31 January 2006

Preview of State of the Union
NPR Interview, 29 January 2006
Liane Hansen speaks with two lawmakers who will be in the House Chamber for the speech: Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) and Sen. Craig Thomas (R-WY). Sen. Menendez gets it right.
SEE ALSO:
Wanted: A Wary Audience
NYT, 30 January 2006
When President Bush gives his State of the Union address tonight, expect to hear a renewed call for setting the administration's first-term tax cuts in concrete, combined with warnings that letting the cuts expire would retard economic growth. Nothing could be further from the truth.
As proof of tax cuts' ability to spur the economy, Mr. Bush generally cites productivity growth, job creation and the rise in personal income. Productivity has indeed been stellar, and supply-siders claim that is because tax cuts have led to investment, which led to higher productivity. But business investment has been flat for five years. Meanwhile, the benefits of productivity growth have been concentrated among the wealthy. So tax cuts haven't unleashed investment, but they have contributed to inequality.
Job growth during the Bush-era recovery has been worse, by far, than in any comparable economic upturn since the 1960's. It would take some 500,000 new jobs a month every month this year just to equal the second worst job-creation record in the modern era. And while working Americans are laboring harder, hourly wages and weekly salaries — the financial lifeblood of most Americans — have been flat or falling, after inflation, since the middle of 2003.
That last inconvenient fact isn't likely to stop Mr. Bush from bragging about rising "real after-tax income." Besides paychecks, that much-cited statistic includes things like bonuses, stock dividends and health insurance.
Dividends flow mainly to the top 5 percent of the income ladder, and health benefits, while valuable, are increasingly provided in lieu of salary. So the fact that personal income, writ large, is up "by 7 percent since I've been your president," as Mr. Bush boasted recently, isn't a measure of what is in most Americans' pockets. (Besides, a 7 percent gain is hardly worth bragging about, since the average from other comparable recoveries is 12.5 percent.)
Mr. Bush bristles at the oft-repeated criticism that cutting taxes on dividends and capital gains mainly benefits the wealthy. That's odd, because the criticism is simply a statement of the obvious, given the facts: almost half of all dividends are earned by people making more than $200,000, and more than half of all capital gains are earned by people with incomes over $1 million.
Of late, the president has taken to saying that cutting taxes on dividends and capital gains helps "workers in the automobile plant" and the other millions of Americans who own stock through their 401(k) plans. But in truth, when taxes on dividends and capital gains are cut, investing in a 401(k) plan becomes less attractive. That's because tax- deferred buildup in a 401(k) is a big part of its allure, but the lower the tax rate, the less valuable the deferral. Investors in 401(k)'s also lose out when wages and salaries are taxed at higher rates than investments, as they are now and as Mr. Bush wants to ensure they remain. That's because money that's withdrawn from a 401(k) is taxed like salary, not like investments.
In his State of the Union speech, the president will also undoubtedly return to his promise to do something about the deficit, which he often vows to halve by 2009. His audience should remember that this claim assumes minimal spending going forward for Iraq and Afghanistan as well as a continuation of the voracious alternative minimum tax, which everyone in government knows must be reformed. This month Congress's budget agency forecast that if the tax cuts are made permanent and the alternative tax fixed, the United States will face large and growing deficits over the next decade, with red ink of between $3.5 trillion and $4 trillion over that time.
Tonight is Mr. Bush's night to speak. But it's the job of all of us to be critical listeners.

Republicans Call for Bush to Reveal All on Abramoff
Three GOP lawmakers say the president should publicly release records of the White House's contacts with the now-disgraced lobbyist.
By David G. Savage
LA Times, 30 January 2006
Three Republican lawmakers Sunday urged President Bush to disclose who in the White House had met with lobbyist Jack Abramoff and what was discussed in those meetings.
Abramoff, once one of the most influential lobbyists in Washington, pleaded guilty this month to criminal charges in a bribery probe that is expected to involve members of Congress and possibly the Interior Department.
But his contacts also reached into the White House: Abramoff was a major fundraiser for Bush's 2004 reelection campaign, and he had his photo taken several times with the president. Last week, Bush told reporters that the two had no personal relationship.
Bush's press secretary, Scott McClellan, has said the photos are typical of receiving-line pictures at large White House events. The administration has acknowledged that Abramoff attended two Hanukkah receptions and met on several occasions with White House staff members.
Bush has refused to release the photos, saying the Democrats would use them for "pure political purposes."
Asked about Abramoff on the Sunday talk shows, the Republican lawmakers said the White House should release all records of its contacts with the now-disgraced lobbyist.
"I'm one who believes that more is better … when it comes to disclosure and transparency, so I'd be a big advocate for making records that are out there available," Sen. John Thune of South Dakota told "Fox News Sunday."
The photos should not be released, he said, "but I do think it's important that everybody understand what this guy's level of involvement was."
Rep. Mike Pence of Indiana, appearing on the same program, agreed on the need for the White House to release its records related to Abramoff.
"Absolutely. I think this president is a man of unimpeachable integrity," Pence said. "The American people have profound confidence in him. And as Abraham Lincoln said, give the people the facts and republican governance, perhaps, will be saved."
Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska said it was "silly" to think that a lobbyist and his campaign contributions would influence the president. But full disclosure is the best policy, he said.
"My personal opinion on these things is to just get it out. If you've got pictures, get the pictures out," Hagel said on ABC's "This Week." "Disclosure is the real issue. Whether it's campaign finance issues, whether it's ethics issues, whether it's lobbying issues, disclosure is the best and most effective way to deal with all of these things."
White House counselor Dan Bartlett told CNN's "Late Edition" that Bush had no plans to release the records or the photos to the public, but that he would release them to prosecutors if requested.

Blair and Bush's UN 'Collusion'
News.Sctosman.com via Informed Comment, 29 January 2006
A White House leak claims Tony Blair and George Bush plotted to go to war against Iraq without United Nations backing at a secret meeting.
A new edition of a book insists the two leaders went through the motions of getting UN support for military action - but were united on invasion even if the UN failed to back them.
The book, by London University law professor Phillipe Sands, said Mr Blair gave his total support to Mr Bush at the secret White House meeting in January 2003. After the meeting, the two leaders gave a press conference where Mr Bush appeared to support going for a second UN resolution to give specific approval for a war.
But Prof Sands' book, entitled Lawless World, claims that president Bush had earlier displayed open contempt for the UN during the summit, made wild threats against Iraq dictator Saddam Hussein and displayed astounding ignorance of the likely post-war problems.

Army's Rising Promotion Rate Called Ominous
Experts say the quality of the officer corps is threatened as the service fights to retain leaders during wartime and fill new command slots.
By Mark Mazzetti
LA Times, 30 January 2006
Struggling to retain enough officers to lead its forces, the Army has begun to dramatically increase the number of soldiers it promotes, raising fears within the service that wartime strains are diluting the quality of the officer corps.
Last year, the Army promoted 97% of all eligible captains to the rank of major, Pentagon data show. That was up from a historical average of 70% to 80%.
Traditionally, the Army has used the step to major as a winnowing point to push lower-performing soldiers out of the military.
The service also promoted 86% of eligible majors to the rank of lieutenant colonel in 2005, up from the historical average of 65% to 75%.
The higher rates of promotion are part of efforts to fill new slots created by an Army reorganization and to compensate for officers who are resigning from the service, many after multiple rotations to Iraq.
The promotion rates "are much higher than they have been in the past because we need more officers than we did before," said Lt. Col. Bryan Hilferty, an Army spokesman.
The Army has long taken pride in the competitiveness of its promotions, and insists that only officers that meet rigorous standards are elevated through its ranks.
But the recent trends in promotions have stirred concerns that the Army is being forced to lower its standards to provide leaders for combat units that will be deployed overseas.
"The problem here is that you're not knocking off the bottom 20%," said a high-ranking Army officer at the Pentagon. "Basically, if you haven't been court-martialed, you're going to be promoted to major."

G.O.P. Senator Opposes Alito as Vote Nears
By DAVID STOUT
NYT, 30 January 2006
Senator Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island today became the first Republican senator to oppose the nomination of Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. to the Supreme Court. But the judge still seemed to have enough support for an all-important vote this afternoon.
"Judge Alito has outstanding legal credentials and an inspiring life story," Mr. Chafee said, in a statement released by his office. "However, I am greatly concerned about his philosophy on some important constitutional issues."
Mr. Chafee said he wanted to support President Bush's choice. "The president did win the election," the senator said. But he added, "I am a pro-choice, pro-environment, pro-Bill of Rights Republican, and I will be voting against this nomination."
Still, Mr. Chafee's spokesman, Stephen Hourahan, said the senator would not support Democratic attempts to block Judge Alito's confirmation by a filibuster, a delay-by-debate tactic that requires 60 votes to defeat.
The Associated Press said Mr. Chafee explained his reasoning in declining to support a filibuster by asking rhetorically, "How are we going to get anything done if we can't work together?"
The vote to end the filibuster was scheduled to begin at 4:30 this afternoon. Since there are 55 Republican senators, and three Democrats have announced their support for the nominee, Judge Alito appeared certain to clear the 60-vote hurdle, given Mr. Chafee's decision not to block a final confirmation vote.
Then, too, a few Democrats have said they are either leaning toward supporting Judge Alito, or at least will not stand in the way of a confirmation vote. The three Democrats who have come out in support of the nominee are Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia, Tim Johnson of South Dakota and Ben Nelson of Nebraska.
Mr. Chafee is one of three Republican moderates whose stand on Judge Alito had been awaited with interest. The others are Susan M. Collins of Maine, who has announced her support for the nomination, and Olympia J. Snowe, also of Maine, who had not announced her decision by midday today.

Exxon Mobil Sets a Profit Record, With $36 Billion
By SIMON ROMERO and EDMUND L. ANDREWS
NYT, 30 January 2006
Exxon Mobil, aided by strong energy prices, disclosed Monday that it had set a record for profits among American companies, reporting $36 billion in annual income. But while most companies would be proud to trumpet record profits, Exxon Mobil did everything it could to play down the news.
For Exxon Mobil, which also handily widened its lead over Wal-Mart as the company with the largest revenues in the nation, the report was an embarrassment of riches. Anxious about criticism of the results, executives began laying the groundwork months ago to try to prevent a political reaction against the company and the energy industry.
For example, Exxon Mobil paid for advertisements in leading newspapers arguing that profit margins in the industry lagged far behind those of other industries, like pharmaceuticals and banking.
Still, growing oil profits are generating new scrutiny of the industry, with legislators and taxpayer groups expressing concern over Big Oil's good fortune, as soaring energy prices put increasing pressure on the pocketbooks of consumers.
"If it's Google, no one asks about the profits because they're too busy buying the stock," said Amy Myers Jaffe, associate director of the energy program at Rice University. "Exxon is different. We have these emotional feelings related to gasoline because there's no readily available substitute."
Exxon Mobil's results on Monday, of course, caused jaws to drop; by some measures, the company became richer than some of the world's most pivotal oil-producing nations. Exxon Mobil reported a 27 percent surge in profits for the fourth quarter as elevated fuel prices gave rise to full-year profits in 2005 of $36.13 billion on revenue of $371 billion. Exxon Mobil said its overall profits climbed more than 40 percent last year, while its tax bill rose only 14 percent.

30 January 2006

Critics Say Detaining Suspected Terrorists' Wives May Backfire
It Could Alienate the Iraqi People, Experts Say
ABC News via Informed Comment, 30 January 2006
Since the beginning of the war in Iraq, there have been questions about U.S. troops' sensitivities to Islamic culture — especially when dealing with women. Now there are new questions about a tactic the military calls leveraging.
For example, marines found weapons and explosives in a woman's house and wanted her to lead them to her husband. The military says this sort of intimidation is a necessary tool.
But internal military documents suggest it's taken a new turn: Detaining wives of suspected insurgents in hopes of getting their husbands to surrender.
"If they're being taken solely for the purpose of drawing their men out of hiding, it can even appear to look like hostage taking," said Jumana Musa of Amnesty International.
Internal Criticism
In a June 10, 2004, memorandum obtained by ABC News, a Pentagon intelligence officer complains about the detention of a 28-year-old mother — still nursing her 6-month-old baby. She was held for two days even though the officer had concluded she had "no actionable intelligence leading to the arrest of her husband."
In an exchange of e-mails obtained by The Associated Press, an Army colonel suggests challenging a wanted man whose spouse was being held "to come get his wife."
Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, the former military police commander at the Abu Ghraib Prison where American troops were accused of torturing prisoners, said detaining wives of suspected terrorists has been a part of the war in Iraq.
"The incidents I would be familiar with occurred in 2003, and there were at least a dozen — perhaps 15 or 20," she said. "I wouldn't say it was a common practice, but it was a practice for the higher value detainees"
Karpinski said she knew of only one incident where the tactic worked and analysts warn the tactic has potential pitfalls.
"If this doesn't end up actually being something that give you a key terrorist, the risk is you're going to alienate a lot of Iraqis," said ABC News analyst Tony Cordesman.
The military says this sort of thing happens rarely and only when necessary. But the question of female detainees has been highlighted by the kidnapping of American reporter Jill Carroll. Her captors have threatened to kill her unless all Iraqi women being held are freed.
Karpinski, who was demoted after the Abu Ghraib incident, said she raised objections to leveraging with several of her commanders.
"It was one of the many issues that we raised — that I raised — with the head of the coalition task force, Gen. Sanchez," she said.

America: Super Hero or Clumsy Gorilla?
The Good Titan
A liberal scholar argues that American power gives the globe security, stability and prosperity.
Book review by Rich Lowry
Washington Post, 29 January 2006
SEE ALSO:
Gorilla Empire?
A Global State of Disunion
By Tom Engelhardt
TomDispatch.com, 29 January 2006

Reflections of American Militarism...
Glory and romance...
A Remembrance of Marine Sgt. Adam Leigh Cann
by Shannon Novak
NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday, 29 January 2006
Marine Sgt. Adam Leigh Cann was killed when he used himself as a shield to protect fellow military personnel and Iraqi civilians from a suicide bomber. The South Floridian was an assistant supervisor of the K-9 units in Iraq, and two months away from returning to California's Camp Pendleton, where he was supposed to be a chief trainer. Shannon Novak of member station WLRN reports.
SEE ALSO:
National Guard Struggles to Recruit
NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday, 29 January 2006
The Army National Guard in New Hampshire and 21 other states is offering a $2,000 bonus to Guard members who get a buddy to sign up. It's the latest sign that dangerous wartime deployments make this a challenging time for military recruiters. But some veterans' groups fear the monetary incentive will be a disincentive to tell your buddy the truth about risks.

Budget to Hurt Poor People on Medicaid, Report Says
By ROBERT PEAR
NYT, 30 January 2006
Millions of low-income people would have to pay more for health care under a bill worked out by Congress, and some of them would forgo care or drop out of Medicaid because of the higher co-payments and premiums, the Congressional Budget Office says in a new report.
The Senate has already approved the measure, the first major effort to rein in federal benefit programs in eight years, and the House is expected to vote Wednesday, clearing the bill for President Bush.
In his State of the Union address on Tuesday, Mr. Bush plans to recommend a variety of steps to help people obtain health insurance and cope with rising health costs. But the bill, the Deficit Reduction Act, written by Congress over the last year with support from the White House, could reduce coverage and increase the number of uninsured, the budget office said.
Over all, the bill is estimated to save $38.8 billion in the next five years and $99.3 billion from 2006 to 2015, with cuts in student loans, crop subsidies and many other programs, the budget office said. Medicaid and Medicare account for half of the savings, 27 percent and 23 percent over 10 years.
The report gives Democrats new ammunition to attack the bill. But they appear unlikely to defeat it, since the House approved a nearly identical version of the legislation by a vote of 212 to 206 on Dec. 19.

In Alito, G.O.P. Reaps Harvest Planted in '82
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
NYT, 30 January 2006
...Judge Alito's confirmation is also the culmination of a disciplined campaign begun by the Reagan administration to seed the lower federal judiciary with like-minded jurists who could reorient the federal courts toward a view of the Constitution much closer to its 18th-century authors' intent, including a much less expansive view of its application to individual rights and federal power. It was a philosophy promulgated by Edwin Meese III, attorney general in the Reagan administration, that became the gospel of the Federalist Society and the nascent conservative legal movement.
Both Mr. Roberts and Mr. Alito were among the cadre of young conservative lawyers attracted to the Reagan administration's Justice Department. And both advanced to the pool of promising young jurists whom strategists like C. Boyden Gray, White House counsel in the first Bush administration and an adviser to the current White House, sought to place throughout the federal judiciary to groom for the highest court.
"It is a Reagan personnel officer's dream come true," said Douglas W. Kmiec, a law professor at Pepperdine University who worked with Mr. Alito and Mr. Roberts in the Reagan administration. "It is a graduation. These individuals have been in study and preparation for these roles all their professional lives."
As each progressed in legal stature, others were laying the infrastructure of the movement. After the 1987 defeat of the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Robert H. Bork conservatives vowed to build a counterweight to the liberal forces that had mobilized to stop him.
With grants from major conservative donors like the John M. Olin Foundation, the Federalist Society functioned as a kind of shadow conservative bar association, planting chapters in law schools around the country that served as a pipeline to prestigious judicial clerkships.
During their narrow and politically costly victory in the 1991 confirmation of Justice Clarence Thomas, the Federalist Society lawyers forged new ties with the increasingly sophisticated network of grass-roots conservative Christian groups like Focus on the Family in Colorado Springs and the American Family Association in Tupelo, Miss. Many conservative Christian pastors and broadcasters had railed for decades against Supreme Court decisions that outlawed school prayer and endorsed abortion rights.
During the Clinton administration, Federalist Society members and allies had come to dominate the membership and staff of the Judiciary Committee, which turned back many of the administration's nominees. "There was a Republican majority of the Senate, and it tempered the nature of the nominations being made," said Mr. Abraham, the Federalist Society founder who was a senator on the Judiciary Committee at the time.
By 2000, the decades of organizing and battles had fueled a deep demand in the Republican base for change on the court. Mr. Bush tapped into that demand by promising to name jurists in the mold of conservative Justices Thomas and Scalia.
When Mr. Bush named Harriet E. Miers, the White House counsel, as the successor to Justice O'Connor, he faced a revolt from his conservative base, which complained about her dearth of qualifications and ideological bona fides.
"It was a striking example of the grass roots having strong opinions that ran counter to the party leaders about what was attainable," said Stephen G. Calabresi, a law professor at Northwestern University and another founding member of the Federalist Society.
But in October, when President Bush withdrew Ms. Miers's nomination and named Judge Alito, the same network quickly mobilized behind him.
Conservatives had begun planning for a nomination fight as long ago as that February meeting, which was led by Leonard A. Leo, executive vice president of the Federalist Society and informal adviser to the White House, Mr. Meese and Mr. Gray.
They laid out a two-part strategy to roll out behind whomever the president picked, people present said. The plan: first, extol the nonpartisan legal credentials of the nominee, steering the debate away from the nominee's possible influence over hot-button issues. Second, attack the liberal groups they expected to oppose any Bush nominee.
The team worked through a newly formed group, the Judicial Confirmation Network, to coordinate grass-roots pressure on Democratic senators from conservative states. And they stayed in constant contact with scores of conservative groups around the country to brief them about potential nominees and to make sure they all stuck to the same message. They fine-tuned their strategy for Judge Alito when he was nominated in October by recruiting Italian-American groups to protest the use of the nickname "Scalito," which would have linked him to the conservative Justice Antonin Scalia.
In November, some Democrats believed they had a chance to defeat the nomination after the disclosure of a 1985 memorandum Judge Alito wrote in the Reagan administration about his conservative legal views on abortion, affirmative action and other subjects.
"It was a done deal," one of the Democratic staff members of the Senate Judiciary Committee said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the staff is forbidden to talk publicly about internal meetings. "This was the most evidence we have ever had about a Supreme Court nominee's true beliefs."
Mr. Leo and other lawyers supporting Judge Alito were inclined to shrug off the memorandum, which described views that were typical in their circles, people involved in the effort said. But executives at Creative Response Concepts, the team's public relations firm, quickly convinced them it was "a big deal" that could become the centerpiece of the Democrats' attacks, one of the people said.
"The call came in right away," said Jay Sekulow, chief counsel of the American Center for Law and Justice and another lawyer on the Alito team.
Responding to Mr. Alito's 1985 statement that he disagreed strongly with the abortion-rights precedents, for example, "The answer was, 'Of course he was opposed to abortion,' " Mr. Sekulow said. "He worked for the Reagan administration, he was a lawyer representing a client, and it may well have reflected his personal beliefs. But look what he has done as judge."
His supporters deluged news organizations with phone calls, press releases and lawyers to interview, all noting that on the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, Judge Alito had voted to uphold and to strike down abortion restrictions.
Democrats contended that those arguments were irrelevant because on the lower court Judge Alito was bound by Supreme Court precedent, whereas as a justice he could vote to overturn any precedents with which he disagreed.
By last week it was clear that the judge had enough votes to win confirmation. And the last gasp of resistance came in a Democratic caucus meeting on Wednesday when Senator Edward M. Kennedy, joined by Senator John Kerry, both of Massachusetts, unsuccessfully tried to persuade the party to organize a filibuster.
No one defended Judge Alito or argued that he did not warrant opposition, Mr. Kennedy said in an interview. Instead, opponents of the filibuster argued about the political cost of being accused of obstructionism by conservatives.
Still, on the brink of this victory, some in the conservative movement say the battle over the court has just begun. Justice O'Connor was the swing vote on many issues, but replacing her with a more dependable conservative would bring that faction of the court at most to four justices, not five, and thus not enough to truly reshape the court or overturn precedents like those upholding abortion rights.
"It has been a long time coming," Judge Bork said, "but more needs to be done."

FEMA Ignored Proposals or Didn't Use Resources Effectively, Department Says
Interior Offered Extensive Katrina Aid
By Joby Warrick
Washington Post, 30 January 2006
Hundreds of federal search-and-rescue workers and large numbers of boats, aircraft and bulldozers were offered to FEMA in the hours immediately after Hurricane Katrina hit, but the aid proposals were either ignored or not effectively used, newly released documents show.
The Interior Department, which made the offers, also proposed dispatching as many as 400 of its law enforcement officers to provide security in Gulf Coast cities ravaged by flooding and looting. But nearly a month would pass before the Federal Emergency Management Agency put the officers to work, according to an Interior document obtained by The Washington Post.
"Although we attempted to provide these assets we were unable to efficiently integrate and deploy these resources," Interior officials said in written response to questions by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
Acting in the "immediate aftermath" of the hurricane, Interior officials provided FEMA with a comprehensive list of assets that were "immediately available for humanitarian and emergency assistance," according to the memo, dated Nov. 7, 2005. Those assets included more than 300 boats, 11 aircraft, 119 pieces of heavy equipment, 300 dump trucks and other vehicles for clearing debris, as well as Interior-owned campgrounds and other land that could be used as staging areas or emergency shelters.
Also offered were rescue crews from the Fish and Wildlife Service and National Park Service, teams specially trained for urban search-and-rescue missions using flat-bottom boats.
"Clearly these assets and skills were precisely relevant to the post-Katrina environment," the memo said. Yet, the rescue teams and boats were not considered in the federal government's planning for hurricane disasters, the memo states.
Ultimately, many Fish and Wildlife teams did travel to the Gulf and assisted in the rescues of more than 4,500 people -- but they were "never formally tasked" for that assignment by FEMA, the document states.
The Interior Department's criticisms echo those expressed by other government agencies that have publicly faulted FEMA's hurricane response. In October, Transportation Secretary Norman Y. Mineta criticized FEMA for moving slowly in requesting buses to evacuate flood victims from central New Orleans. The order for buses was issued in the early hours of Aug. 31, nearly two days after Katrina made landfall.
The Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee has scheduled hearings this week to explore some of the more notorious shortcomings in the federal government's response, including the communications breakdowns and the bungled effort to evacuate tens of thousands of New Orleans residents who were stranded in the city after the storm.

A False Balance
By PAUL KRUGMAN
NYT, 30 January 2006
"How does one report the facts," asked Rob Corddry on "The Daily Show," "when the facts themselves are biased?" He explained to Jon Stewart, who played straight man, that "facts in Iraq have an anti-Bush agenda," and therefore can't be reported.
Mr. Corddry's parody of journalists who believe they must be "balanced" even when the truth isn't balanced continues, alas, to ring true. The most recent example is the peculiar determination of some news organizations to cast the scandal surrounding Jack Abramoff as "bipartisan."
Let's review who Mr. Abramoff is and what he did.
...So Mr. Abramoff is a movement conservative whose lobbying career was based on his connections with other movement conservatives. His big coup was persuading gullible Indian tribes to hire him as an adviser; his advice was to give less money to Democrats and more to Republicans. There's nothing bipartisan about this tale, which is all about the use and abuse of Republican connections.
Yet over the past few weeks a number of journalists, ranging from The Washington Post's ombudsman to the "Today" show's Katie Couric, have declared that Mr. Abramoff gave money to both parties. In each case the journalists or their news organization, when challenged, grudgingly conceded that Mr. Abramoff himself hasn't given a penny to Democrats. But in each case they claimed that this is only a technical point, because Mr. Abramoff's clients — those Indian tribes — gave money to Democrats as well as Republicans, money the news organizations say he "directed" to Democrats.
But the tribes were already giving money to Democrats before Mr. Abramoff entered the picture; he persuaded them to reduce those Democratic donations, while giving much more money to Republicans. A study commissioned by The American Prospect shows that the tribes' donations to Democrats fell by 9 percent after they hired Mr. Abramoff, while their contributions to Republicans more than doubled. So in any normal sense of the word "directed," Mr. Abramoff directed funds away from Democrats, not toward them.
...Why does the insistence of some journalists on calling this one-party scandal bipartisan matter? For one thing, the public is led to believe that the Abramoff affair is just Washington business as usual, which it isn't. The scale of the scandals now coming to light, of which the Abramoff affair is just a part, dwarfs anything in living memory.
More important, this kind of misreporting makes the public feel helpless. Voters who are told, falsely, that both parties were drawn into Mr. Abramoff's web are likely to become passive and shrug their shoulders instead of demanding reform.
So the reluctance of some journalists to report facts that, in this case, happen to have an anti-Republican agenda is a serious matter. It's not a stretch to say that these journalists are acting as enablers for the rampant corruption that has emerged in Washington over the last decade.
SEE ALSO:
A Demographic of Boundless Indifference
By TED KOPPEL
NYT, 29 January 2006
With the advent of cable, satellite and broadband technology, today's marketplace has become so overcrowded that network news divisions are increasingly vulnerable to the dictatorship of the demographic. Now, every division of every network is expected to make a profit. And so we have entered the age of boutique journalism. The goal for the traditional broadcast networks now is to identify those segments of the audience considered most desirable by the advertising community and then to cater to them.
Most television news programs are therefore designed to satisfy the perceived appetites of our audiences. That may be not only acceptable but unavoidable in entertainment; in news, however, it is the journalists who should be telling their viewers what is important, not the other way around.
Indeed, in television news these days, the programs are being shaped to attract, most particularly, 18-to-34-year-old viewers. They, in turn, are presumed to be partly brain-dead — though not so insensible as to be unmoved by the blandishments of sponsors.
Exceptions, it should be noted, remain. Thus it is that the evening news broadcasts of ABC, CBS and NBC are liberally studded with advertisements that clearly cater to older Americans. But this is a holdover from another era: the last gathering of more than 30 million tribal elders, as they clench their dentures while struggling to control esophageal eruptions of stomach acid to watch "The News." That number still commands respect, but even the evening news programs, you will find (after the first block of headline material), are struggling to find a new format that will somehow appeal to younger viewers.
Washington news, for example, is covered with less and less enthusiasm and aggressiveness. The networks' foreign bureaus have, for some years now, been seen as too expensive to merit survival. Judged on the frequency with which their reports get airtime, they can no longer be deemed cost-effective. Most have either been closed or reduced in size to the point of irrelevance.
Simply stated, no audience is perceived to be clamoring for foreign news, the exceptions being wars in their early months that involve American troops, acts of terrorism and, for a couple of weeks or so, natural disasters of truly epic proportions.
You will still see foreign stories on the evening news broadcasts, but examine them carefully. They are either reported by one of a half-dozen or so remaining foreign correspondents who now cover the world for each network, or the anchor simply narrates a piece of videotape shot by some other news agency. For big events, an anchor might parachute in for a couple of days of high drama coverage. But the age of the foreign correspondent, who knew a country or region intimately, is long over.
No television news executive is likely to acknowledge indifference to major events overseas or in our nation's capital, but he may, on occasion, concede that the viewers don't care, and therein lies the essential malignancy.
The accusation that television news has a political agenda misses the point. Right now, the main agenda is to give people what they want. It is not partisanship but profitability that shapes what you see.

Debate on Climate Shifts to Issue of Irreparable Change
Some Experts on Global Warming Foresee 'Tipping Point' When It Is Too Late to Act
By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post, 29 January 2006
Now that most scientists agree human activity is causing Earth to warm, the central debate has shifted to whether climate change is progressing so rapidly that, within decades, humans may be helpless to slow or reverse the trend.
This "tipping point" scenario has begun to consume many prominent researchers in the United States and abroad, because the answer could determine how drastically countries need to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions in the coming years. While scientists remain uncertain when such a point might occur, many say it is urgent that policymakers cut global carbon dioxide emissions in half over the next 50 years or risk the triggering of changes that would be irreversible.
...The debate has been intensifying because Earth is warming much faster than some researchers had predicted. James E. Hansen, who directs NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies, last week confirmed that 2005 was the warmest year on record, surpassing 1998. Earth's average temperature has risen nearly 1 degree Fahrenheit over the past 30 years, he noted, and another increase of about 4 degrees over the next century would "imply changes that constitute practically a different planet."
"It's not something you can adapt to," Hansen said in an interview. "We can't let it go on another 10 years like this. We've got to do something."
Princeton University geosciences and international affairs professor Michael Oppenheimer, who also advises the advocacy group Environmental Defense, said one of the greatest dangers lies in the disintegration of the Greenland or West Antarctic ice sheets, which together hold about 20 percent of the fresh water on the planet. If either of the two sheets disintegrates, sea level could rise nearly 20 feet in the course of a couple of centuries, swamping the southern third of Florida and Manhattan up to the middle of Greenwich Village.

