More Bush duplicity on NSA spying. And to think, I live down the street from this lying ass.
January 26, 2006
Los Angeles Times:
Words, Deeds on Spying Differed
Even as warrantless U.S. eavesdropping was being conducted, the White House opposed easing rules on the issue in 2002 to avoid public debate.
By David G. Savage, Times Staff Writer
WASHINGTON — Four years ago, top Bush administration lawyers told Congress they opposed lowering the legal standard for intercepting the phone calls of foreigners who were in the United States, even while the administration had secretly adopted a lower standard on its own.
The government's public position then was the mirror opposite of its rationale today in defending its warrantless domestic spying program, which has come under attack as a violation of civil liberties.
Government wiretapping — and who sets the rules — has emerged at the center of a growing debate between the White House and Congress since the disclosure last month of the administration's warrantless spying program.
A Justice Department spokesman confirmed Wednesday the administration had opposed changing the law in 2002 in part because it did not want to publicly debate the issue.
"There was a conscious choice not to have a public discussion about it. It could have exposed the program. This was a military defense intelligence program," said the spokesman, who asked not be named because of the sensitivity surrounding the still-classified presidential order on wiretapping.
After the terrorist attacks of September 2001, lawmakers proposed several changes that would make it easier for the government to detect terrorists and their allies who might be operating in the United States.
Sen. Mike DeWine (R-Ohio) proposed making it easier for officials to obtain warrants to conduct wiretapping. The current law, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, said officials must have "probable cause" to believe someone was an agent of an international terrorist group before they could obtain a warrant to tap their phones.
This high standard proved to be a stumbling block at times. When Zacarias Moussaoui — the man later dubbed the 20th hijacker of the Sept. 11 attacks — was arrested in Minnesota in August 2001, officials in the Justice Department did not seek a warrant to search his laptop computer because they did not have probable cause to believe he was an Al Qaeda operative.
This was later judged to be a mistake. DeWine cited this when he proposed to lower the standard for obtaining a warrant to one of "reasonable suspicion." This would permit the government to move quickly to search or eavesdrop on suspicious foreigners such as Moussaoui, he said, even if they lacked "probable cause" to show they were members of Al Qaeda.
But when the proposal came before a Senate committee, the administration's lawyers testified that no change was needed.
"The administration at this time is not prepared to support it," the Justice Department's James A. Baker said of the DeWine amendment in congressional testimony. As counsel for intelligence policy at the time, he headed the office that sought search warrants from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court that meets inside the Justice Department.
The administration now defends the constitutionality of the warrantless domestic spying program and says it is necessary to avoid the "cumbersome" process of getting a warrant from the FISA court.
But in 2002, Baker told Congress it was not clear "whether a 'reasonable suspicion' standard for electronic surveillance would … pass constitutional muster."
Baker also said the existing standard was not a problem.
"We have been aggressive in seeking FISA warrants, and thanks to Congress' passage of the [Patriot Act] we have been able to use our expanded FISA tools more effectively to combat terrorist activities," he said. "It may not be the case that the probable cause standard has caused any difficulties in our ability to seek FISA warrants we require."
DeWine's proposal failed to pass the committee.
This week, top administration officials confirmed that before DeWine even made his proposal, they had adopted a "reasonable basis" standard for this eavesdropping.
"The president's authorization allows us to track this kind of call more comprehensively and more efficiently. The trigger is quicker and a bit softer than it is for a FISA warrant," Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the No. 2 ranking intelligence official and the former head of NSA, told reporters Monday.
Asked whether the key change was to switch from "probable cause" to a "reasonableness" standard, Hayden said, "I think you have accurately described the criteria under which this operates."
A Senate Democrat, Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, accused the administration of having tried "to paper over the legality of a secret spying program. If they really believed the current law is too burdensome, the Bush administration should have asked Congress to change it, but they did not. Instead a top lawyer in the Bush administration did just the opposite."
Timothy Edgar, a lawyer on national security policy for the American Civil Liberties Union, also accused the administration of "remarkable duplicity" for having testified in public against the legal change while carrying it out in private. "It seems they were being incredibly deceptive," he said.
The Justice Department's conflicting statements came to light Wednesday after Glenn Greenwald, a New York lawyer, posted the differing statements on a blog.
New Developments II
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Sonic Youth
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President Jonah
by Gore Vidal
Read this essay in its original context at Truthdig.com, complete with photos and an audio file of Mr. Vidal reading the entire piece.
http://www.truthdig.com/dig/item/20060124_president_jonah/
While contemplating the ill-starred presidency of G.W. Bush, I looked about for some sort of divine analogy. As usual, when in need of enlightenment, I fell upon the Holy Bible, authorized King James version of 1611; turning by chance to the Book of Jonah, I read that Jonah, who, like Bush, chats with God, had suffered a falling out with the Almighty and thus became a jinx dogged by luck so bad that a cruise liner, thanks to his presence aboard, was about to sink in a storm at sea.
Once the crew had determined that Jonah, a passenger, was the jinx, they threw him overboard and--Lo!--the storm abated. The three days and nights he subsequently spent in the belly of a nauseous whale must have seemed like a serious jinx to the digestion-challenged whale who extruded him much as the decent opinion of mankind has done to Bush.
Originally, God wanted Jonah to give hell to Nineveh, whose people, God noted disdainfully, "cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand," so like the people of Baghdad who cannot fathom what democracy has to do with their destruction by the Cheney-Bush cabal. But the analogy becomes eerily precise when it comes to the hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico at a time when a president is not only incompetent but plainly jinxed by whatever faith he cringes before. Witness the ongoing screw-up of prescription drugs. Who knows what other disasters are in store for us thanks to the curse he is under? As the sailors fed the original Jonah to a whale, thus lifting the storm that was about to drown them, perhaps we the people can persuade President Jonah to retire to his other Eden in Crawford, Texas, taking his jinx with him. We deserve a rest. Plainly, so does he. Look at Nixon's radiant features after his resignation! One can see former President Jonah in his sumptuous library happily catering to faith-based fans with animated scriptures rooted in "The Simpsons."
Not since the glory days of Watergate and Nixon's Luciferian fall has there been so much written about the dogged deceits and creative criminalities of our rulers. We have also come to a point in this dark age where there is not only no hero in view but no alternative road unblocked. We are trapped terribly in a now that few foresaw and even fewer can define despite a swarm of books and pamphlets like the vast cloud of locusts which dined on China in that '30s movie "The Good Earth."
I have read many of these descriptions of our fallen estate, looking for one that best describes in plain English how we got to this now and where we appear to be headed once our good Earth has been consumed and only Rapture is left to whisk aloft the Faithful. Meanwhile, the rest of us can learn quite a lot from "Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire" by Morris Berman, a professor of sociology at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.
I must confess that I have a proprietary interest in anyone who refers to the United States as an empire since I am credited with first putting forward this heretical view in the early '70s. In fact, so disgusted with me was a book reviewer at Time magazine that as proof of my madness he wrote: "He actually refers to the United States as an empire!" It should be noted that at about the same time Henry Luce, proprietor of Time, was booming on and on about "The American Century." What a difference a word makes!
Berman sets his scene briskly in recent history. "We were already in our twilight phase when Ronald Reagan, with all the insight of an ostrich, declared it to be 'morning in America'; twenty-odd years later, under the 'boy emperor' George W. Bush (as Chalmers Johnson refers to him), we have entered the Dark Ages in earnest, pursuing a short-sighted path that can only accelerate our decline. For what we are now seeing are the obvious characteristics of the West after the fall of Rome: the triumph of religion over reason; the atrophy of education and critical thinking; the integration of religion, the state, and the apparatus of torture--a troika that was for Voltaire the central horror of the pre-Enlightenment world; and the political and economic marginalization of our culture.... The British historian Charles Freeman published an extended discussion of the transition that took place during the late Roman empire, the title of which could serve as a capsule summary of our current president: "The Closing of the Western Mind." Mr. Bush, God knows, is no Augustine; but Freeman points to the latter as the epitome of a more general process that was underway in the fourth century: namely, 'the gradual subjection of reason to faith and authority.' This is what we are seeing today, and it is a process that no society can undergo and still remain free. Yet it is a process of which administration officials, along with much of the American population, are aggressively proud." In fact, close observers of this odd presidency note that Bush, like his evangelical base, believes he is on a mission from God and that faith trumps empirical evidence. Berman quotes a senior White House adviser who disdains what he calls the "reality-based" community, to which Berman sensibly responds: "If a nation is unable to perceive reality correctly, and persists in operating on the basis of faith-based delusions, its ability to hold its own in the world is pretty much foreclosed."
Berman does a brief tour of the American horizon, revealing a cultural death valley. In secondary schools where evolution can still be taught too many teachers are afraid to bring up the subject to their so often un-evolved students. "Add to this the pervasive hostility toward science on the part of the current administration (e.g. stem-cell research) and we get a clear picture of the Enlightenment being steadily rolled back. Religion is used to explain terror attacks as part of a cosmic conflict between Good and Evil rather than in terms of political processes.... Manichaeanism rules across the United States. According to a poll taken by Time magazine fifty-nine percent of Americans believe that John's apocalyptic prophecies in the Book of Revelation will be fulfilled, and nearly all of these believe that the faithful will be taken up into heaven in the 'Rapture.'
"Finally, we shouldn't be surprised at the antipathy toward democracy displayed by the Bush administration.... As already noted, fundamentalism and democracy are completely antithetical. The opposite of the Enlightenment, of course, is tribalism, groupthink; and more and more, this is the direction in which the United States is going.... Anthony Lewis who worked as a columnist for the New York Times for thirty-two years, observes that what has happened in the wake of 9/11 is not just the threatening of the rights of a few detainees, but the undermining of the very foundation of democracy. Detention without trial, denial of access to attorneys, years of interrogation in isolation--these are now standard American practice, and most Americans don't care. Nor did they care about the revelation in July 2004 (reported in Newsweek), that for several months the White House and the Department of Justice had been discussing the feasibility of canceling the upcoming presidential election in the event of a possible terrorist attack." I suspect that the technologically inclined prevailed against that extreme measure on the ground that the newly installed electronic ballot machines could be so calibrated that Bush would win handily no matter what (read Rep. Conyers' report (.pdf file) on the rigging of Ohio's vote).
