Right Hook: Conservatives kind to Edwards

Conservatives are surprisingly kind to Edwards, although Jonah Goldberg calls him Quayle-lite and Taranto blasts his lack of military experience. But others seem prepared to desert Bush in November.

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By Mark Follman

July 7, 2004 | The most surprising thing about John Kerry's selection of John Edwards was the admiration a number of opinion-makers on the political right expressed for the North Carolina senator.

The newly minted ticket has disillusioned Republican Andrew Sullivan practically sounding like a card-carrying Democrat. Perhaps Sullivan intends to follow through at the voting booth on his recent hints of abandoning a war-bungling, anti-gay Bush administration.

"Well, this is just what I had hoped for -- and it's easily the best choice available to Kerry, who now passes his first presidential judgment test. Edwards is uplifting, while Kerry is a downer; he can touch the Democrats' heart, not just their minds and their wallets; he's fresh and youthful in a way that will only contrast sharply with Cheney; he can speak -- and we need more in politics who have his kind of rhetorical skill; he's positive, which is important in a rancid political atmosphere. Substantively, I don't like his background among the trial lawyers, nor his protectionism. But I've come to think of him as a decent man, who shied from the easy snarl in the primaries, and who believes in this country's promise in ways that some on the left have lost touch with. He's the anti-bitterness candidate. And his presence will change the dynamic. The trouble with Bush's and Cheney's fundamental position -- you cannot trust anyone else to wage this war -- is that it must inevitably conjure fear and danger. Americans also like broad grins and happy futures. Edwards will give them plenty."

London-based foreign policy wonk Gregory Djerejian, author of the Belgravia Dispatch blog, argues that Edwards is weak on national security. But he agrees with Sullivan that Bush-Cheney '04 would do well to take a cue from the happier, shinier Dems.

"I'm not one of those who think that Edwards will look like a cool as a cucumber Kennedy figure to a sweaty, Nixonian Cheney. Cheney will do just fine thank you -- while pointing out Edward's obvious weaknesses in the national security/foreign policy realm. But, bursts of profanity aside, Cheney may want to spend a few days on the beach before the debates, you know, hanging out -- the better so as to project a chiller vibe.

"All well and good to exude macho-gravitas and national security street cred -- but an avuncular (full-blown) smile here and there won't hurt either. Americans do like a winning smile -- a certain breezy optimism has always been part and parcel of the American national character. Put differently, Bush/Cheney can't just run on fear."

Admiration for Edwards aside, the expected offensive against him began in earnest. Opinion Journal editor James Taranto sees a close parallel between the various candidates' military records, arguing that Bush and Cheney deserve a pass in light of Edwards' own youthful lack of service.

"The choice of Edwards also shows the phoniness of the Democratic attacks on President Bush for serving in the Air National Guard and on Dick Cheney for not serving in the military. Unlike Kerry, who by the way served in Vietnam, Edwards, who by the way is the son of a mill worker, has no military experience. The New York Times notes that in a January debate Kerry made fun of Edwards's lack of military experience: 'When I came back from Vietnam in 1969, I don't know if John Edwards was out of diapers then.'"

National Review's Jonah Goldberg charges that Edwards is Dan Quayle-lite when it comes to national security.

"One need not go trolling through Nexis for quotes from prominent Democrats (and pundits) insisting that Dan Quayle lacked the qualifications to be vice president. He was elected to two terms in the House and two terms in the Senate (the youngest man ever elected to the Senate from Indiana). Quayle's foreign policy credentials simply blow away Edwards' by comparison. Whether foreign policy experience was more important in the declining days of the Cold War were more or less important than in the early days of the war on terror is an interesting debate ...

"Edwards is among the worst choices possible if the issue this fall is national security and terrorism. He's not very sharp on foreign affairs. He has very little experience (Please, stop citing junkets to Afghanistan as a qualification!). If the Bush campaign can really make this election about national security, Edwards may not become a full-blown liability, but he might not make much of an asset either."

Meanwhile, InstaPundit's Glenn Reynolds thinks Edwards makes vice presidential rival Dick Cheney a major GOP liability.

"I have to say that I think the Republicans' attacks on Edwards as a 'sleazy trial lawyer' will misfire. That kind of thing appeals to the base, but most swing voters won't share that instinctive hostility -- and harping on it too much will just make the Republicans look like tools of Big Business ...

"My own prediction, by the way, is that at an opportune moment Cheney will drop off the GOP ticket for vague medical reasons and be replaced by someone whose selection will make a splash."

Reynolds also sees a certain Green appeal in the Edwards pick.

"Many journalists and bloggers will be thanking Kerry for picking someone who ran in the primary, as it makes all those archived Edwards items useful again. It's a pro-recycling ticket!"

Jacob Levy, a political science professor at the University of Chicago and contributor to the Volokh Conspiracy blog, argued in May that the Bush camp was in "bafflingly deep denial" about losing Libertarian swing voters in '04. He says that Edwards for veep makes the Kerry ticket a lock for him, in light of the Bush administration's exceptional incompetence in policymaking. (Note to New York Post: Levy also says that a Gephardt pick would've been a Kerry deal-breaker for him.)

"This is really the first presidential race of my adult life in which I've had a very strong commitment about which major-party candidate was the lesser evil. I've had leanings in previous races, but they were uncertain, and typically mitigated by a sense that both major-party candidates had crossed some threshold of unacceptability. This time, it seems very clear to me that the Bush Administration has failed basic tests of competence in policymaking and execution, and of trusteeship of long-term interests like alliances and trade negotiations and moral credibility. I expect to dislike an awful lot of John Kerry's policies. But I don't expect that kind of failure of the basic responsibilities of the office. Four or eight or twelve years ago, I guess I wouldn't have known how important I found those considerations, as I hadn't seen a president who had failed along those dimensions. Now I have, and I do."

"Narrow-minded nationalists"
Though by no means a die-hard conservative, Anne Applebaum, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and occasional contributor to neocon journals, detailed her own disillusionment with the Bush White House in a recent essay in the New Republic. She's incredulous that an administration stacked with Cold War veterans could be so myopic when it comes to battling the rising threat of radical Islam.

"Incredibly, given their backgrounds, top Bush officials still seem not to understand that, like communism, radical Islam cannot be defeated with military power alone. Like communism, radical Islam is an ideology -- one that people will die for. To fight it, the United States needs not just to show off its firepower, but also to prove to Arabs that Western values, in some moderate Islamic form, will give them better lives. The war on terrorism cannot be a narrow American or American-Israeli military struggle, or we will lose it. Like the cold war, the war on terrorism will be over when moderate Muslims abandon the radicals and join us.

"Mistakenly, I assumed this was what the president meant when he talked, in that vague sort of way, about 'democracy in the Middle East.' The fact that he was vague didn't bother me, since this president is vague about a lot of things. But I should have been warier since, in this case, his vagueness was not just a personality tic or a speech impediment, but a sign of a deep lack of seriousness."

Applebaum sees a dangerous provincialism percolating the administration's hollow rhetoric.

"The truth, of course, is that, for all its talk of universal human rights, this is not an administration that actually perceives itself as a part of something greater than the United States. For all of its talk about spreading American values to benighted foreigners, this is not an administration that even likes foreigners. It never occurred to me that American troops would arrive in Baghdad and have absolutely no idea what to do next, or who was important, or who was on their side. But then, I hadn't realized that the Pentagon leadership had no interest in or knowledge of the Iraqi people. I thought these were cold warriors, whereas in fact they are narrow-minded American nationalists, isolationists turned inside out."

The rise of "black blog ops"?
In a recent column for the Weekly Standard, right-wing pundit Hugh Hewitt raised some interesting questions about the ascent of the Web as a source of political news and information.