Health Workers' Choice Debated
Proposals Back Right Not to Treat
By Rob Stein
Washington Post, 30 January 2006
More than a dozen states are considering new laws to protect health workers who do not want to provide care that conflicts with their personal beliefs, a surge of legislation that reflects the intensifying tension between asserting individual religious values and defending patients' rights.
About half of the proposals would shield pharmacists who refuse to fill prescriptions for birth control and "morning-after" pills because they believe the drugs cause abortions. But many are far broader measures that would shelter a doctor, nurse, aide, technician or other employee who objects to any therapy. That might include in-vitro fertilization, physician-assisted suicide, embryonic stem cells and perhaps even providing treatment to gays and lesbians.
...The swell of propositions is raising alarm among advocates for abortion rights, family planning, AIDS prevention, the right to die, gays and lesbians, and others who see the push as the latest manifestation of the growing political power of social conservatives.
"This is a very significant threat to patients' rights in the United States," said Lois Uttley of the MergerWatch project, who is helping organize a conference in New York to plot a counterstrategy. "We need to protect the patient's right to use their own religious or ethical values to make medical decisions."
...Opponents fear the laws are often so broad that they could be used to withhold health services far beyond those related to abortion and embryos.
"The so-called right-to-life movement in the United States has expanded its agenda way beyond the original focus on abortion," Uttley said. "Given the political power of religious conservatives, the impact of a whole range of patient services could be in danger."
Doctors opposed to fetal tissue research, for example, could refuse to notify parents that their child was due for a chicken pox inoculation because the vaccine was originally produced using fetal tissue cell cultures, said R. Alto Charo, a bioethicist at the University of Wisconsin.
"That physician would be immunized from medical malpractice claims and state disciplinary action," Charo said.
Advocates for end-of-life care are alarmed that the laws would allow health care workers and institutions to disregard terminally ill patients' decisions to refuse resuscitation, feeding tubes and other invasive measures.
"Patients have a right to say no to CPR, to being put on a ventilator, to getting feeding tubes," said Kathryn Tucker of Compassion and Choice, which advocates better end-of-life care and physician-assisted suicide.
Others worry that health care workers could refuse to provide sex education because they believe in abstinence instead, or deny care to gays and lesbians.
"I already get calls all the time from people who have been turned away by their doctors," said Jennifer C. Pizer of the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, who is representing a California lesbian whose doctor refused her artificial insemination. "This is a very grave concern."

Study Ties Political Leanings to Hidden Biases
By Shankar Vedantam
Washington Pos, 30 January 2006
Put a group of people together at a party and observe how they behave. Differently than when they are alone? Differently than when they are with family? What if they're in a stadium instead of at a party? What if they're all men?
The field of social psychology has long been focused on how social environments affect the way people behave. But social psychologists are people, too, and as the United States has become increasingly politically polarized, they have grown increasingly interested in examining what drives these sharp divides: red states vs. blue states; pro-Iraq war vs. anti-Iraq war; pro-same-sex marriage vs. anti-same-sex marriage. And they have begun to study political behavior using such specialized tools as sophisticated psychological tests and brain scans.
"In my own family, for example, there are stark differences, not just of opinion but very profound differences in how we view the world," said Brenda Major, a psychologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara and the president of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, which had a conference last week that showcased several provocative psychological studies about the nature of political belief.
The new interest has yielded some results that will themselves provoke partisan reactions: Studies presented at the conference, for example, produced evidence that emotions and implicit assumptions often influence why people choose their political affiliations, and that partisans stubbornly discount any information that challenges their preexisting beliefs.
...The psychologist observed that the way these subjects dealt with unwelcome information had curious parallels with drug addiction as addicts also reward themselves for wrong-headed behavior.
Another study presented at the conference, which was in Palm Springs, Calif., explored relationships between racial bias and political affiliation by analyzing self-reported beliefs, voting patterns and the results of psychological tests that measure implicit attitudes -- subtle stereotypes people hold about various groups.
That study found that supporters of President Bush and other conservatives had stronger self-admitted and implicit biases against blacks than liberals did.
"What automatic biases reveal is that while we have the feeling we are living up to our values, that feeling may not be right," said University of Virginia psychologist Brian Nosek, who helped conduct the race analysis. "We are not aware of everything that causes our behavior, even things in our own lives."
...analysis found that substantial majorities of Americans, liberals and conservatives, found it more difficult to associate black faces with positive concepts than white faces -- evidence of implicit bias. But districts that registered higher levels of bias systematically produced more votes for Bush.
"Obviously, such research does not speak at all to the question of the prejudice level of the president," said Banaji, "but it does show that George W. Bush is appealing as a leader to those Americans who harbor greater anti-black prejudice."
..."If anyone in Washington is skeptical about these findings, they are in denial," he said. "We have 50 years of evidence that racial prejudice predicts voting. Republicans are supported by whites with prejudice against blacks. If people say, 'This takes me aback,' they are ignoring a huge volume of research."

29 January 2006

Climate Expert Says NASA Tried to Silence Him

                                                                                                                                Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
NYT, 29 Januray 2006
The top climate scientist at NASA says the Bush administration has tried to stop him from speaking out since he gave a lecture last month calling for prompt reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases linked to global warming.
The scientist, James E. Hansen, longtime director of the agency's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said in an interview that officials at NASA headquarters had ordered the public affairs staff to review his coming lectures, papers, postings on the Goddard Web site and requests for interviews from journalists.
Dr. Hansen said he would ignore the restrictions. "They feel their job is to be this censor of information going out to the public," he said.

A Little Democracy or a Genie Unbottled
By JAMES GLANZ
NYT, 29 January 2006
The overwhelming sense among politicians and intellectuals in the Middle East last week was that America's little chemistry experiment had blown up in its face. President Bush promoted democracy and free elections as his primary solution to the region's ills — and when Hamas won in a landslide in the Palestinian elections, the president got results that could not have been more inimical to the interests of the United States and its ally, Israel.
Like a powerful catalyst best handled with an eyedropper rather than a ladle, free and fair elections have recently unleashed political forces elsewhere in the region that can hardly be seen as friendly to the United States. The radical Muslim Brotherhood made major gains in Egypt's parliamentary elections, a Shiite clerical list allied with Iran won a plurality in Iraq and Hezbollah — considered, like Hamas, a terrorist organization by the West — surged in last year's elections in Lebanon.
From one point of view, one that produces more than a few chortles in the Middle East, the United States has fallen victim to some grand law of unintended consequences. "You might remember the saying, 'Beware of what you wish — you might get what you want,' " said Abdel Monem Said Aly, director of the Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo, well aware that he was tossing a Western saying back in the direction it came. "It's very much applicable," he said.
..."The most important and urgent lesson" of the Hamas victory, said Khalil Shikaki, a respected Palestinian pollster, "is that if you do not want these groups to take over in the process of democratization, you have to press the existing regimes to reform their systems."
Even if the radical groups win, there is some hope that the daily pressures of making the country work will wear down the firebrands of the world in a way that looks a lot like moderation, said Feisal Amin al-Istrabadi, Iraq's ambassador to the United Nations. Until now, "they've been able to criticize the governments without actually delivering anything but criticism," Mr. Istrabadi said. "Now they have to govern. Pave roads. Make sure the garbage is picked up on time."
Mr. Aly, of the Al-Ahram center, said that in the early going, at least, the members of the Muslim Brotherhood, who now hold 20 percent of the seats in the Egyptian parliament, have behaved amicably. Some experts, like Amatzia Baram, an Israeli who is a senior fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington and a professor of Middle Eastern history at the University of Haifa in Israel, think that Hamas is more likely to maintain a confrontational stance.
In the worst case, that stance could spark a regional war, Mr. Baram said. But even he believes that if the new government does not provide basic services more efficiently than Fatah did, the electorate will give Hamas the boot too.
As for the countries like Lebanon and Iraq that are plagued with sectarian and religious divides, Mr. Baram is another believer that carefully designed forms of democracy will be able to work there. In Lebanon, each group, from the Maronites to the Shiites, is allocated a fixed number of seats, district by district, to prevent sudden shifts in power that could provoke a return to civil war.
"It has to be approached on a country-by-country solution," Mr. Baram said. He said that in Iraq, where the voting produced a Shiite plurality but forced the main clerical party to seek partners in its government, the arrangement could in the long run produce a stable country much like Lebanon appears to have become. Others see in Iraq the potential for a civil war — in the style of what Lebanon went through just 20 years ago — that creates separate Kurdish, Shiite and Sunni regions and generates spinoff conflicts in the entire region.
Many political commentators in the Middle East, including Rami Khouri, a syndicated columnist and editor at large at the Daily Star newspaper in Beirut, say that Mr. Bush's seemingly contradictory statements show that he is not really serious about pushing democracy. Instead, Mr. Khouri believes, talk of democracy is a cover for an invasion of Iraq that happened for other reasons.
"It rings very hollow around the world," Mr. Khouri said. "Most people laugh."
However it has all happened, said Ziad Abu Amr, an independent candidate supported by Hamas who won re-election last week, there is no backing out once the ballots are cast.
"It's not good to say democracy is fine and elections are fine but we can't live with the outcome," Mr. Amr said. "I don't think the United States should make too many conditions on countries which choose to embrace democracy."

Mixed U.S. Signals Helped Tilt Haiti Toward Chaos
By WALT BOGDANICH and JENNY NORDBERG
NYT, 29 Januray 2006
...even as Haiti prepares to pick its first elected president since the rebellion two years ago, questions linger about the circumstances of Mr. Aristide's ouster — and especially why the Bush administration, which has made building democracy a centerpiece of its foreign policy in Iraq and around the world, did not do more to preserve it so close to its shores.
The Bush administration has said that while Mr. Aristide was deeply flawed, its policy was always to work with him as Haiti's democratically elected leader.
But the administration's actions in Haiti did not always match its words. Interviews and a review of government documents show that a democracy-building group close to the White House, and financed by American taxpayers, undercut the official United States policy and the ambassador assigned to carry it out.
As a result, the United States spoke with two sometimes contradictory voices in a country where its words carry enormous weight. That mixed message, the former American ambassador said, made efforts to foster political peace "immeasurably more difficult." Without a political agreement, a weak government was destabilized further, leaving it vulnerable to the rebels.

Spies, Lies and Wiretaps
NYT, 29 Januray 2006
A bit over a week ago, President Bush and his men promised to provide the legal, constitutional and moral justifications for the sort of warrantless spying on Americans that has been illegal for nearly 30 years. Instead, we got the familiar mix of political spin, clumsy historical misinformation, contemptuous dismissals of civil liberties concerns, cynical attempts to paint dissents as anti-American and pro-terrorist, and a couple of big, dangerous lies.
The first was that the domestic spying program is carefully aimed only at people who are actively working with Al Qaeda, when actually it has violated the rights of countless innocent Americans. And the second was that the Bush team could have prevented the 9/11 attacks if only they had thought of eavesdropping without a warrant.
...The Senate Judiciary Committee is about to start hearings on the domestic spying. Congress has failed, tragically, on several occasions in the last five years to rein in Mr. Bush and restore the checks and balances that are the genius of American constitutional democracy. It is critical that it not betray the public once again on this score.

Finding a Place for 9/11 in American History
By JOSEPH J. ELLIS
NYT, 29 January 2006
In recent weeks, President Bush and his administration have mounted a spirited defense of his Iraq policy, the Patriot Act and, especially, a program to wiretap civilians, often reaching back into American history for precedents to justify these actions. It is clear that the president believes that he is acting to protect the security of the American people. It is equally clear that both his belief and the executive authority he claims to justify its use derive from the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
A myriad of contested questions are obviously at issue here — foreign policy questions about the danger posed by Iraq, constitutional questions about the proper limits on executive authority, even political questions about the president's motives in attacking Iraq. But all of those debates are playing out under the shadow of Sept. 11 and the tremendous changes that it prompted in both foreign and domestic policy.
Whether or not we can regard Sept. 11 as history, I would like to raise two historical questions about the terrorist attacks of that horrific day. My goal is not to offer definitive answers but rather to invite a serious debate about whether Sept. 11 deserves the historical significance it has achieved.
My first question: where does Sept. 11 rank in the grand sweep of American history as a threat to national security? By my calculations it does not make the top tier of the list, which requires the threat to pose a serious challenge to the survival of the American republic.
...What Patrick Henry once called "the lamp of experience" needs to be brought into the shadowy space in which we have all been living since Sept. 11. My tentative conclusion is that the light it sheds exposes the ghosts and goblins of our traumatized imaginations. It is completely understandable that those who lost loved ones on that date will carry emotional scars for the remainder of their lives. But it defies reason and experience to make Sept. 11 the defining influence on our foreign and domestic policy. History suggests that we have faced greater challenges and triumphed, and that overreaction is a greater danger than complacency.

Corporate Wealth Share Rises for Top-Income Americans
By DAVID CAY JOHNSTON
NYT, 29 January 2006
New government data indicate that the concentration of corporate wealth among the highest-income Americans grew significantly in 2003, as a trend that began in 1991 accelerated in the first year that President Bush and Congress cut taxes on capital.
In 2003 the top 1 percent of households owned 57.5 percent of corporate wealth, up from 53.4 percent the year before, according to a Congressional Budget Office analysis of the latest income tax data. The top group's share of corporate wealth has grown by half since 1991, when it was 38.7 percent.
In 2003, incomes in the top 1 percent of households ranged from $237,000 to several billion dollars.
For every group below the top 1 percent, shares of corporate wealth have declined since 1991. These declines ranged from 12.7 percent for those on the 96th to 99th rungs on the income ladder to 57 percent for the poorest fifth of Americans, who made less than $16,300 and together owned 0.6 percent of corporate wealth in 2003, down from 1.4 percent in 1991.
...The White House said it did not believe that the 2003 tax cuts had much influence on wealth shares. It also said that since wealth is transitory for many people, a more important issue is how incomes and wealth are influenced by the quality of education.
"We want to lift all incomes and wealth," said Trent Duffy, a White House spokesman. "We are starting to see that the income gap is largely an education gap."
"The president thinks we need to close the income gap, and he has talked about ways in which we can do that," especially through education, Mr. Duffy said.
The data showing increased concentration of corporate wealth were posted last month on the Congressional Budget Office Web site. Isaac Shapiro, associate director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington, spotted the information last week and wrote a report analyzing it.
Mr. Shapiro said the figures added to the center's "concerns over the increasingly regressive effects" of the reduced tax rates on capital. Continuing those rates will "exacerbate the long-term trend toward growing income inequality," he wrote.
The center, which studies how government affects the poor and supports policies that it believes help alleviate poverty, opposes Mr. Bush's tax policies.
The center plans to release its own report on Monday that questions the wisdom of continuing the reduced tax rates on dividends and capital gains, saying the Congressional Budget Office analysis indicates that the benefits flow directly to a relatively few Americans.

Unions Pay Dearly for Success
By EDUARDO PORTER
NYT, 29 January 2006
Want to hear some good news for the labor movement? The percentage of American workers who are union members remained almost steady in the private sector last year.
The bad news is that the figure stood at 7.8 percent — less than a third of the rate of the early 1970's.
Even worse for labor, the rate of unionization has further to fall, according to most labor economists and experts in industrial relations. "In the immediate future, unions will carry on shriveling in the private sector," said Richard Freeman, a professor of economics at Harvard.
While union leaders attribute the weakness to everything from insufficient organizing vigor to a hostile political environment, unions, in a way, are victims of their own success. They have obtained better wage and benefit packages for workers, and in an increasingly competitive business world, that is working against them. Businesses in some competitive industries cannot afford unions.
In the United States, unions may have done their job only too well. Last year, according to the latest report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, private-sector workers who were members of unions typically made 23.1 percent more per week than their nonunion colleagues, up from a 22.4 percent premium in 2004.
In a recent study, David Blanchflower, professor of economics at Dartmouth, and Alex Bryson, a researcher at the Policy Studies Institute in Britain, found that this wage premium was higher in the United States than in most other big industrial countries — including Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Britain and New Zealand.
This success is coming at a steep price. The high premium, Mr. Bryson said, "could well be why management is particularly anti-union in the U.S."
Pressured by increasing competition from producers in cheap labor markets like China and nonunion rivals at home, businesses are resisting unions with an increasing fervor. Union organizing has plummeted.

Health Care, Vexing to Clinton, Is Now at Top of Bush's Agenda
By ROBERT PEAR
NYT, 29 January 2006
More than 12 years after President Bill Clinton unveiled his plan to remake the nation's health care system, President Bush is moving the issue once again to the top of the national agenda and is expected to push a series of health care proposals in his State of the Union address on Tuesday.
Where Mr. Clinton was driven by a desire to guarantee health insurance for every American, Mr. Bush is focusing primarily on health costs, which he says are swamping employers and threatening economic growth. Where Mr. Clinton favored a larger role for government, Mr. Bush has a fundamentally different philosophy, built on the idea that placing more responsibility in the hands of individuals will create market pressure to hold down costs.
The long-running debate has taken on new urgency as more and more companies find themselves struggling to pay for employee health benefits. Health care costs have been a big factor in the troubles of the domestic auto industry, among others.
But some policy experts, Republicans and Democrats alike, say the Bush proposals, which are built around tax breaks, may further drive up health spending and costs by fueling the demand for health care. Such unintended effects show how difficult it is to apply economic theory to the complexities of the current health care system.
By making health care a prominent theme of his prime-time address to the nation, Mr. Bush hopes to regain the initiative on domestic policy. Success with his health care proposals, after the failure of his effort to overhaul Social Security, would allow the president to build political momentum heading into the midterm elections this fall.

28 January 2006

9/11 changed everything...
Documents Show U.S. Military in Iraq Detain Wives
By Will Dunham
Reuters via Informed Comment, 27 January 2006
U.S. forces in Iraq, in two instances described in military documents, took custody of the wives of men believed to be insurgents in an apparent attempt to pressure the suspects into giving themselves up.
Both incidents occurred in 2004. In one, members of a shadowy military task force seized a mother who had three young children, still nursing the youngest, "in order to leverage" her husband's surrender, according to an account by a civilian Defense Intelligence Agency intelligence officer.
In the other, an e-mail exchange includes a U.S. military officer asking "have you tacked a note on the door and challenged him to come get his wife?"
The documents were among thousands obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union from the government under court order through the Freedom of Information Act.
"This is not an acceptable tactic," ACLU lawyer Amrit Singh said on Friday, referring to seizing a wife to try to catch a husband, "nor are any of the other abusive techniques acceptable. We know that abusive techniques were employed in a systemic manner across Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay."
Paul Boyce, an Army spokesman at the Pentagon, said: "It's very hard, obviously, from some of these documents to determine what, if anything, actually happened. ... When you see an individual e-mail note, it's oftentimes very confusing to figure out how that particular case fits into an overall, larger puzzle."
Boyce also said the military has thoroughly looked at "any allegation against soldiers of misconduct or abuse of detainees."

Planted Articles May Be Violation
A 2003 Pentagon directive appears to bar a military program that pays Iraqi media to print favorable stories.
By Mark Mazzetti
LA Times, 27 January 2006
A secret U.S. military program that pays Iraqi newspapers to publish articles favorable to the American mission appears to violate a 2003 Pentagon directive, according to a newly declassified document released Thursday.
The information campaign run by U.S. troops in Baghdad and a Washington-based private contractor is the subject of a high-level military investigation. Last month, the top U.S. general in Iraq said a preliminary investigation into the program had found it did not violate U.S. law or Pentagon regulations.
"We concluded that we were operating within our authorities and the appropriate legal procedures. And so we have not suspended any of the processes up to now," Army Gen. George W. Casey told reporters then.
A secret directive on the Pentagon's information operations policy released Thursday, however, appears to prohibit U.S. troops from conducting psychological operations, or psy-ops, targeting the media.
"Psy-op is restricted by both DoD [Department of Defense] policy and executive order from targeting American audiences, our military personnel and news agencies or outlets," says the directive, dated Oct. 30, 2003, and signed by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.
The document, titled "Information Operations Roadmap," was released by the National Security Archive, a research institution based at George Washington University that obtained it under the Freedom of Information Act.
A Pentagon spokesman did not return calls seeking comment.

U.S. Policy Seen as Big Loser in Palestinian Vote
By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post, 28 January 2006
Standing in a sunny Rose Garden on June 24, 2002, surrounded by his top foreign policy advisers, President Bush issued a clarion call for resolving the deadly Israeli-Palestinian conflict: "I call on the Palestinian people to elect new leaders, leaders not compromised by terror."
This week, Palestinians gave their answer, handing a landslide victory in national legislative elections to Hamas, which has claimed responsibility for dozens of suicide bombings and desires the elimination of Israel. Bush's statement calling for new leaders was aimed at the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, but in the same speech he also said it was necessary to thwart Hamas -- formally the Islamic Resistance Movement -- and other militant groups.
The election outcome signals a dramatic failure in the administration's strategy for Middle East peace, according to analysts and some U.S. officials. Since the United States cannot deal with an organization labeled a terrorist organization by the State Department, Hamas's victory is likely to curtail U.S. aid, limit official U.S. contacts with the Palestinian government and stall efforts to create an independent Palestinian state.
More broadly, Hamas's victory is seen as a setback in the administration's campaign for greater democracy in the Middle East. Elections in Iran, Iraq, Egypt and now the Palestinian territories have resulted in the defeat of secular and moderate parties and the rise of Islamic parties hostile to U.S. interests.
The administration has long been criticized for being reluctant to get involved in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; even after Bush's 2002 speech, the policy drifted except for occasional high-profile speeches and events. But after Arafat's death in late 2004 and the beginning of the new presidential term, Bush vowed things would be different, saying he would invest "political capital" in ensuring a Palestinian state before he leaves office three years from now.

Post-Katrina Promises Unfulfilled
On the Gulf Coast, Federal Recovery Effort Makes Halting Progress
By Spencer S. Hsu
Washington Post, 28 January 2006
Nearly five months after Hurricane Katrina swamped New Orleans, President Bush's lofty promises to rebuild the Gulf Coast have been frustrated by bureaucratic failures and competing priorities, a review of events since the hurricane shows.
While the administration can claim some clear progress, Bush's ringing call from New Orleans's Jackson Square on Sept. 15 to "do what it takes" to make the city rise from the waters has not been matched by action, critics at multiple levels of government say, resulting in a record that is largely incomplete as Bush heads into next week's State of the Union address.

Hurricane Investigators See 'Fog of War' at White House
By ERIC LIPTON
NYT, 28 January 2006
The White House was beset by the "fog of war" in the crucial days immediately after Hurricane Katrina, leaving it unable to respond properly to the unfolding catastrophe, House investigators said Friday after getting the most detailed briefing yet on how President Bush's staff had handled the events.
The closed-door briefing, attended mostly by House committee aides, was provided by Kenneth Rapuano, who as Mr. Bush's deputy domestic security adviser was the senior official in charge of managing storm events at the White House when the hurricane struck. The meeting was a compromise, a result of White House objections to the investigators' requests for copies of e-mail messages and other correspondence from top presidential aides.
Mr. Rapuano, those present said, acknowledged that he left the White House about 10 p.m. on Monday, Aug. 29, the night the storm hit. Some two hours later, the White House received a report indicating that a major levee in New Orleans had been breached and that most of the city had already been flooded. The report was sent by an official of the Federal Emergency Management Agency who had flown over the city late that afternoon.
But Mr. Rapuano said that before he left that night, the White House received a separate report from the Army Corps of Engineers saying an evaluation of the levees was still under way.
The White House, Mr. Rapuano said, finally received confirmation about the levee breach about 6 a.m. on Tuesday, the morning after it occurred. But even then, it does not appear that word got immediately to Mr. Bush, who was on vacation and who later said that he had had a "sense of relaxation" and had thought the city had "dodged a bullet."
"We are left with a picture of a White House that was plagued by the fog of war," said David Marin, the Republican staff director to the House committee investigating the government's response to the hurricane. "The committee is likely to find a disturbing inability by the White House to de-conflict and analyze information — and that had consequences."

War Stance Could Mean a Primary Battle for Lieberman
Businessman Ned Lamont emerges as a possible protest candidate for the Senate.
By Ronald Brownstein, Times Staff Writer
LA Times, 27 January 2006
Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, who rose to national prominence as the 2000 Democratic vice presidential nominee, appears likely to face a serious primary challenge this year that could measure the depth of his party's discontent over the Iraq war.
Ned Lamont, a businessman and war critic, last week began publicly seeking support for a run against Lieberman in the state's August nominating contest. Lamont is attracting interest largely because of Democratic grumbling — in Connecticut and nationally — about Lieberman's unflinching support of President Bush's policies in Iraq.

Oprah's Bunk Club
By MAUREEN DOWD
NYT, 28 January 2006
...In a society obsessed with sin and redemption, this was the superfecta: Oprah admitting her flawed judgment and rescuing her reputation, while carving up James Frey for sinning in his book about sin and redemption.
Oprah interviewed and showed taped clips of her media critics (including me) and credited her turnaround to the essay by The Times's chief book critic, Michiko Kakutani, who wrote, "It is a case about how much value contemporary culture places on the very idea of truth."
When President Bush cut into Oprah's show with a press conference, perhaps he was trying to get the focus off truth. It was truly weird to see the twin live TV moments: A disgraced author, and a commander in chief who keeps writing chapter after chapter of fictionalized propaganda.
...Booksellers were also puzzling over how to proceed.
"I think it should definitely not be on the nonfiction best-seller list," said Mitchell Kaplan, owner of Books & Books in Coral Gables, Fla.
Roxanne Coady, owner of RJ Julia Booksellers in Madison, Conn., said she'd "probably reclassify it as fiction," and she thinks Doubleday should do the same: "Either it's a memoir and someone's doing their best honest job to recall things and this is how they remember it, or it's not true and it's not a memoir."
What about a third category? Non-nonfiction? Self-help and self-dramatization? Pure bunk?

27 January 2006

Drug Plan Denies Supplies to Gravely Ill Patients
The benefit covers home IV medication but not the implements and care needed to administer it.
By Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, Times Staff Writer
LA Times, 27 January 2006
The new Medicare drug program is denying supplies that seriously ill patients need to administer intravenous antibiotics and other medications at home. As a result, some patients are being referred to nursing homes, and others have had to go into hospitals.
Although no national estimates are available, the number of patients affected — including some with life-threatening diseases such as cancer and multiple sclerosis — could run into the thousands. One Anaheim pharmacy says 200 of its patients are having trouble.

K Street's New Ways Spawn More Pork
As Barriers With Lawmakers Fall, 'Earmarks' Grow
By Jonathan Weisman and Charles R. Babcock
Washington Post, 27 January 2006
An explosion of special interest funding engineered in part by lawmakers with close ties to lobbyists is drawing increased scrutiny as Congress moves to address concern about corruption that already has led to the conviction of a Republican House member and former GOP lobbyist Jack Abramoff.
At issue is a symbiotic relationship between lawmakers well positioned to slip special-interest projects into legislation, and wealthy lobbying groups that raise large sums of campaign funds or provide trips and other benefits to those lawmakers.
In the latest example of these backstage dealings, Rep. John T. Doolittle (R-Calif.) told The Washington Post that he helped steer defense funding, totaling $37 million, to a California company, whose officials and lobbyists helped raise at least $85,000 for Doolittle and his leadership political action committee from 2002 to 2005.
Brent Wilkes, a director of the company, PerfectWave Technologies LLC, and a major contributor to House Republican leaders, was identified as "Coconspirator No. 1" in criminal charges brought against Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham (R-Calif.) late last year. Cunningham pleaded guilty in November and resigned from Congress after admitting he conspired to take $2.4 million in bribes in return for using his office to help Wilkes and another defense contractor, in part by placing earmarks in defense appropriations bills.
Doolittle said in a statement this week that as one of three California Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee, he frequently supports "well deserving projects throughout the state." The statement added that his support of PerfectWave Technology "was no exception and based completely on the project's merits and the written support of the military."
The link between special interests and members of Congress has grown so tight that nearly a dozen House and Senate members who control federal spending have retained lobbying veterans to raise campaign funds for them, and those lobbyists have secured lucrative favors in spending bills.
These relationships have coincided with the rapid growth in the volume of home-state pork-barrel projects, commonly called earmarks, that have swelled appropriations bills in recent years, according to congressional experts and watchdog groups.

Bush Reasserts Presidential Prerogatives
Eavesdropping, Katrina Probe Cited as Concerns
By Jim VandeHei
Washington Post, 27 January 2006
President Bush set limits yesterday on White House cooperation in three political disputes, saying he is determined to assert presidential prerogatives on such matters as domestic eavesdropping and congressional inquiries into Hurricane Katrina.
In a mid-morning news conference, Bush told reporters he is skeptical of a proposed law imposing new oversights on his use of the National Security Agency to listen in on electronic communications. He also said that he will block White House aides from testifying about the slow federal response to Hurricane Katrina, and that he will not release official White House photos of himself with former Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff.
Facing repeated questions, Bush distanced himself from Abramoff, who is at the center of the biggest political corruption and bribery scandal in a generation. Bush said he does not recall having his picture taken with Abramoff or ever meeting him. Abramoff was a member of the exclusive club of Bush's $100,000 fundraisers known as Pioneers.
"Having my picture taken with someone doesn't mean that I'm a friend with him or know him very well," Bush told reporters.
According to three people who reviewed half a dozen photos of the men, Bush is pictured at official gatherings and fundraisers with Abramoff and his children. He also attended a White House meeting with some of Abramoff's clients, including tribal leaders and the then-speaker of the House for the Northern Mariana Islands, the sources said. Abramoff has pictures from the event, they said.
If prosecutors "believe something was done inappropriately in the White House, they'll come and look and they're welcome to do so," Bush said. The White House has also refused to detail meetings between Abramoff and top White House aides.
The president was similarly adamant about not allowing top aides to testify about Hurricane Katrina. Bush, who has moved on several fronts over the past five years to strengthen the power of the presidency, said it would be damaging to him and future presidents if aides feared providing candid advice.

Democrats Split Over Filibuster On Alito
By Charles Babington
Washington Post, 27 January 2006
Several prominent Democratic senators called for a filibuster of Samuel A. Alito Jr.'s Supreme Court nomination yesterday, exposing a deep divide in the party even as they delighted the party's liberal base.
The filibuster's supporters -- including Sens. John F. Kerry and Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts -- acknowledged that the bid is likely to fail and that Alito is virtually certain to be confirmed Tuesday. But they said extended debate may draw more Americans' attention to Alito's conservative stands on abortion, civil rights, presidential powers and other matters.
"Judge Alito will take America backward, especially when it comes to civil rights and discrimination laws," Kerry said in a statement issued by his office. He added: "It's our right and our responsibility to oppose him vigorously and to fight against this radical upending of the Supreme Court."
Kennedy said that Alito, 55, "does not share the values of equality and justice that make this country strong," adding: "He does not deserve a place on the highest court of the land."

Health Care Confidential
By PAUL KRUGMAN
NYT, 27 January 2006
American health care is desperately in need of reform. But what form should change take? Are there any useful examples we can turn to for guidance?
Well, I know about a health care system that has been highly successful in containing costs, yet provides excellent care. And the story of this system's success provides a helpful corrective to anti-government ideology. For the government doesn't just pay the bills in this system — it runs the hospitals and clinics.
No, I'm not talking about some faraway country. The system in question is our very own Veterans Health Administration, whose success story is one of the best-kept secrets in the American policy debate.
In the 1980's and early 1990's, says an article in The American Journal of Managed Care, the V.H.A. "had a tarnished reputation of bureaucracy, inefficiency and mediocre care." But reforms beginning in the mid-1990's transformed the system, and "the V.A.'s success in improving quality, safety and value," the article says, "have allowed it to emerge as an increasingly recognized leader in health care."
Last year customer satisfaction with the veterans' health system, as measured by an annual survey conducted by the National Quality Research Center, exceeded that for private health care for the sixth year in a row. This high level of quality (which is also verified by objective measures of performance) was achieved without big budget increases. In fact, the veterans' system has managed to avoid much of the huge cost surge that has plagued the rest of U.S. medicine.

