WASHINGTON, Nov. 13 — President Bush vetoed a $150.7 billion spending measure that would have funded education, health care and job training programs, saying it contained money for too many of the special projects known as earmarks. But he signed a $459 billion bill to increase the Pentagon’s nonwar funding.
By Demian McLean, Bloomberg News
Retired Army Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, who led U.S. forces in Iraq, criticized American leaders for placing partisan gain at home above victory abroad and consigning America to a "nightmare with no end in sight."
| DOES it matter?—losing your legs?... | |
| For people will always be kind, | |
| And you need not show that you mind | |
| When the others come in after hunting | |
| To gobble their muffins and eggs. | |
| Does it matter?—losing your sight?... | |
| There’s such splendid work for the blind; | |
| And people will always be kind, | |
| As you sit on the terrace remembering | |
| And turning your face to the light. | |
| Do they matter?—those dreams from the pit?... | |
| You can drink and forget and be glad, | |
| And people won’t say that you’re mad; | |
| For they’ll know you’ve fought for your country | |
| And no one will worry a bit. --Siegfried Sassoon, 1918 |
Mr. Bremer provided the letters to The New York Times on Monday after reading that Mr. Bush was quoted in a new book as saying that American policy had been “to keep the army intact” but that it “didn’t happen.”
The dismantling of the Iraqi Army in the aftermath of the American invasion is now widely regarded as a mistake that stoked rebellion among hundreds of thousands of former Iraqi soldiers and made it more difficult to reduce sectarian bloodshed and attacks by insurgents. In releasing the letters, Mr. Bremer said he wanted to refute the suggestion in Mr. Bush’s comment that Mr. Bremer had acted to disband the army without the knowledge and concurrence of the White House.
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Challenging militants who attack U.S. forces in Iraq, President Bush said Wednesday they would be dealt with harshly, and declared, "Bring 'em on."
For the second day in a row, Bush vowed that attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq will not shake his administration's resolve to stay in that country until a strong and stable democratic government takes root.
"Anybody who wants to harm American troops will be found and brought to justice," Bush said. "There are some that feel like if they attack us that we may decide to leave prematurely. They don't understand what they are talking about if that is the case. Let me finish. There are some who feel like the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is, bring 'em on."
When Bush made his Bring 'Em On taunt, 254 U.S. soldiers had died in Iraq.
On the fourth anniversary of his unfortunate remark, the U.S. death toll was 3,584.
Washington, D.C.-- Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption, today released new documents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”) related to the “expeditious departure” of Saudi nationals, including members of the bin Laden family, from the United States following the 9/11 attacks. According to one of the formerly confidential documents, dated 9/21/2001, terrorist Osama bin Laden may have chartered one of the Saudi flights.
The document states: “ON 9/19/01, A 727 PLANE LEFT LAX, RYAN FLT #441 TO ORLANDO, FL W/ETA (estimated time of arrival) OF 4-5PM. THE PLANE WAS CHARTERED EITHER BY THE SAUDI ARABIAN ROYAL FAMILY OR OSAMA BIN LADEN…THE LA FBI SEARCHED THE PLANE [REDACTED] LUGGAGE, OF WHICH NOTHING UNUSUAL WAS FOUND.” The plane was allowed to depart the United States after making four stops to pick up passengers, ultimately landing in Paris where all passengers disembarked on 9/20/01, according to the document.
Overall, the FBI’s most recent document production includes details of the six flights between 9/14 and 9/24 that evacuated Saudi royals and bin Laden family members.
By Colum Lynch, Washington Post
UNITED NATIONS -- More than four years after the fall of Baghdad, the United Nations is spending millions of dollars in Iraqi oil money to continue the hunt for Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction.
Every weekday, at a secure commercial office building on Manhattan's East Side, a team of 20 U.N. experts on chemical and biological weapons pores over satellite images of former Iraqi weapons sites. But the inspectors' primary mission -- ridding Hussein's regime of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons -- has become irrelevant since a U.S.-led coalition toppled the Iraqi leader and discovered that his government had destroyed its most lethal weapons shortly after the 1991 Gulf War.
(CNN) -- Two days after resigning as the Bush administration's top weapons inspector in Iraq, David Kay said that his group found no evidence Iraq had stockpiled unconventional weapons before the U.S.-led invasion in March.
