Observations on current events

The So-Called War on Terror and the Rule of Law:

Reuters: U.S. Judge: Guantanamo Suspects Have Rights
"A U.S. judge dealt a setback to the Bush administration and ruled on Monday that the Guantanamo Bay terrorism suspects can challenge their confinement and the procedures in their military tribunal review process are unconstitutional.
U.S. District Judge Joyce Hens Green said the prisoners at the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba have constitutional protections under U.S. law.
'The court concludes that the petitioners have stated valid claims under the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution and that the procedures implemented by the government to confirm that the petitioners are 'enemy combatants' subject to indefinite detention violate the petitioners' rights to due process of law,' Green wrote..."


Iraq:

Linda McQuaig: Today's charade is simply about Iraq's oil
"...No matter how inspired the rhetoric, the U.S. project in Iraq has never been about democracy. It's been about getting control of Iraq's vast, virtually untouched oil reserves, and extending Washington's military reach over the region. 'Think of Iraq as a military base with a very large oil reserve underneath; you can't ask for better than that,' Wall Street oil analyst Fadel Gheit told me in an interview.
Bush officials never wanted to run Iraq themselves, but rather to have a loyal local do it for them. Before the invasion, their plan was simply to install the wealthy, CIA-groomed exile Ahmed Chalabi. They also drew up sweeping plans to privatize the entire Iraqi economy, including the oil sector - before the Iraqi people got to cast a single vote.
But the 'iron fist of the U.S. army' has not been popular in Iraq, fuelling a resistance that has turned key parts of the country into a free-fire zone.
Among other things, this makes meaningful elections impossible. If large numbers of people are too terrified to vote, the results won't reflect the popular will - yet they'll give an aura of legitimacy to a government that may represent a tiny minority.
But while useless in advancing real democracy, the election is highly useful to George W. Bush, who will point to a 'democratic' transfer of power.
Questioned last week, Bush said the U.S. would withdraw if asked by the new government. Really?
Earlier in the week, the Pentagon acknowledged plans and budgets to keep 120,000 troops there for at least two more years.
It sure looks like Washington plans to go on calling the shots in Iraq, but now there will be a plausible government to show off to the world. If Iraq's oil industry is put on the chopping block and ends up in the hands of U.S. oil companies, Washington will be off the hook; the decision will have been made by the 'elected' Iraqi government.
At last — mission accomplished."

Time Magazine: Bremer's Next Insurgency: Auditors
"Less than than two months after former Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) administrator L. Paul Bremer received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, a scathing audit by a longtime confidante of George W. Bush is bashing Bremer's agency for failing to establish 'adequate financial controls,' leaving some fiscal reporting systems 'either weak or non-existent.' The audit charges that the CPA left large portions of the $8.8 billion Iraqi treasury 'open to fraud, kickbacks, and misappropriation of funds,' according to a draft obtained by TIME. The report was written by Stuart Bowen, a lawyer from Texas who became special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction. His audit cites Bremer for lax accounting (on one payroll, for instance, only 602 of the 8,206 names could be confirmed, with no paper trail for the rest of the cash) and inadequate disclosure (the CPA allowed Iraqi officials to delay reporting the $2.5 billion the interim government received in oil-for-food money last spring).
Bremer, in an angry eight-page reply appended to the draft, rapped Bowen for 'misconceptions and inaccuracies' and for expecting the CPA, amid postwar chaos, to follow accounting standards that 'even peaceful Western nations would have trouble meeting within a year.' Among the details Bremer may have trouble explaining: at a press conference last spring, he said the CPA had approved 'fundamental' internal controls for the Health Ministry before handing it over to the interim government. But, the report notes, his staff members said they were 'unaware of the basis' for that assertion."


Employer-Sponsored Health Plans Next on in GOP's Sights:

LA Times Editorial: Bush, GOP Quietly Dismantling Employer-Provided Health Insurance System
"Emboldened by their success at the polls, the Bush administration and Republican leaders in Congress believe they have a new opportunity to move the nation away from the system of employer-provided health insurance that has covered most working Americans for the last half-century.
In its place, they want to erect a system in which workers - instead of looking to employers for health insurance - would take personal responsibility for protecting themselves and their families: They would buy high-deductible 'catastrophic' insurance policies to cover major medical needs, then pay routine costs with money set aside in tax-sheltered health savings accounts.
Elements of that approach have been on the conservative agenda for years, but what has suddenly put it on the fast track is GOP confidence that the political balance of power has changed.
With Democratic strength reduced, President Bush, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) and House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Bill Thomas (R-Bakersfield) are pushing for action.
Supporters of the new approach, who see it as part of Bush's 'ownership society,' say workers and their families would become more careful users of healthcare if they had to pay the bills. Also, they say, the lower premiums on high-deductible plans would make coverage affordable for the uninsured and for small businesses.
'My view is that this is absolutely the next big thing,' said former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, whose consulting firm focuses on healthcare. 'You are going to see a continued move to trying to get people involved in the process by owning their own health accounts.'
Critics say the Republican approach is really an attempt to shift the risks, massive costs and knotty problems of healthcare from employers to individuals. And they say the GOP is moving forward with far less public attention or debate than have surrounded Bush's plans to overhaul Social Security..."


A New Energy Revolution?

AFP: German Farmers Championing 'Flower Power' for Cleaner Energy
"Germany is looking to messier energy sources to produce cleaner fuel, showing the world that it is possible use all-natural plant and animal products to run cars and heat homes.
In a famously ecological country, innovators have backed away from belching gas guzzlers and looked to new energy sources such as gas from liquid manure, rapeseed diesel and wood-burning electric power stations..."

On Torture and Bush's Miserable Choice To Replace Ashcroft:

Michael Ratner: Gonzales "Has His Hand Deep in the Blood of the Conspiracy Of Torture"
"...All this kind of stuff, stress positions, stripping, hooding, all that kind of stuff is considered cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, violates international law, violates treaty agreements of United States. This is not just about Gonzales and what the government has done in the past. This is about what they're doing right now and currently. So that is the first thing I want to say about Gonzales. The second thing is we're putting in someone who really has his hands deep in the blood of the conspiracy of torture in this country. He is the one who wrote the memo saying the Geneva Conventions shouldn't apply. He is the one who asked for the memo, redefining torture so narrowly that the worst abuses we've seen would not constitute torture under his definition. Here's what they've done to this guy. Not only has he basically said he agreed with those conclusions, but they put him in as the chief law enforcement officer of the United States. That means that it is now a conspiracy to continue the cover-up so that this does not go to the higher ups at all, so that nobody, not Rumsfeld, not Cambone, not Gonzales will obviously ever be investigated. These are the people responsible, these are the people who lower level soldiers are really angry at because they're the ones who got led into this by these guys at the top..."

Newsweek: Unanswered Questions
"...more than the policies themselves, it was Gonzales's uninformative responses to senators' questions that seemed to infuriate the Democrats most, leading to their rock-solid opposition to him on Wednesday. In his confirmation hearing three weeks ago and his later written responses, Gonzales time and again told senators 'I do not have a specific recollection' or 'I do not recall' when asked about positions he took on these and other issues.
'It's the most confusing record of any I've looked at,' said Sen. Diane Feinstein, the California Democrat, who had once been expected to support Gonzales but on Wednesday voted against him. She described the mild-mannered White House counsel as 'really a cipher.'
Gonzales not only failed to remember what stands he personally took on crucial legal matters, such as the arguments laid out in the now notorious August 2002 'torture memo' written by Justice Department lawyers, he said he couldn't recall the specifics of meetings he had previously acknowledged took place and that he himself participated in..."


Denial of Global Warming:

The Guardian (UK) - Oil firms fund campaign to deny climate change
"Lobby groups funded by the US oil industry are targeting Britain in a bid to play down the threat of climate change and derail action to cut greenhouse gas emissions, leading scientists have warned.
Bob May, president of the Royal Society, says that 'a lobby of professional sceptics who opposed action to tackle climate change' is turning its attention to Britain because of its high profile in the debate.
Writing in the Life section of today's Guardian, Professor May says the government's decision to make global warming a focus of its G8 presidency has made it a target. So has the high profile of its chief scientific adviser, David King, who described climate change as a bigger threat than terrorism.
Prof May's warning coincides with a meeting of climate change sceptics today at the Royal Institution in London organised by a British group, the Scientific Alliance, which has links to US oil company ExxonMobil through a collaboration with a US institute..."

The Independent (UK) - Global warming is 'twice as bad as previously thought'
"Global warming might be twice as catastrophic as previously thought, flooding settlements on the British coast and turning the interior into an unrecognisable tropical landscape, the world's biggest study of climate change shows.
Researchers from some of Britain's leading universities used computer modelling to predict that under the 'worst-case' scenario, London would be under water and winters banished to history as average temperatures in the UK soar up to 20C higher than at present.
Globally, average temperatures could reach 11C greater than today, double the rise predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the international body set up to investigate global warming. Such high temperatures would melt most of the polar icecaps and mountain glaciers, raising sea levels by more than 20ft. A report this week in The Independent predicted a 2C temperature rise would lead to irreversible changes in the climate.
The new study, in the journal Nature, was done using the spare computing time of 95,000 people from 150 countries who downloaded from the internet the global climate model of the Met Office's Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research. The program, run as a screensaver, simulated what would happen if carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere were double those of the 18th century, before the Industrial Revolution, the situation predicted by the middle of this century..."


