John McCain’s campaign seems to have a serial problem with plagiarism. First there was the Passion Fruit Mousse and then there were the Oatmeal Butterscotch Cookies. Now, apparently, McCain’s stooped to stealing his foreign policy plans from others. And of all sources, he’s stealing from Wikipedia!

A Wikipedia editor notices some similarities between Sen. John McCain’s speech today on the crisis in Georgia and the Wikipedia article on the country Georgia. They appear similar enough that most people would consider parts of McCain’s speech to be derived directly from Wikipedia.

First instance:

one of the first countries in the world to adopt Christianity as an official religion (Wikipedia)

vs.

one of the world’s first nations to adopt Christianity as an official religion (McCain)

So here’s the pathetic thing. The first two times McCain got caught plagiarizing, at least it was a fairly reputable source. Rachael Ray? Hershey’s? Both reasonably respectable sources of recipes.

But Wikipedia? For a foreign policy speech?

Back when I taught college, I would always reserve a special kind of failing grade for those who stole from Wikipedia. After all, it would take someone both lazy and stupid to steal from Wikipedia, right?

John Yoo complains that the Supreme Court’s strong rulings last term are an "unprecedented" grab for power.

Slowly but surely, the justices have expanded their power to make many of our society’s fundamental political and moral decisions. Only the court now decides whether schools or the government can resort to race-based preferences when it admits students or doles out contracts. States and the federal government must live by the court’s dictates on the regulation of abortion. Whether religious groups can help educate inner-city children or provide welfare services is up to the justices. Use of the death penalty, indeed whether each individual execution will go forward, is ultimately controlled by our unelected judges.

[snip]

Some might prefer that judges still make these decisions because they hear cases in a formal, rational setting and issue long opinions explaining their reasons. Nonetheless, the courts are far from ideal as policymakers: They have great difficulty trading off competing values in these sensitive areas; they are insulated from the political process; and their only access to information comes to them through the narrow lens of a lawsuit.

When the federal judiciary decides national policy on these issues, under the guise of interpreting the Constitution, it prevents the people from making the decisions for themselves.

Not surprisingly, Yoo’s argument gets particularly laughable when he complains about Boumediene.

The decisions announced this summer only reaffirm the court’s power. In Boumediene v. Bush, five justices – the wandering Justice Anthony Kennedy joined by a liberal bloc of Justices John Paul Stevens, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Stephen Breyer – took the unprecedented step of striking down a wartime law enacted by Congress and the president.

U.S. history has never seen what the Boumediene majority now demands: Alien enemy prisoners at war with U.S. forces and detained outside the United States have the same right as criminal suspects to challenge their capture in civilian courts. Hundreds of years of practice, and the decided views of the political branches, to which the Constitution gives all of the powers over war, were tossed overboard.

After all, this was a guy who routinely ignored laws passed by Congress–including laws passed during the Vietnam war–to rationalize things like domestic surveillance and torture. But he has found one law–the Military Commissions Act–that he believes should be protected above all else.

Regardless of whether it violates the Constitution or not.

Which is really the argument Yoo is making: how dare the Supreme Court ensure that the political branches don’t violate the Constitution. It makes it really difficult, you know, to change the law at will if you’re actually bound by the Constitution.

Yoo claims this is unprecedented–I guess because it adds to his histrionics–but what he’s really asking is for permission for the "political branches" to legislate away the Constitution. Not that I’m surprised by that. Me, I’m still more surprised that fairly mainstream publications still consider Yoo’s opinion or judgment to be worth squat.

I was never an Edwards supporter. Not because I didn’t like what he said, but because, since he could never speak in more depth on an issue than your average talking point, I suspected all those nice things he was saying about helping the poor were false, just convenient lines around which an old DLCer could build a presidential run. The revelation that Edwards believed he could run for President even while hiding an affair only made me more suspicious that the whole campaign was one convenient lie.

Now, Ken Silverstein makes that case even stronger.

