25 November 2005

Lost Amid the Rising Tide of Detainees in Iraq
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
NYT, 25 November 2005
Early this month, Iraq Abbas received a phone call from a man she did not know.
"Your husband is still alive," Ms. Abbas recalled the man saying, as she sat in a Shiite mosque in central Baghdad. "Don't give up. Meet anyone who can help."
The stranger told her he had shared a cell with her husband in an underground bunker. It was the first that Ms. Abbas had heard of her husband, Ibrahim Fayadh Abdul Hamid al-Timimi, since police commandos came into their home and arrested him on May 26, just hours after a bombing in their neighborhood.
One week after she got the phone call, American forces raided a bunker that fit the description the man gave, uncovering 169 inmates, many of them starving and abused, and tools of torture hidden in the ceiling. Iraqi officials say that all of the men in the bunker had links to the insurgency.
As the Iraqi government begins to take over from the American military, it has stepped up its hunt for insurgents, acting on tips from hot lines and rounding up suspects in neighborhoods near bombings. But the influx of new prisoners - the population of the four American-run prisons here has doubled over the past year, and Iraqi jails are packed - has overwhelmed the Iraqi authorities, rights groups say. And while the scandal in Abu Ghraib prison ushered in new reforms in American-run jails, the mushrooming Iraqi detention facilities operate virtually unchecked.
..."I get calls all the time from families whose relative disappeared after being arrested," said a representative of a rights group in Iraq who agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity, citing safety concerns. "Sometimes I meet them at the morgue because they think they may have been killed."
"There is no transparency," the representative said. "In many cases there is no recourse to the law. A climate of impunity prevails everywhere." The representative, who has done extensive research on Iraqi prisons, said there were hundreds of such cases a month.

Political Donations, Bribery and the Portrayal of a Nexus
By CARL HULSE
NYT, 25 November 2005
The American system of underwriting political campaigns is often derided as legalized bribery. Now the Justice Department is contending that it can amount to illegal bribery as well.
In pursuing a case that threatens to envelop Congress in an election-year lobbying scandal, federal prosecutors are arguing that campaign dollars and other perks routinely showered on lawmakers by those with legislative and political interests on Capitol Hill can reach the level of criminal misconduct.
The prosecutors say that among the criminal activities of Michael Scanlon, a former House leadership aide who pleaded guilty on Monday to bribery conspiracy, were efforts to influence a lawmaker identified in court papers only as Representative No. 1 with gifts that included $4,000 to his campaign account and $10,000 to a Republican Party fund on his behalf.
Lawyers and others who follow such issues say the case against Mr. Scanlon amounted to a shift by the Justice Department, which, they say, has generally steered clear of trying to build corruption cases around political donations because the charges can be hard to prove.
"The department has rarely charged campaign contribution cases," said Joseph E. diGenova, a defense lawyer and former federal prosecutor. "It would be a surprise that a contribution that has been lawfully reported" would lead to a criminal charge.
The case against Mr. Scanlon, who became wealthy in a partnership with the lobbyist Jack Abramoff, reaches far beyond the contributions to Representative No. 1. Court documents filed by prosecutors lay out an extensive conspiracy in which Mr. Scanlon and Mr. Abramoff, identified in the documents only as Lobbyist A, sought to defraud clients - mainly Indian tribes with gambling interests - and win legislative help from lawmakers in exchange for campaign donations, trips, dinners, greens fees and jobs.
Watchdog groups and some lawmakers say the emerging details of how at least one set of well-connected lobbyists operated should help build momentum for changes in lobbying rules. And, they say, the case demonstrates that the Justice Department shares their longstanding contention that campaign contributions can be used to game the system.

Bad for the Country
By PAUL KRUGMAN
NYT, 25 November 2005 (sub only)
...Most commentary about G.M.'s troubles is resigned: pundits may regret the decline of a once-dominant company, but they don't think anything can or should be done about it. And commentary from some conservatives has an unmistakable tone of satisfaction, a sense that uppity workers who joined a union and made demands are getting what they deserve.
We shouldn't be so complacent. I won't defend the many bad decisions of G.M.'s management, or every demand made by the United Automobile Workers. But job losses at General Motors are part of the broader weakness of U.S. manufacturing, especially the part of U.S. manufacturing that offers workers decent wages and benefits. And some of that weakness reflects two big distortions in our economy: a dysfunctional health care system and an unsustainable trade deficit.
According to A. T. Kearney, last year General Motors spent $1,500 per vehicle on health care. By contrast, Toyota spent only $201 per vehicle in North America, and $97 in Japan. If the United States had national health insurance, G.M. would be in much better shape than it is.
Wouldn't taxpayer-financed health insurance amount to a subsidy to the auto industry? Not really. Because most Americans believe that their fellow citizens are entitled to health care, and because our political system acts, however imperfectly, on that belief, tying health insurance to employment distorts the economy: it systematically discourages the creation of good jobs, the type of jobs that come with good benefits. And somebody ends up paying for health care anyway.
In fact, many of the health care expenses G.M. will save by slashing employment will simply be pushed off onto taxpayers. Some former G.M. families will end up receiving Medicaid. Others will receive uncompensated care - for example, at emergency rooms - which ends up being paid for either by taxpayers or by those with insurance.
Moreover, G.M.'s health care costs are so high in part because of the inefficiency of America's fragmented health care system. We spend far more per person on medical care than countries with national health insurance, while getting worse results.
...About the trade deficit: These days the United States imports far more than it exports. Last year the trade deficit exceeded $600 billion. The flip side of the trade deficit is a reorientation of our economy away from industries that export or compete with imports, especially manufacturing, to industries that are insulated from foreign competition, such as housing. Since 2000, we've lost about three million jobs in manufacturing, while membership in the National Association of Realtors has risen 50 percent.
The trade deficit isn't sustainable. We can run huge deficits for the time being, because foreigners - in particular, foreign governments - are willing to lend us huge sums. But one of these days the easy credit will come to an end, and the United States will have to start paying its way in the world economy.
To do that, we'll have to reorient our economy back toward producing things we can export or use to replace imports. And that will mean pulling a lot of workers back into manufacturing. So the rapid downsizing of manufacturing since 2000 - of which G.M.'s job cuts are a symptom - amounts to dismantling a sector we'll just have to rebuild a few years from now.
...Dealing with our trade deficit is a tricky issue I'll have to address another time. But G.M.'s woes are yet another reminder of the urgent need to fix our health care system. It's long past time to move to a national system that would reduce cost, diminish the burden on employers who try to do the right thing and relieve working American families from the fear of lost coverage. Fixing health care would be good for General Motors, and good for the country.

24 November 2005

'Smoking Gun'
Key Bush Intelligence Briefing Kept From Hill Panel
Bush knew there was no evidence of a connection between Al Qaeda and Saddam
By Murray Waas, special to National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc., 22 November 2005
Ten days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda, according to government records and current and former officials with firsthand knowledge of the matter.
The information was provided to Bush on September 21, 2001 during the "President's Daily Brief," a 30- to 45-minute early-morning national security briefing. Information for PDBs has routinely been derived from electronic intercepts, human agents, and reports from foreign intelligence services, as well as more mundane sources such as news reports and public statements by foreign leaders.
One of the more intriguing things that Bush was told during the briefing was that the few credible reports of contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda involved attempts by Saddam Hussein to monitor the terrorist group. Saddam viewed Al Qaeda as well as other theocratic radical Islamist organizations as a potential threat to his secular regime. At one point, analysts believed, Saddam considered infiltrating the ranks of Al Qaeda with Iraqi nationals or even Iraqi intelligence operatives to learn more about its inner workings, according to records and sources.
The September 21, 2001, briefing was prepared at the request of the president, who was eager in the days following the terrorist attacks to learn all that he could about any possible connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda.
...In arguing their case for war with Iraq, the president and vice president said after the September 11 attacks that Al Qaeda and Iraq had significant ties, and they cited the possibility that Iraq might share chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons with Al Qaeda for a terrorist attack against the United States.
Democrats in Congress, as well as other critics of the Bush administration, charge that Bush and Cheney misrepresented and distorted intelligence information to bolster their case for war with Iraq. The president and vice president have insisted that they unknowingly relied on faulty and erroneous intelligence, provided mostly by the CIA.
The new information on the September 21 PDB and the subsequent CIA analysis bears on the question of what the CIA told the president and how the administration used that information as it made its case for war with Iraq.
The central rationale for going to war against Iraq, of course, was that Saddam Hussein had biological and chemical weapons, and that he was pursuing an aggressive program to build nuclear weapons. Despite those claims, no weapons were ever discovered after the war, either by United Nations inspectors or by U.S. military authorities.
Much of the blame for the incorrect information in statements made by the president and other senior administration officials regarding the weapons-of-mass-destruction issue has fallen on the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies.
...In his own speech to the American Enterprise Institute yesterday, Cheney also changed tone, saying that "disagreement, argument, and debate are the essence of democracy" and the "sign of a healthy political system." He then added: "Any suggestion that prewar information was distorted, hyped, or fabricated by the leader of the nation is utterly false."
Although the Senate Intelligence Committee and the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, commonly known as the 9/11 commission, pointed to incorrect CIA assessments on the WMD issue, they both also said that, for the most part, the CIA and other agencies did indeed provide policy makers with accurate information regarding the lack of evidence of ties between Al Qaeda and Iraq.
But a comparison of public statements by the president, the vice president, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld show that in the days just before a congressional vote authorizing war, they professed to have been given information from U.S. intelligence assessments showing evidence of an Iraq-Al Qaeda link.

Indeed, the existence of the September 21 PDB was not disclosed to the Intelligence Committee until the summer of 2004, according to congressional sources. Both Republicans and Democrats requested then that it be turned over. The administration has refused to provide it, even on a classified basis, and won't say anything more about it other than to acknowledge that it exists.
On November 18, Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., said he planned to attach an amendment to the fiscal 2006 intelligence authorization bill that would require the Bush administration to give the Senate and House intelligence committees copies of PDBs for a three-year period. After Democrats and Republicans were unable to agree on language for the amendment, Kennedy said he would delay final action on the matter until Congress returns in December.
The conclusions drawn in the lengthier CIA assessment-which has also been denied to the committee-were strikingly similar to those provided to President Bush in the September 21 PDB, according to records and sources. In the four years since Bush received the briefing, according to highly placed government officials, little evidence has come to light to contradict the CIA's original conclusion that no collaborative relationship existed between Iraq and Al Qaeda.
"What the President was told on September 21," said one former high-level official, "was consistent with everything he has been told since-that the evidence was just not there."
In arguing their case for war with Iraq, the president and vice president said after the September 11 attacks that Al Qaeda and Iraq had significant ties, and they cited the possibility that Iraq might share chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons with Al Qaeda for a terrorist attack against the United States.

Manipulating Intelligence...
Kevin Drum
The Washington Monthly, 23 November 2005
Did the Bush administration mislead the country during the runup to the Iraq war? It's true that they turned out to be wrong about a great many things, but that doesn't answer the question. It merely begs it. Were they sincerely wrong, or did they intentionally manipulate the intelligence they presented to the public in order to mask known weaknesses in their case?
The case for manipulation is pretty strong. It relies on several things, but I think the most important of them has been the discovery that the administration deliberately suppressed dissenting views on some of the most important pieces of evidence that they used to bolster their case for war. For future reference, here's a list of seven key dissents about administration claims, all of which were circulated before the war but kept under wraps until after the war:

1. The Claim: Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, an al-Qaeda prisoner captured in 2001, was the source of intelligence that Saddam Hussein had trained al-Qaeda members to use biological and chemical weapons. This information was used extensively by Colin Powell in his February 2003 speech to the UN.
What We Know Now: As early as February 2002, the Defense Intelligence Agency circulated a report, labeled DITSUM No. 044-02, saying that it was "likely this individual is intentionally misleading the debriefers." Link. This assessment was hidden from the public until after the war.

2. The Claim: An Iraqi defector codenamed "Curveball" was the source of reporting that Saddam Hussein had built a fleet of mobile biowarfare labs. Curveball's claims of mobile bio labs were repeated by many administration figures during the runup to war.
What We Know Now: The German intelligence officials who handled Curveball told the CIA that he was not "psychologically stable" and that his allegations of mobile bio labs were second hand and unverified. Link. The only American agent to actually meet with Curveball before the war warned that he appeared to be an alcoholic and was unreliable. However, his superior in the CIA told him it was best to keep quiet about this: "Let's keep in mind the fact that this war's going to happen regardless of what Curveball said or didn't say, and the powers that be probably aren't terribly interested in whether Curveball knows what he's talking about." Link. This dissent was not made public until 2004, in a response to the SSCI report that was written by Senator Dianne Feinstein. Link.

3. The Claim: Iraq had purchased thousands of aluminum tubes to act as centrifuges for the creation of bomb grade uranium. Dick Cheney said they were "irrefutable evidence" of an Iraqi nuclear program and George Bush cited them in his 2003 State of the Union address.
What We Know Now: Centrifuge experts at the Oak Ridge Office of the Department of Energy had concluded long before the war that the tubes were unsuitable for centrifuge work and were probably meant for use in artillery rockets. The State Department concurred. Link. Both of these dissents were omitted from the CIA's declassified National Intelligence Estimate, released on October 4, 2002. Link. They were subsequently made public after the war, on July 18, 2003. Link.

4. The Claim: Saddam Hussein attempted to purchase uranium yellowcake from Africa as part of his attempt to reconstitute his nuclear program. President Bush cited this publicly in his 2003 State of the Union address.
What We Know Now: The primary piece of evidence for this claim was a document showing that Iraq had signed a contract to buy yellowcake from Niger. However, the CIA specifically told the White House in October 2002 that the "reporting was weak" and that they disagreed with the British about the reliability of this intelligence. Link. At the same time, the State Department wrote that the documents were "completely implausible." Link.
Three months later, in January 2003, Alan Foley, head of the CIA's counterproliferation effort, tried to persuade the White House not to include the claim in the SOTU because the information wasn't solid enough, but was overruled. Link. Five weeks later, the documents were conclusively shown to be forgeries. Link. In July 2003, after the war had ended, CIA Director George Tenet admitted publicly that that the claim should never have been made. Link.

5. The Claim: Saddam Hussein was developing long range aerial drones capable of attacking the continental United States with chemical or biological weapons. President Bush made this claim in a speech in October 2002 and Colin Powell repeated it during his speech to the UN in February 2003.
What We Know Now: The Iraqi drones had nowhere near the range to reach the United States, and Air Force experts also doubted that they were designed to deliver WMD. However, their dissent was left out of the October 2002 NIE and wasn't made public until July 2003. Link.

6. The Claim: Administration officials repeatedly suggested that Saddam Hussein had substantial connections to al-Qaeda. Even after the war, George Bush said, "The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al Qaeda [is] because there was a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda." Dick Cheney said the evidence of a relationship was "overwhelming."
What We Know Now: As early as September 21, 2001, President Bush was told by the CIA that there was "scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda." In fact, according to Murray Waas, "Bush was told during the briefing that the few credible reports of contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda involved attempts by Saddam Hussein to monitor the terrorist group. Saddam viewed Al Qaeda as well as other theocratic radical Islamist organizations as a potential threat to his secular regime." Link.

7. The Claim: Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, an Iraqi defector, told the CIA that he had secretly helped Saddam Hussein's men bury tons of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. After this information was passed to the New York Times by Ahmed Chalabi, it was cited in "A Decade of Deception and Defiance" as evidence of Iraq's continued WMD programs.
What We Know Now: Al-Haideri told his story while strapped to a polygraph. He failed. The CIA knew from the start that he had made up the entire account, apparently in the hopes of securing a visa. Link.
SEE ALSO:
Bush Rewrites History
PERRspectives blog, 23 Novmeber 2005
When in a hole, one of the timeless maxims of politics states, stop digging. President Bush, facing plummeting poll numbers, the festering PlameGate scandal and a growing national consensus that he misled the country into war with Iraq, has apparently decided to keep digging.
In shameless and angry speeches in front of military audiences on Veterans Day and again in Alaska on Monday, the President in essence accused his critics of giving aid and comfort to the enemy. But in seeking to salvage a presidency perhaps in its "last throes", Bush answered charges of past deception with a new crop of lies.
In a nutshell, President Bush, echoed by National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley, RNC Chairman Ken Mehlman and others in his amen corner, has decided to defend himself by offering the American people four falsehoods regarding the path to war. These calumnies - "same intelligence", "no manipulation", "no pressure" and "rewriting history"- are fitting for a President now viewed by a majority of Americans as dishonest and unethical.
The Truth:
1. Congress Did Not Have the Same Intelligence as the President
2. Neither the Senate Intelligence Committee Nor The Silberman-Robb Commission Concluded That Intelligence Had Not Been Manipulated
3. The Bush White House Pressured the Intelligence Community to Support Its Policies
4. It is President Bush Who Is Rewriting History

The Fall of the One-Party Empire
By Jonathan Schell
The Nation via TomDispatch, 23 November 2005
For some time, I have been suggesting that the aim of Republican strategy has been a Republican Party that permanently runs the United States and a United States that permanently runs the world. The two aims have been driven by a common purpose: to steadily and irreversibly increase and consolidate power in Republican hands, leading in the direction of a one-party state at home and a global American empire abroad. The most critical question has been whether American democracy, severely eroded but still breathing, would bring down the Republican machine, or whether the Republican machine -- call it the budding one-party global empire -- would bring down American democracy. This week, it looks as if democracy, after years of decline, has gained the upper hand.
...The imperial dreams are in ruins. But the ruins, strangely, are not of things that were built and then collapsed; they are of fantasies. We are not dealing here with the decline of a new Rome. It is not that a great power has been brought down -- although the casualties of the war, American and Iraqi, have been tragically real -- but that a world of fancy and fraud has been exploded by facts.
And the one-party state at home? It was not the mirage that the empire was. The structure of the American state and, to a lesser extent, the economy, really has been deeply altered. Real hundreds of millions of dollars have poured into the coffers of the GOP while real hundreds of billions poured into the pockets of the rich. Real laws were passed that tore gaping holes in the Bill of Rights. A real shift of the judiciary toward the radical right was set in motion. An unprecedented concentration of power -- fusing government, corporations, the military, portions of the media, and a hugely expanded secret police apparatus -- was created. And yet this structure, too, has been shaken by recent events.
As happened in the Vietnam era, the war came home. The administration's disrespect for law led to law-breaking. Somehow, the law enforcement system in and around the Justice Department has retained enough independence to serve as a check on abuses of executive power.
...Unmaking the conglomeration of unaccountable power built up around the Republican Party in recent years will hardly be the work of a week, and the outcome is anything but certain. But if the effort succeeds, historians may one day write that the fake American empire was the Achilles heel of the real one-party state.

For the holidays...
FEMA Turned Down Housing Units for Hurricane Victims
By Lara Jakes Jordan
AP via San Diego Union-Tribune, 18 November 2005
One of the nation's largest home lenders offered 1,500 housing units for Hurricane Katrina evacuees, but the Federal Emergency Management Agency has so far failed to put families into any of them, a Democratic congressman said Friday.
Responding to concerns raised Friday by Rep. Bennie G. Thompson, D-Miss., mortgage lender Fannie Mae confirmed it offered the housing units – rent-free for up to 18 months – to FEMA two months ago.
Though the units could house only a small fraction of Katrina victims in need of long-term housing, the accusations come as FEMA prepares to stop paying hotel bills of an estimated 53,000 families who lost their homes in the Aug. 29 storm.
"The department's failure to act expeditiously in this matter represents yet another lost opportunity to make things right for the people of the Gulf Coast," Thompson said.
FEMA housing spokesman James McIntyre acknowledged that the agency has so far not put any storm victims in the housing Fannie Mae has offered, citing disagreements with the lender over certain conditions.
Fannie Mae is the second largest financial institution the United States.
Fannie Mae spokesman Brian Faith said the mortgage company offered the housing units not only to FEMA, but also to state agencies, charities and other relief groups seeking temporary homes for evacuees.
In a letter to FEMA acting chief R. David Paulison, Thompson wrote that local organizations have placed 18 families into housing offered by Fannie Mae, while FEMA has not placed any.
Faith refused to comment on FEMA's performance, saying only that Fannie Mae and the agency are still discussing the matter.
FEMA's McIntyre said his agency and Fannie Mae in recent weeks "agreed to disagree" on the housing offer.
SEE ALSO:
Fannie Mae and FEMA Settle Katrina Housing Argument
KVOA.com, 23 November 2005
Two federal agencies have settled a dispute that will put 15-hundred Katrina families into rent-free homes.
Fannie Mae offered the homes, located in nine Southern states, for 18 months. But the mortgage company wanted to be able to keep showing them to prospective buyers.
FEMA said no to that, arguing that it would violate evacuees' privacy.
When FEMA announced last week that it wants hurricane victims out of hotels soon, Congressman Bennie Thompson of Mississippi stepped in. That prompted Fannie Mae to drop its demand about showing the homes.
FEMA says it's moving quickly to put families into the housing, much of which is single-family homes. Some 200 homes are immediately available.
It's not clear how FEMA is picking the families from among the 53-thousand still in hotels.

Hillary Advocates 'Third Way' on Iraq Troop Withdrawal
By TEDDY DAVIS
ABC News, 22 November 2005
 Joining the furious debate over withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq, Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., rejected calls for an immediate pullout while suggesting Iraq may not be stabilized until the new government is told that the U.S. troop commitment is not open-ended.
Speaking to reporters in Rye Brook, N.Y., on Monday, Clinton recommended that pressure be put on Iraq's new government after the Dec. 15 election.
"Then we have to tell this new government we are not going to be there forever, we are going to be withdrawing our young men and women and we expect you to start moving towards stability," Clinton said.
The former first lady said an immediate withdrawal from Iraq would be a "big mistake."
"It will matter to us if Iraq totally collapses into civil war, if it becomes a failed state the way Afghanistan was, where terrorists are free to basically set up camp and launch attacks against us," she said.
She suggested, however, that Iraq may not be stabilized until the United States signals its intention to leave.
Clinton said the Bush administration's approach amounted to giving the Iraqis "an open-ended invitation not to take care of themselves."

Falwell Fighting for Holy Holiday
He threatens to sue, boycott groups that subvert Christmas
Joe Garofoli
San Francisco Chronicle, 20 November 2005
Evangelical Christian pastor Jerry Falwell has a message for Americans when it comes to celebrating Christmas this year: You're either with us, or you're against us.
Falwell has put the power of his 24,000-member congregation behind the "Friend or Foe Christmas Campaign," an effort led by the conservative legal organization Liberty Counsel. The group promises to file suit against anyone who spreads what it sees as misinformation about how Christmas can be celebrated in schools and public spaces.
The 8,000 members of the Christian Educators Association International will be the campaign's "eyes and ears" in the nation's public schools. They'll be reporting to 750 Liberty Counsel lawyers who are ready to pounce if, for example, a teacher is muzzled from leading the third-graders in "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing."
An additional 800 attorneys from another conservative legal group, the Alliance Defense Fund, are standing by as part of a similar effort, the Christmas Project. Its slogan: "Merry Christmas. It's OK to say it."
Fanning the Yule log of discontent against what the Liberty Counsel calls "grinches" like the American Civil Liberties Union are evangelical-led organizations including the 150,000-member American Family Association. It has called for a boycott of Target stores next weekend. The chain's crime, according to the group, is a ban on the use of "Merry Christmas" in stores, an accusation the chain denies.
On his show last week, Fox News commentator Bill O'Reilly offered a list of other retailers that he says refuse to use "Merry Christmas" in their store advertising.
In signing on to "Friend or Foe" this month, Falwell urged the 500,000 recipients of his weekly "Falwell Confidential" e-mail to "draw a line in the sand and resist bullying tactics of the ACLU and others who intimidate school and government officials by spreading misinformation about Christmas."
Standing on the other side of that sand line are religious, liberal and secular organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League, whose national director, Abe Foxman, recently bemoaned the religious right's efforts to "Christianize" America.
"This amped-up effort shows how these groups want to push into the classrooms more," said Tami Holzman, assistant director of the Anti-Defamation League's San Francisco office.
"There is no war against Christmas," said Barry Lynn of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. "There is no jihad against Christians. There is nothing going on around Christmas except these groups' incessant fundraising."

23 November 2005

Koppel Confirms Chomsky:
MSM News is Tailored to Interest of Commercial Customers
Listen Now (mp3)
Producer Bettag Bids Farewell to 'Nightline'
Morning Edition, 22 November 2005
Host Steve Inskeep talks with Tom Bettag, senior executive producer of ABC's Nightline, whose final show will be broadcast Tuesday. The two discuss the changes to television journalism over the last two decades and the commercial pressures that confront reporters, editors, and producers.

Damned terrorists...
U.K. Charges Official with Leaking Blair Memo
Document allegedly says PM dissuaded Bush push for attack on Al-Jazeera
NBC News and news services, 22 November 2005
LONDON - A civil servant has been charged under Britain’s Official Secrets Act for allegedly leaking a government memo that a newspaper said Tuesday suggested that Prime Minister Tony Blair persuaded President Bush not to bomb the Arab satellite station Al-Jazeera.
The Daily Mirror reported that Bush spoke of targeting Al-Jazeera’s headquarters in Doha, Qatar, when he met Blair at the White House on April 16, 2004. The Bush administration has regularly accused Al-Jazeera of being nothing more than a mouthpiece for anti-American sentiments.
The Daily Mirror attributed its information to unidentified sources. One source, said to be in the government, was quoted as saying that the alleged threat was “humorous, not serious,” but the newspaper quoted another source as saying that “Bush was deadly serious, as was Blair.”
...The document was described as a transcript of a conversation between the two leaders.
Court appearance next week
Cabinet Office civil servant David Keogh is accused of passing it to Leo O’Connor, who formerly worked for former British lawmaker Tony Clarke. Both Keogh and O’Connor are scheduled to appear at London’s Bow Street Magistrates Court next week.
According to the Crown Prosecution Service, Keogh was charged with an offense under Section 3 of the Official Secrets Act relating to “a damaging disclosure” by a servant of the Crown of information relating to international relations or information obtained from a state other than the United Kingdom.
O’Connor was charged under Section 5, which relates to receiving and disclosing illegally disclosed information.
According to the newspaper, Clarke returned the memo to Blair’s office. Clarke did not respond to calls from The Associated Press seeking comment.
Press Association, the British news agency, said Clarke refused to discuss the contents of the document. PA quoted Clarke as saying his priority was to support O’Connor who did “exactly the right thing” in bringing it to his attention.
Peter Kilfoyle, a former defense minister in Blair’s government, called for the document to be made public.
“I think they ought to clarify what exactly happened on this occasion,” he said. “If it was the case that President Bush wanted to bomb Al-Jazeera in what is after all a friendly country, it speaks volumes and it raises questions about subsequent attacks that took place on the press that wasn’t embedded with coalition forces,” the newspaper quoted Kilfoyle as saying.
Worrying memo?
Sir Menzies Campbell, foreign affairs spokesman for the opposition Liberal Democrats, said Tuesday that, if true, the memo was worrying.
“If true, then this underlines the desperation of the Bush administration as events in Iraq began to spiral out of control,” he said. “On this occasion, the prime minister may have been successful in averting political disaster, but it shows how dangerous his relationship with President Bush has been.”
Al-Jazeera offices in Iraq and Afghanistan have been hit by U.S. bombs or missiles, but each time the U.S. military said they were not intentionally targeting the broadcaster.
In April 2003, an Al-Jazeera journalist was killed when its Baghdad office was struck during a U.S. bombing campaign. Nabil Khoury, a State Department spokesman in Doha, said the strike was a mistake.
In November 2002, Al-Jazeera’s office in Kabul, Afghanistan, was destroyed by a U.S. missile. None of the crew was at the office at the time. U.S. officials said they believed the target was a terrorist site and did not know it was Al-Jazeera’s office.
Meantime, NBC News analyst Bill Arkin says that while there is no military order to bomb any media outlet, the U.S. Strategic Command in Omaha has been given responsibility for exploiting and disrupting the communications and computer systems of news media outlets worldwide.
Arkin says the center of this effort is the Network Attack Support Staff, which while assigned to Stratcom, is headquartered at Ft. Meade, Md.

"Dirty bomb" goes the way of Iraqi WMDs...
U.S. Indicts Padilla After 3 Years in Pentagon Custody
By DAVID STOUT
NYT, 22 November 2005
Jose Padilla, an American citizen held without charge for more than three years as an enemy combatant, has been indicted in what the federal authorities said today was a plot to "murder, kidnap and maim" people overseas.
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who announced the indictment here, said that Mr. Padilla had conspired as part of a "North American support cell" to send "money, physical assets and new recruits" overseas to engage in acts of terrorism and that he had traveled abroad himself to become "a violent jihadist."
Almost from the moment his arrest was announced in 2002, Mr. Padilla has been at the center of a debate over the proper balance between national security and personal liberties, especially in an age of terrorism and shadowy forces that neither serve nor operate under the conventions of nation-states.
The government's announcement of a criminal indictment of Mr. Padilla today marked a significant shift in its public position on certain people seized as "enemy combatants" in the campaign against terrorism.
The Bush administration position that it has the right to hold Mr. Padilla without formal charges as an enemy combatant, despite his citizenship, was upheld two months ago by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in Richmond, which threw out a lower court ruling to the contrary.
But some lawyers continued to insist that keeping an American citizen in a Navy brig with only limited access to legal counsel was a violation of civil rights and the spirit of the Constitution.
Mr. Gonzales disputed a suggestion today that Mr. Padilla had had inadequate legal representation because of his confinement in a brig. "There has been significant litigation with respect to Mr. Padilla, and he has had access to counsel," Mr. Gonzales said. "He has had access to counsel."
Scott Silliman, a Duke University law professor, who specializes in national security, theorized that the government had secured the indictment against Mr. Padilla so that it could sidestep a Supreme Court showdown over when and for how long American citizens could be held in military prisons.
"That's an issue the administration did not want to face," Mr. Silliman told The Associated Press.
SEE ALSO:
In Legal Shift, U.S. Charges Detainee in Terrorism Case
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
NYT, 23 November 2005
...Mr. Padilla, a Brooklyn-born convert to Islam who is in his mid-30's and has sometimes lived in Broward County, faces life in prison if he is convicted.
The formal charges against Mr. Padilla are the latest development in a case that has been controversial from its very beginning, when he was arrested in 2002 at Chicago's O'Hare airport on his return from Pakistan, and that promises to remain controversial.
The attorney general at the time, John Ashcroft, announced with considerable fanfare that Mr. Padilla, a former Chicago gang member, had hoped to set off a radiological "dirty bomb" and carry out attacks against hotels and apartment buildings in the United States. The government said he had been trained by Al Qaeda
Although today Mr. Gonzales described Mr. Padilla as a violent jihadist, there was no mention of the earlier "dirty bomb" accusation, which was never the subject of formal charges. Nor was there a mention in the indictment of any violence that Mr. Padilla had hoped to wreak in the United States.
Asked by a reporter today if the "dirty bomb" accusations against Mr. Padilla were now "off the table," Mr. Gonzales declined to comment.
SEE ALSO:
Um, About That Dirty Bomb?
NYT, 23 November 2005
...The Padilla case was supposed to be an example of why the administration needs to suspend prisoners' rights when it comes to the war on terror. It turned out to be the opposite. If Mr. Padilla was seriously planning a "dirty bomb" attack, he can never be held accountable for it in court because the illegal conditions under which he has been held will make it impossible to do that. If he was only an inept fellow traveler in the terrorist community, he is excellent proof that the government is fallible and needs the normal checks of the judicial system. And, of course, if he is innocent, he was the victim of a terrible injustice.
The same is true of the hundreds of other men held at Guantánamo Bay and in the C.I.A.'s secret prisons. This is hardly what Americans have had in mind hearing Mr. Bush's constant assurances since Sept. 11, 2001, that he will bring terrorists to justice.

