24 September 2004

Unsafe Harbor: GOP Cuts Taxes as It Fails to Protect America
By Matthew Brzezinski
Baltimore Sun, 23 September 2004
EXCERPT: Three years have passed since the United States started taking stock of its myriad vulnerabilities. In the interim, we have held innumerable commissions on our weaknesses and spent billions of dollars creating a government agency specifically tasked with redressing them. But what have we actually done to shore up our defenses? The short answer is not that much, sometimes nothing at all. Take the chemical plants that produce "nasty stuff," in the words of the BPD officer. There are 15,000 of them scattered around the country. Most are barely protected with a chain-link fence. Many are in areas with populations of over a million. A single rail car or tanker truck filled with 33,000 gallons of chlorine or ammonia could kill 100,000 people, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. A plant could wipe out an entire city. Following 9/11, bipartisan legislation was introduced in Washington that sought to codify perimeter and transport security of toxic chemicals. But a concerted lobbying effort by energy companies, worried about the extra costs involved, led Republican lawmakers to withdraw their support, and the Chemical Security Act died on the vine. Instead, Republican Sen. James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma proposed that chemical plants police themselves and that government have no oversight on safety regulations. As a result, virtually anyone can still gain entry to thousands of dangerous chemical sites around the country. It's not only the specter of a chemical Chernobyl that looms large over industrial port cities such as Baltimore. The danger of a radioactive device smuggled inside a shipping container, so chillingly captured in the Hollywood thriller The Sum of All Fears, remains largely undefended. Nearly 17 million cargo containers enter the country each year, 95 percent of them without any physical inspection whatsoever, and the United States still does not have adequate radiation detectors at its ports of entry. The hand-held personal radiation detectors used by U.S. Customs and Border Protection have proved woefully ineffective, according to Government Accountability Office inspector general reports -- unable even to distinguish between gamma radiation and the far more lethal neutrons emitted by plutonium and weapons-grade uranium. After 9/11, customs bought 4,000 of the PRDs, which are crude little Geiger counters that measure radiation at a close distance. More sophisticated fixed radiation portals -- next-generation Geiger counters that are 4 feet tall and scan all traffic that passes near them -- would solve some of the problem. But most of our ports don't have them. In fact, temporary portals had to be flown to Los Angeles/Long Beach, which handles 40 percent of all seaborne cargo container traffic, ahead of a media day and visit this summer by Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge. Why America's largest port didn't have one is baffling, especially given the relatively low cost of deploying such measures. It would cost roughly $290 million -- the equivalent of less than one day's spending on Iraq -- to outfit all our ports of entry with radiation portals. The 2005 budget, however, allots only $43 million for radiation portals. Where would the money be better spent?

Airport Screening Still Falls Short, Tests Find
By MATTHEW L. WALD
NYT, 24 September 2004
EXCERPT: Covert government tests last November showed that screeners were still missing some knives, guns and explosives carried through airport checkpoints, and the reasons involve equipment, training, procedures and management, according to a report by the inspector general of the Homeland Security Department. A Congressional aide who has been briefed about the report, which is classified, said it showed the test scores were roughly the same in November as in earlier tests. This might actually represent progress, the aide said, because the test had become more difficult, with the weapons "more artfully concealed." "It's improving but it's got a long, long way to go," said the aide, who asked not to be identified because he was describing details that were not made public. Of the objects that screeners are supposed to detect, the explosives are the most difficult , the aide said. Concern over explosives has risen since the destruction of two Russian airliners by Chechen suicide bombers in August.

Critics Say Proposed Senate Chemical Bill Leaves U.S. Vulnerable to Attack
BushGreenWatch, 23 September 2004
EXCERPT: Sometime in the next few weeks, the U.S. Senate is expected to take up, for the first time, the issue of how to protect Americans from terrorist attacks on domestic chemical plants. But environmental groups and unions worry that the main piece of legislation under consideration will provide no real security for chemical plants and is motivated by pre-election politics. "Senate Republicans are working to sneak an industry-friendly, do-nothing bill through the Senate to give President Bush a greenwash feather in his cap before the election," said Rick Hind, legislative director for the toxics campaign at Greenpeace. According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), there are more than 100 chemical facilities in the U.S. that would each put at least one million people at risk were they to come under attack. The agency estimates that more than 750 facilities in the U.S. place at least 100,000 people at risk from chemical releases. Numerous studies reveal substantial security gaps at many of these facilities.

Flip-Flopping Charge Unsupported by Facts
Kerry always pushed global cooperation, war as last resort
By Marc Sandalow
San Francisco Chronical, 23 September 2004
EXCERPT: No argument is more central to the Republican attack on Sen. John Kerry than the assertion that the Democrat has flip-flopped on Iraq. President Bush, seated beside Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, said Tuesday: "My opponent has taken so many different positions on Iraq that his statements are hardly credible at all.'' The allegation is the basis of a new Bush campaign TV ad that shows the Democratic senator from Massachusetts windsurfing to the strains of a Strauss waltz as a narrator intones: "Kerry voted for the Iraq war, opposed it, supported it and now opposes it again.'' Yet an examination of Kerry's words in more than 200 speeches and statements, comments during candidate forums and answers to reporters' questions does not support the accusation. As foreign policy emerged as a dominant issue in the Democratic primaries and later in the general election, Kerry clung to a nuanced, middle-of-the road -- yet largely consistent -- approach to Iraq. Over and over, Kerry enthusiastically supported a confrontation with Saddam Hussein even as he aggressively criticized Bush for the manner in which he did so.
SEE ALSO: An Australian Green on Bush vs. Kerry (ZNet)

