Just Chewing on the (Wing) Nuts
“‘This war is wrong,’ says the last paragraph of Landeck’s letter to the president. ‘Because of your ineptness … I have lost my son, my pride and joy, my hero! (You) will never understand what the families of soldiers are going through and don’t try to tell me you do. My wife, my daughter and I cannot believe we have lost our only son and brother to a ridiculous political war.’”
Hundreds of Mexican federal police and soldiers surrounded the headquarters of Tabasco’s state police and arrested top current and former commanders in a raid apparently linked to an assassination attempt against the state’s public safety secretary.
The federal officers disarmed police at the state public safety headquarters at Villahermosa, the capital of Tabasco located 410 miles (655 kilometers) east of Mexico City, and arrested three top state police commanders there, as well as two other former commanders detained elsewhere, said Tabasco state Interior Secretary Humberto Mayans.
The Saturday raid - in which 350 federal police and about 150 soldiers disarmed state police - followed a March 6 shooting attack in which retired Gen. Francisco Fernandez Solis, the new head of state public safety, was wounded and his driver killed.
No charges against the men were immediately announced, but the five detainees were taken to the offices of the Assistant Attorney General for Investigation of Organized Crime in Mexico City for questioning. Mayans said the arrests were related to the ongoing investigation into the attack on Fernandez Solis.
After the raid, state police officers returned to their duties with only nightsticks, while armed federal officers performed patrols.
While investigators had originally said they thought the attack on Fernandez Solis had been carried out by drug traffickers, Saturday’s arrests appeared to lend credence to reports the shooting had been the work of a shadowy “brotherhood” of rogue policemen angered by the new security secretary’s rigorous approach to combatting the drug trade and other crimes.
The scenario is strikingly similar to the 2004 Denzel Washington movie “Man on Fire,” in which a shadowy group of rogue Mexican police and criminals known as “La Hermandad” - “The Brotherhood,” the same term used to refer to the purported group in Tabasco - committed crimes with impunity.
Another war going so well, the war on drugs…
President Pervez Musharraf’s regime in Pakistan is resorting to increasingly heavy-handed methods to quell protests against him that are growing by the day.
In Islamabad yesterday hundreds of police fought protesters outside the Supreme Court. And as the protests continued, riot police stormed the Geo private television station, which was broadcasting pictures of the protests, tear-gassed the staff and smashed up the studio.
Several high-profile figures were arrested for taking part in demonstrations around the country, including a former president and the leader of one of the main opposition parties. An MP claimed he had been beaten by police at the demonstrations.
Inside the Supreme Court, Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhary was attending his second closed hearing before a special tribunal. At the centre of the row is President Musharraf’s attempt to sack Mr Chaudhary. He has accused the judge of “misuse of office”, but the move is widely suspected of being politically motivated.
The authorities had already ordered one of Geo’s most popular news programmes off the air for its critical coverage of the President’s move against Mr Chaudhary. As the channel defied pressure not to broadcast images of the protests, riot police burst into its Islamabad studio to shut it down by force.
But the tactic appeared to misfire badly when Geo was able to broadcast live images of the helmeted policemen forcing their way into the building.
“President” Pervez Musharraf used to be General Musharraf, and he came to power through a military coup. He is still more a dictator than President, changing the constitution whenever needed. This story will not be on Fox Noise…
The Senate Judiciary Committee today authorized the use of subpoenas to compel the testimony of five Justice Department officials as part of an investigation into the firing of eight U.S. attorneys, but the panel put off a vote on subpoenas for top White House aides, including senior political adviser Karl Rove.
The committee empowered its Democratic chairman, in consultation with its top Republican, to issue subpoenas for D. Kyle Sampson, Gonzales’s former chief of staff; Michael J. Elston, chief of staff to Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty; Monica Goodling, the Justice Department’s White House liaison; William W. Mercer, a nominee to become associate attorney general; and Michael A. Battle, who directed the office overseeing the nation’s 93 U.S. attorneys and carried out the firings.
The committee also authorized subpoenas for six of the eight fired U.S. attorneys: Carol S. Lam of San Diego, Bud Cummins of Little Rock, Paul K. Charlton of Phoenix, John McKay of Seattle, Daniel G. Bogden of Las Vegas and David C. Iglesias of Albuquerque. All six testified under oath last week before the House Judiciary Committee. The other two fired U.S. attorneys, who were not included in today’s subpoena authorization, are Margaret Chiara of Grand Rapids, Mich., and Kevin V. Ryan of San Francisco.
