Donle’s Dispatches
Volume 1 Issue 227 Today’s News and Views Friday, September 8, 2006
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Volume 1 Issue 227 Today’s News and Views Friday, September 8, 2006 |
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Donle's Dispatches RSS News Feeds Latest news and opinion headlines from NPR, BBC, NY Times, etc. |
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Cost of the War in Iraq
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Update of US Casualties in Iraq: 2664 Update of US Casualties in Afghanistan: 336 Figures provided by the Iraq Coalition Causality website |
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Remember
Who Made This MESS! |
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Support Our Troops IMPEACH Bush/Cheney |
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Rep. Louise Slaughter's report "America for Sale" (pdf document) |
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Listen to Air America Radio while reading today's news and views |
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Sign the ACLU's Petition against torture! We demand our country back. |
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The Not Your Soldier Project gives youth the tools we need to stop the military invasion of our schools and our communities. Not Your Soldier Action Camps bring together young people who are heavily targeted by military recruitment. At the camps, youth learn how to take action to fight military recruitment, the poverty draft, and the corporations that profit off of war. In 2006, Not Your Soldier will be hosting a national camp for youth and adult allies. >>Go to the Pick a Camp section to find out more! If you're interested in hosting a regional Not Your Soldier gathering, find out more here. Not Your Soldier National Days of Action are coordinated days of creative, non-violent direct action where youth take leadership and tell recruiters, "We are Not Your Soldiers!" >>Sign up for our action alert e-mail list! Parents: have questions? Check out Info for Parents, and our FAQ's to find out what the camps will be like. copyright 2005 Not Your Soldier. |
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News and Views |
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September 3, 2006 Sistani Led His Followers to Elect Iraq's New Regime. Today He Walked Away By Ron Fullwood The new Iraqi regime's
most important link to its Shiite population is walking away from the
political role he assumed in the wake of our invasion and occupation, and,
presumably, will take his thousands of Iraqi followers with him. Copyright © OpEdNews, 2002-2006 |
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| Things are going swimmingly in Iraq are they not? the Bush Administration proposes "free" elections, then does everything in its power to thwart them, then the mullahs lead demonstrations to make BushCo keeps its word on elections. The Elections take place but the Bush crime family does not like the results, so they force the duly elected leader out of his position and hand-pick his replacement, who promptly calls for an immediate U.S. withdrawal from his country, then to throw salt in the wound he criticizes Israel's actions in Lebanon and America's support for them. Now the religious leader most responsible for getting the elections to take place steps away because he feels that civil war is inevitable. And these incompetent clowns in the White House can't see the writing on the wall. Typical! - Harold, ed. | ||
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GOP's Hold on House ShakierAs Labor Day gets the campaign in full swing, Democrats are counting on voters unhappy with one-party rule and Bush's leadership.By Janet Hook State of race:
July Democratic poll favored Fitzpatrick, 44% to 38% |
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| The headline for this article says it all. The Democrats strategy is to let the Republicans hang themselves. Instead of defining the Republicans and attacking and critiquing their positions, the Democrats are satisfied to sit on the sidelines and let the Republicans do themselves in. Is there a surer way to defeat for the the Democrats than this. They had damn well stand up and demand accountability from the Republicans they hope to unseat. And they should be making an issue of media coverage. Anyone paying attention should know the media is in the Republican corner and is not giving fair unbiased coverage to the Democrats. Democratic candidates should be walking their districts, meeting with constituents, calling people out to meetings to present their case. They should be asking people are you better off than you were at the beginning of the Bush reign? Are you safer today than you were on September 10, 2001? Millions of jobs have gone overseas, do you want yours to join them? Are you satisfied with the medical care available to you? Is it affordable? If you answer yes to these questions then by all means vote for the Republicans, but if you want a better America, a safer America, a smarter America, then consider the alternative. - Harold, ed. | ||
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| In Congress, Republican leaders said the House
would vote on the president’s proposal the week after next, and the chairman
of the Armed Services Committee, Representative Duncan Hunter of California,
argued in favor of the administration’s approach in a hearing on Thursday
