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Email on the Patriot Act Kurt Nimmo Monday January 09th 2006 In an email forwarded to me, regarding my piece posted on the Infowars site (Patriot Act Empowers Ministry of Homeland Security Gestapo), I have the following comments. First, here is the email: This is Islamofascist propaganda—fairy tales for Loony Lefties with Mental Disorders who have been very dumbed down by the Sovietsky Commie Sleeper Agent Moles who took over American Education beginning in the 1960’s. The Soviet Union is alive and well in the Groves of American Academe. We are being set up in a Trojan Horse. The Enemy Within is inside The Gates. While I think going into Iraq the way we did with too little force not adequately armored etc. was a mistake, what is written below is very distorted. It would appear this person is the one suffering from a mental disorder, a form of conspiratorial paranoia quite common on the so-called right, a philosophical illness spawned by Straussian neoconism, for lack of a more precise term. It is interesting how this malady is mixed with the sort of delusional thinking at one time espoused by the John Birch Society and other old school reactionaries, i.e., that the American educational system was deliberately compromised by “Sovietsky Commie Sleeper Agent Moles,” a fantastical absurdity at best. No doubt the educational system in this country was “dumbed down,” but not by the Soviets—in fact, it was “dumbed down” by the United States government for a very simple reason: to facilitate “America’s transition from a sovereign constitutional republic to a socialist democracy,” as Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt, a former senior policy advisor in the U.S. Department of Education, has noted (see The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America). Of course, the inclusion of the word “socialism” would have people such as the author of this email believe that in fact the dumbing down on education in this country is a Soviet plot when in fact it is a mechanism of the neoliberal global elite. “Only when all children in public, private and home schools are robotized—and believe as one—will World Government be acceptable to citizens and able to be implemented without firing a shot. The attractive-sounding ‘choice’ proposals will enable the globalist elite to achieve their goal: the robotization (brainwashing) of all Americans in order to gain their acceptance of lifelong education and workforce training—part of the world management system to achieve a new global feudalism,” writes Thomson Iserbyt. Of course, this has nothing to do with “Sovietsky” communism, more accurately Marxist-Leninist communism, which supposedly advocated the overthrow of capitalism by a revolution of the proletariat or the lowest class of citizens. Now let us consider the fallacious and completely disingenuous term “Islamofascism,” a contradiction at best. Certainly, aspects of Islamic radicalism are authoritarian, although hardly fascist in the traditional sense and use of the term (employed basically as a meaningless pejorative and rhetorical device) is at best a historically inaccurate metaphor. As we know, or should know if we follow history and political philosophy, modern fascism was created by Benito Mussolini, who defined fascism as corporatism. “Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power,” Mussolini declared (see the Encyclopedia Italiana). Islamic militants are not corporatists, they are religionists, and it is disingenuous for the neocons to claim otherwise. Of course, this should not be surprising since the Straussian philosophy is at its core disingenuous and deceptive. “Fascism is nationalistic and Islamicism is hostile to nationalism. Fundamentalism is a transnational movement that is appealing to believers of all nations and races across national boundaries. There is no idea of racial purity as in Nazism. Islamicists have very little idea of the state. It is a religious movement, while Fascism in Europe was a secular movement. So if it’s not what we really think of as nationalism, and if it’s not really like what we think of as Fascist, why use these terms?” notes Roxanne Euben, a professor of political science at Wellesley College. Joseph Sobran, a paleoconservative commentator, declares “Islamofascism is nothing but an empty propaganda term. And wartime propaganda is usually, if not always, crafted to produce hysteria, the destruction of any sense of proportion. Such words, undefined and unmeasured, are used by people more interested in making us lose our heads than in keeping their own.” It is precisely hysteria this email writer is interested in promulgating—hysteria directed against those of us who are alarmed by the fact a clique of Straussian Zionist neocons are in the process of dismantling our constitutional republic, a process that is well advanced. He makes no bones about advocating the invasion of small and defenseless Islamic nations and believes, as do the Straussian neocons and their fanatical and racist Likudite partners in the Zionist state of Israel, that the invasion and occupation used “too little force,” that is to say far too few Arabs were slaughtered (obviously, 100,000 plus dead Iraqis is wholly insufficient) and in order to prevail even more, possibly millions of Iraqis must necessarily be murdered, never mind that at a certain point this engineered murder approaches genocide (an irrelevancy for the Straussian neocons, who take their cues from the Zionist Israelis, because, as the Bush administration has demonstrated, all international laws are malapropos in the “war on terrorism,” in fact a war or engineered destruction of Muslim society and culture). I understand and have experienced this reactionary hysteria on a personal level. On numerous occasions I have endured threatening phone calls at my place of work, emails repeatedly threatening physical violence, miscreants posting in my name on open forums across the internet and making threatening phone calls to others, and the violent insanity of one particular blogger who continual urges his demented compatriots to abduct and summarily execute me and others. Of course, the Straussian neocons have endeavored mightily since nine eleven to create the sort of highly polarized and reactionary political climate in this country that has the potential to result in violence, so I do not dismiss these threats out of hand. Finally, this person demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of the threat we face, as pointed out in my article. The so-called United States Secret Service Uniformed Division is in fact a federal police force with the power to commandeer local police and use them against American citizens opposed to the foreign and increasingly domestic policies of the government. It cannot be denied that the FBI has monitored and infiltrated the patriot, antiwar, and faith-based movements in this country, as revealed by FOIA documents. In May, we learned that the FBI had conducted “pretext interviews” designed to intimidate antiwar activists and others. “Nonviolent antiwar groups in Fresno, Calif., Grand Rapids, Mich., and Albuquerque, N.M., have all been infiltrated or surveilled by undercover police officers. Shortly after the Buckley protest, the Boulder group was infiltrated a second time, by another pair of police posing as an activist couple,” Michelle Goldberg wrote for Salon last year. “Meanwhile, protesters arrested at antiwar demonstrations in New York last spring were extensively questioned about their political associations, and their answers were entered into databases.” As we know, COINTELPRO, designed to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” one-time constitutionally protected speech and activism, is alive and well in America. This effort is currently being intensified by the United States Secret Service Uniformed Division under the Patriot Act at the behest of the Straussian neocons in the White House and the Pentagon. If indeed there is a “Trojan Horse” in America, it was rolled up to the gates of liberty by the government, not "al-Qaeda" or the antiwar and patriot movements.

Prof, Wife Accused of Being Cuban Agents By CURT ANDERSON Associated Press Jan 9, 2006 MIAMI - A Florida college professor and his wife, a university administrator, were accused in federal court Monday of using their academic positions for decades as cover to spy on Americans for Cuba's communist government. Carlos Alvarez, 61, a psychology professor at Florida International University, and Elsa Alvarez, 55, used an encryption system to communicate with their handlers via short-wave radio and carried messages to and from Cuba, said federal prosecutor Brian Frazier. "These were highly placed and very well-regarded operatives in the United States," Frazier said. The couple were charged with acting as agents of Fidel Castro without registering with the U.S. government. Frazier said Alvarez had spied for Cuba since 1977 and his wife since 1982. Neither was charged with the more serious offense of espionage, and FBI agents said there was no evidence they provided classified or military information to Cuba. Much of what they provided involved information about the U.S. political situation, prominent Cuban-Americans in South Florida and the names of at least one FBI agent, Frazier said. The couple were ordered held without bail Monday after prosecutors warned that they might leave their five children and flee to Cuba if released. Neither defendant entered a plea, and another hearing was set for Jan. 19. They were arrested Friday, months after giving statements to the FBI last summer about their contacts with Cuba, prosecutors said. Alvarez is identified on the Florida International Web site as an associate professor in the educational leadership and policy studies department. Elsa Alvarez is described as a coordinator in the social work training program, specializing in psychological treatment, crisis intervention and group psychotherapy. The indictment marks the latest turn in the cloak-and-dagger underworld of espionage between the United States and Cuba, much of it taking place in South Florida where thousands of Cuban exiles live. In August, the convictions and sentences of five alleged Cuban spies were thrown out by a federal appeals court, which said the five were unfairly tried because of intense publicity, community prejudice and inflammatory remarks by prosecutors. The defendants insisted they were spying on Cuban exiles opposed to Castro, not on the United States itself.

The Wiretappers That Couldn't Shoot Straight By Frank Rich 8 Jan 2006 New York Times "That the White House's over-the-top outrage about the Times scoop is a smokescreen contrived to cover up something else is only confirmed by Dick Cheney's disingenuousness. In last week's oration at a right-wing think tank, he defended warrant-free wiretapping by saying it could have prevented the 9/11 attacks. Really? Not with this administration in charge. On 9/10 the N.S.A. (lawfully) intercepted messages in Arabic saying, "The match is about to begin," and, "Tomorrow is zero hour." You know the rest. Like all the chatter our government picked up during the president's excellent brush-clearing Crawford vacation of 2001, it was relegated to mañana; the N.S.A. didn't rouse itself to translate those warnings until 9/12." Almost two weeks before The New York Times published its scoop about our government's extralegal wiretapping, the cable network Showtime blew the whole top-secret shebang. In its mini-series "Sleeper Cell," about Islamic fundamentalist terrorists in Los Angeles, the cell's ringleader berates an underling for chatting about an impending operation during a phone conversation with an uncle in Egypt. "We can only pray that the N.S.A. is not listening," the leader yells at the miscreant, who is then stoned for his blabbing. If fictional terrorists concocted by Hollywood can figure out that the National Security Agency is listening to their every call, guess what? Real-life terrorists know this, too. So when a hyperventilating President Bush rants that the exposure of his warrant-free wiretapping in a newspaper is shameful and puts "our citizens at risk" by revealing our espionage playbook, you have to wonder what he is really trying to hide. Our enemies, as America has learned the hard way, are not morons. Even if Al Qaeda hasn't seen "Sleeper Cell" because it refuses to spring for pay cable, it has surely assumed from the get-go that the White House would ignore legal restraints on eavesdropping, just as it has on detainee jurisprudence and torture. That the White House's over-the-top outrage about the Times scoop is a smokescreen contrived to cover up something else is only confirmed by Dick Cheney's disingenuousness. In last week's oration at a right-wing think tank, he defended warrant-free wiretapping by saying it could have prevented the 9/11 attacks. Really? Not with this administration in charge. On 9/10 the N.S.A. (lawfully) intercepted messages in Arabic saying, "The match is about to begin," and, "Tomorrow is zero hour." You know the rest. Like all the chatter our government picked up during the president's excellent brush-clearing Crawford vacation of 2001, it was relegated to mañana; the N.S.A. didn't rouse itself to translate those warnings until 9/12. Given that the reporters on the Times story, James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, wrote that nearly a dozen current and former officials had served as their sources, there may be more leaks to come, and not just to The Times. Sooner or later we'll find out what the White House is really so defensive about. Perhaps it's the obvious: the errant spying ensnared Americans talking to Americans, not just Americans talking to jihadists in Afghanistan. In a raw interview transcript posted on MSNBC's Web site last week - and quickly seized on by John Aravosis of AmericaBlog - the NBC News foreign affairs correspondent Andrea Mitchell asked Mr. Risen if he knew whether the CNN correspondent Christiane Amanpour might have been wiretapped. (Mr. Risen said, "I hadn't heard that.") Surely a pro like Ms. Mitchell wasn't speculating idly. NBC News, which did not broadcast this exchange and later edited it out of the Web transcript, said Friday it was still pursuing the story. If the Bush administration did indeed eavesdrop on American journalists and political opponents (Ms. Amanpour's husband, Jamie Rubin, was a foreign policy adviser to the Kerry campaign), it's déjà Watergate all over again. But even now we can see that there's another, simpler - and distinctly Bushian - motive at play here, hiding in plain sight. That motive is not, as many liberals would have it, a simple ideological crusade to gut the Bill of Rights. Real conservatives, after all, are opposed to Big Brother; even the staunch Bush ally Grover Norquist has criticized the N.S.A.'s overreaching. The highest priority for the Karl Rove-driven presidency is instead to preserve its own power at all costs. With this gang, political victory and the propaganda needed to secure it always trump principles, even conservative principles, let alone the truth. Whenever the White House most vociferously attacks the press, you can be sure its No. 1 motive is to deflect attention from embarrassing revelations about its incompetence and failures. That's why Paul Wolfowitz, in a 2004 remark for which he later apologized, dismissed reporting on the raging insurgency in Iraq as "rumors" he attributed to a Baghdad press corps too "afraid to travel." That's also why the White House tried in May to blame lethal anti-American riots in Afghanistan and Pakistan on a single erroneous Newsweek item about Koran desecration - as if 200-odd words in an American magazine could take the fall for the indelible photos from Abu Ghraib. Such is the blame-shifting game Mr. Cheney was up to last week. By dragging 9/11 into his defense of possibly unconstitutional bugging, he was hoping to rewrite history to absolve the White House of its bungling. And no wonder. He knows all too well that the timing of Mr. Bush's signing of the secret executive order to initiate the desperate tactic of warrant-free N.S.A. eavesdropping - early 2002, according to Mr. Risen's new book, "State of War" - is nothing if not a giant arrow pointing to one of the administration's most catastrophic failures. It was only weeks earlier, in December 2001, that we had our best crack at nailing Osama bin Laden in Tora Bora and blew it What went down that fateful December is recalled in particularly gripping fashion in a just published book, "Jawbreaker," which, like Mr. Risen's book, is rising on the best-seller list at an inopportune moment for this White House. "Jawbreaker" is the self-told story of a veteran clandestine officer, Gary Berntsen, who was the pivotal C.I.A.i ld commander in the hunt for bin Laden. Mr. Berntsen is a fervent Bush loyalist, but his honest account doesn't do the president any favors. "We needed U.S. soldiers on the ground!" he writes, to "block a possible Al Qaeda escape into Afghanistan!" But his request to Centcom for 800 Army Rangers to do the job went unheeded. We don't know whether the Bush order relaxing legal controls on the N.S.A. was in part a Hail Mary pass to help compensate for that disaster. Either way, all the subsequent wiretaps in the world have not brought bin Laden back dead or alive. Though the White House says that its warrantless surveillance has saved lives by stopping other terrorists since then, Mr. Bush has exaggerated victories against Al Qaeda as often as he has the battle-readiness of Iraqi troops. After he claimed in an October speech that America and its allies had foiled 10 Qaeda plots since 9/11, USA Today reported that "at least" 6 of the 10 had been preliminary ideas for attacks rather than actual planned attacks. The louder the reports of failures on this president's watch, the louder he tries to drown them out by boasting that he has done everything "within the law" to keep America safe and by implying that his critics are unpatriotic, if not outright treasonous. Mr. Bush certainly has good reason to pump up the volume now. In early December the former 9/11 commissioners gave the federal government a report card riddled with D's and F's on terrorism preparedness. The front line of defense against terrorism is supposed to be the three-year-old, $40-billion-a-year Homeland Security Department, but news of its ineptitude, cronyism and no-bid contracts has only grown since Katrina. The Washington Post reported that one Transportation Security Administration contract worth up to $463 million had gone to a brand-new company that (coincidentally, we're told) contributed $122,000 to a powerful Republican congressman, Harold Rogers of Kentucky. An independent audit by the department's own inspector general, largely unnoticed during Christmas week, found everything from FEMA to border control in some form of disarray. Yet even as this damning report was released, the president forced cronies into top jobs in immigration enforcement and state and local preparedness with recess appointments that bypassed Congressional approval. Last week the department had the brilliance to leave Las Vegas off its 2006 list of 35 "high threat" urban areas - no doubt because Mohammed Atta was so well behaved there when plotting the 9/11 attacks. The warrantless eavesdropping is more of the same incompetence. Like our physical abuse of detainees and our denial of their access to due process, this flouting of the law may yet do as much damage to fighting the war on terrorism as it does to civil liberties. As the First Amendment lawyer Martin Garbus wrote in The Huffington Post, every defense lawyer representing a terrorism suspect charged in the four years since Mr. Bush's N.S.A. decree can challenge the legality of the prosecution's evidence. "The entire criminal process will be brought to a standstill," Mr. Garbus explains, as the government refuses to give the courts information on national security grounds, inviting the dismissal of entire cases, and judges "up and down the appellate ladder" issue conflicting rulings. Far from "bringing justice to our enemies," as Mr. Bush is fond of saying, he may once again be helping them escape the way he did at Tora Bora. The president who once promised to bring a "culture of responsibility" to Washington can and will blame The Times and the rest of the press for his failures. But maybe, if only for variety's sake, the moment has come to find a new scapegoat. I nominate Showtime. Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Judges Just Briefed on Surveillance Plans By MARK SHERMAN Associated Press Writer Jan 9, 2006 WASHINGTON (AP) -- The federal judges who were bypassed when the Bush administration ordered warrantless wiretaps in the United States received a secret briefing Monday on details of the surveillance. Separately, a former FBI director and other lawyers questioned whether the surveillance is legal. The classified briefing at the Justice Department had been requested by U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, presiding judge on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court. Established by Congress in the late 1970s, the court oversees the government's handling of espionage and terrorism investigations. U.S. District Judge James Robertson last month resigned from the FISA court and other judges voiced concerns about the National Security Agency's electronic surveillance program, which President Bush authorized after the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks. Gen. Michael Hayden, the principal deputy director of national intelligence, was among administration officials who attended the briefing. Hayden served as NSA director when the electronic surveillance program was launched and has since become the government's No. 2 intelligence official. Details of the program remain highly classified. Justice Department and NSA spokesmen refused to confirm that a meeting took place. A spokesman for Kollar-Kotelly likewise declined comment and the nine other FISA court judges did not return telephone calls Monday. But two government officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, confirmed the briefing and Hayden's presence. According to an account in the Washington Post, U.S. District Judge Dee Benson of Utah, a member of the special panel, has asked why the special court was not used in conducting the surveillance. "If you've got us here, why didn't you go through us? They've said it's faster (to bypass FISA), but they have emergency authority under FISA, so I don't know," Benson was quoted by the newspaper as saying. The existence of the program was first reported last month by the New York Times. Bush later acknowledged he approved the warrantless surveillance and, along with senior lieutenants, has stoutly defended it. In a letter Monday to congressional leaders, 13 legal scholars said the Justice Department's written justification for the NSA monitoring program "fails to offer a plausible legal defense." In a five-page letter to House and Senate intelligence committee leaders, Assistant Attorney General William E. Moschella on Dec. 22 outlined a detailed defense for the warrantless surveillance. He argued that Bush under a congressional resolution passed after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attack, had the authority to order such electronic surveillance as part of his responsibility as commander-in-chief to protect the nation. But the former government officials and constitutional law experts said Congress did not authorize domestic spying as part of the 2001 resolution. Lawmakers, they wrote, also "indisputably" have the authority to regulate electronic surveillance inside the United States. The 13 experts said it is "beyond dispute that, in (our) democracy, the president cannot simply violate criminal laws behind closed doors because he deems them obsolete or impracticable." Legal analysts at the Congressional Research Service last week raised similar questions, and lawmakers have called for hearings on the NSA program. The group included former federal judge William S. Sessions, who served as FBI director from 1987 to 1993 under President Reagan and President George H.W Bush.

Angry and Furious at the Collaborationist Democrats Martin Garbus 8 Jan 2006 Huffingtonpost.com I don't understand. An hour after I saw the Times "scoop" on the Bush illegal wiretapping plan, I wrote that it was clearly illegal and unconstitutional. But as it now turns out, dozens of politicians, as well as the New York Times knew about the surveillance plan and did nothing. Representative Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leader in the House, and Senator Jay Rockefeller, the Democratic senator from West Virginia, a man known for some sensitivity to civil liberties infringements, and a substantial number of congressmen, plus the New York Times, all knew of Bush's illegal spying. Pelosi, Rockefeller, and several other congressmen "confidentially" expressed concern but did nothing. Nothing. Not a peep. Why? It is totally obvious, (1) that the FISA statute specifically prohibits what the President did, and (2) that the congressional permission to use force to fight overseas does not permit illegal surveillance. You need not be a lawyer to know that it's illegal--anyone who can read or understand English can see the plain language of the statute and the military force authorization. Why didn't Pelosi, Rockefeller and the others take a closer look at the illegal surveillance? Even people in Ashcroft's justice department recognized it was illegal--they refused to sign off. They refused to sign off, showing more courage than our Democratic congressmen. For a while, the Bush administration tried to float that the legal justification for the wiretap program was a 34-year old conservative wunderkind, John Yoo, presently teaching at Stanford University. They claimed that his sophisticated legal analysis determined Bush's policy. It was apparent that Bush's John Yoo story was totally false. There are layers and layers of bureaucracy in the Department of Justice, and Yoo's memo would have had to go up the ladder. It's now been confirmed that the Yoo story was fake, for his superiors knew that his legal rationale was at best questionable. We also learned, this Saturday on January 7th, that the congressional research services, a nonpartisan arm of the Congress, said that the "legal rationale... does not seem to be as well-grounded as the Bush team now argues." Why then didn't Pelosi, Rockefeller, or the others, immediately after learning of the programs, get a legal analysis of the program's constitutionality? Instead, they choose to ignore the democratic process and let unchallenged a program that authorized unconstitutional physical break-ins and the surveillance of millions of Americans. Was it that it was not their ox being gored? We know that most Americans do not believe in or support the Bill of Rights. The benefits of liberty, freedom, and privacy rights are too ephemeral and not concrete. Do our politicians also really believe that those ephemeral rights fall in the face of Bush's claims of national security damage? In truth, Pelosi, Rockefeller, and the New York Times collaborated with Bush for four years to ignore the Constitution. No one did anything on behalf of the millions of Americans being surveyed. At the end of the day, no one tried to stop it or even examine it. That says a great deal about our politicians' commitment to democracy and the Constitution. In the immortal words of John Mitchell, the head of Nixon's Department of Justice, "When the going gets tough, the tough get going." Hopefully, the Democrats will compel Supreme Court nominee, Samuel Alito, to tell us why he believes the spy program is not illegal. If the Democrats can't even get that in the nomination process, then the country is in worse shape than I thought. We, the people of the United States have every reason to be angry and furious, not only at Bush, but also at those supposedly better-intentioned people who permitted this to remain undiscovered and unchecked for so long.

The NSA Spy Engine - Echelon By Jason Leopold 9 Jan 2006 ICH A clandestine National Security Agency spy program code-named Echelon was likely responsible for tapping into the emails, telephone calls and facsimiles of thousands of average American citizens over the past four years in its effort to identify people suspected of communicating with al-Qaeda terrorists, according to half-a-dozen current and former intelligence officials from the NSA and FBI. The existence of the program has been known for some time. Echelon was developed in the 1970s primarily as an American-British intelligence sharing system to monitor foreigners - specifically, during the Cold War, to catch Soviet spies. But sources said the spyware, operated by satellite, is the means by which the NSA eavesdropped on Americans when President Bush secretly authorized the agency to do so in 2002. Another top-secret program code-named Tempest, also operated by satellite, is capable of reading computer monitors, cash registers and automatic teller machines from as far away as a half-mile and is being used to keep a close eye on an untold number of American citizens, the sources said, pointing to a little known declassified document that sheds light on the program. Echelon has been shrouded in secrecy for years. A special report prepared by the European Parliament in the late 1990s disclosed explosive details about the covert program when it alleged that Echelon was being used to spy on two foreign defense contractors - the European companies Airbus Industrie and Thomson-CSF - as well as sifting through private emails, industrial files and cell phones of foreigners. The program is part of a multinational spy effort that includes intelligence agencies in Canada, Britain, New Zealand and Australia, also known as the Echelon Alliance, which is responsible for monitoring different parts of the world. The NSA has never publicly admitted that Echelon exists, but the program has been identified in declassified government documents. Republican and Democratic lawmakers have long criticized the program and have, in the past, engaged in fierce debate with the intelligence community over Echelon because of the ease with which it can spy on Americans without any oversight from the federal government. Mike Frost, who spent 20 years as a spy for the CSE, the Canadian equivalent of the National Security Agency, told the news program 60 Minutes in February 2000 how Echelon routinely eavesdrops on many average people at any given moment and how, depending on what you say either in an email or over the telephone, you could end up on an NSA watch list. "While I was at CSE, a classic example: A lady had been to a school play the night before, and her son was in the school play and she thought he did a -- a lousy job. Next morning, she was talking on the telephone to her friend, and she said to her friend something like this, 'Oh, Danny really bombed last night,' just like that," Frost said. "The computer spit that conversation out. The analyst that was looking at it was not too sure about what the conversation was referring to, so erring on the side of caution, he listed that lady and her phone number in the database as a possible terrorist." Ironically, during the first Bush administration, a woman named Margaret Newsham, who worked for Lockheed Martin and was stationed at the NSA's Menwith Hill listening post in Yorkshire, England, told Congressional investigators that she had firsthand knowledge that the NSA was illegally spying on American citizens. While a Congressional committee did look into Newsham's allegations, it never published a report. However, a British investigative reporter named Duncan Campbell got hold of some committee documents and discovered that Newsham was telling the truth. One of the documents described a program called "Echelon" that would monitor and analyze "civilian communications into the 21st century." As of 2000, sources said, the NSA had Echelon listening posts located in: Menwith Hill, Britain; Morwenstow, Britain; Bad Aibling, Germany; Geraldton Station, Australia; Shoal Bay, Australia; Waihopai, New Zealand; Leitrim, Canada; Misawa, Japan; Yakima Firing Center, Seattle; Sugar Grove, Virginia. A January 1, 2001, story in the magazine Popular Mechanics disclosed details of how Echelon works. "The electronic signals that Echelon satellites and listening posts capture are separated into two streams, depending upon whether the communications are sent with or without encryption," the magazine reported. "Scrambled signals are converted into their original language, and then, along with selected "clear" messages, are checked by a piece of software called Dictionary. There are actually several localized "dictionaries." The UK version, for example, is packed with names and slang used by the Irish Republican Army. Messages with trigger words are dispatched to their respective agencies." Electronic signals are captured and analyzed through a series of supercomputers known as dictionaries, which are programmed to search through each communication for targeted addresses, words, phrases, and sometimes individual voices. The communication is then sent to the National Security Agency for review. Some of the more common sample key words that the NSA flags are: terrorism, plutonium, bomb, militia, gun, explosives, Iran, Iraq, sources said. Because Echelon can easily spy on Americans without any oversight or detection, and because Echelon covers such a wide spectrum of communication, many current and former NSA officials said that it's likely the agency used its satellites to target Americans, Mark Levin, a former chief of staff to Edwin Meese during the Reagan administration, wrote last month in a blog post on the National Review Online. "Under the ECHELON program, the NSA and certain foreign intelligence agencies throw an extremely wide net over virtually all electronic communications world-wide. There are no warrants. No probable cause requirements. No FISA court. And information is intercepted that is communicated solely between US citizens within the US, which may not be the purpose of the program but, nonetheless, is a consequence of the program." Copyright: Jason Leopold - - http://www.jasonleopold.com

Create an e-annoyance, go to jail By Declan McCullagh Published: January 9, 2006, 4:00 AM PST It's no joke. Last Thursday, President Bush signed into law a prohibition on posting annoying Web messages or sending annoying e-mail messages without disclosing your true identity. In other words, it's OK to flame someone on a mailing list or in a blog as long as you do it under your real name. Thank Congress for small favors, I guess. This ridiculous prohibition, which would likely imperil much of Usenet, is buried in the so-called Violence Against Women and Department of Justice Reauthorization Act. Criminal penalties include stiff fines and two years in prison. "The use of the word 'annoy' is particularly problematic," says Marv Johnson, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. "What's annoying to one person may not be annoying to someone else." Buried deep in the new law is Sec. 113, an innocuously titled bit called "Preventing Cyberstalking." It rewrites existing telephone harassment law to prohibit anyone from using the Internet "without disclosing his identity and with intent to annoy." To grease the rails for this idea, Sen. Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican, and the section's other sponsors slipped it into an unrelated, must-pass bill to fund the Department of Justice. The plan: to make it politically infeasible for politicians to oppose the measure. The tactic worked. The bill cleared the House of Representatives by voice vote, and the Senate unanimously approved it Dec. 16. There's an interesting side note. An earlier version that the House approved in September had radically different wording. It was reasonable by comparison, and criminalized only using an "interactive computer service" to cause someone "substantial emotional harm." That kind of prohibition might make sense. But why should merely annoying someone be illegal? There are perfectly legitimate reasons to set up a Web site or write something incendiary without telling everyone exactly who you are. Think about it: A woman fired by a manager who demanded sexual favors wants to blog about it without divulging her full name. An aspiring pundit hopes to set up the next Suck.com. A frustrated citizen wants to send e-mail describing corruption in local government without worrying about reprisals. In each of those three cases, someone's probably going to be annoyed. That's enough to make the action a crime. (The Justice Department won't file charges in every case, of course, but trusting prosecutorial discretion is hardly reassuring.) Clinton Fein, a San Francisco resident who runs the Annoy.com site, says a feature permitting visitors to send obnoxious and profane postcards through e-mail could be imperiled. "Who decides what's annoying? That's the ultimate question," Fein said. He added: "If you send an annoying message via the United States Post Office, do you have to reveal your identity?" Fein once sued to overturn part of the Communications Decency Act that outlawed transmitting indecent material "with intent to annoy." But the courts ruled the law applied only to obscene material, so Annoy.com didn't have to worry. "I'm certainly not going to close the site down," Fein said on Friday. "I would fight it on First Amendment grounds." He's right. Our esteemed politicians can't seem to grasp this simple point, but the First Amendment protects our right to write something that annoys someone else. It even shields our right to do it anonymously. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas defended this principle magnificently in a 1995 case involving an Ohio woman who was punished for distributing anonymous political pamphlets. If President Bush truly believed in the principle of limited government (it is in his official bio), he'd realize that the law he signed cannot be squared with the Constitution he swore to uphold. And then he'd repeat what President Clinton did a decade ago when he felt compelled to sign a massive telecommunications law. Clinton realized that the section of the law punishing abortion-related material on the Internet was unconstitutional, and he directed the Justice Department not to enforce it. Bush has the chance to show his respect for what he calls Americans' personal freedoms. Now we'll see if the president rises to the occasion.

