31 March 2006

Iraq at the 11th Hour
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
NYT, 31 March 2006
The fate of the entire U.S. enterprise in Iraq now hangs in the balance, as the war has entered a dangerous new phase. It is the phase of barbaric identity-card violence between Sunnis and Shiites. In the late 1970's, I covered a similar moment in Lebanon, and the one thing I learned was this: Once this kind of venom gets unleashed — with members of each community literally beheading each other on the basis of their religious identities — it poisons everything. You enter a realm that is beyond politics, a realm where fear and revenge dominate everyone's thinking — and that is where Iraq is heading.
...A Baghdad blogger, the Mesopotamian, quoted by AndrewSullivan.com, gave a vivid description of his neighborhood: "The confusion and conflict between the Americans, the army and the Ministry of Interior is producing a situation where the citizens don't know anymore whether the security personnel in the street are friends, enemies, terrorists or simply criminals and thieves. Everybody is wearing the same uniforms. Whole sections of the city have virtually fallen to gangs and terrorists, and this is especially true for the 'Sunni'-dominated neighborhoods. People and businesses are being robbed and the employees kidnapped en masse in broad daylight and with complete ease as though security forces are nonexistent, although we see them everywhere.
"I don't know anymore what can be done to rescue the situation. At least, those who are supposed to be in positions of responsibility should stop lying and painting a false picture. ... I regret sounding so pessimistic, but the alarm must be sounded. ... What is happening is Baghdad is something really awful."
Donald Rumsfeld's criminally negligent decision not to deploy enough troops in Iraq to begin with created this security vacuum. But the insecurity was compounded by the unique enemy that emerged to take advantage of that vacuum — Sunni Islamo-nihilists. These are a disparate collection of groups with one common agenda: America and its Iraqi allies must fail; they must not be allowed to build Iraq into a Western-style, democratizing society. When you are up against an enemy whose only goal is that you must fail, and which does not care about how much death and destruction it inflicts on its own people, let alone on others, it is extremely difficult to establish order.
The Iraqi Shiite community showed remarkable restraint in the face of the murderous provocations by these Islamo-nihilist gangs during the past three years. But that restraint is over. It's now clear that some Shiite militias are ready to match the Sunni nihilists, killing for killing. So the slide into a medieval barbarism has begun.
Do not believe any of the Bush team's happy talk. It doesn't matter if Iraq is quiet in the south and quiet in the north. If Baghdad, the heart of the country, is being ripped apart, then there is no Iraq — because there is no center.

ElBaradei Asks for Restraint in Response to Iran
Jeffrey Fleishman and Alissa J. Rubin
LA Times, 31 March 2006
BERLIN -- U.N. Atomic Energy chief Mohammed ElBaradei urged the international community Thursday to steer away from threats of sanctions against Iran to prevent the dispute over the country's nuclear intentions from spiraling out of control.
Meanwhile, ministers of major powers meeting here similarly struck a more conciliatory tone than in recent weeks following agreement on Wednesday by the U.N. Security Council to give Iran another 30 days to respond to requests from the U.N.'s atomic energy organization that it halt uranium enrichment research.
ElBaradei, speaking in Doha, emphasized that Iran is not "an imminent threat" and urged countries to "lower the pitch" in their effort to stop Iran's nuclear work.
In recent weeks the United States and members of the European Union have made increasingly confrontational statements about what they claim is Iran's intent to perfect technology to enrich uranium with the goal of eventually manufacturing a nuclear weapon.
"There is no military solution to this situation," said ElBaradei, Nobel Prize-winning director-general of the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency. "It's inconceivable. The only durable solution is a negotiated solution."

Misconduct Is Alleged in Terrorism Case
Prosecutor, Agent Indicted in Detroit
By Dan Eggen
Washington Post, 30 March 2006
A former federal prosecutor and a State Department security officer were indicted yesterday on charges that they lied during a bungled terrorism trial in Detroit and then sought to cover up their deceptions once the case began to fall apart.
Former assistant U.S. attorney Richard G. Convertino, 45, and State Department special agent Harry R. Smith III, 49, were charged with conspiracy, obstruction of justice and making false statements in connection with the 2003 prosecution, according to an indictment handed up by a federal grand jury in Detroit.
The charges mark the latest embarrassment for the government in a case that was once hailed by former attorney general John D. Ashcroft as one of the most important terrorism prosecutions since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. It disintegrated after a federal judge ordered an investigation of Convertino's conduct.
Legal experts said yesterday that an indictment of a prosecutor for improper conduct in a federal courtroom is extraordinarily rare, if not unprecedented, in modern times.
"The charge is essentially that he prosecuted too aggressively and crossed the line," said Stephen Gillers, a New York University law professor who specializes in legal ethics. "This is simply astonishing."
Convertino also is charged with presenting false information at a sentencing hearing in a separate drug case to gain a light prison term for an informant.
He resigned from the Justice Department last year and has filed a civil suit alleging that he was the target of a smear campaign by the Justice Department that resulted in the exposure of a valuable counterterrorism informant.
Convertino led the prosecution of Karim Koubriti and three other North African immigrants, who were alleged to be part of a "sleeper operational combat cell." The government gained three convictions -- including two on terrorism charges -- but they were dismissed in 2004 after the Justice Department announced it had uncovered serious prosecutorial misconduct.
A report by a special Justice Department attorney assigned to review the case found that the prosecution had failed to turn over dozens of pieces of evidence to the defense. The "pattern of mistakes and oversights," along with possible misconduct, was so egregious that the government had little choice but to withdraw its case, his report said.
...Margaret Raben, a Detroit lawyer who represented one of the defendants, Abdel-Ilah Elmardoudi, said the government may have purposely kept its case against Convertino narrow in an attempt to prevent him from responding with his own allegations of misconduct by higher-ranking Justice officials.
Raben said the indictment was a "vindication for the defense team," but would do little to help the former defendants in the case. One of the defendants has been deported, two others are fighting fraud charges and the fourth is living in Dearborn, Mich., with his mother.
"The reality is that the government ruined these people's lives, and there is no remedy for that," Raben said. "Rick Convertino can go to prison for the next 15 years and it won't make one bit of difference for Abdel-Ilah or any of the others."

George W. Bush: The Audit
A green-eyeshade accounting of the president's political capital.
By David Atkins
Slate, 29 March 2006
To: George W. Bush Enterprises, 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
From: KPMG
Re: Audit of Political Capital Accounts
We identified a number of questions during our review of your account. Although we realize you are eager to "spend political capital," with the Enron trial currently under way we think it is important to avoid any issues that might catch the attention of regulators, the media, or short-sellers such as Francis Fukuyama. Also, under our consent decree with the Justice Department, we promised to "stop violating accounting standards for real this time."
We're having trouble reconciling assets and liabilities (we ran the numbers three times and still couldn't come up with the positive balance you reported). Do you have a single person responsible for managing this account we might talk to? Is it still Mr. Rove?
We think you may have overstated earnings in November 2004. While assets may be depressed due to "market panic," it seems unlikely they will recover to 2004 levels. And frankly, it's time to write off some, such as Social Security reform, that have been "under water" for a while now.
...P.S.: You have listed a brother "Jeb Bush" as the sole beneficiary of your accounts. He will need to give his formal approval to this. Does he understand he would be at risk for any enduring liabilities?

Flubbing Lobbying Reform
The problem with the Senate bill is what's left out. And as for the House . . .
Washington Post, 31 March 2006
HERE'S A SIMPLE way to judge the lobbying reform bill just approved by the Senate: The leading advocates of reform, including the parties' two designated point men on the issue, Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Barack Obama (D-Ill.), all voted against it. Their objection to the measure, which passed the Senate 90 to 8 on Wednesday, isn't about what's in it but what's missing.

Young Republicans In Love....
Kevin Drum
Wahsington Monthly, 31 March 2006
Today the Wall Street Journal tells the story of Emily Miller and Michael Scanlon, two aides to Tom DeLay who were engaged to be married until, "with the wedding a few months away, he called off the engagement and started dating a 24-year-old waitress." After the breakup, Miller began pondering the events of the preceding few months:

People who have spoken to Ms. Miller say that after her breakup she began questioning how Mr. Scanlon could afford a lavish lifestyle while working summers as a beach lifeguard and doing seemingly little work at his public-relations firm. She talked about the beach house he had presented to her, the private jet he flew around in and the $17,000-a-month apartment he rented at the Ritz-Carlton in Washington.

Indeed. That does seem a trifle extravagant, doesn't it? Shortly thereafter, Miller had a chat with federal prosecutors and helped them build a case against Scanlon, and Scanlon in turn helped build a case against his buddy Jack Abramoff. Miller kept her engagement ring.
Read the whole thing. It's fun for the whole family.

Frist Isn't Leaving Behind a Lot of Fans
Complaints rise from fellow Republicans about the politician's ambitious moves, sparked by his decision to force a Senate debate on illegal immigration.
By Mary Curtius, Times Staff Writer
LA Times, 31 March 2006
As he prepares to leave the Senate and position himself for a presidential bid, Bill Frist faces mounting criticism that he has proved an ineffectual majority leader whose legislative agenda increasingly is dictated by his White House ambitions.
Complaints about the patrician Tennessean by fellow Republicans intensified this week, sparked by his decision to force a Senate debate on illegal immigration. Some GOP lawmakers say his move spotlighted a public squabble within the party over a hot-button issue in an election year.
"We should have had a much more ambitious process of trying to build consensus and bringing people and different views together before we engaged in debate on the Senate floor," Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, told reporters.
But grumbling about Frist and decisions he has made as majority leader were evident before the flap over immigration.
"People have noticed that the (Senate) agenda is driven, at least in part, by issues that he wants to have on the floor, to have accomplishments on," one senior GOP Senate aide said.

G.O.P. Is Taking Aim at Advocacy Groups
By CARL HULSE and SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
NYT, 30 March 2006
To many Republicans, the liberal activist organization MoveOn.org is a political boogeyman that they hope to chase off with new restrictions on so-called 527 groups.
But the pursuit may turn out to be fruitless. Like other major groups planning to inject themselves aggressively into the midterm elections through advertisements, voter drives and issue fights, MoveOn.org has already figured out what it thinks is a better, and less controversial, way to spend its millions. Its 527 — named for a section of the tax code — is being put on ice.
"Our 527 is dormant," said Eli Pariser, executive director of MoveOn.org. He said his group would predominantly operate as a conventional political action committee, allowing it to more freely mix explicit political support and issue advocacy in a way that Mr. Pariser described as "squeaky clean."
MoveOn.org might be moving on from its 527, but Congress is not. Two years after 527's burst onto the political scene, gaining notoriety by raising unlimited amounts from private donors, Congressional Republicans are moving to rein in the groups — just in time for the November midterm elections. Leading Democrats are threatening a fight.
In the House, the Republican leadership intends to bring a plan to impose new restrictions on 527 groups to the floor next week to spur action in the Senate, where Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, a champion of the campaign finance bill that bears his name, is offering similar legislation.
"I think this leaves a gaping loophole in the McCain-Feingold campaign finance bill," the House majority leader, Representative John A. Boehner, Republican of Ohio, told reporters on Thursday, referring to a bill co-sponsored by Senator Russell D. Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin. "I think it needs to be fixed."
But Mr. Boehner's Democratic counterpart, Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, denounced the effort, saying that Republicans could draw unlimited money from wealthy corporations and trade associations that used their own nonprofit arms to wage issue campaigns.

30 March 2006

Two Fronts In Iraq
Robert Dreyfuss
TomPaine.com, 29 March 2006
One week into the fourth year of the war in Iraq, the United States is now fighting two robust insurgencies, not one. The first insurgency, of course, is the Sunni-led one, a resistance movement made up of former and current Iraqi Baathists, many loyal to Saddam Hussein, former Iraqi military officers and fighters from the old Republican Guard and a coalition of tribal and Sunni religious leaders bitterly opposed to the U.S. occupation. That force shows no sign of weakening. And indeed, it is steadily killing American soldiers and Marines, along with scores of Iraqi army and police recruits weekly.
But now a Shiite insurgency has emerged—nearly full-blown and with Iranian support—to confront the occupation. Because it can draw on the majority of Iraq’s population, and because it can count on lethal assistance from Tehran, it is a far more deadly threat to U.S. forces than the first insurgency. It’s safe to say that most Americans, who’ve been paying attention to the first insurgency, have failed to notice the emergence of the second.
Needless to say, the two insurgencies are also battling each other, in what can only be called Iraq’s civil war. There’s little chance that they will unite against their common foe, the United States. But that doesn’t make the situation any less deadly for U.S. forces in Iraq. What is means is that the United States is now fighting virtually the entire Iraqi Arab population. Only the non-Arab Kurds seem loyal to the United States now, and the notoriously fickle Kurds, famed for shifting their allegiances on a dime, can’t be counted on as permanent friends, either.

US Admits Attack Target Contained a Mosque
By Francis Harris in Washington
Telegraph, 29 March 2006
Iraqi and American special forces who attacked an insurgent headquarters in Baghdad were not aware that their target contained a mosque until after the battle, America's most senior soldier said yesterday.
General Peter Pace, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, was responding to 48 hours of unremitting criticism over the controversial raid, which Iraqi radicals claim resulted in the deaths of 21 unarmed worshippers and an imam.
...The new version of events appeared to contradict earlier US military accounts that suggested that Sadr's men had moved corpses to make it appear that the Americans had desecrated a religious site. But Mr Rumsfeld was unapologetic about the hesitant and belated account.
"The US government has not got to the point where we are as deft and clever and facile and quick as the enemy that is perfectly capable of lying, having it printed all over the world, and there's no penalty for having lied."
Pictures of the corpses temporarily stalled talks on forming a new Iraqi government.
President Jalal Talabani has demanded that those "responsible" be punished and the governor of Baghdad said he had cut all ties to US forces.

Suicide Bomb Kills 40 as US faces Fury Over Raid on Shia Mosque
By Patrick Cockburn in Arbil
Independent Online, 28 March 2006
In a crescendo of violence in Iraq, a suicide bomber killed 40 army recruits in Mosul as Shia leaders reacted furiously to a US-Iraqi raid on a mosque which they claim killed 37 people. A further 21 bodies were found in and around Baghdad, some with nooses around their necks.
The suicide bomber blew himself up yesterday in a recruitment centre near a joint Iraqi-American military base, with the usual devastating results for the unemployed young men waiting for a job in the armed forces.
The killing of what the Americans say were 16 "insurgents", and what Shias claim were 37 unarmed worshippers in the Mustafa mosque, may turn out to be a turning point in the three-year-old Iraq crisis. Iraq's Shias, 60 per cent of the population, have hitherto largely co-operated with American occupation while Sunni Arabs have resisted. But the Shias increasingly see the US as trying to deny them power despite the electoral success of its Alliance.
Shia leaders demanded yesterday that the US return overall control of security to the Iraqi government. Jawad al-Maliki, a senior spokesman and ally of Iraq's Prime Minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, said: "The Alliance calls for a rapid restoration of (control of) security matters to the Iraqi government." Negotiations on forming a new government were cancelled by the Shias while President Jalal Talabani said the US had agreed "to form an Iraqi-American committee to investigate the attack".
Critics of the killings at the mosque included the most powerful members of the Iraqi government. "Entering the Mustafa Shia mosque and killing worshippers was unjustified and a horrible violation from my point of view," Bayan Jabr, the Interior Minister, told Al-Arabiya television. "Innocent people inside the mosque offering prayer at sunset were killed."
The US is now caught up in a growing confrontation with Iraq's 15 million Shias. The governor of Baghdad, Hussein Tah-an, said the city's provincial council had cut ties to the US military and diplomatic mission, "because of the cowardly attack on the al-Mustafa mosque".
A US spokesman denied that a mosque had been entered but reporters who visited the scene yesterday said the site of the killings was a Shia mosque complex. The local police said shots had been fired at a joint US-Iraqi patrol but not from the mosque. They confirmed the claim by Shia leaders that all the dead, whom they estimated to number 22, were in the complex for evening prayers and none were gunmen.
The US-Iraqi special forces were patrolling an area loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr, the nationalist cleric, who has a huge following. An Iraqi political scientist said: "The mosque incident was the Americans trying to de-claw Muqtada al-Sadr. The Americans want to show they are the most powerful force on the ground. But this will encourage Iraqis to support Sadr."
The US fought Mr Sadr's militia twice in 2004 but the confrontations served only to add to his popularity.

