The Rag Blog

WASHINGTON – The White House acknowledged on Sunday that presidential adviser Karl Rove served as a conduit for complaints to the Justice Department about federal prosecutors who were later fired for what critics charge were partisan political reasons.

House investigators on Sunday declared their intention to question Rove about any role he may have played in the firings.

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said Rove had relayed complaints from Republican officials and others to the Justice Department and the White House counsel’s office. She said Rove, the chief White House political operative, specifically recalled passing along complaints about former U.S. Attorney David Iglesias and may have mentioned the grumblings about Iglesias to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

Iglesias says he believes he lost his job as the top federal prosecutor in New Mexico after rebuffing Republican pressure to speed his investigation of a Democratic state official.

Perino said Rove might have mentioned the complaints about Iglesias “in passing” to Gonzales.

“He doesn’t exactly recall, but he may have had a casual conversation with the A.G. to say he had passed those complaints to Harriet Miers,” Perino said, relaying Rove’s hazy recollection.

Perino said such a conversation would be fairly routine at the White House.

Folks often ask, rather cynically, where are the students protesting the war? Well, the answer is that they are there–on their campuses and in the dorms–organizing speakers, rallies and teach-ins. The fact that folks off campus do not hear about these events does not mean that they aren’t occurring. What it does mean is that the media is choosing not to cover them. Here in Asheville, NC, the local SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) linked group at University of North Carolina-Asheville (UNCA) organized a counter-recruitment protest in January 2006, a walkout and march against the war last October and is now actively involved in getting students to go to the March 17th March on the Pentagon. At UNC’s Chapel Hill campus, six students were arrested on February 17, 2007 after refusing to leave Congressman David Price’s office in a protest demanding that he vote against further war funding. Meanwhile, on February 15th, students at campuses around the country held rallies and teach-ins against the war. While the movement has not reached the proportions organizers want to see, it is growing. The next student day of protest is scheduled for March 20th–three days after the March on the Pentagon. I recently connected with UNCA SDS member Kati Ketz over email. Besides her activities here in Asheville, Kati is also a spokesperson for the SDS call for the March 20th Day of Action Against the War. The exchange with Kati was an opportunity for me to learn what antiwar students have been up to and how they see the future. I share the transcript below.

Ron: First, what is the March 20th Day of Action? How did the idea originate?

Kati: March 20th is an SDS national day of student and youth action against the war in Iraq. The idea came out of an SDS-sponsored meeting of activists at the School of the Americas demonstration in Ft. Benning, GA. Over 100 students from 20 different campuses were at this meeting, and at the end we voted to make March 20th a national day of action, in order to take all of the local organizing we have been doing on our campuses and attempting to connect those struggles to make a larger impact on a national scale.

Ron: What do the organizers hope to accomplish? What would connote a successful day, here in Asheville and nationally?

Kati: We hope that this day of action will be a catalyst for students to rise up and get organized against the war in Iraq. Four years is four years too many, and it’s time that students in this country get organized against this war. In Asheville, we hope that our actions will draw in more people who want to get more involved in organizing against the war. We also hope that our actions contribute to building a grassroots student anti-war movement. Nationally, we hope that this will help build ties with other campuses and connect different movements together in order to work towards ending this war.

Ron: I notice that the majority of the campuses that have signed on for the March 20th action are from the southern part of the United States. Why do you think this is? In my mind it’s somewhat significant in that it goes against the idea so many US residents have about the south—you know, reactionary and pro-war.

Kati: I think it is very significant that a lot of schools from the south are organizing against the war. It goes against the stigma that the south is normally faced with – that all anti-war organizing happens in the north and that the southern US is largely ignorant of and not involved in any progressive movements. There is some exciting organizing going on in the south – for example, UNC SDS took part in organizing a demonstration against John Ashcroft, who came to speak at their campus. Members of both Alabama and Asheville SDS groups also have participated in a lot of events (MLK day marches, a 4th of July march in New Orleans) concerning race and national oppression, since that is something that is especially relevant to us in the south.

It’s amazing to see that, for March 20th, the schools signing on to the call are from all over the United States – from North Carolina and Alabama in the south to Los Angeles and Santa Barbara in the West to New York City and Boston in the northeast to Minneapolis, Chicago, and Ohio in the Midwest, to name a few.

Ron:What is your impression of the new SDS? Is it growing in numbers and influence?

