The defendants, Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman, lobbyists for the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, are charged with conspiring with Department of Defense intelligence analyst Larry Franklin to leak U.S. secrets in an apparent effort to influence U.S. policy towards Iran.

In a transcript of a recent pre-trial hearing, made available Tuesday, the judge in the case made it clear that prosecutors must prove intention, or what lawyers call "mens rea" -- Latin for "a guilty mind" -- for every element of the conspiracy.

"The Court imposed the requirement that the government prove that the defendant knew the information ... would harm the United States," Judge Thomas Ellis told the Nov. 16 hearing, though prosecutors had asked that this requirement be lifted.

That is important, explains government transparency advocate Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists, because it means the defendants, if found guilty, will have been proved to have "the intention of hurting the United States."

"That distinguishes the activities with which they are charged from the routine activities of reporters and advocates," Aftergood told United Press International, "who may made trade in classified information," but don't so with the intention of harming U.S. security.

He called the bar set by the ruling "a considerable, possibly insurmountable obstacle" to the government.

In a statement announcing the indictment, prosecutors alleged that since at least April 1999, Rosen and Weissman had "use[d] their contacts within the U.S. government ... to gather sensitive U.S. government information, including classified information ... for subsequent unlawful communication, delivery, and transmission to persons not entitled to receive it."

The case has raised the hackles of civil liberties advocates who charge that zealous prosecutors are abusing an over-broad statute designed to punish spies to criminalize the everyday behavior of reporters, lobbyists, and researchers, all of whom occasionally trade in secrets, the stock-in-trade of Washington's back-room policy process.

Jonathan Turley, professor of law at George Washington University, told UPI that the prosecution had "radically expanded the practical scope of national security law." He said it had always been understood that government employees who leaked were in criminal jeopardy, but not the reporters -- or in this case lobbyists -- to whom they were leaking.

He said the case was an effort to "criminalize the act of simply receiving classified information."

Judge Ellis fueled those fears when told a hearing earlier this year that the law on its face applies to everyone: "academics, lawyers, journalists, professors, whatever."

The Department of Justice routinely declines comment on ongoing cases, but prosecutors have said in court filings that they "recognize that a prosecution under the espionage laws of an actual member of the press ... would raise legitimate and serious issues and would not be undertaken lightly.

Indeed," they conclude, "the fact that there has never been such a prosecution speaks for itself."

Rosen and Weissman's supporters say there is no difference between what they are charged with doing and what reporters and other members of what their lawyers call "the Washington policy community," do every day.

But the reality is more complex, according to former counter-intelligence officials who have followed the case.

They make a distinction between reporters -- who seek information about U.S. policy in order to publish it to illuminate public debate -- and the defendants, who are accused of using the information they obtained in a covert effort to influence U.S. foreign policy, including by passing it on to foreign government officials.

"This was a counter-espionage investigation," said one retired veteran, pointing out that it had been conducted by the counter-intelligence unit at the FBI's Washington Field Office.

"They were looking for spies. Those guys don't do leaks," he told UPI earlier this year.

The case was originally expected to come to trial this year, but due to its complexity, the date has been repeatedly deferred, according to Aftergood.

Judge Ellis now says he will reserve time in May and June 2007 for a possible trial.

He also said that a Justice Department investigation into who leaked word of the investigation to CBS News in August 2004 -- a full year before indictments were filed -- is "ongoing."

But defense lawyers said they had been told by "senior officials at CBS News" that no one there had been contacted about the investigation.

Nonetheless, the existence of that probe, and others confirmed by officials, including into the leaks about the existence of the National Security Agency's program of warrantless wiretaps aimed at suspected terrorists, raises concerns.

Critics like Turley accuse the administration of launching a "scorched earth campaign against whistleblowers."

He said the AIPAC case, the leak probes, and another investigation in which federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald had sought to review the phone records of New York Times reporters, were all "part of a mosaic that threatens vital First Amendment institutions, like the press."

On election night 2006, attorney Jonathan Simon of Election Defense Alliance monitored the unadjusted National Election Pool data as it came online at CNN. Exit poll data has long been the standard worldwide for ascertaining the integrity of vote counts. But just as in 2004, this November's unadjusted exit poll data showed results very different from both the announced election returns and the "adjusted" poll data released the following day. The unadjusted polling indicates that Democrats nationwide may have won the election not by 7%, but by a whopping 11%. Thus roughly 3 million Democratic votes in November 2006 appear to have been cast but not counted, or shifted to the Republican column.

