Today, on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), who has held several hearings on the Bush administration’s torture program, said that President Bush has committed “impeachable offenses”:
NADLER: If we had a just system and it weren’t overly political, the president would be impeached. I think he has committed impeachable offenses.
Yesterday, House Judiciary Committee chairman John Conyers (D-MI) said that he may allow Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) to present his impeachment articles against Bush before the August recess. “We’re not doing impeachment, but he can talk about it,” he said.
Terrorism liaison officers have been getting a lot of attention in the national press lately. But the bottom line of what they do is basically old-fashioned police work, according to the state police coordinating the effort in Arizona.
The TLOs, as they are called, keep their eyes and ears open for any suspicious activity.
The three-year-old program is part of the Arizona Department of Public Safety and its Arizona Counter Terrorism Information Center, the state’s intelligence fusion center. The 75 to 80 TLOs are specially trained police officers, firefighters and police crime analysts. They report suspicious behavior they see in the course of their jobs. The reports are put in the state database for further investigation, and could be sent to federal terrorist databases.
DPS Lt. Larry Perry, the man in charge of Arizona’s TLOs, thinks they are necessary. Although he admits their jobs include a concept that all police officers and firefighters should follow, he says TLOs have learned a lot more than that during 40 hours of special training.
“This is situational awareness where people who work in critical infrastructures throughout the state are reporting suspicious activities,” Perry said. “TLOs are not getting information on private citizens in their homes. This is a speciality unit that links TLOs together for the purpose of reporting suspicious activity.”
Perry said TLOs in Arizona have reported theft of military clothing, police or fire uniforms and equipment. He added that TLOs are deployed to large public gatherings of 500 or more people where the potential for terrorism exists so they can assist law enforcement officials.
“If we were to see one person taking a lot of pictures of the power plant at Palo Verde (nuclear plant), that could be a terrorist opportunity,” Perry said.
The program has received four federal and state grants ranging from $200,000 to $500,000, according to Perry. They range from 24 months to 36 months.
Sgt. Brent Olson, a member of the Mesa Police Department emergency services and counter terrorism teams, is a TLO. He believes the program provides an important link between law enforcement and fire protection agencies.
“A lot of it is straight-up crime prevention, but with a twist,” Olson said.
“We’re focused with speciality other units. Something may happen here in Mesa and TLOs can work their counterparts in other cities to check if there’s anything going on there. We can contact each other directly and share information. We don’t have to go through others as we might have had to do. As far as I’m concerned, it’s a good program.”
Perry scoffs at the notion that the program may be likened to snooping.
“It’s not ‘Big Brother’ at all, but I can see that the ACLU might have a problem with it,” he said.
Alessandra Soler Meetze , executive director of the Arizona chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, said her concern is the program might give inexperienced or undertrained volunteers the opportunity to target people because of ethnicity or religion.
“What we don’t want is a policy that encourages non-law enforcement personnel to keep tabs on their neighbors,” Meetze said. “This sounds like good police work and smart profiling based on behavior rather than racial or ethnic factors. The policy clearly targets behavior. We just need to keep tabs on DPS to make sure their officers and volunteers in practice don’t cross the line and begin replacing suspicious activity with skin color when targeting individuals.”
Perry said the reporting of suspicious information by TLOs is based upon suspicious activities and incidents, not on race or religious preference.
Suspicious activity is defined in TLO training as behavior that could lead to terrorism, such as taking photos of no apparent aesthetic value, making measurements or notes, espousing extremist beliefs or conversing in code, according to a draft Department of Justice/Major Cities Chiefs Association document.
Tomorrow, July 8th, could mark the beginning of official condoning of warrantless surveillance of law-abiding citizens in the US, not to mention foreign nationals. Much of this information has been covered by Glenn Greenwald in the past week.
In the video below, I talk about what every American needs to know — and do in the next 24 hours — about the new FISA (Federal Information and Surveillance Act) amendments. The interview, and below partial transcription, answers questions like…
-I don’t have anything to hide. How does this affect me?
-What if this type of surveillance is what has prevented another 9/11 from happening?
-What are common inaccuracies about FISA reported in the media?
