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March 3: The White House approved the firings of seven US attorneys last year, according to both White House and Justice Department officials.
US Attorney firings
The White House says that DOJ officials reported that the seven attorneys were not doing enough to carry out Bush's policies on immigration, firearms and other issues. Administration officials say that the list of prosecutors was assembled last fall, based largely on complaints from members of Congress, law enforcement officials and career Justice Department lawyers. One of the complaints came from Republican senator Pete Domenici of new Mexico, who raised concerns with the Justice Department last fall about the performance of then-US Attorney David Iglesias, according to administration officials and Domenici's office. Domenici refuses to comment on Iglesias's statements that two unnamed New Mexico lawmakers -- identified as Domenici and Republican representative Heather Wilson by other sources -- pressured him in October to speed up the indictments of Democrats before the elections. Any communication by a senator or House member with a federal prosecutor regarding an ongoing criminal investigation is a violation of ethics rules. Wilson was locked in a tight race with her Democratic opponent, and Iglesias believes Wilson pressured him to file indictments on local Democrats before the elections in order to help her achieve re-election.
Until now, the DOJ has insisted that the seven US attorneys were fired for what they call "performance-related" problems. Now officials are admitting that the ousters were based primarily on the administration's unhappiness with the prosecutors' policy decisions. Until today, no one has admitted that the White House played a role in the mass firings. "At the end of the day, this was a decision to pick the prosecutors we felt would most effectively carry out the department's policies and priorities in the last two years," says Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse. White House spokeswoman Dana Perino calls the firings "standard operating procedure." The seven prosecutors were first identified by the Justice Department's senior leadership shortly before the November elections. The final decision was supported by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and his deputy, Paul McNulty, and cleared with the White House counsel's office, including deputy counsel William Kelly. Of Iglesias, Domenici says through his chief of staff, Steve Bell: "We had very legitimate concerns expressed to us by hundreds of New Mexicans -- in the media, in the legal communities and just regular citizens -- about the resources that were available to the US attorney."
The fired prosecutors in San Diego and Nevada are registered independents, while the rest are generally viewed as moderate Republicans, according to administration officials and many of the fired prosecutors. DOJ officials say they became concerned with California prosecutor Carol Lam's approach to prosecuting immigration cases. On the job less than a year, McNulty consulted his predecessor as deputy attorney general, James Comey, about some of the prosecutors before approving the list. Comey praised Iglesias earlier this week as one of the department's best prosecutors. Iglesias was fired despite Comey's endorsement. (White House officials now say that McNulty did not consult with Comey before the attorneys were fired.)
While the White House insists it did not select partisan replacements for the fired attorneys, at least one of the seven, Arkansan Bud Cummins, was replaced by former Karl Rove aide and Republican National Committee operative Tim Griffin. Officials do admit that White House political affairs officials keep databases on potential job candidates that Justice Department officials could have accessed if they chose. Bush's chief of staff, Joshua Bolten, has said that he does not recall whether he was briefed about the firings before they occurred.
Privately, White House officials acknowledge that the administration mishandled the firings by not explaining more clearly to lawmakers that a large group was being terminated at once -- which is unusual -- and that the reason was the policy performance review.
Josh Marshall of Talking Point Memo, who has been closely monitoring the entire case, has serious questions about the entire explanation as proffered by the White House. He writes, "If this whole business was about US attorneys not implementing White House policy on immigration and firearms enforcement, why all the secrecy about it? The White House didn't let members of Congress know what they were doing when they did it. When called on it in an open hearing recently Deputy AG Paul McNulty said the US Attorneys were fired for performance issues. When called on the apparent falsity of those claims, it became a matter of policy disagreements. Again, if the US attorneys were canned for not following administration policy, why was this fact withheld even from the fired US Attorneys themselves? Remember, when called on December 7th and informed that they must resign, apparently none were given any explanation for their ousters. Here's the funny thing. Of all the reasons an administration might have to fire serving US attorneys, a willful refusal to follow the administration's law enforcement policies would seem to be a pretty good one. Given the fact that so many of the fired prosecutors were also in the midst of major public corruption investigations, you'd think they'd be more forthcoming with this exculpating explanation. Even more so when you consider that one of the fired US Attorneys was the target of two sitting members of Congress trying to pressure him to subvert justice to alter the outcome of a 2006 House race. Lots of potential for misunderstanding. And yet the White House has been so resistant to revealing this exculpating explanation until now. Their own worst enemies, I guess."
Marshall continues, "And one other thing. What the White House folks told Solomon was that the list was drawn up at the Department of Justice. White House signed off on it. But they weren't involved. But how does that square with what [Washington Post reporter] Dan Eggen...came up with back on February 4th: 'There is also evidence that broader political forces are at work. One administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in discussing personnel issues, said the spate of firings was the result of "pressure from people who make personnel decisions outside of Justice who wanted to make some things happen in these places."' So who are these folks 'who make personnel decisions outside of Justice who wanted to make some things happen in these places'? Anybody have an answer?" (Washington Post, Talking Points Memo, Washington Post)
March 3: Attorney General Alberto Gonzales says he is just too busy to answer letters from Democratic congressional leaders about his firing seven US attorneys involved in probes of public corruption, according to conservative columnist Robert Novak.
US Attorney firings
Democratic House leader Rahm Emanuel had written Gonzales two letters suggesting that he name Carol Lam, fired as US attorney in San Diego, as an outside counsel to continue her pursuit of the Duke Cunningham case. When asked by a reporter about his failure to respond, Gonzales replies, "I think that the American people lose if I spend all my time worrying about congressional requests for information, if I spend all my time responding to subpoenas." Gonzales does not bother to note that he is legally bound to respond to subpoenas, and that to simply ignore requests from Congress is a direct flaunting of the legislative body. DOJ lobbyist Richard Hertling wrote back to Emanuel 22 days after Emanuel sent his letter, and said in part, "the Justice Department would not ever seek the resignation of a US attorney if doing so would jeopardize a public corruption case. Hertling said the DOJ had no interest in naming Lam as a special prosecutor. (Manchester Union Leader)
March 3: In a move that underscores the continuing influence of war-hyping neoconservatives in the White House, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice selects Eliot Cohen, a professor of military history, former member of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, and strong advocate of US belligerence in the Middle East, as counselor.
Partisan Bush appointees
Cohen replaces Rice's longtime confidant, the more pragmatic Philip Zelikow.
Cohen is a protege of the former Deputy Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz. He sits on the advisory board of the radically neocon American Enterprise Institute. He recently led the neocon attack attack on the bipartisan Iraq Study Group (ISG), co-chaired by former Secretary of State James Baker and former Democratic representative Lee Hamilton.
Some analysts believe Cohen's appointment is designed to placate restive neocons and other hawks inside and outside the administration, and reassure them that the Bush policies of confrontation and military aggressiveness in the Middle East will continue. Cohen has been scathing in his criticism of Bush's recent olive branches to Syria and Iran, and derides any attempt to reopen talks between Israel and Palestine, even though Rice herself has championed such peace talks. "A fatuous process yields, necessarily, fatuous results," Cohen recently wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, dismissing the relevance of what he called the "Washington establishment whose wisdom was exaggerated in its heyday, and which has in any event succumbed to a kind of political-intellectual entropy since the 1960s...."
State Department spokesman Sean McCormack says that Cohen will be Rice's "intellectual sounding board," but many foreign policy experts are dismayed by Cohen's rise to power. "Condi may feel she needs to have a neo-con right next to her to protect her flanks," says Chris Nelson, editor of the Washington insider newsletter, the Nelson Report. "And, if she's really planning to put her foot down on the Israelis, which [Washington] will have to do if it wants to get a real process with the Palestinians underway as part of a bigger regional deal with the Saudis and Iranians, then a guy like Cohen up there on the [State Department's] seventh floor who is in on it and can claim influence on the outcome can help." Steven Clemons, director of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation, says, "Bringing on Cohen could help inoculate her from criticism by the Cheney camp. One of the things that's been consistent is that Rice never takes Cheney head-on and is very careful not to take on people who might antagonize him."
Like Cheney and Wolfowitz, Cohen was a founding member, in 1997, of the neocon Project for the New American Century, whose positions on how to prosecute the "war on terror" -- including the invasion of Iraq and cutting ties to the Palestinian Authority under Yassir Arafat -- he has consistently endorsed. Cohen lacks any regional expertise nor does he have any policy-making experience, but he has written prolifically in recent years on US policy in the Middle East. After the 9/11 attacks, Cohen was perhaps the first to call the "war on terror" "World War IV," a term quicly adopted by hardline neocons such as former CIA director James Woolsey, Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz, and Center for Security Policy president Frank Gaffney, on whose board Cohen also sits. Cohen, like his cohorts, has attempted to define Bush's "war on terror" in what he consideres to be the appropriate historical context and to define its enemy as "militant Islam."
