ARMY POST FORCED TO ALTER MEMORIALS DUE TO RISING IRAQ DEATH TOLL

The Nation -- Because so many Fort Lewis soliders are being killed in Iraq, the Washington State army base says it will no longer hold individual memorial services. Fort Lewis will now hold one memorial a month for all dead soldiers. In May, the bloodiest month of the occupation in 2007, 19 Fort Lewis soldiers were killed --more than at any time during this war, About 10,000 of the base's troops are now in Iraq--the most since the 2003 invasion.

With this order, the base commanders appear to be signaling that they foresee bloodier, deadlier times ahead--as the "surge" takes more lives. And though they may wish to diminish the pain and grief of a hard hit community, collective memorials will also shield people from the reality of the death and destruction wrought by this war and occupation. It is also a policy that reminds of other attempts to suppress the reality of this war. This Administration, for example, has gone out of its way to prohibit evidence of dead soldiers returning home--by prohibiting photographs of coffins as they arrived back in the US. The President and Vice-President have carefully avoided attending any of the more than 3,400 funerals that are the tragic fabric of this war. It is worth remembering that it was the grief and pain at the scores of funerals they attended that moved Republican Walter Jones of North Carolina and Democrat John Murtha of Pennsylvania to oppose this war.

Every day we delay leaving Iraq costs only more American and Iraqi lives.

IMAGINE IF BUSH WERE PRESIDENT IN DECEMBER '41

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

Iraq policy statements coming out of Bush’s manure farm are very much like what you might hear trying to collect money from a deadbeat. They always promise some future event that will allow them to make everything right if only we show patience – some check is coming from someplace. And of course anyone who disbelieves our deadbeat in the White House, we’re told, shows a terrible lack of patriotism or is just a fool who thinks we don’t have to fight terrorists.
Now we wait for General David Patraeus’ report in September. After that, policy will become clear, rational, purposeful, and on course. And if it doesn’t, there’s always another event to wait for.
Before the Patraeus report we had the Baker commission. Remember? The administration first wanted us to wait for it, then wanted us to forget it, but now Bush has revived its memory, probably because its recommendations will have something to do with the next blessed event promising to answer all our questions.
In the meantime, administration flunkies leaked what was supposed to be a bombshell of a story to The New York Times claiming troop strength may well come down to 100,000 or so next year. Gosh, isn’t that an election year?
Patraeus’ battle plan, which is already heaping more pointless casualties onto the altar of Bush’s ego (that’s a metaphor I borrowed from Bill Moyers) can’t possibly be combined with a troop reduction because it calls for establishing numerous smaller outposts and more aggressive patrols. Those troops who aren’t yanked would be even more outnumbered. It’s horrible to contemplate the result.
Meanwhile word has leaked out that years ago an exceptional mine-resistant battle vehicle was designed in Africa. But the manufacturer can make only a few of them a year, and there’s no push from Bush to rev up production even though more than half of our casualties come from mines that tear through our vehicles.

WIN OR PERISH?
In World War II FDR ordered manufacturers to stop making civilian cars and other non-essentials because the nation had to win or perish. Manufacturers poured out liberty ships, planes, artillery pieces, ammo. Designs were stepped up. Inferior tanks and planes were replaced by new ones that could go up against the best. After less than four years of fighting, the enemy was vanquished.
Bush says victory is vital, that al Qaeda will follow us home if we leave Iraq and slaughter bunches and bunches of us, but he does nothing to put the nation on a war footing, and his war of choice in Iraq passed the four-year mark long ago. If he believed what he says, he’d need to revamp manufacturing and establish a draft. Or perhaps not. When informed we were under attack in September 2001, he spent the next seven minutes reading The Pet Goat. Then he ran away, emerging three days later with a bullhorn and a load of crap. That was after spending almost an entire year ignoring terrorist threats and actions.
Had he been at the wheel in December 1941, we’d have lost the war, plain and simple. Achtung, sayanora, that’s all she wrote.
America still has FDRs around, but they no longer rise to the top of the political process and for the most part don’t even get involved with it. That’s because the system has been stunk up by the need for incredible amounts of cash. Beggars, fools, incompetents, and liars rise to the top. Not FDRs or Lincolns.
So we can all look forward to these Bush-manufactured phony events until the big one in November 2008 and hope that somehow this time we'll move up in class to a second-rater.

UNBOMB IRAQ (GUEST POEM BY TEXAS POET SUSAN BRIGHT)

Rewind reality so the gray heap
of someone’s brains rushes back into
a broken skull. Unlight the firestorm

so fragments of ash
meld back together. Attach severed arms and legs
to bodies, breathe life

back into dead children
and their parents. Repair the waste of soldiers who
are battered and die

obeying an illegal campaign.
Draw blood and bad water up from sand, purify
the water, restore

the lives of human beings caught in the human
catastrophe "shock and awe" has wrought
on the world — in our name.

Apologize.
It is a mistake to think weapons fix anything.
Justice solves human problems, not bombs.

Unbomb Iraq.
This is wrong. Americans are not monsters.
Hitler would find no fascists here. Ay!

We suffer from bad government. That’s all.
Enormous errors tangle the American will —
We think we are a free people.

We’re not.
We think we have a free press. We don’t.
Stealth corporations have usurped our constitution.

Human survival on earth depends on our being able
to control them. I startle awake, these words
on my lips —

Unbomb Iraq.
Unbomb Iraq.
Unbomb Iraq.

©Susan Bright, 2003

Award-winning poet Bright is publisher of Plain View Books. http://www.plainviewpress.net/. Her personal Website is http://earthfamilyalpha.blogspot.com 'Unbomb Iraq' is part of the collection The Layers of Our Seeing.

Doubts Grow as G.I.’s in Iraq Find Allies in Enemy Ranks (Riveting, revealing guest article from NY Times)

May 27, 2007
By MICHAEL KAMBER
NEW YORK TIMES

BAGHDAD — Staff Sgt. David Safstrom does not regret his previous tours in Iraq, not even a difficult second stint when two comrades were killed while trying to capture insurgents.

“In Mosul, in 2003, it felt like we were making the city a better place,” he said. “There was no sectarian violence, Saddam was gone, we were tracking down the bad guys. It felt awesome.”

But now on his third deployment in Iraq, he is no longer a believer in the mission. The pivotal moment came, he says, this past February when soldiers killed a man setting a roadside bomb. When they searched the bomber’s body, they found identification showing him to be a sergeant in the Iraqi Army.

“I thought, ‘What are we doing here? Why are we still here?’ ” said Sergeant Safstrom, a member of Delta Company of the First Battalion, 325th Airborne Infantry, 82nd Airborne Division. “We’re helping guys that are trying to kill us. We help them in the day. They turn around at night and try to kill us.”

