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It's always been more or less an open secret who the perps are in this case. And they're very high-level folks -- people with deep influence of the formulation and implementation of policy. And the wrong-doing here is directly related to the execution of policy. So if a crime was committed, and if an indictment is forthcoming, it will bring under scrutiny a whole complex range of wrong-doing (though not necessarily criminal wrongdoing) relating to administration war policy and intelligence manipulation and other stuff we can go into at a later date.
The Washington Post this evening has an article quoting "Republican legal sources who have discussed the case with the White House and the Justice Department" who say that this will give the administration cover and 'depoliticize' the case.
Not likely.
U.S. forces operating in the so-called Sunni Triangle -- the region of Iraq most loyal to captured former dictator Saddam Hussein -- found a significant weapons cache that included al Qaeda literature and videotapes, the U.S. military said Tuesday.The videotapes no doubt included such titles as "The Virgin Suicides", "Die Harder" and "Toby Keith: I'm An American."
Members of Task Force Ironhorse 2nd Infantry's Arrowhead Brigade discovered the material Monday morning at a site in Samarra, about 65 miles north-northwest of Baghdad. Some of the items were found hidden in a false wall, the military said.
A good indicator of the share of increased profits that goes to different income groups is the Congressional Budget Office's estimate of the share of the corporate profits tax that falls, indirectly, on those groups. According to the most recent estimate, only 8 percent of corporate taxes were paid by the poorest 60 percent of families, while 67 percent were paid by the richest 5 percent, and 49 percent by the richest 1 percent. ("Class warfare!" the right shouts.) So a recovery that boosts profits but not wages delivers the bulk of its benefits to a small, affluent minority.
The bottom line, then, is that for most Americans, current economic growth is a form of reality TV, something interesting that is, however, happening to other people. This may change if serious job creation ever kicks in, but it hasn't so far.
The Sydney Morning Herald reports that US forces took Mr. Hussein into custody Saturday, Dec. 13 around 8.30 p.m. local time, but "sat on the news" until 3 p.m. the next day. However, the Herald points out that in the early hours of Sunday, Dec. 14 a Kurdish language wire service reported explicitly: "Saddam Hussein was captured by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). A special intelligence unit led by Qusrat Rasul Ali, a high-ranking member of the PUK, found Saddam Hussein in the city of Tikrit, his birthplace."
According to the Herald, the Western news media in Baghdad were "electrified" by the first media account of the capture, which was from a Tehran-based news agency, but quickly began to rely "almost exclusively on accounts from US military and intelligence organizations."
Whether it's good news, as opposed to a good sign, is a different question. It's pretty obviously something less than an investigation headed by a truly independent prosecutor. It's probably better than having the case managed by career people at Main Justice with the Attorney General kibitzing, probably not as good as having it managed by career people at Main Justice with the Deputy AG or the Assistant AG for the Criminal Division kibitzing.
But the hell with all that niggling analysis. Go out and celebrate. The odds on a Democrat's replacing George W. Bush just shortened considerably.
Republicans won in 2002, but Bush lost most Democrats forever. Conservative critics of "Bush hatred" like to argue that opposition to the president is a weird psychological affliction. It is nothing of the sort. It is a rational response to getting burned. They are, as a friend once put it, biting the hand that slapped them in the face.
No one understood this sense of betrayal better or earlier than Howard Dean. Dean's candidacy took off because many in the Democratic rank and file were furious that Washington Democrats allowed themselves to be taken to the cleaners. Many of Dean's current loyalists had been just as supportive of Bush after Sept. 11 because they, too, felt that doing so was patriotic. So Dean also spoke to their personal sense of grievance.
Here's what's interesting for 2004: The conventional wisdom, fed by shrewd Republican operatives and commentators, is that Democrats, so out there in their antipathy for Bush, will push their party into an extremist wonderland and lose white men, security moms and anybody else who does not share their desire for revenge.
The opposite is true. Democrats will not have to spend inordinate amounts of time or money in this election year "uniting their base." Opposition to Bush has already done that.
Attorney General John Ashcroft will recuse himself from the Justice Department's investigation of the unauthorized disclosure of an undercover CIA officer’s identity, U.S. officials told NBC News on Tuesday.
The officials did not give a reason for Ashcroft’s decision, which Deputy Attorney General James B. Comey was to announce a news conference Tuesday afternoon.
Hating Bush is so much ickier than hating Clinton. So there.In response, one pissed-off regular on Democratic Underground posted the following:
I'm a Vet. He's a deserter.
I invest in the stock market. He's a corporate criminal.
I'm a Christian. He fakes his religion for political gain.
He lied to me and has been allowed, so far, to get away with it.
Anyone who calls me a Bush hater is immediately labeled by me as a Constitution Hater. If one objects to my opinion of George Bush, they obviously have no use for the constitution.
Disliking George Bush is not self-indulgent and it certainly doesn't make me feel better about myself. Morons who wave the flag and don't know why they do are self-indulgent and yearning for something to make themselves feel better. Being lied to makes them feel good. Loving a false god makes them feel good. The truth would ruin them.
“I have nothing against corporations … but we’ve got to have room in the society for ordinary people,” Dean said while talking about passage of the most recent farm bill at Green Bay Southwest High School. “Our government has forgotten we are not meant to be cogs in a big corporate machine."
Although fighter jets were racing toward the city after the commandeered planes, the transcripts showed that controllers at La Guardia Airport, apparently unaware of the hijackings, continued to send out flights until the second plane had struck the World Trade Center. That was nearly an hour after the first plane had been hijacked.
Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.) charged yesterday that former Vermont governor Howard Dean will "melt in a minute" under Republican attacks if he becomes the Democratic presidential nominee and said it was "outrageous" of Dean to suggest that Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe step in and shield him from growing criticism by his rivals.Well, as Jon Stewart says (via Bartcop), "Lieberman is the candidate for people who want to vote for Bush but don't think he's Jewish enough."
A company developing encryption-based software for secure electronic voting has itself become the victim of a computer break-in, the company’s top executive told MSNBC.com. Federal authorities have confirmed that the incident is under investigation.
