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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JohnM who wrote (9761)	9/29/2003 1:57:16 AM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 793858

Twenty four hours into the News cycle, and the Dems want an Independent Counsel. I said you would have fun with this. --------------------------------------------------------------------- washingtonpost.com Bush Aides Say They'll Cooperate With Probe Into Intelligence Leak By Mike Allen Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, September 29, 2003; Page A01 President Bush's aides promised yesterday to cooperate with a Justice Department inquiry into an administration leak that exposed the identity of a CIA operative, but Democrats charged that the administration cannot credibly investigate itself and called for an independent probe. White House officials said they would turn over phone logs if the Justice Department asked them to. But the aides said Bush has no plans to ask his staff members whether they played a role in revealing the name of an undercover officer who is married to former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, one of the most visible critics of Bush's handling of intelligence about Iraq. An administration official told The Washington Post on Saturday that two White House officials leaked the information to selected journalists to discredit Wilson. The leak could constitute a federal crime, and intelligence officials said it might have endangered confidential sources who had aided the operative throughout her career. CIA Director George J. Tenet has asked the Justice Department to investigate how the leak occurred. National security adviser Condoleezza Rice said on "Fox News Sunday" that she knew "nothing of any such White House effort to reveal any of this, and it certainly would not be the way that the president would expect his White House to operate." She also said the White House would leave the probe in the hands of the Justice Department, calling it the "appropriate channels now." White House press secretary Scott McClellan said the Justice Department has requested no information so far. "Of course, we would always cooperate with the Department of Justice in a matter like this," he said. Asked about the possibility of an internal White House investigation, McClellan said, "I'm not aware of any information that has come to our attention beyond the anonymous media sources to suggest there's anything to White House involvement." The controversy erupted over the weekend, when administration officials reported that Tenet sent the Justice Department a letter raising questions about whether federal law was broken when the operative, Valerie Plame, was exposed. She was named in a column by Robert D. Novak that ran July 14 in The Post and other newspapers. CIA officials approached the Justice Department about a possible investigation within a week of the column's publication. Tenet's letter was delivered more recently. The department is determining whether a formal investigation is warranted, officials said. The officials said they did not know how long that would take. Democratic lawmakers and presidential candidates seized on the investigation as a new vulnerability for Bush. Sen. Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.), who has been pushing the FBI to pursue the matter for two months, said that if "something this sensitive is done under the wing of any direct appointees, at the very minimum, it's not going to have the appearance of fairness and thoroughness." From the presidential campaign trail in New Hampshire, Rep. Richard A. Gephardt (Mo.) called it "a natural conflict of interest" for Justice Department appointees to investigate their superiors, and said congressional committees should step in to try to determine what happened. Former Vermont governor Howard Dean said Attorney General John D. Ashcroft should play no role in the investigation and should turn it over to the Justice Department's inspector general, who operates independently of political appointees. "President Bush came into office promising to bring honor and integrity to the White House," Dean said. "It's time for accountability." Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (Conn.) said the investigation "must be conducted by an independent, nonpartisan counsel." Although the Independent Counsel Act, created after the Watergate abuses, expired in 1999, the attorney general can appoint a special counsel to investigate the president and other top government officials. Special counsels have less independence from the attorney general, but proponents of the system said that makes them more accountable. More specific details about the controversy emerged yesterday. Wilson said in a telephone interview that four reporters from three television networks called him in July and told him that White House officials had contacted them to encourage stories that would include his wife's identity. Novak attributed his account to "two senior administration officials." An administration aide told The Post on Saturday that the two White House officials had cold-called at least six Washington journalists and identified Wilson's wife. She is a case officer in the CIA's clandestine service and works as an analyst on weapons of mass destruction. Novak published her maiden name, Plame, which she had used overseas and has not been using publicly. Intelligence sources said top officials at the agency were very concerned about the disclosure because it could allow foreign intelligence services to track down some of her former contacts and lead to the exposure of agents. The disclosure could have broken more than one law. In addition to the federal law prohibiting the identification of a covert officer, officials with high-level national security clearance sign