Why don't the Americans just go home? They've done enough damage and we hear talk of how things will fall apart in Iraq if they 'cut and run', but the fact is that they aren't doing anything right now. How much worse can it get? People are being killed in the streets and in their own homes- what's being done about it? Nothing. It's convenient for them- Iraqis can kill each other and they can sit by and watch the bloodshed- unless they want to join in with murder and rape.

Baghdad Burning

7.28.2006 "Republican Says We Need A Dem Congress"

7.28.2006 Army Dismisses Gay Arabic Linguist

But the GAO also noted that nearly 800 dismissed gay or lesbian service members had critical abilities, including 300 with important language skills. Fifty-five were proficient in Arabic, including Copas, a graduate of the Defense Language Institute in California.

Discharging and replacing them has cost the Pentagon nearly $369 million, according to the Center for the Study of Sexual Minorities in the Military at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

At a time when global warming has become an overriding issue, NASA has been delaying or canceling programs that could shed light on how the climate changes. The shortsighted cutbacks appear to result from sharply limiting NASA’s budget while giving it hugely expensive tasks like repairing the stricken shuttle fleet, finishing construction of the space station, and preparing to explore the Moon and Mars. Something had to give, and NASA’s choices included research into how the planet’s climate is responding to greenhouse gas emissions.

The agency’s shifting priorities may have been signaled by subtle changes in its mission statement this year, as described by Andrew Revkin in The Times. Although the agency had previously led off its goals with “to understand and protect our home planet,” a new mission statement reads simply, “To pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery and aeronautics research.”

Completing the rogues' gallery that assembled in Rome that day was the man who helped Ledeen arrange the meeting: Nicolò Pollari, the director of Italy's military intelligence. Only two months earlier, Pollari had informed the Bush administration that Saddam Hussein had obtained uranium from West Africa—a key piece of false intelligence that Bush used to justify the invasion of Iraq.
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Yet the FBI has been unable to so much as question Chalabi as part of its ongoing espionage case. Last November, when Chalabi returned to the United States for a series of speeches and media events, the FBI tried to interview him. But because he was under State Department protection during his visit, sources in the Justice Department say, the bureau's request was flatly denied.

I have shared this sordid little story with you because it is a cautionary tale about the regime in power. If they were so determined to go with all guns blazing at a single broadcast of public television that is simply doing the job journalism is supposed to do - setting the record straight - you can imagine the pressure that has been applied to mainstream media. And you can understand what's at stake when journalism gets the message and pulls its punches. We saw it once again when Ahmed Chalabi was in town. This is the man who played a key and sinister role in fostering both media and intelligence reports that misled the American people about weapons of mass destruction. Although still under investigation by the FBI, Chalabi has maneuvered himself into the position of Deputy Prime Minister of Iraq. He came to Washington recently to schmooze with the President and to meet with the armchair warriors of the neoconservative crowd who had helped him spin the case for going to war. The old Houdini was back, rolling the beltway press who treated him with deference that might have been accorded George Washington. Watching him knock one soft pitch after another over the wall, I was reminded that the greatest moments in the history of the press have come not when journalists made common cause with power but when they stood fearlessly independent of it. This was not one of them.

Frank Rich says it all: "Faith-Based Politics"

7.22.2006 The Judiciary Strikes Back

The real significance of the case exceeds the NSA wiretapping story and the use of state secrets. Walker's opinion is a stirring defense of the role of the courts, even in times of war. Quoting the Supreme Court's decision in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, he reminds us, "Whatever power the United States Constitution envisions for the Executive in its exchanges with other nations or with enemy organizations in times of conflict, it most assuredly envisions a role for all three branches when individual liberties are at stake." The president and Congress seem to have forgotten that lately; Judge Walker has reminded them.

A legal challenge to AT&T's cooperation with the Bush administration's warrantless eavesdropping program survived dismissal today, as U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker rejected the administration's oft-repeated claim that any scrutiny of its domestic spying programs would endanger national security.

7.22.2006 Maureen Dowd:

W. continues to present simplicity as clarity. When will he ever learn that clarity is the last thing you’re going to find in the Middle East, and that trying to superimpose it with force usually makes things worse? That’s what both the Israelis and Ronald Reagan learned in the early 1980’s when they tried disastrously to remake Lebanon.

