Democrats Move Toward Holding Miers in Contempt

Congressional Democrats inched closer to holding Harriet Miers in contempt yesterday after the former White House Counsel reiterated her decision not to comply with subpoenas seeking testimony and documents related to the recent firing of eight U.S. attorneys.

• The House Judiciary Committee is weighing what to do next but has few options other than moving to vote Miers in criminal contempt. “They’re on the road, and whether they go fast or slow, it is the road to contempt,” says Charles Tiefer, a law professor at the University of Baltimore School of Law and former deputy counsel to the House.

• The committee could reach a decision soon, but the bill would then need to come up for a vote on the House floor. But even if a vote of contempt passes, the choice to prosecute lies in the hands of the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. That’s now Jeffrey Taylor, a former counselor to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. The D.C. U.S. attorney is not required to prosecute such cases—and in the past has refused to do so.

• The House could also vote to put Miers in “inherent contempt,” which would mean holding her in the congressional jail, though that hasn’t happened since the 1930s.

Inherent contempt would be the way to go since the U.S. Attorney probably won’t do anything to piss of Alberto and George. He’ll get a directive from Bush telling him not to do his job.

• Or Democrats could turn up the pressure on the executive branch by subpoenaing other White House officials connected to the firings. Congress has already authorized subpoenas for a number of officials, including J. Scott Jennings, deputy political affairs director; William Kelley, outgoing deputy White House counsel; and Karl Rove, Bush’s chief political adviser. However, the president is likely to assert executive privilege over their testimony, as he did with Sara Taylor, the former White House political director, who testified last week under a subpoena by the Senate.

• Another wild card is the House’s subpoena to the Republican National Committee for documents related to the firings. Conyers gave the RNC extra time yesterday for the White House to determine whether documents contain privileged material.

I love all these options. Bush can’t stonewall forever.

• But if the last most significant battle over executive privilege is any guide, resolution may not come through the legal system. In 1982, then Environmental Protection Agency Director Ann Gorsuch Burford asserted executive privilege over a congressional subpoena, leading the House to hold her in contempt. The U.S. attorney held off prosecution, but eventually the White House, under the direction of then (and now) White House Counsel Fred Fielding, negotiated a compromise that allowed Congress to view the documents.

N.I.E. Report: Failure In Fighting al Qeada

WASHINGTON, July 17 — President Bush’s top counterterrorism advisers acknowledged Tuesday that the strategy for fighting Osama bin Laden’s leadership of Al Qaeda in Pakistan had failed, as the White House released a grim new intelligence assessment that has forced the administration to consider more aggressive measures inside Pakistan.

• The intelligence report, the most formal assessment since the Sept. 11 attacks about the terrorist threat facing the United States, concludes that the United States is losing ground on a number of fronts in the fight against Al Qaeda, and describes the terrorist organization as having significantly strengthened over the past two years.

• In identifying the main reasons for Al Qaeda’s resurgence, intelligence officials and White House aides pointed the finger squarely at a hands-off approach toward the tribal areas by Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who last year brokered a cease-fire with tribal leaders in an effort to drain support for Islamic extremism in the region.

Pointing finger, Bush should be very good at this by now.  It’s always someone else fault but President incompetent and his staff.

• The bleak intelligence assessment was made public in the middle of a bitter Congressional debate about the future of American policy in Iraq. White House officials said it bolstered the Bush administration’s argument that Iraq was the “central front” in the war on terror, because that was where Qaeda operatives were directly attacking American forces.

I guess LIEberman missed the report. After all he did say in his filibuster last night that al Qeada is on the run. What a putz.

• The report nevertheless left the White House fending off accusations that it had been distracted by the war in Iraq and that the deals it had made with President Musharraf had resulted in lost time and lost ground.

• While the assessment described the Qaeda branch in Iraq as the “most visible and capable affiliate” of the terror organization, intelligence officials noted that the operatives in Iraq remained focused on attacking targets inside that country’s borders, not those on American or European soil.

Maybe we should share this with Bush since he continues to say that we are fighting al Qeada in Iraq because they are the group responsible for 9/11. They are not the same, they’ll even tell you there not the same.  Sometimes I think Cheney doesn’t give Bush the correct information, just so he can get a few laughs.

• The intelligence report, known as a National Intelligence Estimate, represents the consensus view of all 16 agencies that make up the American intelligence community. The report concluded that the United States would face a “persistent and evolving terrorist threat over the next three years.”

