What Chief Justice Roberts Forgot in His First Term: Judicial Modesty


By ADAM COHEN
Published: July 9, 2006
At the confirmation hearings for John Roberts, there were two theories about what kind of a chief justice he would be. His critics maintained that he was an extreme conservative whose politics would drive his legal rulings. Judge Roberts, on the other hand, insisted that he was "not an ideologue," and that his judicial philosophy was to be "modest," which he defined as recognizing that judges should "decide the cases before them" and not try to legislate or "execute the laws."

Judicial modesty is an intriguing idea, with appeal across the political spectrum. For all the talk of liberal activist judges, anyone who is paying attention knows that conservative judges are every bit as activist as liberal ones; they just act for different reasons. A truly modest chief justice could be more deferential to the decisions of the democratically elected branches of government, both liberal and conservative, and perhaps even usher in a new, post-ideological era on the court.

That is not, however, how Chief Justice Roberts voted in his first term. He was modest in some cases, certainly, but generally ones in which criminal defendants, Democrats and other parties conservatives dislike were asking for something. When real estate developers, wealthy campaign contributors and other powerful parties wanted help, he was more inclined to support judicial action, even if it meant trampling on Congress and the states.

The term's major environmental ruling was a striking case in point. A developer sued when the Army Corps of Engineers denied him a permit to build on what it determined to be protected wetlands. The corps is under the Defense Department, ultimately part of an elected branch, and it was interpreting the Clean Water Act, passed by the other elected branch. Courts are supposed to give an enormous amount of deference to agencies' interpretations of the statutes they are charged with enforcing.

But Chief Justice Roberts did not defer. He joined a stridently anti-environmentalist opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia that sided with the developer and mocked the corps's interpretation of the law — an interpretation four justices agreed with — as "beyond parody." The opinion also complained that the corps's approach was too costly. Justice John Paul Stevens dryly noted that whether benefits outweighed costs was a policy question that "should not be answered by appointed judges."

In an opinion on assisted suicide, Chief Justice Roberts was again a conservative activist. The case involved Attorney General John Ashcroft's attempt to invoke an irrelevant federal statute to block Oregon's assisted suicide law, which the state's voters had adopted by referendum. Even though it meant overruling the voters, intruding on state sovereignty and mangling the words of a federal statute, Chief Justice Roberts dissented to support Mr. Ashcroft's position.

Chief Justice Roberts voted against another democratically enacted, progressive law when the court struck down Vermont's strict limits on campaign contributions. He joined an opinion that not only held that the law violated the First Amendment, but also engaged in the kind of fine judicial line-drawing — in this case, about the precise dollar limits the Constitution allows states to impose — that is often considered a hallmark of judicial activism.

One of the court's most nakedly activist undertakings in recent years is the series of hoops it has forced Congress to jump through when it passes laws that apply to the states. Judge John Noonan Jr., a federal appeals court judge appointed by President Ronald Reagan, has complained that the justices have set themselves up as the overseers of Congress. But Chief Justice Roberts voted to put up yet another hoop, requiring Congress to put the states on "clear notice" — whatever that means — before requiring them to pay for expert witnesses in lawsuits involving special education. It is a made-up rule that shows little respect for the people's representatives.

These cases make Chief Justice Roberts seem like a raging judicial activist. But in cases where conservative actions were being challenged, he was quite the opposite. When a whistle-blower in the Los Angeles district attorney's office claimed he was demoted for speaking out, Chief Justice Roberts could find no First Amendment injury. When Democrats challenged Republicans' partisan gerrymandering of Texas's Congressional districts, he could find no basis for interceding.

The Roberts court's first term was not radically conservative, but only because Justice Anthony Kennedy, the swing justice, steered it on a centrist path. If Chief Justice Roberts — who voted with Justice Scalia a remarkable 88 percent of the time in nonunanimous cases — had commanded a majority, it would have been an ideologically driven court that was both highly conservative and just about as activist as it needed to be to get the results it wanted.

Chief Justice Roberts still probably views himself as judicially modest, and in some ways he may be. He has been reasonably respectful of precedent, notably when he provided a fifth vote to uphold Buckley v. Valeo, a critically important campaign finance decision that is under attack from the right. He has also been inclined to decide cases narrowly, rather than to issue sweeping judicial pronouncements. But at his confirmation hearings, he defined judicial modesty as not usurping the legislative and executive roles.

His approach to his new job is no doubt still evolving, which could be a good thing. The respect for the elected branches that he invoked while testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee is hardly a perfect judicial philosophy, especially today, when we need the court to resist the president's dangerous view of his own power. Still, that principled approach would do more for the court and the nation than the predictable arch-conservatism the chief justice's opinions have shown so far.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/09/opinion/09sun3.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin

Good gracious, F6, those are some crazy pictures. This administration will do everything possible to silence the press prior to the November elections, then do their best to steal the election.

I'll say it again: Bush is the WORST president in our country's history. Anybody that disagees (all the zits (where is that turkey and his three-legged stool??) and roosters of the country), tell me a worse two-term president!!! We will be feeling the impact of his administration for decades to come.

Hey Sluggo, thanks for the articles from the NY Times. I miss reading them since they started charging for admission.

Mexico's election lesson to U.S.
The country's democracy looks messy on the outside, but its transparent system could teach us a few things.
By Robert A. Pastor

Note:My Dime: My Bolds

ROBERT A. PASTOR is a professor at American University in Washington and director of its Center for Democracy and Election Management. He is also director of the Jimmy Carter-James Baker Commission on

July 8, 2006

IN 1986, I OBSERVED an election in Mexico's northern state of Chihuahua and learned almost everything I would ever need to know about election fraud. Last week, I observed elections again in Mexico, but this time, I concluded that the United States and the world could learn much from Mexico about how to conduct and judge a free and fair election.

This might come as a shock. After all, the election looked messy from the outside. It took four days before Mexico's Federal Election Institute, or IFE, announced a winner — Felipe Calderon, the leader of the conservative National Action Party — by the slimmest of margins (0.58%, or about 244,000 votes out of 41 million). Calderon did not bother to wait for the announcement to proclaim his triumph, and his main rival, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador of the leftist Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD, also announced victory and quickly challenged the IFE's conclusion.

Close elections are always dangerous. Even in long-standing democracies like the U.S., a close election (like in 2000) often leaves the losing party resentful and angry. In new democracies, political suspicions often collide with administrative incapacity during close elections, leading to unrest or violence.

It is too soon to know whether Mexico will avoid these pitfalls. But its chances of doing so are greater because, in the last decade, it has constructed some of the most sophisticated electoral institutions and procedures in the democratic world. I compared the electoral systems of North America, and the good news is that the U.S. came in third. The bad news is that there are only three countries in North America.

It is hard for most Americans to accept that Mexico has overtaken us in electoral administration, but let me count the ways. First, U.S. elections mostly are run by partisan secretaries of state or local officials — not by the federal government. Mexico has a nonpartisan, fully autonomous national election commission — the IFE — whose members must be approved by two-thirds of the legislature. The IFE meetings are open to the political parties but not run by them. On election day, the IFE tracked problems and responded instantly. The IFE is one of Mexico's most respected institutions.

Second, only one U.S. state allows international observers. The IFE opens all of Mexico to international observers and facilitates access to all stages of the process.

Third, the U.S. has great difficulty recruiting and training election officials. The IFE has 13,000 full-time officials and a professional election service of 2,400. It treats election administration as a civic obligation like jury duty, and in 2006, it randomly selected 7.2 million citizens for training. Of those, it chose the best 913,000 citizens to conduct elections at 130,500 polling stations.

Fourth, U.S. voter registration lists are organized poorly by counties or states with very different ID requirements. Mexico, by contrast, has registered 95% of its citizens, and it audits and updates the list at least every year. Mexico has multiple safeguards to ensure that citizens vote only once, including a list with the photos of all citizens, indelible ink on voters' thumbs and a state-of-the-art, biometric ID card.

Fifth, massive private funding continues to taint U.S. campaigns. In Mexico, political parties receive most of their funds from the government and get free access to the media. The IFE monitors and regulates campaign contributions and expenditures.

Sixth, in the last elections, the U.S. was distracted by inaccurate, media-run exit polls. The IFE allowed 32 exit polls and party counts, but the IFE's "quick count" was announced by 11 p.m. on election day, and it was the most accurate (a margin of error of 0.3%). The IFE's announcement after the quick count that the race was too close to call gave stability for the full count to proceed, and the preliminary results came out one day later.

Finally, the U.S. judicial system is not trained for election disputes. The U.S. Supreme Court ultimately precluded a recount in the 2000 presidential election because it judged that there was not enough time before the Electoral College was supposed to vote. Mexico, meanwhile, created a specialized electoral court, or TRIFE, and has allowed two months to hear and resolve all the electoral challenges, still leaving three more months before inauguration.

Mexico's electoral system is hardly perfect. Out-of-state voters faced long lines last week and too few ballots at "special polling stations." There were errors in the local counts. Lopez Obrador has raised issues that must be addressed fully and fairly by the TRIFE for his party to be persuaded that the vote wasn't stolen, and that may require a complete recount. On Thursday, the IFE's very competent president announced who had the most votes, but only the TRIFE can certify who is president, and its final deadline is Sept. 6.

Mexico has traveled a great distance toward democracy, but some politicians still think the election should be decided in favor of whoever can bring the most supporters into the streets or that it should be determined by a closed-door political bargain. The question now is whether Mexico will follow its old habits or its new electoral institutions.

Meanwhile, in the United States, the question is whether we will remain satisfied with our partisan, unprofessional system, driven by private contributions and that does not even permit observers, or whether we are prepared to learn from our neighbor.

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-oe-pastor8jul08,1,3595788,print.story

Sluggo, this administration is gearing up for an election. They can't play 'orange alert' without people getting wise this time around so they will be busting every two bit wanna be to put the fear of God in the voting public. Gay marriage, immigration, terrorists......here they come. And those psuedo KKK roosters in white feathers will bite.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA...........................rOOSTER lOVES hIS rUSH...............................bow down, Rooster, bow down!!!!!

Rooster, I notice we have taken that CRIMINAL Limbaugh back into the country, instead of sending his 'bitch' ass off to Venezuela where he belongs...or maybe Gitmo where there is nothing more than some Frat pranks goin' on down there...

Nowadays, caring about the low wages of the poor seems so...quaint. So dreamy and bleeding heart. We have things to do that are so much more important, so much more noble, like ending the estate tax.

Working for a Pittance
By BOB HERBERT
Published: July 3, 2006

"We can no longer stand by and regularly give ourselves a pay increase while denying a minimum wage increase to the hardworking men and women across this nation."
,Hillary Rodham Clinton, to her fellow senators.

The federal minimum wage, currently $5.15 an hour, was last raised in 1997. Since then, its purchasing power has deteriorated by 20 percent. Analysts at the Economic Policy Institute and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities jointly crunched the numbers and determined that, after adjusting for inflation, the value of the minimum wage is at its lowest level since 1955.

For those who don't remember, Eisenhower was president in 1955, the Dodgers were still in Brooklyn, and Barack Obama hadn't even been born.

If you're making the minimum wage, you're hurting. If Congress and the president don't raise the minimum wage by Dec. 2, it will have remained unchanged for the longest stretch since it was established in 1938. (The longest period previously was from January 1981 to April 1990, a span that saw the entire Reagan administration come and go.)

Senate Republicans recently blocked a Democratic bill, sponsored by Senator Edward Kennedy, that would have raised the minimum wage to $7.25 an hour over the next two years. Jared Bernstein, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, noted that while Republicans in Congress are standing like a stone wall against this modest increase in the poverty-level wage, "they are working as hard as they can to repeal the estate tax."

"That," he said, "is just vicious class warfare."

The most important pay increases for most members of Congress are their own, and they are diligent in that regard. Senator Clinton, in a floor speech supporting the minimum-wage hike, said, "During the past nine years, we've raised our own pay by $31,600."

Mrs. Clinton has introduced a bill that, in addition to raising the minimum wage to $7.25, would link Congressional pay raises to hikes in the minimum wage. Under the bill, the minimum wage would be increased automatically by the same percentage as any increase in Congressional pay.

Polls have shown that Americans overwhelmingly favor an increase in the minimum wage. But the low-income workers who would benefit from such an increase are not part of the natural G.O.P. constituency. Thus, the stonewall.

A separate study by the Economic Policy Institute found that in 2005, with the pay of top corporate executives up sharply, and with the minimum wage falling further and further behind inflation, "an average chief executive officer was paid 821 times as much as a minimum wage earner."

That C.E.O., according to the study, "earns more before lunchtime on the very first day of work in the year than a minimum wage worker earns all year."

The reality, said Senator Clinton, "is that a full time job that pays the minimum wage just doesn't provide enough money to support a family today. We have to acknowledge that fact and do something about it. As a country, we cannot accept that a single mother with two children who works 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year earns $10,700 a year — let me say this again: $10,700 a year. That is almost $6,000 below the federal poverty line for a family of three."

During the 1950's and 60's, the minimum wage was roughly 50 percent of the average wage of nonsupervisory workers. It has now fallen to 31 percent, less than a third, of that average.

As the Economic Policy Institute and the Center on Budget pointed out in their study: "Each year that Congress fails to raise the wage floor, its purchasing power erodes. The fact that the minimum wage has remained the same for nearly nine years means that its real value has declined considerably over that period. As inflation has accelerated recently due to higher energy costs, the real value of the minimum wage has fallen faster."

There is no justification, none, for condemning the nation's lowest-paid workers to this continuing slide into ever deeper economic distress. "No one who works for a living should have to live in poverty," said Senator Kennedy.

It's very telling that in the most prosperous nation in the world, that kind of comment actually sounds radical. We have a very long way to go.

Message Received
In the exceptional life and excruciating loss of Pat Tillman, the freedom can be in the details
Bill Dwyre

July 4, 2006

SAN JOSE — It is a day of barbecues and water-skiing, a day when our Fourth of July independence is medium rare and glassy smooth.

That's why Pat Tillman went to Afghanistan.

His life was nicely marinated and mostly free of ripples. His freedom was a given, his future and that of his family unthreatened — until two planes flew into the World Trade Center and another into the Pentagon. The rest of us gasped and fretted. Tillman acted.

The story is not new. Nor is it any less amazing. He was an honor student and star football player from San Jose who went to Arizona State and became an honor student and star football player. He went on to become a star defensive back with the Arizona Cardinals in the NFL. Then he left it all, including a multimillion-dollar contract, saying that members of his family had traditionally served in the military, that his grandfather had been at Pearl Harbor, "and I really haven't done a damn thing."

We liked him before that. The long hair that flowed from under his helmet set him apart, but not any more than his disdain for showy, material things or for shallow questions from sportswriters. Those questions were greeted by a raised eyebrow and a slight frown that meant he thought they lacked substance, something he never did.

It has been two years, two months and 12 days since he died in Afghanistan. We grill our meat, ride our skis, sit on our beaches and assume that there will always be another Pat Tillman, another shield. The military, as embattled and besieged as it is today, is full of heroes to be celebrated on this day of patriotism. We have civilian heroes in every phase of life, putting out fires and standing in crosswalks so 6-year-olds can pass safely.

But there was only one Pat Tillman, and the world of sports, which generates more swaggering pretend heroes per capita than perhaps any other phase of American life, may never see another like him. Tillman didn't swagger and would have hated being called a hero.

Alex Garwood is Tillman's brother-in-law. His wife, Christine, is the sister of Tillman's widow, Marie. Garwood is also the executive director of the Pat Tillman Foundation, which exists, according to the foundation's website, "to carry forward Pat's legacy by inspiring and supporting young people striving to promote positive change in themselves and the world around them." Garwood says the foundation programs are going well because of "the power of Pat." To the foundation, and Tillman's friends and family, that is a given, not a motto.

"He had it, whatever it was," Garwood says. "He was the kind of man who walked into a room and everybody noticed. People wanted to be close to it, to rub up against it and hope some rubbed off."

Garwood says he never thinks of Tillman in uniform, either football or military.

"I think of him as my friend, sitting with me, having iced tea and talking. He was the best listener I knew."

And the least full of himself.

"When Pat was with the Cardinals," Garwood says, "people he'd run into would ask him what he did? He would tell them he worked in Arizona."

Garwood and Tillman were hiking alongside a river near Sedona, Ariz., five or six years ago when Tillman suggested they walk the middle of the shallow river, rock to rock, without getting their shoes wet.

"We ended up going a mile, maybe more," Garwood recalls. "I was soaked. He never got a drop on his shoes. The amazing thing wasn't just his athleticism, but watching his mind work as he figured out each next step and how best to do it."

When they finished, Tillman climbed a cliff about two stories high and, to get back down, leaped from the top of the cliff to a tree, 10 feet away, and calmly climbed down.

"The rest of us have trepidation," Garwood says.

It is possible that, on that April 22, 2004, in Afghanistan, even Pat Tillman had trepidation. He died a horrible death, at the hands of his fellow Army Rangers, who apparently were confused and frightened and fired at what they thought was the enemy, rather than somebody they had idolized, somebody they'd watched hand out $5 bills to youngsters in the dusty poor towns of Afghanistan, somebody who'd bought and brewed special coffee blends for them so they could have the best.

Tillman's platoon was split, one part ending up firing on the other, Tillman's group in the hills. Not far from the group doing the firing was Tillman's brother, Kevin, who didn't learn that his brother had died until nearly an hour later.

It took a month before the Tillman family was told the truth, although they're still not sure they have it all. Their son had not died from enemy fire, but friendly fire. The military calls that "fratricide."

It has taken several years for journalists, especially those from the San Francisco Chronicle, the Washington Post, CNN and The Times' David Zucchino, to unearth and report the stunning details of what happened and how the truth was stonewalled and turned into a mockery by the U.S. military.

On Dec. 6, 2004, Zucchino wrote: "Pat Tillman died in the dark, between two black boulders, halfway up a canyon wall, just below the mud farmhouse of Zamir Jan. To Jan, Tillman was just another American stranger. But to millions of people a world away, who watched Tillman give up a lucrative professional football contract to fight for his country, his death was an American tragedy."

Last May 29, CNN.com reported the testimony of the unnamed soldier who had been standing next to Tillman when the shooting began.

"Tillman and I were yelling, 'Stop! Stop! Friendlies! Friendlies! Cease Fire!' But they couldn't hear us."

(Tillman threw a smoke grenade to signal that they were Rangers, and for a few moments, it appeared to work.)

"We thought the battle was over, so we were relieved, getting up and stretching out and talking with one another, when I heard some 5.56 rounds coming from the vehicle. They started firing again. That's when I hit the deck and started praying."

(But Tillman didn't get down in time. He was hit, reportedly taking shrapnel in the wrist and body armor.)

"I know this because I could hear the pain in his voice as he called out: 'Cease fire! Friendlies! I am Pat … Tillman, damn it.' He said this over and over again until he stopped."

(Moments later, a sound caught the attention of the soldier next to Tillman.)

"I heard what sounded like water pouring down. I then looked over at my side to see a river of blood coming down from where he was. I had blood all over my shoulder from him and when I looked at him, I saw his head was gone."

For a while, Garwood's garage here in San Jose was packed with memorial gifts from people all over the country. There is at least one item from each of the 50 states.

There are military medals, even others' Purple Hearts. There are flags, some from Camp Tillman in Afghanistan, named after he died. There are teddy bears, photos of babies named after him, trophies from youth football teams that dedicated their season to him and sent along the symbols of their success, combat boots, even a football signed by a group of prison inmates who vowed, in the name of Pat Tillman, to be better people.

Garwood has it all in storage now, respecting each item but, more than two years later, not quite certain what to do with it. He remains, it appears, with the rest of the Tillman family, in a limbo of anger, grief, resolve and numbness.

For the rest of us, we have the terrible details, which bring us disgust. We also have a clear picture of the man, which brings us undying admiration, and perhaps some closure.

Some of us also have the independence to write about this in whatever way we wish. For which we thank, among so many heroes, Pat Tillman.

*

http://www.latimes.com/sports/la-sp-dwyre4jul04,1,3235560,print.column?coll=la-utilities-sports

WWFFD? Who cares?
Let's stop fussing about what America's founders thought, and let our minds run free.
By Mark Kurlansky
MARK KURLANSKY is the author of many books, including, most recently, "The Big Oyster: History On a Half Shell."

(My Dime: My Bold!!)

July 4, 2006

SOMEONE HAS TO SAY IT or we are never going to get out of this rut: I am sick and tired of the founding fathers and all their intents.

The real American question of our times is how our country in a little over 200 years sank from the great hope to the most backward democracy in the West. The U.S. offers the worst healthcare program, one of the worst public school systems and the worst benefits for workers. The margin between rich and poor has been growing precipitously while it has been decreasing in Europe. Among the great democracies, we use military might less cautiously, show less respect for international law and are the stumbling block in international environmental cooperation. Few informed people look to the United States anymore for progressive ideas.

We ought to do something. Instead, we keep worrying about the vision of a bunch of sexist, slave-owning 18th century white men in wigs and breeches. Even in the 18th century, the founding fathers were not the most enlightened thinkers available. They were the ones whose ideas prevailed. Those who favored independence but were not in favor of war are not called founding fathers. John Dickinson of Pennsylvania — with whom John Adams bitterly fought in the Constitutional Congress of 1776 because Dickinson did not believe it was necessary to engage in bloody warfare in order to achieve independence — is not a founding father. You could speak out against slavery and still be a founding father, as long as you did not insist on its abolition, as many did who aren't in the pantheon.

The Constitution produced by the founding fathers lacked the enlightenment of some of the colonial charters of several generations earlier, most notably the laws of Pennsylvania that barred slavery, refused to raise militias and insisted on fair-minded treaties with Indians. Benjamin Franklin despised these "Quaker laws" of his colony and even published a pamphlet denouncing the Pennsylvania Assembly for not sending young men to fight the French and Indians.

To be honest, the U.S. was never as good as it was supposed to be. Perhaps no nation is. Henry David Thoreau wrote of nations, "The historian strives in vain to make them memorable." Even in the first few decades, most Europeans who came to see the great new experiment were disappointed. Writer after writer, from British novelist Charles Dickens to the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville, arrived to discover less than they imagined. Tocqueville observed of American character: "They unceasingly harass you to extort praise and if you resist their entreaties, they fall to praising themselves."

Fanny Trollope, the English writer, made a similar observation in 1832: "A slight word indicative of doubt, that any thing, or every thing, in that country is not the very best in the world, produces an effect which must be seen and felt to be understood." I have no doubt the response to this article will show an America still unwilling to be criticized. But it is difficult for a society that accepts no criticism to progress.

Slavery was the most celebrated flaw of the founding fathers, but they also set the stage for the genocide of about 10 million American Indians and did not even entirely reject colonialism. They believed that it was wrong to tax colonists who did not have representation in the legislature, but the tax, not the lack of representation, was the grievance. They were affluent men of property, and they hated paying taxes. Ironically, they repeatedly used words like "enslavement" and "slavery" to criticize taxes while at the same time accepting real slavery.

The founding fathers were all men of the establishment who wanted what Robespierre sneeringly called, when his own French Revolution was accused of excess, "a revolution without a revolution." John Steinbeck noted that the American Revolution was different from that of France's or Russia's because the so-called revolutionaries "did not want a new form of government; they wanted the same kind, only run by themselves."

Yet it is only with anti-establishment thinkers that a society progresses. The reason that there is always more disillusionment with Democrats than Republicans is that Democrats raise the expectation of being anti-establishment when, in reality, both parties are committed to maintaining the status quo and the "intent of the founding fathers."

But the founding fathers, unlike the Americans of today, understood their own shortcomings. Thomas Jefferson warned against a slavish worship of their work, which he referred to as "sanctimonious reverence" for the Constitution. Jefferson believed in the ability of humans to grow wiser, of humankind to make progress, and he believed that the Constitution should be rewritten in every generation.

"Laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind," Jefferson wrote in 1816. "As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstance, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors."

