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AP Reveals New Document Demonstrating ‘Clear Case’ Of Gonzales Perjury On Spying Program

By ThinkProgress on Jul 25, 2007 at 11:26 pm

The AP reports that a four-page memo sent by then-National Intelligence Director John Negroponte in May 2006 confirms that a March 2004 White House intelligence briefing for top congressional leaders was on “the Terrorist Surveillance Program.”

negroponte06.gif

The revelation is significant because just yesterday Alberto Gonzales testified that the White house briefing was about “other intelligence activities.”

“The dissent related to other intelligence activities,” Gonzales testified at Tuesday’s hearing. “The dissent was not about the terrorist surveillance program.”

“Not the TSP?” responded Sen. Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y. “Come on. If you say it’s about other, that implies not. Now say it or not.”

“It was not,” Gonzales answered. “It was about other intelligence activities.”

ThinkProgress obtained the document, which confirms the accounts of Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) and Sen. John Rockefeller (D-WV), who claimed the briefings they received were about the administration’s NSA domestic surveillance program. Negroponte lists all the lawmakers who attended “briefings on the Terrorist Surveillance Program,” including the eight lawmakers who attended the March 10, 2004 meeting.

Gonzales’ misleading response appears to be an effort to resolve discrepancies with his earlier statements. In Feb. 2006, Gonzales testified that “there has not been any serious disagreement” about the warrantless spying program conducted by the National Security Agency (NSA). Testimony by former Deputy Attorney General James Comey proved there were indeed serious disagreements when the administration tried to seek legal approval for the spying program in 2004.

Instead of settling the contradictions in his testimony, Gonzales is simply compounding his problems by continuing to mislead Congress. MSNBC’s David Shuster reported tonight that “this is a really, really big deal and a big problem for Gonzales. … The legal expert I talked to tonight said this is a clear case of perjury.” Watch it:

Read the full memo HERE.

UPDATE: Commenter burro notes that the “bupkis” is rapidly increasing.

Politics

Despite Congress’ Thrashing Of Gonzales, Snow Claims Nobody ‘Really Laid A Glove On Him’

By Matt Corley on Jul 25, 2007 at 6:43 pm

During the White press briefing today, a reporter asked press secretary Tony Snow whether Alberto Gonzales had lost his “credibility” due to his apparently misleading testimony to Congress. Snow said he hadn’t, claiming “nobody’s really laid a glove” on the Attorney General yet:

QUESTION: But has it reached the point for the attorney general to — he’s lost his effectiveness and his credibility?

SNOW: Well, you know, what’s interesting is that there have been all these hearings on the attorney general and yet nobody’s really laid a glove on him. [...] At this point, we have hundreds of hearings that have produced bupkis.

Snow is dead wrong. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ multiple appearances before Congress have left his reputation in tatters. Sen. Patrick Leahy said, “I don’t trust you.” Sen. Arlen Specter said, “I do not find your testimony credible.” The Washington Post writes, “At what point does someone lose so much credibility that he should no longer serve in public office?”

In particular, the contradictions in Gonzales statements regarding the administration’s warrantless wiretapping program has members of the Senate Judiciary Committee considering an inquiry into whether he has perjured himself. In attempting to “clarify” his previous misstatments, Gonzales only appears to have lied again to Congress.

In fact, contrary to Snow’s claim that Congress never “laid a glove” on Gonzales, lawmakers yesterday leveled one blow after another to the Attorney General’s already-bruised credibility. Watch a compilation of some of the most vigorous exchanges:

[flv http://video.thinkprogress.org/2007/07/GonzalesGloveLand.320.240.flv]

Transcript: Read more

Climate Progress

Fatally Flawed Attack on Renewables by Ausubel

By Joe Romm on Jul 25, 2007 at 6:32 pm

cloud.jpgEvery silver lining has a cloud — or so we are told.

Climate analyst Jesse Ausubel is getting a lot of press with his new, controversial, deeply flawed study, “Renewable and nuclear heresies”–UPDATE: available here and you can also get the main points from this 2005 Canadian Nuclear Association talk and the accompanying PPT presentation.

He says ramping up renewables would lead to the “rape of nature.” His study concludes:

Renewables are not green. To reach the scale at which they would contribute importantly to meeting global energy demand, renewable sources of energy, such as wind, water and biomass, cause serious environmental harm. Measuring renewables in watts per square metre that each source could produce smashes these environmental idols. Nuclear energy is green. However, in order to grow, the nuclear industry must … form alliances with the methane industry to introduce more hydrogen into energy markets, and start making hydrogen itself…. Considered in watts per square metre, nuclear has astronomical advantages over its competitors.

Uh, no, no, and no. Jesse popularized the notion that the economy has been decarbonizing for many decades (see Figure 2 of the PPT). This has led him to make a bunch of serious mistakes.

