History > 2006 > USA > White House / President (III)

Monte Wolverton

The Wolvertoon        Cagle        4.9.2006
http://cagle.msnbc.com/politicalcartoons/PCcartoons/wolverton.asp

George W. Bush - 43rd president of the United States.

Al - Zawahri:

Bush a Liar in War on Terror

September 30, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 3:30 a.m. ET
The New York Times

CAIRO, Egypt (AP) -- Al-Qaida No. 2 Ayman al-Zawahri called President Bush a failure and a liar in the war on terror in a video statement released Friday, and he compared Pope Benedict XVI to the 11th century pontiff who launched the First Crusade.

''Can't you be honest at least once in your life, and admit that you are a deceitful liar who intentionally deceived your nation when you drove them to war in Iraq?'' Osama bin Laden's deputy said, appearing in front of a standing lamp and a small, decorative cannon.

Al-Zawahri also criticized Bush for continuing to imprison al-Qaida leaders in prisons, including al-Qaida No. 3 Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged Sept. 11 mastermind who was captured in Pakistan in March 2003.

''Bush, you deceitful charlatan, 3 1/2 years have passed since your capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, so how have you found us during this time? Losing and surrendering? Or are we launching attacks with God's help and becoming martyrs?'' he said.

''What you have perpetrated against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the other Muslim captives in your prisons and the prisons of your slaves in Egypt, Jordan, Pakistan and elsewhere is not hidden from anyone, and we are a people who do not sleep under oppression and who do not abandon our revenge until our chests have been healed of those who have committed aggression against us,'' he said.

''And we, by the grace of Allah, are seeking to exact revenge on behalf of Islam and Muslims from you and your soldiers and allies.''

Al-Zawahri accused the United States and its agents of torturing Muslim prisoners seized across the Middle East.

''Your agents in the Arabian Peninsula, Yemen, Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan have captured thousands of the youth and soldiers of Islam whom you made to taste at your hands and the hands of your agents various types of punishment and torture,'' al-Zawahri said.

Ben Venzke, head of the Virginia-based IntelCenter, which monitors terrorism communications, said al-Zawahri essentially gave al-Qaida's spin on the arrests and detentions of its leaders.

''They are countering arguments that individuals have been able to provide useful information,'' he said. ''And they are continuing to reinforce their intentions for revenge.''

Al-Zawahri said Benedict is reminiscent of Pope Urban II, who in 1095 ordered the First Crusade to establish Christian control in the Holy Land.

''This charlatan Benedict brings back to our memories the speech of his predecessor charlatan Urban II in the 11th century ... in which he instigated Europeans to fight Muslims and launch the Crusades because he (Urban) claimed 'atheist Muslims, the enemies of Christ' are attacking the tomb of Jesus Christ, peace be upon him,'' al-Zawahri said.

Al-Zawahri's remarks about Benedict were a clear response to the pontiff's comments this month that sparked outrage across the Muslim world. In that speech, Benedict cited a Byzantine emperor who characterized some of the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad as ''evil and inhuman,'' particularly ''his command to spread by the sword the faith.''

''If Benedict attacked us, we will respond to his insults with good things. We will call upon him and all of the Christians to become Muslims who do not recognize the Trinity or the crucifixion,'' al-Zawahri said.

Al-Zawahri also called a U.N. resolution to send peacekeepers into Sudan's war-torn Darfur region a ''Crusader plan'' and implored the Muslims of Darfur to defend themselves.

''There is a Crusader plan to send Crusaders forces to Darfur that is about to become a new field of the Crusades war. Oh, nation of Islam, rise up to defend your land from the Crusaders aggression who are coming wearing United Nations masks,'' he said. ''No one will defend you (Darfur) but a popular holy war.''

The nearly 18-minute statement, titled ''Bush, the Pope, Darfur and the Crusades,'' was produced by al-Qaida's media arm, as-Sahab, and made available by the IntelCenter. An initial segment shows al-Zawahri in an office-type setting, while in the second part he is in front of a brown backdrop. The first segment also has English subtitles.

After conducting a technical analysis of the videotape, the CIA concluded ''with confidence'' that the speaker is in fact Ayman al-Zawahri, said a CIA spokesperson who spoke on condition of anonymity

An intelligence official, who also spoke on condition of anonymity, said U.S. experts view the latest video as a typical propaganda message, whose main thrust is a call for more people to join the jihad, or holy war.

It wasn't immediately clear when the message was recorded, the official said, but al-Zawahri's reference to the pope indicated the message was produced sometime after Benedict's Sept. 12 comments about Islam.

Al-Qaida has released a string of videos to coincide with the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, showing increasingly sophisticated production techniques in a likely effort to demonstrate that it remains a powerful, confident force despite the U.S.-led war on terror.

The IntelCenter said Friday's video was the 48th released by the al-Qaida Web site this year, three times more than last year's number -- which had been the highest. It said al-Zawahri has appeared in 14 of the 2006 videos.

    Al - Zawahri: Bush a Liar in War on Terror, NYT, 30.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Al-Qaida-Tape.html

News Analysis

Detainee Bill Shifts Power to President

September 30, 2006
The New York Times
By SCOTT SHANE and ADAM LIPTAK

WASHINGTON, Sept. 29 — With the final passage through Congress of the detainee treatment bill, President Bush on Friday achieved a signal victory, shoring up with legislation his determined conduct of the campaign against terrorism in the face of challenges from critics and the courts.

Rather than reining in the formidable presidential powers Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have asserted since Sept. 11, 2001, the law gives some of those powers a solid statutory foundation. In effect it allows the president to identify enemies, imprison them indefinitely and interrogate them — albeit with a ban on the harshest treatment — beyond the reach of the full court reviews traditionally afforded criminal defendants and ordinary prisoners.

Taken as a whole, the law will give the president more power over terrorism suspects than he had before the Supreme Court decision this summer in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld that undercut more than four years of White House policy. It does, however, grant detainees brought before military commissions limited protections initially opposed by the White House. The bill, which cleared a final procedural hurdle in the House on Friday and is likely to be signed into law next week by Mr. Bush, does not just allow the president to determine the meaning and application of the Geneva Conventions; it also strips the courts of jurisdiction to hear challenges to his interpretation.

And it broadens the definition of “unlawful enemy combatant” to include not only those who fight the United States but also those who have “purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States.” The latter group could include those accused of providing financial or other indirect support to terrorists, human rights groups say. The designation can be made by any “competent tribunal” created by the president or secretary of defense.

In very specific ways, the bill is a rejoinder to the Hamdan ruling, in which several justices said the absence of Congressional authorization was a central flaw in the administration’s approach. The new bill solves that problem, legal experts said.

“The president should feel he has better authority and direction now,” said Douglas W. Kmiec, a conservative legal scholar at the Pepperdine University School of Law. “I think he can reasonably be confident that this statute answers the Supreme Court and puts him back in a position to prevent another attack, which is the goal of interrogation.”

But lawsuits challenging the bill are inevitable, and critics say substantial parts of it may well be rejected by the Supreme Court.

Over all, the legislation reallocates power among the three branches of government, taking authority away from the judiciary and handing it to the president.

Bruce Ackerman, a critic of the administration and a professor of law and political science at Yale University, sharply criticized the bill but agreed that it strengthened the White House position. “The president walked away with a lot more than most people thought,” Mr. Ackerman said. He said the bill “further entrenches presidential power” and allows the administration to declare even an American citizen an unlawful combatant subject to indefinite detention.

“And it’s not only about these prisoners,” Mr. Ackerman said. “If Congress can strip courts of jurisdiction over cases because it fears their outcome, judicial independence is threatened.”

Even if the Supreme Court decides it has the power to hear challenges to the bill, the Bush administration has gained a crucial advantage. In adding a Congressional imprimatur to a comprehensive set of procedures and tactics, lawmakers explicitly endorsed measures that in other eras were achieved by executive fiat. Earlier Supreme Court decisions have suggested that the president and Congress acting together in the national security arena can be an all-but-unstoppable force.

Public commentary on the bill, called the Military Commissions Act of 2006, has been fast-shifting and often contradictory, partly because its 96 pages cover so much ground and because the impact of some provisions is open to debate.

“This bill is about so many things, and it’s a mixed bag,” said Elisa Massimino, the Washington director of Human Rights First, a civil liberties group.

Ms. Massimino’s group and others criticized the bill as a whole, but she agreed with the Republican senators who negotiated for weeks with the White House that it would ban the most extreme interrogation methods used by the Central Intelligence Agency and the military.

“The senators made clear that waterboarding is criminal,” Ms. Massimino said, referring to a technique used to simulate drowning. “That’s a human rights enforcement upside.”

The debate over the limits of torture and the rules for military commission dominated discussion of the bill until this week. Only in the last few days has broad attention turned to its redefinition of “unlawful enemy combatant” and its ban on habeas corpus petitions, which suspects have traditionally used to challenge their incarceration.

Law professors will stay busy for months debating the implications. The most outspoken critics have likened the law’s sweeping provisions to dark chapters in history, comparable to the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts in the fragile years after the nation’s founding and the internment of Japanese-Americans in the midst of World War II.

Conservative legal experts, by contrast, said critics could no longer say the Bush administration was guilty of unilateral executive overreaching. Congressional approval can cure many ills, Justice Robert H. Jackson wrote in his seminal concurrence in Youngstown Sheet and Tube Company v. Sawyer, the 1952 case that struck down President Harry S. Truman’s unilateral seizure of the nation’s steel mills during the Korean War.

Supporters of the law, in fact, say its critics will never be satisfied. “For years they’ve been saying that we don’t like Bush doing things unilaterally, that we don’t like Bush doing things piecemeal,” said David B. Rivkin, a Justice Department official in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush.

How the measure will look decades hence may depend not just on how it is used but on how the terrorist threat evolves. If a major terrorist plot in the United States is uncovered — and surely if one succeeds — it may vindicate the Congressional decision to give the government more leeway to seize and question those who might know about the next attack.

If the attacks of 2001 recede as a devastating but unique tragedy, the decision to create a new legal framework may seem like overkill. “If there is never another terrorist attack and we never obtain actionable intelligence, this will look like a huge overreaction,” said Gary J. Bass, a professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton.

Long before that judgment arrives, legal challenges are likely to bring the new law before the Supreme Court. Assuming the justices rule that they retain the power to hear the case at all, they will then decide whether Congress has resolved the flaws it found in June or must make another effort to balance the rights of accused terrorists and the desire for security.

    Detainee Bill Shifts Power to President, NYT, 30.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/30/us/30detain.html?hp&ex=1159675200&en=4b0651b4401c1962&ei=5094&partner=homepage

New Woodward Book Says Bush Ignored Urgent Warning on Iraq

September 29, 2006
The New York Times
By DAVID E. SANGER

Correction Appended

WASHINGTON, Sept. 28 — The White House ignored an urgent warning in September 2003 from a top Iraq adviser who said that thousands of additional American troops were desperately needed to quell the insurgency there, according to a new book by Bob Woodward, the Washington Post reporter and author. The book describes a White House riven by dysfunction and division over the war.

The warning is described in “State of Denial,” scheduled for publication on Monday by Simon & Schuster. The book says President Bush’s top advisers were often at odds among themselves, and sometimes were barely on speaking terms, but shared a tendency to dismiss as too pessimistic assessments from American commanders and others about the situation in Iraq.

As late as November 2003, Mr. Bush is quoted as saying of the situation in Iraq: “I don’t want anyone in the cabinet to say it is an insurgency. I don’t think we are there yet.”

Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld is described as disengaged from the nuts-and-bolts of occupying and reconstructing Iraq — a task that was initially supposed to be under the direction of the Pentagon — and so hostile toward Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser, that President Bush had to tell him to return her phone calls. The American commander for the Middle East, Gen. John P. Abizaid, is reported to have told visitors to his headquarters in Qatar in the fall of 2005 that “Rumsfeld doesn’t have any credibility anymore” to make a public case for the American strategy for victory in Iraq.

The book, bought by a reporter for The New York Times at retail price in advance of its official release, is the third that Mr. Woodward has written chronicling the inner debates in the White House after the Sept. 11 attacks, the invasion of Afghanistan, and the subsequent decision to invade Iraq. Like Mr. Woodward’s previous works, the book includes lengthy verbatim quotations from conversations and describes what senior officials are thinking at various times, without identifying the sources for the information.

Mr. Woodward writes that his book is based on “interviews with President Bush’s national security team, their deputies, and other senior and key players in the administration responsible for the military, the diplomacy, and the intelligence on Iraq.” Some of those interviewed, including Mr. Rumsfeld, are identified by name, but neither Mr. Bush nor Vice President Dick Cheney agreed to be interviewed, the book says.

Robert D. Blackwill, then the top Iraq adviser on the National Security Council, is said to have issued his warning about the need for more troops in a lengthy memorandum sent to Ms. Rice. The book says Mr. Blackwill’s memorandum concluded that more ground troops, perhaps as many as 40,000, were desperately needed.

It says that Mr. Blackwill and L. Paul Bremer III, then the top American official in Iraq, later briefed Ms. Rice and Stephen J. Hadley, her deputy, about the pressing need for more troops during a secure teleconference from Iraq. It says the White House did nothing in response.

The book describes a deep fissure between Colin L. Powell, Mr. Bush’s first secretary of state, and Mr. Rumsfeld: When Mr. Powell was eased out after the 2004 elections, he told Andrew H. Card Jr., the White House chief of staff, that “if I go, Don should go,” referring to Mr. Rumsfeld.

Mr. Card then made a concerted effort to oust Mr. Rumsfeld at the end of 2005, according to the book, but was overruled by President Bush, who feared that it would disrupt the coming Iraqi elections and operations at the Pentagon.

Vice President Cheney is described as a man so determined to find proof that his claim about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was accurate that, in the summer of 2003, his aides were calling the chief weapons inspector, David Kay, with specific satellite coordinates as the sites of possible caches. None resulted in any finds.

Two members of Mr. Bush’s inner circle, Mr. Powell and the director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet, are described as ambivalent about the decision to invade Iraq. When Mr. Powell assented, reluctantly, in January 2003, Mr. Bush told him in an Oval Office meeting that it was “time to put your war uniform on,” a reference to his many years in the Army.

Mr. Tenet, the man who once told Mr. Bush that it was a “slam-dunk” that weapons of mass destruction existed in Iraq, apparently did not share his qualms about invading Iraq directly with Mr. Bush, according to Mr. Woodward’s account.

Mr. Woodward’s first two books about the Bush administration, “Bush at War” and “Plan of Attack,” portrayed a president firmly in command and a loyal, well-run team responding to a surprise attack and the retaliation that followed. As its title indicates, “State of Denial” follows a very different storyline, of an administration that seemed to have only a foggy notion that early military success in Iraq had given way to resentment of the occupiers.

The 537-page book describes tensions among senior officials from the very beginning of the administration. Mr. Woodward writes that in the weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Tenet believed that Mr. Rumsfeld was impeding the effort to develop a coherent strategy to capture or kill Osama bin Laden. Mr. Rumsfeld questioned the electronic signals from terrorism suspects that the National Security Agency had been intercepting, wondering whether they might be part of an elaborate deception plan by Al Qaeda.

On July 10, 2001, the book says, Mr. Tenet and his counterterrorism chief, J. Cofer Black, met with Ms. Rice at the White House to impress upon her the seriousness of the intelligence the agency was collecting about an impending attack. But both men came away from the meeting feeling that Ms. Rice had not taken the warnings seriously.

In the weeks before the Iraq war began, President Bush’s parents did not share his confidence that the invasion of Iraq was the right step, the book recounts. Mr. Woodward writes about a private exchange in January 2003 between Mr. Bush’s mother, Barbara Bush, the former first lady, and David L. Boren, a former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and a Bush family friend.

The book says Mrs. Bush asked Mr. Boren whether it was right to be worried about a possible invasion of Iraq, and then to have confided that the president’s father, former President George H. W. Bush, “is certainly worried and is losing sleep over it; he’s up at night worried.”

The book describes an exchange in early 2003 between Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, the retired officer Mr. Bush appointed to administer postwar Iraq, and President Bush and others in the White House situation room. It describes senior war planners as having been thoroughly uninterested in the details of the postwar mission.

After General Garner finished his PowerPoint presentation — which included his plan to use up to 300,000 troops of the Iraqi Army to help secure postwar Iraq, the book says — there were no questions from anyone in the situation room, and the president gave him a rousing sendoff.

But it was General Garner who was soon removed, in favor of Mr. Bremer, whose actions in dismantling the Iraqi army and removing Baathists from office were eventually disparaged within the government.

The book suggests that senior intelligence officials were caught off guard in the opening days of the war when Iraqi civilian fighters engaged in suicide attacks against armored American forces, the first hint of the deadly insurgent attacks to come.

In a meeting with Mr. Tenet of the Central Intelligence Agency, several Pentagon officials talked about the attacks, the book says. It says that Mr. Tenet acknowledged that he did not know what to make of them.

Mr. Rumsfeld reached into political matters at the periphery of his responsibilities, according to the book. At one point, Mr. Bush traveled to Ohio, where the Abrams battle tank was manufactured. Mr. Rumsfeld phoned Mr. Card to complain that Mr. Bush should not have made the visit because Mr. Rumsfeld thought the heavy tank was incompatible with his vision of a light and fast military of the future. Mr. Woodward wrote that Mr. Card believed that Mr. Rumsfeld was “out of control.”

The fruitless search for unconventional weapons caused tension between Vice President Cheney’s office, the C.I.A. and officials in Iraq. Mr. Woodward wrote that Mr. Kay, the chief weapons inspector in Iraq, e-mailed top C.I.A. officials directly in the summer of 2003 with his most important early findings.

At one point, when Mr. Kay warned that it was possible the Iraqis might have had the capability to make such weapons but did not actually produce them, waiting instead until they were needed, the book says he was told by John McLaughlin, the C.I.A.’s deputy director: “Don’t tell anyone this. This could be upsetting. Be very careful. We can’t let this out until we’re sure.”

Mr. Cheney was involved in the details of the hunt for illicit weapons, the book says. One night, Mr. Woodward wrote, Mr. Kay was awakened at 3 a.m. by an aide who told him Mr. Cheney’s office was on the phone. It says Mr. Kay was told that Mr. Cheney wanted to make sure he had read a highly classified communications intercept picked up from Syria indicating a possible location for chemical weapons.

Mr. Woodward and a colleague, Carl Bernstein, led The Post’s reporting during Watergate, and Mr. Woodward has since written a string of best sellers about Washington. More recently, the identity of Mr. Woodward’s Watergate source known as Deep Throat was disclosed as having been W. Mark Felt, a senior F.B.I. official.

In late 2005, Mr. Woodward was subpoenaed by the special prosecutor in the C.I.A. leak case. He also apologized to The Post’s executive editor for concealing for more than two years that he had been drawn into the scandal.

Mark Mazzetti and David Johnston contributed reporting from Washington, and Julie Bosman from New York.

Correction: Sept. 30, 2006

A front-page article yesterday about a new book by Bob Woodward of The Washington Post, which describes divisions in the Bush administration over the Iraq war, gave an incorrect title in some copies for Donald H. Rumsfeld. He is the secretary of defense, not state.

    New Woodward Book Says Bush Ignored Urgent Warning on Iraq, NYT, 30.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/29/washington/29account.html?ex=1159761600&en=4455ad371b44870e&ei=5087%0A

Bush Attacks Democrats Over Iraq and Terror

September 29, 2006
The New York Times
By JIM RUTENBERG

BIRMINGHAM, Ala., Sept. 28 — President Bush took on the Democrats on Thursday with some of his most pointed language yet this campaign year, telegraphing the start of the last, intensive phase of the election season for the White House.

Speaking to a crowd of more than 2,000 supporters in this Bush-friendly Southern city, the president took Democrats to task for their criticism of the Iraq war, for their votes this week against legislation creating military tribunals to try terrorism suspects and for what he called misleading descriptions of the latest National Intelligence Estimate on global terrorism.

“Five years after 9/11, the worst attack on the American homeland in our history, the Democrats offer nothing but criticism and obstruction and endless second-guessing,” Mr. Bush said at a fund-raising event for Gov. Bob Riley. “The party of F.D.R. and the party of Harry Truman has become the party of cut and run.”

The National Intelligence Estimate, completed in April and reflecting a consensus of 16 American intelligence agencies, concluded among other things that the Iraq war had become a “cause célèbre” for Islamic extremists. But other sections in the estimate say terrorists would be demoralized by defeat in Iraq, and Mr. Bush declared that “some in the other party have been quoting selectively from the document for partisan political gain.”

“The Democrats are using the N.I.E. to mislead the American people and justify their policy of withdrawal from Iraq,” the president said. “The American people need to know what withdrawal from Iraq would mean. By withdrawing from Iraq before the job is done, we would be doing exactly what the extremists and terrorists want.”

Mr. Bush has been honing his offensive against Democrats for weeks as his political team seeks to shift the election-year focus from a debate about him and the unpopular war to one about terrorism in general, his party’s efforts to combat it and what he describes as the opposition’s promotion of defeatism and retreat.

But until now he had left the sort of hard-charging talk that he used here to his political strategist Karl Rove, Vice President Dick Cheney and the Republican national chairman, Ken Mehlman.

Minutes after the speech, during which he received several standing ovations, the Democrats hit back.

The administration has “gone from shock and awe to an American public shocked at how awful the situation in Iraq is,” Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said in a statement sent by e-mail to reporters. “Rather than heed the warnings in the N.I.E., President Bush politicized this discussion, and the Republican Congress has stood on the sidelines.”

In his criticism, Mr. Bush also singled out members of the Democratic leadership. Referring to “a senior Democrat in Congress” without mentioning her by name, he recalled a recent comment in which Representative Jane Harman of California, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said: “The president says that fighting them there makes it less likely we’ll have to fight them here. The opposite is true.”

The president pointed to Ms. Harman’s remark as an example of how “some in Washington, some decent people, patriotic people,” think that “we should not be on the offensive in this war on terror.”

“History,” he said, “tells us that logic is false.”

Through a spokesman, Ms. Harman said Thursday evening, “If the president reads his own intelligence, he will see that his failed strategy in Iraq is making the terrorist threat more dangerous.”

    Bush Attacks Democrats Over Iraq and Terror, NYT, 29.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/29/us/politics/29bush.html

Bush Travels to Hill to Push Detainee Bill

September 28, 2006
The New York Times
By CARL HULSE and JOHN O’NEIL

WASHINGTON, Sept. 28 — The Senate today rejected an amendment to a bill creating a new system for interrogating and trying terror suspects that would have guaranteed such suspects access to the courts to challenge their imprisonment.

The vote was 51 to 48 against the amendment, which was offered by the Republican and Democratic leaders of the Judiciary Committee, Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont. The action set the stage for final passage of the bill, which was approved on Wednesday by the House of Representatives.

The bill’s ultimate passage was assured on Wednesday when Democrats agreed to forgo a filibuster in return for consideration of the amendment. Any changes in the Senate bill, however, would have made it impossible for Republican leaders to meet their goal of sending the bill to the White House before adjourning on Friday to hit the campaign trail.

Underscoring the political stakes involved, White House spokesman Tony Snow said today that President Bush will emphasize Democratic opposition to the bill in campaign appearances.

“He’ll be citing some of the comments that members of the Democratic leadership have made in recent days about what they think is necessary for winning the war on terror,” Mr. Snow told reporters en route to a fundraiser in Alabama, according to a transcript provided by the White House.

