So why does all this Rove talk matter so much? A few reasons why:
- A man decides to turn himself in after 8 years AWOL from the Army, determined to get a new start and take punishment if that's warranted. Instead, he's put immediately into a unit headed for Iraq.
- A stockbroker and National Guardsman who served after 9/11. sleeping two weeksin tents downtown, is called up for Iraq despite his documented"Ground Zero cough" and PTSD.
- A couple wonders if they should divorce so that the wife, a GI who has served in Iraq AND Afghanistan, can file a "family care plan" and be allowed to remain in the States with her children - otherwise, she fears, she's going back a third time.
These are altered composites, with some very real details, of some of the stories told around the table at the meeting I was at last night. No links: they're not yet news stories and hopefully won't be -- if some honorable commanders, psychiatrists, chaplains and review boards do the right thing.
But the cases are living examples of the "stress on the force" described in this Chicago Tribune piece, and the flip side of the cheery happy recruiting news that's been reported this week. The Army, at least, is "back on track" with a jump in recruits from the Midwest, thanks largely to the efforts of the enthusiastic Indiana Recruiting Battalion, as described in today's Christian Science Monitor. And re-enlistments are up, thanks to bonus packages that sound pretty sweet when you've been eating MREs.( That report also datelined Indianapolis. CR, I'm praying you will comment here about Indiana so I don't have to.) (Update: Our old friends at the Army Times report that the maximum age for joining up may soon be forty-two. Either someone's been reading Douglas Adams or listening to too much Depeche Mode -- or both.
These cases, these canaries in the coal mine of this war, are also additional evidence of the crime represented by the destruction of our veterans hospital system , even before these "contingency operations" (my snarky comment on the latter here) begin the real flood of veterans home. Home to their families, most of whom live in the red states that believed George Bush when he told them it was important. The Monitor piece lays it out clear: 40 percent of all new recruits since October are from the South, and the Plains states make up most of the rest. (And recruiters who threaten to send wavering recruits to jail get promoted.)
We can only hope that when these families get hold of the White House Iraq Group, they march on the WH like the kids in the "Mosh" video.
As the scandal Shakespeare's Sister has so cannily named WHIG-Gate unrolls before our eyes, the more important big picture is getting the ink it deserves as well. I was as delighted as I was saddened to see it in the Times -- not in some long, investigative piece connecting the dots (how so, when the newspaper itself is implicated) but on the editorial page, where Frank Rich cut to the core:
This case is about Iraq, not Niger. The real victims are the American people, not the Wilsons. The real culprit - the big enchilada, to borrow a 1973 John Ehrlichman phrase from the Nixon tapes - is not Mr. Rove but the gang that sent American sons and daughters to war on trumped-up grounds and in so doing diverted finite resources, human and otherwise, from fighting the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. That's why the stakes are so high: this scandal is about the unmasking of an ill-conceived war, not the unmasking of a C.I.A. operative who posed for Vanity Fair.
So put aside Mr. Wilson's February 2002 trip to Africa. The plot that matters starts a month later, in March, and its omniscient author is Dick Cheney. It was Mr. Cheney (on CNN) who planted the idea that Saddam was "actively pursuing nuclear weapons at this time." The vice president went on to repeat this charge in May on "Meet the Press," in three speeches in August and on "Meet the Press" yet again in September. Along the way the frightening word "uranium" was thrown into the mix.
By September the president was bandying about the u-word too at the United Nations and elsewhere, speaking of how Saddam needed only a softball-size helping of uranium to wreak Armageddon on America. But hardly had Mr. Bush done so than, offstage, out of view of us civilian spectators, the whole premise of this propaganda campaign was being challenged by forces with more official weight than Joseph Wilson. In October, the National Intelligence Estimate, distributed to Congress as it deliberated authorizing war, included the State Department's caveat that "claims of Iraqi pursuit of natural uranium in Africa," made public in a British dossier, were "highly dubious." A C.I.A. assessment, sent to the White House that month, determined that "the evidence is weak" and "the Africa story is overblown."
(Read the rest: it's worth it.) Rich doesn't speak explicitly of the White House Iraq Group, explicitly named in Fitzgerald's subpoena of White House papers. TalkLeft, Digby, and Pacific Views have all drawn attention to work ot Lt. Colonel Gardiner , about the group that dreamed the sales job Rich describes above-- in a campaign-war-room atmosphere where no slur was too low if it got the job done, no lie too outrageous if it could be sold.
