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Hey dzr, all is well here. Beautiful time of year, looking forward to seeing Mom and Dad tomorrow and IDCC's stock price may just be getting ready to flex it muscles, albeit an Arnold 'I am the govenah' starter set.
You are right about Rush, zero cred and basically has become a whack job; for every fact he has two errors and a lie. Oh well, the right prides themselves on being 'hannatized'. So much for thinking.
I wish you and everyone on this board a wonderful Thanksgiving. Time sprints by so take time to smell the roses. And F6, time to resurface!!
My Dime
Rooster, the reason Bush is reticent to tout the 'great economic news' is it ain't so great no matter how much you spin masters try. Even that blowhard Rush knows it
Great Economic News Defies Liberal Gloom,
President Bush's Humble Reticence to Tout It
LOL....and this coming from a rooster genuflecting before that hypocritical druggie Rush
Slug, I looked up the word retard in the dictionary. And yes you guessed! Your picture was right next to it!
Not only do you listen to Rush you then print his innate ramblings...as if any one could read that crap let alone make sense of it.
My, my, rooster, after your obvious love affair with Rush, you of all roosters should understand...Typical Repub...love to dish it out, but....ah, you know the rest
It is amazing to know you are not alone in your devotion to complete failure.
Y'all really must be bored with your own lives that y'all are so opsessed with W! SAD SAD SAD
THE CURVEBALL SAGA
(My Dime: Long article but good read. Rooster, you can skip this)
How U.S. Fell Under the Spell of 'Curveball'
The Iraqi informant's German handlers say they had told U.S. officials that his information was 'not proven,' and were shocked when President Bush and Colin L. Powell used it in key prewar speeches.
By Bob Drogin and John Goetz
Special to The Times
November 20, 2005
BERLIN — The German intelligence officials responsible for one of the most important informants on Saddam Hussein's suspected weapons of mass destruction say that the Bush administration and the CIA repeatedly exaggerated his claims during the run-up to the war in Iraq.
Five senior officials from Germany's Federal Intelligence Service, or BND, said in interviews with The Times that they warned U.S. intelligence authorities that the source, an Iraqi defector code-named Curveball, never claimed to produce germ weapons and never saw anyone else do so.
According to the Germans, President Bush mischaracterized Curveball's information when he warned before the war that Iraq had at least seven mobile factories brewing biological poisons. Then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell also misstated Curveball's accounts in his prewar presentation to the United Nations on Feb. 5, 2003, the Germans said.
Curveball's German handlers for the last six years said his information was often vague, mostly secondhand and impossible to confirm.
"This was not substantial evidence," said a senior German intelligence official. "We made clear we could not verify the things he said."
The German authorities, speaking about the case for the first time, also said that their informant suffered from emotional and mental problems. "He is not a stable, psychologically stable guy," said a BND official who supervised the case. "He is not a completely normal person," agreed a BND analyst.
Curveball was the chief source of inaccurate prewar U.S. accusations that Baghdad had biological weapons, a commission appointed by Bush reported this year. The commission did not interview Curveball, who still insists his story was true, or the German officials who handled his case.
The German account emerges as the White House is lashing out at domestic critics, particularly Senate Democrats, over allegations the administration manipulated intelligence to go to war. Last week, Vice President Dick Cheney called such claims reprehensible and pernicious.
In Congress, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is resuming its long-stalled investigation of the administration's use of prewar intelligence. Committee members said last week that the Curveball case would be a key part of their review. House Democrats are calling for a similar inquiry.
An investigation by The Times based on interviews since May with about 30 current and former intelligence officials in the U.S., Germany, England, Iraq and the United Nations, as well as other experts, shows that U.S. bungling in the Curveball case was worse than official reports have disclosed.
The White House, for example, ignored evidence gathered by United Nations weapons inspectors shortly before the war that disproved Curveball's account. Bush and his aides issued increasingly dire warnings about Iraq's biological weapons before the war even though intelligence from Curveball had not changed in two years.
At the Central Intelligence Agency, officials embraced Curveball's account even though they could not confirm it or interview him until a year after the invasion. They ignored multiple warnings about his reliability before the war, punished in-house critics who provided proof that he had lied and refused to admit error until May 2004, 14 months after the invasion.
After the CIA vouched for Curveball's accounts, Bush declared in his 2003 State of the Union speech that Iraq had "mobile biological weapons labs" designed to produce "germ warfare agents." Bush cited the mobile germ factories in at least four prewar speeches and statements, and other world leaders repeated the charge.
Powell also highlighted Curveball's "eyewitness" account when he warned the United Nations Security Council on the eve of war that Iraq's mobile labs could brew enough weapons-grade microbes "in a single month to kill thousands upon thousands of people."
The senior BND officer who supervised Curveball's case said he was aghast when he watched Powell misstate Curveball's claims as a justification for war.
"We were shocked," the official said. "Mein Gott! We had always told them it was not proven…. It was not hard intelligence."
In a telephone interview, Powell said that George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, and his top deputies personally assured him before his U.N. speech that U.S. intelligence on the mobile labs was "solid." Since then, Powell said, the case "has totally blown up in our faces."
Many officials interviewed for this report, including the German intelligence officers, spoke on the condition they not be identified because they were bound by secrecy agreements, were not authorized to speak to the news media or because the case involved classified sources and methods.
Curveball lives under an assumed name in southern Germany. The BND has given him a furnished apartment, language lessons and a stipend generous enough that he does not need to work. His wife has emigrated from Iraq, and they have an infant daughter.
The BND has relocated him twice because of concerns that his life was in danger. They still watch him closely. "He is difficult to integrate" into local society, said a BND operations officer. "We are still busy with him."
Curveball could not be interviewed for this report. BND officials threatened last summer to strip him of his salary, housing and protection if he agreed to meet with The Times.
"We told him, 'If you talk to anyone on the outside… you are out and you get no more help from us,' " the BND supervisor said.
CIA officials now concede that the Iraqi fused fact, research he gleaned on the Internet and what his former co-workers called "water cooler gossip" into a nightmarish fantasy that played on U.S. fears after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Curveball's motive, CIA officials said, was not to start a war. He simply was seeking a German visa.
German journey
The Curveball chronicle began in November 1999, when the dark-haired Iraqi in his late 20s flew into Munich's Franz Josef Strauss Airport with a tourist visa.
The Baghdad-born chemical engineer promptly applied for political asylum in Arabic and halting English. He told German immigration officials he had embezzled Iraqi government money and faced prison or worse if sent home.
The Germans sent him to Zirndorf, a refugee center near Nuremberg once used for Soviet defectors, where he joined a long line of Iraqi exiles seeking German visas.
Abruptly, his story changed.
He once led a team, he told BND officers, that equipped trucks to brew deadly bio-agents. He named six sites where Iraq might be hiding biological warfare vehicles. Three already were operating. A farm program to boost crop yields was cover for Iraq's new biological weapons production program, he said.
Germany provided Europe's most generous benefits to Iraqi refugees, and several hundred arrived each month. But few had useful credible intelligence on Baghdad's suspected weapons programs. Intelligence agents became accustomed to exaggerated claims.
"The Iraqis were adept at feeding us what we wanted to hear," said a former official of the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency who helped debrief about 50 Iraqi emigres in Germany before the war. "Most of it was garbage.''
But for this defector, the Germans assigned two case officers as well as a team of chemists, biologists and other experts. They debriefed him from January 2000 to September 2001.
Since the Iraqi had arrived in Munich, U.S. liaison with German intelligence was assigned to the local DIA team. Their clandestine operating base was an elegant 19th century mansion known as Munich House. There he was assigned his codename: Curveball.
The base cryptonym "ball" was used to signify weapons, two former U.S. intelligence officials said. An earlier informant in Germany, for example, was called Matchball.
In DIA files, Iraqi sources were listed as "red" if U.S. intelligence could interview them. Curveball was a "blue" source, meaning the Germans would not permit U.S. access to him.
Curveball said he hated Americans, the Germans explained.
As a result, the DIA — like the BND — never tried to check Curveball's background or verify his accounts before sending reports to other U.S. intelligence agencies. Despite that failure, CIA analysts accepted the incoming reports as credible and quickly passed them to senior policymakers.
The reports had problems, however. The Germans usually interviewed Curveball in Arabic, using a translator, although the Iraqi sometimes spoke English.
"But a case officer wants to speak directly to his source," said the senior BND officer. "Curveball began to learn German, and thus there was a big mix [of languages] that went on. This explains some of the confusion."
It got worse, like a children's game of "telephone," in which information gets increasingly distorted. The BND sent German summaries of their English and Arabic interview reports to Munich House and to British intelligence. The DIA team translated the German back to English and prepared its own summaries. Those went to DIA's directorate for human intelligence, at a high-rise office in Clarendon, Va.
Clarendon passed 95 DIA reports to the Weapons Intelligence, Non-Proliferation and Arms Control Center, known as WINPAC, at CIA headquarters in nearby Langley. Experts there called other specialists, including an independent laboratory, to help evaluate the data. Spy satellites were directed to focus on Curveball's sites. CIA artists prepared detailed drawings from Curveball's crude sketches.
The system led to confusion, not clarity.
"Analysts were studying drawings made by artists working from descriptions by a guy we couldn't talk to," explained a former senior CIA official who helped supervise the case and the postwar investigation. "It was hard to figure out."
"Our fear is that as it was analyzed and translated and reanalyzed and retranslated, and comments got added, it could have gotten sexed up by accident," agreed a former CIA operations official.
The British Secret Intelligence Service, known as MI6, blamed the BND for omitting what a Parliamentary inquiry called "significant detail" in the reports they sent to London. At issue were Curveball's trucks.
In an e-mail to The Times, Robin Butler, head of the British inquiry into prewar intelligence, said "incomplete reporting" by the BND misled the British to assume the trucks could produce weapons-grade bio-agents such as anthrax spores. But Curveball only spoke of producing a liquid slurry unsuitable for bombs or warheads.
At the CIA, bio-warfare experts viewed the defector's reports as sophisticated and technically feasible. They also matched the analysts' expectations.
After the 1991 Gulf War, U.N. inspectors struggled to unravel Baghdad's secret biological weapons program. They speculated that the regime produced germs in mobile factories to evade detection.
American U-2 spy planes looked for suspicious vehicles, and U.N. teams raided parking lots.
In 1994, acting on tips from Israeli intelligence, U.N. inspectors even stopped red-and-white trucks in Baghdad marked: "Tip Top Ice Cream." Inside they found ice cream.
"We thought they could easily transport other materials around," said Rolf Ekeus, who headed the U.N. inspectors from 1991 to 1997.
Finally, in mid-1995, Iraq officials admitted that before the Gulf War they had secretly produced 30,000 liters of anthrax, botulinum toxin, aflatoxin and other lethal bio-agents. They had deployed hundreds of germ-filled munitions and researched other deadly diseases for military use. They denied they ever had mobile production facilities.
Curveball's story to the Germans in 2000 and 2001 neatly dovetailed with that history and continuing CIA suspicions.
The Iraqi defector said he was recruited out of engineering school at Baghdad University in 1994 by Iraq's Military Industrial Commission, headed by Saddam Hussein's son-in-law Hussein Kamil. He said he went to work the following year for "Dr. Germ," British-trained microbiologist Rihab Rashid Taha, to build bio-warfare vehicles. Kamil and Taha had headed the pre-1991 bio-weapons program.
Curveball said he was assigned to the Chemical Engineering and Design Center, behind the Rashid Hotel in central Baghdad.
That also fit a pattern, as the center provided a cover story for Iraq's first bio-warfare program .
Curveball said he had helped assemble one truck-mounted germ factory in 1997 at Djerf al Nadaf, a tumble-down cluster of warehouses in a gritty industrial area 10 miles southeast of Baghdad. He helped the Germans build a scale model of the facility, showing how vehicles were hidden in a two-story building — and how they entered and exited on either end.
He designed laboratory equipment for the trucks, he said, providing dimensions, temperature ranges and other details. He sketched diagrams of how the system operated, and identified more than a dozen co-workers.
But the story had holes .
"His information to us was very vague," said the senior German intelligence official. "He could not say if these things functioned, if they worked."
Curveball also said he could not identify what microbes the trucks were designed to produce.
"He didn't know … whether it was anthrax or not," said the BND supervisor. "He had nothing to do with actual production of [a biological] agent. He was in the equipment testing phase. And the equipment worked."
David Kay, who read the Curveball file when he headed the CIA's search for hidden weapons in 2003, said Curveball's accounts were maddeningly murky.
"He was not in charge of trucks or production," Kay said. "He had nothing to do with actual production of biological agent. He never saw them actually produce [an] agent."
But the CIA and the White House overlooked the holes in the story.
In a February 2003 radio address and statement, Bush warned that "first-hand witnesses have informed us that Iraq has at least seven mobile factories" for germ warfare. With these, Bush said, "Iraq could produce within just months hundreds of pounds of biological poisons."
Curveball had told the Germans that Taha's team planned to build mobile factories at six sites across Iraq, from Numaniyah in the south to Tikrit in the north. But he visited only Djerf al Nadaf, he said. His information about the other sites, he told the Germans, was second-hand.
Flawed witness
Curveball's reports were highly valued in Washington because the CIA had no Iraqi spies with access to weapons programs at the time.
One detail particularly impressed the CIA: Curveball's report of a 1998 germ weapons accident at Djerf al Nadaf. Powell cited the incident in his prewar U.N. speech. An "eyewitness" was "at the site" when an accident occurred, and 12 technicians "died from exposure to biological agents," Powell said.
Lawrence B. Wilkerson, then Powell's chief of staff, said senior CIA officials told Powell the "principal source had not only worked in mobile labs but had seen an accident and had been injured in the accident…. This gave more credibility to it."
But German intelligence officials said the CIA was wrong. Curveball only "heard rumors of an accident," the BND supervisor said. "He gave a third-hand account."
The incident led to the first questions inside the CIA about Curveball's credibility. In May 2000, the Germans allowed a doctor from the CIA's counter-proliferation branch to meet Curveball and draw a blood sample. Antibodies in the blood could indicate if he had been exposed to anthrax or other unusual pathogens in the accident.
The medical tests were inconclusive, but the meeting was memorable.
The BND, insisting Curveball spoke no English and would not meet Americans, introduced the doctor as a German. The CIA physician remained silent, because he was not fluent in German. He was surprised, he later told others, that Curveball spoke "excellent English" to others in the room.
Moreover, Curveball was "very emotional, very excitable," the doctor told one colleague. And although it was early morning, Curveball smelled of liquor and looked "very sick" from a stiff hangover.
German intelligence officials said Curveball didn't have a drinking problem. But they had other concerns.
Like many defectors, Curveball at first seemed eager to please. He thanked his new friends and laughed at their jokes. He was charming and clearly intelligent, providing complex engineering details.
But as the questions intensified, Curveball grew moody and irritable. His memory began to fail. He confused places and dates. He fretted about his personal safety, about his parents and wife in Baghdad, and about his future in Germany.
"He was between two worlds, sometimes cooperative, sometimes aggressive," said the BND supervisor. "He was not an easy-going guy."
Curveball largely ceased cooperating in 2001 after he was granted asylum, officials said. He would refuse to meet for days, and then weeks, at a time. He also increasingly asked for money.
"He knew he was important," said the BND analyst. "He was not an idiot."
Defectors are often problem sources. Viewed as traitors back home, many embellish their stories to gain favor with spy services. In the shadow world of intelligence, Curveball's inability or reluctance to provide many details actually helped convince analysts he was telling the truth.
Had Curveball claimed expertise with biological weapons or direct access to other secret programs, said the BND analyst, "It would be easier to assume he was lying."
A former British official involved with the case said Curveball's behavior should be seen through another lens. He is convinced that Curveball was under intense stress, terrified both that his visa scam would be exposed, and that his lies would be used to start a war.
"He must have been scared out of his mind," he said.
But concerns about Curveball's reliability were growing. In early 2001, the CIA's Berlin station chief sent a message to headquarters noting that a BND official had complained that the Iraqi was "out of control," and couldn't be located, Senate investigators found.
MI6 cabled the CIA that British intelligence "is not convinced that Curveball is a wholly reliable source" and that "elements of [his] behavior strike us as typical of … fabricators,'' the presidential commission reported.
British intelligence also warned that spy satellite images taken in 1997 when Curveball claimed to be working at Djerf al Nadaf conflicted with his descriptions. The photos showed a wall around most of the main warehouse, clearly blocking trucks from getting in or out.
U.S. and German officials feared that Ahmad Chalabi had coached Curveball after the defector said his brother had worked as a bodyguard for the controversial Iraqi exile leader. But they found no evidence.
Curveball "had very little contact with his [bodyguard] brother," the BND supervisor said. "They are not close.''
More problematic were the three sources the CIA said had corroborated Curveball's story. Two had ties to Chalabi. All three turned out to be frauds.
