BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: beardedbruce
Date: 20 Jul 07 - 01:09 PM

From the Washington Post

The 20 Percent Solution

By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, July 20, 2007; Page A19

Amid the Senate's all-night pillow fight and other Iraq grandstanding, real things are happening on the ground in Iraq. They consist of more than just a surge of U.S. troop levels. Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker have engaged us in a far-reaching and fundamental political shift. Call it the 20 percent solution.

Ever since the December 2005 Iraqi elections, the United States has been waiting for the central government in Baghdad to pass grand national accords on oil, federalism and de-Baathification to unify and pacify the country. The Maliki government has proved too sectarian, too weak and perhaps too disposed to Iranian interests to rise to the task.

The Democrats cite this incapacity as a reason to give up and get out. A tempting thought, but ultimately self-destructive to our interests. Accordingly, Petraeus and Crocker have found a Plan B: pacify the country region by region, principally by getting Sunnis to join the fight against al-Qaeda.

This has begun to happen in Anbar and Diyala. First, because al-Qaeda are foreigners. So are we, but -- reason No. 2 -- unlike them, we are not barbarous. We don't amputate fingers for smoking, decapitate with pleasure and kill Shiites for sport.

Third, al-Qaeda's objectives are not the Sunnis'. Al-Qaeda adherents live for endless war and a reborn caliphate. Ultimately, they live to die. Iraqi Sunnis are not looking for a heavenly date with 72 virgins. They are looking for a deal, and perhaps just survival after U.S. troops are gone.

That's why so many Sunnis have accepted Petraeus's bargain -- they join our fight against al-Qaeda, and we give them weaponry and military support. With that, they can rid themselves of the al-Qaeda cancer now. And later, when the Americans inevitably leave, they'll be better positioned to defend themselves against the 80 percent Shiite-Kurd majority they are beginning to realize they may have unwisely taken on.

The bargain is certainly working for us. The recent capture of the leading Iraqi in al-Qaeda's Iraq affiliate is no accident, comrade. You capture such people only when you have good intelligence, and you have good intelligence only when the locals have turned against the terrorists.

The place of his capture -- Mosul -- is also telling. Mosul is where you go if you've been driven out of Anbar and Diyala and have no other good place to go. You don't venture into the Shiite south or the purely Kurdish north where the locals will kill you.

The charge against our previous war strategy was that we were playing whack-a-mole: They escape from here, they reestablish there. Petraeus's plan is to eliminate all al-Qaeda sanctuaries.

You hardly hear about that from the antiwar Democrats in the Senate. But you did hear it from someone closer to the scene: Shiite lawmaker and close Maliki adviser Hassan al-Suneid. He is none too happy with the new American strategy. He complained bitterly about the overtures to Sunni groups in Anbar and Diyala. "These are gangs of killers," he told the Associated Press. Petraeus is following a plan according to a "purely American vision."

How very true and very refreshing. We had been vainly pursuing an Iraqi vision that depended on people such as Suneid and Maliki to make the grand bargain. So now, the American vision. "The strategy that Petraeus is following might succeed in confronting al-Qaeda in the early period, but it will leave Iraq an armed nation, an armed society and militias," said Suneid.

Again, he is precisely right. His coalition would not or could not disarm the militias. So Petraeus has taken on the two extremes: (a) the Shiite militias and their Iranian Revolutionary Guard enablers, and (b) al-Qaeda, with the help of local Sunnis.

For an interminable 18 months we waited for the 80 percent solution -- for Nouri al-Maliki's Shiite-Kurdish coalition to reach out to the Sunnis. The Petraeus-Crocker plan is the 20 percent solution: peel the Sunnis away from the insurgency by giving them the security and weaponry to fight the new common enemy -- al-Qaeda in Iraq.

Maliki & Co. are afraid we are arming Sunnis for the civil war to come. On the other hand, we might be creating a rough balance of forces that would act as a deterrent to all-out civil war and encourage a relatively peaceful accommodation.

In either case, that will be Iraq's problem after we leave. For now, our problem is al-Qaeda on the Sunni side and the extremist militias on the Shiite side. And we are making enough headway to worry people such as Suneid. The Democrats might listen to him to understand how profoundly the situation is changing on the ground -- and think twice before they pull the plug on this complicated, ruthless, hopeful "purely American vision."

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: beardedbruce
Date: 20 Jul 07 - 01:05 PM

From the washington Post

Trouble With the Neighbors

By Michael Gerson
Friday, July 20, 2007; Page A19

One of the most infuriating problems in Iraq seems to generate precious little fury.

In a kind of malicious chemistry experiment, hostile powers are adding accelerants to Iraq's frothing chaos. Iran smuggles in the advanced explosive devices that kill and maim American soldiers. Syria allows the transit of suicide bombers who kill Iraqis at markets and mosques, feeding sectarian rage.

This is not a complete explanation for the difficulties in Iraq. Poor governance and political paralysis would exist whether Iran and Syria meddled or not. But without these outside influences, Tony Blair told me recently, the situation in Iraq would be "very nearly manageable."

America does not merely have challenges in the Middle East; we have enemies who contribute to the deaths of our troops. Yet Americans have shown little outrage, and the military reaction has been muted.

A stronger response would be justified, but the choices are neither obvious nor easy.

Iran, the main strategic threat, has two conflicting tendencies: It doesn't want long-term chaos in neighboring Iraq, but it wants America to fail decisively there. The second tendency is currently ascendant because the Iranians are hopeful that America is on the verge of a humiliating collapse of will -- for them an irresistible source of immediate pleasure. So Iranian paramilitary groups train and arm radical Shiite militias and provide explosive devices that also find their way to radical Sunni groups.

Engagement and deft diplomacy are not likely to change the Iranian interest in American defeat. Iran would require an unacceptable inducement to bail out American interests in Iraq: permission to proceed with its nuclear program. America would purchase tactical advantages in Iraq at a tremendous price -- a strategic nightmare in the entire Middle East.

Additional economic pressures on Iran and its proxies would increase the cost of its current course. This week, President Bush issued an executive order financially targeting groups and individuals who recruit and send terrorists to Iraq. But any real leverage in this area will require the Europeans to take actions of their own.

There are also more straightforward approaches. Earlier this year, Bush announced a dragnet directed at Iranian paramilitary activity in Iraq, and the troop surge has taken on the radical militias more directly. Further action might involve stepping up raids against Iranians in Iraq who use legitimate jobs as cover.

Beyond Iraq's borders, the options become difficult: engaging in hot pursuit against weapon supply lines over the Iranian border or striking explosives factories and staging areas within Iran. This sort of escalation is opposed by the Iraqi government and American military leaders. The Defense Department fears what is called "escalation dominance" -- meaning that in a broadened conflict, the Iranians could complicate our lives in Iraq and the region more than we complicate theirs.

Syria, however, is what one former administration official calls "lower-hanging fruit." The provocations are nearly as severe. Syria's Baathist regime provides a base of operations for its Iraqi Baathist comrades involved in the Sunni insurgency. Suicide bombers from Saudi Arabia and North Africa arrive by plane in Damascus, and, with the help of facilitators, some 50 to 80 cross into Iraq each month. The Syrians say they lack the ability to stop them; what they lack is the intention.

Pressuring Syria is not without its own complications. The regime can cause more suffering for its hostage Lebanon or increase tensions with Israel. And our European allies are less willing to support robust sanctions against Syria than against Iran, because Syria is not a nuclear threat.

But here the forceful options are more serious. Recent successful operations in Anbar province were undertaken, in part, to disrupt the trail of suicide bombers passing through Syria. It might also make sense to pursue targets into Syria on this theory: The Syrians say they are powerless to stop the flow of murderers killing innocent Iraqis, so we should try.

Increasing pressure of all types on Syria would demonstrate that being part of an anti-American alliance with Iran brings unpleasant consequences. And when that pressure builds sufficiently, it becomes possible to offer Syria a way out that separates it from Iran.

These are realistic responses to the serious provocations of Iran and Syria: ramping up economic pressure on both regimes; intensifying operations within Iraq against foreign influence; and taking limited but forceful action against Syria's Ho Chi Minh Trail of terrorists.

In combination with the strategy of commander David Petraeus, these measures hold out the promise of something unthinkable a few months ago: America, once again, on the strategic offensive.

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: beardedbruce
Date: 20 Jul 07 - 12:58 PM

General Pleads for Time to Secure Iraq

AP - Fri, 20 Jul 2007 11:27:26 -0400 (EDT)
By ROBERT BURNS

If the U.S. troop buildup in Iraq is reversed before the summer of 2008, the military will risk giving up the security gains it has achieved at a cost of hundreds of American lives over the past six months, the commander of U.S. forces south of Baghdad said Friday.

Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, mentioned none of the proposals in Congress for beginning to withdraw U.S. troops as soon as this fall. But he made clear in an interview that in his area of responsibility south of Baghdad, it will take many more months to consolidate recent gains.

"It's going to take through (this) summer, into the fall, to defeat the extremists in my battle space, and it's going to take me into next spring and summer to generate this sustained
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security presence," he said, referring to an Iraqi capability to hold gains made by U.S. forces.

Lynch said he had projected in March, when he arrived as part of the troop buildup, that it would take him about 15 months to accomplish his mission, which would be summer 2008.

He expressed concern at the growing pressure in Washington to decide by September whether the troop buildup is working and to plan for an early start to withdrawing all combat troops.

Under Lynch's command are two of the five Army brigades that President Bush ordered to the Baghdad area in January as part of a revised counterinsurgency strategy. As part of that "surge" of forces, Lynch's command was created in order to put added focus on stopping the flow of weaponry and insurgents into the capital from contentious areas to the south.

The three other brigades are in Baghdad and a volatile province northeast of the capital with the purpose of securing the civilian population in hopes that reduced levels of sectarian violence will give Sunni and Shiite leaders an opportunity to create a government of true national unity and to pass legislation designed to promote reconciliation.

Lynch said that Iraqi security forces are not close to being ready to take over for the American troops. So if the extra troops that were brought in this year are to be sent home in coming months, the insurgents - both Sunni and Shiite extremist groups - will regain control, he said.

"To me, it would be wrong to take ground from the enemy at a cost - I've lost 80 soldiers under my command -- 56 of those since the fourth of April - it would be wrong to have fought and won that terrain, only to turn around and give it back," he said in an interview with two reporters who traveled with him by helicopter to visit troops south and west of Baghdad.


He said there is a substantial risk that al-Qaida in Iraq, a mostly Iraqi Sunni extremist group, will try to launch a mass-casualty attack on one of the 29 small U.S. patrol bases south of Baghdad in hopes of influencing the political debate in Washington on ending the war.

Lynch visited one of those outposts Friday, near the village of Jurfassakhar along the Euphrates River. He was told by the officer in charge, Lt. Col. Robert Balcavage, that the camp was in "the deepest bad-guy country around," with threats from multiple insurgent groups.

Near Jurfassakhar, just west of the larger town of Iskandariyah, al-Qaida elements have recently been fighting another Sunni extremist group but could be preparing to resume attacks on U.S. and Iraqi forces.

"And that's why we've got to continue offensive operations," he said. "I worry about this talk about reducing or terminating the surge," using the military's term of deploying the five extra combat brigades to the Baghdad area, as well as extra Marines to Anbar province west of the capital.

"We've got him on the run," Lynch said, referring to the insurgents. "Some people say we've got him on the ropes. I don't believe that. But I believe we've got him on the run."

Lynch said he thinks too much focus is being placed on the military part of the solution to Iraq's problems and too little on the need to promote progress toward a functional central government.

Lynch said he thinks too much focus in being placed on the military part of the solution to Iraq's problems and too little on the need to promote progress toward a functional central government.

"We can continue to secure the population here and secure terrain, but until you get a government (that) is of the people, for the people and by the people, and you have an economy where people actually have employment, this place is going to continue to struggle," he said.

Lynch also said the Iraqi government needs to put about seven more Iraqi army battalions and about five more Iraqi police battalions in his area in order to provide the security now provided by U.S. forces.

In a reference to the sectarian tensions that have stalled progress toward stability in Iraq, the general said he has submitted to the Shiite-dominated national government a list of about 3,000 names of Sunnis who have volunteered to join the government security forces south of Baghdad. None of the 3,000 has been approved for addition to the government payroll.

"If they (the central government) just say `No, we ain't gonna do it,' then we've got a problem because (then) we've got nothing but locals who want to secure their area," he said, adding later that this would amount to a "Band-aid" fix rather than a lasting solution.

Ultimately, Lynch said, success or failure will be determined by the Iraqis themselves, and the outcome will not come quickly.

"This is Iraq. Everything takes time," he said.

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Amos
Date: 20 Jul 07 - 12:27 PM

What happened to the George Bush who insisted on honest government?

By Joseph L. Galloway | McClatchy Newspapers
Posted on Thu, July 5, 2007

Why is it that the Bush administration, in its dying throes, looks remarkably more like an organized crime ring than one of the arms of the American government? A poorly organized and run crime ring, truly, but a crime ring nonetheless.

Why do I keep remembering the George Bush that I actually once voted for when he first ran for president — the one who talked of bringing in an administration that would look more like the face of America and of giving us a government whose appointees would be honest, upright, fair and moral.

Yes, that's the one. What happened to him? Where did that George Bush go? When did he go over to The Dark Side? What enticements did Vice President Darth Cheney offer him? Was it the vision of unlimited, unchecked power over the world?

How can it be that this man from Texas presides over a White House that shelters and provides cover for men like Karl Rove and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, who clearly believe that the laws of our country are only meant to be imposed on lesser beings, the man in the street?

Remember the George Bush who declared that anyone who violated the law and participated in the leaking of the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame would be fired on the spot?

What about Karl Rove who works beside President Bush and is his Mr. Fixit and Mr. Fix Them? Was it just my imagination or did I not hear sworn testimony and see documents indicating that he was up to his pudgy little neck in the whole deal?

Can we not suppose that Mr. Rove was, in fact, at the root of the 51 White House employees whose e-mails miraculously vanished from all those e-mail accounts that executive-branch employees maintained through a cut-out: the Republican National Committee? How many laws governing the preservation of White House records, passed by Congress after the sorry spectacle of Richard Nixon and the vanishing 18.5 minutes of taped chit-chat in the Oval Office, have Mr. Rove and his hench-people broken? What ARE they hiding?

What about the lies and lame excuses put forward to hide their actions in the case of the missing federal prosecutors by the chief law enforcement officer of our country, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, and his sophomoric young assistant attorneys general with their degrees from universities where only one book is on the reading list?

Does anyone doubt that Karl Rove personally drew up the list of those prosecutors who were to be executed because they did not enthusiastically go after people who were likely to vote for the Democrats in any election?

The good attorney general should be fired if he didn't know where that list came from and he should also be fired if he did know and denied it under oath before Congress. It was his department, the one that is supposedly dedicated to upholding the laws of our nation fairly and with an even hand, and he damned well should have known and damned well should have told the simple truth.

Where is it written in either the federal statutes or the Constitution of the United States that our laws against criminal acts apply to everyone but nice, meek, small-statured Republican political operatives who have a wonderful wife and children? Our prisons are full of nice, meek white-collar criminals who cheated a bit on their taxes or back-dated their bountiful option awards or raped and looted the coffers of corporations and beggared the poor fools who trusted them and bought stock in their criminal enterprises.

The estimable Scooter Libby repeatedly lied under oath to investigators of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and a sitting federal grand jury. Last time I looked that is a felony offense punishable by fine and imprisonment.

There are two former agents of the U.S. Border Patrol sitting in a federal prison for shooting a fleeing dope smuggler and then lying in their reports in an attempt to cover their butts with their bosses. Where is their commutation of sentences? Where is their pardon?