First, he basically thinks decarbonizing is all but inevitable with some effort on our part (i.e. pushing nukes and hydrogen hard). But if you look closely at Figure 3, you’ll see that in the last few years we’ve been “recarbonizing” — coal use has been soaring while natural gas use has stalled. (Also, even Ausubel’s historical decarbonization was an essentially meaningless trend, since it did not stop absolute carbon levels from soaring dangerously in recent decades.)

Second, if decarbonization is all but inevitable, then global warming will mostly take care of itself. He doesn’t come out and say this, but his talk never discusses the threat of climate change, which is much more likely to rape nature than renewables.

Third, he thinks hydrogen is the inevitable future. In fact it is a dead end — the energy carrier of the future is electricity, hopefully with cellulosic ethanol. Sorry, Jesse, no one in their right mind would use nuclear power to make hydrogen, especially since fuel cells just convert the hydrogen back to electricity — wasting some 75% of the original electricity and requiring you to buy expensive electrolyzers, hydrogen infrastructure, and fuel cells.

His fourth mistake, the land analysis, which got all the recent attention — “Renewable energy projects will devour huge amounts of land, warns researcher” — is the most serious, I think.

Read more

Yglesias

Obama Strikes Back

By ThinkProgress on Jul 25, 2007 at 5:27 pm

In an apparent outbreak of good news for John Edwards, the Obama-Clinton spat seems to be escalating today rather than declining, with the Senator saying “First of all, what is irresponsible and naïve is to have authorized a war without asking how we were going to get out. And I think Senator Clinton still hasn’t fully answered that issue. The general principle is one that, I think, Senator Clinton is wrong on. And that is, if we are laying out preconditions that prevent us from speaking frankly to these folks, then we are continuing Bush-Cheney policies, and I am not interested in continuing that.”

One thing I’d note here is that the thing Clinton actually said during the debate struck me as fairly reasonable. Then again, so did what Obama said. Her campaign’s behavior since then — trying to make big political hay out of Obama’s alleged weakness, seeming to reverse her previous position on the direct talks issue, etc. — has been pretty problematic. And it’s worth saying that she actually did this before, attacking Obama after an earlier debate for having said that he would respond to a terrorist attack by first organizing emergency relief, and then second assessing intelligence to see who was responsible. According to Clinton’s campaign, the “correct” answer was to immediately call for war (against whom?)

What this says about Clinton’s actual foreign policy beliefs, I couldn’t it. It does, however, obviously reflect a certain set of beliefs about politics — specifically that more militarism is always better — which happen to be the exact same set of beliefs that helped drive so many Democratic elected officials to duck and cover during the initial drive for war. To get the foreign policy right, you need on some level to have someone willing to challenge the hawkish political box. Clinton isn’t just failing to do that, she’s going way out of her way to re-enforce it.

Yglesias

The Residuals Debate

By ThinkProgress on Jul 25, 2007 at 5:18 pm

An awful lot of liberals I know seem unduly confident that when their favored candidate is elected President of the United States, he or she will withdraw American troops from Iraq. I think people should pay attention to Progressive Policy Institute chief Will Marshall when he notes that the major candidates at least sometimes seem to more-or-less agree with his case for indefinitely extending the US military occupation of Iraq. Marshall is also to be congratulated for, unlike the candidates themselves, speaking reasonably plainly about what it is he’s proposing and trying to defend the idea on the merits. He endorses the CNAS plan favored by the more hawkish elements of the Democratic establishment and specifically endorses the idea that the goal of our Iraq policy should be not ending the war, not ending the occupation, not bringing the troops home, but rather:

Specifically, we should redefine our military mission in Iraq as enforcing three “noes” that are essential to protecting America’s strategic interests — no safe havens for al Qaeda, no genocide, and no wider regional war.

I have a long counterargument below the fold:

Read more

Yglesias

Home Size and Global Warming

By ThinkProgress on Jul 25, 2007 at 4:29 pm

Robert Samuelson’s basic argument here — that since the best measures to stop global warming are politically unpopular, it’s obvious that environmentalists are all frauds and we shouldn’t do anything to stop global warming — is totally absurd, but he makes an interesting subsidiary point I hadn’t previously considered, namely that one thing that would help on the climate change from would be this:

[E]liminate tax subsidies (mainly the mortgage interest rate deduction) for housing, which push Americans toward ever-bigger homes. (Note: If you move to a home 25 percent larger and then increase energy efficiency 25 percent, you don’t save energy.)

