Moderate Voters.org

Obvious Question in Plame Case Had Early Answer.

ModerateVoters.org — Sat, 09 Sep 2006 22:10:00 +0000

Tom Hamburger & Richard T. Cooper, Los Angeles Times:

Almost three years ago, as Patrick J. Fitzgerald settled in as the newly appointed special counsel in charge of the Valerie Plame leak investigation, he learned a startling secret.
Washington was ablaze with speculation about who had revealed Plame's identity as a covert CIA officer to syndicated columnist Robert Novak; senior White House officials were considered the likely culprits. But Fitzgerald, reading FBI reports just after taking charge, learned that federal investigators already knew Novak's primary source — a gossipy State Department official who seemed to have strained relations with the White House.
So if the mystery was already solved, why did Fitzgerald's investigation continue for almost 36 more months? Why does I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, still face criminal charges in connection with the Plame leak? And why were other senior officials left twisting in the wind, facing possible indictment?
Such questions are at the heart of a furor that erupted late last month after the revelation that several months after Novak's column naming Plame appeared in July 2003, Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage had informed his superiors — and then the Justice Department, which was investigating the leak — that he had been Novak's primary source. Armitage's reasons for talking to Novak remain unclear. He was known for his skepticism on some aspects of President Bush's Iraq war strategy, but also for his penchant to gossip.
Did the special counsel, operating behind the veil of secrecy of all such inquiries, abuse his authority in a witch hunt?
The discovery of Armitage's role — and the fact that it had been known to investigators so early — is stirring administration defenders to fury.
Yet the information on Armitage — first revealed in a new book — along with court filings and interviews with former White House staffers and others familiar with the inquiry, suggest Fitzgerald pressed ahead because he learned quickly that Armitage was not alone in discussing Plame with reporters. Top White House officials had talked about her as well.
Early on, the prosecutor learned that Rove may have been a corroborating source for the information Armitage provided to Novak. That fact alone would have compelled the special counsel to push on with the investigation, in the view of some experts.

Senate Finds No Al-Qaida-Saddam Link.

ModerateVoters.org — Sat, 09 Sep 2006 22:07:00 +0000

Associated Press:

Saddam Hussein rejected overtures from al-Qaida and believed Islamic extremists were a threat to his regime, a reverse portrait of an Iraq allied with Osama bin Laden painted by the Bush White House, a Senate panel has found.

The administration's version was based in part on intelligence that White House officials knew was flawed, according to Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee, citing newly declassified documents released by the panel.

The report, released Friday, discloses for the first time an October 2005 CIA assessment that prior to the war Saddam's government "did not have a relationship, harbor or turn a blind eye toward" al-Qaida operative Abu Musab al-Zarqawi or his associates.

As recently as an Aug. 21 news conference, President Bush said people should "imagine a world in which you had Saddam Hussein" with the capacity to make weapons of mass destruction and "who had relations with Zarqawi."

Iraq Post-War Plan Muzzled.

ModerateVoters.org — Sat, 09 Sep 2006 21:51:00 +0000

Fascinating article about Iraq pre-war planning.

Stephanie Heinatz, Daily Press:

Months before the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld forbade military strategists from developing plans for securing a post-war Iraq, the retiring commander of the Army Transportation Corps said Thursday.
In fact, said Brig. Gen. Mark Scheid, Rumsfeld said "he would fire the next person" who talked about the need for a post-war plan.
Rumsfeld did replace Gen. Eric Shinseki, the Army chief of staff in 2003, after Shinseki told Congress that hundreds of thousands of troops would be needed to secure post-war Iraq.
Scheid, who is also the commander of Fort Eustis in Newport News, made his comments in an interview with the Daily Press. He retires in about three weeks.
On Sept. 10, 2001, he was selected to be the chief of logistics war plans.
On Sept. 11, 2001, he said, "life just went to hell."
That day, Gen. Tommy Franks, the commander of Central Command, told his planners, including Scheid, to "get ready to go to war."
A day or two later, Rumsfeld was "telling us we were going to war in Afghanistan and to start building the war plan. We were going to go fast.
"Then, just as we were barely into Afghanistan ... Rumsfeld came and told us to get ready for Iraq."