It is surprising that these words are not more often quoted in Washington because they are literally carved in stone — on a wall of the Jefferson Memorial to be exact.

So let us stop worshiping the founding fathers and allow our minds to progress and try to build a nation of great new ideas. That is, after all, the intent of the founding fathers.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-kurlansky4jul04,0,7859110,print.story?coll=la-n....

WWFFD?
America's founders had strong views on illegal immigration, preemptive war and executive power.
By Richard Brookhiser
RICHARD BROOKHISER is the author of "What Would the Founders Do: Our Questions, Their Answers."

July 4, 2006

IF SUPERMAN CAN return to help us, why can't America's founders? It's true, Superman is alive and the founders are not. On the other hand, Superman is fictional, whereas Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Hamilton and the rest were flesh-and-blood politicians, dealing with problems surprisingly similar to our own and establishing the laws and institutions we still use to confront those problems.

Illegal immigration, for example, is a red-hot issue today, but the first immigration debates go back more than 200 years. In 1798, Congress passed and President John Adams signed the Alien Act, a law allowing the president to deport dangerous aliens on his own say-so, without trial. The stimulus was an influx of refugees from Ireland and France — countries undergoing political turmoil that many founders feared would be brought to the U.S. by the new immigrants. Rep. Harrison Gray Otis of Massachusetts, for example, warned in Congress of "hordes of wild Irishmen" coming here "to disturb our tranquillity."

Thomas Jefferson, who intended to replace Adams as president, opposed the Alien Act on the grounds that it gave the executive too much power. But Jefferson's position also appealed to ethnic and immigrant voters in America, including, in addition to wild Irishmen, the German Americans in Pennsylvania and New York City. Jefferson's success with these voters was one reason he won the election of 1800.

In other words, key elements of our debate were already in place: fear that immigration would be a political and cultural problem versus confidence that it was no problem at all, especially if immigrants voted the right way. The founders were split on the question, as politicians are today.

The founders were unfamiliar with ICBMs and atom bombs and the threats they posed. But at least one of them contemplated preemptive war. In 1803, President Jefferson bought the Louisiana Territory from France for $15 million. His old enemy, Alexander Hamilton, congratulated him on the acquisition but added that Jefferson should have simply taken it. "Sound policy unquestionably demanded of us … to seize the object at once" — then we could have dickered over the price.

Hamilton was so bellicose because France was ruled by Napoleon, a known aggressor; indeed, the French had already made trouble for Americans trying to ship produce down the Mississippi and out of New Orleans. In Hamilton's view, there were hostile actions short of war that justified hostile responses. An Army veteran who came from a broken home, he expected the world to be dangerous.

In the Federalist Papers, Hamilton had asked: "Is it not time to awake from the deceitful dream of a golden age" and realize that we do not live in "the happy empire of perfect wisdom and perfect virtue?" He would have been willing to strike first to defend the United States.

Today, Rep. William J. Jefferson (D-La.) has been in hot water since he was found cooling $90,000 in cash in his freezer, allegedly from shady deals. When the FBI raided Jefferson's congressional office in May looking for related information, Speaker J. Dennis Hastert and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi condemned the search as a violation of the separation of powers.

The founders would have known that it was no such thing. The Constitution protects congressmen from prosecution while Congress is in session, so they can be free to meet and discuss, but it also allows them to be arrested for treason, felony and breach of the peace. These protections — and these exceptions to protections — apply to their offices and papers.

How would the founders have reacted to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential hopes?

Feminism as we know it was over their horizon. Yet there were engaged women who talked politics at the highest level, and not just political wives such as Abigail Adams or Dolley Madison. When Benjamin Franklin said the Constitutional Convention had produced "a republic, if you can keep it," he was speaking to the plugged-in Philadelphia hostess Eliza Powell, the Pamela Harriman of her day.

In New Jersey in 1776, ordinary women had even more political clout: They could vote. This women's suffrage, the first in America and, so far as I know, the modern world, was the result of an inadvertence — the framers of New Jersey's first state constitution used the word "inhabitants" rather than "freemen" to describe voters. It was not complete: Because there was a property qualification, married women (whose husbands owned all their property) were out of luck. But widows and single heiresses could, and did, qualify. The "petticoat vote," as it was called, lasted until 1807, when women were made scapegoats for a spectacularly corrupt local election and purged from the rolls. New Jersey politics did not improve even so.

John Adams would have another thought on Sen. Clinton, one that also would apply to George W. Bush, Al Gore and hordes of Kennedys. Aristocracy, he wrote Jefferson when they were old men, rested on "five pillars": birth, wealth, beauty, genius and virtue. Clinton certainly has a genius for hard work, and that may be a virtue. But she wouldn't be senator, much less a presidential candidate, if she were Hillary Rodham. The same thing could be said (and was) of John Adams' son, the sixth president, John Quincy Adams.

America is a vastly different country from the one the founders knew. It has cars, computers and good teeth; it has no slaves. In defense of their own relevance, the founders would tell us that human passions — for power, fame, money, sex — remain the same. The founders were obsessed with designing systems that would put those passions to good use, or at least moderate their bad effects. We might no longer agree with all of their solutions, but we can never escape their problems.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-brookhiser4jul04,0,2339132,print.story?coll=la-...

Injured in Iraq, a Soldier Reclaims His Independence
A roadside bomb irrevocably changed Bryan Anderson's life. He lost three limbs but refuses to lose his spirit of optimism and self-sufficiency.
By David Zucchino
Times Staff Writer

(My Dime: Check out this link http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-070506wounded_part4-fl,0,3526613.flash?coll=la-hom... )

July 4, 2006

Bryan Anderson emerged from an elevator in the airport terminal here, a diminished figure in a wheelchair. Both legs were gone, and most of his left arm — all severed when a roadside bomb hidden in a curb demolished the Humvee he was driving in Baghdad last fall.

Anderson was never a big man — 5 feet 6, 125 pounds. Now he was down to 80 pounds, spare and wiry, as he rolled through the terminal in late May to begin a 10-day visit with the soldiers who were with him the day his life changed irrevocably.

Those men — who dragged him from the Humvee and stopped his bleeding Oct. 23 — would see more than a fragile young man in a wheelchair. They would see a stubborn survivor who had transformed their lives, and his own, in a way none of them could have imagined.

The young military policeman who had been confined to a hospital bed when he arrived on Ward 57, the amputee ward at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., was now — seven months later — able to travel alone on a commercial flight.

He had been eager for the soldiers to see him walk off the plane but had injured the stump of his leg getting out of a car. So he was stuck in his wheelchair, feeling frustrated and marginalized.

As he rolled through a terminal exit, Anderson stopped suddenly. He strapped on his metal legs and struggled to his feet. He stood straight up, grimacing but triumphant, a cigarette dangling from his lips, as his friends rushed to embrace him.

"Hurt like hell," he said later. "But I had to show them I could do it."

A daily drumbeat of news reports tracks anonymous American soldiers and Marines wounded by improvised explosive devices in Iraq. Of the 18,700 troops wounded in the war, 57% have been hit by IEDs. On Oct. 23, the soldier injured in downtown Baghdad happened to be Bryan Thomas Anderson, a cheerful kid from suburban Chicago with a mother named Janet, a stepfather named Jim and a twin brother named Bobby.

Spc. Michael Wait was in a Humvee ahead of Anderson's when the bomb exploded. In a side mirror, he saw Anderson's Humvee crumple and burn as it careened into a curb.

Wait, a trained combat lifesaver, ran to the wreck but forgot his medical bag and weapon. He had to run back for them. "I kind of lost my mind, because I knew they were hit bad," he recalled.

Three soldiers escaped the Humvee, two of them wounded. Anderson was trapped inside the burning vehicle. He was stunned and in pain, choking on smoke. He remembers screaming: "I need air!"

Wait used an extraction tool to pry off the heavy Humvee door. He heard Anderson scream: "Help me!"

What Wait saw took his breath away: "I saw his legs were gone and his hand was missing and all the blood under the radio mount, and I said, 'Oh, my God.' "

Wait and another soldier dragged Anderson out. The fresh air seemed to revive him. Anderson remembers a calm and solitary thought: "My life is really going to change now." Wait applied tourniquets to both leg stumps, struggling to close off the femoral arteries. Another soldier tied a tourniquet around Anderson's left arm.

Later, surgeons at Baghdad's Combat Support Hospital said the tourniquets were the most effective they'd seen. Anderson would have bled to death in minutes without them, they said.

"He had three, almost four, arteries wide open, and he didn't go into shock," Wait said. "So I know God was there."

A medevac helicopter flew Anderson to the hospital a few miles away. Wait drove there and saw Anderson's shrunken, bloodied form pierced with medical tubes. He broke down and cried.

Sgt. Kevin Murray arrived with one of Anderson's severed legs, but surgeons told him reattaching the limb was impossible.



Anderson, 25, is among 432 Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans who have undergone amputations. Seventy-three have lost two limbs. Anderson is the fourth to lose three.

With faster and better medical care, and improved body armor, soldiers who would have died in previous wars are surviving. More than 8,500 have been wounded so grievously that most of them will never return to duty, and the amputation rate in Iraq is nearly double that of previous wars.

In January, in the cafeteria at Walter Reed, Anderson was barely able to hold a can of Dr. Pepper in his injured right hand, bracing it against the stump of his left arm. His stepfather, Jim Waswo, made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and fed it to him. Waswo also had to help Anderson with the toilet and the shower.

But Anderson already was getting around on his own, negotiating crowded hospital corridors in his motorized wheelchair.

He spent mornings with Capt. Jon Verdoni, an occupational therapist, operating a computer program designed to train him to use residual muscles in his left upper arm to manipulate a prosthesis. Connected to sensors, he flexed the muscles to move a car icon through road barriers on a computer screen.

"Relax. Extend. Open. Flex. Close — good," Verdoni said.

Anderson visualized opening and closing an imaginary hand.

"I pretend that my hand is still there," he said. "I squeeze to close my hand and think about actually closing it. My muscle contracts, and it'll actually close the hand."

In a few months, Verdoni predicted, Anderson would be bilateral — able to use both hands for everyday tasks.

Anderson was also learning to walk. One day in early January, he eased himself for the first time onto a pair of short prosthetic legs known as "stubbies," training legs to prepare him for the full-length microprocessor-controlled legs.

There were scabs and scar tissue on Anderson's stumps, still sore and tender from the amputations. He wobbled as a prosthesis specialist, Michael Corcoran, helped him stand. Anderson muttered something.

"Don't get discouraged, Bryan," his stepfather said.

"I'm not," Anderson said. "I just don't know how to help him help me."

He struggled to balance on the stubbies, which raised him to the height of a grade-schooler. He took a step and grimaced in pain. He was unsteady, but still standing.

Corcoran was impressed. "To be up and standing in just six weeks — it's remarkable," he said.

Since then, Anderson has undergone punishing physical and occupational therapy six hours a day, five days a week, pushing himself beyond his pain threshold. From the moment he found himself confined to a hospital bed, he said, he was determined to use his arms and legs again — even if they weren't the ones he was born with.

His therapists say some amputees take weeks to overcome shock and depression before starting physical recovery. A few never recover. But Anderson's recovery began at once, they said, and progressed rapidly because of his relentless optimism and capacity for pain. He did not complain, for instance, when 3 more inches were cut from his left arm so that his prosthesis fit properly.

"They think it's amazing, but I think it's just me being me," Anderson said during a therapy break. "I came in here and saw all these soldiers who had been amputated and they're all recovering, and I thought, wow, I'll be able to do that too. Later in life you're not going to even be able to tell I have prosthetics."

Anderson, who says he's had about 20 surgeries, blames no one for his misfortune: "Sometimes I'm like, 'Man, why did this have to happen to me?' But then I'm like, 'Well, I'm alive, you know? I am alive.' "

He did not see his friends Murray and Wait again until late January, at a Ft. Hood ceremony upon the unit's return from Iraq. Anderson flew in with his parents and arrived in his wheelchair, in full uniform.

When he spotted Wait, Anderson pushed his wheelchair through a crowd to reach him. Anderson had received a Purple Heart from a commander, he told Wait, but it meant nothing to him unless the man who saved his life pinned it to his uniform.

Wait found himself crying again as he pinned the medal on his friend.



Anderson's mother, Janet Waswo, a credit union loan officer, and her husband, Jim, a carpenter, took leaves from their jobs to live with their son at Walter Reed. Janet tried to let him do as much as possible for himself in the cramped two-bed quarters the family shared.

At first, they were sustained by what Janet calls "an adrenaline rush" when they learned their son had survived despite devastating injuries. That euphoria quickly faded, she said.

"Now it's, 'Oh my gosh, this is the rest of our lives. It's changed everything. It's big,' " she said. "He's going to need special care for the rest of his life."

She was certain of one thing: "He's not going to sit in a wheelchair the rest of his life, I'll tell you that."

Anderson's family and friends held a fundraiser to build a handicappedaccessible home for him near his parents in Rolling Meadows, Ill., raising $150,000, said his aunt, Carol Schar. The Waswo home is being modified as a temporary residence for Anderson, who is determined to complete his rehabilitation at Walter Reed by Christmas.

Jim Waswo joked with his stepson during therapy, trying to relax him. The focus of his life now, Waswo said, was helping Anderson keep his spirits up and become self-sufficient. "This isn't a sprint," he said. "It's a marathon."

The war in Iraq will be with the family forever, he said. He understands why American troops have to be in Iraq, but it pained him to be reminded, every day in Ward 57, of the price paid by his stepson and other amputees.

"I'm bitter, yeah," Waswo said. "But there's no time to be bitter or angry. I have to put all that aside and focus on Bryan."

Anderson does not dwell on what happened in Iraq. That was his previous life, he said. "Regardless if you have legs or not, you've got to be happy," Anderson said. "That's what life is all about — being happy."

At some point, he intends to work again, perhaps at American Airlines, where he was employed as a ground crew chief. He said the airline offered him a job training new employees.

Even if he had not been wounded, Anderson said, he would not have stayed in the Army when his enlistment expires in September.

"I hated it," he said. "It just wasn't for me…. I've seen vans with seven people in them with their legs just hanging off, body parts everywhere. And I don't need to see that anymore."



On most days, Anderson is optimistic and energetic. But he has slipped into depression a few times. After a bad week in January, he and his mother flew to Las Vegas for a brief vacation to cheer him up.

By early spring, he was comfortable with his prostheses, able to walk for considerable distances. He had mastered his prosthetic left hand. He cooks his own meals, takes showers on his own, lights his own cigarettes.

In April, he went skiing and rock climbing in Colorado, using a bucket-like device clamped to skis and a special rock-climbing harness. His hands bled from climbing and his prosthetic arm fell off at one point, he said, "but I did it, and that's what counts."

By late May, he was back at his unit's base at Ft. Hood, ready to continue the reclamation of his life.

The men of the 411th Military Police Company had known Anderson as high-spirited, energetic and driven. They were not surprised, from the moment he strapped on his legs at the airport, to see that he was still that same man.

"He's actually more upbeat now than he was before," said Sgt. Kenny Olson, 24, who helped rescue Anderson and was one of two other soldiers wounded in the attack.

During the soldiers' reunion in May, there were no regrets, no sorrow, no pity — just a celebration of Anderson's new life. The veterans razzed and teased one another. They guzzled beer, swapped stories and wolfed down cheeseburgers.

They took Anderson tubing on a lake, lifting him in and out of the tube. He drove a Jet Ski, supported by a friend sitting behind him. He played catch with a baseball for the first time since losing his limbs.

"I want to do everything I used to do," Anderson said, sunburned and sweating from a half-hour spin on the Jet Ski. He wore a T-shirt printed with the word "Stumpy." For his girlfriend, who would arrive the following week, he had brought a T-shirt that read "I'm With Stumpy."

When a fellow soldier complained that he could no longer raise his arm above his shoulder because of a bullet wound suffered in Iraq, Anderson shrugged. He raised both arms over his head — his good right arm and his prosthetic left arm.

The soldier laughed so hard he spit out his beer.

When an officer sought help lifting a barbecue grill by yelling, "Somebody give me a hand," Anderson silently waved his prosthetic left hand. His buddies loved it.

Murray, 22, the sergeant who recovered Anderson's leg inside the crushed Humvee, found comfort in watching his friend.

Wait, 23, the soldier who saved Anderson's life, said Anderson's Humvee was in Wait's usual spot in the convoy that day. "I feel it should've been me, and I don't think I could've handled it," Wait said. "I would've given up."

The first night of the reunion set the tone for the visit. Anderson was sipping on a beer, sitting stage-side in the VIP section as the guest of country singer Tracy Lawrence at a concert outside Ft. Hood. His fellow soldiers had arranged it, including renting a special handicapped-accessible van that Anderson had learned to drive.

They helped themselves to Lawrence's private stash of iced beer. The soldiers surrounded Anderson, whooping and hollering as huge speakers blasted Lawrence's down-home, patriotic elegies.

Anderson sat with carbon fiber amputee sockets exposed on each thigh. On one socket he had inscribed an epithet regarding the war in Iraq, on the other, "Freedom Isn't Free." On his right wrist he wore a bracelet his friends had given him, inscribed with the names of three unit soldiers killed in action.

Anderson drank and smoked, handling the bottles and cigarettes with his good right hand and a left hand prosthesis equipped with a hook-like grasping device. (He also has a lifelike, computerized "myoelectric" prosthesis modeled on the left hand of his twin brother; it matches Anderson's skin tone and includes hairs from his own right arm.)

His friends, eager for Anderson to assert his independence, were careful not to be overly solicitous. They fetched his beer, pushed his wheelchair over rough ground, and steadied it so that he could swing himself into a car seat or onto a sofa. But otherwise, they let him fend for himself.

At the concert, Anderson savored his time with his fellow soldiers. He had forgotten how much he missed being with them, he said. Murray promised that they'd be friends forever, living on the same street someday, telling war stories.

Between songs, Lawrence introduced Anderson to the crowd, thanking him for "the ultimate sacrifice." He dedicated a song to Anderson titled "If I Don't Make It Back," about a soldier killed in Iraq.

"It's probably going make you cry, Bryan," Lawrence said.

Anderson didn't cry, not even when strangers reached across a barricade to hug him and kiss him and thank him. When taps was sounded and the Stars and Stripes was illuminated by a yellow spotlight in the black Texas night, he appeared on the verge of tears, but he did not weep.

He saluted with his good right hand and cradled a beer with his new left hand. When taps was over, he raised his beer and let out a whoop, just another soldier-survivor back from Iraq, letting loose with his battle buddies.

hmmm...can I get a second chance at that question???

Why Hillary Ought To Be Watching Joe
From my ""Capital Games" column at www.thenation.com....

Here's something that Hillary Clinton should care about: Senator Joe Lieberman today announced that if he is defeated in the August 8 Democratic Party primary he will run as an independent to seek his Senate seat.

Why should HRC care? Lieberman is being challenged in Connecticut by Ned Lamont, an antiwar multimillionaire Democrat whose campaign is based almost entirely on his complaint that Lieberman has been a cheerleader for George W. Bush's war in Iraq. While Lieberman is ahead in the polls, Lamont has narrowed the gap to the point that it is conceivable that Lamont could topple the incumbent. But, as Lieberman said on Monday, that will not keep him out of the race, for he will start to collect the 7500 signatures he needs to run as an independent. Lieberman had to make that decision now; the filing deadline for independent candidates is the day after the Democratic primary. Lieberman could not wait to see what happened in the primary before preparing to run as an independent.

Is this a sign that Lieberman fears he will lose? Maybe not. But is a sign that Lieberman is not willing to risk losing. And he will have to bear a political cost for crafting this two-track strategy. Lieberman's announcement will probably not help him among Democratic primary voters. He is essentially saying that if the party choses someone else to be its senatorial nominee, he will work to defeat that candidate. That's not showing much party loyalty--and it's possible some Democrats in the Nutmeg State will take exception to his threat.

But back to Hillary. This primary race is--or should be--important to her and other Democrats because it shows how the war can split the party. And that could become the dominant theme of the 2008 race for the Democratic presidential nomination. If the war in Iraq remains a mess a year-and-a-half from now, the Democratic presidential primary will be all about what to do in Iraq. Many Democratic primary voters will be looking for an antiwar, pro-withdrawal candidate (Senator Russ Feingold?) and reluctant to vote for any candidate who has supported the war and stood by it (as has Hillary Clinton). Clinton will certainly have the deepest pockets of any of the candidates--and money usually beats all else (though that didn't work for Howard Dean in 2004). But if Hillary Clinton is on the wrong side of the war (as far as most Democratic primary voters are concerned), the race will be a bitter and divisive one.

Clinton has not cozied up to Bush the way Lieberman has on the war. She has tried to have it both ways by criticizing the execution of the war but not the mission. Such nuance--or hedging--may get her through the nomination process. But, then again, it might not--if there are enough Democrats PO'ed about the war and her support for it. So the junior senator from New York will be paying close attention to what happens next door in Connecticut. The outcome of this contest may be as important for the future of the Democratic Party as any race in November.

http://www.davidcorn.com/

So tell me, Goldman, what second chances do you see???

Justice Kennedy Makes the Calls on Roberts Supreme Court
By David G. Savage
Times Staff Writer

July 2, 2006

WASHINGTON — John G. Roberts Jr. may be the new chief justice, but the Supreme Court is not truly the Roberts court, at least not yet.

In the most divisive cases before the court in the term that just ended, it was Justice Anthony M. Kennedy who determined the outcome every time. In unpredictable fashion, he sided some of the time with the court's conservative bloc and some of the time with its liberals.

His influence was dramatically displayed Thursday, when the court announced that it had struck down President Bush's specially created military tribunals for suspected terrorists.

As Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas read their dissenting opinions in court that day, Roberts and Samuel A. Alito Jr., Bush's other new appointee, could do no more than listen in agreement.

It was 86-year-old John Paul Stevens, the court's last World War II veteran, who read the 5-3 majority opinion. He solemnly declared that the president was "bound to comply with the rule of law" and that he could not ignore congressional mandates and long-standing U.S military rules.

He paused to note that Kennedy, seated next to him, had joined most of his opinion, creating a majority. Liberals hailed the result, and conservatives lamented it.

While the issue before the court was the balance of power in government, the drama showed how little the balance of power within the high court itself had changed. Even when Roberts and Alito side with fellow conservatives Scalia and Thomas, they need a fifth vote to prevail.

For the last decade, Justices Kennedy and Sandra Day O'Connor, both Ronald Reagan appointees, had supplied the votes that decided the court's major cases. They usually joined with the conservatives on issues of crime, the death penalty, civil rights and states' rights, but with the liberals on abortion, gay rights and school prayer.

Now, with O'Connor in retirement, Kennedy stands alone at the center.

He voted with the conservatives more often than not, but joined the liberals in several major rulings. In one closely watched environmental case, Kennedy wrote a separate, solo opinion that was decisive.

On the issue of military tribunals, Kennedy made it clear that he shared the liberals' concern about unchecked presidential power.

The Constitution created "a system where the single power of the executive is checked," he wrote. Even in a national emergency, he said, "the Constitution is best preserved by a reliance on standards tested over time and insulated from the pressure of the moment."

This does not mean that suspected terrorists cannot be tried in military tribunals, Kennedy said — but that Congress should first debate the issue and pass a law.

Kennedy is hardly in the camp of the liberals. Just the day before, he spoke for a five-member majority that upheld the mid-decade redistricting plan engineered by former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay for Texas' seats in the U.S. House of Representatives.

The four liberals, led by Stevens, say "partisan gerrymandering" is unconstitutional. The conservatives, led by Scalia, counter that politics inevitably plays a role in the drawing of electoral districts and that there is no fair way to decide how much politics is too much.

Kennedy came down in between. He says that he finds partisan gerrymandering troubling, but that the Texas plan was not so extreme as to be unconstitutional.

Before 2003, he pointed out, the Democrats had drawn electoral districts that gave them a slim majority of seats in Congress at a time when nearly 60% of Texans were voting Republican. Measured against that map, DeLay's plan "can be seen as fairer," Kennedy said.

