Extortion By Bush, And Other Criminals

Below are fine examples of how our so-called “government” is working these days: some new example of treachery and betrayal of American freedom comes out and becomes public knowledge, the Bush regime calls a meeting, and suddenly our “elected” representatives who are entrusted to protect the best interests of Americans are waffling and knuckling under to yet another extortion by the Bush people.

This writer, personally, suspects that due to the amount of surveillance and spying that has already gone on in this country, that the Bush cabal has the “goods” on everybody’s secret life who might affect the outcome of any particular stinking change that Bush and his people want to bring about in order to further put this country in the grip of this fascist wannabe government.

Let’s face it: everybody has secrets—or someone they love has secrets. Everybody has parts of their life they don’t want to see exposed—all of us are vulnerable to the kind of disclosure of personal information that the Bush administration has, no doubt by now, managed to glean from the highest spy sources in the known universe.

When the Mafia does it, we called it extortion. When the Bush people do it, we call it National Security.

Bull shit.

That’s what this grandma calls it—bull shit. Get a clue, people—our country is in the hands of terrorists who are much more dangerous than Muslim extremists.

And don’t count on the next election bringing any change—the vote is already rigged.

If you don’t believe that, take a Google search on electronic voting machines.

It is now time to get mad—get angry—demand change, and demand adherence by the Bush administration to the laws of our land immediately.

Failing that, we need to impeach this administration. Time is of the utmost importance.

Also, since when are American values so skewed that other nations and “media watchdogs” are demanding that WE release imprisoned journalists? How does the incarceration of any journalist fit the American definition of Freedom of The Press? Why are journalists, of any alleged loyalties, imprisoned by Americans?

Congressional Probe of NSA Spying Is in Doubt
White House Sways Some GOP Lawmakers

By Charles Babington
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, February 15, 2006; A03

Congress appeared ready to launch an investigation into the Bush administration's warrantless domestic surveillance program last week, but an all-out White House lobbying campaign has dramatically slowed the effort and may kill it, key Republican and Democratic sources said yesterday.

The Senate intelligence committee is scheduled to vote tomorrow on a Democratic-sponsored motion to start an inquiry into the recently revealed program in which the National Security Agency eavesdrops on an undisclosed number of phone calls and e-mails involving U.S. residents without obtaining warrants from a secret court. Two committee Democrats said the panel -- made up of eight Republicans and seven Democrats -- was clearly leaning in favor of the motion last week but now is closely divided and possibly inclined against it.

They attributed the shift to last week's closed briefings given by top administration officials to the full House and Senate intelligence committees, and to private appeals to wavering GOP senators by officials, including Vice President Cheney. "It's been a full-court press," said a top Senate Republican aide who asked to speak only on background -- as did several others for this story -- because of the classified nature of the intelligence committees' work.

Lawmakers cite senators such as Olympia J. Snowe (R-Maine) to illustrate the administration's success in cooling congressional zeal for an investigation. On Dec. 20, she was among two Republicans and two Democrats who signed a letter expressing "our profound concern about recent revelations that the United States Government may have engaged in domestic electronic surveillance without appropriate legal authority." The letter urged the Senate's intelligence and judiciary committees to "jointly undertake an inquiry into the facts and law surrounding these allegations."

In an interview yesterday, Snowe said, "I'm not sure it's going to be essential or necessary" to conduct an inquiry "if we can address the legislative standpoint" that would provide oversight of the surveillance program. "We're learning a lot and we're going to learn more," she said.

She cited last week's briefings before the full House and Senate intelligence committees by Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and former NSA director Michael V. Hayden.

"The administration has obviously gotten the message that they need to be more forthcoming," Snowe said.

Before the New York Times disclosed the NSA program in mid-December, administration briefings regarding it were highly secret and limited to eight lawmakers: the top Republican and Democratic leader of the House and Senate, respectively, and the top Republican and Democrat on the House and Senate intelligence committees.

The White House characterized last week's closed-door briefings to the full committees as a significant concession and a sign of the administration's respect for Congress and its oversight responsibilities. Many Democrats dismissed the briefings as virtually useless, but senators said yesterday they appear to have played a big role in slowing momentum for an inquiry.

John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), the Senate intelligence committee's vice chairman, has drafted a motion calling for a wide-ranging inquiry into the surveillance program, according to congressional sources who have seen it. Rockefeller declined to be interviewed yesterday.

Sources close to Rockefeller say he is frustrated by what he sees as heavy-handed White House efforts to dissuade Republicans from supporting his measure. They noted that Cheney conducted a Republicans-only meeting on intelligence matters in the Capitol yesterday.

Senate intelligence committee member Mike DeWine (R-Ohio) said in an interview that he supports the NSA program and would oppose a congressional investigation. He said he is drafting legislation that would "specifically authorize this program" by excluding it from the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which established a secret court to consider government requests for wiretap warrants in anti-terrorist investigations.

The administration would be required to brief regularly a small, bipartisan panel drawn from the House and Senate intelligence committees, DeWine said, and the surveillance program would require congressional reauthorization after five years to remain in place.

