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Editorial: The Pathocratic Nature of the Hunt
Harrison Koehli
The term "witch hunt" has become a common phrase in popular political discourse over the past fifty years. We've all heard of the McCarthy era communist witch hunts, where there was supposedly a "red under every bed." The term now stands for an "investigation carried out ostensibly to uncover subversive activities but actually used to harass and undermine those with differing views," as the American Heritage Dictionary puts it. Wikipedia defines it as the "persecution of a perceived enemy (commonly socially non-conformist groups) with extreme prejudice and disregard of actual guilt or innocence."
However, the term has become so popularized that we seem to forget the historical events responsible for its modern usage. What really happened in the witch hunts of the 15th to 17th centuries? How was such a fraud perpetrated throughout the whole of Europe and subsequently the American colonies? A quick look at what we know about this history can provide a stunning mirror to the modern War on Terror, its motivations, and the reality behind a lie that is so big, it seems that only the distance of centuries can make its perpetuation seem possible. (Note: The majority of the research cited below is drawn from Jeffrey B. Russell's "A History of Witchcraft," and the lecture notes of Dr. Wayne Litke.)
Few modern, technologically advanced cultures tend to believe in witches. We do not often picture elderly women riding brooms in the night to assemble for orgies and feasting on Christian babies. This was not always the case. Because of the state of the historical records of the times, the number of people executed for being witches varies from fifty thousand to nine million, by some counts. On the continent it was considered an ecclesiastical crime, and witches were burned at the stake. In England it remained a civil crime, the punishment being hanging.
The power of the inquisition of the Catholic Church was repeatedly authorized in writing, such as the papal bull of Innocent IV in 1252, authorizing the imprisonment of heretics, their torture, execution, and the seizure of their property on minimal evidence. This was two hundred years before the "craze" took hold. Think of the modern Patriot Act and the thousands of "suspected terrorists" being held indefinitely on minimal evidence today.
The so-called "craze" is perhaps the most striking aspect of the phenomenon. How is it that so many people could be convinced in the existence of something that simply did not exist? (I will be discussing modern theories on the hunts shortly.) It turns out they had a few good reasons for their belief, although the existence of witches was not one of them. Some of the accused even came to proclaim their own guilt. Perhaps these individuals suffered from schizophrenia, or perhaps the intense fear and absurdity of their situation drove them to these delusions, but the nuns of Louviers and Loudun even admitted making love to the devil himself. Others confessed 'voluntarily.' That is, they were tortured and then given the choice of confessing or being tortured again. Pierre Vallin, in southern France in 1438, admitted to serving and copulating with the devil for sixty-three years. Isobel Gowdie, in 1662, confessed without torture that she had made a pact with the devil, that she flew, that she changed herself into a cat, and that the devil baptised her with her own blood. Sometimes the 'witches' managed to implicate most of the people they knew, like the case of a group in Lombardy in 1387. Again, think of the modern men and women being held in secret prisons across the globe. Think of their alleged confessions, many of which they subsequently deny after being released as being torture-induced. Think of the obviously crazed Moussaoui and his odd, shape-shifting confession to terrorist acts he had nothing to do with.
Here is an example of the questions asked to suspects in the torture chambers:
How long have you been a witch? Why did you become a witch? How did you become a witch, and what happened on the occasion? What was the name of your master among the evil demons? What was the oath you were forced to render him? What demons and what other humans participated [at the sabbat]? Who are your accomplices in evil?
Notice that guilt is presumed. I have little doubt that the following is an accurate representation of the line of questioning in our modern secret prisons:
How long have you been a terrorist? Why did you become a terrorist? How did you become a member of Al Qaeda, and what happened on the occasion? What was the name of your master among Al Qaeda? What was the oath you were forced to render him? What Muslims and what other terrorists participated [at the Mosque]? Who are your accomplices in evil?
So, what do we know so far? That innocent people were executed for crimes they could not have committed; that some of these gave confessions (voluntarily or as a result of torture); that the belief and fear of witches was widespread. We may rightly ask, what was the motivation of the judges? Were there no sane people at all? Etienne Delacambre argues (reasonably so, I think) that the majority of the judges were probably honest men who truly believed they were doing a service to their society, and that God would intervene for those innocent parties. How many times have you heard, "Well, I'm against torture, but Muslim terrorism is a big problem, and we have to deal with them effectively" or some similar rationalization? For me the answer is "too many."
However, there were individuals who refused to buy into the blatant propaganda. In certain regions (as a result of the Caroline code of 1532), trials had to be held in open courts, and little heed was paid to obviously false accusations (like the accusations and confessions of children). Johann Weyer wrote "On Magic" in 1563, arguing that witches were merely harmless old woman, probably suffering from mental disorders. In return for his sane and objective account he himself was accused of witchcraft (can I say terrorist sympathizer?) by his intellectual peers. Interestingly, it was the elite, intellectual class that continued to decry the menace of witches even after public stopped believing in the threat. It was the intellectual leaders who defended belief in witches in New England. Cotton Mather was one of these officials. He was also a blood-thirsty psychopath. While portraying himself as a concerned minister during the executions at Salem-worried about innocents being executed-when George Burroughs recited the Lord's Prayer, shaking the public's confidence in his guilt, Mather appeared, urging he be executed. While the courts admitted evidence for which there could be no corroboration (like witnesses seeing incriminating spectres that no one else could see), the public were unmoved by the shoddy investigations. Moreover, Mather ensured that the court would come to the correct judgment by appointing three of the five judges, who just happened to be members of his own congregation. It seems more likely that belief in witches was a manufactured phenomenon. The people could see the absurdity of a lot of the evidence and accusations, but they were convinced of the reality of the threat from the top down.
As to how the craze declined, Russell tells us that by the seventeenth century the only thing prolonging the lie was "popular opinion, conservative intellectuals, and obstinate judges," even after government officials ordered a stop to it all. I can just picture a raving Bill O'Reilly ranting in the streets about Osama while a crowd of objective observers watch in stunned disbelief. In fact, the notoriety of trials like Salem turned public opinion against belief in witches. For another clue into the true nature of the craze, it was only after the governing elites themselves had rejected the belief in witchcraft that the popular belief disappeared. Strange, no? It almost seems as though the ruling elite artificially engineered a false "concerted, fifth column attack against Christian society of an organized satanic cult, dedicated to destroying European values," as professor Litke put it. Now, why would they want to do such a thing?
Just as now there is a minority of sceptics speaking against the myth of a "concerted, fifth column attack against Christian society of an organized Muslim cult, dedicated to destroying American values," there was then, but their influence was "limited by the fear of prosecution and by the powerful intellectual pressures exerted by the prevailing belief-system. [...] To reject witchcraft was to court persecution or mockery. [...] One could argue that this or that heretic was not really a witch, or that flights through the air did not really occur, or that the measure taken against this or that accused witch were too harsh, but one could not challenge the heart of the belief. In this intellectual framework belief in diabolical witchcraft was not a superstition, and opponents of this belief operating within the framework could not oppose it as such. It was part of a coherent, dominant world view" (Russell). Similarly today it is possible to argue that a certain individual is not really a terrorist, that certain events did not occur (or occur as presented), or that it is wrong to torture alleged members of Al Qaeda, but to question the heart of the belief-that crazed Muslims hate our freedom and want to destroy us-is to court persecution or mockery.
You will be hard-pressed to find a modern scholar willing to admit the existence of witches then or now (not counting modern Wiccans, who bear no resemblance to the typical image of a witch). Most will admit that witchcraft was a "combination of folklore, superstition and pagan beliefs which were artificially designated heresy and used by the church as an excuse for persecution." Litke even calls it "state and church-sponsored terrorism aimed at social control."
If the world survives the modern War on Terror, you can take it to the bank that historians will look back on our times a similar perspective. Just as with witchcraft, it is an engineered ideology that determines the form that evil takes. In the past it has been Jews, Christians, heretics, witches, Nazis, communists, blacks, gays. Now it is Muslim terrorists and the 'liberals' that support them. This ideology has been manufactured by an elite ruling class, and it is insidiously clever and successful. They have managed to exploit the suffering Palestinians by using their plight as the foundation for the myth of the crazed Muslim fanatic.
While there may not have been any real witches, there are Muslims who have resorted to violence, just as any number of oppressed groups have and are doing at present. The image of the modern Muslim terrorist is not based on Christian superstition, but on an image of desperation. We have been conditioned to be repulsed and afraid of human suffering.
Who stands to gain from this perversion? Who is this ruling elite? What is it about them that, no matter where or when you live, they seek to control and destroy those who are unlike them? How is it that good people are taken in by their lies? How is it that they manage to tell these lies while the rest of us marvel at their audacity or refuse to believe anyone could tell such a lie? What kind of person derives pleasure from torturing innocent people?
The answer should be fairly obvious: those who themselves cannot truly suffer. Those without conscience.
What is the nature of the hunt? Pure Pathocracy.
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Editorial: My Meeting With Rumsfeld
Ray McGovern
May 08, 2006
"Hold 'em, Yale" is one of the best short stories of "Guys and Dolls" creator Damon Runyon, who depicted the New York City underworld in the 1920s. The story deals with an undercover operation to scalp ducats before the annual Yale-Harvard football game. It begins:
What I am doing in New Haven on the day of a very large football game between the Harvards and the Yales is something calling for no little explanation, for I am not such a guy as you are likely to find in New Haven at any time-and especially not on the day of a large football game.
A variant came to mind Thursday as I walked through a posh Atlanta neighborhood to the Southern Center for International Policy to hear a speech by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
What I am doing in Atlanta on the day of a very large lecture by Donald Rumsfeld to an establishment audience is something calling for no little explanation, for I am not such a guy as you are likely to find in such a venue at any time-and especially not when the ducat requires $40 up front.
But serendipity prevailed. The ACLU of Georgia had invited me to their annual dinner on Thursday, May 4, to receive the National Civil Liberties Award. Friends in Atlanta arranged for me to bookend my remarks at the ACLU dinner with a Wednesday presentation to Pax Christi, the Catholic peace movement, and a talk on Friday evening at Quaker House in Decatur. I planned to put the rationale for looming war with Iran in context by drawing an unhappy but direct parallel with the bogus reasons adduced to "justify" the U.S. attack on Iraq more than three years ago.
When those friends learned last Monday that Rumsfeld would be in Atlanta Thursday to give an afternoon speech at the Center, it seemed a natural to go. The event was said to be open to the public, but it took tradecraft skills assimilated over a 27-year career with the CIA to acquire a ticket. (The event was strangely absent from the Center's website, reportedly at the insistence of the Defense Department.)
The fact that my presence there was pure coincidence turned out to be a huge disappointment for those who began interviews later that day by insisting I tell them why I had stalked Rumsfeld all the way from Washington to Atlanta. Especially people like Paula Zahn, who asked me on Thursday evening "what kind of axe" I had to grind with him.
To prepare for my presentations, I took along a briefcase full of notes and clippings, one of which was a New York Times article datelined Atlanta, Sept. 27, 2002, quoting Rumsfeld's assertion that there was "bulletproof" evidence of ties between al-Qaida and the government of Saddam Hussein.
This was the kind of unfounded allegation that, at the time, deceived 69 percent of Americans into believing that the Iraqi leader played a role in the tragedy of 9/11. Rumsfeld's "bulletproof" rhetoric also came in the wake of an intensive but quixotic search by my former colleagues at the CIA for any reliable evidence of such ties.
A fresh reminder of the Bush administration's Iraq deceptions surfaced Thursday morning, when the Spanish newspaper El Pais published an interview with Paul Pillar, the senior U.S. intelligence specialist on the Middle East and terrorism until he retired late last year. Pillar branded administration attempts to prove a link between al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein "an organized campaign of manipulation... I suppose by some definitions that could be called a lie."
I arrived at the Rumsfeld lecture early, took a seat near a microphone set aside for Q-and-A, and thought I might ask Rumsfeld to explain his use of the "bulletproof" adjective, which came at a time when none other than Gen. Brent Scowcroft was describing such evidence as "scant," and the CIA was saying it was non-existent. (The 9/11 commission later ruled definitively in CIA's favor.)
Rumsfeld brought up bête noire terrorist al-Zarqawi as proof of collaboration between al-Qaida and Iraq, but that was a canard easily knocked down. It appears that Rumsfeld thinks no one really pays attention. Sadly, as regards the mainstream press, he has been largely right-at least until now.
When Rumsfeld broadened our dialogue to include the never-to-be-found Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, saying, "Apparently, there were no weapons of mass destruction," I could not resist reminding him that he had claimed he actually knew where they were. Anyone who followed this issue closely would remember his remark to George Stephanopoulos on March 30, 2003:
We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat.
As soon as the event was over, CNN asked me for my sources, which I was happy to share. The CNN folks seemed a bit surprised that they all checked out. To their credit, they overcame the more customary "McGovern said this, but Rumsfeld said that"-and the dismissive "well, we'll have to leave it there"-kind of treatment. In Rumsfeldian parlance, what I had said turned out to be "known knowns," even though he provided an altered version on Thursday of his "we know where they are." Better still, in its coverage, CNN quoted what Rumsfeld had said in 2003.
That evening a friend emailed me about a call she got from a close associate in "upper management at CNN" to ask about me. She quoted the CNN manager: "We checked and double-checked everything this guy had to say and he was 100 percent accurate." He then asked if those protesting the war "were getting organized or something." She responded, "Indeed we are and have been for some time, and it's about time the mainstream media caught up."
With the exception of CNN-and MSNBC which also did its homework and displayed the tangled web woven by the normally articulate defense secretary-the other networks generally limited their coverage to the "he-said-but-he-said" coverage more typical of what passes for journalism these days. Even CNN found it de rigueur to put neocon ideologue Frank Gaffney on with me for Wolf Blitzer. Gaffney is well to the right of Rumsfeld, so I should not have been surprised to hear Gaffney take the line that the U.S. may still find evidence of ties between Iraq and al-Qaeda, and of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Hope springs eternal.
And there were more subliminal messages. In some press reports I was described as a "Rumsfeld critic" and "heckler" who was, heavens, "rude to Rumsfeld." Other accounts referred to my "alleged" service with the CIA, which prompted my wife to question-I think in jest-what I was really doing for those 27 years. I believe I was able to convince her without her performing additional fact checking.
All in all, my encounter with Rumsfeld was for me a highly instructive experience. The Center's president, Peter White, singled out Rumsfeld's "honesty" in introducing him, and 99 percent of those attending seemed primed to agree. Indeed, their reaction brought to mind film footage of rallies in Germany during the thirties. When Rumsfeld replied to my first question about his false statements on Iraq 's WMD, the applause was automatic. "I did not lie then...," he insisted.
This was immediately greeted with what Pravda used to describe as "stormy applause," followed immediately by rather unseemly shouts by this otherwise well-disciplined and well-heeled group to have me summarily thrown out. At the end, as we all filed out slowly, I could make eye contact with only one person-who proceeded to berate me for being insubordinate.
Scary. No open minds there. A graphic reminder for those wishing to spread some truth around that we have our work cut out for us. We have to find imaginative ways to use truth as a lever to pry open closed minds.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour. A 27-year veteran of CIA's analyst ranks, he now serves on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
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Editorial: Announcing Ziopedia.org
Andrew Winkler
Editor/Publisher
The Rebel Media Group
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Daily Planet
Italian lawmakers reach stalemate on first day of presidential vote
AFP
Mon May 8, 2006
ROME - The first round of voting for Italy's next president ended in stalemate with no candidate obtaining a majority of two-thirds of parliamentary votes needed.
Italian lawmakers were unable to break a deadlock which threatens to further stall incoming prime minister Romano Prodi's accession to power, a month after winning a general election.
The presidential candidate presented by the right-wing coalition, Gianni Letta, outgoing Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's close aide and undersecretary, received 368 votes, according to a first count.
There were 438 blank votes after Prodi said that the centre-left would leave their ballots blank, in a signal that he could not muster the votes to have his candidate elected in the first round.
Prodi, a former European Commission president, said the move was intended to show the opposition that his coalition was still open to negotiations.
Berlusconi had asked his allies to block Prodi's candidate Giorgio Napolitano, an 80-year-old senator for life and former parliament speaker.
Berlusconi's allies said Napolitano was too left-wing for the job.
"Giorgio Napolitano is an excellent candidate, and we will vote for him when the conditions will be present to elect him president. We hope that the centre-right will join their votes to ours to elect him," said Piero Fassino, secretary of the Democrats of the Left (DS) party, after the vote.
"We will see what happens tomorrow (Tuesday) and we'll decide afterwards," Fassino said.
Voting in a second round was due to start at 11:30 am (1030 GMT) on Tuesday.
More than 1,000 deputies, senators and representatives of Italy's 20 regional assemblies voted in the first round.
A two-thirds majority of 674 would have been necessary to elect a president.
More than 150 voters ignored voting orders and gave their support to people who were not on voting lists. Berlusconi received two votes and his friend, lawmaker and lawyer Cesare Previti, in prison for corrupting magistrates, received three votes.
Prodi, who under Italy's constitution cannot form a government until a new president is elected to succeed the retiring Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, may be forced to wait until a fourth round on Wednesday to ensure that his candidate, or a compromise nominee, is elected when voting is decided by a simple majority.
Napolitano emerged as Prodi's compromise candidate late Sunday after a frenzied round of party meetings designed to break a days-long deadlock.
Prodi had to drop his preferred choice, 57-year-old Massimo D'Alema, from DS, after objections from the centre-right over his communist past.
D'Alema, who is instead likely to be given a cabinet post, gave Napolitano his backing.
"Giorgio Napolitano went in a cardinal and I believe he will emerge as pope," he told Italy's Canale 5 television.
Napolitano also comes from the DS, the largest party in Prodi's coalition, a motley collection of parties ranging from Catholics to communists, which has been pressurising Prodi for a major post.
The choice of president must be a widely respected figure seen to be above party politics, such as the 85-year-old Ciampi, seen by many Italians as a grandfather of the nation. The need for Prodi to win consensus is vital, particularly as his coalition's narrow election victory split the country in two.
Berlusconi has accused the left of seeking to "occupy" the main institutional posts, having already used their tiny majority to elect left-wing speakers to both houses of parliament.
Instead, the centre-right has proposed that Prodi's coalition provide a list of four candidates, former prime ministers Giuliano Amato and Lamberto Dini, the newly elected Senate speaker Franco Marini and former EU Commissioner Mario Monti.
All have been spoken of as likely consensus candidates who may come to the fore as the voting process goes on.
Comment: "More than 150 voters ignored voting orders and gave their support to people who were not on voting lists. Berlusconi received two votes and his friend, lawmaker and lawyer Cesare Previti, in prison for corrupting magistrates, received three votes."
Voting officials later revealed that in an unheard of act of selflessness, Berlusconi had actually cast five votes: two for himself, and three for his friend in prison. They noted, however, that Berlusconi had also signed his ballots and wrote a little note at the bottom that read, "Dear little person, Save this signature. It'll be worth billions. Now, get back to work! What do you think I'm paying you for, you [expletive deleted]?!"
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Defiant Blair refuses to set timetable to quit
AFP
Mon May 8, 2006
LONDON - A defiant British Prime Minister Tony Blair has rejected calls by rebels within his party to name the day he will stand down, saying it would "paralyse" government.
After one of the most bruising weeks of his nine years in power, Blair vowed to forge ahead with market-inspired education and other reforms and to fight "all the way" traditional Labour Party leftists trying to block them.
Speaking at his monthly press conference in London, he also confirmed that he saw ambitious Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, the finance minister who has been waiting impatiently in the wings, as his obvious successor.
"To state a timetable now would simply paralyse the proper working of government, put at risk the necessary changes we're making for Britain and therefore damage the country," said the 53-year-old leader.
Blair announced after Labour's third election victory in May last year that he would serve a full third term in office but not run for a fourth when the next general election takes place, before May 2010.
But poor local election results last week, after a series of politically damaging ministerial mishaps and failings, revived pressure within the party for a timetable for his departure and a transition of power to Brown.
The prime minister retorted that setting out an exit date now would be exploited by leftists seeking to turn the tide against reforms undertaken by a party he had steered toward the centre with massive electoral success.
"That way lies not a fourth-term victory but a defeat and a return to opposition, and I will fight that all the way," he said.
He confirmed Brown was his top choice to succeed him and said he would tell Labour parliamentary colleagues later Monday that he would honour pledges to ensure a "stable and orderly transition to a new leader".
He also said he would stay on to fulfill his election mandate for reform of healthcare, pensions, schools and justice.
Critics claim Labour is distracted by the looming change in leadership, with members either still supporting Blair or lining up behind Brown.
Labour members say Blair will face colleagues at Monday's meeting who are angry at his "ruthless" cabinet reshuffle in the wake of Thursday's municipal council results, Labour's worst since it took power in 1997.
The reshuffle saw the prime minister sack his home secretary, demote his foreign secretary, take powers off his deputy prime minister and juggle other key top posts.
Blair admitted the furore surrounding axed home secretary Charles Clarke -- whose department failed to deport hundreds of foreign prisoners once they were released -- had caused "significant damage" to the party in the polls.
Analysts say Blair swung the cabinet axe to demonstrate his authority, put the scandals of recent weeks behind him and give new purpose to his party, but the moves failed to quell calls for a clear handover of power.
Some 50 rebels have now signed up to a draft letter demanding a timetable for a "dignified, orderly and efficient" leadership transition to be set out by July.
A BBC radio survey of 104 Labour backbenchers found 52 who believed Blair should stand down within a year.
Calls on Blair to resign also came Monday from David Cameron, leader of the main opposition Conservatives who scored well ahead of Labour in Thursday's English council elections.
"I think the sooner he goes the better, because I don't see how his authority can recover," Cameron said.
As to his eventual successor, Blair said there was no doubt Brown as prime minister would continue the reform programme and Britain's close alliance with the United States.
"I believe that those people who maybe feel or hope that Gordon would take the Labour Party in a different direction from New Labour are -- on the basis of the discussions that I have had with Gordon -- completely mistaken," Blair said.
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Reshuffle rumours swirl despite denials
PARIS, May 8, 2006 (AFP)
Rumours swirled over the fate of France's damaged prime minister Dominique de Villepin Monday, despite weekend denials from President Jacques Chirac that any reshuffle is planned in reaction to the dirty tricks scandal known as the Clearstream affair.
With a demoralised government plunging in the polls following claims of an internecine smear campaign, the future of the 52 year-old prime minister remained deeply uncertain after he was accused last week of lying to cover up his own alleged role.
Paris newspapers all carried speculation that Chirac could nominate Villepin's arch-rival - Interior Minister and ruling Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) chief Nicolas Sarkozy - to replace him if the political damage from the Clearstream scandal gets any worse.
Sarkozy, 51, who is the leading right-wing candidate for next year's presidential elections, was said by colleagues to be reluctant to take on what is widely seen as the poisoned chalice of French politics, but might feel duty-bound to accept the prime minister's job if he was offered it.
Patrick Devedjian, a UMP deputy who is close to the interior minister, said Monday that Sarkozy would only agree to take on the post if he was allowed a free hand to carry out his own radical platform of reforms.
"Nicolas Sarkozy will have to implement his own project, in a way bringing forward the 'rupture' which he envisages for 2007 if he is elected president of the Republic," Devedjian told Le Monde newspaper.
A complex and sordid story of bogus corruption claims directed at Sarkozy as well as other French personalities, the Clearstream affair has cast the government into disarray at the start of Chirac's last year in office - offering an unhoped-for boon for the opposition Socialist Party (PS).
Last week the prime minister was forced onto the defensive over the leaked testimony of a senior intelligence official, who said that in January 2004 Villepin - then foreign minister - ordered him to conduct a secret enquiry into a list of alleged account-holders at the Clearstream bank in Luxembourg.
Sarkozy - whose name was on the list - believes he was the victim of a campaign to blacken his name ahead of the 2007 presidential race. His entourage suspects Villepin - if not of starting the false allegations - at least of exploiting them for his own ends.
Last week the government's internal divisions widened further when Defence Minister Michèle Alliot-Marie said she too was targeted in the Clearstream affair, because her partner UMP deputy Patrick Ollier was also on the fake list of account-holders.
Villepin has said repeatedly in interviews and before parliament that he did not order any enquiry into named account-holders, but his denials have failed to still the criticism - with even the generally pro-government newspaper Le Figaro last week accusing him of lying.
