THE CALAMITY HOWLER #161 Resent-Date: Wed, 11 Jul 2007 10:15:37 -0500 (CDT) THE CALAMITY HOWLER July 11, 2007 Issue #161 Sometimes an intended epithet can be turned to good advantage in the sole surviving issue of the Decatur, Texas Times one finds the way Populists not only accepted the label `calamity howler but insisted that they had ample reason to howl and would continue to howl until their objectives had been attained. --- THE POPULIST MIND, edited by Norman Pollack EDITOR\PUBLISHER: A.V Krebs E-MAIL: avkrebs@comcast.net TO RECEIVE: Send name and address to avkrebs@comcast.net OVERVIEW: * THE ROAD HOME New York Times Editorial * WHITE HOUSE SEEKS TO LOWER IRAQ REPORT EXPECTATIONS By Ken Fireman and Roger Runningen * PROFITING AT TAXPAYER EXPENSE By Robert Scheer * BUSH: NATURALLY, NEVER WRONG By Shankar Vedantam * A PROFILE IN COWARDICE By Frank Rich * GONZALES WAS TOLD OF FBI VIOLATIONS, SAID HE KNEW OF NO WRONGDOING By John Solomon THE ROAD HOME New York Times Editorial July 8, 2007 It is time for the United States to leave Iraq, without any more delay than the Pentagon needs to organize an orderly exit. Like many Americans, we have put off that conclusion, waiting for a sign that President Bush was seriously trying to dig the United States out of the disaster he created by invading Iraq without sufficient cause, in the face of global opposition, and without a plan to stabilize the country afterward. At first, we believed that after destroying Iraqs government, army, police and economic structures, the United States was obliged to try to accomplish some of the goals Mr. Bush claimed to be pursuing, chiefly building a stable, unified Iraq. When it became clear that the president had neither the vision nor the means to do that, we argued against setting a withdrawal date while there was still some chance to mitigate the chaos that would most likely follow. While Mr. Bush scorns deadlines, he kept promising breakthroughs --- after elections, after a constitution, after sending in thousands more troops. But those milestones came and went without any progress toward a stable, democratic Iraq or a path for withdrawal. It is frighteningly clear that Mr. Bushs plan is to stay the course as long as he is president and dump the mess on his successor. Whatever his cause was, it is lost. The political leaders Washington has backed are incapable of putting national interests ahead of sectarian score settling. The security forces Washington has trained behave more like partisan militias. Additional military forces poured into the Baghdad region have failed to change anything. Continuing to sacrifice the lives and limbs of American soldiers is wrong. The war is sapping the strength of the nations alliances and its military forces. It is a dangerous diversion from the life-and-death struggle against terrorists. It is an increasing burden on American taxpayers, and it is a betrayal of a world that needs the wise application of American power and principles. A majority of Americans reached these conclusions months ago. Even in politically polarized Washington, positions on the war no longer divide entirely on party lines. When Congress returns this week, extricating American troops from the war should be at the top of its agenda. That conversation must be candid and focused. Americans must be clear that Iraq, and the region around it, could be even bloodier and more chaotic after Americans leave. There could be reprisals against those who worked with American forces, further ethnic cleansing, even genocide. Potentially destabilizing refugee flows could hit Jordan and Syria. Iran and Turkey could be tempted to make power grabs. Perhaps most important, the invasion has created a new stronghold from which terrorist activity could proliferate. The administration, the Democratic-controlled Congress, the United Nations and Americas allies must try to mitigate those outcomes --- and they may fail. But Americans must be equally honest about the fact that keeping troops in Iraq will only make things worse. The nation needs a serious discussion, now, about how to accomplish a withdrawal and meet some of the big challenges that will arise. The United States has about 160,000 troops and millions of tons of military gear inside Iraq. Getting that force out safely will be a formidable challenge. The main road south to Kuwait is notoriously vulnerable to roadside bomb attacks. Soldiers, weapons and vehicles will need to be deployed to secure bases while airlift and sealift operations are organized. Withdrawal routes will have to be guarded. The exit must be everything the invasion was not: based on reality and backed by adequate resources. The United States should explore using Kurdish territory in the north of Iraq as a secure staging area. Being able to use bases and ports in Turkey would also make withdrawal faster and safer. Turkey has been an inconsistent ally in this war, but like other nations, it should realize that shouldering part of the burden of the aftermath is in its own interest. Accomplishing all of this in less than six months is probably unrealistic. The political decision should be made, and the target date set, now. Despite President Bushs repeated claims, Al Qaeda had no significant foothold in Iraq before the invasion, which gave it new base camps, new recruits and new prestige. This war diverted Pentagon resources from Afghanistan, where the military had a real chance to hunt down Al Qaedas leaders. It alienated essential allies in the war against terrorism. It