"Like a reverse Atlantis, a new archipelago of opinion and news providers has risen up from nowhere to drive stories and news cycles. So we should be asking about the potential for deception in the format. The web is widely used and relied upon. It would not be hard for intelligence services from around the world to build blogs with an intent to deceive or manipulate, putting out solid content to gain an initial audience before using it to disseminate disinformation intentionally.

"Similarly, the inevitable backstab blog has to be on some political consultant's mind. Get it started and growing as a pro candidate X blog. Build an audience via tried and true techniques -- including the purchase of blog-ads -- and then, late in a campaign, have the blog turn on candidate X. If any of the high profile lefties at work today --the Daily Kos or Atrios, for example -- were to suddenly turn on Kerry, citing implausibility fatigue, for example -- that would be news and a blow to Kerry. Could Kos really be working for Rove? The costs of starting a blog are so low that the mischief potential is quite high ...

"It is a brave new blogging world, and mischief beyond the easily spotted inanities of the MoveOn.org crowd will no doubt follow."
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About the writer
Mark Follman is an associate news editor at Salon.

Report: CIA Gave False Info on Iraq

DCI George J. Tenet introduces President Bush at the dedication ceremony for the George Bush Center for Intelligence with stories of former DCI Bush's term at CIA.


It's the same as being "out of the loop" by his pop in how Bush, Jr., hopes to exploit this finding. ---Sam


By KATHERINE PFLEGER SHRADER, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - The key U.S. assertions leading to the 2003 invasion of Iraq — that Saddam Hussein had chemical and biological weapons and was working to make nuclear weapons — were wrong and based on false or overstated CIA analyses, a scathing Senate Intelligence Committee report asserted Friday.

Intelligence analysts fell victim to "group think" assumptions that Iraq had weapons that it did not, the bipartisan report concluded. Many factors contributing to those failures are ongoing problems within the U.S. intelligence community — which cannot be fixed with more money alone, it said.

The report did not address a key allegation by Democrats: That Bush and other officials further twisted the evidence to back their calls for war against Iraq. The committee's top Democrat, Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, said he was disappointed the panel did not look into what he called "exaggerated" claims of the Iraqi threat by top administration officials...

Dog Ate Bush's Military Records Says Pentagon

"Thanks for getting me into that 'Champagne" unit of the National Guard here in Texas, Dad. Whew! That was a close one."

Pentagon: Bush Military Records Destroyed

Fri Jul 9,10:49 AM ET

WASHINGTON - Military payroll records that could more fully document President Bush's whereabouts during his service in the Texas Air National Guard were inadvertently destroyed, according to the Pentagon.

In a letter responding to a freedom of information request by The Associated Press, the Defense Department said that microfilm containing the pertinent National Guard payroll records was damaged and could not be salvaged. The damaged material included payroll records for the first quarter of 1969 and the third quarter of 1972.

"President Bush's payroll records for those two quarters were among the records destroyed," wrote C.Y. Talbott, of the Pentagon's Freedom of Information and Security Review section. "Searches for back-up paper copies of the missing records were unsuccessful." (SEE LINK ABOVE FOR REST OF STORY)

Bush loses a lifelong Republican

"Pssss. You're such a failure that I can't vote for you."

I've heard this story over and over since Spring. Bush is losing older Republican voters. ---Sam


- Joan Ryan SF GATE
Thursday, July 8, 2004

My parents, like all parents who grew up in New York, live in Florida. They have voted down-the-line Republican in every election since they came of age. Despite their shared Catholicism, they couldn't stand John or Bobby Kennedy. Don't even talk to them about Ted. They still believe Nixon got a raw deal. Needless to say, they supported the Bush brothers in their respective elections, George for president and Jeb for governor.

But a funny thing has happened on the way to the 2004 election. George Bush is managing to do what no politician has done before him -- drive my mother and father and others like them from their well-worn seats on the GOP bus.

"I can't vote for him,'' my father said as we sat in the Florida room of their adult-community condo. I nearly dropped the bottle of beer I had pressed to my forehead. ("What, you're hot?'' my mother had asked. The air conditioning was indeed on, as she assured me it was, set to a frosty 80 degrees.)

"He completely underestimated how the Iraqis would respond,'' my father said. We generally avoid politics when I visit. I'm from the gay-marrying, war- protesting, Michael Moore-loving republic of the San Francisco Bay Area. We tend to limit our current-events discussions to the Giants' chances in the National League West.

"They thought all these people were going to jump up and praise them,'' my father said. "There have been too many mistakes. We're supposed to have control over there, and our boys keep getting killed. It's a mishmash. The whole thing is a mishmash. He's backed himself into a corner by trying to liberate a country, and the people don't want you to be liberating them.''

His anger is about more than a difference of opinion with the president about how and why he waged this particular war. There is a corrosive quality to this presidency that has eaten away at what my father believes his country stands for. Anecdotal evidence suggests he is not alone. Republican leaders, however, will tell you the faithful aren't wavering. As evidence, they point to a bipartisan poll conducted for National Public Radio in May that found just 6 percent of Republicans say they plan to vote for Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry.

But the poll means little. It asked the wrong question. My father would also have told them he doesn't plan to vote for Kerry. He'd cut off his finger before using it to cast a vote for a limousine liberal like Kerry. But his dislike for Kerry does not diminish his disillusionment with Bush. He won't vote for either of them, he says, leaving the top lines of his ballot blank for the first time in his life.

"Maybe I'll write in your mother's name,'' he said.

America's bloody entry into Iraq, with the torture and beheadings and charred bodies and gushing torrents of taxpayer money, is prompting a nation to take stock of who it is and what it believes in. I want to think that the war is diluting the blues and reds on the national political maps, that people are sloughing off their color-coded cloaks as Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, and recognizing the common ideals that bind us as Americans.

Those ideals -- among them, compassion, freedom, diplomacy, liberty, rule of law -- have been battered by a president who still can't produce a compelling reason to have sent our men and women into battle against a country that never attacked us. He tosses aside civil liberties as if they were Kleenex, denies basic due process even to American citizens -- a conceit the Supreme Court recently judged unacceptable -- and believes the Geneva Conventions apply only when he says they do.

My father has always enjoyed quoting the late Al Capp, the creator of the comic strip "Li'l Abner,'' who defended his conservatism in the 1960s by saying that he was and always had been a moderate. He only seemed conservative, he said, because the rest of the country had shifted to the left. There was a code of living in Capp's world, and in my father's. They believed in consistency bordering on stasis, even if it meant becoming a walking anachronism in your own lifetime.

My father and others like him who have always been more or less middle-of- the-road Republicans now feel out of step with this Republican president. It is not because their own ideals have shifted but because their president's have.

"It's terrible that in this country of so many good people,'' my father said, "how an election can come down to the lesser of two evils. You have to vote this time for who will do the least harm. Not the most good, but the least harm.''

Sometimes we settle for a president who isn't inspiring or visionary or all that brilliant. But we should never settle for one who diminishes America by flouting its core ideals. The election is four months away. My father could change his mind and, in the end, vote for Bush.

But I'm hoping my mother's name shows up on at least one ballot in Palm Beach County.

E-mail Joan Ryan at joanryan@sfchronicle.com.

Ex-Chairman of Enron Surrenders and Faces 11-Charge Indictment

US President George W. Bush walks away from a briefing with the media, refusing to answer questions after he was asked about Enron and the reported indictment of former CEO Kenneth Lay, who was a close adviser and fund-raiser for Bush and his father, earning him the presidential nickname of 'Kenny Boy.'(AFP/Paul J. Richards)

And this guy campaigned on bringing "honor" and "accountability" back to the White House... ---Sam

By KURT EICHENWALD
and CHRISTINE HAUSER

Published: July 8, 2004

HOUSTON, July 8 — Kenneth L. Lay, the former chairman and chief executive of Enron, was charged on 11 counts in an indictment unsealed today related to the financial fraud that led to the collapse of the onetime energy giant.