The Bush Standard On Forgeries
"The White House is now saying that it's imperative to get to the bottom of who's behind the CBS Memo forgeries. And they're right. But the US government has never made any serious effort to find out who is behind the Niger uranium forgeries.  Why not?"
     --Josh Marshall, Talking Points Memo

The Story CBS Didn't Run
Here¹s the Piece that '60 Minutes' Killed for Its Report on the Bush Guard Documents
By Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball
Newsweek via Common Dreams, 23 September 2004
EXCERPT: In its rush to air its now discredited story about President George W. Bush¹s National Guard service, CBS bumped another sensitive piece slated for the same "60 Minutes" broadcast: a half-hour segment about how the U.S. government was snookered by forged documents purporting to show Iraqi efforts to purchase uranium from Niger. The journalistic juggling at CBS provides an ironic counterpoint to the furor over apparently bogus documents involving Bush's National Guard service. One unexpected consequence of the network's decision was to wipe out a chance -- at least for the moment -- for greater public scrutiny of a more consequential forgery that played a role in building the Bush administration's case to invade Iraq. A team of "60 Minutes" correspondents and consulting reporters spent more than six months investigating the Niger uranium documents fraud, CBS sources tell NEWSWEEK. The group landed the first ever on-camera interview with Elisabetta Burba, the Italian journalist who first obtained the phony documents, as well as her elusive source, Rocco Martino, a mysterious Roman businessman with longstanding ties to European intelligence agencies. Although the edited piece never ended up identifying Martino by name, the story, narrated by "60 Minutes" correspondent Ed Bradley, asked tough questions about how the White House came to embrace the fraudulent documents and why administration officials chose to include a 16-word reference to the questionable uranium purchase in President Bush's 2003 State of the Union speech.

Leaving Children Behind
Exam privatization threatens public schools
By Ben Clarke
CorpWatch, 23 September 2004
EXCERPT: Under [No Child Left Behind], if a school fails to improve math and reading test scores within three years, a portion of its federal funding will be diverted to "parental choice" tutoring programs further weakening the schools ability to improve. These outsourced programs are run by private companies such as Educate Inc. owner of Sylvan Learning Centers whose revenues have grown from $180 to $250 million in the past three years and whose profits shot up 250% last year. Ironically, while school districts will be required to certify that the percentage of their teaching staff who have a teaching credentials is increasing, private tutoring companies, the replacement recipients of tutoring funds, will be under no such requirement to prove that their staff even have such credentials. The big impact of NCLB still lies in the future. Like the so-called welfare reform act, it will be some years down the road that the real price will be paid. After five years, the act requires that low-performing schools be converted to charter schools, turned over to a private management company or be taken over by the state.
SEE ALSO: Walking the Child Care Tightrope (TomPaine.com)

Cat Stevens 'Victimised' Over US Deportation
Adam Jay and agencies
The Guardian, 23 September 2004
EXCERPT: Yusuf Islam, the charity worker and pop singer formerly known as Cat Stevens, today arrived back in the UK saying he felt "victimised" by being barred from entering the US. His return followed a complaint by the foreign secretary, Jack Straw, to the US secretary of state, Colin Powell, over his treatment. Mr Straw, in New York for the UN general assembly meeting, told Mr Powell "this action should not have been taken" over the former singer, who was known as Cat Stevens until 1977.  The Foreign Office, however, declined to confirm whether "this action" referred to Mr Islam's detention or his inclusion on a US security watch list. Yesterday, the Foreign Office had refused to become involved in the case, saying "the reasons for his detention and return are obviously a matter for the US, and not for us". Mr Islam flew to Heathrow airport after being escorted from a London to Washington flight on Tuesday and interrogated by the FBI. His United Airlines flight was diverted 600 miles to Bangor, Maine after the US Transportation Security Agency was told that he was on board. US officials said Mr Islam was on the watch list because of suspicions he was associated with potential terrorists. He was barred from entering Israel in 2000 following claims he had donated money to Hamas - a claim he denied - and last visited the US in May. "I'm totally shocked," Mr Islam told reporters at Heathrow. "Everybody knows who I am. I am no secret figure. Everybody knows my campaigning for charity, for peace. There's got to be a whole lot of explanation."

23 September 2004

AUDIO LINK
Kerry: President Made 'Wrong Choices' in Iraq
Interview
NPR's All Things Considered, 22 September 2004
As violence continues to escalate in Baghdad, Iraq remains a central issue in the presidential election. In an interview with NPR's Robert Siegel, Sen. John Kerry assails the Bush administration's Iraq policies and stresses the need for international support. "Over the course of the last two years, the president's made the wrong choices," Kerry says. "[International support] is the only way to ultimately be successful… The United States of America can't do this alone." If elected president, Kerry says he will have an easier time garnering global backing. "This president has no credibility with those countries. The leadership has been arrogant and disastrous."