It wasn't that Republicans didn't try to steal the election, according to Simon. They just didn't steal enough to make up for the groundswell of opposition in the final weeks.

Rob Kall's thorough and remarkably overlooked OpEd News story dated November 17 tells us this:

We see evidence of pervasive fraud, but apparently calibrated to political conditions existing before recent developments shifted the political landscape,' said attorney Jonathan Simon, co-founder of Election Defense Alliance, "so 'the fix' turned out not to be sufficient for the actual circumstances.' Explained Simon, 'When you set out to rig an election, you want to do just enough to win. The greater the shift from expectations, (from exit polling, pre-election polling, demographics) the greater the risk of exposure - of provoking investigation. What was plenty to win on October 1 fell short on November 7.'

"The findings raise urgent questions about the electoral machinery and vote counting systems used in the United States," according to Sally Castleman, National Chair of EDA. "This is nothing less than a national indictment of the vote counting process in the United States!"

"The numbers tell us there absolutely was hacking going on, just not enough to overcome the size of the actual turnout. The tide turned so much in the last few weeks before the election. It looks for all the world that they'd already figured out the percentage they needed to rig, when the programming of the vote rigging software was distributed weeks before the election, and it wasn't enough," Castleman commented.

Kall's excellent article goes on to explain that the reasons pollsters gave for "adjusting" their results and bringing them into conformity with "official" election returns don't wash. Although there are legitimate reasons to adjust polling data, doing so to prevent contradictions between them and the "official" results does not qualify, and amounts to a coverup on the part of pollsters.

But the three million Democratic votes apparently lost, strayed or stolen this November are only the tip of this ugly rock. The new Republican election math isn't just about proprietary hardware, software hacks and voting machines that can subtract as well as add. According to Cast Out: Voter Supression Strategies 2006 and Beyond, a paper issued by the Brennan Center For Justice at NYU Law School, a nationwide wave of federal, state and local statutes and administrative regulations are being enacted with the explicit goal of disenfranchising communities that vote mainly Democratic.

In addition to electronic fraud, the Brennan Center identifies four other looming threats to the franchise.

Restricting Voter Registration Drives

Back in the early nineties, well before he declared there was no such thing as black America, Barack Obama made his political bones directing a massive Chicago-based registration drive which, with significant help from commercial black radio, and the participation of scores of community-based organizations, succeeded in putting more than 120,000 mostly minority voters on the rolls in a scant three months. In that case and many since around the country, non profit and community groups registering voters in parking lots, on street corners, at events and door to door have accounted for a significant share of new registrations, 20% of total new registrations in the last two years.

"The kind of massive volunteer-based voter registration drives that ... characterized the Jesse Jackson campaigns for president in 1984 and 1988 are for all practical purposes illegal in much of the country."

The response of many state officials has been to close that door and all but outlaw community-based voter registration drives. Arbitrary regulations have been imposed on their activity and draconian fines or imprisonment are now penalties for minor infractions such as collecting a form a day early, turning it in a day late, assisting a voter in filling out a form, or recording a voter's contact information from a form for verification or get-out-the-vote purposes. The state of Florida shut down the League of Women Voters by imposing a $70,000 fine for having lost 14 filled out registration forms. Restrictive laws like this are presently on the books in Georgia, New Jersey, Maryland, Ohio, California, Washington state, Colorado, Missouri, and of course, Florida.

The kind of massive volunteer-based voter registration drives that enabled the election of Chicago's first black and only progressive mayor Harold Washington in 1983, or that characterized the Jesse Jackson campaigns for president in 1984 and 1988 are for all practical purposes illegal in much of the country.

Barriers to Getting on the Voter Rolls: No Match - No Vote

HAVA, the cynically misnamed "Help America Vote Act" requires every state maintain an electronic voter database as the final authority on who is and is not registered to vote. Some state authorities have taken advantage of this "final authority" by enacting laws that require every name, before being added to the database, be "confirmed" by detection of an exact match in some OTHER government database, such as Social Security or drivers license records.

The catch here is that the matching process introduces countless errors any of which can be grounds for rejecting the voter's application. Suppose a first name, sex, date of birth and Social Security number match between a new voter record and a Social Security record, but a middle name is spelled differently. The voter's application is rejected. Suppose one has a middle initial and the other spells out the middle name? Rejected. Suppose one has a married name and the other a hyphenated name? Rejected. Different addresses? Rejected. Names with apostrophes? Rejected. Typos not in the voter application, but in the drivers license, Social Security or other record being "matched" against? Rejected.