His views are echoed by most of his fellow soldiers in Delta Company, renowned for its aggressiveness.

A small minority of Delta Company soldiers — the younger, more recent enlistees in particular — seem to still wholeheartedly support the war. Others are ambivalent, torn between fear of losing more friends in battle, longing for their families and a desire to complete their mission.

With few reliable surveys of soldiers’ attitudes, it is impossible to simply extrapolate from the small number of soldiers in Delta Company. But in interviews with more than a dozen soldiers over a one-week period with this 83-man unit, most said they were disillusioned by repeated deployments, by what they saw as the abysmal performance of Iraqi security forces and by a conflict that they considered a civil war, one they had no ability to stop.

They had seen shadowy militia commanders installed as Iraqi Army officers, they said, had come under increasing attack from roadside bombs — planted within sight of Iraqi Army checkpoints — and had fought against Iraqi soldiers whom they thought were their allies.

“In 2003, 2004, 100 percent of the soldiers wanted to be here, to fight this war,” said Sgt. First Class David Moore, a self-described “conservative Texas Republican” and platoon sergeant who strongly advocates an American withdrawal. “Now, 95 percent of my platoon agrees with me.”

It is not a question of loyalty, the soldiers insist. Sergeant Safstrom, for example, comes from a thoroughly military family. His mother and father have served in the armed forces, as have his three sisters, one brother and several uncles. One week after the Sept. 11 attacks, he walked into a recruiter’s office and joined the Army.

“You guys want to start a fight in my backyard, I got something for you,” he recalls thinking at the time.

But in Sergeant Safstrom’s view, the American presence is futile. “If we stayed here for 5, even 10 more years, the day we leave here these guys will go crazy,” he said. “It would go straight into a civil war. That’s how it feels, like we’re putting a Band-Aid on this country until we leave here.”

Their many deployments have added to the strain. After spending six months in Iraq, the soldiers of Delta Company had been home for only 24 hours last December when the news came. “Change your plans,” they recall being told. “We’re going back to Iraq.”

Nineteen days later, just after Christmas, Capt. Douglas Rogers and the men of Delta Company were on their way to Kadhimiya, a Shiite enclave of about 300,000. As part of the so-called surge of American troops, their primary mission was to maintain stability in the area and prepare the Iraqi Army and police to take control of the neighborhood.

“I thought it would not be long before we could just stay on our base and act as a quick-reaction force,” said the barrel-chested Captain Rogers of San Antonio. “The Iraqi security forces would step up.”

It has not worked out that way. Still, Captain Rogers says their mission in Kadhimiya has been “an amazing success.”

“We’ve captured 4 of the top 10 most-wanted guys in this area,” he said. And the streets of Kadhimiya are filled with shoppers and the stores are open, he said, a rarity in Baghdad due partly to Delta Company’s patrols.

Captain Rogers acknowledges the skepticism of many of his soldiers. “Our unit has already sent two soldiers home in a box,” he said. “My soldiers don’t see the same level of commitment from the Iraqi Army units they’re partnered with.”

Yet there is, he insists, no crisis of morale: “My guys are all professionals. I tell them to do something, they do it.” His dictum is proved on patrol, where his soldiers walk the streets for hours in the stifling heat, providing cover for one another with crisp efficiency.

On April 29, a Delta Company patrol was responding to a tip at Al Sadr mosque, a short distance from its base. The soldiers saw men in the distance erecting burning barricades, and the streets emptied out quickly. Then a militia, believed to be the Mahdi Army, which is affiliated with the radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, began firing at them from rooftops and windows.

Sgt. Kevin O’Flarity, a squad leader, jumped into his Humvee to join his fellow soldiers, racing through abandoned Iraqi Army and police checkpoints to the battle site.

He and his squad maneuvered their Humvees through alleyways and side streets, firing back at an estimated 60 insurgents during a gun battle that raged for two and a half hours. A rocket-propelled grenade glanced off Sergeant O’Flarity’s Humvee, failing to penetrate.

When the battle was over, Delta Company learned that among the enemy dead were at least two Iraqi Army soldiers that American forces had helped train and arm.

“The 29th was a watershed moment in a negative sense, because the Iraqi Army would not fight with us,” Captain Rogers said, adding, “Some actually picked up weapons and fought against us.”

The battle changed the attitude among his soldiers toward the war, he said.

“Before that fight, there were a few true believers.” Captain Rogers said. “After the 29th, I don’t think you’ll find a true believer in this unit. They’re paratroopers. There’s no question they’ll fulfill their mission. But they’re fighting now for pride in their unit, professionalism, loyalty to their fellow soldier and chain of command.”

To Sergeant O’Flarity, the Iraqi security forces are militias beholden to local leaders, not the Iraqi government. “Half of the Iraqi security forces are insurgents,” he said.

As for his views on the war, Sergeant O’Flarity said, “I don’t believe we should be here in the middle of a civil war.”

“We’ve all lost friends over here,” he said. “Most of us don’t know what we’re fighting for anymore. We’re serving our country and friends, but the only reason we go out every day is for each other.”

“I don’t want any more of my guys to get hurt or die. If it was something I felt righteous about, maybe. But for this country and this conflict, no, it’s not worth it.”

Staff Sgt. James Griffin grew up in Troy, N.C., near the Special Operations base at Fort Bragg. His dream was to be a soldier, and growing up he would skip school and volunteer to play the role of the enemy during Special Operations training exercises. When he was 17, he joined the Army.

Now 22, Sergeant Griffin is a Delta Company section leader. On the night of May 5, as he neared an Iraqi police checkpoint with a convoy of Humvees, Sergeant Griffin spotted what looked like a camouflaged cinderblock and immediately halted the convoy. His vigilance may have saved the lives of several soldiers. Under the camouflage was a huge, six-array, explosively formed penetrator — a deadly roadside bomb that cuts through the Humvees’ armor with ease.

The insurgents quickly set off the device, but the Americans were at a safe distance. An explosive ordnance disposal team arrived to check the area. As the ordnance team rolled back to base, they were attacked with a second roadside bomb near another Iraqi checkpoint. One soldier was killed and two were wounded.

No one has been able to explain why two bombs were found near Iraqi checkpoints, bombs that Iraqi soldiers and the police had either failed to notice or helped to plant.

Sergeant Griffin understands the criticism of the Iraqi forces, but he believes they, and the war effort, must be given more time.

“If we throw this problem to the side, it’s not going to fix itself,” he said. “We’ve created the Iraqi forces. We gave them Humvees and equipment. For however long they say they need us here, maybe we need to stay.”

Will some White House correspondent ask our President about the revelations made in this article? Michael Kamber risked his life to gather the material. --I.G.

