INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
'Yesterday's Man' Leaves Europe
President Bush concluded
his farewell journey through Europe in Belfast, Northern Ireland
yesterday with attempts at rapprochement with leaders throughout the
continent. "[L]ots
has changed"
since 2003, London School of Economics international relations
professor Michael Cox noted. While Bush enjoyed warmer
relations with Germany, Italy, and France -- mainly due to leadership
changes in those countries -- most Europeans, like many Americans, are
suffering from "Bush
fatigue," as they are looking
forward to the next president
and "will be glad
to see the back" of Bush.
Anti-American sentiment in
Europe runs high as a result of Bush's leadership. A
recent poll
by London's Daily Telegraph newspaper found that "[m]ore people in
France, Germany and Britain view the United States as a 'force
for evil' than good in the
world." And despite Bush's seeming
friendly relationship with conservative German Chancellor Angela
Merkel, Germany's leading news source Der Spiegel reported last week
that "senior politicians from Merkel's ruling grand coalition as well
as from opposition parties have done away with diplomatic
niceties, seizing on Bush's
farewell visit to express their
aversion to the president who remains vilified in Germany for launching
the Iraq war."
CAN'T
BE BOTHERED TO BOO: Because
of his rejection of the
Kyoto Protocol and other multilateral measures, Bush was a "popular
villain" to many Europeans even
before the Iraq war, which
ultimately caused his popularity there to bottom out. Though Bush was
met with "boisterous
demonstrations" when he first
visited Slovenia in 2001, "only a few
small, loosely organized protests were planned" when he arrived there
last week for the European Union summit, a reflection of the
"deep-seated apathy for a president increasingly viewed as yesterday's
man." Many Slovenes "expressed a
growing disinterest in Bush,
coupled with a keen interest in who will replace him at the White
House." In Germany, no one "bothered to keep a six-year tradition alive
by organizing" to protest Bush. "Bush is not
even popular in the role of the
enemy anymore," wrote Der
Tagesspiegel newspaper. Rome "braced
for violent protests against
Bush, with 10,000 police mobilized and
hundreds of prisoners being moved out of the Regina Coeli prison to
make room for arrested demonstrators." Yet as Bush's arrival in Italy
came and went, Rome's prison cells "remained
empty" as the protests "numbered
no more
than 2,000 people, most of whom went home when it began to rain." A
respectable but relatively
small crowed turned out in Paris
for demonstrations and across the
English Channel, about 2,500 demonstrators gathered in London to
greet Bush, a far cry from the "hundreds
of thousands who marched down
Whitehall during his state visit in
2003."
REBUILDING
THE ALLIANCE: Before
Bush left for Europe, National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley played
down any expectations that Bush would produce any "breakthroughs"
with his European counterparts: "I don't think you're going to see dramatic
announcements on this trip,"
Hadley noted. While reality played out
much of Hadley's prediction, some European leaders appeared agreeable
on some major issues, indicating the possibility of a stronger and more
effective post-Bush trans-Atlantic partnership. Merkel,
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, and French President Nicolas
Sarkozy pledged unity in confronting Iran's nuclear program, while
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown went a step further agreeing to
tighten sanctions on Iran and urging his EU partners to do the
same. However, the Iranian government preempted any increased
sanctions by
moving $75 billion in assets "from Western financial institutions to
banks in Iran and Asia." But
Brown also pledged to increase
Britain's troop level in Afghanistan
with "about 230 engineers, logistical
staff and military trainers"
and said the U.K. would
keep most of the its 4,500 troops in southern Iraq "until the situation
is stable
enough to withdraw them." While
Brown appears to have acquiesced to
Bush's recent demand that "there should be no
definitive timetable" for
withdrawal from Iraq, the U.K. was expected
to cut its troop levels there to just a few hundred by this time next
year.
