Alarming rise in US soldiers needing medical care
(* Below is the kind of news Bushies do not want Americans to know about, but it is real, extremely important and must be considered as this democracy (not just Bush) makes its decisions for how to deal with the Iraq problem)
More than 85,000 U.S. soldiers who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan have sought medical care from the Department of Veterans Affairs after getting back, that department told Congress Thursday. That is an increase of 52,000 GIs since last summer -- last July the VA said 35,000 vets from Iraq and Afghanistan had sought medical treatment from the department.
"As of February 2005, the VA had data on 360,674 (veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan) who had separated from active duty," John Brown, director of the Seamless Transition Office at the VA told a House panel. "Approximately 24 percent of these veterans, 85,857, have sought health care from the VA."
Brown said about half of the vets getting treatment from the VA were career soldiers and the other half were reserve troops activated for war.
Some of those soldiers were presumably not wounded and wanted to see doctors for other problems after getting home, but the new data sheds more light on the somewhat shocking size and scope of the wars beyond just the statistic of 140,000 soldiers in Iraq that seems to be most common in U.S. newspapers.
Last month, Salon reported that well over 1 million GIs have served in Iraq and Afghanistan since 9/11. And about one-third of those who have fought have done so more than one time. A retired general said the numbers are a sign that the United States is burning through its ground troops at a dangerous clip, threatening to grind down the Army to a level not seen since just after Vietnam.
Not all of those 85,000 GIs were wounded. The number includes those who have served in war and come back home to be released from military service but still need healthcare, soldiers seeing doctors for problems unrelated to war and wounded folks who are on active duty and being treated in military hospitals, like the Army's Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington.
The Department of Veterans Affairs takes care of soldiers even after they leave the military. There are a number of reasons people are released from the Army (though fewer are being released since the Pentagon instituted a "stop-loss" policy), but one is to have been wounded or injured or have some other medical problem.
-- Mark Benjamin
The U.S. military's personnel woes
With U.S. soldiers continuing to get wounded and killed in Iraq, military recruiters have seen the number of young people willing to risk their lives overseas decline. On top of which, troops are going AWOL -- 5,133 at the Pentagon's last count -- while thousands more, according to a report in the UK Independent, are calling the GI Rights Hotline every month for advice on how to leave the Army. And this week, members of the Realignment and Closure Commission told Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that the Pentagon's intended base closures will put a further dent in recruitment. Consolidating National Guard and Reserve members onto fewer bases, some of which are located in remote locations, could create longer commuting times for part-time soldiers, which would make recruiting more difficult, Commissioner James Bilbray said, according to USA Today.
To compensate for the military's declining popularity, recruiters have stepped up efforts on campuses in recent months -- but have met with resistance from universities, some of which have a case pending in federal court to bar recruiters from campus on the grounds that the military discriminates against gays.
Some recruiters, under immense pressure to fill quotas, have resorted to dishonest and illegal tactics to entice young people to enlist, including covering up recruits' criminal records and threatening them with arrest for skipping an appointment. Tomorrow, the Army will suspend recruiting efforts for one day in a "values stand down" -- after a number of troubling reports of recruiting misconduct nationwide -- to refresh recruiters on proper procedure.
-- Julia Scott
[14:13 EDT, May 19, 2005]
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Getting closer but still stuck
The latest meeting among moderates working to avert the nuclear option has just ended -- without an agreement but with some level of optimism that one could be near.
Senators leaving the meeting universally spoke of the “good will” of their colleagues, and senators from both sides said the negotiations over the last several days have helped build a level of trust among the usually warring parties.
As he walked out of the meeting, Colorado Sen. Ken Salazar said he couldn't tell whether the group was “10 percent” or “70 percent” done in getting a deal. “We still have some sticking points,” Salazar said. “We're getting closer, but we do still have some sticking points. We're just not quite at the point where we can all say yes.” Joe Lieberman said he thought there was still plenty of times for the parties to reach middle ground.
The sticking point now seems to be what level of guarantee Republicans will have to give about resisting a renewed drive for the nuclear option sometime down the road. Democrat Bill Nelson confirmed that the participants have reached a “general agreement” on which currently blocked judges are going to get floor votes, and he suggested that Republicans have achieved a “comfort level” with Democrats' assurances that they won't filibuster future Bush nominees except in extraordinary circumstances. But, Nelson said, “nothing is settled until the entire agreement is agreed to.”
The group, which seems to grow with each meeting, will meet again this afternoon, senators said.
-- Tim Grieve
[13:04 EDT, May 19, 2005]
Launching Bolton before the nuclear option
That's what the Bush White House wants to see happen, according to a report in the The Hill -- but it'll require a battle with Bill Frist. According to the paper, Republican sources in the Senate said White House aides urged Frist this week to have John Bolton's nomination considered before the chamber gets tied up with any protracted battle over the issue of filibustering judicial nominees. But a GOP aide said the majority leader "pushed back within minutes and that was the end. It was immediately rejected."
At this point Frist may be more beholden to his right-wing base in terms of prioritizing Senate business; the current Supreme Court term finishes at the end of June, when it's widely expected that the ailing Chief Justice William Rehnquist will announce his retirement. Of course, Frist would be prioritizing the fight for Bush's own judicial nominees -- but apparently the administration is nervous that the longer the wait on Bolton, the more difficult it may become to get its political muscleman the nod for U.N. ambassador. It's an intriguing measure of Bolton's importance to the administration, and the administration's concern over his propects (no doubt a function of Bolton's lengthening rap sheet as a bully and manipulator).
