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You go first....the Dickster will follow...my fine feathered friend:)
I'd love to go hunting with the Dickster!
No rooster, it is time to rise up against those insane neo-cons that have hijacked our country!
It's time for ALL of us to rise against those insane Muslims!
Good find easy. It's King George, baby, our Imperial Master.
Want to know how this has been a disaster?
Posted on Sun, Feb. 05, 2006
By Molly Ivins
Creators Syndicate
"We're on the offensive in Iraq, with a clear plan for victory. First, we are helping Iraqis build an inclusive government, so that old resentments will be eased and the insurgency will be marginalized. Second, we are continuing reconstruction efforts and helping the Iraqi government to fight corruption and build a modern economy, so all Iraqis can experience the benefit of freedom. Third, we are striking terrorist targets while we train Iraqi forces that are increasingly capable of defeating the enemy." -- George W. Bush, State of the Union, Jan. 31.
"The Iraq war has been a disaster." -- CNN reporter Christiane Amanpour, Jan. 30.
The number of terrorist attacks per day in Iraq grew from 55 in December 2004 to 77 per day in December 2005.
Iraq today produces less oil than it did under Saddam. The current oil minister is Ahmad Chalabi, onetime darling of the neocon set and convicted of bank fraud in Jordan.
The majority of Iraqis favor complete American troop withdrawal, though the time frames they prefer vary.
"To the extent we stay there with big forces indefinitely, Iraqis will come up with all these theories that we really want to stay here for their oil. We want to use their country as a springboard for more aggression. They still see us as occupiers." -- Michael O'Hanlon, Brookings Institution, Dec. 27, 2005.
"A sudden withdrawal of our forces from Iraq would abandon our allies to death and prison ... and put men like bin Laden and Zarqawi in charge of a strategic country ..." -- Bush, Jan. 31.
Actually, the insurgency in Iraq is mostly native Iraqis -- old Baathists and others who don't like being occupied by infidels. International terrorist jihadists are a negligible fraction of those fighting, and they are there to fight Americans, not to take over Iraq.
The war in Iraq costs the United States $1 billion per week. Bush originally said it would cost $60 billion. Before the war, he fired his top economic adviser, Larry Lindsey, who said it would cost up to $200 billion.
Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, estimates the total cost between $1 trillion and $2 trillion. He includes lifetime care of the wounded, the economic value of destroyed and lost lives and the opportunity cost of resources diverted to the war.
More than 2,200 Americans have been killed in action in Iraq and 16,600 seriously wounded. Because we are doing a better job saving the lives of the wounded, those who survive often have devastating injuries from which there is no recovery.
Because of its total misjudgment of the war in Iraq, the administration has failed to enlarge the regular Army and has therefore put the institution under immense strain. The "stop-loss" refusal to let people leave at the end of their enlistments affects 50,000 soldiers, and mobilization of the reserves and extended service are a form of draft.
Despite chipper denials from the Pentagon, the Army has serious problems with recruiting, especially getting quality recruits, and with regular Army re-enlistment. The reason that the numbers are not worse is because of the bonuses being offered.
It is quite possible that this administration is destroying the professional Army.
The most important question about the war in Iraq is whether it is doing any good, and an increasing pool of evidence shows that it has become a rallying and recruiting tool for global terrorists. Like the other information in this column, the evidence comes from official reports.
I do hope that this is responsible criticism that aims for cures, not defeatism that refuses to acknowledge anything but failure.
Take this administration -- please
Posted on Thu, Feb. 09, 2006
By Molly Ivins
Creators Syndicate
I like to think that Republicans are having fun. They're such cards. What a wheeze, what a jape. Talking about energy independence in the State of the Union address! President Bush said, "America is addicted to oil," and we will "break this addiction." Oh, what a good trick to see if anyone thought he actually meant it!
I'm not going to embarrass the perennial suckers who fell for it by identifying them, but I assure you they include some well-known names in journalism. Boy, I bet they feel like fools, having written those optimistic columns pointing to how Bush had made a fine proposal -- cut oil imports from the Middle East by 75 percent by 2025 -- and people should take it seriously and stop dissing him.
Of course, the next day the administration trotted out Energy Secretary Sam Bodman and Allan Hubbard, director of the president's National Economic Council, to assure us that the president didn't mean it.
Bodman explained, "That was purely an example." A "for instance." Like, we could set a goal like that.
Actually, we could do that without breaking a sweat: Set fuel efficiency standards at 40 miles per gallon in 10 years (hybrids get higher mileage now), and you save 2.5 million barrels a day -- just what we import now from the Mideast.
According to Knight Ridder, "Asked why the president used the words 'the Middle East' when he didn't really mean them, one administration official said Bush wanted to dramatize the issue in a way that 'every American sitting out there listening to the speech understands.' The official spoke only on condition of anonymity because he feared that his remarks might get him into trouble."
Aw. Let's see -- Bush lied so that every American sitting out there listening to the speech understands. It's our fault. We're so dumb that if he doesn't lie, we don't get it.
Of course, those sophisticates who pay attention to stuff such as the budget, where they decide how to spend the money, were aware that the $150 million (a truly pitiful amount by Washington standards) Bush promised would go to making biofuels more competitive is $50 million less than what was in last year's budget for that purpose.
But you are not to assume that Bush has given up on the Dick Cheney plan to drill our way to energy independence just because he didn't mention it in his speech. Last month, the Department of the Interior released a plan that would open part of Alaska's Western Arctic Reserve for drilling. The head of the Natural Resources Defense Council's Alaska Project, Chuck Clusen, said: "Scientists, sportsmen and conservation groups all agree we should protect the last 13 percent of the most sensitive habitat in the Western Arctic's Northeast area. Eighty-seven percent was already open. The Bureau of Land Management decided ... to hand of it over to the oil companies. ... We can drill every last acre of wilderness, and it won't make us any more secure. We only have 3 percent of the world's oil, and the Middle East has 66 percent. Do the math. We can't drill our way to energy independence."
What a good joke.
And this guy Boehner -- John Boehner, the new Republican majority leader, elected because of Tom DeLay's unfortunate indictment -- what a gagster this guy is, what a zany madcap. He ran as a reform candidate! Har-har-har-har!
This is a guy who's up to his neck in the K Street Project, in which conservative lobbyists and politicians walk hand in hand. Boehner has such a highly developed sense of ethics that he once distributed checks from the tobacco lobby on the floor of the House of Representatives.
But now that he's been elected, it's time to get serious, and Boehner has already backed away from Speaker Dennis Hastert's proposal to actually ban (gasp!) gifts and trips from lobbyists. Boehner figures it's enough just to report them. That'll take care of everything.
I tell you, this bunch of cut-ups just keeps the fun coming. Just a few weeks ago, the House cut $16 billion from Medicaid over 10 years, which means that states will increase co-payments on poor people and drop preventive care -- which will cost more in the long run.
They also cut $12.7 billion in student aid and loan programs over five years, because who needs that? And cut another $1.5 billion in child support enforcement in the next year, which is positively brilliant and will result in a drop of at least $8.4 billion in child support collected over the next 10 years. Oh, and a measly cut of $577 million in foster care over five years, making it harder to take care of neglected and abused children.
Now here's a little howler: Bush proposes cutting $36 billion from Medicare over the next five years only ... wait for it ... he's not cutting the money -- he's saving it! A $36 billion Medicare savings. That's so clever.
Hey Sluggo,
Thanks for posting Dowd, Herbert, etc....Since the Times got cheap, I miss their pieces. And for those that skipped through it, here is the last paragraph again!! If that ain't the rooster watching the chicken coop! Party first, country second.
A final absurd junction of dysfunction was reached on Wednesday, when Republican Party leaders awarded Tom DeLay with a seat on the Appropriations subcommittee overseeing the Justice Department, which is investigating Jack Abramoff, including his connections to Tom DeLay.
Handling Hamas
By DEBORAH SOLOMON
Q: You were this country's chief peace negotiator in the Middle East for 12 years, until 2001, when the talks broke down and never resumed. Do you think the U.S. is at all responsible for the ascent of Hamas in the Palestinian territories and its landslide election victory last month?
I find it incredibly depressing. We had so many opportunities to stop this.
How? Some people see the Israeli pullout from Gaza last summer as the turning point in all this, because the local economy collapsed and left Palestinians feeling as if no one was in charge.
The expectations were that life would get better. Well, it got worse. It became completely lawless, and the jobs disintegrated as well. You needed someone to spearhead the pledging of assistance and the delivery of assistance. The U.S. could have done that. But we didn't have a point person.
Are you saying that we could have saved Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, from his incompetence in Gaza, which Hamas exploited for political ends?
From the beginning, it was clear that Abbas had a limited time to show that his way, the way of nonviolence, worked. And to do that, he had to show that life got better. What didn't happen is a major effort on the part of the outside, which had to be led by us, to help Abbas make decisions and become responsive to the Palestinian public.
Why do you think President Bush decided to eliminate the position of Mideast peace negotiator, after you had served his father and President Clinton and helped broker so many agreements?
The Bush administration, in the first term, made a basic decision to disengage.They took the words "peace process" out of the lexicon. They literally would not use the words "peace process" for the first few months. In the second term, Condoleezza Rice has been more involved.
When she visited Gaza after the Israeli evacuation, it was announced with great fanfare that she pulled an all-nighter to finesse an agreement between the Israelis and the Palestinians.
She was there two days. She has never had a long trip there. And the pullout took place in August. This understanding took place in November. It was good she did it, but it would have been better if this had been done before. Had it betokened a consistent, visible involvement through the person of an envoy, it might have made some difference.
Do you think the members of Hamas will desist in calling for the destruction of Israel now that they have acquired political clout?
No. I think they will not.
In that case, what is the proper course of action for us?
The international community needs to cut them off unless they transform themselves. There can be no dealing with Hamas and no financial assistance to the Palestinians if they don't give up violence and recognize the right of Israel to exist.
Why would an extremist like Ismail Haniyeh and the other leaders of Hamas care what we think anyhow?
Think about this: The Palestinians get about a billion dollars a year from the outside. This year the U.S. was giving them about $350 million, a certain percentage of which was for the Palestinian Authority, but most of it for nongovernmental organizations.
Can't Palestinians get the same support from their fellow Arab nations?
Well, the Arabs give them very little money. The Saudis, who give them the most, have been giving them about $84 million a year. The Egyptians give them no money. There is a genuine sense of grievance throughout the Arab world on the Palestinian issue. But Arab leaders are more prepared to talk about doing something than to actually do it.
What countries do you think are crucial if we are to form an anti-Hamas front that has any influence?
I think right now the U.S. focus has to be on lining up a common front with the Europeans, the Russians, the Chinese, the Japanese and, if possible, Arab leaders.
Are we actually capable of doing that?
The current administration has not shown great interest in group projects. That's true, but sometimes necessity creates reality. There's an imperative here.
Deliberation Nation
By NOAH FELDMAN
The public hearings that the Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled to begin holding tomorrow are supposed to help determine whether the National Security Agency's domestic spying program broke the law. But this is no ordinary trial. Although lawyers will abound and oaths will be administered, there will be no prosecutors or judges, and there are as yet no defendants, no one charged with a specific legal violation. Instead, a profusion of statutes, case law and constitutional provisions surrounds and obscures the issue. The committee will try to shed light on the question of legality, but it won't be easy. We are in the midst of a once-in-a-decade constitutional weather pattern — what you might call a fog of law.
The main reason that the issue before the committee looks so confusing is, paradoxically, that the facts are basically settled. The Bush administration has acknowledged ordering the N.S.A. to listen to conversations between people in the United States and suspected terrorists abroad without getting warrants first. (It would be fascinating to know whose conversations were overheard and how many wiretaps proved useful, but the answers to such inquiries may be classified, and a public accounting is unlikely.) This leaves the legal status of the listening-in as the most likely topic of conversation, and maybe the only one.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 requires warrants for eavesdropping on conversations involving anyone in the United States — so on the face of things, it looks as if the domestic spying program violated the law. Yet the administration argues that another law, the Sept. 18, 2001, Authorization for Use of Military Force, superseded FISA: by giving the president the power to make war against Al Qaeda and its supporters, the argument goes, the law implicitly authorized the customary activities of war, including a wide variety of intelligence gathering. When challenged on this point, the administration's next line of defense is the Constitution: the president's responsibility as commander in chief and his executive power over foreign affairs are said to entail the authority to listen to conversations across borders that are relevant to national security. In a final constitutional twist, critics of the administration argue that the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution guarantees the people the right to be secure from unreasonable searches and seizures, perhaps including warrantless wiretaps.
This morass of competing legal authorities practically begs for an organizing framework. The senators on the judiciary committee are likely to make repeated reference to Justice Robert H. Jackson's canonical concurring opinion in Youngstown Sheet and Tube Company v. Sawyer — the 1952 Supreme Court decision holding that President Truman lacked authority to seize the nation's steel mills in order to prevent a labor strike that threatened arms production for the Korean War. According to the system that Jackson laid out, when Congress has expressly authorized the president to act, "his authority is at its maximum." When Congress has expressly or implicitly told him not to act, then "his power is at its lowest ebb." In between is when Congress is silent — what Jackson memorably called the "zone of twilight." In this situation, the status of presidential action is uncertain and is therefore likely to be decided not by law but by political circumstances and practical considerations.
In the case of the N.S.A.'s domestic spying program, the debate about statutory and constitutional authority threatens to create a twilight zone of its own. No one seems to think that Congress has been silent; on the contrary, it has either flatly banned the eavesdropping or implicitly authorized it. The confusion is making the debate as much a political contest as a legal one. It is here that the committee hearings become most relevant. Congress does not decide actual legal cases, but it has a critical role to play in shaping public deliberation, which in the end may be just as legally influential. By debating what the N.S.A. has done in pursuing security at the expense of privacy, the senators can put before the public the question of how we ought to strike that delicate balance far better than unelected judges could. The specter of the hearings has already driven the Bush administration to start arguing that the FISA rules were inadequate to meet new, post-9/11 threats. Whether this is true — and whether the right constitutional solution was for the president to change the rules by fiat, instead of by asking Congress for permission — is an issue that needs to be discussed.
The Senate is sometimes derided as a mere debating chamber, but in this case, debate is exactly what we need. For the last five years, with a Republican-controlled Congress, Americans have not been exposed to serious Congressional debate on any major issue, let alone how far the executive branch may go in protecting our security. These hearings — called by a Republican, Senator Arlen Specter — will afford us the first major opportunity to hear and (via our representatives) air legitimate concerns about whether the president has gone too far.
Furthermore, the committee's debate will have an indirect effect on the courts. When the eavesdropping issue finally does come before a court — as it seems likely to by one route or another; two civil rights groups recently filed lawsuits against the administration over its domestic spying program — the judges who address it will be aware of what happened in the hearings and of the public debate surrounding them.
Debate should, of course, ultimately lead to action. Lawmakers cannot reverse wrongdoing that has already occurred. But they can express outrage (in a resolution or on the floor) that the president saw fit to usurp Congress's power to set the ground rules for secret surveillance. Alternatively, Congress could pass legislation invalidating the executive order authorizing the eavesdropping and thus set the stage for a potential constitutional battle that would move to the courts. Another option would be for Congress to conclude that new laws actually are needed for the war on terror — but it could pass those laws itself instead of letting the president make them up as he goes along. Even though Congress lacks the courts' authority to say what the law is, it can still cast a ray of light through the legal fog.
Noah Feldman, a contributing writer, is a law professor at New York University.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/05/magazine/05wwln_lede.html?pagewanted=print
U.S.S. Cole Attack Planner Escapes, Interpol Says
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 9:52 a.m. ET
LYON, France (AP) -- A man considered a mastermind of the USS Cole bombing that killed 17 sailors in a Yemeni port in 2000 was among 23 people who escaped from a Yemen prison last week, Interpol said Sunday.
The international police agency issued an ''urgent global security alert'' for those who escaped Friday from the prison via a tunnel. It called the escapees ''dangerous individuals.''
A Yemen security official announced the escape of convicted al-Qaida members Friday but did not provide details.
