21 March 2006

Insurgents Storm Jail in Iraq's Sunni Heartland
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
and KIRK SEMPLE
NYT, 21 March 2006
Insurgents returned to old tactics today and stormed a jail in the Sunni heartland at daybreak, killing 18 police officers and freeing all the prisoners inside.
More than 100 masked fighters surrounded the jail in Muqdadiya, 60 miles north of Baghdad, and blasted government forces with mortars, grenades and machine guns. The police returned fire and killed one insurgent, Interior Ministry officials said.
The attackers destroyed about 20 police vehicles and set fire to the police station and a nearby courthouse before escaping, the Iraqi officials said. An Iraqi army unit that tried to reach the scene to support the police during the attack was disabled by a roadside bomb as the convoy passed through a city gate.
American ground forces and two American OH-58A Kiowa helicopters rushed to the scene in support of Iraqi troops, said Sgt. Doug Anderson, a military spokesman. The helicopters came under small-arms fire, and one soldier was wounded, he said. The helicopters both landed safely.
It was the biggest raid of its kind in months, and it showed that even as sectarian tensions increase and more and more violence is connected to Sunni and Shiite rivalries, the anti-government insurgency rages on. There were also a number of bomb attacks today targeting government positions.

New Business Blooms in Iraq: Terror Insurance
By ROBERT F. WORTH
NYT, 21 March 2006
Twice in the past year, Muhammad Said has survived assassination attempts that left his car riddled with bullets. He works part time as a bodyguard for his father, a Baghdad city councilman, and helps a friend who has contracts with the American military. Both are very dangerous jobs.
So last month, Mr. Said, a slim, baby-faced 23-year-old, did what a small but growing number of Iraqis are doing: He walked into the offices of the Iraq Insurance Company and bought a terrorism insurance policy. It looked like an ordinary life insurance policy, but with a one-page rider adding coverage for "the following dangers: 1) explosions caused by weapons of war and car bombs; 2) assassinations; 3) terrorist attacks."
It cost him 125,000 dinars, about $90. Mr. Said paid more than most people because of his risky occupation. The payout, if he dies, is five million dinars, around $3,500, or about what an Iraqi policeman earns in a year.
That guarantee appears to be the first off-the-shelf terrorism policy in the world, insurance experts say. In most countries, of course, there is no need for it: death by terrorism is rare enough that it is usually covered by ordinary accident insurance. In Iraq it is not, partly because the state used to compensate the families of war victims directly. So the Iraq Insurance Company began stepping into the gap about a year ago.

Weighing the Costs of Today's Defense Strategy
By Cindy Williams | March 21, 2006
Boston Globe, 21 March 2006
The House of Representatives last week voted to add $68 billion to Defense Department coffers to help defray this year's costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Together with the $536 billion in outlays already planned for national defense, the emergency appropriation will bring total defense spending this year to some $600 billion. Adjusting for inflation, that is substantially more than the United States spent on defense in any year since World War II.
Nevertheless, the drumbeat for more money has already started. Advocates of a bigger defense bankroll complain that regular spending (excluding the emergency appropriation) for national defense this year will amount to ''only" 4.1 percent of the $13 trillion gross domestic product. Republican Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma called for Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to bring Congress an extra wish list for next year, in case lawmakers want to top the military up to 4.5 percent of gross domestic product. But judging the military's needs based on the size of the economy makes no sense.
It's true that the requirements of an enterprise as vast as the US military are so complex that it is difficult to judge whether its budget seems too large, too small, or about right. So leaders and the public look for things to which they can compare it: how much is spent on other public priorities, how much other countries spend for defense, or how much the nation spent on the military in past years.
But implicit in such comparisons are two questions. The first is whether the defense budget is large enough to build, maintain, and operate a military force appropriate to the nation's place in the world and the security environment it faces. The second is whether the budget is affordable in the context of the nation's overall economy.

Bush Asks US to Look Beyond Iraq Bloodshed
Takes questions at an Ohio event
By Tom Raum
AP via Boston Globe, 21 March 2006
Three potential 2008 presidential candidates -- Senator Joe Biden, Democrat of Delaware; Governor Bill Richardson, Democrat of New Mexico; and Senator Chuck Hagel, Republican of Nebraska -- offered critical assessments in speeches to the International Association of Firefighters' legislative conference in Washington.
Biden said it was time for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to ''be told to go home" and for Michael Chertoff, homeland security secretary, to ''be given his walking papers." Richardson said US involvement in Iraq had been ''badly mismanaged by the administration."
Hagel said many of the predictions and promises made by the administration have fallen short, including that oil revenues would pay for the war and that the conflict would be short-lived. He also pointed to Vice President Dick Cheney's assertion last May that the insurgency was in its ''last throes."
''There's been a credibility erosion for three years," Hagel said.
On Capitol Hill, some Democrats said there had been progress in Iraq, as Bush asserted, but they said it was clouded by problems across the country. They said Bush had gone to war without enough troops.
''Some positive signs do not mitigate this administration's gross miscalculations and stunning incompetence in Iraq," said Representative Steny Hoyer of Maryland, the number two Democrat in the House.
Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, said the ''policies of the Bush administration and the civilian leadership of our military have made America less safe and left Iraq on the precipice of all-out civil war."
Bush pointed to success in stabilizing an insurgent stronghold in Tal Afar, a northern Iraqi city of 200,000 near the Syrian border.
''The strategy that worked so well in Tal Afar did not emerge overnight," Bush said. ''It took time to understand and adjust to the brutality of the enemy in Iraq."
''The example of Tal Afar gives me confidence in our strategy," the president said.
One woman asked Bush whether he saw terrorism as a sign of the biblical Apocalypse, and a man followed up with how he could restore confidence in US leadership after several reasons for going to war with Iraq later proved false.
''Like you, I mean, I asked that very same question: Where'd we go wrong on intelligence?" Bush said. He said he was working to improve intelligence-gathering because ''the credibility of our country is essential."
As for the Apocalypse, Bush said, ''I haven't really thought of it that way. . . . I guess I'm more of a practical fellow."
Bush bantered with the audience at times. And despite the probing questions, he received several rounds of enthusiastic applause.
The White House made no attempt to screen the audience or the questions, spokesman Scott McClellan said.
However, much of downtown near the hotel where Bush spoke was barricaded off. About 100 antiwar protesters chanted for the president to leave the heavily Democratic city, held signs with peace messages, and banged on drums.

Jordan's Islamists See a Path to Political Power
Hamas's victory buoys movement
By Thanassis Cambanis
Boston Globe, 21 March 2006
In the lobby of the House of Arkam school, a map shows a green wave washing over the Middle East, Europe, and North Africa. ''The Muslims Are Coming!" declares a banner above the map.
The staid administrators of this well-appointed Islamic school have always maintained that Islam will one day replace secular governments throughout the Muslim world.
But the victory of the Islamist Palestinian group Hamas, just across the Jordan River in the West Bank, has invigorated Jordan's steadily growing Islamist movement and reinforced its conviction that democratic elections will pave the way to an Islamic republic in Jordan.
The school and the Islamic Action Front, the sole authorized religious party in parliament, are both wings of Jordan's Muslim Brotherhood, an organization that has followed the same blueprint as Hamas, cultivating support by running charities, hospitals, and schools along with its political party.
Now the Islamists in Jordan have set the stage for a major confrontation over the election law. Jordanians are going to the polls in 2007 to choose a new parliament, and the Islamists have sworn to push through a reform that would fully legalize political parties -- and could dramatically increase the Islamist representation.
Across the Mideast, analysts are calling this new optimism among Islamists the ''Hamas effect."
''We are in a peaceful battle for change," said Zaki Sa'ed, a politician in the Islamic Action Front who has friendly relations with Hamas. ''We represent the will of the majority of Jordanians who seek change."
Their boldness is a source of worry to Jordan's secular, pro-American government, which already suffers pressure from unfriendly regimes in the region -- Syria's Ba'athist dictatorship to the north, Shi'ite Islamists in Iraq, the religious regime to the south in Saudi Arabia, and now Hamas to the West.

20 March 2006

Iraq Three Years Later: The Path to War
by Mike Shuster
NPR's Morning Edition, 20 March 2006
This week marks the third anniversary of the beginning of the war in Iraq. Mike Shuster tracks the events leading up to the U.S.-led invasion. These include Bush administration claims -- since discredited -- of ongoing Iraqi nuclear weapons development and links with al Qaeda.

Iraq War Enters 4th Year With More Deaths
By STEVEN R. HURST
AP, 20 March 2006
As the Iraq war entered its fourth year, nearly 1,500 U.S. and Iraqi soldiers on Sunday sought to root out insurgents from farming villages an hour's drive north of the capital, and at least 35 people died in insurgent and sectarian violence nationwide.
Iraqi politicians still had not formed a government more than three months after landmark elections for the country's first permanent post-invasion parliament, but they announced an agreement on naming a Security Council to deal with key matters while negotiations proceed.
The 133,000 American troops on the ground inside Iraq was nearly a third more than took part in the campaign to oust Saddam Hussein that began in the early hours of March 20, 2003.
At least 2,314 U.S. military personnel have died in the war, which is estimated to have cost $200 billion to $250 billion so far. President Bush says about 30,000 Iraqis have been killed, while others put the toll far higher.
Returning to the White House after a weekend at the presidential retreat in Camp David, Md., Bush offered an upbeat assessment.
"We are implementing a strategy that will lead to victory in Iraq. And a victory in Iraq will make this country more secure and will help lay the foundation of peace for generations to come," he said.

Bush Marks Anniversary, Never Says 'War'
By NEDRA PICKLER
AP via Washington Post, 19 March 2006
President Bush marked the anniversary of the Iraq war Sunday by touting the efforts to build democracy there and avoiding any mention of the daily violence that rages three years after he ordered an invasion.
The president didn't utter the word "war."
"We are implementing a strategy that will lead to victory in Iraq," the president assured a public that is increasingly skeptical that he has a plan to end the fighting after the deaths of more than 2,300 U.S. troops.
Administration officials repeated the mantra that progress continues toward building a unified Iraqi government and nation.
"Now is the time for resolve, not retreat," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld wrote in a column for The Washington Post. "Turning our backs on postwar Iraq today would be the modern equivalent of handing postwar Germany back to the Nazis."
Yet there were acknowledgments from the top commander of U.S. forces in Iraq that the situation is fragile and that he did not predict the strength of the insurgency.
"I did not think it would be as robust as it has been," Gen. George W. Casey said on NBC's "Meet the Press." "And it's something that, obviously, with my time here on the ground, my thinking on that has gained much greater clarity and insight."
Bush did not mention the insurgent attacks, the car bombs or the mounting Iraqi deaths in a two-minute statement to reporters outside the White House after returning from a weekend at Camp David. Avoiding the word "war," he called the day "the third anniversary of the beginning of the liberation of Iraq."
The president only indirectly referred to the violence when he said he spent the morning reflecting on the sacrifices made by U.S. troops. Bush said he spoke by phone earlier in the day with the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, and had received a positive report.

The Top Disasters of the Third Year in American Iraq
Juan Cole
Informed Comment, 20 March 2006

Iraqi Police Report Details Civilians' Deaths at Hands of U.S. Troops
By Matthew Schofield
Knight Ridder Newspapers, 19 March 2006
Iraqi police have accused American troops of executing 11 people, including a 75-year-old woman and a 6-month-old infant, in the aftermath of a raid last Wednesday on a house about 60 miles north of Baghdad.
The villagers were killed after American troops herded them into a single room of the house, according to a police document obtained by Knight Ridder Newspapers. The soldiers also burned three vehicles, killed the villagers' animals and blew up the house, the document said.

