Entries for May 16, 2007

With President Bush's announcement naming Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute as war czar came recognition that his wife, too, has some extensive international credentials. With a Ph.D. from Stanford in political science, Jane Holl Lute is highly regarded in her role as United Nations assistant secretary general for peacekeeping operations. Before her current post, she was also a career military officer, later heading up the Carnegie Commission on the Prevention of Deadly Conflict. They are, joke military officials, a couple that runs the expertise spectrum from war and peace.

Lute is likely to need the help, say current and former U.S. military officials. There is little concern about Lute's own credentials for the job. As director of operations for the Pentagon's Joint Staff, he was, in essence, the chief operating officer for U.S. military operations, facilitating "all military force application on the planet," in the words of one officer--the person essentially doing the work of the war czar for the military.

In response to the unexpected death of Yolanda King, Chief Legal Correspondent Chitra Ragavan recalls the summer she spent with the eldest child of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.:

I had the privilege of working with Yolanda King in 1983, when I was a graduate student at the University of Georgia-Athens. I was making the slow transition from my life in Mumbai, India, to life in America's South. I was taking quite a liking to the warm weather and the buttery grits.

I won a governor's internship that summer and was given a choice of where I could work. I picked the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta, which is the final resting place for the civil rights leader and showcases his legacy as well as his friendship with the Indian leader Mohandas Gandhi, who greatly influenced King's belief in nonviolent political movements and about whom I was going to write my graduate thesis.

After we reported here yesterday that soldiers on large bases can purchase Internet access from a private contractor for around $70 a month, allowing them to circumvent the Department of Defense's ban of YouTube.com, MySpace.com, and 10 other popular websites from their servers, several readers wrote in questioning why the access is so pricey compared with rates back home. (We're hearing today that the figure is $75 a month.)

Beth in Kentucky asks, "Do the soldiers with Internet access on base know how badly they are being ripped off? $75 for Internet access? My broadband service costs half that. We don't pay them enough to begin with, we give them low-rent hospital care when they come home, and now, we can't even give them a decently affordable internet service? What no-bid contractor got a hold of this one?"

The scene that former Deputy Attorney General James Comey described before a Senate panel yesterday was pure pulp: high-ranking officials from the White House duking it out with their counterparts at the Department of Justice at the hospital bedside of an ailing attorney general.

As Comey describes it, many in the Justice Department had serious misgivings about the White House's wiretapping program that superseded normal legal safe guards. President Bush eventually authorized some alterations in the policy that made it more palatable to the critics.

For more about Comey's role in this behind-the-scenes tug-of-war, here are several previous articles by Chief Legal Correspondent Chitra Ragavan about the ex-prosecuctor:

• A Battle in the Brig (March 28, 2004)
• Ashcroft's Way (January 18, 2004)
• Ready, Aim, Misfire (February 21, 1999)

This morning's top stories:

• The violence between rival Palestinian parties in the Gaza Strip continues to escalate. Hamas militants killed six bodyguards from the Fatah movement and mistakenly ambushed one of their own jeeps, killing five, the AP reports.
• The second Republican presidential candidate debate, held Tuesday night at the University of South Carolina, was considerably more confrontational than the first one. Read quotes from the debate.
• The governing board of the World Bank resumes a meeting today that will ultimately decide the fate of its president, Paul Wolfowitz, who made an emotional appeal for his job.
• Martin Luther King Jr.'s oldest daughter died yesterday of unknown causes. She was 51.
• An image snagged by the Hubble Space Telescope has offered astronomers a powerful piece of evidence of the existence of vast amounts of "dark matter" in the universe.