The indictment, by a federal grand jury in Houston, includes charges of wire fraud, securities fraud and making false statements to banks... (see link above)

White House Downplays Bush-Enron Ties

Former Enron CEO Kenneth Lay, left, is led into Federal Court by a law enforcment officer in Houston Thursday July 8, 2004. (AP Photo/Michael Stravato)


Hey, somehow the White House is forgetting how George flew with Kenny Boy on the Enron plane all over Texas and the nation back during his earlier campaign days. Bush (and his dad) sat with Kenny Boy at Ranger ball games. Dick Cheney had Kenny Boy into his office to meet over creating the new energy policy for the nation and consulted with him by phone and all while Cheney ignored the Hart-Rudman Commission's report on national security and its warnings of a terrorist attack on the U.S. And when California was being ripped off by Kenny Boy's Enron and other energy companies with huge financial supporters of Bush during its "energy crisis", he kept the Feds from both investigating the illegal wrong doings AND placing any price caps to find out what was so immorally wrong with the price gouging. Yeah, right. Kenny Boy was just a passing friend...---Sam


By DEB RIECHMANN, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - The White House sought Thursday to minimize President Bush's ties with indicted former Enron chief Kenneth Lay, saying it has been a long time since they talked and suggesting it was only a passing friendship.

When Bush was governor of Texas, he called Lay "Kenny Boy" and Enron was a big financial backer. Bush has received more than $550,000 in donations from Enron, its employees and their relatives during his political career — the most from any source.

Lay was accused in an 11-count indictment of being involved in a wide-ranging scheme to deceive the public, company shareholders and government regulators about the energy company that he founded and led to industry prominence before its collapse in 2001.

"Cracking down on corporate wrongdoing is a top priority for this president," White House press secretary Scott McClellan said when asked about Lay's indictment Thursday. "The administration is taking strong and aggressive actions to pursue corporate wrongdoers and to strengthen corporate accountability. I don't think I'm going to get into discussing specifically a criminal indictment."

Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry's campaign accused the administration of dragging its feet on Enron. "It was three years too late," Kerry spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter said of the Lay indictment.

Trying to distance Bush from Lay, McClellan said Lay had supported many politicians, Democrats as well as Republicans. Altogether, more than 250 members of Congress from both parties have received Enron contributions.

"He was a supporter in the past and he's someone that I would also point out has certainly supported Democrats and Republicans in the past," McClellan said.

He also said that "it's been quite some time" since Bush and Lay talked.

Sources: Lay Indicted in Enron's Collapse

By KRISTEN HAYS, AP Business Writer

HOUSTON - Kenneth Lay, the former Enron Corp. chief executive who insisted he knew nothing about financial fraud at the energy trading giant, has been indicted on criminal charges, sources told The Associated Press on Wednesday.

The action caps a three-year investigation that has already seen several other executives charged and, in some cases, already sentenced to prison for their roles in the company's scandalous collapse.

Lay was expected to surrender to federal authorities Thursday, said the sources who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The specific charges remained under seal. Prosecutors from the Justice Department (news - web sites)'s Enron Task Force presented an indictment to U.S. Magistrate Judge Mary Milloy in Houston on Wednesday, and at their request she sealed both the indictment and an arrest warrant, the sources said.

A hearing before Milloy was scheduled for late Thursday morning. Lay's lawyer, Michael Ramsey, didn't immediately return a call for comment.

The Securities and Exchange Commission (news - web sites) was expected to bring civil fraud charges against Lay on Thursday, including making false and misleading statements and insider trading, a person familiar with the case said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Prosecutors have aggressively pursued the one-time celebrity CEO and friend and contributor to President Bush (news - web sites) who led Enron's rise to No. 7 in the Fortune 500 and resigned within weeks of its stunning failure. Barring last-minute delays, Lay is the 30th and highest-profile individual charged.

He will be the second Enron CEO to be charged. Jeffrey Skilling, who succeeded Lay and then stepped down abruptly in August 2001, shortly before the scandal broke, was charged with nearly three dozen counts of fraud and other crimes in February.

Waiting to testify for the prosecution is former finance chief Andrew Fastow, who pleaded guilty to two conspiracy counts in January. Fastow admitted to engineering partnerships and financial schemes to hide Enron debt and inflate profits while pocketing millions for himself.

Enron's collapse led a series of corporate scandals that led to Congress' passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act two years ago, a package of sweeping reforms to securities law. Thousands of Enron's workers lost their jobs, and the stock fell from a high of $90 in August 2000 to just pennies, wiping out many workers' retirement savings.

The charges against Skilling and former top accountant Richard Causey target actions over several years leading up to Enron's collapse, while allegations against Lay were expected to focus on his actions after he resumed the role of CEO upon Skilling's abrupt resignation in August 2001, the sources said.

Days after Skilling's resignation, Lay met privately with Sherron Watkins, then an executive on Fastow's staff, who had sent him a lengthy memo warning of impending doom from Fastow's myriad schemes to hide debt and inflate profits.

But Lay told The New York Times last month that he didn't believe the company had serious problems and trusted other senior managers — including Fastow and Causey — when they reassured him that all was fine.

Skilling and Causey are awaiting trial on charges of conspiracy, fraud and insider trading. Both pleaded innocent and are free on bond.

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AP Business Writer Marcy Gordon in Washington contributed to this report.

Judge sends message to all of us through Lea Fastow

By LOREN STEFFY
Copyright 2004 Houston Chronicle

Don't cry for Lea Fastow.

Judge David Hittner is doing everything he can to turn the Enron heiress into a sympathetic character. With his decisions this week, Fastow seems more and more a hapless victim torn from the arms of her children and hauled off to the gulag.

In the latest indignity, Hittner ordered Fastow to report to the downtown Federal Detention Center instead of the more upscale calaboose in Bryan she'd requested. No horticulture classes or playground equipment for the kids, just a well-worn orange jumpsuit, public showers and an occasional trip to the roof for some incidental sunshine in the recreation area.

You can choose your crime, but not your punishment.

Lea Fastow is, by her own admission, a tax cheat. Her crime was being well-connected to an Enron insider — her husband, Andrew, Enron's former chief financial manipulator — and being all too willing to take her turn at the trough. Compared to her husband, though, she's a kid with a calculator.

In the last few months, Hittner has done all he can to make her the whipping girl for Enron's sins. He eschewed her plea deal in the spring, he's ignored her requests for more family-friendly incarceration, and he refused a request — which even the prosecutors supported — to send a standard background report on Fastow to the Bureau of Prisons. When Fastow's attorney, Mike DeGeurin, sent the report anyway, Hittner lambasted him in a 10-page order distributed to all federal judges in the region.

Lea, after all, was a tool. Prosecutors needed her husband's testimony, and he wasn't cooperating. So they went after Lea and threatened her with prosecution. She might go to jail at the same time as her husband, and what would happen to their two children? Andrew agreed to serve 10 years and rat out his old cronies, provided Lea would be out in time to watch over the little ones. It's an interesting twist on the trials of the two-career couple. Trying to juggle their busy prison schedules, the Fastows were hoping to still find time for the kids.

From the moment they agreed to plea, the Fastows have tried to work the legal system as if it were just another deal. They wanted to coordinate sentencing. Andrew would plea only if Lea was guaranteed a light sentence. It's as if they believed they still had some say in making the rules.

Lea Fastow is a symbol of the complacency that nurtures white-collar crime. Corporate executives don't usually go bad by breaking the law. They bend it slowly, inching toward criminality, a justification here, a rationalization there. And they convince others — often friends and family — to help them, by insisting that what they're doing isn't wrong, or that it would result in a greater good such as saving the company. Just tweak the numbers and fix it when the business improves.

