Wednesday, November 23, 2005

Limbaugh: Not Even a "Useful" Idiot. . . With his ratings sagging from coast to coast, and all but the most half-witted, dittoheaded cracker trash consigning his toxic regurgitations to the Dustbin of Punditry, Gasbag Emeritus Rush Limbaugh's long run at the top of the dung heap seems to be grinding to a pathetic finis. Maybe that's why he's been thrashing like a landed trout in a basket: sucking wind, flailing about (no doubt for the Oxycontin), and bellyflopping into the Jack Murtha controversy several days late and about a trillion brain cells short. He'd almost be a tragic figure if he wasn't such a fucking asshole.   Limbaugh on Murtha: a "useful idiot" As George W. Bush and Dick Cheney slipped into the "love the sinner, hate the sin" mode on Jack Murtha over the weekend, somebody forgot to get the talking points to Rush Limbaugh. On his show Monday, Limbaugh dismissed Murtha -- a Vietnam veteran who spent 37 years in the Marine Corps -- as the "useful idiot of the moment." "Murtha's irrelevant in all this," Limbaugh said, according to a transcript posted by Media Matters. "This is about our troops and our national security. Murtha's just getting his 15 minutes of fame like Cindy Sheehan got, and like Bill Burkett got. . . the Jersey Girls, Richard Clarke, Joseph Wilson, you name it -- just the latest member of the endless parade of personalities around whom the Democrats can circle and support. " Woah there, Rushbo. The story that you're supposed to be spinning is that even the Democrats don't support Murtha's plan for Iraq. That was the whole point of the Republicans' parliamentary exercise Friday night. They threw before the House a resolution proclaiming that the "deployment of United States forces in Iraq" should be "terminated immediately." And when virtually everyone voted against it, all the Republican talking heads could proclaim that nobody in Congress thinks like Murtha does. "We had Democrats and Republicans alike pressing that button, saying basically, 'Don't pull out,'" Jean "I called him a 'coward' but I didn't mean to imply that he was a coward" Schmidt explained in a statement yesterday. There's a problem with that spin, however: Even Jack Murtha voted against the resolution the Republicans put before the House Friday. And that gets to the point that Slate's Fred Kaplan made the other day. With the help of some sloppy media coverage, the Republicans have been able to caricature Murtha's view as something that it isn't. Murtha didn't suggest that the United States simply pull its troops out of Iraq and send them back home to their families. Rather, in his talk with reporters, he said his plan was to "redeploy U.S. troops consistent with the safety of U.S. forces," creating a "quick reaction force in the region" and an "over-the-horizon presence of Marines." We don't pretend to know what all that means, but, as Kaplan explains, it plainly means something other than "cutting and running." "True," Kaplan says, "his final line reads, 'It is time to bring them home,' but his plan suggests he wants to bring, at most, only some of them home. The others are to be 'redeployed' in the quick-reaction forces hovering just offshore." If that sounds a little familiar, it should. As we noted earlier today, senior military officers are telling the Washington Post that the Pentagon may reduce the U.S. presence in Iraq early next year, at least in part by shifting some of those troops to "on call" status across the border in Kuwait. -- Tim Grieve, salon.com 4:43:29 PM    comment []

"Corrupt and Shameless" ". . .any suggestion that prewar information was distorted, hyped or fabricated by the leader of the nation is utterly false." --Dick Cheney, November 20, 2005 Key Bush Intelligence Briefing Kept From Hill Panel The administration has refused to provide the Sept. 21 President's Daily Brief, even on a classified basis, and won't say anything more about it other than to acknowledge that it exists. By Murray Waas, special to National Journal © National Journal Group Inc. Tuesday, Nov. 22, 2005 Ten days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda, according to government records and current and former officials with firsthand knowledge of the matter. The information was provided to Bush on September 21, 2001 during the President's Daily Brief," a 30- to 45-minute early-morning national security briefing. Information for PDBs has routinely been derived from electronic intercepts, human agents, and reports from foreign intelligence services, as well as more mundane sources such as news reports and public statements by foreign leaders. One of the more intriguing things that Bush was told during the briefing was that the few credible reports of contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda involved attempts by Saddam Hussein to monitor the terrorist group. Saddam viewed Al Qaeda as well as other theocratic radical Islamist organizations as a potential threat to his secular regime. At one point, analysts believed, Saddam considered infiltrating the ranks of Al Qaeda with Iraqi nationals or even Iraqi intelligence operatives to learn more about its inner workings, according to records and sources. The September 21, 2001, briefing was prepared at the request of the president, who was eager in the days following the terrorist attacks to learn all that he could about any possible connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda. Much of the contents of the September 21 PDB were later incorporated, albeit in a slightly different form, into a lengthier CIA analysis examining not only Al Qaeda's contacts with Iraq, but also Iraq's support for international terrorism. Although the CIA found scant evidence of collaboration between Iraq and Al Qaeda, the agency reported that it had long since established that Iraq had previously supported the notorious Abu Nidal terrorist organization, and had provided tens of millions of dollars and logistical support to Palestinian groups, including payments to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. The highly classified CIA assessment was distributed to President Bush, Vice President Cheney, the president's national security adviser and deputy national security adviser, the secretaries and undersecretaries of State and Defense, and various other senior Bush administration policy makers, according to government records. The Senate Intelligence Committee has asked the White House for the CIA assessment, the PDB of September 21, 2001, and dozens of other PDBs as part of the committee's ongoing investigation into whether the Bush administration misrepresented intelligence information in the run-up to war with Iraq. The Bush administration has refused to turn over these documents. Indeed, the existence of the September 21 PDB was not disclosed to the Intelligence Committee until the summer of 2004, according to congressional sources. Both Republicans and Democrats requested then that it be turned over. The