Sen. Larry Craig was so harried by potential press coverage of rumors that he was gay that, in a “state of intense anxiety,” he caved in and pleaded guilty to charges of which he believed himself to be innocent.
Got that?
He was so fearful of being wrongly outed as a gay man that he wrongly pleaded guilty to charges arising from seeking gay sex in a public restroom.
We have the latest documents filed in the case, as Craig attempts to withdraw his guilty plea.
In his testimony today, Gen Petraeus was asked about a Washington Post story over the weekend that reported on a “schism” between Petraeus and his immediate superior, CENTCOM commander Adm. William Fallon. The Post quoted a senior civilian official as saying about the relationship between Petraeus and Fallon, “Bad relations? That’s the understatement of the century. . . . If you think Armageddon was a riot, that’s one way of looking at it.”
In response to questioning today, Petraeus denied that there was any disagreement among top military officials about his recommendation on how to proceed in Iraq, saying he had the support of both Fallon and Joint Chiefs. Take a look at the exchange.
Given the usual difficulties of sorting through internal Pentagon politics, we may have to stash this one away for the historians to unpack later. But something tells me there is more here than what Petraeus is letting on.
Petraeus on counting sectarian death counts: It’s “not that complicated.”
We’ve now had the first day of testimony. Gen. Petraeus made his arguments and presented his numbers. He even knocked down a few questions about how his command in Baghdad counts the civilian death count numbers. But no one asked the general why the White House and/or the Pentagon won’t release the actual data, where it comes from and how it’s counted.
That’s extraordinary — not only the refusal of Petraeus & Co. to release the numbers but the committee’s failure to ask for them.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t pretend that these statistics are the be all and end all of what we should be looking at in Iraq. They’re not. Not even close. But they have taken on an outsized focus because they’re the only thing the administration has seen fit to focus on. And yet we’re asked to take on faith how the numbers are assembled even though there’s ample evidence — both circumstantial and direct — that they’re distorted to suit the administration’s agenda.
The only reasonable course is to demand a public airing of the numbers — to see if they hold up. So who’s going to demand that?
It caught our ears when Gen. Petraeus testified that the U.S. military never gives weapons to Sunni tribal groups in Iraq. But that may be literally true, as the military actually gives the tribes money with which they are free to buy weapons.
Several readers pointed out that the format of the chart of Iraqi civilian casualties produced by General Petraeus in the House committee hearing today didn’t match up with the civilian casualty charts we had produced at TPMmuckraker. So we’ve combined the numbers into a single chart for comparison purposes (click to enlarge):
A couple of points of clarification. The Iraq Body Count provides a maximum and minimum range of casualties per month. We have included only the IBC minimum number in this chart (you can see both IBC numbers charted here). Also, as you can see from the chart, the most recent month for which IBC numbers are available is June 2007.
Let me emphasize again that this chart is not comparing apples to apples. The AP and IBC used different methodologies, and Petraeus has not revealed his command’s methodology, which tellingly remains classified. So comparisons among the numbers have limited utility.
Late Update: One other point that should be emphasized is that the IBC’s final numbers lag because of a reporting lag. The IBC expects its numbers, especially from more recent months, to rise as additional casualty reports are received.
Later Update: We’ve created a larger version of the chart above for your viewing pleasure.
Rep. Jim Walsh (R-NY) is apparently set to reverse course and not only support the withdrawal of U.S. troops but call for a stop to funding of the war.
Here’s an interesting exchange that took place late in Gen. Petraeus’s testimony today. In the lead up to Petraeus’s “report” there’s been a lot of discussion of the September 2004 Washington Post editorial he wrote which not only seemed to track closely with the president’s political campaign but also made arguments about how well things were going that in retrospect appear stunningly wrong. In short, Petraeus argued that things were going great in the training of the Iraqi security forces and victory was just around the corner.
This was going to be an awkward question to field. And one might have expected him simply to say that in retrospect things turned out to be a lot harder than he thought. But he actually defended the piece. And the manner of his defense is what interests me.
Petraeus says he was right. Things were going well with the security forces. But that was before the 2006 al-Askariya mosque bombing in Samarra. I won’t say that this wasn’t a major catalyzing event. But administration officials have increasingly seized upon it as a critical turning point of the occupation, which it quite simply was not.
That’s convenient for them because it posits a very different narrative of events than most of us — reality included — believe in. In this alternative view, it was a hard slog before January 2006. There were mistakes and setbacks. But fundamentally the mission was on track and things were improving until a catastrophic and unpredicted event threw the whole operation into chaos.
It’s not just Petraeus. Look back at President Bush’s statements and the same argument comes up repeatedly from him as well.
But this argument doesn’t square with any of the available facts. The best analogy is some variant of that darkly comic line about the guy falling from a tall building who gets asked, mid-fall, how things are going. So far, so good, he replies. In this case, it may be something like asking the guy what happened. And he replies, things were going well till we passed the second floor. From there on, it got very bad.
Pretty much everything we see began to happen in 2003, actually very soon after the invasion proper. It was all visible by the fall of that year. And every metric has been more or less downhill ever since.
The one thing that’s clear in all the numbers from all the different sources is that things really spiraled out of control in the second half of 2006. But that was no more than an acceleration, probably an inevitable one, from everything that had been building up to that point.
In 2004, Gen. Petraeus penned a Washington Post op-ed with a glowing account of the progress made in the training of Iraqi security forces, a program over which he was then in charge. In today’s hearing, Petraeus was questioned about that op-ed and what, as events have borne out, were his overly optimistic assessments.