Americans' Call for Removal of Iraqi PM Threatens Rift with Shias
By Patrick Cockburn in Arbil
Independent Online, 29 March 2006
President George W Bush has made it clear that he does not want Ibrahim al-Jaafari to remain prime minister of Iraq in a move likely to increase hostility between the US and the Shia community.
Mr Bush has written to the Shi'ite leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the head of the Shi'ite Alliance asking him to nominate somebody else for the post. " The Americans are very firm about this," said a senior official. " They don't want Jaafari at any price."
Friction between the Americans and the Shia, who make up 60 per cent of Iraq's 27 million population, escalated sharply after at least 16 Shi'ites were killed in the al-Mustafa mosque by Iraqi and American Special Forces on Sunday night. Many Shia believe that the US was shocked by, and is not ready to accept, the success of the Shia Alliance in the election on 15 December.
The prolonged negotiations on forming a new national unity government has served to underline the fissures dividing Shia, Sunni and Kurds. The Alliance has called for security to be handed over to the Iraqi government in the wake of the al-Mustafa incident.
The government led by Mr Jaafari for over a year is a Shi'ite-Kurdish coalition, but the Kurds accuse Mr Jaafari of failing to honour agreements on the return of Kurds to Kirkuk and other places from which they were expelled by Saddam Hussein.
Dr Mahmoud Othman, one of the Kurdish negotiators engaged in trying to form the new government, told The Independent yesterday: "Jaafari has been in power one year and he has failed. He's not fit for the job and we should try somebody else." He criticised Mr Jaafari for acting as if he only represented one party and not the whole country. Since he became prime minister last year the Ministry of the Interior has been accused of running anti-Sunni death squads.
Unless he chooses to step down Mr Jaafari may not be finished since he is still the chosen Shia candidate and other Shia leaders may not want to break ranks. The unity of the Shia Alliance is also supported by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and the Hawza (the religious hierarchy) as well as by the Iranians.
The prolonged and rancorous negotiations on the make up of the new Iraqi government gives a false impression that it will be a powerful body. In reality central government authority is now very limited in much of Baghdad, Basra and Mosul, the three largest cities in the country.
There is almost a complete breakdown in law and order...
Iraqi society is dissolving because of the breakdown of law and order. Sami Mudhafar, Higher Education and Scientific Research Minister, said recently that he wanted to lay to rest exaggerated accounts of the number of university professors murdered in the last three years. He said the true figure was only 89 professors killed over three years, Mr Mudhafar's other piece of comforting news was that there was no murder campaign directed against the Iraqi intelligentsia and they were simply being killed because they lived in Iraq. In addition to the professors 311 teachers have been killed in the last four months. He added that the government was too weak to defend anybody: "I myself was target of an assassination attempt recently and the government has failed to obtain any lead on the party behind it."
Many students no longer go to universities that are riven by struggles between parties. "The students and their professors are in a very bad psychological situation," Abdulamir Hayder of Baghdad University was quoted as saying. "The only aim is how to flee to a foreign country to escape assassination or threats."
President George W Bush has made it clear that he does not want Ibrahim al-Jaafari to remain prime minister of Iraq in a move likely to increase hostility between the US and the Shia community.
Mr Bush has written to the Shi'ite leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the head of the Shi'ite Alliance asking him to nominate somebody else for the post. " The Americans are very firm about this," said a senior official. " They don't want Jaafari at any price."
Friction between the Americans and the Shia, who make up 60 per cent of Iraq's 27 million population, escalated sharply after at least 16 Shi'ites were killed in the al-Mustafa mosque by Iraqi and American Special Forces on Sunday night. Many Shia believe that the US was shocked by, and is not ready to accept, the success of the Shia Alliance in the election on 15 December.

Iraq Leader Warns U.S. to Stop Interfering
By Edward Wong
International Herald Tribune, 30 March 2006
In the face of growing pressure from the Bush administration for him to step down, Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari of Iraq on Wednesday vigorously asserted his right to stay in office and warned the Americans against undue interference in Iraq's political process.
Jaafari also defended his recent political alliance with the radical anti- American Shiite cleric Moktada al- Sadr, now the prime minister's most powerful backer, saying in an interview that Sadr and his thousands-strong militia were a fact of life in Iraq and needed to be accepted into mainstream politics.

In Iraq, Frontline Patience Wears Thin
By Charles Levinson
Christian Science Monitor, 30 March 3006
...While US soldiers are practiced in the art of firepower, the sort of counterinsurgency campaign under way at the moment has demanded a far more nuanced approach to battle. Defeating the insurgency is as much about reaching ordinary Iraqis as it is about capturing terrorists.
"The fight is really for the people and their mind-set," says Lt. Col. Richard Greene of Germantown, Md., the battalion's executive officer.
..."When we roll into a neighborhood, it's like a parade with all the young kids running out," says Clevenger. "I think we're definitely making a difference here."
But in the leafy front yard of a well-to-do Kurdish family, three women spew vitriol in the face of platoon leader 1st Lt. Raymond Maszarose of Vicksburg, Md. Last year, they say, US troops accidentally killed their father and two of their nephews.
"We hate the Americans," says one of the women, calling herself simply Om Omar. "They destroyed our country. They can't protect this country, can't provide electricity, why'd they come here? It's a nightmare."
The women say their father was caught in the crossfire during a firefight between US soldiers and insurgents. "How do you know it was the Americans that killed him?" Lieutenant Maszarose asks again and again. But it's no use. For these women, the blame lies squarely on US shoulders.
And they are not alone. A recent poll by WorldPublicOpinion.org of 1,150 Iraqis showed that nearly half of all Iraqis and nine out of 10 Sunni Arabs support attacks on US forces.
"We're up to over 2,300 US military deaths and it sucks that they feel like that," says Clevenger.

General Voices Doubt on Iraq Files
By Demetri Sevastopulo in Washington
Financial Times, 30 march 2006
The top US general this week suggested that the Pentagon had not adequately vetted documents that allege Russia passed intelligence about US troop movements to Saddam Hussein early on during the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
On Tuesday – the same day that Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, asked Russia to investigate the claims – General Peter Pace, the chairman of the joint chiefs, suggested that the US had unresolved questions about the claims contained in Iraqi documents captured after the invasion.
“We still don’t know whether or not the translation itself is 100 per cent accurate,” Gen Pace told reporters at the Pentagon. “We don’t know if this is real information or disinformation. There’s all kinds of pieces of this that need to be looked into.”
...The Russian foreign ministry on Wednesday said the claims were a political attempt by the US to divert attention from the violence in Iraq. One official said the US had not previously raised the issue with Moscow.

Fool Me Twice
By Joseph Cirincione
Foreign Policy, 27 March 2006
I used to think that the Bush administration wasn’t seriously considering a military strike on Iran, because it would only accelerate Iran’s nuclear program. But what we're seeing and hearing on Iran today seems awfully familiar. That may be because some U.S. officials have already decided they want to hit Iran hard.
Does this story line sound familiar? The vice president of the United States gives a major speech focused on the threat from an oil-rich nation in the Middle East. The U.S. secretary of state tells congress that the same nation is our most serious global challenge. The secretary of defense calls that nation the leading supporter of global terrorism. The president blames it for attacks on U.S. troops. The intelligence agencies say the nuclear threat from this nation is 10 years away, but the director of intelligence paints a more ominous picture. A new U.S. national security strategy trumpets preemptive attacks and highlights the country as a major threat. And neoconservatives beat the war drums, as the cable media banner their stories with words like “countdown” and “showdown.”
The nation making headlines today, of course, is Iran, not Iraq. But the parallels are striking. Three years after senior administration officials systematically misled the nation into a disastrous war, they could well be trying to do it again.
Nothing is clear, yet. For months, I have told interviewers that no senior political or military official was seriously considering a military attack on Iran. In the last few weeks, I have changed my view. In part, this shift was triggered by colleagues with close ties to the Pentagon and the executive branch who have convinced me that some senior officials have already made up their minds: They want to hit Iran.
...The unfolding administration strategy appears to be an effort to repeat its successful campaign for the Iraq war. It is now trying to link Iran to the 9/11 attacks by repeatedly claiming that Iran is the main state sponsor of terrorism in the world (though this suggestion is highly questionable). It is also attempting to make the threat urgent by arguing that Iran might soon pass a “point of no return” if it can perfect the technology of enriching uranium, even though many other nations have gone far beyond Iran’s capabilities and stopped their programs short of weapons. And, of course, it is now publicly linking Iran to the Iraqi insurgency and the improvised explosive devices used to kill and maim U.S. troops in Iraq, though Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Peter Pace admitted there is no evidence to support this claim.
If diplomacy fails, the administration might be able to convince leading Democrats to back a resolution for the use of force against Iran. Many Democrats have been trying to burnish a hawkish image and place themselves to the right of the president on this issue. They may find themselves trapped by their own rhetoric, particularly those with presidential ambitions.
The factual debate during the next six months will revolve around the threat assessment. How close is Iran to developing the ability to enrich uranium for fuel or bombs? Is there a secret weapons program? Are there secret underground facilities? What would it mean if small-scale enrichment experiments succeed?
Fortunately, we know more about Iran’s nuclear program now than we ever knew about Iraq’s (or, for that matter, those of India, Israel, and Pakistan). International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors have been in Iran for more than 3 years investigating all claims of weapons-related work. The United States has satellite reconnaissance, covert programs, and Iranian dissidents providing further information. The key now is to get all this information on the table for an open debate.
The administration should now declassify the information it used to estimate how long it will be until Iran has the capability to make a bomb. The Washington Post reported last August that this national intelligence estimate says Iran is a decade away. We need to see the basis for this judgment and all, if any, dissenting opinions. The congressional intelligence committees should be conducting their own reviews of the assessments, including open hearings with independent experts and IAEA officials. Influential groups, such as the Council on Foreign Relations, should conduct their own sessions and studies.
An accurate and fully understood assessment of the status and potential of Iran’s nuclear program is the essential basis for any policy. We cannot let the political or ideological agenda of a small group determine a national security decision that could create havoc in a critical area of the globe. Not again.

U.S. Cuts Off Contacts with Hamas-led Government
By Paul Eckert
Reuters, 30 March 2006
 The United States ordered its diplomats and contractors on Wednesday to cut off contacts with Palestinian ministries after a Hamas-led government was sworn in, the State Department said.
At the same time, U.S. President George W. Bush expressed support for the Palestinian people but repeated his position no U.S. funds should go to the Hamas leadership they elected.
"I think that aid should go to suffering Palestinians, but nor should it go to a government, however, which has expressed its desire to destroy its neighbor," Bush said during a question-and-answer session after he delivered a speech on Iraq.
Hamas is formally committed to the destruction of Israel and is classed by the U.S. government as a terrorist organization. It won a landslide victory in Palestinian parliamentary elections in January.
"We support the election process, we support democracy, but that doesn't mean we have to support governments that get elected as a result of democracy," Bush said.
...A directive, distributed to U.S. diplomats and other officials in the region by e-mail, instructed them with immediate effect not to have contacts with Hamas-appointed government ministers or those who work for them, whether they are members of the group or not, officials said.
"We will not have contact with members of Hamas, no matter what title they may have," said State Department spokesman Sean McCormack.
He said the directive was intended to ensure that U.S. diplomats and officials around the world knew how to deal with Palestinian officials with whom they might come into contact.
McCormack said the United States would also examine its contacts with the Palestinian Authority and Palestinian diplomats around the world.
The no-contact policy was more sweeping than many had expected because it applies not just to Hamas members but to independents and technocrats in the new government.

Senate Approves Watered Down Lobbying Reform
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
NYT, 30 March 2006
The Senate on Wednesday overwhelmingly passed the first major restrictions on lobbying in more than a decade, banning lobbyists from giving gifts and meals to lawmakers and tightening rules for pet projects known as earmarks.
But critics called the bipartisan measure weak, and some lawmakers who led the effort for tighter restrictions voted against it.
The bill would require lobbyists to file more public reports about their activities in a searchable Internet database, would demand that lawmakers receive advance approval for trips paid with private money and would bar former lawmakers and senior aides from lobbying Congress for two years.
The vote, 90 to 8, was taken hours after Jack Abramoff, whose lobbying activities prompted a federal criminal investigation into corruption here and calls for a crackdown on influence peddling, was sentenced in Miami to nearly six years in prison for his role in the fraudulent purchase of a cruise line.
...The measure would not ban private travel, as some members have urged. Nor would it rein in lawmakers' ability to fly on corporate jets at heavily discounted rates, a practice that gives precious access to lobbyists, who often go along for the trip.
The measure would not do away with earmarks, though it would make it more difficult for lawmakers to insert the pet projects quietly into bills at lobbyists' behest. And the Senate overwhelmingly rejected, 30 to 67, a move to create an independent ethics office to investigate accusations of abuse.
The lobbying debate now moves to the House, where Republican leaders are backing a proposal that would temporarily ban privately financed trips. Their approach would also require lobbyists to disclose meals and gifts to lawmakers, and it would require members of Congress to disclose when they earmark money for the specific projects that critics deride as pork-barrel spending.
House Republicans are split over the plan, and it is not clear whether the House and Senate will be able to agree on a measure this year.

29 March 2006

Has Everything (America) Changed?...Checks, Please
Bert Brandenburg and Amy Kay
TomPaine.com, 28 March 2006
Bert Brandenburg is executive director and Amy Kay is director of federal programs and policy counsel for Justice at Stake , a nonpartisan partnership of over 40 groups working to keep American’s courts fair, impartial and independent. The positions and policies of Justice at Stake campaign partners are their own, and do not necessarily reflect those of other campaign partners.
When the U.S. Supreme Court hears arguments in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld today, the justices will confront one of the central issues of the post-9/11 era. How can the Constitution be kept relevant when the federal government’s quest for more anti-terrorism powers rests on two words—“Trust Us.” Trust us with your personal information and your liberty. Trust us not to abuse these awesome powers. Trust us to obey the Constitution, but reduce oversight and outside accountability.
It would be much better to borrow a proverb from President Ronald Reagan: “Trust, but verify.” That’s where our courts come in. Our Constitution’s framers divided power among three branches of government so that our leaders would be held to the rule of law. But since 9/11, Congress and the executive branch have too often acted to weaken the power of the courts to protect our rights.
That’s why the Hamdan case is so important. It’s about more than the administration’s military commissions, and whether they’ll provide standards of due process guaranteed in the Constitution. It’s about whether courts can do their job in our system of checks and balances. This winter, after Hamdan and similar cases were already in the courts, Congress passed a law banning courts from hearing habeas corpus petitions from Guantanamo detainees challenging their treatment and confinement. The law also severely weakens our courts’ ability to make sure the government complies with the law and the Constitution when sentencing prisoners or designating them as enemy combatants. Whether or not the law applies to pending cases like Hamdan’s, the big loser is government accountability.
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Justices Hint That They'll Rule on Challenge Filed by Detainee
By LINDA GREENHOUSE
NYT, 28 March 2006
As the justices of the Supreme Court took their seats Tuesday morning to hear Osama bin Laden's former driver challenge the Bush administration's plan to try him before a military commission, one question — perhaps the most important one — was how protective the justices would be of their jurisdiction to decide the case.
The answer emerged gradually, but by the end of the tightly packed 90-minute argument, it was fairly clear: highly protective.
At least five justices — Stephen G. Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Anthony M. Kennedy, David H. Souter and John Paul Stevens — appeared ready to reject the administration's argument that the Detainee Treatment Act, passed and signed into law after the court accepted the case in November, had stripped the court of jurisdiction.
It was less certain by the end of the argument how the court would then go on to resolve the merits of the case, a multipronged attack on the validity of the military commissions themselves and on their procedures. Lawyers for the former driver, a Yemeni named Salim Ahmed Hamdan who is charged with conspiracy, also argue that he cannot properly be tried before any military commission for that crime because conspiracy is not recognized as a war crime.
Solicitor General Paul D. Clement was on the defensive throughout his argument. His stolid refusal to concede that any of the government's positions, on the jurisdictional as well as ultimate questions of the case, might present even theoretical problems provoked the normally soft-spoken Justice Souter into an outburst of anger.
What appeared to trouble Justice Souter most was Mr. Clement's discussion with Justice Stevens about whether Congress's removal of the federal courts' jurisdiction to hear habeas corpus petitions from detainees at the naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, amounted to "suspending" the writ of habeas corpus.
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Invisible Men - Subversive Liars Caught in the Act
Did Lindsey Graham and Jon Kyl Mislead the Supreme Court?
By Emily Bazelon
Slate, 27 March 2006
Listen to this story on NPR's Day to Day
It's not within the Supreme Court's power to decide the constitutional challenges brought by Salim Ahmed Hamdan, the Guantanamo detainee whose case will be argued before the court tomorrow, say Sens. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Jon Kyl, R-Ariz. In a brief they filed with the Supreme Court, they argue that Congress kicked Hamdan's current case out of court when it passed the Detainee Treatment Act last December.
The senators base their argument on the "legislative history" of the DTA—the official statements that members of Congress make about a bill leading up to its passage, as captured in the Congressional Record. In other words, Graham and Kyl cite themselves: in particular, an "extensive colloquy" between the two that appears in the Record on Dec. 21, 2005, the day of the DTA's passage. Justice Department lawyers for the Bush administration rely on the same colloquy as evidence that "Congress was aware" that the DTA would strip the Supreme Court of jurisdiction to hear "pending cases, including this case" brought by the Guantanamo detainees.
The problem is that Kyl and Graham's colloquy didn't actually happen on Dec. 21. It was inserted into the Congressional Record just before the law passed, which means that the colloquy did not alert other members of Congress to the views it contains. Inserting comments into the Record is standard practice in Congress. What's utterly nonstandard is implying to the Supreme Court that testimony was live when it wasn't. The colloquy is evidence of what Kyl and Graham thought about the meaning of the DTA. But it doesn't show that any other member of Congress shared their understanding. Everything else in the record that directly addresses whether the DTA forces the Supreme Court to toss Hamdan comes from Levin or another Democrat—and explicitly states that the DTA leaves Hamdan alone.