The most important, a former major in the Iraqi intelligence service, was deemed a liar by the CIA and DIA. In May 2002, a fabricator warning was posted in U.S. intelligence databases.
Powell said he was never warned, during three days of intense briefings at CIA headquarters before his U.N. speech, that he was using material that both the DIA and CIA had determined was false. "As you can imagine, I was not pleased," Powell said. "What really made me not pleased was they had put out a burn notice on this guy, and people who were even present at my briefings knew it."
But BND officials said their U.S. colleagues repeatedly assured them Curveball's story had been corroborated.
"They kept on telling us there were three or four sources," said the senior German intelligence official. "They said it many times."
Behind the scenes, the CIA stepped up pressure to interview Curveball. The BND finally accepted a compromise in the fall of 2002. They let CIA analysts send questions, but they could not interview the Iraqi.
The frustration was intense at the CIA. But it wasn't surprising.
Relations long have been rocky between the CIA and BND, officials in both spy services acknowledged. The friction dates to the Cold War, when the BND complained it was treated as a second-class agency.
Spy services jealously guard their sources, and the BND was not obligated to share access to Curveball. "We would never let them see one of ours," said the former CIA operations officer.
Intelligence shift
Despite the lack of access or any new reports from Curveball, U.S. intelligence sharply upgraded its assessments of Iraq's biological weapons before the war. The shift is reflected in declassified portions of National Intelligence Estimates, which are produced as the authoritative judgment of the 15 U.S. intelligence agencies.
In May 1999, before Curveball defected, a national intelligence estimate on worldwide biological warfare programs said Iraq was "probably continuing work to develop and produce BW [bio-warfare] agents," and could restart production in six months.
In December 2000, after a year of Curveball's reports, another national intelligence estimate cautiously noted that "new intelligence" had caused U.S. intelligence "to adjust our assessment upward" and "suggests Baghdad has expanded'' its bio-weapons program.
But the caveats disappeared after the Sept. 11 attacks and the still-unsolved mailing of anthrax-laced letters to several U.S. states.
Iraq "continues to produce at least … three BW agents" and its mobile germ factories provide "capabilities surpassing the pre-Gulf War era," the CIA weapons center warned in October 2001. The CIA followed up with a public White Paper and briefings for the White House and three Senate committees.
The CIA hadn't seen new intelligence on Iraq's germ weapons. Instead, analysts had estimated what they believed would be the maximum output from seven mobile labs — only one of which Curveball said he had seen — operating nonstop or six months. But even Curveball's description of a single lab was a fiction.
Similar misjudgments filled the most important prewar intelligence document, the National Intelligence Estimate issued in October 2002. It was sent to Congress days before lawmakers voted to authorize use of military force if Hussein refused to give up his illicit arsenal.
For the first time, the new estimate warned with "high confidence" that Iraq "has now established large-scale, redundant and concealed BW agent production capabilities."
It said "all key aspects" of Iraq's offensive BW program "are active and that most elements are larger and more advanced than they were before the Gulf War."
The assessment was based "largely on information from a single source — Curveball," the presidential commission concluded. It was one of "the most important and alarming" judgments in the document, the panel added. And it was utterly wrong.
A handful of bio-analysts in the weapons center, part of the CIA's intelligence directorate, controlled the Curveball reports and remained confident in their veracity. But across the CIA bureaucracy, the clandestine service officers who usually handle defectors and other human sources were increasingly skeptical.
Tyler Drumheller, then the head of CIA spying in Europe, called the BND station chief at the German embassy in Washington in September 2002 seeking access to Curveball.
Drumheller and the station chief met for lunch at the German's favorite seafood restaurant in upscale Georgetown. The German officer warned that Curveball had suffered a mental breakdown and was "crazy," the now-retired CIA veteran recalled.
"He said, first off, 'They won't let you see him,' " Drumheller said. " 'Second, there are a lot of problems. Principally, we think he's probably a fabricator.' "
The BND station chief, contacted by The Times during the summer, said he could not "discuss any of this." He has since been reassigned back to Germany. His BND supervisors declined to discuss the lunch meeting.
Drumheller, a veteran of 26 years in the CIA clandestine service, said he and several aides repeatedly raised alarms after the lunch in tense exchanges with CIA analysts working on the Curveball case.
"The fact is, there was a lot of yelling and screaming about this guy," said James Pavitt, then chief of clandestine services, who retired from the CIA in August 2004. "My people were saying, 'We think he's a stinker.' "
The analysts refused to back down. In one meeting, the chief analyst fiercely defended Curveball's account, saying she had confirmed on the Internet many of the details he cited. "Exactly, it's on the Internet!" the operations group chief for Germany, now a CIA station chief in Europe, exploded in response. "That's where he got it too," according to a participant at the meeting.
Other warnings poured in. The CIA Berlin station chief wrote that the BND had "not been able to verify" Curveball's claims. The CIA doctor who met Curveball wrote to his supervisor shortly before Powell's speech questioning "the validity" of the Iraqi's information.
"Keep in mind that this war is going to happen regardless of what Curve Ball said or didn't say and the Powers That Be probably aren't terribly interested in whether Curve Ball knows what he's talking about," his supervisor wrote back, Senate investigators found. The supervisor later told them he was only voicing his opinion that war appeared inevitable.
Tenet has denied receiving warnings that Curveball might be a fabricator. He declined to be interviewed for this report.
Powell said that at the time he prepared for his U.N. speech in early 2003, no one warned him of the debate inside the CIA over Curveball's credibility. "I was being as careful as I possibly could," he said.
Working from a CIA conference room adjoining CIA Director Tenet's seventh-floor office suite, Powell and his aides repeatedly challenged the credibility of CIA evidence — including the mobile germ factories.
"We pressed as hard as we could, and the CIA stood by it adamantly," Powell recalled. "This is one we really pressed on, really spent a lot time on…. We knew how important it was."
No smoking gun
On Feb. 5, 2003, Powell told the packed U.N. chamber that his account was based on "solid sources" and "facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence." "We thought maybe they had the smoking gun," recalled the BND supervisor, who watched Powell on TV. "My gut feeling was the Americans must have so much from reconnaissance planes and satellites, from infiltrated spotter teams from Special Forces, and other systems. We thought they must have tons of stuff."
Instead, Powell emphasized Curveball's "eyewitness" account, calling it "one of the most worrisome things that emerge from the thick intelligence file."
A congressional staffer on intelligence said she realized the case was weak when she saw Powell display CIA drawings of trucks but not photos. "A drawing isn't evidence," she said. "It's hearsay."
Powell's speech failed to sway many diplomats, but it had an immediate impact in Baghdad.
"The Iraqis scoured the country for trailers," said a former CIA official who helped interrogate Iraqi officials and scientists in U.S. custody after the war. "They were in real panic mode. They were terrified that this was real, and they couldn't explain it."
An explanation was available within days, but U.S. officials ignored it.
On Feb. 8, three days after Powell's speech, the U.N.'s Team Bravo conducted the first search of Curveball's former work site. The raid by the American-led biological weapons experts lasted 3 1/2 hours. It was long enough to prove Curveball had lied.
Djerf al Nadaf was on a dusty road lined with auto repair shops and small factories, near the former Tuwaitha nuclear facility and a sewage-filled tributary of the Tigris River.
Behind a high wall, a two-story grain silo adjoined the warehouse that Curveball had identified as the truck assembly facility.
"That's the one where the mobile labs were supposed to be," said a former U.N. inspector who worked with the U.S. and other intelligence agencies. "That's the one we were interested in."
The doors were locked, so Boston microbiologist Rocco Casagrande climbed on a white U.N. vehicle, yanked open a metal flap in the wall, and crawled inside. After scrambling over a huge pile of corn, he scraped two samples of residue from cracks in the cement floor, two more from holes in the wall and one from a discarded shower basin outside.
Back at the Canal Hotel that afternoon, he tested the samples for bacterial or viral DNA. He was searching for any signs that germs were produced at the site or any traces of the 1998 bio-weapons accident. Test results were all negative.
"No threat agents detected," Casagrande wrote in his computer journal that night. "Got to climb on a jeep and crawl into buildings and play second-story man, but otherwise spent the day in the lab."
A British inspector, who had helped bring the intelligence file from New York, found another surprise.
Curveball had said the germ trucks could enter the warehouse from either end. But there were no garage doors and a solid, 6-foot-high wall surrounded most of the building. The wall British intelligence saw in 1997 satellite photos clearly made impossible the traffic patterns Curveball had described.
U.N. teams also raided the other sites Curveball had named. They interrogated managers, seized documents and used ground-penetrating radar, according to U.N. reports.
The U.N. inspectors "could find nothing to corroborate Curveball's reporting," the CIA's Iraq Survey Group reported last year.
On March 7, 2003, Hans Blix, the chief U.N. inspector, told the Security Council that a series of searches had found "no evidence" of mobile biological production facilities in Iraq. It drew little notice at the time.
The invasion of Iraq began two weeks later.
Phantom labs
Soon after U.S. troops entered Baghdad, the discovery of two trucks loaded with lab equipment in northern Iraq brought cheers to the CIA weapons center.
Curveball examined photos relayed to Germany and said that while he hadn't worked on the two trucks, equipment in the pictures looked like components he had installed at Djerf al Nadaf.
Days later, the CIA and DIA rushed to publish a White Paper declaring the trucks part of Hussein's biological warfare program. The report dismissed Iraq's explanation that the equipment generated hydrogen as a "cover story." A day later, Bush told a Polish TV reporter: "We found the weapons of mass destruction."
But bio-weapons experts in the intelligence community were sharply critical. A former senior official of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research called the unclassified report an unprecedented "rush to judgment."
The DIA then ordered a classified review of the evidence. One of 15 analysts held to the initial finding that the trucks were built for germ warfare. The sole believer was the CIA analyst who helped draft the original White Paper.
Hamish Killip, a former British army officer and biological weapons expert, flew to Baghdad in July 2003 as part of the Iraq Survey Group, the CIA-led Iraqi weapons hunt. He inspected the truck trailers and was immediately skeptical.
"The equipment was singularly inappropriate" for biological weapons, he said. "We were in hysterics over this. You'd have better luck putting a couple of dust bins on the back of the truck and brewing it in there."
The trucks were built to generate hydrogen, not germs, he said. But the CIA refused to back down. In March 2004, Killip quit, protesting that the CIA was covering up the truth.
Rod Barton, an Australian intelligence officer and another bio-weapons expert, also quit over what he said was the CIA's refusal to admit error. "Of course the trailers had nothing to do with Curveball," Barton wrote in a recent e-mail.
The Iraq Survey Group ultimately agreed. An "exhaustive investigation" showed the trailers could not "be part of any BW program," it reported in October 2004.
The now-discredited CIA White Paper remains on the agency's website. A CIA spokesman said the report was posted because it was part of the historical record.
After U.S troops failed to find illicit Iraqi weapons in the days and weeks after the invasion, the CIA created the Iraq Survey Group to conduct a methodical search in June 2003.
Tenet appointed Kay to head it. The pugnacious Texan was convinced that Baghdad had hidden mobile germ factories. Kay's teams returned to Djerf al Nadaf and other sites identified by Curveball.
One CIA-led unit investigated Curveball himself. The leader was "Jerry," a veteran CIA bio-weapons analyst who had championed Curveball's case at the CIA weapons center. They found Curveball's personnel file in an Iraqi government storeroom. It was devastating.
Curveball was last in his engineering class, not first, as he had claimed. He was a low-level trainee engineer, not a project chief or site manager, as the CIA had insisted.
Most important, records showed Curveball had been fired in 1995, at the very time he said he had begun working on bio-warfare trucks. A former CIA official said Curveball also apparently was jailed for a sex crime and then drove a Baghdad taxi.
Jerry and his team interviewed 60 of Curveball's family, friends and co-workers. They all denied working on germ weapons trucks. Curveball's former bosses at the engineering center said the CIA had fallen for "water cooler gossip" and "corridor conversations."
"The Iraqis were all laughing," recalled a former member of the survey group. "They were saying, 'This guy? You've got to be kidding.' "
Jerry tracked down Curveball's Sunni Muslim parents in a middle-class Baghdad neighborhood.
"Our guy was very polite," Kay recalled. "He said, 'We understand your son doesn't like Americans.' His mother looked shocked. She said, 'No, no! He loves Americans.' And she took him into [her son's] bedroom and it was filled with posters of American rock stars. It was like any other teenage room. She said one of his goals was to go to America."
The deeper Jerry probed, the worse Curveball looked.
Childhood friends called him a "great liar" and a "con artist." Another called him "a real operator." The team reported that "people kept saying what a rat Curveball was."
Jerry and another CIA analyst abruptly broke off the investigation and took a military flight back to Washington. Kay said Jerry appeared to be nearing a nervous breakdown.
"They had been true believers in Curveball," Kay said. "They absolutely believed in him. They knew every detail in his file. But it was total hokum. There was no truth in it. They said they had to go home to explain how all this was all so wrong. They wanted to fight the battle at the CIA."
Back home, senior CIA officials resisted. Jerry was "read the riot act" and accused of "making waves" by his office director, according to the presidential commission. He and his colleague ultimately were transferred out of the weapons center.
The CIA was "very, very vindictive," Kay said.
Soon after, Jerry got in touch with Michael Scheuer, a CIA analyst who felt he had been sidelined for criticizing CIA counterterrorism tactics. Scheuer would quit within a year.
"Jerry had become kind of a nonperson," Scheuer recalled of their meeting. "There was a tremendous amount of pressure on him not to say anything. Just to sit there and shut up."
A CIA spokeswoman confirmed the account, but declined to comment further. Jerry still works at the CIA and could not be contacted for this report. His former supervisor, reached at home, said she could not speak to the media. "What was done to them was wrong," said a former Pentagon official who investigated the case for the presidential commission. "But we didn't see it so much as a cover-up as an expression of how profoundly resistant to recognizing mistakes the CIA culture was."
Kay's findings
In December 2003, Kay flew back to CIA headquarters. He said he told Tenet that Curveball was a liar and he was convinced Iraq had no mobile labs or other illicit weapons. CIA officials confirm their exchange.
Kay said he was assigned to a windowless office without a working telephone.
On Jan. 20, 2004, Bush lauded Kay and the Iraq Survey Group in his State of the Union Speech for finding "weapons of mass destruction-related program activities…. Had we failed to act, the dictator's weapons of mass destruction program would continue to this day."
Kay quit three days later and went public with his concerns.
In Germany, the BND finally agreed to let the CIA interview Curveball. The CIA sent one of its best officers, fluent in German and gifted at working reluctant sources.
They met at BND headquarters in Pullach, a suburb of Munich, in mid-March 2004 — one year after the Iraq invasion.
Alone with Curveball at last, the CIA officer steadily reviewed details and picked at contradictions like a prosecutor working a hostile witness. He showed spy satellite images and other evidence from the sites Curveball had identified.
Each night, he would file an encrypted report to CIA headquarters on his computer, and then call Drumheller.
"After the first couple of days, he said, 'This doesn't sound good,' " Drumheller recalled. "After the first week, he said, 'This guy is lying. He's lying about a bunch of stuff.' "
But Curveball refused to admit deceit. When challenged, he would mumble, say he didn't know and suggest the questioner was wrong or the photo was doctored. As the evidence piled up, he simply stopped talking.
"He never said, 'You got me,' " Drumheller said. "He just shrugged, and didn't say anything. It was all over. We told our guy, 'You might as well wrap it up and come home.' "
It took more than a month to track and recall every U.S. intelligence report — at least 100 in all — based on Curveball's misinformation. In a blandly worded notice to its stations around the world, the CIA said in May 2004:
"Discrepancies surfaced regarding the information provided by … Curveball in this stream of reporting, which indicate that he lost his claimed access in 1995. Our assessment, therefore, is that Curveball appears to be fabricating in this stream of reporting."
The CIA had advised Bush in the fall of 2003 of "problems with the sourcing" on biological weapons, an official familiar with the briefing said. But the president has never withdrawn the statement in his 2003 State of the Union speech that Iraq produced "germ warfare agents" or his postwar assertions that "we found the weapons of mass destruction."
U.S., British and German intelligence officials still debate what Curveball really saw, and what he really did. One possible answer was buried in records the Iraq Survey Group recovered at the engineering and design center in Baghdad.
They show that Iraqi officials considered installing seed handling gear on trucks in 1995, but instead put the machinery in warehouses, like those at Djerf al Nadaf. Perhaps Curveball heard about the modified trucks and spun them into a bio-weapons system for gullible intelligence agencies.
"You're left at the end with uncertainty," said the former CIA official who helped supervise the Curveball case and the postwar investigation. "We know what he said. We know we don't believe him. But was he making it all up? Was he coached? Did he hear something and then embellish it? These things are still unresolved."