Meanwhile, the indoctrination of the people merrily continues. "In a 'State of the First Amendment Survey' conducted by the University of Connecticut in 2003, 34 percent of Americans polled said the First Amendment 'goes too far'; 46 percent said there was too much freedom of the press; 28 percent felt that newspapers should not be able to publish articles without prior approval of the government; 31 percent wanted public protest of a war to be outlawed during that war; and 50 percent thought the government should have the right to infringe on the religious freedom of 'certain religious groups' in the name of the war on terror."
It is usual in sad reports like Professor Berman's to stop abruptly the litany of what has gone wrong and then declare, hand on heart, that once the people have been informed of what is happening, the truth will set them free and a quarter-billion candles will be lit and the darkness will flee in the presence of so much spontaneous light. But Berman is much too serious for the easy platitude. Instead he tells us that those who might have struck at least a match can no longer do so because shared information about our situation is meager to nonexistent. Would better schools help? Of course, but, according to that joyous bearer of ill tidings, the New York Times, many school districts are now making sobriety tests a regular feature of the school day: apparently opium derivatives are the opiate of our stoned youth. Meanwhile, millions of adult Americans, presumably undrugged, have no idea who our enemies were in World War II. Many college graduates don't know the difference between an argument and an assertion (did their teachers also fail to solve this knotty question?). A travel agent in Arizona is often asked whether or not it is cheaper to take the train rather than fly to Hawaii. Only 12% of Americans own a passport. At the time of the 2004 presidential election 42% of voters believed that Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11. One high school boy, when asked who won the Civil War, replied wearily, "I don't know and I don't care," echoing a busy neocon who confessed proudly: "The American Civil War is as remote to me as the War of the Roses."
We are assured daily by advertisers and/or politicians that we are the richest, most envied people on Earth and, apparently, that is why so many awful, ill-groomed people want to blow us up. We live in an impermeable bubble without the sort of information that people living in real countries have access to when it comes to their own reality. But we are not actually people in the eyes of the national ownership: we are simply unreliable consumers comprising an overworked, underpaid labor force not in the best of health: The World Health Organization rates our healthcare system (sic--or sick?) as 37th-best in the world, far behind even Saudi Arabia, role model for the Texans. Our infant mortality rate is satisfyingly high, precluding a First World educational system. Also, it has not gone unremarked even in our usually information-free media that despite the boost to the profits of such companies as Halliburton, Bush's wars of aggression against small countries of no danger to us have left us well and truly broke. Our annual trade deficit is a half-trillion dollars, which means that we don't produce much of anything the world wants except those wan reports on how popular our Entertainment is overseas. Unfortunately the foreign gross of "King Kong," the Edsel of that assembly line, is not yet known. It is rumored that Bollywood--the Indian film business--may soon surpass us! Berman writes, "We have lost our edge in science to Europe...The US economy is being kept afloat by huge foreign loans ($4 billion a day during 2003). What do you think will happen when America's creditors decide to pull the plug, or when OPEC members begin selling oil in euros instead of dollars?...An International Monetary Fund report of 2004 concluded that the United States was 'careening toward insolvency.' " Meanwhile, China, our favorite big-time future enemy, is the number one for worldwide foreign investments, with France, the bete noire of our apish neocons, in second place.
Well, we still have Kraft cheese and, of course, the death penalty.
Berman makes the case that the Bretton-Woods agreement of 1944 institutionalized a system geared toward full employment and the maintenance of a social safety net for society's less fortunate--the so-called welfare or interventionist state. It did this by establishing fixed but flexible exchange rates among world currencies, which were pegged to the U.S. dollar while the dollar, for its part, was pegged to gold. In a word, Bretton-Woods saved capitalism by making it more human. Nixon abandoned the agreement in 1971, which started, according to Berman, huge amounts of capital moving upward from the poor and the middle class to the rich and super-rich.
Mr. Berman spares us the happy ending, as, apparently, has history. When the admirable Tiberius (he has had an undeserved bad press), upon becoming emperor, received a message from the Senate in which the conscript fathers assured him that whatever legislation he wanted would be automatically passed by them, he sent back word that this was outrageous. "Suppose the emperor is ill or mad or incompetent?" He returned their message. They sent it again. His response: "How eager you are to be slaves." I often think of that wise emperor when I hear Republican members of Congress extolling the wisdom of Bush. Now that he has been caught illegally wiretapping fellow citizens he has taken to snarling about his powers as "a wartime president," and so, in his own mind, he is above each and every law of the land. Oddly, no one in Congress has pointed out that he may well be a lunatic dreaming that he is another Lincoln but whatever he is or is not he is no wartime president. There is no war with any other nation...yet. There is no state called terror, an abstract noun like liar. Certainly his illegal unilateral ravaging of Iraq may well seem like a real war for those on both sides unlucky enough to be killed or wounded, but that does not make it a war any more than the appearance of having been elected twice to the presidency does not mean that in due course the people will demand an investigation of those two irregular processes. Although he has done a number of things that under the old republic might have got him impeached, our current system protects him: incumbency-for-life seats have made it possible for a Republican majority in the House not to do its duty and impeach him for his incompetence in handling, say, the natural disaster that befell Louisiana.
The founders thought two-year terms for members of the House was as much democracy as we'd ever need. Therefore, there was no great movement to have some sort of recall legislation in the event that a president wasn't up to his job and so had lost the people's confidence between elections. But in time, as Ecclesiastes would say, all things shall come to pass and so, in a kindly way, a majority of the citizens must persuade him that he will be happier back in Crawford pruning Bushes of the leafy sort while the troops not killed or maimed will settle for simply being alive and in one piece. We may be slaves but we are not unreasonable.
One way that a majority of citizens can help open the road back to Crawford is by heeding the call of a group called the World Can't Wait (see their website, worldcantwait.org). They believe that the agenda for 2006 must not be set by the Bush gang but by the people taking independent mass political action.
On Jan. 31, the night of Bush's next State of the Union address, they have called for people in large cities and small towns all across the country to join in noisy rallies to make the demand that "Bush Step Down" the message of the day. At 9 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, just as Bush starts to speak, people can make a joyful noise and figuratively drown out his address. Then on the following Saturday, Feb. 4, converge in front of the White House with the same message: Please step down and take your program with you.
by Gore Vidal
Read this essay in its original context at Truthdig.com, complete with photos and an audio file of Mr. Vidal reading the entire piece.
http://www.truthdig.com/dig/item/20060124_president_jonah/
While contemplating the ill-starred presidency of G.W. Bush, I looked about for some sort of divine analogy. As usual, when in need of enlightenment, I fell upon the Holy Bible, authorized King James version of 1611; turning by chance to the Book of Jonah, I read that Jonah, who, like Bush, chats with God, had suffered a falling out with the Almighty and thus became a jinx dogged by luck so bad that a cruise liner, thanks to his presence aboard, was about to sink in a storm at sea.
Once the crew had determined that Jonah, a passenger, was the jinx, they threw him overboard and--Lo!--the storm abated. The three days and nights he subsequently spent in the belly of a nauseous whale must have seemed like a serious jinx to the digestion-challenged whale who extruded him much as the decent opinion of mankind has done to Bush.
Originally, God wanted Jonah to give hell to Nineveh, whose people, God noted disdainfully, "cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand," so like the people of Baghdad who cannot fathom what democracy has to do with their destruction by the Cheney-Bush cabal. But the analogy becomes eerily precise when it comes to the hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico at a time when a president is not only incompetent but plainly jinxed by whatever faith he cringes before. Witness the ongoing screw-up of prescription drugs. Who knows what other disasters are in store for us thanks to the curse he is under? As the sailors fed the original Jonah to a whale, thus lifting the storm that was about to drown them, perhaps we the people can persuade President Jonah to retire to his other Eden in Crawford, Texas, taking his jinx with him. We deserve a rest. Plainly, so does he. Look at Nixon's radiant features after his resignation! One can see former President Jonah in his sumptuous library happily catering to faith-based fans with animated scriptures rooted in "The Simpsons."
Not since the glory days of Watergate and Nixon's Luciferian fall has there been so much written about the dogged deceits and creative criminalities of our rulers. We have also come to a point in this dark age where there is not only no hero in view but no alternative road unblocked. We are trapped terribly in a now that few foresaw and even fewer can define despite a swarm of books and pamphlets like the vast cloud of locusts which dined on China in that '30s movie "The Good Earth."
I have read many of these descriptions of our fallen estate, looking for one that best describes in plain English how we got to this now and where we appear to be headed once our good Earth has been consumed and only Rapture is left to whisk aloft the Faithful. Meanwhile, the rest of us can learn quite a lot from "Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire" by Morris Berman, a professor of sociology at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.
I must confess that I have a proprietary interest in anyone who refers to the United States as an empire since I am credited with first putting forward this heretical view in the early '70s. In fact, so disgusted with me was a book reviewer at Time magazine that as proof of my madness he wrote: "He actually refers to the United States as an empire!" It should be noted that at about the same time Henry Luce, proprietor of Time, was booming on and on about "The American Century." What a difference a word makes!