Emerging pattern?
Student From Virginia Is Convicted of Plotting With Al Qaeda to Assassinate Bush
By DAVID STOUT
NYT, 22 November 2005
An Arab-American student from Virginia was convicted Tuesday of plotting with operatives of Al Qaeda to assassinate President Bush and hijack airplanes.
The Justice Department has seen the trial as an important test of its ability to use foreign intelligence sources for a criminal case in an American court.
The student, Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, was convicted on numerous charges of conspiracy to commit acts of terrorism. The federal jury, in Alexandria, Va., rejected Mr. Abu Ali's account that after he was arrested in Saudi Arabia in 2003, his captors beat and tortured him into confessing.
Mr. Abu Ali, 24, an American citizen who was born to a Jordanian father and grew up in Northern Virginia, faces the possibility of life in prison when he is sentenced by Judge Gerald Bruce Lee of Federal District Court on Feb. 17.
The Justice Department described Mr. Abu Ali before the trial as "one of the most dangerous terrorist threats that America faces in the perilous world after Sept. 11, 2001: an Al Qaeda operative born and raised in the United States, trained and committed to carry out deadly attacks on American soil."
Paul J. McNulty, the United States attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, said after the verdict that Mr. Abu Ali had posed "a grave threat to our national security." Mr. McNulty said that the defendant had scouted nuclear plants in the United States at the behest of his Qaeda confederates, and that the hijacking plot he engaged in was "substantially similar to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks."
But no evidence was presented to show that any plot had reached an operational stage. The defense said Mr. Abu Ali was just an American student who had gone to Saudi Arabia to pursue his religious studies.
"If he's the most dangerous guy they have, then we're very lucky," the defense lawyer John K. Zwerling said early on, "because I don't believe he's very dangerous at all."
Another defense lawyer vowed to appeal. "Obviously, the jury has spoken, but the fight is not over," the lawyer, Khurrum Wahid, told The Associated Press. "We intend to use the justice system to prove our client's innocence."
Prosecutors maintained that Mr. Abu Ali went to Saudi Arabia in 2002 with the idea of becoming a terrorist because he saw President Bush as "the leader of the infidels" and that he eventually met a high-ranking leader of Al Qaeda. Mr. McNulty said terrorists trained the defendant in weapons, explosives and document forgery.
Mr. Abu Ali was arrested at a university in Medina in June 2003 as the Saudi authorities were investigating a wave of bombings. What happened next is at the heart of the case...

Red States Aren't Buying It Either...
"dishonest"  "reprehensible"
For Cheney, the Adjectives Fit the Man in the Mirror
Tahlequah Daily Press (Oklahoma)  via LeftCoaster, 18 November 2005
The public should be thankful Vice President Dick Cheney seldom ventures out to utter his blasphemies. Otherwise, we'd spend a lot of time sick at heart, stomach or both.
Cheney is dangerous because he's a threat to the American way of life. Most of his public statements are fallacious, intended to smear opponents or prop up special interests like Halliburton.
This week he launched an attack against Democrats, who claim the administration misrepresented intelligence to drum up support for its attack on Iraq. Cheney called the charges “dishonest and reprehensible,” but his campaign of disinformation is full of holes - especially since many of the detractors are Republicans, who also feel deceived.
Cheney said elected officials had “access to the intelligence” and arrived at the same conclusion as the administration about Iraq's capabilities. But he failed to add the “access” was only what was allowed by the administration. Nor did he admit the supporters-turned-naysayers arrived at that “same judgment” because the information they received was flawed - information, incidentally, that was publicly refuted by a number of people hired by the administration to bolster its case. Warnings were issued well before boots hit the ground, and they are now a matter of public record. Incredibly, Cheney wants us to believe otherwise.
Indeed, there was “broad-based, bipartisan agreement” that Saddam was a threat, as Cheney says, but again, that consensus was based on the faulty intelligence. Furthermore, Congress did not actually vote to use force against Iraq, but to allow the president to order the use of force if he deemed it the only option available. The distinction is important, because it could be argued that Congress trusted Bush to do the right thing, and he did the opposite.

Tom spots classic symptoms of an untreated alcoholic...
George Bush's Third Term
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
NYT, 23 November 2005 (sub only)
President George W. Bush has just entered his third term. That's right. He's a three-term president. His first term was from 2001 to 2004, and it was dominated by 9/11, which Mr. Bush skillfully used to take a hard-right Republican agenda on taxes and war with Iraq, which was going nowhere on 9/10, and drive it into a 9/12 world.
His second term was very brief. It lasted from his re-election in November 2004 until Election Day 2005. This was an utterly wasted term. It was dominated by an attempt to privatize Social Security, which the country rejected, political scandals involving I. Lewis Libby Jr., Tom DeLay and Bill Frist, a ham-fisted response to Katrina and a mishandling of the Iraq war to such a degree that many Democrats and Republicans have begun to vote "no confidence" in the Bush-Cheney war performance. If ours were a parliamentary system, Mr. Bush would have had to resign by now.
So now begins Mr. Bush's third term. What will he do with it? The last time Mr. Bush hit rock bottom - then from too much drinking - he found God and turned his life around. Now that he has hit rock bottom again - this time from drinking in too much Karl Rove - the question is whether he can find America and turn his presidency around.
When I watch Mr. Bush these days, though, he looks to me like a man who wishes that we had a 28th amendment to the Constitution - called "Can I Go Now?" He looks like someone who would prefer to pack up and go back to his Texas ranch. It's not just that he doesn't seem to be having any fun. It's that he seems to be totally out of ideas relevant to the nation's future.
...We are about to produce the most legitimate government ever in the Arab world, and the Bush-Cheney team - instead of acknowledging its errors on W.M.D., seeking forgiveness and urging the country to unite behind the important effort to defeat the jihadist madness in Iraq - does what? It starts slinging mud at Democrats on Iraq. Sure, some Democrats goaded them with reckless remarks - but they are not in power. Where are the adults? We can't afford this nonsense, while also ignoring our energy crisis, the deficit, health care, climate change and Social Security.
"We are entering the era of hard choices for the United States - an era in which we can't always count on three Asian countries writing us checks to compensate for our failure to prepare for a hurricane or properly conduct a war," said David Rothkopf, author of "Running the World: The Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American Power."
"If President Bush doesn't rise to this challenge, our children and grandchildren will look at the burden he has placed on their shoulders and see this moment as the hinge between the American Century and the Chinese Century. George W. Bush may well be seen as the president who, by refusing to address these urgent questions when they needed to be addressed, invited America's decline."

Drug Costs Run Free Under New York Medicaid
By MICHAEL LUO
NYT, 23 November 2005
...For years, New York Medicaid, the state's health care program for the poor, has been an open-air bazaar for drug companies and their wares. Prescriptions that are severely restricted in many states are often dispensed freely here, and at higher prices, costing taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars.
As a result, the state program spends more on drugs for each Medicaid recipient than any other state but West Virginia, according to federal statistics. While other states have tried to fight soaring drug costs, New York lacks even the most basic controls that dozens of other states and private health insurers have used.
"They call it the gold card," said William Scheer, president of the New York City Pharmacists Society and a pharmacy owner, referring to the state health care program. "You get anything you want with it."

22 November 2005

Damn unpatriotic traitors...
Iraqi Leaders Urge a Timetable for Eventual Troop Withdrawal
Bloomberg, 21 November 2005
Iraqi leaders, meeting at a reconciliation conference in Cairo, urged an end to violence in the country and demanded a timetable for the withdrawal of coalition troops from Iraq.
In a final statement, read by Arab League chief Amre Moussa, host of the three-day summit, they called for ``the withdrawal of foreign troops according to a timetable, through putting in place an immediate national program to rebuild the armed forces.'' No date was specified.

Maybe not just for oil...
The Spoils of War
By Philip Thornton
Independent Online, 22 November 2005
Iraqis face the dire prospect of losing up to $200bn (£116bn) of the wealth of their country if an American-inspired plan to hand over development of its oil reserves to US and British multinationals comes into force next year. A report produced by American and British pressure groups warns Iraq will be caught in an "old colonial trap" if it allows foreign companies to take a share of its vast energy reserves. The report is certain to reawaken fears that the real purpose of the 2003 war on Iraq was to ensure its oil came under Western control.
The Iraqi government has announced plans to seek foreign investment to exploit its oil reserves after the general election, which will be held next month. Iraq has 115 billion barrels of proved oil reserves, the third largest in the world.
According to the report, from groups including War on Want and the New Economics Foundation (NEF), the new Iraqi constitution opened the way for greater foreign investment. Negotiations with oil companies are already under way ahead of next month's election and before legislation is passed, it said.
The groups said they had amassed details of high-level pressure from the US and UK governments on Iraq to look to foreign companies to rebuild its oil industry. It said a Foreign Office code of practice issued in summer last year said at least $4bn would be needed to restore production to the levels before the 1990-91 Gulf War. "Given Iraq's needs it is not realistic to cut government spending in other areas and Iraq would need to engage with the international oil companies to provide appropriate levels of foreign direct investment to do this," it said.
Yesterday's report said the use of production sharing agreements (PSAs) was proposed by the US State Department before the invasion and adopted by the Coalition Provisional Authority. "The current government is fast-tracking the process. It is already negotiating contracts with oil companies in parallel with the constitutional process, elections and passage of a Petroleum Law," the report, Crude Designs, said.

Conservatives hear what they want to hear and know what they want to know. And, oh yes, they aren't lying if they don't know they are.
Colonel Denies Disparaging Murtha
NYT, 22 November 2005
A colonel in the Marine reserves has taken issue with how his views were represented in a Republican attack last week on Representative Murtha.
Speaking on the House floor on Friday, Representative Jean Schmidt, Republican of Ohio, asserted that the colonel had "asked me to send Congressman Murtha a message: that cowards cut and run, marines never do."
But a spokeswoman for the colonel, Danny R. Bubp, said Ms. Schmidt had misconstrued their conversation.
While Mr. Bubp, a Republican member of the Ohio House of Representatives, opposes a quick withdrawal for forces, "he did not mention Congressman Murtha by name nor did he mean to disparage Congressman Murtha," said Karen Tabor, his spokeswoman. "He feels as though the words that Congresswoman Schmidt chose did not represent their conversation."
Asked to respond on Monday, the congresswoman's office said only, "Mrs. Schmidt's statement was never meant to disparage Congressman Murtha."

Cheney Sees 'Shameless' Revisionism on War
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
NYT, 21 November 2005
Vice President Dick Cheney stepped up the White House attacks on critics of the Iraq war on Monday, declaring that politicians who say Americans were sent into battle based on a lie are engaging in "revisionism of the most corrupt and shameless variety."
...Leading Democrats denounced Mr. Cheney's remarks, issuing a point-by-point rebuttal to the major points in his speech.
"The vice president and this administration have a credibility problem," Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader, said in a statement. "Rather than giving our troops a plan to move forward in Iraq and changing their failed course, they continue to ignore the facts and lash out at those who raise legitimate questions about how the administration misused intelligence in its rush to war."
Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, said in a statement, "The only thing dishonest and reprehensible is the way the administration distorted, misrepresented and manipulated the intelligence to justify a war America never should have fought," adding, "It defies belief that the vice president can continue to say with a straight face that Congress had the same intelligence as the president and vice president had."
Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat who ran against Mr. Bush for president in 2004, said Mr. Cheney was "still misleading America" about the war.
Mr. Cheney's remarks closely tracked a speech on terrorism by Mr. Bush in Tobyhanna, Pa., on Nov. 11, that suggested that Democrats were undermining the war effort by accusing him of misleading the nation about Iraq's unconventional weapons. Mr. Cheney's remarks were also similar to the prepared text of a speech that Ken Mehlman, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, was scheduled to make in Chicago on Monday night.
"This kind of political doublespeak sends exactly the wrong message to our troops, to the Iraqis and to our terrorist enemies," the text said.
The White House is waging its campaign against war critics as Mr. Bush's approval ratings have sunk to record lows and polls have shown that he has lost credibility among voters. A recent Associated Press-Ipsos poll found that 42 percent of Americans viewed Mr. Bush as honest, down from 53 percent in the beginning of the year.
But the White House has also tempered its initial response to Mr. Murtha, a combat veteran who voted for the Iraq war. After Mr. Murtha called last week for the pullout of 153,000 American troops from Iraq within six months, the White House press secretary, Scott McClellan, issued an unusually critical statement declaring that Mr. Murtha was endorsing "the policy positions of Michael Moore and the extreme liberal wing of the Democratic Party."
Administration officials now say the language was too strong, and on Sunday Mr. Bush referred to Mr. Murtha, one of the House's most respected experts on military matters, as "a fine man, a good man" whose decision to call for a withdrawal of troops was done in a "careful and thoughtful way."

Iraqi Factions Seek Timetable for U.S. Pullout
By HASSAN M. FATTAH
NYT, 21 November 2005
For the first time, Iraq's political factions on Monday collectively called for a timetable for withdrawal of foreign forces, in a moment of consensus that comes as the Bush administration battles pressure at home to commit itself to a pullout schedule.
The announcement, made at the conclusion of a reconciliation conference here backed by the Arab League, was a public reaching out by Shiites, who now dominate Iraq's government, to Sunni Arabs on the eve of parliamentary elections that have been put on shaky ground by weeks of sectarian violence.
About 100 Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish leaders, many of whom will run in the election on Dec. 15, signed a closing memorandum on Monday that "demands a withdrawal of foreign troops on a specified timetable, dependent on an immediate national program for rebuilding the security forces," the statement said.
"The Iraqi people are looking forward to the day when foreign forces will leave Iraq, when its armed and security forces will be rebuilt and when they can enjoy peace and stability and an end to terrorism," it continued.
The meeting was intended as preparation for a much larger conference in Iraq in late February. The recommendations made here are to be the starting ground for that meeting.

Scanlon, Abramoff `Backroom Guy,' Points Probers at DeLay, Ney
By Jonathan D. Salant
Bloomberg, 21 November 2005
For more than a year, Michael Scanlon has been a shadowy presence behind former partner Jack Abramoff, the Republican lobbyist at the center of a corruption probe. Now, Scanlon may help prosecutors raise the investigation to a higher level.
Scanlon, a former aide to Representative Tom DeLay, is scheduled to appear today in U.S. District Court to present a plea bargain with the Justice Department likely to lead to his cooperation with investigators. His testimony would ratchet up the pressure on Abramoff and aid prosecutors in widening the investigation to members of Congress, such as Republicans DeLay and Representative Robert Ney of Ohio.
Scanlon, 35, is the second person to face criminal charges in connection with the Justice Department-led probe of the 46- year-old Abramoff. In October, a federal grand jury indicted the White House's former chief procurement officer, David Safavian, once an Abramoff associate, for obstruction and making false statements.
``Now you have two people instead of one,'' said Stan Brand, a former counsel to the House of Representatives when it was controlled by the Democrats. ``What you're building is a ladder. You have Abramoff at the intermediate step, elected officials above him, and Scanlon and Safavian underneath.''
Beyond the potential legal concerns, Scanlon's cooperation with authorities may spell political jeopardy for Republicans leading into next year's elections, especially if he helps draw other lawmakers into the investigation. ``He knows where all the bodies are buried,'' said a congressional aide who worked with Scanlon.

The Man Who Sold the Iraq War: John Rendon, Bush's General in the Propaganda War
Interview with James Bamford
DemocracyNow.org, 21 November 2005
Investigative journalist James Bamford examines how the Bush administration and Iraqi National Congress used the PR firm Rendon Group to feed journalists - including Judith Miller -- fabricated stories in an effort to sell the war. The firm has received millions in government contracts since 1991 when it was by the CIA to help "create the conditions for the removal of Hussein from power." Iraq wasn't the first regime change case for Rendon. In 1989 the CIA turned to Rendon to use a variety of campaign and psychological techniques in Panama to put the CIA's choice, Guillermo Endara, into the presidential palace to replace Gen. Manuel Noriega.
SEE ALSO:
The Man Who Sold the War
Meet John Rendon, Bush's general in the propaganda war
By JAMES BAMFORD
Rolling Stone, 17 November 2005

Public TV Overseer Faces New Questions
By STEPHEN LABATON
NYT, 21 November 2005
Senior officials at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting have asked a large accounting firm to rewrite a confidential report, provided to the corporation's board this month, that raised questions about the propriety of a number of large contracts, officials who have seen the report said.
Among the contracts the auditors' report questioned, they said, was a consulting agreement worth almost $500,000 with a former president of the corporation, Robert T. Coonrod. The contract was approved by the corporation's board while Mr. Coonrod was still president to get around a statutory limit on his salary. Federal tax records show he was paid $174,000 in his final year of service.
The corporation is a nonprofit organization Congress created in 1967 to allocate federal financing to support programs on public radio and television.
The report by auditors from the accounting firm PriceWaterhouseCoopers is a particularly sensitive political document. It examines procurement practices while Cheryl Halpern, the corporation's newly elected chairwoman, led the board's audit committee. Most of the same board members who received the PriceWaterhouseCoopers report this month were on the board during the time under study.
The report's conclusions questioning the contracts and spending practices of the corporation could be incendiary on Capitol Hill, where conservative lawmakers have often sought to reduce the corporation's annual budget.
In recent weeks, they have proposed cuts in its current $400 million budget to help pay for other programs, like the reconstruction of the South after Hurricane Katrina and an inoculation program against avian flu.
Corporation officials said that the request to rewrite the report was made not to prevent the disclosure of embarrassing information, but because some officials had challenged parts of the report as inaccurate. They did not, however, dispute the details of Mr. Coonrod's contract.

21 November 2005

Rumsfeld Says Iraq Troop Levels Must Be Maintained
By CHRISTINE HAUSER
NYT, 21 November 2005
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, addressing the renewed debate over American troops in Iraq, said today that any paring down of the forces there would depend on military and security conditions, and that current troop levels must be maintained at least until the December elections in Iraq.
Speaking on the Sunday morning public affairs programs, Mr. Rumsfeld appeared to want to deliver the final word on the recent uproar sparked by a call for an expedited withdrawal of American troops issued by a Democratic congressman who has long been influential on military matters on both sides of the partisan divide.
The Democrat, Representative John P. Murtha of Pennsylvania, a Vietnam combat veteran who voted for the Iraq war, said on Thursday that the 153,000 American troops now in Iraq should be pulled out within six months.
Mr. Murtha's remarks touched off angry partisan exchanges and a public debate in the House on Friday that culminated in a 403-to-3 vote against a summary troop withdrawal. In the process, Republicans and Democrats shouted and traded insults on the floor in a debate that disintegrated amid anger over both President Bush's handling of the war and Mr. Murtha's remarks.
Mr. Murtha was also on the air today, saying in an interview on NBC's "Meet the Press" that he believed that having American forces provide the bulwark against the insurgency discouraged Iraqi forces from taking on more responsibility for their country's security and stability.
"I'm absolutely convinced that we're making no progress at all," said Mr. Murtha, who served nearly four decades with the Marines and the Marine Reserves. "Until we turn it over to the Iraqis, we're going to continue to do the fighting. Our young men and women are going to continue to suffer."

Defense of Phosphorus Use Turns Into Damage Control
By SCOTT SHANE
NYT, 21 November 2005
On Nov. 8, Italian public television showed a documentary renewing persistent charges that the United States had used white phosphorus rounds, incendiary munitions that the film incorrectly called chemical weapons, against Iraqis in Falluja last year. Many civilians died of burns, the report said.
The half-hour film was riddled with errors and exaggerations, according to United States officials and independent military experts. But the State Department and Pentagon have so bungled their response - making and then withdrawing incorrect statements about what American troops really did when they fought a pitched battle against insurgents in the rebellious city - that the charges have produced dozens of stories in the foreign news media and on Web sites suggesting that the Americans used banned weapons and tried to cover it up.
The Iraqi government has announced an investigation, and a United Nations spokeswoman has expressed concern.
...At a time when opposition to the war is growing, the white phosphorus issue has reinforced the worst suspicions about American actions.
...After the Italian documentary was broadcast, the American ambassadors to Italy, Ronald P. Spogli, and to Britain, Robert H. Tuttle, echoed the stock defense, denying that white phosphorus munitions had been used against enemy fighters, let alone civilians. At home, on the public radio program "Democracy Now," Lt. Col. Steve Boylan, an American military spokesman, said, "I know of no cases where people were deliberately targeted by the use of white phosphorus."
But those statements were incorrect. Firsthand accounts by American officers in two military journals note that white phosphorus munitions had been aimed directly at insurgents in Falluja to flush them out. War critics and journalists soon discovered those articles.
In the face of such evidence, the Bush administration made an embarrassing public reversal last week. Pentagon spokesmen admitted that white phosphorus had been used directly against Iraqi insurgents. "It's perfectly legitimate to use this stuff against enemy combatants," Colonel Venable said Friday.
While he said he could not rule out that white phosphorus hit some civilians, "U.S. and coalition forces took extraordinary measures to prevent civilian casualties in Falluja."

Bush at the Tipping Point
A hawkish Democrat calls for an Iraq withdrawal, setting off a bitter fight in Washington over how, and when, the troops should come home.
By Howard Fineman
Newsweek, Nov. 28, 2005 issue
As friends describe it, Rep. Jack Murtha of Pennsylvania had been searching his soul for months, seeking guidance on what to do in Congress about Iraq. "I think he was going through what we Catholics call a 'long night of the soul'," said Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut. In 1974, Democrat Murtha had become the first Vietnam veteran elected to the House. A decorated Marine from the mountainous "Deer Hunter" country east of Pittsburgh, he had always been a down-the-line hawk and a favorite of the Pentagon generals. Now, at 73, he was the dean of the House on defense spending: a gruff, taciturn pasha receiving supplicants from his perch in the "Pennsylvania corner" of the floor—last row, aisle seat, surrounded by equally beefy cronies. "I like to do things behind the scenes," Murtha explained to NEWSWEEK.
But, by last week, Murtha had decided to come out of his corner in spectacular fashion. The result was a turning point—and a low point—in the war at home over the war in Iraq. Reassembling its campaign-style war-room apparatus, the White House went on the offensive against Democrats, who in turn were emboldened by polls that showed a cratering of the Bush presidency. After months of debate over the question of how the country got into Iraq—who knew what and when about the absence of WMD—the political center of gravity suddenly shifted to another question: how we get out.
Murtha was the one-man tipping point. Initially a strong supporter of the conflict, he had voted for it and the money to pay for it. But on his last trip to Iraq, he had become convinced not only that the war was unwinnable, but that the continued American military presence was making matters far worse. "We're the target, we're part of the problem," he told NEWSWEEK. Back in Washington, he resumed his weekly pilgrimage to Walter Reed Army Medical Center, visiting severely wounded casualties in rehab and agonizing over what he saw there. "I think those visits affected him deeply," said DeLauro. In a long chat with an Irish colleague, he talked about his congressional hero and mentor, another blue-collar Irishman, Thomas P. (Tip) O'Neill. No liberal on defense, in 1967 O'Neill had stunned President Lyndon B. Johnson by telling him that the Vietnam War had become a lost cause. Now, Murtha mused, it was his turn to confront a president with harsh truths.
Which was precisely what the Democratic leadership wanted Murtha to do. A close ally, Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, was anxious to open a second axis of attack on Iraq—and was aware of his growing antagonism toward the war. The two met and agreed that he would make his case in private to the party conference. After that, on his own, he would introduce a resolution calling for withdrawal of troops from Iraq "at the earliest practicable date." Pelosi and the other liberals would keep their distance, while their own Marine charged up the Hill. Framed by long rows of American flags at a press conference, he denounced the Iraq war as a "flawed policy wrapped in an illusion."
...The war room now is back, staffed with many of the same people who ran it in 2004, led by the Boy Genius himself, Karl Rove. To answer the charges that Bush "deliberately misled" the country on WMD, the White House is arguing that most Democrats—and most U.N. officials and European intelligence agencies—thought Saddam had WMD, too. Bush aides argue that Democrats saw the same intel and came to the same conclusions Bush did (an assertion Democrats hotly dispute). "We recognized that we can't communicate our message effectively until we deal with this," said a top White House aide.
But it's unclear how calling Democrats hypocrites will help revive Bush's personal reputation. Rather than undermine Bush's foes, the strategy seems unlikely to do more than remind voters of the undeniable fact that the WMD simply weren't there. And to make their case at all, White House strategists have been forced to use a tactic they studiously avoided in the campaign: deploying Bush himself as the attack dog. "Having the president engaged in the argument is not the first choice," says Sen. John Cornyn, a Texan who is close to Bush and Rove. But the president pressed ahead. "While it is perfectly legitimate to criticize my decisions or the conduct of the war," he told a military audience in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., last week, "it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began." Then he resorted once again to the argument all presidents unload in wartime: that criticism undermines morale and emboldens our enemies. "These baseless attacks," he declared, "send the wrong signal to our troops and to an enemy determined to destroy our way of life." But even using that weapon can be risky at a time when polls show most Americans doubt that the war in Iraq has made us safer.

How The Bush Administration Got Spooked
Poll-Driven Politics
By Tom Engelhardt
TomDispatch.com, 20 November 2005
Polls are, it might be said, what's left of American democracy. Privately run, often for profit or advantage, they nonetheless are as close as we come these days -- actual elections being what they are -- to the expression of democratic opinion, serially, week after week. Everyone who matters in and out of Washington and in the media reads them as if life itself were at stake. They drive behavior and politics. Fear, too, is a poll-driven phenomenon. Not surprisingly then, it was the moment late last spring when presidential approval ratings fell decisively below the 50% mark and looked to be heading for 40%, that the White House took anxious note and so, no less important, did a previously cowed media. Somewhere in that period, the fear factor, right in the administration's hands, was transformed into a feeling fearful factor. As I've written elsewhere, faced with the mother of a dead soldier on their doorstep, all the President's men blinked and the Camp Casey fiasco followed. Soon after, before hurricane Cindy could even blow out of town, hurricane Katrina blew in and the President's ratings headed for freefall. In just the last month, they look as if they had been shoved over a small cliff, dipping in the latest Harris and Wall Street Journal polls to an almost unheard of 34% (only five points above Richard Nixon's at his Watergate nadir).
The poll numbers which once gave the administration's fear factor meaning have simply evaporated -- as have any figures which might indicate that this administration is capable of staunching its own wounds. Emboldening media and political opposition in Washington, such figures give Murtha-like cover to behavior that not long ago would have been unthinkable. A record 60% of Americans surveyed in the most recent USA Today poll, including one in four Republicans, said "the war wasn't ‘worth it.' One in five Republicans said the invasion of Iraq was a mistake." Those who felt things were "going well" for the country as a whole dropped nine percentage points in a month.
Democrats long ago fled the ranks of presidential supporters, as more recently have independents; now moderate Republicans are beginning to peel away too. According to Tom Raum of the Associated Press,"[Bush's] approval on handling Iraq fell from 87 percent among all Republicans in November 2004 to 78 percent this month. Among Republican women, from 88 percent a year ago to 73 percent now. Among independents, approval on Iraq fell from 49 percent in November 2004 to 33 percent now." If you want a figure that, from the administration's viewpoint, offers a frightening glimpse into a possible future, consider the 79% of Americans who believe I. Lewis Libby's indictment is "of importance to the nation"; this, despite Republican claims that the grounds for indicting were insignificant, and a new Libby defense fund made up of Republican high-rollers and assorted neocons.
In other words, replace the still emotionally charged issues of the war in Iraq and the President's actions, where, at 34%-40%, a bedrock base of support remains more or less intact, with a less charged ethics-in-government issue and that vaunted Rock of Gibraltar shatters. This is the previously inconceivable future so many Republican politicians suddenly fear.
Just for the heck of it, throw in another factor -- "intensity" -- and you have an even more volatile picture, given the lack of positive, potentially mobilizing news on the domestic and foreign horizons. E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post suggests that the polling figures are even worse than they look because intensity of feeling on the war issue is now "on the side of the war's opponents." He adds:

"The findings on the strength of feelings about the war were matched by the intensity of feelings about Bush himself: Only 20 percent of those surveyed said they strongly approved of the overall job Bush was doing, while 47 percent strongly disapproved. A president who has always played to his base finds that his base is steadily shrinking."