Gee--Bombing Civilians Is Not Only Immoral, It's Ineffective
It was not allied area bombing that won the second world war, any more than did 'shock and awe' in Iraq in 2003
AC Grayling
The Guardian via Antiwar.com, 27 March 2006
No one knows how many civilians have died violently in Iraq since the US-led invasion in 2003. The most careful assessment, by the website Iraq Body Count, estimates at least 36,000. The true figure could be three times higher. The uncertainty is explained by General Tommy Franks' now-notorious remark, "We don't do body counts."
Three interesting facts nevertheless help shape a sense of the possibilities. One is that the US forces insist that they use precision techniques to minimise "collateral damage". The second is that the coalition recently and controversially admitted using phosphorus weapons in its attack on Falluja. The third is that one of the US marine air wings operating in Iraq announced in a press release in November 2005 that since the invasion began it had dropped more than half a million tons of explosives on Iraq.
The felt inconsistency between the first fact and the other two reminds one that ever since the deliberate mass bombing of civilians in the second world war, and as a direct response to it, the international community has outlawed the practice. It first tried to do so in the fourth Geneva convention of 1949, but the UK and the US would not agree, since to do so would have been an admission of guilt for their systematic "area bombing" of German and Japanese civilians.
But in 1977 a protocol was added to that convention at last outlawing civilian bombing, and the UK signed it. The US still has not done so. Because enough nations are signatories the protocol is now part of customary international law, putting the US out on a limb.
Looking at area bombing through the lens of the 1977 protocol explains why it has always been controversial. Even during the second world war there was a vigorous campaign opposing area bombing, most strongly supported in places such as London and Coventry which had themselves been "blitzed". One of the campaign's leaders was Vera Brittain, whose pamphlet Seed of Chaos caused an outcry in the US; not having been bombed, it was enthusiastic about flattening enemy cities and their occupants.

The Economics Of Occupation: Neo-con Economics Lost Iraq
Michael Schwartz
TomPaine.com, 28 March 2006
The claim that the war has an economic foundation may sound strange in the context of American media coverage, because it is so unfamiliar. So let me begin by agreeing with two key points in the currently fashionable media analysis: The initial attack on Saddam Hussein's regime was a success and there was a moment -- just after the fall of Baghdad -- when the Bush administration might have avoided triggering a formidable armed resistance. The war and proto-civil war of the present moment were not the inevitable result of the invasion, but of Bush administration actions taken afterwards.
We do not remember much of this now, but just after Saddam was toppled the American victors announced that a sweeping reform of Iraqi society would take place. The only part of this still much mentioned today -- the now widely regretted dismantling of the Iraqi military -- was but one aspect of a far larger effort to dismantle the entire Baathist state apparatus, most notably the government-owned factories and other enterprises that constituted just about 40% of the Iraqi economy. This process of dismantling included attempts, still ongoing, to remove various food, product, and fuel subsidies that guaranteed low-income Iraqis basic staples, even when they had no gainful employment.
Without going into the tortured details (forcefully described at the time by Naomi Klein in an indispensable Harpers article), this neo-liberal "shock treatment" was adapted from programs undertaken by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank all around the globe in the 1990s, including those that immiserated Russia after the USSR collapsed and that helped to bankrupt Argentina. Because the privatizers of the Bush administration were, however, in control of a largely prostrate and conquered country, the Iraqi reforms were enacted more swiftly and in a far more draconian manner than anywhere else on the planet. Within six months, for example, the American occupation government, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), had promulgated all manner of laws designed to privatize everything in Iraq except established oil reserves. (New oil discoveries, however, were to be privatized.) All restrictions were also taken off foreign corporations intent on buying full control of Iraqi enterprises; nor were demands to be made of those companies to reinvest any of their profits in Iraq.
At the same time, state-owned enterprises were to be demobilized and sidelined. They were to be prevented from participating either in repairing facilities damaged during the invasion (or degraded by the decade of sanctions that preceded it) or in any of the initially ambitious reconstruction projects the U.S. commissioned. This policy was so strict that even state-owned enterprises with specific expertise in Iraqi electrical, sanitation, and water purification systems -- not to speak of Iraq's massive cement industry -- were forbidden from obtaining subcontracts from the multinational corporations placed in charge of rejuvenating the country's infrastructure.
The elimination of all protections for local commerce quickly threw the market wide open to large multinational marketing companies. This resulted in an immediate surge of sales to the Iraqi middle class of previously unobtainable goods like air conditioners, cell phones, and all manner of electronic devices. Though few remember this today, many American journalists reported the influx of such goods as an early sign of coming prosperity -- and of how successful an economy could begin to be once freed from the oppressive binds of state control and state ownership.
As it happened, though, this surge did not last into the winter of 2003-4. The problem, it turned out, was that the CPA-induced economic "opening" to multinational competition administered a series of death blows to locally based enterprises. First of all, shops selling any item that could be imported by foreign companies found themselves in the unenviable position of competing with lower-priced goods that the multinationals could either provide at such prices or afford to sell at a loss to capture the market (i.e., run the local competition out of business). So a depression swept through small business in Iraq, leaving neighborhoods without their normal complement of shops and without the income that they plowed back into communities.
Second, the demobilization of the army and the sidelining of state enterprises resulted in an almost immediate unemployment crisis. Even though many state enterprises continued to pay employees (for doing nothing) and the Coalition Provisional Authority belatedly decided to pay Saddam's former soldiers (also for doing nothing), this money did not regularly reach the targeted groups. The fragmentary administration set up by the occupation was monumentally inefficient at delivering any services, including paychecks, and significant sums were evidently simply gobbled up by increasingly corrupt remnants of the Baathist administrative apparatus. As a result, millions of unemployed workers and soldiers, lacking the money to feed their families, also lacked the money to support local merchants.
These depressed neighborhoods became incubators for ferocious criminal gangs, who sought to redress their own economic hardship by looting public buildings and private dwellings of anything that might yield a return on the black (or export) market. Looting, which began with the fall of the government, became a permanent feature of Iraqi urban life once the occupation dismantled the Iraqi police force. As time passed without the establishment of effective law enforcement, criminality became organized and systematic, targeting professionals and shopkeepers who had substantial assets or retained incomes; while kidnapping for ransom became a regular fact of life for prosperous Iraqis.
As this crisis deepened, multinational corporations found they had sold just about all the appliances the market could bear and were no longer making sufficient profits to continue their marketing efforts in much of Iraq. So they simply withdrew from now-unprofitable local markets, leaving communities already sprinkled with the empty shops of bankrupt local merchants bereft of needed products and services. Those who still had incomes found it increasingly difficult to obtain needed resources. A reverse multiplier effect began to take hold as Iraqis who remained prosperous were forced to shop, work, or live outside their former communities, only depleting and depressing them further. Unemployment rates quickly exceeded 25% in many communities, and today -- as this process reaches its third anniversary -- nationwide unemployment estimates range from a depression-level 30% to a staggering 60%, depending on the source you consult.

One Man, One Vote: Bush Opposes Iraq's Premier, Shiites Report
By EDWARD WONG
NYT, 28 March 2006
The American ambassador has told Shiite officials that President Bush does not want the Iraqi prime minister to remain the country's leader in the next government, senior Shiite politicians said Tuesday.
It is the first time the Americans have directly expressed a preference in the furious debate over the country's top job, the politicians said, and it is inflaming tensions between the Americans and some Shiite leaders.
The ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, told the head of the main Shiite political bloc at a meeting on Saturday to pass on a "personal message from President Bush" to the interim prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, said Redha Jowad Taki, a Shiite member of Parliament who was at the meeting.
Mr. Khalilzad said Mr. Bush "doesn't want, doesn't support, doesn't accept" Mr. Jaafari as the next prime minister, according to Mr. Taki, a senior aide to Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, the head of the Shiite bloc. It was the first "clear and direct message" from the Americans on a specific candidate for prime minister, Mr. Taki said.
The Shiite bloc, which won a plurality in the parliamentary election in December, nominated Mr. Jaafari last month to retain his post for four more years.

Influence in Iraq Emerges as Key Issue as Arab Conference Opens
By ABEER ALLAM
NYT, 28 March 2006
Concerns over growing Iranian influence in Iraq, and the lack of Arab involvement there, dominated the opening of the annual Arab League summit here on Tuesday.
"Any solution for the Iraqi problem cannot be reached without Arabs and Arab participation," Amr Moussa, secretary general of the Arab League, said in his opening speech. "Any consultations conducted without Arab participation will be considered unsatisfactory and will yield no solutions."
Arab countries have been fuming over an Iranian-American agreement this month to hold direct talks about sectarian violence in Iraq.
"They fear Iraq is drifting from the Arabs, being divorced from the Arab world, and the increased influence of another neighboring country," said Hoshyar Zebari, the Iraqi foreign minister. "This time, we are seeing some positive moves by the Arab League toward more realization of the situation on Iraq."
In a draft resolution likely to be approved tomorrow, the group's 22 Arab nations have pledged to reopen diplomatic missions in Iraq. In November, the Arab League also started an effort to reconcile differences among Iraq's religious sects in hopes of ending the sectarian fighting there, as well as increasing the Arab presence. Still, many Arab governments said they felt powerless in the face of Iran's growing influence.
"Arabs have no cards to play with, while Iran has many," said Abdel Wahab Badrakhan, editor of Al Hayat, a newspaper based in London. "Iran can influence the situation in Iraq, Lebanon, world oil prices, and now can play the nuclear card."
Analysts in the region feel that Iran is being rewarded for adopting a confrontational approach. Even though Iran has supported terrorist groups and defied the West's admonition to abandon its nuclear program, Arab countries fear that the United States may cut a deal with Iran that further weakens Arab influence in Iraq.
On the other hand, said Mohammed el-Sayed Said, deputy director of the Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, the Arab countries have complied with international obligations and received nothing from the American government in return.
A declaration expected to be approved by the Arab League on Wednesday pointedly called for "respecting the Iraqi sovereignty, territorial integrity, freedom and independence and noninterference in domestic affairs."

Democrats Opening Assault on Bush Security Policies
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN
NYT, 29 March 2006
Seeking to capitalize on President Bush's troubles overseas, leading Democrats in Congress are unveiling a broad attack this week on the administration's security policies at home and overseas along with a set of proposals intended to demonstrate that they have a credible alternative.
In a set of policy papers titled "Real Security: Protecting America and Restoring Our Leadership in the World," Democratic leaders in the House and Senate plan to join with leading figures in the party, including former Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright and Wesley K. Clark, the retired general and former presidential contender, in presenting the plan on Wednesday.
Their purpose, Democrats say, is to rebut the Republican accusation, echoed in some editorial columns, that with Mr. Bush's approval ratings sagging eight months before the next election, party leaders and candidates have not laid out a coherent set of alternatives, especially on Iraq and on dealing with nuclear proliferation.
The Democrats' material asserts that in combating terrorism, party leaders want to increase financing for Special Operations forces and interdicting terrorist financing and to spend more on economic development in troubled areas like the Middle East and South Asia.
Democrats also want to give greater powers to the office of the national intelligence director and to investigate accusations of abuse and torture of detainees. They say they want increased financing for screening containers at ports and securing nuclear and chemical plants and training emergency health workers.

Andrew Card’s Departure Means Nothing
By Matthew Rothschild
The Progressive, 28 March 2006
So Andrew Card is gone.
That’s not going to make any difference.
All those Washington poobahs who were urging Bush to make a change in his White House staff are missing the point.
The problem with Bush isn’t his chief of staff.
The problem with Bush is Bush.
He’s inattentive. He’s boastfully anti-intellectual. He’s hopelessly ideological. He’s messianic. And he’s bull-headed.
That’s not a good combination.

28 March 2006

Iraqi Police Say U.S.-Led Raid Kills at Least 17 at Shiite Mosque
By Richard Boudreaux
LA Times, 27 March 2006
At least 17 Iraqis were killed Sunday night when U.S. and Iraqi special forces stormed a mosque and clashed with Shiite Muslim militiamen, police officials said, further inflaming the country as its leaders struggled to form a new government and stem sectarian violence.
An Iraqi police official said the dead were Shiite worshipers at the Mustafa mosque in northeast Baghdad. State-owned Al Iraqiya television showed more than a dozen male corpses, at least one of them elderly, laid out in what appeared to be a prayer room as a grieving man in white robes stepped among them on a blood-smeared concrete floor.
The incident is politically explosive because the mosque is a stronghold of followers of the radical Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada Sadr, whose Iranian-backed movement has a powerful bloc in parliament and a large sectarian militia. Sunday's clash was the most serious between that militia and U.S. forces since Sadr led two anti-American uprisings in 2004.
In increasingly insistent language, U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad has been pressing Iraq's leaders to disband such militias, which he blames for much of the sectarian killing here since the Feb. 22 bombing of a Shiite shrine in the mostly Sunni Arab city of Samarra.
Dozens of people are found dead each day in a shadowy campaign of executions.
On Sunday, police and medical officials in Baqubah got a tip that the bodies of 30 beheaded men had been found earlier in the day beside a highway between Baqubah and Baghdad. Iraqi army troops were waiting for U.S. military support before going into the insurgent-infested area to retrieve them.
If Iraqi accounts of the assault on the mosque are confirmed, it could undermine the U.S. effort to disband the militias and centralize control of security issues.

Scalia Says Constitution Doesn't Cover Detainees
His speech, reported by Newsweek, comes before justices hear a foreign inmate's case.
AP via LA Times, 27 March 2006
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia reportedly told an overseas audience this month that the U.S. Constitution did not protect foreigners held at America's military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Scalia also told the audience at the University of Freiberg in Switzerland that he was "astounded" at the "hypocritical" reaction in Europe to the prison, said this week's issue of Newsweek. The comments came weeks before justices were to take up an appeal from a detainee at Guantanamo Bay.
Justices will hear arguments Tuesday on Salim Ahmed Hamdan's claim that President Bush overstepped his constitutional authority in ordering a military trial for Hamdan — the former driver of Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden — held at the prison for nearly four years.
Two years ago, the Supreme Court ruled that detainees could use U.S. courts to challenge their detention. Scalia disagreed with the ruling, and in the recent speech asserted that enemy combatants had no legal rights.
"War is war, and it has never been the case that when you captured a combatant you have to give them a jury trial in your civil courts," Newsweek quoted Scalia as saying. "Give me a break."
Scalia reportedly was challenged by an audience member in Switzerland about whether Guantanamo detainees had protection under the Geneva or human rights conventions.
Newsweek reported that Scalia replied, "If he was captured by my army on a battlefield, that is where he belongs. I had a son on that battlefield and they were shooting at my son, and I'm not about to give this man who was captured in a war a full jury trial. I mean it's crazy." Scalia's son Matthew served in Iraq.

The Founders Never Imagined a Bush Administration
By Joyce Appleby and Gary Hart
History News Network via Talking Points Memo, 27 March 2006
...The Founding Fathers, who always come to mind when the Constitution is in danger, anticipated just such a possibility. Writing in the Federalist Papers, James Madison defined tyranny as the concentration of powers in one branch of the government.
"The great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department," Madison wrote in Federalist 51, "consists in giving to those who administer each department, the necessary constitutional means, and personal motives, to resist encroachments of the others."
Warming to his subject, Madison continued, "Ambition must be made to counteract ambition;" the interest of the office holders must "be connected with the constitutional rights of the place."
Recognizing that he was making an appeal to interest over ideals, he concluded that it "may be a reflection of human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government." "But what," Madison asked, "is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary."
Madison's solution to the concentration of powers that lead to tyranny relied upon either Congress or the Supreme Court to check the overreaching of a president. In our present crisis, Congress has been supine in the face of the president's grab for unconstitutional, unlimited power, and no case is working its way towards a Supreme Court judgment.
If Madison's reliance on the ambition of other office holders has failed us, we need to look elsewhere. Can what Thomas Jefferson called the "common sense and good judgment of the American people" help us now? In the past, they have been a critical last resort when our leaders endangered the constitutional checks and balances that have made us the world's oldest democracy. But first the public must wake up to this constitutional crisis.

