The Long Goodbye

October 27th, 2008

Poor John, I hear these days (and for various reasons, depending on which side you come down on.) I read a lot about who he used to be.

Is John McCain a nice guy, messed over by the political machine? Ya know — among his Republican peers, I’ll bet he’s a frickin prince! But the dying Republican brand isn’t just an indicator — it’s a philosophical cesspool. Those who swim there are bound to smell. And Mac is diving to the bottom of that pond to pick up the last tricks of his political season: socialism, communism, radicalism.

Howard Kurtz put it beautifully:

Barack Obama is noted for his powerful intellect, but I don’t think he gets nearly enough credit for the mental dexterity it takes to be simultaneously an Islamic theocrat, atheistic communist and national socialist while posing as a center left candidate. Those must be the compartmentalization skills they taught him at that Manchurian madrasah in Indonesia.

The fact that Obama embodies the worst nightmares of so many on the political right says far more about them that it does him.

John McCain has shown himself to be a temperamental old coot who thunders about honor while his campaign undercuts his rhetoric with the most dishonorable of tactics, rambles about putting money in the pocket of “my friends,” the audience, while pushing policies that continue to funnel treasure to his actual friends on Wall Street, and brags about experience even as we see example after example of self-serving, ass-covering choices that have become erratic; up to and including the selection of a Theocratic wing-nut/sex-pot as his Second in order to activate his Fundy base.

The choice becomes clearer by the day — the nation is divided again. But it isn’t a 50/50 proposition any more. And that is Very Very Happy news.

Meanwhile, with little fanfare and no attention, the Dubby has been working hard to make Obama’s presidency a nightmare and extend chaos into all of our tomorrows. The wrecking crew is using the last of its tenure to piss off everybody they can, while bending laws to cover their ass.

I don’t think it’s possible to anticipate just how much relief we’ll experience when Bush leaves to Oval — it’ll be like regaining health and suddenly realizing just how sick we were.

This is my last post before I travel — I’ll get back to you at the end of the week.

Keep Hope!

Jude

U.S. threatens to halt services to Iraq without troop accord
Roy Gutman and Leila Fadel, McClatchy Newspapers
Sunday, October 26, 2008

BAGHDAD _ The U.S. military has warned Iraq that it will shut down military operations and other vital services throughout the country on Jan. 1 if the Iraqi government doesn’t agree to a new agreement on the status of U.S. forces or a renewed United Nations mandate for the American mission in Iraq.

Many Iraqi politicians view the move as akin to political blackmail, a top Iraqi official told McClatchy Sunday.

In addition to halting all military actions, U.S. forces would cease activities that support Iraq’s economy, educational sector and other areas _ “everything” _ said Tariq al Hashimi, the country’s Sunni Muslim vice president. “I didn’t know the Americans are rendering such wide-scale services.”

Hashimi said that Army Gen. Ray Odierno, the top U.S. military commander in Iraq, listed “tens” of areas of potential cutoffs in a three-page letter, and he said the implied threat caught Iraqi leaders by surprise.

“It was really shocking for us,” he said. “Many people are looking to this attitude as a matter of blackmailing.”

Odierno had no comment Sunday, but U.S. Embassy officials told McClatchy that a lengthy list of the sort Hashimi described has been passed to the Iraqi government. Among the services the U.S. provides are protection of Iraq’s principal borders, of its oil exports and other shipping through the Shatt al Arab into the Persian Gulf and all air traffic control over Iraq.

The status of forces agreement, which calls for a final withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq by the end of 2011, was supposed to resolve a number of contentious issues between the two countries, but its completion 10 days ago has instead provoked a political crisis within Iraq’s Shiite-dominated government and between Iraq and the United States.

Fearing a major battle in the Iraqi parliament, Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki solicited proposed amendments from his cabinet and called a meeting to review them Sunday afternoon.

However, the two main Shiite parties, Maliki’s Dawa party and the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, were unable to produce their full lists of demands, and he postponed the meeting until Tuesday, other cabinet members said.

Hashimi said that Iran, a longtime backer of both parties, is pressuring Iraq’s leaders not to accept the agreement.

The dispute “is real and factual. The government is not manipulating this dispute,” Hashimi said. He said he hadn’t yet seen the objections to the accord, even those from his own Sunni Iraqi Islamic Party.

Political party heads, including Hashimi, say that Maliki is responsible for the agreement, but Maliki has been unwilling to back the accord unless his Shiite coalition and other party members join him to take the political heat.