After overthrowing the Taliban in Afghanistan, Cohen advocated not only toppling Iraq's Saddam Hussein, whom he falsely accused of "help[ing] al-Qaeda," but said the US should then overthrow "the mullahs" in Iran, whose replacement by a "moderate or secular government would be no less important a victory in this war than the annihilation of bin Laden." Cohen has also argued that the US should support Israel to the exclusion of Palestinians or anyone else in the embattled region, and routinely calls anyone critical of his stance anti-Semites.
In advocating widespread war throughout the Middle East, Cohen wrote, "Only a reshuffling of the deck -- through the disappearance of Arafat, or an event, such as the overthrow of Saddam Hussein that profoundly changes the mood in the Arab world -- will make something approaching truce, let alone peace, possible."
Bush has been photographed carrying Cohen's 2002 book Supreme Command, which argued that the greatest civilian war-time leaders, such as Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill, had a far better strategic sense than their generals. It was a particularly timely message in the months that preceded the Iraq war when a large number of retired generals were voicing strong reservations about the impending US invasion.
Cohen was also a charter member of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, an administration-supported group both to lobby for war in Iraq, largely on behalf of Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress. Cohen, like his friend Wolfowitz, was already arguing publicly for Washington to rely heavily on the INC in any effort to overthrow Hussein in December 2001. Since the invasion, Cohen has become critical of how the occupation and insurgency-suppression efforts were being carried out. In his attacks on the Iraq Study Group, Cohen wrote that US difficulties in Iraq stemmed "not so much from failures to find the right strategy, as from an astounding and depressing inability to implement the strategic and operational choices we have nominally made" -- an inability, for example, "as personal as picking the wrong people for key positions" Cohen is one of the AEI members who hatched the plan to send almost 30,000 American troops to Iraq in Bush's vaunted "surge."
If the surge should fail, however, Cohen's preferred and "most plausible" option, which he laid out in an October 2006 Journal column titled "Plan B," would be a coup d'etat in Iraq ("which we quietly endorse") that would bring to power a "junta of military modernizers," a development which, as he noted himself, would call into question the administration's and Rice's avowed goal of democratization. In any event, he wrote, "American prestige has taken a hard knock [in Iraq]; it will probably take a harder knock, and in ways that will not be restored without a considerable and successful use of American military power down the road. ...The tides of Sunni salafism and Iran's distinct combination of messianism and power politics have not crested, and will not crest without much greater violence in which we too will be engaged."
In a Vanity Fair interview last fall, Cohen said, "I'm pretty grim. I think we're heading for a very dark world, because the long-term consequences of this are very large, not just for Iraq, not just for the region, but globally -- for our reputation, for what the Iranians do, all kinds of stuff." (IPS/Electronic Iraq)
March 3: The major television news broadcasts are refusing to air charges that the Bush administration fired seven US attorneys for the purpose of replacing them with more politically reliable prosecutors, according to an analysis by the media watchdog group Media Matters.
US Attorney firings
At least three of the seven were, before their ousters, conducting investigations involving Republicans; a fourth was ousted after refusing to bring suspect indictments against local Democrats in time for the indictments to affect the November 2006 elections in his state. The House has subpoenaed four former US attorneys, and many believe the Bush administration attempted to politically influence the American judicial system. Yet, none of the flagship news broadcasts from ABC, NBC, or CBS has reported any of this. In fact, those news broadcasts have yet to even mention the firings in the last three months.
As noted earlier in this site, one of the dismissed prosecutors, California's Carol Lam, was investigating allegations of corruption stemming from the bribery case involving former Republican House member Randy Cunningham. That investigation recently resulted in indictments against defense contractor Brent Wilkes and former CIA executive director Kyle Foggo, who face charges including wire fraud and bribery. Additionally, David Iglesias, formerly the US attorney in New Mexico, has alleged that two members of Congress, Republicans Pete Domenici and Heather Wilson, attempted to pressure him to speed up a probe of Democrats just before the November elections. Until recently, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and Justice Department officials have claimed that the US attorneys were fired for performance reasons. But on February 6, Gonzales's deputy, Paul McNulty, admitted that at least one of the seven, Arkansan Bud Cummins, was fired just to allow him to be replaced by former Karl Rove aide and RNC operative Tim Griffin. Lam was replaced by Karen Hewitt, who has virtually no criminal law experience, but is a member of the radically conservative Federalist Society. And at least five of the US attorneys had glowingly positive job evaluations before they were fired.
Iglesias, Lam, Cummins, and Seattle's John McKay have been subpoenaed to testify on March 6 before the House Subcommittee on Commercial and Administrative Law.
The White House admitted today that it approved the firings of seven US attorneys, apparently excluding Cummins, because the prosecutors were not in line enough with Bush's policies on immigration, firearms, and other issues. That explanation, too, is highly suspect.
Yet, according to ABC, CBS, and NBC, at least, none of this is newsworthy. (Media Matters)

Saudi Arabia helping fund Sunni insurgency in Iraq

March 4: Saudi Arabia is funding the Sunni insurgency in Iraq, according to Congressional testimony by the new director of national intelligence, Mike McConnell.
Iraq war and occupation
The Sunni insurgency is considered far more dangerous, at this point, to American troops than are the Shi'ite insurgents of the Mahdi Army and other groups, some of whom are funded by Iran. McConnell's testimony highlights government worries that Iraq's civil war could turn into a direct confrontation between Iran and Saudi Arabia, if by Iraqi proxies, with US troops caught in the middle. Brian Jenkins, a military expert with the Rand Corporation, says, "What we already are seeing in Iraq is an emerging proxy war between Saudi-backed Sunnis and Iranian-backed Shia." If that proxy war cascades into a direct Iranian-Saudi military clash, it could imperil much of the world's oil supply. Saudi Arabia, Iran and Iraq are the first, third, and fourth nations in terms of the largest of the world's proven oil reserves.
In November 2006, Saudi security advisor Nawaf Obaid warned in a Washington Post op-ed that a US withdrawal of forces from Iraq would result in "massive Saudi intervention to stop Iranian-backed Shiite militias from butchering Iraqi Sunnis." The Saudis fired Obaid after the column was published.
While Iran has been considered, in recent years, an opponent of the US in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia has had a long and close relationship with both the US government and the Bush family. The US has long shielded Saudi Arabia from scrutiny, even when evidence shows that Saudi officials supported al-Qaeda operations, including the 9/11 attacks. In his testimony before Congress, McConnell is reluctant to identify the Saudis as the source of funding for the Sunni insurgents. It takes hard questioning from Senate Armed Services Committee chairman Carl Levin, a Democrat, to pry the admission out of McConnell. Under Levin's questioning, McConnell attempts first to lay the blame for the funding on "probably" Syria and "a variety of countries," but Levin isn't letting McConnell wriggle free so easily. "What countries other than Syria could either weapons or funding for the Sunni insurgents come from?" he asks, and, when McConnell tries to weasel, interjects, "What other countries besides Syria? You said that there's evidence that weapons or money for weapons is coming from a number of countries. The one you singled was Syria, but what other countries?" McConnell finally admits, "What I was attempting to say is donors from countries around the area. One would be inside Saudi Arabia, as an example."
After McConnell's admission, one of his deputies, Thomas Fingar, tries to spin McConnell's admission by telling the committee, "Saudi Arabia as a government is not providing funding" to the Sunni insurgents and that the Saudi government is trying to halt the flow of private funds. "But they still do flow, to some extent," he concedes. McConnell later says he has "no awareness at this point" whether the Saudi government is directing the support of Sunni insurgents through private donors, nor does he explain whether Saudi support is flowing to Iraqi insurgents of Sunni allegiance, or to al-Qaeda in Iraq -- a Sunni organization -- or to some combination.
A largely ignored section of the December 2006 report by the Iraq Study Group noted, "Funding for the Sunni insurgency comes from private individuals within Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States even as those governments help facilitate US military operations in Iraq by providing basing and overflight rights and by cooperating on intelligence issues."
Steven Simon, a senior member of the National Security Council during the Clinton administration, says Saudi funding of the Sunni insurgency "is one of those things that we dare not speak its name." Simon continues, "There is a renewed desire to protect the US-Saudi bilateral relationship. So you don't want to draw public attention to things they are doing that many observers might regard as counter to American interests." (Hearst/St. Paul Pioneer Press)
March 4: Republican senator Pete Domeneci of New Mexico admits to calling then-US attorney David Iglesias in October 2006 to "ask" about the status of Iglesias's investigation of corruption among state Democrats, which centers on a former Democratic state senator.
