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The Quantum Future Group 2006 Agenda is now available. Our critics say we have an agenda. Now you can have our agenda, too! This leatherbound pocket agenda includes a handy notepad as well as a double-page weekly view of all of the important events you need to remember. Moreover, it's in French, a subtle way to show your disapproval of the Bush Reich. Planning a trip to Europe next summer to scout out a safe haven for the future? An easy-to-use chart includes distances between major European cities. The Quantum Future Group 2006 Agenda will be available for a limited time for any donation of 20.06 euros (US$24.00 approximately). Get in on the agenda! Click here now to support the Quantum Future Group! Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! The Quantum Future Group Comment: Supplies are very limited - once they are gone, they are gone!

Scandals: Six 'conspiratorial' and six not By Mary Maxwell, Ph.D. Online Journal Contributing Writer Dec 28, 2005 Six of the scandals about the US government that are currently making the rounds of the Internet are simply breathtaking. No one has ever heard of a democratic government being so bold in harming its own people, and thus there is an automatic reluctance (or refusal) to accept these. Here's a list of horrible things that 'they' are doing to us: 1. They damage the environment, virtually for the fun of it, by causing earthquakes, hurricanes, and forest fires. 2. They instill fear and panic by actually carrying out a terrorist incident, such as the Oklahoma City bombing and the 9/11 attacks. 3. They kill off potential leaders such as Sen. Paul Wellstone who died in a plane crash (Note: bumping someone off used to mean shooting them or arranging a car accident, nowadays it can include giving them cancer, heart attack, or infections). 4. They deliberately destabilize society, both by planting drugs among young people and by imprisoning millions, which breaks up families. 5. They outright attack us with biological or chemical weapons for example, it is said that about 50 percent of the American soldiers who went to the Gulf in 1991 are very ill from an intentionally harmful vaccination that was supposedly to protect them against anthrax. 6. They disrupt normal communication and thought via a barrage of lies, hoaxes, and disinformation. Six Old-Fashioned Types of Scandals I shall analyze the above conspiracy-type scandals in a moment, but for now please look at a different sort of six scandals. These old-fashioned ones have been considered normal over many generations and are unlikely to make us feel overwhelmed. Three of the most common kinds of scandal in democratic nations are related to voting, money, and sex. Another three involve aggrieved citizens (rather than naughty politicians) given that the strong arm of the state can be cruel, and the benefits of the state can be handed out inequitably. Thus: 1. Elections are rigged whether by miscounts, by concealed funding, or by last minute smearing of one's opponent. 2. With huge resources just waiting to be abused, financial scandals tend to take the form of bribes, hush money, and padded expense accounts. 3. In the old days, marital infidelity was itself sufficient enough to bring down a leader; today, something more imaginative may be required. 4. Brutality is often reported where police or prison guards assault or humiliate those in their custody. 5. Medical experiments may be carried out on a captive group, such as mentally retarded children or ghetto dwellers. 6. Since favoritism is not allowed in meritocracies, nepotism is the subject of many scandals. One person receiving an undeserved favor means another is overlooked. A glance through newspapers over the years will show that these six types of scandal are ever recurring, and by now they barely evoke a yawn. Human nature assures us that there will always be competition for office, desire for money and sex, and an urge to mistreat underlings when there are no observers present. And which of us hasn't tried to get a summer job for a nephew? A New Analysis of the Conspiratorial Scandals By contrast, the six conspiratorial-type scandals evoke much more than a yawn. In those people who are receptive to the ideas at all, they induce shock. In most, of course, they induce disbelief. Can the head of our own armed forces have played a game in the air to let skyscrapers topple over on the people of New York? "Of course not!" "Don't be absurd!" Reviewing the six conspiratorial scandals again, note that human nature cannot be the explanation. Human nature does not predict that an elected government would wreck the human habitat, terrorize the population, kill off potential leaders, destabilize society by furnishing drugs and dislocating families, spread disease, and disrupt rational thought. But wait! I think I do detect human nature at work here. Those six things are ones that a nation does to its enemies, and it does so without shame or inhibition. After all, when you're out to defeat the other population, you may as well go about it in a comprehensive manner. I'll grant that international law forbids it, but it is nevertheless standard practice on the part of certain nations, including our own. For example, we used the scorched earth policy in Vietnam (having tried it out earlier in Guatemala); we boasted of our terrorizing intent via the 'shock and awe' display in Baghdad; and we have 'dispatched' many leaders such as Mossadegh in Iran and Allende in Chile, and we are openly contemplating the fate of Chavez in Venezuela. With the other three items, also, British examples will show that human nature does predict certain behaviors when we deal with enemies. The British used opium in China to ruin that society during the Opium Wars; it gave disease-ridden blankets to indigenous people during the French and Indian War in Canada, and during WWII it beamed radio programs into Germany (in the German language, natürlich) laced with disinformation. None of us in the Anglo-American world fell into a state of disbelief upon hearing these things. We are hard-wired to feel no sympathy for the enemy and indeed rarely credit the enemy with being human. We are also hard-wired to rejoice with our fellow warriors when we have 'bloodied the bastards to bits.' Excuse Me, Who's the Enemy Here? So then, if it is perfectly believable to envision a group harming its enemy, do we Americans today need to merely to relabel the people of the United States as an enemy in the eyes of their government? Would that solve the problem of the unbelievability of the six conspiratorial scandals? Indeed it would. Say what? American people as the enemy of the US government? Isn't that so patently false that we must discard it without further consideration? Not necessarily. The hidden clue could lie in the fact that members of the US government may owe their allegiance to a nation other than the USA. And what might that nation be? I'm not thinking of a particular territorial state, such as Israel (although the US government is too obeisant to Israel). I am thinking of that supra-nation called Globalia or Club Med or whatever we name the hangout of the high-class people. Many of the members of this supra-nation happen to be American; many are not. So as not to name names, let's call any three of these persons A, B, and C. Now why would A, B, and C want to disrupt American society, terrorize the people, or harm the habitat? As noted above, when you're out to defeat an enemy, you might as well do it comprehensively. But why in the world would A, B, and C have an interest in defeating the American people? I believe the answer is simply because we are their competitors. They want their will to prevail, but so long as we citizens have rights and ambitions, they cannot be assured of smooth sailing. But isn't it absolutely wild to propose that they might do horrible things to us when in the course of a week or a month they deal with us as neighbors, alumni, or even friends? My answer is that the human brain is so able to switch off its altruism when it encounters 'enemy people' that it should be no problem. My guess is that they are able to do horrible things. Of the six conspiratorial scandals mentioned at the beginning, it is perfectly believable that our government is guilty of two of them: it disrupts normal communication via a barrage of lies and it destabilizes families and society through many of its policies. Does it also do the other four? If it does, then I claim that my human nature analysis must be taken seriously. We must acknowledge that the US government has adopted the position of 'enemy of the American people' and is acting accordingly. The four scandals that you would have to accept as real are government participation in 9/11; the killing of Paul Wellstone; the deliberate use of a harmful anthrax vaccine on soldiers; and environmental devastation. Mary Maxwell, Ph.D. P.O. Box 4307, Ann Arbor, MI, USA 48106, is a political scientist. She can be emailed as 'mary' at her website: marymaxwell.us She hereby permits anyone to copy or distribute this article as long as it remains unaltered and contains this notice. Comment: As Mary sez "If it is perfectly believable to envision a group harming its enemy, do we Americans today need to merely relabel the people of the United States as an enemy in the eyes of their government? Would that solve the problem of the unbelievability of the six conspiratorial scandals? Indeed it would." Amen, sister!

A Ten-Step Program Jane Smiley Sat Dec 17,2005 Is Bush in a bubble? Is Bush a dry drunk? Is Bush a drunk drunk? Is Bush a narcissist? Is Bush an idiot? Is Bush a madman? Does Bush have an “Authority Problem”? Theories abound about why Bush does the things he does, but most of them assume that he is making mistakes that he could or would correct if he understood how misguided he was. On Monday, there was an editorial in the New York Times lamenting the apparent indifference of the Bush administration to the rebuilding of New Orleans, the levees in particular. On Tuesday, there was another editorial, excoriating the shameful behavior of the Bush negotiators at the Montreal conference on global warming. The gist of both editorials was that without national leadership, two chances are about to be lost--the chance to rebuild the city of New Orleans and the chance to mitigate the effects of global warming. Then at the end of the week, we learned that Bush has been wiretapping the phones of his own citizens--an impeachable offense. The Times writes as if it is possible still to alter the direction of Bush administration policy, but obviously it is not. The Bushies have a pattern and they stick to it in spite of every apparent reason to change course. It’s not as if we don’t know what pattern it is, and it’s not as if they haven’t advertised what the pattern will be--it is to break down the government so completely that it can’t be put back together again. Let’s take a look at the “mistakes” the Bush administration is said to have made, and, instead, ask ourselves if they are actually realized intentions: 1. Hobbling the government with debt by combining an expensive, prolonged war with perennial rounds of tax cuts. 2. Destroying the bureaucracy by making it impossible for neutral, expert, or objective bureaucrats to keep their jobs, replacing them with incompetents. 3. Destroying the integrity of the election system, state by state, beginning with Florida and Ohio. 4: Defanging the media by paying fake reporters, co-opting members of the MSM (why did the New York Times refrain from publishing stories unfavorable to the Bush administration before the 2004 election?) and allowing (or encouraging) huge mergers and the buying up of independent media operations by known conservative media conglomerates. 5. Destroying the middle class by changing the bankruptcy laws and the tax laws. 6. Destroying the National Guard and the Army by deploying them over and over in a futile war, while at the same time failing to provide them with armor and equipment. 7. Precipitating Iraq into a civil war by invading it. 8. Accelerating the effects of global warming by putting roadblocks in the way of mitigating its effects. 9. Denying healthcare and prescription medication to an increasing number of Americans, most specifically by ramming the prescription drug legislation through Congress, but also by manipulating Medicare and Medicaid so that fewer and fewer citizens are covered. 10. Encouraging the people in the rest of the world to associate the US with torture, military incursion, and fear, by a preemptive attack on a sovereign nation, by vociferously maintaining the right of the US to do whatever it wants whenever it wants, and by refusing to accept international laws. Or, to put it another way, the Bush administration apparently wishes for and is working toward a chaotic Iraq, a corrupt American election structure with openly corrupt influence-peddlers like Delay and Abramoff in charge of policy, a world in which people suffer and die from weather-related catastrophes, a two-tiered economic structure in the US (with most people in the lower tier), and the isolation of the US as a rogue state from the other nations of the world. How else are we going to interpret the satisfaction the President continually expresses in the results of his policies so far? As an example, when Bush said, “Heckuva job, Brownie”, outsiders generally assumed he was making a mistake--that he didn’t know what a bad job Brownie was doing. But let’s say that he knew perfectly well that Brownie had abandoned new Orleans to the forces of nature, and that THAT was the essence of the heckuva job he was doing. In the same way, many people assume that the administration is embarrassed that the extent of the American rendition gulag or the techniques of torture used at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo have gotten into the news along with the use of white phosphorus in Falluja, as if torture and rendition and white phosphorus were something that Bush does not want to do. But let’s say that torture and rendition are something that the Bush administration is happy to do, and doesn’t mind others knowing about. Likewise, many observers, let’s say Jack Murtha, for one, assume that the president does not want to destroy the army. But if the army is destroyed, then the services that the army provides at a relatively moderate expense to the taxpayer can be farmed out to companies like Halliburton. Let’s say that Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Bush have cast their lot not with the draft, or even the volunteer army, but with the mercenary army, which is more profitable, less subject to Congressional and public oversight, and, really, the appropriate army for a rogue state. And, with a mercenary army, there is no problem when a fallen soldier is sent home as a piece of freight. It is only citizen-soldiers who make the ultimate sacrifice out of patriotism. When we get rid of citizen soldiers, then we don’t have to respect them. When Grover Norquist said he wanted to strangle the shrunken government in the bathtub, he was not kidding. He meant that the taxpayers and and voters would not be able to look to the government for any services whatsoever, but also that they would not have any control over the government does. The drowned and strangled government, having ceased to exist, would not only offer no benefits to citizens, it would offer no obstacle to those who wished to break the laws (for example against internal spying), because there would be no law to break. It is for this reason that the Bush administration pays absolutely no attention to the polls--they have already discounted the preferences of the citizens. When the government has been shrunk to nothing and drowned in the bathtub, the citizenry will be entirely powerless--that is the real goal, not an unintended consequence. Norquist and his fellow theorists understand perfectly that in a modern democracy, there are two competing modes of voting: there is “one person, one vote” and there is “one dollar, one vote”. They not only prefer “one dollar, one vote”, they want to entirely get rid of “one person, one vote”. The outcome of such policies will be a dictatorship or a tyranny. Such policies cannot be reconciled with the US as we know it, or with the vision of the Founding Fathers. It is true that rogue elements have stolen elections before, as the slave interest stole the election in Kansas in 1856 by openly ferrying fraudulent voters across the river from Missouri, and then bullying the Congress into certifying the election in spite of plenty of evidence that the election was corrupt. It is also true that the public has been fed lies in the past so that they would support a questionable war (remember the Maine!). Corrupt administrations probably outnumber clean ones in US history. But the ten "successes" I cite above come together to present, I think, the greatest threat to the US since the Civil War. The US is not like much of the rest of the world: France has always been France, and England has been England for many centuries, and Russia defined itself during the reign of Ivan the Terrible as Russia in contrast to the Tartars and Europe. Chinese history is, supposedly, the longest continual history of any people in the world, but the US is based on an abstraction--a certain set of ideas that divide up and share out power so that it does not become concentrated in the hands of a single tyrannical entity, either party or person. We are expected to participate as citizens in our government at the local, state, and national level, and our government has been expected, from the beginning, to be a shared enterprise, not an engine of power and wealth for a single oligarchic group. Our government was devised as a set of ideas about how to avoid kings, aristocracies, and tyrannies. If it fails at that, or is manipulated into producing tyranny, then we are no longer living in the US, we are living in a no man’s land, without an actual identity. This set of ideas, political techniques, and beliefs that holds together immigrants from every continent and every culture. I began considering the possibility that what we see around us might indeed constitute success, as far as the Bushies are concerned, when I read in a post by Karen Kwiatkowski that three witnesses had confirmed that Bush referred to the Constitution as a "just a god damned piece of paper." Then there was the article in The Guardian in which six American pundits were invited to reflect upon the meaning of the last five years of the Bush administration. Two commentators said interesting things. Howell Raines pointed out that four generations of Bushes and Walkers (since 1850) have shown a willingness to do anything for money and power, but no interest of any kind in the common good. R. Emmett Tyrell implied more than he stated when he maintained that the anger that people like me feel toward Bush is mere psychological projection, expressing "the need of the passing Old Order to have enemies." What was striking in Tyrell’s section is his assumption that the Old Order (legal elections, citizen soldiers, healthy middle class, commonly agreed upon morality, laws, and regulations, useful beaurocracy) IS passing. He must know something I don’t know, because I had been thinking the country we used to have was still salvageable. In addition to these signs, though, we have several others, among them the fact that Bush and Cheney attempt to communicate only with their base (and remember, in “Farenheit 911”, Bush told a group of wealthy contributors that they WERE his base). Their base is fairly small and getting smaller, but they seem to have no desire, even when campaigning, to enlarge their base. It’s as if they know that the voters don’t matter, and, of course, according to the president of the Diebold Company, the voters don’t matter (see Avi Rubin’s post about voting machine certifcation). In the face of the administration’s successes, it seems that it is the responsibility of the Democrats to save the republic, and to prevent the government from being shrunken and drowned, but they have been very lax about stepping up to the plate. With the nation beginning to wake up to the injustice and futility of bringing chaos to the Middle East, the most prominent Democrats choose to distance themselves from the citizens and to link themselves more tightly to the administration. Hillary Clinton, for example, refuses to denounce the war and takes up the issue of flag burning! John Kerry refuses to confront the probability that his honor was besmirched and his own election was stolen. The DNC takes the time to denounce the peace movement, even though the peace movement was right about the futility of the war. Bill Clinton seems to be of two minds. He’s willing to speak out about global warming, which is a plus, but every time he takes a stand about any other issue, he soon backpedals. How to understand this? Democrats outside of Washington widely infer that Democrats in Washington are simply cowardly or deluded, but it is also a possibility that they are in on the shift from what Tyrell calls the "Old Order" (democracy) to the "New Order" (what shall we call that?). We normally think of American political thought running along a single continuum, from right to left, from, let’s say from the Ku Klux Klan to the American Communist Party. Most Americans fall in the middle. Moderate Republicans live next door to moderate Democrats, and the way moderation expresses itself shifts, and is expected to shift, from region to region. In an ethnically diverse country where ideas, and ideology, are important, Americans generally understand, almost without realizing it, that moderation is what holds things together. But American political thought runs along another continuum, too, not a continuum of ideas but a continuum of power. What differentiates various groups on this continuum from one another is their embrace or rejection of power as a goal in itself. Essentially ideological thought seeks power in order to achieve certain ideas; power-oriented groups use ideas in order to achieve power. In the conservative movement today, this split is evident--old-line conservatives distrust the Bush administration because small government, low debt, and isolationism are about circumscribing the power of government. Bush is about enhancing the power of--well, I almost said government. But any government is essentially a smoothly-operating bureaucracy. Bush is about enhancing the power of himself and his cronies and dismantling any countervailing entity. The Bushies are not shy about acting on their craving for power (as in the K Street Project) or about talking about it-- "Permanent Republican control of the three branches of government." In addition, Bush himself tends to express his desire for power when he’s joking about how it’s easier to be a dictator than a president, or how the Chinese sure know how to treat journalists. The only reason the Bushies are called "conservative", as many conservatives will themselves tell you, is that the theorists of Bushism managed to graft themselves onto the Republican Party in the 1970s and 80s, when the Republican party was the party of disgruntled racists, fundamentalists, workers, and farmers left behind by Civil Rights, feminism, the sexual revolution, the end of the manufacturing sector, and the abandonment of a rural way of life. Many of the neo-cons are former leftist student radicals because when they were student radicals, power was what they wanted. They needed to be converted from one ideology (Marxism) to another (capitalism), but the essential goal--gaining power--remained the same. If we add the power continuum, then, the American political scene starts looking like a coordinate plane. There is the x-axis, from left to right, and the y-axis, from bottom (power dispersing) to top (power consolidating). Institutions and entities that are power dispersing would be the Libertarian Party, the Novel, the blogosphere, and democracy itself. If we plot the Bush administration point, it would be at the top of the y-axis, but not necessarily very far right, in terms of small government, low debt, and isolationism. In fact, it is this apparent moderation in expressed Bush ideas that makes him seem relatively harmless to many Americans. But the ruthless drive for power of Bush and his cronies is really not about ideas, and in fact views ideas as a kind of trash, even, according to witnesses, the ideas expressed in the Constitution. the reason I never support any Bush policy, no matter how “moderate” on the surface is that every Bush policy is designed to enhance thepower of Bush and his cronies. The grab for absolute power must be resisted absolutely. No doubt the Democrats who are in sympathy with the Bush crowd are high on the power axis, too, at least in their own minds. My point is not to psychoanalyze Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld. How they came to think as they do, and how things look to them are not actually very interesting. What is important is that average Americans come to comprehend how dangerous they are, and how destructive their plans are. Do they actually plan to disenfranchise everyone but their reliable base? Well, yes they do. Can they? If they have control of the electronic voting machines, they can. Do they actually plan for their associates and cronies to skim off vast quantities of the taxpayers’ money? Well, yes they do. Big Pharma, Big Oil, Big Ag, and the major war industries already are doing so, and they have taken plenty from the Indian tribes and foreigners, too Do they actually plan to let New Orleans, that blue spot in a red state, slip away? Looks like it. Do they actually plan to destroy the middle class? They are making good progress--poverty was up twelve percent last year, and the “booming economy” is strangely low on job growth, at least for Americans. The catalogue of their “successes”, or, as average Americans might term it, their “failures”, is pretty long. Given the sympathy the Democrats afford them, we can stop them in only a few ways, it seems--by constantly bearing witness to their crimes, and prosecuting them if and when we can, by never underestimating the ruthlessness of their motives and the enormity of their goal, by being immune to their habitual public relations tools: fear, accusations of betrayal, false patriotism, appeals to populist and religious resentments, use of political red herrings like gay marriage. Most important, we must make every effort to oversee and guarantee the credibility of our elections. I also have a philosophical bulletin for the Bush crowd--the “Thousand Year Reich” doesn’t exist, and neither does “permanent Republican control of all three branches of government”, especially if that control is based on stealing elections. Power is the most ephemeral possession of them all because retaining power means exerting ever more control. Control, of course, operates according to the law of diminishing returns. When you threaten and then torture that first guy, it’s shocking and intimidating, not only to the guy himself but to everyone who hears about it. To maintain that level of intimidation, however, requires ever more threats and ever more torture, and pretty soon you have threatened and tortured, and even killed, hundreds (what’s the count on Iraqis who have died in American custody--121?) or thousands of people, and you are actually losing power because the very thing you thought you could toss out the window in your quest for power, namely morality, comes back to haunt you in the form of disgust (the disgust that others feel toward you) and common decency (that quality that others have retained and you have lost). The US has lasted this long, and survived and thrived because of power dispersal, not power consolidation. Which is not to say that the Bushies can’t do a lot of damage--they have and they can. The loss of our moral compass is devastating. The scattering of beaurocratic talent is a huge hidden cost of the Bush plan, as is the destruction of the volunteer army both as a military entity and as a population of young people who have been required to be ruthless themselves and to be ruthlessly preyed upon by the Iraqi insurgency. Our debts to the Chinese are a price we do not yet know the cost of, and our resistance to the idea of global warming might doom us all. Arousing the foot soldiers of the religious right, whipping them up with ideas of “the Rapture”, then arming them with weapons of mass destruction seems on the face of it to be a first class folly. And all for what? Life is short. Reputations are long.

Checks and No Balance: The story is Bush's spying, not the story's messenger by Sydney H. Schanberg December 27th, 2005 The Village Voice The domestic spying controversy is a story of immense importance. President Bush, by secret directive a few months after 9-11, allowed the National Security Agency, restricted by law to monitoring only foreign communications, to carry out a domestic spying program as well. This directive, now uncovered, is the latest clear confirmation that the president has been conferring more power on himself—without any checks or balances by Congress or the judicial system. While previous presidents have at various times claimed the legal right to authorize searches and electronic surveillance without court warrants so as to gather foreign intelligence, those decisions have undergone scrutiny by either courts or congressional hearings. It's fair to say that Bush had no intention of allowing public scrutiny of his act, since he personally summoned the top executives of The New York Times to a private meeting on December 6 and pressured them not to run the story about the domestic spying. The paper had held the story for a year at the administration's pleading but decided, after second thoughts and more reporting, that its importance required publication. It appeared on the Times' front page on Friday, December 16. Some Bush supporters have attacked the Times for running the piece. On the other hand, some journalists have attacked theTimes for holding it for a year. From where I stand (I'm a Times alumnus), the paper should get credit for digging it out and publishing it. But whatever one's journalistic point of view, the Times' decision-making is not the central story here. The president's secret directive is. The president and others in his White House said the leak of his decision to bypass existing law was a serious national security matter and hinted at an investigation. They argued that the existing Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which requires court warrants and does not allow domestic spying by the National Security Agency, was not designed for an era of terrorism. Since 9-11, Bush and his inner circle have insisted vehemently that all of the administration's anti-terrorism acts at home and overseas have been done in accordance with U.S. law and the Constitution. But listen carefully to the president's own earlier statements, keeping in mind that the domestic spying operation has been in effect since early 2002. On April 19, 2004, in Hershey, Pennsylvania, Bush said, speaking of anti-terrorism wiretapping: " . . . Everything you hear about [wiretapping] requires [a] court order, requires there to be permission from a FISA court, for example." Of note: A member of the FISA court just resigned from the 11-member federal panel in protest against Bush's secret domestic-spying program. The Washington Post reported that U.S. District Judge James Robertson sent his resignation letter to Chief Justice John Roberts on December 19. On April 20, 2004, in Buffalo, New York, Bush said: "Any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires—a wiretap requires a court order." He added: "Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so." On December 16, 2005, the day the Times story appeared, the president—interviewed on Jim Lehrer's NewsHour—would not discuss his domestic-spying directive ("We . . . don't talk about ongoing intelligence operations"). "But," he said, "it's important for the American people to understand that we will do—or I will use my powers to protect us, and I will do so under the law." All the president's above statements about observing the court-order requirement and thus acting "under the law" would appear to be false. They are false by the same measure that showed his weapons-of-mass-destruction claims to be false—after he misled the nation into war. And what about the misdirections and untruths the White House has promulgated about secret CIA prisons on foreign soil, or about violations of the Geneva Conventions against torture of prisoners, or about an operational link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, or about blaming the press for alerting Osama bin Laden to U.S. electronic surveillance techniques when the information has been in the public domain for years? The lies—after all, that's what they really are—have become so numerous that reasonable people are beginning to hear echoes of the Nixon presidency and impeachment. Think about all those rosy "trust me" speeches Bush has been delivering. As for his drumbeat claims that he is honoring the Constitution and the nation's laws, then why did a FISA judge resign, and why are his colleagues now demanding intelligence briefings on the president's secret sidestepping of their jurisdiction? Why are moderate Republicans leaving Bush's side over these issues—all of which have their origin in the president's self-expansion of power as he devised the invasion and ongoing war in Iraq? George Bush and his ultra-conservative Republicans didn't invent the art of presidential spinning and hiding of truths and the "modified limited hang-out." We've been lied to before. But this presidency has lifted these arts to new and scary heights. It has effectively sneered at the Founders' basic principle of checks and balances. A few days ago, Vice President Dick Cheney explained the rationale behind the secret domestic spying by saying that Watergate and Vietnam significantly eroded presidential powers and the Bush regime is merely trying to restore them. He actually said that. The words and deeds of these White House residents point to other conclusions. They seem to be reaching for virtually unchecked power—power even to override laws at will in a nation founded on the rule of law. This president promised to restore "honor and integrity" to the White House. And when he was elected to a second term, he said happily and boldly to a press conference: "You asked, do I feel free. Let me put it to you this way. I earned capital in the campaign, political capital—and now I intend to spend it." His bypassing the law, was that what he meant by those promises? Could the president actually have forgotten that in this country, the monarchy was abolished—and any autocracy forbidden—more than two centuries ago?