Interpol said in a statement that at least 13 of the 23 escapees were convicted al-Qaida fighters, who escaped via a 140-yard-long tunnel ''dug by the prisoners and co-conspirators outside.''
Yemeni officials confirmed to Interpol that a man considered a mastermind of the Cole attack, identified as Jamal al-Badawi, was among those who escaped.
Al-Badawi was among those sentenced to death in September 2004 for plotting the USS Cole attack. Two suicide bombers blew up an explosives-laden boat next to the destroyer as it refueled in the Yemeni port of Aden on Oct. 12, 2000.
Another of the 23 escapees was identified as Fawaz Yahya al-Rabeiee, considered by Interpol to be one of those responsible for a 2002 attack on the French tanker Limburg off Yemen's coast. That attack killed a Bulgarian crew member and spilled 90,000 barrels of oil into the Gulf of Aden.
Rebuilding New Orleans, One Appeal at a Time
By ADAM NOSSITER
NEW ORLEANS, Feb. 4 — Every day the line snakes down a spartan corridor on the eighth floor of City Hall here, as hundreds of people clutch a piece of paper inscribed with a fateful percentage that could force them to abandon their home.
The number is always over 50, and it means a house was so damaged in the flooding after Hurricane Katrina — more than half-ruined — that it faces demolition, unless the owner can come up with tens of thousands of dollars to raise it several feet above the ground and any future floodwaters.
But there is a way out, and that is why so many people stand in line every day, collectively transforming this battered city. "What you need to do is talk to a building inspector and get that lowered below 50 percent," a city worker calls out to the crowd. And at the end of the line, in a large open room down the hall, that is exactly what happens, nearly 90 percent of the time, New Orleans officials say.
By agreeing so often to these appeals — more than 6,000 over the last few months — city officials are in essence allowing random redevelopment to occur throughout the city, undermining a plan by Mayor C. Ray Nagin's rebuilding commission to hold off on building permits in damaged areas for several months until more careful planning can take place. That plan, greeted by widespread opposition, including from the mayor himself, is now essentially dead.
House by house, in devastated neighborhoods across the city, homeowners are bringing back their new-minted building permits and rebuilding New Orleans. As many as 500 such permits are issued every day, said Greg Meffert, the city official in charge of the rebuilding process.
And there is no particular rhyme or reason to who gets a permit, or consideration of whether their neighborhoods can really support its previous residents. One city building inspector, Devra Goldstein, called the proceedings on the eighth floor "really fly-by-night, chaotic, Wild West, get-what-you-want."
The floor, she said, represents "a plan by default."
It is also testament to the fierce desire of many displaced New Orleanians to re-establish themselves, no matter the odds.
"They told us, if things look close, chances are we can get the assessment lowered below 50 percent, and we can start rebuilding," said George Aguillard, a 65-year-old retired longshoreman waiting patiently in the largely African-American crowd at City Hall.
"At my age, there's no starting over in a new house," said Mr. Aguillard, a resident of the flooded Pontchartrain Park neighborhood. His damage assessment came in at 52.13 percent.
But there may be a steep price to the city's largess in allowing so many people to move back into flood plains without having to elevate their homes. Past federal flood insurance directors say the practice violates the program, which established the 50-percent rule to guide safe building in flood-prone areas. Most communities have adopted it as a minimum standard, say officials of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which runs the flood program.
In exchange for heavily-subsidized flood insurance for residents, the program expects cities to insist on flood-resistant construction. Some cities that violate the flood rules have been ousted from the insurance program, putting thousands of residents at huge risk.
"They should be suspended, absolutely," said J. Robert Hunter, a former head of the federal flood-insurance program who is now director of insurance at the Consumer Federation of America. "You can't fake it," he said. "I sympathize with these people. But you shouldn't say 'Well, you're poor, therefore you can build in a dangerous place where you can be flooded again, and killed.' "
He added, "You can't destroy the flood program to achieve a short-term goal."
Another early director of federal flood insurance, George K. Bernstein, was equally critical, saying the practice of reducing flood damage percentages was "just ripping off taxpayers."
"If New Orleans is phonying the damage reports so as to allow inadequate construction, they ought to get thrown out of the program," he said.
FEMA officials say they are keeping a close watch on New Orleans but consider the city to be following the rules.
"I understand they have a process in place," said Michael Buckley, deputy director for mitigation at FEMA. "I wouldn't characterize it as a process to change the determination." Mr. Buckley said he was "not aware" of any large-scale downsizing of damage assessments.
But up on the eighth floor, the downward revisions are over in a matter of minutes. "It was pretty smooth," said Charles Harris, an Orleans Parish sheriff's deputy who had four feet of water in his eastern New Orleans home, and whose percentage of damage was changed to 47 from 52. "They were really helpful. I thought it was going to be a combative thing. I was ready to put on my shield. It wasn't like that at all."
Kevin François, an air-conditioning repairman with a house that was rated as 52 percent damaged, said, "It was basically an in-and-out process." He, left City Hall with a number several points less than 50.
Mr. Meffert, the city official, said the initial assessments sometimes contained errors. Homeowners have to justify any changes to their damage assessments, he said, and must provide the details of their rebuilding plans. "What's swinging the vote is, 'I'm going to do it this way,' " he said.
But some leaving City Hall here are still in a pugnacious mood, despite the friendly reception. "I didn't give them a chance," Florestine Jalvia said proudly, having brought her assessment down to 47 percent damaged from 52.5 percent. A tougher stand on rebuilding would have probably engendered the same kind of reaction as the now-defunct four-month moratorium idea. "I think the city is trying to avoid a major public fight," said Ms. Goldstein, the building inspector.
Out in the once-flooded neighborhoods, there is feverish activity, at intervals. Those hard at work scoff at the commission's idea of holding off on rebuilding until it becomes clearer which areas have a chance of coming back.
"I'm not listening to that, man," said Kristopher Winder, as he finished gutting his mother's house in the Gentilly neighborhood. He had brought it back down to its frame. Down the street, signs in front of one house carry defiant messages: "We're rebuilding, and don't try to stop us!" reads one, and "There's no place like home" reads another.
"I thought, when they said that four-month thing, I thought that was crazy," Mr. Winder said. "I was mad. I thought it didn't make no sense."
"I'm working on this house," he said. "She's going to be up and running in three to four months."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/05/national/nationalspecial/05rebuild.html?ei=5094&en=58ccd84cd4e...
Oil Graft Fuels the Insurgency, Iraq and U.S. Say
By ROBERT F. WORTH and JAMES GLANZ
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Feb. 4 — Iraqi and American officials say they are seeing a troubling pattern of government corruption enabling the flow of oil money and other funds to the insurgency and threatening to undermine Iraq's struggling economy.
In Iraq, which depends almost exclusively on oil for its revenues, the officials say that any diversion of money to an insurgency that is killing its citizens and tearing apart its infrastructure adds a new and menacing element to the challenge of holding the country together.
In one example, a sitting member of the Iraqi National Assembly has been indicted in the theft of millions of dollars meant for protecting a critical oil pipeline against attacks and is suspected of funneling some of that money to the insurgency, said Radhi Hamza al-Radhi, the chairman of Iraq's Commission on Public Integrity. The indictment has not been made public.
The charges against the Sunni lawmaker, Meshaan al-Juburi, are far from the only indication that the insurgency is profiting from Iraq's oil riches.
On Saturday, the director of a major oil storage plant near Kirkuk was arrested with other employees and several local police officials, and charged with helping to orchestrate a mortar attack on the plant on Thursday, a Northern Oil Company employee said. The attack resulted in devastating pipeline fires and a shutdown of all oil operations in the area, said the employee, who was granted anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about the matter.
Ali Allawi, Iraq's finance minister, estimated that insurgents reap 40 percent to 50 percent of all oil-smuggling profits in the country. Offering an example of how illicit oil products are kept flowing on the black market, he said that the insurgency had infiltrated senior management positions at the major northern refinery in Baiji and routinely terrorized truck drivers there. This allows the insurgents and their confederates to tap the pipeline, empty the trucks and sell the oil or gas themselves.
"It's gone beyond Nigeria levels now where it really threatens national security," Mr. Allawi said of the oil industry. "The insurgents are involved at all levels."
American officials here echo that view. "It's clear that corruption funds the insurgency, so there you have a very real threat to the new state," said an American official who is involved in anticorruption efforts but refused to be identified to preserve his ability to work with Iraqi officials. "Corruption really has the potential of undercutting the growth potential here."
An example of how the insurgents terrorize oil truck drivers occurred last month, as a 60-truck convoy of fuel tankers from Baiji that was intended to alleviate fuel shortages in Baghdad was attacked by insurgents with grenades and machine guns despite the heavy presence of Iraqi security forces. In some cases Iraqi guards on the Syrian border have been paid off to let stolen shipments through, and the oil is then sold on the black market, Mr. Radhi said.
Senior officials in Iraq's Oil Ministry have been repeatedly cited in the Iraqi press as complaining about what they call an "oil smuggling mafia" that not only siphons profits from the oil industry but also is said to control the allocation of administrative posts in the ministry.
The former oil minister, Ibrahim Bahr al-Ulum, told the London-based newspaper Al Hayat late last year that "oil and fuel smuggling networks have grown into a dangerous mafia threatening the lives of those in charge of fighting corruption," according to a translation by the BBC.
Mr. Ulum said in an interview with the television network Iraqiya that raids on "smuggling dens" in Baghdad had netted forged documents and tanker trucks.
The indictment against Mr. Juburi, who is now believed to be hiding in Syria, charge that he stole money intended to hire and equip thousands of guards in 2004 and 2005 to protect an oil pipeline running between Baiji and the northern city of Kirkuk, Mr. Radhi said. Iraqi officials also suspect, but have not proved, that Mr. Juburi funneled some of the money he was given to protect the pipeline to the insurgents who were attacking it.
An Iraqi Army battalion commander Mr. Juburi hired was arrested recently and accused of organizing insurgent attacks on the pipeline, said a high-ranking Iraqi official who is close to the investigation. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak about the indictment. It is not clear whether Mr. Juburi knew that the commander was helping plan the attacks, the official said.
Frequent insurgent attacks on the pipeline have been one reason Iraqi oil exports have plummeted over the past year. The mortar attack on Thursday that led to the arrests of oil company officials and police officials was described by Northern Oil company employees as one of the most damaging in years.
The battalion commander hired by Mr. Juburi was identified as Ali Ahmed al-Wazir, commander of the second battalion of the first brigade of the Special Infrastructure Brigades, based in the Wadi Zareitoun district, said the high-ranking Iraqi official close to the investigation. Mr. Juburi fled Iraq just before a warrant was issued for his arrest in late December, Mr. Radhi said. Mr. Juburi's son, Yazen Meshaan al-Juburi, has also been charged in the case and is believed to have fled with him.
Mr. Juburi's party, the Conciliation and Liberation Bloc, won three seats in December's elections. But the charges against him are not likely to affect the current negotiations over forming a new Iraqi government, Mr. Radhi said, because the party Mr. Juburi formed can nominate someone to replace him in the new National Assembly.
Mr. Juburi has long been a controversial figure in Iraq. He was once intimate with the family of Saddam Hussein, but joined other Iraqi exiles in calling for Mr. Hussein's overthrow after fleeing Iraq in 1989.
He claimed that he worked with American Special Forces in the weeks before the war in a covert attempt to undermine the Iraqi military, broadcasting calls to military commanders to lay down their arms from a television station in Kurdistan. He claimed to have taken control of Mosul by the outbreak of the war, but he was later ousted by American commanders.
Mr. Juburi's tribe, the Juburis, is powerful in Salahuddin Province, through which the oil pipeline from Baiji runs. Partly for that reason, Mr. Juburi was asked in 2004 to organize 17 battalions of soldiers to protect the pipeline. In January 2005, Mr. Juburi was elected to the National Assembly, becoming one of a few Sunni Arab members and a hard-line critic of the government, led by Ibrahim al-Jaafari. Iraqi and American officials say they believe that some members of the Juburi tribe are involved in the insurgency.
After attacks on the pipeline grew worse in 2005, a three-month investigation found that Mr. Juburi had hired only a small number of commanders, paying them to appoint hundreds of ghost soldiers on paper and funnel the salaries back to him, Mr. Radhi said.
Mr. Juburi's son, Yazen, was responsible for supplying food for the soldiers, and he appears to have pocketed much of the money allocated for that purpose, the Iraqi official said.
Oil smuggling is only one part of a broader corruption problem that ranges from small-scale kickbacks to major fraud of the kind that took place in Iraq's Defense Ministry, where investigators last August said they had identified more than $1.3 billion in misspent military contracts. Hazem Shaalan, who was defense minister under former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi and gave Mr. Juburi the job of protecting the Baiji pipeline, was charged with public corruption last year and is now living in London.
Not all the corruption is related to the insurgency. But American and Iraqi officials say its scale is so broad as to be a serious threat to Iraq's economic rebirth.
The Commission on Public Integrity has referred about 450 cases for prosecution, and it has more than 1,000 other cases under investigation, Mr. Radhi said.
The reports of corruption have set off a major reform effort in recent months, with American advisers assisting internal investigations and promoting new rules like requiring financial disclosure forms for government officials.
But the changes have often been stymied by intimidation and violence. Iraq set up a new post in each government ministry to do internal monitoring, the inspector general, but two of the officials were assassinated last year just as they were about to publicize the results of investigations. Six other employees of the Commission on Public Integrity have been killed, and the rest live in constant fear of retaliatory violence.
"When the corruption is large, people incline to terror," Mr. Radhi said.
Some of the officials in charge of fighting corruption appear to have been drawn into it instead. The Iraqi inspector general program has suffered from "significant missteps and lapses in progress," and several inspector generals have been relieved of their jobs pending indictments, according to a State Department report on Iraq's reconstruction efforts.
The threat of violence has also deterred many Iraqi journalists from reporting on corruption, despite a campaign by American officials, who have optimistically declared the week starting Feb. 19 to be Anti-corruption Week.
"We have talked to three editors in the past week about anticorruption stories," said an American official in Baghdad who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "They are afraid of getting whacked if they print them."
In other cases, anticorruption officials have helped to hide illegal behavior, joining what Mr. Radhi called "Mafia type" organizations within the government ministries.
The Iraqi government has begun requiring all employees to sign a code of conduct, and all high-level officials must fill out complete financial disclosure forms. But 40 percent of them have refused to do so, saying they fear that filling out such forms will be equivalent to telling kidnappers what ransom to charge, Mr. Radhi said.
There have been some successes, he said: eight government officials have been convicted on corruption charges and sentenced, though many more have escaped prosecution by fleeing to other countries.
Robert F. Worth reported from Baghdad for this article, and James Glanz from New York.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/05/international/middleeast/05corrupt.html?_r=1&th=&oref=slog...
Blunt, Big Government, and Global Warming
David Corn
This morning I was listening to C-SPAN radio and heard a wonderful juxtaposition. First, I encountered a portion of an interview with SEIU leader Andy Stern. A minimum-wage worker had called in and was talking about the difficulty he had living on $5.15 an hour. Such pay was not enough, he explained, to afford rent ($300 a month), a car, car insurance, and food. With pain in his voice, the caller said he was considering food stamps, but he said was doing all he could to avoid taking a handout. It was a poignant moment. Stern, who had been talking about the need to boost the minimum wage, pointed to the call as evidence that the powerbrokers of Republican-controlled Washington are out of touch with the lives of millions of hardworking Americans like this fellow and have done little to address his needs: a higher minimum wage, health insurance, and retirement security.
Moments later--after catching Jane's Addiction on a classic rock station--I returned to C-SPAN and found temporary majority leader Roy Blunt, who is running to be permanent majority leader (since Tom DeLay has abdicated that throne). He had been speaking to students at Georgetown this past weekend. If you think politics doesn't make a difference, Blunt told them, go look at a newspaper from 13 years ago. Back then, he claimed, the folks in control--the Democrats--we're talking about tax hikes, not tax cuts, and growing the government, not growing the economy. While he was on campus, Blunt should have taken a history lesson. The Clintonites were at that point talking about imposing modest tax hikes only on the rich to address the deficit left over from the Bush I years, and they claimed this would lead to economic growth. And--due to their actions or not--years of economic growth did follow
Blunt went on to say, Look, how things turned around once GOPers took control in the 1994 elections. We passed welfare reform. We passed legislation banning late-term abortions. We passed health savings account. At this point, I wished that the caller to the previous show was in the audience. Would any of these measures have helped him? He didn't need welfare, and he had no money to purchase a health savings account.