When California law required a "no match - no vote" rule and Los Angeles County attempted to comply, almost 20% of eligible voters were deleted from the rolls till state officials cancelled the policy. In Pennsylvania, the number of people who could be excluded from the rolls by such a policy is as high as 30%. And the Social Security Administration reported early in 2006 that as many as 28% of voter records checked against its databases yielded no matches.

Despite successful challenges in many areas to "no match-no vote" policies, the Republican legislators and administrators that enact them defend these practices stubbornly, and give ground only grudgingly. And "no match-no vote" laws are proposed in new states every legislative session. There is no doubt that these laws and regulations have disenfranchised tens or hundreds of thousands of voters in the election just past.

Purges of the Voters Rolls

The famous example of Florida in 2000, which had a private contractor make up deliberately imprecise and overwhelmingly black lists of supposed felons, and knocked everyone off the rolls whose name was even a near match - even deleting multiple voters for a match with a single alleged felon, and at least one felon the date of whose crime was more than a decade in the future - illustrates how spurious purges can be implemented to ethnically cleanse the voter rolls. But these practices did not end with 2000 and were never limited to Florida.

Brennan Center Study furnishes these examples:

In Kentucky, 8,000 people were purged because their names matched those of people registered in Tennessee or South Carolina in an attempt to identify voters who had moved. A lawsuit brought by the Kentucky Attorney General has already shown that this purge may have affected eligible voters whose names happened to be the same as others in neighboring states.
In Indiana, 4,500 people were purged, and 36,000 more might be purged. This purge was touted as partisan.

In Washington, 55,000 people were purged earlier this year.

In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 105,000 people were purged from the city voter rolls.

In Churchill County, Nevada, the number of registered voters decreased from 12,537 to 11,880 due to purges.

In Ohio, there were 175,000 purged voters in Cuyahoga County and 133,000 purged voters in Hamilton and Lucas Counties.

Paradoxically, the existence of central voter databases on the state level actually makes it easier to mistakenly or maliciously purge large numbers of undesirable voters, along with those who may have died or moved away. And in many cases procedural safeguards, such as attempts to notify purged voters, are flawed or nonexistent. It is impossible to know how many voters were denied their right to vote based on malicious wholesale purges. But the number is certainly substantial, and may easily rival the number of votes that lost their way this past election day.

Voter ID and Citizenship Requirements

Many new state and federal proposals require voters to show specific forms of ID at the polling place, ostensibly to keep "terrorists" and others from impersonating real voters. But that extraordinarily rare and risky form of vote fraud occurs less than once in every 100,000 votes cast. The real targets of restrictive Voter ID and "proof of citizenship" laws are minority voters and the poor who are more likely to move oftener than they change drivers licenses, or less likely to have the required documents.

"...78% of young black people (in Milwaukee) from 18 to 24 don't have drivers licenses. 97% of Wisconsin college students were recently found not to have current addresses on their drivers licenses. These facts explain the attraction and the intent of voter ID restrictions."

The Brennan Center estimates that more than 10% of all eligible voters nationwide don't possess any state-issued ID. For the poor, the actual cost of such ID is more than the application fee itself, but includes secondary fees, travel expense and time away from work, child or elder care needed to obtain supporting documents like birth certificates, naturalization papers, notarized copies of apartment leases or Social Security documentation. In 2005 the state of Georgia enacted a strict voter ID law even though 36% of its seniors had no drivers licenses, and more than half the state's 200 counties had no office where state ID could be obtained. Courts have so far prevented Georgia from enforcing the law, likening the cost of compliance to many of the state's poorer citizens to a 21st century poll tax.

Before 2005, proof of citizenship at the polling place was not a voting requirement anywhere in the US. But in Milwaukee, the American city with the nation's highest rate of black incarceration, it is estimated that only half as many African Americans possess drivers licenses as whites, and that 78% of young black people from 18 to 24 don't have drivers licenses. 97% of Wisconsin college students were recently found not to have current addresses on their drivers licenses. These facts explain the attraction and the intent of voter ID restrictions. And according to many reports, even in places where picture ID is not required to vote, officials at the polling places are demanding it, and turning people away who don't produce it.

Where are the Democrats?

Despite millions of voters purged and denied in the months before election day, despite millions more votes actually cast that were not counted on election day, and despite DLC flacks like Rahm Emmanuel who used rivers of corporate cash to knock populist and antiwar Democratic congressional candidates out of primary elections in favor of pro-war losers like Tammy Duckworth (Illinois 6th district) and Harold Ford in Tennessee, Democrats won a resounding nationwide victory.

