Part 2 of Bob Woodward excerpts, Washington Post:

On July 15, 2004, Herbits sat down at his computer and wrote another memo, a scathing seven-page report titled “Summary of Post-Iraq Planning and Execution Problems.” Though he discussed the postwar planning and policies, and the tenure of L. Paul Bremer III as head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, his real target was his friend of 37 years. The memo listed a series of tough questions:

· “Who made the decision and why didn’t we reconstitute the Iraqi army?”

· “Did no one realize we were going to need Iraqi security forces?”

· “Did no one anticipate the importance of stabilization and how best to achieve it?”

· “Why was the de-Baathification so wide and deep?”

“Rumsfeld’s style of operation,” Herbits wrote, was the “Haldeman model, arrogant” — a reference to President Richard M. Nixon’s White House chief of staff, H.R. “Bob” Haldeman.

Here.

Syrian arms dealer Monzer al-Kassar, profiled in the Observer:

Photographs furnish a stark reminder of just who Kassar is. One is of him shaking hands with Uday Hussain, Saddam’s brutal son, killed in the months after the invasion. Another photo shows the two men together with an Arab musician. Kassar says he met Uday when he was sponsoring the Iraqi football team.

In a cabinet nearby is a picture of him holding hands with Hassan Aideed, son of Farah Aideed, the now-deceased Somali warlord portrayed in the film Black Hawk Down. ‘A good man,’ says Kassar. (He has been implicated in shipping arms to Somalia, in violation of an international embargo.)

The warlord Aideed is just one of his eclectic group of acquaintances, and Kassar insists that, in fairness, there are many less controversial ones. On the mantelpiece is a photo of Kassar with a Spanish intelligence official and Mustafa Tlas, the former defence minister of Syria. Then there is the photo, taken at a gala fundraiser in Marbella, of him standing next to ageing country music singer Kenny Rogers.

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NYT Book Review:

Bob Woodward reports that when he told Mr. Rumsfeld that the number of insurgent attacks was going up, the defense secretary replied that they’re now “categorizing more things as attacks.” Mr. Woodward quotes Mr. Rumsfeld as saying, “A random round can be an attack and all the way up to killing 50 people someplace. So you’ve got a whole fruit bowl of different things — a banana and an apple and an orange.”

Mr. Woodward adds: “I was speechless. Even with the loosest and most careless use of language and analogy, I did not understand how the secretary of defense would compare insurgent attacks to a ‘fruit bowl,’ a metaphor that stripped them of all urgency and emotion. The official categories in the classified reports that Rumsfeld regularly received were the lethal I.E.D.’s, standoff attacks with mortars and close engagements such as ambushes.”

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NYT:

In a nine-page memorandum, the two officials, Gordon R. England, the acting deputy secretary of defense, and Philip D. Zelikow, the counselor of the State Department, urged the administration to seek Congressional approval for its detention policies.

They called for a return to the minimum standards of treatment in the Geneva Conventions and for eventually closing the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The time had come, they said, for suspects in the 9/11 plot to be taken out of their secret prison cells and tried before military tribunals.

The recommendations of the paper, which has not previously been disclosed, included several of the major policy shifts that President Bush laid out in a White House address on Sept. 6, five officials who read the document said. But the memorandum’s fate underscores the deep, long-running conflicts over detention policy that continued to divide the administration even as it pushed new legislation through Congress last week on the handling of terrorism suspects.

When the paper first circulated in the upper reaches of the administration, two of those officials said, it so angered Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that his aides gathered up copies of the document and had at least some of them shredded.

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Part one, excerpts of Bob Woodward’s new book, Washington Post:

White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card was enough of a realist to see that two negative aspects to Bush’s public persona had come to define his presidency: incompetence and arrogance. Card did not believe that Bush was incompetent, and so he had to face the possibility that as Bush’s chief of staff, he might have been the incompetent one. In addition, he did not think the president was arrogant.

But the marketing of Bush had come across as arrogant. Maybe it was unfair in Card’s opinion, but there it was.

He was leaving. And the man most responsible for the postwar troubles, the one who should have gone, Rumsfeld, was staying.

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More on the Great White fire at The Station, NYT:
Speaking today in the courtroom of Judge Francis J. Darigan Jr., David Griffith, whose brother Scott died in the blaze, said that “all of us have been victimized a second time” by the plea deal.

Judge Darigan acknowledged that many relatives found the agreement inadequate but said he was pressing forward with it. In a letter sent last week to the victims’ families, Judge Darigan said he had decided to strike the deal in part to avoid “public exposition of the tragic, explicit and horrific events experienced by the victims of this fire, both living and dead.”

One relative retorted today in the courtroom, “A trial would have been too hard on you, judge.”

The agreement provides that Jeffrey A. Derderian, 39, be sentenced to 500 hours of community service, but no jail time. His brother Michael, 45, would receive four years in jail.

Here.