Blunt joked--well, sort of--that in the conservative stretch of Missouri where he comes from people believe the federal government should only be responsible for defending the nation and for delivering the mail...and they have their doubts about the mail service. Why not let private entities and nongovernmental public institutions (like schools) address people's needs? he asked.
Now how many lobbyists do you think have had their needs addressed by Blunt, who, by the way, had an affair with a tobacco lobbyist whom he later married? Blunt, for instance, quietly slipped a pro-tobacco provision into a national security bill. I suppose helping Big Tobacco rates somewhere between repelling foreign invaders and delivering Christmas cards on Blunt's to-do list for the federal government. And he has raised much money from lobbyists, who tend not to hand out funds for nada in return.
It's fine to be a government-stinks conservative. But as we've seen in the Abramoff scandal, many rightwingers piggishly grab whatever federal money and contracts they can for their districts and, worse, for the clients represented by lobbyists who fund their campaigns. They love Big Government when they can pillage it.
Listening to Blunt, I thought of yesterday's front-pager in The Washington Post, which reported,
Now that most scientists agree human activity is causing Earth to warm, the central debate has shifted to whether climate change is progressing so rapidly that, within decades, humans may be helpless to slow or reverse the trend.
This is nothing new. For years, climatologists have been worrying that a "tipping point" is fast approaching--beyond which the planet would change drastically and remedies would be beyond the reach of the human societies that have caused this change. (Hollywood weighed in with The Day After Tomorrow.) As the Post noted, three possible changes worry scientists most: the breakdown in the Atlantic Ocean current that keeps temperatures moderate in northern Europe, coral bleaching that can destroy fisheries around the globe, and a significant melting of ice at the poles that would drastically raise sea levels--to such an extent that lower Manhattan could be flooded away.
Now, I would ask Blunt, what private institutions, what nonprofits should be dealing with an issue of this size and reach? If this ain't a job for the US federal government--working with other national governments--what is? But few members of Congress--particularly the Republican leaders--are willing to do anything to deal with this potential problem.
I'm no seer, but it could be that a few decades down the road, George W. Bush's nonaction on global warming will be seen as more of a folly than his invasion of Iraq. In June 2001, after Bush pulled the United States out of the Kyoto accord, he said, "My administration is committed to a leadership role on the issue of climate change." In February 2002, he said he would "address" the issue of global warming. But can anyone with a straight face suggest Bush has been a leader in addressing climate change? No, he has fibbed his way through this issue. His message: don't worry, pass the sunscreen. And the leaders of other countries have not called him to full account for doing so.
But back to Blunt: is there any doubt that he has spent more time helping the tobacco industry than pondering how to thwart global warming of this magnitude and impact? Yes, he's been putting Big Government to good work.
http://www.davidcorn.com/
Debate on Climate Shifts to Issue of Irreparable Change
Some Experts on Global Warming Foresee 'Tipping Point' When It Is Too Late to Act
By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 29, 2006; A01
Now that most scientists agree human activity is causing Earth to warm, the central debate has shifted to whether climate change is progressing so rapidly that, within decades, humans may be helpless to slow or reverse the trend.
This "tipping point" scenario has begun to consume many prominent researchers in the United States and abroad, because the answer could determine how drastically countries need to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions in the coming years. While scientists remain uncertain when such a point might occur, many say it is urgent that policymakers cut global carbon dioxide emissions in half over the next 50 years or risk the triggering of changes that would be irreversible.
There are three specific events that these scientists describe as especially worrisome and potentially imminent, although the time frames are a matter of dispute: widespread coral bleaching that could damage the world's fisheries within three decades; dramatic sea level rise by the end of the century that would take tens of thousands of years to reverse; and, within 200 years, a shutdown of the ocean current that moderates temperatures in northern Europe.
The debate has been intensifying because Earth is warming much faster than some researchers had predicted. James E. Hansen, who directs NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies, last week confirmed that 2005 was the warmest year on record, surpassing 1998. Earth's average temperature has risen nearly 1 degree Fahrenheit over the past 30 years, he noted, and another increase of about 4 degrees over the next century would "imply changes that constitute practically a different planet."
"It's not something you can adapt to," Hansen said in an interview. "We can't let it go on another 10 years like this. We've got to do something."
Princeton University geosciences and international affairs professor Michael Oppenheimer, who also advises the advocacy group Environmental Defense, said one of the greatest dangers lies in the disintegration of the Greenland or West Antarctic ice sheets, which together hold about 20 percent of the fresh water on the planet. If either of the two sheets disintegrates, sea level could rise nearly 20 feet in the course of a couple of centuries, swamping the southern third of Florida and Manhattan up to the middle of Greenwich Village.
While both the Greenland and the Antarctic ice sheets as a whole are gaining some mass in their cold interiors because of increasing snowfall, they are losing ice along their peripheries. That indicates that scientists may have underestimated the rate of disintegration they face in the future, Oppenheimer said. Greenland's current net ice loss is equivalent to an annual 0.008 inch sea level rise.
The effects of the collapse of either ice sheet would be "huge," Oppenheimer said. "Once you lost one of these ice sheets, there's really no putting it back for thousands of years, if ever."
Last year, the British government sponsored a scientific symposium on "Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change," which examined a number of possible tipping points. A book based on that conference, due to be published Tuesday, suggests that disintegration of the two ice sheets becomes more likely if average temperatures rise by more than 5 degrees Fahrenheit, a prospect "well within the range of climate change projections for this century."
The report concludes that a temperature rise of just 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit "is likely to lead to extensive coral bleaching," destroying critical fish nurseries in the Caribbean and Southeast Asia. Too-warm sea temperatures stress corals, causing them to expel symbiotic micro-algae that live in their tissues and provide them with food, and thus making the reefs appear bleached. Bleaching that lasts longer than a week can kill corals. This fall there was widespread bleaching from Texas to Trinidad that killed broad swaths of corals, in part because ocean temperatures were 2 degrees Fahrenheit above average monthly maximums.
Many scientists are also worried about a possible collapse of the Atlantic thermohaline circulation, a current that brings warm surface water to northern Europe and returns cold, deep-ocean water south. Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, who directs Germany's Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, has run multiple computer models to determine when climate change could disrupt this "conveyor belt," which, according to one study, is already slower than it was 30 years ago. According to these simulations, there is a 50 percent chance the current will collapse within 200 years.
Some scientists, including President Bush's chief science adviser, John H. Marburger III, emphasize there is still much uncertainty about when abrupt global warming might occur.
"There's no agreement on what it is that constitutes a dangerous climate change," said Marburger, adding that the U.S. government spends $2 billion a year on researching this and other climate change questions. "We know things like this are possible, but we don't have enough information to quantify the level of risk."
This tipping point debate has stirred controversy within the administration; Hansen said senior political appointees are trying to block him from sharing his views publicly.
When Hansen posted data on the Internet in the fall suggesting that 2005 could be the warmest year on record, NASA officials ordered Hansen to withdraw the information because he had not had it screened by the administration in advance, according to a Goddard scientist who spoke on the condition of anonymity. More recently, NASA officials tried to discourage a reporter from interviewing Hansen for this article and later insisted he could speak on the record only if an agency spokeswoman listened in on the conversation.
"They're trying to control what's getting out to the public," Hansen said, adding that many of his colleagues are afraid to talk about the issue. "They're not willing to say much, because they've been pressured and they're afraid they'll get into trouble."
But Mary L. Cleave, deputy associate administrator for NASA's Office of Earth Science, said the agency insists on monitoring interviews with scientists to ensure they are not misquoted.
"People could see it as a constraint," Cleave said. "As a manager, I might see it as protection."
John R. Christy, director of the Earth Science System Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, said it is possible increased warming will be offset by other factors, such as increased cloudiness that would reflect more sunlight. "Whatever happens, we will adapt to it," Christy said.
Scientists who read the history of Earth's climate in ancient sediments, ice cores and fossils find clear signs that it has shifted abruptly in the past on a scale that could prove disastrous for modern society. Peter B. deMenocal, an associate professor at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, said that about 8,200 years ago, a very sudden cooling shut down the Atlantic conveyor belt. As a result, the land temperature in Greenland dropped more than 9 degrees Fahrenheit within a decade or two.
"It's not this abstract notion that happens over millions of years," deMenocal said. "The magnitude of what we're talking about greatly, greatly exceeds anything we've withstood in human history."
These kinds of concerns have spurred some governments to make major cuts in the carbon dioxide emissions linked to global warming. Britain has slashed its emissions by 14 percent, compared with 1990 levels, and aims to reduce them by 60 percent by 2050. Some European countries, however, are lagging well behind their targets under the international Kyoto climate treaty.
David Warrilow, who heads science policy on climate change for Britain's Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, said that while the science remains unsettled, his government has decided to take a precautionary approach. He compared consuming massive amounts of fossil fuels to the strategy of the Titanic's crew, who were unable to avoid an iceberg because they were speeding across the Atlantic in hopes of breaking a record.
"We know there are icebergs out there, but at the moment we're accelerating toward the tipping point," Warrilow said in an interview. "This is silly. We should be doing the opposite, slowing down whilst we build up our knowledge base."
The Bush administration espouses a different approach. Marburger said that though everyone agrees carbon dioxide emissions should decline, the United States prefers to promote cleaner technology rather than impose mandatory greenhouse gas limits. "The U.S. is the world leader in doing something on climate change because of its actions on changing technology," he said.
Stanford University climatologist Stephen H. Schneider, who is helping oversee a major international assessment of how climate change could expose humans and the environment to new vulnerabilities, said countries respond differently to the global warming issue in part because they are affected differently by it. The small island nation of Kiribati is made up of 33 small atolls, none of which is more than 6.5 feet above the South Pacific, and it is only a matter of time before the entire country is submerged by the rising sea.
"For Kiribati, the tipping point has already occurred," Schneider said. "As far as they're concerned, it's tipped, but they have no economic clout in the world."
© 2006 The Washington Post Company
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/28/AR2006012801021_pf.html
You go Molly!!!
It's time for Democrats to put up or shut up
By Molly IvinsCreators Syndicate
AUSTIN - I'd like to make it clear to the people who run the Democratic Party that I will not support Hillary Clinton for president.
Enough. Enough triangulation, calculation and equivocation. Enough clever straddling, enough not offending anyone. This is not a Dick Morris election. The senator is apparently incapable of taking a clear stand on the war in Iraq, and that alone is enough to disqualify her. Her failure to speak out on Terri Schiavo, not to mention that gross pandering on flag-burning, are just contemptible little dodges.
The recent death of Gene McCarthy reminded me of a lesson I spent a long, long time unlearning. It's about political courage and heroes, and when a country is desperate for leadership. There are times when regular politics will not do, and this is one of those times. There are times when a country is so tired of bull that only the truth can provide relief.
If no one in conventional-wisdom politics has the courage to speak up and say what needs to be said, then you go out and find some obscure junior senator from Minnesota with the guts to do it. In 1968, McCarthy was the little boy who said out loud, "Look, the emperor isn't wearing any clothes." Bobby Kennedy -- rough, tough Bobby Kennedy -- didn't do it. Just this quiet man trained by Benedictines who liked to quote poetry.
What kind of courage does it take, for mercy's sake? The majority of the American people (55 percent) think the war in Iraq is a mistake and that we should get out. The majority (86 percent) of the American people favor raising the minimum wage. The majority of the American people (60 percent) favor repealing President Bush's tax cuts, or at least those that go only to the rich.
The majority (77 percent) think we should do "whatever it takes" to protect the environment. The majority (87 percent) think big oil companies are gouging consumers and would support a windfall profits tax. That is the center, you fools. WHO ARE YOU AFRAID OF?
I listen to people like Rep. Rahm Emanuel superciliously explaining elementary politics to us clueless naifs outside the Beltway ("First, you have to win elections"). Can't you even read the polls?
Here's a prize example by columnist Barry Casselman: "There is an invisible civil war in the Democratic Party now under way, and it is between those who are attempting to satisfy the defeatist and pacifist left base of the party and those who are attempting to prepare the party for successful elections in 2006 and 2008."
This supposedly pits Howard Dean, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, emboldened by "a string of bad news from the Middle East ... into calling for premature retreat from Iraq," vs. those pragmatic folk like Rep. Steny Hoyer, Emmanuel and Sens. Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and Joe Lieberman.
Oh, come on, people -- get a grip on the concept of leadership. Look at this war -- from the lies that led us into it to the lies they continue to dump on us daily.
You sit there in Washington so frightened of the big, bad Republican machine that you have no idea what people are thinking. I'm telling you right now, Tom DeLay is going to lose in his district. If Democrats in Washington haven't got enough sense to own the issue of political reform, I give up on them entirely.
Do it all, go long, go for public campaign financing for Congress. I'm serious as a stroke about this -- that is the only reform that will work, and you know it, and so does everyone else who's ever studied this. Embrace redistricting reform, electoral reform, House rules changes, the whole package. Own this issue or let Jack Abramoff politics continue to run your town.
Bush, Cheney and Co. will continue to play the patriotic bully card just as long as you let them. I've said it before: War brings out the patriotic bullies. In World War I, they went around kicking dachshunds on the grounds that dachshunds were "German dogs." They did not, however, go around kicking German shepherds. The minute that someone impugns your patriotism for opposing this war, turn on them like a snarling dog and explain what loving your country really means.
That, or you could just blow them off elegantly, as Rep. John Murtha did. Or eviscerate them with wit (look up Mark Twain on the war in the Philippines). Or point out the latest in the endless "string of bad news."
Do not sit there cowering and pretending that the only way to win is as Republican-lite. If the Washington-based party can't get up and fight, we'll find someone who can.
Health Care Is Not an Issue to Tinker With
By MATT BAI
Published: January 29, 2006
If previews are to be believed, President Bush will devote a significant portion of his State of the Union address this Tuesday - the sixth of his presidency - to the issue of health care in America, pushing for modest, market-driven solutions like targeted tax breaks and expanded health savings accounts. This is not the most comfortable terrain for a Republican president. For the last decade, Republicans have overtaken Democrats at the federal and state levels and nearly pulled even in voter registration, wiping away some 60 years of minority status in the space of several elections. And yet, despite all that, polls have consistently shown that Americans still trust Democrats more on the domestic issues that were the basis of the New Deal and the Great Society.
Nothing better illustrates why than Bush's plan to provide prescription drugs under Medicare, which the federal government is now clumsily inflicting on the states. Somehow, in trying to solve a pressing crisis, the Republicans who designed the new program in 2003 managed a spectacular feat of alchemy: they created a benefit that perfectly embodies the worst aspects of both dominant ideologies of the 20th century, combining an expensive and impenetrable government bureaucracy with an unseemly concern for corporate profits. Even Republican lawmakers and governors are now professing fears that the program has become an unsalvageable fiasco, with senior citizens panicking over a panoply of complex and confusing choices. All of which suggests, perhaps, that it is far easier to rail against government's rampant inefficiency, as Republicans have skillfully done for decades, than it is to devise creative solutions of one's own.
When it comes to health care, however, Bush's true failing, to this point, is not the poorly conceived prescription drug plan; it is a more general absence of ambition. In a climate of cresting urgency on health care, Bush has been handed a rare opportunity to achieve something truly transformational. Between the time that the Clintons submitted their ill-fated health-care plan in 1993 and Bush's re-election to the presidency in 2004, the overall cost of health care in America doubled and the number of uninsured Americans continued to rise; business leaders who in the 1990's had been merely concerned about rising medical expenses now see them as the single greatest threat to American competitiveness. It is increasingly obvious, at least to all those who do not inhabit the extreme reaches of the ideological spectrum, that the employer-based health-care system that functioned so well during the last century is impractical, if not unworkable, in a global marketplace. Unlike Bill Clinton's, Bush's stature in the business community is such that he could have enticed distrustful C.E.O.'s to form a partnership with the government on a search for what comes next. And, unlike Clinton, Bush had the benefit of a sympathetic Congress and - for most of his presidency, at least - a healthy store of political capital.