drained the strength and readiness of American troops. And it created a new front where the United States will have to continue to battle terrorist forces and enlist local allies who reject the idea of an Iraq hijacked by international terrorists. The military will need resources and bases to stanch this self-inflicted wound for the foreseeable future. The United States could strike an agreement with the Kurds to create those bases in northeastern Iraq. Or, the Pentagon could use its bases in countries like Kuwait and Qatar, and its large naval presence in the Persian Gulf, as staging points. There are arguments for, and against, both options. Leaving troops in Iraq might make it too easy --- and too tempting --- to get drawn back into the civil war and confirm suspicions that Washingtons real goal was to secure permanent bases in Iraq. Mounting attacks from other countries could endanger those nations governments. The White House should make this choice after consultation with Congress and the other countries in the region, whose opinions the Bush administration has essentially ignored. The bottom line: the Pentagon needs enough force to stage effective raids and airstrikes against terrorist forces in Iraq, but not enough to resume large-scale combat. One of Mr. Bushs arguments against withdrawal is that it would lead to civil war. That war is raging, right now, and it may take years to burn out. Iraq may fragment into separate Kurdish, Sunni and Shiite republics, and American troops are not going to stop that from happening. It is possible, we suppose, that announcing a firm withdrawal date might finally focus Iraqs political leaders and neighboring governments on reality. Ideally, it could spur Iraqi politicians to take the steps toward national reconciliation that they have endlessly discussed but refused to act on. But it is foolish to count on that, as some Democratic proponents of withdrawal have done. The administration should use whatever leverage it gains from withdrawing to press its allies and Iraqs neighbors to help achieve a negotiated solution. Iraqs leaders --- knowing that they can no longer rely on the Americans to guarantee their survival --- might be more open to compromise, perhaps to a Bosnian-style partition, with economic resources fairly shared but with millions of Iraqis forced to relocate. That would be better than the slow-motion ethnic and religious cleansing that has contributed to driving one in seven Iraqis from their homes. The United States military cannot solve the problem. Congress and the White House must lead an international attempt at a negotiated outcome. To start, Washington must turn to the United Nations, which Mr. Bush spurned and ridiculed as a preface to war. There are already nearly two million Iraqi refugees, mostly in Syria and Jordan, and nearly two million more Iraqis who have been displaced within their country. Without the active cooperation of all six countries bordering Iraq Turkey, Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Syria --- and the help of other nations, this disaster could get worse. Beyond the suffering, massive flows of refugees --- some with ethnic and political resentments --- could spread Iraqs conflict far beyond Iraqs borders. Kuwait and Saudi Arabia must share the burden of hosting refugees. Jordan and Syria, now nearly overwhelmed with refugees, need more international help. That, of course, means money. The nations of Europe and Asia have a stake and should contribute. The United States will have to pay a large share of the costs, but should also lead international efforts, perhaps a donors conference, to raise money for the refugee crisis. Washington also has to mend fences with allies. There are new governments in Britain, France and Germany that did not participate in the fight over starting this war and are eager to get beyond it. But that will still require a measure of humility and a commitment to multilateral action that this administration has never shown. And, however angry they were with President Bush for creating this mess, those nations should see that they cannot walk away from the consequences. To put it baldly, terrorism and oil make it impossible to ignore. The United States has the greatest responsibilities, including the admission of many more refugees for permanent resettlement. The most compelling obligation is to the tens of thousands of Iraqis of courage and good will --- translators, embassy employees, reconstruction workers --- whose lives will be in danger because they believed the promises and cooperated with the Americans. One of the trickiest tasks will be avoiding excessive meddling in Iraq by its neighbors --- Americas friends as well as its adversaries. Just as Iran should come under international pressure to allow Shiites in southern Iraq to develop their own independent future, Washington must help persuade Sunni powers like Syria not to intervene on behalf of Sunni Iraqis. Turkey must be kept from sending troops into Kurdish territories. For this effort to have any remote chance, Mr. Bush must drop his resistance to talking with both Iran and Syria. Britain, France, Russia, China and other nations with influence have a responsibility to help. Civil war in Iraq is a threat to everyone, especially if it spills across Iraqs borders. President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have used demagoguery and fear to quell Americans demands for an end to this war. They say withdrawing will create bloodshed and chaos and encourage