nondisclosure agreements, with penalties for revealing classified information. Wilson had touched off perhaps the most searing controversy of this administration by saying he had determined on a mission to Niger last year that there was no clear evidence that Saddam Hussein had tried to buy "yellowcake" uranium ore for possible use in a nuclear weapon. His statement led to a retraction by the White House, and bolstered Democrats' contention that Bush had exaggerated intelligence to build a case against Iraq. The yellowcake allegation became known as "the 16 words" after Bush said in his State of the Union address in January that the British government had learned that Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. An administration official said the leaks were "simply for revenge" for the trouble Wilson had caused Bush. Wilson said that in the week after the Novak column appeared, several journalists told him that the White House was trying to call attention to his wife, apparently hoping to undermine his credibility by implying he had received the Niger assignment only because his wife had suggested the mission and recommended him for the job. "Each of the reporters quoted the White House official as using some variation on, 'The real story isn't the 16 words. The real story is Wilson and his wife,' " Wilson said the journalists told him. "The time frame led me to deduce that the White House was continuing to try to push this story." Wilson identified one of the reporters as Andrea Mitchell of NBC News. Mitchell did not respond to requests for comment. Wilson has suggested publicly that Bush's senior adviser, Karl Rove, was the one who broke his wife's cover. McClellan has called that "totally ridiculous" and "not true." Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said on ABC's "This Week" program: "The CIA has an obligation, when they believe somebody who is undercover was outed, so to speak, has an obligation to ask the Justice Department to look into it. But other than that, I don't know anything about the matter." Democrats also questioned why Bush's aides had seemed to show little interest in the disclosure before the CIA request was made public. McClellan was asked about the Novak column during briefings on July 22 and Sept. 16. He replied that no one in the White House would have been authorized to reveal the operative's name and that he had no information to suggest White House involvement. Democrats e-mailed a quotation from former president George H.W. Bush, a former CIA director, who said in 1999 at the dedication of the agency's new headquarters that those who expose the names of intelligence sources are "the most insidious of traitors." washingtonpost.com

To: JohnM who wrote (9761)	9/29/2003 2:21:45 AM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 793858

Good article about what a disaster SS has become in K-12. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Why Doesn't Johnny Vote? Blame it on social studies. BY BRENDAN MINITER WSJ.com Monday, September 29, 2003 12:01 a.m. Social studies, depressingly, is the course Americans students do not want to take. Beginning in the 1970s--and in an apparently irreversible trend--the education establishment downsized history and the like into dull-witted subjects, gutted of all passion and focused on seemingly value-free events. Heroes? Pooh! Nationalism? Bah! Western civilization? You've gotta be kidding! Yet the Sept. 11 attacks may have changed all that. A nation at war--one compelled to ask existential questions of itself and of others--has begun to rediscover the courage, the conviction and the energy long said to be dead in America. While education reform has focused on more structural fixes like school choice, there is now also a movement to reform the substance in the classroom--in particular the curriculum taught in social-studies classes. Tireless reformers have long sought to get back to the basics in the teaching of history, civics and geography; but there's a sense of urgency now, one that has brought us "Where Did Social Studies Go Wrong?"--a collection of essays recently published by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation. Liberal educators should take this book as a warning: The groundwork for reform is now being laid. Their pedagogical world--complacent in its unchallenged political correctness--may be about to be shaken up. It's about time. After the terror attacks it was clear that educators had fallen far out of step with the rest of country. The National Council of the Social Studies designed a curriculum that urged teachers to stress "tolerance," and as its first lesson recommended looking at the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. While Americans were flying flags, a speaker at the council's annual meeting--only a few months after the attacks--warned against singing patriotic songs like "God Bless America." While disconcerting, this behavior is hardly new. Fordham's essayists suggest points in the 1920s and '30s for when social studies first turned down the wrong path. It likely began with the promise of efficiency in stripping out "useless" information for children of factory workers who would never go on to intellectual careers. A body of ideas was then constructed on how best to teach social studies--and an elite has patronized our children ever since. The new social studies often rests on "student-centered instruction" which allows students to be their own learning guides. The starting premise is that students can learn only what is familiar and directly relevant to them. Thus social studies in kindergarten through the third grade teaches students first about family, then local public servants like firemen and policemen. It also holds that members of a racial minority aren't immediately capable of learning about people who are of a different