With Villepin's popularity rating falling to just 20 percent - the second lowest for a prime minister in the Fifth Republic - Chirac was reported by Le Monde at the weekend to have called in Sarkozy to discuss his possible nomination to the prime ministership.
But the Elysée palace then stepped in to scotch rumours of an imminent cabinet shake-up, saying the president has "complete and total confidence" in Villepin.
Le Monde newspaper reported Monday that Chirac would keep Villepin in office as long as the allegations do not come closer to the president himself - but that he is preparing his options in case the scandal escalates.
According to General Philippe Rondot - the intelligence official at the heart of the affair - Villepin told him in 2004 that his instructions to set up a secret enquiry came from Chirac himself. This was denied last week by the prime minister.
Much depended on any new developments in the investigation by two judges trying to find the source of the original fake claims. They are due to speak to Sarkozy later in the week.
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Bolivia nationalization further sidelines US
By Saul Hudson
Reuters
Mon May 8, 2006
WASHINGTON - By nationalizing Bolivia's energy industry, President Evo Morales lived up to a pledge to be Washington's nightmare and highlighted waning U.S. influence in Latin America.
Last week's action from the leftist, whose allies are U.S. adversaries Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Cuban leader
Fidel Castro, was another step in the region's retreat from U.S.-prescribed free-market economics.
And the United States can do little to stem a tide of Latin American voters turning to leftists like Morales who rail at free trade and foreign investment for failing to improve the lives of the region's impoverished majority.
"It is a genie that is not going to be put back in the bottle," said Peter Hakim, head of the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington-based think tank.
It was Brazil, Argentina and Venezuela that held an emergency summit with Morales to manage the aftershocks from his decision to send troops to gas fields, alarming investors, rattling markets and angering foreign governments.
The U.S. public response to the nationalization was merely for spokesmen to cautiously express concern over the potential economic impact.
That belied the importance for Washington of Morales' decree to take over the oil and gas industries, giving government energy company YPFB control over production and the state a 51-percent stake in several foreign companies.
"The socialism championed by him and Chavez is an increasing threat to the United States and its economic model that has dominated for decades. That's what's at stake here," said Larry Birns of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs think tank.
"But with the U.S. under-reaction, you'd think the United States is condemned to be an observer," he said.
"GO ITS OWN WAY"
Unable to forge region-wide support for its policies, the superpower and region's traditional patron will have to depend more and more on bilateral cooperation, such as the free-trade deals it has been hammering out in recent years, analysts say.
"U.S. influence in the region now has to be on a country-by-country, issue-by-issue basis," Hakim said.
That is a stark contrast from the United States that launched the Summit of the Americas in 1994 to spread its free-trade agenda, hoping for an accord for the whole hemisphere.
Latin America will keep trading with its closest economic partner but it will seek increasing independence from the United States by deepening its relations with Europe, China and countries across the developing world, according to Birns.
"Latin America will go its own way," he said.
After the September 11 attacks, President George W. Bush turned his focus to fighting terrorism in the Islamic world -- and away from Latin America, which he had vowed to make a priority of his presidency.
That neglect meant last year -- for the first time -- the U.S.-backed candidate failed to win selection as head of the Organization of American States, the hemisphere's top diplomatic body.
Some Bush supporters want a renewed focus on the region to counter the anti-American sentiment fueled by leftists like Morales, who vowed to be a U.S. nightmare in his election campaign last year.
"Sad to say, it may already be too late for the Bush administration to garner favorable public support from South and Central Americans," Andy Messing of the National Defense Council Foundation wrote in the Washington Times newspaper.
"But laying the groundwork now could be a necessary and worthy effort to be carried over to future administrations," he added.
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Associated Press Falsely Portrays Chavez as Seeking 25-Year Term
Monday, May 08, 2006
Justin Delacour
Latin America News Review
A little scrutiny of a recent Associated Press report about Venezuela provides a lesson in how the English-language press often gets the story wrong. Take the first sentence: "President Hugo Chavez said Saturday that Venezuelan voters should have the chance to decide whether he should govern the country for the next 25 years."
No, such a referendum would not be about "whether he should govern the country for the next 25 years." A referendum would be about whether Chavez would be permitted to run every six years and --in the event that he were to continue winning elections-- serve multiple presidential terms. The AP report's opening sentence makes it sound as if such a referendum would do away with elections in Venezuela, as if its intent would be to grant Chavez a new 25-year term in office! The website of The Calgary Sun even titles the wire report "Chavez seeking 25-year term"!!
This is obviously an extremely poor piece of reporting. Chavez made it clear that, if the opposition committed to participating in the upcoming presidential election, he would not convoke a referendum to end presidential term limits. He explained that the intent of his threat to convoke such a referendum was not to perpetuate himself in power but rather to defend the Bolivarian Revolution.
Fortunately, Agence France Press (AFP) got the story right. The opening sentence of AFP's Spanish-language report reads, "Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez claimed Saturday that, if the opposition decides not to run candidates in the December presidential election, he could decree a referendum to permit his reelection for multiple terms until 2031."
So the choice for the opposition is simple. If they don't want a referendum that would end presidential term limits, they shouldn't pull out of the upcoming presidential election. As far as I'm concerned, the threat of a referendum is a perfectly reasonable (and democratic) way to dissuade the opposition from trying to delegitimize Venezuela's electoral process.
When Venezuela's opposition knows it's going to lose an election, it has a tendency to try to delegitimize the electoral process. Instead of facing up to the fact that it is unpopular, the business-led opposition tries to shift the blame for its electoral misfortunes to the National Electoral Council (CNE). The opposition claims that the CNE could commit "fraud" and that the vote might not be secret. Opposition conspiracy theories of this nature are legion. Never mind that there have been international observers on hand that have testified to the fairness of Venezuela's elections. Never mind that even the opposition's own polls show that Chavez is much more popular than they are.
In other words, many members of the opposition aren't really interested in trying to win elections because they know that they lack popular support. Many in the opposition prefer, instead, to try to create the impression internationally that Venezuela's electoral process is illegitimate.
One has to understand that, given the combination of the opposition's economic interests and political incompetence, it is very desperate. Since it is unable to attract popular support domestically, the opposition resorts to attempts to draw more U.S. hostility toward Chavez in hopes that such hostility might somehow weaken or destroy his presidency. Electoral boycotts are part and parcel of this strategy. The opposition wants to create the (false) impression internationally that Venezuela is another Ukraine and that Chavez wins elections by "fraud," etc. etc. That's what Chavez is up against.
OAS General Secretary Jose Miguel Insulza effectively summed up the problem that Chavez faces when he said the following about the opposition's boycott of legislative elections last December:
"We had a problem with the Venezuelan opposition, which assured us that they would not withdraw from the [electoral] process if certain conditions were met. These were met and, despite this, they withdrew."
Insulza continued, "if the path of abstention is chosen, then one cannot complain that the entire parliament is in the hands of one's political adversary."
Comment: The above gives a good example of how reality and the truth is deliberately twisted by the mainstream press and how the US government wages wars of attrition (when not invading directly) against democratically elected foreign governments.
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Egyptian Police Kill Militant Leader
By ASHRAF SWEILLAM
The Associated Press
Tuesday, May 9, 2006; 10:59 AM
EL-ARISH, Egypt -- Police on Tuesday killed the leader of an al-Qaida-inspired Islamic militant group wanted for the terrorist attacks that killed 21 people in a Sinai beach resort town last month, officials said.
Nasser Khamis el-Mallahi, head of Egypt's Monotheism and Jihad, was shot dead and an accomplice was captured in a battle with police in an olive grove, said Lt. Gen. Essam el-Sheik, commander of the North Sinai security police.
"This is a major blow to the terrorist group," el-Sheik said.
The Interior Ministry congratulated the police in a statement that described el-Mallahi as "the mastermind and leader of the group that carried out the Dahab and el-Gorah explosions," the semi-official Middle East News Agency reported.
Three bombs exploded almost simultaneously in the Red Sea resort of Dahab on April 24, killing 21 people. Two days later, suicide bombers attacked vehicles of the Egyptian police and an international peacekeeping force in el-Gorah, in the north Sinai, killing only themselves.
El-Mallahi, a 30-year-old father of three, led a group that also had been accused of carrying out attacks that killed 34 people in the Sinai resorts of Taba and Ras Shitan in October 2004 and one in Sharm el-Sheik that killed 64 people in July 2005.
The killing of el-Mallahi came a day after Israel warned its citizens to stay away from the Sinai Peninsula, a popular destination, because of an "increased threat of kidnapping of Israeli citizens on the Sinai coast."
El-Sheik said security forces surrounded the grove south of El-Arish, a Mediterranean coastal city near the border with the Gaza Strip, after receiving a tip that el-Mallahi and his accomplice were hiding there. Bedouin scouts also had reported that the two suspects' tracks led into the grove.
The battle lasted a little over 30 minutes. El-Sheik said the accomplice, Mohammed Abdullah Abu Grair, was captured after running out of ammunition. He was not wounded.
Police found automatic rifles and hand grenades that failed to detonate.
Hundreds of security officers celebrated in front of security police headquarters, chanting "Allahu Akbar!" or "God is Great!"
Egyptian authorities, apparently concerned about damaging the vital tourism industry, which earned $6.4 billion last year, have said the Sinai attacks were the work of local groups with no ties to outside terrorist organizations.
But foreign experts say the various terrorist groups operating around the Islamic world under the name Monotheism and Jihad are likely to have links to the international al-Qaida network.
The precise nature of the links is not clear.
The leader of the Iraqi version of Monotheism and Jihad, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, changed the name of his group to al-Qaida in Iraq after swearing allegiance to Osama bin Laden. However, he is not believed to carry out attacks on the specific orders of bin Laden. The same is believed to be the case with other, less well-known groups, such as Monotheism and Jihad in Egypt.
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Cindy Sheehan pressures Canada
MICHAEL DEN TANDT
Globe and Mail
May 5, 2006
OTTAWA -- Canadian soldiers have no business being in Afghanistan and their presence there merely enables the United States to carry on its "illegal and immoral" war in Iraq, prominent U.S. anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan said yesterday.
"I believe my country shouldn't be in Afghanistan anyway," Ms. Sheehan said at a news conference on Parliament Hill. "It's never about spreading freedom or democracy or making the world safe, it's about lining the war profiteers' pockets."
While lambasting President George W. Bush and the U.S. government for the Iraq war, Ms. Sheehan also fired broadsides at the UN-backed international mission in Afghanistan.
"My country supported Osama bin Laden in the fight against Russia," she said. "And now they go in and tear down that country. It's back in the hands of the drug lords, it's producing more opium than ever, and it's not safe. There's not any rebuilding going on, because it's being occupied by occupying forces."
Canada's deployment of 2,300 soldiers to Afghanistan simply "frees up more soldiers to be in Iraq," Ms. Sheehan said.
Ms. Sheehan and Canadian activists from the Council of Canadians and the War Resisters Support Campaign also called on Prime Minister Stephen Harper to "open the border" to U.S. military deserters.
"I believe our war resisters are legitimate refugees," Ms. Sheehan said.
Ms. Sheehan, whose son, Specialist Casey Sheehan, was killed in Iraq in April, 2004, gained prominence last year when she camped for days outside Mr. Bush's Crawford, Tex., ranch, demanding answers for the war.
Yesterday, she added her fame to the so-far unsuccessful efforts of Canadian peace activists to persuade the federal government to grant refugee claims by U.S. military deserters who don't want to serve in Iraq.
Last month, the Federal Court of Canada ruled against two U.S. Army deserters who had appealed for refugee status in Canada on the grounds that they might be jailed if they return to the United States.
The court ruled that prosecution in U.S. courts does not amount to persecution. Immigration and Refugee Board decisions had earlier rejected requests for political asylum from Jeremy Hinzman and Brandon Hughey.
Speaking alongside Ms. Sheehan at yesterday's media briefing, War Resisters organizer Michelle Robidoux said about 20 more soldiers have since fled to Canada. "We estimate there may be several hundred more who are living clandestinely in Canada," she said. "This is an echo of what happened during the Vietnam War."
The activists conceded that current war resisters are different from those in the Vietnam era because they volunteered to serve, rather than being drafted.
However, Ms. Sheehan said, the soldiers are within their rights to desert because many are "lied to" by U.S. military recruiters who tell them they won't have to fight in Iraq. "My son was an honourable, honest person lied to by his recruiter," she said.
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The Earth Strikes Back
Fla. Issues State of Emergency Over Fires
AP
Mon May 8, 2006
NEW SMYRNA BEACH, Fla. - Gov. Jeb Bush declared a state of emergency Monday as brush fires burned more than 8,000 acres, destroyed homes and forced authorities to shut down highways.
Officials are tracking about 50 active wildfires throughout the water-parched state, and Bush said lightning was probably not to blame in most cases.
"The likelihood is most of these fires have been created by either negligence or people doing harm," he said.
A fire in New Smyrna Beach has consumed about 1,300 acres and destroyed three homes. But most of the 1,000 people who were ordered to evacuate Sunday returned home Monday afternoon said Timber Weller, a spokesman for the state Division of Forestry.
A 12-mile stretch of Interstate 95 south of Daytona Beach was not expected to reopen until midmorning Tuesday because of fires burning in the median, according to Florida Highway Patrol. A 20-mile section of the interstate in Brevard County will be shut down early Tuesday morning as a precaution.
A brush fire forced the highway patrol to shut down more than four miles of Interstate 75 south of Tampa on Monday.
Smoke has been settling on roadways, contributing to collisions that have killed four people.
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Major hurricane season brewing in the Atlantic
Associated Press
Mon. May. 8 2006
FREDERICTON -- In what could signal a frightening new fact of life in the age of global warming, Canadian and U.S. forecasters are warning that another major hurricane season is brewing in the Atlantic Ocean.
The 2006 hurricane season officially opens on June 1, and already scientists are telling people living in eastern North America that numerous storms are predicted, with as many as five major hurricanes packing winds of 180 km/h or greater.
"It's kind of comparable to what we were looking at last year at this time," says Bob Robichaud, a meteorologist with the Canadian Hurricane Centre in Dartmouth, N.S.
"Last year we were looking at 12 to 15 storms and this year the forecast is for about 17. No one would go out on a limb and say it is going to be just as bad as last year, but the indications are there that it is still going to be another active season, almost twice as active as normal."
Last year's hurricane season was the most destructive on record.
There were 27 named storms, 15 hurricanes and seven intense hurricanes during the 2005 season. The worst damage was along the U.S. Gulf coast.
Scientists with the Colorado State University hurricane forecast team say the same factors that contributed to last year's violent season are still in play this year.
"The Atlantic Ocean remains anomalously warm, and tropical Pacific sea surface temperatures have continued to cool," says Colorado University forecaster Phil Klotzbach, explaining two of the key triggers for hurricanes.
The Eastern seaboard has been locked in an active storm period for the past decade and while these seasons are normally cyclical, no one knows when, or if, the active period will end.
"Is this global warming? From now on will we see only active hurricane seasons? That's the big question," says Canadian weather guru Dave Phillips of Environment Canada.
While there is no scientific proof that the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is breeding more hurricanes, Phillips says global warming could be contributing to the unusual power of the big storms, like last year's Katrina.
"We are seeing stronger hurricanes - almost a 100 per cent increase in category fours and fives," he says.
"When they do develop, they're a lot bigger, tougher and have more destructive power. They stay together longer. This is the concern. They seem to have more power. That could have a connection to global warming - the fact the atmosphere has changed and ocean temperatures have warmed."
Forecasters stress that there is no way to know, at this point, how many big storms will make landfall or whether any will be able to pick up enough steam to significantly affect Eastern Canada.
That's what happened in 2003, when hurricane Juan stoked up energy from unusually warm waters off northeastern North America and blasted the Maritimes, causing death and destruction in Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and parts of New Brunswick.
Phillips says that despite this year's grim forecast, a lot can happen to shut down offshore hurricanes and prevent them from causing onshore harm.
"The temperature of the water has to be right, the winds have to be just perfect, the timing has to be just so and the depth of the water has to be just so," Phillips says.
"It's like baking a souffle. A lot of things have to come together and if someone slams the door, it won't rise."
Phillips adds that, curiously, what happens in the Pacific with the La Nina phenomenon can have major impact on the Atlantic hurricane season.
La Nina refers to a pattern of usually cold surface temperatures in the eastern Pacific Ocean. The east-to-west winds of La Nina tend to be more favourable for producing hurricanes in the Atlantic.
While La Nina has been the dominating factor in the Pacific for the past two years, it appears to be easing.
NASA oceanographers say they believe La Nina will not affect Atlantic hurricanes this year.
Whatever happens, people who have experienced the wrath of a major hurricane are taking precautions.
A 2005 Environment Canada survey of about 500 Halifax-area residents, obtained by The Canadian Press through Access to Information, found that a majority of respondents - 53 per cent - now feel vulnerable to hurricanes.
It also found that 71 per cent of respondents would do things differently if another hurricane like Juan is forecast for the area.
Nova Scotia resident Lynn Brooks, who lives near Halifax, was one of thousands of Maritimers who experienced property damage and power outages during Juan.
Brooks says she now keeps extra water in her home, because if the power goes out, her well goes off.
"I think I'm like a lot of people in this region," she says.
"We will never taken another hurricane warning for granted."
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102 dead after four months of heavy rains in Colombia
AFP
Mon May 8, 2006
BOGOTA - Heavy rains and flooding since the beginning of the year have killed 102 people and damaged thousand of homes across much of Colombia, according to state rescue agency Socorro Nacional.
On Sunday, four more people died in a landslide in a poor Bogota neighborhood, and much of the capital remains under emergency warning due to elevated river levels.
Socorro Nacional deputy director Carlos Ivan Marquez said that in addition to the dead, the heavy rains since January have completely destroyed 943 homes and damaged more than 7,100 in the country, affecting about 82,400 people.
"The rains have affected thousands of farms and infrastructure and families in remote and high-risk areas, hitting them hard economically," Marquez said.
Max Henriquez, deputy director of the state hydrology and meteorology agency, said the rains will continue to batter much of Colombia, with the agency predicting another five weeks.
"There is an alert for all of the departments in the center of the country for sudden rises in upland rivers and landslides," he said.
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Earth-Hitting Asteroids: Katrina From Space
Leonard David
SPACE.com
Mon May 8, 2006
LOS ANGELES, California - Natural events such as hurricanes, tsunamis and earthquakes rock this planet from time to time. But when the Earth gets stoned by an asteroid, consider it akin to a Katrina from outer space.
When Hurricane Katrina slammed into the United States in August of last year, it became a deadly, destructive, and costly episode--one that has also become a metaphor for lack of government action, both pre- and post strike.
At the current time there is no agency of the U.S. government--nor of any government in the world--with the explicit responsibility to develop and demonstrate the technology necessary to protect the planet from near-Earth object (NEO) impacts.�
The U.S. Congress needs to be encouraged to take a step in demonstrating the ability to deflect a menacing NEOs believes former NASA astronaut, Russell Schweickart, Chairman of the B612 Foundation. He presented an update today on dealing with troublesome asteroids here at the 25th International Space Development Conference.
Key capabilities
The goal of B612, a confab of scientists, technologists, astronomers, astronauts, and other specialists is to significantly alter the orbit of an asteroid in a controlled manner by 2015.
In detailing today's NEO situation, Schweickart said there are several givens: That the Earth is infrequently hit by asteroids which cross our orbit while circling the Sun; the consequence of such impacts ranges from the equivalent of a 15 megaton (TNT) explosion to a civilization ending gigaton event; and for the first time in the history of humankind we have the technology which, if we are properly prepared, we can use to prevent such occurrences from happening in the future.
"Remember, we're dealing here with a less frequent, but far more devastating Katrina ... a Katrina of the Cosmos," Schweickart reported. "NEOs happen so infrequently that even though they are orders of magnitude more devastating, people don't naturally make that match," he told SPACE.com, "but you don't want to be caught with your pants down."
There are key capabilities, Schweickart said, which will enable humanity to avoid devastating cosmic collisions: Early warning; a demonstrated deflection capability; and an established international decision making process.
While some progress is being made, there remains significant work ahead in all these areas, Schweickart emphasized.
Sky-sweeping surveys
Given sky-sweeping surveys and extrapolating into the future, by 2018 on the order of 10,000 NEOs with some risk of impact over the next 100 years are likely to be cataloged, Schweickart forecast - but there is better than an even chance that none of these 10,000 will actually hit the Earth in those 100 years.�
"The important fact however, is that a substantial number of them will appear as though they may be headed for impact," Schweickart advised. Today, of the 104 currently on impact listings, "two have an elevated risk and we are watching them closely," he said.
At present, the two asteroids on that "keep an eye on them roster" are 2004 VD17 and Apophis, formerly listed as 2004 MN4.
"Extrapolating to 2018 we may have as many as 200 in a similarly elevated attention category and of growing concern to the general public," Schweickart reported today. "Therefore, it is certainly possible, if not likely, that in the timeframe of the next 12 years we--the world--may well be in a position where we need to take action to insure that we will be able to carry out a deflection mission if needed," he said.
The U.S. Congress amended the Space Act in 2005 to charge NASA with responsibility to "detect, track, catalogue, and characterize" NEOs greater than some 460 feet (140 meters) in diameter. However, it has, thus far, come up short on actually assigning the responsibility to take action should one of these objects be discovered headed for a collision, Schweickart pointed out.
There is a bit of good news forthcoming, Schweickart explained. The Congress did require NASA to provide by the end of 2006 an analysis of possible alternatives that could be employed to divert an object on a likely collision course with Earth. In response to this Congressional directive, NASA is about to announce a process for carrying out this mandate.
Global threat ... global response
Schweickart told the ISDC audience here, that a third leg of the triad for protecting the Earth from NEO impacts is probably the most challenging, albeit subtle.�
"It is complicated by two related facts," he said, that NEO impacts are a global threat, not a national one, and the only decision making body representing, essentially, the whole planet is the
United Nations--a body not known for timely, crisp decision making, he added.
Still, in this area, steps forward are being made.
The Association of Space Explorers (ASE)--the professional organization of astronauts and cosmonauts--has formed a committee on NEOs which Schweickart chairs. Earlier this year, a technical presentation at a UN meeting in Vienna apprised them that this issue was coming at them.
While the UN has been brought the problem, Schweickart said, the ASE is committed to bringing them a solution. This solution will take the form of a draft United Nations treaty--or protocol--formulated in a series of workshops over the next two years.
"In these NEO Deflection Policy workshops we will gather together a dozen or so international experts in diplomacy, international law, insurance, and risk management, as well as space expertise to identify and wrestle with these difficult international issues," Schweickart noted. "Our goal is to return to the UN in 2009 with a draft NEO Deflection Decision Protocol and present it to them for their consideration and deliberation."
Facing the challenge
In wrapping up his ISDC talk, Schweickart said the NEO challenge, in a sense, "is an entry test for humankind to join the cosmic community." He reasons that, if there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe "it is virtually certain that it has already faced this challenge to survival ... and passed it."
"Our choice is to face this infrequent but substantial cosmic test ... or pass into history, not as an incapable species like the dinosaurs, but as a fractious and self serving creature with inadequate vision and commitment to continue its evolutionary development," Schweickart concluded.
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Volcano erupts on Kamchatka peninsula
PETROPAVLOVSK-KAMCHATSKY, May 9 (RIA Novosti)
The Bezymyanny volcano has erupted on the Kamchatka peninsula in Russia's Far East, a local seismology official said Tuesday.
Alexei Ozerov, a senior researcher at the Institute of Volcanology and Seismology, said the eruption started at 12.25 p.m. Moscow time (08.25 a.m. GMT) on Tuesday. The eruption does not pose any threat to local population, he said.
"A column of gases and ashes over the crater have reached the altitude of several kilometers...and avalanches of melted debris have been moving down the slope at a speed of about 30km/h (19 mph)," the expert said.
Ozerov said that a cloud of ashes, which is expected to reach the height of 10 km (6 miles) and the diameter of up to 1,000 km (622 miles), had been slowly drifting toward the Pacific Ocean.
"There is a threat to flights along the eastern coast and over of the peninsula," Ozerov said.
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Fourth Quake In Four Days Off Southern Italy
May 9 2006
Lipari - There has been yet another tremor from an earthquake in the Aeolian Islands, this time near Filicudi. Seismic activity was recorded around 9.40 am by the National Institute for Geophysics and Volcanic studies in Rome, with an intensity between the fourth and fifth degree on the Mercalli scale and with an epicentre located in the lower Tyrrhenian Sea.
