You're not going to get any clarity from Congress and there are a number
of lawyers in there. What you're going to see is a year of hot air, sound
and fury signifying that they are all afraid of making a move that would
jeapordize staying in power or getting more power in 2008--watch the
calculating Hillary--her of the Iraq trip.
It's a little hard to find out what's going on when you travel with a huge
security entourage and don't venture out of the Green Zone or off a base.
You're going to see a lot of resolutions that have no legal impact on
this--and now the Defense Department is demanding your bank records.
I wonder what the stock price of the Dover coffin makers is doing. The US
is gonna kill a whole lot of kids for nothing forever.
He's in the Bunker Now
By Frank Rich
The New York Times
Sunday 14 January 2007
President Bush always had one asset he could fall back on: the
self-confidence of a born salesman. Like Harold Hill in "The Music Man,"
he knew how to roll out a new product, however deceptive or useless, with
conviction and stagecraft. What the world saw on Wednesday night was a
defeated Willy Loman who looked as broken as his war. His flop sweat was
palpable even if you turned down the sound to deflect despair-inducing
phrases like "Prime Minister Maliki has pledged ..." and "Secretary Rice
will leave for the region. ..."
Mr. Bush seemed to know his product was snake oil, and his White House
handlers did too. In the past, they made a fetish of situating their star
in telegenic settings, from aircraft carriers to Ellis Island. Or they
placed him against Orwellian backdrops shrieking "Plan for Victory." But
this time even the audio stuttered, as if in solidarity with Baghdad's
continuing electricity blackout, and the Oval Office was ditched, lest it
summon up memories of all those past presidential sightings of light at
the end of the Iraqi tunnel. Mr. Bush was banished to the White House
library, where the backdrop was acres of books, to signify the
studiousness of his rethinking of the "way forward."
"I'm not going to be rushed," the president said a month ago when
talking about his many policy consultations. He wasn't kidding. His
ostentatious deep thinking started after Election Day, once he realized
that firing Donald Rumsfeld wouldn't be enough to co-opt the Iraq Study
Group. He was thinking so hard that he abandoned his initial plan to
announce a strategy before Christmas .
The war, however, refused to take a timeout for the holiday festivities
in Crawford. The American death toll in Iraq, which hovered around 2,840
on Election Day, was nearing 3,020 by Wednesday night.
And these additional lives were sacrificed to what end? All the reviews
and thinking and postponing produced a policy that, as a former top Bush
aide summed it up for The Daily News, is nothing more than "repackaged
stay-the-course dressed up to make it look more palatable." The
repackaging was half-hearted as well. Not for nothing did the "way
forward," a rubric the president used at least 27 times in December, end
up on the cutting-room floor. The tossing of new American troops into
Baghdad, a ploy that backfired in Operation Together Forward last year, is
too transparently the way backward.
"Victory" also received short shrift, downsized by the president to the
paltry goal of getting "closer to success." The "benchmarks" he cited were
so vague that they'd be a disgrace to No Child Left Behind. And no wonder:
in November, Mr. Bush couldn't even get our devoted ally, Prime Minister
Nuri al-Maliki, to show up for dinner at their summit in Amman, let alone
induce him to root out Shiite militias. The most muscle the former Mr.
Bring-'Em-On could muster in Wednesday's speech was this: "If the Iraqi
government does not follow through on its promises, it will lose the
support of the American people." Since that support vanished long ago,
it's hard to imagine an emptier threat or a more naked confession of
American impotence, all the more pathetic in a speech rattling sabers
against Syria and Iran.
Mr. Bush's own support from the American people is not coming back. His
"new" Iraq policy is also in defiance of Iraqi public opinion , the Joint
Chiefs, the Baker-Hamilton grandees, and Mr. Maliki, who six weeks ago
asked for a lower American profile in Iraq. Which leaves you wondering
exactly who is still in the bunker with the president besides the first
lady and Barney.
It's a very short list led by John McCain, Joe Lieberman, and
neo-conservative dead-enders like William Kristol and Frederick Kagan, who
congregate at The Weekly Standard and the American Enterprise Institute,
the Washington think tank. The one notable new recruit is Rudy Giuliani,
who likened taming Baghdad to "reducing crime in New York" without
noticing that even after the escalation there will be fewer American
troops patrolling Baghdad than uniformed police officers in
insurgency-free New York City.
