Life in OUR America, Volume 5, the Livyjr Files Options

[Snuffysmith]

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/05/0...tergategate.php
Crashing WatergateGate
Russ Baker
May 08, 2006


Investigative reporter and essayist Russ Baker is a longtime contributor to TomPaine.com. He is also the founder of the Real News Project , a new not-for-profit investigative journalism outlet. He can be reached at russ@russbaker.com.

We knew this was big back in March, when a court sent ex-Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham, R-Calif.—convicted of taking $2.4 million in bribes from military contractors—off to serve eight years in prison, the most severe sentence ever handed out to a member of Congress. From then on, the sleaze chain has been metastasizing. More members of the House might be implicated—and even top CIA officials. Now it is being described as the largest federal corruption scandal in a century. With stories of prostitutes and all-night poker games at the Watergate hotel, it is one scandal that truly is deserving of the "-gate" suffix that has become such a dreary journalistic cliché.

No matter how big the affair grows, though, it is likely to follow in the path of so many of its predecessors—distracting public attention from a larger and more important reality: Today, “the largest corruption scandal in a century” is not WatergateGate—it is the everyday performance of the U.S. government. The worst sleaze in Washington is mainly legal, as the old saying goes; and that includes the sorry state of the entire intelligence apparatus—beyond whether the #3 CIA official improperly participated in those late-night, high-stakes card games.

Too many in the media treat a juicy mess like the Cunningham Affair as a shocking aberration. Consider the wording in a New York Times article on Sunday, which described “a growing suspicion among some lawmakers that corrupt practices may have influenced decision-making in Congress and at executive-branch agencies.”

Who would have thought? Don’t the editors read their own paper? It’s been clear for some time that corruption in the Bush administration has exceeded a Washington standard that already was pretty tawdry. Some of the stories are known already, especially to TomPaine.com readers: White House procurement chief taken out in handcuffs in connection with a sprawling lobbying corruption investigation; the vice president’s chief of staff indicted for perjury; the unseemly setup between Bush’s first FEMA director and Brownie, the incompetent neophyte who replaced him.

But many of the larger misdeeds have gone unreported, in part because—technically illegal or not—they represent business as usual in Republican Washington today. Virtually every federal agency is now captive to the corporate interests it is supposed to regulate. The reach of corporate influence has even compromised the science agencies on whose fact-finding and truth-telling crucial questions of national safety and even survival depend.

And then there is Congress. A quick comparison of committee activity and floor votes with campaign finance reports tells the story. Never mind the now-controversial “earmarks,” in which legislators secretly slip goodies at the last minute into larger bill packages. The real scandal is going on in plain sight. The entities that give the most get the most—and the goodies keep on coming. That outfits like Halliburton can survive a never-ending series of contracting horror shows with their federal contacts intact says a lot about Congress’s willful abrogation of fiduciary duty on behalf of the taxpayer.

The main mistake Randy Cunningham made was accepting the goodies while he was still in Congress. There is no crime involved in doing the exact same favors for government contractors, and later joining the company’s board or getting hired as a highly-paid lobbyist, or getting payback on a more indirect basis. That’s the deal all over town, and some of the most “well-respected” names in America have such arrangements—and not all of them are Republicans. The whole thing stinks, but what to do about it? That’s the rub.

Speaking of a rub, besides the careless greed, in the Cunningham Caper we are blessed by the emergence of a sexual angle worthy of a British tabloid, with the congressman alleged to have enjoyed the favors of big-league prostitutes in return for military contracts. Sexual peccadilloes always get the public’s attention in a way that other misdeeds, like accepting bribes from defense contractors, cannot. That Cunningham and his buddies may have preferred presumably-discreet professional company over out-of-wedlock friends of the Gennifer Flowers ilk, makes perfect sense in an atmosphere where holier-than-thou sanctimony cannot bear scrutiny. That might take the story to a new level, since these sins would have been committed by the staunchest defenders of the "sanctity of marriage."

Those who care about the ever more brazen sellout of the public interest over the last five years have no choice but to take these revelations in whatever garb they come—and if they’re scantily clad, so be it. Meanwhile, consorting with prostitutes—the thing that will get perhaps get the most attention—is the one thing that matters least to the future of our body politic.

With this new WatergateGate, we must at all costs beware the Woodward Fallacy—that sanitation is a substitute for politics and ideas. It is the conceit of the reigning elite. But in fact we can get rid of Cunningham and his cronies and the rot will continue, unless change goes much deeper to the root.

[Livyjr]

And apropos nothing ....

I suppose ...

Other than that history ....

Continues to interest me ....

As I grow older ...

And so ....

"Tombs Found at China Olympic Site"

By CHRISTOPHER BODEEN, Associated Press Writer

47 minutes ago

BEIJING - Work on a shooting range for the 2008 Beijing Olympics has been suspended after the discovery of imperial-era tombs on the site, newspapers and an antiquities official said Monday.

The tombs, found in mid-April, are believed to date back five to six centuries to the Ming dynasty, and may be those of eunuchs serving at the imperial court, the Beijing Morning Post said.

Beijing has been the site of imperial and other capitals for more than 1,000 years, and many major building projects unearth gravesites or relics.

Most are removed or destroyed before experts can examine them.

A spokeswoman for the Beijing Olympic organizers, Zhu Jing, said the find accounted for only a small part of the construction site and "shouldn't affect the work too seriously."

"We'll let everyone know if there is a major discovery," Zhu said.

An official of the Beijing Cultural Relics Department, Liu Baoshan, declined to give an age for the tombs and said no details would be released until a final report is drawn up.

Archaeologists have found coins, ceramics and jade in the tombs at the shooting range on the Chinese capital's western outskirts, the Post and other papers said.

An Associated Press photographer who visited the site Monday saw antiquities officials at work on several pits dug into an area on the edge of the construction site, where work otherwise appeared to have halted.

Workers refused to answer questions and demanded the photographer leave the area.

Olympics organizers broke ground in July 2004 for the shooting range.

The main Olympic facilities are on Beijing's north side, while other facilities are scattered around the city.

Beijing has been racing ahead with construction of venues for the games.

Most have proceeded smoothly, although there have been some protests by people whose homes have been destroyed to make way for new stadiums and gymnasiums.

[Livyjr]

"IT'S SAIGON ALL OVER AGAIN."

And so ....

People are finally beginning to understand .....

What it is all about ....

And so .....

[Livyjr]

And as we continue to hear all of this crap and blather about America being the WORLD'S ONLY SUPERPOWER .....

And how it is our job as a nation ...

To teach all these other nations on the face of the earth how to live .....

What is so very SUPER ...

About this?

"U.S. newborn survival rate ranks low"

By LINDSEY TANNER, Associated Press
Last updated: 4:22 a.m., Tuesday, May 9, 2006

CHICAGO -- America may be the world's superpower, but its survival rate for newborn babies ranks near the bottom among modern nations, better only than Latvia.

Among 33 industrialized nations, the United States is tied with Hungary, Malta, Poland and Slovakia with a death rate of nearly 5 per 1,000 babies, according to a new report.

Latvia's rate is 6 per 1,000.

"We are the wealthiest country in the world, but there are still pockets of our population who are not getting the health care they need," said Mary Beth Powers, a reproductive health adviser for the U.S.-based Save the Children, which compiled the rankings based on health data from countries and agencies worldwide.

The U.S. ranking is driven partly by racial and income health care disparities.

Among U.S. blacks, there are 9 deaths per 1,000 live births, closer to rates in developing nations than to those in the industrialized world.

"Every time I see these kinds of statistics, I'm always amazed to see where the United States is because we are a country that prides itself on having such advanced medical care and developing new technology ... and new approaches to treating illness."

"But at the same time not everybody has access to those new technologies," said Dr. Mark Schuster, a Rand Co. researcher and pediatrician with the University of California, Los Angeles.

The Save the Children report, released Monday, comes just a week after publication of another report humbling to the American health care system.

That study showed that white, middle-aged Americans are far less healthy than their peers in England, despite U.S. health care spending that is double that in England.

In the analysis of global infant mortality, Japan had the lowest newborn death rate, 1.8 per 1,000 and four countries tied for second place with 2 per 1,000 -- the Czech Republic, Finland, Iceland and Norway.

Still, it's the impoverished nations that feel the full brunt of infant mortality, since they account for 99 percent of the 4 million annual deaths of babies in their first month.

Only about 16,000 of those are in the United States, according to Save the Children.

The highest rates globally were in Africa and South Asia.

With a newborn death rate of 65 out of 1,000 live births, Liberia ranked the worst.

In the United States, researchers noted that the population is more racially and economically diverse than many other industrialized countries, making it more challenging to provide culturally appropriate health care.

About half a million U.S. babies are born prematurely each year, data show.

African-American babies are twice as likely as white infants to be premature, to have a low birth weight, and to die at birth, according to Save the Children.

The researchers also said lack of national health insurance and short maternity leaves likely contribute to the poor U.S. rankings.

Those factors can lead to poor health care before and during pregnancy, increasing risks for premature births and low birth weight, which are the leading causes of newborn death in industrialized countries.

Infections are the main culprit in developing nations, the report said.

Other possible factors in the U.S. include teen pregnancies and obesity rates, which both disproportionately affect African-American women and also increase risk for premature births and low birth weights.

In past reports by Save the Children -- released ahead of Mother's Day -- U.S. mothers' well-being has consistently ranked far ahead of those in developing countries but poorly among industrialized nations.

This year the United States tied for last place with the United Kingdom on indicators including mortality risks and contraception use.

While the gaps for infants and mothers contrast sharply with the nation's image as a world leader, Emory University health policy expert Kenneth Thorpe said the numbers are not surprising.

"Our health care system focuses on providing high-tech services for complicated cases."

"We do this very well," Thorpe said.

"What we do not do is provide basic primary and preventive health care services."

"We do not pay for these services, and do not have a delivery system that is designed to provide either primary prevention, or adequately treat patients with chronic diseases."

------

On the Net:

Save the Children: http://www.savethechildren.org

[Livyjr]

And then ....

There is always the economy ....

"A sense of running on empty - Energy costs blamed for rising unease about economy in New York"

By KEVIN HARLIN, Business writer, Albany, New York Times Union

First published: Tuesday, May 9, 2006

Higher energy prices sapped New Yorkers' confidence in the economy in April, bringing upstate down to its lowest level since the Siena Research Institute began the survey in 1999.

The institute on Monday reported consumer confidence fell 9.5 points from the previous month, to 73.8 in April.

That puts New Yorkers 13.6 points behind the nation.

And upstaters continued to be even more down on the economy, measuring a record low 69.1, down 7.7 points from March.

Within the metro New York City area, confidence was down 11.1 points, but was still higher than upstate, at 76.2.

"Everyone -- men, women, Democrats, Republicans, young, old, high and low income -- is feeling the effect of high energy prices," Douglas Lonnstrom, the institute's director, said in a statement.

As consumers were coming off of record high home heating costs this past winter, the price of gasoline has been rising.

Self-serve regular cost over $3 a gallon Monday, according to AAA.

The automobile club said it was about $2.74 a gallon a month ago and $2.27 a year ago.

The Siena College-affiliated institute surveyed 620 adult New Yorkers by phone during the month to compile the index, which has a baseline of 100.

High numbers indicate confidence in the economy, and lower figures show unease.

Lonnstrom said the confidence figures concur with a Siena survey from the previous week, which found that 52 percent of state voters thought the state was heading in the wrong direction -- the highest level since SRI began tracking it a year and a half ago.

