12 May 2005

Terror Suspects Sent to Egypt by the Dozens, Panel Reports
By DAVID JOHNSTON
NYT, 12 May 2005
The United States and other countries have forcibly sent dozens of terror suspects to Egypt, according to a report released Wednesday by Human Rights Watch. The rights group and the State Department have both said Egypt regularly uses extreme interrogation methods on detainees. The group said it had documented 63 cases since 1994 in which suspected Islamic militants were sent to Egypt for detention and interrogation. The figures do not include people seized after the attacks of September 2001 who were sent mainly by Middle East countries and American intelligence authorities. The report said the total number sent to Egypt since the Sept. 11 attacks could be as high as 200 people. American officials have not disputed that people have been sent to countries where detainees are subjected to extreme interrogation tactics but have denied that anyone had been sent to another country for the purpose of torture. Among other countries to which the United States has sent detainees are Jordan, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Syria. Joe Stork, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch, said sending someone to a country where he was likely to be tortured was banned under international law. "Egypt's terrible record of torturing prisoners means that no country should forcibly send a suspect there," he said.

CAFTA Trade Pact on Slippery Slope
Bush will welcome the leaders of the six nations in the Central American Free Trade Agreement, a treaty that is facing trouble in Congress.
By Edwin Chen
LA Times, 12 May 2005
President Bush will pursue his top trade initiative today as he welcomes six Latin American leaders to the White House, but the trade agreement Bush seeks faces serious trouble in Congress and could be defeated by his fellow Republicans. With showdown votes just weeks away, the Central American Free Trade Agreement still lacks majority support in the Senate and the House, with a near-solid phalanx of Democrats lined up in opposition and key Republicans in open revolt.

Fairness of Taser Study in Question
By Kevin Johnson
USA TODAY, 12 May 2005
An adviser to a federally funded study concerning the safety of stun guns made by Taser International also is a paid consultant to Taser, the Justice Department acknowledges. The situation is raising questions about potential conflicts of interest in the $500,000 study, which is being done amid reports that dozens of people have died after being shocked with stun guns.
Robert Stratbucker, a physician from Omaha, is among four paid advisers to a two-year study that is being launched by John Webster, a professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Wisconsin. Webster's application to the Justice Department for a research grant last fall cited Stratbucker as an adviser, but it did not mention that Stratbucker is a medical consultant to Taser, the nation's leading seller of stun guns. Stratbucker has worked with Taser as the Arizona company has touted its stun guns — also known as Tasers — as non-lethal weapons that offer a safe way for police to subdue suspects. Taser, whose Web site lists Stratbucker as the company's medical director, has cited his research in promoting its stun guns.

GOP Seeks More Curbs On Courts
Sensenbrenner Proposes An Inspector General
By Mike Allen
Washington Post, 12 May 2005
A variety of legal scholars said the Republican blueprint looks overtly political. Harvard law professor Alan M. Dershowitz said he does not necessarily disagree with the proposals, but he noted that the scandal-scarred Republican leaders "are the wrong people and this is the wrong political context in which to make changes to improve the judiciary."
"You can't take them seriously, considering their source and timing," he said.
The Constitution specifies that Congress will set the jurisdiction and budgets of the courts, and Republican lawmakers began agitating to exercise that power after Schiavo's death. DeLay drew wide attention to the issue by declaring that the judges involved in that case would have to "answer for their behavior." As a guide to his views on the subject, DeLay has been urging reporters to read "Men in Black: How the Supreme Court Is Destroying America," by Mark R. Levin.
One of the more controversial parts of Sensenbrenner's plan is exploring the creation of an office of inspector general for the federal judiciary, like those that now serve as watchdogs of executive-branch agencies, to take complaints, prepare reports, and audit and investigate the administration of the courts. Republican congressional aides said the inspector general would find ways money could be saved, and could help lawmakers rebut appropriations requests from the judiciary. Critics contend that having such an official, who would likely have an independent office within the court system but would prepare periodic reports for Congress and answer its inquiries, would violate the separation-of-powers doctrine.

A Bloody, Devastating Day: Violence Kills 72
Officials Say Rebels Seeking to Exploit Political Uncertainty
By Jonathan Finer and Bassam Sebti
Washington Post, 12 May 2005
Iraqi officials say the wave of violence is timed to capitalize on political uncertainty during the long transition to a new Shiite Muslim-led government. Negotiations over who would hold senior positions began in late April. The goal of insurgents "is to destabilize the country," said Laith Kubba, a spokesman for Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari. In selecting new ministers, Jafari struggled to satisfy the demands of Iraq's ethnic and religious groups, particularly Sunni Muslims, from whose ranks the bulk of the insurgents are drawn. The number of insurgent attacks has roughly doubled since March to 70 a day, while tips leading to the capture of perpetrators have also increased, according to Kubba. He acknowledged, however, that "in the short term, there is nothing that would enable the government to stop these attacks."
Wednesday's bombings came as a U.S. Marine offensive near the Syrian border in western Iraq continued for a fourth day. In a string of villages near the town of Rummana, north of the Euphrates River, commanders reported that insurgents and foreign fighters had largely dispersed. "The area appears devoid of military-aged males. It's mostly women and children," said Col. Bob Chase, operations chief for the 2nd Marine Division, which is leading the assault. "We are focusing our attention on what is basically their own underground railroad, what we call the ratlines, which are basically smuggling routes and places where people could be hiding."
SEE ALSO:
79 Die in Attacks as Rebels in Iraq Intensify Fight
By JOHN F. BURNS
NYT, 12 May 2005

Anti-U.S. Violence Erupts in Afghanistan
By Musadeq Sadeq
AP in Washington Post, 12 May 2005
Shouting "Death to America!" more than 1,000 demonstrators rioted and threw stones at a U.S. military convoy Wednesday, as protests spread over a report that interrogators desecrated Islam's holy book at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Police fired on the protesters, trying to stifle the biggest display of anti-American anger since the ouster of the radical Taliban militia in 2001. Officials said the violence left four Afghans dead and 71 injured in Jalalabad, a city 80 miles east of the capital, Kabul. There were no reports of U.S. casualties. Mobs smashed car and shop windows and attacked government offices, the Pakistani Consulate and the offices of two U.N. agencies. Smoke billowed from the consulate and a U.N. building. More than 50 foreign aid workers were reportedly evacuated.
In neighboring Pakistan, the government said it was "deeply dismayed" by the reports about Guantanamo, while hard-line Islamic parties said they would hold nationwide demonstrations Friday. Many of the 520 inmates held at Guantanamo are Pakistanis and Afghans.
President Hamid Karzai played down the violence, which came as Afghan and U.S. troops are battling a reinvigorated Taliban insurgency. "It is not the anti-American sentiment, it is a protest over news of the desecration of the holy Koran," Karzai told reporters in Brussels. He said Afghanistan was now a democracy in which demonstrations were allowed, but that security forces were not yet prepared to handle them.
The immediate source of anger was a report in the May 9 edition of Newsweek magazine that interrogators at Guantanamo placed Korans on toilets to rattle suspects and in at least one case "flushed a holy book down the toilet."
A Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Cmdr. Flex Plexico, said the U.S. military was investigating. "This allegation is contrary to our respect for cultural customs and fundamental belief in the freedom of religion," Plexico said.

FDA Received 'Minority Report' From Conservative Doctor on Panel
Memo May Have Swayed Plan B Ruling
By Marc Kaufman
Washington Post, 12 May 2005
Soon after the Food and Drug Administration overruled its advisory panel last year and rejected an application to make an emergency contraceptive more easily available, critics of the agency said it had ignored scientific evidence and yielded to pressure from social conservatives. The agency denied the charge, but an outspoken evangelical conservative doctor on the panel subsequently acknowledged in a previously unreported public sermon that he was asked to write a memo to the FDA commissioner soon after the panel voted 23 to 4 in favor of over-the-counter sales of the contraceptive, called Plan B. He said he believes his memo played a central role in the rejection of that recommendation. The new information comes from a videotaped sermon in October by W. David Hager. On the tape, he said he was asked to write a "minority report" that would outline why over-the-counter sales should be rejected. Speaking at the Asbury College chapel in Wilmore, Ky., Hager said, "I was asked to write a minority opinion that was sent to the commissioner of the FDA. For only the second time in five decades, the FDA did not abide by its advisory committee opinion, and the measure was rejected." ...An FDA spokeswoman said yesterday that the agency did not ask Hager to write a report and that Hager sent what she called a "private citizen letter" to Commissioner Mark McClellan. "We don't ask for minority reports and opinions," she said. "I've been advised that nobody from the FDA asked him to write the letter." Hager has been a highly controversial figure because of his strong views against abortion and emergency contraception and in favor of abstinence education. In his October sermon, he said that Christians such as himself were at "war" with people who would take faith and values out of medical care. Hager was appointed by the FDA to the Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory Committee in 2002 and reappointed last year. A prominent Kentucky obstetrician and gynecologist, he has written numerous books on women's health -- generally from an evangelical Christian perspective.

Democracy on the march...
Egypt Backtracks on Reforms
In the past week, political opponents have been jailed and curbs have been put on who can run for president.
By Dan Murphy
Christian Science Moniton, 11 May 2005
CAIRO – After 24 years as the unchallenged head of Egypt, President Hosni Mubarak seemed to be cracking the door to democratic reform. He had promised a constitutional amendment to allow for a competitive presidential election. It looked as if change, sweeping fitfully through some parts of the Middle East, might be stirring here, too. But in the past week, there have been ominous indications about the extent of the government's commitment to change. The regime has arrested more than 1,000 political opponents, allegedly attacked an opposition group, and watered down attempts to allow for a democratic presidential election.
"This government does not want any independent political forces to appear, or for the people to live freely," charged Mohammed Akef, the supreme guide of the Muslim Brotherhood, the largest opposition movement in Egypt, at a press conference over the weekend to complain about the arrest of 1,500 brotherhood members. The government says 600 have been arrested.
The biggest hope for political change rested in Mubarak's promise of a competitive presidential election, expected by October. But Tuesdasy, Egypt's parliament passed a constitutional amendment leaving Mubarak's National Democratic Party (NDP) in control of who gets on the presidential ballot. "I don't think there will be any figure with stature in the country that can run against Mubarak,'' says Mohammed Sayed Said, a political scientist at the Al Ahram Center for Strategic and International Studies in Cairo. "It will be a true farce. The elections have already lost their meaning."

11 May 2005

Blix: U.S. Not Committed to Nuke 'Bargain'
AP, 10 May 2005
Washington isn't taking "the common bargain" of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty as seriously as it once did, and that's dimming global support for the U.S. campaign to shut down the North Korean and Iranian nuclear programs, the former chief U.N. weapons inspector said.
Undersecretary of State John R. Bolton, by questioning the value of treaties and international law, has also damaged the U.S. position, Hans Blix said. "There is a feeling the common edifice of the international community is being dismantled," the Swedish arms expert said. Blix, now chairman of the Swedish government-sponsored Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission, spoke with reporters in the second week of a monthlong conference to review the 1970 nonproliferation treaty.

