obviously bored silly. The 14-year-old or so yawned, scratched, yawned, yawned, checked his watch, bent over, stared at the ceiling, and then fell asleep during the President's speech. It was very funny. So funny, in fact, that CNN replayed the clip Tuesday during their broadcasts. But, but, but, the first time is was shown, CNN anchorwoman Daryn Kagan reported that the White House said the clip was a total fake, it was merely the Late Show having fun with their ability to edit and do TV tricks. Dave says what the CNN reporter said was an out and out 100% lie.The kid himself was interviewed by the Orlando Sentinal after the bit ran.
A couple hours later, CNN anchor person Kyra Phillips reported that the kid was at the speech but not where the Late Show had him. Dave again makes the claim, "That's an out and out absolute 100% lie. That kid was exactly where we said he was."
It's true. The speech was at a Florida Rally on March 20th at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, Florida. Dave is irked that the White House was trying to make him look like a jerk. But he's glad he got his side of the story out in the open.
Here's the transcript from Clarke's interview on Hardball last night.
He said he feared that U.S. invasions of Iran or Syria could be in the offing “if the same people are around. ... I fear that they haven’t learned from their mistake.”
See? Condi really is a liar. Just not a very good one.
Kean: Commissioner Ben-Veniste, you may begin.Make sure you have your Depends on before you read the rest.
Ben-Veniste: Mr. President, what did you know and when did you know it?
Bush: Say what?
Ben-Veniste: (chuckles) Sorry, Mr. President. I couldn't resist that one. (clears throat, grows more serious) Mr. President, you were inaugurated as president on January 20th, 2001, were you not?
Bush: (evasive) You mean as president of the U.S. of A.?
Ben-Veniste: Yes sir, that's right.
Bush: Well, I, that is, um ... I think ... (Cheney loudly stamps his foot under the table, twice)
Bush: (carefully pronouncing each word) Yes, Commissioner, that statement is correct.
Ben-Veniste: And as president, you bear the ultimate responsibility for your administration's performance, do you not?
Bush: Responsibility? I'm not sure I like the sound of that ... (Cheney loudly stamps his foot, once.)
Ben-Veniste: (annoyed) Is something wrong, Mr. Vice President?
Cheney: It's just my foot, Commissioner. I'm afraid it's gone to sleep. (stamps it again, once.)
Bush: (slowly and precisely) No Commissioner, I must disagree with you about that.
Ben-Veniste: About what?
Bush: What?
Ben-Veniste: You must disagree about what?
Bush: (flustered) Whatever you just said, that's what.
Ben-Veniste: (sighs, consults his papers) Mr. President, we've heard testimony from Director Tenet, and others, that you were briefed on August 6, 2001 about the threat of terrorist hijackings -- either in the United States or abroad -- and that your senior counter-terrorism advisor urged you to take the federal government to "battle stations." Do you recall these conversations?
(Cheney drums his fingers on the table, loudly.)
Bush: (grins at Cheney) Could you repeat your question, Commissioner? A little more slowly?
Ben-Veniste: (exasperated) Mr. President, on August 6, 2001, were you or where you not warned that Al Qaeda terrorists might be planning a major hijacking?
Bush: (slouches back casually in his chair) Welllll, lessee now. August 6th, you say? Hmmmm...you know Commissioner, that was a mighty long time ago. (he glances at Cheney, who nods sympathetically)
Bush: I'm going to have to think real hard about that one, Ben.
Ben-Veniste: My name's Richard.
Bush: Whatever. August 6th ... August 6th ... You know, I think I was on vacation that month, back in Crawford. Ain't that right, Dick? (Cheney nods) You ever been down to that part of Texas, Ben? Awful pretty country ... (Cheney looks at his watch, smiles)
Ben-Veniste: (wearily) Let's move on, Mr. President, maybe we can return to that question later. (Cheney makes a scoffing noise in the back of his throat.)
Ben-Veniste: Mr. President, have you ever had any business dealings with any members of the Bin Laden family?
Bush: (gives Ben-Veniste a shifty look) Have I ever had any what?
Ben-Veniste: Business dealings. Have any members of the Bin Laden family ever invested in any of the companies you've been associated with, or served as directors with you on any corporate boards ...?