2 Iraq Views, 2 Campaigns
By DAVID E. SANGER
NYT, 22 September 2004
EXCERPT:  To hear President Bush and John Kerry argue bitterly in the past two days about the American mission in Iraq is to wonder if they are talking about the same war, or even the same country. At the marble podium of the United Nations, Mr. Bush on Tuesday morning described an Iraq that "has rejoined the community of nations" and is well on the way to being "secure, democratic, federal and free" if the world, and America's allies, do not lose their nerve. It was the kind of declaration that prompts cheers at campaign rallies; at the United Nations, it was greeted with the General Assembly's customary silence.
The day before, just two miles to the south, Mr. Kerry spoke of an invasion of Iraq that "has created a crisis of historic proportions," and warned that "if we do not change course there is the prospect of a war with no end in sight." He went on to describe a country that bore no resemblance to the one Mr. Bush portrays, one of bombings, beheadings, rampant unemployment and few allies sharing the burden. It is no accident. Those diametrically opposed images reflect diametrically opposed strategies for the final six weeks of the presidential campaign. Mr. Bush and his aides are determined to focus the campaign debate on the decision to liberate Iraq from Saddam Hussein's brutal rule and make the argument that if Mr. Kerry had been in office for the past four years, the dictator would still be in his palace. Mr. Bush moved from the vast hall of the General Assembly, where the wounds of his decision to go to war without explicit Security Council approval are still raw, to the first of three days of meetings with Ayad Allawi, the interim Iraqi prime minister, whose success or failure at converting Iraq to a working democracy may shape Mr. Bush's own legacy.
Mr. Kerry is equally determined to take the Iraq debate in a different direction - one that focuses on the here and now, on the "arrogant and incompetent" management of the war since Mr. Hussein was ousted. His campaign has decided that its last hope of undercutting the image of Mr. Bush as a competent war leader is to return relentlessly to the questions, as Mr. Kerry puts it, of why "terrorists are pouring across the border" into Iraq, why so few of America's allies have joined the effort and why Iran and North Korea have advanced their nuclear programs while the administration has been preoccupied with Iraq. "The president wants to shift the topic, and I'm not going to let him shift the topic," Mr. Kerry said Tuesday afternoon in Florida, responding as quickly to Mr. Bush's speech at the United Nations as Mr. Bush did to Mr. Kerry's speech on Monday. "The president needs to get to the world of reality," Mr. Kerry concluded, a line he is repeating often these days. He is trying to nurture an image in the voters' minds that Mr. Bush has begun to believe his administration's own spin about how well the war is going.

AUDIO LINK
Interview with Former White House Adviser Richard A. Clarke
NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross, 22 September 2004
Clarke, a former member of the National Security Council says the Bush administration missed opportunities to avert the Sept. 11 crisis. His controversial book, Against All Enemies: America's War on Terror, is now out in paperback.

Insult to Intelligence
Let’s hope Porter Goss is a partisan hack. The alternative -- that he’s entirely incompetent regarding intelligence issues -- would be far worse.
By Sam Rosenfeld
The American Prospect, 22 September 2004
EXCERPT: Representative Porter Goss endured six and a half hours of questioning during the Senate Intelligence Committee confirmation hearings for his nomination as the new director of central intelligence (DCI), leading up to today’s all but preordained confirmation by the full Senate. Democrats ducked a fight they feared would leave them open to GOP charges of obstructionism and disregard for America’s security.
Democratic panelists had, however, promised some “tough questioning” of Goss during the hearing, and Senators Carl Levin and Ron Wyden did lead the way in challenging his history of partisanship and feckless oversight as the 7-year chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI). They got a few good digs in, to be sure. But there are some more questions that should have been asked before today’s confirmation.

Republicans Push Ahead to Extend Tax Cuts
AP in NYT, 22 September 2004
EXCERPT: Suddenly, legislation to extend three popular middle-class tax cuts is being eyed as a way to extend other expiring tax breaks, from research credits for companies to credits to promote economic development at ground zero in New York. Republican tax writers on a joint House-Senate conference committee are seeking to add business tax breaks to a proposal that originally dealt only with middle-class taxpayers. But the entire effort ran into unexpected roadblocks Wednesday. As a result, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Charles Grassley, who is leading the negotiations, adjourned for several hours of behind-the-scenes discussions. The delays revolved, in part, over developing a Republican response to Democratic efforts led by Sen. Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark., to make sure that some 4 million low-income families, including members of the military, qualify for a refundable child tax credit.

