Miers and Bolten Facing Contempt Charge

By Brian Beutler, Media Consortium. Posted July 26, 2007.

If the court does not overrule executive privilege claims and hold Miers and Bolten in contempt, House Democrats will have to face some difficult choices.

The House Judiciary Committee yesterday voted 22-17 along party lines to refer to the full chamber a report that recommends holding former White House Counsel Harriet Miers and White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten in statutory contempt of Congress. Citing the Bush administration's assertion of executive privilege, Miers and Bolten have ignored House subpoenas concerning their role in the firing of nine U.S. Attorneys last December.

Laying the groundwork for Wednesday's action has been a long and complicated process for House Democratic leaders. To avoid a possible loss in the courts as well as charges of partisanship, they have spent weeks establishing a pattern of White House obstructionism, built a detailed legal argument against the assertions of executive privilege on this issue, and structured a narrow case based upon the flouting of committee subpoenas. If the contempt charge passes the House, the case will be referred to Jeff Taylor, the U.S. Attorney for Washington, D.C., who was appointed by Bush.

On Tuesday, Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) circulated a 52-page memo to all members of the House Judiciary Committee. Intended to serve as a compendium of the offenses that warrant the subpoenas, the memo details just about every facet of the scandal: It includes the apparent motives for the attorney firings, the seemingly false statements White House and Justice Department officials have made about the case, and legal arguments against the executive privilege the president has cited as justification for blocking the investigation from moving forward.

It remains unclear how far Congress can proceed in the long term. A July 25 Associated Press article indicated that the House will likely wait until after Congress' August recess to rule on the contempt citations. If they eventually pass the citations, it would be up to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) to refer the case to Taylor. The administration has insisted that Congress cannot force the U.S. Attorney's office to pursue contempt charges, and Taylor, like all U.S. Attorneys, serves at the pleasure of the president.

But Democrats argue that if they don't pursue contempt proceedings against Bolten and Miers, they'll create a perverse set of incentives for future presidents to block Congressional oversight. Republicans responded that a loss in court might actually make that situation worse. "Our failure is not here," said Rep. Chris Cannon (R-UT) at the hearing. "You have the votes here. If we fail in the courts ... that's when we make the imperial presidency."

Several Democrats responded that a worse incentive is created when the president believes that Congress will not vigorously attend to its oversight duties. "Some may argue that the stakes in this confrontation are so high we cannot afford the risk that we might lose," said Conyers, "I would say to them that if we countenance a process where our subpoenas can be readily ignored, where a witness under a duly authorized subpoena doesn't even bother to show up, where privilege can be asserted on the thinnest of bases and in the broadest possible manner, then we have already lost."

Other Republicans advanced a less technical argument against the citations. Rep. Ric Keller (R-FL) suggested that the Judiciary Committee accept an offer of an off-the-record, closed-door meeting with White House officials in lieu of escalating the Constitutional crisis.

"There has been no attempt to gather this information through alternative means," Keller said. "For example, the White House has made Harriet Miers available to talk about any communications that she had with DOJ officials, members of Congress or outside sources on an informal basis. They've turned down that interview opportunity. Similarly they're seeking the documents for Josh Bolten. Josh Bolten said, 'I will provide you with any documents regarding this situation between the White House and DOJ as well as any documents between the White House and Congress or other third parties.' They've turned down that ... as well."

Though no Democrat at the hearing specifically questioned his assertions on this point, Keller ignored the fact that the president's offer is contingent upon a host of restrictions, including a refusal to provide the committee with any internal White House correspondence and a refusal to participate at all thereafter. Conyers addressed those restrictions in the 52-page memo.

"On March 20, 2007, White House Counsel made a 'take it or leave it' proposal, under which the Committee was offered limited availability to some documents and limited access to witnesses, but without any transcripts and under severe limitations as to permissible areas for questioning," the memo read. "The White House also insisted that a condition of its proposal was that the Committee commit in advance not to subsequently pursue any additional White House-related information by any other means, regardless of what initial review of documents and informal discussions should reveal."

If the court does not overrule the executive privilege claims and hold Miers and Bolten in contempt -- or if it refuses to hear the citation in the first place -- House Democrats will face some difficult choices. One option would be to pursue citations of inherent -- as opposed to statutory -- contempt of Congress, and try Bolten and Miers before the full House of Representatives. That would require dispatching the House Sergeant-at-Arms to arrest the pair and holding them in jail, an option House aides have suggested Democrats have little appetite for. Failing that, they could begin impeachment proceedings against the president himself, or any Senate-approved appointee involved in the obstruction. Or they could do nothing at all. If that happens, it may well end the congressional inquiry into the U.S. Attorney scandal forever.

http://www.alternet.org/story/58068/?page=2

FBI Seeks To Pay Telecoms For Data: The FBI wants to pay the major telecommunications companies to retain their customers' Internet and phone call information for at least two years for the agency's use in counterterrorism investigations and is asking Congress for $5 million a year to defray the cost
http://tinyurl.com/28sc8c

Original Content at http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_ro...o_testify__.htm

July 26, 2007

Refusal to Testify - Hubris or Cover-up?

By Rowan Wolf

There are those who are trying to minimize the issue of the firing of the U.S. attorneys as political comedy, and no big deal. It is a very big deal when the Department of Justice becomes an arm of politics rather than an arm of justice. Gonzales has testified repeatedly that he "doesn't know" or "can't remember." Certainly a stonewalling technique. Bush then extended executive privilege to White House staff so they would not testify. Now the two highest ranked staffers subpoenaed have refused to even show up to testify before Congress. Is this just a flaunting of executive power, or is there a cover up?

Stacking the Department of Justice with political loyalists damages us all. That appears to be the purpose of the dismissal of U.S. prosecutors by Gonzales (who "doesn't remember" most of his tenure thus far). The fact that an administration that has huffed and puffed about politics from the court is doing everything within its power to politicize those very courts is beyond hypocritical. Of course, the side benefits of the strategic replacements are also self-serving.

While arguing that the President has every right to hire and fire U.S. Attorneys, the administration has acted as if their hand was caught in the cookie jar. After all, if they have done nothing wrong, then why not be completely open about the process? Isn't that what they tell us the citizenry about the loss of our privacy protections?

Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten, and former Bush legal counsel and Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers, were covered under an extension of executive privilege early in July. That executive privilege does not exempt them from a subpoena from the Judiciary Committee of Congress. They must show up, even if they decline to answer certain questions under the cover of executive privilege. To not show up at all signals contempt, even if the full Congress does not vote for contempt charges.

From the beginning of his tenure in 2000, George W. Bush and his administration have attempted to sculpt the office of the President under the principle of the "Unitary Executive." Essentially, this principle follows that the Executive Branch has all power without oversight or check. Clearly this is not what is laid out in the U.S. Constitution. However, it is the theory under which the Bush administration has operated even before the events of September 11, 2001. The current extension of executive privilege to an area where there is no legitimate reason for such protection is spitting in the face of Congress, the Constitution, and the people once again.

So is there something to hide here - as there is with "Scooter" Libby - or is this just a matter of "principle?" The "principle" being the complete disregard of Constitutional limits on the Executive Branch of government?

It is difficult to say whether the involvement of the White House in the politicizing of the Justice Department would look unseemly (if not illegal), or whether the refusal of the administration to openness and oversight is driving the current move. However, the "offers" made by the White House are typical. Bush has offered that the staff may be interviewed in private, off the record, and not under oath. You might remember that was the same path taken when Bush and Cheney agreed to meet with the 9/11 Commission instead of testifying publicly under oath.

Why are they so adverse to testifying under oath? Why do they keep offering these little "chats" to clear things up? Do they think that "we the people" are so stupid that we do not recognize the difference between legal testimony and a conversation behind closed doors? Do they think that we are so somnolent, that we don't realize the implications of political hacks in charge of enforcing the nation's laws? Even more to the point, do our elected representatives think that we are fooled by the political shenanigans being pulled?

This obfuscation needs to be stopped and stopped now. The Executive Branch needs to be brought back within Constitutional bounds now.

For those who are on the "conservative" side of the fence, this is not simply a partisan issue. Do you really want "liberals" operating under the powers and scope that George Bush has carved out for the Executive Branch of government? I don't. There must be a system of checks and balances or we are no longer the nation that we think we are. Instead, we are a dictatorship with a toothless Congress and Judiciary.



Authors Website: www.bestcyrano.org/avenger212/

Authors Bio: Rowan Wolf is an activist and sociologist living in Oregon. She is the founder and principle author of Uncommon Thought Journal, and a Senior Editor for Cyrano's Journal Online with her own page being CJO's Avenger.

Conyers Outfoxes Bushie in Contempt Showdown
by Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse
Wed Jul 25, 2007 at 09:19:45 PM PDT

Rep. John Conyers is methodically setting up the legal elements for Congress to pursue statutory and/or inherent contempt proceedings against executive branch officials in a manner that essentially wipes out any claim to executive privilege to shield the truth. A few weeks ago, I wrote a diary on Impeachment by Frog-Marching Congressional Oversight, which suggested that Congress had a better chance -- according to US Supreme Court precedent -- to obtain evidence and testimony from the Bush gang if it conducted a "criminal proceeding" to investigate potential criminal or unlawful conduct by executive branch officials. The beauty of the "criminal proceeding" is that Bush is not likely to prevail on executive privilege claims. Well, it looks like the US Attorney probe has now been officially transformed into a "criminal proceeding" to determine whether Bush officials have violated specific laws.
http://www.opednews.com/maxwrite/linkframe.php?linkid=39273

NUKEWARS Bush Asks Congress Fund Nuclear Arsenal Revamp

The Reliable Replacement Warhead. by Staff Writers
Washington (AFP) July 25, 2007
The White House wants Congress to fund US nuclear missile updates to dissuade possible attacks from countries such as Iran and North Korea, according to a government report released Wednesday. "Credible US nuclear capabilities and our security commitment to allies remain an indispensable part of deterrence and an important element in our effort to limit proliferation," said the report prepared by the Departments of Energy, Defense and State. "The future security environment is very uncertain, and some trends are not favorable," it said, pointing to North Korea and Iran as countries whose nuclear programs "underscore the importance of US security guarantees."