POLITICIANS QUARREL, PFC ANZACK DIES

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

BUSH HAD LET it be known that if Congress failed to appropriate funds for his war in Iraq he’d leave troops out there in the field without provisions to prove his point. Because the threat had been made by a man who’s registered time and time again above 9.0 on the insanity scale, members backed off.

RICHARD NIXON used to say that if the enemy thought you were a little crazy, you could work that to your advantage. He was talking about foreign affairs, but Bush has taken the doctrine several steps further into the realm of domestic madness. You don’t even have to look into his history to understand he meant what he said. You only had to look into his blank, taxidermy eyes, eyes incapable of seeing or understanding or caring.

ONE OF THE many resulting ironies is that Congress, fearing Bush might drive war policy off a cliff, backed off and let him keep sending it down a steep switchback road without any brakes. This coming week they’ll be burying one of his victims, Pfc. Joseph J. Anzack Jr., of Torrance, Calif., the 20-year-old kid whose body was recently found floating in the Euphrates. After being captured with two members of his squad he was shot in the head. The body showed signs of abuse, possibly torture, but we can hope not. Anzack lived down the road from me just a few miles, went to a nearby high school.

TOMATO-SKINNED VEHICLES

IN A WAR that makes no sense, Anzack and his undermanned unit were out on a mission that made even less sense – sitting in one spot in hostile territory, giving the enemy a chance to zero in on them. It was what troops call a cluster-fuck -- an apt illustration of what goes wrong when the primary mission – in this case our participation in Iraq’s civil war – is pointless, and the tools and the manpower are insanely short of what’s required. Not enough guys in a couple tomato-skinned vehicles. Somebody gave a stupid order and it got passed along and eight men are casualties.
ANZACK WAS AN infantryman in the 10th Mountain Division, a proud outfit that took on the Germans in the mountains of Northern Italy, sometimes hand-to-hand. Lieutenant Bob Dole was crippled in the fighting. My cousin Tech 4 Marvin Gillman, a paratrooper in the 509th Parachute Infantry Battalion, was wounded in sustained fighting around Anzio. A unit citation from Lt. Gen. Mark Clark says the severely outnumbered 509th fought off waves of attackers "with rifle butts and even fists."

AFTER THREE WEEKS in the hospital Marvin was returned to his unit, which was later dropped into southern France on a night mission. There was heavy flack. My cousin and the sixteen other men in his plane were mistakenly dropped into the Mediterranean and never seen again.

BUT OVERALL, THE drop was successful. The 509th killed or captured all the Germans in their sector, and there were plenty. Marvin was an only child, and his death broke my aunt and uncle, ruining their lives. He was 19.

AT LEAST Belle and Sol Gillman knew their son fought in a war that had to be fought. The country had no choice, and the overall mission was rational. But Mr. and Mrs. Anzack must at least suspect that this war makes no sense at all, that their son died because we have a president who’s willing to let 20-year-old kids get shot in the head in a futile attempt to prove he knows what he’s doing. Those are real people dying out there, and some of them belong to us.

CONGRESSIONAL DEMOCRATS' '08 CALCULATIONS OVERRIDE MORALITY ON IRAQ (GUEST COLUMN BY DAVID BROMWICH, HUFFINGTONPOST)

By David Bromwich
May 24, 2008
The Democrats who vote this week to give the president the additional billions he wants for his war without a "timeline of withdrawal" are acting on a rational calculation. Nothing, for them, outweighs the importance of 2008, when they look to wrest control of the White House from a demoralized Republican party. The only way to assure that result is to pin the war--all of it--on the
president and his followers. You do it by letting them lose the war in their own way.
Let us concede the realism of the view. The pragmatists mean to watch as the president destroys himself and his party and as much of the U.S. Army and American prestige in the world as still remains for him to destroy. That could be quite a lot, but--so the calculation runs--when it is over it will really be over. The fault will be easy to recognize, heavy to lift, impossible to deny.
By comparison, the argument for declaring a schedule of withdrawal has rested on a vague blend of reasons. The opposition says the 2006 election was a mandate, and so it was--but the people never told the Democrats how to get out. Again it is said the risk to our soldiers has become exorbitant--and yet if the cause were righteous, would Americans not want to accept the risk? Finally, some opponents have treated the war as an accidental intrusion on our politics. "The Iraqi government by its quarrels and delays, and the Iraqi people with their bloodlettings, have disappointed us terribly. They have proved themselves at last unworthy of our generosity." This excuse is congenial to all who want to pretend we had no part in bringing anarchy to Iraq. It is the easy thing to say; and people are saying it.
MORAL ARGUMENT
The argument that carries most force for ending the war now is a moral argument. It is known to the Democratic opposition, but they have mainly left it unspoken. It says that we have no justifiable cause for killing and dying in Iraq; that we can't inflict this suffering any longer on our soldiers, or on the Iraqi people; that we have become a source and a stimulus of violence in that country, more than we can hope to be its remedy; that the only Iraqis who steadily tell us otherwise are America's dependents and camp followers--the unfortunate minority who stand to lose more if we leave than if we stay. Only when this moral argument becomes a public fact will the opposition have found an answer to the calculation of the Democratic party realists and the wish by the president to be out of office before the blame descends.
Disgust with the war is general. Informed opposition has a distance to go. It must turn on something about us, not something about them. It must mention the tortures at Abu Ghraib, the massacre at Haditha, the house-to-house devastation of Falluja--the city we destroyed in order to save it. A country responsible for such things may have meant well, but it can't expect others to grant its honorable intentions. There comes a time when past actions speak louder than present words. If the war has become intolerable and not just politically inexpedient--intolerable because of the things we have allowed ourselves to do to Iraq, and the things the world has seen us do--the Democratic opposition must say so. Their majority may then grow larger; it will certainly grow stronger. And it will have a reply waiting for General Petraeus when he says, as surely he will in September, that the situation is dangerous but getting better; that he needs a little more time, a few more walls, a few thousand more troops.
David Bromwich teaches literature at Yale.