Not for Curveball. "He is convinced his story is true," said the BND analyst. "He has no doubts to this day."
*
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-curveball20nov20,1,1496281,print.story
Knock on the Door, a Knock on the War
Steve Lopez
Points West
November 13, 2005
The knock came just after 6 a.m., way too early for visitors at the neat two-story home in the hills of Castaic.
"I remember my wife wondering who could be at the door at this hour," says Loren Farell, thinking back on that day in July 2003.
It was to have been a big day for Farell, a Los Angeles native and Vietnam vet who was being promoted to lieutenant in the LAPD.
His daughter, Ashley, had just graduated from college and was staying with her parents while looking for a teaching job. Ashley's husband was in Iraq, fighting a war the Farells supported and believed in.
Farell went downstairs, looked through the peephole and saw an Army sergeant.
"You remember how you got butterflies as a kid?" Farell asks. "I got that tenfold. I opened the door, and she asked me, 'Does Ashley Ashcraft live here?' I said, 'Yes, she's my daughter,' and the sergeant asked if she could speak to her."
Farell knew what was coming. His daughter's husband, Evan Ashcraft, 24, was with the 101st Airborne Division. He was a smart kid who played classical piano and wanted to join the LAPD after the war, just like his father-in-law, Mr. Farell.
"You know how cops say a shooting is like slow motion?" asks Farell, who was one of the first two officers on the scene of the harrowing 1997 North Hollywood bank heist. "That's how this was. I stepped outside, shaking like a leaf. I said, 'I'm her father, are you here for what I think you're here for?' She started crying, and she said, 'Yes.' "
Now Farell tried to figure out how he was going to break this to his daughter.
"I aged 25 years. I started to walk up the stairs and my legs weighed a million pounds each. All I could think of was, 'How can I sugarcoat this?' My wife asked who was at the door, and I must have been all white. I said, 'Evan is dead.' She started screaming, and then Ashley bolted out of her room.' "
Not long after they got the news, I was invited to Farell's house by Evan Ashcraft's mother, Jane Bright. Bright, who opposed the war, wanted to tell me a wonderful young man had died. He wasn't a number or a statistic, she said, he was her son, and she wanted people to know the true cost of the war.
It was clear to me that Bright's perspective put the San Fernando Valley woman in a distinct minority in the Farell house, and in fact we did most of our talking outside. I've been in sporadic contact with Bright since then but never saw Farell again until recently, when we bumped into each other in downtown Los Angeles.
Farell told me his daughter and the rest of the family were doing as well as could be expected, and then he said something that stopped me in my tracks. He made a comment about this crazy war and about all the angry letters he'd written to politicians and publications, trying to make his feelings known.
Hadn't he been a supporter of the war, I asked. "That's right," he said, smiling over the irony of his turnaround.
He was still a conservative — "don't get me wrong" — and still a law-and-order cop who will never get over "those longhairs" who spat on returning Vietnam vets. He still supports the troops in Iraq, but he's done a 180 on the American leaders who called them to war, including President Bush, who on Friday lashed out at critics.
Lt. Farell, who works in the Rampart Division, explained why over a long cup of coffee, and he began by recalling the day he got that knock at his door in Castaic.
"Later, we went as a family to counseling and I ended up breaking down," said Farell. "The thing is, as a father, you can always fix things for your daughter. A broken wagon, a broken heart. This, I couldn't fix."
As Farell helped his daughter with funeral arrangements, the body count continued to rise, and Farell, a Republican, grew angrier. Meanwhile, he says, the Army turned the business of death into even more of a nightmare.
"The casualty assistance officer was inept regarding the body, the burial, the money. Everything was like pulling teeth, and you're trying to figure out what part of it you're paying for. Why are we paying for any of it? Evan died a hero and ended up getting a Bronze Star."
Only six people — not seven — showed up to perform the 21-gun salute at Ashcraft's funeral, Farell says, and one shot misfired.
"Evan got a 17-gun salute," he says, still seething.
A month after his son-in-law was killed, Farell opened Newsweek magazine and read a story that said military officials were calling the relatively low number of casualties in Iraq "tragic but militarily insignificant."
He flipped.
"Let me tell you how 'insignificant' Evan's death was," he wrote in a "My Turn" essay submission Newsweek did not print. "He was a young man of only 24 years, the husband of my daughter and between the two, full of plans for their life together."
The following February, Farell wrote a letter that was published in The Times protesting the treatment of fallen soldiers' families.
In it, he said he was tired of empty gestures from politicians, and if his middle-class family's ordeal was difficult, he wondered, what must it be like for less fortunate families?
"Congressmen, senators, the president and even people from other states continue to send a barrage of their guilt toward us by way of a form letter. Letters to the Army by me regarding the mishandling of this entire episode have gone completely unanswered."
Every time another soldier dies, Farell says, someone gets a knock at the door. We all know that, but it doesn't mean anything until you're the one who gets the knock. In his case, he began to question the very premise of the war and every one of the rationalizations he once believed.
"I'm still waiting for word on what we're doing there. If Evan had died in Afghanistan looking for Osama bin Laden and then the war branched out into Iraq, I might have been into this. Sure, I've got 20-20 hindsight. But we were supposed to stabilize the region. Yeah, nice. When will that happen? Weapons of mass destruction? Give me a break.
"Did we do it to get rid of a madman? Yeah, sure, but how do we pick and choose who we remove? Did we do it for oil? Gas is now $2.65 a gallon, and we think that's pretty good compared to what it was, which is exactly what they want us to think."
If it was about Sept. 11, Farell asks, why didn't we lean on countries known to harbor terrorists?
"Yeah, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia. Hey, we just lost 3,000 people, you've got terrorists here, and we're taking them out. You've got five minutes before we go in, and by the way, the F-16s are circling."
I ask if we might see him marching in the next antiwar rally.
"It's not my style," Farell says.
But he understands the sentiment. We tried to root out our enemies and instead created a homeland for them in Iraq. Do we stick it out and hope for the best, or withdraw and pray Iraq doesn't descend into full-blown civil war?
"I haven't got a clue," Farell says, and by his accounting, neither does anyone else. He wishes we'd reinstate the draft, just to get more people to wake up and pay attention to what's going on.
"Someone will ask me, 'Do you want for your son-in-law to have died in vain?' No, I don't. But conversely, I don't want anyone else dying in vain, either. I'd love to think that down the road somewhere President Bush will have an 'I-told-you-so' moment, but it doesn't look good right now, does it?"
Farell tries to get home in time for the "CBS Evening News" every night so he can watch the "Fallen Hero" segment. He always gets a lump in his throat.
At the end of our conversation, Farell tells me he'll be going to visit Evan's grave the next day. Veterans Day, 2005.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-nulopez13nov13,1,5238593,print.column
Rooster; Talk about living in a alternate reality...
Doomed Democrats Live in Alternative Reality
November 2, 2005
BEGIN TRANSCRIPT
RUSH:
Nah, easy, rooster is just like Bush; never let those pesky facts get in the way of their thinking.
Big smile, Tom, oh, and while we are at it, let's get some fingerprints!!
Well, the rumors are running rampant and Cheney always has his health issue to fall back on, if needed, but I just don't see him giving up the power if he is not indicted, and I don't think that will happen. He is the master of staying above (or below) the fray and he would have really had to stick his neck waaay out there for that to happen. Shoot, if Rove is gone, Cheney will have all the levers of power.
You know, got to hand it to Wilson; Bush and his buddies greatly underestimated him as they picked a fight with a pit bull who has brains and doesn't run from a fight. I heard somewhere (the ol' rumor mill) that if there are some indictments, being that the Supreme Court allowed Paula Jones to go after Clinton, he intends to do the same with Bush. What goes around may just come around and it wouldn't happen to a nicer crowd :). Take care, bulldzr, and I hope Wilma steers a wide berth!!
Hey, good to hear from you bulldzr!!
Yup, regarding that 30-35%, they are really Republicans first and Americans second. It is party above all else and for someone like Rooster to really believe history will show Bush to be a great president making great decisions, well, what can you say. If this was a Democrat President they would have gone ballistic by now, but with Bush, they fall back to the Limbaugh's (sp?) and brag about being 'Hannatized' while spouting party line.
In my opinion, this war will turn out to be a huge strategic disaster making Viet Nam (excluding the loss of American lives) pale in comparison. Throughout history, every great power has fallen from the perch and, I believe, history will look back at these eight years of Bush as our turning point. Sad, sad, sad...
Rooster, you are the perfect Bush supporter: loyal to a fault and carrying a huge set of blinders.
Rooster, give this one a good read...and give it some thought.
American debacle
By Zbigniew Brzezinski
ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI was national security advisor to President Carter.
October 9, 2005
Some 60 years ago Arnold Toynbee concluded, in his monumental "Study of History," that the ultimate cause of imperial collapse was "suicidal statecraft." Sadly for George W. Bush's place in history and — much more important — ominously for America's future, that adroit phrase increasingly seems applicable to the policies pursued by the United States since the cataclysm of 9/11.
Though there have been some hints that the Bush administration may be beginning to reassess the goals, so far defined largely by slogans, of its unsuccessful military intervention in Iraq, President Bush's speech Thursday was a throwback to the demagogic formulations he employed during the 2004 presidential campaign to justify a war that he himself started.
That war, advocated by a narrow circle of decision-makers for motives still not fully exposed, propagated publicly by rhetoric reliant on false assertions, has turned out to be much more costly in blood and money than anticipated. It has precipitated worldwide criticism. In the Middle East it has stamped the United States as the imperialistic successor to Britain and as a partner of Israel in the military repression of the Arabs. Fair or not, that perception has become widespread throughout the world of Islam.
Now, however, more than a reformulation of U.S. goals in Iraq is needed. The persistent reluctance of the administration to confront the political background of the terrorist menace has reinforced sympathy among Muslims for the terrorists. It is a self-delusion for Americans to be told that the terrorists are motivated mainly by an abstract "hatred of freedom" and that their acts are a reflection of a profound cultural hostility. If that were so, Stockholm or Rio de Janeiro would be as much at risk as New York City. Yet, in addition to New Yorkers, the principal victims of serious terrorist attacks have been Australians in Bali, Spaniards in Madrid, Israelis in Tel Aviv, Egyptians in the Sinai and Britons in London.
There is an obvious political thread connecting these events: The targets are America's allies and client states in its deepening military intervention in the Middle East. Terrorists are not born but shaped by events, experiences, impressions, hatreds, ethnic myths, historical memories, religious fanaticism and deliberate brainwashing. They are also shaped by images of what they see on television, and especially by feelings of outrage at what they perceive to be the brutal denigration of their religious kin's dignity by heavily armed foreigners. An intense political hatred for America, Britain and Israel is drawing recruits for terrorism not only from the Middle East but as far away as Ethiopia, Morocco, Pakistan, Indonesia and even the Caribbean.
America's ability to cope with nuclear nonproliferation has also suffered. The contrast between the attack on the militarily weak Iraq and America's forbearance of a nuclear-armed North Korea has strengthened the conviction of the Iranians that their security can only be enhanced by nuclear weapons. Moreover, the recent U.S. decision to assist India's nuclear program, driven largely by the desire for India's support for the war in Iraq and as a hedge against China, has made the U.S. look like a selective promoter of nuclear weapons proliferation. This double standard will complicate the quest for a constructive resolution of the Iranian nuclear problem.
Compounding such political dilemmas is the degradation of America's moral standing in the world. The country that has for decades stood tall in opposition to political repression, torture and other violations of human rights has been exposed as sanctioning practices that hardly qualify as respect for human dignity. Even more reprehensible is the fact that the shameful abuse and/or torture in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib was exposed not by an outraged administration but by the U.S. media. In response, the administration confined itself to punishing a few low-level perpetrators; none of the top civilian and military decision-makers in the Department of Defense and on the National Security Council who sanctioned "stress interrogations" (a.k.a. torture) were publicly disgraced, prosecuted or forced to resign. The administration's opposition to the International Criminal Court now seems quite self-serving.
Finally, complicating this sorry foreign policy record are war-related economic trends. The budgets for the departments of Defense and Homeland Security are now larger than the total budget of any nation, and they are likely to continue escalating as budget and trade deficits transform America into the world's No. 1 debtor nation. At the same time, the direct and indirect costs of the war in Iraq are mounting, even beyond the pessimistic prognoses of its early opponents, making a mockery of the administration's initial predictions. Every dollar so committed is a dollar not spent on investment, on scientific innovation or on education, all fundamentally relevant to America's long-term economic primacy in a highly competitive world.
It should be a source of special concern for thoughtful Americans that even nations known for their traditional affection for America have become openly critical of U.S. policy. As a result, large swathes of the world — including nations in East Asia, Europe and Latin America — have been quietly exploring ways of shaping regional associations tied less to the notions of transpacific, or transatlantic, or hemispheric cooperation with the United States. Geopolitical alienation from America could become a lasting and menacing reality.
That trend would especially benefit America's historic ill-wishers and future rivals. Sitting on the sidelines and sneering at America's ineptitude are Russia and China — Russia, because it is delighted to see Muslim hostility diverted from itself toward America, despite its own crimes in Afghanistan and Chechnya, and is eager to entice America into an anti-Islamic alliance; China, because it patiently follows the advice of its ancient strategic guru, Sun Tzu, who taught that the best way to win is to let your rival defeat himself.
In a very real sense, during the last four years the Bush team has dangerously undercut America's seemingly secure perch on top of the global totem pole by transforming a manageable, though serious, challenge largely of regional origin into an international debacle. Because America is extraordinarily powerful and rich, it can afford, for a while longer, a policy articulated with rhetorical excess and pursued with historical blindness. But in the process, America is likely to become isolated in a hostile world, increasingly vulnerable to terrorist acts and less and less able to exercise constructive global influence. Flailing away with a stick at a hornets' nest while loudly proclaiming "I will stay the course" is an exercise in catastrophic leadership.
But it need not be so. A real course correction is still possible, and it could start soon with a modest and common-sense initiative by the president to engage the Democratic congressional leadership in a serious effort to shape a bipartisan foreign policy for an increasingly divided and troubled nation. In a bipartisan setting, it would be easier not only to scale down the definition of success in Iraq but actually to get out — perhaps even as early as next year. And the sooner the U.S. leaves, the sooner the Shiites, Kurds and Sunnis will either reach a political arrangement on their own or some combination of them will forcibly prevail.
With a foreign policy based on bipartisanship and with Iraq behind us, it would also be easier to shape a wider Middle East policy that constructively focuses on Iran and on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process while restoring the legitimacy of America's global role.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/sunday/commentary/la-oe-brzezinski9oct09,0,2062011.story?coll=la...
The Republican racket (which isn't tennis)
By MOLLY IVINS
AUSTIN - Sometimes it helps to draw back from what's going on, to see if any patterns emerge from the chaos of daily events.
In the news biz, attempts to see the Big Picture are known as thumbsuckers and regarded with appropriate contempt. On the famous other hand, it's also sometimes the only way to see the much bigger stories that seep and creep all around us without anyone ever calling a news conference, or issuing talking points, or having gong-show debate over them.
Everybody and his dog in the political commentating trade now agrees that the Bush administration is experiencing hard times -- the going is getting tough, and George W. Bush is getting testy.
It seems to me what we are looking at was put best by noted journalist Billy Don Moyers, formerly of Marshall, who was home recently and observed that the Republican right came to Washington to start a revolution and stayed to run a racket. It has become a game of ideological flimflam, a scam in which all manner of distracting hoo-hah -- abortion, judicial activism, even "the war on terra" -- is used to obscure the fact that the government has been taken over by people who are using it to make money for themselves and their friends.
In the business world, this is called "control fraud," and it refers to an organization, like Enron or Tyco, that is rotten at the head. One of the key figures in this web of malfeasance is Jack Abramoff, the super-lobbyist, top fund-raiser for Bush's re-election and close buddy of Rep. Tom DeLay -- himself the architect of the "K Street Strategy" to convert the entire business lobby into the fund-raising arm of the Republican Party in return for whatever legislative favors the major donors want.
Abramoff is the close ally and college roommate of Grover Norquist, a key right-wing political activist and major leader of the "movement conservatives" in Washington. Abramoff has also bragged that he contacted Karl Rove on behalf of Tyco.
Washington is theoretically covered by the largest concentration of journalistic talent anywhere in the world. This is just a straight, old-fashioned corruption story of the sort theoretically uncovered by many Washington reporters earlier in their lives at various city halls. Did everyone forget how it's done?
Equally, the arrest of David Safavian -- former head of procurement at the White House Office of Management and Budget -- on grounds of having impeded justice by lying or covering up material facts opens up all kinds of lines of inquiry. Safavian was previously a partner in Norquist's consulting firm Janus-Merritt Strategies. Safavian also worked with Abramoff at another law-lobbying firm.
