GOP Lacks Foresight

Memorial honoring fallen soldiers in Iraq, Afghanistan runs out of room

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."

Mission Accomplished Plus 4

Four Years After This

3,415
3,394
U.S. Soldiers Killed

Zero
WMD


Bodies piling up with no WMD and no end in sight

Tillman & Lynch: Lies from the Warmongers

Would you buy a used war from this man?

April 25--A sharply divided House brushed aside a veto threat Wednesday and passed legislation that would order President Bush to begin withdrawing troops from Iraq by Oct. 1.


Pat Tillman turned down a $3.6 million NFL contract with the Arizona Cardinals to enlist in the Army, along with his brother Kevin, several months after the 9/11 attacks. After taking part in the invasion of Iraq, the brothers were redeployed to Afghanistan. Pat Tillman was killed accidentally in April 2004 by fire from his own unit. The Army lied to his family about the cause of his death. The Bush adminisration quickly moved to cover up the details--and still hasn't told the public the truth.

His outraged brother Kevin, appearing before the House Oversight Committee, accused leaders of "exploiting Pat's death" with "deliberate, calculated lies" that suppressed how other Rangers accidentally killed Tillman in a 2004 "friendly fire" incident in Afghanistan. "This wasn't a misstep or error in judgment," said Kevin Tillman, who was speaking in public for the first time about his brother's death and how news about it was handled by the military. The Army and others, he said, "attempted to hijack his virtue and his legacy." The tale "inspired countless Americans, as intended," said Kevin Tillman, also a former Ranger. "There was one small problem with this narrative, however: It was utter fiction...intended to deceive not only the family but more importantly the American public."

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."

NNE in Iraq

The 24-hour coverage of the shooting spree at Virginia Tech might give you the impression that this is the worst thing to recently happen in the world. Although the massacre of 32 people is painful, pointless and heartrending, it is not nearly as bad as a typical day in Baghdad. NNE is the newsroom phrase applied to deaths far from home: Not Nearly Enough to warrant special attention.

Car bombs kill at least 172 in Baghdad

By Edmund Sanders, Los Angeles Times

BAGHDAD -- Five car bombs exploded in and around Iraq's capital Wednesday, killing at least 172 people and injuring more than 220 in the deadliest day since U.S. and Iraqi forces launched a much-publicized security crackdown two months ago.

The deadliest attack killed 140 people in Baghdad's Sadriya district, which was still recovering from a February car bombing that killed at least 130 people in a busy marketplace. The attacks could be a setback for U.S. and Iraqi security forces, which on Feb. 13 announced an aggressive plan to deploy thousands of additional personnel in and around Baghdad.

Bush Going Downhill Fast

Paging Rosemary Woods

Richard Nixon's Watergate scandal features an 18 1/2 minute gap in a crucial secretly-made White House tape recording. Nixon aides tried to pin the wiped out conversation on a "transcription error" by his secretary of 20 years, Rose Mary Woods. Evidence showed that eight separate erasures were made to the pivotal tape. Congressional investigations intothe Watergate break-in and cover-up created a crescendo of public disapproval that resulted in GOP leaders forcing Nixon out the door--the first person ever to resign the presidency.

Now, Bush has his own version of the Rosemary Woods incident: the dog ate my email.

Officials' e-mail may be missing, White House says

By Tom Hamburger, Los Angeles Times

WASHINGTON -- The White House said today that it may have lost what could amount to thousands of messages sent through a private e-mail system used by political guru Karl Rove and at least 50 other top officials, an admission that stirred anger and dismay among congressional investigators.

The e-mails were considered potentially critical evidence in congressional inquiries launched by Democrats into the role partisan politics may have played in such policy decisions as the firing of eight U.S. attorneys.

The White House said an effort was underway to see whether the messages could be recovered from the computer system, which was operated and paid for by the Republican National Committee as part of an effort to separate political communications from those dealing with official business.

If that's not bad enough, even the generals don't want to run Bush's wars.

3 Generals Spurn the Position of War 'Czar'

Bush Seeks Overseer For Iraq, Afghanistan

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.