Developers and property-rights activists hoped a more conservative court, bolstered by Roberts and Alito, would sharply limit the Army Corps of Engineers' control over hundreds of millions of acres of wetlands. Environmentalists feared the same.

Scalia wrote an opinion to do just that, and he was joined by Roberts, Thomas and Alito. He said federal environmental protection extended only to wetlands that were part of a continuously flowing stream. This would exclude many wetlands in the middle part of the nation and nearly all of those in West, where streams are dry for much of the year.

But in this case, Kennedy refused to go along. Instead, he wrote in a separate opinion that wetlands could be protected as long as environmentalists could show that filling them or draining them would affect downstream waters.

Earlier this year, Kennedy and O'Connor thwarted the Bush administration's move to void the nation's only "right to die" law. Oregon's voters had twice approved a measure that allowed dying people to obtain a dose of lethal medication from their doctors.

Bush's first attorney general, John Ashcroft, reinterpreted the federal drug control law and said it empowered him to strip Oregon's doctors of their right to prescribe medication.

In January, Kennedy, speaking for the court, overturned Ashcroft's order. The administration's position, he said, would "delegate to a single executive officer the power to effect a radical shift of authority from the states to the federal government to define general standards of medical practice in every locality."

Had Kennedy agreed with Roberts, Scalia and Thomas to support Ashcroft's view, the court would have split 4-4 and could have held the case until the next month, when Alito took O'Connor's seat. Then a 5-4 majority could have ruled in the administration's favor.

Kennedy, who turns 70 this month, joined the court after a tumultuous confirmation battle. In 1987, Reagan's first nominee, Robert H. Bork, was defeated in the Senate. His second, Douglas H. Ginsburg, withdrew after reports that he had smoked marijuana regularly as a law professor.

Kennedy, a Sacramento native with a reputation as a straight arrow, was nominated next and won unanimous confirmation in the Senate.

At first, he looked to be a reliable conservative, voting regularly with then-Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist. But in 1992, he split with the conservatives and voted with O'Connor to uphold the right to abortion and to maintain the strict ban on school-sponsored prayers.

Since then, many on the right have portrayed him as a traitor. Their ire grew in recent years when Kennedy voted to strike down the death penalty for defendants who are mentally retarded or younger than 18 at the time of the crime.

He also wrote the court's two major rulings in favor of gay rights. In one, he said gay and lesbian couples deserved respect and dignity, not condemnation by law. Scalia denounced his opinion as the first step toward same-sex marriage.

Despite the fiery exchanges over social issues, Kennedy has some conservative views that could loom large in the years ahead. For example, he has voted regularly against affirmative action, arguing that the government should not rely on race in making decisions. In the fall, the court will consider a challenge to voluntary school integration programs, and Kennedy could create a majority for the conservative bloc.

Last year, he voted to uphold the display of the Ten Commandments on public property. O'Connor joined a 5-4 majority to strike down such displays. Now, with Alito having replaced her, the court, with Kennedy, appears to have a majority to uphold religious displays.

The abortion issue also appears to turn on Kennedy's vote. Though he agreed in 1992 to maintain the legal right of women to choose abortion, he also said states had considerable authority to regulate it.

Six years ago, he disagreed with O'Connor when the court struck down a Nebraska law that banned intact dilation and extraction, which opponents call "partial-birth abortion." Kennedy called the practice "abhorrent" and similar to infanticide.

Congress then passed a federal ban on this form of abortion. It was struck down by federal courts relying on the Nebraska ruling.

This fall, the Supreme Court will take up an appeal. Kennedy, as usual, will probably hold the deciding vote.



Major decisions this session

Key Supreme Court decisions in the just-concluded 2005-2006 session, and how the justices voted:

War on terrorism

President Bush overstepped his authority when he set up special military courts to try Al Qaeda suspects without the approval of Congress, the court said in Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld. These tribunals at Guantanamo Bay lack basic standards of fairness, the 5-3 majority said.

Justice John Paul Stevens wrote the opinion and was joined by Anthony M. Kennedy, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer. Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. dissented. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. did not participate because he had ruled on the case when it was before the U.S. appeals court.

End of life

Doctors in Oregon may prescribe lethal medication for people who are terminally ill and near death, the court said in Gonzales vs. Oregon. The 6-3 ruling upheld the nation's only "right to die" law and rejected a Bush administration order that would have stripped doctors of their license to prescribe drugs.

Kennedy wrote the opinion, joined by Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, O'Connor and Breyer. Scalia, Thomas and Roberts dissented.

Wetlands

Federal environmental regulators may protect most wetlands from development if they can show that these swampy areas have some impact on the nation's rivers and lakes. The split ruling in Rapanos vs. U.S. rejected a move by property rights advocates to sharply cut back on environmental protection.

Kennedy wrote the key concurring opinion, and Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg and Breyer sided with the government. Scalia, Roberts, Thomas and Alito would have limited the protection for wetlands.

Redistricting

State lawmakers have broad power to redraw the lines of electoral districts to benefit the party in power, the court said. The five-member majority rejected a charge of "partisan gerrymandering" lodged against the Texas Republicans and former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay for a mid-decade change that gave the GOP six additional seats in Congress.

Kennedy wrote the opinion in League of United Latin American Citizens vs. Perry, and Roberts, Scalia, Thomas and Alito agreed with him.

Campaign funding

The government may not cap how much candidates spend for their campaigns, and contribution limits are illegal if they are too low, the court said in striking down a novel Vermont law. The 6-3 ruling was a defeat for liberal reformers who wanted to lessen the impact of money in politics.

Breyer wrote the opinion in Randall vs. Sorrell, and Roberts, Alito, Scalia, Kennedy and Thomas agreed with him.

Whistle-blowers

Public employees do not have a free-speech right to complain about serious wrongdoing in the workplace, the court said in Garcetti vs. Ceballos. The 1st Amendment protects employees when they speak out in public as citizens, but not for internal matters, the court said in its 5-4 ruling.

Kennedy wrote for the majority, which included Roberts, Scalia, Thomas and Alito. Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg and Breyer dissented.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-scotus2jul02,0,2005651,print.story?coll=la-home...

GOP Aims to Use a War to Win an Election Battle
Republicans are once again making the fight against terrorism a campaign cornerstone. So far, Democrats have not been as engaging.
By Doyle McManus and Peter Wallsten
Times Staff Writers

July 2, 2006

WASHINGTON — President Bush says Democrats want to "wave the white flag of surrender" in Iraq. Vice President Dick Cheney accuses the opposition party's leaders of "defeatism" in the global war on terrorism. And House Republican leader John A. Boehner of Ohio charges Democrats who applauded last week's Supreme Court ruling on detainees with advocating "special privileges for terrorists."

Ever since the Sept. 11 attacks, Republicans have made an uncompromising stance against terrorism a cornerstone of their campaigns. It helped the GOP to take control of the Senate in 2002 and Bush to win reelection in 2004.

Now, in the face of increasing violence in Iraq and eroding public support for the war at home, Republicans are turning again to the theme of toughness — with gloves off.

The environment is not entirely hospitable. A car bomb killed scores of people in a busy Baghdad market Saturday, a day after the Army announced that American soldiers were accused of raping an Iraqi woman and then killing her and three family members. Polls find most voters say they want to see Democrats take control of Congress this fall.

But Republicans believe toughness still sells.

"Foreign policy looked like a minus for Republicans this year," GOP pollster Frank Luntz said, "but it's turning into a plus…. The public doesn't endorse the Republican policy, but they actually reject the Democratic alternative…. By comparison, the Republicans do well."

Republican strategists hailed last week's Supreme Court ruling on detainees at the Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba, which held that Bush had overstepped his powers by refusing some legal protections for alleged terrorists.

"The Supreme Court ruling on Guantanamo was a real blessing in disguise," said Whit Ayres, another GOP pollster. It "allows us to have a debate on whether terrorists should receive the same legal protections as American military personnel…. It's hard to see Republicans losing when that's the debate."

Democratic leaders say, at least in public, that they are confident they can win that debate.

But the Democrats' response so far has been less unified, less pointed and less memorable than the Republicans' attacks.

"The Democratic leadership has not been very good at this," said George P. Lakoff, a linguistics professor at UC Berkeley who has advised some Democrats on ways to sharpen their message. "They're still debating whether you should say as little as possible and hope the Republicans fail, or stand up for what you believe."

Last week's Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll found that 54% of voters said they wanted to see Democrats capture control of Congress this fall, whereas 34% favored Republican control. Voters said they thought Democrats would do a better job than Republicans on issues including the economy, immigration and Iraq. The one exception was national security and terrorism: 39% of registered voters said Republicans would do a better job; 30% favored Democrats.

The poll also found that Bush's approval rating on his handling of the war on terrorism had improved markedly since April — a swing at least partly attributable to signs of progress in Iraq, including the death of Abu Musab Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq.

The Republicans' new offensive on national security was launched last month by the White House, which encouraged Republican leaders in Congress to press for a debate on Iraq.

As the debate approached, Bush embarked on a surprise, made-for-TV mission to Baghdad. On the same day, the president's top strategist, Karl Rove, accused Democrats of wanting to "cut and run" from Iraq.

In a June speech to New Hampshire Republicans, Rove charged that Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) and Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.), who have proposed a timetable for U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, were "ready to give the green light to go to war, but when it gets tough, and when it gets difficult, they fall back on that party's old pattern of cutting and running," according to the Union Leader newspaper.

The next day, Bush signaled that Republicans would paint the Democrats as pushing a plan that would "embolden" terrorists.

"What's going to matter [in the 2006 elections] is who has got the plan that will enable us to succeed in Iraq," he said.

At a fundraising event last week for Sen. Jim Talent (R-Mo.), Bush said: "There's a group in the opposition party who are willing to retreat before the mission is done. They're willing to wave the white flag of surrender. And if they succeed, the United States will be worse off, and the world will be worse off."

And after Thursday's Supreme Court decision on Guantanamo, House Majority Leader Boehner went a step further, accusing his Democratic counterparts of giving Al Qaeda "a show of support" by praising the court ruling.

A statement released by Boehner's office was headlined, "Capitol Hill Democrats Advocate Special Privileges for Terrorists." It noted that House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) had applauded the court's ruling that alleged terrorists were entitled to "the basic guarantees of our justice system." The statement also said that Al Qaeda was "surely pleased at the show of support from Capitol Hill Democrats."

Some Republican strategists think Boehner may have gone too far.

"That's too extreme," Luntz said. "What you don't want to do in this debate [is] go over the top."

A spokesman for Boehner, Kevin Smith, said that the majority leader stood by his statement and that it fit into the GOP's campaign plan.

"Nancy Pelosi's statement was weak and sympathetic to the rights of terrorists," Smith said.

Pelosi spokesman Brendan Daly replied: "Republicans are resorting to their tired tactics of distort, distract and divide. Instead of actually doing something to protect our nation, such as implementing the 9/11 commission recommendations or hiring more border control agents, they are doing what that always do: trying to incite fear and attack Democrats. It won't work."

Pelosi said in her statement that the Supreme Court ruling provided "a reminder of our responsibility to protect both the American people and our constitutional rights. We cannot allow the values on which our country was founded to become a casualty in the war on terrorism."

So far, issues of national security and terrorism haven't turned up much in races for the House, where Democrats are hoping to erase the Republicans' 15-seat majority.

"House races aren't about national security," said Carl Forti, a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee, which is coordinating GOP House campaigns.

"House races are about pocketbook issues."

But national security is already a theme in several close Senate races, including the contest in Missouri, where Bush campaigned last week.

Talent, the Republican incumbent, faces a tough challenge from Democratic State Auditor Claire McCaskill. Talent has been a strong supporter of Bush's policy in Iraq. McCaskill, a moderate, did not endorse either of two Democratic proposals on a withdrawal from Iraq that came before the Senate last month, leading Talent's campaign to accuse her of being "wishy-washy."

In Virginia, Republican Sen. George Allen — who is exploring the possibility of running for president — is facing furious attacks on his national security credentials from Democratic nominee James H. Webb Jr., a Vietnam veteran who served as secretary of the Navy in the Reagan administration before leaving the Republican Party.

Allen has accused Kerry and other Democrats of being "weak in the knees."

Webb said he did not endorse Kerry's position.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-assess2jul02,0,3194486,print.story?coll=la-home...

Perhaps we could play rock-paper-scissors

By Molly Ivins
Creators Syndicate

AUSTIN - Y'all, this isn't gonna work.

North Korea is threatening to launch a long-range missile against us, and we're threatening to reply with an anti-missile missile.

Sorry to remind you, but our "missile defense system" does not work. Good old Star Wars flopped again when tested in 2004 -- in fact, it failed to launch. Since then, several tests have been delayed or cancelled because of technical problems. Just because we spend $130 billion on a bad idea doesn't mean we can ever get it to work. The latest Bush budget has $10.7 billion for Star Wars -- almost twice as much as Homeland Security is spending on customs and border patrol.

The good news is that the North Koreans' rocket doesn't work, either. The last time they fired a long-range missile, it went 1,300 kilometers (807 miles) and could not put a payload into orbit.

The Korean missile supposedly was tanked up and ready to go more than a week ago, but (oops) experts now say if that were true, it would have been fired by now because the fuel is highly unstable.

If you think the "military standoff" with North Korea sounds silly, wait'll you hear about the diplomatic maneuvering. As you may recall, the United States refused to have bilateral talks with North Korea on the grounds that (A.) Kim Jong Il is a nut case and (B.) we were already committed to multilateral talks including South Korea and China.

This kerfuffle went on for quite some time, but so did the six-party talks. Last year, the North Koreans agreed to abandon their nuclear program in return for a security guarantee and economic aid -- but in the meantime, it has come to doubt U.S. sincerity on these pledges. Hard to see how that could happen with such delicate diplomatic players as Dick Cheney and John Bolton at work.

Whenever I need a good laugh, I just think of Bolton's current title: "Ambassador John Bolton" -- ha-ha-ha. Even better, "Ambassador to the United Nations." While there, he has been making Dale Carnegie proud (How to Win Friends and Influence People). Bolton's latest U.N. trick was to pitch a wall-eyed fit over some mild (and justified) criticism by a Brit. Good thing the Brits are our closest allies, at least for now.

I don't mind leaving our relations with the Brits to "Ambassador John Bolton," but do we think it's a good idea to have him in charge of our relations with the nut case who has a missile with unstable fuel? Then again, we might as well leave it to Bolton; William Perry, former secretary of defense, a Democrat, thinks we should pre-emptively strike their missile while it's on the launch pad. Better than trying to hit it in midair, of course.

Republican Richard Lugar, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has called for direct talks with the North Koreans on the issue, which sounds a lot saner.

As the American Progress Action Fund points out, the real problem is that the Bush administration has no policy on North Korea:

"For five years, the Bush administration has been paralyzed over North Korea. Hardliners such as Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense [Donald] Rumsfeld and U.N. Ambassador Bolton have rejected serious engagement in favor of a confrontational approach that has backfired. Over that time, North Korea has withdrawn from the Non-Proliferation Treaty, reprocessed fissionable material, increased its nuclear arsenal and is now on the verge of starting missile testing."

Boy, that policy worked out well.

http://www.dfw.com/mld/startelegram/news/columnists/molly_ivins/14947103.htm?template=contentModules...

The '06 Stakes Just Got Raised
By Robert Parry
June 30, 2006


The narrow margin of the U.S. Supreme Court’s rebuke to George W. Bush on military tribunals highlights the stakes on the table for the November 2006 congressional elections – nothing short of the survival of a meaningful constitutional system in the United States.

The majority opinion, which stopped Bush from proceeding with a kangaroo court that stripped Guantanamo Bay detainees of basic legal protections and mocked the Geneva Conventions, carried a profound secondary message – that the Court was not prepared to endorse Bush’s vision of his “war powers” as limitless and beyond challenge.

But it was equally noteworthy that only five of the nine justices believed that the rule of law and constitutional limits on Bush’s powers should prevail. Four justices – Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and John Roberts – have made clear that they are prepared to rubber-stamp any judgment that Bush makes.

In dissenting opinions on the tribunal case, Scalia, Thomas and Alito embraced legal arguments that bowed before Bush’s imperial presidency. Chief Justice Roberts would surely have joined them, except that he had already ruled in Bush’s favor in the case while sitting on the U.S. Appeals Court and thus was forced to recuse himself.

The one-vote fragility of the Supreme Court’s embrace of constitutional principles over one-man rule was further underscored by the fact that the landmark ruling was written by Justice John Paul Stevens, a decorated World War II veteran who is now 86. Another justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, is known to have battled health problems.

It is a strong possibility that if the Republicans retain control of the U.S. Congress in the November 2006 elections, Bush will get to fill at least one more Supreme Court vacancy with the likes of Scalia, Thomas, Alito and Roberts. Then, the court’s majority will flip in the opposite direction, granting Bush the authoritarian powers he so covets.

Even now, the court balance is being maintained by the swing vote of Republican Anthony Kennedy, the author of the infamous Bush v. Gore decision in December 2000 that prevented a full counting of votes in Florida and handed Bush the presidency.

But, at least in the near term, the Court’s ruling means that Bush will be forced to negotiate with Congress over creating new standards for the tribunals that will try some of the 450 detainees now held by the United States at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Rebuffing Bush

In that ruling on June 29, the Supreme Court majority rejected Bush’s long-held contention that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to detainees in the “war on terror.” The justices also repudiated Bush’s tribunal rules that allowed a defendant to be excluded from his own trial and permitted hearsay evidence, unsworn testimony and evidence secured through coercive means.

“The Executive is bound to comply with the rule of law that prevails in this jurisdiction,” Stevens wrote in the majority opinion.

“The Court’s conclusion ultimately rests upon a single ground,” added Justice Stephen Breyer. “Congress has not issued the Executive a blank check.”

Implicitly the Court’s slim majority was saying, too, that the Constitution does not countenance the notion that the President as Commander in Chief can assert “plenary” – or unlimited – powers indefinitely, any way he sees fit.

Since the 9/11 terror attacks, Bush has maintained that he possesses virtually all the legal power of the U.S. government; that he can decide which laws will be enforced and which ones ignored; that he can take the nation to war without congressional consent; that he can order torture and assassination; and that he gets to parcel out constitutional protections to Americans, overriding such guarantees as the habeas corpus right to a fair trial and the Fourth Amendment ban on unreasonable searches and seizures.

By asserting that the “war on terror” exists everywhere, Bush has claimed powers that know no bounds and no boundaries, reaching from the farthest corners of the earth to the corner of Main Street and Elm.

In effect, Bush has negated the fundamental American concept of “unalienable rights,” heralded by the Declaration of Independence and enshrined in the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

Today, under Bush’s legal theories, Americans have rights only at his forbearance. Bush’s vision of his unlimited powers also would obliterate the constitutional “checks and balances” by subordinating the Legislature and Judiciary to the Executive.

Bush implemented these radical changes to the American political system by combining what his legal advisers call the “plenary” powers of the Commander in Chief with the concept of a “unitary executive” in control of all laws and regulations.

One of the legal theorists who developed these concepts of an all-powerful Executive was Samuel Alito, who became Bush’s second appointee to the Supreme Court, after Chief Justice Roberts.

Rights As ‘History’

Yet, maybe because Bush’s assertion of power has been so extraordinary, almost no one has dared connect the dots. After a 230-year run, the “unalienable rights” – as enunciated by Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and the other Founders – were history.

The Justice Department spelled out Bush’s rationale for his powers on Jan. 19, 2006, in a 42-page legal analysis defending Bush’s right to wiretap Americans without a warrant.

Bush’s lawyers said the congressional authorization to use force against the perpetrators of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks “places the President at the zenith of his powers” and lets him use that authority domestically as well as overseas. [NYT, Jan. 20, 2006]

According to the analysis, the “zenith of his powers” allows Bush to override both the requirements of the Fourth Amendment, which protects against searches and seizures without court orders, and the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which created a special secret court to approve spying warrants inside the United States.

In its legal analysis, the Justice Department added, “The President has made clear that he will exercise all authority available to him, consistent with the Constitution, to protect the people of the United States.”

While the phrase “consistent with the Constitution” sounded reassuring to many Americans, what it meant in this case was that Bush believes he has unlimited powers as Commander in Chief to do whatever he deems necessary in the “war on terror.”

Yet, since the “war on terror” is a vague concept – unlike other wars fought by the United States – there also is no expectation that Bush’s usurpation of traditional American freedoms is just a short-term necessity. Instead it is a framework for future governance.

It was this historic and unprecedented assertion of presidential power that was the real backdrop for the Supreme Court’s ruling in the case of Guantanamo detainee Salim Ahmed Hamdan, who was accused of conspiracy because of his alleged work as a driver for al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

In demanding reasonable legal safeguards for Hamdan and other Guantanamo detainees, the Supreme Court majority also was declaring that Bush’s powers are not without limit. The Court was asserting that other human beings who share the planet with Bush have rights, too.

Election 2006, however, may well decide whether the future of the United States will be as a nation of laws with citizens who continue to possess “unalienable rights” – or whether Bush becomes a modern-day king and all other Americans become his subjects.

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2006/063006.html

THE HIDDEN POWER
The legal mind behind the White House’s war on terror.
by JANE MAYER
Issue of 2006-07-03
Posted 2006-06-26


On December 18th, Colin Powell, the former Secretary of State, joined other prominent Washington figures at FedEx Field, the Redskins’ stadium, in a skybox belonging to the team’s owner. During the game, between the Redskins and the Dallas Cowboys, Powell spoke of a recent report in the Times which revealed that President Bush, in his pursuit of terrorists, had secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on American citizens without first obtaining a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, as required by federal law. This requirement, which was instituted by Congress in 1978, after the Watergate scandal, was designed to protect civil liberties and curb abuses of executive power, such as Nixon’s secret monitoring of political opponents and the F.B.I.’s eavesdropping on Martin Luther King, Jr. Nixon had claimed that as President he had the “inherent authority” to spy on people his Administration deemed enemies, such as the anti-Vietnam War activist Daniel Ellsberg. Both Nixon and the institution of the Presidency had paid a high price for this assumption. But, according to the Times, since 2002 the legal checks that Congress constructed to insure that no President would repeat Nixon’s actions had been secretly ignored.

According to someone who knows Powell, his comment about the article was terse. “It’s Addington,” he said. “He doesn’t care about the Constitution.” Powell was referring to David S. Addington, Vice-President Cheney’s chief of staff and his longtime principal legal adviser. Powell’s office says that he does not recall making the statement. But his former top aide, Lawrence Wilkerson, confirms that he and Powell shared this opinion of Addington.

Most Americans, even those who follow politics closely, have probably never heard of Addington. But current and former Administration officials say that he has played a central role in shaping the Administration’s legal strategy for the war on terror. Known as the New Paradigm, this strategy rests on a reading of the Constitution that few legal scholars share—namely, that the President, as Commander-in-Chief, has the authority to disregard virtually all previously known legal boundaries, if national security demands it. Under this framework, statutes prohibiting torture, secret detention, and warrantless surveillance have been set aside. A former high-ranking Administration lawyer who worked extensively on national-security issues said that the Administration’s legal positions were, to a remarkable degree, “all Addington.” Another lawyer, Richard L. Shiffrin, who until 2003 was the Pentagon’s deputy general counsel for intelligence, said that Addington was “an unopposable force.”

The overarching intent of the New Paradigm, which was put in place after the attacks of September 11th, was to allow the Pentagon to bring terrorists to justice as swiftly as possible. Criminal courts and military courts, with their exacting standards of evidence and emphasis on protecting defendants’ rights, were deemed too cumbersome. Instead, the President authorized a system of detention and interrogation that operated outside the international standards for the treatment of prisoners of war established by the 1949 Geneva Conventions. Terror suspects would be tried in a system of military commissions, in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, devised by the executive branch. The Administration designated these suspects not as criminals or as prisoners of war but as “illegal enemy combatants,” whose treatment would be ultimately decided by the President. By emphasizing interrogation over due process, the government intended to preëmpt future attacks before they materialized. In November, 2001, Cheney said of the military commissions, “We think it guarantees that we’ll have the kind of treatment of these individuals that we believe they deserve.”