In other words, doubt and demoralization are setting in -- a political rot that can do untold damage. Given how many independents and moderate Republicans who once supported the war have changed their minds, the scathing attacks on Democrats for mind-changing on the war may not prove a winning strategy either. They may, as Raum comments, "backfire on Republicans."
But here's a question: Can we trace Bush's polling near-collapse to its origins anywhere? In the latest issue of Foreign Affairs magazine under the eerie title, "The Iraq Syndrome" (subscription only), John Mueller, an expert on how wars affect presidencies, offers a canny, cool-eyed interpretation of changing American opinion on Iraq. He tracks polling data on the three sustained wars -- Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq -- the U.S. has fought in the last half-century-plus where we took more than 300 casualties.
All three show approximately the same polling pattern: broad enthusiasm at the outset, a relatively quick and steep falloff in support, followed by steady erosion thereafter from which no long-term presidential recovery seems possible (certainly not via heightened rhetoric). In all three wars, as support fell, pro-withdrawal sentiment rose. Though some experts link this pattern to an American "defeat-phobia," Mueller points out that, in cases like Lebanon in the Reagan years and Somalia in the Clinton era, Americans have been quite capable of swallowing withdrawal and defeat (of a sort) without making the presidents involved pay any significant political cost.
The crucial factor in loss of support for each of these wars, Mueller insists, is a growing casualty list and not just any casualties either -- only American ones. (The fact that "vastly more" Iraqis have died than all the victims of "all international terrorists in all of history" matters little, he observes, in American popular judgments on the war.) What makes Iraq stand out in this list of three "is how much more quickly support has eroded in the case of Iraq. By early 2005, when combat deaths were around 1,500, the percentage of respondents who considered the Iraq war a mistake -- over half -- was about the same as the percentage who considered the war in Vietnam a mistake at the time of the 1968 Tet offensive, when nearly 20,000 soldiers had already died."
If Mueller's right, then the steady drip of American casualties -- many less dead and many more wounded than in Korea and Vietnam, in part because of improved medical care and triage techniques -- has seeped deeply into American consciousness. This seems so, despite the administration's careful attempt to keep returning bodies and individual funerals out of sight and so out of mind; despite the fact that the American dead -- 60 soldiers in the first 19 days of October -- have largely been kept off the front-pages of American papers and photos of dead Americans off television (where dead Iraqis can regularly be seen). Short of massive draw-downs of American forces in Iraq, there is no casualty end in sight for this administration; and drawing down ground forces (while substituting air power for them), as Richard Nixon learned in his "Vietnamization" program, only solves a home-front problem at the cost of creating staggering problems on the war front.
For an administration still fighting "withdrawal" with all its strength, this may prove a problem with no exit -- further casualties acting as a motor propelling the unhappiness that changes more minds and pushes falling polling figures ever downward, propelling unease about the country which only leads to escalating casualty figures of another kind -- those growing defections from the ranks of your core political supporters.

Time to Leave
By PAUL KRUGMAN
NYT, 21 November 2005
Not long ago wise heads offered some advice to those of us who had argued since 2003 that the Iraq war was sold on false pretenses: give it up. The 2004 election, they said, showed that we would never convince the American people. They suggested that we stop talking about how we got into Iraq and focus instead on what to do next.
It turns out that the wise heads were wrong. A solid majority of Americans now believe that we were misled into war. And it is only now, when the public has realized the truth about the past, that serious discussions about where we are and where we're going are able to get a hearing.
Representative John Murtha's speech calling for a quick departure from Iraq was full of passion, but it was also serious and specific in a way rarely seen on the other side of the debate. President Bush and his apologists speak in vague generalities about staying the course and finishing the job. But Mr. Murtha spoke of mounting casualties and lagging recruiting, the rising frequency of insurgent attacks, stagnant oil production and lack of clean water.
Mr. Murtha - a much-decorated veteran who cares deeply about America's fighting men and women - argued that our presence in Iraq is making things worse, not better. Meanwhile, the war is destroying the military he loves. And that's why he wants us out as soon as possible.
I'd add that the war is also destroying America's moral authority. When Mr. Bush speaks of human rights, the world thinks of Abu Ghraib. (In his speech, Mr. Murtha pointed out the obvious: torture at Abu Ghraib helped fuel the insurgency.) When administration officials talk of spreading freedom, the world thinks about the reality that much of Iraq is now ruled by theocrats and their militias.
Some administration officials accused Mr. Murtha of undermining the troops and giving comfort to the enemy. But that sort of thing no longer works, now that the administration has lost the public's trust.
Instead, defenders of our current policy have had to make a substantive argument: we can't leave Iraq now, because a civil war will break out after we're gone. One is tempted to say that they should have thought about that possibility back when they were cheerleading us into this war. But the real question is this: When, exactly, would be a good time to leave Iraq?
The fact is that we're not going to stay in Iraq until we achieve victory, whatever that means in this context. At most, we'll stay until the American military can take no more.
...Pessimists think that Iraq will fall into chaos whenever we leave. If so, we're better off leaving sooner rather than later. As a Marine officer quoted by James Fallows in the current Atlantic Monthly puts it, "We can lose in Iraq and destroy our Army, or we can just lose."
And there's a good case to be made that our departure will actually improve matters. As Mr. Murtha pointed out in his speech, the insurgency derives much of its support from the perception that it's resisting a foreign occupier. Once we're gone, the odds are that Iraqis, who don't have a tradition of religious extremism, will turn on fanatical foreigners like Zarqawi.
The only way to justify staying in Iraq is to make the case that stretching the U.S. army to its breaking point will buy time for something good to happen. I don't think you can make that case convincingly. So Mr. Murtha is right: it's time to leave.

How U.S. Fell Under the Spell of 'Curveball'
The Iraqi informant's German handlers say they had told U.S. officials that his information was 'not proven,' and were shocked when President Bush and Colin L. Powell used it in key prewar speeches.
By Bob Drogin and John Goetz
LA Times, 20 November 2005
BERLIN — The German intelligence officials responsible for one of the most important informants on Saddam Hussein's suspected weapons of mass destruction say that the Bush administration and the CIA repeatedly exaggerated his claims during the run-up to the war in Iraq.
Five senior officials from Germany's Federal Intelligence Service, or BND, said in interviews with The Times that they warned U.S. intelligence authorities that the source, an Iraqi defector code-named Curveball, never claimed to produce germ weapons and never saw anyone else do so.
According to the Germans, President Bush mischaracterized Curveball's information when he warned before the war that Iraq had at least seven mobile factories brewing biological poisons. Then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell also misstated Curveball's accounts in his prewar presentation to the United Nations on Feb. 5, 2003, the Germans said.
Curveball's German handlers for the last six years said his information was often vague, mostly secondhand and impossible to confirm.
"This was not substantial evidence," said a senior German intelligence official. "We made clear we could not verify the things he said."
The German authorities, speaking about the case for the first time, also said that their informant suffered from emotional and mental problems. "He is not a stable, psychologically stable guy," said a BND official who supervised the case. "He is not a completely normal person," agreed a BND analyst.
Curveball was the chief source of inaccurate prewar U.S. accusations that Baghdad had biological weapons, a commission appointed by Bush reported this year. The commission did not interview Curveball, who still insists his story was true, or the German officials who handled his case.
The German account emerges as the White House is lashing out at domestic critics, particularly Senate Democrats, over allegations the administration manipulated intelligence to go to war. Last week, Vice President Dick Cheney called such claims reprehensible and pernicious.
In Congress, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is resuming its long-stalled investigation of the administration's use of prewar intelligence. Committee members said last week that the Curveball case would be a key part of their review. House Democrats are calling for a similar inquiry.
An investigation by The Times based on interviews since May with about 30 current and former intelligence officials in the U.S., Germany, England, Iraq and the United Nations, as well as other experts, shows that U.S. bungling in the Curveball case was worse than official reports have disclosed.
The White House, for example, ignored evidence gathered by United Nations weapons inspectors shortly before the war that disproved Curveball's account. Bush and his aides issued increasingly dire warnings about Iraq's biological weapons before the war even though intelligence from Curveball had not changed in two years.
At the Central Intelligence Agency, officials embraced Curveball's account even though they could not confirm it or interview him until a year after the invasion. They ignored multiple warnings about his reliability before the war, punished in-house critics who provided proof that he had lied and refused to admit error until May 2004, 14 months after the invasion.
After the CIA vouched for Curveball's accounts, Bush declared in his 2003 State of the Union speech that Iraq had "mobile biological weapons labs" designed to produce "germ warfare agents." Bush cited the mobile germ factories in at least four prewar speeches and statements, and other world leaders repeated the charge.
Powell also highlighted Curveball's "eyewitness" account when he warned the United Nations Security Council on the eve of war that Iraq's mobile labs could brew enough weapons-grade microbes "in a single month to kill thousands upon thousands of people."
The senior BND officer who supervised Curveball's case said he was aghast when he watched Powell misstate Curveball's claims as a justification for war.
"We were shocked," the official said. "Mein Gott! We had always told them it was not proven…. It was not hard intelligence."
In a telephone interview, Powell said that George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, and his top deputies personally assured him before his U.N. speech that U.S. intelligence on the mobile labs was "solid." Since then, Powell said, the case "has totally blown up in our faces."

Cheney's Rules of Evidence
How the vice president argues by deception.
By John Dickerson
Slate, 18 November 2005
Dick Cheney likes to play the heavy—or, as a top aide once put it, "sit in a loincloth with a knife in his mouth." After keeping silent for a couple of weeks following the indictment of his chief of staff, Scooter Libby, Cheney donned the loincloth this week and went back on the attack. He criticized administration opponents, saying that they have lost the "basic measure of truthfulness and good faith in the conduct of political debate." Their claim that the president "purposely misled the American people on prewar intelligence," said Cheney, "is one of the most dishonest and reprehensible charges ever aired in this city."
Welcome back, Mr. Vice President—you're always good for the headlines. What was striking about Cheney's assault was that while denying critics' charges of manipulation and dishonesty involving prewar intelligence, he resorted to exactly the tactics that inspired the criticism. As he did with the prewar intelligence, Cheney told no outright lies, but he exaggerated the case, picked only evidence he liked, and ignored the caveats. Here's how he did it:...

Zipper Problems: Dems with their fly, GOP with their money belt
Corruption Inquiry Threatens to Ensnare Lawmakers
By PHILIP SHENON
NYT, 20 November 2005
The Justice Department has signaled for the first time in recent weeks that prominent members of Congress could be swept up in the corruption investigation of Jack Abramoff, the former Republican superlobbyist who diverted some of his tens of millions of dollars in fees to provide lavish travel, meals and campaign contributions to the lawmakers whose help he needed most.
The investigation by a federal grand jury, which began more than a year ago, has created alarm on Capitol Hill, especially with the announcement Friday of criminal charges against Michael Scanlon, Mr. Abramoff's former lobbying partner and a former top House aide to Representative Tom DeLay.
The charges against Mr. Scanlon identified no lawmakers by name, but a summary of the case released by the Justice Department accused him of being part of a broad conspiracy to provide "things of value, including money, meals, trips and entertainment to federal public officials in return for agreements to perform official acts" - an attempt at bribery, in other words, or something close to it.
Mr. Abramoff, who is under indictment in a separate bank-fraud case in Florida, has not been charged by the federal grand jury here. But Mr. Scanlon's lawyer says he has agreed to plead guilty and cooperate in the investigation, suggesting that Mr. Abramoff's day in court in Washington is only a matter of time.
Scholars who specialize in the history and operations of Congress say that given the brazenness of Mr. Abramoff's lobbying efforts, as measured by the huge fees he charged clients and the extravagant gifts he showered on friends on Capitol Hill, almost all of them Republicans, the investigation could end up costing several lawmakers their careers, if not their freedom.

Have you heard about this rule? If you need help with the forms...forget it. Now, that's real compassion.
For Medicaid Clients, New Hurdle Looms
By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA
NYT, 21 November 2005
A unique program that helps poor New Yorkers enroll in Medicaid could be abolished in the next few months by the state and federal governments, a decision that the program's supporters say would leave hundreds of thousands more people uninsured across the state.
New York is the only state where H.M.O.'s, community groups and clinics are allowed to help people fill out applications for Medicaid, the government health plan for the poor. In other states, people must either do the paperwork on their own or go to government welfare offices to apply. The state's strategy, adopted five years ago, has helped the number of New Yorkers in Medicaid soar by more than a million people, as H.M.O.'s now fill out enrollment forms.
Federal law prohibits such "facilitated enrollment," but Gov. George E. Pataki's administration asked for a waiver, and the Clinton administration granted it. That exemption will expire April 1, and the program will end unless the state asks for a new waiver and the Bush administration approves it.
The state is scheduled to decide by Dec. 1 whether to request a new waiver from the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. But the Pataki administration has not decided whether to do so - a disappointment to advocacy groups and the health care industry, which hailed Governor Pataki, a Republican, for creating the program. People who have lobbied the administration to preserve the program say that they think the state probably will ask to keep it alive, but that it remains far from certain.
And they and state officials say they are not optimistic about getting permission from Washington. A spokeswoman for the Medicaid agency said it could not comment on a request that had not yet been made, but it is clear that the Republican leaders in Congress and the Bush administration have been looking for ways to cut fast-rising Medicaid spending, not expand it.

Don't call it a cut---it's just decreasing the increase...
Doctors Objecting to Planned Cut in Medicare Fees
By ROBERT PEAR
NYT, 20 November 2005
 The Bush administration is headed for a clash with the nation's doctors over a federal plan to cut their Medicare fees by 4.4 percent next year, even as the government tries to measure the quality of care they provide.
Doctors say that if the cut occurs, some physicians will be less willing to accept new Medicare patients.
Administration officials said that on Monday they would publish a final rule cutting 4.4 percent from the amount paid to doctors for each service provided to Medicare patients in 2006. They said the cut was required by a formula in the Medicare law. But doctors pointed out that President Bush had not proposed any specific legislation to avert the cut.
In a report to Congress in April, Medicare's trustees said the formula would produce cuts totaling roughly 25 percent from 2006 to 2011, while doctors' costs are expected to rise 15 percent.

Opps...
One War Lost, Another to Go
By FRANK RICH
NYT, 20 November 2005 (sub only)
IF anyone needs further proof that we are racing for the exits in Iraq, just follow the bouncing ball that is Rick Santorum. A Republican leader in the Senate and a true-blue (or red) Iraq hawk, he has long slobbered over President Bush, much as Ed McMahon did over Johnny Carson. But when Mr. Bush went to Mr. Santorum's home state of Pennsylvania to give his Veterans Day speech smearing the war's critics as unpatriotic, the senator was M.I.A.
Mr. Santorum preferred to honor a previous engagement more than 100 miles away. There he told reporters for the first time that "maybe some blame" for the war's "less than optimal" progress belonged to the White House. This change of heart had nothing to do with looming revelations of how the new Iraqi "democracy" had instituted Saddam-style torture chambers. Or with the spiraling investigations into the whereabouts of nearly $9 billion in unaccounted-for taxpayers' money from the American occupation authority. Or with the latest spike in casualties. Mr. Santorum was instead contemplating his own incipient political obituary written the day before: a poll showing him 16 points down in his re-election race. No sooner did he stiff Mr. Bush in Pennsylvania than he did so again in Washington, voting with a 79-to-19 majority on a Senate resolution begging for an Iraq exit strategy. He was joined by all but one (Jon Kyl) of the 13 other Republican senators running for re-election next year. They desperately want to be able to tell their constituents that they were against the war after they were for it.
They know the voters have decided the war is over, no matter what symbolic resolutions are passed or defeated in Congress nor how many Republicans try to Swift-boat Representative John Murtha...
...But while the war is lost both as a political matter at home and a practical matter in Iraq, the exit strategy being haggled over in Washington will hardly mark the end of our woes. Few Americans will cry over the collapse of the administration's vainglorious mission to make Iraq a model of neocon nation-building. But, as some may dimly recall, there is another war going on as well - against Osama bin Laden and company.
One hideous consequence of the White House's Big Lie - fusing the war of choice in Iraq with the war of necessity that began on 9/11 - is that the public, having rejected one, automatically rejects the other. That's already happening. The percentage of Americans who now regard fighting terrorism as a top national priority is either in the single or low double digits in every poll. Thus the tragic bottom line of the Bush catastrophe: the administration has at once increased the ranks of jihadists by turning Iraq into a new training ground and recruitment magnet while at the same time exhausting America's will and resources to confront that expanded threat.
We have arrived at "the worst of all possible worlds," in the words of Daniel Benjamin, Richard Clarke's former counterterrorism colleague, with whom I talked last week. No one speaks more eloquently to this point than Mr. Benjamin and Steven Simon, his fellow National Security Council alum. They saw the Qaeda threat coming before most others did in the 1990's, and their riveting new book, "The Next Attack," is the best argued and most thoroughly reported account of why, in their opening words, "we are losing" the war against the bin Laden progeny now.
...The arguments about how we got into Mr. Bush's war and exactly how we'll get out are also important. But the damage from this fiasco will be even greater if those debates obscure the urgency of the other war we are losing, one that will be with us long after we've left the quagmire in Iraq.

My God, he's losing his base!! Not that it matters much...but after all the damage they've done, Bush, Cheney and Rove are now doing a fast fade into history.
Bush's Approval Rating Sinks to a New Low, Poll Shows
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL ONLINE, 17 November 2005
President Bush's positive job rating continues to fall, touching another new low for his presidency, the latest Harris Interactive poll finds.
Bush's current job approval rating stands at 34%, compared with a positive rating of 88% soon after 9/11, 50% at this time last year, and 40% in August.
...Mr. Bush's current ratings don't compare favorably with those of three of the last four two-term presidents at a comparable time in their fifth year in office. In November or October of their fifth year, Presidents Johnson (67%), Reagan (66%) and Clinton (58%) all enjoyed the support of majorities, while President Nixon (29%) was less popular than Mr. Bush is now. (See related chart)
In the most recent poll, Americans were also asked to name the two most important issues that the U.S. government needs to address. When considering the most important issues, 34% of those polled say the war is most important, 13% said the economy and 13% said Iraq. Other issues mentioned were health care (11%), education (10%) and taxes (9%).

'Why Iraq Has No Army'
Terry Gross interview of James Fallows,
Fresh Air from WHYY, 16 November 2005
In a cover article for the December issue of Atlantic Monthly, reporter James Fallows argues there is no easy way out of Iraq for American forces. Pressure is mounting to withdraw U.S. troops, but the move would almost certainly leave Iraq in chaos. It will take years to train an Iraqi security force.

Vietnam Archive Offers Parallel to War in Iraq
By THOM SHANKER, DAVID STOUT
and JOHN FILES
NYT, 16 November 2005
White House advisers convene secret sessions on the political dangers of revelations that American troops committed atrocities in the war zone, and whether the president can delicately intervene in the investigation. In the face of an increasingly unpopular war, they wonder at the impact on support at home. The best way out of the war, they agree, is propping up a new government that can attract feuding elements across a fractured foreign land.
With an obvious resonance to current events, the National Archives and Records Administration released 50,000 pages of previously classified documents from the Nixon administration today that reveal how all that president's men wrestled with issues that eerily parallel problems facing the Bush administration.
There are many significant differences between the wars in Vietnam and in Iraq - a point that senior Bush administration officials make at any opportunity. But in tone and content, the Nixon-era debate about the impact of that generation's war - and of war crimes trials -- on public support for the military effort and for White House domestic initiatives strikes many familiar chords.
As the Nixon administration was waging a war and trying to impose a peace in South Vietnam, it worried intensively about how the 1968 massacre at My Lai by American troops would hurt the war effort, both at home and in Asia.
My Lai "could prove acutely embarrassing to the United States" and could affect the Paris peace talks, Defense Secretary Melvin R. Laird warned President Richard M. Nixon. "Domestically, it will provide grist for the mills of antiwar activists," Mr. Laird said.
Documents show how the Nixon White House fretted over politics and perception, much as the current Bush White House has during the Iraq war, and that the Nixon administration feared that reports of the mistreatment of civilians could be ruinous to its image.

Group Seeks Further Inquiry in Frist's Stock Sales
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
Washington Post, 17 November 2005
A consumer advocacy group called Wednesday for the Securities and Exchange Commission to expand its inquiry into the stock trades of Senator Bill Frist, the Republican leader, saying it had uncovered "questionable transactions lucrative to Frist family members."
The commission is already investigating the senator's decision to sell all of his stock in HCA Inc., the healthcare giant founded by his father and brother, shortly before the price hit a peak and then plummeted. Mr. Frist, whose records, along with company's, have been subpoenaed, has repeatedly said that he has done nothing wrong.
Now the advocacy group, Public Citizen, says financial disclosure documents filed by Mr. Frist reveal several additional "exceedingly well-timed transactions" made by trusts that manage investments for his three sons. All involve healthcare companies that at one point had ties to the Frist family.
"We're not sure what this means," said Frank Clemente, director of Congress Watch, Public Citizen's government watchdog arm. But, he added, "It has the smell of the HCA stock trading, and we just thought it was important to bring this to light."
Public Citizen called for an additional investigation by the Senate Ethics Committee. Spokesmen for the ethics panel, the S.E.C. and Senator Frist declined comment.

Woodward Apologizes to Post For Silence on Role in Leak Case
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post , 17 November 2005
Bob Woodward apologized to The Washington Post yesterday for failing to reveal for more than two years that a senior Bush administration official had told him about CIA operative Valerie Plame, even as an investigation of who disclosed her identity mushroomed into a national scandal.

Congress Arrives at A Deal on Patriot Act
Limits Would Spare Some Controversial Government Powers
By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post, 17 November 2005
House and Senate negotiators reached a tentative agreement yesterday on revisions to the USA Patriot Act that would limit some of the government's powers while requiring the Justice Department to provide a better accounting of its secret requests for information on ordinary citizens.
But the agreement would leave intact some of the most controversial provisions of the anti-terrorism law, such as government access to library and bookstore records in terrorism probes, and would extend only limited new rights to the targets of such searches.
For President Bush, renewal of the act would provide a boost as he looks to restore his image as a strong commander in chief in combating terrorism. And Democrats said yesterday that the administration largely got what it wanted -- a major break after lawmakers challenged the White House in recent days on the conduct of the Iraq war, budget policies and tax cuts.
The deal would make permanent 14 Patriot Act provisions that were set to expire at the end of the year. Three other measures -- including one allowing law enforcement agents access to bookstore and public library records -- would be extended for seven years, or three years longer than the Senate had agreed to. The House initially extended the provisions for 10 years but later voted to accept the Senate's four-year extension.

Cheney Denounces Critics of Iraq War
By Michael A. Fletcher
Washington Post 17 November 2005
Vice President Cheney last night accused Democratic senators who allege that the Bush administration distorted intelligence to justify the war in Iraq of engaging in "one of the most dishonest and reprehensible charges ever aired in this city."
Speaking before a Washington dinner of the Frontiers of Freedom Institute, a conservative research organization, Cheney said that Democrats who say they were misled by the administration are "making a play for political advantage in the middle of a war."
The continued criticism, Cheney said, threatens to undermine the morale of U.S. troops who are risking their lives while "a few opportunists are suggesting they were sent into battle for a lie."
"The president and I cannot prevent certain politicians from losing their memory, or their backbone," he continued. "But we're not going to sit back and let them rewrite history."
Cheney's remarks are part of a White House effort to rebut critics who are becoming increasingly vocal as U.S. public opinion has turned decidedly against the war. The growing public skepticism over the conflict has contributed to the decline in President Bush's approval ratings, which have fallen to record lows.

The End of News?
By Michael Massing
New York Review of Books, 1 December issue
In late September, the Government Accountability Office—a nonpartisan arm of Congress—issued a finding that the Bush administration had engaged in "covert propaganda," and thereby broken the law, by paying Armstrong Williams, a conservative commentator, to promote its educational policies. The GAO also faulted the administration for hiring a public relations firm to distribute video news segments without disclosing the government's part in producing them.[1] The auditors' report, which followed a year-long investigation, presents chilling evidence of the campaign that officials in Washington have been waging against a free and independent press. Only months before, it was revealed that Kenneth Tomlinson, the President's choice to head the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, had paid a Republican operative to monitor the political leanings of guests on Bill Moyers's show Now, as part of a broader effort to shift PBS's programming to the right.
The Bush administration has restricted access to public documents as no other before it. According to a recent report on government secrecy by OpenTheGovernment.org, a watchdog organization, the federal government classified a record 15.6 million new documents in fiscal year 2004, an increase of 81 percent over the year before the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Spending on the declassification of documents dropped to a new low. What's more, 64 percent of Federal Advisory Committee meetings in 2004 were completely closed to the public. The Pentagon has banned TV cameras from recording the return of caskets from Iraq, and it prohibited the publication of photographs of those caskets, a restriction that was lifted only following a request through the Freedom of Information Act.
The restrictions have grown so tight that the normally quiescent American Society of Newspaper Editors last fall issued a "call to arms" to its members, urging them to "demand answers in print and in court" to stop this "deeply disturbing" trend. The conservative columnist William Safire, usually a supporter of Bush's policies, complained last September that "the fundamental right of Americans, through our free press, to penetrate and criticize the workings of our government is under attack as never before."
But the campaign against the press is only partly a result of a hostile White House. The administration's efforts have been amplified by a disciplined and well-organized news and opinion campaign directed by conservatives and the Christian right. This well-funded network includes newsletters, think tanks, and talk radio as well as cable television news and the Internet. Often in cooperation with the White House, these outlets have launched a systematic campaign to discredit what they refer to disparagingly as "MSM," for mainstream media. Through the Internet, commentators can channel criticism of the press to the general public faster and more efficiently than before. As became plain in the Swift Boat campaign against John Kerry, to cite one of many examples, an unscrupulous critic can spread exaggerated or erroneous claims instantaneously to thousands of people, who may, in turn, repeat them to millions more on talk radio programs, on cable television, or on more official "news" Web sites. This kind of recycled commentary has become all the more effective because it is aimed principally at a sector of the population that seldom if ever sees serious press coverage.

16 November 2005

The occupying power bares ultimate responsibility under international law...
Torture Alleged at Ministry Site Outside Baghdad
By JOHN F. BURNS
NYT, 16 November 2005
Iraq's government said Tuesday that it had ordered an urgent investigation of allegations that many of the 173 detainees American troops discovered over the weekend in the basement of an Interior Ministry building in a Baghdad suburb had been tortured by their Iraqi captors. A senior Iraqi official who visited the detainees said two appeared paralyzed and others had some of the skin peeled off their bodies by their abusers.
Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari held a hurriedly organized news conference to announce the official inquiry. He also said there would be a second investigation, including a comprehensive count of the thousands held in Iraqi jails, to determine whether there was a wider pattern of abuse, as many opponents of his government have claimed. He said the detainees had been moved to another location and had been given all necessary medical care.
A joint statement by the American Embassy and the United States military command called the situation "totally unacceptable" and said American officials "agree with Iraq's leaders that mistreatment of detainees will not be tolerated."
The discovery of what appeared to have been a secret torture center created a new aura of crisis for American officials and Iraqi politicians who hold power in the Shiite-led transitional government. For many Iraqis, the episode carried heavy overtones of the brutality associated with Saddam Hussein and his Sunni-dominated government.
Ominously, amid rising sectarianism here, Interior Ministry officials reported that the abused detainees appeared to have been mostly Sunni Arabs, and their abusers Shiite police officers loyal to the notorious Badr Organization, a militia with close links to Iran.
For American officials in Iraq, still laboring under the shadow of the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal and other allegations of mistreatment of prisoners, the new allegations came at a particularly inopportune moment.
SEE ALSO:
Iraqis notch it up over Rumsfeld's dogs...
Prisoners Allege Use of Lions
NYT, 16 November 2005 (at the end of the article)
Army officials said Tuesday that they were looking into claims by two former Iraqi detainees that they had been put into cages holding lions to terrify them during interrogations in 2003.
Thahe Mohammed Sabar said in a statement released by the American Civil Liberties Union that soldiers had pushed him and Sherzad Khalid, a friend, into the cage, then pulled them out when a lion moved toward him. Mr. Khalid said soldiers had forced him into the cages after repeatedly asking where to find Saddam Hussein and unconventional weapons.
Asked about the allegations during a news conference on Tuesday, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said, "It seems quite far-fetched..."

Americans Blame Cheney for Iraq Intelligence Problems
Angus Reid Global Scan via Informed Comment, 15 November 2005
Many adults in the United States believe their vice-president directly manipulated information before the war in Iraq began, according to a poll by Princeton Survey Research Associates published in Newsweek. 52 per cent of respondents believe Dick Cheney deliberately misused pre-war intelligence about Iraq’s nuclear capabilities in order to build support for war.

What Bush Isn't Addressing on Iraq
James Fallows
Huffington Post via YahooNews, 14 November 2005
It would be nice if, even once, the Bush administration addressed the strongest version of the case against its Iraq-and-terrorism policy, rather than relying on bromides ("fight them there, so we don't have to fight them here") and knocking down straw men ("some say Iraqis don't deserve freedom...").
It probably won't happen. On available evidence, the President himself has not grasped the essential criticism of moving against Iraq when he did: that a war in Iraq undercut the broader and longer term war against Islamic terrorism. Not in one speech, not in one interview or off-hand remark, not in one insider account of White House deliberation has there been the slightest indication that President Bush recognizes this concept sufficiently to offer a rebuttal to it.
...here are the three biggest, most obvious points not even addressed in his speech:
1) Everybody was not, in fact, working from the same misleading information. The administration's line about WMD these days is: OK, we might have been wrong -- but everybody was wrong, and everybody came to the same conclusion we did. The foreigners came to that conclusion through their intelligence services, and the Democrats (especially that weaselly Kerry and ambitious Hillary) did it when they voted for the war resolution.
But at the time, Administration officials were most emphasically NOT saying "hey, we're all operating in the dark here." The implied message of every briefing for reporters, every speech to the public, and every background session with legislators, was: If you knew what we knew, then you'd be as alarmed as we are. That was the message of Dick Cheney's statement that "there can be no doubt" that Iraq "now" had weapons of mass destruction, of Condi Rice's warning about the mushroom cloud, and of Colin Powell's presentation to the UN. The argument over Iraq's capabilities was by definition one sided, because the Administration's presumed insider knowledge trumped what anyone else could say. To pretend this was just a big widely-shared confusion is dishonest and wrong.
2) To say that Saddam Hussein might have been a threat is not to say that we had to invade when we did.
The Administration had two responses when asked in 2003 "what's the rush?" about beginning the invasion. One was logistical: the troops were in place, they couldn't wait forever, soon it would be hot (as if they would not be in Iraq thorugh many summers!). This obviously is a "Guns of August" style of reasoning: the trains are moving toward the front, so we might as well start World War I.
The other response was: we've waited 12 years, why wait any more? The answer to that was, first, that Iraq was now crawling with weapons inspectors, who at a minimum would make it hard for Saddam to cook up any surprise plans -- and, second, that beginning a war could touch off a lot of messy complications left out of the optimistic war scenarios.
This is the crucial point: Every aspect about managing occupied Iraq could have turned out better with more time. There would be more chance to line up Arabic-speaking or Islamic allies; more time to get adequate U.S. troops on the scene; more chance to think about protecting the power system, the hospitals, and other aspects of the public infrastructure; more time in general to ask "what if..."
3) As for managing Iraq after the fall of Baghdad, there is no shared blame at all. The Bush Administration owns every aspect of this disastrously bungled situation.
The failure to stop the looting; the deliberately low-ball on the number of occupying troops; the rash decision to disband the Iraqi army; the inattention to how quickly American "liberators" would become "occupiers"; the lassitude about recruiting or training enough Arabic speakers or getting serious about developing an Iraqi force -- on these and a dozen other familiar points, the Administration cannot possibly say, "Hey, everybody was wrong." These were the decisions of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, in many cases bulldozing or ignoring contrary views from within the military and other parts of the government. Or, I guess the reality is: the Administration could "possibly" say this. They just couldn't say it honestly.

