BushWhackedUSA-Speaking Truth in a "Post-Truth" America

Surveying a Corporate Dominated, Rightwing Christian,
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ARCHIVE
1-15 January 2005

Items are selected from print and broadcast media, blogs,
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National

A Bloody Mess: How has Britain’s privatization scheme worked out? Well, today, they’re looking enviably upon Social Security.
By Norma Cohen
The American Prospect, February issue
A conservative government sweeps to power for a second term. It views its victory as a mandate to slash the role of the state. In its ﬁrst term, this policy objective was met by cutting taxes for the wealthy. Its top priority for its second term is tackling what it views as an enduring vestige of socialism: its system of social insurance for the elderly. Declaring the current program unaffordable in 50 years’ time, the administration proposes the privatization of a portion of old-age beneﬁts. In exchange for giving up some future beneﬁts, workers would get a tax rebate to put into an investment account to save for their own retirement. George W. Bush’s America in 2005? Think again. The year was 1984, the nation was Britain, the government was that of Margaret Thatcher -- and the results have been a disaster that America is about to emulate.

Proposal by the President's Social Security Commission Whittles Away at Income Support
Economic Policy Institute, 12 January 2005
The White House has signaled that it supports the key proposal by President Bush's 2001 commission on Social Security to freeze future growth in Social Security benefits by fixing them to current living standards.1 This is a change from the current law, which increases benefits to reflect the life time earnings of future workers. Because American workers' pay will most likely grow faster than inflation in the future, this change would steadily lower the share of income that Social Security would replace for retirees, the disabled, and survivors. This proposal would cut the replacement rate in half in 70 years, a major blow to low- and middle-income workers. Since the Social Security program was enacted 70 years ago, benefits have increased as the United States has become more productive and prosperous. Congress made ad hoc increases prior to the 1970s, but since 1977 there has been a sensible formula that uses average wage gains over one's lifetime to establish the initial level for retirement, disability, and survivor benefits. The current method effectively maintains a stable income replacement ratio over time. By adjusting only for inflation and not for wage growth, the proposed new method for calculating benefits would effectively freeze future benefits at today's level.

BUSH'S HOUSE OF CARDS:
The Privatization Fraud
Special Report in The American Prospect

A Gift for Drug Makers
By BOB HERBERT
NYT, 14 January 2005
Vioxx, Celebrex, Prozac. ...
With all the problems and the bad publicity that drug companies have been facing recently, you might think that this would not be a good time for the Bush administration to toss yet another bonanza their way. But the administration is like an ardent lover in its zeal to shower the rich and powerful with every imaginable benefit. So tucked like a gleaming diamond in proposed legislation to curb malpractice lawsuits is a provision that would give an unconscionable degree of protection to firms responsible for drugs or medical devices that turn out to be harmful. The provision would go beyond caps on certain damages. It would actually prohibit punitive damages in cases in which the drug or medical device had received Food and Drug Administration approval. We know the F.D.A. has failed time and again to ensure that unsafe drugs are kept off the market. To provide blanket legal protection against punitive damages in such cases is both unwarranted and dangerous. ...The drug companies have an incredible racket going, as Marcia Angell, the former editor in chief of The New England Journal of Medicine, documents in her book "The Truth About the Drug Companies." "Now primarily a marketing machine to sell drugs of dubious benefit," she wrote, "this industry uses its wealth and power to co-opt every institution that might stand in its way, including the U.S. Congress, the Food and Drug Administration, academic medical centers, and the medical profession itself. (Most of its marketing efforts are focused on influencing doctors, since they must write the prescriptions.)" Among those co-opted is the president himself. Nothing's too good for the drug companies. If ordinary Americans got the same sweet treatment from this administration as the great pharmaceutical houses, we'd all be in a much better place.

All the President's Newsmen
FRANK RICH
NYT, 16 January 2005
...perhaps the most fascinating Williams TV appearance took place in December 2003, the same month that he was first contracted by the government to receive his payoffs. At a time when no one in television news could get an interview with Dick Cheney, Mr. Williams, of all "journalists," was rewarded with an extended sit-down with the vice president for the Sinclair Broadcast Group, a nationwide owner of local stations affiliated with all the major networks. In that chat, Mr. Cheney criticized the press for its coverage of Halliburton and denounced "cheap shot journalism" in which "the press portray themselves as objective observers of the passing scene, when they obviously are not objective." This is a scenario out of "The Manchurian Candidate." Here we find Mr. Cheney criticizing the press for a sin his own government was at that same moment signing up Mr. Williams to commit. The interview is broadcast by the same company that would later order its ABC affiliates to ban Ted Koppel's "Nightline" recitation of American casualties in Iraq and then propose showing an anti-Kerry documentary, "Stolen Honor," under the rubric of "news" in prime time just before Election Day. (After fierce criticism, Sinclair retreated from that plan.) Thus the Williams interview with the vice president, implicitly presented as an example of the kind of "objective" news Mr. Cheney endorses, was in reality a completely subjective, bought-and-paid-for fake news event for a broadcast company that barely bothers to fake objectivity and both of whose chief executives were major contributors to the Bush-Cheney campaign. The Soviets couldn't have constructed a more ingenious or insidious plot to bamboozle the citizenry. Ever since Mr. Williams was exposed by USA Today, he has been stonewalling all questions about what the Bush administration knew of his activities and when it knew it. ... is Mr. Williams merely the first one of his ilk to be exposed? Every time this administration puts out fiction through the news media - the "Rambo" exploits of Jessica Lynch, the initial cover-up of Pat Tillman's death by friendly fire - it's assumed that a credulous and excessively deferential press was duped. But might there be more paid agents at loose in the media machine? In response to questions at the White House, Mr. McClellan has said that he is "not aware" of any other such case and that he hasn't "heard" whether the administration's senior staff knew of the Williams contract - nondenial denials with miles of wiggle room. Mr. Williams, meanwhile, has told both James Rainey of The Los Angeles Times and David Corn of The Nation that he has "no doubt" that there are "others" like him being paid for purveying administration propaganda and that "this happens all the time." So far he is refusing to name names - a vow of omertà all too reminiscent of that taken by the low-level operatives first apprehended in that "third-rate burglary" during the Nixon administration.
If CNN, just under new management, wants to make amends for the sins of "Crossfire," it might dispatch some real reporters to find out just which "others" Mr. Williams is talking about and to follow his money all the way back to its source.

The British Evasion
By PAUL KRUGMAN
NYT, 14 January 2005
We must end Social Security as we know it, the Bush administration says, to meet the fiscal burden of paying benefits to the baby boomers. But the most likely privatization scheme would actually increase the budget deficit until 2050. By then the youngest surviving baby boomer will be 86 years old. Even then, would we have a sustainable retirement system? Not bloody likely. Pardon my Britishism, but Britain's 20-year experience with privatization is a cautionary tale Americans should know about. The U.S. news media have provided readers and viewers with little information about how privatization has worked in other countries. Now my colleagues have even fewer excuses: there's an illuminating article on the British experience in The American Prospect, www.prospect.org, by Norma Cohen, a senior corporate reporter at The Financial Times who covers pension issues. Her verdict is summed up in her title: "A Bloody Mess." Strong words, but her conclusions match those expressed more discreetly in a recent report by Britain's Pensions Commission, which warns that at least 75 percent of those with private investment accounts will not have enough savings to provide "adequate pensions."
SEE ALSO:
Overhauling Retirement Is Worth Risk, Cheney Says
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
NYT, 14 January 2005
The vice president did not address what is emerging as the central political issue of the Social Security debate: whether the creation of investment accounts would be accompanied by a substantial reduction in the guaranteed benefits paid by the government to future retirees. In recent weeks, the White House has signaled its support for changing the way the system would set the initial level of benefits for future retirees, a shift that would reduce initial benefits to levels well below what is promised by current law.

Judge in Georgia Orders Anti-Evolution Stickers Removed From Textbooks
By ARIEL HART
NYT, 14 January 2005
A federal judge in Georgia has ruled that schools in Cobb County must remove from science textbooks stickers that say "evolution is a theory, not a fact" that should be "approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered." The judge, Clarence Cooper of Federal District Court, wrote that the stickers, perhaps inadvertently, "convey a message of endorsement of religion," violating the First Amendment's separation of church and state and the Georgia Constitution's prohibition against using public money to aid religion.

President of Fabricated Crises
By Harold Meyerson
Washington Post, 12 January 2005
Some presidents make the history books by managing crises. Lincoln had Fort Sumter, Roosevelt had the Depression and Pearl Harbor, and Kennedy had the missiles in Cuba. George W. Bush, of course, had Sept. 11, and for a while thereafter -- through the overthrow of the Taliban -- he earned his page in history, too. But when historians look back at the Bush presidency, they're more likely to note that what sets Bush apart is not the crises he managed but the crises he fabricated. The fabricated crisis is the hallmark of the Bush presidency. To attain goals that he had set for himself before he took office -- the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the privatization of Social Security -- he concocted crises where there were none.

White House Fought New Curbs on Interrogations, Officials Say
By DOUGLAS JEHL and DAVID JOHNSTON
NYT, 13 January 2005
At the urging of the White House, Congressional leaders scrapped a legislative measure last month that would have imposed new restrictions on the use of extreme interrogation measures by American intelligence officers, Congressional officials say. The defeat of the proposal affects one of the most obscure arenas of the war on terrorism, involving the Central Intelligence Agency's secret detention and interrogation of top terror leaders like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, and about three dozen other senior members of Al Qaeda and its offshoots. The Senate had approved the new restrictions, by a 96-to-2 vote, as part of the intelligence reform legislation. They would have explicitly extended to intelligence officers a prohibition against torture or inhumane treatment, and would have required the C.I.A. as well as the Pentagon to report to Congress about the methods they were using. But in intense closed-door negotiations, Congressional officials said, four senior members from the House and Senate deleted the restrictions from the final bill after the White House expressed opposition. In a letter to members of Congress, sent in October and made available by the White House on Wednesday in response to inquiries, Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, expressed opposition to the measure on the grounds that it "provides legal protections to foreign prisoners to which they are not now entitled under applicable law and policy." Earlier, in objecting to a similar measure in a Senate version of the military authorization bill, the Defense Department sent a letter to Congress saying that the department "strongly urges the Senate against passing new legislation concerning detention and interrogation in the war on terrorism" because it is unnecessary. The Senate restrictions had not been in House versions of the military or intelligence bills.

Court Rejects Mandatory Sentencing Rules
Pete Williams
MSNBC, 13 January 2005
A divided U.S. Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that federal judges no longer have to abide by controversial 18-year-old mandatory sentencing guidelines, saying that the consideration of factors not presented to jurors violates a defendant’s right to a fair trial.

New FBI Software May Be Unusable
A central feature of the agency's $581-million computer overhaul aimed at coordinating anti-terrorism efforts is reportedly inadequate.
By Richard B. Schmitt
LA Times, 13 January 2005
A new FBI computer program designed to help agents share information to ward off terrorist attacks may have to be scrapped, the agency has concluded, forcing a further delay in a four-year, half-billion-dollar overhaul of its antiquated computer system.

Bush Urges Rigorous High School Testing
By ANNE E. KORNBLUT
NYT, 13 January 2005
President Bush called on Wednesday for a rigorous high school testing program in math and reading that would be the major education initiative of his second term. The effort would expand the No Child Left Behind Act by $1.5 billion as it tries to rescue lagging students in the upper grades. Nearly four years after his first successful campaign to impose federal standards on elementary and intermediate schools, Mr. Bush called on Congress to extend similar tests to high schools. He described poor performance among high school students as a "warning and a call to action" and prescribed testing for freshmen, sophomores and juniors as a solution.

Limbaugh dumped for liberal show
By DANIEL BARLOW
Rutland Herald, 12 January 2005
A southern Vermont-based radio station will trade in the rhetoric of Rush Limbaugh and other conservative talk show hosts for the liberal commentary of Air America next week.