"The feeling is that time is not on our side," said one GOP aide of the nomination.
As The Hill further notes, the fallout from the filibuster battle itself, if it takes precedence, could wipe out Bolton: "Democrats have yet to decide whether they will filibuster Bolton’s nomination, which the Senate Foreign Relations Committee reported to the floor without a recommendation, the first time since 1993 the committee has done so with a diplomatic nominee. It is likely that Democrats will be more inclined to filibuster Bolton’s nomination after Republicans trigger the nuclear option, which Democrats predict will lead to a shattering of bipartisan cooperation."
-- Mark Follman
[12:59 EDT, May 19, 2005]
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Wish the senators luck
Negotiations aimed at averting the nuclear options are under way again this morning, this time in the office of Arizona Sen. John McCain. As Bill Frist was holding a hard line on the Senate floor, a handful of other Republicans, including McCain, Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins and Mike DeWine, were trying again to reach a "six-by-six" compromise with Democrats Mark Pryor, Robert Byrd, Ben Nelson, Joe Lieberman and Mary Landrieu.
The sticking points: Which judges would Democrats allow to get floor votes, and what will keep Frist from trying to go nuclear at some later date?
Senators didn't say much as they filed one by one into McCain's office, but they seemed mostly upbeat. Virginia Sen. John Warner, who has expressed concerns that the nuclear option would destroy Senate tradition, smiled for the cameras and flashed a thumbs up at reporters as he walked into McCain's conference room. "Wish us luck," he said.
Meanwhile, on the floor, Harry Reid was beseeching "responsible Republicans" to reach a compromise with Democrats, stressing, as he has previously, that it only takes six Republicans to kill the nuclear option.
-- Tim Grieve
[11:44 EDT, May 19, 2005]
WSJ phones in media attack
Is being a conservative press critic the easiest, least taxing job in American journalism? Honestly. So little effort goes into documenting the media's alleged liberal sins that the whole practice has become a bit of a joke.
Today's phoning-it-in award goes to Leo Banks, who wrote an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal complaining about the "elite media" and its skewed coverage of the Minutemen, those southwest volunteers who patrolled the U.S./Mexico border in an effort to keep illegal aliens out of this country. The Minutemen received an extraordinary amount of press coverage and Banks complains the liberal press got it all wrong.
It's an utterly predictable attack from the WSJ editorial page, but what makes the piece so amazing is that Banks doesn't provide a single example to show how the press got it wrong. Not one article is quoted and not one television report is cited. Apparently too busy to do any actual media analysis, Banks simply insists the press did X,Y,Z and expects everyone to believe it.
For instance, Banks writes, "In the view of most of the reporters who parachuted into Arizona for this story and, disturbingly, local ones as well, you'd get the distinct impression that the Minutemen are the problem along the border."
Press examples to back up that claim? Zero.
"[Reporters] wanted to stand up the angle that went something like -- no, exactly like -- this: Gun-toting vigilantes run amok in the desert, hunting harmless illegals who are only looking for work."
Press examples to back that up? Zero.
"These border residents are routinely snickered at and called racist vigilantes."
Press examples to back that up? Zero.
Lastly, Banks argues the press has ignored the issue of illegal aliens: "But you haven't heard much about these problems nationally, because the media soft-pedal them. Why? It's politically incorrect. We've built a new third rail in American life. Leave the harmless illegals alone and go after their victims instead."
No press coverage of illegal aliens? Hmm, for a period covering just the last two months, Nexis can retrieve 246 articles and television news accounts that mention "illegal alien" at least four times.
So where do we apply for conservative press critic credentials? It's nice work if you can get it.
-- Eric Boehlert
[11:14 EDT, May 19, 2005]
The press rewrites the Jeff Gannon story
Watching ensconced Beltway journalists get busy trying to rewrite the Jeff Gannon story in recent weeks has made for some strange reading, as scribes argue they were right to ignore the controversy because, in retrospect, it was no big deal. The whole revisionist exercise would be funny if it weren't so sad; a telltale sign of today's press corps timidity.
A good chunk of the recent Vanity Fair feature on Gannon -- the former male escort who used a phony name while volunteering for a phony news organization and got instant access to the White House briefing room without having to submit to a full background check -- was set aside to explore the media elite notion the controversy was a big nothing. The Washington Post's Mike Allen and ABC's Terry Moran, two White House correspondents who all but ignored the Gannon story as it unfolded right in front of them for weeks last winter, were quoted to that effect. Allen assured readers it was "super-naive to think" the White House had anything to do with getting Gannon whisked inside, while Moran tipped his hat to Gannon, calling some of his briefing questions "valuable and necessary."
That's their (defensive) spin and they're entitled to it. But it was a revisionist Boston Globe column from this week that really made War Room's jaw drop. Penned by the paper's D.C bureau chief Peter Canellos, the piece, "Gannon's Story Left Critics Tarnished, Too," took a tsk-tsk approach to Gannon's online accusers. War Room thinks that's a bit of a stretch, but so be it. But this passage was just unpardonable:
"In many respects, the Gannon scandal followed a similar trajectory as the similarly unproven allegations of the swift boat veterans who claimed that John Kerry had lied about his military service: Newspapers could not verify any of the allegations except one that Kerry himself acknowledged. But the veterans' TV ads nonetheless commanded wide coverage as symbols of Kerry's weaknesses as a presidential candidate."
