The Will To Act.

More examples of how big greedy business has run away with the best interests of the American public, and also a heads up view of Italian citizens who are so dissatisfied with budget cuts (sound familiar?) that workers are striking in protest. Drug makers are exempt from House budget-cuts relating to prescription drugs; an Oregonian senator has cut the agency that counts salmon, no doubt with an eye to destroying even more salmon habitat in order to line his own pockets with utilities revenue. The greed just keeps on keeping on, and any end to all this malfeasance seems too far in the future to protect the things in this country that need to be protected, such as poor children, endangered species, and senior citizens, to name a few. Does anyone with any sort of power care about this? Pessimism is our enemy in these times. Hope, and the will to act must remain foremost. Our country and our people depend on the willingness—the will—of people with power to make these greedy bastards step down, step out, and move on, preferably to the nearest prison cell.

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Drugmakers Win Exemption in House Budget-Cutting Bill

By Jonathan WeismanWashington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 30, 2005; A08

As part of a House budget bill that reduces spending on Medicaid prescription drugs, pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly and Co. and other businesses secured a provision ensuring that their mental health drugs continue to fetch top price at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars to the states.

The provision -- inserted by Rep. Steve Buyer (R-Ind.), whose district flanks Lilly's Indianapolis headquarters -- would largely exempt antipsychotic and antidepressant medications from a larger measure designed to steer Medicaid patients to the least expensive treatment options.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee approved Buyer's amendment this month over the strenuous objections of Chairman Joe Barton (R-Tex.) and the National Governors Association. It survived unchallenged in the $50 billion budget-cutting bill that narrowly passed the House just before Congress left for Thanksgiving recess.

Mental health advocates defend Buyer's provision, saying it is necessary to ensure that vulnerable mental health patients receive proper treatment.

Andrew Sperling, the director of legislative advocacy for the National Alliance on Mental Illness, said his organization has been fighting efforts to restrict access to mental health drugs for years and strongly backed Buyer's amendment. "We believe these [restrictive] policies are destructive and contrary to good clinical policies," he said. "We don't like them."

To opponents, however, Buyer's measure underscores the excessive power that corporate interests wield on Capitol Hill. Critics say the measure also violates the purpose of the budget-cutting bill, which was drafted to give state governments the flexibility to cut program costs in ways that minimize the harm done to beneficiaries.

"This is obviously an attempt to prevent state Medicaid offices from getting cheaper, just-as-beneficial drugs to patients, and it's really going to stick it to the taxpayers," said Steve Ellis, a vice president and Medicaid analyst at Taxpayers for Common Sense.

The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that the provision will raise federal drug spending by $125 million over five years, while state officials say they are likely to face far higher costs.

In a letter to the California congressional delegation, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) estimated the provision would raise the state's prescription drug costs by $50 million a year.

"This would definitely limit states' flexibility," Barton protested earlier this month, before nine committee Republicans joined 22 Democrats to override the chairman's wishes. "And again the underlying basis of the bill is to give states more flexibility, not less flexibility."

Under the budget-cutting bill's Medicaid provisions, states would be allowed to create lists of preferred medications. Then, for the first time, they could charge higher co-payments -- even to poor children and pregnant women -- for medicines not on those lists.

The bipartisan National Governors Association, which promoted the changes, maintains that states will save billions of dollars by guiding patients away from newer drugs that may be far more expensive -- but no more effective -- than older alternatives.

But the Buyer amendment carves out an exception for mental health drugs. Under the provision, states could not limit access to such medications unless they could prove to a drug review board that such restrictions would do no harm to patients.

If a state won approval from a review board, patients seeking to go outside the preferred list of mental health drugs would have the right to appeal. If that appeal was not resolved in 24 hours, the state would have to grant a 30-day supply of the medication.

Mental health medicines need special attention because the complex human brain responds very differently to different drugs and different dosages, advocates of the amendment say.

"This provision will help protect a vulnerable patient population and help ensure they receive appropriate medical care," said Ed Sagebiel, a Lilly spokesman. He acknowledged that his company sought the provision, but he noted that other drug companies did so as well, as did mental health advocacy groups. "On behalf of the patients, I ask, why is that wrong?" he said.

The governors group warned that the cost differential between an older, established drug such as Prozac and a new entrant can be staggering, while the difference in utility is often marginal.

Moreover, no state could meet the requirement of proving that one drug is equivalent to another, because drugmakers' clinical trials compare their products with placebos, and scant evidence is available comparing one drug with another, said Stan Rosenstein, deputy director of California's Department of Health Services.

With more than 15 companies making mental health drugs, Lilly hardly has the market cornered, according to Sagebiel. Lilly does have six such medicines, including Prozac, which now has a generic alternative; Cymbalta, a newer antidepressant; Strattera, for attention-deficit (hyperactivity) disorder; Symbyax for bipolar depression; and Zyprexa for schizophrenia.

Lilly has been adept at using Washington for its own purposes, Ellis said. The company fought for years to extend the patents on Prozac and stave off a generic version. In 2002, it was at the center of a political firestorm over a provision, slipped into the giant law that created the Department of Homeland Security, that shielded vaccine makers from lawsuits by families of autistic children.

And it was Lilly's home-state congressman, Buyer, who got the amendment on mental health drugs through the House.

Lilly's headquarters are located in downtown Indianapolis, which falls within the congressional district of Rep. Julia Carson (D). But many of Lilly's employees live in Buyer's suburban Indianapolis district, and -- unlike Carson -- Buyer is a member of the committee with jurisdiction over Medicaid.

Lilly has been the biggest corporate contributor to Buyer's campaigns. Since 1989, the drug company has donated $46,500 to Buyer's congressional campaigns, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Mike Copher, Buyer's chief of staff, said Buyer's interest in the matter stemmed not from his district's proximity to Lilly but from his work as chairman of the Veterans' Affairs Committee and his former position on the House Armed Services subcommittee on military personnel.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company
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Zeroing Out the Messenger
Idaho Senator Eliminates Funds for Center on Salmon Survival

By Blaine HardenWashington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 30, 2005; A21

PORTLAND, Ore. -- In a surgical strike from Capitol Hill, Sen. Larry E. Craig (R-Idaho) has eliminated a little-known agency that counts endangered fish in the Columbia River.

The Fish Passage Center, with just 12 employees and a budget of $1.3 million, has been killed because it did not count fish in a way that suited Craig.

"Data cloaked in advocacy create confusion," Craig said on the Senate floor this month, after successfully inserting language in an energy and water appropriations bill that bans all future funding for the Fish Passage Center. "False science leads people to false choices."

Here in Portland, Michele DeHart, a fish biologist who is the longtime manager of the center, said she is not mad at Craig.

"What's the point?" asked DeHart, 55, who for nearly 20 years has run the agency that keeps score on the survival of endangered salmon as they negotiate federal dams in the Columbia and Snake rivers.

"I have never met the man," she said. "Never talked to him. No one from his office ever contacted us. I guess I am flabbergasted. We are biologists and computer scientists, and what we do is just math. Math can't hurt you."

But the mathematics of protecting salmon swimming in the nation's largest hydroelectric system can hurt your pocketbook -- particularly in the Northwest, where dams supply power to four out of five homes, more than anywhere in the country.

Salmon math has clearly riled up Craig, who in his last election campaign in 2002 received more money from electric utilities than from any other industry and who has been named "legislator of the year" by the National Hydropower Association.

The Fish Passage Center has documented, in excruciating statistical detail, how the Columbia-Snake hydroelectric system kills salmon. Its analyses of fish survival data also suggest that one way to increase salmon survival is to spill more water over dams, rather than feed it through electrical turbines.
This suggestion, though, is anathema to utilities -- and to Craig -- because water poured over dams means millions of dollars in lost electricity generation.

Last summer, a federal judge in Portland, using data and analysis from the Fish Passage Center, infuriated the utilities. He ordered that water be spilled over federal dams in the Snake River to increase salmon survival. Shortly after Judge James A. Redden issued his order, Craig began pushing to cut all funding for the Fish Passage Center.

"Idaho's water should not be flushed away on experimental policies based on cloudy, inexact assumption," Craig said in a news release.

On the Senate floor this month, he justified elimination of the Fish Passage Center on the grounds that "many questions have arisen regarding the reliability of the technical data" it publishes. Craig quoted from the report of an independent scientific advisory board that in 2003 reviewed work done by the Fish Passage Center.
But one of the report's authors, Charles C. Coutant, a fishery ecologist who retired this year from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, said Craig neglected to mention that the board found the work of the center to be "of high technical quality."

"Craig was very selective in reflecting just the critical part of a quotation from the report," said Coutant, who has worked on Columbia River salmon issues for 16 years. "It did give a misleading impression about our board's view of the Fish Passage Center."

Craig also said on the Senate floor that "other institutions" in the Northwest now do "most" of the data collection work done by center. He said getting rid of the center would reduce redundancy and increase the efficiency of regional fish programs.

But according to another recent independent scientific assessment of the work of the center, there was little duplication of data collection between the center and other organizations; it recommended that the center continue to receive funding to meet a substantial need in the Northwest for information on salmon survival.