This afternoon, the Senate was due to vote on two remaining amendments, but the one defeated this morning was the only one that had any Republican support.

The amendment introduced by Mr. Specter would have guaranteed to non-American citizens who are held as unlawful enemy combatants the right to appeal their detention in federal court. The bill now contains no such guarantee.

“What this bill would do is take our civilization back 900 years,” to before the adoption of the writ of habeus corpus in medieval England, Senator Specter said.

Mr. Leahy said the bill as written would allow the executive branch to hold any lawful immigrant in the United States indefinitely without charge. “We are about to put the darkest blot on the conscience of the nation,” he said, charging that the push for quick passage was purely for political gain.

“There is no new national security crisis,” he said. “There’s only a Republican political crisis.”

But Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican who was one of the bill’s authors, stated flatly that allowing habeus corpus appeals “impedes the war effort” by allowing for “irresponsible” litigation that undermines the military.

Senator John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, said the amendment would “divert our soldiers from the battlefield and tie their hands” by providing unnecessarily generous rights to terrorists.

Mr. Cornyn said that detainees such as those held at Guantánamo Bay would still retain the right to appeal decisions of special tribunals set up to consider their status. Mr. Specter responded that those tribunals were certain to be rejected by the Supreme Court.

In general, Republicans opposed to the amendment spoke of the need to limit the legal privileges of “terrorists” or “unlawful combatants,” while supporters of the change spoke about the need to give suspects a way to show whether they had been captured in error.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat, cited the experience of one detainee who had not been involved with Al Qaeda, but who was sold to American forces in Afghanistan by Pakistani bounty hunters for $5,000. That mistake was only corrected because of habeus corpus, she said.

Before the session began this morning, President Bush traveled to Capitol Hill to meet with Republican Senators and urge passage of the bill.

“The American people need to know that we’re working together to win this war on terror,” he said. “Our most important responsibility is to protect the American people from further attack. And we cannot be able to tell the American people we’re doing our full job unless we have the tools to do so.”

The legislation is a response to a Supreme Court ruling in June that threw out the system of military tribunals set up by the Bush administration.

The House, in a politically charged decision, voted 253 to 168 in favor of the bill, which contains extensive new rules governing the questioning of terror suspects and bringing them before military tribunals. If the Senate follows suit today, as is expected, it would yield for the Republicans a major national-security victory before the elections.

In the House, 219 Republicans and 34 Democrats, many in highly competitive districts, supported the bill; 160 Democrats and 7 Republicans opposed it. The opponents included the Democratic leadership and its major voices on military and intelligence issues.

Republicans immediately sought to portray the vote as a defining one between the two parties. “It is outrageous that House Democrats, at the urging of their leaders, continue to oppose giving President Bush the tools he needs to protect our country,” said Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the majority leader.

But House Democrats said the legislation would reverse fundamental American values by allowing seizure of evidence in this country without a search warrant, allowing evidence obtained through cruel and inhuman treatment, and denying relief or appeal to people like Maher Arar, whom the United States sent to Syria for interrogation that included torture even after the Canadian government told American officials he was not a terrorist.

Backers of the measure said the legislation would guarantee terror suspects adequate rights while not hindering interrogations.

“We are dealing with the enemy in war, not defendants in our criminal justice system,” said Representative Duncan Hunter, Republican of California and chairman of the Armed Services Committee. “In time of war it is not practical to apply the same rules of evidence that we apply in civil trials or courts martial for our troops.”

Leading Democrats said the approach would result in government-sanctioned mistreatment of detainees. They predicted it would be again thrown out by the Supreme Court, leaving the United States remaining without a system to try terrorists after a wait that has already extended five years beyond Sept. 11, 2001.

“If you want to be tough on terrorists, let’s not pass something that rushes to judgment and has legal loopholes that will reverse a conviction,” said Representative Ike Skelton of Missouri, senior Democrat on the Armed Services Committee.

Fellow Democrats said the measure could be interpreted by other nations as reducing America’s commitment to the rights of prisoners of war.

“When our moral standing is eroded, our international credibility is diminished as well,” said Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the No. 2 Democrat in the House.

But Republicans argued repeatedly that the nation is facing a faceless and brutal enemy that lurks in the shadows, requiring a new way of thinking on the part of the United States and giving new importance to the ability to freely interrogate them.

“Information is the key weapon we have to prevent them from killing us and prevent them from attacking others in the future,” said Representative Mac Thornberry, Republican of Texas, who said he worried the measure might go too far in tying the hands of American operatives.

The House debate was interrupted repeatedly by protesters in the gallery, who were removed by security workers.

The bill was a compromise worked out between the White House and three Senate Republicans who for weeks had resisted the administration’s approach. They contended the White House’s initial bill would violate the Constitution and redefine the nation’s obligations under the Geneva Conventions, signaling to other nations that they too could rewrite the rules on dealing with combatants seized in wartime.

The intraparty rift had threatened to derail Republican hopes to champion theirs as the party of national security, but before the debate began, Mr. Frist smilingly declared, “Republicans united.” Democrats had stayed mainly on the sidelines during the fight among Republicans, but the pending votes in the House and Senate have forced them to take firm positions on the bill. Senate Democrats did allow a vote to go forward, escaping criticism that they were obstructing the measure, and thus denying Republicans a potential political hammer.

House Democrats were prevented from offering any amendments. Under the Senate agreement, Democrats were allowed four proposed amendments, including the one co-sponsored by Mr. Specter. One, by Mr. Levin, would have adopted the approach endorsed by the Armed Services Committee and the three Republicans who resisted the Bush administration: Senators John Warner of Virginia, John McCain of Arizona, and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. It failed Wednesday on a 54-to-43 vote, with two Democrats, Senators Mary L. Landrieu of Louisiana and Ben Nelson of Nebraska, crossing party lines.

Concerned the legislation was being rushed through before an election without most senators understanding what was in the final version, Democratic Senators Robert C. Byrd of Virginia and Barack Obama of Illinois planned to offer a sunset provision that would require Congress to review the military commissions, as the trials are known, in five years.

While Republicans were nearing success on a key element of their agenda with the terrorism bill, disputes among top Republicans in the House and Senate were threatening other measures they hoped to pass, particularly a domestic security spending bill and a Pentagon policy bill. Lawmakers were scrambling to resolve the differences to avoid leaving the bills on the shelf. They have already abandoned efforts to strike a final agreement on a measure governing a National Security Agency surveillance program, though the House is scheduled to consider the bill on Thursday.

Carl Hulse reported from Washington and John O’Neil from New York. Kate Zernike contributed reporting from Washington.

    Bush Travels to Hill to Push Detainee Bill, NYT, 28.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/28/washington/29detaincnd.html?hp&ex=1159502400&en=f804341525b03650&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Bush Plays Chaperon for Awkward Encounter

September 28, 2006
The New York Times
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

WASHINGTON, Sept. 27 — For the past week, the presidents of Afghanistan and Pakistan have been in the United States, circling one another like wary cats as they lobbed insults across the airwaves from a distance.

On Wednesday night, they stood glumly — more like caged cats — in the Rose Garden with President Bush, who had invited them to the White House for dinner and a little talking-to.

“We’ve got a lot of challenges facing us,” Mr. Bush said, with President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan on his right and President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan a safe distance away on his left. “All of us must protect our countries, but at the same time we all must work to make the world a more hopeful place.”

Having already met separately with the two men — he received General Musharraf on Friday and President Karzai on Tuesday — Mr. Bush used his three-minute speech to proclaim them both “personal friends of mine” and describe the intimate dinner as “a chance for us to strategize together.”

Peter Brookes, a national security expert at the Heritage Foundation, put it another way. “They’re looking for marriage counseling,” he said, “and maybe President Bush will provide some of that.”

The strains in their relationship — each blames the other for the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan — are so obvious that Mr. Bush openly joked about the breach in the East Room of the White House on Tuesday, with Mr. Karzai at his side.

“It will be interesting for me to watch the body language of these two leaders to determine how tense things are,” Mr. Bush told reporters then, though he insisted later he was only teasing.

“I’ll be good,” Mr. Karzai responded.

Though Mr. Karzai politely referred to General Musharraf as “my brother,” that has been pretty much the extent of the politesse this week. As General Musharraf toured about, promoting his new autobiography on television programs as varied as “60 Minutes” and “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart,” he has made clear his disdain for Mr. Karzai, whom he accuses of “turning a blind eye” to his own deteriorating political situation.

“He is like an ostrich with his head buried in the sand,” the general said.

Mr. Karzai was a tad more muted; asked by Wolf Blitzer of CNN on Friday whether he thought General Musharraf was himself “an ostrich,” he did not take the bait. But he has made no bones about the fact that he sees the Pakistani leader as giving the Taliban safe haven across the border.

Complicating matters is a deal General Musharraf recently signed with tribal chiefs along the Afghanistan border; Mr. Karzai views it as a pact to cede control to the Taliban.

“Terrorism has only enemies and knows no boundaries,” Mr. Karzai told the Council on Foreign Relations last week. “The only course is to kill it. You cannot train a snake to bite someone else.”

Whether Mr. Bush can tame the war of words is unclear, but foreign policy experts across the political spectrum give him credit for trying.

“You do have two leaders who want to have a good relationship with the United States and particularly George Bush,” said Ivo H. Daalder, a scholar at the Brookings Institution, “so that does provide Bush an opportunity to say, ‘You guys need to cooperate. We have a common enemy.’ I admire him for doing this. It’s the right thing to do.”

Richard N. Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, said Mr. Bush’s primary challenge was “not only to broker a verbal cease-fire,” but also to get the two men to “deal with the core issue” of their dispute over the Taliban.

“What’s ironic is these two leaders need each other,” he said. “Their personal futures as well as their countries’ futures are very much intertwined, yet there is tremendous mistrust and bad blood.”

That much was evident Wednesday in the Rose Garden body language, which was as interesting as Mr. Bush had predicted. Although the two foreign leaders were handshake-distance apart — and some thought the president might prod them into one — no hands were extended.

Instead, both stood stiff and expressionless as the president spoke, their hands clasped tightly in front of them. When Mr. Bush ended the awkwardness by announcing, “Let’s go eat dinner,” General Musharraf gave a quick salute to the press corps. President Karzai extended his arms, palms up, in an empty embrace of the sky.

    Bush Plays Chaperon for Awkward Encounter, NYT, 28.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/28/world/asia/28prexy.html?hp&ex=1159502400&en=11f088d9441bc726&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Editorial

The Fine Art of Declassification

September 27, 2006
The New York Times

It’s hard to think of a president and an administration more devoted to secrecy than President Bush and his team. Except, that is, when it suits Mr. Bush politically to give the public a glimpse of the secrets. And so, yesterday, he ordered the declassification of a fraction of a report by United States intelligence agencies on the global terrorist threat.

Mr. Bush said he wanted to release the document so voters would not be confused about terrorism or the war when they voted for Congressional candidates in November. But the three declassified pages from what is certainly a voluminous report told us what any American with a newspaper, television or Internet connection should already know. The invasion of Iraq was a cataclysmic disaster. The current situation will get worse if American forces leave. Unfortunately, neither the report nor the president provide even a glimmer of a suggestion about how to avoid that inevitable disaster.

Despite what Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and John Negroponte, the director of national intelligence, have tried to make everyone believe, one of the key findings of the National Intelligence Estimate, which represents the consensus of the 16 intelligence agencies, was indeed that the war in Iraq has greatly increased the threat from terrorism by “shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives.”

It said Iraq has become “the cause célèbre for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of U.S. involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement.” It listed the war in Iraq as the second most important factor in the spread of terrorism — after “entrenched grievances such as corruption, injustice and fear of Western domination.” And that was before April, when the report was completed. Since then, things have got much worse. (The report was written before the killing in June of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq. The authors thought such an event would diminish the danger in Iraq. It has not.)

Mr. Bush decided to release this small, selected chunk of the report in reaction to an article on the intelligence assessment that appeared in The Times over the weekend. As a defense of his policies, it serves only to highlight the maddening circular logic that passes for a White House rationale. It goes like this: The invasion of Iraq has created an entire new army of terrorists who will be emboldened by an American withdrawal. Therefore, the United States has to stay indefinitely and keep fighting those terrorists.

By that logic, the more the United States fights, the longer the war stretches on.

It’s obvious why Mr. Bush did not want this report out, and why it is taking so long for the intelligence agencies to complete another report, solely on Iraq, that was requested by Congress in late July. It’s not credible that more time is needed to do the job. In 2002, the intelligence agencies completed a report on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction in less time. Mr. Bush also made selected passages of that report public to buttress his arguments for war with Iraq, most of which proved to be based on fairy tales.

Then, Mr. Bush wanted Americans to focus on how dangerous Saddam Hussein was, and not on the obvious consequences of starting a war in the Middle East. Now, he wants voters to focus on how dangerous the world is, and not on his utter lack of ideas for what to do about it.

    The Fine Art of Declassification, NYT, 27.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/27/opinion/27wed1.html

Backing Policy, President Issues Terror Estimate

September 27, 2006
The New York Times
By MARK MAZZETTI

WASHINGTON, Sept. 26 — Portions of a National Intelligence Estimate on terrorism that the White House released under pressure on Tuesday said that Muslim jihadists were “increasing in both number and geographic dispersion” and that current trends could lead to increasing attacks around the globe.

The report, a comprehensive assessment of terrorism produced in April by American intelligence agencies, said the invasion and occupation of Iraq had become a “cause célèbre” for jihadists. It identified the jihad in Iraq as one of four underlying factors fueling the spread of the Islamic radicalism, along with entrenched grievances, the slow pace of reform and pervasive anti-American sentiment.

The intelligence estimate said American-led counterterrorism efforts in the past five years had “seriously damaged the leadership of Al Qaeda and disrupted its operations.” But it said that Al Qaeda continued to pose the greatest threat to American interests among terrorism organizations, and that the global jihadist movement overall was “spreading and adapting to counterterrorism efforts.” [Text and news analysis, Page A16.]

The estimate predicted that over the next five years the factors fueling the spread of global jihad were likely to be more powerful than those that might slow it.

The White House ordered portions of the intelligence estimate declassified to counter what it described as mischaracterizations about its findings in news reports.

The Bush administration had initially resisted releasing the document but changed course after being pressured to declassify the report by Republicans, including Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas, chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, and by the conservative editorial page of The Wall Street Journal.

At a news conference on Tuesday where he announced the release of portions of the document, President Bush suggested forcefully that news reports in the past two days about the document had been based on politically motivated leaks.

“You know, to suggest that if we weren’t in Iraq we would see a rosier scenario, with fewer extremists joining the radical movement, requires us to ignore 20 years of experience,” Mr. Bush said. He added: “My judgment is: The only way to protect this country is to stay on the offense.”

The intelligence estimate says that if jihadists who leave Iraq perceive themselves, or are perceived by others, to have failed, fewer fighters will be inspired to keep fighting.

Democrats seized on the document’s conclusions as proof that the invasion of Iraq was a mistake.

“The war in Iraq has made us less safe,” said Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee. Mr. Rockefeller said the judgments contained in the intelligence estimate “make it clear that the intelligence community — all 16 agencies — believe the war in Iraq has fueled terrorism.”

The estimate was the first formal appraisal of the terrorism threat by American intelligence agencies since the invasion of Iraq began in March 2003. The public release of any portion of such a document is highly unusual. The White House declassified fewer than 4 pages of what officials described as a document of more than 30 pages, saying that to release more of it would endanger intelligence sources and methods.

The release of the findings added fuel to an intense political debate about the administration’s record in combating terrorism. Mr. Bush used the news conference to reassert his view that the Iraq war was not to blame for the growth of Islamic radicalism.

He also attributed the disclosure of some of the assessment findings to what he said were government officials leaking classified information to “create confusion in the minds of the American people” weeks before an important Congressional election.

The first article on the findings was published Sunday in The New York Times after more than five weeks of reporting. More than a dozen United States government officials and outside experts were interviewed for the article, including employees of several government agencies and both supporters and critics of the Bush administration.

Democrats also criticized the White House for only declassifying part of the report, and the House minority leader, Nancy Pelosi of California, tried and failed to persuade Republicans to agree to a vote that would have shut the doors of the House of Representatives to allow members to read the entire classified report.

Officials who have read the entire document said the still-classified portion contained a more detailed analysis of the impact of the Iraq war on the global jihad movement. Representative Jane Harman of California, the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee, said that what the White House released Tuesday was broadly consistent with the classified portion of the report.

National intelligence estimates are the most authoritative documents that American intelligence agencies produce on a specific national security issue. They represent the consensus view of the 16 intelligence agencies in government, and are approved by John D. Negroponte, director of national intelligence.

The release on Tuesday of portions of the document was the second time that the Bush administration had come under political pressure to declassify a national intelligence estimate.

In July 2003, the White House released the principal judgments of an October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate about Iraq’s weapons programs in an attempt to address a furor over the origins of President Bush’s statement, made in a State of the Union address, that Saddam Hussein had been trying to buy nuclear materials in Niger.

In recent months, without disclosing the existence of the intelligence estimate on terrorism, some senior American intelligence officials have given glimpses into its conclusions. During a speech in San Antonio in April, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, who was then Mr. Negroponte’s deputy, said new jihadist networks and cells were increasingly likely to emerge.

“If this trend continues, threats to the U.S. at home and abroad will become more diverse and that could lead to increasing attacks worldwide,” General Hayden said, using the exact language of the intelligence assessment made public on Tuesday. General Hayden is now director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

But the intelligence assessment paints a starker picture of the role that the Iraq war is playing in shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders than that presented either in recent White House documents or in speeches by President Bush tied to the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.

The intelligence report specifically cited the role of the Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who led the Iraqi group Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, in attracting new recruits for the jihad cause in Iraq, and stated that “should al-Zarqawi continue to evade capture and scale back attacks against Muslims, we assess he could broaden his popular appeal and present a global threat.”

He was killed by American forces in June.

Frances Fragos Townsend, the president’s homeland security adviser, suggested to reporters on Tuesday that the killing of Mr. Zarqawi might ultimately help dampen the appeal of jihad in Iraq.

At the same time, the report concludes that the increased role of Iraqis in managing the operations of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia “might lead veteran foreign jihadists to focus their efforts on external operations.”

To be successful in combating the spread of a radical ideology, the assessment states, the United States government “must go well beyond operations to capture or kill terrorist leaders.”

    Backing Policy, President Issues Terror Estimate, NYT, 27.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/27/world/middleeast/27intel.html?hp&ex=1159416000&en=e7cb014f7d4fe4e4&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Bush Leads New Offensive Featuring Economy and Linking Democrats to High Taxes

September 22, 2006
The New York Times
By JIM RUTENBERG

ORLANDO, Fla., Sept. 21 — President Bush began a blistering new political offensive on Thursday, asserting that if Democrats won control of Congress from Republicans it would mean higher taxes, less money in the pockets of working families and damage to the economy.

The speech by Mr. Bush here, in which he belittled Democrats as “the party of high taxes,” signaled what Republicans described as a new phase of the White House’s fall campaign, as Republicans begin to combine their emphasis on national security with a tough new emphasis on the issue that unites them more than any other, taxes.

Mr. Bush’s offensive was backed up by a flood of television advertisements on behalf of Republican candidates.

“If they get control of the House of Representatives, they’ll raise your taxes, it will hurt our economy, and that’s why we’re not going to let them get control of the House of Representatives,” the president said at a fund-raising event at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa for Gus Bilirakis, a Republican state representative running for Congress.

“The Democrats have made their position clear,” Mr. Bush said. “I want you to remember the last time they had control of the United States Congress back in 1993, they passed a massive tax increase.”

Mr. Bush’s words were echoed in advertisements that have been showing up on the airwaves, in mailings to voters’ homes and in e-mail sent to their computers. This new offensive reflects what Republicans have said is the power they see in the tax issue, in motivating both Republican base voters — who have seemed particularly dispirited this year — and independents.

Republican officials said they had been scouring the voting records of Democrats running for re-election, in search of ways to press the issue.

“Sherrod Brown has voted for higher taxes over 35 times,” an announcer says in a television advertisement shown this week in Ohio, attacking Mr. Brown, a Democratic member of Congress who is challenging Senator Mike DeWine. Mr. Brown’s face is shown amid a grid of television screens displaying the word “tax” as the announcer lists various taxes Mr. Brown supported.

“Liberal Melissa Bean has not supported making the tax cuts permanent,” says a mailing attacking Representative Melissa Bean, Democrat of Illinois, that was produced by the National Republican Congressional Committee. “Can you afford this tax increase?”

“Taxes have always been a good message in ads for us,” said Carl Forti, a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee. “We’re on the air in 18 districts now, and 8 of them are on taxes.”

Many Democrats are on record calling for some or all of Mr. Bush’s tax cuts to be rolled back, especially those benefiting the wealthiest taxpayers.

But Democrats said that Republicans were distorting Democratic positions on taxes affecting the middle class and that by this point, Republican attacks on tax cuts had become so familiar to voters that they would not have much effect.

“Our candidates have all announced they’re for middle-class tax proposals,” said Representative Rahm Emanuel, Democrat of Illinois, who is leading the Democratic effort to take back the House.

Referring to Mr. Bush’s comments, Mr. Emanuel said: “This is from a guy who ran up three trillion in debt and has submitted a deficit every year for the last five years. If I were him, I wouldn’t be throwing stones in a glass house.”

In Pennsylvania, Chris Carney, a Democratic challenger to Representative Don Sherwood, a Republican, is running an advertisement this week pushing back on Mr. Sherwood’s criticism of him as supporting tax increases.

“The truth is I’m for middle-class tax cuts,” Mr. Carney says in the advertisement. “Truth is, I’m for a new-baby tax credit. These attacks are another example of Sherwood bringing Washington politics back to Pennsylvania.”

After a series of presidential addresses and events meant to put Democrats on the defensive about national security this month, the speeches here and in Tampa were the second phase of an election-year plan to stave off a Democratic takeover of Congress.

Some of the pages of this White House script may seem familiar. The attack on taxes, for instance, was reminiscent of the way the White House tried to use the legislative record of Senator John Kerry in the 2004 presidential campaign, culling all possible votes to try to paint him as a serial tax raiser.

Mr. Bush on Thursday presented a new set of numbers, saying that 95 percent of House Democrats voted against his tax cuts in 2003 and that 92 percent voted against extending his tax cuts this year.

Democrats said they did not fear the new assault and welcomed a fight on economic issues.

Mr. Brown, in Ohio, responded to a Republican advertisement with his own attack posted on his Web site. He criticized Mr. DeWine as supporting “tax breaks for the rich.”

Adam Nagourney contributed reporting from Washington.

    Bush Leads New Offensive Featuring Economy and Linking Democrats to High Taxes, NYT, 22.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/22/us/politics/22bush.html

Bill Schorr        United Media        Cagle        22.9.2006
http://cagle.msnbc.com/politicalcartoons/PCcartoons/schorr.asp

John Sherffius        St Louis, MO        Cagle        22.9.2006
http://cagle.msnbc.com/politicalcartoons/PCcartoons/sherffius.asp

Republicans Reach Deal on Detainee Bill

September 22, 2006
The New York Times
By KATE ZERNIK
 

WASHINGTON, Sept. 21 — The Bush administration and Congressional Republicans reached agreement Thursday on legislation governing the treatment and interrogation of terrorism suspects after weeks of debate that divided Republicans heading into the midterm elections.