Whoring the Media With Taxpayer Funds To Promote White House Policy:

Salon.com - Third Columnist Caught with Hand in Bush Till
"One day after President Bush ordered his Cabinet secretaries to stop hiring commentators to help promote administration initiatives, and one day after the second high-profile conservative pundit was found to be on the federal payroll, a third embarrassing hire has emerged. Salon has confirmed that Michael McManus, a marriage advocate whose syndicated column, 'Ethics & Religion,' appears in 50 newspapers, was hired as a subcontractor by the Department of Health and Human Services to foster a Bush-approved marriage initiative. McManus championed the plan in his columns without disclosing to readers he was being paid to help it succeed..."

But Apparently, Bribing Journalists Is Not Quite Enough:

AP: RNC Seeks Donations to Push Bush Agenda
"The Republican Party is following up record fund raising for President Bush's re-election effort by asking donors to finance its efforts to get Bush's message 'past the liberal media filter' to the public.
Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman sent a fund-raising e-mail Wednesday telling supporters donations are needed to help Bush advance his second-term agenda.
'The president has great goals for our country: a growing economy, strong homeland and national defense, tort and Social Security reform and affordable health care. But we need your help to get the president's message past the liberal media filter and directly to the American people,' wrote Mehlman, Bush's 2004 campaign manager. Mehlman asked donors to give $25 or more..."


Lawmakers Siding With Industry When National Security Should Dictate Otherwise:

The Star-Ledger: GOP Sabotaged Security Efforts at Chemical Plants
"Industry lobbyists worked with key Republican lawmakers to sabotage new security regulations for chemical plants after the 9/11 attacks, Christie Whitman alleges in her new book.
Many chemical plants, including dozens in New Jersey, could release toxic clouds that could kill tens or even hundreds of thousands of people in the case of an attack or a major malfunction. Their security became a prime concern of experts after 9/11, but proposed regulations requiring safety measures failed to pass in Congress.
In her new book, 'It's My Party Too,' former New Jersey Gov. Whitman, who was head of the Environmental Protection Agency as the debate raged in Congress and the Bush administration -- placed the blame squarely at the feet of chemical-industry lobbyists and congressional Republicans.
Whitman wrote that she and Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge crafted rules requiring the 15,000 most high-risk plants to 'take reasonable steps to address those vulnerabilities, and report to the EPA that they had complied.'
'Although both Tom and I agreed such legislation was necessary, strong congressional opposition, led by some Republicans on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee and the House Energy and Commerce Committee, to giving EPA even this modest additional statutory authority made it difficult to secure administration support,' Whitman wrote, singling out Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) and Rep. Billy Tauzin (R-La.) for blame..."

On Social Security:

Paul Krugman: Little Black Lies
"Social Security privatization really is like tax cuts, or the Iraq war: the administration keeps on coming up with new rationales, but the plan remains the same. President Bush's claim that we must privatize Social Security to avert an imminent crisis has evidently fallen flat. So now he's playing the race card.
This week, in a closed meeting with African-Americans, Mr. Bush asserted that Social Security was a bad deal for their race, repeating his earlier claim that 'African-American males die sooner than other males do, which means the system is inherently unfair to a certain group of people.' In other words, blacks don't live long enough to collect their fair share of benefits.
This isn't a new argument; privatizers have been making it for years. But the claim that blacks get a bad deal from Social Security is false. And Mr. Bush's use of that false argument is doubly shameful, because he's exploiting the tragedy of high black mortality for political gain instead of treating it as a problem we should solve.
Let's start with the facts. Mr. Bush's argument goes back at least seven years, to a report issued by the Heritage Foundation - a report so badly misleading that the deputy chief actuary (now the chief actuary) of the Social Security Administration wrote a memo pointing out 'major errors in the methodology.' That's actuary-speak for 'damned lies,'..."

Kevin Drum: Social Security crisis? Not if wealthy pay their way
"...Sen. Wayne Allard (R) of Colorado, for example, told constituents recently, 'The money is spent. I don't believe, in my own opinion, we'll be able to raise the funds to pay it back.'
This statement betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how Social Security works. Unlike ordinary government functions, Social Security is funded by its own tax, the payroll tax. In 1983, at a time when Social Security was genuinely facing a crisis - it was mere months away from failing at the time - a commission appointed by President Reagan and headed by Alan Greenspan proposed a series of fixes. Among other things, the Greenspan commission recommended increasing payroll taxes.But there was a twist: Knowing that the baby boomers would begin retiring around 2010, Mr. Greenspan recommended raising payroll taxes by much more than was needed to pay benefits at the time. The surplus would be used to buy Treasury bonds, which could be redeemed when the boomers retired and payroll taxes were no longer sufficient to fully fund retirement benefits.
This is where the second twist comes in. Because the surplus payroll taxes were handed over to the federal government (in return for Treasury bonds), this meant ordinary income taxes could be kept low. After all, the federal government has a fixed need for money, and if it gets excess money from payroll taxes it can afford to keep income taxes lower than they'd otherwise be.
But the payroll tax is a flat tax, paid disproportionately by low and middle income workers. The income tax is a progressive tax and is paid disproportionately by high earners.
So this was the implicit bargain in the reforms recommended by Greenspan and signed into law by Reagan: From 1983 to 2018, low- and middle-income earners would pay excess payroll taxes. This allowed income taxes to be kept low, and primarily benefited high earners.
Then, beginning in 2018, instead of raising payroll taxes to pay for baby-boomer retirement benefits, Social Security would begin selling its bonds back to the government.
To pay for those bonds, income taxes would be raised - high earners would begin paying higher income taxes.
In other words, the fact that income taxes will eventually need to be increased in order to cover Social Security benefits was part of the Greenspan/Reagan plan from the start..."

Views That Belong, But That Will Never Appear On Commercial TV:

Seymour Hersh: "We've Been Taken Over by a Cult"


Turning The Media into an Administration Whore:

NY Times Editorial: The Best Coverage Money Can Buy
"President Bush says he has ordered his cabinet not to rent any more journalists to promote his policies, which was certainly the right thing to do. But he still seemed as much bemused as discomfited yesterday that administration officials have been caught making payoffs for positive 'news coverage' from ostensibly independent journalists. At his news conference, Mr. Bush said that the White House had no knowledge of the arrangements with sellout members of the Fourth Estate and that he has reminded his cabinet secretaries that 'our agenda ought to be able to stand on its own two feet.'
Still, we were puzzled as to why Mr. Bush had not said that earlier; his administration was caught hiring a public relations specialist last year to pose as a news reporter and peddle propaganda spots. The president also did not say whether his new policy of an 'independent relationship' between the White House and the press corps extended to staff members who deny airplane seats and other access to reporters as punishment for their coverage..."


Can This Military Wilfill Bush's Program for Messianic Empire?

Sidney Blumenthal: This Pollyanna army
"The most penetrating critique of the realism informing President Bush's second inaugural address, a trumpet call of imperial ambition, was made one month before it was delivered, by Lt Gen James Helmly, chief of the US Army Reserve.
In an internal memorandum, he described 'the Army Reserve's inability under current policies, procedures and practices ... to meet mission requirements associated with Operation Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom. The Army Reserve is additionally in grave danger of being unable to meet other operational requirements and is rapidly degenerating into a broken force'.
These 'dysfunctional' policies are producing a crisis 'more acute and hurtful', as the Reserve's ability to mobilise troops is 'eroding daily'.
The US force in Iraq of about 150,000 troops is composed of a 'volunteer' army that came into being with the end of military conscription during the Vietnam war. More than 40% are National Guard and Reserves, most having completed second tours of duty and being sent out again.
The force level has been maintained by the Pentagon only by 'stop-loss' orders that coerce soldiers to remain in service after their contractual enlistment expires - a back-door draft.
Re-enlistment is collapsing, by 30% last year. The Pentagon justified this de facto conscription by telling Congress that it is merely a short-term solution that would not be necessary as Iraq quickly stabilises and an Iraqi security force fills the vacuum. But this week the Pentagon announced that the US force level would remain unchanged through 2006..."