AUDIO LINK
Felon Voting Ban Takes Toll on Minorities
NPR's All Things Considered, 22 September 2004
Two new studies show that state laws that prevent felons from voting are having a dramatic effect on voting in minority areas. In Atlanta, Ga., one out of every seven black men cannot vote due to felony convictions. Josh Levs reports.
SEE ALSO:
Millions Blocked from Voting in U.S. Election
By Alan Elsner
Reuters, 22 September 2004
EXCERPT: Millions of U.S. citizens, including a disproportionate number of black voters, will be blocked from voting in the Nov. 2 presidential election because of legal barriers, faulty procedures or dirty tricks, according to civil rights and legal experts. The largest category of those legally disenfranchised consists of almost 5 million former felons who have served prison sentences and been deprived of the right to vote under laws that have roots in the post-Civil War 19th century and were aimed at preventing black Americans from voting. But millions of other votes in the 2000 presidential election were lost due to clerical and administrative errors while civil rights organizations have cataloged numerous tactics aimed at suppressing black voter turnout. Polls consistently find that black Americans overwhelmingly vote for Democrats.
"There are individuals and officials who are actively trying to stop people from voting who they think will vote against their party and that nearly always means stopping black people from voting Democratic," said Mary Frances Berry, head of the U.S. Commission on Human Rights.
Vicky Beasley, a field officer for People for the American Way, listed some of the ways voters have been "discouraged" from voting. "In elections in Baltimore in 2002 and in Georgia last year, black voters were sent fliers saying anyone who hadn't paid utility bills or had outstanding parking tickets or were behind on their rent would be arrested at polling stations. It happens in every election cycle," she said. In a mayoral election in Philadelphia last year, people pretending to be plainclothes police officers stood outside some polling stations asking people to identify themselves. There have also been reports of mysterious people videotaping people waiting in line to vote in black neighborhoods. Minority voters may be deterred from voting simply by election officials demanding to see drivers' licenses before handing them a ballot, according to Spencer Overton, who teaches law at George Washington University. The federal government does not require people to produce a photo identification unless they are first-time voters who registered by mail. "African Americans are four to five times less likely than whites to have a photo ID," Overton said at a recent briefing on minority disenfranchisement. Courtenay Strickland of the Americans Civil Liberties Union testified to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights last week that at a primary election in Florida last month, many people were wrongly turned away when they could not produce identification.

22 September 2004

News for our many patriotic conservative readers...
From the National Archives: New Proof of Vietnam War Atrocities
Swift Boat Swill
by Nicholas Turse
Village Voice, 21 September 2004
EXCERPT: John Kerry is being pilloried for his shocking Senate testimony 34 years ago that many U.S. soldiers—not just a few "rogues"—were committing atrocities against the Vietnamese. U.S. military records that were classified for decades but are now available in the National Archives back Kerry up and put the lie to his critics. Contrary to what those critics, including the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, have implied, Kerry was speaking on behalf of many soldiers when he testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 22, 1971, and said this:

They told stories that at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam, in addition to the normal ravage of war and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.

The archives have hundreds of files of official U.S. military investigations of such atrocities committed by American soldiers. I've pored over those records—which were classified for decades—for my Columbia University dissertation and, now, this Voice article. The exact number of investigated allegations of atrocities is unknown, as is the number of such barbaric incidents that occurred but weren't investigated. Some war crimes, like the Tiger Force atrocities exposed last year by The Toledo Blade, have only come to light decades later. Others never will. But there are plentiful records to back up Kerry's 1971 testimony point by point. Following (with the names removed or abbreviated) are examples, directly from the archives...
On its website, the SBVT tries to debunk the Winter Soldier Investigation by using the same rhetoric that apologists for the Vietnam War have long employed: They paint the vets who attended the Detroit meeting as a parade of fake veterans offering false testimony. "None of the Winter Soldier 'witnesses' Kerry cited in his Senate testimony less than three months later were willing to sign affidavits, and their gruesome stories lacked the names, dates, and places that would allow their claims to be tested," the SBVT claims. "Few were willing to cooperate with military investigators."
While numerous authors have repeatedly advanced such assertions, U.S. military documents tell a radically different story. According to the formerly classified army records, 46 soldiers who testified at the WSI made allegations that, in the eyes of U.S. Army investigators, "merited further inquiry." As of March 1972, the army's CID noted that of the 46 allegations, "only 43 complainants have been identified" by investigators. "Only" 43 of 46? That means at least 93 percent of the veterans surveyed were real, not fake. Moreover, according to official records, CID investigators attempted to contact 41 people who testified at the Detroit session, which occurred between January 31 and February 2, 1971. Five couldn't be located, according to records. Of the remaining 36, 31 submitted to interviews—hardly the "few" asserted by SBVT. Moreover, as Gerald Nicosia has noted in his mammoth tome Home to War, "A complete transcript of the Winter Soldier testimony was sent to the Pentagon, and the military never refuted a word of it."

Kerry Accuses Bush of 'Reckless Mistakes'
By Glen Johnson and Anne E. Kornblut
Boston Globe, 21 September 2004
EXCERPT:  Senator John F. Kerry yesterday sharply escalated his criticism of President Bush on Iraq, accusing him of ''stubborn incompetence" and warning that if Bush is reelected, ''he will repeat, somewhere else, the same reckless mistakes that have made America less secure than we can or should be."  The Democratic presidential nominee accused Bush of offering ''23 different rationales" for the war, the principal two of which -- the presence of weapons of mass destruction and a possible link between Saddam Hussein's regime and the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 -- have not been proved. Kerry noted the rising number of American casualties and said insurgent attacks have rendered whole sections of Iraq ''no-go zones" for American troops. Kerry, who in October 2002 voted in favor of a congressional resolution authorizing the war, said Bush rushed into Iraq without the backing of allies, preparing a postwar plan, or properly equipping US forces -- ''None of which I would have done." ''Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator who deserves his own special place in hell," Kerry told a supportive audience assembled at New York University, downtown from where Bush is to address the United Nations General Assembly today. ''But that was not, in itself, a reason to go to war. The satisfaction we take in his downfall does not hide this fact: We have traded a dictator for a chaos that has left America less secure." He blamed Bush for ''colossal failures of judgment." ''This is stubborn incompetence," he said.