Berman sets his scene briskly in recent history. "We were already in our twilight phase when Ronald Reagan, with all the insight of an ostrich, declared it to be 'morning in America'; twenty-odd years later, under the 'boy emperor' George W. Bush (as Chalmers Johnson refers to him), we have entered the Dark Ages in earnest, pursuing a short-sighted path that can only accelerate our decline. For what we are now seeing are the obvious characteristics of the West after the fall of Rome: the triumph of religion over reason; the atrophy of education and critical thinking; the integration of religion, the state, and the apparatus of torture--a troika that was for Voltaire the central horror of the pre-Enlightenment world; and the political and economic marginalization of our culture.... The British historian Charles Freeman published an extended discussion of the transition that took place during the late Roman empire, the title of which could serve as a capsule summary of our current president: "The Closing of the Western Mind." Mr. Bush, God knows, is no Augustine; but Freeman points to the latter as the epitome of a more general process that was underway in the fourth century: namely, 'the gradual subjection of reason to faith and authority.' This is what we are seeing today, and it is a process that no society can undergo and still remain free. Yet it is a process of which administration officials, along with much of the American population, are aggressively proud." In fact, close observers of this odd presidency note that Bush, like his evangelical base, believes he is on a mission from God and that faith trumps empirical evidence. Berman quotes a senior White House adviser who disdains what he calls the "reality-based" community, to which Berman sensibly responds: "If a nation is unable to perceive reality correctly, and persists in operating on the basis of faith-based delusions, its ability to hold its own in the world is pretty much foreclosed."
Berman does a brief tour of the American horizon, revealing a cultural death valley. In secondary schools where evolution can still be taught too many teachers are afraid to bring up the subject to their so often un-evolved students. "Add to this the pervasive hostility toward science on the part of the current administration (e.g. stem-cell research) and we get a clear picture of the Enlightenment being steadily rolled back. Religion is used to explain terror attacks as part of a cosmic conflict between Good and Evil rather than in terms of political processes.... Manichaeanism rules across the United States. According to a poll taken by Time magazine fifty-nine percent of Americans believe that John's apocalyptic prophecies in the Book of Revelation will be fulfilled, and nearly all of these believe that the faithful will be taken up into heaven in the 'Rapture.'
"Finally, we shouldn't be surprised at the antipathy toward democracy displayed by the Bush administration.... As already noted, fundamentalism and democracy are completely antithetical. The opposite of the Enlightenment, of course, is tribalism, groupthink; and more and more, this is the direction in which the United States is going.... Anthony Lewis who worked as a columnist for the New York Times for thirty-two years, observes that what has happened in the wake of 9/11 is not just the threatening of the rights of a few detainees, but the undermining of the very foundation of democracy. Detention without trial, denial of access to attorneys, years of interrogation in isolation--these are now standard American practice, and most Americans don't care. Nor did they care about the revelation in July 2004 (reported in Newsweek), that for several months the White House and the Department of Justice had been discussing the feasibility of canceling the upcoming presidential election in the event of a possible terrorist attack." I suspect that the technologically inclined prevailed against that extreme measure on the ground that the newly installed electronic ballot machines could be so calibrated that Bush would win handily no matter what (read Rep. Conyers' report (.pdf file) on the rigging of Ohio's vote).
Meanwhile, the indoctrination of the people merrily continues. "In a 'State of the First Amendment Survey' conducted by the University of Connecticut in 2003, 34 percent of Americans polled said the First Amendment 'goes too far'; 46 percent said there was too much freedom of the press; 28 percent felt that newspapers should not be able to publish articles without prior approval of the government; 31 percent wanted public protest of a war to be outlawed during that war; and 50 percent thought the government should have the right to infringe on the religious freedom of 'certain religious groups' in the name of the war on terror."
It is usual in sad reports like Professor Berman's to stop abruptly the litany of what has gone wrong and then declare, hand on heart, that once the people have been informed of what is happening, the truth will set them free and a quarter-billion candles will be lit and the darkness will flee in the presence of so much spontaneous light. But Berman is much too serious for the easy platitude. Instead he tells us that those who might have struck at least a match can no longer do so because shared information about our situation is meager to nonexistent. Would better schools help? Of course, but, according to that joyous bearer of ill tidings, the New York Times, many school districts are now making sobriety tests a regular feature of the school day: apparently opium derivatives are the opiate of our stoned youth. Meanwhile, millions of adult Americans, presumably undrugged, have no idea who our enemies were in World War II. Many college graduates don't know the difference between an argument and an assertion (did their teachers also fail to solve this knotty question?). A travel agent in Arizona is often asked whether or not it is cheaper to take the train rather than fly to Hawaii. Only 12% of Americans own a passport. At the time of the 2004 presidential election 42% of voters believed that Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11. One high school boy, when asked who won the Civil War, replied wearily, "I don't know and I don't care," echoing a busy neocon who confessed proudly: "The American Civil War is as remote to me as the War of the Roses."
We are assured daily by advertisers and/or politicians that we are the richest, most envied people on Earth and, apparently, that is why so many awful, ill-groomed people want to blow us up. We live in an impermeable bubble without the sort of information that people living in real countries have access to when it comes to their own reality. But we are not actually people in the eyes of the national ownership: we are simply unreliable consumers comprising an overworked, underpaid labor force not in the best of health: The World Health Organization rates our healthcare system (sic--or sick?) as 37th-best in the world, far behind even Saudi Arabia, role model for the Texans. Our infant mortality rate is satisfyingly high, precluding a First World educational system. Also, it has not gone unremarked even in our usually information-free media that despite the boost to the profits of such companies as Halliburton, Bush's wars of aggression against small countries of no danger to us have left us well and truly broke. Our annual trade deficit is a half-trillion dollars, which means that we don't produce much of anything the world wants except those wan reports on how popular our Entertainment is overseas. Unfortunately the foreign gross of "King Kong," the Edsel of that assembly line, is not yet known. It is rumored that Bollywood--the Indian film business--may soon surpass us! Berman writes, "We have lost our edge in science to Europe...The US economy is being kept afloat by huge foreign loans ($4 billion a day during 2003). What do you think will happen when America's creditors decide to pull the plug, or when OPEC members begin selling oil in euros instead of dollars?...An International Monetary Fund report of 2004 concluded that the United States was 'careening toward insolvency.' " Meanwhile, China, our favorite big-time future enemy, is the number one for worldwide foreign investments, with France, the bete noire of our apish neocons, in second place.
Well, we still have Kraft cheese and, of course, the death penalty.
Berman makes the case that the Bretton-Woods agreement of 1944 institutionalized a system geared toward full employment and the maintenance of a social safety net for society's less fortunate--the so-called welfare or interventionist state. It did this by establishing fixed but flexible exchange rates among world currencies, which were pegged to the U.S. dollar while the dollar, for its part, was pegged to gold. In a word, Bretton-Woods saved capitalism by making it more human. Nixon abandoned the agreement in 1971, which started, according to Berman, huge amounts of capital moving upward from the poor and the middle class to the rich and super-rich.
Mr. Berman spares us the happy ending, as, apparently, has history. When the admirable Tiberius (he has had an undeserved bad press), upon becoming emperor, received a message from the Senate in which the conscript fathers assured him that whatever legislation he wanted would be automatically passed by them, he sent back word that this was outrageous. "Suppose the emperor is ill or mad or incompetent?" He returned their message. They sent it again. His response: "How eager you are to be slaves." I often think of that wise emperor when I hear Republican members of Congress extolling the wisdom of Bush. Now that he has been caught illegally wiretapping fellow citizens he has taken to snarling about his powers as "a wartime president," and so, in his own mind, he is above each and every law of the land. Oddly, no one in Congress has pointed out that he may well be a lunatic dreaming that he is another Lincoln but whatever he is or is not he is no wartime president. There is no war with any other nation...yet. There is no state called terror, an abstract noun like liar. Certainly his illegal unilateral ravaging of Iraq may well seem like a real war for those on both sides unlucky enough to be killed or wounded, but that does not make it a war any more than the appearance of having been elected twice to the presidency does not mean that in due course the people will demand an investigation of those two irregular processes. Although he has done a number of things that under the old republic might have got him impeached, our current system protects him: incumbency-for-life seats have made it possible for a Republican majority in the House not to do its duty and impeach him for his incompetence in handling, say, the natural disaster that befell Louisiana.
The founders thought two-year terms for members of the House was as much democracy as we'd ever need. Therefore, there was no great movement to have some sort of recall legislation in the event that a president wasn't up to his job and so had lost the people's confidence between elections. But in time, as Ecclesiastes would say, all things shall come to pass and so, in a kindly way, a majority of the citizens must persuade him that he will be happier back in Crawford pruning Bushes of the leafy sort while the troops not killed or maimed will settle for simply being alive and in one piece. We may be slaves but we are not unreasonable.
One way that a majority of citizens can help open the road back to Crawford is by heeding the call of a group called the World Can't Wait (see their website, worldcantwait.org). They believe that the agenda for 2006 must not be set by the Bush gang but by the people taking independent mass political action.
On Jan. 31, the night of Bush's next State of the Union address, they have called for people in large cities and small towns all across the country to join in noisy rallies to make the demand that "Bush Step Down" the message of the day. At 9 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, just as Bush starts to speak, people can make a joyful noise and figuratively drown out his address. Then on the following Saturday, Feb. 4, converge in front of the White House with the same message: Please step down and take your program with you.
"What the hell?"
Win Butler
Win Butler
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Sonic Youth
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- Posts: 8008
- Joined: Wed Jan 01, 2003 8:35 pm
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When George Met Jack
White House aides deny the President knew lobbyist Abramoff, but unpublished photos shown to TIME suggest there's more to the story
By ADAM ZAGORIN, MIKE ALLEN
Time Magazine
As details poured out about the illegal and unseemly activities of Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, White House officials sought to portray the scandal as a Capitol Hill affair with little relevance to them. Peppered for days with questions about Abramoff's visits to the White House, press secretary Scott McClellan said the now disgraced lobbyist had attended two huge holiday receptions and a few "staff-level meetings" that were not worth describing further. "The President does not know him, nor does the President recall ever meeting him," McClellan said.
