|
IRAQ
Snow Job Summer
With its report due to Congress in just one week, the Bush
administration has used the month of August to mobilize its
congressional, military, and other right-wing allies to spin the facts
on the ground and create a false impression of progress in Iraq. The
administration has watered down nonpartisan government reports that undercut the White House's claims
of significant progress. It has also arranged highly-orchestrated
congressional delegation trips for conservative lawmakers who come
back heralding President Bush's policies, even though they never leave
the Green Zone and are often on the
ground for less than a day. With all these attempts to create the
appearance of success, it's no surprise that the administration plans
to use Gen. David Petraeus's testimony before Congress next week to
claim
that escalation
is working. As the Center for American Progress has argued
previously in the report Strategic
Reset, Iraq is currently
engaged in multiple internal conflicts that American military power
cannot
resolve. A new Center for American Progress report, How
to Redeploy, lays out a plan for an orderly
and safe withdrawal over a 10- to 12-month period.
CONGRESS'S 'GREEN ZONE FOG': Approximately 50 Members of
Congress have visited Iraq this summer. While there, the lawmakers
rarely leave the Green Zone, are constantly surrounded by the U.S.
military, and are subjected to the administration's presentation of the
progress in Iraq. "I will tell you that when you get in the Green Zone,
there is a physiological phenomenon I think called Green
Zone fog. ... It's death by powerpoint. It's always that their
argument is winning," said Rep. Ellen Tauscher (D-CA), who recently
returned from such a trip. Yet the administration has effectively used
these trips to impress conservative lawmakers. Sens. Lamar Alexander
(R-TN), Bob Corker (R-TN), and David Vitter (R-LA) returned from a trip
last month and "gave an upbeat
report on progress in Iraq" to reporters, saying they saw "clear
success, province by province" and believed the "surge is
working very, very well." Unmentioned in press accounts of
Alexander and Corker's trip, however, was the fact that they spent
only half a day on the ground in Iraq. Yet as Washington Post
correspondent Jonathan Finer points out, there is reason to be
skeptical of these "dog-and-pony
shows." "Prescient insights rarely emerge from a few days
in-country behind the blast walls," writes Finer.
MILITARY AS PR FLACKS: The
White House continues to employ Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in
Iraq, as a PR
flack for failing
Iraq policies. Most recently, the White House deployed Petraeus to
help the re-election of Australia's Prime Minister John Howard, who is
one of Bush's few foreign allies on the war and is now suffering in the
polls. Last week, Petraeus offered a one-on-one interview
with The Australian, timed to coincide with Bush's visit. In the
interview, Petraeus said Bush's Iraq strategy is working, and there
"had been a 75 percent reduction in religious and
ethnic killings since last year." But as numerous reports have
indicated, these claims of success are specious.
Sectarian and ethnic killings remain very high,
running at almost double
the rate of last year. Petraeus will be delivering the White
House's report on progress in Iraq to Congress on Sept. 15.
Increasingly, however, foreign policy analysts and lawmakers are raising concerns about Petraeus's "conflicting
loyalty" between "the desire to please the president" and to report
the unvarnished truth about Bush's strategy. "We have to be sanguine
about the surge, and it's [Petreaus's] idea. ... I don't know anybody
that doesn't want to sell their idea and keep selling it," said
Tauscher. A recent Washington Post report found that Petraeus succeeded
in altering
the key judgments of the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) about
security in Iraq to reflect so-called "improvements in recent months."