Christian Convert Said Freed From Prison
By AMIR SHAH
AP via LA Times, 27 march 2006
KABUL, Afghanistan -- An Afghan man who had faced the death penalty for converting from Islam to Christianity has been released from prison after the case was dropped, the justice minister said Tuesday.
The announcement came after the United Nations said Abdul Rahman has appealed for asylum outside Afghanistan and that the world body was working to find a country willing to take him.
Justice Minister Mohammed Sarwar Danish told The Associated Press that the 41-year-old was released from the high-security Policharki prison on the outskirts of Kabul late Monday.
"We released him last night because the prosecutors told us to," he said. "His family was there when he was freed, but I don't know where he was taken."
Deputy Attorney General Mohammed Eshak Aloko told the AP that prosecutors had issued a letter calling for Rahman's release because "he was mentally unfit to stand trial." He also said he did not know where he was being held.
He said Rahman may be sent overseas for medical treatment.
Hours earlier, hundreds of clerics, students and others chanting "Death to Christians!" marched through the northern Afghan Mazar-i-Sharif to protest the court's decision Sunday to dismiss the case.
"Abdul Rahman must be killed. Islam demands it," said senior Cleric Faiez Mohammed, from the nearby northern city of Kunduz. "The Christian foreigners occupying Afghanistan are attacking our religion."
Several Muslim clerics have threatened to incite Afghans to kill Rahman if he is freed, saying that he is clearly guilty of apostasy and deserves to die.
Rahman, 41, was arrested last month after police discovered him with a Bible. He was put on trial last week for converting 16 years ago while he was a medical aid worker for an international Christian group helping Afghan refugees in Pakistan. He had faced the death penalty under Afghanistan's Islamic laws.
The case set off an outcry in the United States and other nations that helped oust the hard-line Taliban regime in late 2001 and provide aid and military support for Afghan President Hamid Karzai. President Bush and others insisted Afghanistan protect personal beliefs.
U.N. spokesman Adrian Edwards said Rahman has asked for asylum "outside Afghanistan."

Moussaoui Says He Was to Fly 5th Plane in 9/11 Attacks
By Richard A. Serrano
LA Times, 27 March 2006
Taking the stand over his lawyers' protests, Al Qaeda conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui declared Monday that he and Richard Reid, later arrested as the so-called shoe bomber, were slated to hijack a fifth airplane on Sept. 11, 2001, and fly it into the White House.
But Moussaoui's bombastic testimony — seriously doubted by intelligence officials — was immediately contradicted by the words of the captured Sept. 11 mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who said in an interrogation read aloud in court that Moussaoui was too "problematic" and unreliable to join the 19 hijackers on their suicide missions.

500,000 Pack Streets to Protest Immigration Bills
The rally, part of a massive mobilization of immigrants and their supporters, may be the largest L.A. has seen.
By Teresa Watanabe and Hector Becerra
LA Times, 26 March 2006
A crowd estimated by police at more than 500,000 boisterously marched in Los Angeles on Saturday to protest federal legislation that would crack down on undocumented immigrants, penalize those who help them and build a security wall along the U.S.' southern border.
Spirited but peaceful marchers — ordinary immigrants alongside labor, religious and civil rights groups — stretched more than 20 blocks along Spring Street, Broadway and Main Street to City Hall, tooting kazoos, waving American flags and chanting, "Sí se puede!" (Yes we can!).
Attendance at the demonstration far surpassed the number of people who protested against the Vietnam War and Proposition 187, a 1994 state initiative that sought to deny public benefits to undocumented migrants but was struck down by the courts. Police said there were no arrests or injuries except for a few cases of exhaustion.
At a time when Congress prepares to crack down further on illegal immigration and self-appointed militias patrol the U.S. border to stem the flow, Saturday's rally represented a massive response, part of what immigration advocates are calling an unprecedented effort to mobilize immigrants and their supporters nationwide.

Testers Slip Radioactive Materials Over Borders
By ERIC LIPTON
NYT, 27 March 2006
Undercover Congressional investigators successfully smuggled into the United States enough radioactive material to make two dirty bombs, even after it set off alarms on radiation detectors installed at border checkpoints, a new report says.
The test, conducted in December by the Government Accountability Office, demonstrated the mixed progress by the Department of Homeland Security, among other federal agencies, in trying to prevent terrorists from smuggling radioactive material into the United States.
Nationally, at a cost so far of about $286 million, about 60 percent of all containerized commercial goods entering the United States by truck or ship and 77 percent of all private cars are now screened for radioactive material.
But flaws in the inspection procedures and limitations with the equipment mean that nuclear materials may still be able to be sent illegally into the country through seaports or land borders, the study found. And because the program for installing radiation detectors is far behind schedule, many border crossing points, including many seaports, still have no detection equipment, the report says.
"We suffer from a massive blind spot in our cargo security measures," Senator Norm Coleman, Republican of Minnesota, said in a statement that accompanied the report, which will be released Tuesday morning at a Senate hearing.
In the test case, undercover investigators bought a small amount of radioactive material, most likely cesium. Then on Dec. 15, they drove across the border at undisclosed locations from Canada and Mexico, intentionally picking spots where the detection equipment had been installed.

27 March 2006

Shiite Officials Express Anger Over U.S. Clash With Militia
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
and JOHN O'NEIL
NYT, 27 March 2006
Shiite officials reacted angrily today to a clash that pitted American and Iraqi government forces against Shiite militiamen in Baghdad on Sunday night.
Iraqi security officials Sunday night said that 17 people had been killed in a mosque, including its 80-year-old imam. The American military, which denied that American forces had entered the mosque, said Sunday night that 16 insurgents had been killed and 15 captured in a combat operation near the mosque against a terrorist cell.
But other Iraqi officials today put the death toll higher. Abdul al-Karim al-Enzi, the national security minister, said that 37 people were killed and charged that they were all unarmed. "Nobody fired a single shot" at the troops, Mr. al-Enzi told Reuters.
And Interior Minister Bayan Jabr called the incident "unjustified aggression against the faithful at prayer in a mosque," news services reported.
At a funeral procession today for victims of the clash, the mood was tense and members of the Mahdi Army, the militia loyal to the radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, kept their weapons on prominent display. Shiite leaders demanded a full investigation of the incident, and the governor for Baghdad's provincial government, Hussein Al-Tahan, said today that he was suspending all cooperation with American forces until an investigation was completed.
Mr. Al-Tahan said at a press conference that he would start "restricted measures to protect the dignity of the Iraqi citizen."
In other incidents, at least 40 Iraqis were killed today and 20 were wounded when a car bomb exploded at a police recruiting station between the cities of Tal Afar and Mosul in the country's north. The bodies of 45 men who had been executed were found in three separate locations, according to Iraqi and American officials.
Those killings came on top of the discovery of 10 bodies in Baghdad on Sunday. But the shootout with the Shiite militiamen who have come to control much of the capital raised tensions in a way that the steady stream of bombings and executions did not.
In its statements after the militia clash, the American military was clearly worried about exacerbating a combustible situation that many Iraqis are already describing as civil war.

Amid Confusion, Iraq Shi'ites Accuse US Troops
By Michael Georgy and Alastair Macdonald
Reuters via Informed Comment, 26 March 2006
Politicians from Iraq's Shi'ite majority accused U.S. troops of massacring 20 worshippers at a Baghdad mosque on Sunday but police and residents said many died in clashes between Shi'ite militia fighters and Americans.
U.S. military spokesmen declined comment on the accusations but issued a statement describing a raid by Iraqi special forces, with U.S. advisers, on a building that was not a mosque in roughly the same area. It said 16 insurgents were killed.
Police said U.S. forces clashed with the Mehdi Army militia of radical Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, killing 20 fighters.
With Baghdad under night curfew it was impossible to pin down what happened. But unusually strident anti-U.S. coverage on government-run state television showed a fierce confrontation between the ruling Shi'ite Islamists and the U.S. administration.
A spokesman for Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari said the premier was "deeply concerned" and had called the U.S. commander in Iraq, General George Casey, who said there would be a full inquiry.
Also on Sunday, U.S. forces arrested 41 officials from the Shi'ite-controlled Interior Ministry and freed 17 foreigners from a secret jail, government, political and U.S. sources said.
Northeast of Baghdad, Iraqi troops found 30 bodies, many of them beheaded, on a village street. And in the same area around Baquba, police arrested one of their own majors, the brother of the regional police chief, over Shi'ite death squad killings.
The events came as Washington raises pressure on the Shi'ites to bring minority Sunnis into government -- it is even planning landmark talks with hostile Shi'ite Iran to break the impasse. Many fear a failure of the plan could plunge Iraq into civil war.
Iraqiya state television carried lengthy footage of the bloodied corpses of men in civilian clothes, in a room where no weapons were visible, calling them victims of U.S. gunfire.
"American forces raid and burn Mustafa mosque. A number of citizens martyred inside," it said in an on-screen headline.

Bush Was Set on Path to War, Memo by British Adviser Says
By DON VAN NATTA Jr.
NYT, 27 March 2006
In the weeks before the United States-led invasion of Iraq, as the United States and Britain pressed for a second United Nations resolution condemning Iraq, President Bush's public ultimatum to Saddam Hussein was blunt: Disarm or face war.
But behind closed doors, the president was certain that war was inevitable. During a private two-hour meeting in the Oval Office on Jan. 31, 2003, he made clear to Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain that he was determined to invade Iraq without the second resolution, or even if international arms inspectors failed to find unconventional weapons, said a confidential memo about the meeting written by Mr. Blair's top foreign policy adviser and reviewed by The New York Times.
"Our diplomatic strategy had to be arranged around the military planning," David Manning, Mr. Blair's chief foreign policy adviser at the time, wrote in the memo that summarized the discussion between Mr. Bush, Mr. Blair and six of their top aides.
"The start date for the military campaign was now penciled in for 10 March," Mr. Manning wrote, paraphrasing the president. "This was when the bombing would begin."
The timetable came at an important diplomatic moment. Five days after the Bush-Blair meeting, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell was scheduled to appear before the United Nations to present the American evidence that Iraq posed a threat to world security by hiding unconventional weapons.
Although the United States and Britain aggressively sought a second United Nations resolution against Iraq — which they failed to obtain — the president said repeatedly that he did not believe he needed it for an invasion.
Stamped "extremely sensitive," the five-page memorandum, which was circulated among a handful of Mr. Blair's most senior aides, had not been made public. Several highlights were first published in January in the book "Lawless World," which was written by a British lawyer and international law professor, Philippe Sands. In early February, Channel 4 in London first broadcast several excerpts from the memo.
Since then, The New York Times has reviewed the five-page memo in its entirety. While the president's sentiments about invading Iraq were known at the time, the previously unreported material offers an unfiltered view of two leaders on the brink of war, yet supremely confident.
The memo indicates the two leaders envisioned a quick victory and a transition to a new Iraqi government that would be complicated, but manageable. Mr. Bush predicted that it was "unlikely there would be internecine warfare between the different religious and ethnic groups." Mr. Blair agreed with that assessment.
The memo also shows that the president and the prime minister acknowledged that no unconventional weapons had been found inside Iraq. Faced with the possibility of not finding any before the planned invasion, Mr. Bush talked about several ways to provoke a confrontation, including a proposal to paint a United States surveillance plane in the colors of the United Nations in hopes of drawing fire, or assassinating Mr. Hussein.

Neo No More
Review by PAUL BERMAN
NYT, 26 March 2006
In February 2004, Francis Fukuyama attended a neoconservative think-tank dinner in Washington and listened aghast as the featured speaker, the columnist Charles Krauthammer, attributed "a virtually unqualified success" to America's efforts in Iraq, and the audience enthusiastically applauded. Fukuyama was aghast partly for the obvious reason, but partly for another reason, too, which, as he explains in the opening pages of his new book, "America at the Crossroads," was entirely personal. In years gone by, Fukuyama would have felt cozily at home among those applauding neoconservatives. He and Krauthammer used to share many a political instinct. It was Krauthammer who wrote the ecstatic topmost blurb ("bold, lucid, scandalously brilliant") for the back jacket of Fukuyama's masterpiece from 1992, "The End of History and the Last Man."
But that was then.
Today Fukuyama has decided to resign from the neoconservative movement — though for reasons that, as he expounds them, may seem a tad ambiguous. In his estimation, neoconservative principles in their pristine version remain valid even now. But his ex-fellow-thinkers have lately given those old ideas a regrettable twist, and dreadful errors have followed. Under these circumstances, Fukuyama figures he has no alternative but to go away and publish his complaint. And he has founded a new political journal to assert his post-neoconservative independence — though he has given this journal a name, The American Interest, that slyly invokes the legendary neoconservative journals of past (The Public Interest) and present (The National Interest), just to keep readers guessing about his ultimate relation to neoconservative tradition.
His resignation seems to me, in any case, a fairly notable event, as these things go, and that is because, among the neoconservative intellectuals, Fukuyama has surely been the most imaginative, the most playful in his thinking and the most ambitious.

Vague Law and Hard Lobbying Add Up to Billions for Big Oil
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS
NYT, 27 March 2006
It was after midnight and every lawmaker in the committee room wanted to go home, but there was still time to sweeten a deal encouraging oil and gas companies to drill in the Gulf of Mexico.
"There is no cost," declared Representative Joe L. Barton, a Texas Republican who was presiding over Congressional negotiations on the sprawling energy bill last July. An obscure provision on new drilling incentives was "so noncontroversial," he added, that senior House and Senate negotiators had not even discussed it.
Mr. Barton's claim had a long history. For more than a decade, lawmakers and administration officials, both Republicans and Democrats, have promised there would be no cost to taxpayers for a program allowing companies to avoid paying the government royalties on oil and gas produced in publicly owned waters in the Gulf.
But last month, the Bush administration confirmed that it expected the government to waive about $7 billion in royalties over the next five years, even though the industry incentive was expressly conceived of for times when energy prices were low. And that number could quadruple to more than $28 billion if a lawsuit filed last week challenging one of the program's remaining restrictions proves successful.
"The big lie about this whole program is that it doesn't cost anything," said Representative Edward J. Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat who tried to block its expansion last July. "Taxpayers are being asked to provide huge subsidies to oil companies to produce oil — it's like subsidizing a fish to swim."

The DeLay-Abramoff Money Trail, Part 2
By Paul Kiel
TPM Muckraker, 24 March 2006
The case against Tom DeLay just got stronger.
Back in December, the Washington Post dropped a bomb on the now-deposed Majority Leader with their article on the U.S. Family Network, an organization that posed as a grassroots outfit, but was really a slush fund pumped full of cash by Jack Abramoff clients trying to curry favor and buy favors from DeLay. Well, a new piece from the National Journal (unfortunately, not online) adds some crucial details to the story and provides much more concrete evidence that DeLay was bought.

25-26 March 2006

Bound, Blindfolded and Dead: The Face of Atrocity in Baghdad
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
NYT, 26 March 2006
...In the last month, hundreds of men have been kidnapped, tortured and executed in Baghdad. As Iraqi and American leaders struggle to avert a civil war, the bodies keep piling up. The city's homicide rate has tripled from 11 to 33 a day, military officials said. The period from March 7 to March 21 was especially gruesome, with at least 191 corpses, many sadistically mutilated, surfacing in garbage bins, drainage ditches, pickup trucks and minibuses.
...What frightens Iraqis most about these gangland-style killings is the impunity. According to reports filed by family members and more than a dozen interviews, many men were taken in daylight, in public, with witnesses all around. Few cases, if any, have been investigated.
Part of the reason may be that most victims are Sunnis, and there is growing suspicion that they were killed by Shiite death squads backed by government forces in a cycle of sectarian revenge. This allegation has been circulating in Baghdad for months, and as more Sunnis turn up dead, more people are inclined to believe it.
"This is sectarian cleansing," said Mahmoud Othman, a Kurdish member of Parliament, who has maintained a degree of neutrality between Shiites and Sunnis.
Mr. Othman said there were atrocities on each side. "But what is different is when Shiites get killed by suicide bombs, everyone comes together to fight the Sunni terrorists," he said. "When Shiites kill Sunnis, there is no response, because much of this killing is done by militias connected to the government."
The imbalance of killing, and the suspicion the government may be involved, is deepening the Shiite-Sunni divide, just as American officials are urging Sunni and Shiite leaders to form an inclusive government, hoping that such a show of unity will prevent a full-scale civil war.
The pressure is increasing on Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, a Shiite, but few expect him to crack down, partly because he needs the support of the Shiite militias to stay in power.
Haidar al-Ibadi, Mr. Jaafari's spokesman, acknowledged that "some of the police forces have been infiltrated." But he said "outsiders," rather than Iraqis, were to blame.
Now many Sunnis, who used to be the most anti-American community in Iraq, are asking for American help.
"If the Americans leave, we are finished," said Hassan al-Azawi, whose brother was taken from the pet shop.
He thought for a moment more.
"We may be finished already."