One definition of Establishment journalism is relying solely on news conferences held by people with public office and power. With the exception of The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, the Washington press corps appears to be standing around waiting for word from the official investigation. Why aren't they ahead of the official investigators?
Seems to me we have all mourned the descent of politics from the noble (if messy and comically picturesque) doings of democracy into a system of legalized bribery. Taking huge campaign contributions from special interests and doing legislative favors in return is so common that one barely blinks at it.
Rep. Roy Blunt, the man whom Republicans chose to replace DeLay temporarily while he's under indictment, tried to alter a Homeland Security bill in 2003 with a last-minute provision to benefit the cigarette company Philip Morris. Philip Morris had not only contributed heavily to Blunt's campaign -- it also employed both Blunt's girlfriend, whom he married in 2003, and one of his sons.
DeLay gets indicted, and the Republicans replace him with another DeLay.
The scandals seem to be a new and more sinister level of corruption.
http://www.dfw.com/mld/startelegram/news/columnists/molly_ivins/12852363.htm
The Miers Mess Continues/Nobel Peace Prize Is a Slap to Bush
The Harriet Miers nomination is becoming more and more a mess for Bush. Yesterday, Bush participated in a tribute for William F. Buckley, and the audience included many a conservative leader--George F. Will, Bill Kristol--who have denounced Bush for selecting Miers. Today Charles Krauthammer, a conservative columnist, called on Bush to withdraw this nomination, accusing Bush of mounting "a sorry retreat into smallness." Ouch!
What is most amusing is how Bush-backers have been defending this nomination. As E.J. Dionne points out in his column today, advocates of Miers are running around telling people she is an evangelical Christian. But wait a minute. When Democrats in the past have suggested that it might be appropriate to ask whether the religious beliefs of a judicial nominee might cause him or her to rule a certain way (particularly on abortion rights), Republicans have howled that this was unfair. They even accused the Democrats of being anti-Catholic. But now Miers fans are selling her partly on the basis on her faith. Since when was that a qualification for being a Supreme Court justice?
Then there's the loyalty argument--which is a spin-off of Bush's trust-me argument. Bush has declared that he knows Miers' heart and character and that this ought to be good enough for conservatives. But many of his rightist allies don't possess that kind of faith. But Richard Land, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission for the Southern Baptist Convention defended the Miers pick by noting that Texans like Bush and Miers value loyalty and courage. He said, "If she were to rule in ways that are contrary to the way the president would want her to rule, it would be a deep personal betrayal." So the point is to put rubber-stamps for the president on the Supreme Court? Is Land suggesting that Miers' loyalty is to Bush not to the Constitution?
Two days ago, Ed Gillespie, the former Enron lobbyist who now helps the White House with Supreme Court appointments, told a gathering of perturbed conservatives that their criticism of Miers was elitist and sexist. But that was a miscalculation on his part. The cons quickly fired back that there were plenty of female jurists who were known rightwing legal warriors who they would prefer over Miers. Score this, cranky conservatives 1, Gillespie 0.
But my favorite argument deployed by Bush is his claim that not only does he know her heart but that he knows--for sure!--that she will not change her views in the next 20 years. This, of course, is an overreaction to David Souter. (Conservatives will never forgive Bush's father for Souter.) But is rigidity an asset? Moreover, let's look at where Miers was, say, seventeen years ago. She was giving money to the Al Gore campaign and the Democratic Party. So if she has shifted from Democratic-backer to Republican backer (and evangelical Christian) in that time, who's to say that in two decades she's not going to be somewhere different from where she is now?
Its important to remember that none of this nonsense would have transpired had Bush picked a nominee with strong and obvious credentials (whether a known rightwing champion or not). This is a jam entirely of Bush's own making. It would truly be entertaining, if the future of the nation was not at stake.
******
Congratulations to Mohamed ElBaradei and the International Atomic Energy Agency for bagging this year's Nobel Peace Prize. This is a tribute to the IAEA's good work but also a slap at the Bush gang. Remember the Bushies--particularly John Bolton--tried to boot ElBaradei from this post--which was an absurd move. After all, when it came to sussing out Iraq's nuclear weapons capabilities, ElBaradei and his IAEA got it right, and the Bush crew got it way wrong. Before the war, Dick Cheney and others claimed that Iraq had revived its nuclear weapons program and that was one reason why war was necessary. ElBaradie and his IAEA inspectors reported there was no evidence that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program. It's good to see that truth matters--at least to the Nobel committee.
http://www.davidcorn.com/
Another Big Speech from Bush on Terrorism/A Cheer for McCain?
Before George W. Bush this morning delivered another Big Speech on the the war on terrorism--the "long war," as Bush aides are reportedly now referring to it--White House press secretary Scott McClellan declared that the address would be loaded with "unprecedented detail." Guess what? It was not. There was one section in which Bush did claim that his adminstration had scored major successes in the fight againt al Qaeda. He maintained that at least ten "serious" al Qaeada plots had been thwarted, three of them in the United States and that five al Qaeda attempts to either infiltrate operatives into the United States or case a target here had been prevented. This would be good news...but only if true. The Bush administration used to point to the break-up of an al Qaeada cell in Lackawanna, New York, as a major accomplishment. But the prosecutor in that case has downplayed that cell's significance. Who knows if these numbers are real? We can hope that some national security reporters will try to factcheck Bush.
As for the rest of the speech, it was not details-driven, but rhetoric-propelled. Bush repeated the same-old arguments for maintaining US troops in Iraq. If the United States withdrew, he said, the country would fall into the hands of Osama bin Laden and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. And who wants that? I don't. But isn't it more likely that the nation would be controlled by Iranian-backed Shiite forces? True, there might be a civil war, as there practically seems to be one now. But it's far from certain that Zarqawi will be sitting on a throne if the United States disengaged. This is not Afghanistan.
Once again, Bush offered mostly rah-rah speechifying "Against such an enemy there is only one effective response: we will never back down, we will never give in, and we will never accept anything less than complete victory." He indicated he was not worried by the sectarian conflict and violence occurring in Iraq, noting that disagreement "is the essence of democracy." Interestingly, he kept pushing the formulation that radical Islam is today's communism. His intent is obvious: to persuade people that this is going to take decades and that they should not become impatient with Iraq.
But a speech given at 10:00 in the morning is not going to reach too many Americans. And Bush's Big Speeches usually have no impact on public opinion. Once again, Bush is resorting to words, not actions, to rally a public that is skeptical of his war in Iraq. Let's hope he's not expecting too much from this speech. Otherwise, that would be a sign he truly lives in an ever-shrinking bubble.
Another point: attending this speech--which was given at a National Endowment of Democracy event--were Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfled, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Peter Pace. Is it petty to ask, don't these people have real work to do? Can't they put two hours to better use than applauding for El Presidente? Some war.
******
The below is a piece I posted in my "Capital Games" column at www.thenation.com. If you've already seen it, please scroll down to other items.
Folks outside the Beltway often wonder why reporters--even those of a liberal bent--have a fondness for John McCain. Yeah, he's a warmonger in that he's been an enthusiastic cheerleader for George Bush's misadventure in Iraq. Yeah, he essentially pimped for Bush in 2004--after the Bush campaign ran a scandalous and dirty-as-can-be campaign against him in the 2000 Republican primaries. Yeah, he sucks up to social conservatives, as he ponders another presidential bid. For instance, he recently said intelligent design should be taught in schools. (McCain is probably hoping that he can take the edge off social conservatives' suspicion of him.) But this week, he poked Bush right in the snout. Despite a veto threat from the White House, McCain led--yes, led--the Senate to a 90-to-9 vote in favor of setting humane limits on the interrogation of detainees in Iraq and elsewhere. Given the damage done by the Abu Ghraib scandal, it's shocking that Bush would not support such a measure. But he didn't. And McCain shoved it down his throat.
McCain attached to the $440 billion military spending bill a provision that both defines the permissible actions that can be taken by US interrogators--whether they are dealing with uniiformed members of an enemy army or stateless terrorists--and prohibits the use of inhumane and degrading tactics. For months, McCain and a few other senators (including Republicans Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and John Warner of Virginia) have pushed this measure, but they have been blocked by Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist. In July, Frist pulled the defense appropriations bill off the floor rather than permit McCain a vote on this provision. Instead, he scheduled a vote on legislation that would protect gun sellers from lawsuits. (Click here for more on that.)
But when McCain on Wednesday introduced this provision as an amendment to the military spending bill--which is considered as a must-pass bill--he and his comrades won over most of their fellow Republicans. Only one Republican--Ted Stevens of Alaska--spoke against the provision. Even at a time when Bush's supposed political capital is draining faster than the waters of Lake Pontchatrain pouring through a busted levee, this was quite an accomplishment for McCain. It was a major rejection of Bush's claim that he knows best how to be commander in chief. During the Senate debate--such as it was--Republican Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee spoke eloquently of how the US Constitution assigns the task of creating rules for the capture of enemies to Congress, not the president. Finally, Congress--that is, the Senate (who knows if the House GOPers will follow its lead?)--has reasserted (for the moment) its standing as a coequal branch of government when it comes to fighting a war. This was McCain's doing.
And this is why McCain tugs on the heatstrings of reporters stuck in Washington. He does occasionally go off the reservation for a principle. Not often enough, but more so than most of his fellow Republicans. After getting ensnared in the Keating Five money-and-politics scandal years ago, he took up the cause of campaign finance reform. (His McCain-Feingold bill was a mixed bag at best, but it was a try.) He tried to shout down Bush's call for tax cuts that would benefit the rich and increase the deficit (but failed). He went after Big Tobacco, one of the main sources of campaign dollars for his party. In recent years, he has worked with Senator Joe Lieberman on global warming legislation.
McCain's anti-Abu Ghraib measure could still be stripped out of the spending bill. Consequently, he has called for public pressure that might persuade House GOP leaders not to undermine this provision and that might make it tough for Bush to veto the measure. So his campaign to bring a dollop of honor to the United States' treatment of its enemies has not yet triumphed. But even if McCain's effort is undone by other Republicans and/or the White House, at least he has shown that when it comes to this issue of decency, Bush is far outside the mainstream.
http://www.davidcorn.com/
That was a good one, bulldzr!! I look forward to the 'next episode'!
Uh-oh -- another religious activist?
By MOLLY IVINS
AUSTIN - Uh-oh. Now we are in trouble. Doesn't take much to read the tea leaves on the Harriet Miers nomination.
First, it's Bunker Time at the White House. Miers' chief qualification for this job is loyalty to George W. Bush and the team. What the nomination means in larger terms for both law and society is the fifth vote on the court to overturn Roe vs. Wade.
Miers, like Bush himself, is classic Texas conservative Establishment, with the addition of Christian fundamentalism. What I mean by fundamentalist is one who believes in both biblical inerrancy and salvation by faith alone.
She attended Valley View Christian Church of Dallas for at least 20 years before moving to Washington five years ago. Among that church's alumni is Nathan Hecht of the Texas Supreme Court, considered second only to former Justice Priscilla Owen as that court's most adamantly anti-abortion judge.
According to Miers' friends, she was pro-choice when a young woman but later changed her mind as a result of a Christian experience of some kind.
Miers had the support of feminists when she ran for office first in the Dallas bar and later when she became the first female president of the State Bar of Texas, even though the feminists were aware she was anti-choice.
At that time, the far more conservative Texas bar was at odds with the American Bar Association and sometimes threatened to withdraw from the national organization. Miers was considered a moderate in that she did not want to withdraw from the ABA but favored a proposal to change the organization's stance from support for abortion rights to a position of neutrality.
One of Miers' key backers was Louise Raggio, a much-revered Dallas feminist lawyer. The female lawyers groups favored Miers despite her stand on abortion because she was a candidate acceptable to the Establishment, thus making her electable as a woman.
Miers sometimes took female judicial candidates through her very prestigious law firm for the obligatory meet-'n'-greet and even donated to Democratic candidates.
The slightly feminist tinge to her credentials is a plus, but she is quite definitely anti-abortion.
She ran for the City Council in 1989 as a moderate but struggled during her interview with the lesbian-gay coalition. (At the time, it would have been considered progressive to even show up.) The Dallas Police Department did not then hire gays or lesbians, and when asked about the policy, Miers replied that the department should hire the best-qualified people -- the classic political sidestep answer.
When pressed, she said she did believe that one should be able to legally discriminate against gays, and it is the recollection of two of the organization's officers that the response involved her religious beliefs.
I have said for years about people in public life, "I don't write about sex, drugs or rock 'n' roll." If I had my druthers, I wouldn't write about the religion of those in public life, either, as I consider it a most private matter.
Separation of church and state is in the Constitution because this country was founded by people who had experienced both religious persecution and state-supported religions. I think John F. Kennedy's 1960 statement to the Baptist ministers should stand as a model of how public servants should handle the relation between religious belief and public service.
Nevertheless, we are now beset by people who insist on dragging religion into governance -- and who themselves believe they are beset by people determined to "drive God from the public square."
This division has been in part created, and certainly aggravated, by those seeking political advantage. It is a recipe for an incredibly damaging and serious split in this country, and I believe we all need to think long and carefully before doing anything to make it worse.
As an 1803 quote attributed to James Madison goes: "The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe with blood for centuries."
DeLay vs. Earle in a Texas cage match
By Molly Ivins
AUSTIN - Jeez, that was quite a hissy fit Tom DeLay had, calling Ronnie Earle a rogue prosecutor, a partisan fanatic and an "unabashed partisan zealot" out for personal revenge.
Ronnie Earle? Our very own mild-mannered -- well, let's be honest, bland as toast, eternally unexciting, Mr. Understatement, Old Vanilla -- Ronnie Earle? If the rest of DeLay's defense is as accurate as his description of Earle, DeLay might as well have himself measured for a white jumpsuit right now.
For the one-zillionth time, of the 15 cases that Earle has brought against politicians over the years, 11 of them were against Democrats. Earle was so aggressive in going after corrupt Democrats that the Republicans never even put up a candidate against him all during the '80s.
Partisan is not a word that anyone can honestly use about Earle, but that sure doesn't stop the TV blabbermouths. So many of them have bought the Republican spin that Earle is on a partisan witch-hunt that the watchdogs like Media Matters can hardly keep up.
On the other hand, I've never liked conspiracy charges. They are notoriously weak and often just an add-on when a prosecutor wants to make someone look bad going in: "... and he's been charged with six felonies!"
Conspiracy as a stand-alone charge is particularly hard to prove without evidence of other concrete acts.
Was there a conspiracy to move corporate cash from DeLay's federal PAC to influence Texas legislative races? On the basis of what we have already known for months, that's a "Does a bear poop in the woods?" question. But as all watchers of Law & Order know, what anyone with common sense would conclude can be a long way from what can be proved in a courtroom.
On the other hand, Earle has already had one spectacular failure trying to prosecute a high-profile Republican. His 1993 case against Kay Bailey Hutchison was a flame-out.
The judge indicated in pre-trial hearings that he had doubts about the admissibility of Earle's evidence, so Earle withdrew the charges -- there was no point if he couldn't present his evidence. The judge wasn't satisfied and directed the jury to acquit Hutchison. Hutchison had an unbeatable legal team: Dick DeGuerin and Mike Tigar. For Earle, this is a case of once-stung.
Speaking of the aforementioned DeGuerin, he is now defending DeLay.
Want to know how good DeGuerin is? One of his recent clients was Robert Durst, heir to a New York real estate fortune, who admitted killing and dismembering an unfortunate vic in Galveston. Durst was a suspect in a California killing at the time and had moved to Galveston posing as a deaf-mute woman.
Durst jumped bail on the Galveston charge and was arrested in Pennsylvania for stealing a chicken sandwich while carrying two guns and $38,000. DeGuerin got him acquitted on the murder charge on the grounds of self-defense, but they nailed him for the guns and tampering with evidence -- that would be dismembering the corpse. They let him slide on the chicken sandwich charge.
I swear I'm not making up any of this. That's how good Dick DeGuerin is.
If I were fool enough to give DeGuerin advice, it would be: "Don't let DeLay on the stand." The man just can't help himself -- he's just too mean; he always pushes it that step too far, like the cheap shot about Earle not coming to work unless there's a news conference on. (Earle comes to work every day -- you can ask anyone at the county courthouse.)
That DeLay always takes things a step too far is apparent from his record. This is the man who pushed Bill Clinton's impeachment when everyone knew it would end with acquittal. He fixed his repeated troubles with the House ethics committee in typical fashion by going after the committee itself. His bludgeoning style earned him his nickname, "The Hammer."
Sometimes, but not that often, it is hard to tell the difference between playing political hardball and operating with no moral compass whatever. But in DeLay's case, we have a very long record, and what it shows is that this man has repeatedly crossed ethical lines and then claimed he was just playing hardball politics -- and that anyone who complained about it was just a partisan whiner.
Whenever he is really threatened, DeLay plays the Jesus card and claims that he is standing up "for a biblical worldview in everything I do and everywhere I am."