AT LEAST ITALY'S FASCISTS, UNLIKE OURS, COULD MAKE TRAINS RUN ON TIME

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

AS I HEARD THE FATHER of a newly dead American soldier ask this morning, if this is a democracy, why is this happening? The Democrats in Congress decided to fund Bush’s pointless war in Iraq after all, without strings, as they’ve done more than four years already. Probably most of them understand that the war not only kills and maims people without purpose, but helps America’s enemies as it sends some of the best young people we have home in coffins (that the government won’t allow to be photographed).
VIRTUALLY ALL polls show that support for the president and his war is now below 30 percent. This less than 30 percent of our populace, the “dead-enders,” to borrow Donald Rumsfeld’s term for Iraqi Baathists, follows a ghastly set of individuals whose tight little faction controls almost every facet of our government at home and abroad. Yet Americans whose Constitution is being carried off by this hard-core minority still refer to their country as a democracy.
FASCISM IS NOT always easily defined because it adjusts to its environment, and like bacteria, morphs into new varieties at different times to respond to specific situations.
ROBERT O. PAXTON, a Columbia professor since retired, concluded that fascism is always based on “a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond reach of traditional solutions,” that it contains the “belief one’s group is the victim, justifying any action without legal or moral limits,” that it compels a “need for authority by a natural leader above the law, relying on the superiority of his instincts,” and that these special leaders and their societal foot soldiers have the right “to dominate others without legal or moral restraint.” Fascism also, Paxton found, always had a fear of “foreign 'contamination.’" I invite you to study these factors one by one and see if they apply to the Bush regime.
BUSH, HIS DISCIPLES, and handlers saw Nine-Eleven as a tool to crack the safe of U.S. government and impose a polity that few of them would define as fascist. But it is not up to the criminal to define his action. That’s done by society at large, and these people are in fact following a fascist code.
THEY'VE SUSPENDED habeas corpus and dispensed with rights of privacy. They employ torture, have renounced the Geneva accords on prisoners of war, and use Americans’ fear of an invisible enemy to justify a succession of other unconstitutional acts that steal our freedom. They use our military as a private army to settle their personal scores and enrich favored corporations. Yet they’re so inept, that unlike Mussolini, they can’t even make the trains run on time. It’s tragic that so-called opponents of Bush in Congress caved in to them once more at this vital juncture and will enable more of the same.
BELIEVE IT OR NOT, in the past I’ve rarely dwelled on political questions. I prefer to consider art, sports, philosophy, and fun. Some people find politics enjoyable. I don’t. But I believe we’re living in terribly dangerous times. We all better start paying more attention, even though that won't be enough to cure what ails our nation.

BUSH-CHENEY DISINFORMATION ON IRAQ STILL WORKING AFTER ALL THESE YEARS

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

THE FORCE OF the administration’s misinformation on Iraq is so strong that even some of our most dovish members of Congress fear the consequences of pulling out, so they seek watered-down legislation that would possibly get us out of there in a couple years, possibly not.
Of course the consequences of staying in Iraq are far worse than remaining, but their minds have been corroded by the never-ending onslaught of Bush-speak. The administration contends that each and every piece of overwhelming evidence showing that its Iraq policy is a disaster is a sign of the exact opposite. Answering its deluded logic is like trying to debate with some drooling maniac raving on a subway platform. It can wear you down. And it’s pointless.
Now we have a host of intelligence officials telling The Los Angeles Times that the war has become an important and burgeoning source of revenue for al Qaeda, which sends money it makes out of the Iraqi chaos to buttress its campaigns in places like the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Al Qaeda and its Taliban ally have become so powerful that Pakistan bowed to reality and removed thousands of troops along its Afghan border, making our troops’ campaign in Afghanistan an uphill battle. The war of choice in Iraq that was supposed to make us safe made us less safe. These intelligence officials aren’t telling the administration one thing and The Los Angeles Times another. They’re giving the same story to Bush, but he lies to the American people about what he’s being told. That’s not just horrendous. It’s an ongoing, impeachable crime.
IRAN THANKFUL FOR IRAQ WAR
Also, the prestigious Chatham House research center in London, perhaps Britain’s most respected think tank, now states flatly that thanks to Bush’s cockamamie invasion, the most powerful force in disintegrated Iraqi society is not America, which monthly pours 90 to 100 lives of its troops and $8 billion into the pot, but Iran, which has profited mightily and in numerous ways.
The Constitution foresaw the possibility of a Bush and a Cheney in office, and it mapped out impeachment as the remedy. In the meantime, no more funds to participate in Iraq's civil war, no more debates with babbling, drooling, lying lunatics.

REPUBLICANS AFTER BUSH'S JOB PLEDGE TO CONTINUE HIS HORRIFIC POLICIES (GUEST COLUMNIST)

May 18, 2007
By PAUL KRUGMAN
New York Times
I’ve been looking at the race for the Republican presidential nomination, and I’ve come to a disturbing conclusion: maybe we’ve all been too hard on President Bush.

No, I haven’t lost my mind. Mr. Bush has degraded our government and undermined the rule of law; he has led us into strategic disaster and moral squalor.

But the leading contenders for the Republican nomination have given us little reason to believe they would behave differently. Why should they? The principles Mr. Bush has betrayed are principles today’s G.O.P., dominated by movement conservatives, no longer honors. In fact, rank-and-file Republicans continue to approve strongly of Mr. Bush’s policies — and the more un-American the policy, the more they support it.

Now, Mr. Bush and Dick Cheney may have done a few things other Republicans wouldn’t. Their initial domestic surveillance program was apparently so lawless and unconstitutional that even John Ashcroft, approached on his sickbed, refused to go along. For the most part, however, Mr. Bush has done just what his party wants and expects.

There was a telling moment during the second Republican presidential debate, when Brit Hume of Fox News confronted the contenders with a hypothetical “24”-style situation in which torturing suspects is the only way to stop a terrorist attack.

Bear in mind that such situations basically never happen in real life, that the U.S. military has asked the producers of “24” to cut down on the torture scenes. Last week Gen. David Petraeus, the U.S. commander in Iraq, circulated an open letter to our forces warning that using torture or “other expedient methods to obtain information” is both wrong and ineffective, and that it is important to keep the “moral high ground.”

But aside from John McCain, who to his credit echoed Gen. Petraeus (and was met with stony silence), the candidates spoke enthusiastically in favor of torture and against the rule of law. Rudy Giuliani endorsed waterboarding. Mitt Romney declared that he wants accused terrorists at Guantánamo, “where they don’t get the access to lawyers they get when they’re on our soil ... My view is, we ought to double Guantánamo.” His remarks were greeted with wild applause.

And torture isn’t the only Bush legacy that seems destined to continue if a Republican becomes the next president. Mr. Bush got us into the Iraq quagmire by conflating Saddam with Al Qaeda, treating two mutually hostile groups as if they constituted a single enemy. Well, Mr. Romney offers more of that. “There is a global jihadist effort,” he warned in the second debate. “And they’ve come together as Shia and Sunni and Hezbollah and Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda with that intent.” Aren’t Sunnis and Shiites killing each other, not coming together? Nevermind.

What about the administration’s state of denial over Iraq, its unwillingness to face up to reality? None of the leading G.O.P. presidential contenders seem any different — certainly not Mr. McCain, who strolled through a Baghdad marketplace wearing a bulletproof vest, accompanied by more than 100 soldiers in armored Humvees while attack helicopters flew overhead, then declared that his experience proved there are parts of Baghdad where you can “walk freely.”