The tremor was felt by the inhabitants of Filicudi and by those of the nearby Alicudi. There weren't any damages reported to people or houses. It is the fourth earthquake in 4 days in the archipelago, where two tremors were felt in Stromboli and one in the channel between Salina and Lipari.
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Minor Earthquake Shakes Southern Calif.
05.08.2006
Forbes.com
A minor earthquake rattled parts of southern California on Monday but there were no reports of injury or damage.
The magnitude-3.6 quake struck shortly after 5 p.m. and was centered in the Pacific Ocean, about 13 miles off the coast of suburban San Diego, according a preliminary report from the U.S. Geological Survey.
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5.4 Quake Hits Colombia
May 8 2006
Prensa Latina
Bogota - An earthquake of 5.4 degrees in the open scale of Richter Monday shook great part of the Colombian territory although no victims or material damages have been reported so far.
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CIA Battlefield
Revolt of the CIA Analysts
By Ahmed Amr
PalestineChronicle.com
"Goss is a political conservative and a reformer. He is pro-Bush Doctrine and pro-shaking-up-the-CIA. We hope the president will select a new CIA director who is willing--eager, even--to challenge CIA careerists and who will continue the reforms of that dysfunctional bureaucracy that started under Goss. We hope the new director will be an independent thinker, someone who is not cowed by criticism from a vocal (and highly partisan) crew of recently retired intelligence officials." -- The Weekly Standard.
"CIA employees were sitting at their computers Friday afternoon when they saw a message advising them to toggle to the agency's in-house television channel. On their screens they saw CIA Director Porter Goss abruptly announcing his resignation. In at least one office at the agency, and I suspect many more, there were quiet cheers." -- David Ignatius, Washington Post, May 7, 2006.
There is a lot of speculation as to why Porter Goss was outed from the CIA. Some suggest it had something to do with losing a turf battle with John Negroponte - his immediate boss. Other reports make a convincing case that his resignation is related to his staff's passion for hookers, poker and bribes - a fallout from the scandals surrounding Congressman Duke Cunningham.
But the above quotes lead me to suspect he was outed as a result of a mutiny by the CIA's rank and file. When the neocon priests at the Weekly Standard groan and the folks at Langley cheer - it's a sure sign that the Feith/Libby crowd has lost a major battle with the intelligence community.
Goss Porter was assigned to the CIA to 'clean house' of dissenters who were unwilling to take the fall for intelligence failures that never happened. It was no secret that the administration didn't take kindly to the agency's 'negative feedback' about the day to day realities of their Iraqi ventures. In short, the professionals in Langley were guilty of demoralizing their neo-con overlords by insisting on doing their job of providing sound analysis to policy makers. It didn't help matters that former CIA analysts were less than enthusiastic about the outing of Valerie Plame.
Under the able leadership of Goss, the neo-cons got their wish and the CIA troublemakers were given their pink slips or quietly opted for early retirement. The rascals had it coming for not being disciplined enough to gracefully take the fall for the bum WMD intelligence that was cooked up by Douglas Feith at his little canard factory - the Office of Special Plans.
We now have a thousand and one reasons to believe that the intelligence was fabricated to provide justification for this disastrous war of choice. We know that Douglas Feith was the man who had primary responsibility for engineering the WMD hoax. The myth about 'intelligence failure' would have been put to rest two years ago if only the mainstream media had dared to ask some very basic questions about the OSP. But we are where we are because they tell us only what they want us to know.
It is only by the grace of neo-con media moguls in high places that we still have to argue about the systematic lies and deception that paved the path to war. Isn't it enough to know that Judith Miller was one of the media operatives who collaborated in disseminating the WMD leaks - with the explicit approval of Arthur Sulzberger, the publisher of the New York Times.
If the general public was less than curious about who exactly was working on the assembly line of Douglas Feith's intelligence manufacturing operation, the folks at Langley knew every little detail about the anatomy of this hoax. Once the war turned into something spectacularly at variance with the cakewalk envisioned by the neo-cons - many CIA agents refused to take the fall for what they regarded as a 'failure of Likudnik fantasies.'
Porter Goss's mission was to make the Langley rebels 'team players.' Unfortunately for Goss and his neo-con brethren - many of the agency's top guns refused to sign up. Some became insubordinate. Others quit. A few went public with their misgivings.
Which brings us back to all the speculation about hookers, gambling and booze. My guess is that a few disgruntled CIA insiders called on their old contacts in the FBI to dig up some dirt on Porter Goss.
For those who think this is far fetched - check out the following extract from an article I published in February of 2004. And ask yourself one question. If your humble servant - who can't place Langley on the map - knew enough to write this two years ago - what did the folks at the CIA know about the so-called 'intelligence hoax.'
Intelligence Failures for Dummies
Why engineer an intelligence failure? When the intelligence community is not giving you the kind of results you desire, a responsible administration needs to find a way to manufacture its own intelligence and make it look like it was cooked at the CIA.
How do you get around the CIA? First, you let Douglas Feith and Wolfie set up their own intelligence unit in the Pentagon and give it a big name like the Office of Special Plans. Make sure the office is staffed with those who share your neo-con agenda.
What next? You need to develop and groom your own independent sources. You get a guy like Chalabi and his imaginary friends to provide you with the exact answers that fit your game plan. Just to make it legitimate, you use a few trusted journalists like Judith 'WMD' Miller of the New York Times to circulate stories confirming your 'findings'. You now have 'double sourcing'
And then what? You challenge the CIA to match your work. Accuse them of timidity. You get Cheney and Libby to breathe down their necks and berate them for missing the Chalabi lead. You point out that Judith Miller is a second source who confirms the Chalabi story. Who can argue with the New York Times?
Isn't this risky business? Not if the war is a cakewalk. Every body loves a winner. Those who made a fuss about the risks will be made to eat crow. We'll just sit back and enjoy reruns of the 'shock and awe' show. Who will hear the detractors over the din of a victory parade?
What if the war ends up being a long hard slog? Well, in that case, we dispatch David Kay to dig up the phantom WMDs. Let him take his own sweet time. The public will be asked to show a little patience.
What happens when Kay doesn't find a trace of WMDs? Well, Dummy, we just stall and send another guy to resume the search. If that doesn't work, we'll just throw a tantrum and blame it on an 'intelligence failure'. Let the CIA take the fall. The President might have to stitch together a bipartisan inquiry staffed by the usual suspects (like Porter Goss.) By the time they set up shop, argue over rules and scope and agree on a list of witnesses, it will be late spring, early summer. The story will die down once it is 'under investigation by the proper authorities'. Look at the 911 probes and the Plame investigation.
What if the public demands an investigation of the OSP, instead of the CIA? By that time, we would have closed our doors, shredded our files and ceased to exist as an intelligence unit.
Isn't it possible that the media boys will smell a rat? If they smell a rat, it will be the stench of their own skin. Can you see the New York Times investigating Judith Miller's role in our little scam? Better still, how likely is it that Bob Woodward of Watergate fame would look into Krauthammer's collaboration with the OSP. They both toil for the Washington Post. The beauty of this whole venture is that we can get our media operatives to turn up the heat on the CIA and put Langley on the defensive. What can the CIA do? Act like a crybaby and say that a few analysts in an obscure Pentagon office managed to bully them.
Can anything go wrong? Not a chance. Intelligence failures happen. We should know. We make them happen. We'll blame the whole thing on Chalabi and his imaginary friends. Chalabi is more than ready to act as the culprit who passed us bum information. He has been accused of worse things. Chalabi is a good sport and not the kind who worries about his reputation.
Notes in the Margins: An internal Pentagon probe and the Senate Intelligence Committee are supposedly investigating Douglas Feith's intelligence manufacturing operation - the OSP. For reasons unknown, no progress has been made in either of these probes. There is also a suspicious lack of interest by Judith Miller's former employers at the New York Times. In the meantime, Douglas J. Feith has just accepted an offer to join the faculty of Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service. I suggest they assign him to teach "intelligence failures 101."
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Lawmakers object as Bush picks Hayden for CIA
AFP
May 8, 2006
WASHINGTON - President George W. Bush named Michael Hayden to lead the CIA, despite lawmakers' objections to a military general heading the civilian spy agency.
Bush called on the US Senate to "promptly" confirm the air force general.
"Mike knows our intelligence community from the ground up," Bush said at the White House.
"He has demonstrated an ability to adapt our intelligence services to the new challenges of the war on terror," said the US leader, flanked by Hayden and his director of national intelligence, John Negroponte.
"He's the right man to lead the CIA at this critical moment in our nation's history."
Hayden, currently Negroponte's deputy, was nominated after Porter Goss abruptly resigned as the CIA director on Friday, after less than two years in the post.
Several top CIA officials resigned during Goss's tenure. Reports said Goss may have been forced out because of turmoil in the agency in the wake of highly publicized intelligence failures related to the September 11, 2001 attacks and intelligence used to justify the
Iraq war.
Many Washington lawmakers have expressed doubts about Hayden's independence from the White House and about whether a military officer, who now answers to the powerful Defense Department, should take over the civilian agency.
Concerns expressed by top Republican and Democratic lawmakers have laid the groundwork for what could be a new battle for the White House with Congress over the nomination.
Some lawmakers were critical of Hayden's involvement in a controversial domestic spying program.
Hayden oversaw the National Security Agency's secret wiretapping without a warrant put in place after the September 11, 2001 attacks.
Former CIA director Stansfield Turner, a retired navy admiral, said that Hayden's role in the domestic eavesdropping program spelled trouble for his nomination.
"I think Mike Hayden is extremely well qualified for the job, but there is this big question mark over the legality of the wiretapping that was done under his supervision.
"I happen to think it was illegal," Turner told CBS television.
Representative Peter Hoekstra (news, bio, voting record), the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said the dual roles of spymaster and military officer are incompatible.
"There is no question that general Hayden is an outstanding military officer and a strong leader with a proven history in the intelligence community," Hoekstra said in a statement. He said a civilian head of the CIA is needed in the interest of "balance".
"By placing a military officer atop the CIA ... we risk losing the critical, civilian intelligence analysis that policymakers need when making foreign policy decisions," he said.
Bush said however that he views Hayden's military background as an asset.
"He's held senior positions at the
Pentagon, the US European Command, the National Security Council, and served behind the Iron Curtain in our embassy in Bulgaria during the Cold War," the president said.
"He's overseen the development of both human and technological intelligence. He has demonstrated an ability to adapt our intelligence services to the new challenges in the war on terror."
Director of National Intelligence Negroponte on Monday likewise defended his top deputy to head the CIA, saying he felt certain that Hayden would not cave in to pressure from the Pentagon.
"I think there's a lot of unfounded concerns there," Negroponte said at a White House press conference.
"Mike Hayden is a very, very independent-minded person, blunt spoken," the US intelligence czar said.
Negroponte said the choice of Hayden underscore's the president's commitment to restore morale among the CIA disheartened workers, while improving the "human intelligence" component of the agency's activities.
But Bush's priority, which Negroponte said Hayden is uniquely qualified to oversee, is the international fight against terrorism.
"His most important priority is intelligence on Al-Qaeda and international terrorism," Negroponte told reporters at the White House.
"I think he (the president) wants us to press ahead in the field of tracking down and disabling and harming the international terrorist movement," said Negroponte.
Comment: Well, sticking a military man in charge of the CIA would accomplish two things:
1. It would increase the influence of the military in all US affairs, both locally and worldwide
2. It just might keep those disgruntled generals happy
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The CIA, a Bush Family Fiefdom
By Robert Parry
May 9, 2006
Since the 9/11 terror attacks, the U.S. government has tried both structural and personnel changes to fix the nation's intelligence services - including now the ouster of CIA Director Porter Goss - but the responses have failed because they've missed the core problem.
What's wrong with the U.S. intelligence community is that over the past three decades its ethos of telling truth to power has been corrupted by politics to such a degree that George W. Bush now sees the Central Intelligence Agency as virtually his family's fiefdom, with the Langley, Virginia, headquarters even named for his father, George H.W. Bush, a former CIA director.
So, when analysts at the CIA were viewed as undercutting George W. Bush's case for war with Iraq, the White House launched a counter-attack against these intelligence professionals for perceived disloyalty.
During the buildup to the Iraq War, Vice President Dick Cheney personally went to CIA headquarters to bang heads with intelligence analysts who doubted White House claims about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. While some analysts resisted, many mid-level bureaucrats acquiesced to Cheney.
Paul Pillar, the CIA's senior intelligence analyst for the Middle East, said the Bush administration didn't just play games with the principle of objective analysis, but "turned the entire model upside down."
After quitting the CIA in 2005, Pillar wrote an article in Foreign Affairs magazine stating that "the administration used intelligence not to inform decision-making, but to justify a decision already made."
"The Bush administration deviated from the professional standard not only in using policy to drive intelligence, but also in aggressively using intelligence to win public support for its decision to go to war," Pillar wrote. "This meant selectively adducing data - 'cherry-picking' - rather than using the intelligence community's own analytic judgments."
After the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq failed to find WMD, some of the suppressed CIA doubts began to surface, embarrassing Bush during Campaign 2004.
At that delicate political moment, Bush installed Goss, a partisan Republican congressman recruited by Cheney, to take over the CIA. The Goss appointment on Sept. 24, 2004, reflected Bush's determination to bring the agency's analytical division into line with his policies both before and after the November 2004 presidential election.
Loyal Henchmen
Like a Medieval ruler punishing a rebellious province, Bush sent in loyal henchmen to root out perceived traitors. Bush's attitude toward CIA analysts who disagreed with his pre-war assertions about Iraq's WMD was much like his anger toward the French for cautioning him about his Iraq invasion plans.
Being right was no protection from Bush's wrath; indeed, it appeared to make him madder. Though Bush has continued to this day to stress how much he values accurate intelligence as vital for the nation's security, his real record has been one of insisting on getting information that fits his preconceptions.
So, rather than reward the CIA analysts who had resisted White House pressure to cook the WMD intelligence on Iraq, Bush set out to remove them. He also took aim at the State Department, another bastion of WMD dissent, where he replaced the diffident Colin Powell with the enthusiastic loyalist Condoleezza Rice.
At the CIA, Bush's intelligence purge gained momentum in the weeks after he secured his second term. Bush saw his victory as almost a mystical validation of his view that the "war on terror" was a conflict between good and evil in which people were either with Bush or with the terrorists. Bush called the election his "accountability moment."
CIA intelligence professionals got the message that they could either get behind Bush's policies or get out. The loyalty demands led to an exodus of senior CIA officials, including deputy CIA chief John E. McLaughlin and deputy director of operations Stephen R. Kappes.
In whipping the remaining intelligence analysts into line, Bush was helped by powerful conservative news personalities - from AM talk radio to Fox News, from right-wing newspaper columnists to Internet bloggers - who conjured up conspiracy theories about a CIA plot to destroy the President.
Conservative columnist David Brooks was among those pushing the argument that the CIA's only rightful role was to serve the President.
"Now that he's been returned to office, President Bush is going to have to differentiate between his opponents and his enemies," wrote Brooks in the New York Times. "His opponents are found in the Democratic Party. His enemies are in certain offices of the Central Intelligence Agency."
To Brooks, the justification for Bush going after the CIA was the release of information that made Bush look bad.
"At the height of the campaign, CIA officials, who are supposed to serve the President and stay out of politics and policy, served up leak after leak to discredit the President's Iraq policy," Brooks wrote.
"In mid-September [2004], somebody leaked a CIA report predicting a gloomy or apocalyptic future for the region. Later that month, a senior CIA official, Paul Pillar, reportedly made comments saying he had long felt the decision to go to war would heighten anti-American animosity in the Arab world." [NYT, Nov. 13, 2004]
On the Mark
Nearly 18 months later, those CIA assessments seem to have been right on the mark, as violence in Iraq continues to spin out of control and the Middle East seethes with hatred toward the United States.
But in November 2004, the victorious President and his conservative allies were set on throttling those intelligence professionals who still believed that their job was to get the information right, not just tell Bush what he wanted to hear.
Indeed, the claim from Bush's supporters that the CIA only existed to "serve the President" was not historically accurate.
While it may be true that the CIA's operations directorate was created as a secret paramilitary arm for the U.S. executive, the CIA's analytical division was established to provide objective information to both the President and other parts of the U.S. government, including Congress.
Even at the height of the Cold War in the 1950s and 1960s, the CIA's analytical division took pride in telling presidents what they didn't want to hear - such as debunking Eisenhower's "bomber gap" or Kennedy's "missile gap" or Johnson's faith in the air war against North Vietnam.
Though never perfectly applied, the ethos of objective analysis continued through the mid-1970s. Then, CIA analysis began to come under sustained attack from conservatives and a new group called neoconservatives, who insisted that the Soviet Union was a rapidly expanding military menace with its eye on world conquest.
The CIA analytical division held a more nuanced assessment of the Soviet threat, viewing Moscow as a declining superpower struggling to keep pace with the West while coping with fissures inside its own empire.
This CIA analysis was the background for the "détente strategy" followed by President Richard Nixon and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who sought to negotiate arms control and other agreements with the Soviet Union.
Reagan's Emergence
But Nixon's ouster over the Watergate scandal in 1974 and Ronald Reagan's entrance on the national political stage in 1976 altered the political dynamic.
Scared by Reagan's successes in the Republican primaries, President Gerald Ford ordered the word "détente" dropped from the White House lexicon and let then-CIA Director George H.W. Bush open up the CIA's analytical division to an unprecedented challenge from right-wing intellectuals, known as "Team B."
The "Team B" assessment, bringing in old-time Cold Warriors and young neoconservatives like Paul Wolfowitz, accused the CIA analytical division of systematically underestimating the growing Soviet threat.
In late 1976, to accommodate this powerful conservative wing of the Republican Party, CIA Director Bush adopted a more alarmist CIA estimate of Soviet power.
When Reagan became President in 1981, with Bush as his Vice President, the assault on the CIA's analytical division resumed in earnest. Analysts who balked at the new administration's ideological vision of the Soviet Union as a 10-foot-tall behemoth were shunted aside or forced out of the CIA.
The CIA's once proud Soviet division took the brunt of the attacks. The surviving analysts began ignoring the mounting evidence of a rapid Soviet decline, so as not to contradict the Reagan-Bush justification for an expanded U.S. military budget and for bloody interventions in Third World conflicts from Nicaragua to Afghanistan.
In reality, Moscow couldn't even keep control along its own borders. But the Reagan-Bush pressure on the U.S. intelligence process proved so effective that CIA analysts filtered out the evidence of a Soviet crackup.
Ironically, when the Soviet Empire collapsed in the late 1980s, the CIA took the blame for "missing" one of the most important political events of the Twentieth Century. Ironically, too, Reagan, who had built up the Soviet straw man, got the most credit when it fell down. [For details, see Robert Parry's Secrecy & Privilege.]
Since then, I have talked with CIA veterans who acknowledged that the politicized agency overstated the Soviet threat despite reliable intelligence from their own agents inside the Soviet bloc who were describing the internal problems.
This "intelligence failure" was not just one of misjudgments; it was one of ideological pressure that distorted the Soviet reality to fit with White House policies.
Whipping Boy
In the second Bush administration, which brought back many of the Reagan-Bush neoconservatives, the same pattern recurred. Intelligence was "cherry-picked" to justify policy, rather than letting objective analysis inform the policy.
In effect, Bush made his decisions on "gut" instincts and had evidence compiled to justify his decisions. When Bush's "gut" failed him - such as when he ignored CIA warnings about the 9/11 attacks or when he pushed bogus intelligence on Iraq's WMD - the CIA stood in as the whipping boy, taking the worst of the institutional blame.
By 2005, the CIA was even stripped of its role as the lead agency in the U.S. intelligence community, when Congress created the new position of National Director of Intelligence on the recommendation of the 9/11 Commission.
However, the new post of NDI - directly under the President - didn't address the question of politicization. Nothing was done to rebuild the lost ethos of objective analysis or to reject the notion that the CIA "serves the President."
Bush appointed John Negroponte, a career diplomat considered a Cold War hard-liner, to fill the new position as NDI in April 2005.
Negroponte had served as ambassador to Honduras in the 1980s when the CIA was organizing the contra war against Nicaragua and he represented the United States as U.N. ambassador when the false Iraq WMD case was presented in 2002-2003. In 2004-2005, he was U.S. ambassador in Iraq as sectarian "death squads" emerged as a new threat.
Despite his prominent roles in the Bush administration, Negroponte wasn't viewed as part of the neoconservative inner circle that had pushed the Iraq War. Rather, he fell more into the traditional Cold War camp of hard-nosed operatives who would carry out orders, even ones that stretched the limits of morality.
When Negroponte became NDI, Goss had to face the fact of his diminished role in the intelligence community. Instead of being called Director of Central Intelligence, he became just the CIA director.
Perhaps trying to demonstrate his intense loyalty to George W. Bush, Goss created more turmoil in the CIA by ordering polygraphs of CIA officials in an investigation into who leaked the secret of clandestine CIA prisons in Eastern Europe where terror suspects were interrogated and allegedly tortured.
The polygraphs led to the ouster of veteran CIA officer Mary McCarthy, though she denied leaking the information.
Prostitute Probe
Goss ran into more controversy when his hand-picked executive director, Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, became embroiled in the investigation of former Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, R-California, who was sentenced in March to more than eight years in prison for accepting $2.4 million in bribes from military contractors.
Foggo was a longtime friend of Brent Wilkes, a contractor mentioned in the Cunningham indictment. Foggo also attended poker games that Wilkes organized at the Watergate and the Westin Grand hotels in Washington.
According to press reports, federal investigators are looking into allegations that the bribery by the military contractors may have included payments for limousines, poker parties and prostitutes. [NYT, May 7, 2006]
Between the disarray from CIA departures and the hint of scandal around Foggo, Goss saw his political stock decline. Negroponte also reportedly felt that Goss was not adapting well to his new subordinate position as just one of many intelligence directors.
Meanwhile, Negroponte faced opposition himself from aggressive neoconservatives who objected to his more tempered assessment of the threat from Iran's nuclear program and his hiring of some intelligence analysts who had objected to Bush's Iraq WMD claims.
Frank J. Gaffney Jr. an original signer of the neoconservative Project for the New American Century, called for Negroponte's firing because of his Iran assessment and his "abysmal personnel decisions."
In an article for Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Washington Times, Gaffney attacked Negroponte for giving top analytical jobs to Thomas Fingar, who had served as assistant secretary of state for intelligence and research, and Kenneth Brill, who was U.S. ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency, which debunked some of the U.S. and British claims about Iraq seeking enriched uranium from Africa.
The State Department's Office of Intelligence and Research led the dissent against the Iraq WMD case, especially over what turned out to be false claims that Iraq was developing a nuclear bomb. Gaffney specifically faulted Fingar for his testimony against neoconservative favorite John Bolton to become U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
"Given this background, is it any wonder that Messrs. Negroponte, Fingar and Brill ... gave us the spectacle of absurdly declaring the Iranian regime to be years away from having nuclear weapons?" wrote Gaffney, who was a senior Pentagon official during the Reagan administration.
Gaffney accused Negroponte of giving promotions to "government officials in sensitive positions who actively subvert the President's policies," an apparent reference to Fingar and Brill.
Iran Cold Water
In an interview with NBC News on April 20, Negroponte had cited Iran's limited progress in refining uranium and their use of a cascade of only 164 centrifuges.
"According to the experts that I consult, achieving - getting 164 centrifuges to work is still a long way from having the capacity to manufacture sufficient fissile material for a nuclear weapon," Negroponte said. "Our assessment is that the prospects of an Iranian weapon are still a number of years off, and probably into the next decade."
Expressing a similar view about Iran in a speech at the National Press Club, Negroponte said, "I think it's important that this issue be kept in perspective."
In effect, the DNI was splashing cold water on the more fevered assessment of Iran's nuclear intentions favored by the neoconservatives around Bush.
Still, Negroponte appears to have come out on top in this latest power struggle. On May 5, Bush announced Goss's abrupt resignation, and on May 8, Bush named Negroponte's current deputy, Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden, to become CIA chief.