I hadn’t thought of that. Another point, though, is that now that I’m looking at the parenthetical on the page, I don’t think Samuelson’s math is actually correct. If your house is 100 Volume Units and requires 1 Energy Unit per Volume Unit per year to power, you’re using 100 EUs/year. Increase the house to 125 VUs and you’re up to 100EUs/year. Now increase energy efficiency to 0.75 EUs per VU per year and you’re down to 93.75 EUs/year. Samuelson’s right that having the tax code create incentives for people to save money in the form of buying very big houses rather than smaller houses plus an equity portfolio is bad policy, including energy policy, but on both this small point and on the broader point, a weird crankiness seems to be getting the better of him.

Politics

Senators Call Bush’s Veto Of Children’s Health Insurance Program ‘Outrageous’ And ‘Offensive’

By Amanda Terkel on Jul 25, 2007 at 4:09 pm

Congress is currently considering legislation to reauthorize and expand the popular State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), which currently insures close to 6 million children. The new proposal would expand “current levels of spending by $35 billion over the next five years” and “reduce the number of uninsured children by 4.1 million.”

Six Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee voted for the SCHIP expansion, which is being heavily opposed by the tobacco industry. But “in an unexpected turn of events,” the conservative leadership announced that it is caving to President Bush’s demands and is objecting to the legislation.

Bush has promised to veto the SCHIP expansion. Today in an event at the Center for American Progress, Sens. Bob Casey (D-PA) and Hillary Clinton (D-NY) sharply criticized the veto threat:

Casey: [Bush] wants to give a billion dollars a year of an increase for children’s health insurance, and tens of billions — by one estimate as much as a hundred billion dollars — in tax cuts to wealthy people. … I don’t understand it and we are not going to accept that because fortunately, unlike a lot of things on Capitol Hill, there is bipartisan agreement on this.

Clinton: [I]f he wants to have part of his legacy be vetoing the child health insurance program then we’ll try to override the veto because this is absolutely an imperative. … I just think it’s outrageous and offensive that the President would threaten to veto this legislation.

Watch it:

[flv http://video.thinkprogress.org/2007/07/jpdcaseyclinton.320.240.flv]

As Ezra Klein notes, the right-wing objections to SCHIP are “explicitly ideological.” They are based in a right-wing desire to see “as few individuals on government-based insurance as possible.” Conservatives are rallying opposition to children’s health care as “spring training” practice for future battles over universal coverage.

This year, SCHIP marks its 10th anniversary as a bipartisan, federal-state collaboration to improve the nation’s health coverage. Bruce Lesley of First Focus calls SCHIP “the one major healthcare success story over the past 10 years” for providing “cost-effective health coverage to millions of children with coverage that the private market by itself has been unable to provide.” Along with Medicaid, SCHIP has “reduced the proportion and the number of low-income children who are uninsured by about one third since 1997.”

Transcript: Read more

Politics

Murtha proposes new redeployment bill.

By Faiz Shakir on Jul 25, 2007 at 3:42 pm

Rep. John Murtha (D-PA) said today that he will soon propose legislation that calls for troop withdrawals from Iraq to begin in November and take about a year to complete. “This is big time,” Murtha told reporters of the upcoming war debate in September. “When you get to September, this is history. This is when we’re going to have a real confrontation with the president trying to work things out.”

UPDATE: More from Murtha:

“I’m hearing signals. They (Republicans) are trying to work out a deal where we leave 70,000 troops over there … That’s the White House telling them to do that, I’m convinced,” he told reporters.

Yglesias

Black Mass

By ThinkProgress on Jul 25, 2007 at 3:37 pm

Bulger-fbi.jpg

This past week I read Black Mass: The True Story of an Unholy Alliance Between the FBI and the Irish Mob by Dick Lehr and Gerard O’Neil. You might know about this, especially if you lived in New England, but it’s really a hell of a story. Basically what happened is that an Irish American Boston-based FBI agent from Southie named John Connolly hooked up with a Irish American Boston-based gangster from Southie named Whitey Bulger, and together they crippled the mafia in Boston, leaving Bulger to rule the streets in partnership with friends in the FBI who protected him and even helped get some people killed.

Then the really wild, can’t make this stuff up, part is that the gangster’s brother was both pals with the FBI agent in question and President of the Massachusetts State Senate.

Unfortunately, while the authors have a great story to tell, they don’t do a great job of telling. They’re two of the Boston Globe reporters who helped break this story open originally, and they’re obviously formidable reporters. They’re not, however, great at narrative pacing or structuring a book. Nor do they have a really good ear for what aspects of the story do and don’t require further elaboration and context. Little things — like the fact that the Boston FBI field office covers all of New England, that the South End and South Boston are different places, etc. — aren’t really explained properly and I wound up needing to look various things up online to really understand what was happening. Ideally, then, one would want to read a different, better book on the subject and I see that there is another one thought I have no idea if it’s better.

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