Friday, April 28, 2006
Is Our 230-Year Experiment In Democracy Over?
Rep Conyers: Daily Kos: Taking the President to Court
"...Several public interest groups have sought to stop some parts of the bill from being implemented, under the theory that the bill is unconstitutional. However, getting into the weeds a bit, they have lacked the ability to stop the entire bill. To seek this recourse, the person bringing the suit must have what is called 'standing,' that is they must show they were injured or deprived of some right. Because the budget bill covers so many areas of the law, it is difficult for one person to show they were harmed by the entire bill. Thus, many of these groups have only sought to stop part of it.
After consulting with some of the foremost constitutional experts in the nation, I determined that one group of people are injured by the entire bill: Members of the House. We were deprived of our right to vote on a bill that is now being treated as the law of the land.
So, I am going to court. With many of my Democratic Colleagues (list appended at the bottom of this diary), I plan to file suit tomorrow in federal district court in Detroit against the President, members of the Cabinet and other federal officers seeking to have a simple truth confirmed: a bill not passed by the House and Senate is not a law, even if the President signs it. As such, the Budget bill cannot be treated as the law of the land..."
Rep Conyers: Daily Kos: Taking the President to Court
"...Several public interest groups have sought to stop some parts of the bill from being implemented, under the theory that the bill is unconstitutional. However, getting into the weeds a bit, they have lacked the ability to stop the entire bill. To seek this recourse, the person bringing the suit must have what is called 'standing,' that is they must show they were injured or deprived of some right. Because the budget bill covers so many areas of the law, it is difficult for one person to show they were harmed by the entire bill. Thus, many of these groups have only sought to stop part of it.
After consulting with some of the foremost constitutional experts in the nation, I determined that one group of people are injured by the entire bill: Members of the House. We were deprived of our right to vote on a bill that is now being treated as the law of the land.
So, I am going to court. With many of my Democratic Colleagues (list appended at the bottom of this diary), I plan to file suit tomorrow in federal district court in Detroit against the President, members of the Cabinet and other federal officers seeking to have a simple truth confirmed: a bill not passed by the House and Senate is not a law, even if the President signs it. As such, the Budget bill cannot be treated as the law of the land..."
Wednesday, April 26, 2006
Politicing With National Security:
Murray Waas: Is There A Double Standard On Leak Probes?
"When the CIA announced on Friday that it had fired an employee who the agency claims 'knowingly and willfully shared classified intelligence' with a newspaper reporter, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kansas, immediately praised the agency's action, saying that 'unauthorized disclosures of classified information can significantly harm our ability to protect the American people.'
Roberts, one of the staunchest defenders of the Bush administration's effort to stop the flow of sensitive information to the press, said in a statement that '[t]hose who leak classified information not only risk the disclosure of intelligence sources and methods, but also expose the brave men and women of the intelligence community to greater danger. Clearly, those guilty of improperly disclosing classified information should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.'
But three years ago on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, Roberts himself was involved in disclosing sensitive intelligence information that, according to four former senior intelligence officers, impaired efforts to capture Saddam Hussein and potentially threatened the lives of Iraqis who were spying for the United States.
On March 20, 2003, at the onset of military hostilities between U.S. and Iraqi forces, Roberts said in a speech to the National Newspaper Association that he had 'been in touch with our intelligence community' and that the CIA had informed President Bush and the National Security Council 'of intelligence information from what we call human intelligence that indicated the location of Saddam Hussein and his leadership in a bunker in the suburbs of Baghdad.'
The former intelligence officials said in interviews that Roberts was never held accountable for his comments, which bore directly on the issue of intelligence-gathering sources and methods, and revealed that Iraqis close to Hussein were probably talking to the United States. These former officials contrasted the Roberts case with last week's firing of CIA officer Mary O. McCarthy, as examples of how rank and file intelligence professionals now have much to fear from legitimate and even inadvertent contacts with journalists, while senior executive branch officials and members of Congress are almost never held accountable when they seriously breach national security through leaks of information..."
Corporate Rule:
Mokhiber and Weissman: The Ten Worst Corporations of 2005
"2005 was a good year for bad corporations.
There were no U.S. elections to worry about, with their troubling possibility of politicians running on the popular platform of curbing corporate power.
There were corporate scandals and corporate crime and violence galore, but none that rated the ongoing banner headlines of Enron and WorldCom.
Indeed, the ongoing prosecutions of individuals associated with corporate financial scandals enabled Big Business and its apologists to claim there had actually been a crackdown on corporate crime.
All leaving corporations free to buy legislation, profiteer, pollute, poison, and mistreat workers without restraint.
Benefiting from the spike in oil prices associated with the tragedy of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, ExxonMobil recorded the most profitable year any company has ever achieved.
Thirty years ago, when the oil giants profiteered in the wake of the first oil embargo, almost half the U.S. Senate voted to break up the integrated oil companies. In 2005, just 40 of 435 members of the House of Representatives were willing to co-sponsor the leading legislation calling for a much more modest approach, imposing a windfall profits tax on the oil companies. Eight members of the Senate co-sponsored the leading windfall profits bill there.
In the U.S. Congress, corporations were able to ram through limitations on victims' rights to sue corporate perpetrators (mislabeled class action 'reform'), the NAFTA-expanding Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), and an energy bill that deregulates electric utilities and actually gives tax breaks to the oil industry, among many other government gifts.
Perhaps nothing revealed Big Business's cockiness more than the Chamber of Commerce and other trade associations' efforts to undermine the Sarbanes-Oxley legislation. Sarbanes-Oxley imposes very modest anti-fraud requirements on corporations. It was the only reform legislation passed after the Enron and related financial scandals.
These corporations will never stop on their own.
Asked to comment on a recent Harris poll that found 90 percent of people in the United States believe corporations have too much power in Washington, D.C., Hank Cox, a spokesperson for the National Association of Manufacturers, replies, 'That's a perception fostered by the news media and the entertainment industry, and if they really had any idea of how little power corporations have they would be astounded.'
The corporations will never give up power, unless forced to do so by the people.
Where to start?
No better place than the 10 worst corporations of 2005, presented herewith in alphabetical order..."
Iraq:
Democracy Now! - Antonia Juhasz on The Bush Agenda: Invading the World, One Economy at a Time
"ANTONIA JUHASZ:...it’s a myth that there was not a post-war planning done by the Bush administration. The reason why it failed was because the interests it was serving were U.S. multinationals, not reconstruction in Iraq.
That plan was ready two months before the invasion. It was written by BearingPoint, Inc., a company based in Virginia that received a $250 million contract to rewrite the entire economy of Iraq. It drafted that new economy. That new economy was put into place systematically by L. Paul Bremer, the head of the occupation government of Iraq for 14 months, who implemented exactly one hundred orders, basically all of which are still in place today. And everyone who is watching who is familiar with the policies of the World Trade Organization, the North American Free Trade Agreement, the World Bank, the I.M.F., will understand the orders.
They implement some of the most radical corporate globalization ideas, such as free investment rules for multinational corporations. That means corporations can enter Iraq, and they essentially don't have to contribute at all to the economy of Iraq. The most harmful provision thus far has been the national treatment provision, which meant that the Iraqis could not give preference to Iraqi companies or workers in the reconstruction, and therefore, U.S. companies received preference in the reconstruction. They hired workers who weren't even from Iraq, in most cases, and utterly bungled the reconstruction.
And the most important company, in my mind, to receive blame is the Bechtel Corporation of San Francisco. They have received $2.8 billion to rebuild water, electricity and sewage systems, the most important systems in the life of an Iraqi. After the first Gulf War, the Iraqis rebuilt these systems in three months' time. It’s been three years, and, as you said, those services are still below pre-war levels...
AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Antonia Juhasz, author and activist, wrote The Bush Agenda: Invading the World, One Economy at a Time. Now, gas is over $3 in many places. What's the connection?
ANTONIA JUHASZ: Well, here's the connection. The Bush administration is the most beholden administration probably in American history to the oil and gas industry. This is the first time in history that the President, Vice President and Secretary of State are all former energy company officials. In fact, both Bush and Rice have more experience as energy company officials than they do as government leaders. Cheney outbeats them. He’s spent 30 years working for government. However, his five years at Halliburton have been so profitable that you might say that his Halliburton years outweigh their oil years, because Bush was a very bad oil company executive. But their links to the oil sector are deep.
The oil industry provided more than 13 times more money to the Bush-Cheney ticket in the first round of elections than it did to his competitor, nine times more in the second. And this industry has been absolutely coddled by the Bush administration: enormous tax subsidies, deregulation, and, I would argue, a war waged on their behalf.
Now, there's two intimate connections between the war and the price of gas. But first, I think it’s very important for people to understand that the vertical integration of the oil industry, which has been absolutely exacerbated under the Bush administration. For example, ChevronTexaco and Unocal merging into one company, the completion of Exxon and Mobil's merger, all of these little companies merging into enormous behemoths, so that you have ExxonMobil being the company that has received the highest profits of any company in the world, over the last two years, ever in the history of the world. That is because of the vertical integration and monopoly power of these companies. That means that they control exploration, production, refining, marketing and sales.
The price of oil at the pump is about 50% the price of a barrel of oil, about 25% taxes, and then the rest is marketing and just the price determined by the company at the pump. So that means that about 18% to 20% is absolutely determined by the oil companies themselves and governed by the companies themselves. So they could reduce the price of oil and reduce their profit margin, or they could jack up the price of oil and increase their profit margin. They have chosen to do the latter.
And one of the things that has helped them do that is, first of all, the United States is receiving a tremendous amount of oil from Iraq. Oil is down in overall export and production, but not tremendously so. We were -- at prewar was 2.5 million barrels a day. We’re now at about 2 or 2.2 million barrels a day. But 50% of that, on average, is coming to the United States, and it’s being brought to the United States by Chevron and Exxon and Marathon. The myth of dramatically reduced supply has helped them create an argument to the American public, which is, you know, it’s a time of war, we’re suffering, gas prices are going to go up, everyone needs to come in and support this because this is war. Well, that's just not true. The companies are using that as a myth to help make it okay for them to receive these utterly ridiculous profits..."
Murray Waas: Is There A Double Standard On Leak Probes?
"When the CIA announced on Friday that it had fired an employee who the agency claims 'knowingly and willfully shared classified intelligence' with a newspaper reporter, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kansas, immediately praised the agency's action, saying that 'unauthorized disclosures of classified information can significantly harm our ability to protect the American people.'
Roberts, one of the staunchest defenders of the Bush administration's effort to stop the flow of sensitive information to the press, said in a statement that '[t]hose who leak classified information not only risk the disclosure of intelligence sources and methods, but also expose the brave men and women of the intelligence community to greater danger. Clearly, those guilty of improperly disclosing classified information should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.'
But three years ago on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, Roberts himself was involved in disclosing sensitive intelligence information that, according to four former senior intelligence officers, impaired efforts to capture Saddam Hussein and potentially threatened the lives of Iraqis who were spying for the United States.
On March 20, 2003, at the onset of military hostilities between U.S. and Iraqi forces, Roberts said in a speech to the National Newspaper Association that he had 'been in touch with our intelligence community' and that the CIA had informed President Bush and the National Security Council 'of intelligence information from what we call human intelligence that indicated the location of Saddam Hussein and his leadership in a bunker in the suburbs of Baghdad.'
The former intelligence officials said in interviews that Roberts was never held accountable for his comments, which bore directly on the issue of intelligence-gathering sources and methods, and revealed that Iraqis close to Hussein were probably talking to the United States. These former officials contrasted the Roberts case with last week's firing of CIA officer Mary O. McCarthy, as examples of how rank and file intelligence professionals now have much to fear from legitimate and even inadvertent contacts with journalists, while senior executive branch officials and members of Congress are almost never held accountable when they seriously breach national security through leaks of information..."
Corporate Rule:
Mokhiber and Weissman: The Ten Worst Corporations of 2005
"2005 was a good year for bad corporations.
There were no U.S. elections to worry about, with their troubling possibility of politicians running on the popular platform of curbing corporate power.
There were corporate scandals and corporate crime and violence galore, but none that rated the ongoing banner headlines of Enron and WorldCom.
Indeed, the ongoing prosecutions of individuals associated with corporate financial scandals enabled Big Business and its apologists to claim there had actually been a crackdown on corporate crime.
All leaving corporations free to buy legislation, profiteer, pollute, poison, and mistreat workers without restraint.
Benefiting from the spike in oil prices associated with the tragedy of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, ExxonMobil recorded the most profitable year any company has ever achieved.
Thirty years ago, when the oil giants profiteered in the wake of the first oil embargo, almost half the U.S. Senate voted to break up the integrated oil companies. In 2005, just 40 of 435 members of the House of Representatives were willing to co-sponsor the leading legislation calling for a much more modest approach, imposing a windfall profits tax on the oil companies. Eight members of the Senate co-sponsored the leading windfall profits bill there.
In the U.S. Congress, corporations were able to ram through limitations on victims' rights to sue corporate perpetrators (mislabeled class action 'reform'), the NAFTA-expanding Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), and an energy bill that deregulates electric utilities and actually gives tax breaks to the oil industry, among many other government gifts.
Perhaps nothing revealed Big Business's cockiness more than the Chamber of Commerce and other trade associations' efforts to undermine the Sarbanes-Oxley legislation. Sarbanes-Oxley imposes very modest anti-fraud requirements on corporations. It was the only reform legislation passed after the Enron and related financial scandals.
These corporations will never stop on their own.
Asked to comment on a recent Harris poll that found 90 percent of people in the United States believe corporations have too much power in Washington, D.C., Hank Cox, a spokesperson for the National Association of Manufacturers, replies, 'That's a perception fostered by the news media and the entertainment industry, and if they really had any idea of how little power corporations have they would be astounded.'
The corporations will never give up power, unless forced to do so by the people.
Where to start?
No better place than the 10 worst corporations of 2005, presented herewith in alphabetical order..."
Iraq:
Democracy Now! - Antonia Juhasz on The Bush Agenda: Invading the World, One Economy at a Time
"ANTONIA JUHASZ:...it’s a myth that there was not a post-war planning done by the Bush administration. The reason why it failed was because the interests it was serving were U.S. multinationals, not reconstruction in Iraq.
