Did Gonzalez Merely Lie... Or Did He Commit Perjury?

Gonzales Was Told of FBI Violations: After Bureau Sent Reports, Attorney General Said He Knew of No Wrongdoing

As he sought to renew the USA Patriot Act two years ago, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales assured lawmakers that the FBI had not abused its potent new terrorism-fighting powers. "There has not been one verified case of civil liberties abuse," Gonzales told senators on April 27, 2005.

Six days earlier, the FBI sent Gonzales a copy of a report that said its agents had obtained personal information that they were not entitled to have. It was one of at least half a dozen reports of legal or procedural violations that Gonzales received in the three months before he made his statement to the Senate intelligence committee, according to internal FBI documents released under the Freedom of Information Act.

Evidently, Attorney General Gonzales cannot tell the difference between the truth and an outright lie. If, however, he claims that he was unaware of these reports of wrongdoing by the FBI, then he convicts himself of being incompetent in his job. So the question we are left with is a choice between three alternatives:

1. Alberto Gonzales lied to congress, which is a felony even if it is not under oath, and punishable by up to 10 years in prison;
2. Alberto Gonzales committed perjury by lying underoath, which is a felony punishable by up to 20 years in prison;
3. Alberto Gonzales is a complete incompetent in his role as the top law enforcement officer and as an officer of the US government and our federal courts.

In either case, it is clear that Gonzales has executed specific malfeasance, conspiracy with others in our government to defraud the public and Congress, and is unfit to hold his office.

The acts recounted in the FBI reports included unauthorized surveillance, an illegal property search and a case in which an Internet firm improperly turned over a compact disc with data that the FBI was not entitled to collect, the documents show. Gonzales was copied on each report that said administrative rules or laws protecting civil liberties and privacy had been violated. The reports also alerted Gonzales in 2005 to problems with the FBI's use of an anti-terrorism tool known as a national security letter (NSL), well before the Justice Department's inspector general brought widespread abuse of the letters in 2004 and 2005 to light in a stinging report this past March.

Liar, Liar, Gonzales' pants should be on fire! Are we ever going to get a truthful answer about anything going on in our government under the direction of this president and his cabinet?

Justice officials said they could not immediately determine whether Gonzales read any of the FBI reports in 2005 and 2006 because the officials who processed them were not available yesterday. But department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said that when Gonzales testified, he was speaking "in the context" of reports by the department's inspector general before this year that found no misconduct or specific civil liberties abuses related to the Patriot Act.

If Gonzales failed to read these reports, or if those that processed them failed to alert him specifically about these violations of our laws, then he proves he is incapable of being our top law enforcement officer, who is supposed to be the primary person responsible for protecting our civil liberties and enforcing the US Constitution.

"The statements from the attorney general are consistent with statements from other officials at the FBI and the department," Roehrkasse said. He added that many of the violations the FBI disclosed were not legal violations and instead involved procedural safeguards or even typographical errors. Each of the violations cited in the reports copied to Gonzales was serious enough to require notification of the President's Intelligence Oversight Board, which helps police the government's surveillance activities. The format of each memo was similar, and none minced words.

Bovine excrement in the extremis! Who are they kidding. A failure to observe civil rights and the proper procedure is both a civil and criminal breach of law under several laws, including the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965, the Bill of Rights (a part of our Constitution), and several provisions of the USA PAtriot Act.

"This enclosure sets forth details of investigative activity which the FBI has determined was conducted contrary to the attorney general's guidelines for FBI National Security Investigations and Foreign Intelligence Collection and/or laws, executive orders and presidential directives," said the April 21, 2005, letter to the Intelligence Oversight Board.

The oversight board, staffed with intelligence experts from inside and outside government, was established to report to the attorney general and president about civil liberties abuses or intelligence lapses. But Roehrkasse said the fact that a violation is reported to the board "does not mean that a USA Patriot violation exists or that an individual's civil liberties have been abused."

What kind of doubletalk is this statement? Most FBI agents are trained lawyers (almost 70% according to FBI statistics), most of whom are admitted to the bar in several states and allowed to appear on behalf of the government within the federal courts. Are we really expected to belief that the top law enforcement organization and its officers are so unfamiliar with our laws that they do not understand when a breach of that law has occurred?