Yet, almost five years later, this improvised military model, which Addington was instrumental in creating, has achieved very limited results. Not a single terror suspect has been tried before a military commission. Only ten of the more than seven hundred men who have been imprisoned at Guantánamo have been formally charged with any wrongdoing. Earlier this month, three detainees committed suicide in the camp. Germany and Denmark, along with the European Union and the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, have called for the prison to be closed, accusing the United States of violating internationally accepted standards for humane treatment and due process. The New Paradigm has also come under serious challenge from the judicial branch. Two years ago, in Rasul v. Bush, the Supreme Court ruled against the Administration’s contention that the Guantánamo prisoners were beyond the reach of the U.S. court system and could not challenge their detention. And this week the Court is expected to deliver a decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, a case that questions the legality of the military commissions.

For years, Addington has carried a copy of the U.S. Constitution in his pocket; taped onto the back are photocopies of extra statutes that detail the legal procedures for Presidential succession in times of national emergency. Many constitutional experts, however, question his interpretation of the document, especially his views on Presidential power. Scott Horton, a professor at Columbia Law School, and the head of the New York Bar Association’s International Law committee, said that Addington and a small group of Administration lawyers who share his views had attempted to “overturn two centuries of jurisprudence defining the limits of the executive branch. They’ve made war a matter of dictatorial power.” The historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who defined Nixon as the extreme example of Presidential overreaching in his book “The Imperial Presidency” (1973), said he believes that Bush “is more grandiose than Nixon.” As for the Administration’s legal defense of torture, which Addington played a central role in formulating, Schlesinger said, “No position taken has done more damage to the American reputation in the world—ever.”

Bruce Fein, a Republican legal activist, who voted for Bush in both Presidential elections, and who served as associate deputy attorney general in the Reagan Justice Department, said that Addington and other Presidential legal advisers had “staked out powers that are a universe beyond any other Administration. This President has made claims that are really quite alarming. He’s said that there are no restraints on his ability, as he sees it, to collect intelligence, to open mail, to commit torture, and to use electronic surveillance. If you used the President’s reasoning, you could shut down Congress for leaking too much. His war powers allow him to declare anyone an illegal combatant. All the world’s a battlefield—according to this view, he could kill someone in Lafayette Park if he wants! It’s got the sense of Louis XIV: ‘I am the State.’ ” Richard A. Epstein, a prominent libertarian law professor at the University of Chicago, said, “The President doesn’t have the power of a king, or even that of state governors. He’s subject to the laws of Congress! The Administration’s lawyers are nuts on this issue.” He warned of an impending “constitutional crisis,” because “their talk of the inherent power of the Presidency seems to be saying that the courts can’t stop them, and neither can Congress.”

The former high-ranking lawyer for the Administration, who worked closely with Addington, and who shares his political conservatism, said that, in the aftermath of September 11th, “Addington was more like Cheney’s agent than like a lawyer. A lawyer sometimes says no.” He noted, “Addington never said, ‘There is a line you can’t cross.’ ” Although the lawyer supported the President, he felt that his Administration had been led astray. “George W. Bush has been damaged by incredibly bad legal advice,” he said.



David Addington is a tall, bespectacled man of forty-nine, who has a thickening middle, a thatch of gray hair, and a trim gray beard, which gives him the look of a sea captain. He is extremely private; he keeps the door of his office locked at all times, colleagues say, because of the national-security documents in his files. He has left almost no public paper trail, and he does not speak to the press or allow photographs to be taken for news stories. (He declined repeated requests to be interviewed for this article.)

In many ways, his influence in Washington defies conventional patterns. Addington doesn’t serve the President directly. He has never run for elected office. Although he has been a government lawyer for his entire career, he has never worked in the Justice Department. He is a hawk on defense issues, but he has never served in the military.

There are various plausible explanations for Addington’s power, including the force of his intellect and his personality, and his closeness to Cheney, whose political views he clearly shares. Addington has been an ally of Cheney’s since the nineteen-eighties, and has been referred to as “Cheney’s Cheney,” or, less charitably, as “Cheney’s hit man.” Addington’s talent for bureaucratic infighting is such that some of his supporters tend to invoke, with admiration, metaphors involving knives. Juleanna Glover Weiss, Cheney’s former press secretary, said, “David is efficient, discreet, loyal, sublimely brilliant, and, as anyone who works with him knows, someone who, in a knife fight, you want covering your back.” Bradford Berenson, a former White House lawyer, said, “He’s powerful because people know he speaks for the Vice-President, and because he’s an extremely smart, creative, and aggressive public official. Some engage in bureaucratic infighting using slaps. Some use knives. David falls into the latter category. You could make the argument that there are some costs. It introduces a little fear into the policymaking process. Views might be more candidly expressed without that fear. But David is like the Marines. No better friend—no worse enemy.” People who have sparred with him agree. “He’s utterly ruthless,” Lawrence Wilkerson said. A former top national-security lawyer said, “He takes a political litmus test of everyone. If you’re not sufficiently ideological, he would cut the ground out from under you.”

Another reason for Addington’s singular role after September 11th is that he offered legal certitude at a moment of great political and legal confusion, in an Administration in which neither the President, the Vice-President, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of State, nor the national-security adviser was a lawyer. (In the Clinton Administration, all these posts, except for the Vice-Presidency, were held by lawyers at some point.) Neither the Attorney General, John Ashcroft, nor the White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales, had anything like Addington’s familiarity with national-security law. Moreover, Ashcroft’s relations with the White House were strained, and he was left out of the inner circle that decided the most radical legal strategies in the war on terror. Gonzales had more influence, because of his longtime ties to the President, but, as an Administration lawyer put it, “he was an empty suit. He was weak. And he doesn’t know shit about the Geneva Conventions.” Participants in meetings in the White House counsel’s office, in the days immediately after September 11th, have described Gonzales sitting in a wingback chair, asking questions, while Addington sat directly across from him and held forth. “Gonzales would call the meetings,” the former high-ranking lawyer recalled. “But Addington was always the force in the room.” Bruce Fein said that the Bush legal team was strikingly unsophisticated. “There is no one of legal stature, certainly no one like Bork, or Scalia, or Elliot Richardson, or Archibald Cox,” he said. “It’s frightening. No one knows the Constitution—certainly not Cheney.”

Conventional wisdom holds that September 11th changed everything, including the thinking of Cheney and Addington. Brent Scowcroft, the former national-security adviser, has said of Cheney that he barely recognizes the reasonable politician he knew in the past. But a close look at the twenty-year collaboration between Cheney and Addington suggests that in fact their ideology has not changed much. It seems clear that Addington was able to promote vast executive powers after September 11th in part because he and Cheney had been laying the political groundwork for years. “This preceded 9/11,” Fein, who has known both men professionally for decades, said. “I’m not saying that warrantless surveillance did. But the idea of reducing Congress to a cipher was already in play. It was Cheney and Addington’s political agenda.”

Addington’s admirers see him as a selfless patriot, a workaholic defender of a purist interpretation of Presidential power—the necessary answer to threatening times. In 1983, Steve Berry, a Republican lawyer and lobbyist in Washington, hired Addington to work with him as the legislative counsel to the House Intelligence Committee; he has been a career patron and close friend ever since. He said, “I know him well, and I know that if there’s a threat he will do everything in his power, within the law, to protect the United States.” Berry added that Addington is acutely aware of the legal tensions between liberty and security. “We fought ourselves every day about it,” he recalled. But, he said, they concluded that a “strong national security and defense” was the first priority, and that “without a strong defense, there’s not much expectation or hope of having other freedoms.” He said that there is no better defender of the country than Addington: “I’ve got a lot of respect for the guy. He’s probably the foremost expert on intelligence and national-security law in the nation right now.” Berry has a daughter who works in New York City, and he said that when he thinks of her safety he appreciates the efforts that Addington has made to strengthen the country’s security. He said, “For Dave, protecting America isn’t just a virtue. It’s a personal mission. I feel safer just knowing he’s where he is.”

Berry said of his friend, “He’s methodical, conscientious, analytical, and logical. And he’s as straight an arrow as they come.” He noted that Addington refuses to let Berry treat him to a hamburger because it might raise issues of influence-buying—instead, they split the check. Addington, he went on, has a dazzling ability to recall the past twenty-five years’ worth of intelligence and national-security legislation. For many years, he kept a vast collection of legal documents in a library in his modest brick-and-clapboard home, in Alexandria, Virginia. One evening several years ago, lightning struck a nearby power line and the house caught fire; much of the archive burned. The fire started at around nine in the evening, and Addington, typically, was still in his office. His wife, Cynthia, and their three daughters were fine, but the loss of his extraordinary collection of papers and political memorabilia, Berry said, “was very hard for him to accept. All you get in this work is memorabilia. There is no cash. But he’s the type of guy who gets psychic benefit from going to work every day, making a difference.”

Though few people doubt Addington’s knowledge of national-security law, even his admirers question his political instincts. “The only time I’ve seen him wrong is on his political judgment,” a former colleague said. “He has a tin ear for political issues. Sometimes the law says one thing, but you have to at least listen to the other side. He will cite case history, case after case. David doesn’t see why you have to compromise.” Even Berry offered a gentle criticism: “His political skills can be overshadowed by his pursuit of what he feels is legally correct.”



Addington has been a hawk on national defense since he was a teen-ager. Leonard Napolitano, an engineer who was one of Addington’s close childhood friends, and whose political leanings are more like those of his sister, Janet Napolitano, the Democratic governor of Arizona, joked, “I don’t think that in high school David was a believer in the divine right of kings.” But, he said, Addington was “always conservative.”

The Addingtons were a traditional Catholic military family. They moved frequently; David’s father, Jerry, an electrical engineer in the Army, was assigned to a variety of posts, including Saudi Arabia and Washington, D.C., where he worked with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. As a teen-ager, Addington told a friend that he hoped to live in Washington himself when he grew up. Jerry Addington, a 1940 graduate of West Point who won a Bronze Star during the Second World War, also served in Korea and at the North American Air Defense Command, in Colorado; he reached the rank of brigadier general before he retired, in 1970, when David was thirteen. David attended public high school in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and his father began a second career, teaching middle-school math. His mother, Eleanore, was a housewife; the family lived in a ranch house in a middle-class subdivision. She still lives there; Jerry died in 1994. “We are an extremely close family,” one of Addington’s three older sisters, Linda, recalled recently. “Discipline was very important for us, and faith was very important. It was about being ethical—the right thing to do whether anyone else does it or not. I see that in Dave.” She was reluctant to say more. “Dave is most deliberate about his privacy,” she added.

Socially, Napolitano recalled, he and Addington were “the brains, or nerds.” Addington stood out for wearing black socks with shorts. He and his friends were not particularly athletic, and they liked to play poker all night on weekends, stopping early in the morning for breakfast. Their circle included some girls, until the boys found them “too distracting to our interest in cards,” Napolitano recalled.

When he and Addington were in high school, Napolitano said, the Vietnam War was in its final stages, and “there was a certain amount of ‘Challenge authority’ and alcohol and drugs, but they weren’t issues in our group.” Addington’s high-school history teacher, Irwin Hoffman, whom Napolitano recalled as wonderful, exacting, and “a flaming liberal,” said that Addington felt strongly that America “should have stayed and won the Vietnam War, despite the fact that we were losing.” Hoffman, who is retired, added, “The boy seemed terribly, terribly bright. He wrote well, and he was very verbal, not at all reluctant to express his opinions. He was pleasant and quite handsome. He also had a very strong sarcastic streak. He was scornful of anyone who said anything that was naïve, or less than bright. His sneers were almost palpable.”

Addington graduated in 1974, the year that Nixon resigned. In the aftermath of Watergate, liberal Democratic reformers imposed tighter restraints on the President and reined in the C.I.A., whose excesses were critiqued in congressional hearings, led by Senator Frank Church and Representative Otis Pike, that exposed details of assassination plots, coup attempts, mind-control experiments, and domestic spying. Congress passed a series of measures aimed at reinvigorating the system of checks and balances, including an expanded Freedom of Information Act and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the law requiring judicial review before foreign suspects inside the country could be wiretapped. It also created the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, which oversee all covert C.I.A. activities.

After high school, Addington pursued an ambition that he had had for years: to join the military. Rather than attending West Point, as his father had, he enrolled in the U.S. Naval Academy, in Annapolis. But he dropped out before the end of his freshman year. He went home and, according to Napolitano, worked in a Long John Silver’s restaurant. “The academy wasn’t academically challenging enough for him,” Napolitano said.

Addington went to Georgetown University, graduating summa cum laude, in 1978, from the school of foreign service; he went on to earn honors at Duke Law School. After graduating, in 1981, he married Linda Werling, a graduate student in pharmacology. The marriage ended in divorce. His current wife, Cynthia, takes care of their three girls full-time.

Soon after leaving Duke, Addington started his first job, in the general counsel’s office at the C.I.A. A former top agency lawyer who later worked with Addington said that Addington strongly opposed the reform movements that followed Vietnam and Watergate. “Addington was too young to be fully affected by the Vietnam War,” the lawyer said. “He was shaped by the postwar, post-Watergate years instead. He thought the Presidency was too weakened. He’s a believer that in foreign policy the executive is meant to be quite powerful.”

These views were shared by Dick Cheney, who served as chief of staff in the Ford Administration. “On a range of executive-power issues, Cheney thought that Presidents from Nixon onward yielded too quickly,” Michael J. Malbin, a political scientist who has advised Cheney on the issue of executive power, said. Kenneth Adelman, who was a high-ranking Pentagon official under Ford, said that the fall of Saigon, in 1975, was “very painful for Dick. He believed that Vietnam could have been saved—maybe—if Congress hadn’t cut off funding. He was against that kind of interference.”

Jane Harman, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, who has spent considerable time working with Cheney and Addington in recent years, believes that they are still fighting Watergate. “They’re focussed on restoring the Nixon Presidency,” she said. “They’ve persuaded themselves that, following Nixon, things went all wrong.” She said that in meetings Addington is always courtly and pleasant. But when it comes to accommodating Congress “his answer is always no.”

In a revealing interview that Cheney gave last December to reporters travelling with him to Oman, he explained, “I do have the view that over the years there had been an erosion of Presidential power and authority. . . . A lot of the things around Watergate and Vietnam both, in the seventies, served to erode the authority I think the President needs.” Further, Cheney explained, it was his express aim to restore the balance of power. The President needed to be able to act as Alexander Hamilton had described it in the Federalist Papers, with “secrecy” and “despatch”—especially, Cheney said, “in the day and age we live in . . . with the threats we face.” He added, “I believe in a strong, robust executive authority, and I think the world we live in demands it.”

At the C.I.A., where Addington spent two years, he focussed on curtailing the ability of Congress to interfere in intelligence gathering. “He was a rookie, plenty bright,” Frederick Hitz, another C.I.A. lawyer, who later became Inspector General, recalled. After the Church and Pike hearings, legislators came up with hundreds of pages of oversight recommendations, he said. “Addington was very pro-agency. He was trying to figure out how to comply with government oversight without getting hog-tied.” Addington viewed the public airings of the C.I.A.’s covert activities as “an absolute disaster,” Berry recalled. “We both felt that Congress did great harm by flinging open the doors to operational secrets.”

When Addington joined the C.I.A., it was directed by William J. Casey, who also regarded congressional constraints on the agency as impediments to be circumvented. His sentiment about congressional overseers was best captured during a hearing about covert actions in Central America, when he responded to tough questioning by muttering the word “assholes.” After Reagan’s election in 1980, the executive branch was dominated by conservative Republicans, while the House was governed by liberal Democrats. The two parties fought intensely over Central America; the Reagan Administration was determined to overthrow the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Using their constitutional authority over appropriations, the Democrats in Congress forbade the C.I.A. to spend federal funds to support the Contras, a rightist rebel group. But Casey’s attitude, as Berry recalled it, was “We’re gonna fund these freedom fighters whether Congress wants us to or not.” Berry, then the staff director for the Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee, asked Casey for help in fighting the Democrats. Soon afterward, Addington joined Berry on Capitol Hill.

When the Iran-Contra scandal broke, in 1986, it exposed White House arms deals and foreign fund-raising designed to help the anti-Sandinista forces in Nicaragua. Members of Congress were furious. Summoned to Capitol Hill, Casey lied, denying that funds for the Contras had been solicited from any foreign governments, although he knew that the Saudis, among others, had agreed to give millions of dollars to the Contras, at the request of the White House. Even within the Reagan Administration, the foreign funding was controversial. Secretary of State George Shultz had warned Reagan that he might be committing an impeachable offense. But, under Casey’s guidance, the White House went ahead with the plan; Shultz, having expressed misgivings, was not told. It was a bureaucratic tactic that Addington reprised after September 11th, when Powell was left out of key deliberations about the treatment of detainees. Lawrence Wilkerson, Powell’s aide, said that he was aware of Addington’s general strategy: “We had heard that, behind our backs, he was saying that Powell was ‘soft, but easy to get around.’ ”

The Iran-Contra scandal substantially weakened Reagan’s popularity and, eventually, seven people were convicted of seventeen felonies. Cheney, who was then a Republican congressman from Wyoming, worried that the scandal would further undercut Presidential authority. In late 1986, he became the ranking Republican on a House select committee that was investigating the scandal, and he commissioned a report on Reagan’s support of the Contras. Addington, who had become an expert in intelligence law, contributed legal research. The scholarly-sounding but politically outlandish Minority Report, released in 1987, argued that Congress—not the President—had overstepped its authority, by encroaching on the President’s foreign-policy powers. The President, the report said, had been driven by “a legitimate frustration with abuses of power and irresolution by the legislative branch.” The Minority Report sanctioned the President’s actions to a surprising degree, considering the number of criminal charges that resulted from the scandal. The report also defended the legality of ignoring congressional intelligence oversight, arguing that “the President has the Constitutional and statutory authority to withhold notifying Congress of covert actions under rare conditions.” And it condemned “legislative hostage taking,” noting that “Congress must realize . . . that the power of the purse does not make it supreme” in matters of war. In his December interview with reporters, Cheney proudly cited this document. “If you want reference to an obscure text, go look at the minority views that were filed in the Iran-Contra committee, the Iran-Contra report, in about 1987,” he said. “Part of the argument was whether the President had the authority to do what was done in the Reagan years.”

Addington and Cheney became a formidable team, but it was soon clear that Addington would not join Cheney as a politician. Adelman recalled Addington’s personality as “dour,” adding that, “unlike with Dick, I never saw much of a sense of humor. Cheney can be witty and funny. David is sober. I didn’t see him at social events much.” But, he added, “Dick wasn’t looking for friends at work. He was looking for performance. And David delivers. He’s efficient and dedicated. He’s a doer.” He went on, “Cheney’s not a lawyer, so he would defer to David on the law.”

In 1989, President George H. W. Bush appointed Cheney Secretary of Defense. Cheney hired Addington first as his special assistant and, later, as the Pentagon’s general counsel. At the Pentagon, Addington became widely known as Cheney’s gatekeeper—a stickler for process who controlled the flow of documents to his boss. Using a red felt-tipped pen, he covered his colleagues’ memos with comments before returning them for rewrites. His editing invariably made arguments sharper, smarter, and more firm in their defense of Cheney’s executive powers, a former military official who worked with him said.

At the Pentagon, Addington took a particular interest in the covert actions of the Special Forces. A former colleague recalled that, after attending a demonstration by Special Forces officers, he mocked the C.I.A., which was constrained by oversight laws. “This is how real covert operations are done,” he said. (After September 11th, the Pentagon greatly expanded its covert intelligence operations; these programs have less congressional oversight than those of the C.I.A.) Cheney, throughout his tenure as Defense Secretary, shared with Addington a pessimistic view of the Soviet Union. Both remained skeptical of Gorbachev long after the State Department, the national-security adviser, and the C.I.A. had concluded that he was a reformer. “They were always, like, ‘Whoa—beware the Bear!’ ” Wilkerson recalled. They immersed themselves in “continuity of government exercises”—studying with unusual intensity how the government might survive a nuclear attack. According to “Rise of the Vulcans,” a history of the period by James Mann, Cheney, more than once, spent the night in an underground bunker.

A decade later, when hijacked planes slammed into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, Addington, perhaps more than anyone else in the U.S. government, was ready to act. During the Clinton Presidency, he had worked as a lawyer for various business interests, such as the American Trucking Associations, and in 1994 he had led an exploratory Presidential campaign for Cheney, who decided against running. Once Cheney became Vice-President, Addington helped oversee the transition, setting up the most powerful Vice-Presidency in America’s history. Addington’s high-school friend Leonard Napolitano said Addington told him that he and Cheney were merging the Vice-President’s office with the President’s into a single “Executive Office,” instead of having “two different camps.” Napolitano added, “David said that Cheney saw the Vice-President as the executive and implementer of the President.” Addington created a system to insure that virtually all important documents relating to national-security matters were seen by the Vice-President’s office. The former high-ranking Administration lawyer said that Addington regularly attended White House legal meetings with the C.I.A. and the National Security Agency. He received copies of all National Security Council documents, including internal memos from the staff. And, as a former top official in the Defense Department, he exerted influence over the legal office at the Pentagon, helping his protégé William J. Haynes secure the position of general counsel. A former national-security lawyer, speaking of the Pentagon’s legal office, said, “It’s obvious that Addington runs the whole operation.”



In the days after September 11th, a half-dozen White House lawyers had heated discussions about how to frame the Administration’s legal response to the attacks. Bradford Berenson, one of the participants, recalled how “raw” feelings were at the time: “There were thousands of bereaved American families. Everyone was expecting additional attacks. The only planes in the air were military. At a moment like that, there’s an intense focus on responsibility and accountability. Preventing another attack should always be within the law. But if you have to err on the side of being too aggressive or not aggressive enough, you’d err by being too aggressive.”

Berry said that Addington felt this keenly. “I’ve talked to David about this a little. Psychologically, it’s really taxing to read every day not about one or two but about a dozen, or two dozen, legitimate reports about efforts to take out U.S. citizens. . . . There’s a little bit of a bunker mentality that set in among some of the national-security-policy officials after 9/11.”

Almost immediately, other Administration lawyers noticed that Addington dominated the internal debates. His assumption, shared by other hard-line lawyers in the White House counsel’s office and in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, was that the criminal-justice system was insufficient to handle the threat from terrorism. The matter was settled without debate, Berenson recalled: “There was a consensus that we had to move from retribution and punishment to preëmption and prevention. Only a warfare model allows that approach.”

Richard Shiffrin, the former Pentagon lawyer, said that during a tense White House meeting held in the Situation Room just a few days after September 11th “all of us felt under a great deal of pressure to be willing to consider even the most extraordinary proposals. The C.I.A., the N.S.C., the State Department, the Pentagon, and the Justice Department all had people there. Addington was particularly strident. He’d sit, listen, and then say, ‘No, that’s not right.’ He was particularly doctrinaire and ideological. He didn’t recognize the wisdom of the other lawyers. He was always right. He didn’t listen. He knew the answers.” The details of the discussion are classified, Shiffrin said, but he left with the impression that Addington “doesn’t believe there should be co-equal branches.” Another participant recalled, “If you favored international law, you were in danger of being called ‘soft on terrorism’ by Addington.” He added that Addington’s manner in meetings was “very insistent and very loud.” Yet another participant said that, whenever he cautioned against executive-branch overreaching, Addington would respond brusquely, “There you go again, giving away the President’s power.”