An additional complication is the decision of Hashimi’s Iraqi Islamic party to suspend all “official communication” with U.S. military and civilian officials until it receives an explanation and an apology following a joint U.S.-Iraqi military raid against party backers in Anbar province in which one man was killed.

It’s unclear what will happen when the Iraqi cabinet offers a list of proposed changes and Maliki winnows them down to proposed amendments.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates has said, “I don’t think you slam the door shut” on amendments, but Hashimi said the U.S. is “adamant in saying, ‘We close the door, we are not accepting any sort of amendment.’ ”

He said that if the United States met Iraq halfway and accepted amendments to the controversial articles of the accord, it would make it “rather easy” to submit the agreement to the parliament.

The alternative to a new agreement governing U.S. forces, an Iraqi request to the U.N. Security Council to extend the U.N. mandate, which now expires on Dec. 31, is also highly contentious.

One of the biggest concessions Iraq won from Washington in the negotiations over the forces accord was a stipulation that private contractors such as Blackwater that have been accused of killing Iraqi civilians would become subject to Iraqi law.

Immunity from prosecution for private contractors _ and for all official U.S. entities _ under Iraqi law was promulgated by the U.S. occupation government in June 2004, and ending that order is the subject of another confrontation between Iraq and the United States, Hashimi said. He said the United States insists that it would reject any Iraqi request to change the mandate.

Ironically, Iraqi politicians of practically every stripe agree that the proposed agreement would be a major advance toward restoring Iraq’s full sovereignty and a vast improvement over the initial U.S. proposal made last spring.

He credited President Bush with changing the U.S. position as a result of twice-weekly conference calls with Maliki. ++

Syrians hold funerals for people killed in U.S. raid
USA Today
10/26/08

SUKKARIYEH, Syria (AP) — Families in this Iraqi border village prepared to hold funerals Monday for eight people they say were killed when U.S. military helicopters launched an extremely rare attack on Syrian territory. Local clergy washed the bodies as angry residents gathered nearby chanting “May God’s wrath fall on them.”

The Syrian government said four U.S. military helicopters attacked a civilian building under construction shortly before sundown Sunday on the Sukkariyeh Farm about five miles inside the Syrian border. The government statement said eight people were killed, including four children.

A U.S. military official in Washington has said special forces conducted a raid in Syria that targeted the network of al-Qaeda-linked foreign fighters moving through Syria into Iraq.

“We are taking matters into our own hands,” the official told The Associated Press, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the political sensitivity of cross-border raids.

The U.S. military in Iraq said it did not have any information about the incident. But the raid came just days after the commander of U.S. forces in western Iraq said American troops were redoubling efforts to secure the Syrian border, which he called an “uncontrolled” gateway for fighters entering Iraq.

Iraqi officials said they hoped the raid would not harm relations with Syria, and Iran condemned the attack.

Syria called the raid a “serious aggression,” and its Foreign Ministry summoned the charges d’affaires of the United States and Iraq in protest.

Parliament member Suleiman Hadad had harsh words Monday, labeling the raid “a last-ditch hit by the defeated and desperate” Bush administration, which is trying to “restore some of its lost dignity in the region.”

Government newspapers also published scathing criticisms of the raid in Monday’s editions. Tishrin splashed its front pages with a headline denouncing it as a “U.S. war crime,” while Al-Baath newspaper described the attack in an editorial as a “stunning, shocking and unprecedented adventure.”

“Even while it’s preparing itself to leave the White House, the Bush administration seems determined to demonstrate its foolishness, and this is a dangerous indication of political madness and stupid arrogance,” Al-Baath said.

In Sukkariyeh, villager Jumaa Ahmad al-Hamad told The Associated Press he was walking Sunday when he saw four helicopters, two of which landed.

“Shooting then started ringing for more than 10 minutes,” al-Hamad said Monday. After the helicopters stopped firing and left the area, he and other villagers went to the site and discovered the bodies of his uncle, Dawoud al-Hamad, and four of his uncle’s sons, who he said were killed in the raid.

The attack comes at time when Syria appears to be making some amends with the United States.

Though Syria has long been viewed by the U.S. as a destabilizing country in the Middle East, in recent months, Damascus has been trying to change its image and end years of global seclusion.

Its president, Bashar Assad, has pursued indirect peace talks with Israel, mediated by Turkey, and says he wants direct talks next year. Syria also has agreed to establish diplomatic ties with Lebanon, a country it used to dominate both politically and militarily, and has worked harder at stemming the flow of militants into Iraq.