Allawi Says Iraq in Middle of Civil War
AP via Washington Post, 19 March 2006
Iraq is in the middle of a civil war, former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi said in a TV interview aired Sunday. His comments were immediately rejected by Britain's defense secretary.
Allawi told the British Broadcasting Corp. there was no other way to describe the increasing violence across the country.
"It is unfortunate that we are in civil war. We are losing each day as an average 50 to 60 people throughout the country, if not more," Allawi told the BBC. "If this is not civil war, then God knows what civil war is."
Allawi heads the Iraqi National List, a secular alliance of Shiite and Sunni politicians that won 25 seats in December parliamentary elections.

Pentagon Hired Contractor to Advise on Collecting Information on Churches, Mosques, other U.S. Sites
By Jonathan S. Landay
Knight Ridder Newspapers, 17 March 2006
A Pentagon intelligence agency that kept files on American anti-war activists hired one of the contractors who bribed former Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, R-Calif., to help it collect data on houses of worship, schools, power plants and other locations in the United States.
MZM Inc., headed by Mitchell Wade, also received three contracts totaling more than $250,000 to provide unspecified "intelligence services" to the White House, according to documents obtained by Knight Ridder. The White House didn't respond to an inquiry about what those intelligence services entailed.
MZM's Pentagon and White House deals were part of tens of millions of dollars in federal government business that Wade's company attracted beginning in 2002.
MZM and Wade, who pleaded guilty last month to bribing Cunningham and unnamed Defense Department officials to steer work to his firm, are the focus of ongoing probes by Pentagon and Department of Justice investigators.
...The disclosure that CIFA was storing information on anti-war activities added to concerns that the Bush administration may have used its war on terrorism to give government agencies expanded power to monitor Americans' finances, associations, travel and other activities.
The administration's domestic eavesdropping program and FBI monitoring of environmental, animal rights and anti-war groups have also fueled such fears. The administration contends that its programs are legal and insists that they're designed to ensure civil liberties while protecting national security.

Chavez Blasts Bush as "Donkey" and "Drunkard"
Reuters via Washington Post, 19 March 2006
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez on Sunday lobbed a litany of insults at U.S. President George W. Bush ranging from ``donkey'' to ``drunkard'' in response to a White House report branding the left-wing leader a demagogue.
Chavez is one of Bush's fiercest critics and has repeatedly accused the U.S. government of seeking to oust him from the presidency of Venezuela, the world's No. 5 oil exporter and a supplier of around 15 percent of U.S. crude imports.
``You are a donkey, Mr. Bush,'' said Chavez, speaking in English on his weekly Sunday broadcast.
``You're an alcoholic Mr. Danger, or rather, you're a drunkard,'' Chavez said, referring to Bush by a nickname he frequently uses to describe the U.S. president.
A White House report released last week on pre-emptive force in national security described Chavez as a ``demagogue'' who uses Venezuela's oil wealth to destabilize democracy in the region.
Washington is increasingly at odds with the former soldier over his close alliance with Cuba and Iran. U.S. officials dismiss his anti-U.S. tirades as rhetoric meant to stir nationalism before presidential elections in December.
Chavez's remarks also came after Venezuela's El Universal newspaper printed an interview with U.S. Ambassador to Venezuela William Brownfield, who reiterated his government's concern over growing ties between Venezuela and Iran.

Rumsfeld: Leaving Iraq Like Giving Nazis Germany
Reuters via Washington Post, 19 March 2006
 Leaving Iraq now would be the same as handing postwar Germany back to the Nazis, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in a column published on Sunday, as retired U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton called Rumsfeld incompetent and urged him to resign.
``Turning our backs on postwar Iraq today would be the modern equivalent of handing postwar Germany back to the Nazis,'' Rumsfeld wrote in an essay published in The Washington Post on the third anniversary of the start of the Iraq war.
He said ``the terrorists'' in Iraq were attempting to stoke sectarian tension and spark civil war, but that they must be ''watching with fear'' the progress in the country over the past three years.
``The terrorists seem to recognize that they are losing in Iraq. I believe that history will show that to be the case,'' Rumsfeld said.
But in an opinion piece published on Sunday in the New York Times, Eaton said Rumsfeld had proven himself ``not competent to lead our armed forces'' and therefore ``must step down.''
``First, his failure to build coalitions with our allies from what he dismissively called 'old Europe' has imposed far greater demands
SEE ALSO:
A Top-Down Review for the Pentagon
By PAUL D. EATON
NYT, 19 March 2006
...In the five years Mr. Rumsfeld has presided over the Pentagon, I have seen a climate of groupthink become dominant and a growing reluctance by experienced military men and civilians to challenge the notions of the senior leadership.
I thought we had a glimmer of hope last November when Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, faced off with Mr. Rumsfeld on the question of how our soldiers should react if they witnessed illegal treatment of prisoners by Iraqi authorities. (General Pace's view was that our soldiers should intervene, while Mr. Rumsfeld's position was that they should simply report the incident to superiors.)
Unfortunately, the general subsequently backed down and supported the secretary's call to have the rules clarified, giving the impression that our senior man in uniform is just as intimidated by Secretary Rumsfeld as was his predecessor, Gen. Richard Myers.
Mr. Rumsfeld has put the Pentagon at the mercy of his ego, his cold warrior's view of the world and his unrealistic confidence in technology to replace manpower. As a result, the Army finds itself severely undermanned — cut to 10 active divisions but asked by the administration to support a foreign policy that requires at least 12 or 14.
Only Gen. Eric Shinseki, the Army chief of staff when President Bush was elected, had the courage to challenge the downsizing plans. So Mr. Rumsfeld retaliated by naming General Shinseki's successor more than a year before his scheduled retirement, effectively undercutting his authority. The rest of the senior brass got the message, and nobody has complained since.
Now the Pentagon's new Quadrennial Defense Review shows that Mr. Rumsfeld also fails to understand the nature of protracted counterinsurgency warfare in Iraq and the demands it places on ground forces. The document, amazingly, does not call for enlarging the Army; rather, it increases only our Special Operations forces, by a token 15 percent, maybe 1,500 troops.
Mr. Rumsfeld has also failed in terms of operations in Iraq. He rejected the so-called Powell Doctrine of overwhelming force and sent just enough tech-enhanced troops to complete what we called Phase III of the war — ground combat against the uniformed Iraqis. He ignored competent advisers like Gen. Anthony Zinni and others who predicted that the Iraqi Army and security forces might melt away after the state apparatus self-destructed, leading to chaos.
It is all too clear that General Shinseki was right: several hundred thousand men would have made a big difference then, as we began Phase IV, or country reconstruction. There was never a question that we would make quick work of the Iraqi Army.
The true professional always looks to the "What's next?" phase. Unfortunately, the supreme commander, Gen. Tommy Franks, either didn't heed that rule or succumbed to Secretary Rumsfeld's bullying. We won't know which until some bright historian writes the true story of Mr. Rumsfeld and the generals he took to war, an Iraq version of the Vietnam War classic "Dereliction of Duty" by H. R. McMaster.
Last, you don't expect a secretary of defense to be criticized for tactical ineptness. Normally, tactics are the domain of the soldier on the ground. But in this case we all felt what L. Paul Bremer, the former viceroy in Iraq, has called the "8,000-mile screwdriver" reaching from the Pentagon. Commanders in the field had their discretionary financing for things like rebuilding hospitals and providing police uniforms randomly cut; money to pay Iraqi construction firms to build barracks was withheld; contracts we made for purchasing military equipment for the new Iraqi Army were rewritten back in Washington.
Donald Rumsfeld demands more than loyalty. He wants fealty. And he has hired men who give it.

Iraq War Opponents Protest From Boston to Tokyo
AP via NYT, 19 March 2006
The third anniversary of the U.S.-led war in Iraq drew tens of thousands of protesters around the globe, from Portland to hurricane-ravaged Louisiana to Australia, with chants of ''Stop the War'' and calls for the withdrawal of troops.
A protest march in downtown Portland, with demonstrators carrying signs that said ''Impeach the Evildoer,'' took nearly an hour to pass through the streets. Police estimated the turnout at about 10,000 and reported no arrests.
''It is time now for you to take back your country,'' said Steven DeFord at a pre-march rally. His son, Oregon National Guard Sgt. David Johnson, 37, was killed in Iraq by a roadside bomb in September 2004.

The President and the Courts
NYT, 19 March 2006
Since the Republican majority has decided to allow President Bush to usurp Congress's role in matters of national security, the battle to save the constitutional balance of powers moves to the judiciary. A critical test of judicial independence will come this month, when the Supreme Court hears arguments in a case that has become a focus of Mr. Bush's imperial vision of the presidency.
Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a Yemeni national accused of having been a bodyguard and driver for Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, has been detained since 2002 in Guantánamo Bay. He filed suit to challenge the legitimacy of the military commission that upheld his designation as an "unlawful enemy combatant" — a term Mr. Bush invented after 9/11 to deny the protections of the Geneva Conventions, international statutes or United States law to certain prisoners.
...At a minimum, we hope the court will rule that Congress and the president may not deny the justices the power to review pending cases. But it should also reject the defective military commissions, as well as the idea of denying access to the courts for future valid claims brought by Guantánamo detainees, including claims of torture.

Bogus Bush Bashing
By PAUL KRUGMAN
NYT, 20 March 2006
Mr. Bush's new conservative critics don't say much about the issue that most disturbs the public, the quagmire in Iraq. That's not surprising. Commentators who acted as cheerleaders in the run-up to war, and in many cases questioned the patriotism of those of us who were skeptical, can't criticize the decision to start this war without facing up to their own complicity in that decision.
Nor, after years of insisting that things were going well in Iraq and denouncing anyone who said otherwise, is it easy for them to criticize Mr. Bush's almost surreal bungling of the war. (William Kristol of The Weekly Standard is the exception; he says that we never made a "serious effort" in Iraq, which will come as news to the soldiers.)
Meanwhile, the continuing allegiance of conservatives to tax cuts as the universal policy elixir prevents them from saying anything about the real sources of the federal budget deficit, in particular Mr. Bush's unprecedented decision to cut taxes in the middle of a war. (My colleague Bob Herbert points out that the Iraq hawks chose to fight a war with other people's children. They chose to fight it with other people's money, too.)
They can't even criticize Mr. Bush for the systematic dishonesty of his budgets. For one thing, that dishonesty has been apparent for five years. More than that, some prominent conservative commentators actually celebrated the administration's dishonesty. In 2001 Time.com blogger Andrew Sullivan, writing in The New Republic, conceded that Mr. Bush wasn't truthful about his economic policies. But Mr. Sullivan approved of the deception: "Bush has to obfuscate his real goals of reducing spending with the smokescreen of 'compassionate conservatism.' " As Berkeley's Brad DeLong puts it on his blog, conservatives knew that Mr. Bush was lying about the budget, but they thought they were in on the con.
So what's left? Well, it's safe for conservatives to criticize Mr. Bush for presiding over runaway growth in domestic spending, because that implies that he betrayed his conservative supporters. There's only one problem with this criticism: it's not true.
It's true that federal spending as a percentage of G.D.P. rose between 2001 and 2005. But the great bulk of this increase was accounted for by increased spending on defense and homeland security, including the costs of the Iraq war, and by rising health care costs.
Conservatives aren't criticizing Mr. Bush for his defense spending. Since the Medicare drug program didn't start until 2006, the Bush administration can't be blamed for the rise in health care costs before then. Whatever other fiscal excesses took place weren't large enough to play more than a marginal role in spending growth.
So where does the notion of Bush the big spender come from? In a direct sense it comes largely from Brian Riedl of the Heritage Foundation, who issued a report last fall alleging that government spending was out of control. Mr. Riedl is very good at his job; his report shifts artfully back and forth among various measures of spending (nominal, real, total, domestic, discretionary, domestic discretionary), managing to convey the false impression that soaring spending on domestic social programs is a major cause of the federal budget deficit without literally lying.
But the reason conservatives fall for the Heritage spin is that it suits their purposes. They need to repudiate George W. Bush, but they can't admit that when Mr. Bush made his key mistakes — starting an unnecessary war, and using dishonest numbers to justify tax cuts — they were cheering him on.