Bush's Botched War on Terror TomDispatch January 8, 2006 Peering ahead into what will certainly be a lively New Year: One aspect of the President's generally poor polling numbers -- which bumped up modestly thanks to a holiday propaganda onslaught about democracy, progress, and victory in Iraq (and, in the first poll to arrive in January, are already sinking again) -- remains striking. What "approval" George Bush now retains seems to rest largely on a single strand of popular feeling: the belief in the President's special aptitude for conducting his global war on terror and keeping Americans safe. Even taking a mid-December ABC/Washington Post poll that had anomalously high positives for the President, in no other area -- health care (37%), Iraq (46%), the economy (47%) and "ethics" (48%) -- did his approval ratings hit the 50% mark. On "terrorism," however, he was at 56%. In other polls, where the rest of those mediocre numbers aren't even matched, his "handling" of terrorism still continues to hover just above or close to 50%. For example, the latest Time magazine poll in early December, had the President's approval rating on terrorism at 49%. Last spring, however, the same poll had it reaching a high for the year of 63%; and let's not forget that, in early 2002, it rested at about 90%. Recent polls also seem to indicate that Americans are coming to believe either political party could handle terrorism equally well. This is perilous territory for the President to be entering. If, as Michael Klare, author of the ever more indispensable book, Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Dependence on Imported Petroleum, indicates below, Americans truly come to believe that Bush has botched his war on terrorism at every level and has made Americans less secure in the world, then this year and the coming elections could prove uncomfortable indeed for the President and his associates. Losing the War on Terrorism Our Incompetent Commander-in-Chief By Michael T. Klare President Bush has lost the support of most Americans when it comes to the economy, the environment, and the war in Iraq, but he continues to enjoy majority support in one key area: his handling of the war on terrorism. Indeed, many analysts believe that Bush won the 2004 election largely because swing voters concluded that he would do a better job at this than John Kerry. In fact, with his overall opinion-poll approval ratings so low, Bush's purported proficiency in fighting terror represents something close to his last claim to public legitimacy. But has he truly been effective in combating terror? As the war on terrorism drags on -- with no signs of victory in sight -- there are good reasons to doubt his competency at this, the most critical of all his presidential responsibilities. Consider, for a moment, the President's view of the global war on terror. While the White House keeps trying to stretch this term to include everything from the war in Iraq to the protection of oil pipelines in Colombia, most Americans wisely view it in more narrow terms, as a global struggle against Muslim zealots who seek to punish the United States for its perceived anti-Islamic behavior and to free the Middle East of Western influence through desperate acts of violence. These zealots -- or "jihadists" as they are often termed -- include the original members of Al Qaeda along with other groups that claim allegiance to Osama bin Laden's dogmas but are not necessarily in direct contact with his lieutenants. It is in fighting these adversaries that the public wants Bush to succeed, and it is in this contest that he is failing. Why is this so? Consider the nature of the commander-in-chief's primary responsibilities in wartime. Surely, his overarching task is to devise (with the help of senior advisers) a winning strategy to defeat, or at least pummel, the enemy and to mobilize the forces and resources needed to successfully implement this framework. Choosing the tactics of battle -- the day-by-day management of combat operations -- should not, on the other hand, fall under the commander-in-chief's responsibility, but rather be delegated to professionals recruited for this purpose. Bush has failed on both counts, embracing a deeply flawed blueprint for the war on terror and then meddling disastrously in the tactics employed to carry it out. Finding Terrorism's Center of Gravity As all the great masters of strategy have taught us, devising a winning strategy requires, first and foremost, understanding one's opponent and correctly identifying his strengths and weaknesses. Once that has been accomplished, it is necessary to craft a mode of attack that exploits the enemy's weaknesses and undermines or overpowers his strengths. In modern military parlance, this task is often described as locating and destroying the enemy's "center of gravity." For example, in both the 1991 Gulf War and the 2003 invasion of Iraq, American war planners correctly identified the Iraqi center of gravity as the highly centralized, top-down command structure of the Saddam Hussein regime; once this structure was crippled early in the fighting, the Iraqi combat units in the field -- however capable and dedicated -- were unable to perform effectively, and so were easily routed. In the current war in Iraq, by contrast, American commanders have been unable to locate the enemy's center of gravity, and so have been incapable of crafting an effective strategy for defeating the insurgents. What, then, is the enemy's center of gravity in the war on terror? This is the critical question that President Bush and his top advisers have been unable to answer correctly. According to Bush, the terrorists' center of gravity has been the support and sanctuary they receive from "rogue" regimes like the Taliban in Afghanistan and, supposedly, Saddam Hussein in Iraq as well as the mullahs in Iran. If these regimes were all swept away, the White House has long argued, the terrorists would find themselves weakened, isolated, and ultimately defeated. "The very day of the [9-11] attacks," Condoleezza Rice later recalled, "[Bush] told us, his advisers, that the United States faced a new kind of war and that the strategy of our government would be to take the fight to the terrorists. That night, he announced to the world that the United States would make no distinction between the terrorists and the states that harbor them." From this basic proposition, all else has followed: the war in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq, and the current planning for a war in Iran. The overthrow of the Taliban did eliminate an important sanctuary and training base for Al Qaeda. But were "rogue" regimes ever truly the center of gravity for the terrorist threat? The events of the past few years unequivocally demonstrate that such has not been the case, then or now. (In fact, we know that there were no links between Saddam Hussein's regime and Al Qaeda.) The Taliban and the Hussein regime are, of course, long gone, but Al Qaeda continues to mount assaults on Western interests around the world and new manifestations of jihadism continue to erupt all the time. "Al Qaeda has clearly shown itself to be nimble, flexible, and adaptive," observed terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman of the RAND Corporation in Current History magazine. "Because of the group's remarkable durability, the loss of Afghanistan does not appear to have affected Al Qaeda's ability to mount terrorist attacks to the extent that the United States hoped." Afghanistan did provide bin Laden with training facilities, supply dumps, and the like, "but these camps and bases...are mostly irrelevant to the prosecution of an international terrorist campaign -- as events since 9-11 have repeatedly demonstrated." Far from impeding Al Qaeda and its offshoots, the overthrow of the Taliban and, especially, the Hussein regime have been a boon to their efforts. War and chaos in the Middle East, with American forces serving as an occupying power, have proved to be the ideal conditions in which to nurture a multinational jihadist movement aimed at punishing the West. As noted in a recent CIA report, would-be jihadists from all over the world are flocking to Iraq to bloody the Americans and acquire critical combat skills that can later be applied in their own countries. According to a summary of a CIA report in the New York Times, the Agency has concluded that "Iraq may prove to be an even more effective training ground for Islamic extremists than Afghanistan was in Al Qaeda's early days, because it is serving as a real-world laboratory" for militants to improve their skills in urban combat. It follows from this that the longer American troops remain in Iraq, the greater will be the potential advantage to international terrorism. Indeed, senior CIA officials have reportedly told Congressional leaders that the war in Iraq is "likely to produce a dangerous legacy, by dispersing to other countries Iraqi and foreign combatants more adept and better organized than they were before the conflict." This prediction has been confirmed in recent months by terror attacks in Jordan and Afghanistan that bear the distinctive trademark of Iraqi-style combat, including the use of both suicide bombers in urban areas and improvised roadside explosive devices, or IEDs. For example, the deadly bombings in Amman, Jordan on November 9 have been described by American intelligence officials as representing an effort by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of the self-styled Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, to apply combat techniques perfected in Iraq to other countries led by pro-American regimes. Likewise, in Afghanistan, U.S. officials have told reporters that "militants are increasingly taking a page from the insurgent playbook in Iraq and using more roadside bombs and suicide attacks." European officials are particularly worried by this phenomenon, fearing the return to Europe of Islamic militants who have slipped off to Iraq for first-hand combat experience. "We consider these people dangerous because those who go will come back once their mission is accomplished," said a senior French intelligence officer in late 2004. "Then they can use the knowledge gained there in France, Europe, or the United States. It's the same as those who went to Afghanistan or Chechnya." Botching the War on Terrorism Clearly, Bush's identification of rogue regimes as the center of gravity of the terrorist enemy has proven faulty; nor, in light of this failure, has he been able to correctly identify the true center. As suggested by most serious scholars of Islamic extremism, the real crux of the jihadists' strength lies in their ability to articulate and propagate a message of radical struggle that inspires and activates thousands of disaffected young Muslims around the world. As summarized by Hoffman of RAND, Al Qaeda has evolved into "an amorphous movement tenuously held together by a loosely networked constituency rather than a monolithic, international organization with an identifiable command and control apparatus.... It has become a vast enterprise -- an international movement or franchise operation with like-minded local representatives, loosely connected to a central ideological or motivational base but advancing its goals independently." Obviously, defeating this "movement" requires a very different strategy than the one now employed by the United States. Instead of military assaults on rogue states, it requires a capacity to identify and apprehend the often self-appointed "local representatives" of Al Qaeda, to disable the movement's propaganda apparatus, and, most of all, to discredit its prime messages. On a grand scale, this requires positioning the United States with progressive forces in the Middle East, withdrawing from Iraq, and ending U.S. support for repressive, regressive regimes like those in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. On a purely tactical level, it means developing harmonious relations with professional intelligence officials in other countries and developing a communications strategy aimed at delegitimizing the jihadists' violent appeals within the Islamic world -- an effort that can only be successful if it enjoys the assistance of moderate Muslims willing to cooperate with the United States. The need for a strategy of this sort has been voiced by at least some terrorism experts in the U.S. and by many knowledgeable officials in Europe. But even those American experts who have advocated such an approach have been repeatedly stymied by the President's unswerving commitment to his own, demonstrably failed approach. No divergence from the official White House blueprint has been permitted. To make matters worse, Bush and his top advisers have insisted on micro-managing the war on terror, choosing tactics that amplify the damage caused by their defective strategy. The greatest damage has been caused by decisions made by top administration officials, including the President, Vice President, and Secretary of Defense, regarding the methods used to apprehend, confine, and extract information from terrorist suspects and those associated with them. Most significantly, this includes decisions to permit the abduction of suspects on the territory of friendly nations, to use Europe as a stopover point for the transport or "rendition" of suspects to Asian and Middle Eastern countries where torture is routinely employed to extract confessions, to allow U.S. interrogators to use methods that by any reasonable definition constitute torture, and to tolerate the mistreatment of Muslim prisoners in U.S. custody (whether at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, or in secret CIA-run prisons in Afghanistan, Europe, and elsewhere). Separately and together, these decisions have severely alienated the very governments and religious figures whose assistance is desperately needed to mount an effective campaign against Al Qaeda and its offshoots. To give just one example of the problems this has caused the United States: On December 24, an Italian judge issued arrest warrants for 22 purported CIA operatives who abducted an Egyptian cleric in Milan in 2003 and "rendered" him to Egypt, where he was subsequently tortured by Egyptian security officers. This case has caused a major uproar in Italy, forcing even Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, normally a reliable White House ally, to distance himself from U.S. policies -- hardly the way to hold on to, no less gain, allies in the war against terror. Equally worrisome is the growing anti-Americanism espoused by supposedly "mainstream" Islamic clerics in Europe. Prompted by what they view as an unrelenting American campaign against the Islamic world -- the abuses uncovered at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and elsewhere providing but the most recent confirmations of this outlook -- these clerics are promulgating a militant message that, European intelligence officers contend, is inspiring young Muslim men to volunteer for combat in Iraq or to form their own, homegrown Al Qaeda-type organizations. It was a group of this sort, experts believe, that staged the bombings in the London Underground on July 7 that killed 52 people. It is impossible to exaggerate the damage caused by the President's improvident decisions. Yes, these tactics are immoral. Yes, they violate American norms and values. Yes, they are in many respects illegal. All this, by itself, is enough to warrant condemnation by Congress and the public. But it is the lethal effect of these decisions on America's capacity for success in the war on terrorism that most concerns us here. By employing tactics that only serve to heighten the destructive consequences of a failing strategy, President Bush has essentially guaranteed America's failure. In the final analysis, the President's incompetent management of the war on terror has helped the jihadists take better advantage of their strengths while exploiting America's weaknesses. This does not bode well for the future of global peace and stability. For too long, the American public has accepted the myth of presidential effectiveness in the war on terrorism. But as the practical implications of Bush's incompetence become ever more apparent -- lamentably, through the continued spread and potency of radical jihadism -- this last, crucial prop of the President's support could soon fall away. As 2005 was the year in which Bush's fatal incompetence in domestic affairs was revealed to all through the tragedy of Katrina and New Orleans, 2006 could prove to be the year in which his failed leadership in the war on terror finally comes back to haunt him. Michael T. Klare is the Professor of Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire College and the author, most recently, of Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Dependence on Imported Petroleum (Owl Books) as well as Resource Wars, The New Landscape of Global Conflict. Copyright 2005 Michael T. Klare

Switzerland to probe information leak over secret CIA prisons www.chinaview.cn 2006-01-10 19:23:29 GENEVA, Jan. 10 (Xinhuanet) -- Switzerland will launch a parliamentary probe into the leak of secret information giving details of alleged clandestine CIA prisons in Europe, Swiss Radio International (SRI) reported online on Tuesday. Hans Hofmann, who is heading the parliamentary sub-committee investigating how the SonntagsBlick newspaper got hold of the classified documents, said he is determined to plug the leak. SonntagsBlick claimed last Sunday to have received a copy of a fax sent by Egypt's foreign ministry to the Egyptian embassy in London confirming the existence of secret prisons in Europe. The fax was intercepted by the Swiss intelligence service in Nov. 2005. "This document was clearly not intended to be made public," SRI quoted Hofmann as saying, "We will conduct a very thorough inquiry to determine the source of this leak and will try to make sure that it does not happen again." The story is embarrassing for the Swiss government, as it has consistently denied possessing any evidence of U.S. jails for suspected terrorists in Europe. Government ministers distanced themselves from the report which said evidence has been available since Nov. 10 last year. Defense Minister Samuel Schmid, who was Swiss president last year, told the Tages-Anzeiger newspaper that he might consider legal action against the SonntagsBlick. Comment: So, the report confirms what the Swiss government has been denying all along. The reaction? To get rid of those who agree to abet the US in breaking international law? No! Of course not. They're going to plug the leak so that the truth will remain hidden, so that the pathocracy can function in peace.

Ugly phrase conceals an uglier truth Salman Rushdie January 10, 2006 Sydney Morning Herald Behind the US Government's corruption of language lies a far greater perversion, writes Salman Rushdie. BEYOND any shadow of a doubt, the ugliest phrase to enter the English language last year was "extraordinary rendition". To those of us who love words, this phrase's brutalisation of meaning is an infallible signal of its intent to deceive. "Extraordinary" is an ordinary enough adjective, but its sense is being stretched here to include more sinister meanings that your dictionary will not provide: secret; ruthless; and extrajudicial. As for "rendition", the English language permits four meanings: a performance; a translation; a surrender - this meaning is now considered archaic; or an "act of rendering"; which leads us to the verb "to render" among whose 17 possible meanings you will not find "to kidnap and covertly deliver an individual or individuals for interrogation to an undisclosed address in an unspecified country where torture is permitted". Language, too, has laws, and those laws tell us this new American usage is improper - a crime against the word. Every so often the habitual newspeak of politics throws up a term whose calculated blandness makes us shiver with fear - yes, and loathing. "Clean words can mask dirty deeds," The New York Times columnist William Safire wrote in 1993, in response to the arrival of another such phrase, "ethnic cleansing". "Final solution" is a further, even more horrible locution of this Orwellian, double-plus-ungood type. "Mortality response", a euphemism for death by killing that I first heard during the Vietnam War, is another. This is not a pedigree of which any newborn usage should be proud. People use such phrases to avoid using others whose meaning would be problematically over-apparent. "Ethnic cleansing" and "final solution" were ways of avoiding the word "genocide", and to say "extraordinary rendition" is to reveal one's squeamishness about saying "the export of torture". However, as Cecily remarks in Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, "When I see a spade, I call it a spade", and what we have here is not simply a spade, it's a shovel - and it's shovelling a good deal of ordure. Now that Senator John McCain has forced upon a reluctant White House his amendment putting the internationally accepted description of torture - "cruel, inhuman or degrading punishment" - into American law, in spite of energetic attempts by the Vice-President, Dick Cheney, to defeat it, the growing belief that the Bush Administration could be trying to get around the McCain amendment by the "rendition" of persons adjudged torture-worthy to less-delicately inclined countries merits closer scrutiny. We are beginning to hear the names and stories of men seized and transported in this fashion: Maher Arar, a Canadian-Syrian, was captured by the CIA on his way to the US and taken via Jordan to Syria where, says his lawyer, he was "brutally physically tortured". Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen of Kuwaiti-Lebanese origin, was kidnapped in Macedonia and taken for interrogation to Afghanistan, where he says he was repeatedly beaten. The Syrian-born Mohammed Haydar Zammar says he was grabbed in Morocco and then spent four years in a Syrian dungeon. Lawsuits are under way. Lawyers for the plaintiffs suggest their clients were only a few of the victims, that in Afghanistan, Egypt, Syria and perhaps elsewhere the larger pattern of the extraordinary-rendition project is yet to be uncovered. Inquiries are under way in Canada, Germany, Italy and Switzerland. The CIA's internal inquiry admits to "under 10" such cases, which to many ears sounds like another bit of double-talk. Tools are created to be used and it seems improbable, to say the least, that so politically risky and morally dubious a system would be set up and then barely employed. The US authorities have been taking a characteristically robust line on this issue. On her recent European trip, the Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, more or less told European governments to back off the issue - which they duly, and tamely, did, claiming to have been satisfied by her assurances. At the end of December, the German Government ordered the closing of an Islamic centre near Munich after finding documents encouraging suicide attacks in Iraq. This is a club which, we are told, Khaled al-Masri often visited before being extraordinarily rendered to Afghanistan. "Aha!" we are encouraged to think. "Obvious bad guy. Render his sorry butt anywhere you like." What is wrong with this kind of thinking is that, as Isabel Hilton of The Guardian wrote last July, "The delusion that officeholders know better than the law is an occupational hazard of the powerful and one to which those of an imperial cast of mind are especially prone … When disappearance became state practice across Latin America in the '70s it aroused revulsion in democratic countries, where it is a fundamental tenet of legitimate government that no state actor may detain - or kill - another human being without having to answer to the law." In other words, the question isn't whether or not a given individual is "good" or "bad." The question is whether or not we are - whether or not our governments have dragged us into immorality by discarding due process of law, which is generally accorded to be second only to individual rights as the most important pillar of a free society. The White House, however, plainly believes that it has public opinion behind it in this and other contentious matters such as secret wiretapping. Cheney recently told reporters, "When the American people look at this, they will understand and appreciate what we're doing and why we're doing it." He may be right for the moment, though the controversy shows no signs of dying. It remains to be seen how long Americans are prepared to go on accepting that the end justifies practically any means Cheney cares to employ. In the beginning is the word. Where one begins by corrupting language, worse corruptions swiftly follow. Sitting as the Supreme Court to rule on torture last month, Britain's law lords spoke to the world in words that were simple and clear. "The torturer is abhorred not because the information he produces may be unreliable," Lord Rodger of Earlsferry said, "but because of the barbaric means he uses to extract it." "Torture is an unqualified evil," Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood added. "It can never be justified. Rather, it must always be punished." The dreadful probability is that the US outsourcing of torture will allow it to escape punishment. It will not allow it to escape moral obloquy.

What We Don't Know Can Hurt Us By Dave Lindorff There are now eight members of Congress who have put their names to a bill calling for a special committee of the House to investigate impeachable crimes by the Bush administration. To date, all of them are Democrats. So far, you'd be hard-pressed to know about any of this--including the very fact that Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), the low-key and soft-spoken but dedicated ranking minority member of the House Judiciary Committee, had even submitted such a bill--as well as two companion bills calling for censure of both Bush and Cheney for abuse of power. Apparently in the editorial cloister of our once proud Fourth Estate, where decisions as to what it is safe or appropriate for us in the public to know, it has been determined that we do not need to know that the notion of impeachment of the president is starting to grow. Most of the major corporate media have yet to let the public know that several respected polls have shown a majority of Americans to favor impeachment if Bush lied about the reasons for going to war against Iraq, which if combined with polls showing that two-thirds of Americans or more think he did lie about those reasons, tells you all you need to know about the public attitude on impeachment. The same paternalistic and pro-administration mindset was at work when the editor and publisher of the New York Times decided a year ago to squelch for a year a story they had about the NSA warrantless spying program. They felt that we the people didn't need to know about that story in a presidential election year, even if the target of that spying may well have been the administration’s electoral opponents, just as it was in the 1972 Watergate spying scandal. There is a clear slide towards dictatorship taking place in America. The president, it turns out, has been signing executive letters along with many of the bills Congress passes, essentially asserting that as commander-in-chief in his fake "war" on terror, he reserves the right to ignore those bills. The latest such letter was signed by him as he signed the bill banning torture. In other words, he conceded to the bill, but then said he'll authorize torture anyway if he wants to, in his role as commander in chief. The beauty of this presidential scam is that, since the "war" on terror will never end, neither will his self-claimed draconian powers. And what is the limit of those powers? Well, basically the limit is whatever Congress and the courts tell him those limits are. And are we seeing Congress and the courts setting any limits? No. A major part of the problem is that the media that are supposed to inform the American public about what is happening are instead dropping the ball, or even hiding it. At the moment, I'm in Rome, trying, among other things, to look into one dark corner of the administration's crimes--the forgery of documents designed to make it appear that Iraq had an active nuclear weapons program and was trying to buy uranium. I don't know what I'll be able to find in my too short stay. An Italian parliamentary committee concluded this past fall that the forgeries were the work of long-time right-wing con-man Michael Ledeen--the guy who helped bring us the criminal Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages-and-stinger-missiles deal during the Reagan administration, along with Dewey Claridge (another Iran-Contra veteran), convicted bank swindler Ahmed Chalabi and Frank Brookes, a PR man hired by the Pentagon to promote Chalabi’s CIA-created Iraqi National Congress. That's another story that we didn’t see in most of our corporate media, though, given that all those people are connected tightly to the White House and the Pentagon, it suggests strongly that top White House officials were behind the whole Niger document scam. If so, it would make Lyndon Johnson's Tonkin Gulf deception seem like child's play (and all by itself would be grounds for impeachment). I should note that Italy provides a good model of where the U.S. is heading. Here virtually the entire media--and certainly the entire electronic media--is literally owned by the right-wing prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi. Except for some fortunately excellent independent newspapers, like La Repubblica, which did most of the investigative work into the Niger document forgery story, it’s hard to get any information in Italy about what its government is doing. The one advantage Italy has is a genuine political opposition. At least Italy’s media have an excuse: they’re literally owned by the prime minister. Our media, supposedly independent, only act like Bush owns them.

More King George by kos Mon Jan 09, 2006 at 12:03:12 PM PDT Ahh, this is why Bush has never vetoed any bills: When George Bush signed the defense appropriation bill containing John McCain's amendment removing torture and other human rights violations from the official repertoire of the armed forces, he added his own little amendment: "Unless I say otherwise." The vehicle through which he reserved the option to break the law is called a bill-signing statement, and as Knight Ridder's Ron Hutcheson revealed on Friday, the McCain bill was far from the first victim of the practice: Bush has used it some 500 times since taking office [...] Bush doesn't veto bills because in his view, he doesn't have to; he can simply ignore the ones he doesn't like. The administration have made that argument explicit, but only in terms of the president's capacity as "commander in chief" during an endless war, as with the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping, the decisions to ignore various Geneva Conventions and the selective suspension of habeas corpus. According to the Hutcheson story, though, it isn't only legislation dealing with national security issues that the White House asserts the right to ignore. In 2003, lawmakers tried to get a handle on Bush's use of signing statements by passing a Justice Department spending bill that required the department to inform Congress whenever the administration decided to ignore a legislative provision on constitutional grounds. Bush signed the bill, but issued a statement asserting his right to ignore the notification requirement. Seriously, why doesn't King George just dissolve Congress and get it over with.

Bush Impeachment Inquiry Has 8 House Co-Sponsors by Matthew Cardinale Atlanta Progressive News January 9, 2006 A total of eight US House members have co-sponsored Resolution 635 to create a select committee to investigate the grounds for impeaching President Bush, Atlanta Progressive News has learned. The co-sponsors are Rep. Lois Capps (D-CA), Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-TX), Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), Rep. Donald Payne (D-NJ), Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY), Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA), and Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-CA), according to the US Congressional website Thomas.loc.gov H Res. 635 reads as its official title: "Creating a select committee to investigate the Administration's intent to go to war before congressional authorization, manipulation of pre-war intelligence, encouraging and countenancing torture, retaliating against critics, and to make recommendations regarding grounds for possible impeachment." The bill was initially proposed by Rep. Conyers on 12/18/2005. The 7 other co-sponsors added their names on 12/22/05. "In brief, we have found that there is substantial evidence the President, the Vice-President and other high ranking members of the Bush 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 such war; countenanced torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment in Iraq; and permitted inappropriate retaliation against critics of their Administration. There is at least a prima facie case that these actions that federal laws have been violated – from false statements to Congress to retaliating against Administration critics," Rep. Conyers said in a press release on 12/20/05. As reported last week in Atlanta Progressive News, US Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) stated in a radio program that he would sign a bill of impeachment of President Bush if it were drafted on account of Bush’s approval of illegal domestic wiretapping. US Senator Barbara Boxer has also requested a report by legal scholars regarding the grounds for the Bush’s impeachment for the same reason. The article regarding the statements by Rep. Lewis and Sen. Boxer is available here. Meanwhile, a current pageview of an MSNBC.com poll as of 01/01/06, shows 86% of 185,673 total respondents believe President Bush should be impeached. The poll is available here and has been active online for several days: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10562904

Fitzgerald Maintains Focus on Rove by Jason Leopold www.truthout.org January 10, 2006 Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is said to have spent the past month preparing evidence he will present to a grand jury alleging that White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove knowingly made false statements to FBI and Justice Department investigators and lied under oath while he was being questioned about his role in the leak of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame's identity more than two years ago, according to sources knowledgeable about the probe. Although there have not been rumblings regarding Fitzgerald's probe into the Plame leak since he met with the grand jury hearing evidence in the case more than a month ago, the sources said that Fitzgerald has been quietly building his case against Rove and has been interviewing witnesses, in some cases for the second and third time, who have provided him with information related to Rove's role in the leak. It is unclear when Fitzgerald is expected to meet with the grand jury again. Fitzgerald has been investigating whether officials in the Bush administration broke the law and blew Plame's cover as a way to retaliate against her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, a staunch critic of the administration's pre-war Iraq intelligence. According to sources, Fitzgerald had planned to meet with the grand jury several times last month, hoping to wrap up the case specifically as it relates to Rove's involvement. But the prosecutor, who empanelled a second grand jury in November and whose term expires in 18 months, had his hands full dealing with another high-profile criminal case he is prosecuting involving Lord Conrad Black, owner of several major metropolitan newspapers, who was indicted on charges including racketeering. Moreover, several members of the grand jury had questions involving Rove's prior testimony before the previous grand jury on four separate occasions and had requested additional information about the testimony and about the overall case, these sources said, leading to a delay in the proceedings so Fitzgerald could provide that information. Robert Luskin, Rove's attorney, said in a brief interview Monday that he has not heard anything about the grand jury requesting additional information about Rove and is unaware that Fitzgerald has been building a case against his client. Randall Samborn, a spokesman for Fitzgerald, said he could not comment on grand jury proceedings because they are secret. However, Luskin said that Rove's status has not changed since the indictment against I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, was indicted in late October on charges of obstruction of justice, perjury, and making false statements related to his role in the Plame leak. "I think it's fair to say that there is no change in [Rove's] status. He is not a target of the investigation, but there remains an open investigation," Luskin said. But sources knowledgeable about the case against Rove say that he was offered a plea deal in December and that Luskin had twice met with Fitzgerald during that time to discuss Rove's legal status. Rove turned down the plea deal, which would likely have required him to provide Fitzgerald with information against other officials who were involved in Plame's outing as well as testifying against those people, the sources said. Luskin would neither confirm nor deny that a meeting with Fitzgerald took place last month. "I am simply not going to comment on whether I was or wasn't talking to Mr. Fitzgerald," Luskin said. "I am not acknowledging that it did or didn't happen, I am just saying that I have never commented about that before and I am not going to start doing that now." Rove has remained under intense scrutiny by Fitzgerald's office for several months. During that time Fitzgerald, according to sources, has acquired evidence suggesting that Rove tried to cover up his role in the leak by withholding crucial facts from investigators and the grand jury, during his three previous appearances beginning in October 2003, about a conversation he had with Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper. Rove's conversation with Cooper took place a week or so before Plame Wilson's identity was first revealed in a July 14, 2003, column published by conservative journalist Robert Novak. Cooper had written his own story about Plame Wilson a few days later. During previous testimony before the grand jury in 2003, Rove said he first learned Plame Wilson's name from reporters - specifically, from Novak's column - and that only after her name was published did he discuss Plame Wilson's CIA status with other journalists. That sequence of events, however, has turned out not to be true, and Rove's reasons for not being forthcoming have not convinced Fitzgerald that Rove had a momentary lapse, according to sources - particularly because Rove was a primary source for Novak and Cooper and failed to disclose this fact when he was first questioned by FBI and Justice Department investigators just three months after Plame's identity was leaked. Luskin maintains that his client has not intentionally withheld facts from the prosecutor or the grand jury but had simply forgotten about his conversations with Cooper. Jason Leopold spent two years covering California's electricity crisis as Los Angeles bureau chief of Dow Jones Newswires. Jason has spent the last year cultivating sources close to the CIA leak investigation, and is a regular contributer to t r u t h o u t.