"My summary view, based on what I've seen, is we're very unlikely to find large stockpiles of weapons. I don't think they exist."
The report was released the same day President Bush signed a $120 billion war funding bill from Congress that includes benchmarks for the Iraqi government.
In a statement attached to yesterday's 229-page report, the Senate intelligence committee's chairman, John D. Rockefeller IV (W.Va.), and three other Democratic panel members said: "The most chilling and prescient warning from the intelligence community prior to the war was that the American invasion would bring about instability in Iraq that would be exploited by Iran and al Qaeda terrorists."
By Frank Davies, San Jose Mercury News
WASHINGTON - Congress already has run out of space on a memorial created last year to honor all of the U.S. service members killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In a grim sign of the times, the "Wall of the Fallen," set up by House Republican leaders in June, is almost full. The mounting death toll from Iraq has forced U.S. House staffers to study how to reconfigure the display in the lobby of the Rayburn Building - the largest office building for members of Congress - to squeeze in more names.
According to the Defense Department, 3,736 U.S. service members died in the two wars by the end of April. New names are added to the display every few months, but none have been added since November. The last name listed is Lance Cpl. Luke Holler, 21-year-old Marine reservist from Bulverde, Texas, killed by an explosive device on Nov. 2.
In the current format, there is space for about 130 more names, but 506 Americans have died since mid-November. In April, 104 Americans were killed in the war's sixth-deadliest month.
Rep. Vernon Ehlers of Michigan said it was difficult to plan how much blank space to leave in a display listing fatalities while a war is going on. When he walked by the wall recently, Ehlers said he realized: "Boy, we could have a problem. More space is needed."
The panel also heard from Jessica Lynch, the 19-year-old Army supply clerk captured during the first month of the Iraq war and then rescued by U.S. forces. Lynch testified Tuesday that the Pentagon's account, depicting her as a "G.I. Jane" emptying her rifle at Iraqi soldiers before her capture, was pure fabrication.
Lynch said she has been battling "misinformation and hype" since she returned from Iraq, badly injured, to discover a media depiction of her as "the little girl Rambo from the hills of West Virginia who went down fighting. It was not true."
By Peter Baker and Thomas Ricks, Washington Post
The White House wants to appoint a high-powered czar to oversee the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with authority to issue directions to the Pentagon, the State Department and other agencies, but it has had trouble finding anyone able and willing to take the job, according to people close to the situation.
At least three retired four-star generals approached by the White House in recent weeks have declined to be considered for the position, the sources said, underscoring the administration's difficulty in enlisting its top recruits to join the team after five years of warfare that have taxed the United States and its military.
"The very fundamental issue is, they don't know where the hell they're going," said retired Marine Gen. John J. "Jack" Sheehan, a former top NATO commander who was among those rejecting the job.Some of the dismissed prosecutors complained at hearings last week that lawmakers tried to influence political corruption investigations. Several also said there had been Justice Department attempts to intimidate them.
E-mails between the Justice Department and the White House, released Tuesday, contradicted the administration's earlier contention that Bush's aides had only limited involvement in the firings.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., predicted Wednesday that Gonzales would soon be out.
"I think he is gone. I don't think he'll last long," Reid said in an interview with Nevada reporters. Asked how long, Reid responded: "Days."
By Eric Eggen and Paul Kane, Washington Post
Senate Democrats said yesterday they are preparing to subpoena five senior Justice Department officials as part of a widening probe into whether eight U.S. attorneys were fired for political reasons.
The fallout from the investigation into why the prosecutors were dismissed continued yesterday. Sen. Pete Domenici (R-N.M.) hired a top defense attorney to handle a related probe by the Senate ethics committee, which is investigating allegations that he pressured a New Mexico prosecutor to bring indictments against a Democrat just before the November elections.
The Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled to vote today to authorize subpoenas for Justice officials, including Michael A. Battle, who carried out the firings, and Kyle Sampson, chief of staff to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales.
By Eric Rich, Washington Post
The Justice Department acknowledged yesterday that Thomas M. DiBiagio, the Maryland U.S. attorney who stepped down early in 2005, was forced from office and did not, as he said at the time, decide on his own to leave for personal reasons.
The Bush administration has said the eight prosecutors were told to leave, all but one for performance-related reasons. However, Democrats and others have suggested evermore pointedly that politics was behind many of the dismissals.