Spotlight Falls on Social Security Waverers
By Holly Yeager in Washington
Financial Times, 12 January 2005
As President George W. Bush steps up his campaign to overhaul Social Security, pressure is mounting on a small cluster of Democrats who will be decisive in the contentious debate. Mr Bush is working hard to ensure broad support from within his own party, where sharp divisions have begun to emerge. But at the same time, Democrats in the Senate who might be persuaded to back the president's plan dubbed the “Fainthearted Faction” by one opponent of the reforms are being monitored for any signs of their intentions.

Some Questions, Mr. Chertoff
What senators should ask Bush's new choice for homeland security secretary before they confirm him.
By Fred Kaplan
Slate, 11 January 2005
President Bush ignored our advice, and that's fine. (What else is new?) But by picking Chertoff, the president seems to be signaling that he views homeland security as an adjunct of the Justice Department. That's a part of its business, but not the most vital one.

Final Verdict: Bush's "Jobs and Growth Plan" a Resounding Failure
Job Watch, 7 January 2005
The Bush Administration promised that the passage of its "Jobs and Growth" tax cut plan would result in 5.5 million new jobs in 18 months. That time has now come and gone, and the economy has not only failed to generate the extra jobs promised by the tax cuts, but it didn't even create the jobs that were projected if the "Jobs and Growth Plan" hadn’t been adopted. The Bush Administration called the tax cut package, which took effect in July 2003, its "Jobs and Growth Plan." The president's economics staff, the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA, see background documents), projected that the plan would result in the creation of 5.5 million jobs by the end of 2004—in other words, 306,000 new jobs in each of the 18 months from June 2003 to December 2004. Even without the passage of Bush's tax cut plan, the CEA projected that the economy would generate 228,000 jobs a month. With the newly released payroll employment data for December 2004 it is now possible to assess whether the administration's tax cut strategy produced the employment growth that was projected...

Soros Group Raises Stakes in Battle with US Neo-Cons
By James Harding in Washington
Financial Times, 11 January 2005
A group of billionaire philanthropists are to donate tens of millions more dollars to develop progressive political ideas in the US in an effort to counter the conservative ascendancy. George Soros, who made his fortune in the hedge fund industry; Herb and Marion Sandler, the California couple who own a multi-billion-dollar savings and loan business; and Peter Lewis, the chairman of an Ohio insurance company, donated more than $63m (£34m) in the 2004 election cycle to organisations seeking to defeat George W. Bush. At a meeting in San Francisco last month, the left-leaning billionaires agreed to commit an even larger sum over a longer period to building institutions to foster progressive ideas and people. Far from being disillusioned by the defeat of John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate, the billionaires have resolved to invest further in the intellectual future of the left, one person involved said. Their commitment to provide new money comes amid criticism of the efforts of high-profile donors such as the Hungarian-born Mr Soros to sway US politics as well as doubts about the effectiveness of record funding in helping the Democratic cause in 2004.

Most extravagant inauguration ever, undermines 'War On Terror'
U.S. Tells D.C. to Pay Inaugural Expenses
Other Security Projects Would Lose $11.9 Million
By Spencer S. Hsu
Washington Post, 11 January 2005
D.C. officials said yesterday that the Bush administration is refusing to reimburse the District for most of the costs associated with next week's inauguration, breaking with precedent and forcing the city to divert $11.9 million from homeland security projects. Federal officials have told the District that it should cover the expenses by using some of the $240 million in federal homeland security grants it has received in the past three years -- money awarded to the city because it is among the places at highest risk of a terrorist attack.

In GOP, Resistance On Social Security
Bush Plan Raises Fear of Voter Anger
By Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen
Washington Post, 11 January 2005
Many Republicans are expressing reservations about the political wisdom of President Bush's vision for restructuring Social Security, as the White House today intensifies its campaign to restructure the entitlement program for the retired and disabled. Bush, who relishes challenging the conventional wisdoms of Washington, has privately counseled Republicans that partially privatizing Social Security will be a boon for the GOP and has urged skeptics to hold fire until he builds a public case for change. But several influential Republicans are warning that Bush's plan could backfire on the party in next year's elections, especially if the plan includes cuts in benefits. Most alarming to White House officials, some congressional Republicans are panning the president's plan -- even before it is unveiled. "Why stir up a political hornet's nest . . . when there is no urgency?" said Rep. Rob Simmons (Conn.), who represents a competitive district. "When does the program go belly up? 2042. I will be dead by then."

As White House Begins Social Security Push, Critics Claim Exaggeration
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS
NYT, 10 January 2005
In the first phase of a strategy to build support for overhauling Social Security, White House officials are planning to describe the retirement program as a system in "crisis" whose promises to younger workers are a "fiction." Beginning Tuesday, when President Bush will hold a public meeting with people worried about their retirement, White House officials plan to hammer home the message that Social Security is "headed toward an iceberg" and will collapse as baby boomers enter retirement. "We need to establish in the public mind a key fiscal fact: right now we are on an unsustainable course," wrote Peter Wehner, a White House political strategist, in a memorandum to conservative groups last week. "The reality needs to be seared into the public consciousness." But opponents of Mr. Bush's approach say he is greatly exaggerating the problems to sell his plan to scale back Social Security, the government's biggest and oldest social program. Outside analysts say Social Security's long-term financial gap, which the government estimates to be $3.7 trillion over 75 years, is smaller than the projected cost of Mr. Bush's tax cuts or the Medicare prescription drug program that he pushed through Congress in 2003. The Social Security trust fund has accumulated more than $1.5 trillion in reserves, held in Treasury bonds. Even if no changes are made, the government's actuaries predict that the program will be able to pay full benefits until at least 2042 and at least 70 percent of benefits after that.

Absence of integrity...
U.S. Paid Journalist to Tout Law
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post via Seattle Times, 8 January 2004
The Education Department paid commentator Armstrong Williams $241,000 to help promote President Bush's No Child Left Behind law on the air, an arrangement that Williams acknowledged yesterday involved "bad judgment" on his part. In taking the money, funneled through a public-relations firm, Williams produced and aired a commercial on his syndicated television and radio shows featuring Education Secretary Rod Paige, touted Bush's education policy and urged other programs to interview Paige. He didn't disclose the contract when talking about the law during cable-television appearances or writing about it in his newspaper column.
The Education Department contract, first reported yesterday by USA Today, increased criticism of the administration's aggressive approach to news management. The department already has paid public-relations firm Ketchum $700,000 to rate journalists on how positively or negatively they report on No Child Left Behind, and to produce a video release on the law that was used by some television stations as if it were real news. Other government agencies also have distributed such prepackaged videos, a practice that congressional auditors have described as illegal in some cases. ...Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., ranking Democrat on the House education committee, said the Williams contract "is propaganda, it's unethical, it's dangerous and it's illegal. ... This is worthy of Pravda." Committee Chairman John Boehner, R-Ohio, agreed to join Miller in requesting an inspector general's investigation, a spokesman said. Miller cited two Government Accountability Office opinions that the administration violated federal law with video news releases. The GAO in May criticized the Health and Human Services Department for using the technique to promote Medicare's new prescription-drug benefit. It criticized the Office of National Drug Control Policy this week for distributing similar reports with a contractor posing as a journalist. Miller, joined by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and other Democrats, asked Bush in a letter to put an end to "covert propaganda." In a separate letter, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, and Sens. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., and Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., asked the president to recover the money paid to Williams. "We believe that the act of bribing journalists to bias their news in favor of government policies undermines the integrity of our democracy," they wrote.
SEE ALSO:
AUDIO LINK
Pundit: Contract Tied to Coverage Promoting Administration
NPR'S All Things Considered

SEE ALSO:
Armstrong Williams Column Axed by TMS
By Dave Astor
Editor and Publisher, 7 January2005
New York Tribune Media Services (TMS) tonight terminated its contract with columnist Armstrong Williams, effective immediately. But Williams told E&P that he plans to continue his feature via self-syndication.
TMS' action came after USA Today reported this morning that Williams had accepted $240,000 from the Bush administration to promote the No Child Left Behind education-reform law on his TV and radio shows. E&P subsequently reported that Williams had also written about NCLB in his newspaper column at least four times last year.
In a statement, TMS said: "[A]ccepting compensation in any form from an entity that serves as a subject of his weekly newspaper columns creates, at the very least, the appearance of a conflict of interest. Under these circumstances, readers may well ask themselves if the views expressed in his columns are his own, or whether they have been purchased by a third party." (Full text of the statement is available at the end of this story.)

Oh, no. It's very clear...
C.I.A. Report Finds Its Officials Failed in Pre-9/11 Efforts
By DOUGLAS JEHL
NYT, 7 January 2005
An internal investigation by the Central Intelligence Agency has concluded that officials who served at the highest levels of the agency should be held accountable for failing to allocate adequate resources to combating terrorism before the Sept. 11 attacks, according to current and former intelligence officials. The conclusion is spelled out in a near-final version of a report by John Helgerson, the agency's inspector general, who reports to Congress as well as to the C.I.A. Among those most sharply criticized in the report, the officials said, are George J. Tenet, the former intelligence chief, and James L. Pavitt, the former deputy director of operations. Both Mr. Tenet and Mr. Pavitt stepped down from their posts last summer. The findings, which are still classified, pose a quandary for the C.I.A. and the administration, particularly since President Bush awarded a Medal of Freedom to Mr. Tenet last month. It is not clear whether either the agency or the White House has the appetite to reprimand Mr. Tenet, Mr. Pavitt or others. ...The vast bulk of Mr. Helgerson's report was completed last summer, intelligence officials said, but its completion was delayed while the document was reviewed first by John E. McLaughlin, who became acting intelligence chief after Mr. Tenet's departure, and then Porter J. Goss, who became director of central intelligence in September.

Bush Urges Congress to Tackle Issue of Rise in Asbestos Lawsuits
By MARIA NEWMAN
NYT, 7 January 2005
The American Trial Lawyers Association said on its Web site today that 300,000 people had died from asbestos contamination, and projected that a similar number would die over the next four decades. The group's president, Todd A. Smith, said Mr. Bush was "attacking the legal rights of millions of Americans. The first step in ending asbestos liability is to stop exposing people to its dangers," Mr. Smith said. "Sadly, we doubt the president will meet with any asbestos victims. Rather, he'll once again meet with the asbestos and insurance industries which are fighting as hard as they can to avoid being held responsible for this national health epidemic."

Bush's Drug Videos Broke Law, Accountability Office Decides
By JOHN FILES
NYT, 7 January 2004
The Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress, said on Thursday that the Bush administration violated federal law by producing and distributing television news segments about the effects of drug use among young people. The accountability office said the videos "constitute covert propaganda" because the government was not identified as the source of the materials, which were distributed by the Office of National Drug Control Policy. They were broadcast by nearly 300 television stations and reached 22 million households, the office said. The accountability office does not have law enforcement powers, but its decisions on federal spending are usually considered authoritative. In May the office found that the Bush administration had violated the same law by producing television news segments that portrayed the new Medicare law as a boon to the elderly. The accountability office was not critical of the content of the video segments from the White House drug office, but found that the format - a made-for-television "story package" - violated the prohibition on using taxpayer money for propaganda. Representative Henry A. Waxman of California, the senior Democrat on the Government Reform Committee, who requested the review, said the use of the mock news segments broke "a fundamental principle of open government."
A spokesman for the drug policy office said the review's conclusions made a "mountain out of a molehill."