Mr. Kagan, a military historian, was sent by the White House to sell
its policy to Senate Republicans. It was he, Mr. Kristol and the retired
Gen. Jack Keane who have most prominently pushed for this escalation and
who published studies and editorials credited with defining it. Given that
these unelected hawks are some of the same great thinkers who promoted the
Iraq fiasco in the first place, it is hard to imagine why this White House
continues to listen to them. Or maybe not that hard. In a typical op-ed
article, headlined "Stay the Course, Mr. President!," Mr. Kagan wrote in
The Los Angeles Times in 2005: "Despite what you may have read, the
military situation in Iraq today is positive."
Yet Mr. Bush doesn't even have the courage of his own disastrous
convictions: he's not properly executing the policy these guys sold him.
In The Washington Post on Dec. 27, Mr. Kagan and General Keane wrote that
escalation could only succeed "with a surge of at least 30,000 combat
troops" - a figure that has also been cited by Mr. McCain. (Mr. Kagan put
the figure at 50,000 to 80,000 in a Weekly Standard article three weeks
earlier. Whatever.) By any of these neocons' standards, the Bush
escalation of some 20,000 is too little, not to mention way too late.
The discrepancy between the policy that Mr. Bush nominally endorses and
the one he actually ordered up crystallizes the cynicism of this entire
war. If you really believe, as the president continues to put it, that
Iraq is the central front in "the decisive ideological struggle of our
time," then you should be in favor of having many more troops than we've
ever had in Iraq. As T. X. Hammes, an insurgency expert and a former
marine, told USA Today, that doesn't now mean a "dribble" (as he ridicules
the "surge") but a total of 300,000 armed coalition forces over a minimum
of four years.
But that would mean asking Americans for sacrifice, not giving us tax
cuts. Mr. Bush has never asked for sacrifice and still doesn't. If his
words sound like bargain-basement Churchill, his actions have been cheaper
still. The president's resolutely undermanned war plan indicated from Day
1 that he knew in his heart of hearts that Iraq was not the central front
in the war against 9/11 jihadism he had claimed it to be, only the
reckless detour that it actually was. Yet the war's cheerleaders, neocon
and otherwise, disingenuously blamed our low troop strength almost
exclusively on Mr. Rumsfeld.
Now that the defense secretary is gone, what are they to do? For
whatever reason, you did not hear Mr. Kagan, General Keane or Mr. McCain
speak out against Mr. Bush's plan even though it's insufficient by their
own reckoning - just a repackaged continuance of the same "Whac-A-Mole"
half-measures that Mr. McCain has long deplored. Surely the senator knows
that, as his loosey-goosey endorsement attests. (On Friday, he called the
Bush plan "the best chance of success" while simultaneously going on
record that "a small, short surge would be the worst of all worlds.")
The question now is how to minimize the damage before countless more
Americans and Iraqis are slaughtered to serve the president's endgame of
passing his defeat on to the next president. The Democrats can have all
the hearings they want, but they are unlikely to take draconian action
(cutting off funding) that would make them, rather than Mr. Bush,
politically vulnerable to blame for losing Iraq.
I have long felt that it will be up to Mr. Bush's own party to ring
down the curtain on his failed policy, and after the 2006 midterms, that
is more true than ever. The lame-duck president, having lost both houses
of Congress and at least one war (Afghanistan awaits), has nothing left to
lose. That is far from true of his party.
Even conservatives like Sam Brownback of Kansas and Norm Coleman of
Minnesota started backing away from Iraq last week. Mr. Brownback is
running for president in 2008, and Mr. Coleman faces a tough re-election
fight. But Republicans not in direct electoral jeopardy (George Voinovich
of Ohio, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska) are also starting to waver. It's
another Vietnam-Watergate era flashback. It wasn't Democrats or the press
that forced Richard Nixon's abdication in 1974; it was dwindling
Republican support. Though he had vowed to fight his way through a Senate
trial, Nixon folded once he lost the patriarchal leader of his party's
right wing.