US Attorney firings
No charges have been filed in the case. Domenici, who has refused to discuss the matter since Iglesias came forward almost a week ago to say that two members of Congress called him to pressure him to file indictments before the November 2006 elections, says he "never pressured him nor threatened him in any way." The other lawmaker, Republican congressman Heather Wilson, still refuses to comment. Iglesias believes he was pressured by both Wilson and Domenici to file the indictments before the elections in order to bolster Wilson's chances to win a tough re-election contest. Domenici also admits to advising Justice Department officials to fire Iglesias, but says his advice came before his October phone call, and that his recommendation had nothing to do with Iglesias's refusal to fast-track the investigation for political purposes. "In retrospect, I regret making that call and I apologize," Domenici says. "However, at no time in that conversation or any other conversation with Mr. Iglesias did I ever tell him what course of action I thought he should take on any legal matter. I have never pressured him nor threatened him in any way." Legal experts say it violates congressional ethics rules for a senator or House member to communicate with a federal prosecutor regarding an ongoing criminal investigation.
Just days ago, Domenici, when asked about Iglesias's allegations, said, "I have no idea what he's talking about." Since Domenici has already proven himself to be a liar about the contact with Iglesias, there is little reason to believe him over Iglesias about the content, or the political pressure, of the contact.
Two sources with inside information, who decline to be identified for fear of political retaliation, have said that Wilson made the first contact, followed by Domenici about a week later. Iglesias and four other fired US attorneys will testify before a House subcommittee tomorrow.
The Justice Department now confirms that that Domenici called Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty during the first week of October to discuss Iglesias. This followed three calls to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in September 2005, January 2006 and April 2006 during which, Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse says, Domenici "expressed general concerns about the performance of US Attorney Iglesias and questioned whether he was up to the job. ...At no time in those calls did the senator mention this corruption case," nor did he specifically ask for Iglesias's ouster, Roehrkasse says. Roehrkasse adds that he is not aware of any similar calls or complaints to the Justice Department from Wilson. But, like Domenici, Roehrkasse is a proven liar whose word cannot be trusted.
Stanley Brand, an ethics lawyer who served as House counsel in the 1980s, says a senator should contact a federal prosecutor about an ongoing investigation only if he or she has evidence or information related to the probe. "It's going to precipitate a huge problem," Brand says, warning of a potential review by the Justice Department.
According to Domenici, "I asked Mr. Iglesias if he could tell me what was going on in that investigation and give me an idea of what time frame we were looking at. It was a very brief conversation, which concluded when I was told that the courthouse investigation would be continuing for a lengthy period." Domenici refuses to specify exactly when the call took place, saying only that he made it "late last year." Iglesias says the calls occurred in mid-October. At that time, Wilson, a close Domenici ally, was locked in a tight reelection battle with state Attorney General Patricia Madrid, a Democrat. Their race included widespread discussion of alleged corruption among New Mexico Democrats.
Domenici says his unhappiness with Iglesias began before he inquired about the probe of Democrats. He says he was concerned about resource problems in the US attorney's office and "an inability within the office to move more quickly on cases. ...This ongoing dialogue and experience led me, several months before my call with Mr. Iglesias, to conclude and recommend to the Department of Justice that New Mexico needed a new United States attorney."
Justice officials have said they were never notified that lawmakers had called Iglesias and have said the issue did not play a role in his firing. Iglesias has acknowledged he erred by not informing Washington officials about the calls, as Justice rules require.
The House Judiciary subcommittee has issued subpoenas for Iglesias, Bud Cummins of Little Rock, Carol Lam of San Diego and John McKay of Seattle. The Senate Judiciary Committee has also asked Daniel Bogden of Las Vegas and Paul Charlton of Phoenix to testify, in addition to the four others. "No one believes anymore these U.S. attorneys were fired for any good reason," says Charles Schumer, a Democratic member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, "and we will start to uncover the real truth at our hearing on Tuesday."
Understandably, Josh Marshall, the well-connected founder of the progressive blog Talking Points Memo, doesn't believe a word of Domeneci's self-serving justifications for calling Iglesias. He notes sardonically, "Well, sure, I called him, Domenici said in statement released to home state media Saturday, but I never told him what course of action I thought he should take, or pressured him, or threatened him in any way. Nonetheless, hindsight being 20/20, I regret making that call. And even though I didn't threaten, pressure, cajole, suggest, hint, wink, or nod, I apologize. ...Well, when a US Senator -- a senior Senator from your own party, no less -- calls you about a case, you can be damn sure it's not a social call. ...So many question remain. Here's one: Did the good senator ever have any discussions with [Wilson] about their calls to Iglesias?" (Washington Post, Talking Points Memo)
March 4: Fired US attorney Daniel Bogden of Nevada confirms that, contrary to the assertions of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and other Justice Department officials, he was not fired for performance-related reasons.
US Attorney firings
When he received the phone call in December 2006 informing him that he was being dismissed, he asked if the firing was related to his performance or to that of his office. "That didn't enter into the equation," he was told by a DOJ official. After several more phone calls, he says he was told by a senior Justice Department official, "There is a window of opportunity to put candidates into an office like mine. They were attempting to open a slot and bring someone else in."
As a fuller picture of the reasons for Bogden's and seven other US attorneys begins to take shape, the story given by DOJ officials -- including Gonzales -- and the White House is falling apart into a tatter of lies and misstatements, as well as slanderous accusations against the attorneys and their performances that are looking more and more like excuses to justify the Justice Department, in collusion with White House officials, trying to politicize the judiciary branch. Congressional Democrats have charged that the mass firing is a political purge, intended to squelch corruption investigations or install less independent-minded successors.
Others of the fired attorneys besides Bogden believe that they were forced out for replacements who could gild resumes, possibly for later political candidacies; several heard that favored candidates had been identified. Others have been given less political reasons, many of which do not seem believable. Paul Charlton in Arizona, for example, apparently annoyed FBI officials by pushing for confessions to be tape-recorded, while John McKay in Seattle had championed a computerized law enforcement information-sharing system that Justice Department officials did not want. Carol Lam of San Diego, who successfully prosecuted former Representative Randy Cunningham, had drawn complaints that she was not sufficiently aggressive on immigration cases, though it will later be revealed that no one had ever spoken to her about their dissatisfaction with the way she was handling such prosecutions.
The DOJ continues to insist that the firings were strictly about performance, with spokesman Brian Roehrkasse continuing to toe the line: "These decisions were based on the individual concerns about each US attorney's overall performance. This included performance concerns about ineffectively prosecuting departmental priority areas, failure to follow departmental guidelines, or just overall concerns about an ability to lead and effectively manage a US attorney's office." As noted in several items in the February and March 2007 pages of this site, almost all of the eight attorneys fired had glowing performance evaluations shortly before they were fired. As White House and DOJ officials continually remind the public, US attorneys have four-year terms but can be removed at any time, and for almost any reason.
But these firings seem to be more about politics, and getting loyal, Bush-supporting Republicans into office, more so than over any performance issues. Federal judge James Brady, himself a former US attorney, says that Michigan's Margaret Chiara was well respected as a US attorney. "It just doesn't look right," Brady says. "It compromises the credibility that justice is being dealt with fairly and impartially. There is a fear that politics have entered in life and death situations."
The firings were first brought up in October in discussions among DOJ officials, and a list of those to be fired, and their replacements, was approved by the White House. On December 7, 2006, the attorneys were informed that they were being dismissed. The list of prosecutors who were targets was approved by Gonzales and the deputy attorney general, Paul McNulty, the day-to-day manager of the Justice Department since he was appointed in the fall of 2005.
McNulty is an interesting case. He has become a powerful deputy under Gonzales; himself a former US attorney in the Virginia office (which has long been a stepping-stone for both Democrats and Republicans who are being groomed for higher office), McNulty worked in Congress for over a decade and was once legal counsel to the Republican House majority leader. The New York Times reports that McNulty "is regarded in legal circles as more attuned to policy and politics than his predecessor, James B. Comey, a former career prosecutor in New York."
The ascent of Gonzales and McNulty to the senior leadership positions in the Justice Department, both Bush loyalists, may explain the removal of prosecutors who had mostly been in place since the start of the Bush administration. Indeed, all are Bush appointees. One fired US attorney says, "I and my colleagues are the same people in December of 2006 that we were in 2001. The only thing that has changed is the administration of the Department of Justice. We were making the same arguments and the same points before."