Unbelievable: Bush's Illegal Spying Could Free the Very Terror Suspects It's Jailed and Hopes to Convict by Andy Ostroy 28 Dec 2005 As reported in the NY Times Wednesday, several captured terror suspects with ties to Al Qaeda are planning to challenge their cases and sue the government claiming the Bush administration used illegal wiretapping in criminal prosecutions that resulted in conviction. The challenges are being mounted in Ohio, Virginia, Florida and Oregon, and including cases involving Iyman Faris, who plotted to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge. At issue is the Busheviks' skirting of the courts and Congress in its post-911 power-grab under the guise of protecting America from the terrorist threat. Since 911, Bush, through the National Security Agency, has authorized some three dozen instances of illegal surveillance of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of U.S. and foreign citizens, both abroad and here at home. In order to have pursued his extreme terrorism and espionage spying, Bush was and is required by law to obtain warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which was established by Congress in 1978 to uphold and protect civil liberties. But Bush has defiantly thumbed his nose at FISC, declaring that his aggressive spying tactics are "fully consistent with my constitutional responsibilities and authorities." "The activities I have authorized make it more likely that killers like these 9/11 hijackers will be identified and located in time," Bush said. "And the activities conducted under this authorization have helped detect and prevent possible terrorist attacks in the United States and abroad." But here's the rub: the very terrorists that sit in U.S. jails right now could be freed if their legal challenges are successful in claiming they've been denied due process and have been victims of illegal wiretapping. Incredulously, the Bushies' flagrant circumvention of the law could result in people like Faris back on the street to plot another NYC catastrophe. All because Bush refused to seek the warrants every legal scholar in America agrees he could've easily, and quickly, obtained. So what we have is an administration run amok. There have been more requests for FISC warrants under Bush than in the last four presidential administrations before him. And most of them have been either amended or denied. So what do the Bushies do as a result? They say, 'screw you, courts, we'll just do whatever we want without you.' One has to seriously question the ultimate motivations and intent of Bush, who willfully circumvented the legal process which he knew would not support his imperialistic pursuits. This is a very serious matter if the president intentionally broke the laws designed to protect U.S. citizens from undue search and seizure, invasion of privacy, and illegal government intrusion. We live in a society based on the rule of law; of checks and balances. In their quest to achieve supreme, unlimited power and create the first totalitarian regime in American history, the Busheviks blatantly disregard these sacred governing principles, and in the process, have actually made our nation less safe and secure, not more. www.OstroyReport.blogspot.com Andy Ostroy, theostroyreport@aol.com, a NYC-based 45-year-old entrepreneur and political commentator, is an aggressive counter to the Bush administration, the Republican Party and the powerful right wing media machine. Our mission is to do whatever possible to help Democrats take back the House and Senate in 2006 and win back the White House in '08. http://www.ostroyreport.blogspot.com/

Rice authorized National Security Agency to spy on UN Security Council in run-up to war, former officials say by Jason Leopold 27 Dec 2005 President Bush and other top officials in his administration used the National Security Agency to secretly wiretap the home and office telephones and monitor private email accounts of members of the United Nations Security Council in early 2003 to determine how foreign delegates would vote on a U.N. resolution that paved the way for the U.S.-led war in Iraq, NSA documents show. Two former NSA officials familiar with the agency's campaign to spy on U.N. members say then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice authorized the plan at the request of President Bush, who wanted to know how delegates were going to vote. Rice did not immediately return a call for comment. The former officials said Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld also participated in discussions about the plan, which involved "stepping up" efforts to eavesdrop on diplomats. A spokeswoman at the White House who refused to give her name also would not comment, and pointed to a March 3, 2003 press briefing by former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer when questions about U.N. spying were first raised. "As a matter of long-standing policy, the administration never comments on anything involving any people involved in intelligence," Fleischer said. "So I'm not saying yes and I'm not saying no." Disclosure of the wiretaps and the monitoring of U.N. members' email came on the eve of the Iraq war in the British-based Observer. The leak -- which the paper acquired in the form of an email via a British translator -- came amid a U.S. push urging U.N. members to vote in favor of a resolution that said Iraq was in violation of U.N. resolution 1441, asserting that it had failed to rid the country of weapons of mass destruction. News of the NSA spying on the U.N. received scant coverage in U.S. newspapers at the time. But with the explosive domestic spying report published in the New York Times last week, a closer examination of pre-war spying may shed light on whether the Bush administration has used the NSA for its own political purposes, as opposed to tracking down communications regarding potential terrorist threats against the U.S. The leaked NSA email detailing the agency's spy tactics against the U.N. was written Jan. 31, 2003 by Chief of Staff for Regional Targets Frank Koza. In the email, Koza asked an undisclosed number of NSA and British intelligence officials to "pay attention to existing non-UN Security Council Member UN-related and domestic comms (home and office telephones) for anything useful related to Security Council deliberations." One intelligence source who spoke to RAW STORY said top White House officials and some Republican members of Congress had debated in December 2002 whether to step up the surveillance of U.N. officials to include eavesdropping on home telephone and personal email accounts. Some feared that in the event it was discovered, it would further erode relations between the U.S. and the U.N. The source added that U.S. spying on the U.N. isn't new. "It's part of the job," the intelligence source said. "Everyone knows it's being done." Eavesdropping on U.N. diplomats is authorized under the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Services Act. However, it's still considered a violation of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, which says that "The receiving state shall permit and protect free communication on the part of the mission for all official purposes... The official correspondence of the mission shall be inviolable." According to one former official, "The administration pushed the envelope by tapping their home phones." Koza's email, a copy of which is included at the end of this report, says the "Agency is mounting a surge particularly directed at the UN Security Council (UNSC) members (minus US and GBR of course) for insights as to how to membership is reacting to the on-going debate RE: Iraq, plans to vote on any related resolutions, what related policies/ negotiating positions they may be considering, alliances/ dependencies, etc." "The whole gamut of information that could give US policymakers an edge in obtaining results favorable to U.S. goals or to head off surprises. In RT, that means a QRC surge effort to revive/ create efforts against UNSC members Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Bulgaria and Guinea, as well as extra focus on Pakistan UN matters." The email was sent out just four days after Blix filed his Iraq weapons report with the U.N. through a top secret surveillance network set up by the NSA, the British Government Communication Headquarters and similar intelligence agencies based in Australia, New Zealand and Canada known as Echelon. It was leaked to a handful of media outlets in the U.S. and U.K. by Katharine Tersea Gun, a former translator for British intelligence. Gun was arrested in November 2003 and charged with violating her country's Official Secrets Act. She said she felt compelled to leak the memo because she believed the U.S. and Britain were about to launch an illegal war. "Any disclosures that may have been made were justified on the following grounds: because they exposed serious illegality and wrongdoing on the part of the U.S. Government who attempted to subvert our own security services and, to prevent wide-scale death and casualties among ordinary Iraqi people and UK forces in the course of an illegal war," she said in a statement at the time. In his book "Plan of Attack," Bob Woodward, deputy managing editor of the Washington Post, said the administration was also spying on Hans Blix, the U.N. weapons inspector sent to Iraq to look for WMDs. "One of the things that's gone unnoticed is national intelligence assets spying on Hans Blix," Woodward told the Council on Foreign Relations on June 9, 2004 "And Bush was getting these reports and felt that there was incongruity between what Blix was saying publicly and what he was actually doing. It makes it very clear we were wiretapping Hans Blix." In an article for Counterpunch, media critic Norman Solomon noted that the U.S. media barely covered the U.N. spying. "Nearly 96 hours after the Observer had reported it, I called Times deputy foreign editor Alison Smale and asked why not," Solomon writes. "'We would normally expect to do our own intelligence reporting,' Smale replied. She added that 'we could get no confirmation or comment.' In other words, U.S. intelligence officials refused to confirm or discuss the memo -- so the Times did not see fit to report on it." The Washington Post printed a 514-word article on a back page with the headline "Spying Report No Shock to U.N," while the Los Angeles Times emphasized from the outset that U.S. spy activities at the United Nations are "long-standing," Solomon wrote. Solomon says his research turned up only one story which took the spying seriously -- a Mar. 4, 2003 piece in the Baltimore Sun. The leaked NSA email which revealed the spying follows. To: [Recipients withheld] From: FRANK KOZA, Def Chief of Staff (Regional Targets) CIV/NSA Sent on Jan 31 2003 0:16 Subject: Reflections of Iraq Debate/Votes at UN-RT Actions Potential for Related Contributions Importance: HIGH Top Secret//COMINT//X1 All, As you've likely heard by now, the Agency is mounting a surge particularly directed at the UN Security Council (UNSC) members (minus US and GBR of course) for insights as to how to membership is reacting to the on-going debate RE: Iraq, plans to vote on any related resolutions, what related policies/ negotiating positions they may be considering, alliances/ dependencies, etc - the whole gamut of information that could give US policymakers an edge in obtaining results favorable to US goals or to head off surprises. In RT, that means a QRC surge effort to revive/ create efforts against UNSC members Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Bulgaria and Guinea, as well as extra focus on Pakistan UN matters. We've also asked ALL RT topi's to emphasize and make sure they pay attention to existing non-UNSC member UN-related and domestic comms for anything useful related to the UNSC deliberations/ debates/ votes. We have a lot of special UN-related diplomatic coverage (various UN delegations) from countries not sitting on the UNSC right now that could contribute related perspectives/ insights/ whatever. We recognize that we can't afford to ignore this possible source. We'd appreciate your support in getting the word to your analysts who might have similar, more in-direct access to valuable information from accesses in your product lines. I suspect that you'll be hearing more along these lines in formal channels - especially as this effort will probably peak (at least for this specific focus) in the middle of next week, following the SecState's presentation to the UNSC. Thanks for your help www.jasonleopold.com Jason Leopold is the author of the explosive memoir, News Junkie, to be released in the spring of 2006 by Process/Feral House Books. Visit Leopold's website at www.jasonleopold.com for updates.

CIA covers prove thin John Crewdson Published December 25, 2005 The CIA's special operations teams that specialize in renditions are drawn from the agency's paramilitary unit, largely composed of former Special Forces personnel, plus career CIA intelligence officers and specialists in surveillance, communications and even behavioral sciences. From Italian and Spanish police reports and court documents, the Tribune was able to identify the names, and in some cases the post office box addresses, used by 67 suspected CIA rendition specialists who registered at hotels in Milan and on the island of Mallorca. Those post office boxes, in turn, led to scores of other names that share the same addresses, most of which are in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Some of the bogus identities appear to be inside jokes, with surnames such as "Grayman" and "Bland," or those of former CIA directors. One of the bogus identities is an apparent homage to Douglas Neidermeyer, the authoritarian ROTC commander in the movie "Animal House" who later is killed by his own troops in Vietnam. A search of commercially available databases reveals no evidence that any of the named individuals ever has had a spouse, a residence, a telephone, a previous address, a mortgage, a credit history or a family. Even though their listed birth dates place them in their 30s, 40s and 50s, none appears to have had a Social Security number before 1998. The CIA requested that the Tribune not publish the names because some are in use abroad. A senior U.S. official acknowledged that while the cover system had served the agency well for many years, it had not been designed to withstand the scrutiny made possible by the Internet. After learning of the extent to which the Tribune had cracked the CIA's cover network, CIA Director Porter Goss ordered sweeping changes in the way the agency's covers are created, according to government sources who asked not to be named.

White House Leaked Classified Intelligence to Make its Case for War by David Swanson 28 Dec 2005 A new report looks into instances in which the Bush Administration leaked classified information to support its case that Iraq was a threat to the United States. While that case was, of course, ridiculous and the information falsified, the leaking of it was illegal. And the leaks appear to have been part of a coordinated effort. Immediately following important leaks, top administration officials appeared on talk shows to discuss information that they could not have legally discussed had it not appeared in a newspaper that morning. Congressman John Conyers has just released an extensive report titled "The Constitution in Crisis: The Downing Street Minutes and Deception, Manipulation, Torture, Retribution, and Cover-ups in the Iraq War." Pages 73 – 81 address the Bush Administration's claims regarding aluminum tubes allegedly acquired by Iraq for the purpose of developing nuclear weapons. On page 78, the report notes: "Our investigation has also found that classified intelligence information supporting the Bush Administration's position regarding the aluminum tubes was leaked to the press. For example, on Sunday, September 8, 2002, the lead story in The New York Times, written by Judith Miller and Michael R. Gordon, quotes 'anonymous' Administration officials as stating that 'Iraq has stepped up its quest for nuclear weapons and has embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb.'" The headline of that article was "U.S. Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts." Conyers' report continues: "The article goes on to source 'administration officials' for the proposition that '[i]n the last 14 months, Iraq has sought to buy thousands of specially designed aluminum tubes, which American officials believe were intended as components of centrifuges to enrich uranium' and that '[t]he diameter, thickness and other technical specifications of the aluminum tubes had persuaded American intelligence experts that they were meant for Iraq's nuclear program.'" So, someone in the Administration was leaking classified information. Of course, it was false information, but that made it all the more damaging. But who was the leaker(s)? According to Conyers' report, "Subsequent media accounts have traced the story, at least in part, to Paul Wolfowitz: "'In the summer of 2002, [Deputy Defense Secretary Paul] Wolfowitz convened a secret meeting [concerning the tubes] in his office with Francis Brooke, the I.N.C. adviser, and Khidir Hamza, a former chief of Saddam's nuclear program, who had defected to America in 1994 . . . Wolfowitz circulated his conclusions to his administration allies. A few days later, the story of the "nuclear" tubes was leaked to The New York Times, where it landed on the front page.' "On the CNN Documentary, Dead Wrong, an anonymous source characterized the dissemination of this biased and slanted information to Miller and Gordon as 'official leaking': 'I would call it official leaking because I think these were authorized conversations between the press and members of the intelligence community that further misreported the nature of the intelligence community's disagreement on this issue.' Of course, a front page story in the New York Times gets everyone's attention, and – if the lies are glaring enough – can lead to a reporter resigning in disgrace. But the Bush Administration has often promoted stories into the "mainstream" media by first establishing them in the super-right-wing outlets. "The Constitution in Crisis" continues: "Our investigation has also learned that administration officials appear to have leaked classified information to the press well before the New York Times article. A July 29, 2002, article in the Washington Times, titled 'Iraq Seeks Steel for Nukes' reported: "'Procurement agents from Iraq's covert nuclear-arms program were detected as they tried to purchase stainless-steel tubing, uniquely used in gas centrifuges and a key component in making the material for nuclear bombs, from an unknown supplier, said administration officials familiar with intelligence reports . . . U.S. intelligence agencies believe the tubing is an essential component of Iraq's plans to enrich radioactive uranium to the point where it could be used to fashion a nuclear bomb.'" With impeccable timing, on the eve of the first anniversary of the September 11th attacks, top Bush officials appeared on the Sunday talk shows to discuss the aluminum tube story that someone among them had just planted in the New York Times. Knight Ridder explained how this worked: "[the leaks] appearance in the nation's most influential paper also gave Cheney and Rice an opportunity to discuss the matter the same day on the Sunday television talk shows. They could discuss the article, but otherwise they wouldn't have been able to talk about classified intelligence in public." ("CIA leak illustrates selective use of intelligence on Iraq [The Aluminum Tubes]," by Jonathan S. Landay, Knight Ridder Newspapers.) And who can forget the horrifying comments that the Bush Administration made? Condoleezza Rice: "[Iraq has obtained] high quality aluminum tubes that are only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs" and "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." -- CNN Late Edition (CNN television broadcast, Sept. 8, 2002). Vice President Dick Cheney: "I do know with absolutely certainty that he is using his procurement system to acquire the equipment he needs to enrich uranium to build a nuclear weapon" -- Meet the Press (NBC television broadcast, Sept. 8, 2002). Donald Rumsfeld: "Imagine a September 11 with weapons of mass destruction." -- Face the Nation (CBS television broadcast, Sept. 8, 2002). http://www.davidswanson.org DAVID SWANSON is a co-founder of After Downing Street, a writer and activist, and the Washington Director of Democrats.com. He is a board member of Progressive Democrats of America, and serves on the Executive Council of the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild, TNG-CWA. He has worked as a newspaper reporter and as a communications director, with jobs including Press Secretary for Dennis Kucinich's 2004 presidential campaign, Media Coordinator for the International Labor Communications Association, and three years as Communications Coordinator for ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. Swanson obtained a Master's degree in philosophy from the University of Virginia in 1997.

Fear destroys what bin Laden could not By Robert Steinback Miami Herald 12/27/05 If, back in 2001, anyone had told me that four years after bin Laden's attack our president would admit that he broke U.S. law against domestic spying and ignored the Constitution -- and then expect the American people to congratulate him for it -- I would have presumed the girders of our very Republic had crumbled. Had anyone said our president would invade a country and kill 30,000 of its people claiming a threat that never, in fact, existed, then admit he would have invaded even if he had known there was no threat -- and expect America to be pleased by this -- I would have thought our nation's sensibilities and honor had been eviscerated. If I had been informed that our nation's leaders would embrace torture as a legitimate tool of warfare, hold prisoners for years without charges and operate secret prisons overseas -- and call such procedures necessary for the nation's security -- I would have laughed at the folly of protecting human rights by destroying them. If someone had predicted the president's staff would out a CIA agent as revenge against a critic, defy a law against domestic propaganda by bankrolling supposedly independent journalists and commentators, and ridicule a 37-year Marie Corps veteran for questioning U.S. military policy -- and that the populace would be more interested in whether Angelina is about to make Brad a daddy -- I would have called the prediction an absurd fantasy. That's no America I know, I would have argued. We're too strong, and we've been through too much, to be led down such a twisted path. What is there to say now? All of these things have happened. And yet a large portion of this country appears more concerned that saying "Happy Holidays" could be a disguised attack on Christianity. I evidently have a lot poorer insight regarding America's character than I once believed, because I would have expected such actions to provoke -- speaking metaphorically now -- mobs with pitchforks and torches at the White House gate. I would have expected proud defiance of anyone who would suggest that a mere terrorist threat could send this country into spasms of despair and fright so profound that we'd follow a leader who considers the law a nuisance and perfidy a privilege. Never would I have expected this nation -- which emerged stronger from a civil war and a civil rights movement, won two world wars, endured the Depression, recovered from a disastrous campaign in Southeast Asia and still managed to lead the world in the principles of liberty -- would cower behind anyone just for promising to "protect us." President Bush recently confirmed that he has authorized wiretaps against U.S. citizens on at least 30 occasions and said he'll continue doing it. His justification? He, as president -- or is that king? -- has a right to disregard any law, constitutional tenet or congressional mandate to protect the American people. Is that America's highest goal -- preventing another terrorist attack? Are there no principles of law and liberty more important than this? Who would have remembered Patrick Henry had he written, "What's wrong with giving up a little liberty if it protects me from death?" Bush would have us excuse his administration's excesses in deference to the "war on terror" -- a war, it should be pointed out, that can never end. Terrorism is a tactic, an eventuality, not an opposition army or rogue nation. If we caught every person guilty of a terrorist act, we still wouldn't know where tomorrow's first-time terrorist will strike. Fighting terrorism is a bit like fighting infection -- even when it's beaten, you must continue the fight or it will strike again. Are we agreeing, then, to give the king unfettered privilege to defy the law forever? It's time for every member of Congress to weigh in: Do they believe the president is above the law, or bound by it? Bush stokes our fears, implying that the only alternative to doing things his extralegal way is to sit by fitfully waiting for terrorists to harm us. We are neither weak nor helpless. A proud, confident republic can hunt down its enemies without trampling legitimate human and constitutional rights. Ultimately, our best defense against attack -- any attack, of any sort -- is holding fast and fearlessly to the ideals upon which this nation was built. Bush clearly doesn't understand or respect that. Do we? ROBERT STEINBACK - rsteinback@MiamiHerald.com

GOP disillusionment with Bush increasing by Doug Thompson 28 Dec 2005 While die-hard Republicans try to present a unified front in support of President George W. Bush’s evasion of the law and Constitution in ordering nonstop spying on Americans, splits are showing in the GOP ranks. “What's wrong with it is several-fold,” former GOP Congressman Bob Barr says of the domestic spying. “One, it is bad policy for our government to be spying on American citizens through the National Security Agency. Secondly, it's bad to be spying on Americans without court oversight. And thirdly, it's bad to be spying on Americans apparently in violation of federal laws against doing it without a court order.” Barr, one of the most conservative members of Congress when he served in the House, leads an increasing group of disenchanted Republicans who have had enough of Bush’s misuse of the law and encroachment of civil liberties that are supposed to be protected by the Constitution. He has joined with fellow conservative firebrand Phyllis Schlafly and the ultra-liberal American Civil Liberties Union to fight renewal of many of the rights-robbing provisions of the USA Patriot Act. And he’s not alone. Republican Senators Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, Larry Craig of Idaho and Olympia Snowe of Maine question Bush’s actions along with Pennsylvania Republican Arlen Specter, chairman of the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee. “I have grave doubts as to its applicability,” says Specter. “The President’s actions raise very fundamental questions about privacy and the Bill of Rights.” Republican strategists tell me House Speaker Dennis J. Hastert and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist are fighting to hold GOP dissension over the President’s policies in check but they may not be able to keep the anger from spilling over into public view. Frist, hampered by questions over his insider stock sale of Hospital Corporation of America holdings, couldn’t keep GOP anger from helping derail Bush’s push to make the USA Patriot Act a permanent law of the land. “The White House is particularly pissed at Frist,” says one longtime GOP consultant. “They want him out as majority leader and a more hardball leader in the style of Tom DeLay in his place.” Bush is also angry with Craig, a conservative who joined with Democrats in a filibuster to defeat permanent renewal of the Patriot Act. As a meeting recently, Bush referred to Craig as “a goddamned traitor” and told the National Republican Senatorial Committee to start recruiting someone to run against the Idaho Senator in 2008. Such anger against those who dare oppose him is typical for a President who all too often launches into obscene tirades when his policies are questioned. Bush, on many occasions, has called political opponents “traitors’ and, in private, refers to Senate Judiciary Chairman Arlen Specter as a “lily-livered bastard.” Craig, however, is unfazed by all this and says the Patriot Act “doesn't do enough to protect the civil liberties of innocent Americans.” And while Criag, Hagel, Snowe and Specter are willing to speak out publicly about the illegal actions of a President who is a member of their own party, other Republicans stick to grumbling in private – not surprising given the President’s reputation to waging wars on revenge against those who oppose him. “Bush may be under siege but he is still the President,” says political scientist George Harleigh, who served in the Nixon Administration. “He still has the power to reward those who back his policies and punish those who do not.” Another political scientist, the University of Virginia’s Larry Sabato, says Bush’s has problems and knows it. “Things are bad,” Sabato says of Bush’s situation. “Really bad.” Sabato says you can tell that Bush knows this because it is “written all over” Bush’s face when he appears in public. So he has a message for the President. “The lesson is obvious, Mr. President: You're a lot closer to Nixon than you are to Eisenhower, Reagan, and Clinton. And that's not where you want to be. Nixon's second term ended rather badly, as you will recall.”

Robert Parry's Year-End Letter: Unparalleled Crisis in America by Robert Parry 28 Dec 2005 Dear Readers, The United States is facing a political crisis almost unparalleled in our history, a crisis uniquely dangerous because at its center it is not about a loss of power but about a loss of principle – and even morality. Instead of following the guideposts of a democratic republic, the U.S. government has veered off into delusions of empire. Instead of promoting international law, it has adopted theories of “preemptive” war. Instead of standing for human rights, it has become known for torture techniques, detentions without trial, and secret prisons. Yet, this American crisis is also about the manipulation of information – and the failure of the U.S. news media to do its job. Indeed, it is hard to envision that the United States would be in this fix if reporters had asked the tough questions, if they had held dishonest political leaders accountable, if reporters had shown more courage. But this failure of the U.S. media wasn’t an accident or simply a reaction to the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. Taming the news media has been a longtime goal of the neoconservative operatives who now dominate George W. Bush’s administration. For years, these neoconservatives have understood that before they could transform the United States into their dream of a uni-polar empire, they had to gain effective control of the information that flows through Washington – and they had to neutralize the honest journalists who got in the way. The neoconservatives knew the power that would come from controlling how Americans saw the world, a process they called “perception management.” So, over the past quarter century, the neocons and their political allies invested heavily in building their own news media and intimidating the mainstream press. That is where our Web site, Consortiumnews.com, comes in. A decade ago, after working many years as an investigative reporter for mainstream news outlets, such as the Associated Press and Newsweek, I felt that a new kind of media institution was needed, one with the courage to resist the pressures brought to bear on journalists. (I had experienced that pressure in the 1980s and early 1990s while investigating what became known as the Iran-Contra scandal.) So, in 1995, on the advice of my oldest son, Sam, we turned to a new medium, the Internet. I cashed in my Newsweek retirement account to raise the money to get started and we began building our Web site as a home for well-researched journalistic stories that had no place in the sensationalistic, trivialized news media of the mid-1990s. Since then, we have produced hundreds of important stories that illuminated how our nation drifted into the predicament it’s in today. Among our investigative projects: --We traced the origins of Republican contacts with Iran’s Islamic fundamentalist regime back to secret meetings during the pivotal 1980 presidential campaign. --We exposed the hidden history of covert arms deals between the Reagan-Bush administration and Iraq’s Saddam Hussein in the 1980s. --We showed how international money-launderer Sun Myung Moon used his mysterious wealth to corrupt the American conservative movement and build the Right’s media. --We laid out the real story behind the myth of Colin Powell, a man whose sterling reputation masked a long record of opportunism. --We explained how Election 2000 was distorted first by bad reporting, then by inaccurate vote tallies, and finally by more bad reporting. --We questioned George W. Bush’s case for war in Iraq and his risky military strategy that was based on dangerous wishful thinking. By contrast, most of the U.S. news media was wrapping itself in the American flag and doing features on “freedom fries.” While we’ve accomplished much with our decade-old Web site, we’ve been hobbled by a chronic shortage of money. At a crucial juncture in early 2000, I had no choice but to make the Web site part-time and take a decent-paying job as an editor at Bloomberg News. (In 2004, I left that job to write Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and try to rebuild Consortiumnews.com.) For our survival, we remain dependent on the generosity of our readers. (We have appealed to many large funders for help, but they have not been supportive. They don’t seem to understand the need.) So, if you can, we would deeply appreciate your help. You can contribute either by credit card online or by sending a check to Consortium for Independent Journalism (CIJ), Suite 102-231, 2200 Wilson Blvd., Arlington, VA 22201. For contributions of $100 or more, you can get an autographed gift copy of Secrecy & Privilege or one of my other books. Also, since we are a non-profit 501-c-3 organization, your contribution is tax-deductible. Thank you -- and best wishes for the New Year. Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at http:www.secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.'