Under the deal, President Bush dropped his demand that Congress redefine the nation’s obligations under the Geneva Conventions, handing a victory to a group of Republicans, including Senator John McCain of Arizona, whose opposition had created a showdown over a fundamental aspect of the rules for battling terrorism.

The administration’s original stance had run into fierce resistance from former and current military lawyers and Mr. Bush’s former secretary of state, Colin L. Powell, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They argued, as did Mr. McCain and the other two senators leading the resistance, that any redefinition would invite other nations to alter their obligations and endanger American troops captured abroad.

“There is no doubt that the integrity and the letter and the spirit of the Geneva Conventions have been preserved,” said Mr. McCain, who was tortured during more than five years as a prisoner in North Vietnam.

Members of Congress and administration officials announced the deal after emerging from a tense and intricate all-day meeting in Vice President Dick Cheney’s office in a Senate building. They said they would try to push the measure through in the five days Congress is scheduled to meet before lawmakers leave to go out and campaign.

The White House moved quickly to assert that it had not surrendered. Administration officials characterized the negotiations as cooperative and the result as a victory for all sides.

“The agreement clears the way to do what the American people expect us to do: to capture terrorists, to detain terrorists, to question terrorists, and then to try them,” Mr. Bush said in Orlando, Fla., where he was attending fund-raisers for several Republican candidates.

The dispute revolved around how to define the rules governing the interrogations of terrorism suspects and providing legal protection to C.I.A. officers conducting interrogations. Under the deal, Congress would seek to codify the limits by outlining in the War Crimes Act, a domestic law, several “grave breaches” of the relevant provision of the Geneva Conventions, known as Common Article 3. The deal would eliminate a legislative provision in the original White House proposal saying that compliance with the Detainee Treatment Act, which Congress passed last year and which bans “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment,” would by itself satisfy the obligations of the United States under the conventions.

“Everybody agreed we ought to try and do it in a way that did not involve modifying or amending our international obligations,” said Stephen J. Hadley, the president’s national security adviser. “That was the objective we all came to here in the last week. The goal was whether we could find language mutually agreed between the Senate and the White House that would achieve those objectives.”

Dan Bartlett, counselor to the president, said: “We proposed a more direct approach to bringing clarification. This one is more of the scenic route, but it gets us there.”

The agreement says the executive branch is responsible for upholding the nations’ commitment to the Geneva Conventions, leaving it to the president to establish through executive rule any violations for the handling of terrorism suspects that fall short of a “grave breach.” Significantly, Senate aides said, those rules would have to be published in the Federal Register.

The agreement provides several pages describing “grave breaches” that would not be allowed, starting with torture and including other forms of assault and mental stress. But it does not lay out specific interrogation techniques that would be prohibited.

The adjustment to the War Crimes Act, “will put the C.I.A. on notice of what they can and can’t do,” said Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who, along with Senator John W. Warner of Virginia, joined Mr. McCain in leading resistance to the White House approach. “It would take off the table things that are not within American values.”

Asked about one of the most controversial interrogation techniques, a simulated drowning known as water-boarding, Mr. Graham said, “It is a technique that we need to let the world know we are no longer engaging in.”

Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the C.I.A. director, issued a statement to employees, saying, “If this language becomes law, the Congress will have given us the clarity and the support that we need to move forward with a detention and interrogation program that allows us to continue to defend the homeland, attack Al Qaeda and protect American and allied lives.”

The senators were careful not to characterize winners and losers. “This was a give-and-take,” Mr. Graham said.

The senators agreed to a White House proposal to make the standard on interrogation treatment retroactive to 1997, so C.I.A. and military personnel could not be prosecuted for past treatment under standards the administration considers vague.

Senators Graham McCain and Warner said the agreement met the three goals they set from the beginning: to preserve the Geneva Conventions, to allow the C.I.A. to continue interrogations and to set up a program that would pass court review.

On another point of contention, the use of classified evidence in prosecutions of terror suspects, the senators won agreement that suspects would be allowed to see any evidence the jury sees, which the senators say is in keeping with 200 years of American judicial tradition. But the agreement includes procedures that would strip the evidence of the most sensitive details that lawmakers have worried could be used to plan more attacks.

The agreement would not allow any evidence obtained by techniques that violate the Detainee Treatment Act, and would not allow hearsay evidence that the defense successfully argues is not reliable or probative.

The Supreme Court had thrown the issue to Congress in June, when it struck down the tribunals the president established shortly after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, saying they violated constitutional and international law.

After weeks of standoff over proposed legislation, the two sides had begun to negotiate in earnest in the last few days, after Mr. Hadley said on the Sunday morning news programs that he believed they could reach consensus without modifying international agreements.

Thursday morning, Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, the majority leader, who has supported the president’s approach, told Mr. Warner that with just a week left before the Senate is to adjourn, they needed a deal by evening.

Mr. Frist said he would send the bill to the floor. In the House, Representative Duncan Hunter of California, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said he had some concerns about the use of classified evidence, but added, “I think we’re very close.”

Democrats have put their trust in Senators Graham, McCain and Warner to push back against the White House, and Thursday they signaled that they intended to continue cooperating. “Five years after Sept. 11, it is time to make the tough and smart decisions to give the American people the real security they deserve,” said the Democratic leader, Harry Reid of Nevada.

Still, Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the senior Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, said he would press to change a provision in the proposal that would deny detainees a right to challenge their captivity in court.

Sheryl Gay Stolberg contributed reporting.

    Republicans Reach Deal on Detainee Bill, NYT, 22.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/22/washington/22detain.html?hp&ex=1158984000&en=aee43ae197a95cb4&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Bush warns Iran to give up 'nuclear weapons ambition'

Updated 9/19/2006 2:43 PM ET
USA TODAY
By Douglas Stangin

UNITED NATIONS — President Bush, in a speech today to the United Nations General Assembly today, warned that Iran must give up its "nuclear weapons ambition" and called on moderates and reformers in the Middle East to marginalize extremists and terrorists.

Bush spoke to world leaders and diplomats at the opening of the 61st Assembly in the same venue he used four years ago to make the case for the world to stand firm against Saddam Hussein on charges that he possessed weapons of mass destruction.

Iran has emerged as a leading target in Bush's war on terrorism because of its nuclear program and support for militant groups, including Hezbollah in Lebanon.

The president said Tehran must heed a U.N. Security Council resolution calling on Iran to suspend its program to make nuclear fuel. "Iran must abandon its nuclear weapon ambitions," Bush said.

Iran says its program is for peaceful purposes, while Bush says Iran is trying to develop nuclear weapons.

Although his remarks on Iran were pointed, Bush said he was working to find a diplomatic solution to the crisis.

His warning to Iran came in a sweeping overview of the Middle East in which the president called for a "world beyond terror."

"We must seek stability through a free and just Middle East, where the extremists are marginalized by millions of citizens in control of their own destinies," he said.

"America has made its choice," Bush told the assembly. "We will stand with the moderates and reformers.

The president spoke only hours before Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was to address the same gathering.

Ahmadinejad challenged Bush to a debate last month. The White House rejected it as a publicity stunt and diversion from dealing with the nuclear issue. Their speeches may be the closest the two come to a debate.

Bush met earlier with French President Jacques Chirac. France is part of the coalition of nations working with the United States to try to stop Iran from taking steps that could lead to producing a nuclear weapon.

The United States wants the U.N. Security Council to impose sanctions on Iran because it refused to meet an Aug. 31 council deadline to halt uranium enrichment.

Chirac, who is balking at the U.S. drive to sanction Iran for defying U.N. deadlines, proposed a compromise to kick-start talks between Iran and the international community. Chirac He suggested that the threat of U.N. sanctions be suspended if Tehran puts a freeze on its uranium enrichment work.

"I am not pessimistic," Chirac said. "I think that Iran is a great nation, an old culture, an old civilization, and that we can find solutions through dialogue."

In his speech, Bush also announced that Andrew Natsios, the former head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, will become Bush's special envoy for Sudan to help end the fighting in the Darfur region, where more than 200,000 people have been killed in three years of unrest.

Contributing: David Jackson and Barbara Slavin, USA TODAY; the Associated Press

    Bush warns Iran to give up 'nuclear weapons ambition' , UT, 19.9.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-09-19-Bush-UN_x.htm

The Limits of Presidential Power (6 Letters)

September 19, 2006
The New York Times

To the Editor:

Re “How the Presidency Regained Its Balance,” by John Yoo (Op-Ed, Sept. 17):

While I don’t for a second doubt the danger the United States and other democracies face from terrorists today, I can’t believe that John Yoo is right when he thinks that one of the bulwarks against terrorism is Mr. Bush’s “reserving his right not to enforce unconstitutional laws.”

I thought that the president had the right to veto legislation he did not deem appropriate. If Congress overrode that veto, he could then ask the Justice Department to appeal the issue to the Supreme Court, the arbiter of what is or is not constitutional.

The executive branch may be more equal than the other two equal branches of our government, but it still has limits, whether Mr. Yoo likes it or not.

Morton A. Baum
Seal Beach, Calif., Sept. 17, 2006

To the Editor:

Schoolchildren have checks and balances drilled into their heads as the hallmark of our government system. John Yoo mentions it not once.

Instead, he talks of George W. Bush’s reinvigorating the presidency, but doesn’t acknowledge the need for limits.

The incompetence in prosecuting the Iraq war aftermath and Katrina alone are reason for vigorous oversight by other branches to bring accountability and transparency.

“Trust me” no longer satisfies the public.

Phyllis Sato
Virginia Beach, Sept. 17, 2006

To the Editor:

John Yoo, a primary creator of the threads of legal theory from which the “war on terror” was spun, explains the benefits of unconstrained presidential power in pursuing it.

In another Op-Ed article the same day, “The View From Guantánamo,’’ Abu Bakker Qassim, an innocent victim of the abuse of that power, recounts how he was freed through judicial review, which pending legislation threatens to cut off for others in his situation.

The fact is that executive authorities do err. That is why checks and balances, and in particular the great writ of habeas corpus, exist.

Congress should reject Mr. Yoo’s theory and instead heed Mr. Qassim’s plea “to protect habeas corpus and let justice prevail.”

Eric M. Freedman
Hempstead, N.Y., Sept. 17, 2006
The writer, a professor at Hofstra Law School, is a lawyer for Guantánamo Bay detainees.

To the Editor:

Regarding John Yoo’s Op-Ed article, I am amazed that an American would write something like that. The way I learned it, the American people, through our representatives, write the law; the executive runs things according to the law; and the courts decide what the law says.

In Mr. Yoo’s world, we all take a back seat to one person — the president — who essentially decides everything. In return, he protects us from harm.

Hmmm ... I’ll take my chances with my father’s America, thanks very much.

David Lyall
Saco, Me., Sept. 17, 2006

To the Editor:

By focusing, in effect, upon the question of what the president has it within his discretion to do without authority from the other branches of government, John Yoo doesn’t tell us what this White House would accept as appropriate “checks and balances” on its own actions.

At this point in his own presidency, George W. Bush appears to recognize no limitations whatever on his executive power. Isn’t that the point of the term “imperial presidency”?

Peter Dear
Ithaca, N.Y., Sept. 17, 2006
The writer is a history professor at Cornell University.

To the Editor:

We can leave it to the legal eagles to rip and tear at John Yoo’s constitutional (and basically sophist) arguments for a strong executive branch, but most people don’t need a lawyer to know an argument for despotism when they hear it.

James Day
Berkeley, Calif., Sept. 17, 2006

    The Limits of Presidential Power (6 Letters), NYT, 19.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/19/opinion/l19yoo.html

Experts Say Bush’s Goal in Terrorism Bill Is Latitude for Interrogators’ Methods

September 19, 2006
The New York Times
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

WASHINGTON, Sept. 18 — In his showdown with rebellious Senate Republicans over bills to bring terrorism suspects to trial, President Bush has repeatedly called for clarity in the rules for what he calls “alternative interrogation techniques” used by the Central Intelligence Agency.

What Mr. Bush really wants, legal experts on both sides of the debate say, is latitude so the interrogators can use methods that the military is barred from using under a recently issued Army field manual.

Despite his call for clarity, the president has been vague in talking about the alternatives, which have in the past included sleep deprivation, playing ear-splittingly loud music and waterboarding, which induces a feeling of drowning.

“They can’t come out and say we want more leeway to rough these people up,” said John Radsan, who was assistant general counsel for the intelligence agency from 2002 to 2004 and now teaches at the William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul. “That doesn’t sell. So he says we need clarity. It doesn’t play well to say we need to deprive them of sleep and play loud music.”

On Monday, the Bush administration appeared to make the first stab at compromise, telling senators, including John W. Warner, the Virginia Republican who is chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and who is leading the opposition to the president’s plan, to expect a counterproposal.

White House officials would not release details of the administration’s new proposal, except to say late Monday night that it involved the part of the Geneva Conventions known as Common Article 3.

At the same time, the House decided to postpone its vote on Mr. Bush’s proposal until at least next week. That was a setback for the White House, which had been counting on the House to pass the measure this week, a step that it hoped would prod the Senate into action before lawmakers break at the end of the month for the midterm elections.

The Supreme Court ruled in June that Common Article 3, which legal experts agree would prohibit the intelligence agency’s techniques, applies to the treatment of terrorism suspects.

So the White House wants Congress to pass measures redefining Article 3 to say it bars “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment,” language that the administration borrowed from a bill written by Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican who was tortured while a prisoner in the Vietnam War.

“The president is advocating a standard that prohibits cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment, a standard based on years of U.S. Court decisions interpreting the constitutional prohibitions on cruel and unusual punishment that protect U.S. citizens in custody,” Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales said Monday in a speech at a conference on citizenship. “Seeking this clarity is important to our efforts to continue gathering information about our enemies.”

Some Senate Republicans, including Mr. Warner and Mr. McCain, are pushing back. They say redefining Article 3 would send a message that the United States was not serious about living up to the Geneva Conventions, a view shared by former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, and are pressing an alternative bill.

Part of the dispute revolves around protection for military and intelligence agency interrogators. The White House says Article 3 is too vague and leaves interrogators open to being sued.

The senators do not disagree. But they propose to clarify Article 3 by amending the War Crimes Act to specify exactly what abuses of the article constitute war crimes.

Jeffrey H. Smith, a general counsel for the intelligence agency under President Bill Clinton, said that the language in the Senate bill would not bar the controversial techniques, but that the White House bill appeared to give the agency greater latitude.

“The senators seem to be prepared to allow some techniques, but not nearly as many as the administration wants,” Mr. Smith said.

Since his speech nearly two weeks ago announcing that he was transferring 14 prominent terrorism suspects, including the reported mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, to the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, Mr. Bush has said the previously secret program under which they were interrogated was invaluable in thwarting terrorism plots.

The president has said he will have no choice but to stop the program if Congress does not pass his bill.

The legislation does not explicitly state what the permissible techniques are, and the president and White House officials, including Gen. Michael V. Hayden, director of the intelligence agency, have steadfastly refused to discuss them.

Tony Snow, the White House spokesman, has been repeatedly asked about waterboarding, for example, and whether Mr. Bush has ruled it out.

“I’m not going to go into what’s ruled in and ruled out,” Mr. Snow told reporters last week, saying to do so would tip the interrogators’ hand with suspects.

In a setback for the White House, the top uniformed lawyer for the Army has now told Mr. Warner that he prefers the Senate approach. The lawyer, Maj. Gen. Scott C. Black, joined military lawyers last week in a letter saying he did not object to the administration bill.

But on Friday, General Black sent a second letter to Mr. Warner in which he said that the Senate bill was preferable and that “further redefinition of Common Article 3 is unnecessary and could be seen as a weakening of our treaty obligations.”

Whether the two sides can reach an agreement is unclear. Mr. Warner and another rebelling Republican senator, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, spoke to reporters late Monday, saying the two sides were exchanging, in Mr. Warner’s words, “ideas and words here and there.”

Mr. Graham said the real work toward compromise started on Sunday, after appearances on Sunday by senators and administration officials on televised news and interview programs.

Mr. Graham said, “Everybody felt like what we were telling each other is: ‘We share the same goals. We have a different way of achieving them. Let’s see if we can write the legislation to meet our goals.’ ”

Kate Zernike contributed reporting.

    Experts Say Bush’s Goal in Terrorism Bill Is Latitude for Interrogators’ Methods, NYT, 19.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/19/washington/19interrogate.html

Editorial

Bush Untethered

September 17, 2006
The New York Times

Watching the president on Friday in the Rose Garden as he threatened to quit interrogating terrorists if Congress did not approve his detainee bill, we were struck by how often he acts as though there were not two sides to a debate. We have lost count of the number of times he has said Americans have to choose between protecting the nation precisely the way he wants, and not protecting it at all.

On Friday, President Bush posed a choice between ignoring the law on wiretaps, and simply not keeping tabs on terrorists. Then he said the United States could rewrite the Geneva Conventions, or just stop questioning terrorists. To some degree, he is following a script for the elections: terrify Americans into voting Republican. But behind that seems to be a deeply seated conviction that under his leadership, America is right and does not need the discipline of rules. He does not seem to understand that the rules are what makes this nation as good as it can be.

The debate over prisoners is not about whether some field agent can dunk Osama bin Laden’s head to learn the location of the ticking bomb, as one senator suggested last week. It is about whether the United States can confront terrorism without shredding our democratic heritage. This nation is built on the notion that the rules restrain our behavior, because we know we’re fallible. Just look at the hundreds of men in Guantánamo Bay, many guilty of nothing, facing unending detention because Mr. Bush did not want to follow the rules after 9/11.

Now Mr. Bush insists that in cleaning up his mess, Congress should exempt C.I.A. interrogators from the Geneva Conventions. “The bottom line is simple: If Congress passes a law that does not clarify the rules — if they do not do that — the program’s not going forward,” Mr. Bush said. But clarity is not the issue. The Geneva Conventions are clear and provide ample room for interrogating terrorists. Similarly, in the debate over eavesdropping on terrorists’ conversations, Mr. Bush says that if he has to get a warrant, he can’t do it at all. Actually, he has ample authority to eavesdrop on terrorists, under the very law he is breaking, the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat who is on the Senate Intelligence Committee, says that after being briefed on the wiretapping, she concluded that “this surveillance can be done, without sacrifice to our national security,” within the law. She has introduced a bill to affirm FISA’s control over all wiretapping. It would also give the authorities far more flexibility to listen first and get a warrant later when it’s really urgent. But the only bill Mr. Bush wants is a co-production of Vice President Dick Cheney and Arlen Specter, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, that gives the president more room to ignore FISA and chokes off any court challenges.

The best thing Congress could do for America right now is to drop this issue and let the courts decide the matter. Mr. Bush can’t claim urgency; it’s not as though he has stopped the wiretapping.

Legislation is needed on the prisoner issue, although not as urgently as Mr. Bush says. Three Republican senators, John McCain, John Warner, and Lindsey Graham, have a bill that is far better than the White House version but it, too, has some huge flaws that will take time to fix. It will be hard in an election year, but if the Republicans stand firm, and Democrats insist on the needed changes, they might just require Mr. Bush to recognize that he is subject to the same restraints that applied to every other president of this nation of laws.

    Bush Untethered, NYT, 17.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/17/opinion/17sun1.html

Op-Ed Contributor

How the Presidency Regained Its Balance

September 17, 2006
By JOHN YOO
The New York Times

Berkeley, Calif.

FIVE years after 9/11, President Bush has taken his counterterrorism case to the American people. That’s because he has had to. This summer, a plurality of the Supreme Court found, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, that Congress must explicitly approve military commissions to try suspected terrorists. So Mr. Bush has proposed legislation seeking to place the tribunals, and other aggressive antiterrorism measures, on a sounder footing.

But the president has broader goals than even fighting terrorism — he has long intended to make reinvigorating the presidency a priority. Vice President Dick Cheney has rightly deplored the “erosion of the powers and the ability of the president of the United States to do his job” and noted that “we are weaker today as an institution because of the unwise compromises that have been made over the last 30 to 35 years.”

Thus the administration has gone to war to pre-empt foreign threats. It has data-mined communications in the United States to root out terrorism. It has detained terrorists without formal charges, interrogating some harshly. And it has formed military tribunals modeled on those of past wars, as when we tried and executed a group of Nazi saboteurs found in the United States.

To his critics, Mr. Bush is a “King George” bent on an “imperial presidency.” But the inescapable fact is that war shifts power to the branch most responsible for its waging: the executive. Harry Truman sent troops to fight in Korea without Congressional authority. George H. W. Bush did not have the consent of Congress when he invaded Panama to apprehend Manuel Noriega. Nor did Bill Clinton when he initiated NATO’s air war over Kosovo.

The Bush administration’s decisions to terminate the 1972 antiballistic missile treaty and to withdraw from the International Criminal Court and the Kyoto accords on global warming rested on constitutional precedents going all the way back to Abraham Lincoln.

The administration has also been energetic on the domestic front. It has re-classified national security information made public in earlier administrations and declined, citing executive privilege, to disclose information to Congress or the courts about its energy policy task force. The White House has declared that the Constitution allows the president to sidestep laws that invade his executive authority. That is why Mr. Bush has issued hundreds of signing statements — more than any previous president — reserving his right not to enforce unconstitutional laws.

A reinvigorated presidency enrages President Bush’s critics, who seem to believe that the Constitution created a system of judicial or congressional supremacy. Perhaps this is to be expected of the generation of legislators that views the presidency through the lens of Vietnam and Watergate. But the founders intended that wrongheaded or obsolete legislation and judicial decisions would be checked by presidential action, just as executive overreaching is to be checked by the courts and Congress.

The changes of the 1970’s occurred largely because we had no serious national security threats to United States soil, but plenty of paranoia in the wake of Richard Nixon’s use of national security agencies to spy on political opponents. Congress enacted the War Powers Resolution, which purports to cut off presidential uses of force abroad after 60 days. It passed the Budget and Impoundment Act to eliminate the modest presidential power to rein in wasteful spending. The Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act required the government to get a warrant from a special court to conduct wiretapping for national security reasons.

These statutes have produced little but dysfunction, from flouting of the war powers law, to ever-higher pork barrel spending, to the wall between intelligence and law enforcement that contributed to our failure to stop the 9/11 attacks.

The 1970’s shifted power from the president to Congress, and the latter proved a far more accommodating boss to federal agencies looking for budget dollars — a fragmented legislature is obviously much easier to game than a chief executive. But 535 members of Congress cannot manage day-to-day policy. A legislature’s function is to draft the laws of the land, set broad goals and spend taxpayer revenues in the national interest, not to micromanage.

The judiciary, too, has been increasingly assertive over the last three decades. It has shown far less deference to the executive in this war than in past conflicts. This energetic judiciary is partly a response to Congress’s bulked-up power; the courts have had to step in to try to repair the problems created by vague laws that try to do too much, that state grandiose goals, while avoiding hard policy choices.

Congress’s vague legal mandates are handed off to the states or the agencies or the courts to sort out. Our legislators rarely turn their attention to the problems created by laws that are old and obsolete, or of dubious relevance to new issues. (This is why the Hamdan decision was less a rebuke of the presidency than a sign of frustration with Congress’s failure to update our laws to deal with the terrorist menace.)