But New Yorkers weren't planning to completely cinch their purse strings.

The number who reported plans to buy a car or truck, a computer, or who expected to make major home improvements was up slightly.

The percentage of respondents who said they planned to buy homes or furniture was down slightly.

Deborah Dorman, president of the Eastern New York Coalition of Automotive Dealers, an Albany-based trade group, said sales seemed to have picked up for her members in April.

"All of a sudden, they're selling some cars," she said.

[Livyjr]

And then ....

There is always the economy ....

"Incomes up most in energy states"

By Dennis Cauchon, USA TODAY

Thu May 4, 7:00 AM ET

Americans' personal income is growing dramatically in states that produce energy or have strong ties to the expanding federal government.

The five states enjoying fastest per-capita income growth since 2000 are major suppliers of oil, natural gas or coal, according to a USA TODAY analysis of federal data.

Wyoming topped the list: Personal income rose an inflation-adjusted 13.9% from 2000 to 2005.

The state was well-positioned to take advantage of higher energy prices.

It ranks No. 1 in coal production, No. 4 in natural gas and No. 7 in oil - but No. 50 in population.

Not far behind the energy states were Virginia and Maryland, which experienced explosive growth in their Washington, D.C., suburbs.

"The engine driving growth here is federal spending, especially for technology related to military and homeland security," says economist Stephen Fuller of George Mason University in Fairfax, Va.

The federal spending boom - up 22% since 2000, after adjusting for inflation, to $2.5 trillion in 2005 - created a wealth of high-paying jobs for private contractors.

It also helped poorer states such as Mississippi by boosting health care spending.

No state could match the affluence of the nation's capital, which had average personal income of $54,985 in 2005, up 19.8% from 2000.

"The Washington, D.C., area is what Atlanta used to be - a place where corporations locate their headquarters or at least large regional offices," says SunTrust Banks economist Gregory Miller.

"Everyone wants to sell to the federal government, so you've got to be there."

This post has been edited by Livyjr: May 9 2006, 06:10 AM

[Livyjr]

 
And here is one more view of where we are vis-a-vis a divided America, right now, today!

"What Bush Threw Away"

By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Washington Post
Tuesday, November 2, 2004; Page A21

George W. Bush once had a chance to be looking forward to a landslide victory today and a nation committed to standing together in defeating terrorism.

Instead, the president is perilously close to defeat.

The best he can hope for is a narrow victory that will leave the nation bitter, divided and angry.

One of Bush's achievements will be exceptional voter turnout and a renewal of the idea that elections and political parties matter.

The downside, for him at least, is that a large share of the country has been activated for the primary purpose of ending his presidency.

The appalling reappearance of Osama bin Laden on the eve of our election was a reminder of what has been lost and of what Bush threw away.

Three years ago, bin Laden was a symbol of the evil that Americans -- nearly all of us -- were fighting against.

Now even bin Laden has been politicized.

In the days after Sept. 11, Democrats put aside their suspicions of Bush and rallied to his side.

"We will speak with one voice," Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle declared on that awful day.

"All of us stand with the president," said Sen. Joe Biden.

And stand with the president we all did.

For several months, Bush, too, stood above party.

In assembling both a domestic and international coalition to wage war against the Taliban in Afghanistan, the president put aside his critiques of unilateralism and "nation-building."

As I wrote at the time -- yes, even I admired Bush that fall -- the president "grafted the language of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman to the martial rhythms of Ronald Reagan."

He sought broad support, not narrow majorities, for the Afghan war and his emergency spending proposals.

Back then I thought Bush had an enormous political opportunity that matched the nation's interest: to build a wide, sustainable, Eisenhower-like Republican majority.

The country was waiting for a call to service, sacrifice and solidarity.

It didn't want the old ideological politics.

But Bush interpreted his prodigious approval ratings not as an opportunity for something new but as a chance to push the same ideological agenda he was pursuing before Sept. 11.

It was a chance to create a Republican majority in Congress in the 2002 elections.

It was a chance to push through even more tax cuts, and never mind the deficits created by all that new spending.

If the Senate, facing the 2002 elections, could be badgered into giving the president broad authority to wage war against Saddam Hussein, why not short-circuit a more searching debate and just grab the power?

And if forcing an early Iraq vote put his potential 2004 opponents -- John Kerry, John Edwards, Dick Gephardt -- in a bind, why not seize that advantage, too?

It worked for a while.

And should Bush squeeze out a narrow win, his supporters will no doubt claim a victory for the president's audacious style.

But the cost of such a victory will be paid off for many years -- perhaps for as long as we're paying off the debt.

Consider the reaction to bin Laden.

Right there on Fox News, the Bush Channel, a Republican operative named David Johnson thought bin Laden's strange disquisition could be interpreted only one way.

"This almost looks," he said, "like an endorsement by Osama bin Laden of John Kerry."

And thus were the last vestiges of the unity achieved on Sept. 11 wiped off the face of our politics.

If holding power meant reaching this ultimate in guilt-by-association (and more respectable conservative commentators were offering similar thoughts in a more respectable way), then go right ahead and use bin Laden to win the election.

The mess can be cleaned up later.

But the mess will not be easily cleaned up.

Unity will not be easily restored.

The willingness of the president's camp to slander the opposition will not be easily forgotten.

I think a majority of the country knows this, which is why I have a hunch that the president will lose.

The virtues so many Americans outside of Bush's party thought they saw in Bush in the months immediately after Sept. 11 -- especially that short-lived willingness to put the needs of the national emergency over the temptations of ideology and partisanship -- are the virtues the president has chosen to abandon.

It's a shame, really.

Bush could have been a great president.

He was for several months.

He chose instead to be the leader of a party and a faction.

However this election turns out, that's what he'll still be on Nov. 3.

postchat@aol.com

Saying that George W. Bush could have been a great president ....

Is a lot like saying that had George W. Bush been a horse ...

He could have won the Kentucky Derby ....

George is like a gang leader, when you come right down to it ....

Because outside of his gang .....

He is nothing ....

And so ....

More "GANG WARFARE" is headed our way .....

Thanks to George W. Bush ...

Who simply has nothing else to offer us anymore .....

Himself being nothing more than the "product" ...

Of some expensive smoke ...

And mirrors .....

Jury-rigged by the ARCHITECT .....

For the sole purpose of grabbing more power here in OUR America ....

What the REPUBLICANS call "PLAY-BOOK POLITICS" ....

As though governing OUR America ..

Were nothing more than a silly game ...

Which for them ...

It is .....

And so ....

"Bush wants fight over CIA choice - President hopes debate over Hayden's role in warrantless wiretaps will hurt Democrats, but some Republicans who usually back White House are balking"

By PETER WALLSTEN and JANET HOOK, Los Angeles Times
First published: Tuesday, May 9, 2006

WASHINGTON -- By picking Gen. Michael Hayden as the next CIA director, President Bush faces another brawl over his controversial program to eavesdrop on suspected terrorists, including people on American soil, without court approval.

But far from fearing such a fight, the White House walked right into it by nominating the program's leading defender to head the CIA.

Administration allies said Monday that by reviving debate over the spy program, which Hayden oversaw when he led the National Security Agency, his nomination would provide a welcomed opportunity to reopen a tried-and-true election-year playbook in which Republicans portray Democrats as weak on national security.

"We welcome that debate," said Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, one of the White House's closest Capitol Hill allies, in a statement released Monday concerning the Hayden nomination.

"If the President's opponents hope to argue that we're doing too much to prevent terrorism, that the intelligence agencies are fighting too hard against terrorists around the world, then we look forward to taking that debate to the American people."

Still, there were signs Monday that the White House might have miscalculated.

Rather than Democrats leading the charge against Hayden, some of the most vocal opposition came from Republicans, including steadfast White House backers such as House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga. and Rep. Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich., who is chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kan., who will lead Hayden's confirmation hearings, has declined to endorse him.

Those unexpected turns of events further underscored how difficult Bush is finding it to govern with approval ratings that have dropped to the low 30s.

And they muddied the message being promoted by White House strategist Karl Rove, who recently predicted that the terrorist wiretapping program would portray Democrats as operating with a "pre-9/11 mind-set."

The political calculations over Hayden's nomination reflected the uneasy terrain facing Republicans just six months before voters decide whether to keep the GOP in control of Congress.

White House strategists are angling to exploit the party's traditional strength on national security issues, but some Republicans are wary of being tied to a President whose approval ratings seem to drop by the day.

A new Gallup survey for CNN and USA Today, released Monday, showed Bush's approval at an all-time low of 31 percent -- with the President winning approval from barely a majority of conservatives.

The NSA program emerged as a hot political issue in December, when The New York Times first revealed its existence.

Democrats and civil libertarians have attacked the program, under which the NSA, without court warrants, monitors phone conversations and e-mail of suspected terrorists communicating with people inside the United States.

Critics charged that the administration could use the program to illegally spy on U.S. citizens.

The program also has drawn fire from some Republicans, including Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., who said the Hayden nomination might give him a renewed chance to investigate whether it violates constitutional protections of privacy.

But Republican strategists on Monday said the White House's decision to nominate Hayden, despite a certain fight over the program, reflected administration thinking that the fall elections will be won by motivating the traditional conservative base, using the same focus on national security that succeeded in 2002 and 2004.

Their formula, they said, included tagging Democrats as soft on terrorism and seizing on statements by liberals such as Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., who proposed censuring Bush over the NSA program.

A mass e-mail sent in March by the Republican National Committee slamming Feingold received the highest response rate of any RNC message since the nomination of Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts.

David Winston, a Republican pollster who works with congressional Republicans, said that Hayden's presence in the spotlight will emphasize the fact that the NSA program was specifically targeting suspected members of al-Qaida, undercutting Democratic opposition to the program.

"The thought there was that getting him up in front of people, constantly reiterating that this was targeting calls to and from al-Qaida, was a good debate" that would benefit Republicans, Winston said. .

Some Democrats worried their party might help the GOP by making an issue of the spy program.

The censure call by Feingold and the refusal over the weekend by House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., to rule out an impeachment vote against Bush risked galvanizing a conservative base that appears decidedly unenthusiastic.

Still, Monday's events underscored tensions among Republicans.

The White House faced complaints from GOP lawmakers they were not properly consulted on the Hayden nomination, raising questions about whether a recent staff shake-up at the White House was having any effect on warming chilly relations with lawmakers.

A spokesman for Hastert, for example, said the speaker was "informed" but not consulted.

In announcing his choice from the Oval Office, Bush declared that Hayden, who wore his Air Force uniform for the occasion, had "vast experience" and was "the right man to lead the CIA at this critical moment in our nation's history."

Porter J. Goss, the current CIA director, was forced out of the position on Friday.

Within 90 minutes of Bush's announcement, John D. Negroponte, the director of national intelligence and Hayden's immediate superior, told reporters in an unusual White House briefing that Hayden would be independent of the Pentagon and that the Navy admiral who was Goss' deputy would be moving aside, according to The New York Times.

Negroponte said that a civilian, Stephen R. Kappes, was under serious consideration for the deputy spot.

Kappes, who is highly regarded by CIA officials, left the agency in 2004 after clashing with Goss.

In another sign the White House was trying to make the change in CIA leadership politically palatable to Congress, the agency's No. 3 official, Kyle Foggo, told colleagues in an e-mail message on Monday that he, too, was stepping down.

Foggo, a longtime administrative officer at the agency, had been promoted by Goss.

end quotes

Plunk your magic twanger, Froggo ....

