Hillary's misleading Euro subcommittee slur

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Wednesday March 05, 2008 · 4:14 PM PST

2008/03/05 · 16:14

In the past week, Hillary has brought a new line of attack against Obama: that he has not used his chairmanship of the European Affairs subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations to conduct oversight on Afghanistan.

This charge is very misleading, and deliberately betrays an understanding of how Senate committees work, in several respects.

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Friday March 10, 2006 · 4:23 PM PST

2006/03/10 · 16:23

The National Journal has an interview with Michael Brown in its new issue that discusses why the hospital ship USS Comfort was diverted to Mississippi when it had been bound for New Orleans, even though the governor of Mississippi had already told the US Navy and Northcom that he didn't need it.

Why? Because Trent Lott got on the phone and started screaming like a spoiled baby. From the story:

One of the problems that [NorthCom Cmdr. Timothy] Keating ran into, which I found embarrassing during Katrina, was with the USS Comfort. I had requested the ship, and it's moving into Mississippi, because Mississippi wanted it for medical purposes. So I gave the order through NorthCom to move that ship there. As it was making its way to Mississippi, Mississippi decided they no longer needed it. The Comfort is primarily a medical ship, so I made the decision, "Steam on to New Orleans, because we can use you in New Orleans for medical triage."

More below the fold... Read More

Total Information Awareness: National Journal looks at where it went

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Thursday February 23, 2006 · 3:16 PM PST

2006/02/23 · 15:16

The National Journal has a story that just came out about what happened to John Poindexter's old Total Information Awareness project after Congress cut off its funding in 2003. The answer: it didn't go anywhere.

Some excerpts:

Two of the most important components of the TIA program were moved to the Advanced Research and Development Activity, housed at NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Md., documents and sources confirm. One piece was the Information Awareness Prototype System, the core architecture that tied together numerous information extraction, analysis, and dissemination tools developed under TIA. The prototype system included privacy-protection technologies that may have been discontinued or scaled back following the move to ARDA....

More below the fold... Read More

White House stonewalling on Katrina investigations

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Tuesday January 31, 2006 · 11:42 AM PST

2006/01/31 · 11:42

US News reports today on Congressional frustration with the Bush administration on the Senate's investigation of Katrina. The article reveals a letter sent by Susan Collins and Joe Lieberman to the White House detailing their frustration with White House stonewalling:

"We have yet to receive the bulk of what we requested," the senators wrote, "and the committee is unable to fully understand and assess actions involving White House personnel during the preparations for and response to Hurricane Katrina." As reported last week, the senators also criticized a White House directive to other government agencies that all personnel before the committee should refrain from detailing their own communications with White House staff. Specifically, the senators wrote, Department of Homeland Security attorneys "have instructed witnesses not to answer any questions related to the White House, regardless of subject matter, context, or the position of the [White House] personnel involved in the conversation."
This, the senators said, "simply must cease."

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Friday January 20, 2006 · 3:35 PM PST

2006/01/20 · 15:35

Karl Rove in his speech today:

"Republicans have a post-9/11 view of the world. And Democrats have a pre-9/11 view of the world," Rove told Republican activists. "That doesn't make them unpatriotic, not at all. But it does make them wrong -- deeply and profoundly and consistently wrong."

Juxtapose this quote with this excerpt from a Washington Post story in December on the creation of the Department of Homeland Security: Read More

UMass Mao library book story is a hoax

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Saturday December 24, 2005 · 12:24 AM PST

2005/12/24 · 00:24

(From the diaries -- Plutonium Page. Please spread the word.)

The story of the student who received a visit from homeland security agents because he had checked out Mao's Little Red Book has now been confirmed to be a fabrication.

From the newspaper that originally broke the story:

NEW BEDFORD -- The UMass Dartmouth student who claimed to have been visited by Homeland Security agents over his request for "The Little Red Book" by Mao Zedong has admitted to making up the entire story.
The 22-year-old student tearfully admitted he made the story up to his history professor, Dr. Brian Glyn Williams, and his parents, after being confronted with the inconsistencies in his account.
Had the student stuck to his original story, it might never have been proved false.
But on Thursday, when the student told his tale in the office of UMass Dartmouth professor Dr. Robert Pontbriand to Dr. Williams, Dr. Pontbriand, university spokesman John Hoey and The Standard-Times, the student added new details.

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Tuesday December 13, 2005 · 4:22 PM PST

2005/12/13 · 16:22

This week's issue of the National Journal has a short piece that adds a new dimension to the story of Dana Rohrabacher's connections to the Jack Abramoff scandal. The key grafs:

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., who famously provided a personal reference for Jack Abramoff in 2000 when the lobbyist was seeking financing to buy SunCruz Casinos, took a six-day trip to Malaysia in January 2002, accompanied by his wife and two of Abramoff's then-partners at the firm Greenberg Traurig. One of the lobbyists was Rohrabacher's former aide Tony Rudy.