Bush/Abramoff Photo "No Big Deal"
Josh Marshall
Talking Points Memo, 26 January 2006
In his press conference today, President Bush suggested that the existence of photographs of himself and Jack Abramoff are no big deal and generally pooh-poohed the press's focus on the story. But our reporting suggests that the White House is actively involved in covering up and possibly destroying photographic evidence of the two men together.

Many Faces of Hillary -- None a Winner
Even liberals are fed up with what they see as the senator's 'triangulation, calculation and equivocation' designed to offend no one.
Jonah Goldberg
LA Times, 2006, 26 January 2006
LIBERALS ARE sizing up Hillary Clinton for the umpteenth time, and they don't like what they see.
To be honest, I never understood what they saw in her in the first place. The amazing thing about Clinton is that she's so unappealing. She isn't a particularly gifted speaker. She's smart, but in a conventional and lawyerly way. She doesn't connect well with audiences. Her idea of improvisation seems to be leaping from the prepared text to prepared note cards.
However, she has defied the rules of nature and gotten better looking over the years, which, along with her soap-opera marriage, probably explains some of her success with supermarket checkout-aisle publications.
...At every turn, Hillary Clinton's Zelig-like public persona has been a fabrication — either by her fans, her enemies or herself. One telling episode came when she published her massively successful autobiography, "Living History." The book tour was nothing short of a coronation, confirming her gravitas and commitment to "the issues." She portrayed herself as resigned to the fact that she'd have to answer Barbara Walters' questions about her personal life, but she always made it seem like she'd rather wrestle with the hard issues of public policy. But when the Washington Post actually tried to ask her about something other than how she cried over her husband's sexcapades with an intern, the senator from New York "declined to be interviewed about the political content of her book."

26 January 2006

Senators in Need of a Spine
NYT, 26 January 2006
...portraying the Alito nomination as just another volley in the culture wars vastly underestimates its significance. The judge's record strongly suggests that he is an eager lieutenant in the ranks of the conservative theorists who ignore our system of checks and balances, elevating the presidency over everything else. He has expressed little enthusiasm for restrictions on presidential power and has espoused the peculiar argument that a president's intent in signing a bill is just as important as the intent of Congress in writing it. This would be worrisome at any time, but it takes on far more significance now, when the Bush administration seems determined to use the cover of the "war on terror" and presidential privilege to ignore every restraint, from the Constitution to Congressional demands for information.
There was nothing that Judge Alito said in his hearings that gave any comfort to those of us who wonder whether the new Roberts court will follow precedent and continue to affirm, for instance, that a man the president labels an "unlawful enemy combatant" has the basic right to challenge the government's ability to hold him in detention forever without explanation. His much-quoted statement that the president is not above the law is meaningless unless he also believes that the law requires the chief executive to defer to Congress and the courts.
Judge Alito's refusal to even pretend to sound like a moderate was telling because it would have cost him so little. Chief Justice John Roberts Jr., who was far more skillful at appearing mainstream at the hearings, has already given indications that whatever he said about the limits of executive power when he was questioned by the Senate has little practical impact on how he will rule now that he has a lifetime appointment.
Senate Democrats, who presented a united front against the nomination of Judge Alito in the Judiciary Committee, seem unwilling to risk the public criticism that might come with a filibuster — particularly since there is very little chance it would work. Judge Alito's supporters would almost certainly be able to muster the 60 senators necessary to put the nomination to a final vote.
A filibuster is a radical tool. It's easy to see why Democrats are frightened of it. But from our perspective, there are some things far more frightening. One of them is Samuel Alito on the Supreme Court.

In 2002, Justice Department said Eavesdropping Law Working Well
By Jonathan S. Landay
Knight Ridder via DailyKos, 25 January 2006
A July 2002 Justice Department statement to a Senate committee appears to contradict several key arguments that the Bush administration is making to defend its eavesdropping on U.S. citizens without court warrants.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the law governing such operations, was working well, the department said in 2002. A "significant review" would be needed to determine whether FISA's legal requirements for obtaining warrants should be loosened because they hampered counterterrorism efforts, the department said then.
President Bush, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and other top officials now argue that warrantless eavesdropping is necessary in part because complying with the FISA law is too burdensome and impedes the government's ability to rapidly track communications between suspected terrorists.
In its 2002 statement, the Justice Department said it opposed a legislative proposal to change FISA to make it easier to obtain warrants that would allow the super-secret National Security Agency to listen in on communications involving non-U.S. citizens inside the United States.
Today, senior U.S. officials complain that FISA prevents them from doing that.
James A. Baker, the Justice Department's top lawyer on intelligence policy, made the statement before the Senate Intelligence Committee on July 31, 2002. He was laying out the department's position on an amendment to FISA proposed by Sen. Mike DeWine, R-Ohio. The committee rejected DeWine's proposal, leaving FISA intact.
So while Congress chose not to weaken FISA in 2002, today Bush and his allies contend that Congress implicitly gave Bush the authority to evade FISA's requirements when it authorized him to use force in response to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks three days after they occurred - a contention that many lawmakers reject.

Rumsfeld Says Military Not Overextended
By LOLITA C. BALDOR
AP, 25 January 2006
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on Wednesday disputed reports suggesting that the U.S. military is stretched thin and close to a snapping point from operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, asserting "the force is not broken."
"This armed force is enormously capable," Rumsfeld told reporters at a Pentagon briefing. "In addition, it's battle hardened. It's not a peacetime force that has been in barracks or garrisons."
Rumsfeld spoke a day after The Associated Press reported that an unreleased study conducted for the Pentagon said the Army is being overextended, thanks to the two wars, and may not be able to retain and recruit enough troops to defeat the insurgency in Iraq.
Congressional Democrats released a report Wednesday that also concluded the U.S. military is under severe stress.
Reports suggesting that the U.S. military is close to the breaking point "is just not consistent with the facts," he said.
In an apparent shot at the Democratic Clinton administration, Rumsfeld said a number of components of the armed forces were underfunded during the 1990s, "and there were hollow pieces to it. Today, that's just not the case."
He said there were over 1.4 million active U.S. troops, and some 2 million — counting National Guard and Reserve units — of which only 138,000 people were in Iraq.
"Do we still need more rebalancing? You bet," Rumsfeld said.
The secretary suggested he was not familiar with reports suggesting an overburdened military. But, he said, "It's clear that those comments do not reflect the current situation. They are either out of date or just misdirected."
SEE ALSO:
U.S. Forces Overstretched? Rumsfeld Says No
by Vicky O'Hara
NPR's All Things Considered, 25 January 2006 ·
Two reports conclude the U.S. Army and Marines are being stretched dangerously thin because of repeated deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. Democrats released one report, while the other Pentagon-commissioned study has not been made public. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has disputed the findings.

Report: U.S. Reconstruction in Iraq Poorly Planned
by Corey Flintoff
NPR's All Things Considered, 25 January 2006 ·
New reports from the Bush administration's watchdog for Iraq reconstruction show that U.S. officials wasted Iraqi money that was intended to help create jobs and revive the economy. A leaked document from the inspector general indicates the rebuilding effort was ill-planned and ill-coordinated from the start.

25 January 2006

Blinding light...
Insurgent Attacks in Iraq Jumped in 2005, US Says
By Will Dunham
Reuters, 23 January 2006
Insurgents in Iraq mounted more than 34,000 attacks last year on U.S. and other foreign troops, Iraqi security forces and Iraqi civilians, a nearly 30 percent jump from 2004, the U.S. military said on Monday.
U.S. officials cautioned that the figure should not be seen as evidence that insurgents are gaining ground because the effectiveness of their attacks declined and the Iraqis achieved numerous political milestones despite the ongoing violence.
"We are succeeding, and the Iraqis are succeeding," said Marine Corps Maj. Tim Keefe, a U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad.
But defense analyst Daniel Goure of the Lexington Institute think tank said, "It's a little hard on the face of it to claim we are being successful when the number of attacks increases by 30 percent.
"Given the fact that the total number of attacks are up and Iraqi casualties are rising, it is real hard to say we have seen any light in this tunnel," Goure added.

Ten Incredible Failures of Bush/Cheney
Juan Cole
Informed Comment, 23 January 2006
...Bush and Cheney have grossly mismanaged the struggle against al-Qaeda and Muslim radicalism after September 11. Here are their chief errors:
1. Bush vastly exaggerates al-Qaeda's size, sweep and importance, while failing to invest in genuine counterterrorist measures such as port security or security for US nuclear plants.
2. Bush could have eradicated the core al-Qaeda group by putting resources into the effort in 2002. He did not, leaving al-Zawahiri and Bin Laden to taunt us, inspire our enemies and organize for years after the Taliban were defeated. It would be as though Truman had allowed Hitler to broadcast calls for terrorism against the US from some hiding place as late as 1949.
3. Bush opened a second front against Iraq before he had put Afghanistan on a sound footing.
4. Bush gutted the US constitution, tossing out the Fourth Amendment, by assiduously spying on Americans without warrants. None of those spying efforts has been shown to have resulted in any security benefits for the United States. Bush says that he wants to watch anyone who calls the phone numbers associated with al-Qaeda. But some of those phone numbers were for food delivery or laundry. We want a judge to sign off on a wire tap so that innocent Americans are not spied on by the government.
5. Bush attempted to associate the threat from al-Qaeda with Iran and Syria. Iran is a fundamentalist Shiite country that hates al-Qaeda. Syria is a secular Arab nationalist country that hates al-Qaeda. Indeed, Syria tortured al-Qaeda operatives for Bush, until Bush decided to get Syria itself. Bush and Cheney have cynically used a national tragedy to further their aggressive policies of Great Power domination.
6. Bush by invading Iraq pushed the Iraqi Sunni Arabs to desert secular Arab nationalism. Four fifths of the Sunni Arab vote in the recent election went to hard line Sunni fundamentalist parties. This development is unprecedented in Iraqi history. Iraqi Sunni Arabs are nationalists, whether secular or religious, and there is no real danger of most of them joining al-Qaeda. But Bush has spread political Islam and has strengthened its influence.
7. Bush diverted at least one trillion dollars in US security spending from the counter-terrorism struggle against al-Qaeda to the Iraq debacle, at the same time that he has run up half a trillion dollar annual deficits, contributing to a spike in inflation, harming the US economy, and making the US less effective in counterterrorism.
8. Counterterrorism requires friendly allies and close cooperation. The Bush administration alienated France, Germany and Spain, along with many Middle Eastern nations that had long waged struggles of their own against terrorist groups. Bush is widely despised and has left America isolated in the world. Virtually all the publics of all major nations hate US policy. One poll showed that in secular Turkey where Muslim extremism is widely reviled and Bin Laden is generally disliked, the public preferred Bin Laden to Bush. Bush is widely seen as more dangerous than al-Qaeda. This image is bad for US counterterrorism efforts.
9. Bush transported detainees to torture sites in Eastern Europe. Under European Union laws, both torture and involvement in torture are illegal,and European officials can be tried for these crimes. HOw many European counterterrorism officials will want to work closely with the Americans if, for all they know, this association could end in jail time? Indeed, in Washington it is said that a lot of our best CIA officers are leaving, afraid that they are being ordered to do things that are illegal, and for which they could be tried once another administration comes to power in Washington.
10. Bush's failure to capture Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri allows them to continue to grandstand, to continue to frighten the public, to continue to affect financial markets, and to continue to plot. Al-Zawahiri almost certainly plotted the 7/7 London subway bombings himself, and gloated about it when he issued Muhammad Siddique Khan's suicide statement. Misplaced Bush priorities are getting our allies hit. The CIA is reduced to firing predators at villages because our counterterrorism efforts have been starved for funds by the Iraq quagmire. If al-Qaeda does pull off another American operation, it may well give Bush and Cheney an opportunity to destroy the US constitution altogether, finally giving Bin Laden his long-sought revenge on Americans for the way he believes they have forced Palestinians and other Muslims to live under lawless foreign domination or local tyranny.

Audit Describes Misuse of Funds in Iraq Projects
By JAMES GLANZ
NYT, 24 January 2006
A new audit of American financial practices in Iraq has uncovered irregularities including millions of reconstruction dollars stuffed casually into footlockers and filing cabinets, an American soldier in the Philippines who gambled away cash belonging to Iraq, and three Iraqis who plunged to their deaths in a rebuilt hospital elevator that had been improperly certified as safe.
The audit, released yesterday by the office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, expands on its previous findings of fraud, incompetence and confusion as the American occupation poured money into training and rebuilding programs in 2003 and 2004. The audit uncovers problems in an area that includes half the land mass in Iraq, with new findings in the southern and central provinces of Anbar, Karbala, Najaf, Wasit, Babil, and Qadisiya. The special inspector reports to the secretary of defense and the secretary of state.
Agents from the inspector general's office found that the living and working quarters of American occupation officials were awash in shrink-wrapped stacks of $100 bills, colloquially known as bricks.
One official kept $2 million in a bathroom safe, another more than half a million dollars in an unlocked footlocker. One contractor received more than $100,000 to completely refurbish an Olympic pool but only polished the pumps; even so, local American officials certified the work as completed. More than 2,000 contracts ranging in value from a few thousand dollars to more than half a million, some $88 million in all, were examined by agents from the inspector general's office. The report says that in some cases the agents found clear indications of potential fraud and that investigations into those cases are continuing.
Some of those cases are expected to intersect with the investigations of four Americans who have been arrested on bribery, theft, weapons and conspiracy charges for what federal prosecutors say was a scheme to steer reconstruction projects to an American contractor working out of the southern city of Hilla, which served as a kind of provincial capital for a vast swath of Iraq under the Coalition Provisional Authority.
But much of the material in the latest audit is new, and the portrait it paints of abandoned rebuilding projects, nonexistent paperwork and cash routinely taken from the main vault in Hilla without even a log to keep track of the transactions is likely to raise major new questions about how the provisional authority did its business and accounted for huge expenditures of Iraqi and American money.

White House Declines to Provide Storm Papers
By ERIC LIPTON
NYT, 25 January 2006
The Bush administration, citing the confidentiality of executive branch communications, said Tuesday that it did not plan to turn over certain documents about Hurricane Katrina or make senior White House officials available for sworn testimony before two Congressional committees investigating the storm response.
The White House this week also formally notified Representative Richard H. Baker, Republican of Louisiana, that it would not support his legislation creating a federally financed reconstruction program for the state that would bail out homeowners and mortgage lenders. Many Louisiana officials consider the bill crucial to recovery, but administration officials said the state would have to use community development money appropriated by Congress.
The White House's stance on storm-related documents, along with slow or incomplete responses by other agencies, threatens to undermine efforts to identify what went wrong, Democrats on the committees said Tuesday.
"There has been a near total lack of cooperation that has made it impossible, in my opinion, for us to do the thorough investigation that we have a responsibility to do," Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut, said at Tuesday's hearing of the Senate committee investigating the response. His spokeswoman said he would ask for a subpoena for documents and testimony if the White House did not comply.
In response to questions later from a reporter, the deputy White House spokesman, Trent Duffy, said the administration had declined requests to provide testimony by Andrew H. Card Jr., the White House chief of staff; Mr. Card's deputy, Joe Hagin; Frances Fragos Townsend, the domestic security adviser; and her deputy, Ken Rapuano.
SEE ALSO:
White House Received Dire Warnings Pre-Katrina
by Pam Fessler
NPR's All Things Considered, 24 January 2006 ·
Newly released documents show the White House and other officials received more dire warnings than previously thought about Hurricane Katrina's potential impact. One Homeland Security report predicted hours before the storm hit that New Orleans would likely be submerged by flooding for weeks, and even months.

Democracy in America, Then and Now, a Struggle Against Majority Tyranny
By ADAM COHEN
NYT Editorial Observer, 24 January 2006
...It was a very different America that Tocqueville was writing about in the Jacksonian Age, but the concerns he raised still resonate strongly. He worried that the state's power would end up concentrated in a single authority, until its citizens were "reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd." He feared the majority would trample on minorities, like the mob that attacked the Baltimore editors, or the whites of Pennsylvania who intimidated blacks into not voting. And he was concerned about tyranny of opinion, saying he knew of no country with "less independence of mind and true freedom of discussion" than America.
Tocqueville pointed to some bulwarks against tyranny. He was a firm supporter of checks and balances. He believed in the power of American law to limit the excesses of the ruler - the exact issue in today's debate over the warrantless wiretapping of American citizens. He had great hopes for the judiciary. "The courts correct the aberrations of democracy," he wrote, and "though they can never stop the movements of the majority, they do succeed in checking and directing them." Tocqueville would not be surprised that the Supreme Court has limited the Bush administration's excesses in the war on terror - or that the administration has been eager to nominate justices with an expansive view of presidential power.
Tocqueville would not have been distracted by all the talk that warrantless wiretaps, indefinite detainment of enemy combatants and other civil liberties incursions are serving the cause of freedom. He understood that the newest incarnation of despotism was likely to be ushered in by the "avowed lover of liberty" who is a "hidden servant of tyranny."
Nor, though, would he be likely to despair. One reason "Democracy in America" has remained so popular is that despite his fears, Tocqueville remained nervously optimistic about democracy. He knew that the kind of equality that had taken hold in America could lead to tyranny, but he also believed that it gave people a "taste for free institutions," which would lead them to resist. Equality "insinuates deep into the heart and mind of every man some vague notion and some instinctive inclination toward political freedom," he insisted, "thereby preparing the antidote for the ill which it has produced."

$13,000 per physician spent annually by pharmaceutical and device manufacturers to influence Rx writing
Doctors Urge Ban on Gifts From Drug Makers
By GARDINER HARRIS
NYT, 24 January 2006
The free gifts, drugs and classes that pharmaceutical and medical device makers routinely give doctors undermine good medical care, hurt patients and should be banned, a group of influential doctors say in The Journal of the American Medical Association.
Medical schools and teaching hospitals should be the first to implement this comprehensive ban, the group writes. But the authors argue in Wednesday's issue of The Journal that all doctors should eventually follow suit.
Broadly adopted, the recommendations would transform doctors' day-to-day lives and shut off the focus of drug makers' biggest expenditures. But Dr. David Blumenthal, one of the article's co-authors, said it was "not very likely" that many in medicine would listen to the group.
"I'm not very optimistic," Dr. Blumenthal said.
Federal law forbids companies from paying doctors to prescribe drugs or devices, but gifts and consulting arrangements are almost entirely unregulated. Voluntary professional guidelines suggest that doctors refuse gifts of greater than "modest" value. Sanctions against doctors who accept gifts of considerable value are almost unknown.
The drug industry spends tens of billions of dollars annually wooing doctors - far more than what it spends on research or consumer advertising. Some doctors receive a significant portion of their income from consulting arrangements with drug and device makers. Others take regular vacations and golfing trips that are paid for by companies.
A recent lawsuit involving the device maker Medtronic revealed that one prominent Wisconsin surgeon received $400,000 for a consulting contract that required him to work just eight days. While such rich arrangements are often restricted to specialists, most physicians routinely accept small gifts from drug salesmen - including pens, mugs, pads and food.
Surveys show that most doctors do not believe that these gifts influence their own medical decisions, although most believe that they do affect their colleagues' medical judgment.
But even small gifts can lead to profound changes in doctors' prescribing behavior, which hurts patients, studies show. As a result, the authors of the paper say that all gifts should be banned.
SEE ALSO:
Doctors' Ties to Drug Makers Need Tighter Rules
by Snigdha Prakash
NPR's All Things Considered, 24 January 2006
A group of medical leaders say the financial ties between doctors and drug companies need to be much more tightly regulated. In this week's Journal of the American Medical Association, they say patients need protection from their doctors' conflicts of interest, and they want medical schools to lead the way.

24 January 2006

Bush Takes Unscripted Questions from a Screened, Hand-Picked Audience
By JENNIFER LOVEN,
AP via YahooNews via DailyKos.com,, 23 January 2006
President Bush pushed back Monday at critics of his once-secret domestic spying effort, saying it should be termed a "terrorist surveillance program" and contending it has the backing of legal experts, key lawmakers and the Supreme Court.
..."It's amazing that people say to me, 'Well, he's just breaking the law.' If I wanted to break the law, why was I briefing Congress?" asked Bush. One of those who had been informed, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kan., was sitting behind Bush during his appearance at Kansas State University.
Bush's remarks were part of an aggressive administration campaign to defend the four-year-old program as a crucial and legal terror-fighting tool. The White House is trying to sell its side of the story before the Senate Judiciary Committee opens hearings on it in two weeks.

Iraq Rebuilding Badly Hobbled, U.S. Report Finds
By JAMES GLANZ
NYT, 23 January 2006
The first official history of the $25 billion American reconstruction effort in Iraq depicts a program hobbled from the outset by gross understaffing, a lack of technical expertise, bureaucratic infighting, secrecy and constantly increasing security costs, according to a preliminary draft.
The document, which begins with the secret prewar planning for reconstruction and touches on nearly every phase of the program through 2005, was assembled by the office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction and debated last month in a closed forum by roughly two dozen experts from outside the office.
A person at the forum provided a copy of the document, dated December 2005, to The New York Times. The inspector general's office, whose agents and auditors have been examining and reporting on various aspects of the rebuilding since early 2004, declined to comment on the report other than to say it was highly preliminary.
"It's incomplete," said a spokesman for the inspector general's office, Jim Mitchell. "It could change significantly before it is finally published."
In the document, the paralyzing effect of staffing shortfalls and contracting battles between the State Department and the Pentagon, creating delays of months at a stretch, are described for the first time from inside the program.
The document also recounts concerns about writing contracts for an entity with the "ambiguous legal status" of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the question of whether it was an American entity or a multinational one like NATO.
Seemingly odd decisions on dividing the responsibility for various sectors of the reconstruction crop up repeatedly in the document. At one point, a planning team made the decision to put all reconstruction activities in Iraq under the Army Corps of Engineers, except anything to do with water, which would go to the Navy. At the time, a retired admiral, David Nash, was in charge of the rebuilding.
"It almost looks like a spoils system between various agencies," said Steve Ellis, a vice president and an authority on the Army corps at Taxpayers for Common Sense, an organization in Washington, who read a copy of the document. "You had various fiefdoms established in the contracting process."
One authority on reconstruction who attended the session last month, John J. Hamre, said the report was an unblinking and unbiased look at the program.

Campaign To Justify Spying Intensifies
NSA Effort Called Legal and Necessary
By Dan Eggen and Walter Pincus
Washington Post, 24 january 2006
A senior U.S. intelligence official offered a wide-ranging and detailed defense of the National Security Agency's domestic spying program yesterday, kicking off a White House campaign aimed at convincing the public that the effort is both legal and necessary to combat al Qaeda terrorists.
Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the former NSA chief who is now deputy director of national intelligence, told reporters in Washington that the warrantless eavesdropping on calls and e-mails between the United States and overseas was "targeted and focused" and did not constitute a "driftnet" over U.S. cities.
Hayden compared the intelligence techniques used in the program to the tactics employed in deciding whether to drop a 500-pound bomb on a terrorist target.
In a separate speech later in the day, President Bush also repeated his argument that Congress effectively endorsed the program of eavesdropping without warrants under its authorization of military action against al Qaeda, dubbing the effort "a terrorist surveillance program."
The president also focused on classified briefings that the White House gave for some senior leaders in Congress. "It's amazing that people say to me, 'Well, he's just breaking the law.' If I wanted to break the law, why was I briefing Congress?" he said, eliciting laughter from the crowd at Kansas State University.
The remarks opened a three-day blitz by the administration aimed in part at making the controversial eavesdropping program a political winner for the White House in a midterm election year. Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales will discuss the legal underpinnings for the program today, and Bush will pay a rare visit to NSA headquarters tomorrow to highlight its work.

Whistle-Blower Suit Says Device Maker Generously Rewards Doctors
By REED ABELSON
NYT, 23 January 2006
A prominent surgeon in Wisconsin was paid $400,000 a year by Medtronic for a consulting contract requiring him to work just eight days. Another doctor in Virginia received nearly $700,000 in consulting fees from Medtronic for the first nine months of 2005.
These doctors work in a growing field, complex back surgery, and this makes them particularly valuable to the spinal-implant division of Medtronic. In recent years, the company has spent tens of millions of dollars on consulting contracts and other types of payments to them and numerous other prominent surgeons, according to papers filed as part of a whistle-blower lawsuit. The suit contends that some of these payments were made to attract or retain the doctors' business.
Medtronic, based in Minneapolis, is one of the country's largest medical device makers, with $10 billion in annual sales.
The documents shed new light on a matter that has troubled the medical device industry for years: the assertion that companies employ a variety of financial ruses to pay doctors who use their devices, a practice that medical and legal experts say is unethical and possibly illegal. But despite industry efforts to clean up such practices, the documents and accusations made by former Medtronic employees suggest that the problem persists and may have gotten worse.

Photos of Bush With Abramoff Are Withheld
White House Calls Pictures Irrelevant to Ethics Inquiry
By Jim VandeHei and Susan Schmidt
Washington Post, 24 January 2006
Several White House officials have been briefed about pictures of President Bush and Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff taken since 2001 but will not release them on grounds that they are not relevant to the ongoing money-for-favors investigation, aides said yesterday.
"Trying to say there's more to it than the president taking a picture in a photo line is just absurd," White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters. Bush, he said, does not recall meeting Abramoff and did not do any favors for the disgraced lobbyist.
SEE ALSO:
Photos of Bush With Disgraced Lobbyist Are Confirmed
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
NYT, 24 January 2006
These pictures may be worth more than a thousand words.
On Monday, White House officials acknowledged that, yes, photographs did exist of President Bush in a classic grip-and-grin with Jack Abramoff, the disgraced Republican lobbyist at the center of a bribery and corruption scandal in the capital. But that did not mean, they said, that Mr. Bush had a personal relationship with him.
If anything, the officials argued on Air Force One - and on NBC, ABC and CBS - White House receiving-line photos like these are so common as to be almost meaningless.
"The president has participated in tens upon thousands of photo lines or pictures in photo lines over the course of the last five years," Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, told reporters on Air Force One.
Earlier, Dan Bartlett, the White House counselor, weighed in on the network morning shows. "Any suggestion by critics or anybody else to suggest that the president was doing something nefarious with Jack Abramoff is absolutely wrong, and it's absurd," Mr. Bartlett told Katie Couric on the "Today" program on NBC.
White House officials nonetheless did not release copies of what a person close to the Abramoff investigation described as photographs of Mr. Abramoff or his children with Mr. Bush that Mr. Abramoff once displayed on his office wall. Two magazines, Washingtonian and Time, first reported over the weekend the existence of about a half-dozen Abramoff-Bush photographs.
The general assumption in Washington was that celebrity tabloids would eventually buy and publish the photographs as the unforgettable images of a scandal that Mr. Bush's aides have been anxious to keep outside the White House gates.

Not. Backing. Hillary.
Equivocation in Democratic party has gone on far too long -- time for real leadership
Molly Ivins
Creators Syndicate via Working for Change, 20 January 2006
I'd like to make it clear to the people who run the Democratic Party that I will not support Hillary Clinton for president.
Enough. Enough triangulation, calculation and equivocation. Enough clever straddling, enough not offending anyone. This is not a Dick Morris election. Sen. Clinton is apparently incapable of taking a clear stand on the war in Iraq, and that alone is enough to disqualify her. Her failure to speak out on Terri Schiavo, not to mention that gross pandering on flag-burning, are just contemptible little dodges.
The recent death of Gene McCarthy reminded me of a lesson I spent a long, long time unlearning, so now I have to re-learn it. It's about political courage and heroes, and when a country is desperate for leadership. There are times when regular politics will not do, and this is one of those times. There are times a country is so tired of bull that only the truth can provide relief.
If no one in conventional-wisdom politics has the courage to speak up and say what needs to be said, then you go out and find some obscure junior senator from Minnesota with the guts to do it. In 1968, Gene McCarthy was the little boy who said out loud, "Look, the emperor isn't wearing any clothes." Bobby Kennedy — rough, tough Bobby Kennedy — didn't do it. Just this quiet man trained by Benedictines who liked to quote poetry.

George W. Bush's Overall Job Approval Rating Returns to Record Low
As American Turn Less Optimistic About the National Economy
American Research Group, Inc. via TPM, 23 January 2006
George W. Bush's overall job approval rating has returned to its lowest point in Bush's presidency as Americans again turn less optimistic about the national economy according to the latest survey from the American Research Group. Among all Americans, 36% approve of the way Bush is handling his job as president and 58% disapprove. When it comes to Bush's handling of the economy, 34% approve and 60% disapprove.
Among Americans registered to vote, 37% approve of the way Bush is handling his job as president and 58% disapprove. When it comes to the way Bush is handling the economy, 35% of registered voters approve of the way Bush is handling the economy and 60% disapprove.

23 January 2006

As Profits Soar, Companies Pay U.S. Less for Gas Rights
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS
NYT, 23 January 2006
At a time when energy prices and industry profits are soaring, the federal government collected little more money last year than it did five years ago from the companies that extracted more than $60 billion in oil and gas from publicly owned lands and coastal waters.
If royalty payments in fiscal 2005 for natural gas had risen in step with market prices, the government would have received about $700 million more than it actually did, a three-month investigation by The New York Times has found.
But an often byzantine set of federal regulations, largely shaped and fiercely defended by the energy industry itself, allowed companies producing natural gas to provide the Interior Department with much lower sale prices - the crucial determinant for calculating government royalties - than they reported to their shareholders.
As a result, the nation's taxpayers, collectively, the biggest owner of American oil and gas reserves, have missed much of the recent energy bonanza.
The disparities in gas prices parallel those uncovered just five years ago in a wave of scandals involving royalty payments for oil. From 1998 to 2001, a dozen major companies, while admitting no wrongdoing, paid a total of $438 million to settle charges that they had fraudulently understated their sale prices for oil.
Since then, the government has tightened its rules for oil payments. But with natural gas, the Bush administration recently loosened the rules and eased its audits intended to uncover cheating.
...Because much of the information about specific transactions is kept secret, it remains unclear to what extent, if at all, the weakness in royalty payments stems from deliberate cheating or from issues with the rules themselves.
...the Bush administration did not close any loopholes for valuing natural gas. Indeed, in March 2005 it expanded the list of deductions and decided against valuing sales at spot-market prices when companies were selling to their own affiliates.
The industry-friendly stance was intentional. Mr. Bush and top White House officials also placed a top priority on promoting domestic energy production. Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force called for giving lucrative new incentives to companies that drill in the Gulf of Mexico and other high-risk areas.
The Bush administration also took a much more relaxed approach to auditing and fraud prevention. In 2003, the Interior Department's inspector general declared that the auditing process was "ineffective" and "lacked accountability" and that many of the auditors were unqualified.
In one instance, inspectors discovered that auditors had lost the working papers for an important audit and tried to cover up their blunder by creating and back-dating false documents. Rather than punish anybody, the inspector general recounted, the minerals service gave the employee who produced the new documents a financial bonus for "creativity."
Administration officials said last week that they had addressed most of the criticisms and that the inspector general had since said its corrective actions were "sufficient."
...Perhaps the most striking example of sluggish auditing is the government's effort to collect back royalties from companies that blatantly ignored one of the government's basic rules.