You can only imagine what Bush's predecessors might have done with this emerging consensus. There are nonideological, creative ideas that might have been explored or tested. John Kitzhaber, the former Democratic governor of Oregon and a doctor himself, recently proposed that his state take the radical step of casting aside both Medicare and Medicaid and asking the federal government to give the state a block grant instead, which would then be used to subsidize a basic health-care plan available to every resident. Others, like Mitt Romney, the Republican governor of Massachusetts, and the New America Foundation have adopted versions of an "individual mandate" plan that would essentially force state residents to buy private insurance plans that would, in turn, be subsidized by the state, possibly by eliminating the tax breaks that now flow to companies who insure their workers. Both of these approaches could have the ultimate effect of disentangling employers from health care, transferring both government dollars and the responsibility for making choices to the consumer.
The president, though, continues to focus on modest initiatives that don't begin to address the structural deficiencies in the system. The health savings accounts that are the centerpiece of his reform agenda, for instance, will help some families afford their doctors' bills - but that's assuming they already have enough money to both buy a plan and save extra money in the first place. That Bush embraces such proposals, at the expense of more lasting reform, fits the larger pattern of his presidency, and it says more about his overarching governing philosophy than it does about his commitment to health care in particular. Unlike most of his Democratic detractors, Bush has shown the vision to rethink time-honored orthodoxy, even at his own political peril; no matter what his critics may say, it took no small amount of courage to ask if Social Security could be stronger than it is or if the tax code could be simpler and less punitive. He recognizes that government should be more flexible and more consumer-oriented. But in every specific case, it seems, Bush has quickly settled on solutions that aim to dismantle government rather than to improve it and that leave the average family more insecure rather than more enabled. In Bush's version of the "ownership society," those who already own nice homes and stock portfolios get to make more choices about their health care and retirement, while everyone else gets to take his chances.
The tragedy of this approach is that it discredits the very idea of modernizing government, driving Bush's liberal critics deep into their own bunker of ideological orthodoxy. The president's address comes just a few weeks after Maryland became the first state to force Wal-Mart to set aside a certain percentage of its payroll for health care. It makes perfect sense for unions to agitate for such measures; millions of American workers are uninsured, and right now, employers are the only ones who can reasonably be expected to fill the gap. But laws like these will not return us to a time when the private sector could be expected to provide lifelong security for American workers. It will take dynamic leadership to usher us into a century in which employees do not have to depend on their bosses for the ability to see a doctor and in which businesses will not be forced to buckle under the soaring costs of what should be an American birthright. It is possible that the president intends to show such leadership when he comes before the nation. In Bush's Washington, however, the possible and the actual grow ever more estranged.
Matt Bai, who covers national politics for the magazine
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/29/magazine/29wwln_essay.html
Bend Over: Bush is coming into your home Tuesday night and it ain't gonna be pretty. Since I am having a colonscopy that afternoon, I'll be ready for him... :)
Health Care, Vexing to Clinton, Is Now at Top of Bush's Agenda
By ROBERT PEAR
Published: January 29, 2006
WASHINGTON, Jan. 28 — More than 12 years after President Bill Clinton unveiled his plan to remake the nation's health care system, President Bush is moving the issue once again to the top of the national agenda and is expected to push a series of health care proposals in his State of the Union address on Tuesday.
Where Mr. Clinton was driven by a desire to guarantee health insurance for every American, Mr. Bush is focusing primarily on health costs, which he says are swamping employers and threatening economic growth. Where Mr. Clinton favored a larger role for government, Mr. Bush has a fundamentally different philosophy, built on the idea that placing more responsibility in the hands of individuals will create market pressure to hold down costs.
The long-running debate has taken on new urgency as more and more companies find themselves struggling to pay for employee health benefits. Health care costs have been a big factor in the troubles of the domestic auto industry, among others.
But some policy experts, Republicans and Democrats alike, say the Bush proposals, which are built around tax breaks, may further drive up health spending and costs by fueling the demand for health care. Such unintended effects show how difficult it is to apply economic theory to the complexities of the current health care system.
By making health care a prominent theme of his prime-time address to the nation, Mr. Bush hopes to regain the initiative on domestic policy. Success with his health care proposals, after the failure of his effort to overhaul Social Security, would allow the president to build political momentum heading into the midterm elections this fall.
The White House has indicated that Mr. Bush will propose tax deductions for out-of-pocket medical expenses, rules to encourage the use of health savings accounts and incentives for small businesses across the country to band together and buy health insurance, exempt from state regulation.
Regina E. Herzlinger, a professor at Harvard Business School, said: "Insuring the uninsured is a fine objective, but how will this control the health costs that are hobbling our global competitiveness? Health savings accounts will increase coverage, and that's great. But they are being touted as a way to control costs, and I very much doubt that claim."
Democrats see the Bush proposals as a pastiche of old and new ideas that falls far short of what is required to tame the explosive growth in health costs.
Many economists say that the tax code, by subsidizing the purchase of health insurance, has fostered excessive use of health care services, driving up costs. Rather than proposing any limit on this subsidy, Mr. Bush wants to make it more widely available, to people who buy health care and insurance on their own.
Under current law, employers who pay health insurance premiums for employees can deduct the payments as a business expense on their tax returns, and the payments are not counted as taxable income for the employees. But such subsidies are unavailable to people who buy insurance themselves. President Bush sees that difference as unfair.
Allan B. Hubbard, assistant to the president for economic policy, said, "Health care purchased by an employer is done on a pretax basis, before your payroll taxes, before your income taxes. If you work for an employer who cannot afford to provide health insurance and so you go out and buy it, you have to use after-tax dollars."
In an interview, Mr. Hubbard continued: "Another unfairness is that if you buy health care with your insurance, you use pretax dollars. If you pay for it out of pocket, you have to use after-tax dollars. That encourages you to insure health care events that are routine. Insurance was never created to deal with the routine."
People use health savings accounts to pay routine medical expenses and buy high-deductible insurance policies to cover larger expenses. Mr. Bush says this arrangement encourages people to take more responsibility for all aspects of their care, including its cost.
"It's the opposite of federal control," Mr. Bush told a group of small-business owners this month. "It is patient control."
The White House had been hoping to highlight the new Medicare drug benefit as a model, showing how private health plans could deliver better benefits at lower cost than the government. But if Mr. Bush mentions it in his State of the Union address, he will invite catcalls from Democrats.
Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the assistant Democratic leader, said the drug benefit had become "a fiasco, a disaster," because it was written by Republicans who placed too much trust in private markets.
Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the House Democratic leader, said, "Health savings accounts are brought to you by the same people who brought you the confusing, special-interest-driven Medicare prescription drug bill."
Health policy experts raise many questions about Mr. Bush's proposals: Would the new tax breaks go to people who already had insurance or would buy it anyway? Would they undermine the system of employer-provided health insurance? Would healthy individuals be more likely to take the new options, leaving employers to pay for sick people with higher health costs?
Stuart M. Butler, a vice president of the conservative Heritage Foundation, said Mr. Bush was focusing more on costs than on coverage for the uninsured. The tax proposals, he said, are "a bit of a gamble," forced on the president by the bizarre politics of health care.
Jonathan Gruber, a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who worked at the Treasury under President Clinton, said, "The new tax breaks would be expensive and regressive, offering the largest benefits to the highest-income taxpayers."
In diagnosing flaws in the health care system, Mr. Bush could lift whole sentences from Mr. Clinton's address to a joint session of Congress on Sept. 22, 1993.
Opening his campaign for "health security," Mr. Clinton said, "Our medical bills are growing at over twice the rate of inflation." He warned that "rising costs are a special nightmare for our small businesses," and that "health care costs will devour more and more and more of our budget."
The Clinton plan died in Congress, after months of criticism from small businesses, health insurance companies and Republicans, who called it a costly, complex "big government" scheme.
Since then, national health spending has doubled, to $1.9 trillion. Health care now accounts for one-sixth of the nation's economy. Medicare and Medicaid, which accounted for 15.5 percent of federal spending in 1993, now consume almost 21 percent.
In Mr. Bush's first term, the number of people without health insurance increased more than a million a year, to 45.8 million in 2004, the last year for which official figures were available.
Democrats and consumer groups led the campaign for health care legislation in 1993. Now business executives and small-business owners express a similar sense of urgency.
In his recent meeting with small-business owners, Mr. Bush said, "Government policy has got to aim at the increasing cost of health care." The number of uninsured is rising because health costs are going up, he said, "so the government needs to address the cost."
While they are not required to provide health benefits, many large employers are committed to doing so, despite the rapidly rising costs. Employers see health benefits as a way to attract workers and to keep them productive, said E. Neil Trautwein, assistant vice president of the National Association of Manufacturers.
Over the years, many employers have become expert in buying health coverage for employees, and they do not want to drop this responsibility or dismantle the current system.
But employers have been clamoring for policy makers to address the needs of the uninsured. Employers say they indirectly pay for the uninsured, because the cost of their care is factored into the prices charged by hospitals and other health care providers.
"The health care cost crisis has a lot to do with the growing number of uninsured," said Katie W. Mahoney, manager of health policy at the United States Chamber of Commerce.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/29/politics/29health.html?pagewanted=2&ei=5094&en=6b36038d1b1...
Guess Who Likes the G.I.'s in Iraq (Look in Iran's Halls of Power)
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN
Published: January 29, 2006
TEHRAN
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Morteza Nikoubazl/Reuters
Defiance An Iranian woman showing support for her nation's nuclear program.
NOT long after the collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq in 2003, a top aide to L. Paul Bremer III, then the head of the American occupation authority there, excitedly explained that Iraq had just become the front line in Washington's effort to neutralize Iran as a regional force.
If America could promote a moderate, democratic, American-friendly alternate center of Shiite Islam in Iraq, the official said, it could defang one of its most implacable foes in the Middle East.
Iran, in other words, had for decades been both the theological center of Shiite Islam and a regional sponsor of militant anti-American Islamic groups like Hezbollah. But if westward-looking Shiites — secular or religious — came to power in southern Iraq, they could give the lie to arguments that Shiites had to see America as an enemy.
So far, though, Iran's mullahs aren't feeling much pain from the Americans next door. In fact, officials at all levels of government here say they see the American presence as a source of strength for themselves as they face the Bush administration.
In almost every conversation about Iran's nuclear showdown with the United States and Europe, they cite the Iraq war as a factor Iran can play to its own advantage.
"America is extremely vulnerable right now," said Akbar Alami, a member of the Iran's Parliament often critical of the government but on this point hewing to the government line. "If the U.S. takes any unwise action" to punish Iran for pursuing its nuclear program, he said, "certainly the U.S. and other countries will share the harm."
Iranians know that American forces, now stretched thin, are unlikely to invade Iran. And if the United States or Europe were to try a small-scale, targeted attack, the proximity of American forces makes them potential targets for retaliation. Iranians also know the fighting in Iraq has helped raise oil prices, and any attempt to impose sanctions could push prices higher.
In addition, the Iranians have longstanding ties to influential Shiite religious leaders in Iraq, and at least one recently promised that his militia would make real trouble for the Americans if they moved militarily against Iran.
All of those calculations have reduced Iranian fears of going ahead with their nuclear program — a prospect that frightens not just the United States, Europe and Israel, but many of the Sunni Muslim-dominated nations in the region, including Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.
In recent days, Iran has moved aggressively to restart its nuclear program, insisting that it is aimed only at research and producing energy. The United States and Europe, who remain suspicious of Iran's intentions, are trying to block it, with cooperation from Russia and China, and have threatened to take Iran to the United Nations Security Council.
Disagreement between the West and Iran on this issue is not new. But Iran's apparent confidence that it can move ahead with little risk of serious punishment is. It is part of a change in the way Iran has decided to address the world, abandoning a strategy of diplomatic compromise pursued by the reformist president Muhammad Khatami, who served from 1997 until last year.
The hard-line conservative, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who was elected in June to replace Mr. Khatami, has joined the religious leadership in a policy of confrontation.
With the Americans stuck fighting a protracted, murky war in Iraq, the Iranians felt they were in a position to defy the West even over the nuclear issue.
A Western diplomat based in Tehran said that Iran's recent behavior has been infuriating, an apparent effort to undermine the diplomatic process. The envoy said that in August, when Europe was about to offer what it called a compromise, the Iranians balked even before seeing the proposal.
"Before we even met, they said: 'We know what's in it. We know what we are looking for is not there,' " the diplomat said, insisting on remaining anonymous so as not to antagonize Iranian authorities.
The West has tried to push back, but Iran has barely budged. Part of the reason, the diplomat said, is that "what was seen as power then may be seen as weakness now," referring to the American presence in Iraq.
This month, Iran welcomed the Iraqi cleric Muktada al-Sadr in a way that helped send just that message. The cleric's militia, the Mahdi Army, rose up twice in 2004 against the American military. Mr. Sadr and his followers have since joined the political process in Iraq, but during his visit to Tehran he warned that any attack on Iran could inspire a response from his militia.
"If neighboring Islamic countries, including Iran, become the target of attacks, we will support them," he said in comments reported by The Associated Press. "The Mahdi Army is beyond the Iraqi Army. It was established to defend Islam."
Not all Iranians think their country's aggressive drive to resume its nuclear program will work as a long-term strategy.
Iran's influence in Iraq and Afghanistan has limits, said Davoud Hermidas Bavand, a political science professor at Tehran University. "It might work as a deterrent for a military strike against Iran but it is not a deterrent to lift the pressure against Iran's nuclear program."
Still, there is near unanimity in the government that the nuclear program should not be canceled. Nasser Hadian, a political science professor at Tehran University who said he has close ties with many in government, said there was a compromise among the core factions over how far to go in the nuclear program. Basically, he said, there is agreement to develop a weapons capability, but not to go as far as building a bomb.
The logic, he said, is based on an assessment that if Iran builds a bomb, it could set off an arms race in the Middle East that could "eventually undermine Iran's conventional superiority if others, like Syria and Egypt, get the bomb."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/29/weekinreview/29slackman.html?hp&ex=1138597200&en=916fa9d9d...
Climate Expert Says NASA Tried to Silence Him
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
The top climate scientist at NASA says the Bush administration has tried to stop him from speaking out since he gave a lecture last month calling for prompt reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases linked to global warming.
The scientist, James E. Hansen, longtime director of the agency's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said in an interview that officials at NASA headquarters had ordered the public affairs staff to review his coming lectures, papers, postings on the Goddard Web site and requests for interviews from journalists.
Dr. Hansen said he would ignore the restrictions. "They feel their job is to be this censor of information going out to the public," he said.
Dean Acosta, deputy assistant administrator for public affairs at the space agency, said there was no effort to silence Dr. Hansen. "That's not the way we operate here at NASA," Mr. Acosta said. "We promote openness and we speak with the facts."
He said the restrictions on Dr. Hansen applied to all National Aeronautics and Space Administration personnel. He added that government scientists were free to discuss scientific findings, but that policy statements should be left to policy makers and appointed spokesmen.
Mr. Acosta said other reasons for requiring press officers to review interview requests were to have an orderly flow of information out of a sprawling agency and to avoid surprises. "This is not about any individual or any issue like global warming," he said. "It's about coordination."
Dr. Hansen strongly disagreed with this characterization, saying such procedures had already prevented the public from fully grasping recent findings about climate change that point to risks ahead.
"Communicating with the public seems to be essential," he said, "because public concern is probably the only thing capable of overcoming the special interests that have obfuscated the topic."
Dr. Hansen, 63, a physicist who joined the space agency in 1967, directs efforts to simulate the global climate on computers at the Goddard Institute in Morningside Heights in Manhattan.
Since 1988, he has been issuing public warnings about the long-term threat from heat-trapping emissions, dominated by carbon dioxide, that are an unavoidable byproduct of burning coal, oil and other fossil fuels. He has had run-ins with politicians or their appointees in various administrations, including budget watchers in the first Bush administration and Vice President Al Gore.