But I think S-Sister and TBL are absolutely correct in insisting that the conspiracy to fix intelligence, as referred to in the Downing Street memo, has a membership with blood on its hands. According to a piece by Walter Pincus at the Washington Post from the fall of 2003 (thanks, TBL):
In an interview with the New York Times published Sept. 6, Card did not mention the WHIG but hinted at its mission. "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August," he said.
The group met weekly in the Situation Room. Among the regular participants were Karl Rove, the president's senior political adviser; communications strategists Karen Hughes, Mary Matalin and James R. Wilkinson; legislative liaison Nicholas E. Calio; and policy advisers led by Rice and her deputy, Stephen J. Hadley, along with I. Lewis Libby, Cheney's chief of staff.
The first days of September would bring some of the most important decisions of the prewar period: what to demand of the United Nations in the president's Sept. 12 address to the General Assembly, when to take the issue to Congress, and how to frame the conflict with Iraq in the midterm election campaign that began in earnest after Labor Day.
A "strategic communications" task force under the WHIG began to plan speeches and white papers. There were many themes in the coming weeks, but Iraq's nuclear menace was among the most prominent. The day after publication of Card's marketing remark, Bush and nearly all his top advisers began to talk about the dangers of an Iraqi nuclear bomb. . ..
With so much at stake - from PNAC's crazy neocon fantasies of remaking the Middle East to the scads of cash soon available to private military firms -- who could beso rude as to interrupt this Cecil B. DeMille project? Especially (gasp) a Democrat? Squash him quickly, the order went out, and the sharks went out in Rove's patented synchronized swim, like a set of demented Esther Williams girls.
In their wake, so far, the GIs of whom the 33,000 Hotline calls, the cases I learned about last night (mostly not Hotline cases), the struggles we never learn about but are nursed privately by families -- many of whom are then fighting the VA hospitals that had promised lifetime care. This excerpt has been all over the blogosphere, but it bears more witness:
According to documents released at recent meetings of the House and Senate Veterans Affairs committees, the VA hospital in White River Junction, Vt., was forced to shut its operating rooms temporarily because of a lack of maintenance funds to repair a broken heating, ventilation and air conditioning system. Hospitals in Arkansas, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Louisiana and eastern Texas stopped scheduling appointments for many veterans. The VA medical center in San Diego, with a waiting list of 750 veterans, diverted $3.5 million in maintenance funds to partially cover operating expenses and delayed filling 131 vacancies for three months to cover operating expenses. The Portland, Ore., hospital delayed non-emergency surgery for at least six months, and 7,000 veterans who use the VA facility in Bay Pines, Fla., are waiting longer than 30 days for a primary care appointment.
Sometimes, the struggle begins before the member's out of the hospital:
During the coming months, before his skull was rebuilt, before a cornea transplant, before speech and physical therapy, the Army made at least three attempts to get her son to accept a discharge, Lefever said. In one instance, she said a top medical officer showed up in her son’s room in Ward 58, the neuroscience ward at Walter Reed, and said Dunn needed to immediately sign papers formally starting the discharge process.
“We all understood he couldn’t return to the Army, but he hadn’t even started his treatment,” Lefever said, adding that her son had just emerged from his coma.
In their wake nearly 2,000 coffins with U.S. flags draped over them, and between 26,000-100,000 Iraqi coffins, some of them quite small.
In their wake, a crackdown on journalists -- and, perhaps, a reevaluation on the part of some more powerful. In her piece today, while defending her star reporter, Gail Collins today hinted that she knows the real story, not the rest of the Jar of Red Herrings":
• Journalists should not tailor their principles to the politics of the moment.
• Coerced waivers of confidentiality are meaningless.
• Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction.
I just pray that the news side of her paper decides, once their legal department has figured out what to do about Judy, to give this story what it deserves -- even with a new SCOTUS appointment due tonight. I have no doubt that Shrub made his choice public now to distract from the story.
I just hope that the SCOTUS fuss (which I'll join along with the others later tonight) gives Patrick Fitzgerald time to indict the lot of them. Including, perhaps, the man who did all this damage so he could be "a war president."
He'd never do that? Billmon was, I think, the first in the 'sphere to mention that Fitzgerald cut his teeth going after mobsters and doesn't stop till he's won. I'd never want the dude after my sources, but he might just be the perfect choice for this cut-rate-Cosa--Nostra operation Rove has been running for five years.
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