administration has refused to provide it, even on a classified basis, and won't say anything more about it other than to acknowledge that it exists. On November 18, Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., said he planned to attach an amendment to the fiscal 2006 intelligence authorization bill that would require the Bush administration to give the Senate and House intelligence committees copies of PDBs for a three-year period. After Democrats and Republicans were unable to agree on language for the amendment, Kennedy said he would delay final action on the matter until Congress returns in December. The conclusions drawn in the lengthier CIA assessment-which has also been denied to the committee-were strikingly similar to those provided to President Bush in the September 21 PDB, according to records and sources. In the four years since Bush received the briefing, according to highly placed government officials, little evidence has come to light to contradict the CIA's original conclusion that no collaborative relationship existed between Iraq and Al Qaeda. "What the President was told on September 21," said one former high-level official, "was consistent with everything he has been told since-that the evidence was just not there." In arguing their case for war with Iraq, the president and vice president said after the September 11 attacks that Al Qaeda and Iraq had significant ties, and they cited the possibility that Iraq might share chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons with Al Qaeda for a terrorist attack against the United States. Democrats in Congress, as well as other critics of the Bush administration, charge that Bush and Cheney misrepresented and distorted intelligence information to bolster their case for war with Iraq. The president and vice president have insisted that they unknowingly relied on faulty and erroneous intelligence, provided mostly by the CIA. The new information on the September 21 PDB and the subsequent CIA analysis bears on the question of what the CIA told the president and how the administration used that information as it made its case for war with Iraq. The central rationale for going to war against Iraq, of course, was that Saddam Hussein had biological and chemical weapons, and that he was pursuing an aggressive program to build nuclear weapons. Despite those claims, no weapons were ever discovered after the war, either by United Nations inspectors or by U.S. military authorities. Much of the blame for the incorrect information in statements made by the president and other senior administration officials regarding the weapons-of-mass-destruction issue has fallen on the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies. In April 2004, the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded in a bipartisan report that the CIA's prewar assertion that Saddam's regime was "reconstituting its nuclear weapons program" and "has chemical and biological weapons" were "overstated, or were not supported by the underlying intelligence provided to the Committee." The Bush administration has cited that report and similar findings by a presidential commission as evidence of massive CIA intelligence failures in assessing Iraq's unconventional-weapons capability. Bush and Cheney have also recently answered their critics by ascribing partisan motivations to them and saying their criticism has the effect of undermining the war effort. In a speech on November 11, the president made his strongest comments to date on the subject: "Baseless attacks send the wrong signal to our troops and to an enemy that is questioning America's will." Since then, he has adopted a different tone, and he said on his way home from Asia on November 21, "This is not an issue of who is a patriot or not." In his own speech to the American Enterprise Institute yesterday, Cheney also changed tone, saying that "disagreement, argument, and debate are the essence of democracy" and the "sign of a healthy political system." He then added: "Any suggestion that prewar information was distorted, hyped, or fabricated by the leader of the nation is utterly false." Although the Senate Intelligence Committee and the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, commonly known as the 9/11 commission, pointed to incorrect CIA assessments on the WMD issue, they both also said that, for the most part, the CIA and other agencies did indeed provide policy makers with accurate information regarding the lack of evidence of ties between Al Qaeda and Iraq. But a comparison of public statements by the president, the vice president, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld show that in the days just before a congressional vote authorizing war, they professed to have been given information from U.S. intelligence assessments showing evidence of an Iraq-Al Qaeda link. "You can't distinguish between Al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror," President Bush said on September 25, 2002. The next day, Rumsfeld said, "We have what we consider to be credible evidence that Al Qaeda leaders have sought contacts with Iraq who could help them acquire … weapons-of-mass-destruction capabilities." The most explosive of allegations came from Cheney, who said that September 11 hijacker Mohammed Atta, the pilot of the first plane to crash into the World Trade Center, had met in Prague, in the Czech Republic, with a senior Iraqi intelligence agent, Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, five months before the attacks. On December 9, 2001, Cheney said on NBC's Meet the Press: "[I]t's pretty well confirmed that [Atta] did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in [the Czech Republic] last April, several months before the attack." Cheney continued to make the charge, even after he was briefed, according to government records and officials, that both the CIA and the FBI discounted the possibility of such a meeting. Credit card and phone records appear to demonstrate that Atta was in Virginia Beach, Va., at the time of the alleged meeting, according to law enforcement and intelligence officials. Al-Ani, the Iraqi intelligence official with whom Atta was said to have met in Prague, was later taken into custody by U.S. authorities. He not only denied the report of the meeting with Atta, but said that he was not in Prague at the time of the supposed meeting, according to published reports. In June 2004, the 9/11 commission concluded: "There have been reports that contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda also occurred after bin Laden had returned to Afghanistan, but they do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship. Two senior bin Laden associates have adamantly denied that any ties existed between Al Qaeda and Iraq. We have no credible evidence that Iraq and Al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States." Regarding the alleged meeting in Prague, the commission concluded: "We do not believe that such a meeting