Iraq as a 'Black Hole'
BBC News, 20 October 2005
France's top anti-terrorist judge has warned that Iraq is a black hole which has helped to radicalise some young Muslims and drawn them into violence.
In an interview with the BBC, Jean-Louis Bruguiere says some Muslims are receiving training in Iraq before returning to Europe to carry out jihad.
He also warns that the terror threat facing Europe remains very high.
Combating Islamist terrorist cells is becoming harder as they are fragmenting in unpredictable ways, he says.
New weapons
Judge Bruguiere is one of Europe's most experienced anti-terrorism investigators, who has specialised in tracking Islamist groups since the 1980s.
In his interview with the Today programme, he says he is pessimistic about the immediate future - saying the terror threat in Europe and the rest of the world remains very high.

Hearts and Minds in Afghanistan
Dateline (Austrailia), 19 October 2005
Since September 11, we've all become uncomfortably familiar with names like Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, Fallujah and maybe even Bagram in Afghanistan. They're all places we now associate with human rights violations or worse - military atrocities and possibly potential war crimes. But after our first story tonight, you can add another placename to that list - Gonbaz in southern Afghanistan, about a 100km from the former Taliban stronghold of Kandahar.
In recent months, the former Muslim extremist Taliban and their al-Qa'ida allies have launched more attacks against US forces than at any time since the Americans first invaded in 2001. Earlier this month, Dateline's John Martinkus was in Afghanistan to cover their elections, but his story tonight actually starts with some startling footage from another Australian, photojournalist Stephen Dupont, who, while he was embedded with the Americans, managed to record some of the grotesque tactics being used by Australia's allies in that part of the world. Dateline should warn you that this report does include some pretty disturbing scenes, particularly for any Muslim viewers.
Read Transcript
Stephen Dupont Interview
Startling scenes of what can be done in the name of a just war, by Dateline's John Martinkus and freelance photojournalist Stephen Dupont. And earlier this evening Stephen and George Negus looked at that Taliban burning footage and then talked about it here in the studio.
Play Video 6:16 secs

Senate Rejects Minimum Wage Hike, Good Jobs Still Hard to Find
Center for American Progress, 20 October 2005
 "Senate proposals to raise the minimum wage were rejected Wednesday, making it unlikely that the lowest allowable wage, $5.15 an hour since 1997, will rise in the foreseeable future." The Senate proposal would have raised the minimum wage to $6.25 an hour over an 18-month period. In related news, the Center for Economic and Policy Research released a report that found only 25 percent of Americans have a job "that offers decent pay (at least $16 per hour or about $32,000 per year), employer-paid health insurance, and a pension." John Schmitt, the author of the report, found that "[t]he United States is a much richer country today than it was a quarter of a century ago, but the economy produces almost an identical supply of good jobs then as now."

Secrets, Evasions and Classified Reports
The CIA leak case isn’t just about whether top officials will be indicted. A larger issue is what Judith Miller’s evidence says about White House manipulation of the media.
By Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball
Newsweek, 20 October 2005
The lengthy account by New York Times reporter Judy Miller about her grand jury testimony in the CIA leak case inadvertently provides a revealing window into how the Bush administration manipulated journalists about intelligence on Iraq’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction.
Whatever the implications for special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s probe, Miller describes a conversation with Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, Lewis (Scooter) Libby, on July 8, 2003, where he appears to significantly misrepresent the contents of still-classified material from a crucial prewar intelligence-community document about Iraq.
With no weapons of mass destruction having been found in Iraq and new questions being raised about the case for war, Libby assured Miller that day that the still-classified document, a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), contained even stronger evidence that would support the White House’s conclusions about Iraq’s weapons programs, according to Miller’s account.
In fact, a declassified version of the NIE was publicly released just 10 days later, and it showed almost precisely the opposite. The NIE, it turned out, contained caveats and qualifiers that had never been publicly acknowledged by the administration prior to the invasion of Iraq. It also included key dissents by State Department intelligence analysts, Energy Department scientists and Air Force technical experts about some important aspects of the administration’s case.
The assertion that still-secret material would bolster the administration’s claims about Iraqi WMD was “certainly not accurate, it was not true,” says Jessica Mathews, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who coauthored a study last year, titled “A Tale of Two Intelligence Estimates,” about different versions of the NIE that were released. If Miller’s account is correct, Libby was “misrepresenting the intelligence” that was contained in the document, she said.
A spokeswoman for Cheney’s office said today that she could not respond to Miller’s account because it described grand jury testimony in the Valerie Plame leak case. Following standard White House policy, the vice president’s office does not intend to make any public comments on any matter relating to the investigation until after it is complete.
Libby’s comments about the NIE may seem at this point a sideshow to the pressing question that is currently consuming much of Washington: whether he or any other White House official will be charged with any crimes stemming from the outing of CIA agent Plame, the wife of former ambassador and administration critic Joseph Wilson.
But Libby’s comments do touch on what many believe is a larger issue raised by the case: whether the administration accurately represented the nature of what the U.S. intelligence community knew, and didn’t know, about Saddam Hussein’s weapons programs before the nation went to war.

Leak Scandal Goes To The Top
Center for American Progress, 20 October 2005
What did the President know and when did he know it? Yesterday, the New York Daily News reported that, according to a "presidential counselor," an "angry President Bush rebuked chief political guru Karl Rove two years ago for his role in the Valerie Plame affair." According to the article, the run-in occurred "shortly after the Justice Department informed the White House in September 2003 that a criminal investigation had been launched." If the report is true, it raises serious questions about the integrity of President Bush's statements about the investigation. (At yesterday's press conference, White House spokesman Scott McClellan refused to dispute the specifics of the article.) The report also suggests that testimony provided to the special prosecutor by Bush and Rove may have been inaccurate.
DID BUSH KNOW WHEN HE SAID HE DIDN'T KNOW? Josh Marshall notes that on October 7, 2003 -- around the same time as Bush's alleged rebuke of Rove -- Bush said, "I mean this town is a -- is a town full of people who like to leak information. And I don't know if we're going to find out the senior administration official." Bush added, "[T]his is a large administration, and there's a lot of senior officials. I don't have any idea. I'd like to. I want to know the truth." The New York Daily News article suggests that Bush already knew the truth: one of the leakers was Karl Rove.
DID BUSH TELL PROSECUTORS ROVE DENIED ANY INVOLVEMENT? National Journal investigative reporter Murray Waas reported on 10/7/05, "In his own interview with prosecutors on June 24, 2004, Bush also testified that Rove assured him he had not disclosed Plame as a CIA employee and had said nothing to the press to discredit Wilson." Apparently, Rove has been telling a similar story. The AP reported that "Rove told President Bush and others that he never engaged in an effort to disclose a CIA operative's identity to discredit her husband's criticism of the administration's Iraq policy, according to people with knowledge of Rove's account in the probe." These accounts, if true, are completely inconsistent with the facts reported in yesterday's New York Daily News. Although Bush was not under oath, making false statements to a federal agent is still against the law.
EVIDENCE OF A CONSPIRACY: Today, the AP reports that "Rove and I. Lewis 'Scooter' Libby discussed their contacts with reporters about an undercover CIA officer in the days before her identity was published." The conversations are "the first known intersection between two central figures in the criminal leak investigation." According to people familiar with Rove's testimony, "Rove told grand jurors it was possible he first heard in the White House that Valerie Plame, wife of Bush administration Joseph Wilson, worked for the CIA from Libby's recounting of a conversation with a journalist." (Rove has also testified that "he probably first heard of Wilson's wife in a casual social setting outside the White House in the spring of 2003 but could not remember who provided the information.") The coordination between Rove and Libby lends credence to the report that "Fitzgerald may be edging closer to a blockbuster conspiracy charge."

FEMA Official Says Boss Ignored Warnings
AP via NYT, 20 October 2005
In the midst of the chaos that followed Hurricane Katrina, a Federal Emergency Management Agency official in New Orleans sent a dire e-mail to Director Michael Brown saying victims had no food and were dying. No response came from Brown.
Instead, less than three hours later, an aide to Brown sent an e-mail saying her boss wanted to go on a television program that night -- after needing at least an hour to eat dinner at a Baton Rouge, La., restaurant.
The e-mails were made public Thursday at a Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing featuring Marty Bahamonde, the first agency official to arrive in New Orleans in advance of the Aug. 29 storm. The hurricane killed more than 1,200 people and forced hundreds of thousands to evacuate.
Bahamonde, who sent the e-mail to Brown two days after the storm struck, said the correspondence illustrates the government's failure to grasp what was happening.
''There was a systematic failure at all levels of government to understand the magnitude of the situation,'' Bahamonde testified. ''The leadership from top down in our agency is unprepared and out of touch.''

House Passes Bill to Protect Gun Industry From Lawsuits
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
NYT, 20 October 2005
The Republican-controlled Congress delivered a long-sought victory to the gun industry today when the House of Representatives, with considerable Democratic support, voted to shield firearms manufacturers and dealers from liability lawsuits. The bill now goes to President Bush, who has promised to sign it.
The gun liability bill has for years been the No. 1 legislative priority of the National Rifle Association, which has lobbied lawmakers intensely for it. Its final passage, by a vote of 283 to 144, reflects the changing politics of gun control, an issue that many Democrats began shying away from after Al Gore was defeated for president in 2000.
"It's a historic piece of legislation," said Wayne LaPierre, the N.R.A.'s president, who said the bill was the most significant victory for the gun lobby since Congress rewrote the federal gun control law in 1986. "As of Oct. 20, the Second Amendment is probably in the best shape in this country that it's been in decades."
The bill, which is identical to one approved in July by the Senate, is aimed at ending a spate of lawsuits by individuals, states and municipalities seeking to hold gun manufacturers and dealers liable for crimes committed with weapons they sold. While it bars these types of cases, the measure includes certain exceptions allowing cases involving defective weapons or criminal behavior by a gun maker or dealer, such as knowingly selling a weapon to someone who has failed a criminal background check.
Backers of the measure say it is necessary to keep the American arms industry in business...

Rain Forest Jekyll and Hyde?
By BOB HERBERT
NYT, 20 October 2005 (sub only)
Please welcome the latest entry to the Chutzpah Hall of Fame: the mighty Chevron Corporation.
On Oct. 28, during a gala ceremony at its headquarters in San Ramon, Calif., the company, which until May was known as ChevronTexaco, will honor the latest recipients of the annual Chevron Conservation Awards. The awards are meant to recognize the achievements of men and women who have "helped to protect wildlife, restore wilderness, create natural preserves and parks, and institute educational programs to heighten environmental awareness."
Meanwhile, Chevron's lawyers are in Ecuador defending the company against charges that it contributed to one of the worst environmental disasters on the planet. The company is accused of dumping more than 18 billion gallons of toxic waste, over a period of 20 years, into the soil and water of a previously pristine section of the Amazon rain forest.
According to a class-action lawsuit brought on behalf of some 30,000 impoverished residents of the rain forest, this massive, long-term pollution has ruined portions of the jungle, contaminated drinking water, sickened livestock, driven off wildlife and threatened the very survival of the indigenous tribes, which have been plagued with serious illnesses, including a variety of cancers.
Chevron, which likes to promote itself as a champion of the environment, contends that no such catastrophe occurred. A spokesman told me yesterday that the billions of gallons of waste that was dumped "wasn't necessarily toxic."
...Texaco merged with Chevron in 2001. From the early 1970's to 1992, the Texaco subsidiary was part of a consortium that ran the oil-drilling operations in an area of virgin rain forest known simply as the Oriente - the East. Texaco discovered oil there in the late 60's.
According to nearly all accounts, neither Texaco nor its primary partner in the consortium, Ecuador's state oil company - Petroecuador - paid much attention to the effects of the venture on the surrounding environment and its people. Tremendous amounts of waste generated from the drilling, extraction, processing and transportation operations - billions upon billions of gallons - were dumped into unlined pits in the ground or poured into freshwater streams.
"The systematic way that they disposed of toxic waste in Ecuador was to dump it into open-air pits that they dug out of the jungle soil, or directly into rivers, streams and swamps in one of the most delicate ecosystems on the planet," said Steven Donziger, who is part of a team of American and Ecuadorean lawyers handling the lawsuit.
Crude oil was also spilled in the jungle, millions of gallons of it.
Disasters of this kind, involving poor people in remote areas of foreign countries, tend to stay low on the level of awareness of the American news media. The suffering tends to go unnoticed by the outside world.
The families in the vicinity of the Ecuadorean oil-drilling operations have had to drink from contaminated rivers and streams because they had such limited access to running water. And any pollution-related illnesses they may contract pose an even greater danger than normal because of their abject poverty and the absence of adequate health care.
Officials at Chevron do not see any of this as their problem. They will tell you that they've cleaned up any mess they might have made, and then some. And they will deny to their dying breath that they have harmed anyone.
After all, they're champions of the environment.