Reason Enough Not To Move To Mississippi:

NY Times: Mississippi Extends Hospitality to Nuclear Power

The Rule of Law:

Sen. Robert Byrd: Standing for the Founding Principles of the Republic: Voting No on the Nomination of Dr. Rice as Secretary of State

Ramsey Clark: Why I'm Willing to Defend Hussein
"...International law requires that every criminal court be competent, independent and impartial. The Iraqi Special Tribunal lacks all of these essential qualities. It was illegitimate in its conception — the creation of an illegal occupying power that demonized Saddam Hussein and destroyed the government it now intends to condemn by law.
The United States has already destroyed any hope of legitimacy, fairness or even decency by its treatment and isolation of the former president and its creation of the Iraqi Special Tribunal to try him.
Among the earliest photographs it released is one showing Hussein sitting submissively on the floor of an empty room with Ahmad Chalabi, the principal U.S. surrogate at that moment, looming over him and a picture of Bush looking down from an otherwise bare wall.
The intention of the United States to convict the former leader in an unfair trial was made starkly clear by the appointment of Chalabi's nephew to organize and lead the court. He had just returned to Iraq to open a law office with a former law partner of Defense Undersecretary Douglas J. Feith, who had urged the U.S. overthrow of the Iraqi government and was a principal architect of U.S. postwar planning.
The concept, personnel, funding and functions of the court were chosen and are still controlled by the United States, dependent on its will and partial to its wishes. Reform is impossible. Proceedings before the Iraqi Special Tribunal would corrupt justice both in fact and in appearance and create more hatred and rage in Iraq against the American occupation. Only another court — one that is actually competent, independent and impartial — can lawfully sit in judgment..."


Corporations Without Social Conscience:

But what should we expect from entities designed for a pathological focus on profit maximization through cost externalization?

Multinational Monitor: The 10 Worst Corporations of 2004

Cover Up?

The Toronto Star: U.S. claims Arar suit a risk to national security
"The United States government is attempting to dismiss a lawsuit brought by Syrian-Canadian Maher Arar, claiming the litigation would jeopardize national security.
Invoking the rarely used 'state secrets privilege,' U.S. Department of Justice lawyers filed a motion with the New York eastern district court this week, stating that the release of any information concerning the U.S.'s involvement in Arar's deportation to Syria could jeopardize 'intelligence, foreign policy and national security interests of the United States.'
Lawyers with New York's Centre for Constitutional Rights, who filed the lawsuit on Arar's behalf a year ago, said the government is abusing claims of national security in order to avoid a review of its policies and handling of terrorism suspects.
'They're asking the court to sanction their cover-up basically,' lawyer Maria LaHood said yesterday.
Arar was detained by immigration officials at New York's JFK airport on Sept. 26, 2002, and subsequently held as a terrorism suspect in a Brooklyn jail, where he says he repeatedly asked to be sent back to Canada. On Oct. 8 he was flown on a private jet to Syria, via Jordan. Arar says he was tortured and held without charges for a year before returning to Canada.
The Centre for Constitutional Rights launched Arar's lawsuit last January alleging that former attorney-general John Ashcroft, former homeland security secretary Tom Ridge and other officials within President George W. Bush's administration knew Arar would be tortured when he was deported. Arar alleges he was a victim of the government's controversial policy of 'extraordinary rendition,' where American authorities can circumvent their own restraints on interrogations by sending suspects to countries that employ harsh tactics."


The Budget, Excluding the Cost of War?

NY Times: Budget Office Predicts $368 Billion Deficit This Year
"The Congressional Budget Office predicted today that the federal government would run a deficit of $368 billion this year, a figure that does not include a request that administration officials plan to unveil later today for $80 billion more in funds for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The figure also does not include the cost or savings from any of the proposals President Bush is expected to make in the budget he will submit to Congress shortly.
The deficit for the 2004 budget year was $412 billion, representing 3.6 percent of the nation's economy. The deficit projection for this year, excluding growth in military spending and other budget changes, would represent 3 percent of the American gross domestic product, the budget office said..."


The Long-Term Occupation of Iraq:

How is this supposed to be reconciled with a new Iraqi government that may ask the US to leave?

NY Times: General Says the Current Plan Is to Maintain 120,000 Soldiers in Iraq Through 2006
"The Army's current plan is to keep about 120,000 soldiers in Iraq through 2006, roughly the same number that are fighting there now, a senior operations officer said Monday.
His projection comes as members of Congress are pressing the administration for a more detailed explanation of its plan for an eventual withdrawal, and as the administration is about to seek approximately $80 billion in additional military spending for operations in Iraq and, to a lesser extent, in Afghanistan.
In a briefing for reporters, Lt. Gen. James J. Lovelace, the director of Army operations, said the projection is for the Army staff's planning purposes only. Actual troop levels follow the recommendations of combat commanders, based on the evolving security situation, and subject to approval by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. But he said the plan represents the 'most probable' level under current assumptions..."


Health and Politics:

NY Times Editorial: The F.D.A. and Plan B
"The Food and Drug Administration continues to drag its feet on granting women over-the-counter access to the morning-after emergency contraceptive known as Plan B.
Under federal guidelines, the agency was supposed to issue a decision by Friday. Instead, the F.D.A. told the manufacturer, Barr Pharmaceuticals, that it was still conducting its review. The agency said it hoped to act soon, but set no specific date for action.
Yet, by now, there is no excuse for delay. No one questions that Plan B, which contains a concentrated dose of the progestin hormone found in daily birth control pills, is safe and effective. Moreover, by proposing to limit its availability over the counter to women over 16, Barr has removed as an issue the effect on adolescents, which the agency cited as a concern last May when, bowing to political pressure, it overrode scientific research and the overwhelming recommendation of two expert advisory panels to reject making Plan B available without a prescription to all women, regardless of age..."

The Pentagon's Expanding Reach:

The Washington Post: Secret Unit Expands Rumsfeld's Domain
"The Pentagon, expanding into the CIA's historic bailiwick, has created a new espionage arm and is reinterpreting U.S. law to give Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld broad authority over clandestine operations abroad, according to interviews with participants and documents obtained by The Washington Post.
The previously undisclosed organization, called the Strategic Support Branch, arose from Rumsfeld's written order to end his 'near total dependence on CIA' for what is known as human intelligence. Designed to operate without detection and under the defense secretary's direct control, the Strategic Support Branch deploys small teams of case officers, linguists, interrogators and technical specialists alongside newly empowered special operations forces.
Military and civilian participants said in interviews that the new unit has been operating in secret for two years -- in Iraq, Afghanistan and other places they declined to name. According to an early planning memorandum to Rumsfeld from Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the focus of the intelligence initiative is on 'emerging target countries such as Somalia, Yemen, Indonesia, Philippines and Georgia.' Myers and his staff declined to be interviewed.
The Strategic Support Branch was created to provide Rumsfeld with independent tools for the 'full spectrum of humint operations,' according to an internal account of its origin and mission. Human intelligence operations, a term used in counterpoint to technical means such as satellite photography, range from interrogation of prisoners and scouting of targets in wartime to the peacetime recruitment of foreign spies. A recent Pentagon memo states that recruited agents may include 'notorious figures' whose links to the U.S. government would be embarrassing if disclosed..."


Iraq:

Howard Zinn: Support our troops: Bring them home

NY Times: Mystery in Iraq as $300 Million is Taken Abroad
"Earlier this month, according to Iraqi officials, $300 million in American bills was taken out of Iraq's Central Bank, put into boxes and quietly put on a charter jet bound for Lebanon.
The money was to be used to buy tanks and other weapons from international arms dealers, the officials say, as part of an accelerated effort to assemble an armored division for the fledgling Iraqi Army. But exactly where the money went, and to whom, and for precisely what, remains a mystery, at least to Iraqis who say they have been trying to find out.
The $300 million deal appears to have been arranged outside the American-designed financial controls intended to help Iraq - which defaulted on its external debt in the 1990's - legally import goods. By most accounts here, there was no public bidding for the arms contracts, nor was the deal approved by the entire 33-member Iraqi cabinet..."

Robert Fisk: Hotel Journalism Gives American Troops a Free Hand
" 'Hotel journalism' is the only phrase for it. More and more Western reporters in Baghdad are reporting from their hotels rather than the streets of Iraq's towns and cities. Some are accompanied everywhere by hired, heavily armed Western mercenaries. A few live in local offices from which their editors refuse them permission to leave. Most use Iraqi stringers, part-time correspondents who risk their lives to conduct interviews for American or British journalists, and none can contemplate a journey outside the capital without days of preparation unless they 'embed' themselves with American or British forces.
Rarely, if ever, has a war been covered by reporters in so distant and restricted a way. The New York Times correspondents live in Baghdad behind a massive stockade with four watchtowers, protected by locally hired, rifle-toting security men, complete with NYT T-shirts. America's NBC television chain are holed up in a hotel with an iron grille over their door, forbidden by their security advisers to visit the swimming pool or the restaurant 'let alone the rest of Baghdad' lest they be attacked. Several Western journalists do not leave their rooms while on station in Baghdad..."


Iraq War Analysis as NOT seen on Fox News:

Knight-Ridder: Iraqi insurgency growing larger, more effective
"The United States is steadily losing ground to the Iraqi insurgency, according to every key military yardstick.
A Knight Ridder analysis of U.S. government statistics shows that through all the major turning points that raised hopes of peace in Iraq, including the arrest of Saddam Hussein and the handover of sovereignty at the end of June, the insurgency, led mainly by Sunni Muslims, has become deadlier and more effective.
The analysis suggests that unless something dramatic changes - such as a newfound will by Iraqis to reject the insurgency or a large escalation of U.S. troop strength - the United States won't win the war. It's axiomatic among military thinkers that insurgencies are especially hard to defeat because the insurgents' goal isn't to win in a conventional sense but merely to survive until the will of the occupying power is sapped. Recent polls already suggest an erosion of support among Americans for the war..."