Attorney General: I Am Not a Crook

You know Bush is in trouble when he starts using the passive voice. "Mistakes were made" is his lame response after being caught red-handed in the firing last December of 8 federal prosecutors for purely political reasons. On the bright side, while Attorney General Alberto Gonzales shuffles in the spotlight, denying he did anything wrong, voter attention is momentarily drawn away from the death of 3,394 U.S. soldiers in the pointless war in Iraq.

Sununu Says Bush Should Fire Attorney General In Wake Of Controversial DOJ Ousters

Sen. John Sununu of New Hampshire on Wednesday became the first Republican in Congress to call for Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' dismissal, hours after President Bush expressed confidence in his embattled Cabinet officer.

Gonzales has been fending off Democratic demands for his firing in the wake of disclosures surrounding the ousters of eight U.S. attorneys — dismissals Democrats have characterized as a politically motivated purge.

Support from many Republicans had been muted, but there was no outright GOP call for his dismissal until now.

"I think the president should replace him," Sununu said in an interview with The Associated Press. "I think the attorney general should be fired."

Bush, at a news conference in Mexico, told reporters when asked about the controversy: "Mistakes were made. And I'm frankly not happy about them."

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."

Crooks Fire Investigators

Subpoenas Likely for Justice Officials in Prosecutor Firings

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.

Justice Admits U.S. Attorney Was Forced Out

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.

---------------------------------------------------------

from The New Republic

Revenge Of The U.S. Attorneys

Hearings Confirm Political Motivation Behind Firing Of U.S. Attorneys

by Barron YoungSmith

Unlike some insta-scandals of recent years (Mark Foley, macaca), the firing of eight U.S. attorneys last December, like a good coffee, has been a slow-brew crisis. At first, the victims went quietly. But then we began to learn tidbits about their ouster: GOP officials had repeatedly called to threaten Thomas DiBagio from Maryland if he didn't back off an investigation of the Republican governor's friends; Senator Pete Domenici called the Justice Department four times over the past year and a half to complain about David Inglesias, who was not investigating a Democratic corruption scandal fast enough for his liking.

from The Wall Street Journal
The 2008 election could be the worst in 30 years to be the Republican candidate, a WSJ/NBC News poll shows.

Cheney Kills American Soldier

Terrorists Practicing for Tet Offensive Blow Up Base During Cheney Visit

Veep's Pacemaker Get a Workout

One U.S. soldier was killed February 27 when terrorists targeted the U.S. Bagram airbase in Afghanistan being visited by Vice President Dick Cheney. Cheney's deadly decision to travel outside D.C. comes at the conclusion of the Lewis Libby trial. A jury in Washington is deliberating the fate of Cheney's former honcho, who got caught up in Bush-Cheney efforts to smear former ambassador Joseph Wilson after he publicly debunked pre-war lies by the administration.

The truck bomb that exploded near the entrance to the base killed a South Korean soldier, a U.S. contractor and up to 20 Afghans.

It's the closest that Cheney, who fought hard to get five draft deferments during the Vietnam war, has ever come to experiencing combat.

Blair Pulls Out as Bush Digs In

Exit Strategy: Declare Victory and Leave


Prime Minister Tony Blair, who's being forced by his own party into early retirement, undercut Bush's surge suit by announcing that British troops are getting out of Iraq.

Unlike Bush -- who wants to send more U.S. soldiers to their deaths -- Blair announced that U.K. troops can leave because Iraqi soldiers have made significant progress preparing to defend their own country.

The Iraqis say they're actually pleased that the foreigners are getting the hell out.

UK troop reduction a welcome catalyst, says Iraqi president

Michael Howard, The Guardian

The Iraqi president, Jalal Talabani, today told the Guardian that Tony Blair's statement on phased troop withdrawal in the southern city of Basra was "a welcome catalyst for Iraqi security forces in the south and elsewhere to stand on their own feet".

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."

Your Tax Dollars at Work

Bush’s Budget Priorities: Fund War, Provide Tax Breaks for the Rich, Deprive the Poor

By Matthew Rothschild, The Progressive

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.

Bush would also cut child-care assistance for 300,000 kids from poor families over the next three years, and he’s giving states an incentive to push these kids off the CHIP program that gives them insurance, the center says. Bush would also gouge Headstart by $100 million from the level in the continuing resolution passed by the House, the center notes. And the preventive health services block grant, which helps state and local agencies undertake efforts to prevent or reduce the incidence of various health problems such as obesity and lead poisoning, would be eliminated.