Speaker-to-be Pelosi infamously declared impeachment "off the table" in favor of good works, positive accomplishments and bipartisan good will. But the trains of wholesale voter suppression, disenfranchisement and electronic vote fraud have already left the station and are picking up speed. If Democrats in office and small "d" democrats in the streets fail to demand new regulations that guarantee every voter the right to vote, and force every vote to be counted, if they do not convene and aggressively pursue investigations -- if we don't get in their faces and in the streets to lay down on or tear up the tracks those trains run on, this November's victory will be wasted. It could be a long time till the next one.

Bruce Dixon is Managing Editor at Black Agenda Report and can be reached at bruce.dixon at BlackAgendaReport.com

It's been a rough season for the Christian right. Even for an eschatological movement, these are dark days. First came former Deputy Director of the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives David Kuo's public admission that evangelicals were often derided as "nuts" and "goofy" within the inner sanctums of the Bush administration. Then, weeks before losing their shotgun seat in the 109th Congress, the booming voice of the National Association of Evangelicals, Ted Haggard, was silenced in a scandal involving a gay hooker, massage oils, methamphetamine, and a string of Denver hotel rooms booked under false names.

But even before all that hit the fundamentalist fan, the movement was contending with a quieter, more systemic crisis: functional Biblical illiteracy among the flock. That's right, religious conservatives aren't so religious, after all.

This alarm was sounded by George Barna, chief pollster and CEO of the Barna Group, a Ventura, CA-based Christian polling and communications outfit. In August of 2005, Barna reported that less than ten percent of born-again Christians held what he termed a "Biblical worldview." Based on his survey, very few grasped the nuances of scripture or believed in "Absolute Truth" any more than their secular counterparts; the "Body of Christ" had been infected with the virus of Relativism, a wasting disease.

"Although most people own a Bible and know some of its content," reported Barna, "our research found that most [professed evangelicals] have little idea how to integrate core biblical principles to form a unified and meaningful response to the challenges and opportunities of life."

The prolific Barna dashed off a book in response to this worrying discovery. Entitled Think Like Jesus -- and marketed as "one of those books that really ticks off Satan" -- it quickly sold out in Barna's online bookstore. A second edition of Think Like Jesus soon went to press to further aggravate the Lord of Darkness.

Barna's poll and subsequent call to think like Jesus caught the attention of Dr. James Dobson, patriarch of the two most important religious right groups, the $140-million-a-year Focus on the Family, and its more politically minded spin-off, the D.C.-based Family Research Council. Dobson called Barna's report on Christian America's disappearing Biblical worldview "very distressing news," and felt that it warranted a muscular response, one befitting the massive resources at his disposal. The result is Focus on the Family's "The Truth Project: An In-Depth Christian Worldview Experience," a slick and intensive two-day training conference that kicked-off a North American tour last month at a mega-church outside Atlanta. It has since visited sell-out audiences in six cities; there are already 10 events planned for 2007.

Partly because the testimonials sound so scripted -- "The presentation in Boston was wonderful and definitely worth my 12 hour round-trip drive!" -- it's hard to say if The Truth Project is really the transformative Christian experience Focus claims it to be. It is, however, an open window into how the country's largest religious right group sees the world -- and how it would like everyone else to see it. The Truth Project is also a testament to the extent to which the religious right leadership understands it is fighting a desperate and rearguard culture war. How can an Army of Light be expected to conquer Satan when the troops not only march out of step, but can't even clean or load their religious rifles? The training conferences are a natural activity for conservative Christian activists at the dawn of the 110th Congress: a retreat from the front lines to regroup and retrain infantry who the generals fear are going AWOL, even as they maintain nominally Christian identities.

Toward this end, Focus on the Family has developed what is essentially a two-day multi-media Bible boot camp, with more than a whiff of a Holiday Inn get-rich-quick seminar. Held in churches instead of hotels, the seminars explain how to attain "Truth", not financial independence. This Truth comes in the form of a neatly packaged immutable Christian worldview to be taken home and shared with your neighbors. Attendees also receive a 12-DVD set of the lectures; meals are not provided.

The seminar is scripted and presented by Dr. Del Tackett, an energetic yet predictably dull senior executive at Focus on the Family and an adjunct professor at New Geneva Theological Seminary and Summit Ministries. Before joining Focus, Tackett spent 20 years in the Air Force and was director of technical planning for George H. W. Bush's National Security Council. The Truth Project website describes him as a "visionary and a teacher."