Traitor Robert Novak Says He’s Not Sorry He Outed Valerie Plame, He’s Only Sorry For The Problems It Caused Himself. PS – He Also Says The Leaker Was A Man. http://www.newshounds.us/2006/01/09/ He ended the career of a CIA agent devoted to working on non-proliferation during a war on terror, he caused the indictment of one high-level Bush Administration official, and more, related indictments may be coming. Yet Robert Novak told Sean Hannity tonight that his only regret about writing the column was the problems Novak suffered as a result. That was just moments after he insisted he would not reveal the name of his source, then let slip that it was a man. What a guy! It was Novak’s first appearance on Hannity & Colmes since joining the FOX News Channel. Near the end of the discussion (with Novak as the only guest for an unbalanced review of today’s Alito confirmation hearings and Tom DeLay’s resignation as House Majority Leader), Alan Colmes asked, “Will the day ever come when you’ll come on here, on the FOX News Channel, and tell everything you know about the Valerie Plame affair?” Novak said he’s not supposed to talk about it until the grand jury investigation ends but said he will not be the first one to reveal his source. “If he reveals HIMSELF, or if somebody else reveals the name, or if the special prosecutor reveals HIS name, it’s another matter. But I’m not going to reveal HIS – my source on television.” (my emphases) In response to Colmes’ next question, if it’s likely the name will come out, Novak answered, “It’s possible.” To end the segment, Hannity said Novak had been quoted as saying he regretted writing the column “with Valerie Plame’s name. Why?” Novak replied, “I didn’t really say that. I said if I had it to do again, I probably wouldn’t do it. I don’t think I made any mistake at all. She was not – I don’t believe she was an undercover agent, I never have. The CIA never told me that it would cause any damage, ‘cause I don’t think it would. So that is not the regret. But it’s caused me a lot of difficulty. In this town, if you’re perceived as being in trouble, people run away from you… So just from the standpoint of self-protection near the end of your career, I probably would have just as soon not done it. But I don’t think I did anything wrong. And I thought it was an interesting part of the story in about the seventh paragraph of a story showing why they named this very strange Clinton appointment – the CIA did – to make a (sic) inquiry into a very important matter regarding the activities of the Iraqi government.” Why was this guy hired by the network that Roger Ailes claims “likes America?” With friends like this… Comment: It is a trait of the psychopath that they are incapable of empathy. Whenever they have done wrong, they still manage to cast themselves as the victim. Novak's response certainly fits. His only concern is the way his outting of Plame affected him. Mind you, we aren't against the outting of CIA agents. Let's out every intelligence agent on the planet! Let's get all secret talks and negotiations out into the open where the public can see and hear and be able to judge or themselves. Secrecy is one of the best tools of the psychopath because it prevents people from comparing notes, from having all of the data necessary to make informed and intelligent decisions. Imagine a world without secrets, where everything was transparent. If you can do it, measure how far we have to go, how far we have slid into accepting the values of the psychopath as our own.

Alito's fantasy world By Kate Michelman | January 9, 2006 IN THE 1998 movie ''Pleasantville," Tobey Maguire and Reese Witherspoon play typical '90s kids who are inadvertently transported into the unreal reality of a 1950s sitcom. They use their '90s values to teach the sitcom world some lessons about diversity and tolerance. Today many people have a stylized, ''Pleasantville" vision of the pre-Roe era in which I grew up. They imagine fondly that almost all families had a Daddy at the office and a Mommy in the kitchen; that almost all family relations were well-ordered and unthreatening; in short, that life looked like ''Leave It to Beaver" -- and that, with a few legal adjustments, it could do so again. The conservative movement has spent the last 20 years working to roll back social progress and make this fantasy a reality. It is time to stop seeing the fate of Roe as a Beltway parlor game. What really hangs in the balance in the Supreme Court nomination of Samuel Alito are the fundamental rights to privacy, dignity, and autonomy -- rights that transcend partisan politics, shape the course of our daily lives, and lie at the heart of who we are as Americans. Conservative ideologues are simply wrong about the 1950s. Fans of the decade seldom mention that, with women's autonomy and earning power severely limited, poverty was a constant threat. According to the Census Bureau, in those days almost 20 percent of American families lived in poverty, as did more than 40 percent of families headed by women -- in both cases, roughly double today's rates. Doctors and social workers were reluctant to report child or spousal abuse, and many women died from unsafe abortions each year. I know, for I grew up imagining a ''Leave It to Beaver" future for myself. But when my husband abandoned our marriage, I fell overnight from stay-at-home mother of three to single pregnant welfare parent. To support my family, I faced hurdles I had never imagined: the difficult decision not to continue the pregnancy, the humiliating interview with a hospital board seeking to prove me ''unfit" to have a child in order to have a ''therapeutic" abortion and avoid the back alleys, and the requirement to seek the permission of the man who deserted me and my family. Still, I was fortunate -- many women in my situation had no choice but to seek illegal abortions, and too many died as a result. We have traveled too far since then to even imagine a return to those conditions. Samuel Alito's public record shows unequivocally that he is out of step with Americans on each of those fundamental issues -- that he has chosen to reside in a 1950s that never really was, rather than the new century in which the rest of us live. He believes that the state needs to assist women in recognizing the moral dimensions of their decisions -- not only abortion but the forms of birth control, such as the Pill and the IUD, that are the most effective ways to prevent unwanted pregnancy. He sought to uphold abortion restrictions that would have treated a grown married woman no differently from a child, forcing her to notify her husband in all circumstances, including abuse and rape, before obtaining an abortion. As Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote in her decision overturning these restrictions, ''Women do not lose their constitutionally protected liberty when they marry." Judge Alito seems not to have grasped this fundamental fact of modern American life. Alito seems as well not to think much of women's constitutionally protected right to equality in the workplace -- a right that women today take for granted. He has repeatedly sought to limit women's right to fight employment discrimination in the courts, even in the most extreme cases, intervening where juries had already found in favor of a woman. He has opposed the affirmative action initiatives that opened the doors for a generation of women and minorities. He seems not to have believed women and minorities deserved equal access to his own educational institution, Princeton University. Since the Constitution was framed, Americans have understood the right to privacy as fundamental to human dignity and freedom. Yet it appears that this is a core American value that Judge Alito does not share. In December we learned of Judge Alito's low opinion of privacy rights for all Americans -- as exemplified by his eagerness to help the Reagan administration chip away at protections against government eavesdropping. Today our privacy rights are under threat in arenas very far from the doctor's office. It is against this backdrop that women and men whose views on politics differ profoundly -- but who share the belief that part of the genius of the American way is its preservation of a personal sphere where government's writ cannot reach -- should view Judge Alito's nomination. Senators should reach across party and ideological lines to reject the Alito nomination, not because we think he will vote to overturn Roe, but because we know he will not respect the dignity and autonomy that are a central part of what it means to be American -- for all of us.

Alito Must Go!! We Must March in the Streets to Send the Message Loud and Clear by Rob Kall OpEdNews.com January 10, 2006 It doesn't matter what Alito says in the hearings. He's said and done enough already. He's another Bush excretion who must be flushed out of government-- as far from the consitution as he can be expelled. Contact the big organizations that organize street actions-- Tell them we need to get in the streets. Tell your favorite progressive websites to publish articles calling for street demonstrations. Blog the message that we need to demostrate really soon on this. We must send a massive message. This is a bigger threat to our future than the war was. Alito on the Supreme court will cast the final die -- the USA's future is on the line. I suggest that street demonstrations be as centralized as possible, to produce very large crowds--. They should be held in major metropolitan areas, in county seats. The demonstrations should be peaceful, non-violent and legal... this time. Remember, Alito promised not to rule on any cases involving a stock he held. He promised the congress. Well the SOB broke his promise. He is another card carrying racist member of the Republican culture of corruption-- a liar who will do what it takes, say what it takes to get the job he wants. Make a great noise. Send out emails to the progressive media. Tell them to help get people to the streets. We need to send a message to the congress that is louder and stronger than emails, petitions and phone calls. We need to show them that this issue is very, VERY VERY important. Alito's appointment draws a line that can't crossed. Cross it and the US as the world has known it will be a thing of the past. This is one march you can't afford to miss, can't afford to be a part of making happen. So... don't just wait for it to happen. Be a part of getting it started. Send some emails, forward this article, call your local activist organizations. Call your local democratic, green or other left leaning groups. Make it happen. Rob Kall is editor of OpEdNews.com, President of Futurehealth, Inc, and organizer of several conferences, including StoryCon, the Summit Meeting on the Art, Science and Application of Story and The Winter Brain Meeting on neurofeedback, biofeedback, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology.

Like arsenic in the water supply, lobbyists have poisoned Washington By Gary Younge 9 Jan 2006 The Guardian The US Congress stands at the pinnacle of American democracy, which the nation is proud - on occasion - to export at the barrel of a gun. Inside, 100 senators and 435 members of the House of Representatives balance the interests of the nation and their constituents with their consciences and party allegiances. Their boss is the American people. Their election campaigns - one huge interview. This is the basic civics lesson on which every American child is raised and which few adults seriously question. Politicians themselves are held in low esteem - a CNN/USA Today poll last week showed 49% of Americans think their legislators are corrupt. This is generally regarded as the product of individual venality rather than an institutional virus. But if Americans still believe that after last week, then they don't know Jack. Jack Abramoff, that is. Last Tuesday Abramoff, a high-powered corporate lobbyist, pleaded guilty in a federal courtroom in Washington to bribery, fraud and tax evasion. He has admitted "providing a stream of things of value to public officials" in return for favours, including agreements to back particular laws and put statements in the Congressional Record. Court papers reveal that this key financier of the Bush administration's high-minded agenda of moral piety is a foul-mouthed, greedy bigot. In intercepted emails, he refers to his Native American clients - whom he played off against each other for millions of dollars which he then used to pamper politicians - as "morons", "monkeys", "fucking troglodytes" and "losers". He did the nation's business not through persuasive debate but with golfing trips to Scotland, junkets to the Pacific, corporate boxes at the Superbowl, and expensive meals at fancy restaurants. So Abramoff is going down. The only question, now that he has agreed to cooperate with investigators, is how many politicians he will take with him and how far up the food chain prosecutors are prepared to follow the money. So far only one legislator, Bob Ney from Ohio, has been directly implicated. But these are early days. Like arsenic in the water supply of the nation's political culture, Abramoff's filthy money sloshed around Capitol Hill and flowed freely wherever there was power. Those who fear contamination are now rushing to give the money he gave them to charity. The wall of shame reads like a Who's Who of American politics, including President George Bush, Hillary Clinton, the Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid, the former House leader Tom DeLay, and the speaker of the House Dennis Hastert. DeLay, who stood down after he was recently indicted for money-laundering, once described Abramoff as "one of my closest and dearest friends". This weekend, under pressure from colleagues, these ties forced DeLay to abandon any hope of returning to the helm. Abramoff is looking at 10 years in prison and has agreed to repay $26.7m to those he defrauded. Washington is looking at several months of scandal that could exact a far higher price. For a man like Abramoff does not get that kind of Rolodex by accident. It takes an entire system to support and indulge him. His actions were not aberrant but consistent with an incestuous world in which you had to "pay to play". "Lawful lobbying does not include paying a public official a personal benefit with the understanding, explicit or implicit, that a certain official act will occur," explained assistant attorney general Alice Fisher last week. "That's not lobbying. That's a crime." If she's true to her word, the entire political class will soon be in the dock. Lobbyists spend about $25m per politician each year trying to gain political advantage. In the words of Zbigniew Brzezinski in 2002: "We have created a culture in which there's no distinction between what is illegal and what is unethical." Just two months ago Randy "Duke" Cunningham, a Republican congressman from San Diego, confessed to accepting $2.4m in bribes and evading more than $1m in taxes. The former navy pilot, whose exploits in Vietnam formed the basis for the film Top Gun, was given a Rolls-Royce, Persian carpets and use of a yacht. Democrats are eager to exploit yet another impending crisis. "This kind of politics," said Democrat Jon Tester, "doesn't really represent the rank-and-file folks that are out there every day trying to make ends meet." Tester is challenging Montana's Republican senator, Conrad Burns, who had close ties to Abramoff. He has a point. But it may not do him any good. The Bush administration did not invent this system - remember all those corporate visitors who stayed over in the White House during Clinton's time? But the problem has certainly got much worse under its tenure, which has seen the number of registered lobbyists in Washington more than double to nearly 35,000. Meanwhile, since 1998 more than 40% of politicians leaving Congress have gained jobs lobbying their former colleagues. This whiff of sleaze has certainly clung to Republicans. After the indictment of vice-presidential aide Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Americans believed that Bill Clinton ran a more ethical administration, even after the Monica Lewinsky scandal, than Bush does now. Abramoff's woes will hardly improve matters. So the Democrats are pushing at an open door. The trouble is that they are on the same side of it as the Republicans, and the public are left out in the cold. Almost a third of Abramoff's money went to Democrats. In a poll for NBC and the Wall Street Journal, 79% of Americans believe corruption is "equally a problem among both parties". The Democrats stand for office, but little in the way of substantive change. This just leads to growing cynicism among their core base. So long as big money has bought up both sides of the aisle, the poor will never get a fair deal. Never mind the red and blue states: whoever you vote for, the green always wins. Those who wield these huge sums to lure politicians are apt to act against the interests of those who have barely any money. One of Abramoff's most successful projects was when he represented officials from the Northern Mariana islands. The islands, seized by the US from Japan after the second world war, operate under a special covenant that allows for a lower minimum wage, making it a haven for sweatshops. "We have evidence that at least some of the Chinese workers, when they become pregnant, are given a three-way choice," the interior secretary, Bruce Babbitt, testified to the Senate in 1998. "Go back to China, have a back-alley abortion ... or be fired." Abramoff lobbied hard to ensure the islands maintained their special status, flying politicians there to play golf on "fact-finding missions". He succeeded. DeLay later hailed the Northern Marianas as a "free-market success". Corporate lobbyists are why one in six Americans has no health insurance even though almost two-thirds want a universal government healthcare system that would provide coverage to everyone. Corporate lobbyists are why the minimum wage has not been increased for the past nine years, even though 86% of Americans support a substantial hike. They pimp the principle of democracy in pursuit of profit - they are the cancer within a body politic that continually boasts a clean bill of health. g.younge@guardian.co.uk © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

Cracks in an evil edifice Leader Monday January 9, 2006 The Guardian America's monstrous system of commercial political lobbying has long needed to be cut down to size. In Washington, more than 35,000 professional lobbyists now spend at least $5bn every year trying to influence the votes of members of the US Congress. It is a system that the former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski has said makes Washington the most corrupt capital in the world. Now, at the start of 2006, there are signs that something is at last being done. The rapid modern growth of this lobbying leviathan - the number of Washington lobbyists has doubled in the last decade - and the Republican control of Congress are umbilically linked. Its evil genius is Congressman Tom DeLay of Texas, who through most of the Bush years has been the Republican leader in the House of Representatives. Mr DeLay's purpose was nothing less than to conscript and expand the lobbying industry for the Republican cause, aggressively trading legislative and regulatory influence for political access and donations, thus locking the lobbyists into mutual interest relationships. Last week's criminal charges against one of the most flamboyant denizens, Jack Abramoff, have thrown the whole network into crisis. Mr Abramoff pleaded guilty to syphoning money from native American gambling clients to finance an extended system of gifts and rewards to favoured congressional contacts - including Mr DeLay - in the form of meals at expensive restaurants, sports tickets and even golfing holidays to St Andrews. But Mr Abramoff has made a plea bargain to cooperate with a justice department political sleaze investigation that has had Republican leaders from President George Bush and house speaker Dennis Hastert downwards, rushing to unload perfectly legal donations from the disgraced lobbyist. The Abramoff story has plenty of juice in it yet. At the weekend, Mr DeLay was forced to give up his efforts to remain house majority leader, making him the scandal's most high-profile casualty so far. All this could hardly come at a worse time for the Republicans, who must try to hold on to Congress in elections in 10 months time. But beware of assuming that the Abramoff revelations will hand victory to the Democrats, a few of whom were also on his books. In a recent Washington Post poll, 71% of voters said there was not much to choose between the parties on ethics issues. This is a powerful reminder that the US system itself is in crisis, not just those who currently control it.

A Donor Who Had Big Allies By Richard A. Serrano and Stephen Braun Staff Writers Los Angeles Times 8 Jan 2006 DeLay and two others helped put the brakes on a federal probe of a businessman. Evidence was published in the Congressional Record. WASHINGTON — In a case that echoes the Jack Abramoff influence-peddling scandal, two Northern California Republican congressmen used their official positions to try to stop a federal investigation of a wealthy Texas businessman who provided them with political contributions. Reps. John T. Doolittle and Richard W. Pombo joined forces with former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas to oppose an investigation by federal banking regulators into the affairs of Houston millionaire Charles Hurwitz, documents recently obtained by The Times show. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. was seeking $300 million from Hurwitz for his role in the collapse of a Texas savings and loan that cost taxpayers $1.6 billion. The investigation was ultimately dropped. The effort to help Hurwitz began in 1999 when DeLay wrote a letter to the chairman of the FDIC denouncing the investigation of Hurwitz as a "form of harassment and deceit on the part of government employees." When the FDIC persisted, Doolittle and Pombo — both considered proteges of DeLay — used their power as members of the House Resources Committee to subpoena the agency's confidential records on the case, including details of the evidence FDIC investigators had compiled on Hurwitz. Then, in 2001, the two congressmen inserted many of the sensitive documents into the Congressional Record, making them public and accessible to Hurwitz's lawyers, a move that FDIC officials said damaged the government's ability to pursue the banker. The FDIC's chief spokesman characterized what Doolittle and Pombo did as "a seamy abuse of the legislative process." But soon afterward, in 2002, the FDIC dropped its case against Hurwitz, who had owned a controlling interest in the United Savings Assn. of Texas. United Savings' failure was one of the worst of the S&L debacles in the 1980s. Doolittle and Pombo did not respond to requests for interviews last week. They publicly defended Hurwitz at the time, saying the inquiry was unfair. Hurwitz's lawyer said Friday that the FDIC had been overzealous. This summer, a judge in Texas agreed and awarded Hurwitz attorney fees and other costs in a civil suit he filed. "They sought to humiliate him," U.S. District Judge Lynn N. Hughes, said in the ruling. The government is appealing the decision. In key aspects, the Hurwitz case follows the pattern of the Abramoff scandal: members of Congress using their offices to do favors for a politically well-connected individual who, in turn, supplies them with campaign funds. Although Washington politicians frequently try to help important constituents and contributors, it is unusual for members of Congress to take direct steps to stymie an ongoing investigation by an agency such as the FDIC. And the actions of the two Californians reflect DeLay's broad strategy of cementing relationships with individuals, business interests and lobbyists whose financial support enabled Republicans to extend their grip on Congress and on government agencies as well. The system DeLay developed and Abramoff took part in went beyond simple quid pro quo; it mobilized whatever GOP resources were available to help those who could help the party. In the Hurwitz case, Doolittle and Pombo were in a position to pressure the FDIC and did so. Pombo received a modest campaign contribution. In another case, Pombo helped one of Abramoff's clients, the Mashpee Indians in Massachusetts, gain official recognition as a tribe; the congressman received contributions from the lobbyist and the tribe in that instance. Andrew Wheat, research director for Texans for Public Justice, a nonpartisan electoral reform group based in Austin, put it this way: "DeLay and Hurwitz seem like natural allies in that they have geographic and ideological proximity. Mr. Hurwitz is a guy who has a reputation of being willing to pay to play. And DeLay likes to play that game too, so there's a natural affinity." DeLay announced Saturday that he was giving up his efforts to regain the majority leader position. He was majority whip when he first became involved in helping Hurwitz. In the Abramoff scandal, members of Congress allegedly did favors for the politically connected lobbyist's clients — including Indian casinos — and received campaign contributions and lavish free entertainment. Last week, the lobbyist pleaded guilty in separate cases in Miami and Washington in a deal that government investigators hope will lead to more prosecutions. Others involved have also made deals to cooperate, and Washington is braced for new criminal charges to come. The episode involving Hurwitz and the two California congressmen took place with little public notice just before the Abramoff scandal began to escalate. The Sacramento Bee published a story when Doolittle inserted FDIC investigative documents into the Congressional Record, noting that it occurred at a time when Congress was distracted by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the anthrax episode. But what lay behind Doolittle's action, and the actions of Pombo and DeLay, did not become clear until recently, when the government documents and copies of letters between the congressmen and FDIC officials were obtained by The Times. J. Kent Friedman, the general counsel for Hurwitz's vast Houston-based holding company, said last week that the FDIC was overzealous in its dealings with his boss. "Their case was weak from the start. They had a terrible case," Friedman said. He said anyone trying to connect the congressmen to the fact that the case fell apart would be "attempting to put a bow on a pig." The Texas S&L in which Hurwitz held a controlling interest of about 25% collapsed in 1988 as part of a financial fiasco that took federal regulators years to untangle. The investigation of Hurwitz began in 1995 and continued for about seven years before it was dropped. After DeLay's 1999 letter attacking the investigation failed to dissuade the FDIC, Doolittle weighed in with a statement on the House floor in 2001, saying the FDIC investigators were "clearly out of control" and should have "dropped the case, period." Pombo, in his own 2001 floor statement, suggested that the banking regulators were using strong-arm methods against Hurwitz, or what Pombo called "tools equivalent to the Cosa Nostra — a mafia tactic." Doolittle, 55, an eight-term congressman, represents California's fourth district, the Sierra Foothills region and the eastern suburbs of Sacramento. He has a consistent conservative voting record, opposing gun control and abortion and siding with property rights, timber and utility interests against environmental groups. By 2000, he had grown close to DeLay, working with the Republican leader to oppose proposed changes to campaign finance law and restrictions on fundraising. When DeLay was indicted in Texas last year, Doolittle distributed about 100 lapel pins in the shape of tiny hammers as a tribute to the man nicknamed the "Hammer" for his ability to pound congressional Republicans into line. Doolittle also was closely aligned with Abramoff. Records show that Abramoff gave Doolittle tens of thousands of dollars in contributions and employed the congressman's wife for other fundraising activities. Pombo, the son of cattle ranchers, plays up his cowboy roots, often appearing in his district wearing a ranch-hand's hat and ostrich-skin boots. Forty-five years old, a seven-term congressman, he represents the fertile farming expanse of the Central Valley. He had impressed DeLay with his fundraising prowess, garnering about $1 million for his 2002 House reelection, which he won easily. And not long after his role in helping Hurwitz, the GOP House caucus — led by DeLay — helped get Pombo elected chairman of the Resources Committee over several more senior Republicans. Hurwitz has been a prolific campaign donor since the early 1990s. He has contributed personally and with funds provided by his Houston-based flagship company, Maxxam Inc., through subsidiaries such as Kaiser Aluminum, and through a company political action committee, Maxxam Inc. Federal PAC. In the last three federal elections cycles, those entities have given about $443,000 in political contributions — most of it to conservative politicians, including President Bush, for whom Hurwitz pledged to raise $100,000 in the 2000 campaign and also helped during that year's vote tally deadlock in Florida. Hurwitz has been generous with DeLay too. Starting in the 2000 election cycle, the businessman and his committees have distributed at least $30,000 to DeLay and his federal causes, including $5,000 for his current legal defense fund in the Texas money-laundering case. Hurwitz also contributed $1,000 to Pombo for his 1996 reelection campaign. And through the Maxxam PAC, Hurwitz gave Doolittle $5,000 for his 2002 reelection campaign and then followed up with $2,000 more for his 2004 race. When DeLay went to bat for Hurwitz, he was particularly critical of reported internal government discussions that would have pressed Hurwitz to settle his obligations for the collapsed S&L by selling the government vast forest areas and redwood trees in Northern California near Scotia. The forest land was owned by Hurwitz's Pacific Lumber company "I am extremely concerned," DeLay told then-FDIC Chairwoman Donna A. Tanoue, "about the apparent abuse of governmental power and what appears to be misconduct in the form of harassment and deceit on the part of government employees." Tanoue responded by telling DeLay "we can assure you that the FDIC lawsuit against Mr. Hurwitz was not filed for political reasons." The investigation pressed on, and a year later the House Resources Committee, which had jurisdiction because of the forest area, set up a special Headwaters Forest Task Force and launched its own review. Doolittle was appointed task force chairman, and Pombo one of its members. Duane Gibson, the committee's general counsel who later went to work for Abramoff, was named the chief investigator. They immediately subpoenaed internal records from the FDIC and the Office of Thrift Supervision, which also had responsibilities for S&Ls. Both agencies were wary and, although complying with the subpoenas, repeatedly urged the lawmakers not to make the documents public or share them with Hurwitz. William F. Kroener III, general counsel at the FDIC, warned the committee that Hurwitz and his lawyers were not entitled to see many of the documents. Kroener told the panel that, should the material end up in their hands, it "could significantly injure our ability to litigate this matter and reduce damages otherwise recoverable to reimburse taxpayers." Carolyn J. Buck, chief counsel at the Office of Thrift Supervision, also wrote the committee emphasizing that "we note our objection to any publication or release of these documents." The task force was set up for six months, and disbanded in December 2000. It held one hearing, and called FDIC and Office of Thrift Supervision officials as witnesses. At that hearing, Tanoue defended the FDIC's investigation. "I have listened to and considered the arguments made directly to me by representatives of Mr. Hurwitz," she testified. "However, I have found no compelling reason to take the extraordinary step of … taking this case out of the hands of the judicial system." Kroener testified that the FDIC was not interested in a trees-for-debt swap, saying his agency "has expressed its preference for a cash settlement." Six months later, in June 2001, Pombo submitted a portion of the subpoenaed documents that filled 14 pages in the Congressional Record. Six months after that, in December 2001, Doolittle did the same, even though he was no longer a member of the committee. And his submission was much larger — filling 111 pages. The documents were so voluminous that Doolittle and Pombo had to pay a total of about $20,000 from their congressional accounts to cover the extra printing costs. The FDIC was outraged over the documents' release. Its chief spokesman, Phil Battey, said in a statement to the Sacramento Bee at the time that the publication of the materials was a "subordination … and a seamy abuse of the legislative process." Not long afterward, the FDIC dismissed its case, and the Office of Thrift Supervision settled with Hurwitz for about $200,000 in administrative costs.

Media’s War Images Delude Instead of Inform By Norman Solomon Source: Media Channel The picture was perfect. It provided a moving portrait, an image that journalists called “iconic.” It was true to the moment. Yet the photograph was deceiving in a way that media images often are -- showing us what’s more apparent than real. One day, during the second week of November 2004, millions of Americans saw the photo. Blake Miller’s face was grimy, but his eyes were clearly visible. He seemed resolute, unflappable. Wisps of smoke appeared to be rising from the long cigarette that dangled from his lips. At the time, Marines were fighting their way into Fallujah, and American news outlets went gaga for the picture. At age 20, Miller suddenly became a famous archetype. The day after the photo was snapped, “CBS Evening News” anchor Dan Rather told viewers: “The picture. Did you see it? The best war photograph of recent years is in many newspapers today, front page in some. Taken by Luis Sinco of the Los Angeles Times, it is this close-up of a U.S. Marine on the front lines of Fallujah. He is tired, dirty and bloodied, dragging on that cigarette, eyes narrowed and alert. Not with the thousand-yard stare of a dazed infantryman so familiar to all who have seen combat firsthand, up close. No. This is a warrior with his eyes on the far horizon, scanning for danger.” And the news anchor urged Americans to take the photo to heart: “See it, study it, absorb it, think about it. Then take a deep breath of pride.” Five days later, when CBS brought members of Blake Miller’s family onto “The Early Show,” a younger brother named Todd said: “He’s just a normal person. Just mellowed out. He doesn’t see nothing big about this.” News stories were dubbing Lance Cpl. Miller a wartime “Marlboro Man,” the epitome of a rugged American soldier doing his grim duty. But his mother, from a small town in Kentucky, had this to say on the CBS show: “I’m proud and he may be an icon, but to me, he’s my baby. He’s my son. And I just want him home.” Media outlets were eager for the icon, but not for too much reality. Overall, little of war’s terrible fear and suffering and death was apt to come through news coverage. Around the time of the November 2004 assault on Fallujah, I interviewed a 21-year-old former U.S. Army specialist named Robert Acosta. He’d lost his right hand after a grenade landed next to him in Baghdad. “A lot of people don’t really see how the war can mess people up until they know someone with firsthand experience,” he said. “I think people coming back wounded -- or even just mentally injured after seeing what no human being should have to see -- is going to open a lot of eyes.” But journalists tend to be enthusiastic about providing icons. And it’s unusual when we catch a media glimpse of what happens in human terms. On the third day of 2006, when the man in the iconic photo returned to the CBS airwaves on “The Early Show,” this time the mood was more somber. “Blake Miller made it home from the war,” co-host Harry Smith reported. “But like many of his comrades, he wasn’t able to completely put it behind him. While on duty during the Hurricane Katrina relief effort, Blake suffered from symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder and was granted an honorable discharge from the Marines.” Blake Miller described what had happened on board a ship when he heard a sailor imitate the noise from an incoming rocket-propelled grenade: “A guy was making a whistling sound. And at that time, I mean, it just -- the sound actually sounded like an RPG.” Miller added: “And without even knowing what I’d done until after it was over, I snatched him up, I slammed him against the bulkhead, the wall, and took him to the floor. And I was on top of him.” The real person Blake Miller, not the media icon, said: “I’m continuing my therapy. I continued up until the day I got out, actually.” And, speaking of other Americans who had fought in Iraq, he said: “The more and more I talked to them, the more I found out that there was a lot of Marines that were going through same, similar emotions. And I mean, it’s -- it’s tough to deal with. I mean, being in Iraq is something that no one wants to talk about.” As an American soldier in an “iconic” photo, Blake Miller was newsworthy for a little while. But in sharp contrast to the media enthusiasm that greeted him back in November 2004, there was no major media coverage in the days after “The Early Show” revealed on Jan. 3 that he’s suffering from posttraumatic stress. For the warfare state, he has outlived his usefulness. Comment: Cannon fodder. We hear the term over and over again, but do we ever really reflect on what it means until it is our son or daughter who is sent over to a foreign land to kill for our country? Do we ever really consider what it means that the leaders who send them are chickenhawks who have never themselves served in the armed forces? That their children, too, are exempt and safe? Cannon fodder. Think about it.