Once upon a time John Edwards wanted to be president and he vowed, back then, that poverty would be his signature issue. “Poverty is the great moral issue of our century,” he told a group of students at Berkeley in 2005. “People living in poverty need you. And another thing: America needs you.”

To show his own dedication, Edwards “created a tax-exempt nonprofit dedicated to fighting poverty”, the New York Times reported.

[snip]

In other words, the Center may have done some good but its primary purpose was to serve as a vehicle for Edwards’ political career. Indeed, it appears to be very similar to the bogus “Reform Institute” that John McCain set up after his defeat to George W. Bush in 2000, and which was designed to keep alive his presidential ambitions and reward his cronies.

Anyway, Edwards of course lost his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination this year, and guess what happened to his big anti-poverty initiative? That’s right—it appears he pulled the plug on it.

About a week before Edwards acknowledged having an affair with Rielle Hunter, Edwards quietly shut down a “scholarship program he started at an Eastern North Carolina high school — a program he once promised would be a model for the nation under an Edwards presidency,” reports the Raleigh News & Observer:

I suppose there are charitable interpretations for why he dismantled his scholarship program. Perhaps he didn’t want it to be associated with what he knew was going to be his soon-to-be-sullied reputation. Perhaps he couldn’t fund the charity anymore because he has been spending so much money keeping Rielle Hunter in her big house in California that he couldn’t afford to fund the charity, either. Perhaps he just wants to spend time with his family(s).

But the whole thing just stinks.

Murray Waas argues that George Bush–and the Republican party–will regret Bush’s efforts to claim absolute immunity to prevent Congress from getting testimony and documents pertaining to the US Attorney purge.

The continuous claims of executive privilege– whatever the motive for them being invoked– are going to appear more and more to the pub[l]ic part and parcel of a cover up. That is inevitable as the U.S. attorney report becomes public, and the report on the politicization of the Civil Rights Division is made public, as well as whatever else the public learns about these issues through leaks from the federal grand jury, the House Judiciary Committee’s ongoing probe, and sleuthing by folks like Josh Marshall.

[snip]

Even though the President might think otherwise, and he is being advised to stay his course, his best hope in assisting Republican congressional candidates in the fall would be to have Karl Rove and Harriett Miers testify before Congress– and the sooner the better. As for the public welfare, the testimony would help resolve many unknowns about the firings of the U.S. attorneys and other allegations of White House misuse of the Justice Department.

He bases that argument on the following logic:

• Per Evan Perez of the WSJ, the two remaining DOJ IG reports on politicization will be released before the election.
• The Civil Rights division IG report–that investigating Shorter Schloz and Hans von Spakovsky–may include criminal referrals.
• The larger US Attorney purge IG report will show that the Kyle Sampson and Rove lackey Chris Oprision deliberately hid Rove’s role in the firings on at least two occasions.
• As the Administration continues to stall on Miers and Rove testimony at the same time as these reports come out, it will be increasingly clear to the public that Bush is stalling precisely because he is trying to cover up the real White House involvement in the US Attorney purge.

I’d be happy if all this came to pass–but I’m a little skeptical, based on three things.

First, when asked by the Senate Judiciary Committee when his reports on the Civil Rights and US Attorney purge would be done, Glenn Fine said he didn’t know–he had to follow whereever the evidence led, and therefore couldn’t know how long it would take to finish up the reports. He specifically said he couldn’t guarantee they’d be done before the election. Now, maybe Fine was just being coy, or just trying to avoid promising he would finish the reports before the election in case he failed to do so. But he’s a straight up guy, so I think we may, in fact, not get one or both of those reports before the election–and certainly not before September.

More importantly, I just don’t think the DOJ IG reports will cause Republicans the embarrassment Murray suggests they will. The Republicans are shameless, and there’s no sign that any of them save Arlen Specter seems to care that Bush is clearly engaged in a cover-up. Furthermore, none of the Republicans directly tied to aiding and abetting Bush’s contempt for Congress–John Boehner, Roy Blunt, Lamar Smith, and Chris Cannon–are going to be any more electorally exposed as these IG reports break than they are now. It’s unlikely the party leaders will be ousted, unlikely Smith will face a challenge, and Cannon is already on his way out. And in the Senate Judiciary Committee, only John Cornyn and (less likely) Jeff Sessions has any exposure for their attempts to help Bush stonewall. In other words, even assuming the US Attorney purge flares back into a front-burner issue, it’s not going to be directly tied to any of the most vulnerable Republicans.