Democrats Push for Own Religious Voice.

ModerateVoters.org — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 15:54:00 +0000

Jim Kuhnhenn, Associated Press:

Thirteen years ago, David Wilhelm, then chairman of the Democratic Party, told the conservative Christian Coalition that good Christians could belong to either major political party.
He was hissed.
Today, Wilhelm wants to spread that message to a different audience - Democrats. He's hoping for a better response.
With a leading poll showing only one in four Americans viewing the Democratic Party as friendly to religion, Wilhelm and a broad-based group of Christian Democratic activists are starting an Internet effort to organize religious voters whose views might be compatible with Democrats.
The site, http://www.FaithfulDemocrats.com , will go online Tuesday and showcase theologians, party strategists, political leaders and bloggers in hopes of conducting a national discussion on politics and faith.
"It struck me as strange that people whose political world is motivated by faith had to be Republican. Democrats need to be on the playing field," Wilhelm said.
He said the site will give religious Democrats "the moral support and some language they can use."

Clarification of the Huge Chevron Gulf Oil Discovery.

ModerateVoters.org — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 15:44:00 +0000

Randy Kirk, Energy Bulletin:

The September 5th announcement by Chevron and Devon and Statoil of the huge Gulf of Mexico discovery should be clarified. The announcement claims that the discovery could increase US proven reserves of oil by as much as 50%. However, the total amounts are highly speculative.

The range of amount -- from 3 billion to 15 billion (in itself a huge range -- reserves of Exxon Mobile are around 14 billion barrels total) is comprised of no single field of more than 300 million barrels. An entire area of as much as 15 billion barrels with no "giant" over 1 Bn bar oil field is unusual.

The area is very deep: 7000 feet of seawater and a further 20,000 feet below the ground. That is about 3 miles below the surface, in 1+ miles of deep water. The normal time to accurately estimate oil and gas field size is months. These fields are more challenging because of the extreme depths. It is therefore likely that very little is known with certainty about the potential reserves from a geological standpoint.

The wells are located in deep water and will not be served by underground GOM pipelines. The oil will be pumped directly to tankers. Pipelines are faster and more efficient, and tankers will put a higher price and limited the amount of oil pumped out.

The wells are most likely mainly natural gas, as they are very deep. All estimates are in barrels of oil equivalent. Oil tends to form closer to the surface, gas deeper. Therefore the discovery is likely to impact natural gas markets, not oil, if the gas exists in meaningful quantities.

The US Senate is weeks away from voting on the lifting of the 25-year ban on offshore drilling off the majority of the coasts in the US. This offshore drilling bill was approved in the Congress but political analysts believe the bill will face more opposition in the Senate. The oil industry stands to make high profits if Congress will open up Florida and the Offshore East coast to drilling. To date the offshore drilling bill has not been approved by both houses because of environmental interests. A large potential oil “discovery” in the Gulf would provide evidence that the passing of the offshore oil bill would be beneficial.

The announcement is reminiscent of the Mexican "huge oil discovery" announced last year, of a possible 10 billion barrels, which was quietly revised this year to around 43 million barrels, a downward revision of 99.57%. This similar "discovery" was made in Mexico last year a few months before the Mexican parliament was to vote on Pemex (state oil co)'s budget and rights to expand drilling. This illustrates the potential political pressure to announce oil and gas discoveries.

A New Issue in the Election Mix.

