Obsidian Wings

US Attorneys: The Basics

by hilzoy

Some basics on the US Attorney story:

(1) Question: Isn't this just like what Clinton did? Answer: no. US Attorneys are often replaced at the beginning of a new President's first term. They are almost never replaced in midterm, like this. Here's a Congressional Research Study:

"At least 54 U.S. attorneys appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate left office before completion of a four-year term between 1981 and 2006 (not counting those whose tenure was interrupted by a change in presidential administration). Of those 54, 17 left to become Article III federal judges, one left to become a federal magistrate judge, six left to serve in other positions in the executive branch, four sought elective office, two left to serve in state government, one died, and 15 left to enter or return to private practice. Of the remaining eight U.S. attorneys who left before completing a four-year term without a change in presidential administration, two were apparently dismissed by the President, and three apparently resigned after news reports indicated they had engaged in questionable personal actions. No information was available on the three remaining U.S. attorneys who resigned."

So: at least two, and at most five, US Attorneys were removed from office in the middle of their terms between 1981 and the present firings. George W. Bush managed to fire more attorneys on one day than had been fired in mid-term during the previous 25 years.

(2) Question: So what? What difference does it make if the President fires people at the beginning of his term or in the middle, given that it's probably for political reasons either way? Answer: When a President replaces US Attorneys at the beginning of his term, he is generally doing so to put in people who fit his ideology or accept his priorities, or to reward supporters. It's a lot less likely that he will be replacing them because they have disobeyed his orders to investigate or indict someone, or to stop an ongoing investigation.

When a President replaces US Attorneys in mid-term, however, he can sack them not just for not being fully aligned with him ideologically, but for their actions on some specific case. He might want them to back off an investigation they think should be pursued, or to investigate or indict where they think there's no evidence. And that's a lot more serious, since it gives Presidents the power to direct the power of law enforcement at their political opponents.

Lest this seem like an abstract worry...

Public Service Announcement

by publius

It's pledge week at Majikthise. I'd encourage people to help Lindsay stay off of drugs (i.e. pharma reporting) and continue with the journalism. Given the lack of institutional funding available for progressive writers, these efforts are both important and areas where progressive blogs can make a real difference.

The Plot Thickens

by hilzoy

From the NYT:

"The White House was deeply involved in the decision late last year to dismiss federal prosecutors, including some who had been criticized by Republican lawmakers, administration officials said Monday.

Last October, President Bush spoke with Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales to pass along concerns by Republicans that some prosecutors were not aggressively addressing voter fraud, the White House said Monday. Senator Pete V. Domenici, Republican of New Mexico, was among the politicians who complained directly to the president, according to an administration official.

The president did not call for the removal of any specific United States attorneys, said Dana Perino, a White House spokeswoman. She said she had “no indication” that the president had been personally aware that a process was already under way to identify prosecutors who would be fired.

But Ms Perino disclosed that White House officials had consulted with the Justice Department in preparing the list of United States attorneys who would be removed.

Within a few weeks of the president’s comments to the attorney general, the Justice Department forced out seven prosecutors.

Previously, the White House has said that Mr. Bush’s aides approved the list of prosecutors only after it was compiled."

And by some strange coincidence, the Justice Department official who helped draw up the list just happened to resign yesterday, "after acknowledging that he did not tell Justice officials about the extent of his communications with the White House, leading them to provide incomplete information to Congress."

The Post adds these details:

"The documents show that Sampson sent an e-mail to Miers in March 2005 ranking all 93 U.S. attorneys. Strong performers "exhibited loyalty" to the administration; low performers were "weak U.S. attorneys who have been ineffectual managers and prosecutors, chafed against Administration initiatives, etc." A third group merited no opinion.

At least a dozen prosecutors were on a "target list" to be fired at one time or another, the e-mails show.

The e-mails also show that Rove was interested in the appointment of a former colleague, Tim Griffin, as an Arkansas prosecutor. Sampson wrote in one e-mail that "getting him appointed was important to Harriet, Karl, etc."