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from The New Republic
Mr Talabani said Mr Blair's announcement to the Commons "had not come as a surprise to anyone".
His comments came as Iraq's political leaders, who have been pressing the Bush administration to allow Iraqi forces shoulder more of the security burden in the country, welcomed news of the troop reduction.
The deputy prime minister, Barham Salih said new funds for Basra would be spent "on improving power and water supplies to the city as well as health and sewage and tackling unemployment".
He added that there were also plans to develop Basra's moribund port into the largest and most profitable in the Middle East.
Meanwhile, civic leaders and residents in Basra expressed relief at what they saw as the first step toward the end of the difficult British presence there.
Hakim al-Mayyahi, an influential member of the city's provincial council, said Mr Blair's statement was long overdue.
"Lately, they [the British troops] were not helping the stability of the security situation in Basra," he added. "On the contrary, their constant conflicts with the anti-British groups here was simply contributing to a negative impact among the public."
You can see Bush’s skewed priorities when you examine his proposed budget.
He wants to spend $481 billion on the Pentagon next year, and that doesn’t even include the $145 billion he is requesting for his little adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was the objective of the Project for a New American Century to get Pentagon spending up to $500 billion a year. With this budget request, it now will stand at $626 billion. And that doesn’t even include the tens of billions of dollars that the Department of Energy spends on nuclear weapons.
Then there are the tax cuts to Bush and Cheney’s rich friends—you know, the people Bush called “his base” in Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 911.Bush’s budget would give people with incomes of more than $1 million an average tax cut of $162,000 a year by 2012, while those in the middle fifth of the income scale would get a mere $840 a year, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Here’s another way of looking at the lopsided distribution of tax benefits: The top 1 percent would enjoy 31 percent of the tax cuts, the bottom 40 percent just 4 percent, the center points out.
That’s redistribution of income, from bottom to top.
Meantime, Bush is proposing cutting aid to low-income people struggling to pay high winter heating bills.
He said: "London is not a battlefield. Those innocents who were murdered on July 7 2005 [the subway bombing that claimed 52 lives] were not victims of war. And the men who killed them were not, as in their vanity they claimed on their ludicrous videos, 'soldiers'. They were deluded, narcissistic inadequates. They were criminals. They were fantasists. We need to be very clear about this. On the streets of London, there is no such thing as a 'war on terror', just as there can be no such thing as a 'war on drugs'.
"The fight against terrorism on the streets of Britain is not a war. It is the prevention of crime, the enforcement of our laws and the winning of justice for those damaged by their infringement."
Sir Ken, head of the Crown Prosecution Service, told members of the Criminal Bar Association it should be an article of faith that crimes of terrorism are dealt with by criminal justice and that a "culture of legislative restraint in the area of terrorist crime is central to the existence of an efficient and human rights compatible process".
He said: "We wouldn't get far in promoting a civilising culture of respect for rights amongst and between citizens if we set about undermining fair trials in the simple pursuit of greater numbers of inevitably less safe convictions."Iraq's massive oil reserves, the third-largest in the world, are about to be thrown open for large-scale exploitation by Western oil companies under a controversial law which is expected to come before the Iraqi parliament within days.
The US government has been involved in drawing up the law, a draft of which has been seen by The Independent on Sunday. It would give big oil companies such as BP, Shell and Exxon 30-year contracts to extract Iraqi crude and allow the first large-scale operation of foreign oil interests in the country since the industry was nationalised in 1972.
The huge potential prizes for Western firms will give ammunition to critics who say the Iraq war was fought for oil. They point to statements such as one from Vice-President Dick Cheney, who said in 1999, while he was still chief executive of the oil services company Halliburton, that the world would need an additional 50 million barrels of oil a day by 2010. "So where is the oil going to come from?... The Middle East, with two-thirds of the world's oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies," he said.
Oil industry executives and analysts say the law, which would permit Western companies to pocket up to three-quarters of profits in the early years, is the only way to get Iraq's oil industry back on its feet after years of sanctions, war and loss of expertise. But it will operate through "production-sharing agreements" (or PSAs) which are highly unusual in the Middle East, where the oil industry in Saudi Arabia and Iran, the world's two largest producers, is state controlled.