Jonathan Schell on Our New Nuclear Age
TomDispatch, 8 May 2005
...It is often said that the first beautiful photos of Earth from space gave us our initial, powerful image of ourselves as living on a single, fragile, expendable planet, or later inspired the ecological idea that our planet was Gaia, a single "breathing," living organism. But the truth is far grimmer. It was the bomb and its fearful planet-busting potential that first gave us a sense of ourselves as a fragile globe spinning in space, one breathing organism to be lost forever. Nuclear weapons brought the whole planet under one ominous cloud of destruction and one thumb (so to speak). ...They may, at a less than conscious level, have created another sort of confusion and so done another sort of damage. They made a long-held dream of global conquest and dominion that had proved beyond the grasp of Romans legions, Mongol khans, Chinese emperors, English imperialists, and the Nazis among others, seem possible, if not plausible. They made the world seem smaller and more unified -- and so more potentially capable of being dominated -- than ever before. And so they perhaps created a basis for more recent dreams of a global Pax Americana in the country that, since 1991, has been called -- and in some cases proudly called itself -- "the lone superpower."
In this sense, the bomb proved a liar among weapons. It made the world seem a militarily smaller and less complex place than it actually is. In fact, as our leaders have only recently learned (or should I say, learned again?), the fantasy that techno-war of any sort can dominate the planet is just that. We all know that the United States has staggering amounts of staggeringly advanced military power, enough theoretically, to crush any of its enemies many times over. But, as it happened, that was a formula which only remained self-evident as long as it remained a threat.
Since 2001, use has destroyed that illusion. As we now know, two wars -- one against a near-medieval force of warriors in Afghanistan and the other against a desperately weakened, third-rate regional power in Iraq, followed by a fierce insurgency by a rag-tag set of Iraqi rebels and an exceedingly low-level guerrilla war in Afghanistan, have tied down the U.S. military in unexpected ways.
         Tom Englehardt

"All but unheard in the snarling din are the true voices of peace -- voices calling on the one group of nations to resist the demonic allure of nuclear arms and on the other group to rid themselves of the ones they have, leaving the world with a single standard: no nuclear weapons. Of the countries represented at the conference, fully 183 have found it entirely possible to live without atomic arsenals, and few -- barring a breakdown of the treaty -- show any sign of changing their minds. In the UN General Assembly the vast majority of them have voted regularly for nuclear abolition. Behind those votes stand the people of the world, who, when asked, agree. Even the people of the United States are in the consensus. Presented by AP pollsters in March with the statement, "No country should be allowed to have nuclear weapons," 66% agreed. In other countries, the percentage of supporters is higher. On the day their voices are heard and their will made active, the end of the nuclear age will be in sight."
          Nuclear Renaissance
          By Jonathan Schell

SEE ALSO:
Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) Nuclear Notebook (The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists)
     ...widely regarded as the most accurate source of information on nuclear weapons and weapons facilities available to the public.
SEE ALSO:
No Resonance in U.S. Media
Bush-Rumsfeld May Allow Regional Commanders to use Pre-emptive Nuclear Strike
The Japan Times via TruthOut, 3 May 2005
Washington - The U.S. military is considering allowing regional combatant commanders to request presidential approval for pre-emptive nuclear strikes against possible attacks with weapons of mass destruction on the United States or its allies, according to a draft nuclear operations paper.
The March 15 paper, drafted by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is titled "Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations," providing "guidelines for the joint employment of forces in nuclear operations . . . for the employment of U.S. nuclear forces, command and control relationships, and weapons effect considerations."
"There are numerous nonstate organizations (terrorist, criminal) and about 30 nations with WMD programs, including many regional states," the paper says in recommending that commanders in the Pacific and other theaters be given an option of pre-emptive strikes against "rogue" states and terrorists and "request presidential approval for use of nuclear weapons" under set conditions. The paper identifies nuclear, biological and chemical weapons as requiring pre-emptive strikes to prevent their use.

Happiness Is...
Juan Cole
Informed Comment, 11 May 2005
The US commanders expressed their happiness that the guerrillas at Ubaydi are standing and fighting, on the grounds that if they do that, they will be finished faster. I wouldn't be so happy if I were them. The jihadis are making themselves martyrs in order to give other young men a reason to fight. It is a recruitment drive. Since guerrillas have managed to kill about 14 US troops in recent days, moreover, it is a way of signalling that the US is not 10 feet tall, but is rather vulnerable. If the US has this much trouble with about 2500 foreign fighters in Iraq (and over 20,000 Iraqi ones), imagine the problems if the jihadi recruitment drive succeeds, and the foreign contingent doubles or triples.

A GOP Plan to 'Fix' the Democrats
By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Washington Post, 10 May 2005
Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform and a leading figure in both the DeLay and Bush political operations, chose more colorful post-election language to describe the future. "Once the minority of House and Senate are comfortable in their minority status, they will have no problem socializing with the Republicans," he told Richard Leiby of The Post. "Any farmer will tell you that certain animals run around and are unpleasant. But when they've been 'fixed,' then they are happy and sedate. They are contented and cheerful. "If you wonder in the coming weeks why Democrats are so reluctant to give ground, remember Norquist's jocular reference to neutering the opposition party. Democrats are neither contented nor cheerful over the prospect of being "fixed." Should that surprise anyone?

Halliburton Lands $72 Million in Bonuses
Army awards firm for logistics work; no decision on dining services
Reuters via MSNBC, 10 May 2005
The U.S. Army said on Tuesday it had awarded $72 million in bonuses to Halliburton Co. for logistics work in Iraq but had not decided whether to give the Texas company bonuses for disputed dining services to troops. ...Bonuses are awarded based on, among other factors, how efficient and responsible the company is to requests from the Army and is an indicator of how the Army views KBR's performance in the field. KBR's logistics deal with the U.S. military has been in the spotlight from the outset in Iraq, with allegations by auditors that they overcharged for some work, including dining services. In addition, investigators are looking into whether the Texas-based firm charged too much to supply fuel to Iraqi civilians, a claim the firm says is not justified. Halliburton, which was run by Vice President Dick Cheney until he joined the 2000 race for the White House, has earned more than $7 billion under its 2001 logistics contract with the U.S. military.

EPA Puts Mandated Lead-Paint Rules on Hold
The agency is looking at voluntary standards to limit exposure instead. The revelation angers public health advocates and some lawmakers.
By Tom Hamburger
Times Staff Writer
LA Times, 10 May 2005
The Environmental Protection Agency has quietly delayed work on completing required rules to protect children and construction workers from exposure to lead-based paint, exploring instead the possibility of using voluntary standards to govern building renovations and remodeling.
The EPA move, first disclosed in documents provided by an agency whistle-blower, has prompted angry questions from Democrats in Congress, the attorneys general of New York and Illinois, and public health advocates around the country.
One organization is threatening a lawsuit against the agency for failing to issue the rules, as required by law. On Monday, five members of Congress wrote to EPA Administrator Stephen L. Johnson, demanding an explanation for the EPA's "apparent abandonment of regulations required by law to protect children from exposure to lead."  The lawmakers — led by two California Democrats, Rep. Henry A. Waxman of Los Angeles and Sen. Barbara Boxer — complained that the EPA's action, which was never announced publicly, breached federal toxic-substance laws. The regulations were to require that only certified contractors, using workers trained in lead-safety practices, be used for remodeling work in buildings constructed before 1978, when the use of lead-based paint for housing was banned.

No. 2 at State Dept. Was Said to Put Restrictions on Bolton
By DOUGLAS JEHL
NYT, 10 May 2005
A new portrayal of John R. Bolton describes him as having so angered senior State Department officials with his public comments that the deputy secretary of state, Richard L. Armitage, ordered two years ago that Mr. Bolton be blocked from delivering speeches and testimony unless they were personally approved by Mr. Armitage. The detailed account was provided to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee by Lawrence S. Wilkerson, a longtime aide to former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell. Mr. Wilkerson said that Mr. Bolton, who was then an under secretary of state, had caused "problems" by speaking out on North Korea, the International Atomic Energy Agency and other delicate issues in remarks that had not been properly cleared. "Therefore, the deputy made a decision, and communicated that decision to me, that John Bolton would not give any testimony, nor would he give any speech, that wasn't cleared first by Rich," Mr. Wilkerson said, according to a transcript of an hourlong interview with members of the committee staff last Thursday.
In an e-mail message on Monday, Mr. Wilkerson said of the restrictions imposed on Mr. Bolton that "if anything, they got more stringent" as time went on. "No one else was subjected to these tight restrictions," he said.

The Super-Lobbyist's "Friend"
Tom DeLay isn't the only politician who ought to consider retirement plans.
By Art Levine
The American Prospect Online, 10 May 2005
Take pity on poor Bob Ney, who insists he's just another victim of lobbyist Jack Abramoff and public-relations consultant Michael Scanlon. Unlike the half-dozen Indian tribes that paid about $82 million to that scamming duo, however, the U.S. representative at least got campaign donations and a lavish trip to Scotland's legendary St. Andrew's golf course out of them. Whether he got more than that is now a matter of interest to Justice Department investigators, according to a knowledgeable source who says that the probers are seeking to discover whether Ney received any illegal donations from Abramoff.

Presidential Ignorance and 'Cheap Posturing'
Josh Marshall
Talking Points Memo, 10 May 2005
To compare the results of the Yalta Conference to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, the key element of which was a secret agreement by which the 20th century's two great dictators agreed to carve up the defenseless neighbour between them, is truly unconscionable. And to compare it to Munich is little less so.
In making this argument the president joins a rich tradition of maniacs who believe that at the end of World War II we should have joined with the defeated remainder of the German army and fought our way through Eastern Europe to the border of Russia and, in all likelihood, on to Moscow to overthrow the Soviet Union itself -- certainly not a difficult proposition considering what an insubstantial land Army the Soviet Union had at the time.
If that seems like an over-dramatic alternative scenario, then you just aren't familiar with the history of the period.
Roosevelt didn't hand the Baltics, Poland and the rest of what became the Warsaw Pact countries over to Soviet rule. The Red Army was there in force already. The question was whether we were able and willing to remove them by force.
The president also makes common cause, though whether he's familiar with the history he's wading into I don't know, with those who argued before the war and after that the US and the UK made their fundamental error in the war itself, by allying with the Soviets against Nazism rather than with Nazism against the Soviets.
Now, no one can expect that Latvians or Poles are going to have warm or cordial feelings about the Great Power agreements at the end of the war. The plain fact is that the outcome of the war led to the imposition of Communist dictatorships across Eastern Europe that lasted for more than forty years. But one cannot assess the morality or political insight of American and British decision-making in the late stages of the war without standing them up against the real alternatives they faced. Anything else is just cheap posturing or folly. In the president's case, perhaps both.
SEE ALSO:
'Rightwing revisionist history'
What Bush got wrong about Yalta (and Vietnam)
By David Greenberg
Slate, 10 May 2005

10 May 2005

Amidst Doubts, CIA Hangs on to Control of Iraqi Intelligence Service
By Hannah Allam and Warren P. Strobel
Knight Ridder Newspapers, 9 May 2005
The CIA has so far refused to hand over control of Iraq's intelligence service to the newly elected Iraqi government in a turf war that exposes serious doubts the Bush administration has over the ability of Iraqi leaders to fight the insurgency and worries about the new government's close ties to Iran. The director of Iraq's secret police, a general who took part in a failed coup attempt against Saddam Hussein, was handpicked and funded by the U.S. government, and he still reports directly to the CIA, Iraqi politicians and intelligence officials in Baghdad said last week. Immediately after the elections in January, several Iraqi officials said, U.S. forces stashed the sensitive national intelligence archives of the past year inside American headquarters in Baghdad in order to keep them off-limits to the new government. Iraqi leaders complain that the arrangement violates their sovereignty, freezes them out of the war on insurgents and could lead to the formation of a rival, Iraqi-led spy agency. American officials counter that the new leaders' connections to Iran have forced them to take measures that protect Iraq's secrets from the neighboring Tehran regime. The dispute also highlights the failure of the Bush administration to establish a Western-leaning, secular government in Baghdad following the 2003 invasion. The Iraqi intelligence service "is not working for the Iraqi government - it's working for the CIA," said Hadi al Ameri, an Iraqi lawmaker and commander of the Badr Brigade, formerly the armed wing of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. SCIRI is the driving force behind the powerful Shiite coalition that swept the parliamentary elections. "I prefer to call it the American Intelligence of Iraq, not the Iraqi Intelligence Service," al Ameri continued during an interview last week at his heavily guarded home in Baghdad. "If they insist on keeping it to themselves, we'll have to form another one."

The Leaning Tower of PBS
By Matea Gold
LA Times, 9 May 2005
Public television officials are increasingly fearful that PBS is reemerging as a political football after a series of efforts by Republicans to promote more conservative perspectives on the taxpayer-supported network.
Station managers and programmers gathered here for two public broadcasting conferences last week expressed growing alarm about recent actions by officials of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the private nonprofit agency charged with distributing federal funds to public broadcasters.
Kenneth Tomlinson, the Republican chairman of the agency, has called for more conservative voices in PBS programming and recently hired a former White House official to help set up an ombudsman's office to evaluate the fairness and balance of public television and radio. Meanwhile, PBS itself has reined in several controversial programs, taking steps some public TV advocates see as self-censorship.
Some believe the Bush Administration is using its allies at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to undermine PBS, much as President Richard Nixon and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich sought to withdraw support for the system in past years. "There is no smoking gun, but when things begin to add up in aggregate, you can really only draw one small subset of conclusions … that CPB is caving to conservative Republican political pressure," said Garry Denny, associate programming director at Wisconsin Public Television and president of the Public Television Programmers Assn.