While Negroponte's bureaucratic victory may represent a defeat for the neoconservatives, it's not likely to solve the larger problem of a politicized intelligence community. Though considered more professional than Goss, Negroponte and Hayden still have shown themselves to be loyal to Bush's edicts.
Negroponte sold Bush's Iraq WMD case at the United Nations and sat behind Secretary of State Colin Powell during his infamous presentation to the Security Council on Feb. 5, 2003. While running the National Security Agency, Hayden implemented Bush's warrantless wiretaps of Americans.
Yet, until the larger question of politicization is addressed - until Bush's sense of entitlement over the intelligence community is ended - the problem of the U.S. government's misuse of intelligence is likely to continue.
[For more on the history of CIA politicization, see Consortiumnew.com's "Why U.S. Intelligence Failed, Redux."]
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Sudden Resignation Of CIA
Director Goss: Another Tremor
In Bush Administration
By Patrick Martin
09 May 2006
World Socialist Web
The resignation of CIA Director Porter Goss, announced abruptly by the White House on Friday, is another demonstration of the instability and vicious infighting within the Bush administration. Goss ends a relatively brief 18-month tenure at the agency, a period during which he conducted a political purge in which at least a dozen top CIA officials were driven out.
The Goss resignation is the outcome of a protracted and murky conflict within the military and intelligence agencies. It involves John Negroponte, Bush's choice as the first Director of National Intelligence; the Pentagon intelligence apparatus, headed by Stephen Cambone, the most trusted deputy of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld; and multiple factions within the CIA itself.
Negroponte apparently has emerged as the victor in this infighting, with his deputy, Air Force Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, former head of the National Security Agency, named by White House officials as the likely choice to succeed Goss at CIA. In an indication that the conflict is continuing, however, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Peter Hoekstra, appeared on "Fox News Sunday" to oppose the as-yet-unannounced selection of Hayden, saying that the career military intelligence official has experience only in electronic information-gathering, not in covert operations.
There are no clear policy differences among Negroponte, Rumsfeld, Cambone and Goss. They all share responsibility for the Bush administration's criminal war of aggression in Iraq, and for the debacle that the US occupation of the oil-rich country has become. To some extent, there is an institutional conflict between the Pentagon, which controls 85 percent of the vast intelligence budget, and Negroponte's new agency, established in 2005 to centralize control over all 16 US intelligence agencies, including the CIA.
The immediate impulse for Goss's ouster, however, is his apparent link to the sex and bribery scandal involving former Republican Congressman Randy Cunningham, who resigned from Congress last fall and has been sentenced to prison for steering military contracts to several favored companies in return for cash and other payoffs.
Three major newspapers-the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and San Diego Union-Tribune-have published articles in the last 10 days reporting that the investigation into Cunningham's corrupt practices, once thought to be limited to several defense contractors, had been expanded to include other congressmen and government officials, including the number-three official at the CIA, executive director Kyle (Dusty) Foggo, who was installed in that position by Goss.
One contractor named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Cunningham case, Brent Wilkes of San Diego, California, is reportedly suspected of arranging for a Washington-area limousine company to provide prostitutes for Cunningham. These services were provided in conjunction with weekly poker parties in the capital, attended by Republican politicians, government officials and businessmen, which Wilkes has hosted for the past 15 years. A CIA spokesman has confirmed that Foggo, a boyhood friend of Wilkes, had been a regular at those parties.
Christopher Baker, president of Shirlington Limousine and Transportation Inc., the company which provided the limos for these parties, was awarded a $21 million contract by the Department of Homeland Security last year to provide transportation services for top DHS officials. This was despite Baker's criminal record for drug possession, attempted petty larceny, and two felony charges for attempted robbery and car theft, two personal bankruptcy filings and a tax lien from the Internal Revenue Service, which seized his house in 1998.
The Post said that the source of the allegations against Wilkes and Baker was Mitchell J. Wade, one of the defense contractors who admitted bribing Cunningham. Wade has pled guilty to charges in that case and is cooperating with prosecutors. "Wade said limos would pick up Cunningham and a prostitute and bring them to suites Wilkes maintained at the Watergate Hotel and the Westin Grand in Washington," the newspaper reported. The Union-Tribune cited a statement from Baker's attorney confirming that Baker had provided limousine services for Wilkes's poker parties from 1990 on, but denying any link to prostitution.
Baker's business arrangements with the DHS were highly unusual. In addition to his own criminal record, which would ordinarily make him an unlikely candidate for a contract to transport top officials in charge of US domestic security, Shirlington Limousine was in poor financial shape. It lost a contract with Howard University for non-performance, and was repeatedly sued for non-payment. At a critical time, in April 2004, the company was awarded a $3.8 million DHS contract for which it was the sole bidder. A year later, Baker succeeded in escaping bankruptcy, paying $125,000 to his creditors. In October 2005, his company won a much larger one-year contract for $21.2 million.
A DHS spokesman sought to explain the relationship with the preposterous claim that while the department conducted criminal background checks for all the limousine drivers, no such check was required for the company's owner. The agency was unaware of Baker's long record of petty crime, the official said.
The connections between Foggo and the Cunningham case may go beyond the seedy questions of gambling and prostitution. Several press reports indicate that the CIA inspector general is examining whether Foggo rigged any contracts from the agency to companies associated with Wilkes. Foggo has told his CIA associates that he will follow Goss into retirement, stepping down as the CIA executive director.
The New York Daily News reported Saturday that Goss himself "may have attended Watergate poker parties where bribes and prostitutes were provided to a corrupt congressman," adding that Foggo could soon be indicted in the case. The newspaper cited statements by former CIA operative Larry Johnson, a frequent critic of the Bush administration, that Goss and Foggo "share a fondness for poker and expensive cigars," and that he understood Goss had occasionally attended the parties thrown by Wilkes. According to the News, "One subject of the FBI investigation is a $3 million CIA contract that went to Wilkes to supply bottled water and other goods to CIA operatives in Iraq and Afghanistan, sources said."
While the tabloid newspaper focused attention on sex and bribery, the more establishment press-particularly the New York Times and Washington Post-were careful to distance the Goss resignation as much as possible from the sordid details of the case. The Times went so far as to publish separate articles on the two subjects Sunday, as though it were possible to consider the political conflicts within the Bush administration outside of the gross corruption that is such an essential part of its character.
Foggo is a career CIA mid-level official who was suddenly vaulted into the top ranks when Goss became director and forced out the previous number-three executive, Michael Kostiw, as part of a purge of allegedly anti-Bush officials in the upper reaches of the agency. Foggo reportedly became a Goss crony while serving as chief of logistics at the CIA station in Frankfurt, Germany, during the period when Goss, then chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, was on inspection trips to CIA offices overseas.
Goss's tenure as CIA director has been one of near-continual crisis, particularly the last eight months, since the existence of clandestine CIA detention centers overseas was made public by the Washington Post. This was followed by a frenzied anti-leaking campaign spearheaded by Goss personally, in an effort to find the source of the Post report. Last month, a veteran CIA official in the inspector general's office, Mary McCarthy, was fired only a week before her scheduled retirement, allegedly for failing a lie detector test about contacts with the press, including the Post. But McCarthy has subsequently denied even knowing of the secret prisons, let alone being the source, and CIA officials admitted that there was no evidence against her on that leak.
The nomination of Hayden could prove to be a political time-bomb for the administration, since confirmation hearings would likely feature questioning about his work at the NSA, where he was responsible for the secret electronic surveillance of American citizens, an operation whose existence was revealed to the New York Times in December. This leak produced another high-pressure internal security investigation, although no one has yet been fired or charged with being the source.
The leaks and counter-leaks demonstrate the increasingly Byzantine atmosphere in official Washington. With all political issues funneled through the increasingly dysfunctional channels of a two-party system in which the nominal opposition, the Democratic Party, offers no alternative to the Republicans, policy disputes within the ruling elite cannot find expression in open debate.
Moreover, so great is the chasm between the official rhetoric of the "war on terror" and reality of predatory seizure of oil resources and strategic positions to benefit American imperialist interests, that no one in the Bush administration, Congress or the corporate-controlled media can discuss foreign policy and security issues publicly in a realistic and serious way.
Hanging over all these debates is the question of the 9/11 attacks and the ample warnings that the military and intelligence agencies received in advance. After countless toothless investigations, not a single top official has been punished for what was either colossal incompetence or deliberate malfeasance. Instead, the conflicts within the intelligence apparatus are taking on the character of a veiled struggle within a palace court.
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Gen. Michael Hayden refused to answer question about spying on political enemies at National Press Club
Amy Goodman
At a public appearance, Bush's pointman in the Office of National Intelligence was asked if the NSA was wiretapping Bush's political enemies. When Hayden dodged the question, the questioner repeated, "No, I asked, are you targeting us and people who politically oppose the Bush government, the Bush administration? Not a fishing net, but are you targeting specifically political opponents of the Bush administration?" Hayden looked at the questioner, and after a silence called on a different questioner.
AMY GOODMAN: We return now to the rare news conference held by General Michael Hayden, the Deputy Director of National Intelligence and former head of the N.S.A., speaking to reporters and others on Monday in Washington, D.C., as part of a public relations offensive by the Bush administration to defend the N.S.A.'s eavesdropping on American citizens without court warrant.
In a separate speech later in the day, President Bush repeated his argument. He had the legal and constitutional authority to authorize the program without congressional approval. Meanwhile, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is scheduled to discuss the legal justification for the program today. And on Wednesday, President Bush will pay a rare visit to N.S.A. headquarters at Fort Meade in Maryland. But it was General Hayden who launched the media offensive Monday morning. These are the excerpts of the news conference, beginning with Hayden being questioned by a reporter.
REPORTER: General Hayden, the FISA law says that the N.S.A. can do intercepts, as long as you go to the court within 72 hours to get a warrant. I understood you to say that you are aggressively using FISA, but selectively doing so. Why are you not able to go to FISA, as the law requires, in all cases? And if the law is outdated, why haven't you asked Congress to update it?
GEN. MICHAEL HAYDEN: If FISA worked just as well, why wouldn't I use FISA? To save typing? No. There is an operational impact here. And I have two -- two paths in front of me, both of them lawful: one, FISA; one, the President's authorization. And we go down this path because our operational judgment is: It is much more effective. So we do it for that reason. I think I got -- I think I've covered all the ones you raised.
REPORTER: Quick follow-up. Are you saying the sheer volume of warrant-less eavesdropping has made FISA inoperative?
GEN. MICHAEL HAYDEN: No. I'm saying that the characteristics we need to do what this program is designed to do, to detect and prevent, okay, make FISA a less useful tool. It's a wonderful tool, it's a wonderful thing for the nation, in terms of fighting the war on terror, but in this particular challenge, this particular aspect, detect and prevent attacks, what we're doing now is operationally more relevant, operationally more effective.
SAM HUSSEINI: Sam Husseini from IPA Media. You just now spoke of, quote, "two paths." But, of course, the FISA statute itself says that it will be the exclusive means by which electronics surveillance may be pursued. Are you not, therefore, violating the law?
GEN. MICHAEL HAYDEN: That's probably a question I should deflect to the Department of Justice. But as I said in my comments, I have an order whose lawfulness has been attested to by the Attorney General, an order whose lawfulness has been attested to by N.S.A. lawyers who do this for a living. No, we're not violating the law.
SAM HUSSEINI: You cited before the congressional powers of the President. Are you asserting inherent so-called constitutional powers that a -- to use a term that came up in the Alito hearings -- a unitary executive has to violate the law when he deems fit?
GEN. MICHAEL HAYDEN: I'm not asserting anything. I'm asserting that N.S.A. is doing its job.
MINISTER: General, first, thank you for your comments, and I think you somewhat answered this in your response. And this goes to the culture and just to the average American. Let me just say this, that domestic spying -- and the faith communities are outraged. Churches in Iowa, churches in Nebraska, mosques across the board are just outraged by the fact that our country could be spying on us. You made a point that the young lady at State Penn shouldn't have to worry, but we're worried that our country has begun to spy on us. We understand the need for terrorism and the need to deal with that. But what assurances, and how can you answer this question -- what can make Americans feel safe? How can the faith community feel safe that their country is not spying on them for any reason?
GEN. MICHAEL HAYDEN: Reverend, thanks for the question. I'm part of the faith community, too. And I've laid it out as well as I could in my remarks here, as to how limited and focused this program is, what its purpose is, that it's been productive. We are not out there -- and again, let me use a phrase I used in the comments -- this isn't a drift net out there where we're soaking up everyone's communications. We're going after very specific communications that our professional judgment tells us we have reason to believe are those associated with people who want to kill Americans . That's what we're doing.
And I realize the challenge we have. I mentioned earlier, the existential issue that N.S.A. has, well before this program, that it's got to be powerful if it's going protect us. And it's also got be secretive if it's going to protect us. And that creates a tremendous dilemma. I understand that. I'm disappointed, I guess, that -- that perhaps the default response for some is to assume the worst.
I'm trying to communicate to you that the people who are doing this, okay, go shopping in Glen Bernie, and their kids play soccer in Laurel, and they know the law. They know American privacy better than the average American, and they're dedicated to it. So I -- I guess the message that I'd ask you to take back to your communities is the same one I take back to mine: This is focused. It's targeted. It's very carefully done. You shouldn't worry.
MINISTER: Just know, General, that the faith communities will take that back, but the faith communities are scared. Where does this stop?
JUSTINE REDMAN: Justine Redman with CNN. How was the national security harmed by The New York Times reporting on this program? Don't the bad guys already assume that they're being monitored anyway, and shouldn't Americans bear in mind that they might be at any time?
GEN. MICHAEL HAYDEN: You know, we've had this question asked several times. Public discussion of how we determine al-Qaeda intentions -- I just -- I can't see how that can do anything but harm the security of the nation. And I know people say, 'Well, they know they're being monitored.' Well, you know, they don't always act like they know they're being monitored. But if you want to shove it in their face constantly, it's bound to have an impact. And so, to -- I understand, as the reverend's question just raised, there are issues here that the American people are deeply concerned with. But constant revelations and speculation and connecting the dots in ways that I find unimaginable and laying that out there for our enemy to see cannot help but diminish our ability to detect and prevent attacks.
TRAVIS MORALES: My name is Travis Morales, and we've read numerous reports in the Times and other papers about massive spying by the N.S.A. on millions of people, along with reports on rendition, torture, etc., and I attended Congressman Conyers's hearings on Friday, where a gentleman came from South Florida talking about how military intelligence went and infiltrated his Quaker peace group, and that this -- they later saw the documents detailing that.
And my question -- I guess I have two questions for you. One is, as a participant in a group called the World Can't Wait: Drive Out the Bush Regime, which is organizing for people to drown out Bush's lies during the State of the Union, and there's a gathering on February 4 demanding that Bush step down, my question is this: Are you or the N.S.A. -- when I say you, I mean the N.S.A. in its entirety -- is it intercepting our email communications, listening to our telephone conversations, etc.? Because, as Bush has said, you're either against us or you're with us, and they have asserted that whatever the President wants to do in time of war, whether it's holding people without charges or writing memos justifying torture, they can do that.
My second question is this, related to that. I publicly challenge you and the N.S.A. to an open debate, a public open debate, that people can gather and listen to your responses, a debate on this warrant-less wiretapping and spying on millions of people that have gone on across this country, because as the reverend said, millions and millions of people are outraged. That is why people are talking impeachment. That is why people are demanding that Bush step down, because of this massive spying, the torture, the rendition, and everything else. So I challenge you to a public and open debate on these questions.
GEN. MICHAEL HAYDEN: What was the question?
TRAVIS MORALES: Will you openly and publicly debate us, myself, in a forum that's open to the public, not restricted, on the N.S.A. spying scandal and defend what has been said and respond to the numerous reports about the N.S.A. spying on millions of people? That is one question. The second question is: Are you spying on or intercepting our communications, e-mails and telephone conversations, of those of us who are organizing the World Can't Wait to Drive Out the Bush Regime?
GEN. MICHAEL HAYDEN: You know, I tried to make this as clear as I could in my prepared remarks. I said this isn't a drift net. I said we're not out there sucking up comms and then using some of these magically alleged key word searches. 'Did he say jihad? Let's get --' That is not -- do you know how much time Americans spend on the phone in international calls alone? Okay? In 2003, our citizenry was on the phone in international calls alone for 200 billion minutes. I mean, beyond the ethical considerations involved here, there are some practical considerations about being a drift net. This is targeted. This is focused. This is about al-Qaeda.
The other request about a public debate, as I mentioned at the beginning of my prepared remarks, this is a somewhat uncomfortable position for someone in my profession to be in, laying out details of the program. One way of describing what you have invited me to would be why don't you come out and tell the world how you're catching al-Qaeda? And I can't do that. That would be professionally irresponsible.
JAMES ROSEN: Excuse me, James Rosen, McClatchy Newspapers. General, you said that if this program had been in place before 9/11, you're pretty confident that you would have detected at least some of the hijackers' presence in the United States and maybe stopped the attack. If that's the case, why is this limited to communications where one person is overseas? Isn't it more urgent, even more urgent, if you've got communications within the United States between two people who might have al-Qaeda links, and why aren't you pursuing that? And a second sort of linked question is, on the 72 hours, if what you said is true, if I understood it, then I and I think a lot of the other reporters have been misreporting this.
GEN. MICHAEL HAYDEN: Yeah.
JAMES ROSEN: Can you explain on the 72 hours and the lack of the free press? Because you said it's not true, but you didn't explain why it's not true.
GEN. MICHAEL HAYDEN: I'm sorry. To be very clear, we throw the language out, and we all maybe lose precision as we do it. N.S.A. just can't go up on a number for 72 hours while it finishes out the paperwork. The Attorney General is the only one who can authorize what's called an emergency FISA. That's what we're talking about there, alright? So it's not -- my point was, that's not something that N.S.A., under the FISA Act, can do on its own. And the first question was, I'm sorry?
JAMES ROSEN: Just a quick follow-up on that. I mean, can it be as quick as you call the Attorney General or the N.S.A. director calls the Attorney General, says, "We've got to go up now." And he says, "Okay. Fill out the paperwork"?
GEN. MICHAEL HAYDEN: The standard the Attorney General must have is that he has sufficient evidence in front of him that he believes he can substantiate that in front of the FISA court.
JAMES ROSEN: Why isn't it even more urgent to monitor communications of two al-Qaeda folks within the United States?
GEN. MICHAEL HAYDEN: Okay, primarily because N.S.A. is a foreign intelligence agency, alright? And this is about -- what we've talked about here today is about foreign intelligence. It's also about, as I tried to suggest in my comments, a balancing between security and liberty. And one of the decisions that have been made collectively, and certainly I personally support it, it's that one way we have balanced this is that we are talking about international communications, so it not only plays to the strength of N.S.A., it's an attempt to balance these consistent continuing legitimate questions of security and liberty. If we were to be drilled down on a specific individual to the degree that the judgment was we need all comms, we need domestic to domestic, that's the route we go through the FISA court in order to do that.
JAMES ROSEN: Okay. Thank you.
JOHN DIAMOND: General, John Diamond, USA Today. There are many things, it seems to me, that presidents can assert they can do without congressional approval. Nevertheless, they seek congressional approval. There are presidents who have consistently argued that the War Powers Act does not apply, that they have the power to send troops into action, etc. And yet, it's felt that for the sense of national unity, the correct thing to do is to go to Congress and get approval.
You laid out an argument today, the urgency of the situation, the reasonableness, the numerous lawyers who have approved it, this would suggest strongly that had it been presented to Congress, Congress would have approved it, would have agreed with the reasonableness of it. And there's a suggestion that by not going to Congress, except to merely inform a very limited number of members, the unspoken message was: We don't feel we could have gotten the approval. The other potential message is that the secret would have leaked out, which seems to be a disturbing message, if that's what you're saying, that the committees, the oversight committees, the intelligence oversight committees can't keep a secret. Sorry for the longwinded --
GEN. MICHAEL HAYDEN: Well, let me take a run, though. We did brief Congress, John, as you know. It's been announced more than a dozen times. I've been the briefer. Every time that's happened, I've been there. And my intent there, in ways less restrictive than I've had to operate here, was to make sure that the people in the room fully understood what had been authorized and what we had been doing.
EVELYN CALDWELL: Evelyn Caldwell with Pacifica Radio. You said that you used your top counsel in the planning process to tell you if this was legal and appropriate back in 2001. What exactly did your counsel tell you, that it was within guidelines and within the law, constitutional law?
GEN. MICHAEL HAYDEN: Yeah, and it was in a group answer. And all three came back, saying that they believe this was lawful, that it was a lawful order that had been authorized by the President that was within his authorities to authorize this activity.
JAMES BAMFORD: Jim Bamford. Good seeing you here in the Press Club, General. It would be good to see more of you here. Just to clarify sort of what's been said, from what I've heard you say here today in an earlier press conference, the change from going around the FISA law was to -- one of them was to lower the standard from what they called for, which is basically probable cause to reasonable basis, and then to take it away from a federal court judge, the FISA court judge, and hand it over to a shift supervisor at N.S.A. Is that what we're talking about here, just for clarification?
GEN. MICHAEL HAYDEN: Yeah. You got most of it right. The people who make the judgment -- and the one you just referred to, there are only a handful of people at N.S.A. who can make that decision. They're all senior executives. They are all counterterrorism and al-Qaeda experts. So even though I - you're actually quoting me back, Jim, saying shift supervisor -- to be more precise in what you just described, the person who makes that decision, very small handful, senior executives, so in military terms, a senior colonel or general officer equivalent, and in professional terms, people who know more about this than anyone else.
JAMES BAMFORD: Well, no. That wasn't the real question. The question I was asking, though, was since you lowered the standard, doesn't that decrease the protections of the U.S. citizens. And number two, if you could give us some idea of the genesis of this, did you come up with the idea? Did somebody in the White House come up with the idea? Where did the idea originate from?
GEN. MICHAEL HAYDEN: Let me just take the first one, Jim, and I'm not going to talk about the process by which the President arrived at his decision. I think you have accurately described the criteria under which this operates. And I think I at least tried to accurately describe changed circumstance, threat to the nation, and why this approach, limited, focused, has been effective.
JONATHAN LANDAY: Jonathan Landay with Knight Ridder. I'd like to stay on the same issue. And that has to do with the standard by which you use to target your wiretaps. I'm no lawyer, but my understanding is that the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution specifies that you must have probable cause to be able to do a search that does not violate an American's right against unlawful searches and seizures.
GEN. MICHAEL HAYDEN: Actually, the Fourth Amendment actually protects all of us against unreasonable search and seizure. That's what it says.
JONATHAN LANDAY: But the measure is probable cause, I believe.
GEN. MICHAEL HAYDEN: The amendment says unreasonable search and seizure.
JONATHAN LANDAY: But does it not say probable --
GEN. MICHAEL HAYDEN: No.
JONATHAN LANDAY: The court standard, the legal standard --
GEN. MICHAEL HAYDEN: The amendment says unreasonable search and seizure.
JONATHAN LANDAY: The legal standard is probable cause, General. You used the terms just a few minutes ago, "We reasonably believe." And a FISA court, my understanding is, would not give you a warrant if you went before them and say "We reasonably believe." You have to go to the FISA court or the Attorney General has to go to the FISA court and say, "We have probable cause." And so what many people believe, and I would like you to respond to this, is that what you have actually done is crafted a detour around the FISA court by creating a new standard of "reasonably believe" in place of "probable cause," because the FISA court will not give you a warrant based on reasonable belief. You have to show a probable cause. Can you respond to that, please?
GEN. MICHAEL HAYDEN: Sure. I didn't craft the authorization. I am responding to a lawful order, alright? The Attorney General has averred to the lawfulness of the order. Just to be very clear, okay -- and believe me, if there's any amendment to the Constitution that employees at the National Security Agency is familiar with, it's the fourth, alright? And it is a reasonableness standard in the Fourth Amendment. So, what you've raised to me -- and I'm not a lawyer and don't want to become one -- but what you've raised to me is, in terms of quoting the Fourth Amendment, is an issue of the Constitution. The constitutional standard is reasonable. And we believe -- I am convinced that we're lawful because what it is we're doing is reasonable.
AMY GOODMAN: The Deputy Director of National Intelligence, former head of the National Security Agency, Michael Hayden, being questioned yesterday at the National Press Club. That last reporter, after Jim Bamford asked his question, was Jonathan Landay of Knight Ridder, editor and publisher pointing out, well, this is the Fourth Amendment: the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated and no warrants shall issue but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation and particularly describing the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized. We are going wrap up with Jim Bamford, live in our Washington studio. Your response to this questioning, Jim Bamford?
