Prometheus 6

The reasons for the hesitation are complex, based on dangers both real and imagined. In most cases, Iraqis say they feel safe with their neighbors but are not sure about other residents. Some are afraid of the new guards on their blocks. In rarer cases, they cannot face neighbors who they suspect helped in killings.

In the patchwork of today’s Iraq, there are many exceptions. But for now, returning families in many areas are still a trickle, indicating that even though sectarian killings seem to have ended, the distrust they sowed lingers. And while most Iraqis are trying hard to put the ugliness of the past behind them, moving their children back to areas where killings once raged is the ultimate act of trust that many parents — at least so far — seem to be unwilling to risk.

I can relate. And we are still underestimating the impact it will have nigh unto perpetuity.

"Leave Iraq? Not on my watch! (but my watch is over soon...)

U.S., Iraqi Negotiators Agree on 2011 Withdrawal
Rice's Baghdad Visit Ends With Accord on Departure Date; Legal Immunity Is Still a Sticking Point
By Karen DeYoung and Sudarsan Raghavan
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, August 22, 2008; A01

BAGHDAD, Aug. 21 -- U.S. and Iraqi negotiators have agreed to the withdrawal of all U.S. combat forces from the country by the end of 2011, and Iraqi officials said they are "very close" to resolving the remaining issues blocking a final accord that governs the future American military presence here.

Iraqi and U.S. officials said several difficult issues remain, including whether U.S. troops will be subject to Iraqi law if accused of committing crimes. But the officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were unauthorized to discuss the agreement publicly, said key elements of a timetable for troop withdrawal once resisted by President Bush had been reached.

"We have a text," Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari said after a day-long visit Thursday by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

The Office of Management and Budget released a report in 2006 stating that risk assessment should focus on actual, rather than possible, harm caused by toxins. This sounds reasonable, but Congress intended for risk assessment to be a preventive measure; by the time the dangers of toxins are apparent, it's often too late to protect workers. 

A Toxic Proposal
The Labor Department politicizes the regulation of workplace health.
Monday, August 18, 2008; A10

FOR 7 1/2 YEARS, the Labor Department has neglected the workers it's supposed to protect. Now it is rushing to make its pro-industry stand official policy. The Post's Carol D. Leonnig reported that the Labor Department has fast-tracked a proposal that would make it more difficult to regulate workplace safety.

"This is hard to watch," said Zekri Youssef, 33, a pizza maker from Egypt. "People don't know this happens."

"I recognize this, because I was tortured, too," said Paul Rivera, 41, who says he was tied down with restraints while he was serving prison time for selling drugs and guns. "This is sad to see."

"That's messed up," said Joshua Sanchez, 16, a Bronx student. "That's real wrong to torture someone, and I wouldn't have put a dollar in if I knew."

"I don't think there's a need for that. I don't like it," said Denise Kennedy, 49, a Brooklyn homemaker who held up her 9-year-old niece to view the exhibit before realizing what it was. "It's not for kids at all."

In N.Y., Waterboarding as Dark Art
By Robin Shulman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 17, 2008; A02

NEW YORK -- Slip a dollar into a slot in the "Waterboard Thrill Ride," and watch through bars as a man in a hooded sweatshirt pours water into the nose and mouth of another man in an orange jumpsuit convulsing against his restraints.

It looks like a scene from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. But this is Coney Island, and the two men are motorized mannequins whose interaction takes place alongside freak shows and funnel cakes.

The scene is the creation of Steve Powers, who has participated in the Venice Biennale, won a Fulbright grant and published art books, but whose roots are in the graffiti art of the streets.

And there's no more racism either.

We opposed Mr. Mukasey’s confirmation because we feared that he would worry more about defending the Bush administration than enforcing the law. His speech to the bar association is further evidence that, like his predecessor, he cares more about politics than justice.

Mr. Mukasey in Denial

Conservatives like to talk about personal responsibility, but Attorney General Michael Mukasey does not seem to think it applies to the Bush administration. In a speech on Tuesday, he described the shameful politicization of the Justice Department as a “painful” episode in which “the system failed.”

Mr. Mukasey made no mention of the role played by his predecessor, Alberto Gonzales, and other members of President Bush’s inner circle. There is by now strong reason to believe that they were involved in plans to fire United States attorneys for political reasons, fill other important positions on the basis of partisanship rather than competence and order prosecutions designed to help Republicans win elections.

“The White House had concocted a fake letter from Habbush to Saddam, backdated to July 1, 2001,” Suskind writes. “It said that 9/11 ringleader Mohammad Atta had actually trained for his mission in Iraq – thus showing, finally, that there was an operational link between Saddam and al Qaeda, something the Vice President’s Office had been pressing CIA to prove since 9/11 as a justification to invade Iraq. There is no link.”