race, so black kids read about the Great Zimbabwe kingdom, not Columbus. This concentric-circle approach leaves students unprepared for serious analysis. But mostly, students find it boring. To combat boredom, teachers use pictures, videos, music and other "hands on" tools to displace reading and writing. We might call it dumbing-down. All of this serves a larger purpose. Social-studies theorists seek to create social activists. Students need not know the facts to be effective change-agents; they're taught that facts are a matter of opinion. Indeed, they need only believe that they are correct as they reject the tenets of society. The result? Elementary-school lessons that use Thanksgiving to teach that we owe redress to American Indians. The results have been disastrous. Young Americans are ignorant of history and are increasingly poor citizens (old-fashioned term!). The percentage of 18- to 24-year-olds who voted fell to 32% in 1996 and 2000, from 50% in 1972. A study in 2000 found that only 28.1% of college freshman kept up to date with politics, a record low and down from 60.3% in 1966. "The current generation of young people may set a new standard for both civic disengagement and civic misinformation," writes J. Martin Rochester in his Fordham essay. Rather than just indict social studies, Fordham's authors offer solutions. Principal among them is to recognize that facts have an objective basis, and aren't mainly a matter of opinion. They add that students respond well to knowledge-based education and are capable of understanding historical perspectives that are different than their own experiences--they can think outside their own skin. So learning about oneself is not a self-contained exercise. It involves the study of one's society and country--of history. Even, dare we say it, of heroes. Mr. Miniter is assistant editor of OpinionJournal.com. His column appears Tuesdays. opinionjournal.com

To: JohnM who wrote (9761)	9/29/2003 2:29:12 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793858

Dowd attacks Rummy in her column today. As Sullivan says, DOWD DEGENERATES: Yes, it's possible. One - perhaps the only - theme of Maureen Dowd's columns is her man-hatred. You know she's really out for someone when she mentions their testosterone. Imagine a male columnist writing about female politicians constantly mentioning PMS. But I digress. Here's her "analysis" of Donald Rumsfeld's role in the liberation of Afghanistan and Iraq: "I would describe him as the man who trashed two countries..." Now no-one can claim that everything is hunk-dory in Afghanistan and Iraq. But, compared to their existence under Saddam and the Taliban ... they're "trashed"? After two of the most target-precise wars ever conducted, with billions of reconstruction money going to Iraq, with levels of human freedom in both countries unprecedented in their history? Trashed? Dowd thinks that it was American intervention and not Saddam and sanctions that "trashed" Iraq? Is she serious? Stupid question. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WINNING THE WAR Help Iraq to Help Itself We're not there to stay. We are there to get the job done. BY DONALD H. RUMSFELD WSJ.com Monday, September 29, 2003 12:01 a.m. If you are like most Americans, the news you see on television and read in the press from Iraq seems grim--stories of firefights, car bombs, battles with terrorists. It is true that Coalition troops are serving in difficult and dangerous circumstances. But what is also true, and seems to be much less often reported, is that the Coalition has--in less than five months--racked up a series of achievements in both security and civil reconstruction that may be without precedent. I recently visited our forces in Tikrit, Mosul, Baghdad and Babylon. Their spirits are good, because they know their mission is important and they know they are making progress. Many recently got access to satellite television from the U.S.--and their first glimpse of the news coverage back home. Some expressed amazement at how few of their accomplishments are reflected in the news on Iraq. As one solider we met in Baghdad put it, "We rebuild a lot of bridges and it's not news--but one bridge gets blown up and it's a front-page story." Their successes deserve to be told. Consider just a few of their accomplishments: • Today, in Iraq, virtually all major hospitals and universities have been re-opened, and hundreds of secondary schools--until a few months ago used as weapons caches--have been rebuilt and were ready for the start of the fall semester. • 56,000 Iraqis have been armed and trained in just a few months, and are contributing to the security and defense of their country. Today, a new Iraqi Army is being trained and more than 40,000 Iraqi police are conducting joint patrols with Coalition forces. By contrast, it took 14 months to establish a police force in post-war Germany--and 10 years to begin training a new German Army. • As security improves, so does commerce: 5,000 small businesses have opened since liberation on May 1. An independent Iraqi Central Bank was established and a new currency announced in just two months--accomplishments that took three years in postwar Germany. • The Iraqi Governing Council has been formed and has appointed a cabinet of ministers--something that took 14 months in Germany. • In major cities and most towns and villages, municipal councils have been formed and are making decisions about local matters--something that took eight months in Germany. • The Coalition has completed 6,000 civil affairs projects--with many more under way. All this, and more, has taken place in less than five months. The speed and breadth of what Ambassador Paul Bremer (and his predecessor Gen. Jay Garner), Gen. John Abizaid and Gen. Rick Sanchez, and the Coalition team, both military and civilian, have