Sitting on stage next to Tackett during the length of the seminar is a serious question of adolescent construction: "Do you really believe that what you believe is really real?"

Or, as a secular humanist might put it: In your heart of hearts, do you guys honestly buy, or even understand, all this Bible crap?


Barna and Dobson are convinced that the vast majority of evangelicals do not, a fact with spiritual and political implications.


"Only by understanding the immutable truth claims of Christ," says Dobson in The Truth Project's promotional video, can Christians successfully defend against the "postmodern worldview" in which "God does not exist", "the family is defined as any circle of love", and "homosexuality is the moral equivalent of heterosexuality."


"If we capture and embrace more of God's worldview and trust it with unwavering faith," says Dobson, "then we begin to...form the appropriate responses to questions on abortion, same-sex marriage, cloning, stem-cell research and even media choices." But the real prize is bigger than any one issue. By fully embracing Truth, religious conservatives can "recapture Western Civilization", which they "invented but have lost."

The questions that will ultimately lead to recapturing the flag of civilization is born-again boilerplate: Is absolute truth defined by the Bible? Did Jesus Christ live a sinless life? Is God the all-powerful and all-knowing Creator of the universe, and does He still rule it today? Is Satan real?

Over the course of his 12 lectures, Del Tackett explains that we know the answers to be yes. We know because the Bible tells us so. In fact, the Bible tells us everything we could ever want to know -- if we only we read it correctly. Most of The Truth Project thus involves parsing Scripture and teasing out its life lessons for 21st-century Christians. This text analysis is often ridiculous, with Tackett probing the possible double meanings of Biblical diction, as if the King James Bible was transcribed directly from the mouth of God, and was not an artistic creation of a team of 17th-century scholars in Oxford and Cambridge.

If the seminar's content is vapid, The Truth Project is still no ordinary Sunday school slide show. No corners were cut in production of the video clips that accompany the lectures. With its nature montages and flashy editing, The Truth Project includes the first religious films ready for IMAX distribution.

Even more striking than the production values, though, is how little knowledge Tackett assumes on the part of his committed born-again audience. Even John 3:16 is reviewed as if for the first time. Once they are explained, Tackett holds basic Biblical Truths up against the Lies of secular culture and the lying liars who tell them. His bete noir throughout is Carl Sagan, the legendary poster-boy of humanism and scientism. Tackett is so obsessed with Sagan that he not only shares an affinity for turtlenecks and corduroy sports jackets, but one suspects he imagines himself to be Sagan's God-fearing equivalent, and the Truth Project his answer to Cosmos, Sagan's famous book and PBS series. Clips from Cosmos are followed by bitter rebuttals from Tackett, who bristles at Sagan's contention that the earth is made of "star stuff", spinning without much purpose in a universe lacking an all-knowing Creator offering redemption through acceptance of his carpenter son. Alongside Sagan, other recurring villains include Charles Darwin and John Dewey.

In a lecture entitled "The State," Tackett explains the proper relationship between ecclesiastical and earthly authority, leaning heavily on the Book of Romans. ("Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, " 12:2.) After drawing a circle with the words God, King and Citizens in the center, Tackett swerves into a rambling exegesis of the books of Daniel and Samuel. When he finally returns to his triangle (God-King-Citizens) inside the circle, he is dragging coils of disjointed scripture that he says prove the King is never in charge -- "God is in charge." And when the King forgets that God is in charge? Then "the state becomes the most monstrous of spheres" and "mass graves" cannot be far behind. To back this up, Tackett supplements the Bible with quotes from the Black Book of Communism and an 1828 edition of Webster's dictionary, which defines politics as that realm dealing with "ethics and morals."

The Bible also contains a few policy recommendations. Tackett points to a mention of a 10 percent tax in the Old Testament, seeing in this a divine recommendation for a flat tax. Apparently Steve Forbes had a direct line in to God, after all. Tackett also locates Biblical grounds for opposing the welfare state and the rise of supranational institutions. It goes without saying that all "freakish sexual behavior," including homosexuality, is to be resisted with the utmost strenuousness.

Tackett blames the sad state of the nation on a long and vicious secular assault on America's Christian foundations by men like Dewey and Sagan. The good news is that America can once again reflect the Godliness of its founders, if only we will let it.