Unfortunately, much of the public misunderstands the true role of the executive branch — in large part because today’s culture transforms presidents into celebrities. On TV, a president’s every move seems central to the universe, so he has the image of power that far exceeds the reality. But as the presidential scholar Richard Neustadt, a liberal icon, argued, the presidency is inherently weak, while mythic things are expected of and attributed to it — like maintaining national security and economic growth.

Today many pundits and political scientists seem to want the president’s power to be the sum of his communication and political skills, his organizational ability, his cognitive style and emotional intelligence. It is almost as if any president who uses the constitutional powers allocated to his office to effect policy has failed, not succeeded.

But the presidency, unlike Congress, is the only office elected by and accountable to the nation as a whole. The president has better access to expertise from the unified executive branch — including its top secret data — than the more ad hoc information Congress develops through hearings and investigations.

That is why, while jealous of its prerogatives, Congress usually goes along with a president’s policy decisions. A strong executive can accept responsibility for difficult choices that Congress wants to avoid. The Republican Congress, for instance, wanted to give President Bill Clinton a line-item veto, only to be blocked by the Supreme Court. Despite hearings and criticism of the energetic executive, Congress has yet to pass laws reining in Mr. Bush very much.

Congress has for years been avoiding its duty to revamp or repeal outmoded parts of bygone laws in the light of contemporary threats. We have needed energy in the executive branch to fill in that gap. Congress now must act to guide our counterterror policy, but it should not try to micromanage the executive branch, particularly in war, where flexibility of action is paramount.

John Yoo, a deputy assistant attorney general from 2001 to 2003, is a professor at the University of California at Berkeley School of Law and the author of “War by Other Means.”

    How the Presidency Regained Its Balance, NYT, 17.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/17/opinion/17yoo.html

In Campaign Ads for Democrats, Bush Is the Star

September 17, 2006
The New York Times
By ADAM NAGOURNEY

WASHINGTON, Sept. 16 — From Rhode Island to New Mexico, from Connecticut to Tennessee, President Bush is emerging as the marquee name in this fall’s Congressional elections — courtesy not of his Republican Party but of the Democrats.

A review of dozens of campaign commercials finds that Mr. Bush has become the star of the Democrats’ advertisement war this fall. He is pictured standing alone and next to Republican senators and members of Congress, his name intoned by ominous-sounding announcers. Republican candidates are damned in the advertisements by the number of times they have voted with Mr. Bush in Congress.

Not surprisingly, given that Mr. Bush’s job approval rating continues to hover around 40 percent, it is hard to spot the president in any of the Republican advertisements that were reviewed. In what may be taken as an indication of changing Republican tastes, Senator John McCain of Arizona is popping up everywhere.

There is Mr. Bush on television screens in Colorado, in an advertisement urging the election of Angie Paccione, a Democrat, leaning over to plant a big kiss on the forehead of Representative Marilyn Musgrave, a Republican.

There is Mr. Bush on the television screens in New Mexico, standing on a stage shoulder-to-shoulder with Representative Heather A. Wilson, a Republican struggling to keep her seat. “Heather Wilson supports George Bush on the war in Iraq with no questions asked,” the announcer says, in an advertisement for Patricia Madrid, the Democrat.

The White House has entered this campaign season looking to seize control of the political dialogue by moving the debate away from issues like Iraq and to Mr. Bush’s role in the campaign against terrorism. The decision by Democrats to invest in advertising directly attacking the war in Iraq, the administration’s war on terrorism and the once overwhelmingly popular president is a marked turn from how they handled these issues in 2002 and 2004.

The emergence of this recurrent theme in Democratic advertising is not a coordinated push by the legions of consultants, party leaders, campaign managers and candidates. Democrats said using advertisements involving Mr. Bush was almost an obvious thing to do, given his lack of popularity, and reflects the effort by many in the party to turn this election into a national referendum on Mr. Bush.

“In certain districts he’s exactly who we want to pivot off,” said Representative Rahm Emanuel, the Illinois Democrat leading the effort to win the House. “I tell all the candidates: Him and his agenda are on the ballot this year.”

Evan Tracey, chief operating officer of the Campaign Media Analysis Group, a firm based in Virginia that tracks advertising, said Saturday that candidates and independent issue groups had already spent $900 million on statewide and national campaigns this year. Mr. Tracey said he expected that by Election Day, the spending would be $1.6 billion, a new record. At a minimum, millions are being spent by the Democrats on ads featuring Mr. Bush.

The strategy has risks. In part, the goal of the Democrats’ advertisements is to rile up their base. But Glen Bolger, a Republican pollster, said that the constant attacks on Mr. Bush appeared to be accomplishing something Republicans had been unable to do: riling up Republican base voters.

“One thing we are seeing in our polling is that the Democratic campaign is helping to jazz up Republican voters,” Mr. Bolger said. “There are two concerns among Republicans: Is our base going to turn out, and how are we going to get out swing voters. The Democrats are taking care of our first concern.”

Many Republicans, and some Democrats, say it will be hard for Democrats to win unless they go beyond attacking Republicans and offer a program of their own. And Ken Mehlman, the Republican national chairman, said the Republicans’ own experience in politics suggested that running against someone who is not on the ballot is challenging. “The last time this kind of morph ad was tried was in ’98 when we tried to nationalize the races against Clinton and it didn’t work,” he said.

Kenneth M. Goldstein, an associate professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin who studies campaign advertisements, said the focus by Democrats on Iraq and security was a sharp shift from what he had observed in the last two election cycles. Then, Mr. Bush was far more popular and public opinion on the war had not changed, but Mr. Goldstein argued that the Democrats still might have made a mistake in not trying to at least challenge Republicans on the war.

“If you’re running a campaign, you try to engage on a subject or change the subject,” Mr. Goldstein said. “The Democratic strategy in 2002 and 2004 was very much to change the subject.”

This time around, Mr. Bush can be found in Democratic advertisements running in Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Arizona, Tennessee, New Jersey and other states.

In New Jersey, Senator Robert Menendez, a Democrat facing a tough election battle, strode along the New Jersey waterfront, attacking the president — rather than, say, the Republican he is running against this fall, Thomas H. Kean Jr. — as failing to improve security in the nation’s ports.

“Five years after 9/11, President Bush still doesn’t get it: homeland security starts here,” Mr. Menendez says.

In Rhode Island, Sheldon Whitehouse, the Democratic challenger to Senator Lincoln Chafee, turns to a room of voters and says, “I want to make it absolutely clear that we need to effect a responsible deployment of our troops out of Iraq.” In South Florida, Representative E. Clay Shaw Jr. is pictured between photographs of Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, under the words, “Shaw votes for the Bush/Cheney agenda 90 percent of the time.” The announcer says that Mr. Shaw, who is facing a tough challenge from Ron Klein, is “refusing to question their handling of the war in Iraq.”

Howard Wolfson, a Democratic consultant, produced a television advertisement for Kirsten Gillibrand, the Democratic challenger to Representative John E. Sweeney of New York, that opens with the image of Mr. Bush saying, “We are making good progress in Iraq.”

“You wouldn’t have done that two years ago,” Mr. Wolfson said.

Republicans have responded with advertisements attacking Democrats for raising taxes and as being weak on national security. And they have invoked their own political totems: In Indiana, Republicans use a picture of Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the Democratic leader who would probably become the next speaker should Democrats take the House, in an advertisement attacking Brad Ellsworth, a Democratic sheriff running a very threatening challenge to Representative John Hostettler.

“Pelosi and other Democrats want to raise your taxes, cut and run in Iraq and give amnesty to illegal immigrants,” the announcer says.

The Republicans have turned to images of Mr. McCain in ads, including one for Mr. Kean in New Jersey.

But for sheer star power, nothing matches a president, as Republicans certainly demonstrated in 2002 and 2004, when Mr. Bush was a constant presence in almost all the Republican campaigns. Mr. Bush’s image this fall is being invoked by Democrats as a proxy for Americans who want change in Washington; who oppose the war in Iraq; who think Mr. Bush has not done enough to protect the nation from future terrorist attacks; or who are angry with changes Mr. Bush has pressed in Medicare.

“It’s not just photos,” said John Lapp, who runs the Democratic campaign committee’s independent advertising program. “It’s statements and actions and votes that show a pattern of people being with Bush.”

Steve Murphy, a consultant whose firm made the Iraq advertisement for Ms. Madrid of New Mexico, said: “The war is a dominant issue. For all these Republican candidates who are going through gyrations to distance themselves from Bush — well, if they support Bush on the war, there is nothing more illustrative of the fact that they are in bed with Bush.”

Senator Charles E. Schumer, the New York Democrat leading his party’s campaign to take back the Senate, said: “In 2004, people were still happy with Bush’s course in Iraq. Now they are not.”

That shows in terrorism, too. Representative Harold E. Ford Jr., a Democratic candidate for Senate in Tennessee, walks through an airplane as he criticizes the administration’s efforts in protecting the nation from terrorism, and mocks any suggestion that the White House deserves credit for the arrests in Britain of a ring of terror suspects accused of plotting to bomb airlines headed for the United States.

“Thank God the British stopped them,” Mr. Ford says, adding: “Today our ports and borders remain vulnerable to terrorists.”

    In Campaign Ads for Democrats, Bush Is the Star, NYT, 17.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/17/us/politics/17ads.html?hp&ex=1158552000&en=7e75e8ab38cbe6f0&ei=5094&partner=homepage

The President

Bush Says G.O.P. Rebels Are Putting Nation at Risk

September 16, 2006
The New York Times
By JIM RUTENBERG and SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

WASHINGTON, Sept. 15 — President Bush made an impassioned defense on Friday of his proposed rules for the interrogation and prosecution of terrorism suspects, warning that the nation’s ability to defend itself would be undermined if rebellious Republicans in the Senate did not come around to his position.

Speaking at a late-morning news conference in the Rose Garden, Mr. Bush said he would have no choice but to end a C.I.A. program for the interrogation of high-level terrorism suspects if Congress passed an alternate set of rules supported by a group of Senate Republicans.

Those alternate rules were adopted Thursday by the Senate Armed Services Committee in defiance of Mr. Bush. Setting out what he suggested could be dire consequences if that bill became law, Mr. Bush said intelligence officers — he referred to them repeatedly as “professionals” — would no longer be willing and able to conduct interrogations out of concern that the vague standard for acceptable techniques could leave them vulnerable to legal action.

“Were it not for this program, our intelligence community believes that Al Qaeda and its allies would have succeeded in launching another attack against the American homeland,” he said. “But the practical matter is if our professionals don’t have clear standards in the law, the program is not going to go forward.”

The administration has said the Central Intelligence Agency has no “high value” terrorism suspects in foreign detention centers, having transferred the last of them this month to military custody at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. But officials said they considered the program crucial to efforts to foil attacks.

“This enemy has struck us, and they want to strike us again,” Mr. Bush said, “and we’ll give our folks the tools necessary to protect the country. It’s a debate that, that really is going to define whether or not we can protect ourselves.”

It was also a debate Mr. Bush had hoped to have this week exclusively with Democrats as he and his party’s leadership set out to draw unflattering distinctions between Republicans and Democrats on fighting terrorism for the fall elections.

Instead, Mr. Bush spent Friday in a second day of heavy debate, casting some of the most respected voices on military matters in his own party as hindering the fight against terrorism. As of late Friday there seemed to be no break in the impasse, even as White House officials worked behind the scenes to build new support in the Senate for the legislation the president wants.

Leading the efforts against him in the Senate are three key Republicans on the Armed Services Committee with their own military credentials: the chairman and a former secretary of the Navy, Senator John W. Warner of Virginia; Senator John McCain of Arizona, a prisoner of war in Vietnam; and Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a military judge. And publicly taking their side is Mr. Bush’s former secretary of state, Colin L. Powell.

The dispute centers on whether to pass legislation reinterpreting a provision of the Geneva Conventions known as Common Article 3 that bars “outrages upon personal dignity”; the Supreme Court ruled that the provision applies to terrorism suspects. Mr. Bush argued that the convention’s language was too vague and is proposing legislation to clarify the provisions. “What does that mean, ‘outrages upon human dignity’?” he said at one point.

Mr. McCain and his allies on the committee say reinterpreting the Geneva Conventions would open the door to rogue governments to interpret them as they see fit.

In a statement late Friday, Mr. McCain stuck to his position, saying that his proposed rules included legal protections for interrogators. “Weakening the Geneva protections is not only unnecessary, but would set an example to other countries, with less respect for basic human rights, that they could issue their own legislative reinterpretations,” he said.

Mr. Bush rejected the crux of Mr. McCain’s argument when a reporter asked him how he would react if nations like Iran or North Korea “roughed up” American soldiers under the guise of their own interpretations of Common Article 3.

“You can give a hypothetical about North Korea or any other country,” Mr. Bush said, casting the question as steeped in moral relativism. “The point is that the program is not going to go forward if our professionals do not have clarity in the law.”

He also discounted an argument made in a letter from Mr. Powell that his plan would encourage the world to “doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism.”

Asked about that analysis, Mr. Bush said, “If there’s any comparison between the compassion and decency of the American people and the terrorist tactics of extremists, it’s flawed logic.”

Mr. Bush was alternately combative and comedic during the hourlong session with reporters. At one point, in describing how he thought the economy and Republican tax policies would help his party in November, he said: “I’ve always felt the economy is a determinate issue, if not the determinate issue in campaigns. We’ve had a little history of that in our family, you might remember.”

It was an off-hand reference to his father’s losing presidential re-election campaign in 1992, when he was damaged by economic woes and the breaking of his “read my lips” vow not to raise taxes.

Mr. Bush said it was “urban myth” that his administration had lost focus on capturing Osama bin Laden. The president said he was frustrated by the United Nations at times, especially when it came to addressing genocide in Darfur.

Asked about a Senate report concluding that there was no working relationship between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda in Iraq, Mr. Bush said forcefully, “I never said there was an operational relationship.”

The questioner had included a reference to Mr. Bush’s Aug. 21 news conference at which he had said, “Imagine a world in which you had Saddam Hussein who had the capacity to make a weapon of mass destruction, who was paying suiciders to kill innocent life, who would — who had relations with Zarqawi,” referring to the Qaeda mastermind in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Democrats for the most part on Friday were content to allow Republicans to fight among themselves on the terrorism question.

“When conservative military men like John McCain, John Warner, Lindsey Graham and Colin Powell stand up to the president, it shows how wrong and isolated the White House is,” said Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

But Republicans boasted that their top issue, terrorism, was dominating the political news for yet another day and overtaking Democratic criticisms of the war in Iraq.

Eric Lichtblau contributed reporting.

    Bush Says G.O.P. Rebels Are Putting Nation at Risk, NYT, 16.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/16/us/16bush.html

Bush faces Senate rebellion

Fri Sep 15, 2006 12:40 AM ET
Reuters
By Vicki Allen and Thomas Ferraro

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A Senate committee rebelled against President George W. Bush on Thursday, passing a bill it said would protect the rights of foreign terrorism suspects and repair a U.S. image damaged by harsh treatment of detainees.

Hours after Bush went to Capitol Hill to urge fellow Republicans to back his proposals for putting terrorism suspects on trial, a divided Senate Armed Services Committee approved its own bill which it said would meet demands of the U.S. Supreme Court that struck down Bush's original plan.

The committee also resisted Bush's bid to more narrowly define the Geneva Conventions' standards for humane treatment of prisoners, which Bush said was essential to enable the CIA to elicit valuable information from detainees.

Bush has been under fire for indefinite detentions and harsh treatment of foreign suspects at Guantanamo Bay as well as abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Human rights groups say mistreatment of prisoners has damaged U.S. moral standing.

Some lawmakers say they fear the practices put American soldiers at greater risk of harm or abuse if they are captured in conflicts overseas.

The bill -- pushed by chairman John Warner of Virginia and fellow Republican heavyweights John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina -- cleared the committee 15-9 with support from Democrats and Maine Republican Susan Collins.

The committee bill would require that defendants have access to classified evidence used against them, limit the use of hearsay evidence and restrict the use of evidence obtained by coercion.

The full Senate will take up the issue as early as next week, meaning Republicans could be in a bitter debate among themselves over national security issues which they view as key to maintaining control of Congress in November elections.

Democrats have stayed out of the fray, letting the Republicans show their divisions over Bush's handling of detainees scooped up since the September 11 attacks killed nearly 3,000 people five years ago.

WHITE HOUSE REACTS

Hoping to head off another setback over measures he insists are necessary to fighting the war on terrorism, Bush met earlier in a closed session with Republicans in the House of Representatives.

This month Bush was forced to acknowledge that the United States had detained high-level terror suspects at secret CIA prisons overseas. The U.S. military also revised its interrogation practices, banning such techniques as forced nudity, hooding, using dogs, conducting mock executions or simulated drownings known as "waterboarding."

Facing a possible loss in the overall Senate, the administration said after the vote it may wait to press its case when House and Senate negotiators meet at a conference to work out a final version of the bill.

The main debate with the White House was over its effort to write definitions of what would be inhumane treatment under the Geneva Conventions. Administration officials said the standards were vague and must be clarified to protect CIA interrogators from prosecution and to allow the CIA's "high value terrorist detention" program to continue.

But Warner, McCain and Graham said that would encourage other countries to interpret the protections to meet their own needs, which would backfire on U.S. personnel in future wars.

McCain, who was himself a prisoner in the Vietnam War, released a letter from Bush's former secretary of state, Colin Powell, that said the "world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism". Powell said he opposed Bush's bid to redefine the Geneva Conventions that require humane treatment of prisoners.

The White House countered with a letter from current Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice saying Bush's plan would "strengthen U.S. adherence" to the Geneva Conventions and would "help demonstrate to our international partners that we are committed to compliance" with the standards.

(Additional reporting by Steve Holland, Richard Cowan, Donna Smith and Joanne Kenen)

    Bush faces Senate rebellion, R, 15.9.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=newsOne&storyID=2006-09-15T044012Z_01_N14195333_RTRUKOC_0_US-SECURITY-USA.xml&WTmodLoc=Home-C1-TopStories-newsOne-2

Bush says U.S. seeing religious reawakening

Wed Sep 13, 2006 2:13 PM ET
Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President George W. Bush believes the United States has embarked on the latest great religious awakening of its history.

Bush, who counts on religious conservatives as a key base of political support, was quoted as saying on Tuesday that the United States appeared to be undergoing a cultural change on the scale of that seen in the 1950s and '60s.

"There was a pretty stark change in the culture of the '50s and the '60s. I mean, boom. But I think something is happening here," Bush said at a roundtable with conservative columnists. His words were reported by the National Review magazine.

"I'm not giving you a definitive statement -- it seems like to me there's a Third Awakening with a cultural change," Bush said.

Historians have pointed to periods such as the early 1700s and early 1800s, as times in which religious movements were particularly significant in America.

Those eras are referred to as Great Awakenings, although there is disagreement on how many there have been. In one such period, in the 1730s and 1740s, religious revivals in the United States coincided with similar movements in Germany and England.

An awakening in the 1800s is credited with helping to inspire the movement to abolish slavery in the United States.

Bush, a Methodist, often talks about the importance of faith in his life. Some critics seeing this as crossing a line between religion and politics, and his frequent references to religion are viewed with particular unease abroad.

Amid growing U.S. concerns about the Iraq war, The National Review article linked Bush's rejection of a pullout to his religious faith.

"I know it upsets people when I ascribe that to my belief in an Almighty, and that I believe a gift from that Almighty is universal freedom. That's what I believe," Bush said.

    Bush says U.S. seeing religious reawakening, R, 13.9.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2006-09-13T181300Z_01_N13197671_RTRUKOC_0_US-BUSH-RELIGION.xml&WTmodLoc=NewsArt-L3-U.S.+NewsNews-4

Bush assassination film set for U.S. release

Tue Sep 12, 2006 1:00 AM ET
Reuters
By Arthur Spiegelman

TORONTO (Reuters) - After you kill off President George W. Bush in a fictional film, what do you do? How about make a deal.

Gabriel Range, the British producer/director/creator of "Death of a President," the fictional documentary that sight unseen became one of the most talked-about movies of the Toronto Film Festival, has sold U.S. distribution rights to Newmarket Films, which handled Mel Gibson's equally provocative movie "The Passion of the Christ."

Newmarket, which reportedly paid $1 million for the film, is expected to give "President" a wide release within the next few months. It will air on Britain's Channel 4 next month.

Range's film opened on Sunday night to a sell-out festival crowd, which sat respectfully through it and applauded briefly at the end. Those who remained after the screening peppered the filmmaker with questions on how he achieved his special effects.

The film is shot as if it were a conventional television documentary, even though the events are fictional.

Range, who also co-wrote the film, uses footage taken of Bush during three visits to Chicago to create the scenes that lead up top the president being shot.

He also uses special digital effects to superimpose the head of the president on that of an actor pretending to be shot, and he creates a flowery eulogy delivered by President Dick Cheney at the funeral of his predecessor.

The movie opens with demonstrations against Bush as he visits Chicago in 2007. As he leaves a hotel after delivering a speech, he is shot by a sniper in a nearby building.

A police hunt leads to the arrest of a Palestinian man on flimsy evidence. Later the man is convicted of the assassination and kept in prison even as evidence points to another person as having committed the crime.

"The reaction of the general public was very good," Range said in an interview with Reuters about the opening night response.

"People didn't know what to expect. Our film has a very striking premise but it is not sensational or gratuitous. I hope people will see it as a balanced film and compelling drama. It is an oblique look at the ways the United States has changed since 9/11. We use the lens of the future to explain the past."

The 93-minute film's subject matter has led to protests in the United States, especially from conservatives. Range said he has received five or six death threats.

But he said that was because there was a rush to judgment about his film, without people knowing what was in it.

"We portrayed the horror of assassination. ... I don't think anyone would get the idea of assassinating Bush from this film," Range said.

    Bush assassination film set for U.S. release, R, 12.9.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2006-09-12T050038Z_01_N11475432_RTRUKOC_0_US-LEISURE-FILMFEST-PRESIDENT.xml&WTmodLoc=Home-C5-domesticNews-2

The President

In Prime-Time Address, Bush Says Safety of U.S. Hinges on Iraq

September 12, 2006
The New York Times
By JIM RUTENBERG and SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

WASHINGTON, Sept. 11 — President Bush used the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks on Monday to tell Americans that they were engaged in “a struggle for civilization” that would be determined in part by the course of the war in Iraq.

“The safety of America depends on the outcome of the battle in the streets of Baghdad,” Mr. Bush said.

In a prime-time speech from the Oval Office, delivered after a day of solemn ceremonies, Mr. Bush sought to place the war in Iraq in the context of an epic battle between tyranny and freedom, saying the campaign against global terrorism was “the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century and the calling of our generation.”

“If we do not defeat these enemies now,” Mr. Bush said, “we will leave our children to face a Middle East overrun by terrorist states and radical dictators armed with nuclear weapons.”

The address capped a week of speeches in which Mr. Bush tried to lay out his best case for the war in Iraq by defining it as a crucial front in the war on terror, while portraying the broader struggle as a natural successor to World War II and the Cold War in defining the place of the United States in the world.

Even by the standards of his latest round of speeches, Mr. Bush’s language was particularly forceful, even ominous, with warnings of a radical Islamic network that was “determined to bring death and suffering to our homes.”

Mr. Bush spent roughly one-fifth of his 17-minute address making the case that the nation’s safety hinged on success in Iraq, even as he implicitly acknowledged there was no link between Saddam Hussein and the Sept. 11 strikes.

