Here we go, another investigation.

Department of Homeland Security administrators — fearing additional scrutiny — concealed from federal investigators information-sharing breakdowns that left the U.S. vulnerable to terrorists, internal DHS memos and e-mails show.

The documents obtained by The Washington Times lay out how officials at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) deliberated telling the Inspector General’s Office that DHS agencies failed to share data before opting to withhold their concerns.

“We better be ready to provide evidence and name names because this type of statement is the height of the post-9/11 criticisms,” former Citizenship and Immigration Services Chief Council Dea Carpenter noted in an e-mail to officials within her DHS agency last year.

The e-mail preceded the removal of references to information-sharing failures in the mammoth department from the third and final draft of a memorandum Mrs. Carpenter wrote for Inspector General Richard L. Skinner. Mr. Skinner had begun a probe into USCIS information-sharing shortcomings at the request of Sen. Charles E. Grassley, Iowa Republican, who had received numerous complaints of internal problems in the agency.

In the first draft of the March 2006 memorandum, Mrs. Carpenter said: “We also experience agencies that are unwilling or unable to share all or part of the information they have, notwithstanding ongoing suspicions. Some agencies close out investigations pertaining to suspicious activity but refuse to share the information they have. It is imperative that USCIS receive any and all information so that it can determine whether an individual is eligible for the immigration benefit being sought.”

It noted “the vulnerabilities caused by law enforcement and intelligence agencies who do not post lookouts of potential threats, or proactively share such information in another manner, so as to ensure we do not grant immigration benefits to persons who pose a threat to national security and/or public safety.”

The Inspector General”s Office never saw the information contained in Mrs. Carpenter’s original. The Washington Times obtained all three copies, which include numerous edits annotated in blue.

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Some good news I hope.

Growing Sunni opposition to al Qaeda and in some cases the perception that U.S. troops will leave the country are key factors behind recent and growing stability in Iraq, according to a major U.S. intelligence report based on findings from 16 agencies.

The updated National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), a consensus view of the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency and other services, says “measurable” security improvements were made in war-torn Iraq since January and will expand modestly in the next 12 months with continued military pressure on insurgents.

Within hours of the report”s release, Sen. John W. Warner of Virginia called on President Bush to bring some U.S. troops home by Christmas, and Army Secretary Pete Geren ruled out extending troop deployments beyond the current 15 months.

Mr. Warner, the former chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said a small-scale withdrawal — perhaps 5,000 of the 160,000 troops in Iraq — would prod the Iraqi government toward the political reconciliation needed to stem sectarian violence.

The report”s unclassified key judgments warned that “levels of insurgent and sectarian violence will remain high, and the Iraqi government will continue to struggle to achieve national-level political reconciliation.”

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I wish that they would get some new campaign slogans instead of the constant regurgitation of the same old topics. They all do it.

“Islamic terrorists are at war with us,” Rudy Giuliani told about 300 people at a synagogue in Rockville, Md., one evening in July. He likes to say it that way — that they are at war with us, not the other way around. “They want to kill us,” he warned a group in New Hampshire the same month. “They hate you,” he told a woman in Atlanta.

Giuliani says he understands terrorism “better than anyone else running for President,” and he certainly talks about it more than anyone else. “Basically, what he’s selling is, ‘As dangerous a world as this is, I can make it safer,’” says G.O.P. pollster Frank Luntz. So far, it seems to be working. Giuliani has been the consistent front-runner of the Republican candidates in most national polls through August.

By framing his campaign this way, Giuliani has raised an interesting question. What does it actually mean to understand terrorism? His supporters might find the question absurd. He owns terrorism, they say. The entire world watched on television as Giuliani led New York City through the aftermath of a terrorism attack. To his opponents, the answer is equally plain: he has no foreign policy experience, and he talks about terrorism as if it’s an enemy country on a continent only he knows how to find.

But being a victim of terrorism, or the steely leader of a recovery, is not necessarily the same as understanding terrorism. Nor is foreign policy experience all that matters. So how would Giuliani actually prevent, contain and respond to the next major terrorist attack in the U.S.? What is his vision for what he considers the existential challenge of our time?

This much is indisputable: Giuliani knows what it means to be a victim of terrorism, to lose old friends in an avalanche of violence and spit the dust of a skyscraper out of his mouth in a new, blackened world. He understands the urgency of speaking to the American people after an attack — and not circling above the ruins in Air Force One. He knows how to grieve and go to work at the same time.