That plan was ready two months before the invasion. It was written by BearingPoint, Inc., a company based in Virginia that received a $250 million contract to rewrite the entire economy of Iraq. It drafted that new economy. That new economy was put into place systematically by L. Paul Bremer, the head of the occupation government of Iraq for 14 months, who implemented exactly one hundred orders, basically all of which are still in place today. And everyone who is watching who is familiar with the policies of the World Trade Organization, the North American Free Trade Agreement, the World Bank, the I.M.F., will understand the orders.
They implement some of the most radical corporate globalization ideas, such as free investment rules for multinational corporations. That means corporations can enter Iraq, and they essentially don't have to contribute at all to the economy of Iraq. The most harmful provision thus far has been the national treatment provision, which meant that the Iraqis could not give preference to Iraqi companies or workers in the reconstruction, and therefore, U.S. companies received preference in the reconstruction. They hired workers who weren't even from Iraq, in most cases, and utterly bungled the reconstruction.
And the most important company, in my mind, to receive blame is the Bechtel Corporation of San Francisco. They have received $2.8 billion to rebuild water, electricity and sewage systems, the most important systems in the life of an Iraqi. After the first Gulf War, the Iraqis rebuilt these systems in three months' time. It’s been three years, and, as you said, those services are still below pre-war levels...
AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Antonia Juhasz, author and activist, wrote The Bush Agenda: Invading the World, One Economy at a Time. Now, gas is over $3 in many places. What's the connection?
ANTONIA JUHASZ: Well, here's the connection. The Bush administration is the most beholden administration probably in American history to the oil and gas industry. This is the first time in history that the President, Vice President and Secretary of State are all former energy company officials. In fact, both Bush and Rice have more experience as energy company officials than they do as government leaders. Cheney outbeats them. He’s spent 30 years working for government. However, his five years at Halliburton have been so profitable that you might say that his Halliburton years outweigh their oil years, because Bush was a very bad oil company executive. But their links to the oil sector are deep.
The oil industry provided more than 13 times more money to the Bush-Cheney ticket in the first round of elections than it did to his competitor, nine times more in the second. And this industry has been absolutely coddled by the Bush administration: enormous tax subsidies, deregulation, and, I would argue, a war waged on their behalf.
Now, there's two intimate connections between the war and the price of gas. But first, I think it’s very important for people to understand that the vertical integration of the oil industry, which has been absolutely exacerbated under the Bush administration. For example, ChevronTexaco and Unocal merging into one company, the completion of Exxon and Mobil's merger, all of these little companies merging into enormous behemoths, so that you have ExxonMobil being the company that has received the highest profits of any company in the world, over the last two years, ever in the history of the world. That is because of the vertical integration and monopoly power of these companies. That means that they control exploration, production, refining, marketing and sales.
The price of oil at the pump is about 50% the price of a barrel of oil, about 25% taxes, and then the rest is marketing and just the price determined by the company at the pump. So that means that about 18% to 20% is absolutely determined by the oil companies themselves and governed by the companies themselves. So they could reduce the price of oil and reduce their profit margin, or they could jack up the price of oil and increase their profit margin. They have chosen to do the latter.
And one of the things that has helped them do that is, first of all, the United States is receiving a tremendous amount of oil from Iraq. Oil is down in overall export and production, but not tremendously so. We were -- at prewar was 2.5 million barrels a day. We’re now at about 2 or 2.2 million barrels a day. But 50% of that, on average, is coming to the United States, and it’s being brought to the United States by Chevron and Exxon and Marathon. The myth of dramatically reduced supply has helped them create an argument to the American public, which is, you know, it’s a time of war, we’re suffering, gas prices are going to go up, everyone needs to come in and support this because this is war. Well, that's just not true. The companies are using that as a myth to help make it okay for them to receive these utterly ridiculous profits..."
Monday, April 24, 2006
W's 'Legacy'
Sean Wilentz: The Worst President in History?
"George W. Bush's presidency appears headed for colossal historical disgrace. Barring a cataclysmic event on the order of the terrorist attacks of September 11th, after which the public might rally around the White House once again, there seems to be little the administration can do to avoid being ranked on the lowest tier of U.S. presidents. And that may be the best-case scenario. Many historians are now wondering whether Bush, in fact, will be remembered as the very worst president in all of American history..."
Robert Dreyfuss: Vice Squad
"They terrorize other government officials, and they’re so secretive that their names aren’t even revealed to a harmless federal employee directory. And they’ve helped ruin the country. Meet Dick Cheney’s staff..."
The Lies That Took A Fearful Nation To War:
Reuters: CIA Warned Bush of No Weapons in Iraq
"The CIA had evidence Iraq possessed no weapons of mass destruction six months before the 2003 US-led invasion but was ignored by a White House intent on ousting Saddam Hussein, a former senior CIA official said according to CBS.
Tyler Drumheller, who headed CIA covert operations in Europe during the run-up to the Iraq war, said intelligence opposing administration claims of a WMD threat came from a top Iraqi official who provided the US spy agency with other credible information.
The source 'told us that there were no active weapons of mass destruction programs,' Drumheller said in a CBS interview to be aired on Sunday on the network's news magazine, '60 Minutes.'
'The (White House) group that was dealing with preparation for the Iraq war came back and said they were no longer interested,' he was quoted as saying in interview excerpts released by CBS on Friday.
'We said: 'Well, what about the intel?' And they said: 'Well, this isn't about intel anymore. This is about regime change',' added Drumheller, whose CIA operation was assigned the task of debriefing the Iraqi official.
He was the latest former US official to accuse the White House of setting an early course toward war in Iraq and ignoring intelligence that conflicted with its aim..."
Jim Sleeper: Armchair Warriors, Exeunt Omnes
"Public intellectuals, once supportive of the war, are now quietly exiting the stage they helped set..."
Throwing Whistleblowers To The Wolves:
NY Times: Secret Prisons Whistle-Blower Fired by CIA
"The Central Intelligence Agency has dismissed a senior career officer for disclosing classified information to reporters, including material for Pulitzer Prize-winning articles in The Washington Post about the agency's secret overseas prisons for terror suspects, intelligence officials said Friday.
The CIA would not identify the officer, but several government officials said it was Mary O. McCarthy, a veteran intelligence analyst who until 2001 was senior director for intelligence programs at the National Security Council, where she served under President Bill Clinton and into the Bush administration.
At the time of her dismissal, Ms. McCarthy was working in the agency's inspector general's office, after a stint at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, an organization in Washington that examines global security issues.
The dismissal of Ms. McCarthy provided fresh evidence of the Bush administration's determined efforts to stanch leaks of classified information. The Justice Department has separately opened preliminary investigations into the disclosure of information to The Post, for its articles about secret prisons, as well as to The New York Times, for articles last fall that disclosed the existence of a program of domestic eavesdropping without warrants supervised by the National Security Agency. Those articles were also recognized this week with a Pulitzer Prize..."
Sean Wilentz: The Worst President in History?
"George W. Bush's presidency appears headed for colossal historical disgrace. Barring a cataclysmic event on the order of the terrorist attacks of September 11th, after which the public might rally around the White House once again, there seems to be little the administration can do to avoid being ranked on the lowest tier of U.S. presidents. And that may be the best-case scenario. Many historians are now wondering whether Bush, in fact, will be remembered as the very worst president in all of American history..."
Robert Dreyfuss: Vice Squad
"They terrorize other government officials, and they’re so secretive that their names aren’t even revealed to a harmless federal employee directory. And they’ve helped ruin the country. Meet Dick Cheney’s staff..."
The Lies That Took A Fearful Nation To War:
Reuters: CIA Warned Bush of No Weapons in Iraq
"The CIA had evidence Iraq possessed no weapons of mass destruction six months before the 2003 US-led invasion but was ignored by a White House intent on ousting Saddam Hussein, a former senior CIA official said according to CBS.
Tyler Drumheller, who headed CIA covert operations in Europe during the run-up to the Iraq war, said intelligence opposing administration claims of a WMD threat came from a top Iraqi official who provided the US spy agency with other credible information.
The source 'told us that there were no active weapons of mass destruction programs,' Drumheller said in a CBS interview to be aired on Sunday on the network's news magazine, '60 Minutes.'
'The (White House) group that was dealing with preparation for the Iraq war came back and said they were no longer interested,' he was quoted as saying in interview excerpts released by CBS on Friday.
'We said: 'Well, what about the intel?' And they said: 'Well, this isn't about intel anymore. This is about regime change',' added Drumheller, whose CIA operation was assigned the task of debriefing the Iraqi official.
He was the latest former US official to accuse the White House of setting an early course toward war in Iraq and ignoring intelligence that conflicted with its aim..."
Jim Sleeper: Armchair Warriors, Exeunt Omnes
"Public intellectuals, once supportive of the war, are now quietly exiting the stage they helped set..."
Throwing Whistleblowers To The Wolves:
NY Times: Secret Prisons Whistle-Blower Fired by CIA
"The Central Intelligence Agency has dismissed a senior career officer for disclosing classified information to reporters, including material for Pulitzer Prize-winning articles in The Washington Post about the agency's secret overseas prisons for terror suspects, intelligence officials said Friday.
The CIA would not identify the officer, but several government officials said it was Mary O. McCarthy, a veteran intelligence analyst who until 2001 was senior director for intelligence programs at the National Security Council, where she served under President Bill Clinton and into the Bush administration.
At the time of her dismissal, Ms. McCarthy was working in the agency's inspector general's office, after a stint at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, an organization in Washington that examines global security issues.
The dismissal of Ms. McCarthy provided fresh evidence of the Bush administration's determined efforts to stanch leaks of classified information. The Justice Department has separately opened preliminary investigations into the disclosure of information to The Post, for its articles about secret prisons, as well as to The New York Times, for articles last fall that disclosed the existence of a program of domestic eavesdropping without warrants supervised by the National Security Agency. Those articles were also recognized this week with a Pulitzer Prize..."
Saturday, April 22, 2006
Iraq:
Jeremy Scahill: Blood Is Thicker Than Blackwater
"...For most people, the gruesome killings were the first they had ever heard of Blackwater USA, a small, North Carolina-based private security company. Since the Falluja incident, and also because of it, Blackwater has emerged as one of the most successful and profitable security contractors operating in Iraq. The company and its secretive, mega-millionaire, right-wing Christian founder, Erik Prince, position Blackwater as a patriotic extension of the US military, and its employees are required to take an oath of loyalty to the Constitution...
...A day after the killings, Prince enlisted the services of the Alexander Strategy Group, a now disgraced but once powerful Republican lobbying and PR firm. By the end of 2004 Blackwater's president, Gary Jackson, was bragging to the press of 'staggering' 600 percent growth. 'This is a billion-dollar industry,' Jackson said in October 2004. 'And Blackwater has only scratched the surface of it.'
But today, Blackwater is facing a potentially devastating battle--this time not in Iraq but in court. The company has been slapped with a lawsuit that, if successful, will send shock waves through the world of private security firms, a world that has expanded significantly since Bush took office. Blackwater is being sued for the wrongful deaths of Stephen 'Scott' Helvenston, Mike Teague, Jerko Zovko and Wesley Batalona by the families of the men slain in Falluja.
More than 428 private contractors have been killed to date in Iraq, and US taxpayers are footing almost the entire compensation bill to their families...
...According to former Blackwater officials, Blackwater, Regency and ESS were engaged in a classic war-profiteering scheme. Blackwater was paying its men $600 a day but billing Regency $815, according to the Raleigh News and Observer. 'In addition,' the paper reports, 'Blackwater billed Regency separately for all its overhead and costs in Iraq.' Regency would then bill ESS an unknown amount for these services. Kathy Potter told the News and Observer that Regency would 'quote ESS a price, say $1,500 per man per day, and then tell Blackwater that it had quoted ESS $1,200.' ESS then contracted with Halliburton subsidiary KBR, which in turn billed the government an unknown amount of money for the same security services, according to the paper. KBR/Halliburton refuses to discuss the matter and will not confirm any relationship with ESS.
All this was shady enough--but the real danger for Helvenston and the others lay in Blackwater's decision to cut corners to make even more money. The original contract between Blackwater/Regency and ESS, obtained by The Nation, recognized that 'the current threat in the Iraqi theater of operations' would remain 'consistent and dangerous,' and called for a minimum of three men in each vehicle on security missions 'with a minimum of two armored vehicles to support ESS movements.' [Emphasis added.]
But on March 12, 2004, Blackwater and Regency signed a subcontract, which specified security provisions identical to the original except for one word: 'armored.' Blackwater deleted it from the contract..."
Taxes:
Los Angeles Times: Taxes Flatten but Deep Pockets Still Bulge
"...Average family net worth has continued to grow, in large part because of rising home prices, but at a rate that sagged from 29% between 1998 and 2001 to 6% between 2001 and 2004. And for most Americans, whatever nominal pay increases they got in the last three years were more than offset by higher costs of things such as healthcare.
Meantime, the disparity between the wealthiest Americans and everyone else has grown.
Last year, for example, a typical corporate chief executive made 279 times the average pay of a non-supervisory production worker, according to the liberal Center for American Progress.
That figure, the second-highest in 40 years, was up from 229 in 2004 and 185 in 2003.
Measured another way, during the previous seven economic expansions before the current one, employee compensation rose four times faster than corporate profits, according to the labor-supported Economic Policy Institute. In the current expansion, profits have risen three times faster than compensation..."
Jeremy Scahill: Blood Is Thicker Than Blackwater
"...For most people, the gruesome killings were the first they had ever heard of Blackwater USA, a small, North Carolina-based private security company. Since the Falluja incident, and also because of it, Blackwater has emerged as one of the most successful and profitable security contractors operating in Iraq. The company and its secretive, mega-millionaire, right-wing Christian founder, Erik Prince, position Blackwater as a patriotic extension of the US military, and its employees are required to take an oath of loyalty to the Constitution...
...A day after the killings, Prince enlisted the services of the Alexander Strategy Group, a now disgraced but once powerful Republican lobbying and PR firm. By the end of 2004 Blackwater's president, Gary Jackson, was bragging to the press of 'staggering' 600 percent growth. 'This is a billion-dollar industry,' Jackson said in October 2004. 'And Blackwater has only scratched the surface of it.'