That leader was Barry Goldwater, who had been one of Nixon's most loyal
and aggressive defenders until he finally realized he'd been lied to once
too often. If John McCain won't play the role his Arizona predecessor once
did, we must hope that John Warner or some patriot like him will, for the
good of the country, answer the call of conscience. A dangerous president
must be saved from himself, so that the American kids he's about to hurl
into the hell of Baghdad can be saved along with him.
-------
January 9, 2007
Editorial
Past Time to Get Real on Iraq
We've been down this road before. This time, it has to be different.
There have been too many times that President Bush has promised a new
strategy on Iraq, only to repeat the same old set of failed approaches and
unachievable objectives. Americans need to hear Mr. Bush offer something
truly new - not more glossy statements about ultimate victory,
condescending platitudes about what hard work war is, or aimless vows to
remain "until the job is done."
If the voters sent one clear message to Mr. Bush last November, it was
that it is time to start winding down America's involvement in this
going-nowhere war.
What they need is for the president to acknowledge how bad things have
gotten in Iraq (not just that it is not going as well as he planned) and
to be honest about how limited the remaining options truly are. The
country wants to know how Mr. Bush plans to end its involvement in a way
that preserves as much of the nation's remaining honor and influence as
possible, limits the suffering of the Iraqi people and the harm to Iraq's
neighbors, and gives Iraqi leaders a chance - should they finally decide
to take it - to rescue their country from an even worse disaster once the
Americans are gone.
The reality that Mr. Bush needs to acknowledge when he speaks to the
nation tomorrow night is that the Iraqi government of Prime Minister Nuri
Kamal al-Maliki is feeding rather than restraining Iraq's brutal civil
war. The Iraqi Army cannot be relied on to impose order even in Baghdad,
while the Iraqi police forces - dominated by sectarian militias - are
inciting the mayhem.
Mr. Bush must acknowledge that there is no military solution for Iraq.
Whatever plan he offers needs to start with a tough set of political
benchmarks for national reconciliation that the Iraqi government is
finally expected to meet. It needs to concentrate enough forces in Baghdad
to bring some security to streets and neighborhoods, giving Iraq's leaders
one last opportunity to try to bargain their way out of civil war.
His plan needs to lay out tight timetables in which the Iraqis must take
major steps to solve fundamental issues, including equitably dividing
their oil wealth and disarming vengeful militias. There must also be a
clear and rapid timetable for achieving enough stability in Baghdad to
hand back significant military responsibilities to the Iraqis.
The last time America presented Mr. Maliki with a set of political
benchmarks, he bluntly rejected them. If he does that again, there is no
way America can or should try to secure Iraq on its own. Mr. Bush must
make clear to both Iraqis and Americans that without significant progress,
American forces will not remain.
We're under no illusions. Meeting those challenges is going to be
extremely tough. And Iraq's unraveling may already be too far gone.
For Mr. Bush, this means resisting any vague Nixonian formula of "peace
with honor" that translates into more years of fighting on for the same
ever-receding goals. Democrats in Congress should also resist euphemistic
formulas like "phased redeployment," which really means trying to achieve
with even fewer troops what Washington failed to achieve with current
force levels.
Nor can America simply turn its back on whatever happens to Iraq after it
leaves. With or without American troops, a nightmare future for Iraq is a
nightmare future for the United States, too, whether it consists of an
expanding civil war that turns into a regional war or millions of Iraq's
people and its oil fields falling under the tightening grip of a more
powerful Iran.
Mr. Bush is widely expected to announce a significant increase in American
troops to deploy in Baghdad's violent neighborhoods. He needs to explain
to Congress and the American people where the dangerously tapped-out
military is going to find those troops. And he needs to place a strict
time limit on any increase, or it will turn into a thinly disguised
escalation of the American combat role.
The Washington Post reported yesterday that just under 23,000 Iraqi
civilians and police officers died violently in 2006, more than 17,000 of
them in the last six months. That is a damning indictment of the Maliki
government, and of current American military strategy.