Joe Biden hypes the inconsequential...
Senate Presses Administration for Iraq Plans
By CARL HULSE
NYT, 16 November 2005
The Senate voted on Tuesday to press the Bush administration to provide more public information about the course of the war in Iraq as lawmakers of both parties made it clear they wanted chief responsibility for securing the country shifted to the Iraqi government within the next year.
Lawmakers voted 79 to 19 for a Republican plan to seek new quarterly reports on matters like the number of Iraqi troops ready to take the lead in combat operations. The proposal expressed the Senate view that "2006 should be a period of significant transition to full Iraqi sovereignty."
But the Senate rejected, by a vote of 58 to 40, a Democratic proposal to require the Bush administration to project dates for a phased withdrawal of troops should conditions allow.
While the practical consequences of the bipartisan vote on the Republican proposal may be limited and largely symbolic, the willingness of most Senate Republicans to join with most Democrats to prod the Bush administration on the war represented new determination to distance themselves from the White House in the face of dwindling public support for operations in Iraq.
"For the first time," said Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, senior Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, "our Republican colleagues have joined Democrats in listing and insisting on a clear Iraqi strategy from this administration, a schedule to achieve it and real accountability."
[President Bush, asked during a news conference in Kyoto, Japan, about the Congressional action, said on Wednesday that he was "more than happy" to provide Congress with more regular updates on Iraq...]

Judge Halts Guantánamo Trial
By NEIL A. LEWIS
NYT, 16 November 2005
A federal judge has halted for at least several months the military's plan to resume the war crimes trial in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, of David Hicks, an Australian charged with fighting for the Taliban in Afghanistan.
In a ruling issued late Monday evening, Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly of Federal District Court issued an order staying the proceedings in response to a request made by Mr. Hicks's lawyers. Judge Kollar-Kotelly cited the Supreme Court's decision last week to review the legality of the military commissions being used to try Guantánamo detainees with war crimes.
The justices ruled in the case of Salim Ahmed Hamdan, who was a driver for Osama bin Laden and has been accused of participating in terrorist activities. After the court agreed to consider the issue, the Pentagon said it would nonetheless go forward with plans to try Mr. Hicks under the same procedure. The military commission that sits at Guantánamo was scheduled to hear motions in the Hicks case beginning this Friday.
Judge Kollar-Kotelly not only overturned those plans but also ordered that Mr. Hicks's trial be postponed until after the Supreme Court rules in the Hamdan case. Such a ruling will not come until next spring at the earliest.
Mr. Hicks and Mr. Hamdan, along with seven other Guantánamo detainees, have been charged with war crimes. The Kollar-Kotelly ruling means, in effect, that none of the proceedings can go forward until the Supreme Court resolves the issue of the legality of the military commissions.
A federal district court judge ruled that the commissions violated domestic law and United States obligations under international treaties. A three-judge appeals court, which included John G. Roberts Jr. before he became chief justice, overturned that ruling. Chief Justice Roberts will not take part in the Supreme Court case, which is to be argued in March.

Money, Oil and Lies...
Document Says Oil Chiefs Met With Cheney Task Force
By Dana Milbank and Justin Blum
Washington Post, 16 November 2005
A White House document shows that executives from big oil companies met with Vice President Cheney's energy task force in 2001 -- something long suspected by environmentalists but denied as recently as last week by industry officials testifying before Congress.
The document, obtained this week by The Washington Post, shows that officials from Exxon Mobil Corp., Conoco (before its merger with Phillips), Shell Oil Co. and BP America Inc. met in the White House complex with the Cheney aides who were developing a national energy policy, parts of which became law and parts of which are still being debated.
In a joint hearing last week of the Senate Energy and Commerce committees, the chief executives of Exxon Mobil Corp., Chevron Corp. and ConocoPhillips said their firms did not participate in the 2001 task force. The president of Shell Oil said his company did not participate "to my knowledge," and the chief of BP America Inc. said he did not know.
Chevron was not named in the White House document, but the Government Accountability Office has found that Chevron was one of several companies that "gave detailed energy policy recommendations" to the task force. In addition, Cheney had a separate meeting with John Browne, BP's chief executive, according to a person familiar with the task force's work; that meeting is not noted in the document.
The task force's activities attracted complaints from environmentalists, who said they were shut out of the task force discussions while corporate interests were present. The meetings were held in secret and the White House refused to release a list of participants. The task force was made up primarily of Cabinet-level officials. Judicial Watch and the Sierra Club unsuccessfully sued to obtain the records.
Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.), who posed the question about the task force, said he will ask the Justice Department today to investigate. "The White House went to great lengths to keep these meetings secret, and now oil executives may be lying to Congress about their role in the Cheney task force," Lautenberg said.

At our own peril...
Ignore the Man Behind That Memo
NYT, 16 November 2005
Judge Samuel Alito Jr.'s insistence that the Constitution does not protect abortion rights is not the only alarming aspect of a newly released memo he wrote in 1985. That statement strongly suggests that Judge Alito is far outside the legal mainstream and that senators should question him closely about it. They should be prepared to reject his nomination to the Supreme Court if he cannot put to rest the serious concerns that the memo, part of a job application, raises about his worthiness to join the court.
When Judge Alito applied for a job with the Justice Department under President Ronald Reagan, he submitted a Personal Qualifications Statement that outlined his approach to the law. That statement raises three major concerns:
First, he has extreme views on the law. Judge Alito said he was particularly proud of his work on cases that tried to establish that "the Constitution does not protect a right to an abortion." He did not merely oppose Roe v. Wade in the abstract - he worked to reverse it. He also noted his "disagreement with Warren Court decisions" in many important areas, including reapportionment. The reapportionment cases established the one-person-one-vote doctrine, which requires that Congressional and legislative districts include roughly equal numbers of people. They played a key role in making American democracy truly representative, and are almost uniformly respected by lawyers and scholars.
Second, Judge Alito does not respect precedent. Judicial nominees who appear extreme often claim that because they respect precedent, they will vote to reaffirm decisions they disagree with. When Judge Clarence Thomas was nominated for the Supreme Court, he told the Senate about his deep respect for precedent - and then immediately began voting to overturn important precedents when he joined the court. The Senate has specific reason to be skeptical about Judge Alito. Not only did he work to overturn Roe v. Wade, but he also said he had been inspired to go to law school by his opposition to Warren Court precedents - presumably by a desire to see them overturned.
Third, he is an ideologue. The White House has tried to present Judge Alito as an impartial judge without strong political views. But he said just the opposite in the 1985 statement. "I am and always have been a conservative," he wrote. He called himself a "life-long registered Republican" who contributed to "Republican candidates and conservative causes" including the National Conservative Political Action Committee, the super-PAC of the Reagan era. He strongly suggested that he would have been active in Republican politics if the law had not prohibited him, as a federal employee, from doing that.
Judge Alito is already trying to distance himself from the memo. He cannot say it was merely a lawyer's representation of an employer's views because it was undeniably a statement of his personal beliefs. He cannot call it an excess of youth because he was 35 when he wrote it. According to Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat, Judge Alito told her yesterday that when he had written it he had merely been "an advocate seeking a job."
This is not very credible because the statement is entirely consistent with his full career. On the bench, Judge Alito has voted to uphold extreme limits on abortion and on other important rights, like freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures.
Equally alarming is the notion that he fudged the truth to tell a potential employer what it wanted to hear. Senators should certainly keep this in mind when they try to decide whether to believe how he describes his views at his confirmation hearing.

Broadcast Chief Violated Laws, Inquiry Finds
By STEPHEN LABATON
NYT, 16 November 2005
Investigators at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting said on Tuesday that they had uncovered evidence that its former chairman had repeatedly broken federal law and the organization's own regulations in a campaign to combat what he saw as liberal bias.
A report by the corporation's inspector general, sent to Congress on Tuesday, described a dysfunctional organization that appeared to have violated the Public Broadcasting Act, which created the corporation and was written to insulate programming decisions from politics.
The former chairman, Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, who was ousted from the board two weeks ago when it was presented with the details of the report in a closed session, has said he sought to enforce a provision of the broadcasting act meant to ensure objectivity and balance in programming.
But in the process, the report said, Mr. Tomlinson repeatedly crossed statutory boundaries that had set up the corporation as a "heat shield" to protect public radio and television from political interference.
...The report said Mr. Tomlinson appeared to have violated federal law by promoting "The Journal Editorial Report" and said he had "admonished C.P.B. senior executive staff not to interfere with his deal to bring a balancing program" to public broadcasting.

Libby's 'Octopus Defense' will chill free press...
Journalists Said to Figure in Strategy in Leak Case
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
NYT, 16 November 2005
Lawyers for I. Lewis Libby Jr., the former White House official indicted on perjury charges, plan to seek testimony from journalists beyond those cited in the indictment and will probably challenge government agreements limiting their grand jury testimony, people involved in the case said Tuesday.
"That's clearly going to be part of the strategy - to get access to all the relevant records and determine what did the media really know," said a lawyer close to the defense who spoke on condition of anonymity.
At Mr. Libby's arraignment this month, his lawyers alluded to using a First Amendment defense in fighting the charges, but they have declined to say what that strategy might entail.
In interviews, lawyers close to the case made clear that the defense team plans to pursue aggressively access to reporters' notes beyond the material cited in the indictment and plans to go to the trial judge, Reggie B. Walton of United States District Court, to compel disclosure as one of their first steps.
Defense lawyers plan to seek notes not only from the three reporters cited in the indictment - Tim Russert of NBC News, Matt Cooper of Time Magazine and Judith Miller, formerly of The New York Times - but also from other journalists who have been tied to the case.
Chief among those is Robert D. Novak, who first disclosed in a column in July 2003 that Valerie Plame worked for the Central Intelligence Agency.
...With critical issues of journalistic confidentiality at stake, lawyers and news media analysts said, the issue of Mr. Libby's access to reporters will probably end up before the appellate court, just as the battle over Ms. Miller's confidentiality agreement did earlier this year.
Ms. Miller spent 85 days in jail after she initially refused a federal judge's order to disclose her source, who turned out to be Mr. Libby.
The prospect of another legal battle over access to reporters' records "could be worse for the media" than the Miller showdown, said Lucy Dalglish, head of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. "You now have a situation where you have a government investigation hung completely on testimony from journalists, with journalists turned into witnesses, and that is a scary notion."
Ms. Dalglish said that unlike the special prosecutor, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, who was restricted partly by Justice Department regulations on subpoenaing reporters' notes, Mr. Libby's defense team will not be bound by those same rules.
"This is a very unsettling case, and it could take years in the courts to resolve," she said.

'Free speech' the Texas way....
'Peace Mom' Plans to Resume War Protest
AP via NYT, 16 November 2005
The fallen soldier's mother who drew thousands to her 26-day war protest near President Bush's ranch this summer plans to return for Thanksgiving next week, despite new county ordinances banning roadside camping.
Cindy Sheehan and at least a dozen supporters are prepared to be arrested as they return to the makeshift campsite along the road leading to Bush's ranch, where he is expected to spend the holiday.
''It is critical for our democracy that we continue to ask the same questions that Cindy Sheehan asked this summer: What is the noble cause for the war with Iraq, and at what point do we say enough bloodshed has happened?'' said Hadi Jawad, co-founder of the Crawford Peace House.
Bush has defended the decision to go into Iraq in 2003, citing the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. Bush also has said troops need to remain in Iraq as long as necessary.
Sheehan, whose 24-year-old son Casey was killed in Iraq last year, was not arrested during the vigil that coincided with Bush's working vacation at his ranch just outside Crawford.
But dozens of residents in the rural area complained of noise and traffic congestion as the protesters pitched tents in shallow ditches about 2 1/2 miles away from the ranch. Some traffic was from counter protests of hundreds of Bush supporters who said Sheehan's group was hurting troop morale.
A month later, McLennan County commissioners approved the new ordinances, which prohibit parking on parts of 14 roads near the ranch -- roughly a 5-mile radius -- and prohibit camping in any county ditch. The laws also ban portable toilets in ditches.

Ten Eco-Friendly Companies
Alternative-energy projects used to be the stuff of high-school science fairs. But pricey oil has changed the game, and the stories of these firms show that new technologies are winning over investors and customers, and saving the environment.
Newsweek, 21 November issue
1 Farming New Fuels
Seattle Biodiesel: It makes an alternative fuel derived from vegetable oil that burns clean
2 Soaking Up the Sun
Miasole: Developing new ways, besides silicon, to capture the sun's rays and create energy
3 Harnessing Hydrogen
Hydrogenics: Building markets for fuel-cell tech. A big bonus: byproducts can quench a thirst.
4 Cow Manure. Really.
Panda Development: Burning bovine 'biomass' to fuel plants that convert corn to ethanol
5 A Sterling Solution
STM Power: A modern twist on the Stirling engine, including a "Fumes to Fuel'' idea for Ford
6 A New Power Paradigm
Ion America: Developing solid oxide fuel cells that could put a power plant in your basement
7 A Mighty Wind
Vestas Wind Systems: Leading the market in installing wind turbines, a business that could grow tenfold to $80 billion by 2010
8 A Very Light Touch
PowerLight: Making solar systems pay off for homeowners, businesses and governments
9 Flights of Fancy
SunPower Corp.: Its solar-panel tech is highly efficient, and its esthetics are better for homes.
10 A Jolt of Conservation
Comverge, Inc.: Its technology cuts power usage, and saves money, for utility customers.
(see article for details on each)

Our Faith in Science
By TENZIN GYATSO
NYT, 12 November 2005
SCIENCE has always fascinated me. As a child in Tibet, I was keenly curious about how things worked. When I got a toy I would play with it a bit, then take it apart to see how it was put together. As I became older, I applied the same scrutiny to a movie projector and an antique automobile.
At one point I became particularly intrigued by an old telescope, with which I would study the heavens. One night while looking at the moon I realized that there were shadows on its surface. I corralled my two main tutors to show them, because this was contrary to the ancient version of cosmology I had been taught, which held that the moon was a heavenly body that emitted its own light.
But through my telescope the moon was clearly just a barren rock, pocked with craters. If the author of that fourth-century treatise were writing today, I'm sure he would write the chapter on cosmology differently.
If science proves some belief of Buddhism wrong, then Buddhism will have to change. In my view, science and Buddhism share a search for the truth and for understanding reality. By learning from science about aspects of reality where its understanding may be more advanced, I believe that Buddhism enriches its own worldview.
For many years now, on my own and through the Mind and Life Institute, which I helped found, I have had the opportunity to meet with scientists to discuss their work. World-class scientists have generously coached me in subatomic physics, cosmology, psychology, biology.
It is our discussions of neuroscience, however, that have proved particularly important. From these exchanges a vigorous research initiative has emerged, a collaboration between monks and neuroscientists, to explore how meditation might alter brain function.
The goal here is not to prove Buddhism right or wrong - or even to bring people to Buddhism - but rather to take these methods out of the traditional context, study their potential benefits, and share the findings with anyone who might find them helpful.
After all, if practices from my own tradition can be brought together with scientific methods, then we may be able to take another small step toward alleviating human suffering.
Already this collaboration has borne fruit. Dr. Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin, has published results from brain imaging studies of lamas meditating. He found that during meditation the regions of the brain thought to be related to happiness increase in activity. He also found that the longer a person has been a meditator, the greater the activity increase will be.
Other studies are under way. At Princeton University, Dr. Jonathan Cohen, a neuroscientist, is studying the effects of meditation on attention. At the University of California Medical School at San Francisco, Dr. Margaret Kemeny has been studying how meditation helps develop empathy in school teachers.
Whatever the results of this work, I am encouraged that it is taking place. You see, many people still consider science and religion to be in opposition. While I agree that certain religious concepts conflict with scientific facts and principles, I also feel that people from both worlds can have an intelligent discussion, one that has the power ultimately to generate a deeper understanding of challenges we face together in our interconnected world.
One of my first teachers of science was the German physicist Carl von Weizsäcker, who had been an apprentice to the quantum theorist Werner Heisenberg. Dr. Weizsäcker was kind enough to give me some formal tutorials on scientific topics. (I confess that while listening to him I would feel I could grasp the intricacies of the full argument, but when the sessions were over there was often not a great deal of his explanation left behind.)
What impressed me most deeply was how Dr. Weizsäcker worried about both the philosophical implications of quantum physics and the ethical consequences of science generally. He felt that science could benefit from exploring issues usually left to the humanities.
I believe that we must find a way to bring ethical considerations to bear upon the direction of scientific development, especially in the life sciences. By invoking fundamental ethical principles, I am not advocating a fusion of religious ethics and scientific inquiry.
Rather, I am speaking of what I call "secular ethics," which embrace the principles we share as human beings: compassion, tolerance, consideration of others, the responsible use of knowledge and power. These principles transcend the barriers between religious believers and non-believers; they belong not to one faith, but to all faiths.
Today, our knowledge of the human brain and body at the cellular and genetic level has reached a new level of sophistication. Advances in genetic manipulation, for example, mean scientists can create new genetic entities - like hybrid animal and plant species - whose long-term consequences are unknown.
Sometimes when scientists concentrate on their own narrow fields, their keen focus obscures the larger effect their work might have. In my conversations with scientists I try to remind them of the larger goal behind what they do in their daily work.
This is more important than ever. It is all too evident that our moral thinking simply has not been able to keep pace with the speed of scientific advancement. Yet the ramifications of this progress are such that it is no longer adequate to say that the choice of what to do with this knowledge should be left in the hands of individuals.
This is a point I intend to make when I speak at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience today in Washington. I will suggest that how science relates to wider humanity is no longer of academic interest alone. This question must assume a sense of urgency for all those who are concerned about the fate of human existence.
A deeper dialogue between neuroscience and society - indeed between all scientific fields and society - could help deepen our understanding of what it means to be human and our responsibilities for the natural world we share with other sentient beings.
Just as the world of business has been paying renewed attention to ethics, the world of science would benefit from more deeply considering the implications of its own work. Scientists should be more than merely technically adept; they should be mindful of their own motivation and the larger goal of what they do: the betterment of humanity.

15 November 2005

Bush Escalates Bitter Iraq War Debate
By TERENCE HUNT
AP via Washington Post, 15 November 2005
ELMENDORF AIR FORCE BASE, Alaska -- President Bush escalated the bitter debate over the Iraq war on Monday, hurling back at Democratic critics the worries they once expressed that Saddam Hussein was a grave threat to the world.
"They spoke the truth then and they're speaking politics now," Bush charged.
Bush went on the attack after Democrats accused the president of manipulating and withholding some pre-war intelligence and misleading Americans about the rationale for war.
"Some Democrats who voted to authorize the use of force are now rewriting the past," Bush said. "They're playing politics with this issue and they are sending mixed signals to our troops and the enemy. That is irresponsible."
The president spoke to cheering troops at this military base at a refueling stop for Air Force One on the first leg of an eight-day journey to Japan, South Korea, China and Mongolia.

Decoding Mr. Bush's Denials
NYT, 15 November 2005
To avoid having to account for his administration's misleading statements before the war with Iraq, President Bush has tried denial, saying he did not skew the intelligence. He's tried to share the blame, claiming that Congress had the same intelligence he had, as well as President Bill Clinton. He's tried to pass the buck and blame the C.I.A. Lately, he's gone on the attack, accusing Democrats in Congress of aiding the terrorists.
Yesterday in Alaska, Mr. Bush trotted out the same tedious deflection on Iraq that he usually attempts when his back is against the wall: he claims that questioning his actions three years ago is a betrayal of the troops in battle today.
It all amounts to one energetic effort at avoidance. But like the W.M.D. reports that started the whole thing, the only problem is that none of it has been true.
• Mr. Bush says everyone had the same intelligence he had - Mr. Clinton and his advisers, foreign governments, and members of Congress - and that all of them reached the same conclusions. The only part that is true is that Mr. Bush was working off the same intelligence Mr. Clinton had. But that is scary, not reassuring. The reports about Saddam Hussein's weapons were old, some more than 10 years old. Nothing was fresher than about five years, except reports that later proved to be fanciful.
Foreign intelligence services did not have full access to American intelligence. But some had dissenting opinions that were ignored or not shown to top American officials. Congress had nothing close to the president's access to intelligence. The National Intelligence Estimate presented to Congress a few days before the vote on war was sanitized to remove dissent and make conjecture seem like fact.
It's hard to imagine what Mr. Bush means when he says everyone reached the same conclusion. There was indeed a widespread belief that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons. But Mr. Clinton looked at the data and concluded that inspections and pressure were working - a view we now know was accurate. France, Russia and Germany said war was not justified. Even Britain admitted later that there had been no new evidence about Iraq, just new politics.
The administration had little company in saying that Iraq was actively trying to build a nuclear weapon. The evidence for this claim was a dubious report about an attempt in 1999 to buy uranium from Niger, later shown to be false, and the infamous aluminum tubes story. That was dismissed at the time by analysts with real expertise.
The Bush administration was also alone in making the absurd claim that Iraq was in league with Al Qaeda and somehow connected to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. That was based on two false tales. One was the supposed trip to Prague by Mohamed Atta, a report that was disputed before the war and came from an unreliable drunk. The other was that Iraq trained Qaeda members in the use of chemical and biological weapons. Before the war, the Defense Intelligence Agency concluded that this was a deliberate fabrication by an informer.
Mr. Bush has said in recent days that the first phase of the Senate Intelligence Committee's investigation on Iraq found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence. That is true only in the very narrow way the Republicans on the committee insisted on defining pressure: as direct pressure from senior officials to change intelligence. Instead, the Bush administration made what it wanted to hear crystal clear and kept sending reports back to be redone until it got those answers.
Richard Kerr, a former deputy director of central intelligence, said in 2003 that there was "significant pressure on the intelligence community to find evidence that supported a connection" between Iraq and Al Qaeda. The C.I.A. ombudsman told the Senate Intelligence Committee that the administration's "hammering" on Iraq intelligence was harder than he had seen in his 32 years at the agency.
Mr. Bush and other administration officials say they faithfully reported what they had read. But Vice President Dick Cheney presented the Prague meeting as a fact when even the most supportive analysts considered it highly dubious. The administration has still not acknowledged that tales of Iraq coaching Al Qaeda on chemical warfare were considered false, even at the time they were circulated.
Mr. Cheney was not alone. Remember Condoleezza Rice's infamous "mushroom cloud" comment? And Secretary of State Colin Powell in January 2003, when the rich and powerful met in Davos, Switzerland, and he said, "Why is Iraq still trying to procure uranium and the special equipment needed to transform it into material for nuclear weapons?" Mr. Powell ought to have known the report on "special equipment"' - the aluminum tubes - was false. And the uranium story was four years old.
• The president and his top advisers may very well have sincerely believed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. But they did not allow the American people, or even Congress, to have the information necessary to make reasoned judgments of their own. It's obvious that the Bush administration misled Americans about Mr. Hussein's weapons and his terrorist connections. We need to know how that happened and why.
Mr. Bush said last Friday that he welcomed debate, even in a time of war, but that "it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began." We agree, but it is Mr. Bush and his team who are rewriting history.
SEE ALSO:
Another Set of Scare Tactics
By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Washington Post, 15 November 2005
Mr. President, it won't work this time.
With a Wall Street Journal/NBC News Poll finding 57 percent of Americans agreeing that George W. Bush "deliberately misled people to make the case for war with Iraq," the president clearly needs to tend to his credibility problems. But his partisan attacks on the administration's critics, in a Veterans Day speech last week and in Alaska yesterday, will only add to his troubles.
Bush was not subtle. He said that anyone accusing his administration of having "manipulated the intelligence and misled the American people" was giving aid and comfort to the enemy. "These baseless attacks send the wrong signal to our troops and to an enemy that is questioning America's will," Bush declared last week. "As our troops fight a ruthless enemy determined to destroy our way of life, they deserve to know that their elected leaders who voted to send them to war continue to stand behind them."
You wonder: Did Patrick Fitzgerald, the special counsel in the Valerie Plame leak investigation, send the wrong signal to our troops and our enemy by daring to seek the indictment of Scooter Libby on a charge of perjury and obstruction of justice? Must Americans who support our troops desist from any criticism of the use of intelligence by the administration?
There is a great missing element in the argument over whether the administration manipulated the facts. Neither side wants to talk about the context in which Bush won a blank check from Congress to invade Iraq. He doesn't want us to remember that he injected the war debate into the 2002 midterm election campaign for partisan purposes, and he doesn't want to acknowledge that he used the post-Sept. 11 mood to do all he could to intimidate Democrats from raising questions more of them should have raised.
The big difference between our current president and his father is that the first President Bush put off the debate over the Persian Gulf War until after the 1990 midterm elections. The result was one of most substantive and honest foreign policy debates Congress has ever seen, and a unified nation. The first President Bush was scrupulous about keeping petty partisanship out of the discussion.
The current President Bush did the opposite. He pressured Congress for a vote before the 2002 election, and the war resolution passed in October.

Why Hillary Won't Win...
The Right Way in Iraq
By John Edwards
Washington Post, 13 November 2005
I was wrong.
Almost three years ago we went into Iraq to remove what we were told -- and what many of us believed and argued -- was a threat to America. But in fact we now know that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction when our forces invaded Iraq in 2003. The intelligence was deeply flawed and, in some cases, manipulated to fit a political agenda.
It was a mistake to vote for this war in 2002. I take responsibility for that mistake. It has been hard to say these words because those who didn't make a mistake -- the men and women of our armed forces and their families -- have performed heroically and paid a dear price.
The world desperately needs moral leadership from America, and the foundation for moral leadership is telling the truth.

Senate Republicans Pushing for a Plan on Ending the War in Iraq
By CARL HULSE
NYT, 15 November 2005
In a sign of increasing unease among Congressional Republicans over the war in Iraq, the Senate is to consider on Tuesday a Republican proposal that calls for Iraqi forces to take the lead next year in securing the nation and for the Bush administration to lay out its strategy for ending the war.
The Senate is also scheduled to vote Tuesday on a compromise, announced Monday night, that would allow terror detainees some access to federal courts. The Senate had voted last week to prohibit those being held from challenging their detentions in federal court, despite a Supreme Court ruling to the contrary.
Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican who is the author of the initial plan, said Monday that he had negotiated a compromise that would allow detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to challenge their designation as enemy combatants in federal courts and also allow automatic appeals of any convictions handed down by the military where detainees receive prison terms of 10 years or more or a death sentence.
The proposal on the Iraq war, from Senator Bill Frist, the majority leader, and Senator John W. Warner, Republican of Virginia, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, would require the administration to provide extensive new quarterly reports to Congress on subjects like progress in bringing in other countries to help stabilize Iraq. The other appeals related to Iraq are nonbinding and express the position of the Senate.
The plan stops short of a competing Democratic proposal that moves toward establishing dates for a phased withdrawal of troops from Iraq. But it is built upon the Democratic approach and makes it clear that senators of both parties are increasingly eager for Iraqis to take control of their country in coming months and open the door to removing American troops.

Science isn't science anymore...in Kansas
Philosophers Notwithstanding, Kansas School Board Redefines Science
By DENNIS OVERBYE
NYT, 15 November 2005
Once it was the left who wanted to redefine science.
In the early 1990's, writers like the Czech playwright and former president Vaclav Havel and the French philosopher Bruno Latour proclaimed "the end of objectivity." The laws of science were constructed rather than discovered, some academics said; science was just another way of looking at the world, a servant of corporate and military interests. Everybody had a claim on truth.
The right defended the traditional notion of science back then. Now it is the right that is trying to change it.
On Tuesday, fueled by the popular opposition to the Darwinian theory of evolution, the Kansas State Board of Education stepped into this fraught philosophical territory. In the course of revising the state's science standards to include criticism of evolution, the board promulgated a new definition of science itself.
The changes in the official state definition are subtle and lawyerly, and involve mainly the removal of two words: "natural explanations." But they are a red flag to scientists, who say the changes obliterate the distinction between the natural and the supernatural that goes back to Galileo and the foundations of science.
The old definition reads in part, "Science is the human activity of seeking natural explanations for what we observe in the world around us." The new one calls science "a systematic method of continuing investigation that uses observation, hypothesis testing, measurement, experimentation, logical argument and theory building to lead to more adequate explanations of natural phenomena."
Adrian Melott, a physics professor at the University of Kansas who has long been fighting Darwin's opponents, said, "The only reason to take out 'natural explanations' is if you want to open the door to supernatural explanations."
Gerald Holton, a professor of the history of science at Harvard, said removing those two words and the framework they set means "anything goes."