Some of the protests from Democrats about the Administration’s legal arguments and some of the declarations of high principle from Republicans are mere partisan gestures. Both sides have changed their views about the need for a strong President, depending on whether they were in power. “It’s a matter of degree,” the liberal Princeton historian Sean Wilentz said. “War always expands the powers of the Presidency. And Presidents always overreach.” Lincoln infamously suspended habeas-corpus rights during the Civil War, locking up thousands of Confederate sympathizers without due process, and Franklin D. Roosevelt interned more than a hundred thousand innocent Japanese-Americans. “Someone said that this Administration is monarchical,” Wilentz added. “That’s just rhetoric. We’re not a dictatorship. At the same time, this White House has assumed powers for itself that no previous Administration has done.” Bush’s defenders frequently cite the example of Lincoln as a justification for placing national security above the rule of law. But Schlesinger, in his book “War and the American Presidency” (2004), points out that Lincoln never “claimed an inherent and routine right to do what [he] did.” The Bush White House, he told me, has seized on these historical aberrations and turned them into a doctrine of Presidential prerogative.

On September 25th, the Office of Legal Counsel issued a memo declaring that the President had inherent constitutional authority to take whatever military action he deemed necessary, not just in response to the September 11th attacks but also in the prevention of any future attacks from terrorist groups, whether they were linked to Al Qaeda or not. The memo’s broad definition of the enemy went beyond that of Congress, which, on September 14th, had passed legislation authorizing the President to use military force against “nations, organizations, or persons” directly linked to the attacks. The memo was written by John Yoo, a lawyer in the Office of Legal Counsel who worked closely with Addington, and said, in part, “The power of the President is at its zenith under the Constitution when the President is directing military operations of the armed forces, because the power of the Commander-in-Chief is assigned solely to the President.” The memo acknowledged that Article I of the Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war, but argued that it was a misreading to assume that the article gives Congress the lead role in making war. Instead, the memo said, “it is beyond question that the President has the plenary Constitutional power to take such military actions as he deems necessary and appropriate to respond to the terrorist attacks upon the United States on September 11, 2001.” It concluded, “These decisions, under our Constitution, are for the President alone to make.”

Another memo sanctioned torture when the President deems it necessary; yet another claimed that there were virtually no valid legal prohibitions against the inhumane treatment of foreign prisoners held by the C.I.A. outside the U.S. Most of these decisions, according to many Administration officials who were involved in the process, were made in secrecy, and the customary interagency debate and vetting procedures were sidestepped. Addington either drafted the memos himself or advised those who were drafting them. “Addington’s fingerprints were all over these policies,” said Wilkerson, who, as Powell’s top aide, later assembled for the Secretary a dossier of internal memos detailing the decision-making process.

On November 13, 2001, an executive order setting up the military commissions was issued under Bush’s signature. The decision stunned Powell; the national-security adviser, Condoleezza Rice; the highest-ranking lawyer at the C.I.A.; and many judge advocate generals, or JAGs, the top lawyers in the military services. None of them had been consulted. Michael Chertoff, the head of the Justice Department’s criminal division, who had argued for trying terror suspects in the U.S. courts, was also bypassed. And the order surprised John Bellinger III, the National Security Council legal adviser and deputy White House counsel, who had been formally asked to help create a legal method for trying foreign terror suspects. According to multiple sources, Addington secretly usurped the process. He and a few hand-picked associates, including Bradford Berenson and Timothy Flanigan, a lawyer in the White House counsel’s office, wrote the executive order creating the commissions. Moreover, Addington did not show drafts of the order to Powell or Rice, who, the senior Administration lawyer said, was incensed when she learned about her exclusion.

The order proclaimed a state of “extraordinary emergency,” and announced that the rules for the military commissions would be dictated by the Secretary of Defense, without review by Congress or the courts. The commissions could try any foreign person the President or his representatives deemed to have “engaged in” or “abetted” or “conspired to commit” terrorism, without offering the right to seek an appeal from anyone but the President or the Secretary of Defense. Detainees would be treated “humanely,” and would be given “full and fair trials,” the order said. Yet the order continued that “it is not practicable” to apply “the principles of law and the rules of evidence generally recognized in the trial of criminal cases in the United States district courts.” The death penalty, for example, could be imposed even if there was a split verdict. Moreover, in December, 2001, the Department of Defense circulated internal memos suggesting that, in the commission system, defendants would have only limited rights to confront their accusers, see all the evidence against them, or be present during their trials. There would be no right to remain silent, and hearsay evidence would be admissible, as would evidence obtained through physical coercion. Guilt did not need to be proved beyond a reasonable doubt. The order firmly established that terrorism would henceforth be approached on a war footing, endowing the President with enhanced powers.

The precedent for the order was an arcane 1942 case, ex parte Quirin, in which Franklin Roosevelt created a military commission to try eight Nazi saboteurs who had infiltrated the United States via submarines. The Supreme Court upheld the case, 8–0, but even the conservative Justice Antonin Scalia has called it “not this Court’s finest hour.” Roosevelt was later criticized for creating a sham process. Moreover, while he used military commissions to try a handful of suspects who had already admitted their guilt, the Bush White House was proposing expanding the process to cover thousands of “enemy combatants.” It was also ignoring the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which, having codified procedures for courts-martial in 1951, had rendered Quirin out of date.

Berenson said, “The legal foundation was very strong. F.D.R.’s order establishing military commissions had been upheld by the Supreme Court. This was almost identical. What we underestimated was the extent to which the culture had shifted beneath us since World War Two.” Concerns about civil liberties and human rights, and anger over Vietnam and Watergate, he said, had turned public opinion against a strong executive branch: “But Addington thought military commissions had to be a tool at the President’s disposal.”

Rear Admiral Donald Guter, who was the Navy’s chief JAG until June, 2002, said that he and the other JAGs, who were experts in the laws of war, tried unsuccessfully to amend parts of the military-commission plan when they learned of it, days before the order was formally signed by the President. “But we were marginalized,” he said. “We were warning them that we had this long tradition of military justice, and we didn’t want to tarnish it. The treatment of detainees was a huge issue. They didn’t want to hear it.” In a 2004 report in the Times, Guter said that when he and the other JAGs told Haynes that they needed more information, Haynes replied, “No, you don’t.” (Haynes’s office offered no comment.)

At the Defense Department, Shiffrin, the deputy general counsel for intelligence, and a career lawyer rather than a political appointee, was taken aback when Haynes showed him the order. Earlier in Shiffrin’s career, at the Justice Department, his office had been in the same room where the Nazi defendants were tried, and he had become interested in the case, which he said he regarded as “one of the worst Supreme Court cases ever.” He recalled informing Haynes that he was skeptical of the Administration’s invocation of Quirin. “Gee, this is problematic,” Shiffrin told him.

Marine Major Dan Mori, the uniformed lawyer who has been assigned to defend David Hicks, one of the ten terror suspects in Guantánamo who have been charged, said of the commissions, “It was a political stunt. The Administration clearly didn’t know anything about military law or the laws of war. I think they were clueless that there even was a U.C.M.J. and a Manual for Courts-Martial! The fundamental problem is that the rules were constructed by people with a vested interest in conviction.”

Mori said that the charges against the detainees reflected a profound legal confusion. “A military commission can try only violations of the laws of war,” he said. “But the Administration’s lawyers didn’t understand this.” Under federal criminal statutes, for example, conspiring to commit terrorist acts is a crime. But, as the Nuremburg trials that followed the Second World War established, under the laws of war it is not, since all soldiers could be charged with conspiring to fight for their side. Yet, Mori said, a charge of conspiracy “is the only thing there is in many cases at Guantánamo—guilt by association. So you’ve got this big problem.” He added, “I hope that nobody confuses military justice with these ‘military commissions.’ This is a political process, set up by the civilian leadership. It’s inept, incompetent, and improper.”

Under attack from defense lawyers like Mori, the military commissions have been tied up in the courts almost since the order was issued. Bellinger and others fought to make the commissions fairer, so that they could withstand court challenges, and the Pentagon gradually softened its rules. But Administration lawyers involved in the process said that Addington resisted at every turn. He insisted, for instance, on maintaining the admissibility of statements obtained through coercion, or even torture. In meetings, he argued that officials in charge of the military commissions should be given maximum flexibility to decide whether to include such evidence. “Torture isn’t important to Addington as a scientific matter, good or bad, or whether it works or not,” the Administration lawyer, who is familiar with these debates, said. “It’s more about his philosophy of Presidential power. He thinks that if the President wants torture he should get torture. He always argued for ‘maximum flexibility.’ ”

Last month, Addington lost this internal battle. The Administration rescinded the provision allowing coerced testimony, after even the military officials overseeing the commissions supported the reform. According to a senior Administration legal adviser who participated in discussions about the commissions, Addington remained opposed to the change. “He wanted no changes,” the lawyer said. “He said the rules were good, right from the start.” Addington accused officials who were trying to reform the rules of “giving away the President’s prerogatives.”

President Bush has blamed the legal challenges for the delays in prosecuting Guantánamo detainees. But many lawyers, even some inside the Administration, believe that the challenges were inevitable, considering the dubious constitutionality of the commissions. The Supreme Court’s ruling in the Hamdan case is expected to establish whether the commissions meet basic standards of due process. The Administration lawyer isn’t sanguine about the outcome. “It shows again that Addington overreached,” he said.



Meanwhile, Addington has fought tirelessly to stem reform of other controversial aspects of the New Paradigm, such as the detention and interrogation of terror suspects. Last year, he and Cheney led an unsuccessful campaign to defeat an amendment, proposed by Senator John McCain, to ban the abusive treatment of detainees held by the military or the C.I.A. Government officials who have worked closely with Addington say he insists that legal flexibility is necessary, because of the iniquity of the enemy; moreover, he does not believe that the legal positions taken by the Bush Administration in the war on terror have damaged the country’s international reputation. “He’s a very smart guy, but he gives no credibility to those who say these policies are hurting us around the world,” the senior Administration legal adviser said. “His feeling is that there are no costs. He’ll say people are just whining. He thinks most of them would be against us no matter what.” In Addington’s view, critics of the Administration’s aggressive legal policies are just political enemies of the President.

Yet, from the start, some of the sharpest critics of detainee-treatment policies have been military and law-enforcement officials inside the Bush Administration; people close to it, like McCain; and our foreign allies. Just a few months after the Guantánamo detention centers were established, members of the Administration began receiving reports that questioned whether all the prisoners there were really, as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had labelled them, “the worst of the worst.” Guter said that the Pentagon had originally planned to screen the suspects individually on the battlefields in Afghanistan; such “Article 5 hearings” are a provision of the Geneva Conventions. But the White House cancelled the hearings, which had been standard protocol during the previous fifty years, including in the first Gulf War. In a January 25, 2002, legal memorandum, Administration lawyers dismissed the Geneva Conventions as “obsolete,” “quaint,” and irrelevant to the war on terror. The memo was signed by Gonzales, but the Administration lawyer said he believed that “Addington and Flanigan were behind it.” The memo argued that all Taliban and Al Qaeda detainees were illegal enemy combatants, which eliminated “any argument regarding the need for case-by-case determination of P.O.W. status.” Critics claim that the lack of a careful screening process led some innocent detainees to be imprisoned. “Article 5 hearings would have cost them nothing,” the Administration lawyer, who was involved in the process, said. “They just wanted to make a point on executive power—that the President can designate them all enemy combatants if he wants to.”

Guter, the Navy JAG, said that, before long, he and other military experts began to wonder whether the reason they weren’t getting much useful intelligence from Guantánamo was that, as he puts it, “it wasn’t there.” Guter, who was in the Pentagon on September 11th, said, “I don’t have a sympathetic bone in my body for the terrorists. But I just wanted to make sure we were getting the right people—the real terrorists. And I wanted to make sure we were doing it in a way consistent with our values.”

While the JAGs’ questions about the treatment of detainees went largely unheeded, he said, the C.I.A. was simultaneously raising similar concerns. In the summer of 2002, the agency had sent an Arabic-speaking analyst to Guantánamo to find out why more intelligence wasn’t being collected, and, after interviewing several dozen prisoners, he had come back with bad news: more than half the detainees, he believed, didn’t belong there. He wrote a devastating classified report, which reached General John Gordon, the deputy national-security adviser for combatting terrorism. In a series of meetings at the White House, Gordon, Bellinger, and other officials warned Addington and Gonzales that potentially innocent people had been locked up in Guantánamo and would be indefinitely. “This is a violation of basic notions of American fairness,” Gordon and Bellinger argued. “Isn’t that what we’re about as a country?” Addington’s response, sources familiar with the meetings said, was “These are ‘enemy combatants.’ Please use that term. They’ve all been through a screening process. We don’t have anything to talk about.”

A former Administration official said of Addington’s response, “It seemed illogical. How could you deny the possibility that one or more people were locked up who shouldn’t be? There were old people, sick people—why do we want to keep them?” At the meeting, Gordon and Bellinger argued, “The American public understands that wars are confusing and exceptional things happen. But the American public will expect some due process.”

Addington and Gonzales dismissed this concern. The former Administration official recalled that Addington was “the dominant voice. It was a non-debate, in his view.” The confrontation made clear, though, that Addington had been informed early that there were problems at Guantánamo. “There wasn’t a lack of knowledge or understanding,” the former official said.

Addington has proved deft at outmaneuvering his critics. Documents embarrassing to Addington’s opponents have been leaked to the press, if not necessarily by him. A top-secret N.S.C. memo describing Powell’s request to reconsider the suspension of the Geneva Conventions appeared in the Washington Times the day after it was circulated to the Secretary of Defense, the Attorney General, and the Vice-President; the article cited unnamed sources who accused Powell of “bowing to pressure from the political left.” The Administration lawyer said, “The way Addington works, he controls the flow of information very tightly.” Addington chastised a Justice Department official who showed a legal opinion on the treatment of detainees to the State Department. He repeatedly directed Gonzales, the White House counsel, to keep Bellinger, the N.S.C. lawyer, out of meetings about national-security issues. “Lip-lock” is the word Addington’s old Pentagon colleague Sean O’Keefe, now the chancellor of Louisiana State University, used to describe his discretion. “He’s like Cheney,” O’Keefe said. “You can’t get anything out of him with a crowbar.” The Administration lawyer said, “He’s a bully, pure and simple.” Several talented top lawyers who challenged Addington on important legal matters concerning the war on terror, including Patrick Philbin, James Comey, and Jack Goldsmith, left the Administration under stressful circumstances. Other reform-minded government lawyers who clashed with Addington, including Bellinger and Matthew Waxman, both of whom were at the N.S.C. during Bush’s first term, have moved to the State Department.

Waxman, a young lawyer who headed the Pentagon’s office of detainee affairs, departed soon after he had a major confrontation with Addington over the issue of clarifying military rules for the treatment of prisoners. Waxman believed that international standards for the humane treatment of detainees should be followed, and argued for reforms in the Army Field Manual. He hoped to reinstate the basic standards that are specified in the Geneva Conventions. This meant the prohibition of torture, overt acts of violence, and “outrages on personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment.” Although the Vice-President’s office is not part of the military chain of command, last September Addington summoned Waxman to his office and berated him. Waxman declined to comment on the incident, but a former colleague in the Pentagon, in whom Waxman confided, said that Addington accused Waxman of wanting to fight the war on terror his own way, rather than the President’s way. The Army Field Manual still hasn’t been revised, and, according to those involved, Addington and his protégé Haynes remain the major obstacles.



Last fall, Richard Shiffrin, the Pentagon lawyer who was left out of the Administration’s initial discussions of the military commissions, learned from the Times about the Administration’s decision to sanction warrantless domestic electronic surveillance by the National Security Agency. This was remarkable, because Shiffrin was the Pentagon lawyer in charge of supervising the N.S.A.’s legal advisers. “It was exceptional that I didn’t know about it—extraordinary,” Shiffrin said. “In the prior Administration, on anything involving N.S.A. legal issues I’d have been made aware. And I should have been in this one.”

Shortly after September 11th, Addington and Cheney, without alerting Shiffrin, held meetings with top N.S.A. lawyers in the Vice-President’s office and told them that the President, as Commander-in-Chief, had the authority to override the FISA statutes and not seek warrants from the special court. According to the Times, Addington and Cheney pushed the N.S.A. to engage in practices that the agency thought were illegal, such as the warrantless wiretapping of American suspects making domestic calls. General Michael Hayden, the former head of the N.S.A., who was recently confirmed as director of the C.I.A., has denied being pressured. Shiffrin, however, doubted that the N.S.A. lawyers were expert enough in Article II of the Constitution, which defines the President’s powers, to argue back. He described the Administration’s legal arguments on wiretapping as “close calls.”

Others are more critical. Fourteen prominent constitutional scholars, representing a range of political views, recently wrote an open letter to Congress, claiming that the N.S.A. surveillance program “appears on its face to violate existing law.” The scholars noted that Bush had made no effort to amend the FISA law to suit national-security needs—he simply ignored it. The Republican legal activist Bruce Fein said, “What makes this so sinister is that the members of this Administration have unchecked power. They don’t care if the wiretapping is legal or not.” But the former high-ranking Administration lawyer suggested that the situation is more serious than an intentional infraction of the law. “It’s not that they think they’re skirting the law,” he said. “They think that this is the law.”

Fein suggested that the only way Congress will be able to reassert its power is by cutting off funds to the executive branch for programs that it thinks are illegal. But this approach has been tried, and here, too, Addington has had the last word. John Murtha, the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, put a provision in the Pentagon’s appropriations bills for 2005 and 2006 forbidding the use of federal funds for any intelligence-gathering that violates the Fourth Amendment, which protects the privacy of American citizens. The White House, however, took exception to Congress’s effort to cut off funds. When President Bush signed the appropriations bills into law, he appended “signing statements” asserting that the Commander-in-Chief had the right to collect intelligence in any way he deemed necessary. The signing statement for the 2005 budget, for instance, noted that the executive branch would “construe” the spending limit only “in a manner consistent with the President’s constitutional authority as Commander-in-Chief, including for the conduct of intelligence operations.”

According to the Boston Globe, Addington has been the “leading architect” of these signing statements, which have been added to more than seven hundred and fifty laws. He reportedly scrutinizes every bill before President Bush signs it, searching for any language that might impinge on Presidential power. These wars of words are yet another battlefront between Addington and Congress, and some constitutional scholars find them troubling. Few of the signing statements were noticed until one of them was slipped into Bush’s signing of the McCain amendment. The language was legal boilerplate, reserving the right to construe the legislation only as it was consistent with the Constitution. But, considering that Cheney’s office had waged, and lost, a public fight to defeat the McCain amendment democratically—the vote in the Senate was 90–9—the signing statement seemed sneaky and subversive.

Earlier this month, the American Bar Association voted to investigate whether President Bush had exceeded his constitutional authority by reserving the right to ignore portions of laws that he has signed. Richard Epstein, the University of Chicago law professor, said, “What’s frightening to me is that this Administration is always willing to push the conventions to the limits—and beyond. With his signing statements, I think the President just goes too far. If you sign these things with a caveat, do the inferior officers follow the law or the caveat?”

Bruce Fein argues that Addington’s signing statements are “unconstitutional as a strategy,” because the Founding Fathers wanted Presidents to veto legislation openly if they thought the bills were unconstitutional. Bush has not vetoed a single bill since taking office. “It’s part of the balancing process,” Fein said. “It’s about accountability. If you veto something, everyone knows where you stand. But this President wants to do it sotto voce. He wants to give the image that he’s accommodating on torture, and then reserves the right to torture anyway.”

David Addington is a satisfactory lawyer, Fein said, but a less than satisfactory student of American history, which, for a public servant of his influence, matters more. “If you read the Federalist Papers, you can see how rich in history they are,” he said. “The Founders really understood the history of what people did with power, going back to Greek and Roman and Biblical times. Our political heritage is to be skeptical of executive power, because, in particular, there was skepticism of King George III. But Cheney and Addington are not students of history. If they were, they’d know that the Founding Fathers would be shocked by what they’ve done.”


http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060703fa_fact1

Marine Shown in 'Fahrenheit 9/11' Killed in Iraq

Raymond J. Plouhar
Wednesday, June 28 2006 @ 03:07 AM EST
Contributed by: River97
Views: 338
The Mercury News -- DETROIT - The father of a U.S. Marine from Michigan who lost his life in Iraq says serving his country was all his son ever wanted to do.

"I remember when he fell in the bath tub and cut his chin when he was 6 years old, and the only way I could get him to go to the hospital was to tell it was a MASH unit," Raymond Plouhar said of his son, Staff Sgt. Raymond J. Plouhar. "I'm proud that my son wanted to protect the freedom of this country whether we all agree with the war or not."

The younger Plouhar, 30, died Monday of wounds suffered while conducting combat operations in the Al Anbar province of Iraq, the Defense Department announced Tuesday.

Plouhar, of Lake Orion, about 30 miles north of Detroit, was assigned to 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division, First Marine Expeditionary Force at Camp Pendleton, Calif.



He signed up for the Marines immediately after graduating from Lake Orion High School, where he wrestled and played football, his father said Tuesday in a telephone interview.

The 57-year-old Plouhar said his son took four years off from active duty to serve as a recruiter in Flint after donating one of his kidneys to his uncle.

During that time, the Marine was filmed as part of Michael Moore's 2004 documentary "Fahrenheit 9/11," about the Bush administration's actions after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

He appeared in a segment that showed recruiters going into underprivileged neighborhoods, but the elder Plouhar said his son didn't realize when he was filmed that it was for a movie critical of the war.

The 10-year Marine's sister and grandfather served in the Army. He had only 38 days left in Iraq and had been there a little over four months during his most recent tour, his family said.

"I'm devastated, sad and proud," Plouhar said of his only son. "This just makes me devoted even more to his belief that people need help in Iraq, and he felt that he was helping."

He said his son was teased a lot as a young kid and protected people as he grew up.

"He liked to protect the underdog," the father said. "All of his buddies from school called saying, `He was my friend when nobody else would be.'"

Plouhar, whose full name is Raymond James Bryon Anthony Charles Plouhar, graduated from Lake Orion High School and is survived by a wife and two children, ages 5 and 9, who live in Arizona.

The family plans to hold a funeral at Modetz Funeral Home in Lake Orion but has not set a date, the elder Plouhar said. The Marine's body was expected to be returned to Michigan early next week.

Despite his son's death, Plouhar said his views on the war are unchanged.

"We need to resolve the war," he said. "If we walk out now, my son died for nothing and that will make me mad."

A 100-mpg car? Let's start the race
How about a $1-billion prize for the first American automaker to take fuel efficiency to the next level?
By Dan Lungren
REP. DAN LUNGREN, a Republican, represents California's 3rd District.

June 30, 2006

WHAT WOULD happen if the United States were to offer a $1-billion prize for the first American automaker to sell 60,000 midsized sedans that could travel 100 miles on one gallon of gasoline?

It wouldn't be a panacea for our energy problems, but it would stimulate the development of viable technologies to reduce oil consumption while we develop alternatives to petroleum.

There is a long history of offering prize money for important inventions. As Amory Lovins and E. Kyle Datta point out in "Winning the Oil Endgame," the Orteig Prize for aviation, offered in 1919, was awarded to Charles Lindbergh in 1927 for his flight across the Atlantic. In fact, the 1895 Great Chicago Car Race — which was really a test of innovation rather than speed — played an important role in giving birth to the American automobile industry.

Competition for a prestigious prize is far more likely to get results than government programs aimed at anticipating and funding "winners." Although occasionally effective, federal subsidies are paid before an industry proves it can achieve what it set out to do, and all too often such subsidies are given to the politically influential, not the meritorious. But prize money is paid out only when the goal is achieved.

Last month I introduced the New Options Petroleum Energy Conservation Act in Congress to establish a prize for a 100-mile-per-gallon car. To win, a vehicle would have to prove itself commercially viable and meet all federal safety standards.

Some may argue that the prize shouldn't be offered for a car, however efficient, that runs on gasoline because the national goal should be to end our oil dependence. But it is foolhardy to insist on making the perfect the enemy of the good. Alternative fuels and new concept cars present exciting possibilities, but they probably won't be developed quickly enough to end our petroleum dependence soon.

Meanwhile, we must conserve. And cutting gasoline consumption in the short term doesn't conflict with the development of alternative fuel sources for the long term.