The So-Called War on Terror:

The Toronto Star: U.S. terror war 'over-reaction,' top judge says
"The American-led war on terrorism is a threat to international justice and a challenge to the rule of law in the 21st century, says one of the world's most eminent jurists.
'Sept. 11 led to a major overreaction by politicians in many countries,' said Richard Goldstone, the first chief prosecutor at the war crimes tribunals for former Yugoslavia and Rwanda.
'In dictatorships their actions don't matter, because we don't expect any respect for human rights. But in a democracy we are handing victory to terrorists if we change our way of life and abandon human rights,'..."


The Bush Innaugural:

Greg Palast: Oaf of Office


Bush's Push to Privatize Social Security:

Paul Krugman: The Free Lunch Bunch
"...President Bush is like a financial adviser who tells you that at the rate you're going, you won't be able to afford retirement - but that you shouldn't do anything mundane like trying to save more. Instead, you should take out a huge loan, put the money in a mutual fund run by his friends (with management fees to be determined later) and place your faith in capital gains.
That, once you cut through all the fine phrases about an 'ownership society,' is how the Bush privatization plan works. Payroll taxes would be diverted into private accounts, forcing the government to borrow to replace the lost revenue. The government would make up for this borrowing by reducing future benefits; yet workers would supposedly end up better off, in spite of reduced benefits, through the returns on their accounts.
The whole scheme ignores the most basic principle of economics: there is no free lunch..."


The Environment:

Glenn Scherer: Courting Disaster
"William G. Myers III is George W. Bush's choice for a lifetime position on the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. That court's jurisdiction covers three-quarters of all federal lands, in nine Western states where contentious battles rage over energy, mining, timber and grazing.
Unlike most judicial nominees, Myers has never been a judge. Instead, his qualifications include decades as a paid lobbyist and lawyer to the coal and cattle industries. In his recent position as the Bush Interior Department's chief attorney, Myers tried to give away valuable federal lands to a mining company and imperiled Native American sacred sites. 'His nomination is the epitome of the anti-environmental tilt of so many of President Bush's nominees,' says Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.)..."

Jason Leopold: Bush's Choice for Energy Secretary Was One of Texas' Top Five Worst Polluters
"In the bizarro world that President Bush lives in, it pays - literally - to be a miserable failure, a criminal and a corporate con man. Those are just some of the characteristics of the dastardly men and women who were tapped recently to fill the vacancies in Bush's second-term cabinet.
But one of the President's most outrageous decisions (besides naming Alberto Gonzales, who concocted a legal case for torturing foreign prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, Attorney General) has got to be choosing 66 year-old Sam Bodman to serve as Secretary of Energy. This is a guy who for a dozen years ran a Texas-based chemical company that spent years on the top five lists of the country's worst polluters.
It's not just a few clouds of smoke emanating from an oil refinery or a power plant that got Bodman's old company, Boston-based Cabot Corporation, those accolades. It was the 54,000 tons of toxic emissions that his company's refineries released into the air in the Lone Star state in 1997 alone that made Cabot the fourth largest source of toxic emissions in Texas. Cabot is the world's largest producer of industrial carbon black, a byproduct of the oil refinery process..."

LA Times: Deleting Hazardous Waste
"Before the Panasonic SD Video Camera was born, designers planned for its death.
When the $400 camera wears out and can no longer record video, play music or take photos, Panasonic engineers want it to do one final thing: be easy to get rid of.
So it has no lead, no mercury and no brominated flame retardants - all hazardous substances that make consumer electronics such as personal computers, digital cameras and televisions dangerous to bury in landfills and difficult to recycle. The camera's aluminum casing can be smelted and made into other products. When its lithium ion battery runs out, it can be dropped off at one of 30,000 retail stores nationwide...
...Americans annually toss out more than 100 million cellphones, according to Collective Good International, a group that collects and resells used cellphones. Each day, 10,000 TVs and PC monitors go dark, according to the National Safety Council. And an estimated three-quarters of all home PCs, working or not, are stuffed in closets, attics and basements - in large part because getting rid of them can be such a hassle....
...Disposing of old electronics traditionally has been the customer's problem. After Jan. 1, though, California retailers are required to collect a $6 to $10 recycling fee for every television and computer monitor sold.
The fee will fund payments to private recyclers, who are paid 48 cents a pound to dismantle and recover reusable materials in old monitors.
European countries go even further. Germany requires electronics manufacturers to take back their products when customers are finished with them. Next year, the rest of the European Union will have similar rules. And by 2006, the European countries will ban sales of equipment containing lead, mercury, cadmium, chromium and brominated flame retardants.
At the heart of these regulations is an economic notion that the best way to deal with pollution is to build its cost into the product. If companies must pay to dispose of their own products, they would have an incentive to design their products to be easier to recycle or more environmentally friendly and, thus, less costly to clean up..."


Media and Democracy:

James Zogby: Cultural and Commercial Influences on the Free Press
"Just how free is the US's 'free press?' Does the absence of direct government control, by itself, create a 'free press?' In a paper I recently presented at a conference organized by the Emirates Center for Strategic Studies and Research, I sought to make a contribution to this discussion by examining the influences that impact US media.
While there is no direct political influence or control of US media, such as may exist in societies with state-run media, there is, nevertheless, influence that 'controls' coverage that can be subtle, but is at all times, pervasive and decisive.
Most US-based news organizations like to claim objectivity as their trademark, from Fox News' claims to be 'fair and balanced' to the New York Times boasting that it covers 'All the news that's fit to print.' While critics from both the right and the left argue that these networks and newspapers report the news with either a liberal or conservative slant, in fact, the forces that shape bias in media coverage run deeper and are more complex. Cultural, commercial and political influences have a profound impact on editorial decisions made by media outlets, as well as on the content of the information they dispense.
Major reporters, their editors, TV news presenters and commentators, and the government officials and other newsmakers they cover, form a very small circle in Washington DC and New York.
In addition to sharing the cultural values and understandings common to all Americans, the members of this small group of elites share the same social class, are neighbors, socialize together and even live in worlds connected by a revolving door. While much has been made of the revolving door that exists between government and business, the revolving door that connects media and government should not be overlooked. And much the same is true of the commentators or analysts hired by the networks to interpret the news..."


The So-Called War on Terror as a War on Privacy:

Washington Post: Private Intelligence Agency Gathers Personal Information
"Now the little-known information industry giant [ChoicePoint] is transforming itself into a private intelligence service for national security and law enforcement tasks. It is snapping up a host of companies, some of them in the Washington area, that produce sophisticated computer tools for analyzing and sharing records in ChoicePoint's immense storehouses. In financial papers, the company itself says it provides 'actionable intelligence.'
'We do act as an intelligence agency, gathering data, applying analytics,' said company vice president James A. Zimbardi.
ChoicePoint and other private companies increasingly occupy a special place in homeland security and crime-fighting efforts, in part because they can compile information and use it in ways government officials sometimes cannot because of privacy and information laws.
ChoicePoint renewed and expanded a contract with the Justice Department in the fall of 2001. Since then, the company and one of its leading competitors, LexisNexis Group, have also signed contracts with the Central Intelligence Agency to provide public records online, according to newly released documents.
Attorney General John D. Ashcroft and other government authorities have said these new tools are essential to national security. But activists for civil liberties and privacy, and some lawmakers, say current laws are inadequate to ensure that businesses and government agencies do not abuse the growing power to examine the activities of criminals and the innocent alike.
These critics said it will soon be hard for individuals looking for work or access to sensitive facilities to ever shake off a criminal past or small transgression, such as a bounced check or minor arrest..."

Iraq:

Robert Fisk: Election Will Divide Iraq More Than Saddam Ever Did
"...The real trouble with this election, however, is not so much the violence that will take place before, during and, rest assured, after 30 January. The greatest threat to 'democracy' is that with four provinces containing around half the population of Iraq in a state of insurgency and many of its towns under rebel control, this election is going to widen the differences between Sunnis, Shias and Kurds in a way that not even Saddam Hussein was able to achieve. If the Sunnis don't vote - save for those living in America, Syria and other exotic locations - then the Shia community, perhaps 60 per cent of the population, will take an overwhelming number of seats in the 'Transitional National Assembly'.
In other words, the Shias, who are not fighting the U.S. occupation of Iraq, will be voting under American auspices while the Sunnis, who are fighting, will refuse to participate in what the insurgents have already labeled a 'quisling' election. The four million Kurds will vote. But however many seats they gain, they are not going to abandon their quasi-independence after the election. Thus the dangers of civil war - so trumpeted by the Americans and British - may be increased rather than suppressed by this much-touted experiment in democracy. In fact, Iraq is a tribal - not a religious - society and the real war, which some in the West might like to be replaced by the civil variety, will continue to be between Sunni insurgents and the United States military..."


WMD:

This is an example of a story the US media is very reluctant to even touch. If untrue, they should have the stones to investigate it and disprove it.