That's right, the Gannon story, which, as Salon detailed, was essentially boycotted by major media outlets for weeks at a time last winter, "followed a similar trajectory" as the Swift Boat story which dominated the political news cycle for a solid month last summer, to the point where it helped wipe out Sen. John Kerry's post-convention bounce last August, and arguably cost him the election.
For some context, consider that during the roughly four weeks last February as the Gannon story made news the Boston Globe published exactly three stories or columns that mentioned the controversy, according to the Nexis electronic database. During the roughly four weeks the Swift Boat story made news last August, the Boston Globe published 41 articles or columns that mentioned the controversy.
Search Nexis' category of major newspapers for mentions Gannon last February and you get 122 hits. Do the same search for Swift Boat Veterans for last August and you get 748 hits.
Yet according to the Globe, the two stories, a fictitious one that targeted a Democratic candidate and was embraced by the Beltway press, and a factual one that targeted a Republican White House and was downplayed by the Beltway press, "Followed a similar trajectory."
It would be funny if it weren't so sad.
-- Eric Boehlert
[07:30 EDT, May 19, 2005]
How the GOP filibustered the truth
In the weeks leading up to the showdown over the judicial filibuster, the GOP helped its supporters form their opinions on the issue with its easy-to-use (if often inaccurate) anti-filibuster talking points. Now that the debate has finally hit the Senate floor, Media Matters for America is countering the misinformation campaign with a handy primer of its own: a Top Ten list of lies conservatives has been spreading in an attempt to force confirmation of President Bush's controversial nominees to the bench.
Media Matters sets readers straight on such right-wing falsehoods as the suggestion that filibustering a judicial nominee is unconstitutional (it is not!), the claim that Democrats' blocking of Bush's nominees is unprecedented (wrong again!), and the idea that the term "nuclear option" was coined by Democrats (it was coined by Trent Lott!). Readers seeking a more complete breakdown of the issue of the day should look no further than Salon's own guide to everything you wanted to know about the "nuclear option."
-- Page Rockwell
[18:36 EDT, May 18, 2005]
Newsweek tells its own story
Newsweek follows up with its own play-by-play of what went wrong with the Quran-abuse story. The magazine's blunder was a big one, and any argument in its own defense merits some skepticism. But staffer Evan Thomas gets it right in his assessment of the greater backdrop for the Islamic world's violent reaction. Though the Bush White House is plenty eager to make Newsweek (rather than its own foreign policy) responsible for the flames of anti-Americanism burning around the globe, the magazine's reporting debacle was more akin to a fresh piece of tinder tossed on a smoldering bonfire.
"The Newsweek report arrived at a particularly delicate moment in Afghan politics," writes Thomas. Militant Islamic clerics in Pakistan and Afghanistan quickly seized upon the piece, he notes, using it to incite the faithful. "Opponents of the Karzai government, including remnants of the deposed Taliban regime, have been looking for ways to exploit public discontent."
And does U.S. post-invasion policy bear any blame for that discontent? Most Americans are aware of just how well the reconstruction job has gone in Iraq -- after all, a lot of our uniformed men and women are still camped out there in harm's way -- but a still seriously shaky Afghanistan is more a land of the forgotten: "The Afghan economy is weak, and the government (pressed by the United States) has alienated farmers by trying to eradicate their poppy crops, used to make heroin in the global drug trade. Afghan men are sometimes rounded up during ongoing U.S. military operations, and innocents can sit in jail for months. When they are released, many complain of abuse. President Karzai is still largely respected, but many Afghans regard him as too dependent on and too obsequious to the United States. With Karzai scheduled to come to Washington next week, this is a good time for his enemies to make trouble."
While abusing the Quran wouldn't legally qualify as torture, one astonishing quote from the Newsweek follow-up shows just how strategically out of touch U.S. interrogators have been in terms of winning the war of ideas, if they did in fact do it. (And anyone who argues that the Newsweek debacle means case closed on allegations at Gitmo, that they're nothing more than the lies of Islamic militants, is kidding themselves.) "We can understand torturing prisoners, no matter how repulsive," said a computer teacher Muhammad Archad, who was interviewed last week by Newsweek in Peshawar, Pakistan, where one of the protests took place. "But insulting the Quran is like deliberately torturing all Muslims. This we cannot tolerate."
-- Mark Follman
[16:26 EDT, May 18, 2005]
Funding the faith-based community
President Bush's abstinence-only education spending spree is coming under fresh scrutiny this week; the American Civil Liberties Union announced it is suing the federal government for giving more than $1 million in faith-based funding to Silver Ring Thing, a program that encourages teens to take abstinence pledges. The ACLU says the program has used the fed funding to preach about God, hand out Bibles and give teens a silver ring inscribed with Scripture to symbolize their chastity vow. Over 30,000 teens in the U.S., Britain and South Africa have taken the pledge, and program founder Denny Pattyn has vowed to put two million rings on teens' fingers by 2010. ("We don't ever want to take the gospel out of our message because we believe the power for abstinence is a changed heart," Pattyn has said.)
The group's message obliterates any separation between church and state, said Carol Rose, Executive Director of the ACLU of Massachusetts, in a statement: "The Silver Ring Thing is nothing more than a vehicle for converting young people to Christianity. Our taxpayer dollars should play no part in such a program."