That is the Iraq that Americans want Mr. Bush to deal with tomorrow night.
http://freedemocracy.blogspot.com/2007/01/frank-rich-forces-that-killed-sheehans.html
Frank Rich: Forces that killed Sheehan's son now in control of Iraq
Saturday, January 06, 2007
Frank Rich: Forces that killed Sheehan's son now in control of Iraq
Raw Story
"The day after Casey Sheehan's slaughter, Dan Senor, the spokesman for the
American occupation, presided over a Green Zone news conference promising
al-Sadr's woefully belated arrest on a months-old warrant for his likely
role in the earlier assassination of Abdel Majid al-Khoei, a rival Shiite
who had fiercely opposed Saddam.
Today al-Sadr and his forces control 30 seats in the Iraqi parliament,
four government ministries, and death squads (aka militias) more powerful
than the nominal Iraqi army. He is the puppetmaster who really controls
Nouri al-Maliki -- the Iraqi prime minister embraced by Bush -- even to
the point of inducing al-Maliki to shut down a search for an American
soldier kidnapped at gunpoint in Sadr City in the fall.
(And, you might ask, whatever happened to Senor? He's a Fox News talking
head calling for a "surge" of American troops to clean up the botch he and
his cohort left behind.) Only Joseph Heller could find the gallows humor
in a moral disaster of these proportions.
It's against the backdrop of both the Saddam video and the Ford presidency
that we must examine the prospect of that much-previewed "surge" in
Iraq -- a surge, by the way, that the press should start calling by its
rightful name, escalation. As Ford had it, America cannot regain its pride
by refighting a war that is finished as far as America is concerned and,
for that matter, as far as Iraq is concerned. By large margins, the
citizens of both countries want us not to escalate but to start
disengaging.
So do America's top military commanders, who are now being cast aside just
as Gen. Eric Shinseki was when he dared assert before the invasion that
securing Iraq would require several hundred thousand troops.
The "surge," then, is a sham. It is not meant to achieve that undefined
"victory" Bush keeps talking about but to serve his own political spin.
His real mission is to float the 'we're not winning, we're not losing'
status quo until Jan. 20, 2009. After that, as Joseph Biden put it last
week, a new president will 'be the guy landing helicopters inside the
Green Zone, taking people off the roof.'"
____________________________________________________________
January 14, 2007
Military Is Expanding Its Intelligence Role in U.S.
By ERIC LICHTBLAU and MARK MAZZETTI
WASHINGTON, Jan. 13 - The Pentagon has been using a little-known power to
obtain banking and credit records of hundreds of Americans and others
suspected of terrorism or espionage inside the United States, part of an
aggressive expansion by the military into domestic intelligence gathering.
The C.I.A. has also been issuing what are known as national security
letters to gain access to financial records from American companies,
though it has done so only rarely, intelligence officials say.
Banks, credit card companies and other financial institutions receiving
the letters usually have turned over documents voluntarily, allowing
investigators to examine the financial assets and transactions of American
military personnel and civilians, officials say.
The F.B.I., the lead agency on domestic counterterrorism and espionage,
has issued thousands of national security letters since the attacks of
Sept. 11, 2001, provoking criticism and court challenges from civil
liberties advocates who see them as unjustified intrusions into Americans'
private lives.
But it was not previously known, even to some senior counterterrorism
officials, that the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency have been
using their own "noncompulsory" versions of the letters. Congress has
rejected several attempts by the two agencies since 2001 for authority to
issue mandatory letters, in part because of concerns about the dangers of
expanding their role in domestic spying.
The military and the C.I.A. have long been restricted in their domestic
intelligence operations, and both are barred from conducting traditional
domestic law enforcement work. The C.I.A.'s role within the United States
has been largely limited to recruiting people to spy on foreign countries.
Carl Kropf, a spokesman for the director of national intelligence, said
intelligence agencies like the C.I.A. used the letters on only a "limited
basis."
Pentagon officials defended the letters as valuable tools and said they
were part of a broader strategy since the Sept. 11 attacks to use more
aggressive intelligence-gathering tactics - a priority of former Defense
Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. The letters "provide tremendous leads to
follow and often with which to corroborate other evidence in the context
of counterespionage and counterterrorism," said Maj. Patrick Ryder, a
Pentagon spokesman.
