In an all to common display of craven gutlessness the Senate once again rolled over and gave the White House what it wanted like a prison punk ass bitch. The only hope is that the House finds it’s balls in that other pair of pant in the laundry basket and stands up. Let’s just say I’m not very hopeful about it.

Bush would like to negotiate a long term agreement with Iraq, including security and training assurances without going to the Senate for ratification of a formal treaty between the nations. Why would he want to do that (other than a long standing hatred of anything that smells like oversight)? Because treaty ratification would require a 2/3 majority vote in the Senate and is therefore unlikely to pass in the face of massive public opposition to a long term presence in Iraq. Why should the dupes paying for the mess have any say at all?

U.S. war costs in Iraq up: report – Yahoo! News
“Funding for U.S. operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and other activities in the war on terrorism expanded significantly in 2007,” the Congressional Budget Office said in a report released on Wednesday.

War funding, which averaged about $93 billion a year from 2003 through 2005, rose to $120 billion in 2006 and $171 billion in 2007 and President George W. Bush has asked for $193 billion in 2008, the nonpartisan office wrote.

“It keeps going up, up and away,” Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad said of the money spent in Iraq since U.S. troops invaded in 2003.

“We’re seeing the war costs continue to spiral upward. It is the additional troops plus additional costs per troop plus the over-reliance on private contractors, which also explodes the costs,” said Conrad, a North Dakota Democrat who opposed the war.

And, to make it more fun, there have been tax increase or spending offsets to pay for the blood spilled. It’s been added to the national debt where it will contribute to the interest payment. Generations to come will no doubt love paying to hide the appearance of defeat in an ill-conceived, poorly planned cluster fuck that’s left us less able to respond to terrorist threats, shown limits of American military power and pissed of huge swaths of the globe.

Bush budget won’t fully fund Iraq war – David Rogers – Politico.com
The White House confirmed Wednesday that its new budget next month will not request a full year’s funding for the war in Iraq, leaving the next president and Congress to confront major cost questions soon after taking office in 2009.

The decision reverses the administration’s stance of just a year ago, when President Bush’s budget made a point of spelling out in advance what he thought the costs would be for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan for 2008. By comparison, the new budget, to be unveiled Feb. 4, requests only incremental “bridge” funding into 2009 and won’t sustain the military through the full length of the fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30, 2009.

The New York Times > Magazine > In the Magazine: Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush
In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

Doubt is useful, it leads to questions and perhaps a bit of curiosity. Without doubt there’s nothing at all intellectually that would prevent moving forward with an idea to it’s logical conclusion, no matter how wrong headed the underlying assumptions were. I claim my place as a proud member of the “reality-based community”.

McClatchy Washington Bureau | 01/11/2008 | In voiding suit, appellate court says torture is to be expected

The detainees allege that they were held in stress positions, interrogated for sessions lasting 24 hours, intimidated with dogs and isolated in darkness and that their beards were shaved.

The three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that the detainees captured in Afghanistan aren’t recognized as “persons” under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act because they were aliens held outside the United States. The Religious Freedom Act prohibits the government from “substantially burdening a person’s religion.”

The court rejected other claims on the grounds that then-Attorney General John Ashcroft had certified that the military officials were acting within the scope of their jobs when they authorized the tactics, and that such tactics were “foreseeable.”

“It was foreseeable that conduct that would ordinarily be indisputably `seriously criminal’ would be implemented by military officials responsible for detaining and interrogating suspected enemy combatants,” Circuit Judge Karen LeCraft Henderson wrote in the court’s main opinion.

Judge Janice Rogers Brown dissented with parts of the opinion, saying that “it leaves us with the unfortunate and quite dubious distinction of being the only court to declare those held at Guantanamo are not `person(s).’

This is the saddest and most damaging legacy of the Bush administration.

One former senior intelligence official with direct knowledge of the matter said there had been “vigorous sentiment” among some top White House officials to destroy the tapes. The former official did not specify which White House officials took this position, but he said that some believed in 2005 that any disclosure of the tapes could have been particularly damaging after revelations a year earlier of abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

h/t The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

Sully says that:

This time, there could not even be a farcical attempt to blame elaborate text-book torture and abuse techniques on free-lance reservists who were easily framed. All this torture – hundreds and hundreds of hours of Gestapo-style hypothermia, stress positions, waterboarding, sleep deprivation – was meticulously approved from the very top. They knew they were risking illegality and obstruction of justice in this act of institutional vandalism. But if they didn’t destroy the tapes, they were risking direct evidence of war crimes. Not a hard call, is it? And you would have to have had blinders and ear-muffs on for the past six years to believe Bush didn’t know about it.

I agree, the White House and Chenney’s fingerprints are all over this. War crimes and obstruction of justice. The Democratic leadership really should put impeachment (starting with Chenney) back on the table immediately.

Dodd’s Filibuster Threat Stalls Wiretap Bill – Politics on The Huffington Post
Senator Chris Dodd won a temporary victory today after his threats of a filibuster forced Democratic leadership to push back consideration of a measure that would grant immunity to telecom companies that were complicit in warrantless surveillance.