DOJ officials claim to have been unaware of charges by one fired attorney, David Iglesias of New Mexico, who says that two lawmakers -- identified by others as Republican senator Pete Domenici and Republican House member Heather Wilson -- attempted to pressure him to rush indictments against local Democrats before the November 2006 elections, in an apparent attempt to bolster Wilson's chances of winning re-election. Of New Mexico's five members in Congress, only Wilson and Domenici have refused to deny that they contacted Iglesias. (Domeneci now admits to calling Iglesias to "ask" about his investigation of New Mexico Democrats, but says he didn't pressure Iglesias; see the item above for more information.)
The Justice Department has already admitted firing Arkansas attorney Bud Cummins in order to make way for Bush loyalist Tim Griffin, a former aide to Karl Rove and a longtime Republican Party operative with little criminal prosecutorial experience outside of the military. Cummins was told to step down after former White House counsel Harriet Miers met with Gonzales's staff on behalf of Griffin.
A former senator from Washington state, Republican Slade Gorton, says that while "[t]The administration has a perfect right to ask people to leave and appoint other ones just because they want turnover," he is unhappy that Seattle prosecutor John McKay was fired. Gorton calls McKay a very effective US attorney, and calls the characterization of McKay as having unacceptable performance issues a mistake. Seattle law enforcement officials say McKay was a strong advocate for the expansion of law enforcement powers under the USA Patriot Act and a determined prosecutor who reorganized the office and allowed senior assistants to focus on complex cases. "Institutions need to go through a period of renewal to be energized," says Norm Maleng, the King County prosecuting attorney. "That's what John did. He took it to a higher level." McKay had won wide praise for his efforts to crack down on drugs and gang activities, and had pursued groundbreaking antiterrorism initiatives, including implementing a new and highly efficient computer system allowing area law enforcement officials to collect and analyze crime data. The program helped make him popular in local law enforcement circles, but his associates believed that Justice Department and FBI officials in Washington, DC, objected, believing that such efforts should be undertaken on the national level.
One reason for McKay's dismissal may be the anger among state conservatives over McKay's refusal to pursue a baseless voter fraud investigation surrounding the 2004 election of Democrat Christine Gregoire, who defeated GOP candidate Dino Rossi by a razor-thin margin. But former Washington state Republican Party chairman Chris Vance says that, in consulting with national party leaders after the 2004 election, McKay was never mentioned. "They never said to me, 'Why isn't John McKay doing something?'" Vance recalls. "That never came up."
Bogden is understandably bitter about his dismissal. "You would think that you would be evaluated on your record, what your office has been able to achieve and what you have been able to accomplish as a United States attorney," he says. "You hear something like that, there is a sense of disbelief." (New York Times)
March 4: The Bush family, beginning at least as far back as George H.W. Bush, has learned a valuable lesson about the necessity of having partisan prosecutors in place as US attorneys to help them politically, writes investigative reporter Robert Parry.

US Attorney firings
In 1992, the elder Bush tried to wreck the Clinton presidential campaign by falsely implicating Clinton in criminal investigations. The attempt failed when federal law enforcement officials, including a US Attorney in Arkansas, resisted what they saw as improper White House political pressure. Parry writes, "Now, the younger George Bush is moving to ensure that he won't be sabotaged by similarly independent-minded prosecutors. The Washington Post reported that the White House approved the firing of seven US attorneys at the end of 2006 after the Justice Department identified them as insufficiently supportive of the President's policies" (see the March 3 item above).
Republicans such as Senator Pete Domenici and others gave key input to the White House on who to fire in order to get more partisan, more politically reliable prosecutors in place, including David Iglesias of Domenici's home state of New Mexico. Iglesias had been contacted by Domenici and House Republican Heather Wilson and pressured to bring indictments against local Democrats in order to help Wilson win a tough re-election campaign. At the time, the Republican congressional majority wasin jeopardy, in part, because of a series of GOP corruption scandals -- scandals that the White House and Congressional Republicans did not, and still do not, want prosecuted. San Diego US Attorney Carol Lam was fired in the middle of her pursuit of an investigation expanding from the corruption conviction of former House Republican Randy Cunningham. And Bush replaced Arkansas attorney Bud Cummins. The Arkansas office was a focal point of investigative activity during the 1992 campaign, when the elder Bush dug for dirt on Bill Clinton, and could be again a source of dirt against 2008 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
In 1992, the Bush campaign wanted to use the office of then-US Attorney Charles Banks of Arkansas to make false allegations against Bill Clinton that would sabotage Clinton's candidacy. One idea was to accuse Clinton of trying to renounce his US citizenship during the Vietnam War. Another idea was to use Banks to act on a dubious criminal referral related to the failed Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan, which had been owned by James McDougal, a partner in the Whitewater real estate deal with Bill and Hillary Clinton. The Madison criminal referral named the Clintons as witnesses. (This site is permeated with information about the Whitewater investigations.) Republican operative Jean Lewis, an investigator for the Resolution Trust Corporation, was eager to investigate Clinton before the elections, and successfully leapfrogged the relatively small Madison investigation over much larger and more costly S&L collapses to April 1992, with a team of investigators dispatched to Little Rock. Parry writes, "Lewis, a conservative Republican who detested Clinton as a 'lying b*stard,' went to extraordinary lengths to link the Whitewater deal to Madison's failure. For several weeks, she pored through warehoused Madison files in Little Rock, but could find nothing to connect Whitewater with the Madison's collapse. Despite Madison's small size compared to other RTC investigative priorities, Lewis returned for a second in-depth search in late April 1992. Finally, Lewis discovered a tenuous link between Whitewater and Madison. 'Included in one of the development work sheets marked "Maple Creek Farms" was an item denoting a $30,000 charge to Whitewater for the cost of an engineering survey,' Lewis wrote in her chronology. 'This was the first indication of a relationship between [Madison] and Whitewater beyond the existence of the Whitewater checking account' at Madison."
Lewis attempted to inflate the tenuous evidence into a full-blown investigation into Clinton and McDougal. In September, Banks received Lewis's referral, as did the FBI. Parry notes that "Lewis soon began pestering the FBI in Little Rock to pursue her referral." But Banks, worried that Lewis was attempting to influence the 1992 presidential elections, resisted opening an investigation until after the November 1992 elections. Banks, a Republican who did not consider himself a friend or ally of Clinton's, held on to the referral, but Republican operatives connected with the Bush administration and his campaign learned about the referral, and attempted to make political hay with it. Bush's Attorney General, William Barr, learned about the referral on September 17. Barr began looking into the referral to see if an investigation of Clinton was underway. "Barr did not want anyone in the Justice Department to know he was inquiring about the matter, to avoid the perception that he was trying to interfere with a sensitive case," according to the final Whitewater report. But even under pressure from Barr, Banks refused to open an investigation until after the elections. In fact, Banks saw little reason to open an investigation at all. "There is absolutely no factual basis to suggest criminal activity on the part of any of the individuals listed as witnesses in the referral," Banks wrote in a memo to Barr. In a separate letter, he wrote that "neither I personally nor this office will participate in any phase of such an investigation...prior to Nov. 3, 1992." Banks wrote that he considered the referral an attempt to influence the election and that to do so would be "prosecutorial misconduct." Barr was "upset," according to the Whitewater report, that Banks had implied that he suggested Banks do anything improper.
Besides Barr, White House counsel Boyden Gray was also aware of the Madison case. Albert Casey, then Resolution Trust Corp. chairman, "recalled receiving a call from Gray about the referral's status," the report said. "Casey went to William Roelle, executive vice president of the RTC, and asked about the status. Roelle told Casey the Clintons were not named as targets, but simply as potential witnesses." Gray, in an interview with Whitewater investigators, claimed not to remember discussing the Whitewater investigation with Casey, but thought he might have heard about the referral at either a dinner party with Casey, or perhaps from a journalist.
With Banks refusing to play politics with the Madison/Whitewater investigation, and with the accusation that Clinton had tried to renounce his citizenship backfiring on the Bush campaign, Clinton defeated Bush in the November 1992 elections.
Of course, as most readers know, after Clinton was elected, Lewis continued to push for a broader investigation even after the Department of Justice agreed with Banks that her referral did not "appear to warrant initiation of a criminal investigation." Timely leaks to newspapers such as the Washington Post initiated a frenzy of media coverage, and the entire Whitewater debacle began in earnest. Lewis eventually lied to Congress about her own efforts to create evidence of a coverup of the Whitewater "scandal" that never existed, but by that point, the Whitewater investigation had a life of its own. "We think we can indict and convict everybody who was close to Clinton in Arkansas," one GOP aide told Parry in 1994.