In 2001, Dr. Hansen was invited twice to brief Vice President Dick Cheney and other cabinet members on climate change. White House officials were interested in his findings showing that cleaning up soot, which also warms the atmosphere, was an effective and far easier first step than curbing carbon dioxide.
He fell out of favor with the White House in 2004 after giving a speech at the University of Iowa before the presidential election, in which he complained that government climate scientists were being muzzled and said he planned to vote for Senator John Kerry.
But Dr. Hansen said that nothing in 30 years equaled the push made since early December to keep him from publicly discussing what he says are clear-cut dangers from further delay in curbing carbon dioxide.
In several interviews with The New York Times in recent days, Dr. Hansen said it would be irresponsible not to speak out, particularly because NASA's mission statement includes the phrase "to understand and protect our home planet."
He said he was particularly incensed that the directives had come through telephone conversations and not through formal channels, leaving no significant trails of documents.
Dr. Hansen's supervisor, Franco Einaudi, said there had been no official "order or pressure to say shut Jim up." But Dr. Einaudi added, "That doesn't mean I like this kind of pressure being applied."
The fresh efforts to quiet him, Dr. Hansen said, began in a series of calls after a lecture he gave on Dec. 6 at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. In the talk, he said that significant emission cuts could be achieved with existing technologies, particularly in the case of motor vehicles, and that without leadership by the United States, climate change would eventually leave the earth "a different planet."
The administration's policy is to use voluntary measures to slow, but not reverse, the growth of emissions.
After that speech and the release of data by Dr. Hansen on Dec. 15 showing that 2005 was probably the warmest year in at least a century, officials at the headquarters of the space agency repeatedly phoned public affairs officers, who relayed the warning to Dr. Hansen that there would be "dire consequences" if such statements continued, those officers and Dr. Hansen said in interviews.
Among the restrictions, according to Dr. Hansen and an internal draft memorandum he provided to The Times, was that his supervisors could stand in for him in any news media interviews.
Mr. Acosta said the calls and meetings with Goddard press officers were not to introduce restrictions, but to review existing rules. He said Dr. Hansen had continued to speak frequently with the news media.
But Dr. Hansen and some of his colleagues said interviews were canceled as a result.
In one call, George Deutsch, a recently appointed public affairs officer at NASA headquarters, rejected a request from a producer at National Public Radio to interview Dr. Hansen, said Leslie McCarthy, a public affairs officer responsible for the Goddard Institute.
Citing handwritten notes taken during the conversation, Ms. McCarthy said Mr. Deutsch called N.P.R. "the most liberal" media outlet in the country. She said that in that call and others, Mr. Deutsch said his job was "to make the president look good" and that as a White House appointee that might be Mr. Deutsch's priority.
But she added: "I'm a career civil servant and Jim Hansen is a scientist. That's not our job. That's not our mission. The inference was that Hansen was disloyal."
Normally, Ms. McCarthy would not be free to describe such conversations to the news media, but she agreed to an interview after Mr. Acosta, at NASA headquarters, told The Times that she would not face any retribution for doing so.
Mr. Acosta, Mr. Deutsch's supervisor, said that when Mr. Deutsch was asked about the conversations, he flatly denied saying anything of the sort. Mr. Deutsch referred all interview requests to Mr. Acosta.
Ms. McCarthy, when told of the response, said: "Why am I going to go out of my way to make this up and back up Jim Hansen? I don't have a dog in this race. And what does Hansen have to gain?"
Mr. Acosta said that for the moment he had no way of judging who was telling the truth. Several colleagues of both Ms. McCarthy and Dr. Hansen said Ms. McCarthy's statements were consistent with what she told them when the conversations occurred.
"He's not trying to create a war over this," said Larry D. Travis, an astronomer who is Dr. Hansen's deputy at Goddard, "but really feels very strongly that this is an obligation we have as federal scientists, to inform the public."
Dr. Travis said he walked into Ms. McCarthy's office in mid-December at the end of one of the calls from Mr. Deutsch demanding that Dr. Hansen be better controlled.
In an interview on Friday, Ralph J. Cicerone, an atmospheric chemist and the president of the National Academy of Sciences, the nation's leading independent scientific body, praised Dr. Hansen's scientific contributions and said he had always seemed to describe his public statements clearly as his personal views.
"He really is one of the most productive and creative scientists in the world," Dr. Cicerone said. "I've heard Hansen speak many times and I've read many of his papers, starting in the late 70's. Every single time, in writing or when I've heard him speak, he's always clear that he's speaking for himself, not for NASA or the administration, whichever administration it's been."
The fight between Dr. Hansen and administration officials echoes other recent disputes. At climate laboratories of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, for example, many scientists who routinely took calls from reporters five years ago can now do so only if the interview is approved by administration officials in Washington, and then only if a public affairs officer is present or on the phone.
Where scientists' points of view on climate policy align with those of the administration, however, there are few signs of restrictions on extracurricular lectures or writing.
One example is Indur M. Goklany, assistant director of science and technology policy in the policy office of the Interior Department. For years, Dr. Goklany, an electrical engineer by training, has written in papers and books that it may be better not to force cuts in greenhouse gases because the added prosperity from unfettered economic activity would allow countries to exploit benefits of warming and adapt to problems.
In an e-mail exchange on Friday, Dr. Goklany said that in the Clinton administration he was shifted to nonclimate-related work, but added that he had never had to stop his outside writing, as long as he identified the views as his own.
"One reason why I still continue to do the extracurricular stuff," he wrote, "is because one doesn't have to get clearance for what I plan on saying or writing."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/29/science/earth/29climate.html?_r=1&th=&emc=th&pagewante...
The truth is you could could be bought right cheaply. Got this story from Rush...I think he popped a couple extra pills...
CATS AND ROOSTERS
Once upon a time in Africa, roosters(read Republicans) ruled cats(read Democrats). The cats worked hard all day and at night they had to bring all they had gathered for the roosters. The king of the roosters would take all the food for himself and for the other roosters.
The roosters loved to eat ants. Thus, every cat had a purse hung round its neck, which it filled with ants for the king of the roosters.
The cats did not like the situation. They wanted to rid themselves of the king so that the food they gathered through hard work and great difficulty would be their own. But they were afraid of the roosters.
The roosters had told the cats that rooster's combs were made out of fire and that the fire of their combs would burn anyone who disobeyed them! The cats believed them and therefore worked from early morning until night for the roosters.
One night, the fire on the house of Mrs. Cat went out. She told her kitten, Fluffy, to bring some fire from Mr. Rooster's house.
When Fluffy went into the house of the rooster, she saw that Mr. Rooster was fast asleep, his stomach swollen with the ants he had eaten. The kitten was afraid to wake the rooster, so she returned home empty handed and told her mother what had happened.
Mrs. Cat said, "Now that the rooster is asleep, gather some dry twigs and place them near his comb. As soon as the twigs catch fire, bring them home."
Fluffy gathered some dry twigs and took them to the rooster's house. He was still asleep. Fluffy fearfully put the dry twigs near the rooster's comb but it was no use, the twigs did not catch fire. Fluffy rubbed the twigs against the rooster's comb again but it was no use they would not catch fire. Fluffy returned home without any fire and told her mother, "The roost's comb does not set twigs on fire."
Mrs. Cat answered "Why can't you do anything right! Come with me I'll show you how to make fire with the rooster's comb." So together they went to the house of Mr. Rooster.
He was still asleep. Mrs. Cat put the twigs as near to the rooster's comb as she could. But the twigs did not catch fire. Then, shaking with fear, she put her paw near the rooster's comb and gently touched it. To her surprise, the comb was not hot, it was very cold, and it was just red colored.
As soon as Mrs. Cat realized that the roosters had lied to the cats about their combs, she joyfully went out and told the other cats about the rooster's tricks. From that day on, the cats no longer worked for the roosters.
At first, the king of the roosters became very angry and said to the cats; "I will burn all of your houses if you do not work for me!"
But the cats said, "Your comb is not made of fire. It is just the color of fire. We touched it when you were sleep. You lied to us.
When the king of the roosters found out that the cats knew that he had lied to them, he ran away. Now, whenever roosters see a cat, they scurry away, because to this very day they are afraid of cats.
Ah, Rooster, once again, so lame:
Now, the basic summation of this is "53% support wiretaps aimed at terrorism." However, if you leave out the word "terrorism" in the question, then you only get 46% who support it. In other words, if you leave the truth out of the question -- if you leave the truth out of the question -- you'll get the answer the mainstream media wants, and that's the Democratic strategy: leave out the truth. If they've got an agenda, that's it: Everything but the truth, everything but that. Leave that out of everything you say, and you'll get the desired result you want.
See how Rush conveniently leaves out the truth and you are so quick to bold this crap. The truth is, as if you or the others really care, is having some oversight on wiretaps. Nothing more, nothing less. And even that rooster brain of yours knows that there has never been a time where there was no oversight on wiretapping, surveillance, etc., and it was not abused. Period. None. And there never will be!
Don't let the truth scare you, rooster.
teapee...old rooster...nah, it couldn't be?!
The perils of unchecked power
A former attorney general remembers the bugging of Martin Luther King Jr.
By Nicholas deB. Katzenbach
NICHOLAS DEB. KATZENBACH served in senior Justice Department positions between 1961 and 1965. He was appointed attorney general by President Johnson in February 1965 and served until October 1966.
January 16, 2006
THE RECENT controversy over warrantless national security telephone taps, coupled with Martin Luther King's birthday, remind me of my time in the Department of Justice in the 1960s. It was a period of turbulent demonstrations, marches and sit-ins, many of them led by King in support of the constitutional rights denied by Southern law enforcement to black citizens. And it was a time of growing animosity between King and J. Edgar Hoover, who had created the Federal Bureau of Investigation and led it since 1924. That animosity created a growing problem for Atty. Gen. Robert Kennedy and those of us on his staff.
Hoover had built a great institution in the FBI, essentially from nothing. In the public eye it stood for fair and decent law enforcement — the rule of law — and was a model of integrity and efficiency. Hoover was a national hero, responsible for putting killers like John Dillinger behind bars. Kids wore Junior G-Man badges. During World War II, he fought Nazi spies, and during the Cold War he went after members of the communist conspiracy.
But Hoover was getting old. He believed the world was questioning and rejecting the values he held out as fundamental — patriotism, respect for law and order, sexual mores grounded in marriage and family, the work ethic. He detested what he saw as a growing culture of permissiveness, and, as a conservative Southerner, he seriously questioned the idea of racial equality.
Hoover was troubled by the activities of King. He did not approve of the constant sit-ins and demonstrations that he saw more as breaking laws than as a protest against their unfairness. The FBI worked regularly with local law enforcement, and he wished to preserve that relationship.
What bothered him even more, however, was the frequent public criticism by King and his followers of the FBI for not protecting demonstrators from local sheriff's deputies. One did not have to be long in the Justice Department to learn that to criticize the FBI was an inexcusable sin in Hoover's eyes.
In October 1963, Hoover requested Atty. Gen. Kennedy to approve a wiretap on King's telephone. At that time, taps had to be approved by the attorney general and did not require court approval in the form of a warrant. The basis for the tap was King's close association with Stanley Levison, who Hoover said was a prominent member of the Communist Party with great influence over King in civil rights matters.
Bobby was furious. Hoover's charge that King was a pawn of the communists could potentially taint the whole movement and bring into question everything we were doing to vindicate the constitutional rights of black citizens. It was hard to think of an issue more explosive.
To understand just how explosive, one has to remember that Hoover was both popular and enormously powerful, with great support in Congress. Some of that support was based on admiration, some on fear that he had damaging personal information in his files. Much support came from conservative Southern Democrats, opposed to King, who chaired virtually every important congressional committee. Hoover was formally a subordinate of the attorney general who could, technically, fire and replace him. That's a big "technically." No attorney general, including RFK and myself when I succeeded him, could fully exercise control over him. And none did.
When Hoover asked for the wiretaps, Bobby consulted me (I was then his deputy) and Burke Marshall, head of the Civil Rights Division. Both of us agreed to the tap because we believed a refusal would lend credence to the allegation of communist influence, while permitting the tap, we hoped, would demonstrate the contrary. I think the decision was the right one, under the circumstances. But that doesn't mean that the tap was right. King was suspected of no crime, but the government invaded his privacy until I removed the tap two years later when I became attorney general. It also invaded the privacy of every person he talked to on that phone, not just Levinson.
But what we didn't know during this period was that Hoover was doing a lot more than tapping King's phones. As King's criticism of the FBI continued, and as Hoover became more and more convinced there must be communist influence even though no evidence ever materialized, he determined to discredit and destroy King. He went further, putting bugs in King's hotel bedrooms across the country. (He claimed that Atty. Gen. Herbert Brownell had authorized him to use such listening devices in cases involving "national security" back in the 1950s, and that he did not require further permission from the current attorney general, who in any case had no idea that the FBI was doing it.)
The FBI recorded tapes of King conducting extramarital affairs — and later had the tapes mailed to King anonymously, in one case actually encouraging him to commit suicide. Tapes were played for journalists, and the FBI sought to discredit King with foreign leaders, religious leaders, White House personnel and members of Congress. The bureau tried to kill a favorable magazine profile and encouraged one university to withhold an honorary degree.
I knew none of this until late 1964, when two prominent journalists told me that a bureau official had approached them and offered to play one of the salacious hotel bedroom recordings. I confronted the official — one of Hoover's senior deputies — who categorically denied the allegation. I flew to President Johnson's Texas ranch and asked him to help put a stop to it. I think that he did, but such was Hoover's power I cannot be sure that even the president had the courage to do so.
It was only years later, at the Church Committee hearings held after Hoover's death, that the full scope of Hoover's anti-King activities became known. I was — and am — appalled. And sad. This man who was a national symbol of law and order ended up grossly violating the nation's trust and respect in the name, he said, of national security. And the man he attacked so viciously was a great leader who never violated the law and who helped this nation realize rights guaranteed by the very Constitution Hoover was sworn to uphold.
All this is ancient history, but it has relevancy today. There is a growing movement to remove Hoover's name from the FBI building in Washington, D.C.. I do not think that is the lesson to be learned. Hoover built the FBI and served for almost 50 years as its leader. His positive achievements should endure and be recognized. He served with distinction, but he served too long. Perhaps because of age accompanied by virtually unchecked power, he lost any sense of proportion in law enforcement, using his authority in what he thought was a righteous cause. To my mind, that is the lesson to be learned from Hoover's vendetta.
Today we are again engaged in a debate over wiretapping for reasons of national security — the same kind of justification Hoover offered when he wanted to spy on King. The problem, then as now, is not the invasion of privacy, although that can be a difficulty. But it fades in significance to the claim of unfettered authority in the name of "national security." There may be good and sufficient reasons for invasions of privacy. But those reasons cannot and should not be kept secret by those charged with enforcing the law. No one should have such power, and in our constitutional system of checks and balances, no one legitimately does.
Forcing the executive to explain its reasons for intrusive law enforcement is essential to maintaining not just privacy but freedom itself. A congressional committee must exercise oversight. So too must an independent court because Congress is also subject to possible political pressure.
Our freedom is too precious, and too much blood has been shed to preserve it, to entrust it to a single person, however sincere and however well intentioned.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-katzenbach16jan16,0,4387924,print.story?coll=la...
Dishonoring the work of others
By Molly IvinsCreators Syndicate
We live in a great nation. The police blotter of the Mill Valley Herald in California informs us that the constabulary there had to be called out on account of a citizen "dressed like a penguin" who was "standing on a street corner playing a ukulele." Makes me proud to be an American.
What does not make me proud to be an American is a specific twist in the Jack Abramoff/Tom DeLay scandal -- in fact, this makes me want to urp despite the fact that I have a strong stomach when it comes to political corruption. Practice, practice, practice, that's what Texas provides when it comes to sleaze and stink.
But this is a reach too far. Abramoff, DeLay and many in their web of colleagues have consistently used nonprofit organizations -- ostensibly formed for charitable purposes -- to launder money, move peculiar proceeds or pay for high-flying perks.
Give us a break -- if you're going to make a mockery of democracy and show your mastery at flipping money, wiring the system and fixing the odds, please don't use charitable organizations designed to help crippled children to do it.