The document sent to Congress, titled National Security and Nuclear Weapons: Maintaining Deterrence in the 21st Century, recalls that in 2001, President George W. Bush ordered reduced by 2012 the number of strategic nuclear weapons from 6,000 to between 2,200 and 1,700.

The Bush administration estimates that that number of nuclear weapons, while smaller than the Cold War arsenal, is sufficient, but says that the weapons must be modernized.

"The United States needs to invest in the Reliable Replacement Warhead program.

"The sooner Congress authorizes and funds transformative replacement programs ... the sooner the United States and its allies can realize the benefits this approach holds for maintaining a credible and effective deterrent with the lowest possible level of nuclear weapons," it said.



http://www.spacewar.com/reports/Bush_Asks_...Revamp_999.html

Is Gonzales’ Perjury a Red Herring to Keep Focus off Bush’s Impeachable FISA Violations? Posted by Jon Ponder | Jul. 26, 2007, 8:12 am

During his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales seemed to be inexplicably upbeat even while he endured hours of grilling and harsh criticism by senators from both parties.

One explanation for Gonzales’ blithe nonchalance while lying to the Senate is that his silence has been bought — as Scooter Libby’s was — with the foreknowledge that Bush will pardon him before he spends a minute in jail. In the wake of his bizarre performance, both the Democratic chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee Patrick Leahy and his Republican counterpart, Arlen Spector, have warned Gonzales that he is very close to facing perjury charges.

Compounding their threats, documents were produced yesterday that appear to demonstrate that Gonzales lied under oath about events leading up to his extremely inappropriate late-night visit in March 2004, when was White House counsel, to the hospital room of his predecessor, John Ashcroft, who was recuperating from surgery.

Others in the room have testified that Gonzales, along with Bush’s then-chief of staff Andrew Card, visited Ashcroft, who was heavily sedated, to try to convince him to countermand objections to the president’s illegal wiretapping scheme.

In earlier testimony, Gonzales claimed that no one in the administration objected to the illegal scheme. In fact, according to subsequent testimony, several top officials, including FBI Director Robert Mueller, threatened to resign if the scheme continued.

On Tuesday, Gonzales repeatedly denied that the purpose of his visit to Ashcroft in his hospital bed was the illegal program, claiming instead that it was another, as yet undisclosed secret program. The newly released documents, as well as statements by people present at a meeting prior to the trip to the hospital, appear to prove that Gonzales is lying.

Alberto Gonzales is following a course remarkably similar to that of John Mitchell, the only previous attorney general to face criminal charges. Like Gonzales, as Pres. Nixon’s A.G., Mitchell okayed the wiretapping of U.S. citizens (most of whom were political enemies of the president) and used security issues as an excuse to restrict civil liberties.

In 1975, Mitchell was found guilty of perjury, obstruction of justice and conspiracy and sentenced to 30 months in prison.

The fact that Gonzales is unconcerned about facing a fate similar to Mitchell’s may itself be circumstantial evidence of a continuing conspiracy to obstruct justice at the White House.

Earlier this year, Gonzales was said to have spent two weeks rehearsing for the appearance before the Senate in which he used phrases like “I don’t recall” dozens of times. Even on Tuesday, his responses were obviously coached and practiced so as to obfuscate … something. He obviously has something to hide. What is it?


At the heart of his matter is a real criminal enterprise to which Pres. Bush has publicly, even proudly, confessed, and for which constitutional scholars say there are solid grounds for impeachment.

In 2005, the New York Times reported that there had been an ongoing scheme by the Bush administration to violate the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). After the leak to the New York Times, the president admitted he had repeatedly violated FISA by eavesdropping on U.S. citizens, which is illegal. To give the program an air of legitimacy, the White House political office spun it as the “terrorist surveillance program” (TSP).

Elizabeth Holzman, who served in the Congress during Watergate, writing in the journal Foreign Policy, said that the president’s repeated violations of FISA are actionable:

The strongest legal argument for impeachment—because it is based on the Watergate precedent—arises out of the fact that President Bush refused for years to seek court approval required under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act for a special wiretapping program in the United States. After revelations that President Nixon illegally wiretapped journalists and White House staffers, Congress enacted FISA to prevent future such abuses, making them a federal crime. Illegal wiretapping was one of the grounds for articles of impeachment against Nixon.

Perhaps the reason Gonzales is so relaxed about perjuring himself is that he is doing what he has been instructed to do: Keep the attention of Congress and the American public on himself as a dodge to to deflect interest away from Pres. Bush’s real impeachable offenses — his repeated violations of the surveillance act.

If so, there is a strong likelihood that Gonzales’ silence has been bought — as Scooter Libby’s was — with the foreknowledge that Bush will pardon him before he spends a minute in jail.

July 27, 2007
U.S. Officials Voice Frustrations With Saudis, Citing Role in Iraq
By HELENE COOPER

This article was reported by Helene Cooper, Mark Mazzetti and Jim Rutenberg, and written by Ms. Cooper.

WASHINGTON, July 26 — During a high-level meeting in Riyadh in January, Saudi officials confronted a top American envoy with documents that seemed to suggest that Iraq’s prime minister could not be trusted.

One purported to be an early alert from the prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, to the radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr warning him to lie low during the coming American troop increase, which was aimed in part at Mr. Sadr’s militia. Another document purported to offer proof that Mr. Maliki was an agent of Iran.

The American envoy, Zalmay Khalilzad, immediately protested to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, contending that the documents were forged. But, said administration officials who provided an account of the exchange, the Saudis remained skeptical, adding to the deep rift between America’s most powerful Sunni Arab ally, Saudi Arabia, and its Shiite-run neighbor, Iraq.

Now, Bush administration officials are voicing increasing anger at what they say has been Saudi Arabia’s counterproductive role in the Iraq war. They say that beyond regarding Mr. Maliki as an Iranian agent, the Saudis have offered financial support to Sunni groups in Iraq. Of an estimated 60 to 80 foreign fighters who enter Iraq each month, American military and intelligence officials say that nearly half are coming from Saudi Arabia and that the Saudis have not done enough to stem the flow.

One senior administration official says he has seen evidence that Saudi Arabia is providing financial support to opponents of Mr. Maliki. He declined to say whether that support was going to Sunni insurgents because, he said, “That would get into disagreements over who is an insurgent and who is not.”

Senior Bush administration officials said the American concerns would be raised next week when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates make a rare joint visit to Jidda, Saudi Arabia.

Officials in Washington have long resisted blaming Saudi Arabia for the chaos and sectarian strife in Iraq, choosing instead to pin blame on Iran and Syria. Even now, military officials rarely talk publicly about the role of Saudi fighters among the insurgents in Iraq.

The accounts of American concerns came from interviews with several senior administration officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they believed that openly criticizing Saudi Arabia would further alienate the Saudi royal family at a time when the United States is still trying to enlist Saudi support for Mr. Maliki and the Iraqi government, and for other American foreign policy goals in the Middle East, including an Arab-Israeli peace plan.

In agreeing to interviews in advance of the joint trip to Saudi Arabia, the officials were nevertheless clearly intent on sending a pointed signal to a top American ally. They expressed deep frustration that more private American appeals to the Saudis had failed to produce a change in course.

The American officials said they had no doubt that the documents shown to Mr. Khalilzad were forgeries, though the Saudis said they had obtained them from sources in Iraq. “Maliki wouldn’t be stupid enough to put that on a piece of paper,” one senior Bush administration official said. He said Mr. Maliki later assured American officials that the documents were forgeries.

The Bush administration’s frustration with the Saudi government has increased in recent months because it appears that Saudi Arabia has stepped up efforts to undermine the Maliki government and to pursue a different course in Iraq from what the administration has charted. Saudi Arabia has also stymied a number of other American foreign policy initiatives, including a hoped-for Saudi embrace of Israel.

Of course, the Saudi government has hardly masked its intention to prop up Sunni groups in Iraq and has for the past two years explicitly told senior Bush administration officials of the need to counterbalance the influence Iran has there. Last fall, King Abdullah warned Vice President Dick Cheney that Saudi Arabia might provide financial backing to Iraqi Sunnis in any war against Iraq’s Shiites if the United States pulled its troops out of Iraq, American and Arab diplomats said.

Several officials interviewed for this article said they believed that Saudi Arabia’s direct support to Sunni tribesmen increased this year as the Saudis lost faith in the Maliki government and felt they must bolster Sunni groups in the eventuality of a widespread civil war.

Saudi Arabia months ago made a pitch to enlist other Persian Gulf countries to take a direct role in supporting Sunni tribal groups in Iraq, said one former American ambassador with close ties to officials in the Middle East. The former ambassador, Edward W. Gnehm, who has served in Kuwait and Jordan, said that during a recent trip to the region he was told that Saudi Arabia had pressed other members of the Gulf Cooperation Council — which includes Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain and Oman — to give financial support to Sunnis in Iraq. The Saudis made this effort last December, Mr. Gnehm said.

The closest the administration has come to public criticism was an Op-Ed page article about Iraq in The New York Times last week by Mr. Khalilzad, now the United States ambassador to the United Nations. “Several of Iraq’s neighbors — not only Syria and Iran but also some friends of the United States — are pursuing destabilizing policies,” Mr. Khalilzad wrote. Administration officials said Mr. Khalilzad was referring specifically to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

Ms. Rice and Mr. Gates, as well as Mr. Cheney and Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser, have in recent months pressed their Arab counterparts to do more to encourage Iraq’s Sunni leaders to support Mr. Maliki, senior administration officials said.