Wacky Bush Priorities

Junior: Cut Back on Medicare & Social Security, Spend More on Iraq

(AP) President Bush, poised to submit his new budget to Congress next week, warned that unless programs like Medicare and Social Security are changed, future generations will face tax hikes, government red ink or huge cuts in benefits.

Bush will ask for $100 billion more for military and diplomatic operations in Iraq and Afghanistan this year and seek $145 billion for 2008, a senior Pentagon official said Friday. Those requests come on top of about $344 billion spent for Iraq since the 2003 invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.

Brit Debunks War on Terror

'There is no war on terror'

Sir Ken McDonald, Britain's director of public prosecutions, warned of the pernicious risk that a "fear-driven and inappropriate" response to the threat could lead Britain to abandon respect for fair trials and the due process of law.

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."

Dangerously Irresponsible

Those are the words a leading Republican senator used to describe Junior's latest plan for continued failure in Iraq.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A second Republican signed onto a Senate resolution on Wednesday opposing President Bush's 21,500-troop buildup in Iraq, setting a marker for a major clash between the White House and Congress over the unpopular war.

Sen. Olympia Snowe, a moderate from Maine, said she would support a nonbinding resolution that would put the Senate on record as saying the U.S. commitment in Iraq can be sustained only with support from the American public and Congress.

Snowe's decision to join the effort came as the White House and GOP leaders struggled to keep Republicans from endorsing the resolution, and raised questions about how many more defections there might be.

''Now is time for the Congress to make its voice heard on a policy that has such significant implications for the nation, the Middle East and the world,'' Snowe said in a written statement.

Earlier, Sen. Chuck Hagel, a Nebraska Republican and potential 2008 presidential candidate, joined Democrats at a news conference announcing the resolution.

''I will do everything I can to stop the president's policy as he outlined it Wednesday night,'' Hagel said. ''I think it is dangerously irresponsible.''

3,075 U.S. dead and counting
$400 billion squandered

Real Reason for Iraq War: It's the Oil, Stupid

A report in the British newspaper the Independent may answer the question that's been nagging the American conscience now for three years: If there are no WMDs in Iraq -- and the country never was a threat to the United States -- why was Bush Junior so intent on invading and occupying the country?

It's the oil, stupid.

Future of Iraq: The spoils of war

How the West will make a killing on Iraqi oil riches

By Danny Fortson, Andrew Murray-Watson and Tim Webb, the Independent

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.

Bush Loses His Edge

Andrew Kohut, of the Pew Research Center, has this interesting take on what last November's elections mean.

Issues the Republicans stressed paid few dividends: Most notably, the many voters concerned about terrorism backed GOP candidates over Democrats by only the modest margin of 5 percentage points. The threat of terrorism is still much on the public's mind, but voters are no longer persuaded that Republicans know best how to deal with it. Discontent with Iraq has taken terrorism off the table for the Republicans. By a margin of 59%-35%, voters said that the war in Iraq did not improve U.S. security.

Britain never thought Saddam was threat - diplomat

· UK warned US that chaos would follow tyrant's fall
· Evidence repudiates claims in run-up to war

Richard Norton-Taylor, The Guardian

The British government never believed Saddam Hussein posed a threat to British interests and warned the US that toppling him would lead to "chaos", according to a Foreign Office diplomat closely involved in negotiations in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.

Damning repudiation of the government's public claims in the run-up to the war is contained in secret evidence to Lord Butler's committee on the abuse of intelligence over Iraq by Carne Ross, a diplomat at Britain's UN mission in New York.

His evidence, in which he says the government privately assessed that Iraq possessed no significant quantity of weapons of mass destruction, has been published on the Commons foreign affairs committee website. Mr Ross gave evidence to the group last month but some MPs had been reluctant to have it published.

Mr Ross told Lord Butler he read UK and US human and signals intelligence on Iraq every working day during the four years he spent in New York up to 2002, and spoke at length to UN weapons inspectors.

