Bush says some war critics irresponsible By Steve

Holland

“A country that divides into factions and dwells on old grievances cannot move forward and risks sliding back

into tyranny,” Bush said.

Wow. Of course, in the quote above, Bush was referring to Iraq.

In the same speech, he advised his adversaries to “watch their words.” Spoken like a true tyrant. mjh

Bush to critics: Don’t

‘comfort our adversaries’ BY JENNIFER LOVEN

President Bush warned Democratic critics of his Iraq policy on Tuesday

to watch what they say or risk giving ”comfort to our adversaries” and suffering at the ballot box in November.

Democrats said Bush should take his own advice.

There are still 10 months left before congressional elections; a recent AP-Ipsos

poll found Americans prefer Democratic control of Congress over a continued GOP majority by 49 percent to 36 percent. But Bush is wasting

no time engaging the battle. …

He said he welcomed ”honest critics,” but he termed irresponsible ”partisan critics who

claim that we acted in Iraq because of oil or because of Israel or because we misled the American people,” as well as ”defeatists

who refuse to see that anything is right.”

With that description, Bush lumped the many Democrats who have accused him of

twisting prewar intelligence with the few people, mostly outside the mainstream, who have raised issues of oil and Israel. …

Democrats said Bush has no business trying to define what sort of talk is acceptable.

ACLU president draws links between Bush spying, Nixon lying and Martin Luther King

Jr. by Daniel Strumpf

The ACLU recently placed two full-page ads in The New York Times comparing Bush to Richard Nixon.

“I think there is a very strong comparison between the two, in terms of having such an exaggerated sense of the power of the

executive branch to ride roughshod over the rights of people who aren’t even suspected of any crimes at all other than political

dissent,” she said. “To me, that links up directly to Martin Luther King.

“Martin Luther King should be remembered not only for

his towering contributions to social justice and racial equality but also as a victim of government spying and abuses of power by the FBI

because of disagreement with his ideas.”

Strossen points out that King was punished for attempting to exercise his First Amendment

rights and draws a direct analogy to the monitoring of citizens Bush perceives to be enemies of the U.S.

Unchecked Abuse

[I]t might be concluded that the Bush

administration has committed itself to ending the use of practices falling just short of torture that it has used on foreign detainees

since 2002. But it has not. Instead, it is explicitly reserving the right to abuse prisoners, while denying them any

opportunity to seek redress in court. Having publicly accepted the ban on cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, Mr. Bush is

planning to ignore it whenever he chooses. …

The president made his intentions clear in signing the defense bill

containing the McCain amendment last month. Mr. Bush issued a presidential signing statement saying his administration would interpret

the new law “in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President to supervise the unitary executive branch and as

Commander in Chief and consistent with the constitutional limitations on the judicial power.” The language refers to the assertion by the

president’s lawyers that his powers allow him, in wartime, to ignore statutes passed by Congress.

Differing Views on

Terrorism By Dan Balz and Claudia Deane, Washington Post Staff Writers

Nearly two in three Americans surveyed said they

believe that federal agencies involved in anti-terrorism activities are intruding on the personal privacy of their fellow citizens, but

fewer than a third said such intrusions are unjustified. …

So far, recent disclosures about domestic spying have not

hurt Bush’s public standing. According to the poll, his job approval rating stands at 46 percent, down one percentage point

from last month. …

Among Republicans, 75 percent said the Bush program is acceptable, while 61 percent of Democrats said it is

unacceptable. Independents called the program unacceptable by a margin of 55 percent to 45 percent.

Listen closely as BushCo tries to paint the Abramoff Scandal as bipartisan. Abramoff was created by

Tom DeLay’s goal to freeze-out Democrats on K-Street — to refuse to meet anyone who gave to both parties and to demand that only

Republican’s benefit from the bribes.

Key point: Abramoff was a major fund-raiser for Duhbya. LOTS more than $6,000. mjh

Bush to give up $6,000 in Abramoff gifts
President Bush plans to donate $6,000 in campaign contributions

from one-time lobbyist Jack Abramoff to the American Heart Association.

