Swamp Gas, November 14, 2007

by Frank James

A quick guided tour of some of the morning's most important, most interesting, or both, Washington-related stories.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has determined no provocation occurred for the killings of 14 Iraqi civilians by private security guards working for Blackwater Worldwide to protect a State Department convoy in September.

Baghdad residents are taking advantage of the marked decline in car bombings and sectarian violence, with daily activities like shopping, weddings and dining outdoors increasingly giving the city a more normal feel but due in part to blast walls and the sectarian cleansing that has occurred.

The Iraq War has left many U.S. troops blinded from the mortars, grenades and improvised explosive devices that insurgents have used to inflict damage.

New polls suggest that voters in both parties and in the key early caucus and primary states of Iowa and New Hampshire, respectively, appear focused on the electability of their presidential candidates, a situation which appears to favor the frontrunners, Sen. Hillary Clinton on the Democratic side and Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, and Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor.

President Bush and the Democratic-controlled Congress clashed over spending, with Bush vetoing a major domestic-spending bill to pay for federal health, education and labor funding while Democrats said they would refuse to fund the Iraq War unless the president sets a troop withdrawal timeline.

Citing intense opposition, Gov. Eliot Spitzer of New York dropped his plan to issue drivers licenses to illegal immigrants, a proposal which shook up the Democratic presidential campaign when Sen. Hillary Clinton failed to take a firm stand for or against the plan, giving her opponents an opening to attack her.

Sen. Hillary Clinton has sharply increased her spending in South Carolina in an effort to deprive Sen. Barack Obama of a victory in a state seen as crucial to his presidential bid because its population's high percentage of blacks.

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf rejected U.S. calls to end the state of emergency, saying it was essential to ensure free and fair elections.

The Central Intelligence Agency had recordings of its interrogations of senior al Qaeda operatives that were available during the federal terrorism trial of Zacarias Moussaoui but failed until recently to tell federal prosecutors or judges of their existence.

In a case that raises doubts about security-clearance procedures at the CIA and FBI, a former employee of both organizations, a Lebanese native, pled guilty to faking her marriage so she could obtain U.S. citizenship, which allowed her later to be employed by the agencies.