John Nichols: Censuring Bush requires citizens' help By John Nichols December 27, 2005 madison.com As President Bush and his aides scramble to explain new revelations regarding Bush's authorization of spying on the international telephone calls and e-mails of Americans, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee has begun a process that could lead to the censure, and perhaps the impeachment, of the president and vice president. U.S. Rep. John Conyers, the Michigan Democrat who was a critical player in the Watergate and Iran-Contra investigations into presidential wrongdoing, has introduced a package of resolutions that would censure President Bush and Vice President Cheney and create a select committee to investigate the administration's possible crimes and make recommendations regarding grounds for impeachment. The Conyers resolutions add a significant new twist to the debate about how to hold the administration to account. Members of Congress have become increasingly aggressive in the criticism of the White House, with U.S. Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., saying last week, "Americans have been stunned at the recent news of the abuses of power by an overzealous president. It has become apparent that this administration has engaged in a consistent and unrelenting pattern of abuse against our country's law-abiding citizens and against our Constitution." Even Republicans, including Senate Judiciary Committee chair Arlen Specter, R-Pa., are talking for the first time about mounting potentially serious investigations into abuses of power by the president. But Conyers is seeking to do much more than schedule a committee hearing, or even launch a formal inquiry. He is proposing that Congress use all its powers to hold the president and vice president to account up to and including the power to impeach the holders of the nation's most powerful positions and to remove them from office. The first of the three resolutions introduced by Conyers, House Resolution 635, asks that Congress establish a select committee to investigate whether members of the administration made moves to invade Iraq before receiving congressional authorization, manipulated pre-war intelligence, encouraged the use of torture in Iraq and elsewhere, and used their positions to retaliate against critics of the war. The select committee would be asked to make recommendations regarding grounds for possible impeachment of Bush and Cheney. The second resolution, H.R. 636, asks that Congress censure the president "for failing to respond to requests for information concerning allegations that he and others in his administration misled Congress and the American people regarding the decision to go to war in Iraq, misstated and manipulated intelligence information regarding the justification for the war, countenanced torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of persons in Iraq, and permitted inappropriate retaliation against critics of his administration, for failing to adequately account for specific misstatements he made regarding the war, and for failing to comply with Executive Order 12958." (Executive Order 12958, issued in 1995 by former President Bill Clinton, seeks to promote openness in government by prescribing a uniform system for classifying, safeguarding and declassifying national security information.) A third resolution, H.R. 637, would censure Cheney for a similar set of complaints. "The people of this country are waking up to the severity of the lies, crimes and abuses of power committed by this president and his administration," says Jon Bonifaz, a co-founder of the AfterDowningStreet.org coalition, an alliance of more than 100 grass-roots groups that have detailed Bush administration wrongdoing and encouraged a congressional response. Bonifaz, an attorney and the author of the book "Warrior King: The Case for Impeaching George Bush" (Nation Books), argues, "Now is the time to return to the rule of law and to hold those who have defied the Constitution accountable for their actions." Bonifaz is right. But it is unlikely that the effort to censure Bush and Cheney, let alone impeach them, will get far without significant organizing around the country. After all, the House is controlled by allies of the president who have displayed no inclination to hold him to account. Indeed, only a few Democrats, such as Conyers, have taken seriously the constitutional issues raised by the administration's misdeeds. Members of Congress in both parties will need to feel a lot of heat if these important measures are going to get much traction in this Congress. The grass-roots group Progressive Democrats of America, which has had a good deal of success organizing activists who want the Democrats to take a more aggressive stance in challenging the administration, will play a critical role in the effort to mobilize support for the Conyers resolutions, as part of a new Censure Bush Coalition campaign. (The campaign's Web site can be found at www.censurebush.org.) PDA director Tim Carpenter says his group plans to "mobilize and organize a broad-based coalition that will demand action from Congress to investigate the lies of the Bush administration and their conduct related to the war in Iraq." Getting this Congress to get serious about maintaining checks and balances on the Bush administration will be a daunting task. But the recent revelations regarding domestic spying will make it easier. There are a lot of Americans who share the view of U.S. Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., that Bush and Cheney have exceeded their authority. As Feingold says of Bush, "He is the president, not a king." It was the bitter experience of dealing with King George III that led the founders of this country to write a Constitution that empowers Congress to hold presidents and vice presidents accountable for their actions. It is this power that John Conyers, the senior member of the House committee charged with maintaining the system of checks and balances established by those founders, is now asking Congress to employ in the service of the nation that Constitution still governs.

TELL YOUR MEMBERS OF CONGRESS TO SUPPORT VOTING REFORM by Velvet Revolution 27 Dec 2005 We want Congress to hear what you have to say about this issue and this bill, and therefore, we have made it simple to fill in the form below to quickly send your personal message to both of your Senators and your House Representative. We'll even look them up based on your address, and send them to all the right ones! Better yet, take the time to write a REAL letter and deluge congress with paper! TELL YOUR MEMBERS OF CONGRESS TO SUPPORT VOTING REFORM VelvetRevolution.us supports legislation requiring accountability and transparency in elections. Although there are several bills presently pending in Congress proposing to address this, and none of them does everything we hope for, VR believes that a bill introduced by Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ), The Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act (H.R. 550), is currently the most comprehensive on this subject and has the best chance of passage. If it does pass, it will begin to fix multiple fundamental problems with our voting systems in time for the 2006 election cycle. Moreover, it currently has over 150 co-sponsors and several of them are even Republicans! This bill is a good starting point and if we pass it now, we will be on a much stronger footing to continue our fight for truly verifiable and transparent elections in the world's most important democracy. The Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act (H.R. 550) should be taken up by the House and passed into law this year; signing this petition will submit the message beneath the form below plus your own personal comments. Even if you don't think your particular representatives would agree with your position, it is important for them to hear from you so they will know that people such as yourself are concerned about this issue. As we have seen from the recent tragedy along the Gulf coast, who is elected is really a matter of life and death. Citizens must be able to see proof of their votes, and be able to verify that they are accurately counted. Comment: Take action -- click here to contact your local newspaper or congress people

Police Seek Suspects in Milwaukee Beating AP December 28, 2005 MILWAUKEE - A motorist who was kicked, punched and left alone in the street after honking at a group of people suffered severe head trauma and may not survive, police said. City officials asked for the public's help in finding the assailants, believed to be between 16 and 23 years old. It was the latest in a string of mob beatings in the city since 2002. "It's Christmas week. A guy's trying to drive down the street. What's the problem here?" said Mayor Tom Barrett. The victim, 50-year-old Samuel McClain, was going to a friend's house, said his niece, Jennifer McClain. He was driving alone at about 10:30 p.m. Monday when he honked at a group of about 15 people to move so he could continue driving. "Instead of moving, they surrounded the vehicle," police spokeswoman Anne E. Schwartz said. Police said he was pulled from the car, and witnesses said they saw some attackers climb on cars and jump on the victim's head. Britney King said she and her two sisters saw the attackers doing flips and cartwheels from cars onto the man. "It looked like they were having a block party," she said. Barrett was in critical condition Tuesday, and Schwartz said it was unclear if he would survive. Several mob beatings have taken place in Milwaukee's inner city in recent years. In 2002, more than a dozen people, mostly boys, chased a man through the streets and beat him to death with shovel handles, rakes and tree limbs. A man with schizophrenia died after being beaten and robbed by a group in 2004. Six teens were charged; one was convicted, charges against four were dropped and one is awaiting trial. Four days after that attack, a 14-year-old boy was kicked, punched and hit on the head with a piece of lumber after he exchanged words with a girl. He was in a coma for two weeks. Also that summer, four brothers were beaten by a group armed with bats, bottles, sticks and socks stuffed with canned food.

Mark Crispin Miller On The Reality of Election Fraud, How to Confront It and Save American Democracy Speech at the First Unitarian Church on Nov. 13, 2005 in Portland, Oregon Mark Crispin Miller is a professor of Media Studies at New York University. He has written articles for The Nation, the New Yorker. He’s been on many different national radio and television shows... He is a real champion for election integrity and for getting the word out about what we need to do to save our Democracy. Mark Crispin Miller: Well, thank you very much and thanks to both groups for doing all this great work and for making enough to bring me here for a book tour. I want to start out by telling you a story, which some of you may have heard. And in fact much of what I have to say will probably not come as news to many of you, because I know you all are very well informed about these issues. Two years ago I got myself invited to a fund raiser for John Kerry, when he was just one of many aspirants to the Democratic party nomination for president. I got myself invited by the New York treasurer of his campaign, who shared my concern about the integrity of the electoral system, precisely, or I should say primarily, because of the use of electronic touch screen machines. This had been a profound concern of mine and of certain other people, since the passage of the HAVA Act. And this limited network of people were trying to do everything they could to get this on the national agenda, so I got a little face time with the senator. It was at George Plimpton’s house. He came in. I was introduced to him. I looked up at him, he was very tall. And he looked down at me. I had about 5 minutes to try to convey the seriousness, the complexity of this problem to him, and with a sense of urgency. And so, you know, I think the cards were stacked against me because I’m sure I sounded psychotic, you know. (audience laughter) And as far as he was concerned, I probably looked psychotic,… short but psychotic...(audience chuckle) because he had never given this a thought. I think he didn’t know about it at all, but he did wear a look of grave concern, you know (smoothing his hair back in a John Kerry gesture, audience chuckle). He nodded thoughtfully for a moment. (Like Kerry, Miller crosses his arms and rests his left first finger on his chin with his face looking downward in a thoughtful pose.) He thanked me for my effort to enlighten him. He was going to take this under advisement, you know. I could almost see my words go, you know, in one ear and out the other. I also met with Terissa Heinz Kerry and talked to her about it. And she at least seemed to get it. She was very exercised about it. But nothing came of this. And we all know what happened, well, I should say we all think we know what happened. Concerning that, what we think happened, as you know I wrote a book about the Election 2004. And I wrote this book to give people a panoramic sense of what went down last year and to try to give people a view of the kind of mentality that drives the anti-democratic crusade. I wrote this book for one reason only, I’m not going to challenge the outcome of the last election, there is no constitutional way to do that. I wrote the book to jump start a national movement of radical electoral reform. And so, knowing as I did that the mainstream media is not going to take this seriously, I decided that I’ve got to get to as many prominent people as possible....So two weeks ago, I got myself invited to a fund raiser for John Kerry. (audience laughter.) His political action committee was meeting in New York. They were going to have a dinner, and I was allowed to come in before the dinner. And in he came, tall as ever, and I had a very different perception of him this time. (audience chuckle.) Ok, I had the book held up, you know, for all to see, and he looked very interested. And I said, “You were robbed, senator!” And he said “I know” (and held his hands up to his head like he had a headache, as Kerry would do) just like that. “I know! (Miller makes the same hand gesture.) And he started to say, "I can’t find the evidence." I can’t persuade my colleagues to take this seriously. I certainly knew what he was talking about. But I had to say, it was more than refreshing to hear him say this. I was delighted. He said he just had a big argument the week before with [Senator] Christopher Dodd from Connecticut trying to tell Dodd that these voting machines are really not reliable. And Dodd just got mad. He didn’t want to hear about it. Dodd said: “We looked into this. There’s no story there!” He (Kerry) said, “Well is there evidence in your book?” I said, “Well, yeah, you know, there is really quite a lot of evidence.” I told him what the Government Accountability Office Report said, the GAO Report. People in here have heard of it. Most people in this country have not, because this ground breaking report on the flaws and dangers of touch screen voting, by a very, very establishment government body, has gone almost completely unreported in this country. In fact, Kerry had not heard about it. [Kerry said]: “Oh really, the GAO report?” So instead of saying, "What, is your staff in a coma?" (loud audience laughter and applause)....so because you can attract more flies with honey than with vinegar, I didn’t say that. (Audience laughter) I said, “Yeah, the GAO Report, you can just go on-line and get a copy.” He was quite pleased. You could see…see that it was obvious that he was going to use this, these arguments. So I said, “Now senator, I believe that, in the spirit of these ground breaking investigations into Iran Contra and the BCCI in the Senate,” which I happen to think is his best, his greatest work, “in the spirit of those investigations, you should really look into what happened last year. And you should make a larger inquiry into the state of American electoral apparatus. Because it’s in a shambles.” And I cannot remember how I put this, I can only tell you what I was trying to say to him. But I was being tactful, so I don’t know what I said. I was trying to say to him: "If you think you are going to get like 10 votes from the people you sold out last time, you know, if you don’t embrace this issue with both arms, you don’t have a prayer." So I didn’t say that either (audience laughter.) So I said, “There are a lot of people felt disappointed...” [Kerry] nodded. Now he wasn’t just wearing a mask of concern. He was really listening. He said, “Well I don’t know if I can be the one to do that because there is the sour grape factor,” he said. OK. Well I understand that. I’m not a politician. It is very easy for me to say, "Do this, do that." But I said, you know, “Read the book. The book is very persuasive.” He said “I will. I’m really excited. I’ll read it this weekend. Thanks a lot.” He punched me on the arm. He gave me the thumbs up. (audience chuckle) Threw me a football, you know. (audience laughter) I caught the football. (laughter) We rough housed a little bit. (loud audience laughter.) The memory is very precious to me. (loud laughter) So anyway, I was really happy. I thought this was a great thing. It didn’t occur to me that this was news exactly. But I did tell my friend, I emailed people that "Kerry thinks the election was stolen." And my book tour started Tuesday a couple weeks ago in New York. And I found that telling that story really went over. I mean, it really made people feel optimistic. Then I was on Democracy Now last Friday. Did any of you hear that? (audience applause) I was debating with Mark Hertzgaard who’s got a piece in the latest Mother Jones, seeking to throw cold water on the "wild theory" that the Republicans stole the election last year. And one of the things that struck me in his arguments .... he’s a friend of mine, OK, I have known him a long time. I don’t think this is his best work. (audience laughter). One of the things that struck me was that he was unduly swayed by the "say so" of Democrats. o we’re talking about Warren County [Ohio]. You know how they declared a terrorist alert throughout the press before the vote count. His claim was, “Well I talked to a Democrat who was there, and he said: "Gee, I wish I could tell you that it was suspicious, but, you know, frankly there is nothing to it." It turned out the next day according to the FBI said that there was no terrorist alert, and then the Cincinnati Inquirer reported that this plan had been in the works for nine days. So I don’t care what a Democrat told him. Who is this democrat? Who cares? Why does that trump common sense? (Audience applause). I didn’t say any of this. But I says to myself, I says, 'Well, if he wants to strut out Democratic authorities, I’ve got a great response.' So I said, “Well as a matter of fact, Kerry thinks the race was stolen.” And I told the story. And Mark was very impressed. “Wow this is really big news. You really buried the lead. You should call a press conference. This is important.” Well in fact that day, Democracy Now sent out a press release. "Breaking: Kerry Believes the Race was Stolen." So there was a lot of stuff on the internet. It was all over the place. And sites like Democratic Underground, long threads about it. Raw Story, in a website in D.C., called Kerry’s office to get a response. And a staffer of Kerry’s office made a statement that categorically denied that he had ever had this conversation with me. (Audience says "Whoa") "The only true thing in Mr. Miller’s account is that he gave the senator the book"...(audience gasps)..like a process server. He kind of pressed it on his arm and ran away..."You’re served!" This was....the most galling thing to me personally was the fact that this implied that I had made this up to sell the book. "We know that Mr. Miller is trying to sell the book," they said. This really pissed me off. So I gave Raw Story my response. And the next day Robert Perry, a great reporter who has the website Consortium News, ran a piece based on what he was told by a guy named John Weiner, who was an old Kerry associate, who said to Perry: "John thinks the race was stolen, he said that to me too." So, there is trouble in making things up. I don’t make things up. In this world, these days, you don’t have to make things up. (Audience laughter.) Do you know what I mean? You can’t. It is impossible to keep track of reality. So I tell this story to make a few larger points. It is not about Kerry per se. And it is not about my personal pique, about being treated so disrespectfully. This is not a personal issue. It is not even a partisan issue. It is a civic issue. It is a civic issue of profound importance. And I tell the story about Kerry partly to make clear that this is not a left versus right, or Democrat versus Republican issue. In fact, on this issue, it’s really the people at risk because of the collusion of the two parties. I think the collusion is passive. Some people have said that they know, they have made a deal, but I think that is unlikely. If someone has the evidence, I’ll look at the evidence. But I don’t think that it is necessary for there to be a deal, because this has happened before. When you have a resolved, well organized, highly disciplined fascistic movement of some kind, (audience applause) right. (Audience applause) Let’s hear it for Fascism. (Sarcastically...Loud audience applause.) Calm yourselves. (Laughter) And they have a tremendous amount of social power and media influence, and they manage to get the press on their side for various reasons, those who would resist this, but who aren’t all that zealous about it, are simply going to deny that there’s a problem. Now why do the Democrats refuse to face this issue? Does it make any sense? Their existence as a party is threatened. They will cease to be, if this Republican party, the Bushevic party, (audience laughter) the theocratic Republican party, has it’s way, there will be no more Democrats. Now, one of the reasons that Democrats refuse to look at this, or read the evidence, or listen to it, is just corruption. Because a lot of democrats are in fact republicans. And in places like Ohio, rural Ohio....maybe you’ve had Bob Fitrakis come here and speak? ...(audience confirms)...as he explains to me and he says in his writing, the democrats in rural Ohio are just as much a part of the status quo as the republicans. They are very close to the Republicans and they all serve at the pleasure of Ken Blackwell. So they all toe the line. There was only one board of elections member, a democrat in the state, who blew the whistle. And that was Sheryl Eaton, who ...(loud audience applause)... We love Sheryl, we know she exposed the deliberate subversion of the recount that was supposed to take place. And it has never taken place. And there are still 100,000 plus votes in that state that haven’t been counted to this day. She is the exception. Since a lot of Democrats just go along to get along and they figure, hey, you know, the two parties have divided the spoils. We can work it out. This is our turf. We’ve got the Sharks and the Jets, you know? We’ve got to divide it up. So why upset the apple cart? There is a lot of that. But aside from that there is just plain old denial. Kerry was describing denial to me. Dodd wouldn’t have gotten angry if this thought did not frighten him. Because the implications of what happened last year are quite frightening....quite frightening. It doesn’t make any difference how brilliant a campaign you run. It doesn’t make any difference how smart your TV ads are. It doesn’t make any difference what a stellar profile your candidate has. You could run Jesus Christ for President, ok? You’re not going to win. You’re not going to win because this is not a functioning Democracy. America is no longer a Democracy. The last three elections have been stolen. This refusal to confront the implications of what is going down has to do with deeply rooted ideological assumptions that we all have. Like "it can’t happen here." That’s the very important one. Like this is "The city on the hill." This nation was claimed by God. And what has happened to other countries can’t happen here, can’t happen here. So however copious and solid the evidence you have that it has happened here, you can’t get anywhere. It’s fascinating. You’ve got a moment in which pretty much everyone now finally agrees that the Bush regime lied, or deluded itself and the rest of us, to get us into a major war that we are losing. That’s really not a good thing. And people will face that. And the press will say yes that seems to be true. You’ve got a moment at which the people will say: yes, they did deliberately conspire to out a CIA agent who was responsible for keeping us safe from weapons of mass destruction, and they did it for petty political reasons. The people struggling to deny this are having an ever harder time. We accept this. We accept that they had to know that the attack was coming on 9/11 and they, at best, did nothing about it. (Audience applause.) We also accept that in the face of one of the worst natural disasters in our modern history, they did nothing and they continue to do nothing. All of this we accept. Right? All of this we accept. All this the press will admit "Yeah that’s true." OK. Progressives, everybody snarling foaming at the mouth...Bush is wicked, terrible. But somehow there is this magic circle drawn around "The Election." "Oh no, they wouldn’t do that! They wouldn’t to that!" Well, that’s what they would do first of all. In fact, that’s what they did do! That’s why they’re there. (Applause) Understand this...I want to try to give you a sense of what we’re really up against, because I think it’s only if we face that, will we be able to deal with it. Ok, here it is folks. It’s about the elections. The electoral system is a mess. I think there are certain policies we should all pursue to improve the system. And we can talk about those policies. I want to give you a foretaste, because often people want to hear that. These are "take home points." We should go back to paper ballots. (Applause.) We should ban the participation of all private vendors in our electoral system. (Loud long applause.) So that means in Oregon, you know, you’ve got the paper ballots. You’ve got to get the software out of there, because as you know, using proprietary software to count the votes is like having a secret vote count. And so this is COMPLETELY UNACCEPTABLE. Anyone who defends this is a foe of American Democracy. It’s a simple as that. We also need a uniform federal standard for our election from coast to coast, from county to county, from precinct to precinct. We have to have....I’m going to say the dirty "B" word...we have to have an efficient, utterly non-partisan bureaucracy, on the order of the Post Office (it just delivers mail) to oversee our elections. And I will add, that I would like to have as an ally in this fight any authentic conservative who believes in The Bill of Rights, way before I’ll accept the half hearted support of an Al Franken or somebody like that, or Mother Jones. The people, now this is us, not the Democratic Party, not the media, the people have got to fight back. We are at that point. And in order to do that we’ve got to make common cause with a lot of people we don’t ordinarily talk to. The Bush administration and the movement it represents is only one part of the Republican party. The Republican party is divided now. A lot of Republicans voted against Bush or just stayed home. In "Fooled Again" I gave a lot of examples. The very prominent Republicans of all kinds came out publically against Bush before the election and the press would never report on this trend, which was remarkable. But you had Bob Barr of Georgia, you can’t get much more right wing than that. You had John Eisenhower. You had General Tony McPeak of the Air Force, who was a pro-Bush military guy in 2000, now coming out for Kerry! You had Tom Clancy! You had Lee Ioacoca. You had an open letter signed by 169 tenured emeritus business professors deploring Bush’s economic policies. And the letter started at the Harvard Business School. You remember who went there? Bipartisan groups of diplomats, military men, moderate Republicans. A guy who ran a chapter of Republicans Abroad said he could not in good conscience support Bush. This guy [Bush] did not really win the election, because very few people really voted for him! (Audience applause.) Just read my book. The thing is that it can happen here, and they knew it. And if we don’t reacquaint ourselves with their concerns, it will happen here, and have happened here for good. Because this is what we’re up against, ok? We are not up against conservatism. Bush is not a conservative president. Cheney is not a conservative vice president. The movement that we’re fighting is not a conservative movement. That is why it didn’t get all those Republican votes. I am not a conservative, but I respect conservatism. I see it as a coherent philosophy. I see it essentially as a philosophy that’s based on the improvement or at least the maintenance of THIS world. See. They believe in limited government, fiscal prudence, no foreign wars, all that kind of stuff. I can live with all of that. What does that have in common with this regime and its agenda? This is a guy who with all his tax cuts has spent more money than all of our other presidents combined. Did you know this? He has vastly expanded the police powers of this government, vastly expanded them. He has repealed Habeas Corpus. I mean, if on his say so, you’re a terrorist, they can come and drag you off to prison, and they don’t have to tell anybody that they did it. This is called disappearing people. This is unprecedented in our history. We don’t have freedom of assembly. We have First Amendment Zones. (Audience groan.) Freedom of Speech has been radically abridged. I mean, you know all that I am saying. Right? This is not conservatism. It is extremely radical. It’s much closer to Fascism. It has a great deal to do with the power of corporations. You can hiss all you want, and I am with you, but they are not going to listen. The fact that End Corporate Personhood is involved with this is really something that makes me very happy, because in a sense the idea that corporations should have the rights of persons, the status of persons, can be regarded, in a sense, as the worm in the apple here. I mean, things really started to go wrong in this country when corporations took on such power. Indeed as we have seen from the dangerous sway of the corporate manufacture of touch screen voting machines, corporations are reeking havoc on American Democracy, because corporations are driven by concern for only one thing, and that is their own profits. That’s money over the franchise, money over votes. This is something I think we can all agree on. We have to take a step further because there is something else at work here. It’s not just corporations. It’s not just the drive for profits. It’s not just corporate capitalism. As a matter of fact, certain large sectors of the corporate system are extremely unhappy with this president, like the insurance industry has done a big about face on global warming. Well for rational reasons. (Audience laughter.) Because they don’t want to go bankrupt! So this is rational self interest at work. You read accounts of the financial get together in Datyl, Switzerland...it’s like a wake there now. They’re just miserable because this guy, this cabal, this movement is destroying the economy. They are on a suicide course. So even though they are infinitely pleasing to many corporate interests, you know, Haliburton and so on, especially their cronies, they are on a suicide course. They had an apocalyptic streak, that cannot be explained in economistic terms. Now people on the left tend to explain everything in economistic terms. It’s always about the money, follow the money. That’s true to a great degree. But it is not enough, because it does not account for the ferocious strain of anti-enlightenment activism that this regime represents. (Audience applause.) Understand that this is a theocratic movement. It is not just a bunch of corporations, that know better, slyly manipulating the pieties of the masses. That is a leftist fallacy. Because we are talking about the energetic, political participation of a number of extremely right wing billionaires with enormous clout, people like Richard Mellon Scaif, and Howard Ahmanson. These are people who are extraordinarily active and productive on the political front and they make [George] Soros look like a piper. They spent far more money that he does. They spend it on propaganda; they spend it on political issues. Howard Ahmanson is the motive force behind the schism in the Episcopalian Church. He supports the Discovery Institute which is behind the spread of Intelligent Design. So to say there is religion over here and there are corporations over here is a mistake. It’s not that simple because there are points of convergence. What we have here is a movement intent on turning the United States into a Christian republic. Now they often say that the United States is a Christian republic, then you say to them, "As a matter of fact, it isn’t." Look at say the First Amendment, look at Article 6 which forbids a religious test for office holders, look at everything the framers ever said on the subject. Well they don’t want to hear that so they say, "Well, it’s a Christian republic." Does this sound familiar? "Mr. President, there is no evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq." "0h yeah? there is too." "Go back and find it." "Oh, wait. Here it is, here it is." See? We think they are lying through their teeth, but please believe me that Cheney still believes there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. If it were only lying, or or if it was only machiavellian manipulation, I promise you we would be better off than we are right now. What we are dealing with is pathological. You tell them, "Hey, there is no evidence for intelligent design," and they say "oh yes there is." They proclaim that there is. There is no evidence that abstainance based sex education does anything except raise pregnancy rates and raise rates of sexually transmitted diseases. They say "Nope...no..." Because it’s faith based. They live in a faith based universe. I want you to grasp the enormity of this problem. We have all grown up in the shadow of the cold war. All of our politics were forged in the context of a post enlightenment moment. I mean the enlightenment is settled, ok? And now we have the clash between two great enlightenment doctrines, capitalism and socialism. Do you want to know something? That turned out to be a blip on the radar screen. We are right back where we were when the framers wrote the Constitution. We are right back there. They did this incredibly brave and intelligent thing. They forged a national charter that was the first in human history not to invoke the deity. They separated church from state. And this was not a plot by a handful of professorial smarty pantses, who were a lot less religious than the average Joe. This was on the one hand an innovation by brilliant Deists who were indeed Rationalists. But it wasn’t just that. Separation of church and state grew out of American soil. Because this was a nation of religious immigrants, and most believing American were grateful for the separation of church and state. You know that the Baptists for over a hundred years were arch- Jeffersonians? Because they understood that if there is a state church in this country it would be Episcopalian and they would be persecuted again. So it was in everybody’s interest to separate church from state. There is no reason to apologize for it. There is no reason to dance away from it. There is no reason to meet with Hillary and decide, "How we can look more religious?" Screw that! (Loud audience applause.) When de Tocqueville came here in the 1830’s, he remarked on the fact that this country was the most religious country on the earth and he understood that the reason is because they separated church and state. The reason is because there is no coersion here. So religion thrives. Why can’t Democrats just say that? What’s wrong with that? Is there any problem? Now the fact that they don’t seem to have any faith in our revolutionary division, they don’t seem to have any understanding of what the framers wrote, they don’t really believe in American democracy, leaves us just extremely vulnerable to a highly organized, extremist movement that is intent on undoing all that. We don’t hear about it. Right? Like this business about the Supreme Court, we hear about Alito’s style, you know his style, what kind of person he is, we parse his record. We talk about what kind of demeanor he has and what kind of suit he wears, his life experiences, and so on. Maybe if we get really bold and specific, we’ll say, "They are going to repeal Roe vs. Wade." What they don’t understand is that Roe vs. Wade is only "Step One" for these people, right? Step one! Do you know what the Constitution Restoration Act is? A few of you do. Go home and do a little google search on it. The Constitution Restoration Act would declare that God is the sovereign basis of American Law. Do you know what that means? That means that a judge could make decisions on the basis of the Old Testament and it couldn’t be reversed. So if you want to see a vision of the possible future as these people imagine it, go home and read the book of Leviticus, and see how many things you can be executed for doing. Heresy, for example, Astrology, Pre-marital sex ... well, only the woman gets killed for pre-marital sex. This is directly and ferociously opposed to the whole American tradition. So when I said this is not a partisan issue, I really meant it. The American people don’t go for this, I promise you. A lot of Americans may have been hood-winked by Bush and so on, but understand that his strong support is now at 22% with a margin of error of 4 points. So it could be 18%. I estimate that at least Kerry won by 51 to 48%. Kerry won! And probably by more or would have, because between the votes that were thrown away, and the votes that were pre-empted, and the votes abroad, it’s a significant number. The American, you know, people for all their, or all our shortcomings, for all the decadence that has been sponded by a consumer culture, which has had a seriously destructive effect on our ability to function in a democracy, for all that, the American people are not extremists. The American people are not theocrats. The Wall Street Journal just a few days ago ran an piece about the new phenomena of the Evangelical Churches trying to do something about global warming through their churches. So it’s time for us all to join hands with each other, all rational Americans who love our traditions got to join hands and insist on electoral reform which both parties seem not to want. Right? It’s not up to the Democrats. It is certainly not up to the media. It’s up to us. Now this is the kind of thinking we’ve become estranged from, as I say, because we’re mostly parked in front of the set, you know, with a big gulp and a bag of Doritos. And we’re thinking, "Oh gee, am I getting fat," or "Don’t I look great?" "Oh let’s watch reality TV" ...getting into so and so’s life for a minute, unreality TV, you know. But we have to get back to that. Do you know why? Because we don’t have any choice. There’s no choice. If we don’t get electoral reform in place, if we don’t reclaim the system from the Right, this experiment is over. If this experiment is over, the world could well be over. I think we should return to the best that our framers had to offer. And consider ourselves as noble and dedicated representatives of that tradition. We have nothing to apologize for, and everything to gain. Thank you.