Only three of those eventually fired were given low rankings: Margaret Chiara in Grand Rapids, Mich., Bud Cummins in Little Rock and Carol S. Lam in San Diego. Two were given strong evaluations: David C. Iglesias in Albuquerque, who has alleged political interference from GOP lawmakers, and Kevin V. Ryan in San Francisco, whose firing has generated few complaints because of widespread management and morale problems in his office. (...)

Iglesias, the New Mexico prosecutor, was not on the list in September. Justice officials said Sampson added Iglesias in October, based in part on complaints from Sen. Pete V. Domenici and other New Mexico Republicans that he was not prosecuting enough voter-fraud cases. (...)

One e-mail from Miers's deputy, William Kelley, on the day of the Dec. 7 firings said Domenici's chief of staff "is happy as a clam" about Iglesias. Sampson wrote in an e-mail a week later: "Domenici is going to send over names tomorrow (not even waiting for Iglesias's body to cool).""

Hopefully, this will help speed up Pete Domenici's move from the US Senate to someplace where he can wander around in his pajamas all day long without anyone batting an eye. He's up for reelection in 2008.

Josh Marshall, whose site I checked right after reading this article, adds:

"There's a sub-issue emerging in the canned US Attorneys scandal: the apparently central role of Republican claims of voter fraud and prosecutors unwillingness to bring indictments emerging from such alleged wrongdoing. Very longtime readers of this site will remember that this used to be something of a hobby horse of mine. And it's not surprising that it is now emerging as a key part of this story. The very short version of this story is that Republicans habitually make claims about voter fraud. But the charges are almost invariably bogus. And in most if not every case the claims are little more than stalking horses for voter suppression efforts. That may sound like a blanket charge. But I've reported on and written about this issue at great length. And there's simply no denying the truth of it. So this becomes a critical backdrop to understanding what happened in some of these cases. Why didn't the prosecutors pursue indictments when GOP operatives started yakking about voter fraud? Almost certainly because there just wasn't any evidence for it."

This is definitely getting interesting.

Why Clinton's Iraq Problem Matters

by publius

Having been on hiatus, I’ve spent some time lately wondering why I’m so viscerally blah about Hillary Clinton’s candidacy. Apparently I’m not the only one – she scored an anemic 4% in the latest MyDD straw poll. I’ve tried hard to come up with a Slate-like contrarian post about why my Clinton Blahs have nothing to do with Iraq. But I can’t – it’s Iraq. It’s not merely though that she supported the war, it’s that the specific way she supported it speaks volumes (bad volumes) about what a future Clinton administration would look like.

First things first – I could care less about whether Clinton “apologizes” for supporting the war. I actually hope she doesn’t at this point. But I won’t be supporting her in the primary regardless of what she does.

I also don’t really care about her 2002 vote. A lot of smart people supported the war in good conscience. No, what bothers me is not her initial support, but her ongoing support in the face of obvious and ongoing failures. What bothers me is her prolonged post-war silence. As Yglesias has documented, she consciously played up an image as a war supporter and a hawk for years. In doing so, she essentially abandoned progressives on the foreign policy and national security fronts until very recently. “Abandon,” I think, is the most appropriate word to use. After all, the netroots’ skepticism of Clinton is rooted in the feeling that she left everyone out to dry when they could have really benefited from her speaking out. Kos expresses well what I think a lot of these people are feeling:

These Democrats didn't just enable Bush's war, they sat by and let the Right Wing smear machine attack those of us who waged our lonely battles to prevent this disaster from happening. And while most of the candidates in the field have come around, Hillary remains the notable exception.

My only quibble is that, with respect to Clinton, the post-war bothers me more than the pre-war. She could and should have spoken out earlier against what she clearly recognized were disastrous policies. But she didn’t. She stayed silent and let others do that, while she floated above the fray with an eye to keeping her centrist hawkish street cred intact for 2008. While others risked political capital to criticize, she waited until criticism no longer carried political risks.

Personal bitterness aside, there’s actually a more substantive concern. After all, I think it’s important to de-personalize presidential elections. Personality matters only to the extent it materially affects the shape of the candidate’s future administration and executive branch. People may feel personally betrayed by Clinton, but that doesn’t mean she wouldn’t assemble an outstanding and effective executive branch.