And see what HACK GUMMINT job ...

You can land next ...

This post has been edited by Livyjr: May 9 2006, 06:50 AM

[Snuffysmith]

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=710...id=aVreBEdY.5cg

Asia Is Getting Ready to Dump the Dollar Peg: Andy Mukherjee
May 8 (Bloomberg) -- Li Yong, China's vice minister for finance, said he had heard a ``rumor'' that the U.S. dollar was headed for a 25 percent drop. If the gossip was true, the consequences would be ``shocking,'' he said.

Li's comment, which he made at a discussion on global financial imbalances last week at the annual meeting of the Asian Development Bank in the Indian city of Hyderabad, was aimed directly at fellow panelist Tim Adams, the U.S. Treasury undersecretary of international affairs.

The unspoken message was: ``Don't try to talk the dollar down.'' And Adams knew better than to ask, ``Well, what are you going to do about it?'' The answer to that question has already begun taking shape: Asia may be getting ready to fix its currencies to a local anchor, dumping the region's unofficial dollar peg.

Even as they continue to pile up U.S. debt in their foreign- exchange reserves to keep their currencies stable against the dollar, Asian nations, China among them, are preparing for a scenario where the dollar does indeed collapse under the weight of a record U.S. current account deficit.

At the Hyderabad meeting, finance ministers of China, Japan and South Korea got together with their counterparts from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or Asean. The 13-nation group said it would sponsor a research project, titled ``Toward greater financial stability in the Asian region: Exploring steps to create regional monetary units.''

Asian Currency Unit

This is no innocuous academic exercise. Regional monetary units are a euphemism for a parallel Asian currency, an idea that has been around since the 1997-98 financial crisis and is now, for the first time, entering the realm of policy making.

Both Japan and China are extremely serious about it and are vying to take ownership of the project.

An Asian Currency Unit, or ACU, will be an index that seeks to capture the value of a hypothetical Asian currency by taking a weighted average of several of them. The weight for a particular currency in the index may be determined by the size of the economy and the quantity of its total trade.

What's the big deal with the ACU? Given the data, anyone can set up an index. It isn't that Asia is talking about replacing its national currencies with the ACU. A European-style single currency in Asia is at least decades away. The ACU is an accounting unit; it won't change hands in the physical world.

The ACU will start making a difference when it becomes the fulcrum of exchange-rate management in Asia. There is some sign that Asian nations want to do just that.

A New Peg

Korea, Japan and China agreed in Hyderabad to ``immediately launch discussions on the road map for a system to coordinate foreign exchange policy.''

The ACU can help a lot in such coordination. It can become a basket peg against which any Asian nation can fix the value of its currency within a band. The ACU, itself, will float.

Why might the ACU work when the now-defunct European Currency Unit, on which the concept is modeled, didn't? One good reason, as noted by economist Barry Eichengreen of the University of California, Berkeley, is that Europe's need for a parallel currency was satisfied by the dollar.

The ACU may well emerge as a viable currency for denominating export invoices, bank loans and bond issuances if the dollar is no longer perceived as a safe storage of value.

So far, Japan has been driving the ACU concept. Haruhiko Kuroda, a former Japanese vice minister of finance and currently the president of the Asian Development Bank, was vigorously pursuing it. The ADB was going to start computing and publishing several ACUs sometime this year.

China in Control

One such ACU would have comprised 13 members, including the Japanese yen, the Chinese yuan, the Korean won and the currencies of Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Brunei, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and the Philippines. Another ACU would have included both the yuan and the Taiwan dollar -- and that would have been anathema to China. Nor would China have liked to peg the yuan to an ACU that was overly dominated by the yen.

Now China has taken control. While the research will still be conducted in Japan, Asean will take the decision on the composition of the ACU. While Japan is a member of this club, its influence is in decline. The association is now firmly under China's thumb.

While China continues to exhort the U.S. not to follow weak- dollar policies, it, like everyone else, can only guess about the longevity of the present global imbalances.

If there is a sudden collapse in the dollar, the U.S. appetite for imported goods may vanish. The Chinese export engine may seize up and its fragile banking system may collapse under a spate of new bad loans. The idea behind the ACU is to buy some insurance, however inadequate, against all of this.

Stalemate

With its ``my currency is your problem'' attitude, the U.S. has made a negotiated settlement of global imbalances a diplomatic non-starter. China isn't willing to consider the U.S. argument that quicker appreciation of the yuan may prevent a costly adjustment later.

Once again in Hyderabad, Undersecretary Adams tried valiantly to get this message across to Chinese Vice Finance Minister Li. He was wasting his breath.

Li, as Adams noted wryly, ``knows all my talking points.''



To contact the writer of this column:
Andy Mukherjee in Singapore amukherjee@bloomberg.net.

[Snuffysmith]

Click here:

http://www.merlehaggard.com/

[Snuffysmith]

http://www.middleeastforex.com/index.php?section=215

Iran: Euro to replace dollar as oil currency
In July Iran will ditch the dollar in favour of the euro as the currency in which it will accept payments for its oil and natural gas exports, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced Friday.

The switch, first mooted months ago, was expected but Ahmadinejad's decision comes just as Washington is stepping up pressure on other United Nations Security Council members to act against Tehran for flouting agreements taken with the UN's nuclear watchdog.

Ahmadinejad's announcement, made in Baku, Azerbaijan where the Iranian leader is attending a regional economics conference, appears aimed at weakening the United States' resolve to seek sanctions against Iran if it does not comply with the UN International Agency for Atomic Energy's demands.

Some observers beleive the Iranian move could deal a severe blow the the American currency as many central banks from oil importing nations could choose to stock up their currency reserves with euros rather than dollars- AKI.

[Snuffysmith]

After reading the below and everything else being said about the new CIA Director, as well as looking at the DOD budget, I'm beginning to wonder whether the blame for 9/11 should be placed at the foot of DOD.



http://blog.washingtonpost.com/earlywarnin...e_is_not_t.html
William M. Arkin on National and Homeland Security

Military Intelligence is Not the CIA's Problem

The President's nomination of Gen. Michael V. Hayden to be CIA director has some fretting about an out-and-out Pentagon power grab, with Donald Rumsfeld winning the final battle over who will control U.S. intelligence.

Hayden, a four star Air Force general who declines to seek retirement, symbolizes the tensions that have existed since 9/11 between the Secretary of Defense and the top civilian intelligence agency.

The Defense Department consumes the lion's share of intelligence dollars and employs far more intelligence related personnel than the CIA. Under Rumsfeld, in addition, DOD has installed a new intelligence czar, Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen A. Cambone, and has moved to improve its human intelligence capabilities.

It is certainly the case that Rumsfeld can't stand to be told that his Defense Department can't get what it needs because of some other agency's priorities or weaknesses, but are military intelligence efforts really the biggest problem facing the CIA?

No -- at least not based on my information about what's going on with military intelligence.

If there is a theory behind changes in DOD intelligence these days, it is that the Cold War model for intelligence is no longer applicable.

The old model, as described by DOD intelligence types, was that intelligence served primarily as a staff function, handled by a closed society that "supported" actual military operations with threat materials prepared for war plans and specific missions. Intelligence mostly prepared "finished" products -- reports -- everyone else "consumed" them.

Certainly, during my experience in military intelligence in West Berlin in the early 1970's, there was a complete separation between intelligence and what we used to call the "combat arms." We did warning for the big boys and wrote reports -- and a select few in the Berlin Brigade might even have read some of them. But since most combat officers only had Secret-level clearances, any "threat" data they used to man those Cold War front lines was packaged and generic "opposing" forces material prepared especially for their supposedly feeble minds. At least, that's how us egg-heads saw it.

Intelligence "data" -- radar signals, enemy emanations, communications traffic patterns -- was a different matter, and that flowed abundantly to what we today call the warfighters. As information technology proliferated within the military -- much the same way it has proliferated in our society -- raw electronics and signals intelligence data were specifically formatted to provide a constant feed.

For some activities, including air operations, electronic countermeasures and jamming, artillery counter-battery radar and fire direction, the intelligence feed of enemy locations and activities has been the unsung hero of the U.S. military. If there is one thing that the United States does better than anybody on the planet, it's winning the electronic battle. And that is to the credit of defense intelligence.

The new intelligence revolution underway in the military today is an attempt to create the same feed of raw data of other types to support soldiers and commanders. The theory is that the substance of voice communication intercepts or news reports or reconnaissance imagery or even human intelligence reporting can be tagged and broken down and fed immediately to those who need it. Think of an RSS feed or an IM window always open that's always open, displaying the right intelligence to the right consumers.

Wonder why $45 billion plus is being spent on intelligence? Building an all-sensing network with the ability to self-report in real time is an expensive dream.

In the short term, the new Pentagon intelligence paradigm is being applied to find the bad guys in the war against terrorism in Afghanistan and Iraq. The wall between intelligence and operations has already been lowered and the dream is eventually to do away with it altogether. The biggest fight is, of course, about power. And since we know that information is power, great tensions have been created between the old "need to know" concept and the new "need to share" one. The Bush administration is a long way from resolving this tension, particularly given its own basic impulse for more secrecy and less openness.

The changes afoot in defense intelligence to implement the new paradigm have also led to monumental white elephants in the fields of computing, information processing, data mining, link analysis, and other building blocks to ingest and distribute the new data. The true benefits are still to be realized; even the feasibility of collecting and identifying the killer piece of information remains in question.

Since military intelligence is about supporting military forces, and since those forces are out there around the globe looking for bad guys, another element of the new system is to build a more robust and diverse "feed" of intelligence of value for military operations. This has led the military to move into territory formally occupied only by the CIA.

The DOD dream, just getting underway, is for military intelligence operatives and special operations collectors -- linguist case officers, skilled, close-in eavesdroppers, clandestine observers -- to conduct "operations" as scouts for bigger operations to follow. These are not collectors collecting for collection sake, intelligence officers say. They are directly supporting the commander.

"We are running intelligence operations every day on the streets of Baghdad and Afghanistan," Lt. General Jerry Boykin told Congress last year. "Action creates intelligence."

"We're talking about looking at intelligence as an operation, much like the CIA does," Boykin continued. "They run operations. …you need to recognize that these are operations, and have a structure that supports these as operations." (New York Times, February 4, 2005)

These new Pentagon intelligence "operations" have reportedly caused friction with the CIA because the military is working in areas where the civilian agency has been the top and only dog. The Pentagon's theory is that the CIA supports "national priorities" and sees its customer base as being mainly the civilian government and the White House. That being the case, the thinking goes, the military just has to get into new areas to support its own broader and more aggressive activities.

Sure, there are issues of coordination and "deconfliction" and, sure. the CIA's alumni and defenders complain of activities that go on without adult supervision (theirs, that is), but those are the issues that a Director of National Intelligence is supposed to resolve. I imagine that the cabal of CIA defenders and alumni just can't stand the notion of anyone elbowing in on their territory.

A more interesting question right now is whether the new Pentagon paradigm is sound. It is still an open question whether some substantive human intelligence data feed can be created to mirror the electronic feed. The bigger question is whether "strategic" analysis -- understanding potential adversaries culturally and socially, forecasting change, appreciating America's position in the world -- won't get short changed in the frenzy to produce data immediately.

By William M. Arkin | May 9, 2006; 9:15 AM ET | Category: Intelligence

[Livyjr]

"Brown joked in e-mail as Katrina churned - Ex-FEMA head’s correspondence shows banter, trivialities before storm"

Nov. 3: The Government Accountability Office is scrutinizing e-mails from former FEMA Director Michael Brown, as well as the actions of some other federal employees.