Two of the earliest reports sent to Gonzales, during his first month on the job, in February 2005, involved the FBI's surveillance and search powers. In one case, the bureau reported a violation involving an "unconsented physical search" in a counterintelligence case. The details were redacted in the released memo, but it cited violations of safeguards "that shall protect constitutional and other legal rights." The second violation involved electronic surveillance on phone lines that was reinitiated after the expiration deadline set by a court in a counterterrorism case.

This seems clear and plain to me... The FBI recognized its own violation of the standards of law. The FBI followed the law and reported these breaches and our government, as represented by President Bush and Attorney General Gonzales, conspired to ignore these felonies and misdeeds.

The report sent to Gonzales on April 21, 2005, concerned a violation of the rules governing NSLs, which allow agents in counterterrorism and counterintelligence investigations to secretly gather Americans' phone, bank and Internet records without a court order or a grand jury subpoena. In the report -- also heavily redacted before being released -- the FBI said its agents had received a compact disc containing information they did not request. It was viewed before being sealed in an envelope.

Gonzales received another report of an NSL-related violation a few weeks later. "A national security letter . . . contained an incorrect phone number" that resulted in agents collecting phone information that "belonged to a different U.S. person" than the suspect under investigation, stated a letter copied to the attorney general on May 6, 2005.

At least two other reports of NSL-related violations were sent to Gonzales, according to the new documents. In letters copied to him on Dec. 11, 2006, and Feb. 26, 2007, the FBI reported to the oversight board that agents had requested and obtained phone data on the wrong people.

Nonetheless, Gonzales reacted with surprise when the Justice Department inspector general reported this March that there were pervasive problems with the FBI's handling of NSLs and another investigative tool known as an exigent circumstances letter.

These reports demonstrate the level of incompetence inherent in the process of covert and secret wiretaps that are not reviewed by a court PRIOR to instituting the tap or search. These reports demonstrate why it is imperative to provide for a full and complete adherence to the provisions of the Foruth Amendment standard of sworn testimony before a magistrtate or justice, and clear evidence of probable cause, before a search, seizure, arrest or wiretap is authorized. While we can all agree mistakes can happen, fewer mistakes will occur if the proper Fourth Amendment procedures are followed.

"I was upset when I learned this, as was Director Mueller. To say that I am concerned about what has been revealed in this report would be an enormous understatement," Gonzales said in a speech March 9, referring to FBI Director Robert S. Mueller. The attorney general added that he believed back in 2005, before the Patriot Act was renewed, that there were no problems with NSLs. "I've come to learn that I was wrong," he said, making no mention of the FBI reports sent to him.

Convenient lies if ever there were any. Can we believe anything this man says? I think not.

Marcia Hofmann, a lawyer for the nonpartisan Electronic Frontier Foundation, said, "I think these documents raise some very serious questions about how much the attorney general knew about the FBI's misuse of surveillance powers and when he knew it." A lawsuit by Hofmann's group seeking internal FBI documents about NSLs prompted the release of the reports.

Yeah! We should all be supporting EFF!

Caroline Fredrickson, a lobbyist for the American Civil Liberties Union, said the new documents raise questions about whether Gonzales misled Congress at a moment when lawmakers were poised to renew the Patriot Act and keenly sought assurances that there were no abuses. "It was extremely important," she said of Gonzales's 2005 testimony. "The attorney general said there are no problems with the Patriot Act, and there was no counterevidence at the time."

Gonzales has now joined Scooter Libby, Bill Clinton, and others from our government in the trend of lying to us and our congress. Nobody with a sound mind can argue that these lies are not intentional, leading us to the conclusion that there is an ongoing conspiracy on the part of Gonzales and his superiors to deliberately lie to us and mislead us.

Some of the reports describe rules violations that the FBI decided not to report to the intelligence board. In February 2006, for example, FBI officials wrote that agents sent a person's phone records, which they had obtained from a provider under a national security letter, to an outside party. The mistake was blamed on "an error in the mail handling." When the third party sent the material back, the bureau decided not to report the mistake as a violation.