The intrusion into Bellevue-based VoteHere’s corporate network occurred in October, said Jim Adler, VoteHere’s founder, president and chief executive officer. No suspects have yet been named, but Adler said his company, in cooperation with investigators, had developed substantial information about the source of the intrusion over the past two months.
“We feel that it may have been politically motivated,” Adler said.
Adler’s revelation came amid a deepening debate over e-voting and its vulnerability to election fraud — and a controversy over surreptitious methods to get information about how e-voting software works.
MJ: What about the Democratic Party? Can it effectively oppose Bush?
TK: I have said this before, and I'll say it again: Anyone that the Democrats run against Bush, even the appalling Joe Lieberman, should be a candidate around whom every progressive person in the United States who cares about the country's future and the future of the world rallies. Money should be thrown at that candidate. And if Ralph Nader runs -- if the Green Party makes the terrible mistake of running a presidential candidate -- don't give him your vote. Listen, here's the thing about politics: It's not an expression of your moral purity and your ethics and your probity and your fond dreams of some utopian future. Progressive people constantly fail to get this.
The GOP has developed a genius for falling into lockstep. They didn't have it with Nixon, but they have it now. They line up behind their candidate, grit their teeth, and help him win, no matter who he is.
MJ: You're saying progressives are undone by their own idealism?
TK: The system isn't about ideals. The country doesn't elect great leaders. It elects fucked-up people who for reasons of ego want to run the world. Then the citizenry makes them become great. FDR was a plutocrat. In a certain sense he wasn't so different from George W. Bush, and he could have easily been Herbert Hoover, Part II. But he was a smart man, and the working class of America told him that he had to be the person who saved this country. It happened with Lyndon Johnson, too, and it could have happened with Bill Clinton, but we were so relieved after 12 years of Reagan and Bush that we sat back and carped.
In a certain sense, Bush was right when he called the anti-war demonstrations a "focus group." We went out on the street and told him that we didn't like the war. But that was all we did: We expressed an opinion. There was no one in Congress to listen to us because we were clear about why they couldn't listen. Hillary Clinton was too compromised, or Chuck Schumer -- and God knows they are. But if people don't pressure them to do better, we're lost.
MJ: Is there a tension between the more analytic, complaint-oriented side of your personality, of your work -- it's everywhere in your plays -- and this more pragmatic view of politics?
TK: I think what one has to do is to ask oneself, "Do you want to have agency in your own time?" If you really believe that it's your place to leave the world a better place than it was when you arrived, then how do you get the power? In this country, the most powerful country on earth, you get it by voting the right people into power. There are means of getting the power out of the hands of the very rich and the very wicked. It still flabbergasts me that people didn't see this during the last presidential election. We had had 12 years of Reagan and Bush to prepare us for this outcome. It couldn't have been clearer who we were dealing with. George W. Bush was -- is -- a little robot programmed by his daddy to punish Saddam Hussein and get as much money for the petrochemical bandits. It's absolutely jaw-dropping that Democrats saw that and decided instead that they wanted to send a message to their own party that they weren't happy with it for some relatively minor offense. Why didn't we turn out in vast numbers for Gore? Why did we vote for Ralph Nader or not at all? We would absolutely not be in Iraq today if we had a Democratic president in the White House, and I don't need to know any more than that.
I'm aware of recent speeches attesting to the Administration's determination to stay the course in a "generational" commitment. This calls to mind what Alexander Cockburn's father Claud is known for saying: "Never believe anything until it is officially denied."
Ah, it's nice to be Neil Bush, who seems to be living the lifestyle immortalized in those famous Dire Straits lyrics: "Money for nothin' and chicks for free."
Stauber said some analysts believed early in 1997 that without an effective feed ban in place in this country, just one case of BSE could cause another 299,000 cases over the next 11 years.In other words, looks like Oprah was right:
In addition to testing every animal, the author said there must be a “strict and total ban on all rendered byproducts,” in order to better protect Americans from food-borne illness.
Stauber said he believes the government is understating the issue, calling the information released “feel-good PR.”
“It’s only one cow — don’t worry — we’ve got it under control,” is the message that has consumers continuing to buy U.S. beef, he said. “Why do they (the government) get to make this decision that we have to take this risk?
“It’s insane to treat this so lightly. It’s a symptom of why we have this disease,” Stauber said.
“We’re playing Russian roulette and we don’t even know how many bullets are in the gun.”
Hueston said he told a producer before the show that there was no evidence of mad cow disease in the United States and that there were no cases of NV-CJD, or new variant Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease, which is the disease in humans that has been linked to mad cow disease.I've read about at least three cases of this disease here in the U.S. One of them was a Green Beret who was accused of faking illness to get out of the service before he was finally diagnosed.
Hueston accused Winfrey of "riling up" the audience both during the show and during commercial breaks, and said he heard whispers of, "You can't trust the government."
During the program, an activist claimed that the feeding of processed cattle parts back to cattle could spread the human version of mad cow disease in the United States. Vegetarian activist Howard Lyman claimed mad cow disease would make AIDS look like the common cold.
Winfrey responded by swearing off hamburgers.
Her show came in response to an announcement that an outbreak of mad cow disease in Britain had probably caused Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease in humans.
The skeptics argue, too, that there is no way to prove that the species barrier cannot be surmounted, and the current rules allow even animals known to be infected with TSE to be fed to pigs and chickens, which can in turn be fed to us. Or they may be fed to cattle and sheep. A study published in April in the scientific journal Nature found that TSE from one species can be carried by another species without making the carrier sick. The authors concluded that "the results presented here would strongly favour a decision to stop feeding ruminant-derived products to all animal species" -- in particular, "domestic animals such as poultry which are raised for human consumption."Goodbye, KFC.
Sure, there are differences on policy matters, but that's not what's going on here. The Washington Democrats -- incumbents, fund-raisers and the consultants who feed off them -- don't like Dean mostly because he doesn't need them.
So far, Dean has reacted to the attacks by holding his ground and taking the high road. The Deanies complained so vociferously about the bin Laden commercial that three unions which had each given $50,000 to the effort went public and asked they be dropped.
