Defending his strategy in an increasingly unpopular war, President George W. Bush on Tuesday ratcheted up his effort to link the U.S.-led fight in Iraq to the broader battle against al Qaeda.
Bush spoke at an air force base in Charleston a day after the city hosted a Democratic presidential debate in which calls for a U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq were a common theme.
The senior U.S. commander in Iraq is preparing a plan for military operations that sets summer 2009 as the goal for achieving a sustainable level of security throughout the country, his spokesman said on Tuesday.
The draft, developed by Gen. David Petraeus’ staff, lays out a series of security-related goals over two years, envisioning U.S. troops in the war zone through 2009.
The plan, first reported by The New York Times, comes as Democrats in the U.S. Congress press for a strategy change that leads to withdrawal.
Barack Obama’s offer to meet without precondition with leaders of renegade nations such as Cuba, North Korea and Iran touched off a war of words, with rival Hillary Rodham Clinton calling him naive and Obama linking her to President Bush’s diplomacy.
Older politicians in both parties questioned the wisdom of such a course, while Obama’s supporters characterized it as a repudiation of Bush policies of refusing to engage with certain adversaries.
Angry senators suggested a special prosecutor should investigate misconduct at the Justice Department, accusing Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on Tuesday of deceit on the prosecutor firings and President Bush’s eavesdropping program.
Democrats and Republicans alike hammered Gonzales in four hours of testimony as he denied trying, in 2004, to push a hospitalized former attorney general into approving a counterterror program that the Justice Department then viewed as illegal.
The return of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to the Senate Judiciary Committee is in some ways the story of Democratic failure to drum up enough pressure to force President Bush’s hand.
Not so long ago, Republicans as well as Democrats thought they’d seen Gonzales sit before them for the last time as attorney general. There was no way Gonzales could survive the controversy over the prosecutor firings, nor the exposure of other missteps, they said. Certainly he could not resist the widespread calls for his resignation — one, from a Republican — to his face as the proceedings were broadcast live.
A former US army reserve major pleaded guilty to accepting bribes from US government contractors while deployed in Iraq, the US Department of Justice said Monday.
Separately, federal agents arrested an active-duty army major on charges of taking millions of dollars in bribes while working as a contracting officer stationed in Kuwait.
John Allen Rivard, 48, faces up to 30 years in prison after he pleaded guilty to bribery, conspiracy to commit bribery and money laundering at federal court in Austin, Texas, a statement by the department said.
Democratic White House hopefuls made history Monday, parrying Internet video questions from voters soured on modern politics, in a sign of the Web’s booming role in elections.
“Wassup? asked the first questioner Zach Kempf from Provo, Utah, in a greeting heralding an unconventional two-hour 2008 campaign debate hosted by video-sharing website YouTube and broadcast by CNN from South Carolina.
Friday afternoon, the White House’s preferred time for actions to which it wishes to draw minimal attention, President Bush issued a long-awaited executive order on torture.
We’re against it. Sort of.
The order requires U.S. interrogators to obey the international Geneva Conventions regarding prisoners that bar “humiliating and degrading treatment,” serious enough that any “reasonable person” would deem it “beyond the bounds of human decency.”
Doug Marlette, an editorial cartoonist best known for his syndicated comic strip “Kudzu,” was killed in a car wreck in Mississippi recently. On the previous Friday he had delivered the eulogy at his father’s funeral in North Carolina, and on Tuesday, July 10, he was on his way to Oxford to help a group of high-school students mount a production of “Kudzu: A Southern Musical.”
SLOAN, Iowa — He squeezed into the diner flanked by burly fellows in pinstriped suits.
When the country’s most famous city slicker came to this small farm town last week, a good portion of Sloan’s roughly 1,000 residents jammed into the corner cafe to catch a glimpse or touch his hands.
Some call Republican Rudolph Giuliani “America’s Mayor” because of that day in New York City that he always reminds folks about: Sept. 11, 2001.