A
'SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP' DAMAGED: In
an interview with the Times of London at the outset of his trip, Bush
admitted "that his gun-slinging rhetoric made the world believe that he
was a 'guy
really anxious for war' in
Iraq," expressing "regret at the bitter
divisions over the war." The Times reported that Bush now aims
"to
leave his successor a legacy of international diplomacy for tackling
Iran." Yet Bush's attempt to heal old wounds seemed to fall on deaf
ears. The London Independent issued a scathing
editorial today reflecting on
Bush's visit and his presidency:
"[P]erhaps Mr. Bush's most significant legacy, as far as Britain is
concerned, will be the destruction of the instinctive trust of America
and its leaders that once prevailed here. It is no exaggeration to say
that Mr. Bush has done more damage to relations between our two nations
than any president in living memory. This rupture is not an accident of
circumstance; there are no impersonal forces of history to blame. This
sorry state of affairs is the consequence of the actions of a single
leader and his small coterie of advisers. ... And whatever the future
holds for transatlantic relations, there will be very few in this
country who watched President Bush's p*** depart yesterday without a
feeling of profound relief that the end of this disastrous presidency
is finally in sight."
ETHICS -- WAXMAN
REQUESTS CONTRACTING FRAUD
INVESTIGATION: House
Oversight Committee Chairman Henry Waxman
(D-CA) requested in a letter yesterday that the Defense
Department Inspector General (IG) begin investigating what could be thousands
of criminal cases
involving fraudulent contracts in Iraq.
A May
22
IG report on
contracting
fraud examined a sampling of contracts, with 4 percent resulting in
criminal
referrals. In his letter, Waxman wrote that when extrapolated "to
the entire
pool of 180,000 transactions, it appears that there may be more than
7,000
potential criminal cases involving more
than $190 million in federal spending
that have not been identified...an astounding amount of potential
criminal fraud."
Last week the AP reported that the
military doesn't
have enough staff to
fully investigate fraud. Although the
Army contracting budget
has
nearly doubled since 2002, from $46 billion to $112
billion -- "the number of people who hunt down crooked companies and
corrupt
officials has stayed about the same," with fewer
than 100 agents assigned to
the Army Criminal Investigation
Command fraud unit.
MILITARY
-- VETERANS RECRUITED FOR
TESTING ON
DRUGS LINKED TO SUICIDE AND VIOLENCE: A
Washington
Times/ABC News investigation
released today finds that "mentally distressed
veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan are being
recruited for government tests on pharmaceutical drugs linked to
suicide and other violent side effects." During one experiment, the
Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) took three months to alert patients
of
the "severe
mental side effects" associated
with Chantrix, an anti-smoking drug
being tested. According to the report, U.S. Army sniper James Elliott,
who has been diagnosed with PTSD and was given $30 per month to take
Chantrix,
suffered a "severe mental breakdown" and was arrested after walking the
streets with a loaded gun. Elliott described himself as a "lab rat,
guinea pig, disposable hero," adding that "they never told me that I
was going to
be suicidal, that I would cease
sleeping." Arthur Caplan, one of the nation's top medical
ethicists, told the Washington Times that Elliot's treatment was "a
pretty serious breach of ethics."
Miles McFall, the
VA's director of programs for PTSD sufferers, blamed the three
month delay in
notifying the patients of potential
problems with Chantrix on
government bureaucracy, saying it was an"
incredibly
quick response for a
governmental institution."
ADMINISTRATION
-- BUSH SAYS CRITICIZING U.S. ACTIONS AT ABU GHRAIB IS 'SLANDERING
AMERICA': During
an interview with Britain's Sky News Monday, President Bush declared,
"I believe in the universality of freedom." Sky News reporter Adam
Boulton noted that many of the Bush administration's policies on
torture and detention represent "the
exact opposite of freedom,"
pointing to Guantanamo Bay, Abu
Ghraib, and rendition and replied, "Of course, if
you want to slander America."
Bush defended Guantanamo, telling the reporter he should "go down to
Guantanamo and take a look at how these prisoners are treated" to see
that the U.S. is "a land of law." Bush also said that Abu Ghraib was
simply "the actions of some soldiers." In fact, today a new Senate
investigation reveals that Pentagon lawyers were directly involved in
creating an abusive
interrogation program for Guantanamo detainees
that included stress
positions, sleep deprivation, and waterboarding. A McClatchy
investigation found that these practices led
to
the radicalization
of Guantanamo detainees and created more terrorists. Furthermore, as
ABC News reported in April, top members of Bush's administration,
including Vice President Cheney and Condoleezza Rice, explicitly
signed off on abusive
interrogations.
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A Senate investigation has
found that "top Pentagon
officials began assembling lists of harsh interrogation techniques
in the summer of 2002 for use on detainees at Guantanamo Bay and that
those officials later
cited memos from field commanders
to suggest that the proposals originated far down the chain of
command." It provides evidence that the policies were "not the work of out-of-control,
lower-ranking troops."