Fish and game agencies in Oregon, Washington and Idaho, Indian tribes with fishing rights on the river and the governors of Oregon and Washington have all said that eliminating the Fish Passage Center is a bad idea that would reduce the quality of information on endangered salmon.

Echoing a number of regional experts on salmon recovery, Jeffrey P. Koenings, director of the Washington Fish and Wildlife Department, said in a letter to the regional congressional delegation that it makes no economic sense to kill the center.

"Eliminating or reducing funding for the Fish Passage Center will actually increase salmon recovery costs, as the states and tribes will need additional staff to replace the lost functions," he wrote.

Money for the center has come from the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA), a federal agency that sells power from federal dams.

In 1980, Congress passed a law ordering that salmon in the Columbia hydro-system receive "equitable treatment," along with electricity generation, irrigation and barge transport. BPA was compelled to fund the Fish Passage Center in 1984 as part of the effort to ensure equitable treatment for fish.

Craig blocked this funding mechanism by inserting a sentence in an energy and water spending bill that says, "The Bonneville Power Administration may make no new obligations in support of the Fish Passage Center."
Here in Portland, DeHart said she did not want to speculate about Craig's motives. "I guess it is just that old cliche about killing the messenger," said DeHart, whose office will close in March.

Other prominent players in the region's decades-old salmon vs. power debate are less reticent.

Don Chapman, an Idaho fisheries biologist who has worked for regional utilities, state agencies and environmental groups, wrote Craig a letter accusing him of bad faith. "I state flatly that your attempt to dismantle the Fish Passage Center is wrongheaded and vindictive," he wrote.

Asked about these charges, Craig's spokesman, Dan Whiting, responded by e-mail: "This is about improving the program, taking advocacy out of science and ensuring we have dams and salmon in the Northwest. It is not about vindictiveness or retribution by Sen. Craig -- that is not his style."

© 2005 The Washington Post Company
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Strikers in Italy protest budget cuts

By Elisabetta Povoledo
International Herald Tribune

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 25, 2005

ROME In the sixth general strike since Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi came to power in 2001, tens of thousands of Italian workers took to the streets Friday to protest widespread spending cuts in the government's 2006 general budget.

Public transportation workers, airline pilots and railroad personnel walked out for several hours, paralyzing airports and train stations, and triggering traffic mayhem throughout the country. Most public administration offices were closed as a result of the strike called by Italy's three main labor unions, which represent more than half of the country's work force.

Berlusconi is facing re-election next spring, and Italy's weak economic growth has reflected negatively on the prime minister in recent opinion polls, which show him several points behind Romano Prodi, leader of the center-left opposition. On Friday, Berlusconi dismissed the strike as a "trite ritual that has no effect."

The government has already won a confidence vote in the Senate tied to the budget. The lower house is expected to vote next week on the budget, which must be approved before the end of the year.

"This strike is sacrosanct because there's a great difference between the reality of the country and the deafness of a government that continues to make mistakes," Guglielmo Epifani, leader of Italy's largest union, CGIL, told the thousands of demonstrators in Rome's central Piazza Navona on Friday. As irate workers blew whistles and chanted, Epifani ticked off sectors that will be affected by government cuts, from state aid to local administrations, to health care and education.

The 2006 budget foresees nearly 17 billion, or $20 billion, worth of deficit-cutting measures, as well as one-time measures like real-estate sales of state property. But union leaders object that the government has proposed little to stimulate Italy's stagnant economy - which grew 0.3 percent in the third quarter - or to curb the public debt.

"The government hasn't come up with a constructive plan of action so that we can be competitive against countries that have low labor costs like China," said Elvira Di Cioccio, who works for Esso and is a CGIL union representative.

In Milan, Savino Pezzotta, leader of the CISL union, said that the budget was "harmful for workers and retired people and useless for the development of the country," and lacking the "courage to face the country's real problems," which he listed as industrial development, the defense of earning power and Italy's depressed South.

Copyright © 2005 the International Herald Tribune

Paranoia: Friend To The Vulnerable.

This writer had the good fortune to live across the bay from the Port of Tacoma in the tiny enclave of Browns Point, Washington for a good number of years. The Port of Tacoma is a huge cargo-container center and a major force in the economics of Washington State.

It was common knowledge albeit ‘hush-hush’ that technology existed similar to what Stephen E. Flynn and Lawrence M. Wein describe in the article below and that, indeed, the Port of Tacoma was either using or testing this technology as part of their routine procedure for inspecting cargo containers coming into America from the Far East. This ‘common knowledge’ was available in the mid-1990’s and given the massive progress in technology one would have to assume that the ability to ensure the safety of America from any sort of terrorist sneak-attack by means of containerized cargo would be by this point a highly available and as nearly fool-proof a technology as is possible.

One would also have to consider the nightmare scenario entangled in the remains of September 11, 2001: that the attack on the World Trade Center was promulgated by our own politicians, by a cabal in America, by the bone-marrow deep greed and cynicism of whoever manages Bush and Company—by whatever horrible spin one would choose to place on this event. Anything is possible, and that is what is so awe-inspiring about considering the possibility that whatever this ‘cabal’ might be—and if it really exists—now that exposure seems to be a sure thing—what will these monsters need to do to re-focus our attention on sources outside America being the enemy rather than sources inside America being the enemy?

Yes. It is easily possible to approach paranoia in these matters, but quite often, ‘paranoia’ is a friend to the vulnerable. Now that we are beginning to get glimpses of what has been possible behind the scenes in Congress, The House of Representatives, The White House, The Supreme Court, we need to be alert and focused on the potential for destruction that lurks in the hearts of these criminals.

Word.

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November 29, 2005

Op-Ed Contributors

Think Inside the Box

By STEPHEN E. FLYNN and LAWRENCE M. WEIN

THIS week President Bush will seek to focus the nation's attention on border security and immigration reform. But the president's proposals won't protect Americans from our gravest cross-border threat: the possibility that a ship, truck or train will one day import a 40-foot cargo container in which terrorists have hidden a dirty bomb or nuclear weapon.

The Bush administration maintains that it has a smart strategy to reduce this risk. A new 24-Hour Rule requires that importers report the contents of their containers to customs inspectors one day before the boxes are loaded on ships bound for the United States. The Department of Homeland Security's National Targeting Center then reviews the data, checking against other intelligence to determine which boxes may pose a threat. Although the containers deemed high risk are inspected at cooperating foreign ports or when they enter the United States, the rest - more than 90 percent - land here without any perusal.

We have two concerns about this strategy. First, it presumes that the United States government has good enough intelligence about Al Qaeda to reliably discern which containers are suspicious and which are not. But our inability to thwart the attacks in Iraq demonstrates that we lack such specific tactical intelligence. And supporting customs inspectors, who must make the first assessment of risk, is not a priority for the intelligence agencies. Inspectors must rely on their experience in spotting anomalies - a company that claims to be exporting pineapples from Iceland, for example.

Second, determined terrorists can easily take advantage of the knowledge that customs inspectors routinely designate certain shipments as low risk. A container frequently makes 10 or more stops between its factory of origin and the vessel carrying it to American shores. Many of the way stations are in poorly policed parts of the world. Because name-brand companies like Wal-Mart and General Motors are widely known to be considered low-risk, terrorists need only to stake out their shipment routes and exploit the weakest points to introduce a weapon of mass destruction. A terrorist cell posing as a legal shipping company for more than two years, or a terrorist truck driver hauling goods from a well-known shipper, can also be confident of being perceived as low risk.

So what needs to be done? A pilot project under way in Hong Kong, the world's largest container port along with Singapore, offers one piece of a potential solution. At an estimated cost of $7 per container, new technology can photograph the box's exterior, screen for radioactive material, and collect a gamma-ray image of a box's contents while the truck on which it is carried moves at 10 miles per hour.

Terrorists can defeat radiation sensors by shielding a dirty bomb with dense materials like lead. But by combining those sensors with gamma ray images, the Hong Kong system allows inspectors to sound the alarm on suspiciously dense objects. Inspectors would need to analyze enough of the scans - perhaps 20 percent to 30 percent - to convince terrorists that there is a good chance that an indistinct image will lead a container's contents to be sent for more reliable X-ray or manual examinations. Images of container contents would then be reviewed remotely by inspectors inside the United States who are trained to spot possible nuclear weapons.

If terrorists were to succeed in shipping a dirty bomb, for example, the database of these images could serve as a kind of black box - an invaluable forensic tool in the effort to identify how and where security was breached. That information could help prevent politicians from reacting spasmodically and freezing the entire container system after an attack.

Such a program could significantly reduce the likelihood that terrorists will smuggle plutonium or a dirty bomb through American ports. But it still would not stop a terrorist from importing highly enriched uranium, which can be used to construct a nuclear weapon. Lengthening the time that a container is screened for radiation would help, and this could be done without increasing waiting times if additional monitors were added to the Hong Kong system near the gate where the trucks must already stop for driver identification checks. Better still would be for the Department of Homeland Security to make the development of new technology that can recognize the unique signature of highly enriched uranium an urgent priority.

Finally, we must find ways to ensure that terrorists do not breach containers before shipments arrive at loading ports. Sensors should be installed inside containers in order to track their movements, detect any infiltration and discern the presence of radioactive material. Where boxes are loaded, certified independent inspectors should verify that companies have followed adequate protocols to ensure that legitimate and authorized goods are being shipped.

