Guess Who Wants to "Micromanage" the President's Policy on Iran?

04.13.2007

Robert Naiman

I know, I know. Accusing Members of Congress of being inconsistent is kind of like telling a rock that it needs to get more exercise. A knowledgeable Congressional staffer once told me: "The first rule of Congress is that if Members have the opportunity to vote opposite ways on the same issue, they will."

Still: a key argument being deployed by Republicans against the Democratic effort to compel the President to accept a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq is that Democrats want to "micromanage" the President's policy in Iraq.

These same Republicans - and some Democrats - have opposed or failed to support a provision reaffirming that the President needs explicit Congressional authorization if he wants to attack Iran. They don't want to "tie the President's hands."

Now the American Israel Public Affairs Committee - the same folks who lobbied to remove the provision against an illegal attack on Iran from the supplemental - is pushing to strengthen unilateral U.S. sanctions against Iran. Guess what their proposed legislation - H.R. 1400 and S. 970 - would do? It would micromanage the President and tie his hands.

Two provisions of the bills stand out.

First, they would remove existing waiver authority. That would mean that if U.S. diplomats were negotiating with the Europeans, Russia, and China over sanctions at the UN, they couldn't offer to relax unilateral U.S. sanctions [quite controversial abroad since they cover the foreign affiliates of U.S. companies] in one area in order to get multilateral sanctions in another area that might be more effective. It also means that U.S. diplomats couldn't offer to relax sanctions in order to achieve a particular diplomatic goal, like restoring full access of UN inspectors to Iranian nuclear facilities.

Second, they would impose unilateral sanctions on Russia for its nuclear cooperation with Iran. The penalty would be ending U.S. nuclear cooperation with Russia until Russia ends nuclear cooperation with Iran - something Russia is very unlikely to do. What's really bizarre about this is that the U.S. cooperates with Russia in the nuclear field not out of altruism but to achieve U.S. nonproliferation goals in Russia. This would qualify as "cutting off your nose to spite your face."

Guess who is supporting the AIPAC Iran sanctions bill? You can check the list of 128 House co-sponsors here and 19 Senate co-sponsors here.

Compare this with the list of 88 House members and 3 Senators who have co-sponsored resolutions against attacking Iran and/or for talking with Iran.

Some highlights:

Senators Durbin, Dodd, Brownback, Mikulski, Coleman, Lautenberg, and Smith won't "tie the Presidents hands" to prevent an illegal military attack on Iran, but they are happy to "tie the President's hands" on unilateral sanctions that may undermine diplomacy.

Reps. Lewis and Pallone - Members of the Out of Iraq Caucus - are co-sponsors of the AIPAC bill but haven't co-sponsored any bill against a military attack.

Check to see where your representatives stand, and send them a note, politely sharing your views.

...

Get involved:
www.justforeignpolicy.org

READ MORE: United States, Iran, Russia, Iraq, U.S. Republican Party, U.S. Congress, U.S. Democratic Party, United Nations

Robert Naiman is National Coordinator of Just Foreign Policy, a membership organization devoted to reforming U.S. foreign policy to reflect the values and serve the interests of the majority of Americans. Naiman edits the daily Just Foreign Policy news summary.
JFP's web site is www.justforeignpolicy.org.

Bush to Veto Bill Requiring Him to Tell Congress of Secret CIA Prisons

Bush Administration Threatens Veto of Secret Prison Measure

By Jeff Bliss

April 12 (Bloomberg) -- Administration officials will advise President George W. Bush to veto legislation requiring him to provide lawmakers with details of the CIA's secret prisons for terrorism suspects, a White House statement said.

The disclosure provisions are included in proposed Senate legislation that would set new requirements for giving lawmakers access to intelligence reports and set intelligence program funding for the fiscal year that ends Sept. 30.

The Bush administration objected to the disclosure requirements, saying, ``Such matters are appropriately left to sensitive handling in the normal course between the intelligence committee and the executive branch.''

Democrats and Republicans have put increasing pressure on Bush to give them information on intelligence matters after media reports that inmates were being tortured in the secret prisons and that the National Security Agency had a program that conducts surveillance without court warrants.

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat, and Senator Christopher Bond, the panel's senior Republican, earlier today said Bush needed to be more forthcoming to Congress about intelligence operations.

