New "Strategery"

National:
Americans today gained their first full glimpse of the contents of Bob Woodward's latest book, State of Denial, in which he details the numerous failings of the Bush administration in its war in Iraq and against terrorist networks both before and after 9/11. Some of the revelations have been patently obvious for some time now, as our Metrics of Failure report details, but others are stunning, among them the apparent cover up of a key pre-9/11 meeting between then National Security advisor Condoleezza Rice and former CIA chief George Tenet in which Rice failed to heed warnings that Osama bin Laden was planning a major attack on the United States.

Read more here.

Chronicles of Pedophilia
As you know, Rep. Mark Foley (R-FL) resigned Friday after it became public that he had repeatedly sent predatory, sexually explicit emails and text messages to underage congressional pages. ABC News reported last night, Foley's obsession with 16- and 17-year-old male pages has been known to Republicans on Capitol Hill for at least five years, but, other than issue a warning, little else seems to have been done about the congressman. At least 11 House members and staff, all Republicans, knew of the inappropriate emails sent by Foley to a page in 2005. The boy told House officials that Foley's messages "freaked him out" and were "sick, sick, sick, sick, sick."

Among those informed were House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL), House Majority Leader John Boehner (R-OH), and Rep. John Shimkus (R-IL), who chairs the three-member House page board. None of these officials apparently ever contacted law enforcement about the emails. None of them informed the Democratic member of the page board. Foley was permitted to retain his position as a member of House leadership and as the co-chair of the congressional caucus on exploited children. New technology has forced parents to become increasingly vigilant about online predators, kidnappers, and cyberporn. The last thing they should have to worry about is a member of Congress preying on their child while he or she away from home. It is unconscionable that House leadership knew of Foley's abhorrent behavior for months and did virtually nothing to stop it.

I'm not going to talk about Foley much more except to give the facts…and just say “good riddin’s”.

A little irony with Happy Pants Foley on

America’s Most Wanted

FOLEY TRANSCRIPTS: instant Messages and emails

Also, new IM exchanges that have been released show Foley fishing for a meeting.

Nothing Like the continuing wealth of conservative “values” as the history of hypocrisy continues…

But Will Dems Miss The Boat Again?
Let's look at how the Democrats are playing this, first off. It's sort of a pattern. You go back and you look at 2002 and 2004 in terms of these midterm elections and 2004 was, again, a year that they thought they were going to win big with Kerry and take back the House and everything. They started off in this campaign season with the culture of corruption. They were going to make real hay out of Jack Abramoff and Tom DeLay, a number of other things, and something came along and preempted that. William Jefferson, Congressman (Democrat-Louisiana), and Harry Reid and a couple of other Democrats came along and gave them a problem advancing the whole notion of the culture of corruption; so they dragged Jack Murtha out, and they started going after the war in Iraq, war on terror, and so forth and so on. They've been lured now back to the culture of corruption with the Mark Foley story. -Rush

Rummy and Another Memo?
"In June 2005," the New York Times reported Sunday, "two senior national security officials in the Bush administration came together to propose a sweeping new approach to the growing problems the United States was facing with the detention, interrogation and prosecution of terrorism suspects." The officials urged in a nine-page memo that the administration "

seek Congressional approval for its detention policies." They called for a return to the minimum standards of treatment in the Geneva Conventions and for eventually closing the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The time had come, they said, for suspects in the 9/11 plot to be taken out of their secret prison cells and tried before military tribunals.

The memo so enraged Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld that his aides gathered up copies of the document and had at least some of them shredded. Rumsfeld disagreed with the memo's substance, but Rumsfeld was most angered that his new deputy, Mr. [Gordon] England, had worked on the memorandum with officials outside the Pentagon without his authorization. Hard-liners such as Rumsfeld and Cheney ultimately won the "sharp internal debate" with the State Department over detainee policy, as Congress gave President Bush "the power to jail pretty much anyone he wants for as long as he wants without charging them, to unilaterally reinterpret the Geneva Conventions, to authorize what normal people consider torture," and to deny habeas corpus rights to detainees.

9/11 Commission Report Lacking (again)
Administration officials did not inform the 9/11 Commission of a July 2001 meeting between CIA Director George Tenet, CIA counterterrorism chief J. Cofer Black, and then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, during which, Rice was warned of an imminent attack and urged to take action against al Qaeda. According to reports in Bob Woodward's new book, "State of Denial," Tenet wanted to "shake Rice" into action, but left the July 11 meeting "frustrated because they were not getting through." Black recalls, "The only thing we didn't do was pull the trigger to the gun we were holding to her head." Despite the importance of the meeting, the 9/11 Commission never heard about the encounter. 9/11 Commissioner Tim Roemer notes, "None of this was shared with us in hours of private interviews, including interviews under oath, nor do we have any paper on this. ... I'm furious." Jamie S. Gorelick, a fellow commission member added, "I can assure you it would have been in our report if we had known to ask about it." Peter Rundlet, counsel to the 9/11 Commission, wrote, "At a minimum, the withholding of information about this meeting is an outrage. Very possibly, someone committed a crime. And worst of all, they failed to stop the plot."

International:
Hugo Chavez Says He Has White House Informant
Venezuela President Hugo Chavez said Sunday he has received warnings from within the White House that the Bush administration is plotting to assassinate him or topple his left-leaning government.

Citing what he said were warnings from an alleged White House informant, Chavez told thousands of supporters at a campaign rally that President Bush has ordered him to be killed before he leaves office in 2008.

Bush "has said that before he goes, Hugo Chavez shouldn't be the president of Venezuela," Chavez told the crowd. "The president of the United States has said it, especially in recent days. What he doesn't know is that I have friends in the White House."

The Venezuelan leader has claimed before that the U.S. government is out to kill him — allegations that U.S. officials deny. Get more info

here

From The Right:

Toay Our quote/ reading comes from none other than John Ashcroft: Never Again: The Moral Imperative for Toughness "One simple but difficult principle provides the opportunity for the United States to achieve "never again." That is: The will to win. The will to do whatever is necessary within the Constitution to protect America separates us from more death and destruction within our shores. It is the will to sacrifice, to persevere in the face of adversity and criticism just as generations of Americans did before us. It is no guarantee, but if we falter, grow complacent, or fail to do what we can, we give the terrorist network opportunities that, with time and patience, they will exploit to kill more innocent Americans."

From the Left:

Our leftie reading comes from Richard A. Clarke: Blinded by Hindsight "Five years after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, three years after the 9/11 commission report, and just weeks before a national election, the issues of what happened before those attacks have resurfaced. Suddenly, we are again witnessing heated disputes about such insignificant issues as whether the Clinton administration prepared a draft "strategy" or, alternatively, "a series of required decisions" about Al Qaeda for the incoming Bush administration.

This spectacle was set off by a partisan rewriting of history billed as a television docudrama and shown on the anniversary of the attack. Mr. Clinton, justifiably, denounced the untruths about his administration's record. "

Thought To Ponder:

Marvin Bush and Wirt Walker III ---the President's brother and cousin, respectively ---were principals of the company in charge of security for the WTC, Dulles International Airport and United Airlines on 9-11, according to public records. The company was backed by an investment firm, the Kuwait-American Corp. .

(Sources: ABCNews, NY Times, Rush Limbaugh, Washington Post, News Max, Town Hall, Center For American Progress, Randi Rhodes, The State, NY Sun, Guardian, UPI, TruthOut)