-- Julia Scott
[15:48 EDT, May 18, 2005]
Dealing with insecurity at Homeland Security
The U.S. House of Representatives had to do a fair amount of trimming to get the $31.8 billion Department of Homeland Security appropriations bill into shape for Tuesday night's vote; lawmakers reduced the department's overall funding request by seven percent. One intriguing item that was stripped from Homeland Security's proposed 2006 budget: the $136,000 the department was paying TV actress Bobbie Faye Ferguson, a former "Dukes of Hazzard" guest star, to be its image consultant.
Now, we'd be the first to agree that Homeland Security is in need of a makeover -- and apparently Ferguson was hired for more than just her Daisy Dukes: Her rather colorful resume includes a stint as a hooker with a heart of gold on Designing Women, event planning for the Clinton administration, and seven years as a spokesperson for NASA. And Homeland Security certainly isn't the only government group to use creative P.R. tactics to burnish its image, as department spokesperson Brian Roerhkasse himself pointed out: "This is a similar function that numerous other federal agencies possess, and is necessary in helping those in multimedia make their projects as accurate as possible." According to the Associated Press, one urgent issue to which Roehrkasse pointed: Some movies continue to refer to the now-defunct Immigration and Nationalization Service, whose functions were absorbed by Homeland Security in 2003.
But Rep. Marilyn Musgrave, R-Colo., wasn't buying Roerhkasse's everyone-else-is-doing-it defense, noting that Homeland Security is the last agency that should be shelling out taxpayer dollars to fact-check Hollywood. "We should direct this money to actually help the people who respond and save lives," Musgrave said. "The people of this country have high expectations about their security after being violated on 9/11." At Musgrave's urging, the House voted to nix Ferguson's salary and commit the funds to state and local disaster teams, many of which are in need of, among other precautionary gear, hazardous-material protective suits and emergency P.A. systems.
-- Page Rockwell
[14:58 EDT, May 18, 2005]
Bush's toxic EPA
Major environmental groups and public health advocacy organizations announced four different legal challenges in federal court to the Environmental Protection Agency's weak new mercury pollution rules today. The dozen groups argue that the Bush administration's new mercury regulations don't do enough to reduce emissions of the harmful neurotoxin from coal-fired power plants. The poison contaminates fish, especially impacting large predators, like tuna and swordfish, which are popular with American diners.
Attorneys general from 13 different states, including New Jersey, California, New York, New Hampshire and Vermont, have already filed suit against the rules, on the grounds that they don't meet the standards of the Clean Air Act. Today, Earthjustice announced it is suing in federal court on behalf of the Sierra Club, Environmental Defense and the National Wildlife Federation. The Clean Air Task Force filed suit for the U.S. Public Research Interest Group, Natural Resources Council of Maine and the Ohio Environmental Council. And the Waterkeeper Alliance, led by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., is suing too, along with Chesapeake Bay Foundation and the Conservation Law Foundation. Finally, the Natural Resources Defense Council is making its own case against the mercury rule.
"Everyone knows that this rule is illegal," said Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., president of the Waterkeeper Alliance, in a joint statement. "Congress knows it, industry knows it, even E.P.A. knows it -- and the courts are about to know it."
But even if the suits are successful, it will take years for all these legal challenges to have any impact on the air -- years when the health of hundreds of thousands of American newborns will be put in danger. According to scientists from the Environmental Protection Agency, mercury pollution puts more than 600,000 American newborns at risk a year for permanent brain damage, which can lead to a lifetime of learning disabilities and developmental problems. "Mercury does not affect everyone equally," said Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club. "The E.P.A.'s job is to 'protect human health and the environment' but what it's really doing is putting more women and children at risk of mercury poisoning."
The Bush Administration has argued that mercury pollution is a global problem, and that cleaning up at the polluting sources at home won't have much impact on it. So, the administration has advised American women in their child-bearing years and parents of young children simply to avoid the most contaminated fish. Yet, the administration has simultaneously fought international regulations against mercury pollution, arguing in favor of voluntary actions on the part of industry.
"In what is becoming an all-too-familiar pattern, instead of protecting the public, the Bush administration chose to side with polluters," said Supryia Ray, an advocate for U.S. PIRG. "The administration is imposing risks on America's children that no parent would want to take."
This sorry state of affairs has led some to take action outside of the court system. One Salon reader was so incensed by the contamination of the tuna fish his toddler loves that he and his wife mailed all their canned tuna to the White House in protest. At the post office, the window attendant asked him, "Are there any toxic or hazardous substances in the package?"
-- Katharine Mieszkowski
[13:39 EDT, May 18, 2005]
L.A. Times blows kiss to Frist
Republicans picked up an unusual ally in their battle over judicial nominees and plan to detonate the nuclear option to blow away filibusters. The usually reliably liberal editorial page of the Los Angeles Times today gives its hearty support to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist to "nuke" the filibuster.
The paper doesn't think Bush's judicial nominees are worthy of appointment, but nonetheless strikes out on its contrarian way:
"We don't share these activists' enthusiasm for the White House judicial nominees triggering the current showdown. But we do believe that nominees are entitled to a vote on the floor of the Senate. The filibuster, an arcane if venerable parliamentary tactic that empowers a minority of 41 senators to block a vote, goes above and beyond those checks on majority power legitimately written into the Constitution."
