Observations on current events

Iraq:

Seymour Hersch: Up In The Air - Where is the Iraq war headed next?
"...A key element of the drawdown plans, not mentioned in the President’s public statements, is that the departing American troops will be replaced by American airpower. Quick, deadly strikes by U.S. warplanes are seen as a way to improve dramatically the combat capability of even the weakest Iraqi combat units. The danger, military experts have told me, is that, while the number of American casualties would decrease as ground troops are withdrawn, the over-all level of violence and the number of Iraqi fatalities would increase unless there are stringent controls over who bombs what...

...Many of the military’s most senior generals are deeply frustrated, but they say nothing in public, because they don’t want to jeopardize their careers. The Administration has 'so terrified the generals that they know they won’t go public,' a former defense official said...

...'The President is more determined than ever to stay the course,' the former defense official said. 'He doesn’t feel any pain. Bush is a believer in the adage ‘People may suffer and die, but the Church advances.’ ' He said that the President had become more detached, leaving more issues to Karl Rove and Vice-President Cheney. 'They keep him in the gray world of religious idealism, where he wants to be anyway,' the former defense official said. Bush’s public appearances, for example, are generally scheduled in front of friendly audiences, most often at military bases. Four decades ago, President Lyndon Johnson, who was also confronted with an increasingly unpopular war, was limited to similar public forums. 'Johnson knew he was a prisoner in the White House,' the former official said, 'but Bush has no idea,'...

...Within the military, the prospect of using airpower as a substitute for American troops on the ground has caused great unease. For one thing, Air Force commanders, in particular, have deep-seated objections to the possibility that Iraqis eventually will be responsible for target selection. 'Will the Iraqis call in air strikes in order to snuff rivals, or other warlords, or to snuff members of your own sect and blame someone else?' another senior military planner now on assignment in the Pentagon asked. 'Will some Iraqis be targeting on behalf of Al Qaeda, or the insurgency, or the Iranians?'..."

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The Telegraph (UK) - Video Allegedly Exposes Security Contractors

We should recall that a FRONTLINE investigation showed similar behavior by mercenaries. They are accountable to noone and their behavior reflects it...

"A 'trophy' video appearing to show security guards in Baghdad randomly shooting Iraqi civilians has sparked two investigations after it was posted on the internet, the Sunday Telegraph can reveal.
The video has sparked concern that private security companies, which are not subject to any form of regulation either in Britain or in Iraq, could be responsible for the deaths of hundreds of innocent Iraqis.
The video, which first appeared on a website that has been linked unofficially to Aegis Defence Services, contained four separate clips, in which security guards open fire with automatic rifles at civilian cars. All of the shooting incidents apparently took place on 'route Irish', a road that links the airport to Baghdad..."


The Democratic Process:

AP: N.C. Judge Declines Protection for Diebold

This should be the 'Aha!' moment for those who are concerned about electronic voting. Diebold, it seems, would rather loose a customer than do what is in the public interest: allow for an audit of the software code that determines the winner of our nation's elections. Are they afraid that a code-review would reveal a backdoor in their system, or a rash of security bugs or holes, that allow for tampering with the results? Their appeal to the protection of intellectual property should not be allowed to outweigh the public interest in a fair electoral system.

"One of the nation's leading suppliers of electronic voting machines may decide against selling new equipment in North Carolina after a judge declined Monday to protect it from criminal prosecution should it fail to disclose software code as required by state law.
Diebold Inc., which makes automated teller machines and security and voting equipment, is worried it could be charged with a felony if officials determine the company failed to make all of its code — some of which is owned by third-party software firms, including Microsoft Corp. — available for examination by election officials in case of a voting mishap.
The requirement is part of the minimum voting equipment standards approved by state lawmakers earlier this year following the loss of more than 4,400 electronic ballots in Carteret County during the November 2004 election. The lost votes threw at least one close statewide race into uncertainty for more than two months..."

On Bush & Co.

Frank Rich: Dishonest, Reprehensible, Corrupt
"George W. Bush is so desperate for allies that his hapless Asian tour took him to Ulan Bator, a first for an American president, so he could mingle with the yaks and give personal thanks for Mongolia's contribution of some 160 soldiers to 'the coalition of the willing.' Dick Cheney, whose honest-and-ethical poll number hit 29 percent in Newsweek's latest survey, is so radioactive that he vanished into his bunker for weeks at a time during the storms Katrina and Scootergate.
The whole world can see that both men are on the run. Just how much so became clear in the brace of nasty broadsides each delivered this month about Iraq. Neither man engaged the national debate ignited by John Murtha about how our troops might be best redeployed in a recalibrated battle against Islamic radicalism. Neither offered a plan for 'victory.' Instead, both impugned their critics' patriotism and retreated into the past to defend the origins of the war. In a seasonally appropriate impersonation of the misanthropic Mr. Potter from 'It's a Wonderful Life,' the vice president went so far as to label critics of the administration's prewar smoke screen both 'dishonest and reprehensible' and 'corrupt and shameless.' He sounded but one epithet away from a defibrillator.
The Washington line has it that the motivation for for the Bush-Cheney rage is the need to push back against opponents who have bloodied the White House in the polls. But, Mr. Murtha notwithstanding, the Democrats are too feeble to merit that strong a response. There is more going on here than politics.
Much more: each day brings slam-dunk evidence that the doomsday threats marshaled by the administration to sell the war weren't, in Cheney-speak, just dishonest and reprehensible but also corrupt and shameless. The more the president and vice president tell us that their mistakes were merely innocent byproducts of the same bad intelligence seen by everyone else in the world, the more we learn that this was not so. The web of half-truths and falsehoods used to sell the war did not happen by accident; it was woven by design and then foisted on the public by a P.R. operation built expressly for that purpose in the White House. The real point of the Bush-Cheney verbal fisticuffs this month, like the earlier campaign to take down Joseph Wilson, is less to smite Democrats than to cover up wrongdoing in the executive branch between 9/11 and shock and awe.
The cover-up is failing, however. No matter how much the president and vice president raise their decibel levels, the truth keeps roaring out..."


Shades of COINTELPRO ?

Washington Post: Pentagon Expanding Its Domestic Surveillance Activity
"The Defense Department has expanded its programs aimed at gathering and analyzing intelligence within the United States, creating new agencies, adding personnel and seeking additional legal authority for domestic security activities in the post-9/11 world.
The moves have taken place on several fronts. The White House is considering expanding the power of a little-known Pentagon agency called the Counterintelligence Field Activity, or CIFA, which was created three years ago. The proposal, made by a presidential commission, would transform CIFA from an office that coordinates Pentagon security efforts - including protecting military facilities from attack - to one that also has authority to investigate crimes within the United States such as treason, foreign or terrorist sabotage or even economic espionage.
The Pentagon has pushed legislation on Capitol Hill that would create an intelligence exception to the Privacy Act, allowing the FBI and others to share information gathered about U.S. citizens with the Pentagon, CIA and other intelligence agencies, as long as the data is deemed to be related to foreign intelligence. Backers say the measure is needed to strengthen investigations into terrorism or weapons of mass destruction.
The proposals, and other Pentagon steps aimed at improving its ability to analyze counterterrorism intelligence collected inside the United States, have drawn complaints from civil liberties advocates and a few members of Congress, who say the Defense Department's push into domestic collection is proceeding with little scrutiny by the Congress or the public.
'We are deputizing the military to spy on law-abiding Americans in America. This is a huge leap without even a [congressional] hearing,' Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said in a recent interview..."


Another Push For Privatization:

NY Times Editorial: Privatizing the American West
"...Mr. Pombo, Republican of California, is head of the House Resources Committee and has long been determined to privatize as much of the West as he can lay his hands on. His bill would allow the holders of mining claims to buy the land outright instead of leasing it - a substantial revision of the current practice. He argues that his proposal would merely adjust laws and affect only about 360,000 acres where mining claims are currently being developed or explored.
But the bill is so vaguely drawn that at least 6 million acres of public land, and possibly as much as 350 million acres, could wind up in the hands of private buyers. These buyers need to express only the intent to develop a mineral claim without any need to demonstrate commercial mining potential. Once the land is bought, it can be developed as the owners see fit. This is a blatant fraud on the American people, expressed in bland legislative legalese. The question is, Who is going to stop it?.."