18-19 March 2006

Anti-War Protests Planned Across the World
By ED JOHNSON
AP via LA Times, 18 March 2006
SYDNEY, Australia -- An anti-war rally in Australia kicked off what was expected to be a wave of global protests on Saturday, as campaigners marked the third anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq with a demand that coalition troops pull out.
Around 500 protesters marched through central Sydney, chanting "End the war now and "Troops out of Iraq." Many campaigners waved placards branding President Bush the "World's No. 1 Terrorist" or expressing concerns that Iran could be the next country to face invasion.
...In Tokyo, about 2,000 people rallied in a downtown park, carrying signs saying "Stop the Occupation" as they listened to a series of anti-war speeches, said Takeshiko Tsukushi, a member of World Peace Now, which helped plan the rally. Tokyo police were unable to immediately confirm the number in attendance.
"The war is illegal under international law," Tsukushi said. "We want the immediate withdrawal of the Self Defense Forces and from Iraq along with all foreign troops."
Japanese Prime Minister Junchiro Koizumi is a staunch supporter of the U.S.-led coalition in Japan and dispatched 600 troops to the southern city of Samawah in 2004 to purify water and carry out other humanitarian tasks. The Cabinet approved an extension of that mission in December, authorizing soldiers to stay in Iraq through the end of the year.
But public opinion polls show the majority of Japanese oppose the mission, which has been criticized as a violation of the country's pacifist constitution. Many say the deployment has made Japan a target for terrorism.
...Demonstrations were also expected across Europe.
"We will continue until we see the last general running for a helicopter on the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad," read a statement from Stop the War Alliance, which is organizing a rally outside the U.S. Embassy in Athens, Greece.
In London, Scotland Yard police headquarters said streets around Piccadilly Circus in the heart of the shopping and theater district would be closed as up to 100,000 people planned to march through the capital. Britain has about 8,000 troops in Iraq.
Demonstrations "Against the Occupation of Iraq" were planned Saturday in several Spanish cities, including Madrid and Barcelona.
In South Korea, which has the third-largest contingent of foreign troops in Iraq after the U.S. and Britain, up to 3,000 demonstrators were expected to gather Sunday at the main train station in the capital Seoul. In Malaysia's largest city, Kuala Lumpur, a rally was planned outside the U.S. Embassy on Sunday, as part of the international anti-Iraq war movement.

Dictatorship is the Danger
A Reagan-appointed supreme court justice voices her fears over attacks on US democracy
Jonathan Raban
The Guardian, 13 March 2006
Linking the words "America" and "dictatorship" is a daily staple of leftwing blogs, which thrive on the idea that Bush administration policies since 9/11 are taking the country ever closer to totalitarian rule. Liberal fears that democracy is endangered by Republicans in Congress are so widespread, so endemic to the jittery political climate in the US, that they hardly bear repeating. It'll surprise no one to learn that another voice was added to the chorus last Thursday, warning that recent attacks on the American judiciary were putting the democratic fabric in jeopardy and were the first steps down the treacherous path to dictatorship.
What is surprising - more than that, electrifying - is that the voice belonged to Sandra Day O'Connor, who retired a few weeks ago from the supreme court. O'Connor is a Republican and a Reagan nominee. Regarded as the "swing vote" on the court, she swung the presidential election to George Bush in 2000.
Equally surprising is that O'Connor's speech to an audience of lawyers at Georgetown University was attended by just one reporter, the diligent legal correspondent for National Public Radio, Nina Totenberg. No transcript or recording of the speech has been made available, so we have only Totenberg's notes to go on. But - assuming they are accurate - the notes are political dynamite.
O'Connor's voice was "dripping with sarcasm", according to Totenberg, as she "took aim at former House GOP [Republican] leader Tom DeLay. She didn't name him, but she quoted his attacks on the courts at a meeting of the conservative Christian group Justice Sunday last year when DeLay took out after the courts for rulings on abortions, prayer and the Terri Schiavo case.
...Then she spoke the D-word. "I, said O'Connor, am against judicial reforms driven by nakedly partisan reasoning. Pointing to the experiences of developing countries and former communist countries where interference with an independent judiciary has allowed dictatorship to flourish, O'Connor said we must be ever-vigilant against those who would strong-arm the judiciary into adopting their preferred policies. It takes a lot of degeneration before a country falls into dictatorship, she said, but we should avoid these ends by avoiding these beginnings."
Delivered by someone who was, until recently, one of the nine guardians of the US constitution, these are spine-chilling opinions, and you might have thought they'd have been all over the papers the next day. Not so. I happened to catch Totenberg's NPR report last Friday, and have been following up references to it. A cable TV talkshow and a handful of blogs have mentioned Totenberg's piece: otherwise there's been a disquieting silence, as if the former justice had laid an unsavoury egg and had best be politely ignored.
Why did O'Connor choose such a closed forum to air her thoughts? Why was Totenberg the only reporter present? The possibility that America is sliding toward dictatorship or an unprecedented form of corporate oligarchy ought to be a matter of world concern. And if O'Connor believes what she is reported to have said, surely she owes it to the world to make public the prepared text of her remarks, which so far have the dubious character of the scores of unverifiable leaks that have passed for news in the compulsively secretive world of the Bush administration. It's unsurprising that, say, Colin Powell chooses to leak rather than speak out, but when a supreme court justice prefers to whisper her fears to a coterie audience, it's hard to avoid the inference that the whisper itself speaks volumes about the imperilled democracy it purports to describe.
SEE ALSO:
O'Connor Decries Republican Attacks on Courts
by Nina Totenberg
NPR's Morning Edition, March 10, 2006
Newly retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor took on conservative Republican critics of the courts in a speech Thursday. She told an audience at Georgetown University that Republican proposals, and their sometimes uncivil tone, pose a danger to the independence of the judiciary, and the freedoms of all Americans.

From war leader to clown...
'War' as Epithet: Sound of Clay Feet Cracking
By ROGER COHEN
International Herald Tribune, 18 March 2006
'America is at war." These are the first words of the Bush administration's new national security strategy, a simple declarative sentence open to multiple interpretations and contestations.
That America is at war in Iraq is certainly true, although it's not the war the administration prepared for. Nor is it a war like any other. It's been accompanied by tax cuts; national sacrifice is not the theme of the hour; small-town America and smaller-salary America have borne the brunt.
But the war that President George W. Bush goes on to outline in the strategy, a revised version of the 2002 document whose emphasis on the supremacy of American power and the right to strike pre-emptively caused global unease, is not merely the Mesopotamian mess.
No, this war is of greater scope. "The United States is in the early years of a long struggle, similar to what our country faced in the early years of the Cold War," the document says. "The 20th century witnessed the triumph of freedom over the threats of fascism and communism. Yet a new totalitarian ideology now threatens, an ideology grounded not in secular philosophy but in the perversion of a proud religion."
This is a little pat. Let's leave aside whether the problem is a "perversion" of Islam or merely a certain reading of it. To compare Osama bin Laden and his scattered followers to the divisions of the Soviet empire is a stretch.
To invoke totalitarianism - a system of complete control over certain territory through state-directed terror - in describing a motley bunch of fanatics who control very little also seems fanciful, however vile the jihadists' methods and however ominous their visions of a restored caliphate.
All in all, it's easy enough to see this broader war as a construct that preserves the familiar paradigm of American liberty confronting tyranny, comforts the far-flung garrisons that serve a global American mission, and gives Bush's Republican Party a pivotal issue that plays to its strengths against a Democratic Party still seen as weak on national security.
None of this is meant to suggest that the terrorist threat to the United States is not real. But to frame the confrontation with this danger as a "war" - a war without apparent or possible end, a war without geographical definition, a war without an opposing army - is a political decision, one of whose effects has been to cast Bush as a "war president."
The epithet has played well. It was decisive in delivering the 2004 election to Bush: you don't change commander-in-chiefs in the middle of a war.
It also captured the qualities many Americans thought they liked in Bush: boldness and decisiveness and an unwavering determination. Because they did not see those traits in John Kerry, the Democratic candidate, they rejected him.
But, a little over a year into Bush's second term, the epithet is tired; Americans have soured on their war president. It's partly the festering situation in Iraq. But the disillusionment runs deeper. With his approval rating at 33 percent, according to a new poll by the Pew Research Center, Bush is in Nixonian territory.
The same poll found that where "honesty" had been the single characteristic most closely associated with Bush, the description now most favored was "incompetent." That's a seismic shift - from war leader to clown.

Materials to Make Bombs Get Through Screeners at 21 US Airports
AFP via Yahoo!News, 17 March 2006
Security screeners at 21 airports across the United States failed to detect materials that could be used to make bombs in recent tests by government agents, US legislators said.
"The fact that government investigators were able to pass through TSA's (Transportation Security Administration) screening at 21 major airports with bomb-making material is frightening," representative Bennie Thompson, a member of the Committee on Homeland Security, said in a statement.
"It's like the story of the Trojan Horse," he added. "TSA has spent so much time telling people to take off their shoes and belts, that they have missed the bomb-making materials."
The tests were conducted last year by the General Accountability Office (GAO), the Department of Transportation and the Department of Homeland Security at the request of US Representative John Mica, a Republican.
Mica said he was disappointed by a report on the results of the tests.

Judges Overturn Bush Bid to Ease Pollution Rules
By MICHAEL JANOFSKY
NYT, 17 March 2006
A federal appeals court on Friday overturned a clean-air regulation issued by the Bush administration that would have let many power plants, refineries and factories avoid installing costly new pollution controls to help offset any increased emissions caused by repairs and replacements of equipment.
Ruling in favor of a coalition of states and environmental advocacy groups, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said the "plain language" of the law required a stricter approach. The court has primary jurisdiction in challenges to federal regulations.
The ruling by a three-judge panel was the court's second decision in less than a year in a pair of closely related cases involving the administration's interpretations of a complex section of the Clean Air Act. Unlike its ruling last summer, when the court largely upheld the E.P.A.'s approach against challenges from industry, state governments and environmental groups, the new ruling was a defeat for the agency and for industry, and a victory for the states and their environmentalist allies.
...the court said the agency went too far in 2003 when it issued a separate new rule that opponents said would exempt most equipment changes from environmental reviews — even changes that would result in higher emissions.
With a wry footnote to Lewis Carroll's "Through the Looking Glass," the court said that "only in a Humpty-Dumpty world" could the law be read otherwise.
"We decline such a world view," said their unanimous decision, written by Judge Judith W. Rogers, an appointee of President Bill Clinton. Judges David Tatel, another Clinton appointee, and Janice Rogers Brown, a recent Bush appointee, joined her.
The winners this time —more than a dozen states, including New York and California and a large group of environmental organizations — hailed the decision as one of their most important gains in years of litigation, regulation and legal challenges under the Clean Air Act.
The provision of the law at issue, the "new source review" section, governs the permits required at more than 1,300 coal-fueled power plants around the country and 17,000 factories, refineries and chemical plants that spew millions of tons of pollution into the air each year.
"This is an enormous victory over the concerted efforts by the Bush administration to dismantle the Clean Air Act," Eliot Spitzer, the New York attorney general, whose office led the opposition from the states, said in an interview.
Mr. Spitzer, who is running for governor, said the ruling "shows that the administration's effort to misinterpret and undermine the statute is illegal."