US Must Justify Cuba Detentions, Judge Says
By Carol D. Leonnig, Washington Post
Boston Globe, 22 September 2004
EXCERPT: A federal judge ordered the government yesterday to justify why it has been holding detainees in a US military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for nearly three years without charges and explain why they should not be released. In a move designed to break stalled negotiations over when the detainees will have their day in federal court, US District Court Judge Joyce Hens Green said the Defense Department must provide the charge or factual basis for detaining each of the 60 detainees who have sued the government, starting immediately and finishing by Oct. 18. The judge also gave the administration an Oct. 4 deadline for filing written arguments on why each of those detainees should not be released. Green's order was the first public sign of movement in the case since the Supreme Court ruled three months ago that the alleged Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters detained at the prison have the right to contest their imprisonment in US courts. The government began transferring hundreds of men captured in the Afghan war to the US Navy base at Guantanamo in early 2002, accusing them of being "enemy combatants" and contending that it was not required to formally charge them or allow them to see attorneys. Officials cited security concerns in holding the detainees incommunicado. But the Supreme Court disagreed in its June decision, and several dozen detainees have since filed suit in federal court in Washington, demanding hearings.

Years of drugs and alcohol takes its toll
Bush Confuses Terrorists' Names Again
AP in Boston Globe, 22 September 2004
EXCERPT:  President Bush might say it was a slip of the tongue when he confused the names of two terrorists in a campaign speech yesterday in New Hampshire. Still, he's made the same misstatement at least 10 times before.
During remarks in Derry, N.H., Bush said the late terrorist Abu Nidal killed Leon Klinghoffer, a 69-year-old Jewish American who was tossed, along with his wheelchair, off the hijacked cruise liner Achille Lauro in 1985. "Do you remember Abu Nidal?" Bush asked the crowd. "He's the guy that killed Leon Klinghoffer. Leon Klinghoffer was murdered because of his religion. Abu Nidal was in Baghdad, as was his organization." He repeated the mistake last evening at a campaign event in New York City: "Abu Nidal was a cold-blooded terrorist killer who killed Leon Klinghoffer."
Actually, it was Abul Abbas, the leader of a violent Palestinian group, who killed Klinghoffer. The White House had no comment on the mix-up. [BWUSA emphasis]

Another attempted 'internal whitewash'
C.I.A. Review Is Critical of Prewar Iraq Analysis
By DOUGLAS JEHL
NYT, 22 September 2004
EXCERPT: A review by the Central Intelligence Agency has identified serious weaknesses in analytical work on Iraq but continues to hold that the prewar conclusion that Iraq possessed illicit weapons was reasonable based on the information available at the time, an internal document shows. We're not kidding ourselves," John E. McLaughlin, the acting director of central intelligence, said Tuesday in an hourlong interview in his office at the agency's headquarters here. "Reasonable doesn't mean we were right." But the description of the prewar conclusions as reasonable is very different from the judgment reached unanimously in July by the Senate Intelligence Committee, whose report described the conclusions as having been unwarranted and unfounded.

Protecting the Homeland from the "Peace Train"
The Former Cat Stevens Turned Away from US by Homeland Security
Associated Press, 21 September 2004
EXCERPT: A London-to-Washington flight was diverted to Maine on Tuesday when it was discovered passenger Yusuf Islam - formerly known as singer Cat Stevens - was on a government watch list and barred from entering the country, federal officials said. United Airlines Flight 919 was en route to Dulles International Airport when the match was made between a passenger and a name on the watch list, said Nico Melendez, a spokesman for the Transportation Security Administration. The plane was met by federal agents at Maine's Bangor International Airport around 3 p.m., Melendez said. Homeland Security Department spokesman Dennis Murphy identified the passenger as Islam. "He was interviewed and denied admission to the United States on national security grounds," Murphy said, and would be put on the first available flight out of the country Wednesday.