The Right To Petition Congress:

Reuters: Abramoff Probe Spreads to White House, 4 Lawmakers
"The US Justice Department's probe of Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff is broader than previously thought, examining his dealings with four lawmakers, former and current congressional aides and two former Bush administration officials, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.
Prosecutors in the department's public integrity and fraud divisions are looking into Abramoff's dealings with four Republicans - former House of Representatives Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas, Rep. Bob Ney of Ohio, Rep. John Doolittle of California and Sen. Conrad Burns of Montana, the paper said, citing several people close to the investigation.
Abramoff is under investigation over his lobbying efforts for Indian tribes with casinos. He has also pleaded not guilty to federal charges in Florida that he defrauded lenders in a casino cruise line deal.
The prosecutors are also investigating at least 17 current and former congressional aides, about half of whom later took lobbying jobs with Abramoff, as well as an official from the Interior Department and another from the government's procurement office, the Journal said.
Justice Department spokesman Paul Bresson declined to comment on the investigation.
The newspaper said investigators were looking into whether Abramoff and his partners made illegal payoffs to the lawmakers and aides in the form of campaign contributions, sports tickets, meals, travel and job offers, in exchange for helping their clients..."


On Torture:

AP: Romania Base Focus of Secret Prison Probe
"Top Romanian leaders and the Pentagon vehemently deny that the Mihail Kogalniceanu base in the country's southeast ever hosted a covert detention center, and the Romanians insist the United States never used it as a transit point for al-Qaida captives.
'It's impossible for something like that to have happened on this base,' Lt. Cmdr. Florin Putanu, the base's No. 2 officer, angrily told The Associated Press in a recent interview.
But the compound, heavily used by American forces in 2001-2003 to transport troops and equipment to Afghanistan and Iraq, and scheduled to be handed over to the U.S. military early next year, is under increasing scrutiny.
Ioan Mircea Pascu, Romania's defense minister in 2001-2004, told the AP that parts of Mihail Kogalniceanu were off-limits to Romanian authorities, and the country's main intelligence agency said it has no jurisdiction there.
Pascu said he could not determine whether prisoners were ever held at the installation, but he conceded that planes flying captives to the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, may have made stopovers in Romania.
On Tuesday, Swiss lawmaker Dick Marty — heading the probe by the Council of Europe, the continent's top human rights watchdog — said he was trying to acquire past satellite images of the base and Poland's Szczytno-Szymany airport. Both airfields, Human Rights Watch has alleged, were likely sites for clandestine CIA prisons..."

Iraq:

AFP: Iraqis miss oil fortune: report
"Up to $US194 billion ($263 billion) in Iraqi oil revenues are going to multinational oil companies under long-term contracts, and not to the Iraqi people, a social and environmental group said.
In a report, the group known as Platform said that oil multinationals would be paid between $US74 billion and $US194 billion with rates of return of between 42 per cent and 162 per cent under proposed production-sharing agreements, or PSAs..."


Ray McGovern:Will the US Seize the Opening for Troop Withdrawal?
"The surprising degree of consensus reached by the main Iraqi factions at the Arab League-orchestrated Reconciliation Conference in Cairo last weekend sharply undercuts the unilateral, guns-and-puppets approach of the Bush administration to the deteriorating situation in Iraq. The common demand by Shia and Kurds as well as Sunnis for a timetable for withdrawal of occupation forces demolishes the administration's argument that setting such a timetable would be a huge mistake. Who would know better - the Iraqis or the ideologues advising Bush?..."

Ray McGovern: Murtha And The Colonels
"Listening to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on ABC yesterday, I was reminded of his infamous “long, hard slog” memo of October 16, 2003, to top Pentagon brass. The memo mentioned that he had asked our regional combatant commanders, 'Is our current situation such that ‘the harder we work, the behinder we get?' That memo was leaked to the press almost immediately, but we never learned what those commanders told Rumsfeld.
Two years later, Rumsfeld has now heard, indirectly, from the commanders fighting the war in Iraq. The silver-tongued defense secretary seemed blindsided yesterday, when he was asked by ABC News to explain why the colonels apparently departed so sharply from the official line that they have all the troops they need in Iraq. The interviewer referred Rumsfeld to a Time magazine report yesterday about an unusual closed-door meeting last week at which 10 battalion commanders were asked for their unvarnished views on the situation in Iraq..."

And They Say They Didn't Know:

Murray Waas: Key Bush Intelligence Briefing Kept From Hill Panel
"Ten days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda, according to government records and current and former officials with firsthand knowledge of the matter.
The information was provided to Bush on September 21, 2001 during the 'President's Daily Brief,' a 30- to 45-minute early-morning national security briefing. Information for PDBs has routinely been derived from electronic intercepts, human agents, and reports from foreign intelligence services, as well as more mundane sources such as news reports and public statements by foreign leaders.
One of the more intriguing things that Bush was told during the briefing was that the few credible reports of contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda involved attempts by Saddam Hussein to monitor the terrorist group. Saddam viewed Al Qaeda as well as other theocratic radical Islamist organizations as a potential threat to his secular regime. At one point, analysts believed, Saddam considered infiltrating the ranks of Al Qaeda with Iraqi nationals or even Iraqi intelligence operatives to learn more about its inner workings, according to records and sources.
The September 21, 2001, briefing was prepared at the request of the president, who was eager in the days following the terrorist attacks to learn all that he could about any possible connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda..."

Robert Scheer: Cheney's trouble with the truth
"You've got to hand it to Dick Cheney; no other modern politician has come so close to perfecting the theater of the absurd. Even as he protests his innocence of lying about matters of state, he lies about matters of state...
...Continuing the administration's recent shrill defensive barrage over whose fault the Iraq mess is and with the truth chasing the lies in full view, Cheney had the gall to smear the war's critics as 'corrupt and shameless.' Then, within a few sentences, he showed again why 52 percent of those polled by Newsweek believe Cheney deliberately 'misused or manipulated' prewar intelligence.
First, he shamelessly repeated the absurd notion that a bum-rushed Congress, most of which does not have high security clearance, was privy to the same intelligence as he and his war-salesmen allies. In fact, not only was Cheney and his staff poring over the classified testimonials of an array of known liars, forgers, drunks, opportunists and desperate exiles we now know supplied White House speechwriters with their best lines, he also had access to the intelligence community's combined disclaimers, rebuttals and outright denunciations of these sources and their conveniently tawdry tales...
...Parsed out, Cheney's recent statements amount to a defensive claim the Bush administration didn't lie so much as it was just calamitously incompetent, too eager for invasion to bother to do its due diligence.
The reality, however, is that while the Yalie president may not be the brightest star on the horizon, the owlish Cheney is nobody's dummy. What he is, and has always been, is the most bald-faced of the administration's war hustlers, shamelessly peddling, for example, the cloak-and-dagger tale of a Hussein operative meeting with Sept. 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta in Prague long after U.S. intelligence had dismissed it.
Similarly, it was Cheney who was instrumental in getting Colin Powell to make the astonishing claims of the intelligence source code-named 'Curveball' the centerpiece of the secretary of state's prewar presentation to the United Nations. Now, thanks to a definitive investigation by the Los Angeles Times published Sunday, we find out that top German intelligence sources in charge of interrogating Curveball had already declared him an unreliable source..."

LA Times: German Intelligence Slams Bush Admin. on Pre-War Intel
"The German intelligence officials responsible for one of the most important informants on Saddam Hussein's suspected weapons of mass destruction say that the Bush administration and the CIA repeatedly exaggerated his claims during the run-up to the war in Iraq.
Five senior officials from Germany's Federal Intelligence Service, or BND, said in interviews with The Times that they warned U.S. intelligence authorities that the source, an Iraqi defector code-named Curveball, never claimed to produce germ weapons and never saw anyone else do so.
According to the Germans, President Bush mischaracterized Curveball's information when he warned before the war that Iraq had at least seven mobile factories brewing biological poisons. Then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell also misstated Curveball's accounts in his prewar presentation to the United Nations on Feb. 5, 2003, the Germans said.
Curveball's German handlers for the last six years said his information was often vague, mostly secondhand and impossible to confirm.
'This was not substantial evidence,' said a senior German intelligence official. 'We made clear we could not verify the things he said.'
The German authorities, speaking about the case for the first time, also said that their informant suffered from emotional and mental problems. 'He is not a stable, psychologically stable guy,' said a BND official who supervised the case. 'He is not a completely normal person,' agreed a BND analyst.
Curveball was the chief source of inaccurate prewar U.S. accusations that Baghdad had biological weapons, a commission appointed by Bush reported this year. The commission did not interview Curveball, who still insists his story was true, or the German officials who handled his case.
The German account emerges as the White House is lashing out at domestic critics, particularly Senate Democrats, over allegations the administration manipulated intelligence to go to war..."