But I don’t think she will. And this is where Iraq comes in. I would bet a million dollars to one that Clinton never really supported the war. But even if she did, I’m even more confident that she quickly recognized the gross incompetence of its execution. But despite all that, she basically stayed silent for years and kept on portraying herself as a hawk.

And here’s the heart of it – the Iraq issue matters because it shows, at heart, what most motivates Clinton is the fear of being perceived as too liberal. I don’t know if these fears are rooted in coming of political age in Arkansas during the Reagan years, or with the scars of 1994, or what. But what bothers me about Clinton’s Iraq policy is that it suggests that her administration will be scared and small. It will be an administration of half-measures and clichés, so scared of its liberal shadow that it won’t go to the mat for progressive policies. For example, in light of 1994, I suspect Clinton is the least likely of all the Democratic candidates to put up a real fight for serious health care reform if elected. I can also easily see her getting bullied into military action. And so on.

The Geffen episode reinforces these fears. Clinton wants to ride an aura of inevitability to victory. Her team wants people to think they’re an efficient, Republican-eating machine. But they’re not. They’re fraidy cats. If the Geffen episode shows us nothing else, it’s that the Clinton team is paranoid, scared, and not very comfortable in their own skin. That’s not exactly a recipe for ushering in the great progressive political realignment.

That said, I’m sure that Clinton – like Bill – will hold the line on the budget and appoint good people to agencies and to the courts. But as far as sticking her neck out and risking capital on something that could be a game-changer such as universal health care or global warming legislation, I don’t see her even attempting it. In other words, there will be no attempt to move the goal posts. She will operate within the terms of the existing debate, and she'll do just fine within that narrow scope. And who knows -- maybe that's a good thing. Maybe we need a break from big ideas. But personally, I'd like a bit more "potential energy."

On a final note, there is some value in keeping the people who voted for the war out of the White House. Let’s be honest -- very few of the Democrats who voted for war (including Kerry) actually believed in it. They made a political gamble and, frankly, it was probably a rational one. But it was a gamble, and they lost. And there’s a certain amount of Justice in denying the White House to those who disingenuously support war for political reasons. (That’s another reason why I admire Gore – his votes never struck me as insincere, even his Gulf War vote).

All the best tragedies turn on a simple thing – a choice. A choice is made and space and time and consequence bend around that choice, changing the world of the chooser. If Clinton loses the White House because of her choice, it might be tragedy for her. But it seems like a pretty just result to me.

But Wait: There's More!

by hilzoy

From Salon:

"As the military scrambles to pour more soldiers into Iraq, a unit of the Army's 3rd Infantry Division at Fort Benning, Ga., is deploying troops with serious injuries and other medical problems, including GIs who doctors have said are medically unfit for battle. Some are too injured to wear their body armor, according to medical records. (...)

Master Sgt. Jenkins, 42, has a degenerative spine problem and a long scar down the back of his neck where three of his vertebrae were fused during surgery. He takes a cornucopia of potent pain pills. His medical records say he is "at significantly increased risk of re-injury during deployment where he will be wearing Kevlar, body armor and traveling through rough terrain." Late last year, those medical records show, a doctor recommended that Jenkins be referred to an Army board that handles retirements when injuries are permanent and severe.

A copy of Jenkins' profile written after that Feb. 15 meeting and signed by Capt. Starbuck, the brigade surgeon, shows a healthier soldier than the profile of Jenkins written by another doctor just late last year, though Jenkins says his condition is unchanged. Other soldiers' documents show the same pattern.

One female soldier with psychiatric issues and a spine problem has been in the Army for nearly 20 years. "My [health] is deteriorating," she said over dinner at a restaurant near Fort Benning. "My spine is separating. I can't carry gear." Her medical records include the note "unable to deploy overseas." Her status was also reviewed on Feb. 15. And she has been ordered to Iraq this week."

The captain interviewed by Salon also requested anonymity because he fears retribution. He suffered a back injury during a previous deployment to Iraq as an infantry platoon leader. A Humvee accident "corkscrewed my spine," he explained. Like the female soldier, he is unable to wear his protective gear, and like her he too was ordered to Iraq after his meeting with the division surgeon and brigade surgeon on Feb. 15. He is still at Fort Benning and is fighting the decision to send him to Baghdad. "It is a numbers issue with this whole troop surge," he claimed. "They are just trying to get those numbers."