Snowe said she is inclined to support DeWine's plan. Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.), who also signed the Dec. 20 letter seeking an inquiry, said yesterday that the FISA law should be amended to include the NSA program and to provide for congressional oversight.

As for Rockefeller's bid, Hagel said: "If some kind of inquiry would be beneficial to getting a resolution to this issue, then sure, we should look at it. But if the inquiry is just some kind of a punitive inquiry that really is not focused on finding a way out of this, then I'm not so sure that I would support that."

© 2006 The Washington Post Company

An Arrogance of Power

By David Ignatius
Wednesday, February 15, 2006; A21

There is a temptation that seeps into the souls of even the most righteous politicians and leads them to bend the rules, and eventually the truth, to suit the political needs of the moment. That arrogance of power is on display with the Bush administration.

The most vivid example is the long delay in informing the country that Vice President Cheney had accidentally shot a man last Saturday while hunting in Texas. For a White House that informs us about the smallest bumps and scrapes suffered by the president and vice president, the lag is inexplicable. But let us assume the obvious: It was an attempt to delay and perhaps suppress embarrassing news. We will never know whether the vice president's office would have announced the incident at all if the host of the hunting party, Katharine Armstrong, hadn't made her own decision Sunday morning to inform her local paper.

Nobody died at Armstrong Ranch, but this incident reminds me a bit of Sen. Edward Kennedy's delay in informing Massachusetts authorities about his role in the fatal automobile accident at Chappaquiddick in 1969. That story, and dozens of others about the Kennedy family, illustrates how wealthy, powerful people can behave as if they are above the law. For my generation, the fall of Richard Nixon is the ultimate allegory about how power can corrupt and destroy. It begins not with venality but with a sense of God-given mission.

I would be inclined to leave Cheney to the mercy of Jon Stewart and Jay Leno if it weren't for other signs that this administration has jumped the tracks. What worries me most is the administration's misuse of intelligence information to advance its political agenda. For a country at war, this is truly dangerous.

The most recent example of politicized intelligence was President Bush's statement on Feb. 9 that the United States had "derailed" a 2002 plot to fly a plane into the U.S. Bank Tower in Los Angeles. Bush spoke about four al Qaeda plotters who had planned to use shoe bombs to blow open the cockpit door. But a foreign official with detailed knowledge of the intelligence scoffed at Bush's account, saying that the information obtained from Khalid Sheik Mohammed and an Indonesian operative known as Hambali was not an operational plan so much as an aspiration to destroy the tallest building on the West Coast. When I asked a former high-level U.S. intelligence official about Bush's comment, he agreed that Bush had overstated the intelligence.

Perhaps the most outrageous example of misusing intelligence has been the administration's attempt to undercut Paul Pillar and other former CIA officials who tried to warn about the dangers ahead in Iraq. I'm not talking about the agency's botched job on weapons of mass destruction but about its warnings that postwar Iraq would be chaotic and dangerous. Pillar said so privately before the war, and he helped draft an August 2004 national intelligence estimate warning, correctly, that the situation in Iraq was deteriorating and heading for "tenuous stability" at best.

Bush was unhappy at this naysaying, just as he has grumbled about pessimistic reports from the CIA station in Baghdad. When Pillar made similar warnings about Iraq at a private dinner in September 2004, the White House went ballistic -- seeing Pillar as part of a CIA conspiracy to undermine the president's policies. Soon after, Bush installed a former Republican congressman, Porter Goss, who began a purge at the agency that has driven out a generation of senior managers. Pillar and many, many others have retired, leaving the nation without some of its best intelligence officers when we need them most.

Bush and Cheney are in the bunker. That's the only way I can make sense of their actions. They are steaming in a broth of daily intelligence reports that highlight the grim terrorist threats facing America. They have sworn blood oaths that they will defend the United States from its adversaries -- no matter what . They have blown past the usual rules and restraints into territory where few presidents have ventured -- a region where the president conducts warrantless wiretaps against Americans in violation of a federal statute, where he authorizes harsh interrogation methods that amount to torture.

When critics question the legality of the administration's actions, Bush and Cheney assert the commander in chief's power under Article II of the Constitution. When Congress passes a law forbidding torture, the White House appends a signing statement insisting that Article II -- the power of the commander in chief -- trumps everything else. When the administration's Republican friends suggest amending the wiretapping law to make its program legal, the administration refuses. Let's say it plainly: This is the arrogance of power, and it has gone too far in the Bush White House.

davidignatius@washpost.com

© 2006 The Washington Post Company

The Silencing Of Science

By Anne Applebaum
Wednesday, February 15, 2006; A21

One of the benefits of writing newspaper articles is that sometimes, instead of sending anonymous insults, readers call you up and tell you interesting things. Two weeks ago, after news broke that a NASA press officer had resigned amid revelations that he'd tried to muffle the agency's top climate scientist, I got several such calls. All were from people with similar tales of government-funded scientists intimidated by heavy-handed public relations departments. Curiosity piqued, I followed one up, at least as far as the nervous scientists and the equally nervous government press officers would let me. Here's what I learned.