The President's memory may soon be unhappily refreshed. TIME has seen five photographs of Abramoff and the President that suggest a level of contact between them that Bush's aides have downplayed. While TIME's source refused to provide the pictures for publication, they are likely to see the light of day eventually because celebrity tabloids are on the prowl for them. And that has been a fear of the Bush team's for the past several months: that a picture of the President with the admitted felon could become the iconic image of direct presidential involvement in a burgeoning corruption scandal like the shots of President Bill Clinton at White House coffees for campaign contributors in the mid-1990s.
In one shot that TIME saw, Bush appears with Abramoff, several unidentified people and Raul Garza Sr., a Texan Abramoff represented who was then chairman of the Kickapoo Indians, which owned a casino in southern Texas. Garza, who is wearing jeans and a bolo tie in the picture, told TIME that Bush greeted him as "Jefe," or "chief" in Spanish. Another photo shows Bush shaking hands with Abramoff in front of a window and a blue drape. The shot bears Bush's signature, perhaps made by a machine. Three other photos are of Bush, Abramoff and, in each view, one of the lobbyist's sons (three of his five children are boys). A sixth picture shows several Abramoff children with Bush and House Speaker Dennis Hastert, who is now pushing to tighten lobbying laws after declining to do so last year when the scandal was in its early stages.
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Pictures of Bush With Abramoff a "Coincidence"
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Monday, January 23, 2006
(01-23) 04:52 PST WASHINGTON, (AP) --
An adviser to President Bush said Monday that Bush's photographs in the company of disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff amount to a coincidence and shouldn't be interpreted any more seriously than that.
"He doesn't have a personal relationship with him," White House counselor Dan Bartlett said of Bush and Abramoff, who recently pleaded guilty to federal charges stemming from his lobbying practices and has pledged to cooperate with government prosecutors.
"We acknowledge he (Abramaoff) attended some Hannukuah celebrations," Bartlett said in an appearance on NBC's "Today" show. "Any suggestions by critics or anyone else to suggest the president is doing something nefarious with Abramoff is absurd."
Bush himself has said that he doesn't recall meeting Abramoff.
Both Washingtonian and Time magazines have reported the existence of about a half-dozen photos showing the two together, however.
Time reported on its Web site Sunday that its staff members have seen at least six photos featuring Bush and Abramoff. They appeared to have been taken at White House functions, according to the reports.
On ABC's "Good Morning America" Monday, Bartlett said, "I don't think it's a surprise to anybody that there's probably widely-gathered events where the president does photo-line opportunities."
The White House has not released any photos featuring the president and Abramoff, who was declared a Bush "pioneer" for raising at least $100,000 for the Bush-Cheney '04 re-election campaign.
Contributions that came directly from Abramoff, his wife and one of the American Indian tribes he represented — a total of $6,000 — were donated to the American Heart Association by the campaign just days after Abramoff entered his guilty pleas.
The White House, after playing down the Bush-Abramoff photos and the lobbyist's ties to the president, criticized Abramoff for breaking the law. "Mr. Abramoff admitted being involved in outrageous wrongdoing," spokeswoman Dana Perino said Sunday.
White House aides deny the President knew lobbyist Abramoff, but unpublished photos shown to TIME suggest there's more to the story
By ADAM ZAGORIN, MIKE ALLEN
Time Magazine
As details poured out about the illegal and unseemly activities of Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, White House officials sought to portray the scandal as a Capitol Hill affair with little relevance to them. Peppered for days with questions about Abramoff's visits to the White House, press secretary Scott McClellan said the now disgraced lobbyist had attended two huge holiday receptions and a few "staff-level meetings" that were not worth describing further. "The President does not know him, nor does the President recall ever meeting him," McClellan said.
The President's memory may soon be unhappily refreshed. TIME has seen five photographs of Abramoff and the President that suggest a level of contact between them that Bush's aides have downplayed. While TIME's source refused to provide the pictures for publication, they are likely to see the light of day eventually because celebrity tabloids are on the prowl for them. And that has been a fear of the Bush team's for the past several months: that a picture of the President with the admitted felon could become the iconic image of direct presidential involvement in a burgeoning corruption scandal like the shots of President Bill Clinton at White House coffees for campaign contributors in the mid-1990s.
In one shot that TIME saw, Bush appears with Abramoff, several unidentified people and Raul Garza Sr., a Texan Abramoff represented who was then chairman of the Kickapoo Indians, which owned a casino in southern Texas. Garza, who is wearing jeans and a bolo tie in the picture, told TIME that Bush greeted him as "Jefe," or "chief" in Spanish. Another photo shows Bush shaking hands with Abramoff in front of a window and a blue drape. The shot bears Bush's signature, perhaps made by a machine. Three other photos are of Bush, Abramoff and, in each view, one of the lobbyist's sons (three of his five children are boys). A sixth picture shows several Abramoff children with Bush and House Speaker Dennis Hastert, who is now pushing to tighten lobbying laws after declining to do so last year when the scandal was in its early stages.
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Pictures of Bush With Abramoff a "Coincidence"
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Monday, January 23, 2006
(01-23) 04:52 PST WASHINGTON, (AP) --
An adviser to President Bush said Monday that Bush's photographs in the company of disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff amount to a coincidence and shouldn't be interpreted any more seriously than that.
"He doesn't have a personal relationship with him," White House counselor Dan Bartlett said of Bush and Abramoff, who recently pleaded guilty to federal charges stemming from his lobbying practices and has pledged to cooperate with government prosecutors.
"We acknowledge he (Abramaoff) attended some Hannukuah celebrations," Bartlett said in an appearance on NBC's "Today" show. "Any suggestions by critics or anyone else to suggest the president is doing something nefarious with Abramoff is absurd."
Bush himself has said that he doesn't recall meeting Abramoff.
Both Washingtonian and Time magazines have reported the existence of about a half-dozen photos showing the two together, however.
Time reported on its Web site Sunday that its staff members have seen at least six photos featuring Bush and Abramoff. They appeared to have been taken at White House functions, according to the reports.
On ABC's "Good Morning America" Monday, Bartlett said, "I don't think it's a surprise to anybody that there's probably widely-gathered events where the president does photo-line opportunities."
The White House has not released any photos featuring the president and Abramoff, who was declared a Bush "pioneer" for raising at least $100,000 for the Bush-Cheney '04 re-election campaign.
Contributions that came directly from Abramoff, his wife and one of the American Indian tribes he represented — a total of $6,000 — were donated to the American Heart Association by the campaign just days after Abramoff entered his guilty pleas.
The White House, after playing down the Bush-Abramoff photos and the lobbyist's ties to the president, criticized Abramoff for breaking the law. "Mr. Abramoff admitted being involved in outrageous wrongdoing," spokeswoman Dana Perino said Sunday.
"What the hell?"
Win Butler
Win Butler
Harry Belafonte, American Hero
BELAFONTE CONTINUES TIRADE AGAINST BUSH
By VERENA DOBNIK, AP
NEW YORK (Jan. 21) - Entertainer Harry Belafonte, one of the Bush administration's harshest critics, compared the national Homeland Security department to the Gestapo and attacked the president as a liar during a fiery Saturday speech.
"We've come to this dark time in which the Gestapo of Homeland Security lurks here, where citizens are having their rights suspended," Belafonte told thousands of people at the annual meeting of the Arts Presenters Members Conference.
"You can be arrested and not charged, you can be arrested and have no right to counsel," said Belafonte, who called President Bush "the greatest terrorist in the world" during a trip to Venezuela two weeks ago. Belafonte, 78, made that comment after a meeting with Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez.
The Harlem-born Belafonte, who was raised in Jamaica, said his activism was inspired by an impoverished mother "who imbued in me that we should never capitulate to oppression."
He acknowledged that the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks demanded a reaction by the United States, but charged that the policies of the Bush administration were not the right response.
Bush, he said, was a president "who has risen to power somewhat dubiously and ... then lies to the people of this nation, misleads them, misinstructs, and then sends off hundreds of
BELAFONTE CONTINUES TIRADE AGAINST BUSH
By VERENA DOBNIK, AP
NEW YORK (Jan. 21) - Entertainer Harry Belafonte, one of the Bush administration's harshest critics, compared the national Homeland Security department to the Gestapo and attacked the president as a liar during a fiery Saturday speech.
"We've come to this dark time in which the Gestapo of Homeland Security lurks here, where citizens are having their rights suspended," Belafonte told thousands of people at the annual meeting of the Arts Presenters Members Conference.
"You can be arrested and not charged, you can be arrested and have no right to counsel," said Belafonte, who called President Bush "the greatest terrorist in the world" during a trip to Venezuela two weeks ago. Belafonte, 78, made that comment after a meeting with Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez.
The Harlem-born Belafonte, who was raised in Jamaica, said his activism was inspired by an impoverished mother "who imbued in me that we should never capitulate to oppression."
He acknowledged that the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks demanded a reaction by the United States, but charged that the policies of the Bush administration were not the right response.
Bush, he said, was a president "who has risen to power somewhat dubiously and ... then lies to the people of this nation, misleads them, misinstructs, and then sends off hundreds of
"Y'know, that's one of the things I like about Mitt Romney. He's been consistent since he changed his mind." -- Christine O'Donnell
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<span style='font-size:17pt;line-height:100%'>2,207</span>
Attack on Iraq Interior Ministry Kills 21
By JASON STRAZIUSO, Associated Press Writer
Monday, January 9, 2006
(01-09) 06:13 PST BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) --
Insurgents exploded a suicide car bomb and launched two mortar shells at Iraq's Interior Ministry during National Police Day celebrations Monday, killing 21 people and injuring 24, police said.
An Internet statement by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in the name of his al-Qaida in Iraq terrorist group rebuked Sunni Arabs for taking part in last month's parliamentary elections, saying they had "thrown a rope" to save U.S. policy.