In the Fastows' case, Enron's financial games were a family sport. The couple used their two children as a conduit to collect their Enron booty. Andrew disguised personal profits from the web of illicit partnerships he assembled as gifts to his children from associate Michael Kopper. Between December 1997 and February 2000, Andrew and Kopper funneled $45,000 in partnership loot through Lea, and $30,000 each in the form of "gifts" to the Fastow children, according to Andrew's indictment.

They drew their parents into Enron's web, too. They tried to set up Lea's father, Jack Weingarten, as an equity investor in an Enron partnership, according to the original six-count indictment filed against her in April 2003. An Enron attorney blocked the investment, calling it a conflict of interest, but Enron paid Weingarten a breakup fee. Lea later told her father's accountants that the fee was interest on a loan to Kopper, the indictment says. Weingarten wasn't accused of wrong-
doing.

Meanwhile, Andrew's father directed the nonprofit family foundation, whose principal cash came from a $4.5 million payment in 2000 from Southampton Place, a partnership that prosecutors say was set up by Fastow to profit from Enron partnership deals.

People who have talked to the Fastows in recent months say the couple still believe they did no wrong. They see themselves as victims.

By participating in the fraud, even tangentially, Lea Fastow forfeited the right to control her atonement. She entered a world where, perhaps for the first time in her life, she doesn't get to make the rules.

Does her sentence seem overly harsh? Sure. Is the judge using her to send a message, just as the prosecutors used her as leverage against her husband? Of course.

No deals are guaranteed. If tax fraud simply becomes a negotiated vacation — "OK, I'll do five months, but I'd like to have the corner cell with the view of the garden, and I'd like to be home before the kids start school in the fall" — then it becomes a predictable risk, a cost people can calculate. Knowing the price, some would simply pay it to get rich.

We can be sympathetic to the Fastows. Hittner's hard line at every turn makes us think of the family, of the children, and the consequences they must bear for their parents' bad judgment.

The judge, though, is sending a message to the rest of us, too, about the nature of fraud and the dangers of complacency. It's far easier to get sucked into schemes like Enron than most of us want to believe. And the time to make choices is before it happens, not before the judge.

Lea Fastow's incarceration will be hard on her, her family and, of course, the kids. That's something she should have considered when she was signing her tax returns.

What's more American than asking questions?

By Michael Moore

Michael Moore's latest documentary film is "Fahrenheit 9/11." (Sam Note: GO SEE IT!)

July 4, 2004

NEW YORK — As a young boy, I loved the American flag. I'd lead my younger sisters in patriotic parades up and down the sidewalk, waving the flag, blowing a whistle and reciting the Pledge of Allegiance over and over until my sisters begged me to let them go back to their Easy-Bake Oven.

I loved singing the national anthem. I won an essay contest on "What the Flag Means to Me." I decorated my bicycle with little American flags for a Fourth of July parade and won a prize for that too. I became an Eagle Scout and proudly promised to do my duty to God and country. And every year I asked to be the one who planted the flag on the grave of my uncle, a paratrooper who was killed in World War II. I was taught to admire his sacrifice, and I hoped to grow up and do my part, as he had, to keep us free.

But, in high school, things changed. Nine boys from my school came back home from Vietnam in boxes. Draped over each coffin was the American flag. I knew that they also had made a sacrifice. But their sacrifice wasn't for their country: They were sent to die by men who lied to them. Those men — presidents, senators, government officials — wrapped themselves in the flag too, hoping that their lies would never be questioned, never be discovered. They wrapped themselves in the very flag that was placed on the coffins of my friends and neighbors. I stopped singing the national anthem at football games, and I stopped putting out the flag.

I realize now I never should have stopped.

For too long now we have abandoned our flag to those who see it as a symbol of war and dominance, as a way to crush dissent at home. Flags are flying from the back of SUVs, rising high above car dealerships, plastering the windows of businesses and adorning paper bags from fast-food restaurants. But these flags are intended to send a message: "You're either with us or you're against us," "Bring it on!" or "Watch what you say, watch what you do."

Those who absconded with our flag now use it as a weapon against those who question America's course. They remind me of that famous 1976 photo of an anti-busing demonstrator in Boston thrusting a large American flag on a pole into the stomach of the first black man he encountered. These so-called patriots hold the flag tightly in their grip and, in a threatening pose, demand that no one ask questions. Those who speak out find themselves shunned at work, harassed at school, booed off Oscar stages. The flag has become a muzzle, a piece of cloth stuffed into the mouths of those who dare to ask questions.

I think it's time for those of us who love this country — and everything it should stand for — to reclaim our flag from those who would use it to crush rights and freedoms, both here at home and overseas. We need to redefine what it means to be a proud American.

If you are one of those who love what President Bush has done for this country and believe you must blindly follow the president to deserve to fly the flag, you should ask yourself some difficult questions about just how proud you are of the America we now inhabit:

Are you proud that one in six children lives in poverty in America?

Are you proud that 40 million adult Americans are functional illiterates?

Are you proud that the bulk of the jobs being created these days are low- and minimum-wage jobs?

Are you proud of asking your fellow Americans to live on $5.15 an hour?

Are you proud that, according to a National Geographic Society survey, 85% of young adult Americans cannot find Iraq on the map (and 11% cannot find the United States!)?

Are you proud that the rest of the world, which poured out its heart to us after Sept. 11, now looks at us with disdain and disgust?

Are you proud that nearly 3 billion people on this planet do not have access to clean drinking water when we have the resources and technology to remedy this immediately?

Are you proud of the fact that our president sent our soldiers off to a war that had nothing to do with the self-defense of this country?

If these things represent what it means to be an American these days — and I am an American — should I hang my head in shame? No. Instead, I intend to perform what I believe is my patriotic duty. I can't think of a more American thing to do than raise questions — and demand truthful answers — when our leader wants to send our sons and daughters off to die in a war.

If we don't do that — the bare minimum — for those who offer to defend our country, then we have failed them and ourselves. They offer to die for us, if necessary, so that we can be free. All they ask in return is that we never send them into harm's way unless it is absolutely necessary. And with this war, we have broken faith with our troops by sending them off to be killed and maimed for wrong and immoral reasons.

This is the true state of disgrace we are living in. I hope we can make it up someday to these brave kids (and older men and women in our reserves and National Guard). They deserve an apology, they deserve our thanks — and a raise — and they deserve a big parade with lots of flags.

I would like to lead that parade, carrying the largest flag. And I would like the country to proclaim that never again will a war be fought unless it is our last resort.

Let's create a world in which, when people see the Stars and Stripes, they will think of us as the people who brought peace to the world, who brought good-paying jobs to all citizens and clean water for the world to drink.

In anticipation of that day, I am putting my flag out today, with hope and with pride.

About Independence

People too often get the impression that the only people who use the nation's civil liberties protections are lawbreakers who were not quite guilty of the exact felony they were charged with. Perhaps we should thank the Bush administration for providing so many situations that demonstrate how an unfettered law enforcement system, even one pursuing worthy ends, can destroy the lives of the innocent out of hubris or carelessness.

There was, for instance, Purna Raj Bajracharya, who was videotaping the sights of New York City for his family back in Nepal when he inadvertently included an office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He was taken into custody, where officials found he had overstayed his tourist visa, a violation punishable by deportation. Instead, Mr. Bajracharya wound up in solitary confinement in a federal detention center for three months, weeping constantly, in a 6-by-9 cell where the lights were never turned off. As a recent article by Nina Bernstein in The Times recounted, Mr. Bajracharya, who speaks little English, might have been in there much longer if an F.B.I. agent had not finally taken it upon himself to summon legal help.

