History > 2008 > USA > Politics > President George W. Bush (IV)

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The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

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3.7.2008

M: U.S. President George W. Bush

Bush signs sweeping housing bill

30 July 2008
USA Today

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Bush has signed a massive housing bill intended to provide mortgage relief for 400,000 struggling U.S. homeowners and stabilize financial markets.

A White House spokesman said Bush signed the measure Wednesday to "improve confidence and stability in markets and to provide better oversight of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac."

The measure offers a temporary financial lifeline to troubled mortgage companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and tightens controls over the two government-sponsored businesses.

It is regarded as the most significant U.S. housing legislation in decades. It lets homeowners who cannot afford their payments refinance into more affordable government-backed loans rather than losing their homes.

Bush signs sweeping housing bill, UT, 30.7.2008, http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2008-07-30-bush-housing_N.htm

Execution by Military

Is Approved by President

July 29, 2008
The New York Times
By STEVEN LEE MYERS

WASHINGTON — President Bush on Monday approved the first execution by the military since 1961, upholding the death penalty of an Army private convicted of a series of rapes and murders more than two decades ago.

As commander in chief, the president has the final authority to approve capital punishment under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and he did so on Monday morning in the case of Pvt. Ronald A. Gray, convicted by court-martial for two killings and an attempted murder at Fort Bragg, N.C., the White House said in a statement.

Although the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the death penalty in the military in 1996, no one has been executed since President Ronald Reagan reinstated capital punishment in 1984 for military crimes.

The last military execution was ordered by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1957, although it was not carried out by hanging until 1961. President John F. Kennedy was the last president to face the question, in 1962, but commuted the sentence to life in prison.

“While approving a sentence of death for a member of our armed services is a serious and difficult decision for a commander in chief, the president believes the facts of this case leave no doubt that the sentence is just and warranted,” the White House press secretary, Dana Perino, said in a statement after the decision was first reported by The Associated Press. “Private Gray was convicted of committing brutal crimes, including two murders, an attempted murder and three rapes.”

Mr. Bush, a supporter of the death penalty, approved the sentence after Private Gray’s case wound its way through the Army’s legal bureaucracy and the military’s courts of appeal. The secretary of the Army sought Mr. Bush’s final approval.

There are six people on the military’s death row at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. but Private Gray was the first whose sentence went to the president. Unlike in the civilian courts, where the president can overturn or commute a sentence, in the military system, he is required effectively to approve it.

It can still be appealed, which the White House suggested was all but certain, meaning an execution is not expected to occur soon, possibly not during Mr. Bush’s remaining months in office.

The military death penalty has been dormant for so long that it was also unclear what the method of execution would be.

Ms. Perino declined to discuss the decision further, citing the potential for appeals. She added that Mr. Bush’s “thoughts and prayers are with the victims of these heinous crimes and their families and all others affected.”

Private Gray was accused of four murders and eight rapes from April 1986 to January 1987 while serving at Fort Bragg.

According to the White House’s chronology of the case, he pleaded guilty to two murders and five rapes, among other offenses, in state court in North Carolina and was sentenced to life in prison.

He separately faced court-martial in two murders and an attempted murder, involving three women, two of them Army soldiers, the other a civilian taxi driver whose body was found on the post.

In 1988, he was convicted, and his sentence has since been approved by his command, the Army Court of Military Review, and the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces. In 2001, the United States Supreme Court declined to hear his case.

Mr. Bush’s decision clears the way for a new round of appeals in civilian courts, beginning with the Federal District Court, said Eugene R. Fidell, president of the National Institute of Military Justice, a nonprofit organization in Washington. Among the issues, Mr. Fidell said, was the fact that Congress has since required capital cases to be considered by a 12-member jury, not the smaller ones that previously decided cases.

    Execution by Military Is Approved by President, NYT, 29.7.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/29/us/29execute.html

Felons Seeking Bush Pardon

Near a Record

July 19, 2008
The New York Times
By CHARLIE SAVAGE

WASHINGTON — Felons are asking President Bush for pardons and commutations at historic levels as he nears his final months in office, a time when many other presidents have granted a flurry of clemency requests.

Among the petitioners is Michael Milken, the billionaire former junk bond king turned philanthropist, who is seeking a pardon for his 1990 conviction for securities fraud, the Justice Department said. Mr. Milken sought a pardon eight years ago from President Bill Clinton, and submitted a new petition in June.

In addition, prominent federal inmates are asking Mr. Bush to commute their sentences. Among them are Randy Cunningham, the former Republican congressman from California; Edwin W. Edwards, a former Democratic governor of Louisiana; John Walker Lindh, the so-called American Taliban; and Marion Jones, the former Olympic sprinter.

The requests are adding to a backlog of nearly 2,300 pending petitions, most from “ordinary people who committed garden-variety crimes,” said Margaret Colgate Love, a clemency lawyer.

Ms. Love, who was the United States pardon attorney from 1990 to 1997, said the backlog was overwhelming the vetting system, meaning that many petitions might not reach Mr. Bush’s desk before he leaves office.

“I have cases that date from the Clinton administration,” Ms. Love said. “I have cases that I filed in the last two or three years and have not even gotten any word about the first step of the investigation being authorized. It’s unbelievable.”

A Justice Department office with about half a dozen officials reviews petitions and recommends whether requests should be granted, although presidents are free to disregard its views. Under the Constitution, Mr. Bush can issue a commutation, which reduces a sentence, or a pardon, which forgives an offense and erases the criminal record, to anyone.

But even if a felon’s petition reaches the Oval Office, legal specialists said that most of those seeking mercy from Mr. Bush should expect to be disappointed.

The Bush administration took office amid heavy criticism of Mr. Clinton’s last-minute pardons, most notably to Marc Rich, the fugitive financier whose ex-wife had donated to Mr. Clinton’s presidential library.

Against that backdrop, Mr. Bush has made little use of his clemency powers, granting just 44 pardons and two commutations. By comparison, over eight years in office President Ronald Reagan granted clemency 409 times and Mr. Clinton 459 times. More than half of Mr. Clinton’s grants came in his final three months.

Fred F. Fielding, the White House counsel, declined to be interviewed about clemency plans.

Erik Ablin, a Justice Department spokesman, said the administration was committed to “giving each clemency petition received the careful review that is necessary to make an appropriate recommendation.” Mr. Ablin noted that any cases left unresolved by Mr. Bush would stay open for his successor.

As the administration wrestles with the cascade of petitions, some lawyers and law professors are raising a related question: Will Mr. Bush grant pre-emptive pardons to officials involved in controversial counterterrorism programs?

Such a pardon would reduce the risk that a future administration might undertake a criminal investigation of operatives or policy makers involved in programs that administration lawyers have said were legal but that critics say violated laws regarding torture and surveillance.

Some legal analysts said Mr. Bush might be reluctant to issue such pardons because they could be construed as an implicit admission of guilt. But several members of the conservative legal community in Washington said in interviews that they hoped Mr. Bush would issue such pardons — whether or not anyone made a specific request for one. They said people who carried out the president’s orders should not be exposed even to the risk of an investigation and expensive legal bills.

“The president should pre-empt any long-term investigations,” said Victoria Toensing, who was a Justice Department counterterrorism official in the Reagan administration. “If we don’t protect these people who are proceeding in good faith, no one will ever take chances.”

Emily Lawrimore, a White House spokeswoman, would not say whether the administration was considering pre-emptive pardons, nor whether it would rule them out.

“We are going to decline to comment on that question since it is regarding internal matters,” Ms. Lawrimore wrote in an e-mail message.

The administration would also not disclose any views submitted on petitions. The first time Mr. Milken sought a pardon, for example, prosecutors and the Securities and Exchange Commission opposed it.

New petitions for clemency are on pace to surpass 2,100 this fiscal year, which ends in September. The record is the 1,827 petitions filed in 2001, which included Mr. Clinton’s final months.

P. S. Ruckman Jr., a political science professor at Rock Valley College in Rockford, Ill., said records of annual clemency petitions dated only to 1860. However, Mr. Ruckman said, it is virtually certain this year’s mark will be the most in history because the population was smaller and there were fewer federal criminal laws in the country’s early years.

The Justice Department does not release a list of petitioners, but will say whether specific people have requested pardons or commutations. The New York Times submitted nearly two dozen names of prominent felons.

The department said it had not received petitions from several recently convicted political figures, including I. Lewis Libby Jr., Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff; Jack Abramoff, the former Republican lobbyist; Bob Ney, a Republican former congressman from Ohio; and George Ryan, a former Republican governor of Illinois.

The department had also not received petitions from several people associated with major financial scandals in recent years, like at Enron, WorldCom and Adelphia, nor from Conrad M. Black, the conservative former newspaper publisher, nor Martha Stewart.

It also has no petition for Jose Compean and Ignacio Ramos, two former Border Patrol agents whose case has become a cause célèbre among some conservatives. They were convicted of shooting a fleeing drug smuggler along the border with Mexico and trying to cover it up. The pair are ineligible to apply for clemency through normal procedures because their cases are on appeal.

But in January 2007, Mr. Bush told a Texas television interviewer that he would review the agents’ cases; presidents are free to give pardons and commutations to people who have not submitted a petition. In July 2007, for example, Mr. Bush eliminated Mr. Libby’s prison sentence even though he had not applied for a commutation.

Far more commutation petitions are being submitted than in the past, largely because of changes to federal sentencing in the 1980s: the abolition of parole and the institution of tough sentencing guidelines and mandatory minimum terms. One of the charges against the Border Patrol agents, for example, carried a mandatory 10-year sentence.

Mr. Bush has received 7,146 petitions for a reduced sentence — more than five times as many as Mr. Reagan received. But the pardon office has not grown in proportion to the workload.

Ms. Love argued that the backlog and delays were “a major flaw in the justice system” because clemency is becoming more important. Sentences are longer, and the stigma of being a felon has increased because of added background checks for many things, including gaining employment and doing volunteer work, she said.

“If we really want to give people a second chance,” Ms. Love said, “then we have to include a pardon which is reasonably available to them. It’s not, now.”

Sarah Abruzzese contributed reporting.

    Felons Seeking Bush Pardon Near a Record, NYT, 19.7.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/19/us/19pardon.html

Bush, in Shift,

Accepts Idea of Iraq Timeline

July 19, 2008
The New YorkTimes
By STEVEN LEE MYERS

HOUSTON — President Bush agreed to “a general time horizon” for withdrawing American troops in Iraq, the White House announced Friday, in a concession that reflected both progress in stabilizing Iraq and the depth of political opposition to an open-ended military presence in Iraq and at home.

Mr. Bush, who has long derided timetables for troop withdrawals as dangerous, agreed to at least a notional one as part of the administration’s efforts to negotiate the terms for an American military presence in Iraq after a United Nations mandate expires at the end of the year.

The agreement, announced in coordinated statements released Friday by the White House and Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s government, reflected a significant shift in the war in Iraq. More than five years after the conflict began with the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the American military presence now depends significantly, if not completely, on Iraqi acquiescence.

The White House offered no specifics about how far off any “time horizon” would be, with officials saying details remained to be negotiated. Any dates cited in an agreement would be cast as goals for handing responsibility to Iraqis, and not specifically for reducing American troops, said a White House spokesman, Gordon D. Johndroe.