At Least 51 More Die in Iraq  Violence
Talabani issues optimistic assessment on cabinet
AP via Toronto Star via Informed Comment, 25 March 2005
Iraq's president issued a highly optimistic report Friday on progress among politicians trying to hammer out the shape of a new unity government. Meanwhile, at least 51 more people, including two U.S. soldiers, were reported dead in rampant violence.
President Jalal Talabani said the government could be in place for parliamentary approval by the end of the month, but acknowledged, "I am usually a very optimistic person." He spoke to reporters after a fifth round of multi-party talks among the country's highly polarized political factions.
U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad brokered the sessions as the Bush administration is applying extreme pressure on Iraqi politicians to form a government. Washington hopes to begin withdrawing troops this summer, but is banking on a decrease in violence once a national unity government is in place.
A less optimistic Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jafaari, whose nomination by the Shiite bloc for a second term produced the continuing political stalemate, has said a cabinet list could be ready by the end of April, a full month beyond the Talabani estimate.

Iraqis in Tal Afar Question Bush's Optimism
REUTERS via San Diego Tribune, 24 March 2006
TAL AFAR, Iraq – U.S. President George W. Bush held up the northern town of Tal Afar this week as an example of progress being made in Iraq but many residents find it hard to share his optimism.
Bush said this week that Tal Afar has become 'a free city that gives reason for hope for a free Iraq' after U.S.-led forces freed it from al Qaeda militants in a 2005 offensive.
Although townspeople say there has been less violence since the assault, they share many of the complaints of other Iraqis watching sectarian violence tearing their country apart.
These days it is Iraq's security forces, drawn heavily from the Shi'ite majority, not Sunni Arab al Qaeda militants from nearby Syria, that make many people in Tal Afar nervous.
'When we stop at a checkpoint they ask us whether we are Sunni or Shi'ite. That is worrying. We are one people and were never divided before,' said Fatma Mohammad Ali, 38, a teacher who is a member of Tal Afar's ethnic Turkmen Shi'ite minority.
U.S. and Iraqi forces said Tal Afar was used as a conduit for smuggling in equipment and foreign fighters from Syria on the way to cities across central Iraq. In doing so, they subjected many townspeople to violence and intimidation.
Al Qaeda and other Sunni Arab insurgent violence has eased in Tal Afar since September's offensive but sectarian violence elsewhere in Iraq after the bombing of a Shi'ite shrine in Samarra last month raised fears among many people of civil war.
'I say that Bush is 100 percent a liar because the city of Tal Afar has become a ghost town rather than the example Bush spoke about,' said Ali Ibrahim, a Shi'ite Turkmen laborer.
It is hard to be sure who is behind violence that still troubles Tal Afar, 420 km (260 miles) northwest of Baghdad. A mortar round wounded six children playing in a street on Friday. Police said it was not clear who fired it.
Bush has been trying to convince a sceptical American public that he has a winning strategy for Iraq to counter fears that violence is spiralling into an all-out sectarian conflict.
...Some of the anger is being directed back at the U.S. forces that pushed out the militants.
'The situation in Tal Afar is deteriorating and the smell of death is everywhere. People never know why they are killed. They only know that the Americans are the cause of their agonies,' said Hussein Mahmoud, a Shi'ite Turkmen university professor.

Unwelcome Attention From Moussaoui Trial
By NEIL A. LEWIS and DAVID JOHNSTON
NYT, 24 March 2006
The sentencing trial of Zacarias Moussaoui was supposed to have been the government's best opportunity to hold someone accountable for the deaths on Sept. 11, 2001.
But after federal prosecutors finished laying out their case this week, even those who strongly supported an aggressive prosecution may wonder whether the trial has shed as much light on Mr. Moussaoui's culpability as it has on the missteps and mistakes by law enforcement agencies.
The testimony of two prosecution witnesses, in particular, has brought renewed and unwelcome attention to how the Federal Bureau of Investigation dealt with early warning signs.

Senator Sets Hearing on Censure of Bush
NYT, 24 March 2006
The Senate Judiciary Committee has set a hearing for next Friday on the call by Senator Russell D. Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, to censure President Bush for his approval of a program to allow electronic eavesdropping without warrants.
Senator Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican who is chairman of the panel, said he had decided to schedule the session after Mr. Feingold, in a television interview, pressed for hearings on the censure proposal.
Some Republicans have seized on the issue to rally their supporters by arguing that the censure plan is evidence that Democrats would try to take some action against Mr. Bush should they gain control of the House or Senate in the November elections.
The issue has also energized some Democrats who contend their party has shied from confronting Mr. Bush. But Mr. Feingold's Democratic colleagues have been cautious about endorsing the plan.

G.M. Offers Pay for Its Workers to Go Away
By MARK A. STEIN
NYT, 24 March 2006
SILVER HANDSHAKES
Unable to sell enough cars to keep its employees busy, General Motors offered to pay them to go away.
In an agreement with the United Automobile Workers union, G.M. offered $35,000 to $140,000 to its 113,000 employees in North America if they agreed to leave their jobs. It also extended the offer to more than 20,000 employees of its quasi-independent supplier, Delphi.
The deal could cost G.M. billions, but the company is racing to fix its business. It lost $10.6 billion last year as sales fell but its fixed costs, including payroll and health care, remained high. G.M. also sold control of its commercial mortgage unit to a group of investors for $1.5 billion in cash and the repayment of about $7.3 billion in intercompany loans. The sale raises much-needed cash.
Delphi said that if it could not sharply reduce its wage and benefit costs by the end of this month, it would ask a bankruptcy court judge for permission to impose less-generous terms — a move that could lead to a walkout, which in turn would cripple G.M.

Pension Reform Politics
NYT, 26 March 2006
The pension reform bill now being worked on by a House-Senate conference is teetering on the verge of being worse than worthless. The nation cannot afford to miss this opportunity to protect workers who count on company retirement plans to see them through their old age. There is still time to rescue this critical legislation — if key lawmakers give up political horse-trading and put public good above corporate interests.
Let's start with Representative John Boehner, Republican of Ohio and the new House majority leader. The most important reform in the bill, as everyone agrees, is to ensure that companies contribute enough money to their pension plans to meet their obligations fully. It is also accepted that companies cannot step up their contributions overnight. But rather than support the sensible notion of a simple seven-year catch-up period, Mr. Boehner championed a super-slow phase-in that is now part of the House bill. The slower the phase-in, the weaker the reform. A seven-year transition, with the clock starting on Day 1, is reasonable and should become law.
On the Senate side, Senator Johnny Isakson, Republican of Georgia, has been a leader in the fight for special airline relief provisions, mainly for the bankrupt Northwest and Delta. But the largess in the Senate bill must be scaled way back. In general, Congress has skillfully devised new rules for computing pension obligations. But an exception to the rules would allow airlines to factor in highly optimistic assumptions that would, in effect, let them get away with putting much less in their pensions each year than would otherwise be the case. That is a horrible precedent, essentially endorsing the use of funny numbers for favored industries.

Retraining Laid-Off Workers, but for What?
By LOUIS UCHITELLE
NYT, 26 March 2006
Layoffs have disrupted the lives of millions of Americans over the last 25 years. The cure that these displaced workers are offered — retraining and more education — is heralded as a sure path to new and better-paying careers. But often that policy prescription does not work, as this book excerpt explains. It is adapted from "The Disposable American: Layoffs and Their Consequences" by Louis Uchitelle, an economics writer for The New York Times. Knopf will publish the book on Tuesday.
...Their hope was that if they cooperated, United would ease up on the layoffs and revive operations at, arguably, one of the most efficient, high-tech maintenance centers in the world. In this state of mind, the union was helping to usher the 60 laid-off mechanics quietly away. It had rented the conference room on this cold January evening in 2003 to introduce the men to what amounted to a boot camp for recycling laid-off workers back into new, usually lower-paying lines of work.
SIMILAR federally subsidized boot camps, organized by state and local governments, often in league with unions, have proliferated in the United States since the 1980's, and now many cities have them. Unable to stop layoffs, government has taken on the task of refitting discarded workers for "alternate careers." In deciding as a nation to try to rejuvenate them as workers, we put in place a system, however unrealistic, that implicitly acknowledged layoffs as a legitimate practice.
The presumption — promoted by economists, educators, business executives and nearly all of the nation's political leaders, Democrats and Republicans alike — holds that in America's vibrant and flexible economy there is work, at good pay, for the educated and skilled. The unemployed need only to get themselves educated and skilled and the work will materialize. Education and training create the jobs, according to this way of thinking. Or, put another way, an appropriate job at decent pay materializes for every trained or educated worker.
If the workers were already trained, as the mechanics certainly were, then what they needed was additional training and counseling as a transition into well-paying, unfilled jobs in other industries. If the transition failed to function as advertised, well, the accepted wisdom suggested that it was the fault of the workers themselves. Their failure to land good jobs was due to personality defects or a resistance to acquiring new skills or a reluctance to move where the good jobs were.
That was the myth. It evaporated in practice for the aircraft mechanics, whose hourly pay ranged up to $31. Not enough job openings exist at $31 an hour — or at $16 an hour, for that matter — to meet the demand for them. Jobs don't just materialize at cost-conscious companies to absorb all the qualified people who want them.
You cannot be an engineer or an accountant without a degree; in that sense, education and training certainly do count. Furthermore, in the competition for the jobs that exist, the educated and trained have an edge. That advantage shows up regularly in wage comparisons. But you cannot earn an engineer's or an accountant's typical pay if companies are not hiring engineers and accountants, or are hiring relatively few and can control the wage, chipping away at it.

Schools Cut Back Subjects to Push Reading and Math
By SAM DILLON
NYT, 26 March 2006
Thousands of schools across the nation are responding to the reading and math testing requirements laid out in No Child Left Behind, President Bush's signature education law, by reducing class time spent on other subjects and, for some low-proficiency students, eliminating it.
Schools from Vermont to California are increasing — in some cases tripling — the class time that low-proficiency students spend on reading and math, mainly because the federal law, signed in 2002, requires annual exams only in those subjects and punishes schools that fall short of rising benchmarks.
The changes appear to principally affect schools and students who test below grade level.
The intense focus on the two basic skills is a sea change in American instructional practice, with many schools that once offered rich curriculums now systematically trimming courses like social studies, science and art. A nationwide survey by a nonpartisan group that is to be made public on March 28 indicates that the practice, known as narrowing the curriculum, has become standard procedure in many communities.
The survey, by the Center on Education Policy, found that since the passage of the federal law, 71 percent of the nation's 15,000 school districts had reduced the hours of instructional time spent on history, music and other subjects to open up more time for reading and math. The center is an independent group that has made a thorough study of the new act and has published a detailed yearly report on the implementation of the law in dozens of districts.
"Narrowing the curriculum has clearly become a nationwide pattern," said Jack Jennings, the president of the center, which is based in Washington.

As Parents Age, Baby Boomers and Business Struggle to Cope
By JANE GROSS
NYT, 25 March 2006
...Companies are responding, but experts say they often use child care benefits as a model when they do not suit the different and unpredictable needs of the elderly. In addition, at a time of cutbacks in expensive health insurance and pensions, the most commonly offered benefits are those that cost a company little or nothing, like referral services and unpaid leaves.
...Experts disagree about whether women will push employers for help with their parents, as they did 30 years ago when child care was their pressing issue.
Ellen Galinsky, 63, president of the Family and Work Institute, led the charge for a day care center at Bank Street College when she was a researcher there in 1969. After "huge resistance," the center opened in 1974. Ms. Galinsky predicts a similar awakening to elder care issues because "demographics are destiny."
"Everyone I know is dealing with this," said Ms. Galinsky, who recently stayed at the bedside of her 98-year-old mother for the last two months of her life. The institute allows unlimited sick leave for such family emergencies. But even with that leeway, Ms. Galinsky said: "I was on another planet. It's like no other experience. I barely have words for how hard it is."
Todd Groves, founder of LTC Financial Partners in Seattle, who advises human resource managers on long term care, is not convinced that women like Ms. Galinsky will have the same galvanizing effect this time around, regardless of their numbers or their passion.
"Back then you still had a paternal business culture," Mr. Groves said. "Now people feel out on their own. They are fearful about their careers and don't feel they can ask for help."

Except for the privileged few...
Inherit the Wind; There's Little Else Left
By EDUARDO PORTER
NYT, 26 March 2006
As the baby boomers deal with the final days of their aged parents, a question often lurks, sometimes unspoken, in the pragmatic discussions about nursing homes, retirement savings, the future of the family house: After all the living is done, will anything be left over for an inheritance?
After all, the evidence shows that baby boomers are going to need it: working Americans are unprepared for their own retirement, economists say. They have little savings of their own, and are facing the possible erosion of Social Security and the limits of company pensions.
While some forecasters still hope that the vast pool of wealth accumulated by the generations born in the first half of last century will prop up the finances of their aging offspring, new statistics provide a starker picture.
Though hundreds of billions of dollars are being passed on every year, most elderly Americans can probably forget about passing on a financial lifeline to their children.
The latest numbers confirm that a vast majority of baby boomers cannot count on an inheritance to help them out of their jam. Even as the total pile of wealth passed down the generations has increased sharply, the inheritance received by a typical American has declined. The shift can be explained in part by demographics changes, but also by the changing nature of old age (life expectancy has increased) and retirement financing (rather, the lack of it).
In 2004 median inheritances — half were bigger and half were smaller — amounted to about $29,000 in today's money, according to a Federal Reserve analysis of the Survey of Consumer Finances. That is enough for the heirs to buy a new Pontiac Coupe. But for almost all, it is hardly life-changing money.
Nor are inheritances likely to increase. According to the analysis of the Fed data by Mark Zandi of Moody's Economy.com, 30 years ago the median inheritance was about $10,000 more, adjusted for inflation.
These meager bequests would seem to fly in the face of the huge transfer of wealth making its way down the generations.
Yes, big money is being passed down. According to the Fed data, the overall pie of inheritances has grown to nearly $200 billion annually — more than three times the amount that was passed down in the mid-1970's, after accounting for inflation. Paul Schervish and John Havens of Boston College's Center for Wealth and Philanthropy predict that by midcentury, $25 trillion will be passed from the old to their offspring.
But the typical American is seeing little of this wealth. Mr. Schervish and Mr. Havens found that most money would go to a few lucky heirs: 7 percent of the estates would account for half the aggregate bequests.
Those heirs are fueling brisk growth in the wealth-management industry, a niche enterprise catering mostly to the rich.

Selling the Forests
NYT, 25 March 2006
It's rarely a good idea to sell off assets to pay normal operating expenses. It's an even worse idea when the assets are chunks of national forest. But that's exactly what the Bush administration wants to do.
Washington has long sent money to isolated local communities surrounded by national forests. The communities cannot tax federal property, so the money helps pay for schools. The grants were calculated as a percentage of timber sales. When the annual harvest declined, partly as a result of court rulings in favor of various endangered species, the money was taken from general revenues.
President Bush's 2007 budget proposes to raise the money by auctioning off about 300,000 acres of federal forest in 41 states, at an anticipated price of $800 million. The administration recently sent a bill to Congress that would give the Forest Service the authority to conduct the sales. The bill has many defects, especially a provision that would sharply limit the public's opportunity to comment on the sales, short of embarking on expensive litigation. But its most glaring defect is its underlying strategy of trading long-term assets for short-term gain.

Bush, on the Road, Adds to G.O.P. War Chest
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
NYT, 25 March 2006
INDIANAPOLIS — President Bush took to the campaign trail Friday, raising $1.2 million for two of his party's most vulnerable incumbents: Representative Mike Sodrel of Indiana and Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania.
At a $1,000-a-plate luncheon in a downtown auditorium here, Mr. Bush delivered a 30-minute speech centered largely on a defense of the war in Iraq, and then exhorted the crowd of 500 to re-elect Mr. Sodrel, a freshman locked in a tight race against Baron Hill, a former Democratic congressman whom he unseated in 2004.
Later, Mr. Bush flew to Pennsylvania to join Mr. Santorum, who is facing a difficult race against the Democratic challenger, Robert P. Casey Jr., the state treasurer and son of a popular former governor.
The Santorum event, a dinner at a residence in the Pittsburgh suburb of Sewickley Heights, was closed to the press. That was standard procedure for the Bush White House when a fund-raiser is held at a private home, but an excuse for Democrats to make a case that growing numbers of Republicans no longer want to be seen in public with a president bedeviled by political woes.
Yet when Mr. Bush arrived at the Pittsburgh airport on Friday, Mr. Santorum was the first to greet him, and the president spun the senator so that he faced the press pool for photos of the two of them, according to the pool report.
Further, whatever Mr. Bush's poll ratings in a year when his party is running hard to retain its majorities in both houses of Congress, Republicans in trouble embrace him and Vice President Dick Cheney for their ability to raise money. The president has raised more than $12.5 million for Republicans this year, the Republican National Committee says, and Mr. Cheney more than $1.5 million.
The fund-raiser for Mr. Sodrel was Mr. Bush's fourth for a House member facing re-election in 2006, and Mr. Cheney has held about two dozen House events in recent months, said Carl Forti, spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee.
"The president and vice president are the best fund-raisers we have," said Mr. Forti, adding that the visits brought good local press for candidates. "They're on the front page of the paper the day before they come, the front page of the paper the day they're there and the front page the day after. It's great exposure."
Indeed, Mr. Sodrel was beaming Friday as he stood alongside Mr. Bush for the traditional grip-and-grin campaign photograph. His organization hoped to bring in $500,000 from the event.

