31 July 2005

The Roots of Prisoner Abuse
NYT's Editorial, 30 July 2005
This week, the White House blocked a Senate vote on a measure sponsored by a half-dozen Republicans, including Senator John McCain, that would prohibit cruel, degrading or inhumane treatment of prisoners. Besides being outrageous on its face, that action served as a reminder of how the Bush administration ducks for cover behind the men and women in uniform when challenged on military policy, but ignores their advice when it seems inconvenient.
Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican who has shown real political courage on this issue, recently released documents showing that the military's top lawyers had warned a year before the Abu Ghraib nightmare came to light that detainee policies imposed by the White House and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld violated American and international law and undermined the standards of civilized treatment embedded in the American military tradition.
In February 2003, Maj. Gen. Jack Rives, the deputy judge advocate general of the Air Force, reminded his civilian bosses that American rules on the treatment of prisoners had grown out of Vietnam, where captured Americans, like Mr. McCain, were tortured. "We have taken the legal and moral 'high road' in the conduct of our military operations regardless of how others may operate," he wrote. Abandoning those rules, he said, endangered every American soldier.
General Rives and the other military lawyers argued strongly against declaring that Mr. Bush was above the law when it came to antiterrorism operations. But the president's team ignored them, offering up a pretzel logic that General Rives and the other military experts warned would not fool anyone. Rear Adm. Michael Lohr, the Navy's judge advocate general, said that the situation at the American prison at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba might be so legalistically unique that the Geneva Conventions and even the Constitution did not necessarily apply. But he asked, "Will the American people find we have missed the forest for the trees by condoning practices that, while technically legal, are inconsistent with our most fundamental values?"
General Rives said that if the White House permitted abusive interrogations at Guantánamo Bay, it would not be able to restrict them to that single prison. He argued that soldiers elsewhere would conclude that their commanders were condoning illegal behavior. And that is precisely what happened at Abu Ghraib after the general who organized the abuse of prisoners at Guantánamo went to Iraq to toughen up the interrogation of prisoners there.
The White House ignored these military lawyers' advice two years ago. Now it is trying to kill the measure that would define the term "illegal combatants," set rules for interrogations and prohibit cruel and inhumane treatment of prisoners. The president considers this an undue restriction of his powers. It's not only due; it's way overdue.

30 July 2005

Oil and Blood; There is No Withdrawal Plan
By BOB HERBERT
NYT, 28 July 2005
...The Bush administration has no plans to bring the troops home from this misguided war, which has taken a fearful toll in lives and injuries while at the same time weakening the military, damaging the international reputation of the United States, serving as a world-class recruiting tool for terrorist groups and blowing a hole the size of Baghdad in Washington's budget.
A wiser leader would begin to cut some of these losses. But the whole point of this war, it seems, was to establish a long-term military presence in Iraq to ensure American domination of the Middle East and its precious oil reserves, which have been described, the author Daniel Yergin tells us, as "the greatest single prize in all history."
...The point here is that the invasion of Iraq was part of a much larger, long-term policy that had to do with the U.S. imposing its will, militarily when necessary, throughout the Middle East and beyond. The war has gone badly, and the viciousness of the Iraq insurgency has put the torch to the idea of further pre-emptive adventures by the Bush administration.
But dreams of empire die hard. American G.I.'s are dug into Iraq, and the bases have been built for a long stay. The war may be going badly, but the primary consideration is that there is still a tremendous amount of oil at stake, the second-largest reserves on the planet. And neocon fantasies aside, the global competition for the planet's finite oil reserves intensifies by the hour.
Lyndon Johnson ignored the unsolicited advice of Senator George Aiken of Vermont - to declare victory in Vietnam in 1966. The war continued for nearly a decade. Many high-level government figures believe that U.S. troops will be in Iraq for a minimum of 5 more years, and perhaps 10.
That should be understood by the people who think that the formation of a permanent Iraqi government will lead to the withdrawal of American troops. There is no real withdrawal plan. The fighting and the dying will continue indefinitely.

28 July 2005

Military's Opposition to Harsh Interrogation Is Outlined
By NEIL A. LEWIS
NYT, 28 July 2005
Senior military lawyers lodged vigorous and detailed dissents in early 2003 as an administration legal task force concluded that President Bush had authority as commander in chief to order harsh interrogations of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, newly disclosed documents show.
Despite the military lawyers' warnings, the task force concluded that military interrogators and their commanders would be immune from prosecution for torture under federal and international law because of the special character of the fight against terrorism.
In memorandums written by several senior uniformed lawyers in each of the military services as the legal review was under way, they had urged a sharply different view and also warned that the position eventually adopted by the task force could endanger American service members.

Ex-Warden Tells of Use of Dogs
FORT MEADE, Md.
AP via NYT, 28 July 2005
The former warden of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq testified Wednesday that he attended a meeting in which the commander of the Guantánamo prison recommended using military dogs for interrogation.
The former warden, Maj. David Dinenna, testified at the end of a preliminary hearing for two Army dog handlers accused of abusing Iraqi detainees. Major Dinenna said that at a meeting in September 2003, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, then the Guantánamo commander, talked about the effectiveness of using the dogs.

How Costco Became the Anti-Wal-Mart
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
NYT, 17 July 2005
...Combining high quality with stunningly low prices, the shirts appeal to upscale customers - and epitomize why some retail analysts say Mr. Sinegal just might be America's shrewdest merchant since Sam Walton.
But not everyone is happy with Costco's business strategy. Some Wall Street analysts assert that Mr. Sinegal is overly generous not only to Costco's customers but to its workers as well.
Costco's average pay, for example, is $17 an hour, 42 percent higher than its fiercest rival, Sam's Club. And Costco's health plan makes those at many other retailers look Scroogish. One analyst, Bill Dreher of Deutsche Bank, complained last year that at Costco "it's better to be an employee or a customer than a shareholder."
Mr. Sinegal begs to differ. He rejects Wall Street's assumption that to succeed in discount retailing, companies must pay poorly and skimp on benefits, or must ratchet up prices to meet Wall Street's profit demands.
Good wages and benefits are why Costco has extremely low rates of turnover and theft by employees, he said. And Costco's customers, who are more affluent than other warehouse store shoppers, stay loyal because they like that low prices do not come at the workers' expense. "This is not altruistic," he said. "This is good business."

Is There an Extra Ingredient in Nonstick Pans?
By MARIAN BURROS
NYT, 27 July 2005
The question of whether Teflon cookware is safe has moved from Web site chatter to the courtroom. But more than nonstick frying pans are under scrutiny these days. Scientists are examining the chemical makeup of other products like food containers to gauge their potential hazards.
In each instance, the substance being questioned is perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA. Studies have shown that PFOA causes cancer and other health problems in laboratory animals, and it is under scrutiny by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration.
A class action suit filed last week against DuPont in several states, including New York, charges that Teflon releases PFOA under normal cooking use and that the company did not warn consumers about its dangers.
DuPont says that while PFOA is used to make Teflon, none of it remains in the finished product, and all Teflon-coated cookware is safe.

