The American people know that the president has lied to us, but not even Obama has called for his impeachment

In the midst of all the proclamations, predictions, protestations and general ballyhoo surrounding the nomination of the first African-American for president, it is not only the other nominee who has been given a free pass by the world media. The incumbent president also seems to have received a get-out-of-jail-free card. Or rather, a stay-out-of-jail card. According to recent polls, Bush's approval rating among Americans is as low as any ever recorded for a president. Only 25% of the country still labours under the delusion that he is doing a good job. Nearly three-quarters of my compatriots have — finally — realised that Bush is a bad president, who has routinely lied to the American people. This puts Bush on a par with Nixon, whose approval rating was 24% when he was forced to resign, over similar mendacities.

After the publication last week of former White House press secretary Scott McClellan's charges that the Bush administration deceived the American people about its role in leaking Valerie Plame's name to the press, and about its casus belli in Iraq, no one has suggested that this is anything other than politics as usual. It merely confirms what we've known for years—and done nothing about. When Bush authorised illegal wire-tapping on a massive scale — one of the crimes that brought Nixon down—he brazenly defended his right to do so, and once again my nation truckled to him, including the media, whom McClellan quite accurately, if rather hypocritically, accuses of being "deferential, complicit enablers" of the Bush administration's misprisions.

Some have asked whether McClellan will prove to be Bush's John Dean, the former White House counsel whose testimony was instrumental in shoving Nixon out the presidential door. But no one has asked who is going to be Howard Baker, the Republican senator who did not close ranks to protect his party's leader, but instead famously demanded on the Senate floor, "What did the president know, and when did he know it?" And no one has asked where amidst all the collusion and corruption we're going to find an Archibald Cox, the incorruptible special prosecutor who called a press conference to inform the American people that Nixon had lied and was going to fire him. Wearing a bowtie, looking and sounding like Jimmy Stewart, Cox called upon America and Congress to ensure that the government would be "of laws and not of men". The White House press corps, always one of the more cynical groups of people around, burst into applause, and in the film of the press conference you can hear a female reporter shout out to Cox: "You, sir, are a great American!" Congress was flooded with telegrams that said just two words: "Impeach Nixon."

So when the story broke in 2006 that Bush had knowingly, admittedly, broken the (lenient) law requiring him to get permission for his wire-tapping schemes, I emailed my state's senator from London, where I live, instructing him, quite seriously, to impeach Bush. I received a very courteous email in reply, informing me that I was not alone in my demand. It read, in part:

I fully appreciate and share your strong disagreement with many of the administration's policies and actions. Many who share your position have had their feelings strengthened as we have watched the developments in a number of stories, most notably the war in Iraq, our government's inadequate response to Hurricane Katrina, and the alleged executive authorization of "domestic spying". These issues have troubled me as well, and I assure you that I will continue to press for honest and comprehensive reviews of these matters. There is no question that President Bush has pushed the envelope in promoting his policies and programs. […] However, while I will continue to use my position in the Senate to oppose those policies with which I do not agree, my focus is on doing what I can in this environment to address the many challenges facing America […] I do not think that options like calling for impeachment of the president serve our ultimate objective, which is getting the country back on the right track.

That senator is Barack Obama. Come November I will vote for him, despite my reservations about whether his actions will live up to his rhetoric. He's certainly better than John McCain. But I fear he's no Archibald Cox.

Wednesday, June 11, 2008

---

Afghans uncover 260
tons of hashish in record bust

Deputy Interior Minister Lt. Gen. Abdul Hadi Khalid

 

By JASON STRAZIUSO
Associated Press / June 11, 2008

KABUL, Afghanistan - Afghan counternarcotics officials said Wednesday that they uncovered 260 tons of hashish hidden in 6-foot-deep trenches in southern Afghanistan in what one DEA official said appears to be the world's biggest drug bust.

The hashish, found in the southern province of Kandahar on Monday, was worth more than $400 million and would have netted the Taliban about $14 million in profits, NATO's International Security Assistance Force said.

The hashish weighed as much as 30 double-decker London buses, ISAF said. The drugs were burned on site. Hashish is a concentrated form of marijuana.

"The Afghan National Police Special Task Force has made a huge step forward in proving its capability in curbing the tide of illegal drug trade in this country," U.S. Gen. David McKiernan, the commander of ISAF, said in a statement.