Jason Leopold: How Pre-War Iraq Intel Was Cooked
"Democrats leading the charge into the second phase of a bipartisan investigation into pre-war Iraq intelligence have said this week that they will spend the next month or so working with Pentagon officials who last week agreed to probe a top secret spy shop once headed by Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith that many longtime CIA and FBI officials and other intelligence analysts believe was responsible for providing the Bush administration with bogus intelligence used to justify war with Iraq.
When the probe is complete, which aides to Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Senator Carl Levin (D-Mich.) - both of whom are aggressively working to collect pre-war intelligence documents that undercut administration's claims that Iraq posed a grave threat to national security - said will likely be in early 2006, there could be some sort of 'public reprimand' brought against lower-level administration officials who work or worked at the Defense Department, the National Security Council, and in the office of Vice President Dick Cheney, for 'cherry-picking' questionable intelligence on Iraq and using it to win public support for the war.
Based on the way the probe is starting to shape up, it's clear the administration, particularly Feith, who resigned earlier this year, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and possibly Cheney will bear the brunt of the blame, because the three of them sidestepped the usual intelligence gathering process that historically was handled by the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency in favor of their own clandestine intelligence gathering operations in which questionable information on the so-called Iraqi threat was collected and used by administration officials to build a case for war but wasn't vetted by career intelligence analysts, said a senior aide to McCain who requested anonymity for fear of angering members of the GOP..."

Ray McGovern: Corrupted Intelligence
"...Congressional sources disclosed Thursday that the Department of Defense Inspector General has agreed to review the pre-war intelligence activities of former defense undersecretary Douglas Feith, a main architect of the war on Iraq. The IG investigation could take at least six months, say defense officials. Indeed, the study is not yet under way, since the IG is 'still discussing it with the Roberts committee staff,' according to Defense Department spokesman Bryan Whitman.
For the gullible, here's a new promise from Pat Roberts: 'We're going to try to expedite it [the IG study on Feith] as much as possible ... The IG knows we are very eager to get this done but he wants to get it done right.'

Right..."


Freedom of The Press?

The Guardian (UK) - Legal gag on Bush-Blair war row
"The attorney general last night threatened newspapers with the Official Secrets Act if they revealed the contents of a document allegedly relating to a dispute between Tony Blair and George Bush over the conduct of military operations in Iraq.
It is believed to be the first time the Blair government has threatened newspapers in this way. Though it has obtained court injunctions against newspapers, the government has never prosecuted editors for publishing the contents of leaked documents, including highly sensitive ones about the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.
The attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, last night referred editors to newspaper reports yesterday that described the contents of a memo purporting to be at the centre of charges against two men under the secrets act.
Under the front-page headline 'Bush plot to bomb his ally', the Daily Mirror reported that the US president last year planned to attack the Arabic television station al-Jazeera, which has its headquarters in Doha, the capital of Qatar, where US and British bombers were based.
Richard Wallace, editor of the Daily Mirror, said last night: 'We made No 10 fully aware of the intention to publish and were given 'no comment' officially or unofficially. Suddenly 24 hours later we are threatened under section 5 [of the secrets act],'..."


Wither The Right To Peaceable Assembly?

AP: Anti-War Protesters Arrested Near Bush's Ranch
"...In August, hundreds of demonstrators camped off the road during a 26-day protest led by Sheehan, whose 24-year-old soldier son Casey was killed in Iraq last year. But a month later, county commissioners banned camping in any county ditch and parking within 7 miles of the ranch, citing safety and traffic congestion issues.
Earlier this week, three demonstrators filed a federal lawsuit against McLennan County over the two local bans..."

Unprecedented Executive Authority:

NY Times Editorial: Um, About That Dirty Bomb?
"Almost three and a half years ago, the Bush administration announced that it had arrested a Chicago-born man named Jose Padilla while he was entering the United States to explode a 'dirty bomb' and blow up apartment buildings. The attorney general, John Ashcroft, said Mr. Padilla was a Qaeda-trained terrorist so dangerous that he was being tossed into a Navy brig and the key was being thrown away.
The administration hotly defended its right to hold Mr. Padilla without legal process because he was declared an unlawful enemy combatant, one of the new powers that President Bush granted himself after 9/11. The administration fought the case up to the Supreme Court. Mr. Padilla's plot was thwarted, the Justice Department claimed, only because of the government's ability to hold suspected terrorists in secretive prisons where they were sweated, to put it mildly, for information. The 'dirty bomb' plot supposedly was divulged by a top Qaeda member who had been interrogated 100 times at one such location.
Never mind. As of yesterday, Mr. Padilla stopped being an unlawful combatant, and the new attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, refused even to talk about that issue. Mr. Padilla is not going to be charged with planning to explode bombs, dirty or otherwise, in the United States. Just in time for the administration to prod Congress on extending the Patriot Act and to avoid having to argue the case before the Supreme Court, Mr. Padilla was charged with aiding terrorists in other countries and will be turned over to civilian authorities.
Mr. Padilla was added late in the game, and in a minor role, to a continuing case against four other men. He faces serious charges that carry a possible life sentence, but they do nothing to clear up the enormous legal questions created by this case, nor do they have the remotest connection with the original accusations.
The Padilla case was supposed to be an example of why the administration needs to suspend prisoners' rights when it comes to the war on terror. It turned out to be the opposite. If Mr. Padilla was seriously planning a 'dirty bomb' attack, he can never be held accountable for it in court because the illegal conditions under which he has been held will make it impossible to do that. If he was only an inept fellow traveler in the terrorist community, he is excellent proof that the government is fallible and needs the normal checks of the judicial system. And, of course, if he is innocent, he was the victim of a terrible injustice.
The same is true of the hundreds of other men held at Guantánamo Bay and in the C.I.A.'s secret prisons. This is hardly what Americans have had in mind hearing Mr. Bush's constant assurances since Sept. 11, 2001, that he will bring terrorists to justice."

A (Former) Lawmaker Finds His Spine:

Sen. Bob Graham: What I Knew Before the Invasion
"In the past week President Bush has twice attacked Democrats for being hypocrites on the Iraq war. '[M]ore than 100 Democrats in the House and Senate, who had access to the same intelligence, voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power,' he said.
The president's attacks are outrageous. Yes, more than 100 Democrats voted to authorize him to take the nation to war. Most of them, though, like their Republican colleagues, did so in the legitimate belief that the president and his administration were truthful in their statements that Saddam Hussein was a gathering menace -- that if Hussein was not disarmed, the smoking gun would become a mushroom cloud...
...At a meeting of the Senate intelligence committee on Sept. 5, 2002, CIA Director George Tenet was asked what the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) provided as the rationale for a preemptive war in Iraq. An NIE is the product of the entire intelligence community, and its most comprehensive assessment. I was stunned when Tenet said that no NIE had been requested by the White House and none had been prepared. Invoking our rarely used senatorial authority, I directed the completion of an NIE.
Tenet objected, saying that his people were too committed to other assignments to analyze Saddam Hussein's capabilities and will to use chemical, biological and possibly nuclear weapons. We insisted, and three weeks later the community produced a classified NIE.
There were troubling aspects to this 90-page document. While slanted toward the conclusion that Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction stored or produced at 550 sites, it contained vigorous dissents on key parts of the information, especially by the departments of State and Energy. Particular skepticism was raised about aluminum tubes that were offered as evidence Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program. As to Hussein's will to use whatever weapons he might have, the estimate indicated he would not do so unless he was first attacked.
Under questioning, Tenet added that the information in the NIE had not been independently verified by an operative responsible to the United States. In fact, no such person was inside Iraq. Most of the alleged intelligence came from Iraqi exiles or third countries, all of which had an interest in the United States' removing Hussein, by force if necessary.
The American people needed to know these reservations, and I requested that an unclassified, public version of the NIE be prepared. On Oct. 4, Tenet presented a 25-page document titled 'Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction Programs.' It represented an unqualified case that Hussein possessed them, avoided a discussion of whether he had the will to use them and omitted the dissenting opinions contained in the classified version. Its conclusions, such as 'If Baghdad acquired sufficient weapons-grade fissile material from abroad, it could make a nuclear weapon within a year,' underscored the White House's claim that exactly such material was being provided from Africa to Iraq.
From my advantaged position, I had earlier concluded that a war with Iraq would be a distraction from the successful and expeditious completion of our aims in Afghanistan. Now I had come to question whether the White House was telling the truth -- or even had an interest in knowing the truth.
On Oct. 11, I voted no on the resolution to give the president authority to go to war against Iraq. I was able to apply caveat emptor. Most of my colleagues could not."

The Lies That Took A Nation To War:

Here is yet another instance of Judith Miller doing the Neo-Cons' budding of selling the agenda of preemptive war on the pages of America's 'Paper of Record.' Remember, this is the journalist whom the NY Times granted a six-figure severance package not long ago.