Abramoff was a Bush-Cheney Pioneer, someone who raised

more than $100,000 for the Republican presidential ticket. But The Washington Post said that the president will give up only money

donated directly by Abramoff, his wife and one of the Indian tribes he lobbied for.

U.S. Newswire : Releases : “Dean: White House Must Tell the Truth About

Abramoff Ties”

One day after former Republican mega-lobbyist and major Bush fundraiser Jack Abramoff pleaded guilty to three

federal crimes, the White House gave back merely $6,000 in donations made by Abramoff to the President’s re-election campaign, but kept

the more than $100,000 that Abramoff personally and directly raised for Bush-Cheney ’04. Given what we now know, Abramoff’s shady

business practices and influence peddling calls into question what meetings he set up or organized for his clients with Administration

officials.

Based on news reports alone, it’s clear Abramoff’s network reached deep into the White House and was used to reap

significant fees from his clients. Specifically, Abramoff charged multi-million dollar fees to arrange meetings with Bush as well as

access to senior White House officials for his clients. …

Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean called on the Bush

White House to come clean regarding the extent of the contact between Abramoff and senior White House officials:

“As a

Bush Pioneer, Abramoff bragged about the influence he held at the White House, as did his former lobbying partner who claimed

that Abramoff had direct access to the President. Abramoff also arranged meetings with the President and members of the Bush

Administration for his clients, who later received favorable treatment.

“Until he was charged with committing three federal

crimes, Abramoff used his Republican contacts, including his ties to the White House, to create an extensive pay-to-play system where

political money was exchanged for policy outcomes. To begin to clear the growing ethical cloud over the White House, President Bush must

disclose his Administration’s contacts and detail their relationship with this admitted felon. The American people deserve the truth.”

…

Abramoff Was A Republican Insider And Who Had Strong Pull With Bush White House. Abramoff’s lobbying partner boasted that he

is a phone call away from the President. “Jack has a relationship with the President,” Abramoff’s former spokesman and fellow lobbyist

Michael Scanlon once said. “He doesn’t have a bat phone or anything, but if he wanted an appointment, he would have one.” Scanlon has

since pleaded guilty to conspiring to bribe a congressman and other public officials. (New Times Broward-Palm Beach, 2/22/01; Washington

Post, 11/29/05)

Case

Bringing New Scrutiny To a System and a Profession By Jeffrey H. Birnbaum and Dan Balz

Jack Abramoff represented the most

flamboyant and extreme example of a brand of influence trading that flourished after the Republican takeover of the House of

Representatives 11 years ago. Now, some GOP strategists fear that the fallout from his case could affect the party’s efforts to keep

control in the November midterm elections.

Abramoff was among the lobbyists most closely associated with the K Street Project,

which was initiated by his friend Tom DeLay (R-Tex.), now the former House majority leader, once the GOP vaulted to power. It was an

aggressive program designed to force corporations and trade associations to hire more GOP-connected lobbyists in what at times became an

almost seamless relationship between Capitol Hill lawmakers and some firms that sought to influence them.

Now Abramoff has become

a symbol of a system out of control. …

With an eye on November’s elections, Republicans have sought to limit the damage to

themselves by portraying the scandal as bipartisan, describing Abramoff as an equal-opportunity dispenser of campaign cash and largess.

So far, the public has not identified corruption as solely a Republican problem. A Washington Post-ABC News poll in November

asked Americans whether they thought Democrats or Republicans were better on ethical matters; 16 percent said Democrats, 12 percent said

Republicans, and 71 percent said there was not much difference between the parties.

But Republicans worry about two possibilities.

The first is that Abramoff, known for his close ties to DeLay, mostly implicates Republicans as a result of his plea agreement. That

could shift public attitudes sharply against the GOP. “People are uneasy about what else is out there,” said one GOP strategist who

requested anonymity to speak more candidly about the possible political fallout.

GOP Leaders Seek Distance From Abramoff
By Jonathan Weisman

With … the highest echelons of the Republican Party increasingly vulnerable to charges, GOP leaders moved yesterday to distance

themselves from disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff and prepare to combat a growing corruption scandal. …

Republican strategists

expressed some relief that the damage could be limited. Carl Forti, a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee, said

that if Abramoff’s revelations ensnare only one lawmaker and some unknown staff members, Democrats will have little chance of sparking a

political revolt when voters go to the polls in November to elect a new Congress.