Daily Times Monitor: US tried to plant WMDs, failed: whistleblower
"According to a stunning report posted by a retired Navy Lt Commander and 28-year veteran of the Defense Department (DoD), the Bush administration’s assurance about finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was based on a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) plan to 'plant' WMDs inside the country. Nelda Rogers, the Pentagon whistleblower, claims the plan failed when the secret mission was mistakenly taken out by 'friendly fire', the Environmentalists Against War report..."


Tactics in the So-Called War on Terror:

Steve Weissman: Jihadis or Godly Hypocrites - Which Side Are You On?


Bush's Miserable Choice To Replace Ashcroft:

Washington Post Editorial: Gonzales 'Does Not Deserve to Be Confirmed'
"Despite a poor performance at his confirmation hearing, Alberto R. Gonzales appears almost certain to be confirmed by the Senate as attorney general. Senators of both parties declared themselves dissatisfied with Mr. Gonzales's lack of responsiveness to questions about his judgments as White House counsel on the detention of foreign prisoners. Some expressed dismay at his reluctance to state that it is illegal for American personnel to use torture, or for the president to order it. A number of senators clearly believe, as we do, that Mr. Gonzales bears partial responsibility for decisions that have led to shocking, systematic and ongoing violations of human rights by the United States. Most apparently intend to vote for him anyway. At a time when nominees for the Cabinet can be disqualified because of their failure to pay taxes on a nanny's salary, this reluctance to hold Mr. Gonzales accountable is shameful. He does not deserve to be confirmed as attorney general...."

Always Worth A Read:

Noam Chomsky: Who Is To Run The World, And How?

Iraq:

Robert Fisk: A Flying Carpet to Baghdad

Environmental Safety As A Nuisance To Business:

Chicago Tribune: DuPont Accused of Concealing Teflon Ingredient's Health Risk
"More than 50 years after DuPont started producing Teflon near this Ohio River town, federal officials are accusing the company of hiding information suggesting that a chemical used to make the popular stick- and stain-resistant coating might cause cancer, birth defects and other ailments.
Environmental regulators are particularly alarmed because scientists are finding perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA, in the blood of people worldwide and it takes years for the chemical to leave the body. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency reported last week that exposure even to low levels of PFOA could be harmful.
With virtually no government oversight, PFOA has been used since the early 1950s in the manufacture of non-stick cookware, rain-repellent clothing and hundreds of other products. The EPA says at this point there is no reason for consumers to stop using those items. But so many unresolved questions remain about PFOA that the agency is asking an outside panel of experts to assess the risks.
'The fact that a chemical with those non-stick properties nonetheless accumulates in people was not expected,' said Charles Auer, director of the EPA's Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxics.
Critics say the lack of knowledge about PFOA and related chemicals - called perfluorinated compounds - exposes a system where environmental regulators largely rely on companies that profit from industrial chemicals to sound alarms about their safety. Questions about potential effects on human health and the environment often aren't raised until years after a chemical is introduced to the marketplace..."


More Politics of Fear From the Bush White House on Social Security:

AP: Bush Budget Chief Predicts 50% Hike in Social Security Tax


Just Change The Rules, If They Are Not Convenient:

Boston Globe: GOP seeks exemption to bias law
"House Republican leaders want to exempt members of Congress from laws against discrimination that apply to private employers, despite the Republicans' Contract With America pledge that ''all laws that apply to the rest of the country also apply equally to the Congress' and a decade-old law that placed Congress under antidiscrimination statutes..."

Parallels in Crisis-mongering:

Paul Krugman: That Magic Moment
"A charming man courts a woman, telling her that he's a wealthy independent businessman. Just after the wedding, however, she learns that he has been cooking the books, several employees have accused him of sexual harassment and his company is about to file for bankruptcy. She accuses him of deception. 'The accountability moment is behind us,' he replies.
Last week President Bush declared that the election was the 'accountability moment' for the war in Iraq - the voters saw it his way, and that's that. But Mr. Bush didn't level with the voters during the campaign and doesn't deserve anyone's future trust.
I won't belabor the W.M.D. issue, except to point out that the Bush administration, without exactly lying, managed to keep most voters confused. According to a Pew poll, on the eve of the election the great majority of voters, of both parties, believed that the Bush administration had asserted that it found either W.M.D. or an active W.M.D. program in Iraq.
Mr. Bush also systematically misrepresented how the war was going. Remember last September when Ayad Allawi came to Washington? Mr. Allawi, acting as a de facto member of the Bush campaign - a former official close to the campaign suggested phrases and helped him rehearse his speech to Congress - declared that 14 or 15 of Iraq's 18 provinces were 'completely safe,' and that the interim government had 100,000 trained troops. None of it was true..."

Social Security Is Abhorrent to Conservatives, Because It Deverts Focus From Greed:

Roger Lowenstein: A Question of Numbers
"...no other conservative has ever come as close to transforming [Social Security] as George W. Bush. He is making Social Security reform, including a partial privatization, a centerpiece of his second term. If the most ardent ideologues have their way, such a reform would be a first step toward a wholly new approach to retirement security - one that would set aside the notion of collective insurance and guaranteed minimums for that of personal investing and responsibility.
This could do more to reverse the New Deal, and even the Great Society, than Goldwater, Stockman and Reagan ever dreamed of. 'We call it a conservative New Deal,' says Stephen Moore, author of 'Bullish on Bush: How George W. Bush's Ownership Society Will Make America Stronger.' In Moore's words, it will be a fundamental shift 'from an entitlement society to an ownership society.' The key to this transformation, according to a generation of conservative thinkers and crusaders, is reducing the size and changing the nature of Social Security, which now pays benefits of half a trillion a year, and which will only grow bigger as America grows older.
The campaign to privatize has not only been about ideology; it has also focused on Social Security's supposed insolvency. Moore's book calls Social Security a 'Titanic . . . headed toward the iceberg'' and a program 'on the verge of collapse.' A stream of other conservatives have bombarded the public, over years and decades, with prophecies of trillion-dollar liabilities and with metaphors intended to frighten - 'train wreck,' 'bankruptcy,' 'cancer' and so forth. Recently, a White House political deputy wrote a strategy note in which he said that Social Security is 'on an unsustainable course. That reality needs to be seared into the public consciousness.'
The campaign is potentially self-fulfilling: persuade enough people that Social Security is going bankrupt, and it will lose public support. Then Congress will be forced to act. And thanks to such unceasing alarums, many, and perhaps most, people today think the program is in serious financial trouble.
But is it? After Bush's re-election, I carefully read the 225-page annual report of the Social Security trustees. I also talked to actuaries and economists, inside and outside the agency, who are expert in the peculiar science of long-term Social Security forecasting. The actuarial view is that the system is probably in need of a small adjustment of the sort that Congress has approved in the past. But there is a strong argument, which the agency acknowledges as a possibility, that the system is solvent as is..."

Letting Corporate Fraudsters Off Easy:

Lucian Bebchuk:What's $13 Million Among Friends?
"Ten former directors of Enron have agreed to pay $13 million from their own pockets to settle a class action suit stemming from Enron's collapse in 2001, which wiped out some $60 billion in shareholder value...
...Of the 18 former directors who were defendants in the Enron case, only 10 have to pay under the settlement. More important, according to the complaint against them, these 10 sold Enron shares worth more than $250 million during the period in which Enron was misreporting its financial affairs. According to the lawyer for the lead plaintiffs, the settlement requires each of these 10 to pay an amount equal to 10 percent of his or her pretax profits. They will be able to keep the other 90 percent - which amounts to $117 million - while investors who held their Enron stock lost their shirts.
The other eight Enron directors will not pay a penny but nonetheless have all claims against them settled. These directors did not sell shares before their value evaporated, which is presumably why they are not contributing. But they played important roles in the board's oversight failure. They include three of the six members of Enron's audit committee as well as six of the eight members of the finance committee, which reviewed many transactions that Enron used to deceive investors. Despite their role in the oversight failure, these eight directors emerge from Enron's ruins without having to pay a cent..."

Killing The Messenger Does Not Discredit The Message:

Greg Palast: CBS' Cowardice and Conflicts Behind Purge - Network's Craven Back-Down on Bush Draft Dodge Report Sure to Get a Standing Rove-ation at White House
"...CBS' cowardly purge of five journalists who exposed George Bush's dodging of the Vietnam War draft was done under cover of what the network laughably called an 'Independent Review Panel.'
The 'panel' was just two guys as qualified for the job as they are for landing the space shuttle: Dick Thornburgh and Louis Boccardi.
Remember Dickie Thornburgh? He was on the Bush 41 Administration's payroll. His grand accomplishment as Bush's Attorney General was to whitewash the investigation of the Exxon Valdez Oil spill, letting the oil giant off the hook on big damages. Thornburgh's fat pay as counsel to Kirkpatrick & Lockhart, the Washington law-and-lobbying outfit, is substantially due to his job as a Bush retainer. This is the kind of stinky conflict of interest that hardly suggests 'independent.' Why not just appoint Karl Rove as CBS' grand inquisitor and be done with it?..."