That's Bad Taste.
According to The Associated Press, Tom DeLay "visited cliff-top Caribbean resorts, golf courses designed by PGA champions and four-star restaurants -- all courtesy of donors who bankrolled his political empire."
"Over the past six years," according to the report, "the former House majority leader and his associates have visited places of luxury most Americans have never seen, often getting there aboard corporate jets arranged by lobbyists and other special interests.
"Public documents reviewed by The Associated Press tell the story: at least 48 visits to golf clubs and resorts; 100 flights aboard company planes; 200 stays at hotels, many world-class; and 500 meals at restaurants, some averaging nearly $200 for dinner for two.
"Instead of his personal expense, the meals and trips for DeLay and his associates were paid with donations collected by the campaign committees, political action committees and children's charity the Sugar Land Republican created during his rise to the top of Congress."
How cynical does that make you? When I hear that House Speaker Dennis Hastert is returning his campaign contributions from Abramoff or "donating it to charity," I wonder which little charmer of a Republican campaign fund masquerading as a charity he's sending it to.
The DeLay Foundation for Kids was set up 18 years ago and works on behalf of foster children. But it is also a way for companies to give unregulated and undisclosed funds: It's a way for companies to get into DeLay's good graces or, as Fred Lewis from Campaigns for People says, "another way for donors to get their hooks into politicians."
Meanwhile, Abramoff was even more cavalier about "charity." He created the Capital Athletic Foundation, supposedly to help inner-city children through organized sports. There is no evidence that any of the money ever went to that purpose, but The Washington Post reports that some went to a sniper school for Israelis on the West Bank, a golf trip to Scotland for Rep. Bob Ney, R-Ohio, and a Jewish religious academy in Columbia, Md.
Abramoff's hapless Indian clients were generous contributors. I wonder if he thought it was funny that Indians might more likely identify with Palestinians than Israelis.
There are nonprofit organizations in this country where the CEO barely makes more than the janitor, where nickels and pennies are saved so the clients or the cause can get a little more.
There are nonprofits where good and faithful servants have spent decades devoting their entire lives to helping those less fortunate than themselves -- without ever going to a cliff-top Caribbean resort.
There are nonprofits where extra-bright young people from top schools work for peanuts because they want to make a better world.
While Abramoff padded his bills and falsified expenses to tribal clients, there are people who work for minimum wages on Indian reservations to help some of the poorest people in America get a minimally decent chance at life.
Abramoff and DeLay and their crummy hangers-on haven't just cheated and lied. They have dishonored the work of many people who are devoted to helping others without even expecting a decent salary.
http://www.dfw.com/mld/startelegram/news/columnists/molly_ivins/13572554.htm
The president's on Line 1 -- listening
By Molly IvinsCreators Syndicate
AUSTIN -
My theory is that they don't tell him anything -- that's why the president keeps sounding like he doesn't know what he's talking about.
There he was at Brooke Army Medical Center over the weekend, once again getting it wrong: "I can say that if somebody from al Qaeda's calling you, we'd like to know why. In the meantime, this program is conscious of people's civil liberties, as am I. This is a limited program. ... I repeat, limited. And it's limited to calls from outside the United States, to calls within the United States."
So then the White House had to go back and explain that, well, no, actually, the National Security Agency's domestic spying program is not limited to calls from outside the United States, or to calls from people known or even suspected of being with al Qaeda. Turns out that thousands of Americans and resident foreigners have been or are being monitored and recorded by the NSA. It's more like information-mining, which is what, you may recall, the administration said it would not do. But now Bush has to investigate The New York Times because Bush has been breaking the law, you see?
I really don't think he'd sound like an idiot if they kept him informed. He would, however, still sound like a kid trying to get out of trouble by tattling on something Billy did: "My personal opinion is it was a shameful act for someone to disclose this very important program [the NSA surveillance program] in a time of war. The fact that we're discussing this program is helping the enemy."
There he goes again. He is being deceitful and insincere. Bush and Co. have broken the law, and furthermore, it was completely unnecessary to do so. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is not a hindrance to tracking down al Qaeda -- every objection to its requirements is easily refuted.
So Bush breaks a law he didn't remotely need to and then denounces anyone who discusses this as helping the enemy.
Come on. It's so stupid. The choice is not between a police state and another al Qaeda attack.
I love the way we always start secret spy programs with great vows that the information shall be guarded and the innocent protected -- and it turns out that one of the first to make use of the NSA program for his own purposes was that parfait, gentile soul of discretion, John Bolton, the Godzilla diplomat.
Came out during his confirmation hearings: Bolton -- no one's idea of a judicious, reticent man -- called on the NSA 10 times to identify sources he wanted the names of, presumably in connection with the NSA's shamelessly undercover spying on the United Nations just before the Iraq war started.
Now, look at how this stuff spreads. We're talking only about the NSA, a top-security spy agency, super-secret -- surely it can hang onto information without having it leak all over hell and gone, right? Wrong. Also in the business of spying on American citizens are the Pentagon, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Homeland Security and dozens of private contractors.
Another reason to be deeply worried about a huge domestic spying operation is that it will inevitably be manned by nincompoops. Just take, for example, this lovely 2003 memo from an FBI agent railing at what he perceived as the dreadful restraints by John Ashcroft's Justice Department: "While radical militant librarians kick us around, true terrorists benefit from [an office in the Justice Department's] failure to let us use the tools given to us." That was reported in The New York Times in December.
Yep, time after time, it's those radical militant librarians impeding those pitiful, helpless agents at the FBI.
Speaking of helpless FBI agents, in a recent column I misattributed the FBI's fine program of spying on vegans and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals to the Pentagon. I'm sure both agencies would appreciate a correction.
You can always suggest to the radical militant librarians that instead of saying, "Shhhh!" they yell, "Shut up!"
http://www.dfw.com/mld/startelegram/news/columnists/molly_ivins/13554995.htm
The Real Choice in Iraq
By Zbigniew Brzezinski
Sunday, January 8, 2006; B07
"Bring 'em on."
-- President Bush on Iraqi insurgents, summer 2003
The insurgency is "in its last throes."
-- Vice President Cheney,
summer 2005
" . . . there are only two options before our country: victory or defeat."
-- President Bush, Christmas 2005
The administration's rhetorical devolution speaks for itself. Yet, with some luck and with a more open decision-making process in the White House, greater political courage on the part of Democratic leaders and even some encouragement from authentic Iraqi leaders, the U.S. war in Iraq could (and should) come to an end within a year.
"Victory or defeat" is, in fact, a false strategic choice. In using this formulation, the president would have the American people believe that their only options are either "hang in and win" or "quit and lose." But the real, practical choice is this: "persist but not win" or "desist but not lose."
Victory, as defined by the administration and its supporters -- i.e., a stable and secular democracy in a unified Iraqi state, with the insurgency crushed by the American military assisted by a disciplined, U.S.-trained Iraqi national army -- is unlikely. The U.S. force required to achieve it would have to be significantly larger than the present one, and the Iraqi support for a U.S.-led counterinsurgency would have to be more motivated. The current U.S. forces (soon to be reduced) are not large enough to crush the anti-American insurgency or stop the sectarian Sunni-Shiite strife. Both problems continue to percolate under an inconclusive but increasingly hated foreign occupation.
Moreover, neither the Shiites nor the Kurds are likely to subordinate their specific interests to a unified Iraq with a genuine, single national army. As the haggling over the new government has already shown, the two dominant forces in Iraq -- the religious Shiite alliance and the separatist Kurds -- share a common interest in preventing a restoration of Sunni domination, with each determined to retain a separate military capacity for asserting its own specific interests, largely at the cost of the Sunnis. A truly national army in that context is a delusion. Continuing doggedly to seek "a victory" in that fashion dooms America to rising costs in blood and money, not to mention the intensifying Muslim hostility and massive erosion of America's international legitimacy, credibility and moral reputation.
The administration's definition of "defeat" is similarly misleading. Official and unofficial spokesmen often speak in terms that recall the apocalyptic predictions made earlier regarding the consequences of American failure to win in Vietnam: dominoes falling, the region exploding and U.S. power discredited. An added touch is the notion that the Iraqi insurgents will then navigate the Atlantic and wage terrorism on the American homeland.
The real choice that needs to be faced is between:
An acceptance of the complex post-Hussein Iraqi realities through a relatively prompt military disengagement -- which would include a period of transitional and initially even intensified political strife as the dust settled and as authentic Iraqi majorities fashioned their own political arrangements.
An inconclusive but prolonged military occupation lasting for years while an elusive goal is pursued.
It is doubtful, to say the least, that America's domestic political support for such a futile effort could long be sustained by slogans about Iraq's being "the central front in the global war on terrorism."
In contrast, a military disengagement by the end of 2006, derived from a more realistic definition of an adequate outcome, could ensure that desisting is not tantamount to losing. In an Iraq dominated by the Shiites and the Kurds -- who together account for close to 75 percent of the population -- the two peoples would share a common interest in Iraq's independence as a state. The Kurds, with their autonomy already amounting in effect to quasi-sovereignty, would otherwise be threatened by the Turks. And the Iraqi Shiites are first of all Arabs; they have no desire to be Iran's satellites. Some Sunnis, once they were aware that the U.S. occupation was drawing to a close and that soon they would be facing an overwhelming Shiite-Kurdish coalition, would be more inclined to accommodate the new political realities, especially when deprived of the rallying cry of resistance to a foreign occupier.
In addition, it is likely that both Kuwait and the Kurdish regions of Iraq would be amenable to some residual U.S. military presence as a guarantee against a sudden upheaval. Once the United States terminated its military occupation, some form of participation by Muslim states in peacekeeping in Iraq would be easier to contrive, and their involvement could also help to cool anti-American passions in the region.
In any case, as Iraqi politics gradually become more competitive, it is almost certain that the more authentic Iraqi leaders (not handpicked by the United States) -- to legitimate their claim to power -- will begin to demand publicly a firm date for U.S. withdrawal. That is all to the good. In fact, they should be quietly encouraged to do so, because that would increase their popular support while allowing the United States to claim a soberly redefined "Mission Accomplished."
The requisite first step to that end is for the president to break out of his political cocoon. His policymaking and his speeches are the products of the true believers around him who are largely responsible for the mess in Iraq. They have a special stake in their definition of victory, and they reinforce his convictions instead of refining his judgments. The president badly needs to widen his circle of advisers. Why not consult some esteemed Republicans and Democrats not seeking public office -- say, Warren Rudman or Colin Powell or Lee Hamilton or George Mitchell -- regarding the definition of an attainable yet tolerable outcome in Iraq?
Finally, Democratic leaders should stop equivocating while carping. Those who want to lead in 2008 are particularly unwilling to state clearly that ending the war soon is both desirable and feasible. They fear being labeled as unpatriotic. Yet defining a practical alternative would provide a politically effective rebuttal to those who mindlessly seek an unattainable "victory." America needs a real choice regarding its tragic misadventure in Iraq.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/06/AR2006010601482_pf.html
After 5 bad years, new hope for democracy in 2006
By Peter Schrag -- Bee Columnist
Published 2:15 am PST Wednesday, December 28, 2005
Goodbye to 2005 and hallelujah. After the battering the Constitution has taken through five grim years, it's showing some signs of life.
The most conservative court in the country tells the administration to stop trying to manipulate the judiciary in its handling of terrorist suspects.
The most egregious snooping allowed by the Patriot Act may not survive congressional scrutiny next year; the dismantling of Social Security is dead. The phony "deficit-cutting" budget bill squeaks through the Senate on the vice president's tie-breaking vote: there's not a vote to spare.
One congressional crook, California's own Randy Cunningham, has resigned. The Hammer is twisting in the wind. His friend and patron Jack Abramoff is negotiating to rat out his former friends. Two other Californians, Richard Pombo and John Doolittle, are trying to avoid the stench of the Abramoff swamp.
Congress bans torture, despite heavy-handed pressure from America's No. 1 chicken hawk, whose own No. 1 aide has been indicted for lying in the outing of Valerie Plame.
And with the president's poll numbers down, the media, red-faced over their own dereliction of duty in the run-up to Iraq, seem to have found a little courage to challenge and question the administration's strategic leaks. A trial judge in Pennsylvania says intelligent design isn't science; it's thinly veiled religion. The school board that approved it is voted out of office.
OK, better to put all this in the category of not-bad news rather than good news. Most of it is things not getting worse, not necessarily getting better.
Congress, which seems as hard to shame as the White House, is still preparing to approve more tax cuts for the rich, which will wipe out whatever "deficit-reduction" it imposed on the backs of Medicaid recipients, needy college students and the elderly.
The president is still waving the bloody shirt. We're at war, he says. It won't cost you anything but your privacy. If you don't support domestic snooping you're aiding the enemy. If you think Americans and Iraqis are dying every day and Iran's mullahs are growing stronger because of the ideological hubris of Rumsfeld, Cheney, Libby, et al., you're not a good American.
Drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge has been blocked, but the administration still refuses to push for any real efforts to reduce oil consumption - higher gas taxes, fuel efficiency standards - that would conserve many times whatever gas ANWR would produce and cut revenues to the Arab sheiks who now finance the terrorists.
The White House drags its feet or simply neglects tougher security at the ports, on airline cargo, most of which is never screened, at oil refineries and power plants, mostly because of resistance from the affected industries. In the meantime, Congress continues to treat homeland security as pork.
Katrina taught us how well prepared the country is for disasters, even those about which we get advance warning. To this day, the help that was promised months ago - the part that, as in Iraq's reconstruction, isn't being peeled off by the politically well-connected - is caught in a limbo of bureaucracy, neglect and incompetence: It's low priority stuff. FEMA, like a host of other federal agencies, is a catch basin for hacks.
What we haven't fully appreciated is the extent to which this administration has politicized practically everything - the Environmental Protection Agency, the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health, the Justice Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Council.
The politicizing isn't new. But not since Watergate, where the Nixon administration enlisted the IRS, the FBI and the plumbers to go after the targets on its enemies list, has it been so systematic. Not for decades has there been so widespread an effort to distort information or to suppress it altogether.
From false data about abortion, to the denial of global warming, to the distorting of intelligence about nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, to unauthorized snooping, to the lies about the costs of the subsidies to the pharmaceutical industry under the new Medicare drug program, ideology and the political agenda drive this administration's information policies. Nixon would be proud.
Still, as the year ends, there's a promise of change in atmosphere. The president, who firmly declared he wouldn't bow to political pressure or set a timetable for withdrawal in Iraq is recognizing the real timetable, which is next year's congressional election calendar. Forty years ago, Sen. George Aiken, a Vermont Republican, told Lyndon Johnson that the way to get out of Vietnam was to declare victory and bring the troops home. Watch the White House roll out the Aiken strategy in the months ahead.
Another terrorist act in this country, no matter how much it may be due to administration negligence, could change the political weather again.
But in the meantime, we may have a chance at some restoration of the nation's historic checks and balances.
One-party rule always has its limits. Happy New Year.
http://www.sacbee.com/content/politics/columns/schrag/v-print/story/14021484p-14853971c.html
Iraqi Civil War? Some Experts Say It's Arrived
The full extent of the conflict is veiled by the presence of U.S. troops, says one, but Americans' premature exit could lead to far worse strife.
By John Daniszewski
Times Staff Writer
January 1, 2006
BAGHDAD — Fourteen members of a Shiite Muslim family are slaughtered in their home. Days later, masked gunmen invade a Sunni Arab household, killing five people. Organized political killing proceeds, as if there had not been elections two weeks ago.
In a speech delivered as Iraqis prepared to go to the polls, President Bush said he didn't believe a civil war would break out in the country. But some observers believe it has already begun — a quiet and deadly struggle whose battle lines were thrown into sharp relief by the highly polarized vote results.
On any given day, a group of Shiite police might be hit in a Sunni suicide attack or ambush. A militiaman in the Shiite-dominated Iraqi security services might arrest, torture and kill a suspected Sunni insurgent. Or a Kurdish official in the new government might be gunned down between home and office.
Unless the assassination target is prominent, or the number of victims rises to at least the high single digits, such events barely rate a mention in Western news reports. Yet the most reliable estimates are that about 1,000 Iraqis have been dying each month, most of them killed by fellow Iraqis.