Kati: I think that we as students finally have an opportunity to build an independent student anti-war movement through SDS. I talk with students on a regular basis that are either considering or have just affiliated with SDS, and the number of SDS chapters grows weekly. SDS groups are having regional conferences and connecting with each other through forum, conferences and actions. Now, we are connecting with one another as SDS through this national day of action. There is a felt need in the student movement for a national student anti-war organization, and SDS is it.

Ron: What are your hopes for its future?

03/11/07 “New York Times” — — EVEN by Washington’s standards, few debates have been more fatuous or wasted more energy than the frenzied speculation over whether President Bush will or will not pardon Scooter Libby. Of course he will.

A president who tries to void laws he doesn’t like by encumbering them with “signing statements” and who regards the Geneva Conventions as a nonbinding technicality isn’t going to start playing by the rules now. His assertion last week that he is “pretty much going to stay out of” the Libby case is as credible as his pre-election vote of confidence in Donald Rumsfeld. The only real question about the pardon is whether Mr. Bush cares enough about his fellow Republicans’ political fortunes to delay it until after Election Day 2008.

Either way, the pardon is a must for Mr. Bush. He needs Mr. Libby to keep his mouth shut. Cheney’s Cheney knows too much about covert administration schemes far darker than the smearing of Joseph Wilson. Though Mr. Libby wrote a novel that sank without a trace a decade ago, he now has the makings of an explosive Washington tell-all that could be stranger than most fiction and far more salable.

Mr. Libby’s novel was called “The Apprentice.” His memoir could be titled “The Accomplice.” Its first chapter would open in August 2002, when he and a small cadre of administration officials including Karl Rove formed the White House Iraq Group (WHIG), a secret task force to sell the Iraq war to the American people. The climactic chapter of the Libby saga unfolded last week when the guilty verdict in his trial coincided, all too fittingly, with the Congressional appearance of two Iraq veterans, one without an ear and one without an eye, to recount their subhuman treatment at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

It was WHIG’s secret machinations more than four years ago that led directly to those shredded lives. WHIG had been tasked, as The Washington Post would later uncover, to portray Iraq’s supposedly imminent threat to America with “gripping images and stories not available in the hedged and austere language of intelligence.” In other words, WHIG was to cook up the sexiest recipe for promoting the war, facts be damned. So it did, by hyping the scariest possible scenario: nuclear apocalypse. As Michael Isikoff and David Corn report in “Hubris,” it was WHIG (equipped with the slick phrase-making of the White House speechwriter Michael Gerson) that gave the administration its Orwellian bumper sticker, the constantly reiterated warning that Saddam’s “smoking gun” could be “a mushroom cloud.”

Ever since all the W.M.D. claims proved false, the administration has pleaded that it was duped by the same bad intelligence everyone else saw. But the nuclear card, the most persistent and gripping weapon in the prewar propaganda arsenal, was this White House’s own special contrivance. Mr. Libby was present at its creation. He knows what Mr. Bush and Dick Cheney knew about the manufacture of this fiction and when they knew it.

Clearly they knew it early on. The administration’s guilt (or at least embarrassment) about its lies in fomenting the war quickly drove it to hide the human price being paid for those lies. (It also tried to hide the financial cost of the war by keeping it out of the regular defense budget, but that’s another, if related, story.) The steps the White House took to keep casualties out of view were extraordinary, even as it deployed troops to decorate every presidential victory rally and gave the Pentagon free rein to exploit the sacrifices of Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman in mendacious P.R. stunts.

The administration’s enforcement of a prohibition on photographs of coffins returning from Iraq was the first policy manifestation of the hide-the-carnage strategy. It was complemented by the president’s decision to break with precedent, set by Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter among others, and refuse to attend military funerals, lest he lend them a media spotlight. But Mark Benjamin, who has chronicled the mistreatment of Iraq war veterans since 2003, discovered an equally concerted effort to keep injured troops off camera. Mr. Benjamin wrote in Salon in 2005 that “flights carrying the wounded arrive in the United States only at night” and that both Walter Reed and the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda barred the press “from seeing or photographing incoming patients.”

A particularly vivid example of the extreme measures taken by the White House to cover up the war’s devastation turned up in The Washington Post’s Walter Reed exposé. Sgt. David Thomas, a Tennessee National Guard gunner with a Purple Heart and an amputated leg, found himself left off the guest list for a summer presidential ceremony honoring a fellow amputee after he said he would be wearing shorts, not pants, when occupying a front-row seat in camera range. Now we can fully appreciate that bizarre incident on C-Span in October 2003, when an anguished Cher, of all unlikely callers, phoned in to ask why administration officials, from the president down, were not being photographed with patients like those she had visited at Walter Reed. “I don’t understand why these guys are so hidden,” she said.