27 July 2005

Rebranding failure...
U.S. Officials Retool Slogan for Terror War
By ERIC SCHMITT and THOM SHANKER
NYT, 26 July 2005
The Bush administration is retooling its slogan for the fight against Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups, pushing the idea that the long-term struggle is as much an ideological battle as a military mission, senior administration and military officials said Monday.
In recent speeches and news conferences, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and the nation's senior military officer have spoken of "a global struggle against violent extremism" rather than "the global war on terror," which had been the catchphrase of choice. Administration officials say that phrase may have outlived its usefulness, because it focused attention solely, and incorrectly, on the military campaign.
Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the National Press Club on Monday that he had "objected to the use of the term 'war on terrorism' before, because if you call it a war, then you think of people in uniform as being the solution." He said the threat instead should be defined as violent extremists, with the recognition that "terror is the method they use."
Although the military is heavily engaged in the mission now, he said, future efforts require "all instruments of our national power, all instruments of the international communities' national power." The solution is "more diplomatic, more economic, more political than it is military," he concluded.
Administration and Pentagon officials say the revamped campaign has grown out of meetings of President Bush's senior national security advisers that began in January, and it reflects the evolution in Mr. Bush's own thinking nearly four years after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Mr. Rumsfeld spoke in the new terms on Friday when he addressed an audience in Annapolis, Md., for the retirement ceremony of Adm. Vern Clark as chief of naval operations. Mr. Rumsfeld described America's efforts as it "wages the global struggle against the enemies of freedom, the enemies of civilization."
The shifting language is one of the most public changes in the administration's strategy to battle Al Qaeda and its affiliates, and it tracks closely with Mr. Bush's recent speeches emphasizing freedom, democracy and the worldwide clash of ideas.
...Douglas J. Feith, the under secretary of defense for policy, said in an interview that if the nation's efforts were limited to "protecting the homeland and attacking and disrupting terrorist networks, you're on a treadmill that is likely to get faster and faster with time." The key to "ultimately winning the war," he said, "is addressing the ideological part of the war that deals with how the terrorists recruit and indoctrinate new terrorists."

Defending The Neocon War
John Brown
TomPaine.com, 26 July 2005
Terrorists may indeed be driven by hate and resentment, but their actions are also determined by geopolitical considerations, as professor Robert Pape of the University of Chicago, among others, has pointed out. Many terrorists—and they include persons with formal educations—have reasons for carrying out their horrible deeds: “The central fact,” notes Pape, “is that overwhelmingly suicide-terrorist attacks are not driven by religion as much as they are by a clear strategic objective: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland” (interview in The American Conservative , July 18). This statement, far from empathy, is an effort to explain terrorism—which we have no choice but to understand if we want to overcome it.
The neocons’ response to these observations is to repeat that terrorists are ogres with nothing on their minds other than death and destruction (even though, in Commentary , Podhoretz claimed jihadist fundamentalists had long-term geopolitical plans against the United States). This crude caveman analysis—to be fair—could be an honest effort to expose the nature of terrorism to ordinary citizens without over intellectualizing the issue. But it is naïve to assume that the neocons are only interested in enlightening the public. They have a political agenda, and their current decoupling of terror from international politics is at heart an attempt to maintain declining popular support for their number-one priority: a forceful, aggressive U.S. military presence in the Middle East that will assure permanent American-led control of the area (for reasons the neocons have never made entirely clear). Their catchword for this bloody, expensive, universally despised attempted U.S. domination? “Democracy in Iraq.”
...Lying and neoconservatism are becoming synonymous in the American language, and “liberating” Iraq is now seen as the neocon fabrication par excellence. So why should we believe their latest fiction—that terror has nothing to do with Iraq—so that they can keep us fighting in the Middle East for reasons we don’t even know?

26 July 2005

Shots to the Heart of Iraq
Innocent civilians, including people who are considered vital to building democracy, are increasingly being killed by U.S. troops.
By Richard C. Paddock
LA Times, 26 July 2005
Three men in an unmarked sedan pulled up near the headquarters of the national police major crimes unit. The two passengers, wearing traditional Arab dishdasha gowns, stepped from the car.
At the same moment, a U.S. military convoy emerged from an underpass. Apparently believing the men were staging an ambush, the Americans fired, killing one passenger and wounding the other. The sedan's driver was hit in the head by two bullet fragments.
The soldiers drove on without stopping.
This kind of shooting is far from rare in Baghdad, but the driver of the car was no ordinary casualty. He was Iraqi police Brig. Gen. Majeed Farraji, chief of the major crimes unit. His passengers were unarmed hitchhikers whom he was dropping off on his way to work.
"The reason they shot us is just because the Americans are reckless," the general said from his hospital bed hours after the July 6 shooting, his head wrapped in a white bandage. "Nobody punishes them or blames them."
SEE ALSO:
What Bush Doesn't Know
By BOB HERBERT
NYT, 25 July 2005

U.S. 'projection of power' to continue
New Name for 'War on Terror' Reflects Wider U.S. Campaign
By ERIC SCHMITT and THOM SHANKER
NYT, 26 July 2005
...Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the National Press Club on Monday that he had "objected to the use of the term 'war on terrorism' before, because if you call it a war, then you think of people in uniform as being the solution." He said the threat instead should be defined as violent extremists, with the recognition that "terror is the method they use."
Although the military is heavily engaged in the mission now, he said, future efforts require "all instruments of our national power, all instruments of the international communities' national power." The solution is "more diplomatic, more economic, more political than it is military," he concluded.
Administration and Pentagon officials say the revamped campaign has grown out of meetings of President Bush's senior national security advisers that began in January, and it reflects the evolution in Mr. Bush's own thinking nearly four years after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Mr. Rumsfeld spoke in the new terms on Friday when he addressed an audience in Annapolis, Md., for the retirement ceremony of Adm. Vern Clark as chief of naval operations. Mr. Rumsfeld described America's efforts as it "wages the global struggle against the enemies of freedom, the enemies of civilization."
The shifting language is one of the most public changes in the administration's strategy to battle Al Qaeda and its affiliates, and it tracks closely with Mr. Bush's recent speeches emphasizing freedom, democracy and the worldwide clash of ideas.
"It is more than just a military war on terror," Steven J. Hadley, the national security adviser, said in a telephone interview. "It's broader than that. It's a global struggle against extremism. We need to dispute both the gloomy vision and offer a positive alternative."
The language shifts also come at a time when Mr. Bush, with a new appointment for one of his most trusted aides, Karen Hughes, is trying to bolster the State Department's efforts at public diplomacy.
Lawrence Di Rita, Mr. Rumsfeld's spokesman, said the shift in language "is not a shift in thinking, but a continuation of the immediate post-9/11 approach."
"The president then said we were going to use all the means of national power and influence to defeat this enemy," Mr. Di Rita said. "We must continue to be more expansive than what the public is understandably focused on now: the military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq."
By emphasizing to the public that the effort is not only military, the administration may also be trying to reassure those in uniform who have begun complaining that only members of the armed forces are being asked to sacrifice for the effort.
New opinion polls show that the American public is increasingly pessimistic about the mission in Iraq, with many doubting its link to the counterterrorism mission. So, a new emphasis on reminding the public of the broader, long-term threat to the United States may allow the administration to put into broader perspective the daily mayhem in Iraq and the American casualties.
Douglas J. Feith, the under secretary of defense for policy, said in an interview that if the nation's efforts were limited to "protecting the homeland and attacking and disrupting terrorist networks, you're on a treadmill that is likely to get faster and faster with time." The key to "ultimately winning the war," he said, "is addressing the ideological part of the war that deals with how the terrorists recruit and indoctrinate new terrorists."

