The Senate veered closer to a contempt finding against the White House on Tuesday after an acrimonious appearance by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, with the Judiciary Committee’s senior Republican offering options for taking the Bush administration to court. Gonzales struggled under a verbal battering from senators that grew unusually personal as the hearing wore on. Several Democrats directly suggested that the besieged attorney general had lied to the committee, indicating they would scour the record for evidence of official perjury. [Link]
Iraq’s largest Sunni Arab bloc said Wednesday it has suspended its membership in Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s coalition government, dealing a serious blow to the Shiite leader’s efforts to achieve national reconciliation. The Iraqi Accordance Front, which has five Cabinet members as well as 44 of parliament’s 275 seats, said it was giving al-Maliki a week to meet their demands or they would quit his 14-month-old Cabinet altogether. [Link]
At least once every two weeks, President Bush gathers with Vice President Dick Cheney and Stephen Hadley, the national security adviser, in the refurbished White house Situation Room and peers, electronically, into the eyes of a man to whom his own legacy is linked: Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki of Iraq. In sessions usually lasting more than an hour, Bush, a committed Christian of Texas by way of privileged schooling in New England, and al-Maliki, a Shiite Muslim of Abu Gharaq by way of political exile in Iran and Syria, talk about leadership and democracy; troop deployments and their own domestic challenges. Sometimes, said an official who has sat in on the meetings, they talk about their shared level of faith in a God they call by different names. [Link]
President Bush is a competitive guy. But this is one contest he would rather lose. With 18 months left in office, he is in the running for most unpopular president in the history of modern polling. [Link]
US President George W. Bush, trying to reverse ebbing support for the Iraq war, sought Tuesday to tie deadly violence there directly to Al-Qaeda terrorist chief Osama bin Laden. Facing mounting calls for a US withdrawal, and intelligence findings that the unpopular war is a recruiting tool for Al-Qaeda, Bush warned that a hasty US pull-out would increase the risk of an attack in the United States. [Link]
Some conservative activist leaders, fearing voter anger with the Iraq war, want President Bush and GOP leaders to begin emphasizing that U.S. troops will be “leaving Iraq” to give Republicans cover as they head into a tough political landscape in 2008. To assuage an angry public, the activists argue that the White House soon needs to articulate clearly that the war will end. That tactic will help Republican presidential and congressional candidates focus on the domestic issues that could energize the base and win over independents, they say. [Link]
U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker chided his Iranian counterpart at a rare and heated meeting Tuesday, saying Tehran has increasingly meddled in Iraq since the pair’s first encounter this year. But he said the United States, Iran and Iraq agreed to set up a security committee to devise ways to help curb the ongoing violence in Iraq. [Link]
Popular support for Osama bin Laden and for suicide bomb attacks against civilians is falling across most of the Muslim world, according to a U.S. survey. [Link]
Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) plans to review the Senate testimony of U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel J. Alito to determine if their reversal of several long-standing opinions conflicts with promises they made to senators to win confirmation. Specter, who championed their confirmation, said Tuesday he will personally re-examine the testimony to see if their actions in court match what they told the Senate. “There are things he has said, and I want to see how well he has complied with it,” Specter said, singling out Roberts. [Link]
Almost six years after the terrorist attack on New York, the federal government still does not have an adequate array of health programs for ground zero workers — or a reliable estimate of how much treating their illnesses will cost — according to a federal report released yesterday. The report, produced by the Government Accountability Office, an arm of Congress, concluded that thousands of federal workers and responders who came to ground zero from other parts of the country do not have access to suitable health programs. [Link]
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