Bush's Military Fantasies on Iran
Bush's Military Fantasies on IranIraq
shows just how badly things can go wrong when an administration rashly embraces
simple military solutions to complicated problems, shutting its ears to military
and intelligence professionals who turn out to be tragically prescient. That
lesson has yet to be absorbed by the Bush administration, which is now
reportedly honing plans for airstrikes on Iranian nuclear
facilities.Congress and the country
need to ask the administration just what is going on, and just what it hopes to
accomplish by this latest saber rattling.
Routine contingency planning goes on
all the time in the Pentagon, but the discussions on Iran seem to have
progressed beyond this level, with high administration officials pushing the
process and dropping indirect hints of possible future American military action
in language that sometimes recalls statements made before the invasion of
Iraq.
Adventures in
Testifying
It's very hard to figure
out what Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is trying to tell the nation when he
testifies about President Bush's domestic spying program. But it is important to
listen, because there is news between the lines. None of it is
good.
But there were two important
pieces of information buried in the testimony. For one thing, he seemed to
confirm that the one warrantless N.S.A. spying program Mr. Bush has owned up to
is not the only one going on. And Mr. Gonzales told the committee he could not
rule out that Mr. Bush believes he has the authority to intercept not just
international telephone calls but also domestic calls between American citizens.
Mr. Gonzales said this would happen only if the call was about Al Qaeda, but we
have to wonder exactly how the government would know what the call is about
without listening. And what we've been able to learn about the admitted spying
suggests that it mostly turns up false leads.
Phone-Jamming
Records Point to White House
Key
figures in a phone-jamming scheme designed to keep New Hampshire Democrats from
voting in 2002 had regular contact with the White House and Republican Party as
the plan was unfolding, phone records introduced in criminal court
show.
The records show that Bush
campaign operative James Tobin, who recently was convicted in the case, made two
dozen calls to the White House within a three-day period around Election Day
2002 — as the phone jamming operation was finalized, carried out and then
abruptly shut down.
With
One Filing, Prosecutor Puts Bush in
Spotlight
From the early days of
the C.I.A. leak investigation in 2003, the Bush White House has insisted there
was no effort to discredit Joseph C. Wilson IV, the man who emerged as the most
damaging critic of the administration's case that Saddam Hussein was seeking to
build nuclear weapons.
But now White
House officials, and specifically President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney,
have been pitched back into the center of the nearly three-year controversy,
this time because of a prosecutor's court filing in the case that asserts there
was "a strong desire by many, including multiple people in the White House," to
undermine Mr. Wilson.
Mr. Fitzgerald's
filing talks not of an effort to level with Americans but of "a plan to
discredit, punish or seek revenge against Mr. Wilson." It concludes, "It is hard
to conceive of what evidence there could be that would disprove the existence of
White House efforts to 'punish Wilson.' "
Posted: Tue - April 11, 2006 at 11:51 AM
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