The ads have now been dropped, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reports, but there's more negativity ahead. Jonathan Chait, who writes for the formerly liberal New Republic -- which this week features a critique of Dean's religious beliefs -- has launched the "Dean-o-phobe Blog." Blogs have become part of the political vitriol machine, feeding venom to the established media and turning the political process into a 24/7 online food-fight.
Lisa Gluskin has had a tough three years. She works almost as hard as she did during the dot-com boom, for about 20% of the income.One of my relatives, whose unemployment and severance package is gone after two years, is applying for IT jobs that pay subtantially less than his previous job (less as in, 25K less). But now he's working at a Pier 1. For $7 an hour. So he's considered a Bush success story, I guess.
When Gluskin's writing and editing business cratered in 2001, she slashed her rates, began studying for a graduate degree and started teaching part time at a Lake Tahoe community college for a meager wage.
It's been a fragmented, hand-to-mouth life, one that she sees mirrored by friends and colleagues who are waiting tables or delivering packages. In the late '90s, the 35-year-old Gluskin says, "we had careers. We had trajectories. Now we have complicated lives. We're not unemployed, but we're underemployed."
The nation's official jobless rate is 5.9%, a relatively benign level by historical standards. But economists say that figure paints only a partial — and artificially rosy — picture of the labor market.
To begin with, there are the 8.7 million unemployed, defined as those without a job who are actively looking for work. But lurking behind that group are 4.9 million part-time workers such as Gluskin who say they would rather be working full time — the highest number in a decade.
There are also the 1.5 million people who want a job but didn't look for one in the last month. Nearly a third of this group say they stopped the search because they were too depressed about the prospect of finding anything. Officially termed "discouraged," their number has surged 20% in a year.
Add these three groups together and the jobless total for the U.S. hits 9.7%, up from 9.4% a year ago.
No wonder the Democratic presidential candidates have seized on jobs as a potentially powerful weapon.
When mad cow disease was discovered in Canada earlier this year, the cattle industry and the U.S. Agriculture Department shrugged off the incident as regrettable, but unlikely to affect beef in the United States. Resisting calls for more testing of animals and new restrictions on how they are raised and slaughtered, the industry boasted the safest beef supply in the world.
Those boasts now look more like wishful thinking. If initial reports that a cow found infected this month in Washington state came from Canada are accurate, this discovery would underscore the consequences of industry-driven policies that rarely call for testing animals.
Cattlemen and meat packers have fought calls for more frequent inspections, and tighter feeding and slaughtering rules. Such measures have long been identified as necessary to fully protect U.S. beef.
The laissez-faire approach to inspections and opposition to regulations might help cattlemen save money in the short run, but it exposes them to far greater losses over time through damage to the reputation of U.S. beef. Already, U.S. beef bans by 28 countries risk shutting off as much as $6 billion in annual exports. Experts see beef prices domestically dropping by 20% or more. And with the announcement on Sunday that meat from the sick Holstein has reached retail markets in eight states and Guam, concern is spreading in spite of assurances by Agriculture Department officials that the public faces no health risk.
According to their contracts, expectations and desires, all three soldiers should have been civilians by now. But Fontaine and Costas are currently serving in Iraq, and Eagle has just been deployed. On their Army paychecks, the expiration date of their military service is now listed sometime after 2030 -- the payroll computer's way of saying, "Who knows?"
The three are among thousands of soldiers forbidden to leave military service under the Army's "stop-loss" orders, intended to stanch the seepage of troops, through retirement and discharge, from a military stretched thin by its burgeoning overseas missions.
"It reflects the fact that the military is too small, which nobody wants to admit," said Charles Moskos of Northwestern University, a leading military sociologist.
To the Pentagon, stop-loss orders are a finger in the dike -- a tool to halt the hemorrhage of personnel, and maximize cohesion and experience, for units in the field in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. Through a series of stop-loss orders, the Army alone has blocked the possible retirements and departures of more than 40,000 soldiers, about 16,000 of them National Guard and reserve members who were eligible to leave the service this year. Hundreds more in the Air Force, Navy and Marines were briefly blocked from retiring or departing the military at some point this year.
In 1998, Dean's Vermont similar task force met in secret to write a plan for revamping state electricity markets that would slow rising consumer costs and relieve utilities of a money-losing deal with a Canadian company.There's an ethics rule of thumb in journalism, and it goes something like this: If someone buys you lunch, your integrity has not been compromised - because it's assumed you have - at the very least - enough integrity that you wouldn't sell it for a sandwich. It's when they start buying you cars that the alarms go off.
The task force's work resulted in Vermont having the first utility in the country to meet energy efficiency standards. It also freed the state's utilities from their deal with a Canadian power company, Hydro Quebec, that had left them near bankruptcy but passed as much as 90 percent of those costs to consumers. Utility shareholders also suffered some losses.
The parallels between the Cheney and Dean task forces are many.
Both declined to open their deliberations, even under pressure from legislators. Both received input from the energy industry in private meetings, and released the names of task force members publicly.
Dean's group volunteered the names of those it consulted with in its final report. While Cheney has refused to formally give a list to Congress to preserve the White House's right to private advice, known as executive privilege, his aides have divulged to reporters the names of many of those from whom the task force sought advice.
The Bush-Cheney campaign and Republican Party received millions in donations from energy interests in the election before its task force was created. Dean's Vermont re-election campaign received only small contributions from energy executives, but a political action committee created as he prepared to run for president collected $19,000, or nearly a fifth of its first $110,000, from donors tied to Vermont's electric utilities.
Americans are working harder and have become ever more productive — astonishingly productive — but are not sharing in the benefits of their increased effort. If you think in terms of wages, benefits and the creation of good jobs, the employment landscape is grim.
The economy is going great guns, we're told, but nearly nine million Americans are officially unemployed, and the real tally of the jobless is much higher. Even as the Bush administration and the media celebrate the blossoming of statistics that supposedly show how well we're doing, the lines at food banks and soup kitchens are lengthening. They're swollen in many cases by the children of men and women who are working but not making enough to house and feed their families.
Convinced that California can no longer afford its $5.3 billion prison and parole system, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's administration is exploring moves that would all but eliminate parole conditions for nonviolent, nonserious offenders and eventually -- through early release and lighter penalties -- dramatically shrink the prison population.