I love the smell of subpeonas in the the morning…It smells like…Fresh coffee and raspberry danish…
~SSquirrel
PS also White Linen but we won’t get into that…
As I wrote in yesterday’s column, Tuesday’s document dump — which initiated from the Justice Department, not the White House — includes e-mails from J. Scott Jennings, Karl Rove’s deputy at the White House, coming from an e-mail address at gwb43.com. That’s a domain owned by the Republican National Committee.
This raises all sorts of questions. I put four of them to a White House spokesman yesterday, but haven’t gotten a response.
The questions:1) Does White House policy allow White House staffers to use non-White House e-mail addresses for official White House business? Does it prohibit it? What is the policy?
2) Would these e-mails be treated any differently from official White House e-mails when it comes to archiving or subpoena purposes?
3) Does it create either impropriety or the appearance of impropriety that gwb43.com is a domain owned by the Republican National Committee?
4) Do other White House staffers regularly use non-White House e-mail accounts for White House business, and if so, why?
Since then, several readers have e-mailed me with their own questions and comments. So I’ve added four more, passed those along as well, and still no response:
5) Does non-White House e-mail fulfill security requirements for White House communications?
6) If other non-White House e-mail accounts are used, who are the providers for all of the other accounts? (Any others besides the RNC?)
7) Does White House policy allow White House staffers to use non-White House e-mail addresses from their computers, even for non-official business? I’m told that during the Clinton administration, access to external e-mail, including Web mail, was shut off from White House (eop.gov) computers. Was there a conscious change of policy by the Bush administration?
8) Have there been any recent changes in policy relating to e-mail practices, or are changes in policy contemplated?
Also in Tuesday’s document dump was a Jan. 8, 2007 e-mail from Steve Bell, the chief of staff to Sen. Pete Domenici, about the senator’s preferred replacement for fired U.S. attorney David Iglesias. Bell sent that e-mail to three people — including one “kr@georgewbush.com“.
I wonder who that was.I called Bell this morning to get a sense of whether the official and political e-mail addresses of White House aides are widely considered to be interchangeable.
“I don’t know how they . . . I don’t know which is . . . I’m not going to comment on it,” Bell said.
I wonder if Bell is sharing lawyers with Sen. Pete or if he has to hire his own?
~SSquirrel
Shortly before Attorney General Alberto Gonzales advised President Bush last year on whether to shut down a Justice Department inquiry regarding the administration’s warrantless domestic eavesdropping program, Gonzales learned that his own conduct would likely be a focus of the investigation, according to government records and interviews.
Bush personally intervened to sideline the Justice Department probe in April 2006 by taking the unusual step of denying investigators the security clearances necessary for their work.
In a March 21, 2006, memo citing his inability to obtain security clearances, Jarrett, the head of OPR, wrote to Paul McNulty, the deputy attorney general, complaining that OPR was being “precluded from performing its duties.”
In contrast, Jarrett noted, the administration promptly approved “the Criminal Division’s request for the same security clearances for a large team of attorneys and FBI agents that was investigating who initially leaked details of the NSA eavesdropping program to The New York Times.”
Investigators from the Office of Professional Responsibility notified senior aides to Gonzales early last year that the first two people they intended to interview were Jack Goldsmith, who had been an assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel, and James A. Baker, the counsel for Justice’s Office of Intelligence Policy and Review. Both men had raised questions about the propriety and legality of various aspects of the eavesdropping program.
Almost immediately after being named as head of the legal counsel office, Goldsmith became a thorn in the side of the White House and, more particularly, to Vice President Dick Cheney, his then-chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, and his then-counsel, David Addington.
“In frequent face-to-face confrontations,” the article said, Addington “attacked Goldsmith for changing the rules in the middle of the game and putting brave men at risk.”
—
Comey certainly would have been interviewed at length during the OPR probe, according to sources close to the investigation. Earlier, he had earned the enmity of some in the White House, a former senior administration official recalled in an interview, when Comey named a special prosecutor to investigate who leaked the identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame to the media.“Comey showed us that he was a guy who wouldn’t be kept on a leash,” said a former White House official, “in an administration that likes to keep everybody on a short leash.”