But the White House statement said that the two leaders “agreed that improving conditions should allow for the agreements now under negotiation to include a general time horizon for meeting aspirational goals such as the resumption of Iraqi security control in their cities and provinces and the further reduction of U.S. combat forces from Iraq.”

The announcement could alter the American political debate over the war in Iraq and how best to end it now that even Mr. Bush is willing to speak of an end to the American presence. It came on the eve of a trip to Iraq and Afghanistan by the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, Senator Barack Obama, who has vowed to pursue a strict phased timetable for withdrawing most combat troops from Iraq over 16 months beginning next year. He has cited Iraq’s eagerness for a timetable as support for his strategy.

A spokesman for Mr. Obama, Bill Burton, called the announcement “a step in the right direction,” but derided what he called the vagueness of the White House commitment. Senator John McCain, the Republican presidential candidate, praised the agreement as evidence that Mr. Bush’s strategy of sending additional forces last year had worked and he sought to use it as a cudgel against Mr. Obama.

“An artificial timetable based on political expediency would have led to disaster and could still turn success into defeat,” Mr. McCain said.

Mr. Bush and his aides, traveling in Tucson and Houston to attend Republican fund-raisers, insisted again that the administration was not accepting any timetable for withdrawing American forces, which now total roughly 140,000. But the administration has faced increasing resistance from a newly confident Iraq, where some officials have said publicly that Iraq can take charge of much of its security by 2009, and be able to operate without American help by 2012.

Under pressure from political parties wanting a diminishing American role, Mr. Maliki began demanding something in the agreement that would make it clear that American troops were on the way out. Iraq’s statement on Friday, reflecting those internal sensitivities, referred more specifically than the American version to “a time frame for the complete transfer of the security responsibilities to the hands of the Iraqi security as preface to decrease the number of the American forces and withdraw them later from Iraq.”

In Baghdad, a member of Mr. Maliki’s Dawa Party, Ali al-Adeeb, said the withdrawal of American and other foreign forces was fundamental to an accord. “The Iraqi government considers the determination of a specific date for the withdrawal of foreign forces an important issue to deal with,” he said. “I don’t know what the American side thinks, but we consider it the core of the subject.”

Mr. Adeeb suggested that a final agreement was not imminent, but White House aides said they were confident one would be reached by the end of the month. “We’re converging on an agreement,” an administration official said, noting that negotiators continued to hammer out provisions involving security matters. Those include command of military operations, legal immunities for civilian contractors and the authority to detain prisoners.

On the prospect of dates for American withdrawals, Mr. Johndroe, the White House spokesman, said that the agreement would not prescribe American troop levels over time, but rather reflect a transition to Iraqi command. “The agreement will look at goal dates for transition of responsibilities and missions,” Mr. Johndroe said in an e-mail message. “The focus is on the Iraqi assumption of missions, not on what troop levels will be.”

The agreement that American and Iraqi negotiators are now completing is more modest than the long-term strategic pact that Mr. Bush and Mr. Maliki pledged last November to negotiate to replace the United Nations mandate at the end of this year.

The administration dropped a promise in that initial agreement to provide long-term security for Iraq, something that would require a treaty and Congressional approval. It has also backed off other demands for sweeping powers to continue military operations there indefinitely.

The negotiations have been bogged down by issues involving the laws governing American troops, diplomats and civilian contractors, as well as details like customs duties and drivers’ licenses for American soldiers.

Administration officials now say that they are negotiating an agreement that would establish the legal authority for American commanders to conduct combat operations, control airspace and detain Iraqi prisoners, while deferring the more complicated details of a “status of forces agreement” to the next administration. The United States has such agreements that govern its military presence in Germany, South Korea and some other nations. Some Bush administration officials had envisioned concluding a similar accord with Iraq before Mr. Bush left office.

Friday’s statements noted the gradual handover of security to Iraqi forces, now complete in 10 of Iraq’s 18 provinces, though not in the most volatile ones, where American and Iraqi troops continue to wage war with insurgents. The statements suggested that the final agreement could link the complete transition of control in the remaining provinces to the withdrawal of American forces — a timetable, though, without specific dates.

The statements also referred to the withdrawal this month of the last of five additional combat brigades that Mr. Bush ordered to Iraq last year. The American commander in Iraq, Gen. David H. Petraeus, is now reviewing the possibility of withdrawing more beginning in September.

On Wednesday, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, said that he hoped that more brigades could come out; some administration and military officials have previously indicated that as many as 3 of the remaining 15 brigades could begin to withdraw by next year.

In Congress, even a more modest agreement with the Iraqis over the American military presence still faces opposition.

Representative Bill Delahunt, a Democrat from Massachusetts who has held hearings on the legality of the agreement the administration is seeking, said that “a timetable with specific dates is critical,” calling the White House’s time horizon “very vague and nebulous.”

He welcomed the pending agreement as “far less grandiose than what was initially articulated,” but said he remained concerned about the legal authority allowing American military operations in Iraq once the United Nations mandate expired on Dec. 31 of this year.

Richard A. Oppel Jr., Tareq Maher, Mohammed Hussein and Ali Hameed contributed reporting from Baghdad, Larry Rohter from Warren, Mich., and Thom Shanker from Washington.

    Bush, in Shift, Accepts Idea of Iraq Timeline, NYT, 19.7.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/19/world/middleeast/19iraq.html

Court Backs Bush on Military Detentions

July 16, 2008
The New York Times
By ADAM LIPTAK

President Bush has the legal power to order the indefinite military detentions of civilians captured in the United States, the federal appeals court in Richmond, Va., ruled on Tuesday in a fractured 5-to-4 decision.

But a second, overlapping 5-to-4 majority of the court, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, ruled that Ali al-Marri, a citizen of Qatar now in military custody in Charleston, S.C., must be given an additional opportunity to challenge his detention in federal court there. An earlier court proceeding, in which the government had presented only a sworn statement from a defense intelligence official, was inadequate, the second majority ruled.

The decision was a victory for the Bush administration, which had maintained that a 2001 Congressional authorization to use military force after the Sept. 11 attacks granted the president the power to detain people living in the United States.

The court effectively reversed a divided three-judge panel of its own members, which ruled last year that the government lacked the power to detain civilians legally in the United States as enemy combatants. That panel ordered the government either to charge Mr. Marri or to release him. The case is likely to reach the Supreme Court.

How helpful the decision will be to Mr. Marri remains to be seen, as the majority that granted him some relief was notably vague about what the new court proceeding should look like. In that respect, Tuesday’s decision resembled last month’s decision from the United States Supreme Court granting habeas corpus rights to prisoners held at Guantánamo Bay.

Mr. Marri is the only person on the American mainland known to be held as an enemy combatant. The government contended, in a declaration from the defense intelligence official, Jeffrey N. Rapp, that Mr. Marri was a Qaeda sleeper agent sent to the United States to commit mass murder and disrupt the banking system.

Mr. Marri was arrested on Dec. 12, 2001, in Peoria, Ill., where he was living with his family and studying computer science. He was charged with credit-card fraud and lying to federal agents, and was on the verge of a trial on those charges when he was moved to military detention in 2003.

Brian Roehrkasse, a Justice Department spokesman, said the decision properly recognized “the president’s authority to capture and detain Al Qaeda agents who, like the 9/11 hijackers, come to this country to commit or facilitate warlike acts against American civilians.”

Mr. Roehrkasse added that while the department believed that Mr. Marri “had already received all the process he was due,” its lawyers were “studying the court’s decision and will respond to Mr. Marri’s contentions” before the trial judge.

Jonathan L. Hafetz, a lawyer for Mr. Marri with the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, called the Fourth Circuit’s decision deeply disturbing.

“This decision means the president can pick up any person in the country — citizen or legal resident — and lock them up for years without the most basic safeguard in the Constitution, the right to a criminal trial,” Mr. Hafetz said.

The 216-page decision included seven opinions, none of which commanded a majority. The only common ground was four unsigned paragraphs at the beginning of the decision summarizing the result.

The Fourth Circuit is generally considered the nation’s most conservative federal appeals court. The closely divided and complex decision in a major terrorism case therefore came as something of a surprise.

Mr. Marri’s unusual situation played a role, said Robert M. Chesney, a law professor at Wake Forest University. Mr. Marri “was lawfully present in the U.S. and then arrested and held here, as opposed to being a noncitizen captured in a foreign land,” Professor Chesney said. “This consideration makes his case more difficult even in the eyes of relatively conservative jurists.”

The five judges who ruled that the president has the authority to detain people captured in the United States offered differing criteria for who might be subject to such detention.

Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III said the president might detain members of organizations or nations against which Congress had authorized the use of force who mean to harm people or property to further military goals.

To reverse the trial judge’s decision allowing Mr. Marri’s detention to continue “because he was not captured on a foreign battlefield or foreign soil,” Judge Wilkinson wrote, “is akin to a judicial declaration that Congress and the executive may fight only the last war.”

Judge Diana Gribbon Motz, writing for herself and three other judges, disagreed, saying that Mr. Marri was at most a civilian criminal who may be prosecuted in the courts but not detained by the executive branch.

“This does not mean that al Marri, or similarly situated American citizens, would have to be freed,” Judge Motz wrote. “Like others accused of terrorist activity in this country, from the Oklahoma City bombers to the convicted September 11th conspirator [Zacarias Moussaoui] they could be tried on criminal charges and, if convicted, punished severely. But the government would not be able to subject them to indefinite military detention.”

Judge William B. Traxler Jr. was the swing vote. He agreed that Mr. Marri was subject to detention if what the government said about him was true. But Judge Traxler broke with the judges who voted against Mr. Marri across the board. Those judges said Mr. Marri had already had an adequate opportunity to challenge his detention in court, in the proceeding based on Mr. Rapp’s statement. Judge Traxler said that Mr. Marri must be given a fair and meaningful opportunity to see and refute “the most reliable evidence” against him, subject to national security and other concerns.

The four judges who would have ordered Mr. Marri’s release from military custody — Judges Motz, Roger L. Gregory, M. Blaine Michael and Robert B. King — agreed to join an order returning the case to the trial court based on Judge Traxler’s middle ground. They did so, Judge Motz wrote, “to give practical effect to the conclusions of the majority of the court who reject the government’s position.”

But Judge Gregory expressed frustration over the net effect of the exercise. “There is no concrete guidance as to what further process is due” Mr. Marri, he wrote.

All of the judges who would have denied Mr. Marri any relief — Judges Wilkinson, Karen J. Williams, Paul V. Niemeyer and Allyson K. Duncan — were appointed by Republican presidents; all who would have granted him full relief were appointed by Democrats. Judge Traxler was appointed to the appeals court by President Bill Clinton.

In the conclusion of his long opinion, Judge Wilkinson said terrorism cases presented courts with special challenges.

“We may never know,” he said, “whether we have struck the proper balance between liberty and security, because we do not know every action the executive is taking and we do not know every threat global terror networks have in store.”

    Court Backs Bush on Military Detentions, NYT, 16.7.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/16/washington/16combatant.html

Bush urges Congress

to open new areas to oil drilling

Fri Jul 11, 2008
6:13pm EDT
Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President George W. Bush urged Congress on Friday to act before its August break to open new areas for oil exploration in the United States to help ease record high oil prices.