ModerateVoters.org — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 15:32:00 +0000

Ronald Brownstein, Los Angeles Times:

When President Bush on Wednesday urged Congress to quickly provide him new legal authority to bring suspected terrorists to trial, he may have answered a political riddle: What issue would Republicans use to sharpen their contrasts with Democrats over national security in the approaching midterm election?
Bush's challenge to lawmakers could reshape the legislative landscape on the question of trying terrorists and inject a volatile dispute into the 2006 election, analysts say.
The Supreme Court in June forced Bush to seek a new legislative framework for trying suspected terrorists when it threw out as unconstitutional the military commission system he had established.
Until now, the dispute over establishing a system to replace the military commissions has not generated much attention outside of legal circles.
But several analysts said Bush emphatically changed that dynamic Wednesday by announcing that he had moved 14 high-profile detainees to the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba — including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the suspected mastermind of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks — and declaring that he intended to bring them to trial as quickly as Congress approved new rules.
By linking the trial of key figures suspected in the Sept. 11 attacks to agreement on a new legal structure, Bush's announcement is likely to increase the pressure on Congress.
Bush also may be establishing a line of contrast with Democrats. Many Democrats believe that by heightening the focus on the detainee trial issue two months before the midterm congressional election, the president may be seeking to replicate a successful GOP strategy from the 2002 campaign.

CIA Can Still Get Tough on Detainees.

ModerateVoters.org — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 15:26:00 +0000

Julian E. Barnes, Los Angeles Times:

New U.S. policies on the treatment and interrogation of terrorism suspects outlined this week by the Bush administration mean that the military no longer will resort to harsh or extreme methods to obtain information — but that the CIA could.
The new administration approach, first presented by President Bush in a speech Wednesday and detailed later by administration and military officials, followed an internal administration debate over the question of how best to extract intelligence from the most notorious suspects apprehended in the war on terrorism.
But by assigning the CIA to use tough, undefined methods on some detainees, the policy outlined by Bush may raise new questions about U.S. procedures and invite more criticism from human rights advocates and allies.
For the five years after the Sept. 11 attacks, the administration's top leaders and senior policymakers have supported the use of harsh methods to obtain information that could head off future attacks and save lives. But military officers have insisted that such interrogation tactics are unproductive — and inevitably lead to abuse.
On Wednesday, after years of internal debates, the administration outlined a compromise meant to reconcile the position of hard-liners and military traditionalists.
The Army, morally and culturally averse to using unorthodox interrogation methods, will get out of the business of using tough tactics against detainees under the compromise. The new Army field manual authorizes only 19 interrogation techniques and bans the most controversial tactics that critics said amounted to torture — hooding prisoners, conducting mock executions, and strapping detainees to boards and using water to simulate drowning.
But the CIA will reserve the right to use the tougher tactics. Bush said such methods had been effective in getting some of the 14 top Al Qaeda suspects held by the agency to talk. Administration officials said the CIA tactics would be legal and fall well short of torture and abuse. But the president and others have pointedly refused to say what those tougher methods might be.
The compromise may satisfy the military, which can now say its soldiers will always comply with international treaties and steer well clear of torture. But it is not certain whether the new policy will satisfy those who have raised questions about American interrogation practices, including human rights advocates and members of Congress.

Lawyers and G.O.P. Chiefs Resist Proposal on Tribunal.

ModerateVoters.org — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 15:17:00 +0000

Kate Zernike, New York Times:

The Bush administration’s proposal to bring leading terrorism suspects before military tribunals met stiff resistance Thursday from key Republicans and top military lawyers who said some provisions would not withstand legal scrutiny or do enough to repair the nation’s tarnished reputation internationally.
Democrats, meanwhile, said they were inclined to go along with Senate Republicans drafting an alternative to the White House plan, one that would allow defendants more rights. That left Republicans to argue among themselves about what the tribunals would look like and threatened to rob the issue of the political momentum the White House hoped it would provide going into the closely fought midterm elections.
A day after President Bush unveiled the plan at the White House, senior administration officials said Mr. Bush was willing to negotiate with Congress about the shape of legislation to establish tribunals, which would replace those struck down in June by the Supreme Court.
The administration officials, who agreed to discuss internal administration deliberations in exchange for anonymity, said the decision to transfer high-level terror suspects from Central Intelligence Agency prisons to military custody had been the result of months of secret debate at the highest levels of government.
The officials said the change had been most vigorously championed by the State Department, under Condoleezza Rice, against some resistance from a range of officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, who had defended the status quo, in which high-level leaders of Al Qaeda, including the man identified as the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, have been held in secret C.I.A custody.

