7 February 2006

2 Laws and Their Interpretation in Limelight at Wiretap Hearing
By ADAM LIPTAK
NYT, 7 February 2006
It is the sort of problem that judges confront every day. One law forbids a certain activity. The other may allow it. Which one counts?
Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales made the case to the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday that two potentially contradictory Congressional actions — one a 1978 law forbidding domestic surveillance without a court's permission, the other a 2001 resolution giving the president authority to use force to combat Al Qaeda — together mean that the executive branch is free to decide on its own to spy on communications between people in the United States and those abroad.
Under the ordinary rules that courts use to harmonize potentially conflicting laws, the more specific one typically governs. Here, that would seem to be the 1978 law, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, which created an elaborate legal scheme to regulate wiretaps, as well as a secret court that promptly hears warrant applications.
If a later law means to override or amend an earlier one, moreover, courts generally require it to say so specifically. The 2001 resolution authorized 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 Sept. 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States."
Whether the 2001 resolution created an exception to the 1978 law depends on whether "necessary and appropriate force" includes surveillance of the enemy. Neither detentions nor surveillance was mentioned in the resolution. The Bush administration says both are natural incidents of the use of force in wartime.
...Mr. Specter urged the administration to present the surveillance program to the FISA court "lock, stock and barrel."
"Let them see the whole thing," Mr. Specter said, "and let them pass judgment."
Mr. Gonzales did not provide a direct answer. He did say that in the case of some individual warrant applications, the administration did not believe it could move quickly enough to satisfy the 1978 law, though he acknowledged that the law allows applications to be filed up to 72 hours after the surveillance has started.
Mr. Gonzales also clarified again a statement he made on Dec. 19, a few days after the spying program was disclosed by The New York Times. At the time, he said the administration had not sought an amendment to the 1978 law because "certain members of Congress" had "advised that that would be difficult, if not impossible." Since then Mr. Gonzales has said the real problem is that such legislation could not be enacted without compromising the program.

Islam and Power
Is President Bush's plan to spread democracy turning into a fiasco? It doesn't have to. But it does need to change.
By Fareed Zakaria
Newsweek, 13 February issue
...There is a tension in the Islamic world between the desire for democracy and a respect for liberty. (It is a tension that once raged in the West and still exists in pockets today.) This is most apparent in the ongoing fury over the publication of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in a small Danish newspaper. The cartoons were offensive and needlessly provocative. Had the paper published racist caricatures of other peoples or religions, it would also have been roundly condemned and perhaps boycotted. But the cartoonist and editors would not have feared for their lives. It is the violence of the response in some parts of the Muslim world that suggests a rejection of the ideas of tolerance and freedom of expression that are at the heart of modern Western societies.
Why are all these strains rising now? Islamic fundamentalism was supposed to be on the wane. Five years ago the best scholars of the phenomenon were writing books with titles like "The Failure of Political Islam." Observers pointed to the exhaustion of the Iranian revolution, the ebbing of support for radical groups from Algeria to Egypt to Saudi Arabia. And yet one sees political Islam on the march across the Middle East today. Were we all wrong? Has Islamic fundamentalism gotten a second wind?

Bush Spending Plan Sparks Protest
By MARTIN CRUTSINGER
AP via LA Times, 7 February 2006
President Bush, constrained by wars, hurricanes and exploding budget deficits, has sent Congress a 2007 spending plan that is garnering howls of pain from farmers, teachers, doctors and a wide array of other groups with special interests.
Democrats, as expected, pronounced the Republican president's budget plan dead on arrival. But many Republicans were equally sharp in their reservations about the $2.77 trillion spending blueprint the administration unveiled on Monday.
Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., called Bush's proposed cuts in education and health "scandalous" while Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, said she was "disappointed and even surprised" at the extent of the administration's proposed cuts in Medicaid and Medicare.
Given the level of congressional frustration, administration witnesses, led by Treasury Secretary John Snow, were expected to face a tough sales job before various congressional committees on Tuesday.
Bush's spending blueprint for the 2007 budget year that begins Oct. 1 would provide large increases for the military and homeland security but would trim spending in the one-sixth of the budget that covers the rest of discretionary spending. Nine Cabinet agencies would see outright reductions with the biggest percentage cuts occurring in the departments of Transportation, Justice and Agriculture.
And in mandatory programs -- so-called because the government must provide benefits to all who qualify -- the president is seeking over the next five years savings of $36 billion in Medicare, $5 billion in farm subsidy programs, $4.9 billion in Medicaid support for poor children's health care and $16.7 billion in additional payments from companies to shore up the government's besieged pension benefit agency.
SEE ALSO:
A Trillion Little Pieces
NYT's editorial, 7 February 2006
President Bush's $2.77 trillion budget is fiction masquerading as fact, a governmental version of the made-up memoirs that have been denounced up and down the continent lately. The spending proposal is built around the pretense that the same House and Senate that are set to consider a record deficit of $423 billion will now impose a virtual freeze on everything other than Pentagon and homeland security outlays. The budget writers even fantasized an end to Social Security's lump-sum death benefit — a whopping $255 per recipient — as if Congress would dare to do something so heartless and easy to exploit in an election year.
The point of all these imaginary financial projections is to give the president leeway to cement in place hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts the nation can ill afford and does not need. The cuts were made temporary in the first place because there was no way to even pretend that budgets could be balanced in the future with such an enormous loss of revenue.
Now, to pay for his top priorities — the military and tax cuts — the president is relying on proposed spending cuts. While Congress will never make some of them, it may make others, but only at the peril of the poor and the middle class. Those cuts include basic needs in education, environmental protection, medical research, low-income housing for the elderly and the disabled, community policing, and supplemental food for the needy.
The budget is steeped in campaign-year pretensions, billboarding $65 billion in "savings" across the next five years — more than half of it in Medicare — even as tax revenue is further choked. A Congress up for re-election should be wary of taking that path, particularly as the open-ended costs of the Iraq war dwarf all promised savings.

New GOP House Leader Has Many Old Ties to K Street
Center for Public Integrity, 2 February 2006
House Republicans today chose as their majority leader, the candidate with the most former staff connections to lobbying firms.
Now, Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio) has a difficult campaign on his hands: taking concrete steps in reducing the influence of lobbyists on Congress.
For starters, Boehner, who is currently the chairman of the House Committee on Education and Workforce, once handed out tobacco industry PAC re-election campaign contributions on the floor of the House. More recently, the Center for Public Integrity could identify 14 former staff members of Boehner's, who currently work for major K Street operations.
The other two candidates were Rep. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) and Rep. John Shadegg (R-Ariz.). Blunt had at least three former staff members working in lobbying firms and Shadegg had two.

Telecoms Helped NSA Wiretapping _ Report
AP via San Antonio Express-News, 6 February 2006
The largest U.S. long-distance carriers cooperated with the National Security Agency's wiretapping of international calls without warrants, according to a published report Monday that cited unnamed telecommunications executives and intelligence officials.
MCI, Sprint and AT&T grant access to their systems without warrants or court orders, and provide call-routing information that helps physically locate the callers, USA Today reported.
Representatives at Sprint Nextel Corp., San Antonio-based AT&T Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc., which last year acquired MCI, had no comment Monday on the newspaper's report.