"The members of Congress, particularly the Democratic leadership, must address this issue before they go home for this upcoming August break," Bush told reporters after a briefing from his economic advisers at the Department of Energy.

"They have a responsibility to explain to their constituents why we should not be drilling for more oil here in America to take the pressure off of gasoline prices," said Bush, who announced last month he favored lifting the restrictions on offshore drilling.

"One way to deal with supply problems is to increase supply here in America," said the president. "And yet the Democratic leaders of Congress just consistently block opening up these lands for exploration."

Democrats say there is no need to give oil companies protected areas to drill, because they already have 68 million acres under federal leases that have yet to be drilled.

Crude oil prices hit a record high on Friday near $147 a barrel, spurred by growing worries of threats to supplies from Iran and Nigeria and the possibility of a strike by Brazilian oil workers next week.

High oil prices have begun to have an impact on the U.S. economy, and Bush last month urged Congress to end a ban on offshore oil drilling in a bid to ease consumer anxiety over $4-a-gallon gasoline prices.

Bush advocated opening federal land off the U.S. East and West coasts, where oil drilling has been barred by both a presidential executive order and a congressional moratorium. He has estimated offshore drilling could yield 18 billion barrels of oil.

The president also advocated opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) in Alaska to drilling, as well as promoting the exploitation of oil shale in the U.S. West.

Drilling in the closed areas would not lower prices in the short-term. Experts at the Energy Department say it would take at least 10 years to bring any ANWR oil to market, and five to 10 years to develop new offshore fields.

(Editing by David Gregorio; Editing by David Gregorio)

    Bush urges Congress to open new areas to oil drilling, R, 11.7.2008, http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSMOL15913820080711

Bush welcomes new U.S. citizens

4 July 2008
USA Today

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. (AP) — President Bush invoked the memory of Thomas Jefferson Friday in welcoming new U.S. citizens at a naturalization ceremony at Monticello, saying "I'll be proud to call you a fellow American."
On his final Fourth of July as president, Bush told an audience at the home of the Declaration of Independence's author that he was honored to be present for the naturalization. Shouts from protesters were heard during Bush's remarks, and the president responded by saying he agrees that "we believe in free speech in the United States of America."

The last six Fourth of July holidays have taken place amid continuing violence in Iraq. Bush's addition of 28,000 U.S. troops last year in Iraq helped foster a measure of stability in what is now the sixth summer of the war.

Bush mentioned neither the war in Iraq nor the battle against terrorism in his speech, other than to say that "we pay tribute to the brave men and women who wear the uniform."

For the people assembled with him at the naturalization ceremony, he said: "When you raise your hands and take your oath, you will complete an incredible journey. ... From this day forward, the history of the United States will be part of your heritage."

"Throughout our history," he said, "the words of the declaration have inspired immigrants around the world to set sail to our shores. ... They made America a melting pot of culture from all across the world. They made diversity a great strength of our democracy."

"Those of you taking the oath of citizenship at this ceremony hail from 30 different nations," Bush noted. " ... You all have one thing in common — and that is a shared love of freedom ... and this is the love that makes us all Americans."

Said Bush: "This is a fitting place to celebrate our nation's independence. Thomas Jefferson once said he'd rather celebrate the Fourth of July than his own birthday. To me, it's pretty simple — the Fourth of July weekend is my birthday weekend."

Before his brief remarks, the president was given a tour of Jefferson's home including the room where the author of the Declaration of Independence died on July 4, 1826, the same day as the death of Jefferson's predecessor, John Adams.

Bush welcomes new U.S. citizens, UT, 4.7.2008, http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2008-07-04-bush-fourth_N.htm

Judge Rejects Bush’s View on Wiretaps

July 3, 2008
The New York Times
By ERIC LICHTBLAU

WASHINGTON — A federal judge in California said Wednesday that the wiretapping law established by Congress was the “exclusive” means for the president to eavesdrop on Americans, and he rejected the government’s claim that the president’s constitutional authority as commander in chief trumped that law.

The judge, Vaughn R. Walker, the chief judge for the Northern District of California, made his findings in a ruling on a lawsuit brought by an Oregon charity. The group says it has evidence of an illegal wiretap used against it by the National Security Agency under the secret surveillance program established by President Bush after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The Justice Department has tried for more than two years to kill the lawsuit, saying any surveillance of the charity or other entities was a “state secret” and citing the president’s constitutional power as commander in chief to order wiretaps without a warrant from a court under the agency’s program.

But Judge Walker, who was appointed to the bench by former President George Bush, rejected those central claims in his 56-page ruling. He said the rules for surveillance were clearly established by Congress in 1978 under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires the government to get a warrant from a secret court.

“Congress appears clearly to have intended to — and did — establish the exclusive means for foreign intelligence activities to be conducted,” the judge wrote. “Whatever power the executive may otherwise have had in this regard, FISA limits the power of the executive branch to conduct such activities and it limits the executive branch’s authority to assert the state secrets privilege in response to challenges to the legality of its foreign intelligence surveillance activities.”

Judge Walker’s voice carries extra weight because all the lawsuits involving telephone companies that took part in the N.S.A. program have been consolidated and are being heard in his court.

Jon Eisenberg, a lawyer for Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, the plaintiff in the case, said the legal issues Judge Walker’s ruling raised were significant. “He’s saying FISA makes the rules and the president is bound by those rules,” Mr. Eisenberg said.

A Justice Department official said the department was reviewing the opinion late Wednesday and would consider its options.

Officials at Al-Haramain say they were mistakenly given a government document revealing the N.S.A. operation. The Federal Bureau of Investigation demanded the document back, and Judge Walker’s ruling made it more difficult for Al-Haramain to use what it claims to have seen . But he refused to throw out the lawsuit, giving the charity’s lawyers 30 days to restructure their claim. “We still have our foot in the door,” Mr. Eisenberg said. “The clock is a minute to midnight, but we’ve been there before and survived.”

The ruling comes as the Senate is overhauling the foreign intelligence law. The measure would reaffirm FISA as the exclusive means for the president to order wiretaps through court warrants, but it would also provide legal immunity to phone companies involved in the eavesdropping program. A vote could come Tuesday.

The immunity issue would not directly affect this lawsuit because Al-Haramain is suing the government, not the phone companies. But the nearly 40 other lawsuits against phone companies that Judge Walker is overseeing would almost certainly have to be dismissed if immunity is signed into law, legal analysts say.

    Judge Rejects Bush’s View on Wiretaps, NYT, 3.7.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/03/washington/03fisa.html

Bush signs $162 billion war spending bill

30 June 2008
USA Today
From staff and wire reports

WASHINGTON — President Bush on Monday signed a $162 billion war funding bill that includes doubling college benefits for troops and veterans and provides a 13-week extension of unemployment benefits.

The spending plan also provides $2.7 billion "to help ensure that any state facing a disaster like the recent flooding and tornadoes in the Midwest has access to needed resources."

"With this legislation we send a clear message to all who are serving on the front lines that the nation continues its support," Bush said of troops fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The legislation allocates money for the wars until mid-2009, when the next president will be in office. It also ends a battle with Bush and Democrats who wanted to delay war funding with demands for a timetable for troop withdrawals.

Bush, who ended up getting the money he wanted, praised Republicans and Democrats for coming together on the bill and "providing these vital funds."

"This bill shows the American people that even in an election year, Republicans and Democrats can come together to support our troops and their families," Bush said in an Oval Office ceremony.

The spending bill will bring to more than $650 billion the amount Congress has provided for the Iraq war since it started more than five years ago.

For operations in Afghanistan, the total is nearly $200 billion, according to congressional officials.

The legislation which is an expansion of the GI bill "will make it easier for our troops to transfer unused education benefits to their spouses and children," Bush said. "It will help us to recruit and reward the best military on the face of the Earth."

The bill also includes $465 million for the Merida Initiative — a partnership with Mexico and nations in Central America to crack down on violent drug trafficking gangs.

Contributing: Associated Press

    Bush signs $162 billion war spending bill, UT, 30.6.2008, http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2008-06-30-bush-war_N.htm

Op-Ed Columnist

Mr. Bush, Lead or Leave

June 22, 2008
The New York Times
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Two years ago, President Bush declared that America was “addicted to oil,” and, by gosh, he was going to do something about it. Well, now he has. Now we have the new Bush energy plan: “Get more addicted to oil.”

Actually, it’s more sophisticated than that: Get Saudi Arabia, our chief oil pusher, to up our dosage for a little while and bring down the oil price just enough so the renewable energy alternatives can’t totally take off. Then try to strong arm Congress into lifting the ban on drilling offshore and in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

It’s as if our addict-in-chief is saying to us: “C’mon guys, you know you want a little more of the good stuff. One more hit, baby. Just one more toke on the ole oil pipe. I promise, next year, we’ll all go straight. I’ll even put a wind turbine on my presidential library. But for now, give me one more pop from that drill, please, baby. Just one more transfusion of that sweet offshore crude.”

It is hard for me to find the words to express what a massive, fraudulent, pathetic excuse for an energy policy this is. But it gets better. The president actually had the gall to set a deadline for this drug deal:

“I know the Democratic leaders have opposed some of these policies in the past,” Mr. Bush said. “Now that their opposition has helped drive gas prices to record levels, I ask them to reconsider their positions. If Congressional leaders leave for the Fourth of July recess without taking action, they will need to explain why $4-a-gallon gasoline is not enough incentive for them to act.”

This from a president who for six years resisted any pressure on Detroit to seriously improve mileage standards on its gas guzzlers; this from a president who’s done nothing to encourage conservation; this from a president who has so neutered the Environmental Protection Agency that the head of the E.P.A. today seems to be in a witness-protection program. I bet there aren’t 12 readers of this newspaper who could tell you his name or identify him in a police lineup.

But, most of all, this deadline is from a president who hasn’t lifted a finger to broker passage of legislation that has been stuck in Congress for a year, which could actually impact America’s energy profile right now — unlike offshore oil that would take years to flow — and create good tech jobs to boot.

That bill is H.R. 6049 — “The Renewable Energy and Job Creation Act of 2008,” which extends for another eight years the investment tax credit for installing solar energy and extends for one year the production tax credit for producing wind power and for three years the credits for geothermal, wave energy and other renewables.

These critical tax credits for renewables are set to expire at the end of this fiscal year and, if they do, it will mean thousands of jobs lost and billions of dollars of investments not made. “Already clean energy projects in the U.S. are being put on hold,” said Rhone Resch, president of the Solar Energy Industries Association.

People forget, wind and solar power are here, they work, they can go on your roof tomorrow. What they need now is a big U.S. market where lots of manufacturers have an incentive to install solar panels and wind turbines — because the more they do, the more these technologies would move down the learning curve, become cheaper and be able to compete directly with coal, oil and nuclear, without subsidies.

That seems to be exactly what the Republican Party is trying to block, since the Senate Republicans — sorry to say, with the help of John McCain — have now managed to defeat the renewal of these tax credits six different times.

