International:Donald Rumsfeld said today
“there was no way to measure if more Islamic extremists were being created than killed in American-led operations in Afghanistan and Iraq,” Reuters reports. Asked about a U.S. intelligence report that concluded the Iraq war had spread Islamic radicalism, Rumsfeld said "intelligence could be faulty and sometimes ‘flat wrong.’“
Sen. Trent Lott (R-MS) said today that the religious differences among Iraqis makes the conflict very difficult for him to understand: “It’s hard for Americans, all of us, including me, to understand what’s wrong with these people,” he said. “Why do they kill people of other religions because of religion? Why do they hate the Israeli’s and despise their right to exist? Why do they hate each other? Why do Sunnis kill Shiites? How do they tell the difference? They all look the same to me.“
Speaking shortly after a meeting with President Bush and Vice President Cheney, Lott added that Iraq wasn’t among the White House’s priorities. “No, none of that,” Lott told reporters after the session when asked if the Iraq war was discussed. “You’re [the media] the only ones who obsess on that. We don’t and the real people out in the real world don’t for the most part.“
New Woodward Book Details Multiple Bush Cover-Ups Over Iraq
The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward is set to release “State of Denial,” the third in his series of books documenting the inner workings of the Bush administration. Woodward will discuss some notable revelations in the book this Sunday on 60 Minutes.
Key highlights:
Bush is covering up the extent of violence against U.S. troops in Iraq: According to Woodward, insurgent attacks against coalition troops occur, on average, every 15 minutes, a shocking fact the administration has kept secret. “It’s getting to the point now where there are eight-, nine-hundred attacks a week. That’s more than 100 a day. That is four an hour attacking our forces,” he says.
Intelligence shows Iraq violence will worsen in 2007:
The situation is getting much worse, says Woodward, despite what the White House and the Pentagon are saying in public. “The truth is that the assessment by intelligence experts is that next year, 2007, is going to get worse and, in public, you have the president and you have the Pentagon [saying], ‘Oh, no, things are going to get better,‘” he tells Wallace. “Now there’s public, and then there’s private. But what did they do with the private? They stamp it secret. No one is supposed to know,” says Woodward.
A report from the UK Ministry of Defense says the Iraq war has acted as a "recruiting sergeant" for Islamic extremists, and describes the west as being "in a fix.""New explosive devices are now used in Afghanistan within a month of their first appearing in Iraq," concludes a new United Nations report on Iraq, which echoes many of the dire predictions in an American assessment.
National:
Senate Approves Terror Detainee Interrogation Bill
The Senate on Thursday endorsed President Bush's plans to prosecute and interrogate terror suspects, all but sealing congressional approval for legislation that Republicans intend to use on the campaign trail to assert their toughness on terrorism.
The 65-34 vote means the bill could reach the president's desk by week's end. The House passed nearly identical legislation on Wednesday and was expected to approve the Senate bill Friday, sending it to the White House.
The bill would create military commissions to prosecute terrorism suspects. It also would prohibit blatant abuses of detainees but grant the president flexibility to decide what interrogation techniques are legally permissible.
Bush: 'Cut and Run' Dems Hurting War on Terror?
President Bush fired a shot across the bow of the Democratic Party Thursday, saying "the party of FDR... has become the party of cut and run."
In his most direct attack this election season, Bush flatly charged that Democrats are incapable of effectively fighting the War on Terror.
"The stakes in this war are high and so are the stakes this November. Americans face a choice between two parties with different attitudes on this War on Terror," he told an audience in Birmingham at a Republican fundraiser for Alabama Gov. Bob Riley.
Congress Adjourns This Week
When Congress adjourns for the November elections later this week, it appears that just 2 of the 11 required spending bills will pass. The budget will not have been enacted, forcing Congress to pass a stopgap measure to keep the federal government open. The legislative branch has also stumbled in its efforts to pass much-debated bills on lobbying reform, immigration, offshore oil drilling, minimum wage, and the estate tax. A popular package of business and education tax credits is teetering. Long-time congressional analysts Thomas Mann of Brookings and Norm Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute wrote recently, "Even those of us with strong stomachs are getting indigestion from the farcical end of the 109th Congress. ... With few accomplishments and an overloaded agenda, it is set to finish its tenure with the fewest number of days in session in our lifetimes, falling well below 100 days this year." Indeed, this Congress will recess having been in session fewer days than the "Do-Nothing Congress" of 1948. A CBS News/New York Times poll finds 75 percent of voters can't name one thing Congress has accomplished. Only 25 percent said they approved of Congress's job performance. Rep. Jack Kingston (R-GA) -- a member of the House leadership -- acknowledged, “We have not accomplished what we need to accomplish.” At the start of this month -- dubbed "Security September" -- the congressional leadership promised to deliver accomplishments that would be focused on national security.