House slow rolling investigation of DeLay
3 DeLay Aides Facing Charges in Fund Inquiry
By GLEN JUSTICE and SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
NYT, 21 September 2004
EXCERPT: Three aides who helped run a political action committee created by the House majority leader, Tom DeLay, were indicted by a grand jury in Texas on Tuesday on charges that included raising illegal corporate contributions and funneling them to state candidates during the 2002 elections. Eight companies were also charged, including Sears Roebuck & Company and Cracker Barrel Old Country Store Inc. The 32 separate indictments sprang from a two-year investigation by local prosecutors into Texans for a Republican Majority P.A.C., a committee created by Mr. DeLay that spent $1.5 million to help Republicans gain control of the Texas House. The Republicans then used that power to carve Texas into new Congressional districts that political analysts say will bring them at least five new seats in this year's elections. The charges against the aides come at a time when Mr. DeLay himself is under investigation by the House ethics committee over accusations of improper fund-raising. News of the indictments led to fresh calls for the committee to move forward with its inquiry. At his regular weekly press briefing on Tuesday, Mr. DeLay dismissed the indictment as politically motivated... ...critics say that the charges are an ominous development for one of the most powerful figures in Congress, whose fund-raising strategies have been repeatedly questioned by Democrats and campaign finance watchdogs over the years, even as he rose through the Republican ranks to become the second-most powerful Republican in the House.
"This first round of indictments reaches directly into DeLay's inner circle,'' said Craig McDonald, executive director of Texans for Public Justice, the group that filed a complaint that helped lead to the Texas investigation. "The cloud hovering over DeLay just got several shades darker.''
The indictments allege that Texans for a Republican Majority P.A.C. raised corporate contributions that were illegal under Texas laws and directed the money to state candidates by using other organizations as a conduit, according to prosecution documents.
The indictments say the P.A.C. gave $190,000 to a committee controlled by the Republican National Committee, along with a list suggesting which state candidates the committee should contribute to and in what amounts, documents say. The indictment says the Republican National Committee, through the same committee, later made $190,000 in contributions to seven candidates for the Texas House of Representatives.
James W. Ellis, 47, of Virginia, a top DeLay aide and one of the committee's officers, was charged with money laundering in a single indictment, documents say. The indictment alleges that he was the one who presented the check and the list to the Republican National Committee. The committee's executive director, John D. Colyandro, 40, of Texas, was charged with illegally accepting corporate contributions in 13 indictments and a 14th indictment charged him with money laundering, documents say. And a fund-raiser for the committee, Warren M. Robold, 48, of Maryland, was changed in nine indictments with soliciting and receiving illegal corporate contributions, documents say. Officials at the Republican National Committee could not be reached for comment on Tuesday. [BWUSA emphasis]

True Conservatives Would Back Kerry
Robert Scheer
LA Times, 22 September 2004
EXCERPT: If they were true to their principles, moderate Republicans and consistent conservatives would be supporting John Kerry. Instead, their acquiescence to the reckless whims of George W. Bush marks a descent into that political abyss of opportunism where partisanship is everything and principle nothing.
How else to explain their cynical support for this shallow adventurer, a phony lightweight who has bled the Treasury dry while incompetently squandering the lives of young Americans in a needless imperial campaign? If Al Gore had been knighted president by the Supreme Court and overseen this mess instead of Dubya, the rational remnant of the Republican Party would be rightly calling for his head. Instead, a century's worth of conservative ideals are tossed out the window for political expediency. Soaring budget deficits suddenly don't matter, and not a tear is shed for the wasted surplus accumulated during Bill Clinton's tenure. Despite two huge tax cuts for the super-rich, Bush turns out to be a big believer in that old GOP boogeyman, Big Government. An equal-opportunity spendthrift, he throws billions into the sinkhole of Iraq as easily as he doles out corporate handouts.

21 September 2004

Stealth PACs Pollute Political Process
Most support GOP rightwing conservatives
Public Citizen, 20 September 2004
EXCERPT: Numerous non-profit groups with 501(c) tax status exploit loose regulations and lax oversight to spend millions of dollars influencing elections while keeping secret the identities of their donors. The New Stealth PACs, a publicly accessible database created by Public Citizen, shines a spotlight on the attempts of these groups to influence elections.  ...Exploiting loose regulations and lax oversight, "New Stealth PACs" have poured millions of dollars into elections without revealing the identities of their donors or how they spend their money to influence elections, according to a new report by Public Citizen.Public Citizen estimates that at least $91 million – and almost certainly many millions more – was spent by 26 non-profit groups registered under Section 501(c) of the tax code to influence at least 117 contests in 2000 and 2002.  In 2004, at least thirteen 501(c) groups have been active.

• Read the press release 
• Read this report, The New Stealth PACs: Tracking 501(c) Non-Profit Groups Active in Elections.
• Read a letter to the IRS regarding concerns about electioneering activity by some 501(c) non-profit groups.
• Read a letter to the Federal Election Commission asking the agency to give due attention to the findings of our report.
• View a chart of the New Stealth PACs' 2004 electioneering activities, organized by states.