Meanwhile, the U.S. military said eight U.S. troops and four American civilians died aboard a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter that crashed late Saturday in northern Iraq. The military initially said only that there were eight passengers and four crew aboard.
The military statement came after a particularly deadly four-day period for Americans, with 28 killed since Thursday.
With the latest military deaths, at least 2,207 U.S. service members have died since the war started in 2003, according to an Associated Press count.
Attack on Iraq Interior Ministry Kills 21
By JASON STRAZIUSO, Associated Press Writer
Monday, January 9, 2006
(01-09) 06:13 PST BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) --
Insurgents exploded a suicide car bomb and launched two mortar shells at Iraq's Interior Ministry during National Police Day celebrations Monday, killing 21 people and injuring 24, police said.
An Internet statement by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in the name of his al-Qaida in Iraq terrorist group rebuked Sunni Arabs for taking part in last month's parliamentary elections, saying they had "thrown a rope" to save U.S. policy.
Meanwhile, the U.S. military said eight U.S. troops and four American civilians died aboard a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter that crashed late Saturday in northern Iraq. The military initially said only that there were eight passengers and four crew aboard.
The military statement came after a particularly deadly four-day period for Americans, with 28 killed since Thursday.
With the latest military deaths, at least 2,207 U.S. service members have died since the war started in 2003, according to an Associated Press count.
"What the hell?"
Win Butler
Win Butler
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Sonic Youth
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- Joined: Wed Jan 01, 2003 8:35 pm
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AP Poll: Congressional Democrats Favored
Jan 6, 5:25 PM (ET)
By WILL LESTER
WASHINGTON (AP) - In an ominous election-year sign for Republicans, Americans are leaning sharply toward wanting Democrats to take control of Congress, an AP-Ipsos poll finds. Democrats are favored 49 percent to 36 percent.
The poll was taken this week as Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff pleaded guilty to tax evasion, fraud and corruption charges and agreed to aid a federal investigation of members of Congress and other government officials.
President Bush's job approval remains low - 40 percent in the AP-Ipsos poll. About as many approve of his handling of Iraq, where violence against Iraqis and U.S. troops has been surging.
"I don't think anyone is hitting the panic button," said Rich Bond, a former Republican National Committee chairman. "But there is an acute recognition of the grim environment that both parties are operating in."
"If the Democrats had any leadership or any message, they could be poised for a good year," Bond said. "But in the absence of that, they have not been able to capitalize on Republican woes. Because of the size of the GOP majority, Democrats have to run the board, and I don't see that happening."
The public's unease with Republican leadership in the White House and Congress creates a favorable environment for Democrats, said Democratic consultant Dane Strother.
"The problem is you don't vote for a party," Strother said. "You're voting for a member of Congress. And we're a year away."
About a third of the public, 34 percent, approves of the job Congress is doing, and nearly twice as many, 63 percent, disapprove, according to the poll of 1,001 adults taken Jan. 3-5. The margin of sampling error was plus or minus 3 percentage points. Public opinion of both Democrats and Republicans in Congress has been mixed, recent polling found.
"Neither one of the parties has done a very good job so far," said Cristal Mills, a political independent from Los Angeles. "They get away with murder, they get paid to pass certain things. It's the good ol' boy syndrome."
In the Senate, 33 seats will be on the ballot in November, 17 of them currently in Democratic hands, 15 controlled by Republicans, and one held by Sen. James Jeffords, a Vermont independent. Democrats now have 44 Senate seats, and need to pick up seven to gain a majority, six if Vermont independent Bernie Sanders replaces Jeffords.
All 435 House seats are on the ballot this fall, and Democrats need to gain at least 15 to become the majority party and take control of the House.
While many House races are noncompetitive, Republican strategists fear that fallout from the Abramoff scandal will give Democrats fresh opportunity for gains. But they dismiss suggestions that Democrats could take control of the House.
Republicans became the dominant party in the House in 1994, when the GOP picked up more than 50 seats held by Democrats. In that midterm election, Democrats won four open seats that previously were held by the GOP.
Carl Forti, a spokesman for the GOP's congressional campaign committee, said about 30 House seats are competitive this year, compared with more than 100 a dozen years ago. Rep. Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, who heads the Democrats' campaign efforts, put the competitive number in 2006 at 42, and he suggested ongoing scandals improve Democratic recruitment of candidates by "making the environment more conducive. It helps move them along in the process."
Some people say they are leaning toward giving Democrats control of Congress because they want to see changes.
"I just don't like the direction our country is going in," said Steve Brown, a political independent from Olympia, Wash. "I think a balance of power would be beneficial right now."
Jan 6, 5:25 PM (ET)
By WILL LESTER
WASHINGTON (AP) - In an ominous election-year sign for Republicans, Americans are leaning sharply toward wanting Democrats to take control of Congress, an AP-Ipsos poll finds. Democrats are favored 49 percent to 36 percent.
The poll was taken this week as Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff pleaded guilty to tax evasion, fraud and corruption charges and agreed to aid a federal investigation of members of Congress and other government officials.
President Bush's job approval remains low - 40 percent in the AP-Ipsos poll. About as many approve of his handling of Iraq, where violence against Iraqis and U.S. troops has been surging.
"I don't think anyone is hitting the panic button," said Rich Bond, a former Republican National Committee chairman. "But there is an acute recognition of the grim environment that both parties are operating in."
"If the Democrats had any leadership or any message, they could be poised for a good year," Bond said. "But in the absence of that, they have not been able to capitalize on Republican woes. Because of the size of the GOP majority, Democrats have to run the board, and I don't see that happening."
The public's unease with Republican leadership in the White House and Congress creates a favorable environment for Democrats, said Democratic consultant Dane Strother.
"The problem is you don't vote for a party," Strother said. "You're voting for a member of Congress. And we're a year away."
About a third of the public, 34 percent, approves of the job Congress is doing, and nearly twice as many, 63 percent, disapprove, according to the poll of 1,001 adults taken Jan. 3-5. The margin of sampling error was plus or minus 3 percentage points. Public opinion of both Democrats and Republicans in Congress has been mixed, recent polling found.
"Neither one of the parties has done a very good job so far," said Cristal Mills, a political independent from Los Angeles. "They get away with murder, they get paid to pass certain things. It's the good ol' boy syndrome."
In the Senate, 33 seats will be on the ballot in November, 17 of them currently in Democratic hands, 15 controlled by Republicans, and one held by Sen. James Jeffords, a Vermont independent. Democrats now have 44 Senate seats, and need to pick up seven to gain a majority, six if Vermont independent Bernie Sanders replaces Jeffords.
All 435 House seats are on the ballot this fall, and Democrats need to gain at least 15 to become the majority party and take control of the House.
While many House races are noncompetitive, Republican strategists fear that fallout from the Abramoff scandal will give Democrats fresh opportunity for gains. But they dismiss suggestions that Democrats could take control of the House.
Republicans became the dominant party in the House in 1994, when the GOP picked up more than 50 seats held by Democrats. In that midterm election, Democrats won four open seats that previously were held by the GOP.
Carl Forti, a spokesman for the GOP's congressional campaign committee, said about 30 House seats are competitive this year, compared with more than 100 a dozen years ago. Rep. Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, who heads the Democrats' campaign efforts, put the competitive number in 2006 at 42, and he suggested ongoing scandals improve Democratic recruitment of candidates by "making the environment more conducive. It helps move them along in the process."
Some people say they are leaning toward giving Democrats control of Congress because they want to see changes.
"I just don't like the direction our country is going in," said Steve Brown, a political independent from Olympia, Wash. "I think a balance of power would be beneficial right now."
"What the hell?"
Win Butler
Win Butler
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Sonic Youth
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Iraq, the ongoing success.
At least 134 killed in attacks across Iraq
80 killed in one attack
Thursday, January 5, 2006; Posted: 11:04 a.m. EST (16:04 GMT)
BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- In the deadliest day since the December 15 elections, at least 134 people were killed in Iraq and scores were wounded in separate insurgent-bomb attacks, authorities said Thursday.
In Ramadi, 80 people were killed and dozens wounded when a bomber detonated near an Iraqi police recruitment and screening drive, according to a U.S. Marine news release.
About 1,000 people were waiting in line to apply for positions on the new Iraqi police force being reconstituted, officials said.
Ramadi is the capital of restive Anbar province, where U.S. and Iraqi military forces conducted several operations just before the elections, aimed at rooting out a strong insurgency there.
A blast in Karbala, a Shiite holy city, killed 45 people and wounded dozens more on Thursday morning in a pedestrian mall that runs between the Imam Hussien and Imam Abbas holy shrines, police spokesman Rahman Mishawi said.
The area has been closed off and police are investigating, Mishawi said.
Karbala, located about 50 miles (80 kilometers) south of Baghdad, has been relatively free of violence for the past year.
Among the 130 dead were five U.S. soldiers with Task Force Baghdad, according to a U.S. military news release.
The soldiers were patrolling in the Iraqi capital when their Humvee was hit by a roadside bomb, the release said.
With the deaths, 2,187 U.S. service members have been killed in the Iraq war.
Meanwhile in central Baquba, four police officers were killed and another four were wounded about 9 a.m. when insurgents ambushed a police patrol using small arms fire, authorities said.
Spike in violence
The attacks marked a second day of widespread violence in Iraq.
The most deadly incident on Wednesday was in Muqdadiya, about 100 kilometers (60 miles) north of Baghdad, where a suicide bomber killed 36 people and wounded 40 others at funeral procession, officials said.
Those attending the funeral were on foot when the bomber mixed in among them.
The funeral was for Mohammed al-Bakka, nephew of Ahmed al-Bakka, Ahmed al-Bakk, ahead of Muqdadiya's Dawa party and director of the town.
Ahmed al-Bakka survived an assassination attempt Tuesday, but a bodyguard and his nephew were killed.
Dawa is the party of Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari.