Review of 'Plan B' Pill Is Faulted
Report Calls FDA Actions 'Unusual'
By Marc Kaufman
Washington Post, 15 November 2005
Senior Food and Drug Administration officials were told that the application to sell the "morning-after pill" without prescription was going to be rejected before the staff completed its scientific review and months before the decision was made public, government investigators reported yesterday.
A report by the independent Government Accountability Office also said senior FDA officials, including then-Commissioner Mark B. McClellan, were actively involved in the politically sensitive decision -- one of four aspects of the agency's actions that the investigators called "unusual."
The GAO report, requested by Congress more than 16 months ago, said the agency did not follow its normal procedures in making the scientific assessment of the Plan B proposal and in having a top official sign off on the eventual decision after lower-ranking scientists refused.
Critics of the FDA's handling of the issue said the report confirmed their view that the agency had allowed politics to trump science. The application was strongly opposed by some social and religious conservatives, including 49 members of Congress who wrote a letter to President Bush asking that the application be rejected.
...Susan F. Wood, a former FDA assistant commissioner for women's health who left her job to protest the agency's actions, said: "This report is a sad reminder of why I felt compelled to resign. Instead of improving and advancing women's health, the FDA leadership is ignoring its process and not relying on science and medical evidence."
The GAO report said then-Commissioner McClellan raised numerous objections to the proposal for over-the-counter sales of Plan B in a staff meeting three months before it was rejected.
The report also said that McClellan, who left the FDA two months before the rejection was announced to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, did not respond to written questions from the GAO except to say that he left before the decision was made and that his actions had been "consistent with his usual practices."
SEE ALSO:
The Republican War on Science
by Chris Mooney

Share price dictates more media consolidation...
Shareholder Pressure Leads Knight Ridder to Announce Sale
By David A. Vise
Washington Post, 15 November 2005
Knight Ridder Inc., which publishes such newspapers as the Philadelphia Inquirer, Miami Herald and San Jose Mercury News, put itself up for sale yesterday under continued pressure from outside shareholders to boost its stock price.
The nation's second-biggest newspaper publisher said it hired Goldman, Sachs & Co. to find a buyer, though it cautioned that a deal may or may not occur. In a sign of the company's seriousness about seeking a buyer, Knight Ridder's board of directors also voted to make it easier for shareholders to submit proposals at the company's 2006 annual meeting, which is tentatively scheduled for the spring.
Analysts said the most likely bidders include the numerous private equity firms that have billions of dollars for acquisitions and major media companies -- with Gannett Co., the New York Times Co. and the Tribune Co. topping the list. Another possibility, analysts said, is that a financial firm could team up with a major newspaper publisher to make a joint offer for Knight Ridder, which is worth $4.4 billion at its current stock price.

Robert Scheer: On Leaving the LA Times
Robert Scheer
Huffington Post, 11 November 2005
On Friday I was fired as a columnist by the publisher of the Los Angeles Times, where I have worked for thirty years. The publisher, Jeff Johnson, who has offered not a word of explanation to me, has privately told people that he hated every word that I wrote. I assume that mostly refers to my exposing the lies used by President Bush to justify the invasion of Iraq. Fortunately sixty percent of Americans now get the point, but only after tens of thousand of Americans and Iraqis have been killed and maimed as the carnage spirals out of control. My only regret is that my pen was not sharper and my words tougher.
Starting Wednesday morning, my column will be appearing here on the Huffington Post.

14 November 2005

'We Do Not Torture' and Other Funny Stories
By FRANK RICH
NYT, 13 November 2005 (sub only)
...when you watch the president stand there with a straight face and say, "We do not torture" - a full year and a half after the first photos from Abu Ghraib - you have to wonder how we arrived at this ludicrous moment. The answer is not complicated. When people in power get away with telling bigger and bigger lies, they naturally think they can keep getting away with it. And for a long time, Mr. Bush and his cronies did. Not anymore.
The fallout from the Scooter Libby indictment reveals that the administration's credibility, having passed the tipping point with Katrina, is flat-lining. For two weeks, the White House's talking-point monkeys in the press and Congress had been dismissing Patrick Fitzgerald's leak investigation as much ado about nothing except politics and as an exoneration of everyone except Mr. Libby. Now the American people have rendered their verdict: they're not buying it. Last week two major polls came up with the identical finding, that roughly 8 in 10 Americans regard the leak case as a serious matter. One of the polls (The Wall Street Journal/NBC News) also found that 57 percent of Americans believe that Mr. Bush deliberately misled the country into war in Iraq and that only 33 percent now find him "honest and straightforward," down from 50 percent in January.
The Bush loyalists' push to discredit the Libby indictment failed because Americans don't see it as a stand-alone scandal but as the petri dish for a wider culture of lying that becomes more visible every day. The last-ditch argument rolled out by Mr. Bush on Veterans Day in his latest stay-the-course speech - that Democrats, too, endorsed dead-wrong W.M.D. intelligence - is more of the same. Sure, many Democrats (and others) did believe that Saddam had an arsenal before the war, but only the White House hyped selective evidence for nuclear weapons, the most ominous of all of Iraq's supposed W.M.D.'s, to whip up public fears of an imminent doomsday.
There was also an entire other set of lies in the administration's prewar propaganda blitzkrieg that had nothing to do with W.M.D.'s, African uranium or the Wilsons. To get the country to redirect its finite resources to wage war against Saddam Hussein rather than keep its focus on the war against radical Islamic terrorists, the White House had to cook up not only the fiction that Iraq was about to attack us, but also the fiction that Iraq had already attacked us, on 9/11. Thanks to the Michigan Democrat Carl Levin, who last weekend released a previously classified intelligence document, we now have conclusive evidence that the administration's disinformation campaign implying a link connecting Saddam to Al Qaeda and 9/11 was even more duplicitous and manipulative than its relentless flogging of nuclear Armageddon.
Senator Levin's smoking gun is a widely circulated Defense Intelligence Agency document from February 2002 that was probably seen by the National Security Council. It warned that a captured Qaeda terrorist in American custody was in all likelihood "intentionally misleading" interrogators when he claimed that Iraq had trained Qaeda members to use illicit weapons. The report also made the point that an Iraq-Qaeda collaboration was absurd on its face: "Saddam's regime is intensely secular and is wary of Islamic revolutionary movements." But just like any other evidence that disputed the administration's fictional story lines, this intelligence was promptly disregarded.
So much so that eight months later - in October 2002, as the White House was officially rolling out its new war and Congress was on the eve of authorizing it - Mr. Bush gave a major address in Cincinnati intermingling the usual mushroom clouds with information from that discredited, "intentionally misleading" Qaeda informant. "We've learned that Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases," he said. It was the most important, if hardly the only, example of repeated semantic sleights of hand that the administration used to conflate 9/11 with Iraq. Dick Cheney was fond of brandishing a nonexistent April 2001 "meeting" between Mohamed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague long after Czech and American intelligence analysts had dismissed it.
The power of these lies was considerable.
...There is still much more to learn about our government's duplicity in the run-up to the war, just as there is much more to learn about what has gone on since, whether with torture or billions of Iraq reconstruction dollars. That is why the White House and its allies, having failed to discredit the Fitzgerald investigation, are now so desperate to slow or block every other inquiry. Exhibit A is the Senate Intelligence Committee, whose Republican chairman, Pat Roberts, is proving a major farceur with his efforts to sidestep any serious investigation of White House prewar subterfuge. Last Sunday, the same day that newspapers reported Carl Levin's revelation about the "intentionally misleading" Qaeda informant, Senator Roberts could be found on "Face the Nation" saying he had found no evidence of "political manipulation or pressure" in the use of prewar intelligence.
His brazenness is not anomalous. After more than two years of looking into the forged documents used by the White House to help support its bogus claims of Saddam's Niger uranium, the F.B.I. ended its investigation without resolving the identity of the forgers. Last week, Jane Mayer of The New Yorker reported that an investigation into the November 2003 death of an Abu Ghraib detainee, labeled a homicide by the U.S. government, has been, in the words of a lawyer familiar with the case, "lying kind of fallow." The Wall Street Journal similarly reported that 17 months after Condoleezza Rice promised a full investigation into Ahmad Chalabi's alleged leaking of American intelligence to Iran, F.B.I. investigators had yet to interview Mr. Chalabi - who was being welcomed in Washington last week as an honored guest by none other than Ms. Rice.
The Times, meanwhile, discovered that Mr. Libby had set up a legal defense fund to be underwritten by donors who don't have to be publicly disclosed but who may well have a vested interest in the direction of his defense. It's all too eerily reminiscent of the secret fund set up by Richard Nixon's personal lawyer, Herbert Kalmbach, to pay the legal fees of Watergate defendants.
THERE'S so much to stonewall at the White House that last week Scott McClellan was reduced to beating up on the octogenarian Helen Thomas. "You don't want the American people to hear what the facts are, Helen," he said, "and I'm going to tell them the facts." Coming from the press secretary who vowed that neither Mr. Libby nor Karl Rove had any involvement in the C.I.A. leak, this scene was almost as funny as his boss's "We do not torture" charade.
Not that it matters now. The facts the American people are listening to at this point come not from an administration that they no longer find credible, but from the far more reality-based theater of war. The Qaeda suicide bombings of three hotels in Amman on 11/9, like the terrorist attacks in Madrid and London before them, speak louder than anything else of the price we are paying for the lies that diverted us from the war against the suicide bombers of 9/11 to the war in Iraq.
SEE ALSO:
Doing Unto Others as They Did Unto Us
By M. GREGG BLOCHE and JONATHAN H. MARKS
NYT, 14 November 2005
How did American interrogation tactics after 9/11 come to include abuse rising to the level of torture? Much has been said about the illegality of these tactics, but the strategic error that led to their adoption has been overlooked.
The Pentagon effectively signed off on a strategy that mimics Red Army methods. But those tactics were not only inhumane, they were ineffective. For Communist interrogators, truth was beside the point: their aim was to force compliance to the point of false confession.
Fearful of future terrorist attacks and frustrated by the slow progress of intelligence-gathering from prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Pentagon officials turned to the closest thing on their organizational charts to a school for torture. That was a classified program at Fort Bragg, N.C., known as SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape. Based on studies of North Korean and Vietnamese efforts to break American prisoners, SERE was intended to train American soldiers to resist the abuse they might face in enemy custody.
The Pentagon appears to have flipped SERE's teachings on their head, mining the program not for resistance techniques but for interrogation methods. At a June 2004 briefing, the chief of the United States Southern Command, Gen. James T. Hill, said a team from Guantánamo went "up to our SERE school and developed a list of techniques" for "high-profile, high-value" detainees. General Hill had sent this list - which included prolonged isolation and sleep deprivation, stress positions, physical assault and the exploitation of detainees' phobias - to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who approved most of the tactics in December 2002.
...A full account of how our leaders reacted to terrorism by re-engineering Red Army methods must await an independent inquiry. But the SERE model's embrace by the Pentagon's civilian leaders is further evidence that abuse tantamount to torture was national policy, not merely the product of rogue freelancers. After the shock of 9/11 - when Americans desperately wanted mastery over a world that suddenly seemed terrifying - this policy had visceral appeal. But it's the task of command authority to connect means and ends rationally. The Bush administration has too frequently failed to do this. And so it is urgent that Congress step in to tie our detainee policy to our national interest.

Jordan Attack Indicates Spread of Iraq Violence
By Ashraf Khalil and Josh Meyer
Los Angeles Times via Seattle Times, 12 November 2005
Islamic militants in Iraq asserted Friday that the deadly coordinated suicide bombings at hotels here this week were carried out by four Iraqis — including a husband-and-wife team — raising new concerns that violence in Iraq is spreading beyond that nation's borders.
An Internet posting in the name of al-Qaida in Iraq made the latest claim of responsibility for the bombings that killed 57 people Wednesday at three Western chain hotels.
It was believed to be the first time a married couple has carried out a suicide attack. The couple bombed the Days Inn after the woman "chose to accompany her husband to his martyrdom," the statement said.

The Exit From Iraq (Part 1)
A Critique of Staying the Course
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
NYT, 13 November 2005
[Following an impact analysis of pulling troops out of Iraq immediately, Kristof says this about the Bush administrqation policy]
Stay the course This is President Bush's current policy, and it neglects a central reality: our very presence feeds the insurgency.
I came to realize how much the neocons lived in a dream world when I visited Najaf, Iraq, in September 2002 and quoted ordinary Iraqis as saying they would fight against any U.S. invaders. Neocons who favored an invasion were apoplectic and felt sure that they had a much richer understanding of the situation - even though they had never been to Iraq, spoke no Arabic and didn't know a minaret from a mihrab. They were well meaning but didn't have a clue about the horror that Iraqis felt for a Western military occupation.
Unfortunately, many of them still don't. The fact is that in a country like Iraq, our troop presence creates insecurity as well as security. Our presence antagonizes much of the population, becomes a magnet for jihadis, and feeds suspicions that our aim is to steal Iraqi oil and retain military bases.
In a poll in September by the International Republican Institute, 42 percent of Iraqis said the country was headed in the wrong direction (more than double the proportion who said so in April), compared with 43 percent who said it was going in the right direction. And the two biggest reasons for pessimism were insecurity and the foreign occupation.
Last month, The Sunday Telegraph of London reported that a secret poll of Iraqis commissioned by the British military found that 82 percent were "strongly opposed" to the presence of coalition troops, and 67 percent felt less secure because of the occupation.
When I traveled around Iraq during and after the war, I was stunned by the number of ordinary Iraqis who told me that President Bush and Saddam Hussein were secret chums, with the U.S. paying Saddam huge bribes so that he would give Washington an excuse to invade and plunder Iraqi oil. That particular tale has faded, but the larger narrative - of duplicitous Westerners seeking a permanent foothold in Iraq - fuels the insurgency, and we're playing into it.
So Mr. Bush's grim insistence on staying the course indefinitely, and his refusal to renounce unequivocally any interest in U.S. bases, reflects the same mistake he has made all along: a failure to appreciate the vigor of Iraqi nationalism. And now we're caught in a trap. We can't pull out, but by hunkering down indefinitely we help fuel the insecurity that keeps us in Iraq.

Playing With Fire
NYT, 13 November 2005
...Fewer than 200 of the approximately 500 prisoners at Guantánamo Bay have filed petitions for habeas corpus hearings. They are not seeking trials, merely asking why they are being held. And according to government and military officials, an overwhelming majority should not have been taken prisoner in the first place. These men have been in isolation for nearly four years, subject to months of interrogation. Do they really have anything left to say?
The habeas petitions are not an undue burden. And in any case, they are a responsibility that this nation has always assumed to ensure that no one is held prisoner unjustly.
Senator Graham argues that the 9/11 attacks were an act of war, not a crime for American courts to judge, and he is trying to put antiterrorist operations back under the Geneva Conventions. Mr. McCain's amendment banning torture, abuse and cruelty has the same goal, and we share it. But the administration shredded the Geneva Conventions after 9/11 and cannot be trusted to follow them now.
There will be amendments and counteramendments in the Senate next week. In the end, the right coalition of senators may actually pass valuable new rules for "unlawful combatants." But they are sure to draw the fierce opposition of the White House, which is hardly likely to agree to an automatic federal court review of its detention policies.
The danger is that the House may do the administration's bidding and produce a bill that strips away the good parts of the Graham amendment, leaving the dangerous parts, and that such a version may be approved behind closed doors during a House-Senate conference.
The problem in creating one exemption to habeas corpus, no matter how narrow, is that it invites the creation of more exemptions. History shows that in the wrong hands, the power to jail people without showing cause is a tool of despotism. Just consider Natan Sharansky or Nelson Mandela. The administration hates that sort of comparison, so we wonder why it keeps inviting it. Just the other day, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said with a sneer that the Guantánamo prisoners on hunger strikes had gone "on a diet where they don't eat" for publicity.
We'd rather see the Senate delete the suspension of habeas corpus from Mr. Graham's measure now. Some constitutional principles are too important to play around with.

Teetering at the Top to Win Bush's Ear
By Warren Vieth and Edwin Chen
LA Times, 13 November 2005
With President Bush's popularity sagging, the White House is getting plenty of advice from Republicans who want to help pull him out of his slump.
There's only one problem: They often disagree with each other.
The challenge of fixing the Bush presidency has heightened long-standing tensions among Bush aides and supporters, between moderate conservatives and hard-liners.
The moderates worry that the president has fallen under the spell of Vice President Dick Cheney and political advisor Karl Rove, and has moved so far to the right that he has alienated many voters. The hard-liners think Bush has erred by not being conservative enough; some of them even accuse White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. of plotting to water down the president's program.
The debate, behind closed doors, is a classic struggle for the president's ear. Outside the White House, members of each camp — in Congress, think tanks and interest groups — gossip over whether any of Bush's top aides will lose their jobs. Inside the White House, no one will talk openly about possible staff changes, but aides acknowledge that a debate over strategy is underway.
"Certainly there's a recognition that at 38% or 39% job approval [for Bush] in polls, no one is satisfied with the status quo," one presidential aide said. "We need to be communicating more effectively with the American people."

Yale Law Frets Over Court Choices It Knows Best
By ADAM LIPTAK
NYT, 13 November 2005
The morning after Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. was announced as the president's choice for the Supreme Court, some students and professors at his alma mater, the Yale Law School, were already hard at work - to defeat him.
Professor Bruce Ackerman, who teaches constitutional law here, appeared on CNN with this instant assessment: "I don't think conservative is the word. This person is a judicial radical."
A group called Law Students Against Alito was formed the same day. "There is a chunk of the population, probably a majority," said Ian Bassin, a founder of the group, "who does not want this guy on the Supreme Court."
...the dominant view, based on a day of interviews at the law school, appeared to be that Judge Alito's jurisprudence represented a betrayal of the law school's liberal values.
Prof. Robert W. Gordon, who teaches legal history, said he had read all of Judge Alito's 15 years of opinions. "Alito is a careful carpenter," Professor Gordon said. "The things are well built, but they are not beautiful. Alito in my judgment is just too steadfastly conservative."
...Justice Thomas's confirmation hearings initially focused on his qualifications and then were rocked by accusations of sexual harassment by a former colleague in the Reagan administration, Anita Hill, of the Yale Law class of 1980. Students these days make jokes at Justice Thomas's expense, said Stephen Townley, a third-year student. "It's a question about intellectual rigor."
Prof. Owen M. Fiss, who teaches procedure and constitutional law, said the opposition to Justice Thomas was not as intense as it might have been, attributing that to Justice Thomas's being black and not well known as a student. "The one lesson for the law school," Professor Fiss said, "was that we didn't work hard enough to oppose him."
Professor Fiss testified against Judge Bork, and he said he had no regrets.

Health Economics 101
By PAUL KRUGMAN
NYT. 14 November 2005
...to the extent that we do have a working system of private health insurance, it's the result of huge though hidden subsidies.
Private health insurance in America comes almost entirely in the form of employment-based coverage: insurance provided by corporations as part of their pay packages. The key to this coverage is the fact that compensation in the form of health benefits, as opposed to wages, isn't taxed. One recent study suggests that this tax subsidy may be as large as $190 billion per year. And even with this subsidy, employment-based coverage is in rapid decline.
I'm not an opponent of markets. On the contrary, I've spent a lot of my career defending their virtues. But the fact is that the free market doesn't work for health insurance, and never did. All we ever had was a patchwork, semiprivate system supported by large government subsidies.
That system is now failing. And a rigid belief that markets are always superior to government programs - a belief that ignores basic economics as well as experience - stands in the way of rational thinking about what should replace it.

Confusion Is Rife About Drug Plan as Sign-Up Nears
By ROBERT PEAR
NYT, 13 November 2005
Enrollment in the new Medicare drug benefit begins in three days, but even with President Bush hailing the plan on Saturday as "the greatest advance in health care for seniors" in 40 years, large numbers of older Americans appear to be overwhelmed and confused by the choices they will have to make.
"I have a Ph.D., and it's too complicated to suit me," said William Q. Beard, 73, a retired chemist in Wichita, Kan., who takes eight prescription drugs, including several heart medicines. "I wonder how the vast majority of beneficiaries will handle this. I fervently wish that members of Congress had to deal with the same health care program we do."
Mr. Beard was interviewed at First United Methodist Church in Wichita, where he and 100 other members of an adult Sunday school class recently received a two-hour explanation of the drug benefit from a state insurance counselor.
Confusion was a dominant theme at education and counseling sessions held over the last two weeks in Wichita and in Glen Burnie, Md.; Fairfax, Va.; Urbana, Ohio; and Santa Rosa, Calif.
"The whole thing is hopelessly complicated," said Pauline H. Olney, 74, a retired nurse who attended a seminar at a hotel in Santa Rosa, north of San Francisco.
The drug benefit, estimated to cost $724 billion over 10 years, is the biggest expansion of Medicare since its creation in 1965 and is often described as Mr. Bush's biggest achievement in domestic policy.
...Even after attending the seminar, Raymond L. Middlesworth, 70, a retired truck driver from Urbana, said he was baffled.
"I've tried reading the Medicare book about the drug plan," Mr. Middlesworth said, "but I couldn't make sense of it. This is the biggest mess that Medicare has ever put us through."

Meeting arranged for only $9 million...
Democrats Seek Documents on Lobbyist and Bush Meeting
By PHILIP SHENON
NYT, 13 November 2005
House Democratic leaders called on the White House on Friday to release documents showing whether a powerful Republican lobbyist had a role in arranging an Oval Office meeting last year between President Bush and the president of the West African nation of Gabon, whose government had been asked by the lobbyist to pay $9 million to help arrange such a meeting.
In a letter to the White House counsel's office, the House Democratic leader, Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, and the senior Democrat on the Government Reform Committee, Representative Henry A. Waxman of California, said they wanted copies of "all records relating to any connections between White House staff" and the lobbyist, Jack Abramoff, "regarding a visit by representatives of Gabon."
The White House and the State Department have said that the meeting with President Omar Bongo of Gabon on May 26, 2004, was routine and that there was no evidence of any involvement by Mr. Abramoff.
"However," Ms. Pelosi and Mr. Waxman wrote, "it is impossible for Congress and the public to assess this assertion without further documentation from the White House."
The White House has said the meeting had special importance because Gabon held the presidency of the United Nations General Assembly last year and because of the Bush administration's interest in AIDS prevention in Africa. The Gabon Embassy in Washington has not responded to written questions from The New York Times about the meeting.
A spokeswoman for Mr. Abramoff, who is under indictment in Florida and under investigation by a federal grand jury in Washington, would not discuss the lobbyist's approach to President Bongo, whose government has often been criticized by the State Department as having a poor record on human rights.
The White House had no comment Friday on whether it would release documents to the House Democrats, who also requested material from the State Department about President Bongo's meeting.

Big Drug Makers See Sales Decline With Their Image
By ALEX BERENSON
NYT, 14 November 2005
The drug industry's image problems are beginning to hurt pharmaceutical companies where it matters most - at the bottom line.
A year after Merck's withdrawal of its arthritis medicine Vioxx led to an industrywide credibility crisis, the Food and Drug Administration is blocking new medicines that might previously have passed muster. Doctors are writing fewer prescriptions for antidepressants and other drugs whose safety has been challenged, like hormone replacement therapies for women in menopause.
Meanwhile, insurers and some states are taking advantage of the backlash against the industry to try shifting patients to older, generic drugs, arguing that they work as well as newer and more expensive branded medicines. Overall, prescriptions continue to rise slightly, but an increasing share of prescriptions are going to generic drugs. Also, consumers seem to be less responsive to aggressive drug marketing.
"A lot of the demand that the industry has created over the years has been through promotion, and for that promotion to be effective, there has to be trust," said Richard Evans, an analyst covering drug stocks at Sanford C. Bernstein and Company. "That trust has been lost."

12 November 2005

GW's Veterans' Day Massacre of Reality
[Bush quotes in italics and PK comments in bold.]
First, these extremists want to end American and Western influence in the broader Middle East, because we stand for democracy and peace, and stand in the way of their ambitions.
This thinking is not even close to reality. As long as the administration remains deluded by its own rhetoric and unwilling to make a meaningful assessment of the motivation of militant terrorism it will remain ineffective in reducing it.
...and now they've set their sights on Iraq. In his recent letter, Zawahiri writes that al Qaeda views Iraq as, quote, "the place of the greatest battle." The terrorists regard Iraq as the central front in their war against humanity. We must recognize Iraq as the central front in our war against the terrorists.
As bad as Saddam was, this is an Iraq of Bush's making. He is the one that opened Iraq up to terrorist activity. He created the conditions in which terrorist from all over the world receive the best possible "on-the-job" training.
Some have also argued that extremists have been strengthened by our actions in Iraq claiming that our presence in that country has somehow caused or triggered the rage of radicals. I would remind them that we were not in Iraq on September the 11th, 2001. The hatred of the radicals existed before Iraq was an issue, and it will exist after Iraq is no longer an excuse. The government of Russia did not support Operation Iraqi Freedom, and yet the militants killed more then 150 Russian school children in Beslan. Over the years these extremists have used a litany of excuses for violence: the Israeli presence on the West Bank, the U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia, the defeat of the Taliban or the Crusades of a thousand years ago.
In fact, we're not facing a set of grievances that can be soothed and addressed. We're facing a radical ideology with inalterable objectives to enslave whole nations and intimidate the world. No act of ours invited the rage of killers, and no concession, bribe or act of appeasement would change or limit their plans for murder. On the contrary, they target nations whose behavior they believe they can change through violence. Against such an enemy, there is only one effective response -- we will never back down, we will never give in, we will never accept anything less than complete victory! The murderous ideology of the Islamic radicals is the great challenge of our new century. Yet in many ways, this fight resembles the struggle against communism in the last century. Like the ideology of communism, Islamic radicalism is elitist, led by a self-appointed vanguard that presumes to speak for the Muslim masses.
This is a fundamental mistake. The ignorant and callous actions of the U.S. and other colonial governments of the twentieth century are significant components of the origin and growth of Islamic terrorism. We ignore the harmful aspects of international relations and global economics at our peril. The U.S. is now, and will for a very long time, pay for this sort of stubborn arrogance and carelessness.
Our coalition against terror has killed or captured nearly all those directly responsible for the September the 11th attacks. We've captured or killed several of bin Laden's most serious deputies, al Qaeda managers and operatives in more than 24 countries; the mastermind of the USS Cole bombing, who was chief of al Qaeda's operations in the Persian Gulf; the mastermind of the bombings in Jakarta and Bali; a senior Zarqawi terrorist planner who was planning attacks in Turkey; and many of their senior leaders in Saudi Arabia.
Has Bush forgotten Osama "Wanted Dead or Alive-Smoke Him Out" bin Laden? Evidently, Iraq has been a bit of a distraction.
The United States, working with Great Britain and Pakistan and other nations, has exposed and disrupted a major black-market operation in nuclear technology led by A.Q. Khan.
In return for Pakistan's partnership in the "war on terrorism," the Bush administration relented to the Musharraf government and gave up any aggressive investigation and pursuit of this "world class" nuclear criminal. This decision may well come back to haunt the world.
...we're determined to deny the militants control of any nation, which they would use a home base and a launching pad for terror. This mission has brought new and urgent responsibilities to our armed forces. American troops are fighting beside Afghan partners and against remnants of the Taliban and their al Qaeda allies. We're working with President Musharraf to oppose and isolate the militants in Pakistan. We're fighting regime remnants and terrorists in Iraq.
Following Afghanistan, Iraq is the most likely state to fall under militant terrorist control...and just who was it that caused that? This is a highly unlikely prospect anywhere else in the world (as long as Bush can keep from invading with any spare military forces).
Some Democrats and antiwar critics are now claiming we manipulated the intelligence and misled the American people about why we went to war. These critics are fully aware that a bipartisan Senate investigation found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community's judgments related to Iraq's weapons programs.
What then, is the "phase two" investigation struggle in the Senate Intelligence Committee all about? Bush's contention that his administration has be cleared of manipulating intelligence is so far from the truth that it is now even becoming apparent to ardent viewers of Fox News.
They also know that intelligence agencies from around the world agreed with our assessment of Saddam Hussein.
Yeah sure. That why the 'coalition of the willing' was so vast and strong and the rest of the world was with us. Both the Bush and Powell speeches in the lead-up to war were laughing stocks at the UN. The rest of the world was quite obviously not in step with the Bush administration.
They know the United Nations passed more than a dozen resolutions citing his development and possession of weapons of mass destruction.
Many of these critics supported my opponent during the last election, who explained his position to support the resolution in the Congress this way: "When I vote to give the president of the United States the authority to use force, if necessary, to disarm Saddam Hussein, it is because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hand is a threat and a grave threat to our security."
That's why more then a hundred Democrats in the House and the Senate, who had access to the same intelligence, voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power.
Bush always mischaracterizes his Congressional resolution as a 'vote for war.' It was an authorization for him to take necessary action, not to "rush to war." Bush's motives and lack of 'trustworthiness' were obvious to most of his opposition, but those in Congress feared that in not authorizing the President his request that they would subject themselves to accusations of being unpatriotic and face other recrimination at the ballot box. The administration did everything in is power to shut down debate by claiming a false level of certainty about Iraq having nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. The Bush Team played an ignorant and patriotic American public to its full political advantage and now claims to have reached Congressional consent to go to war 'after a long debate.' Democrats and the country have paid dearly for the Democratic party's political ineptitude.

Could Cutting Deficit Improve Bush Ratings?
By FLOYD NORRIS
NYT, 11 November 2005 (sub only)
YESTERYEAR'S clichés can be correct. At least for an unpopular president, it really is the economy, stupid. Approval ratings under 40 percent usually reflect a lack of confidence that the administration knows how to manage economic problems.
That is not to say that economic issues are the only ones that matter. Iraq and Hurricane Katrina hurt.
But a look at presidential approval ratings over the last three decades shows that very low ratings tend to come when there are big doubts about domestic economic policy.
...The current President Bush's stated second-term economic priority, the revamping of Social Security, appears to be as dead in Congress as Mr. Clinton's health care plan was, and there appears to be little appetite for tax reform, Mr. Bush's other stated goal. He still wants to make his tax cuts permanent.
In one way, his strategy has worked - at least with Republicans. At Mr. Carter's low point, he had the approval of only 32 percent of Democrats. At their lows, Mr. Clinton and the first President Bush retained the approval of fewer than 60 percent of their party members. But even now the current president has a 77 percent approval rating in his party, and an 11 percent rating, the lowest ever, from the opposition.
That may reflect the greater partisanship of the current era. But it also shows that Mr. Bush has remained steadfast in his policies. Mr. Clinton abandoned health care reform, and the first President Bush went back on his "no new taxes" promise. But even with big deficits and a clear need for spending on hurricane relief, Mr. Bush pushes for permanent tax cuts.
That may not be wise. An aura of bipartisanship can help a president. Angry erstwhile backers can enhance such an aura.
Perhaps Mr. Bush could copy Mr. Clinton and make deficit reduction a real priority, cutting deals with Democrats on taxes and seeking to reduce the pork already passed by his own party in Congress. At the moment, too much of the talk about deficit reduction seems to be based solely on cutting programs that Republicans never much liked anyway, and to rely on what Mr. Bush, as a candidate, called "fuzzy math."
Such moves could change his image, but at the risk to his standing with some Republicans. So far, this president has given no sign that that is a risk he is willing to take.