occurred." Still, Cheney did not concede the point. "We have never been able to prove that there was a connection to 9/11," Cheney said after the commission announced it could not find significant links between Al Qaeda and Iraq. But the vice president again pointed out the existence of a Czech intelligence service report that Atta and the Iraqi agent had met in Prague. "That's never been proved. But it's never been disproved," Cheney said. The following month, July 2004, the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded in its review of the CIA's prewar intelligence: "Despite four decades of intelligence reporting on Iraq, there was little useful intelligence collected that helped analysts determine the Iraqi regime's possible links to al-Qaeda." One reason that Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld made statements that contradicted what they were told in CIA briefings might have been that they were receiving information from another source that purported to have evidence of Al Qaeda-Iraq ties. The information came from a covert intelligence unit set up shortly after the September 11 attacks by then-Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith. Feith was a protégé of, and intensely loyal to, Cheney, Rumsfeld, then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, and Cheney's then-chief of staff and national security adviser, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby. The secretive unit was set up because Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Libby did not believe the CIA would be able to get to the bottom of the matter of Iraq-Al Qaeda ties. The four men shared a long-standing distrust of the CIA from their earlier positions in government, and felt that the agency had failed massively by not predicting the September 11 attacks. At first, the Feith-directed unit primarily consisted of two men, former journalist Michael Maloof and David Wurmser, a veteran of neoconservative think tanks. They liked to refer to themselves as the "Iraqi intelligence cell" of the Pentagon. And they took pride in the fact that their office was in an out-of-the-way cipher-locked room, with "charts that rung the room from one end to the other" showing the "interconnections of various terrorist groups" with one another and, most important, with Iraq, Maloof recalled in an interview. They also had the heady experience of briefing Rumsfeld twice, and Feith more frequently, Maloof said. The vice president's office also showed great interest in their work. On at least three occasions, Maloof said, Samantha Ravich, then-national security adviser for terrorism to Cheney, visited their windowless offices for a briefing. But neither Maloof nor Wurmser had any experience or formal training in intelligence analysis. Maloof later lost his security clearance, for allegedly failing to disclose a relationship with a woman who is a foreigner, and after allegations that he leaked classified information to the press. Maloof said in the interview that he has done nothing wrong and was simply being punished for his controversial theories. Wurmser has since been named as Cheney's Middle East adviser. In January 2002, Maloof and Wurmser were succeeded at the intelligence unit by two Naval Reserve officers. Intelligence analysis from the covert unit later served as the basis for many of the erroneous public statements made by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and others regarding the alleged ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda, according to former and current government officials. Intense debates still rage among longtime intelligence and foreign policy professionals as to whether those who cited the information believed it, or used it as propaganda. The unit has since been disbanded. Earlier this month, on November 14, the Pentagon's inspector general announced an investigation into whether Feith and others associated with the covert intelligence unit engaged in "unauthorized, unlawful, or inappropriate intelligence activities." In a statement, Feith said he is "confident" that investigators will conclude that his "office worked properly and in fact improved the intelligence product by asking good questions." The Senate Intelligence Committee has also been conducting its own probe of the Pentagon unit. But as was first disclosed by The American Prospect in an article by reporter Laura Rozen, that probe had been hampered by a lack of cooperation from Feith and the Pentagon. Internal Pentagon records show not only that the small Pentagon unit had the ear of the highest officials in the government, but also that Rumsfeld and others considered the unit as a virtual alternative to intelligence analyses provided by the CIA. On July 22, 2002, as the run-up to war with Iraq was underway, one of the Naval Reserve officers detailed to the unit sent Feith an e-mail saying that he had just heard that then-Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz wanted "the Iraqi intelligence cell … to prepare an intel briefing on Iraq and links to al-Qaida for the SecDef" and that he was not to tell anyone about it. After that briefing was delivered, Wolfowitz sent Feith and other officials a note saying: "This was an excellent briefing. The Secretary was very impressed. He asked us to think about possible next steps to see if we can illuminate the differences between us and CIA. The goal was not to produce a consensus product, but rather to scrub one another's arguments." On September 16, 2002, two days before the CIA produced a major assessment of Iraq's ties to terrorism, the Naval Reserve officers conducted a briefing for Libby and Stephen J. Hadley, then the deputy national security adviser to President Bush. In a memorandum to Wolfowitz, Feith wrote: "The briefing went very well and generated further interest from Mr. Hadley and Mr. Libby." Both men, the memo went on, requested follow-up material, most notably a "chronology of Atta's travels," a reference to the discredited allegation of an Atta-Iraqi meeting in Prague. In their presentation, the naval reserve briefers excluded the fact that the FBI and CIA had developed evidence that the alleged meeting had never taken place, and that even the Czechs had disavowed it. The Pentagon unit also routinely second-guessed the CIA's highly classified assessments. Regarding one report titled "Iraq and al-Qaeda: Interpreting a Murky Relationship," one of the Naval Reserve officers wrote: "The report provides evidence from numerous intelligence sources over the course of a decade on interactions between Iraq and al-Qaida. In this regard, the report is excellent. Then in its interpretation of this information, CIA attempts to discredit, dismiss, or downgrade much of this reporting, resulting in inconsistent conclusions in many instances. Therefore, the CIA report should be read for content only-and CIA's interpretation ought to be ignored." This same antipathy toward the CIA led to the events that are the basis of Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation of the leak of CIA officer Valerie Plame's identity, according to several former and current senior officials. Ironically, the Plame affair's origins had its roots in Cheney and Libby's interest in reports that Saddam Hussein had tried to purchase uranium yellowcake from Niger to build a nuclear weapon. After reading a Pentagon report on the matter in early February 2002, Cheney asked the CIA officer who provided him with a national security briefing each morning if he could find out about it. Without Cheney's knowledge, his query led to the CIA-sanctioned trip to Niger by former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, Plame's husband, to investigate the allegations. Wilson reported back to the CIA that the allegations were most likely not true. Despite that conclusion, President Bush, in his State of the Union address in 2003, included the Niger allegation in making the case to go to war with Iraq. In July 2003, after the war had begun, Wilson publicly charged that the Bush administration had "twisted" the intelligence information to make the case to go to war. Libby and Deputy White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove told reporters that Wilson's had been sent to Niger on the recommendation of his wife, Plame. In the process, the leaks led to the unmasking of Plame, the appointment of Fitzgerald, the jailing of a New York Times reporter for 85 days, and a federal grand jury indictment of Libby for perjury and obstruction of justice for allegedly attempting to conceal his role in leaking Plame's name to the press. The Plame affair was not so much a reflection of any personal animus toward Wilson or Plame, says one former senior administration official who knows most of the principals involved, but rather the direct result of long-standing antipathy toward the CIA by Cheney, Libby, and others involved. They viewed Wilson's outspoken criticism of the Bush administration as an indirect attack by the spy agency. Those grievances were also perhaps illustrated by comments that Vice President Cheney himself wrote on one of Feith's reports detailing purported evidence of links between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. In barely legible handwriting, Cheney wrote in the margin of the report: "This is very good indeed … Encouraging … Not like the crap we are all so used to getting out of CIA." -- Murray Waas is a Washington-based writer and frequent contributor to National Journal. Several of his previous stories are also available online. Copyright 2005 by National Journal Group Inc. The Watergate · 600 New Hamphire Ave. NW Washington, DC 20037 202-739-8400 · fax 202-833-8069 1:19:07 PM    comment []

Republican Crook of the Day   Rep. Bob Ney Is Poster Boy in Bribe Probe By PETE YOST Associated Press Writer November 23,2005 | WASHINGTON -- Identified in new court documents as "Representative No. 1," Republican Rep. Bob Ney of Ohio has become the poster boy in the Jack Abramoff bribery probe, a beneficiary of trips, tickets and campaign donations, allegedly in exchange for official acts. Ney denies doing anything wrong, and he would hardly appear to be in the top tier of likely targets for Washington lobbyists. He is chairman of the House Administration Committee. The panel's work is often mundane, but important to everyone on the Hill -- from overseeing the distribution of office furniture to protecting the Capitol after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. As low-profile as his duties might seem to be, Ney appears to face serious legal problems, has a legal defense fund and has hired a well-known Washington defense attorney, Mark Tuohey, a former deputy in Independent Counsel Ken Starr's criminal investigation of the Clintons. Ney's relationship with Abramoff could end up hurting him on the political front back home, where Democrats hope to mount a strong challenge to the six-term congressman. He won re-election by a 2-1 margin in 2004. "There's absolutely no question we're going after this seat; I think we can take it," Susan Gwinn, the Athens County, Ohio, Democratic Party chairwoman, said Tuesday night. "I would love to see a close race," said Democrat Roxanne Groff, who lost to Ney in a 1992 state Senate campaign. Among the candidates are Chillicothe Mayor Joe Sulzer, a Vietnam veteran, running on a platform of returning ethics to Ney's eastern Ohio congressional district. "Given what has come out, it seems very likely that Bob Ney would draw a strong opponent," said University of Akron political science professor John Green. "If one were tempted to run against Bob Ney, this would certainly be seen as the time." The unwelcome notoriety Ney faces raises an intriguing question: Who else on Capitol Hill is in the prosecutors' gun-sights? One man who may have some answers is Michael Scanlon, the former partner in Abramoff's lobbying firm. Scanlon, an ex-aide to Rep. Tom DeLay, R-Texas, has become a government witness in the Abramoff investigation. But for now, Ney is Exhibit A. Three full pages in the court papers in Scanlon's guilty plea Monday itemize things of value to Ney or his staff and official acts allegedly performed in return. Ney has ready responses for all of them. The congressman says he was misled by Abramoff about who was paying for a 2002 golf trip to Scotland. Ney said "I was told point blank" that a conservative policy group was footing the bill. Ney said he backed a measure to help reopen an Indian-operated gambling casino in Texas after being assured by Abramoff that Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., supported it. Dodd said neither Abramoff nor Scanlon ever contacted him about it. When evidence emerged that Abramoff and Scanlon had collected $80 million for representing six American Indian tribes with casinos, Ney said, "You do something that is in good faith -- how did I know what they were charging their clients? Why would I hurt anyone, especially an Indian tribe?" Ney has interesting historical connections to another Ohio congressman, the late Rep. Wayne Hays, who chaired the same committee that Ney now heads. Hays put his mistress on his payroll as his secretary, and when the arrangement was publicly disclosed, Hays was forced out of his chairmanship and eventually Congress. Elected to the Ohio House, Hays then lost a bid for re-election to Ney. When Ney was elected to Congress in 1994, he asked to be on Hays' old committee. He wanted to be chairman. He got his wish. Salon provides breaking news articles from the Associated Press as a service to its readers, but does not edit the AP articles it publishes. © 2005 The Associated Press     10:02:22 AM    comment []