Coalition for Visible Ballots 28 Dec 2005 The Coalition for Visible Ballots is a non-partisan, grassroots movement of unprecedented unity on a single issue. That issue is very simple: Invisible ballots are a bad idea. These organizations and individuals are united on the proposition that "We at the Coalition for Visible Ballots believe that the only way to restore fair and honest elections to our country is to set aside ALL machines, including electronic of any type, touchscreen, optical scan counters--and use PAPER BALLOTS, HAND-COUNTED IN PUBLIC VIEW. To some, unused ballots left over from the contested 2000 election are of deep historical significance. To others, they're just stacks of paper in the way. Is this a perfect system? No. But as one of our foremost knowledgeable members, Bev Harris has said, elections conducted in this manner have perhaps five or six "attack vectors", whereas those conducted with electronic equipment have about 50 or 60. Many of the expert researchers, journalists, computer programmers and security engineers, mathematicians and statisticians who have been studying this critical issue have come to the same conclusion, and we stand with them: PAPER BALLOTS, HAND-COUNTED in PUBLIC VIEW. Will we ever see this happen? Maybe not. Is it an uphill battle? Probably. But we will accept nothing less as a "repair" or "temporary fix" to our election systems."

If you cherish your rights, this nominee bears questioning 28 Dec 2005 USAToday When Samuel Alito was a Justice Department lawyer in the 1980s, he wrote that he saw no legal problem with a police officer shooting and killing an unarmed 15-year-old who was fleeing from a $10 burglary. Alito, now nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court, said the shooting "can be justified as reasonable" and advised his bosses that the courts shouldn't interfere with police discretion to use deadly force. But the Supreme Court thought otherwise - by a 6-3 vote. Justice Byron White noted that the Constitution bars "unreasonable" searches and seizures, adding acidly that "a police officer may not seize an unarmed, nondangerous suspect by shooting him dead." The case is one of numerous examples of Alito's troubling deference, both as a government lawyer and a judge, to the power of government institutions, employers and others in authority. Whether that deference adequately protects rights of individuals deserves very close scrutiny at Senate hearings on his nomination next month: •In a death penalty case, Alito rejected a 17-year-old's claims that his public defenders had failed to use mitigating evidence of mental retardation and traumatic upbringing. Again the Supreme Court disagreed, using the case to warn state courts that shoddy defense work in capital cases shouldn't be tolerated. •In an employment case, Alito was alone in siding with a hotel owner seeking dismissal without trial of a housekeeper's claims of illegal demotion and sexual discrimination. By 12-1, his colleagues ordered a new trial. •In a search case, Alito saw nothing wrong with a police strip search of a woman and her 10-year-old daughter though there was no warrant naming them as targets of an investigation. Again, his fellow judges ruled otherwise. Some other cases, however, show Alito in a different light. He ruled against a Pennsylvania prosecutor who had removed 13 of 14 blacks from the jury pool in a case involving a black murder defendant. He rejected the argument of the Newark, N.J., police department that Muslim officers should be forced to shave their beards. And he rapped a New Jersey school district for not responding adequately to the prolonged bullying and harassment of an emotionally troubled boy. No one expects a judicial nominee from this administration to brandish a "Question Authority" bumper sticker. But, prompted by the abuses of British colonial rule, the Founders put a broad range of individual rights in the Constitution. Others have been added since, by constitutional amendment and acts of Congress. Alito's record suggests little deference to those most basic American values. This merits aggressive questioning before the Senate puts him on the nation's highest court, where he would have the power to strip away rights Americans assume to be theirs. Comment: Starting today, write your congress people and demand that Alito be rejected!

Appeals Court Said to Hear DeLay Request 28 Dec 2005 AP AUSTIN - The state's highest criminal court has agreed to hear Tom DeLay's latest request for a quick resolution to money laundering charges that forced him to give up his leadership post in the U.S. House, his spokesman said Tuesday. The all-Republican Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ruled that both sides have a week to submit arguments, DeLay spokesman Kevin Madden said in an e-mail. DeLay's attorneys asked the court either to dismiss money laundering charges or to order a lower court to try him immediately. DeLay attorney Dick DeGuerin took the case to the criminal appeals court Friday, one day after the 3rd Court of Appeals denied his request that the case be sent back to the trial court or expedited through the appeals process. DeGuerin and a spokesman for Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle did not return phone calls seeking comment Tuesday night. DeLay, a Republican from Sugar Land, was forced to step aside as House majority leader after he was indicted on money laundering and conspiracy charges in September. He denies wrongdoing and has been pressing for a quick resolution to his case so he can regain his post before his colleagues call for new leadership elections. His case was put on hold, however, when prosecutors appealed a judge's partial dismissal of the criminal charges. Comment: The gall of the man is astonishing. That he is not embarrassed is astonishing. But then, that's typical of psychopaths.

Shock, awe and Hobbes have backfired on America's neocons Richard Drayton Wednesday December 28, 2005 The Guardian The tragic irony of the 21st century is that just as faith in technology collapsed on the world's stock markets in 2000, it came to power in the White House and Pentagon. For the Project for a New American Century's ambition of "full-spectrum dominance" - in which its country could "fight and win multiple, simultaneous major-theatre wars" - was a monster borne up by the high tide of techno euphoria of the 1990s. Ex-hippies talked of a wired age of Aquarius. The fall of the Berlin wall and the rise of the internet, we were told, had ushered in Adam Smith's dream of overflowing abundance, expanding liberty and perpetual peace. Fukuyama speculated that history was over, leaving us just to hoard and spend. Technology meant a new paradigm of constant growth without inflation or recession. But darker dreams surfaced in America's military universities. The theorists of the "revolution in military affairs" predicted that technology would lead to easy and perpetual US dominance of the world. Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Peters advised on "future warfare" at the Army War College - prophesying in 1997 a coming "age of constant conflict". Thomas Barnett at the Naval War College assisted Vice-Admiral Cebrowski in developing "network-centric warfare". General John Jumper of the air force predicted a planet easily mastered from air and space. American forces would win everywhere because they enjoyed what was unashamedly called the "God's-eye" view of satellites and GPS: the "global information grid". This hegemony would be welcomed as the cutting edge of human progress. Or at worst, the military geeks candidly explained, US power would simply terrify others into submitting to the stars and stripes. Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance - a key strategic document published in 1996 - aimed to understand how to destroy the "will to resist before, during and after battle". For Harlan Ullman of the National Defence University, its main author, the perfect example was the atom bomb at Hiroshima. But with or without such a weapon, one could create an illusion of unending strength and ruthlessness. Or one could deprive an enemy of the ability to communicate, observe and interact - a macro version of the sensory deprivation used on individuals - so as to create a "feeling of impotence". And one must always inflict brutal reprisals against those who resist. An alternative was the "decay and default" model, whereby a nation's will to resist collapsed through the "imposition of social breakdown". All of this came to be applied in Iraq in 2003, and not merely in the March bombardment called "shock and awe". It has been usual to explain the chaos and looting in Baghdad, the destruction of infrastructure, ministries, museums and the national library and archives, as caused by a failure of Rumsfeld's planning. But the evidence is this was at least in part a mask for the destruction of the collective memory and modern state of a key Arab nation, and the manufacture of disorder to create a hunger for the occupier's supervision. As the Süddeutsche Zeitung reported in May 2003, US troops broke the locks of museums, ministries and universities and told looters: "Go in Ali Baba, it's all yours!" For the American imperial strategists invested deeply in the belief that through spreading terror they could take power. Neoconservatives such as Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and the recently indicted Lewis "Scooter" Libby, learned from Leo Strauss that a strong and wise minority of humans had to rule over the weak majority through deception and fear, rather than persuasion or compromise. They read Le Bon and Freud on the relationship of crowds to authority. But most of all they loved Hobbes's Leviathan. While Hobbes saw authority as free men's chosen solution to the imperfections of anarchy, his 21st century heirs seek to create the fear that led to submission. And technology would make it possible and beautiful. On the logo of the Pentagon's Information Awareness Office, the motto is Scientia est potentia - knowledge is power . The IAO promised "total information awareness", an all-seeing eye spilling out a death-ray gaze over Eurasia. Congressional pressure led the IAO to close, but technospeak, half-digested political theory and megalomania still riddle US thinking. Barnett, in The Pentagon's New Map and Blueprint for Action, calls for a "systems administrator" force to be dispatched with the military, to "process" conquered countries. The G8 and a few others are the "Kantian core", writes Barnett, warming over the former Blair adviser Robert Cooper's poisonous guff from 2002; their job is to export their economy and politics by force to the unlucky "Hobbesian gap". Imperialism is imagined as an industrial technique to remake societies and cultures, with technology giving sanction to those who intervene. The Afghanistan war of 2001 taught the wrong lessons. The US assumed this was the model of how a small, special forces-dominated campaign, using local proxies and calling in gunships or airstrikes, would sweep away opposition. But all Afghanistan showed was how an outside power could intervene in a finely balanced civil war. The one-eyed Mullah Omar's great escape on his motorbike was a warning that the God's-eye view can miss the human detail. The problem for the US today is that Leviathan has shot his wad. Iraq revealed the hubris of the imperial geostrategy. One small nation can tie down a superpower. Air and space supremacy do not give command on the ground. People can't be terrorised into identification with America. The US has proved able to destroy massively - but not create, or even control. Afghanistan and Iraq lie in ruins, yet the occupiers cower behind concrete mountains. The spin machine is on full tilt to represent Iraq as a success. Peters, in New Glory: Expanding America's Supremacy, asserts: "Our country is a force for good without precedent"; and Barnett, in Blueprint, says: "The US military is a force for global good that ... has no equal." Both offer ambitious plans for how the US is going to remake the third world in its image. There is a violent hysteria to the boasts. The narcissism of a decade earlier has given way to an extrovert rage at those who have resisted America's will since 2001. Both urge utter ruthlessness in crushing resistance. In November 2004, Peters told Fox News that in Falluja "the best outcome, frankly, is if they're all killed". But he directs his real fury at France and Germany: "A haggard Circe, Europe dulled our senses and fooled us into believing in her attractions. But the dugs are dry in Germany and France. They deluded us into prolonging the affair long after our attentions should have turned to ... India, South Africa, Brazil." While a good Kleinian therapist may be able to help Peters work through his weaning trauma, only America can cure its post 9/11 mixture of paranoia and megalomania. But Britain - and other allied states - can help. The US needs to discover, like a child that does not know its limits, that there is a world outside its body and desires, beyond even the reach of its toys, that suffers too. · Dr Richard Drayton, a senior lecturer in history at Cambridge University, is the author of Nature's Government, a study of science, technology and imperialism Comment: For a good overview of the Neocon philosophy and ideology, read the new Signs of the Times Special article: Neoconservatism, the Israeli Lobby,and other Power Relations .

Fear of the Devil: This maze leads to a trap without an exit By ROBERT C. KOEHLER Tribune Media Services December 22, 2005 "Our world faces a crisis as yet unperceived by those possessing the power to make great decisions for good and evil. The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe." — Albert Einstein The nation is headed for a showdown with Evil ... or rather, with the sense-shattering, all-justifying, absolute belief in it. My God — finally! Here, for instance, is U.S. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, explaining to Wolf Blitzer and archconservative (but pro-Constitution) former congressman Bob Barr on CNN's "The Situation Room" last week why George Bush needs the leeway to spy on American citizens as he sees fit: "Well, I'll tell you something, if a nuclear weapon goes off in Washington, D.C., or New York or Los Angeles, it'll burn the Constitution as it does. So I'm very happy we have a president that's going to wiretap people's communication with people overseas to make sure that they're not plotting to blow up one of our cities." And the commander-in-chief himself, in one of his angry defenses of wiretapping, pointed out that he's fighting an enemy who is "quick, clever and lethal," making an unprecedented concentration of power in his hands necessary. Debate any supporter of the war on terror and you're certain to run up against some variation of that theme. It's like debating the existence of hell. If you believe in it, it rules your life — far more, it appears, than a belief in God does. The Bush administration's belief in Absolute Evil — or at any rate its success peddling that belief to Congress and the American public — has been one hell of a governing tool. Few politicians dare stand tough for tolerance and the rule of law in the face of the great abyss of "what if": What if we pull back on the firepower and the terrorists strike again? What if we follow the niceties of the Geneva Convention and the terrorists strike again? Domestic spying is pretty far down on the list of crimes this administration has committed in the last five years in its battle with the Devil, but the president's brazen attitude about it — making him, in the words of Watergate whistleblower John Dean, the first president in U.S. history to admit an impeachable offense — has tipped a historical balance. Bush's all-out assault on American values, evident to many of us (the ones he's been spying on) since day one, has at last run into serious opposition. This time Congress has stiffened. This time it has refused to be cowed by the commander-in-chief's big bluff: that the "war on terror" can't be fought without an increasingly dictatorial concentration of power. Senators are drawing the line and defending the Constitution. Barbara Boxer, explaining that "unchecked surveillance of American citizens is troubling both to me and many of my constituents," has asked four presidential scholars whether impeachment is warranted. The undoing of King George, if that's what is happening, involves three separate but intertwined spy scandals, involving the Pentagon, the FBI and the National Security Agency. The three entities have engaged in various types of invasive, illegal domestic surveillance of American citizens. Loath to reveal its own secrets, the administration is nonetheless obsessed with prying into the private lives of its citizens. Many of the outed surveillance activities are indicative of priorities that bode ill for anyone with a critical intelligence and passionate determination to have a say in the nation's direction. Such people are the real enemy, it sometimes seems. The unwinnable war on terror is, among other things, a pretext to target peaceniks: They're a threat to war itself. And slowly, over the long haul, they're winning. "The protest itself was very peaceful," Snehal Shingavi, a graduate student at UC Berkeley and a member of the Berkeley Stop the War Coalition, told Amy Goodman of Democracy Now. "It included about 20 students who went in and confronted military recruiters about their presence on campus." This event was one of the hundreds of "threats" to national security the Pentagon monitored and logged into its data base. "And the thing that's quite striking," Shingavi said, "is not that they are watching antiwar and anti-recruitment activity ... but it's how nervous the military has actually become by some pretty tame and pretty peaceful protests against military recruitments and ... the war in Iraq." Groups such as Shingavi's are suspect because they won't be cowed by the administration's constant blare about Absolute Evil. We'll never be secure as long as we act like the enemy we're trying to destroy. Waging war on Absolute Evil — through torture and missile strikes on civilians populations and the shriveling of domestic civil liberties, as though freedom is some childish indulgence, not our strength and greatest hope — is a trap with no exit. Comment: We aren't inclined to disagree with the notion of evil, however everything depends on your definition. To an Evil person, a good person is "evil." See Political Ponerology: A Science on The Nature of Evil adjusted for Political Purposes

A Veteran's Iraq Message Upsets Army Recruiters By MONICA DAVEY December 27, 2005 NY Times DULUTH, Minn.- As those thinking of becoming soldiers arrive on the slushy doorstep of the Army recruiting station here, they cannot miss the message posted in bold black letters on the storefront right next door. "Remember the Fallen Heroes," the sign reads, and then it ticks off numbers - the number of American troops killed in Iraq, the number wounded, the number of days gone by since this war began. The sign, put up by a former soldier, has stirred intense, though always polite, debate in this city along the edge of Lake Superior in northeastern Minnesota. In a way, many of the nation's vast and complicated arguments about war are playing out on a single block here, around a simple piece of wood. The seven military recruiters here, six of whom have themselves served in Iraq, want the sign taken away. "It's disheartening," Staff Sgt. Gary J. Capan, the station's commander, said. "Everyone knows that people are dying in Iraq, but to walk past this on the way to work every day is too much." But Scott Cameron, a local man who was wounded in the Vietnam War, says his sign should remain. Mr. Cameron volunteers for a candidate for governor of Minnesota whose campaign opened a storefront office next door to the recruiting station, and he has permission to post the message he describes as "not antiwar, but pro-veteran." "We're still taking casualties from Vietnam, years later," Mr. Cameron said recently. "Is the same thing going to happen again?" Despite the location, he insists that his purpose is not to prevent new recruits from signing up for the Army, but to honor those who made sacrifices. Still, Mr. Cameron also says, "Before they join the military, people better know what they're getting into." Clashes like this are emerging elsewhere, too, even as the Army wrestles with the challenge of recruiting during a war, a struggle that left it 8 percent shy of its goal to bring in 80,000 new active-duty soldiers in the most recent recruiting year. Some of the conflicts are part of a growing number of planned "counterrecruiting" efforts by antiwar groups, parents and individuals. They have fought to prevent recruiters from getting access to students' contact information from schools or have set up their own booths near recruiters' at job fairs to tell potential recruits why they should not sign up. At George Mason University in Virginia, an Air Force veteran was arrested this fall while standing near a recruitment table on campus, wearing a sign that said "recruiters lie." At Kent State University in Ohio, a former marine climbed a recruiter's rock-climbing display in October and unfurled a peace banner. But some of the debates, like the one here, have played out far more quietly, seeming less staged, more ambiguous and more like the natural edges of the country's debate over war seeping out on their own. Early this month, State Senator Steve Kelley, a candidate for governor of Minnesota from the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (the Democratic party in Minnesota, whose name is a vestige of its liberal heritage), held a grand opening for his new campaign office along Superior Street, a main thoroughfare in downtown Duluth. When Mr. Cameron, a Kelley volunteer, asked whether he could put his sign up in the window of the office, alongside the collage of campaign posters, Mr. Kelley agreed. Mr. Cameron, who was shot in Vietnam in 1969 and says he has since undergone 46 operations to repair the damage, said he felt compelled to post his message to remind people of the soldiers now lost. Decades ago, he said, he did not speak his mind about Vietnam because he feared he might harm support for the troops. He is not, he said, "going to be silent again." Although Mr. Cameron, 55, acknowledged that he opposed the war in Iraq, he insisted that his sign was not about that at all. Its intent, he said, is simple and apolitical: to remember the troops, to care for veterans, to recognize what is being lost each day. "This is for the veterans," he said. "And the way I understand it, this is what we're over there fighting for in the first place - for my right to put a sign right there." A few days after the opening, the office drew a visit from next door. Sergeant Capan, 31, said his recruiters were upset and wanted the sign removed. One woman who had just returned from duty in Iraq, he said, found the sign especially disconcerting and impersonal. "It was upsetting to veterans who don't look at their friends and colleagues killed as numbers on a list," he said. In truth, neither side agrees on what precisely the sign is saying. Each sees its message through its own prism. Sergeant Capan said he wondered why, if Mr. Cameron was truly trying to send a "pro-veterans" message, he had not instead posted a sign listing how many soldiers had returned home from Iraq safely and placed it somewhere else - an Interstate highway, say, or the Capitol. And Mr. Cameron said he suspected that Sergeant Capan's true fear was not so much the well-being of his recruiters as how the sign might deter potential recruits. Sergeant Capan dismissed that notion. "Overall recruiting is going well, and this sign has not detracted," he said, adding, "Everybody who's joining the Army knows that there are deaths at war." Elsewhere, it is nearly impossible to gauge how more concerted counterrecruiting efforts have affected military recruiting, if at all, said S. Douglas Smith, a spokesman for Army Recruiting Command at Fort Knox, Ky. "There's been a good bit of activity this year," Mr. Smith said of the counterrecruiting efforts. "But in terms of impact, it's very hard to say." In this fiscal year, the Army hopes to recruit more than 105,000 active-duty and reserve soldiers by next fall. As of the end of November, Mr. Smith said, the Army was slightly ahead of its year-to-date goals. Back in Duluth, Mr. Kelley ultimately decided to leave Mr. Cameron's sign alone, despite the Army's request that it be removed. Mr. Kelley, who describes the centerpiece of his campaign for governor as education, found himself in the awkward position of being thrust into the debate over war, an issue most candidates for state and local offices rarely have to confront. "In the past, I have taken positions in support of free speech," he said the other day, explaining his decision to let the sign remain. "And I thought if I'm going to try to be consistent about free speech, how could I tell Scott to take the sign down?" Since news of the sign was reported in local newspapers, response has been mixed. A woman from Missouri had two pizzas delivered to reward Sergeant Capan's recruiters, while a veteran wrote to say that the sergeant needed "psychological screening" for even suggesting the removal of a disabled veteran's tribute to "his fallen brothers and sisters." Mr. Cameron, meanwhile, says he has been asked to make copies of his sign (which he had made for $100 at a local sign company) and is thinking of marketing them. For now, the neighbors on Superior Street have agreed to disagree. An offering of cookies by Mr. Cameron was not accepted, Sergeant Capan said, but Sergeant Capan insisted that relations on the street remained polite nonetheless. "We're going to move on," he said. "We're soldiers."

When Santa Visited George W. Bush ... By Mahir Ali Dawn December 28, 2005 Ushered into the White House under the strictest security, Santa Claus had his hands full listening to all of George W. Bush's wishes. According to this op-ed article from Pakistan's Dawn newspaper, after his recent eavesdropping, the President was also quite interested in telling Santa who had been naughty. IT was a few days before Christmas and verily a Santa was hauled out of a Wal-Mart, where for much of the day he had patiently been lending an ear to the seasonal demands of brats of all shapes and sizes. He was driven away in a limousine with dark windows to an undisclosed location by men in dark suits and dark glasses. "We have a very special assignment for you," they told him, and refused to say any more. The vehicle pulled up outside a very big house that looked as if it had recently been whitewashed. Santa was escorted to an empty room, where his sack and elaborate accoutrements were subjected to a thorough search, which yielded nothing exceptionally alarming. His beard was checked for anthrax. In another chamber, men wearing what looked like space suits tested him from tip to toe for traces of radiation. Once it had been established beyond reasonable doubt that he was no suicide bomber, a visibly disconcerted Santa was conveyed to a big hall groaning with Christmas kitsch, and gently but firmly pushed into a plush chair. He sank into it gratefully as the folk in the room, whispering excitedly, formed a disorderly queue. One of them elbowed his way to the front of the queue and then strode purposefully, with a distinctively simian gait, toward the man with the beard. No one said a word, although bespectacled Dick, pushed into second place, gave him a look that resembled a sneer. But those who knew Dick were well aware that this was his natural expression: no one had ever seen him come up with a convincing smile. "Ho, ho, ho, Santa," demanded his interlocutor. "Say ho, ho, ho!" Santa complied in a weary tone that betrayed little interest in conveying joy to the world. "Sit down, boy," he continued in the same tone, "and tell me what you'd like to find in your sock on Christmas Day. But before that, be polite enough to introduce yourself." "My name is George, Santa," beamed George, "but you can call me "W" or 43 like everyone else, and the first thing that I want is a Patriot Act. The next thing on my list ..." "Hold on a second, George. Now this Patriot Act, don't you already have one? Are you being greedy, George?" "No, Santa ... I mean yes, I do have one, but its batteries are about to run out." "Then why not get some new batteries?" "I swear I tried, Santa, but all those unhelpful people in the Congress superstore said they'd only recharge the batteries for a month. Now that's not much good, is it? I want a Patriot Act that runs on oil, not batteries. I've got plenty of oil. I don't have to ask anyone for oil. I can just take it whenever I like." "Ah, that rings a bell: you must be the George a colleague told me about three years or so ago - the boy who wanted a brand new Ay-Rack." "Yes, and I demand you tell me where that colleague can be found. I'd like to wring his neck. Waterboarding's too good for him. Gitmo's much too good for him. That [expletive deleted] gave me a broken Ay-Rack! I didn't want a broken Ay-Rack - I wanted ..." "Stop pouting and shouting, George. Let's not forget this is supposed to be the season of peace and goodwill. And let's keep the record straight. My colleague Kofi did not give you a broken Ay-Rack. I've heard you smashed it while grabbing it from another boy." "That's so not true! Sad-Damn was a bad boy. Very bad. Truly wicked. He wouldn't hand it over even after I pointed all my guns at him. What was I to do? Now you must give me mini-nukes, so that it's easier the next time around. Surgical strikes that produce perfect little mushroom clouds. I'm dying to see a mushroom cloud, Santa, I really am - even just a teeny-weeny, itsy-bitsy one, pretty please?" "Stop jumping up and down, George, before you smash my knee like you smashed Ay-Rack. Now, before I hear any more of your wish list, I need to know whether you've been naughty or good this year." "I've been good, really good, as good as I possibly could. You've got to trust me. I'll tell you who's been naughty. It's all those Al-Canada types like ... like ... well, like Sad-Damn, who says I beat him up after taking away Ay-Rack, which isn't really true, and like Ayman, who keeps releasing all these pirated X-rated videos full of violence and you can't understand a word, very bad chap, and all the insurgents, they don't deserve any gifts. And Osama's probably been naughty, except we don't know where he is or what he's been up to. And don't give anything to Hugo Chavez, who's been trying to sell oil cheap to poor Americans - I mean, how low can you go? - or to his new friend, Evil Immorales, who I'm told is ingenious, how silly is that? I mean no ingenious person could get anywhere close to power in this country, and that's what makes America great ..." "I think you mean indigenous, George. But never mind. I'm not interested in your opinions about other people, I just wanted to know ..." "Hang on, Santa, I haven't told you who else has been good. Surprise, surprise, but it isn't only me. I mean, where would I be without my mentor, Dick? He doesn't live in a bunker anymore, so he'll be waiting for you. Give him a new heart or some other organ. He deserves something big. So does Condi - she's been veeeerrrrry good. Poor Karl could do with a reprieve. Rummy's been good too, at least better than before. Nothing for Colin this time, thank you. And Wolfie doesn't need anything - I gave him a whole bank of some sort not too long ago." "LISTEN to me, George: there will be no presents at all for you if you go on raving this way. I wanted you to evaluate YOURSELF, not everyone else in the world. Now, I hear you've been eavesdropping on fellow Americans. That isn't nice, is it, George?" "Bloody liberal media! Why couldn't The New York Times have sat on that report for a few more years? I'm going to make an example of whoever leaked it. I have my suspicions. Ever heard of Valerie Plame? Elementary, my dear Santa. And you can do your bit for national security: make a gift of all extremist newspapers like The Times and the Post and all the liberal TV networks to Rupert Murdoch. Then Americans will only hear and read the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Wouldn't you call that a fair and balanced proposition?" "You haven't answered my question, George. Eavesdropping?" "Well, just a bit. Sometimes. And it's only for their own good." "Did you not know it was illegal?" "All's fair in war, Santa. There are terrorists everywhere. They hate us, they're coming to get us, some of them are already here, we've got to get them first. So, anything goes. Can you imagine, it's even illegal for us to crack a few heads and break a few bones in trying to get the answers we want, so we have to send our prisoners - and our interrogators, of course - to other countries where there are no such namby-pamby rules. All for the sake of preserving democracy. On the other hand, things like abortion are legal. And they want the same for gay marriage. These are threats to our way of life. I'm sick of pleading with the Congress boys to give passing grades to my handpicked judges, who could fix the Constitution in a jiff. That's why another thing I want this Christmas is a full bench of the Supreme Court. And by the way, the Bible says nothing against listening to phone calls and interspecting e-mails." "Perhaps it doesn't, George, but it does say thou shalt not kill, and you've been doing quite a bit of that lately, haven't you?" "I haven't touched a gun or pushed a button all year." "White phosphorus and Fallujah, George?" "Ask Rummy or Dick about that. Besides, that was last year. What is this anyway, an inquidisposition? And before I forget, I also want an Intelligible Design kit. That's indispensibubble for combating the Bolshevik evolutionaries." "It's not an inquisition, George, I really need to know. I'll decide what's indispensable or not, and in your case the concept of Intelligent Design seems like a contradiction in terms. Now, what about your response to Katrina?" "I don't think you're Santa at all. You must be an impostor. I don't like your beard. Why do you wear red? Are you a communist? Security!" As the Secret Service prepares to escort Santa from the premises, Dick rushes up. "This won't take a moment, Mr Claus," he mutters. "I have only one request: everything that gets smashed, the reconstruction contract must go to Halliburton." "I'm only a Santa," murmurs the man in red as he is led away. "What you guys need is a psychiatrist."