morning with military lawyers. But the military lawyers argued back. And the Senate Republicans said there were still several areas of contention between them and the administration, chiefly, a proposal to deny the accused the right to see classified evidence shown to the jury. Brig, Gen. James C. Walker, the top uniformed lawyer for the Marines, said that no civilized country should deny a defendant the right to see the evidence against him and that the United States “should not be the first.” Maj. Gen. Scott C. Black, the judge advocate general of the Army, made the same point, and Rear Adm. Bruce E. MacDonald, the judge advocate general of the Navy, said military law provided rules for using classified evidence, whereby a judge could prepare an unclassified version of the evidence to share with the jury and the accused and his lawyer. Senate Republicans said the proposal to deny the accused the right to see classified evidence was one of the main points of contention remaining between them and the administration. “It would be unacceptable, legally, in my opinion, to give someone the death penalty in a trial where they never heard the evidence against them,” said Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who has played a key role in the drafting of alternative legislation as a member of the Armed Services Committee and a military judge. “ ‘Trust us, you’re guilty, we’re going to execute you, but we can’t tell you why’? That’s not going to pass muster; that’s not necessary.” President Bush announced his proposal for bringing terror suspects to trial on Wednesday as part of a round of speeches on national security aimed at drawing a sharp distinction between the two parties: Democrats as weak on terror, Republicans strong. The administration created its system of tribunals shortly after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, but the Supreme Court struck down those tribunals in June, saying they violated the Constitution and international law. Senior administration officials said the decision to acknowledge the C.I.A. program, to move the 14 “high value’’ detainees to Guantánamo and to set up a new system for putting them on trial emerged from a committee President Bush established in January, six months before a Supreme Court decision forced his hand on some of those issues. The committee, run by J. D. Crouch, the deputy national security adviser, held more than 20 meetings in secret at the White House and a half-dozen higher-level sessions with Mr. Bush’s national security team, which included Mr. Cheney, Ms. Rice, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and the director of national intelligence, John D. Negroponte. While the White House described those meetings today as a largely harmonious effort to remake a detainee system that had raised objections around the world, other officials said Ms. Rice’s State Department was often pitted against Mr. Cheney’s staff. “There were a range of opinions on a number of issues, but it’s pretty fair to say that the State Department had been arguing for 18 months that we needed to put this whole thing on a strong legislative footing, and end the dispute with the allies,’’ said one official who was part of the process. “And there were others, from the vice president’s office to some in the Justice Department and the White House, who wanted to maintain the status quo.’’ The standoff was broken by the Supreme Court’s decision in June in the tribunal case, which took many in the White House by surprise, the officials said. Administration lawyers on Capitol Hill said Thursday that the military trials now proposed by the administration were markedly different from the previous system and would pass court scrutiny. Among other changes, the proposal sets up tribunals overseen by a judge who could not also serve as part of the jury. Defendants would be given two appeals, and could not be tried twice. But Senate Republicans remained divided over the White House proposal. On one side, Mr. Graham and Senators John McCain of Arizona and John Warner of Virginia have argued that the system must provide enough fairness guarantees that the nation would feel comfortable having American troops tried under it. This is important, they argue, to repair a national reputation that has been damaged internationally by revelations of abuse at Guantánamo Bay and at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and to set a model for how other countries might try American troops. On the other side, Senators John Cornyn of Texas and Jeff Sessions of Alabama have shown more inclination to endorse the president’s proposal. Mr. Cornyn said after a round of meetings Thursday that he still supported the president’s approach on classified evidence, but that he hoped the differences could be bridged. “We’re trying,” he said. Democrats have essentially said they would back Senators Warner, Graham and McCain, leaving the Republicans to lead the fight against the administration, and allowing the Democrats to avoid political fallout from challenging the administration while maintaining their criticism of the administration’s handling of the war in Iraq. “I think you’re looking for a fight that doesn’t exist,” Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the minority leader, told reporters. In testimony on the Hill, an administration lawyer stood firm on the importance of denying suspects the right to know the classified evidence against them. “In the midst of the current conflict, we simply cannot consider sharing with captured terrorists the highly sensitive intelligence that may be relevant to military-commission prosecutions,” said the lawyer, Steven G. Bradbury, the acting assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel. David E. Sanger contributed reporting. |
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| Its quite the predicament we find ourselves in when its the military that is resisting the fascist tendencies of the present Administration and its cheerleaders. A two-tier justice system? Wasn't that a defining institution for the Soviets and the Nazis? - Harold, ed. | ||