MSNBC

Updated: 4:40 p.m. ET Nov. 3, 2005

In the days leading up to Katrina, former FEMA Director Michael Brown sent jocular e-mails to colleagues about his clothing, finding a dog-sitter and asking if he could quit, an investigation revealed.

The House panel investigating the government’s slow response to the storm has released pages of internal e-mail dating from before Katrina hit on Aug. 29 in which Brown appears focused on issues other than the catastrophe at hand.

Brown resigned as director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency on Sept. 12 after being made the main scapegoat for the government’s lack of preparedness for Katrina, which killed more than 1,000 people.

Shortly after 7 a.m. on the morning of the storm, a FEMA public affairs official sent Brown an e-mail complimenting him on the outfit he wore during a national television briefing.

In response to the e-mail, whose subject was “Re: New Orleans update,” Brown said, “I got it at Nordstroms,” then added, “Are you proud of me?"

"Can I quit now?"

"Can I go home?”

Hours later, Brown received e-mails about levee breaches and pieces falling off the roof of the New Orleans Superdome, used as a shelter during the storm.

Casual responses at a critical time

On Aug. 31, FEMA official Marty Bahamonde sent Brown a desperate e-mail from New Orleans, calling the situation “past critical.”

Describing patients in temporary emergency shelters, Bahamonde wrote, “Estimates are many will die within hours.”

He also wrote, “We are out of food and running out of water at the dome, plans in works to address the critical need.”

Brown’s reply to the e-mail was:

“Thanks for the update."

"Anything specific I need to do or tweak?”

A few days after Katrina’s devastation, FEMA aide Sharon Worthy sent an e-mail to Brown suggesting he roll up his sleeves when making television appearances.

“Even the President rolled up his sleeves to just below the elbow,” the e-mail reads.

“In these crises and on TV you just need to look more hard-working.”

‘Order a #2’ for dinner, Brown suggested

The following week, Brown responded to Worthy’s e-mail about her fast food options during a business trip to Florida.

“Order a #2, tater tots, large diet cherry limeade,” Brown wrote on Sept. 6.

A week after Brown corresponded with co-workers about who would look after his dog while he traveled to the Gulf Coast, federal employees forwarded press releases to him and urged him to do more to rescue pets stranded by Katrina.

“If you don’t take action to save these creatures of God who are part of the family of the victims, may God forgive you because the victims of Hurricane Katrina, the rest of America, and the world, will not."

"I guarantee you that!” a government official wrote on Sept. 8.

Brown then ordered an action plan to be developed among his employees who were scattered in the recovery zone.

“If evacuees are refusing to leave because they can’t take their pets with them, I understand that,” he wrote.

“So, we need to facilitate the evacuation of those people by figuring out a way to allow them to take their pets.”

Rep. Charlie Melancon, D-La., decried Brown’s e-mails, saying they “depict a leader who seemed overwhelmed and rarely made key decisions.”

Deflecting blame

After being relieved of his duties as the head of FEMA, Brown had appeared before a special congressional panel set up by House Republican leaders to investigate the catastrophe.

“My biggest mistake was not recognizing by Saturday that Louisiana was dysfunctional,” two days before the storm hit, Brown told the panel.

Brown, who joined FEMA in 2001 and ran it for more than two years, was previously an attorney who held several local government and private posts, including leading the International Arabian Horse Association.

Brown’s resignation came three days after Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff sent him back to headquarters from the gulf area, where he had been the point man in the region.

It also came little more than a week after President Bush, on his first post-storm visit to the region, said .....

“Brownie, you’re doing a heckuva job.”

Following Brown’s resignation, Bush chose FEMA official R. David Paulison to be the agency’s acting director.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

"E-Mails show Brown disputed levee breach"

By LARA JAKES JORDAN, Associated Press
Last updated: 6:35 p.m., Tuesday, May 9, 2006

WASHINGTON -- Former FEMA director Michael Brown disputed that floodwaters had breached New Orleans' levees in the early hours after Hurricane Katrina roared ashore, new e-mails released Tuesday show.

The 928 pages of e-mails, obtained and released by the Center for Public Integrity, also portray Brown and the Federal Emergency Management Agency as obsessed with media coverage in the days leading up to and immediately following the Aug. 29, 2005, disaster.

At one point early that morning, Brown reported to an aide that he was "sitting in the chair, putting mousse in my hair," as he waited for media interviews to begin.

Later that morning, at 9:50 a.m., a FEMA staffer at the National Hurricane Center sent department brass an alert from a local TV station report "a levee breach occurred along the industrial canal" near the Ninth Ward.

More than two hours later, at 12:09 p.m., Brown sent a message back to one of his aides, saying: "I'm being told here water over not a breach."

The aide, Michael Lowder, replied: "Ok."

"You probably have better info there."

"Just wanted to pass you what we hear."

Brown did not immediately respond to messages left on his cell phone and e-mail Tuesday afternoon.

Since quitting FEMA on Sept. 12, Brown has sharply criticized the Bush administration for failing to respond quickly to reports about levee breaches.

He has said previously he was convinced of a levee breach by 1 p.m. the day Katrina roared ashore.

Delays in confirming the levee breaches held up repair efforts and allowed flooding to worsen.

[Livyjr]

After reading the below and everything else being said about the new CIA Director, as well as looking at the DOD budget, I'm beginning to wonder whether the blame for 9/11 should be placed at the foot of DOD.

Back when I was in the Army ...

In the Viet Nam times ...

The term MILITARY INTELLIGENCE was said to be ...

An OXYMORON ....

And since that time ...

I don't think much has really changed ....

Despite all the techo-toys and gizmos and what-not these boys have to play with today ....

A case that is really brought home ...

In the book, Blackhawk Down ....

Which is a real case study .....

In just how stupid ....

What is called INTELLIGENCE in the military ....

Really is .....

And I don't believe that it was the responsibility of military intelligence to have detected these hi-jackers ....

If indeed that is what they really were ...

As opposed to "civilian contractors" .....

Which is how I see them .....

"Civilian contractors" whose job it was to inflict some terror on the American public ...

Just as terror was unleashed on the German population during World War II .....

By the British ...

And the Americans ....

By fire-bombing civilian population centers in Germany ....

And just as terror was unleashed on the civilian population of Japan ....

During WWII ....

By fire-bombing cities full of women and children ....

Who are always favored "targets" of the goons who run the various militaries out there ...

Because generally ...

Women and children are pretty helpless ....

And so ...

And just as George H(e). W(hines). "BIG Bush" Bush inflicted terror on the civilian population of Baghdad ...

During what is known as "BIG BUSH'S WAR TO PUT A SYBARITIC EMIR BACK ON THE THRONE OF KUWAIT" ....

For somebody's "end" ....

Because, Snuf .....

In the world of REAL MACHO MEN ....

And this would include the United States Air Force ....

Which spawned this BUSHCO Hayden ......

Infliction of TERROR on civilian populations ....

Is a legitimate "goal" of war ...

Which by and large, the American public endorses .....

So long as those being terrorized are somewhere else ....

And so ....

And today ....

In the case of 9/11 ....

That "somebody" .....

That "BENEFICIARY" ....

Always ends up looking like the REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE to me ...

And so .....

I used to think ...

After getting back to here from Viet Nam ...

That the only thing that was really saving us from the Russians ...

Was the fact ...

That their leadership was as stupid as ours ...

And so .....

And now ....

That the Russians are gone ...

At least for the moment .....

Well ......

[Livyjr]

And so .....

I used to think ...

After getting back to here from Viet Nam ...

That the only thing that was really saving us from the Russians ...

Was the fact ...

That their leadership was as stupid as ours ...

And so .....

And now ....

That the Russians are gone ...

At least for the moment .....

Well ......

And speaking about Donny Rumsfeld ....

The "MAN WHO CAN'T GET IT DONE" .....

Because he don't know how to do it ....

Other than through the infliction of acts of sexual perversion on Arab men .....

Which is also now a LEGITIMATE AMERICAN GOAL OF WAR .....

In this day and age .....

Of the SON OF BIG BUSH ASCENDENT ......

We have .....

May 5, 2006

"Stakes high in battle between Rumsfeld, generals"

By James Kitfield, National Journal

The matter of Rumsfeld v. the Generals bears close scrutiny.

The controversy represents the worst breach in civil-military relations since Harry Truman dismissed Gen. Douglas MacArthur in 1951 for his conduct and his criticism of the president during the Korean War.

It has proven an unwelcome distraction for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the Joint Chiefs, and has added to the already considerable woes of President Bush in his role as a wartime commander-in-chief.

Notably, the calls from a group of recently retired generals that Rumsfeld should resign has also thrust senior military leaders and, by proxy, the uniformed services into the middle of a hyperpartisan political argument -- territory from which the U.S. military rarely escapes unscathed.

Given the nearly unprecedented nature of the controversy, what is perhaps most remarkable is how utterly unsurprising it is to anyone who has spent time with senior military officers, in the field, over drinks at the officers' club, or especially on the ground in Iraq.

The fact that the Army chief of staff came out of retirement to take the job after sources say at least three active-duty generals declined it, and reports that the Marine Corps commandant, Gen. Michael W. Hagee, may retire before his term is up, speak volumes about the frayed state of civil-military relations in today's Pentagon.

Practically from the moment they first occupied the E Ring, Rumsfeld and his tight circle of senior aides demonstrated a dismissive attitude that has grated on uniformed leaders.

In the view of Bush's civilian team, President Clinton had allowed the generals and the admirals to run roughshod.

Rumsfeld and his band of reformers were a rude awakening for senior military leaders conditioned to expect a measure of courtesy from civilian bosses as a privilege of their rank; instead, Bush's team set out to show the generals who was boss.

Rumsfeld's incessant needling of the Army, in particular, to more rapidly reshape itself into an expeditionary force, at a time when the service has been run nearly ragged by back-to-back-to-back deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq, added insult to injury.

From the beginning, the Rumsfeld reformers have also considered themselves bold revolutionaries who deal only in transformative ideas, and their "roll the dice" spirit in nearly all things has often been at odds with the more cautious nature of a uniformed military pledged to securing the Republic.

In response to Pentagon policies -- set by Rumsfeld and his inner circle -- pushing the envelope on prisoner treatment, for instance, eight retired generals and admirals have written to Bush asking for an independent, 9/11-type commission to investigate detainee abuse.

Two of those senior officers, including the Navy's former judge advocate general, have joined a lawsuit seeking to hold Rumsfeld directly accountable for policies that gave rise to torture and abuse of U.S.-held prisoners.

Above all, the other eight (and counting) retired generals who have called for Rumsfeld's resignation are wrestling to win the narrative of the Iraq war.

Privately, most generals will tell you that a new Defense secretary is unlikely to change the dynamics of an Iraqi campaign now mostly defined by missed opportunities and foreclosed options.

Notably, two of the eight served as division commanders in Iraq and saw firsthand how decisions made by their civilian bosses limited their military choices.

Whatever the final outcome of the conflict, they and a large number of senior officers on active duty believe that the Office of the Secretary of Defense -- Rumsfeld and his top civilian advisers -- is responsible for the most poorly analyzed and mismanaged U.S. military intervention since Vietnam.

For these commanders, who have returned home with 2,400 fewer troops than they led into Iraq, that calls for some accountability.