Government lawyers say the legal authority for the Pentagon and the C.I.A.
to use national security letters in gathering domestic records dates back
nearly three decades and, by their reading, was strengthened by the
antiterrorism law known as the USA Patriot Act.
Pentagon officials said they used the letters to follow up on a variety of
intelligence tips or leads. While they would not provide details about
specific cases, military intelligence officials with knowledge of them
said the military had issued the letters to collect financial records
regarding a government contractor with unexplained wealth, for example,
and a chaplain at Guantánamo Bay erroneously suspected of aiding prisoners
at the facility.
Usually, the financial documents collected through the letters do not
establish any links to espionage or terrorism and have seldom led to
criminal charges, military officials say. Instead, the letters often help
eliminate suspects.
"We may find out this person has unexplained wealth for reasons that have
nothing to do with being a spy, in which case we're out of it," said
Thomas A. Gandy, a senior Army counterintelligence official.
But even when the initial suspicions are unproven, the documents have
intelligence value, military officials say. In the next year, they plan to
incorporate the records into a database at the Counterintelligence Field
Activity office at the Pentagon to track possible threats against the
military, Pentagon officials said. Like others interviewed, they would
speak only on the condition of anonymity.
Military intelligence officers have sent letters in up to 500
investigations over the last five years, two officials estimated. The
number of letters is likely to be well into the thousands, the officials
said, because a single case often generates letters to multiple financial
institutions. For its part, the C.I.A. issues a handful of national
security letters each year, agency officials said. Congressional officials
said members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees had been
briefed on the use of the letters by the military and the C.I.A.
Some national security experts and civil liberties advocates are troubled
by the C.I.A. and military taking on domestic intelligence activities,
particularly in light of recent disclosures that the Counterintelligence
Field Activity office had maintained files on Iraq war protesters in the
United States in violation of the military's own guidelines. Some experts
say the Pentagon has adopted an overly expansive view of its domestic role
under the guise of "force protection," or efforts to guard military
installations.
"There's a strong tradition of not using our military for domestic law
enforcement," said Elizabeth Rindskopf Parker, a former general counsel at
both the National Security Agency and the C.I.A. who is the dean at the
McGeorge School of Law at the University of the Pacific. "They're moving
into territory where historically they have not been authorized or
presumed to be operating."
Similarly, John Radsan, an assistant general counsel at the C.I.A. from
2002 to 2004 and now a law professor at William Mitchell College of Law in
St. Paul, said, "The C.I.A. is not supposed to have any law enforcement
powers, or internal security functions, so if they've been issuing their
own national security letters, they better be able to explain how they
don't cross the line."
The Pentagon's expanded intelligence-gathering role, in particular, has
created occasional conflicts with other federal agencies. Pentagon efforts
to post American military officers at embassies overseas to gather
intelligence for counterterrorism operations or future war plans has
rankled some State Department and C.I.A. officials, who see the military
teams as duplicating and potentially interfering with the intelligence
agency.
In the United States, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has complained
about military officials dealing directly with local police - rather than
through the bureau - for assistance in responding to possible terrorist
threats against a military base. F.B.I. officials say the threats have
often turned out to be uncorroborated and, at times, have stirred needless
anxiety.
The military's frequent use of national security letters has sometimes
caused concerns from the businesses receiving them, a counterterrorism
official said. Lawyers at financial institutions, which routinely provide
records to the F.B.I. in law enforcement investigations, have contacted
bureau officials to say they were confused by the scope of the military's
requests and whether they were obligated to turn the records over, the
official said.
Companies are not eager to turn over sensitive financial data about
customers to the government, the official said, "so the more this is done,
and the more poorly it's done, the more pushback there is for the F.B.I."
The bureau has frequently relied on the letters in recent years to gather
telephone and Internet logs, financial information and other records in
terrorism investigations, serving more than 9,000 letters in 2005,
according to a Justice Department tally. As an investigative tool, the
letters present relatively few hurdles; they can be authorized by
supervisors rather than a court. Passage of the Patriot Act in October
2001 lowered the standard for issuing the letters, requiring only that the
documents sought be "relevant" to an investigation and allowing records
requests for more peripheral figures, not just targets of an inquiry.