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September 8, 2006 The Legal Debate Interrogation Methods Rejected by Military Win Bush’s SupportBy ADAM LIPTAK Many of the harsh interrogation techniques repudiated by the Pentagon on Wednesday would be made lawful by legislation put forward the same day by the Bush administration. And the courts would be forbidden from intervening. The proposal is in the last 10 pages of an 86-page bill devoted mostly to military commissions, and it is a tangled mix of cross-references and pregnant omissions. But legal experts say it adds up to an apparently unique interpretation of the Geneva Conventions, one that could allow C.I.A. operatives and others to use many of the very techniques disavowed by the Pentagon, including stress positions, sleep deprivation and extreme temperatures. “It’s a Jekyll and Hyde routine,” Martin S. Lederman, who teaches constitutional law at Georgetown University, said of the administration’s dual approaches. In effect, the administration is proposing to write into law a two-track system that has existed as a practical matter for some time. So-called high-value detainees held by the C.I.A. have been subjected to tough interrogation in secret prisons around the world. More run-of-the-mill prisoners held by the Defense Department have, for the most part, faced milder questioning, although human rights groups say there have been widespread abuses. The new bill would continue to give the C.I.A. the substantial freedom it has long enjoyed, while the revisions to the Army Field Manual announced Wednesday would further restrict military interrogators. The legislation would leave open the possibility that the military could revise its own standards to allow the harsher techniques. John C. Yoo, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and a former Justice Department official who helped develop the administration’s early legal response to the terrorist threat, said the bill would provide people on the front lines with important tools. “When you’re fighting a new kind of war against an enemy we haven’t faced before,” Professor Yoo said, “our system needs to give flexibility to people to respond to those challenges.” In June, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the Supreme Court ruled that a provision of the Geneva Conventions concerning the humane treatment of prisoners applied to all aspects of the conflict with Al Qaeda. The new bill would keep the courts from that kind of meddling, Professor Yoo said. “There is a rejection of what the court did in Hamdan,” he said, “which is to try to judicially enforce the Geneva Conventions, which no court had ever tried to do before.” Indeed, the proposed legislation takes pains to try to ensure that the Supreme Court will not have a second bite at the apple. “The act makes clear,” it says in its introductory findings, “that the Geneva Conventions are not a source of judicially enforceable individual rights.” Though lawsuits will almost certainly be filed challenging the bill should it become law, most legal experts said Congress probably had the power to restrict the courts’ jurisdiction in this way. The proposed legislation would provide retroactive immunity from prosecution to government agents who used harsh methods after the Sept. 11 attacks. And, as President Bush suggested on Wednesday, it would ensure that those techniques remain lawful. “As more high-ranking terrorists are captured, the need to obtain intelligence from them will remain critical,” Mr. Bush said. “And having a C.I.A. program for questioning terrorists will continue to be crucial to getting life-saving information.” Mr. Bush said he had never authorized torture but indicated that aggressive interrogation techniques short of torture remained important tools in the administration’s efforts to combat terrorism. “I cannot describe the specific methods used — I think you understand why,” he said. “If I did, it would help the terrorists learn how to resist questioning, and to keep information from us that we need to prevent new attacks on our country. But I can say the procedures were tough, and they were safe and lawful and necessary.” A senior intelligence official said that the new legislation, if enacted, would make it clear that the techniques used by the C.I.A. on senior Qaeda members who had been held abroad in secret sites would not be prohibited and that interrogators who engaged in those practices both in the past and in the future would not face prosecution. The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, would not discuss the techniques the agency had used or was prepared to use. Other senior administration officials, all of whom declined to speak on the record, said there was no intention to undercut the interrogation rules in the new Army Field Manual, which does not include some of the most extreme techniques used on some suspected terrorists in American custody. The intent of the legislation, they said, is to prevent the prosecution of interrogators under amendments to the War Crimes Act that were passed in the 1990’s. Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions bars, among other things, “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment.” The administration says that language is too vague. That is nonsense, said Harold Hongju Koh, the dean of Yale Law School and a State Department official in the Clinton administration. “Outrages upon personal dignity is something like Abu Ghraib or parading our soldiers in Vietnam before the television cameras,” he said. “Unconstitutionally vague means you don’t know it when you see it.” But the new legislation would interpret “outrages upon personal dignity” relatively narrowly, adopting a standard enacted last year in an amendment to the Detainee Treatment Act proposed by Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona. The amendment prohibits “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment” and refers indirectly to an American constitutional standard that prohibits conduct which “shocks the conscience.” There is substantial room for interpretation, legal experts said, between Common Article 3’s strict prohibition of, for instance, humiliating treatment and the McCain amendment’s ban only on conduct that “shocks the conscience.” The proposed legislation, said Peter S. Margulies, a law professor at Roger Williams University, “seems to be trying to surgically remove from our compliance with Geneva the section of Common Article 3 that deals with humiliating and degrading treatment.” The net effect of the new legislation in the