20 October 2005

U.S. Gives Florida a Sweeping Right to Curb Medicaid
By ROBERT PEAR
NYT, 20 October 2005
The Bush administration approved a sweeping Medicaid plan for Florida on Wednesday that limits spending for many of the 2.2 million beneficiaries there and gives private health plans new freedom to limit benefits.
The Florida program, likely to be a model for many other states, shifts from the traditional Medicaid "defined benefit" plan to a "defined contribution" plan, under which the state sets a ceiling on spending for each recipient.
Children under the age of 21 and pregnant women will be exempt from the limits.
The Florida plan says, "The state will set aside a specific amount of money for each person enrolled in Medicaid," based on the person's medical condition and historic use of health care.
Michael O. Leavitt, secretary of health and human services, approved the proposal 16 days after it was formally submitted to him, with strong support from Gov. Jeb Bush.
After meeting here on Wednesday afternoon with Governor Bush, Mr. Leavitt said: "Today will be remembered as a day of transformation for the Florida Medicaid program. Florida's framework will be helpful to other states."
Joan C. Alker, a senior researcher at the Health Policy Institute of Georgetown University, said: "Florida's proposal is one of the most far-reaching and radical proposals we've seen to restructure Medicaid. The federal government and the states now decide which benefits people get. Under the Florida plan, many of those decisions will be made by private health plans, out of public view."

White House Watch: Cheney Resignation Rumors Fly
Charlie Archambault for USN&WR
By Paul Bedard
US News, 18 October 2005
Sparked by today's Washington Post story that suggests Vice President Cheney's office is involved in the Plame-CIA spy link investigation, government officials and advisers passed around rumors that the vice president might step aside and that President Bush would elevate Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
"It's certainly an interesting but I still think highly doubtful scenario," said a Bush insider. "And if that should happen," added the official, "there will undoubtedly be those who believe the whole thing was orchestrated – another brilliant Machiavellian move by the VP."
Said another Bush associate of the rumor, "Yes. This is not good." The rumor spread so fast that some Republicans by late morning were already drawing up reasons why Rice couldn't get the job or run for president in 2008.
"Isn't she pro-choice?" asked a key Senate Republican aide.

Cheney 'Cabal' Hijacked Foreign Policy
By Edward Alden
Financial Times, 20 October 2005
Vice-President Dick Cheney and a handful of others had hijacked the government's foreign policy apparatus, deciding in secret to carry out policies that had left the US weaker and more isolated in the world, the top aide to former Secretary of State Colin Powell claimed on Wednesday.
In a scathing attack on the record of President George W. Bush, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Mr Powell until last January, said: “What I saw was a cabal between the vice-president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made.
“Now it is paying the consequences of making those decisions in secret, but far more telling to me is America is paying the consequences.”
Mr Wilkerson said such secret decision-making was responsible for mistakes such as the long refusal to engage with North Korea or to back European efforts on Iran.
Transcript: Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson
Click here
...“I would say that we have courted disaster in Iraq, in North Korea, in Iran.”
The comments, made at the New America Foundation, a Washington think-tank, were the harshest attack on the administration by a former senior official since criticisms by Richard Clarke, former White House terrorism czar, and Paul O'Neill, former Treasury secretary, early last year.
Mr Wilkerson said his decision to go public had led to a personal falling out with Mr Powell, whom he served for 16 years at the Pentagon and the State Department.
“He's not happy with my speaking out because, and I admire this in him, he is the world's most loyal soldier."
Among his other charges:
■ The detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere was “a concrete example” of the decision-making problem, with the president and other top officials in effect giving the green light to soldiers to abuse detainees. “You don't have this kind of pervasive attitude out there unless you've condoned it.”
■ Condoleezza Rice, the former national security adviser and now secretary of state, was “part of the problem”. Instead of ensuring that Mr Bush received the best possible advice, “she would side with the president to build her intimacy with the president”.
■ The military, particularly the army and marine corps, is overstretched and demoralised. Officers, Mr Wilkerson claimed, “start voting with their feet, as they did in Vietnam. . . and all of a sudden your military begins to unravel”.
Mr Wilkerson said former president George H.W. Bush “one of the finest presidents we have ever had” understood how to make foreign policy work. In contrast, he said, his son was “not versed in international relations and not too much interested in them either”.
“There's a vast difference between the way George H.W. Bush dealt with major challenges, some of the greatest challenges at the end of the 20th century, and effected positive results in my view, and the way we conduct diplomacy today.”

Niger Uranium Forgery
Mystery Solved?
The Fitzgerald/Plame investigation goes in a new direction
by Justin Raimondo
Antiwar.com, 19 October 2005
Amid all the brouhaha over whether I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Karl Rove, or any number of Bush administration insiders had a hand in leaking the name of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame, the essential crime at the core of the investigation – and its probable starting point – often gets lost in the shuffle. The "outing" of Plame was not an end in itself: the outers didn't just one day decide that they were going to go after her and Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, her husband, because they were in a vindictive mood. They were out to get them because Wilson drew attention to the provenance of the infamous "16 words" uttered by President Bush in his 2003 state of the union address, in which Bush claimed that Iraq had sought out uranium in "an African country" in order to make a nuclear bomb. Perhaps without knowing it, Wilson – in taking an interest in this subject – was getting too close to the enormous fraud at the center of the War Party's propaganda campaign.
...According to a source in the Italian embassy, Patrick J. "Bulldog" Fitzgerald asked for and "has finally been given a full copy of the Italian parliamentary oversight report on the forged Niger uranium document," the former CIA officer tells me:
"Previous versions of the report were redacted and had all the names removed, though it was possible to guess who was involved. This version names Michael Ledeen as the conduit for the report and indicates that former CIA officers Duane Clarridge and Alan Wolf were the principal forgers. All three had business interests with Chalabi."
Alan Wolf died about a year and a half ago of cancer. He served as chief of the CIA's Near East Division as well as the European Division, and was also CIA chief of station in Rome after Clarridge. According to my source, "he and Clarridge and Ledeen were all very close and also close to Chalabi." The former CIA officer says Wolf "was Clarridge's Agency godfather. Significantly, both Clarridge and Wolf also spent considerable time in the Africa division, so they both had the Africa and Rome connection and both were close to Ledeen, closing the loop."
A veteran of the Iran-Contra scandal, Ledeen played an important role in the "arms for hostages" scheme by setting up meetings between the American government and the Iranian arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar. Not all that unexpected coming from a self-proclaimedadvocate of Machiavelli's amoralism. Today, Ledeen is among the most visible and radical neoconservative ideologues whose passion for a campaign of serial "regime-change" in the Middle East is undiminished by the Iraqi debacle.
...In the course of their campaign of deception, the conspirators not only outed a CIA agent who was working in the vital area of nuclear proliferation, they also passed on classified information to foreign nationals, including the Israelis and the Iranians. They committed forgery and God knows what other crimes.
Before Fitzgerald is done, we'll see the warlords of Washington hauled before a court of the people. We'll hear the whole sordid story of how a band of exiles, at leasttwo foreign intelligence agencies, and a cabal of neoconservatives inside the Pentagon and the vice president's office bamboozled Congress and the American people into going to war. As the indictments come down, so will the elaborate narrative so carefully constructed by the War Party in the run-up to war be exposed as a tissue of fabrication, forgery, and fraud.

That had to hurt...
Bush Whacked Rove on CIA Leak
BY THOMAS M. DeFRANK
Daily News, 19 October 2005
An angry President Bush rebuked chief political guru Karl Rove two years ago for his role in the Valerie Plame affair, sources told the Daily News.
"He made his displeasure known to Karl," a presidential counselor told The News. "He made his life miserable about this."
Bush has nevertheless remained doggedly loyal to Rove, who friends and even political adversaries acknowledge is the architect of the President's rise from baseball owner to leader of the free world.
As special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald nears a decision, perhaps as early as today, on whether to issue indictments in his two-year probe, Bush has already circled the wagons around Rove, whose departure would be a grievous blow to an already shell-shocked White House staff and a President in deep political trouble.

Presidential Deceit? Shocking!
Josh Marshall
Talking Points Memo, 19 October 2005
...For almost two years, Scott McClellan insisted that neither Karl Rove nor Scooter Libby had anything to do with the leaks. He knew because he asked them, he said. He was very categorical.
Now it seems that at least with reference to Rove, the president knew McClellan's statements weren't true. And yet he allowed McClellan to make them. Come to think of it, I guess this one really isn't even a question. It speaks for itself, doesn't it?

Leading by (Bad) Example
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
NYT, 19 October 2005 (sub only)
A delegation of Iraqi judges and journalists abruptly left the U.S. today, cutting short its visit to study the workings of American democracy. A delegation spokesman said the Iraqis were "bewildered" by some of the behavior of the Bush administration and felt it was best to limit their exposure to the U.S. system at this time, when Iraq is taking its first baby steps toward democracy.
The lead Iraqi delegate, Muhammad Mithaqi, a noted secular Sunni judge who had recently survived an assassination attempt by Islamist radicals, said that he was stunned when he heard President Bush telling Republicans that one reason they should support Harriet Miers for the U.S. Supreme Court was because of "her religion." She is described as a devout evangelical Christian.
Mithaqi said that after two years of being lectured to by U.S. diplomats in Baghdad about the need to separate "mosque from state" in the new Iraq, he was also floored to read that the former Whitewater prosecutor Kenneth Starr, now a law school dean, said on the radio show of the conservative James Dobson that Miers deserved support because she was "a very, very strong Christian [who] should be a source of great comfort and assistance to people in the households of faith around the country."
"Now let me get this straight," Judge Mithaqi said. "You are lecturing us about keeping religion out of politics, and then your own president and conservative legal scholars go and tell your public to endorse Miers as a Supreme Court justice because she is an evangelical Christian.
"How would you feel if you picked up your newspapers next week and read that the president of Iraq justified the appointment of an Iraqi Supreme Court justice by telling Iraqis: 'Don't pay attention to his lack of legal expertise. Pay attention to the fact that he is a Muslim fundamentalist and prays at a Saudi-funded Wahhabi mosque.' Is that the Iraq you sent your sons to build and to die for? I don't think so. We can't have our people exposed to such talk."
(Yes, all of this is a fake news story. I just wish that it weren't so true.)

Insiders Collected $1 Billion Before Refco Collapse
By GRETCHEN MORGENSON and JENNY ANDERSON
NYT, 20 October 2005
In the year before Refco sold shares to the public and then promptly made the fourth-largest bankruptcy filing in United States history, insiders at the firm received more than $1 billion in cash, according to the firm's financial statements.
And one insider, Robert Trosten, received $45 million when he left his post as chief financial officer a year ago, according to testimony at an arbitration hearing earlier this year.
A great deal of mystery still surrounds the collapse of Refco, a decades-old firm that conducted billions of dollars in trades in foreign currencies, United States Treasury securities and commodities for more than 200,000 clients last year. But investors and customers who are facing losses in Refco's bankruptcy will certainly want to understand how insiders could drain $1.124 billion from the firm's coffers in the year or so leading up to its demise.
To some degree, the money that insiders took out of the firm is not surprising, given that Refco's executives sold a big stake in the company to Thomas H. Lee Partners, a private equity firm in Boston, in August 2004. Indeed, most of the money insiders received - $1.057 billion - was paid upon the completion of that deal.
Two Refco insiders were on the receiving end of those payouts: Phillip R. Bennett, the former chief executive who has been charged with defrauding investors by concealing a $435 million loan he arranged with the firm, and Tone Grant, Refco's longtime chief executive before Mr. Bennett.

19 October 2005

The Treasure, the Strongbox, and the Crowbar
Part 2 of the Tom Dispatch interview with Juan Cole

The Torture Question
PBS Frontline Documentary, 18 October 2005
Will the so-called "leaders" in this administration ever be held accountable?

Bush’s Obscene Performance with Troops in Tikrit
By Matthew Rothschild
Progressive.org, 15 October 2005
It was obscene enough that Bush put on such a staged event. Turns out now that one of the soldiers he called on was actually a Pentagon PR person, whom he refused to identify as such.
But even more obscene was Bush’s immature and foolish boasting about how cool it was that the soldiers were in Tikrit, Saddam’s hometown.
In an obnoxiously cavalier comment, Bush told one of the soldiers, “It’s probably a little early for me to go to Tikrit.” No shit!
How easy it is for him. He’s not putting his life on the line in Tikrit. No, he’s asking these troops to do that. And he has put them in a no-win situation. That’s what’s most obscene of all.
Despite his happy talk, and the rehearsed cheeriness of the troops, and even the vote on the constitution, Bush cannot change the situation on the ground.
And the more oblivious he is to that fact, and the more boastful he is of the false progress in Iraq, the more shameful his entire enterprise becomes.

Holding the sick and old as hostages...
States Protest Contributions to Drug Plan
By ROBERT PEAR
NYT, 18 October 2005
The Bush administration notified states on Monday that they would have to pay billions of dollars to the federal government next year to help finance the new prescription drug benefit for people on Medicare.
Administration officials said the 2003 Medicare law required them to charge the states, in exchange for taking over the states' Medicaid drug costs. But state officials immediately took issue with the calculations, saying federal officials had overstated the amounts owed by some states.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the required state contributions, also known as clawback payments, will total $6 billion in the current fiscal year and $124 billion from 2006 to 2015.
Some states, including Texas, are openly resisting the requirement for such payments. But federal officials said that if states did not comply, the money could be deducted from federal payments to the states for other programs like Medicaid.