And that all depends on the unlikely possibility that the media would make a big deal about this issue. That, from a media that can’t seem to connect Monica Goodling’s loyalty oaths with inadequate judicial review following immigration raids or that sees one investigation of County-level Democrats as a threat to Obama’s candidacy without considering whether numerous national level investigations might hurt McCain’s bid.

Mind you, I would be thrilled if all this blew up on the Bush Administration and the Republican party this fall. Consider me skeptical, though.

In his description of how Tahir Jalil Habbush Al-Tikriti negotiated protection from the United States, Ron Suskind writes,

Bush, Cheney, and top aides to the vice president wanted Habbush, in essence, to earn his passage. The United States was working furiously on "the case." It needed damning disclosures, not the Iraqi intelligence chief–who was given the code name "George"–saying there were no WMD.

Suskind doesn’t describe how, in spite of the fact that he insisted Iraq didn’t have WMD, Habbush still managed to convince the US to take him to Jordan and install him with $5 million in hush money. Suskind notes–but does not explain–that Habbush got out of Iraq early, close to the start of the war.

Habbush was ready. He slipped out of Baghdad with the help of U.S. intelligence and into Amman, Jordan, where he’d had his meetings with Shipster.

It is instructive, then, to look at the two other Habbush letters sent during the early war period. First, there’s the April 24, 2003 letter designed to frame British (then) Labour MP George Galloway as having been bought off with money from Saddam’s oil sales (h/t for all of these articles to a friend).

Saddam Hussein’s former head of protocol said yesterday that the document found by The Daily Telegraph saying that George Galloway received substantial payments from the Iraqi regime was "100 per cent genuine".

Haitham Rashid Wihaib, who fled to Britain with his family eight years ago after death threats, said he had no doubt that the handwritten confidential memorandum addressed to the dictator’s office apparently detailing how the Labour MP benefited from Iraq’s oil sales was authentic.

Sitting in a cafe in central London, a world away from Saddam’s palace where he spent 13 years arranging the dictator’s daily schedule, he carefully studied the letter discovered in the looted foreign ministry in Baghdad.

As Mr Galloway continued to denounce the letter as a forgery, Mr Wihaib said he recognised the "clear and distinctive" handwriting as that of Tahir Jalil Habbush Al-Tikriti, head of the Iraqi intelligence service, who is number 14 – the jack of diamonds – on America’s "most wanted" list.

The letter would have been intended to smear Galloway for his efforts to forestall the war–and his campaign to show how unfairly Iraq was treated under sanctions.

Then there’s the April 27, 2003 letter that alleged France undermined an Iraqi human rights meeting held in Paris.

France colluded with the Iraqi secret service to undermine a Paris conference held by the prominent human rights group Indict, according to documents found in the foreign ministry in Baghdad.l

Various documents state that the Iraqis believed the French were doing their utmost to prevent the meeting from going ahead.

Ann Clwyd, the Labour MP who chairs Indict, said last night that she would be demanding an apology from the French government for its behaviour, which she described as "atrocious".

The files, retrieved from the looted and burned foreign ministry by The Telegraph last week, detail the warmth and strength of Iraqi-French ties.

[snip]

Perhaps the most damning document is from the Iraqi intelligence service, Iris. The service, known as the Mukhabarat in Iraq, operated as the domestic secret police and as an external intelligence agency.

Its role abroad was to collect intelligence, murder opponents and maintain relations with friendly groups. The document, dated March 28, 2000, is from the head of Iris to Saddam’s office.