JAMES BAMFORD: Well, Amy, that is really the key issue here, because what seems to be happening is that the Bush administration, the Attorney General, General Hayden have all taken it upon themselves to violate the law. The law that was set up by Congress called for a probable cause -- issuing of a probable cause and taking that to the FISA court. And what they've done is say, 'We don't believe in that. We want to lower the standard -- which encompasses far greater numbers of people -- lower the standard to reasonable belief.' And because they couldn't go into a court and argue, 'We just have a reason to believe this is taking place,' the court would say, 'Well, that's not good enough; we want you to have a probable cause' -- they decided simply to violate the law. And that, I think, is something that has to be decided in the court or by a special prosecutor.
AMY GOODMAN: Jim Bamford, we just have 30 seconds. President Bush is going to the N.S.A. as part of his P.R. campaign this week, pushing his spying program. How rare is this to go to this top secret agency?
JAMES BAMFORD: Usually, a president once during his term will go to the N.S.A. President Bush went there a couple of years ago, I think, actually around 2002, right around the same time he decided to issue his very secret order. So this will be the second time. But this time it's being done for public relations reasons. I think this is one of the other tragedies, is the fact that the director of the National Security Agency, for the very first time, is being used sort of as a political ploy in the administration's public relations machine this week.
AMY GOODMAN: Jim Bamford, thanks so much for being with us. James Bamford is, well, suing the government over potentially possibly spying on him, an author of several books on the National Security Agency. This poll, pointed out by Editor and Publisher, a new Gallup poll released Monday showed 51% of Americans said the administration is wrong to intercept conversations involving a party inside the U.S. without a warrant. In response to another question, 58% said they support the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate the spy program.
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Bugging the Democrats
David Corn
May 8, 2006 05:28 PM
By nominating Michael Hayden, the former chief of the National Security Agency (the US government's super-secret eavesdropping outfit), to replace Porter Goss as CIA director, Bush is waving a red cape in front of his critics and daring them to charge.
Hayden, who is now the deputy director of national intelligence (the number two man in the office overseeing the entire US intelligence community), ran the NSA when Bush authorized domestic warrantless wiretapping of American citizens and residents. When news of this programme broke last year, a firestorm of controversy ensued. In the United States, government investigators working on an intelligence case generally have to obtain a court order (from a secret court) in order to intercept a person's phone calls or emails within the United States. The Bush administration revealed little about this programme, but apparently it targeted communications between persons in America and those in other countries and presumably these communications involved al Qaeda suspects.
Upon learning of the programme - from a story in The New York Times - Democrats and Republicans voiced concern or outright criticism. Initially, the Bush White House was defensive - but then it fought back hard. It accused its critics of being opposed to a "terrorist surveillance programme", ignoring the nuanced point that these critics favoured surveillance programmes as long as they abided by existing laws. Vice President Dick Cheney, in particularly, was demagogic on this point, claiming that the critics supported al-Qaeda's ability to communicate within the United States. In the face of the administration's fierce counterattack, many members of Congress backed off.
Hayden was one of the most ardent defenders of the programme, though he eschewed the rhetorical excesses that Cheney deployed. In appearances before Congress, Hayden argued that it was necessary to resort to warrantless eavesdropping because US officials pursuing terrorist suspects would otherwise lose precious time filling out the paperwork for wiretap requests. But the law already allowed US investigators to obtain a wiretap without a warrant in emergencies - as long as they filed a request (within three days) with the court overseeing wiretaps. Hayden's misleading explanation prompted speculation that the programme went further than the media reports indicated. Months later, the full shape of the programme Hayden oversaw remains unknown to the public.
What is clear is that the White House has concluded that the exposure of its warrantless wiretap programme was not a political liability but a potential asset. Bush aides decided that they could sell the programme as a demonstration of Bush's commitment to protecting Americans from terrorists. They maintained it was legal and derided those who raised civil liberties issues as being more concerned with the rights of the evildoers than the safety of the United States. At a time when the American public has turned against Bush and his war, this was the sort of debate the White House much desired.
With the Hayden nomination, Bush is saying, "Bring 'em on." The White House can expect members of the Senate, which has to confirm Hayden before he can serve, to revive their complaints about the warrantless wiretapping programme, and then the White House can respond with its favorite line: Bush cares so much about safeguarding America from the terrorists that, yes, he will not hesitate to adopt the most serious measures.
If the Hayden confirmation process comes to be dominated by the wiretap question, that will be unfortunate. There is much else to consider. The CIA seems to be falling apart, with both senior and junior officers fleeing in what appears to be record numbers. The agency failed before 9/11 and then it botched the Iraq WMD question (and did nothing as Bush aides overstated the already overstated intelligence in the run-up to the war). It has generated controversy, scandal and ill will around the world with its rendition programme and secret prisons. In these dangerous days, the United States - and the world - actually need a CIA that is effective in uncovering actual threats and real plots and that operates within certain bounds of probity.
The Hayden confirmation process will afford the Senate a rare opportunity to explore many contentious and crucial issues. It would be a pity if it becomes no more than a platform for the Bush administration to bash its critics for helping bin Laden make phone calls to America.
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Crashing Watergate
Russ Baker
Monday, May 08, 2006 - 06:27 PM
We knew this was big back in March, when a court sent ex-Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, R-Calif.-convicted of taking $2.4 million in bribes from military contractors-off to serve eight years in prison, the most severe sentence ever handed out to a member of Congress. From then on, the sleaze chain has been metastasizing. More members of the House might be implicated-and even top CIA officials. Now it is being described as the largest federal corruption scandal in a century. With stories of prostitutes and all-night poker games at the Watergate hotel, it is one scandal that truly is deserving of the "-gate" suffix that has become such a dreary journalistic cliché.
No matter how big the affair grows, though, it is likely to follow in the path of so many of its predecessors-distracting public attention from a larger and more important reality: Today, "the largest corruption scandal in a century" is not WatergateGate-it is the everyday performance of the U.S. government. The worst sleaze in Washington is mainly legal, as the old saying goes; and that includes the sorry state of the entire intelligence apparatus-beyond whether the #3 CIA official improperly participated in those late-night, high-stakes card games.
Too many in the media treat a juicy mess like the Cunningham Affair as a shocking aberration. Consider the wording in a New York Times article on Sunday, which described "a growing suspicion among some lawmakers that corrupt practices may have influenced decision-making in Congress and at executive-branch agencies."
Who would have thought? Don't the editors read their own paper? It's been clear for some time that corruption in the Bush administration has exceeded a Washington standard that already was pretty tawdry. Some of the stories are known already, especially to TomPaine.com readers: White House procurement chief taken out in handcuffs in connection with a sprawling lobbying corruption investigation; the vice president's chief of staff indicted for perjury; the unseemly setup between Bush's first FEMA director and Brownie, the incompetent neophyte who replaced him.
But many of the larger misdeeds have gone unreported, in part because-technically illegal or not-they represent business as usual in Republican Washington today. Virtually every federal agency is now captive to the corporate interests it is supposed to regulate. The reach of corporate influence has even compromised the science agencies on whose fact-finding and truth-telling crucial questions of national safety and even survival depend.
And then there is Congress. A quick comparison of committee activity and floor votes with campaign finance reports tells the story. Never mind the now-controversial "earmarks," in which legislators secretly slip goodies at the last minute into larger bill packages. The real scandal is going on in plain sight. The entities that give the most get the most-and the goodies keep on coming. That outfits like Halliburton can survive a never-ending series of contracting horror shows with their federal contacts intact says a lot about Congress's willful abrogation of fiduciary duty on behalf of the taxpayer.
The main mistake Randy Cunningham made was accepting the goodies while he was still in Congress. There is no crime involved in doing the exact same favors for government contractors, and later joining the company's board or getting hired as a highly-paid lobbyist, or getting payback on a more indirect basis. That's the deal all over town, and some of the most "well-respected" names in America have such arrangements-and not all of them are Republicans. The whole thing stinks, but what to do about it? That's the rub.
Speaking of a rub, besides the careless greed, in the Cunningham Caper we are blessed by the emergence of a sexual angle worthy of a British tabloid, with the congressman alleged to have enjoyed the favors of big-league prostitutes in return for military contracts. Sexual peccadilloes always get the public's attention in a way that other misdeeds, like accepting bribes from defense contractors, cannot. That Cunningham and his buddies may have preferred presumably-discreet professional company over out-of-wedlock friends of the Gennifer Flowers ilk, makes perfect sense in an atmosphere where holier-than-thou sanctimony cannot bear scrutiny. That might take the story to a new level, since these sins would have been committed by the staunchest defenders of the "sanctity of marriage."
Those who care about the ever more brazen sellout of the public interest over the last five years have no choice but to take these revelations in whatever garb they come-and if they're scantily clad, so be it. Meanwhile, consorting with prostitutes-the thing that will get perhaps get the most attention-is the one thing that matters least to the future of our body politic.
With this new WatergateGate, we must at all costs beware the Woodward Fallacy-that sanitation is a substitute for politics and ideas. It is the conceit of the reigning elite. But in fact we can get rid of Cunningham and his cronies and the rot will continue, unless change goes much deeper to the root.
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Coincidence? We Think Not
Slated for killing: More than 450 Iraqi intellectuals fear for their lives
By Abduhussein Ghazal
Azzaman, May 8, 2006
A militia group with immense power in Iraq has issued names of 461 intellectuals which it says it has ordered its armed men to assassinate.
The name list is distributed across the country and copies are not hard to obtain in Baghdad.
Several Iraq-related websites have issued the names.
The list includes some of the brightest Iraqi authors, journalists, doctors and scientists.
Azzaman obtained the list from the Iraqi Writers Union which declined to reveal the name of the factional group calling for the killing of the 461 intellectuals, citing security concerns.
Leaflets containing the names warn these intellectuals that "they are now (legitimate) targets for assassination."
The union urged the government to take immediate measures to protect the intellectuals.
"The authorities bear the responsibility for safeguarding the souls of this elite group of Iraqi intellectuals who are now a target for killing.
"The list is part of an organized, foreign-backed campaign to terrorize Iraqi brains," a source at the union said.
Assassinations of Iraqi professors, doctors and other professionals started shortly after the 2003 U.S. invasion.
But the source said such killings have surged recently due to the current collapse of law and order in the country.
The government has so far declined to comment on the latest wave of assassinations and warnings that hundreds of intellectuals can be targeted in the future.
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Mossad murdered 530 Iraqi scientists
5/9/2006
Al-Jazeerah
Assassinations of Iraq academics in Iraq never existed prior to April 2003
Numerous reports for many months have stated that with collaboration from American occupation forces, Israel's espionage apparatus, Mossad, slaughtered at least 530 Iraqi scientists and academic professors.
Persistent Israeli hit squads against Iraqi scientists had been active in Iraq since April 2003, but the latest chapter was uncovered on Tuesday, 14 June 2005 by the Palestine Information Center which, citing a report compiled by the United States Department of State and intended for the American President, stated that Israeli and foreign agents sent by Mossad, in cooperation with United States, to Iraq, killed at least 350 Iraqi scientists and more than 200 university professors and academic personalities .
According to the report, which was referred to the U.S. president George W. Bush, Mossad agents had been operating in Iraq with the aim of liquidating Iraqi nuclear and biology scientists, among other scientists, and prominent university professors.
That was after the U.S. failed to persuade those scientists to cooperate with or work for it.
"Israeli commandos had been operating on Iraqi territory for more than a year, the focus of their activities being the assassination of Iraqi scientists and intellectuals. The Zionists resorted to the large-scale assassination campaign after the failure of American efforts that started immediately after the American occupation of Iraq, aimed at attracting a number of Iraqi scientists to cooperate and go to work in the United States," The Palestine Information Center quoted the report as saying.
"Some Iraqi scientists were forced to work in American research centers; however, the majority of them refused to cooperate in certain fields and fled the U.S. to other countries", it further stated.
The Pentagon agreed with the suggestion of Mossad, which believed that the best way to get rid of those scientists was to "physically eliminate them".
The American security service provided Israel with complete biographies on the Iraqi scientists and academics to facilitate killing them, the report said, adding that the Mossad campaign targeting Iraqi scientists is still underway.
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Autism - Two Views
An Army of one wrong recruit
Sunday, May 07, 2006
MICHELLE ROBERTS
The Oregonian
Autism - The signing of a disabled Portland man despite warnings reflects problems nationally for military enlistment
Jared Guinther is 18. Tall and lanky, he will graduate from Marshall High School in June. Girls think he's cute, until they try to talk to him and he stammers or just stands there -- silent.
Diagnosed with autism at age 3, Jared is polite but won't talk to people unless they address him first. It's hard for him to make friends. He lives in his own private world.
Jared didn't know there was a war raging in Iraq until his parents told him last fall -- shortly after a military recruiter stopped him outside a Southeast Portland strip mall and complimented him on his black Converse All Stars.
"When Jared first started talking about joining the Army, I thought, 'Well, that isn't going to happen,' " said Paul Guinther, Jared's father. "I told my wife not to worry about it. They're not going to take anybody in the service who's autistic."
But they did. Last month, Jared came home with papers showing that he not only had enlisted, but also had signed up for the Army's most dangerous job: cavalry scout. He is scheduled to leave for basic training Aug. 16.
Officials are now investigating whether recruiters at the U.S. Army Recruiting Station in Southeast Portland improperly concealed Jared's disability, which should have made him ineligible for service.
Jared's story illustrates a growing national problem as the military faces increasing pressure to hit recruiting targets during an unpopular war.
Tracking by the Pentagon shows that complaints about recruiting improprieties are on pace to approach record highs set in 2003 and 2004. The active Army and the Reserve missed recruiting targets last year, and reports of recruiting abuses continue from across the country.
A family in Ohio reported that its mentally ill son was signed up, despite rules banning such enlistments and the fact that records about his illness were readily available.
In Houston, a recruiter warned a potential enlistee that if he backed out of a meeting he would be arrested.
And in Colorado, a high school student working undercover told recruiters he had dropped out and had a drug problem. The recruiter told the boy to fake a diploma and buy a product to help him beat a drug test.
Violations such as these forced the Army to halt recruiting for a day last May so recruiters could be retrained and reminded of the job's ethical requirements.
The Portland Army Recruiting Battalion Headquarters opened its investigation into Jared's case last week after his parents called The Oregonian and the newspaper began asking questions about his enlistment.
Maj. Curt Steinagel, commander of the Military Entrance Processing Station in Portland, said the papers filled out by Jared's recruiters contained no indication of his disability. Steinagel acknowledged that the current climate is tough on recruiters here and elsewhere.
"I can't speak for the Army," he said, "but it's no secret that recruiters stretch and bend the rules because of all the pressure they're under. The problem exists, and we all know it exists."
Diagnosis and struggle
Jared lives in a tiny brown house in Southeast Portland that looks as worn out as his parents do when they get home from work.
Paul Guinther, 57, labors 50 to 60 hour weeks as a painter-sandblaster at Sundial Marine Tug & Barge Works in Troutdale. His wife, Brenda, 50, has the graveyard housekeeping shift at Kaiser Permanente Sunnyside Medical Center in Clackamas.
The couple got together nearly 16 years ago when Jared was 3. Brenda, who had two young children of her own, immediately noticed that Jared was different and pushed Paul to have the boy tested.
"Jared would play with buttons for hours on end," she said. "He'd play with one toy for days. Loud noises bothered him. He was scared to death of the toilet flushing, the lawn mower."
Jared didn't speak until he was almost 4 and could not tolerate the feel of grass on his feet.
Doctors diagnosed him with moderate to severe autism, a developmental disorder that strikes when children are toddlers. It causes problems with social interaction, language and intelligence. No one knows its cause or cure.
School and medical records show that Jared, whose recent verbal IQ tested very low, spent years in special education classes. It was only when he was a high school senior that Brenda pushed for Jared to take regular classes because she wanted him to get a normal rather than a modified diploma.
Jared required extensive tutoring and accommodations to pass, but in June he will graduate alongside his younger stepbrother, Matthew Thorsen.
Last fall, Jared began talking about joining the military after a recruiter stopped him on his way home from school and offered a $4,000 signing bonus, $67,000 for college and more buddies than he could count.
Matthew told his mother that military recruiting at the school and surrounding neighborhoods was so intense that one recruiter had pulled him out of football practice.
Recruiters in Portland and nationwide spend several hours a day cold-calling high school students, whose phone numbers are provided by schools under the No Child Left Behind Law. They also prospect at malls, high school cafeterias, colleges and wherever else young people gather.
Brenda phoned her two brothers, both veterans. She said they laughed and told her not to worry. The military would never take Jared.
The Guinthers, meanwhile, tried to refocus their son.
"I told him, 'Jared, you get out of high school. I know you don't want to be a janitor all your life. You work this job, you go to community college, you find out what you want. You can live here as long as you want,' " Paul said.
They thought it had worked until five weeks ago. Brenda said she called Jared on his cell phone to check what time he'd be home.
"I said 'Jared, what are you doing?' 'I'm taking the test,' he said -- the entrance test. I go, 'Wait a minute.' I said, 'Who's giving you the test?' He said, 'Corporal.' I said, 'Well let me talk to him.' "
Brenda said she spoke to Cpl. Ronan Ansley and explained that Jared had a disability, autism, that could not be outgrown. She said Ansley told her he had been in special classes, too -- for dyslexia.
"I said, 'Wait a minute, there's a big difference between autism and your problem,' " Brenda said.
Military rules prohibit enlisting anyone with a mental disorder that interferes with school or employment, unless a recruit can show he or she hasn't required special academic or job accommodations for 12 months.
Jared has been in special education classes since preschool. Through a special program for disabled workers, he has a part-time job scrubbing toilets and dumping trash.
Jared scored 43 out of 99 on the Army's basic entrance exam -- 31 is the lowest grade the Army allows for enlistment, military officials said.
After learning that Jared had cleared this first hurdle toward enlistment, Brenda said, she called and asked for Ansley's supervisor and got Sgt. Alejandro Velasco.
She said she begged Velasco to review Jared's medical and school records. Brenda said Velasco declined, asserting that he didn't need any paperwork. Under military rules, recruiters are required to gather all available information about a recruit and fill out a medical screening form.
"He was real cocky and he says, 'Well, Jared's an 18-year-old man. He doesn't need his mommy to make his decisions for him.' "
Question of comprehension
The Guinthers are not political activists. They supported the Iraq war in the beginning but have started to question it as fighting dragged on. Brenda Guinther said that if her son Matthew had enlisted, she "wouldn't like it, but I would learn to live with it because I know he would understand the consequences."
But Jared doesn't understand the dangers or the details of what he has done, the Guinthers said.
When they asked Jared how long he would be in the Army, he said he didn't know. His enlistment papers show it's just over four years. Jared also was disappointed to learn that he wouldn't be paid the $4,000 signing bonus until after basic training.
During a recent family gathering, a relative asked Jared what he would do if an enemy was shooting at him. Jared ran to his video game console and killed a digital Xbox soldier and announced, "See! I can do it!"
"My concern is that if he got into a combat situation he really couldn't take someone's back," said Mary Lou Perry, 51, a longtime friend of the Guinthers'. "He wouldn't really know a dangerous thing. This job they have him doing, it's like send him in and if he doesn't get blown up, it's safe for the rest of us."
Steinagel, the processing station commander, told The Oregonian that Jared showed up after passing his written exam. None of his paperwork indicated that he was autistic, but if it had, Jared almost certainly would have been disqualified, he said.
On Tuesday, a reporter visited the U.S. Army Recruiting Station at the Eastport Plaza Shopping Center, where Velasco said he had not been told about Jared's autism.
"Cpl. Ansley is Guinther's recruiter," he said. "I was unaware of any type of autism or anything like that."
Velasco initially denied knowing Jared but later said he'd spent a lot of time mentoring him because Jared was going to become a cavalry scout. The job entails "engaging the enemy with anti-armor weapons and scout vehicles," according to an Army recruiting Web site.
After he had spoken for a few moments, Velasco suddenly grabbed the reporter's tape recorder and tried to tear out the tape, stopping only after the reporter threatened to call the police.
With the Guinthers' permission, The Oregonian faxed Jared's medical records to the U.S. Army Recruiting Battalion commander, Lt. Col. David Carlton in Portland, who on Wednesday ordered the investigation.
The Guinthers said that on Tuesday evening, Cpl. Ansley showed up at their door. They said Ansley stated that he would probably lose his job and face dishonorable discharge unless they could stop the newspaper's story.
Ansley, reached at his recruiting office Thursday, declined to comment for this story.
S. Douglas Smith, spokesman for the U.S. Army Recruiting Command, in Fort Knox, Ky., said he could not comment on specifics of the investigation in Portland. But he defended the 8,200 recruiters working for the active Army and Army Reserve.
Last year, the Army relieved 44 recruiters from duty and admonished 369.
"Everyone in recruiting is let down when one of our recruiters fails to uphold the Army's and Recruiting Command's standards," Smith said.
The Guinthers are eager to hear whether the Army will release Jared from his enlistment. Jared is disappointed he might not go because he thought the recruiters were his friends, they said. But they're willing to accept that.
"If he went to Iraq and got hurt or killed," Paul Guinther said, "I couldn't live with myself knowing I didn't try to stop it."
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MMR campaigners demand action as autism cases soar
Scotsman.co.uk
09/05/2006
A MASSIVE surge in the number of autistic schoolchildren in Scotland has been exposed after figures showed an increase of more than 600 per cent in secondary pupils with the condition in the past six years.
Official statistics show 825 pupils were diagnosed with autistic spectrum disorder in state secondaries in 2005, compared with 114 in 1999 - an increase of 623 per cent. Over the same period, the number of autistic youngsters in primary schools more than quadrupled, from 415 to 1,736.
The increases emerged in a written parliamentary answer to be made public today.
Campaigners last night said the figures were further proof that an urgent investigation was needed into the rise in the condition and its potential link with the triple mumps, measles and rubella (MMR) vaccine.
Although no link has ever been clinically proven, campaigners say parents should have the choice of giving their children single vaccinations instead.
Bill Welsh, the chairman of Action Against Autism, said: "Nobody has offered a plausible explanation as to why this has happened.
"This is not a Scottish problem; it is a developed world problem, because the same thing is happening in America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. One common factor affecting children throughout the developed world is the vaccination issue.
"The number of young children who have this previously very rare diagnosis is reaching epidemic proportions and it is being ignored by the medical establishment.
"This is a tragedy for every child concerned and yet our politicians concentrate on soft areas like obesity and ignore the difficult questions, like why we have so many children with neurological problems."
Mr Welsh said the situation amounted to an apparent "public health crime". He added: "We need truly independent, clinical research into why these children withdraw into the world of autism."
The figures break down autism cases by local authority and show wide variations across the country.
Aberdeenshire, for instance, recorded a 533 per cent increase among primary pupils over the six-year period, while in the Borders the rise was a relatively small 137 per cent.
Christine Grahame, the SNP MSP whose written question led to the publication of the figures, accused ministers of negligence by failing to take action to address the problem. She said: "I am concerned that ministers must have taken their eye off the ball, as these figures have risen year on year.
"Autism-specific inspections, for example, have been negligible, with no inspections carried out in mainstream schools at all last year.
"Although there has been some limited specialist support in education, there is no evidence that this has been matched amongst the key, allied, supporting health professionals.
"The growing numbers are bound to add to the pressure on front-line teaching staff, and those pupils with autism deserve to have the right level of support in place, not just from educational staff but also from supporting health professionals."
A spokeswoman for the Scottish Executive said the rise could partly be explained by increased awareness of the condition.
She also said the introduction of the Additional Support for Learning Act would improve education provision for children with special needs.
"We give local authorities £25 million a year for inclusion and we've also funded more classroom assistance to give teachers extra support," she said.
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Media Influence
C-Span Asks Web Sites to Pull Colbert Clip
By NATASHA T. METZLER
Associated Press
May 8, 2006
WASHINGTON -- Political comedy often is intended to stir controversy, but this doesn't usually involve broadcasting rights and the public affairs network C-SPAN.
The cable network asked two Internet video providers, YouTube and IFILM, to pull clips of Stephen Colbert's April 29 performance at the White House Correspondents Association dinner from their Web sites.