accomplished is more than impressive--it may be without historical parallel. Yet much of the world does not know about this progress, because the focus remains on the security situation--which is difficult, but improving. Baath remnants and foreign terrorists are opposing the Coalition, to be sure. But the Coalition is dealing with them. This does not mean dangers don't exist. The road ahead will not be smooth. There will be setbacks. Regime loyalists and foreign terrorists are working against the Coalition. Increasingly they do so by targeting Coalition successes. Yet the Iraqi people are providing intelligence for our forces every day. Division commanders consistently report an increase in the number of Iraqis coming forward with actionable intelligence. With Iraqi help, the Coalition has now captured or killed 43 of Iraq's 55 most wanted, as well as thousands of other Baath loyalists and terrorists, and seized large caches of weapons. As Iraqis see Coalition forces act, their confidence grows--and they are providing more information. In Baghdad, a reporter asked why we don't just "flood the zone"--double or treble the number of American troops in the country? We could do that, but it would be a mistake. First, as Gens. Abizaid and Sanchez have stated, they do not believe they need more American troops--if they did, they would ask and they would get them. The division commanders in Iraq have said that, far from needing more forces, additional troops could complicate their mission--because it would require more force protection, more combat support, and create pressure to adopt a defensive posture (guarding buildings, power lines, etc.), when their intention is to remain on the offense against the terrorists and Baath party remnants. That is why, at the end of May, Gen. Jim Mattis, the Marine division commander in the south central area, decided to send home 15,000 of his 23,000 troops. As he recently explained: "If at any point I had needed more troops, I could have asked for them. But I have not needed them. The enemy over there, once we get the intelligence on them, \[is\] remarkably easy to destroy. My way of thinking: If we needed more people on our side, enlist more Iraqis." That is precisely what Coalition forces are doing--training tens of thousands of Iraqis to serve as police, border guards, a new facilities protection service, a new Iraqi National Army, and an Iraqi Civil Defense Corps. Iraqis are eager to participate in their own security. The commanders in Iraq report that they are exceeding recruitment goals for these forces. The Coalition is not in Iraq to stay. Our goal is to help Iraqis so they can take responsibility for the governance and security of their country, and foreign forces can leave. That is why the president has asked for $20 billion to help the Iraqis get on a path to self-government and self-reliance. He's requested $15 billion to speed repairs to Iraq's dilapidated infrastructure so Iraq can begin generating income through oil production and foreign investments. And he's requested another $5 billion to help the Iraqis assume the responsibility for the security of their own country. The goal is not for the U.S. to rebuild Iraq. Rather, it is to help the Iraqis get on a path where they can pay to rebuild their own country. The money the president is requesting is a critical element in the Coalition's exit strategy. Because the sooner we help Iraqis to defend their own people the faster Coalition forces can leave and they can get about the task of fashioning truly Iraqi solutions to their future. In Baghdad, I met with members of the Governing Council. One message came through loud and clear: They are grateful for what Coalition forces are doing for their country. But they do not want more American troops--they want to take on more responsibility for security and governance of the country. The goal is to help them do so. Those advocating sending more Americans forces--against the expressed wishes of both our military commanders and Iraq's interim leaders--need to consider whether doing so would truly advance our objective of transferring governing responsibility to the Iraqi people. Iraqis will have to overcome the physical and psychological effects of living three decades under a Stalinist system. But the ingredients for success are there. Iraq has oil, water and vast wheat and barley fields. It has biblical sites, and great potential for tourism. It has an educated, intelligent and industrious population. We should resist the urge to do for the Iraqis what would be better done by the Iraqis. We can help--but only if we balance the size of our presence to meet the military challenge, while putting increasing responsibility in Iraqi hands. Mr. Rumsfeld is secretary of defense. opinionjournal.com

To: JohnM who wrote (9761)	9/29/2003 4:13:35 AM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 793858

Another good column by Brownstein. He is a "lefty" who can write. -------------------------------------------------------------------- Democrats Give Belligerence a Chance When it Comes to Trade Ronald Brownstein September 29, 2003 If there's one point of agreement among all of the Democratic presidential candidates, it's that President Bush has unnecessarily alienated the world with an approach to international security that is "arrogant," "bullying" and "belligerent." Here's former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, in a speech in Iowa in February, describing Bush's foreign policy: "I believe that the president too often employs a reckless, go-it-alone approach that drives us away from some of our longest-standing and most important allies, when what we need is to pull the world community together in common action." Now here's Dean, back in Iowa in August, telling a union audience how he would convince America's trading partners to