Find below how you can make a real impact in less than 60 seconds. Every person counts — the Senators who will vote are watching the numbers. 41 Senators can block the bill, and it’s not too late.
Please do the following: How I ask you to spend 60 seconds
1. ALL AMERICANS: Go to the EFF website here and put in your zipcode to find your Senator’s phone number. Call them and read the short script on the same page. If no answer, click the link at the bottom of the page to e-mail them.
(Tell others verbally to go to “www.eff.org” and click “take action”)
2. OBAMA SUPPORTERS: Go to My.BarackObama.com here and join the group requesting he oppose (as he did earlier) the amendment. This takes about 30 seconds. I suggest changing “ListServ” in the bottom right to “Do not receive e-mails.” (Tell others verbally to search “obama please vote no” on Google and My.BarackObama.com will be in the top 3 results, currently #1)
1. Why does the vote this Tuesday, July 8th matter to normal people who have nothing to hide?
Ordinary citizens who want to live in a democracy — including those with nothing to hide — should be concerned about the ability of the government to use private, sensitive personal information to blackmail, manipulate, and intimidate their representatives, journalists and their sources, potential whistleblowers, and activists or dissenters of any sort.
2. Couldn’t it be argued that this type of surveillance ability has prevented another 9/11 from happening? Isn’t it possible that this type of legislation has saved American lives?
The administration has claimed that is has, but without presenting a single piece of evidence that this is so, even in closed hearings to Senators with clearances on the Intelligence Committee. The FISA court has granted warrants in virtually every request that’s been made of it that has any color of helping national security. The administration’s decision to bypass that court, illegally, leads to a strong suspicion that they are abusing domestic spying, as some of their predecessors did, in ways that even the secret FISA court would never approve.
3. What are the most important factual inaccuracies about FISA found in the media?
Advocates of the bill take pride that it makes this amended FISA the exclusive basis for overhearing citizens, but that exclusivity is, in fact, in the current 30-year-old FISA bill already. President Bush simply ignored it in bypassing FISA, and there’s not reason that he and his successors would not continue to do the same here.
It’s been inaccurately stated that if this amendments didn’t pass, FISA would expire. This is flatly false. FISA is open-ended and will continue as it already has, adequately for 30 years. What would expire are some blanket surveillance orders authorized last year, which the majority of Democrats, including Senator Obama, voted against.
The current bill does include one useful amendment to FISA, which could be passed with virtually unanimous approval in an afternoon, to allow warrantless interception of foreign-to-foreign communications that happen to pass through the United States. No one opposes this.
Various administration officials have claimed that the requirement of applying for a warrant from the FISA court deprived them of speed and flexibility. This is false. The FISA allows for surveillance to be implemented in an emergency situation before a warrant is sought, and that could undoubtedly be extended with Congressional approval without controversy.
What the administration seeks, and this bill provides, is permanent warrantless surveillance.
4. Let’s consider an analogy: police officers have the legal right to stop you if you’re going 56 mph in a 55-mph zone, but this right isn’t often abused or applied to harass citizens. What makes you think the administration would abuse their surveillance powers if this amendment is approved?
The abuses of surveillance to which governments are drawn are those that keep them in office, used to intimidate and manipulate their rivals, and to avoid debate and dissent on their policies. These are exactly the abuses that the Church Committee discovered in 1975, which had been conducted on a wide-scale by the Johnson and Nixon administrations, and in some cases even earlier, which is what lead to FISA in the first place.
To remove judicial oversight, which this amendment would effectively do, is to invite the same kind of repressive abuse that lead to FISA in the first place.
5. Why would the current administration want this amendment to pass, if not for safety of citizens and prevention of attacks?
Using NSA to spy without judicial oversight or constraint on American citizens provides the infrastructure for dictatorship. George W. Bush has frequently said what other presidents may only have thought: “It would be a heck of a lot easier in a dictatorship, if only I were the dictator.”
Other presidents have violated the law and the Constitution in much the same way as Bush, so long as they could do it secretly, but they haven’t proclaimed that as a right of their office as Bush, Cheney and their legal advisors have done.
The oath of office they took, along with all members of Congress, was to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign or domestic. I believe that, in the matters we’ve been discussing, the Founders had it right, not only for their time but for ours.