The term "civil war" conjures images of armies massed against each other, and ultimately the breakup of a state — a far cry from the democratic paradigm the U.S. government meant to achieve in Iraq after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein 2 1/2 years ago.
Iraqi politicians and leaders routinely extol the country's unity and its aversion to civil war. Last week, Abbas Bayati, an official of the Shiite-based Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, said it would never happen, because the country's religious leaders would not permit it.
Other experts inside and outside Iraq are less sure.
James Fearon, a Stanford University political scientist and an authority on modern conflicts, believes that Iraq's civil war began almost as soon as Hussein was ousted, and that it is now obscured and partly held back by the presence of foreign forces.
"I think there is definitely a civil war that has been going on since we finished the major combat operations," Fearon said. He rejects the position of many observers that a civil war is still only a possibility for Iraq.
"When people talk about 'Will there be a civil war?' they are really talking about a different type of civil war," he said.
The kind of war emerging in Iraq, characterized by guerrilla attacks, kidnappings, assassinations and "ethnic cleansing," is typical of modern civil conflicts, Fearon said.
"Since 1945, almost all civil wars, a big plurality, have been guerrilla wars where it is kind of insurgency versus counterinsurgency," he said. "Most civil wars look more like what we are seeing in Iraq now."
The presence of U.S. troops in the conflict would not be unusual, he said. "A great number [of civil wars] have involved foreign intervention. But I would still call it a civil war on grounds that the insurgents are attacking and killing far more Iraqis than U.S. troops."
Although he sees the recent elections as a possible step forward, he thinks that if delicate government talks now getting started fail to end in compromise, the war among Iraqis could widen and intensify into open fighting on a larger scale, particularly if U.S. troops withdraw from the country too quickly.
Broadly speaking, the struggle pits armed Sunni factions desperate to regain power in Iraq against Shiite militiamen. The latter are intent on protecting the new government, which Shiites dominate, and to avenge past and current harms at the hands of the Sunnis. Kurds, meanwhile, also are targeted by the Sunnis. Their goal of independence or strong autonomy, and their wish to add the oil-rich city of Kirkuk to their region, has put them on a possible collision course with the rest of the country.
One former mid-ranking Iraqi government official, who asked not to be named, said he had been forced to abandon his Baghdad neighborhood because of his Shiite name and now conceals his identity when he travels between the capital and his home village near Babylon.
"You cannot drive in the south bearing a Sunni name. You cannot go to [Al] Anbar [province] with a Shiite name,'' he said. "There is not a civil war across the whole country, but there are civil wars in at least 20 towns — low-intensity civil war."
Sectarian Violence
Since the summer of 2003, mosques have been bombed and hit with rockets, people have been kidnapped, and hitherto mixed Baghdad districts such as Ghazaliya and Doura have slowly and inexorably been "cleansed" of Shiites through intimidation and violence. Similar pressures have been put on Sunnis in villages in the Shiite-dominated south and on Arabs and Turkmens in Kirkuk.
In a grisly example of the strife, 14 members of a Shiite family who had been warned to leave their mostly Sunni neighborhood were slain last week in their home in a mixed area just south of Baghdad that has become known as the "triangle of death."
Attackers slit the victims' throats as relatives were made to watch. Only the women of the family and a 7-year-old boy were spared, in an incident that evoked the internecine carnage that occurred in Algeria during much of the 1990s.
Alluding to the recent parliamentary elections, in which almost all Iraqis voted along sectarian or ethnic lines rather than for broader-based parties, James Dobbins, an analyst at the Rand Corp. think tank in Washington, has argued that the strong divisions have the potential to tear apart the country.
Already the fighting in Iraq amounts to an unconventional civil war, he said, one in which only one side — the Iraqi government aided by its U.S. and British allies — possesses heavy weapons, while the other side relies on guerrilla tactics. He, too, sees a danger of escalation.
"You could have a civil war of the sort that they had in Yugoslavia in the '90s, in which both sides had heavy weaponry and the casualties were much, much higher."
In fact, "the main argument for America continuing to stay in Iraq and exercise influence is to prevent the situation from degenerating that way. But it is going to be difficult, costly and time-consuming," Dobbins said.
The median length of a civil war, according to a 2002 study by Fearon and his colleague, historian David D. Laitin, is about six years, and on the whole, civil wars since 1945 have been more deadly than wars between countries, claiming more than 16 million lives and devastating the economies of the countries engulfed.
In September 2004, the highly regarded Royal Institute for International Affairs in London forecast that it would be difficult for Iraq to avoid a civil war, and that its ability to do so depended largely on whether the transitional government then being formed could give Iraqis a sense of ownership and belonging to the state.
Looking back 15 months later, Rosemary Hollis, one of the authors, said of the optimistic scenario, "I think you can rule that out." Still, she is not sure the country is on the road to a breakup.
"The other scenario, still in play, is that it doesn't fall apart but the tremendous amount of internal tensions kind of cancel each other out," she said. Rivalries within the Shiite community, for instance, could keep its members' struggles localized and prevent them for acting directly against other communities, she said.
Elections Disputed
Although still not final, the preliminary election results from the December voting for a National Assembly seem to point to the emergence of a parliament heavy on religion-based parties from both the Shiite and Sunni factions. Faring poorly were parties with a secular bent and those seeking to transcend sectarian or ethnic divides.
Disappointed secular and Sunni groups immediately charged vote rigging and intimidation; several leading Sunni politicians felt aggrieved enough to question the legitimacy of the vote, asking that it be held again. But the winning Shiite alliance has refused, and Kurdish and Shiite political leaders are starting consultations to see whether a national unity government can be formed that would satisfy, or at least mollify, the losers.
Most Iraqis shudder at any suggestion that the country could be plunged into full-scale civil war, but the danger is seldom far from their minds.
"The Shiites insist on their demands, and the Sunni and the Arab nationalists remain feeling marginalized and isolated or ignored and this and that, so I think there will be big problems and violence will continue" for the next two or three years, said Yunadim Kana, a Christian politician.
"Will there be a civil war? I don't think it will reach that point," he said, adding that no one can be sure. "Every time in Iraq there is A plus B that should equal C, but then something else happens."
Wamid Nadhmi, an Iraqi political analyst, said he was pleased that the nightmare scenario had not dawned.
"Now there are indications that the country is being gradually pulled into some sort of a sectarian conflict, because there are reports that some Shia personnel on the one hand and some Sunni personnel on the other are getting killed. But up to now it seems to me that this is the action of small groups," he said.
"It is more of an organized mafia rather than mass spontaneous activities."
Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the country's leading Shiite cleric, has been a consistent voice to moderate the tensions between Sunnis and Shiites since the U.S.-led invasion. Last month, he endorsed a unity government that would include Sunnis.
Bayati, of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, says such enlightened thinking will keep the lid on. "Political tension by itself cannot lead to civil war," he said. "Sectarianism is the one possible cause…. But the position of the leadership has pulled the rug out from under this proposition."
The Foreign Factor
Juan Cole, a University of Michigan professor and specialist on Iraq, warns against concluding that if the country is already in the midst of a civil war, it does not matter whether U.S. troops stay or leave.
Recalling the bloodshed in Lebanon from 1975 to 1990, a civil war he witnessed in part firsthand, he says he can imagine the situation in Iraq becoming far, far worse if U.S. forces leave prematurely or are drawn down significantly.
With a weaker U.S. presence, brought about by eroding American support for the war, the neighborhood militias that have formed and are now operating "on the Q.T." would be emboldened to come into the open, perhaps staging organized attacks against neighboring towns or the central government in Baghdad, Cole said.
Another tinderbox would be Kirkuk. In all probability, Kurds would seek a referendum to attach the disputed city to their regional federation, he said. "Are the Turkmens going to lie down and take it? Or the Arabs there as well? My guess is no," Cole said.
Sunnis, long accustomed to running Iraq and now threatened by the prospect of being cut off from the country's petroleum revenue, also would have reason to rebel.
"They can see the writing on the wall," Cole said.
In any widespread civil war, he warned, Iraq's neighbors would probably be drawn in, shifting the "tectonic plates" of regional stability. Turkey could seek to prevent the Turkmen minority from being overwhelmed in Kirkuk. The Persian Gulf states would want to help the Sunnis, and Iran would intervene on the side of the Shiites.
Fearon, like Cole, believes that a too-rapid departure by U.S. forces would be the catalyst to wider civil war. But on the other hand, he said, staying indefinitely gives Iraqis scant incentive to "get their political and military act together."
"I think the U.S. presence makes it possible that you could have talks that result in a government that could function at some level, but the kind of depressing thing is that I don't see talks leading to a government that could clearly survive without a pretty strong U.S. presence," Fearon said.
As things stand now, "there is no real nice exit for the U.S."
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-civilwar1jan01,0,7841794,print.story?coll=la-hom...
January 1, 2006
844 in U.S. Military Killed in Iraq in 2005
By DEXTER FILKINS
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 31 - At least 844 American service members were killed in Iraq in 2005, nearly matching 2004's total of 848, according to information released by the United States government and a nonprofit organization that tracks casualties in Iraq.
The deaths of two Americans announced by the United States military on Friday - a marine killed by gunfire in Falluja and a soldier killed by a roadside bomb in Baghdad - brought the total killed since the war in Iraq began in March 2003 to 2,178. The total wounded since the war began is 15,955.
From Jan. 1, 2005 to Dec. 3, 2005, the most recent date for which numbers are available, the number of Americans military personnel wounded in Iraq was 5,557. The total wounded in 2004 was 7,989.
In 2005, the single bloodiest month for American soldiers and marines was January, when 107 were killed and nearly 500 were wounded. At the time, American forces were conducting numerous operations to secure the country for the elections on Jan. 30. The second worst month was October, when 96 Americans were killed and 603 wounded.
More than half of all 2005 American military deaths, 427, were caused by homemade bombs, most planted along roadsides and detonated as vehicles passed. American commanders have said that roadside bombs, the leading cause of death in Iraq, have grown larger and more sophisticated. Many are set off by remote detonators and are powerful enough to destroy heavily armored tanks and troop carriers.
The totals were compiled by Iraq Coalition Casualty Count, a nonprofit group that tracks American service members killed and wounded in Iraq. The Associated Press, which keeps its own statistics, reported the year's death toll as slightly lower, saying that 841 had been killed.
Death totals for Iraqis have been more difficult to estimate, and vary widely. Iraq Body Count, an independent media-monitoring group, estimates that about 30,000 Iraqis have died since the war began in 2003.
On Saturday, violence flared across Iraq. In Khalis, north of Baghdad, a bomb killed five members of the Iraqi Islamic Party, a Sunni political party that defied insurgent threats and fielded candidates in the Dec. 15 election. Since 2003, at least 75 party members have been killed.
In central Baghdad, a roadside bomb struck an Iraqi police patrol, killing two officers.
At Camp Victory, the American military headquarters just outside Baghdad, Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, urged Iraqi political leaders on Saturday to form a new government as quickly as possible to avoid the kind of delay that stalled the political momentum after the vote last January.
"Clearly, the sooner that they're able to come to agreement on who their leaders are going to be, the sooner that those leaders then can act to appoint the rest of the country's key leadership," General Pace told reporters traveling with him on a troop visit.
In historical terms, the number of casualties in Iraq is still relatively small. At the height of the Vietnam War, the American military was sustaining 500 killed and wounded each week. At the Battle of the Somme in 1916, about 58,000 British soldiers were killed or wounded on the first day.
In interviews, American commanders have said the relatively unchanging number of deaths in Iraq from 2004 to 2005 belies the progress that had been made here against the guerrilla insurgency and in setting up democratic institutions. Three nationwide votes were held this year.
Although the number of attacks against American and Iraqi forces in and around Baghdad has grown over the past year - to about 28 per day now from about 22 a year ago - only about 10 percent of those attacks inflict casualties, said Maj. Gen. William G. Webster Jr., the commander of American forces in and around Baghdad.
A year ago, about 25 percent of attacks inflicted casualties.
More than 400 car and suicide bombs struck the country in 2005, although the number has dropped sharply in recent months. In April, for instance, there were 66 suicide and car bomb attacks, compared with 28 in November.
Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Camp Victory, Iraq, for this article, and an Iraqi employee of The New York Times contributed from Baghdad.
Good post to end up the year, sluggo!! Happy New Year to all!!!
Sir Rush of Bloviation....now that is good:)
Why Are We in Iraq Now?
(David Corn)
Yesterday I taped the weekly television show I usually appear on, Eye on Washington, which airs on the CBS affiliate in Washington, DC, (WUSA, Channel 9) and is picked up by dozens of PBS stations across the nation. When the discussion turned to Iraq, I was, once again, the skunk at the desk. Slate's Will Saletan, conservative columnist Linda Chavez both praised the elections as progress. I cannot recall whether USA Today's Susan Page was cheery about the elections, but she certainly was not in my skeptical camp. Neither was our host, Derek McGinty. But I pointed out that while I hope these elections lead to a decent and effective government that can serve the people of Iraq--who doesn't like elections?--any realistic analysis would have to include the distinct possibility that the elections may lead to deepening the rift between Sunnis and Shiites and, thus, to intensifying the sectarian violence already under way.
Increasingly, the major issue in Iraq seems to be the Sunni-Shiite split (which predates Saddam Hussein, George W. Bush, and the war on terrorism). Interestingly, during the elections the leaders of the Sunni insurgency were able to turn off the violence. That suggests that the insurgency is not a ragtag bunch of crazy men but an organized endeavor with some internal discipline (and strategic thinking). It also suggests that Zarqawi and his al Qaeda in Iraq--still a threat--is not the main problem in Iraq. Zarqawi presumably had no interest in helping the Americans stage a successful election, yet his forces were not able to disrupt them. So if the fundamental conflict is not Zarqawi versus the Iraqi government and the Americans, what is it? It's Sunnis versus Shiites. If that is the case, then the question for the United States is rather basic: What are we doing in Iraq? Are we there to protect a predominantly Shiite (and perhaps theocratic) government, which is cozy with Iran, from an indigenous insurgency? Is it the United States' role to take sides in that fight? These are the sort of questions that Bush, Cheney and their aides duck. But more and more, they seem to be defining questions that demand answers.
In case you missed it, the post-election analysis by the Independent's Patrick Cockburn, a veteran correspondent in the Middle East, is instructive on this point. Earlier this week, he wrote:
Iraq is disintegrating. The first results from the parliamentary election last week show the country is dividing between Shia, Sunni and Kurdish regions.
Religious fundamentalists now have the upper hand. The secular and nationalist candidate backed by the US and Britain was humiliatingly defeated.
The Shia religious coalition has won a total victory in Baghdad and the south of Iraq. The Sunni Arab parties who openly or covertly support armed resistance to the US are likely to win large majorities in Sunni provinces. The Kurds have already achieved quasi-independence and their voting reflected that.
The election marks the final shipwreck of American and British hopes of establishing a pro-Western secular democracy in a united Iraq.
Islamic fundamentalist movements are ever more powerful in both the Sunni and Shia communities. Ghassan Attiyah, an Iraqi commentator, said: "In two and a half years Bush has succeeded in creating two new Talibans in Iraq."
A reminder Ghassan Attiyah, a secular democracy activist in Iraq, has in the past been funded by the international arm of the Republican party. If he believes Iraq is being Talibanized, even GOPers should be worried. Cockburn concludes his piece:
The elections are also unlikely to see a diminution in armed resistance to the US by the Sunni community. Insurgent groups have made clear that they see winning seats in parliament as the opening of another front.
The break-up of Iraq has been brought closer by the election. The great majority of people who went to the polls voted as Shia, Sunni or Kurds - and not as Iraqis. The forces pulling Iraq apart are stronger than those holding it together. The election, billed by Mr Bush and Mr Blair as the birth of a new Iraqi state may in fact prove to be its funeral.
Does that sound like "complete victory" to you?
http://www.davidcorn.com/
How can you possibly say we are losing a War, when everything W. has set out to do there is happening?
Ho, ho, ho....like finding weapons of mass destruction, right?? Talk about clueless, but hey, Merry Christmas!!