America's Shame, Two Years on from "Mission Accomplished"
by Robert Fisk
The Independent via Common Dreams, 9 May 2005
Two years after "Mission Accomplished", whatever moral stature the United States could claim at the end of its invasion of Iraq has long ago been squandered in the torture and abuse and deaths at Abu Ghraib. That the symbol of Saddam Hussein's brutality should have been turned by his own enemies into the symbol of their own brutality is a singularly ironic epitaph for the whole Iraq adventure. We have all been contaminated by the cruelty of the interrogators and the guards and prison commanders.
But this is not only about Abu Ghraib. There are clear and proven connections now between the abuses at Abu Ghraib and the cruelty at the American's. Bargain prison in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay. Curiously, General Janis Karpinski, the only senior US officer facing charges over Abu Ghraib, admitted to me a year earlier when I visited the prison that she had been at Guantanamo Bay, but that at Abu Ghraib she was not permitted to attend interrogations - which seems very odd.

State Department Refuses to Deliver Documents on Bolton
Reuters, 9 May 2005
Senate Democrats have demanded more documents in a wrangle with the State Department over the controversial nomination of John Bolton as the next U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
Sen. Joseph Biden, the senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has given the State Department a list of documents the panel expects to be forthcoming. "Sen. Biden provided them a list of the most critical things that he needs, and now we await their final decision and we expect their cooperation," his spokesman, Norm Kurz, said on Monday.
The State Department has already given the committee some documents but the panel is seeking more as it reviews accusations that Bolton, the top U.S. diplomat for arms control, bullied subordinates and tried to remove intelligence analysts who balked at conforming to his hard-line views on Cuba, Syria, North Korea and Iran.
The committee is scheduled to vote on Bolton's nomination on Thursday, but Biden, of Delaware, said in two weekend letters to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that the timing of the vote depended on the administration's cooperation in providing the necessary documents and witnesses.
Democrats could block the vote if they do not attend Thursday's meeting and deny the necessary quorum.

Scientists Boycott Kansas Evolution Hearings
by John Hanna
AP via Common Dreams, 9 May 2005
Scientists have refused to participate in state Board of Education hearings this past week on how the theory of evolution should be treated in public schools, but they haven't exactly been silent. About a dozen scientists, most from Kansas universities, spoke each day at news conferences after evolution critics testified before a board subcommittee. They expect to continue speaking out as the hearings wrap up on Thursday. "They're in, they do their shtick, and they're out," said Keith Miller, a Kansas State University geologist. "I'm going to be here, and I'm not going to be quiet. We'll have the rest of our lives to make our points."

You bet your sweet bippy...
Ability to Track Costs in Iraq May Be Difficult, Report Says
By Griff Witte
Washington Post, 9 May 2005
Auditors monitoring reconstruction funding in Iraq are concerned that the system for managing work there is so diffuse that the government may not be able to get an accurate estimate of how much its projects cost, according to an inspector general's report set for release today. ...auditors with the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction say the lack of accurate cost estimates raises the possibility that the government could be stuck without enough money to pay for reconstruction programs already begun. "That's always a danger if you don't know how much you've spent," said James Mitchell, spokesman for special Inspector General Stuart W. Bowen Jr.

Other than that...everything is fine.
8 U.S. Troops Killed in Iraq
Insurgent violence rages. The government fills five more Cabinet posts, three with Sunnis.
By Louise Roug and Patrick J. McDonnell
LA Times, 9 May 2005
Eight U.S. troops were killed in action during a 48-hour period as insurgent violence raged in the Sunni Arab heartland of western and central Iraq, the U.S. military reported Sunday. The attacks came as Iraq's new, U.S.-backed government reached out to the disenfranchised Sunni Muslim minority, approving four more Sunnis to serve in the Cabinet of Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari, a Shiite. But one Sunni appointee rejected the post offered to him, again underscoring sectarian divisions.
SEE ALSO:
Melting pot of blood (Salon.com)

Facing the City, Potential Targets Rely on a Patchwork of Security
By DAVID KOCIENIEWSKI
NYT, 9 May 2005
It is the deadliest target in a swath of industrial northern New Jersey that terrorism experts call the most dangerous two miles in America: a chemical plant that processes chlorine gas, so close to Manhattan that the Empire State Building seems to rise up behind its storage tanks.
According to federal Environmental Protection Agency records, the plant poses a potentially lethal threat to 12 million people who live within a 14-mile radius.
Yet on a recent Friday afternoon, it remained loosely guarded and accessible. Dozens of trucks and cars drove by within 100 feet of the tanks. A reporter and photographer drove back and forth for five minutes, snapping photos with a camera the size of a large sidearm, then left without being approached.
That chemical plant is just one of dozens of vulnerable sites between Newark Liberty International Airport and Port Elizabeth, which extends two miles to the east. A Congressional study in 2000 by a former Coast Guard commander deemed it the nation's most enticing environment for terrorists, providing a convenient way to cripple the economy by disrupting major portions of the country's rail lines, oil storage tanks and refineries, pipelines, air traffic, communications networks and highway system.

Former Ministers Flee as Iraq Begins Corruption Inquiry
By Patrick Cockburn in Baghdad
The Independent, 9 May 2005
Former Iraqi ministers are fleeing the country because of reports that the new administration may prevent them going abroad while accusations of corruption are being investigated.
The incoming government of Ibrahim al-Jaafari, who completed his cabinet yesterday, has pledged to fight pervasive corruption among officials. The outgoing administration of Iyad Allawi was regarded as highly corrupt by Iraqis.
Officials say that some former ministers have left Iraq in the past few days because they fear they will be detained if they try to leave later. "I have heard that [the government] are considering preventing any minister of the former government leaving the country," said Adnan Pachachi, a former foreign minister and veteran political leader. The new administration is able to do this under emergency legislation introduced by Mr Allawi.
Iraqi businessmen say that since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein the government machinery has become corrupt. "I am thinking of pulling out of business entirely in Iraq," said one businessman. "Officials at every level demand bribes just to do their jobs so there is no profit left for my company at the end of the day." The corruption relates to the awarding of contracts and jobs. Political parties treat the ministries they control as a source of patronage and funds. The collapse of civil order after the war in 2003 meant that until now there had been little fear of punishment.

Bursting his bubble...
Bush Gets Tough Queries From Youths in Holland
Amid war ceremonies, president holds a round- table where he is asked about anti-terrorism measures and impact of combat on U.S. public.
By Peter Wallsten
LA Times, 9 May 2005
MAASTRICHT, Netherlands — At home, President Bush regularly travels the nation for "conversations" with hand-picked audiences who routinely shower him and his policies with praise. But abroad on Sunday, some youths in Holland had a rare, unscripted opportunity to ask questions that some Americans might want to pose if given the chance. Based on the questions asked in the first half-hour, before reporters were ushered from the room, this group of students might not have passed muster at a typical White House event.

Flip, flop...
U.S. Officers In Iraq Put Priority on Extremists
Hussein Loyalists Not Seen as Greatest Threat
By Bradley Graham
Washington Post, 9 May 2005
Senior U.S. commanders say their view of the Iraqi insurgency has begun to shift, with higher priority being given to combating foreign fighters and Iraqi jihadists. This shift comes in response to the recent upsurge in suicide attacks and other developments that indicate a more prominent role in the insurgency by these radical groups, the commanders say. Previously, U.S. authorities have depicted the insurgency as being dominated largely by what the Pentagon has dubbed "former regime elements" -- a combination of onetime Baath Party loyalists and Iraqi military and security service officers intent on restoring Sunni rule. But since the Jan. 30 elections, this segment of the insurgency has appeared to pull back from the fight, at least for a while, reassessing strategies and exploring a possible political deal with the new government, senior U.S. officers here say.
Acting on the assumption that foreign fighters and Iraqi extremists may now pose the greater and more immediate threat to security in Iraq, U.S. commanders have given orders in recent days to reposition some U.S. ground forces and intelligence assets in northwestern Iraq to further fortify the border with Syria and block suspected infiltration routes. They are also stepping up efforts to go after leading bomb-makers and key organizers of the suicide attacks.
...Even with the reported rise in foreign fighters, several senior officers said, the number estimated to be coming into the country each month is still relatively small -- in the neighborhood of several score. In numerical terms, they said, the insurgency remains essentially homegrown. Iraqi members of extremist Islamic factions, such as the Ansar al Sunna Army, continue to account for many insurgent attacks.

States Propose Sweeping Changes to Trim Medicaid by Billions
By ROBERT PEAR
NYT, 9 May 2005
Governors and state legislators have devised proposals for sweeping changes in Medicaid to curb its rapid growth and save billions of dollars. Under the proposals, some beneficiaries would have to pay more for care, and states would have more latitude to limit the scope of services. The proposals, drafted by separate working groups of governors and state legislators, provide guidance to Congress, which 10 days ago endorsed a budget blueprint that would cut projected Medicaid spending by $10 billion over the next five years.
Many of the proposals resemble ideas advanced by President Bush as part of his 2006 budget. In some cases, the governors embrace Mr. Bush's proposals but go further. At the same time, they also reject some of the president's recommendations that they believe would shift costs to the states.
...A coalition of beneficiary advocates, labor unions and health care providers is already gearing up to fight any significant cutbacks in Medicaid. The coalition includes AARP, Families USA, pediatricians, hospitals and nursing homes.
...State officials generally support Mr. Bush's proposal to limit the ability of elderly people to qualify for Medicaid coverage of nursing home care by transferring assets to their children. The governors say such restrictions "should be encouraged," because "Medicaid can no longer be the financing mechanism for the nation's long-term-care costs." Medicaid now pays for about two-thirds of nursing home residents.

Bush 'freedom fighter' or international terrorist?
Case of Cuban Exile Could Test the U.S. Definition of Terrorist
By TIM WEINER
NYT, 9 May 2005
From the United States through Latin America and the Caribbean, Luis Posada Carriles has spent 45 years fighting a violent, losing battle to overthrow Fidel Castro. Now he may have nowhere to hide but here.
Mr. Posada, a Cuban exile, has long been a symbol for the armed anti-Castro movement in the United States. He remains a prime suspect in the bombing of a Cuban commercial airliner that killed 73 people in 1976. He has admitted to plotting attacks that damaged tourist spots in Havana and killed an Italian visitor there in 1997. He was convicted in Panama in a 2000 bomb plot against Mr. Castro. He is no longer welcome in his old Latin America haunts.
Mr. Posada, 77, sneaked back into Florida six weeks ago in an effort to seek political asylum for having served as a cold war soldier on the payroll of the Central Intelligence Agency in the 1960's, his lawyer, Eduardo Soto, said at a news conference last month. But the government of Venezuela wants to extradite and retry him for the Cuban airline bombing. Mr. Posada was involved "up to his eyeballs" in planning the attack, said Carter Cornick, a retired counterterrorism specialist for the Federal Bureau of Investigation who investigated Mr. Posada's role in that case. A newly declassified 1976 F.B.I. document places Mr. Posada, who had been a senior Venezuelan intelligence officer, at two meetings where the bombing was planned.

The Final Insult
By PAUL KRUGMAN
NYT, 9 May 2005
Hell hath no fury like a scammer foiled. The card shark caught marking the deck, the auto dealer caught resetting a used car's odometer, is rarely contrite. On the contrary, they're usually angry, and they lash out at their intended marks, crying hypocrisy. And so it is with those who would privatize Social Security. They didn't get away with scare tactics, or claims to offer something for nothing. Now they're accusing their opponents of coddling the rich and not caring about the poor.
Well, why not? It's no more outrageous than other arguments they've tried. Remember the claim that Social Security is bad for black people? Before I take on this final insult to our intelligence, let me deal with a fundamental misconception: the idea that President Bush's plan would somehow protect future Social Security benefits.
If the plan really would do that, it would be worth discussing. It's possible - not certain, but possible - that 40 or 50 years from now Social Security won't have enough money coming in to pay full benefits. (If the economy grows as fast over the next 50 years as it did over the past half-century, Social Security will do just fine.) So there's a case for making small sacrifices now to avoid bigger sacrifices later. But Mr. Bush isn't calling for small sacrifices now. Instead, he's calling for zero sacrifice now, but big benefit cuts decades from now - which is exactly what he says will happen if we do nothing. Let me repeat that: to avert the danger of future cuts in benefits, Mr. Bush wants us to commit now to, um, future cuts in benefits.