What Hasn't Been Done?
FAILURE TO ADDRESS NSA WIRETAPPING: Due to "deepening rifts" among conservatives, Congress has been unable to pass legislation authorizing the National Security Agency's (NSA) domestic spying program.
FAILURE TO PASS DEFENSE AUTHORIZATION: Congressional leaders have been unable to come together to pass the defense authorization The military is undoubtedly over-stretched; the Pentagon recently ordered 3,800 troops in Iraq to stay for another 46 days while also calling another unit into Iraq 30 days ahead of schedule.
FAILURE TO PASS VETERANS FUNDING: Congress is failing to enact appropriations for the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), forcing the agency to rely on a stopgap funding measure that provides funding at last year's level. The Government Accountability Office recently released a stinging assessment that the VA is $3 billion in debt since 2005 because the administration failed to properly account for the increasing costs of war. The Bush administration has underfunded the VA by $9 billion over the last six years, and the administration’s long-range budget from last year proposes a $10 billion reduction over the next five years.
FAILURE TO PROTECT CHEMICAL PLANTS: "Congress still has done nothing to protect Americans from a terrorist attack on chemical plants."
FAILURE TO ENACT INTELLIGENCE AUTHORIZATION: For the second consecutive year, Congress will fail to enact a law that is its principal tool for overseeing the intelligence community. Prior to 2005, this law had been enacted in each of the previous 25 years. In addition, several key recommendations from the bipartisan 9/11 Commission still have not been enacted by Congress.
FAILURE TO PASS ENERGY BILL: Nearly 10 months after the President declared that America was addicted to oil, congressional leaders are preparing to adjourn Congress without having taken concrete action to cure America of that addiction.
FAILURE TO ENACT COMPREHENSIVE IMMIGRATION REFORM: Our immigration system is broken. Undocumented immigration is at an all time high.
In Other News… A $75 million project to build the largest police academy in Iraq has been so grossly mismanaged and poorly constructed that feces and urine rained from the ceilings in student barracks. U.S. construction giant Parsons Corp., which oversaw the project, received $1 billion in federal contracts in Iraq and managed the Big Dig "disaster" in Boston.
The New York Times calls the "compromise" military commissions legislation about to be approved by Congress "a tyrannical law that will be ranked with the low points in American democracy, our generation's version of the Alien and Sedition Acts."
Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani said yesterday, "The idea of trying to cast blame on President Clinton [for 9/11] is just wrong for many, many reasons, not the least of which is I don't think he deserves it."70% of Americans oppose the use of U.S. ground troops in Iran. Only nine percent favored U.S. air strikes on selected targets in Iran, while 45 percent said the U.S. should increase diplomatic our efforts with allies.
From The Right: A war we have to win is an article by Jeff Jacoby, he writes The consensus in the intelligence community is that the war in Iraq has worsened the threat from radical Islamic violence and hurt US efforts to combat terrorism.
From the Left: Keith Olbermann: "Our tone should be crazed. The nation's freedoms are under assault by an administration whose policies can do us as much damage as al Qaida; the nation's marketplace of ideas is being poisoned by a propaganda company so blatant that Tokyo Rose would've quit. Bill Clinton did what almost none of us have done in five years. He has spoken the truth about 9/11, and the current presidential administration."
Thought To Ponder:
Newsweek cover stories for all their editions on Oct 2nd:-
Europe: LOSING AFGHANISTAN-
Asia: LOSING AFGHANISTAN-
Latin America: LOSING AFGHANISTAN-
United States: ANNIE LEIBOVITZ: MY LIFE IN PICTURES (What Tha Fuc*?!)
(Sources: Mercury News, the Guardian, Townhall, FOXNews, Boston Globe, CBSNews, Washington Post, NY Times, Newsweek, Library of Congress, Reuters, CNN, Brookings, American Enterprise Institute, LA Times, CBSNews)
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