Situation in Iraq

The Senate gave President Bush a big win on Iraq Tuesday night as it passed a massive $555 billion spending bill combining funding for 14 Cabinet departments with $70 billion for U.S. military operations there and in Afghanistan.

But Bush’s GOP allies were divided over whether the omnibus appropriations bill represented a win for the party in a monthslong battle with Democrats over domestic agency budgets.

In rapid succession, the Senate cast two votes to approve the hybrid spending bill. By a 70-25 vote, the Senate approved the Iraq and Afghanistan war funds—without restrictions that Democrats had insisted on for weeks.

Senators followed with a 76-17 vote to agree to a bundle of 11 annual appropriations bills funding domestic agencies and the foreign aid budget for the budget year that began Oct. 1. Read the rest of this entry »

At least two Iraq police officers were killed and 13 men were wounded a suicide car bomber detonated outside the home of former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, Iraqi Interior Ministry officials said.

The attack was staged around 8:20 a.m. (12:20 a.m. ET) on al-Zaytoun Street, bordering the heavily fortified International Zone, as police were gathering for a shift change.

The suicide attacker was in a white Toyota Corolla car, which has been blown up into many small pieces. According to the Interior Ministry, three vehicles and a number of concrete blast barriers were destroyed.

A U.S. soldier is dead and two others are wounded in a suicide car bombing in a mostly Sunni area of Iraq north of Baghdad. Iraqi police say seven inmates were killed when mortar shells crashed into a prison at an Interior Ministry complex in the capital city. The U.S. military says five prisoners were killed and 25 wounded.

More than a year after infantryman Alejandro Albarran lost part of his right leg to a blast in Iraq, he still hasn’t decided whether he’ll stay in the Army.

“Right now, I’m leaning against it,” Albarran said, looking ahead with distaste to a possible desk job.

But whatever he decides, Spc. Albarran, 20, won’t be leaving Army life behind now that his wife enlisted to take his place among the ranks.

“After everything he’s gone through — and he loves the Army — he kind of inspired me,” Janay Albarran said. “I made him a promise that I would finish what he started.”

So, while he underwent five-day-a-week rehab to recover his balance and strength on a prosthetic leg at an Army rehabilitation facility here, she learned to shoot a rifle and stand in formation in boot camp at Fort Jackson, S.C.

Mrs. Albarran became Pvt. Albarran on Friday. The couple’s 2-year-old daughter is staying with a grandmother in Arizona.

Across the Army, roughly 24,000 soldiers, roughly 9 percent of the force, are married to other soldiers. There are no statistics on how many join after a spouse or family member is badly wounded in combat, but Maj. Anne Edgecomb, an Army spokeswoman, said she’s heard of siblings joining after the injury or death of a soldier and at least one woman who joined after her husband was killed in combat.

“The courage of our soldiers and their families is remarkable,” she said.

Janay Albarran, 19, wasn’t always thrilled with the prospect of Army life. She met her husband at a high school football game in Yuma, Ariz., near where they grew up.

She learned later from an online profile he already had signed up for the Army.

“I was like, ‘Well, I met somebody and he’s about to leave.’ I was a little upset,” Janay Albarran said. “I knew he was joining the Army and we’re at war.”

The couple married in February 2006, and he deployed to Iraq six months later.

He was in a Humvee escorting a unit that was sent to the scene of a detonated bomb in November 2006 when a second blast hit. The vehicle reared up and slammed to the ground. Alejandro Albarran only remembers flashes: a medic over him, the helicopter.

A 5 a.m. phone call told Janay Albarran her husband was hurt and she should have a bag packed.

She met him at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington several days later, and they traveled to Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, where some of the most severely wounded are treated.

It quickly became clear that efforts to save Alejandro Albarran’s lower right leg were failing. When the pain became too great, he told his wife to let the doctors amputate.

At first, Janay Albarran had to help her husband dress and get out his wheelchair.

“She had to be my memory. My short term memory is bad,” said Alejandro Albarran, who also suffered a head injury in the blast.

But as he got more mobile, the teen wife who was afraid of guns decided to take her husband’s place in the ranks.

Janay Albarran will not, strictly speaking, be replacing her husband in the Army. He was an infantryman, a position not open to women. (But he notes with chagrin that she outscored him on her basic training rifle test.)

She expects to get a human resources assignment, one less likely to lead to deployment in Iraq.

“It’s just another job,” Alejandro Albarran said, taking a break between weight lifting sets at the large amputee rehab facility here.

But a safe assignment isn’t guaranteed.

Janay Albarran said she worries about possible deployment when she thinks about their daughter, Iliana.

“That’s the only thing that scares me. He’s already been hurt,” she said. “If I do get deployed, I’m going to miss him so much. But it’s nothing I can’t handle.”

A “State Department project manager banished from Iraq by the U.S. ambassador and under scrutiny by the Justice Department continues to oversee the construction of the much-delayed new American embassy in Baghdad from nearby Kuwait,” State Department officials disclosed yesterday.