Taken together, these recommendations will require new investments and an extraordinary degree of international cooperation. But increased container security will not only help the United States prevent terrorism, it will also help all countries reduce theft, stop the smuggling of drugs and humans, crack down on tariff evasion and improve export controls. What's more, such a program would require an investment of just one one-hundredth of the capital that could be lost if we shut down the global container shipping system after an attack.

Container security is a complex problem with enormous stakes. American officials insist that existing programs have matters well in hand. But we cannot afford to take these perky reassurances at face value while the same officials fail to embrace promising initiatives like the Hong Kong pilot project.

Stephen E. Flynn, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, is the author of "America the Vulnerable." Lawrence M. Wein is a professor at Stanford's graduate school of business.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
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SLEAZE FACTOR MAY CLEAN HOUSE

By JOHN PODHORETZ

FIFTY weeks from now, Americans will vote in the 2006 midterm elections. Republicans hold the House of Representatives by 232-202, so Democrats need a pickup of 16 seats to take control. Can they do it?

Out of 435 total House seats, 16 doesn't sound like a very big number. But according to the obsessive House followers, like Amy Walter of the Cook Political Report, the number of seats that will see competitive races is astoundingly low — just 53 that could go either way by one count, and in another, more realistic reckoning, that drops to just 27.

So a Democratic knockout punch would seem highly unlikely. They'd need to reach into solid Republican territory and take seats in areas that have been Bush country since before Bush won in 2000.

But an X-factor may place the GOP's majority in great jeopardy. Not Iraq or the president's low standing — it all has to do with a really disgusting Republican lobbyist named Jack Abramoff.

Abramoff is under indictment on charges of fraud, as are two of his closest associates. The question is whether the growing scandal swirling around Abramoff will soon ensnare a number of GOP House members. This may prove to be the worst Washington corruption scandal since the Abscam sting nailed six congressmen and a senator 25 years ago.

According to press reports, six Republican congressmen may land in seriously hot water over their ties to Abramoff. The most prominent is former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (who's now battling an outrageously politicized indictment by a run-amok prosecutor in Texas).

The most deeply implicated appears to be Rep. Bob Ney of Ohio, who actually used his time on the House floor to deliver speeches attacking a Florida businessman who was in the midst of difficult negotiations with Abramoff over the price of a casino-boat company. After Ney's peculiar floor speech, the businessman caved in to Abramoff and the two became partners, together with an Abramoff associate named Adam Kidan.

A year later, with the casino-boat company in tatters, the businessman was murdered in a gangland hit in Fort Lauderdale. Four years passed, but then, in September, three reputed members of the Gambino crime family were arrested for the murder. In the months before the hit, one of the three mobsters had been put on the payroll of the casino-boat company by Abramoff's partner, Adam Kidan. (Matthew Continetti's brilliant recap of this unbelievable sequence of events for The Weekly Standard is available at weeklystandard.com.)

What began as an investigation into Abramoff's double-dealing with Indian tribes — he took huge sums of money from one tribe wanting to build a casino, then from another tribe trying to block the first one from building that casino — has turned into something far darker.

Abramoff was the most highly paid lobbyist in history. Now it turns out he got himself involved in a business transaction that probably led to a man being riddled with bullets on a Fort Lauderdale street.

Perhaps the criminal probe into Abramoff won't implicate a bunch of GOP congressmen. If so, the matter will simply stand as a testament to one man's unutterable greed and bad character. (Yesterday's guilty plea by Rep. Duke Cunningham in a bribery scandal is another example of greed and bad character, extending no farther than him.)

But it seems equally likely right now that the investigation will nab several GOP stalwarts. And if that happens, the Democrats will have a strong issue on which to run against the Republican Party nationwide in 2006 — a non-ideological assault based entirely on the corruption emanating from Jack Abramoff's extremely deep pockets.

That's just the sort of thing that could make all the prognostications about competitive seats and Republican strongholds meaningless.

Disgust is a powerful force in politics, and the Abramoff case is one that seems to be churning the stomachs of those Republicans and Democrats alike who know about it. If the whole country comes to know about it, watch out, GOP.


E-mail: podhoretz@nypost.com


Copyright 2005 NYP Holdings, Inc.
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Carpe Diem

We need to take another look at why the U.S. Supreme Court did not act on the lawsuit by the former FBI linguist, Sibel Edmonds. It would seem that these events for which she was dismissed are directly related to misinformation provided by the Bush cabal. Shouldn’t we re-open this case by any means possible to inspect for lies hiding behind ‘national security’ labels? Is it not possible for these events to be investigated without compromising national security?

It is now coming to light just how much of our news has been tainted, censored, and controlled by the Bush people: isn’t it time to trace all this back to the source and charge these fascist criminals with treason against The United States of America? Isn’t it time to finally draw all these disparate news clippings into a cohesive outline delineating an on-going plot to destroy The United States of America from within? Are we still in a state of disbelief that this could have happened in our country?

Is Patrick Fitzgerald the only uncorrupted lawyer left in this country who still has a brain? C’mon, guys, get it together: we bloggers are doing all we can. It’s up to you, now. Carpe Diem.

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Supreme Court rejects appeal by fired FBI linguist

Mon Nov 28, 2005 10:57 AM ET
By James Vicini

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court let stand on Monday the dismissal of a lawsuit by a former FBI linguist who said she had been fired in 2002 for speaking out about possible security breaches, misconduct and incompetent translation work.

Without any comment, the justices rejected an appeal by Sibel Edmonds, who worked as a contract linguist at the FBI's Washington field office from shortly after the September 11, 2001 attacks until her dismissal the following March.

A Web site describing her fight with the FBI said that she had been hired "because of her knowledge of Middle Eastern languages."

Edmonds had reported to FBI management concerns about the quality of the translations, accusing fellow translators of willful misconduct and gross incompetence. She also accused a co-worker of possible espionage.

Edmonds said that numerous communications had been left untranslated or had been mistranslated.
The FBI has said that Edmonds was disruptive and that her allegations were not credible.
In July 2002, she sued the FBI, the U.S. Justice Department and various high-level officials in challenging her dismissal.

U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton dismissed the case after then-Attorney General John Ashcroft invoked the rarely used "state secrets privilege."

He warned that further disclosure of the duties of Edmonds and other translators could cause "serious damage to the national security interests of the United States."

Walton ruled that secret declarations from Ashcroft and a top FBI official demonstrated that the lawsuit could reveal classified information about intelligence-gathering methods and could disrupt diplomatic relations with foreign governments.

A U.S. appeals court, in a three-paragraph judgment, upheld the dismissal.

In appealing to the Supreme Court, attorneys for Edmonds described her as a whistle blower. They said the justices should clarify the proper scope and application of the state secrets privilege.

They also argued that the appeals court violated the First Amendment when it excluded the press and the public from the arguments in the case in April, without any specific findings that secrecy was necessary.

A number of news media companies and groups supported that part of the appeal and said the public's First Amendment right of access to criminal cases should also apply to civil cases, including appellate oral arguments.

Justice Department attorneys said the appeals court's decision upholding the dismissal of the lawsuit was correct and that further review of the case was unwarranted. They said Ashcroft properly invoked the state secrets privilege after personally considering the matter.

© Reuters 2005. All rights reserved
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The old bastard may have a point...

Comments made by Saddam during the trial

The Associated Press

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 28, 2005


BAGHDAD Here are some comments made by Saddam Hussein during the second session of his trial. They were translated from Arabic by The Associated Press.

''The rights of a defendant when he is in a building — which is the Military Industrialization building that is a court now — he should be under the supervision of the court when it comes to administration.''

——————

''How can a defendant defend himself if his pen was taken. Saddam Hussein's pen and papers were taken. I don't mean a white paper. There are papers downstairs that include my remarks in which I express my opinion.''

——————

''I was brought here with handcuffs. ... At the same time the elevator was out of order. The Quran was in my hands and the clutches were in my hands.''

——————

''You are the chief judge. I don't want you to tell them. I want you to order them. They are in our country. You have the sovereignty. You are Iraqi and they are foreigners and occupiers. They are invaders. You should order them.''
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November 28, 2005

Public Broadcasting's Enemy Within

As chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Kenneth Tomlinson proved to be a disastrous zealot. Internal investigators found he repeatedly broke federal law and ethics rules in overreaching his authority and packing the payroll with Republican ideologues.

His actual job - to maintain a "heat shield" between public broadcasting and politics - was turned on its head. The scathing investigation concluded that Mr. Tomlinson was a beacon of partisanship, hiring G.O.P. consultants as ludicrous bias-control monitors and recruiting Patricia Harrison, a former co-chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, to be the corporation's new president.

Mr. Tomlinson, who has now left the corporation, insisted he had "absolutely no contact" with White House partisans. But the inspector general's report found he did indeed consult with administration powers like Karl Rove, President Bush's political guru. He even hired someone still on the White House payroll for advice on creating a balance "ombudsman" for public broadcasting. And he was found to violate the law by promoting a $4 million deal for conservative writers from The Wall Street Journal to be featured as a "balancing program."