Rep. John Conyer's (D-MI) is suing President Bush over the enactment of the Federal Deficit Rediction Act. Shorter version: The House and Senate passed different versions of the bill and even though they went to conference, the House never voted on the version passed by the Senate as a House clerk changed a provision in the Senate version and Bush signed it into law. Bush can't sign a bill unless it has been agreed to by both the House and Senate.

7.20.2006 "Defending Bush’s Veto, Rove Grossly Distorts Stem Cell Science"

7.19.2006 Lying about the Ruinous Cost of the War in Iraq

Defense Secretary Rumsfeld got into the spin circus, saying, “the Office of Management and Budget, has come up with a number that's something under $50 billion for the cost.”
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But facts are facts. The cost is far higher than "under $50 billion," far higher than even the high end of Mr. Lindsay's estimate. As Ms. Belasco has revealed, the cost of the Iraq war through fiscal 2006 is $319 billion.

In addition to this, she notes that both CRS and the General Accounting Office have found that the Defense Department, in reporting on the costs of the war, has omitted substantial amounts of war spending. So the figure is likely to be higher, and it will of course keep growing as the tragic occupation continues.

Tariq Alhomayed, editor in chief of the Arab daily Asharq al-Awsat, stuck the dagger in deeper: "Mr. Nasrallah bombastically announced he consulted no one when he decided to attack Israel, nor did he measure Lebanon's need for security, prosperity, and the safety of its people. He said he needs no one's help but God's to fight the fight." Mr. Alhomayed's punch line was, in so many words: Go with God, Sheik Nasrallah, but count the rest of us out.
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All in all, it seems that when Israel decided to go to war against the priestly mafia of Hamas and Hezbollah, it opened a whole new chapter in the Greater Middle East discourse. And Israel is finding, to its surprise, that a vast, not-so-silent majority of Arabs agrees that enough is enough. To be sure, beneath the hostility toward Sheik Nasrallah in Sunni Muslim states lies the deep and bitter heritage of a 14-century Sunni-Shiite divide, propelled to greater heights now by fears of an ascendant Shiite "arc of menace" rising out of Iran and peddled in the Sunni world by Syria.

New welfare rules created by the Bush administration are doomed to fail by forcing women to take the first dead-end job that comes their way.

In the old empires, there would be a lot of marriages between the royal families. And from time to time, these inter-family marriages would produce a mentally challenged son who would inherit the throne. This would set the empire back for hundreds of years. I'm not saying anything, I'm just saying. Russia is big and so is China.

The windfall, which by some estimates could be $2 billion or more this year, is a result of the transfer of millions of low-income people into the new Medicare Part D drug program that went into effect in January. Under that program, as it turns out, the prices paid by insurers, and eventually the taxpayer, for the medications given to those transferred are likely to be higher than what was paid under the federal-state Medicaid programs for the poor.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee today that President Bush personally halted an internal Justice Department investigation into whether Gonzales and other senior department officials acted within the law in approving and overseeing the administration's domestic surveillance program.

If Hamdan really did open up the possibility that the "administration's" justification for the NSA spying program is without foundation, then that exposes them to the possibility of criminal liability. And so long as no investigation faults the actions of the DoJ's top brass in the way they rendered their advice to the president, "administration" officials may still claim a "good faith" reliance on the advice of their legal counselors. You know, the Shaun Hansen defense.

For some time now, conservative foreign policy rhetoric has consisted of little more than knee-jerk hawkishness coupled with an almost pathological inability to internalize certain basic realities of our world, like the fact that we have limited military resources and that history, like the weather, is very difficult to predict or control.

On July 13, the Pensacola, Fla.-based law firm of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. filed a "qui tam" lawsuit in U.S. District Court, alleging that Diebold and other electronic voting machine (EVM) companies fraudulently represented to state election boards and the federal government that their products were "unhackable."

Kennedy claims to have witnesses "centrally located, deep within the corporations," who will confirm that company officials withheld their knowledge of problems with accuracy, reliability and security of EVMs in order to procure government contracts. Since going into service, many of these machines have been linked to allegations of election fraud.

