George Bush Wants your Mail Read

[IrishMick]

dontcha love it?

[gus danger]

YES I do Michaela Michaela!
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Gus

[SouthwestRanger]

Exclusive: House Judiciary Committee will probe Bush torture, Patriot Act statements




Raw Story | February 1, 2007
Brian Beutler

House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) will be investigating all of President Bush's so-called signing statements to determine how drastically the president has misinterpreted laws passed by Congress.

Specifically, Judiciary aides tell RAW STORY that the Chairman's top priorities are a statement in which Bush said he didn't need to comply with a congressional ban on torture and Patriot Act statements which say the President doesn't need to turn over reports of surveillance to Congress.

?The reason why we're doing this, you don't really know what the Administration is doing with these signing statements,? said a Judiciary Committee aide. ?What they say in the signing statements is that they have the intent to interpret things differently than Congress passed.?

Conyers now wants to know ?to what extent the signing statements are an indication that the Bush Administration is circumventing Congress.?

When asked if any particular signing statements had been particularly noteworthy to Conyers, the aide said, ?If you want to look at the statements that affected [Conyers], it's the Patriot Act and the torture bill.?

However, the aide insisted that the probe will be comprehensive.

President Bush has taken strong criticism for his use of signing statements, which are not mentioned in the Constitution and which many legal experts believe are illegal when used the way Bush has. The courts have generally ruled that signing statements can be used to clarify legislation or direct federal agencies in their application of the laws, but not to overturn or change the meaning of acts of Congress.

Conyers' probe seeks to explore that issue.

The congressman is particularly interested in the specific matters of the Patriot Act and torture. According to the Boston Globe, the president's signing statements allow him to "waive the torture ban if he decides that harsh interrogation techniques will assist in preventing terrorist attacks," and, with regard to the Patriot Act, to "order Justice Department officials to withhold any information from Congress if he decides it could impair national security or executive branch operations."

According to Roll Call, ?Conyers asserted the investigation would be aggressive.? But ?he declined to discuss in a separate interview whether the panel could issue subpoenas should the White House or the Justice Department prove uncooperative.?

?We are a coequal branch of government, and if our system of checks and balances is going to operate, it is imperative that we understand how the executive branch is enforcing ? or ignoring ? the bills that are signed into law,? the Detroit Democrat said.

[gus danger]

I have great respect for Chairman Conyers. The investigation should be aggresive and leave no stone unturned!

All I want is the truth!
Just gimme some truth! //00\\
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Gus

[SouthwestRanger]

U.S. Reconfigures the Way Casualty Totals Are Given




New York Times | February 3, 2007
DENISE GRADY

Statistics on a Pentagon Web site have been reorganized in a way that lowers the published totals of American nonfatal casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan .

Dr. Michael Kilpatrick, deputy director of force health protection and readiness at the Defense Department, said the previous method of tallying casualties was misleading and might have made injuries and combat wounds seem worse and more numerous than they really were.

The old method lumped many problems under the label ?casualties,? including illnesses, minor injuries and injuries from accidents, as well as wounds sustained in combat. But the public may assume that every casualty is a war wound, Dr. Kilpatrick said, so the site was changed to avoid misunderstandings.

On Monday, the bottom line of the Defense Department's Web page on casualties in Iraq listed a total of 47,657 ?nonmortal casualties.?

By Tuesday, the same page no longer showed a total for nonmortal casualties. The bottom line is now ?total ? medical air transported,? and the figure is 31,493.

The new total excludes 16,164 troops who were wounded but did not require medical air transport because their injuries were minor. The total does include combat wounds, nonhostile injuries and diseases serious enough for medical transport.

Half the nonhostile injuries are from vehicle accidents, and a third are sports injuries from activities like basketball, Dr. Kilpatrick said. About 50 disease categories ? including mental problems and gastrointestinal illnesses ? have led to medical evacuations. Dr. Kilpatrick said that 85 percent of those who were flown out for medical reasons eventually returned to duty.

?It may be a few weeks, or it may be a year or more,? he said.

Concern at the Pentagon about public perceptions of the wounded increased last month after Linda Bilmes, a Harvard professor, published an opinion article in The Los Angeles Times mentioning 50,508 ?nonmortal woundings? in Iraq and Afghanistan. That number came from a Web page posted by public affairs employees at the Department of Veterans Affairs .

But officials from both agencies said that figure had been posted by mistake, lumping combat and noncombat injuries as well as illnesses and labeling them all ?woundings? instead of casualties.

?If public affairs people at the V.A. misunderstood, we thought the public would misunderstand it, too,? Dr. Kilpatrick said.

Both Web sites were changed.

Paul Sullivan, director of research and analysis of Veterans for America, said the changes actually meant the Pentagon was trying to conceal the rising toll of injuries and illness.

Mr. Sullivan, formerly a project manager at the Department of Veterans Affairs, also said that the department was not prepared to provide the health care that returning veterans would need for mental and physical disabilities.



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