interrogation context, Professor Yoo said, is to allow the C.I.A. flexibility of the sort that the revisions to the Army Field Manual have denied to the Pentagon. The bill lets the C.I.A. “operate with a freer hand” than the Defense Department “in that space between the Army Field Manual and the McCain amendment,” he said. Dean Koh said the administration’s new interpretation of the Geneva Conventions would further isolate the United States from the rest of the world. “Making U.S. ratification of Common Article 3 narrower and more conditional than everyone else’s,” he said, “by its very nature suggests that we are not prepared to make the same commitment that every other nation has made.” The bill proposed by the White House would also amend the War Crimes Act, which makes violations of Common Article 3 a felony. Those amendments are needed, the administration said, to provide guidance to American personnel. The new legislation makes a list of nine “serious violations” of Common Article 3 federal crimes. The prohibited conduct includes torture, murder, rape, and the infliction of severe physical or mental pain. By implication, some legal experts said, the bill endorses the use of those interrogation techniques that are not mentioned. The proposed legislation in any event represents a further retreat from international legal standards by an administration already hostile to them, some scholars said. “It’s strong evidence that this administration doesn’t accept international legal processes,’’ said Peter J. Spiro, a law professor at Temple University. Neil A. Lewis contributed reporting from Washington. |
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| Why am I not surprised that Bush would support torture. This is the person that as a child blew up frogs by stuffing firecrackers up their asses, and as a member of Skull and Bones at Yale branded the initiates with a blazing hot branding iron and commented that it was one of his fondest college memories. Sick puppy!! - Harold, ed. | ||
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September 8, 2006 Conservatives Help Wal-Mart, and Vice VersaBy MICHAEL BARBARO and STEPHANIE STROM As Wal-Mart Stores struggles to rebut criticism from unions and Democratic leaders, the company has discovered a reliable ally: prominent conservative research groups like the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation and the Manhattan Institute. Top policy analysts at these groups have written newspaper opinion pieces around the country supporting Wal-Mart, defended the company in interviews with reporters and testified on its behalf before government committees in Washington. But the groups — and their employees — have consistently failed to disclose a tie to the giant discount retailer: financing from the Walton Family Foundation, which is run by the Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton’s three children, who have a controlling stake in the company. The groups said the donations from the foundation have no influence over their research, which is deliberately kept separate from their fund-raising activities. What’s more, the pro-business philosophies of these groups often dovetail with the interests of Wal-Mart. But the financing, which totaled more than $2.5 million over the last six years, according to data compiled by GuideStar, a research organization, raises questions about what the research groups should disclose to newspaper editors, reporters or government officials. The Walton Family Foundation must disclose its annual donations in forms filed with the Internal Revenue Service, but research groups are under no such obligation. Companies and such groups have long courted one another — one seeking influence, the other donations — and liberal policy groups receive significant financing from unions and left-leaning organizations without disclosing their financing. But the Walton donations could prove risky for Wal-Mart, given its escalating public relations campaign. The company’s quiet outreach to bloggers, beginning last year, touched off a debate about what online writers should disclose to readers, and its financing to policy groups could do the same. Asked about the donations yesterday, Mona Williams, a spokeswoman for Wal-Mart, said, “The fact is that editorial pages and prominent columnists of all stripes write favorably about our company because they recognize the value we provide to working families, the job opportunities we create and the contributions we make to the community we serve.” At least five research and advocacy groups that have received Walton Family Foundation donations are vocal advocates of the company. The American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, for example, has received more than $100,000 from the foundation in the last three years, a fraction of the more than $24 million it raised in 2004 alone. Richard Vedder, a visiting scholar at the institute, wrote an opinion article for The Washington Times last month, extolling Wal-Mart’s benefits to the American economy. “There is enormous economic evidence that Wal-Mart has helped poor and middle-class consumers, in fact more than anyone else,” Mr. Vedder wrote in the article, which prominently identified his ties to institute. But neither Mr. Vedder nor the newspaper mentioned American Enterprise Institute’s financial links to the Waltons. Mr. Vedder, a professor at Ohio University, said he might have disclosed the relationship had the American Enterprise Institute told him of it. “I always assumed that A.E.I. had no relationship or a modest, distant relationship with the company,” said Mr. Vedder, who has written a forthcoming book about the company. The book, he said in an interview yesterday, would eventually contain a disclosure about the Walton donations to the institute. A spokesman for the Walton Family Foundation, Jay Allen, said there was no organized campaign to build support for Wal-Mart among research groups. All of the foundation’s giving, he said, is directed toward a handful of philanthropic issues, including school