Back in 2003, when DeLay was involved in a sleazy legislative payoff to a big donor, his press secretary offered this defense: "It is wrong and unethical to link legislative activities to campaign contributions." It is precisely that upside-down quality about DeLay's bulletproof sense of moral rectitude that makes it so bizarre. Suddenly it is not wrong or unethical to try to slip an unrelated amendment to help a campaign donor into the defense appropriations bill -- it's wrong and unethical to raise questions about it.
To tell the truth, I don't think Tom DeLay is smart enough to keep getting away with this stuff.
http://www.dfw.com/mld/startelegram/news/columnists/molly_ivins/12792255.htm
Middle-Class Family Life in Iraq Withers Amid the Chaos of War
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Oct. 1 - From her bedroom window, Nesma Abdul-Razzaq, a 43-year-old homemaker, has watched insurgents fire grenades from a patch of grass near her garden. Frequent patrols of American tanks rattle the glass. A bullet has pierced a pane.
"You can't live in safety if you cooperate with either side," she said in the bedroom of her house, deep in insurgent-controlled western Baghdad. So when American troops offered to pay for the use of the roof last month, she politely declined.
"What would I say to the neighbors?" she said.
Two and a half years after the American invasion, the violence shows no sign of relenting, and life for middle-class Iraqis seems only to be getting worse.
Educated, invested in businesses and properties and eager for change, the middle class here had everything to gain from the American effort.
But frustration is hardening into hopelessness, as families feel increasingly trapped by the many forces that are threatening to tear the country apart.
Insurgents fight gun battles on their streets. Sectarian divisions are seeping into their children's classrooms and even their own dinner table discussions. Their secular voices are barely audible above the din of religious politicians and the poorer Iraqis they appeal to.
The daily life the middle class describe is an obstacle course of gasoline lines, blocked roads and late-night generator repairs.
In these families' homes, the talk is mostly about leaving. "For Sale" signs dot the gates of the houses on their block. But gathering children and extended families is proving difficult, and many families, potentially the most skilled builders of democracy here, are bracing themselves for a future that appears to them increasingly under siege.
Over the past year, insurgents have come to control large swaths of western Baghdad, including Khadra, the area where Mrs. Abdul-Razzaq lives with her husband, Monkath, and their two boys, ages 9 and 12, in a spacious two-story house. Their bedroom window looks out on elevated highways that are the main arteries into the capital from the north and west, where insurgents have built no-go zones.
Four times in recent months Mrs. Abdul-Razzaq has seen men, sometimes in masks, tramping across her outer lawn, lifting rocket-propelled grenade launchers to their shoulders. Once, several men shot at an American convoy from behind a funeral tent near her house. American troops often come to look for attackers. They have searched her house six times.
Southwest in Amariya, the area that borders the dangerous airport road, street battles between insurgents and the Iraqi police have been so intense that the two main grocery stores were badly damaged and have closed. Residents must now find food elsewhere.
"We call it the Sunni Triangle," Mrs. Abdul-Razzaq said smiling, a reference to the tribal area northwest of Baghdad where insurgents have used violence to oppose the occupation since 2003.
As a result, she and her sons have been largely confined to the house. They no longer go to parks or for walks. They watch more television. After six children from the boys' school were kidnapped, the family arranged for a driver to deliver the boys to and from school. The kidnapped children were returned after their parents paid ransoms.
Even as the neighborhood deteriorated, Monkath Abdul-Razzaq - a 46-year-old mechanical engineer and a secular Sunni - held out hope for a better life here. He said he had felt that the January election was important for Iraq and had ignored commands of religious Sunnis not to vote. On election day, when men near his house warned residents not to go to the polls, Mr. Abdul-Razzaq sneaked out of his house to vote.
Like many Iraqis, Mr. Abdul-Razzaq said, he despised Saddam Hussein. His uncle was in prison for four years. As an officer in the Iraqi Army, he saw five of his friends executed for treason in 1983 during the war with Iran. But he also enjoyed benefits from his connection with the military, securing contracts for spare parts after he quit. Still, Mr. Hussein's fall was a cause for celebration, and he had high hopes for his future here.
But the rise of the religious parties in the past seven months has sapped Mr. Abdul-Razzaq of his remaining hope. The middle class is largely secular, and most of its members are put off by the religious parties that appeal to the poor Shiite masses on the one hand and to embittered Sunnis, who lost their status after the American-led invasion, on the other. Mr. Abdul-Razzaq voted for a Shiite because the candidate was secular.
The religious Shiite government of Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jafaari, Mr. Abdul-Razzaq said, is pursuing an agenda that favors religious Shiites, driving a wedge deeper into the dangerous divisions in Iraqi society.
"The Americans put us in a ridiculous situation," he said. "They came to Iraq and all the religious parties came with them. The religious man in Iraq is like a fox."
He and his wife have talked of leaving; at least three "For Rent" signs are posted on their block. Ms. Abdul-Razzaq's best friend, a Christian who lived in the house across the street, moved to Syria with her family last month.
But leaving is expensive, and money is tight. Last month, for the first time since the war, Mr. Abdul-Razzaq sold nothing in his spare parts shop. Income from a building he owns helped pay the bills.
"I am very worried," he said, sweating after his third trip in two hours to fiddle with a generator on the roof. "No power. No peace. Do you think this is life? It is hell."
Downstairs, his wife was clearing lunch dishes. "In these two years I've learned to be patient," she said. "To be brave."
Across town in a quiet area of central Baghdad, a family of merchants knows a lot about leaving. Dhia al-Din, 70, a Shiite, presides over three generations spread over two houses. In all, five of eight grown children and their families live abroad, and he lives much of the year in Jordan. He spoke on the condition that his family name not be used. He has received two death threats. One son escaped a kidnapping and left Iraq with his family this month.
He has the means to go, but the migration is scattering his family, and slowly erasing his life that he had carefully built up over decades.
"I lost my money, my hotel, my lovely working with the people," he said, his voice breaking. "My family, it is disappearing."
Then he added in a tone that was only half joking, "It's all because of the Sunnis."
His wife, Samira, a Sunni, shot back, "Why are the Sunnis always blamed?"
The two have been married for 50 years, and the difference in sects never seemed to matter. But recently, new questions have come up. A 9-year-old grandson was asked at school last month whether he was Sunni or Shiite. Then, Rim, a 24-year-old niece, had her engagement broken off by her fiancé's parents because she is Sunni.
"She cried and cried," said her mother, Hana, sitting in a large living room with her hands folded in her lap. "Even if they come back, I will never give my daughter to them."
The blow has driven her daughter to feel her Sunni identity even more intensely, she said. That, in turn, has caused a problem with an uncle, Husham, who was in prison under Mr. Hussein and is now working as a senior official in the Jafaari government. Another family member jokingly introduced him to a visitor as "the Shiite extremist." Rim stopped talking to him when he had made disparaging comments about Sunnis.
"He should not talk about Sunni like that," she said, her eyes looking straight past him. "He hates Sunnis."
Later, over lunch of okra, lamb and eggplant, Samira and one aunt were alone in their nostalgia for the past. Mr. Hussein, they said, was at least able to keep the electricity on.
Dhia al-Din shot back angrily, "They slaughtered us like sheep."
His son motioned to the people gathered at the table and said, "It's a little Iraq."
In Mansour, a neighborhood on the safest edge of western Baghdad, close to the heart of the city, the members of the Abbas family move quietly through their daily rhythms in their large house.
Salwa Ibrahim bakes wedding cakes in her kitchen. Her husband, Ali Abbas, sells sporting goods from a storefront next door. His older brother, disabled from birth, watches television in a back room.
Until recently, the family lived largely sheltered from the violence. But insurgents have now gained a stronger foothold in the area, with some renting houses that empty out as families move away.
Last month, the family had just left a nearby kebab restaurant when a car bomb exploded right outside, killing 2 and wounding 20. Last week insurgents held hostages in a house a few blocks away. A battle raged for four hours, until American helicopters arrived and fired at the house.
Ms. Ibrahim listened, horrified, from her kitchen, as the area erupted in gunfire and people on her street were unable to reach their houses.
The family members feel comfortable in their home, but fear the approaching violence. Mr. Abbas said he had had thoughts of leaving, but with 10 people, including his brother, he had all but discounted that option.
"We're a huge family with a disabled person," he said, sitting at his kitchen table. "It's not an easy job."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/02/international/middleeast/02families.html?ei=5094&en=397d5d9dc3...
He is a pathetic man, let alone president
Tell me, Rooster, how will this benefit the US for a long time to come???
I really never cared about the WMD's I knew going to war in Iraq was the right thing to do no matter what. And I'm still glad we did! This will benefit the US for a long time to come!
Rooster, after Clinton, do you remember this administration was going to bring 'honor and integrity' to the White House?
Clinton got a BJ in the WH and supposedly 'rented' out the Lincoln room; this bunch has sold their souls, the whole damn White House AND the US of A down the river.
No, I don't like that though I am glad he is gone as he is worse than the roaches he tries to exterminate.
I thought y'all might like that!
In the spirit of 'nanny-nanny boo-boo'
By Molly Ivins
AUSTIN - So here are all the liberals going into a giant snit just because George W. Bush appointed a veterinarian to head the women's health section of the Food and Drug Administration.
For Pete's sake, you whiners, the only reason he chose the vet is because Michael Brown wasn't available.
If you recall, Ol' Heckuva-Job Brownie had to go home, walk his dog and hug his wife after exhausting himself in his triumphal handling of Hurricane Katrina. Otherwise, he'd have been Bush's first pick.
Now even the veterinarian doesn't get the job -- just because those professional feminists raised such a stink. What's wrong with a vet? They know a lot about birth and udders and stuff. If the mother is having trouble giving birth, you grab the baby by the legs and pull it out -- it's not brain surgery. Then you worm 'em, you tag 'em, and you spray for fleas. Why the fuss?
The only reason that Bush even needed a new head of the Office of Women's Health is because the last one, Susan Wood, quit. She was upset because the political hacks who run the agency refused to allow over-the-counter sale of the emergency contraceptive pill Plan B.
True, that decision was made against the advice of the FDA's own scientific advisory panel and will unquestionably result in more abortions and almost certainly damage to some women's health. But why would anyone expect the Bush hacks to pay attention to scientific and clinical evidence, fully evaluated and recommended by the professional staff? Just like the folks at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, they got their jobs because they know how to set up photo-ops for Bush.
There's a doctoral dissertation to be written about Bush appointees named during the administration's frequent fits of Petulant Pique. These PP appointments are made in the immortal childhood spirit of "Nanny-nanny boo-boo, I'll show you." Wood resigns in protest over the politicization of women's health care? Ha! We'll show her -- we'll put a vet in charge instead.
The PP appointments are less for reasons of ideology or even rewarding the politically faithful than just in the old nyeh-nyeh spirit. You could, for example, put any number of people at the Department of Labor who are wholly unsympathetic to the labor movement -- Bush has installed shoals of them already. But there is a certain arch, flippant malice to making Edwin Foulke assistant secretary in charge of the health and safety of workers.
Republican appointees who oppose the agencies to which they are assigned are a dime a dozen, but Foulke is a partner from the most notorious union-busting law firm in the country. What he does for a living is destroy the only organizations that care about workers' health and safety.
Here's another PP pick: Put a timber industry lobbyist in as head of the Forest Service. How about a mining industry lobbyist who believes that public lands are unconstitutional in charge of the public lands? Nice shot.
A utility lobbyist who represented the worst air polluters in the country as head of the clean air division at the Environmental Protection Agency? A laff riot. As head of the Superfund, a woman whose last job was teaching corporate polluters how to evade Superfund regulations? Cute, cute, cute.
A Monsanto lobbyist as No. 2 at the EPA. A lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute at the Council on Environmental Quality. And so on. And so forth.
The Federal Trade Commission was finally embarrassed enough by demands from Democratic governors to start an investigation into recent price-gouging by oil companies. But the investigation will be headed by a former lawyer for ChevronTexaco. Is this fun or what? Nanny-nanny boo-boo.
The terrible lesson of Hurricane Katrina is that public policy is not a political gotcha game. The public interest is not well-served by appointing incompetents or anti-competents to positions of responsibility. Public policy is about our lives.
Here's another example: The Violence Against Women Act expires Oct. 1 and must be reauthorized before then. It doesn't look good. For 10 years, this law has helped improve criminal justice and community-based responses to sexual violence and sexual assault. As a result, there has been an overall decline in the incidence of women battered or killed by partners.
But as the July-August issue of Mother Jones painfully demonstrates, domestic violence remains a hideous problem. It is both a public health and a human rights issue.
Homicide is the 10th leading cause of death for women under 65. According to the Family Violence Prevention Fund, about 30 percent of American women report being physically abused by husbands or boyfriends. Every year, more than 300,000 U.S. women are raped and more than 4 million assaulted. Funding for family violence prevention was cut by $48 million this year.
I guess it would be pretty funny, on some level, to put a vet in charge of this issue, too. But let's not.
This is about people's lives. I've already seen too many people staring numbly at walls, still in shock. Let's start by getting Congress to reauthorize the act.
The arsenal of democracy starts with the telephone, the fax, the e-mail, paper and pen. Sign it "Your constituent."
http://www.dfw.com/mld/startelegram/news/columnists/molly_ivins/12730962.htm
You left out Bush. Bring back the blow job!!!
"When Iraq is liberated, you will be treated, tried and persecuted as a war criminal." George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., Jan. 22, 2003
Frist is an idiot. Delay is an idiot and evil. But the business with Abramoff, Norquist, Ralston and Rove (especially Norquist the Islamist enabler); and Rove the National Security leak, this does not appear to be garden variety corruption.
Hey sluggo,
Dont let 'cock-a-doodle-do' bother you, as he and his hero, Cat5 Bush have got this thing all figured out! Have a good one. And remember...
"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."
-- George W. Bush (August 5, 2004)
All the news (except ...)
By Molly Ivins
Creators Syndicate
AUSTIN - What we need in this country (along with a disaster relief agency) is a Media Accountability Day -- one precious day out of the entire year when everyone in the news media stops reporting on what's wrong with everyone else and devotes a complete 24-hour news cycle to looking at our own failures. How's that for a great idea?
Happily, the perfect news peg, as we say in the biz, for Media Accountability Day already exists -- it's Project Censored's annual release of the 10 biggest stories ignored or under-covered by mainstream media. Project Censored is based at Sonoma State University in California, with both faculty and students involved in its preparation.
Of course, the stories are not actually "censored" by any authority, but they do not receive enough attention to enter the public's consciousness.
The No. 1 pick by Project Censored this year should more than make the media blink -- it is a much-needed deep whiff of ammonia smelling salts for the comatose: "Bush administration moves to eliminate open government."
This administration has drastically changed the rules on Freedom of Information Act requests; has changed laws that restrict public access to federal records, mostly by expanding the national security classification; operates in secret under the Patriot Act; and consistently refuses to provide information to Congress and the Government Accountability Office. The cumulative total effect is horrifying.
No. 2: Iraq coverage. Faulted for failure to report the results of the two battles for Fallujah and the civilian death toll. The civilian death toll story is hard to get -- accurate numbers nowhere -- but the humanitarian disaster in Fallujah comes with impeccable sources.
No. 3: Distorted election coverage. Faulting the study that caused most of the corporate media to dismiss the discrepancy between exit polls and the vote tally; and the still-contentious question of whether the vote in Ohio needed closer examination.
No. 4: Surveillance society quietly moves in. The cumulative effect should send us all shrieking into the streets -- the Patriot Act, the quiet resurrection of the MATRIX program, the REAL ID Act, which passed without debate as an amendment to an emergency spending bill funding troops in Afghanistan and Iraq.
No. 5: United States uses tsunami to military advantage in Southeast Asia. Oops. Ugh.
No. 6: The real oil-for-food scam. The oil-for-food story was rotten with political motives from the beginning -- the right used it to belabor the United Nations. The part that got little attention here was the extent to which we, the United States, were part of the scam.
No. 7: Journalists face unprecedented dangers to life and livelihood. That a lot of journalists are getting killed in Iraq is indisputable. I work with the Committee to Protect Journalists and am by no means persuaded that we are targeted by anyone other than terrorists. However, Project Censored honors stories about military policies that could improve the situation of those journalists who risk their lives.
No. 8: Iraqi farmers threatened by Paul Bremer's mandates. It's part of the untold story of the disastrous effort to make Iraq into a neocon's free-market dream. Order 81 issued by Bremer "made it illegal for Iraqi farmers to reuse seeds harvested from new varieties registered under the law." Iraqi farmers were forced away from traditional methods to a system of patented seeds, where they can't grow crops without paying a licensing fee to a U.S. corporation.
No. 9: Iran's new oil trade system challenges U.S. currency. The effects of Iran's switching from dollars to Euros in oil trading.