•  At the White House, Ms. Townsend found herself in the uncomfortable position of explaining why American military action was focused in Iraq when the report concluded that main threat of terror attacks that could be carried out in the United States emanated from the tribal areas of Pakistan.

• She argued that it was Mr. bin Laden, as well as the White House, who regarded “Iraq as the central front in the war on terror.”

Ok so because bin Laden and Bush said the same thing it must be right. That logic would infer that Osama is an advisor to Bush. Do these people in the White think before they open their freaking mouths?

The real reason we are in Iraq is oil and Saddam threatened his daddy.

The President We Were Warned About

There’s something to be said, maybe a lot, about the wisdom of our founding fathers. Maybe their wisdom came from their experience with King George (theirs not ours) or maybe it came from being caught up in the age of enlightenment, when people actually thought about events and consequences. Needless to say, in all the dust books that we don’t bother reading, we were clearly warned about our current day King George.

SF Chronicle: Robert Scheer

GEORGE W. Bush is the imperial president that James Madison and other founders of this great republic warned us about. He lied the nation into precisely the “foreign entanglements” that George Washington feared would destroy our experiment in representative government, and he has championed a spurious notion of security over individual liberty, thus eschewing the alarms of Thomas Jefferson as to the deprivation of the inalienable rights of free citizens. But most important, he has used the sledgehammer of war to obliterate the separation of powers that James Madison enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.

With the “war on terror,” Bush has asserted the right of the president to wage war anywhere and for any length of time, at his whim, because the “terrorists” will always provide a convenient shadowy target. Just the “continual warfare” that Madison warned of in justifying the primary role of Congress in initiating and continuing to finance a war — the very issue now at stake in Bush’s battle with Congress.

In his “Political Observations,” written years after he had served as fourth president of the United States, Madison went on to underscore the dangers of an imperial presidency bloated by war fever. “In war,” Madison wrote in 1795, at a time when the young republic still faced its share of dangerous enemies, “the discretionary power of the executive is extended … and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people.”

How remarkably prescient of Madison to anticipate the specter of our current King George, who imperiously is undermining Congress’ attempts to end the Iraq war. When the prime author of the U.S. Constitution explained why that document grants Congress — not the president — the exclusive power to declare and fund wars, Madison wrote that “The delegation of such powers [to the president] would have struck, not only at the fabric of our Constitution, but at the foundation of all well organized and well checked governments.”

Because “No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare,” Madison urged that the constitutional separation of powers he had codified be respected. “The Constitution expressly and exclusively vests in the Legislature the power of declaring a state of war … the power of raising armies,” he wrote. “The separation of the power of raising armies from the power of commanding them is intended to prevent the raising of armies for the sake of commanding them.”

That last sentence perfectly describes the threat of what President Dwight Eisenhower would describe 165 years later as the “military-industrial complex,” a permanent war economy feeding off a permanent state of insecurity. The collapse of the Soviet Union deprived the military profiteers and their cheerleaders in the government of a raison d’être for the enormous war economy supposedly created in response to it.

Fortunately for them, Bush found in the 9/11 attack an excuse to make war even more profitable and longer lasting. The Iraq war, which the president’s 9/11 commission concluded never had anything to do with the terrorist assault, nonetheless has transferred many hundreds of billions in taxpayer dollars into the military economy. And when Congress seeks to exercise its power to control the budget, this president asserts that this will not govern his conduct of the war.

There never was a congressional declaration of war to cover the invasion of Iraq. Instead, President Bush acted under his claimed power as commander in chief, which the Supreme Court has held does allow him to respond to a “state of war” against the United States. That proviso was clearly a reference to surprise attacks or sudden emergencies.

The problem is that the “state of war” in question here was an al Qaeda attack on the United States that had nothing whatsoever to do with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Perhaps, to spare Congress the embarrassment of formally declaring war against a nation that had not attacked America, Bush settled for a loosely worded resolution supporting his use of military power, if Iraq failed to comply with U.N. mandates. This was justified by the White House as a means of strengthening the United Nations in holding Iraq accountable for its weapons of mass destruction arsenal, but as most of the world looked on in dismay, Bush invaded Iraq after U.N. inspectors on the ground discovered that Iraq had no WMD.

Bush betrayed Congress, which in turn betrayed the American people — just as Madison feared when he wrote: “Of all the enemies of public liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other.”