Book says White House ordered forgery
By: Mike Allen
August 5, 2008 07:46 AM EST

A new book by the author Ron Suskind claims that the White House ordered the CIA to forge a back-dated, handwritten letter from the head of Iraqi intelligence to Saddam Hussein.

Suskind writes in “The Way of the World,” to be published Tuesday, that the alleged forgery – adamantly denied by the White House – was designed to portray a false link between Hussein’s regime and al Qaeda as a justification for the Iraq war.

The author also claims that the Bush administration had information from a top Iraqi intelligence official “that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq – intelligence they received in plenty of time to stop an invasion.”

via Slashdot 

"The politicization of Bush's Justice Department, which this week was officially determined to be illegal, has a funny side too. Sometime in 2005-2006, White House Liaison Jan Williams attended a seminar on LexisNexis searches, and wrote one herself. When she left, she passed it on to her successor Monica Goodling in an email. Justin Mason, author of SpamAssassin, is skeptical about its accuracy:

[First name of a candidate]! and pre/2 [last name of a candidate] w/7 bush or gore or republican! or democrat! or charg! or accus! or criticiz! or blam! or defend! or iran contra or clinton or spotted owl or florida recount or sex! or controvers! or racis! or fraud! or investigat! or bankrupt! or layoff! or downsiz! or PNTR or NAFTA or outsourc! or indict! or enron or kerry or iraq or wmd! or arrest! or intox! or fired or sex! or racis! or intox! or slur! or arrest! or fired or controvers! or abortion! or gay! or homosexual! or gun! or firearm!

Needless to say, when asked about it, Williams first said she didn't remember ever seeing it, then said she'd used an edited version just once. LexisNexis records show she used it, as shown, 25 times."

Note that 'sex!' appears twice in the query. Must be VERY important.

Tony Fratto, a White House spokesman, said there was nothing inappropriate or unusual about installing White House allies in politically appointed positions, and insisted that it had never been the administration’s policy to consider political affiliation when hiring career civil servants.

“I reject the presumption that we have been any more or less aggressive than any other administration in trying to execute our policies,” Mr. Fratto said.

Really?

But in the fall of 2002, then-attorney general John Ashcroft changed the procedures. The Civil Rights Division disbanded the hiring committees made up of veteran career lawyers....

Now, hiring is closely overseen by Bush administration political appointees to Justice, effectively turning hundreds of career jobs into politically appointed positions.

Any other administration do that?

For White House, Hiring Is Political
By CHARLIE SAVAGE

WASHINGTON — On May 17, 2005, the White House’s political affairs office sent an e-mail message to agencies throughout the executive branch directing them to find jobs for 108 people on a list of “priority candidates” who had “loyally served the president.”

“We simply want to place as many of our Bush loyalists as possible,” the White House emphasized in a follow-up message, according to a little-noticed passage of an internal Justice Department report released Monday about politicization in the department’s hiring of civil-service prosecutors and immigration officials.

No one is surprised by this second of four reports documenting the coup at the Justice Department. I want to say "attempted coup" but all those illegal hires are still in their nice permanent places...almost as immune as Clarence Thomas but less visible.

I am surprised the Bush adminstration still has surrogates loyal enough to make surprisingly foolish statements in public. Or at least on PBS...maybe them believe Conservative rhetoric that no one watches it. In this case it's one David Rivkin, trying to convince us this was an isolated incident (Black folks, the sneer your mental voice used when you read that was quite appropriate).

But this report says nothing about the eight U.S. attorneys being fired or replaced, who of course were political appointees, and that's perfectly appropriate to apply a political criteria.

This report very regrettably points two or three people acting wrongfully, dealing -- injecting political criteria in consideration of career employees, violates department regulations, violates federal law, and, quite frankly, is rather sad.

It, frankly, stuns me that she didn't and, again, acted in this way....Having said that, the system worked.

Let's consider that last statement. The system worked.

Every single political appointee shopuld be identified NOW. Every one should be presumed incompetent, especially "graduates" of Regent Law School, Liberty University or any school affiliated with them. Every one of them should be fired, whether they transferred to a "permanent" slot or not.

Mukasey Asked to Watch for Lingerers
By Carrie Johnson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 25, 2008; A08

Two leading Senate Democrats asked Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey yesterday to "exercise vigilance" and ensure that political appointees do not improperly wheedle their way into permanent slots at the beleaguered Justice Department.

Sens. Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.) and Dianne Feinstein (Calif.) wrote to department leaders seeking "personal assurances" that they would monitor employment decisions at Justice as the Bush administration draws to a close.

"When unqualified political appointees take over jobs better left to skilled candidates, it threatens the agency's professionalism and independence," Schumer said. "We don't need ideological stowaways undermining the work of the next administration."