No. 10: Mountaintop removal threatens ecosystem and economy. A classic case of a story not unreported but underreported -- a practice so environmentally irresponsible that it makes your hair hurt to think about it.
Most journalists manage to find a quibble or two with Project Censored's list every year, but mostly we just stand there and nod: Yep, missed that one, and that one and ...
But here's a wonderful fact about daily journalism: We don't ever have to get it all right, because we get a new chance every day.
http://www.dfw.com/mld/startelegram/news/columnists/molly_ivins/12711833.htm
Agreed, F6, and I was contemplating that very thought the past couple days. Quite simply, nowhere in this administration and the polices/laws that flow forth do I see anything resembling a 'Christian' philosophy/feel or a nudging in the direction of the often quoted 'What would Jesus do?'. Damn shame and a huge reason we are viewed with such scorn around the world. Yet, somehow, the so-called 'religious right' claim Bush as 'theirs' with the Schiavo (sp?) bone and the red-herring issue of abortion while millions in this country are ignored/scorned...not to mention our polices around the world and there impact on people/families just trying to live their lives and improve the lives of their children. Did I say damn shame?? Historians in the near future and decades to come will view this president (and the electorate) with utter amazement as to the fact he was 'elected' twice and where were our collective heads??
Far from it, Rooster, as you condemn all who disagree with your limited view of the world, both home and abroad. If you would truly 'condemn the MORONS' Bush would be at the top of your list as any wide eyed Republican must cringe every time this guy begins to open his mouth. But, of course, Bush can do no wrong, MORON or not, and as for politicizing Katrina, the Reps ability to spin poor decisions and horrible outcomes are only exceeded by the MORONS out there nodding their collective heads in approval like the sheep they are. Give up the cackle, Rooster, for Baaa-Baaaa is your calling. Face it: Bush is a MORON!
You know me, Dubya
By Molly Ivins
AUSTIN - (With apologies to Ring Lardner and the "You Know Me, Al" letters.)
Dear Friend Dubya:
You know me, pal -- your ol' buddy, governor of Texas and the man with the reelly, reelly good hair. I am writing to tell you what to do in the wake of this here Hurricane Katrina.
Numero Uno, you got to send money to Texas. Yup, that is the pri-mero responsibility you got, and since -- you don't mind my saying so -- you ain't done too good so far, I suggest you listen to me on this instead of making another dumb mistake, like sending aid to Florida.
Florida may be run by your brother, but he's got nothin' for hair and his schools are already funded, see? Whereas in Texas, we have generously opened some of our finest air-conditioned sports arenas to these soggy refugees from Louisiana so they can sit and drip on real Astroturf. As your momma, that great Houstonian Barbara Bush, said after visiting the Astrodome, those people are better off now because they "were underprivileged anyway."
Dubya, ol' pal, it's an ill wind that blows nobody good, and Texas is standing right in the path of some beneficial fallout from Hurricane Katrina. See, you and the federal government will pay Texas to educate the schoolchildren of Louisiana, which will be real handy for us on account of we don't have the money to educate the schoolchildren of Texas. We'll just take a nice, generous payoff from y'all, meld it into our underfunded schools, and -- viola! -- education all 'round.
I ain't been this happy since the legs fell off Nell's hamster. After I called two special sessions this summer to solve the school finance crisis and not a thing was accomplished, people said I'd have to learn to be a fool.
OK, so I started the year by saying the most important thing we had to do in this state was solve the school finance crisis. Everybody knows the Legislature is worthless as wet bread to begin with, and on school finance they looked like a rubber-nosed woodpecker in a petrified forest.
I would have let it go, but the way we finance public schools in Texas has been getting declared unconstitutional for 25 years now. That's where the mule throwed Russell. We already fixed the courts so they're stacked with right-wing Republicans -- what we need is a different constitution.
Anyway, I called a special session on school finance, and all these Democrats said no idiot would do that without a done deal, or even a plan. But what do they know? They only ran the state for 130 years.
Now it's our turn, and just because the first special session didn't work worth squat was no reason not to call another one. But now I got one wheel down and the axle draggin'. So send that money, pronto.
Oh, and I want to clear up that story about my asking people to send their contributions for Katrina relief aid to my foundation. Now, dog bite my buttons, my OneStar Foundation is just as good as the Red Cross and the Salvation Army, and that's why I said to send money there. And who is this guy Fred Lewis with this Campaigns for People, some election-money reform group, to hint that I'm trying to benefit politically from Katrina victims? (What he actually said was, "One thing about politicians, you can never overestimate their shamelessness.")
My OneStar Foundation coordinates faith-based initiatives and promotes volunteerism, and it's run by the very fine former chair of the state Republican Party. Of course, both of us have been featured speakers at this project to unite churches and organize their membership to vote in coming elections. But that has nothing to do with One-Star's Web site, which has all those nice pictures of me on it. That's all to help faith-based programs and hurricane victims.
Dubya, my man, I'm sure you can appreciate our fix here, since you were the one who cut state taxes bigger than outside and at the same time passed a bunch of requirements for higher performance from the schools.
It ain't worked good so far -- in fact, we hung the wrong horse thief. The only way we could fix this on our own is to raise taxes, so I know you'll understand when I say: Get that money down here faster than small-town gossip.
Your pal,
Gov. Goodhair Perry
http://www.dfw.com/mld/startelegram/news/columnists/molly_ivins/12679067.htm
Message: I Care About the Black Folks
By FRANK RICH
ONCE Toto parts the curtain, the Wizard of Oz can never be the wizard again. He is forever Professor Marvel, blowhard and snake-oil salesman. Hurricane Katrina, which is likely to endure in the American psyche as long as L. Frank Baum's mythic tornado, has similarly unmasked George W. Bush.
The worst storm in our history proved perfect for exposing this president because in one big blast it illuminated all his failings: the rampant cronyism, the empty sloganeering of "compassionate conservatism," the lack of concern for the "underprivileged" his mother condescended to at the Astrodome, the reckless lack of planning for all government operations except tax cuts, the use of spin and photo-ops to camouflage failure and to substitute for action.
In the chaos unleashed by Katrina, these plot strands coalesced into a single tragic epic played out in real time on television. The narrative is just too powerful to be undone now by the administration's desperate recycling of its greatest hits: a return Sunshine Boys tour by the surrogate empathizers Clinton and Bush I, another round of prayers at the Washington National Cathedral, another ludicrously overhyped prime-time address flecked with speechwriters' "poetry" and framed by a picturesque backdrop. Reruns never eclipse a riveting new show.
Nor can the president's acceptance of "responsibility" for the disaster dislodge what came before. Mr. Bush didn't cough up his modified-limited mea culpa until he'd seen his whole administration flash before his eyes. His admission that some of the buck may stop with him (about a dime's worth, in Truman dollars) came two weeks after the levees burst and five years after he promised to usher in a new post-Clinton "culture of responsibility." It came only after the plan to heap all the blame on the indeed blameworthy local Democrats failed to lift Mr. Bush's own record-low poll numbers. It came only after America's highest-rated TV news anchor, Brian Williams, started talking about Katrina the way Walter Cronkite once did about Vietnam.
Taking responsibility, as opposed to paying lip service to doing so, is not in this administration's gene pool. It was particularly shameful that Laura Bush was sent among the storm's dispossessed to try to scapegoat the news media for her husband's ineptitude. When she complained of seeing "a lot of the same footage over and over that isn't necessarily representative of what really happened," the first lady sounded just like Donald Rumsfeld shirking responsibility for the looting of Baghdad. The defense secretary, too, griped about seeing the same picture "over and over" on television (a looter with a vase) to hide the reality that the Pentagon had no plan to secure Iraq, a catastrophic failure being paid for in Iraqi and American blood to this day.
This White House doesn't hate all pictures, of course. It loves those by Karl Rove's Imagineers, from the spectacularly lighted Statue of Liberty backdrop of Mr. Bush's first 9/11 anniversary speech to his "Top Gun" stunt to Thursday's laughably stagy stride across the lawn to his lectern in Jackson Square. (Message: I am a leader, not that vacationing slacker who first surveyed the hurricane damage from my presidential jet.)
The most odious image-mongering, however, has been Mr. Bush's repeated deployment of African-Americans as dress extras to advertise his "compassion." In 2000, the Republican convention filled the stage with break dancers and gospel singers, trying to dispel the memory of Mr. Bush's craven appearance at Bob Jones University when it forbade interracial dating. (The few blacks in the convention hall itself were positioned near celebrities so they'd show up in TV shots.) In 2004, the Bush-Cheney campaign Web site had a page titled "Compassion" devoted mainly to photos of the president with black people, Colin Powell included.
Some of these poses are re-enacted in the "Hurricane Relief" photo gallery currently on display on the White House Web site. But this time the old magic isn't working. The "compassion" photos are outweighed by the cinéma vérité of poor people screaming for their lives. The government effort to keep body recovery efforts in New Orleans as invisible as the coffins from Iraq was abandoned when challenged in court by CNN.
But even now the administration's priority of image over substance is embedded like a cancer in the Katrina relief process. Brazenly enough, Mr. Rove has been officially put in charge of the reconstruction effort. The two top deputies at FEMA remaining after Michael Brown's departure, one of them a former local TV newsman, are not disaster relief specialists but experts in P.R., which they'd practiced as advance men for various Bush campaigns. Thus The Salt Lake Tribune discovered a week after the hurricane that some 1,000 firefighters from Utah and elsewhere were sent not to the Gulf Coast but to Atlanta, to be trained as "community relations officers for FEMA" rather than used as emergency workers to rescue the dying in New Orleans. When 50 of them were finally dispatched to Louisiana, the paper reported, their first assignment was "to stand beside President Bush" as he toured devastated areas.
The cashiering of "Brownie," whom Mr. Bush now purports to know as little as he did "Kenny Boy," changes nothing. The Knight Ridder newspapers found last week that it was the homeland security secretary, Michael Chertoff, not Mr. Brown, who had the greater authority to order federal agencies into service without any request from state or local officials. Mr. Chertoff waited a crucial, unexplained 36 hours before declaring Katrina an "incident of national significance," the trigger needed for federal action. Like Mr. Brown, he was oblivious to the humanitarian disaster unfolding in the convention center, confessing his ignorance of conditions there to NPR on the same day that the FEMA chief famously did so to Ted Koppel. Yet Mr. Bush's "culture of responsibility" does not hold Mr. Chertoff accountable. Quite the contrary: on Thursday the president charged Homeland Security with reviewing "emergency plans in every major city in America." Mr. Chertoff will surely do a heck of a job.
WHEN there's money on the line, cronies always come first in this White House, no matter how great the human suffering. After Katrina, the FEMA Web site directing charitable contributions prominently listed Operation Blessing, a Pat Robertson kitty that, according to I.R.S. documents obtained by ABC News, has given more than half of its yearly cash donations to Mr. Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network. If FEMA is that cavalier about charitable donations, imagine what it's doing with the $62 billion (so far) of taxpayers' money sent its way for Katrina relief. Actually, you don't have to imagine: we already know some of it was immediately siphoned into no-bid contracts with a major Republican donor, the Fluor Corporation, as well as with a client of the consultant Joe Allbaugh, the Bush 2000 campaign manager who ran FEMA for this White House until Brownie, Mr. Allbaugh's college roommate, was installed in his place.
It was back in 2000 that Mr. Bush, in a debate with Al Gore, bragged about his gubernatorial prowess "on the front line of catastrophic situations," specifically citing a Texas flood, and paid the Clinton administration a rare compliment for putting a professional as effective as James Lee Witt in charge of FEMA. Exactly why Mr. Bush would staff that same agency months later with political hacks is one of many questions that must be answered by the independent investigation he and the Congressional majority are trying every which way to avoid. With or without a 9/11-style commission, the answers will come out. There are too many Americans who are angry and too many reporters who are on the case. (NBC and CNN are both opening full-time bureaus in New Orleans.) You know the world has changed when the widely despised news media have a far higher approval rating (77 percent) than the president (46 percent), as measured last week in a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll.
Like his father before him, Mr. Bush has squandered the huge store of political capital he won in a war. His Thursday-night invocation of "armies of compassion" will prove as worthless as the "thousand points of light" that the first President Bush bestowed upon the poor from on high in New Orleans (at the Superdome, during the 1988 G.O.P. convention). It will be up to other Republicans in Washington to cut through the empty words and image-mongering to demand effective action from Mr. Bush on the Gulf Coast and in Iraq, if only because their own political lives are at stake. It's up to Democrats, though they show scant signs of realizing it, to step into the vacuum and propose an alternative to a fiscally disastrous conservatism that prizes pork over compassion. If the era of Great Society big government is over, the era of big government for special interests is proving a fiasco. Especially when it's presided over by a self-styled C.E.O. with a consistent three-decade record of running private and public enterprises alike into a ditch.
What comes next? Having turned the page on Mr. Bush, the country hungers for a vision that is something other than either liberal boilerplate or Rovian stagecraft. At this point, merely plain old competence, integrity and heart might do.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/18/opinion/18rich.html?n=Top%2fOpinion%2fEditorials%20and%20Op%2dEd%2...
Not the New Deal
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: September 16, 2005
Now it begins: America's biggest relief and recovery program since the New Deal. And the omens aren't good.
It's a given that the Bush administration, which tried to turn Iraq into a laboratory for conservative economic policies, will try the same thing on the Gulf Coast. The Heritage Foundation, which has surely been helping Karl Rove develop the administration's recovery plan, has already published a manifesto on post-Katrina policy. It calls for waivers on environmental rules, the elimination of capital gains taxes and the private ownership of public school buildings in the disaster areas. And if any of the people killed by Katrina, most of them poor, had a net worth of more than $1.5 million, Heritage wants to exempt their heirs from the estate tax.
Still, even conservatives admit that deregulation, tax cuts and privatization won't be enough. Recovery will require a lot of federal spending. And aside from the effect on the deficit - we're about to see the spectacle of tax cuts in the face of both a war and a huge reconstruction effort - this raises another question: how can discretionary government spending take place on that scale without creating equally large-scale corruption?
It's possible to spend large sums honestly, as Franklin D. Roosevelt demonstrated in the 1930's. F.D.R. presided over a huge expansion of federal spending, including a lot of discretionary spending by the Works Progress Administration. Yet the image of public relief, widely regarded as corrupt before the New Deal, actually improved markedly.
How did that happen? The answer is that the New Deal made almost a fetish out of policing its own programs against potential corruption. In particular, F.D.R. created a powerful "division of progress investigation" to look into complaints of malfeasance in the W.P.A. That division proved so effective that a later Congressional investigation couldn't find a single serious irregularity it had missed.
This commitment to honest government wasn't a sign of Roosevelt's personal virtue; it reflected a political imperative. F.D.R.'s mission in office was to show that government activism works. To maintain that mission's credibility, he needed to keep his administration's record clean.
But George W. Bush isn't F.D.R. Indeed, in crucial respects he's the anti-F.D.R.
President Bush subscribes to a political philosophy that opposes government activism - that's why he has tried to downsize and privatize programs wherever he can. (He still hopes to privatize Social Security, F.D.R.'s biggest legacy.) So even his policy failures don't bother his strongest supporters: many conservatives view the inept response to Katrina as a vindication of their lack of faith in government, rather than as a reason to reconsider their faith in Mr. Bush.
And to date the Bush administration, which has no stake in showing that good government is possible, has been averse to investigating itself. On the contrary, it has consistently stonewalled corruption investigations and punished its own investigators if they try to do their jobs.
That's why Mr. Bush's promise last night that he will have "a team of inspectors general reviewing all expenditures" rings hollow. Whoever these inspectors general are, they'll be mindful of the fate of Bunnatine Greenhouse, a highly regarded auditor at the Army Corps of Engineers who suddenly got poor performance reviews after she raised questions about Halliburton's contracts in Iraq. She was demoted late last month.
Turning the funds over to state and local governments isn't the answer, either. F.D.R. actually made a point of taking control away from local politicians; then as now, patronage played a big role in local politics.
And our sympathy for the people of Mississippi and Louisiana shouldn't blind us to the realities of their states' political cultures. Last year the newsletter Corporate Crime Reporter ranked the states according to the number of federal public-corruption convictions per capita. Mississippi came in first, and Louisiana came in third.
Is there any way Mr. Bush could ensure an honest recovery program? Yes - he could insulate decisions about reconstruction spending from politics by placing them in the hands of an autonomous agency headed by a political independent, or, if no such person can be found, a Democrat (as a sign of good faith).
He didn't do that last night, and probably won't. There's every reason to believe the reconstruction of the Gulf Coast, like the failed reconstruction of Iraq, will be deeply marred by cronyism and corruption.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/16/opinion/16krugman.html?n=Top%2fOpinion%2fEditorials%20and%20Op%2dE...
Some 'truth' for you, Rooster...
Disney on Parade
By MAUREEN DOWD
WASHINGTON
The president, as he fondly recalled the other day, used to get well lit in New Orleans. Not any more.