Stranger Than Fiction
By BOB HERBERT
NYT, 9 May 2005
When Bob Woodward asked President Bush if he had consulted with his father about the decision to go to war in Iraq, the president famously replied, "There is a higher father that I appeal to." It might have been better if Mr. Bush had stayed in closer touch with his earthly father.
...Amateurs and incompetents have run the war from the start, and fantasy has trumped reality at every turn. If a movie were to be made of the war, the appropriate director would be Mel Brooks. Even as the administration was listening to the likes of Curveball, it was showing the door to the Army's chief of staff, Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, who made the mistake of speaking the plain truth to officials fluent only in self-serving gibberish.
General Shinseki said it would take hundreds of thousands of troops to pacify Iraq. That was the end of his career.
Bush & Co. sent far fewer troops into the war, and many of them were never properly trained or equipped. The results have been nightmarish. Roadside bombs have caused 70 percent of American casualties in Iraq. The military was not prepared for this tactic and has had a miserable record providing protective armor for Humvees and other vehicles carrying soldiers and marines.
So G.I.'s from the wealthiest, most powerful nation in the history of the world have been dying because their nation wouldn't give them up-to-date combat vehicles.
As for training and preparedness, the scandal at Abu Ghraib is instructive. The problems there went far beyond the photos of Lynndie England and others humiliating the Iraqis under their control. We learned last week that Janis Karpinski, the brigadier general whose reserve military police unit was in charge of the prison, had been arrested for shoplifting at a military base in Florida in 2002. The same army that's scouring Iraq for insurgents and terrorists was apparently unaware of the arrest record of the woman assigned to such a sensitive position at Abu Ghraib.
Abu Ghraib was not an aberration. It was a symptom. This is a war in which the people in charge have had no idea what they were doing. One of the recommendations of Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who investigated the scandal at Abu Ghraib, was that a team be sent to Iraq to teach some of the soldiers how to run prisons. How's that for an innovative step?
The United States is now stuck with a war it should never have started. The violence continues to rage out of control. The latest fantasy out of Washington is that somehow, miraculously, Iraqi troops will be able to take over and win the war that we couldn't.
The American public is becoming fed up and with good reason. Support for the war is declining and the reputation of the military is in jeopardy. The Army has been unable to meet its recruitment goals and the search for new soldiers is becoming desperate.
Last week, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Richard Myers, told Congress that the war in Iraq was taking a toll on the military and would make combat operations elsewhere in the world more difficult. That was hardly a comforting thought as the administration was ramping up its rhetoric about North Korea.
If President Bush had consulted with his father before launching this clownish, disastrous war, he might have gotten some advice that would have pointed him in a different direction and spared his country - and the families of the many thousands dead - a lot of grief.

A New Political Setback for Iraq's Cabinet
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.
NYT, 9 May 2005
One of four Sunni Arabs picked this weekend to join Iraq's new Shiite-controlled cabinet abruptly rejected the job on Sunday, saying he first learned of his selection from a television news report on Saturday night. He added that he felt his selection would further a quota system for Sunnis that would only make sectarian problems worse.
The political setback came as the United States military announced that insurgents had killed eight American servicemen over the weekend. In one ambush, insurgents took over a hospital in Haditha, a haven west of Baghdad for the militant leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and killed three marines and a sailor. The American military also said it had captured the mastermind behind both the attack on Abu Ghraib prison a month ago and the wave of car bombings that killed 40 Iraqis in greater Baghdad on April 29.
In the capital, the National Assembly approved six new cabinet ministers on Sunday, including the unwilling candidate, Hashim al-Shibli, who had been named human rights minister. But on a day when Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari had hoped to complete his cabinet and end the contentious political battles that delayed his government, the rejection was another embarrassment.

More on Bush vs. the Environment
Nature At Bay
NYT, 9 May 2005
Roadless Rollback On Thursday, the administration repealed one of President Bill Clinton's proudest and most popular environmental initiatives, a rule that placed nearly 60 million acres, or roughly one-third, of the national forests off limits to new road building and development. The Clinton rule gave protection to some of the last truly wild places in America and the fish and wildlife that live there.
By the Forest Service's own estimates, these roadless areas shelter at least 200 rare species, which under the administration's less protective regime will now be more vulnerable to commercial development. The rollback also completes the administration's demolition job on the web of forest protections it inherited from Mr. Clinton.
Drill, Drill, Drill Meanwhile, the Interior Department continues to move at warp speed to lease ever-larger chunks of the Rocky Mountains to oil and gas companies. At least one governor has had enough. Last month, Bill Richardson of New Mexico filed a suit against a Bureau of Land Management leasing plan that he says would leave 95 percent of the 1.8 million-acre Otero Mesa open to drilling.
At risk are some of the most important and fragile grasslands left in America, the wildlife they sustain and - of special concern to Mr. Richardson - an aquifer that contains the state's largest untapped source of fresh water. The lawsuit is being closely watched by other Western governors, in particular Wyoming's Dave Freudenthal, who is appalled by the pace and volume of the drilling activity in Wyoming's Upper Green River Valley.
It is not as if the oil and gas companies have no place else to go. Fully 85 percent of the petroleum resources on federal lands in the five Rocky Mountain states are already leased or available for leasing. Moreover, by its own admission, the industry has neither the equipment nor the manpower to exploit the leases it already owns - yet another reason to ask why the administration finds it necessary to accelerate drilling in places where moderation is required and to invite new drilling in places where there should be none at all.
Shortchanging Nature Mr. Bush's environmental agenda in the 2000 campaign consisted of three promises, none realized. One was to regulate global warming emissions. Another was to eliminate the maintenance backlog in the national parks. And the third was to fully fund the Land and Water Conservation Fund, the government's main program for creating and preserving parks and wildlife refuges. The program's authorized level is $900 million, half for federal open space purchases, half for state acquisitions.
Mr. Bush hasn't come close. This year he asked for $130 million for federal purchases, nothing for the states. Last week a House subcommittee axed the federal funds altogether. The irony that Mr. Bush may be presiding over the death of precisely the kind of program that the ivory-billed woodpeckers of this world depend on seemed lost on Mr. Bush's senior officials, who uttered nary a peep of protest.

US Defence Budget Will Equal Rest of World Combined "Within 12 Months"
By Guy Anderson Editor of Jane's Defence Industry
Jane's, 5 May 2005
Defence expenditure in the US will equal that of the rest of the world combined within 12 months, making it "increasingly pressing" for European contractors to develop a "closer association" with the US, corporate finance group PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) says. Its report - 'The Defence Industry in the 21st Century' by PwC's global aerospace and defence leader Richard Hooke - adds that "the US is in the driving seat", raising the prospect of a future scenario in which it could "dominate the supply of the world's arms completely". The US defence budget reached US$417.4 billion in 2003 - 46 per cent of the global total. Less than two per cent of the US defence budget is spent outside its home market, the report notes, and of this around one per cent goes to UK contractors.

Everyone can have their own point of view, but not their own 'truth'
An Assertive Scientific Advisory Group Challenges Federal Policies
By PHILIP M. BOFFEY
NYT, 9 May 2005
...a committee that examined whether the spent fuel pools at domestic nuclear power plants might be vulnerable to terrorist attacks. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission had issued bland reassurances that the pools were well protected, but Congress wasn't sure, so it ordered the regulatory agency to have a study done by the academy. The agency undermined the effort by denying the academy information and slowing release of an unclassified version of the report, but the academy ultimately made its voice heard. It found that credible terrorist attacks might release large quantities of radioactive material, and it called for steps to mitigate the risk.
A similar fate befell the Bush administration's plan to develop a nuclear weapon that could penetrate the earth and destroy enemy bunkers buried deep underground. Caught in a swirl of conflicting claims as to how well the weapons would work and how much collateral damage they might cause, Congress called for an academy study. A panel found that while such a warhead would indeed destroy a buried bunker efficiently, it could not go deep enough to avoid huge numbers of casualties at ground level. Suddenly a weapon that had been touted as relatively small and clean looked a lot less appealing.
The space agency has come under similar fire from academy experts. One academy panel has just warned that the nation's Earth-monitoring program from space is "at risk of collapse," mostly because the president's long-range program to explore the Moon and Mars has been forcing NASA to siphon off funds needed for earth sciences. An even sharper jab came last December when an academy panel concluded that a robotic mission to rescue the Hubble Space Telescope would have little chance of success and recommended an astronaut mission instead - precisely the opposite of what the NASA administrator wanted to do. The academy may be winning that fight. The new administrator of NASA has ruled out robotics and said he will reconsider a possible astronaut mission.

U.S. to Spend Billions More to Alter Security Systems
By ERIC LIPTON
NYT, 8 May 2005
After spending more than $4.5 billion on screening devices to monitor the nation's ports, borders, airports, mail and air, the federal government is moving to replace or alter much of the antiterrorism equipment, concluding that it is ineffective, unreliable or too expensive to operate.
Many of the monitoring tools - intended to detect guns, explosives, and nuclear and biological weapons - were bought during the blitz in security spending after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
In its effort to create a virtual shield around America, the Department of Homeland Security now plans to spend billions of dollars more. Although some changes are being made because of technology that has emerged in the last couple of years, many of them are planned because devices currently in use have done little to improve the nation's security, according to a review of agency documents and interviews with federal officials and outside experts.
"Everyone was standing in line with their silver bullets to make us more secure after Sept. 11," said Randall J. Larsen, a retired Air Force colonel and former government adviser on scientific issues. "We bought a lot of stuff off the shelf that wasn't effective."

There's No Plan B to Deter N. Korea
Diplomacy has failed, and military action is unlikely. A nuclear test could occur soon.
By Barbara Demick
LA Times, 7 May 2005
As North Korea accelerates the pace of its nuclear weapons program, the United States and its allies have limited options to prevent one of the world's poorest and most erratic nations from becoming a nuclear power. In a matter of weeks, faint hope that North Korea might be coaxed into voluntarily dismantling its nuclear facilities through multinational talks has all but evaporated. The Bush administration appears to have ruled out any kind of preemptive strike on North Korea, which with its conventional artillery alone could inflict massive casualties on neighboring South Korea and the more than 30,000 U.S. troops stationed there. And with diplomacy failing, nonproliferation experts have begun to speak despairingly of the inevitability of a nuclear North Korea.

Peace and reconciliation continues follow democratic elections in Iraq...
Two Suicide Bombings Kill at Least 24 in Iraq
By Omar Fekeiki and Ellen Knickmeyer
Washington Post, 7 May 2005
Twin suicide bomb attacks, including an explosion in a crowded market near Baghdad, killed at least 24 people Friday in Iraq, climaxing eight days of violence by insurgents that killed 270 people and posed difficult challenges to the newly installed government. Meanwhile, the bodies of 14 men were found in a garbage dump in the capital, officials said. The men had all been blindfolded and recently shot, officials said.

Political Kabuki...
Laura Bush's Mission Accomplished
By FRANK RICH
NYT, 8 May 2005
...Then - just when you think things couldn't get any worse - along comes the annual White House Correspondents' Association dinner. ...Jonathan Klein, the new boss at CNN and a dinner attendee, hit the right note when, in an April speech to the National Association of Broadcasters, he made the "modest proposal" that the gala be canceled and that the White House Correspondents' Association "instead spend that time and energy creating standards - and enforcing them - for those who would call themselves White House correspondents." He meant Jeff Gannon, who masqueraded as a reporter at White House news briefings for two years before it was discovered that his news organization was a front for G.O.P. activists and that his most impressive portfolio had been as a model in ads for an escort service. But there's a bigger issue here than Mr. Gannon. The Washington press corps' eagerness to facilitate and serve as dress extras in what amounts to an administration promotional video can now be seen as a metaphor for just how much the legitimate press has been co-opted by all manner of fakery in the Bush years.