SHIFTING REALITY: Perhaps the
most dissembling has come from the White House itself, which has used
the August recess to plan political spectacles and alter government
reports, even though August was the second
month in a row that sectarian deaths rose. Over the Labor Day
weekend, Bush made a "surprise" visit to Iraq, where he declared, "I
have come here today to see
with our own eyes the remarkable changes that are taking place in
Anbar Province." As The New York Times noted, Bush's trip had a "clear
political goal" -- to "buttress White House contentions that its
efforts
in Iraq are beginning to produce results." Yet Bush spent just seven
hours on the ground and "never
left the confines of the air base." A draft version of an upcoming
Government Accountability Office (GAO) report concludes that "Iraq
has failed to meet all but three of 18 congressionally mandated
benchmarks for political and military progress" and "the Bush
administration's conclusion in July that sectarian violence was
decreasing as a result." As with the NIE, the Bush administration has
already hinted that it will push
the GAO to alter its findings in the final report to benefit the
President's policies. Additionally, former Bush press secretary Ari
Fleischer has teamed up as the spokesman for Freedom's Watch, a new
right-wing front group for the White House that is "funded by
high-profile Republicans who were aides and
supporters of President Bush." The group, which is intended to
pressure Congress to continue supporting Bush's Iraq strategy, has so
far been little more than fear-mongering ads about an Iraq pullout. It
has already
gone after Sen. John Warner (R-VA), who believes Bush should
announce in September that a few thousand U.S. troops will return home
by the end of the year.
ADMINISTRATION -- NEW BOOK REVEALS BUSH'S HOPE TO 'STAY LONGER' IN
IRAQ: Robert Draper, a former senior editor for the Texas
Monthly, has authored a new book on the Bush presidency, entitled "Dead
Certain." In addition to six interviews with the President, Draper
also
interviewed outgoing White House adviser Karl Rove, Vice President Dick
Cheney, Laura Bush, and many
senior White House and administration officials. Bush tells Draper that
his Iraq strategy is to "get us in a position where the
presidential candidates will be
comfortable about sustaining a presence," and, he said later, "stay
longer." Some other highlights from the book: Rove told
Bush he should
not tap Cheney for Vice President; Bush hopes to make
a lot of cash delivering speeches after his presidency is
over; Bush "can't
remember" one of the biggest mistakes in post-war Iraq; the
White House staff, including Dan Bartlett and Rove, were "constantly
at war" with one another; and Bush cries
a lot.
CIVIL LIBERTIES -- DESPITE 'DECLINING
EFFECTIVENESS,' DOMESTIC WIRETAPS UP 25 PERCENT NATIONALLY SINCE 9/11: Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the use of wiretaps
in traditional criminal cases has increased significantly across the
country. In the five years since 9/11, "state
and federal courts authorized 8,122 wiretaps for domestic criminal
investigations," a nearly 25 percent increase over the
previous five years. In that period, "judges denied wiretap
applications only twice," according to a review by the Arizona
Republic. The paper's numbers include neither the controversial
warrantless wiretaps used as part of the administration's so-called
Terrorist Surveillance Program nor the "thousands of wiretaps in which
a secret court approves warrants in counterterrorism and espionage
cases." When he first revealed the existence of the administration's
secret wiretapping program, New York Times reporter James Risen
estimated that the National Security Agency eavesdrops on "as many as five
hundred people in the United States
at any given time and it has potentially has access to the phone
calls
and e-mails of millions more." Analysis of court data by the Arizona
Republic suggested the wiretaps are "declining
[in] effectiveness" as "the federal government has been
strengthening its
counterterrorism-wiretap powers and increasingly shrouding new
surveillance programs in secrecy."
KATRINA -- TWO YEARS LATER, FEDERAL GOVERNMENT STILL GROSSLY MISMANAGING NEW ORLEANS
RECONSTRUCTION: Newsweek reports this week that the Federal
Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is still "bungling"
projects related to the reconstruction of New Orleans. "Local officials
complain bitterly that FEMA is still a
bureaucratic mess," seen, for example, in how a FEMA employee must sign
off on the details of any project costing more than $55,000 in federal
funds. "They'll come in and say something costs $4 million that costs
$40 million," said Rep. Charlie Melancon (D-LA). "When FEMA does sign
off on a project, it doesn't distribute the money directly. It
'obligates' it to the state." Furthermore, FEMA permits the city
to rebuild city sewers "only as they were, not to
upgrade them into a more modern system that officials want," with
such rules further hindering progress in reconstruction. The failings
of FEMA are indicative of wider neglect and mismanagement of
post-Katrina New Orleans. A report from
the Southern Education Foundation highlights how the Bush
administration has grossly shortchanged the region. For
example, the estimated cost of hurricane-related destruction in
K-12 and higher education in Mississippi and Louisiana is $6.2
billion, but "the federal government has provided only $1.2
billion." Furthermore, just two percent of the
federal government's reconstruction funding went toward education
recovery. Instead of education, "rich federal tax breaks designed
to spur rebuilding are flowing hundreds of miles inland to investors
who are buying up luxury condos."
|
President Bush's arrival in Sydney was marked
by protests. "An established anti-war group called the Stop Bush
Coalition called a
small 'unwelcoming ceremony' in Sydney to kick off a series
of protests culminating in a march by up to 20,000 people on
Saturday." Authorities have locked down the city in the biggest
security operation in Australian history.