We Are All Torturers Now
By MARK DANNER
NYT, 6 January 2005
At least since Watergate, Americans have come to take for granted a certain story line of scandal, in which revelation is followed by investigation, adjudication and expiation. Together, Congress and the courts investigate high-level wrongdoing and place it in a carefully constructed narrative, in which crimes are charted, malfeasance is explicated and punishment is apportioned as the final step in the journey back to order, justice and propriety.
When Alberto Gonzales takes his seat before the Senate Judiciary Committee today for hearings to confirm whether he will become attorney general of the United States, Americans will bid farewell to that comforting story line. The senators are likely to give full legitimacy to a path that the Bush administration set the country on more than three years ago, a path that has transformed the United States from a country that condemned torture and forbade its use to one that practices torture routinely. Through a process of redefinition largely overseen by Mr. Gonzales himself, a practice that was once a clear and abhorrent violation of the law has become in effect the law of the land.
On the other hand, perhaps it is fitting that Mr. Gonzales be confirmed. The system of torture has, after all, survived its disclosure. We have entered a new era; the traditional story line in which scandal leads to investigation and investigation leads to punishment has been supplanted by something else. Wrongdoing is still exposed; we gaze at the photographs and read the documents, and then we listen to the president's spokesman "reiterate," as he did last week, "the president's determination that the United States never engage in torture." And there the story ends.
At present, our government, controlled largely by one party only intermittently harried by a timorous opposition, is unable to mete out punishment or change policy, let alone adequately investigate its own war crimes. And, as administration officials clearly expect, and senators of both parties well understand, most Americans - the Americans who will not read the reports, who will soon forget the photographs and who will be loath to dwell on a repellent subject - are generally content to take the president at his word.

The liberal media in action...
Bush Administration Paid TV Commentator to Promote No Child Left Behind
By Greg Toppo
USA Today, 7 January 2005
Seeking to build support among black families for its education reform law, the Bush administration paid a prominent black pundit $240,000 to promote the law on his nationally syndicated television show and to urge other black journalists to do the same. The campaign, part of an effort to promote No Child Left Behind (NCLB), required commentator Armstrong Williams "to regularly comment on NCLB during the course of his broadcasts," and to interview Education Secretary Rod Paige for TV and radio spots that aired during the show in 2004. Williams said Thursday he understands that critics could find the arrangement unethical, but "I wanted to do it because it's something I believe in." The top Democrat on the House Education Committee, Rep. George Miller of California, called the contract "a very questionable use of taxpayers' money" that is "probably illegal." He said he will ask his Republican counterpart to join him in requesting an investigation. The contract, detailed in documents obtained by USA TODAY through a Freedom of Information Act request, also shows that the Education Department, through the Ketchum public relations firm, arranged with Williams to use contacts with America's Black Forum, a group of black broadcast journalists, "to encourage the producers to periodically address" NCLB. He persuaded radio and TV personality Steve Harvey to invite Paige onto his show twice. Harvey's manager, Rushion McDonald, confirmed the appearances. Williams said he does not recall disclosing the contract to audiences on the air but told colleagues about it when urging them to promote NCLB. "I respect Mr. Williams' statement that this is something he believes in," said Bob Steele, a media ethics expert at The Poynter Institute for Media Studies. "But I would suggest that his commitment to that belief is best exercised through his excellent professional work rather than through contractual obligations with outsiders who are, quite clearly, trying to influence content." The contract may be illegal "because Congress has prohibited propaganda," or any sort of lobbying for programs funded by the government, said Melanie Sloan of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. "And it's propaganda."

Promoting Torture's Promoter
By BOB HERBERT
NYT, 7 January 2004
If the United States were to look into a mirror right now, it wouldn't recognize itself. The administration that thumbed its nose at the Geneva Conventions seems equally dismissive of such grand American values as honor, justice, integrity, due process and the truth. So there was Alberto Gonzales, counselor to the president and enabler in chief of the pro-torture lobby, interviewing on Capitol Hill yesterday for the post of attorney general, which just happens to be the highest law enforcement office in the land. Mr. Gonzales shouldn't be allowed anywhere near that office. His judgments regarding the detention and treatment of prisoners rounded up in Iraq and the so-called war on terror have been both unsound and shameful. Some of the practices that evolved from his judgments were appalling, gruesome, medieval. But this is the Bush administration, where incompetence and outright failure are rewarded with the nation's highest honors.
SEE ALSO:
Undiplomatic Immunity
Did Al Gonzales say the president can authorize torture?
By Chris Suellentrop
Slate, 6 January 2005
Early in the day, Gonzales professed the requisite faith that America was "a nation of laws and not of men," but his opinion of the president's ability—however limited—to authorize individuals to engage in criminal acts suggests the opposite. This is a government of good men, Gonzales implicitly assured the senators, so there's no need to worry about legal hypotheticals like whether torture is always verboten. Don't worry, because we don't do it. It's a strange argument from a conservative: We're the government. Trust us.

Too much 'ethics' is not a 'good thing'
No Decision On Ethics Chairman
By Mike Allen and Dan Morgan
Washington Post, 7 January 2005
As House Republicans met privately yesterday beneath a huge banner saying "Fulfilling America's Promise," a clerk read the slate of committee chairmen for the new Congress with one conspicuous exception -- the head of the ethics committee. Aides said that is because Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) is hunting for a new chairman to replace Rep. Joel Hefley (R-Colo.). Hefley has fallen out of favor with GOP leaders and is not trusted by them to handle ethics cases that Democrats might bring against Republican lawmakers, according to aides. One Republican official called Hefley's ouster "a defense measure." Aides said they did not know when the new chairman would be announced. By midweek, Hastert's staff had compiled a list of about 40 candidates. Another committee chairman who lost his job is Rep. Christopher H. Smith (R-N.J.) on Veterans' Affairs, who had become friendly with veterans and did not always adhere to party dictums on spending. He was replaced by Rep. Steve Buyer (R-Ind.), a veteran of the Persian Gulf War who is a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve. "Throwing more money at this does not mean you are more patriotic," Buyer said. Rules Committee Chairman David Dreier (R-Calif.) said committee heads have a responsibility to stay on the same page. "We are a team," he said.

Worse Than Fiction
By PAUL KRUGMAN
NYT, 7 January 2005

Ex-Generals, Clergy Voice Concern on Gonzales
BY MARK SHERMAN
Associated Press via NJ.com, 5 January 2005
Retired military officers, religious leaders and liberal interest groups said yesterday that Attorney General nominee Alberto Gonzales should explain his views on torture and his role in crafting Bush administration policy on questioning terror suspects before the Senate votes on his confirmation. While People for the American Way and Moveon.org announced their opposition to Gonzales' confirmation, most organizations said they want to hear from Gonzales at tomorrow's Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing before deciding whether to support him.
SEE ALSO:
Retired US General on Alberto Gonzales: "He Has Endangered Our Soldiers" (DemocracyNow!)
SEE ALSO:
Attorney General Nominee on Hot Seat
Gonzales to face questions on role in terror, torture memos
Zachary Coile
San Francisco Chronicle, 6 January 2005
"His style may be misleading: He comes across as very soft-spoken, as a middle-manager person," said David Cole, a law professor at Georgetown University Law School, who has been critical of the administration's anti- terror policies. "But when you look into the accounts of the policymaking in the war on terror, he is clearly one of the driving forces in favor of the most extreme positions." Gonzales may face the most scrutiny for his involvement in a 2002 decision to permit the expanded use of torture as an interrogation technique without fear that U.S. intelligence officials would face serious criminal penalties. A 1994 law had strictly limited the use of pain and suffering in interrogations.

Bush Begins Drive to Limit Malpractice Suit Awards
By ROBERT PEAR
NYT, 6 January 2005
"The president's medical malpractice plan is nothing but a shameful shield for drug companies and health maintenance organizations that hurt people through negligence." Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the new Senate Democratic whip, did not dispute the existence of a problem but said Congress should take a balanced approach. "Many good doctors are innocent victims of skyrocketing medical malpractice premiums," Mr. Durbin said. "Many good people are innocent victims of medical malpractice. Lawyers who exploit the system for injured patients must be curbed. A health care system that allows too many medical errors must be fixed, and insurance companies that exploit doctors and patients with exorbitant premium increases must be held accountable." Mr. Bush did not say what, if anything, states might do to discipline incompetent doctors or to beef up insurance regulation. He denounced "junk lawsuits," but did not say how he would distinguish frivolous from meritorious claims, a task that has historically been performed by judges and juries.

G.O.P. Divided as Bush Views Social Security
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON
NYT, 6 January 2005
As he begins deciding on details of his plan to add personal investment accounts to Social Security, President Bush is confronting a deep split within his own party over how to proceed. Two Republican camps are pitted against each other over how big the accounts should be and whether the president should embrace cuts in benefits.

Don't Torture Yourself (That's His Job)
By MAUREEN DOWD
NYT, 6 January 2005
The Associated Press headline that came over the wire yesterday said it all: "Gonzales Will Follow Non-Torture Policies." You know how bad the situation is when the president's choice for attorney general has to formally pledge not to support torture anymore. Alberto Gonzales may have been willing to legally justify something that was abhorrent to everything America stands for, but it's all relative. Given that Mr. Gonzales is replacing the odious John Ashcroft, Democrats didn't seem inclined to try to derail the Hispanic nominee, even though his memo fostered the atmosphere that led to disgusting scandals in Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo. Just to get things started on the right foot, though, Mr. Gonzales planned to go the extra mile and offer the quaint, obsolete Senate Democrats a more nuanced explanation of why he called the Geneva Conventions "quaint" and "obsolete." Before he helped President Bush circumvent the accords and reserve the right to do so "in this or future conflicts," you had to tune in to an old movie with Nazi generals or Vietcong guards if you wanted to see someone sneeringly shrug off the international treaty protecting prisoners from abuse. ("You worthless running dog Chuck Norris! What do we care about your silly Geneva Conventions?") How are you to believe Mr. Gonzales when he says he's through with torture? His mission is clearly to do whatever he thinks Mr. Bush wants. All gall is divided into parts, so what's next?

Bush's Counsel Sought Ruling About Torture
By DAVID JOHNSTON and NEIL A. LEWIS
NYT, 4 January 2005
Alberto R. Gonzales, the White House counsel, intervened directly with Justice Department lawyers in 2002 to obtain a legal ruling on the extent of the president's authority to permit extreme interrogation practices in the name of national security, current and former administration officials said Tuesday. Mr. Gonzales's role in seeking a legal opinion on the definition of torture and the legal limits on the force that could be used on terrorist suspects in captivity is expected to be a central issue in the Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearings scheduled to begin on Thursday on Mr. Gonzales's nomination to be attorney general. The request by Mr. Gonzales produced the much-debated Justice Department memorandum of Aug. 1, 2002, which defined torture narrowly and said that Mr. Bush could circumvent domestic and international prohibitions against torture in the name of national security. Until now, administration officials have been unwilling to provide details about the role Mr. Gonzales had in the production of the memorandum by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel. Mr. Gonzales has spoken of the memorandum as a response to questions, without saying that most of the questions were his. ...Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, who has signaled an intent to question Mr. Gonzales vigorously about his role in the memorandums, said Tuesday that he has been continually frustrated by the White House in trying to obtain answers and documents.

Social Security Formula Weighed
Bush Plan Likely to Cut Initial Benefits
By Jonathan Weisman and Mike Allen
Washington Post, 4 January 2005
The Bush administration has signaled that it will propose changing the formula that sets initial Social Security benefit levels, cutting promised benefits by nearly a third in the coming decades, according to several Republicans close to the White House.
SEE ALSO:
Social Security Battle Likely
In a possible setback to White House efforts, two Democratic centrist groups plan to take a stand against individual investment accounts.
By Ronald Brownstein
LA Times, 5 January 2005
Two groups of prominent Democratic centrists plan to oppose the centerpiece of President Bush's proposal to restructure Social Security, potentially dimming administration hopes of building bipartisan support for its top domestic priority. The Democratic Leadership Council, the party's leading centrist organization, and Third Way, a new group working with moderate Senate Democrats, expect to issue statements soon opposing Bush's push to divert part of the Social Security payroll tax into accounts that individuals could invest in the stock market, officials of the groups say. The opposition is significant because both groups have aggressively argued that Democrats should not flatly resist changes to Social Security. Also, in the past some of the leading officials associated with the Democratic Leadership Council have backed the type of private investment accounts Bush is promoting.