Mr. Bajracharya ran afoul of a Justice Department ruling after the 2001 terrorist attacks that ordered immigration judges to hold secret hearings in closed courtrooms for immigration cases of "special interest." The subjects of these hearings could be kept in custody until the F.B.I. made sure they were not terrorists. That rule might have seemed prudent after the horror of 9/11. But since it is almost always impossible to prove a negative, any decision to let a person once suspected of terrorism free constitutes at least a political risk. If officials have no particular prod for action, they will generally prefer to play it safe and do nothing. The unfortunate Nepalese was finally released only because of James Wynne, the F.B.I. agent who originally sent him to detention. Mr. Wynne's investigation quickly cleared Mr. Bajracharya of suspicion, but no one approved the paperwork necessary to get him out of prison. Eventually, Mr. Wynne called Legal Aid, which otherwise would have had no way of knowing he was even in custody.

When law enforcement officials make mistakes, there is an all-too-human temptation to press on rather than admit an error. Brandon Mayfield, a lawyer in Oregon, was arrested in connection with the bombing of commuter trains in Madrid, even though he had never been to Spain. Spanish authorities had taken a fingerprint from a plastic bag discovered at the scene and F.B.I. officials thought it matched Mr. Mayfield's prints, which were among the many from discharged soldiers in the enormous federal database.

The American investigators must have felt they hit pay dirt when they discovered that Mr. Mayfield was a convert to Islam, that his wife had been born in Egypt and that he had once represented a terrorism defendant in a child custody case. The fact that there was no indication he had been out of the country in a decade did not sway them. Neither did the fact that Spanish authorities were telling them that the fingerprints did not actually match. Mr. Mayfield was held for two weeks, even though the only other connections between him and terrorism were things like the fact, as the F.B.I. pointed out, that his law firm advertised in a "Muslim yellow page directory" whose publisher had once had a business relationship with Osama bin Laden's former personal secretary.

When the Spaniards linked the fingerprint to an Algerian man in May, Mr. Mayfield's case was dismissed and the F.B.I. did apologize. But the ordeal could have dragged on much longer if the investigation had not involved another nation, whose police were not invested in the idea that the Oregon lawyer was the culprit. And it could have been endless if Mr. Mayfield had been an undocumented worker being held in post-9/11 secrecy, or if he had been picked up in Afghanistan as a suspected Taliban fighter and held incommunicado at Guantánamo.

For more than two years now, about 600 men have been kept in American custody in Cuba, and the odds are that some — perhaps most — were merely hapless Afghan foot soldiers or bystanders swept up in the confusion of the American invasion. But it took the Supreme Court to tell the Bush administration they could not be kept there forever without giving them a chance to contest their imprisonment.

Anyone who needs another demonstration of how difficult it is for law enforcement authorities to acknowledge error can always look to the case of Capt. James Yee. A Muslim convert, Captain Yee was a chaplain at Guantánamo until he was taken into custody on suspicion of espionage. He was held in solitary confinement for nearly three months, during which time authorities realized that the case against him was nonexistent. Rather than simply let him go, they charged him with mishandling classified material. The charges seemed to have much less to do with security concerns than official face-saving. And to repay Captain Yee for its self-inflicted embarrassment, the military went at great lengths in court to prove he was having an affair with a female officer. While that had nothing to do with security either, it did humiliate the defendant in public, as well as his wife and child, who were present at the trial.

Virtually every time the Bush administration feels cornered, it falls back on the argument that the president and his officials are honorable men and women. This is an invitation to turn what should be a debate about policy into a referendum on the hearts of the people making it. But this nation was organized under a rule of law, not a dictatorship of the virtuous. The founding fathers wrote the Bill of Rights specifically because they did not believe that honorable men always do the right thing.

Their George and Ours

NY TIMES OP-ED COLUMNIST

By BARBARA EHRENREICH

When they first heard the Declaration of Independence in July of 1776, New Yorkers were so electrified that they toppled a statue of King George III and had it melted down to make 42,000 bullets for the war. Two hundred twenty-eight years later, you can still get a rush from those opening paragraphs. "We hold these truths to be self-evident." The audacity!

Read a little further to those parts of the declaration we seldom venture into after ninth-grade civics class, and you may feel something other than admiration: an icy chill of recognition. The bulk of the declaration is devoted to a list of charges against George III, several of which bear an eerie relevance to our own time.

George III is accused, for example, of "depriving us in many cases of the benefits of Trial by Jury." Our own George II has imprisoned two U.S. citizens — Jose Padilla and Yaser Esam Hamdi — since 2002, without benefit of trials, legal counsel or any opportunity to challenge the evidence against them. Even die-hard Tories Scalia and Rehnquist recently judged such executive hauteur intolerable.

It would be silly, of course, to overstate the parallels between 1776 and 2004. The signers of the declaration were colonial subjects of a man they had come to see as a foreign king. One of their major grievances had to do with the tax burden imposed on them to support the king's wars. In contrast, our taxes have been reduced — especially for those who need the money least — and the huge costs of war sloughed off to our children and grandchildren. Nor would it be tactful to press the analogy between our George II and their George III, of whom the British historian John Richard Green wrote: "He had a smaller mind than any English king before him save James II."

But the parallels are there, and undeniable. "He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power," the declaration said of George III, and today the military is indulgently allowed to investigate its own crimes in Iraq. George III "obstructed the Administration of Justice." Our George II has sought to evade judicial review by hiding detainees away in Guantánamo, and has steadfastly resisted the use of the Alien Tort Claims Act, which allows non-U.S. citizens to bring charges of human rights violations to U.S. courts.

The signers further indicted their erstwhile monarch for "taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments." The administration has been trying its best to establish a modern equivalent to the divine right of kings, with legal memorandums asserting that George II's "inherent" powers allow him to ignore federal laws prohibiting torture and war crimes.

Then there is the declaration's boldest and most sweeping indictment of all, condemning George III for "transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation." Translate "mercenaries" into contract workers and proxy armies (remember the bloodthirsty, misogynist Northern Alliance?), and translate that last long phrase into Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib.

But it is the final sentence of the declaration that deserves the closest study: "And for the support of this Declaration . . . we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor." Today, those who believe that the war on terror requires the sacrifice of our liberties like to argue that "the Constitution is not a suicide pact." In a sense, however, the Declaration of Independence was precisely that.

By signing Jefferson's text, the signers of the declaration were putting their lives on the line. England was then the world's greatest military power, against which a bunch of provincial farmers had little chance of prevailing. Benjamin Franklin wasn't kidding around with his quip about hanging together or hanging separately. If the rebel American militias were beaten on the battlefield, their ringleaders could expect to be hanged as traitors.

They signed anyway, thereby stating to the world that there is something worth more than life, and that is liberty. Thanks to their courage, we do not have to risk death to preserve the liberties they bequeathed us. All we have to do is vote.

When Irish Eyes Stop Smiling

July 4, 2004

The planners of President Bush's recent European summit trip may have envisioned a pleasant inning of softball questions when they penciled in a brief interview with RTE, the state television of Ireland, first stop on his tour. What they got was the intrepid Carole Coleman, RTE's Washington correspondent, firing follow-up questions about death and destruction in Iraq, even as Mr. Bush protested being cut off from fully answering. "You ask the questions and I'll answer them," Mr. Bush finally told Ms. Coleman, a veteran correspondent who served up her next question as he complained.

The White House later protested to the Irish Embassy, but her employers gave Ms. Coleman a well-done, and so do we. The colloquy, as the Irish say, was a sight for sore eyes — an American president who seldom holds a White House news conference unexpectedly subjected to some muscular European perspective. "Do you not see the world is a more dangerous place?" Ms. Coleman asked, her tone more curious than deferential.

Mr. Bush gave as good as he got, once his Irish was up. But Ms. Coleman remained resolute. It may have cost her a follow-up interview with Laura Bush. But the griping and debate about the interview was a sad reminder to Americans that the White House seldom welcomes robust questioning, especially when it is most needed.

Baptists Angry at Bush Campaign Tactics

Call me crazy but I think this move to put the "touch" on church congregations is a major show of fear and desperation on the Bush re-election campaign's efforts.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. - The Southern Baptist Convention, a conservative denomination closely aligned with President Bush, said it was offended by the Bush-Cheney campaign's effort to use church rosters for campaign purposes.