Iraqis Urging Unity, but Rifts May Be Too Deep
By DEXTER FILKINS
NYT, 22 January 2006
With all the ballots from last month's election finally counted, the leader of Iraq's largest Sunni alliance telephoned his Shiite rival on Friday night to wish him well in the weeks ahead.
"I was hoping we could build a good relationship," said Adnan Dulaimi, the Sunni leader, of his chat with the leader of the Shiite alliance, Abdul Aziz Hakim.
The warm feeling may not last very long.
With the results now in, most Iraqi political leaders say they want to form a "national unity" government, a coalition that would include the three main alliances of Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds. With none of the major blocs capturing a majority of the 275 parliamentary seats, the talks to form such a government are already under way.
The stakes are high. Anything short of a unity government, Iraqi and American officials here say, would be tantamount to disaster, with the Sunnis the most likely losers. Leaving them out of the government could very well prompt them to turn away from democratic politics again, and give the insurgency a fresh shot of energy.
Zalmay Khalilzad, the American ambassador here, has made it clear that he intends to involve himself directly in the negotiations - as forcefully as is necessary - to make sure the Sunnis are given a significant role.
But for all the expressions of solidarity, most of the political factors now in play seem weighted against a broad-based government. Many Iraqis suggest that the most likely government will be an alliance between the Shiites and the Kurds, with the Sunnis cut out altogether.
In the vote totals announced Friday, the Shiite coalition and an alliance of the two largest Kurdish parties fell just three seats shy of the two-thirds parliamentary majority needed to form a government.
With 181 seats in all, the Shiites and Kurds would need to pick up just three additional seats from the 10 other groups that won seats in the election. If they can do that, they will not need the Sunnis to form a government or to pass laws.

Iraq's Power Vacuum
By PAUL KRUGMAN
NYT, 23 January 2006
...Power shortages are a crucial issue for ordinary Iraqis, and for the credibility of their government. As Muhsin Shlash, Iraq's electricity minister, said last week, "When you lose electricity the country is destroyed, nothing works, all industry is down and terrorist activity is increased."
Mr. Shlash has reason to be strident. In today's Iraq, blackouts are the rule rather than the exception. According to Agence France-Presse, Baghdad and "much of the central regions" - in other words, the areas where the insurgency is most active and dangerous - currently get only between two and six hours of power a day.
Lack of electricity isn't just an inconvenience. It prevents businesses from operating, destroys jobs and generates a sense of demoralization and rage that feeds the insurgency.
So why is power scarcer than ever, almost three years after Saddam's fall? Sabotage by insurgents is one factor. But as an analysis of Iraq's electricity shortage in The Los Angeles Times last month showed, the blackouts are also the result of some incredible missteps by U.S. officials.
Most notably, during the period when Iraq was run by U.S. officials, they decided to base their electricity plan on natural gas: in order to boost electrical output, American companies were hired to install gas-fired generators in power plants across Iraq. But, as The Los Angeles Times explains, "pipelines needed to transport the gas" - that is, to supply gas to the new generators - "weren't built because Iraq's Oil Ministry, with U.S. encouragement, concentrated instead on boosting oil production." Whoops.
Meanwhile, in the early days of the occupation U.S. officials chose not to raise the prices of electricity and fuel, which had been kept artificially cheap under Saddam, for fear of creating unrest. But as a first step toward their dream of turning Iraq into a free-market utopia, they removed tariffs and other restrictions on the purchase of imported consumer goods.
The result was that wealthy and middle-class Iraqis rushed to buy imported refrigerators, heaters and other power-hungry products, and the demand for electricity surged - with no capacity available to meet that surge in demand. This caused even more blackouts.
In short, U.S. officials thoroughly botched their handling of Iraq's electricity sector. They did much the same in the oil sector. But the Bush administration is determined to achieve victory in Iraq, so it must have a plan to rectify its errors, right?
Um, no. Although there has been no formal declaration, all indications are that the Bush administration, which once made grand promises about a program to rebuild Iraq comparable to the Marshall Plan, doesn't plan to ask for any more money for Iraqi reconstruction.
...if reconstruction stalls, as seems inevitable, it's hard to see how anything else in Iraq can go right.
So what does it mean that the Bush administration is apparently walking away from responsibility for Iraq's reconstruction? It means that the administration doesn't have a plan; it's entirely focused on short-term political gain. Mr. Bush is just getting by from sound bite to sound bite, while Iraq and America sink ever deeper into the quagmire.

Professionals Fleeing Iraq As Violence, Threats Persist
Exodus of Educated Elite Puts Rebuilding at Risk
By Doug Struck
Washington Post, 23 January 2006
The office of Iraq's most eminent cardiologist is padlocked. A handwritten sign is taped on his wooden door in the private clinic in Baghdad: Patients of Dr. Omar Kubasi should call him in Amman, Jordan.
There, Kubasi, 63, spends his days sitting at a cafe with other physicians and professionals from Iraq. Frustrated, he watches from afar as the medical education system he helped set up during his 36-year career slowly disintegrates. His teaching doctors are fleeing the country in fear. Younger physicians are looking for other countries to train in. Even patients are leaving, no longer confident in the care they can get in Iraq.
...Iraq's top professionals -- doctors, lawyers, professors -- and businessmen have been targeted by shadowy political groups for kidnapping and ransom, as well as murder, some of them say. So many have fled the country that Iraq is in danger of losing the core of skilled people it needs most just as it is trying to build a newly independent society.
"It's creating a brain drain," said Amer Hassan Fayed, assistant dean of political science at Baghdad University. "We could end up with a society without knowledge. How can such a society make progress?"
Professionals and businessmen with the means to escape are going to Jordan, Syria, Egypt or, if they have visas, to Western countries. Those left behind say they feel abandoned.

Attacks Strain Efforts On Terror
Alliance Is Tested By Incidents Along Afghan Frontier
By Griff Witte and Kamran Khan
Washington Post, 23 January 2006
Events along the ever-volatile Afghanistan-Pakistan border this month have exposed deep fault lines in the anti-terrorism alliance among the United States, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and officials on all sides say their joint efforts against militants in the region are now highly precarious.
The heightened tension comes as militant extremists and the United States have both become more aggressive in their tactics, with the Pakistani government caught in between.
..."We have a lot of grief in our hearts," said Abdul Hakim Jan, an Afghan tribal leader who helped organize a protest beside a border crossing Wednesday following the deadliest suicide bombing in Afghanistan in the four years since the fall of Taliban rule. "All the terrorists and the enemies of Afghanistan are because of Pakistan. They are receiving their training there and they are being sent to Afghanistan for attacks."
Pakistani tribal leaders, for their part, look a few miles west for the source of their troubles: the American military presence in Afghanistan. Throughout the past week and continuing Sunday, tens of thousands of Pakistanis have participated in boisterous rallies at which protesters burned effigies of President Bush, chanted "Long live Osama!" and denounced the Pakistani government for cooperating with the United States.
"People are so angry that this could become a major movement against the American slaves who are ruling Pakistan these days," said Liaquat Baluch, a leader of Jamaat-e-Islami, the country's largest Islamic party.
Volatility in the border region is nothing new. For centuries, the rugged, mountainous area has been largely beyond the control of any government. Both sides of the border are populated by religiously conservative Pashtuns, who in recent decades have freely transported money, drugs and weapons back and forth across the porous boundary.
But since the United States invaded Afghanistan and toppled the Taliban after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the border has taken on special significance. On the Afghan side, the United States has 19,000 troops who provide crucial support for the government and who enjoy a relative degree of popularity. On the Pakistani side, U.S. troops are officially forbidden from pursuing terrorists. As a consequence, many Islamic militants who found sanctuary in Afghanistan before Sept. 11 reportedly have taken refuge in the semiautonomous tribal areas where sympathies for al Qaeda and its leader, Osama bin Laden, run high.

Pakistan's Push in Border Areas Is Said to Falter
By CARLOTTA GALL and MOHAMMAD KHAN
NYT, 22 January 2006
Two years after the Pakistani Army began operations in border tribal areas to root out members of Al Qaeda and other foreign militants, Pakistani officials who know the area say the military campaign is bogged down, the local political administration is powerless and the militants are stronger than ever.
...An American military official in Afghanistan, in an e-mail response to questions about Pakistan's tribal areas, said: "I believe this region is going through a period of revolutionary change, in which moderates and extremists fight for the future of their nations. And with vast, lawless areas in which Taliban-style justice holds sway, Pakistan faces serious challenges." The official agreed to comment only on the condition of anonymity.
Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan, chief spokesman for the Pakistani military, said the accounts of the size of the militants' forces were exaggerated. He put the number of foreign militants in the whole of the tribal areas at "100, plus or minus."
But the officials and residents say the militants are far more numerous, and have embarked on a disruptive campaign of terrorism, particularly in North and South Waziristan: in the last year, 108 pro-government tribal elders, 4 or 5 government officials, informers and even 2 local journalists, have been assassinated by militants, local journalists say.
Qaeda operatives are the driving force behind the local militants and are influencing their tactics, the officials said. The militants have managed this despite a hammer-and-anvil strategy in the region, with American military forces pressing from the Afghan side of the border. There have been three American strikes in the area in the past six weeks, involving missiles fired from remotely piloted Predator aircraft operated by the Central Intelligence Agency, but whether they were an expression of American frustration or the outcome of a burst of intelligence remains unclear.
Despite government denials, the officials said, the strikes may have had the tacit approval of Pakistan's leadership, which has issued mostly pro forma condemnations. The officials asked not to be identified because their supervisors do not allow them to talk to the media.

Former Abu Ghraib Guard Calls Top Brass Culpable for Abuse
Wife of Jailed Soldier Says Tactics Were in Place From Start
By Josh White
Washington Post, 23 January 2006
Stepping into the Abu Ghraib prison for the first time, Megan Ambuhl was stunned. There were naked men in dusty cells, male prisoners wearing women's underwear, others hooded and shackled in contorted positions to metal railings.
An enlisted officer giving her a tour of the U.S. facility in October 2003 pointed to a group of detainees chained to a cell. He said the bars had often "been decorated like a Christmas tree," with prisoners as ornaments.
"He explained it was a military intelligence tactic," Ambuhl said in a recent interview, speaking publicly for the first time since the Abu Ghraib prison abuse was disclosed nearly two years ago. "He said it was to break the detainees that were being interrogated. It was clear it was a military intelligence facility. As I saw it, I thought that if they were doing it, it must be all right for them to be doing it."
One of the original seven military police soldiers singled out by the Pentagon for their roles in abusive techniques, Ambuhl is speaking out because she believes the truth has been obscured by high-ranking officials intent on covering up a policy of abuse. Though her defense differs little from the arguments made previously by the defendants' attorneys, Ambuhl's first-person description of the macabre world of Abu Ghraib provides a vivid perspective on how things went out of control at the prison outside of Baghdad, a place where there were few rules and little guidance. Her account also shows that some of the abusive tactics were in place when the MPs arrived at the prison.

Held in 9/11 Net, Muslims Return to Accuse U.S.
By NINA BERNSTEIN
NYT, 23 January 2006
Hundreds of noncitizens were swept up on visa violations in the weeks after 9/11, held for months in a much-criticized federal detention center in Brooklyn as "persons of interest" to terror investigators, and then deported. This week, one of them is back in New York and another is due today - the first to return to the United States.
They are no longer the accused but the accusers, among six former detainees who are coming back to give depositions in their federal lawsuits against top government officials and detention guards, at a time when the constitutionality of part of the government's counterterrorism offensive is under new scrutiny.
As in the cases of all the Muslim immigrants rounded up in the New York area after the terror attacks, the six were never accused of a crime related to 9/11; officials eventually cleared all of them of links to terrorism. A report by the inspector general of the Justice Department found systemic problems with immigrant detentions and widespread abuse at the federal detention center where the six had been held; several guards have since been disciplined.
But as the six return to the city - four of them from Egypt, one from Pakistan, one from London - the conditions imposed by the United States government include the requirement that they be in the constant custody of federal marshals.
They are barred from calling anyone during their weeklong stays at an undisclosed New York hotel, where 12 days of closed depositions are to begin today. They can expect hours of questioning by lawyers representing at least 31 defendants in the lawsuits, including John Ashcroft, the former attorney general, and Robert S. Mueller III, the director of the F.B.I.
The first returning detainees, Yasser and Hany Ibrahim, who are brothers, say that putting themselves back in the hands of the government they are suing is an act of faith in America. In recent telephone interviews from Alexandria, Egypt, the two described themselves as frightened but resolute in pressing a 2002 class-action lawsuit charging that they were abused and deprived of due process because of their religion or national origin.
"I'm seeking justice," said Yasser, 33, who had a Web site design business in Brooklyn before he and Hany, 29, a deli worker, were delivered in shackles to the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn 19 days after 9/11. "It's from the same system that did us injustice before. But I have faith in this system. I know what happened before was a mistake."

Judge Alito's Radical Views
NYT, 23 January 2006
If Judge Samuel Alito Jr.'s confirmation hearings lacked drama, apart from his wife's bizarrely over-covered crying jag, it is because they confirmed the obvious. Judge Alito is exactly the kind of legal thinker President Bush wants on the Supreme Court. He has a radically broad view of the president's power, and a radically narrow view of Congress's power. He has long argued that the Constitution does not protect abortion rights. He wants to reduce the rights and liberties of ordinary Americans, and has a history of tilting the scales of justice against the little guy.
As senators prepare to vote on the nomination, they should ask themselves only one question: will replacing Sandra Day O'Connor with Judge Alito be a step forward for the nation, or a step backward? Instead of Justice O'Connor's pragmatic centrism, which has kept American law on a steady and well-respected path, Judge Alito is likely to bring a movement conservative's approach to his role and to the Constitution.
Judge Alito may be a fine man, but he is not the kind of justice the country needs right now. Senators from both parties should oppose his nomination.
It is likely that Judge Alito was chosen for his extreme views on presidential power. The Supreme Court, with Justice O'Connor's support, has played a key role in standing up to the Bush administration's radical view of its power, notably that it can hold, indefinitely and without trial, anyone the president declares an "unlawful enemy combatant."
Judge Alito would no doubt try to change the court's approach. He has supported the fringe "unitary executive" theory, which would give the president greater power to detain Americans and would throw off the checks and balances built into the Constitution. He has also put forth the outlandish idea that if the president makes a statement when he signs a bill into law, a court interpreting the law should give his intent the same weight it gives to Congress's intent in writing and approving the law.
Judge Alito would also work to reduce Congress's power in other ways. In a troubling dissent, he argued that Congress exceeded its authority when it passed a law banning machine guns, and as a government lawyer he insisted Congress did not have the power to protect car buyers from falsified odometers.
There is every reason to believe, based on his long paper trail and the evasive answers he gave at his hearings, that Judge Alito would quickly vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. So it is hard to see how Senators Lincoln Chaffee, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, all Republicans, could square support for Judge Alito with their commitment to abortion rights.
Judge Alito has consistently shown a bias in favor of those in power over those who need the law to protect them. Women, racial minorities, the elderly and workers who come to court seeking justice should expect little sympathy. In the same flat bureaucratic tones he used at the hearings, he is likely to insist that the law can do nothing for them.

Truthiness 101: From Frey to Alito
By FRANK RICH
NYT, 22 January 2006
...This isn't just a slippery slope. It's a toboggan into chaos, or at least war. As everyone knows now - except for the 22 percent, according to a recent Harris poll, who still believe that Saddam helped plan 9/11 - it's the truthiness of all those imminent mushroom clouds that sold the invasion of Iraq. What's remarkable is how much fictionalization plays a role in almost every national debate. Even after a big humbug is exposed as blatantly as Professor Marvel in "The Wizard of Oz" - FEMA's heck of a job in New Orleans, for instance - we remain ready and eager to be duped by the next tall tale. It's as if the country is living in a permanent state of suspension of disbelief.
Democrats who go berserk at their every political defeat still don't understand this. They fault the public for not listening to their facts and arguments, as though facts and arguments would make a difference, even if the Democrats were coherent. It's the power of the story that always counts first, and the selling of it that comes second. Accuracy is optional. The Frey-like genius of the right is its ability to dissemble with a straight face while simultaneously mustering the slick media machinery and expertise to push the goods. It not only has the White House propaganda operation at its disposal, but also an intricate network of P.R. outfits and fake-news outlets that are far more effective than their often hapless liberal counterparts.
The selling of Samuel Alito is a perfect illustration of how our world works. From the moment Judge Alito emerged from Harriet Miers's penumbra, his supporters' story line was clear: he'd be presented as a humble exemplar of American values too mainstream to be labeled "out of the mainstream" by his opponents. In his first courtesy calls on Capitol Hill in November, we learned, Judge Alito often cited his father as a proud immigrant who instilled in him empathy for minorities and the poor - an empathy not remotely apparent in the judge's legal record. A particularly poignant anecdote had it that his father had once defended a black basketball player from discrimination in college.
Yet David Kirkpatrick of The Times reported then that "some colleagues and friends of the elder Mr. Alito, who died in 1987, said they had never heard some of the stories his son has recounted, including the episode about his support for the black student and the fact that his father immigrated from Italy as a child." No matter. If such questions couldn't stop an Oprah Book Club selection, they certainly wouldn't stop a nominee to the Supreme Court.

What's Left Unsaid
By BOB HERBERT
NYT, 23 January 2006
...Speaking about the potential long-term effect of widespread domestic spying, Professor Tribe said:
"The more people grow accustomed to a listening environment in which the ear of Big Brother is assumed to be behind every wall, behind every e-mail, and invisibly present in every electronic communication, telephonic or otherwise - that is the kind of society, as people grow accustomed to it, in which you can end up being boiled to death without ever noticing that the water is getting hotter, degree by degree.
"The background assumptions of privacy will be gradually eroded to the point where we'll wake up one day, or our children will, and it will seem quaint that people at one time, long ago, thought that they could speak in candor."

Curbing a Power Play
By David S. Broder
Wshington Post, 22 January 2006
Is there a message for Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in last week's
6 to 3 Supreme Court decision rejecting the claim by his predecessor, John Ashcroft, that the federal government has the authority to overrule Oregon's assisted-suicide law? In my nonlegal opinion, it casts serious doubt on Gonzales's effort to defend President Bush's authorizing wiretapping of domestic residents without a court order.
...In affirming that judgment, Kennedy said several things about interpreting the will of Congress that could be a clue to how the courts will treat Bush's claim that he has the power to authorize warrantless wiretaps. Years ago Congress explicitly barred such wiretaps except as authorized by a special court created by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. But Gonzales says that statute was, in effect, amended and substantially broadened -- to include warrantless wiretapping -- when Congress empowered the president to "use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001."
The issues are different, but in the Oregon case only three of the nine justices -- John Roberts, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas -- took an expansive view of the kind of executive authority that the Bush administration has claimed for itself.
In his opinion, Kennedy took a distinctly skeptical attitude toward the claim of implied congressional authority. "It would be anomalous for Congress to have so painstakingly described the attorney general's limited authority to deregister a single physician or schedule a single drug, but to have given him, just by implication, authority to declare an entire class of activity outside 'the course of professional practice' and therefore a criminal violation of the CSA," Kennedy wrote. "The idea that Congress gave the attorney general such broad and unusual authority through an implicit delegation in the CSA's registration provision is not sustainable." And then Kennedy added a quotation from the 2001 Supreme Court decision in the case of Whitman v. American Trucking Associations that surely will be noted at the White House and the Justice Department: "Congress, we have held, does not alter the fundamental details of a regulatory scheme in vague terms or ancillary provisions -- it does not, one might say, hide elephants in mouseholes."
When it comes to warrantless wiretaps, it looks to me as if the administration is trying to hide an elephant of a violation of civil liberties in the mousehole of a vague anti-al Qaeda resolution passed by Congress without a single reference to its impact on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
...The right way for Bush to have gone was to ask Congress for authority to expand wiretapping as an antiterrorism tool, not just assert such a power.

The Medicare Drug Mess
NYT, 22 January 2006
After getting off to a promising start last fall, the new Medicare prescription drug program has stumbled badly in recent weeks, leaving tens of thousands of patients unable to obtain essential medicines. We can only hope that Medicare officials fix the glitches quickly before public disenchantment undermines prospects for enrolling enough people to give the new program real prospects for success. When the dust settles, it will be imperative to pinpoint how the problems arose, how much they reflect government ineptitude or malfeasance by private companies, and how further fiascos can be avoided.
The immediate problems have little to do with the most common complaint against the program, namely that many people find it dreadfully confusing to choose a good drug plan from a bewildering array of options offered by private insurers. Instead, most of the snags occurred in the part that should have been the easiest to execute smoothly - the automatic switchover of more than six million poor people from the Medicaid programs in their home states to the new Medicare drug program.
The Medicaid recipients were randomly assigned to a private drug plan, with the option to switch to another if they were dissatisfied. Along the way, as data bounced from one bureaucracy and set of computers to the next, some people's names dropped out of the system. Others, though listed as enrolled, were not earmarked as they should have been for the lowest level of co-payments. Thus many poor people found that when they showed up at the pharmacy they either were denied coverage or were asked to pay hundreds of dollars in deductibles or co-payments. Pharmacists who tried to call the private drug plans could seldom get through. And some plans improperly refused to approve drugs during the transition as they were required to.
Nobody knows how many people were affected, but officials acknowledge it may be in the tens of thousands.

Rice's Blind Spot
By Sebastian Mallaby
Washington Post, 23 January 2006
In January 2000, as the Bush campaign got underway, Rice published a manifesto in Foreign Affairs that laid out the classic "realist" position: American diplomacy should "focus on power relationships and great-power politics" rather than on other countries' internal affairs. "Some worry that this view of the world ignores the role of values, particularly human rights and the promotion of democracy," she acknowledged. But the priority for U.S. foreign policy was to deal with powerful governments, whose "fits of anger or acts of beneficence affect hundreds of millions of people."
Even six years ago, this was an outdated position. The Clinton administration was certainly preoccupied with powers such as Russia and China, but it was also tracking Islamic terrorists who had already attacked the World Trade Center. The importance of other non-state actors, from rebels to environmentalists to bond traders, had become a cliche of globalization commentary; AIDS had been recognized as a security threat. The era of great-power politics was widely thought to have ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Rice seemed like a Sovietologist who hadn't quite caught up.
...The big question today in foreign policy is not whether you are a realist or an idealist. It's whether you are an optimist or a pessimist: whether you think that Iraq has gone badly merely because the Bush administration mishandled it, or whether you believe that no amount of skillful management could have achieved stability after three years. I've watched Rice handle squadrons of aggressive journalists, and there's no doubting her intellect. But her forays into grand theory are disappointing. Last week's call for "transformational diplomacy" merely slides past today's big question. It doesn't offer an answer.

United States Ranks 28th on Environment, a New Study Says
By FELICITY BARRINGER
NYT, 23 January 2006
A pilot nation-by-nation study of environmental performance shows that just six nations - led by New Zealand, followed by five from Northern Europe - have achieved 85 percent or better success in meeting a set of critical environmental goals ranging from clean drinking water and low ozone levels to sustainable fisheries and low greenhouse gas emissions.
The study, jointly produced by Yale and Columbia Universities, ranked the United States 28th over all, behind most of Western Europe, Japan, Taiwan, Malaysia, Costa Rica and Chile, but ahead of Russia and South Korea.
The bottom half of the rankings is largely filled with the countries of Africa and Central and South Asia. Pakistan and India both rank among the 20 lowest-scoring countries, with overall success rates of 41.1 percent and 47.7 percent, respectively.
The pilot study, called the 2006 Environmental Performance Index, has been reviewed by specialists both in the United States and internationally.
Using a new variant of the methodology the two universities have applied in their Environmental Sustainability Index, produced in four previous years, the study was intended to focus more attention on how various governments have played the environmental hands they have been dealt, said Daniel C. Esty, the director of the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy and an author of the report.

20 January 2006

War's Stunning Price Tag - Up to $2 Trillion
By Linda Bilmes and Joseph Stiglitz
LA Times, January 2006
LAST WEEK, at the annual meeting of the American Economic Assn., we presented a new estimate for the likely cost of the war in Iraq. We suggested that the final bill will be much higher than previously reckoned — between $1 trillion and $2 trillion, depending primarily on how much longer our troops stay. Putting that into perspective, the highest-grossing movie of all time, "Titanic," earned $1.8 billion worldwide — about half the cost the U.S. incurs in Iraq every week.
Like the iceberg that hit the Titanic, the full costs of the war are still largely hidden below the surface. Our calculations include not just the money for combat operations but also the costs the government will have to pay for years to come. These include lifetime healthcare and disability benefits for returning veterans and special round-the-clock medical attention for many of the 16,300 Americans who already have been seriously wounded. We also count the increased cost of replacing military hardware because the war is using up equipment at three to five times the peacetime rate. In addition, the military must pay large reenlistment bonuses and offer higher benefits to reenlist reluctant soldiers. On top of this, because we finance the war by borrowing more money (mostly from abroad), there is a rising interest cost on the extra debt.
Our study also goes beyond the budget of the federal government to estimate the war's cost to the economy and our society. It includes, for instance, the true economic costs of injury and death. For example, if an individual is killed in an auto or work-related accident, his family will typically receive compensation for lost earnings. Standard government estimates of the lifetime economic cost of a death are about $6 million. But the military pays out far less — about $500,000. Another cost to the economy comes from the fact that 40% of our troops are taken from the National Guard and Reserve units. These troops often earn lower wages than in their civilian jobs. Finally, there are macro-economic costs such as the effect of higher oil prices — partly a result of the instability in Iraq.
We conclude that the economy would have been much stronger if we had invested the money in the United States instead of in Iraq.
Spending up to $2 trillion should make us ask some questions. First, these figures are far higher than what the administration predicted before the war. At that time, White House economic advisor Lawrence Lindsey was effectively fired for suggesting that the war might cost up to $200 billion, rather than the $60 billion claimed by the president's budget office. Why were the costs so vastly underestimated? Elsewhere in the government, it is standard practice to engage in an elaborate cost-benefit analysis for major projects. The war in Iraq was a war of choice, an immense "project," and yet it now appears that there was virtually no analysis of the likely costs of a prolonged occupation.

Iraqi General detained when he came to U.S. army to inquire about the disposition of his son...
Trial Illuminates Dark Tactics of Interrogation
By Nicholas Riccardi
Times, 20 January 2006
FT. CARSON, Colo. — It was dubbed the "sleeping bag technique."
Interrogators at a makeshift prison in western Iraq, desperate to break suspected insurgents, would stuff them face-first into a sleeping bag with a small hole cut in the bottom for air.
Chief Warrant Officer Lewis E. Welshofer Jr. used it on an Iraqi general as a last-ditch grab for information as Welshofer's unit was in the midst of an offensive against insurgents and desperate for intelligence.
The technique was not in the Army Field Manual, but Welshofer testified Thursday that he believed it was permitted after top commanders told interrogators "the gloves were coming off."
But Welshofer got no information.
Military prosecutors allege that Maj. Gen. Abed Hamed Mowhoush, 57, suffocated in the sleeping bag as Welshofer sat on him. Welshofer's murder trial, which began this week at the home base of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment to which he was assigned in Iraq, opens a window into the murky world of military interrogations.
Issues raised by the prosecutors and the defense about how to calibrate interrogations during the war against terrorism echo those made during the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and the recent debate in Washington over banning torture.
Welshofer described spending months in Iraq without any clear directives about how to manage interrogations. When rules came down, he said, they were vague and he soon found that his training did not apply.

What a relief...
Bush Justice Dept. Finds Bush Spying Efforts Constitutional 
By ERIC LICHTBLAU and JAMES RISEN
NYT, 19 January 2006
The Bush administration offered its fullest defense to date Thursday of the National Security Agency's domestic eavesdropping program, saying that authorization from Congress to deter terrorist attacks "places the president at the zenith of his powers in authorizing the N.S.A. activities."
In a 42-page legal analysis, the Justice Department cited the Constitution, the Federalist Papers, the writings of presidents both Republican and Democratic, and dozens of scholarly papers and court cases in justifying President Bush's power to order the N.S.A. surveillance program.
With the legality of the program under public attack since its disclosure last month, officials said Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales ordered up the analysis partly in response to what administration lawyers felt were unfair conclusions in a Jan. 6 report by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service. The Congressional report challenged virtually all the main legal justifications the administration had cited for the program.
SEE ALSO:
 *Text: Documents on N.S.A. Spying Program
SEE ALSO:
Justice Dept. Backs Spying
Detailed Argument Cites War Powers
By Carol D. Leonnig
Washington Post, 20 January 2006
The Bush administration argued yesterday that the president has inherent war powers under the Constitution to order warrantless eavesdropping on the international calls and e-mails of U.S. citizens and others in this country, offering the administration's most detailed legal defense to date of its surveillance program.
The Justice Department's lengthy legal analysis also says that if a 1978 law that requires court warrants for domestic eavesdropping is interpreted as blocking the president's powers to protect the country in a time of war, its constitutionality is doubtful and the president's authority supersedes it.
Many experts on intelligence and national security law have concluded that the president overstepped his authority, and that the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act specifically prohibits such domestic surveillance without a warrant.
SEE ALSO:
A Discussion about Presidential Power
NPR's Diane Rehm Show, 18 January 2006
Critics charge that this administration has extended its power beyond Congressional oversight and judicial review. We talk about the limits of Presidential authority and ongoing concerns regarding domestic surveillance.
Guests:
Lee Casey, lawyer in private practice, former Justice Department official in the Reagan adminstration and the first Bush administration
David Cole, professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center and author of "Enemy Aliens" and "Terrorism and the Constitution"
Bruce Fein, former associate deputy attorney general, Republican counsel during the Iran-contra hearings, and founding partner with the Lichfield Group

Democratic Leaders Call On Bush to Discuss Administration Ties to Jack Abramoff
Senator Reid's Web Site via TPM, 17 January 2006
Washington, DC -- Today, Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid, Assistant Senate Democratic Leader Richard Durbin, Senate Democratic Campaign Committee Chairman Charles Schumer and Senate Democratic Conference Secretary Debbie Stabenow, wrote President Bush asking him to explain the White House’s numerous connections to indicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff and to disclose further un-known ties so that the American people can be assured that the White House is not for sale.
The full text of the letter follows below...