Yes, Mrs. Bush was funny, but the mere sight of her "interrupting" her husband in an obviously scripted routine prompted a ballroom full of reporters to leap to their feet and erupt in a roar of sycophancy like partisan hacks at a political convention. The same throng's morning-after rave reviews acknowledged that the entire exercise was at some level P.R. but nonetheless bought into the artifice. We were seeing the real Laura Bush, we kept being told. Maybe. While some acknowledged that her script was written by a speechwriter (the genuinely gifted Landon Parvin), very few noted that the routine's most humanizing populist riff, Mrs. Bush's proclaimed affection for the hit TV show "Desperate Housewives," was fiction; her press secretary told The New York Times's Elisabeth Bumiller that the first lady had yet to watch it.

Mrs. Bush's act was a harmless piece of burlesque, but it paid political dividends, upstaging the ho-hum presidential news conference of two days earlier in which few of the same reporters successfully challenged administration spin on Social Security and other matters. (One notable exception: David Gregory of NBC News, whose sharply focused follow-ups pushed Mr. Bush off script and got him to disown some of the faith-based demagoguery of the Family Research Council.) Watching the Washington press not only swoon en masse for Mrs. Bush's show but also sponsor and promote it inevitably recalls its unwitting collaboration in other, far more consequential Bush pageants. From the White House's faux "town hall meetings" to the hiring of Armstrong Williams to shill for its policies in journalistic forums, this administration has been a master of erecting propagandistic virtual realities that the news media have often been either tardy or ineffectual at unmasking.

It was only too fitting that Mrs. Bush's performance occurred on the eve of the second anniversary of the most elaborate production of them all: the "Top Gun" landing by the president on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln. The Washington reviews of her husband at the time were reminiscent of hers last weekend. "This president has learned how to move in a way that just conveys a great sense of authority and command," David Broder raved on "Meet the Press." Robert Novak chimed in: "He looks good in a jumpsuit." It would be quite a while before these guys stopped cheering the Jerry Bruckheimer theatrics and started noticing the essential fiction of the scene: the mission in Iraq hadn't been accomplished, and major combat operations were far from over.

"We create our own reality" is how a Bush official put it to Ron Suskind in an article in The Times Magazine during the presidential campaign. That they can get away with it shows the keenness of their cultural antennas. Infotainment has reached a new level of ubiquity in an era in which "reality" television and reality have become so blurred that it's hard to know if ABC News's special investigating "American Idol" last week was real journalism about a fake show or fake journalism about a real show or whether anyone knows the difference - or cares. This is business as usual in a culture in which the Michael Jackson trial is re-enacted daily on cable and the most powerful television news franchises, the morning triumvirate of "Today" and its competitors, now routinely present promotional segments about their respective networks' prime-time hits as if they were news.

No wonder many local TV news operations thought nothing of broadcasting government video news releases in which fake correspondents recruited from P.R. firms pushed administration policies; in some cases, neither the stations' managers nor journalists even figured out these reports were frauds. Now that public broadcasting is being turned over to Republican apparatchiks, such subterfuge could creep into the one broadcast news organization that, whatever its other failings, was thought to be immune to government or commercial interference.

The more the press blurs these lines on its own, the more openings government propagandists have to erect their Potemkin villages with impunity. "Our once noble calling," wrote Philip Meyer in The Columbia Journalism Review last fall, "is increasingly difficult to distinguish from things that look like journalism but are primarily advertising, press agentry or entertainment." You know we're in trouble when Jeff Gannon, asked about his murky past on Bill Maher's show on April 29, moralistically joked that "usually the way it works is people become reporters before they prostitute themselves." No less chastening was the experience of watching Matt Drudge, in conversation with Brian Lamb the same day, sternly criticize Fox for cutting off the final moments of the Bush news conference for Paris Hilton's reality series. When Mr. Drudge is a more sober spokesman for the sanctity of news than his fellow revelers at the correspondents' dinner, pigs just may start to fly.

Much as we all delight in the latest horse-milking joke, the happiest news in comedy last week was the announcement that "The Daily Show" will be spinning off a new half-hour on Comedy Central starring its "senior White House correspondent," Stephen Colbert. Make no mistake about it: the ratings rise of Jon Stewart's fake news has been in direct relation to the show's prowess at blowing the whistle on propaganda when the legitimate press fails to do so. The correspondents' dinner, itself a "Daily Show" target last week, could not have been a more graphic illustration of why, at a time when trust in real news is plummeting, there's a bull market for fake news that can really be trusted to know what is fake.

A man of incredibly filtered vision...
It's Their Party
[Big business and the Christian right don't define the GOP? ]
Interview of Rep. Christopher Shays, R-Connecticut
by DEBORAH SOLOMON
NYT Magazine, 8 May 2005
Q. How did a longtime Republican congressman from Connecticut wind up being such a vocal critic of his own party? You seem to relish your new role as a G.O.P. contrarian.
The Republican Party does seem lost. The party of Abraham Lincoln is in danger of becoming the party of the church.
And of an ethical impropriety or two. Weren't you the first Republican to call for the resignation of Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, accused of taking free trips from lobbyists?
The problem with Tom DeLay is that he does everything to the extreme. He has consistently pushed his ethical behavior to the edge, and sometimes he goes over the edge. There will always be more stories about Tom. This is the way he conducts business. With regard to those trips, he is aware of far more than he has said publicly.
...The point is, it's a restraint on some congressmen. They don't speak out as much. They don't want to take the chance of having what happened to me happen to them. They want to advance their careers.
...Have you ever considered becoming a Democrat?
Never. The Democratic Party is the party of a collection of special interests.
It's not as if the Republicans are impervious to special interests. What about the oil companies?
Yeah, but we don't add up our special interests and then have them define us. When we vote the way some employers want us to vote, that's the way we feel. It's a part of what we believe in.

Lobbyist Paid by Pakistan Led U.S. Delegation There
By PHILIP SHENON and ANNE E. KORNBLUT
NYT, 8 May 2005
Jack Abramoff, the lobbyist at the center of a federal corruption investigation, led a Congressional delegation to Pakistan in 1997 but failed to tell the group's sponsor or the lawmakers that he was a registered lobbyist for the Pakistani government, according to the sponsor and the two House members on the trip. "I wish I'd known that he had a bias that way," said Representative Michael R. McNulty, Democrat of New York, who was on the trip. Gregg Hilton, whose nonprofit organization, the National Security Caucus Foundation, sponsored the trip for Mr. McNulty and Representative Howard Coble, said he felt "deceived" by Mr. Abramoff. The trip to Pakistan and Mr. Abramoff's role in it came to light with the release of documents this week showing that he had also used his personal credit card to pay more than $350,000 in travel expenses for other Congressional trips, some of them sponsored by the National Security Caucus Foundation, which is now defunct. His payments for trips to the Northern Mariana Islands, a United States territory in the Pacific Ocean, and other locations overseas that involved Representative Tom DeLay and other lawmakers have come under scrutiny. House ethics rules forbid legislators from accepting such gifts from lobbyists.

In Kansas, Darwinism Goes on Trial Once More
By JODI WILGOREN
NYT, 8  May 2005
Six years after Kansas ignited a national debate over the teaching of evolution, the state is poised to push through new science standards this summer requiring that Darwin's theory be challenged in the classroom.
In the first of three daylong hearings being referred to here as a direct descendant of the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial in Tennessee, a parade of Ph.D.'s testified Thursday about the flaws they saw in mainstream science's explanation of the origins of life. It was one part biology lesson, one part political theater, and the biggest stage yet for the emerging movement known as intelligent design, which posits that life's complexity cannot be explained without a supernatural creator.
Darwin's defenders are refusing to testify at the hearings, which were called by the State Board of Education's conservative majority. But their lawyer forcefully cross-examined the other side's experts, pushing them to acknowledge that nothing in the current standards prevented discussion of challenges to evolution, and peppering them with queries both profound and personal....When a later witness, Jonathan Wells, said he enjoyed being in the minority on such a controversial topic, Mr. Irigonegaray retorted, "More than being right?"
If the board adopts the new standards, as expected, in June, Kansas would join Ohio, which took a similar step in 2002, in mandating students be taught that there is controversy over evolution. Legislators in Alabama and Georgia have introduced bills this season to allow teachers to challenge Darwin in class, and the battle over evolution is simmering on the local level in 20 states.

A Serious Drug Problem
By PAUL KRUGMAN
NYT, 6 May 2005
There was a brief flurry of outrage when Congress passed the 2003 Medicare bill. The news media reported on the scandalous vote in the House of Representatives: Republican leaders violated parliamentary procedure, twisted arms and perhaps engaged in bribery to persuade skeptical lawmakers to change their votes in a session literally held in the dead of night.
Later, the media reported on another scandal: it turned out that the administration had deceived Congress about the bill's likely cost.
But the real scandal is what's in the legislation. It's an object lesson in how special interests hold America's health care system hostage.
The new Medicare law subsidizes private health plans, which have repeatedly failed to deliver promised cost savings. It creates an unnecessary layer of middlemen by requiring that the drug benefit be administered by private insurers. The biggest giveaway is to Big Pharma: the law specifically prohibits Medicare from using its purchasing power to negotiate lower drug prices.
Outside the United States, almost every government bargains over drug prices. And it works: the Congressional Budget Office says that foreign drug prices are 35 to 55 percent below U.S. levels. Even within the United States, Veterans Affairs is able to negotiate discounts of 50 percent or more, far larger than those the Medicare actuary expects the elderly to receive under the new plan. After the drug bill's passage, Jacob Hacker and Theodore Marmor of Yale University estimated that a sensible bill could have delivered twice as much coverage for the same price.

Bush diplomacy makes headway...
U.S. Cites Signs of Korean Steps to Nuclear Test
By DAVID E. SANGER and WILLIAM J. BROAD
NYT, 6 May 2005
White House and Pentagon officials are closely monitoring a recent stream of satellite photographs of North Korea that appear to show rapid, extensive preparations for a nuclear weapons test, including the construction of a reviewing stand, presumably for dignitaries, according to American and foreign officials who have been briefed on the imagery.
North Korea has never tested a nuclear weapon.

[Ford and GM] Junk Ratings Make a Big Splash, Ripples to Follow
By JONATHAN FUERBRINGER
NYT, 6 May 2005
Many investors knew it was coming, but they did not expect that two of the nation's biggest issuers of bonds would be reduced to junk status so soon. As a result, Standard & Poor's announcement at midday yesterday that it was cutting its credit ratings for both General Motors and the Ford Motor Company set off a selling spree in the corporate bond market. The rating cut to below investment grade begins a process of adjustment that could ripple through, and roil, the fixed-income markets for weeks.