Gonzales: (interrupts) Mr. Ben-Veniste, the administration wants to cooperate with the commission's work, but we have clearly stipulated as a condition for this session that questions about the president's relationship with the Bin Laden family are entirely out of bounds.
Ben-Veniste: (frowns) You have? I've seen no record of it.
Gonzales: That's because there isn't any. (snorts) We just made it up. (Cheney gives Gonzales a high five)
Following his defeat in a bid for reelection, President Bush had sent the troops into Somalia to insure the delivery of the relief supplies. Brent Scowcroft had asked me to be the White House coordinator for the operation, and in January 1993 he had asked me to brief his successor, Tony Lake, on the subject.
... "Well, thank you for coming, but I gather we won't have to worry too much about Somalia because the U.S. will largely be out by Inauguration Day," Lake said.
"Ah, no, actually, the U.S. troop movement into Somalia will not be complete until the end of January," I replied, pulling out a Pentagon chart that showed the staged deployment of U.S. units.
Lake looked suspiciously at the charts. "We were told that the U.N. would take over. That the U.S. troops would be out." He did not say precisely who told him, but I gathered it was my bosses at the White House.
"The U.N. is dragging its feet, Mr. Lak. Boutro-Ghali thinks it would strain the U.N. who would take over." Lakes reaction made him look like a man who had just been told he had cancer. In a way, he had.
Furious Iraqis hacked up the charred bodies of two people, believed to be foreign civilians, and hung the remains from a bridge after their car was ambushed, saying this rebellious Iraqi town would be the "cemetery" of US-led occupation forces.And then there's this evocative detail:
"Down with the occupation, down with America," they shouted as they hurled rocks at the bodies, one of them headless, that dangled from the bridge over the Euphrates River, an AFP correspondent witnessed.
The bodies were then taken down and placed on the ground for people to kick them and slash with knives.
Young men also strung a severed hand and a leg on an electricity pole on the main street of Fallujah, west of Baghdad, where the attack took place early Wednesday.
Four policemen in a car who were near the bridge at the time were seen leaving the scene without intervening.
The identities of the two dead, among several occupants of a convoy of civilian cars, were unknown. The coalition had no immediate comment on the incident, although US troops later sealed off the town.
***
The two vehicles burst into flames, and young men threw rocks and stones at the blazing wreckage. One body was seen burning inside one of the cars.
As the flames died down men pulled one of the bodies out, laid it on the ground and mutilated it with shovels, hacking off parts and shouting "long live Islam."
"The people of Falluja hanged some of the bodies on the old bridge like slaughtered sheep," Mohammed said. "I saw it myself."
The identities of the dead men were unclear.
Footage from Associated Press Television News showed one American passport near a body and one resident displayed what appeared to be military dog tags.
Eason Jordan, a CNN news exec who was deeply involved in the network's coverage of the kidnapping and murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Danny Pearl, is now romantically involved with Pearl's widow, Mariane, people familiar with the relationship told us yesterday.This is the Washington Post, not the National Enquirer. (The way you can tell the difference is, the Enquirer has more integrity. They pay for their stories with cash, so the whore relationship is right up front.)
"I'm neither confirming it nor denying it," Matt Furman, a CNN spokesman, told us yesterday. "He's not going to speak. I can tell you we don't discuss the personal matters of any of our employees."CNN and ethics, all in the same sentence. From the network that pays Howard Kurtz to assess his own publication.
Said Jordan's wife, Susan, "I have absolutely no comment."
Some CNNers mulled the ethical implications of the relationship. Pearl, who earlier this month was turned down for compensation from the 9/11 victims' fund and is appealing, appeared on CNN yesterday with her attorney. "While she's a source, what kind of source is she?" one staffer wondered. "She's a source about her husband's death."
* "There has never been a vice president -- ever (and even including Spiro Agnew who was Nixon's) -- who needed to be investigated more than Cheney. Nor has there ever been such a secretive vice president. Dick Cheney is the power behind the Bush throne. Frankly, I am baffled why the mainstream news media has given Cheney (not to mention Bush) a free ride. I don't know if it is generational, or corporate ownership, or political bias, but it is clear that Cheney has been given a pass by the major news organizations."