Of course, we’re going to need oil for years to come. That being the case, I’d prefer — for geopolitical reasons — that we get as much as possible from domestic wells. But our future is not in oil, and a real president wouldn’t be hectoring Congress about offshore drilling today. He’d be telling the country a much larger truth:

“Oil is poisoning our climate and our geopolitics, and here is how we’re going to break our addiction: We’re going to set a floor price of $4.50 a gallon for gasoline and $100 a barrel for oil. And that floor price is going to trigger massive investments in renewable energy — particularly wind, solar panels and solar thermal. And we’re also going to go on a crash program to dramatically increase energy efficiency, to drive conservation to a whole new level and to build more nuclear power. And I want every Democrat and every Republican to join me in this endeavor.”

That’s what a real president would do. He’d give us a big strategic plan to end our addiction to oil and build a bipartisan coalition to deliver it. He certainly wouldn’t be using his last days in office to threaten Congressional Democrats that if they don’t approve offshore drilling by the Fourth of July recess, they will be blamed for $4-a-gallon gas. That is so lame. That is an energy policy so unworthy of our Independence Day.

    Mr. Bush, Lead or Leave, NYT, 22.6.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/22/opinion/22friedman.html

Essay

‘Not My Fault’

June 22, 2008
The New York Times
By JACOB HEILBRUNN

Although secrecy and loyalty have been bywords of the Bush White House, its officials have been improbably loose-lipped upon leaving office, particularly in the memoirs they have written. So far, there have been exposés from Paul O’Neill (Bush’s former Treasury secretary), Richard Clarke (his onetime counterterrorism czar), David Kuo (deputy director of the White House’s faith-based initiative), L. Paul Bremer III (the former top civilian in Iraq) and the foreign-policy hands John Bolton and Douglas J. Feith. Each of these books has been a record, to some extent, of disillusionment, and all have excited a good deal of attention. But perhaps none have had the force of “What Happened,” the new memoir by Bush’s former press secretary, Scott McClellan, which has zoomed to the top of the best-seller lists (including the Book Review’s) and brought fresh scrutiny to an administration that had been all but invisible during this election season.

The book’s impact is all the more remarkable given how familiar its revelations are, whether it’s McClellan’s crushingly obvious remarks about the administration’s selling of the Iraq war, Bush’s contempt for the press or Vice President Dick Cheney’s penchant for secrecy. As Joshua Green wrote in The New York Observer, “For all the hype on cable news shows and blogs, ‘What Happened’ adds almost nothing of value to the historical record.”

What may, in fact, be most revealing about McClellan’s book is not what it discloses about the head of state, but what it says about the continuing devaluation of the political memoir as a literary form. Paradoxical though it may seem, even as these books have become more accusatory, they have also become less illuminating. While they were once useful and sometimes absorbing accounts of the inner workings of government at its highest levels, these books now tend to be exercises in apostasy, and their primary purpose seems to be to confer intellectual and moral independence, if not heroism, on their authors. “Forty years ago, publishers had a pretty high standard for who should write books,” the historian Michael Beschloss, who is based in Washington, said in a telephone interview. “There were fewer books published. You had better possess some literary ability.”

He has a point. The eulogistic memoirs of an earlier time were consequential, partly because their authors drew on their own notes and diaries, which very few officials dare to keep in the scandal- and subpoena-driven Washington of our time. Raw material of this kind enabled officials to wait before telling stories that still arrived with a sense of immediacy. Henry L. Stimson’s 1948 doorstop, “On Active Service in Peace and War,” published several years after he ended his tenure as secretary of war, drew copiously on Stimson’s personal papers. “A Thousand Days,” Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s retrospective account of the Kennedy White House, relied heavily on Schlesinger’s diaries. Dean Acheson’s masterly “Present at the Creation” was published in 1969, almost two decades after he left office. And the first volume of Henry Kissinger’s invaluable memoirs, “The White House Years,” did not appear until 1979, when he was well out of government.

How did we go from these cigar-and-brandy tomes — often intended to burnish the reputations of their authors and also those of the presidents they served — to sensationalistic trifles like “What Happened”?

One answer lies in a less well-known but equally important countertradition, the dyslogistic school of memoir written by former officials who present themselves as disillusioned innocents. A classic instance is Raymond Moley’s “After Seven Years,” published in 1939. Moley had been a charter member of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s brain trust but grew disenchanted with what he saw as the president’s sharp turn to the left. Presaging Scott McClellan, Moley brooded histrionically about his employer’s failings: “To say that I was sick at heart over what was happening would be the epitome of understatement. I was also completely baffled. Was Roosevelt really ignorant of the implications of what he was doing?”

A later memoir of this kind is “The Ordeal of Power,” an insider account of the Eisenhower administration written by Emmet John Hughes, a presidential aide and top speechwriter. Hughes depicted his boss as a passive leader who had left the Republican Party in shambles. Like Moley’s memoir, Hughes’s was elegiac in tone and dealt solely in high politics, with no hint of personal innuendo. But Eisenhower was incensed, and the specter of the memoirist as turncoat worried his successor. John F. Kennedy “wondered who in his entourage was going to become the Emmet John Hughes,” Beschloss said.

The Reagan era brought something new, a flurry of score-settling memoirs published while the president was still in office. Alexander M. Haig Jr., forced out as secretary of state in 1982, led the way with “Caveat,” which blamed a clique led by the White House chief of staff, James Baker, for his downfall; labeled the White House as a “ghost ship”; and lamented that Reagan hadn’t hewed more closely to — what else? — Haig’s own advice. A more inflammatory memoir was “For the Record.” Its author, Donald Regan, the chief of staff in Reagan’s second term, described Nancy Reagan’s concern with her husband’s image and reported that she was in thrall to a San Francisco astrologer.

Most revealing of all was the budget director David Stockman’s book, “The Triumph of Politics,” with its complaint that Reagan “had no concrete plan to dislocate and traumatize the here-and-now of American society.” Bill Clinton’s presidency also yielded memoirs that cataloged their authors’ disappointments, most notably George Stephanopoulos’s “All Too Human.” Like Stockman, Stephanopoulos suggested that his boss was the flawed instrument of grand ideals: “I came to see how Clinton’s shamelessness is a key to his political success, how his capacity for denial is tied to the optimism that is his greatest political strength.”

With the Bush administration, however, the memoir of aggrievement has emerged as a crowded genre. Why? Perhaps because, as Walter Isaacson, the author of a biography of Kissinger and the president of the Aspen Institute, told me, the Bush team took office “trying to create complete control of the message as opposed to serving the truth. In the end, that message discipline exploded on them. Now everyone’s expressing their pent-up desire to go off message.”

Enter Scott McClellan, who was a small player, after all. He issued no orders, formulated no policy. He wasn’t even in the room when the big shots assembled, though he does report that after winning re-election in 2004, Bush declared at a staff celebration: “I especially want to thank Scott. I want to thank you for saying — nothing.”

In other words, McClellan wasn’t supposed to function as a press secretary, but to impersonate one. Still smarting, he has avenged himself by exercising the power of the powerless. He has gained the spotlight, if only for a few days, and at the same time has distanced himself from his former brethren. “What Happened” is the latest product of what Isaacson calls the “it-wasn’t-my-fault industry.” And that industry is unlikely to halt operations anytime soon: the former defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld is currently working on his memoirs.

Jacob Heilbrunn, a regular contributor to the Book Review, is the author of “They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons.”

    ‘Not My Fault’, NYT, 22.6.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/22/books/review/Heilbrunn-t.html

Bush visits Iowa,

billions in flood aid available

Thu Jun 19, 2008
4:14pm EDT
Reuters
By Tabassum Zakaria


CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa (Reuters) - President George W. Bush got a close-up view of damage from the worst Midwest flooding in 15 years on Thursday as his administration promised funding from a multibillion-dollar disaster relief fund.

The price tag from the slow-rolling calamity mounted as flood waters surged over and through levees along the surging Mississippi River.

The cost of the flooding across the U.S. corn belt will be felt by consumers worldwide in terms of higher food prices, and in business losses yet to be toted up.

"I know a lot of farmers and cattlemen are hurting right now," Bush said at an emergency center in Cedar Rapids, among the cities hit hardest by this week's flooding. "It's a tough time," he said before taking a helicopter tour of flooded areas with Iowa Gov. Chet Culver.

Near the Cedar River, which jumped its banks and flooded several square miles (kms) of Cedar Rapids, Bush toured a construction company used as a staging area and saw a wall of sandbags stained brown by the river.

During the trip to Cedar Rapids with Bush, Federal Emergency Management administrator David Paulison said the $4 billion currently in FEMA's Disaster Relief Fund should be "more than enough" to provide federal aid.

White House Budget Director Jim Nussle, a former Iowa congressman, said Bush would not announce new aid immediately, but was keeping an eye on the U.S. House of Representatives debate on a war funding bill that included $2.65 billion to replenish the disaster relief fund.

In a sign of the political importance of heartland states, the Republican hoping to succeed Bush in the White House, John McCain, paid a visit to Columbus Junction, downstream on the Iowa River from Iowa City, where Bush was to visit.

McCain praised the effort to minimize the flooding, and said he was confident an aid package will move quickly through Congress.

Earlier this week, likely Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama helped on a sandbag line on the Mississippi River in Illinois.

COST COULD RISE

Culver has said he anticipated $2 billion in federal aid. Ultimately, the cost of the disaster may end up rivaling that of 1993 Midwest floods that caused more than $20 billion in damage and 48 deaths.

Twenty-four deaths have been blamed on flooding and violent storms since late May as rivers overflowed their banks. Another 40,000 people have been forced from their homes.

The high cost of recovery might warrant more federal help, some local residents said. "It might behoove the government to consider spending $5 billion or $6 billion less on foreign wars and invest that money on helping out people here instead," said Dave Spitaleri, owner of the Railsplitter Inn in Hull, Illinois, along the Mississippi River.

U.S. government disaster aid would help with repairing or replacing washed-out roads and rail lines and with the largely uninsured cost of damage to businesses and homes inundated by the flood waters.

Union Pacific Corp, the No. 1 U.S. railroad, said on Thursday it had reopened an East-West track through Iowa, allowing limited traffic. A pair of lock and dams reopened on the Mississippi River, though more than 240 miles of the vital waterway remain closed, stranding scores of barges.

Days without rain have allowed rivers and creeks to recede in Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin and Indiana, revealing the scope of the multibillion-dollar flood disaster. Scattered rainstorms were forecast, but nothing like the deluges that dumped a foot (0.3 meter) of rain on parts of the region earlier this month.

The final destination for all that flood water was the Mississippi River, which had breached or over-topped 23 levees along its North-South route.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said 48 levees protecting more than 285,000 acres of cropland from Dubuque, Iowa, to St. Louis, Missouri, were overflowing or at high flood risk.

The latest to be overtopped was close to the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, north of St. Louis.

Thousands of people filled sandbags and bulldozers pushed piles of sand to patch up leaking levees, as the raging current sought an outlet underneath, over or through the earth and sand embankments.

Corn prices retreated on Thursday, after setting a record high above $8 a bushel on the flooding that has submerged or stunted crops on millions of acres (hectares). According to crop analysts, 5 million acres of cropland mostly planted to corn and soybeans have been ruined.

"If we get good weather we could still have decent crops," said Vic Lespinasse, analyst for GrainAnalyst.com.