Yesterday, the Supreme
Court agreed to hear a lawsuit
brought by a Pakistani man who was
living in the United States before being imprisoned after Sept. 11,
2001. The
man was held for in solitary confinement for several months,
"where he was subjected to daily body-cavity searches...as well as to
beatings and to extremes of hot and cold," after which he pleaded
guilty to document fraud.
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed,
former Justice Department
official John Yoo condemns
last week's Supreme Court habeas
corpus ruling as "judicial
imperialism of the highest order,"
arguing against giving rights to those "captured fighting against the
U.S." Salon's Glenn Greenwald responds, "[A] huge bulk of our 'War on
Terror'
prisoners, including those at Guantanamo, were
not 'captured fighting against the U.S.' at all."
Charles M. Smith, the Army
official who oversaw a
multibillion-dollar contract with KBR, "says he was ousted from his job
when he refused to approve paying more than $1
billion in
questionable charges to KBR."
"They had a gigantic amount of
costs they couldn’t
justify," he said. His
successors "approved most of the payments he
had tried to block."
In a letter sent to Karl Rove's attorney Robert Luskin, Democrats on
the House Judiciary Committee said they may be willing to accept "that Rove
appear 'without a transcript or oath,'
but without any limit
on the committee's right
to seek sworn testimony later."
In the past two fiscal years,
nearly 20,000 soldiers have been
discharged. Many of them run the risk of "financial ruin" while they
wait for their "claims to be processed and their benefits to come
through." Injured
soldiers are usually "discharged on just a
fraction of their salary
and then forced to wait six to nine
months, and sometimes
even more than a year, before
their full disability payments begin
to flow."
"The
global number of refugees and displaced people reached
67 million last year,"
according to the UN refugee agency.
Once again, Afghanistan
and Iraq topped the list
of the countries of origins for refugees with 3.1 million and 2.3
million respectively. In Iraq, "the number of internally displaced rose
from 1.8 million at the start of the year to close to 2.4 million by
the end of 2007" due to sectarian and political divisions.
"Congressional
leaders lost millions in
last year's
economic downturn," financial disclosure reports show. Yet "while House
members suffered losses, senators
defied the odds and saw their profit margins rise."
Both Majority
Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and Minority Leader Mitch
McConnell (R-KY) "added hundreds of thousands to their holdings between
2006 and 2007."
And finally: Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice has made 22 trips
to Israel during the Bush administration, including this past weekend.
Yet as Time's Jerusalem Bureau Chief Tim McGirk notes, "[S]he has
little to show for it." There was "no fanfare, no
motorcades snarling up the city's traffic,"
and she couldn't even
book a room at her usual hotel, having to settle
for a "less grand" one. Israeli TV announcers have even "coined her
name as a verb, meaning
to go endlessly around in circles,
accomplishing nothing."
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After last month's landmark decision striking down a ban on gay
marriage
in California, county clerks around the state "began
issuing marriage licenses to
same-sex couples Monday at 5:01 p.m."
VIRGINIA: "Civic and social organizations are teaming with Virginia Gov. Timothy M. Kaine to try to add thousands of nonviolent offenders to the voting rolls in time for the November election."
NEW JERSEY: "Gov. Jon Corzine and legislative leaders Monday agreed on a $32.8 billion state budget that the governor said will include 'unprecedented' spending cuts."
LOUISIANA: A "storm surge could pour over levees in New Orleans if a strong Category 2 or higher hurricane strikes the city, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Monday."
THINK
PROGRESS: Fox anchor falsely
claims Iranian missile could possibly
"hit some military installations" in the United States.
WONK
ROOM: Afghanistan jailbreak
partially the result of an
under-resourced international effort.
DAILY
DISH: Anti-gay marriage ad from
the Family Research Council reads,
"Enjoy your Father's Day. It might be your last."
GLENN
GREENWALD: John Yoo's ongoing
falsehoods in service of limitless
government power.
"We took an extremely strongly pro-Geneva Convention position in the
Pentagon."
-- Iraq war architect Doug Feith, 4/24/08
VERSUS
"[O]fficials in the office of then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld
started to research the use of waterboarding, stress positions, sensory
deprivation and other practices in July 2002."
-- Washington Post, 6/17/08
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