"Winning the War on Terrorism"
Tom DeLay Cites God's Reason for Tsunami
National Prayer Breakfast via American Coprophagia, 4 January 2004
"Matthew 7:21. Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven.
22. Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? And in thy name have cast out devils? And in thy name done many wonderful works?
23. And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity.
24. Therefore whosoever heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them, I will liken him unto a wise man, which built his house upon a rock:
25. And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not: for it was founded upon a rock.
26. And every one that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man, which built his house upon the sand:
27. And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell: and great was the fall of it."
SEE ALSO:
Tom DeLay, Ethics and the New Congress
Democracy Now!, 4 January 2005

Stopping the Bum's Rush
By PAUL KRUGMAN
NYT, 4 January 2005
The people who hustled America into a tax cut to eliminate an imaginary budget surplus and a war to eliminate imaginary weapons are now trying another bum's rush. If they succeed, we will do nothing about the real fiscal threat and will instead dismantle Social Security, a program that is in much better financial shape than the rest of the federal government. In the next few weeks, I'll explain why privatization will fatally undermine Social Security, and suggest steps to strengthen the program. I'll also talk about the much more urgent fiscal problems the administration hopes you won't notice while it scares you about Social Security. Today let's focus on one piece of those scare tactics: the claim that Social Security faces an imminent crisis. That claim is simply false. Yet much of the press has reported the falsehood as a fact. For example, The Washington Post recently described 2018, when benefit payments are projected to exceed payroll tax revenues, as a "day of reckoning." Here's the truth: by law, Social Security has a budget independent of the rest of the U.S. government. That budget is currently running a surplus, thanks to an increase in the payroll tax two decades ago. As a result, Social Security has a large and growing trust fund. When benefit payments start to exceed payroll tax revenues, Social Security will be able to draw on that trust fund. And the trust fund will last for a long time: until 2042, says the Social Security Administration; until 2052, says the Congressional Budget Office; quite possibly forever, say many economists, who point out that these projections assume that the economy will grow much more slowly in the future than it has in the past. So where's the imminent crisis? Privatizers say the trust fund doesn't count because it's invested in U.S. government bonds, which are "meaningless i.o.u.'s." Readers who want a long-form debunking of this sophistry can read my recent article in the online journal The Economists' Voice (www.bepress.com/ev).
SEE ALSO:
Social Security Formula Weighed : Bush Plan Likely to Cut Initial Benefits
By Jonathan Weisman and Mike Allen
Washington Post, 4 January 2005
The Bush administration has signaled that it will propose changing the formula that sets initial Social Security benefit levels, cutting promised benefits by nearly a third in the coming decades, according to several Republicans close to the White House.

House G.O.P. Voids Rule It Adopted Shielding Leader
By CARL HULSE
NYT, 4 January 2005
Stung by criticism that they were lowering ethical standards, House Republicans on Monday night reversed a rule change that would have allowed a party leader to retain his position even if indicted. Lawmakers and House officials said Republicans, meeting behind the closed doors of the House chamber, had acted at the request of the House majority leader, Representative Tom DeLay, who had been the intended beneficiary of the rule change. ...Democrats remained opposed to the ethics package because a rule dismissing complaints in the event of a ethics committee tie would stymie enforcement. "It still eviscerates the ethics process," said the spokeswoman, Jennifer Crider. Aides to Mr. DeLay said the Republican decision to drop the rule changes had been intended to defuse the Democratic attack.

Revamping Social Security
Experts Disagree on Severity of Shortfall's Consequences
By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post, 2 January 2005
To those who wish to preserve the system, it is merely the day when Congress must own up to its past profligacy and begin repaying Social Security for the trillions of dollars it has borrowed to fund immediate tax cuts and spending. How this debate is resolved could decide the fate of Bush's ambitious plan to revamp Social Security.
Peter R. Orszag, a Brookings Institution economist who heads the Pew Charitable Trusts' bipartisan Retirement Security Project, countered that there are less drastic ways to cover the cost of trust fund redemptions than Bush is contemplating. The White House could consider rolling back its tax cuts, the size of which, he said, dwarf Social Security's funding deficit. Over 75 years, the president's tax cuts will cost the Treasury $11 trillion, nearly triple Social Security's gap during that time. "I do think they are trying to create an artificial sense of crisis," Orszag said.
SEE ALSO:
The Social Security Fear Factor (NYT)

Concentration, anyone?
Wall Street's Designs on '05? A Merger Boom
By ANDREW ROSS SORKIN
NYT, 2 January 2005
If the last month was any indication, Mr. Lipton's prediction may already be a bit dated: the merger boom is already in full throttle. In December alone, Sprint agreed to buy Nextel Communications for $35 billion, Johnson & Johnson made a deal to acquire Guidant for $25 billion, Symantec agreed to buy Veritas for $13.5 billion, PeopleSoft finally capitulated to Oracle's $10.3 billion offer, and I.B.M. sold its flagship personal computer business to Lenovo of China for $1.75 billion. And those kinds of headline-grabbing acquisitions tend to beget more deal making.

Congress Resists Key Recommendation of 9/11 Panel
Without Consolidation, Homeland Security Department Officials Report to 88 Panels on Capitol Hill
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post, 1 January 2005
Congress has balked at consolidating committee jurisdictions when it comes to overseeing the $39 billion Department of Homeland Security and its constituent agencies, a key recommendation of the Sept. 11 commission. The commission found that homeland security officials reported to 88 congressional committees and subcommittees last year. The commission report cited an expert witness who called that "perhaps the single largest obstacle impeding the department's successful development."

Sleaze in the Capitol
NYT, 2 January 2004
One of the sorriest chapters of American history, the gulling of native Indian tribes, is continuing apace in Washington, where two Capitol insiders close to the House majority leader, Tom DeLay, are being investigated for allegedly fleecing six tribes of more than $80 million with inflated promises of V.I.P. access. The shameful dealings of Jack Abramoff, a Republican power lobbyist, and Michael Scanlon, Mr. DeLay's former spokesman, are coming to light as Senate and Justice Department investigators follow leads from nouveau-riche tribes whose casino profits spurred a new category of lucre and greed in the hyperkinetic world of Washington lobbying. Even as the two fast-talking political brokers banked large profits for three years of minimal labor, it was found, they were exchanging gleeful private messages mocking tribal leaders as "morons," "troglodytes" and "monkeys." "I want all their MONEY!!!" Mr. Scanlon exuberantly e-mailed in the midst of one deal. The outrageous affair includes evidence that the two sought to manipulate tribal elections to ensure their lobbying boondoggles, while dropping the names of Mr. DeLay and other leaders and urging tribal contributions to Republican political funds. In the latest high-roller abuses laid bare by The Washington Post, Mr. Abramoff was found to have prodded the tribes to pay for his luxury skyboxes at Washington sports arenas - yes, even at the home of the football Redskins - so he could impress Capitol politicians, staff members and fund-raisers with swank perches to push causes unrelated to tribal issues. A colleague pronounced Mr. Abramoff a master of schmooze, but sleaze seems a far better word. While the Senate Indian Affairs Committee is continuing its inquiry, the Republican House leadership remains mute.
SEE ALSO:
Lowering the Bar for Government Ethics?
Critics Say Republican Moves Reflect Growing Influence of Money on Politics
By Dana Milbank
Washington Post 31 December 2004
A series of high-profile challenges to ethical standards by congressional leaders and administration officials has led watchdog groups to complain about a general loosening of standards for public officials' conduct. The latest example is a plan by Republican House leaders to make it more difficult to bring an ethics complaint against a member. Last month, Republicans in the House scrapped an 11-year-old rule requiring party leaders to step aside if they are indicted, allowing Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) to keep his job if a state grand jury indicts him in its probe into alleged illegal corporate political donations.
SEE ALSO:
How Five Newcomers Could Change Senate
Staunch GOP conservatives shift from the tightly organized House to the prestigious club of 100.
By Gail Russell Chaddock
The Christian Science Monitor, 30 December 2004
Call them the five horsemen of the Republican Revolution: incoming US Sens. Richard Burr of North Carolina, Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, Jim DeMint of South Carolina, John Thune of South Dakota, and David Vitter of Louisiana.
Their arrival in the US Senate next week gives a powerful boost to both fiscal and social conservatives on issues ranging from judicial nominations and abortion rights to tax reform. It also tips the number of former House members in the Senate to 52 percent - the first time it has passed a majority. More than just an additional five GOP votes, they bring a hard-driving style and ideological focus that is at odds with the collegial culture of the Senate.

International

More Trouble in BushWorld

Safe and Secure...More or Less: Mapping the Future
National Intelligence Council's 2020 Project, January 2005
Excerpts from executive summary:

...political Islam will have a significant global impact leading to 2020, rallying disparate ethnic and national groups and perhaps even creating an authority that transcends national boundaries.
The so-called “third wave” of democratization may be partially reversed by 2020—particularly among the states of the former Soviet Union and in Southeast Asia, some of which never really embraced democracy.
With the international system itself undergoing profound flux, some of the institutions that are charged with managing global problems may be overwhelmed by them.
We foresee a more pervasive sense of insecurity—which may be as much based on psychological perceptions as physical threats—by 2020. Even as most of the world gets richer, globalization will profoundly shake up the status quo—generating enormous economic, cultural, and consequently political convulsions.
The transition will not be painless and will hit the middle classes of the developed world in particular, bringing more rapid job turnover and requiring professional retooling. Outsourcing on a large scale would strengthen the anti-globalization movement.
Weak governments, lagging economies, religious extremism, and youth bulges will align to create a perfect storm for internal conflict in certain regions.
Countries without nuclear weapons—especially in the Middle East and Northeast Asia—might decide to seek them as it becomes clear that their neighbors and regional rivals are doing so.
The key factors that spawned international terrorism show no signs of abating over the next 15 years.
We expect that by 2020 al-Qa’ida will be superceded by similarly inspired Islamic extremist groups, and there is a substantial risk that broad Islamic movements akin to al-Qa’ida will merge with local separatist movements.
Our greatest concern is that terrorists might acquire biological agents or, less likely, a nuclear device, either of which could cause mass casualties.

Inspector General Rebukes F.B.I. Over Espionage Case and Firing of Whistle-Blower
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
NYT, 15 January 2005
The F.B.I. has failed to aggressively investigate accusations of espionage against a translator at the bureau and fired the translator's co-worker in large part for bringing the accusations, the Justice Department's inspector general concluded on Friday. In a long-awaited report that the Justice Department sought for months to keep classified, the inspector general issued a sharp rebuke to the F.B.I. over its handling of claims of espionage and ineptitude made by Sibel Edmonds, a bureau translator who was fired in 2002 after superiors deemed her conduct "disruptive." Ms. Edmonds, who translated material in Turkish, Persian and Azerbaijani, had complained about slipshod translations and management problems in the bureau's translation section and raised accusations of possible espionage against a fellow linguist.

Spy-Turned-Author Looks Back At a CIA Mired in Bureaucracy
By Steve Coll
Washington Post, 14 January 2005
Mahle writes that she and her colleagues at first thought that when Tenet defended himself in public after the attacks, he was just following "our mantra, 'Deny Everything.' " But as time passed, Mahle came to believe "[o]bviously something went wrong: why could the CIA not admit this?" She concluded that Tenet "played it safe and played politics" and failed "to take the actions necessary to wage a real war on terrorism." Her criticism echoes the recently reported findings of the CIA's inspector general. The IG's unpublished draft report on CIA leadership failures during the run-up to Sept. 11 is threatening to reopen debate about individual blame at Langley -- issues that congressional investigators had avoided, arguing that the failures were systemic. ...The farther away from Langley she got, the more she came to believe that at the agency, "the system feeds upon itself, creating 'true believers.' Those who leave the CIA, and with the passage of time and distance become nonbelievers, are often surprised by the sheer intensity of the culture they left behind." For Mahle, at least, "the world outside-looking-in was very different than the world inside-looking-out."