"The levees are still breaking and it's tragic for the people involved," he said. "But if we have another weather problem, we could take off like a rocket," he said.
 

(Additional reporting by Nick Carey in Hull, Lisa Shumaker and Sam Nelson in Chicago; writing by Andrew Stern; Editing by Jackie Frank)

    Bush visits Iowa, billions in flood aid available, R, 19.6.2008, http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSN1346134820080619

Bush urges Congress to lift offshore drilling ban

June 18, 2008
Filed at 3:43 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- With gasoline topping $4 a gallon, President Bush urged Congress on Wednesday to lift its long-standing ban on offshore oil and gas drilling, saying the United States needs to increase its energy production. Democrats quickly rejected the idea.

''There is no excuse for delay,'' the president said in a statement in the Rose Garden. With the presidential election just months away, Bush made a pointed attack on Democrats, accusing them of obstructing his energy proposals and blaming them for high gasoline costs. His proposal echoed a call by Republican presidential candidate John McCain to open the Continental Shelf for exploration

''Families across the country are looking to Washington for a response,'' Bush said.

Congressional Democrats were quick to reject the push for lifting the drilling moratorium, saying oil companies already have 68 million acres offshore waters under lease that are not being developed.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called Bush's proposals ''another page from (an)... energy policy that was literally written by the oil industry -- give away more public resources.''

Sen. Barack Obama, the Democrats' presumptive presidential nominee, rejected lifting the drilling moratorium that has been supported by a succession of presidents for nearly two decades.

''This is not something that's going to give consumers short-term relief and it is not a long-term solution to our problems with fossil fuels generally and oil in particular,'' said Obama. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, lumping Bush with McCain, accused them of staging a ''cynical campaign ploy'' that won't help lower energy prices.

''Despite what President Bush, John McCain and their friends in the oil industry claim, we cannot drill our way out of this problem,'' Reid said. ''The math is simple: America has just three percent of the world's oil reserves, but Americans use a quarter of its oil.''

White House spokesman Tony Fratto retorted: ''Anyone out there saying that something can be done overnight, or in a matter of months, to deal with high gasoline prices is trying to fool people. There is no tool in the toolbox out there that will lower gas prices overnight, or in weeks, or probably not even in months.''

Bush said offshore drilling could yield up to 18 billion barrels of oil over time, although it would take years for production to start. Bush also said offshore drilling would take pressure off prices over time.

There are two prohibitions on offshore drilling, one imposed by Congress and another by executive order signed by Bush's father in 1990. Bush's brother, Jeb, fiercely opposed offshore drilling when he was governor of Florida. What the president now proposes would rescind his father's decision -- but the president took the position that Congress has to act first and then he would follow behind.

Asked why Bush doesn't act first and lift the ban, Keith Hennessey, the director of the president's economic council, said: ''He thinks that probably the most productive way to work with this Congress is to try to do it in tandem.''

Before Bush spoke, the House Appropriations Committee postponed a vote it had scheduled for Wednesday on legislation doing the opposite of what the president asked -- extending Congress' ban on offshore drilling. Lawmakers said they wanted to focus on a disaster relief bill for the battered Midwest.

Bush also proposed opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for drilling, lifting restrictions on oil shale leasing in the Green River Basin of Colorado, Utah and Wyoming and easing the regulatory process to expand oil refining capacity.

With Americans deeply pessimistic about the economy, Bush tried to put on the onus on Congress. He acknowledged that his new proposals would take years to have a full effect, hardly the type of news that will help drivers at the gas stations now. The White House says no quick fix exists.

Still, Bush said Congress was obstructing progress -- and directly contributing to consumers' pain at the pump.

''I know the Democratic leaders have opposed some of these policies in the past,'' Bush said. ''Now that their opposition has helped drive gas prices to record levels, I ask them to reconsider their positions.''

Bush said that if congressional leaders head home for their July 4 recess without taking action, they will need to explain why ''$4 a gallon gasoline is not enough incentive for them to act. And Americans will rightly ask how high gas prices have to rise before the Democratic-controlled Congress will do something about it.''

Bush said restrictions on offshore drilling have become ''outdated and counterproductive.''

In a nod to the environmental arguments against drilling, Bush said technology has come a long way. These days, he said, oil exploration off the coastline can be done in a way that ''is out of sight, protects coral reefs and habitats, and protects against oil spills.''

Congressional Democrats, joined by some GOP lawmakers from coastal states, have opposed lifting the prohibition that has barred energy companies from waters along both the East and West coasts and in the eastern Gulf of Mexico for 27 years.

On Monday, McCain made lifting the federal ban on offshore oil and gas development a key part of his energy plan. McCain said states should be allowed to pursue energy exploration in waters near their coasts and get some of the royalty revenue.

Obama retorted that the Arizona senator had flip-flopped on that issue.

    Bush urges Congress to lift offshore drilling ban, NYT, 18.6.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/washington/AP-Offshore-Oil.html

Editorial

Mr. Bush v. the Bill of Rights

June 18, 2008
The New York Times

In the waning months of his tenure, President Bush and his allies are once again trying to scare Congress into expanding the president’s powers to spy on Americans without a court order.

This week, the White House and Democratic and Republican leaders on Capitol Hill hope to announce a “compromise” on a domestic spying bill. If they do, it will be presented as an indispensable tool for protecting the nation’s security that still safeguards our civil liberties. The White House will paint opponents as weak-kneed liberals who do not understand and cannot stand up to the threat of terrorism.

The bill is not a compromise. The final details are being worked out, but all indications are that many of its provisions are both unnecessary and a threat to the Bill of Rights. The White House and the Congressional Republicans who support the bill have two real aims. They want to undermine the power of the courts to review the legality of domestic spying programs. And they want to give a legal shield to the telecommunications companies that broke the law by helping Mr. Bush carry out his warrantless wiretapping operation.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, requires the government to get a warrant to intercept communications between anyone in this country and anyone outside it. The 1978 law created a special court that has approved all but a handful of the government’s many thousands of warrant requests.

Still, after Sept. 11, 2001, Mr. Bush bypassed the FISA court and authorized the interception of international calls and e-mail messages without a warrant. Then, when The Times disclosed the operation in late 2005, Mr. Bush claimed that FISA did not allow the United States to act quickly enough to stop terrorists. That was nonsense. FISA always gave the government the power to start listening and then get a warrant — a grace period that has been extended since Sept. 11.

More fundamental, Mr. Bush’s powers do not supersede laws passed by Congress or the Constitution’s protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.

The ensuing debate did turn up an Internet-age problem with FISA: It requires a warrant to eavesdrop on foreign communications that go through American computers. There was an easy fix, but when Congress made it last year, the White House muscled in amendments that seriously diluted the courts’ ability to restrain the government from spying on its own citizens.

That law expires on Aug. 3, and Mr. Bush is demanding even more power to spy. He also wants immunity for the telecommunications companies that provided the government with Americans’ private data without a warrant after Sept. 11.

Lawsuits against those companies are the best hope of finding out the extent of Mr. Bush’s lawless spying. But Democratic leaders in Congress are reported to have agreed to a phony compromise drafted by Senator Christopher Bond, the Republican vice chairman of the Intelligence Committee.

Under the so-called compromise, the question of immunity would be decided by a federal district court — a concession by Mr. Bond, who originally wanted the FISA court, which meets in secret and is unsuited to the task, to decide. What is unacceptable, though, is that the district court would be instructed to decide based solely on whether the Bush administration certifies that the companies were told the spying was legal. If the aim is to allow a court hearing on the president’s spying, the lawsuits should be allowed to proceed — and the courts should be able to resolve them the way they resolve every other case. Republicans, who complain about judges making laws from the bench, should not be making judicial decisions from Capitol Hill.

This week, House and Senate leaders were trying to allay the concerns of some lawmakers that approving the immunity would be tantamount to retroactively declaring the spying operation to have been legal. Those lawmakers are right. Granting the corporations immunity would send that exact message.

The new bill has other problems. It gives the government too much leeway to acquire communications in the United States without individual warrants or even a showing of probable cause. It greatly reduces judicial review, and it would remain in force for six years, which is too long.

If Congress cannot pass a clean bill that fixes the one real problem with FISA, it should simply extend the temporary authorization. At a minimum, the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, should oppose FISA expansion and pledge to revisit it next year. If any significant changes are going to be made, they should be made under the next president.

There are clear differences between the candidates. Senator John McCain, who is sounding more like Mr. Bush every day, believes the president has the power to eavesdrop on Americans without a warrant.

Senator Barack Obama opposes immunity and voted against the temporary expansion of FISA. We hope he will show strong leadership this time. He might even take time off from the campaign to vote against the disturbing deal brewing in the back rooms of Congress.

    Mr. Bush v. the Bill of Rights, NYT, 18.6.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/18/opinion/18wed1.html

Editorial

The Truth About the War

June 6, 2008
The New York Times

It took just a few months after the United States’ invasion of Iraq for the world to find out that Saddam Hussein had long abandoned his nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs. He was not training terrorists or colluding with Al Qaeda. The only real threat he posed was to his own countrymen.

It has taken five years to finally come to a reckoning over how much the Bush administration knowingly twisted and hyped intelligence to justify that invasion. On Thursday — after years of Republican stonewalling — a report by the Senate Intelligence Committee gave us as good a set of answers as we’re likely to get.

The report shows clearly that President Bush should have known that important claims he made about Iraq did not conform with intelligence reports. In other cases, he could have learned the truth if he had asked better questions or encouraged more honest answers.

The report confirms one serious intelligence failure: President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other administration officials were told that Iraq still had chemical and biological weapons and did not learn that these reports were wrong until after the invasion. But Mr. Bush and his team made even that intelligence seem more solid, more recent and more dangerous than it was.

The report shows that there was no intelligence to support the two most frightening claims Mr. Bush and his vice president used to sell the war: that Iraq was actively developing nuclear weapons and had longstanding ties to terrorist groups. It seems clear that the president and his team knew that that was not true, or should have known it — if they had not ignored dissenting views and telegraphed what answers they were looking for.

Over all, the report makes it clear that top officials, especially Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, knew they were not giving a full and honest account of their justifications for going to war.

The report was supported by only two of the seven Republicans on the 15-member Senate panel. The five dissenting Republicans first tried to kill it, and then to delete most of its conclusions. They finally settled for appending objections. The bulk of their criticisms were sophistry transparently intended to protect Mr. Bush and deny the public a full accounting of how he took America into a disastrous war.

The report documents how time and again Mr. Bush and his team took vague and dubious intelligence reports on Iraq’s weapons programs and made them sound like hard and incontrovertible fact.

“They continue to pursue the nuclear program they began so many years ago,” Mr. Cheney said on Aug. 26, 2002, adding that “we now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons.”

On Oct. 7, 2002, Mr. Bush told an audience in Cincinnati that Iraq “is seeking nuclear weapons” and that “the evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program.” Saddam Hussein, he said, “is moving ever closer to developing a nuclear weapon.”

Later, both men talked about Iraq trying to buy uranium in Africa and about the purchase of aluminum tubes that they said could only be used for a nuclear weapons program. They talked about Iraq having such a weapon in five years, then in three years, then in one.