Another soldier contacted Salon by telephone last week expressed considerable anxiety, in a frightened tone, about deploying to Iraq in her current condition. (She also wanted to remain anonymous, fearing retribution.) An incident during training several years ago injured her back, forcing doctors to remove part of her fractured coccyx. She suffers from degenerative disk disease and has two ruptured disks and a bulging disk in her back. While she said she loves the Army and would like to deploy after back surgery, her current injuries would limit her ability to wear her full protective gear. She deployed to Iraq last week, the day after calling Salon.

Someone needs to explain to me again why we are not in the process of breaking the army. We're already waiving educational requirements, letting people in who have criminal records and behavioral problems, and now we're shipping people who are too badly hurt to serve off to Iraq.

This is just wrong. If we need more soldiers, we should either dramatically increase their pay or institute a draft. People who have already wrecked their health deserve not to be sent back into harm's way. And their fellow soldiers deserve comrades who can actually do what they are asked to do without hesitation.

In good news, however, Kevin Kiley, the Army's Surgeon General who used to command Walter Reed, and who had heard a lot of the complaints about it and done nothing, has resigned under pressure. Besides the fact that he personally seems to have deserved to lose his job, it's a wonderful thing to have the message that screwing over wounded veterans can cost you your career percolating through the Army bureaucracy. It would be nice if we could count on everyone to do the decent thing without needing to be reminded, but since we can't, we need to make sure people are vividly aware that their self-interest requires not being the person on whose watch the Washington Post comes up with its next exposé.

300

by von

LET'S GET the obligatory post on "300" out of the way, since the movie seems to be everywhere these days.

1.  I haven't seen it.

2.  Yet, based on the previews alone, I am willing to endorse the thesis of Andrew Sullivan's respondant.

3.  The stand at Thermopylae was the only good thing that Sparta ever did.  I'm not kidding:  there's very little to like about Spartan society, particularly when compared with Athenian democracy (the competing model); the standard Spartan army was no better than the army of any other Greek state (as clearly demonstrated in later conflicts); and the best way to explain the Spartan foreign policy of the age is that it included equal parts pride, greed and envy -- sometimes with a healthy dose of stupidity as well.  Moreover, only a few decades after Thermopylae, Sparta was making common cause with the Persians in Sparta's wars against Athens.  Defender of the Greeks?  Only when it suited Sparta's interest.

4.  The stand of the 300, while an important rearguard action, was not the critical battle in this particular campaign.  Rather, the crucial battles occured at sea, when an Athens-led navy took on a much-larger Persian fleet.  The Athenian navy both (1) saved Leonidas' ass for days by denying the much-larger Persian fleet safe harbor to land marines directly behind him and (2) eventually destroyed the much-larger Persian fleet at the Battle of Salamis, effectively (although not immediately) ending the campaign against Greece by severing Persia's supply lines.*  (Did I mention that the Persian fleet was much larger than the Athenian one?)  Themistocles, the Athenian general who commanded the naval fleet and masterminded the victory, gets no love.

5.  Oh, and it wasn't "300" anyway.  It was 300 Spartans supported by about 700 Thespians -- or 1000 Greeks total.  The Thespians also get no love. 

6.  The foregoing is Exhibit 1,204,995,231 in support of the thesis that there is no justice.

*Yes, credit for final victory is usually given to the Spartans at the Battle of Plataea, but that was simply the last battle in the Persian war -- it was not the turning point.

UPDATE:  Best comment so far is from Togolosh:  "In fact, I think it's likely that there were *no* Spartans at Thermopylae, but rather 700 regular Thespians and 300 Master Thespians who were pretending to be Spartans. Acting!"