"President Bush's success rating in the
Democratic-controlled House has fallen this year to a half-century low,
and he
prevailed on only 14 percent of the 76 roll call votes on which he took a clear position. The
previous low for any president was in 1995, when Bill Clinton won just
26 percent of the time during the first year after Republicans took
control of the House."
An exchange of letters from 2003, released yesterday by former Iraq
envoy Paul Bremer, reveals that President
Bush was told in advance of a plan to "dissolve Saddam's
military and intelligence structures." The letters contradict claims by Bush
"that American policy had been 'to keep the army intact' but that it
'didn't happen.'"
"A warm summer has produced a record melt of the polar ice
cap,
leaving the Northwest Passage clear enough for a sailboat to pass and
prompting nations of the far north to assert claims over the Arctic
Ocean seabed." "This
melt is unprecedented, and it's speeding up," said Trudy Wohlleben,
senior ice forecaster with the Canadian Ice Service.
North Korea's foreign ministry said yesterday that the Bush
administration had decided to remove the country from its list
of states sponsoring terrorism. But Assistant Secretary of
State Christopher Hill said today, "No, they haven't
been taken off the terrorism list."
"Newly released documents regarding crimes committed by United
States soldiers against civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan detail a
pattern of troops failing to understand and follow the rules
that govern interrogations and deadly actions." The documents,
which were obtained by the ACLU, "show repeated examples of troops
believing they were within the law when they killed local citizens."
"World Bank President Robert Zoellick is an improvement over his predecessor Paul Wolfowitz, said Columbia University economist
Jeffrey Sachs, a prominent advocate for aid to developing countries."
Sachs said he's waiting to hear Zoellick's agenda. "The main thing is, less
ideology, more practical, measurable results," he said.
And finally: A Capitol Hill aide politely declined to make his boss
available for an interview for the "Better Know a District"
segment on the Colbert Report.
Roll Call reports, "The Colbert producer made a valiant effort to
persuade [the aide] to change his mind. 'We're gonna get all 355 of
you,' the producer countered. 'Um,' the aide said. 'I think you're going to be
about 80 short.'"
|
|
|
Just before leaving for its August recess, the House approved a
little-noticed amendment to its energy bill
"that would allow members of Congress to lease only environmentally friendly cars."
The House energy bill would require all federal agencies to buy only
low greenhouse-gas emitting vehicles for their fleets.
MARYLAND:
Maryland, "the wealthiest state in the union," prepares to take an
unprecedented step to ensure that its workers earn a "living wage."
MISSOURI:
"[M]ore than 100,000 Missourians were added to the ranks of the
uninsured between 2005 and 2006," triple the national rate.
ECONOMY: "After
five years of nearly stagnant growth, state employees finally saw a
substantial uptick in their earnings in the past year."
THINK
PROGRESS: CNN's Wolf Blitzer dismantles Rep. Charles Boustany's
(R-LA) assertions of progress in Iraq.
THE
HORSE'S MOUTH: The White House's misleading PR campaign to show
progress in Iraq has been enabled by the media.
CROOKS
AND LIARS: Former Cheney aide Mary Matalin throws her pen on NBC's
Meet
The Press after having her Iraq spin challenged.
AFL-CIO
WEBLOG: A new report shows that one-third of the world's workers
are jobless and poor.
"Do you realize that the United States is the only major industrialized
nation that cut greenhouse gases last year?"
-- President Bush, 8/27/07
VERSUS
"Kristen A. Hellmer, the spokeswoman for the White House Council on
Environmental Quality, acknowledged afterward that the White House was
unable to substantiate the claim."
-- Washington Post, 9/3/07
|
Topic Cloud