Is that light at the end...
Rice, in Iraq, Says Strategy Against Rebels Is Working
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN
NYT, 11 November 2005
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made a surprise stop on Friday in this violent, Sunni-dominated city in northern Iraq , declaring that it had recently become a success story for the strategy of using Iraqi forces to quell the insurgency.
On her way to Mosul, a detour in her trip to the Middle East, Ms. Rice said she wanted to show that the American approach of "clear, hold and build" was working despite criticism at home that the Bush administration lacked a plan for success in Iraq and for the eventual withdrawal of American forces.
"We are working to better unify our political and military activities in the field," Ms. Rice said, citing the creation of three "provincial reconstruction teams," one in Mosul and two in other northern cities, Kirkuk and Hilla. In general, she said, the American objective was to "redefine the mission" toward more cooperation between military forces and the effort to rebuild the area.

11 November 2005

Senate Votes No Terror Suspects in Courts
By LIZ SIDOTI
AP via LA Times, 11 November 2005
The Senate voted Thursday to bar foreign terror suspects at the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, from filing lawsuits in American courts to challenge their detentions, despite a Supreme Court ruling last year that granted such access.
In a 49-42 vote, senators added the provision by Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., to a sweeping defense policy bill.
...Graham sought to curb what he called "lawsuit abuse," arguing that prisoners of war and enemy combatants have never before been given access to U.S. courts.
But Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., said it was too broad and would effectively reverse the Supreme Court's previous decision on the issue of detainees rights. "It is inconsistent with what the Supreme Court did," he said.
Human-rights groups also cried foul.
"Depriving an entire branch of government of its ability to exercise meaningful oversight is a decidedly wrong course to take," said Elisa Massimino, the Washington director of Human Rights First.
On Iraq, Senate Democrats offered a proposal requiring the president to outline a timetable for a phased withdrawal of U.S. forces, and Republicans put forth their own Iraqi policy proposal. Votes on both are expected next week.

Chalabi's Curtain Call
The White House resets the stage yet again for the notorious Iraqi expatriate who helped cook the case for war.
By Juan Cole
Salon, 10 November 2005
...On the street in Iraq, people give nicknames to the big longtime-expatriate politicians whom the Americans brought back to Iraq. They call former transitional Prime Minister Iyad Allawi "Iyad the Baathist" because of his background in that party. And they call Ahmad Chalabi "Ahmad the Thief." How appropriate that Chalabi has again made a splash in a Washington, D.C., that looks increasingly like a kleptocracy itself.
On the surface Chalabi ought to be finished in Iraqi politics. But until Dec. 15, he is a deputy prime minister. His meetings in Washington this week with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Vice President Dick Cheney and National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley acknowledge his high political office -- even though not so long ago the Bush administration tried to destroy him. What accounts for the turnabout in his political fortunes in the United States? Credit the shifting political winds in Iraq -- and perhaps yet more savvy back-channel dealings by Chalabi with the Bush administration. It can't be because of his rap sheet, whole reams of pages long.

Something Happening Here ...
By Mark Rudd, MARK RUDD, who led the student uprising at Columbia University in 1968 and then became a member of the Weather Underground, teaches math at a community college in New Mexico.
LA Times, 11 November 2005
...Who benefits and who loses from an American empire? What are the moral and economic and spiritual costs to Americans? Is a system of international law possible as an alternative to endless use of American military power? Viewed against the bleak future that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice are offering Americans and the rest of the world, these questions begin to seem more practical than idealistic.
What's hard to understand — given the revelations about the rush to war, the use of torture and the loss of more than 2,000 soldiers — is why the antiwar movement isn't further along than it is. Given that President Bush is now talking about Iraq as only one skirmish in an unlimited struggle against a global Islamic enemy, a struggle comparable to the titanic, 40-year Cold War against communism, shouldn't a massive critique of the global war on terrorism already be underway?
Yet the movement has remained small and politically isolated since the original outpouring of opposition in the spring of 2003, during the run-up to the war. In part, it was the victim of its own early success, the spontaneous demonstrations involving millions of people in the streets here and around the world trying to stop the war before it began. When this initial outburst failed, many became demoralized and hopeless.
Then, in 2004, most of the pent-up antiwar energy flowed into John Kerry's campaign, with little to show for it but further demoralization. The movement caught a second wind with the energizing presence of Cindy Sheehan, but it remains small compared with the outpouring against the Vietnam War.
Probably it's because there's no draft now. Clearly the fact that middle-class boys across the country were receiving draft cards and lottery numbers went a long way toward helping spur resistance to the Vietnam War. Nor is there a countercultural movement today that questions authority like the one that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s.
But building a movement can be done. To increase our ranks, we'll need to break through the too-common belief that change is impossible.
We'll also need to take on the larger war. As the next battle heats up, perhaps against Iran or Syria, the movement will have to ask the American people to look honestly at who we are in the world. The antiwar movement will have to engage in the most difficult dialogue of our lives with our neighbors.
SEE ALSO:
Colorado Soldier Founds Anti-War Group
AP via Common Dreams, 11 November 2005
Sgt. Kelly Dougherty went to Iraq in 2003, doubting that the war was just.
She returned in 2004, certain it was wrong, and co-founded Iraq Veterans Against the War.
"People say you are a traitor. People say you are unpatriotic," said Dougherty, 27, about her anti-war work. "We are doing this because we feel strongly about America.
"I really appreciate America, but we are capable of doing some very bad things."

Lying With Intelligence
Robert Scheer
LA Times, 8 November 2005
Who in the White House knew about DITSUM No. 044-02 and when did they know it?
That's the newly declassified smoking-gun document, originally prepared by the Defense Intelligence Agency in February 2002 but ignored by President Bush. Its declassification this weekend blows another huge hole in Bush's claim that he was acting on the best intelligence available when he pitched the invasion of Iraq as a way to prevent an Al Qaeda terror attack using weapons of mass destruction.
The report demolished the credibility of the key Al Qaeda informant the administration relied on to make its claim that a working alliance existed between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. It was circulated widely within the U.S. government a full eight months before Bush used the prisoner's lies to argue for an invasion of Iraq because "we've learned that Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and deadly gases."
Al Qaeda senior military trainer Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi — a Libyan captured in Pakistan in 2001 — was probably "intentionally misleading the debriefers," the DIA report concluded in one of two paragraphs finally declassified at the request of Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and released by his office over the weekend. The report also said: "Ibn al-Shaykh has been undergoing debriefs for several weeks and may be describing scenarios to the debriefers that he knows will retain their interest."
He got that right. Folks in the highest places were very interested in claims along the lines Libi was peddling, even though they went against both logic and the preponderance of intelligence gathered to that point about possible collaboration between two enemies of the U.S. that were fundamentally at odds with each other. Al Qaeda was able to create a base in Iraq only after the U.S. overthrow of Hussein, not before. "Saddam's regime is intensely secular and is wary of Islamic revolutionary movements," accurately noted the DIA.
Yet Bush used the informant's already discredited tall tale in his key Oct. 7, 2002, speech just before the Senate voted on whether to authorize the use of force in Iraq and again in two speeches in February, just ahead of the invasion.
Leading up to the war, Secretary of State Colin Powell tried to sell it to the United Nations, while Vice President Dick Cheney, national security advisor Condoleezza Rice, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer and Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith repeated it breathlessly for homeland audiences. The con worked, and Americans came to believe the lie that Hussein was associated with the Sept. 11 hijackers.
Even CIA Director George Tenet publicly fell into line, ignoring his own agency's dissent that Libi would not have been in a position to know what he said he knew. In fact, Libi, according to the DIA, could not name any Iraqis involved, any chemical or biological material used or where the training allegedly occurred. In January 2004, the prisoner recanted his story, and the next month the CIA withdrew all intelligence reports based on his false information.
One by one, the exotic intelligence factoids Bush's researchers culled from raw intelligence data files to publicly bolster their claim of imminent threat — the yellowcake uranium from Niger, the aluminum tubes for processing uranium, the Prague meeting with Mohamed Atta, the discredited Iraqi informants "Curveball" and Ahmad Chalabi — have been exposed as previously known frauds.

George Does Ethics in the White House
The White House Ethics Lesson
From the Hope Springs Eternal Department
By Tom Engelhardt
TomDispatch, 9 November 2005
Question: Was it unethical for President Bush not to fire Karl Rove on discovering that he had leaked information on CIA agent Valerie Plame. Answer: On September 30, 2003, the President urged anyone in his administration with information about the Plame leak to "come forward". Then, on June 10, 2004, he pledged that any staff member who leaked her name would be "fired." If, by "fired," the President actually meant dismissed from his position, then his behavior would be unethical. However, according to The American Heritage Dictionary, discharged from a position is only the eighth meaning of the word "fire," preceded by, among other definitions, "to bake in a kiln," "to dry by heating," and "to arouse the emotions of." This is admittedly a muddy area (as baking in a kiln might imply), a what "is is" problem on which no one should rush to ethical judgment.

His Image Tarnished, Bush Seeks to Restore Credibility
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON and DAVID S. CLOUD
LA Times, 11 November 2005
Faced with a bleak public mood about Iraq and stung by Democratic accusations that he led the nation into war on false pretenses, President Bush is beginning a new effort to shore up his credibility and cast his critics as hypocrites.
In a Veterans Day speech on Friday in Pennsylvania, Mr. Bush will take on a new round of accusations by Democrats that he exaggerated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's weapons programs, a senior administration official said Thursday, conceding that the Democrats' attack had left more Americans with doubts about Mr. Bush's honesty.
"It will be the most direct refutation of the Democrat charges you've seen probably since the election," the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to outline a strategy that has not yet become public and will play out over several weeks through presidential speeches, close coordination with Republicans on Capitol Hill and a stepped-up effort by the Republican National Committee.
Questions about the intelligence the administration used to justify the war have dogged Mr. Bush almost since the fall of Baghdad in April 2003, but for the most part he insulated himself throughout his re-election campaign last year from the potential political damage arising out of failure to find banned weapons.
But developments in recent months, including the 2,000th American military death and the renewed focus on flawed prewar intelligence in the C.I.A. leak case, have helped drive Mr. Bush's poll numbers to new lows and intensified public disquiet with the war. Among the developments most worrisome to the White House has been a pronounced erosion in the positive public view of the president's personal integrity, a characteristic that Mr. Bush had made the backbone of his political appeal.
The re-energized debate over prewar intelligence is just the latest evidence of the degree to which Mr. Bush's political standing is dependent on the course of the war. The shift in public opinion that has driven that debate has also set off a broader struggle within both political parties to define the right strategy for Iraq.

The Deadly Doughnut
By PAUL KRUGMAN
NYT, 11 November 2005 (sub only)
Registration for Medicare's new prescription drug benefit starts next week. Soon millions of Americans will learn that doughnuts are bad for your health. And if we're lucky, Americans will also learn a bigger lesson: politicians who don't believe in a positive role for government shouldn't be allowed to design new government programs.
Before we turn to the larger issue, let's look at how the Medicare drug benefit will work over the course of next year.
At first, the benefit will look like a normal insurance plan, with a deductible and co-payments.
But if your cumulative drug expenses reach $2,250, a very strange thing will happen: you'll suddenly be on your own. The Medicare benefit won't kick in again unless your costs reach $5,100. This gap in coverage has come to be known as the "doughnut hole." (Did you think I was talking about Krispy Kremes?)
One way to see the bizarre effect of this hole is to notice that if you are a retiree and spend $2,000 on drugs next year, Medicare will cover 66 percent of your expenses. But if you spend $5,000 - which means that you're much more likely to need help paying those expenses - Medicare will cover only 30 percent of your bills.
A study in the July/August issue of Health Affairs points out that this will place many retirees on a financial "roller coaster."
People with high drug costs will have relatively low out-of-pocket expenses for part of the year - say, until next summer. Then, suddenly, they'll enter the doughnut hole, and their personal expenses will soar. And because the same people tend to have high drug costs year after year, the roller-coaster ride will repeat in 2007.
How will people respond when their out-of-pocket costs surge? The Health Affairs article argues, based on experience from H.M.O. plans with caps on drug benefits, that it's likely "some beneficiaries will cut back even essential medications while in the doughnut hole." In other words, this doughnut will make some people sick, and for some people it will be deadly.
The smart thing to do, for those who could afford it, would be to buy supplemental insurance that would cover the doughnut hole. But guess what: the bill that established the drug benefit specifically prohibits you from buying insurance to cover the gap. That's why many retirees who already have prescription drug insurance are being advised not to sign up for the Medicare benefit.
If all of this makes the drug bill sound like a disaster, bear in mind that I've touched on only one of the bill's awful features. There are many others, like the clause that prohibits Medicare from using its clout to negotiate lower drug prices. Why is this bill so bad?
The probable answer is that the Republican Congressional leaders who rammed the bill through in 2003 weren't actually trying to protect retired Americans against the risk of high drug expenses. In fact, they're fundamentally hostile to the idea of social insurance, of public programs that reduce private risk.
Their purpose was purely political: to be able to say that President Bush had honored his 2000 campaign promise to provide prescription drug coverage by passing a drug bill, any drug bill.

Nothing more expected from Congress...
Senators Grill Oil Executives on Prices and Profits
By JAD MOUAWAD
NYT, 11 November 2005
Five of the country's top oil executives walked into a large Congressional hearing room on Wednesday - one filled with nearly a third of all senators and with hundreds of other people, a dozen of them wearing T-shirts reading "Expose Exxon."
Senators from both parties demanded that the executives defend their record profits, amid soaring retail prices for oil and natural gas and suspicions of gasoline price manipulation. The confrontation was a bit theatrical.
"My constituents think someone rigged the price and someone - them - is getting ripped off," said Senator Pete V. Domenici, Republican of New Mexico. "Are you rigging the price of oil?"
Senator Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California, produced a chart showing that executives were making millions of dollars in salaries, bonuses and stock awards.
"Working people struggle with high gas prices," she said. "And your sacrifice, gentlemen, appears to be nothing."
To some, it may have seemed more like stagecraft than substance, as both politicians and executives sought to deflect anger over the steep increases in gasoline prices and home heating costs.

Pat Robertson Warns Pa. Town of Disaster
LA Times, 11 November 2005
Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson warned residents of a rural Pennsylvania town Thursday that disaster may strike there because they "voted God out of your city" by ousting school board members who favored teaching intelligent design.
All eight Dover, Pa., school board members up for re-election were defeated Tuesday after trying to introduce "intelligent design" -- the belief that the universe is so complex that it must have been created by a higher power -- as an alternative to the theory of evolution.
"I'd like to say to the good citizens of Dover: If there is a disaster in your area, don't turn to God. You just rejected him from your city," Robertson said on the Christian Broadcasting Network's "700 Club."
Eight families had sued the district, claiming the policy violates the constitutional separation of church and state. The federal trial concluded days before Tuesday's election, but no ruling has been issued.
Later Thursday, Robertson issued a statement saying he was simply trying to point out that "our spiritual actions have consequences."
"God is tolerant and loving, but we can't keep sticking our finger in his eye forever," Robertson said. "If they have future problems in Dover, I recommend they call on Charles Darwin. Maybe he can help them."
Robertson made headlines this summer when he called on his daily show for the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.
In October 2003, he suggested that the State Department be blown up with a nuclear device. He has also said that feminism encourages women to "kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians."

10 November 2005

US Forces 'Used Chemical Weapons' During Assault on City of Fallujah
By Peter Popham
Independent (UK), 8 November 2005
Powerful new evidence emerged yesterday that the United States dropped massive quantities of white phosphorus on the Iraqi city of Fallujah during the attack on the city in November 2004, killing insurgents and civilians with the appalling burns that are the signature of this weapon.
Ever since the assault, which went unreported by any Western journalists, rumours have swirled that the Americans used chemical weapons on the city.
On 10 November last year, the Islam Online website wrote: "US troops are reportedly using chemical weapons and poisonous gas in its large-scale offensive on the Iraqi resistance bastion of Fallujah, a grim reminder of Saddam Hussein's alleged gassing of the Kurds in 1988."
The website quoted insurgent sources as saying: "The US occupation troops are gassing resistance fighters and confronting them with internationally banned chemical weapons."
In December the US government formally denied the reports, describing them as "widespread myths". "Some news accounts have claimed that US forces have used 'outlawed' phosphorus shells in Fallujah," the USinfo website said. "Phosphorus shells are not outlawed. US forces have used them very sparingly in Fallujah, for illumination purposes.
"They were fired into the air to illuminate enemy positions at night, not at enemy fighters."
But now new information has surfaced, including hideous photographs and videos and interviews with American soldiers who took part in the Fallujah attack, which provides graphic proof that phosphorus shells were widely deployed in the city as a weapon.
In a documentary to be broadcast by RAI, the Italian state broadcaster, this morning, a former American soldier who fought at Fallujah says: "I heard the order to pay attention because they were going to use white phosphorus on Fallujah. In military jargon it's known as Willy Pete.
"Phosphorus burns bodies, in fact it melts the flesh all the way down to the bone ... I saw the burned bodies of women and children. Phosphorus explodes and forms a cloud. Anyone within a radius of 150 metres is done for."
Photographs on the website of RaiTG24, the broadcaster's 24-hours news channel, www.rainews24.it, show exactly what the former soldier means. Provided by the Studies Centre of Human Rights in Fallujah, dozens of high-quality, colour close-ups show bodies of Fallujah residents, some still in their beds, whose clothes remain largely intact but whose skin has been dissolved or caramelised or turned the consistency of leather by the shells.
SEE ALSO:
The Fight for Fallujah
Field Artillery Magazine via Daily Kos, March-April 2005
"WP [i.e., white phosphorus rounds] proved to be an effective and versatile munition. We used it for screening missions at two breeches and, later in the fight, as a potent psychological weapon against the insurgents in trench lines and spider holes when we could not get effects on them with HE. We fired 'shake and bake' missions at the insurgents, using WP to flush them out and HE to take them out."

Suicide Bombers Kill at Least 40 in Iraq
AP via NYT, 10 November 2005
Two suicide bombers blew themselves up near a restaurant frequented by Baghdad police, killing at least 33 people and seriously injuring 19, while a car bomb killed seven army recruits in Saddam Hussein's hometown, police said.
The bombers struck at about 9:45 a.m., when officers usually stop by the restaurant for breakfast. Police Maj. Abdel-Hussein Minsef said seven police officers and 26 civilians were killed in the blast and 24 others injured, among them 20 civilians.
The blasts came just before British Foreign Secretary Straw was expected in the country for a meeting with Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari.
Samiya Mohammed, a housewife who lives nearby, said she rushed outside when she heard the explosion.
''I went out to see the restaurant heavily damaged. There was bodies, mostly civilians, and blood everywhere inside the place. This is a criminal act that only targeted and hurt innocent people having their breakfast,'' she said.
There were no Americans in the area, she said.
''I do not understand why most of the time it is the Iraqis who are killed,'' she said.
...The U.S. military reported Wednesday that some Iraqi civilians were killed in Husaybah when a U.S. jet attacked a house used by insurgents last Monday, not realizing noncombatants were also inside.
A Marine statement quoted a local Iraqi as saying insurgents forced their way into the home, killed two residents and then locked remaining family members in a room.
''The group then used the home to launch an attack against Iraqi and U.S. forces clearing the area,'' the statement said. ''Subsequently, the house was destroyed by coalition aircraft.''
Five bodies were found in the rubble, the statement added. A man and a young girl were rescued and evacuated for medical treatment.
Kubba said the military operations were intended to spread the power of the government ahead of the Dec. 15 parliamentary elections and controlling the Iraqi-Syrian borders.

Lobbyist Abramoff Sought $9 Million to Set Bush Meeting
By PHILIP SHENON
NYT, 10 November 2005
The lobbyist Jack Abramoff asked for $9 million in 2003 from the president of a West African nation to arrange a meeting with President Bush and directed his fees to a Maryland company now under federal scrutiny, according to newly disclosed documents.
The African leader, President Omar Bongo of Gabon, met with President Bush in the Oval Office on May 26, 2004, 10 months after Mr. Abramoff made the offer. There has been no evidence in the public record that Mr. Abramoff had any role in organizing the meeting or that he received any money or had a signed contract with Gabon.
White House and State Department officials described Mr. Bush's meeting with President Bongo, whose government is regularly accused by the United States of human rights abuses, as routine. The officials said they knew of no involvement by Mr. Abramoff in the arrangements. Officials at Gabon's embassy in Washington did not respond to written questions.
"This went through normal staffing channels," said Trent Duffy, a White House spokesman, who said the meeting was "part of the president's outreach to the continent of Africa."
A document from Mr. Abramoff's files that was released last week by a Senate committee shows that in the summer of 2003 he pushed to sign President Bongo as a client, even offering to travel to Gabon immediately after an August golfing vacation to Scotland "with the congressmen and senators I take there each year."
The documents also show that Mr. Abramoff and his colleagues drew up a draft contract that called for $9 million in fees to be paid to GrassRoots Interactive, the small Maryland lobbying company that his former colleagues say he controlled.
Documents, including copies of canceled checks, show that millions of dollars flowed through the company's accounts in 2003, the year it was created, including at least $2.3 million to a California consulting firm that used the same address as the law office of Mr. Abramoff's brother, Robert. A separate check for $400,000 was made out to Kay Gold, another Abramoff family company.
Mr. Abramoff, a Republican fund-raiser who once was one of the most powerful lobbyists in Washington, has been indicted in Florida on federal fraud charges. He is also under investigation by a federal grand jury in Washington and two Senate committees.
The grand jury inquiry initially centered on accusations that Mr. Abramoff had defrauded a group of Indian tribes out of tens of millions of dollars in lobbying fees connected to their gambling operations, including steep fees for work that was never performed.

Oil Company Execs Defend Huge Profits
By H. JOSEF HEBERT
AP via LA Times, 9 November 2005
...ExxonMobil, the worlds' largest publicly trade oil company, earned nearly $10 billion in the third quarter. Raymond was joined at the witness table by the chief executives of Chevron Corp., ConocoPhillips, BPAmerica Inc., and Shell Oil Company.
Together the companies earned more than $25 billion in profits in the July-September quarter as the price of crude oil hit $70 a barrel and gasoline surged to record levels after the disruptions of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.
Raymond said the profits are in line with other industries when earnings are compared to the industry's enormous revenues.
But senators pressed Raymond to explain why in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina some ExxonMobil gas station operators complained the company had raised the wholesale price of its gas by 24 cents a gallon in 24 hours. Is that not price gouging? they asked.
Raymond said he could not confirm the specific price increase, but that ExxonMobil had issued a directive in response to the storm disruptions "to minimize the increase in price while at the same time recognizing if we kept the price too low we would quickly run out (of fuel) at the service stations."
"It was a tough balancing act," said Raymond, who said it was not price gouging.
Although only 28 states have price gouging laws, and they vary widely as to implementation, the head of the Federal Trade Commission cautioned against enactment of a federal price gouging law. "Price gouging laws that have the effect of controlling prices likely will do more harm than good" and would be difficult to enforce, FTC Chairman Deborah Platt Majoras told the hearing held jointly by the committees of energy and commerce.
Democrats had wanted the executives to testify under oath, but Republicans rejected the idea. "If I were a witness I would demand to be put under oath," said Sen. Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii. The soaring prices have sent shivers through a Congress worried about political fallout.
Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., made the issue personal, noting that the executives were reaping multimillion-dollar bonuses on top of multimillion-dollar salaries as "working people struggle" to pay for gasoline and face the specter of soaring home heating bills this winter. "Your sacrifice appears to be nothing," Boxer told the executives.
The head of the National Association of Manufacturers, former Michigan Gov. John Engler, criticized lawmakers for the way they handled the hearing.

Attacks at U.S.-Based Hotels in Amman Were Minutes Apart
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN and SUHA MA'AYEH
NYT, 9 November 2005
Terrorist bombs ripped through three hotels in the Jordanian capital, Amman, tonight, killing dozens of people and wounding hundreds more in what appeared to be a coordinated suicide attack, Jordanian officials said.
At least 57 people were killed and more than 300 injured when bombs exploded at a wedding party at the Radisson SAS, the lobby of the Grand Hyatt and outside a Days Inn, Jordanian officials said.
Deputy Prime Minister Marwan Muasher gave varying casualty estimates to CNN, saying at least 53 initially, then as high as 67. Early casualty tolls in such chaotic situations often fluctuate wildly, and it was impossible to know with any confidence just how many people had been killed and injured.

Free Trade No Further
Why you shouldn't expect to see another CAFTA any time soon.
By Robert B. Reich
The American Prospect, 9 November 2005
The Bush administration had hoped to use last weekend’s summit of 34 heads of state of the Western Hemisphere to restart the long-stalled negotiations toward a Free Trade Area of the Americas. But it didn’t turn out that way. Not only was there no agreement, but there wasn’t even agreement on when to resume talks.
What scuttled the summit? Some think it was the grandstanding of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who used the occasion to cement his place as heir to Fidel Castro in the pantheon of Yankee-go-home heroes. But take a closer look and what you see is mounting resistance to free trade in much of Latin America -- in fact, in much of the developing world.
Remember the so-called "Washington Consensus" of the 1990s that promised that trade liberalization would bring growth and prosperity to South America, Asia, and elsewhere? The Clinton administration (of which I was a member) pushed it. The International Monetary Fund, basically controlled by the United States, pushed it. Mainstream economists pushed it.
It was as logical as economics 101. Trade is good. Markets are good. The free flow of products and services across borders makes everyone better off.
It hasn’t exactly worked out that way. Yes, developing economies have grown. But the benefits often haven’t trickled down to ordinary people. Most of the beneficiaries are at the top -- among those who own most of the natural resources, most of the land and real estate, and the biggest companies.
Those hurt by trade are often small farmers, local producers, and shopkeepers who find they can no longer compete. And the winners haven’t been especially eager to share their winnings with the losers -- in the form of education, health care, social insurance, and more progressive systems of taxation. As a result, in many of these nations, inequality has widened.

Chalabi Gets a Warm Reception
AP via NYT, 9 November 2005
Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Chalabi offered Wednesday to be questioned by the Senate on his role in prewar Iraq but refused to apologize for fueling allegations that Saddam Hussein had hidden caches of weapons of mass destruction.
Accorded a warm reception by the Bush administration, Chalabi lined up Vice President Dick Cheney and five Cabinet officers, including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, for meetings this week and next.
Chalabi, whose reputation in Washington has soared, fallen and now revived, was welcomed by administration officials whom he briefed on Iraq's reconstruction efforts, particularly on energy and financial issues.
But on Capitol Hill, Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., urged the Senate and House intelligence committees to subpoena Chalabi regarding allegations that he provided false information about Saddam's weapons and leaked U.S. secrets to Iran.
Sens. Durbin, Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., and Patrick J. Leahy, D-Vt., told Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales that Chalabi should be sitting down with FBI investigators rather than meeting with Cabinet secretaries.
''Will the FBI interview Mr. Chalabi during his visit to the United States?'' the senators asked in a letter. ''If not, why not?''
On the House side, Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., wrote Rep. Christopher Shays, R-Conn., that if allegations that Chalabi leaked intelligence to Iran are true, he ''has betrayed U.S. interests, caused incalculable damage to our national security and contributed to the death of more than 2,000 troops.'' Waxman urged Shays to cancel a private briefing with Chalabi and instead hold a public hearing in which Chalabi would testify under oath.
The Senate Intelligence Committee already is looking into how the U.S. intelligence community used information provided by the Iraqi National Congress, with which Chalabi was long affiliated, said a spokeswoman for Sen. Pat Roberts, the committee's chairman.
Chalabi said the meeting [ at the American Enterprise Institute] went ''very well.'' He brushed aside reporters' questions on whether he gave the Bush administration misleading information before the war, saying, ''It's more important to look to the future than to the past.''

Religious right depends on voter apathy...
Evolution Slate Outpolls Rivals
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
NYT, 9 November 2005
All eight members up for re-election to the Pennsylvania school board that had been sued for introducing the teaching of intelligent design as an alternative to evolution in biology class were swept out of office yesterday by a slate of challengers who campaigned against the intelligent design policy.
Among the losing incumbents on the Dover, Pa., board were two members who testified in favor of the intelligent design policy at a recently concluded federal trial on the Dover policy: the chairwoman, Sheila Harkins, and Alan Bonsell.
The election results were a repudiation of the first school district in the nation to order the introduction of intelligent design in a science class curriculum. The policy was the subject of a trial in Federal District Court that ended last Friday. A verdict by Judge John E. Jones III is expected by early January.
"I think voters were tired of the trial, they were tired of intelligent design, they were tired of everything that this school board brought about," said Bernadette Reinking, who was among the winners.
The election will not alter the facts on which the judge must decide the case. But if the intelligent design policy is defeated in court, the new school board could refuse to pursue an appeal. It could also withdraw the policy, a step that many challengers said they intended to take.

