President Bush's Failed Bin Laden Hunt

An article in yesterday's New York Times criticized the Bush administration for failing "to develop a comprehensive plan to address the militant problem" along the Afghan-Pakistan border, where Osama bin Laden is reportedly rebuilding the al Qaeda terror network. After expressing enthusiasm for capturing bin Laden shortly after the Sept.11 attacks, the Bush administration has since indicated that "bin Laden doesn’t fit" with its "strategy for combating terrorism" and is "not a top priority use of American resources." Beginning in 2002, the administration "shifted its sights...from counterterrorism efforts in Afghanistan and Pakistan to preparations for the war in Iraq" and outsourced the hunt for bin Laden to Pakistan. As a result, "the Bush administration will leave office with Al Qaeda having successfully relocated its base from Afghanistan to Pakistan's tribal areas, where it has rebuilt much of its ability to attack from the region and broadcast its messages to militants across the world."



According to "current and former military and intelligence officials" interviewed by the Times, "the war in Iraq diverted resources and high-level attention from the tribal areas" on the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan and "drained away most of the CIA officers with field experience in the Islamic world." Intelligence officials have long warned the administration of the dangers of shifting resources prematurely. On Feb.19, 2002, Gen. Tommy Franks reportedly told then-Sen. Bob Graham (D-FL), "We are not engaged in a war in Afghanistan" because "military and intelligence personnel are being redeployed to prepare for an action in Iraq." Similarly, an Army War College report published in December 2003 concluded that the Iraq war "diverted attention and resources away from securing the American homeland against further assault by an undeterrable Al Qaeda." Where the specialists went, the equipment followed. Officials told the New York Times, for instance, that when they "requested additional Predator drones to survey the tribal areas, they were told no drones were available because they had been sent to Iraq." As Graham pointed out, the removal of Predator drones from Afghanistan is "a clear case of how the Bush administration's focus on Iraq undermined the war against al Qaeda in Afghanistan."

The Iraq war also bolstered the view "among Pakistanis that American forces in the tribal areas would be a prelude to an eventual American occupation" and made it difficult for the administration "to have insisted that American forces be allowed to cross from Afghanistan into Pakistan." In fact, the Pakistani government "flatly refused" American proposals to allow Special Operations forces to establish operational bases along the border, and in 2003, "under pressure from Pakistan, the Bush administration decided…to end the American military presence on the ground." With the hunt for bin Laden virtually outsourced to Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf and the administration distracted by the "spiraling violence in Iraq," Bush backed Pakistan’s failed strategy of signing cease-fire agreements "with the Taliban inside Afghanistan." But rather than reducing "cross-border incursions," the agreements allowed al Qaeda to establish an even stronger foot hold in the Pakistan tribal regions. Thus while the Bush administration has propped up "the Muslim world’s most powerful military dictator as an essential ally," Pakistan has shown little commitment to capturing bin Laden. In fact, in January 2008, Musharraf admitted that "the 100,000 troops that we are using...are not going around trying to locate Osama bin Laden and Zawahri, frankly."

The war in Iraq and Bush's over-reliance on Pakistan have allowed al Qaeda to regroup along the Pakistan-Afghan border. Intelligence sources interviewed by the Times suggest that "the makeshift training compounds" in Pakistan's tribal areas "now have as many as 2,000 local and foreign militants, up from several hundred three years ago." The build-up of members has reshaped al Qaeda into a threat that is "comparable" to what the United States faced on Sept. 11, 2001. Similarly, according to the 2006 National Intelligence Estimate, "Iraq jihad is shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives." Rather than reducing the terror threat, the Iraq conflict has become the "cause célèbre for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of US involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement," the report concluded.

Steep increase in civilan deaths in Afghanistan - the "Forgotten Front"

New U.N. figures show that the number of civilians killed in Afghanistan in the first half of this year rose 62 percent over the same period last year, marking increased instability and deteriorating conditions in Afghanistan, the "Forgotten Front."