GOP Spenders Think Voters Dismiss Deficits
Fiscal conservatives may be upset with increased spending, but Congress just can't say no.
By Joel Havemann and Richard Simon
LA Times, 18 March 2006
For two days they marched past the huge marble fountain and upstairs to the terra-cotta and creamy-gold splendor of the grand ballroom at the historic Peabody Hotel in Memphis. There, flanked by the flags of more than two dozen states, four U.S. senators who hope to carry the Republican banner in the 2008 presidential election pledged allegiance to one of the GOP's most revered principles: fiscal responsibility — never spend taxpayers' money you don't have.
Less than a week later, the Senate's Republican majority overwhelmingly approved billions of dollars in deficit spending. Despite outcry from conservative groups that helped build the GOP majorities in both houses of Congress, the Republican spenders were undeterred, for one reason:
They're convinced that voters now care less about big deficits than they do about the things that increased federal spending will buy.
"Senators are betting that pandering to the public with billions in election-year promises will pay off more than they lose by cutting the fiscal conservatives in their own party off at the knees," said Keith Ashdown of Taxpayers for Common Sense.
That political calculation was behind congressional Republicans' support for the new Medicare prescription drug entitlement in 2003. And it drove Thursday's votes to raise the debt ceiling and approve more deficit spending.
There is another reason that many congressional Republicans have drawn back from fiscal discipline: Two other elements in the conservative credo, support for greater spending on national security and determination to cut taxes, have left budget makers with little room to maneuver, and so significant budget cuts have become hard to make.

No Truth, No Consequences
John Steinberg -
Raw Story, 13 March 2006
One of the more unusual places I have visited in my travels is Rotorua, on the north island of New Zealand. The area sits directly over the Pacific ring of fire, which manifests in this spot with geothermal activity in the form of hot mineral springs, geysers, and bubbling mud. When I first arrived near sunset, the stench of sulfur in the air was overpowering. Yet by the time I awoke the next morning, my brain had somehow accepted the smell of decay as part of the normal background, and I no longer noticed it at all.
Though I have not personally visited such a place here in the United States, I am certain they exist. Such as, for example, the Bush Administration. A newcomer would likely be quickly overcome by the lies that spew forth continuously like the malodorous emanations from a Rotorua geyser. The fact that so many in Washington seem to continue to live with the pervasive stench supports the notion that people can get used to just about anything.
How else can we explain the reaction to the latest chapter in the book of Republican Revelations? The recently surfaced video that that shows unequivocally that George Bush was warned of the likelihood of the failure of New Orleans' levees just days before it happened ought to unleash a hurricane of criticism.
Its appearance at this late date ought to embarrass the hell out of our watchdogs in the mainstream media, given that the incriminating tape sat since September, like the Purloined Letter, in their own tape libraries.
It ought to be Rodney King-like in the way it confirms what a whopper Dubya told when he said "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees." The zombified mainstream media seem to have missed the point yet again, of course. But Bush's plummeting poll numbers seem to suggest that Americans are slowly developing the same kind of filtration system that evolved in Soviet citizens fed a steady diet of Pravda and Izvestia.
Finally, the video ought to motivate us to ask an important question: why did Bush lie? Bill Clinton, considered the archetype of mendacity by the far right, lied carefully, and only when cornered (and only about things that were none of our business, but put that aside). When Bush lied about the levees, there was simply no compelling need for him to do so. He was just freelancing. That fact goes a long way toward explaining why Bush's handlers try to keep their charge from deviating from his script. But the question remains: why did he do it? Why did he feel the need to volunteer that excuse when there was no Ken Starr sniffing his crotch? He knew it was false. And he knew there was a record out there that could contradict him.
I think that's a psychological question, with a psychological answer...
...This disconnect has been true of the litany of Bush scandals, but such isolation from consequences has been the hallmark of George Bush's life. From his avoidance of the draft, to his escape from the obligations that he accepted as the price of that avoidance, to his knock-free string of business failures at ever-higher levels, George W. Bush has simply never had to suffer for, or even admit, any of his mistakes. And without consequences, truth is also scarce. Think about it: if you never, at any point in your upbringing, had to pay a price for lying, how strong would your commitment to the truth be?
I don't think Bush's easy, habitual prevarication makes him a compulsive liar. I suspect it is simply the product of an immature mind unconcerned with the difference between truth and fiction. He approaches communication much like your average five-year-old – right and wrong have no meaning beyond what he wants or seeks to avoid in the moment.
Presidents seem to embody the tenor of their time – the optimism of Kennedy's Camelot, the diminution of Jimmy Carter's cardigan, the blind indifference of Reagan's shining city on a hill. Whether they reflected their circumstances, or created them, I cannot say. Did George Bush's sense of personal immunity break the larger system, or did he become president because the system has deteriorated to the point that it no longer punishes transgressors? I think Bill Clinton's odyssey allows us to dismiss the latter. In fact, one could argue that if Bush's frozen scandals are the omega of accountability, the Clinton saga – his slow, endless turning on a Republican spit over Whitewater, followed by impeachment for lying about a blowjob – is the alpha. Bill Clinton was held accountable out of all proportion to his crimes; Bush floats effortlessly past a litany of epic failure after heinous transgression. And so America has become a nation characterized by its President's profound character disorder, in which the difference between truth and fiction is without consequence.

17 March 2006

Democracy Push by Bush Attracts Doubters in Party
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN
NYT, 17 March 2006
Even as it presents an updated national security strategy, the Bush administration is facing fresh doubts from some Republicans who say its emphasis on promoting democracy around the world has come at the expense of protecting other American interests.
The second thoughts signify a striking change in mood over one of President Bush's cherished tenets, pitting Republicans who call themselves realists against the neoconservatives who saw the invasion of Iraq as a catalyst for change and who remain the most vigorous advocates of a muscular American campaign to foster democratic movements.
"You are hearing more and more questions about the administration's approach on this issue," said Lorne W. Craner, president of the International Republican Institute, a foundation linked to the Republican Party that supports democratic activities abroad. "The 'realists' in the party are rearing their heads and asking, 'Is this stuff working?' "
The critics, who include Senators Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and Richard G. Lugar of Indiana and Representative Henry J. Hyde of Illinois, as well as Henry Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft, are alarmed at the costs of military operations and of nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan.
They have also been shaken by the victory of Hamas in Palestinian elections in January and by the gains Islamists scored in elections in Iraq, Egypt and Lebanon.
The administration, with support from legislators like Senators John McCain of Arizona and Sam Brownback of Kansas, contends that whatever their outcome, elections are better than violent upheaval. But critics worry that antidemocratic extremists will prevail wherever tradition and existing civil institutions are too weak to protect the rights of minorities or to nurture moderates.
They also argue that heavy-handed pressure has strained American relations with Egypt, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Russia and China, making it harder to enlist them in fighting terrorism, stabilizing the Middle East and curbing nuclear weapons.
The renewed violence in Iraq since the voting there has discredited, in their view, the promise of democracy as an outlet for tensions, bringing sectarian parties— and their affiliated militias — to the fore.

Iran Agrees to Talk With U.S. About Iraq
White House Says Agenda Is Limited, but Tehran Signals Hopes for More
By Karl Vick
Washington Post, 17 March 2006
A senior Iranian official said Thursday that Iran would enter into direct talks with the United States about Iraq, opening the way for the two countries to hold their first face-to-face discussion about Iran's western neighbor since shortly after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.
"In the days to come we are going to designate people who are going to carry out these talks," Ali Larijani, secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, said in an interview. "The important thing for us is an established government in Iraq and that security is restored."
The White House welcomed the Iranian participation, which was solicited by the U.S. ambassador in Baghdad, Zalmay Khalilzad, and urged by Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, a Shiite leader in Iraq with close ties to Tehran.
Stephen J. Hadley, President Bush's national security adviser, said Khalilzad had been authorized to talk to the Iranians about their interference in Iraq "and make that concern known, recognizing that in the end of the day, it is not a negotiation." Hadley added that Iranian activity in Iraq "is giving comfort and, in some case, equipment to terrorists that are killing Iraqis and killing coalition forces. And that is what we have made very clear is unacceptable."
...Analysts noted that Washington and Tehran have an obvious common interest in Iraq's long-term stability. Iran, governed by Shiite Muslim clerics, has consistently called for democracy that would empower Iraq's own Shiite majority, long oppressed by the country's Sunni Arab minority.
"This has been our ultimate desire," Larijani said. "If a real democracy succeeds in Iraq so that all groups can participate in it, that government can be a real, established government. We are against Americans creating an imposed democracy in Iraq."
At the same time, Iran has reason to worry that the recent rise in sectarian fighting in Iraq could erupt into civil war. Tehran is itself facing unrest in border areas where non-Persian minorities overlap into Iraq -- ethnic Kurds in the northwest and Arabs in the southwest.
"I think Iran's and the United States' short-term interests in Iraq actually coincide," said Ray Takeyh of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Iranian and U.S. diplomats have coordinated on regional conflicts in recent years. Tehran sent representatives to Germany for a conference that the United States convened to plan for Afghanistan's transition following the 2001 U.S.-led invasion. Iranian diplomats continued to meet with U.S. officials in Geneva and Paris in the run-up to the Iraq war, albeit secretly after Bush included Iran in the "axis of evil" he described in his January 2002 State of the Union address.
The governments exchanged information on hundreds of Arab fighters who fled Afghanistan into Iran, including a handful of senior al-Qaeda officials whom Iran offered to exchange for Iranian guerrillas in U.S. custody in Iraq. The guerrillas had tried to overthrow the Iranian government.
Bush eventually rejected the offer, a decision that infuriated the Iranians and marred the secret talks.
The breaking point on the American side came in early May 2003, when Khalilzad flew from Baghdad to Geneva bearing intelligence that a terrorist attack might be imminent somewhere in the region. According to three participants at the meeting, Khalilzad warned that if a bombing could be traced to al-Qaeda operatives in Iran, the talks would end.
Several days later, on May 12, 2003, a bombing in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, killed 35 people, including nine Americans, and ended the U.S.-Iran dialogue.
Khalilzad publicly called for new talks after being named U.S. envoy to Baghdad. A native of Afghanistan, he is fluent in Farsi, the language of Iran, and is well regarded by many Iranian officials.
"He understands the mind-set here, and he's ambitious himself, so that helps," said Nasser Hadian-Jazy, a Tehran University political scientist who has taught at Columbia University. "I believe it's a good time and a good choice. Both countries this time need each other. The cold peace can't continue. Now they're coming together, not out of love or passion, but out of basic biological necessity."