Transcript:
Some Democratic Leaders say Impeachment is off the table.
So, let us set a new table for our nation, upon which we place the Constitution and where we demand that all those who have taken an oath to defend it .. keep their promise and protect our nation from the threat within.
Please go to kucinich.us now and sign the petition, which calls for impeachment. This is the one petition that will make a difference because I will be delivering it personally to your member of congress. Please circulate word of this petition far and wide, to all your friends and family. This is the one opportunity that we have right now to actually change events in this country.
Two hundred and thirty-two years ago, our nation was conceived in liberty. We have once again reached a moment of truth, one that Lincoln recognized at Gettysburg as to whether “this nation or any nation so conceived or so dedicated can long endure”.
Through the ashes of war, Lincoln prayed that “this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom…and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
This Fourth of July, 2008, we face a different kind of war; one which is trying our souls.. a war based on lies. But with the power of truth and the power of the people we can achieve a new birth of freedom, standing up for what is good in America, insisting on the rule of law, demanding adherence to the Constitution, and supporting the impeachment of a President who lied to take us into a war against Iraq.
Be the answer to Lincoln’s Prayer. Please pledge your support now to restoring the rule of law in America. As we once again celebrate our Independence, let us celebrate freedom from fear and pledge that this government of the people will survive in this land that we love.
Please go to kucinich.us now. This is your chance to make a difference; truly celebrate our Independence. Thank you.
“Never appease political bullies, President Bush admonished at the Israeli Knesset,” MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann opened. “Oddly, House Democrats chose to ignore him on the subject of dealing with him.”
Constitutional expert Jonathan Turley sees a “very frightening bill” in a proposed “compromise,” currently in the House, that would update the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to effectively grant immunity from civil lawsuits to telecommunications companies that agreed to spy on their customers as part of the National Security Agency’s warrantless wiretapping program, starting shortly before the World Trade Center attacks in 2001. If the White House asked a phone company to spy with its assurance that it was legal, the measure says, that’s enough to dismiss a case.
Congressional Democrats, Turley went on, knew about surveillance and torture programs, but were politically unable to oppose them at the same time they were touting themselves to the public as defenders of civil liberties. The bill, he said, is part of a campaign of collusion between Congress and the Bush administration, immunizing not only the telecommunications companies, but the administration and any members of Congress, on either side of the aisle, that may have been involved.
“The proposed FISA deal is not a compromise; it is a capitulation,” Senator Russ Feingold said today. “The House and Senate should not be taking up this bill, which effectively guarantees immunity for telecom companies alleged to have participated in the President�s illegal program, and which fails to protect the privacy of law-abiding Americans at home. Allowing courts to review the question of immunity is meaningless when the same legislation essentially requires the court to grant immunity. And under this bill, the government can still sweep up and keep the international communications of innocent Americans in the U.S. with no connection to suspected terrorists, with very few safeguards to protect against abuse of this power. Instead of cutting bad deals on both FISA and funding for the war in Iraq, Democrats should be standing up to the flawed and dangerous policies of this administration.”
“The Democrats never really were engaged in this,” said Turley. “In fact, they repeatedly tried to cave in to the White House, only to be stopped by civil libertarians and bloggers.”
“I think they’re simply waiting to see if the public’s interest will wane,” he went on, referring to repeated attempts to float said legislation past the public. “This bill has quite literally no public value for citizens or civil liberties. It is reverse engineering, though the type of thing the Bush Administration’s famous for, and now the Democrats are doing–that is, to change the law to conform to past conduct.”
“It’s what any criminal would love to do,” Turley continued. “You rob a bank, go to the legislature, and change the law to say that robbing banks is lawful.”
“People need to be very, very much aware of this bill,” he charged. “What you’re seeing in this bill is an evisceration of the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution. It is something that allows the President and the government to go into law-abiding homes, on their word alone–their suspicion alone–and to engage in warrantless surveillance.
“That’s what the framers who drafted the Fourth Amendment wanted to prevent.”
The clash between the European Central Bank and the US Federal Reserve over monetary strategy is causing serious strains in the global financial system and could lead to a replay of Europe’s exchange rate crisis in the 1990s, a team of bankers has warned.