The U.S. requires 8.9 million barrels of oil a day to fuel its vehicles. Replacing our cars with prize-winning vehicles would reduce consumption to about 1.8 million barrels a day. It would also slash carbon emissions.

It is critical to the U.S. national interest to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. The growth of the Chinese and Indian economies increases global demand for oil, while the vulnerability of our supplies has been spotlighted by Venezuelan unrest, veiled Iranian threats to disrupt Persian Gulf shipping and the attempted attack on Saudi oil facilities by Al Qaeda. Our economic lifeblood must be immunized against the dictates of a global petroleum cartel. We must not allow our potential energy vulnerability to become the Achilles heel of our status as a global superpower. Our ability to pursue our interests and promote our values in the conduct of U.S. foreign policy must not be encumbered by our petroleum dependency.

The good news is that our energy, environmental and national security interests are all converging. A new coalition ranging from Greens to those concerned with the national security threat posed by our oil addiction is now possible. The challenge before us transcends traditional ideological barriers. I hope this proposal will contribute to a much-needed rethinking of our national energy policy.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-lungren30jun30,0,6276972,print.story?coll=la-ho...

Rooster LOVES his Rush...that drug-popping, three-time married, self-admitted sex pervert and defender of America's values....HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Yeah, bulldzr, the party of values....vote your values!!! And here they come again, wrapped in the flag, goose stepping towards November, their fingers on the levers of Diebold like the wizard of oz....WORST PRESIDENT EVER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Damn shame, F6. This bs administration attacks the NY Times for printing what it considers treason but when they plant bull shit WMD through Judith Miller...not a word.

Worst President in the history of our country.

BRENNAN CENTER TASK FORCE SAYS SOFTWARE ATTACKS
POSE REAL DANGER TO ALL ELECTRONIC VOTING MACHINES

Threat of Hacking Can Be Reduced by Simple Countermeasures --
Random Audits of Paper Records; Ban on Wireless Systems


Top Scientists from Government and Private Sector Unanimous in Assessment


(My Dime: I talked about this months prior to '04 and here we go again. I hope this doesn't get swept under the rug...and Ohio needs to take note!!)


WASHINGTON, DC - The Brennan Center Task Force on Voting System Security, an initiative of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, today released a report and policy proposals concluding that all three of the nation’s most commonly purchased electronic voting systems are vulnerable to software attacks that could threaten the integrity of a state or national election.



“As electronic voting machines become the norm on Election Day, voters are more and more concerned that these machines are susceptible to fraud,” said Michael Waldman, the Brennan Center’s Executive Director. “In fact, we’ve learned a lot from our study. These machines are vulnerable to attack. That’s the bad news. The good news is that we know how to reduce the risks and the solutions are within reach.”



“I hope that election officials and lawmakers around the country read this report and take a hard look at adopting these policies in time for the 2006 elections,” said Howard A. Schmidt, former White House Cyber Security Advisor and former Chief Security Officer of Microsoft and eBay.



The government and private sector scientists, voting machine experts, and security professionals on the Task Force worked together for more than a year. The members of the non-partisan panel were drawn from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (“NIST”), the Election Assistance Commission (“EAC”), the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, leading research universities, and include many of the nation’s foremost security experts.



The Task Force surveyed hundreds of election officials around the country; categorized over 120 security threats; and evaluated countermeasures for repelling attacks. The study examined each of the three most commonly purchased electronic voting systems: electronic machines (“DREs”) with – and without – a voter verified paper trail, and precinct-counted optical scan systems (“PCOS”). The report, The Machinery of Democracy: Protecting Elections in an Electronic World, is the first-ever systematic analysis of security vulnerabilities in each of these systems. The report’s findings include:



All of the most commonly purchased electronic voting systems have significant security and reliability vulnerabilities. All three systems are equally vulnerable to an attack involving the insertion of corrupt software or other software attack programs designed to take over a voting machine.


Automatic audits, done randomly and transparently, are necessary if paper records are to enhance security. The report called into question basic assumptions of many election officials by finding that the systems in 14 states using voter-verified paper records but doing so without requiring automatic audits are of “questionable security value.”


Wireless components on voting machines are particularly vulnerable to attack. The report finds that machines with wireless components could be attacked by “virtually any member of the public with some knowledge of software and a simple device with wireless capabilities, such as a PDA.”


The vast majority of states have not implemented election procedures or countermeasures to detect a software attack even though the most troubling vulnerabilities of each system can be substantially remedied.


Among the countermeasures advocated by the Task Force are routine audits comparing voter verified paper trails to the electronic record; and bans on wireless components in voting machines. Currently only New York and Minnesota ban wireless components on all machines; California bans wireless components only on DRE machines. The Task Force also advocated the use of “parallel testing”: random, Election Day testing of machines under real world conditions. Parallel testing holds its greatest value for detecting software attacks in jurisdictions with paperless electronic machines, since, with those systems, meaningful audits are not an option.



The Task Force’s report was made public today in the Rayburn House Office Building. Congressmen Rush Holt (D-NJ) and Tom Cole (R-OK) praised the report’s findings and called for enactment of H.R. 550, the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act, the most comprehensive bill before Congress addressing electronic voting security.



Said Lawrence Norden, Chair of the Brennan Center Task Force on Voting System Security: “The Brennan Center is committed to all our policy recommendations shared today with the public and Members of Congress, and we have not taken a position yet on any pending legislation. We’ll be working closely with Mr. Holt, Mr. Cole, and other lawmakers dedicated to protecting our elections.”



“I see this as an historic report because it’s the first time we’ve systematically examined security concerns presented by all of the electronic voting systems in use,” said Professor Ronald Rivest of MIT, a member of the Technical Guidelines Committee of the federal Election Assistance Commission. “The report will be invaluable for any election official grappling with electronic security and, hopefully, will pave the way for widespread adoption of better safeguards.”

http://www.brennancenter.org/presscenter/releases_2006/pressrelease_2006_0627.html

Hey Rooster, I believe what would really get Rush excited is another phony war...have Bush invade Iran and Rush could throw the viagra away...probably have one of those 24 boners...lol

Yeah, Lima, I am rather surprised Rooster didn't 'rush' to post this great piece of news regarding his hero since he posts all his other crap. Rush is as major league hypocritical jerk and anyone that thinks differently, let alone falls in love with the guy, has their head buried in the sand.

Here's a guy divorced three times, promoting 'family values' while going on probation less than two months ago for having 2,000 pills illegally and now what???....he's running around with viagra in his doctor's name. The guy is a friggin' joke with a crappy show that is very representative of right wing radio.

THE CONFLICT IN IRAQ

War's Iraqi Death Toll Tops 50,000
Higher than the U.S. estimate, the tally likely is undercounted. Proportionately, it is as if 570,000 Americans were slain in three years.
By Louise Roug and Doug Smith
Times Staff Writers

June 25, 2006

BAGHDAD — At least 50,000 Iraqis have died violently since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, according to statistics from the Baghdad morgue, the Iraqi Health Ministry and other agencies — a toll 20,000 higher than previously acknowledged by the Bush administration.

Many more Iraqis are believed to have been killed but not counted because of serious lapses in recording deaths in the chaotic first year after the invasion, when there was no functioning Iraqi government, and continued spotty reporting nationwide since.

The toll, which is mostly of civilians but probably also includes some security forces and insurgents, is daunting: Proportionately, it is equivalent to 570,000 Americans being killed nationwide in the last three years.

In the same period, at least 2,520 U.S. troops have been killed in Iraq.

Iraqi officials involved in compiling the statistics say violent deaths in some regions have been grossly undercounted, notably in the troubled province of Al Anbar in the west. Health workers there are unable to compile the data because of violence, security crackdowns, electrical shortages and failing telephone networks.

The Health Ministry acknowledged the undercount. In addition, the ministry said its figures exclude the three northern provinces of the semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan because Kurdish officials do not provide death toll figures to the government in Baghdad.

In the three years since Saddam Hussein's regime was toppled, the Bush administration has rarely offered civilian death tolls. Last year, President Bush said he believed that "30,000, more or less, have died as a result of the initial incursion and the ongoing violence against Iraqis."

Nongovernmental organizations have made estimates by tallying media accounts; The Times attempted to reach a comprehensive figure by obtaining statistics from the Baghdad morgue and the Health Ministry and checking those numbers against a sampling of local health departments for possible undercounts.

The Health Ministry gathers numbers from hospitals in the capital and the outlying provinces. If a victim of violence dies at a hospital or arrives dead, medical officials issue a death certificate. Relatives claim the body directly from the hospital and arrange for a speedy burial in keeping with Muslim beliefs.

If the morgue receives a body — usually those deemed suspicious deaths — officials there issue the death certificate.

Health Ministry officials said that because death certificates are issued and counted separately, the two data sets are not overlapping.

The Baghdad morgue received 30,204 bodies from 2003 through mid-2006, while the Health Ministry said it had documented 18,933 deaths from "military clashes" and "terrorist attacks" from April 5, 2004, to June 1, 2006. Together, the toll reaches 49,137.

However, samples obtained from local health departments in other provinces show an undercount that brings the total well beyond 50,000. The figure also does not include deaths outside Baghdad in the first year of the invasion.

The documented cases show a country descending further into violence.

At the Baghdad morgue, the vast majority of bodies processed had been shot execution-style. Many showed signs of torture — drill holes, burns, missing eyes and limbs, officials said. Others had been strangled, beheaded, stabbed or beaten to death.

The morgue records show a predominantly civilian toll; the hospital records gathered by the Health Ministry do not distinguish between civilians, combatants and security forces.

But Health Ministry records do differentiate causes of death. Almost 75% of those who died violently were killed in "terrorist acts," typically bombings, the records show. The other 25% were killed in what were classified as military clashes. A health official described the victims as "innocent bystanders," many shot by Iraqi or American troops, in crossfire or accidentally at checkpoints.

With the entire country a battleground, it is likely that some of the dead may have been insurgents or members of militias.

"The way to think about the violence is that it's not just the insurgent attacks that matter," said David Lake, a member of the Center for Study of Civil War, an international group of scholars who study the causes and effects of internal strife. "What we should be concerned about is the sense of security at the individual level…. If the fear has gotten out of control."

Societies fall apart when people stop believing the government can keep them safe them and instead turn to militias for protection, said Lake, who is a professor of political science at UC San Diego.

"The question is, have we crossed that threshold? My sense is, we probably have, and that's why I'm worried about the long-term outcome."

Three years of fighting have taken their toll on the country. Gauging how many people died in the first year after the invasion, which included the initial invasion and aerial bombardment of Baghdad, and weeks of near-anarchy afterward, has proved difficult.

According to a 2003 Times survey of Baghdad hospitals, at least 1,700 civilians died in the capital just in the five weeks after the war began. An analysis by Iraqi Body Count, a nongovernmental group that tracks civilian deaths by tallying media reports, estimated that 5,630 to 10,000 Iraqi civilians were killed nationwide from March 19 through April 2003.

Health Ministry figures for May in each of the last three years show war-related deaths more than tripling nationwide, from 334 in May 2004 to 1,154 last month. And as the violence has continued to escalate, it also has become increasingly centralized. At least 2,532 people were killed nationwide last month. Of those, 2,155 — 85% — died in Baghdad.

"Everything has increased," said one official in the Health Ministry who didn't want to be identified for security reasons. "Bombings have increased, shootings have increased."

Iraqi Body Count estimates that 38,475 to 42,889 Iraqis have been killed since the invasion. The estimate does not include deaths among the Iraqi security forces.

The toll in Iraq has been a sensitive issue for the Bush administration, which has maintained that it doesn't track civilian deaths. However, military officials in Baghdad acknowledged that they track the number of civilians accidentally killed by U.S. troops.

Eric Stover, Director of UC Berkeley's Human Rights Center and an expert on medical and social consequences of war, said that the high death toll makes rebuilding society increasingly difficult.

"The way to look at the effects of deaths on that scale is also in the context of how people are living," said Stover, who has also done human rights work in Iraq and identified mass graves in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

"It's not just the immediate deaths that people are dealing with, but fractured lives. They are living in this constant state of fear. It's a very gloomy picture."




http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-deathtoll25jun25,0,4970736.story?coll=la-home-he....

dmiller putting people on ignore....that's a good one!!

Congrats..you are no better than I ever was. You can now join the other undesirables on my ignore list.

ahhh....the self-proclaimed 'big brain' at work. Impressive, indeed.

Me, a chartist? No, but I'm smart enough to realize that a lot of people do invest based on technical analysis. Thus, if a chart indicates an overbought condition, it stands to reason that the technical analysis folks may start selling.

That's JimLur going back to Houston...

Are we on yet. I am still hearing music.

Ministers of Debate
By ZEV CHAFETS
Correction Appended

The slogan of Lynchburg, Va., is engraved on the tile floor of its modest airport: "The most interesting spot in the state." This was the assessment of an early resident of Lynchburg, Thomas Jefferson, who also suggested that someday Lynchburg would be a great metropolis. Jefferson, right about so much, was wrong about this. Today Lynchburg is a sleepy little town of 64,000 on the banks of the polluted James River. Its municipal Web site lists just a few "Famous Products," chief among them the "disposable small-volume enema" and "the first disposable douche." The Web site is discreetly silent about the fact that the local branch of the firm Babcock & Wilcox designed the nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island.

Oddly, city hall doesn't brag about its only national claim to fame — the Liberty University debate team. The most interesting thing about modern Lynchburg is that Liberty consistently produces one of the nation's great collegiate debate programs. This season Liberty is closing in on an unprecedented sweep — first place in the rankings in all three national college debate groups: the American Debate Association, the Cross Examination Debate Association and the National Debate Tournament.

Two men are responsible for this improbable success. One is Liberty's founder, the Rev. Jerry Falwell, who has spared no effort to make his school into a national debate power. The other is the team's head coach, Brett O'Donnell.

O'Donnell, who is 41, is an intensely competitive man — he works 80-hour weeks and spends half of every year away from his wife and two children on the road coaching, scouting and recruiting. He is a political junkie with autographed photos of Karl Rove, Oliver North and Newt Gingrich on display in his small office. His heroes are Jesus Christ and Ronald Reagan — closely followed by the 79-year-old Penn State football coach, Joe Paterno, whom he admires for his work ethic. In 2004, Karl Rove brought O'Donnell in to help the Bush presidential debate team, and O'Donnell expects to be working with Republican candidates again this year. But politics is a sideline for O'Donnell. His day job is teaching nice Christian cheek-turners how to cut their opponents' throats.

Liberty is not the kind of school where the star coach is bigger than the university's chancellor. To get to O'Donnell's office, you pass the Jerry Falwell Ministries Museum, in which the most prominent exhibit consists of two Prohibition-era figures loading booze into a Model T Ford. One figure is said to be Jerry Falwell's father.

Carey H. Falwell was a successful Lynchburg businessman who founded two bus companies. He was also a hoodlum, who, in addition to moonshining, organized cock and dog fights and ran a notorious nightspot. In 1931, he shot his brother Garland to death. The killing was ruled self-defense, but it cemented Carey Falwell's local reputation as a very bad man.

This sort of family laundry is not usually hung in the personal museums of university founders. But Doc Falwell, as O'Donnell calls his boss, is proud of his hardscrabble, entrepreneurial heritage. In 1971, he started Liberty as a small Bible college. Today, perched on a 4,400-acre mountain, with 22,500 resident and online students, Liberty bills itself as the world's largest conservative Evangelical Christian university.

"We expect to double our size in the next 15 years," Falwell told me. Falwell, at 72, has a taste for expansion that seems undiminished. We were sitting in his wood-paneled office on the Liberty campus. He swiveled to a desktop computer and, with surprising dexterity, called up next year's enrollment numbers — 21,678 applicants for 3,200 places in the freshman class. "If I had the money and the staff, we could enroll 200,000," he said with a beatific smile.

There are building sites all over campus, including the recently dedicated LaHaye Ice Center, a hockey arena donated by Beverly and Tim LaHaye, an author of the "Left Behind" novels. Considering LaHaye's apocalyptic beliefs and Falwell's own eschatology, this focus on the future is reassuring.

Falwell is after something more than growth for its own sake. He wants to create "champions for Christ." That's where O'Donnell comes in.

"Our football program can't change the culture," Falwell said. "Our debate program can, by producing advocates who know how to argue for Judeo-Christian ethics and the American Constitution. We have 32 kids on our team this year, and they'll all be lawyers or leaders of some sort. Our goal is to create an army of people who know how to make our case. These are brilliant, articulate students. I couldn't have made the Liberty debate team when I was that age. I couldn't talk that fast."

Falwell's dedication to his debate program was on display that morning. When O'Donnell and I arrived at his office, we learned that Falwell's sister-in-law had died only two hours earlier. I was amazed that he kept our appointment; O'Donnell wasn't.

"We're Doc's baby," he told me. "He meets with the team at the start of every season to offer his support. He follows our schedule. The kids know we matter to him."

This enthusiasm is expressed in practical ways. Liberty's program has five full-time coaches and a budget of half a million dollars. And in college debate, money talks. Since its inception in 1980, the Liberty program has won 15 national-rankings championships, two more than its closest competitor, Northwestern. Most of this success has come under O'Donnell. Born to working-class parents in northern Virginia (his father and mother both worked for the telephone company), he first came to Liberty as a freshman student in 1982. He chose the school over the Air Force Academy because he wanted to be a minister.

The Liberty debate team was a minor activity in those days. Even so, O'Donnell never made varsity. After graduation he received a master's degree in communications from Penn State, coached debate there for two years and then returned to Liberty for good in 1993.

"I convinced Doc that, with the right kind of approach, we could be a national power," he recalls. Falwell liked the sound of that, and O'Donnell came through on his promise. Since 1994, Liberty has always been in the Top 5 of the National Debate Tournament rankings.

"Brett's done amazing things," says Warren Decker, the head debate coach of George Mason University, one of Liberty's chief rivals. "As an overall program, Liberty is very close to the top."

"Overall program" is a term of art. Debate ranking points are awarded for total wins at the novice, junior varsity and varsity levels. Unlike many universities, Liberty emphasizes all three. Its elite varsity debaters may not be as good as the best in the country, but top to bottom, Liberty racks up the most points. This success amazes many of O'Donnell's colleagues.

"We get kids who may have been debating since the sixth grade," says Ed Panetta, head coach of the University of Georgia. "They come to us with seven years' experience, and they attend debate camps in the summer. Brett's kids have limited debate experience."

Partly this is because of Liberty's egalitarian entrance criteria, which Falwell summarizes as "first come, first served." Many Liberty students are more notable for their piety than for their intellectual sophistication. O'Donnell has a budget for scholarships, but his recruiting is severely circumscribed by the school's requirement that students be professing Christians.

"The coaching staff here looks at tapes of the best prep-school debaters in the country," he says. "A lot of them, unfortunately from our point of view, wouldn't fit in here." A few years ago, O'Donnell tried to sign up a debater he met while coaching at a summer camp in Michigan, only to discover that the kid was Jewish.

Being a Christian is a necessary but insufficient requirement for making the Liberty squad. A lot of students are home-schooled; some have even taken part in special home-school debate leagues. But according to O'Donnell, they lack the starch for serious debate. "These kids pray with each other before the matches," he says. "They put a big emphasis on good manners. I've got nothing against manners or praying, but we want to win. I've never met a home-schooled debater who was aggressive enough for college competition."

The paucity of experienced high-school debaters has forced O'Donnell to start mostly from scratch. Each year he sends a mailing to incoming Liberty students who have a combined SAT score of 1,200 or above — roughly 40 percent of the freshman class. Around 60 students reply. They go through a rigorous debate boot camp at the start of their first semester. Seven or eight make it through the freshman season. By senior year, only three or four are left, competing at the varsity level.

The survivors see themselves as an intellectual elite. "Reverend Falwell says, 'We're No. 1, and Harvard is like No. 4 or something,' " Lauren Zawistowski, a first-year debater from Jacksonville, N.C., told me. "The kids on campus are proud of our success, what little they understand about it."

Erin Beard, Zawistowski's teammate, is a sophomore from York, Pa. She considers herself and her teammates to be witnesses for Christ. "Our presence on the debate circuit changes people's conception of Christianity," she says. "They see that we respect their beliefs. We're not close-minded."

O'Donnell encourages his debaters to make friends with competitors from other schools. "They're welcome to attend our devotions, and some of them do," he says. "Some just socialize. We don't beat them over the head with a Bible, and we don't preach to them." Over the years, a number of Liberty debaters have found love and marriage on the debate circuit.




The rules of college debate require teams to argue at each tournament both sides of an annual, nationally chosen topic. This year's is "Resolved: The United States federal government should substantially increase diplomatic and economic pressure on the People's Republic of China in one or more of the following areas: trade, human rights, weapons nonproliferation, Taiwan."

This is not a topic that presents ideological or religious problems to the Liberty squad, but that has not always been the case. "A few years ago," O'Donnell recalls, "the topic dealt with the right of privacy. That means, among other things, abortion. The question arose, can we let our students argue the pro side of the case? Some conservative Christian schools decided that they couldn't argue both sides of certain issues. Bob Jones University wound up dropping policy debating."


O'Donnell took the matter to Falwell. "Doc decided that if we wanted to compete, we'd need to accept the rules," O'Donnell says. That season, by special dispensation, Liberty's debate practice rooms became the only place on campus where students were free to argue in favor of Roe v. Wade.

"Not all the Liberty debaters are all that pious," says the George Mason coach, Warren Decker. Decker was raised in a Christian home in Kansas, but he has long since traded his Sunday-school innocence for a marked skepticism. "Besides," he says,"debate is a liberalizing activity. I doubt that Falwell is producing a lot of people who, when they finish at Liberty, are going out to spread the Word."

O'Donnell disagrees, mostly because he says he doesn't fear the power of secular ideology. "If there's a challenge to belief, it's better that the kids face it now," he says. "We don't need to shelter them. We want them to know the best arguments they will be up against. What determines how they ultimately fall out on this is their relationship with God."

Still, the Liberty team is not what you'd call religiously lax. Not long ago, before leaving campus for a road trip to a tournament at the Naval Academy, they gathered for prayer in front of their vans (the Liberty debate program is so flush that it gives out scholarship money to special team drivers). At the end of the tournament day they prayed again. And when O'Donnell announced that there would be group devotions on Sunday morning at 6:30 a.m., he was greeted with a respectful silence instead of the groans I anticipated.

Several years ago, a Roman Catholic quit the team, declining to pray with the group. O'Donnell, whose own boyhood family was divided between its Catholic and Baptist sides, was sympathetic but unbending. "He just didn't feel comfortable with the style of our devotions," O'Donnell says.

O'Donnell and his coaches scout the other teams. Liberty knew that one of its opponents in Annapolis would probably argue that the Chinese should be pressured because they discriminate against their Muslim minority. In the van on the four-hour drive there, debaters rehearsed responses, using a special lingo.

"They pull the genocide card," one said, "we come back with Heidegger."

"Then blam, Erich Fromm."

"Right. Setting up an accusation of Holocaust triv."

"Holocaust what?" asked O'Donnell.

"Triv. Trivialization."

"Don't use shorthand," O'Donnell said. "Judges don't like it."

He said this gently; O'Donnell has an easy, first-name relationship with his debaters ("I hate being called coach"), and he is not much of a disciplinarian, at least by Liberty standards. Team members, like all students, are obliged to follow the Liberty Way. No alcohol, tobacco or drugs are permitted. (Students are subject to random testing.) On the road the team stays in hotels that have cable TV, but students aren't permitted to watch movies rated R, NC-17 or X. There are romantic couples on the squad, but they are forbidden to do more than hold hands.

O'Donnell supplements the Liberty Way with requirements of his own. His debaters devote about 35 hours a week to the team. For tournaments, O'Donnell maintains a strict dress code: men must wear neckties, women must wear dresses or skirts with stockings, or slacks. All debaters are required to keep up a 3.0 grade average — a standard that has cost him at least one good prospect this season.

