The Pentagon’s top lawyer drew bipartisan fire on Tuesday for coercive techniques used to question terrorism suspects as he struggled to win U.S. Senate confirmation to a seat on a federal appeals court.
Bush has made much of his desire for judges who will respect the law and the Constitution – and yet he doesn’t do it himself. Indeed, those future historians will have much to consider about these times, and part of that may be not only how Americans lost their sense of well-being after 9/11, but also how a president used those attacks to become more like an emperor.
We were recently struck with the unnerving revelation that Verizon, Bell South and AT&T may have enabled the National Security Agency (NSA) to monitor private calling patterns of 200 million Americans.
What ingratitude on the part of Bush toward his former partners in propaganda! After all, the collaborative scare stories transmitted from Dick Cheney’s office and Times headquarters on Saddam Hussein’s atomic-bomb project have arguably made the Bush presidency what it is today
You may have noticed that even on its best days, Washington is not a capital given to rational discourse and contemplative reason. And you couldn’t help but notice that in the days since that June 23 three-newspaper scoop on how America tracks money in the War on Terror, many of Washington’s luminaries have behaved with all the subtlety of a French soccer star head-butting his way into ignominy.
The Bush administration sold the Iraq war on a phony premise. It worked hard to convince Americans that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11. After utterly botching the occupation and causing incalculable damage to America, Bush’s “plan” consists of continuing to pretend the whole thing isn’t a catastrophe until the day he dumps it in his successor’s lap. And Joe Lieberman has been one of the president’s biggest cheerleaders, every bloody step of the way.
Three federal government buildings will remain closed, or mostly closed, for up to several months because of flood damage from record-breaking storms in late June. Several thousand workers have been displaced.
The U.S. Army will discontinue its multi-billion dollar contract with oil services giant Halliburton Co. to provide logistical support to U.S. troops worldwide, The Washington Post reported on Wednesday.
The White House’s announcement Tuesday that it will apply Geneva Convention standards to suspected terrorists did little to quiet political arguments on Capitol Hill over the legal rights of detainees.
A team of U.S. political strategists is creating an Internet forum for debating hot-button issues, hoping to connect the politically obsessed the way MySpace.com hooks up hypersocial teens.