Instead of firing federal prosecutors who didn't go after illegal immigrants and voter registration fraud like pit bulls, why isn't our president demanding the dismissal of prosecutors and appointed regulators who turn a blind eye while the National Treasury is looted of billions by big corporations whose bosses write very large checks to Republican candidates?

What we have here, at the very heart of our own government, is a morass of criminal behavior unlike anything seen in recent American history.

It is past time to throw the rascals out of office, and I mean ALL the rascals of whatever party or political persuasion. If they didn't participate then they closed their eyes to the rot, and by this I cheerfully include the Democrats in Congress who now control Congress and haven't done anything but talk about doing something.

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Amos
Date: 20 Jul 07 - 11:34 AM

All the President's Enablers
            
Published: July 20, 2007

In a coordinated public relations offensive, the White House is using reliably friendly pundits — amazingly, they still exist — to put out the word that President Bush is as upbeat and confident as ever. It might even be true.

What I don't understand is why we're supposed to consider Mr. Bush's continuing confidence a good thing.

Remember, Mr. Bush was confident six years ago when he promised to bring in Osama, dead or alive. He was confident four years ago, when he told the insurgents to bring it on. He was confident two years ago, when he told Brownie that he was doing a heckuva job.

Now Iraq is a bloody quagmire, Afghanistan is deteriorating and the Bush administration's own National Intelligence Estimate admits, in effect, that thanks to Mr. Bush's poor leadership America is losing the struggle with Al Qaeda. Yet Mr. Bush remains confident.

Sorry, but that's not reassuring; it's terrifying. It doesn't demonstrate Mr. Bush's strength of character; it shows that he has lost touch with reality.

Actually, it's not clear that he ever was in touch with reality. I wrote about the Bush administration's "infallibility complex," its inability to admit mistakes or face up to real problems it didn't want to deal with, in June 2002. Around the same time Ron Suskind, the investigative journalist, had a conversation with a senior Bush adviser who mocked the "reality-based community," asserting that "when we act, we create our own reality."

People who worried that the administration was living in a fantasy world used to be dismissed as victims of "Bush derangement syndrome," liberals driven mad by Mr. Bush's success. Now, however, it's a syndrome that has spread even to former loyal Bushies.

Yet while Mr. Bush no longer has many true believers, he still has plenty of enablers — people who understand the folly of his actions, but refuse to do anything to stop him. ...

---

Also Paul Krugman.

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Amos
Date: 20 Jul 07 - 11:18 AM

"..(P)olitical courage was nowhere in evidence when Senate Democrats tried to get a vote on a measure that would have forced a course change in Iraq, and Republicans responded by threatening a filibuster. Mr. Lugar, along with several other Republicans who have expressed doubts about the war, voted against cutting off debate, thereby helping ensure that the folly he described so accurately in his Iraq speech will go on.

Thanks to that vote, nothing will happen until Gen. David Petraeus, the top commander in Iraq, delivers his report in September. But don't expect too much even then. I hope he proves me wrong, but the general's history suggests that he's another smart, sensible enabler.

I don't know why the op-ed article that General Petraeus published in The Washington Post on Sept. 26, 2004, hasn't gotten more attention. After all, it puts to rest any notion that the general stands above politics: I don't think it's standard practice for serving military officers to publish opinion pieces that are strikingly helpful to an incumbent, six weeks before a national election.

In the article, General Petraeus told us that "Iraqi leaders are stepping forward, leading their country and their security forces courageously." And those security forces were doing just fine: their leaders "are displaying courage and resilience" and "momentum has gathered in recent months."

In other words, General Petraeus, without saying anything falsifiable, conveyed the totally misleading impression, highly convenient for his political masters, that victory was just around the corner. And the best guess has to be that he'll do the same thing three years later.

You know, at this point I think we need to stop blaming Mr. Bush for the mess we're in. He is what he always was, and everyone except a hard core of equally delusional loyalists knows it.

Yet Mr. Bush keeps doing damage because many people who understand how his folly is endangering the nation's security still refuse, out of political caution and careerism, to do anything about it. "

From Paul Krugman of the NY Times, 7-20-07

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Amos
Date: 20 Jul 07 - 11:14 AM

The NY Times comments on the Administration's abuse of trust as governors:

""Our hard work is noticed," e-mailed a pleased official of the nation's anti-drug abuse agency after helping the White House bolster vulnerable G.O.P. members of Congress with district visits and federal grants from anti-drug officials in the months before the 2006 elections. The e-mailer apologized that leaders from the supposedly politics-free agency were dispatched to "god awful places" on the taxpayers' tab, but took comfort in the word that, yes, Karl Rove, President Bush's political guru, was pleased with the agency's campaign to help more than a dozen shaky candidates.

This latest episode of the administration's treatment of incumbency as a 24/7 campaign machine is properly under investigation by Congress. The White House's partisan paw print is already all over the firings of nine United States attorneys in an increasingly obvious political purge. And investigators have found that the Hatch Act law barring politicking on the job was violated by a G.O.P. loyalist who ran the General Services Administration, the government's contract-rich, housekeeping monolith.

"Help our candidates," Lurita Doan, the G.S.A. administrator, was widely quoted, instructing underlings to sit through a PowerPoint lecture by Mr. Rove's operatives. The brazen topic was the use of agency clout to undermine the top 20 "House targets" next year among incumbent Congressional Democrats.

Taxpayers must wonder what happened to the notion of governance. The White House nonchalantly insists both parties have laced the duties of federal office with partisanship. Up to a point, perhaps. But the increasingly relevant question as more abuses are disclosed is just how far the Bush administration has gone in mocking the legal distinction between running government and running for office."

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: beardedbruce
Date: 19 Jul 07 - 09:39 AM

From the Washington Post:

Facing al-Qaeda

With the terrorists growing stronger, their sanctuary in Pakistan must be eliminated.
Thursday, July 19, 2007; Page A18


HOMELAND Security Secretary Michael Chertoff makes a good point: No one who has been following the news should have been surprised by the conclusion of U.S. intelligence agencies that al-Qaeda is growing stronger and that the threat that it will stage another major attack against the U.S. homeland is a serious one. That al-Qaeda has established a sanctuary in Pakistan's tribal areas -- cited as among "key elements" in the regeneration of "its homeland attack ability" by the new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) -- has been known and discussed since last year. The "leverage" provided by a thriving affiliate organization in Iraq is all too obvious. What's missing in Washington is not information about al-Qaeda, Mr. Chertoff says, but a readiness to make hard decisions about how to protect the country.

The Homeland Security chief has some choices he'd like Congress to make, including modifications to visa-free travel to the United States and the installation of technology allowing for tighter screening of air travelers. The issues he raises are important, and we will return to them. Yet, if there is one decision that seems most urgent in light of the intelligence reports, it is what to do about the al-Qaeda base in Pakistan, which is allowing the group's senior leadership to coordinate with what the NIE calls "operational lieutenants" and to train militants for operations in Europe and the United States.

The Bush administration has been ducking this critical problem for too long, despite the clear lesson of Afghanistan. The Sept. 11 commission concluded that tolerance of al-Qaeda's sanctuary there was of "direct and indirect value . . . to al-Qaeda in preparing the 9/11 attack." The commission said the U.S. government must disrupt such bases in the future "using all elements of national power." Senior administration officials have publicly acknowledged since early this year that an al-Qaeda sanctuary exists in Pakistan. But they have rigidly stuck to a strategy of depending on Pakistan's autocratic president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, to take that disruptive action -- even while Mr. Musharraf has pursued a contrary policy of appeasing the Pakistani tribesmen who are harboring the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

Administration officials say they believe Mr. Musharraf will resume military operations in the tribal areas after a 10-month suspension -- if only because the militants broke a truce last week and attacked government forces. But earlier operations by the Pakistani army failed; government forces may be too weak to break up the sanctuary. Mr. Musharraf himself is preoccupied with preserving his own regime. If the militants offer him a separate peace, he may well accept it.

The administration says it has a comprehensive strategy that involves funneling $750 million over five years into development programs in the impoverished tribal areas and beefing up the Pakistani forces that patrol the frontier with Afghanistan. The State Department says it is also pressing for democratic elections in Pakistan this year, though it has ignored Mr. Musharraf's blatant preparations to manipulate the process. If it really were to focus on economic development and democracy rather than propping up the tottering general, the United States might contribute to stabilizing, over a period of years, one of the world's wildest territories.

Yet that won't address the imminent threat of a revived al-Qaeda organization able to strike the United States from a secure base. If Pakistani forces cannot -- or will not -- eliminate the sanctuary, President Bush must order targeted strikes or covert actions by American forces, as he has done several times in recent years. Such actions run the risk of further destabilizing Pakistan. Yet those risks must be weighed against the consequences of another large-scale attack on U.S. soil. "Direct intervention against the sanctuary in Afghanistan apparently must have seemed . . . disproportionate to the threat," the Sept. 11 commission noted. The United States must not repeat that tragic misjudgment.

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Donuel
Date: 18 Jul 07 - 05:10 PM

...why not Bush to close America.

(I power stapled my little finger a couple weeks ago so my typing is still iffy.)

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Donuel
Date: 18 Jul 07 - 05:08 PM

It took Nixon to open China so shy not Bush to close America?


7-18-7


BAGHDAD -- "Yesterday, one of my good friends from another office was telling me they were going to start issuing armored vests to us office types because of the growing danger from mortars. We are being shelled daily and, like everything else, casualties are way underreported . But more important than the flak vests was a file he had copied out and which he gave to me to smuggle out of the country. As I have said, we have strict censorship here on all incoming and outgoing snail mail, email, phone calls and so on. This report is so serious I am making a précis of it and am even now sending it around to various news outlets, both Stateside and elsewhere. I have my sources and believe me, the CIC people here are so stupid they couldn't pour piss out of a boot if the directions were on the bottom.

It states that because of "growing popular unrest in the United States, caused by the prolonged war in Iraq .coupled with obvious Congressional inaction," the U.S. military has drawn up plans for combating domestic U.S. civil insurrections. This is not a theoretical study but a very specific one. Units to be used domestically are listed in detail as are detention centers, etc.

As a result of this, plans are now in train to segregate, retrain and reequip certain anti-insurgent U.S. military units now serving in Iraq and to prepare them for quick transfer back to the United States for use "as needed" The Pentagon command believes that such civil insurrections are not only a possibility but a very real probability in the event that the President and his advisors maintain their present course vis a vis the Iraqi war.

It is interesting to note that "foreign intelligence representatives, now active in the United States" (read Mossad) are to be subject to "arrest, confinement and eventual deportation to their country of origin."

The report and several attached ones, run to almost 900 pages and cannot be put up in their current form. However, I will list some of the more important data here:

Classification: Top Secret-Noforn as of 1 June 2007

Distribution Restriction: Distribution authorized to the DOD and DOD contractors only to maintain operations security. This determination was made on 1 June 2007. Other requests for this document must be referred to (redacted)

Destruction Notice: Destroy by any method that will prevent disclosure of contents or reconstruction of the document. .

This publication uses the term insurgent to describe those taking part in any activity designed to undermine or to overthrow the established authorities

Counterinsurgency is those military, paramilitary, political, economic, psychological, and civicactions taken by a government to defeat insurgency (JP 1-02). It is an offensive approach involving all elements of national power; it can take place across the range of operations and spectrum of conflict

In dealing with the local populace, the primary aims must be to:

·Protect the population.

·Establish local political institutions.

·Reinforce local governments.

·Eliminate insurgent capabilities.

·Exploit information from local sources.

An insurgency is organized movement aimed at the overthrow of a constituted government through use of subversion and armed conflict (JP 1-02). It is a protracted politico-military struggle designed to weaken government control and legitimacy while increasing insurgent control. Political power is the central issue in an insurgency.

An insurgent organization normally consists of four elements:

Leadership.

Combatants (main forces, regional forces, local forces).

Cadre (local political leaders that are also called the militants).

Mass base (the bulk of the membership).



A perceived serious potential of dissident American groups rising up against constituted authority has been clearly identified by counter-intelligence agencies.. The stated cause for such an uprising appear to be growing dissatisfaction with the course and conduct of the war in Iraq, the chronic inability of Congress to deal with various pressing issues and the perception of widespread corruption and indifference to public needs.

The support of the people, passive or active then, is the center of gravity. It must be gained in whatever proportion is necessary to sustain the insurgent movement (or, contrariwise, to defeat it). As in any political campaign, all levels of support are relative.

Insurgent movements begin as "fire in the minds of men." Insurgent leaders commit themselves to building a new world. They construct the organization to carry through this desire. Generally, popular grievances become insurgent causes when interpreted and shaped by the insurgent leadership. The insurgency grows if the cadre that is local insurgent leaders and representatives can establish a link between the insurgent movement and the desire for solutions to grievances sought by the local population

Insurgent leaders will exploit opportunities created by government security force actions. The behavior of security forces is critical. Lack of security force discipline leads to alienation, and security force abuse of the populace is a very effective insurgent recruiting tool. Consequently, specific insurgent tactical actions are often planned to frequently elicit overreaction from security force individuals and units.

Insurgencies are dynamic political movements, resulting from real or perceived grievance or neglect that leads to alienation from an established government.

A successful counterinsurgency will result in the neutralization by the state of the insurgency and its effort to form a counterstate. While many abortive insurgencies are defeated by military and police actions alone, if an insurgency has tapped into serious grievances and has mobilized a significant portion of the population, simply returning to the status quo may not be an option. Reform may be necessary, but reform is a matter for the state, using all of its human and material resources. Security forces are only one such resource. The response must be multifaceted and coordinated, yet states typically charge their security forces with "waging counterinsurgency." This the security forces cannot do alone.

These imperatives are-

· Facilitate establishment or reestablishment of a 'legitimate government'.

· Counterinsurgency requires perseverance.

· Foster popular support for the incumbent US government.

· Prepare to perform functions and conduct operations that are outside normal scope of training.

· Coordinate with US governmental departments and agencies, and with vital non-governmental, agencies.

Urban operations.

· Protection of government facilities.

· Protection of infrastructure.

· Protection of commercial enterprises vital to the HN economy.

· Protection of cultural facilities.

· Prevention of looting.

· Military police functions.

· Close interaction with civilians.

· Assistance with reconstruction projects.

· Securing the national borders.

· Training or retraining a national military police and security force.

Establishing and maintaining local government credibility.

· Contributing local government is both tangible and psychological. Local security forces must reinforce and be integrated into the plan at every stage.

· Facilitate and use information and intelligence obtained from local sources to gain access to the insurgent's economic and social base of support, order of battle, tactics, techniques, and procedures.

Army forces help local pro-government police, paramilitary, and military forces perform counterinsurgency, area security, or local security operations. They advise and assist in finding, dispersing, capturing, and destroying the insurgent force.

US forces may conduct offensive operations to disrupt and destroy insurgent combat formations. These operations prevent the insurgents from attacking government-controlled areas.

There are many organizations and extensive resources available to aid counterinsurgent forces.

Commanders should not overlook the aid these organizations may provide. All forces assigned an AO or function should determine which departments and agencies are assisting in that AO and coordinate actions so that there is no duplication of effort. Such departments,

councils and agencies include-

· National Security Council.

· Department of Defense.

· Department of State.

· Department of Justice.

· Department of the Treasury.

· Department of Homeland Security.

· Department of Agriculture.

· Department of Commerce.

· Central Intelligence Agency.

· Department of Transportation

Various governmental departments directly administer or support other governmental agencies. Examples of these US agencies are-

· The US Coast Guard (under Department of Homeland Security).

· The Federal Bureau of Investigation (under Department of Justice).

· Immigration Customs Enforcement (under Department of Homeland Security).