"The people who came here," explains Tackett, "came with a mature and comprehensive Biblical worldview." He gushes over how, as late as the early 20th century, American schoolchildren learned their catechisms along with their multiplication tables. He also provides an orgy of selective quotation from America's overwhelmingly Deist founding fathers, as well as genuinely Christian revolutionary B-listers like Benjamin Rush and Noah Webster. But Tackett can never quite bring himself to describe even the firebrand Sam Adams as a "revolutionary"; all are simply "founders." Tom Paine does not appear anywhere in this history lecture, entitled, "The American Understanding."

If America has turned away from its blessed orgins in Christ, it is because we have forgotten the Bible -- that all-encompassing, simplifying book. It is because we have lost our Biblical worldview, in fact, that we even need things like modern laws at all. "We've had to modify and amend the Constitution," says Tackett, incredibly, "because we're no longer governed internally."

"When we throw God out, our laws become waste paper," he continues. Christianity is the foundation of this country, not the Constitution."

That's Focus on the Family politics in a nutshell: Pilgrims without the Progress.

Perhaps the most tortured and convoluted lecture is the one entitled "Labor", encapsulating society and the economy. Just as Takcett cannot bring himself to utter the word "revolution" in discussing the American Revolution, he also never says "capitalism" when discussing the American economy and its heavily degraded public sphere, as if the hyper-sexualized culture he so loathes has no relation to barrage advertising or an economy based on mass gratuitous consumption. The Truth Project devotes much energy to warnings about the greedy state becoming a monster, but the modern corporation makes not even the briefest cameo. Except for the "freakish" sex it permits and the Satanic trappings of the welfare state, we live in a "glorious social system [that] God has given us."

Whatever the lecture on "Labor" lacks in intellectual seriousness, it more than makes up for in humor. Tackett, a former manager at Kaman Sciences Corporation and ITT Industries, sees in his fellow Christians a management wet dream. Just as the book in Genesis begins with God hard at work -- "forming out of the ground all the beasts of the field and all the birds of the air" -- Tackett believes a Biblical worldview should lead naturally to a positive, can-do, union-free work ethic.

After explaining the Biblical injunction to work and enjoy it, he imagines two businessmen having lunch. One says to the other: "I wish I could hire a Christian! They are so joyful, creative, excited and trustworthy! When I leave the office, they work even harder!"

Why, they're just like magical minimum-wage worker elves!

And however meager the fruits of their joyful Christian labor, teaches Tackett, evangelicals should avoid class envy or joining in demands for "redistribution rights." They should also avoid buying pirated CD's. It's all in the Bible, you see, the only book you'll ever need. But it is a book that can be supplemented on occasion. Say, by a set of The Truth Project DVD's. But unlike George Barna's Think Like Jesus, they are not available in stores.

Since 2003, human-rights investigators and news media reports have described a Boeing Business Jet as one of the most-dreaded planes in the Central Intelligence Agency's clandestine air force. The modified 737 -- a model rolled out in Renton in 2001 -- was built for executive fun and comfort. But it is alleged to be the flagship of the CIA's "extreme rendition" squadron, ferrying suspected terrorists to secret agency prisons or countries where the U.S. is said to outsource torture.

The use of this jet, with a 6,000-mile flying range and plush customized cabin, has until now been Boeing's only connection to the prison airlifts. But a British author and an ex-prisoner's attorney say that records uncovered by Spanish investigators show Boeing has a more direct role -- planning and organizing the flights through a unit of its Seattle commercial airplane division.

Boeing won't confirm or deny the claim. But the Spanish documents, and an investigation by Amnesty International and the Council of Europe, indicate Boeing was making arrangements for as many as 1,000 rendition flights through 14 countries by four CIA planes, including that notorious Boeing Business Jet.

"Travel agent for the CIA seems the right words," Stephen Grey says of Boeing's role. A British author, he has written about prisoner rendition and the CIA's global torture program in his new book, Ghost Plane, in which he has documented about 90 rendition flights.

The Bush administration has acknowledged transfers of Al Qaeda suspects to Guantánamo Bay but has denied the U.S. engages in torture-transfer flights. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in 2005 that the United States "does not use the airspace or the airports of any county" for such purposes. Senate Democrats, who take control in January, are promising a full investigation.

According to Grey and others, a wholly owned Boeing subsidiary called Jeppesen Inc. cleared the airways and runways for the CIA, providing landing and navigation assistance, scheduling flight crews, and booking hotels for them. Jeppesen is a unit of Boeing's Seattle-based Commercial Aviation Division.