1. A CIA employee says they used waterboarding on a prisoner.
2. The US uses only legal methods of interrogation.
3. Therefore waterboarding is legal.

Seems pretty straight forward, but the White House spokesperson Dana Perino refuses to say if it’s legal or not. Why might that be? We have 100 years of history going back to the American occupation of the Philippines, prosenUS law and international treaties that clearly defines waterboarding as torture. Can’t go that way. The other option is

Wider Spying Fuels Aid Plan for Telecom Industry – New York Times
But the battle is really about something much bigger. At stake is the federal government’s extensive but uneasy partnership with industry to conduct a wide range of secret surveillance operations in fighting terrorism and crime.

The N.S.A.’s reliance on telecommunications companies is broader and deeper than ever before, according to government and industry officials, yet that alliance is strained by legal worries and the fear of public exposure.

To detect narcotics trafficking, for example, the government has been collecting the phone records of thousands of Americans and others inside the United States who call people in Latin America, according to several government officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the program remains classified. But in 2004, one major phone carrier balked at turning over its customers’ records. Worried about possible privacy violations or public relations problems, company executives declined to help the operation, which has not been previously disclosed.

In a separate N.S.A. project, executives at a Denver phone carrier, Qwest, refused in early 2001 to give the agency access to their most localized communications switches, which primarily carry domestic calls, according to people aware of the request, which has not been previously reported. They say the arrangement could have permitted neighborhood-by-neighborhood surveillance of phone traffic without a court order, which alarmed them.

Exactly why is there so much paper they never want anyone to see? “The Wonkette says You better get crackin’, Dick — that evidence won’t destroy itself!”

A salivating ultra-hawk admits that the recent Iran NIE makes the chances of a strike against Iran extremely unlikely. Thank God.

The only thing notable about this is that Sweaty Scott blames his masters for feeding him lies. I wonder, does he blame his parents for his excessive credulity  and gullibility?

Iran wants Western “apology” after IAEA report – Yahoo! News
Iran called on its Western foes on Friday to apologize to the Islamic Republic after the release of a U.N. nuclear agency report which Tehran said showed it had been telling the truth about its atomic plans, according to state media.

I think the past shows that the Bush administration does care if they really have WMD’s or not. Apology? Not likely.

From Roll Call by way of Americablog, senate majority leader Harry Reid is going to block Bush recess appointments by not going into recess. He also calls into question the Chuck Schumer’s contention that he *had* to vote for Mukasey’s AG appointment because of the possibility of a recess appointment of someone worse.  Apparently, not so much.

Did $1.5 trillion get us more secure? Buy an awe-inspiring display of American military might? Cheaper oil? A sound dollar? Exactly what did we purchase for so high a price? A generation of hatred? Worldwide disdain? A near total loss of moral authority on the world stage? Did we show Islamic extremists the limits of American military power? When will Congress shut off the near unlimited flow of money? Is it possible for them to finally show some backbone?

“By almost all accounts, this Administration has done more to improve government effectiveness than any previous Administration, ever.”
–Clay Johnson, Bush buddy turned deputy director of OMB who also chairs the President’s Council on Integrity and Efficiency, which oversees all government inspectors general.

Exactly how does he define “by most accounts”? A poll of Bush boot lickers and sycophants? The Bush administration has been a clinic in how not to run a government. It’s a detailed study in management failure, greed and stupidity.

Anyone who would trust the government on this is a deluded fool

House Democrats Press Bush on Subpoenas – washingtonpost.com
House Democrats threatened Monday to hold President Bush’s key confidants in contempt of Congress unless they comply with subpoenas for information on the Justice Department’s purge of federal prosecutors last winter.

The White House shrugged off the ultimatum, saying the information is off-limits under executive privilege and that the aides in question _ White House Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten and former presidential counselor Harriet Miers _ are immune from prosecution.

“It won’t go anywhere,” predicted White House press secretary Dana Perino.

So, executive privilege covers ideological purges to eliminate any signs of independence by US Attorney’s? Either Congress needs to grow some spine and send the Sargent of Arms after Bolten and Meirs to enforce subpeonas. Or concede that they are in agreement with the president’s concept of the supremacy of the executive branch and they’ll have shredded the constitution.

The presidency of George W. Bush is a criminal conspiracy to cover the ass of George W. Bush.

Levin was fired for daring to not toe the line and be a good Bushy.

The Senate Judiciary Committee will, unless something drastically changes, approve Judge Mukasey for Attorney General without him uttering the words “water boarding is illegal”. This is not to protect military personnel, it is to protect policy makers, up to and including the president. The interrogators are immunized by law. It is the senior civilian leadership that’s at risk.

When will someone in a position of power actually do something about it? There is no ambiguityabout torture. It’s wrong, it’s illegal and it’s actionable. As Wategate veteran John Dean suggests, can’t we at least get a special prosecutor to investigate war crimes?

Crooks and Liars has the whole thing here.