· Federal Communications Commission

. The proper application of force is a critical component to any successful counterinsurgency operation. In a counterinsurgency, the center of gravity is public support. In order to defeat an insurgent force, US forces must be able to separate insurgents from the population. At the same time, US forces must conduct themselves in a manner that enables them to maintain popular domestic support. Excessive or indiscriminant use of force is likely to alienate the local populace, thereby increasing support for insurgent forces. Insufficient use of force results in increased risks to US forces and perceived weaknesses that can jeopardize the mission by emboldening insurgents and undermining domestic popular support. Achieving the appropriate balance requires a thorough understanding of the nature and causes of the insurgency, the end state, and the military's role in a counterinsurgency operation. Nevertheless, US forces always retain the right to use necessary and proportional force for individual and unit self-defense in response to a hostile act or demonstrated hostile intent.

The media, print and broadcast (radio, television and the Internet), play a vital role in societies involved in a counterinsurgency. Members of the media have a significant influence and shaping impact on political direction, national security objectives, and policy and national will. The media is a factor in military operations. It is their right and obligation to report to their respective audiences on the use of military force. They demand logistic support and access to military operations while refusing to be controlled. Their desire for immediate footage and on-the-spot coverage of events, and the increasing contact with units and Soldiers (for example, with embedded reporters) require commanders and public affairs officers to provide guidance to leaders and Soldiers on media relations. However, military planners must provide and enforce ground rules to the media to ensure operations security. Public affairs offices plan for daily briefings and a special briefing after each significant event because the media affect and influence each potential target audience external and internal to the AO. Speaking with the media in a forward-deployed area is an opportunity to explain what our organizations and efforts have accomplished.

Continuous PSYOP are mounted to-

· Counter the effects of insurgent propaganda.

· Relate controls to the security and well-being of the population.

· Portray a favorable governmental image.

.Control measures must-

· Be authorized by national laws and regulations (counterparts should be trained not to improvise unauthorized measures).

· Be tailored to fit the situation (apply the minimum force required to achieve the de-sired result).

· Be supported by effective local intelligence.

· Be instituted in as wide an area as possible to prevent bypass or evasion.

· Be supported by good communications.

· Be enforceable.

· Be lifted as the need diminishes.

· Be compatible, where possible, with local customs and traditions.

· Establish and maintain credibility of local government.

A control program may be developed in five phases:

· Securing and defending the area internally and externally.

· Organizing for law enforcement.

· Executing cordon and search operations.

· Screening and documenting the population (performing a detailed census).

· Performing public administration, to include resource control.

Support to the judiciary may be limited to providing security to the existing courts or may lead to more comprehensive actions to build local, regional, and national courts and the required support apparatus. To avoid overcrowding in police jails, the courts must have an efficient and timely magistrate capability, ideally co-located with police stations and police jails, to review cases for trial.

Cordon and search is a technique used by military and police forces in both urban and rural environments. It is frequently used by counterinsurgency forces conducting a population and resource control mission against small centers of population or subdivisions of a larger community. To be effective, cordon and search operations must have sufficient forces to effectively cordon off and thoroughly search target areas, to include subsurface areas.

PSYOP, civil affairs, and specialist interrogation teams should augment cordon and search orces to increase the effectiveness of operations. Consider the following when conducting cordon and search operations:

Cordon and search operations may be conducted as follows:

Disposition of troops should-

· Facilitate visual contact between posts within the cordon.

· Provide for adequate patrolling and immediate deployment of an effective re-serve force.

Priority should be given to-

· Sealing the administrative center of the community.

· Occupying all critical facilities.

· Detaining personnel in place.

· Preserving and securing all records, files, and other archives.

Key facilities include-

· Administrative buildings.

· Police stations.

· News media facilities.

· Post offices.

· Communications centers.

· Transportation offices and motor pools.

· Prisons and other places of detention.

· Schools.

· Medical facilities.

Search Techniques include-

· Search teams of squad size organized in assault, support, and security elements.

One target is assigned per team.

· Room searches are conducted by two-person teams.

· Room search teams are armed with pistols, assault weapons, and automatic weapons.

· Providing security for search teams screening operations and facilities.

Pre-search coordination includes-

· Between control personnel and screening team leaders.

· Study of layout plans.

· Communications, that is, radio, whistle, and hand signals.

· Disposition of suspects.

· On-site security.

· Guard entrances, exits (to include the roof), halls, corridors, and tunnels.

· Assign contingency tasks for reserve.

· Room searches conducted by two- or three-person teams.

· Immobilize occupants with one team member.

· Search room with other team member.

· Search all occupants. When available, a third team member should be the re-corder.

· Place documents in a numbered envelope and tag the associated individual with a corresponding number.

SCREENING AND DOCUMENTING THE POPULATION

Screening and documentation include following:

· Systematic identification and registration.

· Issuance of individual identification cards containing-

A unique number.

Picture of individual.

Personal identification data.

Fingerprints.

An official stamp (use different colors for each administration region).

Family group census cards, an official copy of which is retained at the local po-lice agency. These must include a picture and appropriate personal data.

Frequent use of mobile and fixed checkpoints for inspection, identification, and reg-istration of documents.

Preventing counterfeiting of identification and registration documents by laminat-ing and embossing.

Programs to inform the population of the need for identification and registration.

Covert surveillance is a collection effort with the responsibility fixed at the intelligence/security division or detective division of the police department. Covert techniques, ranging from application of sophisticated electronics systems to informants, should include-

Informant nets. Reliability of informants should be verified. Protection of identity is a must.

Block control. Dividing a community or populated area into zones where a trusted resident reports on the activities of the population. If the loyalty of block leaders is questionable, an informant net can be established to verify questionable areas.

Units designated for counterinsurgency operations

· 115th MIB, Schofield, HI

· 704th MIB, Fort Made, MD, Collaboration with NSA

· 513st MIB, Fort Gordon, GA in Collaboration with NSA

· Arlington Hall Station, VA

· Aberdeen Proving Ground (Maryland)

· US Army Intelligence and Security Command ­ INSCOM- Huachuca ( Arizona )

· INTELLIGENCE THREAT and ANALYSIS CENTER ( Center Analysis for threat and Intelligence )

· 501st Military Intelligence Brigade EAC

· 3rd Military Intelligence Battalion Exploitation Area
http://www.tbrnews.org/Archives/a2720.htm#004

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Amos
Date: 18 Jul 07 - 02:37 PM

Why Bush Will Be A Winner by William Kristol, Sunday, July 15, 2007; Page B01 of the Washington Post, is a meretricious piece of mental acrobatics from a deep-dyed-in-the-wool-over-the-eyes Bush supporter.

Fortunately for rational discourse, Why Bush Is A Loser,By David Corn, in today's edition, makes mincemeat out of Kristol, his track record, and the jejeune partisan slant of his pseudo-analyses.

A

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Donuel
Date: 18 Jul 07 - 12:19 PM

Do you have your stockpile of duct tape and plastic?

I watched a Sundance film on bomb shelters that middle America is building to thwart Al Quada.

I hope they use them in tornado weather.

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Amos
Date: 18 Jul 07 - 11:44 AM

"This administration has never hesitated to play on fear for political gain, starting with the first homeland security secretary, Tom Ridge, and his Popsicle-coded threat charts. It is a breathtakingly cynical ploy, but in the past it has worked to cow Democrats into silence, if not always submission, and herd Republicans back onto the party line.

That must not happen this time. By now, Congress surely can see through the president's fear-mongering and show Mr. Bush the exit from Iraq that he refuses to find for himself."

From this stinging editorial on the politics of fear and fear-mongering.

A

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Amos
Date: 18 Jul 07 - 11:24 AM

And Maureen Dowd observes:

"...The administration's most thorough intelligence assessment since 9/11 is stark and dark. Two pages add up to one message: The Bushies blew it. Al Qaeda has exploded into a worldwide state of mind. Because of what's going on with Iraq and Iran, Hezbollah may now "be more likely to consider" attacking us. Al Qaeda will try to "put operatives here" — (some news reports say a cell from Pakistan already is en route or has arrived) — and "acquire and employ chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear material in attacks."

(Democrats on cots are ineffectual, but Al Qaeda in caves gets the job done?)

After 9/11, W. stopped mentioning Osama's name, calling him "just a person who's now been marginalized," and adding "I just don't spend that much time on him."

This week, as counterterrorism officials gathered at the White House to frantically brainstorm on covert and overt plans to capture Osama, the president may have regretted his perverse attempt to demote America's most determined enemy.

W. began to mention Osama and Al Qaeda more recently, but only to assert: "The same folks that are bombing innocent people in Iraq were the ones who attacked us in America on September the 11th." His conflation is contradicted by the fact that Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, as the Sunni terrorist group in Iraq is known, did not exist before 9/11.

Fran Townsend, the president's homeland security adviser, did her best to put a gloss on the dross but failed. She had to admit that the hands-off approach used by Mr. Musharraf with the tribal leaders in North Waziristan, which always looked like a nutty way to give Al Qaeda room to regroup, was a nutty way to give Al Qaeda room to regroup.

"It hasn't worked for Pakistan," she conceded. "It hasn't worked for the United States."

Just as we outsourced capturing Osama at Tora Bora to Afghans who had no motive to do it, we outsourced capturing Osama in Pakistan to Mr. Musharraf, who had no motive to do it.

Pressed by reporters on why we haven't captured Osama, especially if he's climbing around with a dialysis machine, Ms. Townsend sniffed that she wished "it were that easy." It's not easy to launch a trumped-up war to reshape the Middle East into a utopian string of democracies, but that didn't stop W. from making that audacious gambit.

The Bushies, who once mocked Bill Clinton for doing only "pinprick" bombings on Al Qaeda, now say they can do nothing about Osama because they can't "pinpoint" him, as Ms. Townsend put it. She assured reporters that they were "harassing" Al Qaeda, making it sound more like a tugging-on-pigtails strategy than a take-no-prisoners strategy.

We've had it up the wazir with Waziristan. Surely there are Army Rangers and Navy Seals who can make the trek, even if it's a no-man's land. If it were a movie, we'd trace the saline in Osama's dialysis machine, target it with a laser and blow up the mountain.

W. swaggers about with his cowboy boots and gunslinger stance. But when talking about Waziristan last February, he explained that it was hard to round up the Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders there because: "This is wild country; this is wilder than the Wild West."

Yes, they shoot with real bullets up there, and they fly into buildings with real planes.

If W. were a real cowboy, instead of somebody who just plays one on TV, he would have cleaned up Dodge by now. "

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Amos
Date: 18 Jul 07 - 11:21 AM

"...So let's get this straight: Iraqi parliamentarians, at least those not already boycotting the Parliament, will be on vacation in August so they can be cool, while young American men and women, and Iraqi Army soldiers, will be fighting in the heat in order to create a proper security environment in which Iraqi politicians can come back in September and continue squabbling while their country burns.

Here is what I think of that: I think it's a travesty — and for the Bush White House to excuse it with a Baghdad weather report shows just how much it has become a hostage to Iraq.

The administration constantly says the surge is necessary, but not sufficient. That's right. There has to be a political deal. And the latest report card on Iraq showed that a deal is nowhere near completion. So where is the diplomatic surge? What are we waiting for? A cool day in December?

When you read stories in the newspapers every day about Americans who are going to Iraq for their third or even fourth tours and you think that this administration has never sent its best diplomats for even one tour yet — never made one, not one, single serious, big-time, big-tent diplomatic push to resolve this conflict, but instead has put everything on the military, it makes you sick.

Yes, yes, I know, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is going to make one of her quick-in-and-out trips to the Middle East next month to try to enlist support for an Israeli-Palestinian peace conference in the fall. I'm all for Arab-Israeli negotiations, but the place that really needs a peace conference right now is Iraq, and it won't happen with drive-by diplomacy.

President Bush baffles me. If your whole legacy was riding on Iraq, what would you do? I'd draft the country's best negotiators — Henry Kissinger, Jim Baker, George Shultz, George Mitchell, Dennis Ross or Richard Holbrooke — and ask one or all of them to go to Baghdad, under a U.N. mandate, with the following orders:

"I want you to move to the Green Zone, meet with the Iraqi factions and do not come home until you've reached one of three conclusions: 1) You have resolved the power- and oil-sharing issues holding up political reconciliation; 2) you have concluded that those obstacles are insurmountable and have sold the Iraqis on a partition plan that could be presented to the U.N. and supervised by an international force; 3) you have concluded that Iraqis are incapable of agreeing on either political reconciliation or a partition plan and told them that, as a result, the U.S. has no choice but to re-deploy its troops to the border and let Iraqis sort this out on their own."

The last point is crucial. Any lawyer will tell you, if you're negotiating a contract and the other side thinks you'll never walk away, you've got no leverage. And in Iraq, we've never had any leverage. The Iraqis believe that Mr. Bush will never walk away, so they have no incentive to make painful compromises.

That's why the Iraqi Parliament is on vacation in August and our soldiers are fighting in the heat. Something is wrong with this picture. First, Mr. Bush spends three years denying the reality that we need a surge of more troops to establish security and then, with Iraq spinning totally out of control and militias taking root everywhere, he announces a surge and criticizes others for being impatient.

At the same time, Mr. Bush announces a peace conference for Israelis and Palestinians — but not for Iraqis. He's like a man trapped in a burning house who calls 911 to put out the brush fire down the street. Hello?

Quitting Iraq would be morally and strategically devastating. But to just drag out the surge, with no road map for a political endgame, with Iraqi lawmakers going on vacation, with no consequences for dithering, would be just as morally and strategically irresponsible.

We owe Iraqis our best military — and diplomatic effort — to avoid the disaster of walking away. But if they won't take advantage of that, we owe our soldiers a ticket home. "

Paul Krugman in the N.Y. Times, 07-18-2007

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Amos
Date: 17 Jul 07 - 02:27 PM

A good post on Iraq, BB. Thoughtful and well-spoken.

A

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: beardedbruce
Date: 17 Jul 07 - 11:38 AM

From the Washington Post:

No Magic Bullets For Iraq

By Anne Applebaum
Tuesday, July 17, 2007; Page A19

Leave Washington in the winter, return in midsummer. First you'll be surprised by the heat, then by the humidity. Then you'll be surprised by the certainty.

Out in the world, there are shades of gray. Here inside the Beltway, there are black-and-white solutions. And everybody who is anybody has a plan for Iraq.

Hillary Clinton has a three-point plan; Barack Obama has a "move the soldiers from Iraq to Afghanistan" plan. House Democrats have a plan to take most troops out by next March; Senate Democrats have a plan to take them out by April. Some Senate Republicans want the president to shrink the size of the U.S. military in Iraq; other Senate Republicans want to let the surge run its course. Search the Web, listen to the radio and watch the news, and you can hear people arguing that if only we had more troops, fewer troops or no troops at all, everything would be okay again.

What is missing from this conversation is a dose of humility. More to the point, what is missing is the recognition that every single one of these plans contains the seeds of potential disaster, even catastrophe.

More troops? I hardly need to elaborate on what's wrong with that plan, since so many in Congress do so every day. But for the record, I'll repeat the obvious: More troops means more American casualties, maybe many more casualties. Worse, the very presence of American soldiers creates strife in some parts of Iraq -- angering Iraqis, motivating al-Qaeda, sparking violence. Besides, we've tried the surge, and the surge hasn't brought the results we wanted. And, anyway, the surge simply can't be maintained, let alone expanded: There aren't that many more troops to send, even if we wanted to send them.

Fewer troops? This plan sounds like a reasonable compromise: neither surge nor cut-and-run, just leaving a few guys on the ground to train the Iraqis, guard the border and fight the terrorists. It also sounds a touch naive: So, in the midst of a vast civil war, small groups of Americans will withdraw to some neutral outposts and announce that they would no longer like to be shot at, please? Both "guarding the border" and "fighting terrorism" are hard to do effectively without involving ourselves in wider political and ethnic struggles.

There is also trouble with the "train the Iraqis" part of the plan, as Stephen Biddle spelled out in The Post last week, since "training Iraqis" invariably puts us in the middle of military conflict. Besides, fewer Americans could mean more Iraqi violence; more Iraqi violence could mean more American casualties -- not to mention more Iraqi casualties -- which defeats the purpose of the plan altogether.