Democracy Now! - The Man Who Sold the Iraq War: John Rendon, Bush's General in the Propaganda War
"...AMY GOODMAN: It’s great to have you with us. Well, this piece in Rolling Stone is quite a read. Why don't you start off by talking about a man in the Gulf of Thailand who was taking a lie detector test?

JAMES BAMFORD: Well, this took place in December of 2001. This was really the sort of opening shot of the propaganda war to get the United States into war. And the person being polygraphed was an Iraqi defector by the name of al-Haideri, and the Iraqi National Congress, the I.N.C., had brought him out of Iraq and brought him to Thailand primarily to expose him to the media and to try to get his story told. And what his story was was that Saddam Hussein had not only chemical and biological weapons but even nuclear weapons and precursors to nuclear weapons hidden in Iraq in various places. Some of the biological weapons were supposedly hidden under the main hospital in Baghdad, for example. So it was an amazing story.

And this was the -- up until this time there was a lot of speculation in the press and in Congress and other places about what Saddam may have, what might have been left over from the Gulf War and so forth. But this was going to be the very first time that somebody could actually point to information as proof, having seen where these things were buried and so forth. So, the I.N.C., the Iraqi National Congress, which was led by Ahmed Chalabi, decided to call in two journalists to broadcast this information to the world.

AMY GOODMAN: Wait. First, the lie detector proved what?

JAMES BAMFORD: Exactly. Before he actually called these people in to broadcast this information, obviously the C.I.A. had a big interest in this and the Pentagon had a big interest in this, so the C.I.A. flew a polygraph operator with his machine all the way over to Thailand, Pattaya, Thailand, which is south of Bangkok, and they went into a hotel room, they strapped up al-Haideri, and they asked him all these questions. And they went over and over for hours his allegations regarding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and they came away with charts that indicated he was deceptive, that he was lying, that this was not true. And they flew back to Washington and, presumably, assuming this was going to be the end of it. But that was information that was never made public. They didn't broadcast that information. So what happened was the I.N.C. and Chalabi decided to take that bogus information that al-Haideri was giving and broadcast it around the world. So, they called in two journalists. One of the journalists was Judy Miller, who was given the worldwide print exclusive rights to the story.

AMY GOODMAN: And who called her in?

JAMES BAMFORD: Chalabi called her in. Chalabi asked her if she wanted to do the story, and she flew from Washington all the way over to Bangkok to interview al-Haideri..."

The Right To Privacy:

Dan Savage: Can I Get a Little Privacy?
"...We [Liberals] love the right to privacy because we believe adults should have access to birth control, abortion services and pornography as well as the right to engage in gay sex. Social conservatives hate the right to privacy for the very same reason, as they seek to regulate private behaviors from access to birth control to masturbation. (Think I'm kidding about masturbation? In Justice Antonin Scalia's dissent in Lawrence v. Texas, he wrote that the majority's decision called into question the legality of state laws against 'masturbation, adultery, fornication.')...
...If the Republicans can propose a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, why can't the Democrats propose a right to privacy amendment? Making this implicit right explicit would forever end the debate about whether there is a right to privacy. And the debate over the bill would force Republicans who opposed it to explain why they don't think Americans deserve a right to privacy - which would alienate not only moderates, but also those libertarian, small-government conservatives who survive only in isolated pockets on the Eastern Seaboard and the American West..."


On Torture:

Jane Mayer: THE EXPERIMENT - The military trains people to withstand interrogation. Are those methods being misused at Guantánamo?
"...Last year, Vice-Admiral Albert T. Church III was appointed by the Pentagon to investigate the problem of detainee abuse. This spring, he released a three-hundred-and-sixty-eight-page report, most of which remains classified. In an unclassified section, Church concluded that there was 'no link between approved interrogation techniques and detainee abuse.' When cruelties did occur, the report claimed, they were rare mishaps, the result of combat stress, insufficient oversight, or a 'breakdown of good order and discipline.'
Yet a number of critics, including human-rights officials, detainees’ lawyers, and others with knowledge of the inner workings of the detention center, believe that the problems at Guantánamo are the result of a more systematic effort. The strange accounts of torment that have steadily emerged, these critics say, are connected to decades of research by American scientists into the psychological nature of warfare and captivity..."

More Spin From Team-Bush:

NY Times Editorial: Decoding Mr. Bush's Denials
"...Mr. Bush says everyone had the same intelligence he had - Mr. Clinton and his advisers, foreign governments, and members of Congress - and that all of them reached the same conclusions. The only part that is true is that Mr. Bush was working off the same intelligence Mr. Clinton had. But that is scary, not reassuring. The reports about Saddam Hussein's weapons were old, some more than 10 years old. Nothing was fresher than about five years, except reports that later proved to be fanciful.
Foreign intelligence services did not have full access to American intelligence. But some had dissenting opinions that were ignored or not shown to top American officials. Congress had nothing close to the president's access to intelligence. The National Intelligence Estimate presented to Congress a few days before the vote on war was sanitized to remove dissent and make conjecture seem like fact.
It's hard to imagine what Mr. Bush means when he says everyone reached the same conclusion. There was indeed a widespread belief that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons. But Mr. Clinton looked at the data and concluded that inspections and pressure were working - a view we now know was accurate. France, Russia and Germany said war was not justified. Even Britain admitted later that there had been no new evidence about Iraq, just new politics..."


Mr. Tomlinson's Ethics:

NY Times: Report Says Ex-Chief of Public TV Violated Federal Law
"Investigators at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting concluded today that its former chairman repeatedly broke federal law and its own regulations in a campaign to combat what he saw as liberal bias.
The scathing report by the corporation's inspector general described a dysfunctional organization that violated the Public Broadcasting Act, which created the corporation and was written to insulate programming decisions from politics..."


Guess What Wins Out When Bush's FDA Evaluates Science vs Political Opportunity?

NY Times: F.D.A.'s
Rejection of Contraceptive Is Questioned
"The Food and Drug Administration did not follow its usual procedures in rejecting an application for over-the-counter sales of the emergency contraceptive pill Plan B, the investigating arm of Congress found today.
The Government Accountability Office also said in its 57-page report that there were questions about whether top officials of the F.D.A. made the decision to reject the application for over-the-counter sales of the drug, which is opposed by some religious conservatives, even before its own advisory committee had issued its recommendation on the matter.
Several legislators and scientists have complained that the F.D.A. was putting politics ahead of science in its handling of the contraceptive, which can be used as emergency, morning-after contraception..."


Iraq:

AP: Pentagon Admits Use of White Phosphorus on Iraqis
"Pentagon officials acknowledged Tuesday that U.S. troops used white phosphorous as a weapon against insurgent strongholds during the battle of Fallujah last November. But they denied an Italian television news report that the spontaneously flammable material was used against civilians.
Lt. Col. Barry Venable, a Pentagon spokesman, said that while white phosphorous is most frequently used to mark targets or obscure a position, it was used at times in Fallujah as an incendiary weapon against enemy combatants..."

Turning An Espousal of Peace Into A Policy of 'Preemptive War'

Jimmy Carter: This Isn't the Real America
"In recent years, I have become increasingly concerned by a host of radical government policies that now threaten many basic principles espoused by all previous administrations, Democratic and Republican.
These include the rudimentary American commitment to peace, economic and social justice, civil liberties, our environment and human rights.
Also endangered are our historic commitments to providing citizens with truthful information, treating dissenting voices and beliefs with respect, state and local autonomy and fiscal responsibility.
At the same time, our political leaders have declared independence from the restraints of international organizations and have disavowed long-standing global agreements - including agreements on nuclear arms, control of biological weapons and the international system of justice.
Instead of our tradition of espousing peace as a national priority unless our security is directly threatened, we have proclaimed a policy of 'preemptive war,' an unabridged right to attack other nations unilaterally to change an unsavory regime or for other purposes. When there are serious differences with other nations, we brand them as international pariahs and refuse to permit direct discussions to resolve disputes..."