Iran:

Seymour Hersh: The Coming Wars - What the Pentagon can now do in secret.
"...The Administration has been conducting secret reconnaissance missions inside Iran at least since last summer. Much of the focus is on the accumulation of intelligence and targeting information on Iranian nuclear, chemical, and missile sites, both declared and suspected. The goal is to identify and isolate three dozen, and perhaps more, such targets that could be destroyed by precision strikes and short-term commando raids. 'The civilians in the Pentagon want to go into Iran and destroy as much of the military infrastructure as possible,' the government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon told me.
Some of the missions involve extraordinary coöperation. For example, the former high-level intelligence official told me that an American commando task force has been set up in South Asia and is now working closely with a group of Pakistani scientists and technicians who had dealt with Iranian counterparts. (In 2003, the I.A.E.A. disclosed that Iran had been secretly receiving nuclear technology from Pakistan for more than a decade, and had withheld that information from inspectors.) The American task force, aided by the information from Pakistan, has been penetrating eastern Iran from Afghanistan in a hunt for underground installations. The task-force members, or their locally recruited agents, secreted remote detection devices - known as sniffers - capable of sampling the atmosphere for radioactive emissions and other evidence of nuclear-enrichment programs..."

Social Security In the Sights of the GOP:

Democracy Now! - Leaked GOP Memo: Privatizing Social Security Would Be "One of the Most Significant Conservative Governing Achievements Ever"
"ROGER HICKEY:...Cheney is doing exactly what President Bush and the rest of his campaign have been doing since the election. They have been trying to scare the American people into thinking that there's some kind of a crisis facing Social Security. It's very, very parallel to the scare tactics they used around weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. You will see a steady drumbeat from here through the summer of representatives from the administration trying to convince us that somehow, as Cheney said, Social Security faces a fiscal collapse. Well, that is just bald-faced lies. It is designed to sell people on a program that will eventually dismantle Social Security, and the response that we have to say is, look, there are plenty of people who will be paying into the Social Security system in 2050 and 2060. In the worst case scenario, if we did nothing to the Social Security system, we might have to reduce benefits by 20%, 25% in 2052. Until then, we can pay full benefits. Social Security may be facing a challenge in the future, sometime after the baby boomers retire, because we have this trust fund that we have created, but nowhere near a fiscal collapse, and nothing like the time frame that the administration is talking about...

...it would mean trillions of dollars in terms of management fees that would erode small accounts that would be set up under this plan. So, yes, Wall Street has a motivation, but I think that really, it's broader than that. The Bush administration and the people around them really are out on an ideological mission to dismantle affirmative government. And therefore, they know that if they can get away with dismantling the Social Security system, the very, very popular retirement social insurance system that Americans have supported for decades, if they can dismantle that and privatize it as part of their 'ownership society,' the slogan of which ought to be: 'You're on your own, buddy,' that means that they can get away with practically anything. They can dismantle regulation. They can really go about the -- their whole agenda of dismantling government. It's an ideological fixation with them, and it's going to be an epic test with the very wealthy corporate America and Bush supporters on one side, and on the other side, the organizations that represent the American people. Labor, women's organizations, retiree groups around the country, AARP has just gotten into this battle...."

Paul Krugman: The British Evasion
"...The U.S. news media have provided readers and viewers with little information about how privatization has worked in other countries. Now my colleagues have even fewer excuses: there's an illuminating article on the British experience in The American Prospect, www.prospect.org, by Norma Cohen, a senior corporate reporter at The Financial Times who covers pension issues.
Her verdict is summed up in her title: 'A Bloody Mess.' Strong words, but her conclusions match those expressed more discreetly in a recent report by Britain's Pensions Commission, which warns that at least 75 percent of those with private investment accounts will not have enough savings to provide 'adequate pensions.'
The details of British privatization differ from the likely Bush administration plan because the starting point was different. But there are basic similarities. Guaranteed benefits were cut; workers were expected to make up for these benefit cuts by earning high returns on their private accounts..."

Still No WMD, But Bush Knew That Before The War:

So why didn't more Americans vote against the man who manipulated the media to manufacture consent for the war?

New York Times Editorial: Bulletin: No W.M.D. Found
"The world little noted, but at some point late last year the American search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq ended.
We will, however, long remember the doomsday warnings from the Bush administration about mushroom clouds and sinister aluminum tubes; the breathless reports from TV correspondents when the invasion began, speculating on when the 'smoking gun' would be unearthed; our own failures to deconstruct all the spin and faulty intelligence.
The search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq may have been one of the greatest nonevents of the early 21st century, right up there with the failure of the world's computers to crash at the end of the last millennium. That Y2K scare at least brought us an updated Internet. Fear of the nonexistent W.M.D. brought us a war.
Even after most of the sites were searched, the places that had been identified in spy photos as sinister weapons-production sites had been shown to be chicken coops, and the scary reports about nuclear weapons ready to be detonated proved to be the fantasies of feckless intelligence analysts, die-hard supporters of the invasion insisted that something would turn up. This proves once again the difficulties of debunking hard-held convictions: Mr. Bush did such a good job selling the weapons-hunting nostrum that 40 percent of Americans recently said the weapons were there..."

Preserving the CIA's 'Right' To Torture:

NY Times: White House Fought New Curbs on Interrogations
"At the urging of the White House, Congressional leaders scrapped a legislative measure last month that would have imposed new restrictions on the use of extreme interrogation measures by American intelligence officers, Congressional officials say.
The defeat of the proposal affects one of the most obscure arenas of the war on terrorism, involving the Central Intelligence Agency's secret detention and interrogation of top terror leaders like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, and about three dozen other senior members of Al Qaeda and its offshoots.
The Senate had approved the new restrictions, by a 96-to-2 vote, as part of the intelligence reform legislation. They would have explicitly extended to intelligence officers a prohibition against torture or inhumane treatment, and would have required the C.I.A. as well as the Pentagon to report to Congress about the methods they were using.
But in intense closed-door negotiations, Congressional officials said, four senior members from the House and Senate deleted the restrictions from the final bill after the White House expressed opposition..."

On The Record of Michael Chertoff, once Deputy Attorney under Ashcroft:

LA Weekly (July 2003): LA Weekly: Features: The War on Due Process

Elaine Cassel: Michael Chertoff, Ashcroft's Top Gremlin

Corrupting Media With Cash:

USA Today: Education Dept. paid commentator to promote law
"Seeking to build support among black families for its education reform law, the Bush administration paid a prominent black pundit $240,000 to promote the law on his nationally syndicated television show and to urge other black journalists to do the same.
The campaign, part of an effort to promote No Child Left Behind (NCLB), required commentator Armstrong Williams 'to regularly comment on NCLB during the course of his broadcasts,' and to interview Education Secretary Rod Paige for TV and radio spots that aired during the show in 2004.
Williams said Thursday he understands that critics could find the arrangement unethical, but 'I wanted to do it because it's something I believe in.'
The top Democrat on the House Education Committee, Rep. George Miller of California, called the contract 'a very questionable use of taxpayers' money' that is 'probably illegal.' He said he will ask his Republican counterpart to join him in requesting an investigation..."


On Torture:

Ray McGovern: Gonzales and Torture: It's Not Only Illegal, It's Wrong

Karen J. Greenberg and Joshua L. Dratel: 37 Questions for Donald Rumsfeld


Continuity of Government:

Boston Herald: Congress passes 'doomsday' plan
"With no fanfare, the U.S. House has passed a controversial doomsday provision that would allow a handful of lawmakers to run Congress if a terrorist attack or major disaster killed or incapacitated large numbers of congressmen..."

It's useful to remember who had a hand in developing the CoG: The Armageddon Plan: Cheney & Rumsfeld Have Practiced Running the Country

Bush Tries to Twist the Facts:

NY Times Editorial: For the Record on Social Security
"Late February is now the time frame mentioned by the White House for unveiling President Bush's plan to privatize Social Security. The timing is no accident. By waiting until then, the president will conveniently avoid having to include the cost of privatization - as much as $2 trillion in new government borrowing over the next 10 years - in his 2006 budget, expected in early February.
In this and other ways, the administration is manipulating information - a tacit, yet devastating, acknowledgement, we believe, that an informed public would reject privatizing Social Security. For the record:
The administration has suggested that it would be justified in borrowing some $2 trillion to establish private accounts because doing so would head off $10 trillion in future Social Security liabilities. It's bad enough that the $10 trillion is a highly inflated figure, intended to overstate a problem that is reasonably estimated at $3.7 trillion or even considerably less. Worse are the true dimensions of the administration's proposed ploy, which were made painfully clear in a memo that was leaked to the press last week. Written in early January by Peter Wehner, the president's director of strategic initiatives and a top aide to Karl Rove, the president's political strategist, the memo states unequivocally that under a privatized system, only drastic benefit cuts - not borrowing - would relieve Social Security's financial problem. 'If we borrow $1-2 trillion to cover transition costs for personal savings accounts' without making benefit cuts, Mr. Wehner wrote, 'we will have borrowed trillions and will still confront more than $10 trillion in unfunded liabilities. This could easily cause an economic chain reaction: the markets go south, interest rates go up, and the economy stalls out.'
At a recent press conference, Mr. Bush exaggerated the timing of the system's shortfall by saying that Social Security would cross the 'line into red' in 2018. According to Congress's budget agency, the system comes up short in 2052; according to the system's trustees, the date is 2042. The year 2018 is when the system's trustees expect they will have to begin dipping into the Social Security trust fund to pay full benefits. If you had a trust fund to pay your bills when your income fell short, would you consider yourself insolvent?..."