Al-Qaeda Intentionally Induces Over-Reaction
Juan Cole
Informed Comment, 25 July 2005
The investigation has now been complicated by the killing Friday of an innocent Brazilian, Jean Charles de Menezes, who was living legally in the UK and working as an electrician. He lived in an apartment block that was under surveillance and was followed by plainclothes police. When he headed into the Underground, they commanded him to stop. He ran instead. Because he was wearing a jacket in the middle of the summer, they feared he was a bomber and shot him in the head five times. In fact, it was in the 70s that day in London and one of my correspondents from that city said there was a cool breeze, and he might have put on a jacket to go out himself. I suppose for a Brazilian the weather might have called for a wrap.
The tragedy of the death of Menezes is a deliberate outcome of al-Qaeda tactics. The organization is attempting to spread fear and hatred, and knows that the Western security agencies and military will often over-react, helping discredit them with Muslims and perhaps others. (The racial profiling aspect of Menezes' death is clear, and has cast a chill on the UK Muslim community). That British police have received training in Israel in stopping suicide bombers with the technique of shooting the suspect in the head has not made things easier in that regard.

23 July 2005

Bush Gives a Green Light for Bomb Builders
NYT, 22 July 2005
The Bush administration is full of tough talk about opposing the spread of nuclear weapons. But it keeps undermining the world's most effective instrument for doing so: the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. In May, top administration officials stood aside as a crucial review conference meant to strengthen the treaty ended in a stalemate. Now Washington wants to allow India an end run around the treaty's basic bargain - the one that rewards the countries that are willing to renounce nuclear weapons with the opportunity to import highly sensitive nuclear technology for power reactors.
The strength of that bargain has dissuaded many countries that are capable of building or buying nuclear arms from doing so, including Brazil, South Africa, South Korea, Japan, Turkey and Saudi Arabia. The bargain's credibility has depended on the willingness of the major nuclear exporters to uphold it. One of the most powerful examples of the price a nation would pay for ignoring the rules has been the nuclear export restrictions the United States has imposed on India for decades, ever since India declined to sign the treaty and tested a nuclear device, using materials and technology diverted from a civilian nuclear power program.
Lifting these restrictions would encourage other countries to follow New Delhi's dangerous example. It is now up to Congress and the other nuclear supplier nations to take back what President Bush has so carelessly given away.
India is a great nation with a great future and many common interests with the United States. But India is also one of only four countries in the world that does not abide by the nonproliferation treaty. Pakistan and Israel have also refused to sign it, and North Korea dropped out. None of these other holdouts are now eligible to buy the kind of sensitive nuclear technology being proposed for India.
Besides the four holdouts and the five established nuclear powers recognized under the treaty - the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China - no other nations are known to have nuclear weapons. Without the treaty, there might now be as many as 20 or 25 nuclear weapons states.
The Bush administration is, of course, eager to stop governments it does not like from acquiring nuclear weapons. It regularly rattles military and diplomatic sabers at North Korea and Iran. But it seems to have almost as much contempt for international treaties as it has for rogue states. Given the increasing accessibility of nuclear weapons technology and the growing number of potential governmental and nongovernmental suppliers of the needed materials and equipment, only a strengthened nonproliferation treaty, enforced without exceptions, stands any chance of slowing the spread of nuclear arsenals. A nonproliferation policy that is selective and unilateral is no policy at all.

21 July 2005

The Iraq War is Over, and the Winner is... Iran
Hamstrung by the Iraq debacle, all Bush can do is gnash his teeth as the hated mullahs in Iran cozy up to their co-religionists in Iraq.
By Juan Cole
Salon, 21 July 2005
Iraq's new government has been trumpeted by the Bush administration as a close friend and a model for democracy in the region. In contrast, Bush calls Iran part of an axis of evil and dismisses its elections and government as illegitimate. So the Bush administration cannot have been filled with joy when Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari and eight high-powered cabinet ministers paid an extremely friendly visit to Tehran this week.
The two governments went into a tizzy of wheeling and dealing of a sort not seen since Texas oil millionaires found out about Saudi Arabia. Oil pipelines, port access, pilgrimage, trade, security, military assistance, were all on the table in Tehran. All the sorts of contracts and deals that U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney had imagined for Halliburton, and that the Pentagon neoconservatives had hoped for Israel, were heading instead due east.
...The ongoing chaos in Iraq has made it impossible for Bush administration hawks to carry out their long-held dream of overthrowing the Iranian regime, or even of forcing it to end its nuclear ambitions. (The Iranian nuclear research program will almost certainly continue, since the Iranians are bright enough to see what happened to the one member of the "axis of evil" that did not have an active nuclear weapons program.) The United States lacks the troops, but perhaps even more critically, it is now dependent on Iran to help it deal with a vicious guerrilla war that it cannot win. In the Middle East, the twists and turns of history tend to make strange bedfellows -- something the neocons, whose breathtaking ignorance of the region helped bring us to this place, are now learning to their dismay.
More than two years after the fall of Saddam Hussein, it is difficult to see what real benefits have accrued to the United States from the Iraq war, though a handful of corporations have benefited marginally. In contrast, Iran is the big winner. The Shiites of Iraq increasingly realize they need Iranian backing to defeat the Sunni guerrillas and put the Iraqi economy right, a task the Americans have proved unable to accomplish. And Iran will still be Iraq's neighbor long after the fickle American political class has switched its focus to some other global hot spot.