Finally, what about the Bush administration’s trademark incompetence? In appointing unqualified loyalists to key positions, Mr. Bush was just following the advice of the Heritage Foundation, which urged him back in 2001 to “make appointment decisions based on loyalty first and expertise second.” And the base doesn’t mind: the Bernie Kerik affair — Mr. Giuliani’s attempt to get his corrupt, possibly mob-connected business partner appointed to head the department of homeland security — hasn’t kept Mr. Giuliani from becoming the apparent front-runner for the Republican nomination.

What we need to realize is that the infamous “Bush bubble,” the administration’s no-reality zone, extends a long way beyond the White House. Millions of Americans believe that patriotic torturers are keeping us safe, that there’s a vast Islamic axis of evil, that victory in Iraq is just around the corner, that Bush appointees are doing a heckuva job — and that news reports contradicting these beliefs reflect liberal media bias.

And the Republican nomination will go either to someone who shares these beliefs, and would therefore run the country the same way Mr. Bush has, or to a very, very good liar.

HALLIBURTON FLYING OFF WITH $20 BILLION IN IRAQ BLOOD MONEY & STILL COUNTING (GUEST COLUMNIST)

Giles Whittell of The Times of London is curioius why Cheney’s beloved Halliburton finds it so necessary to transplant its headquarters to Dubai. Are congressional investigators getting too close?

May 17, 2007

Moving house is said to be the most stressful experience in life after divorce and bereavement, and I would not wish to add to anyone’s stress in the middle of such a move. This is offered more in a spirit of reassurance.
The packers have already arrived at the comfortable Houston home of David Lesar. They may even have come and gone: Mr Lesar said after a golf tournament last week that there was little left to do but board a plane with his family and leave.
The Lesars will be going to Dubai, for good. The golf there is outstanding, and if they feel homesick for Texas they could always buy an artificial island in the shape of their home state, recently completed in the opalescent waters of the Gulf.
By way of background, Mr Lesar is the much-admired chief executive of Halliburton, the world’s second-largest oilfield services provider. Its former subsidiary, Kellogg Brown Root, specialises in providing meals, accommodation and laundrettes for the US Army. Together, Halliburton and KBR have earned approximately $20 billion in Iraq since 2003.
In the teeth of wearisome howling from conspiracy theorists, Mr Lesar announced in March that after 90 years based in Oklahoma and Texas his company was moving its world headquarters to Dubai to position it better for the growing volume of business it expects to win in the “Eastern hemisphere”.
As it happens, even after half a century of intense Western interest in the Eastern hemisphere, and in particular in Middle Eastern oil, 60 per cent of Halliburton’s revenues still come from North America – but Mr Lesar is the expert. We assume his projections are accurate.
It also happens that the month before the move was announced, the new chairman of the House Oversight Committee in Washington disclosed that $2.7 billion of Halliburton’s earnings in Iraq are regarded by the US Government’s Defence Contract Audit Agency as the proceeds of “suspect billing”, or overpricing.
And it transpires, finally, that the same vexatious muckrakers who have allowed themselves to become so exercised about Vice-President Dick Cheney’s former role as Halliburton’s chairman are now attacking the group for a new deal signed by an Iranian subsidiary to develop Tehran’s natural gasfields.
There is, of course, no suggestion of wrongdoing by Mr Lesar or Halliburton, which, in any case, formally separated from Kellogg Brown Root last month. But given the vengeful obsessions of Mr Lesar’s enemies in Washington it must be comforting to know that Dubai has no extradition treaty with the US; and that he is moving to a place of unfettered economic dynamism with a supportive commentariat. When Mr Cheney visited nearby Abu Dhabi last week, the political editor of the local newspaper covered the entire visit in a Halliburton baseball cap.

FROM THIS ADMINISTRATION WE NEED DEPOSITIONS, NOT MEMOIRS (GUEST COLUMN BY JANE SMILEY OF HUFFINGTONPOST.COM)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jane-smiley/are-we-done-yet_b_48520.html

'KILLERS IN HIGH PLACES SAY THEIR PRAYERS OUT LOUD'

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

Ever notice whenever U.S. troops get ambushed there’s no shortage of Iraqi men to jump up and down and celebrate in the burned out wreckage?
This morning’s paper had another one of those photos only in this instance it was a troop carrier that had been used by Danish troops, one of whom was killed.

If we’re in this war to help the Iraqi people, how come none of the fine citizens over there that Bush cares so much about ever seem to oppose the ding-a-lings playing in the wreckage left by our dead and disabled? Now with a majority of the Iraqi Parliament asking us to get out, you’d think the people running our Bush-topia would be running out of excuses for continuing this idiocy. Never happen. They’ve got more excuses than the Chicago Cubs.
A friend from London asked me recently just what the Bushies were doing this all for. "Why?" he asked. If there’s any humor in this war, that’s it, that after more than four years of war we’re still trying to find out why they’re doing this to us. It looks more and more like there’s nothing terribly convoluted about their reasoning. Who’s profiting by it? Exxon-Mobil, Saudi Arabia, Halliburton, Blackwater, Cheney. Bush’s oil buddies in Texas and the Mideast.
Pelosi is nuts to look for a compromise on war funding. What kind of logic is there in telling Prince George and Chicken Hawk Cheney that you’ll let them kill just another several thousand people and then you’re through? Don’t let them kill anybody. Not one more dime, not one more life. Not one.
But we needn’t make them grumpy. Heck, why not congratulate our great leaders for a mission accomplished? As of now there are no ties between Saddam and al-Qaeda and Iraq is as free of WMDs as the Republican presidential candidates are of brain cells. So stick a fork in this occupation. It’s done. Time to call in the poets, because some of them had it all figured years before it started – oracle Leonard Cohen, for instance in his song Anthem:

. . . the killers in high places
say their prayers out loud.
But they've summoned, they've summoned up
a thundercloud
and they're going to hear from me.

Cohen’s a Canadian, but he lives mostly in the U.S. We could make it work. Make him President as part of Bush's guest-worker program.

LET BUSH EXPLAIN HIS CURIOUS DISCONNECT WITH CONSEQUENCES TO HIS APPELLATE ATTORNEYS

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

I opened the newspaper this morning hoping for good news on those three U.S. soldiers captured in Iraq over the weekend. What I got on my front page was a photo of President Bush joking with some guy who was wearing a metal breastplate and packing an ancient musket.
Seems the sweet prince and his faithful wife Tonto were off in Jamestown enjoying the celebration of its settlement by the Brits.
There’s a curious disconnect between Bush and the consequences of his monstrous decisions. People are getting killed. They’re getting their limbs burned and blown off and they’re getting tortured and bombed out of their homes, they're losing their jobs, living inside communal nervous breakdowns. And none of it takes its toll on Bush.
He’s a psychopath who's filled his administration with others like him, because there's more where he came from. How do they all find each other?

