“A lawyer for Vice President Dick Cheney told the Secret Service in September to eliminate data on who visited Cheney at his official residence, a newly disclosed letter states.”

The Sept. 13, 2006, letter from Cheney’s lawyer says logs for Cheney’s residence on the grounds of the Naval Observatory are subject to the Presidential Records Act.

The Justice Department filed the letter Friday in a lawsuit by a private group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, seeking the identities of conservative religious leaders who visited Cheney at his official residence.

The newly disclosed letter about visitors to Cheney’s residence is accompanied by an 18-page Secret Service document revealing the agency’s long-standing practice has been to destroy printed daily access lists of visitors to the residence.

Separately, the agency says it has given Cheney’s office handwritten logs of who visits him at his personal residence.

UPDATE: Such unethical secrecy is not new for the Vice President. In 2005, the Center for Public Integrity discovered that “Cheney and his staff have been unilaterally exempting themselves from long-standing travel disclosure rules followed by the rest of the executive branch, including the Office of the President.”

“A series of fatalities announced on Tuesday in Iraq saw the US military’s death toll rise to its highest monthly level in more than two years.” With 114 deaths so far, May is already the third deadliest month of the war, with the highest fatality rate since Nov. 2004.

Weekly Standard editor William Kristol and fellow neoconservative Frederick Kagan have consistently been wrong in their predictions about Iraq. Last year, Kristol claimed an escalation would “improve our chances of winning.” Kagan proclaimed at the end of April, “We are turning a corner in Iraq.” But May was the deadliest month this year for U.S. soldiers.

This week, Kristol and Kagan renewed their calls for a defense of the status quo in Iraq. Writing an op-ed in the Weekly Standard, Kristol and Kagan call for unbridled support of the failing escalation:

This is no time to hedge or hesitate. Now is the time to put everything behind making the president’s strategy–which looks to be a winning strategy–succeed.

Recycling the talking point that debate over the war “undermines the efforts of our commanders in the field,” they respond to reports suggesting increased conservative dissatisfaction by calling on Bush to authoritatively squash all dissenting opinion on Iraq:

Congressional battles calling into doubt our commitment to winning in Iraq have been the major threat to progress since the president began pursuing the right strategy in January. The president, supported by congressional Republicans, has beaten back that threat. Now he needs to deal with his own administration, which has not made up its collective mind to support the president’s strategy wholeheartedly. Mixed messages from Bush’s advisers and cabinet undermine the efforts of our commanders in the field.

Calling the State Department’s recent talks with Iran and Syria “fantasy diplomatic solutions,” Kristol and Kagan instead advocate that “[d]iplomatic engagement by itself is a trap,” suggesting, as they both have before, that America should only deal militarily with Iraq’s neighbors. Such a policy would likely accelerate nuclear development in Iran and has been swiftly rejected by top U.S. military commanders.

Kristol and Kagan aim for a single objective: more war. As Glenn Greenwald noted, “What they [Kristol and Kagan] seek — by their own acknowledgment — is a conflict with Iran and Syria, and they want to stay in Iraq because that is how that goal can be achieved.”

Digg It!

The FBI and a federal grand jury are currently investigating how, in 2000, “Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK) jacked his house off the ground, inserted a new first story and placed the old first floor on top, thanks to the help of a top executive at local oil company Veco Corp. who hired at least one key contractor to complete the feat of a job.” Two former Veco Corp. executives recently pleaded guilty to federal bribery and conspiracy charges, which includes paying $242,000 in illegitimate consulting fees to Stevens’ son, Ben, a former Alaska state senator.

AP reports:

President Bush has chosen Robert Zoellick, a one-time U.S. trade representative and former No. 2 official at the State Department, to lead the World Bank, a senior administration official said Tuesday.

Bush will announce his decision on Wednesday.

Zoellick, who resigned from the Bush administration last June feeling “marginalized” and “subordinate,” is now an executive at Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

In the book The Italian Letter, authors Peter Eiser and Knut Royce reveal that Alan Foley, the head of the CIA’s Weapons Intelligence Non-Proliferation and Arms Control Center, cherry-picked evidence to make the case for war in Iraq:

One day in December 2002, Foley called his senior production managers to his office. He had a clear message for the men and women who controlled the output of the center’s analysts: “If the president wants to go to war, our job is to find the intelligence to allow him to do so.” The directive was not quite an order to cook the books, but it was a strong suggestion that cherry-picking and slanting not only would be tolerated, but might even be rewarded.

(HT: Kevin Drum)