6 February 2006

'Constitution? We don't need no stinking constitution.'
Deliberation Nation
By NOAH FELDMAN
NYT's Magazine, 5 February 2006
The public hearings that the Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled to begin holding tomorrow are supposed to help determine whether the National Security Agency's domestic spying program broke the law.
...The Senate is sometimes derided as a mere debating chamber, but in this case, debate is exactly what we need. For the last five years, with a Republican-controlled Congress, Americans have not been exposed to serious Congressional debate on any major issue, let alone how far the executive branch may go in protecting our security. These hearings — called by a Republican, Senator Arlen Specter — will afford us the first major opportunity to hear and (via our representatives) air legitimate concerns about whether the president has gone too far.
Furthermore, the committee's debate will have an indirect effect on the courts. When the eavesdropping issue finally does come before a court — as it seems likely to by one route or another; two civil rights groups recently filed lawsuits against the administration over its domestic spying program — the judges who address it will be aware of what happened in the hearings and of the public debate surrounding them.
Debate should, of course, ultimately lead to action. Lawmakers cannot reverse wrongdoing that has already occurred. But they can express outrage (in a resolution or on the floor) that the president saw fit to usurp Congress's power to set the ground rules for secret surveillance. Alternatively, Congress could pass legislation invalidating the executive order authorizing the eavesdropping and thus set the stage for a potential constitutional battle that would move to the courts. Another option would be for Congress to conclude that new laws actually are needed for the war on terror — but it could pass those laws itself instead of letting the president make them up as he goes along. Even though Congress lacks the courts' authority to say what the law is, it can still cast a ray of light through the legal fog.
SEE ALSO:
Specter Criticizes Rationale for Spying as "Strained and Unrealistic"
By HOPE YEN
AP, 5 February 2006
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has not adequately justified why the Bush administration failed to seek court approval for domestic surveillance, said the senator in charge of a hearing Monday on the program.
Sen. Arlen Specter said Sunday he believes that President Bush violated a 1978 law specifically calling for a secret court to consider and approve such monitoring. The Pennsylvania Republican branded Gonzales' explanations to date as "strained and unrealistic."
The top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy, predicted that the committee would have to subpoena the administration to obtain internal documents that lay out the legal basis for the program. Justice Department officials have declined, citing in part the confidential nature of legal communications.
Specter said he would have his committee consider such a step if the attorney general does not go beyond his prior statements and prepared testimony that the spying is legal, necessary and narrowly defined to fight terrorists.
"This issue of the foreign intelligence surveillance court is really big, big, big because the president, the administration, could take this entire program and lay it on the line to that court," Specter told NBC's "Meet the Press."
SEE ALSO:
Recapping the Week in Bushworld
"Beam Me Up, Scottie!"
Tom Englehardt
TomDispatch.com, 5 February 2006
...Finally, in the week that just was, our President and his top officials continued their vigorous efforts to rewrite the Constitution. They took up the National Security Agency warrantless spying, evidently had an unannounced constitutional convention in the White House, called on the peerless minds of various White House and justice department lawyers, asked the Attorney General (former White House Counsel, former General Counsel, and friend) Alberto Gonzales for his honest opinion, and then had the good sense to double check with lawyers at the NSA to make sure everything that agency had been doing was genuinely and legally below board and utterly constitutional. Finally, they turned the whole ball of wax over to Karl Rove, who recognized an election issue when he saw one, and next thing you knew, there was the President, at the State of the Union, insisting, as in some Avon ad, that al-Qaeda was calling and it was darn tootin' constitutional as all get out to listen in on what's conveniently been relabeled "a terrorist surveillance program" (no genuine citizens allowed to join!).
I suppose, based on that unbelievably dreary textbook you had to read back in junior high civics class, you thought amending the Constitution took a two-thirds vote of each house of Congress and then passage by three-quarters of the states. Silly you! It only takes two-thirds of the President's brain, three-quarters of the Vice President's brain, and 100% of his Chief of Staff David Addington's brain; toss in the odd administration lawyer or two to check the fine print, and, as they say in one province of Canada (don't shoot!), Voilà!
Now, unbuckle those straps, take that helmet off, and relax. It's a new week. Enjoy yourself!

Pentagon Widens Program to Foil Bombings in Iraq
By ERIC SCHMITT
NYT, 6 February 2006
The Pentagon is tripling its spending, to about $3.5 billion this year, on a newly expanded effort to combat the rising number of increasingly powerful and sophisticated homemade bombs that are the No. 1 killer of American troops in Iraq, military officials say.
The move is a tacit acknowledgment that despite years of rising death tolls from the devices, the response has not been sufficiently focused or coordinated at the highest levels. And it comes in addition to recent spending to get more and better armor for troops and their vehicles, spurred by concerns expressed by Congress and the American public.
Interviews with a dozen officials in Washington and Iraq detailed an intensive effort on the overall project, which at one time was led by a one-star general but was recently put under a retired four-star Army general, Montgomery C. Meigs.
In the next few months, the Defense Department plans to double the number of technical, forensic and intelligence specialists assigned to the problem, to about 360 military service members and contractors in the United States and Iraq. Hundreds of other experts are being called in, including more than are currently involved from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency. New technology and training techniques are also quickly being pushed into service.
The increased response comes after the number of attacks with makeshift bombs against allied and Iraqi forces and Iraqi civilians nearly doubled in the last year, to 10,593 in 2005 from 5,607 in 2004. The military says it is able to discover and defuse only about 40 percent of the bombs, and the result is deadly: 407 of the 846 Americans killed last year in Iraq were killed by the bombs, which are called improvised explosive devices.
...General Meigs's organization, called the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Task Force, had its origins in a 12-person Army office in October 2003. The organization soon was elevated to a Pentagon office, and its budget grew to $1.2 billion last year from $600 million in 2004. The details of this year's budget are still being refined, at about $3.5 billion, but senior officials say they essentially have a blank check.

As Iraqi Shiites Police Sunnis, Rough Justice Feeds Bitterness
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
NYT, 6 February 2006
When Shiite forces took over this Sunni town, they spread out and clamped down. Checkpoints sprung up. People suspected of being insurgents were driven out. A Shiite took over as mayor.
They restored stability, but at a cost: in the fall, an American soldier entered a room and found two Sunni prisoners hanging upside down during questioning. Another prisoner was shot dead during an interrogation. His Iraqi captors claimed that he had been trying to escape.
"There were welts on their bodies, bruises and abrasions on the bottoms of their feet," said Lt. Col. Richard Kucksdorf, the commander of a team of Americans advising the Iraqi forces here. "There were bruises you don't get by resisting arrest."
The worst of the abuses stopped only after the small team of American advisers, the only American presence in the town, intervened. The Shiite general in charge was eventually removed.
The drama in Salman Pak, a largely Sunni town with Shiite suburbs that is 12 miles southeast of Baghdad, provides an early glimpse into the dilemma faced by American authorities across Iraq as they prepare to scale back their military commitment.
The American military has begun withdrawing from ever-larger portions of the Iraqi heartland as part of a strategy to let Iraqis police Iraq. Iraqi forces now control swaths of territory in at least 13 cities, including the heavily Sunni cities of Baquba and Falluja. But the overwhelming majority of Iraq's soldiers and special police forces are Shiites, partly because Americans disbanded Iraq's Sunni-led army and the Shiite-led government built up its own paramilitary forces.

Do You Know What They Know?
By BOB HERBERT
NYT, 6 February 2006
Has the National Security Agency referred your name to the F.B.I. as a result of information it picked up from its illegal domestic eavesdropping program?
You don't know, do you? And the Bush administration, which has linked its mania for secrecy with its fetish for collecting data on Americans, is not saying.
The big problem related to this program, as far as the administration is concerned, is not its metastasizing threat to constitutional government, the rule of law, the privacy of innocent Americans, the venerable system of checks and balances, and the American way of life as we've known it.
No, the big problem for Bush & Co. — the thing that makes the president and his apologists apoplectic — is the mere fact that this domestic spying program has come to light. Investigations are under way to determine who might have leaked information about the supersecret program to The New York Times, which disclosed its existence, and others.
This is not a time for Congress or the media to bow before the intimidation tactics of a bullying administration. This is a time to heed the words of a federal judge named Damon Keith, who reminded us back in 2002 that "democracies die behind closed doors."
...What has been the nature and the extent of the objections from people inside the government to the warrantless spying?
Until recently, no one was above the law in the U.S., not even the president. Richard Nixon was threatened with impeachment and run out of town for thumbing his nose at the Constitution. Bill Clinton was impeached for lying under oath about his sex life.
The Bush administration, by exploiting the very real fear of terrorism, and with the connivance of Republican majorities in both houses of Congress, has run roughshod over constitutional guarantees that had long been taken for granted. The prohibition against cruel and inhuman punishment? Habeas corpus? The right to face one's accuser? When it suits the Bush crowd, such protections are simply ignored.
The president would have you believe that the warrantless N.S.A. spy program is a very limited operation, narrowly focused on international communications involving "people with known links to Al Qaeda and related terrorist organizations."
If that were true, there would be no reason not to get a warrant from the secret court set up by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The most logical reason for not getting a warrant is that the president's intelligence acolytes, who behave as though they graduated from the Laurel and Hardy school of data mining, have not been able to demonstrate that the people being spied upon are connected to Al Qaeda or any other terror organization.