Medicare Drug Plan Looks Like a Big Scam
Michael Hiltzik
Golden State, LA Times, 19 January 2006
One recent afternoon in Los Alamitos, I watched Marcy Zwelling-Aamot, M.D., pick her way through a government website designed to help elderly patients select the right Medicare drug plan, based on their prescription needs and hometown.
The website, created for the launch of Medicare's new prescription drug benefit, identified 48 individual plans available for Southern California residents. All were sponsored by private health insurance companies administering the government drug benefit for a profit. The plans' monthly premiums ranged from $5.41 to $66.08; their lists of covered drugs differed from one another, sometimes significantly; and all imposed different annual out-of-pocket costs on enrollees — a critical consideration for patients on fixed incomes.
Zwelling-Aamot is a private internist who accepts a limited number of patients but places herself at their beck and call. She and her staff have spent months helping her patients navigate the new benefit, a process that requires at least an hour and a half of research per patient (time for which she's not compensated by Medicare). Like many other health professionals who have become familiar with this program, she has come to see it not as a boon for elderly consumers, but as a scandal.
"As a patient, you are totally hoodwinked by this system," she told me. "It's not just an economic tragedy; it's a moral tragedy."
The Medicare drug benefit is shaping up as the single most cynical scam perpetrated by the Bush administration on American consumers. Designed to maximize profits for drug makers and health insurers, the program was launched so ineptly Jan. 1 that hundreds of thousands of patients have been prevented by computer glitches from filling their prescriptions. California and 25 other states have had to step in temporarily to pay for improperly rejected prescription claims.

Republican Operations Correctly Identified as Early as 2000
Josh Marshall
Talking Points Memo, 19 January 2006
Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee alleged racketeering and systematic extortion back in the 2000 election.

19 January 2006

Who Will Stand Up for the Constitution?
By BOB HERBERT
NYT, 19 January 2006
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."-BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
"Those who expect to reap the blessing of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-THOMAS PAINE
Al Gore offered a civics lesson this week for anyone willing to listen. Speaking at Constitution Hall in Washington, the former vice president said:
"As we begin this new year, the executive branch of our government has been caught eavesdropping on huge numbers of American citizens and has brazenly declared that it has the unilateral right to continue without regard to the established law enacted by Congress to prevent such abuses."
Americans do not seem especially concerned about this incredible affront to the integrity of the government and the rule of law. The attitude of a slender majority seems to be that if the likes of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney see fit to dismantle the heretofore sacred system of checks and balances, so be it.
A Washington Post-ABC News Poll showed that 51 percent of respondents felt that in the fight against terror, it's fine for the government to engage in the warrantless wiretapping of telephone calls and e-mail. In other words, it's fine for the president to break the law.
I find it peculiar that an awful lot of Americans who would be outraged by the burning of the American flag are positively sanguine about the trampling of the Constitution.
...why is the president illegally spying on Americans when the administration can so easily comply with the law by secretly getting warrants from the terminally compliant court established by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act?
Clues can be found in a couple of lawsuits seeking to stop the illegal spying that were filed this week by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights. In addition to arguing that the domestic spying program should be shut down because it is illegal, both groups express the fear that the National Security Agency has been spying on individuals who have had nothing whatever to do with terrorism.
That fear was bolstered this week by an article in The Times that said the N.S.A. had all but overwhelmed the F.B.I. with raw tips, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, names - all manner of information - in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. Hundreds of F.B.I. agents were required to check out thousands of N.S.A. tips a month.
Citing interviews with current and former officials, the article said that virtually all of the tips "led to dead ends or innocent Americans."
Warrants for domestic eavesdropping were not only easily available, but could even be obtained retroactively. Nevertheless, as Anthony Romero, executive director of the A.C.L.U., remarked yesterday, "The president chose to completely disregard the rules of the road."
"That means," said Mr. Romero, "that the N.S.A. has been unleashed in a much broader way on Americans."
In a separate interview yesterday, Bill Goodman, the legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, spelled out his belief that the government was using the cover of terror investigations to spy on the private conversations of law-abiding individuals.
"I think they are engaging in surveillance that they don't want even the FISA judges to see. They don't want them looking over their shoulders and seeing that they are doing things like listening in on attorney-client conversations, listening in on journalists talking to their sources, engaging in the kind of Big Brother tactics that will turn this society from a free one into an authoritarian one."

6 Ex-Chiefs of E.P.A. Urge Action on Greenhouse Gases
By MICHAEL JANOFSKY
NYT, 19 January 2006
Six former heads of the Environmental Protection Agency, including five who served Republican presidents, said Wednesday that the Bush administration needed to act more aggressively to limit the emission of greenhouse gases linked to climate change.
Speaking on a panel that also included the current agency chief, Stephen L. Johnson, they generally agreed that the need to address global warming was growing urgent and that the continuing debate over what percentage of the problem was caused by human activities was a waste of time.
"Why argue about things you can't prove?" said William D. Ruckelshaus, who served under President Richard M. Nixon from 1970 to 1973 and President Ronald Reagan from 1983 to 1985. "We need to fashion policies with proper incentives to reduce the amount of carbon we are putting in the atmosphere. There are all kinds of things we can do right now, and we ought to be taking those steps."
Mr. Johnson defended the agency's current policies, saying it has invested $20 billion since 2001 in research and technologies intended to cut carbon emissions through dozens of programs.
But the blunt opinions of Mr. Johnson's Republican predecessors served as a sharp reminder that since Mr. Bush took office in 2001, neither the president nor the Republican-led Congress has proposed any comprehensive plan to limit carbon emissions from vehicles, utilities and other sources, a problem that Mr. Bush's own Department of Energy predicts will grow worse.

GOP Offers Extreme PR Makeover of the New Drug Plan
By Shailagh Murray
Washington Post, 19 January 2006
Republicans are using town meetings and other outreach efforts to try to tamp down senior citizens' outrage over the complicated and troubled new Medicare prescription drug program, as they look warily toward the November elections and the possibility of a political backlash.
..."You can hear the groans everywhere," said Rep. Rahm Emanuel (Ill.), chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, who held a Medicare event in his Chicago district last week.
Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center, said a survey in December found that although a plurality of voters favors the program, seniors are more likely to perceive the benefit as complicated and costly.
Nor is there any assurance that the Republicans' rollout will diminish widespread concerns. As the midterm elections approach, Kohut said, "This could be either the one thing that people say either, 'Wow, they really accomplished something here,' or they say, 'Look at what the Republicans have done. They've fattened up their insurance buddies and left us out in the cold.' "
The prospect of a crisis in the Medicare drug program, coming during a congressional corruption scandal and a shake-up of the House GOP leadership, is politically terrifying to some Republicans. This helps to explain why so many GOP lawmakers invested a large portion of the winter recess trying to calm down their elderly constituents.
"In sheer volume of outreach, I can't think of anything that compares in recent memory," said George Kelemen, campaign manager for AARP's outreach effort.

Fake Retirement Security
Washington Post, 19 January 2006
AMONG CONGRESS'S many bits of unfinished business is corporate pension reform. Both the House and the Senate have passed bad bills that the White House has threatened to veto; the chance to do better will come next month, when the bills go to conference. Unfortunately, the omens are not promising. Lobbies are pressing Congress to stick with its bad legislation, and the news from corporate America is likely to be twisted to suit the lobbyists' ends.
The corporate news is depressing. A procession of blue-chip companies is walking away from traditional defined-benefit promises, the sort that guarantee a fixed proportion of salary upon retirement. Companies such as IBM Corp. and Verizon Communications Inc. have stopped allowing new pension claims to accrue under these plans, while others, such as Alcoa Inc., are barring new hires from participating in them. From the companies' viewpoint, switching to defined-contribution 401(k) plans cuts risk: Companies just have to pay in a fixed and knowable sum each year; they don't have to worry about how long retirees will collect pensions or whether their investments will grow fast enough to pay for their promises. But reduced risk for the company means increased risk for the employee. Companies are better placed to shoulder risk than individuals, so the switch away from traditional defined-benefit plans is a loss to society.

Breaking Ranks
Larry Wilkerson Attacked the Iraq War. In the Process, He Lost the Friendship of Colin Powell.
By Richard Leiby
Washington Post, 19 January 2006
Yet these days he and Powell are estranged: This program represents the last remnant of a long, deep friendship between them. Like ex-spouses in an uneasy detente, "we decided we'd just communicate over the kids," says Wilkerson, sounding pained by the situation.
The split came as both men left the administration -- Powell as secretary of state, Wilkerson as his chief of staff -- after working side by side for 16 years. Wilkerson, a once-loyal Republican with 31 years of Army service, has emerged in recent months as a merciless critic of President Bush and his top people, accusing them of carrying out a reckless foreign policy and imperiling the future of the U.S. military.
"My wife would probably shoot me if I headed to the ballot box with a Republican vote again," he says. "This is not a Republican administration, not in my view. This is a radical administration."
Wilkerson calls Bush an unsophisticated leader who has been easily swayed by "messianic" neoconservatives and power-hungry, secretive schemers in the administration. In a landmark speech in October, Wilkerson said: "What I saw was a cabal between the vice president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made."
He is particularly appalled by U.S. treatment of enemy detainees, counting at least 100 deaths in custody during the course of the war on terrorism -- 27 of them ruled homicides. "Murder is torture," he says. "It's not torture lite."
As for the invasion of Iraq? A blunder of historic proportions, he believes.
"This is really a very inept administration," says Wilkerson, who has credentials not only as an insider in the Bush I, Clinton and Bush II presidencies but also as a former professor at two of the nation's war colleges. "As a teacher who's studied every administration since 1945, I think this is probably the worst ineptitude in governance, decision-making and leadership I've seen in 50-plus years. You've got to go back and think about that. That includes the Bay of Pigs, that includes -- oh my God, Vietnam. That includes Iran-contra, Watergate."
Such a critique, coming from a man who was long thought to speak for Powell, is seismic in Washington power circles. Some observers used to regard Powell and Wilkerson as so close that they enjoyed a "mind meld," but now Powell distances himself from the pronouncements of his former aide.
...Now consulting in the private sector, Powell declined to answer questions about Wilkerson's version of episodes in their tenure together. "General Powell considers Colonel Wilkerson a good friend of 16 years," an aide said by e-mail. "He has no other comment."
Powell did address Wilkerson's central charge of secretive White House decision-making in an interview with the BBC in December. "I wouldn't characterize it the way Larry has, calling it a cabal," Powell said. "Now what Larry is suggesting in his comments is that very often maybe Mr. Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney would take decisions in to the president that the rest of us weren't aware of. That did happen, on a number of occasions."
The White House offered no specific rebuttal of Wilkerson's views...

18 January 2006

Leading Conservatives Call for Extensive Hearings on NSA Surveillance; Checks on Invasive Federal Powers Essential
USNewswire via DailyKos, 17 January 2006
Patriots to Restore Checks and Balances (PRCB) today called upon Congress to hold open, substantive oversight hearings examining the President's authorization of the National Security Agency (NSA) to violate domestic surveillance requirements outlined in the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
Former U.S. Rep. Bob Barr, chairman of PRCB, was joined by fellow conservatives Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform (ATR); David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union; Paul Weyrich, chairman and CEO of the Free Congress Foundation and Alan Gottlieb, founder of the Second Amendment Foundation, in urging lawmakers to use NSA hearings to establish a solid foundation for restoring much needed constitutional checks and balances to intelligence law.
"When the Patriot Act was passed shortly after 9-11, the federal government was granted expanded access to Americans' private information," said Barr. "However, federal law still clearly states that intelligence agents must have a court order to conduct electronic surveillance of Americans on these shores. Yet the federal government overstepped the protections of the Constitution and the plain language of FISA to eavesdrop on Americans' private communication without any judicial checks and without proof that they are involved in terrorism."

Spying on Ordinary Americans
NYT, 18 January 2006
In times of extreme fear, American leaders have sometimes scrapped civil liberties in the name of civil protection. It's only later that the country can see that the choice was a false one and that citizens' rights were sacrificed to carry out extreme measures that were at best useless and at worst counterproductive. There are enough examples of this in American history - the Alien and Sedition Acts and the World War II internment camps both come to mind - that the lesson should be woven into the nation's fabric. But it's hard to think of a more graphic example than President Bush's secret program of spying on Americans.
The White House has offered steadily weaker arguments to defend the decision to eavesdrop on Americans' telephone calls and e-mail without getting warrants. One argument is that the spying produced unique and highly valuable information. Vice President Dick Cheney, who never shrinks from trying to prey on Americans' deepest fears, said that the spying had saved "thousands of lives" and could have thwarted the 9/11 attacks had it existed then.
Given the lack of good, hard examples, that argument sounded dubious from the start. A chilling article in yesterday's Times confirmed our fears.
According to the article, the eavesdropping swept up vast quantities of Americans' private communications without any reasonable belief that they could be related to terrorism. The National Security Agency flooded the Federal Bureau of Investigation with thousands of names, e-mail addresses, telephone numbers and other tips that virtually all led to dead ends or to innocent Americans.
About the only result the administration has been able to dredge up on behalf of the spying program is the claim that the information it gained helped disrupt two plots: one to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge and one to detonate fertilizer bombs in London. But officials in Washington and Britain disputed the connection. And that plot to cut down the Brooklyn Bridge with a blowtorch has been trotted out so many times that it would be comical if the issue were not so serious.
This was not just a tragic waste of the F.B.I.'s resources in dangerous times. It was an outrageous and pointless intrusion into individuals' privacy. Anyone who read the original reports on the spying operation and thought, "Well, so what, I have nothing to hide," should think about the uncounted innocent Americans who had F.B.I. officers knocking on their doors because of secret and possibly illegal surveillance. The National Security Agency was originally barred from domestic surveillance without court supervision to avoid just this sort of abuse.
The first lawsuits challenging the legality of the domestic spying operation were filed this week, and Congress plans hearings. We hope that lawmakers are more diligent about reining in Mr. Bush now than they have been about his other abuses of power in the name of fighting terrorism.

ACLU Readies Suit Over Domestic Spying
By REUTERS via NYT, 17 January 2006
A leading U.S. civil liberties watchdog said it was filing a federal lawsuit on Tuesday to stop the domestic spying program that President George W. Bush authorized after the September 11 attacks.
The American Civil Liberties Union said the lawsuit would be filed against the National Security Agency in U.S. district court for eastern Michigan on behalf of journalists, scholars, attorneys and national nonprofit organizations that frequently communicate by telephone and e-mail with people in the Middle East.
The lawsuit, which also names NSA Director Army Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander as a defendant, seeks a court order declaring that the spying program is illegal and ordering its immediate and permanent halt.
Bush acknowledged last month that he well as James Bamford, a leading expert on U.S. intelligence and the National Security Agency.
Nonprofit groups that have joined the lawsuit on behalf of their members and staff include Greenpeace and Council on American Islamiil with people in the Middle East.
The lawsuit, which also names NSA Director Army Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander as a defendant, seeks a court order declaring that the spying program is illegal and ordering its immediate and permanent hstitution.
The ACLU also charges that Bush exceeded his authority under separation of powers principles.
SEE ALSO:
A Constitutional Crisis
Josh Marshall
Talking Points Memo, 17 January 2006
These really aren't normal political times we're living in. And I think Gore is right to say that we're in the midst of a constitutional crisis, even though too few people are taking notice of it. Our constitution becomes the proverbial falling tree.
The point Gore makes in his speech that I think is most key is the connection between authoritarianism, official secrecy and incompetence.
The president's critics are always accusing him of law-breaking or unconstitutional acts and then also berating the incompetence of his governance. And it's often treated as, well ... he's power-hungry and incompetent to boot! Imagine that! The point though is that they are directly connected. Authoritarianism and secrecy breed incompetence; the two feed on each other. It's a vicious cycle. Governments with authoritarian tendencies point to what is in fact their own incompetence as the rationale for giving them yet more power. Katrina was a good example of this.
The basic structure of our Republic really is in danger from a president who militantly insists that he is above the law.
SEE ALSO:
Transcript: Former Vice President Gore's Speech on Constitutional Issues

Since 9/11 Everything Has Changed
Workplace Intimidation in the Federal Government
Marketplace Morning Report, 17 January 2006
Listen to this story
President Bush has decried the fact that a government worker went to the media with details about his domestic spying program. But as Jeff Tyler reports, workers at government intelligence agencies have little recourse if they want to "blow the whistle" on questionable practices.

S.E.C. Moves to Require More Disclosure on Executive Pay
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS via NYT, 17 January 2006
Federal securities regulators moved Tuesday to require companies to provide far greater detail about their executives' pay packages and perks in an effort to bring more transparency to an area that has provoked investor and public anger.
The five members of the Securities and Exchange Commission voted unanimously at a public meeting to propose the plan, which would make the biggest changes in rules governing disclosure of executives' compensation since 1992. The proposal will be opened to a 60-day public comment period and could be formally adopted by the SEC sometime afterward, possibly in time to take effect for the spring annual-meeting season next year.
Companies for the first time would be required to furnish tables in annual filings showing the total yearly compensation for their chairman, chief financial officer and the next three highest-paid executives. The true costs to the bottom line of their pay packages, including stock options, would have to be spelled out.
''This information is information that shareholders have a right to know,'' Commissioner Cynthia Glassman said before the vote.
Also under the SEC proposal:
--The level at which total executive perks must be detailed would be reduced from $50,000 to $10,000.
--New disclosure tables for executives' retirement benefits and the compensation of company directors would be required.
--Companies would be required to explain the objectives behind their executives' compensation. Companies' annual filings would have to include sections written in plain English on executive pay.
Recent academic studies have shown dizzying leaps in top executives' salaries, bonuses and stock benefits in recent years, as well as big increases in executive compensation as a percentage of company earnings -- money that otherwise would go to shareholders. At the same time, critics of corporate conduct underline what they see as a disconnect between company officials' pay and performance.
With the pay gap between employees and bosses widening enormously, Commissioner Roel Campos said, investors may ask whether ''payment for performance has been replaced by payment for pulse.''
SEC Chairman Christopher Cox, who has made fuller disclosure a high priority since taking the agency helm last August said, ''Simply put, our rules are out of date.''
Still, some critics of corporate conduct don't believe fuller disclosure of compensation goes far enough because it won't rein in runaway pay and may even create competitive pressure among companies that will push it up.
Even after the corporate scandals of 2002, as some companies continued to lavish on their executives extravagant pay packages with scant justification -- and often tied to short-term leaps in stock prices -- the SEC began in 2004 to consider tightened disclosure requirements for compensation.
In one high-profile case, the SEC said in September 2004 that General Electric Co. violated the law by failing to fully disclose to investors the millions of dollars in perks enjoyed by its retired chief executive Jack Welch, one of Wall Street's most admired CEOs. They included unlimited personal use of GE's planes, exclusive use of an $11 million apartment in New York City, a chauffeured limousine, a leased Mercedes, office space, financial services, bodyguard security and security systems for Welch's homes.
The SEC did not fine GE in the settlement but won a promise from the company to fully disclose such benefits in the future. The agency also has brought cases involving disclosure of compensation against Tyson Foods Inc. and The Walt Disney Co.

Oil Prices Leap to a Three - Month High
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS via NYT, 17 January 2006
Crude oil prices jumped to a three-month high above $65 a barrel Tuesday as Iran's nuclear ambitions and unrest in oil-rich Nigeria kept traders edgy over potential supply snags.
Analysts said energy futures jumped on concerns that the U.N. Security Council will consider sanctions against Iran because of its nuclear program, and after Iran's warning that any sanctions imposed could send oil prices even higher.
''The Iranian nuclear issue is driving the market. Traders are short-covering because they know if something happens in Iran the market would be in confusion,'' said Tetsu Emori, chief commodities strategist at Mitsui Bussan Futures in Tokyo. ''The issue poses a threat of supply disruption in a major oil-producing country.''
Analysts also said recent attacks on oil facilities in Nigeria -- Africa's leading oil exporter and the fifth-biggest source of U.S. oil imports -- were supporting crude's rise.

Cronkite's Vietnam Moment: 'US Must Leave Iraq'
By David Usborne
The Independent (UK) via TomPaine.com, 17 January 2006
Walter Cronkite, the former network news anchor they called "the most trusted man in America", has added his voice to those calling for the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, echoing an appeal he made in 1968 to President Lyndon Johnson to cut his losses in Vietnam.
It has been 25 years since Mr Cronkite, now 89, hard of hearing and slow of gait, has presided over the nightly news bulletins for CBS, but he is still employed by the network and his status as an affable and avuncular national sage is intact. So his comments, made at a gathering of television critics in California, will reverberate.
They came as the Democrat congressman John Murtha, who shocked the White House in November by advocating a withdrawal from Iraq, reiterated his stance and predicted that all US troops would be out by year's end.

17 January 2006

USAID Paper Details Security Crisis in Iraq
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post, 17 January 2006
The U.S. Agency for International Development paints a dire and detailed picture of the Iraq security situation in its request for contractors to bid on its $1.32 billion, 28-month project to help stabilize 10 major Iraqi cities.
The USAID program, outlined in a Jan. 2 paper, envisions development between 2006 and 2008 of partnerships in cities that make up more than half of Iraq's population. Those cities would include Baghdad, Basra, Mosul, Kirkuk and Najaf. The project, which to date has only $30 million of the proposed funds, will try to reduce violence by creating jobs, revitalizing community infrastructure, and mitigating ethnic and religious conflicts.
To prepare potential bidders for the task, USAID included an annex with the contractor application. It describes Iraq as being in the midst of an insurgency whose tactics "include creating chaos in Iraq society as a whole and fomenting civil war." Many of the attacks are against coalition and Iraqi security forces, the annex says, and they "significantly damage the country's infrastructure and cause a tide of adverse economic and social effects that ripple across Iraq."
Although President Bush and senior administration officials tend to see the enemy primarily as Saddam Hussein loyalists and foreign terrorists, the USAID analysis also places emphasis on "internecine conflict," which includes "religious-sectarian, ethnic, tribal, criminal and politically based" violence.

Spy Agency Data After Sept. 11 Led F.B.I. to Dead Ends
By LOWELL BERGMAN, ERIC LICHTBLAU, SCOTT SHANE and DON VAN NATTA Jr.
NYT, 17 January 2006
In the anxious months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the National Security Agency began sending a steady stream of telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and names to the F.B.I. in search of terrorists. The stream soon became a flood, requiring hundreds of agents to check out thousands of tips a month.
But virtually all of them, current and former officials say, led to dead ends or innocent Americans.
F.B.I. officials repeatedly complained to the spy agency that the unfiltered information was swamping investigators. The spy agency was collecting much of the data by eavesdropping on some Americans' international communications and conducting computer searches of phone and Internet traffic. Some F.B.I. officials and prosecutors also thought the checks, which sometimes involved interviews by agents, were pointless intrusions on Americans' privacy.
As the bureau was running down those leads, its director, Robert S. Mueller III, raised concerns about the legal rationale for a program of eavesdropping without warrants, one government official said. Mr. Mueller asked senior administration officials about "whether the program had a proper legal foundation," but deferred to Justice Department legal opinions, the official said.
President Bush has characterized the eavesdropping program as a "vital tool" against terrorism; Vice President Dick Cheney has said it has saved "thousands of lives."
But the results of the program look very different to some officials charged with tracking terrorism in the United States. More than a dozen current and former law enforcement and counterterrorism officials, including some in the small circle who knew of the secret program and how it played out at the F.B.I., said the torrent of tips led them to few potential terrorists inside the country they did not know of from other sources and diverted agents from counterterrorism work they viewed as more productive.

Gore Wants Special Counsel to Investigate Bush Spy Power
By Ronald Brownstein
LA Times, 17 January 2006
Former Vice President Al Gore, charging that President Bush's record on civil liberties posed a "grave danger" to America's constitutional freedoms, urged the appointment of a special counsel to investigate Bush's authorization of warrantless domestic surveillance by the National Security Agency.
In a detailed and impassioned speech sponsored by liberal and conservative groups on Monday, Gore said that while much remained unknown about the spying program, "What we do know . . . virtually compels the conclusion that the president of the United States has been breaking the law, repeatedly and insistently."
...Gore said a special counsel was needed because of Gonzales' "obvious conflict of interest" in investigating the program's legality.
..."An executive who arrogates to himself the power to ignore the legitimate legislative directives of the Congress or to act free of the check of the judiciary becomes the central threat the Founders sought to nullify in the Constitution -- an all-powerful executive too reminiscent of the king from whom they had broken free," Gore said.
Gore did not specifically call for Bush's impeachment -- an unlikely occurrence in a Congress where both chambers are controlled by Republicans. But he repeatedly argued that Bush's authorization of the domestic surveillance and other administration assertions of executive authority in the struggle against terror threatened "the rule of law" -- the same phrase House Republicans stressed in their impeachment case against President Clinton.
Ranging beyond the spying program, Gore charged that Bush has "brought our republic to the brink of a dangerous breach in the fabric of the Constitution" through many of his tactics in the war on terror.
Gore criticized the administration's indefinite detention of terrorism suspects and the authorization of aggressive questioning techniques for captives that, Gore said, "plainly constitute" torture.
If the president has the power "to eavesdrop on American citizens without a warrant, imprison citizens on his own declaration, kidnap and torture, then what can't he do?" Gore asked.
Gore drew some of his loudest applause when he argued that Congress has become "entirely subservient to the executive branch" and failed to exercise its oversight responsibilities on Bush. He said congressional Democratic leaders briefed on the spying program "must share the blame" with Republicans for not protesting it.
Gore was scheduled to be introduced via a satellite feed by former Rep. Bob Barr, R-Ga., one of the managers of the House impeachment case against Clinton. But problems with a satellite link prevented Barr from speaking.
Barr, a conservative known for his staunch support for civil liberties, has been critical of the administration's surveillance program.

16 January 2006

Judicial Gag Rule
By BOB HERBERT
NYT, 16 January 2006
A casual newspaper reader or television viewer might have gotten the impression that the major problem with last week's Supreme Court confirmation hearings was that some senators on the Judiciary Committee talked too much. The truth, of course, is that the nominee, Samuel Alito, talked far too little.
Senator Joseph Biden, a Delaware Democrat with designs on the presidency, was singled out for criticism. Senator Biden is unquestionably loquacious. We might as well stipulate that. But he's also a smart guy. And an occasion as important - even solemn - as a Senate inquiry into the fitness of a man to sit on the Supreme Court is as good a time as any for us to worry a little less about style points and a lot more about the substantive matters at hand.
When the president of the United States, who is abusing his power every which way he can, chooses for the Supreme Court an extreme right-winger who is all but mesmerized by the power elite, it would behoove us to pay closer attention to the substance of what Senator Biden and others are saying.
"The whole point here," said Mr. Biden, in an interview on the "Today" show, "is that nominees now, Democrat and Republican nominees, come before the United States Congress and resolve not to let the people know what they think about important issues."
The "real issue," he said, is whether the public has a right to know how Supreme Court nominees view certain crucially important matters, including matters involving threats to life and limb, or that ultimately might determine whether we will continue to live in a reasonably free society.
For example, Senator Biden asked: "Do the people have a right to know whether or not President Bush is able to go to war in Iran without Congressional approval, which his administration argues? That's a pretty basic subject. Do they have that right?
"Well, it seems to me a judge before us should say, 'Well, I think the Constitution says he does or he doesn't,' as opposed to saying, 'Well, he's bound by the Constitution,' which begs the question."
The confirmation hearings have become farcical, an obnoxious hide-and-seek ritual in which the administration's ultimate goal is to have the public know as little as possible - as opposed to as much as possible - about individuals being appointed to the most powerful court in the land. That's the opposite of the way a democracy should work.

President Tells Insurers to Aid Ailing Medicare Drug Plan
By ROBERT PEAR
NYT, 16 January 2006
With tens of thousands of people unable to get medicines promised by Medicare, the Bush administration has told insurers that they must provide a 30-day supply of any drug that a beneficiary was previously taking, and it said that poor people must not be charged more than $5 for a covered drug.
The actions came after several states declared public health emergencies, and many states announced that they would step in to pay for prescriptions that should have been covered by the federal Medicare program.
Republicans have joined Democrats in asserting that the federal government botched the beginning of the prescription drug program, which started on Jan. 1. People who had signed up for coverage found that they were not on the government's list of subscribers. Insurers said they had no way to identify poor people entitled to extra help with their drug costs. Pharmacists spent hours on the telephone trying to reach insurance companies that administer the drug benefit under contract to Medicare.
Many of the problems involve low-income people entitled to both Medicare and Medicaid.
In a directive sent to all Medicare drug plans over the weekend, the Bush administration said they "must take immediate steps" to ensure that low-income beneficiaries were not charged more than $2 for a generic drug and $5 for a brand-name drug.
In addition, it said insurers must cover a 30-day emergency supply of drugs that beneficiaries were taking prior to the start of the new program.
In an interview yesterday, Dr. Mark B. McClellan, administrator of the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said that "several hundred thousand beneficiaries who switched plans" in December may have had difficulty filling prescriptions in the last two weeks.
In California, officials estimate that 200,000 of the state's 1.1 million low-income Medicare beneficiaries had trouble getting their medications.
...The handling of the drug benefit threatens to become a political liability for Republicans, as older voters and people with disabilities complain that they have been denied essential medications.
Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas, a Republican who is chairman of the National Governors Association, declared a public health emergency.
In Wisconsin, Gov. James E. Doyle, a Democrat, said: "It is outrageous how the federal government has mishandled this program and put thousands of lives at risk. As an emergency measure, the state will step in to ensure that no seniors go without lifesaving medicines."
The Senate Democratic leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, said the mismanagement of the program had had "devastating consequences for seniors." In a letter signed by 34 other Democrats, Mr. Reid said, "We want to know why so many of our constituents have fallen through the cracks." Democrats had predicted many of the problems, he said.
The concern was bipartisan. Senator Judd Gregg, Republican of New Hampshire, said many people had been "turned away at their pharmacies or told that they must purchase the drugs up front and seek reimbursement later."
"These are very vulnerable people who do not have the means to pay for their prescriptions and who cannot go without their medications," Mr. Gregg said.
SEE ALSO:
First, Do More Harm
By PAUL KRUGMAN
nyt, 16 January 2006
It's widely expected that President Bush will talk a lot about health care in his State of the Union address. He probably won't boast about his prescription drug plan, whose debut has been a Katrina-like saga of confusion and incompetence. But he probably will tout proposals for so-called "consumer driven" health care.
So it's important to realize that the administration's idea of health care reform is to take what's wrong with our system and make it worse. Consider the harrowing series of articles The New York Times printed last week about the rising tide of diabetes.
Diabetes is a horrifying disease. It's also an important factor in soaring medical costs. The likely future impact of the disease on those costs terrifies health economists. And the problem of dealing with diabetes is a clear illustration of the real issues in health care.
Here's what we should be doing: since the rise in diabetes is closely linked to the rise in obesity, we should be getting Americans to lose weight and exercise more. We should also support disease management: people with diabetes have a much better quality of life and place much less burden on society if they can be induced to monitor their blood sugar carefully and control their diet.
But it turns out that the U.S. system of paying for health care doesn't let medical professionals do the right thing. There's hardly any money for prevention, partly because of the influence of food-industry lobbyists. And even disease management gets severely shortchanged. As the Times series pointed out, insurance companies "will often refuse to pay $150 for a diabetic to see a podiatrist, who can help prevent foot ailments associated with the disease. Nearly all of them, though, cover amputations, which typically cost more than $30,000."
As a result, diabetes management isn't a paying proposition. Centers that train diabetics to manage the disease have been medical successes but financial failures.
The point is that we can't deal with the diabetes epidemic in part because insurance companies don't pay for preventive medicine or disease management, focusing only on acute illness and extreme remedies. Which brings us to the Bush administration's notion of health care reform.
...Critics of health savings accounts have mostly focused on two features of the accounts Mr. Bush won't mention. First, such accounts mainly benefit people with high incomes. Second, they encourage wealthy corporate employees to opt out of company health plans, further undermining the already fraying system of employment-based health insurance.
But the case of diabetes and other evidence suggest that a third problem with health savings accounts may be even more important: in practice, people who are forced to pay for medical care out of pocket don't have the ability to make good decisions about what care to purchase. "Consumer driven" is a nice slogan, but it turns out that buying health care isn't at all like buying clothing.
The bottom line is that what the Bush administration calls reform is actually the opposite. Driven by an ideology at odds with reality, the administration wants to accentuate, not fix, what's wrong with America's health care system.