terrorists. Actually, all of that has already happened --- the result of this unnecessary invasion and the incompetent management of this war. This country faces a choice. We can go on allowing Mr. Bush to drag out this war without end or purpose. Or we can insist that American troops are withdrawn as quickly and safely as we can manage --- with as much effort as possible to stop the chaos from spreading. WHITE HOUSE SEEKS TO LOWER IRAQ REPORT EXPECTATIONS By Ken Fireman and Roger Runningen Bloomberg July 9, 2007 Bush administration officials sought to lower expectations for a report this month on the Iraq war, saying it was unrealistic to expect the study would show significant progress in meeting military and political goals. The report, which must be submitted to Congress by July 15, is just an interim assessment delivered at an early stage of the new U.S. military drive to quell sectarian and insurgent violence, said White House Press Secretary Tony Snow and Defense Department spokesman Bryan Whitman. ``You are not going to expect all the benchmarks to be met at the beginning of something,'' Snow said. Whitman called the report ``a snapshot that's very much at the front end'' of the U.S. offensive. The report will be delivered as Congress debates several measures to limit U.S. military operations in Iraq and amid reports that administration officials are debating a possible change of course. Defense Secretary Robert Gates yesterday canceled a trip to Latin America so he could remain in Washington for meetings on Iraq. Whitman said today that Gates participated in one strategy session this morning and would be involved in others during the week. The New York Times reported today that the administration is discussing whether President George W. Bush should announce an intention to gradually withdraw troops from high-casualty areas in order to stop more Republican lawmakers from turning against the war. Snow said the Times story ``got way ahead of the facts.'' He said there was no debate within the administration ``on withdrawing forces right now from Iraq.'' In a later briefing, Snow told reporters, ``There is no intensifying discussion about reducing troops.'' Still, Pentagon spokesman Whitman didn't dispute that the administration meetings on Iraq this week had grown in importance, leading to Gates's decision to stay home. ``It was a realization that this week it was going to be important for the secretary to be a part of these policy meetings that were going to be taking place,'' Whitman said. Bush must report to Congress by July 15 on the Iraqi government's progress in meeting a host of benchmarks. They include revising the constitution to encourage political participation by Sunnis, relaxing legal restrictions on members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party, guaranteeing all major ethnic and religious groups a share of oil revenue and holding new local elections. On the military front, the report is supposed to measure progress the Iraqi government has made in providing security forces and neighborhood outposts in Baghdad to support the U.S. military offensive. The Senate this week is taking up a $648.8 billion defense policy measure that will be a platform for many amendments to force a change in Iraq policy. Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, said the Senate may vote as soon as tomorrow on an amendment offered by Senator Jim Webb, a Virginia Democrat, that would require all troops to get longer breaks between deployments. Another amendment will be offered by Michigan Democrat Carl Levin, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. It would set a goal of withdrawing most American combat troops by March 31 of next year. Colorado Democrat Ken Salazar is seeking support for a plan to adopt the recommendations of the bipartisan Iraq Study Commission, which proposed setting the conditions for withdrawing most U.S. combat troops by March 31, 2008. A limited number of troops would stay behind to train Iraqis and conduct counterterrorism offensives. U.S. military deaths in the Iraq conflict have climbed to almost 3,600 as rebels continue to target American forces with roadside bombs, gunfire and other forms of attack. May was the third bloodiest month of the war for the U.S., with 120 combat deaths. The tide of Republican defections from Bush's camp grew during the July 4 recess, putting pressure on Bush for a new strategy. Senator Pete Domenici of New Mexico joined Senators Richard Lugar of Indiana and George Voinovich of Ohio in calling for a new tack in Iraq. ``The Iraqis are not stepping up to the plate, and it's been our American troops that are bearing the brunt of the burden,'' Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, said today on Cable News Network. The White House has urged congressional Republicans to maintain solidarity on Iraq, at least until September, to give the U.S. offensive a chance to work. The administration has appealed for lawmakers to hold off until a mid-September progress report by Army General David Petraeus, the U.S. commander in Iraq, and Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to the country. Reid today said today that the votes on Iraq will make clear where senators stand. ``I think we will find in the next couple of weeks whether the Republicans who have said publicly they think the present course should change are willing to vote with us,'' he said. PROFITING AT TAXPAYER EXPENSE By Robert Scheer Creators Syndicate, Inc. June 27, 2007 As the Iraq war that Vice President