Questions Raised About Bush’s Primary Claims in Defense of Secret Detention System.

ModerateVoters.org — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 15:04:00 +0000

Mark Mazzetti, New York Times:

In defending the Central Intelligence Agency’s secret network of prisons on Wednesday, President Bush said the detention system had used lawful interrogation techniques, was fully described to select members of Congress and led directly to the capture of a string of terrorists over the past four years.
A review of public documents and interviews with American officials raises questions about Mr. Bush’s claims on all three fronts.
Mr. Bush described the interrogation techniques used on the C.I.A. prisoners as having been “safe, lawful and effective,” and he asserted that torture had not been used. But the Bush administration has yet to make public the legal papers prepared by government lawyers that served as the basis for its determination that those procedures did not violate American or international law.
The president said the Department of Justice approved a set of aggressive interrogation practices for C.I.A. detainees in 2002 after milder ones proved ineffective on Abu Zubaydah, the first of the Qaeda leaders taken into custody.
Current and former government officials said that specific interrogation methods were addressed in a series of documents, including an August 2002 memorandum by the Justice Department that authorized the C.I.A.’s use of 20 interrogation practices.
The August 2002 document, which was leaked to reporters in 2004, said interrogation methods just short of those that might cause pain comparable to “organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death” could be allowable without being considered torture.
The memorandum was repudiated in another Justice Department document at the end of 2004, and Congressional officials said on Thursday that they had not received documents from the administration explaining the legal underpinnings of the program.

Panel Set to Release Just Part of Report On Run-Up to War.

ModerateVoters.org — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 03:05:00 +0000

Jonathan Weisman, Washington Post:

A long-awaited Senate analysis comparing the Bush administration's public statements about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein with the evidence senior officials reviewed in private remains mired in partisan recrimination and will not be released before the November elections, key senators said yesterday.
Instead, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence will vote today to declassify two less controversial chapters of the panel's report, on the use of intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war, for release as early as Friday. One chapter has concluded that Iraqi exiles in the Iraqi National Congress, who were subsidized by the U.S. government, tried to influence the views of intelligence officers analyzing Hussein's efforts to create weapons of mass destruction.
"It is clear to me, at least, that the INC information provided to the Department of Defense was misleading, that the government spent unnecessary amounts of money supporting that group, and all of that helped create bogus reasons to go to war," said Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), a member of the intelligence committee.
Under pressure from Democrats, Republicans on the committee agreed in February 2004 to write a report on the use of prewar intelligence, but the effort has languished amid partisan feuding. Last year, angry Democrats briefly shut down the Senate to protest the pace of the investigation.
After nearly three years, the heart of the report remains incomplete. Committee Chairman Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) said Democrats produced 511 administration statements to be analyzed, a virtually impossible task. At this point, the section is 800 pages long, accompanied by 40,000 documents, and is nowhere near ready for release, he said.

Inmates Report Mental Illness at High Levels.

ModerateVoters.org — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 19:26:00 +0000

Erik Eckholm, New York Times:

More than half the inmates in the country’s prisons and jails reported mental health problems within the last year, according to a Justice Department survey released yesterday.
The figures are higher than reported in past studies because inmates describing any symptoms of problems like major depression or mania were counted along with those with diagnosed psychiatric disorders, said Fred Osher, director of health systems at the Council on State Governments. Further evaluations would be required to make an official diagnosis of a mental illness.
Still, Dr. Osher said, the findings “underscore what every prison administrator knows — that large numbers of individuals with mental health problems are cycling through their facilities.” Correctional institutions have given increased attention to mental health treatment in recent years, he said, but the new findings highlight the need for intensive screening.
The findings also suggest the need to connect released prisoners with mental health treatment in the community, a goal of the emerging “re-entry” movement that tries to prevent ex-convicts from returning to prison. Prisoners with mental health problems were more likely to have had repeated incarcerations and substance abuse problems and to have been homeless, the study found.
Separate findings were reported for state prisons, where 56 percent of inmates were found to have mental health problems; federal prisons, where the figure was 45 percent; and jails, where it was 64 percent. The figure may be higher for jails, the report said, because they often hold mentally ill prisoners temporarily before they are moved to psychiatric facilities.
Women reported higher rates of mental health problems than men, and whites had higher rates than black and Hispanic inmates.

