Free Republic

WASHINGTON With the final passage through Congress of the detainee treatment bill, President Bush on Friday achieved a signal victory, shoring up with legislation his determined conduct of the campaign against terrorism in the face of challenges from critics and the courts. Rather than reining in the formidable presidential powers Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have asserted since Sept. 11, 2001, the law gives some of those powers a solid statutory foundation. In effect it allows the president to identify enemies, imprison them indefinitely and interrogate them — albeit with a ban on the harshest treatment — beyond...

In classical Judaism, resurrection of the dead was a central belief, essential to defining oneself as a Jew. “Today,” writes Jon D. Levenson, professor of Jewish studies at Harvard, that fact “comes as a shock to most Jews and Christians alike.” Apart from the Orthodox minority, most Jews, including those who acknowledge belief in the resurrection as a part of Judaism’s historical legacy, seem to rush by the idea as quickly as possible, rendering it perhaps as a metaphor for how one’s good works live on, but in any case ushering it to the margins of their tradition, a minor...

The New York Times says Democrats in Congress are more concerned about winning elections than winning the War on Terror or the gallant service and sacrifices of our troops. They say that about all (minus one) those in close reelection races or who might run for the Presidency in 2008. That 'minus one' gets the usual treatment: The Democratic vote in the Senate on Thursday against legislation governing the treatment of terrorism suspects showed that party leaders believe that President Bush’s power to wield national security as a political issue is seriously diminished.The most vivid example of the Democratic assessment...

-snip- I remember a seasoned senior officer explaining the importance of the Geneva Conventions. He said, “When an enemy fighter knows he’ll be treated well by United States forces if he is captured, he is more likely to give up.” A year later on the streets of Baghdad, I saw countless insurgents surrender when faced with the prospect of a hot meal, a pack of cigarettes and air-conditioning. America’s moral integrity was the single most important weapon my platoon had on the streets of Iraq. It saved innumerable lives, encouraged cooperation with our allies and deterred Iraqis from joining the...

LT. EMILY J. T. PEREZ, 23, a West Point graduate who outran many men, directed a gospel choir and read the Bible every day, was at the head of a weekly convoy as it rolled down roads pocked with bombs and bullets near Najaf. As platoon leader, she insisted on leading her troops from the front. Two weeks ago, one of those bombs tripped her up, detonating near her Humvee in Kifl, south of Baghdad. She died Sept. 12, the 64th woman from the United States military to be killed in Iraq or Afghanistan. Eight died in Vietnam. Despite longstanding...

For an older woman I know who was suffering from “implacable depression” that refused to yield to any medications, electroconvulsive therapy — popularly called shock therapy — was a lifesaver. And Kitty Dukakis, wife of the former governor of Massachusetts and 1988 Democratic presidential nominee, says ECT, as doctors call it, gave her back her life, which had been rendered nearly unlivable by unrelenting despair and the alcohol she used to assuage it. Neither woman has experienced the most common side effect of ECT: memory disruption, though Mrs. Dukakis recalls nothing of a five-day trip to Paris she took after...

Scientists have long said the only way to restore Louisiana’s vanishing wetlands is to undo the elaborate levee system that controls the Mississippi River, not with the small projects that have been tried here and there, but with a massive diversion that would send the muddy river flooding wholesale into the state’s sediment-starved marshes. And most of them have long dismissed the idea as impractical, unaffordable and lethal to the region’s economy. Now, they are reconsidering. In fact, when a group of researchers convened last April to consider the fate of the Louisiana coast, their recommendation was unanimous: divert the...

I called Tim Russert to ask if Dick Cheney had washed his hands after their interview on Sunday. "No-o-o," he replied, sounding confused. Any sort of scrubbing, I wondered? Antiseptic wipe, Purell, quick shower on the way out? No, Tim assured me, the vice president did not stop at the basement shower at NBC, or even drop by the men's room you pass on the right as you head out to the parking lot. According to The New York Times' health section on Tuesday, Lady Macbeth and Pontius Pilate were not alone in wanting that "damned spot" out. "People who...

With barely seven weeks until the midterm elections, Americans have an overwhelmingly negative view of the Republican-controlled Congress, with substantial majorities saying that they disapprove of the job it is doing and that its members do not deserve re-election, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll. (snip) Mr. Bush’s job approval rating was 37 percent in the poll, virtually unchanged from the last Times/CBS News poll, in August. On the issue that has been a bulwark for Mr. Bush, 54 percent said they approved of the way he was managing the effort to combat terrorists, again unchanged from...

Seeking a deal with Senate Republicans on the rules governing the interrogation of terrorism suspects, the White House has dropped its insistence on redefining the obligations of the United States under the Geneva Conventions, members of Congress and aides said Tuesday. The new White House position, sent to Capitol Hill on Monday night, set off intensified negotiations between administration officials and a small group of Republican senators. The senators have blocked President Bush’s original proposal for legislation to clarify which interrogation techniques are permissible and to establish trial procedures for terrorism suspects now in United States military custody. The two...