“This message certainly has been made very clear in Riyadh and Abu Dhabi,” a senior administration official said. “But there is a deep reserve directed both at the person of the Maliki government but more broadly at the concept” that Iraq’s Shiites are “surrogates of Iran.” Saudi Arabia has grown increasingly concerned about the rising influence of Iran in the region.

A spokesman at the Saudi Embassy in Washington did not return telephone calls on Thursday. But one adviser to the royal family said that Saudi officials were aware of the American accusations. “As you know by now, we in Saudi Arabia have been active in having a united Arab front to, first, avoid further inter-Arab conflict, and at the same time building consensus to move toward a peace settlement between the Arabs and Israel,” he said. “How others judge our motives is their problem.”

Even as American frustration at Saudi Arabia grows, American military officials are still cautious about publicly detailing the extent of the flow of foreign fighters going to Iraq from Saudi Arabia. Earlier this month, for instance, Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner, the top American military spokesman in Iraq, detailed the odyssey of a foreign fighter recently captured in Ramadi.

In his public account, General Bergner told reporters that the man had arrived in Syria on a chartered bus, was smuggled into Iraq by a Syrian facilitator, and was given instructions to carry out a suicide truck bombing on a bridge in Ramadi. He did not identify the man’s nationality, but American officials in Iraq say he was a Saudi.

The American officials in Iraq also say that the majority of suicide bombers in Iraq are from Saudi Arabia and that about 40 percent of all foreign fighters are Saudi. Officials said that while most of the foreign fighters came to Iraq to become suicide bombers, others arrived as bomb makers, snipers, logisticians and financiers.

American military and intelligence officials have been critical of Saudi efforts to stanch the flow of fighters into Iraq, although they stress that the Saudi government does not endorse the idea of fighters from Saudi Arabia going to Iraq.

On the contrary, they said, Saudi Arabia is concerned that these young men could acquire insurgency training in Iraq and then return home to carry out attacks in Saudi Arabia — similar to the Saudis who turned against their homeland after fighting in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

The Bush administration’s relationship with Saudi Arabia has deteriorated steadily since the United States invasion of Iraq, culminating in April when, bitingly, King Abdullah, during a speech before Arab heads of state in Riyadh, condemned the American invasion of Iraq as “an illegal foreign occupation.”

A month before that, King Abdullah effectively torpedoed a high-profile meeting between Israelis and Palestinians, planned by Ms. Rice, by brokering a power-sharing agreement between the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, and the militant Islamist group Hamas that did not require Hamas to recognize Israel. While that agreement eventually fell apart, the Bush administration, on both occasions, was caught off guard and became infuriated.

But Saudi officials have not been too happy with President Bush, either, and the plummeting of America’s image in the Muslim world has led King Abdullah to strive to set a more independent course.

The administration “thinks the Saudis are no longer behaving the role of the good vassal,” said Steve Clemons, senior fellow and director of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation. The Saudis, in turn, “see weakness, they see a void, and they’re going to fill the void and call their own shots.”

Richard A. Oppel Jr. contributed reporting from Baghdad.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/27/world/mi...agewanted=print

Dangerous Privilege
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070813/huq

Aziz Huq

It's time to do something about executive privilege.

Having stretched the Constitution to the snapping point, the White House now brandishes "executive privilege," talismanlike, to ward off discovery of its wrongdoing. White House counsel Fred Fielding not only refuses to provide specific evidence to Congressional committees investigating the firing of US Attorneys but makes the unprecedented claim that the President can block former advisers from appearing before Congress. Echoing an argument last heard in the infamous torture memo of August 2002, the President also claims unfettered control over federal criminal prosecutions--hence barring one way of challenging Fielding's startling arguments.

This obfuscation, though, is not merely an extension of the Administration's pet theory of monarchical executive power; it is also a calculated strategy to avoid accountability. The Administration knows that federal courts have long been reluctant to force secrets from the executive, and is thus willing to fight the House Judiciary Committee's contempt citations against Joshua Bolten and Harriet Miers. By playing hardball until the clock runs out on the Bush II era, the White House hopes to eliminate accountability for warrantless wiretapping, partisan manipulation of the Justice Department--and even torture. Worse, it sends the message to future Presidents that they can do the same.

The case for limiting executive privilege by a clear law does not rest on White House shenanigans alone. In fact, executive privilege is a vague concept that has metastasized in a short half-century. To prevent it from undermining democratic government, reform is urgently needed.

Start with the Constitution, which makes no mention of executive privilege. To the contrary, only Article I--listing Congress's powers--even mentions secrecy. Article II, describing the presidency, does not. It is not surprising that the branch of government worst structured for keeping secrets receives the sole constitutional power to do so, for the Constitution embodies a presumption toward disclosure. It mandates elections, which are mere farce without information about what a government does. And by constraining government power to muzzle criticism, the First Amendment deepens the constitutional tilt toward transparency. Nevertheless, Presidents since George Washington have exploited the absence of clear constitutional rules to withhold information. With the exponential growth of government after the New Deal and World War II, such inchoate and ill-defined claims suddenly became a potent weapon in the battle over separation of powers.

By the time of Bush II, the President's personal right to keep conversations with advisers confidential had morphed into a bottomless well of secrecy obscuring not only the Oval Office but the entire White House. It extended to cover advisers like Miers and their conversations with people outside the White House. It hid from Congress the August 6, 2001, President's Daily Brief, which revealed that Bush had been warned about Al Qaeda's determination to attack. And of course it sheltered Dick Cheney, who made the startling argument that the office of the Vice President entitles him to keep secret not only conversations with Administration officials but also with private citizens.

The problem will not vanish in 2009. The executive branch has the greatest capacity to create secrets, thanks to its enormous intelligence apparatus. The growing risk of abuse, and the greater capacity for corrosive secrets, means we must find new ways to constrain the Article II leviathan. Moreover, arguments defending the privilege are much weaker than supposed. Foremost among these is what Bush calls the need for "crisp decision-making." Without secrecy, he implies, Presidents do not get candid advice.

There are three reasons this canard ought not to fend off a new law. First, executive privilege is never absolute: The Supreme Court in United States v. Nixon ordered the disclosure of intimate conversations between a President and his advisers. Second, claims for executive privilege are now untethered from any decision-making process that involves the President; they have been extended, viruslike, to the sprawling White House policy-making staff. Third, is it so bad for officials to feel the eyes of the people on their back? After all, they have a fidelity not only to the person who happens to sit in the Oval Office but also, via the Constitution, to the people. Why should officials ever forget their second--and arguably greater--obligation?

By contrast, the risk that Congress will abuse its investigative powers is smaller than generally imagined. Congressional overreaching is mitigated because the President's party is always on hand in Congress to publicize and condemn partisan investigations. Congressional misuse of power, unlike its executive counterpart, is always open to public criticism and condemnation.

An effective law on executive privilege would define and limit it. A law would clarify not only which communications are covered but when Congress can overcome the privilege: Allegations of criminal wrongdoing or violations of law would suffice to dissolve any absolute claim of nondisclosure. The law could then create mechanisms for threshold disclosure to a limited pool of legislators and staff. For disputes that persist, it would expedite judicial appeal. Courts would be obligated to resolve cases of constitutional moment quickly, to stop the clock from being run out. And clear sanctions would be imposed on the privilege's abuse.

The struggle over testimony today is but a fraction of a larger fight. The White House's effort to cloak its dismal legacy should not obscure the importance of the larger battle over the fundamental balance of constitutional power.

The UPI report from Ben Lando has not received the attention that it
deserved. The Iraqi government's attitude towards the labor unions
should be a scandal in Congress...

Links and formatting at original:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-naima...il_b_57978.html

Iraqi Government Says Oil Workers' Unions Are "Not Legitimate"
Robert Naiman, Huffington Post, July 26, 2007

On one side of the ledger, we have: more than 3,600 U.S. soldiers
killed, and more than 25,000 wounded. The financial cost of the war is
now $10 billion a month -- three months of the war would pay for the
expansion in children's health care that the president says is too
expensive. Nearly a million Iraqis have died, and four million have
been made refugees inside or outside the country.

But on the other side of the ledger: we have brought the Iraqis
"democracy." Supporters of the war like Joe Lieberman, echoing
Madeleine Albright's defense of 500,000 Iraqi deaths due to sanctions
(yes, the same Madeleine Albright now lecturing Senator Obama on how
diplomacy works), say the price is right.

What is this "democracy" we have bought for the Iraqis, with our blood
and treasure and theirs? Women's rights organizations say they are
increasingly the targets of violence, and the government does nothing,
the UN's office of humanitarian affairs reports. Iraq's minorities are
suffering a persecution at times verging on genocide, an Iraqi MP told
the BBC.

And now this: "Iraq's oil minister said Iraq's oil unions are not
legitimate," UPI reports:

"There are no legal unions in Iraq," Hussein al-Shahristani said
Wednesday in response to a question about various factions' positions
on the controversial oil law.

No legal unions in Iraq? What kind of democracy is that? Is that what
we purchased with the blood and treasure of America's working
families? Apparently so, according to UPI:

The lone remaining law from the Saddam Hussein regime kept by U.S.
occupying powers and the successive Iraqi government is the one that
bans worker organizing in the public sector.

Early Warning
William M. Arkin on National and Homeland Security
Opening the Nuclear Front

The Bush administration opened a nuclear front in its various wars this week, firing a paper at Congress arguing that nuclear weapons are at a "critical juncture" and continue to be essential for U.S. national security. The statement -- all of three pages -- is essentially a justification for the U.S. nuclear arsenal and a new nuclear warhead. There is, however, a glimmer of hope in a report that is mostly boilerplate.

The glimmer is in the paper's tone, which is almost pleading. Amid the arguments -- that nuclear weapons have been an essential element of "deterrence" since President Truman, and that the principal U.S. national security goal is deterring "aggression against ourselves, our allies, and friends" -- there is the sense that the U.S. is trying too hard to justify a policy that perhaps it realizes is becoming obsolete.