24 March 2006

Of Course It's a Civil War
By Charles Krauthammer
Washington Post, 24 March 2006
Today's big debate over Iraq seems to be: Is there or is there not a civil war? Yes, say the defeatists, citing former prime minister Ayad Allawi, a man with an ax to grind against the current (elected) government, which excluded him.
No, not really, not yet, not quite, say U.S. officials and commanders, as well as Iraq's president, also hardly the most neutral of observers.
This debate appears to be important because the perception that there has been an outbreak of civil war following the Samarra bombing pushed some waverers to jump ship on their support for the war. Most famous of these is William F. Buckley Jr., who after Samarra declared that it is time for "the acknowledgment of defeat." Defeat? Yes, because of the inability of the Iraqi people to "suspend internal divisions" to allow a new democratic order to emerge.
This whole debate about civil war is surreal. What is the insurgency if not a war supported by one (minority) part of Iraqi society fighting to prevent the birth of the new Iraqi state supported by another (majority) part of Iraqi society?
By definition that is civil war, and there's nothing new about it.

Guerrilla Violence Kills 58
Khalilzad Accuses Iranians
Juan Cole
Informed Comment, 24 March 2006
...US Ambassador in Baghdad Zalmay Khalilzad accused Iran on Thursday of training and supplying both the Mahdi Army militia of Muqtada al-Sadr and elements of the Sunni Arab guerrilla movement. Neither allegation is plausible in context. Muqtada's men are mostly nativist Iraqi ghetto youth who often do not like Persians. The major force in Iraq trained by the Iranians is the Badr Corps of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a relative American ally. It is bizarre that Khalilzad should tie Iran to the Mahdi militia but not bring up Badr. Then to turn around and say that Iran is helping the Sunni Arab guerrillas who are blowing up Shiite Iraqis is just self-contradictory and wholly implausible.
Worse, I can't see why Khalilzad thinks the Iranians will talk with him while he is badmouthing them.

Communication Breakdown
By David Ignatius
Washington Post, 24 March 2006
When Bush speaks about the struggle of his presidency, it sometimes sounds as if he's talking to the mirror. Take this week's long, thinking-out-loud news conference: "I believe that my job is to go out and explain to people what's on my mind. That's why I'm having this press conference, see? I'm telling you what's on my mind. And what's on my mind is winning the war on terror." He's ready to lead, he insists; he has made a vow to the American people. To whom are these comments directed, if not himself?
The polls suggest that Bush is losing the ability to communicate effectively about the issue that matters most to him. He has a better story on Iraq than many people seem to appreciate: Iraqi politicians are in fact coming together toward a government of national unity; Iraqi troops are improving their performance; substantial reductions in the number of U.S. troops are likely this year. But to many Americans, judging by the polls, Bush's assertions sound like a broken record. His optimism comes across as happy talk.
Bush works hard to disguise it, but one senses the same inner conflict that afflicted Johnson as Vietnam began to go bad. In "The Best and the Brightest," David Halberstam described LBJ's torment: "He was a good enough politician to know what had gone wrong and what he was in for and what it meant to his dreams, but he could not turn back, he could not admit that he had made a mistake. He could not lose and thus he had to plunge forward." But, recalls Halberstam, "instead of leading, he was immobilized, surrounded, seeing critics everywhere."

Breaking the Silence About Incompetence in Iraq
A prominent former insider is criticizing the administration’s handling of Iraq’s reconstruction. And there’s more to come.
By Michael Hirsh
Newsweek via Talking Points Memo, 22 March 2006
Andrew Natsios has taken a lot of flak over his role in Iraq. The longtime director of America's foreign-aid program has been pilloried for his April 2003 remark, in an ABC News interview, that the U.S. government would spend no more than $1.7 billion to rebuild Iraq. In the ensuing three years, Natsios, a lifelong Republican, has played the loyal soldier for the administration. He regularly defended the U.S. reconstruction effort in Iraq even as he was lumped with other errant prognosticators like Paul Wolfowitz (That's “wildly off the mark") and Dick Cheney ("We will be greeted as liberators"). After Natsios resigned in January to take a teaching post at Georgetown University, he maintained his silence about Iraq.
...Natsios’s criticisms mark another significant milestone in the great Republican crackup over Iraq—especially since they came on the same day that President Bush reiterated, at a news conference, that he would not ask any senior staff to resign in connection with the mess in Mesopotamia. The president’s refusal to consider replacing senior officials, especially Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, has angered many Republicans, as well as Democrats, who say the administration needs to show a sense of accountability for its many mistakes in Iraq. At the very least, Natsios’s criticisms represent the latest effort by a Bush supporter to distance himself from America's new quagmire. Bremer himself, in his new book, "My Year in Iraq" (Simon and Schuster), blames Rumsfeld for many of his problems as viceroy, while other notable GOP stalwarts such as William F. Buckley have emerged as critics of the war.
...If the Democrats manage to get control of the House later this year, it's all going to come in an avalanche of subpoenas and new investigations. Not that the Republicans have been entirely sitting on their hands. When Rep. Christopher Shays, a Connecticut Republican, agreed to subpoena records of funds transmitted to Iraq, his House Government Reform Subcommittee learned that nearly $12 billion in U.S. currency was shipped to Iraq from the Federal Reserve Bank in New York, much of it with little accountability.
...It will take a long time for the contracting mess in Iraq to be sorted out, if it ever is. Natsios says he warned about what might happen if standard procedures, known as Federal Acquisition Regulations, were ignored. "I told Bremer and the CPA that we were following federal law and we were going to implement according to federal statutes so there weren't any scandals. And there weren't any with USAID. But we were criticized for following federal law." Regarding firms like Custer Battles, Natsios added: "The contractors they chose weren't the best people. I heard lots of stories. The staff would come in and say a group of retired officers has set up a business and they got this contract, and they didn't have any qualifications for it."
Jim Mitchell, the spokesman for the special Iraqi inspector general, says his office is currently looking at 57 possible cases of corruption and fraud, and he expects more arrests in coming days. But only four contractors and officials have been arrested so far. That's not a lot, considering the potential size of the Iraq corruption problem. Maybe it really is a free-fraud zone.

Good Versus Evil Isn't a Strategy
LA Times, 24 March 2006
Bush's worldview fails to see that in the Middle East, power politics is the key.
By Madeleine Albright, MADELEINE ALBRIGHT, secretary of State from 1997 to 2001, is the author of "The Mighty and the Almighty -- Reflections on America, God, and World Affairs," to be published by Harper Collins in May.
LA Times, 24 March 2006
The Bush administration's newly unveiled National Security Strategy might well be subtitled "The Irony of Iran." Three years after the invasion of Iraq and the invention of the phrase "axis of evil," the administration now highlights the threat posed by Iran — whose radical government has been vastly strengthened by the invasion of Iraq. This is more tragedy than strategy, and it reflects the Manichean approach this administration has taken to the world.
It is sometimes convenient, for purposes of rhetorical effect, for national leaders to talk of a globe neatly divided into good and bad. It is quite another, however, to base the policies of the world's most powerful nation upon that fiction. The administration's penchant for painting its perceived adversaries with the same sweeping brush has led to a series of unintended consequences.
SEE ALSO:
A Dodo of a National Security Policy
LA Times, 24 March 2006
...as a direct result of our military strength, those who don't like us (an ever-expanding group, thanks to the Bush administration) will employ the classic weapons of the weak: unconventional tactics such as guerrilla warfare, infrastructure sabotage, suicide bombings and terrorism.
Military analysts call it asymmetric warfare, or fourth generation warfare (4GW, in military jargon). And any military analyst worth his salt will tell you that as long as we remain a military superpower in the conventional sense, we can expect our adversaries to avoid direct military confrontations with us, which they will inevitably lose. Instead, they will turn to terrorism, attacks on civilians and similar "force multipliers." That's why we can't "win" the war in Iraq through a traditional military "use of strength."
This is realism, not defeatism. Our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan are doing what they have been trained to do, and then some, but effectively combating insurgents, terrorists and suicide bombers requires skills and institutional capacities our military isn't equipped to provide.
As Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon argue in their recent book, "The Next Attack," the U.S. is losing the war on terror.
We're losing because the cavemen in the Bush administration don't understand the difference between strength and bellicosity, and they don't understand that increased bellicosity will only compound the already grave threat of terrorism.
In Iraq today, we're not fighting the terrorists abroad so we do not have to face them at home, as the president claims. In fact, the Iraq war is creating and inspiring a whole new cadre of terrorists. In Benjamin and Simon's words, we have turned Iraq into a "country-sized [terrorist] training ground."
An effective national security policy in the age of asymmetric warfare would bear little resemblance to the neolithic strategies we have seen from the administration over the last five years. To protect ourselves, we need a new generation of Americans who are capable of looking outward, as well as inward; we need leaders (and citizens) with the linguistic and cultural skills necessary to understand the perspectives of allies and adversaries alike.
Such skills are crucial to intelligence gathering and the detection of terrorist threats, but they also are crucial to forming sensible policies in the first place. Such sensible policies include consistent and nonpoliticized support for meaningful democratic reform and human rights, a revitalized global development and anti-poverty strategy, an energetic effort to rebuild damaged global institutions and alliances, and a commitment to restoring U.S. credibility on issues of rights and the rule of law.
How close to extinction do we need to get before the American electorate figures this out?

Some GOP Flee From Bush, but Not His Money
By TOM RAUM
lLA Times, 23 March 2006
Even as some Republicans are becoming increasingly defiant on a range of issues, they're still lining up dutifully for the president's campaign dollars.
"I would be shocked if a legitimate Republican candidate, not just a fringe candidate, who got word that the president was coming to do a fundraiser said, `no, don't come to my district,'" said GOP consultant Rich Galen.
That said, Republican candidates don't want to be forced off message by such a visit and "have to spend the next two or three days talking about the president's policies ... or what happened yesterday in Ramadi (Iraq)," Galen said.
It has resulted in some fancy GOP footwork as candidates in tight races step away from Bush and Cheney on divisive issues but dance toward them when the subject is money.
Bush has scheduled fundraisers Friday for Rep. Mike Sodrel of Indiana at The Murat Centre in Indianapolis and for Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., at a private residence in the Pittsburgh area.
He's doing another one at a Washington hotel on Monday for Sen. Conrad Burns, R-Mont., where $1,000 will get you in the door, and $10,000 in combined contributions from others will get you a "photo opportunity with the president," according to an invitation.
Bush and Santorum, the No. 3 Republican in the Senate, are not scheduled to appear together publicly on Friday. Santorum, trailing Democrat Bob Casey in polls, broke with Bush on a plan to have an Arab company based in Dubai run terminals at some U.S. ports and has raised concerns about the administration's conduct of the war in Iraq.
When Bush went to Cleveland earlier in the week to make a major speech on Iraq, there was a noticeable absence of top Ohio Republicans, including Sen. Mike DeWine, who is locked in a tight re-election race.
Cheney went to Newark, N.J., earlier in the week to help raise $400,000 for New Jersey GOP Senate candidate Tom Kean Jr. But Kean showed up 15 minutes after Cheney left. Kean said he got stuck in traffic, a claim critics questioned based on the route he took.
Michael Steele, the GOP Senate candidate in Maryland, skipped Bush's speech at the U.S. Naval Academy in November, but joined the president later at a $500,000 fundraiser. Last month, GOP Senate candidate Mark Kennedy in Minnesota did not attend an appearance by Bush at a 3M Corp. plant outside Minneapolis, but joined him later at a fundraiser.
At a local GOP gathering in Nevada last weekend, Republican Sen. John Ensign tied himself to Ronald Reagan rather than Bush, saying spending under the Bush administration "has upset me."
Rep. Jon Porter, R-Nev., who also attended the gathering, told reporters: "I believe the president has his agenda, his focus. I have mine. I will always run on mine."
Worries over the Iraq war are weighing down all Republicans and causing strains between Bush and his congressional allies. "The big issue is now the war," said House Majority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio.

No one disputes rising inequality...but conspicuously left out is any talk about correlated concentration of political power
Economic Inequality In America
NPR's Diane Rehm Show, 22 March 2006
Listen to this segment
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Treasury Secretary John Snow has described economic inequality as "the new sort of battle line in the political arena." We talk about recent assessments of economic inequality in America, what--if anything--should be done about it, and the political ramifications.
Guests
Christian Weller, senior economist at the Center for American Progress
Greg Ip, reporter for the Wall Street Journal
Russell Roberts, research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, and professor of economics at George Mason University
SEE ALSO:
Letter to Secretary Snow
By PAUL KRUGMAN
NYT, 23 March 2006
Dear John Snow, secretary of the Treasury:
I'm glad that you've started talking about income inequality, which in recent years has reached levels not seen since before World War II. But if you want to be credible on the subject, you need to make some changes in your approach.
First, you shouldn't claim, as you seemed to earlier this week, that there's anything meaningful about the decline in some measures of inequality between 2000 and 2003. Every economist realizes that, as The Washington Post put it, "much of the decline in inequality during that period reflected the popping of the stock market bubble," which led to a large but temporary fall in the incomes of the richest Americans.
We don't have detailed data for more recent years yet, but the available indicators suggest that after 2003, incomes at the top and the overall level of inequality came roaring back. That surge in inequality explains why, despite your best efforts to talk up the economic numbers, most Americans are unhappy with the Bush economy.
...Speaking of executive compensation, Mr. Snow, it hurts your credibility when you say, as you did in a recent interview, that soaring pay for top executives reflects their productivity and that we should "trust the marketplace." Executive pay isn't set in the marketplace; it's set by boards that the executives themselves appoint. And executives' pay often bears little relationship to their performance.
You yourself, as you must know, are often cited as an example. When you were appointed to your present job, Forbes pointed out that the performance of the company you had run, CSX, was "middling at best." Nonetheless, you were "by far the highest-paid chief in the industry."
And the business careers of other prominent members of the administration, including the president and vice president, seem to demonstrate the truth of the adage that it's not what you know, it's who you know. So my advice on the question of executive pay is: don't go there.
Finally, you should stop denying that the Bush tax cuts favor the wealthy. I know that administration number-crunchers have produced calculations purporting to show that the tax cuts were tilted toward the middle class. But using the right measure — the effect of the tax cuts on after-tax income — the bias toward the haves and have-mores is unmistakable.
According to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, once the Bush tax cuts are fully phased in, they will raise the after-tax income of middle-income families by 2.3 percent. But they will raise the after-tax income of people like yourself, with incomes of more than $1 million, by 7.3 percent.
And those calculations don't take into account the indirect effects of tax cuts. If the tax cuts are made permanent, they'll eventually have to be offset by large spending cuts. In practical terms, that means cuts where the money is: in Social Security and Medicare benefits. Since middle-income Americans will feel the brunt of these cuts, yet received a relatively small tax break, they'll end up worse off. But the wealthy will be left considerably wealthier.
Of course, my suggestions about how to improve your credibility would force you to stop repeating administration talking points. But you're the secretary of the Treasury. Your job is to make economic policy, not to spout propaganda. Oh, wait.

More 'compassionate conservatism'
Ideology, Self-Interest Stand in the Way of Political Compromise on Asbestos Claims
By Jonathan Peterson
LA Times, 24 March 2006
It is a quest that challenges Congress to its very core.
For almost three decades, a political answer to the barrage of claims arising from exposure to cancer-causing asbestos has eluded lawmakers. Meanwhile, the longest-running legal brawl over a workplace hazard in U.S. history grinds on with no end in sight.
In the latest chapter, the Senate last month rejected a plan to create a $140-billion trust fund to compensate asbestos victims. Compromise has proved elusive because the issue pits Republican allies of big business against Democratic allies of trial lawyers — central constituencies to each party that have vastly different ideas about the conflict.
But asbestos has also pitted Republican against Republican and divided Democrats as well. And it has set loose an army of lobbyists whose corporate clients are equally polarized over the best way to end the fight.
"This vote is about more than asbestos," Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) recently told colleagues during debate on the plan. "It may well signal the last chance that this body will have to be productive, to break free of our respective orthodoxies and legislate for the public good."
Even discounting for hyperbole, Hatch was pointing to a stubborn reality of asbestos politics: Over and over, issues of ideology and self-interest have combined to make compromise impossible and preserve the status quo.