If they had wanted to give an honest accounting of the intelligence on Iraq’s nuclear weapons, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney would have said it indicated that Mr. Hussein’s nuclear weapons program had been destroyed years earlier by American military strikes.

As for Iraq’s supposed efforts to “reconstitute” that program, they would have had to say that reports about the uranium shopping and the aluminum tubes were the extent of the evidence — and those claims were already in serious doubt when Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney told the public about them. That would not have been nearly as persuasive, of course, as Mr. Bush’s infamous “mushroom cloud” warning.

The report said Mr. Bush was justified in saying that intelligence analysts believed Iraq had chemical and biological weapons. But even then, he and his aides glossed over inconvenient facts — that the only new data on biological weapons came from a dubious source code-named Curveball and proved to be false.

Yet Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney persisted in talking as if there were ironclad proof of Iraq’s weapons and plans for global mayhem.

“Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt that he is amassing them to use them against our friends, against our allies and against us,” Mr. Cheney said on Aug. 29, 2002.

Actually, there was plenty of doubt — at the time — about that second point. According to the Senate report, there was no evidence that Mr. Hussein intended to use weapons of mass destruction against anyone, and the intelligence community never said there was.

The committee’s dissenting Republicans attempted to have this entire section of the report deleted — along with a conclusion that the administration misrepresented the intelligence when it warned of a risk that Mr. Hussein could give weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups. They said Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney never used the word “intent” and were merely trying to suggest that Iraq “could” do those terrible things.

It’s hard to imagine that anyone drew that distinction after hearing Mr. Bush declare that “Saddam Hussein would like nothing more than to use a terrorist network to attack and to kill and leave no fingerprints behind.” Or when he said: “Each passing day could be the one on which the Iraqi regime gives anthrax or VX nerve gas or someday a nuclear weapon to a terrorist ally.”

The Senate report shows that the intelligence Mr. Bush had did not support those statements — or Mr. Rumsfeld’s that “every month that goes by, his W.M.D. programs are progressing, and he moves closer to his goal of possessing the capability to strike our population, and our allies, and hold them hostage to blackmail.”

Claims by Mr. Cheney and Mr. Rumsfeld that Iraq had longstanding ties to Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups also were false, and the Senate committee’s report shows that the two men knew it, or should have.

We cannot say with certainty whether Mr. Bush lied about Iraq. But when the president withholds vital information from the public — or leads them to believe things that he knows are not true — to justify the invasion of another country, that is bad enough.

    The Truth About the War, NYT, 6.6.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/06/opinion/06fri1.html

Bush Overstated Iraq Evidence,

Senators Report

June 6, 2008
The New York Times
By MARK MAZZETTI and SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON — A long-delayed Senate committee report endorsed by Democrats and some Republicans concluded that President Bush and his aides built the public case for war against Iraq by exaggerating available intelligence and by ignoring disagreements among spy agencies about Iraq’s weapons programs and Saddam Hussein’s links to Al Qaeda.

The report was released Thursday after years of partisan squabbling, and it represented the close of five years of investigations by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence into the use, abuse and faulty assessments of intelligence leading to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

That some Bush administration claims about the Iraqi threat turned out to be false is hardly new. But the report, based on a detailed review of public statements by Mr. Bush and other officials, was the most comprehensive effort to date to assess whether policy makers systematically painted a more dire picture about Iraq than was justified by the available intelligence.

The 170-page report accuses Mr. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other top officials of repeatedly overstating the Iraqi threat in the emotional aftermath of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Its findings were endorsed by all eight committee Democrats and two Republicans, Senators Olympia J. Snowe of Maine and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska.

In a statement accompanying the report, Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, the West Virginia Democrat who is chairman of the intelligence panel, said, “The president and his advisers undertook a relentless public campaign in the aftermath of the attacks to use the war against Al Qaeda as a justification for overthrowing Saddam Hussein.”

Dana Perino, the White House spokeswoman, on Thursday called the report a “selective view” and said that the Bush administration’s public statements were based on the same faulty intelligence given to Congress and endorsed by foreign intelligence services. Senator Christopher S. Bond of Missouri, the committee’s top Republican, called the report a “waste of committee time and resources.”

The presidential campaigns of Senators John McCain and Barack Obama had not responded by Thursday night to requests for comment on the Senate report.

The report on the prewar statements found that on some important issues, most notably on what was believed to be Iraq’s nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs, the public statements from Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney and other senior officials were generally “substantiated” by the best estimates at the time from American intelligence agencies. But it found that the administration officials’ statements usually did not reflect the intelligence agencies’ uncertainties about the evidence or the disputes among them.

In a separate report released Wednesday, the intelligence committee provided new details about a series of clandestine meetings in Rome and Paris between Pentagon officials and Iranian dissidents in 2001 and 2003. The meetings included discussions about possible covert actions to destabilize the government in Tehran, and were used by the Pentagon officials to glean information about rivalries in Iran and what was thought to be an Iranian “hit” team intending to attack American troops in Afghanistan, the report said.

The report concluded that Stephen J. Hadley, now the national security adviser, and Paul D. Wolfowitz, who was then the deputy defense secretary, “acted within their authorities” to send the Pentagon officials to Rome. But the report criticized the meetings as ill advised, and accused Mr. Hadley and Mr. Wolfowitz of keeping the State Department and intelligence agencies in the dark about the meetings, which the report portrayed as part of a rogue intelligence operation.

The two reports were the final parts of the committee’s so-called Phase 2 investigation of prewar intelligence on Iraq and related issues. The first phase of the inquiry, begun in the summer of 2003 and completed in July 2004, identified grave faults in the C.I.A.’s analysis of the threat posed by Mr. Hussein.

The report on Iraq on Thursday was especially critical of statements by the president and vice president linking Iraq to Al Qaeda and raising the possibility that Mr. Hussein might supply the terrorist group with unconventional weapons. “Representing to the American people that the two had an operational partnership and posed a single, indistinguishable threat was fundamentally misleading and led the nation to war on false premises,” Mr. Rockefeller wrote.

Mr. Bond and four other Republicans on the committee sharply dissented from the report’s findings and suggested that the investigation was a partisan smoke screen to obscure the real story: that the C.I.A. failed the Bush administration by delivering intelligence assessments to policy makers that have since been discredited.

In a detailed minority report, four of those Republicans accused Democrats of hypocrisy and of cherry picking, namely by refusing to include misleading public statements by top Democrats like Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and Mr. Rockefeller.

As an example, they pointed to an October 2002 speech by Mr. Rockefeller, who declared to his Senate colleagues that he had arrived at the “inescapable conclusion that the threat posed to America by Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction is so serious that despite the risks, and we should not minimize the risks, we must authorize the president to take the necessary steps to deal with the threat.”

The report about the Bush administration’s public statements offers some new details about the intelligence information that was available to policy makers as they built a case for war. For instance, in September 2002 Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the defense secretary, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that “the Iraq problem cannot be solved by airstrikes alone,” because Iraqi chemical and biological weapons were so deeply buried that they could not be penetrated by American bombs.

Two months later, however, the National Intelligence Council wrote an assessment for Mr. Rumsfeld concluding that the Iraqi underground weapons facilities identified by the intelligence agencies “are vulnerable to conventional, precision-guided, penetrating munitions because they are not deeply buried.”

On Thursday, Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, a Democratic member of the intelligence committee, said that Congress had never been told about the National Intelligence Council’s assessment.

    Bush Overstated Iraq Evidence, Senators Report, NYT, 6.6.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/06/world/middleeast/06intel.html?ref=opinion

White House Reacts Angrily to Former Aide’s Book

May 29, 2008
The New York Times
By ELISABETH BUMILLER and ANAHAD O’CONNOR

The White House reacted angrily today to scathing criticisms of President Bush and members of his inner circle that appear in a new memoir written by Scott McClellan, the former White House press secretary who was forced out in 2006 after three tumultuous years.

In excerpts from the book, set to be published next week, Mr. McClellan writes that President Bush “convinces himself to believe what suits his needs at the moment,” and has engaged in “self-deception” to justify his political ends. He calls the decision to invade Iraq a “serious strategic blunder,” and says that the biggest mistake the Bush White House made was “a decision to turn away from candor and honesty when those qualities were most needed.”

But Dana Perino, the current White House press secretary, had harsh words for Mr. McClellan, calling him “sad” and suggesting that he mischaracterized his years in the West Wing to sell books.

“Scott, we now know, is disgruntled about his experience at the White House,” she said. “For those of us who fully supported him, before, during and after he was press secretary, we are puzzled. It is sad. This is not the Scott we knew.”

She said that President Bush was told of some of the excerpts but would not be commenting on them because “he has more pressing matters than to spend time commenting on books by former staffers.” But Karl Rove, a principle target of many of Mr. McClellan’s charges and the former deputy chief of staff for President Bush, reacted immediately on Tuesday night. Speaking on Fox News, where he is now a commentator, Mr. Rove said Mr. McClellan was not even present at many of the meetings he describes and suggested that he was not writing truthfully.

“First of all, this doesn’t sound like Scott. It really doesn’t,” he said. “Not the Scott McClellan I’ve known for a long time. Second of all, it sounds like somebody else. It sounds like a left-wing blogger.

“If he had these moral qualms,” he added, “he should have spoken up about them.”

Mr. McClellan’s book, “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception,” is the first negative account by a member of the tight circle of Texans around Mr. Bush. Mr. McClellan, 40, went to work for Mr. Bush when he was governor of Texas and was the White House press secretary from July 2003 to April 2006.

The revelations in the book, to be published by Public Affairs next Tuesday, were first reported Tuesday on Politico.com by Mike Allen. Mr. Allen wrote that he bought the book at a Washington store. The New York Times also obtained an advance copy.

Mr. McClellan writes that top White House officials deceived him about the administration’s involvement in the leaking of the identity of a C.I.A. operative, Valerie Wilson. He says he did not know for almost two years that his statements from the press room that Karl Rove and I. Lewis Libby Jr. were not involved in the leak were a lie.

“Neither, I believe, did President Bush,” Mr. McClellan writes. “He too had been deceived, and therefore became unwittingly involved in deceiving me. But the top White House officials who knew the truth — including Rove, Libby, and possibly Vice President Cheney — allowed me, even encouraged me, to repeat a lie.”

He is harsh about the administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina, saying it “spent most of the first week in a state of denial” and “allowed our institutional response to go on autopilot.” Mr. McClellan blames Mr. Rove for one of the more damaging images after the hurricane: Mr. Bush’s flyover of the devastation of New Orleans. When Mr. Rove brought up the idea, Mr. McClellan writes, he and Dan Bartlett, a top communications adviser, told Mr. Bush it was a bad idea because he would appear detached and out of touch. But Mr. Rove won out, Mr. McClellan writes.

A theme in the book is that the White House suffered from a “permanent campaign” mentality, and that policy decisions were inextricably interwoven with politics.

He is critical of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for her role as the “sometimes too accommodating” first term national security adviser, and what he calls her deftness at protecting her reputation.

“No matter what went wrong, she was somehow able to keep her hands clean,” Mr. McClellan writes, adding that “she knew how to adapt to potential trouble, dismiss brooding problems, and come out looking like a star.”

