side note: about time.

By ANNE PLUMMER FLAHERTY, Associated Press Writer
yahoo.com

WASHINGTON – Key Democratic leaders in the House and Senate have united to call on President Bush to begin pulling U.S. troops out of Iraq by the end of the year, citing an overtaxed military, billions of dollars spent and ongoing sectarian violence.

In a letter to Bush released Monday, the Democrats backed a plan for the “phased redeployment” of troops. (more…)

By Dafna Linzer
The Washington Post

When angry Democrats briefly shut down the Senate last year to protest the slow pace of a congressional investigation into prewar intelligence on Iraq, Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) claimed a rare victory.

Republicans called it a stunt but promised to quickly wrap up the inquiry. Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which is overseeing the investigation, said his report was near completion and there was no need for the fuss.

That was nine months ago.

The Republican-led committee, which agreed in February 2004 to write the report, has yet to complete its work. Just two of five planned sections of the committee’s findings are fully drafted and ready to be voted on by members, according to Democratic and Republican staffers. Committee sources involved with the report, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said they are working hard to complete it. But disputing Roberts, they said they had started almost from scratch in November after Democrats staged their protest. (more…)

By Joby Warrick
The Washington Post

On the grounds of a military base an hour’s drive from the capital, the Bush administration is building a massive biodefense laboratory unlike any seen since biological weapons were banned 34 years ago.

The heart of the lab is a cluster of sealed chambers built to contain the world’s deadliest bacteria and viruses. There, scientists will spend their days simulating the unthinkable: bioterrorism attacks in the form of lethal anthrax spores rendered as wispy powders that can drift for miles on a summer breeze, or common viruses turned into deadly superbugs that ordinary drugs and vaccines cannot stop. (more…)

By Stirling Newberry
t r u t h o u t | Book Report

Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq – the title alone of Thomas E. Ricks’s book is enough to make it shoot to number one on Amazon.com. Ricks has twice been a member of a reporting team that won the Pulitzer; he has been covering the military for over 20 years. His recent book is a brutal look at the bundle of failures in conception, operation and execution that are the American involvement in Iraq. On Friday, he was at the New America Foundation along with Colonel Larry Wilkerson (retired), former chief of staff at the State Department, at a gathering hosted by Steve Clemons, the director of the American Strategy Program at NAF.

Ricks himself was not a critic of the war at its outset, and his ideological stance is one of old fashioned tough-guy Americanism combined with a populist siding with the average grunt. He believes “the WMD evidence was stolen” line. It is for this reason that the almost unremittingly harsh commentary, and the diagnosis that Iraq is the result of a “systemic failure” that includes Congress, the press and the military as crucial actors, carries such weight. Ricks would like to believe in some kind of victory in Iraq, or at least from Iraq. He would like America to learn the lessons of Iraq. He wants there to be some sense of success.

And yet reading his book leaves little doubt that he has chronicled a carnival of catastrophe in Iraq, and in the way that Washington – both official Washington and the media – decided upon war and then attempted to go to war. He begins by excoriating the very basis for war decisions – pointing out that Iraq required that the threat be maximized, and even magnified, and the cost of invasion minimized. Saddam, in short, had to be everything short of Adolf Hitler in his threat profile, and slightly more dangerous than Pizza Face in his capabilities. (more…)

By Kirk Semple
The New York Times

As violence in the Iraqi capital continues to rise, the task of tracking down missing people here has become a grim ordeal. Iraq’s anemic investigative agencies have been ill-equipped to keep up with soaring crime, so for families seeking information, the morgues have often provided the only certainty.

Now, even the morgues have become a source of danger, at least for Sunni Arabs. In recent months, Shiite militias have been staking out Baghdad’s central morgue in particular, and the authorities have received dozens of reports of kidnappings and killings of Sunni Arabs there. (more…)

Reuters
Truthout.org

France has drawn up a draft U.N. Security Council resolution that would call for an immediate cessation of hostilities in Israel and Lebanon and prepare for the deployment of an international force. (more…)

side note: Welcome to the Governing style of Conservatism

By Greg Miller
The Los Angeles Times

Washington – The U.S. agency responsible for administering $1.4 billion in reconstruction funds in Iraq has sought to hide major cost overruns on high-profile projects from Congress by engaging in questionable accounting maneuvers, according to a federal audit released late Friday.

The agency has masked budget spillovers on a children’s hospital in the southern city of Basra and other facilities by hiding the expenditures in seemingly unrelated accounts, the report from the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction says.

Overall, the report found a “lack of effective program management” by the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development, which oversees U.S. reconstruction spending in Iraq and other countries. (more…)

side note: oh yeah, we’re making things wonderful over there. Man, was invading a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 a good idea or what?! We should do this more often.

By Tom Perry
Reuters

Beirut – Lebanese protesters broke into the U.N. headquarters in Beirut on Sunday, smashing windows and ransacking offices, after an Israeli air strike killed 54 people in south Lebanon.