But, Bush added, the United States was pursuing a diplomatic solution to the crisis over Iran. In a 21-minute speech to the United Nations General Assembly, Bush directly addressed the people of a number of Middle Eastern countries, saying that the United States wanted to support democratic reforms, defeat extremism and convince them it was not acting against Islam.

FIVE years after 9/11, President Bush has taken his counterterrorism case to the American people. That’s because he has had to. This summer, a plurality of the Supreme Court found, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, that Congress must explicitly approve military commissions to try suspected terrorists. So Mr. Bush has proposed legislation seeking to place the tribunals, and other aggressive antiterrorism measures, on a sounder footing. But the president has broader goals than even fighting terrorism — he has long intended to make reinvigorating the presidency a priority. Vice President Dick Cheney has rightly deplored the “erosion of the powers and...

Op-Ed Contributor APPROACHING the city of Karbala last year for a meeting with a local Iraqi Army commander, my convoy of four Army Humvees came across hundreds of bearded men in green camouflage uniforms lining the road. They were directing traffic and searching vehicles for bombs — good things — and they waved us through, just as Iraqi security forces should. But we don’t issue green uniforms to Iraqi troops. After the meeting, I sent an e-mail message to my headquarters in Baghdad, asking whether an entire Iraqi battalion, usually 700 to 1,000 soldiers, had been newly authorized for this...

Charitable Times: Embattled Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. Photo: Bloomberg News In a move aimed at boosting morale.....Chairman Arthur "Pinch" Sulzberger Jr. and his cousin, Vice Chairman Michael Golden, will forgo about $2 million in stock and pump it into a bonus pool for employees......Sulzberger's leadership has come under increasing attack from employees and Wall Street, as the company fights to keep readers and advertisers from fleeing to the Internet. The Times disclosed in a filing with the SEC that Sulzberger and Golden "have requested that the board of directors significantly reduce their compensation for 2006 and 2007 by not...

WASHINGTON, Sept. 14 — Representative Bob Ney, Republican of Ohio, has agreed to plead guilty to federal criminal charges related to his dealings with the corrupt lobbyist Jack Abramoff, lawyers and others with knowledge of the investigation said Thursday. A guilty plea would make Mr. Ney, a six-term congressman, the first member of Congress to admit to criminal charges in the Abramoff investigation, which has focused on the actions of several current and former Republican lawmakers who had been close to the former lobbyist. People with detailed knowledge of the investigation said Mr. Ney had entered an in-patient rehabilitation facility...

CONSERVATIVES are dreading the November elections. The Republican capture of the House of Representatives in 1994 was one of modern conservatism’s signal political accomplishments. Now the Democrats are poised to take back the House. If that happens, however, conservatives will find several silver linings in the outcome. It would be worse for conservatives if Republicans actually gained seats. The Congressional wing of the party lost its reformist zeal years ago and has been trying to win elections based on pork and incumbency. An election victory would reward that strategy, leaving the congressmen even less interested in restraining spending, reforming government...

STELLARTON, Nova Scotia, Sept. 12 — There are perils to being unattached in the stodgy world of diplomacy. Sometimes it has seemed that all Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice needs to do is show up in public with a man, and people start talking. The single, sophisticated American secretary of state once drew notice for wearing black stiletto knee-high boots with an above-the-knee black skirt while reviewing American troops in Germany, so she is bound to attract gossip. That is particularly true on the dry, acronym-ridden diplomatic circuit of NATO meetings, APEC forums and Asean conclaves, where much imagination has...

Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has taken his place among the spirits permanently haunting West 43rd Street. “The basic goal,” New York Times reporter David Barstow said, “is to make it more difficult for a future Fitzgerald to follow the breadcrumbs of phone records and notes and expense slips from reporter to source.” Mr. Barstow, the Pulitzer- and Peabody-winning investigative reporter, was on the phone Sept. 12, shortly before The Times began this year’s round of legal seminars for the staff. The sessions, led by Times lawyers George Freeman and David McCraw, have traditionally offered a brush-up on privacy, sourcing and general...

The United States of America vs. Bill Keller How hard is it to be executive editor of the New York Times today? The White House calls him a traitor. He gets roasted every day on talk shows and blogs. The newsroom is losing faith. The paper is shrinking. And the worst part is that fighting back means overcoming his own nature... ...For a meeting without historical precedent, the president of the United States had called the Times to the White House to personally try to prevent a state secret from appearing in print—an exposé of the National Security Agency’s efforts...

The Times' executive editor accuses the Bush White House of stirring up a "partisan hatefest" against the paper over its revelation of an anti-terrorist program that monitored international banking transactions. Deep inside New York magazine's front-page profile of Times Executive Editor Bill Keller (ludicrously called a "true centrist" by writer Joe Hagan) is this gem about his reaction to White House criticism of the paper's exposure of its tracking of international banking transactions for terror clues: "They pissed me off....I think the administration is genuinely distressed that we ran the story over their objections. I think they were embarrassed by...