But before 9/11, Giuliani spent eight years presiding over a city that was a known terrorist target. A TIME investigation into what he did — and didn’t do — to prepare for a major catastrophe is revealing. In addition to extraordinary grace under fire, Giuliani developed an intimate knowledge of emergency management and an affinity for quantifiable results. On 9/11, he earned the trust of most Americans; one year later, 78% of those surveyed by the Marist Institute had a favorable impression of Giuliani. This magazine also named Giuliani its Person of the Year in 2001. Assuming he can keep it, trust is a priceless resource in psychological warfare.

The evidence also shows great, gaping weaknesses. Giuliani’s penchant for secrecy, his tendency to value loyalty over merit and his hyperbolic rhetoric are exactly the kinds of instincts that counterterrorism experts say the U.S. can least afford right now.

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It’s about time.

Venezuela’s regional neighbors should be ready to respond to a potential threat from President Hugo Chavez’s arms build-up, which could be used to intimidate rather than for self-defense, a senior U.S. defense official said on Thursday.

Chavez, a self-styled socialist staunchly opposed to Washington, has irked the White House by spending billions of dollars on Russian fighter jets, attack helicopters and Kalashnikov rifles to refurbish the military.

The Bush administration has banned U.S. arms sales to Venezuela, criticized Chavez’s purchase of jets from Moscow and said his plans to build rifle factories raise concerns about weapons reaching guerrillas in neighboring Colombia.

“It seems as if a build up of this character doesn’t really respond to the reality on the ground there,” U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Western Hemisphere Affairs Stephen Johnson told reporters during a visit Bogota.

“It has an effect of intimidating neighbors … and democracies in the region need to be able to respond to this in a way that will help reduce this kind of threat,” he said.

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I think that they have declared war on the people of this country along time ago.

China has launched a four-month “war” on tainted food, drugs and exports, state media reported on Friday, as beleaguered officials embraced time-tested campaign tactics to clean up the country’s battered image.

Chinese Vice Premier Wu Yi told officials that the campaign, to run to the end of the year, would focus on problem products that have corroded domestic and foreign consumers’ confidence in the “made in China” label.

“This is a special battle to protect the health and personal interests of the public and to protect the reputation of Chinese goods and the national image,” Wu said, according to the government Web site (www.gov.cn).

She called the campaign a “stern political task” — a reminder that officials’ careers may be on the line.

The world’s largest toymaker, Mattel, recalled more than 18 million Chinese-made toys in mid-August because of hazards from small magnets that can cause injury if swallowed, just two weeks after it recalled 1.5 million toys due to fears over lead paint.

Wal-Mart said it was asking suppliers to resubmit testing documentation for the toys it sells after Mattel’s move.

Other Chinese export scares have hit toothpaste, animal food ingredients, tires, eels and seafood, and deadly chemicals that found their way into cough medicine, killing patients in Panama

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I was not in Haditha when these killings occurred and neither were most in the press who wrote stories about atrocities committed. Nor was a Congressman from my home state present in this town but he chose to label these Marines cold blooded killers before a full investigation had even begun.

An investigating officer recommended Thursday dismissing all charges against a Marine accused of murdering two girls in an assault that killed 24 civilians in the Iraqi town of Haditha.

Lance Cpl. Stephen B. Tatum, 26, is charged with unpremeditated murder of two girls and negligent homicide on suspicion that he unlawfully killed two men, a woman and a boy. He is also accused of assaulting another boy and a girl.

Investigating officer Lt. Col. Paul Ware said the evidence was too weak for a court-martial. Tatum shot and killed civilians, but “he did so because of his training and the circumstances he was placed in, not to exact revenge and commit murder,” Ware wrote.

Many times over, I have said that if a member of the military deliberately takes the life of another, even in war, they deserve just punishment. Why is it though, that we are willing to grant civilians the right to be innocent until proven guilty but there are those who assume that the opposite should be true when it applies to our military.

Even if this Marine is eventually found not guilty of all charges as has been recommended, he will live the events of that day for the rest of his life just as someone would if they were in a civilian walk of life. War and tragedy are sometime synonymous, Haditha was one of those times.

HT: The Jawa Report

This is disgusting. These people are rewarded even when they break the law.

When he was last running for the United States Senate from New Jersey in 2002, Robert G. Torricelli collected donations from thousands of people who apparently wanted to see him re-elected. They might be surprised to see how he spent a portion of their money.

Mr. Torricelli, a Democrat who was one of the Senate’s most flamboyant personalities and prodigious fund-raisers, abruptly quit the 2002 race amid allegations of ethical misconduct and became a lobbyist. Since then, he has given $4,000 from his campaign fund to Puerto Rico’s nonvoting member of Congress, $10,000 to Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich of Illinois and more than $40,000 to Nevada Democratic Party organizations and candidates linked to the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid.

All of those politicians had one thing in common: influence over Mr. Torricelli’s, or his clients’, business interests.

