Media

By Jake Tapper, ABC News

The White House this afternoon accidentally sent to its extensive distribution list a Reuters story headlined "Iraqi PM backs Obama troop exit plan - magazine."

The story relayed how Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki told the German magazine Der Spiegel that "he supported prospective U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's proposal that U.S. troops should leave Iraq within 16 months … ‘U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes,'" the prime minister said.

The White House employee had intended to send the article to an internal distribution list, ABC News' Martha Raddatz reports, but hit the wrong button.

Dreading the possibility of peace and - worse - the possibility that the American public might get any credit for having had any influence on its supposed representatives in government, the Heritage Foundation is already announcing that if peace comes, the peace movement will have had nothing whatsoever to do with it.

VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. (AP) - Karl Rove's appearance at a fundraiser for Congresswoman Thelma Drake drew protesters to the Virginia Beach event.

The former White House adviser attended the fundraiser Friday at a local steakhouse while about 40 people gathered outside. Some carried signs reading "Arrest Karl Rove" and "Shame on Thelma Drake."

Earlier this week Democrats called on Drake to cancel the sold-out fund-raiser. They cited Rove's defiance of a congressional subpoena last week.

Drake is a Republican who represents Virginia Beach and parts of Norfolk, Hampton and the Eastern Shore.

(Copyright 2008 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)

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By Peter Phillips

The United States is directly responsible for over one million Iraqi deaths since the invasion five and half years ago. In a January 2008 report, a British polling group Opinion Research Business (ORB) reports that, “survey work confirms our earlier estimate that over 1,000,000 Iraqi citizens have died as a result of the conflict which started in 2003…. We now estimate that the death toll between March 2003 and August 2007 is likely to have been of the order of 1,033,000. If one takes into account the margin of error associated with survey data of this nature then the estimated range is between 946,000 and 1,120,000”.

By Coleen Rowley and Ray McGovern, http://www.consortiumnews.com

One can assume that former Attorney General John Ashcroft didn’t mean it to be funny, but his testimony on Thursday before the House Judiciary Committee might strike one as hilarious, were it not for the issue at hand — torture.

Ashcroft is the Attorney General who approved torture before he disapproved it, but committee members spared him accusations of flip-flopping.

He explained that he initially blessed the infamous torture memoranda drafted by Justice Department lawyer John Yoo and others in mid-2002 because he (Ashcroft) believed it imperative to afford the President “the benefit of genuine doubt” regarding how to protect American lives in the “war on terror.”

But Ashcroft added that, despite this, when concerns about that earlier guidance for interrogations were brought to his attention, changing his mind “was not a hard decision for me.” A very flexible Attorney General.

Watch this video. Max Obuszewski was labeled a terrorist by the Maryland State Police for advocating nonviolent promotion of peace.

By Peter W. Dickson, www.consortiumnews.com

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s call for a timetable on American troop withdrawals has touched off a dramatic change in the debate over the future U.S. engagement in Iraq – essentially, it marks a falling away of the fig-leaf rationales for the five-plus years of occupation.

As these fig leaves drop to the ground, they are exposing raw geo-strategic objectives that were present in the original calculations of Republican foreign policy experts going back to the early 1990s, a desire for a firm U.S. foothold in the Middle East to protect the West's access to oil and to defend the state of Israel from, then, primarily its Arab enemies.

Those objectives were outlined in the Paul Wolfowitz-inspired Defense Strategy paper prepared in 1992 that argued in favor of an American version of the imperial British “East of Suez” concept of projecting power into this strategic region.

By Colonel (retired) Ann Wright

Every day for a parent of a person in the United States military is a long day filled with concern for their daughter or son. Parents of nine US Army soldiers were notified of the deaths of their family members in Afghanistan this week.

July 16 and 17, 2008 have been extraordinarily long days for another group of parents.

by Linda Milazzo

Today on CNN's Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer, Democratic Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, responded to a viewer who asked why she took the impeachment of George W. Bush off the table. Pelosi's response (below in video and text), is categoric proof of her incompetence, dereliction of duty, disdain for the Constitution and disregard for the people of this nation. It underscores why she should NOT continue as Speaker of the House and why she should NOT be reelected in November.