The U.N. report shows that insurgents caused 422 civilian deaths while government or NATO forces caused 255, with 21 deaths unclear. A NATO spokesman said that "those numbers were far, far higher than we would recognize" but "provided no alternative figures." Earlier this month, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Michael Mullen told staff at a public meeting that in Afghanistan "violence is up this year by every single measure we look at." Thirty-nine coalition forces were killed in Afghanistan this month, making June the deadliest month of the war and marking the first month that coalition deaths in Afghanistan surpassed those in Iraq. Military commanders "believe they need three brigades, or 10,000 troops, to address the situation in Afghanistan, but with the heavy U.S. commitment in Iraq, those numbers are difficult to muster."

Administration Blocks Army's Effort To Increase Oversight Of Defense Contractors

Last fall, a blue-ribbon panel examining waste and fraud in defense contracts for Iraq recommended adding five active-duty generals to oversee purchasing and monitor contractor performance. Now that the Army is trying to implement the change, the White House's Office of Management and Budget has shot down the effort, giving no reason for rejecting the Army's proposal.

The additional generals would add a mere $1.2 million a year in personnel costs. By contrast, a Defense Contract Audit Agency found $4.9 billion "in overpricing and waste" in Iraq contracts since 2003, a figure that doesn't include an additional $5.1 billion in "expenses charged without documentation." In other words, the White House is blocking a reform that would cost only .012 percent of the $10 billion already lost to contract waste. Last year, President Bush opposed legislation that would limit no-bid contracts and increase congressional oversight of the most lucrative contracts. Despite his opposition, the House passed the bill with 347 votes, and the Senate approved it unanimously.

Dick Cheney At The Center of Plame Leak. Fair Game?

I think its absolutely disgusting that the Bush administration would knowingly put United States security and United States government employees in danger. There is absolutely no excuse for this: from Democrat, Republican or Libertarian. Scott McClellan gave some inside scoop .. too little and too f'ing late if you ask me.



Last week, former White House press secretary Scott McClellan made the media rounds to promote his insider's account of his time in the Bush administration. The book has revived interest in the Valerie Plame leak scandal, what McClellan calls a "defining moment" in his "disillusionment" with the Bush White House. Pointing to passages in the book, House Oversight Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) requested more documents from the FBI this week after learning that Scooter Libby, who was convicted of crimes for his role in the scandal, "told the FBI that it's possible he was instructed by Cheney to disseminate information to the press about Plame." Reps. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) and Robert Wexler (D-FL) have called on McClellan to testify before Congress as well. Not surprisingly, the White House is already indicating it might try to block that testimony. Last month, Plame appealed last year's dismissal of her civil lawsuit against Bush officials for outing her identity as a CIA agent-- allowing the White House and Karl Rove to continue to duck questions about the scandal by citing the open legal case.

DID BUSH AUTHORIZE PLAME LEAK?: McClellan's account confirms that President Bush was directly behind at least one aspect of the leak scandal. Some history: In July 2003, former ambassador Joseph Wilson published a New York Times op-ed arguing that, contrary to Bush's State of the Union assertion, Wilson had found no evidence that Iraq had purchased uranium from Niger, when he went on a fact-finding mission to the African country in 2002. The next day, White House officials admitted the Niger claim was based on "bogus" intelligence. Still, the White House went into attack mode to discredit Wilson. A week later, Robert Novak published a column outing Wilson's wife, Plame, as a covert CIA agent. At the same time, "Vice President Dick Cheney directed his then-chief of staff, I. Lewis 'Scooter' Libby" to leak to the media portions of "a then-highly classified CIA report that Cheney hoped would undermine the credibility" of Wilson. The 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) "detailed the intelligence community's conclusions about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq"; Bush instructed Cheney to "get it out" to push back against Wilson. Appearing on NBC's Today Show last week, McClellan revealed that Bush confirmed to him in 2006 that he had personally authorized the declassification of the NIE. McClellan said, "Here we were, learning that the President had authorized the same thing we had criticized" -- namely, "the selective leaking of classified information." "I was kinda taken aback," he added. This information reveals that Bush was personally involved in the push-back against Wilson. As McClellan wondered aloud to MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, "Did this set in motion the chain of events that led to the leaking of Valerie Plame's identity?"