On Torture:

M. Gregg Bloche & Jonathan H. Marks: Who Taught Us to Torture?
"How did American interrogation tactics after 9/11 come to include abuse rising to the level of torture? Much has been said about the illegality of these tactics, but the strategic error that led to their adoption has been overlooked.
The Pentagon effectively signed off on a strategy that mimics Red Army methods. But those tactics were not only inhumane, they were ineffective. For Communist interrogators, truth was beside the point: their aim was to force compliance to the point of false confession.
Fearful of future terrorist attacks and frustrated by the slow progress of intelligence-gathering from prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Pentagon officials turned to the closest thing on their organizational charts to a school for torture. That was a classified program at Fort Bragg, NC, known as SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape. Based on studies of North Korean and Vietnamese efforts to break American prisoners, SERE was intended to train American soldiers to resist the abuse they might face in enemy custody...
...SERE methods are classified, but the program's principles are known. It sought to recreate the brutal conditions American prisoners of war experienced in Korea and Vietnam, where Communist interrogators forced false confessions from some detainees, and broke the spirits of many more, through Pavlovian and other conditioning... "


Selective Intelligence:

Michael Isikoff & Mark Hosenball: Al-Libi's Tall Tales
"A CIA document shows the agency in January 2003 raised questions about an al Qaeda detainee's claims that Saddam Hussein's government provided chemical and biological weapons training to terrorists - weeks before President George W. Bush and other top officials flatly used those same claims to make their case for war against Iraq.
The CIA document, recently provided to Congress and obtained by NEWSWEEK, fills in some of the blanks in the mysterious case of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, a captured al Qaeda commander whose claims about poison-gas training for the Qaeda group by Saddam's government formed the basis for some of the most dramatic arguments used by senior administration officials in the run up to the invasion of Iraq..."

Who Is Rewriting History, If Not You, Mr. President?

President Bush, using Veteran's Day as an opportunity to defend his war of choice, had the following to say on Friday:

"...While it's perfectly legitimate to criticize my decisions or the conduct of the war, it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began.
Some Democrats and antiwar critics are now claiming we manipulated the intelligence and misled the American people about why we went to war. These critics are fully aware that a bipartisan Senate investigation found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community's judgments related to Iraq's weapons programs. They also know that intelligence agencies from around the world agreed with our assessment of Saddam Hussein. They know the United Nations passed more than a dozen resolutions citing his development and possession of weapons of mass destruction..."

First of all, what anti-war voices are doing is not a 'rewriting history.' It is an attempt to set the record of manipulation straight; a record that the Administration has been desperate to obfuscate behind a storm of media spin and misinformation.

How can the administration explain Mr. Cheney's September 8, 2002 action of telling Meet The Press's Tim Russert that it was not his assertion or the government's that Iraq had WMD's? Rather, the VP pointed to the 'evidence' presented by the NY Times on September 8, 2002, while in reality it was his Chief of Staff, Libby Lewis, who told NY Times reporter Judith Miller about the aluminum tubes and to speak with the Administration's 'sources.' This type of circular reasoning points to an Administration that seeks to obfuscate information and deflect the attribution of motive to its actions.

Cheney's office fed Ms. Miller information on aluminum tubes and a fake Al Qaeda-Saddam-connection, allowing her to sell 'explosive' headlines to her editors. Had all of this information been allowed to be vetted through normal intelligence channels, rather than being 'stovepiped' from the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans [lead by Douglas Feith] directly to the VP's office, it would have been discredited. Further, had there not been the unprecedented and repeated interference of the Vice President at the CIA, the final National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq would not have contained information that has since been discredited by David Kay and Hans Blix.

Bush's statement that 'a bipartisan Senate investigation found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community's judgments,' is on its face, a lie, or at minimum a half-truth. The bipartisan Senate investigation Mr. Bush mentions expressly did not find any answers to this question, because the second phase of the investigation, whose purpose it was to answer this question, has yet to be undertaken. The omission of this fact is pivotal, yet Mr. Bush's speechwriters insist on repeating it as a means to deflect criticism where it is deserved. The second phase has been deliberately held up by Senator Pat Roberts, the ranking GOP member on the Sen. Intelligence Committee, and it took Sen. Reed's exercise of Senate Rule 21 on November 2nd to force the Senate to pursue finishing this work, which had been initially promised after the 2004 election. What's the hold-up?
The same day Sen. Roberts cited "...two possible roadblocks: the half-done job of analyzing more than 500 prewar intelligence claims and probing the role played by Douglas Feith, the former undersecretary of defense for policy who pushed vigorously for an invasion of Iraq based on flawed intelligence."

The American people deserve to be told the story of how these events unfolded. Sy Hersh and Pentagon whistleblower Karen Kwiatkowski have done investigative work on the matter, so one can only wonder about the motives that drive those who wish story to remain untold:

"The Stovepipe"

"Selective Intelligence"

"The new Pentagon papers"

The Lies That Took A Fearful Nation To War:

William Rivers Pitt: Yes, They Lied
"Find a defender of the White House on your television these days, and you are likely to hear them blame Bill Clinton for Iraq. Yes, you read that right. The talking point du jour lately has focused on comments made by Clinton from the mid-to-late 1990s to the effect that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and was a threat. The pretzel logic here, of course, is straightforward: this Democratic president thought the stuff was there, and that justifies the claims made by the Bush crew over the last few years about Iraqi weapons.
Let's take a deeper look at the facts. Right off the bat, it is safe to say that Clinton and his crew had every reason to believe Iraq was in possession of weapons of mass destruction during the 1990s. For one thing, they knew this because the previous two administrations - Reagan and Bush - actively assisted the Hussein regime in the development of these programs. In other words, we had the receipts..."

The Guardian (UK) - Top level meetings in Washington bring Chalabi in from cold
"Ahmed Chalabi comes in from the cold today, arriving in Washington to meet senior Bush administration officials for the first time in two years - despite lingering allegations that the Iraqi politician provided bogus pre-war intelligence, and a continuing investigation into whether he passed US secrets to Iran.
The investigation began 17 months ago, after US intelligence officials alleged that he or his aides had informed Tehran that Washington had broken Iran's spy codes. Iraqi forces, backed by US troops, raided Mr Chalabi's offices in May last year, and the Baghdad authorities issued an arrest warrant for his security chief, Araz Habib, accusing him of being an Iranian agent..."

Slate.com - President Cheney - His office really does run national security
"...With a national security staff that numbered 14 last year (Al Gore usually had four or five), Cheney's office has a finger in every pie. Several of the State Department's top diplomats, including Eric Edelman, now undersecretary of defense for policy, and Victoria Nuland, now ambassador to NATO, are alums of Cheney's office. According to David L. Phillips' Losing Iraq: Inside the Postwar Reconstruction Fiasco, the dominant figure in some of the key interagency deliberations on postwar Iraq was not the State Department official who chaired them but Samantha Ravich, a Cheney aide who left the government and has since returned to OVP*. In addition, Cheney has remarkable influence over his onetime boss, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld..."


Iraq:

The Independent (UK) - US forces 'used chemical weapons' during assault on city of Fallujah
"Powerful new evidence emerged yesterday that the United States dropped massive quantities of white phosphorus on the Iraqi city of Fallujah during the attack on the city in November 2004, killing insurgents and civilians with the appalling burns that are the signature of this weapon.
Ever since the assault, which went unreported by any Western journalists, rumours have swirled that the Americans used chemical weapons on the city.
On 10 November last year, the Islam Online website wrote: 'US troops are reportedly using chemical weapons and poisonous gas in its large-scale offensive on the Iraqi resistance bastion of Fallujah, a grim reminder of Saddam Hussein's alleged gassing of the Kurds in 1988,'..."


Renewable Energy:

OpenSourceEnergy: TMA's vertical axis wind turbine introduces competitive advantage
"Design creates pull on the back side, contributing to 40%+ wind conversion efficiencies; doesn't kill birds; runs more quietly; and doesn't need to be installed as high, blending better with landscape. Generating costs estimated at 3.5 cents per kilowatt-hour, surpassing conventional energy sources..."


The Guardian (UK) - Running on empty
"...Addressing a select audience that included oil ministers and senior officials from the oil cartel Opec, the energy watchdog International Energy Agency, and the UN, plus advocates of a premature oil peak such as the former British cabinet minister Michael Meacher, Mr Schlesinger offered a graphic analogy.
The peak-oil threat and the response to it are reminiscent, he said, of the rumbles under Vesuvius and the reaction to them of its hapless residents. 'The peak or plateau is coming,' he said.
He's right. We don't know exactly when, but the probability is sooner rather than later. When it comes to oilfield discoveries these days, oil companies are finding small deposits, in contrast with the massive oilfields of old. In fact, 80% of global production today still come from the oilfields discovered before 1970, and these are being rapidly pumped towards exhaustion.
Yet demand is soaring. 'Political systems do not deal easily with long term threats, even if they have a probability of 100%,' Schlesinger warned.
His message was clear: economic horror will descend on the world if we do not plan ahead, and the time to start is now..."

The Lies That Took A Nation To War:

This evidence allows us to understand the Administration's actions in disseminating this information as truly suspect. In light of this, the Administration excuse of 'everyone looked at the same intelligence we did' no longer carries any water. They knew it to be questionable, yet they pushed their invasion agenda full steam ahead. Had the Senate Intelligence Commitee been shown this DIA report, would they still have been supportive of a preemptive strike?