Stability of Mentally Ill Shaken By Medicare Drug Plan Problems
Some Prescription Denials Have Heightened Distress
By Susan Levine
Washington Post, 6 February 2006
...Since the prescription program made its debut Jan. 1, some of the estimated 2 million mentally ill Americans covered because they receive both Medicare and Medicaid have gone without the drugs that keep their delusions, paranoia, anxieties or stress in check. Mental health service providers and advocacy organizations nationwide say they worry that scores are at high risk of relapse. Numerous people have been hospitalized.
"The continuation of medications is absolutely critical to keep them in community living," said Steven S. Sharfstein, chief executive of the Shepherd-Pratt Health System in Baltimore and president of the American Psychiatric Association. Last week, the association joined other mental health groups in a lengthy talk with Medicare officials about the myriad problems.
"I really don't know what the future will bring. . . . I have a very deep concern that psychiatric patients will suffer disproportionately," Sharfstein said. "If by the end of February or March, if [federal officials] haven't figured this out, we could have an epidemic on our hands."
The mentally ill are nearly a third of the "dual eligibles" who qualify for both Medicare and Medicaid because of income and disability or age. Mark B. McClellan, head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, told a Senate committee hearing Thursday that a prime focus is resolving the "remaining transition issues" for this extremely vulnerable population.
SEE ALSO:
Rival Visions Led to Rocky Start for Drug Benefit
By ROBIN TONER
NYT, 6 February 2006
It was clearly intended to be a transformational moment in American politics: At a center for the elderly in Allentown, Pa., on Sept. 5, 2000, George W. Bush, then a presidential candidate, paid tribute to one of the signature Democratic programs of the last century and promised to improve it.
"Medicare is an enduring commitment of our country," said Mr. Bush, locked in a tight race with Vice President Al Gore. "It must be modernized for our times."
What emerged in the next three years, culminating in the passage of the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act, was an effort to blend a classic big government program from the Great Society with the conservative, market-oriented philosophy of the Republicans in power.
It was supposed to be one of the great domestic policy achievements of the Bush presidency.
But today, as state and federal officials struggle to carry out the program, they face widespread complaints from beneficiaries, advocates, pharmacists, lawmakers and others that it is too complex, too cumbersome, too hard to navigate. Congressional committees are holding hearings on problems in the rollout of the plan, which began Jan. 1, and debate has already begun over how to change it.
Even Mr. Bush seems, at the moment, reluctant to proclaim its advantages; he never mentioned the long-sought prescription drug benefit in his 52-minute State of the Union address last week.

ATF Director Is Linked to Cost Overruns For New Building
By Dan Eggen
Washington Post, 6 February 2006
The new headquarters of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in the District is at least $19 million over budget at a time when the agency is considering sharp cuts in the number of new cars, bulletproof vests and other basics it provides agents.
The Justice Department inspector general's office recently received a complaint alleging that ATF Director Carl J. Truscott put through or proposed unnecessary plan changes and upgrades to the 438,000-square-foot building in the past two years, according to four sources familiar with the project.
But the sources said that cost overruns on the building consumed a $13.5 million budget surplus and millions of dollars more from ATF's current operating budget.
ATF officials declined to discuss details...

The Effectiveness Thing
By PAUL KRUGMAN
NYT, 6 February 2006
...Our leaders' bungling hasn't escaped public notice: more than half of Americans say that the Bush administration has been a failure [occupation of Iraq, Medicare drug program, FEMA's response to Katrina]. Yet it's not at all clear that Democrats can translate this sentiment into large political gains — because despite the governing skill of the last Democratic administration, the public doesn't think of Democrats as being effective.
A lot of this has to do with the way the news media cover politics: they focus mainly on Washington, and many news organizations — especially the broadcast media — prefer to do horse-race stories rather than discuss policy issues. And from that point of view, the Democrats present a sorry spectacle. Not only are they a minority in Congress, shut out of power; they're an undisciplined minority constantly facing defections from their own ranks on crucial issues.
The issue of Iraq epitomizes the political paradox. The war has been a monstrous policy failure, but it remains a political asset to the Bush administration, because it divides the Democrats and makes them look ineffectual.
Yet if the Democrats could present a united front on Iraq, they'd probably have a lot of public support. You'd never know it from the range of views represented on the Sunday talk shows, but a majority of Americans believes both that the administration deliberately misled the nation about W.M.D.'s and that we should set a timetable for withdrawal.
And the public's views on other issues seem to favor the Democratic position — or, rather, what the Democratic position would probably be if the Democrats could agree on one — even more strongly. For example, the public believes by two to one that the government should guarantee health insurance for all Americans.
The point is that Democrats are largely winning the battle of ideas: on the issues, public opinion is shifting in their direction. But to take advantage of that shift, they have to overcome an image of ineffectiveness that is partly the fault of the news media, but largely the result of their own disunion.

5 February 2006

Surveillance Net Yields Few Suspects
NSA's Hunt for Terrorists Scrutinizes Thousands of Americans, but Most Are Later Cleared
By Barton Gellman, Dafna Linzer and Carol D. Leonnig
Washington Post, 5 February 2006
Intelligence officers who eavesdropped on thousands of Americans in overseas calls under authority from President Bush have dismissed nearly all of them as potential suspects after hearing nothing pertinent to a terrorist threat, according to accounts from current and former government officials and private-sector sources with knowledge of the technologies in use.
Bush has recently described the warrantless operation as "terrorist surveillance" and summed it up by declaring that "if you're talking to a member of al Qaeda, we want to know why." But officials conversant with the program said a far more common question for eavesdroppers is whether, not why, a terrorist plotter is on either end of the call. The answer, they said, is usually no.
Fewer than 10 U.S. citizens or residents a year, according to an authoritative account, have aroused enough suspicion during warrantless eavesdropping to justify interception of their domestic calls, as well. That step still requires a warrant from a federal judge, for which the government must supply evidence of probable cause.
The Bush administration refuses to say -- in public or in closed session of Congress -- how many Americans in the past four years have had their conversations recorded or their e-mails read by intelligence analysts without court authority. Two knowledgeable sources placed that number in the thousands; one of them, more specific, said about 5,000.

Oil Graft Fuels the Insurgency, Iraq and U.S. Say
By ROBERT F. WORTH and JAMES GLANZ
NYT, 4 February 2006
Iraqi and American officials say they are seeing a troubling pattern of government corruption enabling the flow of oil money and other funds to the insurgency and threatening to undermine Iraq's struggling economy.
In Iraq, which depends almost exclusively on oil for its revenues, the officials say that any diversion of money to an insurgency that is killing its citizens and tearing apart its infrastructure adds a new and menacing element to the challenge of holding the country together.
In one example, a sitting member of the Iraqi National Assembly has been indicted in the theft of millions of dollars meant for protecting a critical oil pipeline against attacks and is suspected of funneling some of that money to the insurgency, said Radhi Hamza al-Radhi, the chairman of Iraq's Commission on Public Integrity. The indictment has not been made public.
The charges against the Sunni lawmaker, Meshaan al-Juburi, lend credence to the suspicions of Iraqi officials that the insurgency is profiting from Iraq's oil riches.
In another incident, the director of a major oil storage plant near Kirkuk was arrested Saturday, with other employees and several local police officials, and charged with helping to orchestrate a mortar attack on the plant on Thursday, a Northern Oil Company employee said. The attack resulted in devastating pipeline fires and a shutdown of all oil operations in the area, said the employee, who was granted anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about the matter.
...The threat of violence has also deterred many Iraqi journalists from reporting on corruption, despite a campaign by American officials, who have optimistically declared the week starting Feb. 19 to be Anti-corruption Week.
"We have talked to three editors in the past week about anticorruption stories," said an American official in Baghdad who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "They are afraid of getting whacked if they print them."
In other cases, anticorruption officials have helped to hide illegal behavior, joining what Mr. Radhi called "Mafia type" organizations within the government ministries.
The Iraqi government has begun requiring all employees to sign a code of conduct, and all high-level officials must fill out complete financial disclosure forms. But 40 percent of them have refused to do so, saying they fear that filling out such forms will be equivalent to telling kidnappers what ransom to charge, Mr. Radhi said.
There have been some successes, he said: eight government officials have been convicted on corruption charges and sentenced, though many more have escaped prosecution by fleeing to other countries.

When Two Worlds Collide: Rove v. Fitzgerald
By Elizabeth de la Vega
TomDispatch.com, 3 February 2006
For Karl Rove, no news from the Plame case -- Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald's grand jury investigation into the outing of Valerie Plame Wilson's identity as a CIA agent -- is definitely not good news. Seismic activity is notoriously silent, so we may not be hearing any rumblings at the moment. But speaking as a former prosecutor, I believe it highly likely that, just below the surface, the worlds of Karl Rove and Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, shifting like tectonic plates, are about to collide. As was true with Vice President Cheney's top aide, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, charged with obstruction of justice and lying to a federal agent as well as to the grand jury, Rove might not be charged with the leak itself. I am confident, however, that Rove will not leave this party empty-handed. He will, at the very least, almost certainly be charged with making false statements to an FBI agent. Here's why...