adopt labor and environmental laws as stringent as those in the United States: "How am I going to get this passed?" Dean asked. "We are the biggest economy in the world; we don't have to participate in [the North American Free Trade Agreement] and we don't have to participate in the [World Trade Organization]. If we don't, it falls apart." Mr. Pot, meet Mr. Kettle. It turns out Dean intends to talk to other countries about trade pretty much the way he says Bush talks to them about everything else. Much like Bush at the United Nations before the invasion of Iraq, Dean is offering the world a simple choice on trade: Either do things our way, or we'll abandon the international rules and systems that we, more than any other nation, helped to build. The point isn't to pick on Dean — who, heaven knows, is receiving enough negative attention from his Democratic rivals these days. Virtually every other Democratic contender is simultaneously promising to mend fences with our allies and to get tough with them over trade. There are good arguments for both positions. But taken too far, the pledge to crack heads on trade could undermine the promise to smooth relations with the world on everything else. "It's a serious problem," says James B. Steinberg, deputy national security advisor under President Clinton. "We have to think of trade as part of a seamless web of how we engage in the world. We have to see all of these pieces being connected with each other." Among the Democratic contenders, it's not just Dean who is failing that test. At a debate in New Mexico this month, Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina charged that Bush's foreign policy has alienated the United States not only from Europe but also from "our friends in Latin America, in Mexico." Only a few weeks earlier — at the same labor forum in Iowa that Dean attended — Edwards said that as president he would demand Mexico renegotiate NAFTA and would oppose the completion of a free trade area linking the United States with all of Central and South America without much tougher requirements that those countries improve their labor and environmental laws. It's difficult to imagine anything that a President Edwards could do that would alienate the United States from Mexico more than unilaterally insisting on reopening NAFTA. For that matter, it's difficult to imagine a more dismissive signal a president could send to America's "friends in Latin America" than threatening to shelve the hemispheric free trade agreement unless those countries radically restructure their economies to suit our demands. The irony in this Democratic chest-thumping on trade is that the last few weeks have offered powerful evidence for their larger case against a foreign policy built mostly on throwing our weight around. When Bush went to the U.N. last week, he didn't give much to the countries demanding more international say in the rebuilding of Iraq. Not surprisingly, nobody gave much back to him. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Army Gen. John Abizaid, the commander of U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf, both told Congress last week not to expect many foreign reinforcements, regardless of whether the U.N. eventually approves a resolution authorizing more international help. Meanwhile, the Financial Times reported that the European Union is preparing to chip in to the estimated $20-billion cost of rebuilding Iraq's infrastructure with a ringing contribution of $230 million. Apparently, if you disparage and belittle people ("old Europe"), they're not eager to bail you out of a jam. Who knew? Even the collapse of the world trade negotiations in Cancun, Mexico, this month may have reflected lingering animosity over Bush's bruising diplomacy. The talks failed principally because the United States and Europe refused to slash farm subsidies that protect their farmers against imports from poor countries. But "a lot of what happened in Cancun was not about trade," as Steinberg, the director of foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution think tank, notes. "It was a broader reaction to the way we want people to help us when it suits us, but we're not responsive to their concerns." If resentment over security issues can poison economic negotiations, the reverse is also true: A Democratic president who tries to bully the world on trade could alienate other countries just as surely as Bush did on Iraq. That doesn't mean legitimate trade concerns have to be sublimated to maintaining security alliances, as they were in the Cold War. It just means any president has to maintain a sense of proportion about how much change the United States can demand in other societies as the price of obtaining access to our markets. Any Democratic president, given the prominence of organized labor in the party, will push harder than Bush for reform in developing countries that provide their producers an unfair cost advantage by allowing them to pollute the environment or exploit their workers. To a point, that emphasis benefits workers in America and around the world. But promises from several Democrats to impose punitive tariffs on countries that don't meet our expectations in their labor and environmental laws — much less Dean's pledge to use trade talks to pressure every nation on the globe to match U.S. standards on those fronts — are a recipe for endless conflict. If the Democrats really intend to take more account than Bush of the world's opinion, they will have to demonstrate it not just on questions of war and peace, where their most ardent partisans want the whole world to hold hands. They'll also have to prove it on the trade disputes where their base is clamoring for the cudgels. Ronald Brownstein's column appears every Monday. See current and past Brownstein columns on The Times' Web site at latimes.com .