It also comes as the flow of foreign fighters into Iraq has been declining. A senior U.S. military intelligence official told the AP in July that it had been cut to an estimated 20 a month. That’s a 50% decline from six months ago, and just a fifth of the estimated 100 foreign fighters who were infiltrating Iraq a year ago, according to the official.

The area targeted Sunday is near the Iraqi border city of Qaim, which had been a major crossing point for fighters, weapons and money coming into Iraq to fuel the Sunni insurgency.

Ninety percent of the foreign fighters enter through Syria, according to U.S. intelligence. Foreigners are some of the most deadly fighters in Iraq, trained in bomb-making and with small-arms expertise and more likely to be willing suicide bombers than Iraqis.

Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem accused the United States earlier this year of not giving his country the equipment needed to prevent foreign fighters from crossing into Iraq. He said Washington feared Syria could use such equipment against Israel.

IRAQ HOPES SYRIA RAID WON’T HARM RELATIONS
The Associated Press

BAGHDAD — A senior Iraqi official says Iraq hopes that an alleged U.S. raid into Syria will not harm Baghdad’s relations with Damascus.

The Syrians say U.S. military helicopters launched the attack Sunday on Syrian territory close to the border with Iraq, killing eight people. Damascus condemned the raid as “serious aggression.”

Foreign Ministry undersecretary Labib Abbawi says the Iraqis hope the raid “does not impact negatively” on relations with Syria. He also said Monday that Baghdad is “trying to contain the fallout” from the “regrettable” incident.

Abbawi says the Iraqis are seeking more information from the U.S.

U.S. officials have complained that Sunni insurgents use Syria as a base for sending fighters and weapons into Iraq.

IRAN CONDEMNS U.S. RAID
The Associated Press

TEHRAN, Iran — Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman is condemning a U.S. military raid in Syrian territory close to the border with Iraq.

Spokesman Hasan Qashqavi told reporters on Monday that a violation of the territorial integrity of any sovereign state is unacceptable.

Syria says U.S. military helicopters launched the attack Sunday. Damascus says U.S. helicopters attacked a civilian building under construction and fired on workers inside. It says civilians were among the dead.

A U.S. military official earlier said special forces conducted a raid targeting the network of al-Qaeda-linked foreign fighters moving through Syria into Iraq. ++

Suspected US strike kills up to 20 in Pakistan
ISHTIAQ MAHSUD,HuffPo
October 27, 2008

DERA ISMAIL KHAN, Pakistan — A suspected U.S. missile strike killed up to 20 people in northwestern Pakistan on Monday, officials said, the latest salvo in an intensifying assault on militant hide-outs near the Afghan border.

The reported strike occurred in the South Waziristan region, part of Pakistan’s wild border zone that is considered a possible hiding place for Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida No. 2 Ayman al-Zawahri.

In other violence in Pakistan’s frontier zone, a car bomb killed two people in Quetta and a suicide attacker demolished a checkpoint, injuring eight police and troops.

Missile strikes into Pakistan’s border region have escalated sharply amid complaints from American commanders that Pakistani forces are not putting enough pressure on militant strongholds on their territory.

U.S. military and CIA drones that patrol the frontier region are believed to have carried out at least 15 strikes since August. The United States rarely confirms or denies involvement.

Two intelligence officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to media on the record, said the targeted house in Mandata Raghzai village belonged to a lieutenant of local Taliban chief Maulvi Nazir.

The officials, citing reports from agents and informers in the area, said militants cordoned off the scene. The identities of the 20 bodies pulled from the rubble were not immediately known, they said.

The missile strikes have killed at least two senior al-Qaida operatives in Pakistan this year and ramped up the threat to groups suspected of plotting attacks on Western troops in Afghanistan and terror strikes in the West.

However, it has also put strain on the country’s seven-year alliance with the U.S. in its war on terror, especially since stalwart U.S. ally Pervez Musharraf stepped down as Pakistan’s army chief and president.

Pakistan’s new leaders have protested the missile strikes _ as well as a highly unusual raid by helicopter-borne commandos in September _ as unacceptable violations of their sovereignty.

The attacks, they argue, are fueling the militancy destabilizing Pakistan and undermining the nuclear-armed nation’s already faltering economy. Pakistan is seeking International Monetary Fund assistance to prevent it from defaulting on its foreign debt.

The car bomb in Quetta exploded in a parking lot near government buildings and the Iranian consulate, setting fire to a string of vehicles. Police said a rickshaw driver and another unidentified person died and that 10 others were injured.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility.