18 October 2005

The Treasure, the Strongbox, and the Crowbar
A Tomdispatch Interview with Juan Cole (Part 1), 16 October 2005
Clan vendettas are still an important part of people's sense of honor. So when the American military kills an Iraqi, I figure they've made enemies of five siblings and twenty-five first cousins who feel honor-bound to get revenge. The Sunni Arab guerrilla movement has taken advantage of that sense of clan honor gradually to turn the population against the United States. Many more Sunni Arabs are die-hard opposed to the U.S. presence in Iraq now than was the case a year ago, and there were more a year ago than the year before that.
The U.S. has used bombing of civilian neighborhoods on a massive scale because the alternative is to send its forces in to fight close, hand-to-hand combat in alleyways in Iraq's cities and that would be extremely costly of U.S. soldiers' lives. It certainly would have turned the American public against the war really quickly.

Administration's Tone Signals a Longer, Broader Iraq Conflict
By DAVID E. SANGER
NYT, 17 October 2005
For most of the 30 months since American-led forces ousted Saddam Hussein, the Bush administration has argued that as democracy took hold in Iraq, the insurgency would lose steam because Al Qaeda and the opponents of the country's interim government had nothing to offer Iraqis or the people of the Middle East.
Over time, President Bush told troops at Fort Bragg, N.C., this spring, "the terrorists will lose their sponsors, lose their recruits, and lose their hopes for turning that region into a base for attacks on America and our allies around the world."
But inside the administration, that belief provides less solace than it once did. Senior officials say the intelligence reports flowing over their desks in recent months argue that even if democratic institutions take hold, the insurgency may strengthen. And that possibility has created a quandary for an administration that desperately wants to equate democracy-building with winning the war, but so far has not been able to match the two.

Judith Miller, the Fourth Estate and the Warfare State
by Norman Solomon
Common Dreams, 17 October 2005
More than any other New York Times reporter, Judith Miller took the lead with stories claiming that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Now, a few years later, she's facing heightened scrutiny in the aftermath of a pair of articles that appeared in the Times on Sunday -- a lengthy investigative piece about Miller plus her own first-person account of how she got entangled in the case of the Bush administration's "outing" of Valerie Plame as a CIA agent.
It now seems that Miller functioned with more accountability to U.S. military intelligence officials than to New York Times editors. Most of the way through her article, Miller slipped in this sentence: "During the Iraq war, the Pentagon had given me clearance to see secret information as part of my assignment 'embedded' with a special military unit hunting for unconventional weapons." And, according to the same article, she ultimately told the grand jury that during a July 8, 2003, meeting with the vice president's chief of staff, Lewis Libby, "I might have expressed frustration to Mr. Libby that I was not permitted to discuss with editors some of the more sensitive information about Iraq."
Let's replay that one again in slow motion.
Judith Miller is a reporter for the New York Times. After the invasion, on assignment to cover a U.S. military unit as it searches for WMDs in Iraq, she's given "clearance" by the Pentagon "to see secret information" -- which she "was not permitted to discuss" with Times editors.
There's nothing wrong with this picture if Judith Miller is an intelligence operative for the U.S. government. But if she's supposed to be a journalist, this is a preposterous situation -- and the fact that the New York Times has tolerated it tells us a lot about that newspaper.

Poor decisions by the Prez must be the handlers fault...
Bush Crises Raise Criticism of Chief of Staff's Management Style
By ANNE E. KORNBLUT
NYT, 17 October 2005
With Karl Rove distracted by the intensifying C.I.A. leak scandal, some of the Bush administration's other challenges in recent months have cast a longer shadow on Andrew H. Card Jr., for years a guiding force as the White House chief of staff.
His office oversaw the administration's response to Hurricane Katrina, coordinating federal assistance that was broadly condemned as too slow. Mr. Card personally managed the selection of Harriet E. Miers for the Supreme Court, a choice that has splintered the Republican Party and left the administration scrambling to rescue her nomination.
The confluence of crises, all running through Mr. Card's suite just steps from the Oval Office, has some critics asking whether he needs to clean house or assert himself more forcefully - or at least consider a course correction before Mr. Bush is downgraded permanently to lame duck status.
"The lesson of both Katrina and Miers is that the system of decision making in the White House no longer meets the needs of the president," said David Frum, a former speechwriter for Mr. Bush who has been critical of the Miers choice.
Critics "could perhaps hold Andy accountable for not saying, 'Mr. President, this is going to be a mistake,' " said William Kristol, the conservative commentator and another vocal critic of the Miers nomination.
"He's always been - weaker is not quite fair, but he's always been a less powerful chief of staff than we're used to," Mr. Kristol said. "It worked well for a while.

Cheney May Be Entangled in CIA Leak Investigation
By Richard Keil
Bloomberg.com, 17 October 2005
A special counsel is focusing on whether Vice President Dick Cheney played a role in leaking a covert CIA agent's name, according to people familiar with the probe that already threatens top White House aides Karl Rove and Lewis Libby.
The special counsel, Patrick Fitzgerald, has questioned current and former officials of President George W. Bush's administration about whether Cheney was involved in an effort to discredit the agent's husband, Iraq war critic and former U.S. diplomat Joseph Wilson, according to the people.
Fitzgerald has questioned Cheney's communications adviser Catherine Martin and former spokeswoman Jennifer Millerwise about the vice president's knowledge of the anti-Wilson campaign and his dealings on it with Libby, his chief of staff, the people said. The information came from multiple sources, who requested anonymity because of the secrecy and political sensitivity of the investigation.

16 October 2005

It's Bush-Cheney, Not Rove-Libby
By FRANK RICH
NYT, 16 October 2005 (sub only)
There hasn't been anything like it since Martha Stewart fended off questions about her stock-trading scandal by manically chopping cabbage on "The Early Show" on CBS. Last week the setting was "Today" on NBC, where the image of President Bush manically hammering nails at a Habitat for Humanity construction site on the Gulf Coast was juggled with the sight of him trying to duck Matt Lauer's questions about Karl Rove.
As with Ms. Stewart, Mr. Bush's paroxysm of panic was must-see TV. "The president was a blur of blinks, taps, jiggles, pivots and shifts," Dana Milbank wrote in The Washington Post. Asked repeatedly about Mr. Rove's serial appearances before a Washington grand jury, the jittery Mr. Bush, for once bereft of a script, improvised a passable impersonation of Norman Bates being quizzed by the detective in "Psycho." Like Norman and Ms. Stewart, he stonewalled.
That stonewall may start to crumble in a Washington courtroom this week or next. In a sense it already has. Now, as always, what matters most in this case is not whether Mr. Rove and Lewis Libby engaged in a petty conspiracy to seek revenge on a whistle-blower, Joseph Wilson, by unmasking his wife, Valerie, a covert C.I.A. officer. What makes Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation compelling, whatever its outcome, is its illumination of a conspiracy that was not at all petty: the one that took us on false premises into a reckless and wasteful war in Iraq. That conspiracy was instigated by Mr. Rove's boss, George W. Bush, and Mr. Libby's boss, Dick Cheney.
...And on Sept. 6, 2002 - just a few weeks after WHIG [White House Iraq Group] first convened - Mr. Card alluded to his group's existence by telling Elisabeth Bumiller of The New York Times that there was a plan afoot to sell a war against Saddam Hussein: "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August."
The official introduction of that product began just two days later. On the Sunday talk shows of Sept. 8, Ms. Rice warned that "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud," and Mr. Cheney, who had already started the nuclear doomsday drumbeat in three August speeches, described Saddam as "actively and aggressively seeking to acquire nuclear weapons." The vice president cited as evidence a front-page article, later debunked, about supposedly nefarious aluminum tubes co-written by Judy Miller in that morning's Times. The national security journalist James Bamford, in "A Pretext for War," writes that the article was all too perfectly timed to facilitate "exactly the sort of propaganda coup that the White House Iraq Group had been set up to stage-manage."
...the truth never mattered. The Bush-Cheney product rolled out by Card, Rove, Libby & Company had been bought by Congress, the press and the public. The intelligence and facts had been successfully fixed to sell the war, and any memory of Mr. Bush's errant 16 words melted away in Shock and Awe. When, months later, a national security official, Stephen Hadley, took "responsibility" for allowing the president to address the nation about mythical uranium, no one knew that Mr. Hadley, too, had been a member of WHIG.
It was not until the war was supposedly over - with "Mission Accomplished," in May 2003 - that Mr. Wilson started to add his voice to those who were disputing the administration's uranium hype. Members of WHIG had a compelling motive to shut him down. In contrast to other skeptics, like Mohamed ElBaradei of the International Atomic Energy Agency (this year's Nobel Peace Prize winner), Mr. Wilson was an American diplomat; he had reported his findings in Niger to our own government. He was a dagger aimed at the heart of WHIG and its disinformation campaign. Exactly who tried to silence him and how is what Mr. Fitzgerald presumably will tell us.
..."Bush's Brain" is the title of James Moore and Wayne Slater's definitive account of Mr. Rove's political career. But Mr. Rove is less his boss's brain than another alliterative organ (or organs), that which provides testosterone. As we learn in "Bush's Brain," bad things (usually character assassination) often happen to Bush foes, whether Ann Richards or John McCain. On such occasions, Mr. Bush stays compassionately above the fray while the ruthless Mr. Rove operates below the radar, always separated by "a layer of operatives" from any ill behavior that might implicate him. "There is no crime, just a victim," Mr. Moore and Mr. Slater write of this repeated pattern.
THIS modus operandi was foolproof, shielding the president as well as Mr. Rove from culpability, as long as it was about winning an election. The attack on Mr. Wilson, by contrast, has left them and the Cheney-Libby tag team vulnerable because it's about something far bigger: protecting the lies that took the country into what the Reagan administration National Security Agency director, Lt. Gen. William Odom, recently called "the greatest strategic disaster in United States history."
Whether or not Mr. Fitzgerald uncovers an indictable crime, there is once again a victim, but that victim is not Mr. or Mrs. Wilson; it's the nation. It is surely a joke of history that even as the White House sells this weekend's constitutional referendum as yet another "victory" for democracy in Iraq, we still don't know the whole story of how our own democracy was hijacked on the way to war.

Schoolyard Bully Diplomacy
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
NYT, 16 October 2005 (sub only)
NIAMEY, Niger
This is a land of thatch-roof mud huts and malnourished children, of whom one in four dies by the age of 5. It's the very least developed country in the world, according to the U.N., and lives here can be saved for pennies.
It's also a rare Muslim country where everybody beams when I say I'm from the U.S.: people express a warm thanks for American assistance, and then ask eagerly if I know how they can get U.S. visas.
So here we have a strongly pro-American democracy - yes, a beacon of democracy in Africa and the Muslim world - that is desperately needy, and what are we doing? Sadly, we're bullying Niger and dozens of other poor countries and cutting off some aid to many of them because of their support for the International Criminal Court.
About 50 of the countries that support the International Criminal Court are unwilling or unable to give the U.S. the "bilateral immunity agreement" that Washington demands to prevent Americans from being prosecuted. Niger, for example, has determined that its Constitution does not allow it to grant the immunity agreement.
So the Bush administration is cutting off certain military aid and "economic support funds" to a couple of dozen of these governments, mostly in Latin America and Africa. The main result has been to undermine our friends and confirm every prejudice that people abroad have about Americans as schoolyard bullies.
...Our first misstep came in 2002 when Congress passed the American Servicemembers' Protection Act, which curbed military aid to countries that back the court but do not sign immunity agreements with the U.S. Then the Nethercutt amendment last year cut "economic support funds" for those same governments (it may be possible to redirect some of the money to private aid groups in those countries).
These economic support funds include humanitarian programs for health care, wheelchair distribution and AIDS education, as well as money for overseas anti-drug and anti-terror programs that are for our own benefit. The American military has already complained to Congress that the sanctions have cut links between U.S. officers and their Latin American counterparts, creating an opportunity for China to fill the gap.
It looks like the ideologues, in Congress and the Bush administration, who backed this legislation are already hurting America more than the International Criminal Court ever could. And aside from the damage to our own image and alliances, we're taking the children of countries like Niger hostage by threatening: Unless you give us an immunity agreement, those kids will die.
Come on, President Bush! Is that really what your administration stands for?

Questions of Character
By PAUL KRUGMAN
NYT, 14 October 2005
George W. Bush, I once wrote, "values loyalty above expertise" and may have "a preference for advisers whose personal fortunes are almost entirely bound up with his own." And he likes to surround himself with "obsequious courtiers."
Lots of people are saying things like that these days. But those quotes are from a column published on Nov. 19, 2000.
I don't believe that I'm any better than the average person at judging other people's character. I got it right because I said those things in the context of a discussion of Mr. Bush's choice of economic advisers, a subject in which I do have some expertise.
But many people in the news media do claim, at least implicitly, to be experts at discerning character - and their judgments play a large, sometimes decisive role in our political life. The 2000 election would have ended in a chad-proof victory for Al Gore if many reporters hadn't taken a dislike to Mr. Gore, while portraying Mr. Bush as an honest, likable guy. The 2004 election was largely decided by the image of Mr. Bush as a strong, effective leader.
So it's important to ask why those judgments are often so wrong.
...And President Bush the great leader is far from the only fictional character, bearing no resemblance to the real man, created by media images.
Read the speeches Howard Dean gave before the Iraq war, and compare them with Colin Powell's pro-war presentation to the U.N. Knowing what we know now, it's clear that one man was judicious and realistic, while the other was spinning crazy conspiracy theories. But somehow their labels got switched in the way they were presented to the public by the news media.
Why does this happen? A large part of the answer is that the news business places great weight on "up close and personal" interviews with important people...
Let's be frank: the Bush administration has made brilliant use of journalistic careerism. Those who wrote puff pieces about Mr. Bush and those around him have been rewarded with career-boosting access. Those who raised questions about his character found themselves under personal attack from the administration's proxies. (Yes, I'm speaking in part from experience.) Only now, with Mr. Bush in desperate trouble, has the structure of rewards shifted.
So what's the answer? Journalists who are better at judging character? Unfortunately, that's not a practical plan. After all, who judges their judgment?
What we really need is political journalism based less on perceptions of personalities and more on actual facts. Schadenfreude aside, we should not be happy that stories about Mr. Bush's boldness have given way to stories analyzing his facial tics. Think, instead, about how different the world would be today if, during the 2000 campaign, reporting had focused on the candidates' fiscal policies instead of their wardrobes.