“I’m often asked why we’re in Iraq when Saddam Hussein was not responsible for the 9/11 attacks,” Mr. Bush said, going on to say that Mr. Hussein was a threat nonetheless, that he needed to be confronted and that the world was safer with him in captivity.

And Mr. Bush reprised some of his tougher talk against Osama bin Laden, delivering a message to him and other terrorists, “America will find you, and we will bring you to justice.”

Mr. Bush gave his address at the end of a tour through the three major attack sites — Lower Manhattan; Shanksville, Pa.; and the Pentagon — in which he attended ceremonies and spoke with the bereaved but made no public comments.

He gave the speech from behind his desk at a fast clip, but with a furrowed brow and circles below his eyes. He delivered it five years to the minute of when he addressed the nation from the same seat on the evening of Sept. 11, 2001, and proclaimed that those who harbored terrorists would be dealt with as if they were terrorists themselves.

Drawing parallels between the challenges of his presidency and those of Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman, Mr. Bush said, “Our nation has endured trials, and we face a difficult road ahead.” And he called for unity, saying, “We must put aside our differences and work together to meet the test that history has given us.”

All of the networks carried the address live; ABC ran it during a break in its miniseries about the attacks that portrayed the Clinton and Bush administrations as having failed at times to move aggressively enough against Al Qaeda before the attacks.

Mr. Bush’s address brought to a close a day when leaders of both parties put aside, at least for the moment, the acrimony that has characterized the national security debate since the brief period of national unity after the attacks. But as soon as the speech was over, the partisanship flared again. Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, said the president “should be ashamed of using a national day of mourning” to justify his Iraq policy. And Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, leader of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, called the address disappointing, saying, “You do not commemorate the tragedy of 9/11 by politicizing it.”

Hours earlier, Congressional leaders joined on the Capitol steps to sing “God Bless America,” an effort to recreate their spontaneous moment of post-attack comity. And the Senate Democratic leader, Harry Reid — whose press office is ordinarily a clearinghouse for hard-charging attacks on the president and Republican leadership — released a statement that read in part, “The light that shone on Sept. 11 cannot die, it cannot be dimmed, it cannot fail.”

But it was the president’s day that dominated a news media environment that was swimming in the imagery of Sept. 11, with the cable news networks offering blanket coverage of the day’s ceremonies, mixed with remembrances from survivors, first responders, officials and politicians.

Before speaking from the Oval Office, Mr. Bush had spent the day in public silence as he and Laura Bush visited the three sites scarred by the attacks, a solemn trek that began at ground zero Sunday night.

The Bushes began their day at the Fort Pitt firehouse on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where they observed back-to-back moments of silence — one at the precise moment each of the twin towers was struck. They then moved to Shanksville, Pa., where Mr. and Mrs. Bush laid a wreath in a spitting rain in the field where United Airlines Flight 93 crashed, and wound up at the Pentagon, where the weight of the day showed on their faces.

It was an emotional and somber, if carefully scripted, day for the Bushes, designed by the White House to maximize the president’s exposure but minimize his words before the evening speech.

At the Pentagon, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld presided over a memorial service that was occasionally interrupted by the eerie roar of commercial jets from nearby Ronald Reagan National Airport.

Addressing a crowd of 500 that included relatives of victims, Mr. Cheney said the United States would keep pressing the fight. “We have no intention of ignoring or appeasing history’s latest gang of fanatics trying to murder their way to power,” Mr. Cheney said, quoting the president and reprising a theme that has been taken by critics as a veiled effort to portray Democrats as appeasing the enemy.

Also speaking at the service, Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said the number of American military personnel killed in Afghanistan and Iraq, at roughly 3,000, was approaching the number of people killed in the attacks.

Teresa Taylor of New Hampshire, who attended in honor of her brother-in-law, Leonard E. Taylor, said she was moved by Mr. Rumsfeld’s recounting of the day of the attacks, given in halting voice. “It brought back a lot of memories,” she said.

But Shannon Mason of Springfield, Va., called the ceremony “too political” for coupling the attacks with the war in Iraq. Ms. Mason, whose mother, Ada Mason, a Pentagon budget analyst, was killed in the attack, added, “I think the war has nothing to do with Sept. 11.”

Even as he called for unity Mr. Bush alluded to Democratic calls for a timetable to withdraw from Iraq, saying, “Whatever mistakes have been made in Iraq, the worst mistake would be to think that if we pulled out, the terrorists would leave us alone. They will not leave us alone.”

Mark Leibovich and Helena Andrews contributed reporting.

    In Prime-Time Address, Bush Says Safety of U.S. Hinges on Iraq, NYT, 12.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/12/us/12bush.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Transcript

President Bush’s Address to the Nation

September 11, 2006
The New York Times

Following is text of President Bush’s address to the nation on Sept. 11, 2006, the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, as recorded by The New York Times:

Good evening. Five years ago, this date - September the 11th - was seared into America's memory. Nineteen men attacked us with a barbarity unequaled in our history. They murdered people of all colors, creeds, and nationalities - and made war upon the entire free world. Since that day, America and her allies have taken the offensive in a war unlike any we have fought before. Today, we are safer, but we are not yet safe. On this solemn night, I have asked for some of your time to discuss the nature of the threat still before us, what we are doing to protect our nation, and the building of a more hopeful Middle East that holds the key to peace for America and the world.

On 9/11, our nation saw the face of evil. Yet on that awful day, we also witnessed something distinctly American: ordinary citizens rising to the occasion, and responding with extraordinary acts of courage. We saw courage in office workers who were trapped on the high floors of burning skyscrapers, and called home so that their last words to their families would be of comfort and love. We saw courage in passengers aboard Flight 93, who recited the 23rd Psalm, and then charged the cockpit. And we saw courage in the Pentagon staff who made it out of the flames and smoke, and ran back in to answer cries for help. On this day, we remember the innocent who lost their lives, and we pay tribute to those who gave their lives so that others might live.

For many of our citizens, the wounds of that morning are still fresh. I've met firefighters and police officers who choke up at the memory of fallen comrades. I've stood with families gathered on a grassy field in Pennsylvania, who take bittersweet pride in loved ones who refused to be victims - and gave America our first victory in the war on terror. And I've sat beside young mothers with children who are now 5 years old, and still long for the daddies who will never cradle them in their arms. Out of this suffering, we resolve to honor every man and woman lost. And we seek their lasting memorial in a safer and more hopeful world.

Since the horror of 9/11, we've learned a great deal about the enemy. We have learned that they are evil and kill without mercy, but not without purpose. We have learned that they form a global network of extremists who are driven by a perverted vision of Islam - a totalitarian ideology that hates freedom, rejects tolerance and despises all dissent. And we have learned that their goal is to build a radical Islamic empire where women are prisoners in their homes, men are beaten for missing prayer meetings, and terrorists have a safe haven to plan and launch attacks on America and other civilized nations. The war against this enemy is more than a military conflict. It is the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century, and the calling of our generation.

Our nation is being tested in a way that we have not been since the start of the cold war. We saw what a handful of our enemies can do with box-cutters and plane tickets. We hear their threats to launch even more terrible attacks on our people. And we know that if they were able to get their hands on weapons of mass destruction, they would use them against us. We face an enemy determined to bring death and suffering into our homes. America did not ask for this war, and every American wishes it were over. So do I. But the war is not over, and it will not be over until either we or the extremists emerge victorious. If we do not defeat these enemies now, we will leave our children to face a Middle East overrun by terrorist states and radical dictators armed with nuclear weapons. We are in a war that will set the course for this new century, and determine the destiny of millions across the world.

For America, 9/11 was more than a tragedy, it changed the way we look at the world. On September the 11th, we resolved that we would go on the offense against our enemies, and we would not distinguish between the terrorists and those who harbor or support them. So we helped drive the Taliban from power in Afghanistan. We put al Qaeda on the run, and killed or captured most of those who planned the 9/11 attacks - including the man believed to be the mastermind, Khalid Sheik Mohammed. He and other suspected terrorists have been questioned by the Central Intelligence Agency, and they've provided valuable information that has helped stop attacks in America and across the world. Now these men have been transferred to Guantanamo Bay, so they can be held to account for their actions. Osama Bin Laden and other terrorists are still in hiding. Our message to them is clear: No matter how long it takes, America will find you, and we will bring you to justice.

On September the 11th, we learned that America must confront threats before they reach our shores, whether those threats come from terrorist networks or terrorist states. I'm often asked why we're in Iraq when Saddam Hussein was not responsible for the 9/11 attacks. The answer is that the regime of Saddam Hussein was a clear threat. My administration, the Congress and the United Nations saw the threat. And after 9/11, Saddam's regime posed a risk that the world could not afford to take. The world is safer because Saddam Hussein is no longer in power. And now the challenge is to help the Iraqi people build a democracy that fulfills the dreams of the nearly 12 million Iraqis who came out to vote in free elections last December.

Al Qaeda and other extremists from across the world have come to Iraq to stop the rise of a free society in the heart of the Middle East. They have joined the remnants of Saddam's regime and other armed groups to foment sectarian violence and drive us out. Our enemies in Iraq are tough and they are committed, but so are Iraqi and coalition forces. We are adapting to stay ahead of the enemy, and we are carrying out a clear plan to ensure that a democratic Iraq succeeds.

We are training Iraqi troops so they can defend their nation. We're helping Iraq's unity government grow in strength and serve its people. We will not leave until this work is done. Whatever mistakes have been made in Iraq, the worst mistake would be to think that if we pulled out, the terrorists would leave us alone. They will not leave us alone. They will follow us. The safety of America depends on the outcome of the battle in the streets of Baghdad. Osama Bin Laden calls this fight "the Third World War," and he says that victory for the terrorists in Iraq will mean America's "defeat and disgrace forever." If we yield Iraq to men like Bin Laden, our enemies will be emboldened; they will gain a new safe haven; and they will use Iraq's resources to fuel their extremist movement. We will not allow this to happen. America will stay in the fight. Iraq will be a free nation, and a strong ally in the war on terror.

We can be confident that our coalition will succeed, because the Iraqi people have been steadfast in the face of unspeakable violence. And we can be confident in victory, because of the skill and resolve of America's Armed Forces. Every one of our troops is a volunteer, and since the attacks of September the 11th more than 1.6 million Americans have stepped forward to put on our nation's uniform. In Iraq, Afghanistan and other fronts in the war on terror, the men and women of our military are making great sacrifices to keep us safe. Some have suffered terrible injuries, and nearly 3,000 have given their lives. America cherishes their memory. We pray for their families. And we will never back down from the work they have begun.

We also honor those who toil day and night to keep our homeland safe, and we are giving them the tools they need to protect our people. We've created the Department of Homeland Security; we have torn down the wall that kept law enforcement and intelligence from sharing information; we've tightened security at our airports, seaports, and borders; and we've created new programs to monitor enemy bank records and phone calls. Thanks to the hard work of our law enforcement and intelligence professionals, we have broken up terrorist cells in our midst and saved American lives.

Five years after 9/11, our enemies have not succeeded in launching another attack on our soil. But they've not been idle. Al Qaeda and those inspired by its hateful ideology have carried out terrorist attacks in more than two dozen nations. And just last month, they were foiled in a plot to blow up passenger planes headed for the United States. They remain determined to attack America and kill our citizens. And we are determined to stop them. We will continue to give the men and women who protect us every resource and legal authority they need to do their jobs.

In the first days after the 9/11 attacks, I promised to use every element of national power to fight the terrorists wherever we find them. One of the strongest weapons in our arsenal is the power of freedom. The terrorists fear freedom as much as they do our firepower. They are thrown into panic at the sight of an old man pulling the election lever, girls enrolling in school, or families worshiping God in their own traditions. They know that given a choice, people will choose freedom over their extremist ideology. So their answer is to deny people this choice by raging against the forces of freedom and moderation. This struggle has been called a clash of civilizations. In truth, it is a struggle for civilization. We are fighting to maintain the way of life enjoyed by free nations. And we're fighting for the possibility that good and decent people across the Middle East can raise up societies based on freedom, and tolerance, and personal dignity.

We are now in the early hours of this struggle between tyranny and freedom. Amid the violence, some question whether the people of the Middle East want their freedom, and whether the forces of moderation can prevail. For 60 years, these doubts guided our policies in the Middle East. And then, on a bright September morning, it became clear that the calm we saw in the Middle East was only a mirage. Years of pursuing stability to promote peace had left us with neither. So we changed our policies, and committed America's influence in the world to advancing freedom and democracy as the great alternatives to repression and radicalism.

With our help, the people of the Middle East are now stepping forward to claim their freedom. From Kabul to Baghdad to Beirut, there are brave men and women risking their lives each day for the same freedoms that we enjoy. And they have one question for us: Do we have the confidence to do in the Middle East what our fathers and grandfathers accomplished in Europe and Asia? By standing with democratic leaders and reformers, by giving voice to the hopes of decent men and women, we are offering a path away from radicalism. And we are enlisting the most powerful force for peace and moderation in the Middle East: The desire of millions to be free.

Across the broader Middle East, the extremists are fighting to prevent such a future. Yet America has confronted evil before, and we have defeated it - sometimes at the cost of thousands of good men in a single battle. When Franklin Roosevelt vowed to defeat two enemies across two oceans, he could not have foreseen D-Day and Iwo Jima - but he would not have been surprised at the outcome. When Harry Truman promised American support for free peoples resisting Soviet aggression, he could not have foreseen the rise of the Berlin Wall - but he would not have been surprised to see it brought down. Throughout our history, America has seen liberty challenged. And every time, we have seen liberty triumph with sacrifice and determination.

At the start of this young century, America looks to the day when the people of the Middle East leave the desert of despotism for the fertile gardens of liberty, and resume their rightful place in a world of peace and prosperity. We look to the day when the nations of that region recognize that their greatest resource is not the oil in the ground, but the talent and creativity of their people. We look to the day when moms and dads throughout the Middle East see a future of hope and opportunity for their children. And when that good day comes, the clouds of war will part, the appeal of radicalism will decline, and we will leave our children with a better and safer world. On this solemn anniversary, we rededicate ourselves to this cause. Our nation has endured trials, and we face a difficult road ahead. Winning this war will require the determined efforts of a unified country. And we must put aside our differences and work together to meet the test that history has given us. We will defeat our enemies, we will protect our people, and we will lead the 21st century into a shining age of human liberty.

Earlier this year, I traveled to the United States Military Academy. I was there to deliver the commencement address to the first class to arrive at West Point after the attacks of September the 11th. That day I met a proud mom named RoseEllen Dowdell. She was there to watch her son Patrick accept his commission in the finest Army the world has ever known. A few weeks earlier, RoseEllen had watched her other son, James, graduate from the Fire Academy in New York City. On both these days, her thoughts turned to someone who was not there to share the moment: her husband, Kevin Dowdell. Kevin was one of the 343 firefighters who rushed to the burning towers of the World Trade Center on September the 11th - and never came home. His sons lost their father that day, but not the passion for service he instilled in them. Here is what RoseEllen says about her boys, "As a mother, I cross my fingers and pray all the time for their safety. But as worried as I am, I'm also proud. And I know their dad would be too."

Our nation is blessed to have young Americans like these. And we will need them. Dangerous enemies have declared their intention to destroy our way of life. They are not the first to try, and their fate will be the same as those who tried before. Nine-Eleven showed us why. The attacks were meant to bring us to our knees, and they did. But not in the way the terrorists intended. Americans united in prayer, came to the aid of neighbors in need, and resolved that our enemies would not have the last word. The spirit of our people is the source of America's strength. And we go forward with trust in that spirit, confidence in our purpose and faith in a loving God who made us to be free.

Thank you, and may God bless you.

    President Bush’s Address to the Nation, NYT, 11.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/11/washington/12bush_transcript.html

Bush wants to renew Social Security push after vote

Sat Sep 9, 2006 2:59 PM ET
Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President George W. Bush hopes to revive his plan to overhaul the U.S. Social Security retirement program if his Republican party keeps control of the Congress in the November midterm elections, the Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday.

Despite polls suggesting Democrats have their best chance in years to regain control of the House of Representatives, Bush told the newspaper in an interview he was confident a power shift was "not going to happen."

"I just don't believe it," he said, adding that if Republicans prevail at the polls, next year might be a good time to reintroduce the effort to reshape Social Security because he could "drain the politics out of the issue."

Bush was forced to abandoned his 2005 push to add private accounts to the retirement program, in part because of concerns among Republicans that the unpopular plan would jeopardize their chances in this year's elections.

Some Democrats have emphasized the Social Security reform plan in their campaign to oust Republican incumbents in November, contending it would inject too much risk into the program and push the government deeper into debt.

Bush made Social Security investment accounts a top domestic priority for his second term, arguing such a system would help young people by putting the retirement program on a more sustainable financial footing.

    Bush wants to renew Social Security push after vote, R, 9.9.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=politicsNews&storyID=2006-09-09T185922Z_01_N09399044_RTRUKOC_0_US-BUSH-SOCIALSECURITY.xml&WTmodLoc=Home-C5-politicsNews-2

Bush: CIA terrorism detention program "invaluable"

Sat Sep 9, 2006 11:35 AM ET
Reuters
By Tabassum Zakaria

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - As he prepared to commemorate the fifth anniversary of September 11, President George W. Bush said on Saturday a CIA detention program to interrogate terrorism suspects had been "invaluable" in efforts to prevent another attack on the United States.

Bush this week publicly acknowledged the CIA had held high-level terrorism suspects, including alleged September 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, in secret overseas locations.

He announced Mohammed and 13 others were transferred recently to the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention center run by the Pentagon to be prosecuted in the future.

The CIA program disclosed by The Washington Post last year prompted an international outcry and criticism from human rights groups.

Bush was unbowed by the criticism and steadfastly supported the program that since the September 11 attacks has held fewer than 100 terrorism suspects. While there was none in CIA custody after the 14 were transferred recently, the program will continue, administration officials said.

"This program has been invaluable to the security of America and its allies, and helped us identify and capture men who our intelligence community believes were key architects of the September the 11th attacks," Bush said in his weekly radio address.

Information from the suspects held by the CIA had helped uncover al Qaeda plots and capture senior members of the network, he said.

"Were it not for this program, our intelligence community believes that al Qaeda and its allies would have succeeded in launching another attack against the American homeland," Bush said.

Democrats, seeking to win control of at least one house of Congress in the November election, are highlighting an increasingly unpopular Iraq war with voters.

Five years after the September 11 attacks, "America is not nearly as safe as we can be and we must be," said Rep. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, a Democrat who is running for U.S. Senate.

"This anniversary of 9/11, we must refocus our efforts on the war on terror by ending our open-ended commitment in Iraq and by redirecting our efforts to destroy al Qaeda," Brown said in the Democratic response to the president's radio address.

"Democrats will fight for this goal even as the president and as congressional Republicans stubbornly insist on staying a failed course," he said.

U.S. forces continue to hunt for al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, who since the September 11 attacks have sporadically issued video and audiotapes to show they have not been captured or killed.

"America still faces determined enemies," Bush said. "And in the long run, defeating these enemies requires more than improved security at home and military action abroad. We must also offer a hopeful alternative to the terrorists' hateful ideology," he said.

"By advancing freedom and democracy as the great alternative to repression and radicalism, and by supporting young democracies like Iraq, we are helping to bring a brighter future to this region -- and that will make America and the world more secure," Bush said.

He plans to commemorate the September 11 anniversary with visits on Sunday and Monday to all three sites struck by the hijacked planes -- Ground Zero where the World Trade Center's twin towers collapsed in New York, the Pentagon outside Washington and a field in Pennsylvania.

    Bush: CIA terrorism detention program "invaluable", R, 9.9.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2006-09-09T153447Z_01_N08426916_RTRUKOC_0_US-BUSH.xml&WTmodLoc=Home-C5-domesticNews-3

Before Speeches, a Bush Strategy to Regain Edge

September 9, 2006
The New York Times
By DAVID E. SANGER and SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

WASHINGTON, Sept. 8 — When President Bush and his top aides gathered in July to sketch out a strategy for the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, it was clear to all that they had to try to reset the clock — back to a time, before Iraq, when portraying Mr. Bush as a steely commander in chief was a far simpler task, and before Hurricane Katrina, when questions about the administration’s competence did not weigh so heavily.

From those discussions emerged the speeches Mr. Bush has delivered over the last week, the leading edge of a remarkably intensive and aggressive campaign in which he has tried to regain ground he has lost for more than two years, by turning the conversation away from Iraq and back toward the broader war on terror.

It is a carefully calibrated strategy that will continue in coming days, first with an appearance Sunday morning by Vice President Dick Cheney on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” the vehicle he used to advantage at key moments after Sept. 11 and then Mr. Bush’s appearance that night at ground zero in New York and a prayer service at St. Paul’s Chapel.

On Monday, for the first time since the first anniversary, in 2002, Mr. Bush will visit all three sites of the attack that remade his presidency — New York, Shanksville, Pa. and the Pentagon. Then he will cap the day and bring to a close this phase of his effort to portray himself and his party on his terms with a nationally televised speech from the Oval Office.

It is bound to be reminiscent of his speech from the same seat exactly five years before, when, after a shaky day, he first pronounced the “Bush doctrine” that led to the toppling of the Taliban in Afghanistan and ultimately became the heart of the administration’s justification for invading Iraq.

“You can never turn back the clock,” Dan Bartlett, the counselor to the president, said on Friday when asked about the strategy. “But we knew that news organizations and everyone else would be using this moment to define where we were five years later, and the president wanted to articulate his view, too.”

“He’s not trying to ignore Iraq — he wouldn’t, he doesn’t want to,” Mr. Bartlett added. “But he had to explain that even if we have a debate here about whether Iraq’s part of the war on terror, the enemy believes it is.”

Mr. Bartlett, like Mr. Bush two weeks ago, said this was a moment of remembrance and a reminder of national resolve, not a moment for politics. But nine weeks before a midterm election that many Republicans fear they may lose, it is impossible to separate remembrance and politics.

In interviews, Republican strategists who are aware of the closely held White House plans for this week say the critical question is whether Mr. Bush still holds the power to alter the course of national conversation away from the Iraq war and back to the theme that has worked for them before, countering direct threats to the United States.

But there is another, related question as well: whether Republicans can succeed again in convincing the nation that Democrats cannot be trusted with keeping it safe. The political strategy pursued by Mr. Bush’s strategist, Karl Rove, has always been to frame elections as choices and to work to make the other side an unappealing alternative.

The White House has signaled its intentions on that score and appears to be pivoting to a more openly political phase of its strategy, in which the administration and its allies will try to undermine the Democrats.

Last week, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld compared critics of the war to “appeasers.” Mr. Cheney, for months, has been calling those who want to withdraw from Iraq “plain wrong.” The White House press secretary, Tony Snow, coined a new term, “Defeatocrats,” that Republicans have quickly worked into their lexicon, along with highly charged words like “surrender.”

“I think this series of speeches will be critical to not simply defining this president, but more importantly to defining the challenges of our generation,” said Ken Mehlman, chairman of the Republican National Committee, adding, “One of the key questions that voters will answer is whether they want to elect leaders who recognize that we’re at war and want to do whatever it takes to win the war, or do they want to surrender very key tools that have been necessary to prosecute the war.”