NY Times: Report Warned Bush Team about Intelligence Doubts
"A top member of Al Qaeda in American custody was identified as a likely fabricator months before the Bush administration began to use his statements as the foundation for its claims that Iraq trained Al Qaeda members to use biological and chemical weapons, according to newly declassified portions of a Defense Intelligence Agency document.
The document, an intelligence report from February 2002, said it was probable that the prisoner, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, 'was intentionally misleading the debriefers' in making claims about Iraqi support for Al Qaeda's work with illicit weapons.
The document provides the earliest and strongest indication of doubts voiced by American intelligence agencies about Mr. Libi's credibility. Without mentioning him by name, President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Colin L. Powell, then secretary of state, and other administration officials repeatedly cited Mr. Libi's information as 'credible' evidence that Iraq was training Al Qaeda members in the use of explosives and illicit weapons..."

The Guardian (UK) - Blair's litany of failures on Iraq - ambassador's damning verdict "Tony Blair repeatedly passed up opportunities to put a brake on the rush to war in Iraq, a failure that may have contributed to the country's present anarchy, according to Sir Christopher Meyer, Britain's ambassador to Washington at the time, in his book DC Confidential, serialised in the Guardian from today.
Sir Christopher, highly critical of Mr Blair's performance in the run-up to the war, argues the prime minister and his team were 'seduced' by the proximity and glamour of US power and reluctant to negotiate conditions with George Bush for Britain's support for the war..."


Our (Fleeting) Civil Rights:

Washington Post: FBI Secretly Scrutinizing Americans
"...The Connecticut case affords a rare glimpse of an exponentially growing practice of domestic surveillance under the USA Patriot Act, which marked its fourth anniversary on Oct. 26. 'National security letters,' created in the 1970s for espionage and terrorism investigations, originated as narrow exceptions in consumer privacy law, enabling the FBI to review in secret the customer records of suspected foreign agents. The Patriot Act, and Bush administration guidelines for its use, transformed those letters by permitting clandestine scrutiny of U.S. residents and visitors who are not alleged to be terrorists or spies.
The FBI now issues more than 30,000 national security letters a year, according to government sources, a hundredfold increase over historic norms. The letters - one of which can be used to sweep up the records of many people - are extending the bureau's reach as never before into the telephone calls, correspondence and financial lives of ordinary Americans.
Issued by FBI field supervisors, national security letters do not need the imprimatur of a prosecutor, grand jury or judge. They receive no review after the fact by the Justice Department or Congress. The executive branch maintains only statistics, which are incomplete and confined to classified reports. The Bush administration defeated legislation and a lawsuit to require a public accounting, and has offered no example in which the use of a national security letter helped disrupt a terrorist plot.
The burgeoning use of national security letters coincides with an unannounced decision to deposit all the information they yield into government data banks - and to share those private records widely, in the federal government and beyond. In late 2003, the Bush administration reversed a long-standing policy requiring agents to destroy their files on innocent American citizens, companies and residents when investigations closed. Late last month, President Bush signed Executive Order 13388, expanding access to those files for 'state, local and tribal' governments and for 'appropriate private sector entities,' which are not defined..."


On Torture:

AP: Wilkerson Points Finger at Cheney on Torture
"Vice President Dick Cheney's office triggered abuse of Iraqi prisoners with word that filtered down to soldiers in the field that interrogations were not providing needed intelligence, a former senior State Department official has alleged.
Lawrence Wilkerson, who was Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff during President Bush's first term, said Thursday, 'It was clear to me there that there was a visible audit trail from the vice president's office through the secretary of defense down to the commanders in the field.'
While the view of Cheney's office was put in carefully couched terms, to a soldier in the field it meant sometimes using ways that 'were not in accordance with the spirit of the Geneva Conventions and the law of war,' Wilkerson, a former colonel, said on National Public Radio's 'Morning Edition.'
'If you are a military man you know that you just don't do these sorts of things because once you give just the slightest bit of leeway there are those in the armed forces who will take advantage of that,' Wilkerson said.
Asked if Powell was aware of Wilkerson's remarks, his spokeswoman, Peggy Cifrino, said, 'Colonel Wilkerson does not speak for or work for him.'
A Cheney spokeswoman, Jennifer Mayfield, said: 'The vice president's office has no response,'."

The public's right to know about pollutants:

OMB-Watch: EPA announcs plans to dismantle the Toxic Release Inventory
"EPA recently announced plans to dismantle the Toxic Release Inventory (TRI), our nation’s premier tool for notifying the public out about toxic pollution. The TRI annually provides communities with details about the amount of toxic chemicals released into the air, land, and water. The information enables groups and individuals to press companies to reduce their pollution, resulting in safer, healthier communities. But EPA is placing corporations ahead of community safety with enormous rollbacks in TRI reporting.

The EPA has proposed three changes, each of which would leave you in the dark about dangerous pollution in your community. The agency wants to:

• Cut this successful annual program in half by eliminating every other year of reporting;

• Allow companies to pollute ten times as much before being required to report the details about how much toxic pollution was produced and where it went;

• Permit facilities to hide information on low production of persistent bioacculuative toxins (PBTs), which are dangerous even small quantities because they are toxic, persist in the environment, and build up in people's bodies.

In a time when people are being exposed to unknown chemicals in the Gulf Coast, we should be arming ourselves with more information, not less. But instead, EPA is sacrificing this needed information in order to reduce paperwork on corporations and save $2 million a year. Our right to know is worth so much more than that..."

File a public comment (by Dec 5, 2005) to keep this change from happening - you can do so at the site above, or go through the procedures outlined in the Federal Register (Docket TRI-2005-0073). To find this document (titled 'Toxics Release Inventory Burden Reduction Proposed Rule'), go to
http://www.gpoaccess.gov/fr/ and use the top search field. Enter the terms in brackets above.

The Right To Privacy:

EFF: No Cell Phone Location Tracking Without Probable Cause
"Court Issues Surveillance Smack-Down to Justice Department

New York - Agreeing with a brief submitted by EFF, a federal judge forcefully rejected the government's request to track the location of a mobile phone user without a warrant.
Strongly reaffirming an earlier decision, Federal Magistrate James Orenstein in New York comprehensively smacked down every argument made by the government in an extensive, fifty-seven page opinion issued this week. Judge Orenstein decided, as EFF has urged, that tracking cell phone users in real time required a showing of probable cause that a crime was being committed. Judge Orenstein's opinion was decisive, and referred to government arguments variously as 'unsupported,' 'misleading,' 'contrived,' and a 'Hail Mary.'
'This is a true victory for privacy in the digital age, where nearly any mobile communications device you use might be converted into a tracking device,' said EFF Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston. 'Combined with a similar decision this month from a federal court in Texas, I think we're seeing a trend—judges are starting to realize that when it comes to surveillance issues, the DOJ has been pulling the wool over their eyes for far too long,'..."


A Conflict Of Interest:

The Boston Globe: Plaintiff alleges Alito conflict
"Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. ruled in a 2002 case in favor of the Vanguard mutual fund company at a time when he owned more than $390,000 in Vanguard funds and later complained about an effort to remove him from the case, court records show -- despite an earlier promise to recuse himself from cases involving the company.
The case involved a Massachusetts woman, Shantee Maharaj, who has spent nearly a decade fighting to win back the assets of her late husband's individual retirement accounts, which had been frozen by Vanguard after a court judgment in favor of a former business partner of her husband.
Her lawyer, John G. S. Flym, a retired Northeastern law professor, said in an interview yesterday that Alito's 'lack of integrity is so flagrant' in the case that he should be disqualified as a Supreme Court nominee.
Maharaj, 50, discovered Alito's ownership of Vanguard shares in 2002 when she requested his financial disclosure forms after he ruled against her appeal to the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit..."


The Lies That Took A Nation To War:

The Guardian (UK) - Italy 'warned Saddam intelligence was bogus'
"Italian intelligence warned the United States about bogus information on Saddam Hussein's nuclear ambitions at about the time President Bush cited them as a crucial reason for invading Iraq, an Italian parliamentarian said yesterday.
Massimo Brutti of the opposition Left Democrats made his claim to reporters after listening to evidence from Italy's chief spymaster, General Nicolo Pollari, in the latest episode to undermine the motivations for the Iraq war.
The Italian government of Silvio Berlusconi was and remains a key ally of the Bush administration. Italian intelligence has been linked to a dossier alleged to have been forged by an Italian that purported to show that Iraq had been seeking to buy uranium from Niger to make nuclear weapons.
In his State of the Union address in January 2003 President Bush repeated a similar claim to bolster his case for war. 'At about the same as the State of the Union address,' Senator Brutti told reporters after listening to Gen Pollari's evidence, the Italian intelligence services 'said that the dossier didn't correspond to the truth'..."