Legislation to keep meat from downed animals off American kitchen tables was scuttled - for the second time in as many years - as Congress labored unsuccessfully earlier this month to pass a catchall agency spending bill.
Now, in the wake of the apparent discovery of the first mad-cow case in the United States, the author of the House version of the cattle provision wants to press the issue anew when Congress returns Jan. 20 from its winter recess. The massive, $373 billion spending bill covering several government agencies is still pending in the Senate.
"I said on the floor of the House that you will rue the day that because of the greed of the industry to make a few extra pennies from 130,000 head, the industry would sacrifice the safety of the American people," said Rep. Gary Ackerman, D-N.Y., chief House sponsor. "It's so pound foolish."
The provision dealing with downed cattle didn't even make it into the compromise version of the legislation that House and Senate conferees brought before Congress late in the year.
For too many Democrats, faith is private and has no implications for political life. But what kind of faith is that? Where would America be if the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had kept his faith to himself?
Howard Dean, the leading challenger to President Bush, illustrates the Democrats' problem. Dr. Dean recently said he left his church in Vermont over a dispute about a bike path, and explained that his faith does not inform his politics. He has also said the presidential race should stay away from the issues of "guns, God and gays" and focus on jobs, health care and foreign policy.
By framing the issue in this way — declining to discuss overtly "religious" topics — Dr. Dean allows Republicans to define the terms of the debate. The "religious issues" in this election will be reduced to the Ten Commandments in public courthouses, marriage amendments, prayer in schools and, of course, abortion.
These issues are important. But faith informs policy in other areas as well. What about the biblical imperatives for social justice, the God who lifts up the poor, the Jesus who said, "blessed are the peacemakers"?
How a candidate deals with poverty is a religious issue, and the Bush administration's failure to support poor working families should be named as a religious failure. Neglect of the environment is a religious issue. Fighting pre-emptive and unilateral wars based on false claims is a religious issue (a fact not changed by the capture of Saddam Hussein).
Such issues could pose problems for the Bush administration among religious and nonreligious people alike — if someone were to define them in moral terms. The failure of the Democrats to do so is not just a political miscalculation. It shows they do not appreciate the contributions of religion to American life.
In recent telephone interviews with The New York Times, three of the former soldiers quoted by The Blade confirmed that the articles had accurately described their unit's actions.
But they wanted to make another point: that Tiger Force had not been a "rogue" unit. Its members had done only what they were told, and their superiors knew what they were doing.
"The story that I'm not sure is getting out," said Mr. Causey, then a medic with the unit, "is that while they're saying this was a ruthless band ravaging the countryside, we were under orders to do it."
Burning huts and villages, shooting civilians and throwing grenades into protective shelters were common tactics for American ground forces throughout Vietnam, they said. That contention is backed up by accounts of journalists, historians and disillusioned troops.
The tactics — particularly in "free-fire zones," where anyone was regarded as fair game — arose from the frustrating nature of the guerrilla war and, above all, from the military's reliance on the body count as a measure of success and a reason officers were promoted, according to many accounts.
The image of Dr. Dean as a Park Avenue patrician is also unlike his image in Vermont as an unpretentious, penny-pinching homebody. But there is little doubt that his family's wealth and position have played a significant role in his life.While this doesn't apply to my own family, I do have several friends whose blue-collar parents amassed some tidy sums. One of them was given $50,000 to buy a house by her parents several years ago. The brother of an old friend was given $125,000 by their Italian immigrant parents to put down on his house.
All told, for instance, Dr. Dean's parents have given him and his family nearly $1 million in cash gifts over the last two decades, including a single gift of $200,000 in the early 1980's. And his wife's parents gave the couple $60,000 in 1985 to help them pay $161,700 in cash for the family's house on Burlington's south side, freeing the couple from monthly mortgage payments.
On December 13, when U.S. forces captured Saddam Hussein, President George W. Bush not only celebrated with his national security team, but also pulled out his pen and signed into law a bill that grants the FBI sweeping new powers. A White House spokesperson explained the curious timing of the signing - on a Saturday - as "the President signs bills seven days a week." But the last time Bush signed a bill into law on a Saturday happened more than a year ago - on a spending bill that the President needed to sign, to prevent shuttng down the federal government the following Monday.
By signing the bill on the day of Hussein's capture, Bush effectively consigned a dramatic expansion of the USA Patriot Act to a mere footnote. Consequently, while most Americans watched as Hussein was probed for head lice, few were aware that the FBI had just obtained the power to probe their financial records, even if the feds don't suspect their involvement in crime or terrorism.
By signing the bill on the day of Hussein's capture, Bush effectively consigned a dramatic expansion of the USA Patriot Act to a mere footnote.
The Bush Administration and its Congressional allies tucked away these new executive powers in the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2004, a legislative behemoth that funds all the intelligence activities of the federal government. The Act included a simple, yet insidious, redefinition of "financial institution," which previously referred to banks, but now includes stockbrokers, car dealerships, casinos, credit card companies, insurance agencies, jewelers, airlines, the U.S. Post Office, and any other business "whose cash transactions have a high degree of usefulness in criminal, tax, or regulatory matters."
Congress passed the legislation around Thanksgiving. Except for U.S. Representative Charlie Gonzalez, all San Antonio's House members voted for the act. The Senate passed it with a voice vote to avoid individual accountability. While broadening the definition of "financial institution," the Bush administration is ramping up provisions within the 2001 USA Patriot Act, which granted the FBI the authority to obtain client records from banks by merely requesting the records in a "National Security Letter." To get the records, the FBI doesn't have to appear before a judge, nor demonstrate "probable cause" - reason to believe that the targeted client is involved in criminal or terrorist activity. Moreover, the National Security Letters are attached with a gag order, preventing any financial institution from informing its clients that their records have been surrendered to the FBI. If a financial institution breaches the gag order, it faces criminal penalties. And finally, the FBI will no longer be required to report to Congress how often they have used the National Security Letters.
When US Central Command has good news to report in Iraq, as it did after troops from the Fourth Infantry Division captured Saddam Hussein on December 13, it adores the media. But journalists say that when there's bad news--a helicopter crash, a mortar attack--they are increasingly being blocked from covering the story by US soldiers, who frequently confiscate and destroy their film disks and videotapes.