At the time the organisation was run by Tahir Jalil al-Habbush, number 14 on America’s wanted list. The letter appears to be written by a different hand from one revealed last week purporting to record that George Galloway benefited from contracts under the oil for food programme. But it carries the same signature.

It states that "one of our sources" met the "deputy spokesman" of the French foreign ministry, "with whom he has good relations".

It claims that the spokesman from the justice and interior ministries had sought to find a legal way of preventing the Indict meeting.

Both letters–like the later letter described by Suskind–"found" by a reporter from the Conrad Black-owned Telegraph, both letters smearing vocal opponents to the war. (There’s also this April 20, 2003 article, alleging cooperation between Russia and Iraq. Though not based on a letter directly attributed to Habbush, it appears to be based on that set of documents dealt to the Telegraph.) These nasty, petty war-mongers–the first thing they wanted to do, apparently, is smear all those who had tried to prevent their pointless war. We could just call these the "Freedom Fry Forgeries."

Suskind never explains how, after insisting that Iraq had no WMDs, Habbush was nevertheless spirited out of the country to safety early in the war. But from the looks of these articles, it appears he "earned his passage" by smearing everyone who had (like him) tried to prevent the war.

(Here’s eriposte on this as well.)

According to the WaPo, Bruce Ivins took personal leave time on September 17, 2001, which, the FBI argues, is when he would have driven to Princeton to mail the anthrax.

Meanwhile, bits of fresh information continued to come out. A partial log of Ivins’s work hours shows that he worked late in the lab on the evening of Sunday, Sept. 16, signing out at 9:52 p.m. after two hours and 15 minutes. The next morning, the sources said, he showed up as usual but stayed only briefly before taking leave hours. Authorities assume that he drove to Princeton immediately after that, dropping the letters in a mailbox on a well-traveled street across from the university campus. Ivins would have had to have left quickly to return for an appointment in the early evening, about 4 or 5 p.m.

Ivins normally got to work early–around 7:30 AM. Assuming his brief stay was half an hour (are they suggesting he went in and picked up the anthrax? and if so, did anyone ask why he’d do so during daytime hours?), he would have had eight hours to drive to Princeton and back. That’s certainly doable–Google says the drive takes 3 hours and 25 minutes. Who knows whether Ivins sped much in his 1993 Honda Civic (in 2001, he also had a 1996 Dodge van; he did not yet have his 2002 Saturn). But even if he went faster than Google says he should have (he would have been driving on I-95, after all, which pretty much requires speeding), he almost certainly would have hit rush hour traffic at least once in his drive, if not twice.

In other words, Ivins could have made the drive, but just barely.

All of which ought to raise the stakes on the FBI’s really dubious explanation for why Ivins purportedly mailed the anthrax in Princeton. After all, there are Kappa Kappa Gamma chapters at George Washington in DC, at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, and Washington and Lee in Lexington, VA–all much closer to Ft. Detrick than Princeton. So what’s the explanation for driving to Princeton (twice), when Ivins could have associated the anthrax mailing with KKG which much less effort if he had mailed it from any of a number of other schools.

And then there’s this bit, which really damns the FBI case:

Federal agents did not interview owners of shops on the street where the mailbox is located to place Ivins at the scene, judging that any witness identification would have been inherently unreliable after nearly seven years. Nor did they uncover tollbooth footage or credit card or phone records that would directly link Ivins to the day’s events.

The FBI never asked anyone in Princeton whether or not they had seen Ivins. However, we know that in August 2002, they did ask 200 people in Princeton whether they had seen Steven Hatfill.

…once the government determined the anthrax letters were mailed from Princeton, New Jersey, FBI special agents showed over 200 residents of Princeton only one photograph–a photo of Dr. Hatfill–and asked whether anyone saw him in the area.