37 percent: Number of military-family members who “approve of the job Bush is doing as president,” according to a new Bloomberg/LA Times poll. Just 36 percent of active-duty military, veterans, and their families believe “it was worth going to war in Iraq,” compared to a 2004 survey that found “64 percent of service members and their families supported the war.” VetVoice has more.

President Bush’s mortgage relief plan was “set by the mortgage industry and Wall Street firms. The effort is voluntary and it leaves plenty of wiggle room for lenders. Moreover, it would affect only a small number of subprime borrowers.”

“Senate Republicans are planning to call for a congressional commission to investigate the conclusions of the new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran as well as the specific intelligence that went into it.”

“In a sharp rebuke to White House counterterrorism policy,” the Senate and House intelligence committees agreed last night “to require all American interrogators to abide by the Army Field Manual, which prohibits coercive methods,” effectively outlawing harsh techniques used by the CIA.

With just a week before News Corporation takes control of Dow Jones & Company, Rupert Murdoch plans to remove many executives in the “upper echelon at Dow Jones” and replace them with his “trusted lieutenants.” (more…)

Bush recently announced a new, “enduring” occupation of Iraq, to be implemented without Congress’ approval. Today, Sens. Jim Webb (D-VA), Bob Casey (D-PA), Robert Byrd (D-WV), Ted Kennedy (D-MA), Carl Levin (D-MI) and Hillary Clinton (D-NY) warned Bush against committing the U.S. to a long-term presence without congressional consent:

[W]e want to convey our strong concern regarding any commitments made by the United States with respect to American security assurances to Iraq to help deter and defend against foreign aggression or other violations of Iraq’s territorial integrity. Security assurances, once made, cannot be easily rolled back without incurring a great cost to America’s strategic credibility and imperiling the stability of our nation’s other alliances around the world. […]

It is unacceptable for your Administration to unilaterally fashion a long-term relationship with Iraq without the full and comprehensive participation of Congress from the very start of such negotiations. […]

We trust you agree that the proposed extension of long-term U.S. security commitments to a nation in a critical region of the world requires the full participation and consent of the Congress as a co-equal branch of our government.

Read the full letter to President Bush below: (more…)

A new Government Accountability Office Pentagon Inspector General report details “massive failure in government procurement,” revealing that there is “more than $1 billion in unaccounted for military equipment and services provided to the Iraqi security forces.” According to the analysis, the military, for example, “could not account for 12,712 out of 13,508 weapons, including pistols, assault rifles, rocket propelled grenade launchers and machine guns.”

In 2005, while “in the midst of congressional and legal scrutiny” over its secret detention program, the CIA “destroyed at least two videotapes documenting the interrogation of two Al Qaeda operatives in the agency’s custody,” the agency admitted today. The videotapes, which contained footage of “severe interrogation techniques,” were “destroyed in part” out of concern that they could “could expose agency officials to greater risk of legal jeopardy.” The decision to destroy the tapes was made “within the C.I.A. itself.”

UPDATE: The AP reports that “House and Senate intelligence committee leaders were informed of the existence of the tapes and the CIA’s intention to destroy them.”

This morning, Time columnist Joe Klein was interviewed on MSNBC and heaped praise on President Bush’s response to the Iran NIE. Klein told Joe Scarborough:

The Bush reaction to [the NIE] — he didn’t try to block it. He didn’t try to postpone it. He didn’t spend weeks, he didn’t ask the intelligence community ‘give me a couple of weeks, let’s see if we can figure out some kind of negotiating initiative or some way to respond to this.’ He didn’t try to spin it to our advantage. This is an amazing moment of candor by the United States.blockquote> ThinkProgress criticized Klein for his comment that Bush’s reaction to the NIE was “an amazing moment of candor by the United States.” In a post titled “Misinterpreted,” Klein responds to our criticism:

This is wrong. OBviously, I was referring to the NIE itself as a remarkable moment of candor for the United States. I thought that Bush’s reaction to it was, literally, incredible. As in, not to be believed–which was made completely clear in my cover story.

In just a few short hours, Klein has gone from saying Bush engaged in an “amazing moment of candor,” to saying Bush is “not to be believed.” We appreciate the conversion, but we don’t appreciate the disingenuousness of it.

We weren’t “wrong” or “misinterpreted.” TV pundit Joe Klein explicitly said that an “amazing moment of candor” occurred in the context of “the Bush reaction” to the NIE; he marveled that Bush “didn’t try to block it” and “didn’t try to spin it.” But Time magazine blogger Joe Klein says, “I thought that Bush’s reaction to it was, literally, incredible. As in, not to be believed.” So what was it? Was Bush’s reaction part of America’s “moment of candor,” or was it “not to be believed”? The two Joe Kleins should interpret one another, sort it out, and get on the same page. And maybe one of the Joe Kleins should apologize to the other. As Atrios stated, “Is it possible for Joe Klein to admit error at all? He could just say: I misspoke, which is easy to do on live radio or television.”

UPDATE: BarbinMD recalls Joe Klein’s classic response to his FISA distortions: “I have neither the time nor legal background to figure out who’s right.”