ThinkFast: June 11, 2007

American commanders are turning to a strategy “that they acknowledge is fraught with risk: arming Sunni Arab groups that have promised to fight militants linked with Al Qaeda who have been their allies in the past.” Critics say the plan “could amount to the Americans’ arming both sides in a future civil war.”

Today’s no-confidence vote on Attorney General Gonzales deserves the vote of every senator “concerned about the American justice system,” the New York Times opines. “The Justice Department is in shambles. Top officials have left under a cloud and have not been replaced. Morale is said to be terrible.” Bush derided the vote as “meaningless.”

“At least one-third of the immigration judges appointed by the Justice Department since 2004 have had Republican connections or have been administration insiders, and half lacked experience in immigration law,” a new Washington Post analysis shows.

“The Taliban carried out an apparent attempt to assassinate Afghan President Hamid Karzai on Sunday, firing rockets that missed him by several hundred yards as he spoke to a group of elders. No one was injured.”

“In what may be a sign of things to come, the lawyers for I. Lewis Libby Jr. last month invoked the rarely used courtroom tactic: the ‘bloggers can be mean’ defense.” Libby’s lawyers urged the judge not to publicly release letters written in support of their client, given “the real possibility that these letters, once released, would be published on the Internet and their authors discussed, even mocked, by bloggers.”

“Acting under pressure from Congress, the CIA has decided to trim its contractor staffing by 10 percent. It is the agency’s first effort since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to curb what critics have decried as the growing privatization of U.S. intelligence work, a circumstance that has sharply boosted some personnel costs.”

“A tribal coalition formed to oppose the extremist group al-Qaeda in Iraq, a development that U.S. officials say has reduced violence in Iraq’s troubled Anbar province, is beginning to splinter, according to an Anbar tribal leader and a U.S. military official familiar with tribal politics.”

“Senate Democrats opened the door to reviving the stalled immigration measure on Sunday, calling on Republicans to resolve their internal divisions and produce an agreement on how to move the legislation forward.”

And finally: HHS Secretary requests meeting with dead Senator. Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt called Sen. Craig Thomas’s (R-WY) office Thursday afternoon to request a meeting with the late senator. Thomas passed away on Monday after a seven month battle with leukemia. The Washington Post writes, “Needless to say, grief-stricken Thomas staffers were stunned.”