Income Inequality Grew Across the Country Over the Past Two Decades
Early Signs Suggest Inequality Now Growing Again After Brief Interruption
Center on Budget Policies and Priorities, 26 January 2006
In most states, the gap between the highest-income families and poor and middle-income families grew significantly between the early 1980s and the early 2000s, according to a new study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and the Economic Policy Institute. The study is one of the few to examine income inequality at the state as well as national level.
The incomes of the country’s richest families have climbed substantially over the past two decades, while middle- and lower-income families have seen only modest increases. This trend is in marked contrast to the broadly shared increases in prosperity between World War II and the 1970s.
In addition, while income inequality declined following the bursting of the stock and high-tech bubbles in 2000 — both of which were quite costly to the highest-income families — early national-level data suggest that inequality began growing again in 2003. Incomes at the top have rebounded strongly from the stock market correction, while the negative effects of the recent recession on low- and moderate-income families have lasted longer than usual. Thus, it appears that the two-decade-long trend of worsening income inequality has resumed.

4 February 2006

Attack Jolts Iraq Oil Business as Civilian, Troop Tolls Rise
By Solomon Moore
LA Times, 3 February 2006
A mortar attack set ablaze a major petroleum facility in the northern city of Kirkuk on Thursday, stopping refining at the plant and further damaging Iraq's beleaguered oil industry.
Iraqi oil workers were still fighting the fire late Thursday, and U.S. officials held high-level meetings in Baghdad to assess the damage. An Iraqi executive with the North Oil Co. called the incident the "most severe attack we have ever faced on an oil installation." The mortar rounds also hit an important pipeline to Turkey that was already out of commission and was being repaired, the executive said.
The cessation of production forced the shutdown of an electricity plant that ran on petroleum supplied by the refinery.
U.S. officials said they had not yet determined how severely the attack would hamper oil production in Iraq, which fell 8% last year to half the 3 million barrels a day envisaged by American officials at the time of the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.
Violence swept through the nation Thursday, taking the lives of at least 26 Iraqis. The U.S. military also announced the deaths of seven American servicemen since Wednesday.
In Shiite Muslim-dominated east Baghdad, car bombs detonated at a gas station and a popular market, sending up towers of fire that killed 16 people and injured 90.
The explosions followed a predawn U.S. helicopter attack in Sadr City, a large Baghdad slum named for the slain father of firebrand Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr. Residents said an Iraqi woman was killed and a 2-year-old injured in that assault, which killed four gunmen who allegedly had fired on U.S. helicopters.
The choppers were supporting a raid to capture a suspected member of Ansar al Sunna, a Sunni Muslim-led militant group that has, on occasion, coordinated its activities with Al Qaeda, said Capt. Bill Roberts, a U.S. military spokesman.
After detaining two Iraqi suspects, U.S. troops attempted to withdraw by helicopter but were fired at by four gunmen on a nearby rooftop, Roberts said. Residents said the men were members of Sadr's Al Mahdi militia, which had clashed with U.S. forces in the past. A U.S. Army attack helicopter then swooped down with machine guns and rockets blazing, Roberts said.
At least one house was completely destroyed. Photos taken by Associated Press showed a deep hole where a rocket had punched through a stone house. Several other residences and cars were also badly damaged.
Roberts said the military had no way of verifying whether civilians were killed in the attack.
Military officials on Thursday also announced the deaths of seven servicemen. A Marine and a soldier were killed Wednesday in gunfights near the city of Fallouja and in southwest Baghdad, respectively. A roadside bomb killed three soldiers Wednesday south of Baghdad.
Two more U.S. servicemen were killed Thursday by snipers in the western city of Ramadi.
The deaths brought to at least 2,249 the American military death toll in the Iraq theater since the invasion.
In another incident Thursday in Ramadi, a joint U.S.-Iraqi unit exchanged gunfire with insurgents for more than an hour. At least one bystander, tribal sheik Nawaf Shahata, was killed.
An Iraqi police source also reported that a Western private security detail opened fire on a minibus, killing two Iraqis and injuring seven.
In the northern city of Mosul, an improvised bomb planted under a traffic stand killed an Iraqi policeman and injured three. After a 20-minute gunfight in the city's outskirts, another Iraqi policeman lay dead and five other officers were wounded.
And 14 corpses were found in a mass grave in north Baghdad, not far from the scene of a recent massacre of 60 would-be police recruits.

Republican Wedge Issues, 2006 Edition
By Harold Meyerson
Washington Post 4 February 2006
Old lies die hard. We grow inured to the administration's howlers in defense of its Iraq policy, so much so that the preposterous case the president made in his State of the Union address for our continued presence in Iraq went almost unnoticed. But he actually said this:
"A sudden withdrawal of our forces from Iraq would abandon our Iraqi allies to death and prison, [and] would put men like bin Laden and Zarqawi in charge of a strategic country. . . ."
Is there one person anywhere inside the administration who really believes that Abu Musab Zarqawi's murderous band of outsiders would emerge as rulers over the vastly larger and very well-armed Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish legions if we pulled out? The same band of outsiders that tried to stop the Sunnis from voting in December's parliamentary election and held their turnout down, in some provinces, to a mere 90 percent?
We've heard this one before. Before the war, the president told us that Saddam Hussein was an ally and co-conspirator of Osama bin Laden -- all evidence to the contrary. Now bin Laden is poised to take over the country if we leave -- all evidence to the contrary.
...other than Bush's assertion that he's tougher than the Democrats in the post-Sept. 11 world, his speech provided precisely nothing on which Republican members of Congress can campaign this year. Switchgrass? Opposition to hybrid human-animal cloning? (Republicans Oppose "Island of Dr. Moreau"!) Which means they have to come before the voters running on what -- the war? The economy? Health care? Anybody out there got a theme that won't immediately backfire?
I fear they think they do. As their poll numbers continue to decline, I suspect an increasing number of embattled Republican incumbents will campaign for the criminalization of the 11 million undocumented workers in the United States.
This will cause a rift with those low-wage employers that are a mainstay of Republican finance (agribusiness and restaurants among them), and won't overjoy party strategists such as Rove, who fear the long-term effect of such campaigns on Latino voting. After all, then-California Gov. Pete Wilson's support for Proposition 187 in 1994, which denied public services to undocumented immigrants and their children, cost the party so much Latino support that the Republicans have been marginalized in that state ever since. But at the time, it also enabled Wilson, who had been trailing in the polls, to win reelection. A war on immigrants might backfire in the long run, but these guys are on the ballot in November.
Warrantless wiretapping and immigrant bashing as the Republican wedge issues of '06? Well, what else can they run on?
Their competence? Their ethics?

Feeding the Oil Addiction
Washington Post, 2 February 2006
"America is addicted to oil." It was a catchy line in President Bush's State of the Union speech. But in truth, few administrations have done more to feed America's oil addiction than this one -- and the same can be said for this Republican Congress.
For most of Mr. Bush's first term, Congress struggled to pass an energy bill. Last year, Mr. Bush signed one into law. Although not as riddled with pork as some previous versions, the law did not change much, either. It provided subsidies for research on some of the alternative technologies the president referred to in his speech, such as clean coal, ethanol, wind, solar and nuclear power. But it also provided billions of dollars in new subsidies for gas and oil, including inducements to drill for more.
Moreover, as the bill wound its way through Congress, the White House rejected a number of measures that might have eased America's addiction. It quashed, for example, the creation of a national "renewable portfolio standard" that would have required utilities to get a certain percentage of their energy from renewable sources, something several states have adopted. It rejected an "oil savings amendment," which would have required successive administrations to find ways to reduce oil use. It spurned any suggestion of automobile fuel efficiency requirements.
Nor did the White House or Congress ever consider imposing a carbon tax, the most straightforward solution possible: Indeed, if one had been imposed five years ago and consumers had been paying higher oil and gas prices as a result, some of the technologies now under discussion might already be on the market thanks to entrepreneurs, not government funding. But this president has never been interested in changing consumer behavior. On the contrary, when asked at a 2001 news conference whether Americans needed to do anything about their high energy consumption, his then-spokesman, Ari Fleischer, said, "The president believes that it's an American way of life, and that it should be the goal of policymakers to protect the American way of life."

Generic Drugs Hit Backlog At FDA
No Plans to Expand Review Capabilities
By Marc Kaufman
Washington Post, 4 February 2006
At a time when the use of low-cost generic drugs is being embraced as one of the few ways to rein in skyrocketing health care costs, the Food and Drug Administration has a backlog of more than 800 applications to bring new generic products to the market -- an all-time high.
As a result, experts say, fewer generic drugs will be available to consumers in the years ahead than the industry is ready and able to provide. The FDA, however, has told Congress that the office that reviews new generics needs no additional money, and the agency has no plans to hire more reviewers.