The paper says that dismantling hundreds of years' worth of Senate precedent regarding judicial nominees "would be a great triumph for the American people."
-- Eric Boehlert
[12:12 EDT, May 18, 2005]
Those are fighting words
The Senate has just begun debating George W. Bush's nomination of Priscilla Owen to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit -- a debate that could lead to the nuclear option. Centrists are working nearly 'round the clock on a compromise plan, and Democrats appear to feel increasingly bullish about their ability to reach a deal.
But the leaders of the two parties aren't moving yet, a fact underscored by the tenor of their statements on the Senate floor this morning. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid said the Republicans' push for the nuclear option is part of a "disturbing pattern" of GOP "arrogance." In the process, he sarcastically referred to Vice President Dick Cheney -- who could provide the tie-breaking vote on the nuclear option -- as a "paragon of virtue."
Not to be outdone, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist -- in a rambling, nondenial denial to the question whether he himself once voted in support of a filibuster of one of Bill Clinton's judicial nominees -- said that Democrats are using the filibuster to "to kill, to defeat, to assassinate" judicial nominees.
Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin just took the Senate floor to call Frist on his comments. Although Durbin said that he was confident that Frist's comments did not "reflect his heart," he said senators should be more careful about the words they use in the debate over judges. As Durbin noted, the Senate Judiciary Committee heard this morning from Joan Lefkow, the federal judge whose family members were murdered earlier this year.
-- Tim Grieve
[11:17 EDT, May 18, 2005]
GOP's Coleman whopped by Brit
War Room agrees with Americablog: You've got to watch this clip. It's an excerpt from yesterday's Senate hearings, chaired by Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., into the United Nations' oil-for-food controversy. Called to testify was a feisty, antiwar member of the British Parliament, accused by Coleman and others of rigging the system, buying up Iraqi oil and befriending Saddam Hussein. But it was Galloway who took control of the hearing and, as Americablog puts it, "ripped Coleman a new one as only a Brit can."
That seemed to be the international consensus.
Here's a key Galloway passage that might still be ringing in Coleman's ears:
"I told the world that Iraq, contrary to your claims, did not have weapons of mass destruction. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to al-Qaida. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to the atrocity on 9/11, 2001. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that the Iraqi people would resist a British and American invasion of their country and that the fall of Baghdad would not be the beginning of the end, but merely the end of the beginning.
"Senator, in everything I said about Iraq, I turned out to be right and you turned out to be wrong. And 100,000 people paid with their lives -- 1,600 of them American soldiers sent to their deaths on a pack of lies, 15,000 of them wounded, many of them disabled forever on a pack of lies."
-- Eric Boehlert
[11:15 EDT, May 18, 2005]
White House wants retraction-plus from Newsweek
Not content with Newsweek's decision to retract its story about a Quran being flushed down the toilet at Gitmo Bay, White House spokesman Scott McClellan thinks the weekly mag should go one step further and "help repair the damage" done by writing some puff pieces about the U.S. military and how it's dedicated to treating Islam with care.
"One way is to point out what the policies and practices of our United States military are," said McClellan. "Our United States military personnel go out of their way to make sure that the Holy Quran is treated with care."
Of course what's really going on is the White House, despite Newsweek's prompt action, is simply trying to get more mileage out of the controversy, while at the same time pushing back on the press corps yet again. The New York Times helps pull the curtain back a bit with this revealing passage:
"Republicans close to the White House said that although President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney were genuinely angered by the Newsweek article, West Wing officials were also exploiting it in an effort to put a check on the press.
"There's no expectation that they're going to bring down Newsweek, but there is a feeling that there is no check on what you guys do," said one outside Bush advisor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he did not want to be identified as talking about possible motives of the White House.
"In the course of any administration," he continued, "you have three or four opportunities, at most, with a high-profile press mistake. And if you're going to make a point -- and no White House is ever going to love the way it's covered -- you have to highlight those places where there is a screw-up."
Meanwhile, McClellan's heavy-handed attempt at playing Newsweek editor, by busily assigning stories to repair the damage, didn't go over real well in the White House briefing room yesterday. As E&P notes, scribes also didn't appreciate the administration lecturing Newsweek about using a single anonymous source when the White House itself often sets up mundane background briefings for reporters using ground rules that they not name the administration source.
Quipped one reporter, "With all due respect, … it sounds like you're saying your single anonymous sources are OK and everyone else's aren't."
-- Eric Boehlert
[07:12 EDT, May 18, 2005]
The biggest cost of Newsweek's blunder
First off, Newsweek screwed up, and screwed up big. But the day after the magazine's retraction of the Quran-abuse story, there is ample evidence of why its mistake is so costly -- because it turns Gitmo into a circus-of-a-media story, rather than one about the long-term pattern of abuses inside the Bush administration's secretive system of military prisons used in the war against terrorism. Newsweek's blunder hinges on Pentagon acknowledgement of Quran abuse at Gitmo, not whether it or other abuses have occurred. (See the above link for more.) Today, conservative bloggers are all piling on with the same woefully misguided (or just plain partisan) question: "How many other stories about torture at U.S. prisons have been bogus?"