"With this single find, they have seriously crippled the Taliban's ability to purchase weapons that threaten the safety and security of the Afghan people and the region."

The spokesman for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, Garrison Courtney, said the drug bust appears is the world's largest in terms of weight. He called the takedown "pretty huge."

"I can't think of any other time I've ever heard of that large of an amount in one hit," he said.

Afghanistan's biggest drug problem is not hashish but opium. The country produced 9,000 tons last year, enough to make over 880 tons of heroin — 93 percent of the world's supply.

But officials have increased warnings that farmers who no longer grow opium poppies because of successful eradication programs have turned their fields to cannabis, the plant used to produce hashish and marijuana, giving the country a second drug problem to contend with.

Deputy Interior Minister Lt. Gen. Abdul Hadi Khalid, who announced the bust Wednesday, said three men were arrested in the raid. He credited the international community for helping to train the Afghan special narcotics forces.

He said that 21 of the country's 36 provinces are now opium-free, but that efforts to eradicate in Kandahar, Helmand, Farah and Uruzgan provinces did not go well this year because of continuing violence there.

Forty-three members of the country's counternarcotics police were killed during eradication operations this spring, he said.

In a separate recent counternarcotics operation in nearby Helmand province, the Interior Ministry said police seized 11,250 pounds of opium and arrested 13 drug dealers.

___

Associated Press reporter Rahim Faiez contributed to this report.

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Washington Post Staff Writer and washingtonpost.com Staff Writer
Friday, June 13, 2008; Page A21

House Republicans yesterday accused their former campaign treasurer of embezzling at least $725,000 in a scheme that federal investigators say involved using the money to cover major home renovations and mortgage payments, and marked the biggest case of political fraud in a generation.

A four-month forensic audit of the National Republican Congressional Committee's books asserted that Christopher J. Ward, who worked in the NRCC's accounting office for more than 12 years, also took $28,000 that should have gone to the National Republican Senatorial Committee. Ward had already been accused by other Republican lawmakers of misappropriating $64,000 from six political action committees and reelection committees, bringing his total alleged embezzlement to more than $810,000.

But Republicans acknowledged that their internal audit may not have reflected the totality of the embezzlement, because NRCC bank records went back only to 2001 and because auditors lacked access to Ward's personal bank accounts, which the FBI has been reviewing. They said the overall amount of money taken could be far greater than their current estimate.

"We'll never know the full extent," Rep. Tom Cole (Okla.), the NRCC chairman, told reporters.

Ward is under FBI investigation for theft and money laundering, according to Justice Department documents filed last week seeking the forfeiture of his Bethesda home. Those documents accused him of taking "more than $500,000" and using about $200,000 for home renovations. The NRCC is cooperating with the FBI in the investigation.

Ward's attorney declined to comment yesterday.

Once considered the gold standard among bookkeepers for Republican political operations -- he was treasurer for at least 83 GOP committees over the past decade -- Ward came under scrutiny in late January when lawmakers demanded to meet outside auditors who had purportedly performed annual audits of the NRCC.

The investigation came during a period of political peril for House Republicans, as they lost three straight special elections in districts they had held for decades. At the end of April, the NRCC trailed its Democratic counterpart by a 7-to-1 ratio in cash on hand.

Cole said the cost of the forensic audit, overseen by the law firm Covington & Burling and the accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, will soon hit $600,000. An additional $300,000 has been spent on beefing up the accounting staff at the NRCC.

The committee could also face a fine from the Federal Election Commission, which last year issued guidelines telling political committees that lax oversight of treasurers would result in hefty penalties.

"I've gone through this issue with my own campaign, and frankly, getting to the bottom of it and understanding how it happened and how to correct it will be well worth the investment," said House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio).

In 2003, a former campaign staffer for Boehner pleaded guilty to embezzling $617,000, which had been the largest political embezzlement in this decade. A staffer for the late Paul Tsongas (D-Mass.) pleaded guilty in 1993 to stealing $1 million from the former senator's 1992 presidential campaign, an incident believed to mark the biggest political fraud case ever uncovered.

The NRCC's audit and Justice Department and FEC records, paint a picture of an alleged crime spree that started small and grew over the years as Ward became a more trusted employee.

As deputy treasurer in 2001 and 2002, Ward used wire transfers -- on which no other official was required to sign off -- to divert money to his personal accounts, according to Robert Kelner, the lawyer with Covington & Burling who oversaw the investigation. "It escalated over time," Kelner said.