Also, Jesurgislac rightly notes that Spartan women had an easier go of it than Athenian women.  That's one reason I wrote "there's very little to like about Spartan society" rather than there's nothing to like about Spartan society, but I should do a better job pointing out that Sparta is closer to modern norms on at least this issue.  Still, given that (1) Sparta's armies really were not the shiznit of the ancient world, but, by and large, were only a notch-or-two above ordinary; (2) until Sparta bribed Athens' best rowers over to its side at the end of the PP war, a Spartan naval victory was defined as "Sparta flees (successfully)"; and (3) Sparta tried to sell out the rest of the Greeks to the Persians about 80 years after Thermopylae, it's pretty stunning how Sparta is regarded today.

Prosecutors

by hilzoy

Having been busy, I haven't written about the firing of the eight prosecutors before now. (Josh Marshall has, and if you haven't been reading his reporting on it, you should. And TPMMuckraker has helpfully collected all its posts on this story here.) But it's one more of those stories that ought to be shocking, but isn't even surprising anymore. (The one truly surprising thing is that I found myself feeling nostalgic for John Ashcroft, of all people. One of the fired prosecutors, quoted in the NYT: "He said he had been guided by a personal admonition from former Attorney General John Ashcroft shortly after he was appointed in 2001. “He took me into his office and said, ‘David, when you come here, you’ve got to stay out of politics.’ ”)

The idea that prosecutors -- who have the power to decide whose life gets to be made hell on earth by being subjected to an investigation, and whose does not -- are being leaned on by Congresspeople, political operatives, and the like to prosecute Democrats is just wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. The latest twist:

"Presidential advisor Karl Rove and at least one other member of the White House political team were urged by the New Mexico Republican party chairman to fire the state's U.S. attorney because of dissatisfaction with his job performance including his failure to indict Democrats in a voter fraud investigation in the battleground election state.

In an interview Saturday with McClatchy Newspapers, Chairman Allen Weh said he complained in 2005 about then-U.S. Attorney David Iglesias to a White House liaison who worked for Rove and asked that he be removed. Weh said he followed up with Rove personally in late 2006 during a visit to the White House. (...)

Weh recalled asking Rove at a White House holiday event in December: "Is anything ever going to happen to that guy?" What Weh didn't know was that the firings of Iglesias and the others had already been approved.

Weh said Rove told him: "`He's gone.' I probably said something close to `Hallelujah.'""

Josh Marshall notes one big unanswered question: given that other prosecutors were subjected to pressure to prosecute Democrats, and apparently fired for not doing so, was Carol Lam fired because of her investigations of Republicans?

"Given what we know about New Mexico and Washington state, it simply defies credulity to believe that Lam -- in the midst of an historic corruption investigation touching the CIA, the White House and major Republican appropriators on Capitol Hill -- got canned because she wasn't prosecuting enough immigration cases. Was it the cover? Sure. The reason? Please.

I'm not sure Lam would have been canned simply for prosecuting Cunningham. His corruption was so wild and cartoonish that even a crew with as little respect for the rule of law would have realized the impossibility of not prosecuting him. But she didn't stop there. She took her investigation deep into congressional appropriations process -- kicking off a continuing probe into the dealings of former Appropriations Committee Chairman Jerry Lewis. She also followed the trail into the heart of the Bush CIA. Those two stories are like mats of loose threads. That's where the story lies. "

(The administration claims Lam was fired because she didn't prosecute immigration cases aggressively enough, though apparently they didn't think so a few months before (pdf).)

Paul Krugman raises another crucial point:

"The bigger scandal, however, almost surely involves prosecutors still in office. The Gonzales Eight were fired because they wouldn’t go along with the Bush administration’s politicization of justice. But statistical evidence suggests that many other prosecutors decided to protect their jobs or further their careers by doing what the administration wanted them to do: harass Democrats while turning a blind eye to Republican malfeasance.

Donald Shields and John Cragan, two professors of communication, have compiled a database of investigations and/or indictments of candidates and elected officials by U.S. attorneys since the Bush administration came to power. Of the 375 cases they identified, 10 involved independents, 67 involved Republicans, and 298 involved Democrats. The main source of this partisan tilt was a huge disparity in investigations of local politicians, in which Democrats were seven times as likely as Republicans to face Justice Department scrutiny."

(The study is available here.)