Republicans and their allies are already stepping up their negative campaign against Democrats. In Tennessee, the Republican National Committee is running an advertisement against the Democratic candidate for Senate, Representative Harold Ford, that features pictures of fighter planes and control towers, as an ominous voice intones: “The threats are out there. The responsibility is clear. Knowing who the terrorists are and where they are is the only way to keep us safe.”

While Mr. Bush proved in recent days that he was capable of seizing the agenda and dominating the news, there were reminders of the limits of his power to drive the national discussion to his benefit. He was out fund-raising on Friday, but the candidates did not campaign publicly with him, only behind closed doors at the fund-raisers.

And even the Senate Intelligence Committee, which Republicans control, released a report on Friday that raised new questions about the administration’s use of prewar intelligence. It found that the Central Intelligence Agency had backed away last fall from the administration’s claims, which Mr. Bush repeated just weeks ago, of ties between Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and the Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

The White House campaign to seize control of the debate grew in part out of a national security issue involving Mr. Bush’s decision to move 14 high-profile terrorist suspects from C.I.A. custody in undisclosed locations in other countries into military custody at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, said one Republican who is often consulted by the White House and who spoke in return for anonymity.

The Republican said it was the transfer of the 14 suspects as much as Monday’s anniversary of the attacks that prompted the political planning. The initial thought, he said, was to give one speech to “talk about the context,” but soon the idea grew into a series of speeches dovetailing nicely with the political agenda, managed by Mr. Rove, the chief strategist; Mr. Bartlett; and Joshua B. Bolten, the chief of staff.

“The political folks and the communications folks, basically Karl and Dan and Josh, were delighted with the notion that you could begin to shape the fall debate around a series of substantive speeches that would not only drive the news but define the policy for people, and define the differences,” this Republican said.

The speeches, written by a team headed by William J. McGurn, emphasized the continuing threat represented by Osama bin Laden and went on to offer Mr. Bush’s own fairly upbeat report on progress made in closing the gaps in domestic security laid bare by the Sept. 11 attacks.

The White House kept the details of one speech particularly secret, even from some senior staff members: Mr. Bush’s declaration on Wednesday that he had transferred the terror suspects from C.I.A. custody to the detention center at Guantánamo in a speech in which he also challenged Congress to give him the authority to begin war-crimes trials.

“This was the most cumbersome, because all of the material was so highly classified,” Mr. Bartlett said, though Mr. Bush declassified some of the details of their interrogations in an effort to bolster his case that sometimes there was a need for what he delicately called “alternative” interrogation methods.

    Before Speeches, a Bush Strategy to Regain Edge, NYT, 9.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/09/us/politics/09elect.html?hp&ex=1157860800&en=3b719ad93e4c8ca0&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Domestic Security

Bush Assures That the Nation Is Safer as Memories Turn to a Day of Destruction

September 8, 2006
The New York Times
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

ATLANTA, Sept. 7 — Setting out his own narrative of what happened on Sept. 11, 2001, President Bush on Thursday defended his administration’s record on domestic security, saying he had “learned a lot of lessons” on that day and had made Americans safer as a result.

Speaking to an audience of conservative intellectuals here, Mr. Bush also called on Congress to pass legislation authorizing one of his most controversial antiterror initiatives, a once-secret National Security Agency program to eavesdrop on suspected members of Al Qaeda.

The president used the latest in a series of his addresses leading up to the fifth anniversary of Sept. 11 to continue his effort to reshape the political climate by focusing the nation on the threat from terrorism rather than the war in Iraq. He mentioned only briefly the proposal he unveiled on Wednesday for interrogating and trying detainees linked to terrorism.

Instead, he offered his version of how terrorists plotted to attack the United States on Sept. 11 and used that framework to present a “progress report” — a rebuttal to critics who say he has not done enough and a playbook that Republican candidates may use as they face skeptical voters in November.

There is a wide range of narratives competing to define how the Sept. 11 attacks came about and played out, from the liberal version embodied in Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 911” to the partly fictionalized account in a coming ABC miniseries “The Path to 9/11,” which has drawn intense criticism from former Clinton administration officials who say it misrepresents what they did to confront Al Qaeda.

In Mr. Bush’s version of events, there was no mention of the August 2001 intelligence report warning that Osama bin Laden was plotting to attack inside the United States. Nor was there any of his own early response, judged by his critics to have been erratic, after learning, during a visit to a Florida elementary school, that planes had crashed into the Word Trade Center.

Instead, the president laid out what he said were the four critical phases of the plot: its early planning abroad; the movement of the first Qaeda operatives to the United States; the arrival of the remainder of the plotters and the flight training they undertook; and the morning of the attacks, when the terrorists passed airport security to board the ill-fated flights.

“Many Americans look at these events,” Mr. Bush said, “and ask the same question: Five years after 9/11, are we safer? The answer is, yes, America is safer. We are safer because we’ve taken action to protect the homeland.”

For each phase, the president ticked off a litany of steps his administration had taken, like air security improvements and revamping intelligence agencies so they can share information more freely. To buttress his case, the White House released a 21-page report entitled “9/11 Five Years Later: Successes and Challenges,” stuffed with facts and numbers.

“I learned a lot of lessons on 9/11,” Mr. Bush said at one point. At another, he said, “We’ve learned the lessons of 9/11, and we have addressed the gaps in our defenses exposed by that attack.”

Critics, including Democrats and the Republican co-chairman of the commission that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks, say the Bush administration has not done nearly enough to prevent another attack. The co-chairman, Thomas H. Kean, a former New Jersey governor, said in an interview last week that both the administration and Congress should be held accountable for failing to adopt his panel’s recommendations in their entirety.

“The most dangerous gap is the possibility of a terrorist with a nuclear weapon,” Mr. Kean said, when asked to cite an example of a vulnerability. “We still haven’t done enough to contain about a hundred sites around the world that have enriched uranium.”

During a year when control of Congress may turn on the question of which party is better suited to keep Americans safe, Mr. Bush is clearly trying to take the offensive. A senior White House official, who requested anonymity before talking about internal strategy, said that Thursday’s address was a way to hammer home the “safer yet not safe” theme.

“It was a way for the president to go back and say, They got into the country, here’s what would happen today,” the official said. “They got money, here’s what would happen today, and kind of go through those four phases to spell out how we are safer but still not safe.”

Later in the day, Mr. Bush turned more directly to politics, traveling to Savannah to attend a fund-raiser for Max Burns, a former Republican congressman who is trying to regain his seat.

Mr. Bush’s request for Congress to authorize the federal eavesdropping was his second legislative request in as many days. On Wednesday he called on lawmakers to approve a bill creating new military commissions to try terror suspects, replacing tribunals that the administration had authorized but that were struck down by the Supreme Court.

“The surest way to keep the program,” Mr. Bush said, referring to the eavesdropping, “is to get explicit approval from the United States Congress.”

    Bush Assures That the Nation Is Safer as Memories Turn to a Day of Destruction, NYT, 8.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/08/washington/08bush.html

Bush Touts Progress Since 9 / 11 Attacks

September 8, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:35 a.m. ET
The New York Times

ATLANTA (AP) -- Terrorists today would have a tougher time plotting and carrying out attacks like the ones of Sept. 11 because of security improvements in the past five years, President Bush said Thursday.

There's no way to know if the attacks would have been prevented by the changes, Bush said, but he contended the nation is safer than in September 2001.

Keeping his focus on national security leading up to Monday's anniversary of the attacks and November's congressional elections, Bush said more still needs to be done to stop the terrorist threat.

He pressed Congress to take quick action on two new laws -- legislation proposed Wednesday by the White House that would allow terror suspects to be tried by a military commission and a bill that would give specific authority for his anti-terror eavesdropping program.

Bush initially resisted eavesdropping legislation on the grounds that the once top-secret program was already legal and that legislation could expose sensitive details.

But some leading members of Congress disagreed, and a federal judge in Detroit ruled last month that the program violated rights to free speech and privacy as well as constitutional separation of powers.

''A series of protracted legal challenges would put a heavy burden on this critical and vital program,'' Bush said in a speech to the conservative Georgia Public Policy Foundation. ''The surest way to keep the program is to get explicit approval from the United States Congress.''

Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid accused Bush of trying to scare Americans into voting Republican in the midterm elections with his speeches. He said the president's announcement Wednesday that he was transferring 14 terror suspects from secret CIA prisons to military custody so they can be tried before military panels was also politically timed.

''He's had years to bring these murders to justice, and he's waited until now -- two months before an election -- to do it?'' Reid said. ''It's a cynical but typical move from the campaigner in chief.''

Bush said the United States has been making progress against terrorists in the past five years, beginning with the unsuccessful mission of the terrorists on United Flight 93, which crashed into a field in Pennsylvania when passengers fought back. ''They delivered America its first victory in the war on terror,'' the president said to sustained applause.

''Many Americans look at these events and ask the same question: Five years after 9/11, are we safer?'' Bush said. ''The answer is: Yes, America is safer.''

Bush said that's because his administration has filled gaps in the country's defenses that the terrorists exploited.

He used the example of two hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, who had come to the attention of the CIA before they helped crash American Flight 77 into the Pentagon but still were able to enter the United States.

Today, Bush said, intelligence officials would put known suspects like al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar on a watch list that would be accessible at airports, consulates, border crossings and for state and local law enforcement. The men would have face-to-face interviews today to get visas and would be fingerprinted and screened against a database of known or suspected terrorists.

Al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi were preparing for the attack while living in California, making phone calls to planners overseas. Bush said today, the National Security Agency monitors international calls ''such as those between the al-Qaida operatives secretly in the United States and planners of the 9/11 attacks.''

On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, al-Hazmi, al-Mihdhar and 17 others were allowed to board their flights even though some of them were flagged by the passenger prescreening system. At the time, rules required only that their checked baggage be held until they boarded the planes.

Some of the hijackers also set off metal detectors. Security screeners manually checked them with handheld devices, but allowed them to board without verifying what had set off the alarms.

Bush said improved screening by the Transportation Security Administration, an increased number of federal air marshals, hardened cockpit doors and pilots trained to carry firearms would help stop a similar plot today.

''Even if all the steps I've outlined this morning had been taken before 9/11, no one can say for sure that we would have prevented the attack,'' Bush said. ''We can say that if America had these reforms in place in 2001, the terrorists would have found it harder to plan and finance their operations, harder to slip into the country undetected, and harder to board the airplanes and take control of the cockpits, and succeed in striking their targets.''

On the Net:

http://www.whitehouse.gov 

    Bush Touts Progress Since 9 / 11 Attacks, NYT, 8.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Bush.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Editorial

A Sudden Sense of Urgency

September 7, 2006
The New York Times

Two months before a Congressional election in which voters are expressing serious doubts about the Republicans’ handling of national security, President Bush finally has some real terrorists in Guantánamo Bay.

Mr. Bush admitted yesterday that the Central Intelligence Agency has been secretly holding prisoners and said he was transferring 14 to Guantánamo Bay, including some believed to have been behind the 9/11 attacks. He said he was informing the Red Cross about the prisoners, placing them under the Geneva Conventions, and asking that Congress — right now — create military tribunals to try them.

Those are just the right steps. If Guantánamo Bay has any purpose, it is for men like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Ramzi bin al-Shibh, considered key players in 9/11. They should go on trial. If convicted, they should be locked up for life.

But Mr. Bush’s urgency was phony, driven by the Supreme Court’s ruling, not principle. This should all have happened long ago. If the White House had not wanted to place terror suspects beyond the reach of the law, all 14 of these men could have been tried by now, and America’s reputation would have been spared some grievous damage. And there would be no need for Congress to rush through legislation if the White House had not stymied all of its attempts to do just that before.

The nation needs laws governing Guantánamo Bay, not just for the 14 new prisoners, but also for many others who have been there for years without due process, and who may have done no wrong.

Last month, for example, The Washington Post wrote about some of the first arrivals at Guantánamo Bay in 2002: six men, born in Algeria but living in Bosnia, accused of plotting to attack the United States Embassy in Sarajevo. Two years after their capture, Bosnian officials exonerated them. Last year, the Bosnian prime minister asked Washington to release them. But The Post said the administration has decided the men will never be returned to Bosnia, only to Algeria, and then only if they are confined or kept under close watch. Even the Algerian government won’t go along with that.

Mr. Bush could have prevented this sort of miscarriage of justice if he had not insisted on creating his own system of military tribunals, which the Supreme Court ruled illegal. Even now, the legislation he is proposing to handle Guantánamo prisoners would undermine key principles of justice. It would permit the use of evidence obtained through coercion, along with hearsay evidence, and evidence that is kept secret from the accused. The military’s top lawyers have all publicly opposed these provisions.

Mr. Bush also wants to rewrite American law to create a glaring exception to the Geneva Conventions, to give ex post facto approval to abusive interrogation methods, and to bar legal challenges to the new system.

Some of the most influential Republican voices on military affairs, Senators John Warner, John McCain and Lindsey Graham, are sponsoring a more sensible bill that would bar the use of coerced testimony and secret evidence. Members of this Congress have a nasty habit of caving in to the White House on national security, and there’s a looming election, but it is vital that they stick to their principles this time.

    A Sudden Sense of Urgency, NYT, 7.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/07/opinion/07thu1.html

News Analysis

A Challenge From Bush to Congress

September 7, 2006
The New York Times
By DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON, Sept. 6 — In calling for public war-crime trials at Guantánamo Bay, President Bush is calculating that with a critical election just nine weeks away, neither angry Democrats nor nervous Republicans will dare deny him the power to detain, interrogate and try suspects his way.

For years now, Guantánamo has been a political liability, regarded primarily as a way station for outcasts. By transforming Guantánamo instead into the new home of 14 Qaeda leaders who rank among the most notorious terror suspects, Mr. Bush is challenging Congress to restore to him the authority to put the United States’ worst enemies on trial on terms he has defined.

But the gambit carries with it a potential downside by identifying Mr. Bush even more closely with a detention system whose history has been marked by widespread accusations of mistreatment.

Mr. Bush had more than one agenda at work when he announced on Wednesday that the country should “wait no longer’’ to bring to trial those seized by the C.I.A. and accused of planning the Sept. 11 attacks.

He is trying to rebuff a Supreme Court that visibly angered him in June when it ruled that his procedures for interrogation and trials violated both the Constitution and the Geneva Conventions.

And he is trying to divert voters from the morass of Iraq and to revive the emotionally potent question of what powers the president should be able to use to defend the country.

Mr. Bush must have known that his call for trials would prompt a standing ovation from the relatives of the Sept. 11 victims who were invited to the East Room for the announcement. It did. What he doesn’t know for sure is whether the transfer of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and other terror suspects will create the pressure on Capitol Hill to give him the legal latitude he says he needs.

“It’s one thing for Congress to argue over abstract rules’’ about approved interrogation techniques and the rules of evidence at military commissions, said one senior administration official who sat in on the debates over how to respond to the Supreme Court ruling in the Hamdan case last June. “But it’s another to say, ‘Once you approve the rules, we put these guys on trial — but it only happens if Congress acts.’ ’’

In this case, the White House needs Congress to write the rules in a way that would satisfy the Supreme Court while allowing the military to introduce its evidence at trial — even though Mr. Muhammed and his fellow defendants will almost certainly assert that their own accounts of their roles in terror plots were extracted by coercion.

That is a balancing act Mr. Bush tried for years to avoid, as he and Vice President Dick Cheney, the chief architect of Mr. Bush’s assertions of broad executive powers, argued that it was the commander in chief — not Congress — who had the power to set rules for unconventional trials in an unconventional war.

Besides trying to shape what happens in Congress, Mr. Bush is also trying to ignite a new debate around the country, one that tries to rekindle memories of the days just after the Sept. 11 attacks. On Wednesday, he recalled those days as a moment when the country “wondered if there was a second wave of attacks still to come.’’

That was also a time when the president seemed to have carte blanche to fight terrorists in any way he saw fit, and when the country seemed unified in a way that is hard to remember today.

So in the week leading up to the announcement on Wednesday, Mr. Bush and his aides again cast themselves as the country’s last line of defense. First came Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, who used a speech to veterans to accuse critics of the war in Iraq of being appeasers, ideological descendants of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain of Britain, whose effort to accommodate Hitler in 1938 has gone down in history as an act of cowardice.

Then came Mr. Bush, who used a speech to the same audience to lump disparate groups together as “Islamo-fascists,’’ and then, this week, to warn explicitly that the world had averted its eyes to the rise of Lenin and then of Hitler, propelling the United States into a century of hot and cold wars.

But perhaps more significantly, a president who had rarely mentioned Osama bin Laden — who, of course, remains at large five years after Sept 11 — quoted Mr. bin Laden at length, describing his visions of a “caliphate’’ that circles the globe.

On Wednesday, in the East Room, Mr. Bush’s words were more moderate, but he made clear that he intended to use his pulpit over the next few days to redefine the enemy as a living threat that will occupy generations of Americans — and to argue that he needs every tool available to fight them. “We’re fighting for our way of life, and our ability to live in freedom,’’ he argued. “We’re fighting for the cause of humanity, against those who seek to impose the darkness of tyranny and terror upon the entire world.’’

It was a move that did not surprise Democrats.

“Look, they have won two elections on the basis of terrorism, and that’s the president’s strongest position,’’ said Lee Hamilton, the former Democratic congressman who is now co-chairman of a study group making recommendations to Mr. Bush about how to develop a new Iraq strategy. “And he’s playing to his strength.’’

But it may also force members of Mr. Bush’s party — many of whom have been creating as much strategic distance from the president as possible — to nationalize the midterm elections, making them a referendum on Mr. Bush and his tactics.

Democrats have been trying to do that for months, betting that the chaos in Iraq is their ticket to regaining a majority in the House, and perhaps the longer shot of the Senate. Now Mr. Bush is betting that once again Americans will look at the faces of the terrorists the C.I.A. has captured, and give the president one last shot at fighting the war on his terms.

    A Challenge From Bush to Congress, NYT, 7.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/07/washington/07terror.html?hp&ex=1157688000&en=4232fc565b4e597b&ei=5094&partner=homepage

The Overview

President Moves 14 Held in Secret to Guantánamo

September 7, 2006
The New York Times
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

WASHINGTON, Sept. 6 — President Bush said Wednesday that 14 high-profile terror suspects held secretly until now by the Central Intelligence Agency — including the man accused of masterminding the Sept. 11 attacks — had been transferred to the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to face military tribunals if Congress approves.

The suspects include Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, thought to be the Sept. 11 mastermind, and other close associates of Osama bin Laden. Mr. Bush said he had decided to “bring them into the open” after years in which the C.I.A. held them without charges in undisclosed sites abroad, in a program the White House had not previously acknowledged.

The announcement, in the East Room of the White House, was the first time the president had discussed the secret C.I.A. program, and he made clear that he had fully authorized it. Mr. Bush defended the treatment the suspects had received but would not say where the so-called “high-value terrorist detainees” had been held or what techniques had been used to extract information from them.

The transfer of the high-level suspects to Guantánamo Bay effectively suspended the extraordinary program, in which the intelligence agency became the jailer and interrogator of suspects counterterrorism officials considered the world’s most wanted Islamic extremists.

The government says the 14 terror suspects include some of the most senior members of Al Qaeda captured by the United States since 2001, including those responsible for the bombing of the destroyer Cole in 2000 in Yemen and the 1998 attacks on American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Most of the detainees have been interviewed extensively and are believed to have little remaining intelligence value.

With the transfer of the suspects to Guantánamo, which is run by the Defense Department, the International Committee of the Red Cross will monitor their treatment, Mr. Bush said. He used the East Room appearance to urge Congress to authorize new military commissions to put terror suspects on trial, replacing rules established by the administration but struck down in June by the Supreme Court. [Page A27.]

“As soon as Congress acts to authorize the military commissions I have proposed, the men our intelligence officials believe orchestrated the deaths of nearly 3,000 Americans on Sept. 11, 2001, can face justice,” Mr. Bush said, to an audience that included family members of the victims. He added, “To start the process for bringing them to trial, we must bring them out into the open.”

To that end, the president sent Congress legislation proposing new rules for the commissions and detailing specific standards for the humane treatment of detainees. Yet the proposal hews closely to the old commission model, and it retains several provisions the court found troublesome, including language that permits defendants to be excluded from their own trials.

At the same time, the Pentagon released a new Army Field Manual that lays out permissible interrogation techniques and specifically bans eight methods that have come up in abuse cases. Among the techniques banned is water-boarding, in which a wet rag is forced down a bound prisoner’s throat to cause gagging; intelligence officials have said Mr. Mohammed was subjected to that treatment while in C.I.A. custody.

Although the C.I.A. has faced criticism over the use of harsh techniques, one senior intelligence official said detainees had not been mistreated. They were given dental and vision care as well as the Koran, prayer rugs and clocks to schedule prayers, the official said. They were also given reading material, DVD’s and access to exercise equipment.

Administration officials said the timing of Mr. Bush’s decision to bring the terror suspects to trial was driven not by politics but by the need to respond to the Supreme Court’s decision and the fact that the suspects were no longer regarded as sources of valuable intelligence.

On Capitol Hill, some Republicans reacted warily. But even those who criticized the proposal said it was imperative for Congress to pass legislation setting up tribunals soon.

“I do not believe it is necessary to have a trial where the accused cannot see the evidence against them,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, a former military prosecutor who has played a central role in the debate. But Mr. Graham said he believed his differences with the White House “can be overcome.”

Mr. Bush’s speech was the third in a series he is delivering on the war on terror in the days before the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, and it carried potential political benefits for a White House that is intent on maintaining Republican control of Congress this November.

The address helped put a face on the enemy, reminding Americans that while Osama bin Laden — to whom Mr. Bush referred repeatedly in a speech on Tuesday — is still at large, many terrorists have been captured. Five years after the attacks, Mr. Bush gave the families of Sept. 11 victims something to cheer about, and those in the audience did, as he announced he wanted to put the suspects on trial.

By moving the high-profile suspects to Guantánamo just two months before the midterm elections, the administration is putting intense pressure on lawmakers to act before adjourning to campaign. If Democrats try to thwart legislation to try senior members of Al Qaeda, they will risk being labeled weak on national security, a label they can ill afford in an election that may turn on the question of which party is better suited to keep Americans safe.

“This is certainly a logical and very sound step both substantively and politically,” said David Rivkin, who served in the White House counsel’s office under the first President Bush and is sympathetic to this administration’s approach. “It’s reminding the country and the world of the folks we are fighting against. Nobody can say these are just pitiful foot soldiers; these are pretty senior guys.”

The C.I.A. program, though officially a secret, has been the subject of numerous news reports in recent months. By speaking publicly about it for the first time, Mr. Bush hopes to build support for it on Capitol Hill, and in the public.

The White House released biographies of the 14 suspects and details of the accusations against them. They include such well-known Qaeda operatives as Abu Zubaydah, who the administration said was trying to organize a terrorist attack in Israel at the time of his capture, and Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who the authorities say helped facilitate the Sept. 11 attacks.

Despite the new information, human rights organizations were critical of Mr. Bush’s announcement.

“It’s wonderful that at last the United States has acknowledged that these detention sites exist,” said Larry Cox, executive director of Amnesty International U.S.A. But Mr. Cox described the program as “a form of torture,” and said the United States should suspend it.

In his speech, Mr. Bush fiercely resisted that characterization. “I want to be absolutely clear with our people, and the world,” he said. “The United States does not torture. It’s against our laws, and it’s against our values. I have not authorized it — and I will not authorize it.”