Bush Assails Democrats Over Patriot ActBy Jim VandeHei

President Bush accused Democrats yesterday of blocking a full reauthorization of the USA Patriot Act for political reasons, as the

White House stepped up an aggressive campaign to defend the president’s terrorism-fighting authority.

“For partisan reasons, in

my mind, people have not stepped up,” Bush told reporters, with 19 federal prosecutors by his side. “The enemy has not gone away;

they’re still there, and I expect Congress to understand that we’re still at war and they’ve got to give us the tools necessary to win

this war.”

White House spokesman Scott McClellan, speaking to reporters earlier in the day, said Senate Democrats are simply doing

the bidding of liberal special interest groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union, which opposes the broad surveillance power

authorized by the act. Democrats are trying to “appease” the ACLU “because they want to weaken and undermine the Patriot Act,” McClellan

said. …

Adopting campaign-style tactics, Bush and his aides plan to accuse Democrats of jeopardizing national security to

further their political agenda, a tack that worked well for the White House in the 2002 and 2004 elections. But the political environment

is different now, with Bush less popular and Democrats better organized in opposition.

Secret Surveillance May Have Occurred Before Authorization By

Dafna Linzer

Even before the White House formally authorized a secret program to spy on U.S. citizens without obtaining warrants,

such eavesdropping was occurring and some of the information was being shared with the FBI, declassified correspondence and interviews

with congressional and intelligence officials indicate.

Safire is more a libertarian conservative than a

Neocon-artist. Note how he speaks from experience — being told to leak a story and being spied on because of that “leak.” Don’t

overlook his point that Duhbya has “made out to believe” some misleading statements — that’s Duhbya’s way with everything. “Mislead”

— you mean lie? mjh

Transcript for

January 1 – Meet the Press, online at MSNBC – MSNBC.com

MR. SAFIRE: OK. I have a thing about wiretapping. …

I was

writing a speech on welfare reform, and the president [mjh: Raygun?] looks at it and says, “OK, I’ll go with

it, but this is not going to get covered. Leak it as far an wide as you can beforehand. Maybe we’ll get something in

the paper.”

And so I go back to my office and I get a call from a reporter, and he wants to know about foreign affairs or

something, and I said, “Hey, you want a leak? I’ll tell you what the president will say tomorrow about welfare reform.”

And he took it down and wrote a little story about it.

But the FBI was illegally tapping his phone at the time, and so

they hear a White House speechwriter say, “Hey, you want a leak?” And so they tapped my phone, and for six

months, every home phone call I got was tapped. I didn’t like that. And when it finally broke–it did me a lot of good at the time,

frankly, because then I was on the right side–but it told me how easy it was to just take somebody who is not really suspected

of anything for any good reason and listen to every conversation in his home–you know, my wife talking to her doctor, my–

everything.

So I have this thing about personal privacy. And I think what’s happening now is that the–as a result of that

scandal back in the ’70s, we got this electronic eavesdropping act stopping it, or requiring the president to go before this court. Now,

this court’s a rubber-stamp court, let’s face it. They give five noes and 20,000 yeses.

MR. RUSSERT: The Foreign Intelligence

Surveillance Act, FISA.

MR. SAFIRE: Right. But the very fact that the FBI has to do a little paperwork beforehand slows

them down and makes them think for a minute. It doesn’t slow them down as much as the president has made out to

believe ….

[T]hat’s why I offended a lot of my conservative and hard-line friends right after September 11th when

they started putting these captured combatants in jail, and said the president can’t seize dictatorial power. And a lot of my friends

looked at me like I was going batty. But now we see this argument over excessive security, and I’m with the critics on

that.

Military Times Polls
Troops sound off
Military Times Poll finds high

morale, but less support for Bush, war effort
By Gordon Trowbridge
Times staff writer

Support for President Bush and

for the war in Iraq has slipped significantly in the last year among members of the military’s professional core, according to

the 2005 Military Times Poll.