Mr. Tomlinson, a Reader's Digest editor appointed to the board by President Bill Clinton, threatened the independence at the heart of public broadcasting's popularity. His departure is no cure-all, however, for the board remains a haven for such political appointees as Cheryl Halpern, a Republican fund-raiser chosen by Mr. Tomlinson as the new corporation chairwoman.

The inspector general's report is a case study of how dangerous ideological cronyism is as a substitute for nonpartisan expertise. Defenders of public broadcasting now must guard against still another conservative putsch - a Congressional move to cut financing for the corporation's $400 million budget of vital aid for local stations. This time, the "balance" zealots may resort to irony by citing the very chaos wrought by Mr. Tomlinson.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Message To New Orleans, Et Alia

Look: you don’t get it. It is useless to bow to the innate human response to beg ones torturer for help when no help is possible. You don’t get it. A sadist does not care about your pain, in fact, a sadist relishes, loves and needs your pain. “You” is a meaningless concept to a sadist other than that the other person, the ‘you’, provides a vehicle to expand the ego of the sadist. The suffering of others is a GOOD thing: try to get your mind around that concept. Realize it may take years for you to comprehend the total self-worship and the lack of need for self-justification that marks a sadist-sociopath. It may take years for you to comprehend that someone could actually take pleasure in your pain.

The underlying sadistic agenda of Nazi Germany, motivated by sadomasochism masquerading as social agenda, is the underlying historical precedent. The citizens of Germany were able to grasp the concepts occurring during the rise of the Nazi party but could do nothing to stop the Nazi agenda from becoming the German agenda. Millions of corpses provide proof that inertia is the enemy of democracy. Millions of Germans who state that they ‘did not know’ what was going on in Germany provide proof that knowledge or the lack of it is no defense when history speaks.

The only defense we have is our own intelligence and education against these so-called Neocons (the label ‘Sadist’ would not be acceptable to the majority of us). The only defense we have is an historical precedent for an example—Germany did nothing to stop Hitler and Cronies because the concept of sadists running the country was beyond what average folks could comprehend. That is what is called ‘doing nothing’ when we wonder why German citizens ‘did nothing’ to prevent Hitler and Cronies from rising to power.

Sadistic-sociopaths cannot be rehabilitated—they cannot be changed. They will destroy this country with no regard for what anyone else’s needs might be, in fact, the worse your need and the deeper your pain, the more you feed the sadistic agenda of Bush and Cronies.

Consider that Bush is seeking new allies in every country where torture is most prevalent; in countries like Jakarta, and Ulan Bator: the countries where torture is an everyday occurrence and where the disappearance of citizens is addressed by the worldwide community in a fit of puling liberals and hand-wringing members of charitable and/or non-profit organizations.

Of course Cheney wants torture to be legal—the man is a sadist. He likes to torture people. This man does not care who you are or who your children are, and when you and yours have fed the beast of sadism, he will toss you in a common grave and continue his fun and games with someone else, someone else’s children. The only thing these monsters understand is someone who is stronger doing to them what they do, or want to do, to others. They cannot be changed. They cannot be rehabilitated. Ask any victim of any serial killer.

We must have an active agenda within this country to root out and destroy this Fascist and Sadomasochistic organization that threatens to derail America as the embodiment of democracy. This is no place for Nazis, or Fascists.

Send Daddy-Bear Cheney, and Drummer-Boy Bush back to the gay-boy-S-and-M-dungeons where they belong. Let them play their games with people who know how to discipline them when they get out of control. The White House is no place for this mess.
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November 27, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist
Dishonest, Reprehensible, Corrupt ...
By FRANK RICH
GEORGE W. BUSH is so desperate for allies that his hapless Asian tour took him to Ulan Bator, a first for an American president, so he could mingle with the yaks and give personal thanks for Mongolia's contribution of some 160 soldiers to "the coalition of the willing." Dick Cheney, whose honest-and-ethical poll number hit 29 percent in Newsweek's latest survey, is so radioactive that he vanished into his bunker for weeks at a time during the storms Katrina and Scootergate.

The whole world can see that both men are on the run. Just how much so became clear in the brace of nasty broadsides each delivered this month about Iraq. Neither man engaged the national debate ignited by John Murtha about how our troops might be best redeployed in a recalibrated battle against Islamic radicalism. Neither offered a plan for "victory." Instead, both impugned their critics' patriotism and retreated into the past to defend the origins of the war. In a seasonally appropriate impersonation of the misanthropic Mr. Potter from "It's a Wonderful Life," the vice president went so far as to label critics of the administration's prewar smoke screen both "dishonest and reprehensible" and "corrupt and shameless." He sounded but one epithet away from a defibrillator.

The Washington line has it that the motivation for the Bush-Cheney rage is the need to push back against opponents who have bloodied the White House in the polls. But, Mr. Murtha notwithstanding, the Democrats are too feeble to merit that strong a response. There is more going on here than politics.

Much more: each day brings slam-dunk evidence that the doomsday threats marshaled by the administration to sell the war weren't, in Cheney-speak, just dishonest and reprehensible but also corrupt and shameless. The more the president and vice president tell us that their mistakes were merely innocent byproducts of the same bad intelligence seen by everyone else in the world, the more we learn that this was not so. The web of half-truths and falsehoods used to sell the war did not happen by accident; it was woven by design and then foisted on the public by a P.R. operation built expressly for that purpose in the White House. The real point of the Bush-Cheney verbal fisticuffs this month, like the earlier campaign to take down Joseph Wilson, is less to smite Democrats than to cover up wrongdoing in the executive branch between 9/11 and shock and awe.

The cover-up is failing, however. No matter how much the president and vice president raise their decibel levels, the truth keeps roaring out. A nearly 7,000-word investigation in last Sunday's Los Angeles Times found that Mr. Bush and his aides had "issued increasingly dire warnings" about Iraq's mobile biological weapons labs long after U.S. intelligence authorities were told by Germany's Federal Intelligence Service that the principal source for these warnings, an Iraqi defector in German custody code-named Curveball, "never claimed to produce germ weapons and never saw anyone else do so." The five senior German intelligence officials who spoke to The Times said they were aghast that such long-discredited misinformation from a suspected fabricator turned up in Colin Powell's presentation to the United Nations and in the president's 2003 State of the Union address (where it shared billing with the equally bogus 16 words about Saddam's fictitious African uranium).

Right after the L.A. Times scoop, Murray Waas filled in another piece of the prewar propaganda puzzle. He reported in the nonpartisan National Journal that 10 days after 9/11, "President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda."

The information was delivered in the President's Daily Brief, a C.I.A. assessment also given to the vice president and other top administration officials. Nonetheless Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney repeatedly pounded in an implicit (and at times specific) link between Saddam and Al Qaeda until Americans even started to believe that the 9/11 attacks had been carried out by Iraqis. More damning still, Mr. Waas finds that the "few credible reports" of Iraq-Al Qaeda contacts actually involved efforts by Saddam to monitor or infiltrate Islamic terrorist groups, which he regarded as adversaries of his secular regime. Thus Saddam's antipathy to Islamic radicals was the same in 2001 as it had been in 1983, when Donald Rumsfeld, then a Reagan administration emissary, embraced the dictator as a secular fascist ally in the American struggle against the theocratic fascist rulers in Iran.

What these revelations also tell us is that Mr. Bush was wrong when he said in his Veterans Day speech that more than 100 Congressional Democrats who voted for the Iraqi war resolution "had access to the same intelligence" he did. They didn't have access to the President's Daily Brief that Mr. Waas uncovered. They didn't have access to the information that German intelligence officials spoke about to The Los Angeles Times. Nor did they have access to material from a Defense Intelligence Agency report, released by Senator Carl Levin of Michigan this month, which as early as February 2002 demolished the reliability of another major source that the administration had persistently used for its false claims about Iraqi-Al Qaeda collaboration.
The more we learn about the road to Iraq, the more we realize that it's a losing game to ask what lies the White House told along the way. A simpler question might be: What was not a lie? The situation recalls Mary McCarthy's explanation to Dick Cavett about why she thought Lillian Hellman was a dishonest writer: "Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the.' "

If Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney believe they were truthful in the run-up to the war, it's easy for them to make their case. Instead of falsely claiming that they've been exonerated by two commissions that looked into prewar intelligence - neither of which addressed possible White House misuse and mischaracterization of that intelligence - they should just release the rest of the President's Daily Briefs and other prewar documents that are now trickling out. Instead, incriminatingly enough, they are fighting the release of any such information, including unclassified documents found in post-invasion Iraq requested from the Pentagon by the pro-war, neocon Weekly Standard. As Scott Shane reported in The New York Times last month, Vietnam documents are now off limits, too: the National Security Agency won't make public a 2001 historical report on how American officials distorted intelligence in 1964 about the Gulf of Tonkin incident for fear it might "prompt uncomfortable comparisons" between the games White Houses played then and now to gin up wars.

SOONER or later - probably sooner, given the accelerating pace of recent revelations - this embarrassing information will leak out anyway. But the administration's deliberate efforts to suppress or ignore intelligence that contradicted its Iraq crusade are only part of the prewar story. There were other shadowy stations on the disinformation assembly line. Among them were the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group, a two-man Pentagon operation specifically created to cherry-pick intelligence for Mr. Cheney's apocalyptic Iraqi scenarios, and the White House Iraq Group (WHIG), in which Karl Rove, Karen Hughes and the Cheney hands Lewis Libby and Mary Matalin, among others, plotted to mainline this propaganda into the veins of the press and public. These murky aspects of the narrative - like the role played by a private P.R. contractor, the Rendon Group, examined by James Bamford in the current Rolling Stone - have yet to be recounted in full.