In its report, the committee said: "Given the clear differences in definition, the UK can no longer rely on US assurances that it does not use torture, and we recommend that the government does not rely on such assurances in the future." 

UK 'must check' US torture denial

The British government should not rely on US assurances that it does not use torture, a report by MPs says.

The foreign affairs select committee said the UK and US differ on their definitions of what constitutes torture and it urged the UK to check US claims.

It recommended the government carry out an "exhaustive analysis of current US interrogation techniques."

The MPs also said the government should check claims that Britain is not used by the US for "rendition" flights.

The Right to Know

In the face of near hysterical opposition from the Bush administration, the Senate Democratic leadership intends to take up a proposed shield law to provide journalists with limited protection against being compelled to reveal confidential sources in federal court. A similar measure won House approval last October in a bipartisan 398-to-21 landslide. But the White House, as ever, is playing the fear card, orchestrating a barrage of warnings that the law would “wreak havoc” on national security and “completely eviscerate” the ability to investigate terrorism.

Such hype and manipulation is predictable from an administration so obsessed with concealing its own abuses. The Senate must not be cowed. Only through robust reporting has the nation learned the hard lessons of President Bush’s illegal programs to eavesdrop on Americans and run torture prisons abroad.

Who Spread False Tales of Heroism?

Widespread — and, we suspect, self-induced — amnesia among high officials of the Bush administration and its Defense Department has made it impossible for House investigators to determine whether top officials helped spread two bogus stories of heroism used to bolster support for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It now looks as if we may never know who kept stoking the impression that Cpl. Pat Tillman, an Army Ranger who became an icon of the administration’s war on terror, had been killed by the enemy in Afghanistan (in a battle that won him a questionable Silver Star) long after the military knew he had been killed accidentally by fire from American forces.

Nor are we apt to find out who promoted the false story that Pfc. Jessica Lynch had been captured in Iraq after a Rambo-like performance in which she emptied her weapon and was wounded in battle. In fact, she had been badly hurt in a vehicle accident during an ambush and was being well cared for by the Iraqis.

Assuming that the President would not put the financial interests of large corporations ahead of the safety of the American people, today's veto threat puts the lie to the dire warnings put forth by the Bush Administration. Alternatively, if the government is being honest about the need for immediate legislation, today's veto threat shows a callous indifference to that purported danger, favoring special interests over security.

Bush: Telecom Immunity More Important Than Surveillance Powers
Posted by Kurt Opsahl

The real reason this bill exists is because Mr. Bush decided after 9/11 that he was above the law. When The Times disclosed his warrantless eavesdropping, Mr. Bush demanded that Congress legalize it after the fact. The White House scared Congress into doing that last year, with a one-year bill that shredded FISA’s protections. Democratic lawmakers promised to fix it this year. 

Compromising the Constitution

Congress has been far too compliant as President Bush undermined the Bill of Rights and the balance of powers. It now has a chance to undo some of that damage — if it has the courage and good sense to stand up to the White House and for the Constitution.

The Senate should reject a bill this week that would needlessly expand the government’s ability to spy on Americans and ensure that the country never learns the full extent of President Bush’s unlawful wiretapping.

NewYorker writer Lawrence Wright wrote in January about one such experience. In 2002, while he was researching The Looming Tower, his Pulitzer Prize-winning book on al-Qaida, two members of an FBI terrorism task force arrived at his home. Why, they asked, had his daughter been speaking with someone in the United Kingdom who was in touch with suspected al-Qaida operatives?

It wasn't his daughter, he told them flatly. Wright himself had made the calls. And the person he contacted was a British civil rights lawyer who had asked him not to speak with her clients, some of whom are relatives of Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's chief lieutenant.

"My daughter is no terrorist - she went to high school with the Bush twins," Wright said. "I was taken aback. They were apparently monitoring my phones."

Domestic spying quietly goes on
NSA faces new limits, but surveillance thrives
By Bradley Olson
Sun reporter
July 7, 2008

With Congress on the verge of outlining new parameters for National Security Agency eavesdropping between suspicious foreigners and Americans, lawmakers are leaving largely untouched a host of government programs that critics say involves far more domestic surveillance than the wiretaps they sought to remedy.

These programs - most of them highly classified - are run by an alphabet soup of federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies. They sift, store and analyze the communications, spending habits and travel patterns of U.S. citizens, searching for suspicious activity.

The surveillance includes data-mining programs that allow the NSA and the FBI to sift through large databanks of e-mails, phone calls and other communications, not for selective information, but in search of suspicious patterns.

And thank you James MacLean!

Obama Voters Protest His Switch on Telecom Immunity
By JAMES RISEN

WASHINGTON — Senator Barack Obama’s decision to support legislation granting legal immunity to telecommunications companies that cooperated with the Bush administration’s program of wiretapping without warrants has led to an intense backlash among some of his most ardent supporters.