“We see striking similarities between the transatlantic tensions that built up in the early 1990s and those that are accumulating again today. The outcome of the 1992 deadlock was a major currency crisis and a recession in Europe,” said a report by Morgan Stanley’s European experts
Just as then, Washington has slashed rates to bail out the banks and prevent an economic hard-landing, while Frankfurt has stuck to its hawkish line - ignoring angry protests from politicians and squeals of pain from Europe’s export industry.
Indeed, the ECB has let the de facto interest rate - Euribor - rise by over 100 basis points since the credit crisis began.
Just as then, the dollar has plummeted far enough to cause worldwide alarm. In August 1992 it fell to 1.35 against the Deutsche Mark: this time it has fallen even further to the equivalent of 1.25. It is potentially worse for Europe this time because the yen and yuan have also fallen to near record lows. So has sterling
Morgan Stanley doubts that Europe’s monetary union will break up under pressure, but it warns that corked pressures will have to find release one way or another.
This will most likely occur through property slumps and banking purges in the vulnerable countries of the Club Med region and the euro-satellite states of Eastern Europe.
“The tensions will not disappear into thin air. They will find fault lines on the periphery of Europe. Painful macro adjustments are likely to take place. Pegs to the euro could be questioned,” said the report, written by Eric Chaney, Carlos Caceres, and Pasquale Diana.
The point of maximum stress could occur in coming months if the ECB carries out the threat this month by Jean-Claude Trichet to raise rates. It will be worse yet - for Europe - if the Fed backs away from expected tightening. “This could trigger another ‘catastrophic’ event,” warned Morgan Stanley.
The markets have priced in two US rates rises later this year following a series of “hawkish” comments by Fed chief Ben Bernanke and other US officials, but this may have been a misjudgment.
An article in the Washington Post by veteran columnist Robert Novak suggested that Mr Bernanke is concerned that runaway oil costs will cause a slump in growth, viewing inflation as the lesser threat. He is irked by the ECB’s talk of further monetary tightening at such a dangerous juncture.
The contrasting approaches in Washington and Frankfurt make some sense. America’s flexible structure allows it to adjust quickly to shocks. Europe’s more rigid system leaves it with “sticky” prices that take longer to fall back as growth slows.
Morgan Stanley says the current account deficits of Spain (10.5pc of GDP), Portugal (10.5pc), and Greece (14pc) would never have been able to reach such extreme levels before the launch of the euro.
EMU has shielded them from punishment by the markets, but this has allowed them to store up serious trouble. By contrast, Germany now has a huge surplus of 7.7pc of GDP.
The imbalances appear to be getting worse. The latest food and oil spike has pushed eurozone inflation to a record 3.7pc, with big variations by country. Spanish inflation is rising at 4.7pc even though the country is now in the grip of a full-blown property crash. It is still falling further behind Germany. The squeeze required to claw back lost competitiveness will be “politically unpalatable”.
Morgan Stanley said the biggest risk lies in the arc of countries from the Baltics to the Black Sea where credit growth has been roaring at 40pc to 50pc a year. Current account deficits have reached 23pc of GDP in Latvia, and 22pc in Bulgaria. In Hungary and Romania, over 55pc of household debt is in euros or Swiss francs.
Swedish, Austrian, Greek and Italian banks have provided much of the funding for the credit booms. A crunch is looming in 2009 when a wave of maturities fall due. “Could the funding dry up? We think it could,” said the bank
D.C. police will seal off entire neighborhoods, set up checkpoints and kick out strangers under a new program that D.C. officials hope will help them rescue the city from its out-of-control violence.
Under an executive order expected to be announced today, police Chief Cathy L. Lanier will have the authority to designate “Neighborhood Safety Zones.” At least six officers will man cordons around those zones and demand identification from people coming in and out of them. Anyone who doesn’t live there, work there or have “legitimate reason” to be there will be sent away or face arrest, documents obtained by The Examiner show.
Lanier has been struggling to reverse D.C.’s spiraling crime rate but has been forced by public outcry to scale back several initiatives including her “All Hands on Deck” weekends and plans for warrantless, door-to-door searches for drugs and guns.