No debate about the past, of course, can undo the mess that the administration made in Iraq. But the past remains important because it is a road map to both the present and the future. Leaders who dissembled then are still doing so. Indeed, they do so even in the same speeches in which they vehemently deny having misled us then - witness Mr. Bush's false claims about what prewar intelligence was seen by Congress and Mr. Cheney's effort last Monday to again conflate the terrorists of 9/11 with those "making a stand in Iraq." (Maj. Gen. Douglas Lute, director of operations for Centcom, says the Iraqi insurgency is 90 percent homegrown.) These days Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney routinely exaggerate the readiness of Iraqi troops, much as they once inflated Saddam's W.M.D.'s.

"We're not going to sit by and let them rewrite history," the vice president said of his critics. "We're going to continue throwing their own words back at them." But according to a Harris poll released by The Wall Street Journal last Wednesday, 64 percent of Americans now believe that the Bush administration "generally misleads the American public on current issues to achieve its own ends." That's why it's Mr. Cheney's and the president's own words that are being thrown back now - not to rewrite history but to reveal it for the first time to an angry country that has learned the hard way that it can no longer afford to be without the truth.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
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Pentagon Expanding Its Domestic Surveillance Activity
Fears of Post-9/11 Terrorism Spur Proposals for New Powers

By Walter PincusWashington Post Staff WriterSunday, November 27, 2005; A06

The Defense Department has expanded its programs aimed at gathering and analyzing intelligence within the United States, creating new agencies, adding personnel and seeking additional legal authority for domestic security activities in the post-9/11 world.

The moves have taken place on several fronts. The White House is considering expanding the power of a little-known Pentagon agency called the Counterintelligence Field Activity, or CIFA, which was created three years ago. The proposal, made by a presidential commission, would transform CIFA from an office that coordinates Pentagon security efforts -- including protecting military facilities from attack -- to one that also has authority to investigate crimes within the United States such as treason, foreign or terrorist sabotage or even economic espionage.

The Pentagon has pushed legislation on Capitol Hill that would create an intelligence exception to the Privacy Act, allowing the FBI and others to share information gathered about U.S. citizens with the Pentagon, CIA and other intelligence agencies, as long as the data is deemed to be related to foreign intelligence. Backers say the measure is needed to strengthen investigations into terrorism or weapons of mass destruction.

The proposals, and other Pentagon steps aimed at improving its ability to analyze counterterrorism intelligence collected inside the United States, have drawn complaints from civil liberties advocates and a few members of Congress, who say the Defense Department's push into domestic collection is proceeding with little scrutiny by the Congress or the public.

"We are deputizing the military to spy on law-abiding Americans in America. This is a huge leap without even a [congressional] hearing," Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said in a recent interview.

Wyden has since persuaded lawmakers to change the legislation, attached to the fiscal 2006 intelligence authorization bill, to address some of his concerns, but he still believes hearings should be held. Among the changes was the elimination of a provision to let Defense Intelligence Agency officers hide the fact that they work for the government when they approach people who are possible sources of intelligence in the United States.

Modifications also were made in the provision allowing the FBI to share information with the Pentagon and CIA, requiring the approval of the director of national intelligence, John D. Negroponte, for that to occur, and requiring the Pentagon to make reports to Congress on the subject. Wyden said the legislation "now strikes a much fairer balance by protecting critical rights for our country's citizens and advancing intelligence operations to meet our security needs."

Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies, said the data-sharing amendment would still give the Pentagon much greater access to the FBI's massive collection of data, including information on citizens not connected to terrorism or espionage.

The measure, she said, "removes one of the few existing privacy protections against the creation of secret dossiers on Americans by government intelligence agencies." She said the Pentagon's "intelligence agencies are quietly expanding their domestic presence without any public debate."

Lt. Col. Chris Conway, a spokesman for the Pentagon, said that the most senior Defense Department intelligence officials are aware of the sensitivities related to their expanded domestic activities. At the same time, he said, the Pentagon has to have the intelligence necessary to protect its facilities and personnel at home and abroad.

"In the age of terrorism," Conway said, "the U.S. military and its facilities are targets, and we have to be prepared within our authorities to defend them before something happens."

Among the steps already taken by the Pentagon that enhanced its domestic capabilities was the establishment after 9/11 of Northern Command, or Northcom, in Colorado Springs, to provide military forces to help in reacting to terrorist threats in the continental United States. Today, Northcom's intelligence centers in Colorado and Texas fuse reports from CIFA, the FBI and other U.S. agencies, and are staffed by 290 intelligence analysts. That is more than the roughly 200 analysts working for the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, and far more than those at the Department of Homeland Security.

In addition, each of the military services has begun its own post-9/11 collection of domestic intelligence, primarily aimed at gathering data on potential terrorist threats to bases and other military facilities at home and abroad. For example, Eagle Eyes is a program set up by the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, which "enlists the eyes and ears of Air Force members and citizens in the war on terror," according to the program's Web site.

The Marine Corps has expanded its domestic intelligence operations and developed internal policies in 2004 to govern oversight of the "collection, retention and dissemination of information concerning U.S. persons," according to a Marine Corps order approved on April 30, 2004.

The order recognizes that in the post-9/11 era, the Marine Corps Intelligence Activity will be "increasingly required to perform domestic missions," and as a result, "there will be increased instances whereby Marine intelligence activities may come across information regarding U.S. persons." Among domestic targets listed are people in the United States who it "is reasonably believed threaten the physical security of Defense Department employees, installations, operations or official visitors."

Perhaps the prime illustration of the Pentagon's intelligence growth is CIFA, which remains one of its least publicized intelligence agencies. Neither the size of its staff, said to be more than 1,000, nor its budget is public, said Conway, the Pentagon spokesman. The CIFA brochure says the agency's mission is to "transform" the way counterintelligence is done "fully utilizing 21st century tools and resources."

One CIFA activity, threat assessments, involves using "leading edge information technologies and data harvesting," according to a February 2004 Pentagon budget document. This involves "exploiting commercial data" with the help of outside contractors including White Oak Technologies Inc. of Silver Spring, and MZM Inc., a Washington-based research organization, according to the Pentagon document.

For CIFA, counterintelligence involves not just collecting data but also "conducting activities to protect DoD and the nation against espionage, other intelligence activities, sabotage, assassinations, and terrorist activities," its brochure states.

CIFA's abilities would increase considerably under the proposal being reviewed by the White House, which was made by a presidential commission on intelligence chaired by retired appellate court judge Laurence H. Silberman and former senator Charles S. Robb (D-Va.). The commission urged that CIFA be given authority to carry out domestic criminal investigations and clandestine operations against potential threats inside the United States.

The Silberman-Robb panel found that because the separate military services concentrated on investigations within their areas, "no entity views non-service-specific and department-wide investigations as its primary responsibility." A 2003 Defense Department directive kept CIFA from engaging in law enforcement activities such as "the investigation, apprehension, or detention of individuals suspected or convicted of criminal offenses against the laws of the United States."

The commission's proposal would change that, giving CIFA "new counterespionage and law enforcement authorities," covering treason, espionage, foreign or terrorist sabotage, and even economic espionage. That step, the panel said, could be taken by presidential order and Pentagon directive without congressional approval.

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said the CIFA expansion "is being studied at the DoD [Defense Department] level," adding that intelligence director Negroponte would have a say in the matter. A Pentagon spokesman said, "The [CIFA] matter is before the Hill committees."

Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in a recent interview that CIFA has performed well in the past and today has no domestic intelligence collection activities. He was not aware of moves to enhance its authority.

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has not had formal hearings on CIFA or other domestic intelligence programs, but its staff has been briefed on some of the steps the Pentagon has already taken. "If a member asks the chairman" -- Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) -- for hearings, "I am sure he would respond," said Bill Duhnke, the panel's staff director.

Staff writer Dan Eggen contributed to this report.
© 2005 The Washington Post Company

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Do Not Forsake Us

By Jim AmossSunday, November 27, 2005; B07

President Bush flew into New Orleans shortly after Hurricane Katrina devastated the city. His staff had to fire up giant generators to bathe St. Louis Cathedral and Jackson Square in floodlights, as a backdrop for his promise that he would "do what it takes" to rebuild New Orleans.

"There is no way to imagine America without New Orleans," he said, "and this great city will rise again."
Then the lights went out, and the president left. Vast swaths of the city have been in darkness ever since.
It would be unprecedented and indefensible for the federal government to leave an American city to fend for itself in recovery. But when we talk of the federal government's role in rebuilding New Orleans, it's important to understand its direct culpability in the destruction.

At the site of the worst urban disaster in American history, we are a city obsessed. Rebuilding New Orleans is our breakfast-table conversation, our lunchtime chatter, our pillow talk. But while we talk, we also wait. For a settlement on our homeowner insurance policy, for our children's schools to reopen, for a sign that our neighbors will come back.