Wolfowitz makes no apologies for his major role in destroying Iraq while shearing off America’s ties with civilized people around the world. Kicked upstairs to the World Bank, he immediately plunges into corrupt practices while claiming to wage an anti-corruption campaign, and now he can’t understand why people are upset with him.
Torture-mongering Gonzalez, the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, lies to Congress about his sleazy personnel actions, then wonders why people won’t let him off the hook on the strength of his generalized denials and slogans.

TENET'S $4 MILLION DENIAL
George Tenet sits at the feet of Colin Powell while he delivers to the U.N. a fictional tale of Saddam ties to Bin Laden and tons of WMD. Tenet knows the intelligence is fabricated on the fly or unconfirmed and makes not a peep. Then he writes a book denying everything, blaming it all on everybody else, and takes $4 million for it. Incidentally, he doesn’t write the book. He hires a ghost writer to do that for him.
Chicken Hawk Cheney throws deals at his favorite corporation in no-bid contracts worth billions, refuses to discuss it, and then runs around calling everyone who disagrees with his disastrous war in Iraq cowards and/or traitors.

I can’t show you the photo of Bush and the guy in the armor costume because I’d have to pay for it. But it’s quite similar to the photo in which he’s joking around with some guy who presented him with a guitar the very day people were drowning and dying of dehydration on the Gulf Coast in the wake of Katrina.
We’ve been watching this scenario six years, and it’s clear there’s nothing that could get Bush and his psycho buddies to recognize their crimes and misdemeanors for what they are. Let their appeals lawyers try to explain it to them after we’ve got their clients in prison where they belong.

AMERICAN POW'S IN IRAQ DESERVE MORE THAN THE USUAL 15 MINUTES

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

Apparently insurgents have taken three more Americans soldiers prisoners in an ambush south of Baghdad. First order of business: How do we get our missing soldiers back? Keep reading.

For starters, let's see if this time we can prevent the administration from waiting out the fifteen minutes and sending these victims into the purgatory of the forgotten.

The new prisoners were part of a weekend patrol of seven soldiers and one Iraqi translator, five of whom were killed. Anyone who’s been following this blog knows two other U.S. soldiers were already believed held by Iraqis. Army Reservist Ahmed Qusai al-Taie, 42, of Ann Arbor, Michigan, was abducted October 23, 2006, and PFC (since promoted to Sergeant) Keith Maupin, 23, of Batavia, Ohio, disappeared in April 2004 after his convoy was attacked near Baghdad International Airport. Al-Jazeera later showed a videotape of Maupin held captive by insurgents. Few Americans are aware of these POWs because the Bush Administration, not eager to advertise the costs of its crimes and misdemeanors, never includes them in the casualty lists, even though in all previous wars the U.S. listed dead, wounded and missing. The mass media, either purposefully or through ignorance, have cooperated in the subterfuge. In a world with the attention span of a mosquito, it's no difficult trick.
Regarding the latest tragic incident, one might ask why so small a contingent was out patrolling hostile territory in the dead of night? But conditions in Iraq are so egregious that only two days earlier U.S. Maj. Gen. Benjamin Mixon flatly told the press he doesn’t have enough soldiers in his sector to do the job they’ve been assigned. These kinds of candid statements are becoming more and more frequent from our military commanders. They’re a cry for help, a declaration that lunatics, fools, or a combination of the two are calling the shots.

SQUAD SHORT TWO MEN
Rifle squads consist of nine soldiers, so even if one agrees the job called for only one squad, this patrol was short two men. That’s the way it is throughout the war theater, and it costs lives. Commanders are so short-handed that they send their troops out day after day, sometimes two patrols a day. This steals sleep and alertness, causing mistakes, casualties, and more frequent and severe battle fatigue. But chicken hawks like Prince George and Shotgun Cheney don’t know or care about such details. They have their own agenda. By announcing their refusal to abide by the Geneva Accords on prisoners they’ve made it impossible for the U.S. to stand on the moral high ground. They've also earned the world’s revulsion and made our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan infinitely less safe.
Of course we can hope the five men now missing and presumed captured will return home soon alive and well. But hope isn’t enough. We need to start talking to intermediaries such as Iran and Syria to get our prisoners back. Our uniquely inhuman leaders George and Dick, living in splendorous bubbles of leisure, show their courage by not even worrying about casualties or POWs. It’s worth wondering how their courage would measure up if they had to switch places with al-Taie or Maupin.
This administration will never get back our soldiers or call a halt to their pointless war. Our best hope of freeing our troops is to remove Bush and Cheney from office so our government can go back to caring about Americans like them. Free ourselves so we can free them.

WOULD FOUNDING FATHERS ACCEPT TYRANNY OF NEVER-ENDING WAR?

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

During the Vietnam War. G.I.s safely walked the streets of Saigon without sidearms. Their biggest worry was getting short-changed by a bartender. But after four years of war in Iraq, the capital city of Baghdad remains so dangerous that our diplomats must wear body armor inside the embassy compound, even though it’s a compound within the compound of the Green Zone.
Meanwhile Prince George and Shotgun Cheney build a hush-hush network of “enduring” military bases there so that the U.S. can hang on to their fanciful oil gains for generations to come. Will the next president accept the gift? We can’t say for sure, but when Daddy Bush built similar bases in Saudi Arabia, his successor Bill Clinton made no move to dismantle them.

BUSH JUNIOR EXPORTS ANARCHY, ADMIRES HANDIWORK

Ironically, it was Bush Junior who pulled us out of Saudi territory in favor of moving into Iraq behind the smokescreen of a cock-and-bull story about WMD and Saddam links to Bin Laden. At the same time The Decider built up our force in Kuwait.
The U.S. has behaved like an armed psychotic child in Iraq, tearing down Saddam's despotic structure and replacing it with an anarchy of warlords and bandits, including some American corporations and their private armies. All around there is death, torture, pillage, driving nearly 2 million of the 25 million Iraqis to other countries. Most were members of a middle class that was already too small.