Parry writes, "The Whitewater investigation...never weighed the possibility that the scandal had started as a political dirty trick intended to help George H.W. Bush win reelection, as US Attorney Banks suspected. The Republican-dominated three-judge panel that set the parameters for the Whitewater probe never authorized an examination into the possible political origins of the case. ...In other words, the Bush I administration was never under investigation for instigating a politically motivated -- and potentially illegal -- criminal probe of the Clintons. Rather, Banks was investigated for possibly obstructing justice when he refused to go along." Though Banks was not targeted specifically by Kenneth Starr's team, but, as Parry notes, "[b]y the time the Whitewater report was finished in 2002, ...the Bush family was ensconced once again in the White House. And the new President Bush had learned an important lesson about the value of having federal prosecutors who see things your way." (Consortium News)
March 4: Now that the November 2006 elections are four months in the past, many GOP candidates are -- finally -- repudiating some of the ugly, baseless political ads run on their behalf by the National Republican Congressional Committee.
GOP campaign strategies
At the time, the candidates said that they could do nothing to influence the airing of the ads, even after a few of the candidates asked that they not be run. On the heels of the biggest losses suffered by Congressional Republicans in decades, many of the NRCC's former candidates are calling for major changes at the NRCC. They depict the committee as a rogue attack-ad shop that shielded party leaders from having to account for the claims in their ads -- encouraging over-the-top accusations that often hurt GOP candidates. "They weren't just attacking my opponent -- they were, bit by bit, destroying a reputation that I had spent years and years building," says Ray Meier, a Republican candidate in upstate New York whose Democratic opponent was wrongly accused of making adult fantasy calls. The ad on behalf of Meier attacked his Democratic opponent, former county district attorney Michael Arcuri, over a one-minute phone call made from his hotel to an adult sex line, which cost taxpayers $1.25. Though the call was clearly a wrong number -- Arcuri was trying to call the state Department of Criminal Justice Services, which has the same phone number but in a different area code -- the ad ran time and again in New York. Arcuri defeated Meier.
Other NRCC ads falsely accused Democrats of, among other charges, fixing a family member's speeding tickets, failing to pay business taxes, endorsing "coffee talk" discussions with members of the Taliban, and of being endorsed by the Communist Party. The NRCC funneled more than $83 million through a special "independent expenditure" arm that made all decisions regarding ads. The creation of the independent entity meant that when candidates such as Meier called NRCC headquarters to complain about the ads, committee officials said they couldn't discuss them, much less yank them from the air, without violating campaign-finance law. Under the law, the NRCC is an "independent committee" that is not bound by strict campaign finance laws. The progenitor of the Republicans' current propensity for smear ads is, perhaps, the 1988 "Willie Horton" attack ad on behalf of presidential candidate George Bush, which falsely smeared his Democratic opponent, Michael Dukakis, for releasing Horton from jail, where Horton promptly committed new and vicious felonies. In reality, Dukakis had nothing to do with releasing Horton, nor did he implement the furlough program that allowed Horton to go free. The Horton ad was the creation of another "independent" group, though it was later proven that the ad was produced with the collusion of members of the Bush-Quayle campaign. In 2004, George W. Bush was the benefactor of a huge smear campaign orchestrated against opponent John Kerry by the "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth."
Now, taking advantage of the latest loophole in the campaign-finance system, the national parties have started putting most of their advertising money into independent groups of their own creation. In 2006, spending by the Democratic and Republican parties' independent expenditure arms jumped 65 percent from 2004, to $202.4 million, according to Federal Election Commission data. The parties have essentially created their own version of the Swift Boat Veterans -- entities that operate outside the normal political apparatus, says Fred Wertheimer, president of the government watchdog group Democracy 21. "There's no accountability," says Wertheimer. "When you have unaccountability on this stuff, people start overreaching. And this idea of creating a Chinese wall within the party, where the people who are doing the ads are kept separate from the people who are doing the expenditures, is a fiction."
By far the biggest expenditures, and the most sleazy ad campaigns, in the 2006 campaigns came from the NRCC, spending over $20 million more than its Democratic counterpart. And the Democrats, though they often played political hardball, did not sink to the depths that the NRCC routinely plumbed. Annenberg Political Fact Check, a nonpartisan group that studies campaign advertisements, called the NRCC's ads "the very definition of political mudslinging." The Fact Check report found that "The National Republican [Congressional] Committee's work stands out this year for the sheer volume of assaults on the personal character of Democratic House challengers."
Representative Christopher Shays, a Connecticut Republican who is among the 2006 candidates who feel the NRCC's actions hurt his campaign, says he plans to file a bill that would allow candidates in both parties to prohibit the national parties from advertising on their behalf. "I would have been better off if they didn't spend one penny on my race," says Shays, who during the campaign embraced the NRCC ads. "The least we should do is give a candidate the ability to say no."
The NRCC's chairman during the 2006 elections, Thomas Reynolds, defends the ads, saying they were well-documented and generally effective. He concedes that his independent expenditure arm "took a lot of liberties," but counters that Democratic committees also stretched the truth. NRCC ads saved 10 to 20 Republican-held seats, Reynolds avers. "Everybody has an opinion, and hindsight after an election is about 20-20," he says. Reynolds does not address how many races were lost because of his committee's mudslinging. Last year, Reynolds put a veteran NRCC operative, Carl Forti, in charge of the party's independent committee. Reynolds says that, in keeping with the law, Forti made all advertising decisions and had no contact with his bosses at the NRCC while working on independent ads. Most observers find that hard to swallow. Forti is now the political director of the presidential campaign of GOP candidate Mitt Romney.
One defeated Republican, Mike Whalen of Iowa, says that the NRCC ads against his opponent, Bruce Braley, damaged his own campaign. The NRCC accused Braley of being supported by the Communist Party after a newsletter of that organization termed Braley a "peace candidate." Whalen tried to get the NRCC to pull the ad, but was told that nothing could be done because it was a product of the independent expenditure arm. "I went ballistic, desperately trying to send the message through back channels," Whalen recalls. "They didn't care. They said, 'We don't have any control over it.' ...That ad in particular I think sullied my reputation, and I will always resent that ad." Whalen doesn't mention how the ad attempted to sully Braley's reputation. (Boston Globe)
March 4: Fox News anchor Brit Hume has put his finger on the central issue of the Walter Reed scandal -- it makes the Bush administration look bad.
Walter Reed scandal
On Fox News Sunday, Hume says that "the problem" is that it "looks terrible" for the administration. Hume calls the neglect and deplorable conditions at the military hospital a "potential" political firestorm, saying, "This is unfortunate. It looks terrible, which is the problem. The problem is that it looks as if this administration, which has sent troops into harm's way, is now neglecting them when they're injured and need care and help. But make no mistake about it, this was a -- there was a potential political firestorm on Capitol Hill began to brew about this. The administration did what it did to try to get it over with, and it may well have succeeded." Hume adds that had the Democrats not taken over Congress in November, no one would have been fired over the scandal. "This is an administration which is known or had been known for sticking by people even when they were embattled." Hume's guest, NPR reporter Mara Liasson, counters, "I think, you know, to say it looks bad, it also is bad. Those pictures were horrible. These are people -- nobody who is being treated for any kind of injury should have to live in that condition, let alone people who just fought in a war for our country." Apparently Hume feels that it is perfectly fine for America's wounded veterans to be treated with contempt and forced to live in verminous squalor, as long as no one in the Bush administration is held accountable. (Fox News/Think Progress [link to video])

March 5: A report by a nonpartisan British think tank, the Oxford Research Group, warns that military strikes against Iran could actually accelerate Iran's development of nuclear weapons.
War with Iran
The report says military action could lead Iran to change the nature of its program and quickly build a few nuclear arms. Frank Barnaby the nuclear scientist and arms expert who authored the report, says, "If Iran is moving towards a nuclear weapons capacity it is doing so relatively slowly, most estimates put it at least five years away." But an attack on Iranian nuclear facilities "would almost certainly lead to a fast-track program to develop a small number of nuclear devices as quickly as possible." It "would be a bit like deciding to build a car from spare parts instead of building the entire car factory."
In February, Iran ignored a deadline set by the UN Security Council to stop enriching uranium. A report by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said Iran was instead expanding the program. Far from setting back Iran's nuclear program, a military attack might create the political conditions in which Iran could accelerate its nuclear weapons program. Enriched uranium is used as fuel for nuclear reactors, but highly enriched uranium can be used to make nuclear bombs. Western powers have threatened to expand sanctions on Iran. The US has not ruled out using force but says it wants to give diplomacy a chance. (BBC)
March 5: Hundreds of US veterans wounded in Iraq confirm to Washington Post reporters Dana Priest and Anne Hull that the massive problems abounding in Walter Reed Army Medical Center also exist in other military hospitals around the country.