No troops? Though deeply appealing to the "we told you so" crowd, this plan is clothed in the greatest degree of hypocrisy. How many of the people who clamor for intervention in Darfur will also be clamoring to rush back into Iraq when full-scale ethnic cleansing starts taking place? How many will take responsibility for the victims of genocide? I'm not saying there will be such a catastrophe, but there could be: Mass ethnic murders have certainly been carried out in Iraq before. Other possibilities include the creation of an Iranian puppet state or an al-Qaeda outlaw state; or there might merely be a regional war involving, say, Turkey, Iran, Syria, Jordan, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, just for starters, and maybe Israel and the Gaza Strip as well. Perhaps these things would never have happened if we hadn't gone there in the first place -- but if we leave, we'll be morally responsible.

Of course, I don't want to exaggerate. There are people who know that there is no perfect solution for Iraq. However, they tend not to be people who are running for the presidency or any other public office. Last weekend, I met a Marine about to depart for his second tour in Iraq. He wasn't exactly enthusiastic about going, nor was he particularly optimistic about what could be achieved. But he wasn't demanding to stay home, either. If nothing else, he felt obliged to stick by the many Iraqis who had helped the Marines and who might well be murdered if the Marines left for good.

He had, in other words, perceived the only truth of which we can really be certain: that there are no obvious solutions in Iraq, only policy changes that could make some things better and some things worse. Maybe much worse.

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Amos
Date: 17 Jul 07 - 08:44 AM

Senator David Vitter of Louisiana has been caught frequenting prostitutes. His behavior stands in stark contrast to the conservative "family values" and harsh sex-negative positions he relentlessly championed in the Senate and state legislature.

Vitter says he has "received forgiveness from God" for his "sins." Thus conveniently cleansed, he now accuses "political enemies" of undermining his future work. Yesterday his wife criticized the news media for "following us every day last week," as if Vitter had merely been caught with an overdue library book.

That's the problem with conceptualizing one's free choices as "sin"—you can simply admit you're not perfect, claim that God forgives you, and take absolutely no responsibility for yourself. This is particularly repulsive in political figures like Newt Gingrich, Ted Haggard, and now Vitter—who make a living blasting tens of millions of American adults following their own vision of sexual morality, when Vitter and colleagues can't follow their own. Or can't admit what their own sexual code really is. ...

(From the Ontario News)

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Amos
Date: 16 Jul 07 - 04:42 PM

Hillary is one piece of work, all right!


A

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: beardedbruce
Date: 16 Jul 07 - 01:06 PM

From the Washington Post:

What Clinton (Almost) Doesn't Say

By Fred Hiatt
Monday, July 16, 2007; Page A15

IOWA, July 10 -- Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton traveled to this crucial caucus state today to assure voters that she would keep U.S. troops in Iraq for the foreseeable future because "we cannot lose sight of our very real strategic national interests in this region."

You missed that news story? Me, too. It's not the message Clinton wanted to convey, and it's not the message that reporters took away from her speech.

But it would have been an accurate, if incomplete, rendition of her long address on Iraq policy. That she wanted to go on the record with such a view, but didn't want voters to really hear it, says much about the current Washington bind on Iraq policy.

Here's what she wanted voters to take away from the speech, judging by the top of the campaign's press release about it: "Today in Iowa, Hillary Clinton announced her plan to end the war in Iraq and urged President Bush to act immediately." Most of the address indeed focused on her plan to withdraw combat troops, which she said she would accompany with increased aid and diplomacy. She peppered the speech with criticism of Bush's war leadership and with phrases such as "as we are leaving Iraq."

But toward the end, Clinton noted that it would be "a great worry for our country" if Iraq "becomes a breeding ground for exporting terrorists, as it appears it already is." So she would "order specialized units to engage in narrow and targeted operations against al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations in the region." U.S. troops would also train and equip Iraqi forces "to keep order and promote stability in the country, but only to the extent we believe such training is actually working." And she might deploy other forces to protect the Kurdish region in the north, she said, "to protect the fragile but real democracy and relative peace and security that has developed there."

In other words, Clinton ascribed to what might be called the consensus, Baker-Hamilton view: Pull out of the most intense combat but remain militarily engaged by going after terrorists, training and advising Iraqi troops, and safeguarding at least some regions or borders. It's the position set forth in the proposal of Democratic Sens. Carl Levin and Jack Reed and in the compromise proposal of Republican Sens. John Warner and Richard Lugar. Last week President Bush said it's "a position I'd like to see us in."

If everyone agrees, what's the problem? Bush and the Democrats have very different ideas of the conditions needed to move to Baker-Hamilton. (So, by the way, did Republican Jim Baker and Democrat Lee Hamilton when they co-wrote the report.) Bush thinks U.S. troops can pull back only after they have established, with their new counterinsurgency strategy, sufficient peace to allow Iraqi factions to begin making political compromises.

Democrats say such compromises aren't likely anytime soon. As Vice President Adel Abdul Mahdi, one of Iraq's more sober-minded leaders, told the New York Times this month, "I am optimistic in the medium and long term . . . [but] it needs five or six or seven or 10 years." During that time, Democrats (and increasing numbers of Republicans) do not want U.S. troops in "the crossfire of sectarian violence," as Clinton said last week.

But, respond supporters of the surge, Baker-Hamilton can't work without security. Training the Iraqi army will be futile if all around is chaos; embedding as advisers will be even more dangerous than patrolling Baghdad now; and how successful could Clinton's "narrow and targeted operations" against terrorists be from a distance? NATO's inability to counter al-Qaeda across the Afghan border in Pakistan, and Israel's frustrations with Hamas in Gaza or Hezbollah in Lebanon, are not encouraging.

Bush, in other words, views Baker-Hamilton as a prize to be won by means of successful combat. According to advisers, he sees himself playing for time, maneuvering so that his successor -- Hillary Clinton, maybe -- will have Baker-Hamilton as an option when he or she moves into the Oval Office in January 2009. Democrats, on the other hand, see it as the least bad response to irrevocable defeat.

There's another problem, too: Democratic primary voters do not want to hear of adjustments, redeployments, reductions. They want all troops out, now. That is why Clinton will devote one paragraph to the military defense "of our very real strategic national interests in this region" and more than 10 pages to troop withdrawal.

That suggests that by the time Bush is ready for or forced into compromise, compromise may no longer be possible in Congress. Which in turn means that, bleak as all the options appear now, the choices that a President Clinton would face in 18 months might look far worse.

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: beardedbruce
Date: 16 Jul 07 - 12:58 PM

From the Washington Post:

The House Votes Down an Earmark

By Robert D. Novak
Monday, July 16, 2007; Page A15

As bipartisan majorities overwhelmed all attempts to eliminate pork-barrel earmarks during a recent House session, one effort actually succeeded -- comfortably, though unnoticed by the public. The reason House members voted to deprive a colleague of pork for his district is the identity of that colleague: Rep. Patrick McHenry, a second-term Republican from Cherryville, in the western Piedmont of North Carolina, who at 31 is the youngest member of the House.

McHenry's $129,000 earmark would have promoted tourism in economically distressed Mitchell County. The new Democratic majority's leadership, which routinely supports earmarks, cracked the whip against this one, apparently in the spirit of political revenge. A conservative firebrand, McHenry had immobilized the House and humiliated the Democrats by leading GOP parliamentary maneuvers to force transparency regarding earmarks, previously hidden by both parties.

But the House showed in the last week of June that the celebrated transparency is a sham. Each newly transparent earmark brought to a floor vote survived by a huge margin. In traditional congressional logrolling, one earmarker protects another. There is no political risk because such votes are publicly ignored. Members insisting on their pork reflect bipartisan congressional nonchalance about ballooning spending. Demonstrating the cynicism of their pretensions toward earmark reform, Democrats also got even with the bumptious McHenry.

While considering the interior appropriations bill, the House kept 11 egregious earmarks alive. Rep. John Murtha, king of Democratic earmarkers, kept $1.2 million for the Southwestern Pennsylvania Heritage Preservation Commission in Hollidaysburg (by a 343 to 86 vote), and $150,000 for W.A. Young & Sons Foundry in Greene County (328 to 104). The House voted 323 to 104 to retain $140,000 for the Wetzel County, W.Va., courthouse sponsored by Democratic Rep. Alan Mollohan, whose earmarks have provoked an FBI investigation.

Moving on to financial services appropriations, the House voted 335 to 87 to continue Murtha's raid on the Treasury: $231,000 for the Grace Johnstown (Pa.) Area Regional Industries Incubator. By 325 to 101, the members refused to remove a $231,000 Mollohan earmark for West Virginia University Research Corp. to renovate a "small business incubator." As usual, dauntless Republican Rep. Jeff Flake of Arizona led the way in targeting colleagues' earmarks. He did not exempt Republicans -- including 15-term California Rep. Jerry Lewis, ranking minority member of the Appropriations Committee, whose past earmarking has raised ethical questions.

Flake opposed Lewis's $500,000 earmark for the Barracks Row Main Street project in Southeast Washington. Flake noted on the House floor that millions in federal funds have flowed into that neighborhood since 1999, including a $750,000 earmark last year. "I certainly hope," said Flake, "that we are not approving a redevelopment earmark today to redevelop last year's redevelopment earmark." Last year, such comments led Republican leaders to purge Flake from the Judiciary Committee. A smiling, sarcastic Lewis asked Flake: "Have you ever attended the Silent March that takes place on Friday evenings at the Marine barracks [on Barracks Row]?" "I have not," Flake replied. "You have not. I would suggest to the gentleman that probably one of the most important things that a member of Congress should do is to go to the Marine barracks." Lewis's earmark was retained, 361 to 60.

That day, I asked Rep. Jeb Hensarling of Texas, Flake's fellow Republican reformer, whether he was discouraged. "Oh, no," he said. "There are three of us now [including second-term Republican Rep. John Campbell of California], and now we only get beat 3-to-1." Little did Hensarling know that the House was about to eliminate one earmark.

Flake's earmark list included McHenry's development grant, which he said "is simply not a good use of federal dollars." Flake had privately reassured McHenry that his earmark was certain to be saved by the pork-hungry House. "Don't be too sure," McHenry replied. Indeed, with Democratic leaders eager to punish him, McHenry's earmark was eliminated, 249 to 174.

An embarrassed McHenry told me that this might well be his last earmark. That does signal a little progress, unintentionally resulting from hypocritical pretensions of reform by the new Democratic majority.

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Amos
Date: 16 Jul 07 - 11:11 AM

MAureen Dowd of the NY Times offered some interesting thoughts recently:

...Someone might tell Condi — who said in one of her golf interviews that her zest for sports is so all-encompassing that "I love anything with a score at the end" — that she'd better get to work or America's score in Iraq will be zero.

The Iraq war she helped sell has turned into Grendel, devouring everything in sight and making it uninhabitable. It has ravaged Iraq, Bush's presidency, the federal budget, the Republican majority, American invincibility and integrity, and now, John McCain's chance to be president.

And there's no Beowulf in sight. Just a bunch of spectacularly wrong hawks stubbornly continuing to be spectacularly wrong at what an alarmed Republican Senator John Warner calls "a time in our history unlike any I have ever witnessed before."

Watching the warring tribes in Iraq grow more violent has caused the beginning of a reconciliation among the warring tribes in Washington, as they realize they have to get the car keys away from the careening president who has crashed into the globe.

With Republicans in revolt over the surge and losing patience, and Bushies worried, as one put it to The Washington Post, that "July has become the new September," the president decided to do a p.r. surge to sound as if he's acquainted with reality.

But in a speech in Cleveland yesterday, the president was still repeating his deranged generalities. Making a tiny concession, he said we would be able to pull back troops "in a while," whatever that means, but asked Congress to wait for Gen. David Petraeus to debrief on the surge in September — rather than focus on the report due this week that says the ineffectual Iraq government has failed to meet benchmarks set by America.

It was ironic that his strongest supporter to the bitter end was the Republican who was once his bitter rival. There was speculation that Mr. McCain would come back from his visit to Iraq and revise his bullish support of the war to save his imploding campaign. But the opposite happened.

As his top advisers were purged, Mr. McCain went to the floor of the Senate to reassert his warped view that "there appears to be overall movement in the right direction."

Like W., Senator McCain values the advice of Henry Kissinger and said, "We can find wisdom in several suggestions put forward recently by Henry Kissinger."

Why they continue to seek counsel from the man who kept the Vietnam War going for years just to protect Richard Nixon's electoral chances is beyond mystifying. But Mr. Kissinger holds their attention with all his warnings of "American impotence" emboldening radical Islam and Iran. Can't W. and Mr. McCain see that American muscularity, stupidly thrown around, has already emboldened radical Islam and Iran?

The president mentioned in his speech yesterday that he was reading history, and he has been summoning historians and theologians to the White House for discussions on the fate of Iraq and the nature of good and evil.

W. thinks history will be his alibi. When presidents have screwed up and want to console themselves, they think history will give them a second chance. It's the historical equivalent of a presidential pardon.

But there are other things — morality, strategy and security — that are more pressing than history. History is just the fanciest way possible of wanting to deny or distract attention from what's happening now.

---

What a redhead!


A

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Amos
Date: 16 Jul 07 - 10:21 AM

Being without health insurance is no big deal. Just ask President Bush. "I mean, people have access to health care in America," he said last week. "After all, you just go to an emergency room."


This is what you might call callousness with consequences. The White House has announced that Mr. Bush will veto a bipartisan plan that would extend health insurance, and with it such essentials as regular checkups and preventive medical care, to an estimated 4.1 million currently uninsured children. After all, it's not as if those kids really need insurance — they can just go to emergency rooms, right?

O.K., it's not news that Mr. Bush has no empathy for people less fortunate than himself. But his willful ignorance here is part of a larger picture: by and large, opponents of universal health care paint a glowing portrait of the American system that bears as little resemblance to reality as the scare stories they tell about health care in France, Britain, and Canada.

The claim that the uninsured can get all the care they need in emergency rooms is just the beginning. Beyond that is the myth that Americans who are lucky enough to have insurance never face long waits for medical care.

Actually, the persistence of that myth puzzles me. I can understand how people like Mr. Bush or Fred Thompson, who declared recently that "the poorest Americans are getting far better service" than Canadians or the British, can wave away the desperation of uninsured Americans, who are often poor and voiceless. But how can they get away with pretending that insured Americans always get prompt care, when most of us can testify otherwise?

A recent article in Business Week put it bluntly: "In reality, both data and anecdotes show that the American people are already waiting as long or longer than patients living with universal health-care systems."

A cross-national survey conducted by the Commonwealth Fund found that America ranks near the bottom among advanced countries in terms of how hard it is to get medical attention on short notice (although Canada was slightly worse), and that America is the worst place in the advanced world if you need care after hours or on a weekend.

We look better when it comes to seeing a specialist or receiving elective surgery. But Germany outperforms us even on those measures — and I suspect that France, which wasn't included in the study, matches Germany's performance.

Besides, not all medical delays are created equal. In Canada and Britain, delays are caused by doctors trying to devote limited medical resources to the most urgent cases. In the United States, they're often caused by insurance companies trying to save money. ...

(Krugman in the Times, Jul 16, 2007)

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Amos
Date: 15 Jul 07 - 01:07 PM

Contempt for Congress
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Published: July 14, 2007
The Bush administration's disregard for the rule of law hit another low this week when Harriet Miers, the former White House counsel, defied a Congressional subpoena. Ms. Miers, who was called to testify about the United States attorneys scandal, refused even to show up at the Capitol. A second former official, Sara Taylor, did testify, but she inappropriately invoked executive privilege to dodge key questions. Congress should take firm action to compel Ms. Miers and Ms. Taylor to provide the testimony it is entitled to hear.