"My primary issue with Secretary Rumsfeld's leadership is accountability, because I grew up in a culture where the captain of the ship or the commander of the unit is held responsible, and Rumsfeld has committed acts of gross negligence and incompetence," retired Marine Corps Gen. Anthony Zinni told National Journal.

As head of U.S. Central Command, which oversees all American troops in the Middle East, Zinni and his staff planned and war-gamed an invasion of Iraq for years, plans that active-duty officers assured him were constantly updated right up to the moment that Rumsfeld discarded them.

"We knew that you would need a lot of troops to establish law and order over a traumatized population, and to combat all kinds of troublemaking elements coming from outside Iraq," Zinni said.

"We knew that you had to secure the infrastructure and that reconstruction would be a huge and expensive task."

"We knew that Iraqi exiles like Ahmad Chalabi had zero credibility in the region."

"All of that was foreseeable, and yet our warnings were brushed aside and we were personally attacked," the general continued.

"Rumsfeld said our planning was 'old and stale.'"

"That this was going to be a 'cakewalk,' with 'shock and awe' and flowers in the streets, and Iraqi oil paying for reconstruction."

"Those were wild-eyed and patently ridiculous ideas."

High-Stakes Showdown

Regardless of the emotional content of the generals' arguments, the stakes of the controversy could hardly be greater.

On a strategic level, the issues raised go to the fundamental judgment and competence of those entrusted with the nation's most lethal levers of power at a time of great uncertainty.

The dangers include a potential confrontation with Iran over its supposed pursuit of nuclear weapons, while North Korea is waiting in the wings.

And the war on terrorism continues.

The U.S. military is also poised to attempt the delicate process of extricating itself from Iraq within the next two years without setting the scene for that country, and the region, to descend into sectarian war.

Meanwhile, another military manpower crunch is coming late this year and early next as planners search for soldiers and marines to deploy to Iraq and Afghanistan for their third -- and in some cases fourth -- combat tours, an effort necessitated by Rumsfeld's stubborn refusal to increase the size of U.S. infantry forces from pre-9/11 levels permanently, despite wars on multiple fronts and urgings from some in Congress.

In breaking with two centuries of military tradition, the retired generals asking for the head of Donald Rumsfeld have essentially gone around their former civilian bosses to put the question directly to the American people: Do you want to confront the crises ahead led by the person who brought you Iraq?

"My own decision to speak out goes back to watching firsthand the arrogant and contemptuous attitude of Rumsfeld as he ignored the advice of military experts during preparations for war, and then living with the impact of those strategic blunders as a division commander in Iraq," retired Army Maj. Gen. John Batiste said in an interview.

After serving in the Pentagon as chief military aide to then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz -- where he was privy to many high-level meetings -- and then commanding the 1st Infantry Division in Iraq, Batiste declined promotion to lieutenant general and command of an Army corps.

"That was a gut-wrenching decision for me, but at some point I realized that in order to try and change course and have this debate, I had to retire," he said.

"Secretary Rumsfeld and his team turned what should have been a deliberate victory in Iraq into a prolonged challenge."

"My concern now is that we still have a long way to go in the Iraq war, and other monumental decisions are coming just around the corner."

"Don't the American people deserve senior leaders whose instincts and judgments they can trust?"

Not surprisingly, Bush has vigorously defended his Defense secretary, having already declined the resignations that Rumsfeld tendered in 2004 over the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.

The era when President Clinton's Defense secretary, Les Aspin, resigned over a single bad day in Somalia and a controversy over gays in the military now seems almost quaint.

One irony of the current controversy, however, is that in speaking out the generals may have actually helped secure Rumsfeld's job.

No wartime president can bow to such public pressure from senior military voices without appearing weak, and firing Rumsfeld would also amount to an admission by Bush that the defining issue of his presidency was fraught with strategic mistakes.

Yet the seriousness of the controversy warrants at least an examination of the generals' writ.

It's not just that the military leaders have called for Rumsfeld's resignation, it's that they cite specific decisions that they say he got terribly, terribly wrong.

The list of particulars was perhaps best summarized by retired Lt. Gen. Greg Newbold, the top operations officer on the Joint Staff in the run-up to the Iraq war.

Before he stepped down, Newbold was a strong candidate for future commandant of the Marine Corps.

"What we are living with now is the consequences of successive policy failures," Newbold wrote in Time magazine.

"Some of the missteps include: the distortion of intelligence in the buildup to the war, McNamara-like micromanagement that kept our forces from having enough resources to do the job, the failure to retain and reconstitute the Iraqi military in time to help quell civil disorder, initial denial that insurgency was at the heart of the opposition to occupation, alienation of allies who could have helped in a more robust way to rebuild Iraq, and the continuing failure of other agencies of U.S. government to commit themselves to the same degree as the Defense Department."

Here are the details behind the generals' specific complaints.

The Intelligence

The failure to find Saddam Hussein's stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, President Bush's casus belli for the invasion, still tops many after-action assessments.

As was detailed in the bipartisan Robb-Silberman report on intelligence regarding weapons of mass destruction, an intelligence failure of that magnitude has many fathers.

The question posed by the generals is whether Rumsfeld and his top aides were prominent among them.

In fact, despite the general assumption within the vast U.S. intelligence network that Saddam almost certainly retained some residual or reconstituted chemical and biological (but not nuclear) weapons capabilities, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were not satisfied with the often qualified and inconclusive intelligence on Iraq's WMD programs that filtered up through the intelligence bureaucracy.

Nor was Rumsfeld's confidant, Vice President Cheney.

So Wolfowitz had the Pentagon's No. 3 civilian, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, establish a new intelligence shop on Iraq called the Office of Special Plans.

OSP operated outside normal intelligence channels and was known to have very close ties to Cheney's office and to Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi and his network of Iraqi defectors, who had a vested interest in overthrowing Saddam.

The vice president's chief of staff and top national security adviser, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, was a former protege of Wolfowitz's, having worked with him in the Pentagon in the early 1990s on issues involving weapons of mass destruction.

Many experts believe that OSP circumvented the normal vetting and filtering process by which intelligence made its way up the pyramid of collection and analysis, and instead relayed essentially raw intelligence gathered from Chalabi's defectors directly to the vice president's office, where it found its way into Cheney's speeches.

In August 2002, for instance, Cheney proclaimed, "There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction" and is pursuing "an aggressive nuclear weapons program" that Cheney surmised would soon produce a weapon.

Nor was there any doubt, Cheney said, that "he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us."

In his address to the United Nations in October 2002, Bush thus posited the case for pre-emptive war against Iraq:

"We cannot wait for the final proof -- the smoking gun -- that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud."

Notably, at the time of Cheney's speech the Pentagon, and not the CIA, was circulating a detailed intelligence briefing on Baghdad's nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons programs to key allies and members of Congress, and was reportedly working on a report that would show links between Al Qaeda and Iraq.

The Pentagon official spearheading that briefing was J.D. Crouch, Rumsfeld's assistant secretary of Defense for international security policy.

The Robb-Silberman report concluded that two Chalabi-supplied Iraqi defectors were "fabricators."

The use of another serial liar, a source code-named "Curveball," who was behind reports of Iraqi mobile biological weapons labs, was, the report noted, "at bottom, a story of Defense Department collectors who abdicated their responsibility to vet a critical source ...."

The 9/11 commission report, meanwhile, found no credible operational links between Al Qaeda and Saddam's regime.

Since the reports' release, both Bill Luti, who ran the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, and Crouch have gone on to work for the National Security Council, in the White House.

"As someone doing consulting work for the CIA right up until the war started, I saw the intelligence on Iraq's WMD, and I can tell you that the administration's talk of an imminent danger of 'mushroom clouds' wasn't just a stretch," Zinni said.

"Quite frankly, it was outright BULL****."

"I asked the CIA analysts where that was coming from, and they just stared at their shoes."

McNamara-Like Micromanagement

Did Rumsfeld micromanage the Iraq operation to the degree that Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and President Johnson did with Vietnam? ("I won't let those Air Force generals bomb even the smallest outhouse without checking with me!" Johnson used to brag.)

Bush asked about Rumsfeld's management approach when talking to the Pentagon's top civilian in Iraq, Paul Bremer, who headed the Coalition Provisional Authority in 2003-2004.

"I like Don, Mr. President."

"I've known him for 30 years, admire him, and consider him highly intelligent."

"But he does micromanage," Bremer recalls in his book My Year in Iraq.

"Don terrifies his subordinates, so that I can rarely get any decisions out of anyone but him."

From a military standpoint, Exhibit A in the micromanagement charge is Rumsfeld's insistence in the critical period leading up to the Iraq invasion that the Joint Staff and the Central Command jettison the Time Phased Force and Deployment List.

What the military calls the "Tip Fid" is the matrix by which theater commanders identify the forces needed for a specific campaign and the services prioritize the deployment of those forces and requisite support units.

The methodical, timed, and phased nature of such a deployment scheme assaulted Rumsfeld's notions of "transformational war," and he derided the Tip Fid as part of the military's "Industrial Age" thinking.

Rumsfeld and his aides favored a "just in time" buildup to war fashioned more on the FedEx model -- hold everything back until you absolutely need it.

War is not package delivery, however, and the Pentagon civilians' insistence on scuttling the Tip Fid infuriated commanders in the Middle East, who were ordered to move into Iraq even as units needed to guard their exposed supply lines were still pouring off ships in Kuwait.

Often those forces arrived in the wrong order of priority and with inadequate supplies and transport.

"Rumsfeld insists that the Tip Fid process is too ponderous and slow, and it may well be, but it's the only process we have for managing the flow of forces into theater and matching them with needed lift and support," a senior general involved in planning the invasion told National Journal at the time.

"Since we've been ordered to abandon the Tip Fid, it would be really nice if those of us responsible for executing this campaign knew and understood what the hell is supposed to replace it."

"And we don't!"

Too Few Troops

When then-Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki told Congress before the Iraq war that it would take on the order of "several hundred thousand" troops to stabilize the country, the general was actually being conservative.

Central Command's war plan for Iraq originally called for a minimum of 380,000 troops to topple the regime and secure the country.

Studying force-to-population ratios in seven previous occupations, ranging from Germany and Japan in the 1940s all the way to Somalia and the Balkans in the 1990s, the Rand think tank prepared a report shortly before the Iraq war that was brought to Rumsfeld's attention.

Rand put the number of troops needed to stabilize Iraq at 500,000.

Yet Wolfowitz derided Shinseki's "notion of hundreds of thousands of American troops" as "way off the mark," and OSD made Shinseki a lame duck by naming his replacement more than a year before his scheduled retirement.

After constant pressure from Rumsfeld prompted Central Command's Gen. Tommy Franks to whittle the invasion force down to roughly 140,000 U.S. troops, it became clear that in their overriding focus on transformation and bold new ideas, Pentagon civilians had ignored the lessons of even recent history.

Rumsfeld has never acknowledged that those forces proved manifestly inadequate to the task of taming an ethnically fractious country of 27 million inhabitants.

Ultimately, there were too few troops to stop the looting and the growing sense of anarchy and lawlessness that took hold in the weeks and months after Saddam's regime fell, or to guard abandoned Iraqi army ammo dumps from raids by the nascent insurgency.

As a result, the U.S. military saw its critical honeymoon of liberation cut short in Iraq, and some senior commanders have never forgotten it.

The generals are, however, at least partly responsible for the lack of sufficient troops in Iraq.

Knowing after the Shinseki affair that OSD would deem a request for more troops most unwelcome, and understanding that if a larger force were committed to Iraq it would hasten the day when deployments would break the back of their Army and National Guard combat and support units, the generals kept mum or played word games in public.