On Thursday night, Mr. Bush wanted to appear casually in charge as he waged his own Battle of New Orleans in Jackson Square. Instead, he looked as if he'd been dropped off by his folks in front of a eerie, blue-hued castle at Disney World. (Must be Sleeping Beauty's Castle, given the somnambulant pace of W.'s response to Katrina.)
All Andrew Jackson's horses, and all the Boy King's men could not put Humpty Dumpty together again. His gladiatorial walk across the darkened greensward, past a St. Louis Cathedral bathed in moon glow from White House klieg lights, just seemed to intensify the sense of an isolated, out-of-touch president clinging to hollow symbols as his disastrous disaster agency continues to flail.
In a ruined city - still largely without power, stinking with piles of garbage and still 40 percent submerged; where people are foraging in the miasma and muck for food, corpses and the sentimental detritus of their lives; and where unbearably sad stories continue to spill out about hordes of evacuees who lost their homes and patients who died in hospitals without either electricity or rescuers - isn't it rather tasteless, not to mention a waste of energy, to haul in White House generators just to give the president a burnished skin tone and a prettified background?
The slick White House TV production team was trying to salvage W.'s "High Noon" snap with some snazzy Hollywood-style lighting - the same Reaganesque stagecraft they had provided when W. made a prime-time television address from Ellis Island on the first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. On that occasion, Scott Sforza, a former ABC producer, and Bob DeServi, a former NBC cameraman and a lighting expert, rented three barges of giant Musco lights, the kind used for "Monday Night Football" and Rolling Stones concerts, floated them across New York Harbor and illuminated the Statue of Liberty as a backdrop for Mr. Bush.
Before the presidential address, Mr. DeServi was surveying his handiwork in Jackson Square, crowing to reporters about his cathedral: "Oh, it's heated up. It's going to print loud."
As Elisabeth Bumiller, the White House reporter for The Times, noted in a pool report, the image wizards had put up a large swath of military camouflage netting, held in place by bags of rocks and strung on poles, to hide the president from the deserted and desolate streets of the French Quarter ghost town.
The president is still looking for a tiny spot of unreality in New Orleans - and in Iraq, where a violent rampage has spiked the three-day death tally to over 200.
The Oedipal loop-de-loop of W. and Poppy grows ever loopier.
With Karl Rove's help, Junior designed his presidency as a reverse of his father's. W. would succeed by studying Dad's failures and doing the opposite. But in a bizarre twist of filial fate, the son has stumbled so badly in areas where he tried to one-up Dad that he has ended up giving Dad a leg up in the history books.
As Mark Twain said: "When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years."
Of course, it's taken Junior only five years to learn how smart his old man was.
His father made the "mistake" of not conquering and occupying Iraq because he had the silly idea that Iraqis would resent it. His father made the "mistake" of raising taxes, not cutting them, and overly obsessing about the federal deficit. And his father made the "mistake" of hewing to the center, making his base mad and losing his bid for re-election.
Bush père did make a real mistake in responding slowly to Hurricane Andrew in 1992, but that blunder has been dwarfed by what the slothful son hath wrought. Because of his fatal tardiness, W. now has to literally promise the moon to fix New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf Coast, driving up the federal deficit and embarking on the biggest spending bonanza and government public works program since F.D.R.
In his address from the French Quarter, the president sounded like such a spendthrift bleeding heart that he is terrifying the right more than his father ever did.
Read my lips: By the time all this is over, people will be saying that Poppy was the true conservative in the family.
E-mail: liberties@nytimes.com
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/17/opinion/17dowd.html?n=Top%2fOpinion%2fEditorials%20and%20Op%2dEd%2...
A Fatal Incuriosity
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: September 14, 2005
I hate spending time in hospitals and nursing homes. I find them to be some of the most depressing places on earth.
Maybe that's why the stories of the sick and elderly who died, 45 in a New Orleans hospital and 34 in St. Rita's nursing home in the devastated St. Bernard Parish outside New Orleans, haunt me so.
At St. Rita's, 34 seniors fought to live with what little strength they had as the lights went out and the water rose over their legs, over their shoulders, over their mouths. As Gardiner Harris wrote in The Times, the failed defenses included a table nailed against a window and a couch pushed against a door.
Several electric wheelchairs were gathered near the front entrance, maybe by patients who dreamed of evacuating. Their drowned bodies were found swollen and unrecognizable a week later, as Mr. Harris reported, "draped over a wheelchair, wrapped in a shower curtain, lying on a floor in several inches of muck."
At Memorial Medical Center, victims also suffered in 100-degree heat and died, some while waiting to be rescued in the four days after Katrina hit.
As Louisiana's death toll spiked to 423 yesterday, the state charged St. Rita's owners with multiple counts of negligent homicide, accusing them of not responding to warnings about the hurricane. "In effect," State Attorney General Charles Foti Jr. said, "I think that their inactions resulted in the death of these people."
President Bush continued to try to spin his own inaction yesterday, but he may finally have reached a patch of reality beyond spin. Now he's the one drowning, unable to rescue himself by patting small black children on the head during photo-ops and making scripted attempts to appear engaged. He can keep going back down there, as he will again on Thursday when he gives a televised speech to the nation, but he can never compensate for his tragic inattention during days when so many lives could have been saved.
He made the ultimate sacrifice and admitted his administration had messed up, something he'd refused to do through all of the other screw-ups, from phantom W.M.D. and the torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo to the miscalculations on the Iraq occupation and the insurgency, which will soon claim 2,000 young Americans.
How many places will be in shambles by the time the Bush crew leaves office?
Given that the Bush team has dealt with both gulf crises, Iraq and Katrina, with the same deadly mixture of arrogance and incompetence, and a refusal to face reality, it's frightening to think how it will handle the most demanding act of government domestic investment since the New Deal.
Even though we know W. likes to be in his bubble with his feather pillow, the stories this week are breathtaking about the lengths the White House staff had to go to in order to capture Incurious George's attention.
Newsweek reported that the reality of Katrina did not sink in for the president until days after the levees broke, turning New Orleans into a watery grave. It took a virtual intervention of his top aides to make W. watch the news about the worst natural disaster in a century. Dan Bartlett made a DVD of newscasts on the hurricane to show the president on Friday morning as he flew down to the Gulf Coast.
The aides were scared to tell the isolated president that he should cut short his vacation by a couple of days, Newsweek said, because he can be "cold and snappish in private." Mike Allen wrote in Time about one "youngish aide" who was so terrified about telling Mr. Bush he was wrong about something during the first term, he "had dry heaves" afterward.
The president had to be truly zoned out not to jump at the word "hurricane," given that he has always used his father's term as a reverse playbook and his father almost lost Florida in 1992 because of his slow-footed response to Hurricane Andrew. And W.'s chief of staff, Andy Card, was the White House transportation secretary the senior President Bush sent to the rescue after FEMA bungled that one.
W. has said he prefers to get his information straight up from aides, rather than filtered through newspapers or newscasts. But he surrounds himself with weak sisters who don't have the nerve to break bad news to him, or ideologues with agendas that require warping reality or chuckleheaded cronies like Brownie.
The president should stop haunting New Orleans, looking for that bullhorn moment. It's too late.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/14/opinion/14dowd.html?n=Top%2fOpinion%2fEditorials%20and%20Op%2dEd%2...
Fret Over the Dog? Kids Need Help First
Having learned firsthand in the Gulf states last week that it might not be wise for us to count on much help from the feds when the Big One hits, I was all set to look into California's disaster preparedness. But then I made the mistake of checking the mailbag.
With thousands of human beings presumed dead in Louisiana and environs, the majority of my e-mail expressed heartfelt concern for stranded pets. I was smacked with a rolled-up newspaper by several readers for failing to rescue a dog that swam toward my boat in contaminated water just after I'd passed a floating human corpse in New Orleans.
My apologies, and no, I don't know what happened to the dog. Although I'm a dog lover, it didn't seem practical or prudent to pursue the matter in a neighborhood where the water reached the tops of stop signs and some people were still stranded in their homes.
As for all of you who called or e-mailed defending President Bush's handling of Hurricane Katrina, I have a suggestion:
Get off the sofa, go into the kitchen for some ice water, and throw it on your face.
In other words, wake up, for God's sake.
A number of readers said Bush had warned people to evacuate before Katrina hit but that the president couldn't respond more quickly after landfall because the governor of Louisiana initially didn't want the federal government's help.
Really? It was the biggest natural disaster in history, and the president of the United States was taking orders from a governor?
"I've read my last Steve Lopez column and you won't be receiving my rants anymore," wrote Paul Knopick. "Your gratuitous slurs on President Bush today was [sic] the old last straw."
Gratuitous? I thought gratuitous meant uncalled for.
"I suppose the state and local politicians share no responsibility," said an e-mail from
Dickandpat.
Dear Dickandpat:
That's not quite the full extent of what I wrote, but let me clarify:
Yes, the Democratic governor of Louisiana (who doesn't appear competent to handle a flooded basement, let alone a flooded state) and the Democratic mayor of New Orleans (who gave conflicting advice to stranded residents) share plenty of blame for colossal failures that contributed to the loss of life.
But it was quite obvious, early on, that this was a multi-state disaster like none we'd ever seen before. So it might have been nice if Bush had seen fit to take charge, as he did when a series of hurricanes blasted the swing state of Florida — where his brother is governor — just before the 2004 presidential election.
Katrina found Bush on an extended vacation in Texas, and Vice President Dick Cheney didn't show any inclination to return from his vacation either. After lollygagging for a couple of days in Arizona and California, Bush used the disaster to make a political point even as bodies floated like balloons through New Orleans, calling for a public and private rebuilding effort.
Can no-bid contracts be far behind?
When Bush finally showed up in the disaster zone Sept. 2, I half expected him to check out the fishing. A few days later, his mother visited the Houston Astrodome and said the evacuees — many of whom lost everything and were still searching for lost relatives — seemed to be fine.
They "were underprivileged anyway," Barbara Bush said, "so this is working out well for them."
What next? Do we find that the Bush twins have been jet skiing New Orleans' east side in search of a bar that's open for business?
Federal Emergency Management Agency boss Mike Brown — or "Brownie," as the president called him when praising him early on for a job well done in New Orleans — was summoned to the nation's capital Friday amid allegations that he had exaggerated his disaster relief experience.
If his head is the first to roll, he may need one of those cots that finally showed up at the Astrodome. Actually, I'd like to get back to Barbara Bush, who made a point worth considering.
If thousands of people had lived in such crummy conditions that they're better off at an evacuation shelter, she might want to mention this to her son. It's only the latest evidence of a social collapse in an economy that doesn't float everyone's boat, to use a bad but irresistible pun.
"We saw a huge population of very poor people who were underinsured and in poor health" even before Katrina hit, said Lynn McMorris, a nurse who worked in the triage unit at the New Orleans airport for a week before moving over to the Cajundome, an evacuation center in Lafayette, La.
"We saw chronic renal failure, people who required dialysis, poorly managed diabetics, lots of hypertension."
McMorris also saw people who hadn't visited a dentist in years, and many of the children she treated had never received vaccinations.
"At the Cajundome," she said, "we were trying to pull out the youngest kids who had no real protection against disease because they hadn't developed good immune systems."
This sounds like lots of places in the country, doesn't it? Sounds particularly like Los Angeles County, where class divisions run as deep as fault lines, a quarter of the residents are uninsured and the road out of poverty might as well be flooded.
And you know what was on the agenda in Washington before Katrina hit, right? More tax cuts at the highest income levels and more Medicaid cuts.
"I work all over the country," said McMorris, who travels from crisis to crisis and understaffed hospital to understaffed hospital, "and everywhere I go, I see less and less kids insured and getting the care they need, and I see longer lines in emergency rooms. This is a growing national problem that has just been ignored."
Maybe we should finally do something about that national embarrassment.
Or we could instead take a cue from Mrs. Bush's observation that the Astrodome is "working out well" and just build more shelters the size of stadiums. It would be a great way to keep the underprivileged contained and out of sight.
Is Halliburton available?
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-lopez11sep11,1,1600437.column?coll=la-headlines-california&a...
Osama and Katrina
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
On the day after 9/11, I was in Jerusalem and was interviewed by Israeli TV. The reporter asked me, "Do you think the Bush administration is up to responding to this attack?" As best I can recall, I answered: "Absolutely. One thing I can assure you about these guys is that they know how to pull the trigger."
It was just a gut reaction that George Bush and Dick Cheney were the right guys to deal with Osama. I was not alone in that feeling, and as a result, Mr. Bush got a mandate, almost a blank check, to rule from 9/11 that he never really earned at the polls. Unfortunately, he used that mandate not simply to confront the terrorists but to take a radically uncompassionate conservative agenda - on taxes, stem cells, the environment and foreign treaties - that was going nowhere before 9/11, and drive it into a post-9/11 world. In that sense, 9/11 distorted our politics and society.
Well, if 9/11 is one bookend of the Bush administration, Katrina may be the other. If 9/11 put the wind at President Bush's back, Katrina's put the wind in his face. If the Bush-Cheney team seemed to be the right guys to deal with Osama, they seem exactly the wrong guys to deal with Katrina - and all the rot and misplaced priorities it's exposed here at home.
These are people so much better at inflicting pain than feeling it, so much better at taking things apart than putting them together, so much better at defending "intelligent design" as a theology than practicing it as a policy.
For instance, it's unavoidably obvious that we need a real policy of energy conservation. But President Bush can barely choke out the word "conservation." And can you imagine Mr. Cheney, who has already denounced conservation as a "personal virtue" irrelevant to national policy, now leading such a campaign or confronting oil companies for price gouging?
And then there are the president's standard lines: "It's not the government's money; it's your money," and, "One of the last things that we need to do to this economy is to take money out of your pocket and fuel government." Maybe Mr. Bush will now also tell us: "It's not the government's hurricane - it's your hurricane."
An administration whose tax policy has been dominated by the toweringly selfish Grover Norquist - who has been quoted as saying: "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub" - doesn't have the instincts for this moment. Mr. Norquist is the only person about whom I would say this: I hope he owns property around the New Orleans levee that was never properly finished because of a lack of tax dollars. I hope his basement got flooded. And I hope that he was busy drowning government in his bathtub when the levee broke and that he had to wait for a U.S. Army helicopter to get out of town.
The Bush team has engaged in a tax giveaway since 9/11 that has had one underlying assumption: There will never be another rainy day. Just spend money. You knew that sooner or later there would be a rainy day, but Karl Rove has assumed it wouldn't happen on Mr. Bush's watch - that someone else would have to clean it up. Well, it did happen on his watch.
Besides ripping away the roofs of New Orleans, Katrina ripped away the argument that we can cut taxes, properly educate our kids, compete with India and China, succeed in Iraq, keep improving the U.S. infrastructure, and take care of a catastrophic emergency - without putting ourselves totally into the debt of Beijing.
So many of the things the Bush team has ignored or distorted under the guise of fighting Osama were exposed by Katrina: its refusal to impose a gasoline tax after 9/11, which would have begun to shift our economy much sooner to more fuel-efficient cars, helped raise money for a rainy day and eased our dependence on the world's worst regimes for energy; its refusal to develop some form of national health care to cover the 40 million uninsured; and its insistence on cutting more taxes, even when that has contributed to incomplete levees and too small an Army to deal with Katrina, Osama and Saddam at the same time.
As my Democratic entrepreneur friend Joel Hyatt once remarked, the Bush team's philosophy since 9/11 has been: "We're at war. Let's party."
Well, the party is over. If Mr. Bush learns the lessons of Katrina, he has a chance to replace his 9/11 mandate with something new and relevant. If that happens, Katrina will have destroyed New Orleans, but helped to restore America. If Mr. Bush goes back to his politics as usual, he'll be thwarted at every turn. Katrina will have destroyed a city and a presidency.
Haunted by Hesitation
By MAUREEN DOWD
WASHINGTON
It took a while, but the president finally figured out a response to the destruction of New Orleans.
Later this week (no point rushing things) W. is dispatching Dick Cheney to the rancid lake that was a romantic city. The vice president has at long last lumbered back from a Wyoming vacation, and, reportedly, from shopping for a $2.9 million waterfront estate in St. Michael's, a retreat in the Chesapeake Bay where Rummy has a weekend home, where "Wedding Crashers" was filmed and where rich lobbyists hunt.
Maybe Mr. Cheney is going down to New Orleans to hunt looters. Or to make sure that Halliburton's lucrative contract to rebuild the city is watertight. Or maybe, since former Senator John Breaux of Louisiana described the shattered parish as "Baghdad under water," the vice president plans to take his pal Ahmad Chalabi along for a consultation on destroying minority rights.
The water that breached the New Orleans levees and left a million people homeless and jobless has also breached the White House defenses. Reality has come flooding in. Since 9/11, the Bush administration has been remarkably successful at blowing off "the reality-based community," as it derisively calls the press.
