ThinkFast: May 14, 2009

A report on “Rightwing Extremism” that upset conservatives has been withdrawn and is being rewritten, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told lawmakers yesterday. “It was not authorized to be distributed. It had not even completed its vetting process,” she said, calling the incident “probably the worst thing” to happen at DHS.

In April 2003, “very senior” Bush administration officials suggested that an Iraqi prisoner be waterboarded to see if he would “provide information of a relationship between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s regime,” says former Iraqi Survey Group chief Charles Duelfer. Two senior U.S. intelligence officials from the time tell the Daily Beast that the suggestion came from the Office of Vice President Cheney.

The Obama administration “is weighing plans to detain some terror suspects on U.S. soil — indefinitely and without trial — as part of a plan to retool military commission trials that were conducted for prisoners held in Guantanamo Bay.” The idea has been “floated with members of Congress” while the administration’s internal deliberations on how to close the prison continue.

President Obama told a bipartisan group of senators yesterday that he would “review names of potential Supreme Court nominees over the weekend.” The potential nominees are believed to include “Solicitor General Elena Kagan, Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and U.S. Appeals Court judges Sonia Sotomayor and Diane Pamela Wood.”

Following the release of Frank Luntz’s right-wing messaging memo on framing the health care debate, Democrats like Sen. Evan Bayh (D-IN) said they felt “unease that we did not have a strategy” to counter the attacks. A lengthy meeting with David Axelrod seemed to quell concerns. “Axelrod came to reassure us that they do have a strategy,” Bayh said.

House Republicans plan to “nitpick” climate change legislation “into legislative oblivion by introducing more than 100 amendments during the committee debate.” “This is not going to be one of gentlemanly, pro forma markups,” Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX), the ranking Republican on Energy and Commerce Committee, told Politico. “We’re prepared for it to take weeks or months.

ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero was sharply critical of President Obama’s decision not to release photos of detainee abuse. “He said officials had described them as ‘worse than Abu Ghraib’ and said their volume, more than 2,000 images, showed that ‘it is no longer tenable to blame abuse on a few bad apples. These were policies set at the highest level.’”

President Obama is “expected to expand its mortgage aid program on Thursday” that will “include ways to allow borrowers to avoid foreclosure by selling their properties or giving them back to lenders.”

Pentagon records show that “[m]ore soldiers have been unavailable for combat in the past year because of wounds or injuries than at any time since the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan began, shrinking the pool of soldiers ready for deployment to those conflicts.” The Army “is counting on plans to draw down forces from Iraq to ease this situation.”

And finally: Make sure your phone is off during the briefing! Yesterday, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs “confiscated” a reporter’s ringing phone. “Just put in on vibrate, man,” Gibbs said initially. After the phone continued to ring, Gibbs demanded, “Give me the phone” and snatched it for the rest of the briefing. “I made the determination that the illumination of the sound was distracting to the briefing as the Press Secretary to the President of the United States,” he explained. Watch it here.

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