U.S. Deflects Criticism Of Commitment to U.N.
Priority of New Rights Council Questioned
By Colum Lynch
Washington Post, 16 January 2006
The Bush administration is defending itself against criticism that it has not followed through on promises to lead a vigorous campaign at the United Nations to establish an effective new human rights council to condemn rights abusers.
For months, human rights advocates have accused the administration of leading a lackluster diplomatic effort, noting that it has assigned a mid-level representative to lead the talks in New York while other governments sent their top U.N. ambassadors.
They also expressed concern that John R. Bolton, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, has been unduly fatalistic about the prospects for success, indicating he is prepared to abandon the effort if he cannot overcome opposition to a credible council.
Kenneth Roth, executive director of the New York-based Human Rights Watch, said: "Frankly, my main critique of U.S. policy at this stage has been that the United States has been mainly AWOL, that its presence during the negotiations has been low level." Roth said he shares Bolton's assessment that the United States "shouldn't settle for window dressing." He expressed concern that Bolton's view reflects "defeatism" because "I don't accept that we can't emerge from these negotiations without a significantly improved council."

Translator's Conviction Raises Legal Concerns
Trial Transcripts Show Lack of Evidence
By Michael Powell and Michelle Garcia
Washington Post, 16 January 2006
For three years federal agents trailed Mohammed Yousry, a chubby 50-year-old translator and U.S. citizen who worked for radical lawyer Lynne Stewart. Prosecutors wiretapped his phone, and FBI agents shadowed and interviewed him. They read his books and notepads and every file on his computer.
This was their conclusion:
"Yousry is not a practicing Muslim. He is not a fundamentalist," prosecutor Anthony Barkow acknowledged in his closing arguments to a jury in federal district court in Manhattan earlier this year. "Mohammed Yousry is not someone who supports or believes in the use of violence."
Still, the prosecutor persuaded the jury to convict Yousry of supporting terrorism. Yousry now awaits sentencing in March, when he could face 20 years in prison for translating a letter from imprisoned Muslim cleric Omar Abdel Rahman to Rahman's lawyer in Egypt.
In June 2000, Stewart released to a reporter a version of the letter, which discussed a cease-fire between Islamic militants and the Egyptian government. Prosecutors said that the lawyer and the translator, by these acts, conspired to use Rahman's words to incite others to carry out kidnappings and killings. No attack took place.
"Kill who? What are they talking about?" Yousry asked recently as he sat alongside his wife, Sarah, an evangelical Christian, in their modest Connecticut condominium. "The words I'm looking for, it's insane."
The prosecution and conviction of Stewart, 66, on charges of aiding terrorist activity, drew international attention, overshadowing Yousry's case. But legal experts, civil liberties lawyers and a juror say Yousry's conviction raises many troubling questions, not least how a court-appointed translator working on instruction from lawyers could be held responsible for navigating complicated and dangerous legal waters.
The trial transcripts reveal that prosecutors advanced no evidence to back up certain claims, including the assertion that Yousry was in touch with Middle Eastern terrorists.

The Myth that Shapes Bush's World
By Mark Helprin
LA Times, 16 January 2006
THE PRESIDENT believes and often states, as if it were a self-evident truth, that "democracies are peaceful countries." This claim, which has been advanced in the past in regard to Christianity, socialism, Islam and ethical culture, is the postulate on which the foreign policy of the United States now rests. Balance of power, deterrence and punitive action have been abandoned in favor of a scheme to recast the political cultures of broad regions, something that would be difficult enough even with a flawless rationale because the power of even the most powerful country in the world is not adequate to transform the world at will.
Nor is the rationale flawless. It is possible to discover various statistical correlations among democracy and war and peace, depending on how they are defined and in what time frames. The chief pitfall in such social-science exercises is in weighing something such as, for example, the Mughal Campaign in Transoxiana, 1646-47, against something like, for example, World War II. Generally, a straightforward historical approach is better. And what does it show?
...It isn't that democracies are too old or too young or too fat or too thin, but that none is perfect and that, therefore, all are subject to forces that may override the theoretical peacefulness of representative governments. Even perfect democracies, which have never been and will never be, cannot offer the kind of Pax Democratica that the United States now seeks to construct among a group of states that are famous for their immunity to liberal governance.
...Not only does the U.S. expend a great deal of effort to usher politically impure states into a form of popular sovereignty that will not stop them from acting inimically to our interests, but in distancing itself from authoritarian states that are willing to work with us, it forgoes potentially critical advantages. For the pleasure of displaying our virtue, we may someday suffer innumerable casualties in a terrorist attack that a compromised state might have helped us to prevent.
In foreign policy, carelessness and confusion often lead to tragedy. Thus, a maxim chosen to guide the course of a nation should be weighed in light of history and common sense.
Or is that too much to ask?

15 January 2006

We Are All Neocons Now
A Nation of Pre-emptors?
By DAVID RIEFF
NYT Magazine, 15 January 2006
The fact that political debate over the U.S. intervention in Iraq breaks down largely along party lines, with Republicans generally in favor and Democrats skeptical or opposed, has tended to obscure the fact that American interventionism has historically been a bipartisan impulse. Indeed, far less separates the parties than it might seem from the current polarized discourse in Washington. For all their scruples about the Iraq adventure, few Democrats question the idea that it is right for the United States to "promote" democracy in the world, by force if necessary.
...Nonetheless, the pervasive sense that the Bush administration bungled the mission in Iraq has led Democrats to play down their own ideas about reshaping the global order. Recently, however, a number of Democratic foreign-policy analysts have tried to reinvigorate their party's internationalist traditions. In a series of articles, Ivo Daalder and James Steinberg, both of whom held senior positions in the Clinton administration, have argued that "states have a responsibility to head off internal developments - acquiring weapons of mass destruction and harboring terrorists, to name two - that pose a threat to the security of other states." If they do not do so, outside powers may and sometimes must intervene. "It would be unfortunate," they write, "if President Bush's doctrine of pre-emption were a casualty of the Iraq war." For them, "conditional sovereignty" is "central to a new norm of state responsibility."
...The Bush administration has claimed that the essential question is not whether an intervention is unilateral or multilateral, United Nations-sanctioned or not, but whether it is right or wrong. Agree or disagree, it is a coherent position: the world needs American leadership, and America must provide it.
The new theorists of conditional sovereignty share this benign vision of American power. Where they differ is over global realities. While they know that the United Nations is unlikely to achieve global peace and security, they view the Bush administration's unilateralism as doomed to failure both because of the opposition it will mobilize across the world and because it will ultimately prove too expensive to sustain. As an alternative, Daalder and his fellow analyst James Lindsay have called for concerted multilateral action by an "alliance of Democratic states" that would, if necessary, constitute "an alternative, and more legitimate body" than the U.N. "for authorizing action."
But what may seem like Wilsonian idealism in Washington appears, in much of the rest of the world, like the multilateralism of a very small club. Unless you believe in American goodness as a matter of faith, a troubling question arises: what countries would actually qualify for admission to this alliance? The answer is obvious: the United States, Canada, the European Union nations, Australia, Japan, South Korea. But this means it would be largely an alliance of the prosperous and the powerful. The corollary is even worse. What countries, deemed to have forfeited their sovereignty, would be subject to "action" by the alliance? Answer: The countries of the poor world - many of which only recently overcame colonial domination and acquired that sovereignty in the first place.
The echoes of 19th-century imperialism are there whether you like it or not. At least Americans need to recognize that these echoes shape the understanding of ideas like conditional sovereignty in much of the world. In Europe or the U.S., sending NATO forces to Darfur may seem like fulfilling the global moral responsibility to protect. But in much of the Muslim world, it is far likelier to be experienced as one more incursion of a Christian army into an Islamic land.
On the evidence of Darfur, where the deployment of African Union peacekeepers has been largely ineffective in stopping the slaughter, it may prove impossible to intervene in the world's gravest crises without arousing fears of imperial agendas. If this is true, then a number of questions have to be faced squarely: should a humanitarian or a human rights justification always trump other concerns? What if the state doing the intervening has little or no credibility in the region, as the polls suggest is now true of the U.S. in the Middle East? Iraq should have taught us that good intentions are never enough. And no matter what a given intervention may accomplish, it is worth remembering that rules of action fashioned by small groups of countries, no matter how democratic, are unlikely to look legitimate in the eyes of people who had no say in their making.

The Drone, the CIA and a Botched Attempt to Kill bin Laden's Deputy
Jason Burke and Imtiaz Gul in Islamabad
The Observer, 15 January 2006
[In the hunt for al-Qaeda, a missile attack on a mountain village killed women and children. The attack was precise, the intelligence was flawed, and the strained relation between Pakistan and the US has been pushed to breaking point ]
The missiles were deadly accurate. In the pitch dark of a night in Pakistan's sparsely populated North West Frontier Province, they not only located the three targeted houses on the outskirts of the village of Damadola Burkanday but squarely struck their hujra, the large rooms traditionally used by Pashtun tribesmen to accommodate guests.
Yesterday some of the results of the strike were very clear: three ruined houses, mud-brick rubble scattered across the steeply terraced fields, the bodies of livestock lying where thrown by the airblast, a row of newly dug graves in the village cemetery and torn green and red embroidered blankets flapping in the chilly wind. Four children were among the 18 villagers who died in the brutally sudden attack on their homes.
Yet evidence emerging appeared to indicate that, though the technology that guided the missiles to their targets at 3am on Friday was faultless, the intelligence that had selected those targets was not.

U.S. Seeking Arab Peacekeepers in Iraq
UPI via Informed Comment, 13 January 2006
The U.S. is reportedly seeking to convince Arab countries to send troops to Iraq to replace U.S. forces after the formation of a new Iraqi government.
Cairo-based Arab diplomatic sources said U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney who will start a Middle East tour on Sunday including Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Oman, will discuss the matter with Arab leaders.
The sources told United Press International Friday Cheney will raise with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and other Arab leaders the possibility of dispatching Arab and Islamic troops to Iraq to pave the way for the reduction of American forces.
Washington hopes Arab forces would participate in keeping peace in the regions from which it will pull out its troops, and as such send a positive message to Iraq's neighbors that it does not intend to keep its forces in the Arab country, the sources said.
Cheney will visit Egypt on Sunday for a few hours during which he will meet President Mubarak only, Egyptian officials said without elaboration.
Cheney's last visit to Egypt took place in March 2002 as part of a regional tour to win Arab support for war against Iraq which Washington waged a year later to topple Saddam Hussein's regime.

The Imperial Presidency at Work
NYT, 15 January 2006
...Mr. Bush, however, seems to see no limit to his imperial presidency. First, he issued a constitutionally ludicrous "signing statement" on the McCain bill. The message: Whatever Congress intended the law to say, he intended to ignore it on the pretext the commander in chief is above the law. That twisted reasoning is what led to the legalized torture policies, not to mention the domestic spying program.
Then Mr. Bush went after the judiciary, scrapping the Levin-Graham bargain. The solicitor general informed the Supreme Court last week that it no longer had jurisdiction over detainee cases. It said the court should drop an existing case in which a Yemeni national is challenging the military tribunals invented by Mr. Bush's morally challenged lawyers after 9/11. The administration is seeking to eliminate all other lawsuits filed by some of the approximately 500 men at Gitmo, the vast majority of whom have not been shown to pose any threat.
Both of the offensive theories at work here - that a president's intent in signing a bill trumps the intent of Congress in writing it, and that a president can claim power without restriction or supervision by the courts or Congress - are pet theories of Judge Samuel Alito, the man Mr. Bush chose to tilt the Supreme Court to the right.
The administration's behavior shows how high and immediate the stakes are in the Alito nomination, and how urgent it is for Congress to curtail Mr. Bush's expansion of power. Nothing in the national consensus to combat terrorism after 9/11 envisioned the unilateral rewriting of more than 200 years of tradition and law by one president embarked on an ideological crusade.
SEE ALSO:
Glum Democrats Can't See Halting Bush on Courts
By ADAM NAGOURNEY, RICHARD W. STEVENSON and NEIL A. LEWIS
NYT, 15 January 2006
...In interviews, Democrats said the lesson of the Alito hearings was that this White House could put on the bench almost any qualified candidate, even one whom Democrats consider to be ideologically out of step with the country.
That conclusion amounts to a repudiation of a central part of a strategy Senate Democrats settled on years ago in a private retreat where they discussed how to fight a Bush White House effort to recast the judiciary: to argue against otherwise qualified candidates by saying they would take the courts too far to the right.
Even though Democrats thought from the beginning that they had little hope of defeating the nomination, they were dismayed that a nominee with such clear conservative views - in particular a written record of opposition to abortion rights - appeared to be stirring little opposition.
...Now,, several Democrats said, even at a time when many of his other initiatives seem in doubt, and though he was forced by conservatives to withdraw his first choice for the seat, Mr. Bush appears on the verge of achieving what he had set as a primary goal of his presidency: a fundamental reshaping of the federal judiciary along more conservative lines.
Mr. Bush has now appointed one-quarter of the federal appeals court judges, and, assuming that Judge Alito is confirmed - the Judiciary Committee vote is expected to occur in the next 10 days - will have put two self-described conservatives on a Supreme Court that has only two members appointed by a Democratic president.
"They have made a lot of progress," said Ronald A. Klain, a former Democratic chief counsel for the Judiciary Committee and the White House counsel in charge of judicial nominations for President Bill Clinton. "I hate to say they're done because Lord only knows what's next. They have achieved a large part of their objective."
Asked if he had any hope that Democrats could slow President Bush's effort to push the court to the right, Mr. Klain responded: "No. The only thing that will fix this is a Democratic president and more vacancies. It takes a long time to make these kinds of changes and it's going to take a long time to undo them."
Senator Charles E. Schumer, a New York Democrat and a member of the Judiciary Committee, said it was now hard to imagine a legislative strategy that could slow Mr. Bush's judicial campaign, assuming vacancies continue to emerge, at least through the end of this year.
"You either need a Democratic president, a Democratic Senate or moderate Republicans who will break ranks when it's a conservative nominee," Mr. Schumer said. "We don't have any of those three. The only tool we have is the filibuster, which is a very difficult tool to use, and with only 45 Democrats, it's harder than it was last term."
Few Democrats or analysts said they thought that Judge Alito's nomination could ever be blocked, noting that as a rule presidents tend to get their Supreme Court nominees approved by the Senate.
"It may be a mistake to think that their failure demonstrates that they necessarily did something wrong," said Richard H. Fallon, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School. Referring to one of the major Democratic complaints about Judge Alito's testimony, Mr. Fallon said: "As long as most of the public will settle for evasive or uninformative answers, maybe there was nothing that they could have done to get Alito to make a major error."

14 January 2006

Iran and Israel Will be Kings of the Middle East Jungle
The US occupation of Iraq has turned its neighbour into a new regional power. But the contagion is likely to spread far wider
David Hirst
The Guardian, 13 January 2006
In March 2003, before US troops reached Baghdad, Middle East scholar Volker Perthes wrote that while the risks of this "illegitimate" war were enormous, those of "a US failure to stabilise postwar Iraq would be even higher". With those words looking increasingly prophetic, no one, in picturing the implications of such failure, is now more lurid than the Bush administration. The direness of the prospect has become its strongest argument for "staying the course", but for others it is already a given, amounting to "the greatest strategic disaster in US history", in the words of the retired US general William Odom.
If so, what will this disaster look like? In scale, it will surely be at least commensurate with the vast ambitions that came with the invasion in the first place, Iraq being cast as the platform for reshaping the entire Middle East.
A general US retreat from the region, with troop withdrawal at its core, is no doubt a prerequisite for, and yardstick of, the emergence of a healthy, self-reliant new Middle Eastern order. But, with the kind of ignominious scuttle from Iraq that failure would presumably entail, the region won't just revert to the status quo ante. Instead of Iraq becoming a beacon of all good things it will become the single most noxious wellspring of all the bad ones the invasion was supposed to extinguish - and new ones to boot.
If the Middle East was a jungle before, it will be a wilder one afterwards, with most elements of the decadent existing order, in their increased insecurity, driven to even cruder methods - increased internal repression or external adventurism - to preserve themselves. And it will become even more anti-American. For while a "good" retreat would decrease such sentiments, a "bad" Iraqi one will only spur and spread the active, often violent expression of them. That is because, for the Arabs, Iraq was only the latest drastic episode in a long history of western interference in their affairs. Until the wider, pre-Iraqi consequences of that interference are remedied, the example of successful anti-American resistance in Iraq will only encourage it elsewhere, especially in Palestine.

Race for Majority Leader Draws a Third Candidate
By CARL HULSE
NYT, 14 January 2006
Representative John Shadegg of Arizona made a late entry into the race for House Republican leader on Friday, suggesting that his two rivals did not represent a "clean break from the scandals of the recent past."
Mr. Shadegg joined Representatives John A. Boehner of Ohio, chairman of the Education and Workforce Committee, and Roy Blunt of Missouri, the acting majority leader, in the race to assume the post vacated by Representative Tom DeLay of Texas.
"Members of our Republican conference disagree about policy and tactics, but we stand together in our respect for this institution, our hatred of corruption and our support for the basic principles of our party," Mr. Shadegg said in a letter to fellow Republicans.

A Protest, a Spy Program and a Campus in an Uproar
By SARAH KERSHAW
NYT, 14 January 2006
SANTA CRUZ, Calif. - The protest was carefully orchestrated, planned for weeks by Students Against War during Friday evening meetings in a small classroom on the University of California campus here.
So when the military recruiters arrived for the job fair, held in an old dining hall last April 5 - a now fateful day for a scandalized university - the students had their two-way radios in position, their cyclists checking the traffic as hundreds of demonstrators marched up the hilly roads of this campus on the Central Coast and a dozen moles stationed inside the building, reporting by cellphone to the growing crowd outside.
"Racist, sexist, antigay," the demonstrators recalled shouting. "Hey, recruiters, go away!"
Things got messy. As the building filled, students storming in were blocked from entering. The recruiters left, some finding that the tires of their vehicles had been slashed. The protesters then occupied the recruiters' table and, in what witnesses described as a minor melee, an intern from the campus career center was injured.
Fast forward: The students had left campus for their winter vacation in mid-December when a report by MSNBC said the April protest had appeared on what the network said was a database from a Pentagon surveillance program. The protest was listed as a "credible threat" - to what is not clear to people around here - and was the only campus action among scores of other antimilitary demonstrations to receive the designation.
...A Department of Defense spokesman said that while the Pentagon maintained a database of potential threats to military installations, military personnel and national security, he could not confirm that the information released by MSNBC was from the database. The spokesman, who said he was not authorized to be quoted by name, said he could not answer questions about whether the government was or had been spying on Santa Cruz students.

Oprah! How Could Ya?
By MAUREEN DOWD
NYT, 14 January 2006
...Despite George Washington and the cherry tree, we no longer have a society especially consecrated to truth. The culture produces an infinity of TV shows and movies depicting the importance of honesty. But they're really talking only about the importance of being honest about your feelings. Sharing feelings is not the same thing as telling the truth. We've become a country of situationalists.
Journalism, politics and publishing have been tarred by scandals that have revealed a chilling insensitivity to right and wrong. Random House isn't concerned that an author makes up stuff in a book labeled nonfiction; it just kept counting the money after The Smoking Gun exposed James Frey's lies about his own life.
When Mr. Frey went on "Larry King Live" with his mom to defend his book's "essential truths," Oprah Winfrey called in to back him up. She sounded disturbingly like Scott McClellan. Despite doubts about facts in the book, she said, "the underlying message of redemption" still "resonates" with her. She should have said: "Had I known that many parts were fake, I wouldn't have recommended the book to millions of loyal viewers. I wouldn't have made this liar a lot of money." She should take a page from Stephen Colbert and put the slippery Frey on her "Dead to me" list.

Scripps Howard News Service Has Latest Paid Pundit Scandal
Editor & Publisher, 13 January 2006
Another columnist has been dropped by his distributor over revelations about previously undisclosed payments.
Scripps Howard News Service (SHNS) announced Friday that it severed its relationship with Michael Fumento -- a senior fellow at the conservative Hudson Institute -- for not disclosing he had taken payments in 1999 from agribusiness giant Monsanto. The payments were revealed by BusinessWeek Online, which also broke a similar story revealing columnist Doug Bandow receiving payments. Copley News Service subsequently dropped Bandow.
In a statement released Friday, SHNS Editor and General Manager Peter Copeland said Fumento "did not tell SHNS editors, and therefore we did not tell our readers, that in 1999 Hudson received a $60,000 grant from Monsanto." Copeland added: "Our policy is that he should have disclosed that information. We apologize to our readers."
SHNS sent out an advisory to subscribers last night that read: "The Jan. 5 column by Michael Fumento about new biotechnology products from Monsanto should have included more information. We believe the column should have disclosed a $60,000 grant from Monsanto that Fumento received in 1999 for a book about biotechnology.
...Bandow and several other conservative commentators -- in a series of 2005 revelations -- were found to have accepted money to promote programs and initiatives without disclosing the funding. They included Armstrong Williams of Tribune Media Services (which dropped Williams), Maggie Gallagher of Universal Press Syndicate, and the self-syndicated Michael McManus.
Fumento also writes for conservative magazines such as the American Spectator and his own blog.
His Jan. 5 column opened: "Both in terms of consumption and variety, biotech is busting out all over -- and we’re reaping a host of benefits from cheaper and better food to land and forest preservation."
Later Fumento cited the Monsanto breakthroughs, adding, "Currently, almost all biotech crops reduce the use of either insecticides or herbicides. Upcoming Monsanto products, however, more effectively kill pests and even combine the two traits. The Agriculture Department has just approved one that protects corn against both weeds and rootworms....
"I chose to focus on Monsanto for lack of space and because their annual report was plopped onto my lap while I was hunting for a column idea. But their pipeline represents a fraction of what the biotech industry as a whole -- large companies and small, here and abroad -- will bring to your supper table. These are truly exciting times for producers, consumers, and those who care about the environment."
In his column right before that one, Fumento opened with, "Everybody's talking about it, but few seem to realize how exquisite a maneuver reducing U.S forces in Iraq is -- unless you just want to cut and run as does Pennsylvania Democrat John Murtha."
He has also recently cautioned against "panic" over avian fl. "The first reason not to panic over Tamiflu is there's no reason to panic over a pandemic," he wrote. "It's true avian influenza type H5N1 is constantly mutating. But the best-kept secret of the flu fright-fest is that it's been doing so since at least 1959 when it was identified in Scottish chickens."
In October on his blog, he noted that antiwar protestor Cindy Sheehan had threatened to chain herself to a fence outside the White House to protest the 2000th American death in Iraq. "Arrest her? Goodness, no!" Fumento declared. "That's her exit plan from the fence. Leave her there and maybe the crows will do the world a favor and eat her tongue out."

13 January 2006

Judge Alito, in His Own Words
NYT, 12 January 2006
Some commentators are complaining that Judge Samuel Alito Jr.'s confirmation hearings have not been exciting, but they must not have been paying attention. We learned that Judge Alito had once declared that Judge Robert Bork - whose Supreme Court nomination was defeated because of his legal extremism - "was one of the most outstanding nominees" of the 20th century. We heard Judge Alito refuse to call Roe v. Wade "settled law," as Chief Justice John Roberts did at his confirmation hearings. And we learned that Judge Alito subscribes to troubling views about presidential power.
Those are just a few of the quiet bombshells that have dropped. In his deadpan bureaucrat's voice, Judge Alito has said some truly disturbing things about his view of the law. In three days of testimony, he has given the American people reasons to be worried - and senators reasons to oppose his nomination. Among those reasons are the following:
EVIDENCE OF EXTREMISM  Judge Alito's extraordinary praise of Judge Bork is unsettling, given that Judge Bork's radical legal views included rejecting the Supreme Court's entire line of privacy cases, even its 1965 ruling striking down a state law banning sales of contraceptives. Judge Alito's membership in Concerned Alumni of Princeton - a group whose offensive views about women, minorities and AIDS victims were discussed in greater detail at yesterday's hearing - is also deeply troubling, as is his unconvincing claim not to remember joining it.
OPPOSITION TO ROE V. WADE  In 1985, Judge Alito made it clear that he believed the Constitution does not protect abortion rights. He had many chances this week to say he had changed his mind, but he refused. When offered the chance to say that Roe is a "super-precedent," entitled to special deference because it has been upheld so often, he refused that, too. As Charles Schumer, Democrat of New York, noted in particularly pointed questioning, since Judge Alito was willing to say that other doctrines, like one person one vote, are settled law, his unwillingness to say the same about Roe strongly suggests that he still believes what he believed in 1985.
SUPPORT FOR AN IMPERIAL PRESIDENCY  Judge Alito has backed a controversial theory known as the "unitary executive," and argued that the attorney general should be immune from lawsuits when he installs illegal wiretaps. Judge Alito backed away from one of his most extreme statements in this area - his assertion, in a 1985 job application, that he believed "very strongly" in "the supremacy of the elected branches of government." But he left a disturbing impression that as a justice, he would undermine the Supreme Court's critical role in putting a check on presidential excesses.
INSENSITIVITY TO ORDINARY AMERICANS' RIGHTS  Time and again, as a lawyer and a judge, the nominee has taken the side of big corporations against the "little guy," supported employers against employees, and routinely rejected the claims of women, racial minorities and the disabled. The hearing shed new light on his especially troubling dissent from a ruling by two Reagan-appointed judges, who said that workers at a coal-processing site were covered by Mine Safety and Health Act protections.
DOUBTS ABOUT THE NOMINEE'S HONESTY  Judge Alito's explanation of his involvement with Concerned Alumni of Princeton is hard to believe. In a 1985 job application, he proudly pointed to his membership in the organization. Now he says he remembers nothing of it - except why he joined, which he insists had nothing to do with the group's core concerns. His explanation for why he broke his promise to Congress to recuse himself in any case involving Vanguard companies is also unpersuasive. As for his repeated claims that his past statements on subjects like abortion and Judge Bork never represented his personal views or were intended to impress prospective employers - all that did was make us wonder why we should give any credence to what he says now.
The debate over Judge Alito is generally presented as one between Republicans and Democrats. But his testimony should trouble moderate Republicans, especially those who favor abortion rights or are concerned about presidential excesses. The hearings may be short on fireworks, but they have produced, through Judge Alito's words, an array of reasons to be concerned about this nomination.
SEE ALSO:
A Hearing About Nothing
By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Washington Post, 13 January 2006
A listless intellectual fog had fallen over the Senate hearing room on Tuesday, the first full day of questioning for Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. before the Judiciary Committee. As one Democratic senator strode out to the hallway during an afternoon break, he leaned toward me and said: "We have to hit him harder."
The senator was expressing frustration over a process that doesn't work. It turns out that, especially when their party controls the process, Supreme Court nominees can avoid answering any question they don't want to answer. Senators make the process worse with meandering soliloquies. But when the questioning gets pointed, the opposition is immediately accused of scurrilous smears. The result: an exchange of tens of thousands of words signifying, in so many cases, nothing -- as long as the nominee has the discipline to say nothing, over and over and over.
Alito, an ardent baseball fan, established himself as the Babe Ruth of evasion.

12 January 2006

Swiss Investigate Leak to Paper on C.I.A. Prisons
By DOREEN CARVAJAL,
International Herald Tribune, 12 January 2006
Switzerland is conducting criminal investigations to track down the source of a leak to the Zurich-based newspaper SonntagsBlick of what it reported was a secret document citing clandestine C.I.A. prisons in Eastern Europe.
The Sunday weekly published what it reported was a summary of a fax in November from Egypt's Foreign Ministry to its London embassy that said the United States had held 23 Iraqi and Afghan prisoners at a base in Romania. It also referred to similar detention centers in Bulgaria, Kosovo, Macedonia and Ukraine.
"The Egyptians have sources confirming the presence of secret American prisons," said the document, dated Nov. 15 and written in French to summarize the contents of the fax.
"According to the embassy's own sources, 23 Iraqis and Afghans were interrogated at the Mikhail Kogalniceau base at Constanza, on the Black Sea."
The leaked fax, which the newspaper said was sent by satellite and intercepted by the Swiss Strategic Intelligence Service, was signed by Egypt's foreign minister, Ahmed Aboul Gheit, the report said.
Christoph Grenacher, the newspaper's editor in chief, said that before the article was published, newspaper officials met with high-ranking Swiss government officials, who urged the paper to withhold the information. "We concluded that the discussion about so-called secret prisons is much more important than the interests of the secret service in Switzerland," he said.
During those discussions, he said, no one contested the authenticity of the document. Egypt has not commented on the report, but it quickly reignited a political fury in Europe that began in the fall with news reports that said there were C.I.A. interrogation centers in Europe and that there had been secret flights through European countries transferring terrorism suspects for questioning.
After the article was published on Sunday, Romania and Ukraine issued denials, and the Swiss criminal investigations were opened. Some European lawmakers seized on the information as evidence of dissembling by European Union members. "This is a piece of real evidence to back up the gut instinct many of us have that the denials of complicity we are hearing from E.U. member and candidate states cannot be relied upon," Sarah Ludford, a Liberal Democratic member of the British Parliament, said in a statement.
The Swiss Army's chief prosecutor opened an investigation of Mr. Grenacher and two of his reporters to determine whether military secrets were exposed and to find the source of the leaks. The Swiss attorney general's office is also investigating the issue, adding another layer to its existing investigation of whether there were C.I.A. flights in Swiss airspace.
Germany and Denmark are also examining accusations that the agency used their airspace to transport terrorism suspects.
The United States has acknowledged flights but not the existence of prisons. A C.I.A. spokeswoman declined to comment on the report in the newspaper.
Conceivably, the journalists could face five years in prison for revealing military secrets, although no one prosecuted under the law has ever served any prison time, the authorities said.
Martin Immenhauser, a spokesman for the military prosecutor, said of the document: "Nobody has told us that it's not authentic. I think you can say that it's 99 percent certain that it's authentic."