MPs leaked Bush plan to hit al-Jazeera David Leigh and Richard Norton-Taylor Monday January 9, 2006 The Guardian Two Labour MPs have defied the Official Secrets Act by passing on the contents of a secret British document revealing how President George Bush wanted to bomb the Arabic TV station, al-Jazeera. The document, a transcript of a meeting between Mr Bush and Tony Blair in April 2004 when the prime minister expressed concern about US military tactics in Iraq, is already the subject of an unprecedented official secrets prosecution in Britain, against an aide to one of the MPs and another man. David Keogh, a Cabinet Office employee, is charged with leaking information damaging to international relations to Leo O'Connor, researcher to Tony Clarke, former MP for Northampton South. The two are due to appear in court tomorrow for committal hearings. The information was then acquired by Mr Clarke, who in turn consulted his parliamentary colleague, Peter Kilfoyle. The two politicians decided to pass on the information to a contact in the US. Mr Kilfoyle, MP for Liverpool Walton and a former defence minister, said last night: "It's very odd we haven't been prosecuted. My colleague Tony Clarke is guilty of discussing it with me and I have discussed it with all and sundry." Asked if he had broken the act in the same alleged way as Mr Clarke's aide who is facing charges, he said: "I don't know. But I'd be very pleased if Her Majesty's finest approached me about it." The two MPs decided in October 2004 to reveal the contents of the transcript of the Blair-Bush meeting to John Latham, a Democrat supporter living in San Diego, California. They hoped to influence the impending 2004 US election, Mr Kilfoyle said. In San Diego, Mr Latham, 71, a retired electrical engineer and a "contributing member" to the Democrat National Committee, told the Guardian that the MPs also wanted him to send letters with the information to newspapers in Los Angeles and New York. At a meeting at the House of Commons, he had been introduced to Mr Clarke by Mr Kilfoyle. Mr Latham, a British expatriate, and Mr Kilfoyle had attended the same school. Mr Latham said he had never met Mr Clarke before. He added: "He mentioned that the document was a transcript of a meeting in Washington DC between Bush and Blair. There had been a proposal to take military action against al-Jazeera at their headquarters in Qatar. This was defused by Colin Powell, US secretary of state, and Tony Blair." Mr Latham decided not to write to US newspapers at the time, in October 2004. As a result, details of the Washington meeting between Mr Bush and Mr Blair remained secret for more than a year. Within days of the charges being brought against Mr Keogh and Mr O'Connor, the contents of the memo were, however, passed on again, this time to the Daily Mirror, which put them on its front page. Lord Goldsmith, the attorney general, unsuccessfully threatened other newspapers with the Official Secrets Act if they re-published the contents of the document. Mr Kilfoyle told the Guardian that in May 2004, Mr Clarke - still a Labour MP - consulted him after he had received the transcript of the Bush-Blair meeting revealing Mr Bush's wish to bomb al-Jazeera. "He told me what was in it," said Mr Kilfoyle. "He agonised and was very nervous. He decided the right thing to do was to return it." It was only after police arrested Mr O'Connor - Mr Clarke's aide - that the two politicians decided they should try to reveal the memo's contents in the US. The Bush-Blair meeting took place when Whitehall officials, intelligence officers, and British military commanders were expressing outrage at the scale of the US assault on the Iraqi city of Falluja, in which up to 1,000 civilians are feared to have died. Pictures of the attack shown on al-Jazeera had infuriated US generals. London was also arguing with Washington about the number of extra British troops to be sent to Iraq. A second, Foreign Office document, separately leaked in May 2004, exposed misgivings within the British government over America's "heavy-handed" behaviour and tactics in Iraq. That memo said: "Heavy-handed US military tactics in Falluja and Najaf some weeks ago have fuelled both Sunni and Shi'ite opposition to the coalition, and lost us much public support inside Iraq."

Abduction of American Reporter in Iraq Blacked Out By U.S. News Outlets By Joe Strupp Published: January 09, 2006 3:05 PM ET NEW YORK The abduction of a Christian Science Monitor reporter in Iraq on Saturday was not disclosed by major U.S. media outlets for nearly two days after the Monitor requested that the incident, and the reporter's name and affiliation, be withheld. A translator was killed in the incident and the reporter, now identified by the Monitor as Jill Carroll, is still being held. Numerous foreign news outlets and several leading wire services disclosed the incident -- and in a few cases, the reporter's name. Such stories did not appear in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and other U.S. papers and their Web sites. The Associated Press ran at least one story out of Baghdad, but without the newspaper or reporter's name, and it did not appear in any major newspapers Sunday or Monday. The AP held off all further reports at the request of the Monitor, which did not release the information until this afternoon. Jay Jostyn, a Monitor spokesman, told E&P it acted now -- sending an email to news organizations after 2:30 p.m. and with a story on its Web site at 3 P.M. -- because the story had by now circulated via 40 to 50 outlets abroad. The Monitor revealed that the reporter, Carroll, is a stringer for the paper who has written many stories for the newspaper for about a year, the last four or five months reporting from Iraq. "We have been advised that the less that is said, the better," Jostyn told E&P this morning, before a Monitor story about the abduction was posted. "We need to be sensitive to that." Jostyn said the request for a news blackout was made in an effort to protect her safety. The Monitor's own story about the abduction, and a related editor's note, did not mention the news blackout. It mentioned that her family had urged her captors to release her. "We just felt it [the blackout] is not something we wanted to publicize," he added. Several editors at major news outlets earlier today said they were glad to oblige and hoped their efforts would help win Carroll's release. Marjorie Miller, foreign editor at the Los Angeles Times, said she was contacted on Saturday after one of her Baghdad correspondents was asked by the Monitor to hold off on a story about the abduction. She said she reviewed the matter with Managing Editor Doug Frantz and the story never ran. "If the feeling of the organization is that it will endanger the life of the victim, we don't want to do anything that will endanger the life of the victim," she told E&P. "They asked us not to do it for the purpose of negotiations." "I am doing everything I possibly can not to endanger a reporter's life and we are trying to gauge what to do," said David Hoffman, assistant managing editor for foreign at the Washington Post, who declined to comment specifically on the requested blackout. "We are trying not to endanger a reporter." A Google search reveals that USA Today's Web site apparently carried an AP story about the abduction on Saturday -- and then killed the link. In a story that it moved after 3 p.m. today, the AP stated, "After initial reports of the kidnapping on Saturday, The Associated Press and other news organizations honored a request from the newspaper in Boston and a journalists' group in Baghdad for a news blackout. The request was made to give authorities an opportunity to resolve the incident during the early hours after the abduction." Kathleen Carroll, the AP's executive editor, said the news service had posted a story about the kidnapping Saturday, which did not include the name of the reporter or her employer because they might not have been known at the time. (That story, and others, identified the victim as a female American.) The AP was then contacted through its Baghdad bureau and asked not to post any further stories. "When somebody approaches us and says we might be able to affect some change, we entertain the request and comply if we are able," she told E&P. "It has been not uncommon in the past for news organizations and other companies to make requests to hold off reporting for a short time if they think it would help recover a kidnapped individual." The Los Angles Times' Miller also indicated such requests have occurred before, on an ad-hoc basis, and the paper is now "figuring out" a policy on how to respond. A spokesperson at the New York Times did not immediately confirm or deny that the paper had been contacted, but was looking into the matter. Foreign editors at The Boston Globe, USA Today and The Wall Street Journal could not be reached Monday. Jill Carroll's ties to a paper with "Christian" in the title was also a likely concern when dealing with Islamic fundamentalists, noted one editor who had agreed not to publish a story on the incident. "That could put her life more in danger," the editor said. "Jill is an established journalist who has been reporting from the Middle East for Jordanian, Italian, and other news organizations over the past three years," the Monitor reported in a story to be published on Tuesday. "In recent months, The Monitor has tapped into her professionalism, energy, and fair reporting on the Iraq scene. It was her drive to gather direct and accurate views from political leaders that took her into western Baghdad's Adil neighborhood on Saturday morning." E&P Online, not aware of any request to withhold coverage, on Sunday published online a story about the abduction, without mentioning the reporter's name or affiliation, based on accounts from AP, UPI, Reuters, AFP and several British newspapers. *** The Monitor's story, published on its Web site today: Jill Carroll, a freelance journalist currently on assignment for The Christian Science Monitor, was abducted by unknown gunmen in Baghdad Saturday morning. Her Iraqi interpreter was killed during the kidnapping. "I saw a group of people coming as if they had come from the sky," recalled Ms. Carroll's driver, who survived the attack. "One guy attracted my attention. He jumped in front of me screaming, 'Stop! Stop! Stop!' with his left hand up and a pistol in his right hand." One of the kidnappers pulled the driver from the car, jumped in, and drove away with several others huddled around Carroll and her interpreter, said the driver, who asked not to be identified. "They didn't give me any time to even put the car in neutral," he recounted. The body of the interpreter, Allan Enwiyah, 32, was later found in the same neighborhood. He had been shot twice in the head, law enforcement officials said. There has been no word yet on Carroll's whereabouts. The kidnapping occurred within 300 yards of the office of Adnan al-Dulaimi, a prominent Sunni politician, whom Carroll had been intending to interview at 10 a.m. Saturday local time, the driver said. Mr. Dulaimi, however, turned out not to be at his office, and after 25 minutes, Carroll and her interpreter left. Their car was stopped as she drove away. "It was very obvious this was by design," said the driver. "The whole operation took no more than a quarter of a minute. It was very highly organized. It was a setup, a perfect ambush." No group has yet claimed responsibility for the kidnapping, which is under investigation by Iraqi and US officials. Richard Bergenheim, editor of the Monitor, appealed to Carroll's abductors to let her go immediately. "Jill's ability to help others understand the issues facing all groups in Iraq has been invaluable. We are urgently seeking information about Ms. Carroll and are pursuing every avenue to secure her release," he said. Carroll's relatives also pleaded for her release, urging her captors to "consider the work she has done to reveal the truth about the Iraq war." Carroll, who has been working in Iraq since October 2003, has been contributing articles regularly since last February to The Christian Science Monitor, according to World News Editor David Clark Scott. "She has proved an insightful, resourceful, and courageous reporter," he said. "But Jill is not the kind of person to take undue risks." When five or six men, including a large, mustachioed man with short hair waving a Glock handgun, stopped Carroll's car, the driver said he thought the men were from Dulaimi's security detail, so he slowed down. On his knees on the ground, after having been pulled roughly from the driver's seat, he turned to see his car, a red Toyota Cressida, accelerating away "with a lot of heads inside." Carroll and Enwiyah were clearly alive at that point, he said. One remaining kidnapper, standing calmly in the middle of the road as the others left, told him to "get away, bastard." "He spoke to me as a father to a boy [but] in a very dirty way, like a traitor," the driver said. It was then, he said, that the kidnapper shot once at him, the only time a firearm was used during the kidnapping. "When he shot at me [and missed], I understood this was an abduction. I jumped behind an electrical pole and then ran down an alley," he recalled, before seeking shelter at a joint Iraqi-US Army base. Since arriving in Baghdad, Carroll has worked for the Italian news agency ANSA, the San Francisco Chronicle, and other US dailies, as well as the Monitor. She had previously worked as a reporter for The Jordan Times in Amman after graduating with a degree in journalism from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Comment: When French journalists have been kidnapped, the entire country has been mobilised to offer support, to date with great success. The US prefers to keep things hidden. Of course, as a country, they have nothing to be proud about in Iraq.

Who's Fighting Our Wars? By Onnesha Roychoudhuri Source: AlterNet During the first Gulf War, there was one private military contract (PMC) employee for every 100 soldiers. In today's Iraq war, that ratio has risen dramatically to one PMC for every 10 soldiers. It's figures like this that make Nick Bicanic's new documentary, "Shadow Company," such an eye-opener. Nation-states are paying private companies to provide armed civilians, in lieu of soldiers, on an unprecedented scale. Yet, aside from a handful of allegations about contract workers firing on innocent civilians, little is known about PMCs. In January 2004, Bicanic, of Purpose Films, began a correspondence with a friend who had joined a private military company and was stationed in Baghdad. Through the pseudonymous "James," who provides narration throughout "Shadow Company," and hundreds of hours of interviews, Bicanic became aware of how much of the war effort was being run by PMCs. "I realized that this film really had to be made because the rules of war had changed, and there was a relevant message about modern warfare that wasn't coming across in other media," he says. Currently in negotiations for release, the film has already attracted attention from media outlets and Hollywood producers. Bicanic joined AlterNet via telephone to discuss the film. What do you try to convey through the film? The film is about the modern-day mercenary, or the private military contractor. They are vital in modern warfare today because the U.S. Army can't go to war without them. They're so overstretched in Iraq that they literally can't have dinner without PMCs. The film tells the story of the men that do this kind of work. It looks at what do they do, where they come from, and what motivates them to put their lives in harm's way on a daily basis. We wanted to chronicle what exactly is going on in the state of modern warfare and modern conflict resolution today. In order to do that, we also had to tell the history of privatization and warfare -- where it originated, historical precedents and where this happens today. How far back can the concept of the mercenary be traced? For as long as there has been war, there has been the outsourcing of war. One of the reasons why we wanted to make the film is to point this out. People look at what's happening in Iraq and think it's new. In actual fact, what's different is there's just a lot more of them and we're hearing about them more. Historically, it hasn't been 20,000 contractors in the same space as the U.S. Army. It might be 100 guys flying planes in Colombia or 50 guys doing executive protection in the Philippines. But, the idea of using private armed civilians to in some way affect the result of a conflict has been around for a long time. Why has there been an upsurge in PMCs? The upsurges throughout history have always occurred in a similar setup: where there's been a drastic reduction in the number of armed forces yet at the same time a conflict that requires armed forces. This is when people are culled from private environments. In this particular case, the U.S. government decided to enter a conflict that it did not have the ability to fully service with its own military. They had to create all these private roles because there weren't enough soldiers to fill them. If PMCs have been around for so many years, why are we only getting a documentary made about them now? It was difficult to find some of this information. The industry is not as transparent and accountable as it should be, and that's one of the points we try to make in the film. Back in the day, even if you tried to look for information on this stuff, it would have been much more difficult to find. In a sense, we started looking for it is just as it started to become more available. This is simply because, for the first time ever, the firms were forced to go on recruiting drives because so many people were needed. What was the result of this urgency? In the early stages in Iraq, so many people were needed so quickly that companies came out of nowhere. There was the infamous case of the company Custer Battles. This was a massive scandal because they appeared to be doing a good job for the better part of nine to 12 months. But that's because nobody was looking. And when they started looking, they realized that Custer Battles was charging the U.S. for employees that didn't exist. This kind of thing happened a lot in the beginning. But, as more people started paying attention, things stabilized more. Hopefully, enough stuff has been shaken out that the major bad apples like Custer Battles have gone away. However, unless we look more closely and educate both the government and the general public, people just aren't going to know what's going on. From your interviews and research, what did you learn about the recruiting process? All these companies have recruitment offices that go and select people. The American companies don't have a problem with the number of people applying. They actually have to turn people away. There's usually some sort of a three-week selection and training course, and that's designed to weed people out. For example, Blackwater has a very large training compound much like a military base, and they put people through a training procedure that also functions as part of the selection. They see how you shoot, move, drive, operate within a teamwork environment, whether you're a natural leader or not, how much experience you have. They try to see whether people will function once they put them into an environment that actually has real bullets flying at them. How do these contract employees work alongside of coalition military forces? It's an interesting problem because you suddenly have an environment where you need so many people, and you're in the same area as a nation-state military -- in this case the U.S. Army. This creates a very difficult environment for the soldiers themselves. For the first time ever, both the U.S. and U.K. Special Forces had real difficulty retaining men. While usually oversubscribed, they had to go on big recruitment drives. It's simple math: you have a given individual who has the prospect of risking his life as part of a member of a nation-state military for X amount of dollars or doing virtually the exact same level of risk and almost the exact same job for roughly three to five times the money for a private company. The proof is in the pudding. A very large number of U.S. and U.K. Special Forces are asking for early retirement, and it's a serious problem. The U.S. Army refused to speak to us about this matter even though we wanted to address it quite specifically. Documents were leaked to the press that indicated that they were actually offering retention bonuses -- something they haven't done before. Sounds almost like a military brain-drain. Definitely. The militaries are facing what every company faces when there are suddenly other companies offering much more money for the same job -- their best people are leaving, and it is causing a serious problem. If you're a young officer, and you're looking at your career prospects for the next 10 years, and every day, at lunch, you see these guys who have better equipment, are getting paid five times as much as you and live in a house with a pool while you're stuck in your barracks, that's got to have an effect of your morale. What kind of PMC jobs are there? You could be doing anything from standing in one place and guarding a particular fixed point -- a crossroads or building or some oil installation or refinery or power plant. Or, you could be moving people around from point A to point B. The environment is so risky that convoys get attacked on the move, people get kidnapped and people get assassinated. It's like the Wild West in more ways than one. Like in the old days, when they had people riding shotgun, literally, in stagecoaches so that the Indians wouldn't attack them. The modern-day equivalent of riding shotgun is three vehicles, four guys apiece with bullet-proof plating on the glass driving at high speeds, weaving in and out in order to survive and keep their client alive. Did the PMCs and employees you spoke with have a problem with the word 'mercenary'? The word mercenary is used a lot in the documentary. I don't have a particular problem with that because one of the things that interested me in the making of this documentary is discovering what the word actually means. The word carries with it very negative connotations, but there is no real clear accepted definition of the word. Many of the companies and employees take great steps to distance themselves from the word. Initially, the companies themselves used the term "private military company." But then they realized that, from a public relations point of view, calling yourselves a freelance military operator was a bad idea because it sounded too much like mercenary. So, they changed it to private security companies. It's all one and the same thing. I don't necessarily think "mercenary" deserves the negative connotations that it has. Many of these guys call themselves mercenaries. They perhaps do it slightly as a joke, but they don't consider it to be a priori a negative thing. They just think, this is what I do, and I do it for a living, and I'm not wearing the uniform of a nation. So, therefore, I am a mercenary. Did you get any sense these mercenaries were more, less, or equivocally reliable as uniformed soldiers? I asked my friend James, who was halfway through his tour in Iraq, "What about this issue that you hear about all the time: If you're there only for money and you really start to get into trouble, you can just run off if you get scared because you won't face a courts-martial or other military repercussion. Why wouldn't you just bail and leave everyone in trouble?" He laughed and asked me who I would rather be with in the event of a problem: a 19-year-old cook from some sort of infantry division that's probably seen combat for the first time in his life and is going to panic, or a 38-year-old guy who has 20 years' worth of combat experience. The point is that these guys are more experienced than almost all the soldiers in Iraq. People often like to say that if you're motivated just by profit, then you can't really be on the frontlines. If you're a professional, you can. There are a lot of "cowboys" out there, and those are the ones that are a problem. Our view is that if you promote transparency and accountability in the industry, then these problem people and the problem companies can essentially come to light and be pushed out. As long as this remains hidden, as long as there aren't documentaries like this that talk about what the industry is and what these people do, it's breeding ground for these dodgy companies that come in under the radar, get some backhanded deal. That creates problems because no one knows what these guys are doing, then they can do whatever they want. There have been recent allegations of contract workers firing at civilians. What can be done in the event of such a transgression? One of the surprising things I learned from the interviews is that local Iraqi laws do not apply to armed civilian contractors. That's actually by decree. They don't apply because it is specifically stated that they don't apply in their contracts with the U.S. government. What that means is that, in the event of something happening, the person responsible is usually just removed from the country. He's not liable under local laws, but at the very least it would be a political and public relations problem for the company involved. In some instances the person is fired, but that doesn't always have to be the case. That's really about it. They can be disciplined. But how much damage can a company do to an individual? They can essentially remove them from their employment, and that's it. If local laws are not applicable, then they haven't really broken any laws. Did any of the companies or workers you spoke with want local law to apply in order to weed out some of the more negligent companies? The one thing that the professional security contractors hate is the unprofessional "cowboys." They give the industry a bad name and create a very negative reputation. But the companies certainly don't want local law to apply because then they wouldn't be able to operate correctly. If you're in a convoy moving at 100 miles an hour and you have to worry about being liable for scratching a car if it cuts in front of you, you just shouldn't be there. There's no way the company could maintain any kind of profit margin. I don't think the individuals want local laws to apply but not because they want to retain the right to indiscriminately shoot people. They realize that if local laws apply, they won't be able to operate correctly. You talk a lot about the resentment that companies and employees harbor for the few "cowboys." Recent allegations of misconduct were aimed at a company called Aegis which was run by Tim Spicer, who was charged with violating a U.N. arms embargo in the past. Is there resentment toward the U.S. government in terms of whom these contracts are being awarded to? No one in the U.S. or U.K. companies understands why Tim Spicer and Aegis were given this particular contract. It was a contract to essentially oversee and handle communication and control of all the private security companies that are working out there. They're this umbrella company that's supposed to help everybody control and communicate to each other. But at the time that Aegis was awarded this contract, they had no men on the ground and no experience in the area. On top of that, the person in charge of the contract was a guy who had, as is clearly stated in the documentary, screwed up on numerous occasions in a major way. Official protests were lodged when this contract was awarded by DynCorp. I tried to talk to DynCorp, but they refused to speak to me. But every individual that I spoke to was appalled that this was happening. Even the guys who just carry the guns, and are obviously not going to be in touch with somebody at the level of Tim Spicer, had heard of him and how much he screwed up before. To this day, it's still not clear as to why that contract was awarded. Having traced the history, and then seeing it in the context of present-day conflict, what do you think the future of the concept of the mercenary is? In some ways, we're seeing the future playing out right now in Iraq. It's a modern example of what happens when a very large military commitment is made in one area. Many people in the industry think that what happened in Iraq is unique in the sense that when the Iraq war finishes, assuming that there is some sort of an end in sight, the amount of people required to service the private military sector, will decrease significantly. So, will this happen again the next time that there is a conflict? Will there be a large amount of private military around? I suspect there will. I suspect that this is a trend. One of the reasons we made this film is because this concept is not going away. It's important that people know about what this is. We need to open people's eyes to this. War is more and more in the public eye, but it is also becoming more and more in private hands. This sort of equation is very dangerous. Why has there been such a lack of transparency? A lot of the companies refused to speak to me even though I tried to get across the point that we were attempting to do an even-handed view of the industry. First of all, they didn't believe me because they're paranoid. Second of all, they just don't like speaking to the media. Some of them are changing their views slightly, but you have to remember that a lot of the guys running these companies come from a background of covert operations for nation-state militaries, where the whole idea of talking to anyone about what they were doing was anathema. They were bred to not talk about what they do. Even though, what they do now should, and eventually hopefully will, come under extremely close public scrutiny. Their instincts are still to carry on doing things like they were when they had their training in the Army -- to not tell anyone about what they're doing and be secretive and promote this secret warrior credo. Did you face any resistance from PMCs while you were putting together the film? Yes. I did an interview with a Canadian national who was due to start working for the U.S. company Triple Canopy. About three weeks after I did the interview, I got a phone call from the head of public relations demanding that I remove the interview. It just seemed odd to me to demand that the interview be removed when the documentary hadn't even been made yet. When I refused, he threatened to fire the guy who I interviewed. Literally during the phone conversation, an email popped up from the guy I interviewed who was in Iraq, and he was saying that he had been placed on restrictive duty, and was told that, if he didn't remove his association with the project, he would be sent home. So I said I wouldn't use it. As it happens, I did end up using some of it. But in the grand scheme of things, I really don't think it matters. That sort of heavy-handed response is indicative of the level of transparency that really shouldn't be there. Why was it really that important that that one guy had spoken to someone from the "press" would be come down on so hard? The guy was talking about how he wanted to buy a sailboat and sail around the world and that's why he wanted to make money working for a PMC. I even sent a copy of this to the guy from Triple Canopy, but it didn't make any difference to him. The public does not seem to expect transparency and open discussions with, say, the U.S. Army. If PMCs are effectively doing similar jobs to those in nation-state armies, is it fair to demand more accountability and transparency from them? I think it is. The fundamental difference in my opinion is that a nation-state army has a hierarchical chain of command that eventually sits with a democratically elected government -- that is who the army is ultimately accountable to. Whereas a private corporation that is profit-motivated is accountable to no one but its shareholders. One only needs to look at a few overbilling scandals -- Custer Battles, Aegis, Halliburton's $150 toilet seat -- to consider the kind of thing that might, and has, happened. The U.S. government's investigations into allegations against contracting companies have largely been shrouded from public view. Do you think this has damaged the perception of these companies? Yes, because what the U.S. is doing with a lot of these companies is essentially foreign policy by proxy. They're washing their hands of the consequences the second they hand over the contract and the cash. They're pretending that they don't have to worry about it anymore. But they do have to especially because the amount of people that they assign to manage these contracts is simply not enough. Just think about their attempt to solve the problem. Rather than better managing the contracts, and forcing accountability and transparency, they created this uber-contract with Aegis where they put another layer of private companies in between themselves and the companies. They just award another contract for no logical reason. They're shooting themselves in the foot. If the U.S. government's desire is more accountability and more transparency, they're certainly not going about it in a very sensible way. Comment: Do you find it unnerving to read such a dispassionate account of the use of mercenaries? Does it make your skin crawl to recognise the ease with which the subject is discussed, the lack of any real moral accountability even if words like transparency are bandied about? The mercenaries are exempt from the local laws of Iraq. They shoot a civilian, and the worst that can happen is that they will be fired. Only to be hired by a competitor? The Wild West, indeed, that psychopath magnet that has so influenced Americans' idea of themselves and their country. We see again the use of language to limit our ability to think about an issue, a thread running through today's page.

The incredible shrinking coalition By David Isenberg Asia Times Despite the best efforts of the Bush administration, increasing numbers of countries are removing or reducing their military forces deployed to Iraq. The coalition of the willing seems to be increasingly unwilling. In all, the coalition has declined from a 2003 high of 38 nations and 50,000 troops to 28 nations and about 20,000 soldiers. The coalition has been shrinking for some time. Italy will withdraw 300 of its 2,800 troops this month as part of a phased pullout, and Spain and the Netherlands have already withdrawn either all or virtually all their troops. The credibility of the coalition as an example of staunch international support for the US invasion of Iraq has always been somewhat suspect, considering its members over time have including small numbers of forces from countries such as Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Estonia, Tonga, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Moldova and Mongolia, to name a few. Other countries have serious political opposition at home to keeping their forces in Iraq. As of mid-December, 201 non-US coalition forces had been killed in Iraq, including 98 from Britain, 27 from Italy, 18 from Ukraine, 17 from Poland, 13 from Bulgaria and 11 from Spain. The withdrawals are not that militarily significant as, with the exception of Britain (which is down from an original 40,000 troop commitment to about 8,500), the other countries have not been fighting insurgents; but politically, they are the latest evidence of declining support for the US presence in Iraq. The withdrawals, however, do have operational consequences. They will increase pressure on Iraq to deploy its own military and security forces, probably including many forces that are not yet fully trained or equipped. Of course, given that US officials have been leaking the news that they expect to withdraw some troops from Iraq this year, it is not surprising that other nations would do the same. Consider some recent news. For the US, the most positive news is that at the end of last month, Polish President Lech Kaczynski, as the supreme armed-forces commander, agreed to his cabinet's request to extent Poland's military mission in Iraq until at least the end of this year. But the size of the mission will be reduced from the current 1,400 troops to 900, with the possibility of a further reduction, and the mission's profile will change to focus chiefly on advice and training. New Polish troops going to Iraq in March will maintain military readiness to support Iraqi forces if need be, but will not undertake military operations themselves. It should be noted that this news had been expected, but the announcement was postponed to improve Poland's position in talks with Washington, with which it is negotiating military aid. Prime Minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz stressed, "The Americans are very much interested in the mission being perceived as an international one rather than solely as a US operation." Also at the end of 2005, the US asked Japan to consider having a few senior, colonel-class, ground-troop officers remain in southern Iraq after a troop withdrawal from the southern city of Samawah, to participate in US provincial reconstruction teams in Iraq. Japan, however, has remained reluctant to join the teams. On December 8, the Japanese government formally extended the deployment of its troops in Iraq into a third year, with an eye to withdrawing key ground troops as early as this summer. The country has just under 600 troops in the country on a strictly humanitarian reconstruction mission. Another end-of-the-year development was the news that Denmark's 534 soldiers stationed in Iraq would come home this year. A pullout of Danish soldiers is expected to begin about October or November. The Danish forces' parliamentary mandate to operate in Iraq expires on February 1. The Danish government intends to request an extension until July 1. On December 30, the last batch of 147 Bulgarian peacekeeping soldiers in Iraq arrived back home. Their two-year mission has now concluded, marking the return of about 400 troops deployed in Iraq since August 2003. The Bulgarian parliament decided in May to withdraw the contingent before the end of the year. Ukraine has also withdrawn the last of its 150 troops. Evidently, the millions of dollars it took from the US for its past elections were not enough of an inducement to keep its troops there. In the midst of President George W Bush's visit to Asia on November 19, South Korean defense officials said they were seeking to reduce their troop contribution in Iraq (the second-largest among US coalition partners, after Britain). South Korea's parliament approved a government plan on December 30 to bring home one-third of the country's troops, but extended the overall deployment for another year. The plan calls for the withdrawal of about 1,000 of the 3,200 South Korean military personnel who are helping rebuild a Kurdish area of northern Iraq. The reduction begins in the first half of this year. David Isenberg, a senior analyst with the Washington-based British American Security Information Council (BASIC), has a wide background in arms control and national security issues. The views expressed are his own.

Hall: Bush has planned exit strategy By Mary Madewell The Paris News Published January 09, 2006 The senior member of the U.S. House of Representatives says President George W. Bush has an exit strategy for Iraq, regardless of some charges to the contrary. “Once we set up a friend as the head of Iraq, the new Iraqi president is going to ask the American military to withdraw,” U.S. Rep. Ralph Hall, R-Rockwall, said Friday in a telephone interview from his home. “That’s going to be our exit strategy,” the District 4 congressman said. Hall said he expects the Iraqi people to elect a Shitte who is friendly to the United States in upcoming presidential elections. “We can then leave it for those people to carry out their defense for the freedom we have fought so hard for them,” Hall said. “I think we need to leave military equipment over there to help in their defense just like we did in Israel.” Comment: And maybe some tens of thousands of troops to give support? Hall explains that troop withdrawal will be gradual, noting that Bush recently announced the down-sizing of troops to begin this year. “I want him to get out of there, but I want him to come out with honor and dignity,” Hall said of his long-time friend. Although Hall has been close to the George H.W. Bush family for years, he is not always in agreement with his friends. While Bush insists the War in Iraq is a part of the War on Terror as well as a war to establish Iraqi freedom, Hall terms it “a war for energy,” a strategy Bush downplays. “The War on Terror involves keeping the bad guy from having his foot on half the oil reserves in that most populated area,” Hall said. “For that reason I think you could glean that this is a war for energy.” “The president places his values on freedom, and Iraq will be a bastion of freedom for the whole Arab world to see,” Hall said of his take on Bush’s emphasis. “He sees energy as a secondary purpose,” Hall continued. “It is clearly a strong secondary purpose, and in my belief the real reason for going over there.” Hall says he has spoken many times with Bush. “We have talked about the War on Terrorism and giving people freedom and that Iraq could begin a domino effect in the Middle East,” Hall said. The congressman expressed frustration with a recent defeat he suffered on Capitol Hill to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for drilling. “I am so mad about that you can’t believe,” said Hall, chairman of the Energy and Air Quality Subcommittee of the powerful Energy and Commerce Committee. “We had it cinched at one time,” Hall raved. “We were outmaneuvered by Democrats and weak-kneed Republicans in the Senate.” The maneuvering included a threatened filibuster of the appropriations bill if ANWR was included. Republicans pulled ANWR to avoid a filibuster. “We should have made those people (Democrats) filibuster a situation that is going to cause our grandchildren to go to war,” Hall said about the recent budget reauthorization bill. An amendment to drill the ANWR had to be pulled. Hall has reiterated his stand on energy many times since District 4 sent him to Congress in the early 1980s. “I don’t have much regard for any of that bunch on the desert over there,” Hall said of oil-rich Middle Eastern countries to a recent Farm Bureau audience. “I don’t trust them and they don’t trust us.” “I would like to do without them, and we can do without them,” Hall said of the opportunities ANWR and off shore drilling would provide. During a later speech at a Lamar Energy Center gathering at Love Civic Center, Hall talked about energy and war. “One of the major duties of a member of Congress is to prevent a war and you do that by removing the causes,” he said. “The lack of energy is one of the major causes.”

