Letters to the Editor

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Elephantman

Published Letters: 1312     Editor's Choice: 15

  • Yes, Robert, I think you are the only one...

    [Read the article: A bigger purge?]
    [Read more letters about this article: Here]

    Take a deep breath, Robert. The person of whom you are speaking, Mr. Graves, is one of the USA's who were "discharged." Not someone who was rewarded in the course of the latest scandal. (Kerfuffle?) The point of including that old news in the current story was... well, what was the point?

    I think this is an appropriate time to announce that the 'US Attorneys scandal' has officially jumped the shark. Now, people are complaining about the ethics of the USA's were discharged.

    Robert, let me know when you get an e-mail from MoveOn or Firedoglake, instructing you to get back on message. Only one 'scandal' at a time, please. I think they will let you know that you need to get on the page of the playbook that dictates that you are all supposed to weep over the fine, hardworking, moral, dilligent, honest USA's, who were all cravenly fired by Karl Rove. Don't mention the very same group of people who were political crooks when they were hired by Karl Rove.

    Are you all almost done with this thing yet? If not, let me know when it is over...

  • Tim Grieve...

    [Read the article: Wolfowitz on the rocks]
    [Read more letters about this article: Here]

    I am going to remember these words that you wrote:

    "The good news for Iraq war architect Paul Wolfowitz: As the Washington Post reports, he'll get a chance to "argue for his job" before a World Bank committee investigating his decision to hook his girlfriend up with a high-paying job at the State Department.

    Because one cannot really be informed about the details of Ms. Riza's career at the World Bank (she worked there long before Wolfowitz took his current job, and she was moved to a State Department job with the knowledge and understanding of everyone at the World Bank, following Wolfowitz's own request that the matter be handled, in the very first instance, by an independent board; and the raise(s) that she got as a World Bank employee assigned to the State Department were not determined at all in the first instance by Wolfowitz himself, and were in part reflective of the fact that she went over to State precisely in order to avoid any hint of nepotism at the World Bank and thereby interrupting her career progress at the Bank) and not think that Tim Grieve has engaged in some contemptible, willful lying in this particular regard.

    I do hope that someday soon, in some public forum, Tim Grieve is called upon to defend the merits of his having described the actual situation as Wolfowitz "hook[ing] his girlfriend up with a high-paying job at the State Department."

  • Carol Lam

    [Read the article: A bigger purge?]
    [Read more letters about this article: Here]

    Back it up, Ann. Link us to any source in which Carol Lam says that one or more of her investigations, prosecutions, etc., of any political figure was in any way hindered or stopped by the White House or the DoJ.

    In other words, you've alleged that the firing of Carol Lam was an obstruction of justice. Prove it.

  • Dear Professor Cole,

    [Read the article: George Tenet on the staircase with the neocons]
    [Read more letters about this article: Here]

    As someone who is intellectually honest, I expect that you might wish to edit your own article to delete your apparently satisfied reliance on George Tenet's story that he had a White House hallway conversation on 9/12 with Richard Perle, whom he quotes as cursing what "Iraq" had done "yesterday." Tenet seems to have crawled out on a limb as to what "yesterday" might have been at issue, and when such a conversation took place, or whether any such conversation took place at all.

    Why?

    Well, as Bill Kristol reports in the Weekly Standard, Mr. Perle was out of the country on 9/11/01. He was notably unable to return to Washington until the 15th of September due to the worldwide shutdown of air traffic. Mr. Perle was not anywhere near where Tenet places him on 9/12, to have made any "yesterday" reference. Mr. Perle denies, rather credibly now, that he ever had any such a conversation with Tenet at all.

    The Tenet book is positively in error on the point you quoted, Prof. Cole. Period.

    http://weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/013/593daqmw.asp

  • I'm shocked...Shocked!

    [Read the article: The attorney general's secret memo]
    [Read more letters about this article: Here]

    ...to understand that a President and his White House staff might want to place politically loyal people in position to be the administrators of the Department of Justice.

    If you allowed that kind of thing to happen, and took it to its extreme, what the heck, you could end up with a situation in which the President could appoint his brother to be the Attorney General! Can you imagine that?

    Or, you could have a President who is willing to appoint someone Attorney General in trade for the resignation of his Supreme Court-justice father! Imagine the political stink in that case?

    What's that, you say? John F. Kennedy actually did appoint his little brother as his AG? And Lyndon Johnson made Ramsey Clark the AG after he got Justice Tom Clark to agree to step down so that LBJ could appoint Thurgood Marshall to the SCOTUS? Oh. Nevermind...

  • Harry Ried and I agree that the President's speech was right.

    [Read the article: "My fellow Americans: Major combat operations in Iraq have ended"]
    [Read more letters about this article: Here]

    You remember Harry Reid; he's the majority leader in the United States Senate who, a couple of days ago, said, "the military mission in Iraq has been accomplished."

    It was one of the more sensible things that Harry Reid has said. But even at that, the President was more accurate. It is truer, and more accurate, to have said that "Major combat operations have ended." The military mission continues. However, the mission of the USS Abraham Lincoln, representing a carrier group of thousands of military personnel, and many more thouseands of similarly-situated combat personnel in other branches, was "accomplished", with stunning effectiveness, four years ago. As Paul Bremer said at the time, never in the history of human affiars had so many people been liberated from a totalitarian state with such speed and with less loss of life than in Operation Iraqi Freedom.