Judy Miller and the Neocons
Arrogance, poor editing, and getting too close to her sources -- not ideology -- led to her fall.
By Juan Cole
Salon, 14 October 2005
...Miller's reputation had already been deeply sullied by her inaccurate and one-sided reporting on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction before the war. Questions have swirled about her relationship with the small coterie of neoconservatives, including Libby, who staffed key positions in the Bush administration, and who were allied with Ahmad Chalabi, a corrupt Iraqi expatriate and notorious liar who became Miller's principal source on WMD issues. Suspicions that Miller had crossed an ethical line and grown too close to her sources increased after the waiver letter she received from Libby was disclosed. That letter ended with this bizarre, highly personal passage: "You went into jail in the summer. It is fall now. You will have stories to cover -- Iraqi elections and suicide bombers, biological threats and the Iranian nuclear program. Out West, where you vacation, the aspens will already be turning. They turn in clusters, because their roots connect them. Come back to work -- and life. Until then, you will remain in my thoughts and prayers. With admiration, Scooter Libby."
All of which raises the question: Should Miller herself be understood as a neocon?
The evidence suggests that she is not. Rather it was a combination of hawkish convictions about Saddam, ambition, arrogance pumped up by her pre-9/11 work on WMD and jihadis, lax editorial oversight, and her long-standing tendency to get too close to her sources, that led her to become a credulous mouthpiece for those who sought to justify war with Iraq.
...In the end, it seems that Miller will go down in history not so much as a true believer as a useful idiot.
SEE ALSO:
My Four Hours Testifying in the Federal Grand Jury Room
By JUDITH MILLER
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON
...Mr. Fitzgerald wanted to know whether the entry was based on my conversations with Mr. Libby. I said I didn't think so. I said I believed the information came from another source, whom I could not recall.
Mr. Fitzgerald asked if I could recall discussing the Wilson-Plame connection with other sources. I said I had, though I could not recall any by name or when those conversations occurred.

At Public Universities, Warnings of Privatization
By SAM DILLON
NYT, 16 October 2005
Taxpayer support for public universities, measured per student, has plunged more precipitously since 2001 than at any time in two decades, and several university presidents are calling the decline a de facto privatization of the institutions that played a crucial role in the creation of the American middle class.
Graham Spanier, president of Pennsylvania State University, said this year that skyrocketing tuition was a result of what he called "public higher education's slow slide toward privatization."
Other educators have made similar assertions, some avoiding the term "privatization" but nonetheless describing a crisis that they say is transforming public universities. At an academic forum last month, John D. Wiley, chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said that during the years after World War II, America built the world's greatest system of public higher education.
"We're now in the process of dismantling all that," Dr. Wiley said.
The share of all public universities' revenues deriving from state and local taxes declined to 64 percent in 2004 from 74 percent in 1991. At many flagship universities, the percentages are far smaller. About 25 percent of the University of Illinois's budget comes from the state. Michigan finances about 18 percent of Ann Arbor's revenues. The taxpayer share of revenues at the University of Virginia is about 8 percent.
"At those levels, we have to ask what it means to be a public institution," said Katharine C. Lyall, an economist and president emeritus of the University of Wisconsin. "America is rapidly privatizing its public colleges and universities, whose mission used to be to serve the public good. But if private donors and corporations are providing much of a university's budget, then they will set the agenda, perhaps in ways the public likes and perhaps not. Public control is slipping away."

In Her Own Words
By DAVID BROOKS
NYT, 13 October 2005
 I don't know if by mere quotation I can fully convey the relentless march of vapid abstractions that mark Miers's prose. Nearly every idea is vague and depersonalized. Nearly every debatable point is elided. It's not that Miers didn't attempt to tackle interesting subjects. She wrote about unequal access to the justice system, about the underrepresentation of minorities in the law and about whether pro bono work should be mandatory. But she presents no arguments or ideas, except the repetition of the bromide that bad things can be eliminated if people of good will come together to eliminate bad things.
Or as she puts it, "There is always a necessity to tend to a myriad of responsibilities on a number of cases as well as matters not directly related to the practice of law." And yet, "Disciplining ourselves to provide the opportunity for thought and analysis has to rise again to a high priority."
Throw aside ideology. Surely the threshold skill required of a Supreme Court justice is the ability to write clearly and argue incisively. Miers's columns provide no evidence of that.
[David later discredits himself by writing: ] ...The conservative movement was founded upon the supposition that ideas have consequences. Conservatives have founded so many think tanks, magazines and organizations, like the Federalist Society, because they believe that you have to win arguments to win political power. They dream of Supreme Court justices capable of writing brilliant opinions that will reshape the battle of ideas.

Bankruptcy Law Is Criticized for Creditors' Role in Counseling
By ERIC DASH and JENNIFER BAYOT
NYT, 14 October 2005
A requirement of the new bankruptcy law that sends Americans into credit counseling before they can erase their debts is drawing criticism from consumer advocates, bankruptcy lawyers and financial educators, who are concerned that the creditors are subsidizing the counseling.
Critics say that the new counseling requirement, part of the law that takes effect on Monday, increases the risk that people will be improperly steered away from the courts and into debt management plans, for which the counseling agency often receives part of any debts repaid.
"Lots of people see the opportunity to make lots of money off the backs of consumer debtors, and that should make people extremely cautious about this," said Karen Gross, a New York Law School professor and president of the Coalition for Consumer Bankruptcy Debtor Education.

13 October 2005

The Democrat's Urge to Lose
Tom Engelhardt
TomDispatch, 13 October 2005
Remember when the Democrats were keeping their powder dry for the fierce battle against the President's still unknown second nominee to the Supreme Court -- and so, during the Roberts nomination hearings, didn't even ask the judge a question about his well-reported role in the Florida 2000 vote recount battle? They were, they swore, saving their "opposition" for the even worse candidate sure to come. Now she's here -- Harriet Miers, the President's lawyer, who contributed $5,000 to his Florida "Recount Fund" in 2000 and was running political/legal interference for the President and Vice President that year. She may also rate as the single most sycophantic candidate for just about any office in memory. (According to former Bush speechwriter David Frum, "She once told me that the president was the most brilliant man she had ever met.") In essence, having passed on a man who, in at least a modest way, helped George grab the 2000 election via the Supreme Court -- not a Democratic senator even asked him if he'd recuse himself, should another such case ever reach the court -- they are now in the process of topping themselves by sending courtwards a family retainer; or rather, as on so many other issues (count the Iraq War as issue number one in this regard), they seem to be preparing yet again to stand aside...
[Engelhardt's preface to an essay How to Lose an Election by Jonathan Schell]

Iraq Has Descended Into Anarchy, says Fisk
By Nigel Morris Home Affairs Correspondent
The Independent, 13 October 2005
Most of Iraq is in a state of anarchy, with insurgents controlling parts of Baghdad just half a mile from the so-called Green Zone, an Independent debate was told last night.
Robert Fisk, Middle East correspondent for The Independent, whose new book The Great War for Civilisation: the Conquest of the Middle East has just been published by 4th Estate, painted a picture of deepening chaos and misery in Iraq more than two years after Saddam Hussein was toppled.
He said that the "constant, intensive involvement" in the Middle East by the West was a recurring pattern over centuries and was the reason why "so many Muslims in the Middle East hate us". He added: " We can close doors on history. They can't."
Fisk doubted the sincerity of Western leaders' commitment to bringing democracy to Iraq and said a lasting settlement in the country was impossible while foreign troops remained. "In the Middle East, they would like some of our democracy, they would like a couple of boxes off the supermarket shelves of human rights as well. But I think they would also like freedom from us."

Pessimism Surrounds Falling Oil Production in Iraq
By Rick Jervis
USA Today, 12 October 2005
Iraq's oil production has fallen below prewar levels to its lowest point in a decade, depriving the country's fledgling government of badly needed income and preventing the United States from achieving one of its main reconstruction goals.
Iraq's oil wells — beset by equipment problems and saboteurs — are producing about 1.9 million barrels a day in net production, lower than the 2.6 million it was producing just before the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, according to the London-based Centre for Global Energy Studies (CGES).
Of the oil produced, about 500,000 barrels are consumed daily by Iraqis, while 1.4 million barrels are exported, CGES says.
Despite the challenges, Iraq has benefited from rising oil prices, which have soared to more than $60 a barrel. Iraq's oil revenue jumped from $5 billion in 2003 — when the price of oil was about half of today's — to $17 billion in 2004, according to the U.S. State Department.
Still, the production trend is troubling. The average daily production last year was 2.07 million barrels, according to CGES. This year through August, Iraq has produced an average of 1.864 million barrels, it said.
"There's a lot of pessimism about oil production in Iraq," says Michelle Billig, a political risk analyst in the oil sector for PIRA Energy Group. "They're producing less this year than last year. And the outlook for next year doesn't look so great."
...Production continues to slide despite a massive U.S.-funded effort to stabilize and boost output, repair critical parts of Iraq's oil infrastructure and develop a long-term plan for the Iraqi oil industry.
The U.S. has spent $420 million fixing the oil network and allocated $1.7 billion to the sector.

Bush Spreads Democracy
Josh Marshall
Talking Points Memo, 13 October 2005
We are, needless to say, engaged in a vast, shambling and tragic occupation of Iraq, the nominal aim of which is to create a secular, rule-of-law-based democracy which would end the cycle of repression, fanaticism and violence which spilled onto America's shores four years ago.
At the same time, President Bush argues for Miers' confirmation neither on the basis of her 'judicial temperament' nor her judicial philosophy or ideology but because she is a staunch evangelical Christian.
The fact that many of the president's more theocratic supporters don't seem to believe him just adds a level of irony or entertainment for those of us still holding out for the Enlightenment tradition.
But doesn't the juxtaposition really show the game is up at some level?
A year ago, in light of one of White House's many wag-the-dog stunts, I noted "how truly important it is that we democratize the Middle East. Because once we have, some of them will be able to come back here and redemocratize us."
Perhaps the same goes for ending theocracy over there. Sooner the better, so they can bring modernity to us too.

SEC Issues Subpoena To Frist, Sources Say
Records Sought On Sale of Stock
By Carrie Johnson and Jeffrey H. Birnbaum
Washington Post, 13 October 2005
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) has been subpoenaed to turn over personal records and documents as federal authorities step up a probe of his July sales of HCA Inc. stock, according to sources familiar with the investigation.
The Securities and Exchange Commission issued the subpoena within the past two weeks, after initial reports that Frist, the Senate's top Republican official, was under scrutiny by the agency and the Justice Department for possible violations of insider trading laws.

Political Correctness at work? What's next...freedom to carry guns on airplanes?
FEMA Reconsiders Gun Ban at Trailer Park
AP via NYT, 12 October 2005
Under pressure from gun rights groups, FEMA said Wednesday it is reconsidering a ban on firearms at a trailer park established to temporarily house Hurricane Katrina victims.
''We've got attorneys who are looking at that as we speak and they're trying to figure out who wrote the rules, what the intent was,'' FEMA spokesman Butch Kinerney said.
The dispute involves a nearly 600-trailer encampment that opened last week near Baton Rouge. Katrina evacuees will be allowed to stay there rent-free while they try to find permanent housing.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency said it has been general policy at FEMA for several years to prohibit guns at such parks anywhere in the country. But the National Rifle Association threatened to sue, and another gun rights group, the Second Amendment Foundation, said it, too, was looking at legal action.
''Whether it's a national disaster, whether it's by nature like Katrina, or a flu pandemic or an earthquake, the Constitution can't be thrown out the window,'' said NRA leader Wayne LaPierre.
He said the NRA was outraged, and he warned that the organization would take its case all the way to Congress and president.

12 October 2005

Scott Ritter: "Iraq Confidential" (Nation Books)
NPR's Diane Rehm Show, 11 October 2005
A former UN weapons inspector talks about looking for WMDs in Iraq. He also explains how much of the intelligence used to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq was discredited by work he and fellow inspectors conducted in the 1990s.
Guests
Scott Ritter, was a top UN weapons inspector in Iraq between 1991 and 1998. He is a former Marine.