"I'm appalled that the Bush-Cheney campaign would intrude on a local congregation in this way," said Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission.

"The bottom line is, when a church does it, it's nonpartisan and appropriate. When a campaign does it, it's partisan and inappropriate," he said. "I suspect that this will rub a lot of pastors' fur the wrong way."

The Bush campaign defended a memo in which it sought to mobilize church members by providing church directories to the campaign, arranging for pastors to hold voter-registration drives, and talking to various religious groups about the campaign.

Other religious organizations also criticized the document as inappropriate, suggesting that it could jeopardize churches' tax-exempt status by involving them in partisan politics.

Campaign spokesman Scott Stanzel said the document, distributed to campaign staff, was well within the law.

"People of faith have a right to take part in the political process, and we're reaching out to every supporter of President Bush to become involved in the campaign," Stanzel said.

One section of the document lists 22 "coalition coordinator" duties and lays out a timeline for various activities targeting religious voters. By July 31, for example, the coordinator is to:

_Send your church directory to your state Bush-Cheney '04 headquarters or give to a BC04 field representative.

_Identify another conservative church in your community who we can organize for Bush.

_Recruit 5 people in your church to help with the voter registration project.

_Talk to your pastor about holding a citizenship Sunday and voter registration drive.

The Rev. Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said the effort "is a shameless attempt to misuse and abuse churches for partisan political ends." Lynn said his organization would be "watching closely to see how this plays out in the pews."

The Rev. Welton Gaddy, president of the Interfaith Alliance, a Washington advocacy group that has been critical of the Christian right, said the document was "totally inappropriate."

"We are alarmed that this initiative by the Bush-Cheney campaign could lure religious organizations and religious leaders into dangerous territory where they risk losing their tax-exempt status and could be violating the law," Gaddy said.

Rabbi David Saperstein, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism , said "efforts aimed at transforming houses of worship into political campaign offices stink to high heaven."

None of those groups, however, has been as supportive of the Bush administration as the Nashville-based Southern Baptists.

Bush spoke to the Southern Baptists' recent national convention, by video link, for the third year in a row. Outgoing SBC President Jack Graham called the president "a man of personal faith whose leadership is great for America."

On Friday, Land said: "It's one thing for a church member motivated by exhortations to exercise his Christian citizenship to go out and decide to work on the Bush campaign or the Kerry campaign. It's another and totally inappropriate thing for a political campaign to ask workers who may be church members to provide church member information through the use of directories to solicit partisan support."

Brando

Are They Losing It?

By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON

One thing you've got to say for Dick Cheney: No one will ever again dismiss the vice presidency as a pitcher of warm spit. Mr. Major League Potty Mouth has shown that, with obsequiousness to the president and obtuseness to the facts, a vice president can run the world. Right into the ground.

This week, it's not just Democrats who are questioning whether Vice is losing it. Now, even some in the White House are saying it's bizarre that he chose a class photo-op on the Senate floor to suggest that Senator Patrick Leahy do something that you won't even find described in Bill Clinton's "My Life."

While Democratic lawmakers delayed final passage of a defense spending bill so they could mingle with Michael Moore, the once sweat-free Bushies were acting jangly.

First Vice chewed out The Times for accurately reporting that the 9/11 commission said there was no collaborative relationship between Saddam and Al Qaeda. Then Paul Wolfowitz called the reporters risking their lives in Iraq craven rumormongers. Then came Mr. Cheney's F-word. (Not Fox, the other one.)

Finally, President Bush got agitated when an Irish TV interviewer said most of the Irish found the world more dangerous now than before the Iraq invasion. "First of all, most of Europe supported the decision in Iraq," Mr. Bush declared. (It's all in how you define "Europe.")

Even as Tom Daschle proposed bipartisan family retreats to heal the harsh mood, even as the Senate passed the "Defense of Decency Act," Mr. Cheney profanely laced into Mr. Leahy for criticizing Halliburton's getting no-bid contracts.

"I felt better afterwards," he told Neil Cavuto during a no-bid interview with Fox News. Hey, if it feels good, Dick, do it.

He said he had no regrets about his "little floor debate in the United States Senate." He didn't want to go along with Mr. Leahy's attitude that "everything's peaches and cream" when the Democrat had just been jawing about Halliburton war profiteering. Peaches and cream have never been on the Bush-Cheney menu, only brimstone and gall.

By playing on the insecurities of an inexperienced leader, Mr. Cheney has managed to change W. from a sunny, open, bipartisan, uniter-not-a-divider, non-nation-builder into a crabby, secretive, partisan, divider-not-a-uniter, inept imperialist. Vice is bounding around the country, talking to his usual circumscribed audiences of conservatives, right-wing think tanks and Fox News anchors. No need to burrow in the bunker when you've turned America into one.

As they used to say about the Soviet Union, the defensive Bush imperialists have to keep expanding because they're encircled. Mr. Cheney's gloomy, scary, contentious world view has fueled a more gloomy, scary, contentious world.

After disastrously dividing the world into the strong (Bush hawks) and the weak (everyone else), Vice turned his coarseness into another macho, tough-guy moment against a Democrat considered a pill by many Republicans. "I think a lot of my colleagues felt that what I had said badly needed to be said, that it was long overdue," he preened.

The conservatives defending Mr. Cheney are largely the same crowd that went off the deep end because of a glimpse of breast on the Super Bowl, demanding everything from fines to new regulations to protect red states from blue language.

Mr. Cheney's foul outburst was not as bad as his foul reasoning. On Fox, he again belabored his obsession with "links" between Iraq and Al Qaeda. Exhibiting WASP chutzpah, this time he used The Times to bolster his faux case.

But the Thom Shanker story he cited said only that in the mid-1990's, Iraq agreed to rebroadcast anti-Saudi propaganda and that a request from Osama "to begin joint operations against foreign forces in Saudi Arabia went unanswered."

Rebroadcast anti-Saudi propaganda? As a threat to U.S. security, that's right up there with Iraqi "weapons of mass destruction-related program activities."

Mr. Cheney assured Fox's anxious viewers that he would stay on the ticket and in the White House until January '09. (No four letter words, dear Democrats.) Vice said of W., "he knows I'm there to serve him."

Mr. Bush must have missed that classic "Twilight Zone" episode where the aliens arrive with a book entitled, "To Serve Man." It turns out to be a cookbook.

The Disaster of Failed Policy, LA TIMES EDITORIAL

LA TIMES EDITORIAL

In its scale and intent, President Bush's war against Iraq was something new and radical: a premeditated decision to invade, occupy and topple the government of a country that was no imminent threat to the United States. This was not a handful of GIs sent to overthrow Panamanian thug Manuel Noriega or to oust a new Marxist government in tiny Grenada. It was the dispatch of more than 100,000 U.S. troops to implement Bush's post-Sept. 11 doctrine of preemption, one whose dangers President John Quincy Adams understood when he said the United States "goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy."

In the case of Vietnam, the U.S. began by assisting a friendly government resisting communist takeover in a civil war, though the conflict disintegrated into a failure that still haunts this country. The 1991 Persian Gulf War, under Bush's father, was a successful response to Iraq's invasion and occupation of Kuwait — and Bush's father deliberately stopped short of toppling Saddam Hussein and occupying Iraq.

The current president outlined a far more aggressive policy in a speech to the West Point graduating class in 2002, declaring that in the war on terror "we must take the battle to the enemy" and confront threats before they emerge. The Iraq war was intended as a monument to his new Bush Doctrine, which also posited that the U.S. would take what help was available from allies but would not be held back by them. It now stands as a monument to folly.