Bush's ranch stay include policy time, reading, clearing brush By DEB RIECHMANN Associated Press Writer December 27, 2005 CRAWFORD, Texas - Read nothing into President Bush's current choice in books, the White House says. The president is reading "When Trumpets Call: Theodore Roosevelt After the White House," but presidential spokesman Trent Duffy said Bush is not thinking about his post-Oval Office days. "He is an avid reader and the president knows full well that he's got a lot of time left in this second term and he's going accomplish big things," Duffy said here Tuesday where Bush is relaxing between Christmas and New Year's. Duffy said Brian Williams, anchor of "NBC Nightly News," recommended the book to the president. In a review, former President Jimmy Carter said author Patricia O'Toole describes Roosevelt's later years, addressing "frustrated ambitions, Republican politics, third party strategy and top-level contention about war and peace." Duffy said Bush also is reading "Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground" by Robert D. Kaplan. The book is about how U.S. imperialism and the global war on terrorism are executed around the world. "He reads books of all stripes and persuasion, and he decided to read it," Duffy said. It's not known if one of these books was a Christmas present from first lady Laura Bush. Besides a book, she gave the president clothes and biking gear. He gave her jewelry and a DVD player for the ranch. Besides reading, Bush is riding his bike at his ranch and working in two- to three-hour sessions cutting and clearing brush. He's also receiving regular intelligence briefings and doing policy work, but has not yet met with his speechwriters about his January State of the Union address, Duffy said.

Lawyer criticizes U.S. ambassador for comments on torture allegation 13:31:43 EST Dec 27, 2005 LONDON (AP) - The lawyer for a Canadian man who says he was tortured in Syria after being detained in New York sharply criticized the U.S. ambassador to Britain on Tuesday for his comments on the case. U.S. Ambassador Robert Tuttle said in a British Broadcasting Corp. radio interview last week that there was no evidence the United States had been involved in removing terror suspects to Syria, a process known as "extraordinary rendition." The U.S. Embassy later issued a statement clarifying Tuttle's comments, saying he was aware there had been a media report of a rendition to Syria. Lorne Waldman, a lawyer for Syrian-born Canadian Maher Arar, an Ottawa engineer, told the BBC on Tuesday it had been ridiculous for Tuttle to suggest he was unaware of Arar's case. "We know of other cases of other individuals who have been rendered," Waldman said. "So this was part of a well-known, well-documented pattern." The U.S. Embassy said it had nothing further to add to its earlier comments. Arar holds dual Syrian-Canadian citizenship and was travelling on a Canadian passport when he was detained in New York during a stopover while returning to Canada from Tunisia. After 12 days, he was sent to Syria in October 2002 on suspicion of being a member of al-Qaida, an allegation he denies. Arar maintains that once imprisoned in Damascus, he was tortured into making false confessions of terrorist activity. He was held for more than a year, then released without charges. The U.S. Justice Department has insisted that it had information linking Arar to al-Qaida, that Syria promised he would be treated humanely and that shipping him there was "in the best interest of the security of the United States." Syria has denied Arar was tortured. Human rights organizations and legal groups, both in the United States and abroad, have accused the United States of allowing a practice known as "rendition to torture," in which suspects are taken to countries where harsh interrogation methods are used. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has denied the allegation.

Israel and the Neocons, The Libby Affair and the Internal War By James Petras 27 Dec 2005 ICH The national debate, which the indictment of Irving Lewis Libby for perjury and obstruction of justice has aroused in the mass media, has failed to address the most basic questions concerning the deep structural context, which influenced his felonious behavior. The most superficial explanation was that Libby, by exposing Valerie Plame (a CIA employee), acted out of revenge to punish her husband Wilson for exposing the lies put forth by Bush about Iraq's "importation" of uranium from Niger. Other journalists claim that Libby acted to cover up the fabrications to go to war. The assertion however raises a deeper question -- who were the fabricators of war propaganda, who was Libby protecting? And not only the "fabricators of war", but the strategic planners, speech-makers and architects of war who acted hand in hand with the propagandists and the journalists who disseminated the propaganda? What is the link between all these high- level functionaries, propagandists and journalists? Equally important given the positions of power which this cabal occupied, and the influence they exercised in the mass media as well as in designing strategic policy, what forces were engaged in bringing criminal charges against a key operative of the cabal? Libby's rise to power was part and parcel of the ascendancy of the neo-conservatives to the summits of US policymaking. Libby was a student, protégé, and collaborator with Paul Wolfowitz for over 25 years. Libby along with Wolfowitz, Elliot Abrams, Douglas Feith, Kagan, Cohen, Rubin, Pollack, Chertoff, Fleisher, Kristol, Marc Grossman, Shumsky and a host of other political operators were long term believers and aggressive proponents of a virulently militaristic tendency of Zionism linked with the rightwing Likud Party of Israel. Early in the 1980's, Wolfowitz and Feith were charged with passing confidential documents to Israel, the latter temporarily losing his security clearance. The ideologues begin their "Long March" through the institutions of the state. In some cases, advisers to rightwing pro-Israel congressmen, others in the lower levels of the Pentagon and State Department, in other cases as academics or leaders of conservative think tanks in Washington during the Reagan and Bush senior regimes. With the election of Bush in 2001, they moved into major strategic positions in the government, and as the principal ideologues and propagandists for a sequence of wars against Arab adversaries of the Israeli State. Leading neocons, like Libby, drew up a war strategy for the Likud government in 1996, and then recycled the document for the US war against Iraq before and immediately after 9/11/01. Along with their rise to the most influential positions of power in the Bush administration, the neocons attracted new recruits, like New York Times reporter Judith Miller. What is striking about the operations of the 'cabal' is the very open and direct way in which they operated: former Director of the National Security Agency (under Reagan) Lt. General William Odom, retired Marine General Anthony Zinni, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson (former chief of staff of Powell), retired Air Force Lt. Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, National Security Adviser to President George Bush (the First) Brent Scowcroft, and numerous disenchanted officials, including veterans of the intelligence agencies, high level observers, and former diplomats openly criticized the neocon takeover of US policy and the close relationship between them and Israeli officials. In the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, Wolfowitz and Libby were the architects of the military strategy for Rumsfeld and Cheney, their bosses. Douglas Feith established the "Office of Special Planning" to fabricate the lies to justify the war. Judith Miller, David Frum and Ari Fleisher served to disseminate the lies and war propaganda through articles, interviews, press conferences, and speechwriting for President Bush. The neocons pushed to manipulate and marginalize many of the key institutions in the US imperial state. To circumvent intelligence from the CIA that didn't promote the Israeli agenda of war with Iraq, neocon Douglas Feith (number 3 in the Pentagon) established the Office of Special Planning, which fabricated propaganda and channeled it directly to the President's Office bypassing and marginalizing any critical review from the CIA. Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld marginalized the leading generals, promoting nondescript "loyalists" and outsiders to the top positions, and discarding any advice which opposed or conflicted with their plans for war with Iraq. The Secretary of State referred to a speech prepared for him by Libby as "bullshit" because of its falsehoods. His chief aide, Colonel Wilkerson has written disparagingly of the cabal, which marginalized the State Department including his boss Powell. The prosecution of Libby however reveals the intense internal struggle over the control of the US imperial state between the neocons and the traditional leaders of its major institutions. Along with the indictment of Libby by a grand jury at the request of the special prosecutor, the FBI has arrested the two leading policy makers of the most influential pro-Israeli lobby (AIPAC) for spying for the State of Israel. These are not simply isolated actions by individual officials or investigators. To have proceeded against Libby and AIPAC leaders , they had to have powerful institutional backing; otherwise the investigations would have been terminated even before they began. The CIA is deeply offended by the neocon usurpation of their intelligence role, their direct channels to the President, their loyalty to Israel. The military is extremely angry at their exclusion from the councils of government over questions of war, the disastrous war policy which have depleted the armed forces of recruits, devastated troop morale, and the neocons' grotesque ignorance of the costs of a colonial occupation. It is no wonder that General Tommy Frank referred to Douglas Feith as "the stupidest bastard I have ever met." The current institutional war recalls an earlier conflict between the rightwing Senator Joseph McCarthy and the Defense Department. At the time during the mid 1950's, Senator McCarty was accumulating power first by purging trade unions, Hollywood, the universities, and promoting likeminded conservative officials. He successfully extended his investigations and purges to the State Department and finally tried to do the same to the military. It was here that Senator McCarthy met his Waterloo, his attack backfired, the Army stood its ground, refuted his accusations and discredited his fabrications and grab for power. In the meantime, the neocons are not at all daunted by the trials of their colleagues in AIPAC and the Vice President's office: they are pressing straight ahead for the US to attack Syria and Iran, via economic sanctions and military bombing. On October 30, 2005 the former head of the Israel Secret Police (Shin Bet) told AIPAC to escalate their campaign to pressure in the US to attack Iran (Israel National News.com). There was a near unanimous vote in the US Congress in favor of economic sanctions against Syria. Despite mass demonstrations, and because of a 'captured' congress, it appears paradoxically that the only force capable of defeating the neocon juggernaut, like the earlier Joe McCarthy, are powerful voices in the state threatened by new disastrous wars not of their making. -James Petras, a former Professor of Sociology at Binghamton University, New York, owns a 50 year membership in the class struggle, is an adviser to the landless and jobless in brazil and argentina and is co-author of Globalization Unmasked (Zed). His new book with Henry Veltmeyer, Social Movements and the State: Brazil, Ecuador, Bolivia and Argentina, will be published in October 2005. He can be reached at: jpetras@binghamton.edu

Telling it like it isn't By Robert Fisk Los Angeles Times 12/27/05 I FIRST REALIZED the enormous pressures on American journalists in the Middle East when I went some years ago to say goodbye to a colleague from the Boston Globe. I expressed my sorrow that he was leaving a region where he had obviously enjoyed reporting. I could save my sorrows for someone else, he said. One of the joys of leaving was that he would no longer have to alter the truth to suit his paper's more vociferous readers. "I used to call the Israeli Likud Party 'right wing,' " he said. "But recently, my editors have been telling me not to use the phrase. A lot of our readers objected." And so now, I asked? "We just don't call it 'right wing' anymore." Ouch. I knew at once that these "readers" were viewed at his newspaper as Israel's friends, but I also knew that the Likud under Benjamin Netanyahu was as right wing as it had ever been. This is only the tip of the semantic iceberg that has crashed into American journalism in the Middle East. Illegal Jewish settlements for Jews and Jews only on Arab land are clearly "colonies," and we used to call them that. I cannot trace the moment when we started using the word "settlements." But I can remember the moment around two years ago when the word "settlements" was replaced by "Jewish neighborhoods" — or even, in some cases, "outposts." Similarly, "occupied" Palestinian land was softened in many American media reports into "disputed" Palestinian land — just after then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, in 2001, instructed U.S. embassies in the Middle East to refer to the West Bank as "disputed" rather than "occupied" territory. Then there is the "wall," the massive concrete obstruction whose purpose, according to the Israeli authorities, is to prevent Palestinian suicide bombers from killing innocent Israelis. In this, it seems to have had some success. But it does not follow the line of Israel's 1967 border and cuts deeply into Arab land. And all too often these days, journalists call it a "fence" rather than a "wall." Or a "security barrier," which is what Israel prefers them to say. For some of its length, we are told, it is not a wall at all — so we cannot call it a "wall," even though the vast snake of concrete and steel that runs east of Jerusalem is higher than the old Berlin Wall. The semantic effect of this journalistic obfuscation is clear. If Palestinian land is not occupied but merely part of a legal dispute that might be resolved in law courts or discussions over tea, then a Palestinian child who throws a stone at an Israeli soldier in this territory is clearly acting insanely. If a Jewish colony built illegally on Arab land is simply a nice friendly "neighborhood," then any Palestinian who attacks it must be carrying out a mindless terrorist act. And surely there is no reason to protest a "fence" or a "security barrier" — words that conjure up the fence around a garden or the gate arm at the entrance to a private housing complex. For Palestinians to object violently to any of these phenomena thus marks them as a generically vicious people. By our use of language, we condemn them. We follow these unwritten rules elsewhere in the region. American journalists frequently used the words of U.S. officials in the early days of the Iraqi insurgency — referring to those who attacked American troops as "rebels" or "terrorists" or "remnants" of the former regime. The language of the second U.S. pro-consul in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer III, was taken up obediently — and grotesquely — by American journalists. American television, meanwhile, continues to present war as a bloodless sandpit in which the horrors of conflict — the mutilated bodies of the victims of aerial bombing, torn apart in the desert by wild dogs — are kept off the screen. Editors in New York and London make sure that viewers' "sensitivities" don't suffer, that we don't indulge in the "pornography" of death (which is exactly what war is) or "dishonor" the dead whom we have just killed. Our prudish video coverage makes war easier to support, and journalists long ago became complicit with governments in making conflict and death more acceptable to viewers. Television journalism has thus become a lethal adjunct to war. Back in the old days, we used to believe — did we not? — that journalists should "tell it how it is." Read the great journalism of World War II and you'll see what I mean. The Ed Murrows and Richard Dimblebys, the Howard K. Smiths and Alan Moorheads didn't mince their words or change their descriptions or run mealy-mouthed from the truth because listeners or readers didn't want to know or preferred a different version. So let's call a colony a colony, let's call occupation what it is, let's call a wall a wall. And maybe express the reality of war by showing that it represents not, primarily, victory or defeat, but the total failure of the human spirit. ROBERT FISK is Middle East correspondent for the London Independent and the author, most recently, of "The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East," published last month by Knopf.

Former IDF Chief Pursued in US Court for War Crimes Palestine Chronicle 28/12/2005 The class action lawsuit is in connection with the hundreds of civilian deaths and injuries in the 1996 bombing of a United Nations compound in Qana. If Israeli Gen. Moshe Ya’alon had thought that retiring from the Israeli Defense Force after almost four decades of zealous military service, would allow him to gracefully spend his time without any cares, he miscalculated. While in New York recently, his nightmare commenced when families of the victims of the Qana massacre charged him for war crimes and human rights violations in a US court. The class action lawsuit by the Center for Constitutional Rights [CCR] is in connection with the hundreds of civilian deaths and injuries in the 1996 bombing of a United Nations compound in Qana, in the south of Lebanon. Gen Ya’alon who retired in June 2005 as the IDF’s Chief of Staff, was then the head of the IDF Intelligence Branch, when the IDF deliberately bombed a place crowded with civilians seeking refuge from Israeli attacks in neighboring towns and villages. CCR Attorney Maria LaHood said that despite knowing that hundreds of civilians had fled their homes to seek shelter at the UN compound, Ya’alon and the Intelligence Branch he headed then targeted its bombardment directly at the compound. “Almost ten years later, the hundreds of victims of the IDF shelling have an opportunity to seek justice.” The April ’96 tragedy has become known as the Qana Massacre. In a military operation code-named “Grapes of Wrath”, Israeli forces directed the bombing, strafing and shelling of villages intended to force thousands of Palestinian inhabitants to flee their homes. The indictment alleges that forces under Ya’alon’s command were deliberately and wantonly attacking and killing internally displaced civilians in a clearly-marked UN compound. This class action lawsuit in an American court follows an earlier charge – filed a week before – against a former Shin Bet chief, Avi Dichter for his role in dropping a one-ton bomb onto a residential block of flats in July 2002 which resulted in the death of a senior Hamas leader, Salah Shehadeh and fourteen civilians. Both legal actions have been brought by the Center for Constitutional Rights in what is emerging to be a major setback for pro-Israeli pressure groups in the US. While it is expected that pro-Israeli lobby groups may resort to charges of anti-semitism in order to discredit the plaintiffs, Judith Chomsky, a CCR Cooperating Attorney has firmly assured that "no official in any country is above the law".

Report: "9200 detainees are imprisoned in Israeli prisons" Saed Bannoura IMEMC & Agencies Tuesday, 27 December 2005, 18:42 The Palestinian Ministry of Detainees and Freed Detainees, reported that 9200 Palestinian detainee are still detained in more than 28 Israeli prisons, detention facilities, and interrogation centers. The ministry released a report on Tuesday and revealed that 270 detainees were arrested during November, and are currently placed in interrogation centers. Also, the ministry reported that Israel arrested since 1967 more than 650.000 detainees, which resembles 20% of the total population of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. In spite of the current “truce” Israeli soldiers carried dozens of arrest raids and “random arrests”, and arrested since the Sharm Al Sheikh truce agreement, in February, 3000 residents, and opened new branches in Ofer and Shatta detention facilities. The report revealed that Israel resumed its violations against the detainees, and attacked them in their rooms and cells; dozens of detainees were injured by bullets which cause skin burn, while others were hit with batons after soldiers repeatedly broke into the detention facilities. 570 detainees (6.2%) were arrested before Al Aqsa Intifada, which erupted late 2000, in addition to 369 detainees (4%) who were arrested before the Palestinian Authority was established. 201 detainees (2.2%) were arrested after the Oslo agreement and before Al Aqsa Intifada, and remained in custody. 400 female detainees were arrested during Al Aqsa Intifada, 116 (1.3%) of them are still imprisoned. 107 of the female detainees are from the West Bank, 6 from Jerusalem, and 3 from the Gaza Strip. Six female detainees are still under the age of 18, 25 women were arrested this year and 35 were arrested in 2004. The detainees are facing very bad living conditions, lack of medical treatments, and suffering continuous violations and attacks. Regarding detained children in Israeli prisons, the report revealed that Israel is arresting children and detaining them under cruel and inhuman conditions, directly violating the international laws and principle of human rights. The report also mentioned that Israel is still using torture during interrogation, including torture against child detainees, in addition to barring the detainees from their basic rights, such as medical attention, and imposing fines on them. Torture is still practiced in Israeli detention facilities in spite of a ruling by the Israeli High Court of Justice in 1966 which prohibited the usage of all sorts of torture during interrogation. According to the report, torture starts directly after arrest; soldiers attack the arrested residents, cuff them with plastic handcuffs that cause cuts and pressure the hands, blindfold and drag them. Dozens of detainees were also kicked, clubbed and hit with the back of the rifle during arrest. 181 detainees died as a result of torture, some of them were killed after they were arrested, while others died as a result of medical neglect. The latest casualty among the detainees was Jawad Adel Mgheisib, 18, who died as a result of medical neglect, at the Negev detention camp on 28 July 2005. Abu Mgheisib was arrested on December 1, 2002, he was only 15 years old when he was arrested and was sentenced to 33 months imprisonment. The future of child detainees is directly endangered especially since Israel deprives them from the right of education. 4000 Palestinian children were arrested since the beginning of the Intifada, 301 (3.3%) are still detained. 15 child detainees are from Jerusalem, 6 from the Gaza Strip, and 208 from the West Bank; 77 from Nablus, 62 from Ramallah, 27 from Hebron. 295 of the child detainees are males. 79 child detainees (26.2%) are suffering different sorts of sicknesses and deprived from medical care and treatment. Hundreds of detainees arrived the age of 18 while they were imprisoned. 99% of the child detainees were tortured, especially by placing bags on their heads, beating them and forcing them to stand for long periods. 200 child detainees are placed in Telmond detention facility, 37 are in Ofer, 20 in Majiddo, 10 in the Negev, while the rest are detained in Hasharon, Al Jalama, Atzion and other detention facilities. Also, there are 369 detainees who were arrested before the Palestinian Authority was formed, and are still imprisoned. 1200 detainees are suffer chronic diseases, among them several detainees who were shot and injured during their arrest and did not receive the needed treatment. Dozens of Palestinian detainees are barred from their visitation rights since several years. 35 detainees were arrested more than 20 years ago, 6 were arrested 25 years ago, and they are still imprisoned.

Israeli warplanes hit militant base in Lebanon Last Updated Tue, 27 Dec 2005 22:35:42 EST CBC News Israel carried out an airstrike in Lebanon early Wednesday in retaliation after militants fired rockets into a northern Israeli town, an army spokesperson said. The Israeli military said the planes attacked a militant training base south of Beirut. The military said the base belonged to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which has been battling against Israel for decades. There was no immediate word on whether anyone had been killed or injured in the airstrike. Late Tuesday, three rockets landed in a residential neighbourhood in the town Kiryat Shemona, near the Lebanese border. The Israeli army said no one was injured in the explosion but the ensuing explosions damaged property. There was no immediate claim of responsibility. Violence often breaks out in the border region and both Hezbollah and Palestinian militants are active in southern Lebanon. In November, Hezbollah launched mortar and rocket attacks from south Lebanon, injuring 11 Israeli soldiers and damaging an Israeli house. Israel retaliated by attacking a Hezbollah command post in south Lebanon.

Three Britons kidnapped in Gaza Staff and agencies Wednesday December 28, 2005 Three British citizens were kidnapped today as they entered the Gaza Strip from Egypt through the Rafah crossing, Palestinian witnesses and security officials said. The hostages are thought to be a man, a woman and their child, according to reports. The woman worked with a local human rights group, a police source told Reuters. There was no immediate claim of responsibility. Palestinian police said the kidnappers' car was spotted heading north, and that a pursuit was under way. A Foreign Office spokesman was unable to give further details but said UK officials were looking into it. The incident is the latest in a series of abductions in Gaza that has undermined attempts by the Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, to establish order in the coastal strip following Israel's withdrawal earlier this year. Militant groups have kidnapped a number of foreigners, usually using them as bargaining tools to get relatives released from Palestinian prisons, secure jobs from the Palestinian Authority or settle personal scores. Last week, two foreign teachers were kidnapped by Palestinian militants near Gaza City. Gunmen abducted Hendrik Taatgen, a Dutch headteacher at a private American school, and his Australian deputy, Brian Ambrosio, as they left for work. The abductors, who claimed to have ties to the radical PLO faction, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, demanded the release of an imprisoned militant leader. They later released the captives unharmed.

Gun battle erupts outside Gaza election office Reuters Wed Dec 28, 3:47 AM ET GAZA - Palestinian gunmen briefly exchanged fire with police outside an election office in the Gaza Strip on Wednesday as internal fighting grew ahead of a January parliamentary election. An election official said employees at the Central Election Committee office in Gaza City took cover as the fighting erupted outside. It took several minutes until police restored order and the gunmen, from President Mahmoud Abbas' mainstream Fatah faction, left. There were no reports of casualties. The incident occurred after gunmen forced two offices of the electoral commission to close in the southern Gaza Strip. Gunmen later left one of the offices and employees were preparing to resume work, officials said. Militants from Fatah's al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades have threatened to shut election offices across Gaza and the West Bank, possibly preventing Abbas from submitting Fatah's latest list of candidates for the January 25 parliament ballot. The growing crisis within Fatah in the run-up to the vote has encouraged some Palestinian officials to push Abbas for a postponement. Abbas has said the elections will go ahead on time.

Eight dead in Iraqi prison shooting Last Updated Wed, 28 Dec 2005 04:52:03 EST CBC News Eight people were shot to death at a Baghdad jail when a prisoner grabbed a guard's assault rifle and opened fire in what is believed to be an attempt to escape. The prisoner fired the AK-47 indiscriminately. Four of those killed were guards; the other four were inmates, said Iraqi army Brig. Gen. Jalil al-Mehamadawi. Another three people were wounded. The incident took place in the northern suburb of Kazimiyah and is under investigation, said U.S. military authorities.

Most Japanese want troops out of Iraq soon: poll AFP Wed Dec 28, 1:36 AM ET TOKYO - Nearly three-quarters of Japanese people want their troops pulled out of Iraq by mid-2006 at the latest, according to a new poll. Some 46 percent of respondents said that Japanese troops should withdraw along with British troops in the first half of next year, while a further 28 percent said they should exit immediately, the Nihon Keizai Shimbun poll said. Only 11 percent said that the troops should remain in Iraq until the US military withdraws, the business daily reported. The findings come less than three weeks after Japan extended its military mission in Iraq for another year with an eye to withdrawing in 2006. Japan has sent some 600 troops to Iraq for non-combat humanitarian assistance, the nation's first deployment since World War II to a country where fighting is underway. Britain and Australia are key to the timing of Japan's exit as they provide security for its troops, who are barred from combat under the post-war pacifist constitution, except in carefully defined circumstances of self-defense. The newspaper conducted the survey from Friday to Monday but did not say how many valid responses it received.

EU expects fair appeal for jailed Egypt politician Reuters December 28, 2005 BRUSSELS - The European Union said on Wednesday that Egypt's decision to allow a rival to President Hosni Mubarak to be convicted and sentenced to prison called into question the country's commitment to democratic reforms. Ayman Nour, leader of the liberal Ghad (Tomorrow) Party and Mubarak's main challenger in September elections, was sentenced to five years in jail on forgery charges last week and plans to appeal the ruling. "This verdict sends negative signals about democratic political reform in Egypt. The EU expects that any appeal application by Nour will be looked at fairly by the Egyptian courts," Britain, which holds the European Union's rotating presidency, said in a statement late on Tuesday. Nour has said his trial was an attempt to remove him from politics. Some deputies form the European Parliament criticized the EU's reaction as too weak, compared with that of the United States, which has called on Egypt to free Nour. "Today's statement by the EU is feeble in the extreme. British Prime Minister Tony Blair should cancel his trip to Egypt and show democratic solidarity," European Parliament vice-president and British Conservative Edward McMillan-Scott said in a statement. Blair is currently on vacation with his family in the Egyptian resort of Sharm-el-Sheikh. "Nour should be freed forthwith and the EU should send a strong signal for reform by blocking aid to Egypt," said McMillan-Scott. McMillan-Scott prompted Nour's release in March by offering to visit him in jail where he was held on the same charges after deciding to stand against Mubarak in this year's elections.