reform, the environment and the economy in Northwest Arkansas, where Wal-Mart is based. “That is the spirit and purpose of their giving,” Mr. Allen said. Mr. Allen said the foundation, which had assets of $608.7 million in 2004, the last year for which data is available, has never asked the research groups to disclose the donations because “the family leaves it up to the individual organization to decide.” Those groups, for the most part, say they have decided not to share the information with their analysts or the public. For example, Sally C. Pipes, the president of the Pacific Research Institute, a free-market policy advocate, has written several opinion articles defending Wal-Mart in The Miami Herald and The San Francisco Examiner. A month after a federal judge in California certified a sex discrimination lawsuit against the company as a class action in 2004, Ms. Pipes wrote an article in The Examiner criticizing the lawyers and the women behind the suit. “The case against Wal-Mart,” she wrote, “follows the standard feminist stereotype of women as victims, men as villains and large corporations as inherently evil.” The article did not disclose that the Walton Family Foundation gave Pacific Research $175,000 from 1999 to 2004. Ms. Pipes was aware of the contributions, but said the money was earmarked for an education reform project and did not influence her thinking about the lawsuit. Asked why she typically did not disclose the donations to newspapers, she said: “It never occurs to me to put that out front unless I am asked. If newspapers ask, I am completely open about it.” The lack of disclosure highlights the absence of a consistent policy at the nation’s newspapers about whether contributors must tell editors of potential conflicts of interest. Juan M. Vasquez, the deputy editorial page editor of The Miami Herald, which ran an opinion article praising Wal-Mart by Ms. Pipes of Pacific Research, said his staff researches organizations that write opinion articles, including their financing. But that does not always require asking if the organization has received money from the subject of an article, he said. The New York Times has a policy of asking outside contributors to disclose any potential conflicts of interest, including the financing for research groups. Several of the research groups noted that their mission is to be an advocate for free market policies and less government intrusion in business. “Those aims are pro-business, so it’s not surprising that companies would be supporters of our work,” said Khristine Brookes, a spokeswoman for the Heritage Foundation. Last year, for instance, The Baltimore Sun published an op-ed article by Tim Kane, a research fellow at Heritage, in which he criticized Maryland’s efforts to require Wal-Mart to spend more on health care. He objected to the move on the grounds that it was undue government interference in the free market, a traditional concern of Heritage. “The existence of Wal-Mart dented the rise in overall inflation so much that Jerry Hausman, an economist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is calling on the federal government to change the way it measures prices,” Mr. Kane wrote. “Translation: Wal-Mart is fighting poverty faster than government accountants can keep track.” Ms. Brookes pointed out that the $20,000 Heritage has received from the Walton Family Foundation since 2000 amounts to less than 1 percent of its $40 million budget. Ms. Brookes said it was unlikely that researchers and analysts at Heritage were even aware of the foundation’s contributions. “Nobody here would know that unless they walked upstairs and asked someone in development,” she said. “It’s just never discussed.” She said Heritage did not accept money for specific research. “The money from the Walton Family Foundation has always been earmarked for our general operations,” she said. “They’ve never given us any funds saying do this paper or that paper.” A spokeswoman for the American Enterprise Institute said the group did not comment on its donors. The group’s focus on Wal-Mart has been notable. In June, the editor in chief then of the group’s magazine, The American Enterprise, wrote a long essay defending Wal-Mart against critics. The editor, Karl Zinsmeister, now the chief domestic policy adviser at the White House, said the campaign against the company was “run by a clutch of political hacks.” Conservative groups are not the only ones weighing in on the Wal-Mart debate. Ms. Williams of Wal-Mart noted labor unions have financed organizations that have been critical of Wal-Mart, like the Economic Policy Institute, which received $2.5 million from unions in 2005. In response, Chris Kofinis, communications director for WakeUpWalmart.com, an arm of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union that gives money to liberal research groups, said: "While we openly support the mission of economic justice, Wal-Mart and the Waltons put on a smiley face, hide the truth, all while supporting right-wing causes who are paid to defend Wal-Mart’s exploitative practices.” The lack of a clear quid pro quo between research groups and corporations like Wal-Mart makes the issue murky, said Diana Aviv, chief executive of the Independent Sector, a trade organization representing nonprofits and foundations. “I don’t know how one proves what’s the chicken and what’s the egg,” she said. Last year, the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, a research and watchdog group, published a report, “The Waltons and Wal-Mart: Self-Interested Philanthropy,” that warned of the potential influence their vast wealth gives them. But Rick Cohen, executive director of the group, said he was more concerned about the role the Walton foundation’s money might play in shaping public policy in areas like public education, where it has supported charter schools and voucher systems. “These are certainly not organizations created and controlled by the corporation or the family and promoted as somehow authentic when they aren’t,” Mr. Cohen said. “More important, I think, is the disclosure of the funding in whatever’s written, a sort of disclaimer.” |