McNulty has a subpeona waiting for him, He seems to be chief White House fixer at Justice. His testimony will definitely be worth hearing, though at this point he might want a good lawyer. If the names Comey, Goldsmith, or Baker come up cake and ice cream for his going away party will be served in conference room B later that afternoon…
~SSquirrel
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — The U.S. military asserted that an American soldier was justified in erasing journalists’ footage of the aftermath of a suicide bombing and shooting in Afghanistan last week, saying publication could have compromised a military investigation and led to false public conclusions.
“Investigative integrity is one circumstance when civil and military authorities will reluctantly exercise the right to control what a journalist is permitted to document,” Col. Victor Petrenko, chief of staff to the top U.S. commander in eastern Afghanistan, said in a letter Friday.
(We can’t give out medals for shooting civilians and claim we captured the number three AlQaeda guy if you take pictures)
He added that photographs or video taken by “untrained people” might “capture visual details that are not as they originally were.”
A U.S. soldier deleted the AP journalists’ footage that showed a civilian four-wheel drive vehicle in which three Afghans were shot to death about 100 yards from the suicide bombing. The journalists had met requests from the military to not move any closer to the bomb site.
Other Afghan journalists said the military also deleted their footage.
Petrenko said that if people who are not part of the investigation entered such a “secured area” they could disturb evidence and other clues, “potentially fouling the conclusions of the investigation.”
(It interferes with our lying)
Petrenko said that taking pictures could also misrepresent what had happened in the incident.
“When untrained people take photographs or video, there is a very real risk that the images or videography will capture visual details that are not as they originally were,” he said. “If such visual media are subsequently used as part of the public record to document an event like this, then public conclusions about such a serious event can be falsely made.”
(Who ya gonna believe? The Pentagon or your lying eyes?)
The AP also raised concerns about the military’s efforts to restrict its coverage of the Feb. 15 crash of a U.S. helicopter in southern Zabul province in which eight soldiers were killed and 14 wounded. Two AP journalists and their vehicle were searched extensively in an effort to prevent footage of the wreckage getting out.
Petrenko justified that action on the grounds of “operational security” exercised when “equipment, aircraft or component parts are classified.”
He maintained that the U.S. military had no intention of curbing freedom of the press in Afghanistan.
(Unless you count taking film, video, and occasionally shooting or bombing journalists)
“We are completely committed to a free and independent press, and we hope that we can help encourage this tradition in places where new and free governments are taking root,” Petrenko said.
(Except when we can get away with it)
“It so happens that on these two recent occasions, military operational or security requirements were compelling interests that overrode the otherwise protected rights of the press.”
(Easy to disappear in Afghanistan, know what I mean?)
Afterwards, Col. Petrenko “confiscated” their wallets, to prevent them from being robbed by “insurgent types” on the way back to their hotel…
I gotta find a picture of this guy, this prick never ceases to amaze me…
~SSquirrel
“Again, red lights went on,” he said. “It was a very unpleasant phone call, because I know that members of Congress should not be making phone calls about pending matters, pending investigations, indictment dates, things of that nature.”
Iglesias also told NPR that he would name the lawmakers who called him if he is directed to do so during testimony at the Judiciary hearing Tuesday. He said he is afraid to do so right now out of fear of retaliation.
“Yes, if directed to do so I will publicly announce who called me,” he said.
He said the two members of Congress called him separately, but he has not named them out of fear of retribution.
The Associated Press late Thursday reported that Sen. Pete Domenici (R-N.M.) and Rep. Heather Wilson (R-N.M.) deflected questions about whether they had called Iglesias while other lawmakers who were asked simply denied doing so.
“I don’t have any comment,” Domenici told the Associated Press. “I have no idea what he’s talking about.”
Wilson referred questions to the administration.
“You should contact the Department of Justice on that personnel matter,” she said.
This could get interesting…
~SSquirrel
“President Bush said Thursday that he would nominate a senior executive of the largest organization representing the nation’s manufacturers to head the government agency assigned to protect consumers from dangerous products.