Bush 'Plotted to Lure Saddam into War with Fake UN Plane'
By Andy McSmith
The Independent, 3 February 2006
George Bush considered provoking a war with Saddam Hussein's regime by flying a United States spyplane over Iraq bearing UN colours, enticing the Iraqis to take a shot at it, according to a leaked memo of a meeting between the US President and Tony Blair.
The two leaders were worried by the lack of hard evidence that Saddam Hussein had broken UN resolutions, though privately they were convinced that he had. According to the memorandum, Mr Bush said: "The US was thinking of flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in UN colours. If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach."
He added: "It was also possible that a defector could be brought out who would give a public presentation about Saddam's WMD, and there was also a small possibility that Saddam would be assassinated." The memo damningly suggests the decision to invade Iraq had already been made when Mr Blair and the US President met in Washington on 31 January 2003 ­ when the British Government was still working on obtaining a second UN resolution to legitimise the conflict.
The leaders discussed the prospects for a second resolution, but Mr Bush said: "The US would put its full weight behind efforts to get another resolution and would 'twist arms' and 'even threaten'. But he had to say that if ultimately we failed, military action would follow anyway." He added that he had a date, 10 March, pencilled in for the start of military action. The war actually began on 20 March.
Mr Blair replied that he was "solidly with the President and ready to do whatever it took to disarm Saddam." But he also insisted that " a second Security Council resolution would provide an insurance policy against the unexpected, and international cover, including with the Arabs" .
The memo appears to refute claims made in memoirs published by the former UK ambassador to Washington, Sir Christopher Meyer, who has accused Mr Blair of missing an opportunity to win the US over to a strategy based on a second UN resolution. It now appears Mr Bush's mind was already made up.
There was also a discussion of what might happen in Iraq after Saddam had been overthrown. President Bush said that he "thought it unlikely that there would be internecine warfare between the different religious and ethnic groups". Mr Blair did not respond. Details of the meeting are revealed in a book, Lawless World, published today by Philippe Sands, a professor of law at University College London.
"I think no one would be surprised at the idea that the use of spy planes to review what is going on would be considered," Mr Sands told Channel 4 News last night. "What is surprising is the idea that they would be painted in the colours of the United Nations to provoke an attack which could then be used to justify material breach.
"Now that plainly looks as if it is deception, and it raises... questions of legality, both in terms of domestic law and international law."
Other participants in the meeting were Mr Bush's National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, her deputy, Dan Fried, the chief of staff, Andrew Card, Mr Blair's then security adviser, Sir David Manning, his foreign policy aide, Matthew Rycroft, and his chief of staff, Jonathan Powell.

New Details Revealed on C.I.A. Leak Case
By DAVID JOHNSTON
NYT, 4 February 2006
Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff told prosecutors that Mr. Cheney had informed him "in an off sort of curiosity sort of fashion" in mid-June 2003 about the identity of the C.I.A. officer at the heart of the leak case, according to a formerly secret legal opinion, parts of which were made public on Friday.
The newly released pages were part of a legal opinion written in February 2005 by Judge David S. Tatel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. His opinion disclosed that the former chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby Jr., acknowledged to prosecutors that he had heard directly from Mr. Cheney about the Central Intelligence Agency officer, Valerie Wilson, more than a month before her identity was first publicly disclosed on July 14, 2003, by a newspaper columnist.
"Nevertheless," Judge Tatel wrote, "Libby maintains that he was learning about Wilson's wife's identity for the first time when he spoke with NBC Washington Bureau Chief Tim Russert on July 10 or 11." Mr. Russert denied Mr. Libby's account. Ms. Wilson is married to Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former ambassador who has criticized the Bush administration's Iraq policy.
Over all, the new material amplified and provided new details on charges outlined in the October 2005 indictment against Mr. Libby. The indictment accused Mr. Libby of falsely telling investigators that he had first learned about Ms. Wilson from reporters, when he had, according to the charging document, learned of it from other government officials like Mr. Cheney.

3 February 2006

GOP Ignores Ethics Lapse as Boehner Makes His Political Comeback
By Dana Milbank
Washington Post, 3 February 2006
In choosing John Boehner to be their new majority leader, House Republicans rejected a member of Tom DeLay's leadership team and resurrected a fallen Newt Gingrich lieutenant.
Boehner's surprise victory over Roy Blunt in yesterday's election completes an extraordinary political comeback for the collegial, heavy-smoking and richly tanned Ohioan. Eight years ago, he lost his position as chairman of the House Republican Conference as his patron, Gingrich, fell from the speakership. But as chairman of the House education committee, he regained favor among his colleagues and made his move when DeLay was forced to abandon the majority leadership.
SEE ALSO:
Remember the Gingrich-DeLay-Boehner Plot Against the House Ethics Committee?
Josh Marshall
Talking Points Memo, 3 February 2006

$120 Billion a Year for Military in Iraq and Afghanistan
By DAVID S. CLOUD
NYT, 3 February 2006
The Bush administration said Thursday that it would seek about $120 billion in additional financing to pay for continuing military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan through 2006.
The request shows that the cost of military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan has remained at virtually the same level for several years, despite hopes that a large number of the American troops may leave Iraq by the end of the year.
The $120 billion includes money for the fiscal year that began in October in the form of a $70 billion supplemental spending request, which had been expected. It also includes $50 billion in the overall budget request for the first months of the 2007 fiscal year that President Bush will submit to Congress on Monday, a figure that was described as basically a placeholder until a more specific number can be developed.
Over all, the Bush administration will propose a Defense Department budget of $439.3 billion for the 2007 fiscal year, almost a 5 percent increase over this year, according to a Pentagon official who spoke on condition of anonymity because the budget request has not officially been submitted to Congress.
The figure does not include the proposed new money for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, which have been financed in stand-alone supplemental spending bills since 2001.
The administration's request for the operations in Iraq and Afghanistan would bring their total cost in the 2006 fiscal year to about $120 billion, some of which Congress has already approved. In a briefing for reporters, Joel Kaplan, the deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget, said the costs of military operations this year "will be roughly similar" to last year's costs.
These costs include pay and benefits for reservists, war-related benefits for the active-duty military, fuel, spare parts, transportation and contractor support.
Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld acknowledged the growing sentiment for reducing the 130,000 American troops in Iraq in a speech on Thursday at the National Press Club, but reiterated that any further reductions depend on improvements in conditions in Iraq.

March of the Straw Soldiers
NYT editorial, 2 February 2006
President Bush is not giving up the battle over domestic spying. He's fighting it with an army of straw men and a fleet of red herrings.
In his State of the Union address and in a follow-up speech in Nashville yesterday, Mr. Bush threw out a dizzying array of misleading analogies, propaganda slogans and false choices: Congress authorized the president to spy on Americans and knew all about it ... 9/11 could have been prevented by warrantless spying ... you can't fight terrorism and also obey the law ... and Democrats are not just soft on national defense, they actually don't want to beat Al Qaeda.
"Let me put it to you in Texan," Mr. Bush drawled at the Grand Ole Opry House yesterday. "If Al Qaeda is calling into the United States, we want to know."
Yes, and so does every American. But that has nothing to do with Mr. Bush's decision to toss out the Constitution and judicial process by authorizing the National Security Agency to eavesdrop without a warrant. Let's be clear: the president and his team had the ability to monitor calls by Qaeda operatives into and out of the United States before 9/11 and got even more authority to do it after the attacks. They never needed to resort to extralegal and probably unconstitutional methods.
Mr. Bush said the warrantless spying was vetted by lawyers in the Justice Department, which is cold comfort. They also endorsed the abuse of prisoners and the indefinite detention of "unlawful enemy combatants" without charges or trials.
The president also said the spying is reviewed by N.S.A. lawyers. That's nice, but the law was written specifically to bring that agency, and the president, under control. And there already is a branch of government assigned to decide what's legal. It's called the judiciary. The law itself is clear: spying on Americans without a warrant is illegal.
One of the oddest moments in Mr. Bush's defense of domestic spying came when he told his audience in Nashville, "If I was trying to pull a fast one on the American people, why did I brief Congress?" He did not mention that some lawmakers protested the spying at the briefings, or that they found them inadequate. The audience members who laughed and applauded Mr. Bush's version of the truth may have forgot that he said he briefed Congress fully on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. We know how that turned out.