Raed Jarrar and Joshua Holland reported on AlterNet this week that more than half the members of Iraq's parliament rejected the continuing occupation, with 144 lawmakers signing a legislative petition calling on the U.S. to set a timetable for withdrawal. http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/51624/ The petition was sponsored by the majority Shias and of course ignored by the Bush Administration, which calls timetables a recipe for defeat. The administration also ignored polls in Iraq showing most Iraqis consider it a righteous act to kill U.S. troops. Big U.S. media paid no attention to the recent legislative action, but that wasn't necessarily by design. Iraq is so dangerous, getting the facts is a death-defying business.
While the occupation steadily deteriorates, our administration tells us, after four years of failure, that everything is spanking new so we must give it a chance to work. New strategy, new general, new troop level, same old bullshit -- all designed to keep this thing going so the architects of disaster can blame whichever future president shows the good sense to get us out of there.
Meanwhile our troops, flesh-and-blood chess pieces moved about by fools and lunatics in Washington, live in gray defensive bubbles that, thanks to the new offensive strategy of General Patraeus, grow more porous, placing them in greater danger and promising to raise the casualty rate. Read between the lines of Patraeus’ recent statements to Congress and you see he’s telling them the truth about it, but diplomatically.

BLUNT TRUTH FROM GENERAL LYNCH
Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, commander of the Army's 3rd Infantry Division, made the same forecast even more forthrightly over the weekend. U.S. deaths now number 3,381, according to the reliable http://www.icasualties.org/.
What should we do about all this? The Founding Fathers would already have taken their muskets off the wall. But we dwell on Paris Hilton and American Idol contestants while our government continues killing people we really don't want killed and wasting the lives of our troops in the process. Because after all, these are more civilized times.

BIG MEDIA RIDICULE IMPEACHMENT JUST AS THEY RIDICULED ANYONE DARING TO EXAMINE RUSH TO WAR

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

Mainstream media are at it again. First they refused to scrutinize Bush’s rush to invade Iraq. Four years and hundreds of thousands of deaths later, leading figures within these media have, to some degree, admitted their error.
But now they’re doing the same thing all over again. This time the subject is impeachment of Bush and Cheney. The big broadcast networks and print media (the latter led by the “liberal” Washington Post and New York Times) became ad hoc arms of the administration leading up to the terrible disaster in Iraq. Disregarding the weight of conflicting intelligence, they even even failed to ask why, if the “coalition of the willing” was really interested in finding WMD, did it order U.N. inspectors who'd proved their competence a hundred times over to leave?

KUCINICH TOO SHORT TO IMPEACH?
A movement to impeach Bush and Cheney, both of whom have admitted performing unconstitutional acts, has been building for years, but it’s done so quietly because the media refuse to pay attention, making the mission infinitely more difficult than it ought to be. When they do pay attention, they treat would-be impeachers such as Rep. Dennis Kucinich and Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson as flakes. The Washington Post assigned some kind of attack dog to Kucinich who, rather than examine his case, chided him about his lack of -- get this -- height.
Politicians have been told in as many ways as you can tell them, that if they pursue impeachment it’s open season. They’ll get treated with the similar mindless but effective ridicule. Nancy Pelosi got the message fast. Shortly after taking over as House Speaker she announced she would not follow a course of impeachment, and that's before any evidence was subpoenaed. Perhaps she was worried because she’s even shorter than Kucinich.
When Rep. John Murtha raised the specter of impeachment, the media treated him like a kind of eccentric uncle. Good ole John. What’ll he think of next? Rep. John Conyers prepared a lengthy dossier of impeachment evidence, but apparently warned off by Pelosi, he backed off from the process.

ADMISSIONS OF CRIMINAL ACTS
But the facts are indisputable – doctored intelligence, illegal wiretapping and reading our mail without warrants, the suspension of habeas corpus. All these acts are punishable felonies and there’s ample evidence, including their own admissions, tying the tin cans of criminality to the tails of Bush and Cheney.
Corporate media took about three years to concede some of their errors on the war, though they never quite owned up to their active complicity. The same slow-burning truth fuse is burning on impeachment. But while it takes its time, people are dying. Our troops, if I may paraphrase Bill Moyers, are being sacrificed on the altar of Bush’s ego. And thanks to U.S. escalation, our casualty rate has been rising and will continue to rise even though the last election and the blue-ribbon commission on Iraq called for the White House to take an opposite course.
Don’t let anyone get away with telling you the pro-impeachment movement can’t be taken seriously. Removing Bush and Cheney for their high crimes and misdemeanors is the logical, patriotic recourse to the most felonious, incompetent administration in U.S. history.

DON'T EXPECT DECENT GOVERNING FROM PEOPLE WHO DESPISE GOVERNMENT

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

Our government is being gnawed by rats. And the rats are paid well for it. Allow me to explain:
I got a first-hand look at Bush governance several weeks ago when I applied for passport renewal. Like millions of other Americans in this fix, I got the same treatment as Franz Kafka’s poor schnooks in The Trial and his lesser known but even better allegory, The Castle. I was told to expect my new passport in maybe ten weeks or so, give or take a while, and meanwhile of course the State Department confiscated my old one. So in terms of international travel, I’m a man without a country – stuck, unable to leave our shores.
Thousands of Americans around the country are learning too late that under the Bush Administration this patch of bureaucracy has been allowed to rot into something beneath the dignity of a Third World country. This problem is, of course, trivial when compared to what residents along the Gulf Coast learned when Katrina struck, but it’s a chip off the same felled tree of government. The ultra-right wingers at the top of this regime despise government and emplaced political supervisors throughout the system who for the last six years have been gnawing at all the cables like the crazed rats I previously mentioned.
OSHA doesn’t protect workers, the EPA loathes the environment, the Food and Drug Administration assists the production and distribution of poisonous substances, the Agriculture Department puts the stamp of approval on cattle too weakened by disease to stand, the United Nations mission has, until earlier this year, been run by a walrus-like loon who ridiculed diplomacy, and the Justice Department is directed by a daffy but dangerous serial perjurer.
Just this week USA Today discovered all those family pets sickened by tainted cat and dog food were victimized by an FDA that was too disorganized and understaffed to prevent it even though it received ample warning.
While the country sinks under the weight of the AttaBoy Brownies Bush has placed throughout its supervisory ranks, his pals – oil cronies in Texas and Saudi Arabia, corporate buddies at Halliburton and equally corrupt business entities – all thrive at our expense.
To entrust the Defense Department to this band of malicious, criminal kooks is the mark of a nation that, to quote our esteemed vice president, could be “in its last throes.” While Bush complains Congress is trying to micro-manage the war politically, he in fact, combed through the military services to pass over everyone who told him the truth – that we can’t control Iraq with the military and must use diplomacy to extricate ourselves.
But of course this regime doesn’t really believe in diplomacy beyond the kind that tosses doggy treats to the British prime minister for throwing his country’s troops into a pointless, murderous conflict whose strategy was incongruent with logic or reality.
This Cheney-Bush-Rove axis follows a government theory, if you want to call it that, that was never grounded in reality. It wants Star Wars, eternal war, billions in favors for its country-club buddies, and no taxes. It wants to cripple government while inserting it into every level of our lives, even following us into bedrooms so it can sit on the end of the bed and frown on condoms. It dismisses and even hates the fact that our government defeated the Axis powers, educated veterans, pulled Europe from the ruins, devised pensions, fed the hungry, ultimately invited all races under the banner of liberty and equality.

