133^rd in continuing blog series on the administration push to war. Summer, 2005                In the realm of Washington and New York media, Bob Woodward’s “Deep Throat” from Watergate years, former FBI agent Mark Felt, is big news, the subject of numerous media discussions about confidential sources and almost always compared to the CIA leak matter. After Mark Felt is exposed as Deep Throat by Vanity Fair magazine, scooping Bob Woodward, Woodward brings out a book on Felt and Watergate. On numerous occasions, Woodward is called upon to discuss the CIA leak matter, sometimes with Carl Bernstein; Woodward consistently downplays the CIA leak as a story and does not mention that he himself was among recipients of the Niger tip, the item about Plame’s being married to Wilson.
June, 2005:

June 3, 2005 – Further inflaming tensions around the globe, the commander at Guantanamo reports several incidents of desecration of the Koran. Reports circulate the world of at least one of the Muslim holy books’ being covered with urine.

 
Officials at Guantanamo have publicized the fact that a Koran is issued to every prisoner who wants one.

June 4, 2005 – The administration concedes that allegations of desecration of the Koran at Guantanamo are true.

June 21, 2005 – Dr. Zalmay Khalilzad, former PNAC signatory and UNOCAL consultant, becomes U.S. Ambassador to Iraq. As of 2007, Khalilzad begins making efforts to talk with insurgents in Iraq.

June 27, 2005 – The U.S. Supreme Court refuses to hear the appeal of the cases of Time magazine correspondent Matthew Cooper and New York Times reporter Judith Miller.

 
Thus ends the last hope of successfully turning the CIA leak investigation into a First Amendment issue.

June 28, 2005 – President Bush addresses the nation from Fort Bragg, North Carolina: “Focus: Renewal in Iraq”:

“The troops here and across the world are fighting a global war on terror. The war reached our shores on September the 11th, 2001. The terrorists who attacked us -- and the terrorists we face -- murder in the name of a totalitarian ideology that hates freedom, rejects tolerance, and despises all dissent. Their aim is to remake the Middle East in their own grim image of tyranny and oppression -- by toppling governments, by driving us out of the region, and by exporting terror.

To achieve these aims, they have continued to kill -- in Madrid, Istanbul, Jakarta, Casablanca, Riyadh, Bali, and elsewhere. The terrorists believe that free societies are essentially corrupt and decadent, and with a few hard blows they can force us to retreat. They are mistaken. After September the 11th, I made a commitment to the American people: This nation will not wait to be attacked again. We will defend our freedom. We will take the fight to the enemy.

Iraq is the latest battlefield in this war. Many terrorists who kill innocent men, women, and children on the streets of Baghdad are followers of the same murderous ideology that took the lives of our citizens in New York, in Washington, and Pennsylvania. There is only one course of action against them: to defeat them abroad before they attack us at home. The commander in charge of coalition operations in Iraq -- who is also senior commander at this base -- General John Vines, put it well the other day. He said: "We either deal with terrorism and this extremism abroad, or we deal with it when it comes to us.”

Perhaps taking advantage of the summer season of lackadaisical news reporting, Bush continues here to link Iraq with 9/11. To him, at least according to this speech, ‘the enemy’ in Iraq is the same as, or linked with, the hijackers who struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.