Quetta is the capital of a region dogged for years by a low-level insurgency seeking greater autonomy. It is also considered a hub for Taliban militants operating in neighboring Afghanistan.

Farther north, a suicide bomber rammed an explosive-laden car into a security post in the Mohmand tribal region late Sunday. The army said the blast killed one civilian and injured 13 other people, including 11 troops and police.

Pakistani troops are battling militants in two areas of the country’s troubled northwest. In the Bajur region, for instance, it claims to have killed some 1,500 suspected insurgents in a two-month offensive.

Yet many Pakistani are weary of a war they believe is being fought at America’s behest and the government has offered to negotiate with any militant group willing to renounced violence, regardless of their ideology.

“There is an increasing realization that the use of force alone cannot yield the desired results,” Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi told a gathering of Pakistani and Afghan tribal elders.

The meeting in Islamabad was part of a dialogue process begun last year in hopes that it could ease strained relations between Pakistan and Afghanistan, both crucial allies of the U.S. ++

Associated Press writers Abdul Sattar in Quetta and Stephen Graham in Islamabad contributed to this report.

Administration to Bypass Reporting Law
CHARLIE SAVAGE, NYT
October 24, 2008

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration has informed Congress that it is bypassing a law intended to forbid political interference with reports to lawmakers by the Department of Homeland Security.

The August 2007 law requires the agency’s chief privacy officer to report each year about Homeland Security activities that affect privacy, and requires that the reports be submitted directly to Congress “without any prior comment or amendment” by superiors at the department or the White House.

But newly disclosed documents show that the Justice Department issued a legal opinion last January questioning the basis for that restriction, and that Michael Chertoff, the homeland security secretary, later advised Congress that the administration would not “apply this provision strictly” because it infringed on the president’s powers.

Several members of Congress reacted with outrage to the administration’s claim, which was detailed in a memorandum posted this week on the Web site of the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department.

Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, called the move “unconstitutional.” He said Mr. Bush should have vetoed the bill if he did not like the provision, and compared the situation to Mr. Bush’s frequent use of signing statements to reserve a right to bypass newly enacted laws.

“This is a dictatorial, after-the-fact pronouncement by him in line with a lot of other cherry-picking he’s done on the signing statements,” Mr. Specter said in a telephone interview. He added, “To put it differently, I don’t like it worth a damn.”

The Bush administration defended the decision not to obey the statute. Erik Ablin, a Justice Department spokesman, said its legal view was consistent with what presidents of both parties had long maintained.

Mr. Ablin also said the administration had told Congress that the provision would be unconstitutional, but Congress passed the legislation — which enacted recommendations of the 9/11 Commission — without making the requested change. So the administration decided to sign the bill and fix what Mr. Ablin called its “defects” later.

The letter that Mr. Chertoff sent to Congress in March was addressed or copied to 10 Congressional leaders. But it was not publicly disclosed and received no press coverage. It is not clear how many lawmakers saw it.

In an apparent coincidence, the Homeland Security Department’s privacy officer, Hugo Teufel III, issued his annual privacy report on Friday. It said there were 4,184 privacy complaints over a recent six-month period, but gave few details about them.

The Department of Homeland Security declined to make Mr. Teufel available for an interview or to say whether administration officials had edited his report.

“We are not able to comment on this specific report,” said Laura C. Keehner, the department press secretary. She added that the department’s activities to date had complied with the Office of Legal Counsel opinion and the Constitution.

A spokeswoman for Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said he would write a letter Monday to the department questioning the process by which the report was made.

The Supreme Court has never ruled on whether Congress can pass a law that puts an executive branch official beyond the control of the president when it comes to giving information to oversight committees.

The court has, however, upheld statutes that gave regulatory agencies and prosecutors independence from presidential control. The Justice Department memorandum issued in January said that those precedents covered different kinds of situations and so did not apply, and that the restrictions Congress sought to impose on the reports by the Homeland Security Department privacy officer “must yield to the extent their application would interfere with the president’s constitutional authority to comment upon or amend” any information provided to Congress.

Several law professors said the administration’s legal theory went too far.

Neil Kinkopf, a law professor at Georgia State University who worked in the Office of Legal Counsel during the Clinton administration, called the opinion an example of the administration’s expansive theories of executive power “run amok.”

Peter Strauss, a Columbia University law professor, said the 2007 law was valid because the president is not the “exclusive” source of communication with Congress.