In early September 2003, for instance, the senior commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, insisted that he had enough troops for the mission "currently assigned."

At the time that mission did not include fighting an all-out insurgency, confronting renegade militias, training a new Iraqi army, securing the porous border against terrorist infiltration, or holding ground cleared of insurgents by U.S. military sweeps.

"If a militia or internal conflict of some nature were to erupt ... that would be a challenge out there that I do not have sufficient force for," Sanchez said then.

When those challenges and more arose in the fateful spring of 2004, however, the generals still bit their tongues in public about the need for more troops.

They did so even after Rumsfeld pulled what many of them saw as a bait and switch.

He originally assured uniformed leaders that the Army's 1st Cavalry Division was in the pipeline to reinforce the U.S. invasion force, and then he abruptly canceled the deployment.

So, did Rumsfeld fail to supply his generals with adequate forces in Iraq?

The Bush administration's top man there certainly thought so.

As early as July 2003, well before the insurgency had fully coalesced, Bremer spoke with then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, as he recalls in his book.

"In my view, the coalition's got about half the number of soldiers we need here," Bremer told her.

"And we run the risk of having this thing go south on us."

Disbanding Iraq's Army

When Bremer signed Coalition Provisional Authority Order No. 2 on May 23, 2003, formally dissolving all Iraqi military formations, he had some compelling reasons.

Iraqi security forces were an instrument of Saddam's brutal repression; they were viewed as a threat by both the Kurds and the Shiite Iraqi exiles like Chalabi who were so favored by OSD; and, anyway, those uniformed forces had largely melted away after the regime collapsed.

After discussing the idea with his civilian staff, Bremer vetted his plan to abolish all Iraqi intelligence, security, and military forces with Rumsfeld and Feith.

Both approved the idea.

For many military commanders in Iraq, however, the idea was pure folly.

As opposed to Saddam's brutal Republican Guard, the regular Iraqi army was a relatively respected institution into which many Iraqis had been conscripted and had served honorably, especially during the Iraq-Iran war.

Because the Iraqi army also had its own command-and-control systems and mobility, U.S. military experts believed that if the force were reconstituted quickly, it could prove critical in establishing security and helping with reconstruction.

Did military experts share their concerns with Bremer?

One who did was retired Army Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, the head of the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, the initial American postwar overseer in Baghdad.

Bremer later replaced Garner.

The retired general advised Bremer that abolishing the Iraqi army would be a huge mistake.

Once again, however, military advice went unheeded.

With Iraq's long, hot summer of occupation just beginning in 2003, the second edict of Bremer's Pentagon-led occupational authority threw hundreds of thousands of military-age Iraqi men out of work, with every last one of them nursing a grudge and trained to bear arms.

The CPA's first edict?

Feith's "De-Baathification of Iraqi Society" order.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the process was eventually entrusted to Chalabi, who predictably took the purge to draconian levels and further inflamed the Sunni-based insurgency.

That may be why Franks, the top U.S. commander of the Iraq war, wrote in his autobiography that Feith was "getting a reputation around here as the dumbest [expletive] guy on the planet."

"Why de-Baathification was handed to Chalabi was one of the great mysteries to all of us, because it was absolutely the wrong thing to do," said a senior active-duty general who was in Iraq at the time.

"Chalabi had a vested interest in the total elimination of the Baathist structure in Iraq as a way of clearing the political field."

"To say that his de-Baathification efforts undercut our attempts to bring the Sunnis into the political process would be an understatement."

No New Iraqi Army

If U.S. military commanders in Iraq were outraged at the formal dissolution of the Iraqi army, they were absolutely confounded by the CPA's noted lack of urgency in training a force to take its place.

Because Saddam had used the Republican Guard to keep his boot on the necks of the Iraqi people, Bremer believed that any new army should have only external security responsibilities -- guarding borders and the like.

With the old Iraqi army formally dissolved, no new one on the horizon, and growing signs of an organized insurgency by fall 2003, however, U.S. commanders viewed that plan as sentencing U.S. troops to indefinite service in Iraq.

U.S. commanders in Iraq understood better than most that raising an army from scratch was a mammoth enterprise likely to take years.

In the end, they won approval to create a small number of "Iraqi National Guard" battalions, but the training and equipping of even these units had to come out of the hides of coalition forces in Iraq, already stretched thin.

A year after the invasion, there were not enough personal weapons for even the new Iraqi National Guard battalions.

Meanwhile, Bremer assigned responsibility for overseeing creation of the New Iraqi Army to a civilian on his staff, Walter Slocombe, who announced the rather modest first-year objective of forming a single army division of roughly 12,000 troops.

Even that effort, according to U.S. military commanders, was plagued by chronic underfunding and a lack of adequate manpower, resources, and high-level attention.

"History will have to sort out the pros and cons of disbanding the Iraqi army, but even proponents of the idea understood that you would have to immediately devote a lot of resources and manpower to replacing it, and the fact that never happened is a damning indictment of Secretary Rumsfeld's leadership," retired Army Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, who led the initial effort to create a New Iraqi Army, told National Journal.

"Instead, I fell in on a staff of five guys borrowed from Central Command's staff, and we were supposed to build an army for a country of 27 million people."

"And I never did get the people and money that were promised to execute the mission, and that same lack of urgency persists even today."

When some of the Iraqi National Guard battalions and units of the New Iraqi Army were thrown into battle in the simultaneous Sunni and Shiite uprisings in spring 2004 -- what Bremer called "the most critical crisis of the occupation" -- most of the poorly trained and ill-equipped Iraqis went AWOL or refused to fight.

That left the mission of quelling the uprisings to U.S. forces in Iraq.

At the time, those forces included one of Paul Eaton's two sons in uniform.

"Some people have criticized my comments as counterproductive to the war effort, but with two children in uniform this is very personal for me," said Eaton, who called for Rumsfeld's resignation in a recent op-ed in The New York Times.

"I looked at the terrible path Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld has led us down, and I thought two and a half more years of that leadership was too long for my nation, for my Army, and for my family."

Alienating Allies

From the beginning, the Rumsfeld team viewed NATO and other venerable U.S. alliances in a suspect light.

A multilateral alliance might be useful for nation-building operations in the Balkans and for keeping the peace in Europe, but such mundane missions held no allure for the Rumsfeld reformers.

Certainly in terms of combat, OSD viewed such alliances as too much of a constraint on its vision of transformational warfare.

This opinion comported with some air-power advocates in uniform who derided the "war by committee" character of NATO's 1999 campaign in Kosovo.

So when NATO proudly invoked its collective defense clause for the first time in history to come to America's aid after the 9/11 attacks, allied nations were stunned by the Pentagon's reply of "thanks, but no thanks."

As Rumsfeld memorably told NATO members when the U.S. set out unilaterally to topple the Taliban and take the fight to Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, "The mission will define the coalition."

Even when that mission entailed invading and occupying a country of 27 million people, however, OSD seemed remarkably cavalier about the need for a broad coalition.

Rumsfeld infuriated European allies when he responded to German and French reluctance to invade Iraq by rhetorically dividing the Continent into "old Europe" and "new Europe."

Wolfowitz's suggestion that the Turkish military should help overcome civilian resistance there to the war upset many civilians in the Ankara government, which eventually denied a U.S. request to launch a northern front in Iraq from Turkish territory.

After Saddam's regime fell, the Pentagon further alienated allies by suggesting that French and German contractors would be barred from the anticipated spoils of Iraqi reconstruction.

Did the Pentagon's incursions into prewar diplomacy help alienate venerable U.S. allies?

One person who thought so was the official frequently tasked with trying to mend those frayed relations.

"Terms like 'old Europe' didn't exactly have a confidence-building effect, and clearly helped turn public opinion in Europe against us," former Secretary of State Colin Powell told the German magazine Stern in an interview last year.

Although the Bush administration eventually cobbled together a coalition of some 30 nations in Iraq, the generals have always understood that their support from allies is a mile wide and an inch deep.

The lack of allied help denied them the much-desired northern front during the invasion, cost them a multinational division planned for fall 2003, and left them without the legitimacy that major Arab allies might have bestowed on a genuine coalition operation.

Several key allies have announced plans to pull their forces out of Iraq this year.

Perhaps most important, polls taken before the war clearly showed that the American public would have been much more supportive of the war if the U.S. were perceived as being part of a broad coalition.

None of that would have mattered if OSD's optimistic assumptions going into Iraq -- that U.S. forces would be viewed overwhelmingly and lastingly as liberators, that the basic structures of government would remain intact, that Iraqi oil would pay for the country's reconstruction, that democratic reforms could surmount long-standing ethnic divisions -- had proven true.

But because those assumptions proved wrong, and with the U.S. military entering its fourth year in Iraq, that lack of broad and deep support at home and abroad matters a lot.

"I have nothing personal against Rumsfeld; I've never even met him," said Zinni, who has a son in uniform serving in Afghanistan.

"But how can we change course, move forward, and win allies back to our cause when the same person who put us on this disastrous path and burned those allies in the past is still at the helm, saying nothing has changed and no mistakes have been made?"

"I just don't think you can be open to new ideas and courses of action if you have a vested interest in constantly defending old decisions."

Not Fading Away

Rumsfeld is reportedly worried that the revolt of the generals has weakened the principle of civilian control of the military, and in that concern he has much company.

Whatever blame Rumsfeld shares for a civil-military relationship in tatters, the active-duty and retired flag officers who have rushed to his defense recognize that their comrades have violated an important tradition.

One reason that the U.S. military consistently polls as the most respected institution in America is that it's viewed as being above politics.

In particular, the Joint Chiefs, hand-picked by Rumsfeld, understand the implied criticism in the generals' writ against their boss: that the chiefs have too often acted as "yes men," insulating Rumsfeld in an echo chamber.

"I haven't noticed any shrinking lilies among the Joint Chiefs, and we all understand our responsibility to state our advice, and for the chairman [of the Joint Chiefs] to take that advice to the secretary of Defense and the president," Gen. Peter Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, said recently to defense reporters.

"That doesn't mean our bosses always agree with our advice," he said.

"At the end of the day, you have to ask yourself: Is a decision legal, ethical, and can I live with the consequences?"

"If you can't, then you do have a responsibility to do something about it; but in my opinion, you should do it while still in uniform."

"If you've gone through the debate and lived with the decision, I think it's inappropriate to go around cleansing your conscience in public after the fact."

"I certainly don't want civil authorities distrusting military advice because they're worried about what someone is going to say publicly down the road."

By tradition, old soldiers who can no longer in good conscience obey their civilian masters are supposed to state their case in private, offer their resignation, and then quietly fade away.

Air Force Chief of Staff Ron Fogleman did that in 1997 over disagreement with the Clinton administration's military drawdown and OSD's disciplining of one of his generals over the Khobar Towers terrorist attack in Saudi Arabia.

Despite being treated shabbily, Shinseki in retirement has largely declined to publicly criticize Rumsfeld.

Ever the old soldier, Colin Powell, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, has refused to directly criticize Rumsfeld and Cheney for their largely successful efforts to marginalize him in the Iraq debate.

Especially for the post-Vietnam generations of officers, however, this burden of silence weighs uneasily.

Nearly all of them have read Dereliction of Duty, a seminal book by Army Col. H.R. McMaster, published in 1997, that was once on the chairman of the Joint Chiefs' required reading list.

In it, McMaster excoriates the Vietnam-era Joint Chiefs and other senior military leaders for not speaking out more forcefully against misguided policies that many in uniform believed cost them a war and the lives of tens of thousands of American soldiers.