Harry Belafonte at 80 has a real story to tell. He remembers, for example, a barely known political hopeful turning up at his apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

John F Kennedy, who was trying to become the Democratic candidate for the presidency, wanted advice and endorsement from the biggest black star in showbusiness.

Nearly half a century on, Belafonte sits in an easy chair and reflects on the meeting: “I listened to him and I refused to endorse him, telling him that his best bet was that he should begin to seek out more details of our struggle and who our leaders were and begin to talk to them rather than just seeking to talk to celebrities.”

He advised JFK to seek out Martin Luther King, then a young activist preacher in Montgomery, Alabama. “He hardly knew who Dr King was. That pointed out to me that he was really distant from our struggle.”

But Kennedy listened and learned, and made contact with the black leader. In a tight election, the black vote split 70:30 Kennedy’s way, enough to tip the finest balance.

Under JFK and then Lyndon B Johnson , Belafonte was Dr King’s conduit to Washington, and also the financial provider at crucial moments, particularly when the civil rights leader had been jailed and needed to be bailed out.

The United States has been defeated in Iraq. That doesn’t mean that there’ll be a troop withdrawal anytime soon, but it does mean that there’s no chance of achieving the mission’s political objectives. Iraq will not be a democracy, reconstruction will be minimal, and the security situation will continue to deteriorate into the foreseeable future.

The real goals of the invasion are equally unachievable. While the US has established a number of military bases at the heart of the world’s energy-center; oil output has dwindled to 1.6 million barrels per day, nearly half of post-war production. More importantly, the administration has no clear strategy for protecting pipelines, oil tankers and major facilities. Oil production will be spotty for years to come even if security improves. This will have grave effects on oil futures; triggering erratic spikes in prices and roiling the world energy markets. If the contagion spreads to the other Gulf States, as many political analysts now expect, many of the world’s oil-dependent countries will go through an agonizing cycle of recession/depression.

America’s failure in Iraq is not merely a defeat for the Bush administration. It is also a defeat for the “unipolar-model” of world order. Iraq proves that that the superpower model cannot provide the stability, security or guarantee of human rights that are essential for garnering the support of the 6 billion people who now occupy the planet. The mushrooming of armed groups in Iraq, Afghanistan and, now, Somalia foreshadows a broader and more violent confrontation between the over-stretched American legions and their increasingly adaptable and lethal enemies. Resistance to the imperial order is on the rise everywhere.

The United States does not have the resources or the public support to prevail in such a conflict. Nor does it have the moral authority to persuade the world of the merit of its cause. The Bush administration’s extra-legal actions have galvanized the majority of people against the United States. America has become a threat to the very human rights and civil liberties with which it used to be identified. There’s little popular support for imprisoning enemies without charges, for torturing suspects with impunity, for kidnapping people off the streets of foreign capitals, or for invading unarmed sovereign nations without the approval of the United Nations. These are fundamental violations to international law as well as commonly held principles of human decency.

The Bush administration defends its illegal activities as an essential part of the new world order; a model of global governance which allows Washington to police the world according to its own discretion. The vast majority of people have rejected this model and polls clearly indicate declining support for US policies nearly everywhere. As former Jimmy Carter National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski noted:

“American power may be greater in 2006 than in 1991, (but) the country’s capacity to mobilize, inspire, point in a shared direction and thus shape global realities has significantly declined. Fifteen years after its coronation as global leader, America is becoming a fearful and lonely democracy in a politically antagonistic world.”

The United States is a nation in a state of irreversible decline; its foundational principles have been abandoned and its center of political power is a moral swamp. The Bush presidency represents the ethical low point in American history.

The US government began hearings on Friday to determine if 14 accused terrorists currently being held at Guantanamo Bay can be deemed enemy combatants. The hearings, which have been closed to independent observers, are receiving heavy criticism for their secretive nature and what some are calling pre-determined outcomes.

“The administration has been almost pathological in trying to find ways to keep these people from ever seeing a real judge or a real lawyer,” John Turley, a law professor at George Washington University, told the Associated Press, “and the reasons are obvious.”

Turley, among many legal analysts, believes that the likelihood that torture tactics were used on the detainees has heightened the administration’s state of secrecy for fear of public retribution. The law professor also suggested that President Bush not only knew about the torture program but may have ordered it.

“It seems pretty clear that they’ve been tortured,” Turley told the AP, “and that the president knew they were being tortured, and may have even ordered their torture through techniques like water boarding.”

