By Michael Abramowitz
Washington Post Staff Writer

For nearly seven years, the office of the vice president has been a virtual black hole for information about the Bush administration. But yesterday, a series of letters aimed at securing leniency for Vice President Cheney’s former chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, provided a small, if selective, window on the world of Cheney and his aides.

Lewis A. Hoffman, the vice president’s White House physician, asked Judge Reggie B. Walton to understand “the mindset that was pervasive” in the vice president’s office after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and the “real fear about what the future held.”

“I can tell you for certain that Mr. Libby worked himself to exhaustion day after day,” Hoffman wrote in a letter dated April 26. “This is a testimony to his devotion to our nation and the Vice President. I also believe that such continuous stress and total exhaustion is just the setting where a person might honestly confuse what he said to who on what day.”

Elizabeth A. Denny, who worked with Libby as the vice president’s social secretary, wrote that her “heart broke” the day Libby walked out of the White House after his indictment on perjury charges in 2005. “I could feel a vacuum sucking the wind out of our office, out of the White House,” she said. “I could feel his absence immediately in a very large way. I still can’t figure it out.”

Full article and a list of letter writers at the Washington Post

By Robert Dreyfuss

Add it all up, and the US will spend nearly $1 trillion on defense, intelligence gathering and homeland security this year, even though it faces no credible state enemy. The amazing thing is that nobody dares question this extravagance, not even the leading Democratic presidential candidates.

War critics are rightly disappointed over the inability of Democrats in the US Congress to mount an effective challenge to President George W Bush’s Iraq adventure. What began as a frontal assault on the war, with tough talk about deadlines and timetables, has settled into something like a guerrilla’style campaign to chip away at war policy until the edifice crumbles.

Still, Democratic criticism of Bush administration policy in Iraq looks muscle-bound when compared with the party’s readiness to go along with the president’s massive military buildup, domestically and globally. Nothing underlines the tacit alliance between so-called foreign-policy realists and hardline exponents of neo-conservative’style empire-building more than the Washington consensus that the United States needs to expand the defense budget without end, while increasing the size of the armed forces.

In addition, spending on the 16 agencies and other organizations that make up the official US “intelligence community” - including the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) -and on homeland security is going through the roof.

The numbers are astonishing and, except for a hardy band of progressives in the House of Representatives, Democrats willing to call for shrinking the bloated Pentagon or intelligence budgets are in essence non-existent. Among presidential candidates, only Congressman Dennis Kucinich and New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson even mention the possibility of cutting the defense budget.

Indeed, presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are, at present, competing with each other in their calls for expanding the US Armed Forces. Both are supporting manpower increases in the range of 80,000-100,000 troops, mostly for the US Army and US Marine Corps. (The current, Bush-backed authorization for fiscal year 2008 calls for the addition of 65,000 more army recruits and 27,000 marines by 2012.)

Read more at Asia Times

You just know these bastards would do it……..

By Gareth Porter

WASHINGTON - After revelations of a US administration policy to hold Iran responsible for any al-Qaeda attack on the United States that could be portrayed as planned on Iranian soil, former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski warned last week that Washington might use such an incident as a pretext to bomb Iran.

Brzezinski, the national security adviser to president Jimmy Carter from 1977 through 1980 and the most senior Democratic Party figure on national’security policy, told a private meeting sponsored by the non-partisan Committee for the Republic in

Washington on May 30 that an al-Qaeda terrorist attack in the US intended to provoke war between the United States and Iran was a possibility that must be taken seriously, and that the administration of President George W Bush might accuse Iran of responsibility for such an attack and use it to justify carrying out an attack on Iran.

Brzezinski suggested that new constraints are needed on presidential war powers to reduce the risk of a war against Iran based on such a false pretense. Such constraints, Brzezinski said, should not prevent the president from using force in response to an attack on the US, but should make it more difficult to carry out an attack without adequate justification.

Brzezinski’s warning came a few weeks after the publication in April of former Central Intelligence Agency director George Tenet’s memoirs, which revealed that CIA officials had told Iranian officials in a face-to-face meeting that the Bush administration would hold Iran responsible for any al-Qaeda attack on the US that was planned from Iranian territory.

The administration has made persistent claims over the past five years that Iran has harbored al-Qaeda operatives who had fled from Afghanistan and that they had participated in planning terrorist actions - claims that were not supported by intelligence analysts.

More at the Asia Times

H/T Bur$atil for this post!

Gwen Stefani - 4 In The Morning

This is so stuck in my head.

(Lyrics below the fold)

Read more »

Oh what a shock, eh?

By Uri Blau

At least 25 percent of the structures built by Israelis in the West Bank’s Area C (full Israeli control) were constructed on private Arab-owned land, an internal report by the Civil Administration found.

According to the report, only 0.5 percent of the illegal structures were constructed on land registered to Jewish owners.

The data also indicate that Israel is practicing a discriminatory policy: It is more lenient on illegal construction by Jews than by Palestinians.

Although the Jewish population in the area is four times bigger than the Arab population, the authorities have demolished triple the number of Palestinian structures compared to Jewish structures.

The data, published here for the first time, appear in a comprehensive report prepared by the Civil Administration, a government body entrusted with administering all nonmilitary issues in the territories.

Read more at Haaretz

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is investigating a Texas laboratory’s finding of acetaminophen in dog and cat food, an agency spokesman said Monday.
“We’re very interested in being able to test these samples ourselves to determine the levels of those contaminants,” said FDA spokesman Doug Arbesfeld. “What’s significant is these things are there. They don’t belong there.”

The pain medication is the fifth contaminant found in pet foods during the past 2 1/2 months and can be toxic or lethal to pets, especially cats. It is not known if any animals became sick with acetaminophen poisoning, or died from it.