General Asserts Right On Self-Incrimination In Iraq Abuse Cases
By Josh White
Washington Post, 12 January 2006
Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, a central figure in the U.S. detainee-abuse scandal, this week invoked his right not to incriminate himself in court-martial proceedings against two soldiers accused of using dogs to intimidate captives at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, according to lawyers involved in the case.
The move by Miller -- who once supervised the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and helped set up operations at Abu Ghraib -- is the first time the general has given an indication that he might have information that could implicate him in wrongdoing, according to military lawyers.
Harvey Volzer, an attorney for one of the dog handlers, has been seeking to question Miller to determine whether Miller ordered the use of military working dogs to frighten detainees during interrogations at Abu Ghraib. Volzer has argued that the dog handlers were following orders when the animals were used against detainees.

F.B.I. Tries to Dispel Surveillance Concerns
By LYNETTE CLEMETSON
NYT, 12 January 2006
F.B.I. officials met with Muslim and Arab-American leaders on Wednesday in an effort to dispel anger and concern over the bureau's secret monitoring of radiation levels at Muslim sites around the country.
John Pistole, deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and John Miller, the bureau's assistant director of public affairs, tried to reassure those at the session that the surveillance of mosques and Muslim businesses and homes had been based on intelligence leads.
"There was intelligence that talked about the desire to use a dirty bomb in the U.S.; there were statements from bin Laden indicating that he had those materials and that there were cells in the U.S. trained to blend into Muslim communities," Mr. Miller said after the meeting. "We explained how we work with intelligence and that we did what we did based on the patterns of Al Qaeda, not because of the patterns or activities of any mosque or Muslim neighborhood."
F.B.I. officials struck a conciliatory tone, several attendees said, and acknowledged that the bureau could have responded to their concerns more quickly. But Mr. Pistole offered few details on the monitoring, they said, and he emphasized that the program, which began after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and lasted through 2003, remained classified.
Leaders of Muslim and Arab-American groups requested the meeting after the program was disclosed last month by U.S. News & World Report. The nationwide surveillance program included air monitoring of more than 100 private properties in the Washington area.

The Jailer
Ariel Sharon is lauded for breaking with his hard-line past. But the truth is that he simply embraced a smarter way of locking up the Palestinians.
By Juan Cole
Salon, 12 January 2006
Even as Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon stirs fitfully from his coma, in the aftermath of a massive stroke and several operations, Gazan militants with a bad aim have fired several Qassam rockets into Israel. Israel is now, and is likely to remain for some time, a dark postmodern terrain of wealthy fortress communities besieged by hopeless unemployed militants from isolated ghettos. This archipelago of anxiety, reminiscent of the noir science fiction film "Blade Runner," is in some significant respects the creation and legacy of Sharon.
The conflict between Sharon and the Likud Party, with which he recently broke, was over two distinct far-right-wing visions of Israel. The somewhat messianic Likud is committed to completing the creeping dispossession of the Palestinians by relentlessly colonizing the West Bank and Gaza (at least), and refusing to accept any clear demarcation between Israeli territory and that of its neighbors. This 19th-century-style settler colonialism, reminiscent of the French in Algeria or the Italians in Eritrea, is so blatantly aggressive that it continually threatens to disrupt vital economic and diplomatic relations between Israel and Europe. Sharon saw that, but his rival Benjamin Netanyahu never could.
Likud is hoping that somehow along the way the indigenous population will gradually be convinced to leave for Egypt or Jordan, as the Israelis move in. (Some hard nudging is not ruled out by some elements of the party.) In the meantime, in the words of Likud leader Netanyahu, the Palestinians might have self-rule, but would not be allowed to have self-government.
In reality, it is the Palestinians, with their high population growth rates, who have the demographic advantage. Israel's ability to retain new immigrants fell during the second intifada or Palestinian uprising. As the Russian economy benefits from high petroleum prices, further major immigration by Jews from that country seems unlikely. Indeed, some of the 1 million Russians in Israel, many of them not actually Jewish, may start returning to the old country. By 2020, most projections predict that Jews will be a minority in the area comprising Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. Even among Israeli citizens, Israeli government demographers predict that by 2030 the population could be a third Arab.
Sharon, unlike the Likud, understood the threat these demographic trends posed to Israel, and so saw the future as one in which Israel stopped expanding in some directions, instead accepting a fixed territory. It would become a huge gated community, surrounded by seven or eight small enclaves. Each enclave might remain a bad neighborhood, but gates, punitive raids and assassinations would keep the ghetto dwellers from storming the citadel. The "gates" include checkpoints, highways and a wall that would have made the first Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huangdi -- who built his own Great Wall -- proud. It would break up the Palestinian regions into isolated cantons and guarantee that they could never mobilize politically and would remain de facto stateless. It would also preserve the Jewish polity by keeping the Palestinians in their current limbo, prevented from claiming Israeli citizenship even as they are denied a viable state of their own.
That the scheme probably creates a permanent state of low-intensity warfare between the Israelis and Palestinians is a price Sharon was willing to pay for the permanent territorial gains and diplomatic superiority it guaranteed Israel. Indeed, this condition of staccato conflict between the wealthy Israelis behind their various gates and the dispossessed Palestinians outside is what Sharon seems to have thought of as "security" for Israel.

The Lawbreaker in the Oval Office
By BOB HERBERT
NYT, 12 January 2006
The country has set the bar so low for the performance of George W. Bush as president that it is effectively on the ground.
No one expects very much from Mr. Bush. He's currently breaking the law by spying on Americans in America without getting warrants, but for a lot of people that's just George being George. Forget the complexities of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or even the Fourth Amendment's safeguards against unwarranted (pun intended) government intrusion into matters that we have a right to keep private.
On his frequent trips home to his ranch in Texas, the president likes to ride his bicycle. He's not studying the Constitution.
...It has become fashionable to say that this controversy is about the always difficult problem of balancing civil liberties and national security. But I think the issue is starker than that. The real issue is President Bush's apparent belief - stoked at every opportunity by that zealot of zealots, Dick Cheney - that he can do just about anything he wants (mistreat prisoners, lock people up forever without filing charges), and justify it in the name of fighting terror.
"There's an enemy out there," said Mr. Bush.
That's also true. But this is not China or the old Soviet Union. The United States should be the one place on the planet where even a devastating terror strike by Al Qaeda is unable to shake the foundations of the government, which is grounded in the rule of law, the separation of powers and a constitution that guarantees the fundamental rights of the citizenry.
A group of former government officials and law professors from some of the nation's most distinguished universities sent a letter to Congressional leaders on Monday expressing their deep concern about the president's domestic spying program. They said:
"Although the program's secrecy prevents us from being privy to all of its details, the Justice Department's defense of what it concedes was secret and warrantless electronic surveillance of persons within the United States fails to identify any plausible legal authority for such surveillance. Accordingly, the program appears on its face to violate existing law."
Among those who signed the letter were William Sessions, the former F.B.I. director, and Philip Heymann, a former deputy attorney general who is now a professor at Harvard Law School.
The Congressional Research Service, a nonpartisan arm of Congress, also took issue with the administration's defense of the warrantless eavesdropping. Its analysts searched diligently but apparently in vain for a legal justification of the spying authorized by the president. Their detailed report on the constitutional and statutory issues raised by the program said, "It appears unlikely that a court would hold that Congress has expressly or impliedly authorized the N.S.A. electronic-surveillance operations here under discussion."
The administration's attempt to justify the program, the analysts said, "does not seem to be as well grounded" as the administration seems to believe.
President Bush and others in the administration have repeatedly argued that the president's wartime powers trump some of the important constitutional guarantees and civil liberties that Americans had previously taken for granted. They don't seem to see the irony of fighting on behalf of liberty in Afghanistan and Iraq while curtailing precious liberties here at home.
The administration should not be allowed to use war as an excuse. The U.S. is a very special place in large part because no one, not even the president, is above the law.

The K Street Project and Jack Abramoff
by Juan Williams
NPR's Morning Edition, 11 January 2006
In Washington, K Street is synonymous with the lobbying industry. The K Street Project, a Republican initiative to integrate lobbyists into the political power structure, had been linked to the current scandal with lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

Republican Govenors to Give Up $500,000 in Abramoff-related Donations
By Glen Johnson
AP via Boston Globe, 12 January 2006
Days after calling on his party to exhibit higher ethical standards, Gov. Mitt Romney said the Republican Governors Association would donate to charity $500,000 in contributions it received from a donor entwined in the investigation of Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff.
Romney, a potential 2008 presidential candidate and the newly elected chairman of the RGA, said the association will give the money to American Red Cross chapters in five hurricane-ravaged states. The RGA had received donations in that amount in October 2002 from a public affairs company owned by Michael Scanlon, Abramoff's business partner.
"When influence peddling is alleged, a political institution like the Republican Governors Association wants to be above any possible shadow of complicity," the governor said Wednesday in an interview with The Associated Press.

House Leadership Candidates Also Have Lobbyist Ties
by Andrea Seabrook
NPR's Morning Edition, 11 January 2006
House Republicans want to move past the setback suffered when their majority leader, Tom DeLay, was indicted. But the two leading candidates to replace DeLay, Roy Blunt (R-MO) and John Boehner (R-OH), have close ties to lobbyists.

In Majority Leader Race, Lobbying Rules Are the Easy Target
By CARL HULSE
NYT, 12 January 2006
With the need for new ethics and lobbying rules emerging as a central theme in the race for House Republican leader, the two contenders on Wednesday engaged in an arms race over who supported the most stringent changes.
Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, trying to appeal to fiscal conservatives unhappy with an explosion in pet projects being inserted in broad spending bills, proposed banning such "earmarks" unless they received individual Congressional scrutiny and approval.
"We all need to acknowledge that the system is spinning out of control and that it's time to do something about it," Mr. Boehner wrote in a letter to Representative David Dreier of California, the Rules Committee chairman who is leading a Republican effort to assemble a proposal to overhaul rules for lobbyists. Mr. Boehner said the plan should also end lobbying rule exemptions for advocates for government-financed institutions like universities.
Representative Roy Blunt of Missouri, Mr. Boehner's rival for the position of majority leader, backed Speaker J. Dennis Hastert's proposal to eliminate Congressional travel paid by special interest groups. Mr. Blunt's other proposals include penalties on lobbyists for violations of the Congressional gift ban. It is now improper only for lawmakers to accept gifts of more than $50, not for a lobbyist to provide such gifts.
It was not just the leadership rivals seeking to replace Representative Tom DeLay who sought to up the ante over Congressional ethics.
Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the House Democratic leader, wrote Wednesday to Mr. Hastert, asking him to join her in urging the House ethics committee to investigate the conduct of Representatives Bob Ney of Ohio, Mr. DeLay of Texas and other lawmakers whose names have emerged in a federal lobbying inquiry.
"To restore the integrity of the House in the eyes of the American people, the conduct of those members and staff whose unethical behavior has severely damaged the reputation of the Congress itself must be immediately and fully investigated," Ms. Pelosi wrote. She blamed Mr. Hastert's decision to replace the ethics committee chairman and to institute other changes for paralyzing the panel in 2005.
In the wake of a guilty plea to corruption charges by the lobbyist Jack Abramoff and the conviction of a California lawmaker on bribery charges, Mr. Hastert has conceded that a review of lobbying rules is necessary and has given the job to Mr. Dreier. Congressional Democrats are preparing their own proposals.
Representatives Boehner and Blunt are trying to establish their credentials on lobbying changes in part to offset criticism that they have their own well-established links to Washington's lobbying community and that neither would represent a significant departure from the reign of Mr. DeLay.

Warming Tied To Extinction Of Frog Species
By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post, 12 January 2006
Rising temperatures are responsible for pushing dozens of frog species over the brink of extinction in the past three decades, according to findings being reported today by a team of Latin American and U.S. scientists.
The study, published in the journal Nature, provides compelling evidence that climate change has already helped wipe out a slew of species and could spur more extinctions and the spread of diseases worldwide. It also helps solve the international mystery of why amphibians around the globe have been vanishing from their usual habitats over the past quarter-century -- as many as 112 species have disappeared since 1980.

Interior Department to Open Alaskan Land to Oil Drilling
Environmentalists Question Statement That Exploration Can Have Minimal Impact on Wildlife
By Justin Blum
Washington Post, 12 January 2006
The Interior Department yesterday agreed to open about 400,000 acres on Alaska's North Slope for exploratory oil drilling, an area that previously had been off limits because of concerns about the impact on wildlife.
Officials said they would lease acreage in the northeastern corner of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska to oil companies to provide access to domestic oil supplies.
...The area -- particularly near Teshekpuk Lake -- has been a focal point of concern among environmentalists. They say oil operations would disrupt an area where thousands of brant geese and white-fronted geese molt. They also predicted harm to caribou and tundra swans.
"This is the single most important goose molting area in the arctic," said Stanley Senner, executive director of Audubon Alaska. "It will mean fewer birds."
The Bureau of Land Management proposed opening the area a year ago. But it was not until yesterday that an Interior Department official, Deputy Assistant Secretary Chad Calvert, approved a modified version of that plan.
The area near Teshekpuk Lake was put off limits to drilling during the Reagan administration. The Clinton administration expanded the restricted area.
But the Bureau of Land Management says technological advances in oil drilling allow drilling to occur without the impact previously feared. Drilling will be allowed about a quarter-mile from the lake.
Bureau officials said they would conduct further study on the impact to molting geese before allowing permanent drilling.

Bush Levels Off at 38% Approval Rating
Democrats Hold Huge Issue Advantage
The Pew Research Center, Released: January 11, 2006
The poll shows that, as with views of congressional leaders, Washington's controversies have not had an impact on opinions of the president. Bush's approval rating has not changed since December (38% approve/54% disapprove). However, the Democratic Party holds a sizable advantage over the GOP as the party better able to handle the country's most important problem. Fully 41% believe the Democratic Party can do a better job of handling the nation's top problem, compared with 27% who say the Republican Party. This represents a major shift from a year ago, when the public split about evenly on which party could better address the most important national problem.

11 January 2006

A Formula for Slaughter
The American Rules of Engagement from the Air
By Michael Schwartz
TomDispatch, 10 January 2006
...[The] Iraq war is a twenty-first century war and so the miracle of modern weaponry allows the U.S. military to kill scores of Iraqis (and wound many more) during a routine day's work, made up of small skirmishes triggered by roadside bombs, sniper attacks, and American foot patrols.
...The Washington Post, along with other major American media outlets, has confirmed that a new military strategy is being put in place and implemented. Quoting military sources, the Post reported that the number of U.S. air strikes increased from an average of 25 per month during the Summer of 2005, to 62 in September, 122 in October, and 120 in November. The Sunday Times of London reports that, in the near future, these are expected to increase to at least 150 per month and that the numbers will continue to climb past that threshold.
Consider then this gruesome arithmetic: If the U.S. fulfills its expectation of surpassing 150 air attacks per month, and if the average air strike produces the (gruesomely) modest total of 10 fatalities, air power alone could kill well over 20,000 Iraqi civilians in 2006. Add the ongoing (but reduced) mortality due to other military causes on all sides, and the 1,000 civilian deaths per week rate recorded by the Hopkins study could be dwarfed in the coming year.
The new American strategy, billed as a way to de-escalate the war, is actually a formula for the slaughter of Iraqi civilians.
SEE ALSO:
U.S. Airstrikes in Iraq Could Intensify
By Drew Brown
Knight Ridder Newspapers, 10 January 2006
U.S. warplanes have carried out hundreds of airstrikes in Iraq in the past two years, bombing and strafing insurgent fighters and targets almost daily. And the air war, which has gone largely unnoticed at home, could intensify once American ground forces start to withdraw.
Since Iraq doesn't have a working air force, U.S. jets are expected to provide air cover for Iraqi troops for at least several more years.
Some analysts have raised questions about how effective air power can be in a counterinsurgency war. A key fear is that Iraq's mostly Shiite Muslim and Kurdish army will use American and allied bombing missions for revenge attacks on the Sunni Muslim Arab minority, which provides most of the insurgency's fighters.
"If we allow that to happen, then in essence we'll be doing the same thing we accused Saddam Hussein of doing," said Larry C. Johnson, a former CIA and State Department official. "We'll just be substituting one tyranny for another."

Bush Issues Stark Warning to Democrats on Iraq Debate
By DAVID E. SANGER
NYT, 19 January 2006
President Bush issued an unusually stark warning to Democrats today about how to conduct the debate on Iraq as midterm elections approach, declaring that Americans know the difference "between honest critics" and those "who claim that we acted in Iraq because of oil, or because of Israel, or because we misled the American people."
In a speech here to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Mr. Bush appeared to be issuing a pre-emptive warning to critics at a time when Democrats are divided between those who say the United States should begin a troop withdrawal now and those who have criticized Mr. Bush but say the United States should stay in Iraq as long as necessary.
In some of his most combative language yet directed as his critics, Mr. Bush said Americans should insist on a debate "that brings credit to our democracy, not comfort to our adversaries."
SEE ALSO:
Great Justices Installed by Bush
Juan Cole
Informed Comment, 10 January 2006
As the Alito confirmation hearings begin, it is worth considering some of the judicial consquences of George W. Bush's various campaigns.
When the US overthrew the Taliban and installed the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, the Bush administration implied that everything had changed.
What few observers seem to have noticed is that Hamid Karzai immediately appointed as Afghanistan's chief justice, Fazal Hadi Shinwari, whose philosophy of life was little different from that of the Taliban!
One can only imagine that Bush, who kept thousands of troops in the country and oversaw the evolution of the Afghanistan government, had no objections to the man's judicial philosophy.
Among Shinwari's rulings:
--Amputation of hands and stoning to death will continue to be the punishment for thieves and adulterers in post-Taliban Afghanistan, country’s new Chief Justice Fazal Hadi Shinwari was reported today as saying.
--Afghan Chief Justice Bans Cable TV.
--Afghan chief justice wants co-ed schools to be shut.
--Fatwa for "Blasphemy" Journalists: The supreme court proposes the death penalty for two journalists who criticised Islamic practice.
Was all this to make his own nominees to the Supreme Court, who merely want to install a king-president over Americans, uphold the privileges of rich white males, and work against women's rights and one-person, one-vote rights for racial minorities, good in comparison?

The 'wax man' cometh...
Doing the Alito Shuffle
By MAUREEN DOWD
NYT, 11 January 2006
...You don't have to know the difference between horizontal and vertical stare decisis, or between emanations and penumbras, to see that the man who could take Sandra Day O'Connor's seat and yank back women's rights was, in a word, shifty.
Or in three words, shifty, sapless and sighing.
To offset his reputation on women's rights, he even played the henpecked husband. When Republican senators used the expression "When did you stop beating your wife?" about Democratic questions, Judge Alito riposted, "I wasn't asked whether she had stopped beating me."
His basic defense to Democrats boiled down to: "I was just saying what my boss wanted to hear at the time." Haven't we had enough yes-men mangling government for the last five years? Heck of a job, Sammy.
I understand why the president is drawn to the judge. Mr. Alito is dubbed "Scalito" - a conservative senator, John Cornyn, accidentally blurted out the nickname - because he's so much like Antonin Scalia. And W. loves Nino.
Judge Alito has supported imperial powers for the presidency, not strong checks and balances; he approved the strip search of a 10-year-old girl but is not probing too deeply into what the executive branch is doing. That's W.'s philosophy, too - a pre-emptive right to secretly do everything from war to torture to snooping.
Like the president, the judge loves baseball. Mr. Alito once vacationed at a fantasy baseball camp (O.K. fielder, hopeless hitter), wearing the red and white Phillies uniform. W. has spent five years in fantasyland on Iraq, on occasion donning military costumes.
His fingers in his ears, W. didn't want to hear that we had too few troops in Iraq - ignoring advice from Viceroy Paul Bremer and Gen. Eric Shinseki - or that the troops didn't have enough armor. But the president continues to fling blame outward. In a speech yesterday before the Veterans of Foreign Wars, he warned the Democrats that they should take care not to bring "comfort to our adversaries."
Judge Alito was evasive, disingenuous and deferential. He fits the Bush era like a baseball glove.
SEE ALSO:
Judge Alito Proves a Powerful Match for Senate Questioners
By ADAM LIPTAK and ADAM NAGOURNEY
NYT, 11 January 2006
If Senate Democrats had set out to portray Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. as extreme on issues ranging from abortion to government surveillance of citizens, they ran up against an elusive target on Tuesday: Samuel A. Alito Jr. For nearly eight hours, Judge Alito was placid, monochromatic and, it seemed, mostly untouchable.
...To a large extent, Judge Alito's success at skating though a good deal of the day reflected the quality of the questioning. The senators frequently did not follow up on their own queries, and Mr. Biden in particular devoted most of his 30 minutes to talking, leaving little time for the nominee to speak.
Mr. Schumer, whose questioning left Judge Alito looking wobbly and pale, was an exception, as was Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, who pressed him on his views about the Supreme Court's authority to overrule precedent. Early in the day, Judge Alito said there "needs to be a special justification for overruling a prior precedent."
Ms. Feinstein asked for an example of such a justification. It took four attempts, but Judge Alito finally listed some decisions in which such justifications figured.

The Problem in Washington, D.C.
Josh Marshall
Talking Points Memo, 10 January 2006
...The problem is a network of criminal activity stretching from the House of Representatives (and, to a lesser degree, the Senate) to K Street and then into the Executive Branch -- a network of bribery, money-laundering and fraud all aimed at selling public policy and official actions not in exchange for political contributions but money rewards to members of Congress, administration officials and their families.
It's not an abstract problem or a merely a few politicians lining their pockets or high-speed log-rolling. As Schmitt puts it, it's a betrayal-of-public-trust, a group of high-ranking politicians who've committed crimes against their constituents and a Republican establishment that wasn't against it then and can't bring itself to turn the folks in even now.
To date, the president hasn't even pledged to cooperate with the investigation, despite the fact that one member of his administration is already under indictment, another is under active investigation and another member of the White House staff was a principal participant in many of the scams about which Jack Abramoff has now agreed to testify.
Pretty much the same applies to Denny Hastert.
In Congress, these aren't backbenchers. It's the former Majority Leader, several of his key allies, at least one committee chairman, probably two or three more, and various officials in the executive branch.
Consider that now the two key lobbying outfits of Tom DeLay's Washington have both been engulfed and destroyed -- first, of course, Jack Abramoff's operation at Greenberg-Traurig, and just today, Alexander Strategies Group, which will shut down at the end of the month.
ASG and Abramoff weren't corrupt because of lax lobbying laws. And they didn't corrupt Tom DeLay. DeLay is the one, in truest sense, who set them both up.
This is a scandal of the people running the show.
And as long as we're discussing it, does anyone notice that every corruption case we're now talking about -- Abramoff, Cunningham, and pretty much all the rest -- either started or shifted into high gear right about the time that George Bush was elected?
Think about it.
SEE ALSO:
News Reports Show Over 100 Officials Disgorge Funds
PoliticalMoneyLine.com, 9 January 2006
With news articles appearing over the weekend, the count of elected officials who have indicated they would disgorge some Abramoff-related funds has now risen to one hundred and one plus one state party committee. The news articles indicate that 99 current Members of Congress, two Governors (former U.S. Represntative Robert Ehrlich, now Governor of Maryland, and Governor Linda Lingle of Hawaii), and the Maryland Republican Party have either stated they would return or donate to charity $927,996.

Staring at the bankruptcy of  national health care...
Diabetes and Its Awful Toll Quietly Emerge as a Crisis
By N. R. KLEINFIELD
NYT, 11 January 2006
Begin on the sixth floor, third room from the end, swathed in fluorescence: a 60-year-old woman was having two toes sawed off. One floor up, corner room: a middle-aged man sprawled, recuperating from a kidney transplant. Next door: nerve damage. Eighth floor, first room to the left: stroke. Two doors down: more toes being removed. Next room: a flawed heart.
As always, the beds at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx were filled with a universe of afflictions. In truth, these assorted burdens were all the work of a single illness: diabetes. Room after room, floor after floor, diabetes. On any given day, hospital officials say, nearly half the patients are there for some trouble precipitated by the disease.
An estimated 800,000 adult New Yorkers - more than one in every eight - now have diabetes, and city health officials describe the problem as a bona fide epidemic. Diabetes is the only major disease in the city that is growing, both in the number of new cases and the number of people it kills. And it is growing quickly, even as other scourges like heart disease and cancers are stable or in decline.
Already, diabetes has swept through families, entire neighborhoods in the Bronx and broad slices of Brooklyn, where it is such a fact of life that people describe it casually, almost comfortably, as "getting the sugar" or having "the sweet blood."
But as alarmed as health officials are about the present, they worry more about what is to come.
Within a generation or so, doctors fear, a huge wave of new cases could overwhelm the public health system and engulf growing numbers of the young, creating a city where hospitals are swamped by the disease's handiwork, schools scramble for resources as they accommodate diabetic children, and the work force abounds with the blind and the halt.
The prospect is frightening, but it has gone largely unnoticed outside public health circles. As epidemics go, diabetes has been a quiet one, provoking little of the fear or the prevention efforts inspired by AIDS or lung cancer.
...It is a city of immigrants, where newcomers eating American diets for the first time are especially vulnerable. It is also yielding to the same forces that have driven diabetes nationally: an aging population, a food supply spiked with sugars and fats, and a culture that promotes overeating and discourages exercise.
Diabetes has no cure. It is progressive and often fatal, and while the patient lives, the welter of medical complications it sets off can attack every major organ. As many war veterans lost lower limbs last year to the disease as American soldiers did to combat injuries in the entire Vietnam War. Diabetes is the principal reason adults go blind.
So-called Type 2 diabetes, the predominant form and the focus of this series, is creeping into children, something almost unheard of two decades ago. The American Diabetes Association says the disease could actually lower the average life expectancy of Americans for the first time in more than a century.
...Nearly 21 million Americans are believed to be diabetic, according to the Centers for Disease Control, and 41 million more are prediabetic; their blood sugar is high, and could reach the diabetic level if they do not alter their living habits.
In this sedentary nation, New York is often seen as an island of thin people who walk everywhere. But as the ranks of American diabetics have swelled by a distressing 80 percent in the last decade, New York has seen an explosion of cases: 140 percent more, according to the city's health department. The proportion of diabetics in its adult population is higher than that of Los Angeles or Chicago, and more than double that of Boston.
There was a pronounced increase in diagnosed cases nationwide in 1997, part of which was undoubtedly due to changes in the definition of diabetes and in the way data was collected, though there has continued to be a marked rise ever since.
Yet for years, public health authorities around the country have all but ignored chronic illnesses like diabetes, focusing instead on communicable diseases, which kill far fewer people. New York, with its ambitious and highly praised public health system, has just three people and a $950,000 budget to outwit diabetes, a disease soon expected to afflict more than a million people in the city.
Tuberculosis, which infected about 1,000 New Yorkers last year, gets $27 million and a staff of almost 400.
..."I will go out on a limb," said Dr. Frieden, the health commissioner, "and say, 20 years from now people will look back and say: 'What were they thinking? They're in the middle of an epidemic and kids are watching 20,000 hours of commercials for junk food.' "
Of course, revolutionary new treatments or a cure could change everything. Otherwise, the price will be steep. Nationwide, the disease's cost just for 2002 - from medical bills to disability payments and lost workdays - was conservatively put by the American Diabetes Association at $132 billion. All cancers, taken together, cost the country an estimated $171 billion a year.
"How bad is the diabetes epidemic?" asked Frank Vinicor, associate director for public health practice at the Centers for Disease Control. "There are several ways of telling. One might be how many different occurrences in a 24-hour period of time, between when you wake up in the morning and when you go to sleep. So, 4,100 people diagnosed with diabetes, 230 amputations in people with diabetes, 120 people who enter end-stage kidney disease programs and 55 people who go blind.

I.R.S. Move Said to Hurt the Poor
By DAVID CAY JOHNSTON
NYT, 11 January 2006
Tax refunds sought by 1.6 million poor Americans over the last five years were frozen and their returns labeled fraudulent, although the vast majority appear to have done nothing wrong, the Internal Revenue Service's taxpayer advocate told Congress yesterday.
A computer program identified the refund requests as suspect and automatically flagged the taxpayers for extra scrutiny for years to come, the advocate said in her annual report to Congress. These taxpayers were not told that the I.R.S. criminal investigation division suspected fraud.
The advocate, Nina Olson, said the I.R.S. devoted vastly more resources to pursuing questionable refunds sought by the poor - which under the highest estimate is $9 billion - than to the $100 billion in taxes not paid each year by people who work for cash and either fail to file tax returns or understate their income.
As for the suspected fraud in refund requests, Ms. Olson said her staff sampled the suspect returns and found that 66 percent were entitled to the amount sought or more. Another 14 percent were due a partial refund. She expressed doubt that many among the remaining 20 percent had committed fraud.
Unless taxpayers press for their refunds, Ms. Olson said, they "are not given an opportunity to substantiate their claims or to show that any overclaims identified were due to honest error rather than fraud."
...Ms. Olson said the criminal investigators' efforts, known within the I.R.S. as the Questionable Refund Program, were unfair and might be illegal.
"At a minimum, this procedure constitutes an extraordinary violation of fundamental taxpayer rights and fairness," Ms. Olson wrote, adding that it "may also constitute a violation of due process of law."
Her staff's sample of frozen returns found that the average reported income was about $13,000 and the refund due was about $3,500.
About three-quarters of those affected were employed parents who applied for the earned-income tax credit, under which all income and Social Security taxes can be returned and, in some cases, a payment made.
The credit is a kind of negative income tax, first advocated by Milton Friedman, the Nobel-winning economist, and championed by President Ronald Reagan as the government's best program to encourage the poor to improve their circumstances through work.
Ms. Olson's report noted that in recent years, Congress has given the I.R.S. more than $875 million to investigate suspected fraud in the $32 billion tax credit program. Ms. Olson has repeatedly said that Congressional estimates of rampant fraud appear to have little or no basis in fact.
She said that in cases where frozen refunds were later issued, the delay was typically more than eight months, which she said was a hardship on the poor taxpayers who had filed proper tax returns.