With Congress increasingly questioning the Bush administration's nuclear weapons strategy and its pursuit of new nuclear warheads and nuclear capabilities, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates joined with the Secretary of Energy Samuel Bodman and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in issuing the report Friday, titled "National Security and Nuclear Weapons: Maintaining Deterrence in the 21st Century."

The paper argues that despite the demise of the Soviet Union, the "future security environment is very uncertain, and some trends are not favorable. Rogue states" -- code for Iran and North Korea -- "either have or seek weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons." More states, it says, could develop nuclear weapons, and "established nuclear powers" -- Russia, China, Pakistan, India, Israel, all unnamed -- could pursue "aggressive nuclear force modernization programs."

All of this requires the United States to continue to offer assurances of security for our allies and U.S. nuclear weapons continue to serve "as the ultimate guarantor of their security." A nuclear arsenal demonstrates "to allies and adversaries alike that the United States has the necessary means, and the political will, to respond decisively against aggression and the use of weapons of mass destruction." In this regard, Iran and North Korea are explicitly mentioned.

But it's not as if the United States is headed for nuclear disarmament. Even with a Democratic Congress or a Democratic president, that's not likely.

The report argues that Congress needs to continue to support "a responsive nuclear infrastructure." That means robust research and a commitment to maintaining technical expertise in nuclear weapons, and even the ability to renew underground testing if necessary. Most important, it means the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW), a new weapon that the administration and the nuclear priesthood hopes to build in large numbers.

None of this is surprising. But that doesn't mean it's the right direction. I see no value in "using" nuclear weapons in our disputes with North Korea and Iran. In fact, brandishing them merely serves to encourage our adversaries to develop their own. Furthermore, when it comes to Russia and China, our goal must be to seek reductions and constraints. And as for the value of our nuclear weapons vis a vis India, Pakistan, or Israel; the history is clear, our nuclear weapons have bought us nothing but their justifications.

Perhaps it is time to adopt the post-9/11 stance when it comes to nuclear weapons, including our own: We cannot just wait for stuff to happen to us. We have to take action. Ultimately that means a commitment to deeper reductions and a further marginalizing of the role nuclear weapons play in U.S. foreign policy.

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/earlywarnin...ar_front_1.html

FBI chief seems to contradict Gonzales
By Richard B. Schmitt
Robert Mueller tells a House panel that he had had reservations about a
wiretapping program, undercutting the attorney general's testimony.
http://email.latimes.com/cgi-bin1/DM/y/eBU...Io30G2B0InDi0EZ

Dark powers, the sequel
The president's recent executive order allows the CIA to detain anyone the agency thinks is a terrorist -- or a terrorist's kid.
By Rosa Brooks
July 27, 2007

'We ... have to work

the dark side, if you will," Vice President Dick Cheney told NBC's Tim Russert, five days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. "We've got to spend time in the shadows

using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies

That's the world [terrorists] operate in, and so it's going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal

"

It was an odd thing to say. Throughout our history -- from John Winthrop's 1630 "City Upon a Hill" sermon to President Clinton's foreign policy speeches -- our leaders have been quick to assure us of the opposite premise: We will prevail against our enemies because (and only if) we're on the side of light, rather than the side of darkness. We will prevail not through spending "time in the shadows" but through our commitment to freedom, democracy, justice and the rule of law.

Granted, previous rhetorical commitments to the side of light were at times accompanied by some pretty dark episodes. But if we didn't always manage to live up to the values we publicly embraced, our public commitments at least gave us a yardstick for measuring ourselves -- and declared to the world our willingness to be held to account when we fell short.

But in keeping with Cheney's admonition to "work

the dark side," this administration has openly embraced tactics that no previous administration would have formally condoned. In prior wars, for instance, we granted the protections of the Geneva Convention to our enemies as a matter of policy, even when those enemies -- like the Viet Cong -- lacked any legal claim to the convention's protections. Yes, some U.S. soldiers abused Viet Cong prisoners anyway -- but when they did so, they violated the clear written laws and policies of the United States.

Contrast that with the Bush administration, which refused to recognize any Geneva Convention rights for the "unlawful enemy combatants" captured in the war on terror until finally ordered to do so by the Supreme Court.

Within months of Cheney's "dark side" comments, Guantanamo filled up with hooded, shackled prisoners kept in open-air cages. The Justice Department developed legal defenses of torture, we opened secret prisons in former Soviet bloc countries and the president authorized secret "enhanced" interrogation methods for "high-value" detainees.

And despite the best efforts of human rights groups, the courts and a growing number of congressional critics from both parties, Cheney's still getting his way. On July 20, President Bush issued an executive order "interpreting" Common Article 3 of the Geneva Convention, as applied to secret CIA detention facilities. On its face, the order bans torture -- but as an editorial in this paper noted Thursday, it does so using language so vague it appears designed to create loopholes for the CIA.

Just as bad, though barely noted by the media, last week's executive order breaks new ground by outlining the category of people who can be detained secretly and indefinitely by the CIA -- in a way that's broad enough to include a hefty chunk of the global population. Under its terms, a non-U.S. citizen may be secretly detained and interrogated by the CIA -- with no access to counsel and no independent monitoring -- as long as the CIA director believes the person "to be a member or part of or supporting Al Qaeda, the Taliban or associated organizations; and likely to be in possession of information that could assist in detecting, mitigating or preventing terrorist attacks [or] in locating the senior leadership of Al Qaeda, the Taliban or associated forces."

Got that? The president of the United States just issued a public pronouncement declaring, as a matter of U.S. policy, that a single man has the authority to detain any person anyplace in the world and subject him or her to secret interrogation techniques that aren't torture but that nonetheless can't be revealed, as long as that person is thought to be a "supporter" of an organization "associated" in some unspecified way with the Taliban or Al Qaeda, and as long he thinks that person might know something that could "assist" us.

But "supporter" isn't defined, nor is "associated organization." That leaves the definition broad enough to permit the secret detention of, say, a man who sympathizes ideologically with the Taliban and might have overheard something useful in a neighborhood cafe, or of a 10-year-old girl whose older brother once trained with Al Qaeda.

This isn't just hypothetical. The U.S. has already detained people based on little more. According to media reports, the CIA has even held children, including the 7- and 9-year-old sons of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. In 2006, Mohammed was transferred from a secret CIA facility to Guantanamo, but the whereabouts of his children are unknown.

It's dark out there, all right.

rbrooks@latimescolumnists.com
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-...;track=ntottext

Some Iraq Stories You Might Have Missed …
Posted by Joshua Holland on July 26, 2007 at 11:27 AM.

We can't fit all of our Iraq coverage on that front page, but maybe I can entice you with one of these fine offerings in our War on Iraq special coverage area …

US Firms in Iraq Still Using Indentured Workers Despite Crackdown David Phinney: Charges of heinous abuses of workers have long dogged the reconstruction effort.

In Iraq, Women Increasingly Targeted for Violence IraqSlogger: One of the bright spots of Saddam Hussein's brutal rule was the full recognition of women's rights. Those days are long gone.

Amid Tensions with US, Iran's Presence in Iraq Grows Sam Dagher: Economic and political ties between Iran and Iraq are growing despite US criticism of Tehran's "meddling."

In Iraq's Kurdish Zone, The Children of Arab Refugees Face Tough Times Najeeba Mohammad: In Iraqi Kurdistan, the children of Arabs who've fled violence in the rest of the country struggle to settle in their new home.

Kirkuk Vote Could Touch Off New Civil War in Iraq Ben Lando: A historic vote in Iraq's northern territories could right past wrongs, but it might also spark a new front in the country's many-sided civil conflict.
http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/#58064

For anyone who was worried about the economic impact of a US strike on Iran, the following scenario (link below) from the Heritage Foundation will make comforting reading. Not only will the economic consequences be much less than the doomsayers predict, but the new war will actually have advantages like opening up ANWR and the Gulf waters for oil exploration and roll-back of energy conservation measures (higher CAFE standards) and environmental regulation (Clean Air). One is lightly surprised that the scenario did not call for an abolition in capital gains tax to tide us through the emergency.

"If Iran Provokes an Energy Crisis: Modeling the Problem in a War Game" James Jay Carafano, Ph.D., and William W. Beach and Ariel Cohen, Ph.D., Lisa A. Curtis, Tracy L. Foertsch, Ph.D., Alison Acosta Fraser, Ben Lieberman, and James Phillips

From December 2006 to March 2007, Heritage Foundation scholars conducted a computer simulation and gaming exercise that examined the likely economic and policy consequences of a major oil disruption in the Persian Gulf. The exercise utilized a realistic scenario, state-of-the-art macroeconomic modeling, and a knowledgeable team of subject-matter experts from government, business, academia, and research institutes from around Washington, D.C.

http://www.heritage.org/Research/Energyand...nt/CDA07-03.cfm

9/11 BILL REQUIRES INTELLIGENCE BUDGET DISCLOSURE

For the first time since it began debating the issue more than three
decades ago, Congress is now poised to adopt legislation that will
require -- not merely recommend -- public disclosure of the total
national intelligence budget.

"Not later than 30 days after the end of each fiscal year beginning
with fiscal year 2007, the Director of National Intelligence shall
disclose to the public the aggregate amount of funds appropriated by
Congress for the National Intelligence Program for such fiscal year,"
states the House-Senate conference agreement on H.R. 1 (section 601),
the massive bill to implement recommendations of the 9/11 Commission.

Excerpts from the conference report concerning intelligence budget
disclosure, declassification and related issues are posted here:

http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2007_cr/hr1-intel.html

The conference bill has already been approved in the Senate and is
expected to win final approval in the House as early as today.

If enacted into law, it would lead to the first authorized disclosure
of current U.S. intelligence spending since the aggregate budgets were
disclosed in 1997 ($26.6 billion) and 1998 ($26.7 billion) in response
to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by the Federation of
American Scientists. (Those figures included spending on "national" as
well as "tactical" intelligence.)