Michael Rectenwald of Citizens for Legitimate Government on MSNBC CLG with commentary by SOTT 10/01/2006 The founder of CLG, Michael Rectenwald, appeared on MSNBC's 'Scarborough Country' where he debated Harry Belafonte's recent comment that Bush was a terrorist. Sadly, yet not surprisingly, host Joe Scarborough revealed himself as yet one more of the many mainstream media government shills who use ridicule and name-calling to silence any criticism of the Bush government. Consider the following excerpts from the transcript of the show: With us now to talk about Belafonte's words and what it means for his role at UNICEF, Michael Rectenwald, from citizens for a responsible government. Michael, do you agree with Harry Belafonte that George W. Bush is a terrorist? MICHAEL RECTENWALD, CITIZENS FOR LEGITIMATE GOVERNMENT: Well, Joe, Harry Belafonte is merely echoing what numerous leaders around the world have been saying about Bush. SCARBOROUGH: What do you think? RECTENWALD: What do I think? SCARBOROUGH: Is he—is George Bush a terrorist? RECTENWALD: Well, let's define terrorism. If terrorism means unjustified aggression, illegal wars and torture, international torture, yes, then indeed George Bush is a terrorist. SCARBOROUGH: I'm sorry. This is an illegal war. Why is this an illegal war? RECTENWALD: Well, because it was not sanctioned by the U.N., another organization that United States citizens support. SCARBOROUGH: OK. So, Kosovo was an illegal war? RECTENWALD: Kosovo? I'm not speaking about Kosovo. I'm talking about Iraq. SCARBOROUGH: But, no, no. You are talking about wars that were not sanctioned by the United Nations. Bill Clinton's Kosovo war certainly was not sanctioned by the United Nations. RECTENWALD: Let's talk about Iraq. (CROSSTALK) SCARBOROUGH: No. (CROSSTALK) SCARBOROUGH: No. It ain't that easy for you, buddy. RECTENWALD: We have lost 2,000 troops. (CROSSTALK) SCARBOROUGH: Listen, if this is about you being opposed to this war because of—it's George Bush's war. (CROSSTALK) SCARBOROUGH: Hold on a second. I'm not going to let you change the subject. RECTENWALD: I'm not. You are. SCARBOROUGH: You said that George Bush is a terrorist because George Bush went into a war that didn't have United Nations support. RECTENWALD: And he's torturing people, against Geneva Convention. SCARBOROUGH: Hold on a second. I'm merely asking you to be consistent. If George Bush is a terrorist for going into Iraq without U.N. support, then you are saying that Bill Clinton is a terrorist for going into Kosovo without U.N. support. (CROSSTALK) RECTENWALD: No, absolutely not. Clinton's war was a humanitarian mission. OK? This was a war of aggression. We overthrew a legitimate government. (CROSSTALK) SCARBOROUGH: No, no, no. Wait. (CROSSTALK) SCARBOROUGH: By using your standards that you just gave, you said the United Nations had to support a war or else the person that started it was illegal and, therefore, a terrorist. The United Nations did not sanction the Kosovo war. (CROSSTALK) RECTENWALD: The general-secretary of the United Nations did not say that Kosovo was an illegal war, but he did say so about Iraq. And he said it recently. And we also support that organization with our taxpayers. SCARBOROUGH: The U.N. did not endorse the Kosovo war. So, again, I guess, by using your standards, Bill Clinton is a terrorist. (CROSSTALK) RECTENWALD: Did Kofi Annan or did the general-secretary say that war of Kosovo was an illegal invasion? I don't think so. (CROSSTALK) SCARBOROUGH: OK. So, what you are saying is, the United Nations, as a body, doesn't have to support a war. Just, the secretary-general has to come out here and say it's illegal. OK. Great. Well, let's forget the body. (CROSSTALK) SCARBOROUGH: Hopefully, we will get a president there—or secretary-general. He can endorse all of our wars, despite—regardless of what the body says. RECTENWALD: No, that's not it. SCARBOROUGH: No, that's what you just said. RECTENWALD: There was no U.N. sanction for that war. It was illegal. SCARBOROUGH: So, who is George Bush terrorizing? RECTENWALD: It was an illegal war, and, therefore, he's a terrorist. SCARBOROUGH: It's not an illegal war. RECTENWALD: Plus, he's torturing more people around the world than is al Qaeda, by far. That's a fact. (CROSSTALK) SCARBOROUGH: So, who is... RECTENWALD: He's killed more people than al Qaeda, by far. SCARBOROUGH: Who is—and how... RECTENWALD: Thirty thousand people, at his own admission, 30,000 people, he killed in Iraq. (CROSSTALK) RECTENWALD: An illegal invasion, 220,000 troops. (CROSSTALK) SCARBOROUGH: You can scream all you want to. The problem is, the facts just don't bear it out. RECTENWALD: You can change the subject all you want, Joe. SCARBOROUGH: The bottom line is this. The difference between Osama bin Laden, which, of course, right now, you are saying President Bush is a greater terrorist than Osama bin Laden. RECTENWALD: Yes. SCARBOROUGH: I'm sure that makes everybody that you work for really proud of you. But Osama bin Laden purposely tried to kill... RECTENWALD: I'm not worried about that. I'm standing on principle, unlike some people. (CROSSTALK) SCARBOROUGH: Yes, standing on principle, where your principle... RECTENWALD: Human rights is what I stand for, human rights. (CROSSTALK) SCARBOROUGH: Hey, let me talk for a second or I'm going to... (CROSSTALK) RECTENWALD: Not jingoism. (CROSSTALK) SCARBOROUGH: OK. (CROSSTALK) RECTENWALD: I'm not a jingoist. SCARBOROUGH: You know what your problem is? RECTENWALD: What is that? SCARBOROUGH: You are a blabbermouth. You are going to keep talking, because you know I have got the facts on my side. RECTENWALD: Look who is talking blabbermouth. You don't let a person even... SCARBOROUGH: OK. The bottom line is this. RECTENWALD: You come on here, talk, and you want to shout me down. Go ahead. SCARBOROUGH: The bottom line is this. Osama bin Laden on September 11 purposefully targeted citizens on September 11, purposely went after civilians, trying to kill Americans. He did it, obviously, World Trade Center, did it at the Pentagon. When we went to war in Iraq, we were going after military targets. We continue to go after military targets, whereas, you take al Qaeda, you take Zarqawi, true terrorists. They are going into markets. They're setting off bombs purposefully trying to kill children, purposefully trying to kill grandmothers, purposefully trying to kill civilians. RECTENWALD: The end does not justify the means, Joe; 30,000 civilians have been killed in Iraq by Joe—by George Bush's own counts. SCARBOROUGH: Using that standard—OK, using that standard, then, FDR was a terrorist because of our firebombing of Dresden. RECTENWALD: No, because this is an illegal war, Joe. That's the difference. It's same sort of aggression that al Qaeda showed towards us. There's no difference morally or otherwise. SCARBOROUGH: OK. OK. So, FDR kills, God, 100, 15, 20 times as many civilians in Dresden. RECTENWALD: No, that's entirely a different... (CROSSTALK) RECTENWALD: Joe, that is such a specious comparison. That's unbelievable that you would actually sit here and say that. (CROSSTALK) SCARBOROUGH: No, it's not. You know why it's different for you? It's different for you because George Bush started this war, instead of Bill Clinton starting Kosovo or FDR leading us during World War II. SCARBOROUGH: Let's bring in John Loftus. He's a former prosecutor with the Justice Department. (CROSSTALK) RECTENWALD: Let me ask you a question, Joe. Why was George Bush Sr. sitting with bin Laden's half-brother on 9/11? Can you answer that? SCARBOROUGH: I'm sorry. Ask me that question again. They were talking in my ear. RECTENWALD: Why was George Bush Sr. sitting in a meeting with bin Laden's half-brother on 9/11 itself? SCARBOROUGH: What are you getting at? RECTENWALD: Oh, I'm getting at—what do you think I'm getting at? Just answer the question. SCARBOROUGH: No, no, no, no. What... (CROSSTALK) RECTENWALD: There's a factual reality that took place, George Bush Sr. sitting with bin Laden's brother on 9/11, the very day. SCARBOROUGH: You are implying that the Bushes knew what was going on. RECTENWALD: I'm not implying anything. Just tell me what that was about. SCARBOROUGH: I'll tell you what. You and Harry Belafonte, I think you have a lot more in common. Let me bring in John Loftus. John is former prosecutor with the... RECTENWALD: Harry Belafonte has five times the sense that anybody in this government seems to have. SCARBOROUGH: Thank you very much. RECTENWALD: Thank you. (CROSSTALK) SCARBOROUGH: John, let me bring you in here. I just—you know, I have got to apologize to my audience for even having Michael on the show. RECTENWALD: Oh, thanks, Joe. SCARBOROUGH: Here, we have a guy that's implying that the Bush family was somehow involved with 9/11. (CROSSTALK) SCARBOROUGH: John, when you hear this, when you hear Harry Belafonte's comments, saying George Bush is the biggest terrorist in the world, why are we Americans paying $260 million to UNICEF, this organization, when this is the type of hatred that's spewed? JOHN LOFTUS, INTELLIGENCE EXPERT: You know, if there ever comes a day that Americans just give up on UNICEF, United Nations, and we walk away from it, it is going to collapse. And, if that day comes, blame Belafonte and blame people like your guest, because with responsibility comes accountability. It's easy to dismiss Belafonte as a guy who is pushing 80 years old. He's an old socialist. But the fact remains, he was not speaking in this country, exercising his rights. He was speaking in the capital of a foreign nation, representing a department of the United Nations. And, drop by drop, this cancerous propaganda is eating up all the goodwill that we put in the United Nations. And people like your guest and Belafonte are using the United Nations as a propaganda base to advance their own agenda. (CROSSTALK) SCARBOROUGH: First of all, John, you have absolutely no problem with Harry Belafonte going out and saying whatever he wants to say. That's his right as an American citizen. It's because he goes there as a representative of the United Nations that you have a problem, right? LOFTUS: Absolutely. I mean, who paid for his plane ticket? United States citizens pay, what, 26 cents out of every dollar that the U.N. spends? And these guys haven't gone on the budget diet after the oil-for-food scandal. UNICEF is bloated with administrators. The U.N. Human Rights Commission is a joke. You have got the worst oppressors in the world there. Comment: Note at the end of the transcript excerpt that Scarborough and Loftus state that, because Bellafonte's UNICEF organisation receives money from US taxpayers, he should refrain from making any negative statements about the U.S. President, statements that are based in fact. In essence then, Scarborough and Loftus are suggesting the the truth can and should be bought, which, of course, is the precise ideology upon which the mainstream media is founded. Could it be any more clear?

Scandal of force-fed prisoners By David Rose 8 Jan 06 The Observer New details have emerged of how the growing number of prisoners on hunger strike at Guantánamo Bay are being tied down and force-fed through tubes pushed down their nasal passages into their stomachs to keep them alive. They routinely experience bleeding and nausea, according to a sworn statement by the camp's chief doctor, seen by The Observer. 'Experience teaches us' that such symptoms must be expected 'whenever nasogastric tubes are used,' says the affidavit of Captain John S Edmondson, commander of Guantánamo's hospital. The procedure - now standard practice at Guantánamo - 'requires that a foreign body be inserted into the body and, ideally, remain in it.' But staff always use a lubricant, and 'a nasogastric tube is never inserted and moved up and down. It is inserted down into the stomach slowly and directly, and it would be impossible to insert the wrong end of the tube.' Medical personnel do not insert nasogastric tubes in a manner 'intentionally designed to inflict pain.' It is painful, Edmonson admits. Although 'non-narcotic pain relievers such as ibuprofen are usually sufficient, sometimes stronger drugs,' including opiates such as morphine, have had to be administered. Thick, 4.8mm diameter tubes tried previously to allow quicker feeding, so permitting guards to keep prisoners in their cells for more hours each day, have been abandoned, the affidavit says. The new 3mm tubes are 'soft and flexible'. The London solicitors Allen and Overy, who represent some of the hunger strikers, have lodged a court action to be heard next week in California, where Edmondson is registered to practise. They are asking for an order that the state medical ethics board investigate him for 'unprofessional conduct' for agreeing to the force-feeding. Edmonson's affidavit, in response to a lawsuit on behalf of detainees on hunger strike since last August, was obtained last week by The Observer, as a Guantánamo spokesman confirmed that the number of hunger strikers has almost doubled since Christmas, to 81 of the 550 detainees. Many have been held since the camp opened four years ago this month, although they not been charged with any crime, nor been allowed to see any evidence justifying their detention. This and other Guantánamo lawsuits now face extinction. Last week, President Bush signed into law a measure removing detainees' right to file habeas corpus petitions in the US federal courts. On Friday, the administration asked the Supreme Court to make this retroactive, so nullifying about 220 cases in which prisoners have contested the basis of their detention and the legality of pending trials by military commission. Although some prisoners have had to be tied down while being force-fed, 'only one patient' has had to be immobilised with a six-point restraint, and 'only one' passed out. 'In less than 10 cases have trained medical personnel had to use four-point restraint in order to achieve insertion.' Edmondson claims the actual feeding is voluntary. During Ramadan, tube-feeding takes place before dawn. Article 5 of the 1975 World Medical Association Tokyo Declaration, which US doctors are legally bound to observe through their membership of the American Medical Association, states that doctors must not undertake force-feeding under any circumstances. Dr David Nicholl, a consultant neurologist at Queen Elizabeth's hospital in Birmingham, is co-ordinating opposition to the Guantánamo doctors' actions from the international medical community. 'If I were to do what Edmondson describes in his statement, I would be referred to the General Medical Council and charged with assault,' he said. · Yesterday the new German Chancellor Angela Merkel became the latest leader to condemn the United States for practices at the prison. In a magazine interview days before her first visit as premier to the US, Merkel said Washington should close Guantánamo and find other ways of dealing with terror suspects. © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

Hunger strike From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. A hunger strike is a method of non-violent resistance in which participants fast as an act of political protest or to achieve a goal such as a policy change. Mahatma Gandhi Mahatma Gandhi was imprisoned in 1922, 1930, 1933 and 1942. Because of Gandhi's notoriety around the world, it is widely viewed that British authorities did not wish to allow him die in custody. It is likely Britain's reputation would have suffered as a result of such an event. However, many also claim that Gandhi would not martyr himself without good reason. Gandhi engaged in two famous hunger strikes. The first protested British rule of India, and the second protested autocratic rule in the newly independent India. British suffragettes In the early 20th Century suffragettes frequently endured hunger strikes in British prisons. Marion Dunlop was the first in 1909. She was released as the authorities did not want her to become a martyr. Other suffragettes in prison also undertook hunger strikes. The prison authorities subjected them to force-feeding, which they categorised as a form of torture. Mary Clarke and several others died as a result of force-feeding. In 1913 the Prisoner's Temporary Discharge of Ill Health Act (nicknamed the "Cat and Mouse Act") changed policy. Hunger strikes were tolerated but prisoners were released when they became sick. When they had recovered, the suffragettes were taken back to prison to finish their sentences. Irish republicans Bobby Sands was the first of ten Irish republican paramilitary prisoners to die during a hunger strike in 1981. This hunger strike was a protest against the revocation by the British government of a prisoner-of-war-like Special Category Status for paramilitary prisoners in Northern Ireland. There was widespread support for the hunger strikers from Irish republicans and the broader nationalist community on both sides of the Irish border. Some of the hunger strikers were elected to both the Irish and British parliaments by an electorate who wished to register their disgust at the intransigent attitude of the British government. The men survived without food for ten weeks on average, taking only water and salt. After the deaths of the men and following severe public disorder, the British government granted politically motivated prisoners Special Category Status. The hunger strikes gave a huge propaganda boost to a severely demoralised IRA. The tactic was not new, having been used by republicans from 1917 and subsequently during the Anglo-Irish War in the 1920's, most famously by the Lord Mayor of Cork Terence MacSwiney, who died on hunger strike in Brixton prison in 1921. Earlier hunger strikes had been countered by force-feeding which culminated in 1917 in the death of Thomas Ashe in Mountjoy Prison. Political prisoners in Turkey Inspired by the Irish Republicans, Turkish political prisoners developed a tradition of hunger strikes, which continues to this day. After the suppression of rising civil socialist movements by a military coup in 1980, many militants as well as civil activists were imprisoned under highly inhumane conditions. In response to torture and mistreatment of political prisoners, the first hunger strike was launched in 1984, taking the lives of 4 Dev-Sol militants, Abdullah Meral, Haydar Başbağ, Fatih Öktülmüş and Hasan Telci. In the following years, socialist movements have been increasingly marginalized and moved underground. However, many militant Marxist/Leninist groups have survived. For this reason, the number of political prisoners has always been high. In 1996, when the nationalist minister of the Islamist/conservative government launched a policy on segregation of political prisoners from each other, another hunger strike broke down, with the participation of several leftist militant groups. The strike lasted 69 days, took 12 lives, and the indifferent attitude of the government provoked a strong public protest. As a result, with the initiative of intellectuals including Yaşar Kemal, Zülfü Livaneli, and Orhan Pamuk, a deal was achieved between the government and prisoners. The prisoners took most of their rights back, which they recall as a victory. The last wave of hunger strikes in Turkey, which has become chronical in recent years, was started against F-type prisons, which were designed for efficient segregation of political prisoners. The project was developed starting in 1997, and the strike was started on October 20, 2000, demanding F-type prisons not to be opened, by a large coalition of militant groups, this time including the Kurdish-separatist militants of PKK. The result was tragic, on December 19, 2000, the now democratic left-extreme nationalist coalition decided to break the strike using force, which was named "Back to life" operation. The operation was faced by a well-organized resistance of prisoners, resulting in the death of 28 prisoners and 2 soldiers. Since then, both F-type prisons and related hunger strikes has become an issue of daily life. According to the organization of prisoner relatives, 101 prisoners have died and above 400 hundred have suffered from unrecoverable disease, particularly Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome. The governments have been consistently denying claims about mistreatment of prisoners, and president Ahmet Necdet Sezer has been pardoning diseased prisoners, only to be critisized by extreme-right, since many of the released militants have been caught or killed in clashes with security forces. The government maintains that 189 hunger strikers received presidential pardons since 2000. Gwynfor Evans In 1980, the Welsh nationalist politician Gwynfor Evans threatened to go on hunger strike in order to hold the newly-elected Conservative government to its election promise to set up a Welsh-language TV channel. The government capitulated and the channel was on air by the end of the year. Animal rights British animal-rights activist, Barry Horne, died on November 5, 2001 after a series of four hunger strikes, the longest of which lasted 68 days from October 6 to December 13, 1998, leaving him partially blind with kidney damage. Akbar Ganji Akbar Ganji is an Iranian journalist imprisoned in Evin prison since April 22, 2000. Ganji has been on a hunger strike since May 19, 2005 [1] except for a 12-day period of leave he was granted on May 30, 2005 ahead of the ninth presidential elections on June 17, 2005. He is represented by a group of lawyers, including the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, Shirin Ebadi. While on hunger strike Ganji wrote two letters to the free people of the world: 1 2. On July 12, 2005 the White House press secretary Scott McClellan said in a statement that the US president, George W. Bush, called on Iran to release Ganji "immediately and unconditionally." "Mr. Ganji is sadly only one victim of a wave of repression and human rights violations engaged in by the Iranian regime," "His calls for freedom deserve to be heard. His valiant efforts should not go in vain. The president calls on all supporters of human rights and freedom, and the United Nations, to take up Ganji's case and the overall human rights situation in Iran." "Mr. Ganji, please know that as you stand for your own liberty, America stands with you," the statement said. Guantanamo Bay hunger strikes During the summer of 2005 the security detainees the United States is holding in their prison at the Guantanamo Bay Naval base, initiated two widespread hunger strikes. The first hunger strike ended on July 28, 2005, when prison authorities agreed to make concessions. According to some accounts half a dozen detainees were then close to death. According to some accounts so many detainees were being forced to receive intravenous rehydration that the prison's well-equipped infirmary was overwhelmed and detainees had to be transferred to the Naval hospital. According to human rights workers the prison authorities had a "waiver form" they called upon detainees to sign if they wanted to refuse intravenous rehydration. But the detainees have all been advised, by their lawyers, not to sign anything their lawyers haven't reviewed. One concession the American authorities acknowledge making was to supply the detainees with a bottle of clean water to drink with each meal. The detainees reported, to their lawyers, that the prison authorities had agreed that they would begin to treat them in a manner consistent with the Geneva Conventions. And when, a week later, it was obvious that the prison authorities were not abiding by their commitment, they initiated a second hunger strike in early August. One of the hunger strikers, 18 year old Omar Khadr, has told his lawyer that other triggers for the hunger strike include the detainees ongoing concerns that the guards are showing disrespect for their religion, including turning on loud fans, playing loud music, and whistling, to informally disrupt the detainees' prayer meetings. Khadr reports that the prison authorities are not honoring their obligation to broadcast the call to prayers five times a day, but rather only four times a day. Khadr reports that many of the detainees resent that the prison authorities are delegating female GIs to broadcast the call to prayer. DoD spokesman Lieutenant Commander Flex Plexico asserted on July 21, 2005 that only 50 detainees were involved in the first hunger strike. DoD spokesman Brad Blackner asserted on September 2, 2005 that 76 detainees were participating in the second hunger strike. Human-rights workers estimate that both hunger strikes have between 150 and 200 participants. On October 26, 2005, a federal judge ordered the Government to provide information about the condition of detainees to lawyers representing the hunger strikers. The Government has contested the detainees' claims of rough treatment during forced feeding. The court's decision reflects major changes from the early years of the camp's operation, when almost no information was obtainable by attorneys. The Government did not immediately announce whether it would appeal the judge's ruling. On November 4 U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld stated at a Pentagon news conference that he would not permit United Nations investigators to interview the striking detainees. He said the International Committee of the Red Cross would continue to have unlimited access to interview them. On December 30, 2005,the military reported that there are 84 strikers as of Christmas Day, 46 having joined that day

How Many Iraqis Have Died Since the US Invasion in 2003? By ANDREW COCKBURN 9 Jan 2006 Counterpunch President Bush's off-hand summation last month of the number of Iraqis who have so far died as a result of our invasion and occupation as "30,000, more or less" was quite certainly an under-estimate. The true number is probably hitting around 180,000 by now, with a possibility, as we shall see, that it has reached as high as half a million. But even Bush's number was too much for his handlers to allow. Almost as soon as he finished speaking, they hastened to downplay the presidential figure as "unofficial", plucked by the commander in chief from "public estimates". Such calculations have been discouraged ever since the oafish General Tommy Franks infamously announced at the time of the invasion: "We don't do body counts". In December 2004, an effort by the Iraqi Ministry of Health to quantify ongoing mortality on the basis of emergency room admissions was halted by direct order of the occupying power. In fact, the President may have been subconsciously quoting figures published by iraqbodycount.org, a British group that diligently tabulates published press reports of combat-related killings in Iraq. Due to IBC's policy of posting minimum and maximum figures, currently standing at 27787 and 31317, their numbers carry a misleading air of scientific precision. As the group itself readily concedes, the estimate must be incomplete, since it omits unreported deaths. There is however another and more reliable method for estimating figures such as these: nationwide random sampling. No one doubts that, if the sample is truly random, and the consequent data correctly calculated, the sampled results reflect the national figures within the states accuracy. That, after all, is how market researchers assess public opinion on everything from politicians to breakfast cereals. Epidemiologists use it to chart the impact of epidemics. In 2000 an epidemiological team led by Les Roberts of Johns Hopkins School of Public Health used random sampling to calculate the death toll from combat and consequent disease and starvation in the ongoing Congolese civil war at 1.7 million. This figure prompted shocked headlines and immediate action by the UN Security Council. No one questioned the methodology. In September 2004, Roberts led a similar team that researched death rates, using the same techniques, in Iraq before and after the 2003 invasion. Making "conservative assumptions" they concluded that "about 100,000 excess deaths" (in fact 98,000) among men, women, and children had occurred in just under eighteen months. Violent deaths alone had soared twentyfold. But, as in most wars, the bulk of the carnage was due to the indirect effects of the invasion, notably the breakdown of the Iraqi health system. Thus, though many commentators contrasted the iarqbodycount and Johns Hopkins figures, they are not comparable. The bodycounters were simply recording, or at least attempting to record, deaths from combat violence, while the medical specialists were attempting something far more complete, an accounting of the full death toll wrought by the devastation of the US invasion and occupation. Unlike the respectful applause granted the Congolese study, this one, published in the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet, generated a hail of abusive criticism. The general outrage may have been prompted by the unsettling possibility that Iraq's liberators had already killed a third as many Iraqis as the reported 300,000 murdered by Saddam Hussein in his decades of tyranny. Some of the attacks were self-evidently absurd. British Prime Minister Tony Blair's spokesman, for example, queried the survey because it "appeared to be based on an extrapolation technique rather than a detailed body count", as if Blair had never made a political decision based on a poll. Others chose to compare apples with oranges by mixing up nationwide Saddam-era government statistics with individual cluster survey results in order to cast doubt on the latter. Some questioned whether the sample was distorted by unrepresentative hot spots such as Fallujah. In fact, the amazingly dedicated and courageous Iraqi doctors who actually gathered the data visited 33 "clusters" selected on an entirely random basis across the length and breadth of Iraq. In each of these clusters the teams conducted interviews in 30 households, again selected by rigorously random means. As it happened, Fallujah was one of the clusters thrown up by this process. Strictly speaking, the team should have included the data from that embattled city in their final result - random is random after all -- which would have given an overall post-invasion excess death figure of no less than 268,000. Nevertheless, erring on the side of caution, they eliminated Fallujah from their sample. For such dedication to scholarly integrity, Roberts and his colleagues had to endure the flatulent ignorance of Michael E. O'Hanlon, sage of the Brookings Institute, who told the New York Times that the self-evidently deficient Iraqbodycount estimate was "certainly a more serious work than the Lancet report". No point in the study attracted more confident assaults by ersatz statisticians than the study's passing mention of a 95 per cent "confidence interval" for the overall death toll of between 194,000 and 8,000. This did not mean, as asserted by commentators who ought to have known better, that the true figure lay anywhere between those numbers and that the 98,000 number was produced merely by splitting the difference. In fact, the 98,000 figure represents the best estimate drawn from the data. The high and low numbers represented the spread, known to statisticians as "the confidence interval", within which it is 95 per cent certain the true number will be found. Had the published study (which was intensively peer reviewed) cited the 80 per cent confidence interval also calculated by the team - a statistically respectable option -- then the spread would have been between 152,000 and 44,000. Seeking further elucidation on the mathematical tools available to reveal the hidden miseries of today's Iraq, I turned to CounterPunch's consultant statistician, Pierre Sprey. He reviewed not only the Iraq study as published in the Lancet, but also the raw data collected in the household survey and kindly forwarded me by Dr. Roberts. "I have the highest respect for the rigor of the sampling method used and the meticulous and courageous collection of the data. I'm certainly not criticizing in any way Robert's data or the importance of the results. But they could have saved themselves a lot of trouble had they discarded the straitjacket of Gaussian distribution in favor of a more practical statistical approach", says Sprey. "As with all such studies, the key question is that of 'scatter' i.e. the random spread in data between each cluster sampled. So cluster A might have a ratio of twice as many deaths after the invasion as before, while cluster B might experience only two thirds as many. The academically conventional approach is to assume that scatter follows the bell shaped curve, otherwise known as 'normal distribution,' popularized by Carl Gauss in the early 19th century. This is a formula dictating that the most frequent occurrence of data will be close to the mean, or center, and that frequency of occurrence will fall off smoothly and symmetrically as data scatters further and further from the mean - following the curve of a bell shaped mountain as you move from the center of the data. "Generations of statisticians have had it beaten in to their skulls that any data that scatters does so according to the iron dictates of the bell shaped curve. The truth is that in no case has a sizable body of naturally occurring data ever been proven to follow the curve". (A $200,000 prize offered in the 1920s for anyone who could provide rigorous evidence of a natural occurrence of the curve remains unclaimed.) "Slavish adherence to this formula obscures information of great value. The true shape of the data scatter almost invariably contains insights of great physical or, in this case medical importance. In particular it very frequently grossly exaggerates the true scatter of the data. Why? Simply because the mathematics of making the data fit the bell curve inexorably leads one to placing huge emphasis on isolated extreme 'outliers' of the data. "For example if the average cluster had ten deaths and most clusters had 8 to 12 deaths, but some had 0 or 20, the Gaussian math would force you to weight the importance of those rare points like 0 or 20 (i.e. 'outliers') by the square of their distance from the center, or average. So a point at 20 would have a weight of 100 (20 minus 10 squared) while a point of 11 would have a weight of 1 (11 minus 10 squared.) "This approach has inherently pernicious effects. Suppose for example one is studying survival rates of plant- destroying spider mites, and the sampled population happens to be a mix of a strain of very hardy mites and another strain that is quite vulnerable to pesticides. Fanatical Gaussians will immediately clamp the bell shaped curve onto the overall population of mites being studied, thereby wiping out any evidence that this group is in fact a mixture of two strains. "The commonsensical amateur meanwhile would look at the scatter of the data and see very quickly that instead of a single "peak" in surviving mites, which would be the result if the data were processed by traditional Gaussian rules, there are instead two obvious peaks. He would promptly discern that he has two different strains mixed together on his plants, a conclusion of overwhelming importance for pesticide application". (Sprey once conducted such a statistical study at Cornell - a bad day for mites.) So how to escape the Gaussian distortion? "The answer lies in quite simple statistical techniques called 'distribution free' or 'non parametric' methods. These make the obviously more reasonable assumption that one hasn't the foggiest notion of what the distribution of the data should be, especially when considering data one hasn't seen -- before one is prepared to let the data define its own distribution, whatever that unusual shape may be, rather than forcing it into the bell curve. The relatively simple computational methods used in this approach basically treat each point as if it has the same weight as any other, with the happy result that outliers don't greatly exaggerate the scatter. "So, applying that simple notion to the death rates before and after the US invasion of Iraq, we find that the confidence intervals around the estimated 100,000 "excess deaths" not only shrink considerably but also that the numbers move significantly higher. With a distribution-free approach, a 95 per cent confidence interval thereby becomes 53,000 to 279,000. (Recall that the Gaussian approach gave a 95 per cent confidence interval of 8,000 to 194,000.) With an 80 per cent confidence interval, the lower bound is 78,000 and the upper bound is 229,000. This shift to higher excess deaths occurs because the real, as opposed to the Gaussian, distribution of the data is heavily skewed to the high side of the distribution center". Sprey's results make it clear that the most cautious estimate possible for the Iraqi excess deaths caused by the US invasion is far higher than the 8,000 figure imposed on the Johns Hopkins team by the fascist bell curve. (The eugenicists of the 1920s were much enamored of Gaussian methodology.) The upper bounds indicate a reasonable possibility of much higher excess deaths than the 194,000 excess deaths (95 per cent confidence) offered in the study published in the Lancet. Of course the survey on which all these figures are based was conducted fifteen months ago. Assuming the rate of death has proceeded at the same pace since the study was carried out, Sprey calculates that deaths inflicted to date as a direct result of the Anglo-American invasion and occupation of Iraq could be, at best estimate, 183,000, with an upper 95 per cent confidence boundary of 511,000. Given the generally smug and heartless reaction accorded the initial Lancet study, no such updated figure is likely to resonate in public discourse, especially when it registers a dramatic increase. Though the figures quoted by Bush were without a shadow of a doubt a gross underestimate (he couldn't even be bothered to get the number of dead American troops right) 30,000 dead among the people we were allegedly coming to save is still an appalling notion. The possibility that we have actually helped kill as many as half a million people suggests a war crime of truly twentieth century proportions. In some countries, denying the fact of mass murder is considered a felony offence, incurring harsh penalties. But then, it all depends on who is being murdered, and by whom. Andrew Cockburn is the co-author, with Patrick Cockburn, of Out of the Ashes: the Resurrection of Saddam Hussein.