Under today’s proposal, the no-go zones will last up to 10 days, according to internal police documents. Front-line officers are already being signed up for training on running the blue curtains.
Peter Nickles, the city’s interim attorney general, said the quarantine would have “a narrow focus.”
“This is a very targeted program that has been used in other cities,” Nickles told The Examiner. “I’m not worried about the constitutionality of it.”
Others are. Kristopher Baumann, chairman of the D.C. police union and a former lawyer, called the checkpoint proposal “breathtaking.”
“I think they tried this in Russia and it failed,” she said. “It’s just our experience in this city that we always end up targeting poor people and people of color, and we treat the kids coming home from choir practice the same as we treat those kids who are selling drugs.”
The proposal has the provisional support of D.C. Councilman Harry “Tommy” Thomas, D-Ward 5, whose ward has become a war zone.
“They’re really going to crack down on what we believe to be a systemic problem with open-air drug markets,” Thomas told The Examiner.
Thomas said, though, that he worried about D.C. “moving towards a police state.”
McALLEN - A U.S. Border Patrol agent accused of smuggling cocaine through airport security checkpoints made his first appearance in U.S. District Court on Friday.
Prosecutors allege Agent Ramiro Flores Jr., 36, of McAllen, used his federal credentials and badge to bypass U.S. Transportation Security Administration screeners at McAllen-Miller International Airport with about 13.2 pounds of the drug hidden in a piece of luggage.
Once inside the secure area of the airport, he is accused of swapping the bag with an awaiting accomplice, before both men boarded a flight to Houston’s Bush Intercontinental Airport.
Houston police arrested both men Thursday as they exited the plane.
According to a criminal complaint filed in the case, Flores unknowingly met with a federal informant earlier in the week to plan the drug smuggling trip. The man offered him $400 up front and an additional $6,000 once the trip was completed.
A search of the Flores’ McAllen home after his arrest uncovered $340 of the initial payment, U.S. attorneys said.
Federal authorities said it remains unclear whether Flores had made previous smuggling trips.
TSA policy allows armed, on-duty local and federal law enforcement officers to bypass airport checkpoints with the proper identification, according to the agency’s Web site. Flores, however, was not supposed to be on duty at the time of his trip, prosecutors said.
It was unclear Friday whether he had retained an attorney. Several phone calls to his home Friday were not returned.
Fellow agents described Flores as a longtime member of the Border Patrol’s ranks in McAllen.
Although local Border Patrol spokesman Dan Doty said he could not comment specifically on Flores’ case, he said it was standard procedure for any agent who becomes the target of a criminal investigation to be put on administrative leave pending the outcome of the case.
FOR YOUR INFORMATION
Ramiro Flores Jr. is the second U.S. Border Patrol agent accused of smuggling activity in Texas this week. On Tuesday, Agent Jesus Miguel Huizar, 26, of El Paso, was arrested on conspiracy and money laundering charges.
Court documents allege Huizar and two Mexican nationals smuggled more than 100 illegal immigrants into the United States since 2005. Huizar is accused of taking $500 per person to go through the checkpoint to a house he owned.
If convicted, he could face up to 30 years in prison.
You’d think that an Iraqi anti-corruption crusader who testified before Congress about his travails would find no great difficulty in obtaining asylum in the United States. You’d think the U.S. would be grateful for the news that $18 billion worth of corruption had virtually “stopped” reconstruction in Iraq. But not so much.
Former State Department officials told Congress earlier this week that, though Radhi Hamza al-Radhi, the former head of the Iraqi Commission on Public Integrity, was able to get access into the U.S., he is not allowed to work and is living hand to mouth. Why has he fallen through the cracks?
It’s always a toss-up between negligence/incompetence and malfeasance with this administration. On the negligence side of things, you have the disastrously impenetrable immigration system, which has allowed so few Iraqis to come to the U.S. As The New York Times reports today, U.S. soldiers have actually set up organizations to help their interpreters gain asylum, since the Iraqis, even though they face certain threat of death for collaborating with American forces, cannot navigate the system on their own. As one Army captain tells it, interpreters are required to produce a letter from a general, which he said was “like a junior associate at a Fortune 500 company asking the chief executive for a letter of recommendation.”