The Bush White House has expressed opposition to intelligence budget
disclosure but is not expected to veto the entire 9/11 bill on that
basis.

"The Administration strongly opposes the requirement in the bill to
publicly disclose sensitive information about the intelligence budget,"
according to a February 28 statement of administration policy.

"Disclosure, including disclosure to the Nation's enemies and
adversaries in a time of war, of the amounts requested by the President
and provided by the Congress for the conduct of the Nation's
intelligence activities would provide no meaningful information to the
general American public, but would provide significant intelligence to
America's adversaries and could cause damage to the national security
interests of the United States."

Hardly anyone agrees with that assessment.

The bipartisan 9/11 Commission came to almost the opposite conclusion:
"The top-line figure by itself provides little insight into U.S.
intelligence sources and methods.... But when even aggregate
categorical numbers remain hidden, it is hard to judge priorities and
foster accountability." (Final Report, p. 416)

In a compromise with Administration opponents, the House-Senate
conference agreed that, beginning in 2009, the President could waive
the disclosure requirement by submitting a statement to Congress that
budget disclosure in that particular year could damage national
security. The legislation does not allow for a waiver in 2007 or 2008.

The conference legislation also includes provisions to strengthen the
Public Interest Declassification Board, and to require declassification
of the executive summary of a CIA Inspector General report on events
leading up to 9/11.

The CIA vs. Scarborough
by Jed Babbin
Posted: 07/27/2007

On July 20, the CIA issued the most extraordinary press release. Director of Public Affairs Mike Mansfield wrote:

We generally don't comment on books, but we have departed from that on occasion, and have decided to do so in connection with Rowan Scarborough's new book, "Sabotage: America's Enemies Within the CIA."

CIA employees work very hard to protect their fellow citizens and to help keep America safe. They take great pride -- and take great risks -- in serving our country. They know that the intelligence they collect, analyze and deliver to policymakers, diplomats, law enforcement officers, and military commanders makes a difference, each and every day.

The premise of Mr. Scarborough's book -- that CIA employees are working to undermine our government -- is both ridiculous and offensive.

Is Scarborough’s book over the top, or is the CIA protesting the truth? And how does a journalist dissect a dispute between a lon
gtime friend (I’ve known Rowan Scarborough for two decades) and a government agency spokesman he holds in high regard?

Start with the fact that the CIA’s track record is nothing to brag about. It was surprised when the Berlin Wall was built in 1961 and again when it was torn down in 1989. It wasn’t able to protect American lives by detecting terrorist attacks before they happened, be it the 9-11 attack or those that preceded it (in 2000, against the USS Cole, in 1998 in the African embassy bombings, in 1996 in the Khobar Towers bombing and in the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993). Then-CIA Director George Tenet told President Bush that the case against Iraq on weapons of mass destruction was a “slam dunk.”

And the CIA’s record of keeping secrets isn’t enviable. We don’t know who leaked the CIA secret terrorist prisons in Eastern Europe, the NSA terrorist surveillance program, or the cooperation of the Belgian “SWIFT” consortium in tracing and disrupting terrorist financing. But those leaks -- as Cong. Pete Hoekstra (former chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and now ranking Republican on one of its subcommittees) told me Thursday -- have damaged our capabilities in the war against the terrorist groups and the nations that support them. The damage is enormous, resulting in changed behavior of nations who -- before the leaks -- were cooperating secretly with us and can no longer because the cooperation was revealed.

The leaks have reduced effectiveness of the NSA eavesdropping operation, closing of some or all of the secret prisons and -- in the case of the SWIFT program -- a huge uproar in the European Union. As Hoekstra said, some of these damaging leaks apparently come right out of the CIA.

Last week the European Union issued a report on the CIA secret terrorist prisons. Hoekstra told me, “last week the EU came out with a report on the prisons…You ought to…read the report, because, not because the report’s interesting, but the report cites anonymous top US government officials and top CIA officials.” More leaks, apparently directly from the CIA. Hoekstra said of that leak and others, “Well, they’ve either come from the CIA or they came out of the [intelligence] community.” He added that some of the damaging leaks may have come from Congress, and from other intelligence agencies. But the CIA is leaking, badly.

Through the whole Valerie Plame name blame game investigation, former CIA employee Larry Johnson vocally condemned the Bush administration for the leak, claiming that he was in contact with a whole network of current and former CIA officers and agents. Was Johnson spinning a yarn, or were CIA employees working hard to inflate the non-scandal into the single event that tied up the Bush administration for years?

I’ve been in Washington for more than three decades. In that time I’ve been a deputy undersecretary of defense, and have made the career change to journalism. And in both capacities, I’ve come to know one overriding fact: no one in the government leaks by accident. Whomever the leaker is, he or she is pushing an agenda. And the leaks -- if they are from the CIA -- were meant to change the behavior of our government and other governments helping us combat terrorists. The leakers’ agenda cannot be explained otherwise.

If some or all of those leaks came from the CIA, then Scarborough’s book is neither “ridiculous” nor “offensive.” If none came from the CIA, it the book is over the top. Given what we know now, the great preponderance of the evidence is on Scarborough’s side, not on Mansfield’s.

Which brings us down to Alberto Gonzales.

The Democrats’ call for a special counsel to investigate Gonzales’ statements to Congress is, mostly, political puffery. The real problem in the Justice Department is not the firings of US attorneys. Ask yourself: why haven’t the leakers of the CIA secret prisons, the SWIFT program’s cooperation, and the NSA terrorist surveillance program been discovered and prosecuted?

We are at war. We cannot afford to have intelligence employees (or members of Congress) leaking our most closely-held secrets and benefiting the enemy. Nor can we afford intelligence agencies that aren’t providing the president the information he needs to make life-or-death decisions.

These leaks need to be investigated with all possible skill, urgency and care. If General Gonzales isn’t prepared to do that, the President should find someone who is. And the CIA, as broken as it is, needs to be fixed.

Last fall, Cong. Hoekstra and the House Intelligence Committee’s Republican staff issued a report that said the intelligence community was still failing to provide sufficient information on Iran’s nuclear program and a host of other programs. In that Thursday interview, Hoekstra confirmed that the CIA and other agencies still weren’t up to the job.

How long can we go without fixing the intelligence agencies for real, creating the capabilities we need? Not much longer, I suspect.

Mr. Babbin is the editor of Human Events. He served as a deputy undersecretary of defense in President George H.W. Bush's administration. He is the author of "In the Words of our Enemies"(Regnery,2007) and (with Edward Timperlake) of "Showdown: Why China Wants War with the United States" (Regnery, 2006) and "Inside the Asylum: Why the UN and Old Europe are Worse than You Think" (Regnery, 2004). E-mail him at jbabbin@eaglepub.com.

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=21706

Democrats: Stuck Between Iraq and The Anti-War Left
by Gary Bauer

Between the proverbial rock and a hard place stands the leadership of today’s Democratic Party. Though you wouldn’t know it from mainstream media coverage, much of the Democratic base, though war-weary, supports the troops and is uneasy about an over-hasty withdrawal from Iraq. But a vocal, small, and increasingly influential anti-war Left revels in maligning the troops and unabashedly rooting for U.S. defeat in Iraq.

For months, Democrats have been trying to pacify both constituencies.

Consider Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who insists he supports the troops and understands that "America's security must come first," but is also leading congressional efforts to force President Bush to withdraw prematurely from Iraq. Reid has for months declared the current mission "lost," and has called the Iraq war the "worst foreign policy mistake in U.S. history."

Reid's is an untenable position. While a person can criticize the war and still support the troops, Reid surely understands that as majority leader his public actions and remarks have served to undercut troop morale and embolden an enemy galvanized by such blatant signs of defeatism by America's political elite.

The ridiculousness of Reid's contradictory positions (which anti-Iraq war columnist Joel Stein has called "one of the wussiest positions the pacifists have taken") underscores the power struggle within the Democratic Party between the fringe anti-war Left and mainstream Democrats.

Two recent incidents help illustrate that struggle’s manifestations.

Two weeks ago, Democratic leaders tried to attach an amendment to the Defense Authorization bill that would have mandated sending terrorist detainees at Guantanamo Bay to the United States. The amendment was eventually pulled and replaced with a Republican amendment that did the exact opposite, prohibiting sending terrorists to the United States. That amendment passed overwhelmingly, and, revealingly, every Democrat sponsor of the original amendment to shut down GITMO ended up voting for the alternative.

Such apparent capriciousness was the by-product of a keen insight: despite the cries of the anti-war activists about alleged, inhospitable conditions for terrorist prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, most Americans are more concerned about having terrorists living next door.

Here's another example. Last year, U.S. Airways removed six Imams from a flight due to passenger complaints about their very erratic and unusual behavior. The Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) filed a lawsuit against U.S. Airways, seeking unspecified monetary damages for false arrest, negligent and intentional infliction of emotional distress, among other alleged offenses. But CAIR went even further, actually naming several of the airline passengers who reported concerns about the imams' behavior as defendants in the case.

In response, conservatives in the House of Representatives introduced legislation to protect "John Doe" citizens who report suspicious behavior from frivolous lawsuits. In March, House Republicans forced a vote on the bill, and it was approved, 304-121.

But, last week, liberal Democrats, in negotiations with their Senate counterparts, stripped the legislation out of the final Homeland Security bill. An attempt in the Senate to attach the "John Doe" protections to an education bill failed to overcome a Democrat filibuster.

So Democrats voted for the bill on the House floor, but then waited until the dead of summer, at the end of the week, to strip it out in a conference committee when they thought no one was paying attention.

Why would they do that? Democrats know this bill is overwhelmingly popular with the American people. It received strong majority support in both the House (304 votes) and Senate (57 votes). Yet, Democrats were set to cave in to the extreme elements of their party. (Fortunately, the conservative media was paying attention, and after a flurry of bad press, liberals in Congress finally acquiesced to Republican demands to include the “John Doe” provision.)