In early 2003, Ward was promoted to treasurer, and soon thereafter, the Justice Department said, he began diverting as much as $72,000 to his home mortgage payments.

Most of his alleged embezzlement took place with the President's Dinner committees, which were accounts for the annual NRCC-NRSC gala fundraising dinner, featuring President Bush as the guest of honor. Ward often left those accounts open with the FEC and banks long after the events had been held.

FEC records show the committee for the 2002 President's Dinner -- held in June of that year -- remained active until August 2004. In 2003, Ward switched that committee's business address to his home on Massachusetts Avenue in Bethesda.

Kelner said Ward sometimes diverted money from the NRCC into the President's Dinner committees, and then to his personal accounts, and other times from the NRCC into other PACs he controlled.

Ward stepped down as NRCC treasurer last summer. Kelner said the last misappropriation by Ward occurred in October, while on the NRCC payroll as a consultant.

By David Cho and Renae Merle

Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, June 13, 2008; Page D01

Banks and mortgage firms are providing questionable information about the number of subprime mortgage borrowers they are helping and the rate at which homeowners are falling into foreclosure, according to the top regulator for the nation's largest banks.

Those details are crucial for regulators to gauge the severity of the housing crisis and evaluate the effectiveness of the steps lenders are taking to address the problems.

John C. Dugan, comptroller of the currency, which oversees national banks, said his agency found "significant limitations with the mortgage performance data reported by other organizations and trade associations."

"Virtually none of the data had been subjected to a rigorous process to check for consistency and completeness -- they were typically responses to surveys that produced aggregate, unverified results from individual firms," Dugan said in a speech in New York on Wednesday. "That lack of loan-level validation raised real questions about the precision of the data, at least for our supervisory purposes."

Dugan's comments also raised questions about the accuracy of the reporting from Hope Now, an alliance of mortgage firms and banks that was formed to help financially troubled holders of subprime mortgages. Leaders of the coalition, which was put together by the Bush administration, contend they have aided more than 1 million homeowners. Those figures were self-reported by lenders in response to the kind of surveys Dugan has faulted.

Faith Schwartz, executive director of Hope Now, acknowledged the need for uniform reporting standards. But, in a statement, she said her coalition's information was more complete than that collected by the OCC. She noted that the OCC data reflect mortgage loans from a limited number of banks, "while Hope Now statistics encompass more member data and provide a broader view of the range of solutions delivered by a larger number of mortgage servicers."

Jay Brinkmann, vice president of research for the MBA, also defended his organization's reporting. His group's information, he said, "gives the most comprehensive look at the performance of mortgage loans from a wide variety of different types of lending institutions in order to give a consistent year-in-and-year-out picture of the landscape."

In an interview yesterday, Dugan tempered the strong language he used in his speech. "It was not intended to be a criticism of what they are doing," he said of MBA and other industry associations. Their figures, he added, "get you in the ballpark . . . but we wanted to have a much more specific level of detail."

Banks and mortgage firms have widely varying definitions for what constitutes a loan modification for a struggling borrower and even define subprime mortgages differently. The lack of standards leave the data open for interpretation or manipulation.

The OCC collected its data from nine large national banks including Citigroup, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and J.P. Morgan Chase.

The agency then did its own evaluation of whether the measures taken by the firms qualified as loan modifications, OCC officials said. For instance, it excluded those agreed to over the phone. These efforts are often included by banks in their loan-modification figures.

The OCC found that the nine banks -- which represent 45 percent of the home loan market -- provided slightly less than 250,000 loan modifications from October to March.

Hope Now has said that its coalition, which represents nearly all lenders, completed nearly 1 million modifications during that same period.

The OCC also found that the rate of newly initiated foreclosures by the banks was 1.13 percent in the first quarter, compared with 1.01 percent in the fourth quarter. The MBA's national survey reported those rates as 0.99 percent and 0.83 percent, respectively.

Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) said the OCC's findings demonstrated that the Hope Now initiative was not enough to solve the housing crisis.

"I welcome the objective report done by the OCC, and I appreciate the willingness of Comptroller Dugan to give us this independent analysis," Frank said. "I supported the Hope Now program when it came out, and I continue to think it is worth trying. But it is now clear that much more aggressive action is needed."