The planned transfer Wednesday of limited sovereignty from the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority to an interim Iraqi government occurs with U.S. influence around the world at a low point and insurgent violence in Iraq reaching new heights of deadliness and coordination. Important Arab leaders this month rejected a U.S. invitation to attend a summit with leaders of industrialized nations. The enmity between Israelis and Palestinians is fiercer than ever, their hope for peace dimmer. Residents of the Middle East see the U.S. not as a friend but as an imperial power bent on securing a guaranteed oil supply and a base for U.S. forces. Much of the rest of the world sees a bully.

The War's False Premises

All the main justifications for the invasion offered beforehand by the Bush administration and its supporters — weapons of mass destruction, close ties between Al Qaeda and Iraq, a chance to make Baghdad a fountain of democracy that would spread through the region — turned out to be baseless.

Weeks of suicide car bombings, assassinations of political leaders and attacks on oil pipelines vital to the country's economy have preceded the handover.

On Thursday alone, car bombs and street fighting in five cities claimed more than 100 lives. Iraqis no longer fear torture or death at the hands of Hussein's brutal thugs, but many fear leaving their homes because of the violence.

The U.S. is also poorer after the war, in lives lost, billions spent and terrorists given new fuel for their rage. The initial fighting was easy; the occupation has been a disaster, with Pentagon civilians arrogantly ignoring expert advice on the difficulty of the task and necessary steps for success.

Two iconic pictures from Iraq balance the good and the dreadful — the toppling of Hussein's statue and a prisoner crawling on the floor at Abu Ghraib prison with a leash around his neck. Bush landed on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln in May 2003 to a hero's welcome and a banner declaring "Mission Accomplished."

A year later, more than 90% of Iraqis want the U.S. to leave their country. The president boasted in July that if Iraqi resistance fighters thought they could attack U.S. forces, "bring them on." Since then, more than 400 personnel have been killed by hostile fire.

Iraqis hope, with little evidence, that the transfer of limited sovereignty to an interim government will slow attacks on police, soldiers and civilians. Another goal, democracy, is fading. The first concern remains what it should have been after the rout of Hussein's army: security. The new Iraqi leaders are considering martial law, an understandable response with suicide bombings recently averaging about one a day but a move they could hardly enforce with an army far from rebuilt.

The new government also faces the difficulty of keeping the country together. In the north, the Kurds, an ethnically separate minority community that had been persecuted by Hussein, want at least to maintain the autonomy they've had for a decade. The Sunnis and Shiites distrust each other. Within the Shiite community, to which the majority of Iraqis belong, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and the violent Muqtada Sadr are opponents. Sadr was a relatively minor figure until occupation officials shut his party's newspaper in March and arrested one of his aides, setting off large protests and attacks on U.S. troops.

The U.S. carries its own unwelcome legacies from the occupation:

• Troops are spending more time in Iraq than planned because about one-quarter of the Army is there at any one time. National Guard and Army Reserve forces are being kept on active duty longer than expected, creating problems at home, where the soldiers' jobs go unfilled and families go without parents in the home.

• The Abu Ghraib prison scandal has raised questions about the administration's willingness to ignore Geneva Convention requirements on treatment of prisoners. Investigations of prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay must aim at finding out which high-ranking officers approved of the abuse or should have known of it. The U.S. also must decide what to do with prisoners of war. The Geneva Convention requires they be released when the occupation ends unless they have been formally charged with a crime. The International Committee of the Red Cross says fewer than 50 prisoners have been granted POW status. Thousands more detained as possible security threats also should be released or charged.

• The use of private contractors for military jobs once done by soldiers also demands closer examination. Civilians have long been employed to feed troops and wash uniforms, but the prevalence of ex-GIs interrogating prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison raises harsh new questions. For instance, what, if any, charges could be brought against them if they were found complicit in mistreatment?

Investigate the Contracts

The administration also put private U.S. contractors in charge of rebuilding Iraq. Congress needs to take a much closer look at what they do and how they bill the government.

Halliburton is the best-known case, having won secret no-bid contracts to rebuild the country. A Pentagon audit found "significant" overcharges by the company, formerly headed by Vice President Dick Cheney; Halliburton denies the allegations.

Iraqis say they want the Americans out, but most understand they will need the foreign forces for many more months. A U.S. troop presence in Iraq should not be indefinite, even if the Iraqis request it. By the end of 2005, Iraq should have enough trained police, soldiers, border guards and other forces to be able to defend the country and put down insurgencies but not threaten neighboring countries.

The Bush administration should push NATO nations to help with the training. Once the Iraqis have a new constitution, an elected government and sufficient security forces, the U.S. should withdraw its troops. That does not mean setting a definite date, because the U.S. cannot walk away from what it created. But it should set realistic goals for Iraq to reach on its own, at which time the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad becomes just another diplomatic outpost. It also means living up to promises to let Iraq choose its own government, even well short of democracy.

France, Germany and others that opposed the war seem to understand that letting Iraq become a failed state, an Afghanistan writ large, threatens them as well as the U.S. and the Middle East. But other nations will do little to help with reconstruction if Iraq remains a thinly disguised fiefdom where U.S. companies get billion-dollar contracts and other countries are shut out.

A Litany of Costly Errors

The missteps have been many: listening to Iraqi exiles like Ahmad Chalabi who insisted that their countrymen would welcome invaders; using too few troops, which led to a continuing crime wave and later to kidnappings and full-blown terror attacks. Disbanding the Iraqi army worsened the nation's unemployment problem and left millions of former soldiers unhappy — men with weapons. Keeping the United Nations at arm's length made it harder to regain assistance when the need was dire.

It will take years for widely felt hostility to ebb, in Iraq and other countries. The consequences of arrogance, accompanied by certitude that the world's most powerful military can cure all ills, should be burned into Americans' memory banks.

Preemption is a failed doctrine. Forcibly changing the regime of an enemy that posed no imminent threat has led to disaster. The U.S. needs better intelligence before it acts in the future. It needs to listen to friendly nations. It needs humility.

Greens Reject Endorsement for Ralph Nader

Thank the stars somebody showed some brains in the Green Party. I love Ralph's record but this ego trip of his to get the nomination to spoil this election is a dirty shame on his part. Bush has to be crushed in the coming election by John Kerry making the world a much more welcome place for a person like Nader and those that support him. The alternative is unthinkable. ---Sam




By JR ROSS, Associated Press Writer

MILWAUKEE - The Green Party nominated Texas attorney David Cobb as its candidate for president Saturday, dealing a blow to independent Ralph Nader's campaign.


Nader, the party's candidate in 1996 and 2000, had hoped for the party's endorsement and access to the ballot Greens have in 22 states and Washington, D.C. (news - web sites) Instead, he will have to find another way to get on the ballot in those states, including Wisconsin and California.

Nader told party officials months ago he would not accept the party's nomination for president, openly courting their formal endorsement instead.

But 408 delegates voted for Cobb on the second ballot to give him the nomination. Maine radio personality Pat LaMarche was the party's nominee for vice president.

Cobb has walked a line between praising Nader and questioning what his candidacy as an independent offered the Greens as they try to expand their status as a third party.

Had Nader won the party's endorsement, it would have been up to the state parties to decide whether to present him as their candidate for president to local election officials. Getting on the ballot in some of those states as an independent could now require him to gather thousands of signatures and meet other requirements.

Nader already has the backing of the Reform Party, which has ballot access in seven states, but he has yet to be placed on any state ballots.

The delegate vote at the party's national convention in Milwaukee underscored the deep divide among party members over who serves their cause best — Cobb, a little known party activist, or Nader, a prominent national figure, but someone who has never joined the party and does not plan to.

Nader tapped longtime Green activist Peter Camejo as his running mate this week, a step that was expected to bolster his chances of winning the party's endorsement.

In speeches before the vote, Camejo, who ran for the Green Party's presidential nomination as a Nader backer, and Cobb tried to stress what they shared, not what divided them. Still, their addresses illustrated the split within the party over Nader's candidacy.

