The Daily Muck

Just one week before General Petraeus is expected to testify about the progress of the surge, General Richard Cody, the army’s vice chief of staff, asserted that the 30,000 additional troops sent to Iraq have inflicted “incredible stress” and have created “a significant risk” for the military. Cody added, “I’ve never seen our lack of strategic depth be where it is today.” (Washington Post)

The U.S. and Britain disagree about the status and future of one of the two British residents who remains in detention at Guantanamo Bay. While the Pentagon is determined to pursue terrorism-related charges against Binyam Mohamed, Britain has criticized the American’s military tribunal process as unfair. Britain is also concerned that information about its intelligence agencies could emerge during a trial: “there is some discomfort with what the defense will try to drag out.” (New York Times)

The ACLU believes that the Pentagon has been using the FBI’s national security letters to hide its efforts to evade legal restrictions on obtaining private internet, financial, and telephone records of American citizens. After reviewing more than 1,000 documents that the Defense Department was forced to turn over in a ACLU filed law suit last year, the ACLU is “incredibly concerned that the FBI and DOD might be collaborating to evade limits put on the DOD’s use of NSLs.” (USA Today)

Post-Alberto Gonzales hearings at the House Judiciary subcommittee have revealed that the Justice Department failed to “investigate illegal mailers sent to African-Americans in Dallas threatening criminal punishment if they registered to vote through a community reform group called ACORN.” The House committee is launching an inquiry into why the FBI neglected to act on this case of voter intimidation. (Huffington Post)

President Bush has decided to bypass at least 30 laws and regulations so that his administration can complete a 670 mile border fence between the U.S. and Mexico. Congress has authorized legal waivers to expedite construction. (AP)

Representative F. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI), a member of the House Science and Technology subcommittee on investigations and oversight, has charged that a report on the tainted FEMA trailers issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is “not acceptable science.” The controversial CDC report (drafted at the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry) asserted that if residents living in FEMA trailers simply left their windows open or ran their air conditioning, formaldehyde levels in their homes could be kept below “levels of concern.” (USA Today)

Last month the House of Representatives voted to rescind $18 billion in tax breaks for the nation’s largest oil producers so that new revenue could be invested in sustainable and renewable energy sources. Yesterday, oil executives asked Congress to stop “imposing punitive taxes on American companies.” Though Exxon set a corporate earnings record with its $40 billion in profits last year, one of its executives said that Exxon could not “continue safeguarding U.S. energy security” without its tax breaks. Representative Edward J. Markey (D-MA) who chairs the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming jested that he thought such testimony was an April Fools joke. (Politico)

Stuart A. Levey, a Treasury undersecretary, told the Senate Finance Committee yesterday that the Bush administration needs to do much more to roll back Saudi Arabia’s funding of international terrorism. Saudi Arabia remains on top of the world’s donor list to al Qaeda at a time when international support for U.S. efforts to stem the flow of terrorist funding has waned. (LA Times)

Representative Jim McDermott (D-WA) must repay House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-OH) almost $1.2 million to settle a lawsuit stemming from McDermott’s role in “leaking the contents of an intercepted 1996 conference call involving Boehner and other Republican leaders.” The fine, imposed by a federal judge, is intended to cover Boehner’s legal fees, interest, and fines that arouse as a result of McDermott’s violation of federal wiretapping statutes. (Washington Post)

Senators Jack Reed (D-RI) and Chris Dodd (D-CT) have asked the Government Accountability Office to investigate whether the Securities and Exchange Commission is adequately staffed and funded. The two senators’ curiosity was piqued when they noticed that “penalties and repayment of ill-gotten gains ordered by the SEC” declined by almost 50 percent in the last year. (Financial Times)

The U.S. House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure believes that recent air safety violations amount to a “systematic pattern of failure” by federal regulators. The committee is focused on allegations that the Federal Aviation Administration exercised a dangerous leniency in regard to Southwest Airlines’ safety inspections. (Financial Times)

The House of Representatives has “quietly shelved” a proposed one year moratorium on earmarks. Last month the Senate defeated a similar proposal by a vote of 71-29. (AP)