Congress has been conducting a much-needed investigation of last year's dismissal of nine top prosecutors. The evidence so far strongly suggests that the firings were done for improper political reasons, to help Republicans win elections, and that Ms. Miers and Ms. Taylor were involved. As part of its supervisory authority, Congress is entitled to question the two women.

Nevertheless, Ms. Miers refused to appear before the House Judiciary Committee after President Bush — claiming executive privilege — took the extraordinary step of ordering her not to testify. If Congress is seeking any privileged information, Ms. Miers can decline to answer those specific questions. But executive privilege did not negate her legal duty to appear when Congress subpoenaed her.

Ms. Taylor came when summoned by the Senate Judiciary Committee. But she then episodically invoked executive privilege. She refused to answer such basic questions as who decided which prosecutors to fire and why they were fired. But she did tell the committee that she hadn't attended any meetings with the president where the firings were discussed. Since executive privilege protects a president's communications with his advisers, that answer seriously undercuts her basis for invoking it.

The House should vote to hold Ms. Miers in contempt. The Senate Judiciary Committee should review Ms. Taylor's testimony and demand answers to the legitimate questions she refused to answer. If she continues her recalcitrance she, too, should face contempt.

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Amos
Date: 15 Jul 07 - 12:42 PM

Sharp Debate, and a Defection
By Shailagh Murray and Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, July 15, 2007; Page A06


Sen. Olympia J. Snowe could wait no longer. On Thursday, the Maine Republican publicly broke with the White House on the Iraq war, which she had long since come to oppose. Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), a fervent war opponent, believes that there are plenty of other Republicans prepared to jump at the next dose of bad news. "I just see the growing fear in their eyes on this," she said.

Snowe's move -- long anticipated, much agonized-over -- came during a week of intense congressional debate over the war, when President Bush issued a mixed report on military and political progress in Iraq and his advisers worried that the political pressure to change course now, rather than after a full report due this fall, would prove inexorable. But Bush voiced his opposition to what he called a "precipitous" departure as Democratic leaders promised a series of votes -- and weeks of agonized debate -- until there is a change of course. ...

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Amos
Date: 14 Jul 07 - 02:38 PM

MIAMI — Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger brought his star power and California's vanguard environmental policies Friday to a climate conference, at which Florida joined the ranks of U.S. states and cities committed to fighting global warming.

The two-day meeting here, hosted by Florida Gov. Charlie Crist, reinforced a growing public and corporate determination to confront the climate change that threatens Florida's 1,200-mile coastline and $7-billion-a-year outdoor recreation industry.

Crist signed executive orders requiring Florida to adopt the same tough pollution controls California has. The aim is to cut greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2025, require 20% of state power to come from renewable sources, and compel civil servants to use fuel-efficient vehicles and "green" offices.

But it was Schwarzenegger who stole the limelight Friday, taking swipes at what he called the Bush administration's neglect of environmental issues and at Detroit automakers for fighting tougher fuel-efficiency standards.

"I'm very proud to see another governor joining California and the growing number of states not looking to Washington for leadership anymore," Schwarzenegger told the gathering of 950 corporate, environmental and community leaders, to thunderous applause.

With 34 states and 600 cities now on board with his plan to halt global warming, Schwarzenegger said, the United States was approaching the "tipping point" — when the federal government and industries would recognize the folly of ignoring this century's greatest challenge.

"We cannot expect rapidly growing countries like China and India to protect the environment when the United States is not showing leadership," he said.

Environment ministers from Germany and Britain, who took part in the conference, praised Crist and Schwarzenegger for helping Americans recognize their global responsibilities. Since the Bush administration rejected the Kyoto Protocols of the U.N. Convention on Climate Change in 2001, relations with European allies on environment issues have been strained.

Schwarzenegger said his anti-pollution actions, the toughest in the nation, were proof that Republicans could be responsible stewards of the environment. But he insisted there was no partisan divide on the climate issue.

"There is no Democratic planet Earth. There is no Republican planet Earth. There's just a planet Earth, and we all have a responsibility to take care of it," he said.

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Amos
Date: 13 Jul 07 - 10:22 AM

No Progress Report
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Published: July 13, 2007
With the American public in despair over the Iraq war and key members of his own party deserting him, President Bush is still trying to twist reality to claim that his failed effort is worth sticking with. Yesterday, the White House issued a report card claiming that Iraq's government had made limited progress on some political and security goals. And Mr. Bush insisted that not only was it not the time to talk about withdrawing American troops, but that he still believes that "the fight can be won."

That's been the spin for months. But Bob Woodward reported yesterday in The Washington Post that Mr. Bush's director of Central Intelligence, Gen. Michael Hayden, warned the bipartisan Iraq Study Group last fall that the "the inability" of the Iraqi government to govern "seems irreversible" and he could not point to "any milestone or checkpoint where we can turn this thing around."

A closer look at Mr. Bush's hyped report card leads to that same grim conclusion. Eight months after General Hayden issued his warning, the United States still has no effective Iraqi government partner committed to an effective program of national reconciliation and no effective Iraqi military capable of acting independently in the absence of American troops.

Officially, the White House credited the Iraqi government with satisfactory performance on 8 of the 18 listed benchmarks, not considered a passing grade in most tests. And most of the claimed successes were partial, or minor. Even the easy graders at the White House had to conclude that there has not been satisfactory progress toward ensuring that Iraqi forces evenhandedly uphold the law, nor progress toward eliminating militia control of local security, nor progress toward equitable distribution of oil revenues nor toward reforming discriminatory anti-Baathist legislation.

The original point of these benchmarks was to spur recalcitrant Iraqi leaders into taking the steps necessary to rescue their country, and Mr. Bush's Iraq policy, from the gathering flames of civil war. That is why Congress wanted to link these report cards to a clear threat of scaled-back American support if the Iraqi authorities failed to measure up. Mr. Bush's veto removed that useful threat, diminishing any real incentive for Iraqis to take the hard steps required. They haven't, and now America needs to act on its own.

Mr. Bush still refuses to talk about what almost everyone else now understands is essential: the need to develop an orderly plan to extricate American troops from a lost cause and reposition them in ways that can genuinely protect our national interests. A new classified study by the intelligence community offers one more reminder why continued delay and delusion is so dangerous. It says that six years after the Sept. 11 attacks Al Qaeda has rebuilt itself and has settled into safe havens in Pakistan.
...

(From The New York Times.

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Amos
Date: 13 Jul 07 - 10:17 AM

BAGHDAD, July 12 — In rebuffing calls to bring troops home from Iraq, President Bush on Thursday employed a stark and ominous defense. "The same folks that are bombing innocent people in Iraq," he said, "were the ones who attacked us in America on September the 11th, and that's why what happens in Iraq matters to the security here at home."

Skip to next paragraph
The Reach of War
Go to Complete Coverage » It is an argument Mr. Bush has been making with frequency in the past few months, as the challenges to the continuation of the war have grown. On Thursday alone, he referred at least 30 times to Al Qaeda or its presence in Iraq.

But his references to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, and his assertions that it is the same group that attacked the United States in 2001, have greatly oversimplified the nature of the insurgency in Iraq and its relationship with the Qaeda leadership.

There is no question that the group is one of the most dangerous in Iraq. But Mr. Bush's critics argue that he has overstated the Qaeda connection in an attempt to exploit the same kinds of post-Sept. 11 emotions that helped him win support for the invasion in the first place.

Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia did not exist before the Sept. 11 attacks. The Sunni group thrived as a magnet for recruiting and a force for violence largely because of the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, which brought an American occupying force of more than 100,000 troops to the heart of the Middle East, and led to a Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad.

The American military and American intelligence agencies characterize Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia as a ruthless, mostly foreign-led group that is responsible for a disproportionately large share of the suicide car bomb attacks that have stoked sectarian violence. Gen. David H. Petraeus, the senior American commander in Iraq, said in an interview that he considered the group to be "the principal short-term threat to Iraq."

But while American intelligence agencies have pointed to links between leaders of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia and the top leadership of the broader Qaeda group, the militant group is in many respects an Iraqi phenomenon. They believe the membership of the group is overwhelmingly Iraqi. Its financing is derived largely indigenously from kidnappings and other criminal activities. And many of its most ardent foes are close at home, namely the Shiite militias and the Iranians who are deemed to support them.

"The president wants to play on Al Qaeda because he thinks Americans understand the threat Al Qaeda poses," said Bruce Riedel, an expert at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy and a former C.I.A. official. "But I don't think he demonstrates that fighting Al Qaeda in Iraq precludes Al Qaeda from attacking America here tomorrow. Al Qaeda, both in Iraq and globally, thrives on the American occupation."

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian who became the leader of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, came to Iraq in 2002 when Saddam Hussein was still in power, but there is no evidence that Mr. Hussein's government provided support for Mr. Zarqawi and his followers. Mr. Zarqawi did have support from senior Qaeda leaders, American intelligence agencies believe, and his organization grew in the chaos of post-Hussein Iraq.

"There has been an intimate relationship between them from the beginning," Mr. Riedel said of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia and the senior leaders of the broader Qaeda group.

But the precise relationship between the Al Qaeda of Osama bin Laden and other groups that claim inspiration or affiliation with it is murky and opaque. While the groups share a common ideology, the Iraq-based group has enjoyed considerable autonomy. Ayman al-Zawahri, Osama bin Laden's top deputy, questioned Mr. Zarqawi's strategy of organizing attacks against Shiites, according to captured materials. But Mr. Zarqawi clung to his strategy of mounting sectarian attacks in an effort to foment a civil war and make the American occupation untenable.

The precise size of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia is not known. Estimates are that it may have from a few thousand to 5,000 fighters and perhaps twice as many supporters. While the membership of the group is mostly Iraqi, the role that foreigners play is crucial.

Abu Ayyub al-Masri is an Egyptian militant who emerged as the successor of Mr. Zarqawi, who was killed near Baquba in an American airstrike last year. American military officials say that 60 to 80 foreign fighters come to Iraq each month to fight for the group, and that 80 to 90 percent of suicide attacks in Iraq have been conducted by foreign-born operatives of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.

At first, Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia received financing from the broader Qaeda organization, American intelligence agencies have concluded. Now, however, the Iraq-based group sustains itself through kidnapping, smuggling and criminal activities and some foreign contributions.

With the Shiite militias having taken a lower profile since the troop increase began, and with Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia embarking on its own sort of countersurge, a main focus of the American military operation is to deprive the group of its strongholds in the areas surrounding Baghdad — and thus curtail its ability to carry out spectacular casualty-inducing attacks in the Iraqi capital.

The heated debate over Iraq has spilled over to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia as well. Mr. Bush has played up the group, talking about it as if it is on a par with the perpetrators of the Sept. 11 attacks. War critics have often played down the significance of the group despite its gruesome record of suicide attacks and its widely suspected role in destroying a Shiite shrine in Samarra in February 2006 that set Iraq on the road to civil war.

Just last week, Mr. Zawahri called on Muslims to travel to Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia to carry out their fight against the Americans and appealed for Muslims to support the Islamic State in Iraq, an umbrella group that Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia has established to attract broader Sunni support.

The broader issue is whether Iraq is a central front in the war against Al Qaeda, as Mr. Bush maintains, or a distraction that has diverted the United States from focusing on the Qaeda sanctuaries in Pakistan while providing Qaeda leaders with a cause for rallying support.

Military intelligence officials said that Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia's leaders wanted to expand their attacks to other countries. They noted that Mr. Zarqawi claimed a role in a 2005 terrorist attack in Jordan. But Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at Georgetown University, said that if American forces were to withdraw from Iraq, the vast majority of the group's members would likely be more focused on battling Shiite militias in the struggle for dominance in Iraq than on trying to follow the Americans home.

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Amos
Date: 13 Jul 07 - 12:20 AM

The Independent(U.K)

Leading article: Mr Bush pays the price for this fatally ill-judged war
Published: 13 July 2007
White House spin-doctors did their utmost to put a positive gloss on it, and President Bush added his own two-penn'orth worth in an unusual morning press conference. But there was little any of them could do to relieve the pervasive sense of gloom. The security situation in Iraq clearly remains extremely bleak - and threatens to become bleaker still. In the words of the report released yesterday, the situation is "complex and extremely challenging" - diplomatic language for as bad as it gets.

This was an interim report, compiled by the White House after consultation with the commander on the ground, General David Patraeus, and the US ambassador in Baghdad, Ryan Crocker. The final version, which is required by the US Congress in mid-September, will be the make-or-break document. As President Bush stressed yesterday, it will be crucial in determining what Washington does next.

Yet the release of the interim report had a significance of its own. That these provisional conclusions saw the light of day at all is testimony to the pressure Mr Bush now finds himself under, not only from the Democrat-controlled Congress, but from American public opinion. Opinion polls show Mr Bush to be as unpopular as Richard Nixon at the height of the Watergate scandal, and seven out of 10 Americans surveyed this week favoured a US withdrawal from Iraq by next April. The conjunction of these two forces could speed Mr Bush towards withdrawal, whether he would choose it or not.

Under the US Constitution, of course, a US President cannot be forced from office other than by impeachment. He can, however, be rendered effectively impotent, if Congress withholds money and his party forsakes him. This is the humiliation confronting Mr Bush a full 18 months before he is due to leave office.

At his press conference yesterday, Mr Bush said that on the 18 benchmarks set by Congress, Iraq had been graded "satisfactory" on eight, "unsatisfactory" on eight, and "mixed" on the remaining two. In theory, that made the score neutral. The trouble is that in practical terms the failures vastly outweigh the successes. The successes - stumping up the requisite cash for training Iraqi troops and police, for instance - tick the boxes, but mean little if those troops and police are unable to combat the insurgency. The failures - no progress on local elections and no law on dividing up oil revenue - remain just that, failures.

Mr Bush offered two points in mitigation. First, he said, it was only last month that the final contingent of US troop reinforcements had arrived to complete the so-called "surge", so it was too early to write that effort off. And second, the failures were by and large on the political side, while the successes were concentrated on the security side. Progress in security, he argued, was a precondition for political progress, therefore the indicators could be described as positive.

These arguments are at very least questionable. There was a time, after all, when political advances - national elections and the rest - were lauded as a necessary prelude to improved security. The "surge", meanwhile, has had less impact on the violence than had been hoped, while upping the US casualty rate to a level that is passing the limits of the American public's tolerance. All that Mr Bush could realistically offer yesterday, citing the report, was that things were likely to get worse before they got better, with the likelihood of an increase in al-Qa'ida-inspired attacks through the summer.

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Amos
Date: 12 Jul 07 - 11:41 PM

Barbara Boxer
United States Senator


"We are in a debate in this United States Senate between talk and action. It's very easy to talk… and call press conferences and say 'we need a change. It's time for a change.' But let's see how people vote. Will they vote for a Sense of the Senate that has absolutely no force of law—that says it is the Sense of the Senate that we should change course? Or will they vote to start redeploying our troops out of the middle of a civil war, out of chaos?

"It's one thing to have an argument with someone and have pride and say you know, I'm not going to admit I made a mistake. It's another thing when people are dying because of your mistake every day.

"Now in November 2006, the American people voted against the Iraq war. They elected Democrats. They want this war to end… they don't want our troops in the middle of a civil war.

"How many more explosive devices are going to blow up in the faces of our troops before we start bringing them home? How many more Iraqis are going to die, women and children? How many more faces are we going to look at on the front page before we get the guts to do the right thing?   

"The President doesn't listen. He didn't listen after the election…he said he had a new strategy. What was it? The surge. The surge is not a new strategy; it's a military tactic, and it isn't working.

"Today the Associated Press reports 'Iraq fails to meet all reform goals.' Not even one goal was met. Our people are dying, and they can't meet one goal. The violence continues unabated. Since the President made his speech on January 10, after the election, when he said there was going to be a new strategy, 590 U.S. servicemen and women have been killed, 107 of whom did not live to see their 21st birthday. What kind of change is it that this President brought?   