Should the FBI, or any agency of the government, be allowed to determine its own violations of law? Should we have a government that operates completely in the dark as the current leadership desires? This is wrong in so many ways... and it violates our very principles of freedom, justice, fairness and openness in government.

The memos also detail instances in which the FBI wrote out new NSLs to cover evidence that had been mistakenly collected. In a June 30, 2006, e-mail, for instance, an FBI supervisor asked an agent who had "overcollected" evidence under a national security letter to forward his original request to lawyers. "We would like to check the specific language to see if there is anything in the body that would cover the extra material they gave," the supervisor wrote.

This is further evidence of wrongdoing, conspiracy (a legal term in this case) and fraudulent acts on the part of our top law enforcement officials.

Sometimes the FBI reached seemingly contradictory conclusions about the gravity of its errors. On May 6, 2005, the bureau decided that it needed to report a violation when agents made an "inadvertent" request for data for the wrong phone number. But on June 1, 2006, in a similar wrong-number case, the bureau concluded that a violation did not need to be reported because the agent acted "in good faith."

Can a pattern of fraud, conspiracy and outright violation of the laws of our nation be considered "good faith" at any time? I think not.

Proof Bush & Company Are Out Of Touch With Iraq Realities

The recent statements made by Senator Reid regarding the un-winnable and untenable situation in Iraq were confronted with denials, dismissals, consternation and confrontation by President Bush, Vice President Cheney and others. In fact, Bush came out and dismissed the entire notion that our efforts in Iraq have proven to be failures: complete and utter failures.

The following references and citations demonstrate the latest in a series of events and issues that clearly point out how much of a failure our efforts in Iraq have been, including undermining our standing in the international community and the entire rationale for our entry into Iraq ab initio. In the minds of most reasonable people the mounting evidence creates a prima facie case against the position held and maintained by Bush and his gang of fascist thugs.

Military Cites ‘Negligence’ in Aftermath of Iraq Killings

In a clear illustration that the policy of maltreatment and abandonment of our own first principles, the Army has a report indicting USMC officers and enlisted personnel for the murder of civilians. The policies developed and promoted by Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney and, now, Gates demonstrates a ruthlessness in pursuit of an ideology, regardless of what principles of freedom, liberty, justice and compassion are undermined or dismissed completely.

A military investigation has found that senior Marine Corps commanders in Iraq showed a routine disregard for the lives of Iraqi civilians that contributed to a “willful” failure to investigate the killing of 24 unarmed Iraqis by marines in 2005, lawyers involved in the case said.

The report, completed last summer but never made public, also found that a Marine Corps general and colonel in Iraq learned of the killings within hours that day, Nov. 19, 2005, in the town of Haditha, but failed to begin a thorough inquiry into how they occurred.

The 130-page report, by Maj. Gen. Eldon A. Bargewell of the Army, did not conclude that the senior officers covered up evidence or committed a crime. But it said the Marine Corps command in Iraq was far too willing to tolerate civilian casualties and dismiss Iraqi claims of abuse by marines as insurgent propaganda, according to lawyers who have read it.

“All levels of command tended to view civilian casualties, even in significant numbers, as routine and as the natural and intended result of insurgent tactics,” General Bargewell wrote in his report, according to two people who have read it. “Statements made by the chain of command during interviews for this investigation, taken as a whole, suggest that Iraqi civilian lives are not as important as U.S. lives, their deaths are just the cost of doing business, and that the Marines need to get the job done no matter what it takes.”

The killings in Haditha, in Anbar Province, began with a roadside bombing that killed one American marine and wounded two. Several marines then began methodically killing civilians in the area, eventually going door to door in the village and killing women and children, some in their beds, according to a Naval criminal investigation.

General Bargewell’s report, completed at the request of Lt. Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, the day-to-day commander of American forces in Iraq at the time, did not focus on the killings themselves, but rather on commanders’ handling of the aftermath.

The Washington Post published details of the report’s findings on Saturday. Spokesmen for the Marine Corps declined to comment, citing hearings for the three enlisted marines charged with murder in the case and for four officers charged with dereliction of duty for failing to ensure a proper investigation.