A senior intelligence official said there had been fewer than 100 detainees in the C.I.A. program since its inception shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks. Beyond the 14, the remainder have either been turned over to the Defense Department as so-called unlawful enemy combatants, returned to their countries of origin or sent to nations that have legal proceedings against them.

The official described the C.I.A. detainees as the government’s “single largest source of insight into Al Qaeda,” saying they accounted for 50 percent of everything the authorities had learned about the terrorist network. But, he said, “Some of these people have been held for a considerable period of time, and their intelligence value has aged off.”

Mr. Bush said the C.I.A. would not relinquish its capability to detain and question terrorism suspects, and the senior intelligence official said the administration intended that the program would continue. But agency officials — who feared employees might be subject to lawsuits or criminal prosecution — welcomed the hand-off of the detainees and the prospect that the C.I.A.’s role would be limited in future cases.

“I am confident that this will be greeted with relief by agency employees,” said Jeffrey H. Smith, a former general counsel for the C.I.A. “Many of them were uncomfortable with their role as jailers.”

Military justice experts say that if Congress passes the legislation, trials of some terror suspects at Guantánamo could begin relatively quickly, in three to four months. But the trials of the 14 high-value suspects, who are held in a special high-security facility separate from other detainees, might not begin for at least a year, because the government would have to build its case .

One expert who has been critical of the administration’s plan, Eugene R. Fidell, predicted that the proposal would attract a lawsuit.

“Going the way they have done this is in fact quite unfair to the very families of 9/11 victims who President Bush had at his meeting today,” Mr. Fidell said, “because those people need closure and in fact what he’s done is guarantee further protracted delay because of the inevitable litigation.”

On Capitol Hill, Democrats were also critical. Representative Jane Harman of California, the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said Mr. Bush should have disclosed the program years ago and called his speech “the opening salvo in the fall campaign.”

David Johnston and Mark Mazzetti contributed reporting for this article.

    President Moves 14 Held in Secret to Guantánamo, NYT, 7.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/07/us/07detain.html?hp&ex=1157688000&en=1b1b17004743af8d&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Transcript

President Bush's Speech on Terrorism

September 6, 2006
The New York Times

Following is the transcript of President Bush's speech on terrorism from the White House, as provided by CQ Transcriptions, Inc

Thank you. Thanks for the warm welcome. Welcome to the White House.

Mr. Vice President, Secretary Rice, Attorney General Gonzales, Ambassador Negroponte, General Hayden, members of the United States Congress, families who lost loved ones in the terrorist attacks on our nation, my fellow citizens, thanks for coming.

On the morning of September the 11th, 2001, our nation awoke to a nightmare attack. Nineteen men armed with box cutters took control of airplanes and turned them into missiles. They used them to kill nearly 3,000 innocent people.

We watched the twin towers collapse before our eyes, and it became instantly clear that we'd entered a new world and a dangerous new war.

The attacks of September the 11th horrified our nation. And amid the grief came new fears and urgent questions. Who had attacked us? What did they want? And what else were they planning?

Americans saw the destruction the terrorists had caused in New York and Washington and Pennsylvania, and they wondered if there were other terrorist cells in our midst poised to strike. They wondered if there was a second wave of attacks still to come.

With the twin towers and the Pentagon still smoldering, our country on edge, and a stream of intelligence coming in about potential new attacks, my administration faced immediate challenges. We had to respond to the attack on our country. We had to wage an unprecedented war against an enemy unlike any we had fought before. We had to find the terrorists hiding in America and across the world before they were able to strike our country again.

So in the early days and weeks after 9/11, I directed our government's senior national security officials to do everything in their power, within our laws, to prevent another attack.

Nearly five years have passed since those initial days of shock and sadness.

And we are thankful that the terrorists have not succeeded in launching another attack on our soil.

This is not for the lack of desire or determination on the part of the enemy. As the recently foiled plot in London shows, the terrorists are still active, and they are still trying to strike America and they are still trying to kill our people.

One reason the terrorists have not succeeded is because of the hard work of thousands of dedicated men and women in our government who have toiled day and night, along with our allies, to stop the enemy from carrying out their plans.

And we are grateful for these hardworking citizens of ours.

nother reason the terrorists have not succeeded is because our government has changed its policies and given our military, intelligence and law enforcement personnel the tools they need to fight this enemy and protect our people and preserve our freedoms.

The terrorists who declared war on America represent no nation. They defend no territory. And they wear no uniform. They do not mass armies on borders or flotillas of warships on the high seas.

They operate in the shadows of society. They send small teams of operatives to infiltrate free nations. They live quietly among their victims. They conspire in secret. And then they strike without warning.

And in this new war, the most important source of information on where the terrorists are hiding and what they are planning is the terrorists themselves.

Captured terrorists have unique knowledge about how terrorist networks operate. They have knowledge of where their operatives are deployed and knowledge about what plots are under way.

This intelligence -- this is intelligence that cannot be found any other place. And our security depends on getting this kind of information.

To win the war on terror, we must be able to detain, question and, when appropriate, prosecute terrorists captured here in America and on the battlefields around the world.

After the 9/11 attacks, our coalition launched operations across the world to remove terrorist safehavens and capture or kill terrorist operatives and leaders.

Working with our allies, we've captured and detained thousands of terrorists and enemy fighters in Afghanistan, in Iraq and other fronts of this war on terror.

These enemy -- these are enemy combatants who are waging war on our nation. We have a right under the laws of war, and we have an obligation to the American people, to detain these enemies and stop them from rejoining the battle.

Most of the enemy combatants we capture are held in Afghanistan or in Iraq where they're questioned by our military personnel. Many are released after questioning or turned over to local authorities if we determine that they do not pose a continuing threat and no longer have significant intelligence value.

Others remain in American custody near the battlefield, to ensure that they don't return to the fight.

In some cases, we determined that individuals we have captured pose a significant threat or may have intelligence that we and our allies need to have to prevent new attacks.

Many are Al Qaeda operatives or Taliban fighters trying to conceal their identities. And they withhold information that could save American lives.

In these cases, it has been necessary to move these individuals to an environment where they can be held secretly, questioned by experts and, when appropriate, prosecuted for terrorist acts.

Some of these individuals are taken to the United States naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

It's important for Americans and others across the world to understand the kind of people held at Guantanamo. These aren't common criminals or bystanders accidentally swept up on the battlefield.

We have in place a rigorous process to ensure those held at Guantanamo Bay belong at Guantanamo. Those held at Guantanamo include suspected bombmakers, terrorist trainers, recruiters and facilitators, and potential suicide bombers. They are in our custody so that they cannot murder our people.

One detainee held at Guantanamo told a questioner questioning -- he said this: I'll never forget your face. I will kill you, your brother, your mother and your sisters.

In addition to the terrorists held at Guantanamo, a small number of suspected terrorist leaders and operatives captured during the war have been held and questioned outside the United States, in a separate program operated by the Central Intelligence Agency.

This group includes individuals believed to be the key architects of the September the 11th attacks and attacks on the USS Cole; an operative involved in the bombings of our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania; and individuals involved in other attacks that have taken the lives of innocent civilians across the world.

These are dangerous men, with unparalleled knowledge about terrorist networks and their plans of new attacks. The security of our nation and the lives of our citizens depend on our ability to learn what these terrorists know.

Many specifics of this program, including where these detainees have been held and the details of their confinement, cannot be divulged. Doing so would provide our enemies with information they could use to take retribution against our allies and harm our country.

I can say that questioning the detainees in this program has given us information that has saved innocent lives by helping us stop new attacks, here in the United States and across the world.

Today I'm going to share with you some of the examples provided by our intelligence community of how this program has saved lives, why it remains vital to the security of the United States and our friends and allies, and why it deserves the support of the United States Congress and the American people.

Within months of September 11, 2001, we captured a man named Abu Zubaydah. We believed that Zubaydah was a senior terrorist leader and a trusted associate of Osama bin Laden.

Our intelligence community believes he had run a terrorist camp in Afghanistan where some of the 9/11 hijackers trained and that he helped smuggle Al Qaeda leaders out of Afghanistan after coalition forces arrived to liberate that country.

Zubaydah was severely wounded during the firefight that brought him into custody. And he survived only because of the medical care arranged by the CIA.

After he recovered, Zubaydah was defiant and evasive. He declared his hatred of America.

During questioning, he, at first, disclosed what he thought was nominal information and then stopped all cooperation.

Well, in fact, the nominal information he gave us turned out to be quite important.

For example, Zubaydah disclosed Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, or KSM, was the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks and used the alias Mukhtar. This was a vital piece of the puzzle that helped our intelligence community pursue KSM.

Zubaydah also provided information that helped stop a terrorist attack being planned for inside the United States, an attack about which we had no previous information.

Zubaydah told us that Al Qaeda operatives were planning to launch an attack in the United States and provided physical descriptions of the operatives and information on their general location.

Based on the information he provided, the operatives were detained; one, while traveling to the United States.

We knew that Zubaydah had more information that could save innocent lives. But he stopped talking.

BUSH: As his questioning proceeded, it became clear that he had received training on how to resist interrogation. And so, the CIA used an alternative set of procedures.

These procedures were designed to be safe, to comply with our laws, our Constitution and our treaty obligations. The Department of Justice reviewed the authorized methods extensively, and determined them to be lawful.

I cannot describe the specific methods used. I think you understand why. If I did, it would help the terrorists learn how to resist questioning and to keep information from us that we need to prevent new attacks on our country.

But I can say the procedures were tough and they were safe and lawful and necessary.

Zubaydah was questioned using these procedures, and soon he began to provide information on key Al Qaeda operatives, including information that helped us find and capture more of those responsible for the attacks on September the 11th.

For example, Zubaydah identified one of KSM's accomplices in the 9/11 attacks, a terrorist named Ramzi Binalshibh. The information Zubaydah provided helped lead to the capture of Binalshibh. And together these two terrorists provided information that helped in the planning and execution of the operation that captured Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

Once in our custody, KSM was questioned by the CIA using these procedures. And he soon provided information that helped us stop another planned attack on the United States. During questioning, KSM told us about another Al Qaeda operative he knew was in CIA custody, a terrorist named Majid Khan (ph). KSM revealed that Khan (ph) had been told to deliver $50,000 to individuals working for a suspected terrorist leader named Hambali, the leader of Al Qaeda's Southeast Asia affiliate known as J.I.

CIA officers confronted Khan with this information. Khan confirmed that the money had been delivered to an operative named Zuber and provided both a physical description and contact number for this operative.

Based on that information, Zuber (sp) was captured in June of 2003, and he soon provided information that helped lead to the capture of Hambali. After Hambali's arrest, KSM was questioned again. He identified Hambali's brother as the leader of a JI cell and Hambali's conduit for communications with al Qaeda.

Hambali's brother was soon captured in Pakistan, and in turn led us to a cell of 17 Southeast Asian JI operatives. When confronted with the news that his terror cell had been broken up, Hambali admitted that the operatives were being groomed at KSM's request for attacks inside the United States, probably using airplanes. During questioning, KSM also provided many details of other plots to kill innocent Americans.

For example, he described the design of planned attacks on buildings inside the United States and how operatives were directed to carry them out. He told us the operatives had been instructed to ensure that the explosives went off at a point that was high enough to prevent the people trapped above from escaping out the windows. KSM also provided vital information on al Qaeda's efforts to obtain biological weapons. During questioning, KSM admitted that he had met three individuals involved in al Qaeda's efforts to produce anthrax, a deadly biological agent, and he identified one of the individuals as a terrorist named Yazeed. KSM apparently believed we already had this information because Yazeed had been captured and taken into foreign custody before KSM's arrest.

In fact, we did not know about Yazid's role in al Qaeda's anthrax program. Information from Yazid then helped lead to the capture of his two principal assistants in the anthrax program. Without the information provided by KSM and Yazid, we might not have uncovered this al Qaeda biological weapons program or stopped this al Qaeda cell from developing anthrax for attacks against the United States.

These are some of the plots that have been stopped because of the information of this vital program.

Terrorists held in CIA custody have also provided information that helped stop the planned strike on U.S. Marines at Camp Lemonier in Djibouti. They were going to use an explosive-laden water tanker. They've helped stop a planned attack on U.S. -- on the U.S. consulate in Karachi using car bombs and motorcycle bombs. And they helped stop a plot to hijack passenger planes and fly them into Heathrow or the Canary Wharf in London.

We're getting vital information necessary to do our jobs, and that's protect the American people and our allies.

Information from the terrorists in this program has helped us to identify individuals that al Qaeda deemed suitable for Western operations, many of whom we had never heard about before. They include terrorists who were sent to case targets inside the United States, including financial buildings in major cities on the East Coast. Information from terrorists in CIA custody has played a role in the capture or questioning of nearly every senior al Qaeda member or associate detained by the U.S. and its allies since this program began.

By providing everything from initial leads to photo identifications, to precise locations of where terrorists were hiding, this program has helped us to take potential mass murderers off the streets before they were able to kill.

This program has also played a critical role in helping us understand the enemy we face in this war. Terrorists in this program have painted a picture of al Qaeda's structure and financing and communications and logistics.

They have identified al Qaeda's travel routes and safe havens, and explained how al Qaeda's senior leadership communications with its operatives in places like Iraq. They provide information that allows us -- that has allowed us to make sense of documents and computer records that we have seized in terrorist raids.

They've identified voices in recordings of intercepted calls and helped us understand the meaning of potentially critical terrorist communications.

The information we get from these detainees is corroborated by intelligence, and we receive -- that we have received from other sources. And together this intelligence has helped us connect the dots and stop attacks before they occur.

Information from the terrorists questioned in this program helped unravel plots in terrorist cells in Europe and in other places. It's helped our allies protect their people from deadly enemies.

This program has been and remains one of the most vital tools in our war against the terrorists. It is invaluable to America and to our allies.

Were it not for this program, our intelligence community believes that al Qaeda and its allies would have succeeded in launching another attack against the American homeland. By giving us information about terrorist plans we could not get anywhere else, this program has saved innocent lives.

This program has been subject to multiple legal reviews by the Department of Justice and CIA lawyers. They've determined it complied with our laws. This program has received strict oversight by the CIA's inspector general. A small number of key leaders from both political parties on Capitol Hill were briefed about this program. All those involved in the questioning of the terrorists are carefully chosen, and they're screened from a pool of experienced CIA officers. Those selected to conduct the most sensitive questioning had to complete more than 250 additional hours of specialized training before they are allowed to have contact with a -- captured terrorists. I want to be absolutely clear with our people and the world. The United States does not torture. It's against our laws, and it's against our values. I have not authorized it, and I will not authorize it.

Last year, my administration worked with Senator John McCain, and I signed into law the Detainee Treatment Act, which established the legal standards for treatment of detainees wherever they are held. I support this act. And as we implement this law, our government will continue to use every lawful method to obtain intelligence that can protect innocent people and stop another attack like the one we experienced on September the 11th, 2001.

The CIA program has detained only a limited number of terrorist at any given time. And once we have determined that the terrorists held by the CIA have little or no additional intelligence value, many of them have been returned to their home countries for prosecution or detention by their governments. Others have been accused of terrible crimes against the American people, and we have a duty to bring those responsible for these crimes to justice. So we intend to prosecute these men, as appropriate, for their crimes.

Soon after the war on terror began, I authorized a system of military commissions to try foreign terrorists accused of war crimes. Military commissions have been used by presidents from George Washington to Franklin Roosevelt to prosecute war criminals because the rules for trying enemy combatants in a time of conflict must be different from those for trying common criminals or members of our own military.

One of the first suspected terrorists to be put on trial by military commission was one of Osama bin Laden's bodyguards, a man named Hamdan. His lawyers challenged the legality of the military commission system. It took more than two years for this case to make its way through the courts. The Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld the military commissions we had designed, but this past June, the Supreme Court overturned that decision. The Supreme Court determined that military commissions are an appropriate venue for trying terrorists, but ruled that military commissions needed to be explicitly authorized by the United States Congress.

So today I'm sending Congress legislation to specifically authorize the creation of military commissions to try terrorists for war crimes. My administration has been working with members of both parties in the House and Senate on this legislation. We've put forward a bill that ensures these commissions are established in a way that protects our national security and ensures a full and fair trial for those accused. The procedures in the bill I am sending to Congress today reflect the reality that we are a nation at war and that it is essential for us to use all reliable evidence to bring these people to justice.

We're now approaching the five-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, and the families of those murdered that day have waited patiently for justice. Some of the families are with us today. They should have to wait no longer.

So I'm announcing today that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, and 11 other terrorists in CIA custody have been transferred to the United States Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay.

They are being held in the custody of the Department of Defense.

As soon as Congress acts to authorize the military commissions I have proposed, the men our intelligence officials believe orchestrated the deaths of nearly 3,000 Americans on September the 11th, 2001, can face justice. (Cheers, applause.)

We will also seek to prosecute those believed to be responsible for the attack on the USS Cole, and an operative believed to be involved in the bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

With these prosecutions, we will send a clear message to those who kill Americans: No longer (sic.25matter) how long it takes, we will find you and we will bring you to justice. (Applause.)

These men will be held in a high-security facility at Guantanamo. The International Committee of the Red Cross is being advised of their detention and will have the opportunity to meet with them. Those charged with crimes will be given access to attorneys who will help them prepare their defense, and they will be presumed innocent. While at Guantanamo, they will have access to the same food, clothing, medical care and opportunities for worship as other detainees. They will be questioned subject to the new U.S. Army Field Manual, which the Department of Defense is issuing today. And they will continue to be treated with the humanity that they denied others. As we move forward with the prosecutions, we will continue to urge nations across the world to take back their nationals at Guantanamo, who will not be prosecuted by our military commissions. America has no interest in being the world's jailer.

But one of the reasons we have not been able to close Guantanamo is that many countries have refused to take back their nationals held at the facility. Other countries have not provided adequate assurances that their nationals will not be mistreated or they will not return to the battlefield, as more than a dozen people released from Guantanamo already have.

We will continue working to transfer individuals held at Guantanamo and ask other countries to work with us in this process. And we will move toward the day when we can eventually close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay. I know Americans have heard conflicting information about Guantanamo. Let me give you some facts. Of the thousands of terrorists captured across the world, only about 770 have ever been sent to Guantanamo. Of these, about 315 have been returned to other countries so far, and about 455 remain in our custody. They are provided the same quality of medical care as the American service members who guard them. The International Committee of the Red Cross has the opportunity to meet privately with all who are held there.

The facility has been visited by government officials from more than 30 countries, and delegations from international or organizations, as well. After the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe came to visit, one of its delegation members called Guantanamo a model prison, where people are treated better than in prisons in his own country.

Our troops can take great pride in the work they do at Guantanamo Bay, and so can the American people.

As we prosecute suspected terrorist leaders and operatives who have now been transferred to Guantanamo, we'll continue searching for those who have stepped forward to take their places. This nation's going to stay on the offense to protect the American people. We will continue to bring the world's most dangerous terrorists to justice, and we will continue working to collect the vital intelligence we need to protect our country.

The current transfers mean that there are now no terrorists in the CIA program. But as more high-ranking terrorists are captured, the need to obtain intelligence from them will remain critical, and having a CIA program for questioning terrorists will continue to be crucial to getting lifesaving information.

Some ask, why are you acknowledging this program now? There are two reasons why I'm making these limited disclosures today.

First, we have largely completed our questioning of the men, and to start the process for bringing them to trial, we must bring them into the open.

Second, the Supreme Court's recent decision has impaired our ability to prosecute terrorists through military commissions and has put in question the future of the CIA program. In its ruling on military commissions, the court determined that a provision of the Geneva Conventions known as Common Article 3 applies to our war with al Qaeda. This article includes provisions that prohibit outrageous upon personal dignity and humiliating and degrading treatment. The problem is that these and other provisions of Common Article 3 are vague and undefined, and each could be interpreted in different ways by an American or foreign judges.

And some believe our military and intelligence personnel involved in capturing and questioning terrorists could now be at risk of prosecution under the War Crimes Act simply for doing their jobs in a thorough and professional way.

This is unacceptable. Our military and intelligence personnel go face to face with the world's most dangerous men every day. They have risked their lives to capture some of the most brutal terrorists on earth, and they have worked day and night to find out what the terrorists know so we can stop new attacks. America owes our brave men and women some things in return; we owe them their (sic) thanks for saving lives and keeping America safe, and we owe them clear rules so they can continue to do their jobs and protect our people.

So I'm -- today I'm asking Congress to pass legislation that will clarify the rules for our personnel fighting the war on terror. First, I am asking Congress to list the specific recognizable offenses that would be considered crimes under the War Crimes Act so our personnel can know clearly what is prohibited in the handling of terrorist enemies.

Second, I'm asking that Congress make explicit that by following the standards of the Detainee Treatment Act, our personnel are fulfilling America's obligations under Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions.

Third, I'm asking that Congress make it clear that captured terrorists cannot use the Geneva Conventions as a basis to sue our personnel in courts, in U.S. courts. The men and women who protect us should not have to fear lawsuits filed by terrorists because they're doing their jobs.

The need for this legislation is urgent. We need to ensure that those questioning terrorists can continue to do everything within the limits of the law to get information that can save American lives.

My administration will continue to work with the Congress to get this legislation enacted, but time is of the essence. Congress is in session just for a few more weeks, and passing this legislation ought to be the top priority. (Applause.)

As we work with Congress to pass a good bill, we will also consult with congressional leaders on how to ensure that the CIA program goes forward in a way that follows the law, that meets the national security needs of our country, and protects the brave men and women we ask to obtain information that will save innocent lives.

For the sake of our security, Congress needs to act and update our laws to meet the threats of this new era, and I know they will.

We're engaged in a global struggle, and the entire civilized world has a stake in its outcome. America is a nation of law, and as I work with Congress to strengthen and clarify our laws here at home, I will continue to work with members of the international community who have been our partners in this struggle. I've spoken with leaders of foreign governments and worked with them to address their concerns about Guantanamo and our detention policies. I'll continue to work with the international community to construct a common foundation to defend our nations and protect our freedoms.

Free nations have faced new enemies and adjusted to new threats before, and we have prevailed. Like the struggles of the last century, today's war on terror is, above all, a struggle for freedom and liberty. The adversaries are different, but the stakes in this war are the same. We're fighting for our way of life and our ability to live in freedom. We're fighting for the cause of humanity against those who seek to impose the darkness of tyranny and terror upon the entire world. And we're fighting for a peaceful future for our children and our grandchildren. May God bless you all.

End

    President Bush's Speech on Terrorism, NYT, 7.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/06/washington/06bush_transcript.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Bush says catching bin Laden still matters: CBS

Wed Sep 6, 2006 9:31 PM ET
Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President George W. Bush on Wednesday said capturing al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, who has eluded a U.S. manhunt since the September 11 attacks five years ago, still mattered.

"He's hiding. And we're on the hunt, obviously," Bush said in an interview with Katie Couric of CBS News before his speech announcing that 14 high-level terrorism suspects had been transferred from secret CIA custody to the Defense Department's facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

"Of course. It matters. He's, he's the head of al Qaeda," Bush said. "But one thing is for certain, though, he's, he's not moving like he used to. Another thing is ... he's, you know, not communicating like he used to."

The hunt continues for bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahri, as well as others, Bush said.

"And we'll get him. It's just a matter of time. We've got a unit in the CIA who is spending a lot of time thinking about these high-value targets," he said.