Above all we are waiting for Congress and the federal government to decide that New Orleans deserves strong levees -- stronger than the sorry system, designed and built by the Army Corps of Engineers, that collapsed, wrecking our neighborhoods. We want word from Washington that a great American city will not be left to die.

As our newspaper has documented in recent weeks, the miles of federally built concrete floodwalls that were meant to keep Lake Pontchartrain from flooding the city through its drainage canals during a hurricane appear to have been poorly designed and improperly constructed. The floodwall system is a federal project, designed by the Corps and built under Corps specifications. Evidence suggests that metal sheet piles didn't go deep enough into the ground and that the walls were built on peaty soil that did not provide adequate anchorage. One engineering professor from Louisiana State University called in to investigate the failures said it was the kind of engineering shortfall he'd expect his first-year students to be able to identify.

When several of the federally built floodwall panels gave way on the morning of Katrina, after the worst winds had passed, the storm-swollen lake cascaded into the city. It was a man-made disaster, a federal engineering failure with multibillion-dollar consequences.

Today, when we New Orleanians travel around the country, we are comforted by a tremendous outpouring of sympathy from ordinary Americans. Many have given generously to charities for Katrina victims. We also hear people talk about how things must be getting back to normal.

Nothing could be farther from the truth. New Orleans has become two cities -- an enclave of survivors clustered along the Mississippi River's crescent and a vast and sprawling shadow city where the water stood, devoid of power and people.

The ancient heart -- the French Quarter and Uptown -- is throbbing with commerce and signs of life from the hardiest returnees. But cross Freret Street, and you enter a dim realm. The neighborhoods that extend from there to the lake are comatose. At night, I drive through darkened and abandoned streets, past acres of housing that marinated in polluted floodwater for weeks, past blocks where I know people died, unable to escape the storm, past the homes of poor, middle-class and affluent New Orleanians -- all devastated alike.

When daylight returns, many of those dead blocks come alive with visiting homeowners dragging their soggy belongings to the sidewalk, stopping sometimes to hug and to cry, then going back to work. Our street scene is an endless row of ruined refrigerators, moldy sheetrock, debris and garbage bags.

The vastness of this destruction is almost impossible to fathom. A steady stream of members of Congress have toured the devastation at ground level, and they all have the same impression that a stunned Sen. Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island came away with last week: "You have to see it."

Our city and state understand that it is incumbent upon them to come up with a plan, sensible and well thought out, for the rebirth of New Orleans. The problem is so vast that it is difficult to harness, and the first steps have been halting. But we're working on it.

When we're ready, we will be expecting, not unreasonably, a commitment from our government to fund a well-designed system of substantial levees, floodgates and other barriers extending into the Gulf of Mexico; a system that will protect us not only from a Category 3 hurricane like Katrina but from the strongest storm, a Category 5. Such a system would already have been built if anyone had taken into account the billions of dollars the government's failure to protect New Orleans is costing us now.

Can America, having witnessed the loss of well over 1,000 lives to Katrina, not rouse itself? Despite its problems, New Orleans remains one of our greatest cities, beloved of this country and the world. We are at the fulcrum of one-third of the nation's oil and gas and 40 percent of its seafood. We gave birth to much of this country's indigenous culture, and we continue to nourish it. What does it say about our civilization if this unique American metropolis is left to die?

What New Orleans needs is no extravagance. Our city must help itself in rebuilding its neighborhoods and reforming its institutions. What is lacking is political will in Washington and the determination to bring our engineering know-how to bear upon the problem. Without a substantial levee system, homeowners won't muster the confidence to rebuild, and businesses will not see fit to invest.

President Bush was still smarting from the embarrassing federal response to Katrina when he stood in the heart of our city and made his promise to rebuild. It would be a greater embarrassment to an entire nation if that promise went unfulfilled.

The writer is editor of the New Orleans Times-Picayune.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company
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Detained in prison by doubletalk

Sean Gonsalves - Cape Cod Times

11.27.05 - I find myself referring to Hugh Rawson's “Dictionary of Euphemisms And Other Doubletalk” just about every day, given the all-consuming fog of war clouding minds and political debate since 9/11.

In his pre-war “message to the Iraqi people,” President Bush declared: “The nightmare that Saddam Hussein has brought to your nation will soon be over. ... You deserve better than tyranny and corruption and torture chambers.”

Now, after the Senate passed legislation banning CIA torture, which really chaffed Cheney's derriere, we find out the CIA has a network of secret prisons in eastern Europe and Asia to “interrogate” terrorist suspects.

We also know the Bush administration doesn't consider those captured in the “war on terror” worthy of the Geneva Conventions, apparently because “the evil ones” don't wear uniforms or represent a recognized government, as if arguing the letter of the law trumps its spirit.

Hence, the emergence of the euphemism “detainee.”

Have you noticed how our free and independent major media use the same bureaucratese, both in print and television?

Rawson's dictionary traces the word to a 1977 New York Times article about the death of South African apartheid resister, Steven Biko.

“Mr. Biko was the 45th political detainee to die in the hands of the security police,” the Times reported.

What does it tell you when the word's origins come from South Africa's apartheid past and was used by the “security” police?

Another example of “detainee” use, Rawson notes, is when the U.S. military imprisoned 1,100 people during the 1983 invasion of Grenada — one of the great “threats” to our national security.

A State Department official at the time instructed us: “They (Grenada prisoners) should be described as detainees.”

When it comes to “detainees,” President Bush said, “we are leading this fight by example,” all the while seeking a legal exemption on a CIA torture ban.

An “example,” indeed, especially in light of a Nov. 3 Human Rights Watch report in which a sergeant with the 82nd Airborne told his interviewer about their reputation in Iraq as “murderous maniacs” because torture “took place almost daily.”

The detainees, one sergeant said, “knew if they got detained by us before they went to Abu Ghraib then it would be hell to pay. ... You couldn't even imagine... it was a like a game. You know, how far could you make this guy go before he passes out or just collapses on you.”

You may think the “terrorists” deserve it, but don't forget the Red Cross study, which reported that 90 percent of the “detainees” were not part of the Iraqi insurgency.

Appropriately, the National Council of Teachers of English 2004 Doublespeak Award went to the Bush administration, in part because “Jay S. Bybee, head of the Office of Legal Counsel, advised that, in order to be considered torture, the pain inflicted on a prisoner ‘must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.’”

“Leaving aside the problem of how to quantitatively measure human pain in this way, the memo advised that international laws against torture 'may be unconstitutional if applied to interrogation' of (suspected terrorists).”

Don't be surprised if the plain-talking Bush administration doesn't start calling torture “aversion therapy” or “behavior modification.”

It's not terrorist-sympathizing, feel-goodism to recognize that this tortured logic is self-defeating in the all-important war for “hearts and minds.” Words shape our thoughts. So as long as we buy into these linguistic sleights-of-hand where prisoners of war are called “detainees,” dangling in a legal limbo, “staying the course” is the path to “winning the war and losing the peace.”

(c) 2005, Cape Cod Times


URL: http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=19931
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How to steal America. How to steal the World.

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Get a bunch of fat, rich international friends together and decide to skim the cream off the worlds’ populations.

Start about 30 years before anything becomes public knowledge.

Work in secret.

Make sure you have no desire to help anyone but the richest 1% of the world (Your “Base”).

Be heartless in your loyalty to wealth.

Be deaf to the cries of children suffering from hunger and disease in every part of the world.

Count on the blind faith of most human beings that their leaders mean them no harm.

Be Godless, and speak of God with Righteousness.

Be black of heart, yet speak of Christ as if you are his representative on Earth.

Make sure you appeal to the superstitions of the most ignorant members of the human race. Set as many tribes against each other as possible.

Make certain that you yourself are stupid enough, greedy enough, dyslexic in spirit enough, to ignore the fable of the Goose Who Laid the Golden Egg.

Prepare yourself for the idea that your own grandchildren, great grandchildren, great-great-grandchildren will exist in this world as inhabitants of a Lord-Of-The-Flies-Universe where the demons will have your name.

By all means, if you have any ability to see beyond your own nose, blind your eyes with the glitter and gleam of a thousand shiny things.

That’s all there is to it.
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November 26, 2005

Privatizing the American West

While lawmakers are in recess, it is worth reflecting on one particular part of the mess they have left behind. Last week, a budget bill scraped through the House, 217 to 215. Democrats and moderate Republicans had already stripped a provision to allow drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. But the House bill left intact an evil trap to be sprung on the American public: Richard Pombo's plan to put a few hundred million acres of publicly owned land up for sale in the American West.

Mr. Pombo, Republican of California, is head of the House Resources Committee and has long been determined to privatize as much of the West as he can lay his hands on. His bill would allow the holders of mining claims to buy the land outright instead of leasing it - a substantial revision of the current practice. He argues that his proposal would merely adjust laws and affect only about 360,000 acres where mining claims are currently being developed or explored.

But the bill is so vaguely drawn that at least 6 million acres of public land, and possibly as much as 350 million acres, could wind up in the hands of private buyers. These buyers need to express only the intent to develop a mineral claim without any need to demonstrate commercial mining potential. Once the land is bought, it can be developed as the owners see fit. This is a blatant fraud on the American people, expressed in bland legislative legalese.