Approval of the president’s Iraq policy fell 9 percentage points from 2004; a bare majority,

54 percent, now say they view his performance on Iraq as favorable. Support for his overall performance fell 11 points, to 60 percent,

among active-duty readers of the Military Times newspapers. …

Positive feelings about Congress, civilian and uniformed

Pentagon leaders and the media all fell. …

While roughly a third of Americans describe themselves as Democrats, just 13

percent of Military Times Poll respondents do so. …

Kohn said he worried that asking such questions of military members

and publishing the results could tarnish the military’s image as a nonpartisan institution.

The poll “tends to communicate to the

American people that the military is just like any other interest group,” Kohn said. “We want the public image of the military to be

decidedly apolitical.”

Military Times Polls
Disconnect cited

between troops, civilian leadership
By Gordon Trowbridge
Times staff writer

From Congress to the White House to the

Pentagon, the career-oriented heart of the military appears increasingly estranged from its leaders in Washington,

according to results of the 2005 Military Times Poll.

The poll of active-duty subscribers to the Military Times newspapers also

shows continued disdain for the media and a belief that the military’s prestige may have slipped in the eyes of

civilians. …

58 percent agreed that President Bush had their best interests at heart, down 11 percentage points from a year ago.

…

Congress saw the most dramatic drop: Just 31 percent agreed Congress looked out for their best interests, less than half the

number a year ago. …

David Segal, an expert in military sociology at the University of Maryland , said the results mirror a

similar estrangement between civilian Americans and their political leaders.

“I see military attitudes converging with

civilian non-elite attitudes,” which show fewer Americans believing that political leaders are looking out for their interests.

You’re not actually

surprised that domestic spying will prove extremely profitable to a few large corporations, are you? mjh

Is the Pentagon spying on Americans?
By

Lisa Myers, Douglas Pasternak, Rich Gardella and the NBC Investigative Unit
Updated: 6:18 p.m. ET Dec. 14, 2005

A year ago, at

a Quaker Meeting House in Lake Worth, Fla., a small group of activists met to plan a protest of military recruiting at local high

schools. What they didn’t know was that their meeting had come to the attention of the U.S. military.

A secret

400-page Defense Department document obtained by NBC News lists the Lake Worth meeting as a “threat” and one of more

than 1,500 “suspicious incidents” across the country over a recent 10-month period.

“This peaceful, educationally oriented group

being a threat is incredible,” says Evy Grachow, a member of the Florida group called The Truth Project. …

The DOD database

obtained by NBC News includes nearly four dozen anti-war meetings or protests, including some that have taken place far

from any military installation, post or recruitment center. …

Other documents obtained by NBC News show that the Defense

Department is clearly increasing its domestic monitoring activities. …

“I think Americans should be concerned that the military, in fact, has reached too far,” says NBC

News military analyst Bill Arkin. …

“It means that they’re actually collecting information about who’s at those protests, the

descriptions of vehicles at those protests,” says Arkin. “On the domestic level, this is unprecedented,” he says. “I think it’s the

beginning of enormous problems and enormous mischief for the military.” …

Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA) is becoming

the superpower of data mining within the U.S. national security community. Its “operational and analytical records”

include “reports of investigation, collection reports, statements of individuals, affidavits, correspondence, and other documentation

pertaining to investigative or analytical efforts” by the DOD and other U.S. government agencies to identify terrorist and other threats.

Since March 2004, CIFA has awarded at least $33 million in contracts to corporate giants Lockheed Martin, Unisys

Corporation, Computer Sciences Corporation and Northrop Grumman to develop databases that comb through classified and

unclassified government data, commercial information and Internet chatter to help sniff out terrorists, saboteurs and spies. …

Bert Tussing, director of Homeland Defense and Security Issues at the U.S. Army War College and a former Marine, says “there is

very little that could justify the collection of domestic intelligence by the Unites States military. If we start going down this

slippery slope it would be too easy to go back to a place we never want to see again,” he says.

Some of the targets of

the U.S. military’s recent collection efforts say they have already gone too far.

“It’s absolute paranoia — at the highest levels of our government,” says Hersh of The Truth

Project.

“I mean, we’re based here at the Quaker Meeting House,” says Truth Project member Marie Zwicker, “and several of us are

Quakers.”