Dick Cheney created continues to shred American --- and many more Iraqi --- lives, further documentation has emerged proving that, even during failed wars, the merchants of death profit. No company has profited more from the carnage in Iraq than Halliburton, which Cheney headed before choosing himself as Bush's running mate. One shudders at the blissful arrogance of this modern Daddy Warbucks, who sees no conflict of interest over the blood-soaked profits garnered by the once-bankrupt division of the company that left him rich. This week's evidence of the continuing corruption of Halliburton and its subsidiaries profiteering from contracts costing American taxpayers an unbelievable $22 billion --- stems from a report by the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction. The report, only one of many about Halliburton's recently severed subsidiary KBR, focuses on work done in Baghdad's super-secure Green Zone. While parent company Halliburton insults U.S. taxpayers by relocating its headquarters to the tax shelter of Dubai, subsidiary KBR has been spun off to focus more directly on the American military contracts that form the core of its operations. Those operations have already produced a litany of condemnation by congressional and administration oversight bodies, and the June 25 report hardly details the company's most egregious activities. However, the Green Zone, the site of this latest instance of taxpayer fleecing, is instructive because, safely removed from the risks of battle, it deprives these war profiteers of their favorite excuse: that construction in a battle zone is inherently more costly. While KBR's Green Zone shenanigans covered by this report may seem small in comparison to the enormous waste attendant to the U.S. reconstruction program in Iraq, they are illustrative of the devil-may-care feeding frenzy that has fueled the American effort. The corrupt reconstruction project has left a wasteland of failed energy, water, educational and political reform plans. As report after report details, garbage is not collected, hospitals are not staffed, schools close soon after they are opened and factories sit idle in shocking refutation of the vaunted efficiency of the United States' political economic model. KBR's role in this fiasco is easily exposed by a basic Google search, beginning with a stop at the Web site of Henry Waxman, the California congressman who heads up the House Committee on Oversight and Reform. Waxman deserves a Medal of Freedom for trying to figure out what happened to those $22 billion that KBR received but are now lost to U.S. taxpayers, as well as to the once hopeful but now bitterly disillusioned Iraqi people. Indeed, six months ago, the inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, Stuart W. Bowen Jr., termed the high level of official corruption in Iraq the "second insurgency," stating that the siphoning-off of U.S. dollars is a major source of funds for the anti-American fighters in the country. It was estimated that last year upward of $100 million in stolen oil funds went directly to the insurgents. In the context of that horrid record of waste and corruption attendant to the destruction of Iraqi society in which "democratic nation building" transmogrified into fascist mayhem, KBR's antics in the Green Zone seem petty. But the fact that KBR played loose with our tax dollars even in the safety of the Green Zone is evidence of the company's contempt for the sacrifice of U.S. taxpayers. For example, concerning KBR's mismanagement of the fuel distribution program, the inspector general wrote: "We found weaknesses in KBR's fuel receiving, distributing and accountability processes of such magnitude that we were unable to determine an accurate measure of the fuel services provided." Yet, it was paid for by American taxpayers. Or, take the extra $4.5 million spent on the company's food service and the cost of billeting 90% of KBR personnel in single quarters, as opposed to the doubling-up practiced by regular Army folks. That was chickenfeed, compared to other examples of taxpayer rip-offs, as revealed in one example by the Army reducing payments to KBR by $19.5 million following Waxman's first "fraud, waste, and abuse hearings." It is hoped that there will be other efforts at forcing accountability for the billions of dollars that have been spent to advertise the efficiency of the United States' free enterprise model to a skeptical Mideast public. It is claimed by American officials that KBR's accountability issues are being addressed. In one instance cited, the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad --- a spiraling enterprise well on its way to become a nation-within-a-nation akin to the Vatican in Italy --- announced that its personnel would no longer be allowed to bring large bags into the eating halls as a means of avoiding food theft. Such sacrifice for the mission of securing Iraqi freedom. BUSH: NATURALLY, NEVER WRONG By Shankar Vedantam Washington Post July 9, 2007 Psychologists once conducted a simple experiment with far-reaching implications: They asked people to describe an instance in their lives when they had hurt someone and another instance when they had been hurt by someone else. The incidents that people described were similar whether they saw themselves in the role of victim or perpetrator --- they were familiar betrayals, lies and acts of unkindness. When people described events in which they were the perpetrators of wrongdoing, they invariably said their actions had caused