The anti-war movement began four years ago as smug anti-Bushism, but the movement has evolved. It is now animated by something far more nefarious: the obscene belief that America and Israel are the source of all that ails the Middle East and that Americans, not the Islamofascists, are the enemy.

One need only visit leftwing websites like MoveOn.org and the Daily Kos to understand how much the extreme Left desires America's defeat in Iraq and beyond. Recent revelations that scurrilous stories in The New Republic and The Nation portraying our soldiers in a very negative light may have been fabricated can be seen as the effects of the Left's uncontrollable desire to think the worst of its fellow citizens.

But you will rarely hear criticism of the anti-war Left by today's Democrats. That's because, as Time magazine's Joe Klein has written, "a fierce bullying, often witless tone of intolerance that has overtaken the left-wing sector of the blogosphere. Anyone who doesn't move in lockstep with the most extreme voices is savaged and ridiculed..." Appeasement of the anti-war fringe was behind the Democrats' fruitless legislative session last week, held through the night even though everyone knew Democrats didn't have enough votes to pass an amendment calling for the draw down of troops starting in four months. But Reid and the Democrats needed to show their Leftwing that they were trying.

Despite all their kowtowing to the Left, Reid et. al. are keenly aware that most Democrats who believe Iraq is a mess also understand, as a fresh study from the liberal Brookings Institution states, that a precipitous withdrawal could bring "a humanitarian nightmare" in which "we should expect hundreds of thousands (conceivably even millions) of people to die." Many responsible Democrats, though they want our troops to come home, also refuse to believe the worst about the troops and do not support bringing terrorist suspects to the U.S. or penalizing concerned citizens for reporting suspicious behavior.

Today's Democrats are trying to appease two distinct constituencies, which may explain Congress's all-time low approval numbers. But, with 2008 looming, they will have to decide whether to stand for victory against Islamofascism and take their lumps from the extreme Leftwing or whether to align with the anti-American bullies who hope for their own country’s destruction. For most Americans, that would not be a tough choice.

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=21704

Hillary's Late Hit
by Patrick J. Buchanan

When, in the South Carolina debate, Barack Obama said he would meet with the leaders of Cuba, Venezuela, Syria, Iran and North Korea in his first year as president, he stepped into a cow pie.

Hillary pounced, declaring that in a Clinton White House, there would be no promised first-year meetings with any dictator or enemy of the United States.

The morning headline in Miami roared that Obama was open to meeting Fidel. In the Jewish community, word was surely being moved that Obama had opened the door to a face-to-face meeting with Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a Holocaust skeptic who has predicted the Israeli state is not long for the Middle East -- and should be transplanted to Europe.

Pundits watching that Citadel debate scored Hillary the winner, contrasting her presidential sobriety with Obama's puppy enthusiasm for talking to tyrants.

Why, then, with press and politicians declaring her the winner, did Hillary Clinton have to step in and clock Obama after she won the fight?

The day after the debate, Hillary said Obama had exposed himself as "irresponsible and naive."

This gave Barack, who had been busy explaining what he had meant, an opening to declare that what was "irresponsible and naive" was Sen. Clinton's vote to give George Bush a blank check to plunge us into a war in Iraq most Democrats have come to believe was the worst strategic blunder in U.S. history.

Instead of Barack's impetuosity being the issue, Hillary's war vote is now front and center, her greatest vulnerability in seeking the nomination of an antiwar party. Her eagerness to exploit Obama's blunder also suggests a lack of serenity and confidence in her double-digit lead over Obama.

In the next debate, Hillary is certain to be put on the defensive about her war vote, and Obama has been liberated, by her throwing the first punch, to hit back hard -- on his strongest issue, the war.

A surprising mistake by Sen. Clinton, who has run something close to a flawless campaign. But there is a more substantive issue here. That is the gravamen of the original question.
Should not the United States be in constant contact with those we see as enemies, to prevent irreconcilable differences from leading us into war? Here, Obama's instincts are not wrong.

During World War II and the Cold War, FDR and Harry Truman met with Josef Stalin. Ike invited the "Butcher of Budapest" for a 10-day tour of the United States and tete-a-tete at Camp David. JFK met Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna -- after he declared, "We will bury you." Richard Nixon went to China and toasted the tyrant responsible for the deaths of thousands of GIs in Korea and greatest mass murderer of the last century, Mao Zedong.

None of the five with whom Obama said he would meet is in the same league with these monsters of the 20th century.

Kim Jong-il has not launched a war on South Korea or tried to assassinate its prime minister and entire cabinet, as his father, Kim Il-Sung, did. Syria's Bashir al-Assad has yet to fight his first war and has never perpetrated the kind of massacre his father did in Homa. Yet, George H.W. Bush welcomed Hafez al-Assad as a fighting ally in the Gulf War.

Castro is the same evil tyrant he has always been. But Vice President Nixon survived meeting him, and he is surely less dangerous than the young Fidel, who reportedly urged the Soviets to fire their Cuban-based missiles at the United States, rather than pull them out.

Hugo Chavez is an anti-American demagogue, but also the twice-elected president of Venezuela. How does he threaten "The Republic That Never Retreats"? As for Ahmadinejad, he is not the supreme leader of Iran, and his nation has not launched a war since the Revolution of 1979. With no atomic weapons, no ICBMs, no air force to challenge ours, no navy, an economy 2 percent of ours and its oil reserves running out, Iran is scarcely an existential threat to the United States.

All of these rulers wish to be seen as defying the United States, but not one of them -- not North Korea, Iran, Syria, Venezuela or Iran -- can seriously be seeking a major war with the United States that would bring wreckage and ruin to any or all of them.

What we have in common with them is that neither of us wants a hot war. As for a cold war, does any one of these nations represent a long-term strategic or ideological threat to a United States of 300 million, with 30 percent of the world's economy, and the best air force, navy and army on earth, and a nuclear arsenal of thousands of weapons?

If Bush can bring Libya's Muammar Khadafi, who was responsible for Pan Am 103, the Lockerbie massacre of American school kids, in from the cold, why cannot we talk with Hamas and Hezbollah and Assad and Ahmadinejad?

What has any of them done to us compared to what Khadafi did?

Though poorly stated, Barack Obama had a point.

Mr. Buchanan is a nationally syndicated columnist and author of "The Death of the West," "The Great Betrayal," "A Republic, Not an Empire" and "Where the Right Went Wrong."

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=21713

Martial Law is Now a Real Threat
Declaring the US a Battlefield

By DAVE LINDORFF

The looming collapse of the US military in Iraq, of which a number of generals and former generals, including former Chief of Staff Colin Powell, have warned, is happening none too soon, as it my be the best hope for preventing military rule here at home.

From the looks of things, the Bush/Cheney regime has been working assiduously to pave the way for a declaration of military rule, such that at this point it really lacks only the pretext to trigger a suspension of Constitutional government. They have done this with the active support of Democrats in Congress, though most of the heavy lifting was done by the last, Republican-led Congress.

The first step, or course, was the first Authorization for Use of Military Force, passed in September 2001, which the president has subsequently used to claim-improperly, but so what? -that the whole world, including the US, is a battlefield in a so-called "War" on Terror, and that he has extra-Constitutional unitary executive powers to ignore laws passed by Congress. As constitutional scholar and former Reagan-era associate deputy attorney general Bruce Fein observes, that one claim, that the US is itself a battlefield, is enough to allow this or some future president to declare martial law, "since you can always declare martial law on a battlefield. All he'd need would be a pretext, like another terrorist attack inside the U.S."

The 2001 AUMF was followed by the PATRIOT Act, passed in October 2001, which undermined much of the Bill of Rights. Around the same time, the president began a campaign of massive spying on Americans by the National Security Agency, conducted without any warrants or other judicial review. It was and remains a program that is clearly aimed at American dissidents and at the administration's political opponents, since the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court would never have raised no objections to spying on potential terrorists. (And it, and other government spying programs, have resulted in the government's having a list now of some 325,000 "suspected terrorists"!)

The other thing we saw early on was the establishment of an underground government-within-a-government, though the activation, following 9-11, of the so-called "Continuity of Government" protocol, which saw heads of federal agencies moved secretly to an underground bunker where, working under the direction of Vice President Dick Cheney, the "government" functioned out of sight of Congress and the public for critical months.

It was also during the first year following 9-11 that the Bush/Cheney regime began its programs of arrest and detention without charge-mostly of resident aliens, but also of American citizens-and of kidnapping and torture in a chain of gulag prisons overseas and at the Navy base at Guantanamo Bay.

The following year, Attorney General John Ashcroft began his program to develop a mass network of tens of millions of citizen spies-Operation TIPS. That program, which had considerable support from key Democrats (notably Sen. Joe Lieberman), was curtailed by Congress when key conservatives got wind of the scale of the thing, but the concept survives without a name, and is reportedly being expanded today.

Meanwhile, last October Bush and Cheney, with the help of a compliant Congress, put in place some key elements needed for a military putsch. There was the overturning of the venerable Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which barred the use of active duty military inside the United States for police-type functions, and the revision of the Insurrection Act, so as to empower the president to take control of National Guard units in the 50 states even over the objections of the governors of those states.

Put this together with the wholly secret construction now under way--courtesy of a $385-million grant by the US Army Corps of Engineers to Halliburton subsidiary KBR Inc--of detention camps reportedly capable of confining as many as 400,000 people, and a recent report that the Pentagon has a document, dated June 1, 2007, classified Top Secret, which declares there to be a developing "insurgency" within the U.S, and which lays out a whole martial law counterinsurgency campaign against legal dissent, and you have all the ingredients for a military takeover of the United States.

As we go about our daily lives--our shopping, our escapist movie watching, and even our protesting and political organizing-we need to be aware that there is a real risk that it could all blow up, and that we could find ourselves facing armed, uniformed troops at our doors.