But today, Blackwater is facing a potentially devastating battle--this time not in Iraq but in court. The company has been slapped with a lawsuit that, if successful, will send shock waves through the world of private security firms, a world that has expanded significantly since Bush took office. Blackwater is being sued for the wrongful deaths of Stephen 'Scott' Helvenston, Mike Teague, Jerko Zovko and Wesley Batalona by the families of the men slain in Falluja.
More than 428 private contractors have been killed to date in Iraq, and US taxpayers are footing almost the entire compensation bill to their families...
...According to former Blackwater officials, Blackwater, Regency and ESS were engaged in a classic war-profiteering scheme. Blackwater was paying its men $600 a day but billing Regency $815, according to the Raleigh News and Observer. 'In addition,' the paper reports, 'Blackwater billed Regency separately for all its overhead and costs in Iraq.' Regency would then bill ESS an unknown amount for these services. Kathy Potter told the News and Observer that Regency would 'quote ESS a price, say $1,500 per man per day, and then tell Blackwater that it had quoted ESS $1,200.' ESS then contracted with Halliburton subsidiary KBR, which in turn billed the government an unknown amount of money for the same security services, according to the paper. KBR/Halliburton refuses to discuss the matter and will not confirm any relationship with ESS.
All this was shady enough--but the real danger for Helvenston and the others lay in Blackwater's decision to cut corners to make even more money. The original contract between Blackwater/Regency and ESS, obtained by The Nation, recognized that 'the current threat in the Iraqi theater of operations' would remain 'consistent and dangerous,' and called for a minimum of three men in each vehicle on security missions 'with a minimum of two armored vehicles to support ESS movements.' [Emphasis added.]
But on March 12, 2004, Blackwater and Regency signed a subcontract, which specified security provisions identical to the original except for one word: 'armored.' Blackwater deleted it from the contract..."
Taxes:
Los Angeles Times: Taxes Flatten but Deep Pockets Still Bulge
"...Average family net worth has continued to grow, in large part because of rising home prices, but at a rate that sagged from 29% between 1998 and 2001 to 6% between 2001 and 2004. And for most Americans, whatever nominal pay increases they got in the last three years were more than offset by higher costs of things such as healthcare.
Meantime, the disparity between the wealthiest Americans and everyone else has grown.
Last year, for example, a typical corporate chief executive made 279 times the average pay of a non-supervisory production worker, according to the liberal Center for American Progress.
That figure, the second-highest in 40 years, was up from 229 in 2004 and 185 in 2003.
Measured another way, during the previous seven economic expansions before the current one, employee compensation rose four times faster than corporate profits, according to the labor-supported Economic Policy Institute. In the current expansion, profits have risen three times faster than compensation..."
Wednesday, April 19, 2006
The Lies That Took A Fearful Nation To War:
Jason Leopold: State Department Memo: '16 Words' Were False
"Sixteen days before President Bush's January 28, 2003, State of the Union address in which he said that the US learned from British intelligence that Iraq had attempted to acquire uranium from Africa - an explosive claim that helped pave the way to war - the State Department told the CIA that the intelligence the uranium claims were based upon were forgeries, according to a newly declassified State Department memo.
The revelation of the warning from the closely guarded State Department memo is the first piece of hard evidence and the strongest to date that the Bush administration manipulated and ignored intelligence information in their zeal to win public support for invading Iraq.
On January 12, 2003, the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) 'expressed concerns to the CIA that the documents pertaining to the Iraq-Niger deal were forgeries,' the memo dated July 7, 2003, says.
Moreover, the memo says that the State Department's doubts about the veracity of the uranium claims may have been expressed to the intelligence community even earlier.
Those concerns, according to the memo, are the reasons that former Secretary of State Colin Powell refused to cite the uranium claims when he appeared before the United Nations in February 5, 2003, - one week after Bush's State of the Union address - to try and win support for a possible strike against Iraq..."
Jason Leopold: State Department Memo: '16 Words' Were False
"Sixteen days before President Bush's January 28, 2003, State of the Union address in which he said that the US learned from British intelligence that Iraq had attempted to acquire uranium from Africa - an explosive claim that helped pave the way to war - the State Department told the CIA that the intelligence the uranium claims were based upon were forgeries, according to a newly declassified State Department memo.
The revelation of the warning from the closely guarded State Department memo is the first piece of hard evidence and the strongest to date that the Bush administration manipulated and ignored intelligence information in their zeal to win public support for invading Iraq.
On January 12, 2003, the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) 'expressed concerns to the CIA that the documents pertaining to the Iraq-Niger deal were forgeries,' the memo dated July 7, 2003, says.
Moreover, the memo says that the State Department's doubts about the veracity of the uranium claims may have been expressed to the intelligence community even earlier.
Those concerns, according to the memo, are the reasons that former Secretary of State Colin Powell refused to cite the uranium claims when he appeared before the United Nations in February 5, 2003, - one week after Bush's State of the Union address - to try and win support for a possible strike against Iraq..."
Sunday, April 16, 2006
It's The POTUS, Not the SECDEF, Stupid!
Greg Palast: Desert Rats Leave The Sinking Ship - Why Rumsfeld Should Not Resign
"Well, here they come: the wannabe Rommels, the gaggle of generals, safely retired, to lay siege to Donald Rumsfeld. This week, six of them have called for the Secretary of Defense's resignation.
Well, according to my watch, they're about four years too late -- and they still don't get it.
I know that most of my readers will be tickled pink that the bemedalled boys in crew cuts are finally ready to kick Rummy In the rump, in public. But to me, it just shows me that these boys still can't shoot straight...
...Let me tell you a story about the Secretary of Defense you didn't read in the New York Times, related to me by General Jay Garner, the man our president placed in Baghdad as the US' first post-invasion viceroy.
Garner arrived in Kuwait City in March 2003 working under the mistaken notion that when George Bush called for democracy in Iraq, the President meant the Iraqis could choose their own government. Misunderstanding the President's true mission, General Garner called for Iraqis to hold elections within 90 days and for the U.S. to quickly pull troops out of the cities to a desert base. 'It's their country,' the General told me of the Iraqis. 'And,' he added, most ominously, 'their oil.'
Let's not forget: it's all about the oil. I showed Garner a 101-page plan for Iraq's economy drafted secretly by neo-cons at the State Department, Treasury and the Pentagon, calling for 'privatization' (i.e. the sale) of 'all state assets ... especially in the oil and oil-supporting industries.' See it here.
The General knew of the plans and he intended to shove it where the Iraqi sun don't shine. Garner planned what he called a 'Big Tent' meeting of Iraqi tribal leaders to plan elections. By helping Iraqis establish their own multi-ethnic government -- and this was back when Sunnis, Shias and Kurds were on talking terms -- knew he could get the nation on its feet peacefully before a welcomed 'liberation' turned into a hated 'occupation.'
But, Garner knew, a freely chosen coalition government would mean the death-knell for the neo-con oil-and-assets privatization grab.
On April 21, 2003, three years ago this month, the very night General Garner arrived in Baghdad, he got a call from Washington. It was Rumsfeld on the line. He told Garner, in so many words, 'Don't unpack, Jack, you're fired.'
Rummy replaced Garner, a man with years of on-the-ground experience in Iraq, with green-boots Paul Bremer, the Managing Director of Kissinger Associates. Bremer cancelled the Big Tent meeting of Iraqis and postponed elections for a year; then he issued 100 orders, like some tin-pot pasha, selling off Iraq's economy to U.S. and foreign operators, just as Rumsfeld's neo-con clique had desired.
For a bunch of military hotshots, they sure can't shoot straight. They're wasting all their bullets on the decoy. They've gunned down the puppet instead of the puppeteers.
There's no way that Rumsfeld could have yanked General Garner from Baghdad without the word from The Bunker. Nothing moves or breathes or spits in the Bush Administration without Darth Cheney's growl of approval. And ultimately, it's the Commander-in-Chief who's chiefly in command.
Even the generals' complaint -- that Rumsfeld didn't give them enough troops -- was ultimately a decision of the cowboy from Crawford. (And by the way, the problem was not that we lacked troops -- the problem was that we lacked moral authority to occupy this nation. A million troops would not be enough -- the insurgents would just have more targets.)..."
Greg Palast: Desert Rats Leave The Sinking Ship - Why Rumsfeld Should Not Resign
"Well, here they come: the wannabe Rommels, the gaggle of generals, safely retired, to lay siege to Donald Rumsfeld. This week, six of them have called for the Secretary of Defense's resignation.
Well, according to my watch, they're about four years too late -- and they still don't get it.
I know that most of my readers will be tickled pink that the bemedalled boys in crew cuts are finally ready to kick Rummy In the rump, in public. But to me, it just shows me that these boys still can't shoot straight...
...Let me tell you a story about the Secretary of Defense you didn't read in the New York Times, related to me by General Jay Garner, the man our president placed in Baghdad as the US' first post-invasion viceroy.
Garner arrived in Kuwait City in March 2003 working under the mistaken notion that when George Bush called for democracy in Iraq, the President meant the Iraqis could choose their own government. Misunderstanding the President's true mission, General Garner called for Iraqis to hold elections within 90 days and for the U.S. to quickly pull troops out of the cities to a desert base. 'It's their country,' the General told me of the Iraqis. 'And,' he added, most ominously, 'their oil.'
Let's not forget: it's all about the oil. I showed Garner a 101-page plan for Iraq's economy drafted secretly by neo-cons at the State Department, Treasury and the Pentagon, calling for 'privatization' (i.e. the sale) of 'all state assets ... especially in the oil and oil-supporting industries.' See it here.
The General knew of the plans and he intended to shove it where the Iraqi sun don't shine. Garner planned what he called a 'Big Tent' meeting of Iraqi tribal leaders to plan elections. By helping Iraqis establish their own multi-ethnic government -- and this was back when Sunnis, Shias and Kurds were on talking terms -- knew he could get the nation on its feet peacefully before a welcomed 'liberation' turned into a hated 'occupation.'
But, Garner knew, a freely chosen coalition government would mean the death-knell for the neo-con oil-and-assets privatization grab.
On April 21, 2003, three years ago this month, the very night General Garner arrived in Baghdad, he got a call from Washington. It was Rumsfeld on the line. He told Garner, in so many words, 'Don't unpack, Jack, you're fired.'
Rummy replaced Garner, a man with years of on-the-ground experience in Iraq, with green-boots Paul Bremer, the Managing Director of Kissinger Associates. Bremer cancelled the Big Tent meeting of Iraqis and postponed elections for a year; then he issued 100 orders, like some tin-pot pasha, selling off Iraq's economy to U.S. and foreign operators, just as Rumsfeld's neo-con clique had desired.
For a bunch of military hotshots, they sure can't shoot straight. They're wasting all their bullets on the decoy. They've gunned down the puppet instead of the puppeteers.
There's no way that Rumsfeld could have yanked General Garner from Baghdad without the word from The Bunker. Nothing moves or breathes or spits in the Bush Administration without Darth Cheney's growl of approval. And ultimately, it's the Commander-in-Chief who's chiefly in command.
Even the generals' complaint -- that Rumsfeld didn't give them enough troops -- was ultimately a decision of the cowboy from Crawford. (And by the way, the problem was not that we lacked troops -- the problem was that we lacked moral authority to occupy this nation. A million troops would not be enough -- the insurgents would just have more targets.)..."
Rumsfeld's Approach Is To Fight Terror With Terror:
Salon.com - What Rumsfeld knew
"Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was personally involved in the late 2002 interrogation of a high-value al-Qaida detainee known in intelligence circles as 'the 20th hijacker.' He also communicated weekly with the man in charge of the interrogation, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the controversial commander of the Guantánamo Bay detention center.
During the same period, detainee Mohammed al-Kahtani suffered from what Army investigators have called 'degrading and abusive' treatment by soldiers who were following the interrogation plan Rumsfeld had approved. Kahtani was forced to stand naked in front of a female interrogator, was accused of being a homosexual, and was forced to wear women's underwear and to perform 'dog tricks' on a leash. He received 18-to-20-hour interrogations during 48 of 54 days.
Little more than two years later, during an investigation into the mistreatment of prisoners at Guantánamo, Rumsfeld expressed puzzlement at the notion that his policies had caused the abuse. 'He was going, "My God, you know, did I authorize putting a bra and underwear on this guy's head?" ' recalled Lt. Gen. Randall M. Schmidt, an investigator who interviewed Rumsfeld twice in early 2005.
These disclosures are contained in a Dec. 20, 2005, Army inspector general's report on Miller's conduct, which was obtained this week by Salon through the Freedom of Information Act. The 391-page document -- which has long passages blacked out by the government -- concludes that Miller should not be punished for his oversight role in detainee operations, a fact that was reported last month by Time magazine. But the never-before-released full report also includes the transcripts of interviews with high-ranking military officials that shed new light on the role that Rumsfeld and Miller played in the harsh treatment of Kahtani, who had met with Osama bin Laden on several occasions and received terrorist training in al-Qaida camps.
In a sworn statement to the inspector general, Schmidt described Rumsfeld as 'personally involved' in the interrogation and said that the defense secretary was 'talking weekly' with Miller. Schmidt said he concluded that Rumsfeld did not specifically prescribe the more 'creative' interrogation methods used on Kahtani. But he added that the open-ended policies Rumsfeld approved, and that the apparent lack of supervision of day-to-day interrogations permitted the abusive conduct to take place..."
Targeting Iran:
The Guardian (UK) - Britain took part in mock Iran invasion
"British officers took part in a US war game aimed at preparing for a possible invasion of Iran, despite repeated claims by the foreign secretary, Jack Straw, that a military strike against Iran is inconceivable.
The war game, codenamed Hotspur 2004, took place at the US base of Fort Belvoir in Virginia in July 2004.
A Ministry of Defence spokesman played down its significance yesterday. 'These paper-based exercises are designed to test officers to the limit in fictitious scenarios. We use invented countries and situations using real maps,' he said...
...The senior British officers took part in the Iranian war game just over a year after the invasion of Iraq. It was focused on the Caspian Sea, with an invasion date of 2015. Although the planners said the game was based on a fictitious Middle East country called Korona, the border corresponded exactly with Iran's and the characteristics of the enemy were Iranian...."
Salon.com - What Rumsfeld knew
"Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was personally involved in the late 2002 interrogation of a high-value al-Qaida detainee known in intelligence circles as 'the 20th hijacker.' He also communicated weekly with the man in charge of the interrogation, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the controversial commander of the Guantánamo Bay detention center.