In early 2006, for instance, Mr. Torricelli contributed $10,000 from his Senate account to the mayor of Trenton and his slate of City Council candidates, just as city agencies were reviewing an ultimately successful proposal by the former senator to develop retail and office space in the city.

There is no evidence that Mr. Torricelli, who declined to be interviewed for this article, violated federal rules, which allow retired officials to give leftover campaign funds to charities, candidates and political parties. Sean Jackson, Mr. Torricelli’s campaign treasurer and a partner in his lobbying firm, said in an interview that any suggestion that the contributions were tied to his business interests was “ridiculous.” He said that Mr. Torricelli contributed to people he knew or with whom he shared policy goals.

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This guy was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

A CIA inquiry has accused the agency’s ex-chief George Tenet and his aides of failing to prepare for al-Qaeda threats before the 9/11 attacks on the US.
“The agency and its officers did not discharge their responsibilities in a satisfactory manner,” the CIA inspector general wrote in a scathing report.

The document was completed in June 2005 and kept classified until now. Its release was ordered by Congress.

Mr Tenet, former CIA director, said the inspector general was “flat wrong”.

But some former CIA employees have told the BBC that the criticisms are justified.

Mr Tenet, who enjoyed strong support from President George W Bush, resigned in 2004 citing “personal reasons”.

The review team led by Inspector General John Helgerson found no “single point of failure” that would have stopped the attacks on 11 September 2001.

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I didn’t know that there was a Civil Rights Division in this justice department.

The head of the Justice Department’s embattled Civil Rights Division is to resign at the end of August, officials said yesterday, making him the latest in a series of senior political appointees to leave the agency amid continued controversy over Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales.

Wan J. Kim, the assistant attorney general for civil rights since November 2005, has been closely questioned by congressional Democrats about the administration’s policy decisions and allegations by former career officials of improper hiring within the division, mostly under his predecessor.

Kim is set to join nearly a dozen other senior Justice Department officials and aides who have resigned this year. The departures come as Gonzales fends off calls from lawmakers for his resignation over his handling of the firings of nine U.S. attorneys last year and congressional testimony that lawmakers have called misleading.

Wan’s predecessor, Bradley J. Schlozman, resigned from the department last week. The department’s inspector general is investigating allegations that Schlozman considered political affiliations in the hiring of career employees.

Gonzales said in a statement that Kim, who joined the department more than a decade ago, has “served the Department of Justice and the American people with distinction and honor.” The statement continued: “I will miss his honest opinions and valuable contributions as an advisor to me.” He praised Kim for enforcing traditional anti-discrimination laws, as well as newer statutes on human trafficking and minority-language ballot requirements.

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Speaks for itself.

It all started, Michael Vick’s estranged father said, when the Atlanta Falcons quarterback was a child growing up in a rough area of Newport News, Va., and would join other neighborhood kids in setting loose a dog every so often to watch it chase a cat around a nearby lumberyard.

Vick’s “fascination with animals” eventually would lead him to be an active participant in a dogfighting operation, Michael Boddie said in an interview yesterday in which he traced his son’s involvement in the illegal activity to Vick’s college days at Virginia Tech. Boddie said he was dismissed by his son when he tried to convince Vick that being involved in dogfighting was potentially harmful to his career.

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In part one of a four part series, Michael Yon tell us of the “Ghosts of Anbar.”

Our Anbar-war can be said to have begun after the invasion in 2003, and for most of its duration, Fallujah has been the crucible Anbar city. In the beginning, in this city of mosques, the people of Fallujah had not resisted. But friction bred of perceived injustices seethed steadily, until the light fighting of 2003 exploded early in 2004, when on the final day of March in that year, four contractors were murdered and mutilated in Fallujah. The spokesmen for the killers called it an act of revenge, justice even. They called the murdered contractors mercenaries; their charred corpses dangling from what soldiers and Marines now call “Blackwater Bridge.”

This segment is presented with some fascinating pictures of gravestones from years gone by.

As always, Michael dispatches a concise, unbiased report.

Now here is a man that shouldn’t be walking the streets free and CNN will now be taken off my channel list of news networks.

This afternoon on The Situation Room, CNN ran one of their “Keeping Them Honest” segments about Crandall Canyon mine owner Robert Murray , examining the safety record of Murray Energy’s 19 other mining operations. Murray correctly claimed that the safety record of Crandall Canyon was “almost outstanding, much better than the national average” — though tragically, that was obviously prior to the collapse that trapped 6 miners 18 days ago and launched a risky recovery mission that took the lives of three rescuers one week ago tonight. CNN looked into Murray’s other mining operations, though, and found some shocking statistics: Of Murray’s 19 mines, 7 were underground and 4 of them had accident rates above the national average. CNN specifically cited Murray’s Illinois Galatia mine, which CNN reports has racked up 3,485 safety citations in the last 2.5 years, and has had an above-average rate of injury every year since Murray bought it. Murray’s Galatia mine has racked up 968 safety citations in 2007, almost a quarter of which are considered “significant and substantial.” Murray challenges many of the citations — but has also paid approximately $700,000 in fines from 2005-2006. Great information to have — but wow, is it ever late.