How can you possibly say we are losing a War, when everything W. has set out to do there is happening? You have no clue!
Hey Bulldzr,
Good posts on the main board. Walt should stick to golf and eddie, geez, what can you say about him. Anyhow, I wish your family the very best and may IDCC bring home some bacon soon.
The law applies to each of us
By MOLLY IVINS
Creators Syndicate
AUSTIN - I'm so sorry, but we are having a constitutional crisis. The timing couldn't be worse. Right in the middle of the wrapping paper, the gingerbread and the whole shebang, a tiny honest-to-goodness constitutional crisis.
Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.
On his own, without consulting the full Congress, the courts or the people, the president decided to use secret branches of government to spy on the American people. He is, of course, using 9-11 to justify his actions in this, as he does for everything else -- 9-11 happened so the Constitution does not apply, 9-11 happened so there is no separation of powers, 9-11 happened so 200 years of experience curbing the executive power of government is something we can overlook.
That the president of the United States unconstitutionally usurped power is not in dispute. He and his attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, both claim he has the right to do so on account of he is the president.
Let's try this again: The president is not above the law. I wish I thought I were being too pompous, but the greatest danger to our freedom always comes when we are scared or distracted -- and right now, we are both.
As an ACLU liberal, I would like to say how proud and honored I am to stand with so many American conservatives on this issue. You do credit to all your heroes. Barry Goldwater would be so proud.
One of the more annoying things about this usurpation of power is that it is both stupid and unnecessary. As large numbers of people have pointed out, it takes almost nothing to get a warrant to do what Bush has been doing illegally -- it's almost pro forma.
Here is a curious fact about the government of this country spying on its citizens: It always goes wrong immediately. For some reason, it's not as though we start with people anyone would regard as suspicious and then somehow slip gradually into spying on the Girl Scouts. We get it wrong from the beginning every time.
The Department of Defense has just proved this yet again with its latest folly of mistaking a flock of Florida Quakers for a threat to overthrow the government. A few months ago, a student at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth tried to check out a copy of Mao's Little Red Book and wound up being interviewed by two feds. Cointelpro and all those misbegotten Nixon-era spy programs were always making ludicrous mistakes.
The usual suspects, like that silly congressman Dan Burton, solemnly try to scare us with the dread specter of war, as though they alone are the hard-headed pragmatists, while only woolly-minded liberals care about the Constitution. "Don't these people realize we're at war?" Well, yes.
This is the same pattern we have seen with Bush when it came to the Geneva Conventions for handling prisoners and to the use of torture. Not only does he consider himself above the law, he has surrounded himself with people who keep inventing perverse readings of the Constitution to justify him. Makes it especially nice to hear him go on about the importance of bringing democracy to Iraq.
On Monday, Bush defended his actions by saying it was part of "connecting the dots." A painful moment, since the 9-11 Commission just finished giving this administration grades of D and F in terms of preventing another terrorist attack -- and it has jack-all to do with wiretapping. This administration has cried wolf so many times using the national security excuse that it has lost all credibility.
Bush just could not resist that especially nasty little fillip at the end: blaming the people who reported the problem. As though the sin were telling the people of this country what is happening, what is being done in our name with our money. As though we have no right to know.
Bush has made one terrible decision after another, from how Homeland Security money was spent to attacking Iraq. The New York Times is not responsible.
RUSH: This next story, folks, is just juicy. Now, where was I yesterday? Oh yeah, high as a kite. getting low on my stash so I had to go to the doctor. I had a follow-up appointment. Needed more drugs. Up until yesterday, I had eaten maybe two hundred pills-- well, in ten days while I had eaten maybe two bananas and a couple of saltine crackers, and the rest of it was, you know, pills and stuff. So I had to go to the doctor yesterday. I have a clean bill of health, everything is cool, got a double dose prescription for the holidays, it should be great.
Easy, I'm a cynic and this group will do everything possible to ensure they stay in power, especially as they have so much to hide. So they will prop this mess up for three more years....all my opinion.
Hey, good post bulldzr and great to hear from you. I agree with everything you say. You know, after walking around on this earth for a while you start to recognize that you see the same crap warmed over again and again. All the bs that passed during the 60's and early 70's, the viet nam fiasco, the lies to get into war, breaking and entering, wire tapping, etc. is back in style with a vengence. (I just read the obit on Jack Anderson and had to laugh where he was such a pain in Nixon's butt that there were discussions with Liddy regarding poisoning Anderson. And now Liddy, like an Oliver North are some sort of right wing Gods. Sheet, give me a break. And liberal media, what a crock, it's the truth they have a problem with. Hmmm, sound familiar, Bush, Cheney?? But hey, great speech, Bush hit a home run. Yeah, only problem is he hit it against us, as in US.)
The sad and scary part of this bunch is their deliberate plan to break every social fabric of the middle class. I have been saying this for a while and easy's article on Greenspan hits it right on the head. This has been the single largest heist of American treasure that the world has every seen, a massive transfer of wealth that no matter who wins the WH in '08 will have hell to pay. Even the war in Iraq was designed with the purpose to steal tens of billions of dollars one way or another. Unfrigginbelievable.
I tell you one thing: When the shit hits the fan in 2010 or so and the whole world slips into a recession/depression not seen since the '30's we will long for the good ol days when terrorism of 2001-08 will seem almost quaint. And the filthy rich bastards will step back while gleefully counting their money and scheme how they can make/steal more from the ensuing crisis.
The last thing to lull Americans to sleep will be a rip snorting bull market in stocks. Like blood sucking leaches, this will allow the greedy rich 'so-called Americans' in power one last opportunity plunge the sword into the middle class while extracting the last bit of wealth from the lambs. Then look out.
Greenspan, Bush, et al will be viewed by historians as the pieces of crap they are and the only question they will ponder is how in the world did we citizens allow this to happen. What were we thinkning?? Like the great empires of the past that rose only to fall, this is the beginning of the end of America as a great civilization...and it is a damn shame. All under a flag waving group of hypocritical, so called God fearing sociopaths hell bent in their quest/lust for the love of money.
Well, now that I vented I too wish you, and everyone on this board, a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays. Save your money and stay alert. A day of reckoning is coming and it won't be pretty.
Good find, easy. This truly has been the greatest theft of treasure in the history of mankind. They will paper this over until after the '08 election...then Katie bar the door.
It's not easy being green 'round the gills
By Molly Ivins
Creators Syndicate
Posted on Sun, Dec. 18, 2005
As one on the liberal side of the chorus of moaners about the decline of civility in politics, I feel a certain responsibility when earnest, spaniel-eyed conservatives such as David Brooks peer at us hopefully and say, "Well, yes, there was certainly a lot of misinformation about WMD before the war in Iraq, but ... you don't think they -- he -- actually lied, do you?"
Draw I deep the breath of patience. I factor in the long and awful history of politics and truth, add the immutable nature of pols -- fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly -- and compare Tonkin Gulf, Watergate and Iran-contra with the piddly Curveball and Niger uranium. I prepare to respond like a reasonable person -- "Of course not actually lie, per se, in the strict sense" -- and then I listen to another speech about Iraq by either the president or the vice president and find myself screaming: "Dammit, when will they quit lying?"
I realize that this is not helping the cause of civility. On the other hand, sanity has its claims as well.
I have been listening with great attention to the series of speeches that President Bush has lately given on his newly revealed "Plan for Victory." Of course I was pleased to learn we have a plan for a victory, which consists, it turns out, of announcing: "We cannot and will not leave Iraq until victory is achieved. ... We will settle for nothing less than complete victory. ... We will never accept anything less than complete victory."
It has long been clear that this administration thinks it can spin reality to a blue-bellied fare-thee-well, but isn't it a little late for this kind of thing?
Of course, it's an awkward time to be a doom-and-gloomer, too. Who wants to remind everyone that this isn't working just when all those brave Iraqis risked their lives to vote again? Of course democracy is a grand thing. Unfortunately, a vote -- no matter how overwhelming -- has never yet created an operative military brigade.
Bush claimed in his Naval Academy speech that 80 Iraqi army and police battalions are fighting alongside American units, while another 40 are "taking the lead" in fighting. But last summer, military leaders told Congress that three of the 115 Iraqi battalions are capable of fighting without U.S. help, and in October the American commander in Iraq, Gen. George Casey, lowered that to one.
Of course, all Texans are raised on the "Never retreat, never surrender" model, but it does ring just a little hollow when the administration's own plans for a drawdown of troops are dominating the news. I mean, we can define "complete victory" down as far as Bush wants, as far as I'm concerned, but this ain't exactly facing reality.
So as not to completely abandon my colleagues who still are yearning for civility, it is only fair to point out that Bush and even Dick Cheney are making some progress. For one thing, they now acknowledge that reconstruction is not going entirely smoothly -- a refreshing degree of candor, given that the oil production and electricity in Iraq both remain below prewar standards.
Also, Bush now acknowledges that we are fighting more than just terrorists. In fact, most of the people we're fighting are themselves Iraqis who don't like our being there. The fact that their government has asked us to leave is still politely passed over. I wouldn't expect Bush to bring up how much this already has cost us, but Congress has appropriated $277 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan so far, with at least another $100 billion to come.
It does seem a little silly, though, to call for "complete victory" without acknowledging that the war itself is not going well. The number of attacks on American and Iraqi troops per day -- rather a clear indicator -- simply grows steadily worse. Rep. Jack Murtha, who is very close to the military, says insurgent incidents over the past year have increased from 150 per week to more than 700 per week.
Bush's claims on reconstruction are likewise mind-boggling. It's not "fits and starts" -- there are rampant overcharges, corruption, lack of oversight; it is a zoo. At least $8 billion that the United States provided to Iraq's Coalition Provisional Authority is unaccounted for, and Halliburton alone has already been accused of $1.4 billion in unreasonable and unsupported charges.
One night in mid-September, George W. stood in New Orleans' Jackson Square, with the floodlit facade of St. Louis Cathedral in the background. He promised help for housing, education and job training: "The work that has begun in the Gulf Coast region will be one of the largest reconstruction efforts the world has ever seen. ... And tonight I also offer this pledge of the American people: Throughout the area hit by the hurricane, we will do what it takes, we will stay as long as it takes, to help citizens rebuild their communities and their lives."
Hey, you know, another mission accomplished.
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Rooster, when it comes to your boy Rush, you must have a cushy set of knee pads...
I hope your boys in Washington don't forget your fair city.
Florida Judge Upholds Rush Limbaugh's Doctor-Patient Confidentiality
Bribery's Scope a Surprise
Observers marvel at the array of gifts that Rep. Cunningham received in exchange for contracts.
By Tony Perry
Times Staff Writer
Note: My Bold
November 30, 2005
SAN DIEGO — Political friends and foes alike had a similar reaction Tuesday to Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham's abrupt resignation and guilty plea to bribery and tax evasion: shock, but not surprise.
The inflated price paid by a military contractor for Cunningham's Del Mar Heights house had long led to an assumption, even among die-hard Republicans, that the eight-term member of Congress was in serious trouble. The fact that Cunningham had lived rent-free aboard the same contractor's yacht while in Washington was also well known.
But the scale of Cunningham's admitted crimes — $2.4 million in bribes and more than $1 million in evaded taxes — caught nearly everyone off guard. The dollar figures make Cunningham's the biggest bribery case involving a federal official in more than two decades.
Constituents and others marveled at the list of luxury items that the four unnamed co-conspirators lavished on Cunningham since 2000 in exchange for his support in landing lucrative government contracts — things at odds with Cunningham's preferred image as an American hero and a man of simple tastes. They include:
• A Rolls-Royce and $17,889.96 for its repairs
• A cut-rate deal on a GMC Suburban
• A $1,500 gift certificate for a set of earrings
• Use of a corporate jet, valued at $8,166
• Resort vacations worth $10,000
• Silver candelabra, antique armoires, Persian carpets and custom oak and leaded-glass doors worth more than $50,000
• A leather sofa and a sleigh-style bed for $6,632
• Two Laser Shot shooting simulators worth $9,200
• A 19th-century French commode, valued at $7,200
• A graduation party at a Washington, D.C., hotel for his daughter worth $2,081.30
Although the sale of the congressman's Del Mar Heights home to military contractor Mitchell Wade was hidden through a corporate screen, details about the gifts and cash payments were easily found in bank records and documents seized at Cunningham's Rancho Santa Fe home.
"It was entirely predictable [that Cunningham would be charged] after the house deal became public," said San Diego lawyer Stanley Zubel, leader of Californians for a Cleaner Congress. "But nobody had a clue that the bribery was as big as it was, and as systematic over years. It evokes outrage."
John Dadian, GOP political consultant and a former Marine, found Cunningham's fall particularly difficult to fathom given his heroics as a fighter pilot during the Vietnam War.
"It is unbelievable that a man who showed so much courage in time of war could lose his moral compass so badly when he went into politics," Dadian said. "Even those of us who have been around politics for ages are stunned at the brazenness of this."
President Bush expressed shock at Cunningham's fall from political grace. Cunningham has been one of Bush's staunchest supporters on the war in Iraq.
"The idea of a congressman taking money is outrageous," said Bush, who was traveling in Texas, "and Congressman Cunningham is going to realize that he has broken the law and is going to pay a serious price, which he should."
Republican leaders are concerned about the effect of Cunningham's guilty plea on the party's national reputation, coming amid other scandals. But it could also have political consequences locally.
In the last two years, three San Diego City Council members have been charged with taking illegal campaign contributions. Six pension board members are charged in state court with conflict of interest for voting themselves pension increases. And a federal grand jury is probing the city's $2-billion pension deficit.
"Like everyone, I'm saddened, shocked and disappointed that someone who served so well for so long could have misled us all in the past five years," said Marc Wolfsheimer, president of an asset management firm. "I think it will further fuel the belief in San Diego that all politicians are corrupt, because we've had an overdose of this recently."
Cunningham, 63, could face 10 years in prison and a $350,000 fine when he is sentenced Feb. 27. His plea agreement with federal prosecutors includes no promise of leniency, even though he has promised to help in the investigation of the four alleged co-conspirators, including Wade, founder of MZM Inc., a firm specializing in intelligence projects.
In late 2003, Wade bought Cunningham's home in Del Mar Heights for $1.675 million. Cunningham and his wife then bought an 8,000-square-foot, five-bedroom home in Rancho Santa Fe for $2.5 million.
Without ever living in the Del Mar Heights home, Wade sold it seven months later for $975,000, taking a $700,000 loss.
When the San Diego Union-Tribune reported the Del Mar Heights house sale in June, it sparked a federal investigation that led to Cunningham's resignation and guilty plea.
At first, Cunningham had denied that he and Wade were friends. Within a week of the newspaper report, however, he said that he and Wade were friends who shared a background — Wade was a U.S. Navy reservist who had worked in the Pentagon — and similar concerns about national security.
He conceded that he had shown poor judgment in selling his house to a "friend who does business with the government." But he denied doing any improper favors for Wade or his firm in exchange for the house deal or for being allowed by Wade to live aboard the contractor's 42-foot yacht, which Wade renamed Duke-Stir, at a Potomac yacht club.
Cunningham's assertions of innocence were contradicted by his guilty plea Monday to having solicited bribes in exchange for helping firms seek lucrative military contracts. He has agreed to forfeit the Rancho Santa Fe house and $1.8 million found by investigators during a search of the property.
Cunningham bought the Rancho Santa Fe home from Douglas Powanda, one of eight former executives of a business software company who were later indicted for securities fraud.
At the time of the purchase, the house had been vacant for several months. Powanda is awaiting trial, and court documents do not indicate he had financial or political links to Cunningham.
In his tearful statement outside the federal courthouse Monday, Cunningham said he realized that he had lost his freedom, reputation and the trust of his friends and family.
But Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-El Cajon), a longtime friend, said Tuesday that Cunningham should be remembered for his service in Vietnam.
"Duke committed crimes, and now he will pay for them," Hunter said. "His future on earth is now in the hands of the justice system, but Duke's soul is in the hands of God and the forgiveness of Christ."
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-duke30nov30,1,6282436,print.story?coll=la-headlines-californ....