Thousands of them are now using the same grass-roots organizing tools previously mastered by the Obama campaign to organize a protest against his decision.

In recent days, more than 7,000 Obama supporters have organized on a social networking site on Mr. Obama’s own campaign Web site. They are calling on Mr. Obama to reverse his decision to endorse legislation supported by President Bush to expand the government’s domestic spying powers while also providing legal protection to the telecommunication companies that worked with the National Security Agency’s domestic wiretapping program after the Sept. 11 attacks.

You know why all this stuff from 2004 is popping up? Because I'm a slave to fashion.

You remember how every 5 minutes in 2004 we got a TERROR ALERT from Homeland Security, and then after Bush was re-elected the TERROR ALERTs seemed to go away? And then Tom Ridge admitted that at least a few of them were politically motivated?

Welcome back.

“The White House said Monday it agreed with an assessment by U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman, who warns terrorists could test the next president with an attack.”

The likelihood of this working this time is essentially zero (nobody trusts the party of Katrina and Iraq with their security anymore) but it is a pretty perverse thing for a government to be engaged in.

It really is. Consider the thought of getting folks to trust you then willfully lying to them, consciously constructing a false view of the world, being shameless enough to defend your right to lie to those who trust you, just to get your way...

This is as close to objective evil as I am willing to admit exists.

In addition to the terrible toll of Americans and Iraqis killed and wounded, the war in Iraq has diverted attention and resources from critical problems here in the U.S., where the housing market has been crippled, the stock market has tanked, gasoline has soared past $4 per gallon, unemployment is increasing and an extraordinary number of debt-ridden working families are staring into a financial abyss.

Even as oil companies are enjoying staggering profits, many Americans — in July! — are already worried sick about the potentially ruinous cost of heating their homes next winter.

‘Oh Happy Day’
By BOB HERBERT

It’s getting harder and harder to remain deluded. With each day comes new facts to drag our heads out of the sand.

Two weeks ago, The Times reported that four Western oil giants were on the verge of signing no-bid contracts that would return them to Iraq, the third-most bountiful petroleum playground on the planet. The deals, expected to be finalized in the next 30 days, were the kind of news that big oil lives for.

Giddy executives singing “Oh Happy Day” could be heard in the corporate offices of Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and BP, which had been shut out of Iraq for three and a half decades.

Here's the thing about magic...it works via misdirection. The magician directs your attention away from what's really going on.

The story of how Al Qaeda, whose name is Arabic for “the base,” has gained a new haven is in part a story of American accommodation to President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan, whose advisers played down the terrorist threat. It is also a story of how the White House shifted its sights, beginning in 2002, from counterterrorism efforts in Afghanistan and Pakistan to preparations for the war in Iraq.

Just as it had on the day before 9/11, Al Qaeda now has a band of terrorist camps from which to plan and train for attacks against Western targets, including the United States. Officials say the new camps are smaller than the ones the group used prior to 2001. However, despite dozens of American missile strikes in Pakistan since 2002, one retired C.I.A. officer estimated that the makeshift training compounds now have as many as 2,000 local and foreign militants, up from several hundred three years ago.

Which makes Bush the magician.

Amid Policy Disputes, Qaeda Grows in Pakistan
By MARK MAZZETTI and DAVID ROHDE

Preparing the Battlefield
The Bush Administration steps up its secret moves against Iran.
by Seymour M. Hersh
July 7, 2008

Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership. The covert activities involve support of the minority Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups and other dissident organizations. They also include gathering intelligence about Iran’s suspected nuclear-weapons program.

Ideology-Based Hiring at Justice Broke Laws, Investigation Finds
By Carrie Johnson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 25, 2008; A11

Senior Justice Department officials broke civil service laws by rejecting scores of young applicants who had links to Democrats or liberal organizations, according to a biting report issued yesterday.

The report by the Justice Department inspector general and the Office of Professional Responsibility concluded that a pair of high-ranking political appointees who are no longer with the department had violated department policy and the Civil Service Reform Act by using ideological reasons to scuttle the candidacy of lawyers who applied to the elite honors and summer intern programs.

In one instance, steering committee member Esther Slater McDonald deemed "unacceptable" an applicant who professed admiration for the environmental group Greenaction and passed over another with ties to the Poverty and Race Research Action Council, the report said.

White House Refused to Open Pollutants E-Mail
By FELICITY BARRINGER

The White House in December refused to accept the Environmental Protection Agency’s conclusion that greenhouse gases are pollutants that must be controlled, telling agency officials that an e-mail message containing the document would not be opened, senior E.P.A. officials said last week.

The document, which ended up in e-mail limbo, without official status, was the E.P.A.’s answer to a 2007 Supreme Court ruling that required it to determine whether greenhouse gases represent a danger to health or the environment, the officials said.