During the same period, detainee Mohammed al-Kahtani suffered from what Army investigators have called 'degrading and abusive' treatment by soldiers who were following the interrogation plan Rumsfeld had approved. Kahtani was forced to stand naked in front of a female interrogator, was accused of being a homosexual, and was forced to wear women's underwear and to perform 'dog tricks' on a leash. He received 18-to-20-hour interrogations during 48 of 54 days.
Little more than two years later, during an investigation into the mistreatment of prisoners at Guantánamo, Rumsfeld expressed puzzlement at the notion that his policies had caused the abuse. 'He was going, "My God, you know, did I authorize putting a bra and underwear on this guy's head?" ' recalled Lt. Gen. Randall M. Schmidt, an investigator who interviewed Rumsfeld twice in early 2005.
These disclosures are contained in a Dec. 20, 2005, Army inspector general's report on Miller's conduct, which was obtained this week by Salon through the Freedom of Information Act. The 391-page document -- which has long passages blacked out by the government -- concludes that Miller should not be punished for his oversight role in detainee operations, a fact that was reported last month by Time magazine. But the never-before-released full report also includes the transcripts of interviews with high-ranking military officials that shed new light on the role that Rumsfeld and Miller played in the harsh treatment of Kahtani, who had met with Osama bin Laden on several occasions and received terrorist training in al-Qaida camps.
In a sworn statement to the inspector general, Schmidt described Rumsfeld as 'personally involved' in the interrogation and said that the defense secretary was 'talking weekly' with Miller. Schmidt said he concluded that Rumsfeld did not specifically prescribe the more 'creative' interrogation methods used on Kahtani. But he added that the open-ended policies Rumsfeld approved, and that the apparent lack of supervision of day-to-day interrogations permitted the abusive conduct to take place..."
Targeting Iran:
The Guardian (UK) - Britain took part in mock Iran invasion
"British officers took part in a US war game aimed at preparing for a possible invasion of Iran, despite repeated claims by the foreign secretary, Jack Straw, that a military strike against Iran is inconceivable.
The war game, codenamed Hotspur 2004, took place at the US base of Fort Belvoir in Virginia in July 2004.
A Ministry of Defence spokesman played down its significance yesterday. 'These paper-based exercises are designed to test officers to the limit in fictitious scenarios. We use invented countries and situations using real maps,' he said...
...The senior British officers took part in the Iranian war game just over a year after the invasion of Iraq. It was focused on the Caspian Sea, with an invasion date of 2015. Although the planners said the game was based on a fictitious Middle East country called Korona, the border corresponded exactly with Iran's and the characteristics of the enemy were Iranian...."
Thursday, April 13, 2006
Bush's 'We have found the WMD' claim was false
Does the man know how to tell the truth about anything?
Washington Post: White House Made False Statements on Iraq WMD
"On May 29, 2003, 50 days after the fall of Baghdad, President Bush proclaimed a fresh victory for his administration in Iraq: Two small trailers captured by U.S. troops had turned out to be long-sought mobile 'biological laboratories.' He declared, 'We have found the weapons of mass destruction.'
The claim, repeated by top administration officials for months afterward, was hailed at the time as a vindication of the decision to go to war. But even as Bush spoke, U.S. intelligence officials possessed powerful evidence that it was not true.
A secret fact-finding mission to Iraq - not made public until now - had already concluded that the trailers had nothing to do with biological weapons. Leaders of the Pentagon-sponsored mission transmitted their unanimous findings to Washington in a field report on May 27, 2003, two days before the president's statement.
The three-page field report and a 122-page final report three weeks later were stamped 'secret' and shelved. Meanwhile, for nearly a year, administration and intelligence officials continued to publicly assert that the trailers were weapons factories.
The authors of the reports were nine U.S. and British civilian experts - scientists and engineers with extensive experience in all the technical fields involved in making bioweapons - who were dispatched to Baghdad by the Defense Intelligence Agency for an analysis of the trailers. Their actions and findings were described to a Washington Post reporter in interviews with six government officials and weapons experts who participated in the mission or had direct knowledge of it.
None would consent to being identified by name because of fear that their jobs would be jeopardized. Their accounts were verified by other current and former government officials knowledgeable about the mission. The contents of the final report, 'Final Technical Engineering Exploitation Report on Iraqi Suspected Biological Weapons-Associated Trailers,' remains classified. But interviews reveal that the technical team was unequivocal in its conclusion that the trailers were not intended to manufacture biological weapons. Those interviewed took care not to discuss the classified portions of their work..."
The investigation into how 'bad intelligence' allowed the White House to beat the war drums is, of course, being hindered by the Administration's allies in the Senate...
The Raw Story: Prewar intelligence probe grinds towards end as parties accuse each other of delay
"The Senate Intelligence Committee's inquiry into whether the U.S. intelligence community 'cooked' pre-war Iraq intelligence now appears likely to be concluded soon, and a spokesman for the Committee's chairman says he's ready to get onto more 'pressing matters' like Iran.
Speaking for Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts (R-KS), spokeswoman Sarah Little told RAW STORY three sections of the so-called 'Phase II' report are likely to made available to members of the committee after the Senate's Easter recess. Little rebuffed Democrats' assertions that the report had been unreasonably delayed, saying that Democratic senators were attempting to 'move the goalpost' by broadening the scope of the inquiry.
Democrats, meanwhile, say Roberts stonewalled the inquiry until November, when they shuttered the Senate to demand the investigation be completed...
...Democrats are troubled that the Committee has declined to investigate perhaps the most contentious issue – whether the Pentagon's 'Office of Special Plans' (OSP) conducted 'unlawful' and 'unauthorized' intelligence activities. Last year, Chairman Roberts requested that the Pentagon probe itself – and said he would not review the program until the Defense Department had completed their own examination.
According to a Nov. 14, 2005 memo written by Democratic senators, no agreement could be reached on how to handle Feith’s office, which has rebuffed requests for pre-war documentation and interviews for more than a year..."
Quid Pro Quo, Mr. DeLay?
The Raw Story: Former DeLay aide paid thinktank to advance Washington lobbying efforts
"The former deputy chief of staff to onetime House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-TX) advised the manufacturer of Stoli Vodka to make a $20,000 contribution to the National Center for Public Policy Research, a conservative thinktank, which wrote an editorial supporting Stoli shortly thereafter, RAW STORY has found.
Former DeLay deputy Tony Rudy got an $8,000 kickback on the deal, according to his plea agreement. In apparent exchange for the tax-deductible donation, the nonprofit's president wrote an article aiding the company's lobbying effort.
The article, written by NCPPR director Amy Ridenour, argued that Russia 'undermined Democratic capitalism' by voiding SPI Spirit’s trademark on Stoli Vodka. At the time, according to Abramoff and Rudy’s lobbying filings, SPI Spirits was lobbying Congress on 'trade with Russia and intellectual property rights.'
To this day, the article written by the National Center's president Amy Ridenour is featured on the Stoli website..."
Iran As The Next Distraction
Thom Hartmann: Republicans Need Another War
"George W. Bush is at it again. This time, reports Sy Hersh in The New Yorker, it'll be Iran. (Those of us who guessed it would have been Syria first apparently underestimated his hubris.) And this time he wants to be able to use nukes.
In the novel 1984 by George Orwell, the way a seemingly democratic president kept his nation in a continual state of repression was by keeping the nation in a constant state of war. Cynics suggest the lesson wasn't lost on Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon, who both, they say, extended the Vietnam war so it coincidentally ran over election cycles, knowing that a wartime President's party is more likely to be reelected and has more power than a President in peacetime.
This wasn't a new lesson, however, and Orwell was not the first to note that a democracy at war was weakened and at risk.
On April 20, 1795, James Madison, who had just helped shepherd through the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and would become President of the United States in the following decade, wrote, 'Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other.'
Reflecting on war's impact on the Executive Branch of government Madison continued his letter about the dangerous and intoxicating power of war for a president.
'In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive [President] is extended,' he wrote. 'Its [his] influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force of the people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war...and in the degeneracy of manners and morals, engendered by both.
'No nation,' he concluded, 'could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare,'..."
Does the man know how to tell the truth about anything?
Washington Post: White House Made False Statements on Iraq WMD
"On May 29, 2003, 50 days after the fall of Baghdad, President Bush proclaimed a fresh victory for his administration in Iraq: Two small trailers captured by U.S. troops had turned out to be long-sought mobile 'biological laboratories.' He declared, 'We have found the weapons of mass destruction.'
The claim, repeated by top administration officials for months afterward, was hailed at the time as a vindication of the decision to go to war. But even as Bush spoke, U.S. intelligence officials possessed powerful evidence that it was not true.
A secret fact-finding mission to Iraq - not made public until now - had already concluded that the trailers had nothing to do with biological weapons. Leaders of the Pentagon-sponsored mission transmitted their unanimous findings to Washington in a field report on May 27, 2003, two days before the president's statement.
The three-page field report and a 122-page final report three weeks later were stamped 'secret' and shelved. Meanwhile, for nearly a year, administration and intelligence officials continued to publicly assert that the trailers were weapons factories.
The authors of the reports were nine U.S. and British civilian experts - scientists and engineers with extensive experience in all the technical fields involved in making bioweapons - who were dispatched to Baghdad by the Defense Intelligence Agency for an analysis of the trailers. Their actions and findings were described to a Washington Post reporter in interviews with six government officials and weapons experts who participated in the mission or had direct knowledge of it.
None would consent to being identified by name because of fear that their jobs would be jeopardized. Their accounts were verified by other current and former government officials knowledgeable about the mission. The contents of the final report, 'Final Technical Engineering Exploitation Report on Iraqi Suspected Biological Weapons-Associated Trailers,' remains classified. But interviews reveal that the technical team was unequivocal in its conclusion that the trailers were not intended to manufacture biological weapons. Those interviewed took care not to discuss the classified portions of their work..."
The investigation into how 'bad intelligence' allowed the White House to beat the war drums is, of course, being hindered by the Administration's allies in the Senate...
The Raw Story: Prewar intelligence probe grinds towards end as parties accuse each other of delay
"The Senate Intelligence Committee's inquiry into whether the U.S. intelligence community 'cooked' pre-war Iraq intelligence now appears likely to be concluded soon, and a spokesman for the Committee's chairman says he's ready to get onto more 'pressing matters' like Iran.
Speaking for Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts (R-KS), spokeswoman Sarah Little told RAW STORY three sections of the so-called 'Phase II' report are likely to made available to members of the committee after the Senate's Easter recess. Little rebuffed Democrats' assertions that the report had been unreasonably delayed, saying that Democratic senators were attempting to 'move the goalpost' by broadening the scope of the inquiry.
Democrats, meanwhile, say Roberts stonewalled the inquiry until November, when they shuttered the Senate to demand the investigation be completed...
...Democrats are troubled that the Committee has declined to investigate perhaps the most contentious issue – whether the Pentagon's 'Office of Special Plans' (OSP) conducted 'unlawful' and 'unauthorized' intelligence activities. Last year, Chairman Roberts requested that the Pentagon probe itself – and said he would not review the program until the Defense Department had completed their own examination.
According to a Nov. 14, 2005 memo written by Democratic senators, no agreement could be reached on how to handle Feith’s office, which has rebuffed requests for pre-war documentation and interviews for more than a year..."
Quid Pro Quo, Mr. DeLay?
The Raw Story: Former DeLay aide paid thinktank to advance Washington lobbying efforts
"The former deputy chief of staff to onetime House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-TX) advised the manufacturer of Stoli Vodka to make a $20,000 contribution to the National Center for Public Policy Research, a conservative thinktank, which wrote an editorial supporting Stoli shortly thereafter, RAW STORY has found.
Former DeLay deputy Tony Rudy got an $8,000 kickback on the deal, according to his plea agreement. In apparent exchange for the tax-deductible donation, the nonprofit's president wrote an article aiding the company's lobbying effort.
The article, written by NCPPR director Amy Ridenour, argued that Russia 'undermined Democratic capitalism' by voiding SPI Spirit’s trademark on Stoli Vodka. At the time, according to Abramoff and Rudy’s lobbying filings, SPI Spirits was lobbying Congress on 'trade with Russia and intellectual property rights.'
To this day, the article written by the National Center's president Amy Ridenour is featured on the Stoli website..."
Iran As The Next Distraction
Thom Hartmann: Republicans Need Another War
"George W. Bush is at it again. This time, reports Sy Hersh in The New Yorker, it'll be Iran. (Those of us who guessed it would have been Syria first apparently underestimated his hubris.) And this time he wants to be able to use nukes.
In the novel 1984 by George Orwell, the way a seemingly democratic president kept his nation in a continual state of repression was by keeping the nation in a constant state of war. Cynics suggest the lesson wasn't lost on Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon, who both, they say, extended the Vietnam war so it coincidentally ran over election cycles, knowing that a wartime President's party is more likely to be reelected and has more power than a President in peacetime.
This wasn't a new lesson, however, and Orwell was not the first to note that a democracy at war was weakened and at risk.
On April 20, 1795, James Madison, who had just helped shepherd through the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and would become President of the United States in the following decade, wrote, 'Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other.'
Reflecting on war's impact on the Executive Branch of government Madison continued his letter about the dangerous and intoxicating power of war for a president.
'In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive [President] is extended,' he wrote. 'Its [his] influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force of the people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war...and in the degeneracy of manners and morals, engendered by both.
'No nation,' he concluded, 'could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare,'..."
Wednesday, April 12, 2006
Targeting Iran:
William River Pitt: How Crazy Are They?
"...The reaction to an attack on Iran with conventional weapons would be bad enough. If we drop a nuke, that reaction will be worse by orders of magnitude and puts on the table the ultimate nightmare scenario: a region-wide conflagration that would reach all the way to Pakistan, where Pervez Musharraf is fending off the fundamentalists with both hands. If the US drops a nuke on Iran, it is possible that the Taliban-allied fundamentalists in Pakistan would rise up and overthrow Musharraf, thus gaining control of Pakistan's own arsenal of nuclear weapons. All of a sudden, those nukes would be loose, and India would lose its collective mind...
...Things have come to a pretty pass in the United States of America when the first question you have to ask yourself on matters of war and death is, 'Just how crazy are these people?' Every cogent estimate sees Iran's nuclear capabilities not becoming any kind of reality for another ten years, leaving open a dozen diplomatic and economic options for dealing with the situation. There is no good reason for attacking that country, but there are a few bad reasons to be found..."