After Iraqi Troops Do Dirty Work, 3 Detainees Talk

Additionally, the way we have failed to effectively train, monitor and supervise Iraqi forces illustrates our ongoing failures. The fact that Iraqi forces and government officials have resorted to torture, murder and maltreatment in pursuit of those actively involved in the insurgency and militia operations under factious leadership points to our utter failure in imparting our first principles of justice, freedom and the ethical conduct of security, military and intelligence operations.

Out here in what the soldiers call Baghdad’s wild west, sometimes the choices are all bad.

In one of the new joint American-Iraqi security stations in the capital this month, in the volatile Ghazaliya neighborhood, Capt. Darren Fowler was heaping praise on his Iraqi counterparts for helping capture three insurgent suspects who had provided information he believed would save American lives.

“The detainee gave us names from the highest to the lowest,” Captain Fowler told the Iraqi soldiers. “He showed us their safe houses, where they store weapons and I.E.D.’s and where they keep kidnap victims, how they get weapons, where weapons come from, how they place I.E.D.’s, attack us and go away. Because you detained this guy this is the first intelligence linking everything together. Good job. Very good job.”

The Iraqi officers beamed. What the Americans did not know and what the Iraqis had not told them was that before handing over the detainees to the Americans, the Iraqi soldiers had beaten one of them in front of the other two, the Iraqis said. The stripes on the detainee’s back, which appeared to be the product of a whipping with electrical cables, were later shown briefly to a photographer, who was not allowed to take a picture.

To the Iraqi soldiers, the treatment was normal and necessary. They were proud of their technique and proud to have helped the Americans.

“I prepared him for the Americans and let them take his confession,” Capt. Bassim Hassan said through an interpreter. “We know how to make them talk. We know their back streets. We beat them. I don’t beat them that much, but enough so he feels the pain and it makes him desperate.”

As American and Iraqi troops set up these outposts in dangerous neighborhoods to take on the insurgents block by block, they find themselves continually facing lethal attacks. In practice, the Americans and Iraqis seem to have different answers about what tactics are acceptable in response.

Beatings like this, which are usually hard to verify but appear to be widespread given the fears about the Iraqi security forces frequently expressed by ordinary Iraqis, present the Americans with a largely undiscussed dilemma.

Iraqi City Council Chief Killed

Given the number of Iraqi leaders that have been targeted by suicide bombers and the number of security and police forces killed for having the courage to seek a future for Iraq that is not dominated by secular or theocratic dictatorships, it is all too apparent that we cannot even develop security methods, procedures or geographic areas where people can be safe.

Gunmen killed the chairman of the Falluja City Council on Saturday, striking a blow to American and Iraqi efforts to develop a functioning representative government in the volatile western province of Anbar.

Sami Naib al-Jumaili, who was slain in a drive-by shooting in front of his house, was at least the third leader of the Falluja City Council killed by insurgents. Another resigned after receiving death threats.

Though police investigators said they did not know who killed Mr. Jumaili, suspicion has fallen most heavily on the extremist insurgent group Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, which has conducted an intimidation and murder campaign against politicians and tribal leaders in Anbar who have cooperated with the Iraqi and American authorities.

Maj. Jeffrey Pool, a spokesman for the American military command in Falluja, said the assassination was “designed to cause fear and to intimidate the populace to cow them into submission.”

In the northern oil city of Kirkuk, gunmen stormed the house of a Kurdish family on Saturday, killing all four family members, including an 8-year-old girl who was beheaded, according to Brig. Gen. Adel Zain al-Abdeen, the chief of the local police.

Police investigators and neighbors of the victims said they had no idea why the attackers had singled out the family, which included the girl’s parents and her 18-year-old sister.

Killings have been on the rise in Kirkuk in recent months as tensions have escalated between Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen in advance of a referendum, expected to be held before the end of the year, to decide whether the city should join Iraqi Kurdistan.

Also on Saturday, three American soldiers were killed and six were wounded in three separate attacks in and around Baghdad, the American military said. The military also reported that a Polish soldier was killed and four were wounded when their vehicle was struck by a bomb Friday on a roadway in Diwaniya, south of the capital.