"Sterling" Judge or "Extreme Rightist"?
Compiled by Page Rockwell and Aaron Kinney
Salon, 20 July 2005
President Bush had the opportunity to choose a real moderate in the mold of Sandra Day O'Connor, but for those of us who are coming from the liberal, progressive side, he has not made a good choice. Instead, he faked a lot of us out: The report came earlier in the day that his pick was Edith Clement, who is a more moderate judge like O'Connor, and then at the end of the day it became clear that he'd chosen Roberts, who seems likely to be more of a [Clarence] Thomas or [Antonin] Scalia.
SEE ALSO:
The John Roberts Dossier
Everything you need to know about Bush's nominee, before the battle begins.
By Katharine Mieszkowski
Salon, 20 July 2005

Iraqi Constitution May Curb Women's Rights
By EDWARD WONG
NYT, 20 July 2005
A working draft of Iraq's new constitution would cede a strong role to Islamic law and could sharply curb women's rights, particularly in personal matters like divorce and family inheritance.
The document's writers are also debating whether to drop or phase out a measure enshrined in the interim constitution, co-written last year by the Americans, requiring that women make up at least a quarter of the parliament.
The draft of a chapter of the new constitution obtained by The New York Times on Tuesday guarantees equal rights for women as long as those rights do not "violate Shariah," or Koranic law.
The Americans and secular Iraqis banished such explicit references to religious law from the interim constitution adopted early last year.

Iraqis Not Ready to Fight Rebels on Own, U.S. Says
By ERIC SCHMITT
NYT, 21 July 2005
About half of Iraq's new police battalions are still being established and cannot conduct operations, while the other half of the police units and two-thirds of the new army battalions are only "partially capable" of carrying out counterinsurgency missions, and only with American help, according to a newly declassified Pentagon assessment.
Only "a small number" of Iraqi security forces are capable of fighting the insurgency without American assistance, while about one-third of the army is capable of "planning, executing and sustaining counterinsurgency operations" with allied support, the analysis said.
The assessment, which has not been publicly released, is the most precise analysis of the Iraqis' readiness levels that the military has provided. Bush administration officials have repeatedly said the 160,000 American-led allied troops cannot begin to withdraw until Iraqi troops are ready to take over security.

Sunnis Boycott Panel Drafting Charter for Iraq
By EDWARD WONG
NYT, 21 July 2005
After the assassination of two colleagues, Sunni Arabs on the committee writing the new Iraqi constitution said Wednesday that they were temporarily withdrawing, a move that could delay the drafting and undermine the legitimacy of the American-backed political process.
But the head of the committee, Sheik Humam Hamoudi, insisted that a full draft of the document would be completed by Aug. 1. A leaked draft of one section has already set off protests from women's groups, who say it strengthens religious law and sharply curtails women's rights.
Several of the Sunni Arabs pulling out of the committee said they would not return until the Iraqi government, dominated by Shiite Arabs and Kurds, provided adequate security.
They accused the government of failing to adequately protect their colleagues, Mejbil Issa and Dhamin Hussein al-Obeidi, who were gunned down Tuesday afternoon by unknown assailants while driving through downtown Baghdad. Insurgent groups had threatened to kill Sunni Arabs working on the constitution, hoping to prevent broad Sunni support for the political process.
"We have suspended our presence in the constitutional committee meetings for reasons regarding our own security and because of the negligence we are suffering," said Fakhri al-Qaisi, whose political group counts among its members several of the Sunni constitution writers, including those who were killed.

17 July 2005

Deadly Attacks Have Been Increasing and Spreading Since Sept. 11, 2001
Suicide Bombs Potent Tools of Terrorists
By Dan Eggen and Scott Wilson
Washington Post, 17 July 2005
Unheard of only a few decades ago, suicide bombings have rapidly evolved into perhaps the most common method of terrorism in the world, moving west from the civil war in Sri Lanka in the 1980s to the Palestinian intifada of recent years to Iraq today. Since the Sept. 11, 2001, suicide attacks in the United States, suicide bombers have struck from Indonesia to India, from Russia to Morocco.

General contradicted his sworn testimony on Pentagon, Abu Ghraib
Chicago Tribune, 14 July 2005
EXCERPT:  An Army general who has been criticized for his role in the treatment of prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay detention center and Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq has contradicted his sworn congressional testimony about contacts with senior Pentagon officials. Gen. Geoffrey Miller told the Senate Armed Services Committee in May 2004 that he had only filed a report on a recent visit to Abu Ghraib, and did not talk to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld or his top aides about the fact-finding trip. But in a recorded statement to attorneys three months later, Miller said he gave two of Rumsfeld's most senior aides - then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary for Intelligence Steve Cambone - a briefing on his visit and his subsequent recommendations. "Following our return in the fall, I gave an outbrief to both Dr. Wolfowitz and Secretary Cambone," Miller said in the Aug. 21, 2004, statement to lawyers for guards accused of prisoner abuse, a transcript of which was obtained by the Chicago Tribune. "I went over the report that we had developed and gave them a briefing on the intelligence activities, recommendations, and some recommendations on detention operations," Miller added. Specific interrogation techniques, he said, were not discussed. Miller's statement about the meeting, if true, suggests that officials at the very top of the Pentagon may have been more involved in monitoring activities at the prison than previously disclosed. Abu Ghraib was later at the center of a scandal surrounding prisoner abuse, which has led to punishments for soldiers. Miller, Cambone and Wolfowitz, who is now acting director of the World Bank, each declined to respond to written questions about Miller's contradictory statements. Rumsfeld, Cambone, Wolfowitz and Miller have denied knowledge of prisoner abuse.
SEE ALSO: Abu Ghraib: Authorized (Andrew Sullivan)

Military Lawyers Fought Policy on Interrogations
Washington Post, 15 July 2005
EXCERPT: Three top military lawyers said yesterday that they lodged complaints about the Justice Department's definition of torture and how it would be applied to interrogations of enemy prisoners captured by U.S. forces, the first time they have publicly acknowledged that they objected to the policy as it was being developed in early 2003. At a Senate hearing yesterday, the judge advocate generals (JAGs) for the Army, Air Force and Marines said they expressed their concerns as the policy was being hashed out at the Pentagon in March and April 2003. Though their letters to the Defense Department's general counsel are classified, sources familiar with them said the lawyers worried that broadly defined, tough interrogation tactics would not only contravene long-standing military doctrine -- leaving too much room for interpretation by interrogators -- but also would cause public outrage if the tactics became known. "We did express opposition," said Maj. Gen. Thomas J. Romig, the Army's top lawyer. "It was accepted in some cases, maybe not in all cases. It did modify the proposed list of policies and procedures." Sen. Lindsay O. Graham (R-S.C.), who chaired the Armed Services subcommittee hearing yesterday, said he was concerned that the JAG objections may have fallen on deaf ears, and that the policy that emerged may have opened the door to abuses at U.S. detention facilities around the world. "If they had listened to you from the outset, we wouldn't have a lot of the problems we've dealt with" over the past two years, Graham said.
SEE ALSO: Geneva Suspended; Orwell on Torture (Andrew Sullivan)