Bruce Fein isn't an alarmist. He says he doesn't see martial law coming tomorrow. But he is also realistic. "Really, by declaring the US to be a battlefield, Bush already made it possible for himself to declare martial law, because you can always declare martial law on a battlefield," he says. "All he would need would be a pretext, like another terrorist attack on the U.S."

Indeed, the revised Insurrection Act (10. USC 331-335) approved by Congress and signed into law by Bush last October, specifically says that the president can federalize the National Guard to "suppress public disorder" in the event of "national disorder, epidemic, other serious public health emergency, terrorist attack or incident." That determination, the act states, is solely the president's to make. Congress is not involved.

Fein says, "This is all sitting around like a loaded gun waiting to go off. I think the risk of martial law is trivial right now, but the minute there is a terrorist attack, then it is real. And it stays with us after Bush and Cheney are gone, because terrorism stays with us forever." (It may be significant that Hillary Clinton, the leading Democratic candidate for president, has called for the revocation of the 2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force against Iraq, but not of the earlier 2001 AUMF which Bush claims makes him commander in chief of a borderless, endless war on terror.)

Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has added an amendment to the upcoming Defense bill, restoring the Insurrection Act to its former version-a move that has the endorsement of all 50 governors--but Fein argues that would not solve the problem, since Bush still claims that the U.S. is a battlefield. Besides, a Leahy aide concedes that Bush could sign the next Defense Appropriations bill and then use a signing statement to invalidate the Insurrection Act rider.

Fein argues that the only real defense against the looming disaster of a martial law declaration would be for Congress to vote for a resolution determining that there is no "War" on terror. "But they are such cowards they will never do that," he says.

That leaves us with the military.

If ordered to turn their guns and bayonets on their fellow Americans, would our "heroes" in uniform follow their consciences, and their oaths to "uphold and defend" the Constitution of the United States? Or would they follow the orders of their Commander in Chief?

It has to be a plus that National Guard and Reserve units are on their third and sometimes fourth deployments to Iraq, and are fuming at the abuse. It has to be a plus that active duty troops are refusing to re-enlist in droves-especially mid-level officers.

If we are headed for martial law, better that it be with a broken military. Maybe if it's broken badly enough, the administration will be afraid to test the idea.

Dave Lindorff is the author of Killing Time: an Investigation into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. His n book of CounterPunch columns titled "This Can't be Happening!" is published by Common Courage Press. Lindorff's newest book is "The Case for Impeachment",
co-authored by Barbara Olshansky.

He can be reached at: dlindorff@yahoo.com

http://www.counterpunch.org/lindorff07272007.html

Analysis: Gonzales Testimony Part of Broader Effort to Conceal Surveillance Program
By Spencer Ackerman and Paul Kiel - July 26, 2007, 6:54 PM Alberto Gonzales' testimony that there was "no serious disagreement" within the Bush Administration about the NSA warrantless surveillance program has left senators sputtering and fulminating about the attorney general's apparent prevarications. But a closer examination of Gonzales' testimony and other public statements from the Administration suggest that there may be a method to the madness.

There's a lot of evidence to suggest that Gonzales's careful, repeated phrasing to the Senate that he will only discuss the program that "the president described" was deliberate, part of a concerted administration-wide strategy to conceal from the public the very broad scope of that initial program. When, for the first time, Program X (as we'll call it, for convenience's sake) became known to senior Justice Department officials who were not its original architects, those officials -- James Comey and Jack Goldsmith, principally -- balked at its continuation. They did not back down until the program had undergone as-yet-unspecified but apparently significant revisions. But when President Bush announced what he would call the "Terrorist Surveillance Program' in December 2005, he left the clear impression that the program had always functioned the same way since its 2001 inception.

The administration's consistent refusal to discuss any aspect of the program -- current or former -- aside from what President Bush disclosed in December 2005 appears to be intended, specifically, to gloss over Comey and Goldsmith's objections. If that's the case, it could mean that the public has been presented with an inaccurate picture of the origins and scope of Program X. The Bush administration is currently contesting a Senate Judiciary Committee subpoena for documentation establishing Program X's history -- in essence, trying to ensure that the public never learns more about the program and the internal deliberations over it than what President Bush chooses to reveal.

Alberto Gonzales, on this theory, has found himself enmeshed in the administration's attempt to distinguish the less-troublesome Terrorism Surveillance Program from Program X. And it may mean he perjured himself in doing so. Today, Senate Democrats responded to Gonzales's dubious testimony on Tuesday by calling for a perjury investigation. At issue is whether Gonzales' assertions that there was "no serious disagreement" within the government about the TSP was so misleading as to amount to perjury, or whether his distinction between TSP and Program X was merely a careful parsing -- perhaps misleading but not, to use Sen. Arlen Specter's word, actionable.

In December 2005, James Risen and Eric Lichtblau broke the story of the Terrorist Surveillance Program for the New York Times. Risen's resulting book, State of War, described a surveillance effort where the National Security Agency "monitor(s) and eavesdrop(s) on large volumes of telephone calls, e-mail messages, and other Internet traffic inside the United States to search for potential evidence of terrorist activity, without search warrants or any new laws that would permit such domestic intelligence collection." Previously, the NSA only eavesdropped on foreign communications. Although the scope of that effort remains unclear, Risen estimated that NSA eavesdrops on "as many as five hundred people in the United States at any given time and it has potentially has access to the phone calls and e-mails of millions more."

The New York Times' publication of those explosive charges prompted President Bush to <a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/12/20051219-2.html">disclose, on December 19, 2005, what he would later call the Terrorist Surveillance Program:

"I authorized the interception of international communications of people with known links to al Qaeda and related terrorist organizations. This program is carefully reviewed approximately every 45 days to ensure it is being used properly. … "(T)he legal authority is derived from the Constitution, as well as the authorization of force by the United States Congress. … "I want to make clear to the people listening that this program is limited in nature to those that are known al Qaeda ties and/or affiliates. That's important. So it's a program that's limited, and you brought up something that I want to stress, and that is, is that these calls are not intercepted within the country. They are from outside the country to in the country, or vice versa. So in other words, this is not a -- if you're calling from Houston to L.A., that call is not monitored. And if there was ever any need to monitor, there would be a process to do that."

What President Bush described was far more constrained than the surveillance Risen reported.

Immediately thereafter, whenever administration officials discussed the surveillance program, they would decline to use names for it in most cases (even the "Terrorist Surveillance Program") and instead refer back to what President Bush disclosed. A letter one month later from Gonzales to then-Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN), referred only to "the NSA activities described by the president." Stumbling for a shorthand, a Justice Department fact sheet issued January 27, 2006 said that "throughout this document, the 'terrorist surveillance program' and 'the NSA program' refer to the activities described by the president.'"

Most significantly, when Gonzales first testified to the Senate on February 6, 2006, about the NSA's domestic surveillance, he at first used the term "terrorist surveillance program" -- the new choice for describing what Bush disclosed. But when Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) asked Gonzales about press accounts reporting that Comey and Goldsmith objected to the "terrorist surveillance program," Gonzales abandoned the construction. He said he was "only testifying about what the president has confirmed." And when it came to that, he said, "I do not believe that these DOJ officials that you're identifying had concerns about this program." The disagreement, Gonzales said, was about “other matters regarding operations.”

In a move that may prove crucial, the administration convinced then-committee chairman Arlen Specter (R-PA) not to swear in Gonzales for that hearing.

The different phases of the program’s implementation did not become clear until Comey’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in May of this year. Comey did not identify the program, only calling it “a particular classified program.” We won't rehash his story in full here. But during his brief reign as acting attorney general, Comey refused to reauthorize Program X in March of 2004 (here’s an explanation as to why it took two years for this to happen). Comey’s refusal was based on the concerns of Jack Goldsmith, the head of the Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, but the precise nature of Goldsmith’s concern isn’t publicly known. Goldsmith declined to comment for this story.

It all came to a head on March 10, 2004, with the deadline for reauthorizing Program X looming. That afternoon, the White House called a meeting with the so-called "Gang of Eight" -- those congressional leaders briefed about Program X -- and Gonzales and Andrew Card made their infamous visit to Ashcroft’s hospital bed that night. The President initially opted to continue the program despite Ashcroft’s refusal to overrule Comey. But the next day, March 11, when faced with the possible resignation of the top echelon of Department of Justice leadership, the President personally told Comey to recommend what changes needed to be made to Program X in order for the Department of Justice to sign off on its legality.

As Comey told the committee, the Department took “two or three weeks” to “get the analysis done and make the changes that need to be made.” Comey (or Ashcroft; Comey couldn’t remember) subsequently signed off on the revised program. Given the depths of Comey's objections and the amount of time needed to overcome them, what must have emerged was a substantially different program.

Another significant revision to Program X occurred around the same time as Comey's objections, according to Risen's book. The Administration had been briefing the chief judge of the FISA court about the program, but in the spring of 2004, a new FISA chief, Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, came onto the bench. She raised concerns about NSA-collected intelligence being used, ultimately, for terrorism prosecutions, which could result in suspected terrorists walking free if the evidence that formed the basis for their prosecutions had been collected illegally. Risen reported that "top administration officials suggested that they abandoned some of the most aggressive techniques used in the NSA surveillance operation after the judge complained."

The sparse record suggests that substantial changes were made to Program X after March of 2004. Precisely what they were, we don’t know. The initial reports, which drew no distinction between the program before and after that crucial month, described a program that surveilled the communications of Americans, including some purely domestic communications, without the issuance of warrants by a court. Prior to 9/11, such surveillance had to be approved by a FISA judge so as not to violate the 4th Amendment.