[snip]

Immediately after Dr. Hatfill’s [August 11, 2002] public statement, in an effort to obtain any evidence adverse to Dr. Hatfill with public relations value, however unreliable and inadmissible in court, federal investigators began showing a single photo of Dr. Hatfill to residents of Princeton, New Jersey in the hope that someone would place him at he scene of the anthrax mailings. The presentation of a single photo instead of an array of photos, in dereliction of FBI protocol is so unfairly suggestive–particularly during a week in which Dr. Hatfill appeared on television and in newspapers around the nation and during the same week Newsweek published a two-page spread featuring several photos of Dr. Hatfill–that no criminal investigator could rightfully believe it to have a proper law enforcement function.

So after having asked 200 people if they had seen Hatfill, they ask no one if they had seen Ivins. I understand that Ivins didn’t become a suspect until much longer after the mailing in question. But if Ivins really had an obsession with this particular KKG chapter, rather than the ones in DC or Baltimore or Lexington, VA, perhaps he might have returned to the scene of the crime.

But the FBI didn’t check, I guess because they don’t want to subject their fragile explanation for how or whether Ivins was ever in Princeton to any scrutiny.

And this is the utterly convincing evidence (not!) that the FBI has offered to explain their certainty that, rather than leaving work and handing off the anthrax to someone whose handwriting matched the envelopes, Ivins risked missing his afternoon appointment to mail the anthrax from close to a KKG chapter that was nowhere near the most convenient to his office.

Update: Hold on. It would not be possible for Ivins to have mailed the anthrax. According to my calculations above, the window during which Ivins could have put the letter in the mailbox on September 17 was from 10:25 to 1:35. But here’s what the FBI itself says about the window in which the letter was mailed:

The investigation examined Dr. Ivins’s laboratory activity immediately before and after the window of opportunity for the mailing of the Post and Brokaw letters to New York which began at 5:00 p.m. Monday, September 17,2001 and ended at noon on Tuesday, September 18, 2001. [my emphasis]

In other words, had he mailed the anthrax when they’re arguing he did, the letter would have been picked up at the 5:00 PM pick-up (if not an earlier one–often boxes have a mid-day pick-up as well), and post-marked on September 17, not on September 18. [Note, suffragette and I were thinking along the same lines.]

Update: fixed the title per skdadl.

Check out this WSJ article chronicling Bruce Ivins’ reactions to the anthrax investigation as it moved forward (h/t Hmmm). The article notes that many of his actions might be natural responses to the attack itself–or they might be efforts to cover up his own involvement in the attack.

Most interesting, though, is confirmation of a detail alluded to by Ivins’ lawyer, but never confirmed. Ivins took–and apparently passed–a lie detector test just after the attack. The FBI never asked him to take a second one, not even when they were having other scientists do so.

That winter, the FBI asked Dr. Ivins to take his first and only lie-detector test, according to a law-enforcement official. The polygraph was part of the bureau’s vetting of investigators. The FBI hasn’t released the results. Dr. Ivins retained his role in the investigation.

[snip]

By this time [spring 2002], all of the scientists in the bacteriology division were under the FBI’s investigative microscope, people working there at the time said. One after another, they submitted to a 3½-hour polygraph test. Dr. Ivins "was in the safety zone" because he had already passed his polygraph, Dr. Andrews said. Dr. Ivins was never tested again, a law-enforcement official said.

I understand lie detector tests can be really unreliable and some people can game them. But we’re talking about a guy who, even by his own admission, was an emotional basket case. No wonder the FBI didn’t mention the lie detector test when it applied for search warrants on Ivins, nor did it mention the test in its press conference the other day. Either the apparent results of his test refute their claim he was emotionally unstable, or they suggest he wasn’t the culprit.

Chuck Grassley has asked the FBI for details on any lie detector tests Ivins submitted to.

Was Dr. Ivins ever polygraphed in the course of the investigation? If so, please provide the dates and results of the exam(s). If not, please explain why not.

It’ll be interesting to see how the FBI gets around the fact that the polygraph seems to poke a pretty big hole in their case against Ivins.