It will be truly ironic if the Bush administration is rewarded for its law-breaking with a bill that, as recently as six months ago, no one would ever have dreamed had a snowball's chance in hell of gaining Congressional approval. This is a strategy that the GOP has mastered. First you take a position that is so outrageous and extreme that it catches everyone off guard. You then advocate for that position so stubbornly and so aggressively that, before long, you've made a lot of formerly extreme positions seem moderate by comparison. Eventually you agree to a "compromise" that replaces the status quo with something that just a short time earlier would have seemed unthinkable. It's amazing how effective this strategy is at shifting the basic terms of the debate.

7.17.2006 Arthur Silber:

For now, I will leave you with one very simple idea, one I often express to friends these days. Even though I write long essays about current events, history and other subjects, as I contemplate the growing devastation around the world, I have one thought above all others. I often feel that I simply want to say to everyone: Look, we can talk about anything you want. We'll talk for as long as it takes. We'll work it out, even if takes years. But, please, for God's sake:

STOP KILLING PEOPLE.

That's all. That's everything.

The Bush administration says it plans sweeping changes in Medicare payments to hospitals that could cut payments by 20 percent to 30 percent for many complex treatments and new technologies.
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The new system is based on a commercial product developed by 3M Health Information Systems, a unit of 3M, the Minnesota-based technology company. In July 2005, the Bush administration awarded a “sole sourceto analyze whether it was feasible for Medicare to use a payment system modeled on the 3M product. The company said yes.

... the administration has fiddled in Iraq while Islamic radicalism has burned brighter and the rest of the Axis of Evil, not to mention Afghanistan and the Middle East, have grown into just the gathering threat that Saddam was not. And there's still no policy. As Ivo Daalder of the Brookings Institution writes on his foreign-affairs blog, Mr. Bush isn't pursuing diplomacy in his post-cowboy phase so much as "a foreign policy of empty gestures" consisting of "strong words here; a soothing telephone call and hasty meetings there." The ambition is not to control events but "to kick the proverbial can down the road - far enough so the next president can deal with it.

A far better approach is the legislation Rep. John Conyers and I have drafted. The Lawful Intelligence and Surveillance of Terrorists in an Emergency by the NSA ('LISTEN') Act (H.R. 5371) would require the program to comply with FISA and would provide the resources needed to do just that. The bill has 58 co-sponsors and has been endorsed by the American Bar Association, the ACLU, the Center for Democracy Technology (CDT), former Reagan Justice lawyer Bruce Fein, and the Open Society Policy Center. Next Wednesday, the House Intelligence Committee is holding a public hearing on various legislative proposals on the NSA program. I suspect that as the public absorbs the discussion, Senator Specter's bill will be dismissed as a non-starter.

7.12.2006 Maureen Dowd on the nomination of William Haynes to the Federal Bench:

Even as the Bush administration was forced to concede, after being slapped back by the Supreme Court, that terrorism suspects must be accorded the rights enshrined in the Geneva Conventions, W. was trying to reward those who helped shred them. He nominated Mr. Haynes to sit on the Fourth Circuit court, the conservative Virginia go-to court for contentious cases on civil liberties and detention of foreign prisoners.
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When Alberto Mora, the former Navy general counsel, recently won the Kennedy Foundation “Profiles in Courage’’ award for trying to warn Mr. Haynes and others that unleashing dogs for psychological torture and turning America into a law unto itself would hurt the nation, he said this:

“Cruelty disfigures our national character. It is incompatible with our constitutional order, with our laws, and with our most prized values. Cruelty can be as effective as torture in destroying human dignity, and there is no moral distinction between one and the other.”

They long ago lost the shield of popularity. The Supreme Court just ruled against them, and in the process, strongly insinuated that they may be war criminals and without any valid defenses to accusations of repeated criminal acts. Even their Congressional allies smell blood and are making threats and demanding concessions. And behind their unprecedentedly fortified walls of secrecy undoubtedly lurk the most incriminating, still-concealed revelations yet, and it is only a matter of time before we learn of those. Bush critics seems to assume that Bush officials are almost divinely protected from any meaningful consequences from their behavior, but it's a very good bet, at this point, that that comforting assumption is not shared by Bush officials.

"It's not really a reversal of policy," Snow asserted, calling the Supreme Court decision "complex."

U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor, who is expected to be the first to rule on the issue, asked only one question during the hearing and gave no indication of how she would rule or when. It was the second hearing she has held within a month on the complex legal issues surrounding the program.