``There may be some officials of the executive branch that prefer a lack of oversight,'' Bond, a Missouri lawmaker, said in a speech today in the Senate chamber. ``That's not how the system works.''

The administration also opposed a proposal to reveal annual U.S. spending on intelligence programs, a figure that's now classified, saying it imperils national security.

Sought

Rockefeller long has sought to get the administration to reveal the overall spending on spy programs. In 2005, newspapers reported that Mary Margaret Graham, deputy director of national intelligence for collection, let slip that the budget was $44 billion.

Under the legislation, the maximum prison sentence would increase to 15 years from 10 years for those who disclose the identity of a covert agent, a response to administration officials revealing the secret status of Central Intelligence Agency agent Valerie Plame.

The House last year passed an intelligence spending proposal without the disclosure requirements for funding and secret prisons. The House Intelligence Committee is working on a spending proposal measure for fiscal year 2008, said Kira Maas, a spokeswoman for the panel's chairman, Representative Silvestre Reyes, a Texas Democrat.

To contact the reporters on this story: Jeff Bliss in Washington jbliss@bloomberg.net .

Last Updated: April 12, 2007 18:07 EDT

The Challenger Disaster and Vote Fraud: LISTEN LIVE

THE 'WHAT REALLY HAPPENED' SHOW
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Editor's note: also see most of yesterday's articles at the overflow blog

And more coming up here.

The overflow blog.

See some of of Thursday's stories at the secondary blog.

More Con Than Neo: MAUREEN DOWD - Wolfowitz

THE COMPLETE ARTICLE
THE NEW YORK TIMES

OP-ED COLUMNIST

More Con Than Neo

By MAUREEN DOWD

Published: April 14, 2007

Wolfie in love is no less deceptive and bumbling than Wolfie at war.

Usually, spring in Washington finds us caught up in the cherry blossoms and the ursine courtship rituals of the pandas.

But this chilly April, we are forced to contemplate the batrachian grapplings of Paul Wolfowitz, the man who cherry-picked intelligence to sell us a war with Iraq.

You will not be surprised to learn, gentle readers, that Wolfie in love is no less deceptive and bumbling than Wolfie at war.

Proving he is more con than neo, he confessed that he had not been candid with his staff at the World Bank. While he was acting holier than thou, demanding incorruptibility from poor countries desperate for loans, he was enriching his girlfriend with tax-free ducats.

He has yet to admit any real mistakes with the hellish war that claimed five more American soldiers yesterday, as stunned Baghdad residents dealt with bombings of the Iraqi Parliament, where body parts flew, and of a bridge over the Tigris, where cars sank.

But he admitted Thursday that he’d made a mistake when he got his sweetheart, Shaha Ali Riza, an Arab feminist who shares his passion for democratizing the Middle East, a raise to $193,590 — more than the taxpaying (and taxing) Condi Rice makes. No doubt it seemed like small change compared with the money pit of remaking Iraq — a task he once prophesied would be paid for with Iraqi oil money. Maybe he should have remunerated his girlfriend with Iraqi oil revenues, instead of ripping off the bank to advance his romantic agenda.

No one is satisfied with his apology. Not the World Bank employees who booed Wolfie and yelled, “Resign! Resign!” in the bank lobby. Not Alison Cave, the chairwoman of the bank’s staff association, who said that Mr. Wolfowitz must “act honorably and resign.”

Not his girlfriend, who says she’s the suffering victim, forced by Wolfie’s arrival to be sent to the State Department (where, in a festival of nepotism, she reported to Liz Cheney).

And not his critics, who say Wolfie has been cherry-picking again, this time with his anticorruption crusade. They say he has used it to turn the bank into a tool for his unrealistic democracy campaign, which foundered in Baghdad, and for punishing countries that defy the United States.

***

...retired Marine Gen. Jack Sheehan...“The very fundamental issue is, they[White House] don’t know where the hell they’re going.”

--MORE--

VIDEO: Iraqi Parliament Bombing Caught on Tape

Attorney Replacements Picked Prior to Firings

White House Identified Bush Insiders for Posts, E-mails Show

By Dan Eggen

Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 13, 2007; 4:30 PM

The Justice Department identified five Bush administration insiders as replacement U.S. attorneys almost a year before most of the prosecutors were fired, contrary to repeated claims that no such list had ever been drawn up, according to documents released today.