Senate Session on Security Erupts in Spying Debate
By SCOTT SHANE
NYT, 3 February 2006
Senate Democrats on Thursday angrily accused the Bush administration of mounting a public relations campaign to defend the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance program while withholding details of the secret eavesdropping from Congressional oversight committees.
An annual hearing on national security threats, led for the first time by John D. Negroponte, director of national intelligence, was overtaken by acrimonious partisan debate about the program. In response to the Democrats' complaints, Republicans and top administration intelligence officials said the real problem was leaks about N.S.A. eavesdropping and other classified matters.
Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, the Senate Intelligence Committee's ranking Democrat, compared the administration's public disclosures of limited information about the N.S.A. program in the six weeks since it was first disclosed to what he described as a similarly misleading use of intelligence before the war in Iraq.
"I am deeply troubled by what I see as the administration's continued effort to selectively release intelligence information that supports its policy or political agenda while withholding equally pertinent information that does not do that," Mr. Rockefeller said.
Another Democrat, Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, said the administration had engaged in "consistent stonewalling" to prevent the Intelligence and Judiciary Committees from carrying out their oversight duties. Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, suggested the administration's public accounts of the eavesdropping program were contradictory, noting that President Bush had described the agency's interception, without court warrants, of "a few" messages, while Michael Chertoff, the homeland security secretary, had referred to "thousands" of messages.
But none of the Republicans on the panel joined the Democrats in their criticism. And in a statement issued later, Senator Pat Roberts, the Kansas Republican who is chairman of the committee, accused Mr. Rockefeller and other Democrats of derailing the discussion about security threats with their concerns about the eavesdropping program.
"I am concerned that some of my Democrat colleagues used this unique public forum to make clear that they believe the gravest threat we face is not Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, but rather the president of the United States," Mr. Roberts said. "There is no doubt in my mind there are marching orders to the minority members of this committee to question and attack, at every opportunity, the president, the vice president, the secretary of state, attorney general and now members of our intelligence agencies."
SEE ALSO:
Constitution Not Relevant: Goss Says Leaks Have Hurt CIA's Work
By Spencer S. Hsu  and Walter Pincus
Washington Post, 3 February 2006

'Rightwing Rot' goes deep...
NASA's Inspector General Probed
Failure to Investigate Safety Violations Is Among the Charges
By Guy Gugliotta
Washington Post, 3 February 2006
An FBI-led watchdog agency has opened an investigation into multiple complaints accusing NASA Inspector General Robert W. Cobb of failing to investigate safety violations and retaliating against whistle-blowers. Most of the complaints were filed by current and former employees of his own office.
Written complaints and supporting documents from at least 16 people have been given to investigators. They allege that Cobb, appointed by President Bush in 2002, suppressed investigations of wrongdoing within NASA, and abused and penalized his own investigators when they persisted in raising concerns.

Public Misled on Air Quality After 9/11 Attack, Judge Says
By JULIA PRESTON
NYT, 3 February 2006
Christie Whitman, when she led the Environmental Protection Agency, made "misleading statements of safety" about the air quality near the World Trade Center in the days after the Sept. 11 attack and may have put the public in danger, a federal judge found yesterday.
The pointed criticism of Mrs. Whitman came in a ruling by the judge, Deborah A. Batts of Federal District Court in Manhattan, in a 2004 class action lawsuit on behalf of residents and schoolchildren from downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn who say they were exposed to air contamination inside buildings near the trade center.
The suit, against Mrs. Whitman, other former and current E.P.A. officials and the agency itself, charges that they failed to warn people of dangerous materials in the air and then failed to carry out an adequate cleanup. The plaintiffs are seeking monetary damages and want the judge to order a thorough cleaning.
In her ruling, Judge Batts decided not to dismiss the case against Mrs. Whitman, who is being sued both as former administrator of the E.P.A. and as an individual.
As a legal matter, the ruling established that the suit's charges were well-documented and troubling enough to meet a legal standard to go forward. But Judge Batts also criticized Mrs. Whitman's performance in the days after the collapse of the towers unleashed, by the E.P.A.'s estimates, one million tons of dust on lower Manhattan and beyond.

'Oil Addiction' and a State of Delusion
By PAUL KRUGMAN
NYT, 3 February 2006
So President Bush's plan to reduce imports of Middle East oil turns out to be no more substantial than his plan — floated two years ago, then flushed down the memory hole — to send humans to Mars.
But what did you expect? After five years in power, the Bush administration is still — perhaps more than ever — run by Mayberry Machiavellis, who don't take the business of governing seriously.
Here's the story on oil: In the State of the Union address Mr. Bush suggested that "cutting-edge methods of producing ethanol" and other technologies would allow us "to replace more than 75 percent of our oil imports from the Middle East."
But the next day, officials explained that he didn't really mean what he said. "This was purely an example," said Samuel Bodman, the energy secretary. And the administration has actually been scaling back the very research that Mr. Bush hyped Tuesday night: the National Renewable Energy Laboratory is about to lay off staff because of budget cuts. "A veteran researcher," reports The New York Times, "said the staff had been told that the cuts would be concentrated among researchers in wind and biomass, which includes ethanol."
Why announce impressive sounding goals when you have no plan to achieve them? The best guess is that the energy "plan" was hastily thrown together to give Mr. Bush something positive to say.
For weeks administration sources told reporters that the State of the Union address would focus on health care. But at the last minute the White House might have realized that its health care proposals, based on the idea that Americans have too much insurance, would suffer the same political fate as its attempt to privatize Social Security. ("Congress," Mr. Bush said, "did not act last year on my proposal to save Social Security." Democrats responded with a standing ovation.)
So Mr. Bush's speechwriters were told to replace the health care proposals with fine words about energy independence, words not backed by any actual policy.
...In other words, this administration is all politics and no policy. It knows how to attain power, but has no idea how to govern. That's why the administration was caught unaware when Katrina hit, and why it was totally unprepared for the predictable problems with its drug plan. It's why Mr. Bush announced an energy plan with no substance behind it. And it's why the state of the union — the thing itself, not the speech — is so grim.

Seducing the Medical Profession
NYT editorial, 2 February 2006
New evidence keeps emerging that the medical profession has sold its soul in exchange for what can only be described as bribes from the manufacturers of drugs and medical devices. It is long past time for leading medical institutions and professional societies to adopt stronger ground rules to control the noxious influence of industry money on what doctors prescribe for their patients.
Last week two new cases came to light that reveal the lengths to which companies will go to buy influence with doctors, pharmacists and other medical professionals. Reed Abelson reported in The Times on Jan. 24 about a whistle-blower's lawsuit alleging that Medtronic had paid tens of millions of dollars in recent years to surgeons in a position to use and recommend its medical devices. In one particularly egregious example, a prominent Wisconsin surgeon received $400,000 for just eight days of consulting.
In last Saturday's Times, Gardiner Harris and Robert Pear revealed that a Danish company paid a pharmacist, doctors' assistants and a drug store chain to switch diabetic patients to the company's high-priced insulin products.
In the wake of past reports of industry's influence over prescribing practices, medical and industry groups have issued guidelines defining appropriate behavior. But as an article in The Journal of the American Medical Association made clear last week, these guidelines are far too weak.
The influential authors called for a complete ban on all gifts, free meals and payments for attending meetings. They urged doctors to reject free drug samples because they are a powerful incentive to use medicines that are expensive but not more effective. And they called for a ban on consulting arrangements that entail no specific scientific duties.
These proposals are hardly onerous. Kaiser Permanente, a California-based managed care group, has adopted nearly all of the recommendations. Its doctors prescribe heavily marketed medicines far less frequently than most other doctors.
The critical issue is that doctors must have the best interests of their patients at heart in prescribing drugs or recommending medical devices. Their judgment must not be clouded by financial self-interest or the desire to please industrial benefactors.

Rightwing courts in US won't let this happen here: Europe defining 'free market' standards
Microsoft Says Europe Blocks Its Defense
By PAUL MELLER
NYT, 2 February 2006
As the antitrust noose tightened around Microsoft in Europe, the company went on the offensive Thursday, accusing the European Commission of denying it access to documents it needs to defend itself.
The commission quickly denied that was the case, saying it was too soon in the process for Microsoft to be making such a claim. Microsoft has until Feb. 15 to respond to the commission's December statement that the company has not complied with a March 2004 antitrust ruling.
That ruling fined Microsoft 497 million euros (about $600 million at the time) and ordered it to change the way it does business in Europe. Microsoft paid the fine, but the commission says the company has still not provided enough information on its Windows operating system to allow makers of rival software to build products that work smoothly with Windows — one of the main requirements of the 2004 ruling. If the company does not comply with the ruling, the commission can fine Microsoft up to 2 million euros a day.
In a letter to the commission dated Monday that was leaked to the press, Microsoft accused the European antitrust regulator of "seriously prejudicing Microsoft's right of defense."
Microsoft wants to see the correspondence between the commission and the external advisers who prepared a report on Microsoft's compliance with the 2004 ruling. The letters, the company says, will help it understand how the commission reached its conclusions. "It's a basic question of fairness and transparency," Mr. Brookes said.
But the European Commission dismissed Microsoft's complaint, saying it was too early to accuse the regulator of failing to disclose relevant documents in the case.
"The issue of Microsoft's requests for access to documents is still the subject of continuing correspondence between the hearing officer and Microsoft," it said in a statement Thursday. "It is therefore premature for Microsoft to claim that the commission has prejudiced their rights of defense."