German official wants to tag Islamic militants Reuters December 28, 2005 BERLIN - Known Islamic militants should be electronically tagged so their movements can be tracked, a regional German interior minister proposed on Wednesday. "This would allow us to monitor the roughly 3,000 Islamists who are prone to violence, hate preachers and fighters trained in terrorist camps," Lower Saxony Interior Minister Uwe Schuenemann said in an interview with Die Welt newspaper. "Hate preachers" is how Germans describe radical Muslim clerics. Schuenemann said electronic tagging was a viable alternative to holding suspected militants in protective custody, a proposal floated by former German interior minister Otto Schily. It would not be against Germany's constitution, he was quoted as saying. "It's practical for all Islamists who are prone to violence and who we can't expel to their home countries because they could be tortured," said Schuenemann. Germany's federal and state governments share responsibility for security services. Under Germany's federal system, states have a great deal of control over their internal security operations and routine policing. Britain's government also proposed electronic tagging of terror suspects in July as an alternative to jailing them without charge. Electronic tagging of criminals has become widespread in Britain where much of the work being outsourced to private companies such as Serco Group Plc. A Hamburg, Germany-based cell of al Qaeda was responsible for the planning and execution of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in the United States. Since those attacks, Germany has cracked down on Muslim extremists living in the country and has had a number of high-profile trials of radical Islamists.

Geldof's year Wednesday December 28, 2005 The Guardian 2005 was supposed to be the year of Africa. Tony Blair committed Britain to ambitious targets on aid and debt relief. Museums staged major exhibitions dedicated to the continent's art. And one of the biggest popular movements ever - spurred on by a very big pop concert - called on eight world leaders in a Scottish hotel to make poverty history. But what, in the end, did it all achieve? Bob Geldof looks back on a year of 'world-saving bollocks' and argues that whatever his critics say, we really did change things. The reappointed German development minister shook her purple-dyed hair. "The Floyd ..." she managed, her tone hushed with awe. "Amazing. I never thought ... How did you ever get them together again?" Her voice trailed off into reverie. Her officials, too, shook their heads in shared wonder. "Eh, minister," I slurped between my spoonfuls of delicious soup 'n' sausage. "What do you think the German position will be on the EU Doha proposal? And can you also give us some insight into your new government's position on the Gleneagles aid commitments?" "Annie Lennox," the minister murmured. "Oh my God. The passion ..." Two weeks ago the new German government reiterated its support for the Gleneagles G8 commitment. The French government set in train the facility that will allow it to raise new funds to pay for its share of Gleneagles. And the Norwegian parliament passed into law the British proposal for an international finance facility that will raise new funds for universal immunisation throughout Africa, a key piece of the G8 promise. Last week the G8 debt deal was ratified by the IMF board and Europe agreed a process for holding itself accountable to its aid promises. Thus the world changes. Or can be changed. If you want to change it. The politics of emotion can take you only so far. All the tears in the world have never kept a human being alive. Practical action does that. Cash and politics. Charity and justice. Morality and realpolitik. Oil and water. But if you are going to do it, if you are serious, deadly earnest - sick of the nightly pornography of poverty trailed pruriently across our teatime television screens, aware through long, tiring experience of the shortcomings of human pity and sympathy, and if you believe that poverty is unnatural in a world of unsurpassed wealth - then it becomes incumbent upon you to try to change it if you can; to recognise that ultimately poverty is political, and therefore you must engage with the process as it is. Not as you imagine it to be, or as you would wish it to be, or even as you think it should be - but as it is. You must engage with the power and the persons and institutions and methods that wield that power. It can be a tiresome process, but ultimately that is irrelevant if that person you saw last night on the television can just stop hurting for one second. If that child is allowed a future. If that mother would just stop crying for her lost children. There are those who will stand outside the tent peeing in, there are those who will be inside the tent peeing out - and then there are the others who will stand inside the tent peeing on the ground where they stand. And the reason for that is simple. Sometimes, by being momentarily allowed inside the tent, you can help to change it. By peeing so wantonly, so copiously, you can stink the place up so much that they want you out - at a reasonable price. Sometimes you can harness the process, to do the unassailable good. And sometimes - rarely, but sometimes - it delivers. That happened this year in our country, and we should be proud. It's been a good year for Africa. At least, given the criminally low norm, better than any in the past. Gleneagles delivered, in Kofi Annan's words, "the greatest summit for Africa ever". President Obasanjo of Nigeria, speaking at the UN, called it the "great leap forward". World Bank and Nobel-winning development economists hailed it as the first serious attempt to deal strategically with structural poverty in Africa. Jose Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission, called it "stupendous". All of this may or may not be true; that remains to be seen. But what is clear is that given the disgraceful results of September's UN summit, called to discuss progress on its own millennium development goals that it turns out were hardly mentioned, and the equally pathetic mewling and sniping that constituted debate at the Hong Kong trade negotiations earlier this month, Gleneagles glows even brighter by comparison. Whatever it was, one thing it clearly was not was a "disaster for the world's poor", as one Dave Spart-like "activist" hilariously called it. Gleneagles agreed to 50 of the 90 proposals outlined in the report by the Commission for Africa, set up by Blair to recommend how Britain should take a lead on the issue. Some, I'm told, have written that there was no intellectual underpinning to Live8. Well, I sort of think, "They're poor, they don't have to be, let's stop it," seems adequate, but since I persuaded the prime minister to analyse the economic decline of Africa for the 21st century and come up with an achievable political and economic plan to finally stop it, and since he then put together some of the smartest and most powerful intellectuals, politicians, academics and businesspeople from the G8, Africa, China and elsewhere to do just that, and since I sat on that commission for almost a year, and since it produced a radical document that was praised by experts, analysts and activists alike, and since Blair bravely accepted it as UK policy for our G8, and since it therefore became the de facto political and intellectual underpinning of the entire bloody project, and since it is available in every bookshop in all its 500 page detail or in a more readable Penguin paperback or a schools edition or online and was heavily discussed in all newspapers ... what the jaysus are they crapping on about? But what did Live8 actually achieve? Primarily by its size, ambition and support, in raising the single greatest lobby for a political platform ever achieved, it forced on the top table of world politics a hitherto economically unacceptable package of benefits for the poor of Africa. Africa was the focus of the entire year that began with the formation of the Commission for Africa, using the opening shot of the Band Aid 20 record to alert a generation unborn when we began all of this 20 years ago. In 1985, because of the political deadlock of the cold war, we could only deal with the symptoms of deadly impoverishment: famine, illness, dislocation, orphans etc. But now we could begin to address the structures of poverty: politics, economics, infrastructure, capacity, governance; the things that in theory should prevent the former. Dull gruel, but still, it seemed something a new generation in the UK was prepared to try. The Make Poverty History (MPH) coalition brought together 60-odd agencies, development geeks of all shades and opinions, and a solid core of the big, serious NGOs, a sprawling assemblage of intent that began to gather a vast army of co-campaigners around the world. I had thought that once Blair had been forced to adopt the Commission for Africa proposals as UK policy, and with the formation of the MPH coalition and the commitment of the BBC to broadcasting 42 programmes in or about Africa, that that would be it. Here was the policy, the lobby, and through the television, the means to spread understanding of this sublime continent in whose name we were acting. But it wasn't. During discussions about the comprehensive spending review, which determines UK expenditure, Brown and then Blair suggested we would "eventually" arrive at a figure for overseas aid of 0.7% of our budget. This was a great breach of faith as they had promised a specific date, equal to the French commitment of 2012, and now they were dodging it. I (self-importantly) huffed and puffed and castigated B 'n' B for their "guff and grandiose schemes". Hurt feelings, massive protests, letters of outrage - and they announced 0.7% by 2013. But if this was happening here, nothing was happening elsewhere. The British negotiators of the G8, the "sherpas", told me almost on a daily basis they were getting nowhere. The MPH coalition was planning what would turn out to be a massive rally in Edinburgh. But MPH seemed to be making minimal political impact outside the UK. Bono and Richard Curtis had been nagging me to do a Live Aid 2, but I didn't want to. I thought we'd done enough. I didn't know if I had the necessary will or energy any more. It wears you out and down in every sense. And any repeat of Live Aid could never match the original that had proved so powerful in memory. What changed my mind was the bleak picture that the sherpas drew as the spring wore on and as Bush seemed immune to the prime minister's blandishments. Bono had told Condoleezza Rice that he would get 10,000 kids to ring the White House every night of U2's US tour. Rice calmly replied that the White House "could take the calls". It was clear that something huge had to be done so that it became politically impossible to refuse us. Something that would affect the capitals of all these leaders, that would start their national media discussing the subject and in turn would get their electorate saying, "Why don't you do something?" Sir Michael Jay, who led the British negotiating team, has said publicly that without Live8 there could have been no deal. That the entire tone of discussion changed as each concert, in each capital, was announced. Gleneagles delivered precisely the aid increase asked for in the Commission for Africa report. A doubling of aid from $25bn to $50bn in graduated steps until 2010, when there will be a review towards a potential doubling again to 2015. Anyone who tells you they would have believed that possible a year ago is a liar. Anyone who tells you the leaders should have done more is probably right, but that wasn't the view of many of my African colleagues on the Africa Commission. Their point was that the African economies, infrastructure and capacity are so weak that the continent, tragically, could not initially absorb more than what was asked. The point is the G8 did what was asked. And the truth is that they did it cos we did it. The G8 also finally agreed to cancel - not relieve but cancel - the unpayable debt of 18 of the poorest countries to the IMF, World Bank and African Development Bank. This was Brown's initiative, with Tony Blair calling in favours from George Bush, whose officials had championed debt cancellation but who initially wanted it done without additional financing. Two days before Live8, when it was clear there would be a million people on the streets of Philadelphia, Bush announced a new initiative on malaria and confirmed America's commitment to double aid to Africa. All of this sounds great, but what does it mean in human terms? Well, it's vast. But the caveat is that having promised these initiatives, they must now be realised and delivered. Blair, seemingly as jaded as the rest of us by all these highfalutin commitments, made the assembled leaders sign their Gleneagles Communiqué, thus in effect turning it into a contract. These commitments must be rigorously monitored and reported on. A promise by the powerful to the weak is the most solemn and binding oath one can make, for to break it is to kill the vulnerable. And we've had quite enough unnecessary dying already. One thing that gives me confidence that we can force the G8 to keep these promises is the strong social, cultural and political legacy of this year. Live8 was like a steroid injection. The One campaign in the US has been super-sized. It now has 2 million activists signed up, regularly writing to Bush and to Congress. The Canadian Make Poverty History campaign doubled in size in a few hours during Live8; 250,000 Canadians are targeting candidates in the January election there. In Japan, this kind of campaigning is unknown, but 4 million people are now wearing the white band there. There are now campaigns in more than 80 countries. In the UK, all the major parties are now formally committed to 0.7% and David Cameron has made "fighting global poverty" one of his six priorities. When these promises are achieved, this will be what happens. Five million more people will be alive every year; 20 million more children will go to school; 6 million Africans will get anti-Aids drugs within the next five years; 600,000 children who would have died from malaria annually will live; a staggering 280 million will be free of debt slavery for the first time in their lives. Isn't that beyond fantastic? Isn't that extraordinary? And precisely because the consequences are so enormous, it must be made to happen. Trade was never on the agenda for Gleneagles. The sherpas had such a difficult time trying to negotiate the aid and debt deal that they simply had no time to deal with the complex wrangling on trade. Despite that, the commission was clear on the key issue of trade. It called for an end to rich countries' agricultural subsidies and endorsed the core demand of Make Poverty History and the Trade Justice Movement, that rich nations must not use aid to force African economies to open up to major multinationals, against whom weak economies could not compete. This broke new ground. Of course, unlike with aid and debt, all of this is verbal piety - and if they meant it at Gleneagles, why didn't they do something about it in Hong Kong, where rich countries served up thin gruel for the poor? Africa has only 1% or 2% of world trade. It is incapable of competing and possesses no threat to the other 98%. It should be considered differently and engaged in an exercise of economic positive discrimination. But by now you will be bored. You will have noted that all I have talked about is policy. What about the gig? The bands? That brings me to one of the criticisms directed at me - that there were no black or African acts on the bill. This, while well meaning, displays a lack of understanding of the whole campaign. It was not a concert; it was a campaign. It was not a cultural event; it was a political device. It was not about music; it was about poverty. Live8 was not a celebration of Africa, or a presentation of its culture to the rest of the world. Others can do that. That is not my interest. In a world that has never been wealthier, my interest is stopping people dying because they are simply too poor to stay alive. To change political policy you have to create a giant lobby for change. To get to the greatest number of people around the world, we had to use the biggest selling artists in the world, nationally and internationally. For all their great musicianship, African acts do not sell many records. People wouldn't watch. Networks wouldn't take the concert. Live8 is nothing to do with my personal preferences in music; the issue is too important to be left to musical indulgence - mine or anyone else's. Death beats culture every time if only on the basis that when everyone dies there's no one around to make culture any more. Having said that, why didn't those critics watch the Johannesburg concert? It was one of the nine Live8 gigs transmitted internationally and simultaneously. Surely that satisfied their narrow criteria. As for black acts - did no one see the US concert? And how depressing that after an entire year of discussing the issues, some only understood Live8 as a numbers count of black faces. When I invited my righteously indignant critics to create an event to their liking, in say Regent's Park, and offered to incorporate it into Live8, answer came there none. Indeed, when Peter Gabriel suggested we adopt his Eden Project World Music gig in Cornwall I readily agreed. Unfortunately, my point is borne out by the fact that 3 million were live spectators to Live8; there were 2,000 in Cornwall. More than 3 billion watched Live8; few saw or watched bits of Cornwall. The Live Aid and Live8 DVDs are the biggest and fastest-selling DVDs ever, now totalling millions of sales; Cornwall has sold a few thousand. That is not to be smug, triumphant or condescending; it is simply to make the point behind my cold, pragmatic thinking around what Live8 was for. If those critics promote an African concert in the future, I wish them well - and can I have some free tickets? But Live8 wasn't and could never be about that. OK. The other things people said. An African concert was cancelled in favour of Live8. Not true. We moved the site to where we could get a global feed and allow Mandela to address the world. Which we did and he did. They said Live8 sponsors included Nestlé, Rio Tinto, BAE Systems. Not true. None of those were involved. They said George Bush's Millennium Challenge Account ties aid to cooperation in the "war on terror". Not true, as a simple check of the facts would have shown. They said I instructed the bands not to criticise Blair or Bush. Not true. I couldn't care less what bands say or do. They said I was forced to bow to pressure for African acts by incorporating the Jo'burg gig and the Eden Project. As I've explained, that's not true either. But let me be very clear: I would never bow to that sort of thing. I would have cancelled the lot rather than indulge in musical correctness. They say I do all of this stuff for my career. Which one? I'm well-off (touch wood). The business stuff is great, thank you very much. I've just finished a mini-tour with my band, brought out an anthology of solo albums and will make a new record next year. I'm fine, thanks. I get plaudits hurled at me with obscene frequency, so my self is already over-aggrandized enough. No, I genuinely could do without all the grief, the numbing boredom of the endless briefings, reports, meetings, abuse, stats, smarming, word-watching, tie-wearing, brown-nosing and general crap that goes with all this "world-saving" bollocks. The thing is, I don't know why or how, but I can do this stuff. And in being able to do it, it would be the most grotesque irresponsibility to then turn away and write another song or something. It is unimpeachably boring - but somehow it works. Behind all of this bitter carping is the corrosively cynical view that none of this works. That because they, as critics, do nothing, nobody else should even try. Well, they're wrong. You can alter policy. The individual is not powerless in the face of either political indifference or monstrous human tragedy. Let me say it embarressedly, cornily, almost guiltily. Let me try to say it without sounding like some pious twat. You can change the world. And millions upon millions of you did that this year. This stuff works. Sometimes. Blair and Brown should get praise for an incredible achievement. They personally wanted this to happen. They were committed to it. They expended political capital and took big risks. They did their job and they did it well, whatever other stuff you may agree or disagree with. This one is down to them and to the UK in general. I don't believe it would have happened elsewhere. It seems that at last the original proposition I articulated 20 years ago, that to die of want in a world of surplus was not only intellectually absurd but morally repulsive, has been utterly agreed with by a towering majority, and reluctantly accepted by the leaders of the rich world. That, ultimately, is what happened this year. It is clear that the majority of people of the world who participated in the greatest civic movement ever created through Make Poverty History and Live8 did begin the process of ending structural and endemic poverty in Africa. It's a small beginning for sure, but it has begun. But I'll end with this truth. Although I am exhausted and bone weary in every sense, all of those 20 years of boring you and myself to death about this stuff would have been worth it for a single life. For just one person, it's been worth it - Birhan Woldu. When we saw that little scrap of humanity on The Cars' film 20 years ago during Live Aid, when we saw that silent scream, the soundless agony of that tiny thing, when the phone lines collapsed with pity for her - and then to see her now, beautiful, dignified, elegant, intellectual, dynamic, hopeful; a young woman worried about passing her agricultural exams on the Live8 stage, then I really, properly mean this: all of it was worth it for just her. For that single life. And in her is everything every person is and can be and must be allowed to be, and therefore every death, every loss is a great loss, an incalculable loss, a diminishment, an impoverishment. This year, all of you started keeping 5 million Berhan people in east Africa alive. Not bad. Not bad at all. Comment: Trouble is, politicians have a very short memory when it comes to promises made to their constituents. Plans now for what to do next year, the year after, or in five years are simply that: plans. What will happen to those plans of spending money in Africa when the economic crash comes? The United States is becoming a third world country itself. Moreover, politicians come and go while the corporations and political structures that feed on the African people remain. Yes, it is good that people in the West spend some time learning about Africa, about the situation there and put pressure on their politicans. These are noble deeds, but when they leave the concert or close their newspapers, they are still part of the system that is exploiting the continent. Furthermore, if solutions for Africa come, short of the West falling into an economic collapse that turns them into homebodies, they will not come from the West. They must come from the many and diverse peoples of Africa themselves, based upon their wants ansd needs.

Greece urged to investigate MI6 torture link Helena Smith in Athens and Richard Norton-Taylor Wednesday December 28, 2005 The Guardian The Greek government faced mounting pressure last night to investigate claims that a senior MI6 officer masterminded the arrest and torture of Pakistani immigrants in Athens by local intelligence agents after the July 7 London bombings. After a prominent weekly newspaper named the operatives allegedly involved at the weekend, the conservative government of prime minister Costas Karamanlis was confronting growing accusations of a cover-up. Yesterday, in a display of rare unanimity, Greece's political opposition called for the issue to be urgently debated in parliament. "It seems that [Anglo-Greek] secret services were acting in a way that was not at all legal," Michalis Papayannakis, a former MEP and leading member of the Left Coalition, told the Guardian. "And, from what we know this is not the first time that this has happened. There should be an investigation." The controversy deepened after the Greek investigative weekly, Proto Thema, revealed the identity of the M16 station chief in Athens who it said had plotted the operation on Greek soil. According to the newspaper, intelligence agents from Greece's national information service, kidnapped the 27 Pakistani-born men from their homes in Athens and the northwestern town of Ioannina, and interrogated them "as if they were in some adventure film" to try to extract information about the July bombings. The agents beat and psychologically tortured the men to "show off" in front of the British officer, the newspaper reported, before dumping the blindfolded men in central Athens at night. Claims of British involvement were vigorously denied by sources close to the British security and intelligence agencies yesterday. Sources would not deny that the arrest of the Pakistanis took place in connection with the July 7 bombings. But they were adamant in denying British involvement. Jave Aslan, who heads the 30,000-strong community of Pakistani immigrants in Athens, said the men had been physically abused. "There was a dark-skinned British [spy] who was apparently in charge. One man was threatened with a pistol that was shoved in his mouth, others were hit. There is no reason for any of these people to tell lies," he said. Greece's public order minister, Giorgos Voulgarakis, has repeatedly denied the charges. Earlier this month, after the Pakistanis went public with the claims, he said: "Such a thing never happened, does not happen and won't happen. It's either a provocation or a farce." The foreign secretary, Jack Straw, and the Pakistani interior minister, have also denied the claims.

Spain's abortion rate soars Dale Fuchs in Madrid Wednesday December 28, 2005 The Guardian The annual number of abortions in Spain has nearly doubled in the last decade, prompting calls for improved sex education in schools. About 85,000 Spanish women terminated their pregnancies in 2004, compared with 49,000 in 1995, according to the ministry of health. Some 15% were teenagers. "We have to get rid of the taboos about sexual education," said Pilar Triguero of Ceapa, a national federation of 12,500 parent-teacher associations. "The state-funded schools tiptoe around the subject, and they don't even have an established curriculum. What is taught depends on the discretion of each teacher." Article continues The abortion rate among women between the ages of 20 and 29 - who were presumably aware of contraception - had also doubled, said Margarita Delgado, a demographer with the Science Research Council in Madrid. Many were married or had stable partners. Ms Delgado said the rise in abortions among these women was partly due to precarious economic conditions. Female workers hold the bulk of temporary contracts, and many wait until they have a permanent post to have children for fear that a pregnancy will dash their chances of a job or promotion, she said. Spain's late business hours make it hard for women to juggle jobs and family and few businesses offer part-time positions. State support for families is among the lowest in the EU, Ms Delgado said. "The business culture is hostile," she said. "We need a change in mentality."

Italians 'dumping grandparents' Barbara McMahon in Rome Wednesday December 28, 2005 The Guardian Italy's image as a family-centred society has taken a knock with the revelation that thousands of grandparents spent a lonely Christmas in hospital because their families did not want them at home. According to doctors, some 10% to 20% of over-70s on Italian hospital wards could have been discharged for the festive season but relatives made excuses to keep them in care. Middle-class families in the north were twice as likely as working-class families in the poorer south to abandon their relatives, research found. Adult children said they did not have room to accommodate their parent for Christmas or they could not get time off work to care for them. Others said they could not cope with their medical needs, although it would often only have involved ensuring they took medication. The numbers of grandparents living alone is on the increase and Il Messaggero, which reported the issue of Christmas abandonments yesterday, said these once-revered members of the family were being treated like "cumbersome packages". Roberto Messina, head of a Rome-based charity for elderly people, said that many know they are unwanted. "The saddest time is when an old person remains alone during visiting hours," he said. "They pull the covers up, close their eyes and pretend to be asleep, but in reality they are crying and clenching their teeth." According to Ido Iori, president of an organisation that monitors hospital admissions, some old people plead to be allowed to stay in hospital until after the festivities, as they have no company at home. Abandonment causes problems for hospitals, which are supposed to discharge people from general wards, if they are well enough, after three or four days. But there has been some festive cheer. The charity Caritas reported that a Christmas scheme in which Italian families open their homes to old people living alone, immigrants or other people in need has been more successful than ever this year.

Sleaze exposed in China as former minister is jailed Jonathan Watts in Beijing Wednesday December 28, 2005 The Guardian A former Chinese cabinet minister was sentenced to life in prison yesterday in a high-level bribery case that has exposed rampant corruption in the country's profit-oriented dictatorship. Amid leadership fears that endemic corruption is undermining the legitimacy of the Communist party, a Beijing court convicted Tian Fengshan, who was fired as minister of land and resources in 2003, of accepting bribes of 4.4m yuan ($545,000). The highest level bribery trial in four years was hailed by the state-controlled media as a sign that the authorities were cracking down on influence-peddling and illegal land transfers, which are increasingly the target of violent protests. But Tian was spared the death penalty. The court said it had been "lenient" because the defendant had confessed and helped police recover illegally obtained assets. Tens of thousands of communist cadres have been sacked, fined, imprisoned or executed for corruption in recent years, but it is rare for such a senior figure to be implicated. Before Tian joined the cabinet, he was governor of Heilongjiang, a province bigger than many countries with a population of more than 38 million people. From 1995 to 2000, he oversaw a system oiled by bribery. For the right sum, he dispensed official positions, organised funding for projects and helped to reclassify farmland so that it could be taken over by developers. Although he was found guilty on 17 charges of bribery involving half a million dollars, his position and reputation suggest this may have been the tip of the iceberg. Several years before his arrest, Tian was the thinly veiled subject of a best-selling novel about corruption in Heilongjiang, The Snow Leaves No Trace. He came under police scrutiny when a Communist party associate, Ma De, admitted paying him 100,000 yuan in 1999 for helping to arrange financing for a broadcasting facility. In a sign of systematic influence-peddling, Ma said that he had paid 800,000 yuan for his post as a local party secretary. After getting the job, he then sold other positions for 24m yuan. As the case widened, it decimated the top level of the Heilongjiang administration. Among those fired or jailed were the president of the high court, the top prosecutor, the vice-governor, the deputy head of the legislature and at least 10 mayors and vice-mayors. Ma and another associate, Han Guizhi, have been given suspended death sentences, which are often commuted to life in prison. Zhu Shengwen, a former deputy mayor of Harbin, reportedly committed suicide in jail. The official version of his death is that he threw himself out of a prison window. His family say he was killed to prevent him from exposing further cases of embezzlement. Since taking power almost three years ago, President Hu Jintao and the prime minister, Wen Jiabao, have tried to dispel growing public cynicism about "crony communism" by purging the ruling party of those found guilty of corruption and ordering the entire membership to undergo re-education. According to the party's anti-corruption watchdog, the central commission for discipline inspection, nearly 50,000 officials have been prosecuted and punished in the past two years. More than 1,000 cadres have committed suicide and 8,000 fled overseas. But the top-down approach of "strengthening party discipline" is systematically undermined by political patronage and a lack of media scrutiny and electoral accountability. He Yong, deputy secretary of the commission, recently said the number of corruption cases was declining, but those involving senior officials was on the increase.

India tests nuclear-capable missile AFP Dec 28, 2005 NEW DELHI - India successfully tested its nuclear-capable, short-range Dhanush ballistic missile Wednesday, defence officials said. The locally-developed missile, a naval version of the surface-to-surface Prithvi, was tested from a ship in the Bay of Bengal off the east coast of Orissa state, the Press Trust of India said, quoting official sources. Dhanush -- which means bow in Hindi -- has a range of 250 kilometresmiles) and can carry a payload of 500 kilograms (1,100 pounds), the news agency said. India, which conducted a series of nuclear tests in 1998, has already developed and deployed two ballistic missiles and a surface missile. It hopes to cap the programme with a 5,000-kilometre (3,125-mile) range ballistic missile to give it the capability of striking beyond South Asia. Nuclear-armed rivals India and Pakistan frequently test-fire missiles but as part of a slow-moving peace process have agreed to inform each other in advance.