Several thousand people massed outside the building in downtown Beirut chanting “Death to Israel, death to America. We sacrifice our blood and souls for Lebanon”. (more…)

By Andrew Buncombe
The Independent UK

The controversy over the US-run detention centre at Guantanamo Bay is to erupt anew with confirmation by the Pentagon that a new, permanent prison will open in the Cuban enclave in the next few weeks.

Camp 6, a state-of-the-art maximum-security jail built by a Halliburton subsidiary, will be able to hold 200 prisoners. Commander Robert Durand, a spokesman for Joint Task Force Guantanamo, said the $30m, two-storey block was due to open at the end of September. He added: “Camp 6 is designed to improve the quality of life for the detainees and provide greater protection for the people working in the facility.” (more…)

By QASSIM ABDUL-ZAHRA, Associated Press Writer
yahoo.com

Iraq’s vice president on Monday accused Israel of carrying out “massacres” in Lebanon, the strongest criticism yet of the Jewish state by a top official of the U.S-backed Iraqi government.

Vice President Adel Abdul-Mahdi, a Shiite, singled out Sunday’s Israeli airstrike that killed at least 56 Lebanese, mostly women and children, in the village of Qana. The deadliest attack in nearly three weeks of fighting has triggered an international uproar. (more…)

Rep. George Miller
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/

At about 1:30 on Saturday morning, the House of Representatives approved a minimum wage increase that has little chance of survival in the Senate because it is coupled with huge tax cuts for the wealthiest estates in the country (8,200 of them would get an average $1.4 million each). Since Republicans control the House, this isn’t a surprise – they’ve vigorously opposed a minimum wage increase for nearly a decade, apparently believing that $5.15 per hour is an acceptable wage for millions of American adults working full time.
The only way they were going to allow a minimum wage vote is if they knew the legislation wasn’t likely to go anywhere.

Saturday’s vote enables vulnerable Republican incumbents to spend their August break telling their constituents that they voted for a minimum wage increase, while allowing the rest of the Republican caucus to reassure their special interest friends that the wage increase is not likely to become law. I’ve been in public life for over 30 years, and while this may not rank as the most craven and cynical act of political deception I’ve ever seen, it’s certainly up there. (more…)

side note: Well said Sen. Hagel, now get off your ass, get on the phone to Bush, or whoever you need to talk to, and start raising hell.
http://thinkprogress.org

Four months ago, Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE) described the conditions in Iraq as a “low grade civil war.” Today, his view is much more bleak. In an interview with the Omaha World Herald, the Vietnam War veteran said that the country had descended into “absolute anarchy” and the war was “an absolute replay of Vietnam.”

Hagel also blasted the Pentagon’s plan to send 5,000 additional U.S. troops to Iraq, saying the move was opposed by several four-star generals:

[Hagel] said that in the previous 48 hours, he had received three telephone calls from four-star generals who were “beside themselves” over the Pentagon’s reversal of plans to bring tens of thousands of soldiers home this fall.

Instead, top Pentagon officials are suspending military rotations and adding troops in Iraq. The Pentagon has estimated that the buildup will increase the number of U.S. troops from about 130,000 to 135,000.

“That isn’t going to do any good. It’s going to have a worse effect,” Hagel said. “They’re destroying the United States Army.“

Hagel — unlike Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) — understands that “staying the course” in Iraq isn’t an option.
see original

By David Jackson, USA TODAY

Amid tensions in Iraq and the Middle East, President Bush meets Friday with a special delegation: Taylor Hicks and the American Idol finalists. (more…)

side note: now this should calm everybodies nerves about how we are trying to bring peace to the middle east. I mean, what better way to push for peace, then to sell weapons to a bunch of countries over there.

Reuters
NY TIMES

The Bush administration spelled out plans on Friday to sell $4.6 billion of arms to moderate Arab states, including battle tanks worth as much as $2.9 billion to protect critical Saudi infrastructure.

The announcement came two weeks after the administration said it would sell Israel its latest supply of JP-8 aviation fuel valued at up to $210 million to help Israeli warplanes “keep peace and security in the region.”

The United States also rushed a delivery of precision-guided bombs requested by Israel after launching its airstrikes against Hizbollah fighters in Lebanon 17 days ago, The New York Times reported last week.

In the newly proposed sales to Arab states, UH-60M Black Hawk helicopter gunships worth up to $808 million would go to the United Arab Emirates, while AH-64 Apache helicopters worth as much as $400 million would go to Saudi Arabia. (more…)

By Anne Plummer Flaherty
The Associated Press
http://www.boston.com

U.S. citizens suspected of terror ties might be detained indefinitely and barred from access to civilian courts under legislation proposed by the Bush administration, say legal experts reviewing an early version of the bill.

A 32-page draft measure is intended to authorize the Pentagon’s tribunal system, established shortly after the 2001 terrorist attacks to detain and prosecute detainees captured in the war on terror. The tribunal system was thrown out last month by the Supreme Court. (more…)