Lexington Green of the Chicago Boyz blog, who insinuates that there's no Gitmo story behind Newsweek's Gitmo story, is case in point: "Republicans in Congress should open an investigation of Newsweek, to determine who leaked this, what the basis was for the leak, what the motive was for the leak. If there is some basis of truth in it, we should know that. If not, we should find out who is responsible for this, and if they are government employees who circulated a lie, they should be disciplined. An appropriate committee should subpoena Isikoff and his colleagues. Make them produce all emails, notes, correspondence, telephone records. We may well find that the motive for this was partisan damage to the President. That is what I would bet on."
Sure, you're quickly digressing into thoughts of Bob Novak here... but let's stay focused:
"We need to get to the bottom of this," Green continues. "The United States has just suffered a global strategic defeat akin to Abu Ghraib, and many people have lost their lives, and many more will in the future, probably all based on a complete lie."
Probably all based on a complete lie? Green needs to revisit his own comparison with Abu Ghraib in the previous part of that same sentence, and think about what went on there -- and why else there might be flashpoints for anti-American violence in the Muslim world today. (Even if a major media screw-up is what sets one off.)
While the righty bloggers lick their chops in anticipation of another CBS-like meal, the mainstream media is apparently having its own tortured time of getting around to the core issue of abuses inside Gitmo. Focusing on poor "journalistic standards," White House spokesman Scott McClellan yesterday emphasized blame on Newsweek (rather than U.S. policies) for fueling anti-Americanism abroad; the New York Times seemed to go along with that official line today, reporting that Newsweek's retraction "reflected the severity of consequences that even one sentence in a brief news article can have at a time of intense anti-American sentiment overseas and political polarization, as well as extreme distrust of the mainstream media at home." (Later in the piece the Times did get around to the heap of allegations -- including from former U.S. interrogators themselves, as well as the FBI -- that led to the Newsweek story in the first place.)
The use (and abuse) of anonymous sources is a worthy sidebar; today's Wall Street Journal focuses a big feature there: "The Newsweek episode is only the latest in a series of high-profile editorial mishaps in recent years that have shaken the public's confidence in the news business. Reporters Jayson Blair of the New York Times and Jack Kelley at USA Today lost their jobs -- and cost some editors theirs as well -- in fabrication scandals. Their made-up anecdotes in some cases were attributed to anonymous sources. The '60 Minutes' segment about President Bush's National Guard duty blew up in part because the main, anonymous source misled CBS News."
Unsurprisingly, the New York Post -- under the tasteful banner of "Holy Shiite: Newsweek retracts its deadly toilet tale" -- flushes the magazine itself down the toilet.
"What actually happened at Guantanamo Bay is still unclear," adds the Journal's piece at one point.
The paper is spot on there. So, too, would be Green's call for a congressional investigation -- if it were for one digging into what's gone on behind the walls of Gitmo in the last three years.
Three months ago, Congress did make a bit of noise about looking into mounting evidence that the U.S. has been outsourcing torture of detainees to foreign "allies." We're still awaiting the results.
-- Mark Follman
[15:38 EDT, May 17, 2005]
Manufacturing consent on the filibuster
The showdown over the GOP's campaign to phase out the judicial filibuster is imminent, and Republicans still haven't been able to rouse much in the way of public support for the plan. But that hasn't stopped them from trying: Blogger Echidne at Atrios points out that identical letters to the editor in support of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist's proposal have been popping up in local papers around the country, using talking points that seem to come from Republican National Committee chair Ken Mehlman. (More on that time-honored tactic here.)
Whether the letters to local papers were actually sent by local residents or are coming straight out of GOP headquarters is tough to tell -- the RNC's GOP.com offers a point-and-click scribe feature that allows visitors to assemble a letter out of prefab paragraphs, sign any name they wish, and automatically submit it to local papers. The site's visitors don't even have to know the names of the newspapers they're writing to; a handy zip code field lets them search for local rags by region.
Mehlman hasn't copped to the letter campaign, but he has been boasting about Republicans' recent "grass-roots" efforts, including ad campaigns and securing space in op-ed pages across the country. However smooth Mehlman's tactics, though, he's up against some creative campaigning from the other side -- including a "Save the Filibuster" event in the Capitol put on today by the Hip Hop Caucus, which counts the filibuster as one issue in its "comprehensive agenda for the Hip-Hop community."
-- Page Rockwell
[14:34 EDT, May 17, 2005]
Pat Buchanan: The right is losing
By most measures, partisans on the religious right -- sure, let's go ahead and start calling them Christianists -- ought to be feeling pretty good about themselves right now. They own the White House. They dominate Congress. Their party -- if not their particular wing of it -- controls the Supreme Court, and before long they'll have that, too.
So why is Pat Buchanan feeling so blue? In an interview in today's Washington Times, the former presidential candidate says the conservative movement has "passed into history." "It doesn't exist anymore as a unifying force," Buchanan says. "There are still a lot of people who are conservative, but the movement is now broken up, crumbled, dismantled."
Buchanan is unhappy with all the infighting within the Republican Party, but he's unhappier still about this: Conservatives, he says, may have lost the culture war. "We say we won a great victory by defeating gay marriage in 11 state-ballot referenda in November," he says. "But I think in the long run, that will be seen as a victory in defense of a citadel that eventually fell."
What's most interesting about Buchanan's comments, however, is the reason he offers for the right's "loss." It's not that the media or liberal politicians or God knows who else is overpowering the will of the American people; it's that a majority of Americans simply don't agree with the Christianist agenda. Moderate Republican leaders, Buchanan says, are "indifferent" to the moral issues that matter to religious Republicans "because they see them -- and correctly -- as no longer popular, no longer the majority positions that they used to be."