23 March 2006

The Joy of Being Blameless
NYT, 23 March 2006
The contrast could not have been more stark, nor the message more clear. On the day that a court-martial imposed justice on a 24-year-old Army sergeant for tormenting detainees at Abu Ghraib with his dog, President Bush said once again that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, whose benighted policies and managerial incompetence led to the prisoner abuse scandal, was doing a "fine job" and should stay at his post.
We've seen this sorry pattern for nearly two years now, since the Abu Ghraib horrors first shocked the world: President Bush has clung to the fiction that the abuse of prisoners was just the work of a few rotten apples, despite report after report after report demonstrating that it was organized and systematic, and flowed from policies written by top officials in his administration.
Just this week, Eric Schmitt and Carolyn Marshall provided a bloodcurdling account in the Times of how a Special Operations unit converted an Iraqi military base into a torture chamber, even using prisoners as paintball targets, in its frenzy to counter a widely predicted insurgency for which Mr. Rumsfeld had refused to prepare. In early 2004, an 18-year-old man suspected of selling cars to members of a terrorist network was arrested and beaten repeatedly. Another man said he had been forced to strip, punched in the spine until he fainted, put in front of an air-conditioner while cold water was poured on him and kicked in the stomach until he vomited. His crime? His father had worked for Saddam Hussein.
These accounts are tragically familiar. The names and dates change, but the basic pattern is the same, including the fact that this bestiality produced little or no useful intelligence. The Bush administration decided to go outside the law to deal with prisoners, and soldiers carried out that policy. Those who committed these atrocities deserve the punishment they are getting, but virtually all high-ranking soldiers have escaped unscathed. And not a single policy maker has been called to account.
Col. Thomas Pappas, the former intelligence chief at Abu Ghraib, testified at the dog handler's trial that the use of dogs had grown out of conversations he had had with military jailers from Guantánamo Bay led by Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who had been sent to Iraq to instruct soldiers there in the interrogation techniques refined at Gitmo under Mr. Rumsfeld's torture-is-legal policy. Colonel Pappas said General Miller had explained how to use the "Arab fear of dogs" to set up interrogations.
What of General Miller? He invoked his right against self-incrimination to avoid testifying, and Time magazine reported this week that he was exonerated by an Army whitewash. Apparently he was not responsible for the actions of soldiers operating under rules he put in place.
About the only high-ranking officer whose career has suffered over Abu Ghraib is Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, who was the commander in Iraq at the time. General Sanchez should certainly take responsibility, but he was also a victim of administration blunders.
General Sanchez was vaulted inappropriately from head of the First Armored Division to overall commander because Mr. Bush declared "mission accomplished": the war's over. He was then denied the staff, soldiers and equipment he needed to deal with the insurgency that quickly broke out and produced thousands of prisoners.
Mr. Bush has refused to hold himself or any of his top political appointees accountable for those catastrophic errors. Indeed, he has promoted many of them. And this is not an isolated problem. It's just one example, among many, of how this president's men run no risk of being blamed for anything that happens, no matter how egregious.
SEE ALSO:
Iraq Abuse Trial Is Again Limited to Lower Ranks
By ERIC SCHMITT
NYT, 23 March 2006
With the conviction on Tuesday of an Army dog handler, the military has now tried and found guilty another low-ranking soldier in connection with the pattern of abuses that first surfaced two years ago at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
But once again, an attempt by defense lawyers to point a finger of responsibility at higher-ranking officers failed in the latest case to convince a military jury that ultimate responsibility for the abuses lay farther up the chain of command.
Some military experts said one reason there had not been attempts to pursue charges up the military chain of command was that the military does not have anything tantamount to a district attorney's office, run by commanders with the authority to go after the cases.
"The real question is, who is the independent prosecutor who is liberated to pursue these cases," said Eugene Fidell, a specialist in military law. "There is no central prosecution office run by commanders. So you don't have a D.A. thinking, I'm going to follow this wherever it leads."
...Sergeant Smith had faced a maximum sentence of eight and a half years, but on Wednesday was sentenced to just under six months (179 days) in prison.
"A mere tap on the wrist for abusing prisoners gives the appearance that once again that the United States is not serious about its responsibility to discipline those convicted of human rights violations," Curt Goering, Amnesty International's senior deputy executive director for policy and programs, said in a statement.
Sergeant Smith will also be demoted to private, fined $2,250 and will be released from the Army with a bad-conduct discharge after serving his sentence.
Several generals and colonels have received career-ending reprimands and have been stripped of their commands, but there is no indication that other senior-level officers and civilian officials will ever be held accountable for the detainee abuses that took place in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The toughest official criticism Mr. Rumsfeld has faced was a relatively mild admonishment in August 2004 from a panel led by former Defense Secretary James R. Schlesinger, which faulted Mr. Rumsfeld for not exercising sufficient oversight.
But when Mr. Schlesinger was asked at the time if Mr. Rumsfeld or other high-ranking officials should resign in an ultimate act of accountability, he said that the secretary's "resignation would be a boon for all of America's enemies." President Bush later declined to accept Mr. Rumsfeld's two offers to resign.
Congress has largely retreated from any meaningful effort to hold senior officials accountable. Last year, Senator John W. Warner, a Virginia Republican who heads the Armed Services Committee, vowed to hold hearings on senior-level accountability. But Mr. Warner later backed off his promise, saying it would have to wait until judicial and nonjudicial proceedings were exhausted, a process that could take several more months.
SEE ALSO:
In Secret Unit's 'Black Room,' a Grim Portrait of U.S. Abuse
By ERIC SCHMITT and CAROLYN MARSHALL
NYT, 19 March 2006
As the Iraqi insurgency intensified in early 2004, an elite Special Operations forces unit converted one of Saddam Hussein's former military bases near Baghdad into a top-secret detention center. There, American soldiers made one of the former Iraqi government's torture chambers into their own interrogation cell. They named it the Black Room.
In the windowless, jet-black garage-size room, some soldiers beat prisoners with rifle butts, yelled and spit in their faces and, in a nearby area, used detainees for target practice in a game of jailer paintball. Their intention was to extract information to help hunt down Iraq's most-wanted terrorist, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, according to Defense Department personnel who served with the unit or were briefed on its operations.
The Black Room was part of a temporary detention site at Camp Nama, the secret headquarters of a shadowy military unit known as Task Force 6-26. Located at Baghdad International Airport, the camp was the first stop for many insurgents on their way to the Abu Ghraib prison a few miles away.
Placards posted by soldiers at the detention area advised, "NO BLOOD, NO FOUL." The slogan, as one Defense Department official explained, reflected an adage adopted by Task Force 6-26: "If you don't make them bleed, they can't prosecute for it." According to Pentagon specialists who worked with the unit, prisoners at Camp Nama often disappeared into a detention black hole, barred from access to lawyers or relatives, and confined for weeks without charges. "The reality is, there were no rules there," another Pentagon official said.
The story of detainee abuse in Iraq is a familiar one. But the following account of Task Force 6-26, based on documents and interviews with more than a dozen people, offers the first detailed description of how the military's most highly trained counterterrorism unit committed serious abuses.

Bush Says U.S. Troops Will Stay in Iraq Past '08
GOP Unrest Dismissed As Sign of Election Year
By Jim VandeHei
Washington Post, 22 March 2006
President Bush acknowledged yesterday that the war in Iraq is dominating nearly every aspect of his presidency, and he served notice for the first time that he expects the decision on when all U.S. troops come home to fall on his successors.

Bush, The Salesman
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post blog, 22 March 2006
When President Bush finished his news conference yesterday, most of the TV pundits were using words like "confident," "combative," "passionate" and, as Bob Schieffer put it, "George Bush sort of unleashed."
But some people I chatted with afterward thought it was painfully obvious that the president had done badly--even though he made about as strong as case for the war as he's ever made.
I think we've reached a point where much of the country has tuned out Bush. The people who like him and the people who dislike him aren't changing their minds. The people who support the war and the people who think it's a total disaster are dug into their positions.
Bush did find a useful foil at the presser in calling on liberal columnist Helen Thomas for the first time in three years. She attacked the war and essentially accused him of lying about why he took the country to war, allowing Bush not only to punch back but to show the country that he's up against a left-wing press corps.
Bush is in the unenviable position of saying much the same thing day after day, which is why he's not breaking through. The new tweaks are that he's taking real questions at his town hall meetings, instead of the pre-screened variety, and talking more candidly about the violence in Iraq, to show that he is not detached from the facts.
But the declarations by Bush, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld that things are getting better are contradicted, in most people's minds, by the pictures they see on television--and all the talk in the world about how the media overemphasize the negative isn't going to change that. With even former prime minister Ayad Allawi saying Iraq is in the midst of civil war, the administration's denials are falling flat.

Recapitulation of Some Bush Lies
David Corn
DavidCorn.com, 21 March 2006
...But here are a few basics that I've presented before.
* Bush said that Iraq had stockpiled large amounts of biological weapons. The best intelligence at the time--and it was wrong--concluded that Saddam had an active biological weapons R&D program, which is not the same thing as a massive stockpile.
* Bush said in December 2002 that it was possible that Iraq already had nuclear weapons. No intelligence indicated that was a possibility, and no intelligence analyst or expert in the matter believed this. The CIA had concluded that Iraq was years away from developing a nuclear weapon.
* Bush said that Saddam was "dealing" with al Qaeda. The intelligence possessed by the US government did not support that assertion.
* Bush said the International Atomic Energy Agency had released a new report stating that Iraq was rebuilding its nuclear weapons facilities. There was no such report.
* Bush said there was "no doubt" about the WMD intelligence possessed by his administration. There was doubt about most of the significant WMD findings: the aluminum tubes (supposedly bought by Iraq to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons but actually purchased for rocket launchers), the mobile biological weapons labs (which did not exist), the uranium-shopping in Niger (which did not occur), Iraq's development of unmanned aerial vehicles that could hit the United States with biological and chemical weapons (which also did not exist). Within the intelligence community, there were analysts and experts that questioned each one of these assertions used by the Bush administration. And the Defense Intelligence Agency noted in a classified report in he fall of 2002 that there was no specific evidence to back up the presumption that Iraq had stockpiles of chemical weapons. So there was plenty of doubt about the intelligence. It just wasn't shared with the American public.
[And] There are other examples... ...Media Matters has a list of its own...

George Bush's Trillion-Dollar War
By BOB HERBERT
NYT, 23 March 2006
Call it the trillion-dollar war.
George W. Bush's war in Iraq was never supposed to be particularly expensive. Administration types tossed out numbers like $50 billion and $60 billion. When Lawrence Lindsey, the president's chief economic adviser, said the war was likely to cost $100 billion to $200 billion, he was fired.
Some in the White House tried to spread the fantasy that Iraqi oil revenues would pay for the war. Paul Wolfowitz, the former deputy defense secretary and a fanatical hawk, told Congress that Iraq was "a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon."
The president and his hot-for-war associates were as wrong about the money as they were about the weapons of mass destruction.
Now comes a study by Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist at Columbia University, and a colleague, Linda Bilmes of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, that estimates the "true costs" of the war at more than $1 trillion, and possibly more than $2 trillion.
"Even taking a conservative approach and assuming all U.S. troops return by 2010, we believe the true costs exceed a trillion dollars," the authors say.

Study Says U.S. Companies Lag on Global Warming
By CLAUDIA H. DEUTSCH
NYT, 22 March 2006
European and Asian companies are paying more attention to global warming than their American counterparts. And chemical companies are more focused on the issue than oil companies.
Those are two conclusions from "Corporate Governance and Climate Change: Making the Connection," a report that Ceres, a coalition of investors and environmentalists, expects will influence investment decisions.
The report, released yesterday, scored 100 global corporations — 74 of them based in the United States — on their strategies for curbing greenhouse gases. It covered 10 industries — oil and gas, chemicals, metals, electric power, automotive, forest products, coal, food, industrial equipment and airlines — whose activities were most likely to emit greenhouse gases. It evaluated companies on their board oversight, management performance, public disclosure, greenhouse gas emissions, accounting and strategic planning.
The report gave the chemical industry the highest overall marks, with a score of 51.9 out of a possible 100; DuPont, with 85 points, was the highest-ranking American company in any of the industries. Airlines, in contrast, ranked lowest, with a score of 16.6; UAL, the parent of United Airlines, received just 3 points.
The study gave General Electric, American Electric Power and Cinergy among the highest scores in their industries. But over all, it concluded, American companies "are playing catch-up" with international competitors like BP, Toyota, Alcan, Unilever and Rio Tinto.
"Dozens of U.S. businesses are ignoring the issue with 'business as usual' responses that are putting their companies, and their shareholders, at risk," said Mindy S. Lubber, president of Ceres and director of the Investor Network on Climate Risk, a group whose members control a total of $3 trillion in investment capital. "When Cinergy and American Electric Power are tackling this issue, and Sempra and Dominion Resources are not, that should be a red flag to investors."

Fewer Doctors Providing Charity Care
AP via NYT, 23 March 2006
The percentage of physicians who provide free care to the poor has dropped over the past decade, signaling a growing problem for the uninsured, a survey suggests.
About three-quarters of physicians provided charity care in the mid-1990s, compared with about two-thirds now, according to a study being released Thursday by the Center for Studying Health System Change.
The numbers have declined across all major specialties. The highest rate of free care, 78.8 percent, comes from surgeons, perhaps because many of these doctors treat uninsured patients in emergency rooms.
Just over 60 percent of pediatricians provided free care, the lowest rate among the specialties. That could be because children are more likely than adults to have insurance coverage.
Dr. Peter Cunningham, senior researcher for the center, said he believes the drop in charity care reflects two trends:
--stagnant reimbursement rates from the government and lower fees that insurers are negotiating on behalf of their customers.
''In the past, a lot of physicians were able to afford it because they could charge paying patients higher rates,'' Cunningham said.
--more physicians are leaving solo practices to join large group practices.
''This means they have less control over the types of patients they see,'' Cunningham said.
The president of the American Medical Association said he was not surprised by the findings. Dr. J. Edward Hill, a family physician from Mississippi, said doctors are committed to providing charity care, but many are constrained by time and finances.
He noted that the average doctor completing residency has about $119,000 in debt.
''Charity care is not the solution to our health coverage problems in this country,'' Hill said. ''Maybe this will help wake up everybody so they understand we've got to solve the problem of almost 46 million people without (insurance) coverage.''
...''With fewer physicians providing charity care, it's going to drive more uninsured people to seek care in hospitals emergency rooms,'' Cunningham said. ''Care in emergency rooms is more costly, it's less efficient.''

Roberts, Scalia, Thomas Stand Squarely for Power of State Over Individual
Roberts Dissent Reveals Strain Beneath Court's Placid Surface
By LINDA GREENHOUSE
NYT, 23 March 2006
A Supreme Court decision on Wednesday in an uncelebrated criminal case did more than resolve a dispute over whether the police can search a home without a warrant when one occupant gives consent but another objects.
More than any other case so far, the decision, which answered that question in the negative by a vote of 5 to 3, drew back the curtain to reveal the strains behind the surface placidity and collegiality of the young Roberts court.
It was not only that this case, out of 32 decided since the term began in October, provoked Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. to write his first dissenting opinion. He had cast two earlier dissenting votes, and had to write a dissenting opinion eventually. And although there has been much commentary on the court's unusually high proportion of unanimous opinions, 22 so far compared with only 27 in all of the last term, few people expected that rate to continue as the court disposed of its easiest cases and moved into the heart of the term.
Rather, what was striking about the decision in Georgia v. Randolph, No. 04-1067, was the pointed, personal and acerbic tone in which the justices expressed their disagreement over whether the Fourth Amendment's ban on unreasonable searches was violated when the police in Americus, Ga., arriving at a house to investigate a domestic dispute, accepted the wife's invitation to look for evidence of her husband's cocaine use.
The dueling opinions themselves were relatively straightforward; as has often been the case in the court's recent past, although not so far this term, the justices revealed their real feelings in the footnotes.
Writing for the majority, Justice David H. Souter said the search was unreasonable, given the vocal objection of the husband, Scott Randolph. True, Justice Souter said, the court had long permitted one party to give consent to a search of shared premises under what is known as the "co-occupant consent rule." But he said that rule should be limited to the context in which it was first applied, the absence of the person who later objected.
The presence of the objecting person changed everything, Justice Souter said, noting that it defied "widely shared social expectations" for someone to come to the door of a dwelling and to cross the threshold at one occupant's invitation if another objected.
"Without some very good reason, no sensible person would go inside under those conditions," he said.
"We have, after all, lived our whole national history with an understanding of the ancient adage that a man's home is his castle," Justice Souter said. "Disputed permission is thus no match for this central value of the Fourth Amendment."
Justices John Paul Stevens, Anthony M. Kennedy and Ruth Bader Ginsburg joined the majority opinion, as did Justice Stephen G. Breyer, who explained himself in a concurring opinion notable for its ambivalent tone. Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. did not vote, as he was not a member of the court when the case was argued.
[Roberts stated in dissent] "Our common social expectations may well be that the other person will not, in turn, share what we have shared with them with another — including the police," he said, "but that is the risk we take in sharing."