Follow the Uranium
By FRANK RICH
NYT, 17 July 2005
This case is about Iraq, not Niger. The real victims are the American people, not the Wilsons. The real culprit - the big enchilada, to borrow a 1973 John Ehrlichman phrase from the Nixon tapes - is not Mr. Rove but the gang that sent American sons and daughters to war on trumped-up grounds and in so doing diverted finite resources, human and otherwise, from fighting the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. That's why the stakes are so high: this scandal is about the unmasking of an ill-conceived war, not the unmasking of a C.I.A. operative who posed for Vanity Fair.
So put aside Mr. Wilson's February 2002 trip to Africa. The plot that matters starts a month later, in March, and its omniscient author is Dick Cheney. It was Mr. Cheney (on CNN) who planted the idea that Saddam was "actively pursuing nuclear weapons at this time." The vice president went on to repeat this charge in May on "Meet the Press," in three speeches in August and on "Meet the Press" yet again in September. Along the way the frightening word "uranium" was thrown into the mix.
...Once we were locked into the war, and no W.M.D.'s could be found, the original plot line was dropped with an alacrity that recalled the "Never mind!" with which Gilda Radner's Emily Litella used to end her misinformed Weekend Update commentaries on "Saturday Night Live." The administration began its dog-ate-my-homework cover-up, asserting that the various warning signs about the uranium claims were lost "in the bowels" of the bureaucracy or that it was all the C.I.A.'s fault or that it didn't matter anyway, because there were new, retroactive rationales to justify the war. But the administration knows how guilty it is. That's why it has so quickly trashed any insider who contradicts its story line about how we got to Iraq, starting with the former Treasury secretary Paul O'Neill and the former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke.
Next to White House courtiers of their rank, Mr. Wilson is at most a Rosencrantz or Guildenstern. The brief against the administration's drumbeat for war would be just as damning if he'd never gone to Africa. But by overreacting in panic to his single Op-Ed piece of two years ago, the White House has opened a Pandora's box it can't slam shut. Seasoned audiences of presidential scandal know that there's only one certainty ahead: the timing of a Karl Rove resignation. As always in this genre, the knight takes the fall at exactly that moment when it's essential to protect the king.

Exporting 'De-bush-mocracy'
Plan Called for Covert Aid in Iraq Vote
By DOUGLAS JEHL and DAVID E. SANGER
NYT, 16 July 2005
In the months before the Iraqi elections in January, President Bush approved a plan to provide covert support to certain Iraqi candidates and political parties, but rescinded the proposal because of Congressional opposition, current and former government officials said Saturday.
In a statement issued in response to questions about a report in the next issue of The New Yorker, Frederick Jones, the spokesman for the National Security Council, said that "in the final analysis, the president determined and the United States government adopted a policy that we would not try - and did not try - to influence the outcome of the Iraqi election by covertly helping individual candidates for office."
The statement appeared to leave open the question of whether any covert help was provided to parties favored by Washington, an issue about which the White House declined to elaborate.
The article, by Seymour M. Hersh, reports that the administration proceeded with the covert plan over the Congressional objections. Several senior Bush administration officials disputed that, although they recalled renewed discussions within the administration last fall about how the United States might counter what was seen as extensive Iranian support to pro-Iranian Shiite parties.
Any clandestine American effort to influence the Iraqi elections, or to provide particular support to candidates or parties seen as amenable to working with the United States, would have run counter to the Bush administration's assertions that the vote would be free and unfettered.
The article, by Seymour M. Hersh, reports that the administration proceeded with the covert plan over the Congressional objections. Several senior Bush administration officials disputed that, although they recalled renewed discussions within the administration last fall about how the United States might counter what was seen as extensive Iranian support to pro-Iranian Shiite parties.
Any clandestine American effort to influence the Iraqi elections, or to provide particular support to candidates or parties seen as amenable to working with the United States, would have run counter to the Bush administration's assertions that the vote would be free and unfettered.
Mr. Bush, in his public statements, has insisted that the United States will help promote conditions for democracy in the region but will live with whatever governments emerge in free elections.
...The article cites unidentified former military and intelligence officials who said the administration went ahead with covert election activities in Iraq that "were conducted by retired C.I.A. officers and other non-government personnel, and used funds that were not necessarily appropriated by Congress." But it does not provide details and says, "the methods and the scope of the covert effort have been hard to discern."
Representative Jane Harman of California, the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee, issued a statement saying that she could not discuss classified information, noting: "Congress was consulted about the administration's posture in the Iraqi election. I was personally consulted. But if the administration did what is alleged, that would be a violation of the covert action requirements, and that would be deeply troubling."
Despite the denials by some Bush administration officials on Saturday, others who took part in or were briefed on the discussion said they could not rule out the possibility that the United States and its allies might have provided secret aid to augment the broad overt support provided to Iraqi candidates and parties by the State Department, through organizations like the International Democratic Institute.

15 July 2005

Bush Administration May Be Responsible for Botching Effort to Thwart London Bombing
AmericaBlog, 14 July 2005
EXCERPT: ABC News just reported that the British authorities say they have evidence that the London attacks last week were an operation planned by Al Qaeda for the last two years. This was an operation the Brits thought they caught and stopped in time, but they were wrong. The piece of the puzzle ABC missed is that this is an operation the Bush administration helped botch last year.
I.e., last year Bush botched the effort to thwart the London subway attacks.
1. The London bombers, per ABC, are connected to an Al Qaeda plot planned two years ago in Lahore, Pakistan.
2. Pakistani authorities recovered the laptop of a captured Al Qaeda leader, Mohammed Naeem Noor Khan, on July 13, 2004. On that laptop, they found plans for a coordinated series of attacks on the London subway. According to an expert interviewed by ABC, "there is absolutely no doubt that Khan was part of a worldwide Al Qaeda operation, not just in the United States but also in Great Britain and throughout the west."
Also important, but not reported by ABC this evening, after his arrest Khan started working for our side - sending emails to his other Al Qaeda buddies, working as our mole.
3. ABC reports that names in Khan's computer matched a suspected cell of British citizens of Pakistani decent, many of who lived near the town of Luton, England - Luton is the same town where, not coincidentally, last week's London bombing terrorists began their day. According to ABC, authorities thought they had stopped the subway plot with the arrest of more than a dozen people last year associated with Khan. Obviously, they hadn't.
4. Those arrests were the arrests that the Bush administration botched by announcing a heightened security alert the week of the Democratic Convention. The alert was raised because of information found on Khan's computer (this is in the public record already, see below). In its effort to either prove that the alert was serious, or to try and scare people during the Dem Convention, the administration gave the press too much information about WHY they raised the alert. This put the media on the trail of Khan - they found him, and they published his name.
Because the US let the cat out of the bag, the media got a hold of Khan's name and published the fact that he had been captured - his Al Qaeda contacts thus found out their "buddy" was actually a mole, and they fled. Our sole source inside Al Qaeda was destroyed. As a result, the Brits had to have a high speed chase to catch some of Khan's Al Qaeda associates as they fled, and, according to press reports, the Brits and Pakistanis both fear that some slipped away.