Rumsfeld's Blinkers
By DAVID BROOKS
NYT, 16 November 2006
Some weeks nothing happens; some weeks change history. The week of March 24, 2003, was one of those pivotal weeks. U.S. troops had just begun the ground invasion of Iraq. They were charging north, but hadn't reached Baghdad. The Fedayeen had begun to launch suicide attacks and were putting up serious resistance in Nasiriya.
Everybody denigrates pundits and armchair generals, but immediately the smartest of them recognized that something unexpected was happening: the U.S. was not in the midst of a conventional war, but was in the first days of a guerrilla war.
Michael Kelly, embedded with the Third Infantry Division, wrote a column describing how Fedayeen guerrillas had taken control of towns like Najaf. Kelly predicted the war would be long and tough. David Ignatius in The Washington Post wrote that it was "time to shelve the rosy scenarios" for the war and face the fact that the U.S. was confronting a difficult battle against resistance fighters.
Gen. Tommy Franks was slighting the insurgents as a mere speed bump, but the terrorism expert Rachel Ehrenfeld estimated there were at least 30,000 insurgents "and they are dangerous." Gary Anderson, a retired Marine colonel, suggested the chief threat would not be Saddam's Republican Guard, but a drawn-out guerrilla war against the "occupation."
Some of the most prescient pieces came from the Islamic world. In Pakistan, a retired politician named Shafqat Mahmood wrote: "This is becoming a kind of war where holding territory or even cities is meaningless.... Saddam Fedayeen and all manner of Republican guards and security forces will take off their uniforms and vanish among the people. They will regroup and continue the fight. We are heading towards a guerrilla war."
All of this, and a great pile of similar commentary, was written in the first few days of the ground war.
...The debate inside the administration was different. We now know a lot about events inside the Pentagon in that crucial week, thanks to "Cobra II," the definitive account of the war by The Times's Michael R. Gordon and Lt. Gen. Bernard E. Trainor.
The officers on the front lines saw the same thing the smart pundits saw, and in more detail. But Rumsfeld and Franks stifled the free exchange of ideas, and shut out the National Security Council. They dismissed concerns about the insurgents and threatened to fire the one general, William Wallace, who dared to state the obvious in public. The military brass followed the war in real time on computer screens. As long as the blue icons representing U.S. troops were heading north to Baghdad, the U.S. was deemed to be winning. The technology seemed to provide real-time information, but it was completely misleading.
The week of March 24 is vital because if Rumsfeld had made adjustments to the new circumstances then, much of the subsequent horror could have been averted.

Bill Would Allow Warrantless Spying
GOP Plan Would Bring Surveillance Under Review of Congress, FISA Court
By Charles Babington
Washington Post, 17 March 2006
The Bush administration could continue its policy of spying on targeted Americans without obtaining warrants, but only if it justifies the action to a small group of lawmakers, under legislation introduced yesterday by key Republican senators.
The four senators hope to settle the debate over National Security Agency eavesdropping on international communications involving Americans when one of the parties is suspected of terrorist ties. President Bush prompted a months-long uproar when he said that constitutional powers absolve him of the need to seek warrants in such cases, even though the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act requires warrants for domestic wiretaps.
The program, begun in 2001, was first publicized late last year.
The bill would allow the NSA to eavesdrop, without a warrant, for up to 45 days per case, at which point the Justice Department would have three options. It could drop the surveillance, seek a warrant from FISA's court, or convince a handful of House and Senate members that although there is insufficient evidence for a warrant, continued surveillance "is necessary to protect the United States," according to a summary the four sponsors provided yesterday. They are Mike DeWine (Ohio), Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.), Chuck Hagel (Neb.) and Olympia J. Snowe (Maine).

Senate Bill Would Override State Health Coverage Rules
GOP backers see the legislation as a way for insurers to offer more affordable plans. Critics say it would undermine treatment protections.
By Ronald Brownstein
LA Times, 16 March 2006
The battle over healthcare moved to a new front Wednesday as Senate Republicans advanced a bill that would change the way health insurance was sold nationwide.
On a party-line vote, a Senate committee approved a bill that would preempt state laws that require insurance policies to cover specific services, such as maternity care and supplies for diabetics.

Nuclear Reactors Found to Be Leaking Radioactive Water
By MATTHEW L. WALD
NYT, 17 March 2006
With power cleaner than coal and cheaper than natural gas, the nuclear industry, 20 years past its last meltdown, thinks it is ready for its second act: its first new reactor orders since the 1970's.
But there is a catch. The public's acceptance of new reactors depends in part on the performance of the old ones, and lately several of those have been discovered to be leaking radioactive water into the ground.

Can Democrats Play This Game?
By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Washington Post, 17 March 2006
...Senators mostly scampered away from the cameras earlier this week, because they didn't want to say publicly what many of them said privately. Most were livid that Feingold sprang his censure idea on a Sunday talk show without giving them any notice. Many see Feingold as more concerned with rallying support from the Democratic base for his 2008 presidential candidacy than with helping his party regain control of Congress this fall.
Some Democrats want the party to forget the issue of warrantless wiretapping, because engaging it would let Bush claim that he's tougher on terrorists than his partisan enemies. Others share Feingold's frustration with the administration's stonewalling on the program, but they think they need to know more before they can effectively challenge Bush on the issue. Both groups were furious that Feingold grabbed headlines away from those delicious stories about Republican divisions and defections.
But at the grass roots and Web roots, Feingold has become a hero -- again. They already loved him for his courage in opposing the USA Patriot Act and his call for a timetable for troop withdrawals from Iraq. Feingold's latest move only reinforced his image of being "a Dem with a spine," as the left-liberal Web site BuzzFlash.com put it in a comment representative of the acclaim he won across the activist blogs.
In an interview, Feingold was unrepentant, arguing that before he made his proposal, "the whole issue of the president violating the laws of this country was being swept under the rug."
"We were going to sit back as Democrats and say, 'This is too hot to handle' -- well that's outrageous." He warned that "the mistakes of 2002 are being repeated," meaning, he said, that Democrats should never again "cower" before Bush on security issues, as so many at the grass roots saw them doing before the 2002 elections.
And it's a sign of Feingold's view of some of his Democratic colleagues that he defended his decision not to let them in on his plan. Had they known what he was up to, he said, "they would have planned a strategy to blunt this."
Here's the problem: Feingold and the activists are right that Democrats can't just take a pass on the wiretapping issue, because Bush's legal claims are so suspect -- even to many in his own party. The opposition's job is to raise alarms over potential abuses of presidential power.
But Democrats, unlike Republicans, have yet to develop a healthy relationship between activists willing to test and expand the conventional limits on political debate and the politicians who have to calculate what works in creating an electoral majority.
For two decades, Republicans have used their idealists, their ideologues and their loudmouths to push the boundaries of discussion to the right. In the best of all worlds, Feingold's strong stand would redefine what's "moderate" and make clear that those challenging the legality of the wiretapping are neither extreme nor soft on terrorism.
That would demand coordination, trust and, yes, calculation involving both the vote-counting politicians and the guardians of principle among the activists. Republicans have mastered this art. Democrats haven't.
Turning a minority into a majority requires both passion and discipline. Bringing the two together requires effective leadership. Does anybody out there know how to play this game?

Vietnam War Deserter Arrested 38 Years On
Julian Borger in Washington
The Guardian via Talking Points Memo, 14 March 2006
A man was being held in a US military prison yesterday for deserting from the marines 38 years ago after being caught on the American-Canadian border amid a new drive to track down Vietnam-era deserters.
Allen Abney, 56, who lives in British Columbia and who is now a Canadian citizen, had frequently crossed into the US without incident. His family was caught by surprise when he and his wife were stopped by immigration officials on Thursday on their way to a social event in Reno, Nevada.
"They were crossing British Columbia-Idaho border, and they handed in their passports and they were told they would have to come inside," Jessica Abney, the couple's daughter told the Guardian. "I don't think he'd been worrying about it, because he'd been in the states hundreds of times since he deserted. I don't think he lived his life that way."
Mr Abney is not the only ex-marine to have been tracked down for desertion recently. Since he took over the marine corps Absentee Collection Centre in 2004, chief warrant officer James Averhart has reopened cold cases and claims to have tracked down 33 deserters. "I have a different leadership style than the guys who have had this job. My job is to catch deserters. And that's what I do," he told Florida's St Petersburg Times.
The army, navy and air force are less determined, shelving cold cases after an initial inquiry. Last year, a 65-year-old man from Florida, Jerry Texiero, was arrested for desertion 40 years earlier. But instead of being prosecuted, he was released with an "other than honourable discharge", after being held in jail for five months.

GOP Seeks Curbs On '527' Groups
By Jeffrey H. Birnbaum and Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post, 16 March 2006
House Republican leaders proposed changes in lobbying laws yesterday that would include a crackdown on independent, big-money committees that heavily aided Democrats in the 2004 elections.
...As part of the House GOP proposals, "527" organizations that operate independently of the political parties would no longer be allowed to collect unlimited sums from individuals. Democratic-leaning 527s have accepted tens of millions of dollars from such wealthy backers as investor George Soros and insurance mogul Peter B. Lewis.
Instead, the groups would be governed by federal campaign finance laws that would restrict such giving to a total of $30,000 from individuals per year. By contrast, during the 2004 election cycle, Soros gave $27 million and Lewis gave nearly $24 million to Democratic-oriented 527 groups, according to PoliticalMoneyLine, a nonpartisan research company.
Republicans were excited at the prospect of crippling these groups. "We strongly commend these efforts as an important step towards much-needed reform," said a spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee.

GOP Irritation At Bush Was Long Brewing
By Jim VandeHei
Washington Post, 17 March 2006
President Bush's troubles with congressional Republicans, which erupted during the backlash to the Dubai seaport deal, are rooted in policy frustrations and personal resentments that GOP lawmakers say stretch back to the opening days of the administration.
For years, the Bush White House and its allies on Capitol Hill seemed like one of the most unified teams Washington had ever seen, passing most of Bush's agenda with little dissent. Privately, however, many lawmakers felt underappreciated, ignored and sometimes bullied by what they regarded as a White House intent on running government with little input from them. Often it was to pass items -- an expanded federal role in education under the No Child Left Behind law and an expensive prescription drug benefit under Medicare -- that left conservatives deeply uneasy.
...The biggest test of dissatisfaction could come this summer if calls for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq intensify. Most Republicans voted to authorize the Iraq war after the White House assured them that Saddam Hussein posed a threat with weapons of mass destruction and that the United States had an effective military strategy. Many now harbor serious doubts about the war's prospects.
Bush still enjoys a high level of personal affection among GOP lawmakers, but there is a deep-seated frustration with his political, policy and congressional relations teams in particular that has poisoned the atmosphere. This is one reason many legislators are among a chorus of Washington voices urging Bush to infuse his White House with new blood.
Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) recently contacted White House officials and implored them to bring aboard a former lawmaker as a new chief diplomat to Congress. Lott floated several names, including former senators Daniel R. Coats (R-Ind.) and Slade Gorton (R-Wash.). It "would be a good idea" to have someone with real stature working Congress on Bush's behalf, Lott said. Former Senate majority leader Howard H. Baker Jr. (R-Tenn.) told CBS on Wednesday that he did the same in a phone call to Bush Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr., offering the name of former senator Fred D. Thompson (R-Tenn.).
Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.), who won his seat in 2002 after a late push by Bush, told the Associated Press this week that the president should shake up the staff more broadly, accusing the White House of having a political "tin ear." That was seen by some top White House aides as a wake-up call, because Coleman has been such a loyal Bush backer.
The White House may be listening. In private conversations with lawmakers in recent days, top officials have hinted that Bush is open to bringing aboard new high-level staffers, including perhaps a former lawmaker or two. With the recent departure of domestic policy chief Claude A. Allen, now facing criminal theft charges, Bush has positions to fill and every incentive to use those openings to rebuild relations with Capitol Hill.

Senior Senator Seeks Subpoenas for Katrina Documents
NYT, 16 March 2006
The Senate should issue subpoenas to require the White House to turn over documents and provide access to senior officials so that a committee can complete its investigation into the response to Hurricane Katrina, the ranking Senate Democrat involved in the inquiry said Wednesday.
The senator, Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, said that before the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee issued its final report, staff members should take depositions from top aides.
"Virtually everyone in the White House who had anything of operational significance to do with the preparation for and response to Katrina falls into the category put off limits to us," Mr. Lieberman said in a letter sent on Wednesday to Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, the committee chairwoman.
Ms. Collins, in a written response, said that she would not support the subpoena request because the White House had been reasonably responsive and that the committee would most likely not be able to overcome an expected White House claim of executive privilege. Her position effectively kills Mr. Lieberman's request.