Iraq New Terror Breeding Ground
War Created Haven, CIA Advisers Report
By Dana Priest
Washington Post, 14 January 2005
Iraq has replaced Afghanistan as the training ground for the next generation of "professionalized" terrorists, according to a report released yesterday by the National Intelligence Council, the CIA director's think tank. Iraq provides terrorists with "a training ground, a recruitment ground, the opportunity for enhancing technical skills," said David B. Low, the national intelligence officer for transnational threats. "There is even, under the best scenario, over time, the likelihood that some of the jihadists who are not killed there will, in a sense, go home, wherever home is, and will therefore disperse to various other countries."
SEE ALSO:
U.S. Panel Sees Iraq as Terror Training Area
By DOUGLAS JEHL
NYT, 14 January 2005
The war in Iraq could provide an important training ground for terrorists, according to a government forecast that also says the key factors behind terrorism show no signs of abating over the next 15 years. The forecast, issued Thursday by the National Intelligence Council, describes a world in 2020 in which the United States remains the world's foremost power and political Islam remains a potent force. It describes the prospect of a terrorist attack using biological agents or, less likely, a nuclear device, as the greatest danger facing the United States. ...The report also sketches alternative outcomes, including the prospect that a new Islamic religious leader could emerge in the Middle East with broad, transnational political authority, and the prospect that security measures intended to combat terrorism and weapons proliferation could lead to an assault on civil liberties, possibly introducing an Orwellian world.

A Touch of Crude
American bankers handled his loot. Oil companies play by his rules. The Bush administration woos him. How the pursuit of oil is propping up the West African dictatorship of Teodoro Obiang.
Peter Maass
Mother Jones Magazine, January/February 2005 Issue
Equatorial Guinea sometimes seems a parody of an oil kleptocracy -- a Blazing Saddles of the world of petroleum. Yet it has emerged as an all-too-real example of how a dictator, awash in petrodollars, enriches himself and his family while starving his people. His conduct has been aided by American companies: As detailed in Senate and Treasury Department documents, Riggs Bank helped Obiang shuttle millions into offshore accounts. Oil companies, meanwhile, made payments to his regime that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is now scrutinizing under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. If America’s interest in foreign countries were predicated on human rights, Equatorial Guinea would have seized our attention long before its 1995 oil boom. Francisco Macias Nguema, whose self-bestowed titles included “Leader of Steel,” “The Sole Miracle of Equatorial Guinea,” and, of course, “President for Life,” was a morph of Idi Amin and Pol Pot. He killed or forced into exile nearly a third of the population, decimating in particular the small educated class. Some of his victims were crucified on the road leading to the airport. It was one of the 20th century’s most brutal genocides, but no foreign power except for Equatorial Guinea’s former colonial ruler paid attention to it, and the fascist regime of Spain’s Francisco Franco was not overly troubled by human rights abuses. Obiang’s coup was a welcome event, and his rule has not been nearly as ruthless as his uncle’s. Of course,that’s not much of an achievement.
SEE ALSO:
AUDIO LINK
Equatorial Guinea
Morning Edition, 14 January 2005
Margaret Thatcher's son, Mark Thatcher, pleads guilty to helping fund a political coup in Equatorial Guinea. NPR's Renee Montagne speaks with Peter Mass about the small country, which supplies the United States with 15 percent of its imported oil. Maas talks about his travels to the African nation, which he writes about in the latest Mother Jones magazine.

No Semblance of Accountability
by Alan Bock
Antiwar.com, 14 January 2005
Perhaps the most striking thing about the official acknowledgment that the two-year hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is over is the fact that it was greeted by most with a collective shrug of the shoulders and an almost cheerful defense of what many of us view as utterly indefensible. "Based on what we know today," White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters, "the president would have taken the same action because this is about protecting the American people."
SEE ALSO:
Iraq War Cost $102 Billion Through September, Pentagon Says
Bloomberg, 13 January 2005
The U.S. spent $102 billion through Sept. 30 on the invasion and occupation of Iraq, with costs averaging $4.8 billion a month, the Pentagon comptroller's office said today.

Prison Abuse Seen as Hurting U.S. Credibility
Foreign governments have cited Abu Ghraib in defending their civil liberties violations, rights group says.
By Sonni Efron
LA Times, 14 January 2005
Responding to U.S. complaints that they violated human rights, foreign governments have cited U.S. mistreatment of Iraqi detainees, a development that indicates American credibility has been undermined by the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, Human Rights Watch said Thursday. To restore U.S. moral authority, the group called for the appointment of an independent special prosecutor to investigate mistreatment of those held by the United States in Iraq, Afghanistan, the American base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and other locations officials have not disclosed.

U.S. Army to Expand Role in Iraq's Civil Engineering
By JAMES GLANZ
NYT, 14 January 2005
In a major shift within the much-criticized $18.4 billion program to rebuild Iraq's physical infrastructure, the office that the Pentagon formed to oversee the effort will begin handing its responsibilities over to the United States Army Corps of Engineers over the next several months. Charles Hess, the director of the agency, the Project and Contracting Office, said in a telephone interview from Baghdad that the change was a natural evolution. He denied that the move was a response to Iraqi and American criticism that the reconstruction effort had focused too much on large projects, started up too slowly and failed to anticipate attacks by insurgents.

Street-Wise Washington Backs Off
By Ashraf Fahim
Asia Times, 13 January 2005
"We hope, at some point in time, everybody is free."
- US President George W Bush , responding to a question about Iran during his December 20 press conference. As the above quote indicates, the Bush administration's rhetorical zeal for democracy-making in the Middle East appears to be waning. While "freedom" is still spoken of as the desired end state, it isn't being suggested that its reign is imminent with the same fervor that preceded the Iraq war. As a recent op-ed in the Christian Science Monitor put it, after Iraq, "A crestfallen America seems to have abandoned its idealistic aspirations to the point that it now favors working with the same unsavory regimes that promise the chimera of stability."

Political Parties, Individuals Withdraw from Iraq Elections
Xinhuanet, 12 January 2005
Due to the grim security situation in Iraq, more political parties and individuals have withdrawn from the landmark elections due on Jan. 30. According to the Al Furat newspaper, 53 political parties and organizations as well as 30 individuals have asked their names to be dropped from the election lists in a bid to show their rejection of elections under US occupation. A Sunni tribal coalition, the Patriotic Front for Iraqi Tribes, said on Wednesday that it would withdraw from the elections unless it is postponed till the day when security improves. The coalition said the announcement was also in protest against the US detention of the alliance's leader Hassan Zeidan Khalaf al-Lihebi. The alliance is the latest major Sunni group that challenged the Iraqi authority which had refused to postpone the elections. The Iraqi Islamic Party, the biggest Sunni party, had earlier announced its withdrawal, saying the deteriorating situation prevents voters from voting and even getting full knowledge of the candidates. Observers claim that more withdrawals are expected due to disputes on the elections among various political groups and individuals. However, the United States and the interim Iraqi government rule out the possibility of postponing the poll. Delaying Iraq's elections beyond Jan. 30 would give insurgents a tactical victory and provide no guarantee that security would improve, said White House spokesman Scott McClellan.

Search for Banned Arms In Iraq Ended Last Month
Critical September Report to Be Final Word
By Dafna Linzer
Washington Post, 12 January 2005
The hunt for biological, chemical and nuclear weapons in Iraq has come to an end nearly two years after President Bush ordered U.S. troops to disarm Saddam Hussein. The top CIA weapons hunter is home, and analysts are back at Langley.

U.S. Lowers Expectations On Iraq Vote
Process Emphasized, Not Turnout or Results
By Robin Wright and Jim VandeHei
Washington Post, Washington Post, 13 January 2005
With just over two weeks until the Iraqi elections, the United States is lowering its expectations for both the turnout and the results of the vote, increasingly emphasizing other steps over the next year as more important to Iraq's political transformation, according to U.S. officials. The Bush administration played down voter turnout yesterday in determining the elections' legitimacy and urged Americans not to get bogged in a numbers game in judging the balloting, a reflection of the growing concern over how much the escalating insurgency and the problem of Sunni participation may affect the vote.

Detainee Says U.S. Handed Him Over for Torture
An Australian held at Guantanamo who is to be freed asserts in court papers that Americans flew him to Egypt where jailors mistreated him.
By Megan K. Stack and Bob Drogin
NYT, 13 January 2005
The burly men who Mamdouh Habib says bundled him onto a small jet in Pakistan bound for a grisly torture cell in Egypt didn't give their names. But their nationality seemed clear. "They … spoke American English with no foreign accent," Habib's lawyer later told a U.S. court. Several of the men sported large tattoos, including one who bore "a tattoo of an American flag on or near his wrist." Habib had already been interrogated in Pakistani jails by three other Americans — two women and a man. Now, according to court papers, they watched silently as one of the tattooed men forced the handcuffed prisoner to the ground, placed a foot on his neck and posed for pictures. The tattooed "Americans … sat at the front of the plane" as he was flown to Cairo in October 2001. Habib, a 48-year-old Australian citizen who grew up in Egypt, was about to disappear for six months into an Egyptian prison. There, he says, his Egyptian captors shocked him with high-voltage wires, hung him from metal hooks on the wall, nearly drowned him and mercilessly beat and kicked him. The former coffee shop owner soon confessed to a litany of terrorism-related crimes, including teaching martial arts to several of the Sept. 11 hijackers and planning a hijacking himself. Habib later insisted that his confessions were false and given under "duress and torture." Habib's more than three years of incarceration came into sharp focus this week, when the Bush administration agreed not to charge him with any crime and to repatriate him to Australia. Once home, he will be free, Australian officials said Wednesday.

Witness: Graner Ordered to Beat Prisoners
By T.R. Reid
Washington Post, 13 January 2005
A former inmate at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison testified Wednesday that Army Spec. Charles A. Graner Jr., a former guard and the alleged ringleader of the abuse there that spawned an international scandal, was ordered by military intelligence officers to beat and torture inmates.
SEE ALSO:

Soldiers Testify on Orders to Soften Prisoners in Iraq
By KATE ZERNIKE
NYT, 13 January 2005
Interrogators at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq gave the military police orders to "soften up" or give harsh treatment to detainees in the weeks leading up to the night that a group of soldiers put naked and hooded prisoners in sexually humiliating positions and photographed them, several soldiers and a detainee testified in a military court here on Wednesday.

US Ignored Warning on Iraqi Oil Smuggling, UN Says
By Claudio Gatti in New York
Financial Times, 13 January 2005
For months, the US Congress has been investigating activities that violated the United Nations oil-for-food programme and helped Saddam Hussein build secret funds to acquire arms and buy influence. President George W. Bush has linked future US funding of the international body to a clear account of what went on under the multi-billion dollar programme. But a joint investigation by the Financial Times and Il Sole 24 Ore, the Italian business daily, shows that the single-largest and boldest smuggling operation in the oil-for-food programme was conducted with the knowledge of the US government.

U.S. Trade Deficit Rises to New High; More Risk to Dollar
By ELIZABETH BECKER
NYT, 13 January 2005
The United States trade deficit soared to a monthly record of $60.3 billion in November, the Commerce Department reported on Wednesday. The figure confounded predictions that the deficit would diminish with the weakening of the dollar and an easing in the price of oil. Instead, the trade gap has created increased pressure for the dollar to drop even further.

Bombers Kill 13 as Iraq is Rocked by Double Attack
Scotsman.com, 11 January 2005
A roadside bomb that missed a passing American military convoy killed seven Iraqis and wounded one south of Baghdad today, while a suicide car bomb killed six people at the police headquarters in Saddam Hussein’s home town. The victims in the roadside bomb explosion were travelling in a minibus in Yussifiyah, nine miles south of Baghdad, when the blast occurred. In Tikrit, a US military spokesman said six people were killed, while police sources said 12 others were wounded. "As the Iraqi police continue to get stronger, and continue to pose a threat to the insurgents and terrorists, they will be targeted," he said. The killings were the latest in a series of attacks by insurgents who are trying to disrupt landmark national elections on January 30. The last two days have seen a new surge of attacks, with four roadside bombings and suicide attacks on Iraqi and American forces yesterday. At dawn today, an explosion tore through an oil pipeline between Kirkuk and a refinery in Beiji. An official with the Northern Oil Company said the pipeline was destroyed and would take five days to repair. The official said an explosion hit another oil pipeline in the Zegheitoun area, 34 miles south-west of Kirkuk, that runs to Beiji. Insurgents have repeatedly targeted Iraq’s oil infrastructure, denying the country much-needed reconstruction money.