C-SPAN said it contacted the companies because the copyrighted material was posted online without its permission.
Both YouTube and IFILM complied with the request.
Colbert hosts a satirical current events show on Comedy Central and performed his comedy routine at the correspondent's dinner.
YouTube posted the Colbert video shortly after the dinner ended and received the letter to remove it May 3, according to Julie Supan, senior director of marketing. The Colbert video was viewed 2.7 million times in less than 48 hours, she said.
"Our community was really passionate about it," Supan said.
After removing the video, YouTube received a large number of e-mails asking about the missing clip, Supan said. A misconception that C-SPAN is funded by the government led viewers to complain that the Colbert video should be in the public domain, Supan said.
IFILM declined to comment.
C-SPAN is a private, nonprofit company and holds the copyright on the entire correspondent's dinner.
On May 5, two days after YouTube received C-SPAN's letter, the Colbert video was publicly available through an agreement with Google Video.
Google had been talking with C-SPAN about a partnership before the dinner, according to Jennifer Feikin, director of video and multimedia search partnerships.
C-SPAN said it chose Google as a partner because it agreed to post video of the entire dinner, and to include a link to C-SPAN's Web site.
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Newspaper Circulation Declines 2.6 Percent
By SETH SUTEL
AP Business Writer
May 08, 2006
NEW YORK - Newspaper circulation fell 2.6 percent in the six-month period ending in March, according to data released Monday, as more people turned to the Internet and other media outlets for news and information.
The decline in average paid weekday circulation was about the same as the previous six-month reporting cycle for the period ending last September, according to the Newspaper Association of America, a trade group.
Average paid circulation at Sunday newspapers fell 3.1 percent versus the same period a year ago, also a comparable decline with the last time circulation tallies were reported, the NAA said.
The figures were based on NAA's analysis of circulation figures released Monday by the Audit Bureau of Circulations, a separate group which reports figures on individual newspapers but not industrywide data.
Despite the declines in paid copies, the NAA also reported Monday that newspaper-run Web sites had an 8 percent increase in viewers in the first quarter. The data from Nielsen/NetRatings found that newspaper Web sites averaged 56 million users in the period, or 37 percent of all online users in the period, the NAA said.
According to Audit Bureau data, Gannett Co.'s USA Today remained the top-selling newspaper with 2,272,815 copies, up 0.09 percent from the same period a year ago; while The Wall Street Journal, published by Dow Jones & Co., was second with 2,049,786, down 1 percent.
Several top newspapers reported significant declines in the period, including Tribune Co.'s Los Angeles Times, down 5.4 percent at 851,832; The Washington Post, down 3.7 percent at 724,242; the New York Daily News, also down 3.7 percent at 708,477. News Corp.'s New York Post slipped 0.7 percent to 673,379.
The largest slump at a major daily came at the San Francisco Chronicle, where average paid weekday circulation fell 15.6 percent to 398,246 as the newspaper continued to cut back on less desirable circulation such as copies paid for by advertisers and then distributed for free.
Patricia Hoyt, a spokeswoman for the Chronicle, said the cutbacks began at the beginning of last year and involved copies that "advertisers didn't value, were quite costly and essentially had no impact on our readership."
The Chronicle, which is owned by Hearst Corp., reported a similar decline in paid circulation for the previous six-month reporting period that ended last September.
Several other large newspapers also reported declines, including The Boston Globe, down 8.5 percent to 397,288, and The Atlanta Journal- Constitution, down 6.7 percent to 365,011. The Globe is owned by The New York Times Co. and the Journal-Constitution by Cox Enterprises Inc.
Besides USA Today, a handful of other major newspapers reported modest circulation gains in the period: The New York Times, up 0.5 percent at 1,142,464; Tribune Co.'s Chicago Tribune, up 0.9 percent at 579,079; and The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J., up 0.9 percent at 398,329. The Star-Ledger is owned by Advance Publications Inc.
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The Star and the Cross
Burning Bush Speaks Again to Jews
May 4, 2006
George W. Bush
My administration shares a strong commitment with the AJC to make sure relations between Israel and America remain strong. We have so much in common. We're both young countries born of struggle and sacrifice. We're both founded by immigrants escaping religious persecution. We have both established vibrant democracies built on the rule of law and open markets. We're both founded on certain basic beliefs, that God watches over the affairs of men, and that freedom is the Almighty God's gift to every man and woman on the face of this earth. (Applause.) These ties have made us natural allies, and these ties will never be broken. America's commitment to Israel's security is strong, enduring and unshakable.
I want to thank the members of Congress who are here. I appreciate the members of the diplomatic corps who have joined us today. I want to pay a special tribute to a friend of mine from Texas who has done a superb job as the Chairman of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, and that's Fred Zeidman.
My administration shares a strong commitment with the AJC to make sure relations between Israel and America remain strong. We have so much in common. We're both young countries born of struggle and sacrifice. We're both founded by immigrants escaping religious persecution. We have both established vibrant democracies built on the rule of law and open markets. We're both founded on certain basic beliefs, that God watches over the affairs of men, and that freedom is the Almighty God's gift to every man and woman on the face of this earth. (Applause.) These ties have made us natural allies, and these ties will never be broken. America's commitment to Israel's security is strong, enduring and unshakable.
I'm looking forward to my meeting with Prime Minister Olmert in a couple of weeks. And as he comes to America, I cannot help but think about my friend, Ariel Sharon. Ariel Sharon is a friend who remains in our thoughts and prayers. He is a man of courage, and a man of peace. And so tonight we pray for his recovery; we rededicate ourselves to the cause to which he devoted his life, the peace and the security of Israel.
As you know, I'm a strong believer in democracy and free elections, but that does not mean we have to support elected officials who are not committed to peace. Hamas has made it clear that they do not acknowledge the right of Israel to exist, and I've made it clear that so long as that's their policy, we will have no contact with the leaders of Hamas. Democratically leaders [sic] cannot have one foot in the camp of democracy and one foot in the camp of terror. Hamas must accept the demands of the international community to recognize Israel, disarm and reject terrorism, and stop blocking the path to peace.
Many of the AJC leaders who have come to know me understand how my thinking was profoundly affected by the attacks on our country on September the 11th, 2001. The security of our nation is foremost in my mind. I vowed that day and I vow to you today that the United States of America will stay on the hunt and bring the killers to justice.
And one of the lessons of September the 11th is that this nation must take threats seriously before they fully materialize. (Applause.) And I saw a threat in Saddam Hussein. He had invaded a neighbor, he had used weapons of mass destruction against his own people, he had the capability of making weapons of mass destruction, he harbored terrorists, he was shooting at U.S. aircraft. He was a threat, and the world is better off without Saddam Hussein in power.
Our goal in Iraq is to have an ally in the war on terror and to help that young country establish an Iraqi-style democracy. Last December, 12 million people defied the car bombers and the killers and the terrorists, and said, that, we want to live in liberty. Recently a unity government has formed in Iraq. They reached an agreement on their top leadership posts. This new government represents a turning point in Iraq, a new chapter in our engagement there, and an opportunity for progress.
We will form a new partnership with these leaders; we will adjust our methods to support their priorities. We will strengthen our mutual efforts to achieve victory.
But I want you to understand that the new government is yet another blow to those who hate liberty. First, it will deny the terrorists their immediate aim of turning Iraq into a safe haven from which they can plot and plan attacks against the United States and our allies. And secondly, a democratic Iraq will be a major blow to the terrorists' hateful ideology, sending a powerful message across the region that the future of the Middle East belongs to freedom. The only way we can lose in Iraq is if we lose our nerve, and I am not going to lose my nerve.
The AJC, the American government, and most of the nations of the world are concerned about Iran. We're concerned because the Iranian regime is repressing its people, sponsoring terrorists, destabilizing the region, threatening Israel, and defying the world with its ambitions for nuclear weapons. America will continue to rally the world to confront these threats.
We're making progress. The first goal is to reach a common objective, and the objective amongst America, our European allies, Russia and China is to deny Iran a nuclear weapon. I spent time with Chancellor Merkel yesterday talking about this important issue. I can assure you we have a strong ally in Chancellor Merkel when it comes to uniting the world to speak with one clear voice.
We will continue to press the Iranian government to comply with the IAEA, as well as U.N. Security Council resolutions. America respects and admires the people of Iran. We respect their history and culture. We respect their right to choose their own future and win their own freedom. And America looks forward to the day when our nation can be closest of friends with a free and democratic Iran.
Before I introduce the Chancellor, I do want to talk about another subject that I know is important to you, and it's important to me, and that's Darfur. Last weekend, thousands rallied on our National Mall to call for justice in Darfur. And among the speakers was a man who understands the meaning of evil. You know him well. And it was Elie Wiesel put it this way: "We refuse to be silent because silent helps the killer, never his victims."
America is not silent. The United States is the only country to have called the crimes taking place in Sudan what they are: genocide. To end these atrocities, we've developed a clear standard. First, there must be a political course. Right now, as we speak, we're negotiating to bring a political settlement so that all sides will lay down their arms, a settlement between the government and the rebels. These conversations are taking place in Abuja.
But, as well, we must understand that the rape and the murder and the suffering must be stopped, and that's why I believe strongly that we must augment AU forces with a blue-helmeted U.N. force, with a NATO overlay, so that we can send a clear message to the leaders of Sudan: We will not tolerate the genocide taking place in that country.
My remaining time in office, I look forward to working with AJC leaders. I appreciate your steadfast strength when it comes to dealing with terror. I appreciate your strong belief in the power of liberty to transform the world we have. I look forward to working with you to continue to lay the foundations of peace, so that generations after our time will look at all of us and say, job well done.
And now it's my pleasure to introduce a leader who understands the importance of freedom. Angela Merkel grew up in East Germany during the dark days of the Cold War. She understands what it means to live in a free society. She understands the power of liberty. She's a straightforward person; she tells me what's on her mind. She's a woman of good judgment. She's a strong leader. It's my privilege to welcome her here, and to our friends at the AJC.
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Olmert: We will ensure Jewish majority
Ilan Marciano
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert delivers speech during special Knesset session to mark Herzl Day, says: 'We must ensure that there will be a proven Jewish majority, otherwise the term Jewish state becomes empty of meaning'
The Knesset will mark a special day dedicated to Theodor Herzl on Monday evening, in accordance with a law passed two years ago. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said during a speech that "we must ensure that there will be a proven Jewish majority in the State of Israel, otherwise the term Jewish state becomes empty of meaning. The obligation of the national leadership is to be responsible to the vision of Herzl and to ensure a Jewish majority in the State."
Olmert said that "this special Knesset session is dedicated not only to marking Herzl's birthday but also the discussion of his heritage. The Law of Zion was passed in the Knesset in order to ensure that the heritage and vision of the State's founding father is preserved. As a journalist he covered the Dreyfus trial and was seriously shocked by the anti-Semitic wave that washed over France."
'No hope in exile'
"Through his sharp senses he realized that the Jewish nation has no hope and that there is no alternative to establishing the State
of Israel. He didn't invent Zionism, which existed before him, but he turned the dream into a political destination and the dreamers into a national movement. We must live as one people, connected not only to all of the scattered Jewish nation, we must lived as united nation here too. That is Herzl's vision. His vision, that the Jewish nation has an independent state, was realized, but the mission is not over," added Olmert.
Knesset Member Binyamin Netanyahu said that "Herzl was a visionary, not a dreamer. He was not only a prophet of the revival but also saw the danger. He said that if the Jews don't return to their land we will be annihilated. Herzl wrote about the Holocaust at least 30 times, and was thought of as a madman as a result. The threat to destroy us which saw then has not passed. We must become unified in the face of the element threatening our national existence. We must unite where we can unite and dedicate the necessary sources in order to stand in the face of the danger. We must be Herzl's students in this sense."
Theodor (Binyamin Ze'ev Herzl) was born on May 2 1860, and passed away on July 3, 1904.
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Over half Israelis want Arab citizens to leave: poll
www.chinaview.cn 2006-05-09 18:36:38
JERUSALEM, May 9 (Xinhua) -- More than half Israelis think that the government should encourage its Arab citizens to leave Israel,a survey published on Tuesday said.
The annual survey titled "the Democracy Index 2006" was released by the Israel Democracy Institute, which showed that 62 percent of Israelis support government-backed Arab emigration. According to the survey, only 14 percent of respondents said ties between Arabs and Jews are good, while 29 percent said a Jewish majority is required for decisions of crucial national significance.
Israeli Arab Knesset (parliament) members slam the result as a show of "Racism," local daily Yedioth Ahronoth reported. United Arab List-Ta'al Chairman Ibrahim Sarsur was quoted as saying that "it is unfortunate and shocking that there is still such a large percentage among the Jewish people who do not believe in full partnership between the Jewish majority and the Arab minority."
Meanwhile, members of ruling party Kadima also expressed their concern over the survey's findings.
Kadima Knesset member Menahem Ben-Sasson, a history professor, said that "the attitude toward minorities is worrying and requires turning the attention and resources to understanding their life, culture and history as a step for developing mutual relations based on respect."
The survey was in preparation for a conference to be held on Wednesday sponsored by Israeli President Moshe Katsav. Currently, about 1.3 million Arabs, accounting for a fifth of the overall Israeli population, live in the Jewish state.
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EU plans to go it alone with aid for Palestinians
David Gow in Brussels and Chris McGreal in Jerusalem
Monday May 8, 2006
Guardian
The EU is preparing to go it alone and channel emergency funds to the Palestinians if talks with the US, Russia and United Nations on setting up an international mechanism for easing their financial plight fail this week, senior officials indicated at the weekend.
Pressure for a swift agreement on supplying food and other aid directly to Palestinians as well as money to pay the salaries of health workers and teachers intensified when President Mahmoud Abbas and Ismail Haniyeh, prime minister of the Hamas-led government, failed to resolve the crisis over the weekend.
The US and EU suspended direct funding to the Hamas government early last month, leaving 165,000 public employees of the Palestinian Authority (PA) unpaid so far this month. According to a Brussels document, the crisis in Gaza and the West Bank could deepen in the next few months, leading to "greatly increased unemployment and poverty levels, and possibly the breakdown of law and order".
The "quartet" of peace mediators - the EU, US, Russia and UN - will discuss in New York tomorrow plans put forward by Britain and France for the "international mechanism" to bypass both Hamas and President Abbas and provide funds and aid through bodies such as the World Bank, IMF or the UN itself.
But Washington has resisted the idea of paying overdue salaries to workers in essential services such as health and education. Its tougher stance, with Israel's backing, is seen by some Palestinians as not so much an effort to change Hamas policies as to change the regime.
Benita Ferrero-Waldner, EU external affairs commissioner, who was in Egypt at the weekend, said: "We do hope there's a chance for a common agreement on this issue." She refused to set a deadline but admitted that the humanitarian crisis among Palestinians was worsening.
Ms Ferrero-Waldner confirmed that the EU, which in the past provided half the PA's aid, or €500m (£342m) a year, plans to release €34m in humanitarian aid to be channelled through agencies, but officials suggested it could unblock other funds if the quartet talks failed. Russia is sending £5.4m for Palestinian health and education, using Mr Abbas as a conduit.
The draft British proposal for the internationally administered fund said that "without sufficient revenues there is a risk the PA will not be able to deliver basic services. This could have serious consequences for living standards, political stability and the humanitarian situation".
Last week, 36 aid agencies issued a joint report warning they are incapable of handling the funding crisis.
The EU plan is to use the Palestinian president as a liaison point for delivering pooled funds via the World Bank or IMF to the Hamas-led PA, rather than placing it under his control. "The international mechanism would enable us to control and deliver health and education funds," Ms Ferrero-Waldner said.
On Saturday Mr Abbas's advisers said Hamas had again refused to change its policy towards Israel, renouncing violence, recognising the Jewish state and standing by past peace deals. The EU and US have reaffirmed that these are absolute conditions for dealing directly with the PA.
Ms Ferrero-Waldner, who sanctioned the release of €120m in February, said a further €125m was blocked. "There might be some salaries paid for health and education but it's not yet clear and it might have to go through the World Bank." Saying the EU was "not abandoning the Palestinians", she insisted Israel should use the international mechanism if necessary to pay withheld tax and customs revenues worth €40m a month to the PA.
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Under the Reich
The President's New Helicopter
By Jonathon Keats
Popular Science
07 May 2006
After decades of upgrades to a fleet of notoriously cramped Sikorsky VH-3 Sea Kings, the White House has tasked Lockheed Martin with a dramatic, $6.1-billion makeover of Marine One, the presidential helicopter, starting this summer. The goal: to fit a mobile Oval Office into the tight quarters of a chopper. The new fleet will consist of 23 VH-71 aircraft, each of which will have 200 square feet of cabin space, nearly double the Sea King's 116.
Aside from the legroom, the copter will incorporate major upgrades to the old defense and communications systems. Equally important is that the aircraft is flight-proven-the $110-million bird is derived from a European-built AgustaWestland EH101, currently doing military service for Canada and the U.K. Here, an inside look at the revamped Marine One, set to gradually go into service between 2009 and 2014.
Fuselage: Made of high-strength reinforced aluminum alloy, it can withstand crash impacts in excess of 15 Gs.
Engine: The VH-71 can shift from three 3,000-horsepower turboshaft engines to two, whereas the twin-engine Sea King must land if one engine fails.
Rotor: Five flared rotor blades increase the craft's efficiency by up to 30 percent over conventional designs when flying at 150-knot cruising speed.
Defense System: The VH-71s, like the EH101s they are modeled on, will probably feature radar-warning receiv-ers, laser detectors and flare dispensers to deflect anti-aircraft missiles.
Cabin: Measuring eight feet wide and 25 feet long, the cabin will include a lavatory and a galley kitchen. The fold-down stair spares the president from ducking during photogenic entrances and exits.
Communications: More room for communications hardware means the president will have secure and continuous access to all White House and Pentagon computer systems and data streams.
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Bush approval rating hits new low
By Susan Page
USA TODAY
5/8/2006 1:42 PM ET
WASHINGTON - President Bush's approval rating has slumped to 31% in a new USA TODAY/Gallup Poll, the lowest of his presidency and a warning sign for Republicans in the November elections.
The survey of 1,013 adults, taken Friday through Sunday, shows Bush's standing down by 3 percentage points in a single week. His disapproval rating also reached a record: 65%. The margin of error is +/- 3 percentage points.
"It is a challenging political environment," acknowledges Tracey Schmitt, a spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee, "but we are confident that ultimately voters in November will recognize that a Democrat Congress would simply not be equipped to ensure either economic or national security for our nation."
Bush's fall is being fueled by erosion among support from conservatives and Republicans. In the poll, 52% of conservatives and 68% of Republicans approved of the job he is doing. Both are record lows among those groups.
Moderates gave him an approval rating of 28%, liberals of 7%.
"You hear people say he has a hard core that will never desert him, and that has been the case for most of the administration," says Charles Franklin, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin who studies presidential approval ratings. "But for the last few months, we started to see that hard core seriously erode in support."
Only four presidents have scored lower approval ratings since the Gallup Poll began regularly measuring it in the mid-1940s: Harry Truman, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter and the first George Bush. When Nixon, Carter and the elder Bush sank below 35%, they never again registered above 40%.
Truman twice sank into the low 30s and then rose into the 60s, but the third time his rating fell, it stayed below 40% as well.
"Historically it's been pretty devastating to presidents at this level," Franklin says. Even Republican members of Congress are "now so worried about their electoral fortunes in November that he has less leverage with them than he normally would with his own party controlling Congress."
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Moussaoui Asks to Withdraw Guilty Plea
By MICHAEL J. SNIFFEN
Associated Press
May 8, 2006
ALEXANDRIA, Va. - Convicted Sept. 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui says he lied on the witness stand about being involved in the plot and wants to withdraw his guilty plea because he now believes he can get a fair trial from an American jury.
U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema denied Moussaoui's request Monday afternoon, saying the motion was "too late."
In a motion filed Friday but released Monday, Moussaoui said he testified on March 27 that he was supposed to hijack a fifth plane on Sept. 11, 2001, and fly it into the White House "even though I knew that was a complete fabrication."
A federal court jury spared the 37-year-old Frenchman the death penalty last Wednesday. On Thursday, Brinkema gave him six life sentences, to run as two consecutive life terms, in the federal supermax prison at Florence, Colo.
Explaining his latest reversal, Moussaoui said in an affidavit: "I was extremely surprised" by the life sentence.
"I had thought I would be sentenced to death based on the emotions and anger toward me for the deaths on Sept. 11, but after reviewing the jury verdict and reading how the jurors set aside their emotions and disgust for me and focused on the law and the evidence ... I now see that it is possible that I can receive a fair trial even with Americans as jurors."
At sentencing, Brinkema told Moussaoui, "You do not have a right to appeal your convictions, as was explained to you" when he pleaded guilty in April 2005. "You waived that right," she said.
Brinkema said Moussaoui could appeal his sentence but added, "I believe it would be an act of futility."
Moussaoui's court-appointed lawyers told the court that they filed the motion even though a federal rule "prohibits a defendant from withdrawing a guilty plea after imposition of sentence." They did so anyway, they said, because of their "problematic relationship with Moussaoui" and the fact that new lawyers have yet to be appointed to replace them.
The defense lawyers were not immediately available for comment Monday. Brinkema said they would be replaced after they filed any appeal Moussaoui might want.
The motion said Moussaoui told his lawyers Friday that he wanted to withdraw his guilty plea because when he entered it his "understanding of the American legal system was completely flawed."
In an attached three-page affidavit, Moussaoui cited his new opinion of American jurors and wrote that he now believes he has a fair chance "to prove that I did not have any knowledge of and was not a member of the plot to hijack planes and crash them into buildings on Sept. 11, 2001."
"I wish to withdraw my guilty plea and ask the court for a new trial to prove my innocence of the Sept. 11 plot," Moussaoui wrote. "I have never met (lead 9/11 hijacker) Mohammed Atta and, while I may have seen a few of the other hijackers ... (in Afghanistan), I never knew them or anything about their operation."
Explaining his twists and turns, Moussaoui said, "Solitary confinement made me hostile toward everyone, and I began taking extreme positions to fight the system."
Moussaoui said that, coupled with his inability to get a Muslim lawyer, led him to distrust his lawyers when they told him he could be convicted of being an al-Qaida member but acquitted of involvement in 9/11.
Moussaoui wrote that he pleaded guilty because he mistakenly thought the Supreme Court would immediately review his objection to being denied the opportunity to call captured enemy combatant witnesses to buttress his claim of not being involved in the 9/11 plot.
An appeals court agreed with the government that national security would be at risk if captured operatives like 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed testified or were even questioned by Moussaoui's lawyers. Instead, statements taken from their interrogations were read to the jury.
Shaikh Mohammed's statements said Moussaoui was never considered for the 9/11 plot, only a later attack.
Moussaoui shocked the courtroom at his sentencing trial when he recanted his four-year-old claim of having nothing to do with 9/11. When he pleaded guilty in 2005, he had explained that he was to hijack a 747 jetliner and fly it into the White House at some later date if the United States refused to release a radical Egyptian sheik who is serving a life term for terrorist acts in New York.
But when he testified, Moussaoui claimed that the 747 was to be a fifth plane hijacked on Sept. 11 and that Richard Reid, now imprisoned for a December 2001 shoe bombing attempt aboard a trans-Atlantic flight, was to be on his hijacking team.
That testimony revived the government's flagging case in the first part of the sentencing trial.
On April 3, the jury found Moussaoui eligible for the death penalty. It apparently accepted prosecutors' arguments that by withholding information from federal agents who arrested him on Aug. 16, 2001, he bore responsibility for at least one death on 9/11 by preventing the agents from identifying and stopping some hijackers.
Nevertheless, the same jury was unable to unanimously find that Moussaoui, who was in jail on 9/11, deserved execution. Three jurors wrote on the verdict form that they doubted he knew much about the 9/11 plot.
After Moussaoui's testimony, his lawyers made clear in court that they thought he was lying to achieve martyrdom through execution. Prosecutors even stipulated that the government doubted Moussaoui's claim that Reid was part of his team. And the judge told lawyers, out of the jury's hearing, that she doubted his testimony about how much he knew about the 9/11 plot.