Earlier Wednesday, five people were killed and 15 wounded in a car bomb attack on an Iraqi police patrol in northern Baghdad neighborhood of Kadhimiya. The casualties included police officers and civilians.
A short time later, Iraq police commandos battled insurgents for about 30 minutes in western Baghdad's Gazaliya neighborhood.
The firefight left one commando dead and 17 other people wounded, including 16 commandos.
Also Wednesday, three people died and 11 more were wounded when a parked car bomb remotely detonated in an attack on an Iraqi police commando patrol in southern Baghdad's al-Dora neighborhood, Baghdad police said.
An Iraqi police commando was among the dead, and six commandos were wounded in the 3 p.m. attack, the official said.
Meanwhile, attackers used rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns Wednesday to destroy 20 fuel tankers in two attacks on a convoy traveling from a refinery in Baiji to Baghdad, an official with the Salah al-Din Joint Coordination Center told CNN.
The first attack took place in Tikrit, where gunmen hit a tanker with an rocket-propelled grenade and killed the driver. An hour later, gunmen attacked the same convoy in Mashahda, about 90 kilometers (60 miles) north of Baghdad, destroying 19 more tankers, the officials said.
The fate of those 19 drivers was unknown, the official added.
At least 134 killed in attacks across Iraq
80 killed in one attack
Thursday, January 5, 2006; Posted: 11:04 a.m. EST (16:04 GMT)
BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- In the deadliest day since the December 15 elections, at least 134 people were killed in Iraq and scores were wounded in separate insurgent-bomb attacks, authorities said Thursday.
In Ramadi, 80 people were killed and dozens wounded when a bomber detonated near an Iraqi police recruitment and screening drive, according to a U.S. Marine news release.
About 1,000 people were waiting in line to apply for positions on the new Iraqi police force being reconstituted, officials said.
Ramadi is the capital of restive Anbar province, where U.S. and Iraqi military forces conducted several operations just before the elections, aimed at rooting out a strong insurgency there.
A blast in Karbala, a Shiite holy city, killed 45 people and wounded dozens more on Thursday morning in a pedestrian mall that runs between the Imam Hussien and Imam Abbas holy shrines, police spokesman Rahman Mishawi said.
The area has been closed off and police are investigating, Mishawi said.
Karbala, located about 50 miles (80 kilometers) south of Baghdad, has been relatively free of violence for the past year.
Among the 130 dead were five U.S. soldiers with Task Force Baghdad, according to a U.S. military news release.
The soldiers were patrolling in the Iraqi capital when their Humvee was hit by a roadside bomb, the release said.
With the deaths, 2,187 U.S. service members have been killed in the Iraq war.
Meanwhile in central Baquba, four police officers were killed and another four were wounded about 9 a.m. when insurgents ambushed a police patrol using small arms fire, authorities said.
Spike in violence
The attacks marked a second day of widespread violence in Iraq.
The most deadly incident on Wednesday was in Muqdadiya, about 100 kilometers (60 miles) north of Baghdad, where a suicide bomber killed 36 people and wounded 40 others at funeral procession, officials said.
Those attending the funeral were on foot when the bomber mixed in among them.
The funeral was for Mohammed al-Bakka, nephew of Ahmed al-Bakka, Ahmed al-Bakk, ahead of Muqdadiya's Dawa party and director of the town.
Ahmed al-Bakka survived an assassination attempt Tuesday, but a bodyguard and his nephew were killed.
Dawa is the party of Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari.
Earlier Wednesday, five people were killed and 15 wounded in a car bomb attack on an Iraqi police patrol in northern Baghdad neighborhood of Kadhimiya. The casualties included police officers and civilians.
A short time later, Iraq police commandos battled insurgents for about 30 minutes in western Baghdad's Gazaliya neighborhood.
The firefight left one commando dead and 17 other people wounded, including 16 commandos.
Also Wednesday, three people died and 11 more were wounded when a parked car bomb remotely detonated in an attack on an Iraqi police commando patrol in southern Baghdad's al-Dora neighborhood, Baghdad police said.
An Iraqi police commando was among the dead, and six commandos were wounded in the 3 p.m. attack, the official said.
Meanwhile, attackers used rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns Wednesday to destroy 20 fuel tankers in two attacks on a convoy traveling from a refinery in Baiji to Baghdad, an official with the Salah al-Din Joint Coordination Center told CNN.
The first attack took place in Tikrit, where gunmen hit a tanker with an rocket-propelled grenade and killed the driver. An hour later, gunmen attacked the same convoy in Mashahda, about 90 kilometers (60 miles) north of Baghdad, destroying 19 more tankers, the officials said.
The fate of those 19 drivers was unknown, the official added.
"What the hell?"
Win Butler
Win Butler
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Support for Bush drops among US military: poll
Jan 02 6:43 PM US/Eastern
AFP
Support for President George W. Bush's Iraq policy has fallen among the US armed forces to just 54 percent from 63 percent a year ago, according to a poll by the magazine group Military Times.
In its annual survey of the views of military personnel, the group reported on its website that support for Bush's overall policies dropped over the past year to 60 percent from 71 percent.
While still significantly more supportive of the president than the broad US population, the fall in support by military personnel tracks a similar decline in the president's popularity among the general public.
"Though support both for President Bush and for the war in Iraq remains significantly higher than in the public as a whole, the drop is likely to add further fuel to the heated debate over Iraq policy," Military Times said.
"In 2003 and 2004, supporters of the war in Iraq pointed to high approval ratings in the Military Times poll as a signal that military members were behind ... the president's policy."
However, it said, the new poll "found diminished optimism that US goals in Iraq can be accomplished, and a somewhat smaller drop in support for the decision to go to war in 2003."
Military Times, which publishes popular magazines for each of the US military branches including Army Times and Navy Times, cautioned that its poll, of 1,215 active-duty servicemen, is not necessarily representative of the military as a whole.
The respondents were "on average older, more experienced, more likely to be officers and more career-oriented than the military population."
But the declining numbers for Bush tracked other polls. According to the CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll, support for Bush's performance as president fell from 49 percent to 43 percent over the year to December 22.
The Military Times poll also showed a significant decline in the armed forces' views of US military policy and management.
With 61 percent of respondents saying they had served in Iraq or Afghanistan, only 58 percent believed that Bush had the military's best interests at heart, a sharp decline from 69 percent a year before.
Only 56 percent felt the US should have gone to war in Iraq, compared to 60 percent a year before.
And 64 percent felt the same about the Pentagon leadership, compared to 70 percent a year ago.
Addressing key issues facing the Pentagon, the poll showed that almost two-thirds of the soldiers felt the US military is "stretched too thin to be effective", but the number was less than a year ago.
At the same time, there was a fall in resistance to restoring the draft in the United States. Opposition fell from 75 percent a year ago to 68 percent this year.
Jan 02 6:43 PM US/Eastern
AFP
Support for President George W. Bush's Iraq policy has fallen among the US armed forces to just 54 percent from 63 percent a year ago, according to a poll by the magazine group Military Times.
In its annual survey of the views of military personnel, the group reported on its website that support for Bush's overall policies dropped over the past year to 60 percent from 71 percent.
While still significantly more supportive of the president than the broad US population, the fall in support by military personnel tracks a similar decline in the president's popularity among the general public.
"Though support both for President Bush and for the war in Iraq remains significantly higher than in the public as a whole, the drop is likely to add further fuel to the heated debate over Iraq policy," Military Times said.
"In 2003 and 2004, supporters of the war in Iraq pointed to high approval ratings in the Military Times poll as a signal that military members were behind ... the president's policy."
However, it said, the new poll "found diminished optimism that US goals in Iraq can be accomplished, and a somewhat smaller drop in support for the decision to go to war in 2003."
Military Times, which publishes popular magazines for each of the US military branches including Army Times and Navy Times, cautioned that its poll, of 1,215 active-duty servicemen, is not necessarily representative of the military as a whole.
The respondents were "on average older, more experienced, more likely to be officers and more career-oriented than the military population."
But the declining numbers for Bush tracked other polls. According to the CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll, support for Bush's performance as president fell from 49 percent to 43 percent over the year to December 22.
The Military Times poll also showed a significant decline in the armed forces' views of US military policy and management.
With 61 percent of respondents saying they had served in Iraq or Afghanistan, only 58 percent believed that Bush had the military's best interests at heart, a sharp decline from 69 percent a year before.
Only 56 percent felt the US should have gone to war in Iraq, compared to 60 percent a year before.
And 64 percent felt the same about the Pentagon leadership, compared to 70 percent a year ago.
Addressing key issues facing the Pentagon, the poll showed that almost two-thirds of the soldiers felt the US military is "stretched too thin to be effective", but the number was less than a year ago.
At the same time, there was a fall in resistance to restoring the draft in the United States. Opposition fell from 75 percent a year ago to 68 percent this year.
"What the hell?"
Win Butler
Win Butler
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Shall we end the year on one more jaw-dropper?
<span style='font-size:14pt;line-height:100%'>JUSTICE DEPT. OPENS PROBE INTO LEAK OF NSA SPY PROGRAM </span>
(Because leaking information is more important than an administration engaging in illegal activities.)
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The Justice Department has opened an investigation into leaks to the media about the National Security Agency's classified domestic surveillance program.
The program authorizes the NSA to eavesdrop on Americans without first seeking permission from a court for a search warrant. It has caused a political uproar with both Democrats and Republicans questioning whether President Bush went beyond his powers under the U.S. Constitution in authorizing it.
The New York Times was the first to report the story on December 16th and then officials confirmed its existence to CNN and other organizations.
"The Justice Department has opened an investigation of the unauthorized disclosure of classified information related to the NSA," a Justice Department official told CNN.
The leak investigation is expected to be handled, as is standard, by Justice Department prosecutors and FBI agents. Officials would not say when the investigation began.
The New York Times declined to comment on the leak investigation.