Gulliver in Iraq
Gilbert Achcar
Informed Comment, 12 October 2005
US Ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, best epitomizes the actual status of the US occupation of Iraq...
From the very beginning of its occupation of Iraq, the US administration has sought to apply the classical imperial recipe of “divide and rule.” In order to be successful, such a game needs smart Machiavellian players: definitely not what you’ve got in Washington. The result now is that, whether the draft passes the referendum or not, there will be a largely autonomous Shiite entity in Southern and Central Iraq, in control of the major part of Iraqi oil reserves and allied with Iran. When one bears in mind the fact that the bulk of Saudi oil reserves are located in the Shiite-majority Eastern province of the US-protected Saudi Kingdom, one gets to realize the full extent of what is more and more of a nightmare for Washington.
...Khalilzad is trying desperately and hectically now to negotiate some kind of last-minute compromise, while there are more and more US statements (C. Rice recently) taking their distances from the draft constitution. “Divide and rule” is an astute imperial recipe when it serves as a way to keep control over a territory. But when it messes up and leads to the most important part of this territory threatening to acquire autonomy, free itself from the tutelage of the Empire and ally with the latter’s bitterest regional enemy, the result has only one name: it is a disaster.
Khalilzad is actually trying to “limit the damage” to US interests by seeking some compromise through which key Iraqi Sunni and Shiite forces could be “reconciled” so that some kind of centralized Iraq could be held together, with the US as main broker/mediator—in other words, Khalilzad is trying to rescue “operation divide and rule.” In this endeavor, the US Ambassador, far from looking as a “honest broker,” is acting more and more like a local player in Iraqi politics (which is by itself an indication of the big failure of the Bush administration’s designs). Khalilzad is now working openly hand in hand with Iraqi CIA-buddy and former “Prime Minister,” Iyad Allawi: they are conducting together Washington’s last-minute attempts, meeting together with the Kurdish leadership, etc. On the other hand, Washington has asked the Arab League—which is even more under US domination than the UN is—to mediate on a parallel track. Below are some indications of the bright results of Washington’s work on these two parallel tracks among Iraqi Shiites.

Iraq Acts Over Missing $1 Billion
Scotsman.com, 11 October 2005
Iraq has issued arrest warrants against the defence minister and 27 other officials from the US-backed government of former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi over the alleged disappearance or misappropriation of 1 billion dollars in military procurement funds, officials said.
Those accused include four other ministers from Allawi's government, which was replaced by an elected Cabinet led by Shiite parties in April, Ali al-Lami of Iraq's Integrity Commission said.
Many of the officials are believed to have left Iraq, including Hazem Shaalan, the former defence minister who moved to Jordan shortly after the new government was installed.
For months, Iraqi investigators have been looking into allegations that millions of dollars were spent on overpriced deals for shoddy weapons and military hardware, apparently to launder cash, at a time when Iraq was battling a bloody insurgency that still persists.

The Gold Parachute
Or, how to stop worrying and save yourself from the president’s profligate spending and stubborn insistence on no new taxes.
By James J. Cramer
NewYorkMetro.com, 11 October 2005
It’s dawning on wall street that George W. Bush may be the first president since Lyndon B. Johnson who believes that we can have a guns-and-butter federal spending policy without creating a serious inflation spiral, if not outright government bankruptcy. At least LBJ, to his credit, believed that there were limits to profligacy and that taxes had to be raised. Not President Bush. He’s making Johnson look like a fiscal conservative, what with his insistence on waging a war in Iraq that’s costing $177 million a day and rebuilding New Orleans by taking on a monstrous load of federal debt.
For the longest time, because Bush is a Republican, we on Wall Street simply didn’t believe that he could be a reckless spender. We knew only two paradigms: You either spent less and cut taxes or you spent more and raised taxes. Both courses at least presumed some sacrifice at some time. Not Bush’s plan. He’s gone on both the biggest spending binge and the lowest taxation course in U.S. history, which, alas, will produce gigantic liabilities down the road. Of course, he’ll be back on the ranch by the time his successor will have to deal with his inflation and currency debasement. Our only hope that financial disaster won’t strike sooner lies with the Chinese, who actually fund our deficit by buying our Treasuries—$242 billion worth, or 12 percent of all foreign holdings.
...Look, I don’t know how bad things are going to get. Fortunately, you can do only so much damage to the deficit in three years’ time. But considering Bush has never vetoed a spending bill and would rather die than raise taxes, you have to believe we’d be just plain stupid to make a huge 401(k) bet on strictly domestic stocks. I’m not waiting until the Chinese decide to walk away from the Treasuries table. I’d start buying these stocks now, even if I were a Republican.

Lobbyists Advise Katrina Relief
A Senate bill includes billions of dollars in projects for clients of 'experienced experts.'
by Alan C. Miller and Ken Silverstein
LAT via Common Dreams, 10 October 2005
Lobbyists representing transportation, energy and other special interests dominated panels that advised Louisiana's U.S. senators crafting legislation to rebuild the storm-damaged Gulf Coast, records and interviews show.
The Louisiana Katrina Reconstruction Act — introduced last month by Louisiana Sens. Mary L. Landrieu, a Democrat, and David Vitter, a Republican — included billions of dollars' worth of business for clients of those lobbyists and a total price tag estimated as high as $250 billion.
One advisory panel member who discovered that most of his fellow panelists were lobbyists called the resulting legislation "a huge injustice" to the state.
"I was basically shocked," said Ivor van Heerden, director of a hurricane public health research center at Louisiana State University. "What do lobbyists know about a plan for the reconstruction and restoration of Louisiana?"
Van Heerden was the first participant of any of the senators' working groups to provide such a detailed and scathing account of the process and its outcome. He said he was shut out after he voiced his concerns.
The result, he said, was a lost opportunity "to come up with something innovative, something the people of Louisiana and the nation could really endorse."
SEE ALSO:
AN EYE ON KATRINA CONTRACTS:
In "Profiting from Katrina," the Center for Public Integrity continues
to track coverage of government contracts being awarded for cleanup and
reconstruction in the aftermath of the early September hurricane. This
daily roundup compiled by Center journalists offers links to the latest
information about contracts from sources that include congressional
testimony, primary data posted by government Web sites and media stories
from around the country. http://www.publicintegrity.org/katrina/

DeLay Is a King Without a Crown in the House
By CARL HULSE
NYT, 12 October 2005
When the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee needed guidance on how to prepare for a series of tough spending and budget issues, he sat down with Tom DeLay.
Mr. DeLay was also on hand as the Budget Committee chairman held a private session on the drive for new spending cuts. And when the Republican leadership was caught short of votes for a contentious energy bill, Mr. DeLay scoured the House floor to help deliver a narrow victory.
While Mr. DeLay is officially out of his position as majority leader because of his indictment on criminal charges in Texas, he remains the go-to guy for many House Republicans. They say he is virtually indispensable as the party faces the daunting prospect of delivering $50 billion or more in spending cuts as well as an immigration measure in the coming weeks.
"He is still dialed in and gives good counsel, and that is what we are seeking," said John Scofield, a spokesman for Representative Jerry Lewis, the California Republican who is chairman of the Appropriations Committee, in explaining why Mr. Lewis called in Mr. DeLay for advice last week.
But the continuing strong presence of Mr. DeLay presents House Republicans with a quandary.
Though he has the political muscle and inside knowledge to maneuver difficult legislation in a dicey political climate, he is also is operating under the liability of the criminal charges. Some Republicans acknowledge that their work could be tainted by any perception that Mr. DeLay commands the House from the sidelines while awaiting a resolution of the charges.
"DeLay is driving the agenda," said one senior Republican lawmaker who did not want to be identified because of the sensitivity of talking about internal party matters. "I guess he has to be because he is the only guy who can get this done. But once people find out he is still in charge, that brings its own set of issues."

11 October 2005

Contemporary Orwell
"The War on Terror" in Translation
by Norman Solomon
Common Dreams, 10 October 2005
When the Bush administration fires off a new round of speechifying about "the war on terror," the U.S. press rarely goes beyond the surface meanings of rhetoric provided by White House scriptwriters. But the president's big speech at the National Endowment for Democracy on Oct. 6 could have been annotated along these lines:
* "We will not tire or rest until the war on terror is won."
Translation: This is a war that can go on forever.
* "And while the killers choose their victims indiscriminately, their attacks serve a clear and focused ideology, a set of beliefs and goals that are evil but not insane."
As president, I am the world's authority on evilness and insanity.
...

The Labyrinth of Iraq
By James Carroll
Boston Globe, 10 October 2005
The ancient myth has it that a person entering the maze will never find the way out. As if that were not terrifying enough, inside the maze lives the beast whose special appetite is for the young. The maze is a cluster of tricks, paths to nowhere, the realm of dead ends. There is no escape. The young must fear being eaten alive, but an eternity of false exits threatens everyone.
...For ancient Athens, the maze was on the island of Crete, and the monster was the Minotaur. For America, the maze is in Iraq, and the monster is labeled ''insurgency." This is no myth, no metaphor, no dream. The war is America's prison. Our politics are paralyzed now because no one can imagine the way out. Youthful GIs and Marines hustle from one dead end to another, from the false exit of Iraqi ''sovereignty" to the trap door of the constitutional vote to the trick mirror of Iraqi armed forces that can take over ''security." This string of exitless corridors leads our troops ever deeper into the maze, more at the mercy of the devouring monster than ever.
Just as Athens sent its boys and girls to feed the Minotaur, keeping the beast appeased and far away, so -- just so -- does Washington. But in our circumstance, the sacrificial offering of the young is not quite working. Here is the ironic surprise that only recently dawns on the United States: We have followed our young ones into the maze. We are a lost nation, right behind them.
Iraq is far away, but its maze transcends locality. US foreign policy is the maze now; so is the evening news, and so are the pages of the newspapers that arrive each morning. We sit at our breakfast tables wide awake, yet the feeling of dreams is over everything. The corridors of American consciousness open only into other corridors. We hustle from one threshold to the next, busier than ever, but we never come out. This war was the entrance into a world with no exit. Those who oppose the war and those who support it are alike in feeling a vast demoralization. And if it remains true that, of Americans, the literal violence of the monster consumes only the uniformed young, the rest of us have begun to devour ourselves.
...How else might citizens think of this situation? There is the maze, with its false trails and dead ends, a geography of despair. But in the dream life of humans, and in the store of metaphor, there is something else -- a labyrinth. In common parlance the words are interchangeable, but there is a difference, and it is instructive. A labyrinth is winding and mysterious but has only one pathway, no tricks, and no cul-de-sacs. To follow this trail in patience and humility is to come, eventually, to a center, which is the knowledge of contemplative truth.
Purposeful walking is the opposite of panicked flight. That is why labyrinths are on the floors of cathedrals, not prisons. To find the way into the heart of the labyrinth is, simultaneously, to find the way out. The labyrinth, therefore, answers the maze. How do we leave Iraq? By reversing ourselves and simply leaving.

10 October 2005

Standby for another glorious victory in Iraq...
The Meaning of No
By NOAH FELDMAN
NYT Magazine, 9 October 2005
We should not deceive ourselves: those who vote against the constitution will not be casting a ballot in favor of the United States or the invasion of Iraq, or even in favor of peace. Neither, for that matter, will those who vote in favor of the constitution be expressing confidence in American competence or in the justice of our presence. In Iraq, as elsewhere, people are able to distinguish democracy from America's efforts to promote it. To the Iraqis, democracy is not an American value. It is just a mechanism - probably the only mechanism - for getting them out of the desperate fix in which they find themselves. That may be the only reason that democracy still has a chance of succeeding in Iraq, against all the odds.

A Central Pillar of Iraq Policy Crumbling
Bush's administration has insisted that political progress would quell the insurgency. But the reverse may be true, U.S. analysts say.
By Tyler Marshall and Louise Roug
LA Times, 9 October 2005
Senior U.S. officials have begun to question a key presumption of American strategy in Iraq: that establishing democracy there can erode and ultimately eradicate the insurgency gripping the country.
The expectation that political progress would bring stability has been fundamental to the Bush administration's approach to rebuilding Iraq, as well as a central theme of White House rhetoric to convince the American public that its policy in Iraq remains on course.
But within the last two months, U.S. analysts with access to classified intelligence have started to challenge this precept, noting a "significant and disturbing disconnect" between apparent advances on the political front and efforts to reduce insurgent attacks.
Now, with Saturday's constitutional referendum appearing more likely to divide than unify the country, some within the administration have concluded that the quest for democracy in Iraq, at least in its current form, could actually strengthen the insurgency.
The commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, Army Gen. George W. Casey, has acknowledged that such a scenario is possible, while officials elsewhere in the administration, all of whom declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the subject, say they share similar concerns about the referendum.
Iraq's Sunni Muslim Arabs, who are believed to form the core of the insurgency, are bitterly opposed to a constitution drafted mainly by the country's majority Shiite Muslims and ethnic Kurds. Yet from all indications, the Sunnis will fail to muster enough votes to defeat it.
"It could make people on the fence a little more angry or [make them] come off the fence," said a senior U.S. official who requested anonymity.
A growing number of experts outside the administration and in Iraq agree with such assessments.