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Money, Money, Money
Global stocks hit record, dollar extends slide
By Christina Fincher
Reuters
Mon May 8, 2006
LONDON - World stocks vaulted highs reached during the 2000 tech bubble on Monday while the dollar continued to slide as investors bet the Federal Reserve may be about to end its two-year credit tightening campaign.
The MSCI All Countries World Index, a widely watched gauge of global stocks, hit a record 349.06 -- surpassing the previous peak hit on March 27, 2000.
European shares pushed to a fresh five-year high and Asian shares also advanced, although the yen's strength against the dollar capped gains.
U.S. stock index futures were pointing to a steady open after a strong rally on Friday put the Dow within 200 points of its record intra-day high hit on Jan 14, 2000.
Eric Lonergan, global strategist at brokers Cazenove, said equities were benefiting from a fundamental re-rating against a backdrop of strong global growth.
"As people get more convinced of a global recovery they are inclined to take on more risk," he said.
The FTSEurofirst 300 index of leading European shares was up 0.22 percent at 1,402 points, having earlier hit 1,407.08 -- its highest since July 2001.
Equities have been rallying worldwide since early 2003 on the back of low interest rates and strong economic growth in countries such as the United States, China and India.
DOLLAR SKIDS
The dollar tumbled more than one percent against the yen as robust data out of the world's second largest economy fueled expectations Japanese interest rates could be on the rise just as the Fed considers taking its foot off the monetary brake.
The Fed is widely expected to deliver its 16th consecutive rate rise on Wednesday, lifting U.S. rates to 5 percent, but the market is increasingly confident this will mark a peak in the current cycle.
Data showing land prices in Japan rose in 2005 for the first time in 15 years also supported the yen, providing further proof that deflation is coming to an end.
The dollar took a battering at the end of last week after data showed U.S. businesses added 138,000 jobs in April, well below forecasts for a gain of 200,000.
That cemented expectations that the Fed would soon pause in its tightening cycle and signal as much in its statement on Wednesday.
"With Japan being out over the last couple of days they have perhaps missed out on some of the dollar selling momentum we've seen over recent sessions," said Rabobank currency strategist Jeremy Stretch, adding such selling was now kicking in.
The euro rose to $1.2787, hitting one-year highs for the third day in a row, while the dollar slid below 111.00 yen for the first time in nearly eight months.
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United Air parent's loss widens on fuel costs
By Kyle Peterson
Reuters
Mon May 8, 2006
CHICAGO - UAL Corp., parent of United Airlines, said on Monday its first-quarter loss rose 1.3 percent as the company grappled with record high fuel prices, sending its shares down nearly 8 percent by midday.
But the No. 2 U.S. airline said that, with the inclusion of special reorganization items, it had a $23 billion profit. In past quarters, one-time reorganization items accounted for staggering quarterly losses.
UAL, which exited bankruptcy on February 1, said its loss, excluding the reorganization benefits, for the full quarter widened to $306 million from $302 million a year earlier.
The company did not provide results on a per share basis for the full quarter because it issued fresh shares on Nasdaq when it emerged from bankruptcy. The company reported a loss of $1.95 per share in the two months ended March 31.
Wall Street analysts had a average forecast for a loss of $1.73 per share, according to Reuters Estimates.
UAL shares were down $2.96, or 7.6 percent, at $36.01 in midday trading on Nasdaq.
"The big question mark obviously remains the fuel. This is still a painfully large loss for the quarter," said Chris Lozier, equity analyst at Morningstar.
"Who knows what crude could do? (Rising) ticket prices are helping, but we don't count on those going up much in the short term."
The company said its emergence from bankruptcy resulted in a new reporting entity and that its first-quarter results before February 1 combined with those after February 1 do not necessarily provide comparable data to previous quarters.
The company said that, including primarily noncash reorganization gains, it earned $23 billion in the first quarter. That profit is due to the "discharge of liabilities" as the company exited bankruptcy, UAL said.
The discharge of liabilities relates to unsecured claims arising from the bankruptcy process, such as the termination of the company's defined benefit pension plans and aircraft- related claims.
The airline said its total revenue increased by 14 percent to $4.47 billion. UAL ended the quarter with an unrestricted cash balance of $3.6 billion.
"The improved revenue environment essentially compensated for record high fuel expense," UAL's Chief Financial Officer Jake Brace said in a statement.
The airline industry has suffered under the weight of soaring fuel costs and low-fare competition that makes it hard for carriers to raise ticket prices enough to cover costs.
In the last year, however, major airlines have been more successful in raising fares to offset fuel prices. United initiated fare increases 16 times in the first quarter, but only six of those remained in place.
UAL's fuel price for the first quarter averaged $1.95 per gallon, compared with $1.47 per gallon a year earlier. The airline said it saw about $9 million in benefits from hedging.
UAL expects its mainline fuel price to average $2.15 per gallon in the second quarter and $2.06 per gallon for the full year. The airline currently has no fuel hedges in place for the remainder of 2006.
"The second quarter looks a lot like the first quarter in terms of year-over-year pressure," Brace said on a conference call with analysts.
UAL, which spent more than three years in bankruptcy, slashed its costs by $7 billion in that time and plans to cut costs more. The airline said it aims to cut $400 million starting in 2007 beyond the savings it targeted in the business plan it submitted as part of its bankruptcy emergence.
Those cost savings will come from streamlining operations and corporate functions, UAL said. The airline also plans to reduce marketing and advertising costs.
The airline said it plans to increase its capacity -- or the number of seats it puts up for sale -- by 3 percent to 3.5 percent in the second quarter and by 3 percent to 3.5 percent for the full year.
Those capacity forecasts apply to UAL's mainline operations and those of its regional affiliates.
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Still More Iran
Bush Setting up Attack on Iran
By Marjorie Cohn
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Monday 08 May 2006
Now that the mission - whatever it was - has not been accomplished in Iraq, Bush is setting up a potentially bigger disaster in Iran.
Last month, Seymour Hersh revealed that the US military is making preparations for an attack on Iran. Recent events confirm Hersh's report.
The Bush administration is stepping up the pressure on the Security Council to pass a resolution that the US will use to justify an invasion. John Bolton, the US ambassador to the United Nations, is pushing Council members to vote on a resolution this week.
Hersh wrote, "There is a growing concern among members of the United States military, and in the international community, that President Bush's ultimate goal in the nuclear confrontation with Iran is regime change."
A former defense official who still advises the Bush administration told Hersh that the military planning is grounded in the belief that "a sustained bombing campaign in Iran will humiliate the religious leadership and lead the public to rise up and overthrow the government."
This reasoning is counter-intuitive. Iranians who become the victims of US aggression are much more likely to rally around the Islamic fundamentalist regime in Iran and fight to expel the foreign infidels.
"Air Force planning groups are drawing up lists of targets, and teams of American combat troops have been ordered into Iran, under cover, to collect targeting data and to establish contact with anti-government ethnic-minority groups," Hersh learned from current and former American military and intelligence officials.
One of the military proposals calls for the use of bunker-buster tactical nuclear weapons against underground nuclear sites. That would mean "mushroom clouds, radiation, mass casualties, and contamination over years," a former senior intelligence official informed Hersh.
A Pentagon adviser said the Air Force would strike many hundreds of targets in Iran, 99 percent of which have nothing to do with nuclear proliferation.
It would not just be Iranians who take the hits, the Pentagon adviser told Hersh. "If we go [into Iran]," he said, "the southern half of Iraq will light up like a candle." Our troops in Iraq would be at risk of retaliation from Iran and the Muslim world, according to the Washington Post.
Mohammad Ebrahim Dehghani, an Iranian Revolutionary Guards commander, said Tuesday that in response to an invasion of Iran by the United States, Iran's first target would be Israel.
Once again, Team Bush is whipping the media - and its consumers - into a frenzy of fear, this time against a nuclear Iran.
Two weeks ago, Condoleezza Rice said that Bush administration officials "have to be concerned when there are statements from Iran that Iran would not only like to have this technology but would share it, share technology and expertise." Rice also said, "We can't let this continue."
Never mind that Western nuclear scientists said last month that Iran lacks the skill, material and equipment to fulfill its immediate nuclear ambitions, the New York Times reported.
Once again, a "preventive" war initiated by Bush would violate the United Nations Charter, which forbids the use of armed force against another country unless it poses an imminent threat, or when the Security Council authorizes an attack.
Bush is following the same route he took on the way to regime change in Iraq. He pressured members of the Security Council for a resolution threatening Iraq. The Council passed Resolution 1441. France, Russia and China issued a joint statement specifying, "Resolution 1441 (2002) adopted today by the Security Council excludes any automaticity in the use of force." In other words, the US would have to return to the Council to secure authorization to invade Iraq.
Bush was unable to secure a second resolution from the Council that would authorize an attack on Iraq. So Bush rationalized his invasion by cobbling together Resolution 1441 and two prior Council resolutions from the Gulf War. None of these, separately or collectively, provided a legal basis for Bush's war on Iraq.
A draft Security Council resolution on Iran, which is supported by Britain, France and the US, was circulated on Wednesday. The next day, French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin said, "My conviction is that military action is certainly no solution." Russia and China, the other two permanent members of the Security Council, concur with de Villepin's sentiments.
But, as it did in Iraq, the British government would likely support Bush if he decides to attack Iran.
Tony Blair has signaled his support of a US military strike, warning that ruling out military action would send a "message of weakness" to Iran.
Last month, Britain's then foreign secretary, Jack Straw, branded the idea of a nuclear strike on Iran as "completely nuts." He said military action against Iran was "inconceivable," and warned his Cabinet colleagues that it would be illegal for Britain to support US military action against Iran.
On Friday, Straw was rewarded for his candor with removal from his position as foreign secretary. Both the Independent and the Guardian in London wrote that Straw's "fate was sealed" after an angry call from the White House to Blair. The Independent reported that friends of Straw believe Bush was extremely upset at Straw's comment that the use of nukes against Iran was "nuts."
When asked a few days ago about the possibility of a nuclear strike on Iran, Bush stated unequivocally, "All options are on the table."
The Bush administration is undoubtedly pushing the draft resolution as a step along the way to its unilateral use of armed force against Iran.
The draft states that the Council would be "acting under Chapter VII" of the UN Charter. This means that it would be based on a finding of a threat to international peace and security, would be legally binding, and could be the basis for the later imposition of sanctions or the authorization of force.
Yury Fedotov, the Russian ambassador in London, explained that Russia opposed the Chapter VII reference because it is reminiscent of past resolutions on Iraq and Yugoslavia that led to US-led military action which had not been authorized by the Security Council.
"We have serious doubts sanctions would work," Fedotov said. "[They] could pave the way to a military action. The military option is a nonsense. It's [an] adventure that could threaten international stability in this region and beyond."
Indeed, there is no basis for a finding that Iran poses a threat to international peace and security, according to John Burroughs, Executive Director of the Lawyers' Committee on Nuclear Policy.
Although the International Atomic Energy Agency found Iran to be in non-compliance with some requirements of the non-proliferation and disarmament regime, the IAEA has clearly said there is no evidence that Iran has diverted its declared nuclear materials to weapons.
President Mahmoud Ahmedinajad, who is not necessarily the controlling power in Iran, has engaged in belligerent rhetoric. "This is deplorable," says Burroughs, "but it does not establish a threat to the peace. There has also been belligerent rhetoric coming from Israel and the United States."
Given the stakes, it would seem logical that the Bush administration would pursue a diplomatic solution and avoid another disastrous conflagration in the Middle East.
Hugh Porter reported in Asia Times that even Ahmedinajad is amenable to negotiation. The Iranians, he writes, are willing to compromise on enrichment if they can achieve security guarantees against attack.
But Bush refuses to talk to Iran's leadership. Richard Armitage,deputy secretary of state in Bush's first term, warns that "diplomacy is not simply meant for our friends. It is meant for our enemies."
When he inaugurated Iran into his "axis of evil," Bush defined Iran as our enemy. Sanctions, or an attack, on Iran would hurt the Iranian moderates, whom the US should view as allies.
Moreover, invading Iran may well achieve precisely the opposite of what it portends to do. Joseph Cirincione of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace maintains it would strengthen Iran's resolve to develop nukes. It "is almost certain to accelerate a nuclear bomb program rather than destroy it." Cirincione said, "It's clear to me there's no military solution to the Iran problem."
Bush's threatened aggression against Iran is no more about nuclear weapons than Iraq was about weapons of mass destruction. It is propelled by an agenda of the neo-conservatives and Washington's pro-Israel lobby. The US seeks to control the entire Middle East and its valuable oil deposits by changing Iran's regime, installing a US-friendly government, and building permanent US military bases.
It's deja vu with the 1953 CIA coup that removed the democratically-elected Mossadeq and installed the tyrannical Shah of Iran. After 25 years of tyranny, the Iranian people rose up and removed the Shah from power, replacing him with Ayatollah Khomeini's theocracy. The chickens came home to roost.
Bolton said Saturday, "We are still working to achieve unanimity [in the Security Council] ... but we're prepared to go to a vote without it."
It is time to take the military option against Iran off the table.
Comment: By now the "fact" that the Iranian President Ahmadinejad stated that "Israel should be wiped from the face of the earth" is seared into the minds of every single citizen of "Western" countries - and that's the really strange thing. You see, the Iranian President didn't actually say that Israel should be wiped from the face of the earth, so could someone explain to me how exactly several billion people around the world now believe that he did?
In the speech in question, Ahmadinejad's reference to Israel was by way of a quote from his predecessor Ayatollah Khomeini who said:
"This occupation regime over Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time."
Khomeni was being very specific in referring to the long-term illegal occupation of Palestinian land by the right-wing Zionist administrations that have dominated Israel politics over the years, and that it was this occupation that must "vanish from the page of time", and, frankly, who can blame him? Anyone still in possession of an ounce of compassion and vaguely familiar with the decades-long oppression under which the Palestinian people have lived cannot but agree that the brutal occupation of Palestinian land should be ended.
What concerns me here however is not the many illegalities that define the state of Israel, but rather how the world came to believe something that is entirely untrue. Now, I know this wouldn't exactly be a first - generally speaking what people believe and reality are about 180 degrees from each other - but this particular 'misunderstanding' carries some pretty dire implications, at least for 86 million Iranians. Similarly, can someone clarify for me how most people in the "West" think that Iran will soon have a nuclear bomb to threaten world peace when nuclear experts are unanimous in their verdict that Iran is, at the very least, 10 years from having the ability to build ONE nuclear bomb?
Of course, these questions are rhetorical for the most part; everyone reading this knows very well how such fabrications come to be entrenched in the collective awareness - it's that old conspiracy theory that the mainstream media, far from being independent, is completely subservient to government interests and 'the truth' is essentially what government wants it to be.
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War Whore Rice: Iran Letter Doesn't Resolve Standoff
By ANNE GEARAN
AP Diplomatic Writer
May 9, 2006
NEW YORK - Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice dismissed a letter that Iran's president sent to President Bush on Monday, saying the first direct communication from an Iranian leader in 27 years does not help resolve the standoff over Tehran's disputed nuclear program.
Iran's top nuclear negotiator called the surprise letter a new "diplomatic opening" between the two countries, but Rice said it was not.
"This letter is not the place that one would find an opening to engage on the nuclear issue or anything of the sort," the top U.S. diplomat said in an interview with The Associated Press. "It isn't addressing the issues that we're dealing with in a concrete way."
Rice said the letter from Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was 17 or 18 pages long and covered history, philosophy and religion.
Rice's comments were the most detailed response from the United States to the letter, the first from an Iranian head of state to an American president since the 1979 hostage crisis at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran.
She would not discuss the contents in detail but made clear that the United States would not change its tack on Iran.
"There's nothing in here that would suggest that we're on any different course than we were before we got the letter," Rice said.
The United States has had no diplomatic ties and almost no economic relationship with Iran since the storming of the embassy and the kidnapping of U.S. diplomats.
Rice was using a two-day trip to the United Nations to confer on the international response to Iran, but she said she expected no quick action on sanctions or other measures.
The letter, which was not made public, appeared timed to blunt the U.S. drive for a U.N. Security Council vote this week to restrain the Islamic regime's nuclear ambitions. It was a striking change after the fiery Ahmadinejad's campaign to vilify Washington and its allies as bullies.
Iran contends it has the right to process uranium as fuel in nuclear reactors to generate electricity. The United States, Britain and France are concerned that the program is a cover for making nuclear weapons.
White House press secretary Scott McClellan said Bush had been briefed on the letter, which the White House received Monday through the Swiss Embassy in Tehran. He would not comment on whether it was actually signed by the Iranian president.
"It does not appear to do anything to address the nuclear concerns" of the international community, McClellan told reporters traveling on Air Force One with Bush to Florida.
The Iranian government spokesman who disclosed the communication did not mention the nuclear standoff and said the missive spoke to the larger U.S.-Iranian conflict.
The linchpin to any better understanding between Washington and Tehran, however, would be movement toward a solution of the nuclear issue.
According to government spokesman Gholam-Hossein Elham, the letter proposed "new solutions for getting out of international problems and the current fragile situation of the world."
Elham declined to reveal more, stressing "it is not an open letter." And when he was asked if the letter could lead to direct U.S.-Iranian negotiations, he replied: "For the time being, it's just a letter."
In Turkey, Ali Larijani, Iran's top nuclear negotiator, said the Iranians were looking for a positive response but would be patient.
"Perhaps it could lead to a new diplomatic opening. It needs to be given some time," Larijani said in a television interview. He cautioned that the "tone of the letter is not something like softening."
The United States has publicly sought renewed contact with Iran through its ambassador in Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, who has been authorized to speak to Iranian officials about security in Iraq.
U.S. officials say the talks await selection of a new Iraqi government and were to be limited to Iraqi security issues. Such meetings would provide an opportunity to broaden discussions about the U.S.-Iranian relationship.
Before the Ahmadinejad letter was announced, Bush said he was paying close attention to threats made against
Israel by Ahmadinejad, who has questioned Israel's right to exist and said the country should be wiped off the map.
"I think that it's very important for us to take his words very seriously," Bush told the German newspaper Bild on Friday, according to a transcript released Sunday. "When people speak, it is important that we listen carefully to what they say and take them seriously."
Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki delivered the letter to the Swiss ambassador Monday, ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi told the AP. The Swiss Embassy acts as a U.S. interest section in the Iranian capital.
The letter appeared as the lead item on several Iranian television and radio news shows throughout the day. The official IRNA announced the letter and carried international reaction to it. Iran's only evening daily, the state-owned Ettalaat, carried a large story on its front page under the headline: "Important letter from Ahmadinejad to the American president."
On Tuesday, Ahmadinejad travels to Indonesia, where Foreign Minister Hassan Wirajuda said, "We support nuclear development for peaceful purposes, especially energy, but we consistently object to nuclear weapons proliferation."
The United States is backing efforts by Britain and France to win Security Council approval for a U.N. resolution that would threaten possible further measures if Iran does not suspend uranium enrichment. If taken to sufficient levels, the process can produce fuel for nuclear warheads.
Russia and China, the two other veto-holding members of the Security Council members, oppose sanctions.
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No agreement reached on draft UN resolution on Iran: U.S.
www.chinaview.cn 2006-05-09 13:37:14
NEW YORK, May 8 (Xinhua) -- Foreign ministers of six major powers had reached no agreement on a draft UN resolution to rein in Iran's controversial nuclear ambitions after two hours of intensive discussions on Monday, said an official with the U.S. State Department.
According to the official, who declined to give his name, the ministers did not spend much time discussing the draft resolution proposed by Britain and France, but focused on exchanging views on the strategic approach to Iran's nuclear issue in the future.
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice hosted talks and a dinner for her counterparts from Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the European Union in a bid to find some common ground on their approach to Iran's nuclear issue. The talks and dinners were held at Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York.
The six ministers spent two hours seated on couches in the presidential suite of the hotel, far exceeding the 45 minutes originally planned. They were accompanied by interpreters but no aides for the talks, said the official.
France and Britain, backed by the United States, on Wednesday proposed a new draft resolution to the UN Security Council demanding Iran suspend all enrichment activities immediately or face possible sanctions.
The draft invokes Chapter 7 of the UN Charter, under which the council can resort to economic or diplomatic sanctions, or even military action, to ensure its decisions are implemented.
Russia insists the draft resolution need adjustment. Chinese Ambassador Wang Guangya reiterated that both the UN Security Council and the international community should hold consultations seriously on Iran's nuclear issue to resolve the crisis through better means.
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Beckett cautious on Iran options
Matthew Tempest and agencies
Tuesday May 9, 2006
Margaret Beckett, the new foreign secretary, has stopped short of calling an attack on Iran "inconceivable" in her first public statement on the developing crisis over the state's nuclear ambitions.
Ms Beckett, in New York for talks with the US, France, Germany, Russia and China, said merely that military action was "not discussed, it's not an issue".
That contrasts with Mr Straw's repeated pronouncements that an attack was "inconceivable" and that a nuclear strike against the country rumoured to be an option being considered in Washington was "completely nuts".
Yesterday, in his monthly press conference, the prime minister, Tony Blair, said foreign policy under the new foreign secretary "will not change one iota".
That was in response to continued Westminster speculation that Mr Straw might have been shifted to facilitate a future attack on Iran. Mr Blair has been far less outspoken in ruling out military options.
In New York last night, asked whether she believed a military strike on Iran was inconceivable - the word used repeatedly by Mr Straw - Mrs Beckett said: "No-one has the intention to take military action.
"That was not discussed, it's not an issue.
"What people are concerned to do is to get Iran to recognise the strong view and the clear will of the international community that they should comply with the IEAE (International Atomic Energy Agency) board."
She added: "You're inviting me to tread down the path of talking about military action - I'm not going to do that.
"Everybody expresses their views, their stance, in their own way. The way that I choose to express it is that it's not anybody's intention to take the course of military action.
"That I think is simple and straightforward and clear."
Last night the US dismissed a letter from Iran's leader, president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, apparently offering talks on various global issues, saying it proposed nothing new.
Britain and France, backed by the US, have proposed a formal Security Council resolution demanding that Tehran suspend uranium enrichment, and insist it must be under chapter seven of the UN charter to make it legally binding.
But Russia and China are wary, fearing it could lead to a re-run of the Iraq crisis.
"The discussions we have had this evening, we have not - and this was said explicitly from the beginning - we have not been negotiating texts, we have been discussing basic issues, the background strategy," Mrs Beckett said.
She added that sanctions might be needed to make Iran comply.
"No one wants to apply sanctions if it's not necessary but what everybody wants is to get Iran to recognise that the international community is serious in its insistence that we cannot continue with the assumption that Iran can just continue to flout the will of the international community this way," she said.
Mrs Beckett paid tribute to Mr Straw, saying he had done a "huge amount of detailed and skilled work" on the issue.
"It's my first full day tackling what is a hugely important and difficult issue, which I suppose is characteristic for this portfolio," she said.
Earlier, Mrs Beckett and Dr Rice, who represent the first all-female US-UK foreign minister pairing, got together on their own for the first time to get to know each other.
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Ahmadinejad letter attacks Bush
Tuesday, 9 May 2006, 10:37 GMT 11:37 UK
Details have emerged of the surprise letter written by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to US President George W Bush.
In it, Mr Ahmadinejad criticises the US invasion of Iraq and urges Mr Bush to return to religious principles.
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has dismissed the letter, saying it contained nothing new.
The letter was issued as foreign ministers met in New York for talks on the Iranian nuclear crisis.
But after three hours, the ministers failed to agree on a unified position on how to tackle the problem of Iran's atomic programme.
Iraq 'lies'
The letter - thought to be the first from an Iranian president to a US leader since Iran's 1979 revolution - sparked intense interest, coming at a time of acutely tense relations between Washington and Tehran.
The 18-page document has not yet been made public, but according to leaks, Mr Ahmadinejad spoke of the invasion of Iraq, a US cover-up over the 11 September 2001 attacks, the issue of Israel's right to exist and the role of religion in the world.
"On the pretext of the existence of WMDs [weapons of mass destruction], this great tragedy [the US invasion of Iraq] came to engulf both the peoples of the occupied and the occupying country.
"Lies were told in the Iraqi matter," Reuters news agency quoted the letter as saying. "What was the result? I have no doubt that telling lies is reprehensible in any culture, and you do not like to be lied to," Mr Ahmadinejad is quoted as saying.
The president also questioned the creation of Israel, asking "how can this phenomenon be rationalised or explained?", Reuters reported.