* "Bush can't dump Cheney, for it is Cheney, not Rove, who is Bush's backroom brain. He is actually a co-president. Bush doesn't enjoy studying and devising policy. Cheney does. While Cheney has tutored Bush for almost four years, and Bush is better prepared today than when he entered the job, Cheney is quietly guiding this administration. Cheney knows how to play Bush so that Cheney is absolutely no threat to him, makes him feel he is president, but Bush can't function without a script, or without Cheney. Bush is head of state; Cheney is head of government."
* Comparing Karl Rove to Chuck Colson: "Colson, on the other hand, was as nasty a political operative as could be found. Indeed, to this day we don't know the full extent of Colson's activities. He even refused to tell Nixon some of the things he had done (while boasting to Nixon he had done things he didn't want to tell the president). Colson walked out of the White House with any of his papers and records that might cause him a problem. Karl Rove, from what I've seen, makes Colson look like a novice."
* On why he agrees with Gen. Tommy Franks that another major terror attack will be used as an excuse to suspend the Constitution: "As I state in the book, I agree for reasons that probably differ from those of Gen. Franks. The short summary of what is really a thread that runs through the book is that when you have a presidency that has no regard for human life, that develops and implements all (not just national security) policy in secrecy, and is driven by political motives and a radical philosophy, it is impossible not to conclude that they will overreact -- and at the expense of our constitutional safeguards. Bush and Cheney enjoy using power to make and wield swords, not ploughs. They prefer to rule by fear. We've had three years to take the measure of these men."
* "I didn't write this book for those who believe that Bush and Cheney have got it right, and don't want to hear otherwise. Rather I wrote it because a lot of people suspect that they've gotten it wrong, and needed someone who knows the workings of the White House to explain what is going on and why. "
For starters, Clarke presented a memo to Condi Rice outlining the URGENT (this tag is on the document) threat presented by Al Qaeda in January 2001. While Dr. Rice insists she made terrorism a top priority, one of her first decisions in the early days of 2001 was to downgrade Clarke's position as the National Coordinator for Counter Terrorism. How is that making terrorism an elevated priority? It is not. Clarke also requested in January 2001 that President Bush convene a meeting of principal Bush officials (e.g., the secretary of state, secretary of defense and the attorney general) but this meeting was postponed by Dr. Rice until Sept. 4, 2001. That seven-month gap represents time that, in retrospect, could have been used to prevent the 9/11 attacks.
The Clarke bashers also insist that that no more could have been done before 9/11 than what was done during the first eight months of the Bush presidency. Oh? If that was the case, then why did Bush direct the airlines to lock cockpit doors after 9/11? Why did the Bush administration decide to arm pilots, put more air marshals on planes and federalize the security force doing screening at airports? Why did the Bush administration order attacks on Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan if, in the words of the Bush spinners, "we did all that we could do prior to 9/11"? Why did Bush officials establish emergency financial task forces composed of intelligence and law enforcement officials to hunt down the trails of terrorist financing if all had been done prior to 9/11?
In the meantime, our man in Uzbekistan is doing his part for human rights.
Jubilant Iraqis dragged the burned body of what appeared to be a foreigner through the streets of Falluja on Wednesday, and doused another with petrol as it lay burning in the road.And this is good news, too.
At least three people were killed, and parts of their charred bodies hung from a pole near their burning cars. Iraqis threw stones at a corpse still inside one of two cars engulfed in flames in the volatile town.
In a separate incident also west of Baghdad, the U.S. military said five of its coalition soldiers were killed by a roadside bomb on Wednesday morning.
Reuters Television footage from Falluja showed two civilian cars ablaze. Residents shouted "Long Live Islam" and "Allahu Akbar" ("God is Greatest") as they danced around waving their arms in the air and making the victory sign.
Two burned bodies still lay in the street several hours after the attacks. Some witnesses said four people were killed, but it was not possible to confirm.
Pictures showed at least one person kicking a burned corpse and stamping on its head. A dead man with fair hair and in civilian clothes lay in the road beside one of the cars, his feet on fire and blood stains on his white shirt.
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