He also brings up the investigation of Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ), which happened shortly before the election and has mysteriously vanished since:

"For those of us living in the Garden State, the growing scandal over the firing of federal prosecutors immediately brought to mind the subpoenas that Chris Christie, the former Bush “Pioneer” who is now the U.S. attorney for New Jersey, issued two months before the 2006 election — and the way news of the subpoenas was quickly leaked to local news media.

The subpoenas were issued in connection with allegations of corruption on the part of Senator Bob Menendez, a Democrat who seemed to be facing a close race at the time. Those allegations appeared, on their face, to be convoluted and unconvincing, and Mr. Menendez claimed that both the investigation and the leaks were politically motivated.

Mr. Christie’s actions might have been all aboveboard. But given what we’ve learned about the pressure placed on federal prosecutors to pursue dubious investigations of Democrats, Mr. Menendez’s claims of persecution now seem quite plausible.

In fact, it’s becoming clear that the politicization of the Justice Department was a key component of the Bush administration’s attempt to create a permanent Republican lock on power. Bear in mind that if Mr. Menendez had lost, the G.O.P. would still control the Senate."

It is, unfortunately, standard practice for Presidents to give things like Ambassadorships to their political supporters. It is not, and should never be, standard practice for them to turn the full punitive powers of the Federal government on their opponents. This is a serious scandal, and I hope it is investigated for all it's worth.

Ahmadinejad's rough week

by Charles

The Iranian president has had better times, but he's been looking downright beleaguered of late.  Going down the list...

The defecting defense minister.  Although it happened a month ago, Mr. Asghari is tucked away in a secret European location and presumably giving his hosts information that is damaging to the regime.  More here:

AN Iranian general who defected to the West last month had been spying on Iran since 2003 when he was recruited on an overseas business trip, according to Iranian sources.

This weekend Brigadier General Ali Reza Asgari, 63, the former deputy defence minister, is understood to be undergoing debriefing at a Nato base in Germany after he escaped from Iran, followed by his family.

A daring getaway via Damascus was organised by western intelligence agencies after it became clear that his cover was about to be blown. Iran’s notorious secret service, the Vavak, is believed to have suspected that he was a high-level mole.

According to the Iranian sources, the escape took several months to arrange. At least 10 close members of his family had to flee the country. Asgari has two sons, a daughter and several grandchildren and it is believed that all, including his daughters-in-law, are now out of Iran. Their final destination is unknown.

Asgari is said to have carried with him documents disclosing Iran’s links to terrorists in the Middle East. It is not thought that he had details of the country’s nuclear programme.

Aaaaahh! Open Thread

by hilzoy

My life has been monstrously busy lately -- deadlines, talks, and then, suddenly, the fact that I had earlier said "sure, I'll sit on the graduate student admissions committee" morphed from a breezy comment into the need to spend most of last weekend reading dossiers, at perhaps the least convenient time in the last year.

Now I'm back, having spent today unnerving all sorts of taxi drivers and people working at airport newsstands by grinning and telling them to have a WONDERFUL day. Completely sincerely. The fact that a new batch of papers to be graded just came in has completely failed to dent this mood.

I haven't read the paper in days. I don't know where to start. What has been happening, other than Libby? And how are you?

Open thread, in case you hadn't figured that out. And have a WONDERFUL day ;)

The Kobayashi Maru Scenario

UNLESS Y'ALL convince me otherwise right quick, I'm about to deploy Plan B of von's way in political giving:  start giving money to the least objectionable candidate in the primaries of both parties.  The idea is to do what one can to avoid the tragedy of a match-up like the one we saw in '04, which really was a no-win situation.  So, like Captain Kirk, I'm going to try to revise the game.

Ironically, the easiest race for me (right now) is the Democratic one:  There's really only one Democratic candidate for whom I have any regard,* and probably only because he still remains a bit of an enigma (despite Hilzoy's efforts).  That would be one Barack Hussein Obama.  On the Republican side, it's come down to a battle between loyalty to McCain -- the authoritarian whom I know -- and Giuliani -- the authoritarian whom I don't know.  I suppose I should support McCain again, since I supported him in '00.  But is loyalty among my vices?

*Bill Richardson is still off my radar.