Camejo portrayed Nader as the only option who could truly give voters an alternative to the George Bush and John Kerry campaigns. He said Nader would give the party the profile it needed to successfully build its base.

Cobb promised to support whatever decision the delegates made but warned them many state parties could lose their ballot access without a nominated candidate, an obvious warning about the possibility of endorsing Nader.

Cheney F@*#s Up

1. Does anyone need anymore evidence of what a vicious and warped little prick Dick Cheney is?

2. Hee hee, with Cheney and Bush getting questioned last week concerning the treason investigation (someone in the White House outed a CIA agent) along with their polls slipping into hell it's obvious the f___s are feeling the heat and having a hard time dealing with it.

Fri Jun 25, 9:44 PM ET

By Dana Milbank and Helen Dewar, Washington Post Staff Writers

Vice President Cheney on Friday vigorously defended his vulgarity directed at a prominent Democratic senator earlier this week in the Senate chamber.

Cheney said he "probably" used an obscenity in an argument Tuesday on the Senate floor with Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) and added that he had no regrets. "I expressed myself rather forcefully, felt better after I had done it," Cheney told Neil Cavuto of Fox News. The vice president said those who heard the putdown agreed with him. "I think that a lot of my colleagues felt that what I had said badly needed to be said, that it was long overdue."

The forceful defense by Cheney came as much of Washington was discussing his outburst on the Senate floor in which a chance encounter with Leahy during a photo session in the usually decorous Senate chamber ended in colorful profanity. The obscenity was published in yesterday's editions of The Washington Post.

President Bush had made his vow to "change the tone in Washington" a central part of his 2000 campaign, calling bipartisan cooperation "the challenge of our moment."

"Our nation must rise above a house divided," he said in his victory speech in December 2000. "I know America wants reconciliation and unity. I know Americans want progress. And we will seize this moment and deliver."

Cheney said yesterday he was in no mood to exchange pleasantries with Leahy because Leahy had "challenged my integrity" by making charges of cronyism between Cheney and his former firm, Halliburton Co. Leahy on Monday had a conference call to kick off the Democratic National Committee's "Halliburton Week" focusing on Cheney, the company, "and the millions of dollars they've cost taxpayers," the party said.

"I didn't like the fact that after he had done so, then he wanted to act like, you know, everything's peaches and cream," Cheney said. "And I informed him of my view of his conduct in no uncertain terms. And as I say, I felt better afterwards."

Leahy, crossing the aisle to the Republican side of the chamber Tuesday, tried to make small talk with Cheney. Cheney yesterday referred to the incident as "a little floor debate in the United States Senate," although the Senate was not in session at the time. According to Leahy's staff, the Vermont senator answered Cheney's complaint about Halliburton with Democrats' complaints that the White House sanctioned a smear of Catholic Democratic senators over their objections to Bush's judicial nominees.

"Ordinarily I don't express myself in strong terms, but I thought it was appropriate here," Cheney said on Fox.

David Carle, Leahy's spokesman, said: "It appears the vice president's previous calls for civility are now inoperative."

As news spread on Thursday of the Cheney-Leahy exchange, Senate Minority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) appealed to colleagues of both parties to rise above "partisan retaliation" and find a "common ground" for lawmaking.

Speaking first with reporters and then addressing the full Senate, Daschle acknowledged that earlier efforts by Democrats and Republicans to restore the Senate's once-cherished comity have yielded meager results. "But we have to try . . . to build a better relationship" between the political parties, regardless of which controls the Senate after the November elections, he said.

Daschle denied that he made his own civility proposals to boost Democratic campaigns, including his own hard-fought bid for reelection in South Dakota this fall. But his pitch for more bipartisanship -- coupled with a similar appeal Wednesday by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) -- underscored the perceived significance of voters' impatience with the partisan squabbling in Washington.

Daschle outlined what he called "fundamental commitments" that would undergird his efforts: to "deal in good faith with the executive branch"; to exert the "historical role of the Senate" on budget, oversight and nomination matters; to respect minority party rights, and to "end the cycle of partisan retaliation."

Among his proposals was full participation by both parties on House-Senate conference committees.

Iacocca Changes Support From Bush to Kerry

I've been hearing stories for months from "old school" Republicans who can't stomach Bush and who are either not voting in the election or switching to Kerry like Iacocca. ---Sam



By NEDRA PICKLER, Associated Press Writer

SAN JOSE, Calif. - Four years after former Chrysler Corp. chairman Lee Iacocca cut ads supporting George W. Bush's election, he's switching alliances to presidential challenger John Kerry.

Iacocca decided to announce his endorsement in person at a Kerry speech Thursday on creating high-tech industry jobs in Silicon Valley.

Iacocca, 79, gained a reputation as a champion of innovation within the automotive industry. He oversaw the development of the Ford Mustang in the 1960s and later the minivan and electric vehicles while at Chrysler Corp. He is the chairman and founder of EV Global Motors Co., a Los Angeles-based firm that designs electronic bicycles.

In a television ad that aired in Michigan during the 2000 campaign, Iacocca criticized Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore (news - web sites) on automotive issues, contending that Gore's environmentally "extreme ideas" could cost autoworkers their jobs.

Iacocca retired as chairman of Chrysler Corp. in 1992. He was president of Ford Motor Co. before joining financially ailing Chrysler in 1978.

In prepared remarks, Kerry said Thursday that the United States is losing its technological edge under President Bush (news - web sites)'s leadership, with the disappearance of 800,000 high-tech jobs and falling from 4th to 10th in the use of broadband. He said countries such as South Korea (news - web sites) and Japan are deploying networks that are 20-50 times faster than what is available in the United States.

He vowed to create jobs in the high-tech industry through an investment of $30 billion raised by auctioning off broadcast airwaves.

"This technological revolution is the foundation of a 21st century economy," Kerry said. "But it's up to us to build on that foundation so that we can create and expand 21st century jobs. We won't get very far with a government that wants to stifle or ignore the creativity and entrepreneurship that will produce the next big idea: We need to encourage it and invest in it."

Bush Interviewed in Gov't CIA Leak Probe

This is about treason from within the White House. ---Sam

By DEB RIECHMANN, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - President Bush was interviewed by government prosecutors Thursday in connection with the federal investigation of who leaked the name of an undercover CIA operative to the news media.

The president was questioned for 70 minutes in the Oval Office by U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald, who is heading the Justice Department investigation, and members of his team.

White House press secretary Scott McClellan said Bush has hired a private attorney, Jim Sharp, a Washington trial lawyer and former federal prosecutor, and he was present for the questioning.

"The leaking of classified information is a very serious matter," McClellan said, adding that the president repeatedly has said that he wants his administration to cooperate with the investigation. "He was pleased to do his part. No one wants to get to the bottom of this matter more than the president of the United States."

McClellan noted that Bush has urged anyone with information about the case to come forward.

Vice President Dick Cheney and other top administration officials, including White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, also have been questioned in the investigation.

Investigators want to know who leaked the name of Valerie Plame, an undercover CIA operative, to syndicated columnist Robert Novak last July. A federal grand jury in recent months has questioned numerous White House and administration officials.

Disclosure of an undercover officer's identity can be a federal crime. (Sam Note: It's treason)

Asked if Bush had answered every question, McClellan said, "The president was glad to do his part to cooperate with the investigation. The president was pleased to share whatever information he had with the officials in charge and answer their questions."

McClellan, who said he was not in the meeting, was asked if Bush had any information about who leaked Plame's name. "That's just getting into questions that are best directed to the officials in charge of the investigation. I would not read anything into that one way or the other. This is an ongoing investigation."

Former Ambassador Joseph Wilson has said he believes his wife's identity was disclosed to attack his credibility because he criticized Bush administration claims that Iraq under Saddam Hussein had tried to obtain uranium from Niger. Wilson went to Niger for the CIA to investigate the information about Iraq and he found the allegation to be highly unlikely.