But then there’s the malfeasance side of things. One of the former officials testified that “a senior State Department official had ordered agency employees not to give al Radhi references or contact him” for help with his asylum.
That might have a lot to do with the trouble that Radhi gave Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and the administration. Like pointing out that corruption ran rampant under Maliki and that he’d jiggered the system so that corruption judges could not bring charges against any of his senior officials without his approval — that was a decree on which Secretary of State Rice refused to pass judgment when she testified late last year. Rice also refused to comment on Radhi’s many accusations.
Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-ND) declared at the hearing early this week that he is “going to ask the State Department what in the hell are they thinking.” Somehow I don’t think Rice will be any more forthcoming this time around
WASHINGTON — The Senate demanded almost unanimously on Tuesday that President Bush halt the shipment of oil to the country’s strategic petroleum reserve as long as oil prices remain high.
“Sticking oil underground is wrong at this point in time,” Senator Byron Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota, said as he urged approval of a measure offered by Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic majority leader.
The Senate voted, 97 to 1, to tell President Bush to halt the shipments to the strategic reserve, the supply of just over 700 million barrels that is stored in salt caverns along the Gulf Coast. The reserve is meant to protect the United States against a disastrous sudden cutoff of oil supplies, like the Arab embargo of the 1970s.
The House was likely to vote Tuesday evening to approve its own measure to cut off shipments to the reserve. If the sentiment in the House mirrors that in the Senate, any veto of the measure by President Bush would be likely to be overridden. But the Senate measure is part of another bill, while the House version is a stand-alone item, so there are some procedural hurdles that must be overcome before the oil-cutoff move can emerge from the full Congress.
President Bush has argued that the 70,000 barrels a day now being added to the reserve is insignificant, compared with the country’s overall consumption of oil. On that point, even some supporters of Mr. Reid’s measure agreed. The United States consumes just under 21 million barrels of oil a day, according to the Energy Department.
Senator Pete Domenici of New Mexico, the ranking Republican on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, conceded that stopping the shipments to the reserve might be largely a symbolic step. Even so, he said, “this is one little thing we can do, and I think we should go ahead and do it.”
The president has argued that shipments to the reserve, which is now about 97 percent full, should be continued until the stockpile reaches its capacity of 727 million barrels. But most lawmakers said the 70,000 barrels a day, while only a tiny fraction of America’s daily consumption, would be better used to add supplies to the overall market, especially with oil now trading for more than $120 a barrel in the spot and futures markets.
President Bush was preparing to depart for the Middle East on Tuesday, and there was no immediate word from the White House about whether Mr. Bush would definitely veto the oil measure.
Only Senator Wayne Allard, a Colorado Republican who is not seeking re-election, voted against the measure, which took the form of an amendment to a flood insurance bill that was approved by a vote of 92 to 6.
Mr. Reid called the petroleum-reserve cutoff “a good first step” and said Republicans “must abandon their shortsighted strategy of ‘drill, drill, drill.’ ”
Shortly after the vote, Senate Democrats introduced legislation, timed to coincide with the president’s trip to the Middle East, to stop a scheduled arms sale to Saudi Arabia unless that country steps up its oil production.
“When the President meets with King Abdullah on Friday, we cannot settle for a smile, or a handshake, or even a glimpse into his soul,” said Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York. “We need a commitment to pump more oil. If Saudi Arabia and other OPEC countries do not substantially increase production, we in Congress will block their lucrative arms deals.”
Both the president and Vice President Dick Cheney have called on the Saudis to increase their output of oil.
Earlier Tuesday, the Senate rejected an amendment offered by Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican minority leader, that would have opened part of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil exploration. That proposal, which needed 60 yes votes on a procedural motion to move ahead, got only 42, while 56 Senators voted no, effectively killing the amendment.
Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois interrupted their campaigns for the Democratic presidential nomination to vote to halt shipments to the petroleum reserve. Senator John McCain of Arizona, the presumptive Republican nominee, was not present.
You’d think that an Iraqi anti-corruption crusader who testified before Congress about his travails would find no great difficulty in obtaining asylum in the United States. You’d think the U.S. would be grateful for the news that $18 billion worth of corruption had virtually “stopped” reconstruction in Iraq. But not so much.