The story begins with the publication of an article -- "Potential Environmental Impact of a Hydrogen Economy on the Stratosphere" -- in the June 2003 issue of the journal Science, which is not exactly beach reading. Yet although crammed with graphs, equations and references to chlorofluorocarbons, the basic premise isn't hard to explain: The five authors, all affiliated at the time with the prestigious California Institute of Technology, wanted to explore the potential long-term impact of hydrogen fuel cells on the Earth's atmosphere.

For those who've forgotten, hydrogen fuel cells were, three State of the Unions ago, the thing that was going to save Americans from their oil addiction and stop the auto emissions that help cause global warming. Nowadays switch grass and biomass are the hot alternative fuels, but back in 2003, the president won applause for proposing "$1.2 billion in research funding so that America can lead the world in developing clean, hydrogen-powered automobiles." On Capitol Hill, there were demonstrations of one such "Freedom Car," and the president called on scientists to be "bold and innovative" in their hydrogen research.

Unfortunately for the authors of "Potential Environmental Impact of a Hydrogen Economy on the Stratosphere," their research, while bold and innovative, didn't exactly mesh with the hype. According to their model, tiny leaks from hydrogen cells, if such cells are ever mass-produced, could cause serious environmental damage. But they made no suggestion of inevitability: One of the study's authors, John Eiler of Caltech, pointed out that foreknowledge of potential environmental problems could "help guide investments in technologies to favor designs that minimize leakage." Presumably thinking along the same lines, NASA, which had helped pay for the research, prepared a news release and news conference on the paper.

Abruptly, both were canceled. Although "we often hear that releases are held up for political reasons," one NASA employee told me, "that one was a surprise: It went all the way to the top and then got killed." In fact, the release and the conference were "killed" by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. An official there told me this was because the office wanted to give Energy Department scientists a chance to respond to the study before it was publicized: "Our role is to facilitate interagency cooperation." Coincidentally or not, it also happens that Spencer Abraham, then the energy secretary, was that same week preparing to depart for Brussels, where he was to tell Europeans that U.S. hydrogen research proved the Bush administration cared about the environment.

All of that part of the story is confirmed. The rest -- the story of how none of the scientists ever got government grants for further research on this subject -- is complicated by rumor and hearsay. Eiler, seeing that the Energy Department was looking for proposals to study the environmental impact of hydrogen, applied for a grant to do so. He was turned down on the grounds that he thought were "peculiar" -- that the department was not, in fact, interested in proposals on the subject. Today he gets his only money for related research from the private sector. The National Science Foundation officially rejected another researcher's grant application -- and then unofficially told him that some in the foundation thought the timing of the Science magazine paper had been deliberately designed to embarrass the energy secretary. One of the authors has now changed his research focus, he e-mailed me, to something that "has less politics." Others refused to talk about the paper at all.

None of this means that there really was any government interference in the funding. Another eminent scientist who does related research, Mark Jacobson of Stanford University, told me that while he considered the Science paper "groundbreaking" and "pioneering," because it was "the first to actually go after this issue," he disagreed with the conclusions and methodology, and said that perhaps grant reviewers did too. The science and technology policy office says it is "preposterous" to think that the White House was involved in funding issues. Abraham remembers the trip to Europe but (very plausibly) doesn't recall anything about this contrarian paper at all.

I'm thus left with nothing to report -- except that a fuss over a press release and a rumor about who said what to whom at the National Science Foundation left some scientists feeling, rightly or wrongly, that they'd better stay away from "political" subjects if they want government grants. And, three years down the road, they have.

applebaumanne@yahoo.com

© 2006 The Washington Post Company

Media watchdog urges US to free two journalists

By Anna Willard
Reuters
Tuesday, February 14, 2006; 1:11 PM

PARIS (Reuters) - An international media watchdog urged the United States on Tuesday to free two journalists held separately at a U.S. prison in Iraq and at a military base in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, saying they had been detained unfairly.

"These journalists have been denied justice and not allowed to see family or lawyers," Paris-based Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said in a statement accompanying a new report into the arrests of journalists in Iraq and Afghanistan.

RSF also said it was investigating the detention by U.S. authorities of three journalists working for Reuters in Iraq although they were recently released.

The U.S. government made no immediate comment on the report.

Abdel Amir Yunes Hussein, 26, who works for U.S. network CBS News, has been held at the Camp Bucca prison in Iraq since last April, the media watchdog said. It said U.S. authorities suspected him of having ties with insurgents.

Sami al-Hajj, a 36-year-old cameraman for satellite television station Al Jazeera, has been held at Guantanamo Bay since 2002 after being arrested in Afghanistan in 2001, it said. He has been accused of making videos of Osama bin Laden.

RSF said he had told a human rights lawyer who visited him in Guantanamo that he had been interrogated more than 130 times and tortured, including sexually.

The media watchdog said it was seeking details about the two journalists from the U.S. Department of Defense under the Freedom of Information Act.

Citing the same act, it is also demanding information about the three Reuters reporters who have now been freed.

Majid Hameed, who was working as a free-lance reporter for Reuters, was detained in September at a friend's funeral and Samer Mohammed Noor and Ali al-Mashadani were detained two months apart in 2005. All were released in January.

© 2006 Reuters