"The Administration is failing on the security front, they're failing on the political front. They don't listen to Senator Biden, the Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee; they don't listen to Senator Lugar, the Ranking Member, who are all saying you have to have a political solution. And the Administration is failing on the reconstruction front. Iraqis living in Baghdad still receive an average of 5.6 hours of electricity a day. The President can't even keep the lights on, let alone succeed in this surge.

"I would say to the President: tell the truth to the American people. Lay out what you expected and then lay out the reality and start getting the troops home. We have not seen these improvements, and now our military's at the breaking point."

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Amos
Date: 12 Jul 07 - 11:58 AM

"At the end of the day, I believe fully the president is doing the right thing, and I think all we need is some attacks on American soil like we had on [Sept. 11, 2001]," Milligan told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, "And the naysayers will come around very quickly to appreciate not only the commitment for President Bush, but the sacrifice that has been made by men and women to protect this country," he concluded.

Yearning for new mass casualty terror attacks for political gain is a GOP strategy - Milligan is merely parroting what was written in a leaked confidential memo that was circulated among senior Republican leaders in late 2005.

"A confidential memo circulating among senior Republican leaders suggests that a new attack by terrorists on U.S. soil could reverse the sagging fortunes of President George W. Bush as well as the GOP and "restore his image as a leader of the American people," reported Capitol Hill Blue on November 12, 2005.

From here.

A

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Donuel
Date: 12 Jul 07 - 11:20 AM

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070710/ap_on_go_co/democrats_cheney_2


The American Institute could cover Cheney, let alone Hllaiburton.

__________________________________

Santorum warns US http://www.propagandamatrix.com/articles/july2007/070707changeview.htm

_________________________________
Harriet Miers ordered to ignore subpeona by W

list of ignored supeona's by Bush http://www.propagandamatrix.com/articles/july2007/070707changeview.htm

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: beardedbruce
Date: 12 Jul 07 - 10:53 AM

from the Washington Post

Wishful Thinking on Iraq

President Bush isn't the only guilty party.
Thursday, July 12, 2007; Page A22


IT SEEMS like just weeks ago, because it was, that Congress approved funding for the war in Iraq and instructed Gen. David H. Petraeus to report back on the war's progress in September. Now, for reasons having more to do with American politics than with Iraqi reality, September isn't soon enough. Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) says he wants a vote in the next week or two "to truly change our Iraq strategy," by which he means starting to withdraw U.S. troops. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.), the leading Democratic candidate for president, urged President Bush on Tuesday "to begin ending the war . . . today." Increasing numbers of Republicans agree. But many of them seem reluctant to confront the likely consequences of a U.S. troop withdrawal.

We agree with Mrs. Clinton that President Bush has been guilty of "wishful thinking" on Iraq. When he was promoting his surge policy at the beginning of this year, we said Iraq's political leadership was unlikely to accept compromises any time soon. It was predictable, therefore, that Mr. Bush's benchmarks would not be met and that within a few months the policy he put forward without popular or congressional support would become even more difficult to sustain.

But his wishful thinking can't excuse, even if it helps explain, the wishful thinking on the other side. Advocates of withdrawal would like to believe that Afghanistan is now a central front in the war on terror but that Iraq is not; believing that doesn't make it so. They would like to minimize the chances of disaster following a U.S. withdrawal: of full-blown civil war, conflicts spreading beyond Iraq's borders, or genocide. They would have us believe that someone or something will ride to the rescue: the United Nations, an Islamic peacekeeping force, an invigorated diplomatic process. They like to say that by withdrawing U.S. troops, they will "end the war."

Conditions in Iraq today are terrible, but they could become "way, way worse," as the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Ryan C. Crocker, a career Foreign Service officer, recently told the New York Times. If American men and women were dying in July in a clearly futile cause, it would indeed be immoral to wait until September to order their retreat. But given the risks of withdrawal, the calculus cannot be so simple. The generals who have devised a new strategy believe they are making fitful progress in calming Baghdad, training the Iraqi army and encouraging anti-al-Qaeda coalitions. Before Congress begins managing rotation schedules and ordering withdrawals, it should at least give those generals the months they asked for to see whether their strategy can offer some new hope.

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: beardedbruce
Date: 12 Jul 07 - 10:52 AM

from the Washington Post:

A Consensus Waiting to Happen

By David Ignatius
Thursday, July 12, 2007; Page A23

The last time I remember Ambassador Ryan Crocker warning about a possible bloodbath, it was in September 1982 as the Sabra-Shatila massacre was taking place in Beirut. So when Crocker tells the New York Times that a rapid U.S. withdrawal from Iraq could produce a human tragedy on a far larger scale, people should take notice. He has seen it happen before.

Iraq's foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, described the dangers starkly on Monday in explaining what might happen if the United States withdraws its troops too quickly from Iraq: "The dangers could be a civil war, dividing the country, regional wars and the collapse of the state."

Those are the stakes as the Senate debates the military authorization bill this week. The daily death toll measures the cost America and the Iraqis already are paying, but Crocker and Zebari are right in warning that a sudden U.S. withdrawal could be even more costly: The violence that is destroying Iraq could spread throughout the region -- an inferno stretching across Lebanon, the Palestinian territories, Jordan, Syria, and even Egypt and Saudi Arabia -- with devastating consequences for global security.

Getting into Iraq was President Bush's decision, and history will judge his administration harshly for its mistakes in the postwar occupation. But getting out of Iraq is now partly in the hands of the Democrats who control both houses of Congress. History will be equally unforgiving if their agitation for withdrawal results in a pell-mell retreat that causes lasting damage.

The Iraq debate in Washington this week is intense and angry. But as with the Palestinian conflict, the rhetorical fireworks mask the fact that there's an emerging consensus on what the final result should be. Leaders on both sides endorse the broad strategy proposed in December by the Iraq Study Group: a gradual withdrawal that shifts the American mission to training, force protection, counterterrorism and border security. That formula gets wide support from members of Congress and administration officials alike. As a senior administration official puts it, it's "where everybody agrees you want to go." The problem is getting there.

The essential elements of the compromise that's necessary don't seem all that complicated. Democrats need to be assured that the troops are beginning to come out; the administration needs to be assured that they aren't coming out so quickly that it will undermine regional security.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates appears to recognize what's necessary, politically and strategically. He is said to favor an announcement by September that the United States will withdraw some troops from Iraq before year-end as a sign that it is committed to a "post-surge" redeployment. The opportunity for a modest drawdown will arise this fall, when two battalions, several thousand troops at most, are scheduled to rotate out of Iraq. One of those is a Marine battalion in Anbar province, where the administration has been touting U.S. success. A good way to underline the gains in Anbar would be to reduce U.S. troop levels there.

Another chance for compromise is the United Nations authorization for the U.S. troop presence in Iraq, which must be renewed this year. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki wants a plan to reduce the number of American troops in his country as much as any member of Congress does. Here's the real opportunity for "timelines" on withdrawal -- ones jointly negotiated by U.S. and Iraqi diplomats rather than imposed by Congress. In a perverse sense, that's the greatest gift America can bestow on the Iraqi government -- to engineer the joint "liberation" of Iraq from U.S. occupation, but "slowly, slowly," as the Arabs like to say.

It used to be said of the Palestinians that "they never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity." Sadly, that has been true for the Bush administration during the past year in its failure to shape a bipartisan policy on Iraq. The release of the Baker-Hamilton report in December provided an opportunity; Bush missed it. Another chance arose in late May, when Bush himself proclaimed that his strategy for the future was " Plan B-H," meaning Baker-Hamilton. But he didn't follow through.

The president should have gathered the members of the Iraq Study Group in the Rose Garden the next day and dispatched them to visit members of Congress. Sorry, Mr. President, but Democratic Study Group members Vernon Jordan and Leon Panetta would be more effective lobbyists right now than anyone from the White House.

There's broad agreement on the need to put Iraq policy on a sustainable path that will gradually withdraw American forces without producing the bloodbath that frightens people such as Ryan Crocker in Baghdad. But Bush and the Democrats are running out of opportunities to make it happen.

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Amos
Date: 12 Jul 07 - 10:31 AM

As we debate what to do in Iraq, here are two facts to bear in mind:


...
First, a poll this spring of Iraqis — who know their country much better than we do — shows that only 21 percent think that the U.S. troop presence improves security in Iraq, while 69 percent think it is making security worse.

Second, the average cost of posting a single U.S. soldier in Iraq has risen to $390,000 per year, according to a new study by the Congressional Research Service. This fiscal year alone, Iraq will cost us $135 billion, which amounts to a bit more than a quarter-million dollars per minute.

We simply can't want to be in Iraq more than the Iraqis want us to be there. That poll of Iraqis, conducted by the BBC and other news organizations, found that only 22 percent of Iraqis support the presence of coalition troops in Iraq, down from 32 percent in 2005.

If Iraqis were pleading with us to stay and quell the violence, maybe we would have a moral responsibility to stay. But when Iraqis are begging us to leave, and saying that we are making things worse, then it's remarkably presumptuous to overrule their wishes and stay indefinitely because, as President Bush termed it in his speech on Tuesday, "it is necessary work."

We can't afford universal health care at home — but we can afford more than $10 billion a month so that American troops can be maimed in a country where they aren't wanted? If we take the total eventual cost of the Iraq war, that sum could be used to finance health care for all uninsured Americans for perhaps 30 years.

Or imagine if we invested just two weeks' worth of the Iraq spending to fight malaria, de-worm children around the globe and reduce maternal mortality. Those humanitarian projects would save vast numbers of lives and help restore America's standing in the world.

On Tuesday, Mr. Bush argued that we should give the surge a chance and that the costs of withdrawal would be enormous.

Just because President Bush says something doesn't mean it is fatuous. It's true, for example, that our withdrawal may lead to worse horrors in Iraq. But don't ignore the alternative possibility, believed overwhelmingly by Iraqis themselves, that our departure will make things better.

Mr. Bush is also right that the surge is only just in place and may still enjoy modest success. Sectarian violence initially dropped in Baghdad (although it seems to have risen again since May), and it's impressive to see Sunni tribes cooperating with us in Anbar against foreign jihadis. Then again, even the Green Zone is now a daily target, Turkish troops may invade Kurdistan and brace yourself for battles in Kirkuk between Kurds and Arabs.

Meanwhile, since Mr. Bush announced the surge, 600 American troops have been killed and 3,000 injured.

But whatever happens on the streets that the Americans patrol, the only solution in Iraq is political, not military. The surge was supposed to build political space for that solution, and that is not happening.

Progress has stalled on de-Baathification and constitutional reform, one-third of Iraq's cabinet is boycotting the government and people are turning to sectarian militias for protection. The Pentagon itself reported last month that 52 percent of Baghdad residents say that militias are serving the interest of the Iraqi people.

In this desperate situation, the last best hope to break the stalemates in Iraqi politics will come if Congress forces Iraqi politicians to peer over the abyss at the prospect of their country on its own. If Congress makes it clear that the U.S. is heading for the exits — and that we want no permanent bases in Iraq — that may undercut the extremists and lead more Iraqis to focus on preserving their nation rather than expelling the infidels.

It's nice that Mr. Bush is still confident about Iraq, telling us on Tuesday: "I strongly believe that we will prevail."

Apparently, we're doing almost as well today as we were in October 2003 when he blamed journalists for filtering out the good news and declared: "We're making really good progress."

Then in September 2004, Mr. Bush assured us that Iraq was "making steady progress." In April 2005: "We're making good progress in Iraq." In October 2005: "Iraq has made incredible political progress." In November 2005: "Iraqis are making inspiring progress."

Do we really want to continue making this kind of inspiring progress for the next 10 years?

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Amos
Date: 11 Jul 07 - 01:24 PM

An opinion piece excerpted from the Seattle Times:

George of Arabia vs. sanity
By Eugene Robinson


WASHINGTON — Don't think it's over, folks. Even though Republican senators are coming to their senses about George of Arabia's tragic war in Iraq, and even though Democrats seem to have remembered why voters put them in charge of Congress, no one should be lulled into thinking there's any guarantee that sanity will prevail.

This is the Decider we're talking about, after all.

Pay attention to what White House spokesman Tony Snow said Monday, knocking down a report that some advisers were advocating troop withdrawals: "There is no debate right now on withdrawing forces right now from Iraq."

I suppose that second "right now" in Snow's response leaves open the possibility that officials are talking about a pullout sometime in the near future. But I doubt it. Allowing himself to be forced to retreat from Iraq would ruin George W. Bush's fantasy of being seen as a latter-day Churchill. Bush keeps a bust of the British leader in his office, and has praised Churchill for being so "resolute."

Since I know he's read a book or two about his hero, hasn't Bush gotten to the part about how Churchill, T.E. Lawrence and Gertrude Bell created Iraq at the fateful Cairo Conference of 1921? And how the object was to get British forces out of Mesopotamia, leave the fractious locals to their own devices and wish them the best?

"Our object and our policy is to set up an Arab government," Churchill told Parliament later that year, describing the new country he had helped design, "and to make it take the responsibility, with our aid and our guidance and with an effective measure of our support, until they are strong enough to stand alone, and so to foster the development of their independence as to permit the steady and speedy diminution of our burden."

Bush's contribution is essentially to have destroyed the Iraq that Churchill cobbled together.

In the coming weeks, as more members of Congress distance themselves from Bush's war, some will blame the failure of the U.S. occupation not on the president but on the Iraqi leadership. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his parliament, we will be told, failed to make the "tough decisions" that could have ended the sectarian civil war and allowed a pro-Western democracy to grow and flourish.

It's convenient to put it all on those disputatious Iraqis, but it's also unfair. Bush's invasion so thoroughly obliterated the apparatus of the Iraqi nation-state that the populace was left with nothing to rally around but sect, clan and ethnicity. Where else were people to turn in the midst of post-invasion chaos? How else were they to ensure that their interests were protected?

...

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: beardedbruce
Date: 11 Jul 07 - 12:23 PM

Partisanship vs. the Children

By Michael Gerson
Wednesday, July 11, 2007; Page A15

Extending health insurance to uninsured children is perhaps the least controversial public policy goal in Washington. So it sets up a test: If progress is not possible on this issue, progress in our divided, embittered political system is no longer possible at all.

Ten years ago, in a passing fit of bipartisanship, Congress enacted the State Children's Health Insurance Program. Under SCHIP, states are given block grants to cover uninsured children whose parents make too much to qualify for Medicaid (the safety net entitlement for Americans in the worst poverty). Six million children, largely from families of the working poor, now get their health care through SCHIP, which is successful, popular and set to expire later this year. An additional 9 million American children, however, remain uninsured.

Reaching this group of the vulnerable is important, but not easy. Nearly two-thirds of that 9 million, according to James Fossett of the Rockefeller Institute, are already eligible for health care through Medicaid or SCHIP, but their parents haven't filled out the paperwork. Fulfilling the most basic parental responsibilities can't be legislated. Yet some of the problem might be solved through aggressive outreach and marketing by state governments, and by making the SCHIP bureaucracy easier to navigate.

Millions of other children, however, are exposed to risk because the traditional way of providing health insurance through businesses is breaking down. Escalating health costs have caused some firms to drop insurance coverage entirely or to boost costs beyond the reach of many employees. And this problem is working its way up the income scale, from the working poor to the middle class. States have responded by expanding eligibility for SCHIP to higher incomes; this year, New York state increased the threshold to 400 percent above the poverty line.

Some see this as a scandal. But consider the situation of a self-employed single mother in New York who is forced to self-insure. The average policy costs about $13,000 a year. So even if she makes $60,000, she will pay more than 20 percent of her pretax income just on health insurance. Giving her some help is not unreasonable.