Someone really ought to call Fred Fielding on his bullshit. Today, perhaps because he reads Murray Waas (I promise, I will return to that post), Fred’s offering further negotiations in the matter of Harriet and Josh and Karl and a stack of documents. In his latest letter to Conyers, Fred says,

[A stay on Bates’ order pending appeal] will provide appellate consideration of the novel questions at stake in this matter [my emphasis]

Fred. I’m not a lawyer, so I could be wrong here. But if even you are admitting that these are "novel" questions, aren’t you, in fact, agreeing with what both John Bates and Linda Sanchez have said all along, that you’re just making this shit up!!! As Bates said,

Indeed, the aspect of this lawsuit that is unprecedented is the notion that Ms. Miers is absolutely immune from compelled congressional process. The Supreme Court has reserved absolute immunity for very narrow circumstances, involving the President’s personal exposure to suits for money damages based on his official conduct or concerning matters of national security or foreign affairs. The Executive’s current claim of absolute immunity from compelled congressional process for senior presidential aides is without any support in the case law.

This absolute immunity shit doesn’t exist. Linda Sanchez knows it, John Bates knows it, and, apparently, you know it. So drop the pretense and send us Turdblossom to testify already, okay? 

Remember Rashid Rauf? Because of him (and Dick Cheney, as I explain below), you’ve got to either try to squeeze your Tom’s of Maine down into 3 ounce tubes or use crappy sugar-sweet toothpaste when you travel.

Rauf is the Pakistani who was kibbitzing a bunch of British wannabe terrorists without passports, teaching them how to make bombs out of liquids in airplane bathrooms.

The story around Rauf’s arrest (and the subsequent fear-mongering about the purported plot) was always sketchy. As I wrote in 2006, news reports basically said he got arrested, without explaining how or by whom.

Here’s me reading the MSNBC scoop about the US launching the arrests before the Brits were ready:

Americans pushed the Brits to do two things they didn’t want to do. First, they pushed the Brits to arrest Rashid Rauf before they wanted to.

The British official said the Americans also argued over the timing of the arrest of suspected ringleader Rashid Rauf in Pakistan, warning that if he was not taken into custody immediately, the U.S. would "render" him or pressure the Pakistani government to arrest him.

British security was concerned that Rauf be taken into custody "in circumstances where there was due process," according to the official, so that he could be tried in British courts. Ultimately, this official says, Rauf was arrested over the objections of the British.

This passage is actually quite interesting. The US wanted Rauf arrested. The Brits wanted to wait–they wanted to wait until they could arrest Rauf in such a way that he could be tried in the UK. The US threatened to render him. The Brits tried to hold out, so they could prosecute him legally. And then … that’s where the article is less clear. Was Rauf arrested using due process? Will Rauf be a defendant and witness in the UK? Or did the US snatch him, making him useless for a legal prosecution and possibly endangering the larger case in the UK?

So to put Murray and MSNBC together, the US wanted Rauf arrested right away. The Brits wanted to wait so they could use due process. The US threatened to "render" Rauf. The Brits complained.

And then he got arrested.

But by whom, and in what way? As I suggested before, the MSNBC article just drops the whole question, making it clear that the US won that battle, somehow. But it doesn’t explain–was he rendered? Did the US force Pakistan to arrest him? Where is he now? Who has custody?

Well, apparently, Suskind answers the unanswered questions about Rauf’s arrest … and would you be surprised if I told you Bush ordered Cheney to have it done in time to fear-monger leading up to the 2006 elections? Here’s Ron Suskind on Fresh Air describing what happened, transcribed at AfterDowningStreet:

NPR: I want to talk just a little about this fascinating episode you describe in the summer of 2006, when President Bush is very anxious about some intelligence briefings that he is getting from the British. What are they telling him?