“We were looking for cyanuric acid and melamine, and the acetaminophen just popped up,” Donna Coneley, lab operations manager for ExperTox Inc. in Deer Park, Texas, told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review yesterday. “It definitely was a surprise to find that in several samples.”

Full article at Raw Story

SHIJIAZHUANG, China - If you pop a vitamin C tablet in your mouth, it’s a good bet it came from China. Indeed, many of the world’s vitamins are now made in China.

In less than a decade, China has captured 90 percent of the U.S. market for vitamin C, driving almost everyone else out of business.

Chinese pharmaceutical companies also have taken over much of the world market in the production of antibiotics, analgesics, enzymes and primary amino acids. According to an industry group, China makes 70 percent of the world’s penicillin, 50 percent of its aspirin and 35 percent of its acetaminophen (often sold under the brand name Tylenol), as well as the bulk of vitamins A, B12, C and E.

In the wake of a pet food scandal, in which adulterated wheat gluten from China led to the deaths of thousands of pets in North America, and other instances of food and toothpaste tampering, China’s vitamin producers are reaching out to reassure U.S. consumers that their vitamins are safe.

Read more at McClatchy

By Dan Froomkin

Scooter Libby today expressed no remorse, and Judge Reggie B. Walton showed no mercy.

The former vice presidential chief of staff spoke only briefly at his sentencing hearing in federal court today, thanking courtroom personnel for their kindness during his trial and saying: “It is respectfully my hope that the court will consider along with the jury verdict my whole life. Thank you your honor.”

Libby’s defense team had asked for probation. But Walton sentenced Libby to two and a half years in prison and fined him $250,000. Libby was found guilty in March of obstruction of justice for lying to a federal grand jury and the FBI about his disclosure of former CIA agent Valerie Plame’s identity to reporters.

Walton put off another important decision, however. Saying he was not inclined to grant the defense’s request that Libby be allowed to remain free on appeal, Walton nevertheless put off his decision until a June 14 hearing.

Ever since Libby was convicted, his supporters have been urging President Bush to grant him a pardon. If Libby remains free on appeal, Bush would probably postpone such a hugely controversial decision, potentially until his last days in office. If Libby is sent to prison, however, that would likely spark an immediate and furious internecine battle within his administration.

Continue reading at the Washington Post

Keith Olbermann discussing the odd coincidences that occur every time the Bush administration is in trouble politically. 6/4/07

These guys are such a joke. And did anyone else see the CNN special last night with the Democratic candidates talking about religion. Why???? Why did they agee to do that??? What happened to seperation of church and state??? Now we have the Democrats pandering to the religious right, too. This is getting to be toooooo much. Our founding Fathers must be turning in their graves……again. And again. And again.

By GLEN JOHNSON
Associated Press Writer

MANCHESTER, N.H. (AP) — President Bush drew sporadic, startling criticism Tuesday night from Republican White House hopefuls unhappy with his handling of the Iraq war, his diplomatic style and his approach to immigration.

“I would certainly not send him to the United Nations” to represent the United States, said Tommy Thompson, the former Wisconsin governor and one-time member of Bush’s Cabinet, midway through a spirited campaign debate.

Arizona Sen. John McCain criticized the administration for its handling of the Iraq War, and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney said, “I think we were underprepared and underplanned for what came after we knocked down Saddam Hussein.”

More at the AP

And from Reuters:

An electrical sound interrupted Giuliani, a Roman Catholic, as he was trying to answer a question from debate moderator Wolf Blitzer of CNN about a Rhode Island bishop who compared him to Pontius Pilate for his views on abortion.

“Look, for someone who went to parochial schools all his life, this is a very frightening thing that’s happening right now,” Giuliani chuckled.

Mitt Romney defended his position on abortion. As the former governor of Massachusetts, Romney tolerated a woman’s right to choose whether to have an abortion, but hardened his opposition in what critics said was an effort attract conservative support for his presidential run.

Romney would be the first Mormon to win the White House and still faces doubts about his religion and questions about his policy switches to oppose abortion rights and gay rights.

“I also believe that there are some pundits out there that are hoping that I’ll distance myself from my church so that’ll help me politically,” Romney said. “That’s not going to happen.”

By ELIANE ENGELER, Associated Press Writer

GENEVA - More than 4 million Iraqis have now been displaced by violence in the country, the U.N. refugee agency said Tuesday, warning that the figure will continue to rise.

The number of Iraqis who have fled the country as refugees has risen to 2.2 million, said Jennifer Pagonis, spokeswoman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. A further 2 million have been driven from their homes but remain within the country, increasingly in “impoverished shanty towns,” she said.

Pagonis said UNHCR is receiving “disturbing reports” of regional authorities doing little to provide displaced people with food, shelter and other basic services.

“Individual governorates inside Iraq are becoming overwhelmed by the needs of the displaced,” Pagonis told reporters in Geneva, where UNHCR has its headquarters.

More than half of Iraq’s 18 governorates are preventing displaced people from entering their territories, either by stopping them at checkpoints or by refusing to register them for food aid and other basic services.

Astrid van Genderen Stort of UNHCR said checkpoints are increasing in northern governorates, specifically along the “green line” that divides Kurdish-controlled zones from the rest of the country. Displaced people are also being stopped on the roads leading out of the cities of Karbala and Najaf, which are both south of Baghdad and considered holy by Shiite Muslims.

While many of the checkpoints were originally established for security reasons, they are being increasingly used to prevent displaced Iraqis from moving around the country, van Genderen Stort said.

Almost half of all displaced people have no access to official food distribution programs, according to U.N. estimates.