Part of Kafka’s genius was to place his protagonists in nightmares that from time to time drew blood. The poor, dazed schlemiel in Metamorphosis woke and discovered he was an insect. It’s unlikely Bush could define the word “Kafkaesque” without a literary coach, but his talent is to make sure the rest of us can.

WATERGATE-ERA SLEUTH GIVES LOWDOWN ON GONZALEZ’S CURIOUS STAYING POWER (GUEST COLUMNIST)

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-holtzman1may01,0,3365495.story?coll=la-opinion-rightrail

From The Los Angeles Times

May 1, 2007
By Elizabeth Holtzman
NO MATTER how many members of Congress lose confidence in Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales, President Bush is unlikely to let him go. If Gonzales resigns, the vacancy must be filled by a new presidential nominee, and the last thing the White House wants is a confirmation hearing.

Already, the Senate is outlining conditions for confirming a Gonzales successor. Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), chairman of the Judiciary Committee, has said that his panel would not hold confirmation hearings unless Karl Rove and other White House aides testify about the firing of U.S. attorneys to clarify whether "the White House has interfered with prosecution."

All this is reminiscent of the Watergate scandal. In 1973, as the coverup was unraveling, the Senate imposed a condition on the confirmation of President Nixon's nominee for attorney general, Elliot Richardson. Richardson's predecessor had resigned because of Watergate troubles. Concerned that the Justice Department would not get at the truth, the Senate insisted that Richardson would name a special prosecutor to investigate Watergate. Richardson duly appointed Archibald Cox.

The rest is history. Cox's aggressive investigations led to the prosecution of top administration officials and the naming of Nixon as an unindicted co-conspirator in the coverup. When Cox sought White House tapes of Nixon's conversations with his staff, the president had him fired, unleashing a firestorm of protests. Americans demanded that a previously reluctant Congress start impeachment proceedings against Nixon. Congress complied; the House Judiciary Committee, of which I was a member, voted for impeachment, and Nixon resigned.

Aspects of this history could easily repeat themselves. The Senate could demand, as it did in 1973, that a new attorney general appoint a special prosecutor, and this could again have dire consequences for the White House.

A new special prosecutor would have many questions to investigate.

For starters, were any of the firings of U.S. attorneys federal crimes — such as obstruction of justice, designed to stymie investigations or to retaliate for prosecutions of Republicans? If so, who is responsible and how high up does that responsibility go? Did Deputy Atty. Gen. Paul J. McNulty, who gave inaccurate testimony to Congress about the firings, commit any crime in doing so? Were those who briefed him for that testimony complicit?

And what happened to the missing e-mail messages from Rove and others? Did these apparent violations of the Presidential Records Act — failure to keep copies of the exchanges — constitute federal crimes?

So there is ample work for a special prosecutor. The Senate could call for appointing one without waiting for Gonzales to resign. But in that case, Gonzales or McNulty would be making the appointment, and the integrity of the choice would be highly questionable.

That leaves Senate confirmation hearings of a new attorney general nominee as the main leverage for Congress to secure an independent criminal investigation of the U.S. attorney firings.

Moreover, the Senate might use such hearings to do more than secure testimony from White House aides about the firings, as Leahy indicated. It also might use the opportunity to probe the Justice Department's role in mistreatment of detainees, four years of flouting the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and other serious matters.

Rather than face such scrutiny, the White House may prefer keeping a drastically weakened Gonzales in place. But doing so exacts a high price for the Justice Department and the nation. It damages department morale and credibility, undermines its ability to recruit and could affect perceptions of federal prosecutors, jeopardizing important cases. By retaining Gonzales to preempt Senate action, the president has signaled that this is a price he is willing to make the nation pay.

ELIZABETH HOLTZMAN, a former Democratic congresswoman from New York, is the coauthor of "The Impeachment of George W. Bush: A Practical Guide for Concerned Citizens."

IRAQ COMMANDER'S FORECAST FOR U.S. CASUALTIES? HIGHER

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

We’re so tired and disgusted with lies about Iraq that we sometimes pay insufficient attention to what people in government tell us about it. Army Gen. David Petraeus, the commander there, has recently divulged hugely significant changes in strategy that will, he’s conceded, result in a higher U.S. casualty rate.
Patraeus, an intellectual soldier who literally and truly wrote the book on counterinsurgency fighting, is repositioning troops, placing them in forward patrol bases like the one in Diyala Province where nine U.S. paratroopers were killed and approximately 20 wounded in two horrific, coordinated suicide bombings on April 23. The repositioning allows U.S. troops to interact on a daily basis with Iraqi civilians while they aggressively patrol their new neighborhoods.
But with our troops spread out in these smaller enclaves, they stay in positions that can’t be defended as easily. Engineers placed formidable concrete barriers and other defensive structures around the Forward Operating Bases (FOBs) that had been the typical headquarters area for ground troops. But those structures aren’t in place around the kind of small base used by those soldiers of the famed 82nd Airborne Division who were killed April 23. Patraeus, who said the new strategy is already bringing some progress, told military personnel at a Pentagon briefing:
“Our achievements have not come without sacrifice. Our increase in operational tempo, location of our forces in the populations they are securing and conduct of operations in areas where we previously had no presence, as well as the enemy's greater use of certain types of explosive devices, have led to an increase in our losses."
Also, in an interview on NPR last week, Patraeus was the first commander of any rank to admit that troop levels are well beyond the announced 160,000. Without citing figures, the forthright general officer pointed out private contractors carry out everyday missions such as guarding the Baghdad airport that would ordinarily be performed by military units, and so these non-uniformed fighters must be included in the force level. Other sources number the mercenary contingent at 112,000. These civilians performing soldier functions for as much as $30,000 a month have been The Great Invader’s stealth method of raising force levels without alarming the public by calling for a draft. They’ve also allowed him to hand out lucrative, no-bid contracts to business pals who accept the casualty rate of their work force as a cost of business.
Patraeus, asked to devise a strategy that could vanquish the many enemies that make up the insurgency, put one together, but in addition to resulting in the killing and maiming of more U.S. troops, it will take years to yield significant results. Patraeus has been telling us this, but no one’s listening. Also, he's not talking about training Iraqis to take our place because he recognizes that strategy has, after four years of failure, proved useless.
The Great Invader has, without asking us, signed America on for a ten-year war at least. Get used to it, or get out in the street and make the government step back from placing all these resources into a war that couldn’t possibly be worth all the lives and treasure it expends in our name.