Advocates of SCHIP such as John DiIulio at the University of Pennsylvania believe that $3 billion to $5 billion in additional funding a year -- maybe $25 billion over five years -- would make health coverage for children affordable for most American families under the median income. He even offers a slogan: "No child left uninsured."

But the debate in Washington on SCHIP has quickly become badly polarized. The administration's budget request is timid -- a measure of how compassionate conservatism has been drained of boldness by budget hard-liners. At $5 billion additional over five years, there are serious questions as to whether the proposal would even maintain coverage for the number of children currently in the program. The administration's attempt to limit eligibility to families at 200 percent of the poverty line or below is too restrictive. And its alternative -- a stingy tax deduction for the purchase of private health insurance -- would be more credible if it were a generous and refundable tax credit.

At the same time, Democrats are in full overreach mode, intent on stuffing themselves at the endless buffet of liberal opportunity. Their proposal -- a $50 billion increase over five years -- represents a barely hidden agenda. Instead of reasonably expanding a successful program, they want to bloat SCHIP beyond its original purposes -- to cover more and more adults -- as a step toward their utopia of government-run universal health care. And this overreach actually reduces the prospect of political agreement that would bring swift help to uninsured children.

There are serious gaps in health insurance for grown-ups, not just children. But here the administration is correct: The answer is not SCHIP and Medicare for everyone. For the hardest cases, public programs can be useful, but all Americans benefit from the innovation and quality of a predominantly private health system.

The complete triumph of public bureaucracies, in the long run, would give us the British model of decaying hospitals and take-a-number-and-wait surgery. A serious, refundable tax credit, in contrast, would allow the working poor and the lower middle class to purchase their own health coverage, while maintaining the benefits of private medicine. Two weeks ago, President Bush signaled his openness to such a credit.

There are splittable differences on these issues. It would be a reasonable compromise to expand SCHIP significantly, while offering adults a generous tax credit to purchase health insurance. But in Washington today, to call something a "reasonable compromise" may be the kiss of death.

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Amos
Date: 11 Jul 07 - 10:15 AM

Overprivileged Executive
               



Published: July 11, 2007
NYT Editorial

It is hardly news that top officials in the current Justice Department flout the law and make false statements to Congress, but the latest instance may be the most egregious. When Attorney General Alberto Gonzales wanted the USA Patriot Act renewed in the spring of 2005, he told the Senate, "There has not been one verified case of civil liberties abuse." But The Washington Post reported yesterday that just six days earlier, the F.B.I. had sent Mr. Gonzales a report saying that it had obtained personal information it should not have.

This is hardly the first time Mr. Gonzales has played so free and loose with the facts in his public statements and Congressional testimony. In the United States attorneys scandal — the controversy over the political purge of nine top prosecutors — Mr. Gonzales and his aides have twisted and mutilated the truth beyond recognition.

Congress and the American public need to know all that has gone on at the Justice Department. But instead of aiding that search for the truth, President Bush is blocking it, invoking executive privilege this week to prevent Harriet Miers, the former White House counsel, and Sara Taylor, a former top aide to Karl Rove, from telling Congress what they know about the purge of federal prosecutors.

Mr. Bush's claim is baseless. Executive privilege, which is not mentioned in the Constitution, is a judge-made right of limited scope, intended to create a sphere of privacy around the president so that he can have honest discussions with his advisers. The White House has insisted throughout the scandal that Mr. Bush — and even Mr. Gonzales — was not in the loop about the firings. If that is the case, the privilege should not apply.

Even if Mr. Bush was directly involved, Ms. Miers and Ms. Taylor would have no right to withhold their testimony. The Supreme Court made clear in the Watergate tapes case, its major pronouncement on the subject, that the privilege does not apply if a president's privacy interests are outweighed by the need to investigate possible criminal activity. Congress has already identified many acts relating to the scandal that may have been illegal, including possible obstruction of justice and lying to Congress.

The White House argues that its insistence on the privilege is larger than this one case, that it is protecting the presidency from inappropriate demands from Congress. But the reverse is true. This White House has repeatedly made clear that it does not respect Congress's constitutional role. If Congress backs down, it would not only be compromising an important investigation of Justice Department malfeasance. It would be doing serious damage to the balance of powers.

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Amos
Date: 11 Jul 07 - 09:46 AM

WASHINGTON, July 10 — Former Surgeon General Richard H. Carmona told a Congressional panel Tuesday that top Bush administration officials repeatedly tried to weaken or suppress important public health reports because of political considerations.

The administration, Dr. Carmona said, would not allow him to speak or issue reports about stem cells, emergency contraception, sex education, or prison, mental and global health issues. Top officials delayed for years and tried to "water down" a landmark report on secondhand smoke, he said. Released last year, the report concluded that even brief exposure to cigarette smoke could cause immediate harm.

Dr. Carmona said he was ordered to mention President Bush three times on every page of his speeches. He also said he was asked to make speeches to support Republican political candidates and to attend political briefings.

And administration officials even discouraged him from attending the Special Olympics because, he said, of that charitable organization's longtime ties to a "prominent family" that he refused to name.

"I was specifically told by a senior person, 'Why would you want to help those people?' " Dr. Carmona said.

The Special Olympics is one of the nation's premier charitable organizations to benefit disabled people, and the Kennedys have long been deeply involved in it.

When asked after the hearing if that "prominent family" was the Kennedys, Dr. Carmona responded, "You said it. I didn't."

In response to lawmakers' questions, Dr. Carmona refused to name specific people in the administration who had instructed him to put political considerations over scientific ones. He said, however, that they included assistant secretaries of health and human services as well as top political appointees outside the department of health.

Dr. Carmona did offer to provide the names to the committee in a private meeting. ...

From the New York Times

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Amos
Date: 11 Jul 07 - 09:40 AM

Budget Deficit Narrows to $205 Billion
               E-Mail

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: July 11, 2007
Filed at 9:19 a.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The nation's budget deficit will drop to $205 billion in the fiscal year that ends in September, less than half of what it was at its peak in 2004, according to new White House estimates.

It's also a gain over the $244 billion predicted by President Bush in February, but not as great an improvement as anticipated by other forecasters.

Bush planned to discuss the figures in an afternoon appearance as the White House's Office of Management and Budget as part of its midyear update of the budget picture.

The deficit last year was $248 billion and has closed in recent years due to impressive revenue growth from the healthy economy. Bush and Democrats in Congress have both promised to erase the deficit by 2012, though they have greatly divergent views on how to achieve the goal, with Bush and Republicans insisting on extension of his 2001 and 2003 tax cuts when they expire at the end of 2010.

---

See? There is another side.


A

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Amos
Date: 10 Jul 07 - 03:19 PM

Report: Gonzales knew of FBI violations
By LAURIE KELLMAN
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER

WASHINGTON -- Democrats raised new questions Tuesday about whether Attorney General Alberto Gonzales may have known about FBI abuses of civil liberties when he told a Senate committee that no such abuses occurred.

Lying to Congress is a crime, but it wasn't immediately clear if Gonzales knew about the violations when he made those statements to the Senate Intelligence Committee or intentionally misled its members.

One Democrat called for a special counsel. President Bush, meanwhile, continued to support his longtime friend.

"He still has faith in the attorney general," White House spokesman Scott Stanzel told reporters Tuesday.

On April 27, 2005, while seeking renewal of the broad powers granted law enforcement under the USA Patriot Act, Gonzales told the Senate Intelligence Committee, "There has not been one verified case of civil liberties abuse" from the law enacted after the 9/11 terror attacks.

Six days earlier, the FBI sent Gonzales a copy of a report that said its agents had obtained personal information to which they were not entitled, according to The Washington Post. Gonzales had received a least half a dozen reports describing such violations in the three months before he made that statement. The newspaper obtained the internal FBI documents under the Freedom of Information Act.

The violations, the Post reported, included unauthorized surveillance and an illegal property search.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a longtime critic of the Patriot Act, called for a special counsel.

"Providing false, misleading or inaccurate statements to Congress is a serious crime, and the man who may have committed those acts cannot be trusted to investigate himself," Nadler, D-N.Y., said in a statement.

Each of the FBI's violations cited in the reports copied to Gonzales was serious enough to require notification of the President's Intelligence Oversight Board, which helps police the government's surveillance activities, the Post reported.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said the inconsistency was troubling and pointed out what he said was another one: the Justice Department's accounting of when Gonzales became aware of the FBI's abuses of so-called National Security Letters - which allow agents to secretly obtain private information on ordinary Americans in terrorism investigations.

According to the department, Gonzales became aware of the abuses "prior" to March 9 this year, when Justice's inspector general released a report documenting them. Gonzales had been receiving reports of FBI abuses in terrorism investigations for months before that, according to the Post.

Leahy said the contradictions warrant further inquiry and said he'd be asking Gonzales about them prior to the attorney general's scheduled testimony before Leahy's committee July 24.

"It appears the attorney General also failed to disclose the truth about when he first knew of widespread abuses by the FBI of National Security Letters (NSLs)," Leahy said in a statement.

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Amos
Date: 10 Jul 07 - 08:36 AM

Bush directs defiance of order to testify
Claims of executive privilege mean ex-aides won't explain roles in firing of attorneys
By Jesse J. Holland
Associated Press

WASHINGTON - President Bush, again claiming executive privilege, directed former aides Monday to defy congressional subpoenas ordering them to explain their roles in the firings of U.S. attorneys over the winter.

White House Counsel Fred Fielding insisted that Bush was acting in good faith in withholding documents and directing Fielding's predecessor, Harriet Miers, and Bush's former political director, Sara Taylor, not to testify before congressional committees this week.

Fielding renewed the White House offer to let Miers, Taylor and other administration officials meet with congressional investigators off the record and with no transcript -- an offer congressional Democrats have rejected.

As a result, a showdown looms in which lawmakers could hold the subpoenaed officials in contempt of Congress.

Here are questions and answers about the process of contempt of Congress:

Q: What is contempt of Congress, and why would Congress want to use this power?

A: Congress can hold a person in contempt if he or she obstructs proceedings or an inquiry by a congressional committee. Congress has used contempt citations for two main reasons: to punish someone (1) for refusing to testify or refusing to provide documents or answers, or (2) for bribing or libeling a member of Congress.

What is the process for holding someone in contempt of Congress?

A: The procedure can start in either the House or the Senate. The two chambers do not work together on contempt citations. It takes only one chamber to refer a person to be prosecuted for contempt.

It takes a majority vote for the citation to move to the full House or Senate. There, it must be debated by the full chamber like any other resolution. It is subject to the same filibuster and procedural rules as any other resolution. It takes a majority vote to be approved.

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Amos
Date: 09 Jul 07 - 06:30 PM

This week, the showdown between the White House and Congress over the improper firing last year of nine U.S. attorneys is set to come to a head. At the center of the dispute are subpoenas issued last month by both the House and Senate Judiciary Committees for the testimony of two former White House aides, Sara Taylor and Harriet Miers, as well as documents related to their involvement in the firing process. Last month, the White House invoked executive privilege to block the release of the documents. Today, President Bush is due to provide "a detailed justification of his executive privilege claims and a full accounting of the documents he is withholding."

But the White House has signaled it will defy the order, with counsel Fred Fielding expected to tell "lawmakers that he has already provided the legal basis for the claims and will not provide a log" of the requested documents. Taylor, an ex-aide to Karl Rove who served as White House political director, is scheduled to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, but her lawyer has said that though she is willing to testify, the White House is urging her to ignore the subpoena. This morning, Bush invoked executive privilege to block Taylor and Miers from providing testimony. Bush's defiance of the subpoenas may lead Congress "to seek criminal contempt citations against the White House," which would bring the battle over separation of powers into the court system, leading to what could be an unprecedented constitutional struggle, as "no president has mounted a court fight to keep his aides from testifying on Capitol Hill."

CONGRESS CONSIDERING HOLDING WHITE HOUSE IN CONTEMPT: On June 29, after the White House invoked executive privilege, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), the respective chairmen of the Senate and House Judiciary Committees, sent a letter to Fielding demanding the details of "which documents, and which parts of those documents, are covered by any privilege" that the administration may invoke. The requested records log, "according to the committees, should describe each document withheld, including its source, subject matter, date and recipients."

Though Leahy and Conyers note that "such privilege logs have been provided by the White House in previous Administrations," and that the Justice Department has already provided similar logs, the White House is balking, viewing "the request as a backdoor attempt to get sensitive information about deliberations." If Fielding refuses to provide the logs today, as is expected, the committees will "move to proceedings to rule on [the executive privilege] claims and consider whether the White House is in contempt of Congress," according to the letter. "We're going to pursue our legal remedies to press forward with the subpoenas," Conyers said yesterday on ABC's This Week.

BUSH BLOCKING AIDES' TESTIMONY: On Saturday, W. Neil Eggleston, the attorney for Sara Taylor, sent a letter to Leahy, writing that "Ms. Taylor expects to receive a letter from [White House Counsel Fred] Fielding on behalf of the President directing her to not comply with the Senate's subpoena." In his letter, Eggleston claimed that "Taylor would testify without hesitation," but that she "faces two untenable choices": follow the President's wishes and be held in contempt of Congress or work with the Senate and risk alienating the President, "a person whom she admires and for whom she has worked tirelessly for years."

Reacting to the letter, Leahy said, "The White House continues to try to have it both ways -- to block Congress from talking with witnesses and accessing documents and other evidence while saying nothing improper occurred." Taylor's testimony to Congress would be an important step in the investigation of why nine U.S. attorneys were singled out for firing last year, as she was one of the main contacts between the White House and the Department of Justice during the deliberations over the purge.

TAYLOR WAS DEEPLY INVOLVED IN FIRINGS: Taylor, who stepped down from her position at the White House in May, is reported to have been intimately involved in the firing process, especially the replacement of former Arkansas U.S. Attorney Bud Cummins with former Rove-protege Tim Griffin. According to Kyle Sampson, the former chief of staff to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Taylor put "pressure" on the Department of Justice to bypass the Senate and install Griffin as the U.S. Attorney in Arkansas.

Additionally, Taylor had a direct role in misleading the Senate about White House's actions when she signed off on a January 2007 letter to Sen. Mark Pryor (D-AR) claiming that "that 'not once' had the Bush 'administration sought to avoid the Senate confirmation process' by exploiting the Patriot Act." After Cummins suggested publicly that the White House orchestrated his ouster, rather than the Justice Department, Taylor led the charge behind the scenes to attack and discredit him. In a February 2007 e-mail to Sampson, Taylor wrote that though she doesn't "like attacking" her friends, they should "tell the deal" on Cummins. In another e-mail, Taylor called Cummins "lazy," implying that he had been fired for performance-related issues -- the charge that first led the ousted U.S. attorneys to speak publicly about their dismissals.


ADMINISTRATION -- ROVE: 'I MAKE NO APOLOGIES' FOR ANY OF ADMINISTRATION'S BLUNDERS: This weekend at the Aspen Ideas Festival, Karl Rove spoke at length about his involvement in a series of key administration blunders related to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Rove grossly distorted the conditions at Guantanamo Bay prison, claiming, "Our principal health problem down there is gain of weight, we feed them so well." In fact, Guantanamo prisoners are facing a mental health crisis, with over 40 suicide attempts, including one suicide in May.

Some have been treated by "experts in treating torture victims." Rove fearmongered that 80-90 percent of violence in Iraq is due to al Qaeda. In fact, as former Secretary of State Colin Powell noted earlier in the Aspen conference, only 10 percent of violence in Iraq is due to al Qaeda. Rove also argued that "we all thought [Saddam Hussein] had weapons of mass destruction. The whole world did." But U.N.weapons inspectors and prominent members of the international community strongly disagreed with this assessment before the invasion.