On Torture:

People's Weekly: Memo reveals Bush OKd torture
"During confirmation hearings on Alberto Gonzales nomination as Attorney General, senators should question him about a recently uncovered memo that George W. Bush ordered the torture of detainees at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and other military prisons around the world, several human rights groups suggested last month.
The groups, who joined in an ACLU Freedom of Information (FOIA) lawsuit, which won release of the memo and other incriminating documents, are describing it as the smoking gun implicating Bush in the torture scandal.
ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero released the memo Dec. 20 in New York. That document, a December 2003 FBI internal e-mail, suggests that Bush issued a secret Executive Order authorizing the use of extreme coercive measures in interrogation, including sleep deprivation, stress positions, attack dogs, and use of hoods to intimidate prisoners. The Geneva Convention Against Torture bans all of these practices.
These documents raise grave questions about where the blame for widespread detainee abuse ultimately rests, Romero said. Top government officials can no longer hide from public scrutiny by pointing the finger at a few low-ranking soldiers.
The human rights groups statement called on the Senate to scrutinize Gonzales, the White House Legal Counsel, on a Jan. 25, 2002, memo he wrote to Bush arguing that the Geneva Conventions outlawing torture did not apply to the war in Afghanistan. Gonzales described the conventions as quaint and obsolete.
In August 2002, Gonzales, without consulting military and State Department experts in the laws of torture and war, according to the Washington Post, approved a memo from the Justice Department claiming that unlawful enemy combatants could be detained indefinitely without criminal charges or the right of due process. The memo, the Post said, gave CIA interrogators the legal blessings they sought..."

Newsweek: Has the Government Come Clean?
"...In the past few weeks, a stack of newly disclosed and startling FBI documents recording agents’ reports about serious abuses at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have been released largely as a result of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union in New York. The newly available documents have prompted some senators to question whether Mueller may have misled the Senate Judiciary Committee when he was questioned closely about the subject in an appearance last May.
At least some of the internal FBI documents indicate that, for nearly a year prior to Mueller’s testimony, top FBI officials were strongly objecting to unorthodox practices—such as hooding and slapping prisoners, sleep deprivation and the use of dogs for intimidation by U.S. military interrogators at Guantanamo Bay. One internal FBI e-mail in December 2003 even calls them 'torture techniques.'
Moreover, as early as the spring of 2003, according to another document, a senior FBI lawyer was pressing the Pentagon to investigate specific instances of abuse reported by bureau agents assigned to Guantanamo. One case, eerily reminiscent of the scenes from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, involved a report by an FBI agent that a female U.S. military interrogator stroked and applied lotion to a shackled male prisoner, yanked his thumbs back, causing him to grimace in pain and then 'grabbed his genitals,' according to a later account of the incident contained in a letter to the Pentagon written by T.J. Harrington, deputy assistant FBI director for counterterrorism..."


Iraq and the Salavadoran Option:

The 'Salvadoran option' lead to priests and others who criticized the government, the military and the rich, being kidnapped, tortured and killed by death squads. Any wonder Mr. Negroponte is involved, in Iraq, too?

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

On the Economy:

Joseph Stiglitz: This can't go on forever - so it won't

Giving A Pass to Gonzales:

NY Times Editorial: Mr. Gonzales Speaks
"It was nice to hear Alberto Gonzales tell the Senate Judiciary Committee in his opening statement yesterday that he doesn't approve of torture and that as attorney general, he'll uphold the law. But things went rapidly downhill after that. By the time the hearing ended, Mr. Gonzales, now the White House counsel, had turned it into one of those depressing exercises in avoiding straight answers and evading accountability. The spectacle brought to mind the hearings last spring when Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his team dutifully denounced the horrors of Abu Ghraib and then refused to accept any responsibility.
Mr. Gonzales said the Abu Ghraib photos 'sickened and outraged' him. But he would not acknowledge that he or any other senior administration official was to blame, even though he was a central figure in the policy decisions that laid the groundwork for the abuse at Abu Ghraib and other American military prisons.
In broad terms, Mr. Gonzales offered the politically necessary repudiation of the Justice Department memo that said Mr. Bush could authorize Americans to torture prisoners with impunity and that redefined torture to exclude almost any brutality.
But it took a half-dozen questions by almost as many senators to get Mr. Gonzales to say declaratively that he now rejects that specific view, which the administration allowed to stand for nearly two years, until it was disclosed by news accounts. And then he equivocated astonishingly when asked whether American soldiers or intelligence agents could 'legally engage in torture under any circumstances.'
'I don't believe so, but I'd want to get back to you on that and make sure I don't provide a misleading answer,' said Mr. Gonzales, who went through many hours of preparation for these very questions.
Blaming a faulty memory, Mr. Gonzales would not provide anything close to a clear account of his role in the formulation of the policy on the treatment of prisoners. At one point, he said the 2002 memo was just the opinion of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel. Then he called it the 'binding interpretation' of anti-torture statutes and treaties. Later, Mr. Gonzales called it 'an arguable interpretation of the law.'
Even his vows of allegiance to the rule of law were rather peculiar. He said that as White House counsel, he had represented 'only the White House,' while as attorney general, he 'would have a far broader responsibility: to pursue justice for all the people of our great nation, to see that the laws are enforced in a fair and impartial manner for all Americans.' We thought that was also the obligation of the president and his staff.
Mr. Gonzales is said to face a sure confirmation. But thanks to the members of the committee, including some Republicans, who met their duty to question Mr. Gonzales aggressively, the hearing served to confirm that Mr. Bush had made the wrong choice when he rewarded Mr. Gonzales for his loyalty. The nation deserves an attorney general who is not the public face for inhumane, illegal and clearly un-American policies."

Mark Danner: We Are All Torturers Now
"...what we are unlikely to hear, given the balance of votes in the Senate, are many voices making the obvious argument that with this record, Mr. Gonzales is unfit to serve as attorney general. So let me make it: Mr. Gonzales is unfit because the slow river of litigation is certain to bring before the next attorney general a raft of torture cases that challenge the very policies that he personally helped devise and put into practice. He is unfit because, while the attorney general is charged with upholding the law, the documents show that as White House counsel, Mr. Gonzales, in the matter of torture, helped his client to concoct strategies to circumvent it. And he is unfit, finally, because he has rightly become the symbol of the United States' fateful departure from a body of settled international law and human rights practice for which the country claims to stand..."

On Torture and Bush's Miserable Choice For AG:

Steve Weissman: Gonzales and the Horse He Rode In On

Democracy Now! - Retired US General on Alberto Gonzales: "He Has Endangered Our Soldiers"
"...The confirmation hearings have become even more controversial in the wake of a new Justice Department memo released just last Thursday revising the August 2002 memo to significantly broaden the definition of torture for which individuals could be prosecuted.
The hearings may also become more contentious because the White House has refused to provide copies of the memos to the Judiciary Committee. Sen. Democrat Richard Durbin of Illinois told the Associated Press 'We go into the hearing with some knowledge of what has occurred...but without the hard evidence that will either exonerate or implicate Judge Gonzales in this policy.'
On Monday, a dozen retired generals and admirals, including former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General John Shalikashvili released a letter to the Judiciary Committee noting that Gonzales' recommendations 'fostered greater animosity toward the United States, undermined our intelligence gathering efforts, and added to the risks facing our troops serving around the world,'..."


The Democratic Process In the United States:

Status Report of the House Judiciary Committee Democratic Staff: What Went Wrong in Ohio
"...We have found numerous, serious election irregularities in the Ohio presidential election, which resulted in a significant disenfranchisement of voters. Cumulatively, these irregularities, which affected hundreds of thousand of votes and voters in Ohio, raise grave doubts regarding whether it can be said the Ohio electors selected on December 13, 2004, were chosen in a manner that conforms to Ohio law, let alone federal requirements and constitutional standards.
This report, therefore, makes three recommendations: (1) consistent with the requirements of the United States Constitution concerning the counting of electoral votes by Congress and Federal law implementing these requirements, there are ample grounds for challenging the electors from the State of Ohio; (2) Congress should engage in further hearings into the widespread irregularities reported in Ohio; we believe the problems are serious enough to warrant the appointment of a joint select Committee of the House and Senate to investigate and report back to the Members; and (3) Congress needs to enact election reform to restore our people's trust in our democracy. These changes should include putting in place more specific federal protections for federal elections, particularly in the areas of audit capability for electronic voting machines and casting and counting of provisional ballots, as well as other needed changes to federal and state election laws.
With regards to our factual finding, in brief, we find that there were massive and unprecedented voter irregularities and anomalies in Ohio. In many cases these irregularities were caused by intentional misconduct and illegal behavior, much of it involving Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, the co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio..."

Get the full report.