2 February 2006

Brutality and violence
An American Obsession
By BOB HERBERT
NYT, 2 February 2006
...Dr. King understood with unusual clarity the price to be paid for the terrible belief that every problem could be settled by a bullet or a bomb. He warned his followers and the nation as a whole to avoid the "quicksand" of violence and hatred. He urged blacks to remain nonviolent in the face of horrendous injustices, and he spoke out boldly against the war in Vietnam.
He might as well have been whispering into a hurricane. Extreme black power advocates excoriated him as a Tom, and supporters of the war told him, essentially, to shut up and stick to civil rights.
We've honored Dr. King, but we've never listened to him. Our addiction to the joy of violence is far too strong. We'll search like hollow-eyed junkies all day and all through the night for a rationale, any rationale, to keep the killing going. Democratic politicians have suffered for years because they have been insufficiently insistent on violence as a solution to national problems.
When Dr. King was slain in 1968, the carnage in Vietnam was just hitting its stride. Barry Zorthian, the public information officer for American forces in Vietnam from 1964 to 1968, was quoted as follows in the book "Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered From All Sides":
"We probably could have gotten the deal we ended up with in 1973 as early as 1969. And between 1969 and 1972 we almost doubled our losses. It's easy to second-guess but I've never been convinced that those last 25,000 casualties were justified."
And that's just on the American side. Anywhere from a million to two million Vietnamese lives were lost in the war.
Here in the U.S., it's almost too frightening to consider how many lives have been sacrificed to mindless violence over the past four decades. In many parts of the black community, this form of domestic terror is taken for granted, and even celebrated in many of the most popular songs.
"Niggas who [bleep] wit me get shot up," says 50 Cent.
Civil rights leaders recently went out of their way to pay their respects to the memory of Stanley Tookie Williams, a co-founder of the Crips street gang who was executed in December for the murder of four people. He'd been redeemed, they said. Maybe so. But the Crips, the Bloods and their murderous imitators have spilled oceans of innocent blood. I think of them as world-class destroyers of children.
And, of course, the war of choice today — the quicksand that Dr. King would certainly have counseled us against — is in Iraq.
Thirty-seven years after the death of her husband (who was only 39 when he died), Coretta Scott King has been called home. Like her husband, she always believed that America's addiction to violence could be brought under control.
They were wrong. We love it much too much.

Middle East Elections are Referendums on Bush
Juan Cole
Informed Comment, 1 February 2006
It is the height of hubris to speak about "self-government" in Iraq. The US is running the place and this is "self-government"? The US puts enormous pressure on them about who is acceptable as prime minister and how they have to write their constitution, and has 136,000 troops running around with tanks and constant aerial bombing. This is "self-government"? Moreover, elections in Iraq and Afghanistan, Lebanon and Egypt are not a "new chapter." They've had parliamentary elections before. Lebanon has been having them for decades, and they've often been pretty representative. In Iraq and Afghanistan foreign interference had a lot to do with the rise of subsequent dictatorships. This idea that the Middle East is a blank slate that never knew what a parliament was before Bush and Cheney showed up is insulting. And, calling the government set up under imperial auspices after an illegal invasion "self-government" is laughable.
Finally, the elections that Bush trumpets in all four countries, and in Palestine, which he did not mention in this regard, were rebukes to Bush, not affirmations of him. The Afghans elected warlords, the Iraqis put in the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and Muqtada al-Sadr's people (the ones who killed Cindy Sheehan's son) along with the Iraqi Muslim Brotherhood and some Baathists. The Shiite parties of Hizbullah and Amal have new weight in Lebanon. The fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt got 88 seats, an unprecedentedly large number.
These elections were Middle Eastern referendums on Bush, and he lost every one hands down. Bush's main accomplishment in the Middle East since 9/11 has been to strengthen Muslim fundamentalist parties everywhere in the region.

Guilty Plea and Wider Scheme Are Seen in Rebuilding of Iraq
By JAMES GLANZ
NYT, 2 February 2006
Robert J. Stein Jr. could not have been clearer about his feelings toward the American businessman who was receiving millions of dollars in contracts from Mr. Stein to build a major police academy and other reconstruction projects in Iraq.
"I love to give you money," Mr. Stein wrote in an e-mail message to the businessman, Philip H. Bloom, on Jan. 3, 2004, just as the United States was trying to ramp up its rebuilding program in Iraq.
As it turned out, Mr. Stein had the money to give. Despite a prior conviction on felony fraud that his Pentagon background check apparently missed, Mr. Stein was hired and put in charge of at least $82 million of reconstruction money in the south central Iraqi city of Hilla by the Coalition Provisional Authority, the American-led administration that was then running Iraq.
In United States District Court in Washington, court papers indicate, Mr. Stein will plead guilty today to conspiracy, bribery, money laundering, possession of a machine gun and being a felon in possession of firearms, for essentially giving millions of that money to Mr. Bloom, and taking millions more for himself.
Mr. Stein used some of his stolen money, the papers say, to buy items as wildly diverse as grenade launchers, machine guns, a Lexus, "an interest in one Porsche," a Cessna airplane, two plots of real estate in Hope Mills, N.C., a Toshiba personal computer, 18 Breitling watches, a 6-carat diamond ring and a collection of silver dollars. The papers say that the ring of corruption was much wider than previously known, drawing at least seven Americans, including Mr. Stein, Mr. Bloom and five Army reserve officers, into what is portrayed as a maelstrom of greed, sex and gun-running at the heart of the American occupation of a conservative Muslim country.
As part of their bribery scheme, Mr. Stein and his co-conspirators dispensed and received a wide range of other items like cigars, alcohol, first-class plane tickets and "money laundering services," according to the papers. And if all of that were not enough reason for Mr. Stein to love giving money to his partner, the papers say, there was another: Mr. Bloom kept a villa in Baghdad where he provided women who gave sexual favors to officials he hoped to influence, including Mr. Stein. Mr. Bloom's lawyer, Robert A. Mintz, declined to comment on the case.
The court papers say the money was taken by outright theft of millions of dollars in cash — some of it then lugged aboard commercial flights back to the United States — by improperly steering millions of dollars in construction contracts to Mr. Bloom's companies in return for bribes, and through international wire transfers of millions more.
Over all, Mr. Stein is accused of stealing at least $2 million of American taxpayer money and Iraqi funds, which came from Iraqi oil proceeds and money seized from Saddam Hussein's government, accepting at least $1 million in money and goods in direct bribes and grabbing another $600,000 in cash and goods that belonged to the Coalition Provisional Authority.
In return, Mr. Stein and his cronies used rigged bids to steer at least $8.6 million in contracts for buildings like the police academy, a library and a center meant to promote democracy, the papers say. And the papers say that "Stein and his co-conspirators recommended numerous construction projects in Hilla, Iraq that were intended to be, and were in fact, steered" to Mr. Bloom.
That charge suggests that Mr. Stein, using his perch at the provisional authority, was manipulating at least part of the American reconstruction program in Iraq to enrich himself and his cronies.

House Approves Budget Cutbacks of $39.5 Billion
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
NYT. 2 February 2006
House Republicans eked out a victory on a $39.5 billion budget-cutting package on Wednesday, with a handful of skittish Republicans switching their votes at the last minute in opposition to reductions in spending on health and education programs.
The vote helped President Bush deliver on his promise to rein in federal spending while underscoring deep anxiety within his party over cutting social welfare programs in an election year.
The measure represents the first major effort by lawmakers since 1997 to cut the growth of so-called entitlement programs, including student loans, crop subsidies and Medicaid, in which spending is determined by eligibility criteria.
It passed 216 to 214, with 13 Republicans voting against. The Senate, with Vice President Dick Cheney casting the decisive vote, approved the spending cuts in December. The bill now goes to the White House for Mr. Bush's signature.
Coming on the heels of the State of the Union address, the vote was a critical test of Mr. Bush's ability to hold his fractured party together.