ROVE VERSUS McCLELLAN: McClellan said on the Today Show that he "grew increasingly disillusioned" with the Bush administration when it was clear "that what I'd been told by Karl Rove and Scooter Libby -- that they were in no way involved in the leak of Valerie Plame's identity" -- turned out to be false. When asked by Olbermann whether he had ever lied from the podium, McClellan admitted that he had "unknowingly" lied "when it came to the issue of the Valerie Plame leak episode." "I had been given assurances by Karl Rove and Scooter Libby that they were not involved in the leak but it turned out later they were," he said. To rebut these charges, Rove took to the airways himself last week, "maintaining his hair-splitting defense that since he didn't use Plame's name, he didn't reveal her identity." "What I told Scott was that I didn't know her name, didn't reveal her name, didn't know what she did at the CIA, and that I wasn't the source for the leak," Rove said. On NBC's Meet the Press last Sunday, McClellan called Rove's defense "pretty disingenuous." "When I said, 'were you involved in this in any way...he categorically said, 'no,'" McClellan said. McClellan recalled Bush's vow to fire anyone in his administration involved in the leak. "I think the president should have stood by the word and that meant Karl should have left," McClellan said.

RIGHT WING POINTS TO ARMITAGE: Besides parsing his language on what, exactly, he told McClellan, Rove, and his conservative allies are deflecting McClellan's criticisms by pointing their own finger of blame to former State Department official Richard Armitage. As the Washington Post's Dan Froomkin wrote Tuesday, "Armitage was the first to disclose Plame's identity to journalists, but that doesn't change the fact that Rove and Libby did so too, likely for more nefarious reasons than Armitage, and then lied about it." Talking to Fox News's Bill O'Reilly, Rove emphasized that "the identity of Valerie Plame was leaked to Robert Novak by Richard Armitage." Right-wing website Newsbusters picked up Rove's talking points, complaining that during McClellan's interviews, "Richard Armitage, who was the actual leaker, was virtually ignored." Novak argued in a June 2 column that McClellan "virtually ignores" Armitage's role because it "undermines the Democratic theory, now accepted by McClellan, that Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and political adviser Karl Rove aimed to delegitimize Wilson as a war critic." Regardless of the right wing's misdirection campaign, it is a fact that Rove also directly leaked Plame's identity to at least one person: the New York Times's Matt Cooper, who said last August, "I didn't know Ambassador Wilson even had a wife until I talked to Karl Rove and he said that she worked at the agency and she worked on WMD."

Iraq: "We'll all be home by Christmas" ... Keeping The "Feith"

Douglas Feith, former Undersecretary of Defense and an architect of the Iraq war, appeared on the Brian Lehrer radio show on Tuesday and claimed that the American people "weren't told" the war would be easy "by the administration. Absolutely not."



When Lehrer played a 2003 clip of Vice President Dick Cheney claiming U.S. troops would "be greeted as liberators," Feith dismissed it as "one of the more optimistic comments" but claimed that others, "especially" former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, "were a lot more reserved than that."

In fact, the entire administration and its allies declared repeatedly the war would be quick and painless, including Rumsfeld, who said the Iraqi people "will be enormously relieved and liberated" and claimed the war could last "six days, six weeks, I doubt six months." Cheney said the war would take "weeks rather than months," and then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice said that the U.S. will not "need to maintain a military presence in Iraq as was the case in Europe" after World War II.

It looks like Feith can add “lying” to the list of his post-White House activities.

The dishonesty and incompetence of these people does an injustice to the amazing work being done by the US Military in Iraq.

Strain On The US Military.

While much attention was focused on the Iraq hearings with Gen. David Petraeus and Amb. Ryan Crocker yesterday, House Armed Services Committee Chairman Ike Skelton (D-MO) also held an important, less-publicized hearing about the current strain on the military forces. "That marathon has become an enduring relay and our soldiers continue to run -- and at the double time," Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Richard Cody said, referring in part to the consequences of the administration's decision last year to extend tours of duty in Iraq to 15 months to supply troops for the surge. In response to "intense pressure from service commanders," President Bush will announce this morning that he is cutting Army combat tours in Iraq from 15 months to 12 months. Despite previously stating he is "keenly aware" of the stress on the forces, Petraeus claimed yesterday that "after several years of a generalization of morale as going down, morale actually went up." This assessment, however, glosses over the harsh reality facing our troops.