In Baghdad, a car bomb exploded in the Shiite enclave of Sadr City on Saturday, killing two and wounding five, an Interior Ministry official said.

U.S. Erects Baghdad Wall to Keep Sects Apart

Here we see our military resorting to a strategy that is not only excessively expensive, but also extraordinarily ineffective. If we know that a huge fence doesn't keep people from entering our country illegally, what makes anyone think that a wall will keep the factious ideologues in Baghdad from killing each other? This is a silly, short-sighted and asinine approach, especially when the size and geographical realities of Baghdad are considered. While everyone, including the Bush gang, acknowledges the need for an internal political solution to the issues and problems in Iraq, we still insist on implementing strategies that are doomed not to work.

American military commanders in Baghdad are trying a radical new strategy to quell the widening sectarian violence by building a 12-foot-high, three-mile-long wall separating a historic Sunni enclave from Shiite neighborhoods.

Soldiers in the Adhamiya district of northern Baghdad, a Sunni Arab stronghold, began construction of the wall last week and expect to finish it within a month. Iraqi Army soldiers would then control movement through a few checkpoints. The wall has already drawn intense criticism from residents of the neighborhood, who say that it will increase sectarian tensions and that it is part of a plan by the Shiite-led Iraqi government to box in the minority Sunnis.

A doctor in Adhamiya, Abu Hassan, said the wall would transform the residents into caged animals.

“It’s unbelievable that they treat us in such an inhumane manner,” he said in a telephone interview. “They’re trying to isolate us from other parts of Baghdad. The hatred will be much greater between the two sects.”

“The Native Americans were treated better than us,” he added.

The American military said in a written statement that “the wall is one of the centerpieces of a new strategy by coalition and Iraqi forces to break the cycle of sectarian violence.”

As soldiers pushed forward with the construction, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates insisted to the Iraqi government that it had to pass by late summer a series of measures long sought by the White House that were aimed at advancing reconciliation between the warring Sunni Arabs and Shiite Arabs.

Whether Parliament meets that benchmark could affect a decision that the Bush administration plans to make in late summer on extending the nearly 30,000 additional troops ordered to Iraq earlier this year, Mr. Gates said.

His words were the bluntest yet by an American official in tying the American military commitment here to the Iraqi political process. It reflected a growing frustration among Bush administration officials at Iraq’s failure to move on the political elements of the new strategy. President Bush’s new security plan here is aimed at buying time for the feuding Iraqi factions to come to political settlements that would, in theory, reduce the violence.

Bush Defends Troop Buildup in Iraq, Claiming Progress in War

Despite all the fraud, waste and failure to restore working utilities and services to the vast majority of Iraqi neighborhoods, towns and cities, President Bush insists that progress is being made in a steady fashion. Despite the numerous outbreaks of violence, the indiscriminate use of IEDs, the use of chemical (chlorine gas) weapons, the numerous murders and the continued exercise of power over sectarian militias, Bush and company remain committed to a strategy that is nothing but a failure.

In family therapy, substance abuse treatment and change management approaches to organizations the first issue to conquer is dysfunctional employment of denial as a coping strategy. In the case of our efforts in Iraq, the use of denial and the resulting dysfunction is harming our nation, killing and maiming our troops and murdering thousands upon thousands of Iraqis.

President Bush turned to visual aids on Friday to promote his troop buildup in Iraq, using maps and photographs on a wide electronic screen to assert that in Baghdad, “the direction of the fight is beginning to shift.”

The speech, to an audience of high school students and members of a civic group devoted to studying world affairs, was part of an intense White House public relations effort to persuade Americans — and, more important, Democrats in Congress — to give Mr. Bush’s troop buildup a chance. Democrats are trying to use an Iraq war spending bill to force the president to bring troops home, and Mr. Bush has promised to veto it.

On the second day of a two-day outside-the-Beltway swing, Mr. Bush laid out in his most specific terms to date what he viewed as improvements in Iraq. “So far, the operation is meeting expectations,” he said, at one point quoting an unnamed Middle East scholar who, Mr. Bush said, drew a contrast between “the gloomy despair in Washington and the cautious sense of optimism in Baghdad.”