CIA Leak Case:
Greg Palast: GANGSTER GOVERNMENT - A LEAKY PRESIDENT RUNS AFOUL OF 'LITTLE RICO'
"...Let me draft the indictment for you as I would have were I still a government gumshoe:
'Perpetrator Lewis Libby (alias, 'Scooter') contacted Miller while John Doe 1 contacted perpetrators' shill at the Washington Post, Bob Woodward, in furtherance of a scheme directed by George Bush (alias 'The POTUS') and Dick Cheney (alias, 'The Veep') to release intelligence information fraudulently proffered as 'classified,' and thereinafter, knowingly withheld material evidence from a grand jury empanelled to investigate said disclosure. Furthermore, perpetrator 'The POTUS' made material statements designed to deceive investigators and knowingly misrepresent his state of knowledge of the facts.'
Statements aimed at misleading agrand jury investigation are hard-time offenses. It doesn't matter that Bush's too-clever little quip was made to the press and not under oath. I've cited press releases and comments in the New York Times in court as evidence of fraud. Bush, by not swearing to his disingenuous statement, gets off the perjury hook, but he committed a crime nonetheless, 'deliberate concealment.'
Here's how the law works (and hopefully, it will). The Bush gang's use of the telephone in this con game constituted wire fraud. Furthermore, while presidents may leak ('declassify') intelligence information, they may
not obstruct justice; that is, send a grand jury on a wild goose chase. Under the 'RICO' statute (named after the Edward G. Robinson movie mobster, 'Little Rico'), the combination of these crimes makes the Bush executive branch a 'racketeering enterprise,'..."
The So-Called War On Terror:
Tom Porteous: The al Qaeda Myth
"We now know that Al Qaeda had nothing to do with the London bombings in July 2005. This is the conclusion of the British government's official inquiry report leaked to the British press on April 9.
We now also know that the U.S. military is deliberately misleading Iraqis, Americans and the rest of the world about the extent of Al Qaeda's involvement in the Iraqi insurgency. This was reported in The Washington Post on April 10, on the basis of internal military documents seen by that newspaper.
What do these revelations tell us about the arguments of President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Blair that in Al Qaeda the 'Free World' faces a threat comparable to that of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, a world-wide terrorist network which seeks to build a radical Islamist empire over half the world?
That they are threadbare, to say the least. But also that they are cynical, misleading and self serving.
The London bombings, it turns out, were the work of four alienated British Muslims, with no links to 'international terrorist networks', who had learned how to make bombs by trawling the Internet. They had been radicalized and motivated, according to the report, by British foreign policies in the Muslim world - a view Tony Blair has consistently sought to undermine and discredit.
The role of the alleged 'Al Qaeda mastermind in Iraq,' Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, we are now told, was cynically misrepresented and exaggerated by the U.S. military's propaganda units in an effort to discredit and divide the Iraqi insurgency and to provide a retrospective justification for the Iraq war by suggesting a link between Iraq and 9/11.
Wherever in the world Al Qaeda crops up, its appearance has often been uncannily convenient for the local authorities - dictators, warlords, occupation forces and elected governments alike. And often the precise nature of the Al Qaeda connection turns out, on close examination, to be tenuous or non-existent...
...Stripped of exaggeration, romanticism, demonization and myth making, the picture of Al Qaeda which has emerged from the trial in the United States of Zacarias Moussaoui is of a fractious organisation that has been a magnet for bewildered martyrdom-seeking fantasists. At least this has a ring of truth to it.
This is not to say that Al Qaeda is not dangerous. It is a serious security challenge. It may even one day be a strategic threat, especially if it gets hold of some WMD. But it is not the threat Bush and Blair tell us it is...
...First, this war, as it is being fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, is not principally fighting 'Al Qaeda' but is creating and fighting new enemies: people who don't like being invaded, occupied and kicked around by foreigners and who are prepared to stand up and resist. These people may eventually become terrorists. But it will have been U.S. policies that created them. If Iran is next on the Pentagon's list, the same thing will happen there. To the extent that Israel is seen by the United States as pursuing its own war on terror in the Palestinian territories it occupies, it is happening in Gaza and the West Bank too.
Second, the Long War is a distraction from the real issues which need to be addressed as a matter of urgency in order to reduce conflict, violence and injustice in the region and thus to reduce the radicalization of a generation of angry and alienated Muslim youth at home and in the diasporas. These include: ending the Israeli occupation of occupied Palestinian territories through negotiation; pursuing peaceful nuclear reduction throughout the region; and engaging seriously with political Islam. Talk of 'democratization' without engaging with political Islam is nonsense.
Third, on the grounds that it is fighting a 'just war,' the United States and its allies have justified using levels of violence, coercion and repression - including torture, collective punishment and the killing of large numbers of civilians - which are not only of questionable tactical efficacy, but have led to a collapse of U.S. prestige in a part of the world where it has long been seen as a necessary protector, stabilizer and arbiter..."
NY Times: Young Officers Leaving Army at a High Rate
"Young Army officers, including growing numbers of captains who leave as soon as their initial commitment is fulfilled, are bailing out of active-duty service at rates that have alarmed senior officers. Last year, more than a third of the West Point class of 2000 left active duty at the earliest possible moment, after completing their five-year obligation..."
...on second thought, why not rename the war so it fits the political agenda (never-ending war to secure fat Defense contracts for all the 'right' companies with all the 'right' connections):
BBC News: Planning the US 'Long War' on terror
"...The man behind what the US military calls its 'principles of the Long War' is Brig Gen Mark Kimmitt.
Gen Kimmitt, Centcom's deputy director of plans and strategy, told BBC News: 'Even if Iraq stabilised tomorrow the Long War would continue.'
So as Centcom tries to control events in Iraq, he is also planning a strategy for 'nothing less than the defeat of al-Qaeda across the world and its associated movements strung together by extremist ideology'..."
The Lies That Took A Fearful Nation To War:
Robert Scheer: Now Powell Tells Us
"...On Monday, former Secretary of State Colin Powell told me that he and his department’s top experts never believed that Iraq posed an imminent nuclear threat, but that the president followed the misleading advice of Vice President Dick Cheney and the CIA in making the claim. Now he tells us.
The harsh truth is that this president cherry-picked the intelligence data in making his case for invading Iraq and deliberately kept the public in the dark as to the countervailing analysis at the highest level of the intelligence community. While the president and his top Cabinet officials were fear-mongering with stark images of a 'mushroom cloud' over American cities, the leading experts on nuclear weaponry at the Department of Energy (the agency in charge of the U.S. nuclear-weapons program) and the State Department thought the claim of a near-term Iraqi nuclear threat was absurd..."
Domestic Surveillance:
WIRED News: Whistle-Blower Outs NSA Spy Room
"AT&T provided National Security Agency eavesdroppers with full access to its customers' phone calls, and shunted its customers' internet traffic to data-mining equipment installed in a secret room in its San Francisco switching center, according to a former AT&T worker cooperating in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's lawsuit against the company.
Mark Klein, a retired AT&T communications technician, submitted an affidavit in support of the EFF's lawsuit this week. That class action lawsuit, filed in federal court in San Francisco last January, alleges that AT&T violated federal and state laws by surreptitiously allowing the government to monitor phone and internet communications of AT&T customers without warrants.
On Wednesday, the EFF asked the court to issue an injunction prohibiting AT&T from continuing the alleged wiretapping, and filed a number of documents under seal, including three AT&T documents that purportedly explain how the wiretapping system works.
According to a statement released by Klein's attorney, an NSA agent showed up at the San Francisco switching center in 2002 to interview a management-level technician for a special job. In January 2003, Klein observed a new room being built adjacent to the room housing AT&T's #4ESS switching equipment, which is responsible for routing long distance and international calls..."
Suing For The Right To Apply Bigotry Legally:
LA Times: Christians Sue for Right Not to Tolerate Policies
"Ruth Malhotra went to court last month for the right to be intolerant.
Malhotra says her Christian faith compels her to speak out against homosexuality. But the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she's a senior, bans speech that puts down others because of their sexual orientation.
Malhotra sees that as an unacceptable infringement on her right to religious expression. So she's demanding that Georgia Tech revoke its tolerance policy..."
From Karl Rove's Book Of Dirty Tricks:
AP: Phone-Jamming Records Point to White House
"Key figures in a phone-jamming scheme designed to keep New Hampshire Democrats from voting in 2002 had regular contact with the White House and Republican Party as the plan was unfolding, phone records introduced in criminal court show.
The records show that Bush campaign operative James Tobin, who recently was convicted in the case, made two dozen calls to the White House within a three-day period around Election Day 2002 — as the phone jamming operation was finalized, carried out and then abruptly shut down..."
William River Pitt: How Crazy Are They?
"...The reaction to an attack on Iran with conventional weapons would be bad enough. If we drop a nuke, that reaction will be worse by orders of magnitude and puts on the table the ultimate nightmare scenario: a region-wide conflagration that would reach all the way to Pakistan, where Pervez Musharraf is fending off the fundamentalists with both hands. If the US drops a nuke on Iran, it is possible that the Taliban-allied fundamentalists in Pakistan would rise up and overthrow Musharraf, thus gaining control of Pakistan's own arsenal of nuclear weapons. All of a sudden, those nukes would be loose, and India would lose its collective mind...
...Things have come to a pretty pass in the United States of America when the first question you have to ask yourself on matters of war and death is, 'Just how crazy are these people?' Every cogent estimate sees Iran's nuclear capabilities not becoming any kind of reality for another ten years, leaving open a dozen diplomatic and economic options for dealing with the situation. There is no good reason for attacking that country, but there are a few bad reasons to be found..."
CIA Leak Case:
Greg Palast: GANGSTER GOVERNMENT - A LEAKY PRESIDENT RUNS AFOUL OF 'LITTLE RICO'
"...Let me draft the indictment for you as I would have were I still a government gumshoe:
'Perpetrator Lewis Libby (alias, 'Scooter') contacted Miller while John Doe 1 contacted perpetrators' shill at the Washington Post, Bob Woodward, in furtherance of a scheme directed by George Bush (alias 'The POTUS') and Dick Cheney (alias, 'The Veep') to release intelligence information fraudulently proffered as 'classified,' and thereinafter, knowingly withheld material evidence from a grand jury empanelled to investigate said disclosure. Furthermore, perpetrator 'The POTUS' made material statements designed to deceive investigators and knowingly misrepresent his state of knowledge of the facts.'
Statements aimed at misleading agrand jury investigation are hard-time offenses. It doesn't matter that Bush's too-clever little quip was made to the press and not under oath. I've cited press releases and comments in the New York Times in court as evidence of fraud. Bush, by not swearing to his disingenuous statement, gets off the perjury hook, but he committed a crime nonetheless, 'deliberate concealment.'
Here's how the law works (and hopefully, it will). The Bush gang's use of the telephone in this con game constituted wire fraud. Furthermore, while presidents may leak ('declassify') intelligence information, they may
not obstruct justice; that is, send a grand jury on a wild goose chase. Under the 'RICO' statute (named after the Edward G. Robinson movie mobster, 'Little Rico'), the combination of these crimes makes the Bush executive branch a 'racketeering enterprise,'..."
The So-Called War On Terror:
Tom Porteous: The al Qaeda Myth
"We now know that Al Qaeda had nothing to do with the London bombings in July 2005. This is the conclusion of the British government's official inquiry report leaked to the British press on April 9.
We now also know that the U.S. military is deliberately misleading Iraqis, Americans and the rest of the world about the extent of Al Qaeda's involvement in the Iraqi insurgency. This was reported in The Washington Post on April 10, on the basis of internal military documents seen by that newspaper.
What do these revelations tell us about the arguments of President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Blair that in Al Qaeda the 'Free World' faces a threat comparable to that of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, a world-wide terrorist network which seeks to build a radical Islamist empire over half the world?
That they are threadbare, to say the least. But also that they are cynical, misleading and self serving.
The London bombings, it turns out, were the work of four alienated British Muslims, with no links to 'international terrorist networks', who had learned how to make bombs by trawling the Internet. They had been radicalized and motivated, according to the report, by British foreign policies in the Muslim world - a view Tony Blair has consistently sought to undermine and discredit.
The role of the alleged 'Al Qaeda mastermind in Iraq,' Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, we are now told, was cynically misrepresented and exaggerated by the U.S. military's propaganda units in an effort to discredit and divide the Iraqi insurgency and to provide a retrospective justification for the Iraq war by suggesting a link between Iraq and 9/11.
Wherever in the world Al Qaeda crops up, its appearance has often been uncannily convenient for the local authorities - dictators, warlords, occupation forces and elected governments alike. And often the precise nature of the Al Qaeda connection turns out, on close examination, to be tenuous or non-existent...
...Stripped of exaggeration, romanticism, demonization and myth making, the picture of Al Qaeda which has emerged from the trial in the United States of Zacarias Moussaoui is of a fractious organisation that has been a magnet for bewildered martyrdom-seeking fantasists. At least this has a ring of truth to it.
This is not to say that Al Qaeda is not dangerous. It is a serious security challenge. It may even one day be a strategic threat, especially if it gets hold of some WMD. But it is not the threat Bush and Blair tell us it is...
...First, this war, as it is being fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, is not principally fighting 'Al Qaeda' but is creating and fighting new enemies: people who don't like being invaded, occupied and kicked around by foreigners and who are prepared to stand up and resist. These people may eventually become terrorists. But it will have been U.S. policies that created them. If Iran is next on the Pentagon's list, the same thing will happen there. To the extent that Israel is seen by the United States as pursuing its own war on terror in the Palestinian territories it occupies, it is happening in Gaza and the West Bank too.
Second, the Long War is a distraction from the real issues which need to be addressed as a matter of urgency in order to reduce conflict, violence and injustice in the region and thus to reduce the radicalization of a generation of angry and alienated Muslim youth at home and in the diasporas. These include: ending the Israeli occupation of occupied Palestinian territories through negotiation; pursuing peaceful nuclear reduction throughout the region; and engaging seriously with political Islam. Talk of 'democratization' without engaging with political Islam is nonsense.