This happened to Detroit Free Press photographer David Gilkey while covering the crash of a CH-47 Chinook helicopter carrying thirty-six US soldiers, shot down near Fallujah on November 2. His film disk was erased by a soldier from the 82nd Airborne, who then forced Gilkey and other journalists on the scene to a site twenty miles away. "Listen, I have respect for these guys," Gilkey says of the soldiers. "I truly understand that they are upset, and angry, that they've lost friends. The point is, however, you don't have the right to take disks and clean them. When did that become standard operating procedure?"
Chip Somodevilla, a Knight Ridder photographer, was accompanying two Iraqi fishermen on their small boat in the Tigris River in Baghdad on December 9, when shots from a high-velocity rifle exploded in the water under the port bow of their twelve-foot craft.
"We looked in the direction from which it was fired--a mansion formerly belonging to Saddam Hussein's nephew--and noticed several men waving their arms in the air and shouting," Somodevilla e-mailed to his editors after the incident. He and the fishermen drove their boat toward the group of men. One of them turned out to be an American in civilian clothing who was carrying a high-velocity rifle outfitted with a silencer and scope.
"He asked who I was and what I was doing," the photographer said. The American, who appeared to be some sort of Special Operations paramilitary or intelligence official, "asked me to produce identification and then attempted to destroy my press credentials. He forcefully quizzed me about my assignment and then turned to an Iraqi standing nearby" to verify aspects of the photographer's story.
"After being shot at, I felt very threatened and swore to the man that I was an American and that I was on his side," Somodevilla said. "Yeah, John Walker [Lindh, the so-called American Taliban] made a lot of promises too," the American interrogator snapped back. "What have you done for your country?" He let Somodevilla go with the warning, "We're watching you."
"Our journalists in Iraq have been shoved to the ground, pushed out of the way, told to leave the scene of explosions; we've had camera disks and videotapes confiscated, reporters detained," says Sandy Johnson, Washington bureau chief for the Associated Press. On November 12 Johnson sent a letter to the Pentagon, signed by thirty other media companies, which cited their concern at "a growing number of incidents in Iraq in which journalists are harassed by U.S. troops in the course of covering the news."
1) Being a drug addict is a moral failing and a crime, unless you are a millionaire conservative radio jock, which makes it an "illness" and needs our prayers for your "recovery."
2) You have to believe that those privileged from birth achieve success all on their own.
3) You have to believe that the US should get out of the UN, and that our highest national priority is enforcing UN resolutions against Iraq.
4) You have to believe that government should stay out of people's lives but it needs to punish anyone caught having private sex with the "wrong" gender.
5) You have to believe that pollution is ok, so long as it makes a profit.
6) You have to believe in prayer in schools, as long as you don't pray to Allah or Buddha.
7) "Standing Tall for America" means firing your workers and moving their jobs to India.
8) You have to believe that a woman cannot be trusted with decisions about her own body, but that large multi-national corporations can make decisions affecting all mankind with no regulation whatsoever.
9) You have to believe that you love Jesus and Jesus loves you, and that Jesus shares your hatred of AIDS victims, homosexuals, and Hillary Clinton.
10) You hate the ACLU for representing convicted felons, but they owed it to the country to bail out Oliver North.
11) You have to believe that the best way to encourage military morale is to praise the troops overseas while cutting their VA benefits.
12) You believe that group sex and drug use are degenerate sins that can only be purged by running for governor of California as a Republican.
13) You have to believe it is wise to keep condoms out of schools, because we all know if teenagers don't have condoms they won't have sex.
14) You have to believe that the best way to fight terrorism is to alienate our allies and then demand their cooperation and money.
15) You have to believe that government medicine is wrong and that HMO's and insurance companies only have your best interests at heart.
16) You have to believe that providing health care to all Iraqis is sound government policy but providing health care to all Americans is socialism personified.
17) You believe that tobacco's link to cancer and global warming are "junk science" but Creationism should be taught in schools.
18) You have to believe that waging war with no exit strategy was wrong in Vietnam but right in Iraq.
19) You have to believe that Saddam was good guy when Reagan armed him, a bad guy when Bush's daddy made war on him, a good guy when Cheney was doing business with him, and a bad guy when Bush needed a "we can't find Bin Laden" diversion.
20) You believe that government should restrict itself to just the powers named in the Constitution, which include banning gay marriages and censoring the Internet.
21) You have to believe that the public has a right to know about the adulterous affairs of Democrats, while those of Republicans are a "private matter."
22) You have to believe that the public has a right to know about Hillary's cattle trades but that Bush was right to censor those 28 pages from the Congressional 9/11 report because you just can't handle the truth.
23) You support state rights, which means Ashcroft telling states what locally passed voter initiatives he will allow them to have.
24) You have to believe that what Clinton did in the 1960s is of vital national interest but what Bush did decades later is "stale news" and "irrelevant."
25) You have to believe that trade with Cuba is wrong because it is communist, but trading with China and Vietnam is just dandy.
The administration presents the new policy as a necessary tonic for southeast Alaska's depressed economy, and as a necessary response to a state lawsuit that it says it could never have won. The reality is otherwise. This is essentially a holiday gift to Senator Ted Stevens and Gov. Frank Murkowski, both of whom have lobbied for the resumption of the clear-cutting that has already stripped the nation's only temperate rain forest of a half million acres of old-growth trees.
The announcement came wrapped in the same deceptive packaging that has camouflaged much of this administration's forest policy. The most egregious example was the Forest Service's disingenuous assertion that the new policy would allow logging on only 300,000 acres of the Tongass, or about 3 percent of the 9.6 million roadless acres that are earmarked for protection.
Though that is technically true, the actual ecological impact would be far greater. For one thing, those 300,000 acres include many of the forest's oldest trees and most valuable watersheds, as well as an extraordinary collection of wildlife. It is no exaggeration to say that these acres constitute the forest's biological heart. And because these acres are not all in one place, but are distributed among 50 different logging projects, the new roads required to reach them will inevitably violate even more of the forest.
