Bogus Congressional Credentials
The sheets of paper seemed to be everywhere the lawmakers went in the Green Zone, distributed to Iraqi officials, U.S. officials and uniformed military of no particular rank. So when Rep. James P. Moran Jr. (D-Va.) asked a soldier last weekend just what he was holding, the congressman was taken aback to find out.In the soldier’s hand was a thumbnail biography, distributed before each of the congressmen’s meetings in Baghdad, which let meeting participants such as that soldier know where each of the lawmakers stands on the war. “Moran on Iraq policy,” read one section, going on to cite some the congressman’s most incendiary statements, such as, “This has been the worst foreign policy fiasco in American history.”. . . .For one, the quotations appeared to be selected to divide the visitors into those who are with the war effort and those who are against. For another, they were not exactly accurate. Under “latest Iraq vote,” Tauscher’s bio noted that she had voted in favor of legislation requiring the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq within 120 days of the bill’s enactment.
She did vote that way — in May. On Aug. 2, Tauscher voted in favor of her own bill, which mandates that troops be granted a leave from combat at least as long as their last combat deployment before being shipped back to Iraq. That vote might have been a little too popular with the soldiers she was meeting, Tauscher said.
Fan-tastic. Think Progress (keeps climbing as my favorite political blog) posted images of the documents in question. Also:
ThinkProgress spoke with one of the delegation’s military escorts, Maj. Toby Patterson, who said that he didn’t know who made the bios or why they were created in the first place. He added that his office, the Marine Corps liaison for the U.S. House of Representatives, usually just uses lawmakers’ readily-available bios off of congressionalquarterly.com.
So the question is, who’s lying to the soldiers? My guess is that it’s an officer acting alone over there with a political agenda. I hope, anyway. Seems a little too dumb for it to have come from the top levels. At any rate, now that they’ve been found out, I’m guessing this won’t go on again, and if something similar happens again, we’ll know it’s more than just one person.
OOH! Just saw this from snuhwolf in the comments. This would be intriguing:
If the military intelligence had the desire to find out who is printing the broadsheets it would be an easy task since all modern color printers leave a unique secret watermark:
http://www.eff.org/Privacy/printers/list.php
http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/21071/135/
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Wes said…
Just as a side point; liking them is fine, but you are not thinking they are bipartisan as they claim, are you?
Well, I don’t mean favorite as in most objective, I mean that it has frequent posting, lots of news items, less grandstanding than Kos, less sensationalism than Crooks & Liars. Not to mention a fairly nice layout. But no, I wouldn’t consider it to represent a conservative point of view.
Wes check out this article Washington vs. Maliki by Charles Krauthammer. It has nothing at all to do with your post, but it is a nice take on Maliki.
Think Progress is all those things you said. They are good at packaging their site, as well as when they package their candidates. They are very liberal/progressive, but no, they are not shrill. They should not say they are nonpartisan though.
You know, when Maliki says he didn’t really want the job, I have to believe him, and that article would back that up. It is right, he’s not governing with the force of a man who believes in the mission, and because of that, his government has unquestionably been a failure. But I can’t fully blame him. He’s had to sit back and watch several mistakes on our part and watch the country get torn apart. And I think he feels that it’s basically inevitable that he will take the fall whether we succeed in bringing the tribes together or not.
But at the same time, you have to wonder who could actually take that role. He’s a politician that was considered (at least at first) to be fairly neutral among the various factions, right? Who else could be seen as not being favorable only to a particular tribe but still have the motivation and passion to make the government gel and not turn into a giant power struggle? I guess that question is why nobody has made any moves in that direction yet.