22 March 2006

Fly Into a Building? Who Could Imagine?
By MAUREEN DOWD
NYT, 21 March 2006
Three little words:
Still employed there.
Of all the through-the-looking-glass moments in the last few days, the strangest is this: The F.B.I officer who arrested and questioned Zacarias Moussaoui told a jury that he had alerted his superiors about 70 times that Mr. Moussaoui was a radical Islamic fundamentalist who hated America and might be plotting to hijack an airplane.
Seventy? That makes one time for every virgin waiting for Mr. Moussaoui in heaven. Judging by how disastrously the prosecution is doing, the virgins will have to wait.
We could have cracked the 9/11 plot if the F.B.I. wasn't run by dunces. Mr. Moussaoui's lawyers got a break because according to the testimony of the officer, Harry Samit, a better-run bureau could have broken the case even without the terrorist's confession — maybe F.B.I. officers should have shot him with some paintballs.
On Sept. 10, 2001, Mr. Samit confided to a colleague that he was "desperate to get into Moussaoui's computer." He never heard back from the F.B.I.'s bin Laden unit before 9/11 — what did the unit have to do that was more pressing than catching bin Laden? And he was obstructed by officials in F.B.I. headquarters here, whom he labeled "criminally negligent."
He named two of the officials who did not want to endanger their careers with any excess aggression toward radical fundamentalists: David Frasca and Michael Maltbie, then working on the Radical Fundamentalist Unit.
Even though Condi Rice told the 9/11 commission that "no one could have imagined" terrorists' slamming a plane into the World Trade Center, an F.B.I. officer did. Officer Samit testified that a colleague, Greg Jones, tried to light a fire under Mr. Maltbie by urging him to "prevent Zacarias Moussaoui from flying a plane into the World Trade Center."
Later, Mr. Jones told Mr. Samit that it had just been "a lucky guess."
Kenneth Williams, a Phoenix agent, also sent a warning memo to the phlegmatic Mr. Frasca in July 2001, after sniffing out a scheme by Osama to dispatch Middle East extremists to America to get flight training.
Neil Lewis wrote in The Times yesterday that "William Carter, an F.B.I. spokesman, said that neither the bureau nor Mr. Maltbie nor Mr. Frasca, who are still employed there, would have any comment."
Still employed there? How can Mr. Maltbie and Mr. Frasca still be employed at the F.B.I.? How can Michael Chertoff still be employed at Homeland Security? How can Donald Rumsfeld still be employed at the Pentagon?
Missing 9/11, missing Katrina, mangling Iraq, racking up a $9 trillion debt — those things don't cause officials to lose their jobs. Only saying something honest — as prescient Gen. Eric Shinseki did — can get you a one-way ticket to Palookaville.

A Punchy President Meets the Press
By Dana Milbank
Washington Post, 22 March 2006
President Bush had a senior moment midway through his news conference yesterday. Referring to an earlier question from the Los Angeles Times' Jim Gerstenzang, who has covered much of Bush's presidency, Bush looked at the veteran correspondent -- and forgot his name.
"Back, to, uh, this man's question right here," he said, and then he looked down at his seating chart for a refresher before adding: "This man being Jim."
"Sorry, Jim," the president said after everybody had a chuckle at his expense. "I got a lot on my mind these days."
That he does. Bush's presidency is in trouble, his approval ratings are in the 30s, Iraq is approaching civil war, and congressional Republicans are in open rebellion. But Bush has maintained his equanimity. He may be a lame duck, but he seems to be enjoying his swim.
SEE ALSO:
Bush Slipping and Spinning at a Press Conference
DavidCorn.com, 21 March 2006
From my "Capital Games" column at www.thenation.com....
In his Tuesday press conference, President Bush delivered the good news:
But I believe -- I believe the Iraqis -- this is a moment where the Iraqis had a chance to fall apart, and they didn't. And that's a positive development.
Not falling apart. That's hardly the prewar view of post-invasion Iraq Bush sold the American public three years ago. But "positive" has become a rather relative term regarding Iraq.
When asked whether he was concerned by the growing number of Americans who, according to the polls, are "questioning the trustworthiness of you and this White House," Bush replied,
I believe that my job is to go out and explain to people what's on my mind. That's why I'm having this press conference, see. I'm telling you what's on my mind. And what's on my mind is winning the war on terror.
Is that supposed to reassure Americans--or Iraqis? Such a remark prompts a larger question: why does Bush and the White House believe that sending him out to give a seemingly endless series of speeches on Iraq--and his plan for victory there--is going to change anything at this stage? This is the guy who said the war was about WMDs and who said virtually nothing when senior members of his administration before the war made it sound as if the post-invasion period would be a breeze. With that history, is sharing what's on Bush's mind about Iraq an effective strategy?
Asked about Senator Russ Feingold's bill to censure him for approving warrantless wiretapping conducted by the National Security Agency, Bush replied,
I think during these difficult times -- and they are difficult when we're at war -- the American people expect there to be an honest and open debate without needless partisanship. And that's how I view it. I did notice that nobody from the Democrat Party has actually stood up and called for getting rid of the terrorist surveillance program. You know, if that's what they believe, if people in the party believe that, then they ought to stand up and say it. They ought to stand up and say the tools we're using to protect the American people shouldn't be used. They ought to take their message to the people and say, vote for me, I promise we're not going to have a terrorist surveillance program.
No needless partisanship? It's not needless partisanship to accuse the Democrats of being opposed to a "terrorist surveillance program"? This was a good example of the White House's Rove-ian response to criticism of the wiretapping program: equate the controversial (if not illegal) wiretapping with all surveillance conducted of terrorist suspects, including that which occurs lawfully under the authority of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and is monitored by the FISA court established by that law. No Democrat puts forward the "message" that "we're not going to have a terrorist surveillance program." The only issue is whether wiretapping can be done outside of the FISA law--which Bush claims is permissible and which others (including assorted legal scholars) argue is illegal.
SEE ALSO:
Bush Concedes Iraq War Erodes Political Status
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
NYT, 21 March 2006
 President Bush said Tuesday that the war in Iraq was eroding his political capital, his starkest admission yet about the costs of the conflict to his presidency, and suggested that American forces would remain in the country until at least 2009.
In a quick remark at a White House news conference about the reserves of political strength he earned in his 2004 re-election victory — "I'd say I'm spending that capital on the war" — Mr. Bush in effect acknowledged that until he could convince increasingly skeptical Americans that the United States was winning the war, Iraq would overshadow everything he did.
Later, in response to a question about whether a day would come when there would be no more American forces in Iraq, he said that "future presidents and future governments of Iraq" would make that decision.
That statement was one of the few he has made that provides insight into his thinking about the duration of the American commitment in Iraq, and signaled that any withdrawal of troops would extend beyond his term in office.
Mr. Bush asserted that Iraq was not in a civil war, and took issue with Ayad Allawi, a former Iraqi prime minister and White House ally, who said Sunday that it was. The president also said repeatedly that he was convinced that the United States would succeed in Iraq and that he would continue to deliver that message across the country.
"I'm going to say it again: if I didn't believe we could succeed, I wouldn't be there," he said at the nearly hourlong session in the White House press briefing room. "I wouldn't put those kids there."
The president's news conference was part of a White House campaign to convince Americans that there is good news in Iraq, not only the daily bloodshed they see on television. The session with reporters was sandwiched in between a series of presidential Iraq speeches — Washington last Tuesday, Cleveland this last Monday and Wheeling, W. Va., scheduled for Wednesday — and like them, projected a tone of qualified optimism.
Mr. Bush admitted mistakes and acknowledged chaos on the ground, but emphatically asserted that the situation would improve.
...The speech tactic worked in late 2005 when another series of Iraq addresses helped to stabilize the president's poll numbers temporarily. But analysts said that with his message now familiar to the nation, it was not clear whether people were listening.
"The problem with the speeches is they get gradually more realistic, but they are still exercises in spin," said Anthony Cordesman, a military specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "They don't outline the risks. They don't create a climate where people trust what's being said."
SEE ALSO:
Mr. Bush Unvarnished
Washington Post, 22 March 2006
...Much of the administration's approach in Iraq continues to strike us as feckless. Though he has been publicly calling on Iraqi politicians to form a unity government, Mr. Bush doesn't seem to be doing all he could to promote a deal; for example, there has been little visible effort to mobilize international pressure on the Iraqi parties. The focus on training Iraqi forces and consolidating U.S. bases since the December elections may have allowed Iraqi insurgents and foreign terrorists to regain ground, even in the city that Mr. Bush held up Monday as a model, Tall Afar. Though Iraqi power generation and oil production remain below prewar levels, the administration seems to have all but abandoned U.S.-financed reconstruction.

'I'm not a crook...'
Bush Defends Decisions on Iraq, but Concedes Public's Unease
AP via NYT, 21 March 2006
...The news conference marked a new push by Bush to confront doubts about his strategy in Iraq. A day earlier, he acknowledged to a sometimes skeptical audience that there was dwindling support for his Iraq policy and that he understood why people were disheartened.
''The terrorists haven't given up. They're tough-minded. They like to kill,'' he said Tuesday. ''There will be more tough fighting ahead.''
The president said he did not agree with former interim Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, who told the British Broadcasting Corporation Sunday, ''If this is not civil war, then God knows what civil war is.''
Bush said others inside and outside Iraq think the nation has stopped short of civil war. ''There are other voices coming out of Iraq, by the way, other than Mr. Allawi, who I know by the way -- like. A good fellow.''
''We all recognized that there is violence, that there is sectarian violence. But the way I look at the situation is, the Iraqis looked and decided not to go into civil war.''
Nearly four out of five Americans, including 70 percent of Republicans, believe civil war will break out in Iraq, according to a recent AP-Ipsos poll.
Bush said he's confident of victory in Iraq. ''I'm optimistic we'll succeed. If not, I'd pull our troops out,'' he said, warning that abandoning the nation would be a dangerous mistake.
''So failure in Iraq, which isn't going to happen, would send all kinds of terrible signals to an enemy that wants to hurt us and people who are desperate to change the condition in the broader Middle East,'' Bush said.
...His opening remarks were designed to steel Americans for more fighting in Iraq and put an optimistic spin on the state of the U.S. economy.
''Productivity is strong. Inflation is contained. Household net worth is at an all-time high,'' Bush said, crediting his administration's policies.
On Iraq, Bush bristled at a suggestion that he had wanted to wage war against that country since early in his presidency.
''I didn't want war. To assume I wanted war is just flat wrong ... with all due respect,'' he told a reporter. ''No president wants war.'' To those who say otherwise, ''it's simply not true,'' Bush said.

Pastors' Get-Out-the-Vote Training Could Test Tax Rules
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
NYT, 21 March 2006
Weeks after the Internal Revenue Service announced a crackdown on political activities by churches and other tax-exempt organizations, a coalition of nonprofit conservative groups is holding training sessions to enlist Pennsylvania pastors in turning out voters for the November elections.
Experts in tax law said the sessions, organized by four groups as the Pennsylvania Pastors Network, could test the promises by the tax agency to step up enforcement of the law that prohibits such activity by exempt organizations.
Such a test could define the boundaries for churches and other groups.
Although the tax agency has often overlooked political activity by churches, it has repeatedly warned the clergy and religious groups that it intends to enforce its rules with new vigor this year, in part to correct what it considers to have been too much political intervention by churches and charities in 2004.
The first training session, on March 6 in Valley Forge, included a videotaped message from a single candidate, Senator Rick Santorum, the Pennsylvania Republican who faces a difficult re-election fight.
"I encourage you to let your voices be heard from the pulpit" on vital issues, Mr. Santorum said, urging the pastors to champion a proposed constitutional ban on same-sex marriage, according to a recording made by a person at the session. Americans United for Separation of Church and State, a liberal group critical of the effort, provided the recording to The New York Times.
After the tape, organizers offered participating pastors copies of the senator's book "It Takes a Family."
Colin A. Hanna, founder of the conservative advocacy group Let Freedom Ring and master of ceremonies, called the book "thoroughly and soundly grounded in Christian doctrine and Scripture as the revealed word of God," according to the recording.
...Gary Marx, who helped direct the Bush re-election campaign's work with Christian groups in 2004, oversees the get-out-the-vote effort.
A politician speaking to a religious group is hardly new, and the tax code allows churches and other tax-exempt charities to register voters and to express views on public issues.
But the rules forbid supporting a political party or candidate. Inviting just one candidate to speak, singling out one candidate for special praise and highlighting a combination of issues tailored to one candidate's campaign are all factors that the I.R.S. considers problematic.
That is especially the case if the discussion is in the context of a get-out-the-vote effort, said Marcus S. Owens, a lawyer here who is the former director of the exempt-organizations division of the tax agency.
The training session was two weeks after the internal revenue commissioner, Mark W. Everson, spoke at the City Club of Cleveland saying, "We can't afford to have our charitable and religious institutions undermined by politics."
The tax agency found "a disturbing amount" of political activity during the 2004 election, including churches' inviting just one candidate to speak or distributing voters' guides that in effect favored one candidate over another, Mr. Everson said in a statement.
Pennsylvania appears to be the sole state where advocacy groups are pouring so much into working with churches so early. The outcome of the effort, and the way the tax agency responds, could have an influence far beyond the state.
Republicans, encouraged by their success mobilizing religion-minded voters in 2004, are stepping up their efforts to collect church directories around the country to help turn out voters for the midterm races. Democrats are watching the Pennsylvania senator's race closely in part because Mr. Santorum's opponent, Bob Casey Jr., shares Mr. Santorum's opposition to abortion rights, defusing the issue that has galvanized Christian conservatives.
In an interview on Friday, Mr. Hanna said the meetings were unrelated to Mr. Santorum's campaign. He noted that the training sessions explicitly encouraged the members of the clergy to speak about policies and to avoid endorsing candidates, guidelines within the limits of tax laws.
He also noted that one of the speakers was Raymond L. Flynn, a former Democratic mayor of Boston and ambassador to the Vatican who has become a supporter of President Bush and social conservative causes.
Mr. Santorum spoke on the tape for about seven minutes. A spokesman for the senator, Robert Traynham, said his statement was "generic video greetings about a public policy initiative that will be pending before the United States Senate," referring to the debate over the proposed ban on same-sex marriage.
"You are the leaders of the flock," Mr. Santorum told the pastors. "You have a responsibility to be informed and to inform" and "to help guide those who seek your counsel," especially about the importance of banning same-sex marriage.
SEE ALSO:
Grants Flow To Bush Allies On Social Issues
Federal Programs Direct At Least $157 Million
By Thomas B. Edsall
Washington Post, 22 March 2006
For years, conservatives have complained about what they saw as the liberal tilt of federal grant money. Taxpayer funds went to abortion rights groups such as Planned Parenthood to promote birth control, and groups closely aligned with the AFL-CIO got Labor Department grants to run worker-training programs.
In the Bush administration, conservatives are discovering that turnabout is fair play: Millions of dollars in taxpayer funds have flowed to groups that support President Bush's agenda on abortion and other social issues.
...Under the auspices of its religion-based initiatives and other federal programs, the administration has funneled at least $157 million in grants to organizations run by political and ideological allies, according to federal grant documents and interviews.
An example is Heritage Community Services in Charleston, S.C. A decade ago, Heritage was a tiny organization with deeply conservative social philosophy but not much muscle to promote it. An offshoot of an antiabortion pregnancy crisis center, Heritage promoted abstinence education at the county fair, local schools and the local Navy base. The budget was $51,288.
By 2004, Heritage Community Services had become a major player in the booming business of abstinence education. Its budget passed $3 million -- much of it in federal grants distributed by Bush's Department of Health and Human Services -- supporting programs for students in middle school and high school in South Carolina, Georgia and Kentucky.
Among other new beneficiaries of federal funding during the Bush years are groups run by Christian conservatives, including those in the African American and Hispanic communities. Many of the leaders have been active Republicans and influential supporters of Bush's presidential campaigns.
Programs such as the Compassion Capital Fund, under the Health and Human Services, are designed to support religion-based social services, a goal that inevitably funnels money to organizations run by people who share Bush's conservative cultural agenda.
"If what you are asking is, has George Bush as president of the United States established priorities in spending for his administration? The answer is yes," said Wade F. Horn, who as assistant secretary for children and families at HHS oversees much of the spending going to conservative groups. "That is a prerogative that presidents have."
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Fmr. GOP Strategist Kevin Phillips on American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century
DemocracyNow.org, 21 March 2006
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Former Republican strategist Kevin Phillips joins us to discuss his new book, "American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century." Throughout the 1970s and 1980s Phillips was viewed as one of the GOP's top theoreticians and electoral analysts.

Writing American Theocracy
By Kevin Phillips
TPMCafe.com, 20 March 2006
My underlying thesis in American Theocracy is that these are the three major perils of the United States in the early 21st century. First, radical religion – this encompasses everything from the Pat Robertson-Jerry Falwell types to the attacks on medicine and science and the Left Behind books with their End Times and Armageddon scenarios. Second, oil dependence – oil was essential to 20th century U.S. hegemony, and its growing scarcity and cost could play havoc. And third, debt is becoming a national weakness – indeed, the “borrowing” industry in the U.S. has grown so rapidly that finance has displaced manufacturing as the leading U.S. sector.