Murray Waas reports that President Bush personally received a report in January 2003 stating “that U.S. intelligence agencies unanimously agreed that it was unlikely that Saddam would try to attack the United States — except if ‘ongoing military operations risked the imminent demise of his regime’ or if he intended to ‘extract revenge’ for such an assault.”
Media Sat On Katrina Video For 6 Months
A videotape of a briefing that occurred the day before Hurricane Katrina struck is blanketing television news. The coverage is appropriate; the tape proves that Bush and other top officials knew about the severity of the storm in advance and still were slow to respond.
What you won’t hear on TV is that the media have had this tape for six months but haven’t done anything with it. From the LA Times:
Department briefings are routinely recorded, said [Homeland Security spokesman Russ] Knocke, adding that Homeland Security does not know how Associated Press got the footage of the Aug. 28 briefing. It was also obtained that day or the day after by a network and a cable affiliate, but neither aired it, he said.
The contents of the tape are clearly newsworthy. Which media organizations obtained the tape and why wasn’t it aired?
Scarborough: Katrina Video ‘Won’t Hurt Bush So Much,’ Shows ‘Brownie Did A Heckuva Job’
Last night Joe Scarborough explained how “Bush-bashing bloggers and their allies in the press” are missing the real story from the new Katrina video. According to Scarborough, it’s a net positive for the Bush administration. Watch it:
Actually, what the tapes really show is that both Bush and Brown knew about Katrina’s potential devastation and still did nothing.
Full transcript below: Read more
ThinkFast: March 2, 2006
ThinkFast is a new feature of ThinkProgress. (It’s still a work in progress – let us know what you think.)
Supreme Court justices “signaled” yesterday “that they were likely to uphold the partisan-charged, mid-decade Texas redistricting plan” engineered by criminally indicted Rep. Tom DeLay (R-TX), despite the fact that the Justice Department found the plan would likely “reduce minority electoral opportunity.”
The Philadelphia Daily News reports, “The largest known giver to a controversial charity founded by U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum made its $25,000 donation as the senator was working to win as much as $8.5 million in federal aid for the donor’s project.” Officials with the company, Preferred Real Estate Inc., also gave over 20,000 to Santorum’s reelection campaign. Santorum was ultimately successful in securing the money.
Of Pennsylvania’s 10 largest employers, Wal-Mart has the highest percentage of employees enrolled in the state medical assistance program for the poor and disabled.
Court documents “may provide the first detailed evidence of U.S. residents being spied upon by President Bush’s secret eavesdropping program.” The conversations were between the director of a defunct Islamic chairty, who was in Saudi Arabia, “and two U.S. citizens in Washington who were working as lawyers for the organization.”
$3 billion: The amount in budget cuts that NASA now faces, after its administrator vowed to Congress six months ago that not “one thin dime” would be taken from space science. Read more