Third, on the grounds that it is fighting a 'just war,' the United States and its allies have justified using levels of violence, coercion and repression - including torture, collective punishment and the killing of large numbers of civilians - which are not only of questionable tactical efficacy, but have led to a collapse of U.S. prestige in a part of the world where it has long been seen as a necessary protector, stabilizer and arbiter..."
NY Times: Young Officers Leaving Army at a High Rate
"Young Army officers, including growing numbers of captains who leave as soon as their initial commitment is fulfilled, are bailing out of active-duty service at rates that have alarmed senior officers. Last year, more than a third of the West Point class of 2000 left active duty at the earliest possible moment, after completing their five-year obligation..."
...on second thought, why not rename the war so it fits the political agenda (never-ending war to secure fat Defense contracts for all the 'right' companies with all the 'right' connections):
BBC News: Planning the US 'Long War' on terror
"...The man behind what the US military calls its 'principles of the Long War' is Brig Gen Mark Kimmitt.
Gen Kimmitt, Centcom's deputy director of plans and strategy, told BBC News: 'Even if Iraq stabilised tomorrow the Long War would continue.'
So as Centcom tries to control events in Iraq, he is also planning a strategy for 'nothing less than the defeat of al-Qaeda across the world and its associated movements strung together by extremist ideology'..."
The Lies That Took A Fearful Nation To War:
Robert Scheer: Now Powell Tells Us
"...On Monday, former Secretary of State Colin Powell told me that he and his department’s top experts never believed that Iraq posed an imminent nuclear threat, but that the president followed the misleading advice of Vice President Dick Cheney and the CIA in making the claim. Now he tells us.
The harsh truth is that this president cherry-picked the intelligence data in making his case for invading Iraq and deliberately kept the public in the dark as to the countervailing analysis at the highest level of the intelligence community. While the president and his top Cabinet officials were fear-mongering with stark images of a 'mushroom cloud' over American cities, the leading experts on nuclear weaponry at the Department of Energy (the agency in charge of the U.S. nuclear-weapons program) and the State Department thought the claim of a near-term Iraqi nuclear threat was absurd..."
Domestic Surveillance:
WIRED News: Whistle-Blower Outs NSA Spy Room
"AT&T provided National Security Agency eavesdroppers with full access to its customers' phone calls, and shunted its customers' internet traffic to data-mining equipment installed in a secret room in its San Francisco switching center, according to a former AT&T worker cooperating in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's lawsuit against the company.
Mark Klein, a retired AT&T communications technician, submitted an affidavit in support of the EFF's lawsuit this week. That class action lawsuit, filed in federal court in San Francisco last January, alleges that AT&T violated federal and state laws by surreptitiously allowing the government to monitor phone and internet communications of AT&T customers without warrants.
On Wednesday, the EFF asked the court to issue an injunction prohibiting AT&T from continuing the alleged wiretapping, and filed a number of documents under seal, including three AT&T documents that purportedly explain how the wiretapping system works.
According to a statement released by Klein's attorney, an NSA agent showed up at the San Francisco switching center in 2002 to interview a management-level technician for a special job. In January 2003, Klein observed a new room being built adjacent to the room housing AT&T's #4ESS switching equipment, which is responsible for routing long distance and international calls..."
Suing For The Right To Apply Bigotry Legally:
LA Times: Christians Sue for Right Not to Tolerate Policies
"Ruth Malhotra went to court last month for the right to be intolerant.
Malhotra says her Christian faith compels her to speak out against homosexuality. But the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she's a senior, bans speech that puts down others because of their sexual orientation.
Malhotra sees that as an unacceptable infringement on her right to religious expression. So she's demanding that Georgia Tech revoke its tolerance policy..."
From Karl Rove's Book Of Dirty Tricks:
AP: Phone-Jamming Records Point to White House
"Key figures in a phone-jamming scheme designed to keep New Hampshire Democrats from voting in 2002 had regular contact with the White House and Republican Party as the plan was unfolding, phone records introduced in criminal court show.
The records show that Bush campaign operative James Tobin, who recently was convicted in the case, made two dozen calls to the White House within a three-day period around Election Day 2002 — as the phone jamming operation was finalized, carried out and then abruptly shut down..."
Sunday, April 09, 2006
Bush's Next Target: Iran
Seymour Hersh: THE IRAN PLANS
"The Bush Administration, while publicly advocating diplomacy in order to stop Iran from pursuing a nuclear weapon, has increased clandestine activities inside Iran and intensified planning for a possible major air attack. Current and former American military and intelligence officials said that Air Force planning groups are drawing up lists of targets, and teams of American combat troops have been ordered into Iran, under cover, to collect targeting data and to establish contact with anti-government ethnic-minority groups. The officials say that President Bush is determined to deny the Iranian regime the opportunity to begin a pilot program, planned for this spring, to enrich uranium...
...One former defense official, who still deals with sensitive issues for the Bush Administration, told me that the military planning was premised on a belief that 'a sustained bombing campaign in Iran will humiliate the religious leadership and lead the public to rise up and overthrow the government.' He added, 'I was shocked when I heard it, and asked myself, ‘What are they smoking?,’'...
...Some operations, apparently aimed in part at intimidating Iran, are already under way. American Naval tactical aircraft, operating from carriers in the Arabian Sea, have been flying simulated nuclear-weapons delivery missions—rapid ascending maneuvers known as 'over the shoulder' bombing—since last summer, the former official said, within range of Iranian coastal radars...
...One of the military’s initial option plans, as presented to the White House by the Pentagon this winter, calls for the use of a bunker-buster tactical nuclear weapon, such as the B61-11, against underground nuclear sites...
...The elimination of Natanz would be a major setback for Iran’s nuclear ambitions, but the conventional weapons in the American arsenal could not insure the destruction of facilities under seventy-five feet of earth and rock, especially if they are reinforced with concrete.
There is a Cold War precedent for targeting deep underground bunkers with nuclear weapons. In the early nineteen-eighties, the American intelligence community watched as the Soviet government began digging a huge underground complex outside Moscow. Analysts concluded that the underground facility was designed for 'continuity of government' — for the political and military leadership to survive a nuclear war...
...Any American bombing attack, Richard Armitage told me, would have to consider the following questions: 'What will happen in the other Islamic countries? What ability does Iran have to reach us and touch us globally—that is, terrorism? Will Syria and Lebanon up the pressure on Israel? What does the attack do to our already diminished international standing? And what does this mean for Russia, China, and the U.N. Security Council?'
Iran, which now produces nearly four million barrels of oil a day, would not have to cut off production to disrupt the world’s oil markets. It could blockade or mine the Strait of Hormuz, the thirty-four-mile-wide passage through which Middle Eastern oil reaches the Indian Ocean. Nonetheless, the recently retired defense official dismissed the strategic consequences of such actions. He told me that the U.S. Navy could keep shipping open by conducting salvage missions and putting mine- sweepers to work. 'It’s impossible to block passage,' he said. The government consultant with ties to the Pentagon also said he believed that the oil problem could be managed, pointing out that the U.S. has enough in its strategic reserves to keep America running for sixty days. However, those in the oil business I spoke to were less optimistic; one industry expert estimated that the price per barrel would immediately spike, to anywhere from ninety to a hundred dollars per barrel, and could go higher, depending on the duration and scope of the conflict..."
The CIA Leak Case:
NY Times: Bush Knew Niger Claims Were False When He Leaked Them "President Bush's apparent order authorizing a senior White House official to reveal to a reporter previously classified intelligence about Saddam Hussein's efforts to obtain uranium came as the information was already being discredited by several other officials in the administration, interviews and documents from the time show.
A review of the records and interviews conducted during and after the crucial period in June and July of 2003 also show that what the aide, I. Lewis Libby Jr., said he was authorized to portray as a 'key judgment' by intelligence officers had in fact been given much less prominence in the most important assessment of Iraq's weapons capability..."
Seymour Hersh: THE IRAN PLANS
"The Bush Administration, while publicly advocating diplomacy in order to stop Iran from pursuing a nuclear weapon, has increased clandestine activities inside Iran and intensified planning for a possible major air attack. Current and former American military and intelligence officials said that Air Force planning groups are drawing up lists of targets, and teams of American combat troops have been ordered into Iran, under cover, to collect targeting data and to establish contact with anti-government ethnic-minority groups. The officials say that President Bush is determined to deny the Iranian regime the opportunity to begin a pilot program, planned for this spring, to enrich uranium...
...One former defense official, who still deals with sensitive issues for the Bush Administration, told me that the military planning was premised on a belief that 'a sustained bombing campaign in Iran will humiliate the religious leadership and lead the public to rise up and overthrow the government.' He added, 'I was shocked when I heard it, and asked myself, ‘What are they smoking?,’'...
...Some operations, apparently aimed in part at intimidating Iran, are already under way. American Naval tactical aircraft, operating from carriers in the Arabian Sea, have been flying simulated nuclear-weapons delivery missions—rapid ascending maneuvers known as 'over the shoulder' bombing—since last summer, the former official said, within range of Iranian coastal radars...
...One of the military’s initial option plans, as presented to the White House by the Pentagon this winter, calls for the use of a bunker-buster tactical nuclear weapon, such as the B61-11, against underground nuclear sites...
...The elimination of Natanz would be a major setback for Iran’s nuclear ambitions, but the conventional weapons in the American arsenal could not insure the destruction of facilities under seventy-five feet of earth and rock, especially if they are reinforced with concrete.
There is a Cold War precedent for targeting deep underground bunkers with nuclear weapons. In the early nineteen-eighties, the American intelligence community watched as the Soviet government began digging a huge underground complex outside Moscow. Analysts concluded that the underground facility was designed for 'continuity of government' — for the political and military leadership to survive a nuclear war...
...Any American bombing attack, Richard Armitage told me, would have to consider the following questions: 'What will happen in the other Islamic countries? What ability does Iran have to reach us and touch us globally—that is, terrorism? Will Syria and Lebanon up the pressure on Israel? What does the attack do to our already diminished international standing? And what does this mean for Russia, China, and the U.N. Security Council?'
Iran, which now produces nearly four million barrels of oil a day, would not have to cut off production to disrupt the world’s oil markets. It could blockade or mine the Strait of Hormuz, the thirty-four-mile-wide passage through which Middle Eastern oil reaches the Indian Ocean. Nonetheless, the recently retired defense official dismissed the strategic consequences of such actions. He told me that the U.S. Navy could keep shipping open by conducting salvage missions and putting mine- sweepers to work. 'It’s impossible to block passage,' he said. The government consultant with ties to the Pentagon also said he believed that the oil problem could be managed, pointing out that the U.S. has enough in its strategic reserves to keep America running for sixty days. However, those in the oil business I spoke to were less optimistic; one industry expert estimated that the price per barrel would immediately spike, to anywhere from ninety to a hundred dollars per barrel, and could go higher, depending on the duration and scope of the conflict..."
The CIA Leak Case:
NY Times: Bush Knew Niger Claims Were False When He Leaked Them "President Bush's apparent order authorizing a senior White House official to reveal to a reporter previously classified intelligence about Saddam Hussein's efforts to obtain uranium came as the information was already being discredited by several other officials in the administration, interviews and documents from the time show.
A review of the records and interviews conducted during and after the crucial period in June and July of 2003 also show that what the aide, I. Lewis Libby Jr., said he was authorized to portray as a 'key judgment' by intelligence officers had in fact been given much less prominence in the most important assessment of Iraq's weapons capability..."
Thursday, April 06, 2006
Iraq:
Sidney Blumenthal: The tethered goat strategy
"Since the Iraqi elections in January, US foreign service officers at the Baghdad embassy have been writing a steady stream of disturbing cables describing drastically worsening conditions. Violence from incipient communal civil war is rapidly rising. Last month there were eight times as many assassinations committed by Shia militias as terrorist murders by Sunni insurgents. The insurgency, according to the reports, also continues to mutate. Meanwhile, President Bush's strategy of training Iraqi police and army to take over from coalition forces - 'when they stand up, we'll stand down' - is perversely and portentously accelerating the strife. State department officials in the field are reporting that Shia militias use training as cover to infiltrate key positions. Thus the strategy to create institutions of order and security is fuelling civil war.
Rather than being received as invaluable intelligence, the messages are discarded or, worse, considered signs of disloyalty. Rejecting the facts on the ground apparently requires blaming the messengers. So far, two top attaches at the embassy have been reassigned elsewhere for producing factual reports that are too upsetting..."
ThinkProgress: The Architects of War: Where Are They Now?
"President Bush has not fired any of the architects of the Iraq war. In fact, a review of the key planners of the conflict reveals that they have been rewarded - not blamed - for their incompetence..."
Corporate PR Passed Off As News Reporting:
The most outrageous example has to be the pharmaceutical industry PR that's presented as 'news.' When the industry run TV/radio/print ads they are somewhat regulated (if they say what a drug does, they must say what the risks are), but these stories cirumvent these requirements in a rather cynical way.
Democracy Now! - Fake TV News: Widespread and Undisclosed... How Corporate-Funded Propaganda Is Airing On Local Newscasts As 'News'
"A new study being released today by the Center for Media and Democracy reveals that at least 77 TV stations around the country have been caught airing corporate-sponsored propaganda disguised as news news releases in the past 10 months. Companies funding the video news releases include General Motors, Intel and Pfizer.
The stations are scattered throughout 30 states and are affiliated with all of the major networks: ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox. And many of the stations are owned by some of the country's largest media companies including Clear Channel, News Corp, Viacom, the Tribune Company and Sinclair Broadcast.
The study by the Center for Media and Democracy is called 'Fake TV News: Widespread and Undisclosed'
[Read Report].
The authors of the report charge that these TV stations actively disguise the corporate-sponsored content to make it appear to be their own reporting.
Until now, television news directors have downplayed how often VNRs made it onto air. Last year Barbara Cochran, president of the Radio-Television News Directors Association, compared VNRs to the Loch Ness monster. She said 'Everyone talks about it, but not many people have actually seen it.'
Today we are going to spend the hour looking at how fake news is making its way onto the airwaves of local newscasts. We will speak with the authors of the report, as well as a consultant who has appeared in several video news releases [See Part II of DN's Fake TV News Special] and with FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein [See Part III of DN's Fake TV News Special] who has said he was stunned by the findings of Fake TV News report.
But first we will air some examples of how video news releases are used.