Investigate Alleged Violations of Law in Fallujah Attack
By JIM MCDERMOTT AND RICHARD RAPPORT
Jim McDermott, M.D., represents the 7th District in Congress. Richard Rapport, M.D., is in the neurological surgery department at Group Health. Other authors are 17 area doctors and medical professionals.
Seattle PI, 11 January 2005
At the beginning of their recent attack on Fallujah, U.S. Marines and Iraqi National Guard troops stormed Fallujah General Hospital, closing it to the city's wounded and confiscating cell phones from the doctors. A senior officer told The New York Times the hospital was "a center of propaganda." Interviews with hospital personnel (which had revealed the extent of civilian casualties in an aborted April invasion) would not be a problem this time. As the invasion proceeded, air strikes reduced a smaller hospital to rubble and smashed a clinic, trapping patients and staff under the collapsed structure. With the main hospital empty and other facilities destroyed, only one small Iraqi military clinic remained to serve the city. U.S. forces cut off Fallujah's water and electricity. About 200,000 residents were forced to flee, creating a refugee population the size of Tacoma. Those who remained faced a grim existence; they were afraid to leave their homes for fear of snipers and they had little to eat and only contaminated water to drink. Public buildings, mosques and residences were subjected to assault by air and ground forces. The city now lies in ruins, largely depopulated, but still occupied by U.S. forces. Convoys sent by the Iraqi Red Crescent to aid the remaining population have been turned back. Diseases brought on by bad water are spreading in Fallujah and the surrounding refugee camps. The means of attack employed against Fallujah are illegal and cannot be justified by any conceivable ends. In particular, the targeting of medical facilities and denial of clean water are serious breaches of the Geneva Conventions. Continuation of these practices will soon confirm what many already suspect: that the United States of America believes it is above the law.

Diplomat Questions Validity of Iraq Voting
By BARRY SCHWEID
AP via Guardian, 11 January 2005
Taking a pessimistic view, a senior Jordanian diplomat on Tuesday questioned the validity of the elections Iraq is due to hold at the end of the month if many Iraqis do not vote. More than 40 percent of Iraqis will be unable to participate in electing an interim assembly, said Karim Kawar, Jordan's ambassador to the United States, adding, ``This raises questions about the authenticity of the elections.'' The Arab diplomat said some of the Iraqis would be prevented from voting by threat of insurgents while others lack the will to vote.

Chemical-Arms Disposal Snagged
By Peter Eisler
USA TODAY, 11 January 2005
The Pentagon plans to delay building two plants crucial to meeting international treaty deadlines for destroying thousands of tons of U.S. chemical weapons, according to documents obtained by USA TODAY.
Pentagon officials have said repeatedly that quick destruction of the U.S. chemical arsenal is a security priority. Storing the aging weapons raises risks of terrorists stealing or detonating them at a storage site. And as the stockpiles sit, odds rise that a leak of such agents as VX or sarin nerve gas could threaten communities. The Dec. 21, 2004, documents indicate that major construction on the plants in Pueblo, Colo., and Blue Grass, Ky., won't begin until 2011 — about five years after the Pentagon had promised. Asked about the documents, Pentagon spokeswoman Cheryl Irwin said officials are exploring other ways to meet a 2012 deadline set by the international Chemical Weapons Convention to destroy the U.S. arsenal. "Communities that have been told for 20 years that the military will do whatever it takes to get rid of this stuff because it poses all of these risks now are being told that they have to let it sit," said Craig Williams of the Chemical Weapons Working Group, a coalition of citizens living near stockpile sites. The Colorado and Kentucky plants are supposed to destroy 10% of the 30,600-ton U.S. cache of chemical weapons. The rest of the stockpile is stored at six other sites. Disposal plants already are running at Deseret, Utah; Aberdeen, Md.; Anniston, Ala.; and Umatilla, Ore. Two other plants — at Newport, Ind., and Pine Bluff, Ark. — missed start-up deadlines in 2004 but are expected to begin work this year. The Pentagon's plans to delay construction of the Colorado and Kentucky plants are in documents outlining future budget needs for chemical-weapons disposal. The plans need congressional approval, and lawmakers from both states vowed Tuesday to resist them.

Did North Korea Cheat?
By Selig S. Harrison
Foreign Affairs, January/February 2005
Two years ago, Washington accused Pyongyang of running a secret nuclear weapons program. But how much evidence was there to back up the charge? A review of the facts shows that the Bush administration misrepresented and distorted the data--while ignoring the one real threat North Korea actually poses.

U.S. Aid for Tsunami-Hit Nations Falls Short
By David Bryden
Foreign Policy In Focus, 7 January 2004
As the full extent of the destruction and death the tsunami wrought in South Asia becomes clear, significant aid pledges are finally pouring in. While the U.S. is beginning to respond, little attention is being paid in the public debate to the need for effective development assistance for South Asia in the medium to long term. Comparisons of what the U.S. is doing for disaster relief relative to other nations are obscuring the need for a sober assessment of how well U.S. aid measures up compared to the actual need. The White House is drafting its 2006 budget this month, so this is an important opportunity to expose how the U.S. falls short when it comes to providing aid commensurate with its wealth.

Iraq Victory Certain as 'Democracy American Style' Established
Allawi Group Slips Cash to Reporters
By Steve Negus in Baghdad
Financial Times, 10 January 2005
The electoral group headed by Iyad Allawi, the interim Iraqi prime minister, on Monday handed out cash to journalists to ensure coverage of its press conferences in a throwback to Ba'athist-era patronage ahead of parliamentary elections on January 30. After a meeting held by Mr Allawi's campaign alliance in west Baghdad, reporters, most of whom were from the Arabic-language press, were invited upstairs where each was offered a "gift" of a $100 bill contained in an envelope.
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Education Dept. Paid Commentator to Promote Law (USA Today)

Interrogating Donald Rumsfeld
37 Questions Congress Should Ask the Secretary of Defense on Administration Torture Policies
By Karen J. Greenberg and Joshua L. Dratel
TomDispatch.com, 11 January 2005
For an administration that, in one of its legal memos, had already put the power to define torture into the hands of the torturer, it wasn't so hard to be against acts of "torture" – as long as the dictionaries were theirs.
In the meantime, last week the well-respected New England Journal of Medicine and the Los Angeles Times published pieces by two legal experts, Gregg Bloche and Jonathan H. Marks, offering us news about the role physicians are playing in our Bermuda Triangle of injustice – both at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and at Guantanamo. In both places, thanks to former Guantanamo commander Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller and his team, who had the urge to "fuse" all prison functions in pursuit of the "interrogation mission," each place ended up with "Behavioral Science Consultation Teams," aka "Biscuits" in the trade, made up of psychologists and psychiatrists.
As Bloche and Marks put it, "Not only did caregivers pass clinical data to interrogators, physicians, and other health professionals helped craft and carry out coercive interrogation plans." And now the Pentagon, through Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Clinical and Program Policy David Tornberg, claims that there isn't "'a doctor-patient relationship in the traditional sense between a military healthcare provider and an enemy prisoner of war…. Medical information will not be protected … to the extent it is military relevant….' A medical degree, Tornberg told us, isn't a 'sacramental vow.' When a doctor participates in interrogation, 'he's not functioning as a physician,' and the Hippocratic ideal of fidelity to patients is beside the point." Uh-huh. You see, it's all just a matter of definition.

Ukraine Announces Pullout of Iraq Force
Statement Follows Blast That Killed 8
By Jackie Spinner
Washington Post, 11 January 2005
The government of Ukraine, acting a day after an explosion killed eight of its soldiers in Iraq, announced Monday that it would withdraw its 1,650-member force by the middle of 2005.

More Dissent in Pentagon Ranks Over Iraq War
by Jim Lobe
Inter Press Service via Antiwar.com, 11 January 2005
For the second time in as many months, a report by a key Pentagon advisory group has implicitly taken the administration of President George W. Bush to task for major failures in pre-war planning, particularly with respect to Iraq. A 220-page report [.pdf], quietly released late last month by the Defense Science Board (DSB), concludes that the administration clearly underestimated the number of troops and cost required to achieve its political objectives in Iraq. The report, entitled "Transition to and From Hostilities," explicitly contradicts another key assumption of top Pentagon officials before the Iraq war that Washington could quickly reduce its troop presence after ousting the regime of President Saddam Hussein. "[W]e believe that more people are needed in-theater for stabilization and reconstruction operations than for combat operations," asserts the report, which based its conclusions on a study of U.S. military interventions over the last 15 years. ...The Pentagon, according to the report, "has not yet embraced stabilization and reconstruction operations as an explicit mission with the same seriousness as combat operations. This mindset must be changed."

'The Salvador Option’
The Pentagon may put Special-Forces-led assassination or kidnapping teams in Iraq
By Michael Hirsh and John Barry
Newsweek, 9 January 2005
What to do about the deepening quagmire of Iraq? The Pentagon’s latest approach is being called "the Salvador option"—and the fact that it is being discussed at all is a measure of just how worried Donald Rumsfeld really is. "What everyone agrees is that we can’t just go on as we are," one senior military officer told NEWSWEEK. "We have to find a way to take the offensive against the insurgents. Right now, we are playing defense. And we are losing." Last November’s operation in Fallujah, most analysts agree, succeeded less in breaking "the back" of the insurgency—as Marine Gen. John Sattler optimistically declared at the time—than in spreading it out. advertisement
Now, NEWSWEEK has learned, the Pentagon is intensively debating an option that dates back to a still-secret strategy in the Reagan administration’s battle against the leftist guerrilla insurgency in El Salvador in the early 1980s. Then, faced with a losing war against Salvadoran rebels, the U.S. government funded or supported "nationalist" forces that allegedly included so-called death squads directed to hunt down and kill rebel leaders and sympathizers. Eventually the insurgency was quelled, and many U.S. conservatives consider the policy to have been a success—despite the deaths of innocent civilians and the subsequent Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal. (Among the current administration officials who dealt with Central America back then is John Negroponte, who is today the U.S. ambassador to Iraq. Under Reagan, he was ambassador to Honduras.)

The Scent of Fear
By BOB HERBERT
NYT, 10 January 2005
The assembly line of carnage in George W. Bush's war in Iraq continues unabated. Nightmares don't last this long, so the death and destruction must be real. You know you're in serious trouble when the politicians and the military brass don't even bother suggesting that there's light at the end of the tunnel. The only thing ahead is a deep and murderous darkness. With the insurgency becoming both stronger and bolder, and the chances of conducting a legitimate election growing grimmer by the day, a genuine sense of alarm can actually be detected in the reality-resistant hierarchy of the Bush administration.
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Iraq
Kevin Drum
Political Animal at Washington Monthly, 10 January 2005
Three stories today paint a very grim collective picture of Iraq. ...Is there anybody left who still thinks we can win in Iraq? Anybody, that is, aside from George Bush, who apparently lives in a cocoon and refuses to allow bad news to pass through his doors? It sure doesn't sound like it. And yet the crew that's responsible for this is going to remain in charge for four more years. Four very long years.

Vintage Wolfowitz
Kevin Drum
Political Animal at Washington Monthly, 8 January 2005
In celebration of Paul Wolfowitz's decision to stay at the Pentagon, I'd like to take this chance to reprint my favorite Wolfowitz testimony of all time. This is from the New York Times account of Wolfowitz's testimony before Congress on February 28, 2003, a mere three weeks before the invasion of Iraq:

Mr. Wolfowitz...opened a two-front war of words on Capitol Hill, calling the recent estimate by Gen. Eric K. Shinseki of the Army that several hundred thousand troops would be needed in postwar Iraq, "wildly off the mark." Pentagon officials have put the figure closer to 100,000 troops.