Five major grocery chains in Oregon and Washington have pulled ground beef from their shelves. In Oregon, some of the recalled meat has been accounted for at the wholesale level.
"But some has been distributed at the retail level, at which point it was sold," said Dalton Hobbs, a spokesman for the Oregon Department of Agriculture.
The developments came on a day when President Bush sought to reassure citizens that the food supply is safe; his spokesman said the president "continued to eat beef." Exports of U.S. beef are on hold to nearly two dozen nations, and a U.S. trade team was dispatched to Japan, which has banned U.S. beef imports. The officials expect to arrive in Tokyo by Monday to try to recover the Japanese market, which is worth $1.03 billion to the U.S. beef industry.
On Tuesday, the Bush Administration finalized the opening of 300,000 acres of Alaska's Tongass National Forest for logging and other development. Now the timber industry will be able to clearcut trees in one of the most ancient forests in the world.
Wes Clark had a strong message for the Bush White House:
"As Americans gathered to celebrate the traditions of the holiday season, the Bush Administration practiced its own tradition - rolling back environmental protections when most Americans weren't looking.
It's wrong to announce gifts to your special interest supporters under cover of Christmas. American needs leadership that puts the people's interests above the special interests. That's the kind of leadership I'll bring back to White House."
Years ago, when concern was being expressed about the shipment of factory jobs to places with slave wages, hideous working conditions and even prison labor, proponents said there was nothing to worry about. Exporting labor-intensive jobs would make U.S. companies more competitive, leading to increased growth and employment, and higher living standards. They advised U.S. workers to adjust, to become better educated and skillful enough to thrive in a new world of employment, where technology and the ability to process information were crucial components.
Well, the workers whose jobs are now threatened at I.B.M. and similar companies across the U.S. are well educated and absolute whizzes at processing information. But they are nevertheless in danger of following the well-trodden path of their factory brethren to lower-wage work, or the unemployment line.
The Wall Street Journal reported last week that I.B.M. had told its managers to plan on moving as many as 4,730 jobs from the U.S. The I.B.M. spokesman told me he was sure that figure was too high, but added that no one had complained to The Journal about the number. He said he didn't know how many American jobs would be lost.
I.B.M. officials are skittish to the point of paranoia on this matter, which has powerful social and political implications. Pulling the plug on factory workers is one thing. A frontal assault on the livelihood of solidly middle-class Americans — some of whom may be required to train the foreign workers who will replace them — is something else.
Most of the millions of white-collar workers who could be affected by this phenomenon over the next several years are clueless as to what they can do about it. They do not have organized representation in the workplace. And government policies overwhelmingly favor the corporations. Like the employees at I.B.M. whose holiday cheer has been dampened by uncertainty, these hard-working men and women and their families have little protection against the powerful forces of the global economy.
Political operatives have become experts at manufacturing the appearance of outrage. In the last few weeks the usual suspects have been trying to paint Howard Dean's obviously heartfelt comments about his brother's death in Laos as some sort of insult to the military. We owe it to our readers not to fall for these tricks.I've been saying this for years: Yes, reporters are generally lazy. They do the bare minimum, the knee-jerk stories because it's easy. The editors are often lazy, stupid, or sick of fighting with them, and the end result is what you see.
• It's not about you. We learn from The Washington Post that reporters covering Mr. Dean are surprised — and, it's implied, miffed — that "he never asks a single question about them." The mind reels.
I don't really expect my journalistic colleagues to follow these rules. No doubt I myself, in moments of weakness, will break one or more of them. But history will not forgive us if we allow laziness and personal pettiness to shape this crucial election.
Are there still people dumb enough to believe invading Iraq was a principled thing?
"In the week ending Dec. 20, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 353,000, a decrease of 1,000 from the previous week's revised figure of 354,000."
Here's the UNADJUSTED number: ETA Press Release: Unemployment Insurance Weekly Claims Report, "The advance number of actual initial claims under state programs, unadjusted, totaled 423,782 in the week ending Dec. 20, an increase of 11,248 from the previous week."
So what is the Libya back story? None of the pieces so far seem to totally nail it. Who were the actors, the back channels, on both sides? One report suggested such discussions began five years ago. Was the US invasion of Iraq really the event that clinched the negotiations? We hope and expect Seymour Hersh is on the story, but will be interesting to see.
Meantime, it's hard to fathom why Washington appears to remain so sanguine about Pakistani nuclear proliferation to North Korea and Iran -- and perhaps even to emissaries of bin Laden. The evidence here is fairly overwhelming -- and impossible to reconcile with the US's rhetorical commitment to prevent WMD proliferation to rogue states and terror groups.
Bush vs. the Beltway, the subject of additional hosannas from both Woolsey and Perle, claims that Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the now-captured mastermind of 9/11, is an Iraqi intelligence agent, like Ramzi Yousef, who adopted the identity of a Pakistani living in Kuwait. Funnily enough, the U.S. government doesn't seem to have explored this intriguing theory. Why not? According to Mylroie, a plot is afoot to prevent Mohammed's unmasking. Shortly after Bush vs. the Beltway was published, she appeared as an expert witness before the blue-ribbon commission investigating 9/11, testifying that "there is substantial reason to believe that these masterminds [of both the '93 and 9/11 Trade Center attacks] are Iraqi intelligence agents." Mylroie explained that this had not been discovered by the U.S. government because "a senior administration official told me in specific that the question of the identities of the terrorist masterminds could not be pursued because of bureaucratic obstructionism." So we are expected to believe that the senior Bush administration officials whom Mylroie knows so well could not find anyone in intelligence or law enforcement to investigate the supposed Iraqi intelligence background of the mastermind of 9/11, at the same time that 150,000 American soldiers had been sent to fight a war in Iraq under the rubric of the war on terrorism. Please.
Further undermining Mylroie's theory about Khalid Sheik Mohammed is the fact that since his apprehension in Pakistan, KSM, as he's known to law enforcement, has specifically denied any connection to Iraq, at the same time that he has offered up actionable intelligence about terror plots in the United States. A senior U.S. counter-terrorism official told me that KSM, like several other high-ranking al Qaeda operatives, has disgorged much useful information following the use of coercive methods that include making him "uncomfortable and withholding water and sleep." As a result of KSM's interrogations, Iyman Faris, a trucker living in Ohio, was arrested for plotting to cut through the cable supporting the Brooklyn Bridge and was sentenced in October to 20 years in prison.