But now, when W., Mr. Cheney, Laura, Rummy, Gen. Richard Myers, Michael Chertoff and the rest of the gang tell us everything's under control, our cities are safe, stay the course - who believes them?
This time we can actually see the bodies.
As the water recedes, more and more decaying bodies will testify to the callous and stumblebum administration response to Katrina's rout of 90,000 square miles of the South.
The Bush administration bungled the Iraq occupation, arrogantly throwing away State Department occupation plans and C.I.A. insurgency warnings. But the human toll of those mistakes has not been as viscerally evident because the White House pulled a curtain over the bodies: the president has avoided the funerals of soldiers, and the Pentagon has censored the coffins of the dead coming home and never acknowledges the number of Iraqi civilians killed.
But this time, the bodies of those who might have been saved between Monday and Friday, when the president failed to rush the necessary resources to a disaster that his own general describes as "biblical," or even send in the 82nd Airborne, are floating up in front of our eyes.
New Orleans's literary lore and tourist lure was its fascination with the dead and undead, its lavish annual Halloween party, its famous above-ground cemeteries, its love of vampires and voodoo and zombies. But now that the city is decimated, reeking with unnecessary death and destruction, the restless spirits of New Orleans will haunt the White House.
The administration's foreign policy is entirely constructed around American self-love - the idea that the U.S. is superior, that we are the model everyone looks up to, that everyone in the world wants what we have.
But when people around the world look at Iraq, they don't see freedom. They see chaos and sectarian hatred. And when they look at New Orleans, they see glaring incompetence and racial injustice, where the rich white people were saved and the poor black people were left to die hideous deaths. They see some conservatives blaming the poor for not saving themselves. So much for W.'s "culture of life."
The president won re-election because he said that the war in Iraq and the Homeland Security Department would make us safer. Hogwash.
W.'s 2004 convention was staged like "The Magnificent Seven" with the Republicans' swaggering tough guys - from Rudy Giuliani to Arnold Schwarzenegger to John McCain - riding in to save an embattled town.
These were the steely-eyed gunslingers we needed to protect us, they said, not those sissified girlie-men Democrats. But now it turns out that W. can't save the town, not even from hurricane damage that everyone has been predicting for years, much less from unpredictable terrorists.
His campaigns presented the arc of his life story as that of a man who stumbled around until he was 40, then found himself and developed a laserlike focus.
But now that the people of New Orleans need an ark, we have to question the president's arc. He's stumbling in Iraq and he's stumbling on Katrina.
Let's play the blame game: the man who benefited more than anyone in history from safety nets set up by family did not bother to provide one for those who lost their families.
Falluja Floods the Superdome
By FRANK RICH
AS the levees cracked open and ushered hell into New Orleans on Tuesday, President Bush once again chose to fly away from Washington, not toward it, while disaster struck. We can all enumerate the many differences between a natural catastrophe and a terrorist attack. But character doesn't change: it is immutable, and it is destiny.
As always, the president's first priority, the one that sped him from Crawford toward California, was saving himself: he had to combat the flood of record-low poll numbers that was as uncontrollable as the surging of Lake Pontchartrain. It was time, therefore, for another disingenuous pep talk, in which he would exploit the cataclysm that defined his first term, 9/11, even at the price of failing to recognize the emerging fiasco likely to engulf Term 2.
After dispatching Katrina with a few sentences of sanctimonious boilerplate ("our hearts and prayers are with our fellow citizens"), he turned to his more important task. The war in Iraq is World War II. George W. Bush is F.D.R. And anyone who refuses to stay his course is soft on terrorism and guilty of a pre-9/11 "mind-set of isolation and retreat." Yet even as Mr. Bush promised "victory" (a word used nine times in this speech on Tuesday), he was standing at the totemic scene of his failure. It was along this same San Diego coastline that he declared "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln more than two years ago. For this return engagement, The Washington Post reported, the president's stage managers made sure he was positioned so that another hulking aircraft carrier nearby would stay off-camera, lest anyone be reminded of that premature end of "major combat operations."
This administration would like us to forget a lot, starting with the simple fact that next Sunday is the fourth anniversary of the day we were attacked by Al Qaeda, not Iraq. Even before Katrina took command of the news, Sept. 11, 2005, was destined to be a half-forgotten occasion, distorted and sullied by a grotesquely inappropriate Pentagon-sponsored country music jamboree on the Mall. But hard as it is to reflect upon so much sorrow at once, we cannot allow ourselves to forget the real history surrounding 9/11; it is the Rosetta stone for what is happening now. If we are to pull ourselves out of the disasters of Katrina and Iraq alike, we must live in the real world, not the fantasyland of the administration's faith-based propaganda. Everything connects.
Though history is supposed to occur first as tragedy, then as farce, even at this early stage we can see that tragedy is being repeated once more as tragedy. From the president's administration's inattention to threats before 9/11 to his disappearing act on the day itself to the reckless blundering in the ill-planned war of choice that was 9/11's bastard offspring, Katrina is déjà vu with a vengeance.
The president's declaration that "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees" has instantly achieved the notoriety of Condoleezza Rice's "I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center." The administration's complete obliviousness to the possibilities for energy failures, food and water deprivation, and civil disorder in a major city under siege needs only the Donald Rumsfeld punch line of "Stuff happens" for a coup de grâce. How about shared sacrifice, so that this time we might get the job done right? After Mr. Bush's visit on "Good Morning America" on Thursday, Diane Sawyer reported on a postinterview conversation in which he said, "There won't have to be tax increases."
But on a second go-round, even the right isn't so easily fooled by this drill (with the reliable exception of Peggy Noonan, who found much reassurance in Mr. Bush's initial autopilot statement about the hurricane, with its laundry list of tarps and blankets). This time the fecklessness and deceit were all too familiar. They couldn't be obliterated by a bullhorn or by the inspiring initial post-9/11 national unity that bolstered the president until he betrayed it. This time the heartlessness beneath the surface of his actions was more pronounced.
You could almost see Mr. Bush's political base starting to crumble at its very epicenter, Fox News, by Thursday night. Even there it was impossible to ignore that the administration was no more successful at securing New Orleans than it had been at pacifying Falluja.
A visibly exasperated Shepard Smith, covering the story on the ground in Louisiana, went further still, tossing hand grenades of harsh reality into Bill O'Reilly's usually spin-shellacked "No Spin Zone." Among other hard facts, Mr. Smith noted "that the haves of this city, the movers and shakers of this city, evacuated the city either immediately before or immediately after the storm." What he didn't have to say, since it was visible to the entire world, was that it was the poor who were left behind to drown.
In that sense, the inequality of the suffering has not only exposed the sham of the relentless photo-ops with black schoolchildren whom the president trots out at campaign time to sell his "compassionate conservatism"; it has also positioned Katrina before a rapt late-summer audience as a replay of the sinking of the Titanic. New Orleans's first-class passengers made it safely into lifeboats; for those in steerage, it was a horrifying spectacle of every man, woman and child for himself.
THE captain in this case, Michael Chertoff, the homeland security secretary, was so oblivious to those on the lower decks that on Thursday he applauded the federal response to the still rampaging nightmare as "really exceptional." He told NPR that he had "not heard a report of thousands of people in the convention center who don't have food and water" - even though every television viewer in the country had been hearing of those 25,000 stranded refugees for at least a day. This Titanic syndrome, too, precisely echoes the post-9/11 wartime history of an administration that has rewarded the haves at home with economic goodies while leaving the have-nots to fight in Iraq without proper support in manpower or armor. Surely it's only a matter of time before Mr. Chertoff and the equally at sea FEMA director, Michael Brown (who also was among the last to hear about the convention center), are each awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom in line with past architects of lethal administration calamity like George Tenet and Paul Bremer.
On Thursday morning, the president told Diane Sawyer that he hoped "people don't play politics during this period of time." Presumably that means that the photos of him wistfully surveying the Katrina damage from Air Force One won't be sold to campaign donors as the equivalent 9/11 photos were. Maybe he'll even call off the right-wing attack machine so it won't Swift-boat the Katrina survivors who emerge to ask tough questions as it has Cindy Sheehan and those New Jersey widows who had the gall to demand a formal 9/11 inquiry.
But a president who flew from Crawford to Washington in a heartbeat to intervene in the medical case of a single patient, Terri Schiavo, has no business lecturing anyone about playing politics with tragedy. Eventually we're going to have to examine the administration's behavior before, during and after this storm as closely as its history before, during and after 9/11. We're going to have to ask if troops and matériel of all kinds could have arrived faster without the drain of national resources into a quagmire. We're going to have to ask why it took almost two days of people being without food, shelter and water for Mr. Bush to get back to Washington.
Most of all, we're going to have to face the reality that with this disaster, the administration has again increased our vulnerability to the terrorists we were supposed to be fighting after 9/11. As Richard Clarke, the former counterterrorism czar, pointed out to The Washington Post last week in talking about the fallout from the war in Iraq, there have been twice as many terrorist attacks outside Iraq in the three years after 9/11 than in the three years before. Now, thanks to Mr. Bush's variously incompetent, diffident and hubristic mismanagement of the attack by Katrina, he has sent the entire world a simple and unambiguous message: whatever the explanation, the United States is unable to fight its current war and protect homeland security at the same time.
The answers to what went wrong in Washington and on the Gulf Coast will come later, and, if the history of 9/11 is any guide, all too slowly, after the administration and its apologists erect every possible barrier to keep us from learning the truth. But as Americans dig out from Katrina and slouch toward another anniversary of Al Qaeda's strike, we have to acknowledge the full extent and urgency of our crisis. The world is more perilous than ever, and for now, to paraphrase Mr. Rumsfeld, we have no choice but to fight the war with the president we have.
The Larger Shame
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
The wretchedness coming across our television screens from Louisiana has illuminated the way children sometimes pay with their lives, even in America, for being born to poor families.
It has also underscored the Bush administration's ongoing reluctance or ineptitude in helping the poorest Americans. The scenes in New Orleans reminded me of the suffering I saw after a similar storm killed 130,000 people in Bangladesh in 1991 - except that Bangladesh's government showed more urgency in trying to save its most vulnerable citizens.
But Hurricane Katrina also underscores a much larger problem: the growing number of Americans trapped in a never-ending cyclone of poverty. And while it may be too early to apportion blame definitively for the mishandling of the hurricane, even President Bush's own administration acknowledges that America's poverty is worsening on his watch.
The U.S. Census Bureau reported a few days ago that the poverty rate rose again last year, with 1.1 million more Americans living in poverty in 2004 than a year earlier. After declining sharply under Bill Clinton, the number of poor people has now risen 17 percent under Mr. Bush.
If it's shameful that we have bloated corpses on New Orleans streets, it's even more disgraceful that the infant mortality rate in America's capital is twice as high as in China's capital. That's right - the number of babies who died before their first birthdays amounted to 11.5 per thousand live births in 2002 in Washington, compared with 4.6 in Beijing.
Indeed, according to the United Nations Development Program, an African-American baby in Washington has less chance of surviving its first year than a baby born in urban parts of the state of Kerala in India.
Under Mr. Bush, the national infant mortality rate has risen for the first time since 1958. The U.S. ranks 43rd in the world in infant mortality, according to the C.I.A.'s World Factbook; if we could reach the level of Singapore, ranked No. 1, we would save 18,900 children's lives each year.
So in some ways the poor children evacuated from New Orleans are the lucky ones because they may now get checkups and vaccinations. Nationally, 29 percent of children had no health insurance at some point in the last 12 months, and many get neither checkups nor vaccinations. On immunizations, the U.S. ranks 84th for measles and 89th for polio.
One of the most dispiriting elements of the catastrophe in New Orleans was the looting. I covered the 1995 earthquake that leveled much of Kobe, Japan, killing 5,500, and for days I searched there for any sign of criminal behavior. Finally I found a resident who had seen three men steal food. I asked him whether he was embarrassed that Japanese would engage in such thuggery.
"No, you misunderstand," he said firmly. "These looters weren't Japanese. They were foreigners."
The reasons for this are complex and partly cultural, but one reason is that Japan has tried hard to stitch all Japanese together into the nation's social fabric. In contrast, the U.S. - particularly under the Bush administration - has systematically cut people out of the social fabric by redistributing wealth from the most vulnerable Americans to the most affluent.
It's not just that funds may have gone to Iraq rather than to the levees in New Orleans; it's also that money went to tax cuts for the wealthiest rather than vaccinations for children.
None of this is to suggest that there are easy solutions for American poverty. As Ronald Reagan once said, "We fought a war on poverty, and poverty won." But we don't need to be that pessimistic - in the late 1990's, we made real headway. A ray of hope is beautifully presented in one of the best books ever written on American poverty, "American Dream," by my Times colleague Jason DeParle.
So the best monument to the catastrophe in New Orleans would be a serious national effort to address the poverty that afflicts the entire country. And in our shock and guilt, that may be politically feasible. Rich Lowry of The National Review, in defending Mr. Bush, offered an excellent suggestion: "a grand right-left bargain that includes greater attention to out-of-wedlock births from the Left in exchange for the Right's support for more urban spending." That would be the best legacy possible for Katrina.
Otherwise, long after the horrors have left TV screens, about 50 of the 77 babies who die each day, on average, will die needlessly, because of poverty. That's the larger hurricane of poverty that shames our land.
E-mail: nicholas@nytimes.com
A Failure of Leadership
By BOB HERBERT
"Bush to New Orleans: Drop Dead"
Neither the death of the chief justice nor the frantic efforts of panicked White House political advisers can conceal the magnitude of the president's failure of leadership last week. The catastrophe in New Orleans billowed up like the howling winds of hell and was carried live and in color on television screens across the U.S. and around the world.
The Big Easy had turned into the Big Hurt, and the colossal failure of George W. Bush to intervene powerfully and immediately to rescue tens of thousands of American citizens who were suffering horribly and dying in agony was there for all the world to see.
Hospitals with deathly ill patients were left without power, with ventilators that didn't work, with floodwaters rising on the lower floors and with corpses rotting in the corridors and stairwells. People unable to breathe on their own, or with cancer or heart disease or kidney failure, slipped into comas and sank into their final sleep in front of helpless doctors and relatives. These were Americans in desperate trouble.
The president didn't seem to notice.
Death and the stink of decay were all over the city. Corpses were propped up in wheelchairs and on lawn furniture, or left to decompose on sunbaked sidewalks. Some floated by in water fouled by human feces.
Degenerates roamed the city, shooting at rescue workers, beating and robbing distraught residents and tourists, raping women and girls. The president of the richest, most powerful country in the history of the world didn't seem to notice.
Viewers could watch diabetics go into insulin shock on national television, and you could see babies with the pale, vacant look of hunger that we're more used to seeing in dispatches from the third world. You could see their mothers, dirty and hungry themselves, weeping.
Old, critically ill people were left to soil themselves and in some cases die like stray animals on the floor of an airport triage center. For days the president of the United States didn't seem to notice.
He would have noticed if the majority of these stricken folks had been white and prosperous. But they weren't. Most were black and poor, and thus, to the George W. Bush administration, still invisible.
After days of withering criticism from white and black Americans, from conservatives as well as liberals, from Republicans and Democrats, the president finally felt compelled to act, however feebly. (The chorus of criticism from nearly all quarters demanding that the president do something tells me that the nation as a whole is so much better than this administration.)
Mr. Bush flew south on Friday and proved (as if more proof were needed) that he didn't get it. Instead of urgently focusing on the people who were stranded, hungry, sick and dying, he engaged in small talk, reminiscing at one point about the days when he used to party in New Orleans, and mentioning that Trent Lott had lost one of his houses but that it would be replaced with "a fantastic house - and I'm looking forward to sitting on the porch."
Mr. Bush's performance last week will rank as one of the worst ever by a president during a dire national emergency. What we witnessed, as clearly as the overwhelming agony of the city of New Orleans, was the dangerous incompetence and the staggering indifference to human suffering of the president and his administration.
And it is this incompetence and indifference to suffering (yes, the carnage continues to mount in Iraq) that makes it so hard to be optimistic about the prospects for the United States over the next few years. At a time when effective, innovative leadership is desperately needed to cope with matters of war and peace, terrorism and domestic security, the economic imperatives of globalization and the rising competition for oil, the United States is being led by a man who seems oblivious to the reality of his awesome responsibilities.
Like a boy being prepped for a second crack at a failed exam, Mr. Bush has been meeting with his handlers to see what steps can be taken to minimize the political fallout from this latest demonstration of his ineptitude. But this is not about politics. It's about competence. And when the president is so obviously clueless about matters so obviously important, it means that the rest of us, like the people left stranded in New Orleans, are in deep, deep trouble.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/05/opinion/05herbert.html?n=Top%2fOpinion%2fEditorials%20and%20Op%2dE...