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I’m probably one of very few that doesn’t care what happens to Iraq once we leave so I’ll let this article speak for itself.

A stark assessment released Thursday by the nation’s intelligence agencies depicts a paralyzed Iraqi government unable to take advantage of the security gains achieved by the thousands of extra American troops dispatched to the country this year.
The assessment, known as a National Intelligence Estimate, casts strong doubts on the viability of the Bush administration strategy in Iraq. It gives a dim prognosis on the likelihood that Iraqi politicians can heal deep sectarian rifts before next spring, when American military commanders have said that a crunch on available troops will require reducing the United States’ presence in Iraq.

But the report also implicitly criticizes proposals offered by Democrats, including several presidential candidates, who have called for a withdrawal of American combat troops from Iraq by next year and for a major shift in the American approach, from manpower-intensive counterinsurgency operations to lower-profile efforts aimed at supporting Iraqi troops and carrying out quick-strike counterterrorism raids.

Such a shift, the report says, would “erode security gains achieved thus far” and could return Iraq to a downward spiral of sectarian violence.

After a summer of rancorous debate over the future of America’s mission in Iraq, the intelligence report is the most prominent and authoritative assessment to date of what the administration calls a surge strategy.

The report, which represents the consensus view of America’s 16 intelligence agencies, suggests that policy makers face a dilemma. While the current strategy in Iraq has produced “measurable but uneven improvements” in security, it says, the approach has done little to bridge sectarian divides in Iraq. The report also says that pulling American troops out of Iraq would most likely make things far worse.

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What the heck is going on in the peoples house?

Rep. Rick Renzi (R-Ariz.) will not be running for reelection next year, creating a highly contested open seat in a competitive eastern Arizona district.

“I will not be seeking reelection to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2008. I am honored and thankful to serve Arizona’s 1st District and appreciate all that we have accomplished together over the past 6 years,” Renzi said in a statement released by his office.

Renzi had been under an ethical cloud for much of the year, amid a federal investigation into his business dealings. He resigned from all of his committee assignments, and was under pressure from GOP leadership to vacate his seat. He also suffered financial woes: At the end of the second quarter, Renzi’s legal bills were higher than the amount of money in his campaign account.

Renzi’s retirement is the fifth among House Republicans in the last month, following announcements from Reps. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), Ray LaHood (R-Ill.), Deborah Pryce (R-Ohio) and Chip Pickering (R-Miss.) that they will not be seeking reelection.

There will likely be a crowded Democratic field vying for the nomination. State Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick has already announced her candidacy, and is considered one of the leading candidates. Attorney Howard Shanker and television reporter Mary Kim Titla have also announced campaigns, with a slew of other Democrats considering bids.

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Speaks for itself.

One of the Senate’s top Republicans has called on President Bush to start bringing U.S. troops home from Iraq by Christmas, telling reporters Thursday that a pullout was needed to spur Iraqi leaders to action.

Sen. John Warner, the influential former chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he has recommended that Bush announce the beginning of a U.S. withdrawal in mid-September, after a report from the top U.S. officials in Iraq.

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I guess that they take care of their own.

Florida’s top police agency said Wednesday its investigation into former U.S. Rep. Mark Foley’s lurid Internet communications with teenage boys has been hindered because neither Foley nor the House will let investigators examine his congressional computers.

The Florida Department of Law Enforcement says it hopes to conclude its investigation next week. Foley, a Florida Republican, resigned from Congress on Sept. 29 after being confronted with the computer messages he sent to male teenage pages who had worked on Capitol Hill.

“We have requested to review federally owned computers that Mr. Foley used during his time as a representative, but the U.S. House of Representatives … cited case law restrictions that prohibited them from releasing those computers,” said Heather Smith, an FDLE spokeswoman.

Smith said that the House claims the computers are considered congressional work papers, and that only Foley can release them for review.

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This is Guss’ and my great-aunt. She was also a surrogate mother to us, hence we called her Mama-Auntie.

She was kind but very strict. In this photo you see her sitting on the front deck of her basket shop making a shopping basket.

From the looks of the shawl around her I would think this picture was taken in late summer or early fall.

Today is the 115th anniversary of her birth and I still miss her tremendously.

I also want to mention that Guss’ beloved is celebrating a birthday today. Happy birthday to her. You’re the best thing that ever happened to Guss.