"And the second way to defeat the terrorists is to spread freedom. You see, the best way to defeat a society that is — doesn't have hope, a society where people become so angry they're willing to become suiciders, is to spread freedom, is to spread democracy."  —George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., June 8, 2005   Except, of course when a free media gets in his way. . .   Report: Bush Talked of Bombing Al-Jazeera By ROBERT BARR, Associated Press WriterTue Nov 22, 3:02 PM ET A civil servant has been charged under Britain's Official Secrets Act for allegedly leaking a government memo that a newspaper said Tuesday suggested that Prime Minister Tony Blair persuaded President Bush not to bomb the Arab satellite station Al-Jazeera. The Daily Mirror reported that Bush spoke of targeting Al-Jazeera's headquarters in Doha, Qatar, when he met Blair at the White House on April 16, 2004. The Bush administration has regularly accused Al-Jazeera of being nothing more than a mouthpiece for anti-American sentiments. The Daily Mirror attributed its information to unidentified sources. One source, said to be in the government, was quoted as saying that the alleged threat was "humorous, not serious," but the newspaper quoted another source as saying that "Bush was deadly serious, as was Blair." "We are not interested in dignifying something so outlandish and inconceivable with a response," White House spokesman Scott McClellan told The Associated Press in an e-mail. Blair's office declined to comment on the report, stressing it never discussed leaked documents. Al-Jazeera said in a statement that it was investigating the report. "If the report is correct then this would be both shocking and worrisome not only to Al-Jazeera but to media organizations across the world," it said. The network said that if true the report would "cast serious doubts" on the Bush administration's explanations of earlier incidents involving Al-Jazeera journalists and the American military. The document was described as a transcript of a conversation between the two leaders. Cabinet Office civil servant David Keogh is accused of passing it to Leo O'Connor, who formerly worked for former British lawmaker Tony Clarke. Both Keogh and O'Connor are scheduled to appear at London's Bow Street Magistrates Court next week. According to the Crown Prosecution Service, Keogh was charged with an offense under Section 3 of the Official Secrets Act relating to "a damaging disclosure" by a servant of the Crown of information relating to international relations or information obtained from a state other than the United Kingdom. O'Connor was charged under Section 5, which relates to receiving and disclosing illegally disclosed information. According to the newspaper, Clarke returned the memo to Blair's office. Clarke did not respond to calls from The Associated Press seeking comment. Press Association, the British news agency, said Clarke refused to discuss the contents of the document. PA quoted Clarke as saying his priority was to support O'Connor who did "exactly the right thing" in bringing it to his attention. Peter Kilfoyle, a former defense minister in Blair's government, called for the document to be made public. "I think they ought to clarify what exactly happened on this occasion," he said. "If it was the case that President Bush wanted to bomb Al-Jazeera in what is after all a friendly country, it speaks volumes and it raises questions about subsequent attacks that took place on the press that wasn't embedded with coalition forces," the newspaper quoted Kilfoyle as saying. Sir Menzies Campbell, foreign affairs spokesman for the opposition Liberal Democrats, said Tuesday that, if true, the memo was worrying. "If true, then this underlines the desperation of the Bush administration as events in Iraq began to spiral out of control," he said. "On this occasion, the prime minister may have been successful in averting political disaster, but it shows how dangerous his relationship with President Bush has been." Al-Jazeera offices in Iraq and Afghanistan have been hit by U.S. bombs or missiles, but each time the U.S. military said they were not intentionally targeting the broadcaster. In April 2003, an Al-Jazeera journalist was killed when its Baghdad office was struck during a U.S. bombing campaign. Nabil Khoury, a State Department spokesman in Doha, said the strike was a mistake. In November 2002, Al-Jazeera's office in Kabul, Afghanistan, was destroyed by a U.S. missile. None of the crew was at the office at the time. U.S. officials said they believed the target was a terrorist site and did not know it was Al-Jazeera's office. Copyright © 2005 The Associated Press 8:45:56 AM    comment []

The Republican Cancer Continues to Grow and Spread With all the gloating lately about how George Bush and the Republican Party are getting smacked around in the polls, you'd think these scum weren't still running the country. Well they are, and don't forget that. And as long as they are, they will continue the sort of national debasement personified by the rape of the Endangered Species Act, described in the article below:   Unbearable Officials say grizzly bears in Yellowstone are thriving enough to be taken off the Endangered Species Act list. But if Congress passes a new bill, the act that helped preserve the bears may be headed for extinction. By Katharine Mieszkowski Nov. 23, 2005 | Last Tuesday, the grizzly bears that live in Yellowstone National Park socked in for the winter. Some got in some last-minute feeding, perhaps gorging on high-calorie whitebark pine nuts cadged from an unlucky ground squirrel's cache. Others were digging out their dens with those huge, powerful claws, getting their beds shipshape for the coming hibernation. And many were already snugly tucked in for the long sleep. But in Washington, D.C., far away from the largest grizzly population in the lower 48, humans were making portentous pronouncements that could roil even the fattest grizzly's peaceful slumber. The word from Washington: There are enough grizzlies in the Yellowstone area to declare that the bears are no longer threatened and to take Endangered Species Act protections away from them. Environmentalists are divided over the decision, with some advocates arguing that it is premature and others supporting it. But all of them, as well as federal wildlife officials, agree that the grizzly's comeback is due in large part to the Endangered Species Act, which has helped preserve the big predator's habitat. And environmentalists are gearing up to fight a new bill, written by Rep. Richard Pombo, R-Calif., that they say would fatally weaken the ESA. "It's a terrible bill. It undermines all of the fundamental protections of endangered species," says Bob Irvin, senior vice president for conservation programs at Defenders of Wildlife. "It would be devastating to endangered species and their habitats, across the board. In the 30-year history of the Endangered Species Act, it's certainly the first time the House of Representatives has passed such an egregious measure to weaken the act." On Nov, 15, Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton proposed a major change for the grizzlies that live in the Yellowstone area, removing them from the federal