Canada blames U.S. for gun violence CNN Tuesday, December 27, 2005 TORONTO, Ontario (AP) -- Canadian officials, seeking to make sense of another fatal shooting in what has been a record year for gun-related deaths, said Tuesday that along with a host of social ills, part of the problem stemmed from what they said was the United States exporting its violence. Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin and Toronto Mayor David Miller warned that Canada could become like the United States after gunfire erupted Monday on a busy street filled with holiday shoppers, killing a 15-year-old girl and wounding six bystanders -- the latest victims in a record surge in gun violence in Toronto. The shooting stemmed from a dispute among a group of 10 to 15 youth, and the victim was a teenager out with a parent near a popular shopping mall, police said Tuesday. "I think it's a day that Toronto has finally lost its innocence," Det. Sgt. Savas Kyriacou said. "It was a tragic loss and tragic day." While many Canadians take pride in Canadian cities being less violent than their American counterparts, Toronto has seen 78 murders this year, including a record 52 gun-related deaths -- almost twice as many as last year. "What happened yesterday was appalling. You just don't expect it in a Canadian city," the mayor said. "It's a sign that the lack of gun laws in the U.S. is allowing guns to flood across the border that are literally being used to kill people in the streets of Toronto," Miller said. Miller said Toronto, a city of nearly three million, is still very safe compared to most American cities, but the illegal flow of weapons from the United States is causing the noticeable rise in gun violence. "The U.S. is exporting its problem of violence to the streets of Toronto," he said. Miller said that while almost every other crime in Toronto is down, the supply of guns has increased and half of them come from the United States. Miller said the availability of stolen Canadian guns is another problem, and that poverty in certain Toronto neighborhoods is a root cause. [...]

Jet With Fuselage Hole Lands in Seattle AP Wed Dec 28, 1:44 AM ET SEATTLE - A 12-inch hole in the fuselage of an Alaska Airlines jet caused the plane to lose cabin pressure, forcing the pilots to make an emergency descent and return to the airport, authorities said Tuesday. The incident Monday involved an MD-80 jet en route from Seattle to Burbank, Calif. The plane landed safely at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, and none of the 140 passengers was hurt. A ramp worker acknowledged that he failed to report immediately striking the plane at the gate Monday with a baggage cart or baggage-belt machine, said Jim Struhsaker, a spokesman for the National Transportation Safety Board. The worker told the agency that although the vehicle touched the plane, he was not aware he had dented it, Struhsaker said. The accident created a crease in the plane's aluminum skin, which opened up into a 12-by-6-inch gash as the jet came climbed to 26,000 feet, Struhsaker said. The crew of Flight 536 reported a loss of cabin pressure about 20 minutes after takeoff, airline spokeswoman Caroline Boren said. Oxygen masks deployed for passengers, and the plane made a rapid descent back toward the airport. "I could feel that obviously my ears popping ... and then it got hard to breathe, and then, whoosh, all the compression in the plane was lost," passenger Jeremy Hermanns said. The worker who damaged the jet was employed by Menzies Aviation, a British company under contract with the airline to provide baggage handling and other ramp services, Boren said. Menzies did not immediately return a call seeking comment Tuesday night. Meetings were being held with ramp workers to review safety procedures, including the "rapid and thorough reporting" of incidents on the ground, Boren said. The plane was being repaired and should be back in service within a few days, she added. Last May, the airline laid off nearly 500 baggage handlers and other ramp workers at the airport, saying it needed to trim costs amid rising fuel prices and fierce competition from low-cost carriers.

Da Vinci novel breaks code for success John Ezard Wednesday December 28, 2005 The Guardian A group of statisticians has laboured for months to crack the secret of producing best selling novels - only to find that under their formula The Da Vinci Code should have been a flop. This year's runaway bestseller should have had only a 36% chance of reaching the charts, according to Alvai Winkler and his team. Their model fits work by some topselling authors but gives only middling marks to the Harry Potter titles and rules out almost everything by Charles Dickens except for his lesser-known Christmas story The Battle of Life. However, Dr Winkler, a former academic at Middlesex University who works intensively for large companies, says he does not think the method is a turkey. It was developed to help customers of the UK wing of the self-publishing website Lulu.com hone their books for the market. It assumes that much of success lies in the title. The team of three statisticians, helped by programmers, studied 54 years of fiction number ones in the New York Times and the 100 favourite novels in the BBC's Big Read poll. Comparing these with a control group of less successful novels by the same authors, they found that the winning books had three common features; they had metaphorical, or figurative titles instead of literal ones; the first word was a pronoun, a verb, an adjective or a greeting; and their grammar patterns took the form either of a possessive case with a noun, or of an adjective and noun or of the words The ... of ... By this formula the most perfect titles were Agatha Christies' last thriller Sleeping Murder (1976) and Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, both with 83% marks. The poorest was Patricia Cornwell's thriller Cause of Death, with 9%. British authors produced the highest-scoring titles in both studies. John Le Carre was the most consistent with Smiley's People, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, the Tailor of Panama and others. Dr Winkler said: "When we tested our model on 700 titles published over 50 years, it correctly predicted whether a book was a bestseller or not for nearly 70% of cases. This is 40% better than random guesswork. It is far from perfect but given the nature of the data and the way tastes change 70% accuracy is surprisingly good." Yet the Harry Potter books score only 51% because their titles count as literal, though with correct grammar patterns. The Da Vinci Code is written off for being literal, as is Catch-22 and Dickens' Bleak House and a number of others. Dan Brown however, can take heart. The Lulu team predicts he will have a real bestseller next year with The Solomon Key. Though its title structure is identical to The Da Vinci Code, they count it as figurative "due to its reference to the Greater and Lesser Keys of Solomon, medieval books about black magic". However, Dr Winkler, a former academic at Middlesex University who works intensively for large companies, says he does not think the method is a turkey. It was developed to help customers of the UK wing of the self-publishing website Lulu.com hone their books for the market. It assumes that much of success lies in the title. The team of three statisticians, helped by programmers, studied 54 years of fiction number ones in the New York Times and the 100 favourite novels in the BBC's Big Read poll. Comparing these with a control group of less successful novels by the same authors, they found that the winning books had three common features; they had metaphorical, or figurative titles instead of literal ones; the first word was a pronoun, a verb, an adjective or a greeting; and their grammar patterns took the form either of a possessive case with a noun, or of an adjective and noun or of the words The ... of ... By this formula the most perfect titles were Agatha Christies' last thriller Sleeping Murder (1976) and Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, both with 83% marks. The poorest was Patricia Cornwell's thriller Cause of Death, with 9%. British authors produced the highest-scoring titles in both studies. John Le Carre was the most consistent with Smiley's People, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, the Tailor of Panama and others. Dr Winkler said: "When we tested our model on 700 titles published over 50 years, it correctly predicted whether a book was a bestseller or not for nearly 70% of cases. This is 40% better than random guesswork. It is far from perfect but given the nature of the data and the way tastes change 70% accuracy is surprisingly good." Yet the Harry Potter books score only 51% because their titles count as literal, though with correct grammar patterns. The Da Vinci Code is written off for being literal, as is Catch-22 and Dickens' Bleak House and a number of others. Dan Brown however, can take heart. The Lulu team predicts he will have a real bestseller next year with The Solomon Key. Though its title structure is identical to The Da Vinci Code, they count it as figurative "due to its reference to the Greater and Lesser Keys of Solomon, medieval books about black magic".

How Beijing Escapes the 'Bush Doctrine' By Liu Kin-ming The Standard December 20, 2005 President George Bush is a man with 'deep convictions,' who has risked his presidency to institute democracy in Iraq. But the President's doctrine of opposing dictatorships doesn't seem to apply to China. Sadly, according to this op-ed article from Hong Kong's The Standard, even a man like George W. has succumbed to 'The China Exception.' As a long-time student of U.S. policies and attitudes toward China, I am constantly amazed at one enduring element I call the China Exception. Presidents can come and go; Congress can be led by either the Democrats or the Republicans; but China has always viewed in a very special way by Americans. The United States, the bastion of anti-communism during the Cold War, considered the Russians to be wicked and dangerous. The Chinese, somehow, were seen as more benign and misguided. In other words, the Russians were bad communists while the Chinese were good communists. American attitudes toward China always swung between love and skepticism, but the Soviet Union was always considered the bad guy. What's more, the Soviet Union didn't have lobbyists like the Fortune 500 the way China does. Even George W Bush, the most revolutionary U.S. president since Ronald Reagan, doesn't seem immune to this romanticism about China. I happen to be a strong supporter of Bush. I admire his courage and insight in trying to bring democracy and liberty to many parts of the world. This, Bush argues and I agree, is the best way to fight terrorism. In a nutshell, I like the Bush doctrine. But it seems to be applicable everywhere but China. Ellen Bork, acting executive director at the Project for the New American Century, made a compelling case at a panel discussion hosted by the American Enterprise Institute last Wednesday in Washington. Bork simplified the Bush Doctrine down to three key points. First, the United States would show active leadership. Second, it would promote liberal democracy. Third, it would oppose dictatorships, and one of the strategies for this is regime change. But Washington apparently is not pursuing these policies toward Beijing. "The U.S. has not made the establishment of liberal democracy a top priority for China," Bork said. Instead, Washington still believes in "economy first, politics later." Bush's speech in Kyoto last month cited Taiwan and South Korea as examples of political liberalization through economic development. He claimed Taiwan "has moved from repression to democracy as it liberalized its economy. "And like South Korea, the opening to world markets transformed the island into one of the world's most important trading partners. And like South Korea, economic liberalization in Taiwan helped fuel its desire for individual political freedom - because men and women who are allowed to control their own wealth will eventually insist on controlling their own lives and their own future." But it's much more complex than that, Bork said. In the 1980s, the United States started to withdraw support from dictatorships in Asia, from South Korea, to the Philippines to Taiwan. "Democracy is not inevitable for economic development," Bork said. While development can provide a basis for real change, just getting people rich won't do it. Constant pressure and vigilance, as well as the economic card, are a must for meaningful change. The United States still has leverage over China. Think of why the European Union did a U-turn on lifting the arms embargo on China earlier this year. And Bork said: "The fear of losing most-favored nation status led to the release of [political] prisoners." To apply the Bush Doctrine to China, Bork says, the United States should spend some yet-to-be-spent capital. "Washington shouldn't look to the Chinese Communist Party for reforms and should stand with Chinese dissidents like we did with the Soviet dissidents before," she suggested. Fellow panelist Pei Minxin, senior associate and director of the China program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, disagreed. He said: "Bush can't just stop by [former secretary to late party general secretary Zhao Ziyang] Bao Tong's house for coffee" as it's impossible for reasons of protocol. Another panelist Lorne Craner - formerly assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor and currently president of the International Republican Institute - rejoined: "That could take place at the U.S. ambassador's residence." And Ying Ma from the AEI suggested that U.S. officials meet Chinese dissidents in the United States more often. Of course, Bush didn't receive any dissidents during his trip to China. Instead, he worshipped in a state-sanctioned church, a move that might end up sending the wrong signal. While Bush was critical of China in his Kyoto speech, he was more restrained when he went to China. Bush is someone with deep convictions, risking his presidency to try and implement democracy in Iraq. But when the president pays Beijing much more courtesy than he would other dictatorships, then I know that sadly, the China Exception is here to stay. Comment: For a clear and concise explication of the "Bush Doctrine," read the new Signs of the Times special article: Neoconservatism, the Israeli Lobby,and other Power Relations

The Fall of the House of Cards Pop Goes the Bubble! By MIKE WHITNEY December 27, 2005 Four months ago I wrote an article, "Doomsday; the Final Months of the Housing Bubble" that predicted a dramatic fall in housing prices that would have a catastrophic effect on the American economy. In truth, I'm a lousy forecaster and simply collected the relevant data from a number of sources that convinced me that the end was quickly approaching. Now, it seems that dismal day is upon us and the Grim Reaper has begun churning out the disappointing statistics that we've dreaded from the very beginning. In November the sales of new homes plunged by the largest amount in 12 years. The 11.5% decline from October was 4 points higher than expected by Wall Street analysts, fueling the belief that the red-hot housing market is headed for the dumpster. This sudden downturn is expected to slow the wave of speculation that has kept the market booming for the last few years. According to an Associated Press report, sales dropped by "22% in the West, the biggest decline in the region since February 1995." Many readers will wonder why trimming the spec-market threatens the overall economy. The reason, as The Economist points out, is that "23% of all American houses bought in 2004 were for investment, not owner-occupation. Another 13% were bought as second homes. Investors are prepared to buy houses they will rent out at a loss; just because they think prices will keep rising -- the very definition of a financial bubble." If we consider the effects of 36% of buyers moving out of the market we can grasp the magnitude of the problem. The crisis is compounded by the enormous effect of the housing market on both growth and jobs. "Over the past four years, consumer spending and residential construction have together accounted for 90% of the total growth in GDP. And over two-fifths of all private sector jobs created since 2001 have been in housing-related sectors, such as construction, real estate and mortgage broking." (The Economist) "2 out of every 5" private sector jobs!?! "90% of the total growth in GDP"!?! These are figures that simply boggle the mind. What it tells us is that the market has been artificially inflated by the Federal Reserve's shortsighted low-interest rates policy and the shabby lending practices of the major mortgage companies. The banks have lowered the standards for home loans to such an extent that the traditional loan of 20% down and a fixed interest rate is virtually a thing of the past. Instead, those conservative practices have been replaced with "creative financing" schemes that put the entire housing market at risk. In 2004 "one-fourth of all home-buyers -- including 42% of first-time buyers -- made no down payment." (New York Times, July 7, 2005) Equally troubling is the fact that "nearly one third of all new mortgages this year call for interest-only payments (NY Times) This tells us that a large number of new buyers can barely make their payments, but are gambling that their property value will go up enough to justify their investment. This is "equity roulette," a shell game that anticipates that salaries will go up while interest rates stay low. We can anticipate that many overstretched homeowners will begin to fall from the economic precipice in short order. In fact, many markets are already showing a 40% increase in foreclosures even though the air has just begun hissssssing out of the bubble. The ridiculously low interest rates coupled with the irresponsible lending practices has precipitated a feeding frenzy for cheap money. Greenspan is expected to raise rates another one-half percent before he leaves in January which should be just enough to collapse the market and put the economy in a permanent coma. As Paul Van Eeden says in 'The End of the Real Estate Boom', "This is not a trivial matter. As the real estate market goes, so goes the economy and the stock market. The only thing that could keep the US on life-support a little longer is another round of interest rate reductions, but this time it could hurt the dollar, and that would mean higher gasoline prices again, so it's a double-edged sword." Van Eeden provides a good description of the mess that Greenspan has created: a blind alley from which there is no foreseeable escape. The Federal Reserve has managed to keep the economy running on fumes by dropping rates 12 times to a rock bottom 1% after the fall of the stock market (another Greenspan fiasco which cost the American people $7 trillion) It was basically "free money" loaned out to keep the country limping along (and to facilitate Bush's tax cuts) while millions of Americans tried to recoup from their losses. Regrettably, the cheap money and shaky loans simply created an even bigger and more lethal bubble that is following the same trajectory as the Hindenburg. Ka-booom! Adding insult to injury, the Federal Reserve announced 2 weeks ago that new steps will be taken to regulate low-interest, high-risk loans. In the third quarter a full 33% of first-time home buyers took advantage of "non-traditional" mortgages. ("No interest" or "ARMS" adjustable rate mortgages) Try to imagine the chilling effect on the housing market when 33% of first-time homeowners are removed from the pool of potential buyers? Still think you'll be able to sell your house at a profit? Jittery Americans don't need a crystal ball to spot the shipwreck looming just on the horizon. The last remaining droplets of prosperity are trickling from the ailing economy and Greenspan's 18 year quest to flatten the American middle class will soon be realized. 'The Economist' summarized it best when they said, "the worldwide rise in housing prices is the biggest bubble in history. Prepare for the economic pain when it pops". Mike Whitney can be reached at: fergiewhitney@msn.com

Kremlin reasserts control of oil, gas By Fred Weir Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor 28 Dec 2005 MOSCOW – Call it PetroKremlin. A vast state-run energy conglomerate has been assembled over the past year, some experts say, to fuel Russia's bid to revive Soviet-style great power status. To date, the Kremlin has effectively renationalized almost a third of the formerly private oil-and-gas sector. Other developments also point to growing state ambitions: • A $15-billion Siberian pipeline, due to begin pumping in 2008, will shift Russian crude exports to Asia, particularly China, where Moscow is cultivating fresh strategic relationships. • A 737-mile gas line being laid under the Baltic Sea will cut out middlemen Ukraine and Poland, whose relations with Moscow have recently soured, while locking in Russia as Western Europe's key energy supplier. • State-run Gazprom has teamed up with several foreign partners to develop a vast Barents Sea gas field whose production, converted to liquefied natural gas (LNG), could begin supplying the US market by 2010. • A long-delayed law on subsoil resources, to be passed by the Duma next year, is expected to ban foreign-owned companies from exploring or developing Russian oil fields and other key mineral resources. "Amazing changes are happening swiftly, because Putin has understood that energy is Russia's key card to play at the international table," says Michael Heath, a political analyst with Aton, a Russian brokerage. "Instead of the military force the Soviet Union used to project its power, Russia is using oil as a major tool of foreign policy." Russia is the world's second-largest producer of petroleum - about 8 million barrels of crude per day - which accounts for nearly 40 percent of the country's GDP. Spiking global oil prices over the past five years have wafted state budgets into the black, fueled a modest economic boom, and enabled the Central Bank to rack up reserves of $170 billion. But far beyond taxing windfall energy profits, the Kremlin has moved to take over the industry. Russia's third-largest oil firm, Yukos, was dismantled in parallel with the prosecution of its politically defiant owner, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and its main production units gobbled up by the state oil company Rosneft. Earlier this year, the government took a controlling 51 percent stake in Gazprom, the natural-gas giant that holds a quarter of the world's reserves, and Gazprom paid $13 billion to purchase Russia's fifth-largest oil company, Sibneft. Sibneft, now effectively state-owned, moved this month to purchase a 25 percent stake in the huge Lopukhov oil field, on Russia's Pacific coast, formerly held by TNK-BP, a Russian-British joint venture. "Now the state directly controls about 30 percent of petroleum production in Russia and the big question is, how much more will it take?" says Valery Nesterov, an energy expert with Troika Dialogue, a Russian investment bank. "This is a big cause of concern for Russian and foreign oil investors." In the short run, the Kremlin's oil grab may have damaged Russia's energy prospects, Mr. Nesterov says. Growth in oil production has plunged from an average 9 percent in Putin's early years to just 3 percent this year. Exploration has virtually ground to a halt, as both foreign and domestic investors wait to see what the new rules of the game will be. Inner-Kremlin squabbling appears to have halted a planned merger between Gazprom and Rosneft that would have created a gargantuan state-run petroleum conglomerate. Tightened state control could prove good news for foreign investors who want a piece of Russia's oil pie but don't insist on controlling rights. Up to 49 percent of Rosneft may soon be sold to outside investors, to raise cash to repay $7.5 billion the state borrowed to acquire a majority stake in Gazprom. Curbs on foreigners seeking to buy shares in Gazprom will also soon be lifted, experts say. "The new rule is that not less than 50 percent must belong to the state," says Nikolai Nikitin, editor of Neftegazovaya Vertikal, a Russian petroleum industry journal. "No longer will private companies be allowed to get fat from Russia's mineral resources." Experts say the Kremlin aims to blunt international criticism of its takeover of the energy sector by offering a few symbolic management positions to prominent foreigners such as former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, who has reportedly agreed to head the new North European gas pipeline project, which will carry Russian gas directly to Germany. Earlier this month, Putin personally offered former US Secretary of Commerce Donald Evans the post of Rosneft chairman, a job Mr. Evans turned down. Putin has appointed some of his top aides to run the Kremlin's newly acquired empire.The daily Nezavisimaya Gazeta estimated earlier this year that seven people from Putin's inner circle now control nine state companies with total assets of $222 billion, which is equal to 40 percent of Russia's GDP. Some experts argue that the unregulated "oligarchic" capitalism of the 1990s brought on a public backlash and made the state's return to economic intervention necessary. "Many private oil companies were not serving the national interest, and those mistakes had to be corrected," says Nazit Boikov, an expert with the official Institute of World Economy and International Relations in Moscow. Others allege that a new Kremlin elite is simply helping itself to Russia's riches, much as the oligarchs of the past decade did. "Just ignore all that rhetoric about returning resources to national control," says Stanislav Belkovsky, director of the independent Center for National Strategy. "A certain group of people are using nationalization as a mechanism to enrich themselves; that's the bottom line." Last week Kremlin economic adviser Andrei Illaryonovslammed what he called the transformation of Russia into a giant corporation. "The main outcome of this year is the formulation of a new corporatist model for political, economic, social, public, and international life," said the outspoken Mr. Illaryonov, who Tuesday offered his resignation. "Until recently, no one put any restrictions on me expressing my point of view. Now the situation has changed," the Associated Press reported him as saying. While there may be confusion over the long-term domestic impact of Putin's policies, there seems little doubt that direct control over Russia's vast petroleum resources offers the Kremlin substantial foreign-policy clout in an increasingly energy-starved world. At a meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in mid-December, Putin pledged to ramp up oil deliveries to Asia, from the present 3 percent of Russia's total exports to 30 per cent by 2020. In a joint statement, leaders of the 10-nation group pledged to build a "comprehensive partnership" and boost trade and security cooperation with Russia. A new Siberian pipeline should start pumping crude in 2008, with early deliveries going mainly to China. "Russia has been seeking a more active role in the Asia-Pacific region, and it's been recognized that only oil that can facilitate this," says Yury Sinyak, head of energy studies at the official Institute of National Economic Forecasting in Moscow. "It's an open question whether Russia actually has enough oil to fulfill all the political promises." If the Kremlin is demonstrating that energy supplies can be dangled like a carrot, it has also realized they can be wielded like a stick. Ukraine, which broke free of Moscow's orbit in last year's "Orange Revolution," was hit last month with more than a quadruple price hike for natural gas supplies - from $50 per 1,000 cubic meters to $230. Kiev has protested that it cannot adjust to such a rapid price hike, but Gazprom has threatened to shut down gas deliveries to Ukraine on New Year's Day if it doesn't comply. Ukraine announced Tuesday an agreement had been reached but a Gazprom spokesman in Moscow denied the claim. Meanwhile Belarus, Moscow's most loyal former Soviet ally, has contracted with Gazprom to pay just $46 per 1,000 cubic meters of gas. Comment: Well, looks like the neocons have gone and done it: Detente is over, the Power race is on again.

Marriott Customer Data for 200,000 Missing AP Wed Dec 28, 6:21 AM ET ORLANDO, Fla. - The timeshare unit of Marriott International Inc. is notifying more than 200,000 people that their personal data are missing after backup computer tapes went missing from a Florida office. The data relates to 206,000 employees, timeshare owners and timeshare customers of Marriott Vacation Club International, the company said in a statement Tuesday. The computer tapes were stored in Orlando, where the unit is based. The company did not say when the tapes disappeared. They contained Social Security numbers, and bank and credit card numbers, according to letters the company began sending customers on Saturday. Over the past year, a series of personal data breaches affected high-profile companies including Citigroup Inc., Bank of America Corp. and DSW Shoe Warehouse. The incidents have spurred calls for greater security and highlighted the perils of identity theft. Vacation club officials reported the missing data to authorities and began their own investigation into the tapes' disappearance, according to the statement. MVCI planned to search for the tapes, to determine how they disappeared and monitor accounts for any unusual activity or possible misuse, spokesman Ed Kinney said. The company offered those affected by the data loss a chance to enroll in a credit monitoring service without charge. Company officials were not available for comment late Tuesday. "We regret this situation has occurred and realize this may cause concern for our associates and customers," MVCI President Stephen P. Weisz said in the statement.

Scientists recruit wasps for war on terror By Mimi Hall USA TODAY Tue Dec 27, 7:29 AM ET Scientists at a Georgia laboratory have developed what could be a low-tech, low-cost weapon in the war on terrorism: trained wasps. The tiny, non-stinging wasps can check for hidden explosives at airports and monitor for toxins in subway tunnels. "You can rear them by the thousands, and you can train them within a matter of minutes," says Joe Lewis, a U.S. Agriculture Department entomologist. "This is just the very tip of the iceberg of a very new resource." Lewis and others at the University of Georgia-Tifton Campus developed a handheld "Wasp Hound" to contain the wasps while they sniff out chemicals and other substances. Lewis and his partner, University of Georgia biological engineer Glen Rains, say their device is ready for pilot tests and could be available for commercial use in five to 10 years. Rains says the wasps could one day be used instead of dogs to check for explosives in cargo containers coming in to the nation's seaports, in vehicles crossing at border checkpoints, at airports and anywhere else where security should be tight. "It's real easy to learn how to work with them," he says about the wasps. "You could show somebody what to do in 30 to 40 minutes. And they're very specific in what they learn." This new method comes as the government has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on high-tech equipment and training since 9/11 to secure the nation from another terrorist attack. Bomb-sniffing dogs cost thousands of dollars and take months to train. High-tech equipment can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per unit and often has spotty performance. "We don't have portable, flexible systems," Lewis says. Scientists started working with the species, a type of parasitic wasp called Microplitis croceipes, decades ago — long before the terrorist attacks in 2001. In the 1990s, the Defense Department paid for part of that work to find out whether wasps could be used for a variety of defense purposes, including sniffing out land mines. They couldn't do that well because the areas they would have to check are too vast. The scientists — funded by the Agriculture Department and the University of Georgia — have looked at other uses for the wasps. Rains says the wasps can be trained to detect fungal diseases on crops while the damage is still below ground and can't be seen. This method would help farmers avoid having to spread toxic fungicide over an entire crop after the disease spreads. Rains says farmers would save money, and consumers and the environment would benefit as well. The wasps may also be trained for medical uses, including detecting cancer or ulcers by smelling someone's breath. They probably can be trained like dogs to find bodies buried in rubble, Rains says. Given the strong government effort since 9/11 to focus on the nation's security, the scientists see a vast market for the wasps to detect explosives. The wasps are trained with sugar water by using the classical conditioning techniques made famous by Pavlov's dogs. Rains says the wasps are sensitive to a host of chemical odors, including 2,4-DNT, a volatile compound used in dynamite. To do their work, five wasps — each a half-inch long — are placed in a plastic cylinder that is 15 inches tall. This "Wasp Hound," which costs roughly $100 per unit, has a vent in one end and a camera that connects to a laptop computer. When the wasps pick up an odor they've been trained to detect they gather by the vent — a response that can be measured by the computer or actually seen by observers. Lewis says the wasps, when exposed to some chemicals, "can detect as low as four parts per billion, which is an incredibly small amount." He says the "ability to capture nature and its marvels is ... revolutionary." Rains says, "The sensitivity of animals (and insects) to chemicals in general is probably beyond what we can comprehend. We don't really know what the limits are."