Iraqi widows feel lost in land that cannot provide By Deepa Babington 09 Jan 2006 Reuters MOSUL, Iraq - Three sewing machines in a dingy apartment were all Munna Abdul Adeem Ahmed could scrape together when she set up a tailoring co-op for poor widows. She soon realised it was not enough. More than 1,000 women from the northern city of Mosul turned up looking for work on the first day. Ahmed finally stopped registering new names after the 1,200th widow signed up. The women were mostly young, poor and desperate for work. Many lost their spouses during the wars, uprisings and civil conflict that have bedevilled Iraq over the past 25 years. Now, a raging insurgency is adding to their numbers. Behind the daily bloodshed and attacks that make headlines across the world, there is a growing population of widows. Traditionally, Iraqi widows have been supported by their late husband's family or other relatives, but in a country brought to its knees by violence and war, there is now little to spare for the most vulnerable members of society. "We don't have enough money to clothe our children," said Nawal Ayob, who lost her husband during the bombings in the first Gulf War in 1991 and has since joined Ahmed's co-op. "We have no salaries, no support. How can we survive?" There are few reliable statistics on the number of widows, but the Ministry of Women's Affairs has recorded at least 206,000 in Iraq, outside of Kurdish provinces. There are just over half as many widowed men. Women's groups, however, say anecdotal evidence suggests the number of widows is far higher, with some estimates putting the number in Baghdad alone at 250,000 out of a population of about 7 million. "In every house in Iraq, you will find at least one widow," said Azhaar al-Hakim, member of the Women's Alliance for a Democratic Iraq, an activist group. "In some houses, there may be two or three." JUST A JOB For many widows, life is blighted by grinding poverty. Finding a job in post-war Iraq is hard enough for the average male -- securing one as a widow in an increasingly Islamic society is almost always an uphill climb. The insurgency and almost daily bombings in and around Baghdad have hindered economic rebuilding since the U.S. invasion in 2003. Some widows take up menial jobs they once would not have even considered, Hakim said, recalling one widow she met in the holy city of Kerbala who worked as a maid despite holding a college degree. Others have been forced to sell off possessions or live off handouts from relatives, say womens' groups. "The main problem widows face is poverty," said Buthaina al-Suheil, head of the Iraqi Family Organisation which helps support 200 widows in Baghdad. "We have women whose children left school to earn a living to support their mother." When Suad Hussein Musshada's only source of income dried up with the death of her husband, she moved out of her house to live with her father and sent her son to an uncle. Six years later, the 40-year-old widow, who also signed up for Ahmed's co-op, is still looking for employment. "I'm suffering," she said. "I just want to find a job." 'BE SELF-SUFFICIENT' Widows and aid groups say their plight is made worse by the government's indifference. During Saddam Hussein's rule, widows of men killed in battle -- particularly during the 8-year Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s -- were often compensated by the government, sometimes given land and free education for their children. But this compensation began to dry up after foreign sanctions in the 1990s left Iraq financially strapped. Now, rampant corruption and Iraq's general chaos have pushed widows' concerns to the back burner, women's groups say. Ahmed, the co-op organiser, said she and others had travelled to the Mosul governor's office seeking money for cloth and a building to replace the tiny apartment her seamstresses toil in. But their requests were not granted. Ahmed, whose husband was disabled during Iraq's conflict with Kurdish rebels in the 1970s, also complained about the lack of governmental support at a meeting of local women ahead of December elections. The influential head of the local women's centre sympathised but could only offer some blunt advice: "You just have to learn to become self-sufficient."

Bremer warns Dutch to back Afghan mission 9 January 2006 Expatica AMSTERDAM — A decision not to send more troops in Afghanistan would be damaging for Dutch interests in the US, former American diplomat Paul Bremer III warned on Monday. Dutch politicians have been putting off a final decision for weeks on whether to send 1,200 troops to southern Afghanistan to assist in the US-led campaign against the Taliban. The coalition government, with the possible exception of junior partner D66, supports the mission but is reluctant to proceed without the backing of parliament. Many MPs in the 150-seat chamber are worried the the southern province of Uruzgan is too dangerous. In an interview with Dutch newspaper 'De Volkskrant', Bremer said the Netherlands must not expect that a refusal to send the troops will not have consequences. Acknowledging Dutch politicians must weigh all the considerations, he said question marks would be raised on the US side about Nato if the mission doesn't go ahead. "What is Nato all about if our allies are not prepared to stand should-to-shoulder with us?" Bremer said Europe was correct to want more international cooperation "but when the possibility emerges, people are side-stepping it," he said. Consequences would be unavoidable if the Dutch does not send the troops. "Time and time again decisions must be taken by the US government, by Congress, that influence Dutch economic interests. It is not difficult to imagine decisions could be taken that would not be in the interests of the Netherlands," Bremer said. He said some elements in Europe do not understand how dangerous Muslim extremism is. "Many Europeans don't understand 11 September was an earthquake for almost all Americans," Bremer said. President George W. Bush appointed Bremer the Director of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance for post-war Iraq on 6 May 2003. He served as the effective civil ruler of the country until Iraqi sovereignty was restored on 28 June 2004. Bremer was US ambassador to the Netherlands from 1983 until 1986, when he became Ambassador-at-Large for Counterterrorism for the US. A book about his time in Iraq was published on Monday. [Copyright Expatica News ANP 2006]

Taliban's Omar calls for jihad against U.S. Japan Economic Newswire Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge 9 Jan 2006 ISLAMABAD - Taliban Supreme leader Mullah Mohammad Omar has renewed a call for jihad against the United States, saying it is the only way to safeguard the Islamic world, the Pakistan-based Afghan Islamic Press reported Monday. In a message on the eve of the pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia, read out over the telephone by Muhammad Hanif, claiming to be a spokesman of the Taliban, Omar asked Muslims worldwide to be prepared for the "sacrifice of jihad." "Muslims should be ready...jihad is the only way to protect the Islamic world," he was quoted as saying in his statement. Omar has been in hiding since the collapse of the Taliban rule in November 2001 and carries a $25 million reward on his head. "The United States has forcibly occupied the real and financial resources of the Muslim world so jihad has become obligatory for Muslims in light of the Holy Koran. If Muslims remain quiet at this juncture, it would only mean the success of the United States," he was quoted as saying. He was quoted as promising an intensification of attacks on U.S. targets in Afghanistan during the new calendar year and said the Taliban would soon force the Americans to leave Afghanistan.

An Attack on Iran is Inevitable By Alan Caruba MichNews.com Jan 9, 2006 A military confrontation with Iran is inevitable. Israel will need to destroy as much of Iran’s nuclear weapons capability as possible. If it does not, Iran’s ayatollahs will launch nuclear-armed ballistic missiles at Israel. If the Israelis attack, it will be with the assistance and blessing of the U.S. because a nuclear attack on America using innocent-looking merchant ships as launch platforms is a significant fear among counterterrorism experts. Or the U.S. will undertake its own preemptive military operation. This isn’t conjecture or speculation. The president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has made it clear to the world that Israel is to be “wiped off the map” of the world and, in the first days of its Islamic Revolution, it was American diplomats who were held hostage for 444 days by the Iranians. For the ayatollahs, America is the “Big Satan” and Israel is the “Little Satan.” No ambiguity here. No slippery rhetoric to disguise their intentions. Ahmedinijad recently told an Islamic summit in Mecca that an alternative to killing all the Israelis would be to have them all move to Europe! He is not merely certifiably insane, but he is virtually begging for a war with Israel. In a chapter in a new book, “War Footing”, the collective thinking of some of the nation’s best defense, diplomatic, and intelligence gathering experts, looks at Iran and says, “It is surprising to most terrorism experts that, even after four years of a global war on terror, there has yet to be any serious national debate about the need and the means to confront Iran.” When asked how far Israel was prepared to go to protect itself, one of its top military leaders replied, “About two thousand kilometers,” the distance between Israel and Iran. Guess who will be refueling those Israeli bombers and fighter jets over Iraq? Guess who will be flying with them? It will be the United States because Iran leaves neither America, nor Israel, any alternative. With a news media beleaguering Americans daily with reports of every casualty in order to sap our national resolve to remain in Iraq long enough to eliminate the threat that emanates from the entire Middle East, Americans are most surely not being reminded that, in the years prior to the attacks of 9-11, “Iran was responsible for the deaths of more than fifteen hundred Americans—more than any other state sponsor of terror or terrorist organization in history.” A U.S. National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, leaked to the media in August 2005 stated that Iran is unlikely to produce the fissile material it needs for a nuclear weapon until “early to mid-next decade.” Bear in mind the intelligence community has been taking a beating over its estimates of WMDs and other reasons to invade Iraq. The NIE estimate is probably too cautious. Iran may well be closer to what it needs to make nuclear weapons. What will stop this? A massive bombing campaign to degrade their capacity to make or launch nuclear missiles. Take away their nuclear option, along with their command and control capabilities, and there will be no need to invade. Indeed, with sufficient planning, resistance groups inside Iran could be armed to finish off the relative handful of ayatollahs in charge. Recently, an Iranian opposition group, based in the United States and calling itself the “Iran of Tomorrow Movement” issued a statement calling on Iranians to begin a period of resistance just prior to the next election on June 17 and calling on all governments worldwide to support the resistance. There is momentum gathering among Iranian resistance groups and one can only hope that Iranians, who are mostly young and pro-American, will respond to the call. Iran, however, is a total dictatorship and the risks are literally a matter of life and death. What are the alternatives? “War Footing” offers a number of steps the U.S. and the rest of the world can take. Its authors dismiss any “détente” or negotiated resolution. They recommend such measures as making freedom in Iran a declared U.S. policy; an active effort to delegitimize the Tehran regime, declaring it a threat to humanity; waging economic and political warfare, inside and out of Iran; and supporting resistance movements, among the options available. In the end, the experts conclude that military power may be the only option. I believe this will prove to be the only way to avoid a nuclear Armageddon. We are dealing with religious fanatics who want to bring about the return of the twelfth Imam al-Mahdi. Born 800 years ago, the lunatics running Iran believe that, before he returns, “one third of the world population will die by being killed and one-third will die as a result of epidemics.” The ayatollahs of Iran have decided to kill one-third of the “unbelievers” with nuclear weapons. This is Islam’s gift to the world, murder on a scale no one can conceive. If they succeed, the world will plunge backward to a time comparable to the Dark Ages. The destruction of Iran’s nuclear and other military facilities is a small price to pay to avoid this. Let’s do it sooner than later. Alan Caruba writes a weekly column, “Warning Signs”, posted on the Internet site of The National Anxiety Center, www.anxietycenter.com. © Alan Caruba, January 2006

Russia hopes Iran nuclear dispute not to trigger war Xinhua 9 Jan 2006 MOSCOW -- Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov said on Monday he hopes the dispute over Iran's nuclear program will not lead to warfare between Iran and the West. "Russia has made a very reasonable proposal that complies with international law and will not cause concern in the international community. Russia has offered to enrich Iranian nuclear fuel on its own territory," Ivanov, who is also deputy prime minister, was quoted by the Interfax news agency as saying. Commenting on the prospect that the Iranian nuclear dispute might trigger a war between Iran and the West, Ivanov said: "It is my great hope that things won't go that far." A Russian delegation headed by Security Council Deputy Secretary Valentin Sobolev held talks with Iranian officials on Saturday and Sunday on Moscow's compromise plan that the two sides establish a joint venture in Russia to enrich uranium for Iran. Ivanov said he did not know the results of the talks. "The Iranian nuclear problem does exist, and it needs to be dealt with by political and diplomatic means and within the framework of the IAEA," Ivanov said, referring to the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN nuclear watchdog. Russia has been resisting calls from the United States and the European Union to refer Iran to the UN Security Council for possible sanctions. The United States accuses Iran of running a covert nuclear arms program. Iran, however, says its nuclear work is designed merely to meet its energy needs and insists on the right to develop a full nuclear fuel cycle.

Blair unveils his 'respect' plans Tuesday, 10 January 2006, 12:39 GMT People could be evicted from their own homes for three months if they are nuisance neighbours, under a new action plan for Tony Blair's "respect agenda". The plan would also allow the public to grill police about anti-social behaviour and demand tougher action. And there will be more use of parenting orders and classes for parents. The prime minister denied the plans were a "gimmick" and said they would help "take back the streets for the law-abiding majority". Powers to shut buildings can already be used against "crack houses". Ministers are now to consult on extending the idea so people can be evicted from their homes for three months. Eviction by court order would be a "last resort", says the government but it could, for example, be used against students who annoy their neighbours with loud music. Introducing fines for owner-occupiers and others not on housing benefit who persist with anti-social behaviour are also being considered. Mr Blair set up a "respect" task force last year and the plans are the first real fruits of its work. Downing Street says as few as 50 families in each area cause many of the problems so small measures can have a big effect. Under the proposals, police officers and council officials would have to hold "face the people" sessions. And where local people were not satisfied, they could ask new local scrutiny committees to investigate through "community calls to action". The committees would have to report within a deadline. The police and other agencies would have a duty to respond to the committees' findings. In a speech in Downing Street, Mr Blair said he accepted that on-the-spot fines had reversed the burden of proof for some crimes. But traditional justice methods were too cumbersome and remote from reality, he said. He said "spitting at an old lady" in the street was a crime but the person doing it was not prosecuted because it took so many man hours and only resulted in a fine. "To get on top of 21st century crime we need to accept that what works in practice, in reality on the streets, is a measure of summary powers with right of appeal alongside the traditional court processes," he argued. Radical measures were needed to "rebuild the bonds of community", said Mr Blair. But he accepted that the vast majority of people, including young people and families on low incomes, did respect each other. The prime minister later helped to remove graffiti in Swindon, Wiltshire. 'Pessimistic' Conservative leader David Cameron said Mr Blair had been tough neither on crime nor its causes. As he met voluntary group leader in London, he said: "The real respect agenda must include long-term solutions to the causes of social breakdown, not just short-term sanctions and punishment. "The real respect agenda must be based on optimism about the ability of people and communities to create civilised lives for themselves, rather than a pessimistic view of human nature." Mr Cameron wants "social enterprise zones" to remove barriers to voluntary groups pioneering new measures. And he plans to create a national school leaver programme to give every young person the chance to take part in voluntary work in Britain or abroad. Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman Mark Oaten said his party would support the government if it was serious about making communities safer and helping families. But he warned: "It is an enormous challenge and it cannot be achieved with this government's usual mish-mash of gimmicks and spin." He warned against "nanny state" measures, saying decisions about parenting were ultimately decisions for parents. Comment: As society breaks down, or, in other words, as the "values" of the psychopath become the values of society as a whole, anti-social behaviours become more common, be it throwing your trash on the sidewalk, playing loud music, road rage, cutting off people in lines, abusive language, and other such activity. Blair's response is to impose ever greater restrictions and to set up a system where the public can bully the police into tougher action. It's kinda of like giving the people the ability to use the police to do lynchings. But where is the serious anti-social behaviour in our world coming from? Your neighbour, or the politicians who lie about WMD in order to invade and occupy a foreign country? The youth who spits on an elderly person or the corporations that sell poisoned food on a mass scale and then blame the people who eat it for not being smart enough to say no? Tony's "Respect" programme is going to do nothing about Blair's own lies. His ever-so-earnest justifications for his murderous ways will be exempt from citizen oversight while.

Beijing declares war on spitting, littering www.chinaview.cn 2006-01-10 16:16:07 BEIJING, Jan. 10 (Xinhuanet) -- Beijing has vowed to eradicate five boorish behaviors among its citizens this year, including spitting and littering on the street. For the citizens' convenience, Beijing will set up trash boxes every 100 meters in the city's major streets and other public areas and provide handy sanitary bags for people to spit into on buses, taxis and other public facilities. Most Beijingers said hawking phlegm and throwing wastes onto the pavement were among the five most disgusting habits in a survey among 10,000 citizens last November, according to officials with Beijing office for the promotion of social ethics. It was also considered rude for pedestrians to run about the road amid heavy traffic, for passengers to create a rowdy scrum while getting on buses and for pet owners to allow their animals to relieve themselves on the streets, the officials said at a meeting on the capital's ethic building Monday. The Beijing municipal government will work to eradicate these bad behaviors this year, they said. In a latest move to maintain public hygiene, Beijing residents have been told to build toilets for pet dogs in their communities, using waste paperboards or plastics. The local government has also urged the municipal legislature to empower heavier penalties on those who disrupt public hygiene or order. This year, Beijing also plans to amend and detail its code of behaviors for the citizens, a set of regulations promulgated 10 years ago.

Q&A: antisocial behaviour Tuesday January 10, 2006 Tony Blair today unveiled new powers to crackdown on antisocial behaviour. Matt Weaver explains the detail What is antisocial behaviour? According to Tony Blair, it is one of the biggest problems facing most people in Britain today. It is a catch-all phrase for a range of low-level criminality that makes other people's lives a misery. It includes noisy neighbours, abandoned cars, vandalism, graffiti and litter. How bad is the problem? It happens every two seconds, according to an official government count. The count, over a 24-hour period on September 10 2004, found 66,107 recorded incidents of antisocial behaviour (ASB). What's the government doing about it? It made tackling ASB - or "yob culture" - its biggest priority in the last parliament. It has set up a new antisocial behaviour unit in the Home Office, headed by the former homelessness tsar, Louise Casey. Last year its hardline Antisocial Behaviour Act came into force. Now, as part of Mr Blair's crusade for respect in society, the government has proposed more ways of dealing with the problem. What does the action plan propose? · Extending powers to close crack houses to cover any property that is a focus for antisocial behaviour. Under the plan, privately owned homes as well as council and housing association properties would be temporarily closed. · Reviving much criticised plans to dock housing benefit to unruly tenants, 18 months after dropping the idea as unworkable. · Setting up a national parenting academy to train social workers and others to help families whose children are at risk of getting involved in antisocial behaviour. · Allowing schools to apply for parenting orders against unruly pupils. · Giving community groups the right to demand action against local troublemakers in regular public meetings with the police. What's been the reaction? Councils have welcomed it, but others have expressed alarm. The civil rights group Liberty said the proposals treated vulnerable families like criminals. The homelessness charity Shelter warned that evicting troublemakers would not deal with the problem but merely move it on. What other measures are available? Under 2004 Antisocial Behaviour Act, the police were controversially given the power to disperse groups of people who have gathered in areas designated as antisocial hotspots. Why controversial? Children's charities says it victimises youngsters who have not committed a crime and race groups say it could target ethnic minorities whose cultures traditionally involve street gatherings. What are the other main points of the act? · New powers to close crack houses within 48 hours. · Restrictions on owning airguns and replica guns. · More police-style powers for private security guards. · On-the-spot fines for youngsters throwing fireworks and making hoax emergency calls. · A new offence of selling spray paints to under-16s. · New powers for environmental health offices to fine noisy neighbours. · Begging becomes a recordable offence, so that courts can order drug treatments. What response has there been to the act? Welfare charities have dismissed many of the measures as populist kneejerk reactions that do nothing to tackle the root causes of the problems. For example, the homelessness charity Shelter says only support, and not punishment, will tackle begging. What other measures are used to tackle ASB? The government is encouraging greater use of antisocial behaviour orders - or asbos. These are civil injunctions applied for by councils, police forces and housing associations against anyone over 10 years old causing harassment, alarm or distress to a neighbour or neighbourhood. Breaching the order is treated as a criminal offence and carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison. Under the ASB Act, a media ban on naming children subjected to asbos has been lifted. What else? The use of asbos has been patchy across the country as many councils and police forces regard them as too tough and bureaucratic to implement. Many areas have preferred to adopt the more moderate alternative, known as acceptable behaviour contracts. These are written agreements typically between unruly teenagers and the police and other public agencies banning antisocial behaviour. The contracts are not legally binding but if breached they can lead to tougher sanctions which are.

U.S. Financial Aid To Israel: Figures, Facts, and Impact Washington Report on Middle East Affairs Benefits to Israel of U.S. Aid Since 1949 (As of November 1, 1997) Foreign Aid Grants and Loans $74,157,600,000 Other U.S. Aid (12.2% of Foreign Aid) $9,047,227,200 Interest to Israel from Advanced Payments $1,650,000,000 Grand Total $84,854,827,200 Total Benefits per Israeli $14,630 Cost to U.S. Taxpayers of U.S. Aid to Israel Grand Total $84,854,827,200 Interest Costs Borne by U.S. $49,936,680,000 Total Cost to U.S. Taxpayers $134,791,507,200 Total Taxpayer Cost per Israeli $23,240

Good News for Netanyahu Abdel Wahab Badrakhan Al-Hayat - 09/01/06// "His health does not concern us," said the People's Front. "The world will be better off without Sharon," said "Hamas". "He will die without being held accountable for his crime," said one of the survivors of the Sabra and Chatila massacre. Sharon's health condition will intensify the Israeli violence against the Palestinians, said Saeb Oraykat. But President Mahmoud Abbas called the office of the Israeli Prime Minister to inquire about his heath and wish him recovery. Many European presidents voiced their concern, asserting that they are praying that Sharon will recover from his critical illness. George Bush was the first president who started to pray upon the deterioration of Sharon's state, referring to him once again as "the man of peace." Sharon may die or be saved by medical intervention, surviving outside the political realm. However, it is indisputable that those concerned with peace did not discern the peace of this man, but rather witnessed and lived with his massacres and crimes. Even the "change of heart" that he seemingly underwent and probably caused this stroke, after he was compelled to dismantle the Gaza Strip settlements, did not materialize in a peace project. It did not even mark an inception of negotiations, or the beginning of respect for a people that suffered from occupation and Sharon's criminality. It was rather represented in a sham scheme to seize more Palestinian territories, swallow up Jerusalem, and inhibit the final solution to impose it by force and blackmail. The settlers will not shed tears over their "spiritual father" who led them in seizing territory. The Likudians will not bemoan the man who turned their party into scattered shambles. The Arabs will surely not regret him, including the most fervent advocates of normalization and the most audacious opportunists in the normalization business. The reason is that he devoted the military and political stages of his life to practice killing, killing, and more killing until he made daily killing the core of his cabinet's achievements. Still, Arabs and Palestinians wished and are still wishing that Sharon will the last "elected" Israeli terrorist prototype they witness, especially that they witnessed Israeli cabinets succeeding one another and competing over more of the same thing, i.e. aggression, crime, and massacre. As for Sharon, he seemed to have sum up all the acts of his predecessors in a quasi repetition of history since 1948 till our present day. In a few years, he committed all the crimes of his predecessors and repeated his same crimes before coming up with new terrorist skills. This is in addition to the Israeli "Berlin Wall" and the poisoning of the late Palestinian President Yasser Arafat. Will Sharon be the last Israeli terrorist model, or will his successors compete over more terrorist Sharonian governance? There is no doubt that the collapse of Sharon was good news to Benjamin Netanyahu, who was handed over an unexpected gift allowing him to pick up the pieces of the "Likud" and embark on the elections with a stronger party, more ready to stay inflexible and practice utmost terrorism. It is the second chance for Netanyahu at the leadership for the same mission. The first time, he had to thwart and rescind the "Oslo Peace Agreement" and he did. The second time, he will find pleasure in thwarting Sharon's "brave" move (as it is still described) in Gaza Strip. The scheme is ready. Netanyahu does not bear the brunt of the Gaza pullout but he will make sure to reap the glories of seizing the West Bank and Jerusalem. If those who are more extremist than Netanyahu still reproach him conceding Hebron, he shall prove to them one day that this "concession" did not change much in the city's status as he maintained the occupation in its heart. Moreover, his concession cannot be compared to the painful "concession" of Sharon in Gaza. The Western leaders, who swiftly declared that they were praying for Sharon, should assume their own responsibilities in the post-Sharon era. They handed him the "peace file", which he turned into killing and destruction. Before his health deteriorated, his assistants were even talking about his plan to tear down "the road map." If the International Community is determined to make peace, it should prove this determination now, not leave it to Netanyahu or any other succeeding terrorist, who will waste time with more killing and criminality.

Unfulfilled commitment Mohamed Sid-Ahmed AL-AHRAM Following Ariel Sharon's surprise announcement at the end of November that he was leaving the Likud and forming a new centrist party, Kadima, his most vocal critic within the Likud, Benyamin Netanyahu, was elected to succeed him as party leader. According to the results of elections held on 19 December, Netanyahu got 44 per cent of the vote, Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom 33 per cent, the leader of the far-right faction within the party, Moshe Figlin, 15 per cent and a fourth candidate, Minister of Agriculture Israel Katz, nine per cent. Thus Netanyahu, who led the Likud from 1993 to 1999, has been re-instated as party leader. The electoral campaign conducted by Sharon to launch his new party was over in a matter of days. It did not take him long to persuade more than a dozen members of parliament to shift their allegiance from the Likud to Kadima. However, he failed to win over his foreign minister, whose public support of Sharon's Gaza disengagement plan belied his strong reservations towards the move. At the same time, Shalom did not support Netanyahu's candidacy because he disagreed with what he considered to be the latter's ultra-liberal policies as finance minister. Despite the loss of many prominent members of the party who left to join Sharon, Netanyahu seemed unfazed. While deploring Sharon's move as aimed at reducing the Likud into a subsidiary of Kadima, he welcomed the chance to "bring Likud back to its original identity, and then prepare it to resume its role to lead the country". The big loser in the game is obviously Silvan Shalom who decided not to join Sharon and who, contrary to Defence Minister Mofaz, decided to remain in Likud. His task is difficult because the structure of the party that Netanyahu inherited from Sharon lacks coherence and has little in common with the original Likud that Sharon helped create. According to several opinion polls, Likud, which was represented by 39 members of parliament in 2003, is not expected to capture more than 13 of the 120 Knesset seats in the parliamentary elections to be held on 28 March. The polls give Kadima a clear lead, with 39 seats, 15 more than its closest rival, Labour, which is expected to win 24 seats. if, as is likely, Kadima and Labour, which is now led by the veteran trade unionist Amir Peretz, form a coalition, Sharon will dominate the Knesset with a very comfortable majority. With Sharon's departure, the Likud has fallen prey to a power struggle between Netanyahu and Figlin. A rising star in the firmament of the extreme right in Israel, Figlin poses a real challenge to the elected leader of the Likud. The rivalry between the two men can only weaken the status of each, while Sharon's position is strengthened thanks to Mofaz's decision to join Kadima. This state of affairs could eventually induce Shalom to reconsider his decision not to leave Likud. On 18 December, Sharon suffered a mild stroke, said to have been caused by a hole in his heart. The health issue, in addition to his age, 77, is raising questions about his ability to lead the country for yet another term. The stroke, which occurred 99 days before the parliamentary elections, came at what is a critical moment not only for Israel but for the region at large. In addition to the uneasy situation in Lebanon and Syria and the continuing violence in Iraq, Gaza remains a tinderbox primed to explode at any time. The roadmap's deadline for the establishment of a Palestinian state has not been met, despite the removal from the scene of the man both the Israelis and Americans claimed was the main obstacle impeding progress on the issue. When Arafat died, whether by natural causes or as the victim of assassination, Bush and Sharon said his death created favourable conditions for a settlement. But nearly one year on, there is still no prospect of a settlement any time soon. Even though Israel pulled out of Gaza last September, almost all of the West Bank remains under Israeli occupation and Israel continues to launch rocket attacks in Gaza. The roadmap was set up by four different entities: the United States, the European Union, Russia and the United Nations, constituting together what has come to be described as the Quartet. This new body tried to benefit from the mistakes of the past in order to avoid them in future. In this, it was inspired by three basic ideas. First, to make concomitant efforts with both sides to avoid that issues already settled be renegotiated. For example, as the Palestinians disband their armed organisations, the Israelis are required to freeze the construction of new settlements. Second, the establishment of a supervisory mechanism by the Quartet to assess the progress achieved. Third, to determine three consecutive confidence-building stages (until June 2003) during which a Palestinian state within temporary borders will be set up (until December 2003). During these stages, final borders will be negotiated in talks covering all the basic aspects of the conflict: Jerusalem, Palestinian refugees, Israeli settlements, etc. The last stage, in which normalisation will have been achieved between the parties, ended on 31 December 2005. By the time the parliamentary elections are held, all the Israeli parties are expected to determine their final position towards the conflict as a whole. Sharon's unilateral disengagement plan effectively neutralised the Quartet's efforts for the whole of last year. Moreover, pulling out of Gaza to strengthen Israel's security can hardly be made compatible with pulling out to achieve the independence of the Palestinian people. That is why Mahmoud Abbas insisted on passing directly to the third and final stage of the roadmap without going through the first two stages envisaged by the Quartet, that is, on proceeding directly with final status negotiations. Abbas's plan is the very opposite of Sharon's. As the latter wants to prolong this ultimate stage indefinitely, Abbas proceeds from the idea that an agreement on the basic issues of contention is the only way to convince the various Palestinian factions that negotiations can achieve better results than armed struggle.