Bush said airline security was "much improved," citing hardened cockpit doors, pilots able to carry guns, and better information about who was getting on the plane.

"Is there more work to be done? Of course. But there's more work to be done on every front," he said.

Information sharing between security agencies, one of the key criticisms about the government's performance related to the September 11, 2001, attacks, was "much better than prior to September the 11th," Bush said, citing a counterterrorism center where people from different agencies work.

"We're working to improve as best as we possibly can. But this system of ours has improved dramatically since September the 11th," he said.

    Bush says catching bin Laden still matters: CBS, R, 6.9.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=newsOne&storyID=2006-09-07T013113Z_01_N06251150_RTRUKOC_0_US-BUSH-BINLADEN.xml&WTmodLoc=Home-C2-TopNews-newsOne-7

Bush outlines Gitmo trial plan, transfer of CIA-held terror suspects

Updated 9/6/2006 2:42 PM ET
USA Today
From staff and wire reports

WASHINGTON — Fourteen senior members of al-Qaeda, including the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks, have been transfered from CIA custody to the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay Cuba, President Bush said today as he outlined plans to try prisoners held in the war on terror.
The announcement is the first time the administration has acknowledged the existence of CIA prisons. The United States currently holds about 445 detainees at Guantanamo Bay. Many have been held without charges for more than four years.

The 14 include Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the alleged Sept. 11 mastermind, and Abu Zubaydah, a top lieutenant to al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, Bush said. The list also includes Riduan Isamuddin, known additionally as Hambali, who was suspected of being Jemaah Islamiyah's main link to al-Qaeda and the mastermind of a string of deadly bomb attacks in Indonesia until his 2003 arrest in Thailand.

"They are in custody so they cannot murder our people," Bush said in a White House address in which he defended the administation's policies on prisoners in the war on terror.

"In this new war, the most important source of information on where the terrorists are hiding and what they are planning is the terrorists themselves," he said. That has required the United States to hold prisoners in several locations, including military prisons near battlefieds, in Guantanamo Bay and a "small number" in secret, he said.

Defending the program, the president said the questioning of these detainees has provided critical intelligence information about terrorist activities that have enabled officials to prevent attacks not only in the United States, but Europe and other countries. He said the program has been reviewed by administration lawyers and been the subject of strict oversight from within the CIA.

Bush would not detail the type of interrogation techniques that are used through the program, saying they are tough but do not constitute torture.

"This program has helped us to take potential mass murderers off the streets before they have a chance to kill," the president said. "It is invaluable to America and our allies.'

Bush said he was sending to Congress legislation to authorize the creation of military commissions to try enemy combatants for war crimes. In June, the Supreme Court ruled that the administration's military tribunal system to try the prisoners is illegal. The court said the tribunals lacked congressional authorization and did not meet U.S. military or international justice standards.

That system would have allowed the defendants, most of whom were captured in Afghanistan, to be barred from their own trials. It also would have limited their access to evidence and allowed testimony from interrogations.

"We intend to prosecute these men as appropriate for these crimes," Bush said.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has said the administration would propose trying enemy combatants based on military court martial procedures, although with a number of key changes such as admitting hearsay evidence, limiting rights against self-incrimination before a trial and limiting defendants' access to classified information.

Gonzales also told lawmakers the administration's plan might allow testimony obtained by coercion if it was reliable and useful.

Democrats have said those provisions would leave the new trial system vulnerable to another Supreme Court rebuke.

Senate leaders were briefed on the legislative plan Tuesday night. It already has met resistance from lawmakers who say it would set a dangerous precedent.

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner, a Virginia Republican, said he and Republican Sens. John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina were circulating their version of legislation, which adheres more closely to military court martial procedures.

Warner's spokesman John Ullyot said there were "some sticking points with the administration" on it.

The House Armed Services Committee also was set to release its version of the bill in hopes of producing final legislation before Congress breaks in early October to campaign for November congressional elections.

The administration also plans to brief lawmakers today on a new Army field manual that would set guidelines for the treatment of military detainees. Congress passed legislation late last year requiring military interrogators to follow the manual, which abided by Geneva Conventions standards.

Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said the new Army manual "reflects the department's continued commitment to humane, professional and effective detention operations and builds on lessons learned and a review of detention operations."

The new manual specifically forbids intimidating prisoners with military dogs, putting hoods over their heads and simulating the sensation of drowning with a procedure called "water boarding," one defense official told the Associated Press on condition of anonymity because the manual had not yet been released.

Sixteen of the manual's 19 interrogation techniques were covered in the old manual and three new ones were added on the basis of lessons learned in the war on terrorism, the official said, adding only that the techniques are "not more aggressive" than those in the manual used before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has said from the start of the war that prisoners are treated humanely and in a manner "consistent with Geneva Conventions."

But Bush decided shortly after 9/11 that since it is not a conventional war, "enemy combatants" captured in the fight against al-Qaeda would not be considered prisoners of war and thus would not be afforded the protections of the convention.

Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, the top Armed Services Committee Democrat, said after being briefed on the proposed changes that the Army "looks as though it's moving in the right direction."

Congress last year passed a law championed by McCain to prohibit cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment or punishment of prisoners and to create uniform standards for treating them.

It spells out appropriate conduct and procedures on a wide range of military issues and applies to all the armed services, not just the Army. It doesn't cover the CIA, which also has come under investigation for mistreatment of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan and for allegedly keeping suspects in secret prisons elsewhere around the world since the Sept. 11 attacks.

Contributing: USA TODAY's David Jackson; Associated Press

    Bush outlines Gitmo trial plan, transfer of CIA-held terror suspects, UT, 6.9.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-09-06-guantanamo_x.htm

Bush admits secret CIA prisons

Wed Sep 6, 2006 11:52 PM ET
Reuters
By Steve Holland and Will Dunham

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President George W. Bush acknowledged on Wednesday the CIA had interrogated dozens of terrorism suspects at secret overseas locations and said 14 of those held had been sent to the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay.

Bush made the surprise admission as he prodded the U.S. Congress to approve rules for military commissions to try such detainees and with national security a key issue for Republicans who face the possibility of losses in the November congressional elections.

"The need for this legislation is urgent," Bush said. "We need to ensure that those questioning terrorists can continue to do everything within the limit of the law to get information that can save American lives."

Bush was forced to come up with a new method to try foreign terrorist suspects after the U.S. Supreme Court in June rejected the military tribunal system his administration set up to try Guantanamo prisoners, most captured in Afghanistan.

The Pentagon said the 14 detainees arrived at Guantanamo, where they could face prosecution, on Monday from undisclosed locations. Among them were the suspected mastermind of the September 11 attacks, Khalid Sheik Mohammed and two other al Qaeda leaders, Ramzi Binalshibh and Abu Zubaydah.

Bush strongly defended the secret detention and questioning of terrorism suspects and said the CIA treated them humanely and did not torture. His announcement was greeted with some skepticism by human rights activists. The detention program, disclosed last year by The Washington Post, provoked an international outcry.

Citing gains made under the secret program, Bush said information provided by Zubaydah, described as a close associate of Osama bin Laden, helped foil an attack being planned inside the United States.

Intelligence gained from Mohammed led to the capture of a suspected terrorist named Zubair and provided information on al Qaeda's efforts to obtain biological weapons, Bush said.

With the fifth anniversary of the hijacked airliner attacks looming, Bush called the legislation a top priority for Congress in coming weeks and sent up a bill that rivaled an effort by several key Republicans that affords detainees greater rights.

Bush said he wanted the legislation to clarify the rules that interrogators may use and make explicit that they are meeting the requirements of the Geneva Conventions.

Republican Sens. John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said the major sticking point was over allowing defendants access to classified evidence, which the White House plan would limit.

SECRET PRISONS

The Bush administration previously declined to admit the existence of the secret CIA prisons. The U.N. committee against torture in May called on the United States to close any such facilities, but senior administration officials said the program was essential and would remain open.

Larry Cox, executive director of Amnesty International USA, welcomed the transfer of the 14 suspects but said, "We are appalled that the Bush administration will further undermine its moral leadership" by continuing to use them.

U.S. officials said the CIA had held less than 100 suspects and after the transfer of the 14, the agency held none.

Bush would not say where the CIA secret prisons were located overseas but there have been reports of such facilities in Eastern Europe.

Bush's current focus on terrorism comes not only as the September 11 anniversary approaches but as his Republican Party faces stiff challenges in the midterm elections in two months. A vote on Bush's plan to establish such commissions could put Democrats on the defensive on the national security issue just weeks before the voting that could change control of Congress.

Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada said Democrats welcomed Bush's "long-overdue decision" to try September 11 suspects and called on Republicans to accept a bipartisan approach.

"The last thing we need is a repeat of the arrogant, go-it-alone behavior that has jeopardized and delayed efforts to bring these terrorists to justice for five years," Reid said.

The Pentagon also tried to soothe concerns about the Guantanamo facility.

It said it had prohibited eight abusive interrogation practices and allowed three new ones as part of long-awaited changes to the Army Field Manual governing the interrogation of prisoners held by the military.

Interrogators may not force a detainee to be naked, perform sexual acts or pose in a sexual manner, and cannot place hoods or sacks over a detainee's head or use duct tape over his eyes. They cannot beat or electrically shock or burn a detainee or inflict other forms of physical pain.

(Additional reporting by Tabassum Zakaria, Matt Spetalnick and Vicki Allen)

    Bush admits secret CIA prisons, NYT, 7.9.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=newsOne&storyID=2006-09-07T035150Z_01_N06455488_RTRUKOC_0_US-SECURITY-USA-DETAINEES.xml&WTmodLoc=Home-C1-TopStories-newsOne-2

Bush says tax cuts helping workers

Mon Sep 4, 2006 4:24 PM ET
Reuters
By Caren Bohan

PINEY POINT, Maryland (Reuters) - President Bush on Monday pitched his tax cuts as the best way to help U.S. workers, but said the country's dependence on foreign oil was threatening economic growth.

Bush, whose Republican Party faces a struggle to keep control of Congress in November elections, has been campaigning by defending the war in Iraq and now its record on the domestic economy.

A Democratic takeover of the House of Representatives or the Senate would undermine Bush's ability to push his agenda in his last two years, including plans to make hefty tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 permanent.

"We ought to make the tax relief permanent. I like it when people are working for a living, have more after-tax money in their pocket," Bush said as he marked Labor Day by touring a maritime training center on Maryland's southern shoreline.

"To make sure that we're the economic leader of the world, we got to keep taxes low," he added.

Bush was courting members of the Seafarers International Union, whose leadership has maintained friendly ties with him, in contrast to many U.S. unions' support for Democrats.

Bush told the workers it was clear that "dependence on foreign oil jeopardizes our capacity to grow".

"I mean, the problem is we get oil from some parts of the world and they simply don't like us. And so the more dependent we are on that type of energy, the less likely it will be that we are able to compete, and so people have good, high-paying jobs."

ECONOMY DEBATE

Bush, a former Texas oilman, has called for the United States to kick its "addiction" to oil and for tapping alternative fuel sources, such as ethanol, hydrogen fuel cells and gasoline-electric hybrid vehicles.

Analysts say that Democrats stand a good chance of wresting away control of the House of Representatives in November, helped by the increasingly unpopular war in Iraq and doubts over Bush's leadership. Democrats are seen facing a tougher battle when it comes to the Senate.

Democrat candidates have made growing income inequality, wage stagnation, and a ballooning federal deficit under Bush a top theme in their campaigns.

Bush administration officials have pointed to data like last week's employment report -- which showed a solid payroll gain of 128,000 in August and a dip in the unemployment rate to 4.7 percent from 4.8 percent -- as evidence that Bush's tax cuts put the economy on a strong growth path.

Bush's 2001 tax cut package slashed individual income tax rates and set a phased-in reduction in estate taxes. The centerpiece of the 2003 package was cuts in dividends and capital gains taxes. Most of Bush's tax cuts are set to expire after 2010.

Democrats say the tax reductions have mainly benefited the wealthy and have contributed to a widening of the income gap.

They also contend the economic expansion has failed to help most workers, who have seen meager pay increases even as they face surging costs for essentials like gasoline and healthcare.

The income of U.S. households, adjusted for inflation, rose 1.1 percent to $46,326 in 2005, according to a Census Bureau report released last week. Despite the increase, income was down 0.5 percent compared with 2001, the year Bush took office.

    Bush says tax cuts helping workers, R, 4.9.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=politicsNews&storyID=2006-09-04T202417Z_01_N04263640_RTRUKOC_0_US-BUSH.xml&WTmodLoc=Home-C5-politicsNews-2

Bush Says Dependence on Foreign Oil Hurts Growth

September 4, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:45 p.m. ET
The New York Times

PINEY POINT, Md. (AP) -- President Bush said Monday the economy is growing steadily and jobs are plentiful, but America must work harder to break its dependency on foreign oil. Making a Labor Day appearance at Maryland's Paul Hall Center for Training and Education, which offers vocational training to Seafarers International Union members, Bush said ''dependence on foreign oil jeopardizes our ability to grow.''

''Problem is, we get oil from some parts of the world and they simply don't like us,'' he said. ''The more dependent we are on that type of energy, the less likely it will be that we are able to compete and so people can have good paying jobs.''

Bush also said he is interested in new technology that advances that produce battery-operated cars and allows people to fuel their vehicles with ethanol, particularly in Farm Belt states. And he made a fresh push for greater development of nuclear energy.

''Nuclear power is safe and nuclear power is clean and nuclear power is renewable,'' the president said.

On trade, he said the United States must ''continue opening markets to U.S. products.''

''... My message to the world is this: just treat us as we treat you,'' Bush said. ''I believe this country can compete anytime, anywhere, as long as the rules are fair.''

Bush again called on Congress to make permanent a host of tax cuts, saying ''I like it when people working for a living have more after-tax money in their pocket.''

He said people in all walks of life should work hard to ensure that ''our workers have the skills necessary to compete in the 21st Century.''

Bush made a brief mention on the war and terrorism issue, thanking America's fighting men and women for their sacrifices and saying, ''They may hear all the political discourse going on, but the people of this country -- the people of the United States of America -- stand squarely behind the men and women who wear our uniform.''

    Bush Says Dependence on Foreign Oil Hurts Growth, G, 4.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Bush.html?hp&ex=1157428800&en=de732532deeef423&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Editorial

Mr. Bush’s Nuclear Legacy

September 2, 2006
The New York Times

Unless something changes soon, by the end of President Bush’s second term North Korea will have produced enough plutonium for 10 or more nuclear weapons while Iran’s scientists will be close to mastering the skills needed to build their own.

That’s quite a legacy for a president sworn to keep the world’s most dangerous weapons out of the hands of the world’s most dangerous regimes.

Even if the United States were not tied down in Iraq, military action would be a disaster. Besides, American analysts don’t know where North Korea has stashed its plutonium nor what technology Iran might have hidden. Its huge centrifuge plant at Natanz is still nearly empty, and the more threatened Iran feels, the more reason it has to hide its program.

If Mr. Bush has any hope of avoiding this legacy, he will have to give up his dreams of regime change, persuade his battling inner circle he means it and direct Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to do some real diplomatic horse trading — starting with a clear pledge that the United States will not try to overthrow their governments as long as they give up their nuclear ambitions.

Only in Mr. Bush’s go-it-alone world would Ms. Rice get so much outside credit — and so much inside criticism — for her clenched-teeth approach to these negotiations. It’s also not working.

Iran defied the Security Council’s demand that it stop enriching uranium. The good news is that it is making only slow progress. It is also restricting inspectors’ access and refusing to answer questions.

The Bush administration was right to bring Iran before the Security Council. It will have to work even harder to convince Russia and China to impose some punishment. The threat of isolation might have some effect on Iranian politics. But unless the council agrees to cut off Iran’s oil exports — not even a tough-talking White House seems ready to pay the political price for even higher gas prices — its leaders are unlikely to be quickly swayed.

It has been months since North Korea and the other members of the six-party talks even sat at the table. When Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill proposed going to North Korea to try to jump-start the process, he was told no by his bosses.

The only approach with even the remotest chance of success is to persuade these regimes that they do not need nuclear weapons to ensure their survival, and that there will be real rewards for good behavior.

This doesn’t mean ignoring all their other misdeeds. If anything, it should allow the United States to open a wider discussion with them about their mistreatment of their citizens or sponsorship of terrorism or sales of illicit technology.

There is no guarantee that Tehran or Pyongyang will accept such an offer. A serious try by Washington would certainly make it harder for Russia and China and skittish Europeans to oppose sanctions. In Iran’s case, it might also start the internal political debate that Mr. Bush has been hoping for — and that his paeans to democracy and saber rattling have failed to produce.

    Mr. Bush’s Nuclear Legacy, NYT, 2.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/02/opinion/02sat1.html

Dwayne Booth        Mr. Fish        Cagle        1.9.2006
http://cagle.msnbc.com/politicalcartoons/PCcartoons/booth.asp
George W. Bush - 43rd president of the United States.

In Latest Push, Bush Cites Risk in Quitting Iraq

September 1, 2006
The New York Times
By ANNE E. KORNBLUT and SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

SALT LAKE CITY, Aug. 31 — President Bush said Thursday that withdrawing now from Iraq would leave Americans at risk of terrorist attacks “in the streets of our own cities,” and he cast the struggle against Islamic extremists as the costly but necessary successor to the battles of the last century against Nazism and Communism.

“The war we fight today is more than a military conflict,’’ Mr. Bush said in a speech to veterans at an American Legion convention here. “It is the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century.’’

The speech, the first of five addresses on national security Mr. Bush plans to deliver between now and Sept. 19, was part of an orchestrated White House offensive to buttress public support for the Iraq war and portray Democrats as less capable of protecting the country, a theme that has proved effective for Republicans in the past two elections.

Even as Mr. Bush spoke, a series of explosions ripped through Baghdad, providing more images of a sort that he acknowledged have been “sometimes unsettling” to the public. [Page A6.]

The latest White House offensive — the third major public relations effort in the past year to offset a decline in public support for the Iraq war and place it in the context of a broader cause — began unfolding this week, with combative speeches to veterans groups by Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld. Both invoked variations of the word “appease’’ to characterize critics of the president’s policies, with Mr. Rumsfeld saying they had not “learned history’s lessons.’’

That language drew an immediate backlash from Democrats on Wednesday, and Mr. Bush did not adopt it. But he did echo the allusions to the failed strategy of trying to appease Nazi Germany. He called today’s terrorists ‘’successors to Fascists, to Nazis, to Communists and other totalitarians of the 20th century,’’ and cautioned Americans against concluding that five years after the Sept. 11 attacks the threat had receded.

“That feeling,’’ he said, “is natural and comforting — and wrong.’’

It was an aggressive opening salvo to the midterm election season, timed to coincide with the days preceding the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. In forceful language, the president painted the war on terror as an epic struggle between good and evil.

While he predicted victory, resurrecting a word he had dropped months ago and using it 12 times in a 44-minute speech, Mr. Bush also cautioned that the road ahead would be fraught with obstacles.

But he put particular emphasis on what he said would be the consequences of a failure to ensure Iraq’s stability, saying, “If we give up the fight in the streets of Baghdad, we will face the terrorists in the streets of our own cities.”

Telling his audience that the path to a stable and peaceful Middle East would be “uphill and uneven,” he invoked Thomas Jefferson, who said nations cannot move “from despotism to liberty in a featherbed.”

Wiping a tear from his eye, Mr. Bush told the story of Cpl. Adam Galvez of Salt Lake City, a marine who was killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq and was buried Wednesday.

Corporal Galvez’s parents attended the speech, which coupled familiar phrases about fighting terrorists “overseas so we do not have to face them here at home” with a fresh effort to lump various strains of Islamic extremism into what the president called “a worldwide network of radicals that use terror to kill those who stand in the way of their totalitarian ideology.’’

Democrats said Mr. Bush’s strategy of painting them as weak on national security would not work this year and accused him of trying to divert attention from his record.

“After six years,’’ said Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, “they’ve got only fear to sell.’’

Another Democrat, Senator Barbara Boxer of California, called the Bush speech “a long repetition of old messages and rhetoric to scare the American people’’ and said she would push for a Senate vote calling on the president to replace Mr. Rumsfeld.

“This latest Rumsfeld rampage cannot stand,’’ Ms. Boxer said.With Congressional Republicans fighting to hold on to their majorities in the House and the Senate, the speech came at a delicate time. Many of those lawmakers view the war as a political liability and have spent the past month at home getting an earful from voters.

“Members of Congress are going to be returning next week, and they will be quite anxious because they will have been briefed by their pollsters, have spent the last three weeks with their constituents and most of them will be worried,’’ said Scott Reed, a Republican strategist. “So the administration is trying to set the terms of the debate to really make this a clear choice between moving forward and the cut-and-run crowd.’’

Indeed, Mr. Bush’s speech made clear that he would make the issue central to his campaign on his fellow Republicans’ behalf. It reflected a belief at the White House that there is no option for the administration but to convince the nation that the struggle in Iraq is necessary and worth the cost in the service of a broader goal: eradicating the threat from Islamic extremists by bringing democracy to the Middle East.

It also reflected a belief inside the White House that Republicans can once again convince voters that they can do a better job of protecting them than can Democrats.

“Between ’04 and now, the Democrats have not only not provided a more united front, they are backsliding into a very irresponsible position of premature withdrawal from the fight in Iraq,’’ said Dan Bartlett, counselor to Mr. Bush. “Most Americans, I think, understand the consequences of that action, and I think that will prove to be difficult for the Democrats.’’

Yet even some Republicans, granted anonymity to speak freely about their criticism of the White House strategy, were skeptical, saying the public was tired not only of the war but also of politically divisive speeches on national security.

“The hard-core conservatives are already behind his Iraq policy,’’ said a senior Republican Senate aide. “For him to move the numbers in a way that benefits Congressional Republicans, he needs to reach out to moderates, and it’s difficult to do that when his surrogates are contradicting him and calling opponents of his policy appeasers.’’

But Mr. Bartlett said the White House did not expect public opinion to change quickly.

“The goal is not to see an immediate spike in poll numbers,’’ he said. “We’ve clearly understood that public sentiment doesn’t develop overnight. It’s been over a period of time, and it doesn’t change overnight.’’

In making the case that the war in Iraq is “the central front in our fight against terrorism,’’ the president linked Iraq, the summer battles between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon and the growing nuclear threat in Iran under the general rubric of his freedom agenda.

At the same time, he placed various factions of terrorists — Sunnis who swear allegiance to Al Qaeda, Shiite radicals who join groups like Hezbollah and so-called homegrown terrorists — under one umbrella.

Experts said that might be overstating the facts.

“ ‘Network of radicals’ suggests they are actually connected in some practical fashion, and that’s obviously not the case,’’ said Steven Simon, a State Department official in the administrations of President Bill Clinton and Mr. Bush’s father.

But the comparison is central to Mr. Bush’s message, said Ken Mehlman, chairman of the National Republican Committee, who has played an integral role in developing Republican strategy for the midterm elections.

“I thought linking together the different elements of this ideological movement was important to do, and was effective,’’ Mr. Mehlman said.

Anne E. Kornblut reported from Salt Lake City for this article, and Sheryl Gay Stolberg from Washington.

    In Latest Push, Bush Cites Risk in Quitting Iraq, NYT, 1.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/01/washington/01bush.html