Revealed: the pill that prevents cancer By Jeremy Laurance, Health Editor The Independent 28 December 2005 A daily dose of vitamin D could cut the risk of cancers of the breast, colon and ovary by up to a half, a 40-year review of research has found. The evidence for the protective effect of the "sunshine vitamin" is so overwhelming that urgent action must be taken by public health authorities to boost blood levels, say cancer specialists. A growing body of evidence in recent years has shown that lack of vitamin D may have lethal effects. Heart disease, lung disease, cancer, diabetes, high blood pressure, schizophrenia and multiple sclerosis are among the conditions in which it is believed to play a vital role. The vitamin is also essential for bone health and protects against rickets in children and osteoporosis in the elderly. Vitamin D is made by the action of sunlight on the skin, which accounts for 90 per cent of the body's supply. But the increasing use of sunscreens and the reduced time spent outdoors, especially by children, has contributed to what many scientists believe is an increasing problem of vitamin D deficiency. After assessing almost every scientific paper published on the link between vitamin D and cancer since the 1960s, US scientists say that a daily dose of 1,000 international units (25 micrograms) is needed to maintain health. " The high prevalence of vitamin D deficiency combined with the discovery of increased risks of certain types of cancer in those who are deficient, suggest that vitamin D deficiency may account for several thousand premature deaths from colon, breast, ovarian and other cancers annually," they say in the online version of the American Journal of Public Health. The dose they propose of 1,000IU a day is two-and-a-half times the current recommended level in the US. In the UK, there is no official recommended dose but grey skies and short days from October to March mean 60 per cent of the population has inadequate blood levels by the end of winter. The UK Food Standards Agency maintains that most people should be able to get all the vitamin D they need from their diet and "by getting a little sun". But the vitamin can only be stored in the body for 60 days. High rates of heart disease in Scotland have been blamed on the weak sunlight and short summers in the north, leading to low levels of vitamin D. Differences in sunlight may also explain the higher rates of heart disease in England compared with southern Europe. Some experts believe the health benefits of the Mediterranean diet may have as much to do with the sun there as with the regional food. Countries around the world have begun to modify their warnings about the dangers of sunbathing, as a result of the growing research on vitamin D. The Association of Cancer Councils of Australia acknowledged this year for the first time that some exposure to the sun was healthy. Australia is one of the world's sunniest countries and has among the highest rates of skin cancer. For three decades it has preached sun avoidance with its "slip, slap, slop" campaign to cover up and use sunscreen. But in a statement in March, the association said: "A balance is required between avoiding an increase in the risk of skin cancer and achieving enough ultraviolet radiation exposure to achieve adequate vitamin D levels." Bruce Armstrong, the professor of public health at Sydney University, said: " It is a revolution." In the latest study, cancer specialists from the University of San Diego, California, led by Professor Cedric Garland, reviewed 63 scientific papers on the link between vitamin D and cancer published between 1966 and 2004. People living in the north-eastern US, where it is less sunny, and African Americans with darker skins were more likely to be deficient, researchers found. They also had higher cancer rates. The researchers say their finding could explain why black Americans die sooner from cancer than whites, even after allowing for differences in income and access to care. Professor Garland said: "A preponderance of evidence from the best observational studies... has led to the conclusion that public health action is needed. Primary prevention of these cancers has been largely neglected, but we now have proof that the incidence of colon, breast and ovarian cancer can be reduced dramatically by increasing the public's intake of vitamin D." Obtaining the necessary level of vitamin D from diet alone would be difficult and sun exposure carries a risk of triggering skin cancer. "The easiest and most reliable way of getting the appropriate amount is from food and a daily supplement," they say. The cost of a vitamin D supplement is about 4p a day. The UK Food Standards Agency said that taking Vitamin D supplements of up to 1,000IU was " unlikely to cause harm". [...]

Antidepressants May Spur Brain Cell Growth HealthDay News Tue Dec 27,11:47 PM ET Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), a widely used class of antidepressant drugs that include Celexa, Paxil, Prozac and Zoloft, boost nerve fiber growth in key parts of the brain, according to a study with rats. The finding may help explain how SSRIs work and why it takes a few weeks before some antidepressants begin to have an effect. The research team from Johns Hopkins University found that SSRIs increased the density of nerve impulse-carrying axons in the frontal and parietal lobes of the neocortex and part of the limbic brain that controls smell, emotions, motivations, and organs that work reflexively, such as the heart, stomach and intestines. "It appears that SSRI antidepressants rewire areas of the brain that are important for thinking and feeling, as well as operating the autonomic nervous system," study leader and neuropathologist Dr. Vassilis E. Koliatsos said in a prepared statement. It has long been thought that antidepressants work by increasing synaptic concentrations of the brain chemicals serotonin and norepinephrine, enhancing or stimulating their transference. "But our findings -- that serotonin reuptake modulators increase the density of nerve synapses, especially in the front part of the brain -- may offer a better explanation of why antidepressants are effective and why they take time to work," Koliatsos said. The study appears in the January issue of the Journal of Neurochemistry. Comment: There, see? Antidepressants may cause you to commit suicide, but at least they're making you smarter! Strangely enough, there is one widely available - and highly demonised - chemical that appears to work wonders for the brains of many people: nicotine.

Virus Masquerades as MSN Messenger Beta Robert McMillan IDG News Service Tue Dec 27, 5:00 PM ET MSN Messenger users who may think they're getting a sneak peak at the latest version of Microsoft's instant messaging client are in for a nasty surprise, a Finnish security firm is warning. A variation of the Virkel instant messaging virus has been circulating amongst MSN users, posing as a leaked beta version of MSN Messenger 8, according to F-Secure. The virus uses the MSN Messenger client to send download links to all of an infected user's contacts, and connects the user's machine to a second "botnet" server, which could then could be used to install unauthorized software on the machine. Infection Spreads Victims are being infected by clicking and installing the BETA8WEBINSTALL.EXE file that is being distributed via these download links, F-Secure says. "There is no MSN Messenger 8 yet. Not in public beta anyway." writes F-Secure Chief Research Officer Mikko Hypponen, writing on a company blog. Microsoft recently released MSN Messenger 7.5. A representative of Microsoft's public relations agency was not able to comment for this story.

Dozens indicted in alleged Katrina scam CNN Wednesday, December 28, 2005 Forty-nine people have been indicted in a scam to pocket Red Cross hurricane relief funds and more indictments are expected, according to Justice Department officials. Authorities said 22 people working for a Red Cross contractor at a call center in Bakersfield, California, filed false claims worth tens of thousands of dollars. They are also accused of involving family members and friends in the alleged scheme, bringing the number of people under indictment to 49. "I'm really surprised people in this day and time would try to take advantage of the system that's intended to help those in need," said Jackie Smith, whose brother-in-law was named in the indictment on charges of wire fraud. Officials said they planned to widen the investigation. "Our investigation is going to be expanded to include other parts of California and other states, and there are thousands of claims made in other states," FBI Special Agent Javier Colon said. McGregor Scott, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of California, said about $200,000 in lost funds had been traced to the 49 people indicted, and that the total is expected to reach between $300,000 and $400,000. "We anticipate in the coming weeks and months that we will indict a large number of people, perhaps even doubling the present number," Scott said. "These are people who lack certain moral guidance in their lives to think that they would undertake a fraud to essentially steal from the victims." Alleged scheme The Bakersfield claim center processed calls from up to 16,000 people a day who were scattered across the country after Hurricane Katrina devastated parts of the Gulf Coast in August. Red Cross workers said that because of the volume of calls, people were asked to provide only their name, address and birth date. Call center agents would then have to confirm and approve those details before issuing a claim number, so the evacuees could receive payment at local Western Union outlets -- $360 for individuals and more than $1,500 for families. Officials accuse the contract workers under indictment of tapping into the system by creating fake accounts. Suspicious Red Cross employees called the FBI to investigate after an audit found a disproportionate number of disbursements for evacuees going to the Bakersfield region, thousands of miles away from the area ravaged by Katrina. One Western Union store manager said an employee grew suspicious when the same person came in three times to collect money. "She was the one who found out," he said. "She contacted the authorities." Assistant U.S. attorney Jonathan Conklin told CNN that scams are a fact of life, even in such dire circumstances as the wake of Katrina. "Unfortunately, the fraud schemes are ever-present, and in this case, while we hoped no one would be willing to take advantage of the situation, people have," Conklin said. Colon said he was surprised by the number of confessions authorities obtained. "In many cases they've openly admitted that they have never been to the state of Louisiana and they were never entitled to the money," Colon said. Red Cross: Safeguards weren't enough The Red Cross had safeguards in place after Katrina, but "they were not fully adequate," spokesman Steve Cooper said. He told CNN that the group was aware after Katrina that "there was some small possibility of fraud" in the system for distributing funds. "We put the appropriate safeguards in place as best we could," Cooper said. "But we made the decision to take that risk in order to help as many people as possible." Cooper said that about 4,000 cases of assistance out of 1.4 million were being investigated, involving about $400,000 of the $1.4 billion the Red Cross distributed. Both figures represented a "small percentage" of the totals, he said. The Red Cross said it is devising new systems with the help of the FBI and Secret Service so that such fraud will be easier to detect in the future. "Should we ever find ourselves with a disaster of the scope and complexity of a Hurricane Katrina," Cooper said, "the American public can continue its high level of confidence that the American Red Cross will protect the funds that we receive and will properly distribute those."

One woman dead as grass fires continue to rage through Oklahoma and Texas 03:50:21 EST Dec 28, 2005 MATT CURRY KENNEDALE, Texas (AP) - Rancher Dean Dillard was able to save his 72-year-old mother's home by soaking the land before fires roared through his hometown. Many of his neighbours weren't as lucky. Wildfires fuelled by dry brush and driven by gusty wind damaged scores of homes as they raced across Texas and Oklahoma Tuesday, leaving one person dead and forcing a small town to evacuate. "It looked like we had been bombed in a big war, the whole city was on fire everywhere," said Dillard, whose town of Cross Plains, about 240 kilometres southwest of Dallas, had 25 homes and a church burned. The town's 1,000 residents were told to leave. Drought and windy conditions help set the stage for the wildfires, which authorities believe were mainly set by people ignoring fire bans and burning trash, shooting fireworks or tossing cigarettes on the crunchy, brown grass. Texas Gov. Rick Perry deployed state firefighters and issued a disaster declaration after at least 73 fires were reported burning in the northern and central parts of the state. Firefighters from at least three other states were called in to help. "It's like trying to stop a 30-mph (50 km/h) car coming down the street," Texas Deputy Fire Marshal Keith Ebel said. "The wind is the worst enemy right now." In Cooke County, near the Texas-Oklahoma border, an elderly woman was killed, said Texas Forest Service spokeswoman Traci Weaver. No details were available. The flames were so bad in Cross Plains that firefighters couldn't fight all the blazes at once. Dillard, a former city councilman, spent the day fighting fires with neighbours. "Houses are just burned down that nobody could ever get to," Dillard said. "Instantly, there were 15 or 20 houses on fire at same time and no way to get around to all of them." In Oklahoma, the biggest fire burned at least 160 hectares in a rural area near the town of Mustang, southwest of Oklahoma City. After the flames passed, residents emerged and were "watering their yards and standing in their yards," said Harold Percival, who lives about one and a half kilometres from the Mustang fire. "It just kept jumping. I've never seen anything like it," said Maria Vantour-Smith. They were able to remove a few antiques and other items from the home before it was gutted.

Maine Ocean Floor Has Mud-Trapped Gas AP December 28, 2005 PORTLAND, Maine - The Maine coast has dozens of methane gas fields on the ocean bottom where mud-trapped gas occasionally bubbles to the surface, according to a team of University of Maine scientists. There are 70 known gas fields between Portland and Eastport, and the rising bubbles create craters or pits, according to the scientists, who are publishing their findings in Marine Geology magazine. The largest crater is the size of a football stadium. The gas fields have no commercial value, the scientists say, but they could pose a hazard for man-made objects on the ocean floor such as utility lines that connect the mainland to Maine's islands. The scientific team is led by geologists Joe Kelley and Daniel Belknap, who say fishermen over the years have reported seeing bubbles and plumes of mud, and divers have told stories of craters that produced bubbles like carbonated soda. The ocean floor off the Maine coast, Belknap said, is surprisingly active. "I visualize a pot of tomato soup bubbling constantly," he said. Most of the craters are between 32 feet and 260 feet in diameter. The largest, in Belfast Bay, is more than 650 feet wide and 100 feet deep. In their paper, Kelley and Belknap argue that the craters are evidence of gas eruptions, with gas seeping out of the soupy mud through sandy veins and burping through the ocean floor with enough violence to create bowl-shaped pockmarks. Three-dimensional sonar images of the bay's floor reveal there are thousands of pockmarks grouped together, like dimples on a golf ball. Similar crater fields are found off Nova Scotia and Labrador, the Pacific Northwest, Alaska and the North Sea. But some dispute the findings. Charles Paull, lead scientist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California, said he has yet to see evidence that the craters are produced by gas. Paull probed the pockmarks in Belfast Bay several years ago, but found nothing unusual, he said. He found more methane in the Penobscot River than in the bay itself. "It turns out these pockmarks have been about the dullest places I have ever gone to study," he said. Kelley said it is difficult to find evidence of the gas in a single attempt because the gas is emitted only occasionally. Because the gas is trapped in mud, it would cost too much to extract it for commercial energy purposes. But core samples of the pockmarks have contained significant quantities of methane, he said, and scientists have spotted muddy plumes in the water and detected eruptions using sonar.

Volcano of Fire spews lava and ash Tue Dec 27, 2005 11:24 PM GMT168 GUATEMALA CITY (Reuters) - Guatemala's Volcano of Fire erupted on Tuesday, sending rivers of lava down its slopes and a huge cloud of ash and smoke into the sky. About 25,000 local residents were put on alert. Emergency teams said there was no immediate need for evacuations but they might be necessary if there were more eruptions. Experts said two rivers of lava, both about 1.5 miles (2 km) long, were flowing down the volcano's slopes, although they posed no threat to villagers in the area. A column of ash rose 1.5 miles and ash fell on areas south of the capital. The volcano stands 40 miles southwest of Guatemala's capital and its peak is about 12,000 feet (3,700 metres) above sea level. It is one of the most active of Guatemala's 33 volcanoes.

Third earthquake occurs in one day 12:29 28-12-2005 AKIpress Kyrgyzstan - On December 28, 2005, at 07: 54 AM the earthquake at rate 4, 5 occurred in the north of the country. It was stated by Ministry of Emergency Situations (MES) of KR. According to Institute of earthquake station “Bishkek”, the earthquake occurred in Bistrovka at rate 4, in Tokmok- 3, 5, Kant- 3. It has to be mentioned that there are already two earthquakes registered in this day. In the morning of December 27, 2005, the earthquake occurred in Kemin district at rate 4, and then at 16:45 PM another earthquake occurred in the south of the country. In Uzgen district the earthquake was at rate 3, 5- 4, in Jalalabad- 3.

Moderate earthquake shakes central Turkey Associated Press Ankara (Turkey), December 28, 2005 Moderate earthquake shakes central Turkey A moderate earthquake shook central Turkey early on Wednesday, the Kandilli Observatory said. No injuries or damage were reported. The quake, with a preliminary magnitude of 4.2, struck near the town of Kastamonu at 04.11 am, the observatory said. Quakes are frequent in Turkey, much of which lies atop the active North Anatolian fault. Two devastating earthquakes killed about 18,000 people in northwestern Turkey in 1999.

Travellers face chaos as freeze hits Europe James Sturcke and agencies Wednesday December 28, 2005 Freezing conditions across parts of northern Europe caused travel chaos today as forecasters warned that more snow and colder temperatures were expected over the next two days. British motoring organisations urged people only to make essential journeys, while hundreds of drivers in France spent the night in their cars after 30cm of snow fell in parts the country. In Austria, a blizzard resulted in power cuts to homes and was blamed for numerous road accidents across eastern parts of the country. In the UK, Kent and eastern England suffered the worst of the freezing conditions, which brought road closures and train cancellations. The coldest place in Britain last night was Benson, Oxfordshire, where temperatures plunged to -8.2C. Forecasters said temperatures were likely to drop further tonight. "Temperatures tonight could fall as low as -10C where snow lies on the ground, and they could be down to -7C in other places," PA WeatherCentre spokesman Paul Knightley said. "Tomorrow looks like being the coldest day of this cold spell, with daytime temperatures not rising above freezing in many places." He said there would be snow today from north-east Scotland down the eastern side of England to the Wash, with snow showers in Kent. "There could be some heavy snow in northern England and Scotland ahead of another weather system which will bring rain and higher temperatures on Friday and Saturday," Mr Knightley added. The RAC said lanes on sections of the M20 in Kent were closed because of the snow, and that there was also disruption on the A20 between Dover and Folkestone. Canterbury was hit by severe black ice, while part of the A3 at Milford, Surrey, was closed, as was a section of the A14 in Cambridgeshire. "There are hazardous driving conditions throughout northern and eastern counties of England," an RAC spokesman said. South Eastern Trains urged passengers from coastal areas in Kent and East Sussex not to travel at all this morning. No train services were running from Hastings to Tonbridge, Dover to Folkestone, Ashford to Swanley, Tonbridge to Redhill or Strood to Maidstone West. Passengers using Arriva Trains Wales and Central Trains faced long delays after a road vehicle hit a railway bridge in the Oakengates area between Wolverhampton and Shrewsbury. Signalling problems at Tulse Hill, south London, led to delays for passengers on Southern and Thameslink services. In France, hundreds of motorists were stranded overnight after heavy snowfall blocked roads, forcing some to abandon their cars and others to sleep in their vehicles. Scores of travellers spent the night in community centres and hotels near Nancy, where road crews worked to clear up to 30cm of snow, according to the Regional Road Information and Coordination Centre in nearby Metz. Several cars were abandoned on the A31 highway, which remained heavily congested heading north toward Luxembourg. Officials ordered trucks to remain parked in rest areas until normal traffic flow was restored, and advised drivers not to travel. Hundreds of people were stranded overnight in the Calvados region in western Normandy, where the A84 highway was closed in both directions. "There were 600 vehicles blocked, which amounts to around 600 or 800 people [stranded]," road security official Remi Fromont told the French television channel LCI. In Austria, at least 15cm of snow fell in eastern areas, creating treacherous conditions blamed for numerous road accidents. Authorities said at least 11 trucks had jack-knifed in the province of Lower Austria, causing long tailbacks, and at least 300 homes were without power. Four trucks collided on the motorway linking the Czech capital, Prague, with the southern city of Brno, blocking traffic, while officials in Slovakia warned of a heightened avalanche risk in some areas. Heavy snow and icy rain in Croatia forced officials to close local roads, effectively cutting off access to dozens of central villages. Snow also created traffic and rail havoc in Hungary, where nearly 120 trains were running behind schedule. Most of northern Italy was under a blanket of snow, causing traffic disruption, and a motorway from Parma to La Spezia was closed as a precaution.

Mysterious ‘purple rain’ falls in Williamsburg By Tom DiStefano Clarion News writer 12/27/2005 WILLIAMSBURG, PA -- “It’s not the birds doing it,” said Joe Billotte of the mysterious substance he found on property he owns in Williamsburg . Billotte says he found a “pinkish-purple” liquid spattering the ground and the side of a mobile home along State Route 68 south of Exit 62. Billotte lives across the highway from the mobile home. What he found looked a lot like what he saw on the evening television news regarding an incident near Saxonburg. KDKA-TV on Dec. 19 reported five homeowners found discolored snow in southeastern Butler County ; one man said it was a purplish color and claims he found toilet paper in the stains. The man called it “purple rain,” but it’s more often called “blue ice.” Blue ice is toilet waste from passenger planes. The color is from chemicals added to the water to improve its odor, help break down solids and keep it from freezing. The waste is held in tanks until emptied by airport ground crews. The Federal Aviation Administration explains on its website that holding tank valves sometimes leak on commercial aircraft, causing small amounts of blue liquid to freeze on the outside of the plane at high altitudes. Sometimes the blue ice breaks free from the aircraft while in flight. The ice often thaws as it falls into warmer regions of the atmosphere, and is liquid by the time it reaches the ground. The FAA says the thawed blue ice dissipates into “miniscule droplets that are nearly invisible.” But the droplets found in Williamsburg , Saxonburg and other locations are neither miniscule nor invisible. Billotte said he found spots ranging from pea-sized to a little larger than a silver dollar. The stuff that hit the side of his trailer left streaks a foot or more long and a couple inches wide, he said. The spots were mostly found concentrated in splotches about 10 to 15 feet in diameter. Some of the spots he found were sunk into the snow, inside melted areas Billotte thinks were created by the darker color absorbing more sunlight than the white snow. And the blue ice doesn’t always thaw. There is at least one report of a chunk of blue ice hitting and breaking through the roof of a home, landing on the bed of a young girl who found quite a mess in her room when she returned from school. Billotte says he has heard recent reports about a blue ice incident near Brookville, and has heard privately that other land owners in Clarion County are finding the substance. Clarion County Emergency Management Coordinator Mike Rearick said his office received no reports of blue ice. Department of Environmental Protection spokeswoman Freda Tarbell said she has heard of no recent reports, but perhaps remembers one similar incident in her seven years at the DEP Meadville Regional office. Tarbell says the DEP has no regulations regarding aircraft sanitation systems, and that such matters might be handled by the FAA. The FAA and the airlines say many reports of “blue ice” or toilet wastes from aircraft are actually birds. Some birds eat fruit or berries which can give a blue or purple color to their droppings. But in December in Western Pennsylvania , there are no berries, and the songbirds that eat them have long departed for warmer climes. Some people think aircraft purposely release the contents of the toilet tanks while in flight, but the FAA says this is a myth. The dump valve handle is on the outside of airliners and the tanks can only be drained by maintenance crews on the ground. The pilot has no way of operating the valve while in flight. The color of the toilet water can vary from greenish-blue to purplish-blue, apparently depending on the particular type or brand of chemical used. Aviation and health officials say the blue ice presents a minimal health risk at most. But Billotte said he will not let his grandchildren play in the area, and others say, without knowing what chemicals are used, they are concerned about exposing pets and children to what might be toxic chemicals. Some methanol-based antifreeze products, such as automotive antifreeze, taste sweet to animals, but are toxic and can kill them when ingested. And of course there is concern about possible disease-causing biological contamination from human wastes. There is an old joke about not eating yellow snow; it might also apply to blue or purple snow. Comment: The incidents mentioned in this article are not rare events. Check out our "Mystery Muck" Signs supplement for more information.

Now for something completely odd: offbeat escapades from 2005 AFP Dec 27 10:55 PM US/Eastern Alongside tragedies, wars and natural disasters the year just ending brought its share of unusual, outrageous, tragi-comic and just downright silly news items. A selection: - In Denmark, a 43-year-old man was sentenced to two months in prison for passing himself off as a bona fide prisoner and thereby spending a night voluntarily behind bars. Per Thorbjoern Lonka said he carried out the prank in order to prove that rich people could easily pay someone else to serve their prison terms. The prison guards who locked him up failed to ask for his identity papers. - A canny youth serving a sentence for assault in a Scottish jail escaped by virtue of the fact that his identical twin was also incarcerated there, but was due for release. When the brother's name was called, his twin presented himself, and was duly let out. The authorities then had little choice but to free the brother as well. - A court in the Swiss city of Zurich ruled that owners of very short cars could pay only half a parking fine, provided that two of them could really fit into one space. A couple who owned two tiny city runabouts had done just that, but needless to say the parking attendant had stuck a fine on both their vehicles. - Tired of hearing reports of visitors paying grossly inflated prices for taxi rides in his city, the mayor of Prague disguised himself as an Italian visitor -- and promptly unmasked a driver whose meter ran at over six times the normal rate. "Disguised the way I was, I was certainly expecting to be charged a higher price, but not to such an outrageous extent," he said. - Local lawmakers in the US state of Virginia threw out a bill that would have banned young people from wearing baggy falling-down trousers, which are currently all the rage. "Underwear is called underwear for a reason" said the congressman who sought the measure. - Forty-six students in Thailand were banned from the military for life after they tried to cheat their way through the army entrance exam via mobile phones concealed in their shoes. - A woman in the US city of Norwalk, Connecticut filed a lawsuit against the local authorities for exposing her to colleagues' perfumes and colognes in her job as a municipal clerk. She cited a serious allergy. - A couple in California pleaded guilty to trying to extort money from a major hamburger restaurant chain after claiming to have found a human fingertip in a bowl of chili. The court found that the fingertip was placed there on purpose, and had been purchased for 100 dollars from a construction worker who lost it in an industrial accident. - The local council in the northern English resort town of Blackpool enacted an employment rights charter for the donkeys that carry tourists along the beach. The animals won regulated working hours and a day off each week. - A German woman who was mistakenly recorded as being dead by her local pensions office was asked to provide documentary proof that she was, in fact, alive. - When World Trade Organisation negotiators rolled into Hong Kong for a major summit, digital piracy figured prominently on their busy agenda. Strange to relate, many of the bustling outlets that usually sell music CDs, DVDs and software in the city decided to shut down for the duration of the talks. - In a inversion of the familiar Third World call centre set-up, a British man was fined for advertising his "sex chat" phone line as offering "Filipina girls," when the women in question were in fact working from central England. He was unmasked when clients found the alleged "Filipinas" had strangely familiar accents. - A Swiss woman sees colours and experiences tastes when she hears music, scientists at the University of Zurich in Switzerland reported. The rare phenomenon, known as synaesthesia, was confirmed in a 27-year-old professional musician, who saw violet on hearing an F sharp and red on a middle C. - Researchers at National University in La Jolla, California, threw a dinner party and then analysed the leftovers to see if their guests left significant DNA samples on them. Complete profiles were recovered from 43 percent of the sample, and partial ones from 33 percent. Such work could be useful in catching burglars, who often like tucking into the food found in their victims' kitchens. - African elephants have at least one thing in common with parrots: they imitate sounds they hear around them, said scientists in the United States and Norway. A captive female jumbo in Kenya was found to imitate the noise of trucks on a nearby road, while a male kept with Asian elephants at a zoo in Switzerland mimicked their chirping noises. - Enterprising students at Brown University in the United States invented an alarm clock that monitors its user's brainwaves and works out the best time to wake him or her up. The only drawback: the sleeper must wear a headband equipped with electrodes. - Alexis Lemaire, a 24-year-old student in Reims, France, claimed a world record for working out the 13th root of a 200-digit number by mental arithmetic. The feat, checked by a notary, took him 48 minutes and 51 seconds. - Also in the maths department, Akira Haraguchi, a 59-year-old psychiatric counselor in Japan, recited from memory the value of "pi," a constant which consists of an infinite string of digits, to 83,431 decimal places. It took him 13 hours to beat the previous record, also set by a Japanese, of a mere 54,000 digits. - The guardians of animal nomenclature had mixed feelings over a proposal to name three newly-discovered species of slime-mould beetle after US President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. A pair of insect experts reserved the names Agathidium bushi, Agathidium cheneyi and Agathidium rumsfeldi for their latest creepy-crawlies. - An odd-looking rodent spotted on sale for meat in a Laotian food market turned out to be not only a new species but also the first member of a new family of mammals to be identified in more than three decades. An alert member of the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society noticed the creature, which was baptised a stone-dwelling puzzle-mouse -- or, more simply, "rock rat". - Cane toads, reptiles imported into Australia in the erroneous belief that they would eliminate pests from sugar-cane fields, are attracted by disco-style flashing lights, said researchers in the Northern Territory who are desperate to find a way of eliminating the fast-spreading creatures. "The old toads are definitely a disco animal," said a member of a group called Frogwatch. - The fashion for television detective series which focus on forensic science may be unwittingly providing tips to real-world criminals, a study by British researchers said. Some forensic scientists were even becoming unwilling to cooperate with the media for precisely that reason. - Proof that scientists have a sense of humour: the annual Ig Nobel awards, which give spoof prizes to the most offbeat research. This year's crop went to the inventor of an alarm that rings then runs away and hides, thus ensuring that the sleeper has to get up to turn it off... to scientists who researched whether humans swim faster in syrup rather than in water... to British boffins who analysed the electrical activity of a locust's brain cell while the insect watched a "Star Wars" movie... and to a German team that calculated the pressure produced in penguins' anuses when the birds expel their faeces.

Ark's Quantum Quirks SOTT December 28, 2005

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