by TChris

Even as Michael Brown plays the blame game, deflecting attention from his poor response to Hurricane Katrina, other FEMA officials are providing the Senate with honest information:

Marty Bahamonde, a FEMA regional director, told a Senate panel investigating the government's response to the disaster that he gave regular updates to people in contact with then-FEMA Director Michael Brown as early as Aug. 28, one day before Katrina made landfall.

In most cases, he was met with silence.

Brown's press secretary finally responded on Brown's behalf on Aug. 31, complaining via email that not enough time had been allocated for Brown to enjoy his dinner in Baton Rouge. At least we know that Brown's priorities are consistent with the president's: "It's important for me to go on with my life."

A must-read: Ray McGovern's "Cheney's chickens come home to roost."

The Wall St. Journal (free link) reports:

Officials who know Mr. Libby say he was almost certainly trying to shield Mr. Cheney from Mr. Wilson's charges that the White House manipulated prewar intelligence on Iraq. What is unknown is whether Mr. Libby's conversations with reporters were done on impulse, or part of a larger, scripted White House effort to discredit and punish Mr. Wilson by disclosing that his wife, Valerie Plame, worked at the Central Intelligence Agency. The grand jury on the case has also four times questioned White House deputy chief of staff Karl Rove.

WaPO has more details on Rove's last grand jury appearance in which sources familiar with his testimony (if it's not Luskin, I bet it's Ben Ginsberg) say Rove told the grand jury he learned of Plame's identity from Libby who said he learned it from Russert.

This Counterpunch timeline by Former NSC staffer Roger Morris is well-worth re-reading.

Human Rights First has released a report finding serious flaws in the investigations conducted by the U.S. into the death of 27 detainees.

The details are staggering – for example, evidence, including a bag of body parts, left on an airport tarmac that exploded from the heat and investigations so vague that the date of death falls within a 5-month span.

This is of critical relevance given the White House’s and House of Representatives' attempts to kill or water down the McCain Anti-Torture Amendment.

A 16 year old has been charged with the murder of Pamela Vitale, the wife of lawyer and tv pundit Daniel Horowitz.

I'm glad Dan and his family will have the closure. The funeral is today.

by TChris

An activist who wanted to make a media splash with his demonstration in favor of a proposed Georgia law that would deny state benefits to undocumented aliens couldn't find enough supporters to join his protest, so he paid fourteen homeless people $10 each to hold signs at a rally.

by TChris

"Tough on crime" posturing has been the fallback position of most politicians, Republican and Democrat alike, for more than two decades. It's nonetheless odd to hear Jeanine Pirro criticizing Democrats in the New York State Assembly for failing to enact sexual predator legislation that would detain convicted sex offenders indefinitely after they've finished serving their sentences. Pirro is running for the United States Senate, not the New York Assembly. Her obvious attempt to paint Sen. Hilary Clinton as just another Democrat who "coddles" criminals is disingenuous, given that Clinton isn't a state legislator and doesn't vote on proposed state legislation.

by TChris

As reported in the NY Times, Australian journalists revealed that American soldiers in Afghanistan “burned the bodies of two dead Taliban fighters and then used the charred and smoking corpses in a propaganda campaign against the insurgents.” According to the Australian report, a “psychological operations team” used a loudspeaker to broadcast taunts while driving through a village suspected of harboring Taliban fighters.

According to the program's translation of the taunts, which were delivered in the local language by American forces on the scene, a soldier identified as Sgt. Jim Baker, said: "You allowed your fighters to be laid down facing west and burned. You are too scared to come down and retrieve the bodies. This just proves you are the lady boys we always believed you to be." … The reference to the bodies "facing west" appeared to be a deliberate mocking of the Islamic requirement to face Mecca during prayers.

The Pentagon acknowledged that a video of the incident appeared to be accurate and announced that it would undertake a criminal investigation of those responsible. According to the Times, “senior officials” admitted the obvious: “that the incident posed the potential to do further harm in the Islamic world to the image of the United States, already badly tarnished by the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal.”

At a speech at Washington's New America Foundation Wednesday, Colin Powell's former Chief of Staff made some serious charges against the Bush Administration:

Vice-President Dick Cheney and a handful of others had hijacked the government's foreign policy apparatus, deciding in secret to carry out policies that had left the US weaker and more isolated in the world, the top aide to former Secretary of State Colin Powell claimed on Wednesday.

In a scathing attack on the record of President George W. Bush, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Mr Powell until last January, said: “What I saw was a cabal between the vice-president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made.

Former intelligence agents have told the New York Daily News that members of the White House Iraq Group funnelled information to Judith Miller and that she was a "charter member" of the group.

There were a number of occasions when White House officials or Vice President [Cheney's] staffers, or others, wanted to push the envelope on things," an ex-intelligence official said. "The agency would say, 'We just don't have the intelligence to substantiate that.'" When Wilson was sent by his wife to Africa to research the claims, he showed the documents claiming Saddam tried to buy the uranium were forgeries. "People in the Iraq group then got very frustrated. It was a side show," said a source familiar with WHIG.

TalkLeft's eminently qualified Washington Correspondent reports:

I don't ordinarily criticize newspaper coverage, but today's New York Times story on Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation is not only wrong, but damaging. The thrust of the article is that although "[a] final report had long been considered an option for Mr. Fitzgerald if he decided not to accuse anyone of wrongdoing," Fitzgerald has indicated he is not going to issue a report. According to the Times, this indicates that Fitzgerald is more likely to seek indictments.

This is wrong on so many counts.

In response to Monday's New York Daily News article reporting that a high-level White House official had flipped, I speculated that it was Karl Rove, and that he had decided to throw Cheney and Libby under the bus. It turned out that the News article was not referring to Rove. But with today's Daily News article, I'm again drawn to this theory.

I have just written a piece outlining the theory. But, I'm stuck on whether Rove would also try to save Cheney, even though he blames him for this whole mess, as a means of protecting Bush's legacy -- or whether, Cheney can't be saved from being at least an unindicted co-conspirator because of the timeline of Wilson's allegations, so he didn't.

Before publishing it, and perhaps making a total fool of myself, I'd like a national MSM reporter who has been covering the story to read it. If any happen to read this and are interested, please e-mail me.

Update: I think I've found my answer. No need for anyone to read it. I'm refining it and will be publishing it soon, probably in bits and pieces.

Crooks and Liars finds this in today's Daily News:

The New York Times gave Judith Miller 3,454 words in Sunday's paper to defend her actions in the Valerie Plame affair. But we hear Miller didn't appreciate the scourging she got in an accompanying 5,805-word analysis of "The Miller Case." We're told that colleagues heard Miller and executive editor Bill Keller screaming at each other in the hours before the story went to bed. (A Times spokeswoman declined to comment on whether Miller and Keller had traded words.)

Miller is said to have implored Keller to tone down the piece's criticism of her. Nevertheless, it reported that she was "a divisive figure," and that in 2003 Keller told her she could no longer cover Iraq and weapons issues because her reporting about Saddam's supposed weapons of mass destruction was so far off the mark.

Jane at FireDogLake reacts. Arianna has more unanswered questions about the Times and Miller.