14 July 2005

"Disassembling" a Carrot
Rice Claims U.S. Role in Korean About-Face
By JOEL BRINKLEY
NYT, 14 July 2005
Returning from a six-day trip to Asia, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her aides said Wednesday that North Korea's decision to return to nuclear disarmament talks was a vindication of the Bush administration's strategy and not solely the result of a South Korean offer to provide the North with electricity.
While some Asian officials, and even some administration officials, say they believe that South Korea's surprise offer last month to wipe away the North's energy problems broke the stalemate, Ms. Rice played down its significance. She portrayed it as an elaboration of the offer that the United States made during the last negotiating session, in June 2004.
"It was really a part of the June proposal that somehow North Korea's energy needs would have to be dealt with," she said, speaking to reporters on her plane. "And, of course, the South Korean proposal addresses it in a major way."
It is far from clear that the North Koreans are going to accept the offer. That will be determined in the talks, which open on July 25.
There are distinct advantages to having the initiative come from South Korea. The Bush administration can maintain that it has not broken President Bush's pledge not to improve the existing offer until the North responds to it at the negotiating table. At the same time, the North enters the talks knowing what specific benefits it can gain if it gives up its nuclear ambitions.
...Administration officials insisted that they did not know why North Korea had suddenly decided to return to the talks, but seemed to go out of their way to dismiss the South Korean offer.

Data Shows Faster-Rising Death Toll Among Iraqi Civilians
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
NYT, 14 July 2005
Iraqi civilians and police officers died at a rate of more than 800 a month between August and May, according to figures released in June by the Interior Ministry.
In response to questions from The New York Times, the ministry said that 8,175 Iraqis were killed by insurgents in the 10 months that ended May 31. The ministry did not give detailed figures for the months before August 2004, nor did it provide a breakdown of the figures, which do not include either Iraqi soldiers or civilians killed during American military operations.
While the figures were not broken down month by month, it has been clear since the government of Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari took over after the Jan. 30 election that the insurgency is taking an increasing toll, killing Iraqi civilians and security workers at a faster rate.

When Secrets are Lies
Protecting sources is one thing. Hiding lies is a totally different game.
By Robert Kuttner
The American Prospect, 13 July 2005
Consider a startling idea. Matt Cooper of Time magazine was right to testify before the grand jury and identify Karl Rove as the leak.

Maintaining Focus: Rove and Iraq War Data
By Daniel Schorr
NPR's All Things Considered, 13 July 2005
NPR Senior News Analyst Daniel Schorr says that the real issue in the Karl Rove controversy is not a leak, but a war, and how America was misled into that war.

13 July 2005

Unfit for Public Office
Juan Cole
Informed Comment, 12 July 2005
A man who would do what Rove did should not be in the White House in any capacity. And no person who tolerates a man like Rove in the White House should be commander in chief of American security.

'Mission Accomplished' as midterm elections approach
U.K. Memo Cites Plans For Troop Reduction
By Glenn Frankel and Josh White
Washington Post, 11 July 2005
The United States and Britain are drawing up plans to withdraw the majority of their troops from Iraq by the middle of next year, according to a secret memo written for British Prime Minister Tony Blair by Defense Secretary John Reid.

NYT's Friedman admits fascists have led Israel...
The Revolt of Israel's Center
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
NYT, 13 July 2005
...The Israeli left was blown apart by Yasir Arafat's rejection of the peace deal at Camp David. The Israeli right was blown apart by the last four years of Palestinian uprisings, which made it clear that Israel could not indefinitely occupy the West Bank and Gaza without losing its Jewish majority and democratic character. The collapse of the Israeli left and right has created the New Israeli Center.
The New Israeli Center wants to simply disengage from as many Palestinians as possible, keep only those Jewish settlements adjacent to Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, and wait for a new Palestinian leadership to emerge.
But the New Israeli Center needed a leader who had the legitimacy and toughness to pull this off. It turned out to be Ariel Sharon, the man who led the settlement movement in the first place but who has now concluded that Israel must get rid of Gaza to retain its Jewish character.
Mr. Sharon's transformation has shocked the settlers, and many have vowed to disobey.
"The settlers believe that authority only resides in the Land of Israel, not the State of Israel," said Moshe Halbertal, a philosopher at the Hartman Institute and the Hebrew University. "They insist that the state is not sovereign when it comes to the Land of Israel. This struggle is the Land of Israel versus the State of Israel" - and the state is winning.
...This Gaza withdrawal is the revolt of the Israeli majority against being taken hostage any longer by the settler minority," said the Israeli writer Ari Shavit. "And that is why these settlers go berserk - because they have gotten so used to controlling our destiny, no matter who was in power. Now, for the first time, there is a clear message: 'Enough is enough.' "
In this sense, Mr. Shavit added, there is something heroic about what the Israeli center is doing: "It is disengaging from Gaza and from a minority - without even knowing where exactly it is going next." This assertion by the vital center in Israeli society is a sign of "something really healthy," Mr. Shavit concluded, "but it is a real battle," and the forces of moderation need "a lot of support from the outside world."
Indeed, the struggle in Israel today is a microcosm of what needs to happen in this whole region.
Mr. Sharon described the settler youths who wrote "Muhammad Is a Pig" as "extremist gangs who are trying to terrorize Israeli society and tear it to pieces through violence against Jews and Arabs, and [through] offending Muslims and violating their symbols by thuggery and disobedience."
It's time the Arab-Muslim world talked to its Islamo-fascists, suicide "martyrs" and hate-spewing preachers the same way.

10 July 2005

"Dying to Win"
BuzzFlash Book review of Dying to Win : The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism by Robert Pape
BuzzFlaxh, 7 July 2005
What if the whole concept of Bush's "Crusade" against Islamic fundamentalists is flawed? What if the motivation of terrorists, particularly suicide bombers, is political and not religious in terms of goals?
Well, then, Lucy, "We've got a problem here!"
This book is based on a thorough study of suicide bombings and reveals that the Bush "war on terrorism" is fundamentally flawed because it does not deal with the political strategic goals of the terrorists. Among the books findings is that "Every suicide terrorist campaign has had a clear goal that is secular and political: to compel a modern democracy to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland."
Among the other interesting findings of note is this fact: "With data from more than 460 such attackers -- including the names of 333 -- we know that these individuals are not mainly poor, desperate criminals or uneducated religious fanatics, but are often well-educated, middle-class political activists."
Although we don't agree with all of the conclusions by the author, Robert Pape, an associate professor of political science at the University of Chicago, we agree with most of them, and highly value this book because its conclusions are based on research and science, not the radical ideological beliefs of the Busheviks.
Pape concludes that "the idea that all Muslims around the world are quietly anti-American because Islam encourages hatred for American values for democracy and free markets does not square with the facts. Indeed, robust evidence shows that American military policies, not revulsion against Western political and economic values, are driving anti-Americanism among Muslims."
...With striking clarity and precision, Professor Pape uses this unprecedented research to debunk widely held misconceptions about the nature of suicide terrorism and provide a new lens that makes sense of the threat we face.