Delgado forfeits any hope of running for president...
Lifting the Censor's Veil on the Shame of Iraq
By BOB HERBERT
NYT, 5 May 2005
...Mr. Delgado, 23, is a former Army reservist who was repelled by the violence and dehumanization of the war. He completed his tour in Iraq. But he sought and received conscientious objector status and was honorably discharged last January. Some of the most disturbing photos in his possession were taken after G.I.'s at Abu Ghraib opened fire on detainees who had been throwing rocks at guards during a large protest. Four detainees were killed. The photos show American soldiers posing and goofing around with the bodies of the detainees.
In one shot a body bag has been opened to show the gruesome head wound of the corpse. In another, a G.I. is leaning over the top of the body bag with a spoon in his right hand, as if he is about to scoop up a portion of the dead man's wounded flesh. "These pictures were circulated like trophies," Mr. Delgado said. Some were posted in command headquarters. He said it seemed to him that the shooting of the prisoners and the circulation of the photos were viewed by enlisted personnel and at least some officers as acceptable - even admirable - behavior.
Mr. Delgado said that when his unit was first assigned to Abu Ghraib, he believed, like most of his fellow soldiers, that the prisoners were among the most dangerous individuals in Iraq. He said: "Most of the guys thought, 'Well, they're out to kill us. These are the ones killing our buddies.' " But while at work in a headquarters office, he said, he learned that most of the detainees at Abu Ghraib had committed only very minor nonviolent offenses, or no offenses at all. (Several investigations would subsequently reveal that vast numbers of completely innocent Iraqis were seized and detained by coalition forces.)
Several months ago Mr. Delgado gave a talk and presented a slide show at his school, New College of Florida in Sarasota. To his amazement, 400 people showed up. He has given a number of talks since then in various parts of the country.
His goal, he said, is to convince his listeners that the abuse of innocent Iraqis by the American military is not limited to "a few bad apples," as the military would like the public to believe. "At what point," he asked, "does a series of 'isolated incidents' become a pattern of intolerable behavior?"
The public at large and especially the many soldiers who have behaved honorably in Iraq deserve an honest answer to that question. It took many long years for the military to repair its reputation after Vietnam. Mr. Delgado's complaints and the entire conduct of this wretched war should be thoroughly investigated.
SEE ALSO:
Fighting Mad (Guardian)

Lessons from Iraq: Rand Offers War 101 Textbook
By JOSEPH L. GALLOWAY
Knight Ridder Newspapers, 4 May 2005
It isn't all that often that a think tank dependent on government contracts dares tell the emperor that he is naked, and that makes a recent Rand Corp. report to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on lessons learned in Iraq all the more remarkable.
The Rand report puts the finger on what went wrong there and makes "a case for change, and even urgency" in fixing those problems in a brief and frank distillation of what its researchers found in more than 20 studies focused on the Iraq invasion and what has followed. Rand, although independent now, was originally formed by the U.S. government and is often hired by the Pentagon to conduct major research on military operations.
The Rand researchers found that the "shock and awe" air attacks against the enemy leadership did not achieve the advertised objectives of "decapitating, isolating or breaking the will" of that leadership. They added that future operations should not be predicated on expectations of fast regime collapse through air attacks because of a host of limitations, some self-imposed to avoid civilian casualties.
The study also cautioned the Pentagon to move very carefully as it shifts the Army to a family of lightly armored fighting vehicles heavily reliant on networked systems of intelligence information until such time as those fighting the war at lower levels have the wide-band satellite communications to access the information and trained personnel to interpret the images of what's waiting up ahead for a fast-moving tank column.
Rand said that division commanders and above were well served by the increased situational awareness provided by aerial sensor aircraft and satellite coverage in Iraq, but lower-level commanders actually fighting the battles didn't get the specific intelligence needed in time to make use of it.

60 Kurds Killed by Suicide Bomb in Northern Iraq
By WARZER JAFF and RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.
NYT, 5 May 2005
A suicide bomber pretending to be a job seeker blew himself up Wednesday morning outside a police recruiting center in this Kurdish provincial capital, killing at least 60 Kurds, most of them prospective policemen, and wounding 150 others as insurgents pressed an effort to destabilize Iraq's infant democratic government. A well-known terrorist group, Ansar al-Sunna, which has been active in northern Iraq, took responsibility for the blast and said it was intended as retribution for the involvement of Kurdish troops fighting insurgents alongside American forces.

Fraud Allegations Compound Iraq Accounting Investigation
Matt Kelley, Associated Press
Star-Tribune.com, 5 May 2005
U.S. civilian authorities in Iraq cannot properly account for nearly $100 million that was supposed to have been spent on reconstruction projects in south-central Iraq, government investigators said Wednesday. There are indications of fraud in the use of the $96.6 million, according to a report by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. A separate investigation of possible wrongdoing continues. More than $7 million of the total is unaccounted for, the report said. An additional $89.4 million in payments do not have the required supporting documents. The report accused civilian contract managers of "simply washing accounts" to try to make the books balance. Staffing shortages and the quick turnover of those responsible for the cash contributed to the problems, the report said.

The Real Nuclear Option
The Non-Proliferation Treaty is a mess. We have to save it anyway.
By Fred Kaplan
Slate, 3 May 2005
The NPT—in effect for 35 years and signed by 189 countries (every country in the world but three)—is teetering in crisis, possibly on the edge of obsolescence. One country, North Korea, has abrogated the treaty, the first signatory ever to do so, and has since reprocessed enough plutonium to build at least a half-dozen bombs. Another, Iran, is poised to go down the same road via enriched uranium.
More broadly, vast loopholes in the treaty, which have long been noticed, are finally being exploited. It is increasingly doubtful whether the NPT, in its current form, can remain a useful tool for constraining nuclear ambitions.
It desperately needs repair, yet the Bush administration has sent only a midlevel State Department official as its delegate to the review session. Not just Iran, but also the United States, France, and Japan have rejected—for commercial reasons—a proposal by Mohamed ElBaradei, the U.N.'s chief atomic-weapons inspector, to freeze uranium-enrichment for five years. Nobody in a position of power seems willing to take any new steps to avert a crisis that everyone sees as looming and dangerous.

Interest-Group Conservatism
George Bush's philosophy of government.
By Jacob Weisberg
Slate, 4 May 2005
...In this, the third year that Republicans have controlled everything, a variation on the old interest-group liberalism has emerged as the new governing philosophy. One might have expected that once in command, conservative politicians would work to further reduce Washington's power and bury the model of special-interest-driven government expansion for good. But one would have been wrong. Instead, Republicans have gleefully taken possession of the old liberal spoils system and converted it to their own purposes. The result is the curious governing philosophy of interest-group conservatism: the expansion and exploitation of government by people who profess to dislike it. [Jacob Weisberg offers a view of politics in the United States that is different from that of PoliticalKabuki. He maintains that conservative interest-groups have merely supplanted liberal interest-groups in influence. PK sees American politics moving away from pluralism and participatory democracy and more toward concentrated power, as apathy and alienation grows. Differentiating political parties in the United States is becoming less useful. Interest-groups dominating both parties are entrenched in corporate management and the ownership class. The result is a concentration of political power in the hands of a few already possessing economic power. Legal, legislative and executive functions of government facilitate business and financial interests to 'externalize' real operating costs (i.e., pollution, product liability, poor working conditions, less than livable wage) and to accumulate greater economic gain.]

Israel and the Pentagon...ties that bind
Pentagon Analyst Charged With Disclosing Military Secrets
By DAVID JOHNSTON and ERIC LICHTBLAU
NYT, 5 May 2005
Federal agents arrested a Pentagon analyst on Wednesday, accusing him of illegally disclosing highly classified information about possible attacks on American forces in Iraq to two employees of a pro-Israel lobbying group.
The analyst, Lawrence A. Franklin, turned himself in to the authorities on Wednesday morning in a case that has stirred unusually anxious debate in influential political circles in the capital even though it has focused on a midlevel Pentagon employee.
The inquiry has cast a cloud over the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which employed the two men who are said to have received the classified information from Mr. Franklin. The group, also known as Aipac, has close ties to senior policymakers in the Bush administration, among them Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who is expected to appear later this month at the group's annual meeting.
The investigation has proven awkward as well for a group of conservative Republicans, who held high-level civilian jobs at the Pentagon during President Bush's first term and the buildup toward the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and who were also close to Aipac.

Documentary Proof Revealed in UK that Bush Fixed the Facts to Justify Iraq War
Ray McGovern
TomPaine.com, 4 May 2005
Ray McGovern served 27 years as a CIA analyst and is now on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. He works for Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour. 

"Intelligence and facts are being fixed around the policy."

Never in our wildest dreams did we think we would see those words in black and white—and beneath a SECRET stamp, no less.  For three years now, we in Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) have been saying that the CIA and its British counterpart, MI-6, were ordered by their countries' leaders to "fix facts" to "justify" an unprovoked war on Iraq.  More often than not, we have been greeted with stares of incredulity.
It has been a hard learning—that folks tend to believe what they want to believe.  As long as our evidence, however abundant and persuasive, remained circumstantial, it could not compel belief.  It simply is much easier on the psyche to assent to the White House spin machine blaming the Iraq fiasco on bad intelligence than to entertain the notion that we were sold a bill of goods.
Well, you can forget circumstantial. Thanks to an unauthorized disclosure by a courageous whistleblower, the evidence now leaps from official documents—this time authentic, not forged.  Whether prompted by the open appeal of the international Truth-Telling Coalition or not, some brave soul has made the most explosive "patriotic leak" of the war by giving London's Sunday Times the official minutes of a briefing by Richard Dearlove, then head of Britain's CIA equivalent, MI-6. Fresh back in London from consultations in Washington, Dearlove briefed Prime Minister Blair and his top national security officials on July 23, 2002, on the Bush administration's plans to make war on Iraq.
...In emotionless English, Dearlove tells Blair and the others that President Bush has decided to remove Saddam Hussein by launching a war that is to be "justified by the conjunction of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction."  Period.  What about the intelligence?  Dearlove adds matter-of-factly, "The intelligence and facts are being fixed around the policy."
At this point, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw confirms that Bush has decided on war, but notes that stitching together justification would be a challenge, since "the case was thin."  Straw noted that Saddam was not threatening his neighbors and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran.
In the following months, "the case" would be buttressed by a well-honed U.S.-U.K. intelligence-turned-propaganda-machine.  The argument would be made "solid" enough to win endorsement from Congress and Parliament by conjuring up:

• Aluminum artillery tubes misdiagnosed as nuclear related;
• Forgeries alleging Iraqi attempts to obtain uranium in Africa;
• Tall tales from a drunken defector about mobile biological weapons laboratories;
• Bogus warnings that Iraqi forces could fire WMD-tipped missiles within 45 minutes of an order to do so;
• Dodgy dossiers fabricated in London; and
• A U.S. National Intelligence Estimate thrown in for good measure.

Iraq Backlash in Britain May Affect Future Military Moves
By ALAN COWELL
NYT, 4 May 2005
Election campaigns claim unforeseen casualties, and in Britain's case one may be the ability of British leaders to order troops to war at America's side in quite the same way the United States has come to expect. The campaign for the election here on Thursday has brought a series of damaging disclosures about Prime Minister Tony Blair's actions in the prelude to the invasion of Iraq, provoking forecasts that future prime ministers will face greater constraints in sending troops to war. ...But then came Iraq. At the heart of the current debate has been the accusation that as preparations for the war unfolded, Mr. Blair withheld vital legal advice and other information from the rest of the government and Parliament itself - allegations that seem to have been substantiated by a slew of newspaper disclosures.
"This week's revelations have left grave questions that Parliament must pursue determinedly after polling day," said Robin Cook, a former foreign minister and stalwart of Mr. Blair's Labor Party who resigned from the government in March 2003 to protest the war. "They also demand changes to the way Britain is governed so that the cabinet is never again asked to take a major, strategic decision while crucial advice is withheld from it."
The disclosures began last week when the government was forced to publicize the legal arguments for Britain's involvement in the war. Kept secret for more than two years, a 13-page document dated March 7, 2003, set out arguments by Lord Goldsmith, the attorney general, for and against the legality of the war.

Is Bigotry All Right in Politics?
Juan Cole
Informed Comment, 4 May 2005
John Aravosis argues that Pat Robertson should be a political pariah after his remarks on ABC's "This Week" on Sunday that Muslim Americans are not fit to serve in the US cabinet. It is actually much worse than that. Robertson also implied that Jews are unfit to serve on the Supreme Court because some of them defend the ACLU, which he equates with defending Communism. The anti-Jewish bigotry among some evangelicals that codes Jews as a "cultural elite" promoting non-Christian values just drips from his words. I give the relevant parts of the interview below.

Seeking Support, Bush Offers Assurances on Retirement Cuts
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON
NYT, 4 May 2005
President Bush took his Social Security campaign back on the road on Tuesday, seeking to reassure workers here about his new call to cut promised retirement benefits for most Americans as part of an effort to ensure the system's long-term solvency. But the White House signaled that Mr. Bush would be flexible if Congress had other ideas about how to close the projected long-term gap in Social Security's finances, reflecting the reluctance of many members of his own party on Capitol Hill to embrace any plan that could be portrayed as harming the middle class.

