Politics

Howard Dean has published a list of sixteen questions that President Bush needs to answer, and has created a petition to sign asking that Bush address these questions. Sign the petition here.

The questions (along with citations, thanks to Steve Perry and John P. Hoke) are reprinted below.

1. Mr. President, beyond the NSC and CIA officials who have been identified, we need to know who else at the White House was involved in the decision to include the discredited uranium evidence in your speech, and, if they knew it was false, why did they permit it to be included in the speech? (Washington Post, NY Times)
2. Mr. President, we need to know why anyone in your Administration would have contemplated using the evidence in the State of the Union after George Tenet personally intervened in October 2002, to have the same evidence removed from the President’s October 7th speech. (The Washington Post, Walter Pincus and Mike Allen, 7/13/2003)
3. Mr. President, we need to know why you claimed this very week that the CIA objected to the Niger uranium sentence “subsequent” to the State of the Union address, contradicting everything else we have heard from your administration and the intelligence community on the matter. (Washington Post, Priest, Dana and Dana Milbank, 7/15/2003)
4. Mr. President, we urgently need an explanation about the very serious charge that senior officials in your Administration may have retaliated against Ambassador Joseph Wilson by illegally disclosing that his wife is an undercover CIA officer. (The Nation, Corn, David, 7/16/2003)
5. Mr. President, we need to know why your Administration persisted in using the intercepted aluminum tubes to show that Iraq was pursuing a nuclear program and why your National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice, claimed categorically that the tubes were “only really suited for nuclear weapons programs,” when in fact our own government experts flatly rejected such claims. (CNN, 9/08/2002, Knight Ridder News Service, 10/04/2002)
6. Mr. President, we need to know why Secretary Rumsfeld created a secret intelligence unit at the Pentagon that selectively identified questionable intelligence to support the case for war including the supposed link to al-Qaeda while ignoring, burying or rejecting any evidence to the contrary. (New Yorker, Seymour Hersh, 5/12/03)
7. Mr. President, we need to know what the basis was for Secretary Rumsfeld’s assertion that the US had bulletproof evidence linking Al Qaeda to Iraq, despite the fact that U.S. intelligence analysts have consistently agreed that Saddam did not have a “meaningful connection” to Al Qaeda. (NY Times, Schmitt, Eric, 9/28/2002, NY Times, Krugman, Paul, 7/15/2003)
8. Mr. President, we need to know why Vice President Cheney claimed last September to have “irrefutable evidence” that Saddam Hussein had reconstituted his nuclear weapons program, an assertion he repeated in March, on the eve of war. (AP, 9/20/2002, NBC 3/16/2003)
9. Mr. President, we need to know why Secretary Powell claimed with confidence and virtual certainty in February before the UN Security Council that, “Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical weapons agent. That is enough agent to fill 16,000 battlefield rockets.” (UN Address, 2/05/2003)
10. Mr. President, we need to know why Secretary Rumsfeld claimed on March 30th in reference to weapons of mass destruction, “We know where they are. They’re in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat.” (The Guardian, Whitaker, Brian and Rory McCarthy, 5/30/2003)
11. Mr. President, we need an explanation of the unconfirmed report that your Administration is dishonoring the life of a soldier who died in Iraq as a result of hostile action by misclassifying his death as an accident. (Time, Gibbs, Nancy and Mark Thompson, 7/13/2003)
12. Mr. President, we need to know why your Administration has never told the truth about the costs and long-term commitment of the war, has consistently downplayed what those would be, and now continues to try keep the projected costs hidden from the American people. (Miami Herald, LA Times).
13. Mr. President, we need to know why you said on May 1, 2003 , that the war was over, when US troops have fought and one or two have died nearly every day since then and your generals have admitted that we are fighting a guerrilla war in Iraq. (Abizaid, Gen. John, 7/16/2003)
14. Mr. President, we need to know why your Administration had no plan to build the peace in post-war Iraq and seems to be resisting calls to include NATO, the United Nations and our allies in the stabilization and reconstruction effort. (Miami Herald, LA Times)
15. Mr. President, we need to know what you were referring to in Poland on May 30, 2003, when you said, “For those who say we haven’t found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they’re wrong. We found them.” (The Washington Post, Mike Allen, 5/31/2003)
16. Mr. President, we need to know why you incorrectly claimed this very week that the war began because Iraq would not admit UN inspectors, when in fact Iraq had admitted the inspectors and you opposed extending their work. (The Washington Post, Priest, Dana and Dana Milbank, 7/15/2003)

Sign the petition here!