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| And thus another step down the road of fascism for the United States. - Harold, ed. | ||
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Body Count in Baghdad Nearly Triples By Ellen Knickmeyer BAGHDAD, Sept. 7 -- Baghdad's morgue almost tripled its count for violent deaths in Iraq's capital during August from 550 to 1,536, authorities said Thursday, appearing to erase most of what U.S. generals and Iraqi leaders had touted as evidence of progress in a major security operation to restore order in the capital. Separately, the Health Ministry confirmed Thursday that it planned to construct two new branch morgues in Baghdad and add doctors and refrigerator units to raise capacity to as many as 250 corpses a day. The morgue expansion plans and the final body count for August show the dramatic surge in violence in Baghdad since U.S.-led foreign troops entered Iraq in 2003. Baghdad's morgue chiefly handles unidentified gunshot victims, now predominantly shot execution-style and often found with hands bound and showing signs of torture. Since the spring, as sectarian violence has mounted, monthly counts of civilian casualties have reached the highest levels of the war, topping 1,800 at the Baghdad morgue in July. At least 3,438 Iraqis were killed across the country that month, according to Iraqi government figures, nearing the total of roughly 5,000 for the entire first year of the war. In 2002, before U.S.-led forces entered Iraq, the Baghdad morgue averaged 15 shooting victims a month, morgue officials have said. Gianni Magazzeni, chief of the U.N. human rights office in Iraq, which tracks casualty figures from Iraq's government, confirmed Thursday that the government-run Baghdad morgue had reported 1,536 dead for August. Bombing victims and many others who die violently in Baghdad are taken to the city's hospitals rather than the morgue. The figures announced Thursday do not include those killings, or killings outside Baghdad and its surrounding towns. A complete countrywide toll is due from the Health Ministry later this month. At the end of August, Baghdad's morgue initially reported receiving 550 bodies during the month. U.S. military and Iraqi government officials hailed what they said was a massive decrease in violence, calling it a sign of the success of Operation Forward Together. The joint U.S.-Iraqi security push had placed at least four of Baghdad's most violent neighborhoods under cordons and search operations, which were welcomed by many residents as bringing a relief from violence. The U.S. military had called in units from Germany and Kuwait and postponed the scheduled return home of an Alaska-based unit for the bid to return peace to Iraq's capital in the fourth year of the U.S. occupation. U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad called it the Battle of Baghdad and said it was essential that American forces win it, although U.S. commanders cautioned that the work would take months rather than weeks. By late August, Maj. Gen. William Caldwell was claiming a 46 percent decrease in the murder rate in Baghdad for that month. "We are actually seeing progress," Caldwell said at the time. A U.S. military Web site on Thursday continued to assert a roughly 50 percent drop in killings in Baghdad. A U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, said Thursday that the U.S. figures were based on the military's "consolidated reporting with the Iraqi government." Johnson also disclosed that the military's numbers included only "individuals targeted as a result of sectarian-related violence, to include executions," and did not include "other violent acts such as car bombs and mortars." Johnson said he did not track the morgue's figures and could not account for the substantial gap between the military's count for August killings and the latest figures from Baghdad's morgue. The issue of civilian casualties has been politically charged since the start of the Iraq war. Soon after the invasion, U.S. and Iraqi officials for a time forbade Baghdad's medical officials to release morgue counts. About a week after the bombing of a Shiite Muslim shrine in Samarra in February this year, a Baghdad morgue official, a Health Ministry official and an Interior Ministry official -- all of whom oversaw the morgue's body counts -- said 1,000 or more people had been killed as Shiite militias rolled openly across Baghdad to carry out retaliatory killings. Iraqi officials and Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top U.S. commander in Iraq, called that figure exaggerated, saying only about 350 people were killed. An international official in Baghdad said Health Ministry officials had cited the higher toll before lowering it in response to what he said was political pressure. The Health Ministry is run by the Shiite religious party of cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and is guarded by his militia, known as the Mahdi Army. Sadr's militia and that of the country's other main Shiite religious party have been blamed for much of the continuing Sunni-Shiite violence. After the Samarra bombing, morgue officials brought in refrigerated trucks to hold corpses and crammed refrigerators in the morgue far beyond their intended capacity. Most of the corpses taken to Baghdad's morgue are unidentified and are held for long periods awaiting identification. This week, Health Minister Ali Hussein al-Shamari said morgue workers plan to begin shooting videos of the unclaimed bodies so that officials can bury them after three or four days rather than storing them at the morgue for the required two weeks. Health officials were also working to increase the number of refrigerators to allow the morgue to handle as many as 200 to 250 bodies a day, Shamari said. Two new buildings were planned, in the districts of Karkh and Rasafa. Morgue officials also intend to double the pay of the morgue's overworked doctors and award bonuses, the health minister said. Shamari made his comments to a Health Ministry in-house newspaper. The ministry's spokesman, Qasim Yahia, on Thursday confirmed the details in the account. Yahia said expansion had "nothing to do with the violence and killing." Magazzeni, the U.N. human rights official, said, "Reducing the level of violence and the number of civilians killed is crucially important." Doing so would take a "common effort" by the U.S. and Iraqi military, police and Iraq's debilitated justice system, he said. Special correspondent Naseer Nouri and other Washington Post staff in Iraq contributed to this report. © 2006 The Washington Post Company |