Israel says Palestinians in Jerusalem permitted to vote in upcoming election www.chinaview.cn 2006-01-10 18:33:48 JERUSALEM, Jan. 10 (Xinhuanet) -- Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz on Tuesday said Israel will permit Arab residents of East Jerusalem to vote in the upcoming Palestinian parliamentary election, local newspaper Ha'aretz reported on its online edition. Mofaz was quoted as saying Israel would follow the policy of previous Palestinian elections. In last year's presidential vote, a small number of East Jerusalem Arabs were permitted to cast votes in local post offices, while the remainder voted in outlying suburbs in the West Bank. "Israel's policy regarding elections in East Jerusalem will stay like it was, and the elections will be held under the arrangement reached in 1996," Mofaz told local reporters while on a tour near Jerusalem. "There will be elections in East Jerusalem in the 50 post offices approved in 1996 and residents will also be able to vote in other polling booths in the West Bank," he added. It is a key step toward resolving a standoff that had threatened to derail the balloting. Israeli government sources in Jerusalem said on Monday that Israel would not give Palestinians an excuse to postpone the elections. Palestinian National Authority (PNA) Chairman Mahmoud Abbas on Monday said the United States has assured him that East Jerusalem Palestinians will be allowed to vote in the city and the PNA elections will therefore go ahead as scheduled on Jan. 25. The United States, however, refused to confirm or deny Abbas'statements, said Israel Radio on Tuesday morning. Comment: We suppose we are all supposed to jump up and do the happy dance because Israel has been so generous?

Al-Qaeda Cell in Spain May Have Been Planning Attack in Europe Bloomberg January 10, 2006 Jan. 10 (Bloomberg) -- One of the al-Qaeda cells arrested early today in Spain may have been planning an attack in Europe, Spanish Interior Minister Jose Antonio Alonso said. Spanish police arrested 20 people comprising two cells following raids in Madrid, Catalonia and the Basque region, Alonso told reporters in Madrid. The cells were primarily involved in recruiting and training suicide bombers for the Iraq insurgency, he said. Those arrested included 15 Moroccans, a Turk, an Algerian and three Spaniards. The Algerian, leader of the Madrid-based cell, was trained in Afghanistan, Alonso said. Spanish authorities have arrested 52 people suspected of involvement in Islamist terrorism in the past two months. Spain, with historic links to Muslim North Africa across the Gibraltar Straits, was used as a base by Islamists involved in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington and others linked to the Casablanca bombing of May 2003. Comment: Uh, well, were they or weren't they planning an attack on Europe? What is the source of this assertion? Or do sources not matter when it comes to the dreaded al Qaeda because we all know how evil they are? Next, what proof is there that these individuals are really part of an al Qaeda cell? As you may recall, in the frenzy after 9/11, a number of these "cells" were uncovered in the US. The proof they were dastardly terrorists? Video taken during a trip to Disneyland! Of course, Spain was the sight of the March 2004 bombings, and we know that it was Mossad al Qaeda that carried out that attack, right? So obviously there must be a large number of cells in Spain. It is all so obvious when you get into the mind set of the clash of civilisations. It is so obvious you don't even need to think.

EU constitution not dead: incoming presidency VIENNA, Jan 9 (AFP) VIENNA, Jan 9 (AFP) - Austrian Chancellor Wolfgang Schuessel insisted Monday that the European Union's constitution is not dead despite its rejection by French and Dutch voters, as he launched Vienna's six-month EU presidency. "The constitution is not dead, but it is not in force," he told reporters in Vienna, where the 25-nation bloc's new Austrian presidency was meeting with the European Commission, the EU's executive arm. "The constitution is in the middle of a ratification process," Schuessel added. The EU constitution, aimed at preventing decision-making gridlock in the expanding bloc, was put on ice last June after referendums in France and the Netherlands delivered stunning rejections. Schuessel confirmed plans to present proposals on the future of Europe at a June summit which will end Vienna's turn at the EU helm. "I think we can at the end of the Austrian presidency present some success," he said. Comment: Hmmm, the European Constitution sounds like it is in about the same state as Ariel Sharon.

Turkish bird flu spreads west Last Updated Mon, 09 Jan 2006 13:54:59 EST CBC News The number of people who have tested positive for bird flu is now 14, including two teenagers who died last week, according to the Turkish Health ministry. The new cases are in the Black Sea provinces of Kastamonu, Corum and Samsun, near the capital Ankara. Experts fear it could indicate a westward march by the virus towards Europe. The virus first surfaced in Van, about 1,000 kilometres farther east. Three of the new cases include two young brothers who may have contracted the virus by playing with their father's gloves after he handled dead chickens. Last week, three children from the same family in the eastern part of the country died after playing with dead birds. On Monday, Turkey's health minister, Recep Akdag, visited the children's father in Van, a largely Kurdish region near the Iranian border. The international team, which included officials from the World Health Organization and the European Union, were trying to find out how quickly the H5N1 virus is spreading. Turkish officials are trying to stop the spread of avian flu with massive culls in the countryside. However, they're facing resistance from impoverished people and farmers who keep small flocks on their land. Over the weekend, a woman refused to hand over her little flock of chickens, insisting the birds were not sick. The workers returned with police to take the birds away.

Number of cases of avian flu, locations set Turkey apart Last Updated Mon, 09 Jan 2006 18:40:44 EST CBC News There is no evidence avian flu is spreading between humans, say officials with the World Health Organization who are investigating the higher infection rate in Turkey. Infected people in Turkey had contact with infected birds in all 14 confirmed cases and three deaths, WHO says. "Based on the epidemiological information we have so far we haven't seen any change in the way that the virus is being transmitted," said Dr. Maria Cheng of WHO in Geneva. If the H5N1 strain of avian flu gains the ability to spread easily between people, it could trigger a pandemic. In Turkey, with the 14 confirmed cases, officials are concerned about how and why the country is be being hit so hard across four broad regions. By way of comparison, Indonesia has faced 16 cases and 11 deaths since its first human infection last June. In East Asia, human cases are more sporadic although millions of birds are infected. It's also possible human cases have been missed. The high number of human and animal cases in Turkey could mean a new strain is circulating that is picked up by humans more easily, or the strain may have circulated for some time undetected or it is simply a coincidence, health officials say. "Can this virus now recognize human cells more effectively than bird cells?" asked Dr. Todd Hatchette, a virologist at Dalhousie University in Halifax. "That will be one of the key things they'll be looking at." Of the 23 people tested for bird flu in Turkey, 13 are children or teens. The country's three fatalities were also among young people, who scientists say may be at greater risk. One hypothesis is that children may be exposed to infected chicken feces while playing in dirt. The H5N1 strain of avian flu can live in feces for up to 35 days, even in cold weather. Another idea is children may be more vulnerable if a "cytokine storm" causes their immune systems to overreact to the virus, leading to damage in the lungs, kidneys and other tissues. Infected people in Turkey are being treated with Tamiflu, the antiviral medication thought to be the best treatment and defence against avian flu. In at least one case, a child died despite the treatment, raising concerns in other countries about the effectiveness of stockpiling the drug. WHO plans to send more disease tracking and diagnostics experts to Turkey. Canada's public health agency has offered to send a team of virologists and a mobile laboratory.

Bird flu cases 'under-estimated' Monday, 9 January 2006, 21:08 GMT The number of cases of bird flu in humans may have been hugely under-reported, a Swedish study says. Doctors quizzed nearly 46,000 people from affected areas of Vietnam, where there have been 87 cases of bird flu. The Archives of Internal Medicine study found more than 8,000 had had flu-like symptoms and up to 750 cases could have been down to sick birds. Under-reporting was possible, experts said, but unlikely to be as much as the Karolinska Institute study suggested. Lead researcher Anna Thorson said the study - the largest one carried out into bird flu to date - clearly suggested the incidence of the virus in humans was much higher than had been recognised. But she added: "The results suggest that the symptoms most often are relatively mild and that close contact is needed for transmission to humans." The news comes as the H5N1 virus has claimed its first human victims in Turkey. It has been confirmed that two children have died in Turkey and reports have suggested more people have been infected by the deadly flu strain which has killed over 60 people in Asia. The researchers quizzed the people - randomly selected - in the Bavi district of north west Vietnam, which has been hit by bird flu. Birds Some 8,149 people - nearly one in five - said they had had flu-like illnesses in the pre-ceding months and over 38,000 said they kept poultry. The team then asked about contact with sick or dead birds and concluded between 650 and 750 cases of flu could be attributed to bird contact. The researchers said while they could not be certain bird flu had caused the symptoms, it was the only virus poultry was affected by which could be passed to humans at the time. But Professor Neil Ferguson, an infectious disease expert at Imperial College London, said there were some problems with the research and the indications were that the true level of under-reporting was likely to be lower. "The conclusions are interesting but not conclusive, as they didn't take blood samples from the people questioned - so they don't really know whether they were infected with bird flu or not." He added people who did develop flu-like symptoms were more likely to remember contact with dead birds because of the fear over bird flu.

China: human bird flu cases "likely to increase" www.chinaview.cn 2006-01-10 17:30:18 BEIJING, Jan. 10 (Xinhuanet) -- Human cases of bird flu may continue to increase in China if there are more bird flu outbreaks, Ministry of Health spokesman Mao Qun'an said at a press conference Tuesday. Noting that the current bird flu situation is "not optimistic", Mao said measures to prevent and control the epidemic must be strengthened as the danger of bird flu not only exists in China but also threatens other countries. All 31 municipalities, provinces and autonomous regions in the Chinese mainland have set up leading bird flu monitoring centers. Bird flu prevention and control schemes have been improved to ensure the early detection and restriction of the disease. In a recent national health conference, Health Minister Gao Qiang said that to curb the spread of major infectious diseases such as severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) is the most important task in China's health field. At present, the government is working to build an effective monitoring system in rural areas. "The human cases of bird flu reported so far have been spotted by big medical institutions. So, it's imperative to strengthen the capability of grass-roots medical institutions in confirming an outbreak as soon as possible," Gao said. The eight infected human bird flu patients had been put under strict medical surveillance. About 38,000 people involved in the first seven human cases had been monitored well, Mao Qun'an said. "No abnormal clinic symptoms have been detected in the patients. Nor are there human-to-human cases," said Mao. Epidemiological investigation is being carried out in the seventh and eighth human cases to find the causes of infection. Among the eight human cases reported, three people have died. Comment: A curious surge in the number of bird flu reports today, almost as if the holiday distractions were over, and it was time to start pumping up the fear-factor once more. There may well be a flu pandemic. The important question is whether or not the pandemic will be an engineered or a natural pandemic? We place a high probability on the possibility that the powers that be want to cull not only the fowl population, but, more importantly, the human population. They know that we are heading into "interesting" times, and that climate change, or earth changes, will reshape the globe. If there are too many of us around, that will make managing the chaos more difficult.

77 Japanese may have been infected by bird flu virus www.chinaview.cn 2006-01-10 20:44:58 TOKYO, Jan. 10 (Xinhuanet) -- A total of 77 people may have been infected by bird flu virus, but they have shown no symptoms and will not spread the disease to other people, a government report said Tuesday. The report compiled by the Health Ministry and the National Institute of Infectious Diseases was based on inspection of their blood samples that they may have been infected by the H5N2 strain of the avian influenza virus, which is a weaker type compared with the H5N1 virus. Their antibody were positive, but none virus has been detected, the report said. The investigation involved about 350 people who are linked to poultry industry and sanitary workers in the Ibaraki and Saitama prefectures where poultry farms have been hit by bird flu.

Welcome to Mars express: only a three hour trip IAN JOHNSTON The Scotsman Thu 5 Jan 2006 AN EXTRAORDINARY "hyperspace" engine that could make interstellar space travel a reality by flying into other dimensions is being investigated by the United States government. The hypothetical device, which has been outlined in principle but is based on a controversial theory about the fabric of the universe, could potentially allow a spacecraft to travel to Mars in three hours and journey to a star 11 light years away in just 80 days, according to a report in today's New Scientist magazine. The theoretical engine works by creating an intense magnetic field that, according to ideas first developed by the late scientist Burkhard Heim in the 1950s, would produce a gravitational field and result in thrust for a spacecraft. Also, if a large enough magnetic field was created, the craft would slip into a different dimension, where the speed of light is faster, allowing incredible speeds to be reached. Switching off the magnetic field would result in the engine reappearing in our current dimension. The US air force has expressed an interest in the idea and scientists working for the American Department of Energy - which has a device known as the Z Machine that could generate the kind of magnetic fields required to drive the engine - say they may carry out a test if the theory withstands further scrutiny. Professor Jochem Hauser, one of the scientists who put forward the idea, told The Scotsman that if everything went well a working engine could be tested in about five years. However, Prof Hauser, a physicist at the Applied Sciences University in Salzgitter, Germany, and a former chief of aerodynamics at the European Space Agency, cautioned it was based on a highly controversial theory that would require a significant change in the current understanding of the laws of physics. "It would be amazing. I have been working on propulsion systems for quite a while and it would be the most amazing thing. The benefits would be almost unlimited," he said. "But this thing is not around the corner; we first have to prove the basic science is correct and there are quite a few physicists who have a different opinion. "It's our job to prove we are right and we are working on that." He said the engine would enable spaceships to travel to different solar systems. "If the theory is correct then this is not science fiction, it is science fact," Prof Hauser said. "NASA have contacted me and next week I'm going to see someone from the [US] air force to talk about it further, but it is at a very early stage. I think the best-case scenario would be within the next five years [to build a test device] if the technology works." The US authorities' attention was attracted after Prof Hauser and an Austrian colleague, Walter Droscher, wrote a paper called "Guidelines for a space propulsion device based on Heim's quantum theory". Comment: The Readers that would like to have some background may like to inspect the extracts from the 1999 discussion on antigravity at: http://www.merkabaweb.net/ANTIGRAVITY.txt Heim's theory is mentioned there. As you will see: Nothing new under the Sun...

More U.S. companies ducking out of their pension promises By Mary Williams Walsh The New York Times JANUARY 9, 2006 NEW YORK The death knell for the traditional company pension has been tolling for some time now in the United States. Companies in ailing industries like steel, airlines and auto parts have thrown themselves into bankruptcy and turned over their ruined pension plans to Washington. Now, with the recent announcements of pension freezes by some of the cream of corporate America - Verizon, Lockheed Martin, Motorola and, just last week, IBM - the bell is tolling even louder. Even strong, stable companies with the means to operate pension plans are facing longer worker life spans, looming regulatory and accounting changes and, most important, heightened global competition. Some are deciding they either cannot, or will not, keep making the decades-long promises that a pension plan involves. IBM was once a standard-bearer for corporate America's compact with its workers, paying for medical expenses, country clubs and lavish Christmas parties for the children. Perhaps most importantly, it rewarded long-serving employees with a guaranteed monthly stipend from retirement until death. Most of those perks have long since been scaled back at IBM and elsewhere, but the pension freeze is the latest sign that workers in the United States are, to a much greater extent, on their own. Companies now emphasize 401(k) plans, which leave workers responsible for ensuring that they have adequate funds for retirement and expose them to the vagaries of the financial markets. "IBM has, over the last couple of generations, defined an employer's responsibility to its employees," said Peter Capelli, a professor of management at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. "It paved the way for this kind of swap of loyalty for security." Capelli called the switch from a pension plan to a 401(k) program "the most visible manifestation of the shifting of risk onto employees." He added: "People just have to deal with a lot more risk in their lives, because all these things that used to be more or less assured - a job, health care, a pension - are now variable." IBM said it was discontinuing its pension plan for competitive reasons, and that it planned to set up an unusually rich 401(k) plan as a replacement. The company is also trying to protect its own financial health and avoid the fate of companies like General Motors that have been burdened by pension costs. Freezing the pension plan can reduce the impact of interest-rate changes, which have made the plan cost much more than expected. "It's the prudent, responsible thing to do right now," said J. Randall MacDonald, IBM's senior vice president for human resources. He said the new plan would "far exceed any average benchmark" in its attractiveness. Pension advocates said they were dismayed at the sight of rich and powerful companies like IBM and Verizon throwing in the towel on the traditional pension. "With Verizon, we're talking about a company at the top of its game," said Karen Friedman, director of policy studies for the Pension Rights Center, an advocacy group in Washington. "They have a huge profit. Their CEO has given himself a huge compensation package. And then they're saying, 'In order to compete, sorry, we have to freeze the pensions.' If companies freeze the pensions, what are employees left with?" Verizon's chief executive, Ivan Seidenberg, said in December that his company's decision to freeze its pension plan for about 50,000 management employees would make the company more competitive, and also "provide employees a transition to a retirement plan more in line with current trends, allowing employees to have greater accountability in managing their own finances and for companies to offer greater portability through personal savings accounts." In a pension freeze, the company stops the growth of its employees' retirement benefits, which normally build up with each additional year of service. When they retire, the employees will still receive the benefits they earned before the freeze. Like IBM, Verizon said it would replace its frozen pension plan with a 401(k) plan, also known as a defined-contribution plan. This means the sponsoring employer creates individual savings accounts for workers, withholds money from their paychecks for them to contribute, and sometimes matches some portion of the contributions. But the participating employees are responsible for investing the money themselves. Traditional defined-benefit pensions are backed by a U.S. government guarantee, while defined-contribution plans are not. Precisely how many companies have frozen their pension plans is not known. Data collected by the government are old and imperfect, and companies do not always publicize the freezes. But the trend appears to be accelerating. As recently as 2003, most of the plans that had been frozen were small ones, with less than 100 participants, according to the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, which insures traditional pensions. The freezes happened most often in troubled industries like steel, textiles and metal fabrication, the guarantor found. Only a year ago, when IBM decided to close its pension plan to new employees, it said it was "still committed to defined-benefit pensions." But now the company has given its imprimatur to the exodus from traditional pensions. Its pension fund, one of the largest in corporate America, is a pace-setter. Industry surveys suggest that more big, healthy companies are doing what IBM did, or will do so this year and next. "There's a little bit of a herd mentality," said Syl Schieber, director of research for Watson Wyatt Worldwide, a large consulting firm that surveyed the nation's 1,000 largest companies and reported a sharp increase in the number of pension freezes in 2004 and 2005. The thinking grows out of boardroom relationships, he said, where leaders of large companies meet, compare notes and discuss whether a strategy tried at one company might also work at another. Another factor appears to be impatience with long-running efforts by Congress to tighten the pension rules, Schieber said. Congress has been struggling for three years with the problem of how to make sure companies measure their pension promises accurately - a key to making sure they set aside enough money to make good. But it is likely to be costly for some companies to reserve enough money to meet the new rules.

Take a leap into hyperspace Haiko Lietz NewScientist.com 05 January 2006 EVERY year, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics awards prizes for the best papers presented at its annual conference. Last year's winner in the nuclear and future flight category went to a paper calling for experimental tests of an astonishing new type of engine. According to the paper, this hyperdrive motor would propel a craft through another dimension at enormous speeds. It could leave Earth at lunchtime and get to the moon in time for dinner. There's just one catch: the idea relies on an obscure and largely unrecognised kind of physics. Can they possibly be serious? The AIAA is certainly not embarrassed. What's more, the US military has begun to cast its eyes over the hyperdrive concept, and a space propulsion researcher at the US Department of Energy's Sandia National Laboratories has said he would be interested in putting the idea to the test. And despite the bafflement of most physicists at the theory that supposedly underpins it, Pavlos Mikellides, an aerospace engineer at the Arizona State University in Tempe who reviewed the winning paper, stands by the committee's choice. "Even though such features have been explored before, this particular approach is quite unique," he says. Unique it certainly is. If the experiment gets the go-ahead and works, it could reveal new interactions between the fundamental forces of nature that would change the future of space travel. Forget spending six months or more holed up in a rocket on the way to Mars, a round trip on the hyperdrive could take as little as 5 hours. All our worries about astronauts' muscles wasting away or their DNA being irreparably damaged by cosmic radiation would disappear overnight. What's more the device would put travel to the stars within reach for the first time. But can the hyperdrive really get off the ground? The answer to that question hinges on the work of a little-known German physicist. Burkhard Heim began to explore the hyperdrive propulsion concept in the 1950s as a spin-off from his attempts to heal the biggest divide in physics: the rift between quantum mechanics and Einstein's general theory of relativity. Quantum theory describes the realm of the very small - atoms, electrons and elementary particles - while general relativity deals with gravity. The two theories are immensely successful in their separate spheres. The clash arises when it comes to describing the basic structure of space. In general relativity, space-time is an active, malleable fabric. It has four dimensions - three of space and one of time - that deform when masses are placed in them. In Einstein's formulation, the force of gravity is a result of the deformation of these dimensions. Quantum theory, on the other hand, demands that space is a fixed and passive stage, something simply there for particles to exist on. It also suggests that space itself must somehow be made up of discrete, quantum elements. In the early 1950s, Heim began to rewrite the equations of general relativity in a quantum framework. He drew on Einstein's idea that the gravitational force emerges from the dimensions of space and time, but suggested that all fundamental forces, including electromagnetism, might emerge from a new, different set of dimensions. Originally he had four extra dimensions, but he discarded two of them believing that they did not produce any forces, and settled for adding a new two-dimensional "sub-space" onto Einstein's four-dimensional space-time. In Heim's six-dimensional world, the forces of gravity and electromagnetism are coupled together. Even in our familiar four-dimensional world, we can see a link between the two forces through the behaviour of fundamental particles such as the electron. An electron has both mass and charge. When an electron falls under the pull of gravity its moving electric charge creates a magnetic field. And if you use an electromagnetic field to accelerate an electron you move the gravitational field associated with its mass. But in the four dimensions we know, you cannot change the strength of gravity simply by cranking up the electromagnetic field. In Heim's view of space and time, this limitation disappears. He claimed it is possible to convert electromagnetic energy into gravitational and back again, and speculated that a rotating magnetic field could reduce the influence of gravity on a spacecraft enough for it to take off. When he presented his idea in public in 1957, he became an instant celebrity. Wernher von Braun, the German engineer who at the time was leading the Saturn rocket programme that later launched astronauts to the moon, approached Heim about his work and asked whether the expensive Saturn rockets were worthwhile. And in a letter in 1964, the German relativity theorist Pascual Jordan, who had worked with the distinguished physicists Max Born and Werner Heisenberg and was a member of the Nobel committee, told Heim that his plan was so important "that its successful experimental treatment would without doubt make the researcher a candidate for the Nobel prize". But all this attention only led Heim to retreat from the public eye. This was partly because of his severe multiple disabilities, caused by a lab accident when he was still in his teens. But Heim was also reluctant to disclose his theory without an experiment to prove it. He never learned English because he did not want his work to leave the country. As a result, very few people knew about his work and no one came up with the necessary research funding. In 1958 the aerospace company Bölkow did offer some money, but not enough to do the proposed experiment. While Heim waited for more money to come in, the company's director, Ludwig Bölkow, encouraged him to develop his theory further. Heim took his advice, and one of the results was a theorem that led to a series of formulae for calculating the masses of the fundamental particles - something conventional theories have conspicuously failed to achieve. He outlined this work in 1977 in the Max Planck Institute's journal Zeitschrift für Naturforschung, his only peer-reviewed paper. In an abstruse way that few physicists even claim to understand, the formulae work out a particle's mass starting from physical characteristics, such as its charge and angular momentum. Yet the theorem has proved surprisingly powerful. The standard model of physics, which is generally accepted as the best available theory of elementary particles, is incapable of predicting a particle's mass. Even the accepted means of estimating mass theoretically, known as lattice quantum chromodynamics, only gets to between 1 and 10 per cent of the experimental values. Gravity reduction But in 1982, when researchers at the German Electron Synchrotron (DESY) in Hamburg implemented Heim's mass theorem in a computer program, it predicted masses of fundamental particles that matched the measured values to within the accuracy of experimental error. If they are let down by anything, it is the precision to which we know the values of the fundamental constants. Two years after Heim's death in 2001, his long-term collaborator Illobrand von Ludwiger calculated the mass formula using a more accurate gravitational constant. "The masses came out even more precise," he says. After publishing the mass formulae, Heim never really looked at hyperspace propulsion again. Instead, in response to requests for more information about the theory behind the mass predictions, he spent all his time detailing his ideas in three books published in German. It was only in 1980, when the first of his books came to the attention of a retired Austrian patent officer called Walter Dröscher, that the hyperspace propulsion idea came back to life. Dröscher looked again at Heim's ideas and produced an "extended" version, resurrecting the dimensions that Heim originally discarded. The result is "Heim-Dröscher space", a mathematical description of an eight-dimensional universe. From this, Dröscher claims, you can derive the four forces known in physics: the gravitational and electromagnetic forces, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. But there's more to it than that. "If Heim's picture is to make sense," Dröscher says, "we are forced to postulate two more fundamental forces." These are, Dröscher claims, related to the familiar gravitational force: one is a repulsive anti-gravity similar to the dark energy that appears to be causing the universe's expansion to accelerate. And the other might be used to accelerate a spacecraft without any rocket fuel. This force is a result of the interaction of Heim's fifth and sixth dimensions and the extra dimensions that Dröscher introduced. It produces pairs of "gravitophotons", particles that mediate the interconversion of electromagnetic and gravitational energy. Dröscher teamed up with Jochem Häuser, a physicist and professor of computer science at the University of Applied Sciences in Salzgitter, Germany, to turn the theoretical framework into a proposal for an experimental test. The paper they produced, "Guidelines for a space propulsion device based on Heim's quantum theory", is what won the AIAA's award last year. Claims of the possibility of "gravity reduction" or "anti-gravity" induced by magnetic fields have been investigated by NASA before (New Scientist, 12 January 2002, p 24). But this one, Dröscher insists, is different. "Our theory is not about anti-gravity. It's about completely new fields with new properties," he says. And he and Häuser have suggested an experiment to prove it. This will require a huge rotating ring placed above a superconducting coil to create an intense magnetic field. With a large enough current in the coil, and a large enough magnetic field, Dröscher claims the electromagnetic force can reduce the gravitational pull on the ring to the point where it floats free. Dröscher and Häuser say that to completely counter Earth's pull on a 150-tonne spacecraft a magnetic field of around 25 tesla would be needed. While that's 500,000 times the strength of Earth's magnetic field, pulsed magnets briefly reach field strengths up to 80 tesla. And Dröscher and Häuser go further. With a faster-spinning ring and an even stronger magnetic field, gravitophotons would interact with conventional gravity to produce a repulsive anti-gravity force, they suggest. Dröscher is hazy about the details, but he suggests that a spacecraft fitted with a coil and ring could be propelled into a multidimensional hyperspace. Here the constants of nature could be different, and even the speed of light could be several times faster than we experience. If this happens, it would be possible to reach Mars in less than 3 hours and a star 11 light years away in only 80 days, Dröscher and Häuser say. So is this all fanciful nonsense, or a revolution in the making? The majority of physicists have never heard of Heim theory, and most of those contacted by New Scientist said they couldn't make sense of Dröscher and Häuser's description of the theory behind their proposed experiment. Following Heim theory is hard work even without Dröscher's extension, says Markus Pössel, a theoretical physicist at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Potsdam, Germany. Several years ago, while an undergraduate at the University of Hamburg, he took a careful look at Heim theory. He says he finds it "largely incomprehensible", and difficult to tie in with today's physics. "What is needed is a step-by-step introduction, beginning at modern physical concepts," he says. The general consensus seems to be that Dröscher and Häuser's theory is incomplete at best, and certainly extremely difficult to follow. And it has not passed any normal form of peer review, a fact that surprised the AIAA prize reviewers when they made their decision. "It seemed to be quite developed and ready for such publication," Mikellides told New Scientist. At the moment, the main reason for taking the proposal seriously must be Heim theory's uncannily successful prediction of particle masses. Maybe, just maybe, Heim theory really does have something to contribute to modern physics. "As far as I understand it, Heim theory is ingenious," says Hans Theodor Auerbach, a theoretical physicist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich who worked with Heim. "I think that physics will take this direction in the future." It may be a long while before we find out if he's right. In its present design, Dröscher and Häuser's experiment requires a magnetic coil several metres in diameter capable of sustaining an enormous current density. Most engineers say that this is not feasible with existing materials and technology, but Roger Lenard, a space propulsion researcher at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico thinks it might just be possible. Sandia runs an X-ray generator known as the Z machine which "could probably generate the necessary field intensities and gradients". For now, though, Lenard considers the theory too shaky to justify the use of the Z machine. "I would be very interested in getting Sandia interested if we could get a more perspicacious introduction to the mathematics behind the proposed experiment," he says. "Even if the results are negative, that, in my mind, is a successful experiment." Who was Burkhard Heim? Burkhard Heim had a remarkable life. Born in 1925 in Potsdam, Germany, he decided at the age of 6 that he wanted to become a rocket scientist. He disguised his designs in code so that no one could discover his secret. And in the cellar of his parents' house, he experimented with high explosives. But this was to lead to disaster. Towards the end of the second world war, he worked as an explosives developer, and an accident in 1944 in which a device exploded in his hands left him permanently disabled. He lost both his forearms, along with 90 per cent of his hearing and eyesight. After the war, he attended university in Göttingen to study physics. The idea of propelling a spacecraft using quantum mechanics rather than rocket fuel led him to study general relativity and quantum mechanics. It took an enormous effort. From 1948, his father and wife replaced his senses, spending hours reading papers and transcribing his calculations onto paper. And he developed a photographic memory. Supporters of Heim theory claim that it is a panacea for the troubles in modern physics. They say it unites quantum mechanics and general relativity, can predict the masses of the building blocks of matter from first principles, and can even explain the state of the universe 13.7 billion years ago. Comment: There's just one catch: the idea relies on an obscure and largely unrecognised kind of physics. Can they possibly be serious? Sure, they can be serious, but are they? In their paper "Future space propulsion based on Heim's field theory", W. Dröscher and J. Häuser write: Again, as was said in [1], the authors are aware of several shortcomings in this paper. Not all of the physical features of Heim's theory were de-rived properly. Some of the conclusions are based on a somewhat speculative physical model concerning the generation of gravitophoton par­ticles. It should be mentioned that Heim's legacy is very large, several thousand pages, and his presenta­tion style is not the one of contemporary physics. Heim uses his own terminology that needs to be translated into the language of modern physics. In addition, since his theory is completely geo­metric, there are many concepts that have no counterpart in modern physics. Whether his the­ory is actually true, can only be determined by experiment. And then, further: Heim's theory currently is not mainstream phys­ics, but it contains several highly interesting ideas, and its geometric origin of the physical world, is appealing, at least to the authors. As far as the authors understand Heim's theory (many of his calculations remained unchecked so far, simply because of the amount and the difficulty of his work), [...] In other words: the Authors do not understand Heim's theory, but they hope that someone will. ;-) Jack Sarfatti quotes Nobel Prize winner, physicist G. t'Hooft: [Sarfatti] Berkant, Heim's work is incoherently presented in the AIAA paper. It reads like gibberish. One wonders about the mind processes of the AIAA engineers who selected it for an award. Again I remind you of Nobel Prize physicist's remark about it: On Jan 8, 2006, at 11:27 AM, Hooft 't G. wrote: > Prof. 't Hooft is being exposed to this sort of nonsense several > times per week. Be assured: this nonsense is indeed nonsense. > G. 't Hooft. To which Ark replies: [Ark] Albert Einstein was a Nobel Physicist, and yet this is what another physicist (t.Hooft) wrote about Einstein's ideas: "Einstein was one of the first people to protest against this impoverishment of the concept of logic. It has turned out, however, to be a fact of life." See http://physicsweb.org/articles/3/18/12/2/1 So, opinions of a Nobel Prize physicists do not oblige. Sarfatti replies: [Sarfatti] So what? What is the context. Einstein was wrong about locality in quantum theory. However, if it were not for Einstein raising the issue, most of modern quantum information theory would not exist - most likely. His EPR paper of 1935 was crucial even though he took a position that proved false. No matter. Even Einstein's mistakes were great ones that were very important for the progress of physics. Great minds make mistakes that are more important than the Victorian Station Master's normal science discoveries. I suppose I am a Nietzschean? ;-) And then he continues, writing to Ark: [Sarfatti] Well if you think Heim's theory is correct, then explain it to all of us. Hauser's paper is unreadable. Ball is in your court. Indeed it looks like a ball game... ;-)