Fairness In The Tax-Code?

Robert Reich: Mortgage Deductions Could Use a Ceiling
"White House panel's suggestion to dramatically limit homeowners' tax write-off is sensible, fair -- and dead on arrival..."

CPB Chair's Behavior Too Much, Even For The Republican Majority:

NY Times: Broadcasting Ex-Chairman Is Removed From Board
"Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, the former head of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, was forced to step down as a member of its board on Thursday evening.
The move came after the board began reviewing a confidential report by the inspector general of the corporation into accusations about Mr. Tomlinson's use of corporation money to promote more conservative programming.
They included Mr. Tomlinson's decision to hire a researcher to monitor the political leanings of guests on the public policy program 'Now' with Bill Moyers; his use of a White House official to set up an ombudsman's office to scrutinize programs for political balance; and secret payments approved by Mr. Tomlinson to two Republican lobbyists.
The move - and a statement by the corporation - strongly suggested that the inspector general discovered significant problems under Mr. Tomlinson, but officials at the corporation declined to discuss those findings. Board members who had copies of the report declined to discuss it, citing confidentiality agreements...."


The Forged Intel That Took A Nation To War:

NY Times: Italy's Top Spy Names Freelance Agent as Source of Forged Niger-Iraq Uranium Documents
"Italy's spymaster identified an Italian occasional spy named Rocco Martino on Thursday as the disseminator of forged documents that described efforts by Iraq to buy uranium ore from Niger for a nuclear weapons program, three lawmakers said Thursday.
The spymaster, Gen. Nicolò Pollari, director of the Italian military intelligence agency known as Sismi, disclosed that Mr. Martino was the source of the forged documents in closed-door testimony to a parliamentary committee that oversees secret services, the lawmakers said.
Senator Massimo Brutti, a member of the committee, told reporters that General Pollari had identified Mr. Martino as a former intelligence informer who had been 'kicked out of the agency.' He did not say Mr. Martino was the forger.
The revelation came on a day when the Federal Bureau of Investigation confirmed that it had shut down its two-year investigation into the origin of the forged documents..."

Stalin's Cynical Comment A Reality?

"It is enough that the people know there was an election. The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything."

The Free Press: Powerful Government Accountability Office report confirms key 2004 stolen election findings
"...The latest critical confirmation of key indicators that the election of 2004 was stolen comes in an extremely powerful, penetrating report from the Government Accountability Office that has gotten virtually no mainstream media coverage.
The government's lead investigative agency is known for its general incorruptibility and its thorough, in-depth analyses. Its concurrence with assertions widely dismissed as 'conspiracy theories' adds crucial new weight to the case that Team Bush has no legitimate business being in the White House.
Nearly a year ago, senior Judiciary Committee Democrat John Conyers (D-MI) asked the GAO to investigate electronic voting machines as they were used during the November 2, 2004 presidential election. The request came amidst widespread complaints in Ohio and elsewhere that often shocking irregularities defined their performance.
According to CNN, the U.S. House Judiciary Committee received 'more than 57,000 complaints' following Bush's alleged re-election. Many such concerns were memorialized under oath in a series of sworn statements and affidavits in public hearings and investigations conducted in Ohio by the Free Press and other election protection organizations...
...Among other things, the GAO confirms that:

1. Some electronic voting machines 'did not encrypt cast ballots or system audit logs, and it was possible to alter both without being detected.' In other words, the GAO now confirms that electronic voting machines provided an open door to flip an entire vote count. More than 800,000 votes were cast in Ohio on electronic voting machines, some seven times Bush's official margin of victory.

2. 'It was possible to alter the files that define how a ballot looks and works so that the votes for one candidate could be recorded for a different candidate.' Numerous sworn statements and affidavits assert that this did happen in Ohio 2004.

3. 'Vendors installed uncertified versions of voting system software at the local level.' 3. Falsifying election results without leaving any evidence of such an action by using altered memory cards can easily be done, according to the GAO.

4. The GAO also confirms that access to the voting network was easily compromised because not all digital recording electronic voting systems (DREs) had supervisory functions password-protected, so access to one machine provided access to the whole network. This critical finding confirms that rigging the 2004 vote did not require a 'widespread conspiracy' but rather the cooperation of a very small number of operatives with the power to tap into the networked machines and thus change large numbers of votes at will. With 800,000 votes cast on electronic machines in Ohio, flipping the number needed to give Bush 118,775 could be easily done by just one programmer.

5. Access to the voting network was also compromised by repeated use of the same user IDs combined with easily guessed passwords. So even relatively amateur hackers could have gained access to and altered the Ohio vote tallies.

6. The locks protecting access to the system were easily picked and keys were simple to copy, meaning, again, getting into the system was an easy matter.

7. One DRE model was shown to have been networked in such a rudimentary fashion that a power failure on one machine would cause the entire network to fail, re-emphasizing the fragility of the system on which the Presidency of the United States was decided.

8. GAO identified further problems with the security protocols and background screening practices for vendor personnel, confirming still more easy access to the system.

In essence, the GAO study makes it clear that no bank, grocery store or mom & pop chop shop would dare operate its business on a computer system as flimsy, fragile and easily manipulated as the one on which the 2004 election turned.

The GAO findings are particularly damning when set in the context of an election run in Ohio by a Secretary of State simultaneously working as co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign. Far from what election theft skeptics have long asserted, the GAO findings confirm that the electronic network on which 800,000 Ohio votes were cast was vulnerable enough to allow a a tiny handful of operatives -- or less -- to turn the whole vote count using personal computers operating on relatively simple software.

The GAO documentation flows alongside other crucial realities surrounding the 2004 vote count. For example:

# The exit polls showed Kerry winning in Ohio, until an unexplained last minute shift gave the election to Bush. Similar definitive shifts also occurred in Iowa, Nevada and New Mexico, a virtual statistical impossibility.

# A few weeks prior to the election, an unauthorized former ES&S voting machine company employee, was caught on the ballot-making machine in Auglaize County

# Election officials in Mahoning County now concede that at least 18 machines visibly transferred votes for Kerry to Bush. Voters who pushed Kerry's name saw Bush's name light up, again and again, all day long. Officials claim the problems were quickly solved, but sworn statements and affidavits say otherwise. They confirm similar problems in Franklin County (Columbus). Kerry's margins in both counties were suspiciously low.

# A voting machine in Mahoning County recorded a negative 25 million votes for Kerry. The problem was allegedly fixed.

# In Gahanna Ward 1B, at a fundamentalist church, a so-called 'electronic transfer glitch' gave Bush nearly 4000 extra votes when only 638 people voted at that polling place. The tally was allegedly corrected, but remains infamous as the 'loaves and fishes' vote count.

# In Franklin County, dozens of voters swore under oath that their vote for Kerry faded away on the DRE without a paper trail.

# In Miami County, at 1:43am after Election Day, with the county's central tabulator reporting 100% of the vote - 19,000 more votes mysteriously arrived; 13,000 were for Bush at the same percentage as prior to the additional votes, a virtual statistical impossibility.

# In Cleveland, large, entirely implausible vote totals turned up for obscure third party candidates in traditional Democratic African-American wards. Vote counts in neighboring wards showed virtually no votes for those candidates, with 90% going instead for Kerry.

# Prior to one of Blackwell's illegitimate 'show recounts,' technicians from Triad voting machine company showed up unannounced at the Hocking County Board of Elections and removed the computer hard drive.

# In response to official information requests, Shelby and other counties admit to having discarded key records and equipment before any recount could take place.

# In a conference call with Rev. Jackson, Attorney Cliff Arnebeck, Attorney Bob Fitrakis and others, John Kerry confirmed that he lost every precinct in New Mexico that had a touchscreen voting machine. The losses had no correlation with ethnicity, social class or traditional party affiliation---only with the fact that touchscreen machines were used.

# In a public letter, Rep. Conyers has stated that 'by and large, when it comes to a voting machine, the average voter is getting a lemon - the Ford Pinto of voting technology. We must demand better.'

But the GAO report now confirms that electronic voting machines as deployed in 2004 were in fact perfectly engineered to allow a very small number of partisans with minimal computer skills and equipment to shift enough votes to put George W. Bush back in the White House.
Given the growing body of evidence, it appears increasingly clear that's exactly what happened."