And, of course, no dairy products are allowed on game days. "Milk loosens the mucus in the throat, and that makes it harder to speak quickly," he explains.

Debaters research their own arguments, practicing once or twice a week by scrimmaging under the supervision of an assistant coach, who tapes the sessions and then reviews and critiques them to point out mistakes. Some of these are simple things — speech tics like "you know" or "I mean." But coaching also involves instilling O'Donnell's debate theory. "The trick is to persuade the audience," he explained to me. "It's psychological, and it rests in Aristotle's theory of enthymeme. Aristotle saw that pure logic can't carry a public argument. You need to make the audience go along with you. You do that by leaving out a premise the audience will add itself.

"For example, if you are trying to convince senior citizens to invest in something, you emphasize the stability of the investment. You don't have to convince seniors that stability is in their interest. They already know that. When they connect what you are proposing to what they already know, you have them arguing with you instead of against you. That's what we teach our kids."

Quick speaking hardly captures the velocity of collegiate debate. Varsity debaters talk at 350 to 400 words a minute — about the speed of a fast auctioneer. Only experienced judges — most of whom are coaches from neutral schools — can actually follow the argument. For this reason, debate isn't a spectator sport. Sitting in a classroom at Annapolis for the opening debate of the tournament, a match between Liberty and Trinity University, I could make out only random bursts of words: "Chinese. . .production facilities . . . economic consequences. . .freely elected. . .patient. . .consequences. . .targets. . .moratorium. . .nuclear winter. . .human rights.. . ."

O'Donnell calls debate "a game of the mind," but it is also a sport that requires strength and stamina. Contests last 92 minutes, and each debater on each two-person team speaks three times — opening arguments, cross-examination and closing arguments — for a total of 23 minutes. At some tournaments, teams have five matches a day.

Debaters gulp air like competitive swimmers. Melissa Hurter, a senior from Huntsville, Ala., talked at high speed for nine full seconds between breaths (she and her partner Lindsey Hoban, a senior from Lake Ariel, Pa., keep in shape by playing wind instruments). The Trinity debaters sucked air after only five seconds and sounded as if they were drowning. Liberty won handily.

There is a tactical logic to speed-talking. Arguments — even nonsensical or irrelevant arguments — must be rebutted. Those left unanswered count against you. The faster you talk, the more arguments you can make, and the better your chance to rack up points. Debaters carry their ammunition, files of every possible argument and rebuttal, in 14-gallon plastic tubs.

The emphasis on words per minute presents Liberty with another challenge. Debate is generally a male sport; Liberty tends to be an exception. Many of its best debaters are, like Hurter, Southerners who come from a culture that frowns on fast-talking women. They compete against self-assured, big-city Northern boys who have been arguing since the playground.

"A lot of these guys are like me, frustrated athletes," O'Donnell says. "I'm a classic slow white guy, but I'll race you to the door."

Liberty does have one great advantage: Despite its perennially high ranking, it is underestimated. "We're supposed to be dumb," O'Donnell says. "People take us lightly. And I won't lie, that gets the kids motivated. We get a lot of pleasure when we beat a Columbia or a Dartmouth."

There were no Ivy League teams at the tournament in Annapolis, but Liberty went up against Navy, Army, Boston College, Georgia, George Mason, the University of Michigan at Dearborn and a number of other bigger schools. They won two of the three divisions, novice and junior varsity. The following week in Austin, Liberty teams defeated squads from Emory and Northwestern. Heading into the National Debate Tournament, which begins later this week, Liberty was No. 1 in overall points in all three national rankings.

"We don't compete against Mount Pisgah College," Falwell told me proudly.

One on one, the best debaters from Harvard, Northwestern, Emory and Berkeley will usually — but not always — beat Liberty's top varsity team. At the National Debate Tournament, a single-elimination shootout structured along the lines of the N.C.A.A. basketball tournament, Liberty will be happy to finish in the Sweet 16.

This doesn't bother O'Donnell. "If we changed the way we recruit and concentrated on fielding an elite varsity, we'd definitely have a shot at winning the national tournament every year," he says. "But that's not who we are. I spend more of my time with the novices than I do with the varsity. The evidence we work up gets shared among all the debaters. Our goal here is to grow an entire program. We want to educate a lot of kids and instill them with a sense of mission. That's the secret of our success — that and a lot of hard work."

Everyone on the college circuit is aware that Liberty is a conservative Christian university. This could be a problem — judging is highly subjective. "Ninety-five percent of the debate community, including the judges, are more liberal than the most liberal members of Congress," O'Donnell says. But he isn't complaining. Judges can be idiosyncratic, but most of them will be swayed by strong argument, O'Donnell says; some even bend over backward to correct for their liberal bias.

Occasionally, though, being at Liberty can present a challenge. After Falwell made incendiary remarks about American immorality causing the 9/11 attacks, the George Mason University team argued that Liberty should lose simply because its chancellor's offensive statements undermined the debate team's credibility. This tactic, described in debate circles as "postmodern," failed to persuade the judge, and according to O'Donnell, Decker, the George Mason coach, later apologized. Decker denies apologizing, and when I raised the incident with him in Annapolis he grinned in a way that couldn't be called remorseful.

Still, for the most part, the debate community is collegial and tight-knit, and O'Donnell is definitely a member of the in-crowd. This year he serves as treasurer of the National Debate Tournament board of trustees. After the first day of the Annapolis tournament, half a dozen rival coaches — including Frank Harrison, whose Trinity varsity lost to Liberty — repaired to Harry Brown's Restaurant. O'Donnell refrained from drinking with his colleagues, and he said a short, silent grace before tucking in to the she-crab bisque, but other than that he gave no hint that he was anything but a big-time college coach enjoying an expense-account meal at the best joint in town.

O'Donnell is aware of his privileged status at Liberty, but he is cautious about the future. Falwell has been in uncertain health, and his anointed successor, Jerry Falwell Jr., is a relatively unknown quantity. ("Politically my son is to the right of me," Falwell told me with gleeful pugnacity.) Falwell Jr. supports the debate program, but O'Donnell knows from the Bible what can happen to Pharaoh's favorite when a new king comes to power.

To safeguard his program, O'Donnell has embarked on a campaign to raise a $10 million endowment. More than 60 of Liberty's ex-debaters are now lawyers; some are doing very well. When he isn't coaching or recruiting, O'Donnell spends an increasing amount of time with them, trying to turn nostalgia and team spirit into hard cash.




O'Donnell also has ambitions that go beyond debate. It was in May 2004, when Karl Rove gave the commencement speech at Liberty, that O'Donnell introduced himself and said, "You should hire me to get President Bush ready in the fall." A few weeks later he received a call from Rove's office inviting him to try out.

O'Donnell's first assignment was to analyze John Kerry's previous debates from the primaries and earlier elections. He did the same with John Edwards's tapes. The results, according to Bush's chief media adviser, Mark McKinnon, were "very good." McKinnon's company, Maverick Media, put O'Donnell on the payroll.

"The guy has great chops," McKinnon told me. "He knows more about presidential debates than anyone I've ever talked to."

O'Donnell drafted a paper that served as a basis for Bush-Kerry predebate technical negotiations. He conferred with Bush's campaign manager, Ken Mehlman, in almost daily telephone conferences. O'Donnell was made part of two debate subgroups, one charged with anticipating Kerry's lines of attack, the other with devising ways of turning the tables.

O'Donnell didn't participate in Bush's actual rehearsal sessions. Those were limited to the inner circle — people like Rove, McKinnon, Condoleezza Rice, Karen Hughes and Dan Bartlett, the communications director. Bush's handlers feared that bringing a new man into the room might throw him off. Some campaign staff members were annoyed by O'Donnell's persistent harping on the need for the president to improve his nonverbal communication, and his opinion that Bush shouldn't agree to an audience-question format at the second debate. He was right about both. "I think he could have been helpful as a participant," McKinnon says.

For O'Donnell, even his limited role was a dream come true. "I've wanted to work on political campaigns ever since I started debating," he says. "I did a little pro bono work for Jack Kemp in 1988. Now here I was working for the president of the United States. Talk about nervous. When Karl Rove asked me if I wanted to do it, I jumped. I never even asked him about money. I would have done it for free."

O'Donnell has since lost his amateur standing. After the 2004 election, he founded his own consulting company, O'Donnell and Associates Ltd. In 2005, his first private client, the Republican Jerry Kilgore, lost the Virginia gubernatorial race.

O'Donnell doesn't intend to stay 0-1. He's already negotiating with four 2006 campaigns — two senatorial and two gubernatorial — although he won't name them. The deals aren't yet closed, and at least one of his potential clients is nervous about being publicly associated with the Falwell wing of the party.

Ken Mehlman, who is now the chairman of the Republican National Committee, has no such worries. "I'm a big fan of Brett's," he says. "If candidates ask me about him for 2006, I'm going to recommend him."

O'Donnell wouldn't mind working for Democratic candidates who share his values. (He has a signed photo of Zell Miller in his office.) On the other hand, there are some Republican clients he wouldn't take. "It would be very hard for me to work with a pro-choice candidate like Rudy Giuliani," he told me. "Or someone lukewarm on the war in Iraq, like Chuck Hagel. I believe in a preemptive strategy, in fighting over there and not over here. I don't want to be just a hired gun. I have an agenda. I'm an ideologue."

A Christian ideologue?

"Absolutely. But would I work for a candidate who isn't a Christian, somebody with the same core principles as mine? Sure. Mitt Romney, for example; he's a Mormon, but our beliefs are similar. I'd work for an atheist if he shared my values."

What about Lynchburg's most famous son? Would O'Donnell work for Thomas Jefferson?

O'Donnell laughed. "With his skills, I doubt he'd need a debate coach. And we'd probably have our ideological differences. But sure, I'd relish working for Thomas Jefferson. He was a patriot."

In the meantime, O'Donnell is focusing on more realistic possibilities. He takes his team into the National Debate Tournament in Evanston, Ill., on March 24. Then, win or lose, he has another season to prepare for. Some talented junior-varsity kids will be moving up. A couple of very promising recruits are coming from Ohio and Florida. And best of all, there will be crop of novices from nowhere, willing young Christians eager for Lynchburg's minister of debate to teach them the art of fast talking for the greater glory of God and Liberty.

Zev Chafets last wrote for the magazine about Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein. His book on Jews and Evangelicals will be published by HarperCollins in the fall.

Correction: Mar. 19, 2006, Sunday:

An article on Page 52 of The Times Magazine today about the debate team at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va., misstates the percentage of students there with SAT scores over 1200. It is 15 percent, not 40.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/19/magazine/319debate.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print

In Secret Unit's 'Black Room,' a Grim Portrait of U.S. Abuse

By ERIC SCHMITT and CAROLYN MARSHALL

As the Iraqi insurgency intensified in early 2004, an elite Special Operations forces unit converted one of Saddam Hussein's former military bases near Baghdad into a top-secret detention center. There, American soldiers made one of the former Iraqi government's torture chambers into their own interrogation cell. They named it the Black Room.

In the windowless, jet-black garage-size room, some soldiers beat prisoners with rifle butts, yelled and spit in their faces and, in a nearby area, used detainees for target practice in a game of jailer paintball. Their intention was to extract information to help hunt down Iraq's most-wanted terrorist, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, according to Defense Department personnel who served with the unit or were briefed on its operations.

The Black Room was part of a temporary detention site at Camp Nama, the secret headquarters of a shadowy military unit known as Task Force 6-26. Located at Baghdad International Airport, the camp was the first stop for many insurgents on their way to the Abu Ghraib prison a few miles away.

Placards posted by soldiers at the detention area advised, "NO BLOOD, NO FOUL." The slogan, as one Defense Department official explained, reflected an adage adopted by Task Force 6-26: "If you don't make them bleed, they can't prosecute for it." According to Pentagon specialists who worked with the unit, prisoners at Camp Nama often disappeared into a detention black hole, barred from access to lawyers or relatives, and confined for weeks without charges. "The reality is, there were no rules there," another Pentagon official said.

The story of detainee abuse in Iraq is a familiar one. But the following account of Task Force 6-26, based on documents and interviews with more than a dozen people, offers the first detailed description of how the military's most highly trained counterterrorism unit committed serious abuses.

It adds to the picture of harsh interrogation practices at American military prisons in Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, as well as at secret Central Intelligence Agency detention centers around the world.

The new account reveals the extent to which the unit members mistreated prisoners months before and after the photographs of abuse from Abu Ghraib were made public in April 2004, and it helps belie the original Pentagon assertions that abuse was confined to a small number of rogue reservists at Abu Ghraib.

The abuses at Camp Nama continued despite warnings beginning in August 2003 from an Army investigator and American intelligence and law enforcement officials in Iraq. The C.I.A. was concerned enough to bar its personnel from Camp Nama that August.

It is difficult to compare the conditions at the camp with those at Abu Ghraib because so little is known about the secret compound, which was off limits even to the Red Cross. The abuses appeared to have been unsanctioned, but some of them seemed to have been well known throughout the camp.

For an elite unit with roughly 1,000 people at any given time, Task Force 6-26 seems to have had a large number of troops punished for detainee abuse. Since 2003, 34 task force members have been disciplined in some form for mistreating prisoners, and at least 11 members have been removed from the unit, according to new figures the Special Operations Command provided in response to questions from The New York Times. Five Army Rangers in the unit were convicted three months ago for kicking and punching three detainees in September 2005.

Some of the serious accusations against Task Force 6-26 have been reported over the past 16 months by news organizations including NBC, The Washington Post and The Times. Many details emerged in hundreds of pages of documents released under a Freedom of Information Act request by the American Civil Liberties Union. But taken together for the first time, the declassified documents and interviews with more than a dozen military and civilian Defense Department and other federal personnel provide the most detailed portrait yet of the secret camp and the inner workings of the clandestine unit.

The documents and interviews also reflect a culture clash between the free-wheeling military commandos and the more cautious Pentagon civilians working with them that escalated to a tense confrontation. At one point, one of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's top aides, Stephen A. Cambone, ordered a subordinate to "get to the bottom" of any misconduct.

Most of the people interviewed for this article were midlevel civilian and military Defense Department personnel who worked with Task Force 6-26 and said they witnessed abuses, or who were briefed on its operations over the past three years.

Many were initially reluctant to discuss Task Force 6-26 because its missions are classified. But when pressed repeatedly by reporters who contacted them, they agreed to speak about their experiences and observations out of what they said was anger and disgust over the unit's treatment of detainees and the failure of task force commanders to punish misconduct more aggressively. The critics said the harsh interrogations yielded little information to help capture insurgents or save American lives.

Virtually all of those who agreed to speak are career government employees, many with previous military service, and they were granted anonymity to encourage them to speak candidly without fear of retribution from the Pentagon. Many of their complaints are supported by declassified military documents and e-mail messages from F.B.I. agents who worked regularly with the task force in Iraq.

A Demand for Intelligence

Military officials say there may have been extenuating circumstances for some of the harsh treatment at Camp Nama and its field stations in other parts of Iraq. By the spring of 2004, the demand on interrogators for intelligence was growing to help combat the increasingly numerous and deadly insurgent attacks.

Some detainees may have been injured resisting capture. A spokesman for the Special Operations Command, Kenneth S. McGraw, said there was sufficient evidence to prove misconduct in only 5 of 29 abuse allegations against task force members since 2003. As a result of those five incidents, 34 people were disciplined.

"We take all those allegations seriously," Gen. Bryan D. Brown, the commander of the Special Operations Command, said in a brief hallway exchange on Capitol Hill on March 8. "Any kind of abuse is not consistent with the values of the Special Operations Command."

The secrecy surrounding the highly classified unit has helped to shield its conduct from public scrutiny. The Pentagon will not disclose the unit's precise size, the names of its commanders, its operating bases or specific missions. Even the task force's name changes regularly to confuse adversaries, and the courts-martial and other disciplinary proceedings have not identified the soldiers in public announcements as task force members.

General Brown's command declined requests for interviews with several former task force members and with Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who leads the Joint Special Operations Command, the headquarters at Fort Bragg, N.C., that supplies the unit's most elite troops.

One Special Operations officer and a senior enlisted soldier identified by Defense Department personnel as former task force members at Camp Nama declined to comment when contacted by telephone. Attempts to contact three other Special Operations soldiers who were in the unit — by phone, through relatives and former neighbors — were also unsuccessful.

Cases of detainee abuse attributed to Task Force 6-26 demonstrate both confusion over and, in some cases, disregard for approved interrogation practices and standards for detainee treatment, according to Defense Department specialists who have worked with the unit.

In early 2004, an 18-year-old man suspected of selling cars to members of the Zarqawi terrorist network was seized with his entire family at their home in Baghdad. Task force soldiers beat him repeatedly with a rifle butt and punched him in the head and kidneys, said a Defense Department specialist briefed on the incident.

Some complaints were ignored or played down in a unit where a conspiracy of silence contributed to the overall secretiveness. "It's under control," one unit commander told a Defense Department official who complained about mistreatment at Camp Nama in the spring of 2004.

For hundreds of suspected insurgents, Camp Nama was a way station on a journey that started with their capture on the battlefield or in their homes, and ended often in a cell at Abu Ghraib. Hidden in plain sight just off a dusty road fronting Baghdad International Airport, Camp Nama was an unmarked, virtually unknown compound at the edge of the taxiways.

The heart of the camp was the Battlefield Interrogation Facility, alternately known as the Temporary Detention Facility and the Temporary Holding Facility. The interrogation and detention areas occupied a corner of the larger compound, separated by a fence topped with razor wire.

Unmarked helicopters flew detainees into the camp almost daily, former task force members said. Dressed in blue jumpsuits with taped goggles covering their eyes, the shackled prisoners were led into a screening room where they were registered and examined by medics.

Just beyond the screening rooms, where Saddam Hussein was given a medical exam after his capture, detainees were kept in as many as 85 cells spread over two buildings. Some detainees were kept in what was known as Motel 6, a group of crudely built plywood shacks that reeked of urine and excrement. The shacks were cramped, forcing many prisoners to squat or crouch. Other detainees were housed inside a separate building in 6-by-8-foot cubicles in a cellblock called Hotel California.

The interrogation rooms were stark. High-value detainees were questioned in the Black Room, nearly bare but for several 18-inch hooks that jutted from the ceiling, a grisly reminder of the terrors inflicted by Mr. Hussein's inquisitors. Jailers often blared rap music or rock 'n' roll at deafening decibels over a loudspeaker to unnerve their subjects.

Another smaller room offered basic comforts like carpets and cushioned seating to put more cooperative prisoners at ease, said several Defense Department specialists who worked at Camp Nama. Detainees wore heavy, olive-drab hoods outside their cells. By June 2004, the revelations of abuse at Abu Ghraib galvanized the military to promise better treatment for prisoners. In one small concession at Camp Nama, soldiers exchanged the hoods for cloth blindfolds with drop veils that allowed detainees to breathe more freely but prevented them from peeking out.

Some former task force members said the Nama in the camp's name stood for a coarse phrase that soldiers used to describe the compound. One Defense Department specialist recalled seeing pink blotches on detainees' clothing as well as red welts on their bodies, marks he learned later were inflicted by soldiers who used detainees as targets and called themselves the High Five Paintball Club.

Mr. McGraw, the military spokesman, said he had not heard of the Black Room or the paintball club and had not seen any mention of them in the documents he had reviewed.

In a nearby operations center, task force analysts pored over intelligence collected from spies, detainees and remotely piloted Predator surveillance aircraft, to piece together clues to aid soldiers on their raids. Twice daily at noon and midnight military interrogators and their supervisors met with officials from the C.I.A., F.B.I. and allied military units to review operations and new intelligence.

Task Force 6-26 was a creation of the Pentagon's post-Sept. 11 campaign against terrorism, and it quickly became the model for how the military would gain intelligence and battle insurgents in the future. Originally known as Task Force 121, it was formed in the summer of 2003, when the military merged two existing Special Operations units, one hunting Osama bin Laden in and around Afghanistan, and the other tracking Mr. Hussein in Iraq. (Its current name is Task Force 145.)

The task force was a melting pot of military and civilian units. It drew on elite troops from the Joint Special Operations Command, whose elements include the Army unit Delta Force, Navy's Seal Team 6 and the 75th Ranger Regiment. Military reservists and Defense Intelligence Agency personnel with special skills, like interrogators, were temporarily assigned to the unit. C.I.A. officers, F.B.I. agents and special operations forces from other countries also worked closely with the task force.

Many of the American Special Operations soldiers wore civilian clothes and were allowed to grow beards and long hair, setting them apart from their uniformed colleagues. Unlike conventional soldiers and marines whose Iraq tours lasted 7 to 12 months, unit members and their commanders typically rotated every 90 days.

Task Force 6-26 had a singular focus: capture or kill Mr. Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant operating in Iraq. "Anytime there was even the smell of Zarqawi nearby, they would go out and use any means possible to get information from a detainee," one official said.

Defense Department personnel briefed on the unit's operations said the harsh treatment extended beyond Camp Nama to small field outposts in Baghdad, Falluja, Balad, Ramadi and Kirkuk. These stations were often nestled within the alleys of a city in nondescript buildings with suburban-size yards where helicopters could land to drop off or pick up detainees.

At the outposts, some detainees were stripped naked and had cold water thrown on them to cause the sensation of drowning, said Defense Department personnel who served with the unit.

In January 2004, the task force captured the son of one of Mr. Hussein's bodyguards in Tikrit. The man told Army investigators that he was forced to strip and that he was punched in the spine until he fainted, put in front of an air-conditioner while cold water was poured on him and kicked in the stomach until he vomited. Army investigators were forced to close their inquiry in June 2005 after they said task force members used battlefield pseudonyms that made it impossible to identify and locate the soldiers involved. The unit also asserted that 70 percent of its computer files had been lost.

Despite the task force's access to a wide range of intelligence, its raids were often dry holes, yielding little if any intelligence and alienating ordinary Iraqis, Defense Department personnel said. Prisoners deemed no threat to American troops were often driven deep into the Iraqi desert at night and released, sometimes given $100 or more in American money for their trouble.

Back at Camp Nama, the task force leaders established a ritual for departing personnel who did a good job, Pentagon officials said. The commanders presented them with two unusual mementos: a detainee hood and a souvenir piece of tile from the medical screening room that once held Mr. Hussein.

Early Signs of Trouble

Accusations of abuse by Task Force 6-26 came as no surprise to many other officials in Iraq. By early 2004, both the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. had expressed alarm about the military's harsh interrogation techniques.

The C.I.A.'s Baghdad station sent a cable to headquarters on Aug. 3, 2003, raising concern that Special Operations troops who served with agency officers had used techniques that had become too aggressive. Five days later, the C.I.A. issued a classified directive that prohibited its officers from participating in harsh interrogations. Separately, the C.I.A. barred its officers from working at Camp Nama but allowed them to keep providing target information and other intelligence to the task force.

The warnings still echoed nearly a year later. On June 25, 2004, nearly two months after the disclosure of the abuses at Abu Ghraib, an F.B.I. agent in Iraq sent an e-mail message to his superiors in Washington, warning that a detainee captured by Task Force 6-26 had suspicious burn marks on his body. The detainee said he had been tortured. A month earlier, another F.B.I. agent asked top bureau officials for guidance on how to deal with military interrogators across Iraq who used techniques like loud music and yelling that exceeded "the bounds of standard F.B.I. practice."

American generals were also alerted to the problem. In December 2003, Col. Stuart A. Herrington, a retired Army intelligence officer, warned in a confidential memo that medical personnel reported that prisoners seized by the unit, then known as Task Force 121, had injuries consistent with beatings. "It seems clear that TF 121 needs to be reined in with respect to its treatment of detainees," Colonel Herrington concluded.

By May 2004, just as the scandal at Abu Ghraib was breaking, tensions increased at Camp Nama between the Special Operations troops and civilian interrogators and case officers from the D.I.A.'s Defense Human Intelligence Service, who were there to support the unit in its fight against the Zarqawi network. The discord, according to documents, centered on the harsh treatment of detainees as well as restrictions the Special Operations troops placed on their civilian colleagues, like monitoring their e-mail messages and phone calls.