Some Democrats have accused the F.B.I. of using the letters for fishing
expeditions, and the American Civil Liberties Union won court challenges
in two cases, one for library records in Connecticut and the other for
Internet records in Manhattan. Concerned about possible abuses, Congress
imposed new safeguards in extending the Patriot Act last year, in part by
making clear that recipients of national security letters could contact a
lawyer and seek court review. Congress also directed the Justice
Department inspector general to study the F.B.I.'s use of the letters, a
review that is continuing.
Unlike the F.B.I., the military and the C.I.A. do not have wide-ranging
authority to seek records on Americans in intelligence investigations. But
the expanded use of national security letters has allowed the Pentagon and
the intelligence agency to collect records on their own. Sometimes,
military or C.I.A. officials work with the F.B.I. to seek records, as
occurred with an American translator who had worked for the military in
Iraq and was suspected of having ties to insurgents.
After the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Rumsfeld directed military lawyers and
intelligence officials to examine their legal authorities to collect
intelligence both inside the United States and abroad. They concluded that
the Pentagon had "way more" legal tools than it had been using, a senior
Defense Department official said.
Military officials say the Right to Financial Privacy Act of 1978, which
establishes procedures for government access to sensitive banking data,
first authorized them to issue national security letters. The military had
used the letters sporadically for years, officials say, but the pace
accelerated in late 2001, when lawyers and intelligence officials
concluded that the Patriot Act strengthened their ability to use the
letters to seek financial records on a voluntary basis and to issue
mandatory letters to obtain credit ratings, the officials said.
The Patriot Act does not specifically mention military intelligence or
C.I.A. officials in connection with the national security letters.
Some F.B.I. officials said they were surprised by the Pentagon's
interpretation of the law when military officials first informed them of
it. "It was a very broad reading of the law," a former counterterrorism
official said.
While the letters typically have been used to trace the financial
transactions of military personnel, they also have been used to
investigate civilian contractors and people with no military ties who may
pose a threat to the military, officials said. Military officials say they
regard the letters as one of the least intrusive means to gather evidence.
When a full investigation is opened, one official said, it has now become
"standard practice" to issue such letters.
One prominent case in which letters were used to obtain financial records,
according to two military officials, was that of a Muslim chaplain at
Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, who was suspected in 2003 of aiding terror suspects
imprisoned at the facility. The espionage case against the chaplain, James
J. Yee, soon collapsed.
Eugene Fidell, a defense lawyer for the former chaplain and a military law
expert, said he was unaware that military investigators may have used
national security letters to obtain financial information about Mr. Yee,
nor was he aware that the military had ever claimed the authority to issue
the letters.
Mr. Fidell said he found the practice "disturbing," in part because the
military does not have the same checks and balances when it comes to
Americans' civil rights as does the F.B.I. "Where is the accountability?"
he asked. "That's the evil of it - it doesn't leave fingerprints."
Even when a case is closed, military officials said they generally
maintain the records for years because they may be relevant to future
intelligence inquiries. Officials at the Pentagon's counterintelligence
unit say they plan to incorporate those records into a database, called
Portico, on intelligence leads. The financial documents will not be widely
disseminated, but limited to investigators, an intelligence official said.
"You don't want to destroy something only to find out that the same guy
comes up in another report and you don't know that he was investigated
before," the official said.
The Counterintelligence Field Activity office, created in 2002 to better
coordinate the military's efforts to combat foreign intelligence services,
has drawn criticism for some domestic intelligence activities.
The agency houses an antiterrorist database of intelligence tips and
threat reports, known as Talon, which had been collecting information on
antiwar planning meetings at churches, libraries and other locations. The
Defense Department has since tightened its procedures for what kind of
information is allowed into the Talon database, and the
counterintelligence office also purged more than 250 incident reports from
the database that officials determined should never have been included
because they centered on lawful political protests by people opposed to
the war in Iraq.
Enjoy as always,
CH