....In his testimony, Mr. Wolfowitz ticked off several reasons why he believed a much smaller coalition peacekeeping force than General Shinseki envisioned would be sufficient to police and rebuild postwar Iraq. He said there was no history of ethnic strife in Iraq, as there was in Bosnia or Kosovo.

He said Iraqi civilians would welcome an American-led liberation force that "stayed as long as necessary but left as soon as possible," but would oppose a long-term occupation force. And he said that nations that oppose war with Iraq would likely sign up to help rebuild it. "I would expect that even countries like France will have a strong interest in assisting Iraq in reconstruction," Mr. Wolfowitz said. He added that many Iraqi expatriates would likely return home to help.

....Enlisting countries to help to pay for this war and its aftermath would take more time, he said. "I expect we will get a lot of mitigation, but it will be easier after the fact than before the fact," Mr. Wolfowitz said. Mr. Wolfowitz spent much of the hearing knocking down published estimates of the costs of war and rebuilding, saying the upper range of $95 billion was too high....Moreover, he said such estimates, and speculation that postwar reconstruction costs could climb even higher, ignored the fact that Iraq is a wealthy country, with annual oil exports worth $15 billion to $20 billion. "To assume we're going to pay for it all is just wrong," he said.

You just can't make this stuff up.

Bush: Elections=Democracy=Peace
Campaigning in Iraq has Worsened Ethnic, Religious Tensions
BY NANCY A. YOUSSEF
Knight Ridder via SunHerald.com, 8 January 2004
Asking someone whether he or she is Shiite, Sunni or Kurd was once taboo in Iraq. Iraq was one country, bound through wars and dictatorship, not a nation of divided sects or ethnic groups, came the standard answer. But that national identity has been breaking down in the parliamentary election campaign. In the absence of political ideologies or competing policy agendas, the nation's newly formed political parties are increasingly depending on religious and ethnic labels to help voters distinguish among them. While the appeals help build party support for the Jan. 30 elections, they contribute to a growing sectarianism. Shiite Muslim Arabs account for roughly 60 percent of Iraq's population. Sunni Muslim Arabs are about 20 percent, and the ethnic Kurds, who are also Sunni Muslim, are another 20 percent, mainly in the north of the country.

Iraq: Winning the Unwinnable War
By James Dobbins
From Foreign Affairs, January/February 2005
By losing the trust of the Iraqi people, the Bush administration has already lost the war. Moderate Iraqis can still win it, but only if they wean themselves from Washington and get support from elsewhere. To help them, the United States should reduce and ultimately eliminate its military presence, train Iraqis to beat the insurgency on their own, and rally Iran and European allies to the cause. ...Keeping U.S. troops in Iraq will only provoke fiercer and more widespread resistance, but withdrawing them too soon could spark a civil war. The second administration of George W. Bush seems to be left with the choice between making things worse slowly or quickly. The beginning of wisdom is to recognize that the ongoing war in Iraq is not one that the United States can win. As a result of its initial miscalculations, misdirected planning, and inadequate preparation, Washington has lost the Iraqi people's confidence and consent, and it is unlikely to win them back. Every day that Americans shell Iraqi cities they lose further ground on the central front of Iraqi opinion. ...Assuming elections do occur, the new government will emerge with only modestly enhanced legitimacy. Shiites and Kurds may be adequately represented, but the Sunnis will not be. If they cannot or do not vote, the Sunnis will be underrepresented. If the electoral system is modified to peg the number of representatives to the number of eligible rather than actual voters, the Sunnis will be represented by individuals they regard as unrepresentative. Elections are always polarizing events, and in a fragile, deeply conflicted society such as Iraq's, they could deepen the gulf between Sunnis on the one hand and Shiites and Kurds on the other.

U.S. Is Haunted by Initial Plan for Iraq Voting
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN
NYT, 8 January 2005
In its struggle to transfer sovereignty back to Iraq last spring, the Bush administration made some tough decisions about the makeup of the political system and how Iraqi elections could occur quickly and fairly. But now a little-noticed decision on election procedures has come back to haunt administration officials, just weeks before the vote is to take place, administration and United Nations officials say. ...But now, with the violent insurgency and more than 7,000 candidates, many in alliances with other candidates, running for 275 seats nationwide, the disadvantages of the current system are becoming all too apparent, according to American, Iraqi and United Nations officials. ...Thus an election intended to bring Iraq together and quell the insurgency could produce the opposite outcome, in part because of the way it has been organized.

~~Liberating~~ Devastating Iraq
Tom Engelhardt
TomDispatch, 7 January 2004
Measure Iraq any way you want and it adds up to disaster: Less electricity is now being delivered than in the Saddam Hussein years; infant malnourishment has, according to a Norwegian study, doubled in the same time period ("It's on the level of some African countries," says the deputy director of the institute that conducted the study); attacks on the country's oil infrastructure are now so severe that no oil whatsoever is leaving the country heading north; there are far more insurgents and sympathizers (over 200,000 and growing) than American troops in the country, according to a recent estimate by Iraq's national intelligence chief; new plans with a distinctly Vietnam-ish ring to them are being developed to place sizeable numbers of American "advisers" with newly trained Iraqi military units that are under siege and crumbling (to "bolster the Iraqi will to fight") -- and that just scratches the surface of this moment. ...Below, freelance reporter Dahr Jamail returns to the early months of 2004 to remind us -- from his travels through Iraq -- just how much the seeds of the present lie in what, for us, is an already half-erased past. . . . "The broken promises, broken infrastructure, and broken cities of Iraq were plainly visible in those early months of 2004 -- and the sad thing is that the devastation I saw then has only grown worse since. The life Iraqis were living a year ago, horrendous as it was, was but a prelude to what was to come under the U.S. occupation."

Using 500 pound bombs and rockets to make friends isn't working?
U.S. General to Review Policy, Iraq Training
By Charles Aldinger
Reuters via WiredNews, 7 January 2005
The Pentagon, concerned over a bold and growing insurgency in Iraq, is sending a retired Army general to Iraq to review U.S. military operations and the training of Iraqi forces, defense officials said on Friday. Gen. Gary Luck, who formerly headed U.S. forces in South Korea and is an adviser to the military's Joint Forces Command, will go to Iraq next week on orders from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and military leaders to provide an assessment within weeks.

Some Iraq Areas Unsafe for Vote, U.S. General Says
By DEXTER FILKINS
NYT, 7 January 2005
With three weeks to go before nationwide elections, significant areas of 4 of Iraq's 18 provinces are still not secure enough for citizens to vote, the commander of American ground forces here said Thursday. The acknowledgement came on a day when the Iraqi government announced that it was extending emergency rule in most areas of the country for 30 more days, after a string of suicide attacks that have left more than 80 Iraqi police officers and soldiers dead in the last week. ...His statement came after several major offensives against insurgent strongholds in Falluja, Samara and areas south of Baghdad. It was an acknowledgement of the continued resilience of the Iraqi insurgency, which is thought to number 8,000 to 10,000 fighters and which has grown in strength despite sustained American efforts to crush it.
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Political Einstein: Democracy = Peace says it all
Bush Dismisses Growing Concerns Over Elections in Iraq
By DAVID STOUT
NYT, 7 January 2005
President Bush rejected any suggestion today that the Jan. 30 elections in Iraq would do more harm than good. He declared that they would constitute a landmark, not only in American policy toward Iraq but in that country's road to democracy. "Democracy is hard," Mr. Bush said in a brief question-and-answer session in the White House. "Our own country's had a history of kind of a bumpy road toward democracy." Referring to the campaign to stabilize Iraq, Mr. Bush said: "I know it's hard, but it's hard for a reason. And the reason it's hard is because there are a handful of folks who fear freedom." Mr. Bush did not break new ground in his remarks... Brent Scowcroft, who was national security adviser for the first President Bush, said on Thursday that he had grown pessimistic about chances for stability in Iraq. "The Iraqi elections, rather than turning out to be a promising turning point, have the great potential for deepening the conflict," Mr. Scowcroft said in a speech to a public policy group, The Washington Post reported. Asked whether he shared Mr. Scowcroft's concerns, Mr. Bush replied: "Quite the opposite. I think elections will be such an incredibly hopeful experience for the Iraqi people."

Guerrillas Kill 9 US Troops
18 Bodies of Lured Workers Found in Mosul
Juan Cole
Informed Comment, 7 January 2004

Human Rights First Blog - The Gonzales Confirmation Hearings

Newly Released Reports Show Early Concern on Prison Abuse
By KATE ZERNIKE
NYT, 6 January 2005
In late 2002, more than a year before a whistle-blower slipped military investigators the graphic photographs that would set off the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal, an F.B.I. agent at the American detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, sent a colleague an e-mail message complaining about the military's "coercive tactics" with detainees, documents released yesterday show. "You won't believe it!" the agent wrote. Two years later, the frustration among F.B.I. agents had grown. Another agent sent a colleague an e-mail message saying he had seen reports that a general from Guantánamo had gone to Abu Ghraib to "Gitmo-ize" it. "If this refers to intell gathering as I suspect," he wrote, according to the documents, "it suggests he has continued to support interrogation strategies we not only advised against, but questioned in terms of effectiveness." When the Abu Ghraib scandal broke last spring, officials characterized the abuse as the aberrant acts of a small group of low-ranking reservists, limited to a few weeks in late 2003. But thousands of pages in military reports and documents released under the Freedom of Information Act to the American Civil Liberties Union in the past few months have demonstrated that the abuse involved multiple service branches in Afghanistan, Iraq and Cuba, beginning in 2002 and continuing after Congress and the military had begun investigating Abu Ghraib. Yesterday, in response to some of the documents, the Pentagon said it would investigate F.B.I. reports that military interrogators in Guantánamo abused prisoners by beating them, grabbing their genitals and chaining them to the cold ground.

Land of Penny Pinchers
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
NYT, 6 January 2005
So is the U.S. "stingy" about helping poor countries? That accusation by a U.N. official, in veiled form, provoked indignation here. After all, we're the most generous people on earth ... aren't we? No, alas, we're not. And the tsunami illustrates the problem: When grieving victims intrude onto our TV screens, we dig into our pockets and provide the massive, heartwarming response that we're now displaying in Asia; the rest of the time, we're tightwads who turn away as people die in far greater numbers. The 150,000 or so fatalities from the tsunami are well within the margin of error for estimates of the number of deaths every year from malaria. Probably two million people die annually of malaria, most of them children and most in Africa, or maybe it's three million - we don't even know. But the bottom line is that this month and every month, more people will die of malaria (165,000 or more) and AIDS (240,000) than died in the tsunamis, and almost as many will die because of diarrhea ( 140,000). And that's where we're stingy.
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Cash Aid Urged for Tsunami Survivors
Xinhuanet, 6 January 2005
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan Thursday urged the international donors to turn their aid pledges for the devastating tsunami victims into 1 billion US dollars cash for immediate use. "Getting aid to the millions of victims of the tsunami is a race against time," Annan told world leaders at the one-day summithere aimed at coordinating the massive relief and reconstruction efforts for the earthquake and tsunami hit countries. "Millions in Asia, Africa, and even in far away countries, are suffering unimaginable trauma and psychological wounds that will take a long time to heal. Families have been torn apart," Annan said, adding that "the disaster was so brutal, so quick, and so far-reaching, that we are still struggling to comprehend it."

Bodies of 18 Iraqis Found Near Mosul - Iraqi Police
By REUTERS, 6 January 2005
The bodies of 18 Iraqi Shi'ite men killed last month on their way to work at a U.S. base in Mosul have been found in farmland near the northern city, police sources said on Thursday. Police said the bodies had been discovered on Wednesday. Each of the victims had been shot in the head. Over the past two months, scores of bodies have been found dumped in and around Mosul, most of them Iraqi police and National Guards captured by insurgents.

Iraqi Insurgents Now Outnumber Coalition Forces
By James Hider
TimesOnLine, 4 January 2004
The head of intelligence services in Baghdad says that there are more than 200,000 fighters
IRAQ’S rapidly swelling insurgency numbers 200,000 fighters and active supporters and outnumbers the United States-led coalition forces, the head of the country’s intelligence service said yesterday.
The number is far higher than the US military has so far admitted and paints a much grimmer picture of the challenge facing the Iraqi authorities and their British and American backers as elections loom in four weeks.