With Energy-Tax Bonanza, Wyoming Schools Enjoy Windfall
By KIRK JOHNSON
NYT, 16 March 2006
Forget the bucking bronco. A clattering cash register has become the more apt symbol of Wyoming in the energy rush.
Over the past four years, as natural gas prices have spiked and drillers have descended here on the nation's least-populous state, Wyoming has collected about $65 million a month more in energy taxes than the government can spend. The numbers, in their cumulative power and duration, are starting to change the state's vision of what it could be and how to get there.
Money has been poured into wildlife protection, historical preservation and the support of families of National Guard troops in Iraq. A $100 million tax cut this year eliminated the sales tax on groceries. (There is no personal or corporate income tax to cut.) But that still left hundreds of millions to be set aside in an all-purpose savings account that some state officials fantasize could one day grow large enough to subsidize the state budget itself — Wyoming as trust-fund kid, or cowboy emirate.
Gov. Dave Freudenthal, a Democrat elected in 2002 in a mostly Republican state, has staked much of his administration — and his re-election hopes this year — on the argument that Wyoming has been given a rare power and responsibility which must not be squandered.

16 March 2006

Give reality a chance.
Stop Bush's War
By BOB HERBERT
NYT, 16 March 2006
"By some estimates," according to a recent article in Foreign Affairs, "the number of Iraqis who have died as a result of the [U.S.] invasion has reached six figures — vastly more than have been killed by all international terrorists in all of history. Sanctions on Iraq probably were a necessary cause of death for an even greater number of Iraqis, most of them children."
Not everyone agrees that Iraqi deaths have reached six figures. President Bush gave an estimate of 30,000 not too long ago. That's probably low, but horrendous nevertheless. In any event, there is broad agreement that the number of Iraqis slaughtered has reached into the tens of thousands. An ocean of blood has been shed in Mr. Bush's mindless war, and there is no end to this tragic flow in sight.
Jeffrey Gettleman of The Times gave us the following chilling paragraphs in Tuesday's paper:
"In Sadr City, the Shiite section in Baghdad where the [four] terrorist suspects were executed, government forces have vanished. The streets are ruled by aggressive teenagers with shiny soccer jerseys and machine guns.
"They set up roadblocks and poke their heads into cars and detain whomever they want. Mosques blare warnings on loudspeakers for American troops to stay out. Increasingly, the Americans have been doing just that."
Everyone who thought this war was a good idea was wrong and ought to admit it. Those who still think it's a good idea should get therapy.
Last Friday and Saturday, a conference titled "Vietnam and the Presidency" was held at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston. Discussions about the lessons we failed to learn from Vietnam, and thus failed to apply to Iraq, were pervasive.
...President Bush continues to assert that our goal in Iraq is "victory." Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently told Tim Russert that things were going "very, very well" in Iraq.
They are still crawling toward the mirage. It's time to give reality a chance.
SEE ALSO:
Bush's Fantasy of 'Progress' in Iraq
By Robert Scheer
TruthDig.com via Informed Comment, 14 March 2006
What is he thinking?
On a day when Shiite vigilantes conducted hangings in Sadr City in reprisal for the killing of scores of their co-religionists in a market bombing, President Bush continued to insist that progress in Iraq justified staying the course.
“By their response over the past two weeks, Iraqis have shown the world that they want a future of freedom and peace,” he said Monday. “We’re helping Iraqis build a strong democracy so that old resentments will be eased and the insurgency marginalized.”
Contrast that fantasy with the same day’s harsh news: “In Sadr City, the Shiite section in Baghdad where the terrorist suspects were executed, government forces vanished,” reported the New York Times. “The streets are ruled by aggressive teenagers with shiny soccer jerseys and machine guns. They set up roadblocks and poke their heads into cars and detain whomever they want. Mosques blare warnings on loudspeakers for American troops to stay out. Increasingly, the Americans have been doing just that.”
The next day, 87 corpses, all male, were found scattered throughout the city, shot or strangled after being bound and blindfolded. This, in turn, was in apparent reprisal for a series of bombings on Sunday targeting Shiite civilians that killed 58 and wounded 300, according to Iraq’s Health Ministry.
Of course, the drip-drip of American troop deaths continues, as Lance Cpl. Bunny Long, 22, of Modesto, Calif., will be coming home in a flag-draped casket after being killed Friday by a suicide bomber with a vehicle-borne IED.
If such constant mayhem is taken as a sign of progress, three years after the U.S. invasion, then Bush surely will be thrilled by what the future holds.
...Bush would have us believe this expanding civil war is the work of insidious foreigners rather than of competing agendas arising from within an Iraq society long stunted by colonialism and dictatorship. It does not occur to him that he is the foreigner whom the majority of Iraqis hold responsible for the country’s despair, and whose occupation immeasurably strengthens the hand of extremists on all sides.
SEE ALSO:
Iraq: The Big Lie
Bush and Rumsfeld robotically repeat their Iraq talking points, ignoring the fact that their ambassador and generals are contradicting them.
By Sidney Blumenthal
Salon.com, 16 March 2006
Bush's speech provided a text contradicting his own key officials. On the crucial issues of Iranian involvement in Iraq, the worthiness of Iraqi security forces, the democratic nature of the Iraqi government, the cause of human rights, U.S. intentions about staying or leaving, long-term strategy and even the origins of the war, the words of the president and his men clash. The president contradicts U.S. ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad, while the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Peter Pace, and the U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. John Abizaid, contradict the president. At the same time, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld blithely contradicts the Joint Chiefs on the entire strategy.
The inconsistent story reflects the occasional weakness of Khalilzad especially for acknowledging harsh realities, letting slip the veneer of bravado and failure to armor with euphemism. Bush and Rumsfeld, of course, remain impregnable fortresses of denial.

More Rallies, No Sale
Bush Fails to Resolve Public Doubts About War
By David S. Broder
Washington Post, 16 March 2006
On the third anniversary of the war in Iraq, President Bush once again finds himself trying to rally American public opinion to support that costly venture. The series of speeches that began this week comes against a background of deepening skepticism on the part of voters about the effort that began in March 2003 with a lightning strike against Saddam Hussein's forces.
A CNN-USA Today-Gallup poll, taken just as Bush began this latest oratorical push, found 57 percent of those surveyed said it was a mistake to start the war and 60 percent believe the struggle for democracy and order in that country is going badly. Only 1 voter in 3 believes Bush has a clear plan for winning or ending the war.
...In the summer of 2002, seven months before the war began, he told an audience in Florida what would be required if the United States invaded Iraq. "You could inherit the country of Iraq, if you're willing to do it," he said. "If our economy is so great that you're willing to put billions of dollars into reforming Iraq. If you want to put soldiers that are already stretched so thin all around the world and add them into a security force there forever, like we see in places like the Sinai. If you want to fight with other countries in the region to try to keep Iraq together, as Kurds and Shiites try and split off, you're going to have to make a good case for that."
Now it is 2006, and Bush is still trying to make that case.

Bush to Restate Terror Strategy
2002 Doctrine of Preemptive War To Be Reaffirmed
By Peter Baker
Washington Post, 16 March 2006
President Bush plans to issue a new national security strategy today reaffirming his doctrine of preemptive war against terrorists and hostile states with chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, despite the troubled experience in Iraq.
The long-overdue document, an articulation of U.S. strategic priorities that is required by law, lays out a robust view of America's power and an assertive view of its responsibility to bring change around the world. On topics including genocide, human trafficking and AIDS, the strategy describes itself as "idealistic about goals and realistic about means."
...The strategy expands on the original security framework developed by the Bush administration in September 2002, before the invasion of Iraq. That strategy shifted U.S. foreign policy away from decades of deterrence and containment toward a more aggressive stance of attacking enemies before they attack the United States.
The preemption doctrine generated fierce debate at the time, and many critics believe the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq fatally undermined an essential assumption of the strategy -- that intelligence about an enemy's capabilities and intentions can be sufficient to justify preventive war.
In his revised version, Bush offers no second thoughts about the preemption policy, saying it "remains the same" and defending it as necessary for a country in the "early years of a long struggle" akin to the Cold War. In a nod to critics in Europe, the document places a greater emphasis on working with allies and declares diplomacy to be "our strong preference" in tackling the threat of weapons of mass destruction.

The Torture Judge
U.S. court rules our government can break international laws to keep us safe
by Nat Hentoff
Village Voice, 13 March 2006
Essentially you have a judge saying that assuming that U.S. officials sent Mr. Arar to be tortured, a judge can do nothing about it. Georgetown University law professor David Cole, New York Law Journal, February 17

In a startling, ominous decision—ignored by most of the press around the country—Federal District Judge David Trager, in the Eastern District of New York, has dismissed a lawsuit by a Canadian citizen, Maher Arar, who, during a stopover at Kennedy Airport on the way home to Canada after vacation, was kidnapped by CIA agents. Arar was flown to Syria, where he was tortured for nearly a year in solitary confinement in a three-by-six-foot cell ("like a grave," he said). He became, internationally, one of the best-known victims of the CIA's extraordinary renditions—the sending of suspected terrorists to countries known for torturing their prisoners.

Federal judge David Trager: Am I my president's keeper? photo: Rick Kopstein

Released after his ordeal, Arar has not been charged with any involvement in terrorism, or anything else, by Syria or the United States.

Stigmatized by his notoriety, still traumatized, unemployed, he is back in Canada, where the Canadian Parliament had opened an extensive and expensive public inquiry into his capture and torture. The United States refuses to cooperate in any way with this investigation.
Maher Arar sued for damages in federal court here (Maher Arar v. John Ashcroft, formerly Attorney General of the United States, et al.). Representing Arar for the New York–based Center for Constitutional Rights, David Cole predicts, and I agree, that if Judge Trager's ruling is upheld in an appeal to the Supreme Court, the CIA and other American officials will be told "they have a green light to do to others what they did to Arar"—no matter what international or U.S. laws are violated in the name of national security.
Following the dismissal of Arar's case by Trager (former dean of Brooklyn Law School), Barbara Olshansky (deputy legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights) underscored the significance of what Trager has done to legitimize the Bush administration's doctrine that in the war on terrorism, the commander in chief sets the rules. Said Olshansky: "There can be little doubt that every official of the United States government [involved in the torture of Maher Arar] knew that sending him to Syria was a clear violation of the U.S. Constitution, federal statutes, and international law . . . This is a dark day indeed."