E-mails sent to the White House in January and May of 2006 by D. Kyle Sampson, then chief of staff to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, list potential replacements for U.S. attorneys in San Diego, San Francisco, Grand Rapids, Mich., and Little Rock, Ark.

The replacements on the list were all high-level administration insiders, including two who have gone on to different U.S. attorney postings: Jeff Taylor, now chief prosecutor in the District, and Deborah Rhodes, now U.S. attorney in Alabama. The others were Rachel L. Brand, currently head of the Office of Legal Counsel, and Daniel Levin, a former senior Justice and White House official, the memos show.

Justice officials have previously said that only Tim Griffin, currently acting U.S. attorney in Little Rock, was specifically identified as a replacement candidate for one of the fired prosecutors.

Seven U.S. attorneys were fired Dec. 7, and another was dismissed earlier in 2006, as part of a plan that originated in the White House to replace some prosecutors based in part on their perceived disloyalty to President Bush and his policies. The uproar over the removals has grown amid allegations that Republican lawmakers had improper political contact with prosecutors and assertions by Democrats that the firings may have been an attempt to disrupt public corruption investigations.

Sampson resigned as Gonzalez's top aide last month ahead of revelations that White House political officials helped direct the dismissals.

Also last month Sampson submitted prepared testimony to the Senate saying that, with the exception of the prosecutor in Little Rock, "none of the U.S. attorneys was asked to resign in favor of a particular individual who had already been identified to take the vacant spot."

During the same March 29 hearing, Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) asked Sampson whether he had specific replacements in mind for seven of the prosecutors before they were fired.

"I personally did not," Sampson replied. "On December 7th, I did not have in mind any replacements for any of the seven who were asked to resign."

Justice spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said today that the list of candidates "in no way contradicts the department's prior statements" because it "reflects Kyle Sampson's initial thoughts," was compiled long before the firings and was never followed through.

"With the exception of Griffin, none of those individuals was named as an interim U.S. Attorney in any of the eight districts," Roehrkasse said.

Roehrkasse said that Brand had initially expressed interest the U.S. Attorney's job in western Michigan after being approached by Sampson. But he said Brand later decided against it "and never entered into a formal selection process for the position."

Sampson's attorney, Bradford A. Berenson, released a statement today saying that the "testimony regarding the consideration of replacements was entirely accurate."

"In December 2006, when the seven U.S. Attorneys were asked to step down, no specific candidate had been selected to replace any of them, and Kyle had none in mind," Berenson said. "Some names had been tentatively suggested for discussion much earlier in the process, but by the time the decision to ask for the resignations was made, none had been chosen to serve as a replacement. Most, if not all, had long since ceased even to be possibilities."

The potential replacements are the latest contradiction to emerge from thousands of pages of Justice Department documents that have been turned over to the House and Senate, including a new batch of more than 2,000 pages delivered to Capitol Hill this morning.

The documents also underscore the extent of efforts to place Bush administration insiders in U.S. attorney's jobs around the country. About a third of the Justice Department's four dozen prosecutor appointments during the past two years went to former Justice or White House officials, including 10 senior aides to Gonzales, government records show.

The disclosures come as Gonzales continues preparations for pivotal testimony next Tuesday at the Senate Judiciary Committee, where Democrats plan to focus on the department's numerous misstatements about the firings and Gonzales's shifting explanations about his role in carrying them out.

Among other documents released today was a chart of U.S. attorneys distributed in February that notes whether each sitting prosecutor is a member of the Federalist Society, a coalition of conservative lawyers and legal scholars with close ties to the Bush administration.

Another document -- internal Justice Department "talking points" about the fired prosecutors -- shows that Justice officials used identical language to describe alleged shortcomings in immigration enforcement by two U.S. attorneys.

About Carol S. Lam of San Diego, the memo said: "Regardless of what was done by the office in this area, she failed to tackle this responsibility as aggressively and as vigorously as we expected and needed her to do." The same sentence was used for David C. Iglesias of New Mexico, except that "her" was replaced with "him."

The same document also includes criticism of Iglesias, a Naval Reserve officer, for allegedly traveling too much: "We expect our U.S. Attorneys, particularly those in critical districts, to be hands-on managers working hard to advance the work of the Department."

Six other U.S. attorneys are currently serving double duty as senior Justice officials in Washington. They include acting Associate Attorney General William W. Mercer, who is also the U.S. attorney in Montana, where the chief federal judge has demanded Mercer's removal.