---------------------------------
Happy new year. Three more years of this destructive tyrant to go. I don't think we'll have a country left.
<span style='font-size:14pt;line-height:100%'>JUSTICE DEPT. OPENS PROBE INTO LEAK OF NSA SPY PROGRAM </span>
(Because leaking information is more important than an administration engaging in illegal activities.)
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The Justice Department has opened an investigation into leaks to the media about the National Security Agency's classified domestic surveillance program.
The program authorizes the NSA to eavesdrop on Americans without first seeking permission from a court for a search warrant. It has caused a political uproar with both Democrats and Republicans questioning whether President Bush went beyond his powers under the U.S. Constitution in authorizing it.
The New York Times was the first to report the story on December 16th and then officials confirmed its existence to CNN and other organizations.
"The Justice Department has opened an investigation of the unauthorized disclosure of classified information related to the NSA," a Justice Department official told CNN.
The leak investigation is expected to be handled, as is standard, by Justice Department prosecutors and FBI agents. Officials would not say when the investigation began.
The New York Times declined to comment on the leak investigation.
---------------------------------
Happy new year. Three more years of this destructive tyrant to go. I don't think we'll have a country left.
"What the hell?"
Win Butler
Win Butler
Sonic Youth wrote:Sorry to be a wet blanket, but if it's from Capitol Hill Blue, it's sure to be a lie.
Oh, okay. Thanks, Sonic. I'll be sure to make a note of that for all future posts in this thread.
"The mantle of spinsterhood was definitely in her shoulders. She was twenty five and looked it."
-Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
-Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
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Sonic Youth
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Sorry to be a wet blanket, but if it's from Capitol Hill Blue, it's sure to be a lie.flipp525 wrote:You've gotta love the part about troops being told they can go home early if they give the media favorable statements about the war. This is just sick (but not entirely unexpected).
Soldiers Ordered to Promote War While at Home
CHB Investigates. . .
Pentagon propaganda program orders soldiers to promote Iraq war while home on leave
By DOUG THOMPSON
Publisher, Capitol Hill Blue
Dec 29, 2005, 05:44
"What the hell?"
Win Butler
Win Butler
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Sonic Youth
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Harris Survey: Many Americans Still Think Saddam Was Behind 9/11
By E&P Staff
Published: December 29, 2005 3:45 PM ET
More than four years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, 22% of adults believe that Saddam Hussein "helped plan and support the hijackers who attacked the United States on September 11," according to a new Harris Poll. And nearly one in four (24%) of all adults wrongly believe that "several of the hijackers who attacked the United States on September 11 were Iraqis."
In other results bearing on support for the Iraq war, 26% of adults believe that Iraq "had weapons of mass destruction when the U.S. invaded," and 41% believe that Saddam Hussein had strong links to Al Qaeda."
While these numbers have declined in the past two years, Harris commented, “Many U.S. adults still believe some of the
justifications for the invasion of Iraq, which have now been discredited,” raising questions about media coverage during this period.
These are the results of a nationwide Harris Poll of 1,961 U.S. adults between December 8 and 14, 2005.
By E&P Staff
Published: December 29, 2005 3:45 PM ET
More than four years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, 22% of adults believe that Saddam Hussein "helped plan and support the hijackers who attacked the United States on September 11," according to a new Harris Poll. And nearly one in four (24%) of all adults wrongly believe that "several of the hijackers who attacked the United States on September 11 were Iraqis."
In other results bearing on support for the Iraq war, 26% of adults believe that Iraq "had weapons of mass destruction when the U.S. invaded," and 41% believe that Saddam Hussein had strong links to Al Qaeda."
While these numbers have declined in the past two years, Harris commented, “Many U.S. adults still believe some of the
justifications for the invasion of Iraq, which have now been discredited,” raising questions about media coverage during this period.
These are the results of a nationwide Harris Poll of 1,961 U.S. adults between December 8 and 14, 2005.
"What the hell?"
Win Butler
Win Butler
You've gotta love the part about troops being told they can go home early if they give the media favorable statements about the war. This is just sick (but not entirely unexpected).
Soldiers Ordered to Promote War While at Home
CHB Investigates. . .
Pentagon propaganda program orders soldiers to promote Iraq war while home on leave
By DOUG THOMPSON
Publisher, Capitol Hill Blue
Dec 29, 2005, 05:44
Link
Good soldiers follow orders and hundreds of American military men and women returned to the United States on holiday leave this month with orders to sell the Iraq war to a skeptical public.
The program, coordinated through a Pentagon operation dubbed “Operation Homefront,” ordered military personnel to give interviews to their hometown newspapers, television stations and other media outlets and praise the American war effort in Iraq.
Initial reports back to the Pentagon deem the operation a success with dozens of front page stories in daily and weekly newspapers around the country along with upbeat reports on local television stations.
“We've learned as a military how to do this better,” Captain David Diaz, a military reservist, told his hometown paper, The Roanoke (VA) Times. “My worry is that we have the right military strategy and political strategies now but the patience of the American public is wearing thin.”
When pressed by the paper on whether or not his commanding officers told him to talk to the press, Diaz admitted he was “encouraged” to do so. So reporter Duncan Adams asked:
“Did Diaz return to the U.S. on emergency leave with an agenda -- to offer a positive spin that could help counter growing concerns among Americans about the U.S. exit strategy? How do we know that's not his strategy, especially after he discloses that superior officers encouraged him to talk about his experiences in Iraq?”
Replied Diaz:
“You don't. I can tell you that the direction we've gotten from on high is that there is a concern about public opinion out there and they want to set the record straight.”
Diaz, an intelligence officer, knows how to avoid a direct answer. Other military personnel, however, tell Capitol Hill Blue privately that the pressure to “sell the war” back home is enormous.
“I’ve been promised an early release if I do a good job promoting the war,” says one reservist who asked not to be identified.
In interviews with a number of reservists home for the holidays, a pattern emerges on the Pentagon’s propaganda effort. Soldiers are encouraged to contact their local news media outlets to offer interviews about the war. A detailed set of talking points encourages them to:
--Admit initial doubts about the war but claim conversion to a belief in the American mission;
--Praise military leadership in Iraq and throw in a few words of support for the Bush administration;
--Claim the mission to turn security of the country over to the Iraqis is working;
--Reiterate that America must not abandon its mission and must stay until the “job is finished.”
--Talk about how “things are better” now in Iraq.
“It’s way better now (in Iraq). People are friendlier. They seem more relaxed, and they say, ’Thank you, mister,’” Sgt. Christopher Desierto told his hometown paper, The Maui News.
But soldiers who are home and don’t have to return to Iraq tell a different story.
“I've just been focused on trying to get the rest of these guys home,” says Sgt. Major Floyd Dubose of Jackson, MS, who returned home after 11 months in Iraq with the Mississippi Army National Guard's 155th Combat Brigade.
And the Army is cracking down on soldiers who go on the record opposing the war.
Specialist Leonard Clark, a National Guardsman, was demoted to private and fined $1,640 for posting anti-war statements on an Internet blog. Clark wrote entries describing the company's commander as a "glory seeker" and the battalion sergeant major an "inhuman monster". His last entry before the blog was shut down told how his fellow soldiers were becoming increasingly opposed to the US operation in Iraq.
“The message is clear,” says one reservist who is home for the holidays but has to return and asked not to be identified. “If you want to get out of this man’s Army with an honorable (discharge) and full benefits you better not tell the truth about what is happening in-country.”
But Sgt. Johnathan Wilson, a reservist, got his honorable discharge after he returned home earlier this month and he’s not afraid to talk on the record.
“Iraq is a classic FUBAR,” he says. “The country is out of control and we can’t stop it. Anybody who tries to sell a good news story about the war is blowing it out his ass. We don’t win and eventually we will leave the country in a worse shape than it was when we invaded.”
© Copyright 2005 by Capitol Hill Blue
Soldiers Ordered to Promote War While at Home
CHB Investigates. . .
Pentagon propaganda program orders soldiers to promote Iraq war while home on leave
By DOUG THOMPSON
Publisher, Capitol Hill Blue
Dec 29, 2005, 05:44
Link
Good soldiers follow orders and hundreds of American military men and women returned to the United States on holiday leave this month with orders to sell the Iraq war to a skeptical public.
The program, coordinated through a Pentagon operation dubbed “Operation Homefront,” ordered military personnel to give interviews to their hometown newspapers, television stations and other media outlets and praise the American war effort in Iraq.
Initial reports back to the Pentagon deem the operation a success with dozens of front page stories in daily and weekly newspapers around the country along with upbeat reports on local television stations.
“We've learned as a military how to do this better,” Captain David Diaz, a military reservist, told his hometown paper, The Roanoke (VA) Times. “My worry is that we have the right military strategy and political strategies now but the patience of the American public is wearing thin.”
When pressed by the paper on whether or not his commanding officers told him to talk to the press, Diaz admitted he was “encouraged” to do so. So reporter Duncan Adams asked:
“Did Diaz return to the U.S. on emergency leave with an agenda -- to offer a positive spin that could help counter growing concerns among Americans about the U.S. exit strategy? How do we know that's not his strategy, especially after he discloses that superior officers encouraged him to talk about his experiences in Iraq?”
Replied Diaz:
“You don't. I can tell you that the direction we've gotten from on high is that there is a concern about public opinion out there and they want to set the record straight.”
Diaz, an intelligence officer, knows how to avoid a direct answer. Other military personnel, however, tell Capitol Hill Blue privately that the pressure to “sell the war” back home is enormous.
“I’ve been promised an early release if I do a good job promoting the war,” says one reservist who asked not to be identified.
