Iraq: Bush’s ‘Closest Friend’ Leaves Iraq

ETHICS — RIGHT WING LAUNCHES BASELESS SMEAR CAMPAIGN AGAINST 12-YEAR OLD SCHIP RECIPIENT: Two weeks ago, the Democratic radio address was delivered by a 12-year old Graeme Frost, who was involved in a severe car accident three years ago and received access to medical care because of the Children’s Health Insurance Program. Following the speech, conservatives began launching baseless attacks on Graeme and his family. A poster at Free Republic asserted that Graeme and his sister Gemma attend wealthy schools that cost “nearly $40,000 per year for tuition” and live in a well-off home. The smear attack against Graeme has also taken firm hold in the right-wing blogosphere. The National Review, Michelle Malkin, Wizbang, Powerline, and the Weekly Standard blog have all launched assaults on the Frost family. The story is slowly working its way into traditional media outlets as well. Here are the facts the right wing distorted in order to attack Graeme:  First, Graeme has a scholarship to a private school. The school costs $15K a year, but the family only pays $500 a year. Second, the Frosts bought their “lavish house” 16 years ago for $55,000 at a time when the neighborhood was less safe. And finally, the Frosts make $45,000 combined and over the past few years they have made no more than $50,000 combined. Since the address, right wing bloggers have been harassing the Frosts, repeatedly calling their home to get information about their private lives.

MEDIA — JOE WILSON CALLS OUT ROBERT NOVAK FOR ‘LYING’ ABOUT CIA LEAK: Over the weekend, conservative columnist Robert Novak, who infamously outed undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame in a July 2003 column, spoke at “a seminar on the CIA leak case at the 2007 Society of Professional Journalists Convention.” Novak claimed that Plame’s husband, Amb. Joe Wilson, “was not terribly exercised about” the column when he spoke to him prior to publication. “Instead,” claims Novak, “Wilson focused on not being portrayed as simply an opponent of the Iraq war.” In an interview with Talking Points Memo’s Greg Sargent yesterday, Wilson disputed Novak’s claims, calling him a “chronic liar.” “When I talked to him it was not about what he was writing,” Wilson told Sargent. “The purpose of my phone call to him was to tell him that it was not appropriate for him to be telling strangers in Washington that my wife works for the CIA.” Additionally, Wilson said “that Novak’s claim that he hadn’t forcefully objected to the naming of his wife was a severe distortion, based on the fact that Wilson couldn’t say anything direct about it to Novak without confirming it.” According to Sargent, The Hill, which reported Novak’s remarks, never contacted Wilson for comment.

TERRORISM — WHITE HOUSE LEAK OF BIN LADEN VIDEO FORCES INTELLIGENCE COMPANY TO END OPERATIONS: The Washington Post reports today that Search for International Terrorist Entities (SITE), a private intelligence company, gave the White House an advanced copy of an Osama bin Laden video last month under the condition that the government keep the video secret until it was officially released by al Qaeda. Within hours, however, the video was leaked to cable news shows. “The founder of the company…says this premature disclosure…destroyed a years-long surveillance operation that the company has used to intercept and pass along secret messages, videos and advance warnings of suicide bombings from the terrorist group’s communications network.” The breach spurred al Qaeda to shut down its intranet network and online communications. Nick Grace, the founder of clandestineradio.com who tracked the network shutdown, said, “It was both unprecedented and chilling from the perspective of a Web techie. The discipline and coordination to take the entire system down involving multiple Web servers, hundreds of user names and passwords, is an astounding feat, especially that it was done within minutes.” The government did not deny the leak charge, but “some intelligence officials called the incident regrettable.”

“Two months after vowing to roll back broad new wiretapping powers won by the Bush administration,” the New York Times writes, “Congressional Democrats appear ready to make concessions that could extend some of the key powers granted to the National Security Agency.” Glenn Greenwald suggests that “the picture is more complicated and less depressing than this NYT article suggests.”

In a new report, the Iraqi government wants the United States to “to sever all contracts in Iraq with Blackwater USA within six months and pay $8 million in compensation to each of the families of 17 people killed when the firm’s guards” opened fire in a Baghdad last month. The Iraqis also want the United States to hand over the guards involved in the incident for possible trial in Iraqi court.

Army chief of staff Gen. George Casey said the Army “will need three or four years to recover from the strains of repeated deployments to Iraq even with a planned drawdown of US forces next year.”

“Almost 40% of the people displaced from New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina” lived “below the poverty line last year,” according to a Census Bureau survey. The survey also found that “nearly a third of those who fled the hurricane could not find jobs last year, and thousands more weren’t trying.”

President Bush’s SCHIP veto has caused “fresh divisions” among Senate Republicans. “Because the president and Republican leaders are not pushing a positive health care agenda, a lot of people are not comfortable opposing anything that has children in it,” Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) told Roll Call that the “lack of a forceful positive agenda” has “sort of split our caucus.”

“Americans are hearing much less from the Bush administration about democracy for the Middle East than they did a year ago. As Shiite Iran rises, the White House has muted its calls for reform in the region as it redirects policy to reembrace Sunni Arab allies — who run, to varying degrees, authoritarian regimes.”

Six years after 9/11, “the ‘war on terror’ is failing and instead fueling an increase in support for extremist Islamist movements,” according to the Oxford Research Group, a British think tank. The group stated that a “fundamental re-think is required” if al Qaeda is to be rendered ineffective.

And finally: In the introduction of his new book, “I Am America (And So Can You!),” Stephen Colbert writes, “I AM NO FAN OF BOOKS. AND CHANCES ARE, IF YOU’RE READING THIS, YOU AND I SHARE A HEALTHY SKEPTICISM ABOUT THE PRINTED WORD. WELL, I WANT YOU TO KNOW THAT THIS IS THE FIRST BOOK I’VE EVER WRITTEN, AND I HOPE IT’S THE FIRST BOOK YOU’VE EVER READ. DON’T MAKE A HABIT OF IT.”