threatened-species list. "When it was listed in 1975, this majestic animal that greeted Lewis and Clark on their historic expedition stood at risk of disappearing from the American West," Norton said. "Thanks to the work of many partners, more than 600 grizzlies now inhabit the Yellowstone ecosystem, and the population is no longer threatened. With a comprehensive conservation strategy ready to be put into place upon delisting, we are confident that the future of the grizzly bear in Yellowstone is bright. Our grandchildren's grandchildren will see grizzly bears roaming Yellowstone." For the Bush administration officials, the announcement was a chance to trumpet a major environmental coup: the country's most celebrated land predator restored on George W.'s watch! But some environmentalist groups, including the Natural Resources Defense Council and Defenders of Wildlife, see the proposed delisting as a case of kicking a still ailing -- if improving -- patient out of the hospital. These environmentalists argue that delisting will make the grizzly's habitat more vulnerable to logging, roads and development. Currently, under the Endangered Species Act, federal agencies must consider the impact on grizzlies when, say, the Forest Service decides to build roads for logging or open up a new area of harvestable timber. When they haven't, the ESA has given environmentalists grounds to sue. In the past, to protect bears, the act has been employed to stop a ski development in the Gallatin Forest, argue for the removal of a fishing bridge where Yellowstone bears competed with humans for trout, and argue for major road closures in the Flathead, Gallatin and Targhee forests -- all lands that are contiguous to Yellowstone and that form the major portion of the grizzly's habitat. Those humans who are lined up against delisting the grizzly point out that the bears are an isolated population, lacking habitat corridors connecting them with other grizzly populations, which would give them healthy genetic diversity for the long term. "I don't think that you should be moving an intensively managed population on a small habitat island from the endangered-species list," says Craig Pease, a biologist at Vermont Law School. "It looks to me like they should be on the endangered-species list forever." Delisting the grizzlies will turn responsibility for their welfare over to the states -- which will mean some of them will be facing the barrel of a gun. Wyoming, Idaho and Montana, which along with Washington are the only states in the contiguous U.S. where grizzlies remain, have already announced plans for grizzly hunts when they take over the bears' management, which could be as soon as late 2006. But environmentalists fear that controlled hunting is not the biggest danger grizzlies will face if delisted. Under the Endangered Species Act, the grizzlies can be shot only if they threaten human life. But if they're taken off the list, they can be blown away if they threaten human property, according to Louisa Willcox of the Natural Resources Defense Council. Snacking in an orchard could be grounds for summary execution. Under current federal protection, poaching a grizzly can carry a fine in the thousands, plus restitution fees up to $15,000. Poaching would carry with it a fine of just $700 in states like Wyoming when the bears are no longer listed as federally threatened. When Europeans arrived, between 50,000 and 100,000 grizzly bears ranged from the Pacific Coast to the Mississippi River. But they're mostly gone now, wiped out by habitat loss as humans moved into their domains. The bear whose image is on the California flag can no longer be found anywhere in the state. The bears have been driven out of 98 percent of their historic range in the lower 48 states. There are just 1,200 or so left there, including the largest single population, the 600 bears that live around Yellowstone, which could be delisted (30,000 grizzlies live in Alaska, and 22,000 in Canada). "They're in less than 2 percent of their native habitat," says Dick Dolan, conservation director for the Greater Yellowstone Coalition in Bozeman, Mont. "We've got them ringed in, and their habitat is not coming back. They're not going to be wandering across the plains of central Wyoming again. It's never going to happen." Some environmental groups support the decision to delist. The National Wildlife Federation sent out a grizzly e-mail alert with the subject line "I'm back, baby!" to its members last Tuesday. They argue that the bear population in and around Yellowstone is now healthy enough to be managed by the states, with the looser protections that implies. The federal government's plans to delist will now enter a public comment period, during which everyone from environmental groups to business lobbyists to the general public will have a chance to weigh in. Most analysts expect the delisting to go forward. While environmentalists and grizzly conservationists may argue the merits of delisting, there's one thing that they all agree on: The Endangered Species Act has kept the bears roaming in the northern Rockies. "It's probably one of the greatest success stories under the Endangered Species Act," says Chris Servheen, grizzly bear recovery coordinator for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. "It's a very difficult species to get to recovery." The grizzlies are second only to the musk oxen in North American land mammals for the slowness of their reproductive rate. And the bears need large home ranges, about 100 square miles for females and 300 for males. Plus, there's that old deadly-conflict-with-humans problem. "It's obvious that the Endangered Species Act has worked because there are more bears now than when they were protected," says Marv Hoyt, Idaho director for the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, which opposes delisting. "Federal protection is the only reason these bears exist in Yellowstone today, and they aren't yet ready to survive without it," says Wilcox from the Natural Resources Defense Council. Yet at the very moment that the highest federal environmental officials in the land, from Gale Norton on down, are trumpeting the return of the grizzly as an Endangered Species Act success story, the act itself is on the brink of endangerment. The House recently passed Pombo's Threatened and Endangered Species Recovery Act of 2005, which would strip the ESA of many of the protections that have helped the grizzly come back. Environmentalists say the Pombo bill threatens far more than the grizzly population or even endangered species in general: If passed, it could jeopardize wildlife protection and conservation throughout the country. Last April, I went to Yellowstone National Park to see the grizzly comeback firsthand. At 7 a.m. on a brisk spring morning, I watched a mother grizzly swinging her head back and forth, her big black nose sniffing the air. Even down on all fours, the sow dominated the rocky outcropping scattered with