The cargo of prisoners includes many who say they were tortured and others who claim to have been mistakenly abducted and abused. One detainee, Khaled el-Masri, a German of Lebanese decent who is suing the CIA and aviation companies under the Alien Tort Statute for alleged Fifth Amendment (due process) violations, says he now plans to add Boeing to his lawsuit.

Masri "was injected with a drug and chained to the floor of the plane," says his attorney, Ben Wizner of the New York ACLU. "I don't think anybody would hold Boeing responsible for manufacturing the plane. However, the emergence of [Boeing's flight-assistance role] changes all that."

The prisoner flights, launched by the Clinton administration to transfer foreign suspects to trial in the United States, became a darker undertaking following 9/11. George W. Bush approved what critics say amounts to the kidnapping of foreign nationals, some flown to countries such as Morocco or Egypt, known for abusive interrogation techniques. Others were taken to a system of CIA prisons in Afghanistan and Europe, or the U.S. compound in Guantánamo, rights groups say.

In his book, Grey cites documents showing Boeing made travel arrangements for the CIA flights. He does not specifically name Boeing, but in a phone conversation last week with Seattle Weekly, Grey confirmed that Spanish government documents he obtained name Jeppesen's International Trip Planning unit as rendition flights planner.

Boeing bought the Denver-based company, then called Jeppesen Sanderson, in 2000 for $1.5 billion from the (Chicago) Tribune Co., whose mixed portfolio includes the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Cubs. John Hayhurst, then a Boeing vice president here, hailed Jeppesen as "another enduring global brand" for Boeing's business roster. Boeing later bought two related companies and expanded the Jeppesen unit, offering electronic mapping and navigation services to airline, general aviation, and government customers along with flight and trip planning.

Spain's largest newspaper, El Pais, last year reported that Jeppesen was named the CIA's flight arranger in investigative documents compiled by Spanish police. More recently, The New Yorker magazine noted the connection, reporting "it is not widely known that the [CIA] has turned to a division of Boeing, the publicly traded blue-chip behemoth, to handle many of the logistical and navigational details for these [rendition] trips."

On its Web site, Boeing boasts: "From Aachen to Zhengzhou, King Airs to 747s, Jeppesen has done it all."

But what, exactly, has it done? How deep is Boeing's involvement in the rendition flights? The company won't specifically say. From Chicago headquarters, Boeing spokesperson Tim Neale points out that flight planning is done for "thousands and thousands of customers each year. It's done on a confidential basis, and unless a customer authorizes us to comment, we can't."

He adds: "Jeppesen's flight planning process is to provide the route that is going to be followed, how much fuel is needed on board, where they will stop, and how many people will be on board, for weight reasons.

"We don't necessarily know very much about the purpose of a flight because that information isn't necessary to create a flight plan. What somebody's going to do when they get off is not part of that plan."

It's not publicly known how much Boeing, the nation's No. 2 defense contractor, earned from the flights. The CIA, a stand-alone agency, does not reveal its contracts and agency work can be billed through other government departments, including the Pentagon. Jeppesen has done $7.7 million in defense contracting since Boeing bought it in 2000, based on a review of Pentagon records.

Grey says he plans to soon post on the Internet "assorted aviation documents including Jeppesen planning data" that confirm Boeing's role (Update: Grey posted the flight logs recently at www.ghostplane.net.). The documents include, he says, a 2004 Boeing-arranged flight on the Boeing jet from Morocco through Spain and on to Afghanistan, which coincides with the Masri case.

Masri was mistaken as an Al Qaeda suspect and arrested by Macedonia officials on New Year's Eve 2003. In a Virginia federal lawsuit filed against ex-CIA Director George Tenet and others, Masri says he was "forcibly abducted" in Macedonia and handed over to U.S. officials. He was beaten, drugged, and eventually flown to a CIA prison in Afghanistan, he says. Five months after his abduction, the suit notes, "Mr. El-Masri was deposited at night, without explanation, on a hill in Albania" -- and that was two months after U.S. officials realized they made a mistake, the suit says.

The lawsuit was thrown out earlier this year, not because it lacked merit but because it could lead to disclosure of state secrets, a federal judge ruled. Masri is appealing and Wizner, his attorney, was scheduled to make his arguments this week before a Virginia appeals court.

"Obviously," says Wizner, "before we can add Boeing to the suit, we have to get it reinstated. It's a real hurdle -- the CIA is, in effect, claiming immunity, that they're never liable in such cases." He's buoyed by three federal court rulings in recent months that rejected similar government-secrets argument -- all of them cases involving challenges to warrantless eavesdropping authorized by President Bush.