"At no time did [the government] assess that Iraq's WMD (or any other capability) posed a threat to the UK," he told the Butler committee. "On the contrary, it was the commonly-held view among the officials dealing with Iraq that any threat had been effectively contained ... At the same time, we would frequently argue, when the US raised the subject, that 'regime change' was inadvisable, primarily on the grounds that Iraq would collapse into chaos."

Mr Ross continued: "Iraq's ability to launch a WMD or any form of attack was very limited. There were approximately 12 or so unaccounted-for Scud missiles; Iraq's airforce was depleted to the point of total ineffectiveness; its army was but a pale shadow of its earlier might; there was no evidence of any connection with any terrorist organisation that might have planned an attack using Iraqi WMD."

Mr Ross said he repeatedly questioned Foreign Office and Ministry of Defence officials about their threat assessments of Iraq. He said: "None told me that any new evidence had emerged to change our assessment; what had changed was the government's determination to present available evidence in a different light." Referring to the government's weapons adviser who later committed suicide, he added: "I discussed this at some length with David Kelly in late 2002, who agreed that the Number 10 WMD dossier was overstated".

Bush on Path to Defeat

These strong words come from a Republican senator, Gordon Smith of Oregon.

I "do not support policies, nor should the American people support policies, that lead us down a path to defeat," Smith said. "And I believe that that's what we've been pursuing."

Smith first broke with his party over the issue of Iraq on Thursday night, when he delivered an emotional speech about the state of the war just before Congress recessed for the end of the year.

"I, for one, am at the end of my rope when it comes to supporting a policy that has our soldiers patrolling the same streets in the same way, being blown up by the same bombs day after day," said Smith before a mostly empty Senate chamber. "That is absurd. It may even be criminal. I cannot support that anymore."

"When you get to being policeman in a sectarian civil war, that is not what the American people enlisted for. That's not what I voted for," said Smith. "I voted for toppling a chief terrorist and tyrant, ridding him of weapons of mass destruction, but not for being target practice in the middle of a sectarian strife."

House Ethics Whitewash on Foley

The folks who blab incessantly about family values could not bring themselves to admit they'd done anything wrong in protectly child predator and former GOP Congressman Mark Foley.

Willful Ignorance But No Rules Broken

The House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct released its report investigating the scandal surrounding the inappropriate contact former Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.) had with congressional pages, finding that "a pattern of conduct was exhibited among many individuals to remain willfully ignorant" of Foley's behavior though no "current House Members of employees violated the House Code of Official Conduct."

The chairmen of the ethics committee, Reps. Doc Hastings (R-Wash.) and Howard Berman (D-Calif.), effusively praised each other and the bipartisan committee's work over the previous nine weeks, but would take no questions, preferring to let the 89-page report speak for itself. They said their investigation was completed after 50 interviews and depositions, 3,000 pages worth of transcribed interviews, and more than 100 hours of testimony and deliberations.

In what some critics see as a way of letting his colleagues' behavior off the hook, Hastings in prepared remarks said that "20/20 hindsight is easy" and that "doing the right thing...can be very hard and difficult."

Attack of the Pregnant Lesbian

Who Got Mary Cheney Pregnant?

Some Washington insiders are betting on the guy Dick Cheney shot in the face last February.


Mary Cheney and Heather Poe are having a baby. The Republican's religious right base is furious. The couple lives in Virginia, where just last month voters made it one of 27 states that ban gay marriage.

Bush's War Zips Toward Another Sad Milestone

The 9/11 terrorist attacks killed 2,973 victims in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.

As President Bush clings to his "Stay the Course" mantra, the U.S. death toll in the mindless civil war in Iraq has now claimed the lives of 2,964 U.S. soldiers. No weapons of mass destruction have been found -- and Osama bin Laden is resting comfortably in Pakistan.

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- Four U.S. Marines died when a Sea Knight helicopter plunged into a lake in volatile Anbar province, the military said Monday, raising to 13 the number of American troops killed during a bloody weekend in Iraq.

It was the second military aircraft to go down in a week in Anbar, a stronghold of Sunni insurgents, although the military said mechanical problems rather than gunfire had forced the emergency landing on Sunday.

The deaths came on a weekend in which nine other U.S. troops were killed, including five in Anbar.