Baghdad Governor Slain by Insurgents
5 Americans, 13 Iraqis Killed in Other Attacks
By Karl Vick
Washington Post, 5 January 2005
Insurgents on Tuesday assassinated the governor of Baghdad, the most senior official killed in Iraq since political authority was transferred to an interim government last summer. Insurgents also killed four U.S. soldiers and a Marine in three separate attacks, eight Iraqi commandos and two others in a suicide bombing at a commando base in Baghdad, and three Iraqi troops in a roadside bombing northeast of the capital. "The war's worse, the insurgency's worse," said a senior U.S. Embassy official in Baghdad, who spoke on condition of anonymity in order to talk candidly. "This is not going to be a short fight. Nobody should think it is." The assessment reflected a new willingness among senior Iraqi and American officials to acknowledge that large tracts of the country remain beyond the control of their combined forces. More than three months ago, interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi asserted during a visit to Washington that 15 of Iraq's 18 provinces were stable and largely peaceful. Now, in interviews, he routinely refers to the situation as "our catastrophe."

Carnage Continues With 27 Dead
Juan Cole
Informed Comment, 4 January 2004
Bombings and assassinations resulted in at least 27 deaths in Iraq on Monday. Not only was a bomb exploded outside the headquarters of interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi's Iraqi National Accord party (killing four and wounding 24), but another blast went off outside the Green Zone that houses government offices and the US embassy. In Dujail a car bomber blew up a national guard station, killing 7 and wounding 8. Another such incident targeted national guardsmen at a checkpoint outside a US military base near Balad. In a gruesome incident at Tel Afar in the Turkmen north, a policeman was killed when he approached a decapitated body that had been booby-trapped with a bomb.
General Muhammad Abdullah Shahwani, head of Iraqi intelligence, estimated on Monday that the force strength of the guerrilla insurgency was about 200,000 men. My own estimate had been 100,000. The US military used to say 5,000, then started saying 20,000- 25,000, but frankly I don't think they have any idea. My colleague, military historian Tom Collier, suggested at a panel we were on that you can usually safely triple the US military estimate of the numbers of the enemy in a guerrilla conflict.

Attacks Continue in Iraq as Elections Approach
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr. and DAVID E. SANGER.
NYT. 4 January 2005
A bomb-laden fuel truck killed eight Iraqi commandos and two other people when it crashed into a checkpoint in western Baghdad about 9 a.m. Tuesday, according to an interior ministry official. Sixty others were wounded in the attack, which happened near the scene of two of the deadly car bombings Monday. Insurgents also assassinated the governor of Baghdad Tuesday morning, killing Ali al-Haidari after he left his home, the interior ministry said. The Associated Press reported that six of the governor's bodyguards were also killed. Hours after a wave of bombing attacks that left at least 20 people dead on Monday, Prime Minister Ayad Allawi telephoned President Bush and discussed the many impediments still facing the country as it heads toward elections in 27 days, according to senior American officials familiar with the contents of the call. ...some officials in Washington and in Iraq interpreted the telephone call as a sign that Dr. Allawi, who is clearly concerned his own party could be headed to defeat if the election is held on schedule, may be preparing the ground to make the case for delay to Mr. Bush.

Bomber Kills 20 Iraqi Troops
Suicide attack targets a bus north of Baghdad. Four police are shot dead in a nearby town.
By Robin Fields
LA Times, 3 January 2005
A suicide bomber detonated an explosives-packed SUV alongside a bus full of Iraqi national guards Sunday morning, killing at least 20 soldiers. The blast near Balad, about 50 miles north of Baghdad, was one of the first of several attacks on Iraqi security forces throughout the day that left at least 27 people dead. Authorities described the violence as part of a campaign to undercut Iraq's interim government and scare Iraqis away from participating in the Jan. 30 national election, in part by assailing forces charged with safeguarding the polls. The last few weeks have brought a relentless run of deadly strikes on police, national guardsmen, election officials and political candidates.

Who is really twisting election logic?
Militants' Campaign Twists Logistics of Iraq Election
Workers and candidates risk their lives and limit their visibility. Voting locations are still secret.
By Ashraf Khalil
LA Times, January 2005
The parties have registered, the alliances have formed and the calls for a delay have mostly died down. With the first frantic stage of Iraq's landmark electoral saga past, planners face the nuts and bolts of holding a credible vote in four weeks' time. Until now, the campaign was almost a theoretical concept. Much of the work took place inside Baghdad's Green Zone fortress, and the far-flung local offices of the Independent Electoral Commission kept a low profile. Most of the estimated 14 million eligible voters were automatically registered without having to leave their homes. Now, the campaign planning inevitably will become more visible — and more of a target. Thousands of temporary employees are being recruited as quietly as possible. They will operate under constant threat of attack and somehow have to offer enough voting opportunities in the insurgency-racked Sunni Muslim heartland to produce a result acceptable to that vital minority. Organizers must also oversee the transport of 7 million pounds of equipment, including ballot boxes, ballots, special ink and 142,000 collapsible polling booths. Where those stations will be situated on election day has not yet been revealed. But the lack of security on many highways makes trucking the supplies too risky. Sunday, an SUV carrying two suicide bombers exploded alongside an Iraqi troop bus on a road near Balad, northwest of the capital, killing 20 soldiers. So organizers will resort to what one electoral expert called "one of the largest airlifts this region has seen since the first Gulf War." It would be an intimidating prospect even if organizers had the full month before the election to get everything in place. But the planners are concerned that insurgents will simply target warehouses, as in November, when a building full of registration forms was torched in Mosul. The solution? They're waiting to deliver the equipment in the final 10 days before Jan. 30.

Lugar Condemns Plan To Jail Detainees for Life
Reuters via Washington Post, 3 January 2005
A leading Republican senator yesterday condemned as "a bad idea" a reported U.S. plan to keep some suspected terrorists imprisoned for a lifetime even if the government lacks evidence to charge them. The Pentagon and the CIA have asked the White House to decide on a more permanent approach for those it is unwilling to set free or turn over to U.S. or foreign courts, The Washington Post said in a report yesterday that cited intelligence, defense and diplomatic officials. ...Sen. Carl M. Levin (Mich.), senior Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, cited earlier U.S. Supreme Court decisions. "There must be some modicum, some semblance of due process . . . if you're going to detain people, whether it's for life or whether it's for years," Levin said, also on Fox.
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Long-Term Plan Sought For Terror Suspects
By Dana Priest
Washington Post, 2 January 2005
Administration officials are preparing long-range plans for indefinitely imprisoning suspected terrorists whom they do not want to set free or turn over to courts in the United States or other countries, according to intelligence, defense and diplomatic officials. The Pentagon and the CIA have asked the White House to decide on a more permanent approach for potentially lifetime detentions, including for hundreds of people now in military and CIA custody whom the government does not have enough evidence to charge in courts. The outcome of the review, which also involves the State Department, would also affect those expected to be captured in the course of future counterterrorism operations.

US takes a leadership role...
Amid Good Intentions, Aid Workers Try to Bring Order to the Generosity
By STEPHANIE STROM
NYT, 3 January 2005
With emergency provisions now piling up in warehouses and on tarmacs around the Indian Ocean, officials are trying to avert a potential tragedy that often strikes after a disaster: a lack of coordination among those seeking to do good. All too often, a surplus of good intentions leads to relief agencies tripping over one another in what Raymond C. Offenheiser, president of Oxfam America, has called "the anarchy of altruism" that produces waste, duplication and frustration.
SEE ALSO:
'The Distribution System Is Not Working'
By Edward Cody
Washington Post, 3 January 3, 2005

Car Bomb Kills 19 Iraqis, Most of Them Soldiers
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, 2 January 2005
A suicide attacker detonated a car bomb north of Baghdad on Sunday, killing 19 Iraqis -- all but one of them National Guards -- in another strike against Iraqis cooperating with American forces, the U.S. military said. Four Iraqi policemen were killed in a separate attack. Six Guards were also wounded in the car bomb blast near Balad, 50 miles north of Baghdad, U.S. military spokesman Maj. Neal E. O'Brien said. An Iraqi civilian was among the 19 killed while the other casualties were members of Iraq's 203rd National Guard Battalion. The driver of the vehicle also died. The military said the four policemen were killed while on patrol in Samarra, 60 miles north of Baghdad. A fifth was wounded. Both Samarra and Balad are in the so-called Sunni Triangle, the scene of frequent assaults on U.S. and Iraqi security forces.

Thousands of Fallujans Demonstrate
Not reported in the West
Juan Cole
Informed Comment, 2 January 2005
Ash-Sharq al-Awsat: Thousands of Fallujans demonstrated on Saturday in front of the main entrance to the largely abandoned city. They demanded that US military forces leave their city and that basic services be restored so that they could return. One eyewitness reporter called in from the scene an estimate of 30,000 demonstrators. [Cole: I saw footage of the demonstration on Arab satellite television, and agree that it was a big, important demonstration, but I'd say it was only a few thousand strong; I suspect that having 30,000 people out by that gate would be a logistics problem--where did their water come from, e.g.] Some of the placards announced that Fallujans refused to live under a military occupation. They presented a list of demands, which included the facilitation of their return to the city, speedy return of services, rebuilding of the devastated city, and monetary compensation to its inhabitants. They also protested the US military demand that returnees show identification papers. Many said that such papers got left behind in the city when they fled. Children marched with placards reading "Where is my Father?" or "Where is my house, you supposed Liberators?"

Masochistic military moralists master mistreatment
Fresh Details Emerge on Harsh Methods at Guantánamo
By NEIL A. LEWIS
NYT, 1 January 2005
Sometime after Mohamed al-Kahtani was imprisoned at Guantánamo around the beginning of 2003, military officials believed they had a prize on their hands - someone who was perhaps intended to have been a hijacker in the Sept. 11 plot. But his interrogation was not yielding much, so they decided in the middle of 2003 to try a new tactic. Mr. Kahtani, a Saudi, was given a tranquilizer, put in sensory deprivation garb with blackened goggles, and hustled aboard a plane that was supposedly taking him to the Middle East. After hours in the air, the plane landed back at the United States naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where he was not returned to the regular prison compound but put in an isolation cell in the base's brig. There, he was subjected to harsh interrogation procedures that he was encouraged to believe were being conducted by Egyptian national security operatives. The account of Mr. Kahtani's treatment given to The New York Times recently by military intelligence officials and interrogators is the latest of several developments that have severely damaged the military's longstanding public version of how the detention and interrogation center at Guantánamo operated. Interviews with former intelligence officers and interrogators provided new details and confirmed earlier accounts of inmates being shackled for hours and left to soil themselves while exposed to blaring music or the insistent meowing of a cat-food commercial. In addition, some may have been forcibly given enemas as punishment. ..."We do not discuss specific interrogation techniques nor do we identify any specific detainee," Colonel Sumpter said in a statement. "All detainees are safeguarded and are assured food, drink, clothing, shelter, health care and basic rights, all in accordance with the Geneva Convention. The U.S. does not permit, tolerate or condone torture by any of its personnel or employees." ...It is unclear whether the Justice Department's new, broader definition of torture, posted on the department's Web site late Thursday, would have affected operations at Guantánamo.

Counter - Insurgency in Iraq Plagued by Fear, Doubt
By REUTERS via NYT, 1 January 2005
...some critics among Iraqis say the new recruits' methods are shoddy and they often hit the wrong targets. ...Now there are fears that Iraq's new security forces, made up mostly of members of the long-oppressed Shi'ite majority, will use even tougher measures against Saddam's once-privileged Sunni brethren -- all with the blessing of the U.S. military. In the meantime, recruitment of members of Saddam's former security apparatus has raised the specter of human rights abuses -- worries that U.S. and Iraqi officials dismiss as unwarranted.

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