"If the el-Masri suit can continue, we would try to develop evidence that people within Jeppesen were aware that detainees were being subjected to human rights abuses on these flights," Wizner says. "If we can show that, Boeing should by all rights be a defendant."

Policy was pulled in two directions at once but the government's credibility was at stake, so it talked tough and hoped the financial markets did not spot that it was acting weak. But the markets latched on immediately, sensing that Major and his chancellor, Norman Lamont, would not follow through on their blood-curdling public statements to do whatever it took to maintain the pound's ERM parity because that would have killed off any hopes of economic recovery. Once the markets woke up to the fact that the Tories were paper tigers, Black Wednesday was inevitable.

It's hard not to feel a sense of deja vu now, with the Federal Reserve facing a milder version of the dilemma that troubled the Treasury and the Bank of England 14 years ago. There are real differences between Britain then and the US now: the dollar is floating, rather than fixed; it is underpinned by its status as a global reserve currency; and the US economy has not been mired in recession for two years.

Even so, Ben Bernanke, the Fed's chairman, knows his credibility is on the line. Inflation is high enough to make the central bank nervous and that ought to mean the 18th rise in interest rates since the trough of 1%, taking them to 5.5%. But the deflating housing bubble is now affecting the rest of the economy. Friday's manufacturing snapshot was a lot weaker than Wall Street expected, with an index of below 50 suggesting that industry's output is falling.

Dean Baker, of the Centre for Economic Policy and Research in Washington, is predicting a recession in the next year, with the economy contracting by 0.7% and more than a million added to the dole queues. Most analysts are not that gloomy - at least not yet - but most expect this year's slowdown to persist through 2007 and to prompt the Fed to ease policy in the first half of next year.

So Bernanke's warning last week on the need for vigilance against inflation fell on deaf ears. The dollar fell because the markets do not believe the Fed will make good on its threat. Bernanke is wary of cutting rates for fear of looking soft on inflation; he is wary about raising rates for fear of weakening the economy. So, for now, he'll do nothing and hope that something comes up to get him out of the bind he's in. That doesn't always work: ask Major or Lamont.

Rebalancing

One lesson from the ERM experience is that a weaker dollar is not necessarily a bad thing. In the context of the US trade deficit, it is to be welcomed that the dollar is likely to get a lot cheaper. Sterling's devaluation in 1992 and four points off interest rates coupled with a tighter fiscal policy helped rebalance the UK economy, boosting production at the expense of consumption. A similar rebalancing is long overdue in the US.

Indeed, it is unclear why a $2 pound is being greeted with such enthusiasm on this side of the Atlantic. It makes a Christmas shopping spree in New York far cheaper but the British economy's problem is not that we shop too little but too much. Sterling's trade-weighted index hit a six and a half year high on Friday and the UK trade deficit is at about 5% of GDP. Economic fundamentals suggest the pound must go lower, just as it is obvious the dollar had to fall.

Bernanke's problem, however, is that there is the world of difference between a gentle but steady decline in the dollar and a pell-mell crash. A controlled depreciation would ease strains caused by global imbalances - US trade deficits, Asian trade surpluses - and insulate the US economy a little from the impact of a severe housing market downturn. A crash in the dollar would lead to turmoil on the world's markets, an increase in long-term US interest rates and a vastly increased risk of a hard landing.

One difficulty in analysing how the markets will react is that nobody is sure why the dollar has suddenly fallen out of favour. Some commentators say the trigger was the hint from China that it favoured diversifying reserves so they were less weighted towards dollars. But Beijing has said this regularly over the past three years but carried on buying US assets and thus propping up the dollar. There seems no logical reason why Asian central banks should start dumping greenbacks; not only would they be selling their US assets at a loss, it would make their exports more costly.

Carry trades

A greater risk is that private investors change their behaviour. Hedge funds could determine what happens next. One issue is the growth in carry trades, which is when money is borrowed in a country with low interest rates (such as Japan) and invested in a country with high rates (the US, say). This is lucrative for investors and supports the dollar but risky and attractive to speculators only if the currency in the country with high rates remains strong. If it doesn't, gains from the differential in rates are wiped out by the depreciating currency.

All in all, the prognosis is not good for the dollar. The economy is weak, policymakers seem paralysed and speculators look ready to stampede for the exit. Doing nothing is sometimes the least bad option; it is hard to see that it will be this time. There is a risk that the Fed will get badly behind the curve, and that every bit of gloomy economic news triggers more selling of dollars. Bernanke needs to start preparing the markets for rate cuts or he could be facing a real panic.