Four weeks ago, the Fox affiliate in South Bend Indiana aired a video news release produced by the PR company Medialink for General Motors. The video was narrated by Medialink's Andrew Schmertz. When the VNR aired on March 16, the local anchor introduced Andrew as if he were a Fox reporter..."
Nuclear Weapons:
LA Times: Bush Wants Capacity to Make 125 Nukes a Year
"The Bush administration on Wednesday unveiled a blueprint for rebuilding the United States' decrepit nuclear weapons complex, including restoration of a large-scale bomb manufacturing capacity.
The plan calls for the most sweeping realignment and modernization of the nation's massive system of laboratories and factories for nuclear bombs since the end of the Cold War.
Until now, the nation has depended on carefully maintaining aging bombs produced during the Cold War arms race, some several decades old. The administration, however, wants the capability to turn out 125 new nuclear bombs per year by 2022, as the Pentagon retires older bombs that it claims will no longer be reliable or safe.
Under the plan, all of the nation's plutonium would be consolidated into a single facility that could be more effectively and cheaply defended against possible terrorist attacks. The plan would remove the plutonium now kept at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory by 2014, though transfers of the material could start sooner. In recent years, concern has sharply grown that Livermore, surrounded by residential neighborhoods, could not repel a terrorist attack.
But the administration blueprint is facing sharp criticism, both from those who say it does not move fast enough to consolidate plutonium stores and from those who say restarting bomb production will encourage aspiring nuclear powers across the globe to develop weapons..."
Sidney Blumenthal: The tethered goat strategy
"Since the Iraqi elections in January, US foreign service officers at the Baghdad embassy have been writing a steady stream of disturbing cables describing drastically worsening conditions. Violence from incipient communal civil war is rapidly rising. Last month there were eight times as many assassinations committed by Shia militias as terrorist murders by Sunni insurgents. The insurgency, according to the reports, also continues to mutate. Meanwhile, President Bush's strategy of training Iraqi police and army to take over from coalition forces - 'when they stand up, we'll stand down' - is perversely and portentously accelerating the strife. State department officials in the field are reporting that Shia militias use training as cover to infiltrate key positions. Thus the strategy to create institutions of order and security is fuelling civil war.
Rather than being received as invaluable intelligence, the messages are discarded or, worse, considered signs of disloyalty. Rejecting the facts on the ground apparently requires blaming the messengers. So far, two top attaches at the embassy have been reassigned elsewhere for producing factual reports that are too upsetting..."
ThinkProgress: The Architects of War: Where Are They Now?
"President Bush has not fired any of the architects of the Iraq war. In fact, a review of the key planners of the conflict reveals that they have been rewarded - not blamed - for their incompetence..."
Corporate PR Passed Off As News Reporting:
The most outrageous example has to be the pharmaceutical industry PR that's presented as 'news.' When the industry run TV/radio/print ads they are somewhat regulated (if they say what a drug does, they must say what the risks are), but these stories cirumvent these requirements in a rather cynical way.
Democracy Now! - Fake TV News: Widespread and Undisclosed... How Corporate-Funded Propaganda Is Airing On Local Newscasts As 'News'
"A new study being released today by the Center for Media and Democracy reveals that at least 77 TV stations around the country have been caught airing corporate-sponsored propaganda disguised as news news releases in the past 10 months. Companies funding the video news releases include General Motors, Intel and Pfizer.
The stations are scattered throughout 30 states and are affiliated with all of the major networks: ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox. And many of the stations are owned by some of the country's largest media companies including Clear Channel, News Corp, Viacom, the Tribune Company and Sinclair Broadcast.
The study by the Center for Media and Democracy is called 'Fake TV News: Widespread and Undisclosed'
[Read Report].
The authors of the report charge that these TV stations actively disguise the corporate-sponsored content to make it appear to be their own reporting.
Until now, television news directors have downplayed how often VNRs made it onto air. Last year Barbara Cochran, president of the Radio-Television News Directors Association, compared VNRs to the Loch Ness monster. She said 'Everyone talks about it, but not many people have actually seen it.'
Today we are going to spend the hour looking at how fake news is making its way onto the airwaves of local newscasts. We will speak with the authors of the report, as well as a consultant who has appeared in several video news releases [See Part II of DN's Fake TV News Special] and with FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein [See Part III of DN's Fake TV News Special] who has said he was stunned by the findings of Fake TV News report.
But first we will air some examples of how video news releases are used.
Four weeks ago, the Fox affiliate in South Bend Indiana aired a video news release produced by the PR company Medialink for General Motors. The video was narrated by Medialink's Andrew Schmertz. When the VNR aired on March 16, the local anchor introduced Andrew as if he were a Fox reporter..."
Nuclear Weapons:
LA Times: Bush Wants Capacity to Make 125 Nukes a Year
"The Bush administration on Wednesday unveiled a blueprint for rebuilding the United States' decrepit nuclear weapons complex, including restoration of a large-scale bomb manufacturing capacity.
The plan calls for the most sweeping realignment and modernization of the nation's massive system of laboratories and factories for nuclear bombs since the end of the Cold War.
Until now, the nation has depended on carefully maintaining aging bombs produced during the Cold War arms race, some several decades old. The administration, however, wants the capability to turn out 125 new nuclear bombs per year by 2022, as the Pentagon retires older bombs that it claims will no longer be reliable or safe.
Under the plan, all of the nation's plutonium would be consolidated into a single facility that could be more effectively and cheaply defended against possible terrorist attacks. The plan would remove the plutonium now kept at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory by 2014, though transfers of the material could start sooner. In recent years, concern has sharply grown that Livermore, surrounded by residential neighborhoods, could not repel a terrorist attack.
But the administration blueprint is facing sharp criticism, both from those who say it does not move fast enough to consolidate plutonium stores and from those who say restarting bomb production will encourage aspiring nuclear powers across the globe to develop weapons..."
Wednesday, April 05, 2006
On Our Leadership:
William River Pitt: An Average Joe's Spectacular Lies
"Page four of Sunday's Washington Post carried a story titled 'The President as Average Joe,' which described how George W. Bush is trying once again to cast himself as a regular fella so as to boost his anemic poll numbers. 'As he takes to the road to salvage his presidency,' reported the Post, 'Bush is letting down his guard and playing up his anti-intellectual, regular-guy image.'
Most of us, presumably, know enough 'Average Joe' types to fill a room. Most of us, presumably, don't know a single 'Average Joe' type who could pull off a trick like the one reported by the New York Times last week. The issue centered, once again, around a memo that was drafted before the invasion of Iraq.
'During a private two-hour meeting in the Oval Office on Jan. 31, 2003,' read the Times, '[Bush] made clear to Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain that he was determined to invade Iraq without the second resolution, or even if international arms inspectors failed to find unconventional weapons, said a confidential memo about the meeting written by Mr. Blair's top foreign policy adviser and reviewed by the New York Times,'..."
Taxes In Bush's America:
NY Times: Big Gain for Rich Seen in Tax Cuts for Investments
"...As Congress debates whether to make the Bush tax cuts permanent, The Times analyzed I.R.S. figures for 2003, the latest year available and the first that reflected the tax cuts for income from dividends and from the sale of stock and other assets, known as capital gains.
The analysis found the following:
¶Among taxpayers with incomes greater than $10 million, the amount by which their investment tax bill was reduced averaged about $500,000 in 2003, and total tax savings, which included the two Bush tax cuts on compensation, nearly doubled, to slightly more than $1 million.
¶These taxpayers, whose average income was $26 million, paid about the same share of their income in income taxes as those making $200,000 to $500,000 because of the lowered rates on investment income.
¶Americans with annual incomes of $1 million or more, about one-tenth of 1 percent all taxpayers, reaped 43 percent of all the savings on investment taxes in 2003. The savings for these taxpayers averaged about $41,400 each. By comparison, these same Americans received less than 10 percent of the savings from the other Bush tax cuts, which applied primarily to wages, though that share is expected to grow in coming years.
¶The savings from the investment tax cuts are expected to be larger in subsequent years because of gains in the stock market..."
Domestic Surveillance:
Tim Shorrock: Watching What You Say
"Two months after the New York Times revealed that the Bush Administration ordered the National Security Agency to conduct warrantless surveillance of American citizens, only three corporations--AT&T, Sprint and MCI--have been identified by the media as cooperating. If the reports in the Times and other newspapers are true, these companies have allowed the NSA to intercept thousands of telephone calls, fax messages and e-mails without warrants from a special oversight court established by Congress under the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Some companies, according to the same reports, have given the NSA a direct hookup to their huge databases of communications records. The NSA, using the same supercomputers that analyze foreign communications, sifts through this data for key words and phrases that could indicate communication to or from suspected terrorists or terrorist sympathizers and then tracks those individuals and their ever-widening circle of associates. 'This is the US version of Echelon,' says Albert Gidari, a prominent telecommunications attorney in Seattle, referring to a massive eavesdropping program run by the NSA and its English-speaking counterparts that created a huge controversy in Europe in the late 1990s.
So far, a handful of Democratic lawmakers--Representative John Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, and Senators Edward Kennedy and Russell Feingold--have attempted to obtain information from companies involved in the domestic surveillance program. But they've largely been rebuffed..."
Energy Politics:
Gerg Palast: THE NEW WORLD OIL ORDER: HUGO CHAVEZ TELLS BBC, WE HAVE MORE OIL THAN SAUDI ARABIA
"...US Department of Energy analyses seen by Newsnight show that at $50 a barrel Venezuela - not Saudi Arabia - will have the biggest oil reserves in OPEC. Venezuela has vast deposits of extra heavy oil in the Orinoco. Traditionally these have not been counted because at $20 a barrel they were too expensive to exploit - but at $50 a barrel melting them into liquid petroleum becomes extremely profitable.
The US DoE report shows that at today's prices Venezuela's oil reserves are bigger than those of the entire Middle East including Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, Iran and Iraq. The US DoE also identifies Canada as another future oil superpower. Venezuela's deposits alone could extend the oil age for another 100 years.
The US DoE estimates that Chavez controls 1.3 trillion barrels of oil - more than the entire declared oil reserves of the rest of the planet. Hugo Chavez told Newsnight's Greg Palast that 'Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world. In the future Venezuela won't have any more oil - but that's in the 22nd century. Venezuela has oil for 200 years.' Chavez will ask the OPEC meeting in June to formally accept that Venezuela's reserves are now bigger than Saudi Arabia's..."
RFID
NY Times: Out of Consumers' Sight, Radio Tags Gain Ground
"...RFID technology comes in two forms. Passive tags consist of paper-thin microchips that are attached to equally thin antennae; they use power captured from signals broadcast by scanning devices to respond with the chips' encoded data. Active tags, which are larger, have a longer range and are more expensive, come with a small battery or other power source. They are widely used in toll collection systems like EZ Pass and for tracking valuable goods or animals.
While the roots of the technology are decades old, interest mushroomed when leading retailers and manufacturers came together in 1999 to begin working toward open standards that, like bar codes, could be used throughout the economy. The pace accelerated in 2004 when Wal-Mart and the Department of Defense announced they would require suppliers to begin using passive RFID tags on cartons and pallets of goods.
Those mandates generated unrealistic expectations in some quarters about the technology's ability and how rapidly it could expand. Many suppliers delayed investing and numerous obstacles emerged, including intellectual property battles, confrontations with privacy advocates and vendors failing to figure out ways to cut tag and reader costs as quickly as expected. There have also been delays in agreeing on standards, and many systems have not worked reliably..."
William River Pitt: An Average Joe's Spectacular Lies
"Page four of Sunday's Washington Post carried a story titled 'The President as Average Joe,' which described how George W. Bush is trying once again to cast himself as a regular fella so as to boost his anemic poll numbers. 'As he takes to the road to salvage his presidency,' reported the Post, 'Bush is letting down his guard and playing up his anti-intellectual, regular-guy image.'
Most of us, presumably, know enough 'Average Joe' types to fill a room. Most of us, presumably, don't know a single 'Average Joe' type who could pull off a trick like the one reported by the New York Times last week. The issue centered, once again, around a memo that was drafted before the invasion of Iraq.
'During a private two-hour meeting in the Oval Office on Jan. 31, 2003,' read the Times, '[Bush] made clear to Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain that he was determined to invade Iraq without the second resolution, or even if international arms inspectors failed to find unconventional weapons, said a confidential memo about the meeting written by Mr. Blair's top foreign policy adviser and reviewed by the New York Times,'..."
Taxes In Bush's America:
NY Times: Big Gain for Rich Seen in Tax Cuts for Investments
"...As Congress debates whether to make the Bush tax cuts permanent, The Times analyzed I.R.S. figures for 2003, the latest year available and the first that reflected the tax cuts for income from dividends and from the sale of stock and other assets, known as capital gains.
The analysis found the following:
¶Among taxpayers with incomes greater than $10 million, the amount by which their investment tax bill was reduced averaged about $500,000 in 2003, and total tax savings, which included the two Bush tax cuts on compensation, nearly doubled, to slightly more than $1 million.
¶These taxpayers, whose average income was $26 million, paid about the same share of their income in income taxes as those making $200,000 to $500,000 because of the lowered rates on investment income.
¶Americans with annual incomes of $1 million or more, about one-tenth of 1 percent all taxpayers, reaped 43 percent of all the savings on investment taxes in 2003. The savings for these taxpayers averaged about $41,400 each. By comparison, these same Americans received less than 10 percent of the savings from the other Bush tax cuts, which applied primarily to wages, though that share is expected to grow in coming years.
¶The savings from the investment tax cuts are expected to be larger in subsequent years because of gains in the stock market..."
Domestic Surveillance:
Tim Shorrock: Watching What You Say
"Two months after the New York Times revealed that the Bush Administration ordered the National Security Agency to conduct warrantless surveillance of American citizens, only three corporations--AT&T, Sprint and MCI--have been identified by the media as cooperating. If the reports in the Times and other newspapers are true, these companies have allowed the NSA to intercept thousands of telephone calls, fax messages and e-mails without warrants from a special oversight court established by Congress under the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Some companies, according to the same reports, have given the NSA a direct hookup to their huge databases of communications records. The NSA, using the same supercomputers that analyze foreign communications, sifts through this data for key words and phrases that could indicate communication to or from suspected terrorists or terrorist sympathizers and then tracks those individuals and their ever-widening circle of associates. 'This is the US version of Echelon,' says Albert Gidari, a prominent telecommunications attorney in Seattle, referring to a massive eavesdropping program run by the NSA and its English-speaking counterparts that created a huge controversy in Europe in the late 1990s.