The article then indicates that the trip cost $21,000 and the nature of the meetings that took place. The article continues (below the fold): Read More

Did the White House even read the 9/11 Commission Report?

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Monday December 05, 2005 · 5:30 PM PST

2005/12/05 · 17:30

If they did, not very closely.

Today the 9/11 Commission Public Discourse Project released a report updating progress on the Commission's recommendations...now 17 months after the initial report.

From the WaPo story on the 9/11 Commission press conference today:

Today's report card, which ranks 41 of the commission's recommendations by letter grades, is likely to mark the last official event of the panel, which recast itself as a private education group a year ago after it ceased to exist as the official independent Sept. 11 investigation.

From a Knight Ridder Story posted in the last hour:

"Protecting the American people at home is the president's highest priority," said Allen Abney, a White House spokesman. "The commission gave out 74 recommendations and this administration has acted on 70 of them."

41? 74? Did the White House EVEN READ THE DAMN REPORT??? Read More

CQ: Saudis getting waiver for US border security program

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Friday November 04, 2005 · 10:56 PM PST

2005/11/04 · 22:56

In a story on the Department of Homeland Security's US-VISIT program written by Congressional Quarterly today (subscription only, no link), this anecdote is worthy of further circulation:

Several Border Patrol officers said they are worried the exemptions may leave airports and land borders open to terrorist infiltration. One Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agent at Dulles International Airport said he was recently told to waive the US-VISIT requirement for about 70 people arriving from Saudi Arabia who were affiliated with the Saudi royal family.

"People coming from known terrorist countries [are] to be fingerprinted and photographed for a reason," said the CBP officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "When you start making exceptions, you start losing the credibility of the program."

[more below...] Read More

Times of London, FT: Secret prison in Poland and/or Romania

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Wednesday November 02, 2005 · 3:15 PM PST

2005/11/02 · 15:15

This Times of London story just came out in the last hour:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/...

It basically narrows down the list of countries that could potentially hold the secret Eastern European prison mentioned in today's Washington Post story to two: Poland and Romania.

Key excerpts:

Hungary, Slovakia and Bulgaria rushed to issue denials of their involvement. But Frantisek Bublan, Interior Minister of the Czech Republic, said last night that the US had approached his Government a month ago about holding suspects on its territory, but Prague had refused.

Human rights groups point at Poland and Romania as two eastern European countries that have taken in America's "ghost detainees". They also claimed that the US was running out of countries willing to host its terror suspects.

David Addington: Cheney's Dick (and Lynne's Defender)

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Sunday October 30, 2005 · 6:32 PM PST

2005/10/30 · 18:32

According to this story in the National Journal (mentioned in an earlier post and at TPM in the last few hours) David Addington is in line to replace Scooter Libby as Cheney's chief of staff. There's some good background on Addington in this story, about a number of issues, such as his role in the White House torture memo, and his role in deflecting requests by Congress and the GAO to learn about the energy task force in 2001:

As early as May 2001, Addington was the point person for the White House in deflecting requests by congressional Democrats and later the General Accounting Office (now named the Government Accountability Office) for information about the energy policy task force convened by Cheney's office.

...but I'd like to focus for a minute on a lighter, but equally sinister moment in his past... Read More

The Irony of Plamegate: The System Worked

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Friday October 28, 2005 · 4:10 PM PDT

2005/10/28 · 16:10

I've been watching the reactions unfold on TV and in the blogosphere in the last few hours, and have felt a mix of emotions. Vindication that Libby is getting nailed - after all, I told my parents in late 2003 that I had a hunch that he was the main culprit. Unease that Turdblossom and others have eluded the net so far. Pride that America's legal system includes public officials as fine as Patrick Fitzgerald. And more than a hint of schadenfreude at what appears to be an administration in freefall and disarray.

But one other thought is gnawing at me, and crowding out all of the others: the idea that this outcome is exactly what the Bush Administration hoped to get, back in mid/late-2003 when they first realized that they had screwed up, and they first realized that this episode had the chance to unmask and expose their venality and lies - not just about Valerie Plame, but about the entire leadup to the war in Iraq.
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Hillary's misleading Euro subcommittee slur

Trent Lott diverted Katrina hospital ship from New Orleans

Total Information Awareness: National Journal looks at where it went

White House stonewalling on Katrina investigations

Karl Rove lives in a pre-9/11 world

UMass Mao library book story is a hoax

National Journal finds more Rohrabacher ties to Abramoff

Did the White House even read the 9/11 Commission Report?

CQ: Saudis getting waiver for US border security program

Times of London, FT: Secret prison in Poland and/or Romania

David Addington: Cheney's Dick (and Lynne's Defender)

The Irony of Plamegate: The System Worked