SUSKIND: In late July of 2006, the British are moving forward on a mission they’ve been–an investigation they’ve been at for a year at that point, where they’ve got a group of "plotters," so-called, in the London area that they’ve been tracking…Bush gets this briefing at the end of July of 2006, and he’s very agitated. When Blair comes at the end of the month, they talk about it and he says, "Look, I want this thing, this trap snapped shut immediately." Blair’s like, "Well, look, be patient here. What we do in Britain"–Blair describes, and this is something well known to Bush–"is we try to be more patient so they move a bit forward. These guys are not going to breathe without us knowing it. We’ve got them all mapped out so that we can get actual hard evidence, and then prosecute them in public courts of law and get real prosecutions and long prison terms"…

Well, Bush doesn’t get the answer he wants, which is "snap the trap shut." And the reason he wants that is because he’s getting all sorts of pressure from Republicans in Congress that his ratings are down. These are the worst ratings for a sitting president at this point in his second term, and they’re just wild-eyed about the coming midterm elections. Well, Bush expresses his dissatisfaction to Cheney as to the Blair meeting, and Cheney moves forward.

NPR: So you got the British saying, "Let’s carefully build our case. Let’s get more intelligence." Bush wants an arrest and a political win. What does he do?

SUSKIND: Absolutely. What happens is that then, oh, a few days later, the CIA operations chief–which is really a senior guy. He’s up there in the one, two, three spots at CIA, guy named Jose Rodriguez ends up slipping quietly into Islamabad, Pakistan, and he meets secretly with the ISI, which is the Pakistani intelligence service. And suddenly a guy in Pakistan named Rashid Rauf, who’s kind of the contact of the British plotters in Pakistan, gets arrested. This, of course, as anyone could expect, triggers a reaction in London, a lot of scurrying. And the Brits have to run through the night wild-eyed and basically round up 25 or 30 people. It’s quite a frenzy. The British are livid about this. They talk to the Americans. The Americans kind of shrug, "Who knows? You know, ISI picked up Rashid Rauf."

DAVIES: So the British did not even get a heads-up from the United States that this arrest was going to happen?

SUSKIND: Did not get a heads-up. In fact, the whole point was to mislead the British…The British did not know about it, frankly, until I reported it in the book…

What’s interesting is that the White House already had its media plan already laid out before all of this occurred so that the president and vice president immediately–even, in Cheney’s case, before the arrest, the day before–started to capitalize on the war on terror rhetoric and political harvest, which of course they used for weeks to come, right into the fall, about, "The worst plot since 9/11, that has been foiled, and this is why you want us in power." [my emphasis]

None of it surprising (though the news that Jose Rodriguez is the guy who did Cheney’s political dirty work for him makes Rodriguez’ destruction of the torture tapes more interesting). But useful to have more details about how these fuckers work.

And of course, Cheney’s personal involvement in Pakistan policy is one of the reasons things are going FUBAR over there today.

And we’re all still surviving on hotel shampoo when we travel, two years later.

I see that Henry Waxman’s just as focused on oil as those Republicans trying to stink up the House–only in Waxman’s case, he’s demonstrating that the Iraqi budget surplus is almost the same amount as the money Americans have spent on Iraqi oil.

On Tuesday, the Govemment Accountability Office reported that by the end of this year Iraq may amass a budget surplus of between $67 billion and $79 billion as a result of windfall oil sale revenues.

This is roughly the same amount U.S. consumers have paid to purchase Iraqi oil since the war began. According to data provided by the Energy Information Administration, the United States is the single largest purchaser of Iraqi oil, and U.S. consumers will have spent between $70 billion and S74 billion to purchase Iraqi oil by the end of this year.

This means U.S. consumers have been paying record gas prices at the pump to build up Iraq’s massive budget surplus. At the same time, U.S. taxpayers have paid $48 billion to fund Iraq’s reconstruction. I am writing to ask what steps the Bush Administration is taking to ensure that Iraq contributes its fair share to finance the reconstruction.

I’m sure the international oil market doesn’t work on a one-to-one correlation like this. But the American consumers paying $4 a gallon to fund their 30 mile commutes don’t know that–nor do they care, I suspect. Waxman writes:

Based on this information, it appears that U.S. taxpayers are paying twice – once through their taxes to pay for lraq’s reconstruction and a second time at the pump to help build Iraq’s massive surplus.

Shorter Waxman: Why have American taxpayers been asked to forgo necessities to line Nuri al-Maliki’s pockets?