Iraq:

AFP: Resistance in Iraq Outnumbers U.S. Forces
"Iraq's insurgency counts more than 200,000 active fighters and sympathisers, the country's national intelligence chief told AFP, in the bleakest assessment to date of the armed revolt waged by Sunni Muslims.
'I think the resistance is bigger than the US military in Iraq. I think the resistance is more than 200,000 people,' Iraqi intelligence service director General Mohamed Abdullah Shahwani said in an interview ahead of the January 30 elections.
Shahwani said the number includes at least 40,000 hardcore fighters but rises to more than 200,000 members counting part-time fighters and volunteers who provide rebels everything from intelligence and logistics to shelter.
The numbers far exceed any figure presented by the US military in Iraq, which has struggled to get a handle on the size of the resistance since toppling Saddam Hussein's regime in April 2003.
A senior US military officer declined to endorse or dismiss the spy chief's numbers.
'As for the size of the insurgency, we don't have good resolution on the size,' the officer said on condition of anonymity.
Past US military assessments on the insurgency's size have been revised upwards from 5,000 to 20,000 full and part-time members, in the last half year, most recently in October.
Defense experts said it was impossible to divine the insurgency's total number, but called Shahwani's estimate a valid guess, with as much credence, if not more, than any US numbers..."


Lying About the State of Social Security to Create Fear:

Paul Krugman: Stopping the Bum's Rush
"The people who hustled America into a tax cut to eliminate an imaginary budget surplus and a war to eliminate imaginary weapons are now trying another bum's rush. If they succeed, we will do nothing about the real fiscal threat and will instead dismantle Social Security, a program that is in much better financial shape than the rest of the federal government.
In the next few weeks, I'll explain why privatization will fatally undermine Social Security, and suggest steps to strengthen the program. I'll also talk about the much more urgent fiscal problems the administration hopes you won't notice while it scares you about Social Security.
Today let's focus on one piece of those scare tactics: the claim that Social Security faces an imminent crisis.
That claim is simply false. Yet much of the press has reported the falsehood as a fact. For example, The Washington Post recently described 2018, when benefit payments are projected to exceed payroll tax revenues, as a 'day of reckoning.'
Here's the truth: by law, Social Security has a budget independent of the rest of the U.S. government. That budget is currently running a surplus, thanks to an increase in the payroll tax two decades ago. As a result, Social Security has a large and growing trust fund..."

NY Times Editorial: The Social Security Fear Factor
"If you've lent even one ear to the administration's recent comments on Social Security, you have no doubt heard President Bush and his aides asserting that a $10 trillion shortfall threatens the retirement system - and the economy itself. That $10 trillion hole is the basis of the president's claim last month that 'the [Social Security] crisis is now.' It's also the basis of the administration's claim that the cost of doing nothing to reform the system would be far greater than the cost of acting now.
Well, the $10 trillion figure is the closest you can get to pulling a number out of the air. Make that the ether. Starting last year, as the groundwork was being set for the emerging debate, the Social Security trustees took the liberty of projecting the system's solvency over infinity, rather than sticking to the traditional 75-year time horizon. That world-without-end assumption generates the scary $10 trillion estimate, and with it, Mr. Bush's putative rationale for dismantling Social Security in favor of a system centered on private savings accounts. The American Academy of Actuaries, the profession's premier trade association, objected to the change. In a letter to the trustees, the actuaries wrote that infinite projections provide 'little if any useful information about the program's long-range finances and indeed are likely to mislead any [nonexpert] into believing that the program is in far worse financial condition than is actually indicated.'
As it often does with dissenting professional opinion, the administration is ignoring the actuaries. But that doesn't alter the facts or common sense. If the $10 trillion figure is essentially bogus, so is the claim that Social Security is in crisis. The assertion that doing nothing would be costlier than enacting a privatization plan also turns out to be wrong, by the estimates of Congress's own budget agency.
Over a 75-year time frame, Social Security's shortfall is estimated by the Congressional Budget Office at $2 trillion and by the Social Security trustees at $3.7 trillion, a manageable sliver of the economy in each case. If the shortfall is on the low side, Social Security will be in the black until 2052, when it will be able to pay out 80 percent of the promised benefits. If it is on the high side, the system will pay full benefits until 2042, when it will cover 70 percent.
Contrary to Mr. Bush's frequent assertion that Social Security is constantly imperiled by political meddling, it has in fact been preserved and improved by political intervention throughout its 70-year history, most significantly in 1983. The system could - and should - be strengthened again by a modest package of benefit cuts and tax increases phased in over decades.
Instead, the administration wants workers to divert some of the payroll taxes that currently pay for Social Security into private investment accounts, in exchange for a much-reduced government benefit. To replace the taxes it would otherwise have collected - money it needs to pay benefits to current and near retirees - the government would borrow an estimated $2 trillion over the next 10 years or so and even more thereafter.
In effect, the administration's plan would get rid of the financial burden of Social Security by getting rid of Social Security. The plan shifts the financial risk of growing old onto each individual and off of the government - where it is dispersed among a very large population, as with any sensible insurance policy. In a privatized system, you may do fine, but your fellow retirees may not, or vice versa..."

The So-Called War on Terror as a War on Due Process:

Washington Post: Long-Term Plan Sought For Terror Suspects
"Administration officials are preparing long-range plans for indefinitely imprisoning suspected terrorists whom they do not want to set free or turn over to courts in the United States or other countries, according to intelligence, defense and diplomatic officials.
The Pentagon and the CIA have asked the White House to decide on a more permanent approach for potentially lifetime detentions, including for hundreds of people now in military and CIA custody whom the government does not have enough evidence to charge in courts. The outcome of the review, which also involves the State Department, would also affect those expected to be captured in the course of future counterterrorism operations..."

Fundraising Points To Who Benefits From Privatizing Social Security:

Washington Post:
Conservatives Raise Millions to Privatize Social Security
"President Bush's political allies are raising millions of dollars for an election-style campaign to promote private Social Security accounts, as Democrats and Republicans prepare for what they predict will be the most expensive and extensive public policy debate since the 1993 fight over the Clinton administration's failed health care plan.
With Bush planning to unveil the details of his Social Security plan this month, several GOP groups close to the White House are asking the same donors who helped reelect Bush to fund an extensive campaign to convince Americans - and skeptical lawmakers - that Social Security is in crisis and that private accounts are the only cure.
Progress for America, an independent conservative group that backed Bush in the campaign, has set aside about $9 million to support the president's Social Security plan as well as other White House domestic priorities in the new year, said spokesman Brian McCabe. The group is asking its donors for much more, he said.
Stephen Moore, head of the conservative Club for Growth, has raised $1.5 million and hopes to hit a $15 million target when his fundraising drive ends.
But their contributions are likely to be dwarfed by those from corporate trade associations, spearheaded by the National Association of Manufacturers. Other likely contributors include the financial services and securities industries and other Fortune 500 companies, GOP officials say. White House officials, led by Karl Rove and Charles P. Blahous III, the president's policy point man on Social Security, are helping to shape the public relations campaign, said the officials, who talked about private discussions with the White House on the condition of anonymity..."

Torture:

AP: Justice Dept. 'Rewrites' Torture Memo
"...The Justice Department memo, dated Thursday, was released less than a week before the Senate Judiciary Committee was to consider Bush's nomination of his chief White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales, to replace John Ashcroft as attorney general..."

Steve Weissman: Torture - From J.F.K. to Baby Bush
"...Republicans have no monopoly on American torture. In the early 1960s, the Kennedy Administration made Stress and Duress a specialty of J.F.K.'s much-beloved Green Berets, and torture became common during much of the Vietnam War. Just as in Mr. Bush's "War on Terror" - or in colonial wars throughout the ages - the explicit goal was to get information. New paradigms to the contrary, 9/11 did not change the world.
Kennedy and Johnson also led the way in having U.S. troops teach "Stress and Duress" to client armies throughout the world, notably at the School of the Americas, which has trained some of the hemisphere's worst torturers.
Nor was Gonzales the first to concoct legal arguments to help American and allied torturers ply their trade. From Camelot on, government lawyers have exhausted themselves trying to explain why Stress and Duress was not really torture, you know, but only Torture-Lite..."

NY Times: Fresh Details Emerge on Harsh Methods at Guantánamo
"...Interviews with former intelligence officers and interrogators provided new details and confirmed earlier accounts of inmates being shackled for hours and left to soil themselves while exposed to blaring music or the insistent meowing of a cat-food commercial. In addition, some may have been forcibly given enemas as punishment.
While all the detainees were threatened with harsh tactics if they did not cooperate, about one in six were eventually subjected to those procedures, one former interrogator estimated. The interrogator said that when new interrogators arrived they were told they had great flexibility in extracting information from detainees because the Geneva Conventions did not apply at the base.
Military officials have gone to great lengths to portray Guantánamo as a largely humane facility for several hundred prisoners, where the harshest sanctioned punishments consisted of isolation or taking away items like blankets, toothpaste, dessert or reading material. Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, who was the commander of the Guantánamo operation from November 2002 to March 2004, regularly told visiting members of Congress and journalists that the approach was designed to build trust between the detainee and his questioner..."


The So-Called War on Terror Has Great Benefits Some:

The Center for Corporate Policy: The Top Ten War Profiteers of 2004


Democracy in America:

Democracy Week: Ohio Recount Steeped in Fraud