"Footing is unstable on the cobbled floor, and blackberry vines crisscross the streambed and trip feet. Ferns grow 6 feet high, and sycamore and oak shield against the intense sun. It smells of mint, and running water gurgles under rocks."
"'I'm concerned that the federal government is only trying to rebuild the levees to the level they were before. I'm concerned that FEMA is an immobile bureaucracy stuck in red tape with idiot political appointees at the top.
'I'm concerned because, for far less money than we have spent in Iraq — for 10% of what we have spent in Iraq — all of this could have been avoided. I'm concerned that we have worked like demons to get back into the city and to get back to business and to create a little pocket of normalcy, and I fear it was all for nothing.'"
"But Bush and his aides had access to much more voluminous intelligence information than did lawmakers, who were dependent on the administration to provide the material. And the commissions cited by officials, though concluding that the administration did not pressure intelligence analysts to change their conclusions, were not authorized to determine whether the administration exaggerated or distorted those conclusions.
National security adviser Stephen J. Hadley, briefing reporters Thursday, countered 'the notion that somehow this administration manipulated the intelligence.' He said that 'those people who have looked at that issue, some committees on the Hill in Congress, and also the Silberman-Robb Commission, have concluded it did not happen.'
But the only committee investigating the matter in Congress, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, has not yet done its inquiry into whether officials mischaracterized intelligence by omitting caveats and dissenting opinions. And Judge Laurence H. Silberman, chairman of Bush's commission on weapons of mass destruction, said in releasing his report on March 31, 2005: 'Our executive order did not direct us to deal with the use of intelligence by policymakers, and all of us were agreed that that was not part of our inquiry.'"
"'I'm sure it wasn't nice,' said Diego Pol, a researcher at the Mathematical Biosciences Institute at Ohio State University and a member of the research team. 'A top predator role in the food chain.'"
"'The question is no longer whether we will need to address this problem, but when we will need to address the problem,' said Kenneth Caldeira, an author of the study and a climate expert at the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology, based at Stanford University."
"For the first time in history, organized labor has taken a stance against a military conflict. At its recent convention, the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) voted to support an immediate end to the Iraq War.
“I think this indicates a change in the way labor conducts its business,” said Andy Zipser, editor of the Guild Reporter, official publication of the Newspaper Guild-Communications Workers of America."
"Read Senator Jay Rockefeller's Statement below. Rockefeller, of course, is Ranking Member on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence:
'At its core, this is about accountability -- Congressional accountability and White House accountability.
'Congress has a fundamental, constitutional responsibility to conduct oversight -- that's what checks and balances are all about – and we have utterly failed.
'My colleagues and I have tried for two years to do our oversight work, and for two years we have been undermined, avoided, put off, and vilified by the other side. Any line of questioning that has brought us too close to the White House has been thwarted.
'At some point the majority needs to understand that we are willing to bring the Senate to a halt until they will join us in conducting the kind of investigation this situation demands.
'The American people still want to know -- now more than ever -- why the United States went to war, whether they were misled, and whether our intelligence was misused.
'Whether these actions amount to crimes is not the litmus test for congressional oversight. Mr. Fitzgerald is investigating possible criminal activity by senior White House officials, and we won't and shouldn't get in the way of his work.
'But the American people deserve to know not just whether this Administration committed crimes, but whether this Administration told the truth -- the full truth, the straight story.
'And if they didn't -- if they misled about the war and if they misused intelligence, then the American people need to know that the Congress will do everything in its power the make sure that it never happens again.'
Reid, Durbin, Rockefeller -- I salute all three. It's time to spend some political capital on this battle with the White House over the Iraq War and how we got into it."