"We're talking about billions of people" around the world who potentially have been exposed to U.S. beef, Lester Friedlander, a former USDA veterinarian who has been insisting mad cow is present in American herds for years, told UPI.
The USDA insisted the case is probably isolated and the US beef supply is safe. "I plan to serve beef for my Christmas dinner," Veneman said, "and we remain confident in the safety of our food supply."
Responded Friedlander: "She might as well kiss her (behind) goodbye, then."
Veneman went on to say she had confidence in the USDA surveillance system for detecting mad cow and protecting the public, noting the agency has tested more than 20,000 cattle for the disease this year.
This represents only a small percentage of the millions of cows in the U.S. herd, however, and experts say current procedures are unlikely to detect mad cow.
The Washington cow was tested because it was a so-called downer cow -- a cow unable to stand on its own -- which is a sign of mad cow disease. However, the United States sees approximately 200,000 of these per year or about 10 times as many animals are tested for the disease.
USDA officials told UPI as recently as Dec. 17 the agency still is searching for documentation of its mad cow testing results from 2002 and 2003.
UPI initially requested the documents on July 10, and the agency sent a response letter dated July 24, saying it had launched a search for any documents pertaining to mad cow tests from 2002 and 2003.
"If any documents exist, they will be forwarded," USDA official Michael Marquis wrote in the letter.
Despite this and a 30-day limit under the Freedom of Information Act on responding to such a request, the USDA never sent any corresponding documents. The agency's FOI office also did not return several calls from UPI placed over a series of months.
Finally, UPI threatened legal action in early December if the agency did not respond.
In a Dec. 17 letter to UPI from USDA Freedom of Information Act Office Andrea E. Fowler, the agency wrote: "Your request has been forwarded to the (Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service) for processing and to search for the record responsive to your earlier request."
To date, the USDA has not said if any records exist or if they will be sent to UPI.
"It's always concerned me that they haven't used the same rapid testing technique that's used in Europe," where mad cow has been detected in several additional countries outside of the United Kingdom, Michael Schwochert, a retired USDA veterinarian in Ft. Morgan, Colo., told UPI.
"It was almost like they didn't want to find mad cow disease," Schwochert said.
He noted he had been informed that approximately six months ago a cow displaying symptoms suggestive of mad cow disease showed up at the X-cel slaughtering plant in Ft. Morgan.
Once cows are unloaded off the truck they are required to be inspected by USDA veterinarians. However, the cow was spotted by plant employees before USDA officials saw it and "it went back out on a special truck and they called the guys in the office and said don't say anything about this," Schwochert said.
Veneman said the Washington case "does not pose any kind of significant risk to the human food chain."
Friedlander called that assessment, aptly enough, "B.S." Referring to the USDA's failure to provide their testing documentation to UPI, he said, "The government doesn't have records to substantiate their testing so how do they know whether this is an isolated case." The agency also cannot provide any assurance that this animal did not get processed for human consumption, he said.
Schwochert agreed with that, saying the USDA's sparse testing means they cannot say with any confidence whether there are additional cases or not.
In the speech Jan. 28, President Bush cited British intelligence in asserting that Hussein had tried to buy uranium from an unnamed country in Africa. The White House later said the claim should not have been made, after reports that the intelligence community expressed doubts it was true. After reviewing the matter for several months, the intelligence board -- chaired by former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft -- has determined that there was "no deliberate effort to fabricate" a story, the source said. Instead, the source said, the board believes the White House was so anxious "to grab onto something affirmative" about Hussein's nuclear ambitions that it disregarded warnings from the intelligence community that the claim was questionable.See? I knew they were just being overly eager. They wouldn't lie to us.
"You'd be surprised at how many of the guys I talked to in my company and others believed that the president's scare about Saddam's WMD was a bunch of bullshit and that the real motivation for this war was only about money. There was also a lot of crap that many companies, not just marine companies, had to go through with not getting enough equipment to fulfill their missions when they crossed the border. It was a miracle that our company did what it did the two months it was staying in Iraq during the war…. We were promised to go home on June 8th, and found out that it was a lie and we got stuck doing missions for an extra three months. Even some of the most radical conservatives in our company including our company gunnery sergeant got a real bad taste in their mouth about the Marine corps, and maybe even president Bush."
An August Federal Reserve study estimates that as many as 79 percent of jobs are in industries where jobs have been lost forever, a phenomenon Fed economists call "structural change."
Another estimate by Forester Research goes into more specifics. Forrester estimates that by 2015, some 3.3 million service-sector jobs will be shipped overseas or rendered obsolete by technology. Forester analyst John McCarthy says jobs that are most at risk require fewer skills, are automated or are highly portable.
Those include computer programming and software engineer jobs, that have long been leaving the country. By 2015, 26 percent of those jobs will be gone, says McCarthy.
Clerical jobs, like accounts receivable and payable, financial research, data-entry and various administrative services also are vulnerable since their tasks are either becoming automated or can be performed by less-expensive workers somewhere else.
Even government jobs are getting farmed out, albeit far more slowly, says Gartner Group's government analyst Rashid Sood.
"Off-shoring is a political hot potato," notes Sood.
To sue for violation of his rights under the federal Privacy Act, Lee must identify the government agencies that leaked the defamatory information. Last week, New York Times reporters Jeff Gerth and James Risen, who did the most to hype claims of Lee spying for China, for which the paper later apologized, defied the judge's order to reveal their sources. (Three other reporters — including one from the Los Angeles Times — are also under subpoena.)
A spokesperson for the New York Times defended its reporters' actions, saying they "chose to take advantage of their 1st Amendment privilege on identifying sources." What about the constitutionally protected rights of Lee, whose reputation, livelihood and freedom were destroyed by the irresponsible reporting of the Times? That is often the dire consequence of leaked government smears and is a serious concern in the defamation of individuals accused after 9/11 of having links to terrorism under the USA Patriot Act. Yet the knee-jerk reaction of the media is to claim a 1st Amendment protection, even if it results in defaming individuals on the basis of secret sources.