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| Ah yes the violence in Iraq is abating. Don't you just feel all warm and gooey knowing our President is leading us to glorious victory against the most significant threat of the 21st Century? - People actually determining their fate and future. - Harold, ed. | ||
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Down the Homestretch, the House Wanders Off Course By Dana Milbank Let us stipulate, as the lawyers like to say, that horses should not be slaughtered for human consumption. Let us further stipulate that there is nothing inherently offensive about minting coins to commemorate the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln's birth. Still, the question arises: What are House Republicans thinking? Returning from a five-week summer vacation, GOP lawmakers have much to worry about: war in Iraq and Afghanistan, terrorism and border problems, high energy prices and health-care costs, and none of the federal government's annual spending bills enacted. So what did House leaders decide to make the centerpiece of the week? H.R. 503: the American Horse Slaughter Prevention Act. This legislation, passed yesterday, followed Wednesday's action on a full slate of bills including H.R. 2808, the Abraham Lincoln Commemorative Coin Act. And to think that Republicans are in jeopardy of losing their majority in the House. Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.), setting the pace for yesterday's debate, was champing at the bit. Holding a poster of a horse's bloody head in the well, he proclaimed: "What we are exposing today is a brutal, shadowy, shameful, predatory practice that borders on the perverse." Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) was equally hot-to-trot in support of horse slaughtering. "These horses are eating our cellulose and costing us ethanol," he countered. The debate -- lasting nearly four hours while horse lover Bo Derek watched from the gallery -- quickly degenerated into dueling expressions of equestrian love. "The horses are part of the history of this nation, and the West would never have been settled if it weren't for the horses," declared Rep. Walter Jones (R-N.C.) in support of the horsemeat ban. Whoa, answered pro-slaughter Rep. Michael Conaway (R-Tex.) "My horse Skychief Poco and I won the 1997 SandHills Rodeo and quarter horse shows team penning championship." Democrats enjoyed all the whinnying. "I'm for the horsies, too; I'll vote for it," allowed Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.). But what about Iraq, energy, health care and the federal debt? "I can't believe that we are here today using the very limited time left to this Congress to deal with horsemeat," she said. Majority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio), meeting privately with colleagues in the morning, referred to the legislation as "the horse [expletive] bill," according to someone present at the meeting. Even Rep. David Dreier (R-Calif.), who as Rules Committee chairman helped to jockey the horse bill to the floor, was a bit sheepish about trotting out the legislation. The work of Rep. John Sweeney (R-Saratoga Race Course), it would effectively close the three U.S.-based slaughterhouses that produce horsemeat for human consumption in Europe and Asia. "When you've got Bo Derek twisting your arm, what can you say?" Dreier rationalized, noting that the actress visited the Republican breakfast caucus before the debate. The chairman, in a brief interview off the House floor, tried to rein in the story: "This will be old news as of tomorrow." Even before the horse bill, House leaders had been a bit sensitive about their legislative pace. The People's Representatives have been in session for all of 80 days this year, and with 15 days remaining on the legislative calendar, the House is on pace to shatter all records for inactivity. The "Do-Nothing" House of 1948 was positively frenetic by comparison, passing 1,191 measures in 110 days in session. The current House has passed barely 400 measures, including this week's lineup of legislative priorities: H. Res. 912, "Supporting the goals and ideals of National Life Insurance Awareness Month" and H. Res. 605, "Recognizing the life of Preston Robert Tisch and his outstanding contributions to New York City, the New York Giants Football Club, the National Football League, and the United States." By yesterday, when the House devoted itself to equine slaughter, even Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the dead-serious House minority leader, was ready for a bit of horseplay. "And we can't even get out of the gate with any good legislation!" she observed as she headed to the speaker's office for a meeting. For all their ridicule, Democrats weren't about to let the other side canter off with the horse-lover's vote. "I've been around horses all my life," said Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.), who represents Manhattan's Upper East Side. "They are cherished companions. They are sporting animals. . . . They are probably the most beloved animals native to the United States." Nobody pointed out that the Spanish introduced the modern horse to the Americas; everybody was busy praising the beasts. "They are as close to humans as any animal can get," asserted Rep. John Spratt (D-S.C.). "I have as much appreciation and admiration for these creatures as anyone in this body," challenged Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Tex.). "Look at the monument in front of the Capitol -- it's a horse!" exulted Rep. Jim Moran (D-Va.). It took the long-in-the-tooth Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.), the dean of the House, to rear up against the horse celebration. "It's a triumph of emotion over common sense," he scolded. "We have before us a solution, a poor one, to a nonexistent problem." But in the final tally, 263 lawmakers voted for the horse bill. Only 146 dared to say "nay." © 2006 The Washington Post Company |