New Global Warming Fear.

ModerateVoters.org — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 19:21:00 +0000

Seth Borenstein, Chicago Sun-Times:

Global warming gases trapped in the soil are bubbling out of the thawing permafrost in amounts far higher than previously thought and may trigger what researchers warn is a climate time bomb.
Methane -- a greenhouse gas 23 times more powerful than carbon dioxide -- is being released from the permafrost at a rate five times faster than thought, according to a study being published today.
"The effects can be huge," said lead author Katey Walter of the University of Alaska. "It's coming out a lot and there's a lot more to come out."
Scientists worry about a global warming vicious cycle that was not part of their already gloomy climate forecast: Warming already under way thaws permafrost, soil that has been continuously frozen for thousands of years. Thawed permafrost releases methane and carbon dioxide. Those gases reach the atmosphere and help trap heat on Earth in the greenhouse effect. The trapped heat thaws more permafrost and so on.
"The higher the temperature gets, the more permafrost we melt, the more tendency it is to become a more vicious cycle," said Chris Field of the Carnegie Institution.

Southern Women Breaking Up with Bush.

ModerateVoters.org — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 19:15:00 +0000

Associated Press:

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, is 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.

Mixed Messages on Torture.

ModerateVoters.org — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 14:58:00 +0000

Mark Benjamin, Salon.com:

In the war on terror, abusive interrogations of suspects don't work. You get faulty information. The rough stuff has been proven worthless and should be banned.

Or, harsh interrogation tactics have been a successful and indispensable tool that has generated crucial intelligence to foil terror plots that would have otherwise caused death and destruction inside the United States.

Both versions were true in Washington on Wednesday, depending on whom you asked -- the Pentagon or the White House -- and depending on whether you watched the president's nationally broadcast afternoon press conference or a press conference by a general on a cable channel little seen outside military bases.

On Wednesday afternoon, President Bush announced the transfer of 14 high-value terrorism suspects to Guantánamo for trials. He said that the suspects had been held outside the country by the CIA, and then admitted they had been detained as part of a secret program that also included specialized interrogation techniques, techniques the president described as "tough." Most observers believe the president was referring to a long-rumored program involving secret CIA prisons, or "black sites," where terrorism suspects have allegedly been sequestered, interrogated and perhaps tortured.

Meanwhile, across the Potomac, an Army general unveiled a new Army interrogations manual designed to fit squarely within the protections of the Geneva Conventions. That new manual specifically bars hooding, forced nudity, sexual humiliation, mock executions and many of the other "tough" techniques allegedly practiced in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantánamo and the black sites.

Diminished Public Appetite for Military Force and Mideast Oil.

ModerateVoters.org — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 19:47:00 +0000

Pew Research Center:

Five years later, Americans' views of the impact of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks have changed little, but opinions about how best to protect against future attacks have shifted substantially. In particular, far more Americans say reducing America's overseas military presence, rather than expanding it, will have a greater effect in reducing the threat of terrorism.

By a 45% to 32% margin, more Americans believe that the best way to reduce the threat of terrorist attacks on the U.S. is to decrease, not increase, America's military presence overseas. This is a stark reversal from the public's position on the first anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. In the summer of 2002, before serious public discussion of removing Saddam Hussein from power had begun, nearly half (48%) said that the best way to reduce terrorism was to increase our military involvement overseas, while just 29% said less involvement would make us safer.

Similarly, in 2002 a 58% majority felt that military strikes against nations developing nuclear weapons were a very important way to reduce future terrorism. Today, just 43% express the same level of support for such action.

Yet most Americans do not believe that the ability of terrorists to launch another attack against the U.S. has been diminished. Rather, 62% say terrorists' capabilities are the same (37%) or greater (25%) than they were at the time of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. This view has remained stable since the summer of 2002.