Mr. McClellan does not exempt himself from failings — “I fell far short of living up to the kind of public servant I wanted to be” — and calls the news media “complicit enablers” in the White House’s “carefully orchestrated campaign to shape and manipulate sources of public approval” in the march to the Iraq war in 2002 and 2003.

He does have a number of kind words for Mr. Bush, particularly from the April day in 2006 when Mr. Bush met with Mr. McClellan after he learned he was being pushed out. “His charm was on full display, but it was hard to know if it was sincere or just an attempt to make me feel better,” Mr. McClellan writes. “But as he continued, something I had never seen before happened: tears were streaming down both his cheeks.”

    White House Reacts Angrily to Former Aide’s Book, NYT, 29.5.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/29/washington/28cnd-mcclellan.html?hp

In Ex-Spokesman’s Book, Harsh Words for Bush

May 28, 2008
The New York Times
By ELISABETH BUMILLER

PHOENIX — President Bush “convinces himself to believe what suits his needs at the moment,” and has engaged in “self-deception” to justify his political ends, Scott McClellan, the former White House press secretary, writes in a critical new memoir about his years in the West Wing.

In addition, Mr. McClellan writes, the decision to invade Iraq was a “serious strategic blunder,” and yet, in his view, it was not the biggest mistake the Bush White House made. That, he says, was “a decision to turn away from candor and honesty when those qualities were most needed.”

Mr. McClellan’s book, “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception,” is the first negative account by a member of the tight circle of Texans around Mr. Bush. Mr. McClellan, 40, went to work for Mr. Bush when he was governor of Texas and was the White House press secretary from July 2003 to April 2006.

The revelations in the book, to be published by PublicAffairs next Tuesday, were first reported Tuesday on Politico.com by Mike Allen. Mr. Allen wrote that he bought the book at a Washington store. The New York Times also obtained an advance copy.

Mr. McClellan writes that top White House officials deceived him about the administration’s involvement in the leaking of the identity of a C.I.A. operative, Valerie Wilson. He says he did not know for almost two years that his statements from the press room that Karl Rove and I. Lewis Libby Jr. were not involved in the leak were a lie.

“Neither, I believe, did President Bush,” Mr. McClellan writes. “He too had been deceived, and therefore became unwittingly involved in deceiving me. But the top White House officials who knew the truth — including Rove, Libby, and possibly Vice President Cheney — allowed me, even encouraged me, to repeat a lie.”

He is harsh about the administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina, saying it “spent most of the first week in a state of denial” and “allowed our institutional response to go on autopilot.” Mr. McClellan blames Mr. Rove for one of the more damaging images after the hurricane: Mr. Bush’s flyover of the devastation of New Orleans. When Mr. Rove brought up the idea, Mr. McClellan writes, he and Dan Bartlett, a top communications adviser, told Mr. Bush it was a bad idea because he would appear detached and out of touch. But Mr. Rove won out, Mr. McClellan writes.

A theme in the book is that the White House suffered from a “permanent campaign” mentality, and that policy decisions were inextricably interwoven with politics.

He is critical of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for her role as the “sometimes too accommodating” first term national security adviser, and what he calls her deftness at protecting her reputation.

“No matter what went wrong, she was somehow able to keep her hands clean,” Mr. McClellan writes, adding that “she knew how to adapt to potential trouble, dismiss brooding problems, and come out looking like a star.”

Mr. McClellan does not exempt himself from failings — “I fell far short of living up to the kind of public servant I wanted to be” — and calls the news media “complicit enablers” in the White House’s “carefully orchestrated campaign to shape and manipulate sources of public approval” in the march to the Iraq war in 2002 and 2003.

He does have a number of kind words for Mr. Bush, particularly from the April day in 2006 when Mr. Bush met with Mr. McClellan after he learned he was being pushed out. “His charm was on full display, but it was hard to know if it was sincere or just an attempt to make me feel better,” Mr. McClellan writes. “But as he continued, something I had never seen before happened: tears were streaming down both his cheeks.”

    In Ex-Spokesman’s Book, Harsh Words for Bush, NYT, 28.5.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/28/washington/28mcclellan.html?ref=review

Bush calls on Americans to remember war dead

26 May 2008
USA Today

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Bush paid tribute Monday to America's fighting men and women who died in battle, saying national leaders must have "the courage and character to follow their lead" in preserving peace and freedom.

"On this Memorial Day, I stand before you as the commander in chief and try to tell you how proud I am," Bush told an audience of military figures, veterans and their families at Arlington National Cemetery. Of the men and women buried in the hallowed cemetery, he said, "They're an awesome bunch of people and the United States is blessed to have such citizens."

That provoked a standing ovation from the crowd in a marble amphitheater where Bush spoke. "Whoo-hoo!" shouted one woman, who couldn't contain her enthusiasm.

Bush and his wife, Laura, traveled from the White House across the Potomac River to the rolling hillsides of Arlington. Along the way, one man stood with a sign that said: "Bring out troops home." But, otherwise, the presidential motorcade on a sparkling clear spring day was warmly greeted at the cemetery entrance by scores of people, including two men in hats, shirts and shorts made out of American flag material. Others visited gravesites where each white tombstone was marked with a tiny American flag.

"From faraway lands, they were returned to cemeteries like this one where broken hearts received their broken bodies," Bush said. "They found peace beneath the white headstones in the land they fought to defend. It is a solemn reminder of the cost of freedom that the number of headstones in a place such as this grows with every new Memorial Day."

He eulogized all U.S. troops who have died in service to the nation, but particularly those who lost their lives this past year.

He singled out Army Spc. Ronald Tucker of Fountain, Colo., who died less than a month ago in Iraq in a bomb attack that occurred as he returned from helping build a soccer field for Iraqi children. The president also spoke of two Navy SEALs, Nathan Hardy of Durham, N.H., and Michael Koch of State College, Pa., who often headed into battle wearing American flags on their chests under their uniforms. The two died Feb. 4 in Iraq and are buried side-by-side at Arlington.

"I am humbled by those who have made the ultimate sacrifice that allow a free civilization to endure and flourish," Bush said. "It only remains for us, the heirs of their legacy, to have the courage and the character to follow their lead and to preserve America as the greatest nation on Earth and the last, best hope for mankind."

Bush's motorcade drove out of the cemetery as cannon fire left gray smoke settling over the tombstones.

After returning to the White House, Bush met in the Oval Office with five NCAA head football coaches, who recently returned from a seven-day visit to military bases in the Middle East to boost troop morale. The head coaches, who coached flag football games, were: Mark Richt from the University of Georgia; Randy Shannon, University of Miami; Jack Siedlecki, Yale University; Tommy Tuberville, Auburn University; and Charlie Weis, University of Notre Dame.

The coaches visited military personnel in Germany, Qatar, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, and aboard the U.S.S. Nassau on a trip coordinated by the Defense Department.

    Bush calls on Americans to remember war dead, UT, 26.5.2008, http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2008-05-26-bush-memorialday_N.htm

'Sleeper cell' case questions Bush's authority

25 May 2008
By Matt Apuzzo, Associated Press
USA Today

WASHINGTON — If his cell were at Guantanamo Bay, the prisoner would be just one of hundreds of suspected terrorists detained offshore, where the U.S. says the Constitution does not apply.
But Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri is a U.S. resident being held in a South Carolina military brig; he is the only enemy combatant held on U.S. soil. That makes his case very different.

Al-Marri's capture six years ago might be the Bush administration's biggest domestic counterterrorism success story. Authorities say he was an al-Qaeda sleeper agent living in middle America, researching poisonous gasses and plotting a cyberattack.

To justify holding him, the government claimed a broad interpretation of the president's wartime powers, one that goes beyond warrantless wiretapping or monitoring banking transactions. Government lawyers told federal judges that the president can send the military into any U.S. neighborhood, capture a citizen and hold him in prison without charge, indefinitely.

There is little middle ground between the two sides in al-Marri's case, which is before a federal appeals court in Virginia. The government says the president needs this power to keep the nation safe. Al-Marri's lawyers say that as long as the president can detain anyone he wants, nobody is safe.

Other plans

A Qatari national, al-Marri came to the U.S. with his wife and five children on Sept. 10, 2001 — one day before the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. He arrived on a student visa seeking a master's degree in computer science from Bradley University, a small private school in Peoria, Ill.

The government says he had other plans.

According to court documents citing multiple intelligence sources, al-Marri spent months in al-Qaeda training camps during the late 1990s and was schooled in the science of poisons. The summer before al-Marri left for the United States, he allegedly met with Osama bin Laden and Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The two al-Qaeda leaders decided al-Marri would make a perfect sleeper agent and rushed him into the U.S. before Sept. 11, the government says.

A computer specialist, al-Marri was ordered to wreak havoc on the U.S. banking system and serve as a liaison for other al-Qaeda operatives entering this country, according to a court document filed by Jeffrey Rapp, a senior member of the Defense Intelligence Agency.

According to Rapp, al-Marri received up to $13,000 for his trip, plus money to buy a laptop, courtesy of Mustafa Ahmad al-Hawsawi, who is suspected of helping finance the Sept. 11 attacks.

A week after the attacks, Congress unanimously passed the Authorization for Use of Military Force. It gave President Bush the power to "use all necessary and appropriate force" against anyone involved in planning, aiding or carrying out the attacks.

The FBI interviewed al-Marri that October and arrested him in December as part of the Sept. 11 investigation. He rarely had been attending classes and was failing in school, the government said.

When investigators looked through his computer files, they found information on industrial chemical suppliers, sermons by bin Laden, how-to guides for making hydrogen cyanide and information about chemicals labeled "immediately dangerous to life or health," according to Rapp's court filing. Phone calls and e-mails linked al-Marri to senior al-Qaeda leaders.

In early 2003, he was indicted on charges of credit card fraud and lying to the FBI. Like anyone else in the country, he had constitutional rights. He could question government witnesses, refuse to testify and retain a lawyer.

On June 23, 2003, Bush declared al-Marri an enemy combatant, which stripped him of those rights. Bush wrote that al-Marri possessed intelligence vital to protect national security. In his jail cell in Peoria, however, he could refuse to speak with investigators.

A military brig allowed more options. Free from the constraints of civilian law, the military could interrogate al-Marri without a lawyer, detain him without charge and hold him indefinitely. Courts have agreed the president has wide latitude to imprison people captured overseas or caught fighting against the U.S. That is what the prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba is for.

But al-Marri was not in Guantanamo Bay.

"The president is not a king and cannot lock people up forever in the United States based on his say-so," said Jonathan Hafetz, a lawyer who represents al-Marri and other detainees. "Today it's Mr. al-Marri. Tomorrow it could be you, a member of your family, someone you know. Once you allow the president to lock people up for years or even life without trial, there's no going back."

Glenn Sulmasy, a national security fellow at Harvard, said the issue comes down to whether the nation is at war. Soldiers would not need warrants to launch a strike against invading troops. So would they need a warrant to raid an al-Qaeda safe house in a U.S. suburb?

Sulmasy says no. That's how Congress wrote the bill and "if they feel concerned about civil liberties, they can tighten up the language," he said.

That would require the politically risky move of pushing legislation to make it harder for the president to detain suspected terrorists inside the U.S.