Bush Call to Expand Military Powers at Home Seen as Unnecessary, Political
by Niko Kyriakiou
OneWorld.net, 8 October 2005
President Bush recently suggested that the military be given broader powers to deal with domestic crises like Hurricane Katrina or a potential bird flu epidemic, but emergency response and security groups in the U.S. say the military already has the power it needs to provide both relief and protection to citizens, and question whether the president's real motives aren't political.
...relief groups doubt whether giving the military police power in emergency situations would really increase Americans' safety.
...Some security groups and military experts, for their part, have questioned what benefit granting the military domestic police powers could bring in responding to crises such as an avian flu pandemic.
"I cannot imagine U.S. troops surrounding a town where avian flu has broken out with fixed bayonets to prevent people from getting out of the town--that's just nuts," says retired army Lieutenant General, Robert G. Gard.
But Gard says the main argument against changing Posse Comitatus is that the military can already serve as police in domestic emergencies, although only in the gravest circumstances.
Under the current system, the military is allowed to offer all kinds of logistical support during domestic crises, but cannot engage in policing, says Gard, who is now the senior military fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation in Washington, D.C.
"The point that's often made about deploying troops in a time of disaster is that they have a good logistic capability to quickly deploy food, shelter, and supplies, and you can already do that," Gard says.

Protesters Say Parking Ban Near Bush Ranch Won't Deter Them
by Angela K. Brown
AP via Common Dreams, 9 October 2005
Along the narrow road meandering between corn fields and cow pastures, something odd has popped up every few hundred feet: "no parking" signs.
Folks who live in the normally tranquil area near President Bush's ranch never dreamed they would want or need a parking ban until August, when war protesters from around the nation pitched tents in shallow ditches about 2 1/2 miles away from the Western White House.
After residents complained of noise and traffic congestion with the campsite that drew thousands, McLennan County commissioners recently approved new ordinances banning parking on parts of 14 roads near the ranch - roughly a 5-mile radius - and prohibiting camping in any county ditch.
"Everyone who lives around here is glad things are back to normal," said Dusty Harrison, who lives about 300 yards from the protesters' site. "With the ban on camping and parking, I believe it will put a stop to it."

"Beware of leaders who drink their own Kool-Aid."
The Faith-Based President Defrocked
By FRANK RICH
NYT, 9 October 2005
To understand why the right is rebelling against Harriet Miers, don't waste time boning up on her glory days with the Texas Lottery Commission. The real story in this dust-up is not the Supreme Court candidate, but the man who picked her. The Miers nomination, whatever its fate, will be remembered as the flashpoint when the faith-based Bush base finally started to lose faith in our propaganda president and join the apostate American majority.
Though James Dobson, America's foremost analyst of the gay subtext of SpongeBob SquarePants, was easily rolled by Karl Rove and dragged back into the Miers camp, he's an exception. The pervasive mood on the right was articulated by Cathie Adams, president of the Texas branch of Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum. She told The Washington Post: "President Bush is asking us to have faith in things unseen. We only have that kind of faith in God."
This is a sea change. If anything, Ms. Miers's record of opposition to abortion (a contribution to Texans United for Life, a leadership role at a strenuously anti-abortion church) is less "unseen" than that of John Roberts, whose nomination aroused no protest on the right only three months ago. The difference between then and now is a startling index of the toll taken by a botched war and hurricane response on whatever remains of Mr. Bush's credibility. The continuing inability of the administration to accomplish the mission in Iraq and of its post-Brownie FEMA to do a heck of a job on the Gulf Coast has inflicted collateral damage on its case for Harriet Miers.
"The president's 'argument' for her amounts to: Trust me," George Will wrote in the op-ed column that last week galvanized conservative opposition to the nomination. He then went on to list several reasons why he doesn't trust Mr. Bush. As if to prove the point, the president went out to the Rose Garden and let loose with one whopper after another in his first press conference in four months.
"Of all the people in the United States you had to choose from, is Harriet Miers the most qualified to serve on the Supreme Court?" Mr. Bush was asked. "Yes," he answered. Has he ever discussed abortion with her? "Not to my recollection." How much political capital does he have left? "Plenty." With a straight face he promised that Ms. Miers was "not going to change" and that "20 years from now she'll be the same person with the same philosophy that she is today." Even were that a praiseworthy attribute, it would still contradict the history of a woman who abandoned her Roman Catholic faith for evangelical Christianity and the Democratic Party for the Republicans.

Bush's Veil Over History
By KITTY KELLEY
NYT, 10 October 2005
Secrecy has been perhaps the most consistent trait of the George W. Bush presidency. Whether it involves refusing to provide the names of oil executives who advised Vice President Dick Cheney on energy policy, prohibiting photographs of flag-draped coffins returning from Iraq, or forbidding the release of files pertaining to Chief Justice John Roberts's tenure in the Justice Department, President Bush seems determined to control what the public is permitted to know. And he has been spectacularly effective, making Richard Nixon look almost transparent.
But perhaps the most egregious example occurred on Nov. 1, 2001, when President Bush signed Executive Order 13233, under which a former president's private papers can be released only with the approval of both that former president (or his heirs) and the current one.
Before that executive order, the National Archives had controlled the release of documents under the Presidential Records Act of 1978, which stipulated that all papers, except those pertaining to national security, had to be made available 12 years after a president left office.
Now, however, Mr. Bush can prevent the public from knowing not only what he did in office, but what Bill Clinton, George H. W. Bush and Ronald Reagan did in the name of democracy. (Although Mr. Reagan's term ended more than 12 years before the executive order, the Bush administration had filed paperwork in early 2001 to stop the clock, and thus his papers fall under it.)
Bill Clinton publicly objected to the executive order, saying he wanted all his papers open. Yet the Bush administration has nonetheless denied access to documents surrounding the 177 pardons President Clinton granted in the last days of his presidency. Coming without explanation, this action raised questions and fueled conspiracy theories: Is there something to hide?
...What can be done to bring this information to light? Because executive orders are not acts of Congress, they can be overturned by future commanders in chief. But this is a lot to ask of presidents given the free pass handed them by Mr. Bush. (And it could put a President Hillary Clinton in a bind when it came to her own husband's papers.)
Other efforts to rectify the situation are equally problematic. Representative Henry Waxman, Democrat of California, has repeatedly introduced legislation to overturn Mr. Bush's executive order, but the chances of a Republican Congress defying a Republican president are slim.
There is also a lawsuit by the American Historical Association and other academic and archival groups before the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. A successful verdict could force the National Archives to ignore the executive order and begin making public records from the Reagan and elder Bush administrations.
Unless one of these efforts succeeds, George W. Bush and his father can see to it that their administrations pass into history without examination. Their rationales for waging wars in the Middle East will go unchallenged. There will be no chance to weigh the arguments that led the administration to condone torture by our armed forces. The problems of federal agencies entrusted with public welfare during times of national disaster - 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina - will be unaddressed. Details on no-bid contracts awarded to politically connected corporations like Halliburton will escape scrutiny, as will the president's role in Environmental Protection Agency's policies on water and air polluters.
This is about much more than the desires of historians and biographers - the best interests of the nation are at stake. As the American Political Science Association, one plaintiff in the federal lawsuit, put it: "The only way we can improve the operation of government, enhance the accountability of decision-makers and ultimately help maintain public trust in government is for people to understand how it worked in the past."

8 October 2005

Welcome to the Hackocracy
The New Republic, 6 October 2005
The events of the past months have awakened the press to the true nature of the Bush administration. It is overrun with hacks--that is, government officials with waifish resumés padded like the Michelin man, whose political connections have won them important national responsibilities. But, in the face of this rush to flay the Bush hacks, we should consider their achievements.
To fully appreciate the virtues of this administration, we must first recall the administration that came before. Back in the 1990s, Bill Clinton recruited a small army of Arkansans and Rhodes scholars to the West Wing. Although there was the occasional kindergarten buddy who was out of his depth, most of these FOBs (friends of Bill) were insufferable wonks who never let you forget their dense resumés. President Bush put his finger on the smug mindset of these Clinton meritocrats when he said, "They're all of a sudden smarter than the average person because they happen to have an Ivy League degree."
Now we can consider this problem solved. The Bush era has taken government out of the hands of the hyper-qualified and given it back to the common man. This new breed may not have what the credentialists sneeringly call "relevant experience." Their alma maters may not always be "accredited." But they have something the intellectual snobs of yore never had: loyalty. If not loyalty to country, then at least loyalty to party and to the guy who got them the job. And their loyalty has been rewarded: Even if they fail, they know they can move up the chain until they find a job they can succeed in or until a major American city is destroyed, whichever comes first.

GOP Leaders Win on Energy Bill
DeLay Twists Arms Over Measure to Increase Refining Capacity
By Justin Blum and Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post, 8 October 2005
In the first major vote since Rep. Tom DeLay stepped down from the House GOP leadership, Republicans narrowly escaped an embarrassing defeat when nearly an hour of arm-twisting pushed through a bill designed to expand the nation's capacity to refine oil into gasoline.
To Democratic shouts of "Shame! Shame," House leaders held a five-minute vote open for 45 minutes as they worked to bring around balking moderate Republicans. The bill was fervently opposed by environmentalists and their Democratic and Republican allies, but under heavy pressure from House leaders, Rep. Wayne T. Gilchrest (R-Md.) switched his vote from no to yes, ensuring the bill's passage by a vote of 212 to 210.
And if rank-and-file Republicans wondered what role DeLay (R-Tex.) would play after his indictments last month on money-laundering and conspiracy charges, Friday's theatrics provided the answer. Even without a leadership title, DeLay made it clear that he will still wield power. Just as he did when he was part of the leadership, he was present for the whole vote, pressing dissenting Republicans, especially Rep. Roscoe G. Bartlett (R-Md.), who fidgeted with his voting card as DeLay pressed for his assent.
"It was a heck of a performance to turn this around," said Rep. Michael N. Castle (R-Del.), one of 13 Republicans who joined 196 Democrats and one independent to nearly defeat the Gasoline for America's Security -- or GAS -- Act. "The lesson was that nothing's changed."
"I saw DeLay come out of retirement," said Rep. John D. Dingell (D-Mich.) "I saw him twisting the arms of at least three of my colleagues. . . . I saw a lot of unhappy Republicans."

A complete and utterly devastating rebuttal to Bush's speech...
You Can't "Stay the Course" Because You Don't Have a Course. Get One.
Juan Cole
Informed Comment, 7 October 2005
Mr. Bush, I don't recognize the world you paint. I find your speech a form of sheer propaganda, having almost no relationship to reality. And I am very, very worried that you will allow to happen to the Oil Gulf what you allowed to happen to New Orleans. After watching you for five years I have become convinced that you don't have the slightest idea what you are doing in Iraq, that you are just reacting and playing it by ear. You can't do that, George. This Iraq thing is extremely complex. It needs serious, concerted thought by high-powered people, not just your cronies and yes-men and ideologues of various stripes (from Right to far-Right). You might just need the help of Iran and Syria to get Iraq right. Did you ever think of that? Iraq is the biggest policy failure in US history so far. You need to get a handle on it, the way you do on tax cuts for the billionaires (you've been very effective in making your rich friends richer). Otherwise all that extra treasure you've thrown to your tuxedoed "base" is going to go right down the tubes, drowned in a world of $20 a gallon gasoline.
You can't "stay the course" because you don't have a course. Get one.

Bush Says 10 Plots by Al Qaeda Were Foiled
Speech Aims to Rally U.S. Support for War
By Peter Baker and Susan B. Glasser
Washington Post, 7 October 2005
The United States and its allies have thwarted at least 10 serious al Qaeda terrorist plots since Sept. 11, 2001, including never-before-disclosed plans to use hijacked commercial airliners to attack the East and West coasts in 2002 and 2003, President Bush and his aides said yesterday.
The reported plots aimed to strike a wide variety of targets, including the Library Tower in Los Angeles, ships in international waters and a tourist site overseas, the White House said last night. Three of the 10 were directed at U.S. soil, officials said. The government, they added, also stopped five al Qaeda efforts to case possible targets or infiltrate operatives into the country.
Most of the plots were previously reported in some form; a few were revealed yesterday. The White House had never before placed a number or compiled a public list of the foiled attempts to follow up the Sept. 11 attacks, but it offered scant information beyond the location and general date of each reported plot -- making it difficult to assess last night how serious or advanced they were or what role the government played in preventing them.
Bush cited the disrupted plans in a speech yesterday intended to shore up sagging public support for the war in Iraq and address more extensively than ever before the philosophical framework undergirding Islamic extremism. The radical movement, he said, goes beyond "isolated acts of madness," animated by a coherent philosophy akin to Soviet Communism and Nazi fascism with the goal to "establish a radical Islamic empire that spans from Spain to Indonesia."
"While the killers choose their victims indiscriminately, their attacks serve a clear and focused ideology, a set of beliefs and goals that are evil but not insane," the president said. The disruption of some plots, he said, means that "the enemy is wounded but the enemy is still capable of global operations."
Bush singled out Syria and Iran for condemnation, calling them "allies of convenience" of Islamic radicals "with a long history of collaboration with terrorists" and saying they "deserve no patience from the victims of terror." He rebuffed calls to withdraw from Iraq, dismissing the "dangerous illusion" that pulling out would make the United States safer. And he rejected the argument that the Iraq war has only fostered terrorism, a position taken even by some in government.
The 40-minute address to the National Endowment for Democracy outlined no new strategy for the nation's four-year-old battle with al Qaeda but inserted Bush directly into the underlying war of ideas, as many security specialists have been urging for some time. In the past few years he has avoided personalizing the conflict for fear of building up terrorist leaders, but yesterday he talked repeatedly and in unusually personal terms about Osama bin Laden and Abu Musab Zarqawi, the leader of the insurgency in Iraq.