By not going forward with her Constitutionally mandated requirement to impeach George W. Bush and Dick Cheney for their high crimes and misdemeanors, Mrs. Pelosi has cemented her legacy and secured her "BUT" forever. Let me be clear - I don't mean the double "TT" derriere kind of "BUTT." I mean the single "T" conjunction kind of "BUT." The proviso. The disclaimer. The tiny word that will ever be the prefix to her legacy. The "BUT" her grandchildren will hear from those who know history and politics - and who care about humanity - when they mention that Pelosi is their grandmother. The "BUT" like:

"BUT" wasn't your grandmother the one who wouldn't impeach George W. Bush?

"BUT" wasn't your grandmother the one who let Bush get away with murder?

"BUT" why did your grandmother do that?"

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Zoriah Banned for Blog

“I want you to observe and comprehend what others live through on a daily basis.... I want people who follow my photography to understand that although I am able to bring images of war to the world in a form of art, what actually goes on here is horror.” [Zoriah]

July 17, 2008: Military media censors in Iraq send photographer packing.

By David Michael Green

So, did you hear about the latest bipartisan commission report?

Bet you can’t guess who’s on the thing! James Baker? Check. Warren Christopher? Check. Lee Hamilton? Check. Ed Meese? Check. Brent Scowcroft? Check.

(What, no Henry Kissinger? Guess he was busy fighting war crime extraditions.)

These guys should just go get a room and get it over with, already, eh? Anytime anyone in government needs some mind-numbingly anodyne cover story for the latest word in power consolidation, they bring in this crew – The Center-Right Dinosaur Club. Six words out of Warren Christopher’s mouth alone is guaranteed to render comatose any formerly sentient being. The guy is a human anesthesia.

By Jacob G. Hornberger, FFF

Led by conservative judges, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals has just affirmed the Bush administration’s “enemy combatant” doctrine, a doctrine that allows President Bush and his military forces to designate anyone anywhere in the world as an “enemy combatant” in the so-called war on terrorism and treat him accordingly. While the case that the Court was deciding involved a foreigner, Ali al-Marri, the Court’s reasoning applies to American citizens as well.

By Howard Zinn, The Boston Globe

Barack Obama and John McCain continue to argue about war. McCain says to keep the troops in Iraq until we “win” and supports sending more troops to Afghanistan. Obama says to withdraw some (not all) troops from Iraq and send them to fight and “win” in Afghanistan.

For someone like myself, who fought in World War II, and since then has protested against war, I must ask: Have our political leaders gone mad? Have they learned nothing from recent history? Have they not learned that no one “wins” in a war, but that hundreds of thousands of humans die, most of them civilians, many of them children?

Did we “win” by going to war in Korea? The result was a stalemate, leaving things as they were before with a dictatorship in South Korea and a dictatorship in North Korea. Still, more than 2 million people — mostly civilians — died, the United States dropped napalm on children, and 50,000 American soldiers lost their lives.

Activist Groups Surveilled Under Ehrlich, Records Show
By Washington Post

Maryland State Police officers conducted surveillance on local peace activists and groups opposed to the death penalty, including some in Takoma Park, for more than a year during the administration of former Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. (R), documents released this morning show.

The 46 pages released to the American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland through a lawsuit seeking public information on the activities of the State Police Homeland Security and Intelligence Division reveal undercover agents monitored private organizing meetings, public forums and rallies outside the State House in Annapolis. The agents used aliases to attend these events and to join listservs, logging information about protest activities into a database, the records show.

By David Swanson

There's been a lot of public discussion of late of the Associated Press's Washington Bureau Chief Ron Fournier's changes in style rules. Out with "just the facts," in with opinion and perspective. Or so the story goes. The changes that are afoot at the AP appear to be part of a broader trend, influenced - in part - by the internet, the medium itself and the competition from bloggers. Of the two biggest problems I see in American journalism, this trend could fix one of them while not necessarily having any immediate impact, pro or con, on the other.

By Katrina vanden Heuvel, The Nation

It started with one simple question posed by Senator Bernie Sanders to his constituents in an invitation to a town meeting: What does the decline of the middle class mean to you personally?

Over 700 people replied.

A second question was asked in his e-newsletter, The Bernie Buzz: Do you have a story to tell about how gas prices are affecting you?

Over 1200 responses.