10 January 2006

Waging a War We Could Be Proud Of
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
NYT, 10 January 2006
PUTTALAM, Sri Lanka
One of the lessons of the tsunami a year ago is that however stingy we Americans have been in giving foreign aid, we want to do better.
For every $100 of national income, the U.S. gives 17 cents in overseas development assistance - a lower percentage than any donor country except Italy. But after the tsunami, Americans responded with a wave of stunning generosity, and there is growing bipartisan support for helping poor countries.
It's an opportunity that President Bush should seize, by working with Tony Blair and Kofi Annan to wage a Global War on Poverty.
President Bush could help revive his floundering presidency by providing moral leadership to the world. He has taken half-steps in this direction, with his landmark programs against AIDS in Africa and against sex trafficking, but his overall efforts against global poverty have been grudging. It's sad when we must rely on a compassionate rock star, Bono, or a generous computer geek, Bill Gates, for moral vision on poverty - instead of on our president.
[Kristof recommends three areas of focus: Wiping out malaria, cutting maternal mortality in half and educating girls.]
If President Bush took on global poverty in a major way, I think the American people would sign on enthusiastically. And Laura Bush, who has shown an interest in women in the developing world, could greatly assist. Just as John Kennedy bolstered America's image in the world when he started the Peace Corps and the Alliance for Progress, we could restore luster to our reputation around the globe.
What we need is leadership. Mr. Bush would do wonders for his legacy - and, above all, wonders for the poor - if he'd summon the moral vision to launch a high-profile Global War on Poverty. That is one American-backed war that nearly all the world would thunderously applaud.

Bombing an Iraqi Accord
Washington Post 10 January 2006
EVEN AS IRAQ'S political leaders inch toward agreement on a new government, its militants are racing to tear the country apart. In the past week suicide bombers have unleashed a new onslaught, killing more than 200 people in both Shiite and Sunni towns, including 29 in an attack yesterday. Five more bound and blindfolded bodies were found in Baghdad on Sunday, the likely victims of sectarian death squads. U.S. forces, meanwhile, have suffered a grievous spike in losses, with 28 soldiers and civilians killed since Thursday, a dozen of them in the crash of a Black Hawk helicopter. The carnage, combined with failing supplies of gasoline and power, has caused some Iraqis to conclude that conditions in their country are the worst they've been since Saddam Hussein fell. Unless the politicians act quickly, the pessimists will be proved right.
Much of the violence aims to ignite war between Iraqi's Sunni and Shiite communities just as their newly elected leaders begin to explore political accord that could create a "unity" government designed to hold the country together. A vicious bombing in the Shiite city of Karbala last Thursday slaughtered 54; the same day, 80 died when a bomber attacked a police recruiting station in the Sunni town of Ramadi. Radicals are responding: Shiites marching in Baghdad last week demanded that American authorities stop trying to restrain Shiite militias that have been abducting, torturing and murdering Sunnis. U.S. officials say that Sunni leaders, for their part, have threatened to establish their own militias in self-defense.

How Low Can Army Recruiters Go?
By Fred Kaplan
Slate, 9 January 2006
Three months ago, I wrote that the war in Iraq was wrecking the U.S. Army, and since then the evidence has only mounted, steeply. Faced with repeated failures to meet its recruitment targets, the Army has had to lower its standards dramatically. First it relaxed restrictions against high-school drop-outs. Then it started letting in more applicants who score in the lowest third on the armed forces aptitude test—a group, known as Category IV recruits, who have been kept to exceedingly small numbers, as a matter of firm policy, for the past 20 years. (There is also a Category V—those who score in the lowest 10th percentile. They have always been ineligible for service in the armed forces and, presumably, always will be.)
The bad news is twofold. First, the number of Category IV recruits is starting to skyrocket. Second, a new study compellingly demonstrates that, in all realms of military activity, intelligence does matter. Smarter soldiers and units perform their tasks better; dumber ones do theirs worse.
Until just last year, the Army had no trouble attracting recruits and therefore no need to dip into the dregs. As late as 2004, fully 92 percent of new Army recruits had graduated high school and just 0.6 percent scored Category IV on the military aptitude test.
Then came the spiraling casualties in Iraq, the diminishing popularity of the war itself, and the subsequent crisis in recruitment.
In response to the tightening trends, on Sept. 20, 2005, the Defense Department released DoD Instruction 1145.01, which allows 4 percent of each year's recruits to be Category IV applicants—up from the 2 percent limit that had been in place since the mid-1980s. Even so, in October, the Army had such a hard time filling its slots that the floodgates had to be opened; 12 percent of that month's active-duty recruits were Category IV. November was another disastrous month; Army officials won't even say how many Cat IV applicants they took in, except to acknowledge that the percentage was in "double digits."

Attacking Alito
Paul Waldman
TomPaine.com, 9 January 2006
...So what is the one thing Democrats and liberals want you to believe about Samuel Alito, the one reason he should not be on the Supreme Court? Is it that Alito is unethical, or that he’ll overturn Roe, or that he’ll let the government intrude on your privacy, or that he’ll give the executive branch unfettered authority? To return to the Kerry analogy, the story has it that at one point during the campaign Paul Begala went to Kerry headquarters, and in a meeting with some of the senior staff, he wrote out a number of central themes the campaign could employ. Pick one, he begged them—I don’t care which one you pick, but pick one.
Can The Left Win By Losing?
There are three possible outcomes to the Alito nomination.
...The third outcome may be the best progressives can hope for—and the one they should be working toward. In this scenario, Alito ultimately gets confirmed, but not before a debate that makes it crystal clear to the public just what the conservative vision of the Supreme Court entails: overturning Roe , a dramatic narrowing of civil liberties and the president invested with the power to ignore the laws he finds inconvenient.
Make Them Own It
One of the remarkable developments in recent months has been the way conservatives have run from the things they’ve been advocating for years. They finally get a president who pushes to privatize Social Security, and they deny that his plan will do any such thing. They get Supreme Court nominees who believe, as Alito said, that “the Constitution does not protect the right to an abortion,” and they protest that he didn’t really mean it and won’t act on it once he’s on the court. Even Sam Brownback of Kansas, as fervent an opponent of abortion as there is in the Senate, acted during his appearance yesterday on ABC’s “This Week” as though he had no idea whether Alito would vote to overturn Roe and wasn’t too concerned either way. Obviously, the Republicans know that if they were forthright about their agenda and their nominee, the American people would recoil in disgust.
So progressives need to make Alito and his patrons own their true beliefs. Alito’s nomination isn’t merely—to use the words of IndependentCourt.org’s press releases—“troubling” or “flawed.” It represents a radical vision for America. Those who oppose Alito already have the bill of particulars. What they need to do now is focus their criticism on a single theme, not because they think it might be the magic bullet that sinks the nomination, but because it articulates what the true stakes are for the court and the country.
If they do that, at the end of the day they will have advanced the interests of progressivism even if Alito takes a seat on the court. This is precisely what didn’t happen in the case of John Roberts; progressives were so flummoxed by his smooth performance that they couldn’t settle on one good reason to oppose him. As a consequence, Americans never understood the stakes, and no senator will be forced on the defensive by his or her vote for Roberts. But there’s still time to make the Alito vote one of the defining events of Bush’s second term.

Change Is Coming: The Question Is Just How Much
By Jeffrey H. Birnbaum
Washington Post, 9 January 2006
Skeptics consider the American system of funding elections a form of legalized bribery. It's legal because the law allows donations up to certain limits. It's "bribery" because the money is given to elect people who will do or have done essentially what the giver wants.
The recent guilty pleas of Jack Abramoff and his partner Michael Scanlon, however, threaten that tidy description. Lobbyists are worried that perfectly legal contributions will sometimes be construed as prosecutable bribes and that their time-honored and (to them) highly valuable role as fundraisers might soon be thrown into question.
"We're concerned that the cases might create a precedent that would label all legal contributions as bribes," said Douglas G. Pinkham, president of the Public Affairs Council, a nonpartisan lobbyists' education group. "This could cast doubt over the entire campaign-finance process."
Not many people believe that all donations would ever be viewed as "illegal bribes." Then again, any disruption to the system that moves in that direction would probably be good for democracy. The less campaign lucre there is, the better government will be. In an earlier column I recommended that registered lobbyists be barred from raising money for politicians -- at least during congressional sessions -- and I stand by that suggestion.
...the bill to watch is authored by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Rep. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.). Under it, lobbying firms and organizations would have to disclose each fundraising event they host or sponsor for federal candidates and the total amount raised at each such event.
The legislation would also require lobbyists to report on their lobbying forms the donations they make to members of Congress and at events that honor members or entities that they created or support. In addition, the bill would force lobbyists to disclose on quarterly reports any gifts worth more than $20 that they gave to lawmakers or their aides, including meals and tickets to events.
Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.) has a separate plan that would go much further. He would outright ban gifts to lawmakers and staff and would prohibit lobbyists from financing or attending trips with members of Congress. Don't expect any new law to be that extreme, but the fact that he could even countenance such ideas is an indication how serious the problem has become.
Will lobbying change? Yes, clearly. But will it change much? Probably not. "Entertainment may slow for a while but then people will figure out new ways to accomplish the same things and it will likely be business as usual for a few years," Danner said, "until the next scandal."

Record Share Of Economy Is Spent on Health Care
By Marc Kaufman and Rob Stein
Washington Post, 10 January 2006
Rising health care costs, already threatening many basic industries, now consume 16 percent of the nation's economic output -- the highest proportion ever, the government said yesterday in its latest calculation.
The nation's health care bill continued to grow substantially faster than inflation and wages, increasing by almost 8 percent in 2004, the most recent year with near-final numbers.
Spending for physicians and hospitals shot up considerably faster than in recent years, while drug costs grew at a slower rate than over the past decade.
...Political, medical and economic leaders and experts have long warned that health care cost trends will gradually overwhelm the economy, and many companies now complain that employee and retiree health costs are making them less competitive. Yesterday's report added new reasons to worry.
The overall cost of health care -- everything from hospital and doctor bills to the cost of pharmaceuticals, medical equipment, insurance and nursing home and home-health care -- doubled from 1993 to 2004, said the report from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. In 2004, the nation spent almost $140 billion more for health care than the year before.
In 1997, health care accounted for 13.6 percent of the gross domestic product.
"Americans rejected the tougher restrictions of managed care in the late 1990s, and yet they want all the latest advances in medical technology," said Drew Altman, president of the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation, which researches health issues. "Since government regulation of prices and services is not in the cards, the inevitable result is higher costs."
The health care increase of 7.9 percent in 2004 was almost three times the overall national inflation rate, which was 2.7 percent. The average hourly wage for workers in private companies was essentially unchanged that year, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.

9 January 2006

Executive power, unchecked and unbalanced is now a prominent characteristic of 'American democracy.' It is likely to become the decisive feature for many decades to come as rightwing advocates of centralized power complete their takeover of the judiciary and the Supreme Court.
The interests of big business and  the very wealthy dominate. Corruption and the influence of moneyed interests is everywhere in government. It is a systemic issue and not peculiar to one political party, even though the excesses of extreme rightwing politicians are now being spotlighted. That said, it must be recognized that these excesses have not reached such proportions since the Gilded Age and there is very little political will to resist. Perhaps reform too has been 'privatized.'

The Limits of Power: Questions for Alito
by JEREMY BRECHER & BRENDAN SMITH
The Nation, 6 January 2006
The Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Samuel Alito represent the first major battle in an emerging constitutional war over the authority of the President. Revelations that President Bush authorized the National Security Agency to spy on US citizens without court approval have shifted the focus of the hearings from domestic social issues to what distinguished University of Texas law professor Sanford Levinson describes as "the major issue before the Court, and the nation, both now and in the foreseeable future.... [Namely] the ability to stave off ever more aggressive assertions of executive power uncheckable by either Congress or the judiciary."
...Time magazine reported that in 2001 Alito acknowledged that he is a strong proponent of the theory of the "unitary executive" under which all executive branch power is vested in the President--and any incursion on it by Congress should be resisted. This theory has been used by the Bush Administration to justify various extralegal activities, including the infamous torture memos. In Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, Justice Clarence Thomas used the "unitary executive" theory to argue that the Supreme Court's restrictions on the President's unilateral power to lock up US citizens constituted "judicial interference"--a view rejected by the Court's majority.
If we are in a war to preserve the Constitution from executive usurpation, the opening salvos will be the questions the Judiciary Committee puts to Alito. Here are questions in eight key subject areas Samuel Alito should be asked as the hearings unfold: ...
SEE ALSO:
Bush Using a Little-Noticed Strategy to Alter the Balance of Power
By Ron Hutcheson and James Kuhnhenn
Knight Ridder Newspapers, 6 January 2006
President Bush agreed with great fanfare last month to accept a ban on torture, but he later quietly reserved the right to ignore it, even as he signed it into law.
Acting from the seclusion of his Texas ranch at the start of New Year's weekend, Bush said he would interpret the new law in keeping with his expansive view of presidential power. He did it by issuing a bill-signing statement - a little-noticed device that has become a favorite tool of presidential power in the Bush White House.
In fact, Bush has used signing statements to reject, revise or put his spin on more than 500 legislative provisions. Experts say he has been far more aggressive than any previous president in using the statements to claim sweeping executive power - and not just on national security issues.
"It's nothing short of breath-taking," said Phillip Cooper, a professor of public administration at Portland State University. "In every case, the White House has interpreted presidential authority as broadly as possible, interpreted legislative authority as narrowly as possible, and pre-empted the judiciary."
... In some cases, Bush bluntly informs Congress that he has no intention of carrying out provisions that he considers an unconstitutional encroachment on his authority.
"They don't like some of the things Congress has done so they assert the power to ignore it," said Martin Lederman, a visiting professor at the Georgetown University Law Center. "The categorical nature of their opposition is unprecedented and alarming."
The White House says its authority stems from the Constitution, but dissenters say that view ignores the Constitution's careful balance of powers between branches of government.
... "If you take this to its logical conclusion, because during war the commander in chief has an obligation to protect us, any statute on the books could be summarily waived," said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.
"The Constitution says that if the president doesn't like it (a bill), he can veto it. And we have an opportunity to override the veto," Kennedy noted.

Texas Two-Step
By MATTHEW COOPER, MIKE ALLEN
Time Magazine, 8 January 2006
When legal and ethical questions began spinning around House majority leader Tom DeLay last year, President George W. Bush was publicly supportive. Privately, though, he questioned his fellow Texan's mojo. Bush had scored 10 points higher than DeLay in the Representative's district in 2004, and that was only after Bush had recorded a telephone message to help rally local Republicans. "I can't believe I had to do robocalls for him," the President said bitingly to an Oval Office visitor.
To people who know Bush well, the remark said it all about the longtime chill between the two pols—a distance that is only sure to grow with former lobbyist Jack Abramoff's guilty plea. Both camps describe the two conservative Texan's relationship as "professional,” an alliance, not a friendship.
...Abramoff was one of the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign's "pioneers" meaning he raised at least $100,000, most of it from others, in increments of $2,000. After Abramoff pleaded guilty, Bush aides announced they had donated to the American Heart Association $6,000 that had been given to the campaign by Abramoff, his wife and one of his Indian-tribe clients. But Republican officials said they plan to keep the remaining $94,000. A Bush aide said it cannot be assumed that the other donors, who were simply recruited by Abramoff, have done anything wrong: "That's not a fair standard."
Fair or not, the Bush Administration must now spend time and capital trying to minimize collateral damage from people they have tried to keep at a safe distance. Fortunately for the White House, the President a year ago began sending mixed signals about DeLay. When conservative leaders held a $250-a-plate tribute dinner in April to show solidarity with him, no one from the White House spoke. But a few weeks earlier, when Bush spoke in Galveston, Texas, he went out of his way to praise DeLay ”then unindicted in Texas but under fire”and even gave him a ride to Washington on his helicopter, Marine One, and his jet, Air Force One. In his remarks, Bush saluted DeLay's effectiveness, which no one could dispute, but didn't bother to mention his character. That was exactly the point.

Carrots, Not Sticks Key to Republican Success
Josh Marshal
Talking Points Memo, 6 January 2006
...One of the great questions of the last decade is how congressional Republicans managed to maintain such unprecedented party discipline. The standard answer is that that's how Tom DeLay earned his nickname 'The Hammer', by squashing anyone who threatened to get out of line. Only that's not really quite how the House GOP Caucus functioned. Notwithstanding the reputation DeLay liked to cultivate, he worked a lot more with Carrots than Sticks. And that means money. Lots and lots and lots of money.
...You can't understand the K Street Project or the sort of slush fund Jack Abramoff was running without understanding that Tom DeLay had built a very effective patronage machine -- one that organized a great deal of the money in the city in the hands of the political leadership.
Most people now think that the Abramoff indictments effectively end any realistic hope for DeLay to reclaim the leadership. So the question is whether you end up with DeLayism without DeLay -- the same money and machine, just under a new boss.
On the one hand, you have acting Majority Leader Roy Blunt, who ants to push DeLay aside and claim the post for himself. But Blunt is a DeLay Man through and through, part of the machine in every way. On the other hand, you've got rebels who just don't think the GOP can get out from under these scandals without a real change in leadership and direction.
That's the fight the Post article talks about. But a big part of what's happening now isn't just which leadership slate takes over the House GOP Caucus. At a deeper level, the Abramoff scandal may do so much damage to the machine DeLay built -- by knocking out key leaders, exposing illegality and 'legal' corruption -- that whomever comes out on top may not be able to run the place with anything like the party discipline DeLay managed during his years in power.
SEE ALSO:
The Abramoff Scandal is Strictly a Rightwing Republican Scandal
Dean sets Wolf straight
by Kos, 8 January 2006
Not a single Dem took Abramoff money. Democrats have to set the record straight one misinformed person at a time. Dean took point on Wolf Blitzer:
...BLITZER: Should Democrats who took money from Jack Abramoff, who has now pleaded guilty to bribery charges, among other charges, a Republican lobbyist in Washington, should the Democrat who took money from him give that money to charity or give it back?
DEAN: There are no Democrats who took money from Jack Abramoff, not one, not one single Democrat. Every person named in this scandal is a Republican. Every person under investigation is a Republican. Every person indicted is a Republican. This is a Republican finance scandal. There is no evidence that Jack Abramoff ever gave any Democrat any money. And we've looked through all of those FEC reports to make sure that's true.
BLITZER: But through various Abramoff-related organizations and outfits, a bunch of Democrats did take money that presumably originated with Jack Abramoff.
DEAN: That's not true either. There's no evidence for that either. There is no evidence...
SEE ALSO:
Killing the Hydra...
After Abramoff, a GOP Scramble
DeLay's House Colleagues Anticipate a Leadership Shake-Up
By Jonathan Weisman and Shailagh Murray
Washington Post, 6 January 2006
An internal battle is underway among House Republicans to permanently replace Rep. Tom DeLay (Tex.) as majority leader and put in place a new leadership lineup that is better equipped to deal with the growing corruption scandal.
Acting Majority Leader Roy Blunt (Mo.) will ask House Republicans to make his temporary tenure permanent early next month if, as is likely, DeLay is unable to clear his name in the gathering corruption and campaign finance scandals, according to a member of the GOP leadership and several leadership aides.
The move would almost certainly touch off a GOP power struggle between Blunt, whose rise to power was heavily aided by DeLay and House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (Ill.), and House Education and the Workforce Committee Chairman John A. Boehner (Ohio), a former House leader who has been maneuvering for a comeback.
But other potential candidates could add unexpected twists, especially if rank-and-file Republicans decide that neither Blunt nor Boehner would present a fresh response to the corruption scandal triggered by Jack Abramoff, a GOP lobbyist with close ties to DeLay.
Rep. Mike Pence (Ind.), chairman of the conservative Republican Study Committee, recently said in an Internet chat that he had "no present intention of seeking any leadership position at this time" but that circumstances could change.
A potential bid by Pence, who has angered some members with what they consider grandstanding on a host of issues, has prompted some conservatives to reach out to the low-key Rep. John Shadegg (Ariz.) as an alternative. Rep. Zach Wamp (Tenn.) has announced his intention to run for a leadership post, saying yesterday that "the leadership of Congress needs to be above reproach." Other dark horses could emerge as members scramble for a consensus candidate.

CNN's Amanpour Under Surveillance, But Not Targeted
From David Ensor
CNN, 6 January 2006
A senior U.S. intelligence official told CNN on Thursday that the National Security Agency did not target CNN's chief international correspondent Christiane Amanpour or any other CNN journalist for surveillance.
NBC raised the question in an interview with The New York Times reporter James Risen, asking him whether he knew anything about possible surveillance of Amanpour by the NSA. Risen, author of a new book, "State of War: the Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration," said he had not heard anything about it.
NBC posted a transcript of the interview on the MSNBC.com Web site Wednesday, then quickly removed the page. In a statement posted on the industry weblog TVNewser, the network said the transcript was "released prematurely," and that reporting would continue.
The interview was not broadcast on any NBC news program, the network said.
The senior official said that from time to time NSA surveillance overseas "inadvertently" acquires recordings or copies of communications involving Americans -- or what the government calls "U.S. persons," which includes most U.S. residents and employees of American companies. By law, however, such materials are required to be erased or destroyed immediately, the official said.

8 January 2006

The Rightwing and the Bush administration's zeal to increase power of the executive is designed to deny constitutional rights to detainees, to deny Congress and the Judiciary a role in the defining the legal process, to apply 'conspiracy' to wartime acts enforcing a moral equivalency between low-level players and leaders, to deny prisoners the rights of habeas corpus and to generally nullify decisions of the Supreme Court.
The Bush Administration vs. Salim Hamdan
By JONATHAN MAHLER
NYT, 8 January 2006
...In a three-page military order issued on Nov. 13, 2001, President Bush authorized the special tribunals before which Salim Hamdan and other non-American enemy combatants are to be tried. The trials will held in Guantánamo before panels of three to seven military officers selected by an administration appointee. Two-thirds of a majority will be required for non-death-penalty convictions. (A death sentence requires unanimity.) These are war-crimes tribunals, though unlike the recent international tribunals in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, the list of offenses pertain to acts of terrorism rather than genocide.
The administration opted for these special tribunals over the U.S. criminal courts for a number of practical reasons. Broadly speaking, certain rights that would be considered fundamental in a civilian court wouldn't apply. If defendants were suspected terrorists, for instance, they couldn't very well be permitted to see all the evidence against them as some of it would no doubt be classified for national-security reasons.
Practical considerations aside, the creation of the nation's first war-crimes tribunals since World War II sent a symbolic message, putting the war against Islamic extremism in the same class as the war against Nazism. Moreover, the tribunals fit with the Bush administration's larger strategy to reassert and expand presidential authority in the aftermath of 9/11. The executive branch would have complete control. Not only was Congress - the body empowered by the Constitution to convene military tribunals - left out of the decision to establish them, but it also wasn't consulted on how the tribunals would work. Instead, the administration's lawyers wrote all of the rules, from the composition of the panels to the standards for admissible evidence to the definition of a war crime. The judiciary branch was also cut out of the process: contested verdicts would be reviewed not by a federal court of appeals but by a three-member panel picked by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.
...In the U.S. criminal courts, conspiracy is especially popular among prosecutors going after organized-crime rings; it gives them leverage to lean on foot soldiers to testify against their superiors. In the context of war-crimes tribunals, however, conspiracy becomes more complicated. Because it can be applied to people at every level, it can create a moral equivalence between low-level players and leaders. This very issue came up at Nuremberg, when an assistant attorney general in the Roosevelt administration attacked a Pentagon proposal to file conspiracy charges against German foot soldiers because it might, in the world's eyes, weaken the impact of the charges against the Nazi leaders. (The proposal was never adopted.) What's more, because conspiracy is such a broad, catch-all charge, it's an easy one for prosecutors to fall back on when their proof of guilt is thin. The U.S. criminal-court system has numerous protections against this - jury trials, judges who are insulated from politics, access to an independent court of appeals - most of which are absent from the tribunals. "In the American criminal system, we can have a conspiracy doctrine because we have this unique set of vibrant protections," says Neal Katyal, a Georgetown law professor, the architect of Hamdan's lawsuit against the Bush administration and a champion of the conspiracy charge in the criminal context. "But when it comes to war-crimes trials, the international consensus is that conspiracy is a no-no. When the U.S. Congress itself defined war crimes in two statutes in 1996 and 1997, it didn't include conspiracy."
...Hamdan's lawyers also see him as much more than a detainee; to them, he represents the pretext for a historic and unconstitutional presidential power grab. As Hamdan's lawyers and other critics see it, the administration, by unilaterally creating the tribunals, defining the offenses and handpicking the panels, is not only denying detainees fair trials, it is also violating bedrock principles of the American government. To put an even finer point on it, they say the Bush administration is undermining the very values it purports to be defending in its war against Islamic extremism. They would like to see Hamdan and other enemy combatants tried before a traditional military court, a pre-existing legal system approved by Congress with built-in provisions for the complications that arise during wartime.
Katyal, who served as Vice President Gore's co-counsel in the suit over the 2000 election, draws a sharp distinction between waging war, an act over which the president should have broad authority, and meting out justice. And so, working at his own expense with research support from a loose network of law students from Georgetown, Yale and the University of Michigan along with attorneys from the law firm Perkins Coie, Katyal has written more than a thousand pages of briefs arguing that the president has neither the authority to create the tribunals without explicit Congressional approval nor the right to deny Hamdan status as a prisoner of war, and in so doing strip him of protections guaranteed by the Geneva Conventions. "The Geneva Conventions were written precisely to make it difficult for political leaders facing political pressure to suspend basic rights and P.O.W. protections," Katyal says. "The moment we let a president say he can determine whether someone is a prisoner of war, other countries are going to start doing it back to us."
Katyal's arguments found traction in federal court in Washington in the fall of 2004. Just as Hamdan's second round of preliminary hearings were getting under way at Guantánamo, Judge James Robertson, a former Naval officer, ruled in his favor, declaring the tribunals illegal and abruptly halting the proceedings 30 minutes after they had begun. In July 2005, however, a three-judge appeals panel that included John G. Roberts Jr., now chief justice of the Supreme Court, overturned the decision. Katyal and Swift petitioned the Supreme Court for review, and in November, after delaying action on the case for several weeks, the court announced that it would hear Hamdan v. Rumsfeld.
This was not the final word, though. No sooner had the Supreme Court agreed to consider Hamdan's case than a Republican senator from South Carolina, Lindsey Graham, introduced a last-minute amendment to a defense-authorization bill explicitly denying all Guantánamo detainees habeas corpus rights, or access to the U.S. federal courts. This had been the administration's intent from the moment it started sketching out its legal strategy in the war on terror in the aftermath of 9/11, but the last time the issue came before the Supreme Court, in the spring of 2004 in another detainee case, the court ruled against the president (with a loud dissent from Justice Scalia). Now Graham was effectively interceding on the administration's behalf in what amounted to an end run around the Supreme Court.
Days later, however, Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat, persuaded Graham to change the wording of the amendment so that it would not derail pending cases, including Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. It has since passed both the House and the Senate and at press time awaited the president's signature.
What about the hundreds of detainees who have not yet filed suits protesting their imprisonments? Aside from trial or continuing detention, the only option for the United States is to send them back to their respective nations. To date, it has released about 260 men, including a handful of Yemenis, all of whom remain in prison in Yemen, no doubt at the behest of the Bush administration. But Yemen is an unpredictable ally. In November, the United States suspended it from an aid program worth hundreds of millions of dollars, citing enduring governmental corruption, fiscal irresponsibility and the failure to enact democratic reform. Meanwhile, Islamic fundamentalism continues to gather strength in Yemen. Recently, three of the country's best-known extremists, including al-Zindani, one of bin Laden's spiritual mentors, called for a new coalition dedicated to confronting Islam's enemies and promoting Muslim values. The ongoing detention of 100 Yemenis at Guantánamo Bay may only help their cause and increase their leverage with President Saleh. So the United States finds itself trapped between two unappealing choices: hold these men as the potentially endless war against terrorism goes on, or return them to a breeding ground for Islamic radicalism in Yemen.
For his part, Hamdan's immediate concerns have more to do with day-to-day life at Guantánamo Bay - how much time detainees are permitted to exercise and at what time of day, what books they are allowed to read, what comfort items they are allowed to keep in their cells - than with the future of his historic lawsuit against the United States government. As Schmitz, his interpreter, told me recently, "The most important thing to him is what we can deliver in the camp, and that is zip."
Shortly after the Supreme Court agreed to hear Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, Swift visited Hamdan's cell armed with several front-page newspaper articles about the development. When Swift delivered the news, Hamdan smiled. Within a matter of minutes, though, his mood had visibly darkened, Swift says. Then Hamdan asked him, "What is this exactly that I've won?"

Investigation opens a window on Rightwing Republican methods using K Street corporate lobbyists to funnel money and influence. Alexander Strategy had a client list including the likes of Microsoft, United Parcel Service, Time Warner, Freddie Mac, MGM Mirage and Eli Lilly & Company.
Officials Focus on a 2nd Firm Tied to DeLay
By ANNE E. KORNBLUT and GLEN JUSTICE
NYT, 8 January 2006
...And at one time, Americans for a Republican Majority, or Armpac, the leadership committee that raised money for Mr. DeLay, was run out of the offices of Alexander Strategy.
But the firm's web of contacts on Capitol Hill reaches past Mr. DeLay, making Alexander Strategy a potentially useful resource as investigators examine other lawmakers.
The firm's name surfaced at the periphery of the corruption investigation into Representative Randy Cunningham, Republican of California. Mr. Cunningham resigned after pleading guilty to accepting bribes from a defense contractor that did business with Alexander Strategy.
For years, Alexander Strategy was one of the crown jewels of the so-called K Street project, an effort Republicans began after taking control of Congress in 1994 to dominate the lobbying industry. The hope, exemplified by Mr. Buckham's company, was for Republican lobbyists to harness the power of their corporate clients to help keep the party in power for years to come.
The successful history of Alexander Strategy since its founding in the late 1990's offers a window into the nexus of Mr. Abramoff, Mr. DeLay and the lobbying world over the last decade or so of Republican control of Congress.
As Mr. DeLay grew more powerful in Congress, the lobbying firm rose in prominence on K Street, building an impressive roster of clients for such a young company and earning, according to records, about $8.8 million lobbying in 2004. That ranked it in the middle of the pack among Washington's largest lobbying firms, but its client list - including Microsoft, United Parcel Service, Time Warner, Freddie Mac and Eli Lilly & Company - suggests what was, at least at one time, a powerful and well-connected operation.
And Mr. DeLay, so intertwined with the lobbying world that his extensive network of allies and former aides scattered throughout town is nicknamed "DeLay Inc.," responded more quickly to calls from Alexander Strategy than he did for any other firm, former aides of his said.
One element prosecutors are trying to understand is what role Mr. DeLay played in sending business to the company. There is evidence, one participant in the case said, that it was "you hire these guys because Tom DeLay tells you to."
Mr. Buckham also ran the U.S. Family Network, a self-styled grassroots organization tied to Mr. DeLay that, according to The Washington Post, was financed almost entirely by clients and associates of Mr. Abramoff. People involved in the case said they expected investigators to examine whether Mr. DeLay cast a vote in Congress in exchange for donations to the network.
Another critical component of the investigation is the activities of Tony C. Rudy, a former DeLay deputy chief of staff who went to work with Mr. Abramoff as a lobbyist before joining Mr. Buckham at Alexander Strategy, where he still works. Mr. Rudy is mentioned - named only as "Staffer A" - in Mr. Abramoff's plea agreement, and investigators are looking into whether he helped secure legislative favors for Mr. Abramoff's clients in exchange for gifts and the promise of a future job while he was still on the DeLay staff.