In the Justice Department memorandum, however, Steven G. Bradbury, the principal deputy assistant attorney general and head of the Office of Legal Counsel, argued that presidents of both parties had long objected to bills that would infringe on their ability to control executive branch officials or to protect against the unauthorized disclosure of information to Congress.

“Such interference is impermissible regardless of its purported oversight or other justifications,” Mr. Bradbury wrote.

The Office of Legal Counsel interprets the law for the executive branch, often ruling on issues that are difficult to get before a court. Its opinions are often secret. Under Mr. Bush, the office has come under criticism as using aggressive legal arguments to provide legal cover for bypassing statutes that inhibited White House policies, including harsh interrogations and sending taxpayer dollars to religious groups. ++

Administration Reopens Effort to De-List Endangered Gray Wolves
TruthOut

EPA weakens new lead rule after White House objects
Renee Schoof, McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — After the White House intervened, the Environmental Protection Agency last week weakened a rule on airborne lead standards at the last minute so that fewer polluters would have their emissions monitored.

The EPA on Oct. 16 announced that it would dramatically reduce the highest acceptable amount of airborne lead from 1.5 micrograms of lead per cubic meter to 0.15 micrograms. It was the first revision of the standard since EPA set it 30 years ago.

However, a close look at documents publicly available, including e-mails from the EPA to the White House Office of Management and Budget, reveal that the OMB objected to the way the EPA had determined which lead-emitting battery recycling plants and other facilities would have to be monitored.

EPA documents show that until the afternoon of Oct. 15, a court-imposed deadline for issuing the revised standard, the EPA proposed to require a monitor for any facility that emitted half a ton of lead or more a year.

The e-mails indicate that the White House objected, and in the early evening of Oct. 15 the EPA set the level at 1 ton a year instead.

According to EPA documents, 346 sites have emissions of half a ton a year or more. Raising the threshold to a ton reduced the number of monitored sites by 211, or more than 60 percent.

The EPA also required states to place monitors in areas with populations of 500,000 or more. But the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group that pushed for tougher lead standards to protect public health, said that a single monitor in a large city was different from a monitor placed near a plant.

“We don’t expect the urban monitors to be effective to get the hot spots that the site-specific monitors can get,” said Gina Solomon, an NRDC scientist and a professor of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco. “The monitoring network has a lot of gaps in it.”

Airborne lead can be inhaled, but the main way people are exposed is when they ingest it from contaminated soil — for example, when children play in a contaminated area and put dirty hands to their mouths.

The EPA originally estimated that at the half-ton annual emissions cutoff, it would need from 150 to 600 monitors, said EPA spokeswoman Cathy Milbourn.

Under the final rule with the 1-ton cutoff, the requirement will be 135 site-specific monitors and 101 urban monitors in areas of 500,000 or more people, she said. There are 133 monitors now.

Milbourn said that EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson set the requirement for monitoring at sites that emit 1 ton or more of lead a year because it was “an approach that would reduce the burden to states but would still assure monitoring around those sources” that might violate the air-quality standard.

The Battery Council International, a trade group that represents U.S. lead battery makers and recyclers, told the EPA in public comments in August that the proposed half-ton threshold was “unjustifiably low.”

Milbourn said that state and local officials should monitor any site they think might violate the new EPA standard.

“In other words, states may go beyond the minimum monitoring requirements,” and EPA will help them identify sources that emit less than a ton per year but still might produce amounts of lead in the air that are higher than the rule allows, she said.

Lead in the air was greatly reduced three decades ago when the government ordered it removed from gasoline, but it is still emitted by lead smelters, cement plants and steel mills.

Scientific studies have found that lead is dangerous at much lower levels in the human body than previously thought. The studies show that children’s nervous systems are especially vulnerable, and that lead exposure can result in IQ loss and damage to many internal systems. ++

Renewed Crackdown On Illegal Immigrants
Spencer S. Hsu, Washington Post
Friday, October 24, 2008

The Bush administration in its final weeks will revive a stalled crackdown on U.S. companies that hire illegal immigrants, issuing a new regulation and asking a federal judge to lift a ban on the measure, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff announced yesterday.

If the court agrees, the government could begin mailing notices to 140,000 employers regarding suspect Social Security numbers used by an estimated 8.7 million workers, pressuring businesses to either resolve discrepancies or fire workers within 90 days.

Critics said the move would probably set off a new round of litigation that could outlast the president’s waning term and leave the thorny issue of immigration enforcement to President Bush’s successor to manage amid an economic downturn.