In interviews with a number of reservists home for the holidays, a pattern emerges on the Pentagon’s propaganda effort. Soldiers are encouraged to contact their local news media outlets to offer interviews about the war. A detailed set of talking points encourages them to:
--Admit initial doubts about the war but claim conversion to a belief in the American mission;
--Praise military leadership in Iraq and throw in a few words of support for the Bush administration;
--Claim the mission to turn security of the country over to the Iraqis is working;
--Reiterate that America must not abandon its mission and must stay until the “job is finished.”
--Talk about how “things are better” now in Iraq.
“It’s way better now (in Iraq). People are friendlier. They seem more relaxed, and they say, ’Thank you, mister,’” Sgt. Christopher Desierto told his hometown paper, The Maui News.
But soldiers who are home and don’t have to return to Iraq tell a different story.
“I've just been focused on trying to get the rest of these guys home,” says Sgt. Major Floyd Dubose of Jackson, MS, who returned home after 11 months in Iraq with the Mississippi Army National Guard's 155th Combat Brigade.
And the Army is cracking down on soldiers who go on the record opposing the war.
Specialist Leonard Clark, a National Guardsman, was demoted to private and fined $1,640 for posting anti-war statements on an Internet blog. Clark wrote entries describing the company's commander as a "glory seeker" and the battalion sergeant major an "inhuman monster". His last entry before the blog was shut down told how his fellow soldiers were becoming increasingly opposed to the US operation in Iraq.
“The message is clear,” says one reservist who is home for the holidays but has to return and asked not to be identified. “If you want to get out of this man’s Army with an honorable (discharge) and full benefits you better not tell the truth about what is happening in-country.”
But Sgt. Johnathan Wilson, a reservist, got his honorable discharge after he returned home earlier this month and he’s not afraid to talk on the record.
“Iraq is a classic FUBAR,” he says. “The country is out of control and we can’t stop it. Anybody who tries to sell a good news story about the war is blowing it out his ass. We don’t win and eventually we will leave the country in a worse shape than it was when we invaded.”
© Copyright 2005 by Capitol Hill Blue
"The mantle of spinsterhood was definitely in her shoulders. She was twenty five and looked it."
-Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
-Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
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Sonic Youth
- Tenured Laureate
- Posts: 8008
- Joined: Wed Jan 01, 2003 8:35 pm
- Location: USA
U.S.-led coalition in Iraq continues to shrink
Bulgaria, Ukraine withdraw; Poland reduces its force
- Paul Richter, Los Angeles Times
Wednesday, December 28, 2005
Washington -- The U.S.-led international military coalition in Iraq shrank further Tuesday after Bulgaria and Ukraine completed troop withdrawals and Poland announced it was reducing its contingent by 40 percent while switching to a noncombat role.
Responding to appeals from U.S. officials, the Polish government reversed an earlier plan to remove all troops by the end of this year. But Polish officials said that the 900 remaining soldiers of its 1,500-troop force will focus almost exclusively on training Iraqis while they wind down their mission over the course of 2006.
Prime Minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz said in Warsaw that the government would like to complete the drawdown of its forces but not abruptly.
Ukraine's departure, which had been announced earlier this year, removed a final 876 troops and Bulgaria's removed 380.
The "coalition of the willing," as the Bush administration had dubbed it, has dwindled from a peak of 38 nations and 50,000 troops in mid-2003 to 26 countries and about 23,000 troops, according to a State Department tally. Most of the remaining countries have announced that they will end their participation in 2006.
Since only the 8,000-member British force plays a substantial combat role, the disappearance of the international contingent would not be a major setback for the United States. But the departures represent a political setback for the Bush administration, because troops from other countries help lend international legitimacy to the U.S.-led effort to build a new Iraq.
The White House said it respected the troop deployment decisions made by the governments of Poland, Bulgaria and Ukraine, but declined to discuss the effects they might have on U.S. plans to withdraw forces next year.
"Those are questions the president has always left to his military commanders in the field," deputy press secretary Trent Duffy said in Crawford, Texas, where Bush is spending the week at his family ranch.
South Korea, which is the second-largest troop contributor after the United Kingdom, is expected to order home about 1,000 of its 3,200 troops in the first half of 2006. Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said last month that the 2,900 Italian troops in Iraq would probably all go home this year.
The 26 countries with troops still serving in Iraq are: Albania, Armenia, Australia, Azerbaijan, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Czech Republic, Denmark, El Salvador, Estonia, Georgia, Italy, Japan, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Moldova, Mongolia, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Singapore, Slovakia, South Korea, and the United Kingdom.
Bulgaria, Ukraine withdraw; Poland reduces its force
- Paul Richter, Los Angeles Times
Wednesday, December 28, 2005
Washington -- The U.S.-led international military coalition in Iraq shrank further Tuesday after Bulgaria and Ukraine completed troop withdrawals and Poland announced it was reducing its contingent by 40 percent while switching to a noncombat role.
Responding to appeals from U.S. officials, the Polish government reversed an earlier plan to remove all troops by the end of this year. But Polish officials said that the 900 remaining soldiers of its 1,500-troop force will focus almost exclusively on training Iraqis while they wind down their mission over the course of 2006.
Prime Minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz said in Warsaw that the government would like to complete the drawdown of its forces but not abruptly.
Ukraine's departure, which had been announced earlier this year, removed a final 876 troops and Bulgaria's removed 380.
The "coalition of the willing," as the Bush administration had dubbed it, has dwindled from a peak of 38 nations and 50,000 troops in mid-2003 to 26 countries and about 23,000 troops, according to a State Department tally. Most of the remaining countries have announced that they will end their participation in 2006.
Since only the 8,000-member British force plays a substantial combat role, the disappearance of the international contingent would not be a major setback for the United States. But the departures represent a political setback for the Bush administration, because troops from other countries help lend international legitimacy to the U.S.-led effort to build a new Iraq.
The White House said it respected the troop deployment decisions made by the governments of Poland, Bulgaria and Ukraine, but declined to discuss the effects they might have on U.S. plans to withdraw forces next year.
"Those are questions the president has always left to his military commanders in the field," deputy press secretary Trent Duffy said in Crawford, Texas, where Bush is spending the week at his family ranch.
South Korea, which is the second-largest troop contributor after the United Kingdom, is expected to order home about 1,000 of its 3,200 troops in the first half of 2006. Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said last month that the 2,900 Italian troops in Iraq would probably all go home this year.
The 26 countries with troops still serving in Iraq are: Albania, Armenia, Australia, Azerbaijan, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Czech Republic, Denmark, El Salvador, Estonia, Georgia, Italy, Japan, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Moldova, Mongolia, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Singapore, Slovakia, South Korea, and the United Kingdom.
"What the hell?"
Win Butler
Win Butler
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Sonic Youth
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- Posts: 8008
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- Location: USA
Published on Monday, December 26, 2005 by the Los Angeles Times
Iraq Contingent May Grow if Attacks Persist, Pace Says
by Josh Meyer
WASHINGTON - Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Peter Pace said Sunday that the number of U.S. troops in Iraq could increase next year, not decrease, if the insurgency continued.
Pace's comments on "Fox News Sunday" suggested that the Pentagon's plan to reduce the scale of American forces in Iraq, announced Friday by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, depended on several variables.
Pace, like Rumsfeld, said the military and the Bush administration had no specific target for how many troops to keep in Iraq now that the general election was over.
Instead, Pace said, military commanders would continue to closely monitor the Pentagon's "offramps and onramps based on [the forces] we have on the ground" in Iraq. The four-star Marine general said that any decision to withdraw or deploy additional troops in Iraq would depend mostly on whether the insurgency continued to launch deadly attacks against U.S.-led forces and friendly elements of the fledgling Baghdad government.
"So if things go the way we expect them to, as more Iraqi units stand up, we'll be able to bring our troops down and turn over that territory to the Iraqis," Pace said on the Christmas Day edition of the talk show. "But on the other hand, the enemy has a vote in this, and if they were to cause some kind of problems that required more troops, then we would do exactly what we've done in the past, which is give the commanders on the ground what they need. And in that case, you could see troop level go up a little bit to handle that problem."
Pace, the first Marine appointed to the top military job, also said that U.S. troops probably would be redeployed to specific regions within Iraq based on where the insurgency was strongest and where Iraq's battalions of young, inexperienced troops were struggling the most.
He said that if Americans were looking at a color-coded map of deployments next year, they would "watch the colors change" as Iraqi battalions took over for U.S. forces.
Iraq Contingent May Grow if Attacks Persist, Pace Says
by Josh Meyer
WASHINGTON - Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Peter Pace said Sunday that the number of U.S. troops in Iraq could increase next year, not decrease, if the insurgency continued.
Pace's comments on "Fox News Sunday" suggested that the Pentagon's plan to reduce the scale of American forces in Iraq, announced Friday by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, depended on several variables.
Pace, like Rumsfeld, said the military and the Bush administration had no specific target for how many troops to keep in Iraq now that the general election was over.
Instead, Pace said, military commanders would continue to closely monitor the Pentagon's "offramps and onramps based on [the forces] we have on the ground" in Iraq. The four-star Marine general said that any decision to withdraw or deploy additional troops in Iraq would depend mostly on whether the insurgency continued to launch deadly attacks against U.S.-led forces and friendly elements of the fledgling Baghdad government.
"So if things go the way we expect them to, as more Iraqi units stand up, we'll be able to bring our troops down and turn over that territory to the Iraqis," Pace said on the Christmas Day edition of the talk show. "But on the other hand, the enemy has a vote in this, and if they were to cause some kind of problems that required more troops, then we would do exactly what we've done in the past, which is give the commanders on the ground what they need. And in that case, you could see troop level go up a little bit to handle that problem."
Pace, the first Marine appointed to the top military job, also said that U.S. troops probably would be redeployed to specific regions within Iraq based on where the insurgency was strongest and where Iraq's battalions of young, inexperienced troops were struggling the most.
He said that if Americans were looking at a color-coded map of deployments next year, they would "watch the colors change" as Iraqi battalions took over for U.S. forces.
"What the hell?"
Win Butler
Win Butler