only brief pain to others. Many said the hurtful acts were justified or could not have been prevented. When people reported the same kinds of incidents as victims, however, they invariably described the actions as inexplicable, senseless and immoral. Victims never felt that the wrongdoing was unavoidable. And they reported that the pain lasted a long time. The most interesting aspect of social psychologist Roy Baumeister's study was that the same people dealing with the same kinds of hurt perceive hurtful actions in entirely different ways, depending on whether they are the ones causing the hurt or the ones being hurt. These differing perceptions are a central cause of conflict in our personal, professional and political lives. For Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson, they explain everything from the Middle East conflict to why President Bush commuted the prison sentence of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Cheney's former chief of staff who was recently convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice in a case involving the outing of a CIA agent. The different perceptions of victims and perpetrators in Baumeister's experiment are a result of a phenomenon known as cognitive dissonance, Tavris and Aronson argue in a new book titled "Mistakes Were Made (but Not by Me)." When we do something that hurts others, there is a part of us that recognizes our action as despicable. But that comes into conflict --- into dissonance -- with our belief that we are good people. The solution? We reinterpret our hurtful actions to minimize our responsibility and downplay the pain we have caused. When we are victims, on the other hand, it would feel dissonant to empathize with our wrongdoers. No, it is much easier to see their actions as inexplicable and immoral. The important thing to remember, and the reason this has bearing on Bush's actions in the Libby case, Tavris and Aronson say, is that the process happens at an entirely subconscious level. People don't consciously tell themselves to minimize the consequences of their hurtful actions or to maximize the culpability of those who have done them wrong --- that, in fact, would defeat the point of the mental juggling act. The people in Baumeister's experiment did not realize they were acting in contrary ways depending on whether they were victims or perpetrators. Bush's handling of the Libby case, and the way the nation as a whole has dealt with the Iraq war, reek of cognitive dissonance, Tavris and Aronson say. "Republicans and Democrats have both been very busy reducing dissonance over the Iraq decision," said Tavris, an independent researcher who works in Los Angeles. "The Republicans who were most in support of the war continue to believe that weapons of mass destruction have been found and al-Qaeda was in Iraq and Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were in cahoots. They reduce their dissonance by rejecting evidence they were wrong." "Half of all Democrats supported the war," she added. "They have reduced dissonance by conveniently forgetting they once supported the war. . . . That is the way memory works and the way the brain works. We ignore, forget or dismiss information that suggests we might be wrong. We rewrite our memories to confirm what we believe." Aronson, who works at the University of California at Santa Cruz, said that while self-justification is a universal human trait --- and in some cases quite helpful for retaining our sanity --- the Bush administration has taken the trait to such an extreme that it prompted the two researchers to write a book about the phenomenon. Aronson said the bias toward self-justification explains the administration's shifting rationale for the Iraq war and why Bush could not have allowed Libby to go to prison: "If Scooter Libby, working with the blessing of the vice president, lied about what he did in order to protect higher-ups, he is a good guy, he is loyal. It is an exquisite example of self-justification because the good guys are defined as those who are loyal to the cause even if the cause is wrong." For Bush to have allowed Libby to go to jail, he would have had to live with the idea that someone who he thought was a good and loyal soldier was being punished for being a good and loyal soldier --- a fairly extreme form of cognitive dissonance. The only way to keep such cognitive dissonance at bay, the psychologists said, was for Bush to see Libby's prison sentence as overly harsh and do away with it altogether, even though Bush, both as president and governor of Texas, has long prided himself on refusing clemency to felons. "He sees no inconsistency, just as we cannot see our own inconsistencies even though they are strikingly clear to everyone else," Tavris said. "He is protecting one of his own, but his reasoning is consistent with the way the mind works to preserve consistency." A PROFILE IN COWARDICE By Frank Rich New York Times July 8, 2007 There was never any question that President Bush would grant amnesty to Scooter Libby, the man who knows too much about the lies told to sell the war in Iraq. The only questions were when, and how, Mr. Bush would buy Mr. Libbys silence. Now we have the answers, and theyre at least as incriminating as the act itself. They reveal the continued ferocity of a White House cover-up and expose the true character of a commander in chief whose tough-guy shtick can no longer camouflage his fundamental cowardice. The timing of the presidents Libby intervention was a surprise. Many