-- Tim Grieve
[09:45 EDT, May 17, 2005]
The leaders stop talking
The nuclear option negotiations between Harry Reid and Bill Frist have come to a close, but it's hard to say that there were really negotiations in the first place. While Reid offered up-or-down votes on some of the seven blocked Bush judges in exchange for Frist's promise not to kill the filibuster, Frist made virtually no movement at all. His offer: Forsake the filibuster for Supreme Court and appellate judges, and you can keep it for lower court judges who aren't being filibustered anyway.
In a way, you can't blame Frist -- and on Monday Reid made it clear, sort of, that he doesn't: Having decided to kowtow to the religious right on judges, the Senate majority leader doesn't have a whole lot of room to maneuver. "I don’t think Sen. Frist is capable of working something out on this," Reid told reporters Monday. "I think he’s going to try to satisfy the radical right."
With talks between the Senate leaders done for now, the future of the filibuster -- and, in some ways, the Senate itself -- now lies in the hands of the centrist senators working on what Roll Call calls the "six-by-six" deal. Under that plan, a half-dozen Democrats would agree to allow votes on most of the stalled nominees and to refrain from filibustering future nominees except in extreme circumstances. In exchange, a half-dozen Republicans would promise to vote against the nuclear option if it comes up. It's a workable soluton in principle; getting six Republicans to sign on to it is another matter entirely. One Democratic aide tells Roll Call that the collapse of the Reid-Frist talks actually makes the centrists' work a little easier: If Reid and Frist aren't talking to each other, there's little need for others to refrain from deal making out of fear that they'll undercut their leaders.
But the six-by-six plan isn't a deal yet, and it's not clear whether it ever will be. What is clear is this: Frist plans to bring the nominations of Priscilla Owen and Janice Rogers Brown to the Senate floor this week as soon as work is done on a transportation bill. When he makes that move, the nuclear clock will begin ticking for real.
-- Tim Grieve
[09:07 EDT, May 17, 2005]
Newsweek retracts, but where are the facts?
So Newsweek has now officially "retracted" its report that U.S. sources had confirmed that U.S. investigators had confirmed that U.S. interrogators at Guantánamo Bay had flushed a copy of the Quran down the toilet. That should make the White House happy -- although Scott McClellan, who speaks the truth every day in every way, says that it's only a "good first step" -- but what about those of us in the reality-based community? We're still waiting for McClellan and the truth-before-all crowd for whom he works to answer two questions: Newsweek's sourcing problems aside, did U.S. interrogators in fact flush a Quran down the toilet? And is the deadly rioting in Afghanistan really the direct result of a short item in an American magazine?
On the first question, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann makes the point as clearly as anyone: Given everything else that's happened at Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, is it really possible that some interrogator hasn't tossed a Quran into a toilet? "Everybody in the prosecution of the so-called 'war on terror' has done something dumb, dating back to the President’s worst-possible-word-selection ("crusade") on Sept. 16, 2001," Olbermann writes. "So why wouldn’t some mid-level interrogator stuck in Cuba think it would be a good idea to desecrate a holy book?" Seriously, how could anyone think otherwise? Imagine the conversation: "Hmm, we can waterboard these guys. We can put collars around their necks and make them walk like dogs; we can make them wear panties and let them think we're smearing menstrual blood on their faces; we can force them to pretend to masturbate for the camera. But no, flushing the Koran, that's definitely off limits."
And indeed, as the Newsweek story began to trickle out, some voices on the right shouted loudly that flushing a Quran was exactly the right sort of idea. Under the heading "Dismay at US Koran 'desecration' (Have You Flushed a Qur'an Today?)," a gaggle of Freepers piled on with more ideas for desecration: "I would have flushed it one page at a time," one contributor suggested, "after using the pages thoroughly." Is the White House comfortable saying that this sort of sentiment never found its way into the mind of a U.S. interrogator -- despite the numerous reports that suggest that it did?
And what about the second question? Did the Newsweek report really cause the riots in Afghanistan? That's the conventional wisdom, peddled hard by McClellan and others in the Bush administration. In the Washington Post this morning, Howard Kurtz says at the top of his piece -- without attribution -- that the Newsweek story "sparked riots in Afghanistan and elsewhere." As the story began to bubble over yesterday, we did the same. But as the New York Times reports today, evidence of a cause-and-effect relationship is a little more tenuous than all that. Last week, Gen. Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters that the senior U.S. commander in Afghanistan believed the protests in that country had resulted from developments there, not from a story in Newsweek. "He thought it was not at all tied to the article in the magazine," Myers said.
-- Tim Grieve
[08:40 EDT, May 17, 2005]
The bigger story on Quran abuse at Gitmo
This afternoon, Newsweek fully acknowledged its blunder with the Quran-abuse story: "Based on what we know now, we are retracting our original story that an internal military investigation had uncovered Quran abuse at Guantanamo Bay," the magazine said in a statement.
The key phrase here is "internal military investigation." Newsweek screwed up in that it clearly didn't have reliable information (from its single anonymous government source) that the Pentagon is taking action on -- or has even acknowledged -- the existence of such abuse.