But Mr. Bush said that since the security operation began in Baghdad “we have seen some of the highest casualties of the war,” and his visuals included an image of one of Wednesday’s bombings in Baghdad.

Bombs killed at least 171 people on Wednesday in the deadliest day in the capital since before the American-led security plan for the city took effect two months ago.

On Capitol Hill, Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader, took to the Senate floor to defend his assessment, made Thursday, that “this war is lost,” a comment Republicans have seized upon. “The longer we continue down the president’s path, the further we will be from responsibly ending this war,” Mr. Reid said Friday. In Michigan, Mr. Bush chided Democrats for suggesting they had an “alternative strategy,” adding, “Withdrawal is not a strategy.”

Like a general outlining his battle plan, the president delivered a step-by-step analysis of the conflict in Baghdad, Anbar Province and the outskirts of Baghdad. He began with a map that used red triangles to pinpoint the location of joint security stations, posts in Baghdad where American and Iraqi forces are supposed to work to root out terrorists.

“Day by day, block by block, Iraqi and American forces are making incremental gains in Baghdad,” the president said, adding, “Displaced families are beginning to return home. And the number of sectarian murders in Baghdad has dropped by half since the operation began.”

Death squad killings have dropped by half, according to the United States military, but bombings, which have mainly been directed at Shiites, have increased in Baghdad.

Wolfowitz Backed Friend for Iraq Contract in ’03

The scandals, waste, mismanagement and fraud continues all the way to the top echelon of political and government, including the top supporters of the Bush agenda and campaigns. The Wolfowitz scandal is just another link in a long chain of fraud, nepotism, cronyism and influence peddling that has gone on ever since our forces illegally invaded Iraq. The no-bid contracts with former business associates and corporations linked directly to George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld continue in an unchecked manner, with little to no oversight of how things are managed (mismanaged) or how services and construction are delivered.

Wolfowitz is yet another example of a fascist in high political position under the Bush banner. His behavior in his past positions and his present position is nothing less than scandalous to an extreme. Representatives of other nations and the UN have been calling for his resignation for several years. His approach toward dealing with his own staff and those he must deal with on a daily basis is so poor that he has been the subject of many complaints.

Paul D. Wolfowitz, while serving as deputy secretary of defense, personally recommended that his companion, Shaha Ali Riza, be awarded a contract for travel to Iraq in 2003 to advise on setting up a new government, says a previously undisclosed inquiry by the Pentagon’s inspector general.

The inquiry, as described by a senior Pentagon official, concluded that there was no wrongdoing in Mr. Wolfowitz’s role in the hiring of Ms. Riza by the Science Applications International Corporation, a Pentagon contractor, because Ms. Riza had the expertise required to advise on the role of women in Islamic countries.

The investigators also found that Mr. Wolfowitz, now president of the World Bank, had not exerted improper influence in Ms. Riza’s hiring. Earlier this week, Science Applications International said an unnamed Defense Department official had directed that she be hired. She had been a World Bank employee for five years at the time.

Mr. Wolfowitz’s office said it could not comment on the latest disclosure. Ms. Riza’s lawyer, Victoria Toensing, did not respond to a request for a comment.

The disclosure of Mr. Wolfowitz’s role in Ms. Riza’s contract in 2003 provides a new indication of his involvement in her employment, at a time when the World Bank’s board is investigating his role in arranging for a large salary increase, a promotion and a transfer for Ms. Riza when he came to the bank in 2005.

The disclosure also came on a day of swirling pressure at the bank, where the 24-member executive board met into the evening to discuss the situation amid mounting calls for Mr. Wolfowitz’s resignation.

Wave of Bombings Continues in Iraq

The overwhelming evidence of failure is written in the aftermath of explosives and murders of insurgents and civilians all over Iraq.

Bombs ravaged Baghdad in five horrific explosions aimed mainly at Shiite crowds on Wednesday, killing at least 171 people in the deadliest day in the capital since the American-led security plan for the city took effect two months ago.

Another suicide car bomber killed 10 more people in a religiously mixed neighborhood today. The wave of attacks, five of them involving car bombs, took place as Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki declared that the Iraqi government planned to take full control of security from the American-led forces before the end of the year.