Downplaying his role in the CIA leak scandal, Rove said, "My contribution to this was to say to a reporter, which is a lesson about talking to reporters, the words 'I heard that, too.'" In fact, Rove may have intentionally leaked Valerie Plame's identity, writing in an e-mail to a reporter that "[Joe] Wilson's wife...works at the agency on wmd [weapons of mass destruction]." One reporter said his conversation with Rove was the first time he heard anything about Plame. Subsequently, Rove partook in an "an aggressive campaign to discredit Wilson." Nonetheless, Rove remains confident today. "Look, I make no apologies," he said. 

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Amos
Date: 09 Jul 07 - 12:32 PM

Excerpt from "A Profile in Cowardice"
            By FRANK RICH (NY Times Columnist)
Published: July 8, 2007


THERE was never any question that President Bush would grant amnesty to Scooter Libby, the man who knows too much about the lies told to sell the war in Iraq. The only questions were when, and how, Mr. Bush would buy Mr. Libby's silence. Now we have the answers, and they're at least as incriminating as the act itself. They reveal the continued ferocity of a White House cover-up and expose the true character of a commander in chief whose tough-guy shtick can no longer camouflage his fundamental cowardice.


The timing of the president's Libby intervention was a surprise. Many assumed he would mimic the sleazy 11th-hour examples of most recent vintage: his father's pardon of six Iran-contra defendants who might have dragged him into that scandal, and Bill Clinton's pardon of the tax fugitive Marc Rich, the former husband of a major campaign contributor and the former client of none other than the ubiquitous Mr. Libby.

But the ever-impetuous current President Bush acted 18 months before his scheduled eviction from the White House. Even more surprising, he did so when the Titanic that is his presidency had just hit two fresh icebergs, the demise of the immigration bill and the growing revolt of Republican senators against his strategy in Iraq.

That Mr. Bush, already suffering historically low approval ratings, would invite another hit has been attributed in Washington to his desire to placate what remains of his base. By this logic, he had nothing left to lose. He didn't care if he looked like an utter hypocrite, giving his crony a freer ride than Paris Hilton and violating the white-collar sentencing guidelines set by his own administration. He had to throw a bone to the last grumpy old white guys watching Bill O'Reilly in a bunker.

But if those die-hards haven't deserted him by now, why would Mr. Libby's incarceration be the final straw? They certainly weren't whipped into a frenzy by coverage on Fox News, which tended to minimize the leak case as a non-event. Mr. Libby, faceless and voiceless to most Americans, is no Ollie North, and he provoked no right-wing firestorm akin to the uproars over Terri Schiavo, Harriet Miers or "amnesty" for illegal immigrants.

The only people clamoring for Mr. Libby's freedom were the pundits who still believe that Saddam secured uranium in Africa and who still hope that any exoneration of Mr. Libby might make them look less like dupes for aiding and abetting the hyped case for war. That select group is not the Republican base so much as a roster of the past, present and future holders of quasi-academic titles at neocon think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute.

What this crowd never understood is that Mr. Bush's highest priority is always to protect himself. So he stiffed them too. Had the president wanted to placate the Weekly Standard crowd, he would have given Mr. Libby a full pardon. That he served up a commutation instead is revealing of just how worried the president is about the beans Mr. Libby could spill about his and Dick Cheney's use of prewar intelligence.

Valerie Wilson still has a civil suit pending. The Democratic inquisitor in the House, Henry Waxman, still has the uranium hoax underlying this case at the top of his agenda as an active investigation. A commutation puts up more roadblocks by keeping Mr. Libby's appeal of his conviction alive and his Fifth Amendment rights intact. He can't testify without risking self-incrimination. Meanwhile, we are asked to believe that he has paid his remaining $250,000 debt to society independently of his private $5 million "legal defense fund."

The president's presentation of the commutation is more revealing still. Had Mr. Bush really believed he was doing the right and honorable thing, he would not have commuted Mr. Libby's jail sentence by press release just before the July Fourth holiday without consulting Justice Department lawyers. That's the behavior of an accountant cooking the books in the dead of night, not the proud act of a patriot standing on principle.

When the furor followed Mr. Bush from Kennebunkport to Washington despite his efforts to duck it, he further underlined his embarrassment by taking his only few questions on the subject during a photo op at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. You know this president is up to no good whenever he hides behind the troops. This instance was particularly shameful, since Mr. Bush also used the occasion to trivialize the scandalous maltreatment of Walter Reed patients on his watch as merely "some bureaucratic red-tape issues."

Asked last week to explain the president's poll numbers, Andrew Kohut of the Pew Research Center told NBC News that "when we ask people to summon up one word that comes to mind" to describe Mr. Bush, it's "incompetence." But cowardice, the character trait so evident in his furtive handling of the Libby commutation, is as important to understanding Mr. Bush's cratered presidency as incompetence, cronyism and hubris. "

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Amos
Date: 09 Jul 07 - 12:27 PM

President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have used demagoguery and fear to quell Americans' demands for an end to this war. They say withdrawing will create bloodshed and chaos and encourage terrorists. Actually, all of that has already happened — the result of this unnecessary invasion and the incompetent management of this war.

This country faces a choice. We can go on allowing Mr. Bush to drag out this war without end or purpose. Or we can insist that American troops are withdrawn as quickly and safely as we can manage — with as much effort as possible to stop the chaos from spreading.



New Yorkl Times

---

The complete self-centered stupidity of Bush's major decisions on almost every front is perhaps the trademark of his tenure. He is clearly an interloper in the history of civilization, a fraud and pretender in the ranks of thinking men.

A

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Donuel
Date: 09 Jul 07 - 10:50 AM

The Patriot Act needed all the help it could get in the first few days.

Is it possible that the anthrax attacks were launched from within our own government? A former Bush 1 advisor thinks it is.

Francis A. Boyle, an international law expert who worked under the first Bush Administration as a bioweapons advisor in the 1980s, has said that he is convinced the October 2001 anthrax attacks that killed five people were perpetrated and covered up by criminal elements of the U.S. government. The motive: to foment a police state by killing off and intimidating opposition to post-9/11 legislation such as the USA PATRIOT Act and the later Military Commissions Act.

"After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the Bush Administration tried to ram the USA PATRIOT Act through Congress," Boyle said in a radio interview with Austin-based talk-show host Alex Jones. "That would have set up a police state.

"Senators Tom Daschle (D-South Dakota) and Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont)
were holding it up because they realized what this would lead to. The
first draft of the PATRIOT Act would have suspended the writ of habeas
corpus [which protects citizens from unlawful imprisonment and
guarantees due process of law]. Then all of a sudden, out of nowhere,
come these anthrax attacks."

"At the time I myself did not know precisely what was going on, either
with respect to September 11 or the anthrax attacks, but then the New
York Times revealed the technology behind the letter to Senator
Daschle. [The anthrax used was] a trillion spores per gram, [refined
with] special electro-static treatment. This is superweapons-grade
anthrax that even the United States government, in its openly
proclaimed programs, had never developed before. So it was obvious to
me that this was from a U.S. government lab. There is nowhere else you
could have gotten that."

Boyle's assessment was based on his years of expertise regarding
America's bioweapons programs. He was responsible for drafting the
Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989 that was passed
unanimously by both houses of Congress and signed into law by President
George H.W. Bush.

After realizing that the anthrax attacks looked like a domestic job,
Boyle called a high-level official in the FBI who deals with terrorism
and counterterrorism, Marion "Spike" Bowman. Boyle and Bowman had met
at a terrorism conference at the University of Michigan Law School.
Boyle told Bowman that the only people who would have the capability to
carry out the attacks were individuals working on U.S. government
anthrax programs with access to a high-level biosafety lab. Boyle gave
Bowman a full list of names of scientists, contractors and labs
conducting anthrax work for the U.S. government and military.

Bowman then informed Boyle that the FBI was working with Fort Detrick
on the matter. Boyle expressed his view that Fort Detrick could be the
main problem. As widely reported in 2002 publications, notably the New
Scientist, the anthrax strain used in the attacks was officially
assessed as "military grade."

"Soon after I informed Bowman of this information, the FBI authorized
the destruction of the Ames cultural anthrax database," the professor
said. The Ames strain turned out to be the same strain as the spores
used in the attacks.

The alleged destruction of the anthrax culture collection at Ames,
Iowa, from which the Fort Detrick lab got its pathogens, was blatant
destruction of evidence. It meant that there was no way of finding out
which strain was sent to whom to develop the larger breed of anthrax
used in the attacks. The trail of genetic evidence would have led
directly back to a secret government biowarfare program.

"Clearly, for the FBI to have authorized this was obstruction of
justice, a federal crime," said Boyle. "That collection should have
been preserved and protected as evidence. That's the DNA, the
fingerprints right there. It later came out, of course, that this was
Ames strain anthrax that was behind the Daschle and Leahy letters."

At that point, recounted Boyle, it became very clear to him that there
was a coverup underway. He later discovered, while reading David Ray
Griffin's book on the 9/11 attacks, The New Pearl Harbor, that Bowman
was the same FBI agent who allegedly sabotaged the FISA warrant for
access to [convicted co-conspirator] Zacharias Moussaoui's computer
prior to 9/11. Moussaoui's computer contained information that could
have helped prevent the attacks on the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon.

In 2003, Bowman was promoted and given the Presidential Rank Award by
FBI Director Robert S. Mueller. Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) wrote a
letter to Mueller, chastising the organization for granting such an
honor to an agent who had so obviously compromised America's security.

During the anthrax scare, the House of Representatives was officially
shut down for the first time in the history of the republic. Once
opposition from Leahy and Daschle evaporated in the wake of the
attempts on their lives, the USA PATRIOT Act was rammed through.
Testimony by Representative Ron Paul (R-Texas) revealed that most
members of Congress were compelled to vote for the bill without even
reading it.

"They were going to move to suspend the writ of habeas corpus, which is
all that really separates us from a police state," Boyle said. "And
that is what they have done now with respect to enemy combatants [in
the Military Commissions Act of 2006]." Boyle added that lawmakers are
now arguing that Amendment XIV, which guarantees due process of law to
all Americans, does not mean what it has been taken to mean and that,
under the Military Commissions Act, any U.S. citizen can be stripped of
citizenship and be labeled an enemy combatant.

Continued Boyle: "In other words, they have taken the position that at
some point in time, if they want to, they can unilaterally round up
United States native-born citizens, as they did for Japanese-Americans
in World War II, and stick us into concentration camps." Boyle asserted
that top officials, such as White House legal advisor John Yoo and
former Assistant Attorney General Jack Goldsmith (now a professor at
Harvard Law School), are pushing for the legalization of torture as
well.

"The Nazis did the exact same thing," said Boyle. "They had their
lawyers infiltrating law schools. Carl Schmidt was the worst, and he
was the mentor to Leo Strauss, the [ideological] founder of the
neoconservatives. So the same phenomenon that started in Nazi Germany
is happening here, and I exaggerate not. We could all be tortured; we
could all be treated this way."

Boyle stressed that it is vital to keep up the pressure on Senator
Leahy, who now chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, giving him
subpoena power. Since Leahy was himself a target, he may have
sufficient motivation to get to the bottom of the attacks. The FBI and
the Justice Department have so far refused full disclosure to Congress.

In addition to his credentials as a government advisor, Boyle also
holds a doctorate of law magna cum laude and a Ph.D. in political
science, both from Harvard University. He teaches international law at
the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. Boyle also served on
the Board of Directors of Amnesty International (1988-92) and
represented Bosnia-Herzegovina at the World Court.

Boyle alleged that due to his activities as a lawyer, he was
interrogated by an agent from the CIA/FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force in
the summer of 2004. The agent tried to recruit him as an informant to
provide the FBI with information on his Arab and Muslim clients. When
he refused, according to Boyle, the FBI placed him on the government's
terrorism watch lists.

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Dickey
Date: 09 Jul 07 - 09:49 AM

Court orders dismissal of U.S. wiretapping lawsuit

"...The appeals court ruled that the plaintiffs didn't prove they had been affected by the NSA's Terrorist Surveillance Program, authorized by President Bush in 2002. The program allowed the NSA to monitor communications between U.S. residents and people in other countries with suspected ties to the terrorist group al-Qaeda...."

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9026379

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Amos
Date: 08 Jul 07 - 02:30 PM

The NEw York Times editorializes:

"Just as Iran should come under international pressure to allow Shiites in southern Iraq to develop their own independent future, Washington must help persuade Sunni powers like Syria not to intervene on behalf of Sunni Iraqis. Turkey must be kept from sending troops into Kurdish territories.

For this effort to have any remote chance, Mr. Bush must drop his resistance to talking with both Iran and Syria. Britain, France, Russia, China and other nations with influence have a responsibility to help. Civil war in Iraq is a threat to everyone, especially if it spills across Iraq's borders.

•

President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have used demagoguery and fear to quell Americans' demands for an end to this war. They say withdrawing will create bloodshed and chaos and encourage terrorists. Actually, all of that has already happened — the result of this unnecessary invasion and the incompetent management of this war.

This country faces a choice. We can go on allowing Mr. Bush to drag out this war without end or purpose. Or we can insist that American troops are withdrawn as quickly and safely as we can manage — with as much effort as possible to stop the chaos from spreading."


A

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Amos
Date: 07 Jul 07 - 10:41 PM

growing number of Republican lawmakers are dissenting from the administration and urging for a change of course.
By Noam N. Levey, LA Times Staff Writer
July 7, 2007


'I do support a new strategy that will move our troops out of combat operations and on the path to coming home.'
— Sen. Pete V. Domenici, (R-N.M.) on his defection from Bush's war approach

WASHINGTON — Wearied by the lack of progress in Iraq and by the steady stream of military funerals back home, a growing number of Republican lawmakers who had stood loyally with President Bush are insisting his strategy has failed and are calling on him to bring the war to an end.

In the last two weeks, three GOP senators — including one of the party's leading voices on foreign affairs and one of Bush's strongest allies — have urged the president to change course now so U.S. troops can start to withdraw.

And Friday, in interviews with the Los Angeles Times, two more Senate Republicans bluntly voiced disappointment with the president's approach and pressed for change.

"It should be clear to the president that there needs to be a new strategy," said Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee. "Our policy in Iraq is drifting."

Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, who helped lead the charge earlier this year against Democratic efforts to oppose Bush's troop buildup, said: "We don't seem to be making a lot of progress."

It is vital to have "a clear blueprint for how we were going to draw down," he said.

None of these GOP lawmakers has embraced Democratic legislation to compel a troop withdrawal. But nearly five years after congressional Republicans overwhelmingly answered Bush's call for military action against Iraq's Saddam Hussein, some are doing what was once unthinkable: challenging a wartime president from their own party.

By publicly branding Bush's buildup a failure and calling for troops to begin coming home, they are forcing a reluctant White House to reassess how long it can maintain a large military presence in Iraq.

Subject: RE: BS: Popular views of the Bush Administration
From: Amos
Date: 06 Jul 07 - 10:08 PM

Dear Friend:

I want to let you know about legislation that I am cosponsoring that is designed to protect the Constitutional rights we all hold dear.

The Habeas Corpus Restoration Act of 2007 (S.185) would repeal provisions of the Military Commissions Act that currently deny habeas corpus rights to those persons detained by the United States. I am proud to be a cosponsor of this important bipartisan bill.

The U.S. Supreme Court has recognized habeas corpus as "the fundamental instrument for safeguarding individual freedom against arbitrary and lawless state action." The principle of habeas corpus permits an accused person to challenge whether his or her imprisonment is lawful. It is the foundation of our legal system that protects every one of us – not just those accused of a crime.

This 900-year-old legal standard was eliminated by the Bush Administration in the Military Commissions Act of 2006. Reestablishing habeas corpus rights is critical to repairing the damage that has been caused by the Administration's harmful and misguided detention policies.

I will work to pass S.185 and other legislation that is consistent with America's guiding principles of fairness, justice, and the rule of law.

Sincerely,

Barbara Boxer
United States Senator