7 October 2005

Prosecutor in Leak Inquiry Orders Rove to Return Again
By DAVID JOHNSTON
NYT, 7 October 2005
The special prosecutor in the C.I.A. leak case has summoned Karl Rove, the senior White House adviser, to return next week to testify to a federal grand jury in a step that could mean charges will be filed in the case, lawyers in the case said Thursday.
The prosecutor, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, has held discussions in recent days with lawyers for several administration officials suggesting that he is considering whether to charge them with a crime over the disclosure of an intelligence operative's identity in a 2003 newspaper column.
Mr. Fitzgerald is said by some of the lawyers to have indicated that he has not made up his mind about whether to accuse anyone of wrongdoing and will use the remaining days before the grand jury's term expires on Oct. 28 to decide.
Mr. Rove has appeared before the grand jury on three previous occasions.
Meanwhile, Mr. Fitzgerald has indicated that he is not entirely finished with Judith Miller, the reporter for The New York Times who recently testified before the grand jury after serving 85 days in jail. According to a lawyer familiar with the case, Mr. Fitzgerald has asked Ms. Miller to meet him next Tuesday to further discuss her conversations with I. Lewis Libby, the vice president's chief of staff.

President Bush's Major Speech: Doing the 9/11 Time Warp Again
NYT editorial, 7 October 2005
...Yesterday was an ideal moment for Mr. Bush to demonstrate that he was really in control of his administration. He could have taken any one of a number of pressing worries and demonstrated that he was on the job, re-examining the problems, working on answers. For instance, he could have addressed the crisis facing the overstretched military due to the endless demands made by Iraq on both the Army and the beleaguered National Guard.
The speech came one day after the White House threatened to veto a bill onto which the Senate added a ban on the use of "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment" against prisoners of the American government. This president could not find the spine to veto a bloated transportation bill that included wildly wasteful projects like the now-famous "bridge to nowhere" in Alaska. What kind of priorities does that suggest? If we ever needed the president to demonstrate that he has a working understanding of exactly where he wants to take this country, we need it now.
The president's inability to grow beyond his big moment in 2001 is unnerving. But the fact that his handlers continue to encourage him to milk 9/11 is infuriating. For most of us, the memories are fresh and painful. We mourn the people who died on Sept. 11, as we mourn Daniel Pearl and other Americans, not to mention innocents from other countries, who were murdered by terrorists. The administration's penchant for using them as political cover is offensive. It threatens to turn our wounds, and our current fears, into cynical and desperate spin.

6 October 2005

All the President's Women
By MAUREEN DOWD
NYT, 5 October 2005 (sub only)
...Maybe it's because his mom was not adoring enough, but more tart and prickly, even telling her son, the president, not to put his feet up on her coffee table. Or maybe it's because, as his wife says, his kinship with his mom gives him a desire to be around strong, "very natural" women. But W. loves being surrounded by tough women who steadfastly devote their entire lives to doting on him, like the vestal virgins guarding the sacred fire, serving as custodians for his values and watchdogs for his reputation.
First he elevated Condi Rice to secretary of state, even though she had bungled her job as national security adviser, failing to bring a sense of urgency to warnings about terrorism aimed at America before 9/11, and acting more as an enabler than honest broker in the push to invade Iraq.
But what were these limitations, considering the time the workaholic bachelorette logged at W.'s side in Crawford and Camp David, coaching him on foreign affairs, talking sports with him, exercising with him, making him feel like the most thoughtful, farsighted he-man in the world?
Then he elevated his longtime aide, speechwriter, memoir ghostwriter and cheerleader Karen Hughes to undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, even though it is exceedingly hard for the 6-foot Texan to try and spin a billion Muslims whom she doesn't understand the first thing about.
But who cares about her lack of expertise in such a critical job, as long as the workaholic loyalist continues to make her old boss feel like the most thoughtful, farsighted he-man in the world?
And now he has nominated his White House counsel and former personal lawyer, Harriet Miers, to a crucial swing spot on the Supreme Court. The stolid Texan, called "Harry" by some old friends, is a bachelorette who was known for working long hours, sometimes 16-hour days, and was a frequent guest at Camp David and the Crawford ranch, where she helped W. clear brush.
Like Ms. Hughes and Laura Bush, she's a graduate of Southern Methodist, and she has always been there for W. In 1998, during his re-election race for governor, Harry handled the first questions about whether Mr. Bush had received favorable treatment to get into the Texas Air National Guard to avoid the draft. Though the former Democrat once gave a grand to Al Gore in '88, she passed the loyalty test for W. during the Bush v. Gore standoff in 2000, when she recruited conservative lawyers to work for the Bush scion in Tallahassee.
But who cares whether she has no judicial experience, and that no one knows what she believes or how she would rule from a bench she's never been behind, as long as the reason her views are so mysterious is that she's subordinated them to W.'s, making him feel like the most thoughtful, farsighted he-man in the world?
David Frum, the former White House speechwriter and conservative commentator, reported on his blog that Ms. Miers once told him that W. was the most brilliant man she knew.

And despite their unwillingness to exercise their oversight responsibility...
Senate Moves to Protect Military Prisoners Despite Veto Threat
By ERIC SCHMITT
NYT, 6 October 2005
Defying the White House, the Senate overwhelmingly agreed Wednesday to regulate the detention, interrogation and treatment of prisoners held by the American military.
The measure ignited a fierce debate among many Senate Republicans and the White House, which threatened to veto a $440 billion military spending bill if the detention amendment was tacked on, saying it would bind the president's hands in wartime. Nonetheless, the measure passed, 90 to 9, with 46 Republicans, including Bill Frist of Tennessee, the majority leader, joining 43 Democrats and one independent in favor.
More than two dozen retired senior military officers, including Colin L. Powell and John M. Shalikashvili, two former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, endorsed the amendment, which would ban use of "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment" against anyone in United States government custody.
It would also require all American troops to use only interrogation techniques authorized in a new Army field manual. It would not cover techniques used by the Central Intelligence Agency.

Pentagon Analyst Admits He Shared Secret Information
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
NYT, 6 October 2005
A senior Defense Department analyst admitted Wednesday that he shared secret military information with two pro-Israeli lobbyists and an Israeli official in an effort to create a "backchannel" to the Bush administration on Middle East policy.
The analyst, Lawrence A. Franklin, pleaded guilty in federal court here to three criminal counts for improperly retaining and disclosing classified information, and he gave the first account of his motives and thinking in establishing secret liaisons with people outside the government.
The offenses carry a maximum of 25 years in prison, but as part of a plea agreement, prosecutors are expected to recommend leniency for Mr. Franklin in return for his cooperation in a continuing investigation in the January trial of the two lobbyists, Steven J. Rosen and Keith Weissman.
The lobbyists were dismissed last year by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or Aipac, after the investigation became public.
Mr. Franklin, 58, said in entering his guilty pleas that he had shared with the lobbyists "my frustrations with a particular policy" during repeated meetings from 2002 to 2004. He did not divulge the particular policy, but officials in the case said he was referring to the Bush administration's dealings with Iran.

4 October 2005

Alas, the American political and legal system is fundamentally tilted against an egalitarian sense of justice and equality in favor of the rights of property owners. Always has been. Always will be.
Order in the Court
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
NYT, 4 October 2005 (sub only)
With another Supreme Court battle looming, this time over Harriet Miers, let's acknowledge something up front: Republicans are right to complain about judicial activism.
One of the most fundamental mistakes that liberals made after World War II was, time after time, to seek social progress through the courts rather than through the political process.
...So, granted, the courts were often the most efficient way to advance a liberal agenda, and cases like Roe v. Wade now deserve respect as precedents. But there were two problems with the activist approach.
The first was that these rulings alienated ordinary Americans who just could not see how the Constitution banned school prayers but protected obscenities. Frustration still seethes at liberals who try to impose their values on the heartland, and one consequence has been the rise of the religious right.
The second objection is that conservatives can play the same game of judicial activism to advance a social agenda. Alas, they already are.
"Judicial activism" is usually associated with liberals, but Paul Gewirtz of Yale Law School has shown that lately conservatives have been far more likely to strike down laws passed by Congress. Clarence Thomas voted to invalidate 65 percent of the laws that came before him in cases, while those least likely to do so were Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer. Indeed, Justice Breyer has written a thoughtful new book, "Active Liberty," which calls for judicial restraint and suggests that the best arena for resolving crucial national questions is legislatures rather than courts.
A growing number on the left are questioning the traditional idea of using courts to achieve a more liberal society. Justice Ginsburg, in her Senate hearings, even criticized the scope of Roe v. Wade for short-circuiting the legislative process: "My view is that if Roe had been less sweeping, people would have accepted it more readily, would have expressed themselves in the political arena in an enduring way on this question."
In the magazine of the Democratic Leadership Council, Prof. William Galston warned:
"We must acknowledge that as a party, we have opened ourselves to charges of elitism. We cannot be an effective party if we substitute litigation for mobilization. We cannot be a democratic party if we do not trust the people."
That doesn't mean blindly trusting Ms. Miers or any other Supreme Court nominee. But it does mean that the main mode for seeking a more liberal agenda, such as permitting gay marriage or barring public displays of the Ten Commandments, should be the democratic process, not the undemocratic courts. And it also suggests that the Republicans are dead right to fret about judicial activism - and we should hold them to their word.

Iraqi implementation of American 'constitutional process'
Election Move Seems to Ensure Iraqis' Charter
By ROBERT F. WORTH
NYT, 4 October 2005
 Iraq's Shiite and Kurdish leaders quietly adopted new rules over the weekend that will make it virtually impossible for the constitution to fail in the coming national referendum.
The move prompted Sunni Arabs and a range of independent political figures to complain that the vote was being fixed.
Some Sunni leaders who have been organizing a campaign to vote down the proposed constitution said they might now boycott the referendum on Oct. 15. Other political leaders also reacted angrily, saying the change would seriously damage the vote's credibility.
Under the new rules, the constitution will fail only if two-thirds of all registered voters - rather than two-thirds of all those actually casting ballots - reject it in at least three of the 18 provinces.
The change, adopted during an unannounced vote in Parliament on Sunday afternoon, effectively raises the bar for those who oppose the constitution. Given that fewer than 60 percent of registered Iraqis voted in the January elections, the chances that two-thirds will both show up at the polls and vote against the document in three provinces would appear to be close to nil.
"This is a mockery of democracy, a mockery of law," said Adnan al-Janabi, a secular Sunni representative and a member of former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi's party. "Many Sunnis have been telling me they didn't believe in this democratic process, and now I believe they are vindicated."
The rule change could prove a serious embarrassment to American officials in Iraq, who have spent recent weeks struggling to persuade Sunni Arabs to vote for the constitution and even trying to broker last-minute changes that would make it more palatable to them.

Second Indictment Issued Against DeLay
By PHILIP SHENON
NYT, 4 October 2005
A grand jury in Texas issued a second indictment on Monday against Representative Tom DeLay, accusing the Texas Republican and two aides of money laundering in a $190,000 transaction that prosecutors have described as a violation of the state's ban on the use of corporate money in local election campaigns.
The indictment was announced without warning on Monday in Austin, the state capital, after lawyers for Mr. DeLay went to court earlier in the day to ask that the original conspiracy indictment be dismissed on technical grounds. Mr. DeLay was forced to step down temporarily as House majority leader as a result of that indictment last week.
...Without an explanation from the prosecutors, local criminal law specialists seemed perplexed by Mr. Earle's actions, saying they may reflect an effort by the prosecutor to ensure that some charge sticks to Mr. DeLay even if the conspiracy indictment is dimissed.
George E. Dix, a law professor at the University of Texas and a specialist in criminal procedures, speculated that prosecutors "saw a potential problem" with the conspiracy counts "and didn't want to hassle over it, so they went with a legal theory on money laundering that wouldn't present the same problems." He said if that was the case, it could be embarrassing to Mr. Earle because "it is a little awkward to have to change a theory before your horse is out of the gate."
The essential allegations are identical in the new and old indictment - that Mr. DeLay and his aides transferred $190,000 in corporate donations from a Texas political action committee to the Republican National Committee in September 2002, and that it was returned to individual Republican candidates for the Texas state house. A century-old ban in Texas prohibits the use of corporate money in the campaigns of state candidates.

2 October 2005

U.S. Generals Now See Virtues of a Smaller Troop Presence in Iraq
By Mark Mazzetti, Times Staff Writer
LA Times, 1 October 2005
The U.S. generals running the war in Iraq presented a new assessment of the military situation in public comments and sworn testimony this week: The 149,000 U.S. troops currently in Iraq are increasingly part of the problem.
During a trip to Washington, the generals said the presence of U.S. forces was fueling the insurgency, fostering an undesirable dependency on American troops among the nascent Iraqi armed forces and energizing terrorists across the Middle East.
For all these reasons, they said, a gradual withdrawal of U.S. troops was imperative.
SEE ALSO:

Strategic Redeployment
A Progressive Plan for Iraq and the Struggle Against Violent Extremists
By Lawrence Korb and Brian Katulis
Center for American Progress, 29 September 2005
Read Full Report (PDF)
Strategic Redeployment has four main components:  military realignment that restores a realistic deployment policy for our active and reserve forces and moves troops to other hot spots in the struggle against global terrorist networks or brings them home to rebuild; a global communications campaign to counter misinformation and hateful ideologies; new regional diplomatic initiatives; and smarter support for Iraq's renewal and reconstruction.