Al-Marri is not the first prisoner who did not fit neatly into the definition of enemy combatant.

Two U.S. citizens, Yaser Esam Hamdi and Jose Padilla, were held at the same brig as al-Marri. But there are differences. Hamdi was captured on an Afghanistan battlefield. Padilla, too, fought alongside the Taliban before his capture in the United States.

By comparison, al-Marri had not been on the battlefield. He was lawfully living in the United States. That raises new questions.

Did Congress really intend to give the president the authority to lock up suspected terrorists overseas but not those living here?

If another Sept. 11-like plot was discovered, could the military imprison the would-be hijackers before they stepped onto the planes?

Is a foreign battlefield really necessary in a conflict that turned downtown Manhattan into ground zero?

Also, if enemy combatants can be detained in the U.S., how long can they be held without charge? Without lawyers? Without access to the outside world? Forever?

These questions play to two of the biggest fears that have dominated public policy debate since Sept. 11: the fear of another terrorist attack and the fear the government will use that threat to crack down on civil liberties.

"If he is taken to a civilian court in the United States and it's been proved he is guilty and it's been proved there's evidence to show that he's guilty, you know, he deserves what he gets," his brother, Mohammed al-Marri, said in a telephone interview Friday from his home in Saudi Arabia. "But he's just been taken there with no court, no nothing. That's shame on the United States."

Courts have gone back and forth on al-Marri's case as it worked its way through the system. The last decision, a 2-1 ruling by a 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel, found that the president had crossed the line and al-Marri must be returned to the civilian court system. Anything else would "alter the constitutional foundations of our Republic," the judges said.

The full appeals court is reviewing that decision and a ruling is expected soon. During arguments last year, government lawyers said the courts should give great deference to the president when the nation is at war.

"What you assert is the power of the military to seize a person in the United States, including an American citizen, on suspicion of being an enemy combatant?" Judge William B. Traxler asked.

"Yes, your honor," Justice Department lawyer Gregory Garre replied.

The court seemed torn.

One judge questioned why there was such anxiety over the policy. After all, there have been no mass roundups of citizens and no indications the White House is coming for innocent Americans next.

Another judge said the question is not whether the president was generous in his use of power; it is whether the power is constitutional.

Whatever the decision, the case seems destined for the Supreme Court. In the meantime, the first military trials are set to begin soon against detainees at Guantanamo Bay. Al-Marri may get one, too. Or he may get put back into the civilian court system. For now, he waits.

    'Sleeper cell' case questions Bush's authority, UT, 25.5.2008, http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2008-05-25-enemy-combatant_N.htm

Bush Vetoes Farm Bill; Override Likely

May 21, 2008
Filed at 1:10 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush vetoed the $300 billion farm bill on Wednesday, calling it a tax increase on regular Americans at a time of high food prices in the face of a near-certain override by Congress.

It was the 10th veto of Bush's presidency. But since it passed both houses of Congress with veto-proof majorities, his action will likely be overridden.

The president believes the legislation is fiscally irresponsible and gives away too much money to wealthy farmers, yet his criticism rang hollow with lawmakers from both parties who voted for increased crop subsidies, food stamps for the poor and other goodies to help their districts in an election year.

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said lawmakers should think twice before they override Bush's veto.

''Members are going to have to think about how they will explain these votes back in their districts at a time when prices are on the rise,'' she said. ''People are not going to want to see their taxes increase.''

Perino said the bill is $20 billion over the current baseline -- ''way too much to ask taxpayers right now.''

''This bill is bloated,'' she said. ''When grocery bills are on the rise, Congress is asking families to pay more in subsidies to wealthy farmers at a time of record farm profits.''

In announcing Bush's veto, White House budget director Jim Nussle said Bush rejected it because it increases federal spending. He said Americans are frustrated with wasteful government spending and the funneling of taxpayer funds to pet projects. ''This only worsens the frustration that they will feel,'' Nussle said, adding that Congress should extend the current farm bill.

About two-thirds of the bill would pay for nutrition programs such as food stamps and emergency food aid for the needy. An additional $40 billion is for farm subsidies while almost $30 billion would go to farmers to idle their land and to other environmental programs.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., has said that the measure will drastically increase nutrition initiatives that will help 38 million U.S. families put food on their tables. She made it clear she would have preferred smaller farm subsidies, but deferred to some Democratic colleagues looking ahead to the fall campaign.

Some Republicans criticized the mostly bipartisan and popular bill because a few home-state pet causes, including tax breaks for Kentucky racehorse owners and additional aid for salmon fishermen in the Pacific Northwest.

The bill also would:

--Boost nutrition programs, including food stamps and emergency domestic food aid, by more than $10 billion over 10 years. It would expand a program to provide fresh fruits and vegetables to schoolchildren.

--Increase subsidies for certain crops, including fruits and vegetables excluded from previous farm bills.

--Extend dairy programs.

--Increase loan rates for sugar producers.

--Urge the government to buy surplus sugar and sell it to ethanol producers for use in a mixture with corn.

--Cut a per-gallon ethanol tax credit for refiners from 51 cents to 45 cents. The credit supports the blending of fuel with the corn-based additive. More money would go to cellulosic ethanol, made from plant matter.

--Require that meats and other fresh foods carry labels with their country of origin.

--Stop allowing farmers to collect subsidies for multiple farm businesses.

--Reopen a major discrimination case against the Agriculture Department. Thousands of black farmers who missed a deadline would get a chance to file claims alleging they were denied loans or other subsidies.

--Pay farmers for weather-related farm losses from a new $3.8 billion disaster relief fund.

    Bush Vetoes Farm Bill; Override Likely, NYT, 21.5.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Bush-Farm-Bill.html?hp

Bush Won’t Back Bill That Bails Out Lenders

May 19, 2008
Filed at 12:20 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times


WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush, acknowledging the economic ''tough times'' for many Americans, said Monday that he remains opposed to any homeowner rescue legislation that would be a bailout for lenders.

The president's comments came as Senate leaders are working on a bipartisan bill to help strapped borrowers get government-backed mortgages, paid for by tapping a fund designed to help poor families. Bush did not comment on that proposed legislation directly. He has threatened to veto a House version of the bill.

''Laws shouldn't bail out lenders,'' Bush said after getting an economic update from Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. ''Laws shouldn't help speculators. The government ought to be helping creditworthy people stay in their homes.''

The president pushed Congress to pass legislation to more tightly regulate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored companies that finance home loans.

''Our fellow citizens have got to know that these major players in the mortgage markets -- if reformed properly by Congress -- will really help stabilize the markets and make it easier for people to stay in their homes,'' Bush said.

The Bush administration on Monday also reiterated its stance that it remains too soon to consider a second economic stimulus boost for the nation. The first package produced tax rebates checks for millions of Americans. Bush said Paulson assured him that people are getting the money as promised.

''It should help our economy, and more importantly, help people pay their bills,'' Bush said. ''And we hope people use that money and take care of their families and shop.''

Many Democrats in Congress are pushing for another government-backed economic boost to help people deal with rising gas and food prices.

Meanwhile, Bush has threatened to veto a House-passed Democratic measure aimed at preventing foreclosures. It would have the government step in to insure up to $300 billion in new mortgages for distressed homeowners; Bush says it would ''reward speculators and lenders.''

Senators are working on a version that would tap a fund drawn from Fannie Mae's and Freddie Mac's profits to pay for a new foreclosure-prevention program. Many community groups want that money directed to a low-income housing fund. Yet without diverting the affordable housing fund, many Republicans say the bill would be a bailout that would open taxpayers to undue risk.

Negotiations were continuing on the possible bargain, and action on the proposed Senate bill was expected to pick up on Tuesday.

Bush spokesman Scott Stanzel said the White House had no position on the proposed bill yet.

    Bush Won’t Back Bill That Bails Out Lenders, NYT, 19.5.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/business/AP-Bush.html?hp

Bush Vows to Veto Housing-Relief Bill in House

May 8, 2008
The New York Times
By DAVID STOUT

WASHINGTON — As the House prepared to vote on a housing-relief bill offered by Democratic leaders, President Bush on Wednesday told the lawmakers, in effect, not to bother.

“I will veto the bill that’s moving through the House today if it makes it to my desk,” the president said at the White House, after meeting with Republican House leaders. “I urge members on both sides of the aisle to focus on a good piece of legislation that is being sponsored by Republican members.”

The president’s remarks were not surprising, given that the administration issued a statement on Tuesday evening declaring its opposition and saying that White House advisers would urge the president to veto it.

But Mr. Bush’s personal pledge to veto the measure championed by Representative Barney Frank, the Massachusetts Democrat who heads the Financial Services Committee, made it less likely that a bipartisan housing deal will be achieved soon, especially in this election year.

The House is expected to vote on the Frank bill, which would expand access to federally insured mortgages to help troubled homeowners refinance their loans, on Wednesday or Thursday. Under the bill, lenders would be required to reduce the principal balances for borrowers at risk of default. The troubled loans, typically with high, adjustable interest rates, would then be refinanced into more affordable 30-year fix-rate loans insured by the Federal Housing Administration. The new loans would be limited to 90 percent of a property’s value, based on an updated appraisal, and the government would retain a stake in any future sale of the property.

The Bush administration prefers a more limited expansion of federally insured mortgages and has argued that housing relief can be accomplished by the Federal Housing Administration without new legislation.

The president on Wednesday repeated his opposition to a bill “that will reward speculators and lenders” who have suffered because of their own foolishness. More modest measures are pushed by Republicans leaders, and Mr. Bush said those steps “will do the right thing for the American people.”

Mr. Frank, anticipating a veto pledge, said on Tuesday evening that a veto would signal that the president was abandoning efforts to help homeowners and would mean that “he’s stopped trying to govern.” Moreover, Mr. Frank and other Democrats said Republicans in the Senate would read the president’s remarks as a signal that they should stand fast against the Frank-backed bill if it reaches their chamber.

Though Democrats enjoy a considerable advantage over Republicans in the House (235 to 199, with 1 vacancy), and some Republicans have been gravitating toward the Frank bill, the political math would appear to be in the president’s favor. Even if Mr. Frank’s bill sailed through the House with the two-thirds majority needed to override a veto, the odds of the Senate passing it with the necessary two-thirds majority would be much slimmer, since the Democrats control the Senate by only 51 to 49.

With six months to go until his successor is chosen, Mr. Bush is sometimes referred to as a lame duck. But as he spoke on Wednesday on the north portico of the house he will soon vacate, he showed his unwillingness to surrender power before he has to.

He called on Congress to pass a $108 billion war-supplemental bill “without any strings,” meaning anything that smacks of a withdrawal timetable for Iraq; to give his Colombia free-trade agreement “an up-or-down vote” instead of letting it stall in the House; to make his “temporary” tax cuts permanent, and to allow “environmentally friendly domestic exploration” for oil.

The reference to oil exploration sounded like an allusion to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which the president has long said can be explored in a way that would do no damage while enhancing energy independence. The House has endorsed the idea a dozen or more times in recent years, but it has always stalled in the Senate.
 

David M. Herszenhorn contributed reporting.

    Bush Vows to Veto Housing-Relief Bill in House, NYT, 8.5.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/08/washington/07cnd-bush.html