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| Got to protect them horses! Screw all them whining soldiers and wounded veterans. And dead soldiers? What dead soldiers? - Harold, ed. | ||
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War turns southern women away from GOPBy SHANNON McCAFFREY, Associated Press Writer Thu Sep 7, 3:43 PM ET President Bush's once-solid relationship with Southern women is on the rocks. "I think history will show him to be the worst president since Ulysses S. Grant," said Barbara Knight, a self-described Republican since birth and the mother of three. "He's been an embarrassment." In the heart of Dixie, comparisons to Grant, a symbol of the Union, are the worst sort of insult, especially from a Macon woman who voted for Bush in 2000 but turned away in 2004. In recent years, Southern women have been some of Bush's biggest fans, defying the traditional gender gap in which women have preferred Democrats to Republicans. Bush secured a second term due in large part to support from 54 percent of Southern female voters while women nationally favored Democrat John Kerry, 51-48 percent. "In 2004, you saw an utter collapse of the gender gap in the South," said Karen Kaufmann, a professor of government at the University of Maryland who has studied women's voting patterns. White Southern women liked Bush because "he spoke their religion and he spoke their values." Now, anger over the Iraq war and frustration with the country's direction have taken a toll on the president's popularity and stirred dissatisfaction with the Republican-held Congress. Republicans on the ballot this November have reason to worry. A recent Associated Press-Ipsos poll found that three out of five Southern women surveyed said they planned to vote for a Democrat in the midterm elections. With control of the Senate and House in the balance, such a seismic shift could have dire consequences for the GOP. Democrats need to gain 15 seats in the House and six in the Senate to seize control. In a sign of how crucial races in the South will be to the GOP national strategy, Bush traveled to Georgia Thursday to help former Rep. Max Burns (news, bio, voting record) raise money in his bid to unseat Democratic Rep. John Barrow. The president also gave a speech in Atlanta. Knight lives in another congressional district considered competitive. Republicans hope to oust Democratic Rep. Jim Marshall (news, bio, voting record), whose district was redrawn by the GOP-controlled Georgia Legislature to make it more conservative. Voters like Knight could prove to be spoilers. The 66-year-old real estate agent doesn't particularly like Marshall, a hawkish Democrat and former Army Ranger, but she said she'll vote for him because she likes his conservative Republican opponent, former Rep. Mac Collins, even less. "I'm going to go for the moderate, and these days that tends to be Democrats," Knight said. Sandy Rubin, a high school teacher in Macon, voted for Bush and said she's also likely to vote for Marshall. Rubin said the GOP's focus on issues that appeal to social conservatives, such as gay marriage and abortion, have turned her off. "I care about job security and education. The things I hear the Republicans emphasizing in their campaigns are not things that affect me or my family," said the 39-year-old mother of two. The movement of some Southern women away from the Republican Party tracks with national poll results showing that women have become more disillusioned with the war and were more likely than men to list the conflict as the important issue facing the country. Nationally, the AP-Ipsos poll found that only 28 percent of women approve of Bush's handling of the war. Bush did better in the South, but only slightly — just 32 percent of women in the region said they approve of his handling of the war. "I never did understand why we went into Iraq and didn't instead clean up the mess in Afghanistan first," Knight said. Teresa Cranford, 39, also of Macon, said her support for Bush was lukewarm in 2004, but she ultimately voted for him so he could finish the job in Iraq. As the death toll has risen, so has her discomfort. "I'm a mother and that makes me think differently about it," Cranford said. Lynn Hamilton, 44, said she still supports Bush even though her backing for the ongoing war has waned. "As a mother you worry, 'Am I going to lose my baby boy?'" said the Gray, Ga., resident. "A mother's view about war is often going to be a lot different than dad's is." Neither Cranford nor Hamilton has decided how they plan to vote in the midterm elections, although neither ruled out voting for a Democrat. "I'm not a straight party-line Republican anymore," Cranford said. Still, some Southern women remain stalwart supporters of the president and the Republican Party. At a watermelon festival in Chickamauga, in the mountains of northwest Georgia, substitute teacher Clydeen Tomanio said she remains committed to the party she's called home for 43 years. "There are some people, and I'm one of them, that believe George Bush was placed where he is by the Lord," Tomanio said. "I don't care how he governs, I will support him. I'm a Republican through and through." Copyright © 2006 The Associated Press. Copyright © 2006 Yahoo! Inc |
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| About time women started waking up to this clown and his cohorts! -Harold, ed. | ||
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copyright Harold P. Donle 2006 proud member of Veterans for Peace |