House and Senate Reach Accord on $82 Billion for Costs of Wars
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
NYT, 4 May 2005
A House and Senate conference agreed Tuesday to the final version of an $82 billion supplementary spending bill for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Iran Determined to Pursue Nuclear Enrichment
By Louis Charbonneau
Reuters, 3 May 2005
Iran is determined to develop all legal types of nuclear technology, including processes that could be used to develop fuel for weapons, Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi said on Tuesday. "Iran is determined to pursue all legal areas of nuclear technology including enrichment, exclusively for peaceful purposes," Kharrazi told a United Nations-sponsored conference on nuclear disarmament.

U.S. Called Unprepared For Nuclear Terrorism
Experts Critical of Evacuation Plans
By John Mintz
Washington Post, 3 May 2005
When asked during the campaign debates to name the gravest danger facing the United States, President Bush and challenger Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) gave the same answer: a nuclear device in the hands of terrorists. But more than 3 1/2 years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the U.S. government has failed to adequately prepare first responders and the public for a nuclear strike, according to emergency preparedness and nuclear experts and federal reports. Although hundreds of thousands of lives could be saved by rapidly evacuating people downwind of a radiation cloud, officials have trained only small numbers of first responders to prepare for such an event, according to public health specialists and government documents. And the information given to the public is flawed and incomplete, many experts agree. "The United States is, at the moment, not well prepared to manage an [emergency] evacuation of this sort in the relevant time frame," said Richard Falkenrath, former deputy homeland security adviser and now a fellow at the Brookings Institution. "The federal government currently lacks the ability to [rapidly] generate and broadcast specific, geographically tailored evacuation instructions" across the country, he said.

Iraq Needs Another Sunni for Cabinet
Defense job open; swearing-in today
By Caryle Murphy
The Washington Post via Post-Gazette.com, 3 May 2005
Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari struggled yesterday to reach a last-minute consensus within his broad Shiite political coalition on a Sunni Arab to fill the key post of defense minister, while his new Cabinet prepared for a swearing-in ceremony today. The political negotiations took place on another day of insurgent violence in which bombings killed more than 20 Iraqis, raising the death toll to nearly 140 since Jaafari announced the formation of his government last week. Also yesterday, two U.S. Marine jets from the USS Carl Vinson aircraft carrier were reported missing while flying in support of operations in Iraq, the U.S. military said.

Lobbying the Watchdogs: Hundreds of Companies Push their Agendas with the GAO, FEC and OGE
By Elizabeth Brown
Center for Public Integrity Press Release, 3 May 2005
When it comes to lobbying in Washington, ChevronTexaco Corp. knows how to distribute its energy. The petroleum powerhouse is a high-profile fixture on Capitol Hill, spending millions to curry legislative favor. The company's hired guns routinely seek to influence regulations at the Department of Energy, rulemakings at the Environmental Protection Agency—and even independent investigations at the Government Accountability Office. But ChevronTexaco is hardly unique. The GAO has launched thousands of inquiries into government programs during the past six years. During that time nearly 300 companies and organizations have sought to influence those investigations, according to a study of federal lobbying records by the Center for Public Integrity. In fact, many of the federal offices responsible for overseeing the integrity of American democracy are among the more than 200 agencies lobbied during the past six years—agencies such as the Federal Election Commission, the Office of Government Ethics and the GAO, which serves as the investigative arm of Congress. "So many lobbyists cover so many issues, it is not surprising to find them popping up almost everywhere," said lobbying expert Burdett Loomis. Lobbying these oversight agencies, he added, may be a "more indirect" way of influencing government, but it can still be quite effective. ..."The moneyed interests may weigh in more. Well, welcome to the real world."

Iraqi Press Under Attack from Authorities in Iraq
by Mohammed al Dulaimy
Knight Ridder Newspapers, 3 May 2005
A photographer for a Baghdad newspaper says Iraqi police beat and detained him for snapping pictures of long lines at gas stations. A reporter for another local paper received an invitation from Iraqi police to cover their graduation ceremony and ended up receiving death threats from the recruits. A local TV reporter says she's lost count of how many times Iraqi authorities have confiscated her cameras and smashed her tapes. All these cases are under investigation by the Iraqi Association to Defend Journalists, a union that formed amid a chilling new trend of alleged arrests, beatings and intimidation of Iraqi reporters at the hands of Iraqi security forces. Reporters Without Borders, an international watchdog group for press freedom, tracked the arrests of five Iraqi journalists within a two-week period and issued a statement on April 26 asking authorities "to be more discerning and restrained and not carry out hasty and arbitrary arrests."
While Iraq's newly elected government says it will look into complaints of press intimidation, local reporters said they've seen little progress since reporting the incidents. Some have quit their jobs after receiving threats - not from insurgents, but from police. Most Iraqi reporters are reluctant to even identify themselves as press when stopped at police checkpoints. Others say they won't report on events that involve Iraqi security forces, which creates a big gap in their local news coverage. "We've become hated because we say the truth, and the truth is that Iraqi police make a lot of mistakes," said Ahmed Abed Ali, the photographer arrested Jan. 13 for taking pictures of long lines at gasoline stations. Even with the backing of a major company, journalists in Iraq are targeted by local authorities. The Middle East's two most popular satellite TV stations have suffered: Al-Jazeera's Baghdad bureau has been shuttered for months because of government criticism, and Iraqi forces held a reporter from Al-Arabiya for two weeks because he had footage of insurgent attacks.

Only an Outside Counsel Can Investigate DeLay
Common Cause Press Release, 2 May 2005
Last week we celebrated the decision by Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL) to reverse the ethics rules changes that gutted the way the House monitors and enforces its ethics system. But as we've said all along, rolling back those rules is only an important first step toward broader reform.
One of those reforms must include the appointment of an outside counsel to investigate ethics complaints involving congressional leaders, like Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-TX).
DeLay wields complete influence and control over members of his party. He determines who gets coveted committee appointments and whose bills are passed. He doles out favors and dollars at election time from his political action committees and has proven he will do just about anything to get a colleague to vote his way. What's more, four of the five Republican members of the Ethics Committee have taken money from DeLay's political action committee, and two have donated to his legal defense fund. How can they sit in judgement of him?
They can't. That's why we need an outside counsel who operates outside the sphere of DeLay's influence to conduct a thorough, impartial investigation without fear of retaliation. Nothing less will be credible.
Join us in demanding that Congress appoint an outside counsel to investigate DeLay, as it did in the cases of former House speakers James Wright (D-TX) and Newt Gingrich (R-GA). Please sign our petition calling for the appointment of an outside counsel in the case of DeLay. A message that you signed the petition will automatically be sent to your Representative.

Secrecy, Propaganda Seen Sweeping US
by William Fisher
Inter Press Service via Common Dreams, 3 May 2005
NEW YORK -- Freedom of the press is in decline in the United States amid increased government secrecy and propaganda, say media veterans, analysts, and advocates. Contrary to the conventional wisdom here that U.S. media are the freest in the world, the United States has suffered ''notable setbacks'' in press freedom and has slipped among countries tracked by the New York-based rights group Freedom House. The organization, in an annual survey released in advance of Tuesday's commemoration of World Press Freedom Day, said media in Finland, Iceland, and Sweden faced the fewest fetters in 2004 while the most restrictions were slapped on journalists in North Korea, Burma (also known as Myanmar), Cuba, and Turkmenistan. The United States was tied with Barbados, Canada, Dominica, Estonia, and Latvia at 24th place out of 194 countries covered in the survey. ...White House spokespersons routinely counter such assertions by saying that the administration's policy toward the media is honest and transparent.
Even so, Jack Behrman, a former assistant secretary of commerce, accused the administration of hypocrisy. ''Our government avowedly promotes freedom abroad but has sought successfully to limit it in the U.S. through secrecy and manipulation of the media,'' Behrman told IPS.

3 May 2005

Iraq is the New Afghanistan: US State Department Report
Times of India, 3 May 2005
Iraq is now the new Afghanistan used by jehadi groups to train Islamic terrorists, the US State Department's Country Reports on Terrorism for 2004 has said.
Titled "Global Jihad: Evolving and Adapting", the report said: "Foreign fighters appear to be working to make the insurgency in Iraq what Afghanistan was to the earlier generation of jehadists - a melting pot for jehadists from around the world, a training ground, and an indoctrination centre. "In the months and years ahead, a significant number of fighters who have travelled to Iraq could return to their home countries, exacerbating domestic conflicts or augmenting with new skills and experience existing extremist networks in the communities to which they return."
The report unwittingly seems to confirm the claims by many critics of the US invasion of Iraq who say the country has become a fertile recruiting and training ground for Al Qaeda. Describing the global jehadist movement as the "the pre-eminent terrorist threat to the United States, US interests and US allies, it said Al Qaeda "has spread its anti-US, anti-Western ideology to other groups and geographical areas".US and coalition successes against Al Qaeda "have forced these jehadist groups to compensate by showing a greater willingness to act on their own and exercising greater local control over their strategic and tactical decisions. "As a result of this growing dispersion and local decision-making, there is an increasing commingling of groups, personnel, resources, and ad hoc operational and logistical coordination," it said.
SEE ALSO:
"Country Reports on Terrorism" (pdf), US State Department

Moving out of the Superpower Orbit
By Tom Engelhardt
TomDispatch, 2 May 2005
Of the two superpowers that faced each other down in an almost half-century-long Cold War, one -- the United States -- emerged victorious, alone in the world, economically powerful, militarily dominant; the other, never the stronger of the two, limped off, its empire shattered and scattered, its people impoverished and desperate, its military a shell of its former self. This is a story we all know, and more or less accept. Winner/loser, victor/vanquished. It makes sense. That's the way we expect matches, competitions, struggles, wars to end. But what if, as I've suggested recently, the Cold War turned out to be a loser/loser contest? That may seem counterintuitive. In regards to the U.S., it would have been considered laughable not so long ago, except to a few scholars of imperial decline like Immanuel Wallerstein, and yet it may be an increasingly plausible thought.

When you don't have any material, just make something up...
Take My President, Please
The first lady's speech at the White House Correspondents' Dinner was so funny I forgot to laugh.
By Dana Stevens
Slate, 2 May 2005
The big take-away meme from the event seems to be that Laura Bush stole the show with her unexpected takeover of her husband's speech, which turned into a roast written by conservative gag-writer Landon Parvin. (Click here for complete transcript.) One of the New York tabloids has a banner headline today proclaiming her "the First Lady ... of laughs!" and at a press event today the president dubbed his wife "Laura Leno Bush." I'm with him on that: neither Leno nor Laura is very funny. Apparently Parvin's instincts were off at last year's Radio and Television Correspondents dinner, where a slide show he co-wrote of Bush poking around the White House, looking for WMD's under the furniture drew a strong backlash the next day. A lot of people, including some war veterans, didn't double over in mirth at the idea that over 500 American troops (the number has since more than tripled) had lost their lives in a war over ... what again? But this year, Parvin understood a truth that Bush's handlers had already grasped during last year's campaign: Approval ratings down? Insurgency spiraling out of control? Better wheel out the librarian.

Four day death total is 116
35 Iraqis Killed as Leaders Seek to Fill Cabinet
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.
NYT, 2 May 2005
Insurgents using car bombs struck a Kurdish funeral near Mosul and American soldiers handing out candy to children in Baghdad on Sunday in the worst of a spate of attacks that killed at least 35 Iraqis and wounded 80. It was an ever grimmer backdrop to efforts by Iraq's first Shiite-majority government to fill gaps in the new cabinet from the restive Sunni minority.

Frist: Showdown with Democrats Over Court Nominees may be 'Inevitable'
By Kathy Kiely
USA TODAY, 2 May 2005
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist says he's "running out of options" in a fight with Democrats over President Bush's judicial nominees. In an interview with USA TODAY, the Tennessee Republican said he believes a showdown over Bush's federal appellate court nominees is "almost inevitable." He said he'll push for a vote on the judicial candidates before Memorial Day because the "extreme partisanship" in the Senate justifies the move. "There are times in history where you have to change either the rules or the precedent based on external behavior," he said Friday.