Walter Reed scandal
Problems such as documented at Walter Reed -- outpatients forced to live in squalor, wounded soldiers and their families treated with disdain and contempt by hospital and military officials, soldiers unable to get needed treatment because of systematic bureaucratic ineptitude, wounded soldiers left to descend into drug and alcohol addiction without intervention -- are rampant throughout the Veterans Administration hospital system, but before the Walter Reed scandal, have been largely ignored by the Bush administration, the US military, and the mainstream media.
"It is just not Walter Reed," writes veteran Ray Oliva, who receives care -- such as it is -- from the VA in Livermore, California. "The VA hospitals are not good either except for the staff who work so hard. It brings tears to my eyes when I see my brothers and sisters having to deal with these conditions. I am 70 years old, some say older than dirt but when I am with my brothers and sisters we become one and are made whole again." Hull and Priest write, "Oliva is but one quaking voice in a vast outpouring of accounts filled with emotion and anger about the mistreatment of wounded outpatients at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Stories of neglect and substandard care have flooded in from soldiers, their family members, veterans, doctors and nurses working inside the system. They describe depressing living conditions for outpatients at other military bases around the country, from Fort Lewis in Washington state to Fort Dix in New Jersey. They tell stories -- their own versions, not verified -- of callous responses to combat stress and a system ill equipped to handle another generation of psychologically scarred vets." As noted elsewhere in this site, military officials are rushing to repair the most visible evidence of the systematic problems at Walter Reed, but the scandal "has exposed the potential political costs of ignoring Oliva's 24.3 million comrades -- America's veterans -- many of whom are among the last standing supporters of the Iraq war," they write.
US veterans, among the last staunch supporters of the Iraq war and Bush's foreign policies, are rising up in anger and dismay over the treatment of their brothers and sisters by the military. Hull and Priest write, "Wrenching questions have dominated blogs, talk shows, editorial cartoons, VFW spaghetti suppers and the solitary late nights of soldiers and former soldiers who fire off e-mails to reporters, members of Congress and the White House -- looking, finally, for attention and solutions." Physician and author Ron Glasser says, "It all adds up and reaches a kind of tipping point." Until now, he says, America had believed the government's assurances that the wounded were being taken care of. "The country is embarrassed" to know otherwise, Glasser says. "It's been a potent reminder of past indignities and past traumas" for veterans of earlier wars, says Thomas Mellman, a professor of psychiatry at Howard University who specializes in post-traumatic stress and has worked in Veterans Affairs hospitals. "The fact that it's been responded to so quickly has created mixed feelings -- gratification, but obvious regret and anger that such attention wasn't given before, especially for Vietnam veterans."
House Democrat John Tierney agrees. "We need a sustained focus here, and much more needs to be done," he says of the Walter Reed scandal. He fears "these problems go well beyond the walls of Walter Reed," and adds that "as we send more and more troops into Iraq and Afghanistan, these problems are only going to get worse, not better. ...This is absolutely the wrong way to treat our troops, and serious reforms need to happen...immediately."
Testifying before Tierney's House subcommittee, Annette McLeod says that her husband, Corporal Wendell McLeod, was originally sent to the wrong hospital after he suffered a head injury in Iraq. Once at Walter Reed, she says, he suffered interminable delays in getting outpatient tests and treatment. "My life was ripped apart the day that my husband was injured," she says through tears. The experience at Walter Reed made it "worse than anything I've had to sacrifice in my life."
Many military quarters for wounded outpatients are in similarly horrific shape as the now-infamous Building 18 of Walter Reed. Those soldiers and their families report similar problems, both with their living conditions and their treatment: vermin infestations, mold, callously untrained staff, bureaucratic nightmares, and endless waits for treatment. Sandy Karen was horrified when her 21-year-old son was discharged from the Naval Medical Center in San Diego a few months ago and told to report to the outpatient barracks, only to find the room swarming with fruit flies, trash overflowing and a syringe on the table. "The staff sergeant says, 'Here are your linens' to my son, who can't even stand up," she says. "This kid has an open wound, and I'm going to put him in a room with fruit flies?" She took her son to a hotel instead. "My concern is for the others, who don't have a parent or someone to fight for them," she says. "These are just kids. Who would have ever looked in on my son?" Captain Leslie Haines recalls her treatment at Fort Knox after being wounded in Iraq in 2004: "The living conditions were the worst I'd ever seen for soldiers," he says. "Paint peeling, mold, windows that didn't work. I went to the hospital chaplain to get them to issue blankets and linens. There were no nurses. You had wounded and injured leading the troops."
Other soldiers tell similar stories. A soldier at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, writes, "There were yellow signs on the door stating our barracks had asbestos." A soldier at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, writes, "They are on my [expletive] like a diaper...there are people getting chewed up everyday." From Fort Dix, New Jersey, a soldier writes, "Scare tactics are used against soldiers who will write sworn statement to assist fellow soldiers for their medical needs." A soldier at Fort Irwin, California, reports, "Most of us have had to sign waivers where we understand that the housing we were in failed to meet minimal government standards."
Soldiers back from Iraq worry that their psychological problems are only beginning to surface. "The hammer is just coming down, I can feel it," says retired Major Anthony DeStefano of New Jersey, describing his descent into post-traumatic stress and the Army's propensity to medicate rather than talk. When he returned home, Army doctors put him on the antipsychotic drug Seroquel. "That way, you can screw their lights out and they won't feel a thing," he says of patients like himself. "By the time they understand what is going on, they are through the Board and stuck with an unfavorable percentage of disability" benefits. Nearly 64,000 of the more than 184,000 Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans who have sought VA health care have been diagnosed with potential symptoms of post-traumatic stress, drug abuse or other mental disorders as of the end of June, according to the latest report by the Veterans Health Administration. Of those, nearly 30,000 have possible post-traumatic stress disorder, the report said.
And the VA hospitals must contend with a new surge of patients from Iraq and Afghanistan. One veteran, Specialist Roberto Reyes, who is permanently disabled from an IED explosion in Iraq and can barely move his fingers, sits, untreated, at the Peters VA Medical Center in the Bronx. His aunt, Maria Mendez, says of the hospital staff, "They fight over who's going to have to give him a bath -- in front of him!" Reyes suffered third-degree burns on his leg when a nurse left him in a shower unattended. He was unable to move himself away from the scalding water. His aunt found out only later, when she saw the burns.
Until now, the blizzard of complaints from veterans and their families have gone unanswered. "I have been trying to get someone, ANYBODY, to look into my allegations" at the Dayton, Ohio VA, Darrell Hampton writes. 62-year old Horace Williams of South Carolina said in a phone call, "I'm a Marine from the Vietnam era, and it took me 20 years to get the benefits I was entitled to." The VA has a backlog of 400,000 benefit claims, including many concerning mental health. Vietnam vets whose post-traumatic stress has been triggered by images of war in Iraq are flooding the system for help and are being turned away. The editor of this site can relate information from a former wife, who once worked at a VA hospital in the Southeast in the early 1980s: an audiologist, she was directed to ensure that as many patients as possible were certified with enough hearing, even after suffering intensive hearing trauma in combat or in training, to be denied medical and disability benefits.
For years, politicians have received letters from veterans complaining of bad care across the country. While the VA has long refused to handle those complaints, under Bush, the problems have intensified. Sergeant William Jones had recently written to his Arizona senators -- both Republicans -- complaining about abuse at the VA hospital in Phoenix. He had written to the president before that. "Not one person has taken the time to respond in any manner," Jones says via e-mail. And it isn't just Republicans. Oliva says, "I wrote a letter to Senators [Dianne] Feinstein and [Barbara] Boxer [both Democrats] a few years ago asking why I had to wear hospital gowns that had holes in them and torn and why some of the vets had to ask for beds that had good mattress instead of broken and old. Wheel chairs old and tired and the list goes on and on. I never did get a response." Oliva says, "I sat with guys who'd served in 'Nam. We had terrible problems with the VA. But we were all so powerless to do anything about them. Just like Walter Reed." (Washington Post, Washington Post, my own sources)
March 5: The White House, reeling from the Walter Reed scandal, is in full damage control mode, as Americans and people around the world register their shock and anger at the horrific treatment of wounded American soldiers at the Army medical center in Washington.
Walter Reed scandal
One such soldier, Latseen Benson, a double amputee, remembers meeting a parade of VIPs at the hospital, including Bush, Dick Cheney, and then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Before their visits, Benson's mother Diane Benson recalls, the military hospital would be thoroughly scrubbed. But the improvements would not last long. "I wasn't so bothered by the rats, although there were a lot running around outside, but I really wanted his room to be swept and kept clean," she says. "You couldn't get people to mop the blood and urine from the floor while my son was there with his legs wide open."