In the worst of the bombings Wednesday, a car packed with explosives exploded at an intersection in the Sadriya neighborhood that serves as a hub for buses traveling to the Shiite district of Sadr City. The blast killed at least 140 people and wounded 150; incinerated scores of vehicles, including several minibuses full of passengers; and charred nearby shops, witnesses and the police said.

No Solution in Sight as Bush and Lawmakers Discuss Iraq Spending Measure

The fact that President Bush has the audacity to declare he will veto any appropriations bill offered by Congress that has restrictions as to how money can be spend and/or time lines and benchmarks for withdrawal only demonstrates his ego-centric ideology and his willingness to thumb his nose at the will of Congress and the overwhelming number of Americans that feel withdrawal from Iraq is our only real option. In effect, President Bush is "flipping the bird" (middle finger gesture) at Congress and every American citizen.

But then Bush has the unmitigated gall to accuse Congress of not supporting our troops and undermining the mission in Iraq. Since we do not have a clearly defined mission in Iraq (and never had such a mission), it is unreasonable and unconscionable that Bush would dare to lay the blame for our failed mission at the feet of Congress. Even if Congress needs to share in the blame for our failures in Iraq, the blame belongs to the last Congress, which was controlled and dominated by ultra-conservatives that backed Bush and his agenda no matter what the outcomes or the number of times Bush and company were caught lying to us.

In an effort to even further demonstrate his lack of concern for our troops and the disregard for the role, authority and will of Congress, Bush has the unmitigated gall to also point the finger at the current Congress for endangering our troops on the ground in Iraq. Congress provided Bush with the funds and appropriations for his continued, albeit failing, efforts in Iraq, but with legitimate restrictions in compliance with the will of a majority of American citizens. So, once again, Bush is engaging in the blame game and refuses to take ownership of his own incompetence and failures.

After weeks of acrimonious sparring over financing the next phase of the war, President Bush and Congressional leaders softened their tone on Wednesday but failed to resolve their differences over a timeline for removing most American combat troops from Iraq next year.

Mr. Bush met with a bipartisan group of lawmakers in the White House for nearly an hour, the first face-to-face discussion since the House and Senate passed emergency Iraq spending bills last month with provisions to end the war. Democrats said they would send the president legislation by the end of next week, despite his pledge to veto it.

“We believe he must search his soul, his conscience, and find out what is the right thing for the American people,” Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic majority leader, told reporters after the meeting. “I believe signing this bill will do that.”

The White House, though, said Mr. Bush had no intention of signing any legislation that included a call for a troop withdrawal. Democrats do not have enough support to override a veto, so the debate over financing the troops remains at an impasse.

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, said, “The president, obviously, as you already know, is not going to accept language that specifies a date for surrender or language that micromanages the efforts of our military in Iraq.”

The discussions took place on one of the deadliest days of the year in Baghdad, where at least 171 people were killed in bombings. Democrats said the violence underscored the urgency of finding a new direction in Iraq, one that did not place American troops in the middle of a civil war.

At the beginning of the meeting, Mr. Bush declared, “People have strong opinions around the table and I’m looking forward to listening to them.” And for the next hour, according to participants and aides in the room, a frank conversation unfolded between the president and the 10 legislative leaders seated around the table in the Cabinet Room.

A White House official who attended the meeting, and spoke on condition of anonymity in order to describe details, said Mr. Bush’s first question to the Democratic leaders was, “When can you get me a bill?”

And, this official said, Mr. Bush told the Democrats that he hoped to ultimately follow several of the guidelines set forth last year in a report by the Iraq Study Group, which called for an eventual draw-down of American troops. According to the official, Mr. Bush noted that the Study Group, whose co-chairman was his father’s former political aide, James A. Baker III, had suggested that a temporary troop increase could be a necessary step on the way to an eventual withdrawal.

Names of the Dead

The most significant evidence against Bush and company is in the following report.

The Department of Defense has identified 3,303 American service members who have died since the start of the Iraq war.

Add this statistic to the number of injured, maimed, missing and permanently disabled and we have all the evidence needed to indict President Bush and his entire administration for incompetence, failure and disgrace.