assumed he would mimic the sleazy 11th-hour examples of most recent vintage: his fathers pardon of six Iran-contra defendants who might have dragged him into that scandal, and Bill Clintons pardon of the tax fugitive Marc Rich, the former husband of a major campaign contributor and the former client of none other than the ubiquitous Mr. Libby. But the ever-impetuous current President Bush acted 18 months before his scheduled eviction from the White House. Even more surprising, he did so when the Titanic that is his presidency had just hit two fresh icebergs, the demise of the immigration bill and the growing revolt of Republican senators against his strategy in Iraq. That Mr. Bush, already suffering historically low approval ratings, would invite another hit has been attributed in Washington to his desire to placate what remains of his base. By this logic, he had nothing left to lose. He didnt care if he looked like an utter hypocrite, giving his crony a freer ride than Paris Hilton and violating the white-collar sentencing guidelines set by his own administration. He had to throw a bone to the last grumpy old white guys watching Bill OReilly in a bunker. But if those die-hards havent deserted him by now, why would Mr. Libbys incarceration be the final straw? They certainly werent whipped into a frenzy by coverage on Fox News, which tended to minimize the leak case as a non-event. Mr. Libby, faceless and voiceless to most Americans, is no Ollie North, and he provoked no right-wing firestorm akin to the uproars over Terri Schiavo, Harriet Miers or amnesty for illegal immigrants. The only people clamoring for Mr. Libbys freedom were the pundits who still believe that Saddam secured uranium in Africa and who still hope that any exoneration of Mr. Libby might make them look less like dupes for aiding and abetting the hyped case for war. That select group is not the Republican base so much as a roster of the past, present and future holders of quasi-academic titles at neocon think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute. What this crowd never understood is that Mr. Bushs highest priority is always to protect himself. So he stiffed them too. Had the president wanted to placate the Weekly Standard crowd, he would have given Mr. Libby a full pardon. That he served up a commutation instead is revealing of just how worried the president is about the beans Mr. Libby could spill about his and Dick Cheneys use of prewar intelligence. Valerie Wilson still has a civil suit pending. The Democratic inquisitor in the House, Henry Waxman, still has the uranium hoax underlying this case at the top of his agenda as an active investigation. A commutation puts up more roadblocks by keeping Mr. Libbys appeal of his conviction alive and his Fifth Amendment rights intact. He cant testify without risking self-incrimination. Meanwhile, we are asked to believe that he has paid his remaining $250,000 debt to society independently of his private $5 million legal defense fund. The presidents presentation of the commutation is more revealing still. Had Mr. Bush really believed he was doing the right and honorable thing, he would not have commuted Mr. Libbys jail sentence by press release just before the July Fourth holiday without consulting Justice Department lawyers. Thats the behavior of an accountant cooking the books in the dead of night, not the proud act of a patriot standing on principle. When the furor followed Mr. Bush from Kennebunkport to Washington despite his efforts to duck it, he further underlined his embarrassment by taking his only few questions on the subject during a photo op at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. You know this president is up to no good whenever he hides behind the troops. This instance was particularly shameful, since Mr. Bush also used the occasion to trivialize the scandalous maltreatment of Walter Reed patients on his watch as merely some bureaucratic red-tape issues. Asked last week to explain the presidents poll numbers, Andrew Kohut of the Pew Research Center told NBC News that when we ask people to summon up one word that comes to mind to describe Mr. Bush, its incompetence. But cowardice, the character trait so evident in his furtive handling of the Libby commutation, is as important to understanding Mr. Bushs cratered presidency as incompetence, cronyism and hubris. Even The Wall Street Journals editorial page, a consistent Bush and Libby defender, had to take notice. Furious that the president had not given Mr. Libby a full pardon (at least not yet), The Journal called the Bush commutation statement a profile in non-courage. What it did not recognize, or chose not to recognize, is that this non-courage, to use The Journals euphemism, has been this presidents stock in trade, far exceeding the wimp factor that Newsweek once attributed to his father. The younger Mr. Bushs cowardice is arguably more responsible for the calamities of his leadership than anything else. People dont change. Mr. Bushs failure to have the courage of his own convictions was apparent early in his history, when he professed support for the Vietnam War yet kept himself out of harms way when he had the chance to serve in it. In the White House, he has often repeated the feckless pattern that he set back then and reaffirmed last week in his hide-and-seek bestowing of the Libby commutation. The first fight he conspicuously ran away from as president was in August 2001. Aspiring to halt federal underwriting of embryonic stem-cell research, he didnt