Douglas fir. Weighing in at 300 pounds, the bear lolled 180 degrees to the right, then left, then back again, using her long snout to scan the crisp air for any whiff of danger. The grizzly mom was protecting her yearlings, which gamboled nearby, rooting in the dirt on the hillside. With all the intensity of adolescents, the cubs tore at the earth with their claws, trying to grub up some ants, moths or worms to eat. The three 80-pounders threw their bodies into the effort, their paws sending dirt and moss careening off the hillside behind them. The pronounced humps on their silvery, yellowish brown backs showcased the powerful muscles that come together at their shoulders. These bruisers are built to turn over logs, move boulders, excavate dens, strike prey. Then about a year and a half old, the cubs still nursed and would continue to stay with mom for another year, before she literally ran them off to wean them. That morning, those four grizzlies ruled the south side of Lamar Canyon, above Lamar River, just north of Specimen Ridge in Yellowstone. Below them, on surrounding hillsides, hoary-looking bison with their awkward just-born calves, pregnant elk and expectant pronghorn antelope grazed on new grass in herds. A trio of coyotes yipped and howled. Just behind the bears, visible over the top of the ridge, a red-tailed hawk perched on a limber pine. Ensconced in America's oldest national park, these bears are the top of the food chain -- so-called apex predators -- along with the gray wolf, which has been successfully reintroduced into the park after being exterminated there, another Endangered Species Act success story. These great predators are one of the main draws for the park's more than 3 million annual visitors, who hope to catch a glimpse of just such unfettered wildness -- from a safe distance, of course -- and go back home to whatever tamed city or suburbs they live in with a good story to tell. It wasn't always this way. As recently as the early '70s, the bears living in this park weren't as wild as they are now. They'd become scavengers, having enjoyed a 70-year run of rummaging through the trash at open-pit garbage dumps while park visitors gawked nearby. Some grizzlies had even come to take treats directly from visitors, right out of car windows. "There was a huge problem with bears who were dependent on human food sources and were not afraid of people," says Tom France, director of the National Wildlife Federation's northern Rockies office. And when bears and humans tangled, most often the bears ended up dead. "When the bear got listed, most of the mortalities were occurring in the park because that's where the dumps and the conflicts were with people," says Willcox from the Natural Resources Defense Council. In the mid-'70s, the feds decided to wean the grizzlies from the human handouts. But closing the dumps led to about 150 bears having to be killed by federal agents in the following five years, when they got into trouble as they continued to turn to humans for food. But as bears learned to fend for themselves again, the population surged: "The bear population we have in Yellowstone now is not only larger, it's wilder. It's almost entirely dependent on wild food and has a much greater wariness of people," France says. "Those who want to take the teeth out of the ESA try to portray it as a failure. The Yellowstone grizzly situation refutes that." Now, after decades of bear-proof containers and visitor education -- all a part of bear recovery -- the new generation of bears, like the mothers and cubs I saw, are both more independent and more numerous. The great bears were one of the first species to enjoy protection under the Endangered Species Act, and there were thought to be 200 to 250 bears in the area at that time. Now, the feds estimate that there are 600, even as the human population in the Yellowstone area has boomed, too. These days, the motto in bear country is "A fed bear is a dead bear." Beyond cleaning up dumps in the parks there are now measures to minimize other bear attractants, from mandating back-country food storage containers to limiting sheep grazing in grizzly habitat. It's even brought better garbage-management techniques to areas on private land. And bears are relocated instead of being immediately killed when they get into trouble with garbage or livestock. The Endangered Species Act also helped create more space for bears: "We didn't take a gun and go out and shoot bears," says Hoyt from the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, referring to the initial decline in the bears' population. "We just logged the heck out of their habitat and they quit using this area." The act not only stopped the hunting of bears but also forced federal agencies to take a "look before you leap" approach to road building or timber allotments and assess how an activity would affect the bears before greenlighting it. But if the Pombo bill is approved, environmentalists say, not just the grizzly but wildlife conservation in general will be the endangered species. Richard Pombo is probably the most virulently anti-environmental Congress member in the country. A major landowner in his Tracy, Calif., district, just east of the San Francisco Bay Area, he subscribes to a doctrine of private-property rights über alles. In the 1996 book he coauthored, "This Land Is Our Land: How to End the War on Private Property," Pombo writes: "In theory, the ESA saves species from the depredations of humankind and restores them to viable populations. In actuality, it violates property rights and has arguably resulted in the recovery of no species. It has cost the United States billions of dollars -- not only in direct costs, but in lost opportunity costs for economic growth." In keeping with this philosophy, the Pombo bill allows developers to demand financial restitution from the government if the presence of an endangered species leads the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to curb development. Environmentalists see this provision as spelling doom for the entire ESA. "If you're a developer, under the Pombo bill, what you want to do is propose the most expensive development you can which will have the most disastrous results for endangered species, because that's what you can demand payment for from taxpayers," says Irvin from Defenders of Wildlife. Like some kind of reverse Robin Hood, Pombo's bill promises payback. It aims to extract those billions from the federal government for the developers whom he sees the Endangered Species Act as having robbed. Kostyack, senior council for the National Wildlife Federation, says that this is the provision that essentially makes all the rest of the regulatory twists in the bill beside the point. It would essentially require the feds to pay developers for the projected losses on a proposed project if preserving endangered species gets in the way of it. In other words, if this bill passes, it would be a great time to propose building a casino