Officer Says He Wrongly Approved Use of Dogs
Tactic Employed At Abu Ghraib
By Josh White
Washington Post, 16 March 2006
The top U.S. military intelligence officer at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq testified yesterday that he inappropriately approved the use of dogs for interrogations without consulting higher-ranking officers, accepting responsibility for giving his subordinates an aggressive tool that was used to terrify detainees.
Col. Thomas M. Pappas, speaking publicly for the first time since the abuse at Abu Ghraib was revealed two years ago, told a military court-martial that in December 2003 he signed off on using dogs on one "high-value" detainee who was not responding to standard interrogation tactics. He said a series of interrogation memos from Baghdad that listed dogs as an option led him to believe he did not need to seek approval from Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, then the top general in Iraq.
"I wouldn't say that I was confused, but later on it turned out that I was wrong," Pappas said in a low voice, looking out over a small military courtroom at Fort Meade, Md. "I misinterpreted the language."
Pappas -- who was testifying at the trial of a military police dog handler accused of abuse at the prison -- is the highest-ranking officer to take responsibility for misconduct there.
The abuse in late 2003 and early 2004 included soldiers putting detainees in painful stress positions, keeping them naked and sexually humiliating them. The dispute between the military and the accused is whether the actions were the work of a few bad soldiers or whether they were part of a system of aggressive tactics sanctioned by the highest levels of government.
Although Pappas has long been considered a potential link between use of the aggressive tactic and authorizations from superiors in Baghdad and Washington, he instead told jurors he proceeded without clearance in telling one of his interrogators he could bring dogs into an interrogation booth to scare a detainee.
But Pappas was quick to acknowledge that he did not ensure that military intelligence and military police soldiers were trained in using the technique, that he failed to put proper control measures in place, and that he did not follow up with interrogators to see how the approach was being applied. Pappas said that he ordered the use of dogs in interrogation booths only if they were muzzled and that he was unaware that military intelligence soldiers were using unmuzzled dogs outside of the booths.
Attorneys for Sgt. Michael J. Smith called Pappas to testify in an attempt to show that top officials at the prison ordered interrogators to use dogs without explaining the rules to military police dog handlers, who were not trained in the procedure. The lawyers have said that Smith, 24, and his black Belgian shepherd were used as a tool to frighten high-value detainees into talking, while prosecutors have likened Smith to "rogue" MPs who photographed themselves stacking naked detainees in a pyramid and have been sentenced to prison for abuse.
Smith's case has highlighted the fact that dogs were approved for use at Abu Ghraib, and testimony has suggested that at least one civilian contract interrogator was urging the use of dogs at night to break down certain uncooperative detainees. Evidence has shown that one detainee whom Smith allegedly abused -- Ashraf Abdullah Ahsy al-Juhayshi -- was a suspected al-Qaeda operative and the subject of a "special project team" that some at the prison believed had authority to use severe tactics.
Interrogator notes presented to the seven-member jury yesterday appeared to show that Pappas and a senior interrogator approved the use of dogs for the detainee. But Pappas said he had "no explanation" for why his name appeared on the documents.
For his error, Pappas accepted an administrative punishment, which included being relieved of command and fined $8,000. He testified under the protection of immunity.
..."In hindsight, clearly we needed to establish some definitive rules and put out clear guidance to everyone concerned," he said.

Move to Curb Gifts of Travel Creates Rift in House G.O.P.
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
NYT, 16 March 2006
A proposal to bar lawmakers temporarily from privately financed trips is generating resistance among House Republicans, even as their leaders insist it is necessary to restore public faith in the integrity of Congress before voters cast ballots in November.
The proposed travel restrictions are part of a broad package of lobbying law changes that the leaders unveiled Wednesday morning at a closed session of the Republican caucus. Their plan, two months in the making, would also require lobbyists to disclose the gifts and meals they provide to lawmakers, and would for the first time require lawmakers to reveal when they designate money for pet projects, known as earmarks, that are often requested by lobbyists.
"We feel very strongly about the need to bring about bold, strong reforms," said Representative David Dreier, Republican of California and chairman of the House Rules Committee and the chief architect of the legislation.
Details of the plan were not yet available in writing, and Mr. Dreier said he hoped to have a draft of a bill by Thursday. But the travel provisions generated an immediate backlash.
Two House Republicans, Representatives Jeff Flake of Arizona and Dan Lungren of California, said they would introduce competing legislation that would avoid a ban by creating a preapproval process for private travel and require lawmakers to post records of such trips on the Internet.
"People are afraid to stand up and say, I want private travel," Mr. Flake said. "It's become a political issue."
The House majority leader, Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, who has not been keen on the travel restrictions, was noticeably absent from the morning news conference where Mr. Dreier and other House leaders, including Speaker J. Dennis Hastert of Illinois, announced their plan. Later, asked about the travel provisions, Mr. Boehner said, "There's some discontent over that."

Rep. Harris Pledges Fortune to Revive Senate Race
By ABBY GOODNOUGH
NYT, 16 March 2006
Representative Katherine Harris announced late Wednesday that she would not end her flagging campaign for the Senate, saying she would instead invest her $10 million fortune in the race.
"I'm going to put everything on the line," Ms. Harris said in an interview on "Hannity & Colmes" on the Fox News Channel. "I'm in this race, and I'm going to win."
The announcement ended days of speculation about whether Ms. Harris, who gained fame overseeing the presidential recount of 2000 as secretary of state in Florida, would withdraw. She has struggled to raise money and lagged far behind Senator Bill Nelson, the Democratic incumbent, in the polls, making her party fear that Mr. Nelson would cruise to victory in November.
Her troubles grew last month, when the military contractor who pleaded guilty to bribing Representative Randy Cunningham, Republican of California, admitted funneling contributions to Ms. Harris's 2004 re-election campaign. She has not been charged with wrongdoing, and she denied knowing that the donations were illegal.
Democrats have seized on her ties to the contractor, Mitchell Wade, who was seeking federal money for a project in her district.

Bush Picks F.D.A. Chief, but Vote Is Unlikely Soon
By GARDINER HARRIS
NYT, 16 March 2006
President Bush nominated Dr. Andrew C. von Eschenbach to serve as commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday, but a dispute over the "morning after" contraceptive pill all but ensures that the nomination will go nowhere for months or even years.
A Bush family friend, Dr. von Eschenbach was appointed acting F.D.A. commissioner in September, when his predecessor abruptly resigned. He has led the National Cancer Institute since 2002 but now intends to resign from the institute, a spokeswoman said. With a nomination pending, Dr. von Eschenbach can lead the F.D.A. indefinitely.
Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Patty Murray of Washington, both Democrats, have vowed to block any vote on Dr. von Eschenbach's nomination until the drug agency decides whether to allow over-the-counter sales of Plan B, an emergency contraceptive known as a morning-after pill. The senators support the Plan B application.
"If they don't come to a decision on Plan B," Ms. Murray said, "the White House is going to need a Plan C on their nominee."
Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, said, "The administration will have to address the Plan B issue fair and square before he can be confirmed."
The Plan B application has been pending for three years. Anti-abortion groups oppose the application; abortion advocates support it.
The fight comes as the drug agency has been under attack for its inability to ascertain whether popular drugs can be safely taken for years and for approving drugs like the painkiller Vioxx that were later shown to cause heart attacks.
Some agency observers say that only a confirmed commissioner can make the changes needed to steady the organization, but it is unclear how much of a difference such a confirmation has on its day-to-day operations.
The Bush administration has had two confirmed commissioners whose combined service amounted to a year of the administration's five in office, and political observers predicted a long-term stalemate.

Call for Censure Is Rallying Cry to Bush's Base
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
NYT, 16 March 2006
Republicans, worried that their conservative base lacks motivation to turn out for the fall elections, have found a new rallying cry in the dreams of liberals about censuring or impeaching President Bush.
The proposal this week by Senator Russell D. Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, to censure Mr. Bush over his domestic eavesdropping program cheered the left. But it also dovetailed with conservatives' plans to harness such attacks to their own ends.
With the Republican base demoralized by continued growth in government spending, undiminished violence in Iraq and intramural disputes over immigration, some conservative leaders had already begun rallying their supporters with speculation about a Democratic rebuke to the president even before Mr. Feingold made his proposal.
"Impeachment, coming your way if there are changes in who controls the House eight months from now," Paul Weyrich, a veteran conservative organizer, declared last month in an e-mail newsletter.
The threat of impeachment, Mr. Weyrich suggested, was one of the only factors that could inspire the Republican Party's demoralized base to go to the polls. With "impeachment on the horizon," he wrote, "maybe, just maybe, conservatives would not stay at home after all."

15 March 2006

85 Bodies Found in Baghdad in Sectarian Strife
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
NYT, 15 March 2006
The bodies of more than 85 executed men have surfaced across Baghdad in the past two days, in Sunni and Shiite neighborhoods, providing graphic proof, yet again, of sectarian mayhem.
Many bodies bore marks of torture — badly beaten faces, gagged mouths and rope burns around the neck — though it remains unclear who is responsible.
The wave of unchecked killings comes at a time when the American government is insisting that Iraqi security forces can reverse the slide toward chaos. But less than a month after an assault on a Shiite shrine nearly plunged Iraq into all-out civil war, the blood continues to flow, just as freely.
Many of the street executions happened in the same areas where Shiite militiamen rampaged in the days after the shrine attack, suggesting that no one is able, or willing, to stop them.
In one measure of concern, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld hinted in Washington that troop levels might be increased temporarily, to coincide with the arrival of Muslim pilgrims in coming weeks.

US General Says No Proof Iran Behind Iraq Arms
Reuters via Informed Comment, 14 March 2006
The top U.S. military officer said on Tuesday the United States does not have proof that Iran's government is responsible for Iranians smuggling weapons and military personnel into Iraq.
President George W. Bush said on Monday components from Iran were being used in powerful roadside bombs used in Iraq, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said last week that Iranian Revolutionary Guard personnel had been inside Iraq.
Asked whether the United States has proof that Iran's government was behind these developments, Marine Corps Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the military's Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a Pentagon briefing, "I do not, sir."
"Unless you physically see it in a government-sponsored vehicle or with government-sponsored troops, you can't know it," Rumsfeld said at the same briefing. "All you know is that you find equipment, weapons, explosives, whatever, in a country that came from the neighboring country."
"With respect to people, it's very difficult to tie a thread precisely to the government of Iran," Rumsfeld added.
Washington's charges about Iranian weapons and personnel in Iraq have added to tensions between the United States and Iran over Tehran's nuclear program.
Rumsfeld reiterated that there was evidence that Revolutionary Guard personnel had been in Iraq, and said, "It's entirely possible there are rogue elements and they're just there on their own or they're pilgrims. Not likely."
Bush said on Monday, referring to improvised explosive devices: "Some of the most powerful IEDs we're seeing in Iraq today includes components that came from Iran."

A Senate Maverick Acts to Force an Issue
Democrat Feingold's Motion to Censure the President Roils Both Parties
By Shailagh Murray
Washington Post, 15 March 2006
For months the Democrats have resisted calls from their liberal base to more aggressively challenge President Bush. Now a maverick Democratic senator from Wisconsin has forced his party and Congress to confront head-on the question of whether Bush should somehow be punished for secretly ordering warrantless wiretaps of U.S. citizens.
Sen. Russell Feingold's call this week to formally censure Bush for what some say was a clear violation of a federal statute regulating domestic surveillance has touched off a fierce debate on Capitol Hill that is likely to persist throughout the congressional campaign season.
GOP leaders who had been reeling from the impact of Republican political scandals, an unpopular war and Bush's mishandling of the port-security issue sensed that Feingold overplayed his hand and denounced the censure resolution as a political stunt by an ambitious lawmaker positioning himself to run for president in 2008. Many Democrats, while sympathetic to Feingold's maneuver, appeared to be distancing themselves from his resolution yesterday, wary of polls showing that a majority of Americans side with the president on wiretapping tactics.
Feingold, 53, says he is convinced that Bush broke the law in ordering National Security Agency wiretaps of overseas telephone calls and e-mails of U.S. citizens that involved people suspected of terrorist activities without first obtaining special court approval, and that his party must take a firm stand in protest. Unless Democrats make the case that they are more trustworthy than Republicans on national security issues, Feingold says, the party cannot win control of the White House or Congress.
"We have a great case that they have done a poor job of fighting the war against terrorism," Feingold said of the Republicans in an interview yesterday. "We need a different strategy, one that shows we stand for something."
Feingold's resolution, formally introduced Monday, would censure Bush for approving an "illegal program to spy on American citizens on American soil." The senator's intention was to refer the matter to the Judiciary Committee for hearings and a vote before consideration by the full Senate. Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) tried to force an immediate vote, to put the Democrats on the spot, but Democratic leaders objected, and for now the censure measure appears to be stalled.