US draws up space tourism rules BBC Sunday, 8 January 2006, 08:42 GMT Space tourists must be screened to ensure they are not terrorists, according to proposed regulations from the US Federal Aviation Administration. The draft report's suggestions aim to prevent a terrorist from destroying a spacecraft or using it as a weapon. However, the report has no strict proposals on the health of any would-be space tourists. The suggestions will affect Sir Richard Branson's enterprise which aims to launch people into space this decade. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is attempting to regulate the commercial space industry in a bid to ensure minimum safety standards. It has recommended security checks similar to those for airline passengers. The public interest is served by creating a clear legal, regulatory, and safety regime for commercial human spaceflight FAA The FAA also suggests space tourism companies check the global "no-fly" list, from the US Homeland Security Department, to exclude potential terrorists. "New technologies carry new risks. Nonetheless, Congress recognises that private industry has begun to develop commercial launch vehicles capable of carrying human beings into space, and greater private investment in these efforts will stimulate the nation's commercial space transportation industry as a whole," said the report. "The public interest is served by creating a clear legal, regulatory, and safety regime for commercial human spaceflight." Companies should give passengers safety advice including the number of flights the spacecraft has been on and any problems they have experienced with the craft, according to further recommendations in the report. Space tourists should also be given pre-flight training to handle emergency situations such as a loss of cabin pressure or fire. However, the FAA has so far left any medical requirements in the hands of the tourist, who should decide themselves if they are fit to fly. The draft regulations could come into force soon, as the first space tourists have already made it into low orbit around the Earth. In 2004, Burt Rutan witnessed the successful launch of SpaceShipOne, as his team won the $10m prize for having the first private ship to fly 100km above Earth's surface. By the end of this decade, Virgin Galactic aims to take people into space from a spaceport in New Mexico. After consulting the public, the FAA should publish its final report before June 2006. Comment: Yup! We're just certain that Osama is training an elite crew of Suicide Astronauts in some cave in the Middle East...

New nanotech armor called 5 times stronger than steel SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM Monday, January 9, 2006 TEL AVIV - An Israeli firm has developed armor based on nanotechnology. ApNano has tested armor said to be five times stronger than steel and twice as strong as any impact-resistant material used in protective gear. Last year, a sample of the ApNano material was subjected to tests in which a steel projectile traveling at a speed of up to 1.5 kilometers per second slammed into the material. Executives said the impact was the equivalent to dropping four diesel locomotives onto an area the size of a human fingernail. They said the nano-based armor, which stemmed from a new carbon form called Inorganic Fullerenes, withstood the impact. The company's chief executive officer, Menachem Genut, said the company would launch initial production within the next six months. Genut said this would mean the production of between 100 and 200 kilograms of the nano-material per day. By 2007, Genut said, ApNano, based in Nes Ziona, Israel, would begin full-scale production of the armor. This would mean the production of several tons per day. The company began development of the nano-material in 2004. Genut said the nano-material would require additional field testing before it was ready for the market. He said the first product could be ready by 2009.

Military Sensor Hears Through Walls By Bill Christensen 09 January 2006 08:48 am ET A new handheld radar scope from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) can provide troops with an ability that was formerly the province of science fictional superheroes alone—the ability to sense through up to 12 inches of concrete whether someone is in the next room. The Radar Scope is expected to be in use in Iraq by spring of this year, according to DARPA's Edward Baranoski. Weighing just 1.5 pounds, the device is about the size of a telephone handset and will cost about $1,000. Waterproof and rugged, it runs on AA batteries. Held up to a wall, users will be able to sense movements as small as breathing up to fifty feet into the next room. "It may not change how four-man stacks go into a room (during clearing operations)," Baranoski said. "But as they go into a building, it can help them prioritize what rooms they go into. It will give them an extra degree of knowledge so they know if someone is inside." From DefenseLink)

Gold hits new 25-year peak at $550 per ounce By Zach Howard Reuters January 10, 2005 NEW YORK - Gold rallied to hit a new 25-year peak on Monday as fund managers shifted more money into the metal on bullishness for 2006 and uncertainty about economic growth and the dollar, analysts said. Trading was volatile in Europe, with some speculative profit-taking emerging earlier, but a late flurry of fund buying in New York pushed bullion to a new high to reach above $550 an ounce for the first time since January 1981. Spot gold was last quoted at $548.50/549.25, compared with its intraday peak at $550.75 touched late in New York and against Friday's late quote of $538.30/9.00. The day's rally in gold -- an asset seen as an alternative to more common investments -- was unusual in that it coincided with the Dow Jones industrial average's first rise above 11,000 in 4-1/2 years, and with a firmer dollar in the afternoon. Fairly steady fund buying in gold, mixed with some dealer buying, helped power the market to its latest in a series of recent multiyear highs, said Andy Montano, a director at ScotiaMocatta in Toronto. "It seemed to be more a sentiment move than anything else and there didn't seem to be any significant interest in selling, and so the buying just kept taking it upwards and upwards," he said. "There seems to be some pretty good economic strength in the markets in general and that is giving rise, I would imagine, to some concerns over inflation." At its peak, gold was up more than 5 percent from a week ago, 18 percent from some two months earlier and 30 percent from a year ago. The price has more than doubled in five years. Market talk that China and other central banks in Asia -- which jointly have $2.6 trillion in foreign currency assets -- might be looking to diversify some of their reserves into gold had underpinned sentiment since late last year. China said on Thursday it planned to explore new ways of using the country's foreign exchange reserves and broadening their investment scope. It has 600 tonnes of gold in its reserves, accounting for only 1.2 percent of the total. Dealers said worries about rising energy costs and general security concerns in the Middle East had prompted funds and investors to diversify away from equities, currencies and bonds. "The market overall does look strong," said Frank Aburto, a broker at Rosenthal-Collins Group in New York. "I don't think it is going to collapse. Setbacks are an excuse to go into the market and go long, which is what the funds are doing at this point." NO PRESSURE TO LIQUIDATE Analysts said speculative positions in the U.S. market were high but had been stable for the past four to five weeks and there was no pressure on market players to liquidate. Stronger gold prices elevated mining shares in Australia, the world's second-largest bullion producer after South Africa, but physical buying fell in many parts of Asia. Newcrest Mining Ltd. (NCM.AX), Australia's biggest gold miner, rose as much as 5 percent and Lihir Gold Ltd. (LHG.AX) gained more than 6 percent. Numis Securities Limited lifted its 2006 forecast to $500 an ounce from $475 previously, in response to rapid rise in prices, buying by funds, inflation fears, falling mine output and rising production costs. Oil climbed to a three-month high, boosting gold's allure as an inflation-hedge, before being dragged lower in late trade. The dollar rebounded after last week's sell-off, as investors mull the future course of U.S. interest rates. Investors in Japan were absent due to a holiday but dealers and analysts noted fund buying from elsewhere in the region. In other precious metals, platinum crossed a psychologically important level of $1,000 an ounce. Spot was at $1,001/$1,005 from $993/$998 late on Friday. Palladium rose to $275/$280 an ounce from $267/$271. Silver was up at $9.20/9.23 an ounce, vs. New York's $9.09/$9.12.

US will shrink deficit with spending cuts: Snow By Mark Felsenthal Reuters January 10, 2005 WASHINGTON - The White House aims to shrink the U.S. budget deficit through spending restraint and strong government revenues but will oppose letting tax breaks expire, U.S. Treasury Secretary John Snow said on Tuesday. "You'll see the administration press awfully hard to contain spending," Snow told reporters at a briefing. The administration's budget proposal for the coming year will reflect its deficit-cutting commitment through a slowdown in spending increases and outright cuts in some areas, Snow said, though he did not give details. The deficit in the fiscal year ending September 30 was $318.62 billion, down from a record $412.85 billion in the previous year, but still large enough to loom over mid-term elections this year. In a spate of recent public appearances, senior administration officials led by President George W. Bush have highlighted strong economic growth and job creation. Snow said the year to come should bring more of the same, as the economy looks poised for above-trend, non-inflationary growth. "It's our judgment that the economy is really on a solid footing going forward, and that this would continue," he said. There is little reason to worry that inflation would interrupt continued growth, he added. Strong flows of revenue to government coffers from a thriving economy help trim the deficit but could be weakened by efforts to end tax breaks for dividends and capital gains, Snow said. The Treasury secretary brushed off concerns that China may be preparing to shift some of its foreign exchange reserves away from the U.S. dollar. Investments in U.S. stocks and bonds offer strong returns with low risk, he said. "As long as we sustain this sort of environment, and I'm confident we will, the U.S. will continue to attract the capital it needs, in both the public and private sectors," Snow said. The Treasury secretary said a rebound in business spending was evidence of the solidity of the U.S. economic rebound and the effectiveness of tax breaks. "When I talk to business people, I see reflected in their ideas a real sense of where the economy's going, and that's reflected in their spending patterns," Snow said. Strong returns on capital are leading businesses to expand by investing and by hiring, he said.

China "unlikely to sell dollars" www.chinaview.cn 2006-01-10 14:27:45 BEIJING, Jan. 10 -- China is unlikely to sell current U.S. dollar assets in its foreign reserves to diversify its holdings, the chief of research at the central bank said on Tuesday, contradicting market speculation. Media last week had wrongly interpreted a statement from the foreign exchange regulator as meaning that China would sell U.S. dollar assets, Tang Xu, director-general of the research bureau of the People's Bank of China, told Reuters. The reserves now exceeded $800 billion, he said. Asked whether the yuan would appreciate sharply, Tang said: "It is unlikely." The new forex trading system introduced since the currency's 2.1 percent revaluation in July was more flexible and responsive to market supply and demand, he added. "The general trend is that every country wants to diversify its reserves," Tang said on the sidelines of a conference. "No one is willing to put all of their eggs in one basket and it is impossible for China to put all its forex reserves, which exceed $800 billion, in one currency. "But it is unlikely that China would reduce its current dollar assets to increase the proportion of other assets," he said. Dollar assets still dominated the reserves, whose mix was based on the currencies that denominated China's exports and imports. On Thursday, China's State Administration of Foreign Exchange issued a statement on its priorities for 2006 and said it would "improve the operation and management of foreign exchange reserves and actively explore more effective ways to utilise reserve assets." Investors globally and some media took that as a hint that China may diversify into other currency holdings or commodity-based assets. "That was definitely a misunderstanding," Tang said.

Lots of Lightning in 2005 Hurricanes Baffles Scientists By Patrick L. Barry and Dr. Tony Phillips Science@NASA posted: 10 January 2006 08:11 am ET The boom of thunder and crackle of lightning generally mean one thing: a storm is coming. Curiously, though, the biggest storms of all, hurricanes, are notoriously lacking in lightning. Hurricanes blow, they rain, they flood, but seldom do they crackle. Surprise: During the record-setting hurricane season of 2005 three of the most powerful storms—Rita, Katrina, and Emily—did have lightning, lots of it. And researchers would like to know why. Richard Blakeslee of the Global Hydrology and Climate Center (GHCC) in Huntsville, Alabama, was one of a team of scientists who explored Hurricane Emily using NASA's ER-2 aircraft, a research version of the famous U-2 spy plane. Flying high above the storm, they noted frequent lightning in the cylindrical wall of clouds surrounding the hurricane's eye. Both cloud-to-cloud and cloud-to-ground lightning were present, "a few flashes per minute," says Blakeslee. "Generally there's not a lot of lightning in the eye-wall region," he says. "So when people see lightning there, they perk up — they say, okay, something's happening." Indeed, the electric fields above Emily were among the strongest ever measured by the aircraft’s sensors over any storm. "We observed steady fields in excess of 8 kilovolts per meter," says Blakeslee. "That is huge—comparable to the strongest fields we would expect to find over a large land-based 'mesoscale' thunderstorm." The flight over Emily was part of a 30-day science data-gathering campaign in July 2005 organized and sponsored by NASA headquarters to improve scientists' understanding of hurricanes. Blakeslee and others from NASA, NOAA and 10 U.S. universities traveled to Costa Rica for the campaign, which is called "Tropical Cloud Systems and Processes." From the international airport near San Jose, the capital of Costa Rica, they could fly the ER-2 to storms in both the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific Ocean. They combined ER-2 data with data from satellites and ground-based sensors to get a comprehensive view of each storm. Rita and Katrina were not part of the campaign. Lightning in those storms was detected by means of long-distance sensors on the ground, not the ER-2, so less is known about their electric fields. Nevertheless, it is possible to note some similarities: (1) all three storms were powerful: Emily was a Category 4 storm, Rita and Katrina were Category 5; (2) all three were over water when their lightning was detected; and (3) in each case, the lightning was located around the eye-wall. What does it all mean? The answer could teach scientists something new about the inner workings of hurricanes. Actually, says Blakeslee, the reason most hurricanes don't have lightning is understood. "They're missing a key ingredient: vertical winds." Within thunderclouds, vertical winds cause ice crystals and water droplets (called "hydrometeors") to bump together. This "rubbing" causes the hydrometeors to become charged. Think of rubbing your socked feet across wool carpet—zap! It's the same principle. For reasons not fully understood, positive electric charge accumulates on smaller particles while negative charge clings to the larger ones. Winds and gravity separate the charged hydrometeors, producing an enormous electric field within the storm. This is the source of lightning. A hurricane's winds are mostly horizontal, not vertical. So the vertical churning that leads to lightning doesn't normally happen. Lightning has been seen in hurricanes before. During a field campaign in 1998 called CAMEX-3, scientists detected lightning in the eye of hurricane Georges as it plowed over the Caribbean island of Hispaniola. The lightning probably was due to air forced upward—called "orographic forcing"—when the hurricane hit the mountains. "Hurricanes are most likely to produce lightning when they're making landfall," says Blakeslee. But there were no mountains beneath the "electric hurricanes" of 2005—only flat water. It's tempting to think that, because Emily, Rita and Katrina were all exceptionally powerful, their sheer violence somehow explains their lightning. But Blakeslee says that this explanation is too simple. "Other storms have been equally intense and did not produce much lightning," he says. "There must be something else at work." It's too soon to say for certain what that missing factor is. Scientists will need months to pour over the reams of data gathered in this year's campaign before they can hope to have an answer. Says Blakeslee, "We still have a lot to learn about hurricanes."

Earthquake felt in region south of Montreal Updated Mon. Jan. 9 2006 11:32 PM ET Canadian Press MONTREAL — Residents in the greater Montreal area felt the earth tremble Monday but there were no reports of damage. The Geological Survey of Canada confirmed an earthquake hit the region just south of Montreal about 10:30 a.m. ET with a force of 4.2 on the Richter scale, not enough usually to cause any damage. The federal agency said it received many calls from concerned citizens in the greater Montreal area, but no reports of damage or injuries Seismologist Allison Bent said an earthquake of that magnitude rarely causes damage. Bent said people living close to the centre would notice walls and windows rattle, comparable to when a large truck passes by. The centre of the quake was 22 kilometres east of Huntingdon, close to the U.S. border, she said.

Astronomers discover the North Star has another companion Last Updated Mon, 09 Jan 2006 16:28:21 EST CBC News Astronomers have discovered that the North Star has a second smaller star next to it. Researchers at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore found the star, which they called Polaris Ab, by using the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope. "With Hubble, we've pulled the North Star's companion out of the shadows and into the spotlight," said Howard Bond, a member of the research team. The scientists described Polaris Ab and how they detected it on Monday at the 207th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Washington, D.C. While the North Star, also known as Polaris, is a super-giant more than 2,000 times brighter than the sun, its newly discovered second close companion is a dwarf star 3.2 billion kilometres away from it. The first known companion can be seen with a small telescope. The three-star system is 430 light years away from Earth. A light-year is about 9.5 trillion kilometres, the distance light travels in a year. By observing the movements of the new companion star, researchers hope to determine the mass of the North Star more accurately. Knowing the mass is important for astronomers and cosmologists, who rely on measuring differences in the brightness of the North Star to determine the distance of galaxies and the expansion rate of the universe.

Mummified body found in front of TV Tuesday, January 10, 2006 Posted: 1415 GMT (2215 HKT) CINCINNATI, Ohio (AP) -- The mummified body of a woman who didn't want to be buried was found in a chair in front of her television set 2 1/2 years after her death, authorities said. Johannas Pope had told her live-in caregiver that she didn't want to be buried and planned on returning after she died, Hamilton County Coroner O'Dell Owens said Monday. Pope died in August 2003 at age 61. Her body was found last week in the upstairs of her home on a quiet street. Some family members continued to live downstairs, authorities said. No one answered the doorbell at Pope's home Monday afternoon. It could take weeks to determine Pope's cause of death because little organ tissue was available for testing, Owens said. An air conditioner had been left running upstairs, and that allowed the body to slowly mummify, he said. The machine apparently stopped working about a month ago, and the body began to smell. "Standing outside, one could smell death," Owens said. Police went to the house last Wednesday after receiving a call from a relative who hadn't seen Pope in years. They found a staircase behind a door blocked by a basket and climbed to the second floor, where they found the body. It was not clear if any crimes were committed, Owens said. Authorities did not identify the caregiver, a woman in her 40s who apparently lived in the home with Pope, Pope's daughter and her 3-year-old granddaughter. "The caregiver is not someone you'd think was from another planet or really seems off the wall -- (she's) a pretty normal kind of person," he said. "But I think out of loyalty, friendship and love of her friend, (she) decided to keep the body at home."

Richard Dawkins: Beyond belief Tuesday January 10, 2006 The Guardian Men are supposed to mellow in their mid-60s. Richard Dawkins appears to be going the other way. Never one to tolerate fools at the best of times, he's become noticeably less patient as the years roll by. "It does appear that I've become rather more grumpy," he says, without appearing that bothered one way or another. And despite a contented home life with his third wife, the actor Lalla Ward, there's a great deal to be grumpy about. Back in 1976, as a 30-something research fellow recently returned to Oxford after the obligatory two-year stint in the US at the University of California at Berkeley, Dawkins secured his reputation with The Selfish Gene as a cutting-edge thinker and a man blessed with the common touch. Long before popularising science became a career route for academics, Dawkins managed to advance the scientific understanding of the evolutionary process, while making that knowledge accessible to the general reader. There were two key parts to The Selfish Gene. The first was Dawkins's inversion of the process of natural selection. Instead of trotting out the established view that organisms use genes to self-replicate, Dawkins made the revolutionary suggestion that genes use organisms to propagate themselves, an idea that immediately answered many of the difficult questions of Darwinism, such as the apparent selflessness of some animal behaviour. The second important theme was the rehabilitation of memes, self-replicating cultural transmissions - "viruses of the mind" - that are passed on both vertically and horizontally within families. And it is the meme, or rather one particular meme, that is the prime cause of Dawkins's current grumpiness. According to memetic theory, memes are subject to the same process of natural selection as genes. And yet one meme, the religious meme, steadfastly refuses to die. You can see where the religious meme sprung from: when the world was an inexplicable and scary place, a belief in the supernatural was both comforting and socially adhesive. But as our understanding of the world grew, you might have expected the religious meme to give way to rationalism. Yet the opposite has happened. Despite overwhelming scientific evidence for the Darwinian explanation of evolution, religious belief - and fundamentalist religion at that - remains as ingrained as ever. Religion offends every bone in Dawkins's rational, atheist body. "You can see why people may want to believe in something," he acknowledges. "The idea of an afterlife where you can be reunited with loved ones can be immensely consoling - though not to me. But to maintain such a belief in the face of all the evidence to the contrary is truly bewildering." If individual faith is, for Dawkins, an expression of an ignorance, collective faith and organised religion embody something much more pernicious. That is what drove him to make two films for Channel 4, the first of which was shown last night, and to write his new book, The God Delusion, to be published in September. Dawkins describes these projects as "consciousness-raising exercises" but the films come across as full-frontal assaults. Protestantism, Catholicism, Judaism and Islam all get both barrels. Powerful and well-argued, they are; subtle, they ain't. Richard Harries, Bishop of Oxford, gets a walk-on role as the liberal voice of religion, but mostly it's the fundamentalists of all faiths who fall under Dawkins's scrutiny. "They are profoundly wrong," he says, "but in some ways I have more sympathy with their views than I do with the so-called more liberal wings. At least the fundamentalists haven't tried to dilute their message. Their faith is exposed for what it is for all to see." No such thing What angers Dawkins most is the way religion gets such an easy ride. "We treat it with a politically correct reverence that we don't accord to any other institution," he says. "Even secularists talk about Jewish, Catholic and Muslim children. There's no such thing. Children aren't born with a particular religious gene. What they are is children of Jewish, Catholic and Muslim parents. If you started to talk about monetarist or Marxist children, everyone would consider you abusive. Yet for religion we make an exception. We are incapable of distinguishing between race and religion. There is some statistical correlation between the two, but they are very different entities and we shouldn't allow them to be confused." Predictably, Dawkins has no time for faith schools. "Segregation has no place in the education system," he argues. "Take Northern Ireland. You could get rid of the climate of hostility within a generation by getting rid of segregated schooling. Separating Catholics and Protestants has fomented centuries of hostility." But Dawkins reserves his greatest scorn for creationists. "How any government could promote the Vardy academies in the north-east of England is absolutely beyond me. Tony Blair defends them on grounds of diversity, but it should be unthinkable in the 21st century to have a school whose head of science believes the world is less than 10,000 years old." Evolution offers Dawkins all the explanations he needs - "if there are other worlds elsewhere in the universe, I would conjecture they are governed by the same laws of natural selection" - but he does acknowledge there are still large gaps in our knowledge. "Of course, we would love to know more about the exact moment of Big Bang," he says, "but interposing an outside intelligence does nothing to add to that knowledge, as we still know nothing about the creation of that intelligence." Unfortunately for Dawkins, it is into precisely these gaps that faith and superstition insinuate themselves, a problem made worse for secularists when scientists declare a religious affiliation. "I think the figures are somewhat overstated in this country," he says tersely, "as it's generally the same three scientists making their voices heard. Most scientists use the term God in the way that Einstein did, as an expression of reverence for the deep mysteries of the universe, a sentiment I share. "In the US, the picture is rather different. Coming out as an atheist can cost an academic his or her job in some parts of America, and many choose to keep quiet about their atheism. In a recent survey, 40% of US scientists said they believed in God; however, when the sample was narrowed to those in the National Academy [the US equivalent of the Royal Society] the figure was down to 10%." He didn't start out as an unbeliever. Dawkins was born into a middle-class family that went to church each Christmas. At school, Anglicanism, if not rammed down the throat, was at least a given. "I had my first doubts when I was nine," he recalls, "when I realised there were lots of different religions and they couldn't all be right. However I put my misgivings on hold when I went to Oundle and got confirmed. I only stopped believing when I was about 15." Opponents have claimed that Dawkins offers a bleak view of humanity, something he categorically denies. "The chances of each of us coming into existence are infinitesimally small," he argues, "and even though we shall all die some day, we should count ourselves fantastically lucky to get our decades in the sun." But even he expresses regret at our long-term prospects. "Within 50 million years, it's highly unlikely humans will still be around and it is sad to think of the loss of all that knowledge and music." Greatest skill Dawkins's greatest skill has been to synthesise other people's material and come up with different ways of thinking about problems that revolutionise future research. But to write him off as an ideas man, pure and simple, is to lose sight of the man. He may not do any white-coat lab work these days but he can number-crunch with the best of them. In person, he's friendly rather than approachable, and there's a hint of distance that suggests someone more at home in front of a computer than with other people. "I did used to be addicted to computer programming," he admits. "In the early days, there was no off-the-shelf software and I wrote everything, from my own word-processing programmes to more complex programmes simulating cricket sounds that were necessary for my research. However, I now view programming as a vice, so I don't allow myself to do it." This split between the nerd and the populist has been evident all through his career. The nerd may have been more in evidence early on - not least when he was doing his doctorate and ignored the advice of his Nobel prize-winning supervisor, Nikolaas Tinbergen, and opted for a stats fest, "a classic piece of Popperian science", instead of a fluffier study of animal behaviour - but it's still around. Though Dawkins has held the Charles Simonyi Chair in the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford since 1995 and gets more attention than most other scientists, you sense there's still a part of him that's not altogether comfortable in the public gaze. It seems self-evident that his recent work has become more polemical, though he becomes strangely reticent when you suggest he's now a political figure as much as a scientist. "I don't know about that," he says. "I wouldn't want to make those claims." But then he adds that he wishes more scientists would stand up to be counted in the public arena. There are similar competing pulls elsewhere. After declaring himself a recently converted anti-monarchist and delivering a withering attack on Prince Charles - "he's clearly soft on religion, just as he is on every dopey, half-baked failure to think" - he pulls back, saying he has nothing against Prince Charles as a person and giving the thumbs up to the Queen. Even so, no one's ever going to die wondering what Dawkins really thinks. He may agonise over the thinking process and worry about how his ideas are interpreted, but the real voice always emerges in the end. Perhaps it is the populariser's dilemma: you get remembered for the soundbite rather than the complexity. Put on the spot, Dawkins reveals he believes his lasting contribution to science is his 1984 book, The Extended Phenotype. Most lay people have long since forgotten or never heard of the book in which he argued that genes extend beyond their physical organisms - think beavers' dams and birds' nests - to ensure their survival. But phenotypes have to remain on hold for the time being as it's religion that Dawkins has in his sights for the forseeable future. And what if, by some mischance, he were to find there is a God when he dies? He looks at me as if I were mad. "The question is so preposterous that I can hardly grace it with a hypothetical answer," he says finally. "But, to quote Bertrand Russell, I suspect I would say, 'There's not enough evidence, God'. " Curriculum vitae Name: Richard Dawkins Age: 64 Job: Charles Simonyi Chair in the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford Likes: walking the dog Dislikes: back-to-front baseball caps, gratuitous noise Books: The Selfish Gene, The Extended Phenotype, The Blind Watchmaker, Climbing Mount Improbable, The Ancestor's Tale Married: to Lalla Ward (of Dr Who fame), one daughter from previous marriage Comment: Dawkins offers, we think, one of the most lucid descriptions and accounts of the organic portal's experience of life. His criticisms of religion are accurate. The existing religions have been emptied of their deeper meaning, leaving only a well-ensconsed system of control. Who can argue when Dawkins castigates the easy ride religion gets? However, we think that there is something more to life than genes and memes and the material world. In our work we see a difference between the existing religions and their teachings for the wide public and the hidden teachings that were meant to supplement them when the student was ready. The meat is in these esoteric teachings, teachings that are not unique to any one religion, but that are, rather, an ancient science of the soul that rises from the underground, taking a different form according to local culture and customs. Let us state clearly that we have never met Mr. Dawkins and are in no way saying that he is himself an organic portal. We are all subject to the experiences and standards of the OP until we make the conscious choice to be other.

Ark's Quantum Quirks SOTT January 10, 2005 SOTT Programmer

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