In Harshest Critique Yet, Kerry Attacks Bush Over War in Iraq
By JODI WILGOREN and ELISABETH BUMILLER
NYT, 21 September 2004
EXCERPT: Charging President Bush with "stubborn incompetence" on the war in Iraq, Senator John Kerry yesterday made his most definitive statement yet that he would not have invaded when Mr. Bush did as he delivered a point-by-point indictment of the administration's Iraq policies. "Invading Iraq has created a crisis of historic proportions, and, if we do not change course, there is the prospect of a war with no end in sight," Mr. Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee, told an invited audience of party advocates at New York University. "Today, President Bush tells us that he would do everything all over again, the same way," Mr. Kerry said. "How can he possibly be serious? Is he really saying that if we knew there were no imminent threat, no weapons of mass destruction, no ties to Al Qaeda, the United States should have invaded Iraq? My answer, resoundingly, is no, because a commander in chief's first responsibility is to make a wise and responsible decision to keep America safe." While Mr. Kerry said Saddam Hussein "deserves his own special place in hell," he argued, "we have traded a dictator for a chaos that has left America less secure." The 47-minute speech was Mr. Kerry's most stinging critique to date of what he called Mr. Bush's "colossal failures of judgment" on Iraq. Mr. Kerry also laid out, as he has at other points in the campaign, four broad steps that he urged Mr. Bush to take immediately: repairing alliances, training Iraqi security forces, improving reconstruction and ensuring elections. "This is what I would do if I were president today," Mr. Kerry said. "But we can't afford to wait until January and I can't tell you what I will find in Iraq on Jan. 20."
SEE ALSO:
Kerry Echoes GOP Senators on Iraq War
by Jim Lobe
Antiwar.com, 21 September 2004
EXCERPT: "The worst thing we can do is hold ourselves hostage to some grand illusion that we're winning," said Nebraska Republican and former Vietnam veteran Sen. Chuck Hagel during a widely noted hearing last week. "Right now we are not winning. Things are getting worse." In unusually harsh language, the normally bland and ultra-polite Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman, Indiana Republican Sen. Richard Lugar, joined in, complaining about the "dancing-in-the-street crowd" within the administration, notably the vice president's office and Pentagon political appointees, for unrealistic assumptions about how Iraqis would greet a U.S. occupation. On Sunday, Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain, who has strongly backed Bush's reelection despite a close friendship with Kerry, also noted that the administration had made "serious mistakes" in Iraq due mostly to its failure to deploy more troops there. Yet another influential Republican, Sen. Lindsey Graham, assailed Bush for being "stubborn about troops. We do not need to paint a rosy scenario for the American people," he said. The Republican attacks were also provoked by a series of leaks of classified intelligence documents that depicted a far bleaker outlook in Iraq than what Bush was offering publicly. Both the leaks and the Republican attacks suddenly made Bush appear a great deal more vulnerable on Iraq than just seven days before. In his address Monday, Kerry deliberately echoed many of the Republicans' complaints, even citing Hagel, Lugar and McCain by name. Bush was "in denial," he said, noting that before, during, and after the war, "he hitched his wagon to the ideologues who surround him, filtering out those who disagreed, including leaders of his own party and the uniformed military." The result, he declared, included "colossal errors of judgment" during and after the war for which no one was held accountable. "In fact the only officials who lost their jobs over Iraq," he said, "were the ones who told the truth." Despite the fact that the major justifications for the war – such as Hussein's alleged buildup of weapons of mass destruction and his ties to al Qaeda – have since turned out to have had little or no factual basis, "President Bush tells us that he would do everything all over again, the same way. How can he possibly be serious?" Kerry asked.

Bush Squeezes the Middle Class
More US Families Struggle to Stay on Track as Middle Class Jobs Vanish
By Griff Witte
Washington Post, 20 September 2004
EXCERPT:  This transformation is no longer just about factory workers, whose ranks have declined by 5 million in the past 25 years as manufacturing moved to countries with cheaper labor. All kinds of jobs that pay in the middle range -- Clark's $17 an hour, or about $35,000 a year, was smack in the center -- are vanishing, including computer-code crunchers, produce managers, call-center operators, travel agents and office clerks. The jobs have had one thing in common: For people with a high school diploma and perhaps a bit of college, they can be a ticket to a modest home, health insurance, decent retirement and maybe some savings for the kids' tuition. Such jobs were a big reason America's middle class flourished in the second half of the 20th century. Now what those jobs share is vulnerability. The people who fill them have become replaceable by machines, workers overseas or temporary employees at home who lack benefits. And when they are replaced, many don't know where to turn. "We don't know what the next big thing will be. When the manufacturing jobs were going away, we could tell people to look for tech jobs. But now the tech jobs are moving away, too," said Lori G. Kletzer, an economics professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz. "What's the comparative advantage that America retains? We don't have the answer to that. It gives us a very insecure feeling." The government doesn't specifically track how many jobs like Clark's have gone away. But other statistics more than hint at the scope of the change. For example, there are now about as many temporary, on-call or contract workers in the United States as there are members of labor unions. Another sign: Of the 2.7 million jobs lost during and after the recession in 2001, the vast majority have been restructured out of existence, according to a study by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Each layoff or shutdown has its own immediate cause, but nearly all ultimately can be traced to two powerful forces that reinforce each other: global competition and rapid advances in technology.

CIA Nominee Says Iraq Threat Was Perhaps Overstated
By DOUGLAS JEHL
NYT, 21 September 2004
EXCERPT: Representative Porter J. Goss, the nominee to become director of central intelligence, said on Monday that some prewar statements by senior Bush administration officials might well have overstated available intelligence about the threat posed by Iraq. Under sharp questioning from a Senate Democrat, Mr. Goss, a Republican from Florida, said he agreed that statements by Vice President Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice that linked Iraq to the Sept. 11 attacks; to Al Qaeda; and to an active nuclear weapons program appeared to have gone beyond what was spelled out in intelligence reports at the time. Mr. Goss's concession could fuel Democratic criticisms that Mr. Bush and his advisers overstated the threat posed by Iraq before the war. Democrats failed this year to persuade Republicans to include conclusions related to the administration's use of intelligence in the Senate Intelligence Committee report on Iraq that was completed in July.