Solving Inequality Problem Won't Take Class Warfare
By Steven Pearlstein
Washington Post, 15 March 2006
...Indeed, you can construct a tax regime that, without increasing the top marginal rate beyond 35 percent for either individuals or corporations, would not only balance the federal budget but also provide extra revenue to repair and extend the social safety net and revitalize public services.
This last point is crucial. Up to now, Americans have put up with more income inequality than Europeans, Canadians or Japanese. But their tolerance is wearing thin as they see Wall Street sharpies and corporate executives getting fabulously rich by undercutting the economic security of the working poor and middle class. Not only are job security, private pensions and employer-provided health care coverage being cut back, but there is also a noticeable erosion in the public services that serve as a backstop -- schools and colleges, transportation, health, recreation, job training, and food stamps. Many citizens feel they are now walking an economic tightrope, without a net, and it is this -- more than mansion-envy -- that animates their anxiety.
As a rough approximation, the top 10 percent of income earners now take in an extra $750 billion a year because of their increased share of national income. I think it hardly "class warfare" to suggest taking back a chunk of that good fortune, investing it in public goods that can help take the sting out of rising income inequality.
That said, I doubt that merely redistributing income is going to be enough to offset, let alone reverse, the dramatic increase in income inequality over the past 30 years. The forces that are pushing the economy toward inequality are not abating. In fact, they are just picking up steam, moving their way up the economic ladder from the poor and working class to college-educated engineers or legal researchers, who now find themselves competing with workers in India and the Philippines. And with the continuing trend toward globalization, corporate consolidation and "winner-take-all" competition, the gap between ordinary workers and superstars continues to widen exponentially.
Free-market types will huff and puff that any attempt to tinker with the market machinery will turn the United States into France. This is nonsense. There is nothing in theory or experience to suggest that modest steps to soften the rules of competition, or rebalance the power relationship between labor and capital, will "kill the goose." Nor is it unreasonable for a society to decide that it is willing to sacrifice a half a point of GDP growth to achieve greater social harmony.
What "modest steps" do I have in mind?
One would certainly be giving workers more bargaining leverage by restoring the right of workers to form a union -- a right that's been effectively repealed through the indifference of the National Labor Relations Board.
Or requiring shareholders to approve executive compensation packages.
Increasing the minimum wage, and indexing it to inflation, would help push up wages at the bottom of the income ladder.
Would American capitalism be brought to its knees if all companies had to pay half the cost of catastrophic health insurance for their workers? Or if companies were required to fully fund their pension promises each year before using free cash to pay dividends, buy back shares or fund executive bonuses?
Sixty years ago, American political and industrial leaders came up with a "social compact" designed to generate enough economic equality to discourage dangerous new ideas like communism and socialism. It worked remarkably well. But now that communism and socialism are in retreat, the compact is crumbling. Shouldn't there be something to replace it? And wouldn't these steps be a reasonable place to start?

Senate G.O.P. Blocks Tight Budget Rule
By CARL HULSE
NYT, 15 March 2006
Senate Republicans on Tuesday narrowly defeated an effort to impose budget rules that would make it harder to increase spending or cut taxes, a move that critics said that showed Republicans were posturing in their calls for greater fiscal restraint.
In the first of several politically charged budget and spending issues confronting Congress this week, the Senate rejected on a 50-to-50 tie a proposal to restore what are known as "pay-go" rules, a requirement that tax cuts and some new spending be approved by 60 votes or offset by budget savings or revenue increases.
Democrats and a handful of Republican allies said that the added discipline was essential to getting a handle on the mounting federal debt and that the rules had been instrumental in reducing red ink before they were allowed to lapse in 2002.
"For those who say they are fiscally responsible, here is your chance," said Senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota, senior Democrat on the Budget Committee. "You are going to be able to prove with one vote whether you are serious about doing something about these runaway debts and runaway deficits or whether it is all talk."
But Republicans said the push to add the rules to the budget was a back-door effort to make it harder to extend President Bush's tax cuts.
"The practical effect of this is to raise taxes," said Senator Judd Gregg, Republican of New Hampshire and chairman of the Budget Committee.
The vote illustrated the difficult position Republicans are in this week as the Senate tries to pass a budget and the House takes up more than $91 billion in emergency spending for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as hurricane relief.
Aware that Republican voters favor lower spending, Republicans want to appear responsive, and yet the leadership does not want to push too far and cause problems for lawmakers in difficult re-election fights. The leaders also want to give the administration what it seeks for its military operations. And, as the vote on the budget rules showed, they do not want to impair their ability to deliver popular tax cuts.

U.S. Limits Demands on Google
By KATIE HAFNER
NYT, 15 March 2006
After the Justice Department drastically reduced its request for information from Google, a federal judge said on Tuesday that he intended to approve at least part of that request.
The government first subpoenaed Web data from Google last August, as part of its defense of an online pornography law.
At a hearing in Federal District Court here, Judge James Ware said that in supporting the government's more limited request, he would nonetheless pay attention to Google's concerns about its trade secrets and the privacy of its users.
The government is now requesting a sample of 50,000 Web site addresses in Google's index instead of a million, which it was demanding until recently. And it is asking for just 5,000 search queries, compared with an earlier demand for an entire week of queries, which could amount to billions of search terms.
A Justice Department lawyer said at the hearing that the government would review just 10,000 Web sites and 1,000 search queries out of those turned over.
It intends to use the data in a study to measure the effectiveness of software that filters out pornographic Web sites. The government says it is not seeking information that would "personally identify" individuals.
"It is my intent to grant some relief to the government," Judge Ware said, "given the narrowing that has taken place with the request and its willingness to compensate Google for whatever burden that imposes."
He said, however, that he was well aware that the request for individual search terms from Google had raised privacy concerns. He appeared to be less troubled about the release of Web site addresses.
He said he was particularly concerned about perceptions by the public that Web searches could be subject to government scrutiny, "so I'll pay particular attention to that part of it." The judge said that he would issue a full decision shortly, but did not give a date.
Google stock closed at $351.16, up $14.10, or 4.2 percent.

A Stumble a Day ...
NYT, 15 March 2006
Every second-term presidency tends to get tired and falter a bit. But these days, when so many big things are going so very wrong, smaller errors seem like an echo of overall ineptitude. And since President Bush has convinced Americans that we live in a permanent state of threat from evildoers abroad, the bumbling takes on a more ominous note.
This page opposes the death penalty, so we're not going to be upset if federal prosecutors fail to execute Zacarias Moussaoui on conspiracy charges related to Sept. 11, and have to settle for sending him to jail for life. But it's unnerving that the setback for the prosecution was due to the incredible misbehavior of one of the government lawyers, a member of the Transportation Security Administration. The lawyer, Carla Martin, violated a court order and drew down the wrath of the presiding judge by attempting to coach via e-mail some witnesses expected to testify — in a manner that a first-year law student should have known was a very, very bad idea. It may be irrelevant that Ms. Martin's main job is as an aviation security expert, but it doesn't make us feel any better.
Minor flare-ups of bad news are also much more disturbing when they remind us of the administration's history of rewarding party loyalists and campaign workers with jobs that are far above their level of competence. Claude Allen, who recently resigned as the president's domestic policy adviser, was arrested in a bizarre case involving a scheme to collect refunds from stores for merchandise he had never purchased, from a home theater system to an item worth only $2.50. The allegations about Mr. Allen might have been classified as a sad tale of a White House official who fell victim to pressure or overwork, had it not been for the fact that the Bush administration had also nominated him for a seat on the United States Court of Appeals despite a résumé that's exceedingly thin on legal experience.
The founding fathers understood that there would be times in American history when the country lost confidence in the judgment of the president. Congress and the courts are supposed to fill the gap. But the system of checks and balances is a safety net that doesn't feel particularly sturdy at present. The administration seems determined to cut off legitimate court scrutiny, and the Republicans who dominate the House and Senate generally intervene only to change the rules so Mr. Bush can do whatever he wants. (If the current Congress had been called on to intervene in the case of Mr. Allen, it would probably have tried to legalize shoplifting.)...

The Cost Of Incompetence
Patrick Doherty
TomPaine.com, 14 March 2006
There's a realization going around Washington these days. It goes something like this: If an administration gets elected by saying government is bad, it follows that they will appoint people who don't care about governing. Hurricane Katrina demostrated this in spades last year. But two stories this week illustrate just how endemic, and costly, this anti-government problem is at a strategic level.
The first story this week was the announcement by the United Arab Emirates that they would shift 10 percent of their foreign exchange reserves from dollars to Euros. In real terms, this move alone will not seriously impact the value of the dollar, but it's symbolic significance is great. That's because the UAE's move represents more than just retribution for the horrible way in which U.S. politicians distorted the issue. Simply the fact that it is happening represents a real move away from the dollar by a major energy player. When South Korea, a major holder of foreign exchange, made some similar diversification noises a year ago, the news roiled the markets.
The UAE move is a direct result of the Bush administration's lack of concern about governing the nation. A responsible executive would have placed port security at the top of its priority list in the wake of 9/11. Instead, the Bush administration spent most of its energy on building the case for invading Iraq while its homeland security agenda amounted to a massive and innefectual restructuring of the bureaucracy. In turn, the overly-politicized Department of Homeland Security spent most of its money on red-state pork instead of securing our vulnerable blue-state ports.
...The second story is the revelation of Don Rumsfeld's ideological intervention in the Iraq war planning. Writing in the New York Times, Michael Gordon and retired General Bernard Trainor excerpted a powerful article from their newly-released book, Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq. Speaking on last night's Charlie Rose program on PBS, Gordon and Trainor said that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld believed that "America doesn't do nationbuilding" and believed that their understanding of the Iraqi order of battle was so complete that a the war would be "a cake-walk."
They were wrong, of course. Not only did the administration seem to believe its self-fabricated intelligence about Iraq's non-existent weapons of mass destruction, Gordon and Trainor have exposed the fact that Rumsfeld and his regional commander, General Tommy Franks, could not or would not integrate contradictory intelligence coming from the battlefield. That intelligence, of course was that the Iraqi battle plan relied more on the irregular fedayeen paramilitaries to prosecute a dispersed insurgency than on conventional forces fighting a defensive, traditional war. That the White House could not admit that its WMD intel was wrong has, of course, been well documented in the Plame affair.
In both cases, the Bush administration's incompetence and short-cutting proved the decisive factors. That attitude belies their well-established disdain for government and, by extention, for the welfare of the majority of the American people. And for that incompetence America is now paying an obscenely high price in terms of blood and treasure.

Even some businesses think they're the government...
Many Utilities Collect for Taxes They Never Pay
By DAVID CAY JOHNSTON
NYT, 15 March 2006
Many electric utility companies across the nation are collecting billions of dollars from their customers for corporate income taxes, then keeping the money rather than sending it to the government.
The practice is legal in most states. The companies say it is smart business.
But some representatives of utility customers say that the practice, which involves using losses from other subsidiaries to reduce taxes owed, is not fair. They say that money that utilities are required to collect for federal and state taxes — typically a nickel on each dollar paid for electricity — should go for just that, or not be included in electric bills.
Otherwise, they argue, these legal monopolies make more than they are authorized to, and other taxpayers have to make up the difference in higher taxes or reduced services.
An examination of regulatory filings by The New York Times shows that companies with electric utilities in at least 26 states have pocketed money intended for income taxes, and that utilities can legally do so in 21 more states.