Last September, CIA sources told ABC News that the harshest, technique they were authorized to use on “high-value detainees, such as the 9/11 attacks architect Khalid Sheikh Mohamed…was called ‘water boarding,’ in which a prisoner’s face was covered with cellophane, and water is poured over it (pictured above) — meant to trigger an unbearable gag reflex.”

Brian Ross and Richard Esposito reported for ABC’s The Blotter that “new rules issued by the Pentagon today prohibit water boarding, though there was no clear acknowledgement that it was permitted previously,” and that “CIA officers told ABC News that 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed lasted the longest under water boarding, two and a half minutes, before beginning to talk.”

TEHRAN (Reuters) – Iran said on Sunday President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wanted to brief the U.N. Security Council about his country’s civilian nuclear plans, which the West says are a covert attempt to make atom bombs.

The five permanent members of the Council — the United States, France, Britain, China and Russia — plus Germany are considering imposing new sanctions on Iran over its nuclear ambitions, which Tehran insists are entirely peaceful.

“The president of Iran plans to speak in a possible meeting of the Security Council on Iran’s nuclear program to defend the right of the Iranian nation to use peaceful nuclear technology,” state TV on Sunday quoted government spokesman Gholamhossein Elham as saying, without giving further details.

Iran’s IRNA news agency quoted Elham as saying Ahmadinejad planned to attend “if the Security Council has a meeting on Iran’s nuclear program.” The Foreign Ministry spokesman confirmed the news to reporters but gave no more details.

The military’s most senior doctor pledged to improve the standard of care for wounded service personnel after the publication of a series of complaints about their treatment by the NHS.

Lieutenant General Louis Lillywhite, the Surgeon General, defended the way casualties were looked after but said: “If we need to do things better, we shall.”

His statement came after leaked complaints from soldiers and their families graphically described the dire state they were left in after being injured while serving their country.

Liam Fox, the shadow defence secretary, said their treatment represented a “betrayal” while Lord Guthrie, the former defence staff chief, told one Sunday newspaper: “The handling of the medical casualties from both Afghanistan and Iraq is a scandal.”

The complaints, leaked to the newspaper by military sources, centre on Birmingham’s Selly Oak hospital, where many injured soldiers are now treated following the closure of almost all separate military units.

One reveals how Jamie Cooper, the youngest British soldier wounded in Iraq, spent a night lying in his own faeces after staff allowed his colostomy bag to overflow.

On another occasion, according to the letter from the 18-year-old’s parents, his medical air mattress was allowed to deflate, leaving him in “considerable pain”. He also contracted the superbug MRSA.

Phillip and Caroline Cooper, from Bristol, wrote to Ministry of Defence officials and hospital managers to complain after he had spent more than two months at Selly Oak.

The letter told how their son had been wounded in a double mortar attack and it was only “by the grace of God and the work of an excellent surgeon” that his life had been saved – but there followed a “catalogue of errors”.

In separate correspondence Alex Weldon of 45 Commando Royal Marines complained of pain relief arriving hours late. The marine, who was shot in Afghanistan, described seeing a fellow casualty from Afghanistan in such agony on the ward that it “brought tears to his eyes”.

Dr Fox accused the Government of “an act of betrayal against our bravest soldiers”.

Top American generals make shock admission as Iraq leader pleads with neighbouring countries to seal off their borders

The US army is lagging behind Iraq’s insurgents tactically in a war that senior officers say is the biggest challenge since Korea 50 years ago.

The gloomy assessment at a conference in America last week came as senior US and Iraqi officials sat down yesterday with officials from Iran, Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia in Baghdad to persuade Iraq’s neighbours to help seal its borders against fighters, arms and money flowing in. During the conference the US, Iranian and Syrian delegations were reported to have had a ‘lively exchange’.

In a bleak analysis, senior officers described the fighters they were facing in Iraq and Afghanistan ‘as smart, agile and cunning’.

In Vietnam, the US was eventually defeated by a well-armed, closely directed and highly militarised society that had tanks, armoured vehicles and sources of both military production and outside procurement. What is more devastating now is that the world’s only superpower is in danger of being driven back by a few tens of thousands of lightly armed irregulars, who have developed tactics capable of destroying multimillion-dollar vehicles and aircraft.

By contrast, the US military is said to have been slow to respond to the challenges of fighting an insurgency. The senior officers described the insurgents as being able to adapt rapidly to exploit American rules of engagement and turn them against US forces, and quickly disseminate ways of destroying or disabling armoured vehicles.