Senate Panel Rebuffed on Documents on U.S. Spying
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
NYT, 2 February 2006
The Bush administration is rebuffing requests from members of the Senate Judiciary Committee for its classified legal opinions on President Bush's domestic spying program, setting up a confrontation in advance of a hearing scheduled for next week, administration and Congressional officials said Wednesday.
The Justice Department is balking at the request so far, administration officials said, arguing that the legal opinions would add little to the public debate because the administration has already laid out its legal defense at length in several public settings.
But the legality of the program is known to have produced serious concerns within the Justice Department in 2004, at a time when one of the legal opinions was drafted. Democrats say they want to review the internal opinions to assess how legal thinking on the program evolved and whether lawyers in the department saw any concrete limits to the president's powers in fighting terrorism.
With the committee scheduled to hold the first public hearing on the eavesdropping program on Monday, the Justice Department's stance could provoke another clash between Congress and the executive branch over access to classified internal documents. The administration has already drawn fire from Democrats in the last week for refusing to release internal documents on Hurricane Katrina as well as material related to the lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

Lobbying Changes Divide House GOP
Many Resist Leaders' Proposed Reforms
By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post, 2 February 2006
Just two weeks after House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) pledged to pass far-reaching changes to the rules of lobbying on Capitol Hill, House Republican members pushed back hard against those proposals yesterday, charging that their leaders are overreacting to a growing corruption scandal.
In a tense, 3 1/2 -hour closed-door session, many Republicans challenged virtually every element of the leadership's proposal, from a blanket ban on privately funded travel to stricter limits on gifts to an end to gym privileges for lawmakers-turned-lobbyists. Rep. John Shadegg (R-Ariz.), a veteran conservative who is seeking a top leadership post, scoffed that Congress knows how to do just two things well -- nothing and overreact, according to witnesses.
GOP leaders did withstand a motion to force every leader but Hastert to stand for reelection today. Yet the motion was backed by 85 of the roughly 200 Republicans at the meeting, after leaders predicted that it would attract little support.

House Extends Patriot Act Another 5 Weeks
By DAVID STOUT
NYT, 1 February 2006
The House of Representatives voted this evening to extend the antiterrorism law known as the USA Patriot Act to March 10, giving House and Senate negotiators another five weeks to resolve their long-running dispute over the statute.
The voice vote was on the extension measure offered by Representative F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., a Wisconsin Republican, who heads the House Judiciary Committee and has been a central figure in the debate. The vote to extend the act was not a surprise, since the alternative for lawmakers was to let it expire on Friday, as scheduled.
“We must extend it, mend it but not end it,” Representative Jane Harmon of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said just before the vote.
Mr. Sensenbrenner offered a strong defense of the Patriot Act, saying that “dozens” of civil rights protections had been installed to answer generally groundless objections of the act’s opponents. “This law has worked,” Mr. Sensenbrenner said. “It has not violated anyone’s rights.”
The Senate was expected to vote either late today or Thursday on an extension. That chamber, too, was likely to agree to another five weeks rather than let the act expire altogether.

1 February 2006

Bold Visions Have Given Way to New Reality
By DAVID E. SANGER
NYT, 1 February 2006
It was an evening for President Bush to confront America's anxieties — and his own.
Only a year after Mr. Bush stood in the House, describing in bold terms how he planned to spend the political capital he had amassed in the 2004 election, the president who addressed the nation on Tuesday evening was far less ambitious, his tone noticeably different.
The Texan who swept onto the national political scene six years ago talking about drilling for new energy supplies and preserving the American way of life vowed on Tuesday night to wean the nation from its reliance on oil. Instead of urging Congress to drill in the Arctic, the president who had waved off the critics who portrayed him and Vice President Dick Cheney as captives of the oil industry asked Congress to finance federal research into alternative fuels and lithium batteries.
A president who has rarely dwelled on the impact of globalization for American workers was suddenly looking over his shoulder at China and India, and committing the federal government to a quest for 70,000 teachers and 30,000 scientists to prepare American students for a new era of competition.
It was, in short, a speech rooted in some harsh global and political realities, and one unlikely to rank among Mr. Bush's most memorable. Instead of evoking the grand ambitions that have suffused his presidency since the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Bush emphasized the familiar and the modest. At a moment of partisan fervor, he offered an olive branch, reviving a pledge to lower the temperature. "Our differences cannot be allowed to harden into anger," he said.
Yet by any measure, Mr. Bush's options are far more limited than they were a year ago. Much of the momentum he boasted about in the days after his re-election is gone, some of it lost on a bold Social Security initiative that never took off, some washed away by the deeply disorganized federal response to Hurricane Katrina.

Draft Legislation Undercuts Bush Domestic Spying Rationale
By Sandy Bergo
Center for Public Integrity, 31 January 2006
A Justice Department memo written in 2003 may call into question the legal rationale the Bush administration has offered to justify electronic surveillance of Americans without court review.
The draft of the Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003 (Adobe Acrobat format, Microsoft Word format)
Some critics of the ongoing National Security Agency (NSA) wiretapping program believe the 2003 memo undermines the position President Bush is taking today. The memo describes legislation drafted by Justice Department staff to expand surveillance powers under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
Critics say it is hard to understand why Justice Department attorneys felt this change was needed, if, as the administration now claims, it had even broader authority and could avoid judicial review. In recent days, the administration has said the inherent constitutional powers of the president and the congressional authorization of military force against al Qaeda gave President Bush the authority he needed to circumvent the court.
The memo and proposed Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003, dubbed "Patriot II," were first obtained and posted on the Center for Public Integrity website in February 2003.
A public firestorm
Once made public, the proposal raised a firestorm of criticism among civil liberties advocates. They were concerned about attempts to broaden the government's powers over domestic intelligence gathering, and to decrease judicial review and public access to information.
Following its disclosure, the executive branch dropped consideration of "Patriot II," and never presented it to Congress. However, pieces were later considered and passed.

Effort to Impose Market in Medicare Causes Unnecessary Pain and Suffering
The Confused Policies of Medicare's Drug Plan
by Terry Gross
Fresh Air from WHYY, 31 January 2006
The new Medicare prescription drug plan is complex, confusing, and irrational, according to health policy expert Jonathan Oberlander.
A month after the rollout of the new Medicare Prescription drug plan, many seniors are finding it difficult to get the drugs they need.
Oberlander teaches about the politics of medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A co-editor of The Social Medicine Reader, Volume III: Health Policy, Markets and Medicine (2005), he also wrote The Political Life of Medicare (2003).

Forget the 'Right to Privacy.' As long as business can be contracted to do what government can't, it won't matter much anyway.
Unleashing the Surveillance Society
NPR's Diane Rehm Show, 31 January 2006
How recent disclosures regarding domestic surveillance, the Justice Department's requests for Google search histories, and advances in data mining are challenging conventional notions of privacy.
Guests
Robert O'Harrow, Washington Post reporter, associate of The Center for Investigative Reporting,
and author of "No Place To Hide"
Bruce Schneier, chief technology officer, Counterpane Internet Security
Joe Whitley, attorney, Alston and Bird, and former general counsel, Department of Homeland Security
SEE ALSO:
Trial Opens in Challenge to Law Over Teenage Sex
By JODI RUDOREN
NYT, 31 January 2006
A federal trial opened here Monday over whether a Kansas law prohibiting virtually all sexual activity by people under age 16 means health care professionals and educators must report such behavior to state authorities, which some say would stop many teenagers from seeking contraception or treatment for sexually transmitted diseases.
The class-action lawsuit stems from a 2003 opinion by the Kansas attorney general, Phill Kline, a conservative Republican who has developed a national reputation for fighting abortion and whose pursuit of abortion clinic records is also being challenged in court.
Mr. Kline's interpretation of the law focused mainly on the reporting duty of abortion providers, arguing that any pregnant, unmarried minor had by definition been the victim of rape or abuse. But it included a broad mandate for reporting whenever "compelling evidence of sexual interaction is present."
Bonnie Scott Jones, a lawyer for the Center for Reproductive Rights in New York, which is representing the plaintiffs, said in her opening statement that Mr. Kline's "dragnet approach" to amassing information on under-age sex violated minors' privacy rights and the Constitution's equal protection clause, and that it "seriously endangers the health and well-being of adolescents."
"Sexual abuse is not synonymous with consensual sexual activity," Ms. Jones said to the judge deciding the case, J. Thomas Marten of Federal District Court. "Consensual sexual activity is not inherently injurious. It is a normal part of adolescent development."
Steve Alexander, an assistant attorney general defending the suit, said the Kansas statute meant that those younger than 16 could not consent to sex, and that those violating the law forfeited any privacy rights.