9 November 2005

Report Warned on C.I.A.'s Tactics in Interrogation
By DOUGLAS JEHL
NYT, 9 November 2005
A classified report issued last year by the Central Intelligence Agency's inspector general warned that interrogation procedures approved by the C.I.A. after the Sept. 11 attacks might violate some provisions of the international Convention Against Torture, current and former intelligence officials say.
The previously undisclosed findings from the report, which was completed in the spring of 2004, reflected deep unease within the C.I.A. about the interrogation procedures, the officials said. A list of 10 techniques authorized early in 2002 for use against terror suspects included one known as waterboarding, and went well beyond those authorized by the military for use on prisoners of war.
The convention, which was drafted by the United Nations, bans torture, which is defined as the infliction of "severe" physical or mental pain or suffering, and prohibits lesser abuses that fall short of torture if they are "cruel, inhuman or degrading." The United States is a signatory, but with some reservations set when it was ratified by the Senate in 1994.
The report, by John L. Helgerson, the C.I.A.'s inspector general, did not conclude that the techniques constituted torture, which is also prohibited under American law, the officials said. But Mr. Helgerson did find, the officials said, that the techniques appeared to constitute cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment under the convention.

C.I.A. Asks Criminal Inquiry Over Secret-Prison Article
By DAVID JOHNSTON and CARL HULSE
NYT, 9 November 2005
The Central Intelligence Agency has asked the Justice Department to open a criminal investigation to determine the source of a Washington Post article that said the agency had set up a covert prison network in Eastern Europe and other countries to hold important terrorism suspects, government officials said on Tuesday.
The C.I.A.'s request, known as a crimes report or criminal referral, means that the Justice Department will undertake a preliminary review to determine if circumstances justify a criminal inquiry into whether any government official unlawfully provided information to the newspaper. The possibility of this new investigation follows by less than two weeks the perjury and obstruction indictment of I. Lewis Libby Jr., then Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, in a leak case involving other news reporting about a national security issue.
Republican leaders in Congress also jumped into the matter over The Post's article, asking the Intelligence Committees of the House and the Senate on Tuesday to investigate whether classified material had been disclosed. At the same time, the Senate rejected a Democratic call for an independent commission that would conduct an investigation into claims of abuses of detainees in American custody.
Eric C. Grant, a spokesman for the newspaper, said it would have no comment on the new developments concerning its article. A spokesman for the C.I.A. said a crimes report had indeed been sent to the Justice Department but would not otherwise comment.
The front-page article, published last Wednesday, said the agency had set up secret detention centers in as many as eight countries in the last four years.
...the Senate voted, 55 to 43, to reject an outside commission to examine detainee abuse. The measure, introduced by Senator Carl Levin of Michigan as an amendment to a broader military policy bill, was opposed by 54 Republicans and 1 Democrat, Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska.
In debate on the amendment Monday, Mr. Levin said 12 military investigations into prisoner abuse in Iraq, Afghanistan and Cuba had failed to address several important matters, including the role of contractors and Special Operations forces in interrogations.
"The investigations so far have swept critical issues under the rug," Mr. Levin said.

Ambush of Defense Lawyers in Hussein Trial Kills One
By JOHN F. BURNS
NYT, 9 November 2005
The killings compounded a sense that the tribunal is trapped in a crisis that may be hard to resolve. With 2 of the 13 defense lawyers who appeared at the court's opening session slain, and a third badly wounded, the others seem determined to shun the court. The Iraqi Bar Association, saying it spoke for the defense lawyers, said it would uphold a boycott of the trial it announced after the first killing. Two lawyers representing Mr. Hussein said they would demand that the trial be annulled.
Iraqi court officials said the defense lawyers had rebuffed an offer of round-the-clock protection by Interior Ministry bodyguards after the killing of the first defense lawyer on Oct. 20. The chief prosecutor, Jaafar al-Mousawi, said in a telephone interview that the defense lawyers had refused to take telephone calls from court officials, and that the bar association had also rejected the offers.
The Tuesday killings brought the total number of people slain in connection with the court to eight, according to a tally given by officials at the Iraqi High Tribunal, the name given to the court trying Mr. Hussein when it was reconstituted under a new Iraqi statute last month. .
The total includes the first defense lawyer killed, Sadoun al-Janabi, who died less than 36 hours after the trial's opening session. He was the chief lawyer for Awad al-Bandar, the chief judge of Mr. Hussein's revolutionary court.
The dead also include one of the court's judges, shot in his driveway with his son earlier this year; the brother of the chief prosecutor, Jaafar al-Mousawi, working as a driver for the court when he was killed; and three other court officials.
At least a dozen of the court's judges and prosecutors have been given bodyguards, and some travel in armored cars. Some have been housed, with their families, in the heavily protected "green zone" that is the base for the Iraqi government and high-ranking American officials.
..."It only goes to show how cleverly they coordinate these attacks. It is the Interior Ministry that has offered to provide us with protection against these attacks, but it is the ministry itself that is planning the killings."

Secret Military Spending Gets Little Oversight
By Matt Kelley and Jim Drinkard
USA TODAY, 9 November 2005
...Larry Noble, an independent ethics expert with the Center for Responsive Politics, says the timing of the contributions creates the appearance that the company's political giving helped it get taxpayer-funded business from the Pentagon.
It is not illegal for defense industry political action committees or defense industry workers to make campaign donations, unless they are given with the intent of influencing Pentagon contract awards.
Political donations from military contractors are quite common, but timing those donations around contract decisions is not, said Noble, a former chief counsel for the Federal Election Commission.
In a civil lawsuit filed by the U.S. Attorney's office in San Diego on Aug. 25, federal prosecutors accused Cunningham of seeking and receiving a bribe in exchange for helping MZM get government contracts.
...The Pentagon's classified budget for buying goods and services has increased by nearly 48% since 9/11 — from $18.2 billion in fiscal 2002 to $26.9 billion this year — according to figures compiled by the non-partisan Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.
The budget has long been a repository for spending that members of Congress want to shield.
"We had a classified annex to our bill, and we would hide all sorts of things in there," says Jim Currie, who worked as a Democratic staff member at the Senate Intelligence Committee until 1991 and now teaches at the National Defense University. "In theory, any member of Congress could find out about it, but in reality no one ever came in and checked. ... It's a beautiful way to hide something."
Harold Relyea, who studies government secrecy at the Congressional Research Service, says even if lawmakers had the time to study classified programs, most are not inclined to question the pet projects of their colleagues.
And within the defense industry, "there is a coziness that sometimes builds up. You are familiar with the company and their people, it's easy to go back to them" for more work. "It's a new phase of what we used to call the military-industrial complex."
Neither Congress nor the executive branch regularly produces reports on oversight of classified spending. None has been made during the buildup after the 2001 terrorist attacks. Without such investigations, it's impossible to know whether, or to what extent, the classified "black budget" is being abused.
"The amount of effort in looking at classified programs is very small," Ott says. "We don't have the manpower or time to look into this, so we take it on faith that all of the companies working the black world are basically honest."

As Industry Profits Elsewhere, U.S. Lacks Vaccines, Antibiotics
Incentives Are Low to Develop Some Public-Health Drugs
By SCOTT HENSLEY and BERNARD WYSOCKI JR.
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, 8 November 2005 (free this week)
A shortage of flu shots forces millions to go without them. Hospitals report they're running out of antibiotics for tough bugs. The U.S. is called vulnerable to avian flu and terrorists spreading anthrax.
How is it that the U.S., known for its prowess in producing lifesaving drugs and boasting an industry with a stock-market value in the hundreds of billions of dollars, doesn't have the medicine necessary to protect itself from these public-health threats?
The same market forces that reward the production of Lipitor, Viagra and other drugs for chronic conditions have proved a poor way to provide some of the antibiotics and vaccines that the public needs most. By itself, Lipitor, an anticholesterol drug, brings in more revenue -- about $12 billion this year -- than the entire vaccine market.
Publicly traded drug companies are encouraged by their shareholders to make drugs that either are priced in the thousands of dollars per prescription or can be prescribed for years. What turns off drug companies is a product with low profit margins, infrequent use and a high likelihood of liability lawsuits.
Many vaccines and anti-infectives have all these characteristics. Once, these products were bread and butter for drug makers. Today, the number of U.S. vaccine manufacturers is down to a handful from 25 three decades ago. Last year the U.S. was dependent on a single French-owned plant in Pennsylvania for its flu-vaccine supply. Antibiotics comprised just five of 506 new drugs in the pharmaceutical pipeline, according to a 2004 report by the Infectious Diseases Society of America, a nonprofit group pushing for more antibiotics.
In vaccines and antibiotics, the value of a drug is often spread across the entire public. Each person vaccinated against a disease helps everyone by keeping bad bugs out of circulation. Everyone benefits if doctors have plenty of antibiotics in reserve for drug-resistant bacteria, even if only a few people need those drugs now. Economists generally agree that in markets like these government should step in -- just as governments deliver services such as police, roads and national defense because they benefit the public collectively.
...The market for new antibiotics is often small, because specialists often want new drugs just as a backup for exceptional cases. When they find a potent bacteria-killer, doctors nowadays use it sparingly to prevent drug resistance from developing. In 2003, Steven Projan, formerly head of Wyeth's antibacterial research, calculated that the net present value of a drug to treat a chronic condition of the muscles or bones such as osteoporosis was $1.15 billion compared with just $100 million for an injectable antibiotic.
"Making a new antibiotic that doesn't return its investment isn't good for us or for making other drugs. Other diseases need us, too," says Robert Ruffolo, Wyeth's head of research.
'Case of Desperation'
Doctors at Johns Hopkins University, struggling for weapons against superbugs, have dusted off an antibiotic called colistin, first developed in the 1960s but infrequently used because it can damage kidneys and nerves. Relying on improved patient monitoring, Johns Hopkins uses colistin several times a month in drug-resistant cases, according to John Bartlett, chief of the infectious-diseases division at the university's medical school. "It's a case of desperation," Dr. Bartlett says.

It’s the Illicit Economy, Stupid
By Moisés Naím
Foreign Policy, November/December 2005
I recently asked a Swiss banker, “How much harder is it for you to move $50 million and keep it hidden from authorities today than 10 years ago?” He smiled and replied: “The main difference is that now I charge more.”
That’s discouraging. Apparently, the­ anti-money laundering laws that many governments enacted after Sept. 11, 2001, have changed little. Indeed, according to Edwin Truman and Peter Reuter’s study for the Institute for International Economics, in the United States, where these new protections are most stringent, money launderers face only a 5 percent chance of being convicted in any given year. Anywhere else, the chances are even less.
...The explosion of money laundering offers a glimpse of the total size of the world’s illicit economy. Money laundering has grown at least tenfold since 1990, reaching $1 to $1.5 trillion today. Considering that legitimate global trade roughly doubled in the same period, from $5 to $10 trillion, it’s easy to see that the illicit economy is significant, vast, and surging.
Of course, smuggling, trafficking, and international crime have always existed. But this familiarity creates a dangerous complacency because it treats today’s illicit trades largely as irritants, rather than systemic threats. In the 1990s, revolutionary changes in politics and technology reduced the obstacles that distance, borders, and governments imposed on the international movement of goods, money, and people—legal and illegal. These changes allowed regional traffickers to become global traffickers. And, as the reach of criminal enterprises expanded, governments failed to keep up.
Now the criminals are only becoming more sophisticated. Because, as illicit industries become big business, they naturally adopt the strategic thinking of big businesses everywhere: diversify, politicize, and legitimize. First, like any normal corporation, traffickers diversify to reduce the risk of having all their revenues come from just one—in this case, illegal—enterprise. Second, traffickers spend vast sums to gain the support and protection of politicians and government officials. And third, they invest heavily in reputation-enhancing activities—churches, sports teams, art exhibits, social work, and media.
...Criminals have always tried to grow their businesses, influence politicians, gain social respectability, and buy into legitimate enterprises. The difference is that they are now able to do it on a scale and with consequences that are without precedent.

The Other Chomsky
By TAKIS MICHAS
WSJ, 4 November 2005 (free this week)
...The European left loves him for the same reason that the American right hates him: His views on foreign policy, which are virulently critical of the U.S. and Israel. In the eyes of the left, Mr. Chomsky is the champion of the downtrodden who suffer in the "neoliberal world order" championed by the U.S. government and the multinationals. In the eyes of the right, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology linguist is an unashamed apologist for Castro, Pol Pot and generally any Third World tyrant or Middle Eastern terrorist who loves to hate the U.S.
It's a real shame that only Mr. Chomsky's tedious harangues against America get any attention. His body of work deserves more serious treatment. The interesting yet overlooked aspects of his political philosophy cannot easily fit into the left-right dichotomy.
...What makes Mr. Chomsky unique is that his criticism of the capitalist economic order takes its point of departure from the classical liberal thinkers of the Enlightenment. His heroes are not Lenin and Marx but Adam Smith and Wilhelm von Humboldt. He argues that the free market envisaged by these thinkers has never materialized in the world and that what we have gotten instead is a collusion of the state with private interests. Moreover he has repeatedly stressed that the attacks on democracy and the market by the big multinationals go hand in hand. The rich, he claims, echoing Adam Smith, are too keen to preach the benefits of market discipline to the poor while they reserve for themselves the right to be bailed out by the state whenever the going gets rough. As he puts it: "The free market is socialism for the rich. Markets for the poor and state protection for the rich." He has spoken positively about the work of Peruvian liberal economist Hernando De Soto who sees the problem of poverty in the Third World as being related to the fact that the poor usually lack clearly defined property rights.
Another aspect of his political work that has been overlooked by foes and critics alike is Mr. Chomsky's fight against the forces of irrationality that tend to dominate the humanities in the universities. His dismissal of Marxism as a religious "pseudoscience" devoid of all scientific pretensions is one such case. Another is his insistence that the social "sciences" and economics do not meet the methodological criteria that would qualify them as sciences and should thus give up any pretense to being so.
But the brunt of his attacks has been reserved for Parisian "postmodernism," which he considers as the apotheosis of irrational nonsense. He has not hesitated to accuse some of the leading figures of French "postmodernism" (Lacan, Derrida and Foucault) as "charlatans" and "illiterates" while he has characterized their texts as "pretentious" and "gibberish."
Mr. Chomsky has been especially hard on those that try to denigrate the scientific endeavor by either relativizing it or by trying to show that science serves ideological interests of "gender" or "race." "The entire idea of 'white male science' reminds me of 'Jewish physics,'" he writes. "When I read a scientific paper I can't tell whether the author is white or male." Mr. Chomsky has repeatedly deplored the attitude of the academic left "to declare that the project of the Enlightenment is dead and that we should abandon the illusions of science and rationality."
One aspect of Mr. Chomsky's work I do find disagreeable: his tendency to adopt double standards, most glaringly on the issue of academic freedom. Consider his position on academic studies of the "truth" of the Holocaust and the links between race and IQ. In the first instance he argued that the historian has the right to explore, even change, the reality of the Holocaust. Moreover, while he has distanced himself quite categorically from the methods and findings of the revisionist historians, he has nevertheless argued that questioning whether the gas chambers and the genocide of the Jews in Hitler's Germany really happened doesn't by itself constitute an act of anti-Semitism.
On the other hand, however, he has failed to adopt a similarly liberal approach to work on race and IQ. Here he has explicitly questioned the reason for the existence of those studies, claiming that the social costs of finding correlations between racial characteristics and intelligence by far outweigh the questionable scientific merits of any such investigation.
Mr. Chomsky deserves more serious and closer reading from his critics and his supporters. Unfortunately his writings are used to score easy points in vitriolic debates whose aim isn't illumination or understanding. For this Mr. Chomsky, who nurtures his iconic status for the world's left, has also himself to blame.
Mr. Michas, a Greek journalist based in Athens, is writing a book on Noam Chomsky and liberalism.

8 November 2005

President Bush's Walkabout
NYT's editorial, 8 November 2005
After President Bush's disastrous visit to Latin America, it's unnerving to realize that his presidency still has more than three years to run. An administration with no agenda and no competence would be hard enough to live with on the domestic front. But the rest of the world simply can't afford an American government this bad for that long.
In Argentina, Mr. Bush, who prides himself on his ability to relate to world leaders face to face, could barely summon the energy to chat with the 33 other leaders there, almost all of whom would be considered friendly to the United States under normal circumstances. He and his delegation failed to get even a minimally face-saving outcome at the collapsed trade talks and allowed a loudmouthed opportunist like the president of Venezuela to steal the show.
It's amazing to remember that when Mr. Bush first ran for president, he bragged about his understanding of Latin America, his ability to speak Spanish and his friendship with Mexico. But he also made fun of Al Gore for believing that nation-building was a job for the United States military.
...Second terms may be difficult, but the chief executive still has the power to shape what happens. Ronald Reagan managed to turn his messy second term around and deliver - in great part through his own powers of leadership - a historic series of agreements with Mikhail Gorbachev that led to the peaceful dismantling of the Soviet empire. Mr. Bush has never demonstrated the capacity for such a comeback. Nevertheless, every American has a stake in hoping that he can surprise us.
The place to begin is with Dick Cheney, the dark force behind many of the administration's most disastrous policies, like the Iraq invasion and the stubborn resistance to energy conservation. Right now, the vice president is devoting himself to beating back Congressional legislation that would prohibit the torture of prisoners. This is truly a remarkable set of priorities: his former chief aide was indicted, Mr. Cheney's back is against the wall, and he's declared war on the Geneva Conventions.
Mr. Bush cannot fire Mr. Cheney, but he could do what other presidents have done to vice presidents: keep him too busy attending funerals and acting as the chairman of studies to do more harm. Mr. Bush would still have to turn his administration around, but it would at least send a signal to the nation and the world that he was in charge, and the next three years might not be as dreadful as they threaten to be right now.

Wider Scope in Prewar Probe Sought
Democrats on Intelligence Panel Want Right to Question Top Policymakers
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post, 8 November 2005
Democrats on the Senate intelligence committee want the right to interview top policymakers or speechwriters as part of the inquiry into whether the Bush administration exaggerated or misused intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war, Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), the panel's vice chairman, said yesterday.
Rockefeller raised the possibility of issuing subpoenas, and outlined a more wide-ranging approach than the one described by Committee Chairman Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), who said the work would center on comparing public statements by administration officials to intelligence reports circulating at the time. Rockefeller, Roberts and four other senators are to meet today to work out a schedule and process for the committee's review.
"Comparing public statements with what the intelligence community published does not alone tell the story," Rockefeller said in a statement yesterday. "If necessary, we may need to conduct interviews and request supporting documents." Rockefeller warned that "if the committee is denied testimony or documentation, we must be prepared to issue subpoenas."
Rockefeller's recommended approach also appears tougher than the one reflected in an agreement he and Roberts reached last year. At that time, they agreed to schedule the "Phase Two" of their inquiry into prewar intelligence, which would include some of the most sensitive issues, including whether the administration mischaracterized intelligence in public. That inquiry would review public statements, reports and testimony by U.S. government officials and determine whether they "were substantiated by intelligence information," according to a committee statement in February 2004.
It was to be a relatively simple process, as Roberts described it Sunday on CBS's "Face the Nation." "You have the statements over here," he said. "Then you have the intelligence over here. And I want members to roll up their sleeves . . . and say, 'Okay, here's the statement, here's the intelligence. Is it credible?' "
Under last year's agreement, it was unclear whether the committee would consider whether there were contradictory or competing intelligence reports circulating at the time public statements were made that could call them into question, or whether the panel would simply check to see whether each statement could be backed up by at least one piece of intelligence.

The Blame Game
By Stephen M. Walt
Foreign Policy, November/December 2005
Who will be blamed for Iraq? It’s easy for politicians to point fingers at each other. But ultimately, the buck stops at the Oval Office.
Pro-war hawks offer a different set of excuses. Some assert that going to war was the right idea, but the operation was bungled by incompetent leadership in the Pentagon. William Kristol, editor of the conservative Weekly Standard, wants Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to resign, yet the pundit simultaneously claims that the debacle in Iraq vindicates his earlier call for vast increases in U.S. defense spending. In this view, we are losing because we don’t have a big enough army to run an empire and because civilians at the top were never serious about winning.
This excuse suffers from two glaring weaknesses. First, the war may not have been winnable no matter what we did, because Iraq was a deeply divided society from the onset, and occupying powers almost always face fierce resistance. That the occupation was badly executed is indisputable, but it is by no means clear that any occupation would have succeeded. Second, if hawks such as Kristol thought we needed a bigger military to perform a global imperial role, they should have withheld their support until adequate forces were available. Instead, they did everything they could to get us into the regime-changing business as quickly as possible.
For their part, Secretary Rumsfeld and other administration officials blame our problems on Baathist “dead-enders” and radical jihadis, aided and abetted by Syria and Iran. It’s not the Bush administration’s fault we’re losing, we are told; it’s our enemies’ fault. That is no defense at all, of course, because it merely reminds us that the Bush team failed to anticipate what would happen once Saddam was gone and we “owned” Iraq. And given that the Bush administration has repeatedly threatened Syria and Iran with regime change, it is hardly surprising that these regimes are now happy to see us bogged down in Baghdad. U.S. leaders should have considered these possibilities before they went to war, and their failure to do so is hardly a reason to excuse them now.
The most scurrilous alibi, however, blames our difficulties on eroding public support at home. Grieving antiwar mother Cindy Sheehan gets pilloried by right-wing commentators such as Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter, and President Bush declares that Americans who favor withdrawing “are advocating a policy that would weaken the United States.” Similarly, neoconservative pundit Max Boot recently maintained that Iraqi democracy would survive its birth pangs only “if we don’t cut and run prematurely.” So, we are told, “staying the course” will work, unless we are forced to pull out by weak-willed critics back home.
This argument is a clever bit of political jujitsu, because it in effect blames any future defeat on the people who have long contended that the war was unnecessary and unwise. But it is also a bogus excuse. In a democracy, a commander in chief who wants to go to war is responsible for building and maintaining public support for sending our sons and daughters into harm’s way. President Bush sold the war brilliantly before the fighting started, but his sales pitch could not survive the failure to find weapons of mass destruction, the embarrassing revelations of torture at Abu Ghraib, the bungled occupation, the mounting list of dead and wounded, and the rising economic toll. Most of all, this rationale highlights the conspicuous lack of a plausible theory of victory now. We are not losing because our troops lack public support. The war lacks support because we are losing.
If our Iraq adventure ends badly, there will be ample blame to go around. But the buck should stop, as President Harry Truman famously said, in the Oval Office. President Bush was quick to claim credit when things were going well, and he cannot escape blame when things turn ugly. This is President Bush’s war, and America’s failure will be his legacy.

Pentagon Plans Tighter Control of Interrogation
By ERIC SCHMITT and TIM GOLDEN
NYT, 8 November 2005
The Pentagon has approved a new policy directive governing interrogations as part of an effort to tighten controls over the questioning of terror suspects and other prisoners by American soldiers.
The eight-page directive, which was signed without any public announcement last Thursday by Acting Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon R. England, will allow the Army to issue a long-delayed field manual for interrogators that is supposed to incorporate the lessons gleaned from the prisoner-abuse scandals last year.
The Army intends, for example, to ensure that interrogation techniques are approved, up to the highest levels in the Pentagon, that interrogators are properly trained and that personnel in the field are required to report any abuses, Army officials said.
Such changes have been under consideration since the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison were disclosed in April 2004, and reflect continuing problems with abuses by troops in Afghanistan and Iraq since then.
The Senate has approved a measure by Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, i to ban abusive treatment of prisoners in American custody.
The new interrogations directive is also part of a wider effort by the Defense Department, which began last December, to review the treatment of prisoners in military custody.
A second directive, governing all aspects of prisoner detentions, not just interrogation methods, has caused sharp debate within the Bush administration. At issue is whether the Pentagon's broad guidelines on detention should include language from the Geneva Conventions barring the use of "cruel," "humiliating" and degrading treatment.

Deadliest Suicide Bombing Against G.I.'s in Months Kills 4 in Iraq
By SABRINA TAVERNISE and KIRK SEMPLE
NYT, 7 November 2005
A suicide bomber plowed a car loaded with explosives into an American checkpoint here on Monday evening, killing four American soldiers in the single deadliest suicide bombing against an American target in more than four months.
The bomber struck the checkpoint around 5 p.m. on Monday on a road in southern Baghdad, said Specialist Ricardo Branch of the Third Infantry Division, the Army unit that patrols the capital. The military declined to say precisely where the attack took place, or how the bomber managed to penetrate the security barriers that often shield such locations.
In Washington, the Pentagon announced planned troop rotations that would leave a force of at least 92,000 in Iraq through 2008, though officials emphasized that the numbers could change.

Top Secret: Status Of Chalabi Inquiry
Few Signs of Progress Emerge in FBI Case
Involving a Possible Leak of U.S. Intelligence
By SCOT J. PALTROW
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, 7 November 2005 (free this week)
As Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Chalabi arrives this week in Washington for talks, there is little sign of progress in a federal investigation of allegations that he once leaked U.S. intelligence secrets to Iran.
More than 17 months after then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice publicly promised a full criminal inquiry, the Federal Bureau of Investigation hasn't interviewed Mr. Chalabi himself or many current and former U.S. government officials thought likely to have information related to the matter, according to lawyers for several of these individuals and others close to the case.
The investigation of Mr. Chalabi, who had been a confidant of senior Defense Department officials before the war in Iraq, remains in the hands of the FBI, with little active interest from local federal prosecutors or the Justice Department, these people said. There also has been no grand-jury involvement in the case.
The investigation centers on allegations that one or more U.S. officials in early 2004 leaked intelligence to Mr. Chalabi, including the fact that the U.S. had broken a crucial Iranian code, and that Mr. Chalabi in turn had passed the information to the Baghdad station chief of Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security. The assertions about Mr. Chalabi's involvement came after U.S. intelligence agencies intercepted a cable from the station chief back home to Iran, detailing what the chief claimed was a conversation with Mr. Chalabi about the broken code.
Former intelligence officials said such a leak could have caused serious damage to U.S. national security. The broken code had enabled U.S. intelligence agencies to monitor covert cable traffic among Iranian operatives around the world. The encrypted cable traffic was a main source of information on Iranian operations inside Iraq. The leak also threatened U.S. efforts to monitor any Iranian steps to develop nuclear weapons. And there was concern that the disclosure could prompt other countries to upgrade their encryption, making it more difficult for the U.S. to spy on them.

Antiwar Sermon Brings IRS Warning
All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena risks losing its tax-exempt status because of a former rector's remarks in 2004.
by Patricia Ward Biederman and Jason Felch
LA Times via Common Dreams, 7 November 2005
The Internal Revenue Service has warned one of Southern California's largest and most liberal churches that it is at risk of losing its tax-exempt status because of an antiwar sermon two days before the 2004 presidential election.
ACTIVISM: Rector J. Edwin Bacon encourages congregants at All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena to sign petitions and vote. Bacon says the church is careful never to endorse candidates.
(Richard Hartog / LAT)
Rector J. Edwin Bacon of All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena told many congregants during morning services Sunday that a guest sermon by the church's former rector, the Rev. George F. Regas, on Oct. 31, 2004, had prompted a letter from the IRS.
In his sermon, Regas, who from the pulpit opposed both the Vietnam War and 1991's Gulf War, imagined Jesus participating in a political debate with then-candidates George W. Bush and John Kerry. Regas said that "good people of profound faith" could vote for either man, and did not tell parishioners whom to support.
But he criticized the war in Iraq, saying that Jesus would have told Bush, "Mr. President, your doctrine of preemptive war is a failed doctrine. Forcibly changing the regime of an enemy that posed no imminent threat has led to disaster."
On June 9, the church received a letter from the IRS stating that "a reasonable belief exists that you may not be tax-exempt as a church … " The federal tax code prohibits tax-exempt organizations, including churches, from intervening in political campaigns and elections.
The letter went on to say that "our concerns are based on a Nov. 1, 2004, newspaper article in the Los Angeles Times and a sermon presented at the All Saints Church discussed in the article."
The IRS cited The Times story's description of the sermon as a "searing indictment of the Bush administration's policies in Iraq" and noted that the sermon described "tax cuts as inimical to the values of Jesus."
As Bacon spoke, 1984 Nobel Peace Prize winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a co-celebrant of Sunday's Requiem Eucharist, looked on.
"We are so careful at our church never to endorse a candidate," Bacon said in a later interview.
"One of the strongest sermons I've ever given was against President Clinton's fraying of the social safety net."
Telephone calls to IRS officials in Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles were not returned.

Looted Iraqi Relics Slow To Surface
Some Famous Pieces Unlikely to Reappear
By Guy Gugliotta
Washington Post, 8 November 2005
More than 2 1/2 years after looters sacked Iraq's National Museum in Baghdad, Iraqi authorities and police forces throughout the world are still searching for thousands of stolen items, including a handful of the most famous artifacts in history.
U.S. military sources say forces in Iraq have no systematic way of investigating the missing objects, and in the ongoing insurgency neither U.S. nor Iraqi forces can justify using scarce manpower to guard sites in the countryside, where widespread looting has continued unchecked since the March 2003 U.S. invasion.
Law enforcement organizations worldwide are chasing the lost items, but their representatives said there is no systematic coordination, and they are relying on a shifting set of ad hoc partnerships to bring the thieves to account.
Marine Col. Matthew Bogdanos, charged with recovering the museum treasures in the six months after the fall of Saddam Hussein, eventually counted about 14,000 lost items, of which about 5,500 have been recovered.
Perhaps not surprisingly, only a few high-quality looted pieces have reappeared since the end of 2003. Yet paradoxically, although lower-end artifacts occasionally are placed for auction on the Internet, there has been no serious upsurge in public sales of Iraqi antiquities, either in the United States or Europe.

7 November 2005

And The War Goes On
By BOB HERBERT
NYT, 7 November 2005 (sub only)
...Opposition to the war may be mounting. But the reality of the war, especially the toll of American dead and wounded, fades in and out of the public's consciousness.
There was a rush of articles a couple of weeks ago when the number of deaths of Americans serving in Iraq reached 2,000. But those stories were quickly superseded by Harriet Miers's withdrawal of her nomination to the Supreme Court; President Bush's selection of Samuel Alito to take her place; the indictment of Mr. Libby; the president's address to the nation on the possibility of a bird flu pandemic and so on.
The killing of G.I.'s in Iraq once again took its place as a relatively minor story, meriting in most cases just a brief mention on the inside pages of the major newspapers, and the most cursory coverage on television newscasts.
The death toll has now reached at least 2,035 and, of course, it is climbing. More than 15,000 G.I.'s have been wounded in action. Limbs have been lost. Men and women have been permanently paralyzed, horribly burned, or blinded. Thousands more have been injured in nonhostile incidents, such as accidents, and many have fallen ill.
If the American public could see the carnage in Iraq the way television viewers saw the agony of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, this war would be over. A solution would be found. Imagine watching a couple of soldiers in flames, screaming, as they attempt to escape the burning wreckage of a vehicle hit by a roadside bomb or a rocket-propelled grenade.
For all the talk, neither the administration nor the public has taken the reality of this war seriously enough to do something about it. If the sons and daughters of the privileged were fighting it, we'd be out of Iraq soon enough. But they're not fighting it.
So the war goes on and on.