stand up and say so but instead unveiled a bogus compromise that promised continued federal research on 60 existing stem-cell lines. Only later would we learn that all but 11 of them did not exist. When Mr. Bush wanted to endorse a constitutional amendment to protect marriage, he again cowered. A planned 2006 Rose Garden announcement to a crowd of religious-right supporters was abruptly moved from the sunlight into a shadowy auditorium away from the White House. Nowhere is this presidents non-courage more evident than in the signing statements The Boston Globe exposed last year. As Charlie Savage reported, Mr. Bush quietly claimed the authority to disobey more than 750 laws enacted since he took office. Rather than veto them in public view, he signed them, waited until after the press and lawmakers left the White House, and then filed statements in the Federal Register asserting that he would ignore laws he (not the courts) judged unconstitutional. This was the extralegal trick Mr. Bush used to bypass the ban on torture. It allowed him to make a cowards escape from the moral (and legal) responsibility of arguing for so radical a break with American practice. In the end, it was also this presidents profile in non-courage that greased the skids for the Iraq fiasco. If Mr. Bush had had the guts to put America on a true wartime footing by appealing to his fellow citizens for sacrifice, possibly even a draft if required, then he might have had at least a chance of amassing the resources needed to secure Iraq after we invaded it. But he never backed up the rhetoric of war with the stand-up action needed to prosecute the war. Instead he relied on fomenting fear, as typified by the false uranium claims whose genesis has been covered up by Mr. Libbys obstructions of justice. Mr. Bushs cowardly abdication of the tough responsibilities of wartime leadership ratified Donald Rumsfelds decision to go into Iraq with the army he had, ensuring our defeat. Never underestimate the power of the unconscious. Not the least of the revelatory aspects of Mr. Bushs commutation is that he picked the fourth anniversary of Bring em on to hand it down. It was on July 2, 2003, that the president responded to the continued violence in Iraq, two months after Mission Accomplished, by taunting those who want to harm American troops. Mr. Bush assured the world that weve got the force necessary to deal with the security situation. The surge notwithstanding, we still dont have the force necessary four years later, because the president never did summon the courage, even as disaster loomed, to back up his own convictions by going to the mat to secure that force. No one can stop Mr. Bush from freeing a pathetic little fall guy like Scooter Libby. But only those who paid the ultimate price for the avoidable bungling of Iraq have the moral authority to pardon Mr. Bush. GONZALES WAS TOLD OF FBI VIOLATIONS, SAID HE KNEW OF NO WRONGDOING By John Solomon Washington Post July 10, 2007 As he sought to renew the USA Patriot Act two years ago, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales assured lawmakers that the FBI had not abused its potent new terrorism-fighting powers. "There has not been one verified case of civil liberties abuse," Gonzales told senators on April 27, 2005. Six days earlier, the FBI sent Gonzales a copy of a report that said its agents had obtained personal information that they were not entitled to have. It was one of at least half a dozen reports of legal or procedural violations that Gonzales received in the three months before he made his statement to the Senate intelligence committee, according to internal FBI documents released under the Freedom of Information Act. The acts recounted in the FBI reports included unauthorized surveillance, an illegal property search and a case in which an Internet firm improperly turned over a compact disc with data that the FBI was not entitled to collect, the documents show. Gonzales was copied on each report that said administrative rules or laws protecting civil liberties and privacy had been violated. The reports also alerted Gonzales in 2005 to problems with the FBI's use of an anti-terrorism tool known as a national security letter (NSL), well before the Justice Department's inspector general brought widespread abuse of the letters in 2004 and 2005 to light in a stinging report this past March. Justice officials said they could not immediately determine whether Gonzales read any of the FBI reports in 2005 and 2006 because the officials who processed them were not available yesterday. But department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said that when Gonzales testified, he was speaking "in the context" of reports by the department's inspector general before this year that found no misconduct or specific civil liberties abuses related to the Patriot Act. "The statements from the attorney general are consistent with statements from other officials at the FBI and the department," Roehrkasse said. He added that many of the violations the FBI disclosed were not legal violations and instead involved procedural safeguards or even typographical errors. Each of the violations cited in the reports copied to Gonzales was serious enough to require notification of the President's Intelligence Oversight Board, which helps police the government's surveillance activities. The format of each memo was similar, and none minced words. "This enclosure sets forth details of investigative activity which the FBI has determined was conducted