The question is, Who is going to stop it?

The bill has to clear a few more hurdles before becoming the law of the land - a House-Senate conference committee and final votes in the House and the Senate. In the best of all possible worlds, the House negotiators would reject the worst aspects of the Senate bill, which authorizes drilling in the Arctic refuge, and the Senate negotiators would reject the worst aspects of the House version, including Mr. Pombo's outrageous raid on the public lands.

This is not the long shot it might have seemed as recently as a week ago. Americans have come to understand that America can't drill its way out of dependency on Middle Eastern oil, and that ravaging the Arctic is no substitute for sound energy policy. They also understand that Mr. Pombo's sleight of hand is little more than legislative robbery.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
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Strikers in Italy protest budget cuts

By Elisabetta Povoledo
International Herald Tribune

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 25, 2005

ROME In the sixth general strike since Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi came to power in 2001, tens of thousands of Italian workers took to the streets Friday to protest widespread spending cuts in the government's 2006 general budget.

Public transportation workers, airline pilots and railroad personnel walked out for several hours, paralyzing airports and train stations, and triggering traffic mayhem throughout the country. Most public administration offices were closed as a result of the strike called by Italy's three main labor unions, which represent more than half of the country's work force.

Berlusconi is facing re-election next spring, and Italy's weak economic growth has reflected negatively on the prime minister in recent opinion polls, which show him several points behind Romano Prodi, leader of the center-left opposition. On Friday, Berlusconi dismissed the strike as a "trite ritual that has no effect."

The government has already won a confidence vote in the Senate tied to the budget. The lower house is expected to vote next week on the budget, which must be approved before the end of the year.

"This strike is sacrosanct because there's a great difference between the reality of the country and the deafness of a government that continues to make mistakes," Guglielmo Epifani, leader of Italy's largest union, CGIL, told the thousands of demonstrators in Rome's central Piazza Navona on Friday. As irate workers blew whistles and chanted, Epifani ticked off sectors that will be affected by government cuts, from state aid to local administrations, to health care and education.

The 2006 budget foresees nearly 17 billion, or $20 billion, worth of deficit-cutting measures, as well as one-time measures like real-estate sales of state property. But union leaders object that the government has proposed little to stimulate Italy's stagnant economy - which grew 0.3 percent in the third quarter - or to curb the public debt.

"The government hasn't come up with a constructive plan of action so that we can be competitive against countries that have low labor costs like China," said Elvira Di Cioccio, who works for Esso and is a CGIL union representative.

In Milan, Savino Pezzotta, leader of the CISL union, said that the budget was "harmful for workers and retired people and useless for the development of the country," and lacking the "courage to face the country's real problems," which he listed as industrial development, the defense of earning power and Italy's depressed South.

Copyright © 2005 The International Herald Tribune
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Ford facing labor unrest in Russia

By Andrew E. Kramer
The New York Times

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 25, 2005


VSEVOLOZHSK, Russia An industrial action at Ford Motor's plant in Russia that has slowed production by about 25 percent is coming at a delicate time for Ford in Russia.

On Saturday, a union will vote on whether to strike in mid-December for higher wages. Currently, union members are engaged in a work slowdown battle with management.

Ford is striving to gain a larger share of the booming automobile market here, which is driven by the inflow of oil wealth, but is being undersold by cheaper Asian brands like Hyundai, and is planning to double production next year. Successful union actions are rare in Russia. Ironically, the union at the plant north of St. Petersburg has succeeded partly because of Ford's strict adherence to Russian labor laws - something not common among domestic producers, union leaders and analysts say.

Aleksei Etmanov, president of the union here, said union organizing this summer met with no resistance from Ford management.

"We don't want to strike. But we have our demands," Etmanov, a welder at the plant, said. "We're big fans of Ford. We say as productivity goes up, so should our salaries."

The dispute stems from the rapidly changing economy in Russia because of windfall revenues from oil, a major export commodity, Etmanov said.

When the plant opened in 2000, just two years after Russia's financial crisis, Ford offered the desirable factory jobs in the Leningrad Region, the industrial belt that loops around St. Petersburg. But now the company has competition. Caterpillar, the U.S. heavy equipment maker, and Nokia, the Finnish cellphone company, have plants in the region, and Russian factories are also getting back on their feet.

The union roll grew from 100 or so last winter to 1,100 by Friday after an attempt by managers to cap labor costs last winter, Etmanov said. The factory froze a pay grade system that awarded higher salaries to more experienced workers, and then reintroduced it a week later but with a lower pay scale, he said.

In September, the union presented Ford with four demands: a 30 percent pay raise; an end-of-the-year bonus; an end to the two-tier salary system that resulted from the new pay grades introduced in March; and union oversight of the factory's social welfare funds.

Etmanov said Ford had agreed only to union oversight of social spending. Ford declined an offer of arbitration on Nov. 8, he said. The work slowdown began Tuesday.

The president of Ford in Russia, Henrik Nenzen, declined to comment on specifics of the negotiations in an interview by telephone. Ford issued a statement saying the plant had "minor delays of production in some units" because of the industrial action.

The waiting list for a Russian-made Focus is already six months. Dealers and analysts say customers are turning to other makes rather than waiting, in spite of Ford's popularity. The factory expects to make 35,000 Focus sedans this year, but plans to ramp up output to 60,000 in 2006. Ford has already slipped from the second-most popular foreign brand in Russia in 2003 to fifth place this year. Hyundai, with plants in southern Russia, is No.1.

The problem, said Elena Sakhnova, an automotive analyst at United Financial Group brokerage in Moscow, is that Ford is operating in Russia on "very, very miserable margins" and possibly a loss because of the price structure of the market.

Copyright © 2005 The International Herald Tribune
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International Herald Tribune

Other Views: Handelsblatt, The Guardian, Daily Star

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 25, 2005


DÜSSELDORF German vision for the EU required

DÜSSELDORF: For months the European Union has been waiting for its biggest member state to be fully functional again. Expectations are correspond-ingly high. Basically, the EU is hoping for clear leadership from Berlin. Hopes are high not least because the other "big countries" - France, Britain and Italy - are being led by weakened governments. Chancellor Angela Merkel cannot bank on the French-German axis as much as Gerhard Schröder did. The EU of 25 is too big for one axis. In addition, Germany must find its way back to the traditional mediating role between Washington and Paris. German EU policy also must be broader because German and French visions of Europe are slightly divergent. Merkel has a huge task. She must avoid divisions between the 25 EU members but at same time clearly point the direction in which the EU should develop. (Handelsblatt)


Antipathy toward Al Jazeera

LONDON: It is impossible to know if President George W. Bush was being serious if he did indeed suggest to Prime Minister Tony Blair that the U.S. attack the Arabic satellite television broadcaster Al Jazeera. The White House does not even want to dignify this ''outlandish'' report with an answer. The British government is saying nothing either, but it has charged two men under the Official Secrets Act with leaking a document. U.S. politicians have made no secret of their hostility to the TV station, whose scoops have included interviews with Osama bin Laden as well as videos showing terrorists beheading Western hostages. Such horrors apart, Al Jazeera has been a pioneer of free expression in a part of the world where there is precious little of it. The idea that Al Jazeera journalists could be legitimate targets for countries purporting to support democracy is outrageous.(The Guardian)


A violation of Lebanese sovereignty

BEIRUT: In the early hours of Wednesday morning, a warning from Israel, in the form of thousands of leaflets, drifted down from the sky into the streets of Beirut and South Lebanon. Israeli warplanes and combat helicopters violated Lebanese airspace (again) to deliver a message to the Lebanese people: ''Hezbollah is causing enormous harm to Lebanon.'' The Arabic note, signed by the state of Israel, also suggested the Lebanese political party and resistance group wants the ''return of destruction.'' What are we to think of this reminder that the Israelis can invade our territory at will by flying warplanes over our country and drop whatever they like — whether propaganda or bombs — on the heads of our civilians? What would happen if the Lebanese could reciprocate this act of communication? the citizens of Israel and the international community react to such a blatant intrusion? (Daily Star)


Copyright © 2005 The International Herald Tribune
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German leader moves to seize the initiative

By Judy Dempsey
International Herald Tribune

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 25, 2005


BERLIN Germany's new government moved quickly this week to re-establish its central role in European politics, reaching out to the new states of the European Union and negotiating with Britain for a quick agreement on an EU budget.

Chancellor Angela Merkel - who took office on Tuesday and visited Paris and Brussels on Wednesday - met in London on Thursday with Prime Minister Tony Blair, who is also chairman of the EU's rotating presidency and is preparing budget proposals for a European summit meeting next month.

Negotiations over the EU budget collapsed in acrimony in June as Britain and France clashed over subsidies. London refused to consider revisions to the budget rebate it has been receiving since 1984 unless there were sweeping changes in the Common Agricultural Policy, which subsidizes Europe's agricultural sector. France, the policy's main beneficiary, refused to budge on the subsidies. More than 40 percent of the EU's 101 billion budget is allocated to agriculture.

In Berlin on Thursday, Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier met his Estonian counterpart, Urmas Paet, before traveling to the Netherlands, and he plans to visit Italy and Spain on Friday. On Saturday, Steinmeier will meet the Czech foreign minister in Berlin and then go to New York and Washington next week.