Bush unveiled the Social Security “no-match” letter initiative in August 2007 after the Senate failed to pass an immigration overhaul measure. However, the program was stayed by U.S. District Judge Charles R. Breyer of San Francisco, who wrote last year that the plan could have “staggering” and “severe” effects on workers and businesses.

The plan had been challenged in a lawsuit filed by the AFL-CIO and other unions, the American Civil Liberties Union and a cross-section of industry led by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Business groups say the administration failed to consider the cost of the plan to small businesses and to justify subjecting employers to possible criminal liability for the first time. Labor leaders and civil libertarians said the plan would lead to discrimination against many legal workers, including native-born Americans, because of errors in the government’s Social Security database and in the program’s structure.

Randel K. Johnson, a vice president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said his group was disappointed the government made virtually no changes in its revised final rule as it prepared to go back before Breyer.

“We are looking at our litigation options,” Johnson said.

John Sweeney, president of the AFL-CIO, accused the Bush administration of “leaving a disastrous parting gift to our new leadership.”

Lucas Guttentag, director of the ACLU’s Immigrants Rights Project, said, “Instead of fixing the database, the Bush administration has turned a blind eye to reality and is intent on punishing American workers in the middle of an economic meltdown.”

Also yesterday, Chertoff delayed once more the Department of Homeland Security’s estimate of when 670 miles of pedestrian and vehicle fencing on the U.S.-Mexico border will be completed. He said he expected “90 to 95 percent” of the fence to be built or underway by Jan. 20, when Bush leaves office.

Last month, Chertoff said the border fence, which Congress ordered done by year-end, would be fully completed or underway by that time.

Still Chertoff said the government was “turning the tide on illegal immigration,” citing decreasing border arrests, immigrants’ remittances to their home countries and estimates of the number of illegal immigrants in the United States. ++

Special Counsel Bloch Resigns Under Pressure
Carrie Johnson, Washington Post
Friday, October 24, 2008

Office of Special Counsel chief Scott J. Bloch resigned under pressure after meeting with White House officials yesterday, five months after the FBI raided his home and his government office as part of an ongoing obstruction of justice probe.

Bloch had refused persistent demands from lawmakers and his own employees to leave before the end of the Bush administration, writing to the president on Monday that he would fulfill his five-year term and exit in January.

Citing the Greek playwright Sophocles and defending his tenure at the office designed to protect whistleblowers, Bloch wrote that “doing the right thing can result in much criticism and controversy from every side.”

Employees learned of Bloch’s removal at a hastily called 4 p.m. meeting when they were instructed not to accept his phone calls and told that he no longer had access to the office. The interim chief will be William E. Reukauf, a career employee, according to a White House news release.

In recent weeks several of Bloch’s top deputies have left the office, blaming untenable workplace conditions and distractions that stemmed from the criminal investigation.

The OSC is supposed to be a haven for federal whistleblowers and disgruntled employees. But the tables turned under Bloch, who previously worked at the Justice Department’s Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives.

Bloch came under fire shortly after joining the whistleblower unit in 2004.

Employees claimed that he engaged in political bias and improperly handled scores of cases. By his own account, White House officials twice had asked him to resign, but he refused.

Debra S. Katz, an attorney representing OSC employees who had chafed under Bloch’s leadership, said she is pleased that “the Bush administration has finally acted to remove this rogue presidential appointee.”

The U.S. attorney in the District of Columbia, the FBI and the inspector general at the Office of Personnel Management are examining Bloch’s use of a contract company to scrub his computer hard drive, even as the inspector general investigated his treatment of employees and whistleblowers. Prosecutors declined to comment yesterday, but sources familiar with the case said no law enforcement action is imminent. ++

HUMAN RIGHTS — U.S. RANKS 36TH ON PRESS FREEDOM LIST
The Progress Report

Reporters Without Borders (RWB) released its annual Press Freedom Index yesterday. According to the new report, “press freedom in many places is particularly damning for one country that purports to be a beacon for the rest of the world as far as human-rights protections and freedom of thought and of expression are concerned. That country is the United States.” RWB ranked America 36 out of 173 countries, a spot also shared by Bosnia and Herzegovina. Iceland ranked first, with Ghana, Slovenia, Trinidad and Tobago, Surinam, and Jamaica also ranking higher than the United States. In one of the main conclusions from the report, RWB found that “[i]t is not economic prosperity but peace that guarantees press freedom.” The report also singled out “wars carried out in the name of the fight against terrorism” as a cause for the steep decline in press freedoms around the world. ++

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

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Entry Filed under: Political Waves