And that's actually the much bigger story here. As Raw Story notes today, the Newsweek debacle aside, there have been numerous past reports -- including from the New York Times, Washington Post, UK Guardian, and the Center for Consitutional Rights -- of desecration of the Quran by U.S. interrogators at Gitmo:
"One such incident -- during which the Koran allegedly was thrown in a pile and stepped on -- prompted a hunger strike among Guantanamo detainees in Mar. 2002, which led to an apology. The New York Times interviewed former detainee Nasser Nijer Naser al-Mutairi May 1, who said the protest ended with a senior officer delivering an apology to the entire camp: 'A former interrogator at Guantanamo, in an interview with the Times, confirmed the accounts of the hunger strikes, including the public expression of regret over the treatment of the Korans,' Times reporters Neil A. Lewis and Eric Schmitt wrote in 'Inquiry Finds Abuses at Guantanamo Bay.'
"The toilet incident was reported in the Washington Post in a 2003 interview with a former detainee from Afghanistan: 'Ehsannullah, 29, said American soldiers who initially questioned him in Kandahar before shipping him to Guantanamo hit him and taunted him by dumping the Koran in a toilet. "It was a very bad situation for us," said Ehsannullah, who comes from the home region of the Taliban leader, Mohammad Omar. "We cried so much and shouted, Please do not do that to the Holy Koran." (Marc Kaufman and April Witt, 'Out of Legal Limbo, Some Tell of Mistreatment,' Washington Post, Mar. 26, 2003.)
"Also citing the toilet incident is testimony by Asif Iqbal, a former Guantanamo detainee who was released to British custody in Mar. 2004 and subsequently freed without charge: 'The behaviour of the guards towards our religious practices as well as the Koran was also, in my view, designed to cause us as much distress as possible. They would kick the Koran, throw it into the toilet and generally disrespect it.' (Center for Constitution Rights, Detention in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, (Aug. 4, 2004.)"
Raw Story's roundup has more of the same, including links to all the stories and depositions cited.
It bears mentioning here that the testimony of detainees can warrant some skepticism; terrorists are trained to undermine the enemy when taken prisoner by using allegations of abuse (we know this from al-Qaida training manuals, among other things.) But the pattern and sheer amount of allegations -- combined with Pentagon obfuscation about dubious interrogation practices at Gitmo and elsewhere -- outline a case against the U.S. government that stretches far beyond Newsweek's single reporting debacle. And remember, the error (no small one) retracted by Newsweek, hinges on Pentagon acknowledgment of abuse -- not whether such abuses have been taking place.
While the Newsweek error provided another flash point, it's absurd to insinuate that anti-American violence from Kabul to Baghdad isn't about a much larger fallout from U.S. war policies over the last three-plus years. Which is why it's so appalling to watch the White House get up on its soap box as a matter of political convenience now.
"I think there's a certain journalistic standard that should be met and in this instance it was not," said Bush spokesman Scott McClellan today, according to Reuters. "The report has had serious consequences," he said. "People have lost their lives. The image of the United States abroad has been damaged."
The Bush administration may recall another report -- one called Taguba -- that had more serious consequences in terms of damaging the image of the United States abroad. More than a year later, nobody striding through Washington's halls of power has been held accountable for the systematic practices of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison -- maybe McClellan and his bosses inside the White House want to weigh in on accountability there?
-- Mark Follman
[17:49 EDT, May 16, 2005]
Minnesota goes ice cold on Bush
There's little doubt that if liberal author and radio host Al Franken goes ahead with plans to run against Bush pal Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., in 2008, the GOP will pull out all the stops to block his path. Former Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura -- who knows a thing or two about going from celebrity to politician in the land of ten thousand lakes -- told Salon last month that Franken should "look forward to having his entire past exposed," because Coleman is "going to have the Republican machine behind him 110 percent." But according to a new Minnesota Poll conducted by the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune, that Republican machine is losing serious ground with Minnesota voters. President Bush's approval rating among Minnesotans has plummeted to an all-time low of 42 percent, down nine points since January, and 55 percent of poll respondents said the country "has gotten seriously off on the wrong track."
That's good news for Franken's potential candidacy, and it could be good news for Democrats nationwide, too. Minnesotans' feelings may be a good barometer of the national mood -- no president has gotten this poor a report card from Minnesota voters since George H.W. Bush scored a 32 percent approval rating in 1992, one month before he lost his reelection bid to Bill Clinton. Then again, the next round of congressional elections is more than a year off -- and there is still a long, hard thaw ahead before Dems get the chance to see any payoff on the president's poor ratings in 2008.
-- Page Rockwell
[16:23 EDT, May 16, 2005]
Our good friends, the Saudis
Pointing to recent Iraqi elections, protests in Lebanon, and a few faint murmurings about political reform in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, supporters of President Bush's foreign policy have been particularly vocal about a wave of democratic influence sweeping the region. The invasion and occupation of Iraq, they argue, deserves much of the credit for setting it off.
It has yet to wash over Riyadh. Three Saudi academics, first imprisoned in March of last year, will now stay locked away for up to nine years for petitioning the kingdom's rulers to move toward a constitutional monarchy and speed up political reforms.
Relations were warm when Bush clasped the hand of Crown Prince Abdullah in Crawford in late April and pressed the Saudis to pump more oil and help ease gas prices. Apparently the issue of democratic reform in the kingdom didn't make the agenda.
-- Mark Follman |