Pride, Prejudice, Insurance
By PAUL KRUGMAN
NYT, 7 November 2005 (sub only)
General Motors is reducing retirees' medical benefits. Delphi has declared bankruptcy, and will probably reduce workers' benefits as well as their wages. An internal Wal-Mart memo describes plans to cut health costs by hiring temporary workers, who aren't entitled to health insurance, and screening out employees likely to have high medical bills.
These aren't isolated anecdotes. Employment-based health insurance is the only serious source of coverage for Americans too young to receive Medicare and insufficiently destitute to receive Medicaid, but it's an institution in decline. Between 2000 and 2004 the number of Americans under 65 rose by 10 million. Yet the number of nonelderly Americans covered by employment-based insurance fell by 4.9 million.
The funny thing is that the solution - national health insurance, available to everyone - is obvious. But to see the obvious we'll have to overcome pride - the unwarranted belief that America has nothing to learn from other countries - and prejudice - the equally unwarranted belief, driven by ideology, that private insurance is more efficient than public insurance.
Let's start with the fact that America's health care system spends more, for worse results, than that of any other advanced country.
In 2002 the United States spent $5,267 per person on health care. Canada spent $2,931; Germany spent $2,817; Britain spent only $2,160. Yet the United States has lower life expectancy and higher infant mortality than any of these countries.
But don't people in other countries sometimes find it hard to get medical treatment? Yes, sometimes - but so do Americans. No, Virginia, many Americans can't count on ready access to high-quality medical care.
...Taiwan, which moved 10 years ago from a U.S.-style system to a Canadian-style single-payer system, offers an object lesson in the economic advantages of universal coverage. In 1995 less than 60 percent of Taiwan's residents had health insurance; by 2001 the number was 97 percent. Yet according to a careful study published in Health Affairs two years ago, this huge expansion in coverage came virtually free: it led to little if any increase in overall health care spending beyond normal growth due to rising population and incomes.
Before you dismiss Taiwan as a faraway place of which we know nothing, remember Chile-mania: just a few months ago, during the Bush administration's failed attempt to privatize Social Security, commentators across the country - independent thinkers all, I'm sure - joined in a chorus of ill-informed praise for Chile's private retirement accounts. (It turns out that Chile's system has a lot of problems.) Taiwan has more people and a much bigger economy than Chile, and its experience is a lot more relevant to America's real problems.
The economic and moral case for health care reform in America, reform that would make us less different from other advanced countries, is overwhelming. One of these days we'll realize that our semiprivatized system isn't just unfair, it's far less efficient than a straightforward system of guaranteed health insurance.

Bush and His Administration Commit All Seven Deadly Sins
Juan Cole
Informed Comment, 7 November 2005
Pride, Envy, Anger, Laziness, Greed, Gluttony and Lust
SEE ALSO:
Bush and the Seven Deadly Sins
by Mina Hamilton
Dissident Voice, 23 May 2003

Blair's Litany of Failures on Iraq - ambassador's damning verdict
Meyer says PM failed to exert any leverage on Bush and was seduced by US power
Julian Glover and Ewen MacAskill
The Guardian, 7 November 2005
Tony Blair repeatedly passed up opportunities to put a brake on the rush to war in Iraq, a failure that may have contributed to the country's present anarchy, according to Sir Christopher Meyer, Britain's ambassador to Washington at the time, in his book DC Confidential, serialised in the Guardian from today.
Sir Christopher, highly critical of Mr Blair's performance in the run-up to the war, argues the prime minister and his team were "seduced" by the proximity and glamour of US power and reluctant to negotiate conditions with George Bush for Britain's support for the war.
He says Mr Blair failed to exploit his enormous leverage with Mr Bush not only to secure a precious delay but to plan for postwar Iraq. "We may have been the junior partner in the enterprise but the ace up our sleeve was that America did not want to go it alone. Had Britain so insisted, Iraq after Saddam might have avoided the violence that may yet prove fatal to the entire enterprise."
But Mr Blair did not have any appetite for bargaining with Mr Bush, according to Sir Christopher: "Tony Blair chose to take his stand against Saddam and alongside President Bush from the highest of high moral ground. It is the definitive riposte to Blair the Poodle, seduced though he and his team always appeared to be by the proximity and glamour of American power.
"But the high moral ground, and the pure white flame of unconditional support to an ally in service of an idea, have their disadvantages. They place your destiny in the hands of an ally. They fly above the tangled history of Sunni, Shia, Kurd, Turkomen and Assyrian. They discourage descent into the dull detail of tough and necessary bargaining: meat and drink to Margaret Thatcher but, so it seemed, uncongenial to Tony Blair."
The former diplomat accuses Mr Blair of weakness in failing to engage Mr Bush in the "plain-speaking conversation" that needed to take place. "Had Blair told Bush in clear and explicit terms that he would be unable to support a war unless British wishes were met? I doubted it."
The Washington embassy repeatedly advised Downing Street to use its leverage, but was ignored.

Public Voices Dissatisfaction Over Iraq War, Economy
Voter Anger Might Mean An Electoral Shift in '06
By Dan Balz, Shailagh Murray and Peter Slevin
Washington Post. 6 November 2005
One year before the 2006 midterm elections, Republicans are facing the most adverse political conditions of the 11 years since they vaulted to power in Congress in 1994. Powerful currents of voter unrest -- including unhappiness over the war in Iraq and dissatisfaction with the leadership of President Bush -- have undermined confidence in government and are stirring fears among GOP candidates of a backlash.
Interviews with voters, politicians and strategists in four battleground states, supplemented by a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, found significant discontent with the performance of both political parties. Frustration has not reached the level that existed before the 1994 earthquake, but many strategists say that if the public mood further darkens, Republican majorities in the House and Senate could be at risk.

No Evidence of Pressure on Iraq Data, Senator Says
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
NYT, 7 November 2005
With Democrats stepping up their attacks over prewar intelligence on Iraq, the Republican leader of the Senate Intelligence Committee said on Sunday that the panel's initial work had found no evidence of "political manipulation or pressure" in the use of such intelligence.
This week the committee expects to begin circulating among its members draft reports on the question of whether the administration manipulated or distorted intelligence on Iraq in making its case for war, said the chairman, Pat Roberts of Kansas.
Mr. Roberts did not say what the draft reports would conclude. But he did make clear that past work by his committee and other commissions did not point to any evidence that made him believe that intelligence had been distorted.
As part of a report released last year by his committee that found widespread intelligence failures on Iraq's weapons capabilities, "we interviewed over 250 analysts and we specifically asked them: 'Was there any political manipulation or pressure?' Answer: 'No,' " Mr. Roberts said on "Face the Nation" on CBS.
Studies by the independent Robb-Silberman commission, appointed by the president, as well as the similar Butler commission in Britain reached the "same conclusion," said Mr. Roberts, who has been a staunch supporter of the administration's policies on Iraq.

6 November 2005

The FBI's Secret Scrutiny
In Hunt for Terrorists, Bureau Examines Records of Ordinary Americans
By Barton Gellman
Washington Post, 6 November 2005
..."National security letters," created in the 1970s for espionage and terrorism investigations, originated as narrow exceptions in consumer privacy law, enabling the FBI to review in secret the customer records of suspected foreign agents. The Patriot Act, and Bush administration guidelines for its use, transformed those letters by permitting clandestine scrutiny of U.S. residents and visitors who are not alleged to be terrorists or spies.
The FBI now issues more than 30,000 national security letters a year, according to government sources, a hundredfold increase over historic norms. The letters -- one of which can be used to sweep up the records of many people -- are extending the bureau's reach as never before into the telephone calls, correspondence and financial lives of ordinary Americans.
Issued by FBI field supervisors, national security letters do not need the imprimatur of a prosecutor, grand jury or judge. They receive no review after the fact by the Justice Department or Congress. The executive branch maintains only statistics, which are incomplete and confined to classified reports. The Bush administration defeated legislation and a lawsuit to require a public accounting, and has offered no example in which the use of a national security letter helped disrupt a terrorist plot.
The burgeoning use of national security letters coincides with an unannounced decision to deposit all the information they yield into government data banks -- and to share those private records widely, in the federal government and beyond. In late 2003, the Bush administration reversed a long-standing policy requiring agents to destroy their files on innocent American citizens, companies and residents when investigations closed. Late last month, President Bush signed Executive Order 13388, expanding access to those files for "state, local and tribal" governments and for "appropriate private sector entities," which are not defined.
National security letters offer a case study of the impact of the Patriot Act outside the spotlight of political debate. Drafted in haste after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the law's 132 pages wrought scores of changes in the landscape of intelligence and law enforcement. Many received far more attention than the amendments to a seemingly pedestrian power to review "transactional records." But few if any other provisions touch as many ordinary Americans without their knowledge.
...Senior FBI officials acknowledged in interviews that the proliferation of national security letters results primarily from the bureau's new authority to collect intimate facts about people who are not suspected of any wrongdoing.

Hemisphere Meeting Ends Without Trade Consensus
By LARRY ROHTER and ELISABETH BUMILLER
NYT, 6 November 2005
A two-day summit meeting of leaders of 34 Western Hemisphere nations in Argentina, attended by President Bush, broke up Saturday without a clear agreement on when and how to resume stalled talks aimed at achieving a hemispherewide free trade agreement.
Mr. Bush had hoped to persuade his counterparts from Latin America and the Caribbean to deliver a resounding endorsement of the plan, the Free Trade Area of the Americas. But suspicions of American intentions prevailed in the end, and by late Saturday no final communiqué had been issued.
The White House, smarting from the failure of the talks, sought to play down the importance of an agreement.
...Latin America has never spoken with one voice on free trade. Many layers of doubt and dissent are on display here, and the situation may have been worsened by Washington's insistence on an agreement.
On the left are those, led by Venezuela's fiery, populist president, Hugo Chávez, who oppose free trade in any form. Mr. Chávez calls the Free Trade Area of the Americas "an annexationist plan" that would stifle or destroy local industry, roll back social safety nets and labor protections and permanently extend American political domination of the region to the economic realm.
"We have to bury F.T.A.A." because it is the latest manifestation of "an old project of the imperial eagle that from the beginning has wanted to sink its claws" into Latin America, Mr. Chávez said Friday at a rally here of 25,000 people, who chanted anti-Bush and anti-Free Trade Area of the Americas slogans.
In contrast, Brazil and Argentina, the leaders of the Mercosur bloc, the third-largest trading group in the world, do not oppose the concept of free trade, only Washington's version. The Mercosur group, which includes Paraguay and Uruguay, was founded in 1991 to eliminate trade barriers among its members, but also aims to achieve political integration. It covers an area with a population of nearly 250 million and produces more than $1 trillion annually in goods and services.
As large exporters of foodstuffs, Mercosur wants the Bush administration to end billions in subsidies to American agriculture, in return for Latin American concessions on intellectual property rights, financial regulation and market access.
"We are here neither to bury F.T.A.A. nor to resuscitate it," but to see "what are the advantages," Brazil's foreign minister, Celso Amorim, said. "We have no prejudice against trade integration, but we don't want to put something on paper just because it looks nice."

Iraq Sunni Group Blasts Defense Minister
UPI via Informed Comment, 5 November 2005
An Iraqi Sunni group demanded Saturday the dismissal of Defense Minister Sadoun al-Dulaimi for threatening to demolish civilian houses that harbor terrorists.
In a statement, the Iraqi Council for National Dialogue called on the government of Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari to sack Dulaimi after he vowed the Iraqi forces will not hesitate to "demolish their houses on their women's and children's heads, as we did before."
The defense minister made his threats in a local television interview last week, referring to air strikes on four houses last month in the western Anbar province that killed 40 people.
The Sunni group said Dulaimi was "thirsty for Iraqi blood," insisting the joint U.S.-Iraqi military operations in western Iraq were aimed at shedding "more blood of innocent civilians, women and children."
The council said the minister's comment was a confession of committing war crimes and called for his trial as a war criminal in the International Court of Justice.
It added there were more than 200,000 refugees stranded in the Anbar desert with no food and water, and warned of a "humanitarian disaster" as disease spreads among the "homeless people" in the area.
Dulaimi, meanwhile, told reporters in Baghdad Saturday the government insists on "cleaning up Iraq from the satanic terrorists" and vowed that "terrorism in Iraq will end soon."
He made his remarks as 3,500 U.S. and Iraqi troops launched a new offensive, dubbed Operation Steel Curtain, in western Iraq near the Syrian border.
The U.S. military said the operation was to "restore security along the Iraqi-Syrian border and destroy the al-Qaida in Iraq terrorist network operating throughout Husayba," a vast desert area.
['Collective punishment is forbidden to occupying powers by the fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, since the Nazis had used it so extensively.' --Informed Comment]

More evidence of intelligence misuse...
Newly Released Data Undercut Prewar Claims
Source Tying Baghdad, Al Qaeda Doubted
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post, 6 November 2005
In February 2002, the Defense Intelligence Agency questioned the reliability of a captured top al Qaeda operative whose allegations became the basis of Bush administration claims that terrorists had been trained in the use of chemical and biological weapons in Iraq, according to declassified material released by Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.).
Referring to the first interrogation report on al Qaeda senior military trainer Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the DIA took note that the Libyan terrorist could not name any Iraqis involved, any chemical or biological material used or where the training occurred. As a result, "it is more likely this individual is intentionally misleading the debriefers," a DIA report concluded.
In fact, in January 2004 al-Libi recanted his claims, and in February 2004 the CIA withdrew all intelligence reports based on his information. By then, the United States and its coalition partners had invaded Iraq.
Levin, ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he arranged for the material to be declassified by the DIA last month. At the same time that the administration was linking Baghdad to al Qaeda, he said, the DIA and other intelligence agencies were privately raising questions about the sources underlying the claims.
Since then, Levin said in an interview Friday, almost all government intelligence on whether Iraq pursued or possessed weapons of mass destruction has proved faulty. In addition to the allegation of training terrorists loyal to Osama bin Laden, there were government claims that then-Iraq President Saddam Hussein had stocks of chemical and biological weapons, that he had reconstituted his nuclear weapons programs, and that unmanned airborne vehicles posed a threat, Levin said.
He said that he could not be certain that White House officials read the DIA report, but his "presumption" was that someone at the National Security Council saw it because it was sent there.
Administration officials declined to comment for this article.

A shear incapacity for the truth...
The Mysterious Death of Pat Tillman
By FRANK RICH
NYT, 6 November 2005 (sub only)
...This administration just loves to beguile us with a rollicking good story, truth be damned. The propagandistic fable exposed by the leak case - the apocalyptic imminence of Saddam's mushroom clouds - was only the first of its genre. Given that potboiler's huge success at selling the war, its authors couldn't resist providing sequels once we were in Iraq. As the American casualty toll surges past 2,000 and Veterans Day approaches, we need to remember and unmask those scenarios as well. Our troops and their families have too often made the ultimate sacrifice for the official fictions that have corrupted every stage of this war.
If there's a tragic example that can serve as representative of the rest, it is surely that of Pat Tillman, the Arizona Cardinals defensive back who famously volunteered for the Army in the spring after 9/11, giving up a $3.6 million N.F.L. contract extension. Tillman wanted to pay something back to his country by pursuing the enemy that actually attacked it, Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. Instead he was sent to fight a war in Iraq that he didn't see coming when he enlisted because the administration was still hatching it in secret. Only on a second tour of duty was he finally sent into Taliban strongholds in Afghanistan, where, on April 22, 2004, he was killed. On April 30, an official Army press release announcing his Silver Star citation filled in vivid details of his last battle. Tillman, it said, was storming a hill to take out the enemy, even as he "personally provided suppressive fire with an M-249 Squad Automatic Weapon machine gun."
It would be a compelling story, if only it were true. Five weeks after Tillman's death, the Army acknowledged abruptly, without providing details, that he had "probably" died from friendly fire. Many months after that, investigative journalists at The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times reported that the Army's initial portrayal of his death had been not only bogus but also possibly a cover-up of something darker. "The records show that Tillman fought bravely and honorably until his last breath," Steve Coll wrote in The Post in December 2004. "They also show that his superiors exaggerated his actions and invented details as they burnished his legend in public, at the same time suppressing details that might tarnish Tillman's commanders."
This fall The San Francisco Chronicle uncovered still more details with the help of Tillman's divorced parents, who have each reluctantly gone public after receiving conflicting and heavily censored official reports on three Army investigations that only added to the mysteries surrounding their son's death. (Yet another inquiry is under way.) "The administration clearly was using this case for its own political reasons," said Patrick Tillman, Pat Tillman's father, who discovered that crucial evidence in the case, including his son's uniform and gear, had been destroyed almost immediately. "This cover-up started within minutes of Pat's death, and it started at high levels."
His accusations are far from wild. The Chronicle found that Gen. John Abizaid, the top American officer in Iraq, and others in his command had learned by April 29, 2004, that friendly fire had killed their star recruit. That was the day before the Army released its fictitious press release of Tillman's hillside firefight and four days before a nationally televised memorial service back home enshrined the fake account of his death. Yet Tillman's parents, his widow, his brother (who served in the same platoon) and politicians like John McCain (who spoke at Tillman's memorial) were not told the truth for another month.
Why? It's here where we find a repeat of the same pattern that drove the Valerie Wilson leak a year earlier. Faced with unwelcome news - from the front, from whistle-blowers, from scandal - this administration will always push back with change-the-subject stunts (like specious terror alerts), fake news or, as with Joseph Wilson, smear campaigns. Much as the White House was out to bring down Mr. Wilson because he threatened to expose its prewar hype of Saddam's supposed nuclear prowess, so the Pentagon might have been out to delay or rewrite a story that could be trouble when public opinion on the war itself was just starting to plummet.
It was an election year besides. Tillman's death came after a month of solid bad news for America and the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign alike: the publication of Richard Clarke's book about pre-9/11 administration counterterrorism fecklessness, the savage stringing up of the remains of American contractors in Falluja, the eruption of Sunni and Shiite insurgencies in six Iraqi cities, the first publication of illicit photos of flag-draped coffins. In the days just after Tillman's death, "60 Minutes II" first broadcast the Abu Ghraib photos, Ted Koppel read the names of the war's fallen on "Nightline," and the Pentagon's No. 2, the Iraqi war architect Paul Wolfowitz, understated by more than 200 the number of American casualties to date (722) in an embarrassing televised appearance before Congress.
Against this backdrop, it would not do to have it known that the most famous volunteer of the war might have been a victim of gross negligence or fratricide. Though Tillman himself was so idealistic that he refused publicity of any kind when in the Army, he was exploited by the war's cheerleaders as a recruitment lure and was needed to continue in that role after his death. (Even though he was adamantly against the Iraq war, according to friends and relatives interviewed by The Chronicle.)
"They blew up their poster boy," Patrick Tillman told The Post; he is convinced that "all the people in positions of authority went out of their way to script" the fake narrative (or, as he puts it, "outright lies") that followed. Pat Tillman's mother, Mary Tillman, was offended to discover that even President Bush wanted a cameo role in this screenplay: she told The Post that he had offered to tape a memorial to her son for a Cardinals game that would be televised shortly before Election Day. (She said no.)
In an interview with The Arizona Republic, Mary Tillman added: "They could have told us upfront that they were suspicious that it was a fratricide but they didn't. They wanted to use him for their purposes. It was good for the administration. It was before the elections. It was during the prison scandal. They needed something that looked good, and it was appalling that they would use him like that."
Appalling but consistent. The Pentagon has often failed to give the troops what they need to fight the war in Iraq, from proper support in manpower and planning at the invasion's outset to effective armor for battle to adequately financed health care for those who make it home. But when it comes to using troops in the duplicitous manner that Mary Tillman describes, the sky's the limit.
Pat Tillman's case is itself a replay of the fake "Rambo" escapades ascribed to Pfc. Jessica Lynch a year earlier, just when Operation Iraqi Freedom showed the first tentative signs of trouble and the Pentagon needed a feel-good distraction. As if to echo Mary Tillman, Ms. Lynch told Time magazine this year, "I was used as a symbol." But the troops aren't just used as symbols for the commander in chief's political purposes. They are also drafted to serve as photo-op props and extras, whether in an extravaganza like "Mission Accomplished" or a throwaway dog-and-pony show like the recent teleconference in which the president held a "conversation" with soldiers who sounded as spontaneous as the brainwashed G.I.'s in "The Manchurian Candidate."

"Right now the US government is not a credible messenger."
Bush's Bad Business Empire
Making the World Unsafe for Microsoft and Mickey Mouse
By Mark Engler
TomDispatch, 5 November 2005
...When it comes to Iraq, we hear a lot about the government largesse flowing toward Halliburton, Bechtel, and a handful of other favored firms. Less often do we consider the possibility that the administration's "war on terrorism" has been a major business blunder. If you start, though, with the lackluster corporate records of Bush and Cheney, the administration's foreign policy comes into quite a different focus. Even if you believe that the White House is designing its overseas crusade to benefit U.S. corporations, there's no reason to assume that it has been doing so successfully.
Increasingly, the business press is suggesting that corporate leaders, who once hoped the current administration would push the corporate globalization of the Clinton years to new heights, now fear another fate from the international order Bush has created. Tax cuts and deregulation on the domestic front have been obvious bonuses, but otherwise many U.S. multinationals face a troubling scene. The White House's failed CEOs have pursued a global agenda that, at best, benefits a narrow slice of the American business community and leaves the rest exposed to a world of popular resentment and economic uncertainty.
When it comes to the interventions of Bush, Cheney, Condi, and the neocons in the global economy, "at best an average job" might be a charitable judgment, and "messed up big-time" could be closer to reality. Those business people who have yet to join the majority that opposes the president's handling of his war in Iraq -- or the increasing chorus of conservative critics who have begun questioning the administration's foreign policy -- may soon have a long list of reasons to get on the bandwagon, starting with the bottom line.
...The Clinton administration served as a steady advocate for building a cooperative, "rules-based" international economy -- a multilateral order known to critics as "corporate globalization." The Bush administration, while purporting to be interested in issues like "free trade," has offered up a very different set of policies. Aggressive and unilateralist, it has fashioned a new model of "imperial globalization" which has even put multilateral institutions like the World Trade Organization, decried by globalization activists, in jeopardy. Rather than working through such bodies, the current administration has regularly shown intransigence in international negotiations around trade and development; it has focused on tying its aid for other countries directly to its militarist prerogatives; and it has tried to deny war-weary "Old Europe" its traditional role as a junior partner in the globalization endeavor. In the process, it has begun dismantling an international order that served multinational corporations very well in the booming 1990s, and facilitated their rise over the past 30 years.
In short: If Bush is an oil president, he's not a Disney president...
...In December 2004, Jim Lobe of Inter Press Service reported on a survey of 8,000 international consumers released by the Seattle-based Global Market Insite (GMI) Inc. The survey noted that

"one-third of all consumers in Canada, China, France, Germany, Japan, Russia, and the United Kingdom said that U.S. foreign policy, particularly the ‘war on terror' and the occupation of Iraq, constituted their strongest impression of the United States... 'Unfortunately, current American foreign policy is viewed by international consumers as a significant negative, when it used to be a positive,' comments Dr. Mitchell Eggers, GMI's chief operating officer and chief pollster."

Brands the survey identified as particularly at risk at the time included Marlboro cigarettes, America Online (AOL), McDonald's, American Airlines, Exxon-Mobil, Chevron Texaco, United Airlines, Budweiser, Chrysler, Barbie Doll, Starbucks, and General Motors.
More recent assessments have verified these trends. Indeed, in past months, a litany of stories in the financial press featured unnerving questions for business. Typical were the British Financial Times in August (World Turning Its Back on Brand America) and Forbes in September (Is Brand America In Trouble?).

More from the Lying Liars
Josh Marshall
Talking Points Memo. 5 November 2005
Bill Kristol, 11/14/2005: "After all, the bipartisan Silberman-Robb commission found no evidence of political manufacture and manipulation of intelligence." [now a frequent GOP talking point]

Silberman-Robb Commission Report, 3/31/05: "[W]e were not authorized to investigate how policymakers used the intelligence assessments they received from the Intelligence Community. Accordingly, while we interviewed a host of current and former policymakers during the course of our investigation, the purpose of those interviews was to learn about how the Intelligence Community reached and communicated its judgments about Iraq's weapons programs--not to review how policymakers subsequently used that information."

5 November 2005

For Americans, Getting Sick Has Its Price
Survey Says U.S. Patients Pay More, Get Less Than Those in Other Western Nations
By Rob Stein
Washington Post, 4 November 2005
Americans pay more when they get sick than people in other Western nations and get more confused, error-prone treatment, according to the largest survey to compare U.S. health care with other nations.
The survey of nearly 7,000 sick adults in the United States, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Britain and Germany found Americans were the most likely to pay at least $1,000 in out-of-pocket expenses. More than half went without needed care because of cost and more than one-third endured mistakes and disorganized care when they did get treated.
Although patients in every nation sometimes run into obstacles to getting care and deficiencies when they do get treated, the United States stood out for having the highest error rates, most disorganized care and highest costs, the survey found.
"What's striking is that we are clearly a world leader in how much we spend on health care," said Cathy Schoen, senior vice president for the Commonwealth Fund, a private, nonpartisan, nonprofit foundation that commissioned the survey. "We should be expecting to be the best. Clearly, we should be doing better."
Other experts agreed, saying the results offer the most recent evidence that the quality of care in the United States is seriously eroding even as health care costs skyrocket.
"This provides confirming evidence for what more and more health policy thinkers have been saying, which is, 'The American health care system is quietly imploding, and it's about time we did something about it,' " said Lucian L. Leape of the Harvard School of Public Health.
...Americans were also much more likely to report forgoing needed treatment because of cost, with about half saying they had decided not to fill a prescription, to see a doctor when they were sick or opted against getting recommended follow-up tests. About 38 percent of patients in New Zealand reported going without care; the numbers were 34 percent in Australia, 28 percent in Germany, 26 percent in Canada and 13 percent in Britain.
"If that's not a reason for moral outrage, I don't know what is," Leape said.

A Cheney-Libby Conspiracy, Or Worse? Reading Between the Lines of the Libby Indictment
by John Dean
FindLaw.com via Common Dreams, 5 November 2005
In my last column, I tried to deflate expectations a bit about the likely consequences of the work of Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald; to bring them down to the realistic level at which he was likely to proceed. I warned, for instance, that there might not be any indictments, and Fitzgerald might close up shop as the last days of the grand jury's term elapsed. And I was certain he would only indict if he had a patently clear case.
Now, however, one indictment has been issued -- naming Vice President Cheney's Chief of Staff Lewis "Scooter" Libby as the defendant, and charging false statements, perjury and obstruction of justice. If the indictment is to be believed, the case against Libby is, indeed, a clear one.
Having read the indictment against Libby, I am inclined to believe more will be issued. In fact, I will be stunned if no one else is indicted.
Indeed, when one studies the indictment, and carefully reads the transcript of the press conference, it appears Libby's saga may be only Act Two in a three-act play. And in my view, the person who should be tossing and turning at night, in anticipation of the last act, is the Vice President of the United States, Richard B. Cheney.
...It has been reported that Libby's attorney tried to work out a plea deal. But Fitzgerald insisted on jail time, so Libby refused to make a deal. It appears that only Libby, in addition to Cheney, knows what Cheney knew, and when he knew, and why he knew, and what he did with his knowledge.
Fitzgerald has clearly thrown a stacked indictment at Libby, laying it on him as heavy as the law and propriety permits. He has taken one continuous false statement, out of several hours of interrogation, and made it into a five-count indictment. It appears he is trying to flip Libby - that is, to get him to testify against Cheney -- and not without good reason. Cheney is the big fish in this case.
Will Libby flip? Unlikely. Neither Cheney nor Libby (I believe) will be so foolish as to crack a deal. And Libby probably (and no doubt correctly) assumes that Cheney - a former boss with whom he has a close relationship -- will (at the right time and place) help Libby out, either with a pardon or financially, if necessary. Libby's goal, meanwhile, will be to stall going to trial as long as possible, so as not to hurt Republicans' showing in the 2006 elections.
So if Libby can take the heat for a time, he and his former boss (and friend) may get through this. But should Republicans lose control of the Senate (where they are blocking all oversight of this administration), I predict Cheney will resign "for health reasons."

Bush Orders Staff to Attend Ethics Briefings
White House Counsel to Give 'Refresher' Course
By Jim VandeHei
Washington Post, 5 November 2005
President Bush has ordered White House staff to attend mandatory briefings beginning next week on ethical behavior and the handling of classified material after the indictment last week of a senior administration official in the CIA leak probe.
According to a memo sent to aides yesterday, Bush expects all White House staff to adhere to the "spirit as well as the letter" of all ethics laws and rules. As a result, "the White House counsel's office will conduct a series of presentations next week that will provide refresher lectures on general ethics rules, including the rules of governing the protection of classified information," according to the memo, a copy of which was provided to The Washington Post by a senior White House aide.

Court Nominee Has Paper Trail Businesses Like
By STEPHEN LABATON
NYT, 5 November 2005
Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. has reliably favored big-business litigants as he has pushed the federal appeals court in Philadelphia in a conservative direction.
His extensive paper trail of 15 years of opinions reveals a jurist deeply skeptical of claims against large corporations. A review of dozens of business cases in which Judge Alito has written majority or dissenting opinions or cast the decisive vote shows that, with few exceptions, he has sided with employers over employees in discrimination lawsuits and in favor of corporations over investors in securities fraud cases.
Judge Alito, President Bush's choice to replace Sandra Day O'Connor on the Supreme Court, cast the decisive vote in a case involving a major steel company, and in another involving a large chemical maker, over environmentalists in pollution cases.
He has set asi