BACK TO LAST WINTER: The administration's plan does not appear to go far enough, as it "will not apply to any soldiers now serving in Iraq, Afghanistan or other war zones" and therefore only affect troops sent to Iraq as of Aug. 1. This move means that those already deployed must complete 15-month tours. Bobby Muller of Veterans for America said that nearly "half of the Army's active-duty frontline units are currently deployed for 15 months, and that Bush's decision leaves them out." "In short, this is a hollow announcement; it has no immediate effect," he said. "[I]t only resets us to where we were last winter," added Skelton. "This pace will still wear our troops out." The administration's plan will also give troops equal rest time at home as deployed. But the White House had this option on the table in 2007, and has stubbornly opposed it. It went on a full-scale assault against Sen. Jim Webb's (D-VA) "dwell time" bill last year, pressuring Sen. John Warner (R-VA), who introduced a toothless "sense of the Senate" resolution to effectively kill Webb's "will of the Senate" legislation. In fact, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates even recommended that Bush veto Webb's "dwell time" proposal, should it ever pass Congress.

MILITARY UPRISING: Bush's decision to cut tour lengths comes after months and months of warnings from his top military advisers. "The current demand for our forces exceeds the sustainable supply," Army Chief of Staff George Casey said back in September. This week, Joint Chiefs Chairman Mike Mullen noted he was "very public for many months that we need to get off 15 month deployments as fast as we can." In a recent meeting in the Pentagon, top military leaders "told President Bush they are worried about the Iraq war's mounting strain on troops and their families." While a step forward in the right direction, Bush's announcement today is more likely forced due to necessity, Ilan Goldenberg of the National Security Network observed. "The military is so strained, the president really didn't have a choice," he said. As Colin Powell presciently observed in July 2007, "[T]hey probably can't keep this up at this level past the middle of next year, I would guess. This is a tremendous burden on our troops."

STRAIN BY THE NUMBERS: As a result of the administration's delay in coming off "the longest Army combat tours since World War II," soldiers now are more strained than ever. "Among combat troops sent to Iraq for the third or fourth time, more than one in four show signs of anxiety, depression or acute stress," according to an Army survey of mental health. Twenty-seven percent of noncommissioned officers on their third or fourth tour exhibit post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms. The study noted that "soldiers on multiple deployments report low morale, more mental health problems and more stress-related work problems." Today, one in five troops returns from Iraq and Afghanistan with post-traumatic stress disorder. In fact, there were 121 Army suicides in 2007, up more than 20 percent over 2006. An estimated 2,100 troops tried to commit suicide or injure themselves last year -- up from 350 in 2002. Family life is also affected by the war, as 20 percent of married troops in Iraq say they are planning a divorce.

US General Says Iraq Violence Down

Some welcome good news on Iraq from the AP. Important to note that while violence has abated, 2007 is still the deadliest year in the war to date.

BAGHDAD (AP) — Violence in Iraq is at its lowest levels since the first year of the American invasion, finally opening a window for reconciliation among rival sects, the second-ranking U.S. general said Sunday as Iraqi forces formally took control of security across half the country.

Lt. Gen. Ray Odierno, the man responsible for the ground campaign in Iraq, said that the first six months of 2007 were probably the most violent period since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. The past six months, however, had seen some of the lowest levels of violence since the conflict began, Odierno said, attributing the change to an increase in both American troops and better-trained Iraqi forces.



"I feel we are back in '03 and early '04. Frankly I was here then, and the environment is about the same in terms of security in my opinion," he said. "What is different from then is that the Iraqi security forces are significantly more mature."
Violence killed at least 27 Iraqis on Sunday — 16 of them members of a U.S.-backed neighborhood patrol killed in clashes with al-Qaida in a volatile province neighboring Baghdad. Thirty-five al-Qaida fighters also died in that fighting, Iraqi officials said.

Odierno said Anbar province, once plagued by violence, only recorded 12 attacks in the past week, down from an average of 26 per week over the past three months.

"The violence last week was the lowest ever," he said of Anbar.

"So that kind of defines 2007 very simply. A long hard fight and a lot of sacrifice by a lot of soldiers, Marines and airmen to get there," Odierno said.

A planned reduction of troops to about 130,000 at the end of next year from a high of around 165,000 at the height of the "surge" should not derail that effort, but Iraq's government must take advantage of the improved security, Odierno said. There are 154,000 U.S. troops in Iraq now.

So far 3,983 members of the US Armed Forces have been killed in Iraq.