President Johnson's "plan of deception depended on the tacit approval or silence of the Joint Chiefs of Staff," McMaster wrote.

"LBJ had misrepresented the mission of U.S. ground forces in Vietnam, distorted the views of the chiefs to lend credibility to his decision against mobilization, grossly understated the numbers of troops General [William] Westmoreland had requested, and lied to the Congress about the monetary cost of actions already approved and of those awaiting final decision ...."

"The 'five silent men' on the Joint Chiefs made possible the way the United States went to war in Vietnam."

Retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey was one of the most decorated combat veterans of Vietnam and a division commander in the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

"You know, when people ask me whether Secretary Rumsfeld should resign, I tell them it would be inappropriate for me to comment on such a personal matter, but I will provide my objective view on some of his policies that have gotten this country and our military into serious trouble," he told National Journal.

"I still think our national leadership has the unquestioned loyalty of our senior military leaders in uniform."

"These retired generals who are speaking out, however, I view as combat veterans with the full rights of U.S. citizens to talk about the security challenges they see facing the country."

For the Vietnam generation of officers and those who mentored at their shoulder, the quintessential model of a leader struggling with the dilemma of divided loyalties is not Gen. George Catlett Marshall, but rather Gen. Edward (Shy) Meyer.

Given that the Senate Armed Services Committee recently announced possible hearings on the matter of Rumsfeld v. the Generals, his case is worth contemplating.

In the spring of 1980, the Soviet Union had just invaded Afghanistan, U.S. diplomats were still being held hostage in Iran, and the U.S. military was reeling from a post-Vietnam decade of poor morale and defense cutbacks.

As Army chief of staff, Meyer knew that speaking out publicly on that sorry state of affairs would be viewed as an act of disloyalty by his civilian bosses in the Pentagon and by President Carter, who was entering a difficult re-election campaign.

A veteran of Vietnam, Meyer was also mindful that the United States military was nearly unique in taking its oath of allegiance not to an individual leader, political party, or monarch, but rather to the principles and ideals in the Constitution.

The Constitution prescribed not only civilian control of the military but also a separation of powers, establishing the president as commander-in-chief but giving Congress the responsibility for the raising of armies.

So when members of Congress asked the general in public testimony about the state of their army, Meyer told them that the United States had a "hollow Army."

Pointedly, Meyer did not directly criticize the commander-in-chief or call for the resignation of the secretary of Defense.

He privately offered his own resignation.

It was not accepted.

When the secretary of the Army, his civilian boss, demanded that Meyer rescind his comments about a "hollow Army," however, he flatly refused.

Gen. Shy Meyer just told the truth and trusted in the Constitution.

The American people did the rest.

[Livyjr]

May 5, 2006

"Stakes high in battle between Rumsfeld, generals"

By James Kitfield, National Journal

One irony of the current controversy, however, is that in speaking out the generals may have actually helped secure Rumsfeld's job.

No wartime president can bow to such public pressure from senior military voices without appearing weak, and firing Rumsfeld would also amount to an admission by Bush that the defining issue of his presidency was fraught with strategic mistakes.

The Impeachment of Andrew Johnson

Editorial

Harper's Weekly, August 24, 1867

After Congress adjourned, President Johnson suspended Secretary of War Edwin Stanton and directed General Grant to take charge of the War Department ad interim.

This riled Congress and stirred up impeachment talk once again, but he still had not committed an overt violation of the Tenure of Office Act.

In January 1868, the Senate passed a resolution reinstating Stanton as Secretary of War.

Grant surrendered his ad interim office to Stanton, and Johnson was left with another congressional move to stalemate him.

THE SECRETARY OF WAR

If the request of the President to Mr. Stanton that he would resign the Secretaryship of War means that he is about undertaking to change all the military personnel under the Reconstruction bill, substituting men like Steedman and Rousseau for Sheridan and Schofield and Sickles, the deluge will not be after Mr. Johnson, but upon him.

We do not believe that the country will submit to such a plain paralysis of its purpose.

The services of Mr. Stanton to this country are incalculable.

It is not easy to conceive of a more efficient Secretary of War at a time when that office was of the very highest importance.

The faults which were popularly ascribed to the Secretary, his abruptness, his brusqueness, were often merely a necessary decision and rapidity of action.

A man in such an office at such a time may be pardoned if he does not stop to make bows, and if he speaks too crisply for common courtesy.

Coming into the War Department at a time when the headquarters of General George B. M’Clellan were fast becoming the head bureau of the Government, and when even the President went to the General, instead of requiring the General to come to him, the Secretary of War taught General M’Clellan that the President was to be respected as his Commander-in-Chief.

Mr. Stanton was never deceived in the character or the capacity of General M’Clellan.

The Secretary’s comprehensive grasp of the vast duties of his office, his unquailing energy, his exhaustless industry, his silent fidelity, were no less remarkable than his heroic faith in the people and his inflexible determination that the war should be fought to an unconditional overthrow of the rebellion.

When that result was almost accomplished he instantly repudiated the immense error of General Sherman; and when President Lincoln was murdered, and there was a moment of inexpressible confusion, it was the steady hand of the Secretary of War which seized the government and passed it to Mr. Lincoln’s lawful successor.

During the melancholy and humiliating administration of Mr. Johnson, which has sought in every way to defeat the national victory and to demoralize the national mind, Mr. Stanton has tenaciously clung to the real issue, and he alone in the Cabinet has represented the national conviction and the national purpose.

He, therefore, has been the especial object of the President’s hostility, and after a thousand rumors of his designed or attempted removal the President has at last formally summoned him to resign.

Mr. Stanton’s retirement would be a national misfortune.

Upon the part of the President it would be another impotent blow at the purpose of the country, which he can not change.

But if, as we said, he should go further, and by appointing his own creatures show an evident intention to defeat the objects sought by the Reconstruction bill, he would be hoist with his own petard.

http://www.impeach-andrewjohnson.com/08Ove...ngress/v-11.htm

[Livyjr]

Because generally ...

Women and children are pretty helpless ....

And so ...

In the world of REAL MACHO MEN ....

Infliction of TERROR on civilian populations ....

Is a legitimate "goal" of war ...

Which by and large, the American public endorses .....

So long as those being terrorized are somewhere else ....

And so ....

And speaking of the reasons the REAL MACHO MEN ...

Like to go "off to war" ....

In foreign countries ...

Where the people have no rights ...

Because unlike us ...

They are not Americans ...

We have ....

"Peacekeepers, teachers prey on Liberia girls: report"

By Alphonso Toweh

Mon May 8, 1:10 PM ET

MONROVIA (Reuters) - UN peacekeepers, aid workers and teachers are having sex with Liberian girls as young as 8 in return for money, food or favors, threatening efforts to rebuild a nation wrecked by war, a report said on Monday.

Save the Children UK said an alarming number of girls were being sexually exploited by men in authority in refugee camps and in the wider community, sometimes for as little as a bottle of beer, a ride in an aid vehicle or watching a film.

"This cannot continue," Save the Children UK Chief Executive Jasmine Whitbread said.

"Men who use positions of power to take advantage of vulnerable children must be reported and fired."

"More must be done to support children and their families to make a living without turning to this kind of desperation."

The 20-page document said local people reported sexual exploitation by peacekeepers in every location where a contingent of the UNMIL peacekeeping force was stationed, highlighting the continuing problem of sex abuse by UN forces.

Allegations of sexual misconduct have dogged UN operations in Liberia, Ivory Coast, Haiti and the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the world body has accused members of its biggest peacekeeping force of rape, pedophilia and giving children food or money in return for sex.

The UN force in Liberia said in a statement eight cases of sexual exploitation and abuse involving UN personnel had been reported since the start of 2006.

One of those had been substantiated and the member of staff suspended.

"We are appalled with any activity, the sexual exploitation or abuse by aid workers, be they international or Liberian."

"It's unacceptable behavior," Jordan Ryan, UN humanitarian coordinator in Liberia, told BBC radio from Monrovia.

Save the Children urged Liberia's new government, UN agencies and donors to set up a government-led ombudsman office to ensure sex abuse allegations are investigated.

Countries which contribute troops to the UN force should also ensure soldiers who sexually exploited children are charged and those found guilty removed from the force, it said.

The report highlighted the relationship between food aid, poverty and sex, in particular accusations that some men involved in distributing food rations demanded sex in return.

"The World Food Programme (WFP) together with the other UN agencies will obviously be looking into these allegations very seriously because obviously we have zero tolerance for any sexual exploitation," WFP spokeswoman Caroline Hurford told Reuters TV in Rome.

"MAN BUSINESS"

Liberian society has been shattered by a 1989-2003 civil war which caused an estimated 250,000 deaths in a country of barely 3 million people, forcing around 1.3 million people from their homes into camps around the capital Monrovia or abroad.

Elections late last year saw Harvard-trained former World Bank economist Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf voted in as president, but her government faces a massive task to rebuild an economy and society torn apart by years of bloodshed.

The report's compilers spoke to more than 300 people in camps for displaced people and communities where people had recently returned to their pre-war localities.

"All of the respondents clearly stated that they felt that the scale of the problem affected over half of the girls in their locations," it said, adding aid workers, teachers, camp and government employees, policemen and soldiers were involved.

"The girls reportedly ranged in age from 8 to 18 years, with girls of 12 years and upwards identified as being regularly involved in 'selling sex'," it said.

(Additional reporting by Alistair Thomson in Dakar, Tim Castle in London and Cristiano Corvio in Rome)

end quotes]

Yes, indeed, Snuf ....

It sure is Saigon ....

All over again ....

And so ...

WHAT DOES REALLY EVER CHANGE?

[Livyjr]

And speaking of alleged "MILITARY INTELLIGENCE" .....

In this day and age ...

Of BUSH THE SMALLER ....

Who is the son ....

Of BUSH THE BIGGER ....

We have ...

From page 300 ....

Of the book CRUSADE ....

About BIG BUSH'S WAR in Iraq ....

By Rick Atkinson .....

As follows:

"As in Viet Nam and eventually in Korea, the PERSIAN GULF WAR (BIG BUSH'S WAR) would be fought for relatively modest objectives."

"Unlike those earlier wars, the objectives in the gulf were plainly stated and rigidly maintained."

"BUSH (BIG BUSH) AND HIS MEN CONCLUDED THAT THE EXCESSIVE PRICE OF TOTAL VICTORY WOULD BE INDEFINITE RESPONSIBILITY FOR REBUILDING A HOSTILE NATION WITH NO TRADITION OF DEMOCRACY BUT WITH IMMENSELY COMPLEX INTERNAL POLITICS."

"THIS WAS - AND REMAINS IN RETROSPECT - A SENSIBLE STRATEGIC CALCULATION."

BIG BUSH'S "men", then, of course, included Richard Bruce Cheney, who now calls himself, appropriately, just plain DICK, as SECRETARY OF DEFENSE, the job that RUMMY is holding now, and failing miserably at, and this Paul Wolfowitz character, who then was Richard Bruce Cheney's MAIN MAN .....

And Colin Powell .....

And so ...

BEFORE THEY WERE FOR IT .....

The invasion of IRAQ ...

And the deposing of Saddam ....

At whose feet, Donny Rumsfeld once fawned, calling him, in alleged "tones of affection", or endearment .....

"MR. PRESIDENT" .....

What are now the FABULOUS FLYING BUSHCOS .....

WERE AGAINST IT .....

And so ...

Talk about FLIP-FLOPS .....