FACT: Suicide terrorism is not primarily a product of Islamic fundamentalism.

FACT: The world’s leading practitioners of suicide terrorism are the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka–a secular, Marxist-Leninist group drawn from Hindu families.

FACT: Ninety-five percent of suicide terrorist attacks occur as part of coherent campaigns organized by large militant organizations with significant public support.

FACT: Every suicide terrorist campaign has had a clear goal that is secular and political: to compel a modern democracy to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland.

FACT: Al-Qaeda fits the above pattern. Although Saudi Arabia is not under American military occupation per se, one major objective of al-Qaeda is the expulsion of U.S. troops from the Persian Gulf region, and as a result there have been repeated attacks by terrorists loyal to Osama bin Laden against American troops in Saudi Arabia and the region as a whole.

FACT: Despite their rhetoric, democracies–including the United States–have routinely made concessions to suicide terrorists. Suicide terrorism is on the rise because terrorists have learned that it’s effective.

In this wide-ranging analysis, Professor Pape offers the essential tools to forecast when some groups are likely to resort to suicide terrorism and when they are not. He also provides the first comprehensive demographic profile of modern suicide terrorist attackers. With data from more than 460 such attackers–including the names of 333–we now know that these individuals are not mainly poor, desperate criminals or uneducated religious fanatics but are often well-educated, middle-class political activists.
More than simply advancing new theory and facts, these pages also answer key questions about the war on terror.
• Are we safer now than we were before September 11?
• Was the invasion of Iraq a good counterterrorist move?
• Is al-Qaeda stronger now than it was before September 11?
Professor Pape answers these questions with analysis grounded in fact, not politics, and recommends concrete ways for today’s states to fight and prevent terrorist attacks. Military options may disrupt terrorist operations in the short term, but a lasting solution to suicide terrorism will require a comprehensive, long-term approach–one that abandons visions of empire and relies on a combined strategy of vigorous homeland security, nation building in troubled states, and greater energy independence.
For both policy makers and the general public, Dying to Win transcends speculation with systematic scholarship, making it one of the most important political studies of recent time.
SEE ALSO:
Al Qaeda's Smart Bombs
By ROBERT A. PAPE
NYT, 9 July 2005
The clear implication is that if Al Qaeda was no longer able to draw recruits from the Muslim countries where there is a heavy American combat presence, it might well collapse.
As the top chart shows, what is common among the attacks is not their location but the identity of the victims killed. Since 2002, the group has killed citizens from 18 of the 20 countries that Osama bin Laden has cited as supporting the American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
There is good evidence that this shift in Al Qaeda's scheme was the product of deliberate choice. In December 2003, the Norwegian intelligence service found a lengthy Qaeda planning document on a radical Islamic Web site that described a coherent strategy for compelling the United States and its allies to leave Iraq. It made clear that more spectacular attacks against the United States like those of 9/11 would be insufficient, and that it would be more effective to attack America's European allies, thus coercing them to withdraw their forces from Iraq and Afghanistan and increasing the economic and military burdens that the United States would have to bear.
In particular, the document weighed the advantages of attacking Britain, Poland and Spain, and concluded that Spain in particular, because of the high level of domestic opposition to the Iraq war, was the most vulnerable.
"It is necessary to make utmost use of the upcoming general election in Spain in March next year," the document stated. "We think that the Spanish government could not tolerate more than two, maximum three, blows, after which it will have to withdraw as a result of popular pressure. If its troops still remain in Iraq after these blows, then the victory of the Socialist Party is almost secured, and the withdrawal of the Spanish forces will be on its electoral program."
That prediction, of course, proved murderously prescient. Yet it was only one step in the plan: "Lastly, we emphasize that a withdrawal of the Spanish or Italian forces from Iraq would put huge pressure on the British presence, a pressure that Tony Blair might not be able to withstand, and hence the domino tiles would fall quickly."
No matter who took the bombs onto those buses and subways in London, the attacks are clearly of a piece with Al Qaeda's post-9/11 strategy. And while we don't know if the claim of responsibility from a group calling itself the Secret Organization of Al Qaeda in Europe was legitimate, an understanding of Al Qaeda's strategic logic may help explain why that message included a threat of further attacks against Italy and Denmark, both of which contributed troops in Iraq.
The bottom line, then, is that the terrorists have not been fundamentally weakened but have changed course and achieved significant success. The London attacks will only encourage Osama bin Laden and other Qaeda leaders in the belief that they will succeed in their ultimate aim: causing America and its allies to withdraw forces from the Muslim world.