Like Halliburton, Cheney's Wyoming is a big winner...
Bush Has Failed to Deliver Jobs in 49 of 50 States
Job Watch, 17 September 2004
EXCERPT: Recent months have brought the overdue news that a majority of states finally have growing payrolls. But as welcome as these reports have been, job growth in most instances is still insufficient. In the so-called "jobless recovery" of the early 1990s, 33 months after that recession ended, only nine states still had fewer jobs than when the recession started. There was a strong regional pattern‹the nine states were California and eight states around the northeastern part of the country. The current jobless recovery is a much different story. By August 2004, the current recession has also been over for 33 months, but the jobs picture across the country is very different. Thirty-two states, spread across the country, are still in the jobs hole. In some cases, the job deficit is still severe: Colorado, for example, is still down over 70,000 jobs (3% of employment) and Ohio has lost over 224,000 jobs (4% of employment). Simply looking at the number of jobs, however, understates the severity of the shortfall. For example, while Texas has 93,000 fewer jobs compared to the start of the recession, the working-age population has grown by over 5%. In order to have kept up with a growing population, the state of Texas would need over 600,000 more jobs than it actually has. And in all but one (Alaska) of the 18 states with more jobs than when the recession began, job growth has been insufficient to keep up with population growth. So while Wisconsin has 2,000 more jobs than when the recession began, it will need to add over 26,000 jobs per month for the rest of 2004 in order to have enough jobs by the end of the year to account for the growth in population over that time. (Wisconsin has only added an average of 7,000 jobs a month in the last six months.)

Portrait of Bush in '72: Entitled, Irresponsible Dropout
By Sara Rimer, Ralph Blumenthal and Raymond Bonner
New York Times, 20 September 2004
EXCERPT: Nineteen seventy-two was the year George W. Bush dropped off the radar screen. He abandoned his once-prized status as a National Guard pilot by failing to appear for a required physical. He sought temporary reassignment from the Texas Air National Guard to an Alabama unit but for six months did not show up for training. He signed on as an official in the losing campaign of a Republican Senate candidate in Alabama, and even there he left few impressions other than as an amiable bachelor with a good tennis game and a famous father. "To say he brought in a bunch of initiatives and bright ideas," said a fellow campaign worker, Devere McLennan, "no he didn't." This year of inconsequence has grown increasingly consequential for President Bush because of persistent, unanswered questions about his National Guard service - why he failed to take his pilot's physical and whether he fulfilled his commitment to the Guard. If anything, those issues became still murkier this past week, with the controversy over the authenticity of four documents disclosed by CBS News and its program "60 Minutes" purporting to shed light on that Guard record. Still, a wider examination of his life in 1972, based on dozens of interviews and other documents released by the White House over the years, yields a portrait of a young man like many other young men of privilege in that turbulent time - entitled, unanchored and safe from combat, bouncing from a National Guard slot made possible by his family's prominence to a political job arranged through his father. In a speech on Tuesday at a National Guard convention, Mr. Bush said he was "proud to be one of them," and in his autobiography he writes that his service taught him respect for the chain of command. But a review of records shows that not only did he miss months of duty in 1972, but that he also may have been improperly awarded credit for service, making possible an early honorable discharge so he could turn his attention to a new interest: Harvard Business School.
SEE ALSO: Bush's Top-Secret 'AWOL' Mission, Revealed (BushWhackedUSA)

Will a real conservative please stand up?
Republican Senator Says He May Not Support Bush
Reuters, 21 September 2004
EXCERPT: U.S. Sen. Lincoln Chafee, a Republican moderate from Rhode Island, said on Monday he might not vote for President Bush in the Nov. 2 election. Chafee stressed, however, that he has no plans to bolt his party, and that if he does not back Bush he will write in the name of another Republican. His spokesman Stephen Hourahan said afterward that if Chafee does write in a name it would be that of Bush's father, former President Bush. "I'll look at my options," Chafee said in a brief interview on Capitol Hill after discussing his indecision about the current president earlier in the day with reporters in his home state. Asked if he might not vote for the president, Chafee said: "That's accurate." His office said this has been his position for months, though it has gotten little, if any, attention in Washington. "There is no secret that on some very important issues I have difference with the current administration," Chafee said, listing abortion rights, the environment and war in Iraq.

The House's Fear of Tom DeLay
NYT editorial, 20 September 2004
EXCERPT: The House ethics committee, ever the Capitol's hibernating watchdog, has been dithering for months about allegations that the majority leader, Tom DeLay, abused his office when he engineered the gerrymander of Texas House seats to cushion his Republican edge in Congress. The committee should have at least approved a formal inquiry by now, but the latest reports indicate that the issue will soon be deep-sixed as the Republican Congress shows no appetite for investigating Mr. DeLay, one of Washington's most feared and bare-knuckled partisans.
Committee leaders claim to be still fact-gathering, but it has becoming clear that their mission is to dismiss this hot potato yet not seem cowardly about it. One gambit is called the "option of last resort" under ethics rules: punting the issue to the evenly divided panel. Unless there's a profile in courage in the wings, this would mean a 5-to-5 deadlock on party lines and no inquiry. The "option of last resort" is really a political magic wand to make the duties of office vaporize.
The far better option is to appoint an outside counsel to look into the charges, as was done in earlier ethics investigations of Speakers Jim Wright and Newt Gingrich. Mr. DeLay's role in the redistricting power play, right down to his personal visit to lobby the Austin statehouse, is a matter of record. What is in dispute are the charges from one of the Democratic losers in the gerrymander, Representative Chris Bell, that Mr. DeLay improperly offered favors for campaign donations, laundered funds to bolster his party clout in Texas and sicced federal agencies on runaway Democratic lawmakers who boycotted the state redistricting vote.