If you will ...

To me .....

This one takes the cake ...

And so ...

WHO THE HELL IS GEORGE W. BUSH ....

And the REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE ....

To call anyone here in OUR America ...

A "flip-flopper" ....

When history clearly demonstrates ...

That the BUSHCOS are the real American CHAMPIONS at that art ....

Here in OUR America ...

And so ....

[Livyjr]

And so ...

BEFORE THEY WERE FOR IT .....

The invasion of IRAQ ...

And the deposing of Saddam ....

At whose feet, Donny Rumsfeld once fawned, calling him, in alleged "tones of affection", or endearment .....

"MR. PRESIDENT" .....

What are now the FABULOUS FLYING BUSHCOS .....

WERE AGAINST IT .....

And so ...

Talk about FLIP-FLOPS .....

If you will ...

To me .....

This one takes the cake ...

And so ...

WHO THE HELL IS GEORGE W. BUSH ....

And the REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE ....

To call anyone here in OUR America ...

A "flip-flopper" ....

When history clearly demonstrates ...

That the BUSHCOS are the real American CHAMPIONS at that art ....

Here in OUR America ...

And so ....

Send the BUSH-LEAGUE BUSHCOS back to Podunk .....

Would seem to be the message that emerges from all of this ...

And so ....

"5 issues redraw playing field for Election 2006"

By Susan Page, USA TODAY
Tue May 9, 7:09 AM ET

All politics is local.

Except when it's not.

Republicans have counted on financial advantage, redrawn district lines and the power of parochial issues and constituent services to hold narrow majorities in Congress since they won control 12 years ago.

A handful of issues is shaping the landscape for competitive contests nationwide, driving down the standing of President Bush and Congress and creating formidable hurdles for the GOP.

Democrats are banking that unhappiness over the Iraq war - plus record gas prices, divisions over immigration, snags in Medicare's new prescription-drug benefit and corruption - will make this election a referendum on the president and the direction of the country.

In a sign of Republican travails, Bush's approval rating fell to a record-low 31% in a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll taken Friday through Sunday.

"At this moment, it doesn't look like the Republican Party can dig out of this hole," veteran Republican pollster Lance Tarrance says.

"You have a mosaic of things coming together, and that creates challenges," says former House speaker Newt Gingrich, architect of the GOP takeover in 1994.

He questions, though, whether Democrats led by such liberals as national Chairman Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont, and House leader Nancy Pelosi of California can seal the deal with voters.

"It's not guaranteed that the Democrats will be able to sell a contract with Vermont and San Francisco," he says, a reference to the "Contract With America" that Republicans employed in 1994.

During the past three decades, three elections have taken place in a similar environment: One party controlling the White House and Congress, and both branches of government getting low approval ratings.

In those elections, the party in power lost 15 House seats in 1978, 34 seats in 1980 and 54 seats in 1994.

Democrats need to pick up 15 seats in November to regain control of the House, six seats for the Senate.

Pelosi is confident enough that she's begun discussing the Democrats' agenda for their first week in power, from raising the minimum wage to reinstating deficit controls.

Winning either chamber would enable the opposition party to more aggressively challenge Bush's proposals, scrutinize his appointments and launch investigations.

"I think of it as a 'mood' election or a 'wave' election," says analyst Amy Walter of the non-partisan Cook Political Report.

That's "wave" as in "tidal wave."

They happen about once a decade and are almost always bad news for the people in power.

[Livyjr]

And now ...

For something completely different ...

Just because .....

I need to get as far away from politics ...

As I can ...

For at least a moment ....

Just to get some "clean air" to breathe ....

And so ....

We have ....

"Climate Change, Not Humans, Killed Large Beasts"

Bjorn Carey, LiveScience Staff Writer, LiveScience.com

Wed May 10, 2:00 PM ET

Failure to adapt to a drastically changing climate, and not overkill by humans or disease, most likely lead to the extinction of mammoths, wild horses, and other large mammals after the last Ice Age, a new study suggests.

But this fresh take on an old argument might not be the final word.

Dale Guthrie of the University of Alaska has added 600 radiocarbon-dated fossils to the established collection, and his examination reveals that mammoths and wild horses were in serious decline before humans arrived on the scene in Alaska and the Yukon Territory.

Like the end of the dinosaurs, the topic of large mammal extinctions is a hot one.

While the new results might be true of the far North, some researchers still believe over-hunting contributed to the demise of the beasts across the rest of the continent.

The study, which also analyzed the fossil record of bison, elk, moose, and humans in the far North between 18,000 and 9,000 years ago, is published in the May 11th issue of the journal Nature.

Pushed to the brink

It's generally accepted that humans first entered North America from Siberia around 12,000 years ago.

Since mammoths and wild horses became extinct roughly 11,500 and 12,500 years ago, some scientists have figured that hungry humans might have hunted them into oblivion.

"The old idea, that I once had, was that these animals were killed off and then the modern large mammals expanded and took their place," Guthrie said.

According to Guthrie's new data, however, bison and elk populations were doing well during this period, and those species had expanded dramatically long before other species went extinct.

So why weren't bison and elk over-hunted to extinction as well?

Interestingly, the fossil record shows the two beasts were hunted more vigorously, yet they endured.

"I imagine humans were hunting anything they could get," Guthrie said.

"Horse meat is probably just as tasty as bison."

"But their campsites don’t show many mammoth and horse remains—they're full of bison and elk."

Guthrie's interpretation of the fossil record is that something else pushed mammoths and horses to the brink, and if humans did play a role in the extinctions, it was limited to just killing stragglers.

The fossil record also casts doubt on the possibility of a mega-disease that wiped out animals across the board, Guthrie said.

A deadly disease would create a distinct end for each species, which isn't reflected in the fossils.

Also, diseases that infect and kill multiple species are extremely rare, and unlikely in this case since bison, elk, and moose weren't affected.

So what happened up North?

The period between 13,000 and 11,000 years ago was a great transitional time for the far North.

Although scientists don't know exactly what happened during this period, they can tell certain things from the geologic and fossil record.

"We know that animals' body size changed, there was a mass extinction, temperature changes, and humans came in," Guthrie said.

"A lot of animals, such as bison, didn't do real well before that time."

"Then they really prospered for a while and didn't do real well after that."

Before 13,000 years ago, the food available in the region was mostly short, dry grass of little nutritional value, Guthrie said.

Then, as the Alaska and the Yukon warmed up, and water returned to the land, the dry grass was replaced with tall lush grass and bush—the type of plants grazers like elk and bison prosper on.

"Long before horses and mammoths became extinct, bison and elk began to expand," Guthrie said.

"The only good way to account for that expansion would be the availability of a more abundant and nutritious food source."

But as the region continued to warm and received more rain, the plants kept growing.

Boreal forest—which includes inedible trees such as pine, spruce, and birch—began sprouting and limited the amount of grassy areas for grazing.

Bison and elk populations decreased with this transformation, but, Guthrie said, they adapted to the habitat change and out-competed mammoths and horses for the remaining food.

"Humans were probably hunting some of the animals that went extinct, but 1,000 years after humans came in, [bison and elk] were still doing fine," Guthrie said.

Continental overkill?

David Steadman, a researcher at the University of Florida who believes humans drove the giant sloth to extinction, agrees that encroaching boreal forest may have been the end for large mammals in the North.

But what about across the rest of the continent?

"It's a great piece of evidence—I don't doubt it; I trust his data," Steadman told LiveScience.

"What happened in Alaska and the Yukon is swell, but why did these things die out in Texas and Mexico and Arizona and Florida?"

Like many researchers in the field, Steadman attributes a combination of factors to the extinction of these beasts.

But he believes humans, and not climate, played the leading role throughout the New World.

"There are so many things going on, and to me it's illogical to think that warming up and getting rid of ice sheets at 40 degrees latitude is a bad thing for large mammals," Steadman said.

"They went through 20 glacial cycles in the last million years, and got through every one except for the last one."

"It has a certain odor to it, and that odor is of humans."

[Livyjr]

And while scientists ponder what really did happen to the mastodons ...

And mammoths .....

And such ....

America needs to ponder ....

Exactly how many more Bush presidents it can stand ...

Before it too becomes extinct .....

And so ....

"A 3rd President Bush? First 2 all for it"

By NEDRA PICKLER, Associated Press
Last updated: 6:36 a.m., Thursday, May 11, 2006

ORLANDO, Fla. -- Could there be a third President Bush?

The current chief said Wednesday that younger brother Jeb would make a great one, too, and has asked him about making a run.

The first President Bush likes the idea as well.

Jeb Bush, the Republican governor of Florida, has one asset that his presidential brother doesn't right now -- approval from most of his constituents.

While George W. Bush's approval ratings are in the low 30s, some 55 percent of Florida voters surveyed last month by Quinnipiac University said Jeb was doing a good job.

The governor has repeatedly said he won't be a candidate for president in 2008, but that doesn't stop his family from encouraging him to go for it some day.

"I would like to see Jeb run at some point in time, but I have no idea if that's his intention or not," the president said in an interview with Florida reporters, according to an account on the St. Petersburg Times Web site.

He said his brother would make "a great president" and that he had "pushed him fairly hard about what he intends to do."

"I truly don't think he knows," Bush said.

Jeb Bush, 53, will end his second term as governor in January.

His brother George ends his second presidential term in January 2009.

Neither can seek re-election because of term limits.

The governor got the buildup from his brother on the same day that he got some bad news out of Tallahassee.

Florida House Speaker Allan Bense said Wednesday that despite personal appeals from the governor, he will not challenge Rep. Katherine Harris for the party's nomination for U.S. Senate.

Jeb Bush has said he doesn't think Harris, the former secretary of state famous for her role in the 2000 Florida recount that clinched George Bush's presidential bid, can win the seat.

The Bush name could hurt as well as help in national politics right now.

But because of that familiar name and family connections throughout the country, Jeb Bush has the luxury of being able to wait and decide if he wants to run while other candidates have to get to work early.

"Right off the bat, if he decided to run, he's got the advantage over many of the others who might be contenders," said Republican political consultant Rich Galen, who has known the family since George H.W. Bush was vice president.

"He doesn't have to establish his name."

"He's got it."

And, Galen points out, Jeb Bush has dealt with a lot of high-profile issues including hurricanes, immigration and sprawling development in one of the most important political states.

His own father says no one believes him when he says he's not interested in running at some point.

Former President Bush told CNN's "Larry King Live" last year that he would like Jeb to run one day and that the son would be "awfully good" as president.

The Florida governor laughed when asked about his father's comments last June and said, "Oh, Lord."

He simply shook his head no when asked if he was running.

The brothers Bush appeared together Tuesday during the president's visit to the Tampa area.

Gov. Bush was waiting on the tarmac when Air Force One arrived and greeted the president with a politician's handshake and "Welcome to Florida."

The president brushed aside the formality and playfully adjusted his younger brother's necktie.

Jeb Bush introduced his brother at a retirement community in Sun City Center.

They had a private lunch together with political supporters, then visited a fire station and appeared together before television cameras to express concern about wildfires that were blazing across the state.

The governor was not with the president during his visit to The Puerto Rican Club of Central Florida in Orlando Wednesday -- George W. Bush's final stop on a three-day trip to the state.

But the president was sure his brother still got some attention.

"Yesterday I checked in with my brother," President Bush said as he took the stage.

"Make sure everything's going all right."

"I'm real proud of Jeb."

"He's a good, decent man and I love him dearly."

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On the Net:

http://www.whitehouse.gov