We're Not in Watergate Anymore
By FRANK RICH
NYT, 10 July 2005
...But the most important difference between the Bush and Nixon eras has less to do with the press than with the grave origins of the particular case that has sent Judy Miller to jail. This scandal didn't begin, as Watergate did, simply with dirty tricks and spying on the political opposition. It began with the sending of American men and women to war in Iraq.
Specifically, it began with the former ambassador Joseph Wilson's July 6, 2003, account on the Times Op-Ed page (and in concurrent broadcast appearances) of his 2002 C.I.A. mission to Africa to determine whether Saddam Hussein had struck a deal in Niger for uranium that might be used in nuclear weapons. Mr. Wilson concluded that there was no such deal, as my colleague Nicholas Kristof reported, without divulging Mr. Wilson's name, that spring. But the envoy's dramatic Op-Ed piece got everyone's attention: a government insider with firsthand knowledge had stepped out of the shadows of anonymity to expose the administration's game authoritatively on the record. He had made palpable what Bush critics increasingly suspected, writing that "some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat."
Up until that point, the White House had consistently stuck by the 16 incendiary words in President Bush's January 2003 State of the Union address: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." The administration had ignored all reports, not just Mr. Wilson's, that this information might well be bogus. But it still didn't retract Mr. Bush's fiction some five weeks after the State of the Union, when Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, announced that the uranium claim was based on fake documents. Instead, we marched on to war in Iraq days later. It was not until Mr. Wilson's public recounting of his African mission more than five months after the State of the Union that George Tenet at long last released a hasty statement (on a Friday evening, just after the Wilson Op-Ed piece) conceding that "these 16 words should never have been included in the text written for the president."
The Niger uranium was hardly the only dubious evidence testifying to Saddam's supposed nuclear threat in the run-up to war. Judy Miller herself was one of two reporters responsible for a notoriously credulous front-page Times story about aluminum tubes that enabled the administration's propaganda campaign to trump up Saddam's W.M.D. arsenal. But red-hot uranium was sexy, and it was Mr. Wilson's flat refutation of it that drove administration officials to seek their revenge: they told the columnist Robert Novak that Mr. Wilson had secured his (nonpaying) African mission through the nepotistic intervention of his wife, a covert C.I.A. officer whom they outed by name. The pettiness of this retribution shows just how successfully Mr. Wilson hit the administration's jugular: his revelation threatened the legitimacy of the war on which both the president's reputation and re-election campaign had been staked.
This was another variation on a Watergate theme. Charles Colson's hit men broke into the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist, seeking information to smear Mr. Ellsberg after he leaked the Pentagon Papers, the classified history of the Vietnam War, to The Times. But there was even greater incentive to smear Mr. Wilson than Mr. Ellsberg. Nixon compounded the Vietnam War but didn't start it. The war in Iraq, by contrast, is Mr. Bush's invention.
Again following the Watergate template, the Bush administration at first tried to bury the whole Wilson affair by investigating itself. Even when The Washington Post reported two months after Mr. Wilson's Op-Ed that "two top White House officials" had called at least six reporters, not just Mr. Novak, to destroy Mr. Wilson and his wife, the inquiry was kept safely within the John Ashcroft Justice Department, with the attorney general, according to a Times report, being briefed regularly on details of the investigation. If that rings a Watergate bell now, that's because on Thursday you may have read the obituary of L. Patrick Gray, Mark Felt's F.B.I. boss, who, in a similarly cozy conflict of interest, kept the Nixon White House abreast of the supposedly independent Watergate inquiry in its early going.
Political pressure didn't force Mr. Ashcroft to relinquish control of the Wilson investigation to a special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, until Dec. 30, 2003, more than five months after Mr. Novak's column ran. Now 18 more months have passed, and no one knows what crime Mr. Fitzgerald is investigating. Is it the tricky-to-prosecute outing of Mr. Wilson's wife, the story Judy Miller never even wrote about? Or has Mr. Fitzgerald moved on to perjury and obstruction of justice possibly committed by those who tried to hide their roles in that outing? If so, it would mean the Bush administration was too arrogant to heed the most basic lesson of Watergate: the cover-up is worse than the crime.
"Mr. Fitzgerald made his bones prosecuting the mob," intoned the pro-Bush editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, "and doesn't seem to realize that this case isn't about organized crime." But that may be exactly what it is about to an ambitious prosecutor with his own career on the line. That the Bush administration would risk breaking the law with an act as self-destructive to American interests as revealing a C.I.A. officer's identity smacks of desperation. It makes you wonder just what else might have been done to suppress embarrassing election-season questions about the war that has mired us in Iraq even as the true perpetrators of 9/11 resurface in Madrid, London and who knows where else.
In his original Op-Ed piece in The Times, published two years to the day before Judy Miller went to jail, Mr. Wilson noted that "more than 200 American soldiers have lost their lives in Iraq already," before concluding that "we have a duty to ensure that their sacrifice came for the right reasons." As that death toll surges past 1,700, that sacred duty cannot be abandoned by a free press now.

Pushing Prescriptions: How the Drug Industry Sells its Agenda at Your Expense
Center for Public Integrity, 6 July 2005
The pharmaceutical and health products industry has spent more than $800 million in federal lobbying and
campaign donations at the federal and state levels in the past seven years, a Center for Public Integrity investigation has found. Its lobbying operation, on which it reports spending more than $675 million,
is the biggest in the nation. No other industry has spent more money to sway public policy in that period.
The drug industry's huge investments in Washington-though meager compared to the profits they make-have paid off handsomely, resulting in a series of favorable laws on Capitol Hill and tens of billions of
dollars in additional profits.
The findings include:
*Drug Lobby Second to None: How the pharmaceutical industry gets its way in Washington
*FDA: A Shell of its Former Self: The Food and Drug Administration lacks the power to regulate pharmaceuticals and keep you safe
*Surrogates for Their Agenda: How the drug industry uses non-profits to push its interests
*Checkbook Politics: Over the last seven years, the pharmaceutical industry has given $150 million in campaign contributions
To read the full investigation log on to http://www.publicintegrity.org.

4 July 2005

U.S. Foreign Policy and the Bush Administration
Conversations with History: UCTV interview with James Fallows, 4 July 2005
Jim Fallows, National Correspondent of The Atlantic Monthly, joins Conversations host Harry Kreisler for a discussion of foreign policy decisions in the administration of President George W. Bush. Fallows talks about the factors shaping the choices made, the resulting opportunity costs, and alternative strategies in the war on terrorism.
RealPlayer (Mac & Windows)
If the above link is busy, please try one of the following
links using Streaming MPEG-4 technology:
Quicktime v6.0 Users (Mac & Windows)
RealOne Player Users (Windows only)
Audio Only Using Quicktime v6.0

The Two Wars of the Worlds
By FRANK RICH
NYT, 3 July 2005
Mr. Bush could have addressed that question honestly on Tuesday night. Instead of once more cooking the books - exaggerating the number of coalition partners, the number of battle-ready Iraqi troops, the amount of non-American dollars in the Iraq kitty - he could have laid out the long haul in hard facts, explaining the future costs in manpower, money and time, and what sacrifices he proposes for meeting them. He could have been, as he is fond of calling himself, a leader.
It was a blown opportunity, and it's hard to see that there will be another chance. Iraq may not be Vietnam, but The Wall Street Journal reports that the current war's unpopularity now matches the Gallup findings during the Vietnam tipping point, the summer of 1968. As the prospect of midterm elections pumps more and more genuine fear into the hearts of Republicans up for re-election, it's the Bush presidency, not the insurgency, that will be in its last throes. Is the commander in chief so isolated in his bubble that he does not realize this? G.W.B., phone home.

Is That a Pool Cue in Corporate America's Pocket, Or Are They Just Excited About the Supreme Court?
by David Sirota
Common Dreams, 2 July 2005
You can just imagine it, can't you - a group of sweaty, cigar-smoking executives and lobbyists are right now sitting around a mahogany conference table somewhere on K Street rubbing their greasy palms together and plotting how to make sure that just the right corporate hack will replace Justice Sandra Day O'Connor on the Supreme Court. You can almost hear their pulses accelerating and their hormones flowing - the prospect of putting one of their own on the Supreme Court is exactly what arouses these guys and exactly what they fantasize about when the lights shut off in their mansions at night
Now it's true - the media will make this whole story about the Religious Right vs. Evil Secular Liberals. But behind the curtains in a dark little peep-show-like room, Corporate America will be busy lubing up the process and panting with glee as they take over our judiciary.
Surprised that this is what's really going on? Think I am making this up? Not so - read Big Business's paper of record, the Wall Street Journal, to get the real story. There you will find a story about how Corporate America is already scheming. Here are some of the excerpts: ...