After his talks with Steinmeier, Paet said that further delays in reaching agreement on a budget would hamper Estonia's efforts to implement projects that require EU financing. "The structural funds are very important to us," he said. "We would like a deal as soon as possible." EU structural funds provide generous financing for modernizing infrastructure.

Merkel will visit Poland next week, which is also eager for agreement on an EU budget for the period of 2007 to 2013. "A budget agreement is very important for the new member states," Steinmeier said. "Germany will mediate. It wants a solution for the EU budget."

As a net contributor, paying in more than it receives, Germany will continue to fight hard for a cap on EU spending, particularly since the new coalition government is committed to getting its own budget under control through savings of 37 billion by 2007.

So far, nobody has any idea what budget proposals Blair plans to make, and Paet said he was disappointed that Blair had not yet presented any. "Britain might present them on December 6. But that does not give us much time before the summit, especially if there are big changes," Paet said.

One thing Germany and the new member states fear is that the basic budget proposals presented at last June's summit will be rejected by Sweden and the Netherlands. Both countries, which are net contributors and no longer benefit from structural funds, want budget spending to shift to research and development as well as justice and interior affairs.

The new member states oppose such proposals and are working on a joint letter urging EU leaders to clinch a deal on the EU budget next month, Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz, the Polish prime minister, said Thursday in London.

Now it appears that they can expect strong support from the new German government for that aim.

Merkel also seemed to set a new tone in Germany's relations with new EU members in her meetings with French and EU leaders this week.

She made it clear to President Jacques Chirac of France that the new member states "had to feel they were secure in the EU." That was an indirect reference to the perception that these countries looked more to the United States than to Europe for their security.

Chirac criticized some of them for supporting the U.S.-led war against Iraq, and advised new members at an EU summit meeting two years ago to "shut up" over issues about which they knew nothing.

Merkel's predecessor, Gerhard Schröder, allied himself with France and Russia against the U.S.-led war in Iraq, and several of the new member states concluded that he was more interested in cultivating a relationship with Russia than in defending the interests of former Soviet satellites. Some also concluded that Germany was less interested in using its close relationship with France to further European integration.

But while Chirac could rely on Schröder in the past to criticize Britain over the rebate issue, Merkel has made it clear she was not prepared to place the blame squarely on Britain for last June's budget failure.

"We need a reliable framework that is valid, particularly for the new member states, but also for the Eastern German states," she said, adding that the British rebate was part of the "complex compendium."

The rebate is now worth 4 billion and could swell to 7 billion by next year, according to commission estimates.

Copyright © 2005 The International Herald Tribune
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“Well-being” v. Hunger

Perhaps,the way is being prepared for withdrawal from Iraq in opening arms trade with Jakarta. If the war in Iraq ends, arms manufacturers will continue to get sufficient blood money so that they won’t suffer any decrease in their feelings of ‘well-being’, as the news article and editorial following would seem to indicate.

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November 24, 2005

Jakarta Welcomes U.S. Move to End Arms Curbs

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

JAKARTA, Indonesia, Nov. 23 (AP) - Indonesia has welcomed a decision by the United States to lift a six-year-old arms embargo to help the mostly Muslim nation fight terrorism, but human rights groups said the decision betrayed victims of military brutality.

President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, an American-education former general, said Wednesday on a visit to India that the move represented "a new chapter" and would enable Indonesia to modernize its military.
But John Miller, from the East Timor and Indonesia Action Network, said, "This is a profoundly disappointing and sad day for human rights protections everywhere."

The military has long been accused of human rights violations in putting down separatists.
The Bush administration had wanted to lift the arms embargo, imposed in 1999 after troops ravaged East Timor during the territory's break from Jakarta, but was stymied by demands from American lawmakers that the Indonesian military undertake meaningful reform.

Citing national security concerns, the State Department used recently granted powers to waive the curbs.
"Indonesia plays a unique strategic role in Southeast Asia," Sean McCormack, a State Department spokesman, said Tuesday in explaining the decision. It is "a voice of moderation in the Islamic world."

Indonesia is the world's most populous Muslim nation and is seen by the United States as a major ally in the effort to curb terror. Militants with links to Al Qaeda have carried out deadly bombings on Western targets here since 2002, including suicide attacks last month on three crowded restaurants on Bali that killed 20 people.

But the decision to lift the embargo may also reflect the United States' desire to increase its influence in Southeast Asia to counterbalance China's growing importance.

Parts of the embargo had already been lifted, but lethal weapons could not be sold to Indonesia.

Mr. McCormack said that the administration planned to help modernize the military and support American and Indonesian security objectives, including counterterrorism, but that the United States "remained committed to pressing for accountability for past human rights abuses."

Moves to restore ties accelerated after the tsunami last December, which killed 130,000 people here, when American and Indonesian soldiers worked together to aid victims.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
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November 24, 2005

Economic Scene

Sometimes, a Tax Cut for the Wealthy Can Hurt the Wealthy

By ROBERT H. FRANK

WHEN market forces cause income inequality to grow, public policy in most countries tends to push in the opposite direction. In the United States, however, we enact tax cuts for the wealthy and cut public services for the needy. Cynics explain this curious inversion by saying that the wealthy have captured the political process in Washington and are exploiting it to their own advantage.

This explanation makes sense, however, only if those in power have an extremely naïve understanding of their own interests. A careful reading of the evidence suggests that even the wealthy have been made worse off, on balance, by recent tax cuts. The private benefits of these cuts have been much smaller, and their indirect costs much larger, than many recipients appear to have anticipated.

On the benefit side, tax cuts have led the wealthy to buy larger houses, in the seemingly plausible expectation that doing so would make them happier. As economists increasingly recognize, however, well-being depends less on how much people consume in absolute terms than on the social context in which consumption occurs. Compelling evidence suggests that for the wealthy in particular, when everyone's house grows larger, the primary effect is merely to redefine what qualifies as an acceptable dwelling.

So, although the recent tax cuts have enabled the wealthy to buy more and bigger things, these purchases appear to have had little impact. As the economist Richard Layard has written, "In a poor country, a man proves to his wife that he loves her by giving her a rose, but in a rich country, he must give a dozen roses."
On the cost side of the ledger, the federal budget deficits created by the recent tax cuts have had serious consequences, even for the wealthy. These deficits will exceed $300 billion for each of the next six years, according to projections by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. The most widely reported consequences of the deficits have been cuts in government programs that serve the nation's poorest families. And since the wealthy are well represented in our political system, their favored programs may seem safe from the budget ax. Wealthy families have further insulated themselves by living in gated communities and sending their children to private schools. Yet such steps go only so far.

For example, deficits have led to cuts in federal financing for basic scientific research, even as the United States' share of global patents granted continues to decline. Such cuts threaten the very basis of our long-term economic prosperity. As Senator Pete Domenici, Republican of New Mexico, said: "We thought we'd keep the high-end jobs, and others would take the low-end jobs. We're now on track to a second-rate economy and a second-rate country."

Large deficits also threaten our public health. Thus, despite the increasing threat from micro-organisms like E. coli 0157, the government inspects beef processing plants at only a quarter the rate it did in the early 1980's. Poor people have died from eating contaminated beef but so have rich people.

Citing revenue shortfalls, the nation postpones maintenance of its streets and highways, even though doing so means having to spend two to five times as much on repairs in the long run. In the short run, bad roads cause thousands of accidents each year, many of them fatal. Poor people die in these accidents but so do rich people. When a pothole destroys a tire and wheel, replacements cost only $63 for a Ford Escort but $1,569 for a Porsche 911.

Deficits have also compromised the nation's security. In 2004, for example, the Bush administration reduced financing for the Energy Department's program to secure loosely guarded nuclear stockpiles in the former Soviet Union by 8 percent. Sam Nunn, the former United States senator, now heads a private foundation whose mission is to raise private donations to expedite this effort. And despite the rational fear that terrorists may try to detonate a nuclear bomb in an American city, most cargo containers continue to enter the nation's ports without inspection.

Large federal budget deficits and low household savings rates have also forced our government to borrow more than $650 billion each year, primarily from China, Japan and South Korea. These loans must be repaid in full, with interest. The resulting financial burden, plus the risks associated with increased international monetary instability, fall disproportionately on the rich.

At the president's behest, Congress has already enacted tax cuts that will result in some $2 trillion in revenue losses by 2010. According to one recent estimate, 52.5 percent of these cuts will have gone to the top 5 percent of earners by the time the enabling legislation is fully phased in. Republicans in Congress are now calling for an additional $69 billion in tax cuts aimed largely at high-income families.

With the economy already at full employment, no one pretends these cuts are needed to stimulate spending. Nor is there any evidence that further cuts would summon outpourings of additional effort and risk taking. Nor, finally, does anyone deny that further cuts would increase the already high costs associated with larger federal budget deficits.

Moralists often urge the wealthy to imagine how easily their lives could have turned out differently, to adopt a more forgiving posture toward those less prosperous. But top earners might also wish to consider evidence that their own families would have been better off, in purely practical terms, had it not been for the tax cuts of recent years.

Robert H. Frank has taught introductory economics at Cornell University since 1972. He is co-author, with Ben S. Bernanke, of "Principles of Microeconomics."

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company