In an apparent allusion to Iran's nuclear programme, Mr Ahmadinejad is quoted by the Associated Press as asking: "Why is it that any technological and scientific achievement reached in the Middle East region is translated into and portrayed as a 'threat to the Zionist [Israel] regime'? Is not scientific R&D [research and development] one of the basic rights of nations?"
In another part of the letter, Mr Ahmadinejad suggests Washington has concealed elements of the truth about the 11 September 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, Reuters reports.
"Why have the various aspects of the attacks been kept secret? Why are we not told who botched their responsibilities?" he asks.
The president ends the letter by appealing to Mr Bush to return to religion.
"We increasingly see that people around the world are flocking towards a main focal point - that is the Almighty God.
"My question for you is, 'Do you not want to join them?'"
Divisions exposed
Washington swiftly dismissed the letter as a ploy, saying it contributed nothing towards helping resolve the stand-off over Iran's nuclear programme.
"This letter is not the place that one would find an opening to engage on the nuclear issue or anything of the sort," Ms Rice told AP.
"It isn't addressing the issues that we're dealing with in a concrete way."
Hours after the letter was sent, Ms Rice held an inconclusive meeting with her UN Security Council counterparts and the German foreign minister on what action to take over Iran.
BBC diplomatic correspondent James Robbins says that far from drawing the key powers at the UN towards agreement on how to confront Iran, the meeting seems to have exposed the scale of division.
The UK's newly-appointed foreign minister, Margaret Beckett, acknowledged the meeting had been important but difficult.
She refused to repeat her predecessor Jack Straw's insistence that military action against Iran was inconceivable.
Mrs Beckett said she preferred to make clear that no-one was discussing military action. This language, our correspondent says, was far more welcome to the Americans.
After the meeting, an unnamed senior US state department official said prospects for an agreement this week on a UN Security Council resolution were "not substantially good".
However, the official said the US was "very satisfied and confident" at this stage.
Germany's Foreign Minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, warned against starting a process which could not be stopped.
"We need to make sure we don't start something we cannot stop and which could get out of control afterwards," Mr Steinmeier was quoted as telling German ZDF television.
Mr Steinmeier said "five or six questions" needed to be resolved before a final resolution could be agreed upon.
Washington has pushed for any resolution to be adopted under the terms of Chapter Seven of the UN Charter.
These are binding on all UN members, but do not automatically lead to sanctions or military action. Further decisions would be needed for such measures.
But China and Russia have resisted such a move, fearing it could lead to a new war.
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Israel: 'Iran can also be wiped off the map'
By NATHAN GUTTMAN AND NEWS AGENCIES
Jerusalem Post
May. 8, 2006 11:41
Vice Premier Shimon Peres said Monday that "the president of Iran should remember that Iran can also be wiped off the map."
"Teheran is making a mockery of the international community's efforts to solve the crisis surrounding Iran's nuclear program," Peres told Reuters, adding that "Iran presents a danger to the entire world, not just to us."
Peres's vehement expressions came the same day that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wrote to US President George W. Bush proposing "new solutions" to their differences in the first letter from an Iranian leader to an American president in 27 years, Iranian government spokesman Gholam-Hossein Elham said Monday.
In the letter, Ahmadinejad proposes "new solutions for getting out of international problems and current fragile situation of the world," Elham said.
Peres did not say who should act against Iran if it continues with its nuclear program, but implied military action should be led by the United States, pointing to the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Israeli officials have indicated that Israel would join any international operation against Iran.
Peres urged China and Russia to join Western efforts to impose sanctions on Iran. The two countries have been reluctant to back such proposals in the UN Security Council. If all world powers are united against Iran, military action can be avoided, Peres said.
"We can prevent all of this threat, without weapons, if there will be unity," Peres said, adding that the Security Council had to act on the matter. "If the crucial moment comes and they are incapable of taking [action] or making a policy...then they endanger their existence as an important world body," he said.
Ahmadinejad's letter may also contain ideas on how to resolve the conflict over Iran's nuclear ambitions. Yet neither Teheran nor Washington provided any information regarding the content of the letter or the proposals it contains.
Iran's top nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani said Monday that the Iranian president's letter to Bush could create a "new diplomatic opening," but also warned that the letter did not reflect a softening in Iran's position.
Larijani refused to give details of the letter's content, but said, "Perhaps it could lead to a new diplomatic opening. It needs to be given some time."
"There is a need to wait before disclosing the content of the letter, let it make its diplomatic way," Larijani said in an interview with Turkey's NTV television.
Larijani added, however, that the "tone of the letter is not something like softening."
He also warned against any US attack against Iran.
"If they have a little bit of a brain, they would not commit such a mistake," he said. "Iran is not Iraq. Iraq was a weak country, it did not have a legitimate government. Iran is a powerful country."
The White House announced late Monday afternoon that the letter of Iranian president Mahmuod Ahmadinejad has arrived. Spokesman Fredrick Jones said that the National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley would be the one in charge of examining the Iranian letter.
It is the first time that an Iranian president has written to his US counterpart since 1979, when the two countries broke relations after Iranian militants stormed the US Embassy and held the occupants hostage for more than a year.
The US sees the letter as no more than an attempt to influence world opinion on the eve of a United Nations Security Council new resolution regarding Iran. John Negroponte, the head of the US intelligence, said Monday that "certainly one of the hypotheses you'd have to examine is whether and in what way the timing of the dispatch of that letter is connected with trying in some manner to influence the debate before the Security Council."
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will discuss the Iranian nuclear project this week with foreign ministers of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany, known as the P5+Germany group.
The US is trying to form a broad coalition which will support a new UN resolution under Chapter 7 of the UN charter that would include the threat of sanctions against Iran if it does not comply with international demands regarding its nuclear project. China and Russia still oppose such a resolution and wish to maintain a non-sanction approach to Iran.
Comment: Did Israel just threaten to nuke another country? Oh, boy... It looks like Bush will have to conquer Israel, too!
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Science and Technology
Electronic smog
By Geoffrey Lean, Environment Editor
The Independent
07 May 2006
Invisible "smog", created by the electricity that powers our civilisation, is giving children cancer, causing miscarriages and suicides and making some people allergic to modern life, new scientific evidence reveals.
The evidence - which is being taken seriously by national and international bodies and authorities - suggests that almost everyone is being exposed to a new form of pollution with countless sources in daily use in every home.
Two official Department of Health reports on the smog are to be presented to ministers next month, and the Health Protection Agency (HPA) has recently held the first meeting of an expert group charged with developing advice to the public on the threat.
The UN's World Health Organisation (WHO) calls the electronic smog "one of the most common and fastest growing environmental influences" and stresses that it "takes seriously" concerns about the health effects. It adds that "everyone in the world" is exposed to it and that "levels will continue to increase as technology advances".
Wiring creates electrical fields, one component of the smog, even when nothing is turned on. And all electrical equipment - from TVs to toasters - give off another one, magnetic fields. The fields rapidly decrease with distance but appliances such as hair dryers and electric shavers, used close to the head, can give high exposures. Electric blankets and clock radios near to beds produce even higher doses because people are exposed to them for many hours while sleeping.
Radio frequency fields - yet another component - are emitted by microwave ovens, TV and radio transmitters, mobile phone masts and phones themselves, also used close to the head.
The WHO says that the smog could interfere with the tiny natural electrical currents that help to drive the human body. Nerves relay signals by transmitting electric impulses, for example, while the use of electrocardiograms testify to the electrical activity of the heart.
Campaigners have long been worried about exposure to fields from lines carried by electric pylons but, until recently, their concerns were dismissed, even ridiculed, by the authorities.
But last year a study by the official National Radiological Protection Board concluded that children living close to the lines are more likely to get leukaemia, and ministers are considering whether to stop any more homes being built near them. The discovery is causing a large-scale reappraisal of the hazards of the smog.
The International Agency for Research on Cancer - part of the WHO and the leading international organisation on the disease - classes the smog as a "possible human carcinogen". And Professor David Carpenter, dean of the School of Public Health at the State University of New York, told The Independent on Sunday last week that it was likely to cause up to 30 per cent of all childhood cancers. A report by the California Health Department concludes that it is also likely to cause adult leukaemia, brain cancers and possibly breast cancer and could be responsible for a 10th of all miscarriages.
Professor Denis Henshaw, professor of human radiation effects at Bristol University, says that "a huge and substantive body of evidence indicates a range of adverse health effects". He estimates that the smog causes some 9,000 cases of depression.
Perhaps strangest of all, there is increasing evidence that the smog causes some people to become allergic to electricity, leading to nausea, pain, dizziness, depression and difficulties in sleeping and concentrating when they use electrical appliances or go near mobile phone masts. Some are so badly affected that they have to change their lifestyles.
While not yet certain how it is caused, both the WHO and the HPA accept that the condition exists, and the UN body estimates that up to three in every 100 people are affected by it.
Case History: 'I felt I was going into meltdown'
Until a year ago, Sarah Dacre reckoned she had a "blessed life". Running her own company, and living in an expensive north London home, the high-earning divorcee described herself as "fab, fit and 40s". Then suddenly the sight in her right eye failed: she first noticed it when she was unable to read an A-Z map. Soon she was getting pains and numbness in her joints. She could not sleep and spent nights "pacing about like a caged lion". Her short-term memory failed and if she took notes to remind her, she would forget she had made them.
The symptoms got worse whenever she was exposed to electricity. She could not use a computer for more than five minutes without becoming nauseous. Even using a telephone landline gave her a buzzing in the ear and made her feel she was "going into meltdown".
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Meteorites carry ancient carbon
Monday, 8 May 2006, 13:09 GMT 14:09 UK
Meteorites that have fallen to Earth contain some of the most primitive stuff of life, a new study has found.
Contrary to popular belief, they are packed with ancient carbon-rich (organic) molecules that were essential for life to get started on Earth.
Until now, it was thought such matter, which was formed before our Solar System came into existence, could only be found in interstellar dust.
The Carnegie Institution of Washington study is reported in Science magazine.
It challenges the notion that the only way we can investigate our molecular origins is to try to collect samples of unaltered cosmic material from space - the driving force behind missions such as Stardust.
Instead, the Carnegie team argues that primitive organic materials - essentially unaltered components of the original building blocks of the Solar System - can be found in the pieces of interplanetary rock and metal that land on our planet.
Organic 'fingerprints'
The US scientists analysed six carbonaceous chondrite meteorites - the oldest type known.
Elephant Moraine meteorite (Science Photo Library)
It was thought meteorites would contain only altered material
Using new techniques, the researchers looked at the relative proportions of different types (isotopes) of nitrogen and hydrogen atoms associated with the meteorites' organic matter.
Their analysis found regions where there was an excess of the heavier forms of these elements - something also found in interstellar dust grains.
It suggested, therefore, that the meteorites contained material that had been largely unaltered since the time when the Solar System was formed from the collapse of a giant cloud of gas and dust called the solar nebula.
"It's amazing that pristine organic molecules associated with these isotopes were able to survive the harsh and tumultuous conditions present in the inner Solar System when the meteorites that contain them came together," said Carnegie researcher Conel Alexander.
"It means that the parent bodies - the comets and asteroids - of these seemingly different types of extraterrestrial material are more similar in origin than previously believed."
Elusive time period
The discovery opens up a new window to study a long-gone era.
"Before, we could only explore minute samples from interplanetary dust particles (IDPs)," said the lead author of the Science paper, Henner Busemann.
"Our discovery now allows us to extract large amounts of this material from meteorites, which are large and contain several percent of carbon, instead of from IDPs, which are on the order of a million, million times less massive."
The scientists believe that further investigation of meteorites may yield enough material to perform experiments that would not be possible with the tiny primitive organic grains from interplanetary dust particles or cometary grains returned by the US space agency's (Nasa) Stardust mission.
Pre-solar origin
UK planetary expert Ian Wright, of the Open University in Milton Keynes, believes we now have the potential to be able to study pre-solar organic molecules in the laboratory.
"That organic molecules in carbonaceous chondrites are, at least in part, pre-solar in origin, is not a new idea," he told the BBC News website.
"What is presented here are data that show that the distribution of isotopic compositions within the organic complex is [highly varied].
"I guess it is possible that we could be looking at the remnants of precursor organic molecules, formed in the interstellar medium before the Solar System even existed, embedded in a complex that formed at a later time (perhaps within the solar nebula itself)."
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Flying robot attack "unstoppable": experts
AFP
May 09, 2006
It may sound like science fiction, but the prospect that suicide bombers and hijackers could be made redundant by flying robots is a real one, according to experts.
The technology for remote-controlled light aircraft is now highly advanced, widely available -- and, experts say, virtually unstoppable.
Models with a wingspan of five metres (16 feet), capable of carrying up to 50 kilograms (110 pounds), remain undetectable by radar.
And thanks to satellite positioning systems, they can now be programmed to hit targets some distance away with just a few metres (yards) short of pinpoint accuracy.
Security services the world over have been considering the problem for several years, but no one has yet come up with a solution.
"We are observing an increasing threat from such things as remote-controlled aircraft used as small flying bombs against soft targets," the head of the Canadian secret services, Michel Gauthier, said at a conference in Calgary recently.
According to Gauthier, "ultra-light aircraft, powered hang gliders or powered paragliders have also been purchased by terrorist groups to circumvent ground-based countermeasures."
On May 1 the US website Defensetech published an article by military technology specialist David Hambling, entitled "Terrorists' unmanned air force".
"While billions have been spent on ballistic missile defense, little attention has been given to the more imminent threat posed by unmanned air vehicles in the hands of terrorists or rogue states," writes Hambling.
Armed militant groups have already tried to use unmanned aircraft, according to a number of studies by institutions including the Center for Nonproliferation studies in Monterey, California, and the Center for Arms Control, Energy and Environmental Studies in Moscow.
In August 2002, for example, the Colombian military reported finding nine small remote-controlled planes at a base it had taken from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).
On April 11, 2005 the Lebanese Shiite militia group, Hezbollah, flew a pilotless drone over Israeli territory, on what it called a "surveillance" mission. The Israeli military confirmed this and responded by flying warplanes over southern Lebanon.
Remote-control planes are not hard to get hold of, according to Jean-Christian Delessert, who runs a specialist model airplane shop near Geneva.
"Putting together a large-scale model is not difficult -- all you need is a few materials and a decent electronics technician," says Delessert.
In his view, "if terrorists get hold of that, it will be impossible to do anything about it. We did some tests with a friend who works at a military radar base: they never detected us... if the radar picks anything up, it thinks it is a flock of birds and automatically wipes it."
Japanese company Yamaha, meanwhile, has produced 95-kilogram (209-pound) robot helicopter that is 3.6 metres (11.8 feet) long and has a 256 cc engine.
It flies close to the ground at about 20 kilometres per hour (12 miles per hour), nothing but an incredible stroke of luck could stop it if it suddenly appeared in the sky above the White House -- and it is already on the market.
Bruce Simpson, an engineer from New Zealand, managed to produce an even more dangerous contraption in his own garage: a mini-cruise missile. He made it out of readily available materials at a cost of less than 5,000 dollars (4,000 euros).
According to Simpson's website, the New Zealand authorities forced him to shut down the project -- though only once he had already finished making the missile -- under pressure from the United States.
Eugene Miasnikov of the Center for Arms Control, Energy and Environmental Studies in Moscow said these kinds of threats must be taken more seriously.
"To many people UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) may seem too exotic, demanding substantial efforts and cost compared with the methods terrorists frequently use," he said. "But science and technology is developing so fast that we often fail to recognise how much the world has changed."
Comment: Well, gosh - if the technology for remote-controlled light aircraft is widely available, how hard would it be for, say, a certain North American government and the infamous intelligence agency of another Middle Eastern nation to remotely pilot an "airliner" mockup into the Pentagon, for example?
In any case, one thing is certain: the Bush administration is going to get all the mileage it can from its increasingly large fleet of drones for spying on the US populace. Not only will everyone be afraid of Big Brother, but they will also be wondering if that drone buzzing above their house is instead a terrorist weapon being remotely controlled by Osama from a cave in Afghanistan.
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Ark's Quantum Quirks
Ark
Signs of the Times
May 9, 2006
Modern Samurai
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Odds 'n Ends
Pooh Bear unveils 80th birthday portrait
Daily Mail
8th May 2006
Winnie the Pooh has joined the Queen in having an 80th birthday portrait.
Jane Bown, who photographed the monarch earlier this year in celebration of her 80th, was given exclusive access to Britain's beloved bear at Hundred Acre Wood in Sussex.
Ms Bown, a distinguished octogenarian herself whose previous subjects have included Sir Mick Jagger, John Lennon, Muhammad Ali and Samuel Beckett, said: "It was a happy experience and I was totally enchanted by him."
Pooh has been invited to attend the Children's Party at Buckingham Palace on Sunday June 25 to honour the Queen's birthday with the biggest celebration of British children's literature.
The first book featuring AA Milne's famous character was published in October 1926. Hundred Acre Wood is based on Ashdown Forest, which was near the author's country home Cotchford Farm.
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Jharkhand women battle witch killing scourge
2006/5/8 7:19:58
Ranchi: Ramani Devi was badly tortured after being branded a witch. But despite the scars in her body, the survivor is fighting back for hundreds of vulnerable women.
Ramani Devi, 45, is leading a programme all over Jharkhand through 'Nukkad Nataks' (street plays) to raise awareness about the practice and thus save many others who might meet a fate worse than her own.
"I simply do not want repetition of what I had to face. It is all because of superstitious beliefs and nothing else," says Ramani.
Recalling the trauma she faced, Ramani narrates: "I was tortured and forced to eat human excreta just because I was branded a witch by the ojhas (witch doctors)."
Today Ramani is not alone in the fight.
Vaisakhi, another survivor, says: "It is a blot on our society. We have to face such inhuman torture even in this 21st century. It is a shame that when women have reached space, we are subjected to such horror."
Vaisakhi, in her 50s, had also been brutally beaten up by a villager, who branded her a witch.
There are scores of women who have been branded witch by villagers and tortured. Many were killed, sometimes by beheading or dismembering their limbs.
Many like Ramani Devi are forced to drink urine or consume human excreta. Some are ostracised and thrown out of their villages.
"When these women tell the gory acts and inhuman things they were subjected to, people can feel it. They succeed in pulling a good number of crowds," says Vasvi, a social worker engaged with Free Legal Aid Committee (FLAC), an NGO that organises the street plays and works to spread awareness against witch killings.
"Witch killing follows a rising graph if we look at the figures," says Ajoy Kumar, director of FLAC.
"In 1991-2000, a total of 522 people, mostly women, were killed after they were branded witches. We don't have the exact figure of killing since then," Kumar says.
According to the crime branch of the Jharkhand police, however, 190 witch killings were reported in the past five years. "Only an awareness programme can curb it," says Kumar.
The street plays try to create awareness at different levels. It first tries to inform people about the reality and scientific aspects of witchcraft.
It also tries to educate the people about legal aspects and how courts could punish the perpetrators.
The Prevention of Witch Practices Act was formulated in 1999 to curb the menace, but in most of the cases the witch doctors went scot-free.
"The arrested people rarely name the witch doctors fearing their wrath," says a police official with the Criminal Investigation Department. "Even the conviction rate is a low 15 percent."
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Tests 'damaging pupil confidence'
Monday, 8 May 2006, 22:58 GMT 23:58 UK
The "over-testing" of England's pupils is "damaging the confidence" of less able children, a teaching union said.
The Association of Teachers and Lecturers said staff had to "teach to the test, against their professional judgement" to prevent this.
But its study of 50 schools found that national literacy and numeracy strategies, introduced in the late 1990s, had raised standards.
The government said tests were "integral" to improving education.
'Taken away'
The ATL, which conducted 188 interviews with school staff, said teachers were complaining that testing of seven, 11 and 14-year-olds had "gone too far".
Its report - Coming Full Circle - said: "Increasingly the performance of teachers was being judged according to their ability to enable pupils to meet attainment targets."
Recent government initiatives have stressed the need for more "creativity" in the classroom.
But ATL general secretary Mary Bousted said reforms were "putting back into teaching what had been taken away by the imposition of narrow and prescriptive literacy and numeracy strategies".
The survey, which compared teachers' views of the regimes operating in schools in 1992-94 and 2003-05, said there had been a "dramatic increase in whole-class teaching" since Labour's 1997 election victory.
Meanwhile, the curriculum had moved from "activity-based" and "topic-centred" to a "subject-centred" one.
Children were more likely to sit in rows - rather than grouped around tables - than previously.
'Broad skills'
However, the changes to learning had "generally" been viewed positively, although the extra paperwork involved was regarded "very negatively".
The ATL, Britain's third-biggest teaching union, wants tests for under-16s to be abolished.
It says the national curriculum should be cut, to give children "entitlements" to broad skills, such as creativity and physical co-ordination, rather than specific knowledge.
A Department for Education and Skills spokesman said: "National tests are an integral part of effective teaching and learning, helping to identify pupils that need extra support as well as those with talents that need to be stretched.
"Children sit just three sets of national curriculum tests during their 11 years at school. Teachers are well accustomed to ensuring that their children know what to expect and can cope well with the tests."
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UFO study finds no sign of aliens
By Mark Simpson
BBC News
Sunday, 7 May 2006
A confidential Ministry of Defence report on Unidentified Flying Objects has concluded that there is no proof of alien life forms.
In spite of the secrecy surrounding the UFO study, it seems citizens of planet Earth have little to worry about.
The report, which was completed in 2000 and stamped "Secret: UK Eyes Only", has been made public for the first time.
Only a small number of copies were produced and the identity of the man who wrote it has been protected.
His findings were only made public thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, after a request by Sheffield Hallam University academic Dr David Clarke.
The four-year study - entitled Unidentified Aerial Phenomena in the UK - tackles the long-running question by UFO-spotters: "Is anyone out there?"
The answer, it seems, is "no".
The 400-page report puts it like this: "No evidence exists to suggest that the phenomena seen are hostile or under any type of control, other than that of natural physical forces."
It adds: "There is no evidence that 'solid' objects exist which could cause a collision hazard."
So if there are no such things as little green men in spaceships or flying saucers, why have so many people reported seeing them?
Well, here is the science bit.
"Evidence suggests that meteors and their well-known effects and, possibly some other less-known effects are responsible for some unidentified aerial phenomena," concludes the report.
Unidentified Flying Object Meteors may have been responsible for some UFO sightings "Considerable evidence exists to support the thesis that the events are almost certainly attributable to physical, electrical and magnetic phenomena in the atmosphere, mesosphere and ionosphere.
"They appear to originate due to more than one set of weather and electrically charged conditions, and are observed so infrequently as to make them unique to the majority of observers."
People who claim to have had a "close encounter" are often difficult to persuade that they did not really see what they thought they saw. The report offers a possible medical explanation.
"The close proximity of plasma related fields can adversely affect a vehicle or person," states the report.
"Local fields of this type have been medically proven to cause responses in the temporal lobes of the human brain. These result in the observer sustaining (and later describing and retaining) his or her own vivid, but mainly incorrect, description of what is experienced."
There are, of course, other causes of UFOs - aeroplanes with particularly bright lights, stray odd-shaped balloons and strange flocks of birds, to name but a few.
The report admits its findings will not persuade everyone
Yet, it will be difficult to convince everyone that there is a rational explanation for all mysterious movements in the sky.
Some UFO-spotters believe governments will always cover up the truth about UFOs, because they are afraid of admitting that there is something beyond their control.
It is not clear how much time and effort the MoD has spent looking at the skies in recent years, but it appears there are no plans for an in-depth UFO report like the one written in 2000.
A MoD spokesperson said: "Both this study and the original "Flying Saucer Working Party" [already in public domain in the national Archives] concluded that there is insufficient evidence to indicate the presence of any genuine unidentified aerial phenomena.
"It is unlikely that we would carry out any future studies unless such evidence were to emerge."
Comment: Why would a report debunking UFOs be classified as top secret? After all, if there are no UFOs, then there is no secret to hide.
The "scientific" explanation given for UFO sightings is rather interesting, however. If local "plasma-related fields" can have an effect on the temporal lobes of the human brain and cause people to see things that aren't there, don't you think governments and/or intelligence agencies around the world would be scrambling to put this "medically proven" effect to good use? In other words, the declassified report attempts to debunk the UFO phenomenon, but gives a nice boost to the idea that mind control at a distance is very possible and very real. See our podcast Mind Programming for Dummies for more information.
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