Taylor has scheduled no further hearings, and told the lawyers she would take the case "under advisement," meaning that she would weigh their arguments and issue a ruling.
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ACLU attorney Ann Beeson said the government's position was so expansive that it "would preclude judicial review in every case where the president chose to ignore Congress whenever he wants to wiretap Americans."

She said government officials had revealed sufficient information about the program that the judge could rule without further fact-finding. That is crucial to the ACLU's argument because it would give the judge an opportunity to rule without delving into the program's inner workings, avoiding the risk of revelations government officials say would harm the country.

7.10.2006 A Few Bad Men by David Holthouse, Southern Poverty Law Center

Ten years after a scandal over neo-Nazis in the armed forces, extremists are once again worming their way into a recruit-starved military.

A recent book (May 2006) speaks to the issue of leader accountability with stunning eloquence. Tiger Force is a documented account of 120 U.S. soldiers who, between May and November of 1967, rotated through an Army special operations platoon. This platoon, Tiger Force, wreaked its vengeance in the vicinity of Duc Pho and Chu Lai in South Vietnam.
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In 1974-75, Richard Cheney was a special assistant to President Ford. Ford's chief of staff was Donald Rumsfeld. The secretary of defense from 1973-75 was James Schle er. The case was made to disappear by these men who served presidents Nixon and Ford - probably out of considerations of politics. There were never any charges filed against the soldiers or the officers who ordered and participated in the routine killing of civilians.
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This administration never holds anyone in senior positions accountable for derelict performance. However, unless there is full accountability for the war crimes of Iraq - wherever the evidence leads - there is a high probability that the lessons today's lieutenants and captains need to learn about the law of war and command leadership will never be sufficiently absorbed to make the crucial difference when those men and women become colonels and generals.

The court's reasoning was complex, but the majority opinion, written by Justice John Paul Stevens, concluded that the military commissions, with their limited protections for the rights of the accused, violated the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the basic provisions of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions—precisely the argument that Taft, Bowker and other State Department lawyers had tried to make four years ago.
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The court decision's possible effects have set off an intense debate within the administration over how to respond. One camp, headed by national-security adviser Stephen Hadley and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, want to use the decision as the basis for a wide-ranging "fix" that would accept a role for Congress and the courts on detainee issues.
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But hard-liners—led by Addington, now Vice President Cheney's chief of staff—are fiercely resisting. They, along with some congressional Republicans, want to nullify the court ruling by rewriting portions of the Uniform Code of Military Justice and granting the president the powers the court rejected.

7.9.2006 By ERIC LICHTBLAU and SCOTT SHANE: , NYT

The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee said Sunday that the Bush administration briefed the panel on a "significant" intelligence program only after a government whistle-blower alerted him to its existence and he pressed President Bush for details.
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"We can't be briefed on every little thing that they are doing," Mr. Hoekstra said in an interview on "Fox News Sunday." "But in this case, there was at least one major — what I consider significant — activity that we had not been briefed on that we have now been briefed on. And I want to set the standard there, that it is not optional for this president or any president or people in the executive community not to keep the intelligence committees fully informed of what they are doing."
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"We need to make sure the whistle-blower process is an open door," Mr. Hoekstra said at the hearing. Otherwise, he said, when intelligence officers see something they believe to be illegal or unwise, "they just go, 'Well, I'll just go to the press.' "

7.9.2006 FBI plans new Net-tapping push CNET via Raw Storey

The FBI has drafted sweeping legislation that would require Internet service providers to create wiretapping hubs for police surveillance and force makers of networking gear to build in backdoors for eavesdropping, CNET News.com has learned.

TWO weeks and counting, and the editor of The New York Times still has not been sentenced to the gas chamber. What a bummer for one California radio talk-show host, Melanie Morgan, who pronounced The Times guilty of treason and expressly endorsed that punishment. She and the rest of the get-the-press lynch mob are growing restless, wondering why newspapers haven't been prosecuted under the Espionage Act. "If Bush believes what he is saying," taunted Pat Buchanan, "why does he not do his duty as the chief law enforcement officer of the United States?"
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The administration has a more insidious game plan instead: it has manufactured and milked this controversy to reboot its intimidation of the press, hoping journalists will pull punches in an election year. There are momentous stories far more worrisome to the White House than the less-than-shocking Swift program, whether in the chaos of Anbar Province or the ruins of New Orleans. If the press muzzles itself, its under-the-radar self-censorship will be far more valuable than a Nixonesque frontal assault that ends up as a 24/7 hurricane veering toward the Supreme Court.