Perhaps the Administration's position is that those elements of Program X that were jettisoned in March of 2004 were so substantial that what remained -- the program that Bush announced in December of 2005 -- was a new and entirely different program. Again, we don’t know. But several members of Congress feel misled, though principally those objections are confined to Democrats, who have an obvious political interest in bringing down Gonzales. Both Jay Rockefeller and Jane Harman, members of the Gang of Eight, have stated that there has only ever been one surveillance program.

Unfortunately for Gonzales, not even he has been able to keep the distinction between the Terrorist Surveillance Program and Program X straight. During a June 5th press conference this year, he said that Comey's dispute “related to a highly classified program which the president confirmed to the American people sometime ago” – precisely the opposite of what he’d testified before. By way of explanation, Gonzales testified Tuesday that his spokesman had subsequently contacted the reporter who’d asked the question, Dan Eggen of The Washington Post, to retract that statement.

Despite that embarrassing admission, Gonzales hewed to the same line this Tuesday he’d taken in the hearing the previous February, saying that Comey’s disagreement was “not about the terrorist surveillance program that the president announced to the American people.” He maintained that line under blistering questioning – including the questions of senators, such as Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI), who also sit on the Senate intelligence committee and have been briefed on the program.

Following Gonzales' testimony, Democrats' contention that there was only one warrantless surveillance program was bolstered by the release of a May 2006 letter from John Negroponte, then the director of national intelligence, specifying that the March 10, 2004 meeting was, indeed, a TSP meeting. In response, an anonymous DOJ official told the Washington Post that in his testimony on Tuesday Gonzales "did not say that the TSP was not discussed at the meeting" -- underscoring the absurdity of the distinction that the administration is still trying to draw. Similarly, FBI Director Robert Mueller told Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee today that he and Comey had objections to the "much discussed" NSA program, a reference clear in context to the TSP.

In essence, the issue is this: if Gonzales succeeds in convincing the committee that there really is a material distinction between the program as it existed before and after Comey’s intervention, he won't just save himself from perjury. He will perhaps have preserved an administration strategy of concealing the scope of Program X from the public and most of Congress -- making it appear that the program that Bush disclosed in December 2005, incorporating Comey's objections, is the same program that existed since October 2001, long before Comey put the brakes on at least some aspects of it. That may be at the heart of the White House's claim of executive privilege to prevent the Senate Judiciary Committee from seeing documents detailing the genesis of Program X.

We may be about to learn whether a perjury investigation will pierce the obfuscations and begin to explore the extent of Program X -- a program the American public was never supposed to know about.

Permalink | TOPICS: surveillance

angers of a Cornered George Bush Applied Psychoanalysis By Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity & Dr. Justin Frank As we watched the pressure build on President Bush, looked toward the additional challenges we expect him to face over the next 18 months, and pondered his tendency to disregard the law and the Constitution, we felt very much in need of professional help in trying to estimate what kinds of decisions he is likely to make. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18081.htm

A new crisis in Russia-Iran relations
By Kaveh L Afrasiabi

Moscow's decision to postpone the completion of a 1,000-megawatt reactor in Bushehr, Iran, has shocked Tehran and is bound to bring Russia-Iran relations to a crisis point, this at a time when neither country can afford to have such a negative impact on their geostrategic considerations.

On August 15, President Mahmud Ahmadinejad is due in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, to attend (as an observer) a summit of the
Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), the regional security organization launched by Russia and China and encompassing the Central Asian states. Iran can potentially contribute to the SCO's security-related priorities and, certainly, to its anti-terrorism center.

Yet compared with last year when there were lively discussions, particularly in the Russian press, of Iran's inclusion as a member of SCO, not only is there no such talk this year but, worse, the crisis over Bushehr threatens the wellspring of the entire Iran-Russia relationship.

As usual, the Kremlin has veiled its "playing politics with Bushehr" by hiding behind its private contractors involved with the Bushehr project, who insist their announcement that Bushehr will not go operational this autumn as planned and will at the earliest the following autumn, is purely financial in nature.

According to Grigory Noginsky, chairman of the Federation Council Commission for Nuclear Energy, payments made by Iran for the construction of the plant "were in fact stopped in the beginning of the year. Even if Iran fully resumes payments today, there is such a notion as inertia, and I think that the launch will be possible in reality no earlier than in summer-autumn 2008."

This is nonsense, the Iranians insist, and they have threatened to go public by publishing all the records of Iran's regular payments to the Russian nuclear subcontractors. Noginsky's announcement coincided with a high-level Iranian delegation heading to Moscow to discuss the matter, making it look like a peremptory move on Russia's part to assure those talks are futile.

Thus the fate of the US$1 billion nuclear project has been cast under a thick cloud of uncertainty. "Confidence in the project has been undermined," Irina Yesipova, the spokeswoman for Atomstroiexport, which is building the Bushehr plant, told Interfax news agency.

As a result, confidence in Russia-Iran relations has been seriously undermined. From Iran's vantage point, there is no doubt that Moscow has appeased Washington, whose officials have openly asked Russia not to complete Bushehr.

This year, Russia also reneged on its contractual obligation to deliver nuclear fuel to Iran. Iran has a separate agreement with Moscow on nuclear fuel, which should have been respected. According to Ahmad Gharib, a former official of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization in charge of nuclear fuel, Iran can now complain against Russia for "failure to fulfill its contractual obligations". Gharib and a number of other Iranian current and/or former officials have criticized Tehran's "lack of political will" with respect to Russia's constant manipulation of its nuclear partnership with Iran for the sake of its relations with the US.

In a press interview on Wednesday, Ali Larijani, Iran's chief nuclear negotiator, once again accused the US of trying to deprive Iran of "nuclear technology and know-how". Certainly, Russia's willingness to accommodate the White House's objectives against Iran go a long mile in that direction. Gharib has rightly noted that "the operationalization of Bushehr greatly facilitates [the fulfillment] of Iran's nuclear rights and the procurement of peaceful nuclear technology".

The fact that Bushehr is now more than seven years behind schedule translates into serious worries about the future of Iran's power industry. Iran is in dire need of nuclear-generated electricity and the crisis over Bushehr directly translates into a crisis of economic planning in Iran. [1] The Russian leadership must realize the extent of damage to Iran, both short-term and long-term, caused by their toying with Bushehr for the sake of their US policy.

"Iran expects its friends to prevent the denial of Iran's legitimate rights," Iran's former president Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani has complained, and more bitter reactions on the part of other Iranian politicians have been reflected in the Iranian press. A growing number of parliamentarians openly use the word "betrayal" to describe the Kremlin's behavior. The Kremlin's other decision, to offer cooperation with the US in monitoring Iran's missile program through the giant radar stationed in Azerbaijan, has also met criticism by Iranian politicians.

At the same time, there are other points of tension between Russia and Iran, such as their competition for the European energy market. Russia has bitterly complained against the recent Iran-Turkmenistan-Turkey gas deal, which undermines Russia's energy strategy toward Europe, and the Iranian media have made [/color]no secret about the implications of this deal in harming Russia's interests.

As neighbors who share only maritime borders in the Caspian Sea, Russia and Iran are also at odds over the division of the water and its resources. Marathon negotiations among the littoral states over a new legal regime for the Caspian have been deadlocked for many years and, certainly, the worsening political
climate due to the nuclear rift will further complicate this matter.

President Vladimir Putin has not hesitated in flexing Russia's naval might in the Caspian to coerce the Iranians on the contested issue of Caspian ownership and, with alarming signs of a full-fledged crisis in Iran-Russia relations, he (and his successor) may be inclined to make more use of that leverage.

A pertinent question is whether or not Russia's still-formidable pool of shared interests with Iran, including the containment of the United States' unipolar hegemony and hopes for a world gas cartel, will act as deterrents against the current deterioration of relations above-mentioned.

After all, Russia's security calculus continues to count on Iran in its global policy, and if Russia is not careful, it may lose what it has taken for granted for a long time, that is, Iran's role in its grand scheme of things. Moscow is clearly not thrilled about the latest news from Baghdad regarding Iran-US talks and the formation of a joint panel on Iraq's security, which portends broader US-Iran security dialogue.

Until now, the Iranians have blamed Washington for obstructing talks over Tehran's nuclear program, and this position has been reiterated by Hassan Rowhani, Iran's former chief negotiator during the presidency of Mohammad Khatami, in his latest press interview. Yet that might change in light of alarming signs of Russia's thinly veiled ambiguities on the concrete proposals to resolve the nuclear standoff.

Concerning the latter, Larijani has told the foreign press that the "time-out" proposal by International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohammad ElBaradei "is not the same as a suspension demand". He is thus hinting that Iran is still seriously considering this proposal as it might be a way around Tehran's steadfast insistence that it will not suspend its nuclear program.

Both Larijani and Rowhani have said that US-Iran dialogue on Iraq can improve the climate over the nuclear talks, with Larijani putting the accent on the need for a "long-term vision" by Western and other governments insisting on a suspension of Iran's nuclear enrichment program.

"They do not say what is the next step. If Iran suspends, then what? Nothing is clear," Larijani has rightly complained. Unfortunately, the US has rejected the offer by Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki for "higher-level" talks between the US and Iran, claiming the time is not ripe. But if the US is really interested in a serious breakthrough in the nuclear row with Iran, it will have to set aside its misgivings and internal bickerings and embrace Mottaki's suggestion. This is in light of Larijani's insistence that Iran "has not rejected" the incentive package that was offered to Iran by the "five plus one" (the United Nations Security Council's permanent five - the US, Russia, China, France and the United Kingdom - plus Germany). [2]

In conclusion, it is curious that just as the US and Iran are breaking some significant ice in their long-frozen relations, new ice is gathering around the ship of Iran-Russia diplomacy. That need not be so, and the two issues are not mutually exclusive. However, if Russia persists with its shenanigans over Bushehr, which have soured the prospects for Russia-Iran cooperation on not only nuclear but also a whole array of other, eg regional and security, issues, then there is no alternative to the word "crisis" in describing the overall state of relations between the two countries.
Notes
1. For more on this, see Afrasiabi, et al,