or a resort on some endangered species habitat, and then sit back and wait for your payout. In the end, it creates a huge financial incentive to threaten to crush endangered species. And no doubt, the federal government will want avoid such big payouts, so there goes enforcement of endangered-species protections. "Every year, there are grizzly bears in Cody, Wyoming, that end up on private lands," says Hoyt from the Greater Yellowstone Coalition. "If you had to pay each of those landowners to protect that habitat, the costs would be insurmountable." He argues that this part of the bill would essentially mean that the Endangered Species Act would apply only on public lands. Or maybe the whole ESA would be kaput because there will be no money to enforce it. "There's no money in the bill to pay for this, so its clear purpose is to thwart any enforcement of the ESA. If the Fish and Wildlife Service is wiped out by these payments to developers, they're not going to be able to enforce the act anywhere," says Kostyack from the National Wildlife Federation. "The Pombo bill is not analysis paralysis. It's fiscal paralysis," says Doug Honnold, a lawyer for Earthjustice, a nonprofit public-interest environmental law firm. "By driving up costs, it makes the ESA unworkable. A consequence of that is that no species would get adequately protected." An analysis by the Congressional Budget Office found that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Animal and Planet Health Inspection Service would have to spend $2.7 billion between 2006 and 2010 if the bill passes. Pombo and other critics of the ESA claim that the act has been a failure because only a handful of species have been deemed recovered since it passed in 1973 (President Nixon signed it with huge support from Congress). The act was meant to function as a safety net to catch species careening toward extinction and bring them back from the brink. But while it's rescued hundreds of species, like the bald eagle, American alligator and whooping crane from the abyss, it hasn't brought more than a handful to full recovery. Yet, the changes to the Endangered Species Act that Pombo is now proposing in the name of "reforming" the act will do nothing to help more species recover. Take the case of the grizzly bear. If Pombo's proposed changes to the bill had been in effect, would the grizzly have come back as much as it has in Yellowstone? France from the National Wildlife Federation, who believes the bears are ready to be delisted, doesn't think so: "The Pombo bill would undermine a lot of what the agencies have done." Right now, any federal agency that is contemplating taking an action that might jeopardize a threatened or endangered species, such as logging a forest, must consult the Fish and Wildlife Service about how that would affect the critter in question. "One of the main reasons that the bear has enjoyed a resurgence is that the ESA has prevented us from managing the ecosystem in the old way, which was commodities first, worry about the ecosystem later," says Dolan from the Greater Yellowstone Coalition. Under the ESA, the Fish and Wildlife Service has worked with everyone from the Bureau of Land Management to the Forest Service, the National Park Service, the U.S. Geological Survey and state wildlife agencies on grizzly recovery, but the buck stopped with the Fish and Wildlife Service. "The agencies that are trying to push through projects are not necessarily the best agencies to make decisions about what a species needs, so right now, Fish and Wildlife has the final call on what constitutes jeopardy," explains John Kostyack, senior council for the National Wildlife Federation. After overcoming initial mistrust, the agencies came to work together very effectively on grizzly recovery. Currently, the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee coordinates efforts to bring the bears back in six regions in the lower 48, including Yellowstone. "The act has required agencies, like the Forest Service, to not just manage for timber production, but to manage for bears. And they've done a good job of that in cooperation with the Fish and Wildlife Service," says Bob Irvin, senior vice president for conservation programs for Defenders of Wildlife. Under the Pombo bill, the secretary of the interior can circumvent that consultation requirement. So much for the structure that has proved to work. The Pombo bill also invites the secretary of the interior to get involved with determining which science to rely on when a decision is being made about impacts on an endangered species. "This bill is basically an invitation to let the political officials muck around with these decisions that should be guided by biology," says Kostyack of the National Wildlife Federation. And, under the Pombo bill, when an agency wants to do something that could hurt bears, it need only consider the impact of that single action. Every logging project or oil and gas lease could be evaluated individually, without regard for the bigger picture of what is happening in the overall habitat, says Honnold from Earthjustice. So, Pombo's initiative, Honnold says, subjects "threatened and endangered species to death by a thousand paper cuts. In the grizzly bear context, that death could come through many individual logging projects and small-scale oil and gas leases." One of the main arguments for delisting the grizzly in the Yellowstone area is that if states don't do a good job of keeping populations stable, as environmentalists fear, the feds can always step in and relist the bears. But biologists and environmentalists worry that by the time that happens, the act that helped save the grizzly over the last 30 years will be so full of holes it won't have the teeth to save the bears again. The Pombo bill has already passed the House of Representatives and is now in the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, which is chaired by James Inhofe, R-Okla., whose environmental record is best exemplified by his recent suggestion on the Senate floor that "man-made global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetuated on the American people." The bill is being considered in that committee's Fisheries, Wildlife and Water Subcommittee, which includes a moderate Republican, Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, son of the late, great conservationist John Chafee, who has a National Wildlife Refuge named after him. If Democrats also on the subcommittee, like Hillary Clinton hang together, Chafee could be the swing vote that keeps the bill from going further. While the feds are merrily celebrating the resurgence of the grizzly in Yellowstone, Congress is considering undermining the very law that's made it possible for the bears to stage a comeback there. That's some cold way for the grizzlies bedding down in Yellowstone to start the winter. -- By Katharine Mieszkowski   7:17:06 AM    comment []

© Copyright 2005 Michael D. Zungolo. Last update: 12/1/2005; 11:08:21 AM.