Although the standard of intensive medical care at the hospital is widely praised by injured veterans and their families, they claim squalid conditions, bureaucratic chaos and insensitive regulations have made the process of recovery appallingly stressful. Staff Sergeant John Shannon, whose eye and skull were shattered by a sniper in Ramadi, was sent to Walter Reed in November 2004. On arrival he was given a map of the grounds and told to make his own way to his room. Badly disoriented and barely able to see, he had to hold himself upright by sliding against the walls, asking anybody he could find for directions. After treatment for his injuries and a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder, he remained stuck at Walter Reed for two years as an outpatient, but felt neglected by case workers. "I thought, 'Shouldn't they contact me?'" he recalls wondering, as quoted by the Washington Post in articles excerpted in the February 2007 page of this site. "I didn't understand the paperwork. I'd start calling phone numbers asking if I had an appointment."
Although Bush and Pentagon officials claim to have known nothing about the appalling conditions at Walter Reed, problems at Walter Reed have been known to officials at the highest level for some time. Joyce Rumsfeld, Donald Rumsfeld's wife, was recently reported as making a surreptitious visit to the hospital at the urging of a concerned friend last October. She learned that her husband was receiving reports from soldiers hand-picked to ensure a rosy, and inaccurate, picture of conditions at the hospital would be presented. Mrs. Rumsfeld's friend was subsequently barred from visiting the hospital.
The underlying problem, according to injured veterans, is that the venerable hospital has been overwhelmed by the number of casualties in a war that was supposed to be over quickly. Roughly two Americans were wounded for every one who died in the Second World War. In Vietnam and Korea, the ratio was three to one. With advances in medical treatment, in Iraq it is seven to one. (London Sunday Times/Australian)
March 5: Republican representative Heather Wilson admits to contacting then-US attorney David Iglesias to complain about the pace of his corruption investigation into New Mexico Democrats before the November 2006 election.
US Attorney firings
Until now, Wilson, who Iglesias says pressured him to file indictments against New Mexico Democrats before the election in an apparent attempt to influence her bid for re-election against a tough Democratic opponent, has refused to confirm that she ever contacted Iglesias. Wilson's Republican colleague and political mentor, Senator Pete Domenici, confirmed yesterday that he called Iglesias about the investigations several weeks before the elections. Domenici is now the subject of a Senate ethics inquiry.
Like Domenici, Wilson denies that she pressured Iglesias to file indictments before the election. "I did not ask about the timing of any indictments and I did not tell Mr. Iglesias what course of action I thought he should take or pressure him in any way," Wilson says. "The conversation was brief and professional." A month after the election, which Wilson won by a narrow margin, Iglesias was fired as one of the eight US attorneys "purged" by the Justice Department. Both Wilson and Domenici have likely broken Congressional ethics rules that bar contacts with federal prosecutors officials during most active investigations.
Iglesias and three other fired prosecutors testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee today, and the same group, with two other fired prosecutors, will testify before a House Judiciary subcommittee later in the day.
The Senate Ethics Committee released a statement yesterday evening declining to address the allegations against Domenici, but it said that anytime a legitimate complaint is filed against a senator, a preliminary inquiry is begun. The statement, from the chairwoman, Democratic senator Barbara Boxer, and ranking Republican John Cornyn, noted that preliminary inquiries can lead to wider investigations. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a liberal-leaning advocacy group, filed a complaint against Domenici with the committee yesterday. CREW's complaint reads, in part, "In a discussion of Senate Rule 43, the Senate Ethics Manual states that '[t]he general advice of the Ethics Committee concerning pending court actions is that Senate offices should refrain from intervening in such legal actions...until the matter has reached a resolution in the courts.' The manual also indicates that Senators are not to communicate with an agency regarding ongoing enforcement or investigative matters. CREW's complaint alleges that Sen. Domenici violated Rule 43 by pressuring Mr. Iglesias to act quickly on a pending corruption investigation. Moreover, given that Sen. Domenici made the call shortly before the November elections, he appears to have violated the prohibition on contacting agencies based on political considerations. CREW also alleges that by initially denying Mr. Iglesias's allegation, Sen. Domenici may have violated Senate rules by engaging in 'improper conduct which may reflect upon the Senate.'" CREW's executive director Melanie Sloan says, "If, as it appears, Senator Domenici pressured a sitting US attorney to push a criminal case to benefit a political party, the Ethics Committee should take swift and harsh action. No member of Congress can be permitted to manipulate our system of justice for political gain."
Wilson claims in her statement that many of her constituents had complained about "the slow pace of federal prosecutions" in corruption cases and that one unidentified constituent told her that "Iglesias was intentionally delaying corruption investigations." She says she was merely trying to help Iglesias: "If the purpose of my call has somehow been misperceived, I am sorry for any confusion. I thought it was important for Mr. Iglesias to receive this information and, if necessary, have the opportunity to clear his name." She claims that Iglesias's dismissal took place "without input from me." Justice officials say they are not aware of any contacts by Wilson about Iglesias. But they have confirmed that Domenici complained about him to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales three times in 2005 and 2006, and spoke to Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty in the first week of October 2006.
Talking Points Memo proprietor Josh Marshall says that Wilson's spinning explanation is "so risible as to almost be sad." He writes, "Consider what Wilson is asking us to believe: she says she didn't ask Iglesias about the timing of the expected indictment. Nor did she tell him [what] 'course of action' she should take. She called because so many of her constituents had complained that this Republican US Attorney, appointed by President Bush, wasn't moving quickly enough in his corruption investigation of a prominent New Mexico Democrat. Indeed, one unidentified constituent said Iglesias was intentionally bottling up the investigation. And Wilson called to give him the chance to 'clear his name.' Imagine Iglesias not understanding that in placing this call Wilson was just looking out for his own good? Enough. Wilson would have done better to follow the Domenici route and just pretended she was making an informational call. After reading this transparently bogus line from Wilson this is the first moment when I think there's a decent chance there will be a special election some time over the next twelve months in the first district of New Mexico. Anyone who reads even Wilson's defense knows that she did precisely what Iglesias said she did: muscled a US Attorney to issue an indictment two weeks prior to election day because she believed it would help her save her seat. Again, even going by Wilson's account of what happened, there's really no other reasonable explanation." (Washington Post, Talking Points Memo, CREW)
March 5: Former US attorney Thomas DiBiagio says he was forced out as Maryland's top federal prosecutor in early 2005 because he wouldn't respond to political pressure stemming from public corruption investigations involving associates of Maryland's then-governor, Republican Robert Ehrlich.
US Attorney firings
"There was direct pressure not to pursue these investigations," says DiBiagio. "The practical impact was to intimidate my office and shut down the investigations." DiBiagio says that until now, he has not discussed his firing in public, but he sees disturbing similarities between his ouster and the recent firings of eight other US attorneys. The Justice Department disputes DiBiagio's version of events. DiBiagio's office had been investigating whether associates of Ehrlich had improperly funneled money from gambling interests to promote legalized slot machines in Maryland. DiBiagio says that several prominent Maryland Republicans had pressed him to back away from the inquiries and that one conversation had so troubled him that he reported it to an FBI official as a threat. Instead, he says that the DOJ offered little support and that made it "impossible for me to stay." Several current and former officials in the Baltimore office say DiBiagio voiced concerns in 2004 that the corruption inquiries were jeopardizing his career, a view that they shared. But a DOJ official, David Margolis, says he told DiBiagio in late 2004 that he had to leave because "we had lost confidence in him," blaming DiBiagio's "harsh management style" and saying that DiBiagio's investigation into the gambling case had no impact on the decision to fire him. Ehrlich, who was defeated for re-election in November 2006, says he had nothing to do with DiBiagio's firing, and says that the gambling investigations were pointless.
But, like DiBiagio, several of the fired US attorneys had investigations of Republicans in the works when they were abruptly terminated.
Ehrlich, one of Maryland's most powerful Republicans at the time of DiBiagio's appointment in 2002, played a key role in recommendind DiBiagio for the position with the White House. DiBiagio, a former assistant prosecutor, was then a political unknown, but he and Ehrlich had become friends while the two were lawyers in Maryland. But their friendship disintegrated once DiBiagio took office and began investigating Ehrlich's ties to gambling interests. DiBiagio's indictment in 2003 of Ehrlich's state police superintendent, Edward Norris, over Norris's misuse of police money, angered Ehrlich and his own advisors.