So far, a handful of Democratic lawmakers--Representative John Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, and Senators Edward Kennedy and Russell Feingold--have attempted to obtain information from companies involved in the domestic surveillance program. But they've largely been rebuffed..."
Energy Politics:
Gerg Palast: THE NEW WORLD OIL ORDER: HUGO CHAVEZ TELLS BBC, WE HAVE MORE OIL THAN SAUDI ARABIA
"...US Department of Energy analyses seen by Newsnight show that at $50 a barrel Venezuela - not Saudi Arabia - will have the biggest oil reserves in OPEC. Venezuela has vast deposits of extra heavy oil in the Orinoco. Traditionally these have not been counted because at $20 a barrel they were too expensive to exploit - but at $50 a barrel melting them into liquid petroleum becomes extremely profitable.
The US DoE report shows that at today's prices Venezuela's oil reserves are bigger than those of the entire Middle East including Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, Iran and Iraq. The US DoE also identifies Canada as another future oil superpower. Venezuela's deposits alone could extend the oil age for another 100 years.
The US DoE estimates that Chavez controls 1.3 trillion barrels of oil - more than the entire declared oil reserves of the rest of the planet. Hugo Chavez told Newsnight's Greg Palast that 'Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world. In the future Venezuela won't have any more oil - but that's in the 22nd century. Venezuela has oil for 200 years.' Chavez will ask the OPEC meeting in June to formally accept that Venezuela's reserves are now bigger than Saudi Arabia's..."
RFID
NY Times: Out of Consumers' Sight, Radio Tags Gain Ground
"...RFID technology comes in two forms. Passive tags consist of paper-thin microchips that are attached to equally thin antennae; they use power captured from signals broadcast by scanning devices to respond with the chips' encoded data. Active tags, which are larger, have a longer range and are more expensive, come with a small battery or other power source. They are widely used in toll collection systems like EZ Pass and for tracking valuable goods or animals.
While the roots of the technology are decades old, interest mushroomed when leading retailers and manufacturers came together in 1999 to begin working toward open standards that, like bar codes, could be used throughout the economy. The pace accelerated in 2004 when Wal-Mart and the Department of Defense announced they would require suppliers to begin using passive RFID tags on cartons and pallets of goods.
Those mandates generated unrealistic expectations in some quarters about the technology's ability and how rapidly it could expand. Many suppliers delayed investing and numerous obstacles emerged, including intellectual property battles, confrontations with privacy advocates and vendors failing to figure out ways to cut tag and reader costs as quickly as expected. There have also been delays in agreeing on standards, and many systems have not worked reliably..."
Tuesday, April 04, 2006
The Lies That Took A Fearful Nation To War
Fear that the public, the people whose interests the Administration supposedly serves, might get wind of the truth, smacks of lies, cover-up, and a general contempt for the public itself. How much more evidence do the American people need that this Administration clearly had other interests in mind, than those of the public?
Murray Waas: Insulating Bush
"Karl Rove, President Bush's chief political adviser, cautioned other White House aides in the summer of 2003 that Bush's 2004 re-election prospects would be severely damaged if it was publicly disclosed that he had been personally warned that a key rationale for going to war had been challenged within the administration. Rove expressed his concerns shortly after an informal review of classified government records by then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen J. Hadley determined that Bush had been specifically advised that claims he later made in his 2003 State of the Union address -- that Iraq was procuring high-strength aluminum tubes to build a nuclear weapon -- might not be true, according to government records and interviews.
Hadley was particularly concerned that the public might learn of a classified one-page summary of a National Intelligence Estimate, specifically written for Bush in October 2002. The summary said that although 'most agencies judge' that the aluminum tubes were 'related to a uranium enrichment effort,' the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research and the Energy Department's intelligence branch 'believe that the tubes more likely are intended for conventional weapons,'..."
Fear that the public, the people whose interests the Administration supposedly serves, might get wind of the truth, smacks of lies, cover-up, and a general contempt for the public itself. How much more evidence do the American people need that this Administration clearly had other interests in mind, than those of the public?
Murray Waas: Insulating Bush
"Karl Rove, President Bush's chief political adviser, cautioned other White House aides in the summer of 2003 that Bush's 2004 re-election prospects would be severely damaged if it was publicly disclosed that he had been personally warned that a key rationale for going to war had been challenged within the administration. Rove expressed his concerns shortly after an informal review of classified government records by then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen J. Hadley determined that Bush had been specifically advised that claims he later made in his 2003 State of the Union address -- that Iraq was procuring high-strength aluminum tubes to build a nuclear weapon -- might not be true, according to government records and interviews.
Hadley was particularly concerned that the public might learn of a classified one-page summary of a National Intelligence Estimate, specifically written for Bush in October 2002. The summary said that although 'most agencies judge' that the aluminum tubes were 'related to a uranium enrichment effort,' the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research and the Energy Department's intelligence branch 'believe that the tubes more likely are intended for conventional weapons,'..."
Monday, April 03, 2006
Iran:
While others point out that Iran is not enough of a 'open' society to make an Euro oil trading market work, the attempt is clearly a perceptible threat to the dollar.
William Clark: The Real Reasons Why Iran is the Next Target
"...It is now obvious the invasion of Iraq had less to do with any threat from Saddam’s long-gone WMD program and certainly less to do to do with fighting International terrorism than it has to do with gaining control over Iraq’s hydrocarbon reserves and in doing so maintaining the U.S. dollar as the monopoly currency for the critical international oil market. Throughout 2004 statements by former administration insiders revealed that the Bush/Cheney administration entered into office with the intention of toppling Saddam Hussein. Indeed, the neoconservative strategy of installing a pro-U.S. government in Baghdad along with multiple U.S. military bases was partly designed to thwart further momentum within OPEC towards a 'petroeuro.' However, subsequent events show this strategy to be fundamentally flawed, with Iran moving forward towards a petroeuro system for international oil trades, while Russia discusses this option.
Candidly stated, ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’ was a war designed to install a pro-U.S. puppet in Iraq, establish multiple U.S military bases before the onset of Peak Oil, and to reconvert Iraq back to petrodollars while hoping to thwart further OPEC momentum towards the euro as an alternative oil transaction currency..."
Energy Policy:
New York Times: Automakers Use New Technology to Beef Up Muscle, Not Mileage
"For two decades automakers have been developing technology that could make vehicles go farther on a gallon of gasoline. But instead, they have chosen pep and size — making vehicles like the new Murano accelerate faster than cars like the old Mustang, and making them bigger.
The average vehicle, which 25 years ago accelerated to 60 miles an hour in 14.4 seconds, now does it in 9.9 seconds, a pace once typical only of sporty or luxury cars like Camaros and Jaguars. And vehicle weight now averages about 4,100 pounds, up from about 3,200 in the early 1980's, as many buyers switched to larger, roomier cars or to sport utility vehicles and minivans, and as automakers added safety equipment.
Buyers like the extra zoom and room, but these have come at a cost: average fuel economy has fallen slightly over the last two decades...
...If 2005 model vehicles, with their better technology, had the performance and size of those in 1987, they would use only 80 percent of the gasoline they do today, according to the Environmental Protection Agency...
...But because Americans have not insisted on better fuel economy, 'we can take the technology in the cars and turn the knob toward performance,' said Karl H. Hellman, an automotive development expert who retired from the E.P.A. two years ago.
Improving mileage now would be easy if drivers sacrificed some zip in new cars, he said, 'but in this country, we don't sacrifice for anything,'..."
While others point out that Iran is not enough of a 'open' society to make an Euro oil trading market work, the attempt is clearly a perceptible threat to the dollar.
William Clark: The Real Reasons Why Iran is the Next Target
"...It is now obvious the invasion of Iraq had less to do with any threat from Saddam’s long-gone WMD program and certainly less to do to do with fighting International terrorism than it has to do with gaining control over Iraq’s hydrocarbon reserves and in doing so maintaining the U.S. dollar as the monopoly currency for the critical international oil market. Throughout 2004 statements by former administration insiders revealed that the Bush/Cheney administration entered into office with the intention of toppling Saddam Hussein. Indeed, the neoconservative strategy of installing a pro-U.S. government in Baghdad along with multiple U.S. military bases was partly designed to thwart further momentum within OPEC towards a 'petroeuro.' However, subsequent events show this strategy to be fundamentally flawed, with Iran moving forward towards a petroeuro system for international oil trades, while Russia discusses this option.
Candidly stated, ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’ was a war designed to install a pro-U.S. puppet in Iraq, establish multiple U.S military bases before the onset of Peak Oil, and to reconvert Iraq back to petrodollars while hoping to thwart further OPEC momentum towards the euro as an alternative oil transaction currency..."
Energy Policy:
New York Times: Automakers Use New Technology to Beef Up Muscle, Not Mileage
"For two decades automakers have been developing technology that could make vehicles go farther on a gallon of gasoline. But instead, they have chosen pep and size — making vehicles like the new Murano accelerate faster than cars like the old Mustang, and making them bigger.
The average vehicle, which 25 years ago accelerated to 60 miles an hour in 14.4 seconds, now does it in 9.9 seconds, a pace once typical only of sporty or luxury cars like Camaros and Jaguars. And vehicle weight now averages about 4,100 pounds, up from about 3,200 in the early 1980's, as many buyers switched to larger, roomier cars or to sport utility vehicles and minivans, and as automakers added safety equipment.
Buyers like the extra zoom and room, but these have come at a cost: average fuel economy has fallen slightly over the last two decades...
...If 2005 model vehicles, with their better technology, had the performance and size of those in 1987, they would use only 80 percent of the gasoline they do today, according to the Environmental Protection Agency...
...But because Americans have not insisted on better fuel economy, 'we can take the technology in the cars and turn the knob toward performance,' said Karl H. Hellman, an automotive development expert who retired from the E.P.A. two years ago.
Improving mileage now would be easy if drivers sacrificed some zip in new cars, he said, 'but in this country, we don't sacrifice for anything,'..."
Saturday, April 01, 2006
The Right To Petition Congress:
The way the system works today can hardly be what the Founders had in mind...
NY Times: Vague Law and Hard Lobbying Add Up to Billions for Big Oil
"...For more than a decade, lawmakers and administration officials, both Republicans and Democrats, have promised there would be no cost to taxpayers for a program allowing companies to avoid paying the government royalties on oil and gas produced in publicly owned waters in the Gulf.
But last month, the Bush administration confirmed that it expected the government to waive about $7 billion in royalties over the next five years, even though the industry incentive was expressly conceived of for times when energy prices were low. And that number could quadruple to more than $28 billion if a lawsuit filed last week challenging one of the program's remaining restrictions proves successful.
'The big lie about this whole program is that it doesn't cost anything,' said Representative Edward J. Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat who tried to block its expansion last July. 'Taxpayers are being asked to provide huge subsidies to oil companies to produce oil — it's like subsidizing a fish to swim.'
How did a supposedly cost-free incentive become a multibillion-dollar break to an industry making record profits?
The answer is a familiar Washington story of special-interest politics at work: the people who pay the closest attention and make the fewest mistakes are those with the most profit at stake..."
Common Cause: Wolves in Sheep's Clothing Report
"As consumer demand for high-tech services grows, billions of dollars are at stake for telecommunications companies. Much of the battle is being waged in the halls of Congress right now, where our representatives are considering an overhaul of the 1996 Telecommunications Act.
Cable, telephone and Internet industry giants are fiercely lobbying, using every tool at their disposal to gain a competitive advantage in telecom reform legislation. Some of those tools are easy to spot - campaign contributions, television ads that run only inside the Beltway, and meetings with influential members of Congress. Other tactics are more insidious.
One of the underhanded tactics increasingly being used by telecom companies is 'Astroturf lobbying' -- creating front groups that try to mimic true grassroots, but that are all about corporate money, not citizen power. Astroturf lobbying is hardly a new approach. Senator Lloyd Bentsen is credited with coining the term in the 1980s to describe corporations' big-money efforts to put fake grassroots pressure on Congress. Astroturf campaigns generally claim to represent huge numbers of citizens, but in reality their public support is minimal or nonexistent..."
The way the system works today can hardly be what the Founders had in mind...
NY Times: Vague Law and Hard Lobbying Add Up to Billions for Big Oil
"...For more than a decade, lawmakers and administration officials, both Republicans and Democrats, have promised there would be no cost to taxpayers for a program allowing companies to avoid paying the government royalties on oil and gas produced in publicly owned waters in the Gulf.
But last month, the Bush administration confirmed that it expected the government to waive about $7 billion in royalties over the next five years, even though the industry incentive was expressly conceived of for times when energy prices were low. And that number could quadruple to more than $28 billion if a lawsuit filed last week challenging one of the program's remaining restrictions proves successful.
'The big lie about this whole program is that it doesn't cost anything,' said Representative Edward J. Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat who tried to block its expansion last July. 'Taxpayers are being asked to provide huge subsidies to oil companies to produce oil — it's like subsidizing a fish to swim.'
How did a supposedly cost-free incentive become a multibillion-dollar break to an industry making record profits?
The answer is a familiar Washington story of special-interest politics at work: the people who pay the closest attention and make the fewest mistakes are those with the most profit at stake..."
Common Cause: Wolves in Sheep's Clothing Report
"As consumer demand for high-tech services grows, billions of dollars are at stake for telecommunications companies. Much of the battle is being waged in the halls of Congress right now, where our representatives are considering an overhaul of the 1996 Telecommunications Act.
Cable, telephone and Internet industry giants are fiercely lobbying, using every tool at their disposal to gain a competitive advantage in telecom reform legislation. Some of those tools are easy to spot - campaign contributions, television ads that run only inside the Beltway, and meetings with influential members of Congress. Other tactics are more insidious.
One of the underhanded tactics increasingly being used by telecom companies is 'Astroturf lobbying' -- creating front groups that try to mimic true grassroots, but that are all about corporate money, not citizen power. Astroturf lobbying is hardly a new approach. Senator Lloyd Bentsen is credited with coining the term in the 1980s to describe corporations' big-money efforts to put fake grassroots pressure on Congress. Astroturf campaigns generally claim to represent huge numbers of citizens, but in reality their public support is minimal or nonexistent..."