“Bush’s choice of Michael E. Baroody, executive vice president of the National Assn. of Manufacturers, to be chairman of the Consumer Product Safety Commission drew an angry response from consumer advocates and predictions of a tough battle for Senate confirmation from the Democratic majority.”
Said Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.): “Here was a golden opportunity to put a true champion of consumers onto a very important commission, and instead President Bush selected someone who represents the special interests… This administration seems incapable of doing anything in the public interest.”
Something has gone badly awry at The Washington Times since editor-in-chief Wesley Pruden Jr. announced his retirement and went on C-SPAN to announce managing editor Fran Coombs as his successor.
Coombs has gone power-crazy.
…
In the discussion with colleagues on The Washington Times foreign desk, editor Jones said: “The reason we are running this story is that Coombs thinks all the aborted girls means that Indian men will be immigrating to the United States to marry our girls.” That is an exact quote, what Jones told his colleagues on the foreign desk.
Coombs has told me and others repeatedly that he favors abortion because he sees it as a way to eliminate black and other minority babies.
…
We all knew he had a bad temper, drank a lot, smoked a lot of pot, but he supported his team of great reporters and we loved his feistiness and enthusiasm.
Wingnuts always did love a good back-stabbing… 
YESTERDAY THE Post reported that Lt. Gen. Kevin C. Kiley heard years ago from a veterans advocate and even a member of Congress that outpatient care at Walter Reed Army Medical Center was distressingly squalid and disorganized. That commander proceeded to do little, even though he lives across the street from the outpatient facilities in a spacious Georgian house. Also yesterday, the Army announced that Maj. Gen. George W. Weightman, the head of Walter Reed since August, had been relieved of his command. His temporary replacement? None other than Gen. Kiley.
Rep. C.W. Bill Young (R-Fla.) and his wife say they repeatedly told Gen. Kiley about unhealthful conditions in outpatient facilities.
The evidence compiled so far suggests that Gen. Kiley has been more complicit in the scandalous neglect of Walter Reed’s outpatient facilities for longer than Gen. Weightman has been. It also indicates that the Army’s reshuffle is really about projecting the appearance of accountability, not punishing those most responsible. As Mr. Young said yesterday of Gen. Weightman, “I don’t know him. But I know he’s the fall guy.”
I think the sheer arrogance of this bullshit move is breathtaking. Gen. Kiley was promoted to Army Surgeon General after doing such a “heckuva” job as Head of Walter Reed.
A senior Defense Department official said Gates had demanded quick action to show that the Pentagon was serious about improvements at Walter Reed. But the official said that Gates was not involved in the appointment of Kiley.
Weightman, an easygoing, open Army leader, is well respected in the military medical community and well liked among the staff at Walter Reed. He took command in August and instituted some changes to improve outpatient care. The defense official said his firing and replacement by Kiley are likely to be demoralizing to the staff at the medical center.
The Army said the decision to relieve Weightman was made Wednesday after several days of consideration. Army Secretary Francis J. Harvey consulted with Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, and Gen. Richard A. Cody, the vice chief of staff, according to Paul Boyce, an Army spokesman.
They shoot horses (and hopefully Generals), don’t they?
~S(tunned)Squirrel
Whoever had Rep. Linda Sanchez (D-Calif.) down as your pick in the office pool as the issuer of the first politically toxic subpoenas in the new Democratic majority in the 110th Congress, you’re the winner!
In less than five minutes Thursday, Sanchez issued four subpoenas to federal prosecutors who’ve been dismissed from their jobs during a series of firings that saw eight U.S. attorneys relieved of their duties.
Those dismissed are all appointees of President Bush, so their partisan credentials aren’t suspect, but there are lingering questions as to whether any of them have been dismissed because of the way they were aggressively investigating Republican corruption, or not pursuing Democratic corruption aggressively enough.
“Are these people being removed for doing their job and for doing it too well?” Sanchez asked.
It’s one of the bigger upsets of the year. Linda Sanchez, a mere pup having been elected in 2002, beat a host of other full committee and subcommittee chairmen — the so-called “Old Bulls” — to the punch in the subpoena sweepstakes.
No Republicans showed up for Sanchez’s hearing. Once all seven Democrats on the subcommittee arrived, they had a quorum and quickly approved the subpoenas.
Some folks say this is about the death penalty, some immigration, but this came from Cheney’s office and is definitely CYA…