3 Ex-Officials Describe Bullying by Bolton
By DOUGLAS JEHL
NYT, 3 May 2005
Three former senior government officials have provided new accounts of what they described as bullying and intolerance shown by John R. Bolton to subordinates and other officials who disagreed with his views on policy and intelligence matters.
The three former officials provided the accounts in interviews with the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, according to transcripts of the conversations. The committee is reviewing Mr. Bolton's nomination to be ambassador to the United Nations.
The firsthand accounts came from a former ambassador to South Korea, a former assistant secretary of state, and the former head of the Central Intelligence Agency's weapons proliferation center. All three described Mr. Bolton as unwilling to listen to alternative views, the transcripts show, and two provided new details about episodes in which he sought to punish those who challenged his positions.
A copy of the transcripts was provided to The New York Times by a Congressional official opposed to Mr. Bolton's nomination, who said they raised new questions about his conduct.

With Federal Cash, Religious Group Builds Power
By JASON DePARLE
NYT, 3 May 2005
A religion-based fusion of politics and policy, the fund is the president's most tangible effort to help those he calls the "armies of compassion," small religious groups with shoestring budgets that care for the downtrodden. Over the last three years, it has spent $100 million to train such religiously motivated foot soldiers, and in some cases to give them small grants, on the theory that a bit of managerial coaching will mobilize new healing platoons.
Operating from a converted envelope factory in North Philadelphia, Mr. Cortes's organization, Nueva Esperanza Inc., has one of the largest contracts of the 44 groups chosen to provide the training to smaller organizations and distribute the federal cash. With $7.4 million, it has worked with 180 small programs from Miami to Seattle, making Mr. Cortes one of the most prominent Hispanic evangelicals in politics, even though he has found it more difficult than expected to bring fledgling programs to scale.
Viewed in one light, the compassion fund reflects decades of serious thought about fortifying civil society: by empowering grass-roots groups, it seeks a third way between cold government and cool indifference. Yet with much of the money flowing to conservative supporters of President Bush, the fund is also a tool of realpolitik, which Mr. Cortes readily invokes in mapping his partisan loyalties.

A Gut Punch to the Middle
By PAUL KRUGMAN
NYT, 2 May 2005
...a close look at President Bush's proposal for "progressive price indexing" of Social Security puts the lie to claims that it's a plan to increase benefits for the poor and cut them for the wealthy. In fact, it's a plan to slash middle-class benefits; the wealthy would barely feel a thing. Under current law, low-wage workers receive Social Security benefits equal to 49 percent of their wages before retirement. Under the Bush scheme, that wouldn't change. So benefits for the poor would be maintained, not increased. The administration and its apologists emphasize the fact that under the Bush plan, workers earning higher wages would face cuts, and they talk as if that makes it a plan that takes from the rich and gives to the poor. But the rich wouldn't feel any pain, because people with high incomes don't depend on Social Security benefits. Cut an average worker's benefits, and you're imposing real hardship. Cut or even eliminate Dick Cheney's benefits, and only his accountants will notice. ...If the Bush scheme goes through, the same thing will eventually happen to Social Security. As Mr. Furman points out, the Bush plan wouldn't just cut benefits. Workers would be encouraged to divert a large fraction of their payroll taxes into private accounts - but this would in effect amount to borrowing against their future benefits, which would be reduced accordingly.
As a result, Social Security as we know it would be phased out for the middle class.
"For millions of workers," Mr. Furman writes, "the amount of the monthly Social Security check would be at or near zero."
So only the poor would receive Social Security checks - and regardless of what today's politicians say, future politicians would be tempted to reduce the size of those checks.
The important thing to understand is that the attempt to turn Social Security into nothing but a program for the poor isn't driven by concerns about the future budget burden of benefit payments. After all, if Mr. Bush was worried about the budget, he would be reconsidering his tax cuts.
No, this is about ideology: Mr. Bush comes to bury Social Security, not to save it. His goal is to turn F.D.R.'s most durable achievement into an unpopular welfare program, so some future president will be able to attack it with tall tales about Social Security queens driving Cadillacs.

Republican Chairman Exerts Pressure on PBS, Alleging Biases
By STEPHEN LABATON, LORNE MANLY and ELIZABETH JENSEN
NYT, 2 May 2005
The Republican chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is aggressively pressing public television to correct what he and other conservatives consider liberal bias, prompting some public broadcasting leaders - including the chief executive of PBS - to object that his actions pose a threat to editorial independence.
Without the knowledge of his board, the chairman, Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, contracted last year with an outside consultant to keep track of the guests' political leanings on one program, "Now With Bill Moyers."
In late March, on the recommendation of administration officials, Mr. Tomlinson hired the director of the White House Office of Global Communications as a senior staff member, corporation officials said. While she was still on the White House staff, she helped draft guidelines governing the work of two ombudsmen whom the corporation recently appointed to review the content of public radio and television broadcasts.
Mr. Tomlinson also encouraged corporation and public broadcasting officials to broadcast "The Journal Editorial Report," whose host, Paul Gigot, is editor of the conservative editorial page of The Wall Street Journal. And while a search firm has been retained to find a successor for Kathleen A. Cox, the corporation's president and chief executive, whose contract was not renewed last month, Mr. Tomlinson has made clear to the board that his choice is Patricia Harrison, a former co-chairwoman of the Republican National Committee who is now an assistant secretary of state.
Mr. Tomlinson said that he was striving for balance and had no desire to impose a political point of view on programming, explaining that his efforts are intended to help public broadcasting distinguish itself in a 500-channel universe and gain financial and political support. ...Last November, members of the Association of Public Television Stations met in Baltimore along with officials from the corporation and PBS. Mr. Tomlinson told them they should make sure their programming better reflected the Republican mandate.
Mr. Tomlinson said that his comment was in jest and that he couldn't imagine how remarks at "a fun occasion" were taken the wrong way. Others, though, were not amused. "I was in that room," said Ms. Mitchell. "I was surprised by the comment. I thought it was inappropriate."

Religious Right Targets Church-State Separation
By Dick Polman
Knight Ridder Newspapers via Seattle Times, 1 May 2005
Religious conservatives, emboldened by President Bush's re-election and confident of their political clout, are not interested in merely overhauling the judiciary. Ideally, they are seeking a judiciary that would remove the wall of separation between church and state.

Report: Suicide Bomber Kills 25 in Northern Iraq
May 1, 2005
Reuters via Boston Globe, 1 May 2005
A suicide bomber attacked the headquarters of a Kurdish party in north Iraq Sunday, killing around 25 people, satellite television Al Arabiya reported.
The Arabic-language news channel, citing its correspondent, said the attack took place in the town of Tal Afar near Mosul, about 240 miles north of Baghdad.
The channel said around 30 people were wounded in the attack on the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), but gave no more details. The report could not immediately be confirmed.
Insurgents have in recent days carried out a furious sequence of attacks, including more than 15 car bombings in Baghdad that have killed dozens.

Conservative Republicans Grab Centralized Power
GOP Gives More Power to Federal Government
States blocked on industry rules
By Susan Milligan
Boston Globe, 1 May 2005
WASHINGTON -- Despite having made a commitment to return power to the states, the Bush administration and the GOP- controlled Congress are using legislation and the legal system to quash state efforts to regulate industry, a trend state officials say is weakening hard-fought efforts to protect the health and safety of their constituents.
New and proposed federal rules or laws would overturn California's ban on a vaccine preservative some think contributes to autism, and would block any state's efforts to control small-engine emissions. New England would be thwarted in its efforts to control pollution wafting over from other states, while Massachusetts and California would not be able to keep unwanted liquefied natural gas terminals from their shores. A recent banking rule change severely limits the impact of state laws intended to protect consumers from shady banking practices.
Policy makers in the administration and Congress say they are merely making rules uniform and easier to follow. With so many companies doing business across the country, they say, it is unfair and impractical to expect industries to keep track of 50 different sets of regulations. ''The president, as a former governor, strongly believes in states' rights," Bush spokesman Trent Duffy said. But ''there are certain powers reserved for the federal government" that it must keep, he said, especially in areas involving interstate commerce, energy, regulating medicine, and homeland security.
But critics see a powerful assertion of federal authority in those areas and others by a government controlled by one party. While conservatives have traditionally supported states' rights and the decentralization of government, the Bush administration and congressional leadership are moving jurisdiction over laws and regulations back into the federal sphere, according to government scholars and state attorneys general.
The result, attorneys general say, is that some Americans will have less consumer protection and less safe environments -- and states won't be able to do anything about it. ''It's a whole pattern of accumulating power in Washington [through] federal agencies that is more extensive than any administration in the history of this country," said California Attorney General Bill Lockyer, a Democrat who has been fighting the Bush administration over California laws involving energy, banking, access to abortion, and air quality.
...Some of the federal preemptions are aimed at social issues, like abortion and gay marriage. But consumer advocates and state officials are more worried about the lesser-noticed rule changes aimed at reducing industry regulation -- changes the local officials say could harm the health of their citizens.

Creative Justifications for War are Documented in UK...No Impact in USA
Blair Hit by New Leak of Secret War Plan
Michael Smith
The Times (UK), 1 May 2005
A SECRET document from the heart of government reveals today that Tony Blair privately committed Britain to war with Iraq and then set out to lure Saddam Hussein into providing the legal justification.
The Downing Street minutes, headed “Secret and strictly personal — UK eyes only”, detail one of the most important meetings ahead of the invasion.
It was chaired by the prime minister and attended by his inner circle. The document reveals Blair backed “regime change” by force from the outset, despite warnings from Lord Goldsmith, the attorney-general, that such action could be illegal.
The minutes, published by The Sunday Times today, begins with the warning: “This record is extremely sensitive. No further copies should be made. The paper should be shown only to those with a genuine need to know.” It records a meeting in July 2002, attended by military and intelligence chiefs, at which Blair discussed military options having already committed himself to supporting President George Bush’s plans for ousting Saddam.
“If the political context were right, people would support regime change,” said Blair. He added that the key issues were “whether the military plan worked and whether we had the political strategy to give the military plan space to work”.
The political strategy proved to be arguing Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) posed such a threat that military action had to be taken. However, at the July meeting Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, said the case for war was “thin” as “Saddam was not threatening his neighbours and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran”.
Straw suggested they should “work up” an ultimatum about weapons inspectors that would “help with the legal justification”. Blair is recorded as saying that “it would make a big difference politically and legally if Saddam refused to allow in the UN inspectors”.
A separate secret briefing for the meeting said Britain and America had to “create” conditions to justify a war.

A few bad apples...America's torture architects promoted
OneWorld.net via CommonDreams, 29 April 2005
Human Rights First, a group formerly known as the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights that is suing Rumsfeld with the ACLU, complained that a number of senior officers and defense officials had been promoted rather than punished for their alleged role in promoting, condoning, or ignoring the abuses. ''Those in charge of detention and interrogation operations and policies when the torture at Abu Ghraib first became public have been promoted,'' said Michael Posner, the group's executive director.
Alberto Gonzales, for example, helped prepare the administration's case for relaxing interrogation rules and ''was among the first to embrace the no-rules-apply approach to the 'war on terror','' and subsequently advanced to his current job as U.S. attorney general, Human Rights First said.
''The month after the Abu Ghraib photos became public, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, formerly in charge of interrogations at Guantanamo and credited with instituting the use of dogs at Abu Ghraib, was assigned to be senior commander in charge of detention operations in Iraq,'' the group added.
Jay Bybee, a former assistant attorney general and the principal author of a memo defining torture so narrowly as to require an act to ''be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death,'' was appointed as a judge on the federal appeals court, Human Rights First said.
William Haynes, who as Defense Department general counsel recommended over the protests of military lawyers many of the most abusive tactics used at Guantanamo, has been nominated to the federal appeals bench.
Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, who oversaw detention facilities in Iraq and was ''excoriated in Pentagon reports for his role in letting torture continue under his command,'' was named the head of the Army's 5th Corps in Europe, Human Rights First said.
Indeed, it added, ''the highest ranking service member successfully prosecuted has been Marine Major Clarke Paulus, who was dismissed from the service without jail time after being convicted for his role in the strangulation death of a non-Abu Ghraib detainee.'' More than 11,000 people are in U.S. detention in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay, Human Rights First said. In Iraq alone, the detainee population has doubled in the past five months, ''rapidly approaching the level it was when the abuses documented in the Abu Ghraib photos occurred.''