The real surprise, though, is that two prominent journalists, William Buckley and George Will, were also regular paid advisors to Hollinger. Now, I thought there were rules here. First, if you're a full-time journalist, you shouldn't be in that kind of relationship. Second, whoever you are, if you write a favorable article about someone with whom you have a personal or financial connection — like Mr. Perle's piece on the tanker deal or Mr. Will's March column praising Lord Black's wisdom — you disclose that connection. But I guess the old rules no longer apply.UPDATE - Jim Capozzola has the pithiest possible comments on the whole matter.
It was supposed to be simple, breaking into a small boatyard near here and stealing a marine radio to monitor police frequencies.
But when the two intruders, Patrick V., 14, and his accomplice, Christopher Conley, 19, spotted what they thought were video surveillance cameras, they panicked and set fire to the building, burning it down along with several boats and engines. Unknown to them, one of the boat engines belonged to former President George Bush, whose summer house is seven miles away.
Within days of the July 2002 fire, Secret Service and other federal agents were at Patrick's house here. His mother, Denise Collier, said they told her that the young men had "blown up the president's boat" in what might have been "a terrorist act." One federal firearms agent told her, Ms. Collier recalled, that the incident had raised "national security concerns."
Patrick then found himself in a highly unusual predicament. Instead of being tried in local juvenile court, he was turned over to the United States attorney's office in Portland, tried in Federal District Court and found guilty. He was given the maximum sentence allowed: 30 months incarceration, followed by 27 months of probation. He was then sent to a maximum security juvenile facility in Pennsylvania on the order of the federal Bureau of Prisons.
So, I think this all adds up to no reason to believe there's anything to do this story, at least not based on what I've seen in published accounts. What I think we've got here is a rumor which got picked up by an inexperienced reporter and then made its way on to some mainstream newswires.I guess the difference between us and the wingnuts is, if we were them, we'd keep repeating the story without question if we thought there was a political advantage to be had.
There've been other rumors flying around -- like this one from Debkafile. But Debkafile is about as reliable as raw intelligence and should be treated with the same skepticism. Actually, it's not just that it should be treated like raw intelligence, it ... well, that's for another day.
Let me be clear: I'm not saying there's nothing to this. I haven't had time to make any calls. Anything could be true. And it's entirely possible that there are dimensions to the intel leading to Saddam's capture, which haven't yet been revealed. But none of the publish accounts I've seen strike me as credible or even close to substantiated.
Over a span of two decades, from 1982 to 2002, OSHA investigated 1,242 of these horror stories — instances in which the agency itself concluded that workers had died because of their employer's "willful" safety violations. Yet in 93 percent of those cases, OSHA declined to seek prosecution, an eight-month examination of workplace deaths by The New York Times has found.
What is more, having avoided prosecution once, at least 70 employers willfully violated safety laws again, resulting in scores of additional deaths. Even these repeat violators were rarely prosecuted.
OSHA's reluctance to seek prosecution, The Times found, persisted even when employers had been cited before for the very same safety violation. It persisted even when the violations caused multiple deaths, or when the victims were teenagers. And it persisted even where reviews by administrative judges found abundant proof of willful wrongdoing.
Behind that reluctance, current and former OSHA officials say, is a bureaucracy that works at every level to thwart criminal referrals. They described a bureaucracy that fails to reward, and sometimes penalizes, those who push too hard for prosecution, where aggressive enforcement is suffocated by endless layers of review, where victims' families are frozen out but companies adeptly work the rules in their favor.
According to diplomats, relations between the allies have gone into "deep freeze" since the capture of Saddam Hussein last weekend.
President Bush was incensed that Mr Blair stole Washington's thunder by being the first Western leader to confirm that the former dictator had been arrested by US troops.
Downing Street rushed out Mr Blair's announcement before he had spoken to the American leader early last Sunday, when Mr Bush - six hours behind London - was still in bed.
Whitehall insiders confirmed that Mr Blair's decision was partly out of anger over a US veto on his proposed visit to British troops in Iraq during the Christmas holiday.
Presidential advisers in Washington wanted Mr Bush to be the sole leader to make a Christmas visit to troops in Baghdad and urged Downing Street to postpone any visit.
The US refused to co-operate on security arrangements for a Christmas visit by Mr Blair, who is going to spend the festive season with his family in the Egyptian resort of Sharm al-Sheikh.
Mr Blair and Mr Bush have had at least three phone conversations during the past seven days which Whitehall officials described as "increasingly terse".
To All Employees:Goodness, I'm feeling safer already. How about you?
1. The Department of Homeland Security has issued an upgraded advisory on terrorist activity. Unfortunately, increased security comes at the expense of being inconvenienced at times due to those measures. For this reason, we ask for your continued cooperation in this matter and ask that you review the following points as well as individual and family readiness plans in the attached document.
Our Security Staff will continue to handle [touch] each individual photo ID badge upon entering this building. All ID/Access badges must be displayed at all times.
If a stranger is seen in the office without a proper ID badge, either report it to a supervisor or call Security at extension XXXX.
Employees who are on break in the Courtyard Smoking Area should not admit anyone through those doors who does not have an ID. Employees who notice individuals without proper identification trying to gain access should immediately notify a supervisor or call Security at extension XXXX.
Employees should be reminded that the precincts of the federal reservation extend beyond the building to the perimeter fences and the parking lot. Employees and visitors are prohibited from bringing weapons on a federal reservation.
Parking permits must be displayed prominently on each vehicle in our lot. Parking is permitted on the main upper lot only. If you are missing your parking permit, you must apply immediately to Facilities Management (extension XXX) for a replacement. Parking in the lower areas is restricted to GSA, AEL, and fitness center employees only.
As directed by the Federal Protective Service, security officers will randomly inspect trunks of all vehicles entering the lot.
The attached document includes action that can be taken at your home or residence.
Thank you for your cooperation in this matter.
2. Questions regarding this matter may be referred to Management Staff on extension XXXX. Supervisors, please make sure this message gets to employees without e-mail access.
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