Will this plan work? It did after 9/11. The chilling words articulated at the get-go by Ari Fleischer (Americans must "watch what they say") carried over to the run-up to the Iraq war, when the administration's W.M.D. claims went unchallenged by most news organizations. ...

7.8.2006 Ally Told Bush Project Secrecy Might Be Illegal

In a sharply worded letter to President Bush in May, an important Congressional ally charged that the administration might have violated the law by failing to inform Congress of some secret intelligence programs and risked losing Republican support on national security matters.

The letter from Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, did not specify the intelligence activities that he believed had been hidden from Congress. h/t

MEDFORD, Ore. (July 6) - The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit Thursday alleging the U.S. Secret Service and state and local police protecting President Bush during a 2004 campaign appearance discriminated against protesters when they cleared the streets outside where the president was eating dinner.

7.7.2006 Man indicted in phone jamming case will argue Administration approved election scheme

Mr. Hansen may asserts [sic] the defense of "derivative entrapment" in which the government uses a private party as its agent," Levin adds.
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A liberal political action group, Senate Majority Project, also uncovered that GOP Marketplace, which subcontracted out the hang-up calls to Hansen’s Mylo Enterprises, was partly owned by Mississippi Governor and former RNC Chair Haley Barbour.
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The Republican National Committee, which shelled out millions to defend Tobin, has said it is "preposterous" to suggest the calls involved phone jamming.

7.6.2006 Something to sing

7.6.2006 Something to laugh about: Tom Delay is caught in a catch 22 situation. A (Republican) judge, won't allow him to be substituted off of the ballot. (Here)

7.6.2006 Consultant Breached FBI's Computers

The FBI's Trilogy program cost more than $535 million but failed to produce a usable case-management system for agents because of cost overruns and technical problems, according to the Government Accountability Office.

While Trilogy led to successful hardware upgrades and thousands of new PCs for bureau workers and agents, the final phase -- a software system called the Virtual Case File -- was abandoned last year. The FBI announced in March that it would spend an additional $425 million in an attempt to finish the job. The new system would be called "Sentinel."

Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld

7.3.2006 "Judge Temporarily Bars Navy Use of Sonar"

7.2.2006 Andrew Sullivan:

America is not in essence a geographical entity. When it was founded, it occupied a fraction of the land it now does. Nor is it defined by an ethnic group or a royal line. Its core is essentially a piece of paper, a written constitution, a formal set of procedures designed, before everything else, to protect individual liberty. At the heart of that liberty is the right to a fair trial and the insistence that nobody — especially not the president — can take that away.
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What happened last week was the return of constitutional order. The court insisted that the president needed legislative backing for prosecuting terrorists and that he was bound by the laws of warfare passed by Congress. The farcical military tribunals at Gitmo were more suited to a banana republic than the US — and they had to be scrapped. Torture is illegal in America — and the president has no authority to say otherwise. What we saw last week, in other words, was the end of a potential rival regime to constitutional government in America.
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If he wants to torture prisoners, he must ask Congress to repeal the law against it.

NYT, Bill Keller: "We have on many occasions withheld information when lives were at stake," Keller said. "However, the administration simply did not make a convincing case that describing our efforts to monitor international banking presented such a danger. Indeed, the administration itself has talked publicly and repeatedly about its successes in the area of financial surveillance."

WSJ Editorial: "Some argue that the Journal should have still declined to run the antiterror story. However, at no point did Treasury officials tell us not to publish the information. And while Journal editors knew the Times was about to publish the story, Treasury officials did not tell our editors they had urged the Times not to publish. What Journal editors did know is that they had senior government officials providing news they didn't mind seeing in print. If this was a 'leak,' it was entirely authorized...."

June 30 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. National Security Agency asked AT&T Inc. to help it set up a domestic call monitoring site seven months before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, lawyers claimed June 23 in court papers filed in New York federal court.

Our political heritage is to be skeptical of executive power, because, in particular, there was skepticism of King George III. But Cheney and Addington are not students of history. If they were, they’d know that the Founding Fathers would be shocked by what they’ve done.”