A Government of War Criminals , A Press of Agents Provocateurs, A Bureaucracy of Foreign Spies
Juan Cole
Informed Comment, 1 October 2005
Just reading ordinary press reports on the state of government and the press in Washington is like stepping into Orwell's 1984.
...One thing must be said, which is that there is no sinister cabal, that all this is just single-interest politics. The American system is one of checks and balances, and takes it for granted that there will be lobbies on both sides of an issue. But because there are no wealthy, organized, well-connected lobbies on the other side of AIPAC or the Cuban-American National Foundation (e.g.), US government policy ends up being unbalanced and often irrational on those issues. And, AIPAC functions as a foreign agent in the US without having to register as such, and some of its major officers clearly have been deeply involved in espionage for Israel for years. The last two points are uncontestable. Is this really a situation that serves the American people? Franklin, the "go-to" man at the Pentagon for then Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, was trying to get up a US war against Iran, and was soliciting AIPAC's help. We already know that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has tried as hard as he could to get the US into a war against Tehran. Do the rest of us, who already have one military occupation of a Middle Eastern country we're not comfortable with, have any say at all in this? Don't we need a PAC for Middle East Peace that could begin offsetting AIPAC, the War PAC? If the pro-Israeli lobby or the Israeli prime minister want wars in the Middle East, why don't they fight them themselves? By the way, AIPAC has for several years been attempting to get Congress to pass a law that would put it in charge of the Middle East professors, like myself, and in a position to punish our universities financially if any of us criticize it or Israeli policy. The most dangerous thing about key elements of the Zionist lobby is that they really do want to gut the US First Amendment when it comes to Israeli interests.
I hope everyone who reads this will consider writing their Congressional representatives and senators and asking them to work to see that AIPAC is made to register as the agent of a foreign power, given the repeated pattern whereby it acts as such.

Medicine's Sticker Shock
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
NYT, 2 October 2005
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, we have an opportunity to construct something far more important than higher levees - a national health care system that looks less like a tightrope and more like a safety net.
A dozen years after Bill Clinton's health reform efforts were destroyed by the insurance industry's duplicity, it's worth trying again. The health care system is steadily becoming more gummed up in ways that are impossible to hide.
One of the bumper stickers attacking the Clinton plan read: "If You Like the Post Office, You'll Love National Health Insurance." That wouldn't work today: the Postal Service runs a system that is manifestly more rational and efficient than our health care system. For starters, imagine a postal system that refused to deliver letters to or from 45 million Americans - except on rare occasions, by ambulance.
"This is one of those fleeting opportunities where a catastrophe creates an opportunity to rebuild something better than before," says Dr. Irwin Redlener, president of the Children's Health Fund and associate dean of the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University.
In a sign of the growing disenchantment with our health system, 13,000 doctors have joined Physicians for a National Health Program, which lobbies for a single-payer government-financed health program.
There are four main problems with the existing system. First, it leaves out 45 million uninsured Americans, and their number is rising. Second, it is by far the most expensive in the world, costing 15 percent of our national income, yet our outcomes are awful - U.S. life expectancy is worse than Costa Rica's. Third, our business competitiveness is undermined when, for example, medical expenses add $1,500 to the sticker of each General Motors car. Fourth, our system is catastrophically inefficient: according to a study in The New England Journal of Medicine, health administrative costs are $1,059 per capita in the U.S., and just $307 in Canada.
A single-payer system would be most efficient but probably is not politically feasible at the moment. The smart new book "The Health Care Mess" suggests a variety of more gradual approaches that would face less opposition.

Stumbling Storm-Aid Effort Put Tons of Ice on Trips to Nowhere
By SCOTT SHANE and ERIC LIPTON
NYT, 2 October 2005
When the definitive story of the confrontation between Hurricane Katrina and the United States government is finally told, one long and tragicomic chapter will have to be reserved for the odyssey of the ice.
Ninety-one thousand tons of ice cubes, that is, intended to cool food, medicine and sweltering victims of the storm. It would cost taxpayers more than $100 million, and most of it would never be delivered.

In the Beginning, There Was Abramoff
By FRANK RICH
NYT, 2 October 2005 (sub only)
"Terri Schiavo is not brain-dead; she talks and she laughs, and she expresses happiness and discomfort. Terri Schiavo is not on life support."
- Tom DeLay, March 20, 2005
If you believed Tom DeLay then, you no doubt believe now that the deposed House majority leader is only on "temporary" leave from his powerful perch in Washington and that he'll soon bounce back, laughing all the way, from a partisan witch hunt that unjustly requires his brief discomfort in a Texas courtroom.
Those who still live in the reality-based community, however, may sense they're watching the beginning of the end of something big. It's not just Mr. DeLay, a k a the Hammer, who is on life support, but a Washington establishment whose infatuation with power and money has contaminated nearly every limb of government and turned off a public that by two to one finds the country on the wrong track.
But don't take my word for it. And don't listen to the canned talking points of the Democrats, who are still so busy trying to explain why they were for the war in Iraq before they were against it that it's hard to trust their logic on anything else. Listen instead to Andrew Ferguson, of the conservative Rupert Murdoch magazine, The Weekly Standard. As far back as last December in a cover article on the sleazy lobbyist Jack Abramoff, Mr. Ferguson was already declaring "the end of the Republican Revolution."
He painted the big picture of the Abramoff ethos in vibrant strokes: the ill-gotten Indian gambling moolah snaking through the bank accounts of a network of DeLay cronies and former aides; the "fact-finding" Congressional golfing trips to further the cause of sweatshop garment factories in the Marianas islands; the bogus "think tank" in Rehoboth Beach, Del., where the two scholars in residence were a yoga instructor and a lifeguard (albeit a "lifeguard of the year"). Certain names kept recurring in Mr. Ferguson's epic narrative, most prominently Ralph Reed and Grover Norquist, Republican money-changers who are as tightly tied to President Bush and Karl Rove as they are to Mr. Abramoff and Mr. DeLay, if not more so.
The bottom line, Mr. Ferguson wrote, was a culture antithetical to everything conservatives had stood for in the Gingrich revolution of 1994. Slaying a corrupt, bloated Democratic establishment was out, gluttony for the G.O.P. and its fat cats was in. Mr. Abramoff and his gang embodied the very enemy the "Contract With America" Congress had supposedly come to Washington to smite...

Americanization?
Middle Class Sees Daily Life Wither in Iraq
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
NYT, 2 October 2005
From her bedroom window, Nesma Abdul-Razzaq, a 43-year-old homemaker, has watched insurgents fire grenades from a patch of grass near her garden. Frequent patrols of American tanks rattle the glass. A bullet has pierced a pane.
"You can't live in safety if you cooperate with either side," she said in the bedroom of her house, deep in insurgent-controlled western Baghdad. So when American troops offered to pay for the use of the roof last month, she politely declined.
"What would I say to the neighbors?" she said.
Two and a half years after the American invasion, the violence shows no sign of relenting, and life for middle-class Iraqis seems only to be getting worse.
Educated, invested in businesses and properties and eager for change, the middle class here had everything to gain from the American effort.
But frustration is hardening into hopelessness, as families feel increasingly trapped by the many forces that are threatening to tear the country apart.

A True Story about Bill Bennett
By Reed Hundt
From: Politics, TPMCafe, 1 October 2005
When I was chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (1993-97), I asked Bill Bennett to visit my office so that I could ask him for help in seeking legislation that would pay for internet access in all classrooms and libraries in the country. Eventually Senators Olympia Snowe and Jay Rockefeller, with the White House leadership of President Clinton and Vice President Gore, put that provision in the Telecommunications Law of 1996, and today nearly 90% of all classrooms and libraries do have such access. The schools covered were public and private. So far the federal funding (actually collected from everyone as part of the phone bill) has been matched more or less equally with school district funding to total about $20 billion over the last seven years. More than 90% of all teachers praise the impact of such technology on their work. At any rate, since Mr. Bennett had been Secretary of Education I asked him to support the bill in the crucial stage when we needed Republican allies. He told me he would not help, because he did not want public schools to obtain new funding, new capability, new tools for success. He wanted them, he said, to fail so that they could be replaced with vouchers,charter schools, religious schools, and other forms of private education. Well, I thought, at least he's candid about his true views. The key Senate committee voted almost on party lines on the bill, all D's for and all R's against, except one -- Olympia Snowe. Her support provided the margin of victory. On the House side, Speaker Gingrich made sure the provision was not in the companion bill, but in conference again Senators Snowe and Rockefeller, with White House support, made the difference. The Internet has been the first technology made available to students in poorly funded schools at about the same time and in about the same way as to students in well funded schools.

Miller and Her Stand Draw Strong Reactions
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post, 1 October 2005
"People are angry," one staffer said. "Was this a charade on her part for martyrdom, or a real principle? She wanted to resurrect herself from the WMD thing," the staffer said, a reference to Miller stories about Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction that turned out to be wrong.
"I am truly depressed," another staffer said. "It absolutely makes no sense. Basically she did the same thing Matt Cooper did, with the intervening weeks in jail. But I just don't buy that she's doing it for her own image enhancement."
...Even some Miller supporters concede that the journalists involved are seen as protecting presidential aides who may have been retaliating against Plame's husband, a White House critic on the weapons controversy, rather than shielding whistle-blowers who were exposing corruption.

1 October 2005

Just Vote No: Iraqis should reject the constitution.
By Fred Kaplan
Slate, 27 September 2005
When Iraqis go to the polls Oct. 15 to vote on the constitution, it would probably be best if they rejected it. Elections for a new parliament are scheduled to take place this December in any case. Let them be for a new constitutional assembly (as current law provides in the event of a rejection), and let the process start over again. Further delay may prolong the chaos, but passage of this parchment will almost certainly make things worse—and for much longer still.

Income Dropped Unexpectedly and Spending Fell in August
By VIKAS BAJAJ
NYT, 30 September 2005
Americans' income fell unexpectedly and spending declined more than forecast in August, the government reported yesterday, as the economy registered the effects of Hurricane Katrina and as once-strong auto sales waned.
A separate report from the University of Michigan showed that consumer confidence fell to its lowest level in almost 13 years last month, indicating that the impact of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita was taking a toll on Americans' perceptions about the economy.

Audit Assails the White House for Public Relations Spending
By ROBERT PEAR
NYT, 1 October 2005
Federal auditors said today that the Bush administration had violated the law by purchasing favorable news coverage of President Bush's education policies, by making payments to the conservative commentator Armstrong Williams and by hiring a public relations company to analyze media perceptions of the Republican Party.
In a blistering report, the investigators, from the Government Accountability Office, said the administration had disseminated "covert propaganda" inside the United States, in violation of a longstanding, explicit statutory ban.
The contract with Mr. Williams and the general contours of the administration's public relations campaign had been known for months. The report today provided the first definitive ruling on the legality of the activities.
Lawyers from the G.A.O., an independent nonpartisan arm of Congress, found that the Bush administration had systematically analyzed news articles to see if they carried the message, "The Bush administration/the G.O.P. is committed to education."
The auditors declared: "We see no use for such information except for partisan political purposes. Engaging in a purely political activity such as this is not a proper use of appropriated funds."

Karen Hughes, Stay Home!
What on earth is she doing in the Middle East?
By Fred Kaplan
Slate, 29 September 2005
Could someone please explain to me what Karen Hughes is doing. Her maiden voyage to the Middle East has turned into a fiasco. She assures a room of Saudi women that they, too, will someday drive cars; they tell her they're actually happy right now, thank you. She meets with a group of Turkish women—hand-picked by an outfit that supports women running for political office—who brusquely tell her she has no credibility as long as U.S. troops occupy Iraq.
In a sense, this is par for the course when American officials meet with unofficial audiences abroad. But here's the puzzler: Why is it Karen Hughes who's taking these meetings? It was strange enough when her longtime friend President George W. Bush named her as the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy. It's absolutely mind-numbing to discover that she considers it one of her mandates to be the public diplomat.
The main task of this posting is to improve America's image in the Muslim world. Let us stipulate for a moment that Hughes is ideally suited for the job—that she can figure out how to spin sheiks, imams, and "the Arab street" as agilely as she spun the White House press corps in her days as Bush's communications director.

Journalists Fear Impact on Protecting Sources
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
NYT, 1 October 2005
The decision by Judith Miller, a reporter for The New York Times, to testify before a grand jury after spending 85 days in jail for refusing to do so has left many people who are interested in the case confused and eager for more details.
Lawyers said it was difficult to predict the long-term legal consequences of Ms. Miller's sudden release from jail and subsequent testimony because many questions about the circumstances that led to those events remain.
But some lawyers and journalists said the claim by journalists that they have the right to protect confidential sources had been weakened. And they were less worried that Ms. Miller's case would cause sources to refuse to talk than it would cause prosecutors to clamp down.
"The inescapable conclusion that some could draw here is that after a certain period of time, when the reporter is fed up with being in prison, she will make a concession," said Jane Kirtley, a professor of media ethics and law at the University of Minnesota. "I'm not saying that's what happened here. But that's the appearance. The danger is it will embolden others in more common garden-variety investigations to say to the judge, 'All you have to do is stick the reporter in jail, and we'll get what we want.' "