contrary to the attorney general's guidelines for FBI National Security Investigations and Foreign Intelligence Collection and/or laws, executive orders and presidential directives," said the April 21, 2005, letter to the Intelligence Oversight Board. The oversight board, staffed with intelligence experts from inside and outside government, was established to report to the attorney general and president about civil liberties abuses or intelligence lapses. But Roehrkasse said the fact that a violation is reported to the board "does not mean that a USA Patriot violation exists or that an individual's civil liberties have been abused." Two of the earliest reports sent to Gonzales, during his first month on the job, in February 2005, involved the FBI's surveillance and search powers. In one case, the bureau reported a violation involving an "unconsented physical search" in a counterintelligence case. The details were redacted in the released memo, but it cited violations of safeguards "that shall protect constitutional and other legal rights." The second violation involved electronic surveillance on phone lines that was reinitiated after the expiration deadline set by a court in a counterterrorism case. The report sent to Gonzales on April 21, 2005, concerned a violation of the rules governing NSLs, which allow agents in counterterrorism and counterintelligence investigations to secretly gather Americans' phone, bank and Internet records without a court order or a grand jury subpoena. In the report --- also heavily redacted before being released --- the FBI said its agents had received a compact disc containing information they did not request. It was viewed before being sealed in an envelope. Gonzales received another report of an NSL-related violation a few weeks later. "A national security letter . . . contained an incorrect phone number" that resulted in agents collecting phone information that "belonged to a different U.S. person" than the suspect under investigation, stated a letter copied to the attorney general on May 6, 2005. At least two other reports of NSL-related violations were sent to Gonzales, according to the new documents. In letters copied to him on December 11, 2006, and February 26, 2007, the FBI reported to the oversight board that agents had requested and obtained phone data on the wrong people. Nonetheless, Gonzales reacted with surprise when the Justice Department inspector general reported this March that there were pervasive problems with the FBI's handling of NSLs and another investigative tool known as an exigent circumstances letter. "I was upset when I learned this, as was Director Mueller. To say that I am concerned about what has been revealed in this report would be an enormous understatement," Gonzales said in a speech March 9, referring to FBI Director Robert S. Mueller. The attorney general added that he believed back in 2005, before the Patriot Act was renewed, that there were no problems with NSLs. "I've come to learn that I was wrong," he said, making no mention of the FBI reports sent to him. Marcia Hofmann, a lawyer for the nonpartisan Electronic Frontier Foundation, said, "I think these documents raise some very serious questions about how much the attorney general knew about the FBI's misuse of surveillance powers and when he knew it." A lawsuit by Hofmann's group seeking internal FBI documents about NSLs prompted the release of the reports. Caroline Fredrickson, a lobbyist for the American Civil Liberties Union, said the new documents raise questions about whether Gonzales misled Congress at a moment when lawmakers were poised to renew the Patriot Act and keenly sought assurances that there were no abuses. "It was extremely important," she said of Gonzales's 2005 testimony. "The attorney general said there are no problems with the Patriot Act, and there was no counterevidence at the time." Some of the reports describe rules violations that the FBI decided not to report to the intelligence board. In February 2006, for example, FBI officials wrote that agents sent a person's phone records, which they had obtained from a provider under a national security letter, to an outside party. The mistake was blamed on "an error in the mail handling." When the third party sent the material back, the bureau decided not to report the mistake as a violation. The memos also detail instances in which the FBI wrote out new NSLs to cover evidence that had been mistakenly collected. In a June 30, 2006, e-mail, for instance, an FBI supervisor asked an agent who had "overcollected" evidence under a national security letter to forward his original request to lawyers. "We would like to check the specific language to see if there is anything in the body that would cover the extra material they gave," the supervisor wrote. Sometimes the FBI reached seemingly contradictory conclusions about the gravity of its errors. On May 6, 2005, the bureau decided that it needed to report a violation when agents made an "inadvertent" request for data for the wrong phone number. But on June 1, 2006, in a similar wrong-number case, the bureau concluded that a violation did not need to be reported because the agent acted "in good faith." These newletters are produced by the Calamity Howler. If you do not wish to receive this e-mail, simply click on the link to :(http://www.thecalamityhowler.com/?unsubscribeCode=595ca&unsubscribeEmail=rich%40math.missouri.edu)unsubscribe:(http://www.thecalamityhowler.com/?unsubscribeCode=595ca&unsubscribeEmail=rich%40math.missouri.edu).