The Reality of War No Commercial Media Wants To Broadcast:

Le Nouvel Observateur: Confessions of a Marine
"In a just-published book, Master-Sergeant Jimmy Massey tells about his mission to recruit for, then fight in, the war in Iraq. He tells why he killed. And cracked..."


The Right To Petition Congress:

NY Times: Inquiry on Lobbyist Abramoff Widens to Senior Officials
"Investigators have expanded their inquiries into the activities of the lobbyist Jack Abramoff to include his efforts to pressure Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton and other senior Interior Department officials on behalf of Indian tribes with gambling interests, lawyers involved in the investigations said in interviews this week.
Although Ms. Norton is not reported to be a focus of the inquiries, the lawyers said investigators from the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, the Justice Department and the inspector general of the Interior Department had raised questions about actions of her former deputy and the president of a lobbying group that Ms. Norton helped found..."


Above The Law?

The Washington Post: CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons
"The CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe, according to US and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement.
The secret facility is part of a covert prison system set up by the CIA nearly four years ago that at various times has included sites in eight countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan and several democracies in Eastern Europe, as well as a small center at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, according to current and former intelligence officials and diplomats from three continents.
The hidden global internment network is a central element in the CIA's unconventional war on terrorism. It depends on the cooperation of foreign intelligence services, and on keeping even basic information about the system secret from the public, foreign officials and nearly all members of Congress charged with overseeing the CIA's covert actions.
The existence and locations of the facilities - referred to as 'black sites' in classified White House, CIA, Justice Department and congressional documents - are known to only a handful of officials in the United States and, usually, only to the president and a few top intelligence officers in each host country.
The CIA and the White House, citing national security concerns and the value of the program, have dissuaded Congress from demanding that the agency answer questions in open testimony about the conditions under which captives are held. Virtually nothing is known about who is kept in the facilities, what interrogation methods are employed with them, or how decisions are made about whether they should be detained or for how long..."

Democracy Now ! - Headlines for November 3, 2005
"...Human Rights Watch has identified Poland and Romania as likely locations, citing flight records of CIA aircraft transporting detainees from Afghanistan. A spokesperson for the Polish defense ministry denied the allegations to the Financial Times. A Romanian spokesperson declined comment. Agence France Presse is reporting Czech Republic Interior Minister Frantisek Bublan says his country recently turned down a US request to set up a detention center on its territory..."

Don't 'blink,' The Push Toward RFID Technology is Here:

Chase, my bank, sent me a new credit card for my account. It has an RFID chip embedded in it, enabling the user to have a 'new and convenient' way to make payments by holding their card near a vendor's 'blink' device. A signature is no longer required. The RFID chip contains no internal power source, but rather is energized by the 'reader' device and is then capable of transmitting information stored on it.

The problem with this, and the reason I had Chase extend the use of my current cards, is hacking. What is to prevent a person from building or aquiring such a device, approaching people in public, and holding the device up to a person's wallet or purse to validate a transaction of their choosing? What assurances do users have that their card does not contain their full account information, including their PIN? Why would a consumer, especially in this era of ID theft, wish to use technology that potentially decreases, rather than increases their personal data security?

And here is the "see, I thought so"...

AP: Hackers' Prowess on Display at Defcon Conference
"...Defcon is a no-man's land where customary adversaries -- federal agents vs. digital mavericks -- are supposed to share ideas about making the Internet a safer place. But it's really a showcase for flexing hacker muscle.
This year's hot topics included a demonstration of just how easy it may be to attack supposedly foolproof biometric safeguards, which determine a person's identity by scanning such things as thumb prints, irises and voice patterns.
Banks, supermarkets and even some airports have begun to rely on such systems, but a security analyst who goes by the name Zamboni challenged hackers to bypass biometrics by attacking their backend systems networks. 'Attack it like you would Microsoft or Linux,' he advised.
Radio frequency identification tags that send wireless signals and that are used to track a growing list of items including retail merchandise, animals and U.S. military shipments-- also came under scrutiny.
A group of twentysomethings from Southern California climbed onto the hotel roof to show that RFID tags could be read from as far as 69 feet (21 meters). That's important because the tags have been proposed for such things as U.S. passports, and critics have raised fears that kidnappers could use RFID readers to pick traveling U.S. citizens out of a crowd.
RFID companies had said the signals didn't reach more than 20 feet (six meters), said John Hering, one of the founders of Flexilis, the company that conducted the experiment..."

The Retaliatory Leak:

William Rivers Pitt: Nothing Shakin' on Shakedown Street?
"...At first blush, the indictment of Libby gets nowhere near the center of the issue: the lies that led to war, and the outing of a covert CIA agent to cover those lies. Yet it feels very much as if this indictment was only the first salvo in a larger barrage to come..."



Sen. Harry Reid: (today)
"...When General Shinseki indicated several hundred thousand troops would be needed in Iraq, his military career came to an end. When then OMB Director Larry Lindsay suggested the cost of this war would approach $200 billion, his career in the Administration came to an end. When U.N. Chief Weapons Inspector Hans Blix challenged conclusions about Saddam's WMD capabilities, the Administration pulled out his inspectors. When Nobel Prize winner and IAEA head Mohammed el-Baradei raised questions about the Administration's claims of Saddam's nuclear capabilities, the Administration attempted to remove him from his post. When Joe Wilson stated that there was no attempt by Saddam to acquire uranium from Niger, the Administration launched a vicious and coordinated campaign to demean and discredit him, going so far as to expose the fact that his wife worked as a CIA agent. This behavior is unacceptable..."


Food:

NY Times:
What Is Organic? Powerful Players Want a Say
"...last week, Senate and House Republicans on the Agriculture appropriations subcommittee inserted a last-minute provision into the department's fiscal 2006 budget specifying that certain artificial ingredients could be used in organic food.
The Organic Trade Association, an industry lobbying group that proposed the amendment and spent several months pushing for its adoption, says that the measure will encourage the continued growth of organic food.
Some advocacy groups, however, say the amendment will weaken federal organic food standards, first established under a 1990 law. Ronnie Cummins, national director of the Organic Consumers Association, calls the initiative a 'sneak attack engineered by the likes of Kraft, Dean Foods and Smucker's.'
One of the lobbyists for Altria, Kraft's majority owner, Abigail Blunt - the wife of Representative Roy Blunt, Republican of Missouri, who recently became interim House majority leader after Tom DeLay of Texas resigned from the post - has been working on the issue, the company says.
Dean Foods' subsidiary Horizon Organic and the J. M. Smucker Company, the owner of Knudsen and Santa Cruz Organic juices, said they supported the work by the Organic Trade Association, which represents both large and small companies in the business, but did no lobbying on their own.
The amendment injects Congress directly into the debate over whether certain artificial ingredients and industrial chemicals should be allowed in products labeled organic. In a lawsuit ruled upon in January, Arthur Harvey, an organic blueberry farmer, argued that no synthetics at all should be in food bearing the 'USDA Organic' seal. A federal judge agreed, sending shivers down the spine of many organic food manufacturers.
Katherine DiMatteo, executive director of the Organic Trade Association, said that the amendment was intended to protect the industry from the Harvey ruling and will not change the status quo. If applied, the judge's ruling would have forced many manufacturers to stop using the USDA Organic seal and instead relabel products to state, for instance, 'cookies made with organic flour' or 'frozen lasagna made with organic tomatoes.'
Many in the organic industry say they are willing to allow some use of synthetics in organic food. Since 2002, the National Organic Standards Board, a 15-member panel of advisers appointed by the Agriculture Department, has served as the gatekeeper for such substances. In that time, 38 have been approved, many of them relatively harmless ingredients like baking powder, pectin, ascorbic acid and carbon dioxide.
But Joseph Mendelson, legal director at the Center for Food Safety, a liberal advocacy group, says that the proposed legislation will open the door to a range of other chemicals and artificial materials, including a large category of so-called food contact substances - things like boiler additives, disinfectants and lubricants with unpronounceable names..."


Special Treatment, If You're WalMart:


NY Times: Labor Dept. Is Rebuked over Pact with Wal-Mart
"The Labor Department's inspector general strongly criticized department officials yesterday for 'serious breakdowns' in procedures involving an agreement promising Wal-Mart Stores 15 days' notice before labor investigators would inspect its stores for child labor violations.
The report by the inspector general faulted department officials for making 'significant concessions' to Wal-Mart, the nation's largest retailer, without obtaining anything in return. The report also criticized department officials for letting Wal-Mart lawyers write substantial parts of the settlement and for leaving the department's own legal division out of the settlement process.
The report said that in granting Wal-Mart the 15-day notice, the Wage and Hour Division violated its own handbook. It added that agreeing to let Wal-Mart jointly develop news releases about the settlement with the department violated Labor Department policies..."