Maj. Gen. George E. Ennis, who until recently commanded the D.I.A.'s human intelligence division, declined to be interviewed for this article. But in written responses to questions, General Ennis said he never heard about the numerous complaints made by D.I.A. personnel until he and his boss, Vice Adm. Lowell E. Jacoby, then the agency's director, were briefed on June 24, 2004.

The next day, Admiral Jacoby wrote a two-page memo to Mr. Cambone, under secretary of defense for intelligence. In it, he described a series of complaints, including a May 2004 incident in which a D.I.A. interrogator said he witnessed task force soldiers punch a detainee hard enough to require medical help. The D.I.A. officer took photos of the injuries, but a supervisor confiscated them, the memo said.

The tensions laid bare a clash of military cultures. Combat-hardened commandos seeking a steady flow of intelligence to pinpoint insurgents grew exasperated with civilian interrogators sent from Washington, many of whom were novices at interrogating hostile prisoners fresh off the battlefield.

"These guys wanted results, and our debriefers were used to a civil environment," said one Defense Department official who was briefed on the task force operations.

Within days after Admiral Jacoby sent his memo, the D.I.A. took the extraordinary step of temporarily withdrawing its personnel from Camp Nama.

Admiral Jacoby's memo also provoked an angry reaction from Mr. Cambone. "Get to the bottom of this immediately. This is not acceptable," Mr. Cambone said in a handwritten note on June 26, 2004, to his top deputy, Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin. "In particular, I want to know if this is part of a pattern of behavior by TF 6-26."

General Boykin said through a spokesman on March 17 that at the time he told Mr. Cambone he had found no pattern of misconduct with the task force.

A Shroud of Secrecy

Military and legal experts say the full breadth of abuses committed by Task Force 6-26 may never be known because of the secrecy surrounding the unit, and the likelihood that some allegations went unreported.

In the summer of 2004, Camp Nama closed and the unit moved to a new headquarters in Balad, 45 miles north of Baghdad. The unit's operations are now shrouded in even tighter secrecy.

Soon after their rank-and-file clashed in 2004, D.I.A. officials in Washington and military commanders at Fort Bragg agreed to improve how the task force integrated specialists into its ranks. The D.I.A. is now sending small teams of interrogators, debriefers and case officers, called "deployable Humint teams," to work with Special Operations forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Senior military commanders insist that the elite warriors, who will be relied on more than ever in the campaign against terrorism, are now treating detainees more humanely and can police themselves. The C.I.A. has resumed conducting debriefings with the task force, but does not permit harsh questioning, a C.I.A. official said.

General McChrystal, the leader of the Joint Special Operations Command, received his third star in a promotion ceremony at Fort Bragg on March 13.

On Dec. 8, 2004, the Pentagon's spokesman, Lawrence Di Rita, said that four Special Operations soldiers from the task force were punished for "excessive use of force" and administering electric shocks to detainees with stun guns. Two of the soldiers were removed from the unit. To that point, Mr. Di Rita said, 10 task force members had been disciplined. Since then, according to the new figures provided to The Times, the number of those disciplined for detainee abuse has more than tripled. Nine of the 34 troops disciplined received written or oral counseling. Others were reprimanded for slapping detainees and other offenses.

The five Army Rangers who were court-martialed in December received punishments including jail time of 30 days to six months and reduction in rank. Two of them will receive bad-conduct discharges upon completion of their sentences.

Human rights advocates and leading members of Congress say the Pentagon must still do more to hold senior-level commanders and civilian officials accountable for the misconduct.

The Justice Department inspector general is investigating complaints of detainee abuse by Task Force 6-26, a senior law enforcement official said. The only wide-ranging military inquiry into prisoner abuse by Special Operations forces was completed nearly a year ago by Brig. Gen. Richard P. Formica, and was sent to Congress.

But the United States Central Command has refused repeated requests from The Times over the past several months to provide an unclassified copy of General Formica's findings despite Mr. Rumsfeld's instructions that such a version of all 12 major reports into detainee abuse be made public.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/19/international/middleeast/19abuse.html?ei=5094&en=d312add1d3601...

A Sliding Scale for Victory

As the conflict in Iraq enters its fourth year and civil war threatens, the Bush administration is again working to lower expectations.
By Doyle McManus
Times Staff Writer

March 19, 2006

WASHINGTON — Three years ago, as they ordered more than 150,000 U.S. troops to race toward Baghdad, Bush administration officials confidently predicted that Iraq would quickly evolve into a prosperous, oil-fueled democracy. When those goals proved optimistic, they lowered their sights, focusing on a military campaign to defeat Sunni-led insurgents and elections to jump-start a new political order.

As the conflict enters its fourth year today, the Bush administration faces a new challenge: the prospect of civil war. And, in response, officials again appear to be redefining success downward.

If Iraq can avoid all-out civil war, they say, if Baghdad's new security forces can hold together, if Sunni Arabs, Shiites and Kurds all participate in a new unity government, that may be enough progress to allow the administration to begin reducing the number of U.S. troops in the country by the second half of this year.

In increasingly sober public statements — and in slightly more candid assessments from officials who insisted that they not be identified — the administration is working to lower expectations.

"It may seem difficult at times to understand how we can say that progress is being made," President Bush said Saturday in his weekly radio address, acknowledging that much of the recent news from Iraq has been bad. "But … slowly but surely, our strategy is getting results."

"We may fail," said a senior official directly involved in Iraq policy. "But I think we're going to succeed. I think we're going to nudge this ball down the road…. It's not going to be easy, and it's going to take time."

The more sober tone is not entirely new; officials, from Bush on down, have tacitly acknowledged for more than a year that trying to stabilize Iraq is proving more difficult than they expected when they launched the war in 2003.

But independent foreign policy analysts say they see signs of a more fundamental shift in the administration's position — a creeping redefinition of U.S. goals in Iraq that increasingly allows for the possibility that the nation may remain unstable for years to come.

"It isn't going to be perfect," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said last month. "It isn't going to be pretty. It isn't going to look like the United States of America. It's going to be an Iraqi solution politically, and Iraqi solution economically and an Iraqi solution from a security standpoint."

"Initially, we were going to stay until the insurgency was defeated," noted James F. Dobbins, a former special envoy under Presidents Clinton and Bush. "About a year ago, we amended that in a fairly important way by saying we were going to stay until the Iraqi government and its army and police were capable of coping with the insurgency. We redefined victory in terms of the Iraqis' capability instead of the defeat of the insurgency."

"Now even that measure of success has proven elusive," said Dobbins, who is now with Rand Corp. "At this point I think we would be content if we could diminish our presence, allow the Iraqis to simply hold their own against the insurgency and prevent the country from rupturing into an even more serious civil war than the one that now exists."

The violence between Sunni and Shiite Arabs in recent weeks, which increased after the Feb. 22 bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra, touched off what one official called "a moment of fear" within the administration — a sense that events in Iraq could spiral beyond any measure of U.S. control.

In the aftermath of the bombing, U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad said, "We have opened the Pandora's box…. There is a concerted effort to provoke civil war."

And Rumsfeld, asked whether U.S. forces would intervene in an intra-Iraqi conflict, said, "The plan is to prevent a civil war, and to the extent one were to occur … from a security standpoint, have the Iraqi security forces deal with it to the extent they're able to."

Before the recent violence, U.S. military officials said they hoped to reduce the number of troops in Iraq from about 130,000 to about 100,000 over the year. Officials said last week that the violence could slow the U.S. drawdown but that they still expected some troop reduction to occur.

The good news, Rumsfeld and other officials noted, was that U.S.-trained Iraqi security forces did not disintegrate, and Iraqi political leaders, particularly in the Shiite community, quickly intervened to stop the violence from escalating further.

But the senior official said the U.S. strategy of nurturing a unity government and building multi-ethnic Iraqi security forces was still dangerously vulnerable.

"Sectarian violence … is not going down as [quickly] as we would like to see," he said. "A surge further in sectarian violence, way below what I would call a civil war, is still enough to really threaten what we're trying to do there, because it strengthens the militias, it strengthens the radicals, it weakens the security forces."

The most important immediate step, President Bush and other officials said, is for Iraqi politicians from all three major communities to form a unity government. "I urge them … to form a government that can confront the terrorist threat and earn the trust and confidence of all Iraqis," Bush said Saturday.

But that is proving difficult. Sunni and Kurdish leaders are unhappy with the decision by the Shiite bloc, the largest in the new parliament, to reelect Ibrahim Jafari for the post of prime minister. U.S. officials are unhappy with the choice, too; many of them consider Jafari incompetent and divisive. The result, at least in the short run, has been a political deadlock.

"They have to step up to the plate," the senior official said, reflecting the administration's frustration with the Iraqi leaders. "They cannot just sit aside and press their short-term interests."

Unless a unity government succeeds, said a civilian advisor to the Pentagon, "you are heading for a de facto independent Kurdistan, a Shia Iraq that is very close to the Iranians and a Sunni Iraq which is rebellious in perpetuity."

One of the major goals of U.S. policy in Iraq has been to avoid choosing sides. But that goal may be slipping away, outside analysts said.

"In a sense, as your own forces diminish, you have to choose sides," Dobbins said. "We may be forced to do that. We already have to some degree."

"The Sunnis already see us as having chosen sides," said Steven Biddle, a former professor at the U.S. Army War College who is at the private Council on Foreign Relations.

Biddle has argued that by building new Iraqi security forces dominated by Shiites and Kurds, the United States in effect has armed and trained two of the sides in the Iraqi conflict. The Sunnis, he wrote in a recent article, "perceive the 'national' army and police force as a Shiite-Kurdish militia on steroids."

"I think we're in a civil war now. We've been in a civil war for more than a year. It's just a civil war that's being fought at low intensity," he said in an interview.

Instead of trying to build Iraqi security forces quickly, Biddle argues, the United States should slow down its training program, slow its own military withdrawal, and concentrate on strengthening political leaders — especially among the Sunnis — who can make compromises.

But Biddle acknowledges that there is no political support in the United States for a longer or larger troop deployment.

"If we had the troops, I'd increase the troops," he said. "But we don't have the troops."

Administration officials say that waning U.S. public support for the war has become one of their major concerns, if only because Iraqis on all sides increasingly wonder how long the Americans will stay.

A poll released last week by the Pew Research Center found that public support for keeping U.S. troops in Iraq had reached its lowest point since the 2003 invasion. Half of the respondents said they wanted to bring U.S. troops home as soon as possible, compared with 44% who said the troops should stay "until the situation is stabilized."

Reflecting the increasingly partisan cast of the issue, Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, in the Democratic response to Bush's radio address Saturday, called on the president to give the Iraqi government more responsibility for security "so our troops can responsibly be redeployed."

"The administration's dangerous incompetence has made the job harder," she said.

A former senior official said that he did not expect political pressure to affect Bush's decisions on Iraq this year but that the 2008 presidential election could be a different story.

"There is deep concern in the White House that 2008 will be a referendum on Iraq," he said. "I don't think the president will be affected by the congressional elections. But in 2007, at some point, does he say, 'I'm going to do what's right, no matter what the political consequences?' Or does he say, 'We gave the Iraqis every chance; we can't want a successful Iraq more than the Iraqis want it?'

"Leaving Iraq in its current state would be a very serious strategic setback for us," he said. "It would be a defeat. We can dress it up. We can try to recover from it. But it's a defeat."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-anniversary19mar19,0,1462990,print.story?coll=la...

You can only hope, Rooster, that the airwaves are full of blowhards like that OD'd pumpkin head, brain dead Ruuuuussshhh. Must be nice walkin' around without a clue...

AIR AMERICA TUNED OUT?

Oh, responsibility ...?

By Molly Ivins
Creators Syndicate

AUSTIN - Of course the jokes are flying all over Texas: "What's the fine for shooting a lawyer?" and so forth. Dick Cheney shooting Harry Whittington is fraught, as they say, with irony. It's not as though the ground in Texas is littered with liberal Republicans. I think the vice president winged the only one we've got.

Not that I accuse Whittington of being an actual liberal -- only by Texas Republican standards, and that sets the bar about the height of a matchbook. Nevertheless, Whittington is seriously civilized, particularly on the issues of crime, punishment and prisons. He served on the Texas Board of Corrections and on the bonding authority that builds prisons. As he has often said, prisons do not curb crime -- they are hothouses for crime: "Prisons are to crime what greenhouses are to plants."

When Whittington was the chairman of the Texas Public Finance Authority, he had a devastating set of numbers on the demand for more, more, more prison beds. As Whittington was wont to point out, the only thing that prisons are good for is segregating violent people from the rest of society, and most of them belong in psychiatric hospitals to begin with. The severity of sentences has no effect on crime.

Texas still keeps the nonviolent, the retarded, senior citizens, etc., locked up for ridiculous periods -- all at taxpayer expense. If we could ever get to where we spend as much per pupil on education as we do per prisoner, this state would take off like a rocket. In 2003, we spent nearly $15,000 per prisoner, while average per-pupil spending was about $8,000.

I am not trying to make a big deal out of a simple hunting accident for partisan purposes; I just thought it was a good chance to pay tribute to old Harry, a thoroughly decent man. However, I was offended by the never-our-fault White House spin team.

Cheney adviser Mary Matalin said of her boss, "He was not careless or incautious [and did not] violate of any of the [rules]. He didn't do anything he wasn't supposed to do." Of course he did, Ms. Matalin -- he shot Harry Whittington.

Which brings us to one of the many paradoxes of the Bush administration, which claims to be creating "the responsibility society." It's hard to think of a crowd less likely to take responsibility for anything they have done or not done than this bunch. They're certainly good at preaching responsibility to others -- and blaming other people for everything that goes wrong on their watch.

Of course the Cheney shooting was an accident. But is it an accident if your home and your life are destroyed by the flood following a hurricane? Especially if the flood was caused by failed levees -- a government responsibility?

Is it an accident if you are born with a clubfoot and your parents are too poor to pay for the operation to fix it? Is there any societal responsibility in such a case?

Is it an accident when your manufacturing job gets shipped overseas and all you can find to replace it is a low-wage job at the big-box store with no health insurance, and your kid breaks his leg, and you can't pay the bill, so you have to declare bankruptcy under a new law that leaves you broke for good, with no chance of ever getting out of debt?

Or was all of that caused by deliberate government policy?

Cheney is much given to lecturing us about taking responsibility. When and where does societal responsibility come in?

Cheney has a curious, shifting history on issues of blame and responsibility. He was vice chairman of the congressional committee that spent 11 months investigating the Iran-contra affair and author of its minority report. As John W. Dean highlights in a recent essay, the 500-page majority report concluded that the entire affair "was characterized by pervasive dishonesty and inordinate secrecy." But Cheney's report said the Reagan administration's repeated violations of the law were "mistakes ... were just that -- mistakes in judgment and nothing more."

Those of you who saw Cheney's interview with Jim Lehrer last week might recall the passage on Darfur that ended with this:

Lehrer: "And it's still happening. There's now 2 million people homeless."

Cheney: "Still happening, correct."

Lehrer: "Hundreds of thousands of people have died, and -- so you're satisfied the U.S. is doing everything it can do?"

Cheney: "I am satisfied we're doing everything we can do."

His head still tilts over more to the right when he lies.



http://www.dfw.com/mld/startelegram/news/columnists/molly_ivins/13886091.htm

My Dime: Rooster, Hundreds of billions of dollars spent, thousands of lives lost, many more thousands seriously wounded so you can crow You would believe Saddam over your own Country... Now, thanks to Cheney/Bush, spineless Democrats and party first, our own Country second Republicans, we have created this mess. Damn, I'm feeling safer all the time.....yeah, right!


Iran Was on Edge; Now It's on Top
The war in Iraq has bolstered the regime's influence in the region and made it bolder.
By Megan K. Stack and Borzou Daragahi
Times Staff Writers

February 18, 2006

BAGHDAD — The Islamic government in neighboring Iran watched with trepidation in March 2003 when U.S.-led troops stormed Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein's regime and start remaking the political map of the Mideast.

In retrospect, the Islamic Republic could have celebrated: The war has left America's longtime nemesis with profound influence in the new Iraq and pushed it to the apex of power in the region.

Emboldened by its new status and shielded by deep oil reserves, Tehran is pressing ahead with its nuclear program, daring the international community to impose sanctions. Iran is a Shiite Muslim nation with an ethnic Persian majority, and the blossoming of its influence has fueled the ambitions of long-repressed Shiites throughout the Arab world.

At the same time, Tehran has tightened alliances with groups such as Hamas, which recently won Palestinian elections, and with governments in Damascus and Beijing.

In the 1980s, Iran spent eight years and thousands of lives waging a war to overthrow Hussein, whose regime buffered the Sunni Muslim-dominated Arab world from Iran. But in the end, it took the U.S.-led invasion to topple Iraq's dictator and allow Iranian influence to spread through a chaotic, battle-torn country.

Now Iraq's fledgling democracy has placed power in the hands of the nation's Shiite majority and its Kurdish allies, many of whom lived as exiles in Iran and maintain strong religious, cultural and linguistic ties to it. The two groups sit atop most of Iraq's oil, and both seek a decentralized government that would give them maximum control of it. A weak central government would also limit Sunni influence.

The proposed changes have aggravated ancient tensions between the two branches of Islam, not to mention Arabs and Iranians. Neighboring countries have historical and tribal links to Iraq's Sunnis.

"A weak Iraq is now sitting next to a huge, mighty Iran. Now the only counterpart to Iran is not a regional power, but a foreign power like the United States," said Abdel Khaleq Abdullah, a political analyst and television host in Dubai. "This is unsustainable. It's bad for [Persian] Gulf security. It's given Iran a sense of supremacy that we all feel."

Fear of a Shiite Iraq has helped shape the Sunni Arab world's view of the insurgency in that country. Although many revile the violence, there is also a quiet sense that the insurgents are fighting on behalf of Sunnis, standing up for their sect in the face of American and Iranian attempts to dominate Iraq.

Some Sunni extremists, jihadis from Yemen to Morocco, have been drawn to Iraq to attack symbols of Shiite power.

"When they attack the Shiites, they think they are attacking the Iranian influence," said Mustafa Alani, a counter-terrorism expert at the Gulf Research Center in Dubai. "They think they're attacking Iranian agents. To them, it's a legitimate target."

Though Iran owes much of its newfound strength to the war in Iraq, that's not the only event that has benefited it. The U.S. eliminated another foe, the Taliban regime in neighboring Afghanistan, in 2001.

Meanwhile, hard-liners in Tehran centralized their power and quashed dissent after winning control of the government in elections that brought President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to office last year. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice asked Congress this week to increase 2006 spending on promoting democracy in Iran, to $85 million from $10 million.

Rising oil prices have deepened Iran's value as a strategic partner and dramatically increased its assets.

Keenly aware that it is playing with a strong hand, Iran is working to establish itself as a power to be reckoned with beyond Iraq. The government's increasing confidence can be seen in its aggressive insistence on the right to a nuclear program.

In 2003, when the secret program first became an international controversy, Tehran sought to calm concerns with a conciliatory, soft-spoken tone. Now talks with three European powers have failed, and it is pressing ahead with uranium enrichment and even hinting that it might pull out of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. It also has sharpened its rhetoric.

At a news conference in January, Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi unleashed a torrent of sarcasm and taunts at Europe. British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw was "ignorant," he said, and French President Jacques Chirac "doesn't understand democracy."

The possibility that Iran will develop nuclear weapons is another worry for the Sunni-dominated Arab world.

When Jordan's King Abdullah II warned a year ago with uncharacteristic bluntness that the emergence of a new government in Iraq could create a "Shiite crescent," Shiites in Iraq reacted angrily and Jordanian officials insisted the king had been misunderstood.

But many analysts believe he meant exactly what he said: that a fortified Iranian influence now stretches throughout Iraq, through the Kurdistan region into Turkey, to an ever weaker Syria and down into Lebanon's Hezbollah-dominated south, on Israel's border. Iran's hand also stretches into the heart of the Arabian peninsula through Shiite communities scattered in the Persian Gulf countries.

The roots of distrust between Sunnis and Shiites are old, and Persian rulers have vied for centuries with Arab and Ottoman rivals. But until the invasion of Iraq, a solid bloc of Sunni Arab governments ruled the northern and western coasts of the gulf. Strong, oil-rich Iraq and Saudi Arabia were seen as counterweights to Iran.

For many gulf Arabs, Iran is a long-feared boogeyman, quietly coming to dominate Iraqi politics with an eye to controlling those vast oil fields.

"We fought a war together to keep Iran from occupying Iraq. . . . Now we are handing the whole country over to Iran without reason," Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al Faisal told the Council on Foreign Relations in New York last year.

Sunni Arab leaders across the region worry about a lessening of their power, wonder whether they've fallen out of favor with the Americans, and fret over increasing threats to their dominance over Shiites at home.

"The U.S. knows everything and they're allowing everything to happen," said Adel Mawda, a Sunni sheik and legislator in Bahrain's parliament. "They know very well the Sunnis have lost a lot, and they are not defending them."

The example of Iraq has inspired many Shiites living under the rule of Sunni governments to become more outspoken in demanding their due.

In Saudi Arabia, the Shiite minority is concentrated in the east, the same turf that covers the kingdom's vast oil reserves. For Saudi Shiites, the war in Iraq has helped deliver increased political participation and unprecedented religious freedoms. For the first time, Shiites have been permitted to openly celebrate the Shiite holiday of Ashura with traditional processions.

Saudi Arabia is leery that Iran may diminish its importance as a regional power broker, analysts say. They cite Riyadh's involvement in trying to craft a compromise between Lebanon and Syria as evidence that Saudi Arabia is working overtime to establish its importance.

In tiny Bahrain, the example of Iraq has exacerbated tensions between a disadvantaged Shiite majority and the ruling Sunni minority. Shiites have taken to the streets in a series of increasingly volatile demonstrations in recent months, and sectarian fault lines have deepened.

"It's reached the point where the community wants to go to the street, to make uprising, to make a revolution," said Sheik Ali Salman, president of Bahrain's largest Shiite organization, Al Wefaq. "Nobody wants it to happen. But when the government doesn't want to deal with it, we can't promise it won't happen. It's not in our hands."

Iran is also showing a more overt interest in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, nurturing its long-standing ties to the Lebanese Hezbollah and Palestinian Hamas militant groups. President Ahmadinejad, like those groups, has called for the destruction of the Jewish state.

The upset victory of Hamas in recent Palestinian elections also promises to boost Tehran's regional role. If the United States and the European Union back away diplomatically and withdraw funding from the Palestinians, some analysts think Iran will have an opportunity to fill in the void as a longtime supporter of Hamas, gaining an unprecedented foothold in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Syria, internationally alienated over suspicions that it has played a role in political assassinations in Lebanon, has also been embraced by Iran. Just days after the slaying of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri plunged Syria into deeper diplomatic distress, Tehran and Damascus announced a "united front" to meet any threats.

There is long-standing kinship between the Shiite state and Syria's ruling Allawite sect, an offshoot of Shiism. Analysts describe the two countries, along with Hezbollah, as a defiant coalition that finds common ground in its standoff with the international community.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-iranrising18feb18,0,7670474,print.story?coll=la-...

I'll bet Whittington isn't one of those 57%...

"57% say the Cheney hunting accident is no big deal. This will anger David Gregory and the mainstream press because it illustrates (yet again) their inability to shape public opinion to their wishes."

Hey Jim, this is your idea of keeping 'this thread clean and neat'?? Sharing your PM's and then making your post to Eddie F who couldn't fix his lips to say anything positive about IDCC if his life depended on it and whose contributions rarely exceed a jab or a dig??

Your right, LOL!

Ed , After I made that post I had a few PM's that TeeCee was bragging over on AB how he brought this fund in . What a joke. They must have got tired of his BS or rumors and as we know they sold the farm.
Good job TeeCee did for the shareholders?

LOL