“I think all foreigners should stop interfering in the internal affairs of Iraq,” said Wolfowitz, who is touring the country to meet U.S. troops and Iraqi officials.

How is this adminstration able to say anything with a straight face anymore?

(via Atrios)

Still, [Douglas J. Feith, the No. 3 official at the Pentagon] and other Pentagon officials said, they are studying the lessons of Iraq closely — to ensure that the next U.S. takeover of a foreign country goes more smoothly.

“We’re going to get better over time,” promised Lawrence Di Rita, a special assistant to Rumsfeld. “We’ve always thought of post-hostilities as a phase” distinct from combat, he said. \”The future of war is that these things are going to be much more of a continuum.

“This is the future for the world we’re in at the moment,” he said. “We’ll get better as we do it more often.”

— The final three paragraphs of this LA Times article

(via Atrios)

This is just creepy: David Kelly, the British scientist named as the possible source for some of the disputed Iraq intelligence, has been found dead in the woods.

Accident? Or “accident”? Too soon to tell.

(via Atrios and Kos)

Two more quick links worth browsing, then I think I’m done with politics for the evening — there’s only so much bile I can choke back in one sitting, after all.

Incidentally, both of these come from Len, who I’ve been finding a lot of good stuff through lately. I seriously considered putting him in my recommended links post the other night — the only reason I didn’t is that he’s a bit more Dean-centric (not that there’s anything wrong with that!), while the three I chose are more wide-ranging. He’s still definitely worth checking on a regular basis.

Anyway. Two stories: first up, one about what Prairie deemed the “Passing Judgement on Poor Women With Bastard Children Act“. Secondly, more of Bush’s prior supporters are realizing that, to quote some old famous dead guy, “something smells rotten in Denmark…“.

Ari Fleischer’s replacement, Scott McClellan, must be hating his life right about now. Go read through this transcript from a press conference that Tom Tomorrow posted.

Here’s something amusing — given the fluid nature of the ‘net, it may not last for terribly long, but it works for now:

1. Go to Google.
2. Put “who will be president in 2004?” into the search field (no quotes).
3. Hit the “I’m feeling lucky” button.

For future reference, as of 7/17/2003, the result is Howard Dean’s campaign homepage. :)

(via Mathew Gross)

Be careful what you read in public:

“The FBI is here,”Mom tells me over the phone. Immediately I can see my mom with her back to a couple of Matrix-like figures in black suits and opaque sunglasses, her hand covering the mouthpiece like Grace Kelly in Dial M for Murder. This must be a joke, I think. But it’s not, because Mom isn’t that funny.

“The who?” I say.

“Two FBI agents. They say you’re not in trouble, they just want to talk. They want to come to the store.”

[…]

Trippi’s partner speaks up: “Any reading material? Papers?” I don’t think so. Then Trippi decides to level with me: “I’ll tell you what, Marc. Someone in the shop that day saw you reading something, and thought it looked suspicious enough to call us about. So that’s why we’re here, just checking it out. Like I said, there’s no problem. We’d just like to get to the bottom of this. Now if we can’t, then you may have a problem. And you don’t want that.”

You don’t want that? Have I just been threatened by the FBI? Confusion and a light dusting of panic conspire to keep me speechless. Was I reading something that morning? Something that would constitute a problem?

[…]

Special Agent Trippi didn’t return calls from CL. But Special Agent Joe Paris, Atlanta field office spokesman, stressed that specific FBI investigations are confidential. He wouldn’t confirm or deny the Schultz interview.

“In this post-911 era, it is the absolute responsibility of the FBI to follow through on any tips of potential terrorist activity,” Paris says. “Are people going to take exception and be inconvenienced by this at times? Oh, yeah. … A certain amount of convenience is going to be offset by an increase in security.”

Welcome to America, ~~2003~~ 1984.

(via Tom Tomorrow and Len)