Several months ago, a longtime aide to Ehrlich, Jervis Finney, called DiBiagio to reassure the fired attorney that "neither Governor Bob Ehrlich or his representatives had asked the Department of Justice to push him out." DiBiagio says the explanation is a lie. "I believe it was that [gambling] investigation that played an integral role in what was done to me," DiBiagio says. "I clearly got the message that I had alienated my political sponsor and I would not have any political support to stay another term. Clearly, they wanted me to leave." DiBiagio recalls tense conversations in 2003 and 2004 with advisors to the governor who, he said, intimated that the corruption investigations could derail his career. He would not name them publicly. DiBiagio says he was particularly troubled by one visit in June 2004 in which, he said, a lawyer allied with the governor said the gambling inquiries were disrupting legislative consideration of the slots question and should be shut down. DiBiagio says the lawyer inquired about his political future, asked whether he was interested in being a judge and suggested that his life could be closely scrutinized. DiBiagio says he was so troubled by the conversation that he reported it to the FBI as a possible threat. Soon after the meeting, DiBiagio told a Justice Department official in Washington about his office's gambling investigation and said, "Powerful politicians and businessmen are very upset that we are looking into this matter," according to an e-mail message.
When prosecutors secured a grand jury subpoena for the records of Ehrlich's communications director, Paul Schurick, Ehrlich was angered by the move. DiBiagio's investigators were interested in tracing substantial payments made by a gambling company to a political marketing business in Maryland with ties to Maryland Republicans. But when DiBiagio was summarily ousted and left office in January 2005, the investigation fizzled.
DiBiagio has caused controversy before. He was publicly rebuked by DOJ officials after a leaked memorandum hit the press that spoke of his desire to bring three "front page" corruption cases before November, a memorandum widely interpreted in Baltimore as an effort to pursue Democrats. After that, the DOJ said it would have to approve any public corruption prosecutions from DiBiagio's office. Shortly thereafter, DiBiagio was the subject of an unscheduled performance review, which obtained mixed results, including finding that some of his officials harbored resentment over the prosecutor's aggressive management style. But several officials in the Baltimore prosecutor's office say that although DiBiagio had been an unpopular manager, the timing of the events leading to his departure appeared to be linked, at least partly, to the corruption investigations. "We had several investigations that were very sensitive publicly, and what did him in was the probes into prominent Republicans," says one former official. The state's attorney in Baltimore, Patricia Jessamy, who worked often with DiBiagio, says she believes that he had alienated too many important people to succeed. "He was a good prosecutor," she says. "But he did not play politics well, and that was his downfall."
After the publication of the New York Times report about DiBiagio, the Justice Department acknowledges that DiBiagio was indeed forced from office, though it refuses to admit to ousting DiBiagio over the Ehrlich-related investigation. In 2004, DiBiagio, obviously playing it safe, merely said that he was stepping down for personal reasons. (New York Times, Washington Post)
March 5: Michael Battle, the director of the Executive Office for US Attorneys, announces that he will resign his post on March 16.
US Attorney firings
Battle was the DOJ official who personally informed seven US attorneys that they were being fired in December 2006, but the DOJ insists that Battle was not involved in the actual decision making process. Battle himself told the attorneys that the order to fire them had come from "'on high." A Justice Department spokesperson says the timing of Battle's abrupt, unexplained resignation is merely a "coincidence." The DOJ also insists that Battle informed officials there of his resignation as long ago as last summer, which would have been unusual since Battle only came on board in June 2005.
Congressional Democrats do not believe that Battle's resignation is anything approaching a coincidence. Senator Charles Schumer speculates that Battle's resignation may be just "another casualty of the US attorney's imbroglio." House Democrat Linda Sanchez, whose Judiciary subcommittee will be hearing testimony from the fired attorneys, says, "The administration's explanation of Mr. Battle's apparent resignation is as murky as everything else they have told us about this case. I look forward to hearing the testimony of the fired federal prosecutors so we can get closer to the truth of what happened." (AP/Houston Chronicle/Buzzflash)
March 5: Slate's Dahlia Lithwick examines the murky chain of events surrounding the late-night inclusion of the controversial provision in the USA Patriot Act that gives the attorney general the right to name interim US attorneys to the position indefinitely without having to go through the normal Senate confirmation process.
US Attorney firings
Many believe that the Bush administration has used the provision to fire US attorneys and replace them with political pawns that will do the administration's bidding. Lithwick writes, "[W]e seem to have forgotten that even without the mass firings, this law had been changed in the sneakiest way imaginable." The new Patriot Act provision serves three purposes, Lithwick observes: "consolidating presidential power, diminishing oversight, and ensuring that 'interim' prosecutors had permanent jobs.
On February 6 (see related items in the February page of this site), former Senate Judiciary Chairman Arlen Specter claimed to know nothing of the insertion of the provision into the reauthorization bill, which took place in the dead of night just before the Senate voted to authorize the bill. "The first I found out about the change in the Patriot Act occurred a few weeks ago when Sen. [Dianne] Feinstein approached me on the floor," Specter claimed, and said he looked into it: "I then contacted my very able chief counsel, Michael O'Neill, to find out exactly what had happened. And Mr. O'Neill advised me that the requested change had come from the Department of Justice, that it had been handled by Brett Tolman, who is now the US attorney for Utah, and that the change had been requested by the Department of Justice because there had been difficulty with the replacement of a US attorney in South Dakota." So, according to Specter, O'Neill had merely been doing the Justice Department's bidding when he secretly inserted the provision into the Patriot Act, a groundbreaking provision that fundamentally changed the way the executive branch can influence the judiciary.
Lithwick writes, "[T]his was not some minor technical amendment. It was a substantial enhancement of executive power. So, Specter now finds himself in an exceedingly strange position: His staff either lied to him or misled him about what he acknowledges to be a significant legal change. He himself observed at that same hearing: 'I did not slip it in and I do not slip things in. That is not my practice. If there is some item which I have any idea is controversial I tell everybody about it.' So, Specter concedes that the item is controversial. He denies knowing about it. That implies it was O'Neill who slipped the new language in, and misled Specter and the Senate. And yet, at least as far as I can tell, nobody in power has said a word about O'Neill's conduct, and not one iota of blame has been laid at his doorstep." Lithwick notes that progressive columnist Joe Conason, in a February piece for Salon excerpted in the February page of this site, found that O'Neill is a former Clarence Thomas clerk, and he joined Specter's staff at the same time Specter was fighting accusations of being somewhat disloyal to the White House. Lithwick says, "[I]t now seems that either the DOJ snookered O'Neill, O'Neill snookered Specter, or Specter snookered his colleagues. But any way you slice it, the executive seems to have encroached on congressional turf in order to expand executive turf."
Lithwick concludes, "Whether Specter actually knew that O'Neill was carrying water for Karl Rove and turned a blind eye, or whether he was duped by O'Neill may never be known. But either way, it seems to me that Specter's office has done terrible damage to the very notion of independent and co-equal branches of government in this affair, and has yet to be called to account for it. Given that respect and esteem for co-equal independent branches of government is one of the senator's sacred cows, it's doubly ironic that no one has questioned him on this. ...The outrage isn't merely that the Justice Department abused its power to hire and fire. The real scandal is that it rewrote federal laws to do so, yet nobody seems to know who did it or why." (Slate)
March 5: At least two major television news outlets, Fox News and MSNBC, have devoted more airtime to the circumstances and speculation surrounding the death of Anna Nicole Smith than to the Walter Reed hospital scandal.
Walter Reed scandal
By far the most lopsided coverage, measured on March 2 broadcasts, came from Fox News, which devoted 12 times the amount of coverage to Smith than to the Walter Reed scandal -- 10 references to Reed and 121 to Smith. MSNBC was nearly even in its coverage, with 84 references to Walter Reed and 96 to Smith. CNN narrowly favored the Reed scandal over Smith in its own coverage, with 53 mentions of the Reed scandal and 40 of Smith. (Think Progress [multiple sources, links to video])
March 5: Three major advertisers -- Verizon, Washington Mutual, and NetBank -- yank their advertising from Ann Coulter's Web site after Coulter made derogatory remarks about John Edwards and other Democrats on March 3.
Conservative hate speech and intolerance
(See the above item for the details of Coulter's slanderous remarks, including labeling Edwards a "faggot.") Details of the mobilization of progressives and decent Americans who protested to Coulter's advertisers in the wake of her comments at the Conservative Political Action Conference can be found at the Daily Kos link below. (Daily Kos)

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THIS FAR AND NO FURTHER

A Timeline of Events Surrounding the Radical Right's Attempt to Subvert American Democracy

Written and Compiled by Black Max

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